The Third Reich at War (80 page)

But the British were able to decode German naval signals traffic again from December 1942 and route their convoys away from the waiting U-boats.
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The submarines were forced to search for Allied convoys mainly by sailing in loosely knit groups (‘wolf-packs’) which converged when one of them spotted the enemy. Shore-to-ship radio traffic with the convoys was also intercepted by the German navy from 1941 until June 1943, when a new code was introduced, thus helping the submarines find the convoys or at least work out where they were heading. But the radio signals used by the wolf-pack U-boats to communicate with one another were intercepted by the convoy escort ships. The submarines could not send and receive radio signals while submerged, and when under water they could only move very slowly, so they spent most of their time on the surface, making them vulnerable to location and attack. Under water, they could be located by echo-sounding and damaged by depth-charges. Submarines generally attacked from the surface and at night, so the convoy escorts developed a searchlight system to locate them. From 1943 small aircraft carriers accompanied the convoys. This made a huge difference, not least to the Arctic convoys. In February 1943 for the first time the Allies, above all the Americans, were building more ship tonnage than the Germans were sinking. By May 1943 U-boat losses were running at one a day and submarine commanders were becoming reluctant to engage the enemy. On 24 May 1943 Admiral D̈nitz conceded defeat and ordered the submarine fleet to move out of the North Atlantic. U-boats continued to be constructed in substantial numbers, new, more advanced types were commissioned, and the war at sea continued, but the threat to Allied supplies across the Atlantic and through the Arctic Ocean was never really significant again.
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‘HELL HAS BROKEN OUT’

I

On the Eastern Front, the defeat of the German Sixth Army at Stalingrad marked the beginning of a long retreat that was only to end with total defeat in Berlin just over two years later. It was the decisive turning-point of the war in the east.
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Even before Paulus and his bedraggled forces had surrendered, Army Group A (the other half of Army Group South) was also getting into trouble. In the summer of 1942 Army Group A had made rapid advances through the Caucasus as the Red Army retreated while the Soviet generals desperately tried to organize reinforcements of men and supplies. By the early autumn, the German armies were exhausted, reduced in numbers, dependent on long and precarious supply lines, and weakened by being split into a number of different spearheads. By mid-September 1942, despite their rapid advances, they were still hundreds of miles away from their objectives, the oilfields at Grozny and Baku. The commander of Army Group A, Field Marshal Wilhelm List, concluded that he simply did not have the resources to drive the Russians back across the mountain passes before winter set in. Told of the situation, Hitler flew into a towering rage and sacked List, temporarily taking over command of Army Group A himself, though he did not trouble to visit the scene of operations. Hitler still thought that he would be able to conquer the Caspian oilfields. But even he eventually had to admit that this would not happen in 1942. The Red Army finally organized itself enough to make a stand. For many German soldiers, the advance through the fragrant orchards, the vineyards and the maize fields, with snow-capped mountains on the horizon, had seemed almost idyllic. But at the city of Ordzhonikide, they met with insurmountable resistance. ‘None of us,’ wrote one young artilleryman on 2 November, ‘has experienced days such as these. Hell has broken out.’
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‘What we have experienced in the last two weeks,’ he wrote on 14 November 1942, ‘was dreadful.’
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Surrounded by Red Army troops, the German forces fought their way out; but there was nowhere to go but backwards. The offensive was not just stalled, it was over.
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Retreat now became the only option, as the Soviet thrust to the west of Stalingrad not only cut off Paulus’s Sixth Army but also threatened other German positions. Army Group A would be isolated as well if Soviet forces managed to capture Rostov and seal off the Caucasus on the northern side. As he became increasingly preoccupied with Stalingrad, Hitler appointed Field Marshal Ewald von Kleist to command Army Group A. Kleist immediately saw the danger of being cut off. On 27 December 1942 Manstein persuaded Zeitzler to ask Hitler for permission to withdraw from the Caucasus. Hitler reluctantly gave his assent. Perhaps he realized that with the Sixth Army tied up in Stalingrad and key units sent earlier to the north, it would not be possible to get reinforcements to the Caucasus. Shortly afterwards, he changed his mind; but it was too late: Zeitzler had telephoned through the order and the retreat had begun. Pursued by relatively weak Soviet forces, the German troops marched all the way back to Rostov-on-Don, and then, as the Red Army advanced westwards in the wake of its victory at Stalingrad, the Germans were forced to retreat even further.
