The Second World War Read online

  The Desert Air Force in Egypt has also been criticized for its inability to cripple Rommel’s armour when it retreated over the Halfaya Pass back into Libya. But it had been hampered by the time it took to bring up fuel and supplies to its forward airfields. Air Vice Marshal Coningham turned to the Americans for help, and Brereton’s command, now designated the Ninth Air Force, began to airlift fuel to the front. Rommel, certain that the war in North Africa was lost, established a defence line at Mersa el Brega, just east of El Agheila on the Gulf of Sirte, where he had begun his desert campaign in February 1942.

  On 14 January 1943, Roosevelt arrived in Casablanca, exhausted by his five-day journey from the US. He and Churchill met that evening at Anfa, and the next day the combined chiefs of staff assembled to hear Eisenhower’s report on the campaign in North Africa. The Allied forces commander was distinctly nervous. He had been ill with influenza, not helped by his voracious consumption of Camel cigarettes, and suffered from very high blood pressure. The improvised attack on Tunis had been a failure. Eisenhower blamed the rain and mud, and the difficulties of working with the French rather than Anderson’s refusal to concentrate his already weak forces. He also acknowledged the chaos of the supply system, which his chief of staff Bedell Smith was trying to sort out.

  Eisenhower then outlined his plan for a thrust through to Sfax on the Gulf of Gabes, with a division from Major General Lloyd Fredendall’s II Corps. This was shot down by General Brooke in his incisive way. The attacking force, he pointed out, would be crushed between the retreating Rommel and Generaloberst Hans-Jürgen von Arnim’s so-called Fifth Panzer Army in Tunis. Brooke, stooping forward, with his hooded eyelids and gaunt, beaky-nosed face, looked like a cross between a bird of prey and a reptile, especially when he ran his tongue over his lips. Eisenhower, deeply shaken, offered to rethink the plan and retreated from the room.

  The Casablanca conference was not Eisenhower’s finest hour, and he confessed to Patton that he feared he might be sacked. He was also taken to task by General Marshall over the bad discipline of American troops and chaos in the rear. Patton’s smartly turned-out corps at Casablanca, on the other hand, made a fine impression on everyone, as he had ensured it would.

  The main task of the conference was to establish strategy. Admiral King made no bones about his belief that all the Allies’ resources should be directed against Japan in the Pacific. He passionately disagreed with the policy of ‘holding operations’ in the Far East. And the Americans were far more interested than the British in supporting Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists. General Brooke, however, was determined to get full agreement on finishing the war in North Africa, then invading Sicily. He despaired of Marshall’s lack of strategic grasp. Marshall still clung to the idea of a cross-Channel invasion in 1943, when it was clear that the American army was still far from ready to take on the forty-four German divisions in France, and the Allies lacked the necessary shipping and landing craft. Marshall was forced to concede. Thanks to good staff preparation, the British had all the statistics at their fingertips. The Americans did not.

  Brooke felt that Marshall was a brilliant organizer of American military strength, but did not know what to do with it. Once the Americans had been argued out of an invasion of France, and were uncertain what course to follow in its stead, Brooke managed to wear them down. He also had to win a battle over the British planning staff, who wanted to invade Sardinia instead of Sicily. Finally, on 18 January, Brooke, helped by Field Marshal Dill, now the British military representative in Washington, and Air Chief Marshal Sir Charles Portal, chief of the air staff, persuaded the Americans to agree to their Mediterranean strategy with Operation Husky, the invasion of Sicily. Brigadier General Albert C. Wedemeyer, a War Department planner, who deeply distrusted the British, was forced to admit afterwards that ‘we came, we listened, and we were conquered’. The Casablanca conference was the high water mark of British influence.

