Meanwhile, Allied troops continued to fight their way slowly up the peninsula. In their path lay the Pontine marshes, which Mussolini had drained at huge expense during the 1930s, converting them into farmland, settling them with 100,000 First World War veterans and their families, and building five new towns and eighteen villages on the site. The Germans determined to return them to their earlier state, to slow the Allied advance and at the same time wreak further revenge on the treacherous Italians. Not long after the Italian surrender, the area was visited by Erich Martini and Ernst Rodenwaldt, two medical specialists in malaria who worked at the Military Medical Academy in Berlin. Both men were backed by Himmler’s Ancestral Heritage research organization in the SS; Martini was on the advisory board of its research institute at Dachau. The two men directed the German army to turn off the pumps that kept the former marshes dry, so that by the end of the winter they were covered in water to a depth of 30 centimetres once more. Then, ignoring the appeals of Italian medical scientists, they put the pumps into reverse, drawing sea-water into the area, and destroyed the tidal gates keeping the sea out at high tide. On their orders German troops dynamited many of the pumps and carted off the rest to Germany, wrecked the equipment used to keep the drainage channels free of vegetation and mined the area around them, ensuring that the damage they caused would be long-lasting.108
The purpose of these measures was above all to reintroduce malaria into the marshes, for Martini himself had discovered in 1931 that only one kind of mosquito could survive and breed equally well in salt, fresh or brackish water, namely anopheles labranchiae, the vector of malaria. As a result of the flooding, the freshwater species of mosquito in the Pontine marshes were destroyed; virtually all of the mosquitoes now breeding furiously in the 98,000 acres of flooded land were carriers of the disease, in contrast to the situation in 1940, when they were on the way to being eradicated. Just to make sure the disease took hold, Martini and Rodenwaldt’s team had all the available stocks of quinine, the drug used to combat it, confiscated and taken to a secret location in Tuscany, far away from the marshes. In order to minimize the number of eyewitnesses, the Germans had evacuated the entire population of the marshlands, allowing them back only when their work had been completed. With their homes flooded or destroyed, many had to sleep in the open, where they quickly fell victim to the vast swarms of anopheles mosquitoes now breeding in the clogged drainage canals and bomb-craters of the area. Officially registered cases of malaria spiralled from just over 1,200 in 1943 to nearly 55,000 the following year, and 43,000 in 1945: the true number in the area in 1944 was later reckoned to be nearly double the officially recorded figure. With no quinine available, and medical services in disarray because of the war and the effective collapse of the Italian state, the impoverished inhabitants of the area, now suffering from malnutrition as well because of the destruction of their farmland and food supplies, fell victim to malaria. It had been deliberately reintroduced as an act of biological warfare, directed not only at Allied troops who might pass through the region, but also against the quarter of a million Italians who lived there, people now treated by the Germans no longer as allies but as racial inferiors whose act of treachery in deserting the Axis cause deserved the severest possible punishment.109
III
The Allied invasion of Italy was made possible by what had by now become a complete Allied domination of the Mediterranean Sea. In 1942-3 the British and Americans were able to land their armies in North Africa, Sicily and Italy with impunity. The German and Italian navies were unable to attack them. During the 1930s, Hitler had intended to build a large surface fleet, but the fate of the relatively few ships that had been constructed by 1939 was not encouraging. Early in the war, the British Royal Navy outmanoeuvred the German pocket battleship Count Spee and forced it to scuttle off the coast of Uruguay. Another Royal Navy unit boarded a German prison ship, the Altmark, off Norway on 16 February 1940 and freed 300 captured British sailors. More German ships were destroyed in the invasion of Norway, as we have seen. The German navy never managed to build an aircraft carrier, so aerial attacks on British shipping were limited by the range of land-based bombers. Aircraft based in Norway did attack convoys en route for Russia’s ports in the Arctic, but they were in short supply. The damage