by Reg Grant
EL ALAMEIN, EGYPT On October 23, 1942 the British Eighth Army, commanded by General Bernard Montgomery, launched a large-scale offensive against a well-prepared Axis defensive line at El Alamein, Egypt. By November 4, the British Eighth Army had broken through, forcing Rommel to retreat toward Tunisia. This victory was followed on November 8 by Operation Torch. Commanded by U.S. General Dwight D. Eisenhower, it landed Allied forces in French North Africa.
After its victory at El Alamein in October–November 1942, the British Eighth Army advanced across North Africa to Tunisia.
General Erwin Rommel was an inspired commander of German tanks in North Africa.
GERMAN SURRENDER
British journalist Alan Moorhead witnessed the Axis surrender in Tunisia. He wrote: “We rode back … to Tunis, past the prisoners who now stretched in a procession reaching from the tip of Cap Bon far into Tunisia. Weeks were going to elapse before a final count revealed the total at over a quarter of a million prisoners … In all the Axis had lost close to a million men in Africa. Now they had nothing, absolutely nothing to show for it.”
—From African Trilogy, Alan Moorhead
The last stages of the North African campaign did not go smoothly for the Allies. Unwilling to accept defeat anywhere, Hitler decided to give higher priority to the desert war and rushed reinforcements into Tunisia. Allied hopes that the Axis forces could be defeated by the end of 1942 were dashed. The troops that Hitler poured into North Africa, however, were sacrificed in a lost cause. Some 200,000 Germans and Italians were taken prisoner when their Axis forces surrendered in May 1943. The Allies could now use North Africa to launch an invasion of Italy.
CHAPTER 4
CLASH OF GIANTS
German troops advance through the ruins of a Russian village in July 1942. Hitler’s order to carry a “war of annihilation” led the German invaders to devastate much of the Soviet Union.
After the Nazi-Soviet Pact of August 1939, Soviet dictator Josef Stalin behaved as a loyal ally of Hitler, supplying Germany with food and raw materials, including oil. As early as July 1940, however, Hitler informed his generals of his intention to invade the Soviet Union. Planning for the invasion, code-named Operation Barbarossa, began the following December.
RUTHLESS WARFARE
German army commanders accepted Hitler’s view that the war with the Soviet Union would be of a different nature from the war in the West. One tank commander, General Erich Hoepner, told his men: “This struggle has to have as its aim the smashing of present-day Russia and must consequently be carried out with unprecedented severity. Every military action must … be led by the iron will mercilessly and totally to annihilate the enemy.”
—Quoted in Hitler, Vol. 2, Ian Kershaw
Hitler felt contempt and hatred for the Soviet people, both because they were communists and because they were Slavs—regarded by Hitler as an inferior subhuman race. He told his generals that they were embarking on a “war of annihilation” (total destruction). Victory would, Hitler believed, make Germany unbeatable, with control of huge supplies of food and raw materials. There would be no country left in Europe capable of challenging German power.
The Germans had a low opinion of the Soviet Red Army, despite its huge size, and confidently expected to achieve total victory in one to three months. They intended to launch their offensive in May 1941 and win well before the dreaded Russian winter closed in. The start of Barbarossa was delayed, however, partly because the events in Yugoslavia and Greece required the Germans’ attention in the spring (see pages 20–21). The launch of the offensive was finally set for June 22.
Invading the Soviet Union in June 1941, German forces advanced rapidly and captured millions of Soviet soldiers. Leningrad was put under siege, but the German advance ground to a halt in December without reaching Moscow.
For the invasion, Germany assembled an army over three million strong along the border with the Soviet Union, from the Baltic in the north to the Black Sea in the south. It included not only Germans but also soldiers from Romania, Hungary, Italy, Finland, Slovakia, and Spain. Only a small part of this huge force consisted of armored divisions, however, and much of the army did not even have motorized transportation—there were 3,550 tanks involved in the offensive, but 700,000 horses.
