The Second World War (93 page)
On 13 July Hitler, greatly preoccupied by the successful Allied invasion of Sicily three days before, summoned Generalfeldmarschall von Manstein and Generalfeldmarschall von Kluge to the Wolfsschanze for a conference. Manstein had given orders to the II SS Panzer Corps and to Army Detachment Kempf to renew the attack, but Hitler announced that he needed to withdraw troops from the eastern front to defend Italy. Operation Citadel was cancelled forthwith. He suspected that the Italians were not prepared to fight for Sicily and this put Italy itself in danger of invasion.
Yet Manstein, knowing that Hoth agreed, wanted to continue the battle if only to stabilize the front. Some furious fighting still continued. Army Detachment Kempf finally linked up with Hoth’s forces, but on 17 July the OKH gave orders that II SS Panzer Corps was to be pulled back from the front prior to transfer to western Europe. The invasion of Sicily, although it was not the Second Front that Stalin wanted, had still had an effect. Also that day, the Soviet South-Western and Southern Fronts launched
combined attacks along the Donets and the Mius down to the Sea of Azov. This was partly a diversionary operation to attract German forces away from Kharkov, the recapture of which was the main Soviet objective.
For once Stalin’s desire for a general offensive was well timed. The Germans were shaken by the number of fresh or rebuilt formations which appeared, and by the Red Army’s ability to launch fresh attacks immediately after the monstrous Battle of the Kursk Salient. ‘
This war was never
more horrific nor cruel than now,’ wrote a Stuka pilot with misplaced self-pity, ‘and nowhere can I see an end to it.’ To make matters worse, the Soviet partisan sabotage of railway lines intensified. On 22 July, Hitler gave Model permission to prepare to withdraw from the Orel Bulge.
The implications of the victory at Kursk were so great that Stalin decided to make his one visit to the front in the whole war. On 1 August, a heavily guarded and camouflaged train took him to the headquarters of the Western Front. He then went to the Kalinin Front to the north. But since he spent no time talking with officers or soldiers, one can only assume that the purpose of the visit was to boast about it to Churchill and Roosevelt.
On 3 August, Konev’s Steppe Front with other armies from the Voronezh Front was unleashed in
Operation Rumyantsev
, with just under a million men, more than 12,000 guns and Katyusha batteries, and nearly 2,500 tanks and self-propelled guns. Manstein had not expected such a powerful onslaught so soon. ‘For the weary German infantry, it was as if their beaten enemy had risen from the grave with renewed strength.’ Two days later Belgorod was retaken, and the Red Army could now focus on Kharkov.
On 5 August Soviet forces also entered Orel north of the salient to find that the Germans had just pulled out. Vasily Grossman, who remembered only too well the scenes of panic in the city in 1941, entered that afternoon. ‘
The smell of burning
was hanging in the air,’ he wrote. ‘A light blue milky smoke was rising from the dwindling fires. A loudspeaker unit was playing the “Internationale” in the square… Red-cheeked girls, traffic controllers, were standing at all the crossroads, smartly waving their little red and green flags.’
On 18 August, Briansk was liberated. But that week, as Konev’s forces advanced on Kharkov, the Germans launched a counter-attack. This time the Red Army was not caught off balance, and fought back. On 28 August, Kharkov finally fell after a bitter defence by Army Detachment Kempf, now redesignated the Eighth Army. Hitler had ordered Kharkov to be held as long as possible in an effort to reduce the demoralization of Germany’s allies. The catastrophic situation in Italy had shaken him, and he feared the effect on the Romanians and Hungarians. This was ironic since Hitler’s insistence on the Kursk Offensive had been to impress his allies.
The German army had received a severe battering. It had lost some 50,000 men. A number of divisions were reduced to the equivalent of a regiment or less. But the Red Army’s victory had also come at an immense price. Because of Zhukov’s battering-ram tactics, the Belgorod–Kharkov Offensive alone cost more than a quarter of a million casualties, an even greater figure than the 177,000 men lost in the Kursk Salient. Operation Kutuzov to retake the Orel Salient was even worse, with around 430,000 casualties. Overall, the Red Army had lost five armoured vehicles for every German panzer destroyed. Yet now the Germans had no choice but to withdraw to the line of the River Dnepr, and start to pull their remaining forces out from the bridgehead left on the Taman Peninsula. Hitler’s lingering dream of securing the oilfields of the Caucasus was destroyed for ever.
