The Second World War Read online

  Ilya Ehrenburg was one of the few writers to visit the fighting there. ‘One part of a small wood on the outskirts of [Rzhev] had been a battlefield; the trees blasted by shells and mines looked like stakes driven in at random. The earth was criss-crossed by trenches; dugouts bulged like blisters. One shell-hole gaped into the next… The deep roar of guns and the furious bark of mortars were deafening, then suddenly, during a lull of two or three minutes, the chatter of machineguns would heard… In the field hospitals they were giving blood-transfusions, amputating arms and legs.’ The Red Army had suffered 70, 374 dead and 145,300 wounded, a massive sacrificial tragedy that was kept secret for nearly sixty years.

  For the great encirclement operation against the Sixth Army, Zhukov reconnoitred in person the attack sectors on the Don while Vasilevsky visited the armies south of Stalingrad. There, Vasilevsky ordered a limited advance to just beyond the line of salt lakes to provide a better start-line. Secrecy was of paramount importance. Even the army commanders were not told of the plan. Civilians were evacuated from behind the front. Their villages would be needed to conceal the troops being brought up at night. Soviet camouflage was good, but not good enough to hide the assembly of so many formations. Yet this was not critical. While Sixth Army and Army Group B staff officers expected some sort of attack on the Romanian-held sector to the north-west to cut the railway line to Stalingrad, they never imagined an attempt at outright encirclement. The ineffective attacks on their northern flank near Stalingrad had convinced them that the Red Army was incapable of launching a deadly strike. All Hitler was prepared to do was to allocate the very weak XLVIII Panzer Corps as a reserve behind the Romanian Third Army. It consisted of the 1st Romanian Armoured Division with obsolete tanks, the 14th Panzer Division which had been ground down in the fighting for Stalingrad, and the 22nd Panzer Division whose vehicles had been immobile for so long due to lack of fuel that mice, escaping the cold, hid inside them and gnawed through the wiring.

  As a result of transport shortages, Operation Uranus had to be postponed until 19 November. Stalin’s patience was severely taxed. With more than a million men now in position, he was terrified that the Germans would discover what was happening. From north of the Don the 5th Tank Army, the 4th Tank Corps, two cavalry corps and other rifle divisions crossed at night into the bridgeheads. South of Stalingrad, two mechanized corps, a cavalry corps and supporting formations were brought across the Volga in the dark, a perilous undertaking with the ice floes coming down the river.

  During the night of 18–19 November, Soviet sappers in the Don bridgeheads had crawled forward through the snow in white camouflage uniforms to clear minefields. In the thick, freezing mist they were invisible to the Romanian sentries. At 07.30 hours, Moscow time, howitzers, artillery, mortars and Katyusha rocket regiments all opened fire simultaneously. Despite the bombardment, which made the ground tremble fifty kilometres away, the Romanian soldiers resisted far more tenaciously than German liaison officers had expected. As soon as the tanks were thrown into the attack, steamrolling the barbed wire, the Soviet advance began, with T-34s and cavalry cantering across the snowfields. Caught in the open, German infantry divisions found themselves fighting off cavalry charges ‘as if it were 1870’, as one officer wrote.

  Sixth Army headquarters was not unduly alarmed, and it heard that the XLVIII Panzer Corps was advancing to counter the breakthrough. But interference from Führer headquarters and changes of orders caused confusion. With 22nd Panzer Division barely able to move because most of its tanks’ electrics were still unrepaired, Generalleutnant Ferdinand Heim’s counter-attack collapsed in chaos. When Hitler found out, he wanted Heim shot.

  By the time Paulus started to react it was far too late. His infantry divisions lacked their horses and thus their mobility. His panzer formations were still tied down in Stalingrad itself, and unable to disengage quickly because of attacks launched by General Chuikov to prevent this. When they were finally free, the panzer troops were ordered west to join Generalleutnant Karl Strecker’s XI Corps to block the breakthrough far in their rear. But this meant that the southern flank, guarded by the Fourth Romanian Army, was left with just the 29th Motorized Division as a reserve.

