The Second World War Read online

  The Afrika Korps now consisted of the 15th and 21st Panzer Divisions, and a mixed division which was later renamed the 90th Light Division. This formation included an infantry regiment, largely made up of Germans who had been serving in the French Foreign Legion. Yet due to malnutrition and sickness the 45,000-strong Afrika Korps lacked 11,000 men in its front-line units. The disastrous supply situation also meant that its panzer divisions, with 249 tanks, badly needed replacements. The Italians fielded the Ariete Armoured Division and three semi-motorized divisions.

  The British, on the other hand, were for once plentifully supplied, with 300 Cruiser tanks and 300 American Stuart light tanks, which they called ‘Honeys’, together with more than a hundred Matildas and Valentines. The Western Desert Air Force possessed 550 serviceable aircraft against only seventy-six for the Luftwaffe. With such advantages, Churchill expected a long-awaited victory, especially since he badly needed something to show Stalin. But, although the British were at last fully equipped, their weapons were decidedly inferior to those of the Germans. The new Stuarts and the Cruiser tanks with their two-pounder guns did not stand a chance against the German 88mm gun, ‘the long arm’ of the Afrika Korps, which could knock them out well before they were in range to fire back. Only the British 25-pounder field gun was impressive, and commanders had finally learned to use it over open sights against German panzer attacks. The Germans called it the ‘Ratsch-bum’.

  The British plan was to concentrate XXX Corps, with the bulk of the armour, in an attack north-westwards from the Libyan frontier. These forces were to defeat the German panzer divisions and then advance to Tobruk to break the siege. The 7th Armoured Brigade was to lead the 7th Armoured Division’s thrust to Sidi Rezegh, on the escarpment south-east of Tobruk’s defensive perimeter. On the right, XIII Corps was to engage the German positions close to the coast at the Halfaya Pass and Sollum. Ideally, the Eighth Army should have waited until Rommel had begun his attack on Tobruk, but Churchill refused to allow General Auchinleck to delay any longer.

  The 7th Armoured Brigade reached Sidi Rezegh, occupied the airfield and captured nineteen aircraft on the ground before the Germans had time to react. But the 22nd Armoured Brigade on its left received a surprise battering from the Ariete Division, while the 4th Armoured Brigade on its right found itself up against parts of the 15th and 21st Panzer Divisions attacking south from the Via Balbia coast road. Fortunately for the British, the Germans were short of diesel. Fuel consumption for all vehicles was heavy in such terrain. A New Zealand officer described the Libyan Desert as ‘a bare flat plain tufted with camel thorn, with wide acres of barren rock scree, stretches of soft sand, and shallow twisting wadis’. It also increasingly resembled a military rubbish dump, with discarded ration tins, empty oil barrels and burned-out vehicles.

  On 21 November, General Cunningham, with excessive optimism, decided to order the breakout to begin from Tobruk, even though the destruction of the German panzer force had not begun. This led to heavy losses, both among the besieged and within 7th Armoured Brigade, one of whose regiments lost three-quarters of its tanks to 88mm guns attached to a German reconnaissance battalion. 7th Armoured soon found its rear threatened by the two panzer divisions, and was reduced to twenty-eight tanks by nightfall.

  Unaware of the losses, Cunningham launched the next phase of the operation, with the advance of XIII Corps northwards behind the Italian positions along the frontier. It was led in determined style by General Freyberg’s New Zealand Division, supported by a tank brigade with Matildas. Cunningham also ordered the breakout from Tobruk to recommence. But 7th Armoured Brigade, attacked on two sides at Sidi Rezegh, was by now down to just ten tanks. And 22nd Armoured Brigade, which had come to its support, had only thirty-four. They were forced back towards the south to join the 5th South African Brigade’s defensive position. Rommel wanted to crush them between his panzer divisions on one side and the Ariete on the other.

  On 23 November, which happened to be Totensonntag, the German Sunday for remembering the dead, an encirclement battle began south of Sidi Rezegh against 5th South African Brigade and the remnants of the two British armoured brigades. It represented a Pyrrhic victory for the Germans. The South African brigade was virtually wiped out, but it and the 7th Armoured support group exacted a heavy price on their attackers. The Germans lost seventy-two tanks, which were hard to replace, and an extraordinarily high percentage of officers and NCOs. The 7th Indian Division and the New Zealanders to the east also fought some effective engagements, with Freyberg’s New Zealanders capturing part of the Afrika Korps staff.

