A History of War in 100 Battles

by Richard Overy

  The other axes of advance also went the way of the Neapolitans to begin with. Two columns from the east swept towards Caserta, the main city and road junction. On the right of the line of Garibaldini, a division commanded by Nino Bixio first absorbed the attack, then drove the enemy back in disorder. The central column was more successful and soon reached and occupied Caserta Vecchia. After hours of fighting, the exhausted Neapolitans, unaware of the defeats elsewhere, slept in and around the small town. Sirtori ordered those units that had seen the least fighting to assemble during the night for an attack on the unwary Neapolitans. Early in the morning they woke to gunfire and the sound of the approaching enemy. The 3,000 men were surrounded and either killed or captured. The battle was over. Garibaldi and his thousands had made possible the creation of a new Italy, for the death or injury of 1,634 of his men against the 1,128 casualties and 2,160 prisoners suffered by his enemy.

  Garibaldi was essential to the victory, not only for his capacity to outthink the professional officers he opposed, but for his courageous and conspicuous presence at all points of a wide and dangerous battlefield. Nevertheless, Victor Emmanuel refused on his arrival to review the Garibaldini, unable to embrace the idea that patriotic irregulars and foreign volunteers alone could have secured victory. Disillusioned, Garibaldi abandoned his army and departed for his home at Caprera carrying, it is alleged, a year’s supply of macaroni. ‘You have done much,’ he told his men, ‘with scant means in a short time’ – a fitting epitaph for an unpredictable adventure against seemingly invincible odds, and a modest assessment of his own charismatic contribution.

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  No. 15 BATTLE FOR WARSAW

  13-20 August 1920

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  There are few more obvious examples of the importance of leadership in the history of modern war than the story of Marshal Józef Piłsudski’s rout of the Red Army before the gates of Warsaw in the summer of 1920. What made the battle all the more extraordinary was the curious blend of old and new. There were pitched engagements between cavalry units with lance and sabre; the progress of the Red cavalry was marked by a level of violence towards the troops and populations in its path that resembled the Thirty Years’ War of the seventeenth century; but there were primitive tanks, armoured trains and a handful of aircraft to show that this was also a conflict of the twentieth.

  Piłsudski was a remarkable individual. Born in 1867 in a Poland divided between Russia, Prussia and Austria, he spent thirty years campaigning for Polish independence as a clandestine terrorist. Before the war, he organized a Polish armed force with 20,000 volunteers, known as the Legion. When war broke out that summer, the Austrian army recruited the Legion to fight against Russia and when the war ended, these experienced legionaries formed the core of a new Polish army under Piłsudski’s command. Their job was to build a new Polish state with their commander as its first president. The victorious Allies were willing to recognize Poland’s right at last to independence, but they had no means to help the infant state in case of any threat. Germany was temporarily immobilized by defeat, but revolutionary Russia, struggling under Lenin to defeat its many anti-communist enemies, was an unknown quantity.

  The Bolshevik leaders in Moscow had grandiose ambitions. The gradual defeat of the White armies in the Russian Civil War paved the way for a revolutionary crusade into Europe. In February 1920, Lenin ordered a war against Poland as the first stage in the possible ‘liberation’ of the workers and peasants of eastern and central Europe. There was talk of sweeping through to Germany and Italy; world revolution seemed within the grasp of the new Red Army. The Soviet troops were commanded by a spirited commander, Mikhail Tukhachevsky, a young Russian soldier who had been a prisoner-of-war for most of the First World War but who was nevertheless trusted by the Red Army commander, Leon Trotsky, to organize and lead whole armies. By chance, both Tukhachevsky and Piłsudski were avid readers of Napoleon; it was the Pole, however, who drew the better lessons.

  This colour lithograph of the Polish commander at the defence of Warsaw in 1920, Marshal Jósef Pilsudski, was made by the Polish-Jewish artist Arthur Szyk (1894-1951), who served as a cavalry officer during the Polish-Soviet war. Pilsudski went on to become prime minister of Poland in 1926 while Szyk moved to live and work in Paris in 1921.

