Second World War, The

by Corrigan, Gordon

  With the capture of Kiev, the Russians were now firmly established in the Ukraine, and, while the Germans were still much better at manoeuvring, they had precious little to manoeuvre with. By Christmas 1943 the Germans had around 2.5 million men on the Eastern Front but were desperately short of infantry. With 151 infantry divisions between the three main army groups and Kleist’s small Army Group A, there were only 341,000 combat infantrymen, less than 20 per cent of authorized establishment, and there were very few reinforcements arriving – indeed, there were very few available to be sent. Facing them were nearly 2 million Red Army combat infantrymen. The situation in armour was even worse: out of about 2,000 tanks and assault guns in the East, the Germans mustered 686 that were operational – many that would have been available were lost when the advancing Russians overran German armoured workshops – compared to the nearly 8,000 available to the Red Army. By now the German Panzer Mk V Panther had had most of its teething troubles ironed out and was technically a much better tank than the T-34 – some authorities think it was the best tank of the war – but quality can only defeat quantity up to a certain limit, and the Russians had gone way past that limit.

  As it was, the Soviet offensives continued with the main point of effort against Manstein in the south, and with Hitler once more reverting to his ‘not an inch’ philosophy. While he could eventually be persuaded to change his mind, it was often far too late and soldiers were sacrificed needlessly when they could instead have been pulled out from pockets to fight another day. In January 1944 the Red Army reached the old Russian–Polish border and German generals were becoming increasingly unhappy about the command arrangements on the Eastern Front. It was an OKH theatre – that is, the army high command was responsible for it – but there was no overall commander in theatre since the actions of the various army groups were being coordinated by Hitler, who was the army’s Commander-in-Chief and paid little attention to the counsel of his chief of the general staff, Zeitzler. Manstein attempted to persuade Hitler that he should give up command on the Eastern Front and appoint a commander-in-chief (presumably Manstein himself, under whom, according to his ADC, Field Marshals von Kluge, von Kleist and Rommel* were prepared to serve), but the Führer would not budge. Many of the generals could not see how the war could be won, although many were convinced – or said they were – that the Russians could not keep on attacking and must run out of men soon. Manstein still thought that, given complete operational freedom, he could effect a stalemate that would allow political negotiations to end the war. He seems, however, to have been living in a fool’s paradise, for it is inconceivable that the USSR, the USA or the UK would have entered into any negotiation with Hitler or an NSDAP government, and in any event Hitler would not, now or at any time, give Manstein that operational freedom he wanted.

  The German line now ran from Leningrad in the north, south to the west of Smolensk, through the Pripet Marshes, down to the west of Kiev and then along or behind the elbow of the River Dnieper to the Black Sea. Behind it, the only obstacle barriers left were the Rivers Bug and Dniester, after which the Germans would be defending on Romanian soil in the south and back in Poland in the centre. In the north, massive attacks on Army Group North at last lifted the siege of Leningrad when the Soviet Second Shock and Forty-Second Armies of the Baltic Front crashed through the German defences on 19 January 1944. South of Kiev, the Germans still held a sector of the east bank of the Dnieper west of the town of Cherkassy, but the two northernmost German corps, belonging to Eighth Army, were becoming increasingly liable to encirclement as the Russian salient round Kharkov continued to expand. Forbidden to withdraw, the corps commander began to stockpile rations and ammunition, despite protests from the Luftwaffe that they could supply him by air. Sure enough, on 24 January 1944 the Red Army’s First and Second Ukrainian Fronts under Generals Nikolai Vatutin and Ivan Konev began their attempt to encircle this enticing morsel, and on 28 January, against stiff German resistance, they succeeded in closing what became known as the Korsun Pocket, with 60,000 German soldiers inside. Initially, all went well for the Germans. The Luftwaffe managed to deliver between 150 and 200 tons a day, which with the stockpiles already there was sufficient; a Russian lieutenant-colonel appeared with a flag of truce inviting surrender and was taken to General Wilhelm Stemmerman, the senior German officer in the pocket, who gave him a glass of champagne and sent him on his way. Then the Russians began to put more and more fighters overhead and more and more anti-aircraft guns on the routes in and out of the pocket. At this point, Manstein recommended a breakout. Hitler would have none of it, instead insisting that Gruppe Stemmerman’s situation would enable its Red Army attackers to be themselves cut off and allow the Germans to recapture Kharkov, even as he completely failed to realize that the units he intended to achieve this with were so under-strength that such a bold move was totally impossible. As it was, Manstein launched a counter-attack that at first made considerable progress, pushing the Russians back against the river and getting within a few miles of the pocket. Then the spring thaw came early, with the ground turning to mud under the snow by day and freezing again by night, taking away the German advantage in manoeuvre. The counter-attack ground to a halt and Manstein ordered Stemmerman to break out the last five miles with his own resources. The retreat from the pocket was very nearly a total disaster: the wider tracks of the Russian tanks spread their weight better and allowed them to move when German tanks could not and the American Lend-Lease trucks and jeeps were far more reliable and performed better in mud than the collection of captured and cobbled-together vehicles the German army was reduced to. Russian tanks machine-gunned the horses of ambulances and drove over the wounded; a Belgian brigade of SS Division Viking was wiped out; General Stemmerman was killed and, with vehicles bogged in and abandoned, the troops retreated on foot through the snow by companies and platoons. Through their own efforts and a sterling performance by Manstein and Eighth Army’s two panzer divisions, contact was finally made with the pocket, and by 16 February 35,000 men were extricated. To the surprise of all, Hitler approved Manstein’s decision in retrospect. Had the Russians been tactically more nimble, they might have ruptured the German line and poured through, but, as it was, the shortening of the line allowed Manstein to plug the gap just in time. General Konev was none the less promoted to Marshal of the Soviet Union.

