History of the Second World War (120 page)

Hitler, however, felt that he could not venture to concentrate his resources on that sea-and-air effort while the Russian Army stood poised on his eastern border, as a threat to Germany on land. So he argued that the only way to make Germany’s rear secure was to attack and defeat Russia. His suspicion of Russia’s intentions was all the more intense because hatred of Russian-style Communism had so long been his deepest emotion.

He also persuaded himself that Britain would agree to peace once she could no longer hope for Russian intervention in the war. Indeed, he imagined that Britain would have made peace already if Russia were not inciting her to fight on. When, on July 21, Hitler held his first conference to discuss the hastily drafted plans for invading England, he revealed the turn of his mind, saying: ‘Stalin is flirting with Britain to keep her in the war and tie us down, with a view to gain time and take what he wants, knowing he could not get it once peace breaks out.’ From this came the further conclusion: ‘Our attention must be turned to tackling the Russian problem.’

Planning was initiated immediately, though it was not until early in 1941 that he took the definite decision. The invasion was launched on June 22 — a day ahead of Napoleon’s date. The panzer forces quickly overran the Soviet armies that were immediately available and within less than a month had driven 450 miles into Russia — three-quarters of the way to Moscow. But the Germans never reached there.

What were the key factors in their failure? The autumn mud and snow were the obvious ones. But more fundamental was the Germans’ miscalculation of the reserves that Stalin could bring up from the depths of Russia. They reckoned on meeting 200 divisions, and by mid-August had beaten these. But by then a further 160 had appeared on the scene. By the time these in turn had been overcome, autumn had arrived, and when the Germans pushed on towards Moscow in the mud, they again found fresh armies blocking the route. Another basic factor was Russia’s continued primitiveness, despite all the technical progress achieved since the Soviet Revolution. It was not only a matter of the extraordinary endurance of her soldiers and people, but the primitiveness of her roads. If her road system had been developed comparably to that of the West, she would have been overrun almost as quickly as France. Even as it was, however, the invasion might have succeeded if the panzer forces had driven right on for Moscow in the summer, without waiting for the infantry — as Guderian had urged, only to be overruled on this occasion by Hitler and the older heads of the army.

The winter in Russia proved a terrible strain and drain on the German forces — and they never fully recovered from it. Yet it is evident that Hitler still had quite a good chance of victory in 1942, as the Red Army was seriously short of equipment, while Stalin’s grip on it had been shaken by the heavy initial defeats. Hitler’s new offensive swept quickly through to the edge of the Caucasus oilfields — on which Russia’s military machine depended. But Hitler split his forces between the double objectives of the Caucasus and Stalingrad. Narrowly checked here, he wore down his army in repeated bull-headed efforts to capture the ‘City of Stalin’, becoming obsessed with that symbol of defiance. Forbidding any withdrawal when winter came, he doomed the army attacking it to encirclement and capture when Russia’s newly raised armies arrived on the scene late in the year.

The disaster at Stalingrad left the Germans with a far longer front than they could hold with their depleted strength. Withdrawal was the only saving course, as the generals urged, but Hitler obstinately refused to sanction it. Deaf to all arguments, he constantly insisted on ‘No retreat’. That parrot-cry could not stem the tide, and merely ensured that each eventual retreat would be enforced by a heavy defeat, at higher cost because it was delayed too long.

Hitler’s forces were suffering, increasingly, the consequences of strategic overstretch — which had proved the ruin of Napoleon. The strain was all the worse because in 1940 the war had been extended to the Mediterranean — by Mussolini plunging into the war to take advantage of France’s downfall and Britain’s weakness. That had offered the British a chance for counterattack, in an area where seapower could exert its influence. Churchill was quick to seize the chance — in part, too quick. Britain’s mechanised force in Egypt, though small, soon smashed the out-of-date Italian army in North Africa, besides conquering Italian East Africa. It could have driven on to Tripoli, but was halted in order that a force could be landed in Greece — a premature and ill-prepared move that was easily repulsed by the Germans. But the Italian breakdown in North Africa led Hitler to send German reinforcements there, under Rommel. However, having his eyes fixed on Russia, Hitler sent only enough to bolster up the Italians, and never made a strong effort to seize the eastern, central, and western gates of the Mediterranean — Suez, Malta, and Gibraltar.

