How Hitler Could Have Won World War II (25 page)

At Quadrant the western Allies agreed to opportunistic moves in the Mediterranean, but Overlord was to receive absolute priority.

Hitler recognized that the Italians were going to quit and, equally in secret, set in motion Operation Axis to take over Italy. Marshal Rommel rushed eight divisions into northern Italy—ostensibly to allow the Italian troops there to move south to confront the Allies—and secured the passes through the Alps as well as all key locations in the region. Hitler directed Hube's troops in Sicily to delay but to evacuate as quickly as possible through Messina. He also ordered SS Captain Otto Skorzeny to spy out the place Il Duce was being held and free him.

General Hube conducted highly effective delaying actions, causing heavy Allied casualties, while, over six days and seven nights, Fregattenkapitän Gustav von Liebenstein, under the cover of German fighter aircraft and strong antiaircraft artillery, evacuated 40,000 German and 60,000 Italian soldiers. Although the Italians left nearly all their equipment, the Germans took off 10,000 vehicles, forty-seven tanks, ninety-four guns, and 17,000 tons of supplies.

On August 17, the Americans and the British arrived in a Messina empty of enemy forces.

Since only about 60,000 Germans had moved into Sicily while 13,500 wounded were evacuated by air and 5,500 were captured, relatively few Germans were killed. Total British casualties were almost 13,000, American 10,000—about 5,500 killed all told.

Marshal Badoglio was getting frightened that the Germans might seize him and the king, and demanded a major landing of Allied paratroops on Rome as a condition of Italian surrender. This was far too dangerous for Eisenhower, since Hitler had moved Kurt Student with his 2nd Parachute Division and the 3rd Panzergrenadier Division close to Rome. Student had instructions to disarm all Italian forces around the capital as soon as Badoglio announced surrender.

It is a comment on Allied and German attitudes that although Badoglio had five Italian divisions at Rome, the Allies had no confidence they could protect a landing site, while Student was sure his much smaller force could eliminate them.

Eisenhower demanded an immediate cease-fire. Badoglio gave in. On September 3, 1943, near Syracuse, Eisenhower's chief of staff, Walter Bedell Smith, signed the capitulation document with Giuseppe Castellano, who had conducted the Lisbon negotiations. At the same moment, Victor Emanuel and Badoglio received the German ambassador to assure him that Italy would remain true to its Axis partner. On the same day British divisions crossed the Strait of Messina and formed a bridgehead on the Italian mainland. The Allies announced the cease-fire over Radio Algiers on September 8, 1943. Shortly thereafter the main invasion of Italy (Operation Avalanche) began.

Kesselring declared all of Italy to be a war theater. Rommel disarmed Italian troops in the north. Parachutists overpowered Rome. In general the Italian soldiers either took off their uniforms and faded into the population or allowed themselves to be carted off as prisoners of war. Only in the Balkans did a very few Italian units put up some resistance, none effective. It was a pathetic end to Mussolini's dreams of a new Roman empire. Victor Emanuel, the queen, Crown Prince Umberto, Badoglio, and other members of his government fled to Brindisi on the Adriatic coast.

Most of the Italian fleet surrendered at Malta, but a newly designed German radio-guided gliding bomb sank the Italian flagship,
Roma,
on the way.

Meanwhile Skorzeny had tracked down the place where Mussolini was being held—on the 2,900-meter Gran Sasso in the Abruzzi Mountains seventy miles northeast of Rome. At 2 P.M. on September 12, 1943, eight gliders landed on the grounds of the Campo Imperiale Hotel. In moments seventy parachutists and Waffen-SS commandos spread out, intimidated the Italian guards, and rescued Mussolini. Shortly afterward a light Fieseler Storch landed on the grounds, picked up Mussolini and Skorzeny, and flew them to a nearby airport, where a transport carried Il Duce to Hitler at Rastenburg in East Prussia. The entire raid took less than twenty minutes.

Mussolini, a broken man, formed a “republican-socialistic government,” with Salò on Lake Garda as his “capital.” But he was a puppet of Hitler, with no power.

Two incidents in Sicily in August cast severe doubt on the capacity of George Patton as a senior commander. Visiting an evacuation hospital August 3, Patton came upon an enlisted man who had no wounds. Patton asked him where he was hurt.

