A World at Arms (150 page)

The other major target to which the Allies paid increasing attention with devastating results for the German war economy was the transportation system. In a localized way, this had been an important part of the preparation for the invasion; the Allies had disrupted the German transportation system in the West just as the Soviet partisans repeatedly concentrated on the German railway network in the occupied U.S.S.R. before major Red Army offensives. Certain, on the basis of this experience and some assessments of air attacks on the transportation system in Italy earlier, that the railway network, including its freight marshalling yards, was potentially a highly rewarding target, some of the British leaders, especially Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder, now argued
for an offensive against the whole German transportation system, with special emphasis on the railways and canals.
⁶⁹

New directives were issued to the Allied strategic air forces in September 1944 to concentrate on oil with transportation as the second target, barely mentioning the area attacks which had become the mainstay of British Bomber Command’s operations. In the following months, the head of Bomber Command, Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris, frequently ignored these directives, successfully defying the Chief of the Air Staff.
⁷⁰
In spite of the resulting dispersion of Allied bombing effort, the transportation plan worked, drastically reducing German deliveries of coal and other vital materials to factories and stranding parts and finished products at the plants where they were made.

In the fall of 1944 the German railway system, the main artery of the whole economic structure, was being pounded to bits, with industrial production dropping precipitously as a result. Ironically one of the attacks on the railways also dealt the greatest single blow to Germany’s highly important water transport system. An American attack on the railway yard at Cologne on October 14, 1944, set off the explosive charges which had been placed by German engineers in the piers of the great new suspension bridge over the Rhine, against the contingency of its being seized by the Allies. Thereupon the whole bridge fell into the river, blocking the Rhine, Germany’s most important waterway, to barge traffic.
⁷¹
Other attacks, especially by the RAF using the largest bombs of the war, hit the German canal system and blocked it at key points.
⁷²
Here was a way to bring the German war machine to a halt.

Having failed to arrest the Allied air offensive by the mass employment of fighters, the Germans tried other expedients. They had earlier turned to underground facilities for the fabrication of parts for the V-1 and V-2; in early March, 1944, Hitler ordered that all war production be moved into caves, tunnels, and excavated underground spaces; but this was obviously not the sort of thing which could be done quickly.
⁷³
Hitler was most certainly not going to make peace as the fired German air force Chief of Staff, General Werner Kreipe, suggested to Göring on his departure at the beginning of November 1944.
⁷⁴

On the contrary, the Germans, like the Japanese, began to give serious consideration to the deliberate use of suicide attacks, though never implementing this tactic on the scale actually employed by the latter. German plans and actions in this regard have never been subjected to a serious and comprehensive scholarly analysis,
⁷⁵
but they appear to have begun with a June 1944 project, code-named “Carl,” for a bombing operation at extreme one–way range of Soviet hydro–electric works on the upper Volga and in the Urals.
⁷⁶
The German air force planners then
shifted to the idea of ramming Allied heavy bombers with single-seater fighters on the assumptions that the trade was worthwhile and that the tactic would shake the morale of the bomber crews; and they exchanged experiences with the Japanese who introduced the kamikaze suicide squadrons into action in the battle for the Philippines in October 1944.
⁷⁷
Although the German ramming squadron did fly one mission on April 7, 1945, the whole project never played a substantial role in German, as it did in Japanese, planning for defense.
^f
There really was no way to put a secure roof over the Third Reich anymore. As there was no reversal of the naval defeat of 1943, there could be no reversal of the air defeat of February–March 1944.

THE SITUATION BY JANUARY 1945

The employment of Germany’s last reserves in the failed December offensive in the West and the collapse of Germany’s industrial system under the pounding of Allied bombers combined to set up Germany and what remained of its European satellites–Hungary, the puppet states of Slovakia and Croatia together with Mussolini’s “Social Republic” in northern Italy–for their final defeat. The counter-attacks of the Western Allies, squeezing out the bulge in the West, and the slow but continued advance of the Red Army in Hungary were harbingers of new major offensives to come: the Soviet winter operation which looked ever more imminent and the resumption of offensives by the Allied forces in the West and also in Italy.

