The Second World War in 100 Facts

by Clive Pearson

  By spring 1941 Hitler had amassed huge forces on the frontier with the Soviet Union. But preparations were not complete and in May he was forced to divert German forces to the Balkans in order to bail out his hapless ally Mussolini.

  Finally, later than expected, on June 22 1941, a mighty army of 3 million German troops and 1 million foreign contingents crossed the 1,800-mile Soviet frontier stretching from Finland to the Black Sea.

  25. STALIN WOULDN’T BELIEVE THE TRUTH

  In 1941 Stalin viewed the spectre of war with Nazi Germany with horror. Under the pact with Hitler he believed he had bought himself time to build up his armed forces and his defences while Hitler fought the French and British. But Hitler’s rapid victories had laid bare Stalin’s policy and the Führer was now able to point his armies eastward. However, the Soviet dictator still clung to the hope that the German war machine would need more time to prepare an attack on the vastness of the Soviet Union.

  The Soviet Army was still woefully unprepared for a major conflict. The reason for this could be clearly laid at the feet of Stalin himself. In his usual paranoid and vindictive way he had recently set about removing any threat to his position from inside his own armed forces. In the period 1937–38 he had purged nearly all his top commanders along with 37,000 officers. Although many of these later returned (if they hadn’t been shot!), it created chaos and loss of morale just when war with Nazi Germany was in the offing. In addition, the Soviet Union was still especially vulnerable to an attack. Stalin had moved forces forward to the new frontline in Poland, but defences there were far from ready leaving his armies dangerously exposed. Moreover, the old defensive lines along the previous Soviet frontier had been abandoned and no longer offered any security.

  Stalin did all he could to keep his Nazi partner satisfied with the pact. The agreement had stipulated that raw materials such as cereals and oil were to be sent to Germany in exchange for military equipment, ships and engines. The Soviet leader made sure his country kept strictly to his side of the bargain.

  This was not to be enough, however. In the spring of 1941 it was clear that there was a massive build-up of Nazi forces on the Soviet frontier. Rather than face reality, Stalin tamely accepted the German story that the forces there were merely on manoeuvres. Further information that an offensive was about to take place in late June came from Britain, Japan and inside the German Air Ministry. Stalin refused to believe these sources as they had previously warned of a German offensive in May, but nothing had happened. They had in fact all been right but Hitler had delayed his offensive at the last moment. The Soviet leader also tried to comfort himself with the thought that late June was too late in the year to launch an attack.

  Stalin now further added to his woes. Fearful of provoking the Nazi leader he dismissed the need for mobilisation even when it he had clear information the attack was about to commence.

  Hitler was thus allowed to gain complete surprise. Soviet forces were left with no prior warning resulting in massive, catastrophic losses. Stalin’s foolhardy denial of reality almost led to the destruction of the Soviet Union itself. Lucky circumstance allowed it to survive.

  26. HITLER MADE A MISTAKE BY TURNING SOUTH

  As mentioned before (Fact 25) Stalin had left his forces unprepared when Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union was launched. The Germans, once again using their blitzkrieg tactics, made short shrift of Soviet forces facing them. Within a week Nazi forces had reached Minsk in Belorussia and soon ensnared 340,000 enemy soldiers. In the air the German Luftwaffe reigned almost supreme as many Russian planes were destroyed on the ground in the first few hours of 22 June. In fact, around 4,000 planes were lost in the first two weeks alone.

  The speed of the advance shook Stalin to the core. At first he retreated in despair to his country dacha but eventually he pulled himself together and took charge. Declaring himself Supreme Commander he set out the strategy to confront the invader. There would be fierce discipline, constant offensives and a ‘no retreat’ policy. This was a successful policy that had been used in the Russian Civil War in 1918–21, but was hardly appropriate now. The German Army was using vast encircling movements and such a policy only invited further disasters. As testament to Stalin’s new discipline General D. Pavlov and his staff were blamed for the failure at Minsk and shot. Other generals who were seen to have ‘failed’ met a similar fate.

