The World at War (40 page)

MAJOR HANS HINRICHS

German engineer officer

In Russia the fighting is a war of infantry and of single tanks. In the desert the fighting is characterised by the opposition of tanks in larger quantities and of air support. Air support, for instance, did not play a considerable role in Russia, at least not in the central part where the troops had enough cover. In Africa, air superiority was all-decisive. In Russia you saw the individual enemy soldier, in the desert you hardly saw the British tanks.

LAWRENCE DURRELL

It's a very funny thing, a battlefield, it's extraordinary how inanimate the whole thing seems. There was a little bit of an action going on in the right-hand corner of some sort, for the rest there were people lying about smoking. It's one of the very singular things that films and books don't bring out, although I think Tolstoy perhaps is an exception, of a
battlefield where nothing seems to be happening, the action is always somewhere in another corner and it's a decisive thing. And then they ask you if you were there.

LIEUTENANT PULLINI

At the end of the
battle of El Alamein we were left there without transport because we were paratroopers and had very little transport of our own. So far as I know the majority of the German troops withdrew before us and not much transport was left for us.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL BELCHEM

When viewers see the pictures of El Alamein battlefield they will see these wide areas as flat as a pancake and therefore let us bear in mind that Eighth Army had to assault, had to cross, this very open desert into defensive positions organised, sited and developed over a period of months under German direction with three belts of interlocking defensive positions. The minefields were up to five and a half miles in depth and behind them stood the 15th and 21st Panzer divisions. While admittedly we had superiority of forces and Air Force by anyone's standards, under these conditions the assaulting force was obliged to be considerably superior to that of the defender.

MAJOR GENERAL DE GUINGAND

Alex showed
Montgomery a signal he'd just had from the Prime Minister saying we must attack in September and that it was absolutely essential. Alex said to Monty, 'What shall I answer?' and Monty said, 'I'm not going to attack in September.' So he said to me, 'Freddie, give me your pen.' He wrote in his very clear handwriting and said, 'Send this to the Prime Minister.' The first point he made was that Rommel was attacking on 31st August and it would cause delay in our preparations, secondly that training and getting used to the new tanks and equipment would take longer than September before we were ready and he finished up saying if we are forced to attack in September it will probably fail. If we wait until October then it will be a complete success. And he said, 'Alex, send that off to
Winston,' and Alex read it and said, 'Yes, I will,' which he did. Any Prime Minister getting a document like that from the military commanders, he couldn't go against it. If he forced us to attack in September and it failed then there it was on the record that the principal military authority had said it would fail.

MAJOR GENERAL HARDING

The landing in Algeria was a long way off, it took quite a time to reach even within striking distance of Tunis and I doubt if they'd have got there as soon as they did but for the defeat of Rommel at El Alamein and the subsequent advance of the Eighth Army. 1 think the two fronts were too far apart for that to be effective. You can't win a war, much less a campaign, without defeating the enemy. If Rommel had been able to leave small containing forces facing us in the desert and used the whole of his force against the First Army and the Americans who landed with them, then I think it would have ever got to within striking distance of Tunis.

COLONEL WESTPHAL

At Alamein Hitler did not allow the retreat from El Alamein in the direction to west. But we didn't obey, we pursued the retreat and that was the only possibility – to stand about six months in
North Africa to cover the southern flank of Europe. If we had obeyed this, to stand at Alamein, defend every piece of soil of the desert, we would be surrounded and captured by Montgomery two days later. But sometime God in heaven did help us, we had heavy rain in Nile Delta and therefore the Air Force couldn't start, that was our luck. Otherwise the Army would have been destroyed before we could reach the Halfaya Pass.

MAJOR GENERAL HARDING

As far as the High Command was concerned there was, just before the breakthrough operation was launched, a question as to whether or not there was sufficient resources left to break the German front and to make a hole big enough to allow pursuing forces to get through. A battle like that was a battle of attrition and it was fought, rightly, in a way in which you had to continue the offensive until you had broken the enemy's power of resistance, and this does take time, especially under those sort of conditions.