  On 20 November, General Yeremenko gave the order for the southern attack to begin. Led by two mechanized corps and a cavalry corps, the 64th, 57th and 51st Armies began to advance. The moment of revenge had come, and morale was high. Wounded soldiers refused to be evacuated to the rear. ‘I’m not leaving,’ said a member of the 45th Rifle Division. ‘I want to attack with my comrades.’ Romanian soldiers surrendered in large numbers, and many were shot out of hand.

  Without air reconnaissance at this crucial moment, Sixth Army headquarters failed to apprehend the Soviet plan. This was for the two thrusts to meet up in the area of Kalach on the Don, having encircled the whole of the Sixth Army. On the morning of 21 November, Paulus and his staff in their headquarters at Golubinsky, twenty kilometres north of Kalach, had little idea of the danger. But as the day progressed, with alarming reports arriving of the progress of the Soviet spearheads, they became aware of the imminent catastrophe. There were no units available to stop the enemy, and their own headquarters was now threatened. Files were burned rapidly, and disabled reconnaissance aircraft on the landing strip destroyed. That afternoon Führer headquarters signalled Hitler’s order: ‘Sixth Army stand firm in spite of danger of temporary encirclement.’ The fate of the largest formation in the whole Wehrmacht was about to be sealed. Kalach, with its bridge over the Don, was virtually undefended.

  The commander of the Soviet 19th Tank Brigade discovered from a local woman that German tanks always approached the bridge with their lights on. He therefore put two captured panzers at the head of his column, ordered all drivers to turn on their lights, and drove straight on to the bridge at Kalach before the scratch unit of defenders and Luftwaffe anti-aircraft guncrews realized what was happening.

  The next day, Sunday, 22 November, the two Soviet spearheads met up in the frozen steppe, guided towards each other by firing green flares. They embraced with bear-hugs, exchanging vodka and sausage to celebrate. For the Germans, that day happened to be Totensonntag–the day of remembrance for the dead. ‘I don’t know how it is all going to end,’ Generalleutnant Eccard Freiherr von Gablenz, the commander of the 384th Infantry Division, wrote to his wife. ‘This is very difficult for me because I should be trying to inspire my subordinates with an unshakeable belief in victory.’

  25

  Alamein and Torch

  OCTOBER–NOVEMBER 1942

  In October 1942, while Zhukov and Vasilevsky were preparing their great encirclement of the Sixth Army at Stalingrad, Rommel was in Germany on sick leave. He had been suffering from stress, with low blood pressure and intestinal problems. His last attempt to break through the Eighth Army in the Battle of Alam Halfa had failed. Many of his troops were also ill, as well as desperately short of food, fuel and ammunition. After all his dreams of conquering Egypt and the Middle East had turned to ashes, Rommel refused to accept personal responsibility. He went on to convince himself that Generalfeldmarschall Kesselring had deliberately held back supplies for the Panzerarmee Afrika out of jealousy.

  The Panzerarmee Afrika’s position was indeed serious. The Italians in the rear areas and the Luftwaffe were keeping the bulk of the supplies for themselves. German morale was very low. Thanks to Ultra intercepts, Allied submarine attacks and bombing sank even more freighters in October. Hitler’s distrust of his ‘anglophile allies’ convinced him ‘that German transports were being betrayed to the English by the Italians’. The possibility that German Enigma codes were being broken did not occur to him.

  General der Panzertruppe Georg Stumme, the corps commander who had been court-martialled for the loss of the plans for Operation Blau, commanded the army in Rommel’s absence, and Generalleutnant Wilhelm von Thoma took over the Afrika Korps. Hitler and the OKW did not believe that the British would attack before the next spring, and
therefore there was still a chance for the Panzerarmee Afrika to break through to the Nile Delta. Rommel and Stumme were more realistic. They knew that they could do little in the face of Allied air power and the Royal Navy’s attacks on their supply convoys.

  Rommel was further dismayed by the complacency he encountered in Berlin when he received his field marshal’s baton. Göring dismissed Allied air power, saying: ‘Americans can only make razor blades.’ ‘Herr Reichsmarschall,’ Rommel replied, ‘I wish we had such razor blades.’ Hitler promised to send forty of the new Tiger tanks, together with units of Nebelwerfer multi-barrelled rocket launchers, as if these would be more than enough to make up for his shortages.

