The History Buff's Guide to World War II (22 page)

The eastern front became a meat grinder for the German army from which there was no break during four years of fighting.

What was supposed to be a six-week operation for the Third Reich turned into nearly two hundred weeks of overextended, unfocused slaughter. Of all the war’s military and civilian dead, most were destined to perish between Berlin and Moscow.

Hitler could have picked a better operation code name. Barbarossa was a twelfth-century crusader who died on his way to the Holy Land. While attempting to ford a river on horseback, he fell off midstream and drowned. Barbarossa might have survived had he not been weighted down with armor.

5
. STALINGRAD (AUGUST 23, 1942–FEBRUARY 2, 1943)

Though enduring delays and setbacks, Germany was still on the advance a year into the Soviet invasion. Nowhere had the Third Reich suffered a true reversal. Yet on the approach to the oil-rich Caucasus, Hitler decided to take Stalingrad. It would be his undoing.

On a map the idea seemed reasonable. A heavily industrialized metropolis, Stalingrad guarded a key north-south rail line and a deep westerly bend to the Volga River, both of which fed Baku’s oil to the Soviet Union. The city also loomed over any advance into southeast Russia. For Hitler, the chance to shame the city’s namesake was an added incentive. In August 1942 a third of a million Axis troops charged through the Ukraine to smash the city against the Volga. Joseph Stalin ordered his town to be held at all costs. Hell was about to open a branch office.

Germans made quick progress to the outskirts, but the head of their formations dissolved when entering Stalingrad’s narrow streets. Progress was suddenly measured not in miles but in blocks. To add force to the blow, Hitler pushed in more troops, dangerously overcommitting himself.

Both sides poured in reserves, but the Soviets had the advantage of much shorter supply lines. Three months into the battle, just as the brutal Russian winter set in, the Soviets smashed through the Axis flanks and encircled the overcommitted troops. Outside the hardening cordon, German tank commander Erich Von Manstein led an attack to break through and rescue the Sixth Army, but Hitler forbade the Sixth from attempting a breakout to meet the panzers.

German forces laid siege to Stalingrad in the late summer of 1942 but fell victim to the brutal winter that shortly followed.

As the noose tightened, fighting within the city became nothing short of animalistic. Squads of men hunted each other, block by block, room to room, preferring to kill silently with knives and spades but resorting more often to submachine guns and grenades. Flamethrowers were particularly effective in the sewers. Snipers ruled open ground. Tanks hid among the rubble and scythed away at moving targets. Artillery set fire to everything, and the city was wrapped in a perpetual shroud of smoke, noise, and stench. During the battle, ruptured oil tanks bled into the Volga, and at times the river itself was on fire. Luftwaffe transport planes were shot out of the sky—rations stopped coming in, and the German wounded could not get out. In due course, the rat population exploded and grew fat on corpses.
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Two months later, with no hope of escape or resupply, a fraction of the original German force surrendered. The rest were dead, wounded, or missing. It was the first major defeat of the Third Reich on land anywhere. Germany lost a fourth of its manpower on the eastern front as well as any reasonable chance to take Leningrad, Moscow, or the oil fields Hitler’s war machine so desperately needed. From Stalingrad onward, Hitler’s mental and physical health began a precipitous decline, and he was rarely seen in public again.
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Germany lost more soldiers in and around Stalingrad than the United States lost in Europe during the entire war.

6
. SECOND EL ALAMEIN (OCTOBER 23–NOVEMBER 4, 1942)

For the British army the war began with a string of humiliating defeats: France and Norway in 1940, Greece and Crete in 1941, Malay and Singapore in 1942. Aside from liberating Abyssinia, the war had been a bust.

North Africa was no better. Irwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps harassed and beat the British Eighth Army out of Libya, then chased it into Egypt. It appeared as if Alexandria would fall, then perhaps Cairo and the Suez Canal. In full retreat, British commander Gen. Claude Auchinleck ordered a halt just west of the shore city of El Alamein, fifty miles from the critical port of Alexandria. It was an ideal move. For Rommel to get beyond this point would require a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, or more correctly, a Desert Fox to squeeze through a bottleneck.

Protected on the north by the Mediterranean and on the south by the impassible chasm of the Qattara Depression, Auchinleck’s Australians, New Zealanders, South Africans, and British stood astride a forty-mile pass, the only avenue into Egypt. In July 1942, Rommel tried to push through and failed. In September he tried and failed again. All the while his forces dwindled while his opponent’s grew.

Though Claude Auchinleck did most of the preparation work, Bernard Montgomery received most of the credit for the Allied victory at Second El Alamein.