  As this was going on, all army group commanders on the Eastern Front and a selection of senior officers from all three services were summoned to Hitler’s headquarters in Rastenburg to be subjected to a diatribe by the Führer on the subject of loyalty – a move probably sparked off by rumours that some of the officers captured at Stalingrad had been induced to agree to broadcast anti-Nazi propaganda. Most members of the audience were highly offended; how dare they be spoken to like this? Had they not already sworn a personal oath to Hitler? Manstein was particularly displeased and said so. A second summons came on 19 March to all field marshals, who were required to line up at the Berghof in Obersalzburg and sign a declaration of loyalty that was then read out by the senior field marshal, von Rundstedt. This time, the trigger was the formation of the National Committee for Free Germany formed in Russian captivity by General von Seydlitz, a corps commander captured at Stalingrad, who was calling for the overthrow of Hitler.

  Meanwhile, the German defences along and behind the Dnieper were now in tatters, and the westward withdrawal went on. On 23 March 1944 the Red Army encircled First Panzer Army, which since October 1943 had been commanded by the one-armed General of Panzer Troops Hans Hube, on the River Bug, and once again Hitler issued his ‘to the last man and last round’ order. An incandescent Manstein flew to the Berghof and threatened to resign. Hitler relented, Manstein ordered a breakout and Hube got his army away, for which he was promoted to colonel-general.* It was the last time Manstein would argue with Hitler. On 30 March he and Field Marshal von Kleist, commanding Army Group A, were summoned to Obersalzburg, where they were presented with the swords with oak leav
es of the Knight’s Cross and relieved of their commands. Hitler thanked both men for their services and told them that the time for operations was over, now there could only be defending. Manstein would be replaced by Walter Model, a field marshal since the beginning of the month, and Kleist by Colonel-General Ferdinand Schorner.

  Now Army Group South would be renamed Army Group North Ukraine, despite its not having anything left of the Ukraine to cling to. In April 1944 the Red Army invaded the Crimea from the north, and in May the German navy began to evacuate Seventeenth Army, after Hitler had sacked its commander, Colonel-General Erwin Jaenecke, for pointing out that the position was untenable. The Russians now had all the Ukraine and the Crimea, although it would take time to restore peace in the teeth of furious opposition from Ukrainian guerrillas who had no wish to return to the arms of Mother Russia and who killed the Commander First Ukrainian Front, Colonel-General Vatutin, in an ambush. The NKVD would also be kept busy deporting to Central Asia 200,000 Crimean Tatars (virtually the entire Tatar population), who were considered to have collaborated with the Germans.

  Then, on 6 June 1944, the British and Americans landed in Normandy. Germany would now have to fight on three fronts.

