Second World War, The

by Corrigan, Gordon

  In the north, von Leeb’s army group had taken Riga, crossed the old Russian–Latvian border and was preparing to advance on Leningrad. Militarily, Leningrad was a naval base for the Red Banner Baltic Fleet, which, if left alone, could close the Gulf of Finland to shipments of Swedish iron ore to Germany, and an important centre of the Soviet armaments industry. Politically it was important to Stalin because of its name, and, if the main railway line from Leningrad to Moscow could be cut, then troops in and around Leningrad could not be removed by the Russians for use elsewhere. Panzer Group 4 cut off Leningrad from the outside world by land on 8 July, although a tenuous sea link across Lake Lagoda remained. Field Marshal von Leeb thought he could hook round and join up with the Finns, advancing from the north, and then take Leningrad in four days, but problems arose. So far the Finns had been able to deal with such Russian counter-attacks that had been launched. The north of their country was safe from the large Russian garrison in Murmansk as its attention was fully focused on the two mountain divisions under the German Lieutenant-General Eduard Dietl, who had crossed the Norwegian–Russian border and was attacking in the direction of Murmansk. Despite this, the Finns were not prepared to advance beyond their 1939 frontier – their main objective in joining the war was to regain the territory lost in the Winter War, and they had now done that. Besides the problem of the uncooperative Finns, the ground was increasingly difficult for vehicles, particularly for tanks, and, with Hitler demanding that the city be razed to the ground, the attack on Leningrad settled down into a rather untidy blockade.

  In Army Group South the results were less spectacular than in the centre, but impressive none the less. On 11 July von Kleist’s armour reached the outer defensive positions of Kiev on the Dnieper. He had advanced 250 miles in nineteen days but was rightly reluctant to get involved in fighting in built-up areas so turned south along the Dnieper, intending to cross and get east of the city while he waited for the infantry of Sixth and Seventeenth Armies to come up. In fact, General Kirponos’s South-West Front had performed better than any of the other Russian fronts and was expected by Stalin (and by Kirponos himself) to be able to hold Kiev. Field Marshal von Rundstedt now had a problem. He wanted to encircle Kiev and trap Kirponos’s troops in the pocket thus created, but with only one panzer group he could not be sure that the ring would be strong enough to prevent the Russians from breaking out before the German infantry armies could get up.

  Now occurred the first serious example of Hitler overruling his generals on an operational matter. He had overruled them before – on Anschluss and on the invasion of Czechoslovakia – but these had been cases where Hitler considered that the political imperative outweighed the military risks. He had also tinkered with operational plans, but so far he had generally decided the strategic objectives and then allowed the generals to get on with waging the war. Once the Smolensk battle was over, the army wanted to press on to capture Moscow. Field Marshal von Brauchitsch, Commander-in-Chief of the army, and Colonel-General Halder, the Chief of the General Staff, urged the Führer to ignore Leningrad and Kiev and allow the army to go for the big prize, Moscow. Hitler, on the other hand, wanted the Russian armies west of Kiev to be enveloped and destroyed. There were insufficient reserves to do both simultaneously without an unacceptable risk to Army Group South and Hitler decided on the Kiev option. He ordered that, once the Smolensk battle was over, the advance on Moscow was to halt and Guderian’s Panzer Group 2 from Army Group Centre was to turn south and form the northern arm of the encirclement of Kiev, with Army Group South turning north and forming the southern arm. Guderian’s tanks and lorries left the Smolensk pocket on 6 August and began to attack south. On 12 August Field Marshal Keitel’s OKW, on Hitler’s orders, directed that Army Group Centre, which had already lost Panzer Group 2, was to go over to the defensive and send Hoth and his Panzer Group 3 north to assist Army Group North in the attack on Leningrad.

  In the south, Kiev still held out but Army Group South had achieved a limited encirclement at Uman, 120 miles south of Kiev, which shattered twenty Russian divisions and yielded 103,000 prisoners. By the end of August the army group was closing up to the Dnieper, against far harder resistance than anywhere else, and on 31 August its armour had forced a crossing ninety miles south-east of Kiev and established a bridgehead. Now von Kleist’s Panzer Group 1 could begin to move round east of Kiev to link up with Guderian coming down from the north. Soon all the assets would be in place for the biggest envelopment battle so far of the campaign.

