The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War

by Andrew Roberts

  The Luftwaffe failed to support the tanks enough during this vicious, pell-mell, close-quarter battle; indeed, when considering the campaign as a whole one historian has noted that its ‘loss of supremacy in the air is as important and interesting as the Wehrmacht’s loss of supremacy in armour’.45 Occasionally almost lunatic bravery was shown by the Russian Air Force: on 6 July, Lieutenant Alexei Gorovets, flying an American Airacobra, single-handedly engaged twenty German aircraft, destroying eight (or possibly nine) before being shot down himself.46 His impressive memorial can be seen today near the spot where he crashed on the battlefield. In all, the Germans lost 702 planes over the Eastern Front in July and August 1943, a number they could ill afford.

  Kursk was the first major engagement where the Russians were able to put up more aircraft than the Luftwaffe, which showed, as with so many other aspects of that battle, the shape of things to come. The Second and Seventeenth Air Armies flew 19,263 sorties from Kursk over the southern sector, in much larger formations than hitherto. One author has subtitled his chapter on the battle ‘A New Professionalism’, and in many ways it did exemplify how much the Soviet armed forces had adapted and learnt from the débâcles of 1941.47 For all that, however, II SS Panzer Corps (comprising the Leibstandarte, Totenkopf and Das Reich Divisions) inflicted more damage than it received in the mêlée at Prokhorovka – indeed the Soviet tank force suffered more than 50 per cent casualties – but by then it did not matter.48 By the end of the day the Russians had lost around 400 tanks against around 300 German (including 70 Tigers).49 What was later dubbed the Prokhorovskoe poboische (slaughter at Prokhorovka) by Russian propaganda had been mutual, but anything less than a stunning breakthrough was now a disaster for the Germans by that stage of the conflict; pyrrhic victories were of no use to the Reich. The Germans kept possession of the field until ordered to retreat from it, but Zitadelle had clearly completely fizzled out, and the salient was in no danger of being ‘pinched out’. The 3rd, 17th and 19th Panzer Divisions started the operation with 450 tanks, and now had barely 100 between them.50 Like a boxer who has won his last bout on points but is unable to fight another because of the battering he has received, the Wehrmacht was too damaged after Prokhorovka to undertake another major offensive.

  Hitler summoned Manstein and Kluge to Rastenburg on 13 July and ordered Zitadelle to be closed down. The Allies had landed in Sicily three days earlier and part of II SS Panzer Corps, including the Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler, needed to be transferred to Italy forthwith. This was easier to order than to carry out, for as Mellenthin put it: ‘We are now in the position of a man who has seized a wolf by the ears and dare not let him go.’51 Kluge, in the words of Liddell Hart, ‘had sufficient moral courage to express his views frankly to Hitler, yet he also refrained from pressing his views to the point of being troublesome.’52 In that he was not unlike a number of German generals, who knew that there were always many well-qualified men eager to take their places.

  Manstein believed that, since Zhukov had now committed his mobile reserves in the shape of the Fifth Guards Tank Army, the offensive should be carried on, but he was overruled by Hitler. By 23 July, Army Group South – weakened by the loss of the Grossdeutschland Division being sent to Kluge – had been forced back to its starting lines for Operation Zitadelle.53 Konev’s fresh Steppe Front took over the positions held by the heroic but exhausted Voronezh Front on 3 August, and confused tactical fighting took place until 17 August, with the Germans withdrawing to the Hagen Line across the base of the Orel salient in the north and the Soviets pushing on in the south to recapture Kharkov – the most fought-over city in the Soviet Union – which fell on 23 August when Manstein finally abandoned it (against Hitler’s orders) and fell back to the Dnieper river.54 Four distinct and bloody battles over one city emphasizes the nature of war on the Eastern Front, and by the time of Kharkov’s last fall the Voronezh and Steppe Fronts had suffered over 250,000 casualties.55 This places in stark perspective the battles that were taking place in Sicily at the time, which were all puny by comparison.