  After the terrible British tank losses, Cunningham wanted to withdraw, but Auchinleck overruled him. He told Cunningham to continue the operation whatever the cost. It was a brave decision, and the right one as events turned out. The next morning Rommel, eager to complete the destruction of the 7th Armoured Division and force a general retreat, became carried away by the scent of victory. In person he led the 21st Panzer Division on a race to the frontier, thinking he could encircle most of the Eighth Army. But this led to chaos, with contradictory orders and bad communications. At one point, Rommel’s command vehicle broke down, and he found himself out of radio contact and trapped on the Egyptian side of the thick wire fence along the frontier. His insistence on leading from the front once again created major problems in a complex battle.

  On 26 November, he heard from the headquarters of the Afrika Korps that the New Zealand Division, supported by another armoured brigade with Valentine tanks, had retaken the airfield at Sidi Rezegh on its route to Tobruk. The 4th New Zealand Brigade had also seized the airfield at Kambut, which meant that the Luftwaffe was left without any forward bases. Later in the day, the Tobruk garrison joined up with Freyberg’s forces.

  Rommel’s dash to the frontier had proved a disastrous mistake. The 7th Armoured Division was rearming with most of the 200 reserve tanks, while his own men were exhausted. And when they turned back from his futile thrust on 27 November, they were harried on their return by the Hurricanes of the Western Desert Air Force, which now enjoyed air supremacy.

  Auchinleck decided to relieve Cunningham, whom he regarded as insufficiently aggressive and who was anyway on the point of a nervous breakdown. He replaced him with Major General Neil Ritchie. Ritchie renewed the attack westward, taking advantage of Rommel’s supply crisis. The Italians had warned Rommel yet again that he could expect no more than the most basic levels of ammunition, fuel and rations. And yet the self-confidence of the Italian navy returned as its ships managed to transport more supplies through to Benghazi. Italian submarines were used to bring urgently needed ammunition to Darna, and the light cruiser Cardona was turned into a tanker. The Kriegsmarine was suddenly impressed by the efforts of its ally.

  On 2 December, Hitler transferred II Fliegerkorps from the eastern front to Sicily and North Africa. Determined to support Rommel, he was horrified to hear of the supply situation due to British attacks on Axis convoys. He ordered Admiral Raeder to transfer twenty-four U-boats to the Mediterranean. Raeder complained that ‘the Führer is prepared practically to abandon the U-boat war in the Atlantic to deal with our problems in the Mediterranean’. Hitler ignored Raeder’s arguments that most of the Axis transport ships were being sunk by Allied aircraft and submarines, so U-boats were not the right counter-measure to protect Rommel’s convoys. But in the event, the German submarines inflicted serious losses on the Royal Navy. In November U-boats in the Mediterranean sank both the aircraft carrier HMS Ark Royal and then the battleship HMS Barham. Further losses followed, and on the night of 18 December an Italian human-torpedo group led by Prince Borghese penetrated Alexandria harbour to sink the battleships HMS Queen Elizabeth and Valiant as well as a Norwegian tanker. Admiral Cunningham was left without any capital ships in the Mediterranean. The timing could hardly have been worse coming just eight days after Japanese aircraft sank both the battleship HMS Prince of Wales and the battle-cruiser Repulse off the coast of Malaya.

&
nbsp; Despite the improvement for the Axis in the Mediterranean, Rommel’s appeal on 6 December to the OKW and OKH for replacement vehicles and weapons, as well as reinforcements, was bound to be rejected at this critical moment for the eastern front. On 8 December, Rommel lifted the siege of Tobruk and began to withdraw to the Gazala Line over sixty kilometres to the west. Then, during the rest of December and early January 1942, he abandoned the whole of Cyrenaica and drew back to the line where he had started the year before.

  The British celebrated the victory of Operation Crusader, but it was a temporary success achieved mainly through superior force, and certainly not by better tactics. The failure to keep the armoured brigades together had been the greatest mistake. Over 800 tanks and 300 aircraft had been lost. And by the time the Eighth Army reached the frontier of Tripolitania, a year after its victory over the Italians, it found itself severely weakened, with excessively long supply lines. In the see-saw of the North African campaign, and now with urgent demands from the Far East, the British and Dominion forces were vulnerable to yet another defeat in 1942.

