HISTORY OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR
Second Fronts: AD 1941-1943
From the time of the first German onslaught against Russia, in 1941, Stalin has been demanding that Churchill launch a second front across the Channel to divert German troops from the east. Churchill argues in telegrams that such a move would fail because Britain has as yet neither the landing craft nor the divisions to attempt an amphibious assault on a strongly protected coast. Stalin merely reiterates his demand, with the added implication that the British are afraid of confronting the Germans head-on and should derive courage from the Russian example.
By August 1942 Churchill becomes convinced that he must meet Stalin in person to persuade him that a landing in France is not possible until 1943 at the earliest – and to bring him news of another landing soon to take place.
Churchill flies to Moscow by the only safe route, skirting round the European theatre of war – first to Cairo, then to Teheran and thus, east of the fierce battle developing at Stalingrad, northwest to the Russian capital. In talks lasting five days Stalin still refuses to accept that an immediate invasion of France is not possible, but he responds warmly to news of Operation Torch – the codename for the imminent invasion of northwest Africa by US and British troops.
In the event Stalin’s expectation of an invasion of France is frustrated even during 1943, a year in which the western Allies decide to make Italy their next target – and in which U-boat activity in the Atlantic is seriously reducing the flow of supplies from the USA to Britain.
The German production of bigger and faster U-boats, and the increase of the fleet to 240 under Karl Dönitz (a World War I submarine officer recently given command of the German navy), results in a massive increase in the number of merchant ships sunk in the early months of 1943. The crucial battle of the Atlantic is reaching its climax, and Germany seems poised to win it.
But the Allies also have new weapons in the pipeline, including longer-range bombers and short-wave radar (which can detect U-boats without them being aware of it). In April and May 1943 fifty-six U-boats are sunk, with the result that from now on the convoys suffer greatly reduced losses. Just in time, victory in the Atlantic goes to the Allies.
There is yet another front on which the advantage swings during 1943. During 1940 the civilian victims of night-time bombing raids have mainly been the inhabitants of British towns. But in 1942-3 the strategy which the Germans first used to such effect is turned upon them with a new intensity.
During 1943, from March to July, Britain’s Bomber Command mounts an almost nightly campaign against the industrial targets in the Ruhr. And with heavier bombs the technique of carpet bombing, pioneered at Coventry, leads to a devastating new phenomenon, the fire storm. The one that rages through the narrow streets of Wuppertal, during the night of May 29, kills some 3400 people – compared to about 550 in Coventry.
The assault on the Ruhr is followed by equally intense attacks on Hamburg (July to November 1943, causing a million people to flee the city) and on Berlin (November 1943 to March 1944). The destruction is devastating, but there is also a huge loss of bombers and their crews. And as with Britain in 1940, the Blitz fails to break the morale of the German people. More effective, at minimal cost, is the brilliantly daring and ingenious raid in which two hydroelectric schemes in the Ruhr valley are destroyed in May 1943 by the bouncing bombs of the Dam Busters.
Thus in Italy, in the Atlantic and in the air over Germany there are second fronts of various kinds during 1943. But the one which Stalin most wants, in France, has still not materialized.
Churchill accepts reluctantly the need to postpone by a year the planned invasion of Normandy (codenamed Overlord), which cannot happen with any reasonable chance of success before the summer of 1944. Meanwhile Russian advances early in 1944 suggest that Stalin can perhaps succeed without the controversial second front. In January the Russians finally push back the German army besieging Leningrad. On fronts further south they press ahead into Poland, cross the borders of Romania and almost reach Hungary. In April they recapture the Crimea.
It is another two months before the western Allies will be ready to cross the Channel. There are alarming signs of a race developing. Which of Stalin and the western Allies will penetrate furthest into central Europe and Germany?
The western front: AD 1944
Almost exactly four years after Hitler’s preparations to send an invasion force across the Channel to England, the Allies are at last ready to do the same in the opposite direction. D-day (a World War I codename for the launch date of an operation, standing for ‘day-day’) is fixed for 6 June 1944. On the first day of the operation ships carrying about 130,000 troops (roughly half American, half British and Canadian) assemble to the southeast of the Isle of Wight. From there they move south to the Normandy beaches between Cherbourg and Caen. Another 20,000 men are dropped in by air.
Events do not go according to plan. Montgomery, in command of the British sector, expects to take Caen on the first day. He is in for a disappointment.
A German panzer division denies Caen to Montgomery for a month. Further west along the coast Cherbourg resists the Americans, under Patton, until June 20. It is mid-August before the Allies begin to make real progress eastwards.
The German defence, though extremely effective, is handicapped by several factors. One is a desperate lack of troops in the region, compared to the Allied forces being landed every day. Another is a false optimism on Hitler’s part, based on his knowledge that he can now deploy two extraordinary new weapons with which to overawe civilians in Britain. Named Vergeltungswaffen (‘reprisal weapons), the become known as the V-1 and V-2 (an aerial torpedo and the first space-age rocket). These are impressive achievements and are terrifying to those in their immediate path. But the damage they do turns out to be relatively insignificant.
