Between 1914 and 1918, almost the entire British Army was fighting the main enemy (Germany) in the main theatre (the Western Front) for the whole of the war. In 1940, however, the BEF was bustled unceremoniously out of Europe and the British Army subsequently did very little until returning to France in 1944. All else – North Africa, Italy, even the Far East (where only one third of the British Army was actually British) – was peripheral to the defeat of the main enemy. Britain’s major contribution to the war was in not losing it in 1940, and thus making herself available as a staging area for British and American forces to launch Operation Overlord, the Normandy landings in June 1944.
The more recent the event, of course, the more difficult it is to form an opinion of it, if only because one tries to avoid giving too much offence to those who were there and are still around to heckle. Evidence from the veterans of any conflict is sometimes useful, but it becomes less so with the passing of time. Former combatants may come to believe what others think they ought to believe and views formed over the years may be very different from those held at the time. As a result, confusion, however honest, can set in. On a recent visit to one of the three Normandy beaches on which British troops landed in 1944, I was approached by a lovely old boy wearing his medals and his regimental beret complete with cap badge, who told me that he had landed there with his battalion on D-Day. It seemed churlish to tell him that he had landed on the next beach down on D + 1, so I kept quiet.
And finally, a brief point about the structure of the book. As I have alluded to above, the causes of the various wars in Europe, Africa and the Far East were not identical, and in some cases were not even associated. That all these wars happened in the same time frame is, of course, not entirely coincidental, but for ease of understanding I have considered them as separate, albeit related and interlinked, conflicts. I trust that this approach will enlighten rather than confuse.
Gordon Corrigan
Kent 2010
PRELUDE
FEBRUARY 1942
The Russian village of Nikolskoje, a motley collection of log cabins thatched with turf, lay 180 miles south-west of Moscow and was of no importance whatsoever except that in February 1942 it was held by units of the Red Army’s 32 Cavalry Division, a mix of horse- and tank-mounted troops, and, like a host of similar villages all along the 1,200 miles of the Eastern Front, it would have to be dealt with to give the Germans a jump-off line for the resumption of the drive east once the snow cleared and the ground hardened.
Nikolskoje had been taken by the Germans in 1941, and for a brief time Field Marshal Fedor von Bock had his headquarters there, but then it had been abandoned as the Germans went into defence for the winter of 1941/42. On 10 February 1942, Major Günter Pape was ordered to take Nikolskoje, along with its outlying hamlet of Solojewka. Pape commanded the Third Motorcycle reconnaissance battalion of 3 Panzer Division, part of Colonel-General Rudolf Schmidt’s Second Panzer Army of Army Group Centre commanded by Field Marshal Günter von Kluge, and in addition to his own battalion he was allocated a motorized infantry battalion of the Waffen SS, three tanks and an anti-tank platoon commanded by Oberfeldwebel (Staff-Sergeant) Albert Ernst, a thirty-year-old regular soldier who had joined the Reichswehr in 1930.
Pape’s battle group moved off at 0700 hours, an hour before first light, and, as the likely threat was from Russian tanks, the anti-tank platoon led. With its Krupp six-wheeler vehicles to tow the guns, the platoon had a reasonable cross-country capability, but in any case there was little shelter on the snow-covered ground. Soon two Russian machine-gun posts began to chatter: Ernst ordered one of his 50mm guns to unhitch and return fire, and very soon the machine-guns ceased. A little farther on and a Russian mortar opened up, but the effects of its bombs were muffled by the snow and Ernst simply ordered his lead vehicle to drive over it: those of its crew who were not crushed beneath the wheels fled back to Solojewka in their rear. Now the German infantry came up and stormed into the buildings while the Mk III tanks and Ernst’s guns provided fire support. As they hurled themselves from hut to hut through the now fiercely burning village, the infantry found that they had stumbled upon the Red Army divisional headquarters – far further forward than it should have been – and accepted the surrender of a bemused divisional commander.