  In a war of men and machines, the Russians were out-producing the Germans in both. German, Hungarian, Italian and Czech factories produced a total – when added to the tanks captured in France – of 53,187 tanks and self-propelled guns of all kinds throughout the war, whereas between 1941 and 1945 the USSR produced 58,681 T-34s alone, 3,500 IS-2s (which had a 122mm cannon with a 2.5-kilometre accurate range) and 3,500 SU-100 self-propelled guns, not including the KV range of tanks. By 1943 the Russians were also turning out huge numbers of the excellent 122mm M-30 howitzers, and their standard hand grenade was as good as Germany’s M-24 classic stick grenade, which had not undergone any major improvement since 1924.

  The Russian performance at Kursk, especially in the area of co-operation between different arms, brought the losses down to tolerable levels (albeit still much higher than the German). It created a new military theory and ethos for Russia, one that afforded her a glimpse of victory. The casualty rate at Kursk was half that of the Moscow battles of late 1941, and the rates for 1944 were to be one-quarter of it. ‘The reconstruction of an almost entirely new army on the ruins of the collapse of 1941’, reckons Richard Overy, ‘ranks as the most remarkable achievement of the war.’56 The Soviets had combined their arms, applied new techniques to offensive operations, exploited successes quickly and learnt how to defeat Blitzkrieg. They were still losing more men than the Germans, it was true, but they had reduced the ratio to three for two, at which proportion it was to stay until the end of the war. As a result, ‘German defeat simply became a matter of blood and time.’57 The Germans had little of either; the Russians now had plenty of both.

  In the two months of fighting at Kursk, it is estimated that the Germans lost half a million men killed, wounded, taken prisoner or missing, as well as 3,000 tanks, 1,000 guns, 5,000 motor vehicles and 1,400 planes.58 Soviet losses were half as heavy again, at three-quarters of a million men, but the German retreat from Prokhorovka meant that it was a defeat, since the Russian population and levels of production ensured that the USSR could absorb the losses in a way that the Reich no longer could. Konev was thus right to describe Kursk as ‘the swan-song of the German armoured force’.59

  A growing problem for the Germans was getting matériel to the front line. By the end of 1942 the pro-Soviet partisans – hitherto almost ignored by the Stavka – were being supplied with officers, mine-experts and engineers, who were parachuted in to them with orders to disrupt the German lines of communication. With thousands of miles of railway track between German factories and regimental depots deep inside Russia, the partisans were able to cause massive dislocation of supplies. They meanwhile invented instruments which could adjust Russian machine-gun barrels to the size of captured German ammunition, and special steel bars that could be welded on to railway tracks in order to derail trains, examples of which can be seen in the Armed Forces Museum in Moscow today. In the month of June 1943, against Army Group Centre alone, partisans blew up forty-four railway bridges, damaged 298 locomotives and 1,233 wagons and disrupted rail traffic 746 times.60 This had severely hampered the Germans’ ability to reinforce their fronts just prior to Kursk, and afterwards it was to get much worse, despite the extremely harsh German reprisals against local populations. By contrast, Russian matériel was flooding into the Red Army by 1943. That calendar year the Soviets produced 24,000 tanks, twice the number of Germany, and the firepower they deployed in the Kursk salient that summer underlined their immense achievement in taking losses but surviving them and replenishing their numbers.61 They had 3,800 tanks when the German attack began on 5 July, and were down to 1,500 when it was called off on 13 July, yet by 3 August the Red Army was up to 2,750 in that sector.

  The outcome of the battle of Kursk was superb for Russian morale, and correspondingly bad for German. Zhukov and the Stavka had timed and placed their counter-punch perfectly. German invincibility had been shown to be a myth at Stalingrad, but at Kursk the Russians
turned back a fifty-division, full-scale attack. Not only had the Germans shown that they were capable of losing the war, but just as crucially the Russians had demonstrated that they – despite their appalling losses of experienced combat commanders – were developing the tactics necessary to win it. Zhukov’s strategy in the immediate aftermath of Kursk of not over-extending a counter-attack so much as to invite a counter-counter-attack is still taught in military colleges as a model example. ‘The three immense battles of Kursk, Orel and Kharkov, all in the space of two months,’ wrote Churchill, ‘heralded the downfall of the German army on the Eastern Front.’ Germany had lost the initiative on by far the most important front of the war, and was never to regain it. Intelligent Germans, and even some not so intelligent ones such as Keitel, recognized that the war in the east could not now be won. On the walls of the Hall of Glory in the Museum of the Great Patriotic War in Moscow there are the names of no fewer than 11,695 Heroes of the Soviet Union, winners of the Red Star medal.

