The Second World War in 100 Facts

by Clive Pearson

  On 23 August units of Army Group B reached the Volga River. German forces were soon penetrating Stalingrad and it seemed that within a few days the city would fall. By 13 September General Paulus, commander of the German 6th Army, was preparing for a final push on the last remaining pockets of Soviet resistance. With heroic and unimaginable sacrifice the defenders held on. The city had refused to fall and fresh men and supplies were constantly ferried across the Volga in support. Both sides were now joined in a desperate and seemingly endless hand-to-hand struggle. However, Stalin was waiting to spring a trap.

  For the Germans Operation Blue had started well but would end in disaster.

  46. IN THE UKRAINE FACTORIES AND WORKERS ARE TRANSPORTED EASTWARDS

  One of the reasons that the Soviet Union was able to achieve a military turnaround by the end of 1942 was due to the incredible transportation of men and machines out of the Ukraine in the second half of 1941. It was often carried out under the most arduous of circumstances with German forces perhaps only hours away as complete factories, together with their workforces, were placed onto trains and moved wholesale to the Urals or Siberia. As many as 2,600 factories were transported in this way.

  Even more incredible was the vast exodus of people who accompanied these factories or sought to escape the invader. It is believed as many as 25 million men, women and children left their homes. Many went on foot.

  The journey there was not always the most difficult part. Very often the new factories were to be set up on undeveloped sites in the open countryside. Sometimes the conditions were seemingly impossible with permafrost and a lack of food and shelter. At one tank factory it was reported that 8,000 female workers were living in industrial bunkers – literally holes in the ground. Nevertheless, despite these wretched conditions Russian workers were soon able to reconstruct these factories to get them fully operational again.

  The results were staggering. The Nazi onslaught had reduced the Soviet economy to a mere rump of its former self, but by the last half of 1942 it managed to turn out 13,000 tanks and 15,000 aircraft and even outstrip what Nazi Germany produced in a whole year.

  47. THE BURMA CAMPAIGN MARKED THE LONGEST RETREAT IN BRITISH MILITARY HISTORY

  You may recall that at the end of 1941 the Japanese had launched offensives that had captured Hong Kong and would soon overrun Singapore. However, the Japanese had not waited for the fall of Singapore before extending their offensive campaign. Already at the end of January 1942 their forces had crossed over the Siam (Thailand) frontier and entered Burma.

  Burma had become part of the British Empire when Churchill’s father, Lord Randolph Churchill, had annexed it in 1886 while secretary for India. For the Japanese Burma was a vital military objective. Strategically it could be a launch pad for an invasion of India but more importantly it cut the Allies’ Burma Road, which was a major land route into China. For some time the Americans had been providing much-needed supplies to the Chinese via this road and the Japanese were determined to sever the link. In addition, Burma was rich in oil and minerals.

  As elsewhere the British military thinking was that because of the lack of good metalled roads and the thick jungle Burma was inaccessible for the enemy. They were about to be in for a shock. Only two divisions were available to stave off the attack – the British 1st Burma Division and the poorly trained 17th Indian Division (staffed by British officers). Despite the arrival of some reinforcements British forces would be woefully inadequate.

  Rangoon, the capital, lay on the southern coast and was clearly vulnerable. Attempts to hold back the Japanese offensive soon proved fruitless, but British forces under the command of Sir Harold Alexander managed to extricate themselves just in time. These troops now had to endure a long march into the interior of Burma relentlessly pursued by a rampant Japanese foe. Their eventual destination would be India.

  The first town on the way was Mandalay. British and Commonwealth soldiers had to struggle through the jungle at the hottest time of the year. The Japanese were now not the only enemy they had to contend with as the jungle was alive with nasties such as 15-inch poisonous centipedes, spiders the size of plates, and leeches. In addition, soldiers soon picked up diseases such as malaria, dysentery, typhus and jungle sores. Above all there was a scarcity of water and the troops often became numb with exhaustion.

