The Second World War Read online

  De Gaulle wisely held his tongue in public, since this problem had been created by the Americans. Perhaps he had already perceived that Vichy officers loathed him almost as much as they loathed the British. Although he never acknowledged it, the American policy of dealing with Darlan and Giraud ahead of him would work ultimately in his favour. These two stepping stones prevented a civil war in North Africa.

  The Special Operations Executive was alarmed by the deep distrust that the Darlan deal was causing not just among the Gaullists in London, but above all in Allied relations with the French resistance of the interior and even in other countries. Along with the American OSS (Office of Strategic Services), SOE had rapidly set up bases in Algiers to train the many young French volunteers for work in Tunisia. One of their recruits was called Fernand Bonnier, who had started to mix in monarchist circles and added de la Chapelle to his name in a grandiose gesture. Those dreaming of a restoration, with the Comte de Paris becoming King of France, viewed de Gaulle as a possible regent who would pave the way, if only because the general’s family was known to have been monarchist.

  In this murky world of conspiratorial complications, a plot to assassinate Darlan took shape. It involved Gaullists, who passed $2,000 from London via General François d’Astier de la Vigerie to finance the operation; Lieutenant Colonel Douglas Dodds-Parker of the Grenadier Guards, the senior SOE officer in Algiers; and Fernand Bonnier, who carried it out. Dodds-Parker, who had accompanied the French resistance leader Jean Moulin to his aircraft on his final return to France, trained Bonnier in pistol shooting and later claimed, inaccurately as it turned out, that his own gun had been used in the assassination. The plan was for Bonnier to be spirited away from Algiers on board the Mutin, a boat commanded by Gerry Holdsworth of SOE’s secret flotilla for infiltrating agents in the Mediterranean. But just after ambushing and shooting Darlan in the stomach on 24 December, Bonnier was captured, court-martialled and executed with indecent haste to avoid a trail which might bring out many embarrassing deails.

  Eisenhower, shaken by the event although he had earlier longed for ‘a damned good assassin’, summoned Dodds-Parker to Allied Force Headquarters to demand a categorical assurance that SOE was not involved. Dodds-Parker gave it to him. How far knowledge of the plot had spread in advance is hard to establish. OSS in London was certainly aware of it and approved, but it seems that neither Churchill nor Sir Charles Hambro, the head of SOE, gave any form of authorization. The despatch of the ‘squeezed lemon’ provoked few tears, even among those Allies who had supported him. Roosevelt cold-bloodedly remarked to one of his White House guests on New Year’s Eve that Darlan was just a ‘son-of-a-bitch’.

  In the Stalingrad pocket, troops in the encircled Sixth Army kept up their spirits as Christmas approached. Although they were suffering from lice, cold and hunger, it offered an escapist alternative to pondering their fatal predicament. They knew that Manstein’s Operation Winter Storm to relieve them had failed, yet many soldiers were still prey to ‘Kessel fever’, imagining that they could hear the artillery of the SS Panzer Army, which Hitler had promised, coming to their rescue. They could not believe that their Führer would abandon the Sixth Army. But both the OKW and Manstein realized that it would have to be sacrificed to tie down the Soviet armies surrounding it, while the Germans forces in the Caucasus were evacuated.

  Sixth Army soldiers dreamed of celebrating Christmas ‘in the German way’. They prepared small gifts to give to each other, often little carvings or secretly hoarded food, which they could ill afford. In their bunkers under the snow, an extraordinary generosity of comradeship developed in the face of adversity. On Christmas Eve, they sang ‘Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht’, the familiar words making many break down in tears at the thought of their families back in Germany. Yet Christian instincts did not extend to the Soviet prisoners held in two camps within the Kessel. Deprived of any food so as not to reduce German rations, the few survivors were reduced to eating the bodies of their comrades.