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The retreat depressed many of the troops. ‘You could almost break into tears,’ wrote Albert Neuhaus to his wife on 16 February 1943, ‘when you think what the conquest of these territories has cost in sacrifice and effort. You mustn’t think about it . . . There seems to be a real crisis at the moment and you could almost lose your courage if you didn’t have a devout heart.’
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This was one of his last letters home. Albert Neuhaus fell to a Red Army bullet just under a month later, on 11 March 1943.
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The Eastern Front had been reconstructed and to some extent stabilized by these withdrawals. Fresh troops were transferred from Western Europe, while Manstein reorganized and re-equipped his forces ready for a counter-attack. On 19 February 1943, Army Group South sent two panzer armies northwards, pulverizing the Soviet advance forces and retaking Kharkov, while another panzer army destroyed the Soviet armour further east. A month later, the spring thaw turned everything to mud and stopped further movement for the time being. But neither Hitler nor the army leadership had any illusions about these limited gains. After Stalingrad, they knew, for all the bold rhetoric in which the Nazi leadership continued to indulge, that Germany had gone over to the defensive on the Eastern Front. The main priority was now to preserve control over the heavy-industrial areas of the Donets Basin, with its rich and essential deposits of coal and ores. Its loss would mean the end of the war, Hitler told the generals.
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What was needed was a tactical offensive designed to straighten out the German front, sacrificing as little in men and armaments as possible, and weakening the Red Army sufficiently to stop it launching a successful summer offensive. The possibilities were limited. The German generals knew that the Red Army now had nearly twice as many men and three or four times as many artillery pieces and tanks as they did on the Eastern Front. Where in these circumstances would it be safest to launch the offensive? As they had done before Moscow, the generals argued amongst themselves and were unable to take a united decision. The Combined Armed Forces Supreme Command disagreed with the Army Supreme Command on whether it was in any case more important to strengthen defences in Italy and the west. And as before Moscow, Hitler was eventually forced to take the decision himself. The blow, he ordered, would fall at Kursk, where a salient in the front line exposed the Soviet forces to a classic encircling manoeuvre.
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While they waited for the ground to harden, the German commanders moved up large quantities of the new Tiger and Panther tanks, together with other heavy armour - especially another new weapon, the Ferdinand self-propelled gun - and combat aircraft, in preparation for an assault on the salient. Manstein wanted to move quickly, before the Red Army could make its preparations, but he was frustrated by the problems the railway system experienced in getting the reinforcements to the front, and the attacks carried out on the transports by partisans. Field Marshal Model, commander of the Ninth Panzer Army to the north of Kursk, warned repeatedly that his forces were too weak to carry out their part of ‘Operation Citadel’, as it was called. Hitler therefore delayed the attack while his armies gathered their strength. But the vulnerability of the Kursk bulge was obvious to all, so the Red Army brought in massive reinforcements of men and armour. Soviet intelligence managed to discover not only where the German offensive thrusts would be launched, but when they would begin as well. The element of surprise essential to the original concept of the attack had been lost. The consequences were to prove fatal for the German armies.