  Alexander and Major-General Bill Slim managed to skilfully keep the troops just ahead of the enemy despite the attempts of the Japanese to use the rivers to outflank them. Mandalay was reached safely but soon had to be abandoned in April for fear of encirclement. Eventually, after another month of forced marches a rather bedraggled and rag-tag army staggered into Assam in India.

  The Burmese Army had marched an incredible 1,000 miles, which ranks as the longest retreat in British military history. Despite being constantly harried and without regular supplies, they had somehow avoided collapse and rout. Excellent generalship from Alexander and Slim had saved the empire and India from disaster.

  48. SHOSTAKOVICH SHOWS SOLIDARITY WITH THE BESIEGED LENINGRADERS

  Dmitri Shostakovich is remembered as one of the great composers of Communist Russia. When German forces reached the outskirts of Leningrad in September 1941 he found himself, like so many ordinary Russians, unable to escape. There was no alternative but to stay and suffer the siege.

  Shostakovich had already started on his Seventh Symphony before the war began but continued to work hard at it even as bombs and shells exploded around him. Those who heard his first two movements were enthralled. After a month he was evacuated out of Leningrad and the composer set about quickly finishing his masterpiece. The first performance was aired in March 1942 on Soviet radio. The first movement especially struck a chord with its famous ‘invasion theme’. The score was soon flown out to London and America where performances received critical acclaim.

  Leningraders, however, had to wait longer to hear the symphony. The Leningrad Radio Orchestra had trouble collecting together their players due to the dreadful rigours of the siege. Eventually, after much practice and after receiving extra rations, the symphony was duly played on 9 August. It was a momentous occasion. Prior to the concert Soviet forces fired a massive salvo of shells onto the besieging Germans to ensure their silence. Then the masterpiece was played. Loudspeakers even relayed it to enemy. The music unleashed a massive outpouring of emotion as it seemed to encapsulate all the horrific suffering of the people there.

  49. BLETCHLEY WAS THE GOLDEN GOOSE THAT NEVER CACKLED

  During much of the war the Allies held an important advantage over the Axis enemy. The secret codes that were transmitted by their armed forces were picked up and eventually broken by Britain’s codebreaking establishment in Bletchley Park, near Milton Keynes. The enigma machine used by German armed forces to send their encoded messages seemed impregnable as the odds of breaking it were 159 million million million to one. How it was achieved is a remarkable story.

  The British were lucky in their enterprise from the start as Polish codebreakers managed to smuggle two examples of the machine out of Warsaw just before Nazi forces arrived. With help from the Poles the British experts could see how it operated and could begin to crack it. However, it was a daunting task. The machine looked something like a typewriter with three to five rotor wheels in the top part and a plug board in the lower section. The complexity of the machine meant that there were over 17,000 different settings. Once a letter was pressed an electrical impulse was sent twice through the system and eventually a different letter would emerge on a display panel. The messages themselves were sent using radio waves, which would then be picked up and sent on to Bletchley. What was received looked like gobbledegook.

  To begin with the codebreaking was agonisingly slow. Mathematicians, crossword solvers and top chess players were set to work with their crib sheets, but they could take days or weeks to crack a single message, by which time their information had become largely redundant. A further problem was that the settings were changed
daily by the Germans according to a secret code book. Added to this each section of the German armed forces had a different system. Something needed to be done to speed up the whole process.

  Alan Turing, a fellow of the University of Cambridge and something of a mathematical genius, had the answer. He introduced his ‘bombes’, which were fast-running electrical machines that could test possible settings at incredible speeds. Now the codes could often be cracked within hours.

  Turing’s contribution did not end there. By 1943 one frustrating code still eluded the Bletchley team. This was the one used by Hitler himself when communicating with his generals. His machine was called Lorenz and had as many as twelve rotor wheels, making it the most formidable of all. Turing had drawn up a plan for a computer prior to the war and the Bletchley people now used that model to create the first programmable electronic computer in order to crack Lorenz. This new machine, dubbed ‘Colossus’, could process characters at 5,000 characters per second. Soon Hitler’s messages were laid before the Allied top brass in almost real time.

