The Allies Strike Back, 1941–1943

James Holland

• Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780802190147
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Seconda guerra mondiale

Volume two in this "expert, anecdote-filled, thoroughly entertaining" history of WWII follows The Rise of Germany as the Allied forces turn the tides ( Kirkus ). James Holland's The Rise of Germany, the first volume in his War in the West trilogy, was widely praised for his impeccable research and lively narrative. Covering the dawn of World War II, itended at a point when the Nazi war machine appeared to be unstoppable. Germany had taken Poland and France with shocking speed. London was bombed, and U-boats harried shipping on the Atlantic. But Germany hadn't actually won the Battle of Britain or the Battle of the Atlantic. It was not producing airplanes or submarines fast enough. And what looked like victory in Greece and Crete had expended crucial resources in short supply. The Allies Strike Back continues the narrative as Germany's invasion of Russia unfolds in the east, while in the west, the Americans formally enter the war. In North Africa, following major setbacks at the hands of Rommel, the Allies storm to victory. Meanwhile, the bombing of Germany escalates, aiming to not only destroy the its military, industrial, and economic system, but also relentlessly crush civilian morale. Comprehensive and impeccably researched, "Holland brings a fresh eye to the ebb and flow of the conflict" in this "majestic saga" of 20th century history (Literary Review, UK).

PART I

AMERICA ENTERS THE WAR

CHAPTER 1
The Largest Clash of Arms

OBERST HERMANN BALCK was one of the deep-thinking, progressive and vastly experienced fighting Army officers that had played such a crucial part in Germany’s string of land victories so far in this second European war in a generation. Forty-seven years old in June 1941, he had soldiering in his blood: his great-grandfather had fought under Wellington in the King’s German Legion in the Peninsular War; his grandfather had fought with the British Army too, with the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, while his father was a general under the Kaiser and had won a Pour le mérite, or the ‘Blue Max’ as it was known, the highest award a soldier could get, and was regarded as one of the finest tactical writers in the Imperial Army. From a very early age it was understood that young Hermann would also become a soldier, something he accepted without question; in fact, from the age of ten, he would ride most days with his father, who would talk to him about history and great leaders and battles, but also about a sense of responsibility for the men that he would one day command. ‘What I observed and heard during these exercises,’ he wrote, ‘made a deep impression on me.’ Like his father before him, he became an ardent student of history and warfare but a highly cultured man too.

By 1913, he was officially in the Army as a Fahnenjunker, that is, an officer cadet, in a Jäger – infantry – regiment, and was among the first wave of troops to advance into France as part of the Schlieffen Plan, crossing the River Meuse at Sedan. Over the next four years he served on the Western Front, the Eastern Front, the Italian Front and in the Balkans, and even spent several weeks commanding a company of men behind Russian lines. Wounded seven times, he was awarded the Iron Cross First Class and had been nominated for a Blue Max like his father when the war finally ended before the citation could be rubber-stamped.

Repeatedly, Balck had proved himself as a highly effective combat commander, and although he was one of the comparatively few officers to remain in the Army following the end of the last war, time and again he turned down the chance to join the General Staff, the accepted route for career advancement, in favour of remaining an officer in the line. By 1940, he was commanding 1. Rifle Regiment under General Heinz Guderian, the practical architect of the attack in the West. It was Balck who had led the first troops across the River Meuse at Sedan, where he had seen action in 1914, and it was Balck who had given an inspiring speech to his men at the end of that crucial day, 13 May 1940, spurring them to take a critical hill overlooking the town in the fading light.

Later promoted to command of a panzer (tank) regiment, he had been at the spearhead during the German invasion of Greece, had once again led from the front and by June 1941 had been given command of the Panzerbrigade 2 in the elite 1. Panzerdivision. Even by June 1941, panzer divisions were comparatively few in number; the vast majority of German divisions were not mechanized in any way and were dependent on using the feet of their soldiers and horse and wagon. This meant that panzer divisions really were the elite, and tended to have some of the most motivated and well-trained troops of the Wehrmacht.

