A History of War in 100 Battles

by Richard Overy

  The deception worked better than the Allies could have hoped. Hitler became convinced that Calais was the principal target. The Germans had evidence to show that Allied forces were clustered in southwest England, too, but it was assumed that this was for a diversionary assault in Normandy, not the real thing. This forced the German army to divide its forces in the West: fourteen divisions of the 7th Army were stationed in Normandy and Brittany; twenty divisions of the 15th Army were in the Calais region. More divisions were held in southern France in case of an invasion there. The idea that Normandy might be a ruse to divert the Germans west and allow FUSAG to attack an undefended Calais lodged so firmly in Hitler’s mind that not until 7 August, long after the Allies had almost defeated the German army in France, did he order 15th Army to move. The timing was less important than the disposition of forces. The German army was weaker in Normandy than it would have been; even knowledge of the date of Operation Overlord would not have persuaded Hitler to risk putting all his eggs in the Normandy basket.

  American officers run the gauntlet of a mock battlefield during training in Britain in 1943 at the US Officer Candidate School. Every effort was made to conceal whereabouts in France these men would be undertaking the real invasion of Hitler’s Europe in 1944.

  Here, American soldiers help their injured companions onto the invasion beach codenamed ‘Utah’ on the morning of 6 June 1944. In the D-Day landings this beach was the furthest west and was captured with relatively low casualties under the command of General Theodore Roosevelt Jr.

  The story of D-Day itself is well known. The weather in early June seemed too poor to launch an invasion and the Germans relaxed. The commander of the coastal defence, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, was away in Germany celebrating his wife’s birthday; most of the junior commanders had been sent away on an exercise to Rennes. On the night of 5–6 June, paratroopers slowly descended into the Normandy countryside to secure bridges and roads. In the early morning of 6 June, German sentries on the coast were greeted by the staggering sight of an armada of 4,000 vessels emerging out of the mist. Soon, over 2,500 heavy bombers were pounding the German guns and concrete bunkers, followed by waves of rocket-firing fighter-bombers and a ferocious fusillade from the Royal Navy. On the three beaches assigned to British and Canadian forces – codenamed ‘Gold’, ‘Juno’ and ‘Sword’ – a lodgement was made by mid-day with modest casualties; on Utah Beach, assigned to the American army, a bridgehead 10 kilometres (6 miles) deep had been achieved by evening. Only on Omaha Beach, where neither the heavy bombing nor the naval barrage had done sufficient damage to the defenders, was the struggle bitter and costly, but here, too, a small beachhead was secured by evening. Over the next few days a more secure front was established and the invasion battle was over. Hitler and the High Command regarded Normandy as a sideshow and anticipated an assault on the Dieppe area further east some time in mid-June. ‘Fortitude South’ had done everything expected of it, confirming once again that in situations where the danger is great, surprise can be the most precious strategic asset of all.

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  No. 67 OPERATION BAGRATION

  22 June – 3 July 1944

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  The Russians in the Second World War were masters in the art of strategic deception. So important was this tactic that it was known in planning by a special term, maskirovka, meaning ‘camouflaging of intentions’. From the successful defeat of Axis forces in November 1942, when deception had been critical in the strategy to surround Stalingrad, misleading the enemy as to strength and intentions was central to the revival of Soviet military fortunes. In late spring 1944, the head of German Army Intelligence in the east, General Reinhard Gehlen, told Army Group Centre, the major element in Germany’s front line, to expect a ‘calm summer’. Three weeks later the Soviets launched their biggest assault to date, destroying the resistance of Army Group Centre in Belorussia in one of biggest battles of the war. They gained almost complete surprise against an enemy on its guard against surprises.

  The most important element in a deception is to work out what the enemy expects and to play on those assumptions, as the Western Allies did for the invasion of France. On the Eastern Front, the main effort of the Red Army in the winter and early spring of 1943–44 had been in Ukraine and southern Russia, where the geography favoured the rapid movement of mobile armies. The Germans assumed that this momentum would be maintained in the same area during the summer of 1944, and concentrated their armoured forces against the threat. Army Group Centre in Belorussia was the largest army group, dug in behind solid defences and protected, so it was thought, by the swampy, wooded Pripet Marshes to the south, where mobile warfare would be difficult. Any threat in the centre was expected to be a feint, to mask the real campaign from the direction of Ukraine.

  In Moscow, these assumptions were exploited in the Red Army’s planning. Every effort was made to make it appear as if the southern front were the main axis, while in complete secrecy massive forces were deployed into the area facing the centre. The result would confuse German planning and make a Russian success possible in both sectors – in Belorussia and Ukraine. Security began right at the top. Only five people knew of the plan – Stalin, his deputy Marshal Georgy Zhukov, the chief-of-staff Marshal Alexander Vasilevski, his deputy, General Alexei Antonov, and the chief of operations, General Sergei Shtemenko. They imposed on themselves a ban against mentioning the operation by telephone, telegraph or letter. They deliberately set no date. Officers from the central front had to report only two or three at a time, and in person. No-one was told more than he needed to know for his small part of the preparations. Only in a state as habitually paranoid as Stalin’s Soviet Union could such a shroud of secrecy be woven with any hope of success.