  Britons and Americans got to know each other better during the Anfa conference, but not always with admiration. Patton, in his cavalier way, considered General Alan Brooke to be ‘nothing but a clerk’. Brooke’s analysis of Patton was much closer to the truth. He described him as ‘a dashing, courageous, wild and unbalanced leader, good for operations requiring thrust and push, but at a loss in any operation requiring skill and judgment’. The one thing on which British and Americans agreed was that General Mark Clark was interested only in General Mark Clark. Eisenhower got on well with Admiral Cunningham and Air Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder, who would become his deputy later, but in American eyes ‘Ike’ bent too far backwards in accommodating British influence in the theatre. General Alexander was appointed under him to command all the ground forces. Although Patton at first rather admired Alexander, he was disgusted by what he saw as a downgrading of the US Army. It was not long before he wrote in his diary that ‘Ike is more British than the British and is putty in their hands.’

  But even Eisenhower did not like the idea of having to work with a British political counsellor in the form of Harold Macmillan. Macmillan was determined to support de Gaulle, and after Darlan’s assassination there was little that either Eisenhower or Roosevelt could do to exclude him for much longer. Eisenhower also feared interference in the chain of command, given Macmillan’s close links to Churchill and his ministerial status, but Macmillan had no intention of pulling rank. He recognized that the Americans would soon wield almost total power within the alliance, so he preferred a more subtle approach. Harking back to a classical education by comparing the Americans to the Romans, he thought that the best way to deal with Britain’s more powerful ally was to take on the role of ‘the Greek slaves [who] ran the operations of the Emperor Claudius’.

  Eisenhower was still feeling battered by the reaction to the Darlan deal by the American and British press. ‘I am a cross between a one-time soldier,’ he had written to a friend, ‘a pseudo-statesman, a jack-legged politician and a crooked diplomat.’ Having drowned himself in detail across every field, he handed over political dealings to Bedell Smith, as well as many of his other problems, a burden which did not help ‘Beetle’s’ ulcers. But Bedell Smith, although famously acerbic with American officers, managed to get on well with the British and the French.

  The one outstanding problem in North Africa, which Churchill and Roosevelt made an effort to resolve at Casablanca, was the role of General Charles de Gaulle. Roosevelt had lost none of his distrust for de Gaulle, but at Churchill’s urging Giraud and de Gaulle were brought together and made to shake hands for the cameras. The American President had blithely promised Giraud the weapons and equipment for eleven French divisions without checking whether this was possible. De Gaulle, who had initially refused the summons to Casablanca, was, however, content to leave Giraud as commander-in-chief of French forces in North Africa, providing he achieved the political leadership. For that, he needed to wait a little longer. This reversal of power should not, he knew, be too difficult. The brave ‘tin soldier’ was no match for the most determined of political generals.

  Once the embarrassing charade of the two French generals reluctantly shaking hands had been repeated for the photographers, President Roosevelt announced that the Allies intended to achieve the unconditional surrender of Germany and Japan. Churchill then stated that Britain was in full agreement, even though he had been taken by surprise that Roosevelt had decided to make the aim public. In his view, the implications had not been fully thought through, even though he had obtained the War Cabinet’s agreement in advance. Yet this declaration, which would go some way towards reassuring the suspicious Stalin, probably did not make that great a difference to the outcome of the war. Both the Nazi and the Japanese leaderships intended to fight to the very end. The other important decision designed to hasten the result was to step up the strategic bombing campaign against Germany using both Bomber Command and the US Eighth Air Force.

  Stalin, as Churchill expected, was not impressed when he received a joint signal from Roos
evelt and the prime minister sent from Marrakesh, reporting on the decisions reached at Casablanca. Yet the Torch landings had provoked Hitler into reinforcing Tunisia and occupying southern France. This diverted German troops much more effectively than a failed cross-Channel operation. It also forced the Luftwaffe to redeploy 400 aircraft from the eastern front, with disastrous results. By the late spring of 1943 Göring’s formations had lost 40 per cent of their entire strength in the Mediterranean. But Stalin was not mollified by such details. The Anglo-American decision to delay confronting the Germans in France in a battle of attrition was what angered him. The Red Army still faced, and would continue to face, the overwhelming bulk of the German army.

