War Stories III

by Oliver North

  I went around to our shelter, and thankfully my parents were inside. They asked, “What is it like?” They had heard our house had been hit, but didn’t know how bad. I said, “Yeah, it’s pretty bad.” But we were all safe and alive.

  I think everybody was proud of the RAF, and what it did. Imagine, kids of nineteen or twenty going up in a Spitfire, facing hundreds of German planes, with only a couple, a weeks’ training in some little trainer. Yeah, it took guts—especially in light of some terrible losses.

  Hitler’s deeply flawed decision to shift from bombing the RAF Fighter Command bases to terror bombing of British cities in September of 1940 is the turning point in the Battle of Britain. Though no single document survives to explain his rationale, most historians surmise that it was the consequence of a navigational error.

  On the night of 24 August 1940, a ten-plane flight of He-111s, aiming to hit the piers on the lower Thames, overshot their target and dropped their bombs on the center of London, killing scores of civilians. The next night, RAF Bomber Command launched an eighty-plane raid on Berlin—the first against the German capital. Five days later, the Führer lifted his ban on “terror bombing” and urged Goering to “destroy” London.

  Within a week of this decision, the Blitz was on—and Hitler was preparing to abandon Sea Lion, his plan for the invasion of England. On 14 September—the day after Mussolini launched the invasion of Egypt from Italian bases in Libya—Hitler postponed Sea Lion and on 12 October, he permanently cancelled the operation. By then, the RAF had recovered sufficiently to inflict horrific losses on the Luftwaffe bomber crews conducting daylight attacks and in November, Goering ordered that all major cross-channel raids would be conducted at night.

  In describing the role of the RAF in this bloody contest, Prime Minister Winston Churchill told the House of Commons on 20 August, “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.”

  They were few indeed. By the end of September, RAF Fighter Command had lost more than 850 fighters knocking down 600 German bombers. Fewer than 2,500 RAF fighter pilots—among them a handful of Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders, Poles, Free French, Czechs, South Africans, and Americans—had handed Hitler his first defeat.

  Thanks to their courage, by the winter of 1940–41 Churchill no longer had to worry about a German invasion. Instead he began to focus on how to turn his island nation into a springboard for a joint British-American return to the Continent.

  Hitler, thwarted in his hope for a neutral or defeated England, turned his attention to a new adventure: crushing the “Bolshevik menace” by means of Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union.

  CHAPTER 3

  THE EASTERN FRONT 1939–1941

  Hitler’s 12 October 1940 decision to cancel Operation Sea Lion—the invasion of England—was predicated on the inability of the Luftwaffe to gain air superiority over the British Isles. But even before his conclusion that a cross-channel operation was impossible, the Führer had already begun exploring other options and opportunities. In mid-August he had raised the prospect of taking on the “Bolshevik menace” with his military commanders—suggesting that a campaign against the Soviets would be necessary in order to secure Germany’s eastern frontier.

  On 2 September he signed a new Tripartite Pact with Italy and Japan—in which they all pledged to aid one another in the event of an attack on any signatory. Eleven days later, Mussolini launched an assault into Egypt from Italian bases in Libya—prompting Hitler to meet with Il Duce on 4 October at the Brenner Pass in the Alps. There, the two fascist dictators concocted a plan for bringing Franco’s Spain into the Axis—and seizing all British territories in the Mediterranean from Gibraltar east to Suez.

  Hitler took Amerika, his specially configured “command train,” for the meeting with the Spanish dictator on 23 October. But Franco was unimpressed—and rejected the idea of allowing the Wehrmacht to transit Spanish territory in order to attack Gibraltar. Frustrated in his grand design for turning the Mediterranean into an Axis-controlled lake, Hitler returned to Berlin—only to learn that Mussolini, without consulting anyone, had invaded Greece.

  Hitler launched nearly four million Wehrmacht troops into Russia in Operation Barbarossa on June 22, 1941.

  By the first week of November 1940, Adolf Hitler was on the sidelines of world events for the first time in three years. Mussolini’s Italian “Legions” were charging pell-mell across the Egyptian desert toward Suez, and his “Alpine Army” was promising to seize Athens by the middle of the month. The Russians were moving more troops into Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania—as they were permitted to do under the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.