  Reality could not be denied for long. No supply flights had arrived for two days, because of the Soviet tank attack on Tatsinskaya airfield. The Sixth Army was dying by degrees from starvation on its diet of Wasserzuppe – a few pieces of horsemeat boiled in melted snow. The army’s pathologist, Dr Hans Girgensohn, who had been flown into the Kessel in mid-December, soon came to an alarming discovery after carrying out fifty autopsies. Soldiers were dying of hunger far more rapidly than they would do in other circumstances. This, he concluded, came from the interacting effect of stress, prolonged malnutrition, lack of sleep and intense cold. This interfered with the body’s metabolism. Although the soldier might have consumed a few hundred calories worth of food, his digestive system absorbed probably only a fraction. The resulting weakness also reduced his ability to survive disease. Even those who were not ill were far too weak to attempt a breakout through deep snow, and in any case Paulus lacked the courage to defy Hitler’s orders.

  Conditions in the field hospitals were appalling beyond belief. Blood from open wounds froze even inside the tents. Limbs gangrenous from frostbite were sawn off. Pliers were used on fingers. No anaesthetic remained, and those with stomach or serious head wounds were left to die. The desperately overworked surgeons had to carry out a pitiless triage. ‘The German soldier suffers and dies with uncomplaining bravery,’ wrote the chaplain of the 305th Infantry Division. ‘Even the amputees were composed.’

  Only walking wounded were now evacuated by transport plane, because stretchers took up too much room. Feldgendarmerie armed with sub-machine guns tried to hold back the crowds of wounded and malingerers who attempted to storm each plane on the ice runways at Gumrak and Pitomnik airfields. Even a secured place on a plane was no guarantee of survival. The heavily loaded Junkers 52s and large Focke-Wulf Condors struggled to gain height before reaching the perimeter, where Soviet anti-aircraft batteries fired away at them. Soldiers watched a number crash in a fireball, knowing they were full of wounded comrades.

  The new year of 1943 brought another irrational surge of hope when Hitler in his message promised that ‘I and the whole German Wehrmacht will do everything in our power to relieve the defenders of Stalingrad, and that with your staunchness will come the most glorious feat in the history of German arms.’ Out of respect for the suffering of the Sixth Army, Hitler banned the consumption of brandy and champagne at Führer headquarters.

  The German people were still not told that the Sixth Army had been surrounded, and soldiers writing home were threatened with severe punishment if they revealed this fact. One sent home a New Year’s drawing, but in the corner in tiny letters he wrote in French: ‘It’s twenty days since we were encircled. It’s terrible to be sitting here in this trap. But they say to us, “Hold on, hold on!”, but we get 200 grams of bread per day and some horsemeat soup. We have almost no salt. Lice are a torture and it is absolutely impossible to get rid of them. It is dark in the bunkers and it is minus twenty or thirty outside.’ But his letter never reached home, for it was in a Feldpost sack on one of the transport planes shot down. The Don Front intelligence department was using German Communists and deserters to sift all this intercepted mail. Another soldier wrote sarcastically: ‘On the first day of the holidays, we had goose with rice for dinner, on the second day, goose with peas. We have been eating geese for a long time. Only our geese have got four legs and horseshoes.’

  Stalin begrudged every delay in the mounting of Operation Ring, the coup de grâce for the Sixth Army. Rokossovsky would have forty-seven divisions supported by 300 aircraft. On 8 January, Don Front headquarters sent two emissaries under a white flag offering surrender terms to Paulus. But almost certainly on the orders of his chief of staff, Generalleutnant Schmidt, they were sent back with the document they had brought.

  Two days later at dawn, Operation Ring began with a heavy artillery bombardment and the scream of Katyusha rocket batteries. Red Army officers now referred with pride to their massed guns as the ‘God of War’. The main
attack was directed against the ‘Marinovka nose’, a salient in the south-west of the Kessel. German soldiers, wrapped up like scarecrows, could hardly fit their swollen, frostbitten fingers round their triggers. The white landscape, with little mounds of snow marking unburied bodies, was pitted with black shellholes stained yellow at the edges by cordite. On the southern sector, the remnants of a Romanian division broke and ran, leaving a kilometre gap in the defence line. The 64th Army immediately sent in a brigade of T-34 tanks, their tracks churning through the frozen snow-crust.

  German divisions in the south-west, forced to withdraw, found it impossible to establish a new defence line as the ground was too hard to dig trenches. They had so little ammunition left that soldiers waited until their Soviet attackers were at almost point-blank range. The chaplain of the 305th Division recorded the ruthless Soviet attack, ‘crushing the wounded with tanks, pitiless shooting down of wounded and prisoners’.

