How Hitler Could Have Won World War II (18 page)

Rommel attacked the next day, Wednesday, July 1, 1942. His reputation was so awesome that the news terrified the British. The fleet withdrew through Suez into the Red Sea. In Cairo, headquarters hastily burned files. Commanders frantically planned to evacuate Cairo and the Delta.

Africa Corps's assault went in about twelve miles south of the sea at Deir el Shein and hit a box Rommel didn't know was there. Defended by the 18th Indian Brigade, the box held till evening, when the Germans smashed it and captured most of the defenders. British armor arrived too late to save the brigade, but in time to check Rommel's efforts during the night to penetrate to the rear.

From this point on, Axis presence in Africa was doomed. Rommel renewed the attack the next day, but he had fewer than forty tanks now and was forced to halt when he saw British tanks blocking their way, as well as others moving around their flank. Rommel tried again on July 3. By now he had only twenty-six tanks, yet he advanced nine miles before British fire halted them. During the day a New Zealand battalion captured nearly all of Ariete Division's artillery in a flank attack, while the remaining Italians took to their heels. It was clear evidence of exhaustion and overstrain.

Rommel, at last recognizing reality, broke off the attack. Auchinleck had at last gained the initiative. He counterattacked on July 4. The Axis troops held, and both sides soon stopped out of exhaustion. Now the two opponents slowly built their strength. In the following weeks they exchanged savage attempts to crack the other's line. The tactical situation altered little. But the strategic situation had been transformed. The Axis had no hope of matching the huge buildup that had begun apace on the British side.

Churchill flew out to Cairo on August 4 and changed commanders when he found Auchinleck strongly resisting his insistence on renewing the offensive. Auchinleck wanted to wait until September so newly arrived troops could learn desert warfare. Churchill handed over the Middle East command to General Sir Harold Alexander and brought out General Sir Bernard Montgomery from England to run the 8th Army. Montgomery turned out to be more insistent than any officer in the army in meticulously tidying up his forces before doing anything. He took even longer than Auchinleck, but Churchill couldn't admit he'd been wrong, and gave way.

Rommel launched one more desperate offensive on August 30. It had to go in on a less-fortified stretch to the south, but 8th Army had mined the region, and German mobility was limited by shortage of fuel. Rommel at last had to pull back, defeated. From this point on, the Axis forces simply hung on, waiting for the British blow to fall.

14 STALINGRAD

THE STALINGRAD CAMPAIGN IN RUSSIA IN 1942 IS ONE OF THE MOST POIGNANT examples ever recorded of a ruler engineering his own destruction.

When the army chief of staff, Franz Halder, protested the self-defeating operations, Hitler removed him. Only in the late stages when the German 6th Army had been isolated and a quarter of a million men were about to be lost was Erich von Manstein able to induce Hitler to grant just enough leeway to keep the entire southern wing of the German army from being destroyed as well.

After Stalingrad, Germany surrendered the initiative in Russia. Hitler never could summon enough strength thereafter to alter the balance of power against him. Despite heroic efforts by his soldiers, he had doomed himself to the slow, inevitable destruction of his army and his regime.

Two elements of the 1942 campaign stand out. First, Hitler committed the oldest and most obvious mistake in warfare: he neglected the principle of concentration and split his efforts between capturing Stalingrad on the Volga River and seizing the oil fields of the Caucasus. Either task would have been enough for his gravely weakened army. It was madness to attempt both, since the two thrusts diverged in different directions over hundreds of miles, leaving insufficient strength in either arena. The Red Army seized the opportunity, stopped both offensives, and concentrated against the closest danger, Stalingrad.

This brought on the second element of the campaign: Hitler, instead of being satisfied with an advance to the Volga and interdicting traffic on the river, which had been his stated aim, insisted on 6th Army capturing the city itself. This forced it to concentrate in the built-up area at the end of an extremely deep salient, offering the Russians an invitation to lock 6th Army in place by launching a street-by-street urban battle. As this titanic hand-to-hand clash went on, the Soviets assembled armies on the long, weakly held defensive lines on either flank, unleashed a powerful counteroffensive, and surrounded 6th Army.

Russian preparations for this counteroffensive were unmistakable. Yet Hitler refused to allow 6th Army to withdraw, and—because he had committed his other forces to the Caucasus—had insufficient troops to strengthen either flank of the salient.

Well before the Russians actually launched their counterstrike on November 19, 1942, the battle for the city had been lost. After 6th Army was encircled, Hitler refused to marshal strength from less-threatened theaters to break through the Russian ring and free the trapped army. The forces made available to Manstein, who was saddled with the job, were too few and arrived too late.