There was no real equivalent to a panzer division in any other army in the world. The British, because they were entirely mechanized, believed the fighting units of an armoured division should consist almost entirely of tanks. The French, before they surrendered the previous June, had taken a similar approach. For the vehicle-starved Germans, however, the panzer division was a formation in which all three arms – infantry, armour and artillery – would be motorized and could work together. What bound these arms together was radio – every part of the formation had radios, whether motorcycles, armoured cars, half-tracks, lorried infantry or the panzers themselves. This meant they could move forward with speed, each part mutually supporting the other. The theory was that these spearhead divisions, with the Luftwaffe providing close air support, would bulldoze their way forward, with the foot-slogging infantry divisions and field artillery mopping up behind and adding weight to the advance.

So far in the war, no other army they had come up against had been able to bring this combination to bear with the same level of speed of manoeuvre and ability to keep in close communication. The Nazis had been great advocates of radio from the moment Hitler took power in 1933; radios became smaller and cheaper so that by the outbreak of war in September 1939 there were more radio sets per household in Germany than in any other country in the world, including the technologically advanced United States. This meant Germany was in the strange position of being one of the least automotive societies in the Western world, but leaders in communications and radios.

Only France had had an army comparable in size to that of Germany, but although it had bigger and better tanks and double the number of guns, it had neglected radio communication, and this proved to be a fatal flaw. It didn’t really matter that the much larger part of the German Army was under-mechanized and, more often than not, not especially well trained. The hard yards – the decisive breakthrough – had been achieved already by the panzer spearhead: a fast-moving combined assault of furious fire-power.

There were now twenty panzer divisions in the Germany Army, and seventeen available for Operation BARBAROSSA, as well as a further seven motorized divisions and four Waffen-SS divisions, which were well equipped and fully motorized, but whose training was not quite up to those of the panzer units of the Oberkommando des Heeres (OKH – or Supreme Command of the German Army); this was because their commanders were primarily Nazis and SS men rather than long-serving Army officers. Theodor Eicke, for example, the commander of the Waffen-SS Totenkopf Division, had served in the last war as a private and formed the division from concentration camp guards at Dachau. It was hardly surprising they were a little rough around the edges.

In other words, it was the Wehrmacht panzer divisions that were very much the corps d’élite. There had been just ten of them for the attack in the west the previous year, so there was now double that number in the OKH. However, the number of panzer battalions in each division had been reduced from four to three. This meant that while Germany had launched the attack on the West with 35 panzer battalions, for BARBAROSSA the number was now 49, an increase of just 30 per cent.

There was no doubt that Germany had amassed a mighty army for this clash. In all, the German Army that crossed the border of the Soviet Union on 22 June stood at just over 3 million men, 500,000 horses, 600,000 vehicles and some 3,350 armoured vehicles, including tanks, armoured cars and half-tracks. On paper, certainly, this was an enormous force, yet so it needed to be if it was going to encircle and annihilate the Red Army in quick order and within 500 miles – the effective range within which they could operate with the kind of speed and weight of force needed before everything began grinding to a halt.

Yet as with the panzer divisions, once this force was broken down a bit, it no longer appeared so very impressive. Back in May 1940, Germany had invaded France and the Low Countries with 91 divisions in the initial waves along a border that spanned some 600 miles, but, in reality, they had a striking operational distance of less than 150 miles. By June 1941, the German Army had swollen to 208 divisions, but only 121 were directly involved in BARBAROSSA, and of those 64 in all were either mechanized or ‘First Wave’ – that is, fully trained and fit – infantry divisions. That was still, obviously, a lot; but, in contrast with a year earlier, the front they were now about to attack was over 1,300 miles in length. And while the overall size of the Army had increased by 52 divisions, 49 of those were now tied down maintaining their conquests in the West.

In other words, the German Army was invading a country more than ten times the size of France and the Low Countries with a force that was only slightly larger than that of a year earlier.

Over-confidence and hubris was once more clouding sound military judgement. During the previous summer, woeful intelligence combined with over-confidence had led to the Luftwaffe seriously underestimating the strength of the RAF, a very dangerous policy by an attacking force. In the summer of 1940, the Luftwaffe had paid a terrible price for their hubris. Hitler had to hope history was not about to repeat itself.

