Second World War, The

by Corrigan, Gordon

  Auchinleck now decided that what was needed was not the seeking out of Rommel’s strongest formations – the Germans of the DAK – but instead the concentration on his weakest units – the Italian infantry. In a series of limited operations and raids, the British managed to knock the Italians, who were holding the front while the DAK rested farther back, off balance and on one occasion even penetrated to within a few miles of the headquarters of Panzer Army Africa, and on 15 July, despite a failure of the tanks to support the infantry, they captured the vital ground of the Ruweisat Ridge. Field Marshal Rommel was now forced to accept that the supply and manpower situation in Panzer Army Africa precluded any more offensives and that he would be fortunate to be able to hold the ground that he had won. On the evening of 21 July, Auchinleck launched a major offensive designed to break through the German defences and destroy the DAK. Alas, while the British were slowly learning the lessons of a successful defence, they had not yet absorbed the principles of attack. The armour failed to support the infantry, and when it did it reverted to the tactic of lining up and going as fast as it could; the infantry failed to properly clear minefield gaps, thus losing more tanks, and relations between the British, Australian and South Africans and between everyone and the armour were almost at breaking point, with all blaming each other and the mysterious ‘they’ for what was going wrong. Auchinleck knew what had to be done, but he simply did not have enough professional subordinates to carry it out. For the moment, Rommel could do nothing because he had no supplies, and Auchinleck could do nothing because he had insufficient men.

  Auchinleck had saved the Eighth Army and the Suez Canal, but that was not the way Churchill saw it. Relations between the two men had been steadily, and occasionally, when Churchill sent a particularly offensive signal, unsteadily, declining since the spring, and Auchinleck’s report after First Alamein that he would not be able to go on the offensive until mid-September enraged the prime minister, who now decided that he would personally go out to Egypt with the CIGS before they flew on, as arranged, to consult with Stalin in Moscow. He and Brooke arrived in Cairo on 3 August 1942. It was the beginning of what came to be known as the Cairo Purge, an episode that would not reflect well on either Churchill or Brooke.

  8

  THE RUSSIAN WAR

  OCTOBER 1941–NOVEMBER 1942

  By October 1941 the German army was poised to take Moscow in the centre, was well into the Crimea and about to break into the Caucasus in the south, and was besieging Leningrad in the north.* Despite the inability of the Replacement Army† to fully compensate for the losses of men and materiel, delays in the conversion of the Russian railway to German gauge and the ominous signs of the approach of winter, most German commanders thought, or convinced themselves they should think, that the war could still be won swiftly. Already, however, they were building up problems in the rear areas that would plague them for the rest of the Russian war. The Germans had overrun huge swathes of territories from which much of the population had not been removed and they had taken nearly 2 million Russian prisoners of war. Not all of the captured soldiers were enthusiastic about fighting for Stalin, and many of the civilians thought the Germans would release them from the burden of communism, particularly from the generally detested collectivization of farming. Within the German armed forces and the civil administration that followed them, there were divided opinions. All realized that pacification of the rear areas was essential to allow the Wehrmacht to move deeper into the USSR and to supply itself as it did so; the disagreement was in how that should be achieved. One school of thought – mainly, but not exclusively, in the army – held that humane treatment of prisoners and the civilian population could turn them away from communism and, if not persuade them to actively support the invaders, at least keep them quiescent. The other school held that the way to keep the peace was to ensure that prisoners and civilians were too terrified to step out of line and that brutality should be the tool to ensure it. The latter viewpoint coincided with the desire of NSDAP party officials to carry out racial cleansing, and it was their policies that prevailed. It is unclear how much the army participated in what were termed atrocities at the post-war trials. At Nuremberg and in their memoirs, the generals denied that they had anything to do with illegal executions, blaming the party or the SS, and many of the records, if records were kept, have been lost or destroyed, but there can be little doubt that, while some units steadfastly refused to become involved in what officers considered to be conduct that stained the honour of the German army, there were also some that participated with varying levels of enthusiasm in the killing of political commissars and the rounding up of Jews.