  The OKW played down any suggestion that the Allies might land in north-west Africa in the immediate future. Only the Italians took the threat seriously. They made contingency plans to occupy French Tunisia, a project which the Germans opposed for fear of resistance from the Vichy French forces. In fact, Allied planning for Operation Torch was more advanced than even the Italians suspected. In early September, Eisenhower’s headaches began to lessen as transatlantic disagreements were resolved. There would be simultaneous landings at Casablanca on the Atlantic coast, and at Oran and Algiers in the Mediterranean. But the supply problem, due to confusion and a shortage of shipping, became a nightmare for his chief of staff, Major General Walter Bedell Smith. Most of the troops crossing the Atlantic arrived without weapons or equipment, so amphibious training was delayed.

  On the diplomatic front, both the American and British governments began to reassure Franco’s regime in Spain that they had no intention of violating Spanish sovereignty, either in North Africa or on the mainland. This was necessary to counter German rumours that the Allies planned to seize the Canary Islands. Fortunately, the pragmatic General Conde Francisco de Jordana was again foreign minister after Franco had removed his pro-Nazi and over-ambitious brother-in-law, Ramón Serrano Súñer. The diminutive and elderly Jordana was determined to keep Spain out of the war, and his appointment in September was a great relief to the Allies.

  Stumme, although lacking precise intelligence, remained certain that Montgomery was preparing a major offensive. He stepped up patrol activity and accelerated the laying of nearly half a million mines, in so-called ‘devil’s gardens’ in front of the Panzerarmee Afrika’s positions. Following Rommel’s guidance, Stumme strengthened the Italian formations with German units and split the Afrika Korps, with the 15th Panzer Division behind the northern part of the front and the 21st Panzer Division in the south.

  General Alexander acted as an umbrella, shielding Montgomery from Churchill’s impatience. Montgomery needed time to train his new forces, especially Lieutenant General Herbert Lumsden’s X Armoured Corps, which he proudly and over-optimistically called his corps de chasse. The newly arrived Shermans were being prepared, bringing the Eighth Army’s strength up to over a thousand tanks. Lumsden, a flamboyant cavalryman who had won the Grand National, was hardly Montgomery’s favourite but Alexander liked him.

  Montgomery’s plan, Operation Lightfoot, consisted of making his main attack in the northern sector, which was also the most heavily defended. He assumed that the Germans would not expect this. Lumsden’s X Corps was to exploit the breakthrough once XXX Corps made it across the minefield south of the coast road. With the aid of a sophisticated deception plan carried out by Major Jasper Maskelyne, a professional illusionist, Montgomery hoped to persuade the Germans that his main push was coming in the south, so that they would move their forces down there. Maskelyne installed hundreds of dummy vehicles and even a fake water pipeline in the southern sector. Radio traffic was stepped up in the area, transmitting pre-recorded signals, while trucks drove around towing chains behind the lines to stir up dust. To lend weight to this vital part of Montgomery’s plan, Lieutenant General Brian Horrocks’s XIII Corps would attack, followed by the 7th Armoured Division and supported by a third of his artillery. On the extreme left of the Alamein Line, Koenig’s Free French would attack the strong Italian position of Qaaret el Himeimat on the edge of the Qattara Depression, but they lacked sufficient support for such a difficult objective.

  On 19 October, the Desert Air Force and the Americans began to launch a series of bombing and strafing raids against Luftwaffe airfields. Four days later, at 20.40 hours on 23 October, Montgomery’s artillery opened a massive bombardment of Axis positions. The ground trembled from the shockwaves, and the muzzle flashes illuminated the entire night-time horizon. From a distance it looked like sheet lightning. Allied bombers attacked the reserve positions and rear areas. General Stumme, afraid of using up his ammunition, ordered his own artillery not to respond.