Hermann Balck, however, felt Germany now had little other choice but to attempt such an ambitious assault. Time, he believed, was running against them. Russia was an old enemy and ideologically opposed to Germany too. Right now, in June 1941, Balck felt the Russians were militarily inferior. In the later 1930s, much of the Red Army’s leadership had been arrested and executed: three out of five marshals, including the enlightened Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, had been shot, along with three out of five army commanders, fifty out of fifty-seven corps commanders and 154 out of 186 divisional commanders. The details were not known outside the Soviet Union, but the culling of so many senior commanders was. Recovery from this purge of the Red Army leadership was taking time, as Hitler was well aware. The poor performance of the Red Army in Finland had demonstrated that all too clearly.

None the less, Soviet military power was not standing still, and Balck wondered what the situation would be when Russia had grown and Germany had suffered some terrible harvest failure? ‘Then Russia will pursue its political goals against us with all means,’ he noted in his journal. ‘In other words, it will attack us together with England and America. The tight encirclement that we have destroyed will be replaced by a more dangerous wide one.’

Balck was revealing the insecurity that was shared by so many Germans: that their geographical position at the heart of Europe meant they were always threatened on all sides. For Balck, Germany had so far simply unpicked what, on paper, should have been an impregnable alliance of states that surrounded them – and justifiably too. The Soviet Union did not seem to him to be a threat at that moment, but it would be, and before too long. And lurking in the west was ‘England’ – rarely did Germans refer to the United Kingdom as ‘Britain’ – her factories building ever-more aircraft and armaments, and, across the Atlantic, the United States, which had already made clear to which mast it was tying its colours. ‘For us,’ Balck concluded, ‘the only course of action must be to attack Russia as soon as possible, to destroy it, to gain control of the Baltic States, the Ukraine, and the Caucasus, and then to turn our attention calmly to the Anglo-Americans.’

In this neat summary, Balck was reflecting Hitler’s own strategy and the view that had been promulgated by the Nazi machine: that for Germany, this was a fight for national survival, and a pre-emptive strike to neutralize a potential serious threat. The difference between Hitler’s view and Balck’s, however, was that woven into this war of national necessity and survival were the Führer’s own warped ideologies of racial and political supremacy. The Russians, in Hitler’s view, were downtrodden Slavs – they were Untermenschen, a large mass of ill-educated, illiterate and inferior people who would, after a hard initial blow, quickly collapse and with them their corrupt Bolshevik leadership. ‘The upcoming campaign,’ Hitler told General Alfred Jodl, the Chief of Staff of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW), ‘is more than a mere contest of arms. It will be a struggle between two world-views.’

In fact, unlike with the earlier campaigns, both the OKW and OKH, working alongside the SS, had been preparing for this coming clash since the previous summer when Hitler had first begun to realize that he would have to turn east before he could deliver any kind of killer blow to Britain. Right from the outset, they had been told to prepare for an ideological war as well as a military campaign. This included earmarking territory for Lebensraum – living space – and primarily for growing food. The so-called ‘Hunger Plan’, developed by the OKW, acknowledged that some 20–30 million Soviet citizens would probably starve to death as a consequence of channelling desperately needed food into the mouths of Germans instead. Since it was a war of survival, however, this regrettable plan was none the less accepted as a necessity. The second part of the ideological war was to get rid of the Soviet leadership and intelligentsia.

Detailed planning had begun on 3 March 1941 when Hitler gave General Jodl his comments on a draft administrative directive for the Soviet Union. The entire area had to be dissolved into new German states, he told Jodl. ‘The socialist idea,’ he wrote, ‘alone can form the domestic basis for the creation of new states and governments. The Jewish-Bolshevik intelligentsia, as the oppressor in the past, must be liquidated.’ This ‘liquidation’ was to be carried out by Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler’s SS, operating independently of the Wehrmacht and on their own responsibility.

