It was ironic that just as Albert Speer, who had been appointed armaments minister after the death in a plane crash of Fritz Todt in April 1942, found a way of rationalizing the manufacture of U-boats – using time-and-motion studies prevalent in the pre-war motor-car industries – down from forty-two weeks to only sixteen, there were fewer places for them to be deployed.65 Although twenty-eight U-boats did return to the North Atlantic in September 1943, they sank only nine of the 2,468 ships that crossed in the next two months. Despite large numbers of U-boats being put into service – there were never fewer than 400 between the summer of 1943 onwards, of which one-third were operational – the battle of the Atlantic had been decisively lost by Germany. Shipping losses of over 7 million tons in 1942 fell to 3 million in 1943.66 It was not negligible, but it was survivable. In August 1943 more U-boats were destroyed than merchant ships were sunk, ‘a piece of news which stirred a thousand hearts, afloat and ashore’, recalled Monsarrat. ‘For the first time in the war, the astonishing balance was struck.’67
Between January and March 1944 Germany lost twenty-nine U-boats while sinking only three merchantmen. They were thus incapable of interdicting the D-Day landings, although by the start of 1944 they had perfected the Schnorchel, a hinged air mast which permitted the U-boats’ diesel engines to suck in air and expel exhaust while fully submerged. Batteries could therefore be recharged underwater without having to surface and U-boats could increase their speed while submerged to 8 knots.68 Yet by August 1944 Dönitz had given up attempting to prevent resupply of the Allied armies on the Continent, especially after more than half of the U-boats in the Channel had been sunk.
In June 1944, just in time for the Normandy landings, Turing’s greatest invention of all, the Colossus II, came on stream. The world’s first digital electronic computer, it was able to decode Fish as well as Enigma messages in real time, and also decrypted the correspondence between OKW and the Commander-in-Chief West. As one who worked on Colossus, Donald Michie, has recalled: ‘At the end of hostilities 9 new-design Colossi were operational and 63 million characters of high-grade German messages had been decrypted.’69 Turing’s reputation for eccentricity seemed confirmed by his practices of bicycling around wearing a gas mask, and chaining his coffee mug to a radiator, but one of those who worked at Bletchley, WAAF Sergeant Gwen Watkins, later explained that ‘If you had a china mug and it was “borrowed”, you could replace it only by an enamel one, which made tea taste horrid. And cycling to work in your gas mask, if you had hay fever, was a good idea.’70 Eccentric or not, Turing’s contribution to victory was enormous, making his OBE a paltry reward and his cyanide-by-apple suicide in 1954 correspondingly tragic.
*
As the Russians made their way along the Baltic coast, the Germans had to relocate their U-boat fleet to Norway. Although their number peaked at the huge figure of 463 in March 1945, it was far too late for them to be able to make a difference. In total, throughout the war Germany deployed 1,162 U-boats, of which 785 were destroyed (over 500 by British ships and planes). Altogether they sank 145 Allied warships and 2,828 Allied and neutral merchantmen totalling 14,687,231 tons.71 In the course of the war, the Royal Navy lost 51,578 men killed and the Merchant Navy 30,248, mainly to U-boats.72 The U-boat crewmen were immensely brave, and at 75 per cent suffered among the highest death rates of any branch of service in the Reich, in what they themselves dubbed iron coffins. As the war progressed, the U-boat sailors’ life expectancy decreased, as is superbly portrayed in the German movie Das Boot. Furthermore, heavy Allied bombing of U-boat construction and marshalling yards meant that the newest-pattern U-boat – once hailed as a super-weapon – did not slide down the slipway until 3 May 1945, just as Dönitz was negotiating peace terms with the Allies.
For all that the battle of the Atlantic could have been disastrous for Britain had the Nazis built up a large submarine fleet before the war, nonetheless it was very unlikely that Britain could have lost, for the simple reason that the United States’ entry into the war meant that, even when the Shark code went suddenly silent in February 1942, the vast American production of merchant shipping was always ready to make up the losses, almost however bad. Thus whereas the amount of Allied tonnage sunk totalled 4.01 million against the 0.78 million built in 1940, and 4.355 million sunk against 1.972 million built in 1941, and the totals were almost equal at 7.39 million versus 7.78 million in 1942, in 1943 only 3.22 million were sunk against 15.45 million being built, in 1944 1.04 million were sunk against 12.95 million being built, and in 1945 0.437 million tons were sunk against 7.592 million being built.73 The overwhelming majority were being built by America, by a factor of over five to one.