In the end, Manstein could not save 6th Army, and had to expend his skill and troops to keep an even greater Stalingrad from being created by a thrust of the Red Army to Rostov, where it could cut off Manstein's army group and the army group in the Caucasus.

At every stage Hitler made disastrous decisions—dividing his army in the first place, insisting on seizure of Stalingrad, refusing to allow 6th Army to retreat, failing to go all out to save the army once it had been surrounded, and refusing to heed evidence that the Russians were about to isolate the two army groups in the far south.

By 1943 the incapacity of Adolf Hitler as a commander was revealed for all to see. This showed Red Army generals not only that he could be beaten, but
how
he could be beaten. And it proved to senior German officers that, since Hitler would not listen to them, there was little chance of a stalemate, and the Allies would almost surely insist on total subjugation of Germany.

The German army in the east (
Ostheer
) came out of the winter of 1941–1942 with 2.4 million men on the front, counting replacements, more than 600,000 fewer than had started the campaign in June 1941. The situation was worst among infantrymen, whose numbers had fallen 50 percent in the south and 65 percent in the center and north. This weaker army had to defend a line that, since Hitler prohibited straightening out loops and protuberances, wove in and out for 2,800 miles from the Baltic to the Black Sea.

The quantity of German weapons was declining as well. Tank production was below 600 units a month. When Halder told Hitler Soviet tank manufacture was more than three times as great, Hitler slammed the table and said it was impossible. “He would not believe what he did not want to believe,” Halder wrote in his diary.

At least the Mark IV tanks had been rearmed with long-barreled high-velocity 75-millimeter guns and could meet the Soviet T-34s on better terms. But nearly a third of the artillery pieces were old French cannons, the number of combat-ready aircraft had fallen to half what it had been in June 1941, while shortages of fuel and ammunition were great and growing.

In the early spring, special operations removed dangerous Soviet penetrations and freed a number of German forces that had been surrounded.

Manstein launched a surprise thrust in the Kerch peninsula of the Crimea, May 8–18, which shattered three Russian armies and yielded 169,000 prisoners. This induced the Russians, under Semen K. Timoshenko, to make a premature diversionary attack in the Kharkov region to the north, giving the Germans an opportunity to thrust into their flank in the Donetz region. These battles, May 17–22, used up a great part of the Soviet forces from the Volga to the Don. The Germans captured 239,000 men, and destroyed more than a thousand tanks and two thousand cannons.

Manstein opened a third offensive against the Crimean fortress of Sevastopol on June 7, a gruesome confrontation that lasted three weeks. After storming Soviet positions, Germans captured 97,000 enemy soldiers, but 100,000 got away on ships of the Soviet Black Sea fleet.

Soviet morale declined from these defeats, and Stalin commenced a new drive to get the western Allies to establish a second front to draw off German forces. Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov signed an alliance with Britain on May 26, but this brought no guarantees and not many supplies.

Although army chief of staff Franz Halder tried to get Hitler to remain on the defensive in 1942, Hitler insisted on a summer offensive in the south (Operation Blue). Hitler called for Army Group South under Fedor von Bock to advance in two directions—eastward across the Don to Stalingrad on the Volga with one army, and southward to the oil fields of the Caucasus with four.

The campaign opened on June 28, 1942. Hermann Hoth's 4th Panzer Army with two armored corps (800 tanks and self-propelled assault guns) achieved complete surprise, broke through the Russian lines, and seized Voronezh in a few days. The army then swung southeast down the west bank of the Don through ideal tank country—open rolling plains, dry and hard from summer drought, broken occasionally by deep valleys in which villages were tucked away. Infantry divisions attacked simultaneously and secured the flanks and rear of the armor. Hoth hoped to trap many Russians in the great bend of the river.

While Hoth's fast troops rolled down the Don, 17th Army (Richard Ruoff) and 1st Panzer Army (Ewald von Kleist) seized Rostov on July 23.

Nevertheless, Russian commanders were able to withdraw numerous divisions across the Don south of Rostov and at Kalach, forty-five miles west of Stalingrad. Hitler blamed Bock and removed him from command.

Hitler now made an irretrievable error. He had concluded, because of the initial success of the offensive, that Soviet strength had been broken, and diverted Hoth's 4th Panzer Army south to help Kleist's 1st Panzer Army cross the lower Don to open a path to the Caucasus.