Russian soldiers were now fleeing as fast as they could in the snow to reach the safety – as they thought – of Nikolskoje, but Ernst’s anti-tank platoon and the Mk III panzers were in hot pursuit and Ernst reached the outskirts and set up his guns just as his vehicles were consuming their last drops of fuel. Giving the Russians no time to organize a coherent defence, Major Pape ordered the tanks to shoot the infantry in and by eleven o’clock in the morning the German battle group had taken Nikolskoje and had pressed on with the infantry and the tanks, driving the Soviets from the next three villages, or more properly the straggling collections of mud-floored hovels of Nowo-Dankilowo, Moskwinka and Stakanowo.
Pape * was awarded the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross for the action, and Ernst the Iron Cross First Class, but in the greater scheme of things the four-hour battle was but a minor skirmish: it is covered only in personal memoirs and was mentioned just briefly in Pape’s hometown newspaper. It was, nevertheless, one of the first successful attacks of the German army’s 1942 campaign, and soon, after many little actions like it, all would be ready for the next phase, when the German army would surge forward to the Volga and then turn south into the Caucasus and the glittering prize of the oil fields that would feed German industry and the Wehrmacht, regardless of Allied blockade or bombing.
* * *
As Major Pape’s men regrouped and congratulated themselves on the successful first moves to continue the eastwards march of German conquest, 5,000 miles to the south-east it was night and the men of the Japanese 18 Division were filing down to the bank of the estuary of the River Skudai, at the tip of the Malayan peninsula and directly across the strait from the north shore of Singapore Island. In a hastily assembled collection of sampans, army landing craft and rubber assault boats, they would form the first wave of the landings on Britain’s impregnable Far East bastion. The soldiers’ morale was high but most were resigned to the fact that there was a very good chance of dying for the emperor before the night was over: so far the Japanese advance down Malaya had been unstoppable, but now the British and the Indians and the Australians would surely fight like cornered rats, even if the invading force managed actually to get across the water and land in the teeth of the artillery fire that would swamp the boats and rend the bodies of their occupants.
All day, the positions of the Australians defending the opposite shore had been subjected to bombardment, but, as the little armada moved out into the water, the Japanese had to cease shelling, for fear of hitting their own men. Now, surely, would come the retaliation, but as the boats moved closer and closer to the shore, there was no reply from the defenders, until at last, only fifty yards from landing, a desultory rattle of rifle and Bren gun fire began. It was far too late. The Japanese lieutenants and sergeants and corporals who led that first wave could hardly believe their good fortune as they stormed ashore and through the hastily dug defences. There should indeed have been a devastating artillery barrage to fall upon them, and Vickers machine-guns and anti-tank guns should have ripped through the plywood and rubber of their boats, but the searchlights that the British had sited to illuminate them had never come on (nobody ever knew quite why); the frantic telephone messages from the artillery forward observation officers had not got through as the cables had been severed by the Japanese shelling; there were too few radios and communication by this means was anyway patchy; and the last resort of flares fired in a certain sequence to bring down fire were not seen by the men on the guns in their camouflaged positions two miles behind.
Within hours, the invaders had reached Tengah airfield, abandoned days before by the RAF as the station commander shot himself in shame and desperation, the shore defence had collapsed and
more and more Japanese troops were streaming off the landing craft. In a matter of days, it would all be over. Singapore would be in Japanese hands and the myth of British invincibility shattered. Next would come Burma, and then India, the jewel in the crown of the British Empire that, were it not taken by the Japanese themselves, would fall into their hands by internal revolt. The Japanese dream of the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere was only a grasp away from becoming reality.