had to be done by German ships. So the commander of the German navy, Grand Admiral Raeder, sent out capital ships to attack the British. But they met with mixed fortunes. A new battleship, the Bismarck, sank the British cruiser Hood and badly mauled the battleship Prince of Wales, but it was located by a British flying boat and sunk on 27 May 1941. The pocket battleship Lützow was torpedoed on 13 June 1941, while the battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau were damaged by British mines while slipping through the English Channel on their way from France to Norway early the following year, and were effectively put out of action. A British commando raid on the port of St Nazaire destroyed the only Atlantic dock capable of repairing the one remaining battleship, Tirpitz, which was repeatedly attacked in its Norwegian bolt-hole until it was hit by a British mini-submarine raid in September 1943 and then put permanently out of action by bombing. The lessons were clear. Conventional naval forces would not succeed. Grand Admiral Raeder, who had continued to advocate surface attacks throughout this period, was summarily dismissed on 30 January 1943 and replaced by Admiral Karl Dönitz, commander of the submarine fleet, who only just managed to dissuade Hitler from decommissioning all the German navy’s remaining big ships and using their guns for coastal defence.110
Hitler had in fact long since focused resources on the construction of U-boats. But, in the early part of the war, hampered by shortages of essential raw materials such as copper and rubber, and by the concentration of resources on planning for the land invasion of France, the ambitious plans of Dönitz to construct 600 U-boats had stood no chance of being realized. In fact, only twenty were built between the outbreak of the war and the summer of 1940. The infiltration of a submarine into the British naval base at Scapa Flow, where it sank the battleship Royal Oak, was a spectacular propaganda coup. But far more serious was the fact that the U-boats, few in number though they were, immediately launched submarine attacks on Allied shipping in an attempt to disrupt supplies. They were helped by their success in breaking the codes into which the British encrypted their radio transmissions. By March 1940 they had sunk nearly 680,000 tons of British shipping. This caused serious alarm in London. Yet this was only a fraction of the total. Losses, breakdowns and lengthy periods in port for repairs meant that there were only twenty-five U-boats operating in the Altantic by the summer of 1940. This was nowhere near sufficient to cut off Britain’s transatlantic supply lines.111
As well as being few in number, German submarines were also not much more technically advanced than they had been in the First World War. They still had to sail mostly on the surface, where they moved slowly and could easily be spotted by enemy planes; diving was only possible for relatively short periods of time. They were also disadvantaged by their lack of air reconnaissance support, so that they had to find the ships themselves. The British set up a convoy system almost immediately, providing destroyer protection for vulnerable merchant ships. Scanning the horizon anxiously for the tell-tale columns of smoke from British ships rising faintly over the horizon, German submariners had to take visual aim before releasing their torpedoes. Diving was a defensive tactic, a last-resort measure undertaken to evade the attentions of the accompanying destroyers and their depth-charges. It was easy to be spotted, and only a few losses among the U-boat fleet would severely damage the attempt to destroy Britain’s seaborne supply lines.112 A really major construction campaign might have given the U-boats the upper hand. They were far cheaper to build than surface warships. Hitler ordered the rate of construction to be stepped up to twenty-five submarines a month in July 1940. But the effects were slow in coming through. By the end of the year, an observer like the intellectual soldier Hans Meier-Welcker was forced to admit: ‘We cannot break English s
ea-power.’113 Other, more senior, figures agreed. A short time afterwards, Hitler changed priorities back to the army, and by March 1941 only seventy-two additional submarines had been delivered. Over the same period, the twenty-odd U-boats cruising the Atlantic at any one time none the less managed to sink more than 2 million tons of British shipping. However, the convoy system was then reinforced, and the British succeeded in deciphering German radio codes, so that losses had fallen to below 100,000 tons a month by the summer of 1941.114