  The two armoured arms of the pincers met on 13 September at Lubny, 125 miles east-south-east of Kiev, and by the 16th the outer ring was secure as infantry divisions hurried up to seal the exits from the pocket. Inside the city of Kiev and the pocket were four Soviet armies. Stalin gave permission for Kiev to be given up, and while there were still gaps in the ring he sent a senior staff officer to General Kirponos to tell him to withdraw from the pocket – but in Stalin’s Russia nobody did anything on verbal orders. Kirponos insisted on written permission to withdraw, and by the time it arrived it was too late. Kiev was abandoned on 19 September, and fighting in the pocket was virtually over by 25 September. General Kirponos was himself killed trying to lead his staff out of the pocket on foot and the Germans took 650,000 prisoners. They now fell victim to what would become standard Soviet practice when abandoning cities. Before departing Kiev, the Russians had booby-trapped any building or utility likely to be useful to the invaders. Large factory buildings that would be ideal as billets for housing troops, and hotels and government buildings that could be used for formation headquarters or offices for the staff, had explosive charges hidden in them to be detonated either by timing devices or by remote control by stay-behind parties (the Germans blamed Kiev’s Jews). Such was the destruction caused by these explosions and the subsequent fires that Hitler ordered that in future cities and towns were to be bypassed and reduced to rubble by aerial bombing and artillery fire – an order which was generally ignored as the army needed the infrastructure of the cities for its own administration.

  Although Hitler,in his directive Number 34 dated 12 August, agreed that the advance on Moscow could be resumed once the Kiev pocket had been eliminated, many German generals after the war blamed Hitler’s decision to halt Army Group Centre’s advance on Moscow and send Guderian’s armour south as the decision that lost Germany the war. In support of this argument, they said that, had the drive on Moscow continued immediately after Smolensk, the weather would have been much more favourable to the attackers, and Stalin would not have had time to deploy the forces for the defence of Moscow that he did in due course deploy. On the other hand, the formations of Army Group Centre had by the end of August almost run out of ammunition, rations and fuel, and did need and, because of Hitler’s interference, did indeed get a lengthy pause for replenishment and to allow their largely horse-drawn logistics units to come up. On this occasion, in a strange twist, the soldiers were thinking like politicians – capture the enemy capital – whereas Hitler was thinking like a soldier – destroy the enemy’s armies. To this author at least, Hitler’s decision seems perfectly sensible, and, while there is some evidence to suggest that a German capture of Moscow in the autumn of 1941 might have been the catalyst for the anti-Stalin factions (and there were many) to coalesce and depose him, whether that would have led to a Soviet government that would have opened negotiations to end the war – and whether Hitler would have accepted an end before his armies got to the Urals – is a moot question.

  In the meantime, it soon became apparent to OKH and OKW – as it had been to Army Group North for some time – that the forests and swamps around Leningrad were totally unsuitable for armour, and so the reduction of that city would now be entrusted to the infantry. Hoth’s Panzer Group 3 was restored to Army Group Centre and von Leeb’s own armour, Hoepner’s Panzer Group 4, would also come under the command of Army Group Centre, which now had three panzer groups, or the bulk of the German armoured and motorized units on t
he Russian front. The plan for Case Typhoon – the attack on Moscow – envisaged another great envelopment battle. Panzer Groups 3 and 4 would encircle Moscow from the north and Panzer Group 2 from the south, meeting east of the city and closing the ring. Altogether, von Bock disposed of 2 million men in seventy-eight divisions and three panzer groups with 14,000 artillery pieces and over 1,000 tanks, supported by 1,400 aircraft of the Luftwaffe. Opposing him were ninety-six Soviet divisions of various types with around the same number of tanks (although only a few were of the latest type), about half as many guns and about 1,000 aircraft. The operation began on 2 October and almost immediately led to the annihilation of four Soviet armies at Vyazma, 125 miles west-south-west of Moscow, as Panzer Groups 3 and 4 closed behind them, and two more as Panzer Group 2 broke through to Orel and Bryansk, 150 miles south of the capital.

  Despite Typhoon starting a month later than the army would have liked, the situation in late 1941 still appeared very favourable for Germany. In a series of brilliantly conducted battles of manoeuvre, German armies had killed or taken prisoner over 2 million Russians and wounded another 690,000. They had advanced 700 miles as the crow flies, and about 1,500 miles as the tank drives; they were poised to take the Caucasus and the Crimea in the south, Leningrad in the north and Moscow in the centre. In the Ukraine, Germans were being welcomed as liberators from the hated communists, and not just by those of German origin, planted there by Catherine the Great in the eighteenth century. But there were worrying signs. As the Luftwaffe had discovered in its initial bombing offensive in June 1941, the range of its bombers was insufficient to reach beyond Moscow, and so industrial plant east of that city could not be attacked and its removal farther east could not be prevented. The number of prisoners taken indicated that many Russian soldiers were only fighting half-heartedly for Stalin, yet fight they did, and, however many Russian armies were destroyed, more always seemed to appear from somewhere. And as early as 23 June the new Russian tanks, the KV-1 and the T-34, had begun to appear. There were very few of them and they were badly handled, but the standard German anti-tank gun, the 37mm, could do nothing against them, and even the Mk IV tank with its short gun was not a match for either.