  Since dusk, sappers had been moving slowly forward as the moon rose, prodding the sand with bayonets and lifting mines to create corridors marked by white tape and oil lamps. At 22.00 hours, XXX Corps started to advance through them with four divisions–the 51st Highland, 9th Australian, 1st South African and 2nd New Zealand–each supported by at least one armoured regiment. The newly arrived Highlanders went in with pipes skirling and bayonets fixed, having heard that the Italian troops seemed to fear cold steel more than almost anything else. Infantry casualties were comparatively light, but, to Montgomery’s irritation, the tanks of Lumsden’s X Corps became mixed up in the minefields. The delays meant that they were hit hard once dawn came.

  General Stumme wanted to see the situation at the front for himself, but when his vehicle came under fire the driver drove away, not realizing that Stumme had got out. Stumme died from a heart attack and his body was not found until the following day. When General von Thoma heard the news and took command, he was reluctant to launch a major counterattack, because he did not dare use up fuel before his forces were resupplied. But on 25 October both the 15th Panzer Division in the north and 21st Panzer in the south put in successful local responses.

  Montgomery’s master plan was not going well. The Germans had not swallowed his feint, and no forces had been sent to the south to face the diversionary attack by XIII Corps. Meanwhile in the north, the German minefields and Axis resistance had proved much stronger than expected. Montgomery unfairly blamed the 10th Armoured Division, even accusing it of cowardice, when in fact it was being misused. Montgomery’s anti-cavalry prejudice did not help him learn how best to use his armour.

  On hearing of the British offensive and Stumme’s death, Rommel ordered a plane to fly him to Africa via Rome. He reached his headquarters at dusk on 25 October, having heard in Rome that the fuel situation was worse than ever due to the Royal Navy and the Allied air forces.

  The British attack was then helped when the Australians captured two German officers carrying detailed maps of their minefields. The Australians seized a key hill during the night, which they held against heavy counter-attacks the next day. With the build up of XXX Corps and X Corps, the pressure in the north on the Panzerarmee Afrika was becoming irresistible. Rommel then heard that the tanker on which they had been counting had also been sunk. He warned OKW that with little fuel and a lack of ammunition he would find it hard to continue the battle. By now it was clear that Montgomery was concentrating the bulk of his forces in the north, so Rommel moved the 21st Panzer Division up to help. Without the necessary fuel for his panzers to withdraw and fight a battle of movement in the open, he was now tied down to a slogging match which he could not win. Over half his panzers had been destroyed, falling victim either to the six-pounder anti-tank gun or to air attacks. The new 40mm gun on the American P-39 Airacobras proved a most effective tank-busting weapon.

  Montgomery, forced to change his plan in the face of such a determined defence, prepared a new offensive while the Australians bore the brunt of the continuing counter-attacks. On 2 November, Operation Supercharge began in the early hours, with another heavy bombardment accompanied by air attacks. Montgomery sent in the 9th Armoured Brigade in a charge against dug-in anti-tank guns. He was warned that it would be suicidal, but replied that it had to be done. The
attack proved another Balaklava, and the brigade was virtually wiped out. Freyberg’s New Zealand Division advanced well north of Kidney Ridge, but German counter-attacks with both panzer divisions prevented a breakthrough. Containing the bridgehead, however, represented the Panzerarmee’s last effort. Montgomery was finally winning the battle of attrition.

  Rommel gave orders to withdraw towards Fuka, even though he knew that the unmotorized troops, mostly Italian, would be rapidly overrun. Many German troops seized Italian trucks for themselves at gunpoint, producing ugly scenes. That evening Rommel sent a message to the OKW, outlining the situation and giving reasons for his retreat. Due to a misunderstanding on the part of a staff officer, Hitler did not receive the signal until the next morning. Suspecting a conspiracy to prevent him from countermanding Rommel’s retreat, Hitler became incoherent with rage, and hysterical scenes ensued at Führer headquarters. The shock of Rommel’s defeat was totally unexpected because Hitler’s attention had been focused on Stalingrad and the Caucasus. His belief in Rommel as a commander had made him incapable of imagining such a setback.

  Shortly after midday on 3 November, he sent Rommel an order: ‘In the position in which you find yourself, there can be no other thought than to stand fast, not to take even one step back, and to throw every available weapon and soldier into the battle.’ He promised Luftwaffe support and supplies and finished: ‘This is not the first time in history that resolute determination will prevail over the stronger battalions of the enemy. There is only one choice you can offer your troops: victory or death.’