The Second World War

by John Keegan

  Whether Ultra ‘shortened the war’, as is sometimes suggested, or even materially altered its course, is more difficult to argue. There was no single Ultra triumph as great as the American codebreakers’ success in identifying Midway as the target for the Japanese fleet in June 1942, a genuinely tide-turning intelligence operation. Although the breaking of the Shark key in December 1942 very greatly contributed to the winning of the Battle of the Atlantic in the following spring, against it must be set the cost of the B-Dienst’s concurrent success in reading the British naval convoy codes. Ultra did not much influence the course of the war in the air, despite the insecurity of the Luftwaffe keys, and in the ground fighting between the Germans and the Western Allies it can never be said to have given the advantage consistently to the eavesdropping side. That was because, as Clausewitz’s famous and accurate observation on combat reminds us, on the battlefield ‘friction’ always intervenes between the intentions and achievements of even the best-informed general: accident, misunderstanding, delay, disobedience inevitably distort an enemy’s plans so that, whatever advance knowledge his opponent may have of them, he can never so predisposition his troops and responses as to be sure of frustrating the enemy’s actions; nor, because of ‘frictions’ working against him, can he count on smoothly carrying out his own counter-measures. Ultra reduced friction for the Allied generals; but it did not abolish it.

  If we shift the focus and ask whether in the spectrum of clandestine warfare cryptanalysis was more or less valuable to the Allies than the activity of the resistance, the answer is simple. Cryptanalysis was consistently and immensely more valuable indeed. The Second World War in the West could have been won without either the resistance or Ultra; but the cost of the former was heavy, and its material, as opposed to psychological significance was slight. The cost of Ultra, by contrast, was trivial – the whole apparatus employed only 10,000 people, including clerks and cryptographers – while its material value was considerable and its psychological significance inestimable. The proof of that comes from the German as well as the Allied side. Ultra sustained the confidence of the very few Western decision-makers who were privy to its secret in a way nothing else could have done. Twenty years after the war was over, when their German opponents discovered that their most secret correspondence had been read daily by the British and Americans, they were struck speechless.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  The Vistula and the Danube

  The destruction of Army Group Centre had cast Germany’s strategic position on the Eastern Front into ruins. The military implications were grave enough. The remnants of Army Group Centre now stood on the line of the Vistula less than 400 miles from Berlin, with the great Polish plain at its back and no obstacle but the river Oder between it and the capital. On the Baltic coast Army Group North, now commanded by Ferdinand Schörner, one of Hitler’s chosen ‘standfast’ generals, was threatened by the Baltic fronts’ thrust to Riga with encirclement in northern Latvia and Estonia – the ‘Courland pocket’ as it was called by OKH. From there the army group could be supplied only by sea, but Hitler would not allow the position to be abandoned because he insisted on preserving free use of the Baltic to train the crews of his new U-boats. The physical damage the army had suffered in the summer battles was staggering. Between June and September the number of dead on the Eastern Front rose to 215,000 and of missing to 627,000; when losses in the west were added in and the number of wounded included, the total rose to nearly 2 million, or as many casualties as the army had suffered from the beginning of the war until February 1943, including those of Stalingrad. By the end of 1944 106 divisions – a third of those in the order of battle – had been disbanded or rebuilt, more than the army had fielded on the eve of its victory era in September 1939.

  Hitler resisted striking divisions from the order of battle. His solution to the massacre that had taken place, therefore, was to decree the formation of new divisions with the same number as the old, but now to be designated ‘people’s grenadier’ (Volksgrenadier) divisions. Despite the rising output of the German arms industry, which Speer raised to unprecedented heights in September 1944, the Volksgrenadier divisions were only 10,000 strong (divisions had contained 17,000 men in 1939), lacked anti-tank guns and mounted their reconnaissance battalions on bicycles. Even so only sixty-six Volksgrenadier divisions altogether could be formed to replace the seventy-five infantry divisions lost in the west and east during 1944. They were raised within the Home Army, command of which Hitler had given to the SS chief, Heinrich Himmler, in the aftermath of the July Plot. After 23 July the military salute was also abolished; instead all servicemen were required to give the ‘Heil Hitler’ with outstretched arm. Guderian, who replaced Zeitzler as chief of staff after 20 July, accepted this and the institution of military ‘courts of honour’ to strike suspects from the officer corps before they were tried by the people’s courts.