  13

  THE ASIAN WAR

  JUNE 1942–AUGUST 1944

  In the India of 1942 General Wavell not only had to defend against the external threat from the Japanese; he also had to worry about the threat from within. The British could rely on the loyalty of the non-political classes, whence came the police and the soldiers of the Indian Army. The vast majority of the rulers of the nominally independent princely states backed the British as their shield against democracy and the mob, and the professional classes employed in the judiciary and the administration were also trustworthy. Not only did they rely on the British for employment and advancement, but most could see that the only time when India was united was when she came under British rule, and they could genuinely appreciate the benefits of the rule of law and of an administration that, while it did not always do what they would like, was at least incorruptible, a rare quality in the East. This outlook was not shared by all, however, and one of the results of the import of universal education and the opening of the professions to Indians was a wish for more political power than the British were prepared to give. Prior to the abolition of the East India Company, a Royal Proclamation of 1858 had declared Indians to be ‘equal citizens of the British Empire’ and successive British governments accepted that India would certainly be ready for Dominion status, like Canada or Australia, at some point, but that point tended to be a lot farther off than politicized Indians would have liked. The largest and oldest Indian political party, All India Congress, had supported the British unequivocally in the First World War, and felt that it had got little reward. By now there was a strong ‘Quit India’ movement which, having failed to get the British to agree to ‘Swaraj’ or Home Rule, demanded that they leave India altogether, and attempted to advance its aims by (mainly) non-violent protest such as stopping rail travel by lying down on the tracks,* marching around and sitting down in the streets, and generally being a confounded nuisance.

  The inspiration for the ‘Quit India’ movement was one Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, seventy-two years old in 1942 and a high-caste Hindu who had been educated in London and called to the Bar of the Inner Temple in 1891. After a short and generally unsuccessful career as a lawyer in the Bombay courts, he took a post as a lawyer for an Indian trading company in South Africa in 1893, which led him into agitation for Indian rights in South Africa, including the organization of an Indian ambulance unit which served on the British side during the South African War. Returning to India via London (where again he organized an Indian ambulance corps in 1915), he was awarded a gold medal by the (British) Indian government, but once back in India he came to the conclusion that the British Raj must be overthrown, not because it was intrinsically bad or because he disliked the British but because it was materialistic and detracted from what he thought India should be – largely rural, self-reliant and with only minimal government, a land where all races and religions could live peacefully together. To the British, that was all very well in time of peace – Gandhi and his adherents could be locked up for a short period and then released when they had seen the error of their ways – but it posed a real threat in time of war when other, more sinister, elements piggy-backed on Gandhi’s probably genuine moral principles.

  Already there were those amongst the political classes who were prepared to back the Japanese, believing, or pretending to believe, that the Japanese meant what they said and that the implementation of the Co-Prosperity Sphere would lead to Indian self-rule unfettered by Japan. One of these, a Bengali, Subhas Chandra Bose, another high-caste Hindu, born in 1897 and educated in English schools in India and then at Cambridge and secretly married to an Austrian, was, unlike Gandhi, a believer in getting rid of the British by force. He had been the leader of the Bengal Congress, the mayor of Calcutta, briefly the president of the All India Congress and in and out of jail for various acts of violence in the 1930s. In January 1942 he fled Calcutta and entered Afghanistan, whence by a roundabout route he reached Berlin, where he tried to set up the Indian Legion, recruited from Indian prisoners of war captured in North Africa. In February a German submarine handed him over to a similar Japanese vessel and he arrived in Tokyo, where he persuaded the prime minister, Tojo, to let him set up an Indian government-in-exile and to reinvigorate the Indian National Army, which the Japanese had already tried and failed to organize, from Indians captured in Malaya and Singapore. Much pressure, often including torture and beatings, was applied to persuade prisoners to join, and it is to their very great credit that the vast majority refused.* Those that did join did so from a mixture of motives: fear, disillusionment, a belief that the British were indeed beaten, the hope of an improvement in rations, release from imprisonment – all played a part, and, in the case of the few Viceroy Commissioned Officers who signed up, promises of promotion and status were undoubtedly persuasive. The INA, when it was eventually deployed against the British, was a complete disaster. The men either went to ground and avoided fighting, or deserted to the British, to the great embarrassment of those few King’s Commissioned Officers with political ambitions who had agreed to serve in the hope of rapid advancement in the army of an independent India. Bose himself died as the result of an aircraft crash in Taiwan in August 1945, but for many years there were those who believed that, like some Indian King Arthur or Drake, he would return when his country needed him.As he has yet to materialize, we may safely assume that he did indeed die of burns in 1945.