“It could have taken Stalingrad without a fight at the end of July,” Kleist said after the war. “I did not need its aid, and it merely congested the roads I was using. When it turned north again, a fortnight later, the Russians had gathered sufficient forces at Stalingrad to check it.”

Panzer leader Friedrich-Wilhelm von Mellenthin voiced the opinion of nearly all senior officers in this campaign. When Stalingrad was not taken in the first rush, it should have been shielded with defensive troops and not attacked directly.

“By concentrating his offensive on a great city and resorting to siege warfare,” Mellenthin wrote, “Hitler was playing into the hands of the Russian command. In street warfare the Germans forfeited all their advantages in mobile tactics, while the inadequately trained but supremely dogged Russian infantry were able to exact a heavy toll.”

On the day Rostov fell, Hitler set up two new army groups, with new goals. Army Group A (17th and 1st Panzer Armies) under Wilhelm List was to seize the mountain passes and oil fields of the Caucasus, while Army Group B (2nd, 6th, and 4th Panzer Armies) under Maximilian von Weichs was to build a defense along the Don, drive to Stalingrad, block off the land bridge between the Don and the Volga, and interdict traffic on the Volga.

In his original plan, Hitler intended four armies to press into the Caucasus, while one went toward Stalingrad. Now three armies marched on Stalingrad—an objective of infinitely less importance than the oil fields—while two armies drove into the Caucasus.

This was lunacy to every professional soldier, and Halder protested to Hitler. But the Fuehrer paid no attention, and also ignored evidence of powerful Soviet formations to the east of the Volga and in the Caucasus. Hitler transferred his headquarters to Vinnitsa in Ukraine, and took over direct command of the southern part of the front.

Army Group A swept over the lower Don into the Caucasus. The 17th Army seized Krasnodar, crossed the Kuban River, and penetrated the thickly wooded west Caucasus Mountains to Novorossiysk on the Black Sea. Elsewhere, mountain troops could not drive the Russians out of the high passes. Kleist's 1st Panzer Army, slowed by fuel shortages, captured the oil field of Maykop, 200 miles south of Rostov, though not before the Russians had destroyed it. But Kleist did not have the strength to drive to Batum, Tiflis, and Baku, which would have secured the Caucasus.

In Army Group B, 2nd Army fought around Voronezh, while the huge 6th Army with twenty divisions under Friedrich Paulus pressed toward Stalingrad. The ever-lengthening north flank of 6th Army along the Don was covered by the Hungarian 2nd Army, the Italian 8th Army, and the Romanian 3rd Army, while the Romanian 4th Army held a thin line in the Kalmuk steppe south of Stalingrad. The flanks thus were guarded by extremely weak forces, since none of the allies had good equipment or adequate training.

Hoth's 4th Panzer Army had now turned northeast and was pressing through Elista across the steppe toward Stalingrad. About fifty miles south of the city, Hoth's attack broke down against fierce resistance by the Soviet 57th and 64th Armies.

Originally the Soviet high command, Stavka, did not plan to hold Stalingrad. It intended to withdraw Red forces east of the stream, so the Germans would be forced to overwinter on the unprotected steppe. But the unexpected splitting of the German offensive called for new decisions. Stalin removed Timoshenko from command in the south and ordered Andrei I. Eremenko to take over and keep the city.

Stalingrad was no fortress. The old city of Tsaritsyn (Stalin had named it after himself in 1925) was surrounded by a jumble of old wooden structures, barrack-like apartments, industrial installations, and railroad switchyards sprawling fifteen miles along the west bank of the river, and two to four miles back from it. Above the apartments and factories reared water towers and grain silos. Numerous balkas (dry ravines or gullies with steep banks) and railway embankments eased the defense, as did the high western bank of the Volga and, west of the city, a twenty-nine-mile arc of woods, a mile wide at its thickest, protecting against dust and snow-storms. In August 1942 Stalingrad held about 600,000 people, including refugees.

Eremenko had five armies, some hard-hit. But Stalin issued a
“Ni shagu
nazad!”
(“Not a step back!”) order on July 28, and reinforcements began to arrive. Eremenko got eleven divisions and nine Guards brigades, supplied from dumps on the steppe east of the river. He mobilized 50,000 civilian volunteers into a “people's guard,” assigned 75,000 inhabitants to the 62nd Army, organized factory workers into rifle companies and tank units (using T-34s driven right off the floor of the tractor plant Dzherhezinsky where they were made), assigned 3,000 young women as nurses and radio operators, and sent 7,000 boys aged thirteen to sixteen to army formations. But Eremenko did order the evacuation of those too old or young to fight—200,000 crossed over to the east bank in a three-week period.