  In April, the new Polish army, a hotch-potch of units from the Great War and volunteer patriots, undertook a pre-emptive strike against the Red Army in Ukraine and Belorussia. It failed to achieve anything decisive, and in May a Russian counter-offensive pushed the Poles back rapidly. Two large army groups were formed: one in the north striking from Belorussia; one in the south made up of cavalry, the Konarmia, under the swashbuckling horseman, Semyon Budionny, which swept like a Tatar horde against the Poles, driving them back towards Lvov, though suffering heavy losses in the process. On 29 May, Budionny’s Cossacks met the Polish 1st Krechowiecki Lancers and an old-fashioned encounter took place between a champion chosen from each side. The two men rode at each other, but the Polish lancer was quicker, slashing his opponent open from the neck to the waist. The Cossacks turned and fled.

  In the north, an even more terrifying army of horsemen was formed under Gaia Bzhishkian, nicknamed Gai Khan because of his reputation for exceptional savagery. His army, known as the Konkorpus III, was composed of Circassian cavalry from the Caucasus, more used to sabres than rifles. By July, the Red Army had crossed the River Bug and was bearing down on Warsaw, spearheaded by Gai’s terrifying vanguard. Confidence rose in Moscow. A provisional communist government was formed; Lenin expected Tukhachevsky to enter the Polish capital in early August 1920 and declare a communist Poland.

  Polish forces were short of equipment – even boots and uniforms – and spent much of the summer retreating in haste before the apparently unstoppable Red Army, whose reputation for rape, pillage and slaughter preceded them; Polish villagers fled west, while Polish soldiers lost the will to defend themselves. On 8 August, the Russian armies were ordered to seize Warsaw, 30 kilometres (20 miles) from the Russian lines. There were around 68,000 Poles facing two Russian army groups of between 100,000 and 130,000. Both sides were exhausted and short of materiel after the long summer’s fighting, but the Polish position seemed hopeless. Warsaw was filled with a mood of panic. On 5 August, Piłsudski locked himself away in a room in the Belvedere Palace in the capital to think out a way to snatch victory from the jaws of imminent defeat.

  His solution was exceptionally daring. He planned to leave weaker forces in front of Warsaw under the overall command of General Józef Haller, while using the armies of the southern Polish wing to swing north to strike the Russian armies an unexpected and annihilating blow in the flank and rear. If it worked, victory was possible; if it failed, Warsaw would be taken anyway. Having organized the defence of Warsaw, Piłsudski headed south where he reviewed all his troops, instilling in them at last a belief in the possibility that the Russian onrush could be halted. This tall, tough, rough-hewn man, with dark bushy brows and a large military moustache, was an inspiration to the dispirited soldiers around him and he posed the chief obstacle between Tukhachevsky and a quick victory.

  The Russian armies began the assault on Warsaw on 13 August. There were problems with the Red Army, too. The long supply line back to Belorussia left units short of ammunition and reserves; most soldiers were barefoot, fighting in rags or a jumble of borrowed clothing. They were bullied by political commissars and sustained only by the promise of loot and women. Tukhachevsky had expected to be supported by the Konarmia in the south, but Budionny’s advance had stalled from exhaustion, and the Moscow representative on the southern front, the young Joseph Stalin, refused to release any forces to help against Warsaw. In addition, Gai’s army of horsemen were sent west to bypass Warsaw and reach the German frontier, leaving Russian armies short of cavalry. Gai’s force cut a swathe of terror through the Polish countryside and was at the German frontier within days, but they were not available for the decisive battle. The Poles wer
e, nevertheless, heavily outnumbered. Piłsudski had received poor intelligence on the whereabouts of the main Russian forces and had not realized that so many were deployed in the north. The 5th Polish Army under General Władisław Sikorski fought a bitter three-day battle for the line of the River Wkra, yielding, then counter-attacking against the main Russian force. The Poles found a new heart and their defence against the encirclement and capture of Warsaw made Piłsudski’s plan all the more likely to work.