  Some of what went on can be understood, if not excused. Numbers of Russian soldiers were shot when trying to surrender, but that happens in any war and on any front and there were reports of Russians pretending to surrender and then carrying on fighting once their potential captors had lowered their guard. It was sometimes difficult to distinguish between partisans – armed civilians taking part in the fighting – who may legally be executed, and bypassed groups of cut-off soldiers, who may not. It was claimed that some commissars were removing their brassards and pretending to be ordinary prisoners, which led to the shooting of all sorts of people who just might be commissars but usually were not. The Germans were particularly concerned about women soldiers, of whom the Red Army had a great many, and at one stage there was an order (later countermanded) saying that all female prisoners of war were to be shot.* The German army found itself with far more prisoners of war than it ever thought it would have to look after. Prisoners need to be got away from the battle area and into detention camps well behind the lines, and the original intention was for them to be transported back to camps in occupied Poland or East Prussia in otherwise empty lorries going back to collect supplies. This rarely worked because commanders of transport units refused to carry prisoners on the grounds that they would infest their vehicles with lice, and prisoners had to march, often for hundreds of miles and taking weeks to get to the very basic accommodation made available to them. Many died on the way and those who did not found that the ration supplied was barely sufficient to keep them alive. Inevitably, in the primitive conditions of the camps into which they were eventually put, disease, particularly typhus, took its toll and medical arrangements, if provided at all, were of the most basic kind. Had the war been won as quickly as the Germans thought it would, then the brutality option would have worked, but as it was the treatment of prisoners and the civil population fostered a deep hatred of the Germans and acted as an excellent recruiter for partisan activity, something that would cause more and more trouble for the Germans as they drove deeper into the USSR. It was not, of course, a one-way street. The Russians shot prisoners and treated the captured at least as badly as the Germans; in Poland the Red Army set out to deliberately exterminate anyone who might lead a rising against them – priests, army officers, intellectuals. It is impossible to say who started it, but the Germans might at least have been expected to have known better.

  The opening moves of Operation Typhoon, the attack on Moscow, had gone very well for the Germans. By 7 October they had captured Orel and Bryansk south of Moscow, cutting off yet more Russian armies and bagging 85,000 prisoners, while at Vyazma to the west they had taken another 600,000 when Stalin refused to permit a withdrawal until it was far too late. In the Soviet version of the war, much is made of the heroic fighting of the armies in the Bryansk and Vyazma pockets and of their undying glory, which rather calls into question why so many surrendered. Already there were captured Russians who were quite prepared to collaborate, and even the occasional unit whose commander took them across to the Germans. A number of generals, including three army commanders, captured by the Germans told their captors that the peasants and workers had been badly let down by the broken promises of the Communist Party, and that, if the German government made a public announcement that it would establish a Russian state where the farmer could tend hi
s own land and the worker could have a say in the running of his factory, then they would certainly fight for the Germans and they thought that others still serving would too. The Reich was not prepared to make such a statement, and it was an opportunity missed. By the time the Germans set up the Russian Liberation Army under General Vlasov, who commanded an army in the defence of Moscow and who was captured by the Germans in 1942, it was too late.

  The Germans now assumed that the Russians had no reserves to mount an effective defence of Moscow, and were fearful that the Red Army would abandon the capital and retreat into the vast interior to regroup. In order to prevent that happening, and also to avoid the necessity of having to fight through the streets of Moscow if the Red Army, contrary to expectations, did defend it, the plan for Typhoon was recast. Hoth’s Panzer Group 3 would now drive towards Kalinin, 100 miles north-west of Moscow, to relieve the Soviet pressure on Army Group North. Panzer Group 4 would hook round to the north of Moscow, and in the south Guderian’s Panzer Group 2,now renamed Second Panzer Army, would split into two prongs: one would head north-east and slip round the south of Moscow while the other would drive south-east for Kursk. Von Bock was unhappy; he thought that this would disperse his troops more than was wise – and Second Panzer Army’s units would be 200 miles apart – and he wanted to delay until he had finished mopping up the Bryansk and Vyazma pockets, but he was overruled. It was now that things began to go wrong.

  With the autumn rains came what the Russians call ‘the time with no roads’. The existing roads turned to mud and became heavily rutted, then froze with the early frosts and then thawed back into mud again. The speed of German advance slowed and the Luftwaffe found it increasingly difficult to use the primitive Russian airstrips it had captured. (The alternative was flying from airfields in Germany and Poland, which meant that the time aircraft could spend over their targets was greatly reduced.) Nevertheless the Germans did advance, and, when the bulk of USSR governmental functionaries were evacuated to Kuybyshev on the River Volga well behind the lines, there was panic and looting in Moscow. Order was swiftly restored by NKVD troops by the simple expedient of shooting anyone caught misbehaving, and quite a few who were not but would serve as object lessons. On 10 October, Colonel-General Konev, who had taken over as Commander Western Front from Timoshenko on 15 September, and Marshal Budenny, Commander Reserve Front, both ex-Tsarist NCOs, were relieved of their commands and both Fronts amalgamated into one Western Front to be commanded by General Zhukov. Konev was allowed to stay on as Zhukov’s second-in-command and Budenny, an old friend of Stalin’s, similarly escaped the usual penalty for failed generals. In Moscow itself, every able-bodied man, and woman, was pressed into digging anti-tank ditches and trench lines, and 40,000 were incorporated into so-called Peoples’ Guard divisions with what equipment could be scraped together and some very rudimentary training. Plans to destroy factories and plants that might be useful to the Germans were drawn up, and those archives that could not be transported to the rear were burned. Huge efforts were made to bolster the defences of the city: thirteen rifle divisions and five armoured brigades were moved from the interior and, another 250 tanks were found from somewhere; Zhukov issued a stirring appeal to every Soviet soldier to do his duty in defence of the motherland, adding that ‘cowards and panic-mongers’ were to be shot on the spot as traitors. The Russians still could not identify where a German attack might come, and when the armour of Panzer Groups 3 and 4 burst through the defences of the 1812 battlefield of Borodino on 18 October and Colonel Sbytov, commanding the Moscow region Red Air Force, reported that his reconnaissance aircraft had seen German units also moving on Kalinin to the north and on Tula to the south, he was threatened with prosecution by the NKVD for scare-mongering.