  In the United States, FDR won an unprecedented third term and became increasingly bellicose in his comments about the Axis in general and Germany in particular. Meanwhile, Hitler was relegated to nighttime air raids on English cities and hoping his U-boats and surface raiders could sink enough merchant vessels to strangle the British Isles into submission.

  On 12 November, Soviet foreign minister Molotov arrived in Berlin for meetings with Ribbentrop and Hitler. The Führer hoped to co-opt the Soviets into helping him despoil the British Empire. Hitler needed access to coal, iron, tin, bauxite, and other raw materials from the Balkans and oil from Romania. In exchange for ceding control of the Balkans to Germany, Russia would be given a free hand in Iran, the “Stan” states, and unspecified British territories in Africa.

  Molotov wanted nothing to do with Hitler’s deal. Instead, the Soviet official—one of Stalin’s closest confidants—demanded that Russia be allowed to annex Finland and be guaranteed free access to the Baltic and transit rights into the Mediterranean from the Black Sea. Ribbentrop’s efforts to convince Molotov that the British were on the ropes were not helped by British air raids that forced the two foreign ministers to conduct their final meetings in an air raid shelter.

  By the time Molotov left the German capital on 14 November, Hitler had no doubt as to what his next steps were going to be. He instructed his generals to complete plans for invading the Soviet Union in the spring of 1941. On 5 December, the first draft of the war plan was presented to the Führer at the Reich Chancellery. He called it Operation Barbarossa—after a twelfth-century Teutonic emperor—and directed that “nothing interfere with completing all necessary preparations for an invasion by 15 May 1941.”

  Wehrmacht soldier

  But on 7 December, the British counter-attacked against the Italians in Egypt—forcing one of many “interferences” in preparations for the biggest invasion in history.

  Il Duce had been in need of Hitler’s help even before the British Western Desert Force launched their Egyptian counter-offensive. On the night of 11–12 November, British aircraft from the carrier HMS Illustrious attacked the Italian fleet moored at Taranto, sinking three battleships and a heavy cruiser with aerial torpedoes. And by the end of the month, the poorly equipped Greek army had driven the Italians out of Greece and back into Albania.

  In Berlin, Hitler found opportunity in Mussolini’s military reversals. In February 1941 he ordered General Erwin Rommel to North Africa to shore up the Italians and start pushing the British back into Egypt. In the Balkans, his plans for “peacefully occupying” territory that the British might use to attack Germany from the south were contravened by a coup in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, on 25 March. Using the coup as a pretext, Hitler ordered the simultaneous invasion of Yugoslavia and Greece on 6 April.

  As it had in Poland and then Western Europe at the start of the war, the Wehrmacht blitzkrieg proved unstoppable. Yugoslavia, compromised by internal discord and antiquated arms, capitulated on 17 April. Though three divisions of British troops rushed to aid the Greeks, they too were forced to surrender to the German onslaught five days later. On 27 April 1941, the Nazi swastika was hoisted over the Acropolis in Athens.

  The late spring thaw in northeastern Europe allowed time for Hitler to postpone the start of Barbarossa and launch Operation M
ercury—the world’s first airborne invasion—against the British garrison on the island of Crete. Though the Germans eventually prevailed, the 20 May–1 June operation proved costly—rendering the elite 7th Airborne and 5th Mountain Divisions combat ineffective.

  Crete was certainly damaging to the British. More than 2,000 soldiers—most of them New Zealanders—were killed and 12,000 were taken prisoner. Meanwhile, the Royal Navy successfully evacuated 18,000—but the British Mediterranean Fleet lost eighteen ships sunk or badly damaged in the campaign. It was the costliest engagement for the Royal Navy in WWII.

  By the end of May 1940, it appeared to many observers that Hitler was once again unstoppable. German conquests in the Balkans, Greece, and on Crete were being matched by Rommel’s Afrika Corps in North Africa. On the eve of Barbarossa—other than the bizarre defection of his principal deputy Rudolf Hess to Scotland on 10 May and the loss of the battleship Bismarck on 27 May—there was no doubt that the Führer was in absolute control of events. There were no indications that his enormous military machine was being stretched.