  Even before the war in the Far East began, the British government felt that it had more than enough to cope with. Then, on 9 December, Stalin put pressure on Britain to declare war on Finland, Hungary and Romania as they were Germany’s allies on the eastern front. Yet Stalin’s desire to get his new western Allies to agree to post-war frontiers even before the Battle for Moscow had begun was partly an attempt to overcome an embarrassing contradiction. Soviet prisons and labour camps still contained over 200,000 Polish troops taken in 1939 during his joint operation with Nazi Germany. Now the Poles were allies, with their government-in-exile recognized by both Washington and London. Energetic representations by General Sikorski, backed by Churchill’s government, persuaded a very reluctant Soviet regime that the NKVD should release its Polish prisoners of war to form a new army.

  Despite constant obstruction by Soviet officials, newly released Poles began to assemble and form units under General Wadysaw Anders, who had been held in the Lubyanka for the previous twenty months. In early December, a review of the Anders army was organized near Saratov on the Volga. It was an occasion full of bitter irony, as the writer Ilya Ehrenburg witnessed. General Sikorski arrived accompanied by Andrei Vyshinsky. The notorious prosecutor from the show trials of the Great Terror had apparently been chosen because of his Polish origins. ‘He clinked glasses with Sikorski, smiling very sweetly,’ observed Ehrenburg. ‘Among the Poles there were many grim-looking men, full of resentment at what they had been through; some of them could not refrain from admitting that they hated us… Sikorski and Vyshinsky called each other “allies” but hostility made itself felt behind the cordial words.’ Stalin’s hatred and distrust of the Poles had only changed on the surface, as subsequent events would show.

  15

  The Battle for Moscow

  SEPTEMBER–DECEMBER 1941

  On 21 July 1941, the Luftwaffe bombed the Soviet capital for the first time. Andrei Sakharov, a fire-sentry at the university, spent most nights ‘on the roof watching as searchlights, tracer bullets, criss-crossed the uneasy skies over Moscow’. But, following their losses in the Battle of Britain, German bomber formations were still reduced severely. Unable to inflict serious damage on the city, they returned to operations in support of ground forces.

  After the halt of Army Group Centre to concentrate on Leningrad and Kiev, Hitler had finally come round to a major offensive against Moscow. His generals had mixed feelings. The huge encirclement east of Kiev had restored a sense of triumph, yet the vastness of the landmass, the length of their lines of communication and the unexpected size of the Red Army made them uneasy. Few now believed that victory would be achieved that year. They feared the Russian winter ahead for which they were sorely ill equipped. Their infantry divisions were short of boots after the hundreds of kilometres they had marched, and little had been done to provide warm clothing because Hitler had forbidden any discussion of the subject. Panzer units suffered from a shortage of replacement tanks and engines, which had been damaged by the thick dust. Yet, to the dismay of their commanders, Hitler was reluctant to release reserves. The great offensive against Moscow, Operation Typhoon, was not ready until the end of September. It had been delayed because Generaloberst Erich Hoepner’s Fourth Panzer Group had been tied down in the stalemate round Leningrad. General-feldmarschall von Bock’s Army Group Centre mustered one and a half million men, including three rather weakened panzer groups. They faced Marshal Semyon Budenny’s Reserve Front and Colonel General Andrei Yeremenko’s Briansk Front. Colonel General Ivan Konev’s Western Front formed a second line behind Budenny’s armies. Twelve of the divisions consisted of pathetically armed and untrained militia, including students and professors from Moscow University. ‘Most of the militia soldiers were wearing civilian overcoats and hats,’ wrote one of them. As they were marched through the streets, onlookers thought they were partisans to be sent against the German rear.

  On 30 September, in an early-morning autumn mist, the preliminary phase of Operation Typhoon began as Guderian’s Second Panzer Army attacked north-east towards the city of Orel, which lay more than 300 kilometres south of Moscow. The sky soon cleared, allowing the Luftwaffe to fly in close support to the panzer spearheads. The sudden attack created panic in the countryside.