  The political implications of the outcome of Operation Bagration were even more menacing than the military ones. The Russian triumph threatened the integrity of the whole complex Balkan alliance Hitler had so painstakingly constructed through the Tripartite Pact between August 1940 and March 1941. On 20 August the Second and Third Ukrainian Fronts opened an offensive against Army Group South Ukraine and burst across the river Prut to the delta of the Danube in five days. The weight of the attack fell on the Romanian Third and Fourth Armies and the Romanians were panicked into changing sides. On 23 August King Michael staged a palace revolution in Bucharest, arrested Ion Antonescu, Hitler’s Romanian collaborator, and replaced his government with one of ‘national unity’, which included communists. When Hitler responded by bombing Bucharest on 24 August, the King declared war on Germany. In demonstration of the country’s change of heart, but also to avenge a national grievance, the surviving elements of the Romanian army at once invaded Hungary, still in Hitler’s camp, to recover the province of Transylvania which had been transferred to Hungary under the terms of the Tripartite Pact of August 1940. The Russians would not at first accept the move as an act of co-belligerency. Having already overrun Ploesti and its oilfields, the jewel in the crown of Hitler’s economic empire, they entered Bucharest as conquerors on 28 August. Not until 12 September did they concede an armistice, allowing Romania to retain Transylvania but taking back the provinces of Bessarabia and northern Bukovina which had been their local share of the spoils of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact.

  Romania’s defection provoked Bulgaria’s. The Bulgarians, traditionally the most Russophile of Slavs, had been careful not to allow their accession to the Tripartite Pact in March 1941 to commit them to war against Russia. They had granted the German army basing and transit facilities; they had taken their share of Yugoslavia and also sent occupation troops to Greece; but no Bulgarian soldier had fought against the Red Army. Indeed the existence since 1943 of a small anti-German partisan movement inside the country made a change of sides easier to arrange. With the death of King Boris in August 1943 Hitler had been robbed of his most dependable Bulgarian supporter; the successor government, though rebuffed by the Western Allies when it explored the possibility of changing sides, knew it must disentangle itself from the German alliance. On the approach of the Red Army, however, a ‘Fatherland Front’ proclaimed a national uprising on 9 September, supplanted the government – which had already asked Russia for a truce on 5 September – and took power. On 18 October the Red Army marched into Sofia and the 150,000-strong Bulgarian army went over to its side.

  The collapse of the German front in the north had already forced Finland to reconsider its position. The Finns had never been ideological allies of Hitler. They were fiercely democratic – they had succeeded in retaining their national parliament even under tsarist rule – and their quarrel with Russia was a territorial one. Once they had regained during the Barbarossa campaign the territory they had been forced to concede at the end of the Winter War (together with land east of Lake Ladoga to which they had an historic claim) they had halted. As e
arly as January 1944 they had made approaches to the Allies through Washington but had been warned that the Russian price for a separate peace would be high: a return to the 1940 frontier, the cession of Petsamo, centre of Finland’s mineral industry and its outlet to the Arctic in the Far North, and a large financial indemnity. The terms had then seemed too harsh; as Bagration developed they came to look more attractive. During June the Finnish president, Risto Ryti, was personally confronted with conflicting demands from Hitler and Stalin: he must either formally reject a separate peace with Russia (the German ultimatum) or capitulate (the Russian ultimatum). Under pressure from Marshal Mannerheim, effectively Finland’s leader, Ryti gave Ribbentrop his assurance that Finland would not make a separate peace. However, Mannerheim had privately resolved to use this assurance to fight for time. During July he managed to blunt the Russian attack on Finland’s fortified frontier until the retreat of Army Group North had drawn the Russian northern fronts westward into the Baltic states. Then on 4 August he assumed the office of President, revoked Ryti’s commitment and opened direct negotiations with Moscow. On 2 September he broke relations with Germany and on 19 September signed a treaty with Russia whose terms were much as they had been in January. The most important differences were a halving of the size of the indemnity, offset by the grant of a naval base on the Porkala peninsula, near Helsinki, and a Finnish undertaking to disarm the German Twentieth Mountain Army in Lapland. As Mannerheim privately recognised, the Finnish army had neither the strength nor the the will to drive the Twentieth Army out of the country into Norway, from which it was supplied, and the operation was not completed until April 1945, and then only with Russian help.

