The History Buff's Guide to World War II (41 page)

Soon after hearing of Rommel’s crippling defeat at S
ECOND
E
L
A
LAMEIN
, Hitler received intelligence of an even greater crisis. Soviet forces, during a frigid and whirling blizzard in late November 1942, launched major counterattacks north and south of S
TALINGRAD
, threatening to encircle Gen. Friedrich von Paulus and 250,000 soldiers of the Sixth Army.

Sentenced to die at Stalingrad, the German Sixth Army paid the ultimate price for its leader’s hubris.

Fixated on holding the city, Hitler adamantly refused withdrawal. Three days later the two claws of the Red Army closed forty miles west of Paulus and began to curl inward. As Soviet artillery rained down on the German, Romanian, Italian, and Hungarian troops, pockets of Russians still within the city chewed away at Hitler’s men like a cancer. Adding to the misery, temperatures fell below freezing. Immediately Paulus started to run low on ammunition, medical supplies, and food. H
ERMANN
G
ÖRING
assured Hitler his Luftwaffe could supply Paulus from the air. Instead, a lack of planes and landing sites, the relentless weather, and Göring’s ineptitude assured failure. The army did not receive a tenth of the supplies it needed.

Twice the Soviets offered surrender terms. Twice Hitler ordered Paulus to refuse, demanding he fight to the last man for “the salvation of the Western world.” Hitler even promoted Paulus to field marshal, knowing that never in history had a German of that rank ever been taken alive. Nonetheless, after months of cruel fighting, Paulus capitulated, and Hitler lost all of an army that could have been saved.
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The German Sixth Army started the Soviet campaign with 285,000 men. After Stalingrad, it numbered 91,000. After years of imprisonment, only 5,000 members survived to return to Germany.

5
. THE UNTOUCHED OIL TANKS (PEARL HARBOR, DECEMBER 7, 1941)

In the attack on P
EARL
H
ARBOR
, the Japanese lost just twenty-nine planes and five midget submarines. They destroyed seven battleships, three cruisers, three destroyers, and more than three hundred aircraft. But they missed one huge, vital target.

Opposite Battleship Row, adjacent to the submarine pens and main naval station, sat two sprawling fields of oil tanks, the sole cache of lifeblood for every Corsair and carrier in the U.S. Pacific Fleet. Every drop had to be transported from California, more than two thousand miles away. And every three-story storage tank was vulnerable to .50-caliber bullets.

Big, full, and overlooked oil tanks skirt the water’s edge at Pearl Harbor.

Technically, the oversight was not the fault of the Japanese dive bombers and fighters. Responsibility rested with the usually meticulous Adm. Yamamoto Isoroku, architect of the assault. He had simply failed to include the hillside of oil tanks in his list of primary targets.
⁹⁵

To what precise extent the damaged reservoirs and lost fuel might have hindered the U.S. war effort cannot be determined, but an authority on naval operations suggested the effect would have been considerable. By his estimation, Adm. C
HESTER
N
IMITZ
calculated that the loss of the P
EARL
H
ARBOR
oil field “would have prolonged the war another two years.”
⁹⁶

Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in retaliation for something that happened on August 1, 1941. To curb Imperial aggression, President Franklin Roosevelt imposed a total oil embargo on the empire.

6
. OPERATION MARKET-GARDEN (HOLLAND, SEPTEMBER 17–25, 1944)

The Allies had stalled along Germany’s western border, but Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery convinced Gen. D
WIGHT
E
ISENHOWER
to try a radical solution: push north into occupied Holland, then east into the industrial heart of Germany, then on to Berlin. The plan would secure the Belgian port of Antwerp and shorten Allied supply lines by hundreds of miles, avoid Nazi fortifications in the Siegfried Line (a.k.a. the West Wall), and, if all fared well, end the war by Christmas.
⁹⁷

Though the premise was tempting, the specifics left much to be desired. Crossing Holland meant traversing a myriad of canals, streams, and rivers, the last being the deep and expansive Rhine. No fewer than nine bridges had to be secured behind enemy lines. To do this, Monty proposed airdropping the U.S. 101st and 82nd, the Polish 1st, and the British 1st Airborne Divisions to secure the bridges while the British Armored Thirty Corps attacked northward and covered seventy miles to link them all up.