  On 12 January, just a few days before the Casablanca conference started, the Red Army launched Operation Spark to break the German encirclement of Leningrad south of Lake Ladoga. Zhukov, sent back by Stalin to coordinate the offensive, used the 2nd Shock Army attacking from the ‘mainland’, the 67th Army from the Leningrad side and three brigades of ski troops crossing the great frozen lake. The 67th Army had to cross the Neva, and the offensive was delayed until the ice on the river was thick enough to support the lighter tanks.

  The offensive opened with a heavy bombardment, finishing in a storm of screaming Katyusha rockets. In temperatures of minus 25 degrees Centigrade, Soviet troops in white camouflage surged across the ice. On the south-western corner of Lake Ladoga, the Tsarist fortress of Shlisselburg was surrounded. In two days of fighting in the forests and frozen marshland, the vanguards of the two attacking armies were within ten kilo metres of each other. Soviet troops even managed to recover a Tiger tank intact, an important prize for their engineers to study.

  On 15 January Irina Dunaevskaya, a young interpreter, walked across the frozen Neva to visit the battlefield. She saw dead men ‘under a transparent crust of ice, as if in a glass sarcophagus’. In a captured German headquarters, she found Red Army soldiers rolling cigarettes with the paper from lists recommending the award of medals. Because of their nicknames, she guessed that they were released criminals transferred from the Gulag. Outside there were ‘treetops knocked off and branches on the ground, felled trees, snow that is black with soot, and bodies of soldiers, individual and in piles, mostly those of the enemy, but also ours, corpses of horses, scattered ammunition, and broken weapons–too much for a woman’s eyes… The corpse of a very young, blond German was lying on the road in a very natural pose, as if he were still alive. Three scorched corpses of German soldiers were still sitting in the front seat of their huge vehicle. Once again there were corpses of our soldiers under the ice on the highway, as if under glass, squashed into a flat sheet by the heavy vehicles that had recently driven over them… Far away from us the landscape was of a whitish-grey colour, the pine trunks were greyish-brown. All the colours were stern, cold and lonely.’

  ‘Your prayers’, a tank driver wrote home to his mother, ‘must be guarding me in the battles, as I have gone four or five times unharmed through a minefield where a lot of tanks were blown up, and a shell that exploded in the tank and killed the commander and the gunner did me no harm. One becomes here both a fatalist and an extremely superstitious person. I have become very bloodthirsty. Each killed Fritz makes me delighted.’

  On 18 January, the two Soviet armies closed the gap at a cost of 34,000 casualties. The encirclement of Leningrad was broken, even if the landbridge from the city to the ‘mainland’ was no more than a dozen kilometres wide. Stalin that day promoted Zhukov to marshal of the Soviet Union.

  With a new railway laid across the conquered strip south of Lake Ladoga, supplies to Leningrad increased greatly. The line, however, remained within easy range of German artillery, so the Soviet command launched yet another offensive, Operation Polar Star commanded by Marshal Timoshenko. Timoshenko ordered that the town of Sinyavino had to be taken by Red Army Day on 23 February. This attempt to deepen the bridgehead opened with a heavy artillery bombardment. The ground was so boggy that the exploding shells did little more than send up geysers of mud, and many rounds never exploded at all. Red Army troops broke through the German lines and advanced through the fir and birch forest. Vasily Churkin recounted how they passed a field brothel: ‘a two-storey barrack that the Germans had knocked together from rough boards. People said that 75 Russian girls from nearby villages were living there. The Germans had forced them.’

  The German XXVI Army Corps timed its counter-attack with great skill. ‘We saw several Tiger tanks moving towards us and firing as they moved,’ Churkin wrote. ‘They were followed by German infantry. As the tanks approached our soldiers started leaving the trenches and retreating. Platoon commanders were shouting at the cowards, telling them to return to their trenches, but the panic spread fast.’

  One of the Wehrmacht formations to suffer heavily in Operation Polar Star was the Spanish División Azul, or Blue Division, of mainly Falangist volunteers. The decision to form it had been taken in Madrid only five days after the launch of Operation Barbarossa. The Spanish right still blamed the Soviet Union as the chief instigator of their civil war. Almost a fifth of the early volunteers were students and it could be argued that the Blue Division was one of the most intellectually over-qualified formations ever to go to war. Commanded by General Agustín Muñoz Grandes, a regular army officer who had become a Falangist, it was constituted as the 250th Infantry Division and sent to the Novgorod front after training in Bavaria. In that region of forests and marshland, its men suffered badly from sickness and then frostbite. But Hitler was impressed by their resilience under attack, and by their contribution to the destruction of General Vlasov’s 2nd Shock Army in the spring of 1942.

