All Hell Let Loose (64 page)

Whatever setbacks Eisenhower’s army suffered, the tide of war in North Africa was running overwhelmingly in the Allies’ favour. The caution of the Italian high command denied Rommel a chance to exploit a brief opportunity to outflank and destroy Allied forces in northern Tunisia. The Americans were reinforcing rapidly, while German strength was shrinking. On 22 February 1943 Rommel was obliged to break off his offensive. Next day, he was promoted to become C-in-C Army Group Africa. A week later, Ultra revealed his intention to use all three of his weak panzer divisions to strike Montgomery’s Eighth Army, approaching the Axis Mareth line in southern Tunisia. The German push at Medenine on 6 March was easily thrown back; Rommel, a sick man, left Africa for the last time.

Soon Montgomery was attacking Mareth with a large superiority of tanks and aircraft. After the failure of his first assault on 19 March, he conducted a successful outflanking operation deeper inland, but the Germans were able to withdraw intact to new positions at Wadi Akarit. Meanwhile, the Americans regained the ground lost in the small disaster at Kasserine. At the urging of Alexander, now Eisenhower’s deputy, chaotic Allied command arrangements were reorganised; the most visibly incompetent American officers were replaced with a ruthlessness the British might profitably have emulated. Through April, the Allies steadily pushed back the Axis line. By early May, von Arnim’s forces were confined to a pocket seldom more than sixty miles from the Mediterranean coast, along a 150-mile front where the British confronted them in the east, the Americans further west.

The Allies tightened their grip on the Mediterranean supply route, achieving record sinkings of Axis ships. Von Arnim’s shortage of armour, ammunition, fuel and food worsened. It became plain that his resistance could not be much prolonged; indeed, it was remarkable that he sustained the struggle for so long, against much superior Allied forces – at no time in North Africa did Eisenhower’s and Alexander’s soldiers find their task easy. In April, the US 2nd Corps was frustrated in an attempted breakthrough, but Montgomery finally achieved success at Wadi Akarit, driving back his opponents to a new line. On 22 April, Alexander launched an all-out offensive: First Army attacked towards Tunis, Bradley’s corps at Bizerta and the French towards Pont du Fahs. The British Eighth Army failed to smash the new German line at Enfidaville. On Montgomery’s advice, Alexander transferred two of his divisions to First Army, to deliver a final assault along the Medjez–Tunis road, with massive air and artillery support. The combined pressure on von Arnim’s front proved irresistible: Tunis, Bizerta and Pont du Fahs fell on the same day, and two wrecked German panzer armies disintegrated. The last Axis pocket surrendered on 13 May, and 238,000 prisoners fell into Allied hands.

Victory had required almost five months’ more fighting than the Anglo-American high command had anticipated in November, after El Alamein and
Torch
. But Hitler’s reinforcement of failure rendered success, when it came, correspondingly greater. Initial American hubris was punished by Wehrmacht skill, but Eisenhower and his colleagues displayed sense and humility in learning the lessons. Weaknesses of command, tactics, equipment and junior leadership were addressed to some effect before the Allied armies began to cross the Mediterranean.

The British Army was vastly cheered by the sense of redemption that accompanied its arrival in Tunis. After almost three years of hard campaigning, it had achieved a victory which won enthusiastic applause at home. Despite the overblown acclaim lavished on Montgomery, Eighth Army’s commander had shown himself a steady professional. His record was tarnished by failure to destroy Rommel’s army after Alamein, the sluggishness of his subsequent pursuit and some important failures against German defensive positions. British Lt. Gen. Sir Frederick Morgan, a bitter critic, asserted that ‘The pursuit of Rommel across Africa was in the nature rather of a stately procession than of a rout of a defeated army.’ But Montgomery had proved himself the ablest British general of the war thus far, with a shrewd awareness of the limitations of his citizen army.

The North African campaign established the reputations of the Allied commanders who would dominate the big western campaigns in Europe – ‘Monty’, Alexander, Eisenhower, Patton, Bradley. It was their good fortune to face the Germans when the Allies had substantial material superiority, and the Wehrmacht had suffered debilitating losses in Russia. There is no reason to suppose that any of the battlefield stars of 1942–45 would have fared better than their French and British predecessors, had they borne responsibility for the earlier campaigns of the war. The first requirement of a general eager to forge a great reputation is to lead an army with sufficient strength to overcome its opponents.