“I guess I can't take it,” the soldier replied.

Patton burst into a rage, cursed the man, slapped his face with his gloves, and stormed from the tent. The soldier had been diagnosed with dysentery and malaria. That evening Patton issued a memo to commanders berating cowards who went into hospitals “on the pretext that they are nervously incapable of combat.”

On August 10 at another hospital Patton was walking down a line of cots with a medical officer. Coming to a man shivering in bed, Patton asked what the trouble was.

“It's my nerves,” the soldier said, and started to cry.

“Your nerves, hell,” Patton shouted. “You are just a goddamned coward, you yellow son of a bitch. You're a disgrace to the army, and you are going back to the front to fight, although that's too good for you. You ought to be lined up against a wall and be shot. In fact, I ought to shoot you myself right now, goddamn you.”

Patton pulled his pistol from the holster and waved it, then struck the man across the face with the gloves he held in his other hand. He ordered the medical officer to move the man out at once. “I won't have these other brave boys seeing such a bastard babied.” He started to leave the tent, turned, and hit the weeping soldier again.

The doctor placed himself between Patton and the patient, and Patton departed. The medical authorities sent a report to Omar Bradley, commander of 2nd Corps in Patton's army. Bradley locked the paper in his safe and said nothing. The doctors, however, also forwarded their report to Eisenhower. He sent Patton a letter that questioned his judgment and self-discipline, ordered him to explain his actions, and told him to apologize to those who witnessed the events.

When some newspaper correspondents got wind of the incident, Eisenhower asked them to withhold publication because it would require him to fire Patton. The journalists agreed. Meanwhile Patton wrote a humble letter to Eisenhower; summoned doctors, nurses, and medical personnel of the two hospitals to Palermo and expressed his regret; and called the two soldiers into his office, apologized, and shook hands.

Eisenhower hoped the matter had ended. In November, however, Drew Pearson, an American newspaper columnist, revealed the slapping incidents on a national radio broadcast. In the public furor that followed, many citizens demanded Patton's dismissal. The storm slowly subsided. But when Eisenhower named the army group commander to direct American ground troops going into Normandy, he selected Bradley. Patton stayed for months in Sicily without a job, but on January 22, 1944, Eisenhower ordered him to Britain to take command of the U.S. 3rd Army—and delivered him from disgrace.

19 THE CITADEL DISASTER

THE CAMPAIGNS OF 1941 AND 1942 HAD PROVED THAT GERMAN PANZERS WERE virtually invincible when they maneuvered freely across the great open spaces of Russia and Ukraine. The proper decision for Germany in 1943, therefore, was to make strategic withdrawals to create fluid conditions so panzers could carry out wide movements and surprise attacks. This would have given maximum effect to the still superior quality of German command staffs and fighting troops.

Instead, as General Friedrich-Wilhelm von Mellenthin, one of the most experienced panzer leaders on the eastern front, wrote, “The German supreme command could think of nothing better than to fling our magnificent panzer divisions against Kursk, which had now become the strongest fortress in the world.”

Head-to-head confrontation was becoming increasingly unrealistic as the disparity of strength between Germany and the Allies grew. By mid-1943, even after urgent recruiting of non-Germans, Hitler's field forces amounted to 4.4 million men. The Red Army alone had 6.1 million, while Britain and the United States were mobilizing millions more. In war production the Allies were far outproducing Germany in every weapon and every vital commodity.

Erich von Manstein offered Hitler the best strategic plan still open to him shortly after the recapture of Kharkov in late winter. The German front projected dangerously as a “balcony” southeastward from Kharkov more than two hundred miles down the Donetz and Mius rivers to Taganrog, on the Sea of Azov. The 17th Army also was still in the Kuban peninsula of the Caucasus.

“The bulge in the German front,” Manstein wrote, “was just begging to be sliced off.”

The Russians might break through east of Kharkov and drive southwest to the Black Sea coast in hopes of cutting off and destroying the entire German southern wing. This was the movement Manstein had feared after the fall of Stalingrad, and it remained an ever-present danger.