  On 14 October the Germans captured Kalinin, and the Russians formed a new Kalinin Front, commanded by Konev, and having at last recognized where the German thrusts were aiming for, and throwing everything they had at them, they managed to halt Guderian’s northern prong at Tula on 29 October. Around Moscow the roads were being demolished and barricades of barbed wire and timber, covering anti-tank obstacles and minefields, were being erected. The Germans paused to wait for the weather to improve and to bring up supplies and repair their tanks. Their intention was to wait for that brief window between the ground freezing permanently, when the armour could move, and the coming of the heavy snows, when it could not, and make one last attempt to capture Moscow before the worst of the winter set in. Then Stalin, against the advice of Zhukov, ordered counter-attacks against the German north and south wings. They achieved nothing except to add to the already staggering Russian casualties. In Moscow the departure of the elite for safer pastures in the east had not gone unnoticed, and the NKVD firing squads were kept busy dealing with smugglers, looters, enemy spies, agents provocateurs, defeatists and anyone who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Political prisoners, including the wives of executed generals, were taken out and shot as the secret police dealt with their enemies now, just in case the regime did collapse. Stalin did not leave Moscow, and insisted that, despite the Germans being but a couple of hours’ drive away, the traditional (if something only twenty-four years old can be called traditional) military parade in Red Square should take place on 7 November, the anniversary of the 1917 revolution. It was a fast ball for the Moscow Garrison Commander but he did manage to rustle up clerks, storemen, militia and a band, as well as some regular troops supported by a few tanks called back from the front for the occasion. As it began to snow just before the parade started, participants and spectators at least knew that they were safe from German air raids.

  The same day, 7 November, was also the first of the permanent freeze, and the Germans thrust forward again. Seven Panzer Division of Hoth’s Panzer Group 3 pushed across the Moscow–Volga canal and penetrated as far as fifteen miles north of the capital, from where the men could see the onion domes of the old city twinkling in the frosty air. This caused great excitement in Berlin but rather less at the front – the soldiers knew that it could not last, and it was as close to Moscow as the German army would ever get. By mid-November, with the weather getting progressively worse and German divisions at about half their established strength and at the end of an increasingly unreliable supply chain, the Russians could muster eighty-four divisions and twenty brigades, supported by 700 tanks in and around Moscow. Every time units of the Red Army met the Germans, they were defeated, sometimes resoundingly so, but somehow the Russian supreme command, the Stavka, kept finding more units to throw in. By 1 December, Operation Typhoon had ground to a halt, and Field Marshal von Bock recommended to OKH that the offensive be called off. OKW (actually Hitler) refused to accept von Bock’s assessment and insisted that the operation continue until Moscow had been captured. The attacks continued, but they made little progress. There were far more defenders than German intelligence had calculated, winter arrived unexpectedly early and by 4 December the temperature was down to –35°C. There were no Arctic lubricants; vehicles would not start; artillery breeches froze shut and rifle bolts would not open. Behind the lines, German railway engines running on converted Russian tracks constantly broke down as their boilers, never designed for such low temperatures, froze, and there were 100,000 cases of frostbite in December alone. In the north von Leeb was no nearer capturing Leningrad, and in the south von Rundstedt had captured the critical city of Rostov but had insufficient reserves to hold it and had pulled back. Hitler ordered him to reverse his decision to withdraw and, when the field marshal indicated that he would resign rather than countermand what he knew to be a correct military decision, Hitler accepted his resignation on 28 November and replaced him with the fifty-six-year-old Field Marshal Walther von Reichenau, one of the very few senior army officers who had openly supported Hitler and the NSDAP. Reichenau initially cancelled the withdrawal order, then realized that Rundstedt had been quite right, withdrew to Rundstedt’s intended defensive position and then told Hitler he had done
it, prefacing the signal with ‘in anticipation of your concurrence…’ He got away with it but was not to remain in post for long.