  The Blue Division, defending a sector on the Izhora River, held on despite suffering 2,525 casualties in twenty-four hours of fighting. One of its regiments collapsed, but the line was re-established with German reinforcements. It was the division’s largest and most costly battle of the whole war, and certainly contributed to the failure of the Soviet offensive.

  In the south of Russia, Operation Little Saturn had forced Manstein to withdraw the First Panzer and Seventeenth Armies to the Kuban bridgehead in the north-western corner of the Caucasus, south of Rostov. Rokossovsky grumbled that the downgrading of the offensive, and the failure to advance to Rostov to cut the enemy off completely, had been a missed opportunity. But Stalin had once again suffered a rush of optimism just as he had a year before. Forgetting how quickly the German army recovered from a disaster, he wanted to liberate the eastern Ukraine in the Donbas and Kharkov operations with armies now freed by the surrender of the Sixth Army.

  On 6 February Manstein met Hitler, who at first accepted responsibility for the defeat at Stalingrad, but then blamed Göring and others for the disaster. He complained bitterly about Paulus’s failure to commit suicide. Yet the Japanese were even more upset by the news. In Tokyo, Shigemitsu Mamoru, the new foreign minister, and an audience of about 150 Japanese generals and senior officials, watched a film of Stalingrad made by Russian cameramen. The scenes which showed Paulus and the other captured generals shocked them deeply. ‘Can this possibly be the case?’ they demanded in disbelief. ‘If it is true, why did Paulus not commit suicide like a real soldier?’ The Japanese leadership suddenly realized that the invincible Hitler was going to lose the war after all.

  Manstein was now in a better position to demand flexibility of action. Hitler wanted a dogged defence of occupied territory, but the threat of a collapse in southern Russia paradoxically gave Manstein the opportunity to achieve one of the most startling counter-attacks in the whole war.

  The Red Army, having crushed the Hungarian Second Army and encircled part of the German Second Army with the Voronezh Front, on Manstein’s left flank, then pushed on westward to seize what would become the Kursk Salient. ‘For the last week and a half,’ a soldier wrote to his wife on 10 February, ‘we’ve been marching on land that has just been liberated from the fascists. Yesterday our armoured vehicles broke into Belgorod. A
lot of booty has been taken and many prisoners of war. While on the march we constantly encounter huge groups of captured Hungarians, Romanians, Italians and Germans. If only you could see, Shurochka, what a pitiful sight this famous gang of Hitler’s has become. They are wearing army boots, some in straw galoshes, summer uniforms, only a few wear greatcoats, and on top of all that they are wearing the overclothes that they’ve stolen, male or female. On their heads are fore and aft caps, and women’s shawls are wrapped around over them. Many of them have frostbite; they are dirty, with lice. It gives one a revolting feeling to think that this riff-raff had got so far into our country. We’ve already marched 270 kilometres in the provinces of Voronezh and Kursk. So many villages, towns, factories and bridges have been destroyed. Civilians are going back home as the Red Army arrives there. They are so happy!’

  Another part of the Voronezh Front advanced on Kharkov. On 13 February, Hitler insisted that the city should be held by Gruppenführer Paul Hausser’s II SS Panzer Corps, with the Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler and the Das Reich Divisions. Hausser, on his own initiative, disobeyed orders and withdrew. At the same time, Manstein pulled back the First Panzer Army to the River Mius. The Soviet South-Western Front with four armies had thrust westwards. It was spearheaded by four tank corps (although no greater in strength than a single panzer corps) commanded by Lieutenant General M. M. Popov. The Stavka thought that a great victory was about to be achieved by exploiting the gap in the German front south of Kharkov, but their own supply lines were desperately over-extended.