  At the outset of Barbarossa the Germans were poised at the narrow end of a large funnel, and as they advanced farther into the USSR, so that funnel widened out, and more and more troops were needed to cover it. The armoured units had performed wonders, but by the beginning of October the German army in the East had lost around 50,000 soldiers dead and 2,000 tanks, including 215 Mk IVs. Replacement tanks amounted to 999, including 128 Mk IVs, but, even when 122 captured tanks of various sorts were painted with iron crosses and taken into German service, the replacement rate was still only 50 per cent. All this notwithstanding, if Moscow could be taken before the onset of winter, the war could still be won in 1941. But then, on 6 October, the first snow fell.

  6

  THE ASIAN WAR

  SEPTEMBER–DECEMBER 1941

  On 14 November 1928, in a display of pomp and pageantry that was in part age-old tradition and in part copied from what court officials had seen of the coronation of George V in London in 1910, the twenty-eight-year-old Michinomya was crowned as Emperor of Japan, taking the name Hirohito. He had spent the previous night in the holiest of Shinto shrines, supposedly taking counsel of his direct ancestor the sun goddess, and from the moment of his coronation was divine. He now sat at the apex of a nation that was still unsure what it wanted. On the one hand, there was the liberal intellectual faction, influenced by the West and anxious to join the club of developed nations, while at the other extreme were the ultra-nationalists determined that Japan should be the superpower of the East and wanting to cast out all traces of Western influence and ideology. Meanwhile, at the very bottom of Japanese society were the peasants and manual workers, exploited as they always had been, but now by the industrialists and their allies in the army and the navy.

  Even today, the personality of Emperor Hirohito is an enigma. After the war it was in the interests of the Americans and British to believe, or pretend to believe, that the emperor had been but a ceremonial figure, only able to act on the advice of his ministers, and with no responsibility for the horrors that his soldiers and sailors had unleashed on his unfortunate neighbours. As the Western Allies needed Japan as a counterweight to the USSR during the Cold War, this was a convenient way to retain Japanese support rather than alienate it by hanging their emperor as a war criminal – which many believed he was. From the little we know of the personality of the man whom in later years the West saw as a stooped, mild-mannered marine biologist, peering shyly at the world though thick, old-fashioned spectacles, Hirohito would probably have preferred peace to war, but there was an inevitability about his country’s road to conquest.

  Japan was still inclined towards the West in the aftermath of the First World War, but faith in the goodwill of the Americans and the British was fading fast. The Washington Naval Treaty of 1922 had stipulated a naval tonnage ratio of five for each of the UK and the USA to only three for Japan. American intercepts of Japanese communications revealed that three was the lowest ratio the Japanese would accept without walking out of the conference, but, although this was twice the 1.5 allowed to the French and Italians, the Japanese navy considered they had been sold out by the politicians, and all thought they had been let down by the British. In 1924 the United States Congress passed the Exclusion Act banning Japanese immigration, and in 1925 the British, largely under American pressure, had declined to renew the Anglo-Japanese treaty. The collapse of world trade consequent upon the onset of the Depression only strengthened the hand of those who thought that Japan should cut herself off from all Western ties and develop an economic strategy of her own. Japanese industry was efficient and modern; the problem was that there was now nobody to sell to, and it was totally reliant on imported raw materials. For some time it had seemed to those who held the real power in Japan – the industrialists, the generals and the admirals – that Manchuria might provide the source of raw materials, the market and the self-sufficiency that Japan needed.

  Manchuria is that portion of the Chinese mainland that bordered on Korea to the south and the USSR to the north and east. Both Russia and Japan had long harboured designs on Manchuria, the land of the Manchus, the Mongolians who had invaded and conquered China in the seventeenth century and established the Qing dynasty in 1636. Early twentieth-century China was in nearly all respects a failed state. As with previous Asiatic invaders, the Manchus were absorbed and by the 1920s were indistinguishable from the Han Chinese, although the Japanese tried to justify what they did by maintaining that the occupants of Manchuria were still Manchu. Over the centuries, Qing emperors had been stripped of real power, which was instead wielded by an assortment of warlords, courtiers, eunuchs, generals and administrators, all to a greater or lesser degree corrupt and nearly all incompetent. As had happened many times before in Chinese history, when a dynasty had run out of steam, China had fragmented into a patchwork of semi-independent fiefdoms ruled over by bandits of varying degrees of viciousness and with a number of foreign concessions and treaty ports. To all Chinese, however, Manchuria was an inalienable province of the motherland, albeit one ruled by a semi-independent warlord, while to Japan it was the equivalent of the Wild West – ungoverned or ill-governed and there for the taking. Since 1905, Japanese troops had been in Manchuria to protect Japanese investments and interests there, but the deposition of the Qing emperor in 1912 and the establishment of government by the Kuo Min Tang, a nationalist movement intent on re-establishing control over the whole country, including Manchuria, threatened Japanese interests. Increasingly, Japanese army officers were ignoring the instructions of the home government and plotting a complete takeover of Manchuria.