  The Wehrmacht’s 180 Infantry, twenty Panzer and twelve motorized divisions now numbered five million strong, the Luftwaffe 1.7 million, and the Navy 420,000. Twenty-five percent of all German males were now in uniform. Hitler replaced them with slave labor in agricultural production and eventually even in manufacturing war materiel.

  Though Hitler’s military campaigns of 1939–41 had produced the most effective and experienced military force in the world, German losses and the occupation commitments they generated were not insignificant. Operations in Poland, Norway, France, the Low Countries, the Balkans, and Greece had cost 66,750 German dead and missing, and a near equal number wounded. Over 4,000 German paratroopers and elite mountain troops perished on Crete, and several thousand more were wounded. All eighty gliders and 223 of 600 Ju-52 transport aircraft were destroyed. Too many Axis divisions were required for occupation duty in Poland, Western Europe, Greece, and Yugoslavia and Crete. But in North Africa, Rommel was demanding more troops, tanks, and planes to reinforce his 5th and 15th Panzer Divisions.

  Yet none of these losses or commitments deterred final preparations for Barbarossa—finally set for 22 June. Hitler and the German General Staff were convinced that the forces they had assembled for Barbarossa would overwhelm Stalin’s Red Army. Hitler was certain that the operation could be completed before the first snows whipped in from Siberia. They had good reason for optimism.

  While the Red Army in the summer of 1941 looked formidable on paper—235 infantry divisions, fifty armored divisions with 24,000 tanks, twenty-five mechanized divisions, and an air force of 10,000 aircraft, and overall, more than 7.5 million in uniform—it was essentially a hollow force thanks to the purges of its leader, Josef Stalin. Between 1937 and 1939, nearly three quarters of the Red Army’s officers were shot, jailed, or exiled to Siberian gulags.

  The resulting chaos in the ranks of the Soviet military seriously degraded Russian readiness to fight as evidenced by the abysmal showing of Red Army in Finland during the “Winter War” of 1939–40. Stalin responded by ordering yet another purge—and finally, much-needed reforms.

  But improvements and promotions were slow in coming through the cumbersome Communist Party political apparatus that Stalin had inherited from Vladimir Ilich Lenin in 1924. At the brink of war, none of Stalin’s Stavka (general staff) or his field commanders had anything close to the military acumen, experience, or skill of their German counterparts.

  In the spring of 1941, most of the Red Army’s mobility still depended on horses. Few of its tanks or aircraft could be considered equivalent to Hitler’s, and the Russian divisions arrayed on the western frontier were poorly disposed for any kind of a defense in depth. Perhaps most importantly, Stalin himself did not believe any of the multiple warnings he was being given about an impending attack.

  Though both Roosevelt and Churchill distrusted Stalin, they both repeatedly sought to warn him of Hitler’s intentions. In March 1941 U.S. undersecretary of state Joseph Grew passed to the Soviet ambassador in Washington the gist of a decrypted German cable outlining the planned attack. On 19 April, Churchill sent the British ambassador in Moscow to see Molotov with a similar intercept. In May, Richard Sorge, a Soviet intelligence agent in Japan, warned that Hitler was preparing to invade Russia with nine German armies.

  Stalin’s willful disregard for the realities of the German buildup even extended to ignoring his own commanders. From the first of June onward, Soviet units on the western frontier filed near daily reports of German reconnaissance over-flights, cross-border patrols by Germans dressed in Russian uniforms, and the selective jamming of tactical radio nets. Instead of mobilizing, the Soviet dictator instructed his field commanders to avoid “provocations” and ordered that Soviet state-run businesses deliver to Germany their full quotas of oil, foodstuffs, and bulk ores that had been agreed to in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.

  When 7,200 German artillery pieces opened fire across the Russian frontier at 0316 the morning of 22 June 1941, the last trainload of Russian oil and wheat, paid for in German gold, had just crossed the frontier into Nazi-held Poland. By dawn, more than 3,350 tanks and nearly four million German troops were moving eastward—beneath the air cover of 900 Luftwaffe bombers and 600 fighters. Within hours, more than 1,200 Soviet aircraft were destroyed—most of them still on the ground.