The Red Army had grown immeasurably in strength and experience, but ingrained faults still remained. After the battle Vasily Grossman visited Major General Gleb Baklanov who had taken command of the 13th Guards Rifle Division. Baklanov told him that ‘
the men are now fighting
intelligently, without frenzy. They fight as if they are working.’ But he was scornful of Red Army staff work when planning an offensive, and of the many regimental commanders who did not check on details before an attack, or lied about the position of their units. And he still felt that the cry of ‘“Forward! Forward!” is either the result of stupidity, or fear of one’s superiors. That’s why so much blood is being shed.’
There was far more resentment within the German army after the fatal loss of initiative at Kursk and Kharkov. The Nazi hierarchy became nervous and angry. Still envious of the Soviet
politruk
system, it once again demanded that army officers should take on the role of commissar. But it could do little to contain the criticism of military leadership on the eastern front and the planning of Kursk. Hitler’s postponements of the operation to await the arrival of the Panthers had undoubtedly contributed to the scale of the disaster, but it is far from certain that it would have succeeded if it had been launched in May rather than July.
German commanders at the front pointed out that soldiers wanted to know the truth about the general situation, and their officers found it hard to give a straight answer. ‘
The 1943 warrior
is a different man from the one of 1939!’ wrote Generaloberst Otto Wöhler, the commander-in-chief of the Eighth Army after the fall of Kharkov. ‘He has long ago realized how bitterly serious the struggle is for our nation’s existence. He hates clichés and whitewashing, and wants to be given the facts, and be given them “in his own language”. Anything that looks like propaganda he instinctively rejects.’ Manstein, the commander-in-chief of Army Group South, fully endorsed this report.
The OKH then tried to place the blame on the Eighth Army’s new chief of staff, Generalmajor Dr Hans Speidel, who was caricatured as that ‘
intellectual, introspective
, researching Württemberger, always fond of stressing the negative and missing much that is good’. Wöhler fired back a strong rejection, and Keitel promptly forbade any futher correspondence on the question. Keitel demanded that all officers should demonstrate unreserved confidence in the leadership. Anything else was tantamount to defeatism and any measure, however brutal, was justified in destroying those who tried to weaken the national will. This war would not end with a peace treaty. It was a matter of victory or annihilation. The unintelligent and pompous Keitel was for once right to be suspicious. Speidel was already becoming one of the key figures in the military resistance to Hitler and would play a major part in the July plot a year later.
MAY–SEPTEMBER 1943
O
n 11 May 1943, the day that American forces landed on the Aleutian Islands in the far northern Pacific, Winston Churchill and his chiefs of staff reached New York aboard the
Queen Mary
. General Sir Alan Brooke was dreading the Trident conference, due to begin in Washington, DC the next day. He suspected that the Americans were quietly going back on the ‘Germany first’ policy, by sending major reinforcements to the Far East. ‘
Their hearts are really in the Pacific
,’ he had written in his diary less than a month before. ‘We are trying to run two wars at once which is quite impossible with limited resources of shipping.’
Brooke was also having to restrain Churchill from charging off again on another pet project, the invasion of Sumatra to deprive the Japanese of oil. The prime minister had also not given up the idea of launching Operation Jupiter to take northern Norway. Trying to contain his incontinent enthusiasms, which bore no relation to Britain’s resources and above all shipping capacity and air cover, left Brooke exhausted.
In Washington, battle lines between the two allies were immediately apparent and perhaps deeper than before. Many senior American officers felt that they had been ‘led up the Mediterranean garden path’ by the British. General Marshall, who had been forced to concede on Operation Husky, the invasion of Sicily, was still determined that US forces should not linger in the Mediterranean. They should be brought back to Britain ready for the invasion of northern France in the late spring of 1944. If not, they should be sent to the Far East. This was probably more of a threat than a serious proposal, to force the British to commit themselves irrevocably. But it was exactly what Admiral King wanted.