  Pitomnik airfield was a chaotic mess, with blackened, smashed aircraft and piles of frozen corpses outside the hospital tents. There was little fuel left to evacuate the remaining wounded back to field hospitals. Some were dragged on sledges, until their comrades gave up exhausted. The scenes of misery were almost beyond imagination. Dispirited and shell-shocked soldiers tried to escape back towards the ruined city in such numbers that the Feldgendarmerie found it hard to maintain discipline. Yet most men fought on, joined in many cases by Russian Hiwis, who knew full well what fate awaited them when the battle was over.

  On 16 January, Pitomnik was abandoned, and the last Messerschmitts stationed there flew out on orders from Richthofen. The other smaller airfield at Gumrak was in no state to receive transport aircraft and was itself now under direct artillery fire. The Luftwaffe began to parachute supplies in, but most drifted and fell behind Soviet lines. A whole battalion of German troops from the 295th Infantry Division surrendered that day. Some battalion commanders could not face the suffering of their men any more. They limped on frost-bitten feet, their lips had cracked open, and their bearded faces had the yellow, waxen aspect of departing life. Crows circled and landed to peck out the eyes of both the dead and the dying.

  The Red Army felt no pity, especially after gruesome discoveries. ‘When liberating the hamlet of Novo-Maksimovsky,’ Don Front NKVD reported, ‘our soldiers found in two buildings with bricked-up windows and doors seventy-six Soviet prisoners, sixty of them dead from starvation, some bodies decomposed. The remaining prisoners are half alive and most of them cannot stand up because they are so starved. It turned out that these prisoners spent about two months in these buildings. The Germans were starving them to death. Sometimes they threw them pieces of rotten horseflesh and gave them salted water to drink.’ The officer in charge of the camp, Dulag-205, later stated in a SMERSh interrogation that ‘from the beginning of December 1942, the command of the Sixth German Army, in the person of Lieutenant General Schmidt, absolutely stopped supplying the camp with food and mass deaths from starvation started’. Soviet soldiers showed no mercy to the German wounded, especially after they came across the last few surviving Russian prisoners who had been starved in another camp at Gumrak. Tragically, their rescuers killed them unintentionally by giving them too much food.

  On 22 January, Sixth Army headquarters received a signal from Hitler. ‘Surrender out of the question. Troops fight on to the end. If possible, hold reduced Fortress with troops still battleworthy. Bravery and ten acity of Fortress have provided the opportunity to establish a new front and launch counter-attacks. Sixth Army has thus fulfilled its historical contribution in the greatest passage in German history.’ In Stalingrad, where men had dragged themselves on all fours ‘like wild animals’, the conditions in cellars were even worse with perhaps as many as 40,000 wounded and sick out of those still left alive in the Sixth Army. Toes and fingers on badly frostbitten hands and feet often came away with the bandages as these were taken off. Nobody had the strength to remove the bodies of those who died. Grey lice could be seen leaving them in search of living flesh.

  On 26 January, the remnants of the Sixth Army were split in two when the 21st Army reached the lines of Rodimtsev’s 13th Guards Division north of the Mamaev Kurgan. Paulus himself, also suffering from dysentery, fell into a state of nervous collapse in the cellars of the Univermag department store on Red Square. Schmidt was now in charge. Several of his generals and senior officers shot themselves rather than face the humiliation of surrender. Some men chose a ‘soldier’s suicide’, by standing up in a trench waiting to be shot.

  Hitler announced Paulus’s promotion to the rank of Generalfeldmarschall. Paulus knew that this was a coded order to kill himself, but now that all his admiration for Hitler had evaporated, he had no intention of giving the Führer that satisfaction. On 31 January, Red Army soldiers entered the Univermag building. ‘Paulus was completely unnerved,’ wrote the Soviet interpreter, a Jewish lieutenant called Zakhary Rayzman. ‘His lips were quivering. He told General Schmidt that there was too much commotion going on, that there were too many people in the room.’ Rayzman escorted 151 German officers and soldiers back to their divisional headquarters. He had to stop Red Army soldiers from trying to humiliate them on the way. ‘Such is the irony of fate,’ a German colonel announced, intending to be overheard. ‘A Jew is seeing to it that we are not harmed.’ Paulus and Schmidt were taken to the 64th Army headquarters of General Shumilov, where their surrender was filmed. Paulus’s nervous tic was still much in evidence.