So in effect he merely opened up a fresh drain on Germany’s strength, which ultimately offset the success of Rommel’s counterthrusts in postponing for over two years the clearance of North Africa. The Germans were now stretched out along both sides of the Mediterranean, and the whole coastline of western Europe, while trying to hold a perilously wide front in the depths of Russia.

The natural consequences of such general overstretch were postponed, and the war prolonged, by Japan’s entry into the war — in December 1941. But this proved more fatal to Hitler’s prospects in the long run, because it brought America’s weight into the war. The temporary effect of the Japanese surprise stroke at Pearl Harbor, which crippled the U.S. Pacific Fleet, enabled the Japanese to overrun the Allied positions in the South-west Pacific — Malaya, Burma, the Philippines, and the Dutch East Indies. But in this rapid expansion they became stretched out far beyond their basic capacity for holding their gains. For Japan was a small island state, with limited industrial power.

THE THIRD PHASE OF THE WAR

Once America’s strength developed, and Russia survived to develop hers, the defeat of the Axis powers — Germany, Italy, and Japan — became certain, as their combined military potential was so much smaller. The only uncertainties were — how long it would take, and how complete it would be. The most that the aggressors, turned defenders, could hope for was to obtain better terms of peace by spinning out time until the ‘giants’ became weary or quarrelled. But the chances of such prolonged resistance depended on shortening fronts. None of the Axis leaders could bear to ‘lose face’ by voluntary withdrawal, and so clung on to every position until it collapsed.

There was no real turning point in this third phase of the war, but only an incoming tide.

The tide flowed more easily in Russia and in the Pacific, because in these areas an ever-growing superiority of force was combined with ample space for manoeuvre. In southern and western Europe the tide met more checks because space was more cramped.

The Anglo-American forces’ first bound back into Europe — in July 1943 — was eased by the way that Hitler and Mussolini poured troops across the sea into Tunisia in the hope of holding a bridgehead there to block the converging advance of the Allied armies from Egypt and Algeria. Tunisia turned into a trap, and the capture of the whole German-Italian army there left Sicily almost denuded of defence. But when the Allies pushed on from Sicily into Italy — in September 1943 — their advance up that narrow and mountainous peninsula became sticky and slow.

On June 6, 1944, the main Allied armies, which had been built up in England for a cross-Channel invasion, landed in Normandy. Here success was certain if they could firmly establish themselves ashore in a bridgehead big enough to build up their massed strength and swamp the Germans’ barricading line. For once they broke out, the whole width of France would be open for the manoeuvre of their armies, which were fully mechanised, whereas the bulk of the German forces were not.

The Germans’ defence was thus doomed to eventual collapse unless they could throw the invaders back in the sea in the first few days. But in the event the move-up of their panzer reserves was fatally delayed by the paralysing interference of the Allied air forces, which had a 30 to 1 superiority over the Luftwaffe in this theatre.

Even if the invasion of Normandy had been repulsed on the beaches, the Allies’ now tremendous air superiority, applied direct against Germany, would have made her collapse certain. Until 1944 the strategic air offensive had fallen far short of the claims made for it, as an alternative to land invasion, and its effects had been greatly overestimated. The indiscriminate bombing of cities had not seriously diminished munitions production, while failing to break the will of the opposing peoples and compel them to surrender, as expected. For collectively they were too firmly under the grip of their tyrannical leaders, and individuals cannot surrender to bombers in the sky. But in 1944-5 airpower was better directed — applied with ever-increasing precision and crippling effect to the key centres of war production that were vital to the enemy’s power of resistance. In the Far East, too, the master key of airpower made the collapse of Japan certain, without any need for the atom bomb.