  By August Hitler’s general staff believed that they could seize the Russian capital and bring about a decisive blow. However, Hitler could see rich pickings in the Southern front in Ukraine. Stalin had mistakenly placed a large part of his armies there and Hitler could see that by diverting his Army Group Centre south he could win a victory of epic proportions. The result was that in a short campaign Hitler’s armies bagged over 500,000 Soviet troops. No other country in history had suffered such losses but Stalin’s regime nevertheless continued in the war.

  It was now that Hitler discovered his error. Belatedly, he turned his attention on Moscow. Leningrad (today’s St Petersburg) was already surrounded and it seemed only a matter of time before the capital fell, too. Stalin sent in further scratch forces to hold the line and the people of Moscow came out to dig anti-tank ditches. Although further setbacks followed these measures served to delay the Nazi onslaught. By November the Russian winter closed in with all its traditional severity. With temperatures of -30 degrees Celsius the German juggernaut ground to a halt on the outskirts of Moscow. Lacking winter clothing and with the fuel in their tanks and vehicles frozen over, Hitler’s exhausted men were in a perilous state. Stalin now brought in his top general, G. K. Zhukov, to launch a counter-attack with fresh Siberian troops. In a desperate struggle Hitler’s front line was thrown back 100 miles and Moscow was saved.

  This proved significant. Hitler had failed to achieve a knock-out blow in the first year of campaigning. It was now set to be a lengthy war of attrition in which Germany was unlikely to be the winner.

  27. STALIN WAS A BRUTAL PARANOID DICTATOR

  Imagine a European dictatorship in the 1930s and ’40s. Opponents of the regime are carted off and face torture, execution or being placed in special camps in which they will be lucky to survive. Millions died in this way. You may think I’m talking about Hitler’s Germany, but in fact this is life inside the Soviet Union under the rule of Josef Stalin.

  How did it all start? Stalin means ‘man of steel’ and, of course, wasn’t his real name but one he chose for himself later. He was born Joseph Dzhughashvili in the small town of Gori in Georgia in 1878. At first he was set for the priesthood and studied hard at the local seminary where he often received the top grade in nearly all subjects. However, Georgia was under the rule of the Tsars and suddenly in his last year of study he dropped out and adopted the life of a Marxist revolutionary bent on removing their imperialist rule.

  Eventually, he reached the attention of Vladimir Lenin, leader of the hard-line Communist or Bolshevik movement in Russia. Lenin appreciated his ability to organise and as a result he rose in the party. Stalin took part in the Communist seizure of power in October 1917 but in the civil war that followed he showed his true colours. At Taritsyn on the River Volga he repressed the local peasants with such ferocity that even some other communists were shocked. The town was later renamed Stalingrad ‘in honour’ of his time there. He was by now beginning to show his real character – sly, volatile and vindictive.

  Lenin died in 1924 without a clear successor. Trotsky, the darling of the party, fancied his chances, but Stalin had taken control of the party apparatus and slowly removed him from the centre of power. Trotsky, fearing for his life, fled abroad.

  By 1928 Stalin was in complete control of the Soviet state and nobody was to be trusted. Anybody could be denounced as a counter-revolutionary and be sent to a gulag (labour camp) in Siberia or tortured in Lubyanka prison in Moscow. Even old comrades in the party were purged in a series of show trials and this was followed in 1938 when 90 per cent of the officer class were removed f
rom the army. Later on, Molotov, his Foreign Minister, was forced to denounce his own wife, who ended up in a gulag. Perhaps thirty million people Soviet citizens died in this way in his twenty-five-year rule. One of Stalin’s favourite bon mots was, ‘one death is a tragedy: one million is a statistic.’

  However, when it came to the war with Nazi Germany his rule did have beneficial effects. In the 1930s he had thoroughly modernised the economy and his tight grip on the state meant that Russia did not collapse as it had done in 1917 during the First World War.

  Stalin continued as leader until 1953 when he died of natural causes.