Adding to the challenge, the Allies did not have enough planes to carry all the paratroopers at once, radio equipment was inadequate and faulty, and Thirty Corps had but one narrow road that could handle the weight of its twenty thousand vehicles. In addition, intelligence reports gave conclusive evidence of German heavy armor units deployed where the Allied attack was most vulnerable—along the Rhine.
⁹⁸

Soon after it started, the operation unraveled. Thirty Corps planned to make thirty-six miles on the first day. Caught in a series of firefights, it advanced only six. Radios failed. Fog rolled in and delayed supporting airdrops for days, leaving paratroopers without supplies and reinforcements. German resistance was tougher than expected around every bridgehead, especially at A
RNHEM
, where the 1st Polish and 1st British Airborne were nearly wiped out in less than a week. The Allies had achieved little more than moving sideways along the border of the Reich at a cost of more than ten thousand casualties. Stopped cold in Holland, the Allies would not cross the Rhine until March of the following year.
⁹⁹

Bird’s-eye view of Arnhem bridge. Reconnaissance photos and reports also showed the presence of German armor, but Allied planners went ahead with the attack.

The Allies lost more soldiers in Operation Market-Garden than they lost in the first week of the Normandy invasion.

7
. BLITZKRIEG STRIKES TWICE (BATTLE OF THE BULGE, DECEMBER 16, 1944)

During April 1940, from Switzerland to the North Sea, French and Belgian defenses deployed to withstand a German offensive. Fortresses, batteries, men, and armor were at the ready—everywhere except directly in the middle, west of the A
RDENNES
. Topographically, the minimalist treatment seemed logical. Densely forested, the A
RDENNES
was also the only area in all the Low Countries dominated by steep hills and deep basins through which only a few narrow roads passed. To practically every observer, it seemed to be a natural barrier.
¹⁰⁰

A GI guards German prisoners near Bastogne. He was a lucky survivor in a battle that cost sixty thousand American casualties.

Adjacent to this region, France placed nine divisions, or about a tenth of its army. Through this area, in May 1940, Germany thrust forty-five divisions, taking France and much of the Western world by surprise.

By November 1944, the Allies had returned to the German border with three massive army groups. But in the middle, in the “impassible” A
RDENNES
, the United States had just six divisions. On December 16, 1944, twenty-five German divisions came barreling through.

The Allies responded rather brilliantly once the attack began. Eisenhower treated the battle as an opportunity, and Patton rapidly counterattacked from the south. The tenacious fight offered by frontline and reserve troops all prevented a grave mistake from turning into disaster. The price for initial indiscretion was, however, exceedingly high, especially for the Americans. Hitler’s 1944 Ardennes offensive killed more U.S. soldiers than any other battle in the war.
¹⁰¹

The U.S. lost more men in the Battle of the Bulge than at Pearl Harbor, Midway, D-day, and Iwo Jima combined.

8
. THE INVASION TEST (DIEPPE, FRANCE, AUGUST 19, 1942)

Barely hanging on against the bulk of the German army, Soviet leaders became incensed by London’s vacillation on opening a second front in Europe. American military and public opinion also clamored for action. To satisfy their allies, Churchill and company presented an offering. In the summer of 1942, ten thousand troops would land in northern France and establish a beachhead for future operations. This was later scaled down to six thousand troops to perform a brief “reconnaissance in force” at the port city of Dieppe.

In the planning phase, information on enemy strength was sketchy. Adequate landing vehicles were not available. Sheer cliffs one hundred feet high dominated the landing zones. The area would not be bombed beforehand. Dismayed, Gen. Bernard Montgomery recommended canceling the operation indefinitely. But a youthful, glory-hunting vice admiral, Louis Mountbatten, personally adopted the project. Impressing Churchill with his vigor, Mountbatten was allowed to proceed with the raid.
¹⁰²

Approaching the French coastline at 3:00 a.m. on August 19, 1942, the armada of eight destroyers and scores of landing vessels, shepherded by hundreds of fighter planes, lost the vital element of surprise when a German patrol convoy spotted their advance. Rushing to hit the shoreline, landing craft arrived in the wrong places at the wrong times. Previously undetected German batteries slaughtered advancing columns while Luftwaffe and infantry poured into the area. It took only six hours for the British operation to fail completely.

From an invasion force of 6,000, the losses were 3,369 killed, wounded, or captured, most of them Canadian. The Royal Navy lost an additional 550 men plus one destroyer and more than thirty smaller ships. More than one hundred RAF fighters fell from the sky. The defenders lost less than half their planes and a sixth of their men and began to redouble their defenses for the larger invasion to come.
¹⁰³