The main obstacle in the Allies’ path, once the tide had turned, was a self-raised barrier — their leaders’ unwise and short-sighted demand for ‘unconditional surrender’. It was the greatest help to Hitler, in preserving his grip on the German people, and likewise to the War Party in Japan. If the Allied leaders had been wise enough to provide some assurance as to their peace terms, Hitler’s grip on the German people would have been loosened long before 1945. Three years earlier, envoys of the widespread anti-Nazi movement in Germany made known to the Allied leaders their plans for overthrowing Hitler, and the names of the many leading soldiers who were prepared to join such a revolt, provided that they were given some assurance about the Allied peace terms. But then, and later, no indication or assurance was given them, so that it naturally became difficult for them to gain support for a ‘leap in the dark’.

Thus ‘the unnecessary war’ was unnecessarily prolonged, and millions more lives needlessly sacrificed, while the ultimate peace merely produced a fresh menace and the looming fear of another war. For the unnecessary prolongation of the Second World War, in pursuit of the opponents’ ‘unconditional surrender’, proved of profit only to Stalin — by opening the way for Communist domination of central Europe.

BOOKS REFERRED TO IN THE TEXT

Where British and American publishers are given, the first mentioned is the edition from which I have taken any quotations, and the page numbers of any reference may be valid for that edition only. I would like to thank the authors, publishers and other copyright holders concerned for permission to make quotations from some of these works.

Bradley, Omar N.:
A Soldier’s Story of the Allied Campaigns from Tunis to the Elbe.
London, Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1951; New York, H. Holt & Co., 1951.

Butcher, Captain Harry C.:
My Three Years with Eisenhower.
New York, Simon & Schuster, 1946; London, Heinemann, 1946.

Churchill, Winston S.:
The War Speeches of Winston S. Churchill
(compiled by Charles Eade, 3 vols). London, Cassell, 1952; Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1953.

Churchill, Winston S.:
The Second World War
(6 vols). London, Cassell, 1948-54: Boston, Houghton, Mifflin, 1948-54.

Vol. I:
The Gathering Storm
(9th edition, 1967).

Vol. II:
Their Finest Hour
(9th edition, 1967).

Vol. III:
The Grand Alliance
(5th edition, 1968).

Vol. IV:
The Hinge of Fate
(4th edition, 2nd impression, 1968).

Vol. V:
Closing the Ring
(4th edition, 2nd impression, 1968).

Vol. VI:
Triumph and Tragedy
(2nd edition, 1954).

Clark, General Mark:
Calculated Risk.
London, Harrap, 1951; New York, Harper, 1950.

Cunningham, Admiral Lord:
A Sailor’s Odyssey.
London, Hutchinson, 1951.

Douhet, Giulio:
The Command of the Air.
London, Faber, 1943; New York, Coward-McCann, 1942.

Eisenhower, Dwight D.:
Crusade in Europe.
New York, Doubleday, 1948; London, Heinemann, 1949.

Feiling, Keith:
The Life of Neville Chamberlain.
London, Macmillan, 1946.

Halder, General Franz:
Diaries.
Privately printed. Copyright © Infantry Journal Inc. (U.S.A.), 1950.

Kippenberger, Major-General Sir Howard:
Infantry Brigadier.
London (and New York), Oxford University Press, 1949.

Liddell Hart, Captain B. H.:
The Defence of Britain.
London, Faber, 1939.

The Other Side of the Hill.
London, Cassell, 1951.

(See my list of books, following the Index.
The Other Side of the Hill
in its 1951 edition has not been published in the United States. The considerably smaller 1948 edition was published in New York by Morrow in 1948 as
The German Generals Talk.)

The Tanks: The History of the Royal Tank Regiment and its Predecessors
etc. (2 vols). London, Cassell, 1959; New York, Praeger, 1959.

Linklater, Eric:
The Campaign in Italy.
London, H.M.S.O., 1951.

Martel, Lieut.-General Sir Gifford:
An Outspoken Soldier.
London, Sifton Praed, 1949.

North, John:
North-West Europe 1944-5. The Achievements of 21st Army Group.
London, H.M.S.O., 1953.