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By the beginning of July, the forces were assembled for what was to be the greatest land battle in history. The statistics were staggering. The Battle of Kursk, including Operation Citadel and two Soviet counter-offensives, involved a total of more than 4 million troops, 69,000 artillery pieces, 13,000 tanks and self-propelled guns, and nearly 12,000 combat aircraft. In the initial assault of Operation Citadel the Red Army outnumbered the German forces by a factor of almost three to one (1,426,352 men against roughly 518,000). 2,365 tanks and self-propelled guns on the German side faced 4,938 Soviet vehicles of the same kind. The Soviet defenders possessed 31,415 artillery pieces of various categories, including rocket-launchers, to put up a wall of fire that the Germans would find it hard to penetrate, while the 7,417 artillery pieces deployed by the German armies had no chance of destroying the Soviet defences. The German forces on the Eastern Front had long since lost the command of the skies, and with only 1,372 combat aircraft to put against their opponents’ 3,648, they were unlikely to regain it. In addition to all this, the Red Army held vast quantities of men and equipment in reserve nearby, ready to throw into the fray if and when it became necessary. Realizing this, Model kept significant panzer forces back from the battle in case the Soviets brought on their reserves to threaten his rear. Altogether in the whole area of the battle, the Red Army outnumbered its German opponents by 3:1 in men, 3:1 in tanks and armour, 5:1 in artillery and 4:1 in aircraft. And it was far better prepared and organized than it had been in previous encounters.
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II

On the morning of 5 July 1943, the Germans attacked simultaneously from both sides of the salient. The Russians were ready for them. In three months of feverish work, 300,000 civilian conscripts had helped the Soviet troops construct defensive systems 300 kilometres deep, with barbed wire, deep ditches, tank traps, bunkers, machine-gun emplacements, flame-throwers and artillery arranged in eight lines, one behind the other. Nearly a million landmines had been laid, in some sectors more than 3,000 per kilometre. One German panzer commander commented: ‘What happened at Kursk was unbelievable. I’ve never experienced anything like it in war, either before or since. The Soviets had prepared a defensive system whose extension in depth was inconceivable to us. Every time we broke through one position in bitter fighting, we found ourselves confronted with a new one.’
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Nevertheless, the battle began badly for the Red Army. Misled by false information from a captured German soldier as to the time of the intended assault, the Soviet artillery opened up first, thus betraying to the Germans the fact that they knew the assault was coming. Soviet bombers took to the air in a surprise attack on the German airfields, which were crowded with combat aircraft, but they were spotted by German radar, and the German air force scrambled its fighter planes, which shot down 425 Soviet aircraft for the loss of only thirty-six of its own. As a result, the Germans obtained temporary air supremacy, despite the far greater strength of the Soviet air forces in the area.
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Meanwhile, in the north, Field Marshal Walter Model pushed forward with the Ninth Panzer Army. Mindful of the huge Soviet reserves in his rear, and the massive superiority of the forces that faced him, he was uncharacteristically hesitant. He tried to preserve his tanks by using them to follow up the infantry instead of deploying them to punch through the deep Soviet defences. This slowed up the advance, and then Model began to lose his tanks as they were blown up by mines. After five days of ferocious combat, the advance ground to a halt.
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To the south, Manstein deployed his considerably larger panzer army, with more than 200 Tiger and Panther tanks, in the classic manner, pushing them through the Soviet defences. But they too were slowed down by minefields, which destroyed twenty-five of them on the first day. Mechanical failure crippled another forty-five Panthers, in another illustration of the dangers of deploying a new weapon before it had been fully tried and tested. Nevertheless, the heavy Tigers proved strongly resistant to attempts to destroy them, and even the Panthers soon proved their superiority over the Soviet T-34s, shooting them to pieces at distances well in excess of 2,000 metres. Manstein and Hoth’s forces advanced steadily, and the Soviet generals began to panic. They decided to bury a large proportion of their tanks in the ground, up to the turret, for protection. This caused enormous difficulties for the German tanks, which now had to approach extremely close in order to destroy their Soviet opponents; the well-camouflaged Russian tanks frequently let the Tigers and Panthers pass by before destroying them at close quarters from behind. The southern attack began to slow down, its situation worsened by the transfer of a large number of combat aircraft to assist the beleaguered Model in the north. Still, by 11 July 1941, Manstein’s forces had broken through the Soviet defences and were within reach of their first major objective, the town of Prochorovka.
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