The Second World War (77 page)
Stalin, as Churchill expected, was not impressed when he received a joint signal from Roosevelt and the prime minister sent from Marrakesh, reporting on the decisions reached at Casablanca. Yet the Torch landings had provoked Hitler into reinforcing Tunisia and occupying southern France. This diverted German troops much more effectively than a failed cross-Channel operation. It also forced the Luftwaffe to redeploy 400 aircraft from the eastern front, with disastrous results. By the late spring of 1943 Göring’s formations had lost 40 per cent of their entire strength in the Mediterranean. But Stalin was not mollified by such details. The
Anglo-American decision to delay confronting the Germans in France in a battle of attrition was what angered him. The Red Army still faced, and would continue to face, the overwhelming bulk of the German army.
On 12 January, just a few days before the Casablanca conference started, the Red Army launched Operation Spark to break the German encirclement of Leningrad south of Lake Ladoga. Zhukov, sent back by Stalin to coordinate the offensive, used the 2nd Shock Army attacking from the ‘mainland’, the 67th Army from the Leningrad side and three brigades of ski troops crossing the great frozen lake. The 67th Army had to cross the Neva, and the offensive was delayed until the ice on the river was thick enough to support the lighter tanks.
The offensive opened with a heavy bombardment, finishing in a storm of screaming Katyusha rockets. In temperatures of minus 25 degrees Centigrade, Soviet troops in white camouflage surged across the ice. On the south-western corner of Lake Ladoga, the Tsarist fortress of Shlisselburg was surrounded. In two days of fighting in the forests and frozen marshland, the vanguards of the two attacking armies were within ten kilo metres of each other. Soviet troops even managed to recover a Tiger tank intact, an important prize for their engineers to study.
On 15 January Irina Dunaevskaya, a young interpreter, walked across the frozen Neva to visit the battlefield. She saw dead men ‘
under a transparent crust of ice
, as if in a glass sarcophagus’. In a captured German headquarters, she found Red Army soldiers rolling cigarettes with the paper from lists recommending the award of medals. Because of their nicknames, she guessed that they were released criminals transferred from the Gulag. Outside there were ‘treetops knocked off and branches on the ground, felled trees, snow that is black with soot, and bodies of soldiers, individual and in piles, mostly those of the enemy, but also ours, corpses of horses, scattered ammunition, and broken weapons–too much for a woman’s eyes… The corpse of a very young, blond German was lying on the road in a very natural pose, as if he were still alive. Three scorched corpses of German soldiers were still sitting in the front seat of their huge vehicle. Once again there were corpses of our soldiers under the ice on the highway, as if under glass, squashed into a flat sheet by the heavy vehicles that had recently driven over them… Far away from us the landscape was of a whitish-grey colour, the pine trunks were greyish-brown. All the colours were stern, cold and lonely.’
‘
Your prayers
’, a tank driver wrote home to his mother, ‘must be guarding me in the battles, as I have gone four or five times unharmed through a minefield where a lot of tanks were blown up, and a shell that exploded in the tank and killed the commander and the gunner did me no harm. One becomes here both a fatalist and an extremely superstitious person. I have
become very bloodthirsty. Each killed Fritz makes me delighted.’
On 18 January, the two Soviet armies closed the gap at a cost of 34,000 casualties. The encirclement of Leningrad was broken, even if the landbridge from the city to the ‘mainland’ was no more than a dozen kilometres wide. Stalin that day promoted Zhukov to marshal of the Soviet Union.
With a new railway laid across the conquered strip south of Lake Ladoga, supplies to Leningrad increased greatly. The line, however, remained within easy range of German artillery, so the Soviet command launched yet another offensive, Operation Polar Star commanded by Marshal Timoshenko. Timoshenko ordered that the town of Sinyavino had to be taken by Red Army Day on 23 February. This attempt to deepen the bridgehead opened with a heavy artillery bombardment. The ground was so boggy that the exploding shells did little more than send up geysers of mud, and many rounds never exploded at all. Red Army troops broke through the German lines and advanced through the fir and birch forest. Vasily Churkin recounted how they passed a field brothel: ‘
a two-storey barrack
that the Germans had knocked together from rough boards. People said that 75 Russian girls from nearby villages were living there. The Germans had forced them.’