In the first months after war was declared on the USA, German submarines lurking off the American coast and around the Caribbean took advantage of the Americans’ failure to dim the lights of coastal towns to sink large quantities of supply ships setting out across the Atlantic without armed naval escort. By the end of August 1942, 485 ships had been sunk, totalling more than two and a half million tons. For most of 1942, until it was finally broken in December 1942, a new German cipher prevented the British from decoding naval messages while the Germans for their part were able to decipher British radio traffic. In November 1942 alone 860,000 tons of Allied shipping were sunk, 720,000 of them by submarines. By this time, the number of U-boats at sea had increased from twenty-two in January 1942 to more than 100. Already on 27 June 1942 the Arctic convoy PQ17, carrying military supplies to the Soviet Union, had been largely destroyed by German planes and submarines with the loss of twenty-six out of thirty-nine ships after the naval authorities in London had ordered it to scatter in the erroneous belief that the battleship Tirpitz had left port to attack it. Many lessons were learned from this debacle, and after a short break the Arctic convoys resumed in September 1942, this time with a greater degree of success. However, attempts to bomb the shipyards where the U-boats were built and the harbours where they rested proved a costly failure. The ‘Battle of the Atlantic’, as it was dubbed, reached a climax in the first four months of 1943 in a series of hard-fought engagements between convoy escorts and German submarines, of which there were now more than 120 in the North Atlantic.115 The outcome seemed in the balance.
But the British were able to decode German naval signals traffic again from December 1942 and route their convoys away from the waiting U-boats.116 The submarines were forced to search for Allied convoys mainly by sailing in loosely knit groups (‘wolf-packs’) which converged when one of them spotted the enemy. Shore-to-ship radio traffic with the convoys was also intercepted by the German navy from 1941 until June 1943, when a new code was introduced, thus helping the submarines find the convoys or at least work out where they were heading. But the radio signals used by the wolf-pack U-boats to communicate with one another were intercepted by the convoy escort ships. The submarines could not send and receive radio signals while submerged, and when under water they could only move very slowly, so they spent most of their time on the surface, making them vulnerable to location and attack. Under water, they could be located by echo-sounding and damaged by depth-charges. Submarines generally attacked from the surface and at night, so the convoy escorts developed a searchlight system to locate them. From 1943 small aircraft carriers accompanied the convoys. This made a huge difference, not least to the Arctic convoys. In February 1943 for the first time the Allies, above all the Americans, were building more ship tonnage than the Germans were sinking. By May 1943 U-boat losses were running at one a day and submarine commanders were becoming reluctant to engage the enemy. On 24 May 1943 Admiral D̈nitz conceded defeat and ordered the submarine fleet to move out of the North Atlantic. U-boats continued to be constructed in substantial numbers, new, more advanced types were commissioned, and the war at sea continued, but the threat to Allied supplies across the Atlantic and through the Arctic Ocean was never really significant again.117
‘HELL HAS BROKEN OUT’
I
On the Eastern Front, the defeat of the German Sixth Army at Stalingrad marked the beginning of a long retreat that was only to end with total defeat in Berlin just over two years later. It was the decisive turning-point of the war in the east.118 Even before Paulus and his bedraggled forces had surrendered, Army Group A (the other half of Army Group South) was also getting into trouble. In the summer of 1942 Army Group A had made rapid advances through the Caucasus as the Red Army retreated while the Soviet generals desperately tried to organize reinforcements of men and supplies. By the early autumn, the German armies were exhausted, reduced in numbers, dependent on long and precarious supply lines, and weakened by being split into a number of different spearheads. By mid-September 1942, despite their rapid advances, they were still hundreds of miles away from their objectives, the oilfields at Grozny and Baku. The commander of Army Group A, Field Marshal Wilhelm List, concluded that he simply did not have the resources to drive the Russians back across the mountain passes before winter set in. Told of the situation, Hitler