COLONEL WESTPHAL

It was very funny: we had only one road from El Alamein through Mersa Matruh, Bardia, Tobruk and Benghazi, and on this one road we marched. At first the German division then following a British armoured division, then again a German division followed by another British division. But they did not attack us and we couldn't make anything because we had no petrol.

MAJOR GENERAL HARDING

I was actually in favour of pressing on all-out, hard as I could go and as fast as I could go. On the other hand I think Montgomery was very conscious of the fact that we had already been twice up and twice back and he was determined not to be pushed back for a third time. A defeat then or a failure to exploit the success of Alamein would have had very far-reaching consequences on morale and confidence and on the general position throughout the war. I think he was right – I thought he was overcautious at the time but looking back at it all, I think he was right to be cautious and maybe there was something between the two views.

CHAPTER 16
STALINGRAD AND THE EASTERN FRONT

During 1942 the Red Army was rebuilt under new leadership, including officers imprisoned during the Tukhachevsky purge who were released to replace the Stalinist yes-men who had led the Army to defeat in 1941. Britain agreed to divert some American supplies and equipment due to her under Lend-Lease and in 1941–42 the Royal Navy fought twenty-one convoys through icy seas to north Russia. The struggle between the Nazi and Soviet regimes reached its climax when a German thrust towards the Caucasus oilfields led to the battle of Stalingrad (August 1942–February 1943). Including all operations along the flanks of the salient, the Germans and their allies suffered some 800,000–900,000 casualties and the Soviets approximately a million. The last German effort to regain the initiative, at Kursk in July 1943, destroyed such a large proportion of German armour and ground-attack aircraft that they never recovered. In an offensive second only in size to Barbarossa three years earlier, on 22 June 1944 the Soviets launched Operation Bagration on the Byelorussian front, where the Germans had thinned their line to send units to counter the Allied landings in Normandy. The Soviet advance was halted at the outskirts of "Warsaw in August–September while the Germans crushed a heroic uprising by the Polish Home Army. Stalin refused to permit Allied aircraft to stage through Soviet-held territory in order to drop supplies to the Polish patriots and the advancing Red Army – admittedly over-extended at the end of its offensive – did not support the Poles, who suffered heavy losses. The Soviets did not enter the ruins of Warsaw until January 1945, when they launched the final offensive that took them to Berlin.

The Eastern Front claimed the lives of over five million Germans and their allies, including perhaps a quarter of a million Soviet citizens who joined them, plus 10 million Soviet soldiers and as many civilians, although even today these figures remain a matter of dispute. Stalin had probably killed at least as many more, in purges or as a result of hasty 'collectivisation' in the 1930s, and Russia has arguably never really recovered from this double genocide. Both world wars were conflicts, on a gigantic scale, of economic and industrial as well as military strength. In neither would Germany be defeated until the heart had been ripped out of her Army. In the First World War this occurred chiefly on the Western Front, as too many French, British and Dominion war memorials testify. In the Second, it occurred chiefly (though of course not exclusively) on the Eastern Front, and it was the Red Army that paid the exorbitant price.

ALBERT SPEER

Hitler's Armaments Minister

Already in 1942 there was important group of
officers, which later on belonging to the plot of 20 July, opposed to Hitler's military policies in Russia. That meant they wanted to think about defence policy, to build small fortifications along the Russian line, to build the defence as strong as possible and not waste the tanks . . . and so on in a long offensive. On both sides only a few were still in action and those few were fighting each other, but all the other tanks, thousands of them, were lying lost somewhere in Russia and couldn't be transported back any more. The idea of the generals was if those tanks could be spared for defence, approximately five times more Russians would be necessary to launch successful attacks than the defender has. And the losses for the man who is leading the offensive in warfare is much higher than those of the defence, as long as the defence doesn't break down. The estimation was that Russia couldn't afford to attack because in the long time they would be exhausted before they are winning back the whole country. This was the idea of the generals, and I think it proved to be the right idea.