  Despite the Finns’ excellence as soldiers (they were alone among the Wehrmacht’s allies in regarding themselves and being regarded, man for man, as the Germans’ military equals, even superiors), by late 1944 Finland was peripheral to Hitler’s strategic crisis. Hungary, on the far southern flank and next in the firing line after Romania and Bulgaria, was by contrast central to the defence of the Reich’s outworks. The Hungarians too had a reputation as excellent soldiers which had been won in the service of the Habsburg emperors – and in rebellion against them. However, Admiral Horthy, the Hungarian dictator, had made the mistake of committing them to Operation Barbarossa against the Red Army, which they were not equipped to fight once the shield of Wehrmacht protection had been withdrawn from them. The collapse of Army Group South Ukraine (renamed Army Group South in early September) and the defection of the Romanians now exposed them to a Soviet thrust which they lacked the power to repel, even from their strong positions in the Carpathians. Horthy hoped that he would be saved from choosing between the Germans and the Russians by an Anglo-American advance from Italy into Yugoslavia. Not only had the Allies been deflected by internal disagreement from such a manoeuvre; the Americans, with whom he was in contact through their ambassador in Switzerland, informed him in August that he must make his own arrangements with the Russians. As soon as the Romanians attacked his army in Transylvania, he had no option but to do so. A Hungarian delegation arrived in Moscow at the end of September to negotiate terms for a change of sides. Horthy, however, had unilaterally undermined the chances of doing so successfully by allowing Hitler in March to station German troops on Hungarian soil. When the Russians heightened their pressure on Horthy’s delegates in Moscow by launching an attack into eastern Hungary towards Debrecen on 6 October, the occupation army – reinforced by three Panzer divisions – counter-attacked and blunted the advance. Hitler, moreover, had by now got wind of Horthy’s impending treachery. He was aware that Horthy had issued orders to his First and Second Armies, which were still fighting with Army Group South, to make a unilateral retreat; he also suspected that Horthy was on the point of announcing a change of sides. On 15 October, therefore, he authorised Skorzeny, his expert in such operations, to kidnap Horthy’s son and then confronted the dictator with a demand that he transfer power to a pro-German replacement. Early on 16 October Horthy abdicated as Regent, and German troops took control of the whole of Budapest. The Second Ukrainian Front was by then only fifty miles from the Hungarian capital, but it was to remain safe in German hands for several months.

  Revolt in the Balkans

  Hitler had meanwhile also quashed another attempt at defection among his eastern satellites. Slovakia, ruled since October 1939, in the aftermath of Czechoslovakia’s dismemberment, by Joseph Tiso, a signatory of the Tripartite Pact and a co-belligerent in the war against Russia, had been seething with internal discord since the spring. While the ‘London’ Czechs, legitimately the government in exile, looked to a post-war settlement to restore them to power, the dissident Slovaks, through the underground Czechoslovak Communist Party, were in contact with Moscow, which sponsored a small army in exile stationed on Russian territory. Part of the Slovak army of Monsignor Tiso’s puppet state remained under German control on the Eastern Front; the rest, stationed at home, fell increasingly under patriot influence. A pro-Soviet partisan movement was also active in eastern Slovakia, towards which Operation Bagration had drawn the Fourth Ukrainian Front at the beginning of August. At the end of August the pro-Soviet partisans precipitated action. Liaising directly with the Red Army and bypassing both the London Czechs and the dissidents’ ‘Slovak National Council’, on 25 August they initiated a national uprising, in which they were joined by the home-based Slovak army, and looked for support to the Russians beyond the Carpathians. Their response was far more positive than it had been to the Polish Home Army in Warsaw. They at once sent liaison officers and initiated an offensive by the First and Fourth Ukrainian Fronts to come to the insurgents’ rescue. They also airlifted parts of the Czech army in exile from Russia into Slovakia and embodied the rest in the Ukrainian fronts fighting to cross the Slovak passes through the Carpathians. However, pressure from without and within was not strong enough to overcome the response Hitler organised to preserve his position in Slovakia. Two German corps, XXIV Panzer and XI, were sent to man the Carpathian position, including the key Dukla Pass. At the end of September the Soviet Thirty-Eighth Army, assisted by the I Czechoslovak (exile) Corps, was still battering against the pass, and it did not fall until 6 October. Meanwhile the security troops which were so experienced in anti-partisan operations in the eastern theatre were being earmarked for commitment. Two SS divisions formed from ethnic minorities, the 18th Horst Wessel (racial German) and the 14th Galizian (Ukrainian), were concentrated for a counter-offensive, together with five German army divisions; by 18 October the Dirlewanger and Kaminski brigades had also been brought down from Warsaw to turn their murderous talents against the Slovaks. Between 18 and 20 October ‘free Slovakia’ was assaulted at eleven points and by the end of the month the insurrection was extinct. The Soviet Thirty-Eighth Army and the I Czechoslovak Corps (commanded by General Ludwik Svoboda, whom the Russians would install as Dubcúek’s successor after the ‘Prague Spring’ of 1968) suffered 80,000 casualties in the effort to come to the insurgents’ rescue; almost all the insurgents who did not escape into the hills died in combat or in concentration camps.