  On 16 August, a day earlier than planned, the Polish armies from the southern wing rolled forwards against the Russian flank. The main Russian weight was in the north, so Pilsudski’s forces made rapid progress. His 53,000 infantry and 4,000 cavalry reached the Warsaw battle by 17 August and the following day crashed into the side and rear of the attacking Russian force. The Russian 16th Army disintegrated in panic. Tukhachevsky knew little of what was happening because radio communications had been jammed by the Poles. He ordered a new front to be formed, unaware that his armies were now in full retreat, trying to avoid the trap set by the oncoming Polish army in their rear. By 20 August, he finally realized the situation and ordered a general retreat, but it was too late. The Red Army moved east in complete disorder, intercepted by Polish forces moving at right angles to them every few miles. The Poles reached the German and Lithuanian border, wheeled east and pursued the Red Army past Minsk and almost to Kiev. Gai’s savage horsemen, cut off and harried by the Poles, escaped into East Prussia, where they were disarmed and interned by German troops, who had been warily watching his progress. On 15 October, Lenin’s government was forced to seek an armistice.

  The Battle for Warsaw depended for its outcome entirely on the success of Pilsudski’s operational inspiration and bold leadership. An ability to act opportunistically, even in the face of uncertain risks, had strong echoes of Napoleon at his best. Victory did not depend on the modern armoury of aircraft, tanks and radio, but relied a great deal on the simplicity and speed of the Polish counter-strike, and on the patriotic fervour of the embattled Polish divisions; this meant literally a matter of life or death for them and for a new national Poland. Nineteen years later when it was the German turn to attack, the armoury of Blitzkrieg condemned the Poles to the rapid loss of Warsaw and showed what a modern war of manoeuvre could achieve. Piłsudski became Poland’s hero and died in 1935, four years before the new war; Tukhachevsky was eventually arrested and executed on Stalin’s orders in June 1937, a long revenge for the failure at Warsaw.

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  No. 16 THIRD BATTLE OF KHARKOV

  19 February – 15 March 1943

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  German Field Marshal Erich von Manstein titled his memoirs, published in 1955, Lost Victories. This was not an ironic title, for Manstein believed that with the right supreme commander, Germany might not have lost the war nor have squandered the successes he had managed to achieve for Hitler. Both during and after the war, his enemies agreed that Manstein was the finest operational commander the German army possessed. Those qualities were displayed on numerous occasions, but no battle displayed them quite as fully as the sudden German counter-offensive in February 1943 after months of retreating, when Manstein’s panzer armies recaptured the Russian city of Kharkov and won back a large swathe of southern Russian territory against a surprised Red Army. This was perhaps the most poignant of those ‘lost victories’, for within months the German army was again in full retreat, never again to win a clear-cut battle.

  Field Marshal Erich von Manstein (1887–1973) was born Erich von Lewinski, but changed his name when he was adopted by the von Manstein family. He became Germany’s most celebrated Second World War general, but had a difficult relationship with his supreme commander, Adolf Hitler.

  Manstein was a tough, resolute, perceptive commander who flourished on manoeuvre warfare. He took risks, but won dividends. Best known for his contribution to the operational plan that destroyed the Franco-British front in 1940, Manstein had a professional confidence in what he did that contrasted sharply with his inexperienced supreme commander. Both men found it difficult to give way once they had arrived at a decision. The leadership that Manstein displayed in what came to be called the Third Battle of Kharkov (the city had changed hands twice in the 1941–42 campaigns) was not simply that he understood the nature of the crisis facing his Army Group South after the retreat from Stalingrad and how it might be reversed, but in the fact that he had to argue his case against a sceptical and obstructive supreme commander.

