The Second World War (76 page)
On 26 January, the remnants of the Sixth Army were split in two when the 21st Army reached the lines of Rodimtsev’s 13th Guards Division north
of the Mamaev Kurgan. Paulus himself, also suffering from dysentery, fell into a state of nervous collapse in the cellars of the Univermag department store on Red Square. Schmidt was now in charge. Several of his generals and senior officers shot themselves rather than face the humiliation of surrender. Some men chose a ‘soldier’s suicide’, by standing up in a trench waiting to be shot.
Hitler announced Paulus’s promotion to the rank of
Generalfeldmarschall
. Paulus knew that this was a coded order to kill himself, but now that all his admiration for Hitler had evaporated, he had no intention of giving the Führer that satisfaction. On 31 January, Red Army soldiers entered the Univermag building. ‘
Paulus was completely unnerved
,’ wrote the Soviet interpreter, a Jewish lieutenant called Zakhary Rayzman. ‘His lips were quivering. He told General Schmidt that there was too much commotion going on, that there were too many people in the room.’ Rayzman escorted 151 German officers and soldiers back to their divisional headquarters. He had to stop Red Army soldiers from trying to humiliate them on the way. ‘Such is the irony of fate,’ a German colonel announced, intending to be overheard. ‘A Jew is seeing to it that we are not harmed.’ Paulus and Schmidt were taken to the 64th Army headquarters of General Shumilov, where their surrender was filmed. Paulus’s nervous tic was still much in evidence.
Hitler heard the news of the surrender in silence. He apparently stared into his vegetable soup. But next day his anger exploded against Paulus for having failed to shoot himself. On 2 February General Strecker, commanding the few remnants of XI Corps in the ruins of northern Stalingrad, also surrendered. The Red Army discovered that they had 91,000 prisoners on their hands, far more than expected. Due mainly to lack of preparation, they received no food and no medical assistance for some time. Nearly half had died by the time spring arrived.
Soviet casualties for the whole Stalingrad campaign amounted to 1.1 million, of whom nearly half a million died. The German army and its allies had also lost over half a million men, killed and captured. In Moscow, the bells of the Kremlin rang out a victory peal. Stalin was portrayed as the great architect of this historic victory. The reputation of the Soviet Union soared around the world, bringing many recruits to Communist-led resistance movements.
In Germany, radio stations were ordered to play solemn music. Having steadfastly refused to acknowledge that the Sixth Army had been surrounded since November, Goebbels now tried to pretend that the whole of the Sixth Army had perished in a final stand: ‘They died so that Germany might live.’ But his attempt to create a heroic myth soon backfired. Word spread rapidly in Germany, mainly from those listening in secret to the
BBC, that Moscow had announced the capture of 91,000. The shock of the defeat was overwhelming in Germany. Only Nazi fanatics still believed that the war could be won.
The OKW was disturbed by the ‘
great agitation caused
among the German public’ after the surrender of the Sixth Army at Stalingrad and issued a sharp warning to officers not to exacerbate the situation with criticism of the military or political leadership with ‘
so-called factual
accounts’ of the fighting. Attempts to infuse the armed forces with the ‘National Socialist vision’ increased, yet the authorities received reports that older officers from the Reichswehr ‘
days of apolitical soldiering
’ showed little interest in indoctrinating their soldiers. Committed officers and the SS complained that the Red Army was much more effective in its ideological teaching.
On 18 February, Goebbels invoked the theme ‘
Total War–Short War
!’ at a mass meeting in the Berlin Sportpalast. The atmosphere was electric. From the podium he screamed: ‘Do you want Total War?’ The audience leaped to its feet and bayed in the affirmative. Even an anti-Nazi journalist covering it confessed afterwards that he too had jumped to his feet in enthusiasm and only just stopped himself from bellowing ‘Ja!’ with the rest of the crowd. He said later to friends that if Goebbels had yelled, ‘Do you all want to go to your deaths?’, the crowd would have roared back their consent. The Nazi regime had trapped the whole population of the country as accomplices, willing or not, in its own crimes, and its own insanity.