  Hitler heard the news of the surrender in silence. He apparently stared into his vegetable soup. But next day his anger exploded against Paulus for having failed to shoot himself. On 2 February General Strecker, commanding the few remnants of XI Corps in the ruins of northern Stalingrad, also surrendered. The Red Army discovered that they had 91,000 prisoners on their hands, far more than expected. Due mainly to lack of preparation, they received no food and no medical assistance for some time. Nearly half had died by the time spring arrived.

  Soviet casualties for the whole Stalingrad campaign amounted to 1.1 million, of whom nearly half a million died. The German army and its allies had also lost over half a million men, killed and captured. In Moscow, the bells of the Kremlin rang out a victory peal. Stalin was portrayed as the great architect of this historic victory. The reputation of the Soviet Union soared around the world, bringing many recruits to Communist-led resistance movements.

  In Germany, radio stations were ordered to play solemn music. Having steadfastly refused to acknowledge that the Sixth Army had been surrounded since November, Goebbels now tried to pretend that the whole of the Sixth Army had perished in a final stand: ‘They died so that Germany might live.’ But his attempt to create a heroic myth soon backfired. Word spread rapidly in Germany, mainly from those listening in secret to the BBC, that Moscow had announced the capture of 91,000. The shock of the defeat was overwhelming in Germany. Only Nazi fanatics still believed that the war could be won.

  The OKW was disturbed by the ‘great agitation caused among the German public’ after the surrender of the Sixth Army at Stalingrad and issued a sharp warning to officers not to exacerbate the situation with criticism of the military or political leadership with ‘so-called factual accounts’ of the fighting. Attempts to infuse the armed forces with the ‘National Socialist vision’ increased, yet the authorities received reports that older officers from the Reichswehr ‘days of apolitical soldiering’ showed little interest in indoctrinating their soldiers. Committed officers and the SS complained that the Red Army was much more effective in its ideological teaching.

  On 18 February, Goebbels invoked the theme ‘Total War–Short War!’ at a mass meeting in the Berlin Sportpalast. The atmosphere was electric. From the podium he screamed: ‘Do you want Total War?’ The audience leaped to its feet and bayed in the affirmative. Even an anti-Nazi journalist covering it confessed afterwards that he too had jumped to his feet in enthusiasm and only just stopped himself from bellowing ‘Ja!’ with the rest
of the crowd. He said later to friends that if Goebbels had yelled, ‘Do you all want to go to your deaths?’, the crowd would have roared back their consent. The Nazi regime had trapped the whole population of the country as accomplices, willing or not, in its own crimes, and its own insanity.

  27

  Casablanca, Kharkov and Tunis

  DECEMBER 1942–MAY 1943

  During December 1942, while Anderson’s First Army struggled in the rain-lashed hills of Tunisia, Montgomery’s Eighth Army failed to follow up Rommel’s retreating Panzerarmee with any dash. Montgomery, anxious not to harm his reputation as a guarantor of victory, did not want to get a bloody nose from the sort of sudden counter-attack in which the German army excelled. Many regiments were also content to leave ‘other buggers to do the chasing’, as the commanding officer of the Sherwood Rangers put it. They felt that they had done their bit, and preferred to concentrate on loot, such as Luger pistols, alcohol, cigars and chocolate taken from abandoned German vehicles.

  Montgomery was perhaps right to acknowledge that the British army was still not yet ready to match the Germans in a war of movement, but his anti-cavalry prejudices entrenched his over-cautious conduct of operations. Only armoured car regiments, the 11th Hussars and the Royal Dragoons, were far enough forward to harry the retreating Germans in a consistent fashion. Even though Rommel’s forces were by then reduced to around 50,000 men and less than a battalion of tanks, Montgomery’s reluctance to take risks made him at one point consider leaving Tripoli as well as Tunis to Anderson’s First Army. This complacency was reflected lower down. ‘We had all seen the enemy so disorganized that it did not seem possible he could regroup enough to give us much trouble,’ wrote the poet Keith Douglas, a lieutenant with the Sherwood Rangers. ‘When we heard of the North African landings there were very few people who expected more than a few more weeks of mopping up before the African campaign ended.’