COLONEL GENERAL NIKOLAI LOMOV

Deputy Head of Operations, Red Army General Staff
Throughout the period of the war and especially in 1943–45, most indicative were the great number of troops in the Soviet Army. The number did not fall below six million people – that is in the active Army – who were deployed on the Soviet–German front from the Barents to the Black Sea. So, of these six million people, in spring and summer in the four Ukrainian Fronts [in the Soviet Army an Army Group was a 'Front'] there were about two and a half million people. It goes without saying that these forces were backed with the requisite equipment – tanks, planes, etc. In 1941 at the beginning of the war there were about two thousand tanks, then already in 1944 there were twelve thousand tanks, modern tanks, T-34s, and self-propelled artillery platforms. Our artillery was also in very good order. It must be said that the German defence was very strong and a very high density of artillery was required to break through this defence – this density reached more than two hundred pieces of artillery per kilometre of the front.

PRIVATE ALBRECHT SCHIMPF

German Army

In Russia there were no signposts to mark the way, no streets like in Western Europe, and to find our way we had to set the frozen bodies of horses along the snow roads to find the way during the snowdrifts. Certainly it was a very macabre sight but it was only to find the roads because there were no points to find, no house, no cottage, no tree, always wasteland, snow and snow.

CAPTAIN EKKEHARD MAURER

Infantry, German Army

The Russian soldier was a very robust and hardy soldier, well used to those climatic conditions. Sometimes we got terribly angry because for instance we had to leave behind or just drop our arms, machine guns or what have you because they didn't work any more, and the Russians just grabbed them, we saw sometimes, put some winter oil on them and used them against us. The Russian soldier was also probably more prepared for man-to-man
fighting – most of those divisions actually were composed of Asiatic people. Our soldiers being Western European people did not like this man-to-man fighting so much, they were more relying on our automatic weapons, on using their brains.

MAJOR HANS HINRICHS

Engineer, German Army

We were attacked by a Soviet company in the early morning at approximately thirty-five degrees below zero. This company attack was repulsed and the Soviet soldiers remained motionless about ten hours lying in the snow and in the evening they attacked again with the same spirit.

OLGA RYBAKOVA

Leningrad housewife

Well, naturally, we felt very depressed when we heard about the suburbs of our city being taken by the Fascist troops. But still we thought and we hoped that all these defeats would be only temporary, just as they were a hundred and forty years ago when we had the invasion of Napoleon troops.

ALBERT SPEER

During my visit to Kiev I was of the same opinion as the generals with whom I was together quite often, that the whole movement of
partisans in Russia who just started this time was caused by the treatment of the population. Even Goebbels, it's well known at this time, he was for better treatment of Ukrainians, mainly because he thought if they get some, if the situation is eased and they get some national pride, then possibly they could be won over even to fight the Stalin system. There was one very old church which was blown up, but I was told that there was, it was an explosion of some munitions magazine I found out later, that it was done by the gauleiter who was in charge of the
Ukraine.

PRIVATE SCHIMPF

I think the war is very cruel, but which war is without cruelty? And it was especially cruel if the Russian soldiers they are drunken when they attacked. One night I had to make a counter-thrust to win back the position of another company and we found the chief of this company badly wounded and upon him a drunken Russian soldier cutting off the face.

OLGA RYBAKOVA

The most terrible time was December 1941 because I think until August we had commercial shops so we could buy something and it was a great help for us. We even could buy caviare, but then the commercial shops were closed. The blockade began. And in September–October it was still passable, although already in October a great friend of my mother died. It was the first death that we heard of. But in November it was began to be cold and the rations were shortened, became less and less food, and the end of November, December and January were most tragical times. Firstly it was cold – minus forty – then the famine, the hunger began to be felt and people began to starve and die from cold and undernourishment. Most deaths came when the end of February and March. When I went to the shops to receive the ration for my family and for some friends living in my house, when I went on the way there I found I had to pass dead bodies and then on my way back some more bodies were lying – if I passed on the way there two bodies, on the way back there were four.