  28. A BRITISH SUBMARINE KEEPS A REINDEER ON BOARD!

  One of the supposed myths of the war was that a British submarine that was on a visit to Russia in 1941 took a deer on board, which was then accompanied back to England. It seems improbable but it is true – a recently unearthed photograph has confirmed the legend. How and why it came about is rather bizarre, as you might expect.

  A British submarine by the name of HMS Trident was sent on a goodwill mission to the Soviet Union after the Nazi invasion in June 1941. Her destination was Polyarny, near Murmansk, in the Arctic Circle. However, the submarine’s main mission was to attack German vessels off the Norwegian coast. In August, after a tour of duty, the submarine returned to Polyarny for much-needed repairs. It was then that the unexpected occurred.

  Prior to the British submarine’s departure the Russians hosted their British guests in a banquet. During the event Commander Geoffrey Sladen confided to his Soviet counterpart that his wife had trouble pushing her pram through the snow. Immediately, the Russian admiral knew the solution. His wife needed a reindeer to help her!

  The next morning, as the British crew prepared their departure, a large bag containing a young deer and a barrel of moss duly appeared on the dockside. Not wishing to disappoint their hosts, it was decided to take her on board. The animal was lowered through the torpedo tube of the submarine as it was thought that it would sleep in the torpedo and food store. She received the nickname Pollyanna after the base.

  Conditions soon proved difficult, however. The Russians had believed that the submarine would return immediately to the UK. Instead, it was sent on a six-week tour of duty. Unfortunately for the deer, the moss soon ran out but luckily she seemed to appreciate the scraps from the galley and the odd navigation chart. She also gorged herself on condensed milk. Instead of sleeping in the torpedo store as expected, Pollyanna preferred to settle down under the captain’s bed. The burly commander, it seems, had become something of a mother figure. With fifty-six crewmen and a rather smelly deer the air on board became rather putrid. However, whenever the submarine surfaced it was the special guest, panting heavily, who managed to force her way up the hatchway first.

  On arrival in Blyth in Northumberland a new problem was encountered. The reindeer had grown in size and could not be pulled out through the hatch. She had to be trussed up and pulled through with the help of a dockside winch and a broom.

  Afterwards, Pollyanna was found a home in Regent’s Park Zoo. She never forgot her experience and if she ever heard a siren she always lowered her head as if getting ready to run to the hatch. She died in February 1946. Ironically, this was only a few days after HMS Trident itself was decommissioned.

  29. GERMAN U-BOATS HAVE ‘HAPPY TIMES’

  During the 1930s Hitler had concentrated on building up a large surface fleet at the expense of his U-boat arm. Unfortunately for the German war effort, when war came in September 1939 these ships, although impressive in power and size, were far too few in number to affect the course of the war. With the defeat of France in June 1940, however, it soon became abundantly clear that the small U-boat fleet was now to be an important weapon in Hitler’s war against Britain. The hope was that the British could be starved into submission by cutting their imports upon which they depended.

  The ‘Battle of the Atlantic’ was to be key to Britain’s survival. In 1938 the British relied on imports of 68 million tons of dry cargo, but the U-boats were to cause this to be more than halved by 1942. In 1940 the Commander of the U-boat fleet, Admiral Karl Doenitz, reckoned he could bring Britain to her knees if he had 300 submarines; in fact at that time he only had twenty serviceable ones. However, Hitler now gave the go-ahead for a massive expansion.

  By 1941 U-boats were hunting across the Atlantic in large groups or ‘wolf-packs’. Their prey were merchant ships carrying vital supplies from America for Britain’s war-weary population. The U-boats lay in line waiting for the convoys with their naval escorts. The first half of 1941 was indeed a ‘happy time’; for example, between April and June 1941 1,100,000 tons of Allied shipping was lost. Furthermore, in September 1941 the German B-Dienst naval intelligence service had broken British naval codes. It was a grim time.

  The Germans did not have it all their own way, however. Bletchley Park, the British codebreaking facility, was able to break the German U-boat code called naval enigma in June 1941. This meant that many convoys were able to be rerouted, which resulted in a substantial diminution of shipping losses. Nevertheless, by the end of 1941 these losses were outstripping replacements by 7 million tons. It was still a dangerous situation.