  A crisis loomed in late January 1943, as large Soviet forces from the Voronezh Front pushed into a gap that had opened up between Army Group Centre and Army Group Don (renamed South on 12 February). If successful, the Red Army might advance to the Black Sea and encircle the defending German armies in the south. Though Manstein asked for more reinforcements from static sections of the German-Soviet front further north, none arrived. The Red Army recaptured Kursk and Belgorod and by mid-February was pushing into the Ukrainian capital of Kharkov. The commander of the SS panzer divisions holding the city disobeyed Hitler’s orders to hold fast and slipped out of the noose. He was sacked and replaced by General Werner Kempf, a successful tank commander.

  In his memoirs, Manstein recalled that grim though his position looked, he could see the germ of an idea to reverse the situation. Both armies were exhausted, with many Soviet divisions down to only a few thousand men and limited numbers of tanks; German divisions, too, were fighting with a fraction of the tanks and armour they needed, but there were still panzer units available to him in the 1st and 4th Panzer Armies and the Army Detachment Kempf further north. The 4th Air Fleet, under General Wolfram von Richthofen, was also strengthened with up to 1,000 aircraft for the operation. Manstein’s idea was to use the available armour to attack the long flank of the Soviet advance from north and south, then push on to retake the Kharkov area. The critical issue was to persuade Hitler that his plan would work. On 17 February, Hitler arrived at Manstein’s southern headquarters at Zaporozhe on the River Dnepr, in southern Ukraine. For three days they argued about Manstein’s plan and the future of the southern front. Hitler feared the coming of the rainy season, the rasputitsa, which might halt the whole plan; he wanted Kharkov recaptured first on grounds of prestige; he almost certainly wanted his view to prevail over Manstein’s for political reasons. After two days, Hitler finally agreed that the ‘defensive-offensive’ Manstein proposed could take place, though he insisted that Kharkov should be retaken. The morning of his flight back to his headquarters, a unit of Soviet tanks moved up the road towards the airport, and Hitler was flown off just 30 kilometres (20 miles) away from the nearest Russians.

  The tanks near Zaporozhe stopped because they ran out of fuel. This was the furthest the Soviet offensive came. On 19 February, Manstein’s plan went into operation. The extended Soviet armies, short of supplies and taking heavy losses, crumbled in a matter of days, pushed back by the 4th Panzer Army northwards towards Kharkov or into the German net. By 2 March, the German units counted 23,000 Soviet dead, 615 captured tanks and 9,000 prisoners. The next blow was struck north towards Kharkov itself. Manstein wanted the SS panzer divisions under the command of Lieutenant General Paul ‘Papa’ Hausser (nicknamed as father of the Waffen-SS) to drive west of Kharkov and encircle it from the north. He did not want to risk a second Stalingrad in the ruined streets of the city. But Hausser ignored the instructions and sent his three SS panzer divisions, Totenkopf, Das Reich and Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler, directly into the city from three directions. Manstein thought he had done it to find favour with Hitler, but his Stalingrad fear proved misplaced and by 14 March the last pockets of Soviet resistance in the city were snuffed out. Hitler visited Manstein’s headquarters again on 10 March with victory in the battle assured. When he returned to Berlin, Hitler characteristically gave the impression that he had been the author of the success. Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda chief, noted in his diary: ‘the Führer is very happy that he has succeeded in closing the front again’
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  The battle was a triumph for Manstein’s sense of where and when to strike to maximize the impact even of weakened forces and the defensive-offensive, risky though it was if the rains had started early, probably postponed the Soviet victory on the Eastern Front by anything from six months to a year. It was his last ‘lost victory’. The subsequent Battle of Kursk was lost despite Manstein, who had urged an earlier start before the Russians were dug in, but this time found Hitler adamantly against the idea. Time and again, Manstein recommended that Hitler should appoint a commander-in-chief in the Eastto ease his burden as supreme commander. He suggested it in February 1943 and again in September. In March 1944, Hitler had finally had enough and Manstein was sacked. Western commanders were keen to learn after the war was over how Manstein had succeeded at all, given the obstacles presented by Hitler, and he proved more than willing to oblige. Implicit in all he wrote is the belief that the war might have gone very differently under his high command. More recently, his record has been sullied by evidence of his endorsement of or indifference towards the many atrocities committed in the regions under his command in the East.