Europe: A History (212 page)

The hard-fought Italian campaign developed from the Allies’ growing strength throughout the Mediterranean. Contrary to expectations, the British held on to Malta and the sea route to Suez; and Anglo-American landings on the western
extremities of North Africa spelled mortal danger for the
Afrika Korps
. Operation Torch soon had the Axis bottled up in Tunisia, whence in May 1943 they were obliged to withdraw completely. Thereafter it was a relatively simple step for the Allies to cross the Sicilian Straits, and to attack the toe of the Fascist boot.

The invasion of Sicily began on 10 July 1943, when British and American troops landed simultaneously on the southern and eastern shores. German reinforcements arrived too late to prevent the rapid conquest of the whole island. From Sicily, the Allies jumped across to Calabria in September and began the arduous task of pushing northwards up the mountainous peninsula; in all, the task was to take them nearly two years. Yet the Allied toehold in southern Italy was to have important consequences. Once a major base was established at Brindisi, it permitted the projection of Allied air power onto a wide range of destinations throughout Central and Eastern Europe, including Poland and Yugoslavia. It forced the German Command to commit ill-spared divisions to the occupation of southern France. Most importantly, it provoked the collapse of Mussolini’s regime. On 25 July 1943 Marshal Badoglio persuaded the King of Italy to dismiss the Duce and to accede to Allied overtures. The Duce was saved from arrest on the Gran Sasso in a sensational rescue by German paratroopers, and lived again to rule a German-sponsored Republic of Northern Italy from Milan. But the first major crack in the Axis fortress could not be concealed.

Meanwhile, on the Eastern Front, the gigantic German-Soviet War was moving to its climax. Having survived the disaster of 1941, the Soviet regime moved to tap the great reservoir of Russian patriotism. Stalin reopened the Orthodox churches which he had all but annihilated, and appealed like Lenin before him for the defence of Holy Russia. What seemed impossible at any time before 1941, millions of men went willingly to their deaths with ‘Za Stalina’ (For Stalin) on their lips. The Red Army’s prodigal use of its expendable manpower amazed and, to a degree, demoralized the German soldiery. Waves of infantry were used to assault fixed positions with no sign of artillery support. Through fields of mounting corpses, the hordes of ill-clothed and ill-armed ‘Ivans’ kept coming and coming, till the German machine-guns overheated and the gunners lost stomach for the slaughter. It was an accepted fact of the contest that the Soviet side could sustain casualties of three or four to one and still carry the day. The Red Army’s sacrifices were helped by the wilderness and the weather, and by the T-34, the best tank of the war. A brilliant military team led by Marshal Zhukov maximized the advantages of space and numbers.

In 1942 the Wehrmacht was drawn on and on. The constant series of local German successes concealed the fact that the elusive Soviet enemy was not now being trapped or encircled, and that the long lines of communication were growing ever longer. By the early autumn, as the weather deteriorated, neither the Volga nor the Caspian had been reached; and a dangerous salient was developing on the approaches to Stalingrad. A tactical withdrawal might have remedied the situation. But the Führer adamantly refused. Hitler must take the sole blame for the fateful order which told General von Paulus to hold his ground at all costs.
The Germans’ momentum eventually took them to the right-bank suburbs of ‘Stalin’s city’. Yet they were entering the head of a noose. Day after day, Zhukov’s forces inched round the German flanks, until, in one sudden movement, von Paulus was finally surrounded. Three months of desperate hand-to-hand fighting in icy, deserted ruins preceded von Paulus’s surrender on 2 February 1943. Stalingrad cost over one million lives. It was the largest single battle of world history. The invincible Nazi colossus was shown to be fallible.

News of Stalingrad flashed round the world, giving heart to anti-Nazi resistance movements all over Europe. Before Stalingrad, Resistance leaders had only been able to indulge in small-scale sabotage, or to run the clandestine escape lines for Allied airmen and prisoners. After Stalingrad, they began to dream of liberation.

In Western Europe, resistance was relatively uncomplicated. Prompted by the broadcasts of the BBC, and by the skulduggery of the British Special Operations Executive (SOE), devoted cells of courageous men and women planned the sabotage and diversions which would eventually help the advance of the Allied armies. In Denmark, where the Nazis had hoped to create a model protectorate, the Resistance forced the Germans in August 1943 to declare martial law. In Norway, too, the Nazis abandoned the attempt to rule through the pro-Fascist government of Vidkun Quisling. Their one and only shipment of heavy water from the Norsk-Hydro Plant was sunk in the Tinnsjo fiord by Norwegian saboteurs. In ‘the Netherlands they were less disturbed, having penetrated the Dutch Resistance in a brilliant project called the
Englandspiel
, the ‘English Game’. In Belgium, France, Italy, and Greece, the resistance was increasingly influenced by communist elements. The French resistance came to life after 1942 with the German occupation of the Vichy Zone, where large numbers of patriots took to the
maquis
. At the same time the Italian partisans, whose achievements were still greater, concentrated their activities in the northern zone ruled by Mussolini, whom they eventually captured and killed.