  ‘I thought I’d seen retreat,’ Vasily Grossman wrote in his notebook, ‘but I’ve never seen anything like what I am seeing now… Exodus! Biblical Exodus! Vehicles are moving eight abreast, there’s the violent roaring of dozens of trucks trying simultaneously to tear their wheels out of the mud. Huge herds of sheep and cows are driven through the fields. They are followed by trains of horse-drawn carts, there are thousands of wagons covered with coloured sackcloth. There are also crowds of pedestrians with sacks, bundles, suitcases… Children’s heads, fair and dark, are looking out from under the improvised tents covering the carts, as well as the beards of Jewish elders, and the black-haired heads of Jewish girls and women. What silence in their eyes, what wise sorrow, what a sensation of fate, of a universal catastrophe! In the evening, the sun comes out from the multi-layered blue, black and grey clouds. Its rays are wide, stretching from the sky down to the ground, as in Doré’s paintings depicting those frightening biblical scenes when celestial forces strike the Earth.’

  On 3 October rumours of the rapid advance reached Orel, but the senior officers in the city refused to believe the reports and carried on drinking. Dismayed by this fatal complacency, Grossman and his companions set off on the road to Briansk, expecting to see German tanks at any moment. But they were just ahead. Guderian’s spearhead entered Orel at 18.00 hours, the leading panzers passing tramcars in the street.

  The day before, 2 October, the main phase of Typhoon had begun further north. After a short bombardment and the laying of a smokescreen, Third Panzer Group and Fourth Panzer Group smashed through on either side of the Reserve Front commanded by Marshal Budenny. Budenny, another cavalry crony of Stalin’s from the civil war, was a moustachioed buffoon and drunkard who could not find his own headquarters. Konev’s chief of staff was put in charge of launching the Western Front’s counter-attack with three divisions and two tank brigades, but they were brushed aside. Communications collapsed, and within six days the two panzer groups had surrounded five of Budenny’s armies, linking up at Viazma. German tanks chased Red Army soldiers, trying to crush them under their tracks. It became a form of sport.

  The Kremlin had little information about the chaotic disaster taking place to the west. Only on 5 October did the Stavka receive a report from a fighter pilot who had sighted a twenty-kilometre column of German armoured vehicles advancing on Yukhnov. No one dared believe it. Another two reconnaissance flights were sent out, both of which confirmed the sighting, yet Beria still threatened to put their commander in front of an NKVD tribunal as a ‘panic-monger’. Stalin, nevertheless, recognized the danger. He summoned a meeting of the State Defence Committee and sent Z
hukov in Leningrad a signal telling him to return to Moscow.

  Zhukov arrived on 7 October. He claimed later that when he entered Stalin’s room he overheard him telling Beria to use his agents to make contact with the Germans about the possibility of making peace. Stalin ordered Zhukov to go straight to Western Front headquarters and report back on the exact situation. He arrived after nightfall to find Konev and his staff officers bent over a map by candlelight. Zhukov had to telephone Stalin to tell him that the Germans had encircled five of Budenny’s armies west of Viazma. In the early hours of 8 October, he discovered at Reserve Front headquarters that Budenny had not been seen for two days.

  The conditions within the encirclements at Viazma and Briansk were indescribable. Stukas, fighters and bombers attacked any groups large enough to merit their attention, while the surrounding panzers and artillery fired constantly at the trapped forces. Rotting bodies piled up, filthy and starving Red Army soldiers slaughtered horses to eat, while the wounded died untended in the chaos. Altogether, nearly three-quarters of a million men had been cut off. Those who surrendered were ordered to throw away their weapons and march westwards without food. ‘The Russians are beasts,’ wrote a German major. ‘They are reminiscent of the brutalized expressions of the Negroes in the French campaign. What a rabble.’

  When Grossman escaped from Orel on 3 October just ahead of the Germans, he had been heading for Yeremenko’s headquarters in the forest of Briansk. Throughout the night of 5 October, Yeremenko waited for an answer to his request to withdraw, but no authorization came from Stalin. In the early hours of 6 October, Grossman and the correspondents with him were told that even front headquarters was now threatened. They had to drive as fast as possible towards Tula before the Germans cut the road. Yeremenko was wounded in the leg and nearly captured during the encirclement of the Briansk Front. Evacuated by aeroplane, he was more fortunate than Major General Mikhail Petrov, the commander of the 50th Army, who died of gangrene in a woodcutter’s hut deep in the forest.