Brooke argued back in his staccato style that the western Allies could not stand idly by for ten months while the Red Army faced the bulk of the Wehrmacht alone. He was thus playing the argument for Sledgehammer back at the Americans. Either Hitler would send powerful forces into Italy at the expense of the eastern front and the Channel defences, or he would abandon most of the country, and establish a line north of the River Po in the foothills of the Alps. Besides, he continued, an invasion of the mainland across the Straits of Messina, once Sicily was taken, would bring down Mussolini and knock Italy out of the war. To regain control of the
Mediterranean would shorten the route to the Far East and help save the equivalent of a million tons of shipping a year.
Where the British were either disingenuous or over-optimistic was in their assurance that the campaign in Italy would require no more than nine divisions. Churchill’s idea of the ‘soft underbelly of Europe’, which he had first tried on Stalin, had become a mantra. He had even started to suggest an invasion of the Balkans to hold back a Soviet occupation of central Europe, an idea which provoked the deepest distrust among Americans. They saw it as another example of British politicking for the post-war period.
On 19 May, at an off-the-record meeting with just the chiefs of staff on each side, a compromise was reached. Some twenty-nine divisions would prepare in Britain for an invasion of France in the spring of 1944, and the invasion of Italy would go ahead. Marshall insisted on one proviso. After the capture of Sicily, seven divisions had to be brought back from the Mediterranean to Britain for the cross-Channel attack.
After all his forebodings, Brooke was satisfied. His plan to disperse German strength before the cross-Channel invasion had been accepted. In any case, the build-up of American forces in Britain had been far too slow to permit an invasion of France in 1943, and the Allies certainly lacked both the landing craft and the air superiority to make it a success.
Churchill and Brooke flew on to Algiers accompanied by General Marshall, in order to brief Eisenhower on the decisions made in Washington. Marshall was still opposed to the invasion of Italy and insisted that no final decision could be taken until the outcome of the Sicilian campaign was clear. Every time that Churchill tried to nobble him on strategic questions during the flight over, Marshall would head him off by innocently asking a question about a subject on which Churchill could not resist expounding at great length. But even if Marshall remained non-committal about the next stage after Sicily, Churchill and Brooke convinced Eisenhower of the advantages of an invasion of Italy, assuming Axis resistance collapsed.
Stalin, then awaiting the German onslaught on the Kursk Salient, was far more dissatisfied with the Italian project, as he made clear in a joint signal to Roosevelt and Churchill. Churchill sent back a sharp reply, yet the prime minister was entirely at fault for having told Stalin in February that they were aiming to launch the cross-Channel invasion in August, an operation which Brooke knew to be impossible. It had been a totally unnecessary deception which was bound to confirm Stalin’s worst suspicions about Britain’s broken promises.
The planning for Operation Husky, the invasion of Sicily, had been complicated and almost acrimonious at times. In April, Eisenhower had considered calling it off when he heard that two German divisions had
been deployed on the island. Churchill had been contemptuous. ‘
He would have to meet
a good deal more than two German divisions’ when they invaded France, he pointed out. ‘I trust the chiefs of staff will not accept these pusillanimous and defeatist doctrines, from whomever they come,’ he minuted.
Montgomery, who had been heavily involved in the final battles for Tunis, then felt that the planners for Husky had been working at cross purposes, and thinking back to front. The problems of resupply had encouraged the idea that it would be better to make numerous landings. He rejected this approach and argued for the Eighth Army to be landed in the south-east of the island in a greater concentration, with Patton’s Seventh Army to its left for mutual support. Patton suspected that Montgomery wanted to achieve the victory himself and use the Americans as little more than a flank guard.
This created a certain amount of inter-Allied friction. Patton even felt that ‘
Allies must fight in separate
theaters or they hate each other more than the enemy.’ Eisenhower’s British chief of staff, Air Chief Marshal Tedder, shared Patton’s scepticism about Montgomery. ‘
He is a little fellow
of average ability,’ he apparently said to Patton, ‘who has had such a build-up that he thinks of himself as Napoleon–he is not.’ Patton also thought that Alexander was afraid of Montgomery, which is why he was not firm enough with him.