* * *
For any German – or Italian or Japanese – the world view must indeed have seemed a rosy one in mid-February 1942.In 1939, the Wehrmacht had swept into Poland, and then in 1940 had conquered the whole of Western Europe in a mere six weeks, with the opposition either running up the white flag or, in the case of the British, scrambling humiliatingly back across the Channel. The invasion of Russia in June 1941 had been a run of almost unbroken success, with the Luftwaffe ruling the skies and hundreds of thousands of Red Army soldiers encircled, defeated, killed or taken prisoner. True, the German army had been unable to take Moscow in 1940, but, as Hitler had said, Moscow was only a name on a map, and now they had survived the coldest Russian winter for fifty years. Meanwhile, in North Africa Rommel’s German and Italian forces were preparing an offensive that would drive the British Eighth Army all the way back from Gazala to the Egyptian border and in the Far East Germany’s ally, Japan, had driven the British from Malaya, captured Hong Kong and Singapore, destroyed the Dutch empire in the East Indies and would soon take the surrender of the American and Filipino forces on Corregidor.
It would be both a cliché and simply untrue to remark that, despite all the euphoria in Berlin, Rome and Tokyo, there were dark clouds on the horizon, for dark clouds can be seen, and it would have been a brave man indeed in those heady days of mid-February 1942 who would have been prepared to lay any sort of odds against the Axis winning the Second World War. But wars are not predictable, and, however much we soldiers might wish it to be otherwise, they are not necessarily decided by the courage, leadership, training and loyalty of the troops involved, nor by the quality of the equipment they deploy – these are, of course, important, but money, population and industrial capacity are often the final deciders.
In very short order, the global situation would change utterly. In less than four months, the Japanese Combined Fleet, far from luring the Americans to disaster, would itself suffer a devastating defeat; a month after that, American forces would land on the Japanese-occupied island of Guadalcanal; in October, the British Eighth Army, hitherto beaten and outgeneralled, would strike the first blow at Alamein that would drive Panzer Army Africa all the way back to Tunisia, and then the British and Americans would invade Vichy French Algeria and Morocco, spelling the death of the German and Italian campaign in North Africa. Worst of all for the Axis, by the end of 1942 the German drive to the Volga would be halted by the disaster of Stalingrad and most of the Caucasus oil would prove unreachable. The Russian campaign, until now a more or less unbroken string of great German victories, would instead become a grim and bloody defence – an unremitting succession of desperate counter-attacks and heartbreaking retreats back to the gates of Berlin and the heart of the Reich itself. The fortunes of war are indeed fickle.
1
ON YOUR MARKS…
It would be quite unfair to blame the United States of America for starting the Second World War. Hitler did not come to power because of the Wall Street Crash, but, as the Great Depression sparked off by the crash affected the economies of the whole developed world and encouraged the rise of extreme politics, it certainly helped. Indeed, before the crash led indirectly to the collapse of a major Austrian bank in May 1931 – a collapse which brought down the entire German banking system with it – German liberal democracy might, just, have survived; after it, the rise of extreme German nationalism could not be contained.
Stock markets depend on confidence – confidence in the soundness of the market, confidence in the individual companies and utilities quoted on it, and confidence in its regulation. When any of these factors is absent, then it is only a question of time before financial chaos and collapse ensue. The Wall Street Crash was not the first such implosion, nor by any means the last. Economists still argue about the causes of the 1929 crash, but what actually happened is clear enough, even if the reasons for it are not. Democracies and controlled economies are mutually incompatible and in a free market occasional adjustment – recession even – is probably inevitable. The United States had been heading for recession in 1914 and the First World War had got her out of it. The slack in American industry was taken up by British and French contracts for war-making materiel, and indeed there were cynics who claimed (unfairly, in this author’s view) that America only entered the war to make sure that the Allies won and she got paid. As the only participant that actually emerged from the war richer than she entered it, America was poised for a period of sustained economic growth after it, and, under the administrations of Presidents Calvin Coolidge from 1921 and Herbert Hoover from 1928, she got it. Among the results of this boom were very large amounts of cash looking for a home, and some of this surplus cash was absorbed by lending to overseas governments and financial institutions: by 1929, American banks had outstanding foreign loans of $8.5bn, about half of this total being to Germany.* A proportion of these loans were undoubtedly dubious, but, as long as the lenders were happy to lend and the borrowers could service the loans at interest rates that were not onerous, nobody minded very much.