flew into a towering rage and sacked List, temporarily taking over command of Army Group A himself, though he did not trouble to visit the scene of operations. Hitler still thought that he would be able to conquer the Caspian oilfields. But even he eventually had to admit that this would not happen in 1942. The Red Army finally organized itself enough to make a stand. For many German soldiers, the advance through the fragrant orchards, the vineyards and the maize fields, with snow-capped mountains on the horizon, had seemed almost idyllic. But at the city of Ordzhonikide, they met with insurmountable resistance. ‘None of us,’ wrote one young artilleryman on 2 November, ‘has experienced days such as these. Hell has broken out.’119 ‘What we have experienced in the last two weeks,’ he wrote on 14 November 1942, ‘was dreadful.’120 Surrounded by Red Army troops, the German forces fought their way out; but there was nowhere to go but backwards. The offensive was not just stalled, it was over.121
Retreat now became the only option, as the Soviet thrust to the west of Stalingrad not only cut off Paulus’s Sixth Army but also threatened other German positions. Army Group A would be isolated as well if Soviet forces managed to capture Rostov and seal off the Caucasus on the northern side. As he became increasingly preoccupied with Stalingrad, Hitler appointed Field Marshal Ewald von Kleist to command Army Group A. Kleist immediately saw the danger of being cut off. On 27 December 1942 Manstein persuaded Zeitzler to ask Hitler for permission to withdraw from the Caucasus. Hitler reluctantly gave his assent. Perhaps he realized that with the Sixth Army tied up in Stalingrad and key units sent earlier to the north, it would not be possible to get reinforcements to the Caucasus. Shortly afterwards, he changed his mind; but it was too late: Zeitzler had telephoned through the order and the retreat had begun. Pursued by relatively weak Soviet forces, the German troops marched all the way back to Rostov-on-Don, and then, as the Red Army advanced westwards in the wake of its victory at Stalingrad, the Germans were forced to retreat even further.122 The retreat depressed many of the troops. ‘You could almost break into tears,’ wrote Albert Neuhaus to his wife on 16 February 1943, ‘when you think what the conquest of these territories has cost in sacrifice and effort. You mustn’t think about it . . . There seems to be a real crisis at the moment and you could almost lose your courage if you didn’t have a devout heart.’123 This was one of his last letters home. Albert Neuhaus fell to a Red Army bullet just under a month later, on 11 March 1943.124
The Eastern Front had been reconstructed and to some extent stabilized by these withdrawals. Fresh troops were transferred from Western Europe, while Manstein reorganized and re-equipped his forces ready for a counter-attack. On 19 February 1943, Army Group South sent two panzer armies northwards, pulverizing the Soviet advance forces and retaking Kharkov, while another panzer army destroyed the Soviet armour further east. A month later, the spring thaw turned everything to mud and stopped further movement for the time being. But neither Hitler nor the army leadership had any illusions about these limited gains. After Stalingrad, they knew, for all the bold rhetoric in which the Nazi leadership continued to indulge, that Germany had gone over to the defensive on the Eastern Front. The main priority was now to prese
rve control over the heavy-industrial areas of the Donets Basin, with its rich and essential deposits of coal and ores. Its loss would mean the end of the war, Hitler told the generals.125 What was needed was a tactical offensive designed to straighten out the German front, sacrificing as little in men and armaments as possible, and weakening the Red Army sufficiently to stop it launching a successful summer offensive. The possibilities were limited. The German generals knew that the Red Army now had nearly twice as many men and three or four times as many artillery pieces and tanks as they did on the Eastern Front. Where in these circumstances would it be safest to launch the offensive? As they had done before Moscow, the generals argued amongst themselves and were unable to take a united decision. The Combined Armed Forces Supreme Command disagreed with the Army Supreme Command on whether it was in any case more important to strengthen defences in Italy and the west. And as before Moscow, Hitler was eventually forced to take the decision himself. The blow, he ordered, would fall at Kursk, where a salient in the front line exposed the Soviet forces to a classic encircling manoeuvre.126
The Third Reich at War Page 59