  Despite the risk of protesters blocking the rail and road lines to the north-east and preventing supplies and reinforcements from reaching the front, the Quit India movement did little to impede British military operations in and from India – those who led the movement were interned when necessary – but it did harden opinion, both in India and in the United Kingdom, and meant that complete British withdrawal sometime after the war, assuming that Britain won the war, became inevitable, as did partition and the bloodshed associated with it, and the tensions that continue to this day to bedevil relations between the two successor states to the Raj.

  * * *

  One of the most extraordinary aspects of the Second World War is not that the United States was able to take a tiny regular army that was unloved, ill-equipped and inexperienced in 1941 and turn it into the largest army in the West and the most technologically advanced in the world – money, population and industry could do that in time – but that they managed to do it so quickly, for by mid-1942, and despite the gloom, doom and despondency in Allied circles about the progress of the war as a whole, in a mere twelve months after being dragged into it the Americans were already making their presence felt. By June 1942 there was an American division in New Caledonia, 900 miles north-east of Brisbane, Australia, another in the New Hebrides, 300 miles north-west, another in Fiji, 600 miles east, a Ma
rine Regiment (a brigade in British terms) in Samoa, still further to the northeast, and there were two US divisions in Australia itself, bolstered by the arrival of the Australian 7 Division from the Middle East. American engineers were constructing airfields in the northern New Hebrides, Australia was now relatively secure from Japanese attack and the Americans could begin to think of embarking on limited offensives of their own.

  It was now that argument arose. Both the Americans and the British were agreed, at least at this stage, that Japan herself must be conquered and forced into surrender. As Britain had few forces to spare from the defence of India and the eventual reconquest of Burma, the burden of any offensive against Japan would, at least to begin with, fall to the USA. There were two ways to get near enough to the Japanese mainland to mount an invasion: the Americans could either go via the Dutch East Indies, Borneo, the Philippines and Taiwan – the southern route – or by way of the islands and atolls of the Pacific, the Solomon, Gilbert, Marshall and Mariana Islands – the northern route. Unsurprisingly, given his emotional attachment to the Philippines, MacArthur favoured the southern route. This had some roads and airfields that could be used, but there were also large Japanese garrisons to consider. For its part, the US Navy, in the form of Admiral King, who was concerned about American carriers and battleships having to operate where they could be subject to attack by land-based aircraft, favoured the northern, island-hopping route. Eventually, after a great deal of special pleading and inter-service bickering, the decision was made in Washington and it was that both approaches would be used. It is probable that MacArthur was right, although perhaps for the wrong reasons, as, should an invasion of the Japanese home islands become necessary, then only by the southern route could a base be established for an army large enough both to mount a successful invasion and be supplied once ashore. It might be argued that the northern arm of the advance was therefore unnecessary, and entailed much loss of life in a succession of assaults on well-dug-in Japanese positions in order to capture barren rocks. That said, the two-pronged strategy did confuse the Japanese as to American intentions and prevented them from concentrating their naval assets. What was inexcusable militarily was the refusal to appoint one overall commander in the Pacific. Instead, MacArthur was to command the recapture of the occupied Japanese territories or southern route while Admiral Nimitz with a separate command would mastermind the island-hopping or northern route. This led to dispersion of assets, fierce arguments between the various service commanders and, in some cases, unnecessary casualties and wasteful duplication. MacArthur, interminable self-publicist though he was, was surely right when he described the decision not to appoint one supreme commander as one that ‘cannot be defended in logic, in theory, or even in common sense… The handicaps and hazards unnecessarily resulting were numerous and many a man lies in his grave today who could have been saved.’75 MacArthur felt so strongly that the command should not be divided that he offered to serve under Nimitz, despite being senior in rank, but the prospect of that enormous ego satisfactorily serving under anybody else rather defies belief.