Moreover, despite the losses, the size of the British merchant fleet stayed almost level throughout the war at between 16 and 20 million tons, making up tonnage through purchase, requisition, chartering from neutrals and other means. Even when the U-boats were sinking large quantities of shipping from 1939 to 1941, therefore, the British merchant fleet actually increased in size by three-quarters of a million tons. The statistics for U-boat and all other sinkings as a percentage of the net tonnage of incoming cargo docked in the United Kingdom are conclusive throughout: in 1939–40 it was 2.0 per cent; thereafter 1941: 3.9 per cent; 1942: 9.7 per cent; 1943: 2.7 per cent; 1944: 0.3 per cent and 1945: 0.6 per cent. Of course imports were wildly below the 91.8 million tons of pre-war levels – and were down to 24.5 million tons in 1942 – but by 1944 they had risen to 56.9 million tons.74 This means that, in the absence of a huge U-boat fleet in 1939 such as the one Germany belatedly had in 1945, and after America had entered the war, however vicious and bitter the battle of the Atlantic undoubtedly was Britain’s survival was never really in doubt, even though for most people on both sides it certainly did not look that way at the time.
12
Up the Wasp-Waist Peninsula
July 1943–May 1945
Here is this beautiful country suffering the worst horrors of war, with the larger part still in the cruel and vengeful grip of the Nazis, and with the hideous prospect of the red-hot rake of the battle-line being drawn from sea to sea right up the length of the peninsula.
Winston Churchill, House of Commons, 24 May 19441
The invasion of Sicily, codenamed Operation Husky, had been agreed at the Casablanca Conference in January 1943, once the alternatives of Sardinia and Corsica were discarded, and then confirmed at the Trident Conference in Washington that May. However, the Americans had not agreed to invade mainland Italy once Sicily had fallen, and were not to do so until the Quadrant Conference in Quebec in August 1943, while the fighting was actually taking place on the island. The Italian campaign thus grew naturally out of the Sicilian, yet the delay in officially authorizing it had the disastrous effect of allowing large numbers of Germans to escape capture in Sicily, which an early landing on the toe of the Italian boot at Reggio could probably have prevented.
Although the Allies wanted to capture Naples and take the airfields around Foggia, hoping thereby to relieve the pressure on the Russians on the Eastern Front, General Marshall recognized that landing on the Italian mainland could only further delay the eventual invasion of north-west France, which he always saw as the most important step towards extinguishing the Third Reich. Although the Oxford-educated German General Fridolin von Senger und Etterlin believed that the Allies should have invaded Sardinia and Corsica instead of Sicily, thereby leap-frogging Italy altogether, this would not have achieved the objective of tying down as many German units in Italy as possible. The German Military Cemetery outside Cassino contains the remains of 20,057 men, buried six to a grave, who represent less than 5 per cent of the casualties that the Reich was to suffer in Italy.
Sicily was invaded at dawn on Saturday, 10 July 1943 by 160,000 men of General Alexander’s 15th Army Group, comprising Patton’s US Seventh Army and Montgomery’s Commonwealth Eighth Army, landing in 3,000 vessels on the southern coast in stormy weather, but with the advantages of surp
rise and heavy naval gunfire. The Axis had 350,000 troops stationed in Sicily, but only one-third were German. In all, the Allies were to pour 450,000 troops on to the island during the thirty-eight-day campaign. Although the Italian Sixth Army fought back bravely as soon as the Allies landed, and German divisions at Gela and Licata nearly reached the invasion beaches in counter-attack, western Sicily was conquered in the week after 15 July.