  That night, in a radio broadcast, Prime Minister Churchill pledged British support for “Russians fighting for their homeland.” But there was scant aid he could deliver given the rapid pace of the German advance. At the end of the first week of Barbarossa, more than a half million Russian soldiers had been killed, wounded, captured, or simply gone missing. On 3 July Stalin, in desperation, announced a “scorched earth” program—telling the Soviet people to burn their homes, factories, barns, and crops—to “leave nothing behind for the fascists to eat or use.” It proved to be a cruel but effective policy.

  By 9 July, two weeks into the battle, Hitler’s General Staff estimated that it had destroyed more than half the Red Army divisions confronting the Wehrmacht advance. But German field commanders were already beginning to experience shortages of fuel, tank parts, and food. And though they would eventually receive personnel replacements—divisions of Finns, Hungarians, Slovaks, Italians, and even the “all volunteer” Spanish “Blue” Division—the supply situation would only get worse.

  By August 1941, Hitler’s armies were at the gates of Leningrad in the north, aimed at Moscow in the center, and headed for Stalingrad in the south. By then more than five million Red Army soldiers had been killed, wounded, or captured. Of the nearly three million Russian prisoners of war, over half a million would be dead by winter’s end.

  Russian POWs weren’t the only ones suffering at the hands of the conquerors. Civilians in the “Occupied Zone” were treated with barbarity unseen on the Western front. Behind the advancing Panzers and German infantry, came the Einsatzgruppen—SS “killing units” under Hitler’s orders to systematically kill “partisans, Bolsheviks, and Jews” in the conquered territories. During the first month of the invasion nearly 150,000 Jews were murdered. By the time the killing was done, fewer than 300,000 of Russia’s nearly three million Jews would be alive.

  For Stalin, the catastrophe of losing his army and the brutality to which his population was subjected were secondary matters. By 9 August, as Roosevelt and Churchill commenced four days of meetings at Placentia Bay, Newfoundland, that would result in the Atlantic Charter, Stalin was simply hoping to hold on until help arrived from his “allies.” The British and Americans had promised him aid—but while he waited he knew he could count on help from Russia’s most reliable and consistent ally: winter.

  American wartime assistance to the Soviet Union would prove to be even more difficult to deliver than either FDR or Churchill imagined. Much of it would have to be convoyed through the U-boat-infested North Atlantic to the Russian port of Murmansk. Some could be delivere
d from Alaska through Siberia. To ensure that there would be at least one “fair weather” route, Russian and British forces—in their first joint action of World War II—occupied Iran.

  But there was a further complication to delivering the aid that Stalin so desperately needed. The vagaries of the Lend-Lease act, passed in March 1941, permitted direct aid to Britain—but not to the Soviet Union. Though Roosevelt had been emboldened by his re-election the previous November, he realized that isolationist sentiment in the U.S. was still strong. A Gallup poll taken in June 1941 showed that 83 percent of the American people were still opposed to entering the war.

  To help keep the Soviets in the fight, FDR engaged in something of a shell game. American trucks, tanks, machine parts, and foodstuffs would be loaded in U.S. ports—earmarked for delivery to Britain. Once the vessel arrived in Liverpool or Scotland, Churchill’s people would decide what they needed—and ship the rest on to Murmansk.

  For the delivery of aircraft—which Stalin needed more than tanks—he turned to a handful of young Army Air Corps officers. One of them, Lieutenant John Alison, was already in London when he received secret orders to go to Moscow.

  LIEUTENANT JOHN ALISON, USAAF

  The Kremlin, Moscow, USSR

  12 October 1941

  I was sent to London during the Battle of Britain, to assist in training RAF pilots. We had secretly set up a mission there immediately after the Lend-Lease Agreement was signed in September of 1940—even though no aid could theoretically be delivered until Congress passed the Lend-Lease Act in March of ’41. Our job was to make sure that the RAF pilots and mechanics knew how to fly and maintain the aircraft we would be sending under Lend-Lease.