The very fact that the concentric operations of the Allies were continuing showed that the hopes which German leaders had pinned on a disruption of the alliance of their enemies would not be realized. The frictions between the United States and Great Britain, which had originally centered on the debates over the invasion of Western Europe and then on strategy in the Mediterranean, had turned more and more to political issues in the winter of 1944–45, especially in regard to British support of monarchist elements in Italy and Greece. Whatever the significance of these political disagreements, and some of the military
implications which they might have,
⁷⁸
those at the top in the two countries in general and Roosevelt and Churchill in particular were determined not to allow them to cause any major breach. The death of Sir John Dill, a key figure holding them together, in early November 1944, came at a time when the alliance was firmly set,
⁷⁹
and when a closer approximation of their respective policies toward de Gaulle reduced one earlier source of friction.

Similarly, the developing difficulties between the British and Yugoslav partisan leader Tito did not lead to any break between them. Churchill was upset about the partisan leader’s increasingly close relations with Moscow, but the supply of weapons to him continued. The project for joint British–partisan operations in and later from the area of Zara, the Italian port on the eastern Adriatic, which had been under review since November, 1944, was called off in January, 1945, as it became obvious that from Tito’s perspective this was simply another way to acquire equipment and definitely
not
British units. Given the British shortage of troops, with more and more of them being sucked into the contentious situation in Greece, one wonders whether anything substantial would actually have come of the scheme, code-named “Baffle,” if it had ever been implemented.
⁸⁰

The most critical alliance relationship, however, was that between the Soviet Union and the Western Powers. The possibility that their differences over military operations or, more likely, over the political future of Poland and Southeast Europe, would lead to a breakup of the grand coalition, had been a mainstay of German hopes for the future as it had been a major source of concern for the British and Americans. But if there had been real prospects of such a break earlier in the war, they had vanished by now. The Soviet Union had liberated its own territory, had driven Finland out of the war–on terms which paid some attention to the concerns of her allies–had occupied all of Romania and Bulgaria, was in control of substantial portions of Hungary and Poland, and had begun to move into Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. Now that their Western Allies had agreed to a division of Germany which provided for a substantial Soviet zone in the East and the annexation of the northern half of East Prussia to the Soviet Union, what could the Germans possibly offer Moscow, even had they been so inclined?

According to the report the Hungarian Fascist leader Ferenc Szálasi had given to the Japanese ambassador, Hitler had not entirely rejected his advice to reach an understanding with the U.S.S.R., whereas there was no possibility of a compromise with the Western Powers,
⁸¹
but all Soviet incentive and interest had vanished by this time. It was obvious to the Soviet political and military leaders that there was still hard
fighting ahead, but the possible gains in Europe were substantial; and thereafter portions of the Red Army could be moved to the Far Eastern provinces of the U.S.S.R. to assure further important gains there. Certainly nothing happening in the Pacific War in. 1944 argued against such a policy. The Japanese were obviously being beaten by the Americans while the Japanese victory in China was not only off-set by defeat of the attempted invasion of India, but would in addition weaken Chiang Kai-shek’s ability to resist whatever demands Moscow might make of him.

The prospect of a series of further bloody campaigns against Japan only enhanced American interest in eventual Soviet intervention in the Pacific War–and hence desire to accommodate her in Europe if possible. The shock received by the Americans in the Battle of the Bulge and the continued slowness of the campaign in Italy served to underline for American leaders the enormous importance of continued pressure by the Red Army to Allied victory in Europe. The dispatch of Air Chief Marshal Tedder to Moscow as Eisenhower’s representative in late December 1944 reflected the concern of the Western Powers that the final pushes into Germany be coordinated as carefully as possible; there was as yet no recognition of the effect strategic bombing–after so many earlier disappointments–was at last having on the German industrial system.