By May 1943, after the Germans’ epic defeat at Stalingrad and expulsion from North Africa, there was no doubt among the Allied nations, and little among the Axis peoples, about the outcome of the war. Lt. Vicenzo Formica, whose hopes of desert victory were so high on 1 November 1942, reflected wretchedly on the disillusionment that had followed: ‘I think back with pride to those far-off days, and my heart bleeds on contemplating the reality of life around us today. I am a prisoner in a concentration camp [his own description of his PoW camp] in the middle of North America.’ Yet, if the tide was now running strongly for the Allies, great uncertainties persisted about the course and duration of the war. It seemed plausible that the Nazi empire might survive until 1947 or 1948. While Churchill ordered the church bells of Britain rung for victory in North Africa, much more pain and hardship lay ahead before the Allies would enjoy real cause for celebration.

In 1943, while the Western Allies were still conducting modest operations in the Mediterranean, the Soviet Union inflicted on Germany a series of massive defeats, causing irreparable losses of men, tanks, guns and aircraft. The superiority of Stalin’s armies grew alongside the confidence of his generals. Soaring weapons output increased the Red Army’s advantage: the Russians were building over twelve hundred T-34s a month, while the Germans produced only 5,976 Panthers and 1,354 Tigers, their best tanks, during the whole war. After the triumphs of the winter, Stalin’s people had no doubt of final victory. Nonetheless, until the end they were obliged to fight hard and to accept massive casualties.

The plight of Russia’s civilians remained dire, with millions nudging starvation even when the tide of war ebbed from their immediate vicinity. In January 1943, some people who had sent their families out of Moscow when the city seemed doomed now brought them back, but Lazar Brontman was deterred by continuing shortages of fuel, electricity and rations. ‘Everyone talks incessantly of food,’ the journalist wrote. ‘We recall the menus of dinners gone by, and if somebody dines in richer and more fortunate company, he afterwards torments others with details of the dishes served.’ In the printworks of
Pravda
, it was necessary to remove lightbulbs as soon as the daily edition was dispatched, to prevent them from being stolen. Amid the fuel famine, wooden fences vanished from Moscow’s streets and suburbs. Sub-zero temperatures obliged office staff to work in overcoats and gloves.

Battlefield successes provided satisfaction but scant cause for exuberance, because so many people continued to die. Again and again in 1943, the Russians accomplished dramatic encirclements, only to find the Germans smashing their way free, conducting fighting withdrawals with their customary skill. ‘The Russians weren’t very good,’ asserted Waffen SS gunner Captain Karl Godau. ‘They just had the masses. They attacked in masses, so they lost in masses. They had good generals and good artillery, but the soldiers were poor stuff.’ Such condescension was overstated, but it remained true that Soviet middle-ranking leadership was weak, organisation often collapsed on the battlefield, and men paid in blood for repeated tactical blunders.

Machine-gunner Aleksandr Gordeev deplored the crudity of his own army’s tactics: ‘The frontal attacks puzzled me. Why advance straight into German machine-gun fire? Why not make flank attacks?’ He briefly deluded himself that his own company, reduced to one-third strength, would be spared from making further assaults, but instead early one morning it was reinforced by rear-area personnel, some of them clerks. They were issued double rations of vodka, ‘and those who wanted it drank more’. Gordeev’s assistant gunner was reassigned as a rifleman, and ‘walked off as though assured he was facing death’. He was replaced by a soldier sweating with terror, and limping from the consequences of a self-inflicted wound. Gordeev wrote, ‘The situation was pretty shitty; this wasn’t a company, but a drunken mob’; it was nonetheless plunged back into battle.

In Nikolai Belov’s sector of the front, on the morning of 20 February 1943, a Russian bombardment designed to pound the Germans fell instead on his own men, who suffered heavily even before meeting the enemy. After a day of bloody fighting, at 1600 he himself was wounded. He lay between the trenches for four hours before darkness fell and sub-machine gunners were able to drag him back into the trenches, and thence to the rear for treatment. Belov returned to his battalion three weeks later to find almost all its officers gone, most of them dead: ‘Major Anoprienko left for the [Military] Academy. Division commander Colonel Ivanov is killed. Captain Novikov shot [presumably for dereliction of duty], Grudin killed. Dubovik killed. Alekseev died of wounds. Stepashin stripped of rank and sentenced to ten years [imprisonment].’

But Russia could endure such losses, and even such clumsy, brutal war-making. Stalin’s forces were now much larger than those of Hitler, and their superiority was growing steadily: some Soviet weapons systems were better than those of the Wehrmacht. Russian air power was increasingly formidable, as ever more of the Luftwaffe’s declining strength was diverted to defend the Reich from Allied bombers. For a time in the spring of 1943, the Germans looked incapable of holding any line east of the Dnieper, four hundred miles from Stalingrad. Indeed, it seemed plausible that Hitler’s Army Groups A and Don could be prevented even from getting back to the river. As thousands of prisoners were herded into cages, Russian soldiers savoured booty, notably including clothing: many men in Ivan Melnikov’s unit seized the opportunity to replace the cloths wrapped around their feet with German boots. ‘It was hard to take off our foot bandages, for they had stuck to the skin and one had to tear them off rag by rag,’ Melnikov wrote with clinical dispassion. ‘Using water unsparingly, we washed our blistered, bleeding feet. Some of us put on socks that we found … Then we marched onwards full of cheer.’