  In Belorussia the Red Army was ordered to make a show of digging in for the summer, creating a defensive line along the central front. Complete radio silence was imposed and all the main Soviet radio stations on the front closed down. Further south towards Ukraine, however, an entire dummy force was set up, with fake tanks and gun parks protected by real anti-aircraft fire to enhance the subterfuge. A second dummy force was constructed further north, on the Baltic front. German air reconnaissance was difficult in 1944, given the Red Air Force’s overwhelming superiority, but the Soviet side allowed German aircraft to fly over and photograph the fake forces. The Germans had previously relied on information from Russian informers or spies, but these sources dried up as the Red Army advanced, victorious and vindictive. Gehlen and his intelligence department swallowed the bait. Additional armour was sent south to strengthen the front opposite Ukraine. Army Group Centre had only 553 tanks and self-propelled guns against a Soviet force of over 5,000, and only 775 aircraft against 5,300.

  With the odds so heavily in its favour, the Red Army might not have needed deception at all. But the purpose of the campaign was to annihilate Army Group Centre swiftly, without mistakes or delays. Deception made the task on the battlefield much more straightforward. So it was that 1 million tons of supplies and 300,000 tons of oil were moved surreptitiously into place behind the four army groups designated for the operation. Train drivers were not told their destination, only the number of the train they were to drive. On the way to the front, soldiers and workers had to remain on the train at stations under guard, so they would not know where they were. The most elaborate preparations took place in the ‘impassable’ Pripet Marshes, where Soviet engineers, as noiselessly as possible, set up long wooden causeways strong enough to hold Soviet tanks as they passed across the swampy ground. Like the German penetration of the Ardennes Forest in May 1940, which unhinged French resistance, the sudden emergence of large units of Soviet tanks from out of the marshes would break German morale at a critical moment.

  The Soviet battle line was drawn up in June. The operation was given the codename ‘Bagration’ after the Georgian prince Pyotr Bagration, who was killed defending Moscow from Napoleon. The date was finally fixed for 22 June 1944, two weeks afte
r the Allied landing in Normandy. On the German side, Field Marshal Ernst Busch, with headquarters at Minsk, had only 792,000 men in 51 divisions. Facing him were four army groups, two commanded by Zhukov, two by Vasilevski, with a total of 2.6 million troops. On the eve of the assault, the German side received the first clues: partisans systematically targeted German rail links in the region, while Soviet bombers pounded German bases and supplies. Surprise was nevertheless almost complete. On 22 June, by chance the anniversary of the start of the Barbarossa campaign of 1941, armed forays were made into the German defensive line, and the following day the tidal wave of Soviet armoured forces struck the hapless defenders. While struggling to cope with this onrush, the Germans were then suddenly presented with the armour of Marshal Rokossovsky’s First Belorussian Front rushing at them out of the marshy land to the south.

  The battle was over quickly. Four major towns, designated special ‘fortified zones’ by Hitler’s headquarters, were encircled and captured by 29 June. The leaders in Moscow lost no time in contrasting the speed and completeness of Soviet success with the slow progress of the Allies in Normandy, which were kept bottled up by a German force far smaller than Army Group Centre. On 3 July, Minsk was captured along with the whole of the German Fourth Army, and the battle was all but won. Some 300,000 German soldiers were killed or captured. The Red Army pursued the fleeing Germans to the River Vistula in Poland, campaigning across almost 500 kilometres (300 miles) in just six weeks. German reinforcement was impossible, not only because of the battle in France, but because on 13 July the Soviet southern front unleashed its campaign towards Lvov, the gateway to central Europe. On 17 July, the Red Army marched 57,000 German prisoners through the streets of Moscow, including 19 generals. After they had left, cleaning lorries passed along the same streets symbolically spraying disinfectant. Bagration was one of the greatest battles of the Second World War and an annihilating victory for the Red Army. Deception was key to making sure that the victory was sure and swift, as it had been for the Germans three years before. It could hardly have tasted sweeter.

  Red Army troops and guns cross a river on the approach to the city of Lvov during the Operation Bagration campaign in July 1944. The Soviet forces were adept at using topography to their advantage, and movement through marshland and water proved no barrier.

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  No. 68 THE SIX DAY WAR

  5–10 June 1967

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  The Six Day War is in some sense a misnomer. What happened in the second week of June in the territories bordering the young state of Israel was a single colossal battle of manoeuvre between a greatly outnumbered Israeli Defence Force and the armies and air forces of almost all Israel’s Arab neighbours. After six days, the battle was over, with Israel the bloodied victor. Deception mattered in the battle for two very distinct reasons. First, the Israeli armed forces successfully masked their intentions right up to the decisive moment when enemy aircraft were caught by surprise and destroyed, followed shortly by the invasion of the Sinai Peninsula. But second, the Arab states deceived themselves repeatedly during the battle by pretending all the time that they were winning when the truth was exactly the reverse.