  ‘Ultra’, as the codebreakers’ information was called, had a decisive impact in the war, especially in such conflicts as the U-boat war in the Atlantic, the desert war and D-Day. Churchill called Bletchley his ‘golden goose that never cackled’ as its secrets were never revealed to the enemy.

  50. MONTY SENDS THE ‘DESERT FOX’ PACKING

  By July 1942 Erwin Rommel, the commander of German forces in North Africa, had pushed British and Commonwealth forces 570 miles back across Libya and into Egypt. His army was now within striking distance of Alexandria and the Suez Canal. Their capture would be a serious blow to the British war effort in the Mediterranean, the Middle East and beyond.

  Rommel had built up quite a reputation for himself due to his skilful and imaginative use of his panzer forces. British troops had called him the ‘Desert Fox’ while the British Eighth Army, which opposed him, was dubbed the ‘Desert Rats’. For the moment the British had managed to avoid disaster by holding Rommel at a line called El Alamein. Churchill had expressed his strong displeasure with the performance of his commanders thus far in the desert war. So out went one lot of generals and in came Lieutenant-General Bernard Montgomery or ‘Monty’.

  Montgomery immediately set about restoring morale. He exuded self-confidence and decisiveness and told the troops that there could be no further withdrawals. Rommel could and would be defeated. The new British commander had a couple of aces up his sleeve, however. For one thing he knew that Rommel’s Axis forces were seriously overstretched due to the 2,000-mile supply line from Tunisia. From the codebreakers at Bletchley Park (FACT 49) he knew exactly Rommel’s situation and his plans. In addition, British forces were now being plentifully resupplied with tanks, artillery and men. By the autumn Montgomery had an advantage of two to one in military forces at his disposal. This meant that when the next battle came Rommel would almost inevitably be on the back foot.

  Montgomery planned the battle meticulously. When it came on 23 October it was not a battle of manoeuvre. The Germans were at first bludgeoned with a massive artillery barrage before infantry and armour were pushed forward with the intention of punching a hole in the German lines. However, Axis forces were well dug in behind miles of minefields. It was not until 3 November, ten days later, that Rommel’s German and Italian forces fled the battlefield. Hitler had commanded him to stay and fight to the last man – ‘Victory or death’. The German commander, however, wisely disobeyed this insane order and headed back westwards across the desert.

  For the Allies it marked the first defeat of German armed forces in the west. It was also the last great British and Commonwealth victory in the war before the Americans joined in. Bells rang out across Britain to celebrate the victory. Churchill noted later that ‘Before Alamein we never had a victory, after Alamein we never had a defeat.’

  The victory was not total, however. Rommel had managed to extricate the remnants of his forces and escape back to Tunisia. Many felt that Monty had let the Germans off the hook. With only twenty tanks left surely Rommel’s forces should have been wiped out there and then. As it was, the war there dragged on for another seven months.

  51. STALINGRAD WAS A HUGE TURNING POINT IN THE WAR

  You may recall that the German offensive code-named Operation Blue had started well. Nazi forces had swept eastwards across the Ukraine, inflicted more massive defeats on the Soviets before reaching the Volga River. There was a feeling of euphoria in the German camp as it seemed that their Soviet enemy was finished. After such crushing defeats surely the enemy would be unable to muster any more armies.

  Upon reaching Stalingrad, however, the resistance of the enemy suddenly stiffened. Despite continuing losses from the first day, Soviet forces refused to be bowed. During September and October the German 6th Army, aided by continual aerial bombardment, launched numerous offensives to take the city, but Soviet forces refused to crack.

  Meanwhile, a new change of direction was happening in the Soviet army headquarters, or Stavka. Stalin by August 1942 had decided on a more collegiate approach to decision making. As the German forces entered Stalingrad the Soviet leader proposed the usual immediate counter-attack. When his two top generals, Zhukov and Vasilevsky, muttered something about ‘another solution’, Stalin famously turned round and asked ‘what other solution?’ For the first time Stalin was prepared to listen to his generals. Instead of attacking, his new team decided to let the Germans continue their advance into the city. New Soviet armies would be held in reserve, thoroughly trained and prepared until the propitious moment came for a mighty counter-punch.