As for the British, they were certainly not about to allow their differences with Moscow to produce a breach now. Whatever the arguments about Eastern Europe, it was Western Europe and Greece that mainly concerned them; and in these areas, the cooperation of the Soviet Union appeared to be provided. As for Central and Eastern Europe, there was little hope of the British ever obtaining in reality the occupation zone in northwest Germany, which they had argued for for so long, except in a continuing alliance which assured heavy offensive operations by the Red Army in the East with the aim of occupying the zone allocated, in the British-originated scheme, to the Soviet Union. As for the rest of Central and Eastern Europe, the same attitudes which had once led many in England to accept, reluctantly perhaps, but to accept all the same a German sphere in the region, now argued for a similarly complaisant attitude toward the Soviet Union.
⁸²

For now the alliance against Hitler’s Germany was secure, whatever its internal tensions. The leaders were about to meet again after an interval of a year and a half since Teheran, and they could be expected to find ways to continue the struggle against Germany together. That struggle had now moved very close to the old borders of Germany. In the East, the Red Army had barely crossed into East Prussia, but its
bridgeheads over the Vistula in central Poland offered an opportunity for a drive across open and excellent tank country into the industrial center of Silesia and the political center at Berlin. Simultaneously, the Western Allies, who already held a significant piece of German territory, were back on the line before the German Ardennes offensive and, in spite of the slow progress of the American–French offensive in .Alsace stood poised to close and cross the Rhine. Germany still controlled most of Norway, all of Denmark, much of Czechoslovakia, and portions of Hungary, Yugoslavia and Italy as well as practically all of pre-I939 Germany. But with the roof falling in and the Allies pounding on the doors, how long could the Germans expect to hold out?

^a
Hitler also regaled Szálasi with a lengthy account of the past, explaining that the British were responsible for the outbreak of the war, having introduced conscription in 1935/36 (
sic
; in reality in 1939), and that the weakness and defection of Germany’s allies had caused the setbacks of the last two years.

^b
The post-war British literature on the controversy over “Anvil”-“Dragoon” has yet to engage fully the fact that as early as September 1944 the southern French ports provided the largest contribution to American supplies for the invading armies. See the revealing table in Ruppenthal,
The European Theater of Operations
2: 124. The American XV Corps was transferred from 3rd to 7th Army solely so that it could use Marseilles as its base (ibid., p. 17).

^c
One American soldier, Private Eddie Slovik, was executed for desertion, the first execution for a battlefield offence since 1865 (David Eisenhower,
Eisenhower at War,
p. 586).

^d
What is one to make of the fact that in his diary Brooke constantly misspells, and in different ways, the name of General William Simpson, the commander of the American 9th Army which he always wanted to have subordinated to Montgomery, although one of his closest assistants, the Director of Military Operations, spelled his name in exactly the same way? On March 3, 1945, it was “Stinson,” on March 25 it was “Syrmson;” after the war, around 1955, Brooke referred to him as “Stimson,” perhaps confusing the general with the American Secretary of War! (Liddell Hart Centre, Alanbrooke Papers, 3/B/XV, p. 1171).

^e
The new submarines themselves used types of batteries and fuels independent of the navy’s oil supply.

^f
A partial parallel was the American project to load up war weary planes with explosives, fly them toward Germany with skeleton crews which would bail out over Allied territory at the last moment, and leave the planes to crash with a big explosion somewhere in the Third Reich. Subsequently the idea of a skeleton crew was replaced by that of mechanical flight control, thus converting the plane into a drone. Roosevelt favored the plan, which Truman eventually dropped in the face of Churchill’s adamant opposition. The British leader was concerned about retaliation against London. The American case is put in FDR to Churchill, 29 March 1945, Loewenheim,
Roosevelt and Churchill,
pp. 688–89; Kimball,
Churchill and Roosevelt,
3: 591–92. The most useful British file, beginning with the receipt of the American proposal of 11 November 1944, is in PRO, AIR 8/838; see also AIR 20/95.