  Rumours about what was happening to Russian POWs in German captivity had percolated back to the Red Army, were sedulously spread by Soviet propaganda and left the Russian soldiers understandably disinclined to surrender whatever the circumstances. This was yet another example of how Nazi fanaticism actually weakened Germany’s military position.

  To visit the battlefield of Prokhorovka today, and see the furthest point that the German armour reached on their final great offensive on the Eastern Front – the last gasp of Nazi aggression, as it were, before the Reich was turned on to the defensive – is a profoundly moving experience. These undulating fields saw the furthest expansion that Hitler ever achieved in his dreams of world conquest. Its forces having been turned back at Moscow, then defeated at Stalingrad, for Nazism Prokhorovka was the beginning of the end. The bell atop a tall campanile that today tolls six times every twenty minutes on those windy flat cornfields effectively tolled the death knell of Operation Zitadelle. OKW hoped Kursk would be a turning point for them, but on the battlefield of Prokhorovka – although the Russians lost more men and machines than the Germans – history failed to turn.

  14

  The Cruel Reality

  1939–1945

  From the flak tower, the air raids on Berlin were an unforgettable sight, and I had constantly to remind myself of the cruel reality in order not to be completely entranced by the scene: the illumination of the parachute flares… followed by the flashes of explosions which were caught by the clouds of smoke, the innumerable probing searchlights, the excitement when a plane was caught and tried to escape the cone of light, the brief flaming torch when it was hit. No doubt about it, this apocalypse provided a magnificent spectacle.

  Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich, 19701

  Along with the decision to use nuclear weapons against Japan, the most controversial aspect of the Allies’ war has been the area, strategic or – more emotively – carpet or terror bombing of German cities and civilians. For most in the west at the time it was considered a perfectly legitimate way to bring a satanic enemy to its knees once Total War had been unleashed by Hitler, but for some – especially after the war had been safely won – it was a morally unacceptable war crime. This chapter will seek to establish simply whether or not it worked strategically, whether it was necessary and whether there was any alternative.2

  Proponents of air doctrine in the bomber wings of the German, British and American air forces in the 1920s and 1930s all believed that it was possible to win wars through bombing alone, with navies relegated to a blockading role and armies primarily used for mopping up and occupation. ‘It is well also for the man in the street to realize that there is no power on earth that can protect him from being bombed,’ the former and future British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, then lord president of the council, told the House of Commons in November 1932. ‘Whatever people might tell him, the bomber will always get through.’3 He spoke before the invention of radar, the Spitfire and the mass-production of the 4.5-inch anti-aircraft gun, but the message certainly got through so that by 1939 it was assumed that general aerial bombardment would lead to massacre and the breakdown of civilization.

  When war broke out, the Luftwaffe’s bombing of Warsaw in September 1939 and of Rotterdam and Louvain in May 1940 made it clear that Germany did not intend to abide by the ‘civilized’ view of warfare that confined targets to military assets attacked in daylight. Further raids on Coventry (on 15 November 1940), Belgrade (in April 1941, when 17,000 people were killed), Hull and even unarmed beauty spots like Bath (where more than 400 people died over three nights in April 1942) confirmed this. As the Luftwaffe bomber General Werner Baumbach later recalled: ‘Hitler talked about “extirpating” the English towns, and propaganda coined the word “coventrizing” for the maximum degree of destruction which was deemed to have been inflicted on Germany.’4 Yet simply because the Nazis had adopted ruthless methods of warfare, it did not follow that their foes ought to have as well.