DECEMBER 1942–MAY 1943
D
uring December 1942, while Anderson’s First Army struggled in the rain-lashed hills of Tunisia, Montgomery’s Eighth Army failed to follow up Rommel’s retreating Panzerarmee with any dash. Montgomery, anxious not to harm his reputation as a guarantor of victory, did not want to get a bloody nose from the sort of sudden counter-attack in which the German army excelled. Many regiments were also content to leave ‘
other buggers to
do the chasing’, as the commanding officer of the Sherwood Rangers put it. They felt that they had done their bit, and preferred to concentrate on loot, such as Luger pistols, alcohol, cigars and chocolate taken from abandoned German vehicles.
Montgomery was perhaps right to acknowledge that the British army was still not yet ready to match the Germans in a war of movement, but his anti-cavalry prejudices entrenched his over-cautious conduct of operations. Only armoured car regiments, the 11th Hussars and the Royal Dragoons, were far enough forward to harry the retreating Germans in a consistent fashion. Even though Rommel’s forces were by then reduced to around 50,000 men and less than a battalion of tanks, Montgomery’s reluctance to take risks made him at one point consider leaving Tripoli as well as Tunis to Anderson’s First Army. This complacency was reflected lower down. ‘
We had all seen the enemy
so disorganized that it did not seem possible he could regroup enough to give us much trouble,’ wrote the poet Keith Douglas, a lieutenant with the Sherwood Rangers. ‘When we heard of the North African landings there were very few people who expected more than a few more weeks of mopping up before the African campaign ended.’
The Desert Air Force in Egypt has also been criticized for its inability to cripple Rommel’s armour when it retreated over the Halfaya Pass back into Libya. But it had been hampered by the time it took to bring up fuel and supplies to its forward airfields. Air Vice Marshal Coningham turned to the Americans for help, and Brereton’s command, now designated the Ninth Air Force, began to airlift fuel to the front. Rommel, certain that the war in North Africa was lost, established a defence line at Mersa el Brega, just east of El Agheila on the Gulf of Sirte, where he had begun his desert campaign in February 1942.
On 14 January 1943, Roosevelt arrived in Casablanca, exhausted by his five-day journey from the US. He and Churchill met that evening at Anfa, and the next day the combined chiefs of staff assembled to hear Eisenhower’s report on the campaign in North Africa. The Allied forces commander was distinctly nervous. He had been ill with influenza, not helped by his voracious consumption of Camel cigarettes, and suffered from very high blood pressure. The improvised attack on Tunis had been a failure. Eisenhower blamed the rain and mud, and the difficulties of working with the French rather than Anderson’s refusal to concentrate his already weak forces. He also acknowledged the chaos of the supply system, which his chief of staff Bedell Smith was trying to sort out.
Eisenhower then outlined his plan for a thrust through to Sfax on the Gulf of Gabes, with a division from Major General Lloyd Fredendall’s II Corps. This was shot down by General Brooke in his incisive way. The attacking force, he pointed out, would be crushed between the retreating Rommel and Generaloberst Hans-Jürgen von Arnim’s so-called Fifth Panzer Army in Tunis. Brooke, stooping forward, with his hooded eyelids and gaunt, beaky-nosed face, looked like a cross between a bird of prey and a reptile, especially when he ran his tongue over his lips. Eisenhower, deeply shaken, offered to rethink the plan and retreated from the room.
The Casablanca conference was not Eisenhower’s finest hour, and he confessed to Patton that he feared he might be sacked. He was also taken to task by General Marshall over the bad discipline of American troops and chaos in the rear. Patton’s smartly turned-out corps at Casablanca, on the other hand, made a fine impression on everyone, as he had ensured it would.
The main task of the conference was to establish strategy. Admiral King made no bones about his belief that all the Allies’ resources should be directed against Japan in the Pacific. He passionately disagreed with the policy of ‘holding operations’ in the Far East. And the Americans were far more interested than the British in supporting Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists. General Brooke, however, was determined to get full agreement on finishing the war in North Africa, then invading Sicily. He despaired of Marshall’s lack of strategic grasp. Marshall still clung to the idea of a cross-Channel invasion in 1943, when it was clear that the American army was still far from ready to take on the forty-four German divisions in France, and the Allies lacked the necessary shipping and landing craft. Marshall was forced to concede. Thanks to good staff preparation, the British had all the statistics at their fingertips. The Americans did not.