At the end of January, a fast tank force directed by South-West Front commander Nikolai Vatutin crossed the Donets east of Izyum and raced south towards Mariupol on the Sea of Azov, to get behind the Germans. On 2 February, Zhukov and Vasilevsky launched an ambitious two-pronged attack, one spearhead driving south-westwards, past Kharkov towards the Dnieper, the other heading north-west for Smolensk by way of Kursk, which fell on 8 February. Kharkov was captured a week later, and within days Soviet forces approached the Dnieper crossings at Dnepropetrovsk and Zaporozhye.

Thereafter, however, Russian difficulties increased. Panzers wrecked Vatutin’s mobile force by superior tactics and gunnery. Manstein took command of Army Group South, and launched a series of punishing offensives. Before the spring thaw reduced the battlefield to mud, which as usual immobilised armour, on 11 March the Germans retook Kharkov, where many Russians experienced extraordinary odysseys. On 8 March, medical orderly Aleksei Tolstukhin found himself trapped by the German advance on the city. He wrote later to his parents: ‘For ten days I wandered around the steppe, trying to get back to the Red Army. I was frozen, starving and very tired. On the eleventh day I found a straw stack and fell asleep in it. I was woken by a heavy blow on the back from a rifle butt. I opened my eyes to find Hitler’s men standing over me. After that, a new icy and hungry life began for me, with endless beatings. I cannot describe to you all that I have suffered. I can’t bear to talk about it. Only on 17 September did I find an opportunity to escape. At ten in the morning of 21 September I walked through the front line 20 km from Poltava … I still cannot believe that I am back with my own people.’ Corporal Tolstukhin escaped the draconian sanctions often imposed on escaped prisoners by their own commissars, and was merely returned to duty. He was soon wounded by shrapnel, though not badly enough to escape the battlefield; on 16 November, he was killed on the bank of the Dnieper.

The Germans, meanwhile, endured ample miseries of their own. ‘We never heard a frank admission of defeat,’ wrote Guy Sajer. When his unit began to pull back from the west bank of the Don, ‘As most soldiers had never studied Russian geography, we had very little idea of what was happening.’ But after Stalingrad, fear of encirclement gnawed at every German. Sajer and a handful of fellow infantrymen made their escape in darkness, in a Russian truck towed by a tank. ‘The windshield became caked with mud, and Ernst waded through the liquid ground to scrape it away with his hand … Behind us the wounded had stopped moaning. Maybe they were all dead – what difference did it make? Daylight dawned on faces haggard with exhaustion.’ The party halted and an engineer NCO shouted, ‘One hour’s rest! Make the most of it!’ The towing tank commander shouted back, ‘Fuck you! We’ll leave when I’ve had enough sleep!’ There was a fierce altercation between the two men, the engineer seeking to pull rank. The tankman said, ‘Shoot me if you like, and drive the tank yourself. I haven’t slept in two days, and you’re to leave me the hell alone.’ They got away two hours later, but the experience emphasised that German soldiers, like their foes, could flag in the face of acute adversity.

On 18 March two panzer divisions took advantage of a railway embankment to race their tanks in column to Belgorod and retake the city. In the north, Hitler reluctantly authorised a withdrawal from the Rzhev salient, which no longer presented a credible threat to Moscow. This enabled Army Group Centre to shorten its line by 250 miles, and created a sufficient concentration of strength to stem an offensive by Rokossovsky. As the Germans fell back, millions of Russians beheld the devastation and carnage left behind them. Many who remained unmoved by the familiar plight of adults gave way to emotion on witnessing the tragedies of the very young. Captain Pavel Kovalenko wrote on 26 April: ‘We understand the horrors of war, its relentless laws written in blood. But children, these blossoms of life, the blossoms of blossoms, these innocent holy souls, the beauty of our lives … they, who have done no harm to anyone … are suffering for the sins of their parents … We’ve failed to protect them from the beast. One’s heart bleeds, one’s thoughts freeze with horror at the sight of small bloodsoaked bodies, with gnarled fingers and distorted little faces … They bear mute testimony to indescribable human suffering. These small, frozen, dead eyes … reproach us, the living.’