  The RAF’s Bomber Command wing was founded in 1936, based in High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire and at the outbreak of war it consisted of thirty-three squadrons comprising 488 aircraft. Initially these were planes with too short a flying range to reach even the Ruhr industrial basin – the closest German targets worth bombing – and with bomb-loads too small to cause much damage even if they had managed to get there and back. Even worse, in the words of Richard Overy:

  There were no effective bomb-sights; there were few bombs bigger than 250 pounds; only a handful of bases in Britain could handle the larger aircraft; and there was even a shortage of maps for navigating in north-west Europe. Bombing trials betrayed a wide margin of inaccuracy even when bombing in bright sunlight from a few thousand feet with no enemy interference.5

  It was an unpromising start from which to try to force the Third Reich to its knees. With a general lack of navigational aids, target-marking and aiming equipment and carrying capacity, Bomber Command was initially forced into the strategy of attacking cities, effectively through the lack of a realistic alternative. After a raid on Berlin in which most of the bombs fell on farms in the surrounding countryside, rather than on the capital itself, Berliners joked: ‘Now they are trying to starve us out!’

  Once Bomber Command had suffered unacceptably high – sometimes as much as 50 per cent – losses in daylight raids on largely coastal targets such as Heligoland and Wilhelmshaven at the start of the war, it switched to night-time bombing instead, with a serious reduction in accuracy. Bomber Command pilots had not expected or been intensively trained for night-bombing, and the navigational aids were basic, yet after victory was won in the battle of Britain in the autumn of 1940 the emphasis turned from Fighter Command defence to Bomber Command attack. By then an altogether more offensively minded Churchill had replaced Chamberlain, whose government had even discouraged the bombing of Germany’s Black Forest on the ground that ‘so much of it was private property’.6 The bombing of Germany – even if inaccurate and at night – gave an immense morale boost to Britons, who felt that they were at last taking the war directly to the enemy. There was also a tangible sense that after Dunkirk and the battle of Britain the bombing offensive was the only possible way for Britain to show that she was still in the war and keen to continue to fight.

  While Bomber Command did attempt throughout the war to pinpoint specific German production facilities for bombing – never devoting less than 30 per cent of bombing efforts to those types of targets – in a short space of time the general policy widened to destroying huge, heavily populated industrial areas in order to ‘de-house’ the workers, dislocate production and demoralize the population. The Commander-in-Chief of Bomber Command, Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur ‘Bomber’, ‘Bert’ or ‘Butch’ Harris, was convinced that the policy he had inherited when he took over in February 1942 could win the war. In the words of one historian, ‘four years of arms production had given Britain the four-engined heavy bombers… and little else with which to fight… Counter-city strateg
y was his only option if Britain, unable to face the disaster that might ensue from invading a defended Europe with inferior forces, and under attack in Africa and threat in the Far East, was to show any signs of fighting at all.’7 Harris tended to decry precision attacks on individual industries such as ball-bearing or synthetic-oil factories, as favoured by the Americans, dismissing them as ‘panacea targets’ in the belief that the Germans could perfectly well compensate through dispersed production, alternative technologies, foreign purchases and stockpiling. While he was right to take this stance at the beginning of the war, when few bombs came close to landing on their targets, advancing technology meant that by the end of the war he was starting to be proved wrong. Yet he was not overruled when he continued to pursue his strategy.

  De-housing certainly had an effect on Germany’s industrial production because, as one study has concluded, in many cases after a raid ‘workers did not turn up for work as they were either looking after their families, or physically could not reach their workplaces. Many left the devastated city for the countryside, where food was more available, and stayed with relatives.’8 In the BMW factory in Munich, for example, some 20 per cent of the workforce were absent in the summer of 1944, and in the same year absenteeism rose to 25 per cent in the Ford plant in Cologne in the Ruhr.9 In 1939 Göring had addressed the Luftwaffe, saying: ‘No enemy bomber can reach the Ruhr. If one reaches the Ruhr, my name is not Göring. You can call me Meyer.’ (They did not, at least not to his face.)