None the less, the Wehrmacht High Command was entirely complicit. On 17 March, General Franz von Halder, the Chief of Staff of the OKH, had had a conference with the Führer in which Hitler again reiterated the need to exterminate the Soviet leadership and intelligentsia. ‘The controlling machinery of the Russian Empire,’ recorded Halder, ‘must be smashed.’ Force, he added, was to be used ‘in its most brutal form.’ Halder, a career staff officer and the chief planner – in many ways architect – of the early campaigns, had never been a Nazi and in the autumn of 1939 had even been part of a plot to assassinate Hitler. His nerve had failed him then, and now he made no attempt to question what the Führer was saying. Just ten days later, on 27 March, Halder’s immediate superior, Feldmarschall Walther von Brauchitsch, spoke to senior Army commanders at the OKH Headquarters at Zossen, to the south-east of Berlin. ‘The troops have to realize,’ he told them, ‘that this struggle is being waged by one race against another, and proceed with the necessary harshness.’ The Wehrmacht top brass, at any rate, appeared to have swallowed Hitler’s ideological claptrap hook, line and sinker.

From the outset, when Germany had invaded Poland in September 1939, it had been clear that nothing less than complete victory – that is, the annihilation of their enemies – would ultimately win them the war. What was equally clear as their massed armies prepared for BARBAROSSA was that this battle was going to be conducted with immense violence and brutality unprecedented so far in this war. Hitler had repeatedly gambled the future not only of his armies, but also the entire German people. Never was this more the case than now, on the eve of the largest clash of arms the world had ever seen. If the Germans failed in this latest enterprise, then they could expect little mercy in turn. The consequences of failure would be almost too terrible for the German people to bear.

Few were thinking of such visions of apocalypse, however, and certainly not Oberst Hermann Balck. No army had proved able to stop the Wehrmacht so far. Could a nation that had defeated the sophisticated modern armies of France and Britain really be halted by a mass of backward Soviet peasants? The Red Army had, after all, been given a bloody nose by the Finns just over a year earlier. The Finns! That hardly said much for Soviet military prowess. ‘At the present time,’ noted Balck, ‘we are so superior to the Russians that they cannot seriously compete with us.’

On the eve of BARBAROSSA, German confidence was high.

CHAPTER 2
Manoeuvring

ON SUNDAY, 22 JUNE at 3.30 a.m., German summertime, BARBAROSSA was finally launched. Guns opened up as some 3,600,000 men, more than 3,500 panzers and 2,700 aircraft began streaming across the Soviet border of former Poland along a 1,200-mile front. To the far north, two Finnish armies were also on the move, joining forces with Germany against an enemy that had invaded their country back in 1939; this was their chance for revenge. Now they were heading across Karelia towards Leningrad and supported by 97,000 German mountain troops from Norway. Prior to this massive movement of armies, 800 ‘Brandenburgers’ – special forces disguised as Russians – had crossed into Soviet territory and blown up power stations, cut telegraph wires and other communications, so that at the moment BARBAROSSA began, telephone lines up to 30 miles inside the border had been severed. Soviet security in the border area had proved extraordinarily lax; this augured well for the Germans.

Much to his frustration, however, and despite his proven track record, Oberst Balck was not part of this first wave of German panzer units in the attack on the Soviet Union. To his chagrin, he was called to Berlin where he was to help the beleaguered General Adolf von Schell, the General Plenipotentiary of Motor Vehicles at the OKW, and General Friedrich Fromm, who commanded the Ersatzheer, or Reserve Army, which co-ordinated all personnel from training to replacements sent to the front.

In many ways, however, attempting to streamline military motor production was a greater challenge than fighting the Red Army. Ever since 1938, General von Schell had been valiantly trying to make German motor production more efficient and to make the Army increasingly mechanized. The trouble was that right up to the war and beyond, the German motor industry was both small and disparate, made up of numerous independent companies. Compared with Britain, France – which had been Europe’s leading motor-vehicle producer before the war – or especially the United States, Germany had been, and remained, way behind.

This could not be rectified overnight, particularly in a country so short of resources such as oil and even steel; there were simply too many competing areas, such as ships and aircraft. Nor were there enough factories, or garages, or enough spare parts. Lots of small companies making lots of different models was inherently inefficient and meant large-scale mass production was impossible. Yet Hitler wanted his armies to be increasingly mechanized. It had been von Schell’s task to make possible the impossible. It had been a Herculean one, and he had achieved a great deal, all things considered, but the string of victories had, in many ways, only added to the problems. Part of the booty of war had been vast numbers of captured vehicles, but these were all different too and rarely came with spares. Von Schell had just managed to partially streamline vehicle production in Germany only to be saddled with a whole load more different types.

Repeatedly, he had been told how important it was that the Army have as man...