Because the Eighth Army was halted for a week at Catania by fierce German defence, the US 3rd Division reached Messina first, on 17 August. By then, however, 53,545 German troops, 50 tanks and 9,185 vehicles plus 11,855 tons of stores had been successfully evacuated off the island, which Eisenhower later privately admitted had been a severe strategic error of the Allies.2 The Sicilian campaign saw 7,319 American casualties and 9,353 British, but 132,000 Italians and 32,000 Germans were killed, wounded and (mainly) captured there.3 The Mediterranean and Suez Canal could now be opened up as an Allied sea route, ending the necessity of taking supplies via the Cape of Good Hope. This, General Brooke estimated, was to free up a million tons of Allied shipping for use elsewhere.4
The landings in Sicily also had the effect of overthrowing Mussolini, whose Fascist Grand Council passed a vote of no confidence in him by nineteen votes to seven a fortnight later. (His own son-in-law and foreign minister, Count Ciano, voted with the majority, and along with four of the others was to pay for it with his life later on.) It seems somewhat unFascist of the Council even to call a vote, and even more unFascist of Mussolini to take any note of its democratic will, but when he visited the King to report what had happened, he was arrested. His replacement, Marshal Pietro Badoglio, publicly committed Italy to fighting on against the Allied invader, in order to reassure Hitler, while secretly entering into peace negotiations with Eisenhower. Even before the Sicilian campaign was over, Hitler sent Rommel, commander of a new Army Group B, to contest the peninsula with eight and a half divisions. (After Rommel left for France on 6 November 1943, this army group was reconstituted as the Fourteenth Army.)
The Sicilian campaign saw the equally egocentric Generals Patton and Montgomery fighting together in the same campaign. Their rivalry was as pathetic as it was probably unavoidable, and when later the egos of Generals Mark Clark and Omar Bradley were added to the ever combustible mix, it did the Allied war effort no good. While much is made of Montgomery’s and Patton’s vanity and ceaseless self-promotion, however, it is often forgotten how Clark, in the words of one history:
became obsessed with public relations and soon had fifty men working to ensure that his efforts, and those of his Army (and particularly the American part of it), were given maximum publicity. Ensuring this he ordered a ‘three to one rule’. Every press release was to mention Clark three times on the front page and at least once on all other pages – and the General also demanded that photographs be only taken of him from his left side. His public relations team even came up with a Fifth Army song: ‘Stand up, stand up for General Clark, let’s sing the praises of General Clark…’ He was very fond of that song.5
Patton’s ambitions for a major command in Italy were ended prematurely after he slapped two hospitalized, shell-shocked soldiers. In two separate incidents, he called Private Charles H. Kuhl an ‘arrant coward’ and a week later Private Paul G. Bennett a ‘yellow bastard’, adding, ‘I won’t have those cowardly bastards hanging around our hospitals. We’ll probably have to shoot them some time anyway, or we’ll raise a breed of morons.’6 Although on Eisenhower’s insistence Patton had to apologize to his troops – most of whom vocally supported him – Patton felt no genuine repentance, except insofar as the incidents had damaged his hitherto meteoric career. (In both the German and Russian armies, needless to say, the two privates would have been shot.) Eisenhower’s relegation of his old friend Patton led to Omar Bradley leapfrogging him, and becoming commander of the US First Army in the invasion of France. When Bradley paid a final courtesy call on Patton on 7 September 1943, at his palace in Palermo, he found him ‘in a near-suicidal state… This great proud warrior, my former boss, had been brought to his knees.’
To counter the general impression of George Patton it is worth considering the testimony given many years after the war to the US Army’s Senior Officer Oral History Program by General John ‘Ed’ Hull, one of George Marshall’s right-hand men at the Pentagon, who knew Patton well and worked with him closely in the planning stages of three campaigns. ‘General Patton was in a way a two-faced individual,’ Hull stated.