Brooke felt that Marshall was a brilliant organizer of American military strength, but did not know what to do with it. Once the Americans had
been argued out of an invasion of France, and were uncertain what course to follow in its stead, Brooke managed to wear them down. He also had to win a battle over the British planning staff, who wanted to invade Sardinia instead of Sicily. Finally, on 18 January, Brooke, helped by Field Marshal Dill, now the British military representative in Washington, and Air Chief Marshal Sir Charles Portal, chief of the air staff, persuaded the Americans to agree to their Mediterranean strategy with Operation Husky, the invasion of Sicily. Brigadier General Albert C. Wedemeyer, a War Department planner, who deeply distrusted the British, was forced to admit afterwards that ‘
we came, we listened
, and we were conquered’. The Casablanca conference was the high water mark of British influence.
Britons and Americans got to know each other better during the Anfa conference, but not always with admiration. Patton, in his cavalier way, considered General Alan Brooke to be ‘
nothing but a clerk
’. Brooke’s analysis of Patton was much closer to the truth. He described him as ‘
a dashing, courageous
, wild and unbalanced leader, good for operations requiring thrust and push, but at a loss in any operation requiring skill and judgment’. The one thing on which British and Americans agreed was that General Mark Clark was interested only in General Mark Clark. Eisenhower got on well with Admiral Cunningham and Air Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder, who would become his deputy later, but in American eyes ‘Ike’ bent too far backwards in accommodating British influence in the theatre. General Alexander was appointed under him to command all the ground forces. Although Patton at first rather admired Alexander, he was disgusted by what he saw as a downgrading of the US Army. It was not long before he wrote in his diary that ‘
Ike is more British
than the British and is putty in their hands.’
But even Eisenhower did not like the idea of having to work with a British political counsellor in the form of Harold Macmillan. Macmillan was determined to support de Gaulle, and after Darlan’s assassination there was little that either Eisenhower or Roosevelt could do to exclude him for much longer. Eisenhower also feared interference in the chain of command, given Macmillan’s close links to Churchill and his ministerial status, but Macmillan had no intention of pulling rank. He recognized that the Americans would soon wield almost total power within the alliance, so he preferred a more subtle approach. Harking back to a classical education by comparing the Americans to the Romans, he thought that the best way to deal with Britain’s more powerful ally was to take on the role of ‘
the Greek slaves
[who] ran the operations of the Emperor Claudius’.
Eisenhower was still feeling battered by the reaction to the Darlan deal by the American and British press. ‘
I am a cross between
a one-time soldier,’ he had written to a friend, ‘a pseudo-statesman, a jack-legged
politician and a crooked diplomat.’ Having drowned himself in detail across every field, he handed over political dealings to Bedell Smith, as well as many of his other problems, a burden which did not help ‘Beetle’s’ ulcers. But Bedell Smith, although famously acerbic with American officers, managed to get on well with the British and the French.
The one outstanding problem in North Africa, which Churchill and Roosevelt made an effort to resolve at Casablanca, was the role of General Charles de Gaulle. Roosevelt had lost none of his distrust for de Gaulle, but at Churchill’s urging Giraud and de Gaulle were brought together and made to shake hands for the cameras. The American President had blithely promised Giraud the weapons and equipment for eleven French divisions without checking whether this was possible. De Gaulle, who had initially refused the summons to Casablanca, was, however, content to leave Giraud as commander-in-chief of French forces in North Africa, providing he achieved the political leadership. For that, he needed to wait a little longer. This reversal of power should not, he knew, be too difficult. The brave ‘tin soldier’ was no match for the most determined of political generals.
Once the embarrassing charade of the two French generals reluctantly shaking hands had been repeated for the photographers, President Roosevelt announced that the Allies intended to achieve the unconditional surrender of Germany and Japan. Churchill then stated that Britain was in full agreement, even though he had been taken by surprise that Roosevelt had decided to make the aim public. In his view, the implications had not been fully thought through, even though he had obtained the War Cabinet’s agreement in advance. Yet this declaration, which would go some way towards reassuring the suspicious Stalin, probably did not make that great a difference to the outcome of the war. Both the Nazi and the Japanese leaderships intended to fight to the very end. The other important decision designed to hasten the result was to step up the strategic bombing campaign against Germany using both Bomber Command and the US Eighth Air Force.