German soldiers found fighting in the Soviet Union much tougher than in earlier campaigns. They came to fear a posting to the Eastern Front as if it were a death sentence.
Stalin received precise warnings of the coming offensive both from Britain, which was reading German coded messages, and from his own spies on his treacherous German partner, but he failed to call for full alert. As a result, his Soviet forces were taken by surprise, and their shallow defensive lines were easily broken.
The Soviets had more tanks and aircraft than their enemies, and Soviet soldiers fiercely defended their homeland. Poorly organized, however, and poorly led, they faced total disaster the first month of the campaign. The German Army Group Center quickly advanced, taking Minsk and Smolensk by mid-July (see page 25). Had they continued, they might have taken the Soviet capital, Moscow. Instead, in August, Hitler ordered them to help Army Group South conquer the Ukraine. By the end of September, encircled Soviet forces in the south were forced to surrender at Kiev, while the German Army Group North waited outside Leningrad. By the time their advance on Moscow resumed at the beginning of October, however, the weather was already worsening. Heavy rains were followed by snow and bitter cold. By the end of November, the Germans were within about 12 miles (20 km) of the center of Moscow, but, without clothing or equipment for a winter war, they faltered in the face of dedicated Soviet resistance. On December 5, the Soviets forcefully counterattacked. Worn down by freezing cold and five hard months of fighting, the Germans retreated for the first time in the entire war. Moscow was saved.
Given the concentration of forces to the south, the only lifeline for supplies to besieged Leningrad was across Lake Ladoga, by boat in summer and by trucks across the ice in winter.
THE FATE OF LENINGRAD
Unquestionably, 1941 had been a catastrophic year for the Soviet armed forces. They had lost about a million men killed and 3.5 million taken prisoner. German losses had also been extremely heavy—about a million killed, wounded, or taken captive.
This Soviet propaganda photograph shows snipers in snow camouflage fighting on the Leningrad front in 1943. Soviet troops generally were better prepared to fight in severe winter weather conditions than were their German enemies.
The suffering of the Soviet people was intense, especially in Leningrad, which was kept under blockade by the Germans for 900 days from September 1941 to February 1944. The city’s only lifeline to the outside world was across Lake Ladoga—bringing supplies by boat in summer and over the ice in winter. About a million of the Leningrad population died either under bombardment or of starvation and disease. The terrible brutality of German rule in the occupied areas ensured that, even among people who had suffered injustice and oppression under Stalin, there were very few who wanted to collaborate with the German invaders.
Cossack cavalry, from the Don region of the Soviet Union, ride out on patrol. Despite the use of tanks and trucks, horses played an important role in warfare on the Eastern Front.
OVERWHELMED BY DEATH
A Leningrad resident, Vera Inber, writing in her diary in December 1941, described how people were overwhelmed by the scale of the deaths in the besieged city: “The mortuary itself is full. Not only are there too few trucks to go to the cemetery, but, more important, no gasoline to put in the trucks and the main thing is—there is not enough strength left in the living to bury the dead.”
—Quoted in Russia’s War, Richard Overy
German artillery hits a factory in Stalingrad in 1942. Named after the Soviet dictator, the city became a prize neither side felt they could afford to lose.
The survival of the Soviet Union came as a huge relief to Britain and the United States, who desperately needed Stal
in as an ally against Hitler. Stalin equally need the Western Allies, who provided a generous flow of modern military equipment, delivered to the Red Army via the Arctic port of Murmansk. In factories relocated to safety beyond the Ural mountains, the Soviets were also soon producing their own armaments in vast quantities, including tanks and aircraft that were a match for anything the Germans had.
In 1942, however, it still looked as if Hitler might win the war in the Soviet Union. In the first half of the year, the Soviets exhausted their strength in a series of costly and largely unsuccessful counterattacks. The Germans then launched a devastating offensive in the south that carried them to the Caucasus mountains, threatening the vital Baku oilfields. At the same time, the German Sixth Army advanced on Stalingrad, a city on the Volga River.