At heart he was very gentle, he was modest, very friendly, not at all superior in his attitude towards you, but very kindly, very considerate. But he put on the other face – well, we’ve had a lot of generals in history that were people of that kind… but that face was the rough and ready face. Curse a little bit at times and he knew all the words; but when he left a formation where he bawled somebody out, he might sit down and write a prayer… So, all in all he was quite a character, interesting and very likeable if you knew him.7
Field Marshal ‘Smiling Albert’ Kesselring was in overall charge of German troops in Italy, superior even to Rommel. A bourgeois gunner turned airman from Bavaria, he was looked down upon socially by the aristocratic Prussians under his command, but he was obeyed. Kesselring assumed that the Allies’ next step would be to make amphibious landings at the Gulf of Salerno, just south of Naples, which was as far north as Allied air cover from Sicily could stretch. Sure enough, at 03.30 hours on Thursday, 9 September 1943, forty-seven-year-old Mark Clark’s Fifth Army landed on the Gulf in Operation Avalanche, and dug in on four narrow, unconnected beach-heads. They were vigorously counter-attacked by the German Tenth Army, commanded by General Heinrich von Vietinghoff, who had commanded a Panzer division in Poland, a Panzer corps in Yugoslavia and Russia and the Fifteenth Army in France and was now to prove an equally formidable opponent in Italy. ‘Shells were flashing in the water,’ recalled an American journalist, Jack Belden, ‘flames were yellowing the sky, and bullets were slapping into the boat. They snapped over our heads, rattled against the boat sides like hail and beat at the ramp door… The boat shuddered and the ramp creaked open… I stepped down… At last I was on the continent of Europe.’8
Montgomery had landed almost unopposed on the tip of Italy five days earlier in Operation Baytown. Nonetheless the Germans concentrated their efforts further north at Salerno, hoping to fling Clark’s Fifth Army – comprising Major-General Richard McCreery’s British X Corps to the north of the Sele river and Major-General Ernest Dawley’s US VI Corps to the south – back into the sea. If they had succeeded, which they almost did on 13 September amid bitter fighting, it would have had a profound effect on the plans to invade Normandy the following year. At the same time as Avalanche, the 1st Airborne Division of the Eighth Army landed at the instep of the Italian boot at Taranto. In Berlin, Goebbels was reading Richard Llewellyn’s 1939 novel about Wales, How Green was my Valley. ‘It is very informative about English mentality,’ he noted in his diary on 20 September. ‘I don’t believe that England is in any present danger of becoming Bolshevized.’9
Sailing to Salerno, the men of the Fifth Army had been informed that Italy had signed an armistice, formally dropping out of the war. It made no difference to the reception that Clark’s men received from the Germans when they landed, of course, and Kesselring later claimed that Badoglio’s defection had meant that ‘Our hands were no longer tied’ and that he could now requisition anything he needed without tiresome negotiations with the Italians over compensation.10 There was a viciousness to Kesselring that was to come to the fore in March 1944 when, with his full prior knowledge, following the killing of thirty-two SS men in Rome by partisans, 335 Romans were taken to the Ardeatine Caves on the southern side of the city and shot in the back of the neck in groups of five. He could also undertake wholesale reprisals against the partisans, sending out an order on 17 June 1944 that ‘The fight against the partisans must be carried out with all means at our disposal and with utmost
severity. I will protect any commander who exceeds our usual restraint in the choice of methods… Wherever there is evidence of a considerable number of partisan groups a proportion of the male population of the area will be arrested, and in the event of an act of violence being committed these men will be shot.’11 Churchill and Alexander nonetheless called for the commutation of Kesselring’s death sentence in 1947, and he was released in 1952.
Although the Germans disarmed and interned all Italian forces in their vicinity, much of the Italian Navy sailed from Spezia to Malta, allowing Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham on 11 September 1943 to make his splendid signal to the Admiralty Board in London: ‘Be pleased to inform Their Lordships that the Italian Battle Fleet now lies at anchor under the guns of the fortress of Malta.’12 In all five battleships, eight cruisers, thirty-three destroyers, thirty-four submarines and scores of other war vessels surrendered, as well as 101 merchant ships totalling 183,591 tons. A further 168 merchant ships were scuttled to avoid capture by the Germans. On their arrival in Spezia, the Germans shot all Italian captains responsible. ‘That’s the way to treat your late Allies!’ remarked Cunningham. The Italian Navy was subsequently used against Germany, especially its brave special underwater section, the 10th MAS Flotilla, with no less an authority than Admiral Cunningham paying tribute to their ‘cold-blooded bravery and enterprise’.
The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War Page 46