But the balcony offered a wonderful bait as well. Manstein had proposed the plan after Stalingrad, and he now urged it on Hitler again. As soon as the Russians launched an attack southward, he said, all German forces on the Donetz and Mius should withdraw step by step, pulling the Red Army westward toward the lower Dnieper River around Dnepropetrovsk and Zaporozhye. At the same time, reserves should assemble west of Kharkov, and drive into the northern flank of the Russians as they advanced westward.

“In this way,” Manstein asserted, “the enemy would be doomed to suffer the same fate on the coast of the Sea of Azov as he had on store for us on the Black Sea.”

Hitler did not understand mobile warfare, or surrendering ground temporarily to give his forces operational freedom. He rejected Manstein's plan. He turned to the kind of brute force, frontal battle he did understand. Hitler resolved to attack the Kursk salient—a 150-mile-wide bulge that extended nearly a hundred miles into the German front north of Belgorod and Kharkov and south of Orel.

The idea for this attack (Operation Citadel) originated with Kurt Zeitzler, army chief of staff, and Günther von Kluge, commander of Army Group Center. They proposed to cut off the salient at its eastern base and destroy the Russian forces within it.

Manstein's Army Group South was to drive north with eleven “fast divisions” (panzer or panzergrenadier) and five infantry divisions, while Kluge's army group was to push south with six fast and five infantry divisions. Because of technical problems in getting new Tiger and Panther tanks into combat condition, Hitler advanced the date of Citadel to July 5, giving the Russians all the time they needed to prepare.

The Russians picked up evidence of the Kursk buildup from radio intercepts and a spy ring in Switzerland. They began to assemble overwhelming strength in and around the salient.

The only forceful opponent of the attack now became Heinz Guderian, whom Hitler had brought back in February 1943 as inspector of armored troops. At a conference on May 3–4, 1943, at Munich with Hitler and other generals, Guderian looked at aerial photographs showing the Russians were preparing deep defensive positions—artillery, antitank guns, minefields—exactly where the German attacks were to go in.

Guderian said Germany ought to be devoting its tank production to counter the forthcoming Allied landings in the west, not wasting it in a frontal attack against a primed and waiting enemy.

A few days later in Berlin, Guderian told Hitler: “It's a matter of profound indifference to the world whether we hold Kursk or not.” Hitler replied: “You're quite right. Whenever I think of this attack my stomach turns over.”

Meanwhile Guderian was having great problems with the new Panther tank, armed like the Tiger with a powerful 88-millimeter gun. Its track suspension and drive were not operating correctly, and optical instruments were unsatisfactory. He told Hitler on June 15 that the Panthers were not ready for battle, but by now Hitler had committed himself and turned a deaf ear.

In the Kursk salient the Russians barred likely avenues of approach with minefields and tank traps, built several lines of resistance, and converted important points into defensive bastions. Even if the Germans hacked their way through the minefields and broke the barriers, the Russians would have time to withdraw, and the Germans would gain little.

Hitler was committing the same error he had made at Stalingrad: he was going to attack a fortress, throwing away all the advantages of mobile tactics and meeting the Russians on ground of their own choosing. Besides that, he was concentrating his strength along a narrow front and gravely weakening the rest of the line, as he also had done at Stalingrad.

The Germans assembled 900,000 men, 10,000 cannons, 2,000 aircraft, and 2,000 tanks. The Russians marshaled 1.9 million men, 20,800 cannons, 2,000 aircraft, and 5,100 tanks.

Except for parity in aircraft, Hitler was risking his entire position in the east by attacking an enemy with more than twice his own strength. Even more ominous, the Russians had
not
stripped their other fronts to achieve this huge mass of men and weapons. They were assembling strong forces on either flank of Kursk, with the intention of breaking through and rolling up the German army, just as they had done on either side of Stalingrad.

Hitler's plan was for Hermann Hoth's 4th Panzer Army on the south and Walter Model's 9th Army on the north to advance toward each other. The main thrust of 4th Panzer Army was to be delivered by 48th Panzer Corps and SS Panzer Corps. East of Kursk they were to meet 9th Army advancing south with 800 tanks.