The German XXVI Army Corps timed its counter-attack with great skill. ‘We saw several Tiger tanks moving towards us and firing as they moved,’ Churkin wrote. ‘They were followed by German infantry. As the tanks approached our soldiers started leaving the trenches and retreating. Platoon commanders were shouting at the cowards, telling them to return to their trenches, but the panic spread fast.’
One of the Wehrmacht formations to suffer heavily in Operation Polar Star was the Spanish División Azul, or
Blue Division
, of mainly Falangist volunteers. The decision to form it had been taken in Madrid only five days after the launch of Operation Barbarossa. The Spanish right still blamed the Soviet Union as the chief instigator of their civil war. Almost a fifth of the early volunteers were students and it could be argued that the Blue Division was one of the most intellectually over-qualified formations ever to go to war. Commanded by General Agustín Muñoz Grandes, a regular army officer who had become a Falangist, it was constituted as the 250th Infantry Division and sent to the Novgorod front after training in Bavaria. In that region of forests and marshland, its men suffered badly from sickness and then frostbite. But Hitler was impressed by their resilience under attack, and by their contribution to the destruction of General Vlasov’s 2nd Shock Army in the spring of 1942.
The Blue Division, defending a sector on the Izhora River, held on despite suffering 2,525 casualties in twenty-four hours of fighting. One of
its regiments collapsed, but the line was re-established with German reinforcements. It was the division’s largest and most costly battle of the whole war, and certainly contributed to the failure of the Soviet offensive.
In the south of Russia, Operation Little Saturn had forced Manstein to withdraw the First Panzer and Seventeenth Armies to the Kuban bridgehead in the north-western corner of the Caucasus, south of Rostov. Rokossovsky grumbled that the downgrading of the offensive, and the failure to advance to Rostov to cut the enemy off completely, had been a missed opportunity. But Stalin had once again suffered a rush of optimism just as he had a year before. Forgetting how quickly the German army recovered from a disaster, he wanted to liberate the eastern Ukraine in the Donbas and Kharkov operations with armies now freed by the surrender of the Sixth Army.
On 6 February Manstein met Hitler, who at first accepted responsibility for the defeat at Stalingrad, but then blamed Göring and others for the disaster. He complained bitterly about Paulus’s failure to commit suicide. Yet the Japanese were even more upset by the news. In Tokyo, Shigemitsu Mamoru, the new foreign minister, and an audience of about 150 Japanese generals and senior officials, watched a film of Stalingrad made by Russian cameramen. The scenes which showed Paulus and the other captured generals shocked them deeply. ‘
Can this possibly be
the case?’ they demanded in disbelief. ‘If it is true, why did Paulus not commit suicide like a real soldier?’ The Japanese leadership suddenly realized that the invincible Hitler was going to lose the war after all.
Manstein was now in a better position to demand flexibility of action. Hitler wanted a dogged defence of occupied territory, but the threat of a collapse in southern Russia paradoxically gave Manstein the opportunity to achieve one of the most startling counter-attacks in the whole war.
The Red Army, having crushed the Hungarian Second Army and encircled part of the German Second Army with the Voronezh Front, on Manstein’s left flank, then pushed on westward to seize what would become the Kursk Salient. ‘
For the last week and a half
,’ a soldier wrote to his wife on 10 February, ‘we’ve been marching on land that has just been liberated from the fascists. Yesterday our armoured vehicles broke into Belgorod. A lot of booty has been taken and many prisoners of war. While on the march we constantly encounter huge groups of captured Hungarians, Romanians, Italians and Germans. If only you could see, Shurochka, what a pitiful sight this famous gang of Hitler’s has become. They are wearing army boots, some in straw galoshes, summer uniforms, only a few wear greatcoats, and on top of all that they are wearing the overclothes that they’ve stolen, male or female. On their heads are fore and aft caps,
and women’s shawls are wrapped around over them. Many of them have frostbite; they are dirty, with lice. It gives one a revolting feeling to think that this riff-raff had got so far into our country. We’ve already marched 270 kilometres in the provinces of Voronezh and Kursk. So many villages, towns, factories and bridges have been destroyed. Civilians are going back home as the Red Army arrives there. They are so happy!’