  In the extreme south of his Balkan theatre, Hitler was to prove less successful at shoring up a defence than in Hungary and Slovakia. The occupation of Greece had been crumbling since the capitulation of the Italians in September 1943, when at least 12,000 of their weapons had fallen into the hands of the resistance. The Greek partisans had been fighting bravely and doggedly against the occupiers, as their forefathers had done in the war to liberate their homeland from the Turks 120 years earlier. Many of the British liaison officers whom SOE infiltrated into the Greek islands and mainland were touched by a Byronic afterglow, seeing themselves as successors to the philhellenes who had fought at the patriots’ side in the War of Liberation in the 1820s. However, German reprisals against the villages near which the resistance attacks took place were ferocious; at the Nuremberg trial a prosecution lawyer was to testify that ‘in Greece there are a thousand Lidices [
Lidice was the Czech village obliterated after the assassination of Heydrich], their names unknown and their inhabitants forgotten.’ Therefore much SOE effort was devoted to restraining rather than encouraging the partisans; but the British liaison officers had not been able to check violence between the right and left wings of the resistance movement, which, as in Yugoslavia, obeyed different authorities – ELAS the Greek Communist Party, EDES the Greek government in exile in Cairo. The Germans restored and maintained order after the surrender of the Italians – whom they treated with almost as much brutality as any partisans they caught – but, as their Balkan position began to collapse, they evacuated the Greek islands (except for Crete and Rhodes) from 12 September and then on 12 October the whole of Greece. As they left and the British began to arrive, the first round of a civil war between ELAS and EDES broke out; it was to be quelled, at a tragic cost in British lives, by the intervention of the 2nd Parachute Brigade and other formations against ELAS at Christmas.

  Army Group E, the German command in Greece and Albania, had a single hope of salvation, which was to find its way through the Ibar and Morava valleys to link up with Army Group F in Yugoslavia. The sudden onset of the Third Ukrainian Front, now supported by the Bulgarian Army, forced it to fight a desperate rearguard action. Meanwhile Army Group F was confronted by a Soviet assault on its eastern flank aimed at the Yugoslav capital, Belgrade. The Third Ukrainian Front had crossed the Yugoslav border on 6 September, prompting Tito to fly to Moscow from a British airfield on the Adriatic island of Vis to discuss the terms on which the Red Army would operate on Yugoslav territory. In a remarkable exercise in negotiation from weakness, Tito persuaded Stalin by 28 September to agree to lend troops from the Third Ukrainian Front for a joint assault on Belgrade but to withdraw them, leaving civil administration in Tito’s hands, once the operational task was complete. The battle for Belgrade opened on 14 October and ended on 20 October; 15,000 German soldiers were killed and 9000 taken prisoner in the defence of the city. Tito paraded his Partisans through the streets as victors on 22 October; of his ‘Belgrade battalion’, which had fought the three-year partisan war, only two of its original members were still in the ranks.