The Germans reached the suburbs of Stalingrad in mid-September, but the Soviets defended their city building by building and street by street. Two months later, elements of the Red Army were still holding out in the city, their backs to the river. On November 19, more Soviet forces counterattacked north and south of Stalingrad. They formed a noose around the city, with the German Sixth Army trapped inside and blocked from receiving supplies. All efforts to break the iron ring around Stalingrad failed. Despite an impressive effort to supply Hitler’s Sixth Army by air in terrible weather conditions, the German troops ran short of food and ammunition. On January 31, 1943, German Sixth Army commander Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus finally surrendered.
A crushing defeat for Hitler, Stalingrad marked the turning point of the war. The Germans had reached the limits of their power. Now the forces against Hitler would only get stronger, as the Soviet Union and the United States focused their enormous reserves of manpower and industrial productivity on the war.
In the summer of 1942, the Germans advanced to Stalingard and toward the important oil fields in the Caucasus. The Soviet counteroffensive in November cut off the German army and defeated them in Stalingrad, the turning point in the European theater of World War II.
Of the 91,000 German soldiers taken prisoner by the Soviets in the battle of Stalingrad, most would die in captivity.
LOSSES AT STALINGRAD
Although Stalingrad was a defeat for the Germans, it is estimated that the more populous Soviets paid a higher price in casualties. They could afford such losses; the Germans could not. The majority of the German prisoners taken at Stalingrad died in captivity. German losses: 147,000 dead, 91,000 prisoners
Soviet losses:
about 500,000 dead
CHAPTER 5
OCCUPIED EUROPE
Throughout German-occupied Europe there were shortages of food and other essentials of life. Here French people search through refuse in the hope of finding scraps to eat.
At the peak of its military success, Nazi Germany controlled a huge area of Europe from the Atlantic to the Caucasus Mountains and from Norway to the Mediterranean Sea. Every country on the European mainland except the Soviet Union had either been conquered, was allied with Germany, or was a neutral country that made itself useful to the Nazis. In most countries that the Nazis occupied (Poland was a strong exception) they found political movements that were keen to imitate Nazi policies and that collaborated enthusiastically with the occupiers. The Vichy French government of Marshal Pétain, for example, actively collaborated with the Nazis even before the area of France it governed was occupied by the Wehrmacht, or German troops, at the end of 1942. Collaborators were often known as “Quislings,” after the Norwegian Nazi leader Vidkun Quisling, head of government in Occupied Norway.
At the end of 1942, Germany’s domination of Europe was at its fullest extent. German troops had recently occupied Vichy France and pushed deep inside the Soviet Union.
A German firing squad prepares a French Resistance fighter for execution. The Germans on many occasions executed groups of prisoners in retaliation for German officers or soldiers that had been killed by the Resistance.
STARVATION AND NEGLECT The scale of suffering under Nazi rule was almost unimaginable. Within Nazi-occupied Europe, many millions of people died in the course of the war—systematically or casually slaughtered by the Germans and their allies, or allowed to die of starvation or neglect.
MASTER RACE
Many Poles were deported to Germany for use as slave labor. Nazis issued instructions to fellow Germans who found themselves working alongside Poles, stressing German racial superiority: “Germans, the Pole is never your friend. He is inferior to every German on your farm or in your factory. Remember that you belong to the master nation.”
—Quoted in The Second World War, Henri Michel
The immediate demands of the war effort led the Germans to exploit conquered territories ever more intensely as the war became more desperate. For conquered peoples, this led to hardship and widespread malnutrition. Germany’s growing labor shortage was met by forcibly importing hundreds of thousands of foreign workers and by using prisoners of war and inmates of concentration camps as slaves forced to work in factories and on building projects.