It was not just corporations and the US government that used overseas loans as a seemingly safe resting place for spare capital, but individuals too, and many not only bought into loans but piled into the stock market, which seemed as if it would go on rising for ever.By 1929 it was estimated that 9 million individuals were engaged in owning, buying and selling shares, which, if dependants are included, means that around 20 per cent of the entire US population (120 million in 1929) was involved with the stock market and directly affected by it. Many knew perfectly well that shares can go down as well as up, but there was an almost universal suspension of belief that for many years appeared to be justified as the market marched ever upwards.
America had never believed in the regulation of making money, and there was the usual crop of out-and-out swindlers who encouraged investment in companies that either did not exist or were set up purely to fleece the gullible. Most brokers – those who arranged for the purchase and sale of shares – were not dishonest, but too many of them were either incompetent or incurable optimists who encouraged the naive and the greedy to buy and to go on buying. By 1929 shares were changing hands at prices that could not possibly be justified by the underlying assets backing them, and between 1925 and 1929 the total of share prices on the New York exchange had trebled. The trouble about booms, though, is that they nearly always over-extend themselves and are followed by some sort of bust.
Matters were hardly improved by the fact that, alongside the straightforward investment in the Wall Street market, there was a great deal of buying on margin, which was effectively a way of buying shares with borrowed money, the collateral for the loan being the shares themselves. If the market went up, the profits could be enormous,* but, if it went down, then the investor had to keep pumping more and more money in to back the loan, which now became increasingly greater than the value of the shares. As it was, by October 1929 a staggering total of $6.8bn was outstanding in loans to buy shares, most of it backed by the shares themselves. In short, Wall Street had become as much a medium for gambling, with many small investors sucked in by the lure of easy money, as it was a mechanism for economic growth. It had taken twenty years, from 1907 until 1927, for the Dow Jones industrial average – the measure of the total value of a representative basket of shares on the New York market – to double. It took only another two years – from 1927 to 1929 – for it to double again. The bubble could not go on expanding for ever, and eventually it burst.
The twenties had stopped roaring well
before October 1929, although very few seemed to notice. On the 17th of that month, the committee of the Investment Bankers Association of New York warned that speculation in utilities (gas, electricity, water) had ‘reached danger point and many stocks are selling far above their intrinsic value’.2 No one seemed to listen. On Wednesday, 23 October, New York prices started to drop and the second-highest number of shares in the history of the exchange was traded. The telegrams demanding increases in margin payments started to go out. The next day’s opening saw more selling but there was a modest upturn in late trading when the banks and investment houses pumped money in to steady the market, and the morning’s losses were halved. On Friday, 25 October, the Dow Jones closed marginally up, and on Saturday marginally down but in steady trading. Both the optimists and those who were in too deeply to get out without huge losses breathed again.
Their relief was short-lived. On Monday morning, a rumour-fuelled wave of selling saw Wall Street’s biggest drop in share prices to date, with $14bn lopped off the value of shares. Worse was to come. On Tuesday, 29 October, massive selling, which was now panic selling, continued. By the close of trading that day, 16.4 million shares had been traded. The Dow, which on 1 October stood at 343, was at 230 and it would be another twenty-five years before it would reach its pre-crash levels again. In all, $10bn had been wiped off the market value. To put this sum into perspective, it was equal to the total cost to America of the first war, ten times the Union budget for the Civil War and twice all the money in circulation throughout the entire nation.3 It was now breathtakingly clear that this really was a crash: there would be no correction, no rally, no pumping in of money by the banks. By the time loans had not been repaid and banks and businesses had failed, the total cost has been estimated at $50bn or $559bn in today’s money.
Second World War, The Page 3