In the village of Tarasevichi by the Dnieper, Vasily Grossman met a teenage boy. ‘They are so frightening, these old, tired, lifeless eyes of children. “Where is your father?” “Killed,” he answered. “And mother?” “She died.” “Have you got brothers or sisters?” “A sister. They took her to Germany.” “Have you got any relatives?” “No, they were all burned in a partisan village.” And he walked into a potato field, his feet bare and black from the mud, straightening the rags of his torn shirt.’ A million such encounters forged the mood of Russia’s soldiers as the time approached when they would enter the territories of Hitler’s people. Soviet propagandist Ilya Ehrenburg wrote: ‘Not only divisions and armies … [but] all the trenches, graves and ravines with the corpses of the innocents are advancing on Berlin.’ A Soviet propaganda slogan said: ‘The soldier’s rage in battle must be terrible. He does not merely seek to fight; he must also be the embodiment of the court of his people’s justice.’

Grigory Telegin wrote to his wife on 28 June 1943: ‘I received the letter telling me that your brother Aleksandr was killed on 4 May … My heart has become like stone, my thoughts and feelings reject pity; hatred towards the enemy burns in my heart. When I look through my sights, firing point-blank at these beasts on two legs, and see their split skulls and mutilated bodies, I feel a great joy and laugh like a child in the knowledge they will not come back to life. I will describe a typical day in action. 5 June. The rising sun’s rays are reflected in flashes from our tank turrets. Droplets of fog hang like crystals on the leaves of the trees. Three green rockets signalled the attack. At 0700 our tanks advanced in column, then extended into line in a clearing. We could clearly see the wooden houses of the village.’

Russian shells were exploding in the German positions. The attackers glimpsed figures running towards the rear, prone bodies crushed beneath their own tank tracks. But mines and anti-tank guns caught first one Soviet tank, then a second, then a third, which burst into flames. Telegin continued: ‘My heart sickens at the thought of my friends, still firing from the burning vehicles. Anger and hatred drive us on, overtaking the stricken tanks. We crush enemy machine-gun pits and anti-tank guns with their crews.’ Reaching the far side of the village, he saw German trenches ahead, between woods and ditches impassable by tanks. Identifying nearby the tank of his friend Misha Sotnik, he ran his own T-34 alongside. They switched off their engines and held a brief shouted exchange. Agreeing to advance one on each side of the German trenches, they started up again and lurched onwards.

During the ensuing struggle, a direct shell hit wrecked Telegin’s machine-gun and optics. As the hours dragged on amid smoke and dust, the crew became so thirsty that some men at times drifted into unconsciousness. Then the engine overheated and died. Stranded under fire, they took another direct hit which concussed the driver and caused Telegin briefly to pass out. ‘We gasped like fish, our lips cracked, mouths dry. We opened the driver’s hatch and saw ten metres away a crater filled with water. Bullets buzzed around us, but I rolled out of the hatch, crawled towards the water and drank. I brought water for my comrades in mess-tins, and we revived.’ For the next ten hours they remained prisoners of their stinking, sun-baked steel box. Then, at last, the driver’s experiments with the choke were rewarded, and the engine roared. ‘We pulled back. An ambulance drove up, and I saw a familiar silhouette on a stretcher. It was Misha Sotnik, a sub-machine gun bullet in his head. Unable to hold back my tears, I kissed Misha’s blue lips and said farewell.’

Even when the tide of war had turned, and indeed until the last months, Stalin’s armies suffered a relentless haemorrhage of deserters, many of them ‘Eldash’ or ‘Youssefs’ – Asians. Nikolai Belov recorded his own battalion’s losses on 13 June 1943: ‘Two more men have deserted to the enemy, making a total of eleven, most of them Eldash.’ Red Army statistics showed 1,964 of its soldiers deserting to the enemy in April 1943, 2,424 in May, 2,555 in June. The usual penalties were imposed on those caught making such an attempt. Belov wrote of one execution: ‘Today a Youssef was shot in front of the unit for trying to desert to the Germans. Creepy feeling.’ On 2 June he recorded laconically: ‘Two more men tried to desert today. Luckily they got blown up on mines and were dragged back.’ Like many Red officers, he felt able to rely only on his own racial group, writing after reinforcements reached the unit: ‘They are greenhorns, born 1926. Such youngsters. But what is good about them is that they are well-trained and all of them Russian. These men won’t desert.’

The enemy had his own morale problems. Belov was astonished to learn from a neighbouring unit that two Wehrmacht soldiers, one of them a sergeant, had surrendered. ‘This is the first time I’ve heard of Germans coming over to us. Their lives are not so good, then.’ Captain Pavel Kovalenko had the same experience on 31 March: ‘A German deserter appeared completely out of the blue. There was a knock at the door. “Who is there? Come in!” The door opened and a Fritz appeared. Everyone grabbed their guns. He took out a gold watch and gave it to one soldier, handed a gold ring to another, his rifle to a third. Then he raised his hands. He is from Westphalia, a coal miner, aged twenty-two. His father had told him to desert.’