A third complication is an unwelcome distraction at this time of crisis. On July 20 the Stauffenberg plot nearly succeeds in killing Hitler. More than 5000 people are executed for a link, sometimes remote, with this attempted insurrection. Among them is Germany’s greatest general, now commanding the panzer forces in the west. The conspirators’ papers reveal that Rommel is in sympathy with their aims. He is arrested and is forced to take poison.
And finally, Hitler’s character provides a fatal flaw. Once again, as at Stalingrad, he gives the order that no German forces are to withdraw. The result is that the chance to fall back to a strong defensive position is lost. So when the Allies eventually move, they move fast.
Patton and the Americans reach Orléans on August 17. A week later a French division is placed in the vanguard, to enter and liberate Paris on August 24. On September 3 the British enter Brussels, and a day later they are in Antwerp. Meanwhile Patton’s armies have crossed the Meuse at Verdun and have moved on to the Moselle, near Metz.
The Germans are by this time in such disarray that they could offer little resistance if the Allies, with huge superiority in numbers of tanks and aircraft, pushed straight on into Germany’s industrial heartlands. But in mid-September the Americans and British pause, partly from shortage of fuel, partly because of a disaster at Arnhem, partly because of differences of opinion in the Allied high command.
The event at Arnhem, in mid-September, frustrates the first Allied attempt to cross the Rhine. Montgomery, pushing north towards the river, drops paratroops and gliders on the other side to seize the northern end of the Arnhem bridge. They succeed in doing so, but the main army fails to reach the southern end in time. 7500 men are trapped and captured.
This is a tactical disaster, but it is disagreements between Montgomery and Patton which most delay the campaign. Urging different strategies for the next stage, they make incompatible demands on the US general, Dwight Eisenhower, who has been in overall command of the Normandy campaign from the start.
Eisenhower tries to find a solution which will accomodate both his army commanders, but precious time is lost – so much so that the Germans, after frantic searches for reinforcements, are able to astonish the Allies by mounting a counter-offensive in mid-December in the wooded region of the Ardennes.
Their intention is to break through towards the coast, thus dividing the British army to the north from the Americans in the south. The element of surprise enables three German armies to push west almost as far as the Meuse. But by mid-January 1945 their bridgehead has been contained and squeezed back (the campaign is known as the battle of the Bulge). It turns out to be the last German offensive of the war.
Yalta and Dresden: AD 1945
A few weeks after the battle of the Bulge the three Allied leaders, Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin, meet in Yalta, a resort on the Black Sea. Their focus, when they gather on 4 February 1945, is no longer on how to conduct the war in the west. It is on what to do when it is over.
Each leader has a different and in many ways incompatible agenda. Roosevelt and Churchill want to secure Stalin’s cooperation in establishing the United Nations. Stalin is more interested in extending Russia’s borders in the west to those of the old empire, before the humiliating peace treaty made with Germany in 1917 and the subsequent provisions of the treaty of Versailles. This would mean absorbing much of eastern Poland, together with the three Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia.
The other main concern of Roosevelt, by now a very sick man, is a swift end to the war in the Pacific against the still extremely powerful Japanese empire. He wants to ensure that Stalin declares war on Japan as soon as the European conflict is over. To achieve this purpose he is in a mood to compromise with the Russian dictator.
Churchill, well aware of an obligation to Poland (on whose behalf Britain entered the war), has a greater interest in standing up to Stalin. But militarily he is the weakest of the three leaders. And the unavoidable fact is that the Russian armies have been making much faster inroads on German-held territory than the Allies. They are already occupying Poland, Rumania and Bulgaria. Is Britain on her own likely to use force to drive them out after the war?
Compromises are reached. The eastern part of prewar Poland is to be sacrificed to Stalin. In return he offers an olive branch on a topic of great importance to both Roosevelt and Churchill. In keeping with the democratic principle of self-determination, Stalin guarantees that the nations of eastern Europe will enjoy free postwar elections. Yet all three leaders at Yalta must certainly be aware that this is an empty and unenforceable promise.
Stalin also promises to enter the war against Japan within two or three months of the surrender of Germany. In reward for this it is agreed that Russia shall after the war annexe some of the territory held by Japan on the Chinese coast, together with the Japanese Kuril islands.
The conference at Yalta ends on February 11. Three days later there occurs one of the most controversial Allied actions of World War II. The Russians, with a justifiable fear that Hitler will move divisions to the eastern front to halt their advance, have requested Allied bombing raids in eastern Germany to prevent this happening. The Allies decide that Dresden is the best target for the purpose.
The city, famous for the beauty of its buildings, is full of refugees fleeing from the Russians when nearly 800 British bombers strike during the night of 14 February 1945. Their target is the railway marshalling yards which would be of use to German divisions moving eastwards.
This initial assault is followed by 450 American bombers the following morning. The result of this vast weight of explosive is a fire storm which rages through the streets of Dresden, destroying eleven square miles of the city and killing countless numbers of people. Estimates have varied widely, but the modern consensus is around 35,000 (by comparison the immediate deaths at Hiroshima will be about 80,000).
Done for a military purpose, this calamitous event probably does nothing to hasten the end of the war. For as the three leaders at Yalta are well aware, the end is now clearly in sight for Hitler’s thousand-year Reich.