In the south, 48th Panzer Corps, with 300 tanks and 60 assault guns in the “Gross Deutschland” Panzergrenadier and the 3rd and 11th Panzer Divisions, was to attack on the west, while, about ten miles to the east, SS Panzer Corps's three Waffen-SS divisions of about the same strength were to thrust along the railway line running north from Belgorod. M. E. Katukov's 1st Tank Army was waiting to block both corps.

The battlefield was mostly an open plain, covered with grainfields, broken by numerous valleys, small copses of trees, villages here and there, and a few rivers and streams. The ground rose slightly to the north, giving the Russians better observation.

The Germans had assembled their forces in secrecy, but the Russians knew their positions and approximate strength.

The battle opened on July 5 with a sharp artillery preparation and an air bombardment, using Stukas, new Focke-Wulf 190-A fighter-bombers, and new Henschel 129 B2 tank-killer aircraft. The Germans had mounted 30-millimeter automatic cannons on Stukas and Henschels, which could penetrate the thin armor on the tops of the T-34s.

But neither 48th Corps nor SS Panzer Corps was able to penetrate the Russian line. Not only was the entire area infested with mines, but Soviet guns shelled the panzers heavily, aircraft flew in and destroyed a number of tanks, and Russian armor occupied high ground and targeted German panzers.

The Russians had mastered new antitank tactics developed by the Germans. They distributed numerous “antitank fronts” all over a defended area. Each front had ten antitank guns under a single commander. The aim was to draw a German tank into a web of these guns, firing at it from several locations. The Russians fortified their antitank fronts with minefields and antitank ditches. Even after penetrating miles into Russian lines, the Germans found themselves in the midst of minefields and facing more antitank fronts.

To guard against these defenses, German armor advanced in a wedge (Panzerkeil), with the heaviest tanks in the spearhead. Tigers could break an antitank front, but Mark IVs could not, and Panzerkeile were generally able to advance only by delivering concentric tank fire on the AT guns. Even so, losses were often heavy.

On the north, Hoth's 9th Army had heavy going from the outset. Russian defenses were formidable, and the main hope of the Germans, ninety Tiger tanks made by Ferdinand Porsche (who had designed the Volkswagen automobile), had no machine guns. As Guderian wrote, they “had to go quail-shooting with cannons.” The Tigers could not neutralize enemy rifles and machine guns, so German infantry was unable to follow them. Russian infantry, in no danger of being shot down, approached some of the Tigers and showered the portholes with flamethrowers, or disabled the machines with satchel charges. The Tigers were shattered, the crews suffered high losses, and Model's attack bogged down after penetrating only six miles.

The experience of 48th Corps demonstrated the kind of war now being fought in Russia. The corps could make little progress till July 7, when it finally broke through on both sides of a village (Ssyrzew), and advanced four miles. A “Gross Deutschland” battle group then moved north six miles and attacked a hill (243) that had been holding up 3rd Panzer Division on the left flank, but the battle group broke down in front of the hill.

On July 9, 3rd Panzer finally was able to swing to the west of the Russians blocking it, but was stopped by more enemy in a small forest four miles southwest of Hill 243 and three miles northwest of Beresowka village. “Gross Deutschland” Division evicted the Russians from Hill 243 with the help of a Stuka attack and, in a series of bitter engagements, drove the surviving Russian tanks into the wood.

It looked as if the enemy on the left flank had been eliminated, and Otto von Knobelsdorff, the corps commander, ordered “Gross Deutschland” to turn north, hoping to break through, since Model's attack had collapsed. But the Russians counterattacked out of the wood and overran 3rd Panzer, forcing “Gross Deutschland” to turn back and rescue the division in new headlong attacks that finally drove the Russians out of the wood, but left the corps too weak to advance.

Meanwhile 11th Panzer on the corps's east flank was unable to do more than defend against repeated Russian tank attacks. SS Corps east of 11th Panzer at first also could do little but ward off tank attacks, but slowly each SS division chopped holes in the enemy front, advancing step by step.

On July 12, SS Panzer Corps's slugging match reached Prokhorovka Station on the railway line, twenty-one miles past the jump-off point. This penetration was dangerous, and Marshal Zhukov authorized a counterattack by 5th Guards Tank Army under P. A. Rotmistrov.