Another part of the Voronezh Front advanced on Kharkov. On 13 February, Hitler insisted that the city should be held by Gruppenführer Paul Hausser’s II SS Panzer Corps, with the
Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler
and the
Das Reich
Divisions. Hausser, on his own initiative, disobeyed orders and withdrew. At the same time, Manstein pulled back the First Panzer Army to the River Mius. The Soviet South-Western Front with four armies had thrust westwards. It was spearheaded by four tank corps (although no greater in strength than a single panzer corps) commanded by Lieutenant General M. M. Popov. The Stavka thought that a great victory was about to be achieved by exploiting the gap in the German front south of Kharkov, but their own supply lines were desperately over-extended.
On 17 February, furious that his orders were being ignored, Hitler flew to Zaporozhye for a showdown with Manstein. But Manstein had things well in hand. He moved Fourth Panzer Army headquarters to take control over the II SS Panzer Corps, now reinforced with the
Totenkopf
Division, and prepared the First Panzer Army to strike the Soviet attackers from below. Hitler felt obliged to fall in with his plans. Manstein’s double counter-attacks destroyed Popov’s armoured force and almost encircled the 1st Guards and the 6th Army. The troops of the 25th Tank Corps, by then out of fuel, had to abandon all their vehicles and make their way on foot back towards Soviet lines.
In the first week of March, Fourth Panzer Army advanced back on Kharkov, and Hausser eventually retook the city on 14 March after an unnecessarily costly battle. Heavy spring rains soon brought further operations to a halt. Soviet prisoners of war were to put to work burying the dead. Most were so famished that they searched the bodies for scraps of food in pockets, but this was deemed to be looting the dead. Usually they were just shot, but the odd sadist would take it further. One tied three Soviet prisoners accused of theft to a gate together. ‘
When his victims
had been secured,’ wrote another soldier, ‘he stuck a grenade into the pocket of one of their coats, pulled the pin, and ran for shelter. The three Russians, whose guts were blown out, screamed for mercy until the last moment.’
Hitler had his eye on the immense Kursk Salient for a summer offensive to restore German superiority on the
eastern front
. Yet the German army in the Soviet Union had been disastrously weakened. Apart from the loss of the Sixth Army and those of its allies, there had been heavy casualties in
the withdrawal from the Caucasus, to say nothing of the fighting around Leningrad and the
Red Army’s
Rzhev Offensive against the Ninth Army. Many vehicles had been abandoned in the retreat when they ran out of fuel, and were finished off with a grenade in the engine. Panzers were often reduced to towing several trucks filled with wounded.
The Wehrmacht’s strength on the eastern front had also been reduced by the transfer of troops to Tunisia, and to France in case of an Allied invasion. Operations in the Mediterranean continued to inflict heavy losses on the Luftwaffe, as did the strategic bombing campaign against German cities and aircraft factories. And the need to protect the Reich had led to the withdrawal of fighter squadrons and anti-aircraft batteries, giving air superiority to the Soviets for the first time. By the spring of 1943, German strength stood at just over 2,700,000 men, while the Red Army mustered just under 5,800,000, with four and half times as many tanks, and three times as many guns and heavy mortars. The Red Army also possessed greater mobility, thanks to the flow of Jeeps and trucks provided by American Lend–Lease.
A part of the increase in the Red Army’s strength came with the recruitment of young women to a maximum strength of 800,000. Although many had served from early in the war, and well over 20,000 had done so in the Battle of Stalingrad alone, the greatest intake began in 1943. Their military roles now extended well beyond their previous ones of doctor, medic, nurse, telephone operator, signaller, pilot, air observer and anti-aircraft guncrew. The bravery and competence shown by women, especially during the Battle of Stalingrad, encouraged the Soviet authorities to recruit more, and there were more women serving in the Red Army than in any other regular army during the war. Although there had been a number of women snipers who became famous for their deadly skills, the main influx came with the establishment of a woman’s sniper school in 1943. Women were considered to resist cold better than men and to have a steadier hand.
These intrepid young women, however, also had to cope with the attentions of male comrades and especially superiors. ‘
These girls evoked memories
of school-leaving dances, of first love,’ wrote Ilya Ehrenburg. ‘Almost all those I met at the front had come straight from school. They often winced nervously: there were too many men around with hungry eyes.’ A number found themselves forced to become a senior officer’s ‘campaign wife’–known as a ‘PPZh’ (short for
pokhodno-polevaya zhena
) because it sounded like PPSh, the Red Army’s standard sub-machine gun.