  Self-deception is a corrosive and dangerous influence in war. The Arab states – principally Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Iraq – had waited many years to stamp out an Israel that they had failed to emasculate in 1948 and again in the brief Suez war in 1956. Their anti-Semitic hostility was expressed in visceral terms, while for years in the 1960s they brought ever larger military resources in preparation for the moment when they could begin again to reclaim land they saw as properly Arab. By 1967, they were confident that the military balance was at last decisively in their favour; the Soviet Union was supportive and encouraging, because it condemned Israel as an outpost of American capitalist imperialism, while the United States, it was thought, was bogged down with the war in Vietnam. When the Soviet Union mischievously (and wrongly) informed the Egyptian president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, that Israel was massing troops on the northern frontier opposite Syria, the Arab states moved closer to a showdown they were overconfident of winning.

  The path to conflict was a complex mix of diplomacy, threats and military planning, but the decisive step was taken by Nasser when he reoccupied the demilitarized zone on Sinai and closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping in the third week of May 1967. Nasser’s commander-in-chief, Abd al-Hakim Amer, drew up a battle plan for a major advance into Israel that would link up with the army of King Hussein of Jordan. The plan was poorly prepared and communicated, but Amer was confident that Egypt’s 420 aircraft, 1,500 tanks and 200,000 men would sweep the Israelis away. Jordan was less convinced, but Hussein cemented an alliance with Nasser that compelled him to take part. Syria was more circumspect, but with the arrival of Iraqi reinforcements, the planned Operation Victory seemed more certain of success.

  The Israeli government was caught between conflicting pressures – from her Arab neighbours who were clearly, at least from the evidence, gearing up for a major war, from the Soviet Union, which was constantly warning Israel of its support for the Arab cause, and from the United States, which was desperate to persuade the Israelis not to provoke or be provoked into war. This locked the Israeli leadership into a vicious circle: either accept the changed balance in the Arabs’ favour, or risk starting a conflict from which they were likely to be the losers. Chief-of-staff Yitzhak Rabin and Prime Minister Levi Eshkol endorsed military preparations. Israel’s 200 aircraft, 1,100 tanks and 275,000 reservists were primed for battle in case it came. To deceive the Egyptians, dummy movements and camps were simulated to make it look as if the chief threat was along the north coast of Sinai, when the bulk of Israeli armour was further south. A daring plan was worked out to neutralize enemy air power by a stealthy and unexpected first strike. Given the material imbalance, surprise and deception were valuable allies.

  A photograph of the Israeli defence minister, General Moshe Dayan (1915–81), taken at a press conference in Jerusalem during the Six Day War in June 1967. The city was entirely in Israeli hands after only a few days’ fighting.

  War came a step closer when, due to popular demand, the flamboyant ex-soldier, Moshe Dayan, with his distinctive eyepatch, was finally appointed Minister of Defence with the right to make key military decisions. He was all for pre-emption. ‘We’re not England here,’ he told his cabinet colleagues, ‘with its tradition of losing big battles first.’ On 4 June, the Israelis decided to strike first while Nasser made sabre-rattling speeches in Cairo and all the Egyptian high command was away from Sinai. The operation began at 7 a.m. on 5 June when almost all Israel’s 200 aircraft were airborne. Flying low under the radar, some made a wide loop to attack Egypt’s bases from the west while others flew towards bases on Sinai, keeping complete radio silence. The surprise was an overwhelming, almost unbelievable success. No anti-aircraft guns fired because no-one expected an attack. The runways were pitted with bombs, radar installations blown up and 286 out of Egypt’s 420 aircraft destroyed. One-third of Egypt’s pilots died on the ground rather than in the air. Over the following two days the same destruction was meted out to the Jordanian, Syrian and Iraqi air forces.

  The Arab forces and public were instead told that the Israeli air force had been destroyed and that the Egyptian army was advancing into southern Israel. Amer did not learn the full truth until later, and then became almost insensible with the crisis, locking himself in his office and communicating with no-one. The air strike, however, was only the start of the Israeli programme of deception. At 7.50 a.m. the invasion of Sinai began, first along the coast, which was heavily defended, because the Egyptians had been fooled into thinking the main thrust would come here. Then, gradually, major Israeli offensives with tanks and heavy artillery opened up further south. The tactics were a model of what Blitzkrieg strategy was thought to be. Moving as fast as possible, outflanking or surprising the enemy, using heavy air support, the Israeli attack was, as Ariel Sharon, commander o
f one of the southern divisions, described it, ‘a continuous unfolding of surprises’. The enemy defended stoutly, but in the absence of clear commands or adequate intelligence and with only negligible air support, the front crumbled. The Egyptians made a disorganized retreat and Israeli tanks reached the east bank of Suez by 9 June. Arab soldiers were utterly confused and demoralized by the contradiction between Cairo radio, constantly broadcasting news of phantom victories, and the evidence all around of dead and dying soldiers, burned-out tanks and vehicles and the order to retreat at all costs back to Egypt.