  Inside Stalingrad the battle became ever-more bitter, bringing unimaginable losses and suffering; for example, Rodimtsev’s division of 10,000 men was reduced to only 320 in one short battle. The fighting was brutal with no quarter given. Strategic points such as the Red October Factory exchanged hands several times. Snipers were a continuous hazard. The Soviet hero was General Vasily Chuikov, who commanded the troops inside Stalingrad. His bunker was right in the front line and his ruthless and heroic leadership prevented the city from falling. However, one last final push by the Germans in November left the Soviets with just two small pockets supplied from across the Volga River. But still the city refused to fall.

  Hitler, in a speech that month, had expressed his confidence that the battle would soon be over. However, at that very moment General Zhukov unleashed a vast double envelopment of Stalingrad. Romanian and Italian forces, guarding the flanks of the German Army to the north and south, were overwhelmed. The Soviet pincers linked up on 23 November leaving Von Paulus’s forces trapped inside. General Manstein desperately tried to reach them with a relieving army, but it was of no avail. With few supplies getting in and with sub-zero temperatures, the end was inevitable. On the 2 February General Paulus formally surrendered his frostbitten and half-starved army.

  Of an original German force of 275,000 men only 91,000 shuffled off into captivity. However, the Soviet losses in the Stalingrad campaign had amounted to over one million. For Hitler, though, it was a disaster and a turning point as for Nazi Germany these were irreparable losses.

  52. MARSHALL ZHUKOV WAS THE MAN WHO SAVED THE SOVIET UNION

  Marshall Georgi K. Zhukov was one of the most outstanding generals of the Second World War. He was a tough and decisive commander who time and time again won important battles when the future of his country hung in the balance. But perhaps his greatest contribution was his ability to stand up to the fearsome Soviet leader, Josef Stalin. It was Zhukov, and Zhukov alone, who had the courage to make the dictator see sense regarding his direction of the war. At Stalingrad, as we have seen (Fact 51), it proved crucial.

  Zhukov started life as a humble shoemaker’s son. During the First World War he was drafted into the imperial cavalry where he immediately showed promise and was awarded the Cross of St George twice for bravery. After the Russian Revolution in October 1917 he sided with the communists and fought for the Re
d Army. During the 1920s and 1930s he rapidly rose through the ranks and somehow survived the dictator’s ferocious purges of the military top brass.

  It would seem that Stalin liked or admired Zhukov, for in 1938 he was put in charge of a whole army group in the Russian Far East. Here he showed his abilities when a year later he inflicted a crucial defeat on the Japanese, who were pushing up through northern China. In January 1941 he was awarded the position of Chief of the General Staff but was dismissed after he disagreed with the Soviet leader over how to react to the Nazi invasion. Stalin despatched him off to command the reserve army outside Smolensk, where he inflicted the first setback on German forces. Perhaps as the result of this in September that year Stalin recalled him and sent him on missions to firstly save Leningrad and then later Moscow from the Nazis.

  By 1942 he was rehabilitated and persuaded Stalin to accept his plans for the Battle of Stalingrad, which resulted in the first decisive victory. From then on he played an important role in Soviet triumphs all the way to the final battle for Berlin.

  After the war Stalin became suspicious and jealous of this illustrious hero and gave him minor postings far from Moscow. After the death of Stalin in 1953 he played an important part in the removal of the dictator’s hated hatchet man, Lavrentiy Beria, and was rewarded with the post of Defence Minister. He died in 1974.

  Zhukov was a tough-minded military commander who stood up to the Soviet dictator. However, his story is not all heroic. He was never afraid to sacrifice his soldiers in order to secure a victory. He was generally brusque and coarse and was not averse to threatening his own generals with execution. Nevertheless, he did save the Soviet people in their hour of need.