  The year 1942 did not see an easing of the situation for the Allies. In December 1941 Hitler had declared war on the USA. German U-boats were now free to sink a large number of unescorted American merchant ships on the US east coast. To add to the Allied problems the Germans had altered the machine that sent out the naval enigma code, and for most of 1942 Bletchley Park remained blind. In addition, Doenitz now had his 300 U-boats, and the impact was devastating. A second ‘happy time’ resulted in 4 million tons of shipping being lost in the first eight months of that year.

  Churchill later declared ‘the only thing that really frightened me during the war was the U-boat peril’. New strategies and new technology would be required if the Allies were to win the war.

  30. THE MERCHANT NAVY WAS THE FORGOTTEN BRANCH OF BRITAIN’S ARMED SERVICES

  The merchant navy represented the lifeblood of Britain during the war and kept her supplied with vital food and supplies. However, the immense sacrifice of the merchant navy has often been overlooked. Almost on a daily basis merchant seamen had to face the gauntlet of enemy submarines, capital ships and mines. As testament to this, during the course of the war Britain lost 2,426 merchant ships and 11,331,933 tons of shipping. The sad tally of merchant seamen lost was 29,180, which is a higher casualty figure proportionately than that suffered by the three other UK armed services.

  Conditions were invariably treacherous, but perhaps the worst conditions were those encountered on the Arctic convoys that travelled around the North Cape of Norway to Archangel or Murmansk in the Soviet Union. Falling into the icy waters there could result in death in just a few minutes. But, of course, most merchant convoys were in the Atlantic.

  Inevitably, there are various epic tales. One famous event was the case of the San Demetrio. She was sailing in convoy HX-84 in October 1940 crossing the Atlantic from Halifax, Nova Scotia to the UK. The convoy was attacked by the German heavy cruiser Admiral Scheer. The German ship soon sent several shells into the San Demetrio. As she was carrying aviation fuel it was decided to abandon ship and to make for the two lifeboats. One lifeboat, which included the captain, was picked up the next day. The other lifeboat containing sixteen men drifted for twenty-four hours. Incredibly, they then sighted their old abandoned ship still afloat and after some hesitation decided to reboard it. Lacking navigational equipment but somehow steering by using the sun, they managed to reach the UK after seven days. It was remarkable that only 200 of the 12,000 tons of aviation fuel were lost; even more so was the fact that as the crew had achieved their feat unassisted, they were entitled to £14,000 of salvage money, which they shared out among themselves.

  Another example of remarkable survival is that of the freighter Anglo-Saxon. She set sail in August 1940 with a cargo of coal for Argentina as normal trad
e still took place during the war. Two hundred miles north of the Tropic of Cancer she was shelled by a German raider. Seven men made it to the small jolly boat. The boat drifted west for seventy days before two survivors staggered out onto a beach in the Bahamas. Unfortunately, one survivor later died on the journey home when his ship was sunk one day before it was due to reach England. Only one man, Robert Tapscott, eventually made it back to the UK.

  It is no wonder then that over 600 decorations were awarded for gallantry. Every day those manning the merchant ships knew their lives were on the line. Sadly, the only recognition of their terrible losses is a single memorial on London’s Tower Hill.

  31. HITLER WAS A SUPER JUNKIE

  As the absolute dictator of the German Reich, Hitler was aware that he needed to be on top form, especially for all public appearances. He felt he could not be seen to be suffering from any ailments that might impinge on his performance and could be seen as weakness.

  It was not just common colds that the Führer was concerned about. He also suffered from debilitating stomach cramps that would leave him doubled up in pain. In 1936 a quack doctor by the name of Theodor Morell came to his rescue by offering him regular injections of glucose and vitamins, and these successfully removed all symptoms.

  By August 1941, however, with the war in Russia reaching a crucial phase, Hitler found himself in need of something stronger. Morell started to inject Hitler with a special concoction of his own, which included the sexual hormone Testoviron, Orchikrin (a derivative of bull’s testicles) and extracts from other farm animals. Over time Morell used some eighty different medicinal cocktails.