The way the Nazis behaved was also based on their long-term aim to create a “New Order” on the continent. The Nazi “New Order” was to be a Europe based on the domination of the so-called Aryan race—Germans and other blond, blue-eyed people—over the rest. The Slavs, regarded by Nazis as subhuman, were to be either reduced to slavery or exterminated to make room for German settlers in the east. The Poles (a Slav people) lost about one in five of their people in the course of the war. Soviet prisoners of war (also Slavs) died in the millions in German camps, and further millions of Soviet citizens perished during the occupation. The Roma and Sinti (Gypsy) people of Europe also suffered grievously under Nazi rule.
THE JEWS The only people treated worse than the Slavs were the Jews. German military successes brought about eight million Jewish people under Nazi rule. There was no room for them (or for Gypsies, homosexuals, or the mentally retarded) in the Nazi New Order. Europe was to be “cleansed” of Jews, regarded by Hitler as a demonic race responsible for Germany’s and the world’s ills. From 1941 onward, the Nazis embarked upon a “Final Solution” of the “Jewish problem.” They set out systematically to exterminate the Jewish people—men, women, and children. At first, hundreds of thousands were killed by firing squad or gassed in the back of vans. Then death camps were established at sites inside occupied Poland—Majdanik, Chelmno, Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, Auschwitz—where they killed Jews in specially made gas chambers. The Nazis devoted massive resources to transport Jews from all over Europe to the death camps. It is estimated that about six million Jews were killed in this horrible effort, now known as the Holocaust.
Jewish people deported to Auschwitz by the Germans under crowded cattle-car conditions wait to discover their fate. Many, including almost all children, were gassed to death within hours of arrival at Auschwitz.
Nazis used these ovens at the Dachau concentration camp in Germany to cremate the bodies of prisoners they killed.
The brutality of Nazi rule naturally led to resistance. Secret movements were set up in all occupied countries. Their activities ranged from organizing acts of passive resistance such as strikes or the concealment of Jews from their persecutors, to sabotage, assassinations, uprisings, and full-scale guerrilla warfare. The largest armed resistance movements were in the occupied areas of the Soviet Union and in Yugoslavia, where two mutually hostile guerrilla armies, one led by the communist Josip Broz Tito and the other by the Royalist Colonel Draza Mihailovic, fought the Germans, Italians, and Croats. Other substantial partisan groups included those in southern France and in northern Italy toward the end of the war.
Resistance movements pinned down considerable numbers of German troops that could have been used elsewhere in the war. In Poland, for example, when the underground Home Army staged an armed insurrection in Warsaw in 1944, more than 20,000 German troops, backed by airpower, spent two months putting down the uprising. Although they tied up Nazi troops in this way, r
esistance groups were never strong enough to drive out the occupation forces unaided.
The Nazi camps dedicated to the extermination of Jews were located in the Polish General Government (German-occupied Poland). Concentration camps, used mostly to provide slave labor, were mainly in Germany. Auschwitz was both a concentration camp and an extermination camp.
A German soldier supervises the burial of massacred Polish Jews, probably in late 1941. The men digging would then also be killed.
Britain tried to encourage resistance through the Special Operations Executive (SOE), set up in 1940, later helped by the American Office of Strategic Services (OSS). The SOE and OSS sent secret agents into Occupied Europe and also delivered arms and equipment to resistance groups. These perilous operations cost many brave people their lives but had limited effect.
SAVED BY SLAVERY
The lives of many Jews and Slavs were saved by the German need for slave labor in their factories, which led the Nazis reluctantly to keep them alive. Hitler’s propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels wrote in his diary in March 1941: “We have to go easy on the 30,000 Jews who work in armaments production; we need them—who would have thought this could ever become possible?”
—Quoted in The Holocaust, R. G. Grant
As well as encouraging resistance movements, between 1940 and 1943 the Western Allies carried out a few scattered coastal raids on German-occupied Europe. The largest of these, a landing at Dieppe, northern France, by Canadian troops in August 1942, was a disaster, with over 3,000 of the 5,000 troops involved either killed or taken prisoner.