By October, the Eighth Army outnumbered the Germans and Italians more than two to one in men and tanks and owned near complete mastery of the air. After a lengthy wait and extensive planning, the new (and supposedly aggressive) Eighth Army commander Gen. Bernard Montgomery finally decided to start boxing. He jabbed with the left on the south side of the line, forcing the Axis to protect its flank. As soon as the left feint made contact, Montgomery smashed with his right. Initially, the British took heavy losses, but knowing that attrition was a fight Rommel could not win, Monty kept punching.

Down to a few dozen operational tanks, nearly surrounded, running low on everything, Rommel disengaged and began a long trek back across Libya and into Tunisia. Monty cautiously and ineffectually pursued.

Viewed objectively, the battle meant little. Rommel was down to a pittance of resources when the fight commenced. Days after it ended, the Allies had landed in Northwest Africa, dooming the Axis either way. But for the British Empire it was a soul-saving victory, “the greatest in military history.” El Alamein also catapulted Montgomery to the top of Allied command, where he would simultaneously help and hinder the war effort with his absolute carefulness and monumental ego.

The United States played a significant role in the British victory at El Alamein. Nearly half of Montgomery’s tanks were American-made Grants and Shermans
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7
. KURSK (JULY 5–23, 1943)

As the war neared its fourth anniversary, the Third Reich was already dying. North Africa was lost, as was the Atlantic. But an opportunity presented itself on the Russian steppes in the shape of a large bend in the Soviet front lines.

Around the rail junction of Kursk, nearly one hundred miles across, a large horseshoe salient bulged westward into Nazi-held territory; five Soviet armies were at risk. Desperate for a victory, Hitler aimed to slice this salient at its base, attacking from both sides, capturing everyone and everything inside.

For once the Soviet high command anticipated Hitler’s moves almost exactly. Inside the salient, citizens and soldiers constructed hundreds of miles of overlapping trenches, dug countless tank traps, and laid four hundred thousand mines. Some areas of the defensive belt were forty miles across. The plan was to lure the Germans into the deadly quagmire, wait for the offensive to wear down, and then crush it with counterattacks.
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The nearly three-week-long battle of Kursk included some thirteen thousand armored vehicles and twelve thousand aircraft.

The Germans obliged. North and south of the salient, more than 900,000 Germans launched their pincer move, armed with 2,900 tanks and assault guns, 10,000 artillery pieces, and 2,000 aircraft. On schedule, the offensive broke down, battered by antitank guns, swarmed by infantry, tangled in barbed wire. In turn, the counterattacks came, with Soviet forces totaling twice the number of German soldiers and weapons. But it was no mopping up.

Most of the Germans fought their way out, fiercely inducing 50 percent casualties on the Soviets and higher. For every German killed or wounded, there were more than three Soviet casualties. For each German tank destroyed, the Soviets lost more than five.
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Altogether, Kursk involved approximately three million combatants with more than four hundred thousand casualties, making it one of the largest and bloodiest battles ever. The Germans viewed the battle as a minor setback, especially compared with the simultaneous invasion of Sicily. The Soviets considered Kursk to be an absolute triumph, the first authoritative combat victory over the Third Reich.

Time would validate the Soviet position. Kursk was the last great German offensive on the eastern front. The Soviets soon replaced their losses; the Germans could not. Most important, Kursk signaled the beginning of a general Nazi retreat that would last twenty months and not stop until the fall of Berlin.
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Involving more than seven thousand tanks, Kursk remains the largest tank battle in history.

8
. NORMANDY (JUNE 6, 1944)

For two years Churchill argued against a cross-channel attack. Better to go into North Africa, he argued, to gain valuable combat experience and to spread the Germans thin. North Africa turned into Sicily, then Italy, and nearly Greece, Yugoslavia, and northern Norway. Fearing a slaughter reminiscent of the First World War, the prime minister wanted the Allies to go anywhere but France. On June 6, 1944, his fears dissipated.

There were several mistakes. Roughly 90 percent of the U.S. airborne troops failed to hit their drop zones, with some “sticks” (plane or gilder loads) drifting more than twenty miles off course. Most of the amphibious tanks either sank or were blasted off the beaches. Landing craft off Omaha Beach initially unloaded troops more than a quarter mile from shore.

But predictions of 70 percent casualties proved wildly inflated. Overall, the rate was closer to 15 percent, mostly because Operation Overlord was unquestionably the best-planned military operation of the entire war. Secrecy had more than one million men in complete isolation for weeks. Deception plans had Hitler believing, even weeks after the initial landings, that Calais was the true invasion point. Ten sea lanes had been swept of mines. Artificial harbors called “Mulberries” were brought in. Bomb runs had destroyed French rail lines as far as three hundred miles inland. The Allies had a fifty-to-one advantage in aircraft. It was the heaviest ship-to-shore bombardment and largest amphibious landing in history.

In ten days more than four hundred thousand men and ninety thousand vehicles came ashore.