Yet nowhere was popular defiance more determined than in tiny Luxemburg. In the plebiscite of October 1941, only 3 per cent of Luxemburgers voted for joining the Reich. Later, they organized the only effective general strike against Nazi rule, whilst sustaining a ceaseless campaign of obstructions and propaganda.

In Eastern Europe, Resistance was more problematical. German policies there were far harsher. Despite very different political colorations, the leading formations of the Underground—the democratic Polish
Armia Krajowa
(Home Army, AK), the undemocratic Ukrainian Insurrectionary Army (UPA), and the Serbian
Četniks
—were all caught in a painful political trap, where the pursuit of national freedom demanded resistance to Stalin as well as to Hitler. Co-operation with the advancing Red Army, or with communist partisans, who did not recognize the principle of ‘bourgeois independence’, involved at best abject surrender, more usually imprisonment and death, [
BUCZACZ
]

In Poland, for example, the largest and most senior of Europe’s Resistance movements faced an almost impossible task. It came into being in late 1939, when it treated both the Nazis and the Soviets as occupation forces. Its main formation,
the
Armia Krajowa
(AK), was a loose federation of ill-assorted groups. Its authority was respected by the numerous Peasant Battalions (BCh), but not by the semi-fascist (but violently anti-German) National Armed Forces (NSZ) or by the communist People’s Guard (GL). It had proper, if slight, relations with the Jewish Fighting Organization (ZOB) in the ghettos—and bloody confrontations with the Ukrainians, the Soviet partisans, and the gangs of deserters, fugitives, and bandits with whom it shared the woods. It organized and ran an impressive ‘Secret State’—with clandestine intelligence, diversionary, educational, judicial, and political branches. But it did not survive the Soviet ‘Liberation’. Its democratic leaders ended up in a Moscow show trial. Honourable men, like the unbroken General Okulicki, the AK’s last Commander, deserve to stand amongst the heroes of the Allied cause. Instead, amidst the shameful silence of their comrades in the West, they were consigned to obscurity, dishonour, and an early grave.
¹¹⁵

In Yugoslavia, the problem was solved by a controversial and, some would say, disreputable decision of the Anglo-Americans. Yugoslavia, unlike Poland, layout-side the sphere of direct Soviet influence. But in 1943 it came within range of Allied support from Italy. London and Washington chose to back Tito’s communists. Thereafter, Tito’s rivals, the
Četniks
, were heaped with every form of calumny. Their leaders, including Mihajlovi, would eventually be executed by Tito’s courts for ‘treason’.

Such developments well illustrate the facile definitions of ‘resistance’ and ‘collaboration’ which prevailed in Anglo-American circles. Nations who have never experienced foreign invasion rarely comprehend its complications. Of course, some people in continental Europe chose to serve the invaders from base motives of personal gain. Others, like Leon Degrelle’s Rexist Movement in Belgium, acted in accordance with principles developed before the war. But many were moved to collaborate in order to exert a moderating influence and to limit the harm done. In France, after Pétain’s fateful meeting with Hitler, the policy of collaboration may or may not have been misguided. But it was coined for reasons of patriotic necessity.

In the broad expanse of Europe that was successively occupied both by Soviets and by Nazis, the element of choice was largely absent. Both totalitarian regimes sought to enforce obedience through outright terror. For most ordinary civilians, the prospect of serving the Soviets posed the same moral dilemmas as serving the fascists. The only course of principled action for patriots and democrats was the suicidal one of trying to oppose Hitler and Stalin simultaneously.

After Stalingrad, the news from the Eastern Front continued to be disheartening for Berlin. In the spring of 1943, the Red Army moved to the general offensive for the first time in two years. In the opening stages of five mighty campaigns that would carry them all the way to Berlin, Stalin’s confident marshals began to roll back the Nazi enemy. On the open steppe near Kursk in July, the Germans’ strategic tank-force was smashed. Their capacity for large-scale attack was broken. The tide, to use Churchill’s metaphor, had turned.