Читать книгу Hitler’s Terror Weapons: The Price of Vengeance - Richard Overy - Страница 11

CHAPTER 3

The Renewal of War

On September 1^st 1939, Germany invaded Poland. Britain and France declared war, but could do little else to help the Poles. German armoured forces penetrated rapidly and deeply behind the lines of the brave, but antiquated, Polish army. The Polish air force was annihilated in days. German aircraft ranged over Poland at will, hitting cities and troops with demoralising impunity. On September 17th, the Soviet army, in accordance with the secret terms of the Nazi – Soviet pact the preceding month, re – occupied eastern Poland, which the Poles had wrested from them in the war of 1920. Poland was crushed.

Hurrying behind the German forces came seven ‘Einsatzgruppen’, Reichsfuehrer Heinrich Himmler’s death squads, who sought out the Polish aristocrats, priests and intelligentsia, as well as the hapless Jews, for slaughter. There was no treaty. Poland was simply absorbed by her conquerors, and Polish troops were to continue fighting in western armies until the end of the war, while at home the Polish underground began a long struggle, conducted with unbelievable gallantry. They would play a notable part in the defeat of the ‘V’ weapons.

On April 9^th 1940 Germany began her attack on Norway; however despite British and French naval and military assistance, it was conquered by June. Denmark was attacked at the same time, the Danish government ordering a ceasefire less than two hours later. These conquests were a preliminary to the most dramatic military debacle of the twentieth century. Bad weather had caused a German attack on France to be postponed several times. In January 1940 a German officer mistakenly landed in Belgium, where he was interned. He had with him documents detailing German plans for the offensive, and it was not known whether he had managed to destroy them¹. The plans were therefore altered. The new plans were more daring.

France, Holland, Belgium and Luxemburg were invaded on May 10th. Parachutists landed on the roof of the great Belgian fortress of Eban Emael, which was neutralised, and captured by advancing forces later. German panzer divisions, composed of tanks, self propelled guns and motorized infantry, using a strategy propounded by Sir Basil Liddell Hart, burst through the French front in the Ardennes mountains, which were thought to be impassable to tanks. They were the steel tip of a wedge of some fifty divisions.² Penetrating deeply to the rear of the British and French armies, which had, as the Germans had expected, swung into Belgium to meet the German advance there, they rapidly reached the Channel coast, to the consternation of both the allies and the German high command itself, which was fearful of a counterstroke.

Columns of refugees streamed westwards along the French roads, hampering military movement. Both refugees and soldiers were harassed by swarms of dive-bombers, the famous Stukas, which were fitted with sirens, and their bombs with screaming whistles, to add to the terror. All around was confusion. No sooner did the position of the German forces seem to have been established than the information became outdated. Rumour and chaos led to panic, and panic led to demoralisation. It was a game of chess, with the allies blindfolded by German air superiority and their own panic and confusion, in which the Germans, fighting a new, faster, more mechanised war, seemed to have three moves to the allied one.

When the Germans reached the channel coast, their commanders wanted to hurl their forces at the British, who were attempting to establish a defence perimeter around the port of Dunkirk in order to facilitate their withdrawal to their home islands. But General (later field Marshal) Gerd von Rundstedt (1875-1953) was concerned about the wear on his armoured forces, which might have to respond to a French attack from the Aisne. Goering had promised Hitler that the Luftwaffe could finish off the British army, which was strung out on the open beaches; furthermore, the high command, remembering the Great War, were wary of their armoured forces being bogged down in the marshes of Flanders. Hitler accordingly stopped his tanks just short of Dunkirk, in one of the most fateful decisions of the war. Whether this decision owed anything to his admiration for the British, his desire for an alliance with them, and his wish not to humiliate them, is one of history’s deepest mysteries. The British army owed much to the gallantry of the French defence at Lille, which occupied German troops and attention; to the Belgians, whose bravery won the admiration of the Germans; to the Royal Air Force, which fought at odds in the sky over the beaches; and to the Royal Navy, to whose courage and organisation the survivors owed their return home.

The French army was finished off by the now unstoppable German war machine. ‘The great battle of France is over; it lasted 26 years,’ wrote a young German engineer officer,³ linking the bloodshed of 1914–1918, the great collapse, the simmering fury of Freikorps and Nazis, the French occupation of the Ruhr and Hitler’s gigantic rearmament programmes with the fall of France into one great war. This view will no doubt be taken by Historians a thousand years hence. It was certainly taken by Hitler. But the Historian of the far future will make one small alteration; he will discover the end of the great battle of France in the ruined heart of Germany, after a conflict of 31 years.

The French, now under the government of the aged hero of the first World War, Marshal Petain, sought an armistice. It was signed, at Hitler’s insistence, in the very same railway carriage in which the German delegation had signed the 1918 armistice, which was towed to Compiegne just for that purpose, and then blown up. This was vengeance indeed. Alsace – Lorraine, taken from France in 1871 and forcibly returned in 1919, was again to be part of the German Reich. French prisoners of war were not to be returned, and northern and western France were to be occupied, while Germany remained at war with Britain. The French government retired to Vichy. The British, frightened that the great French fleet would fall into German hands, insisted that the French sail it to a French Caribbean or a United States port, or that it join the British, or scuttle, or otherwise demilitarize. Acting quickly, without allowing time for full discussions, the British attacked the French fleet at Mers el Kebir, and seized or demilitarized French ships elsewhere. France, tormented by defeat, had now to suffer humiliation by her allies.

But Hitler’s policy towards France was rooted in the events of 1918, and the French occupation of the Ruhr in 1923. He had considered France to be ‘the inexorable mortal enemy of the German people,’ and thought, ‘on soberest coldest reflection’ that Britain and Italy were Germany’s only possible allies.’⁴ But the theatrical scene enacted in the railway carriage at Compiegne was not born of the ‘soberest and coldest reflection.’ It was vengeance; delightful, narrow and expensive. He could not exploit the anti-British bitterness of the French caused by the evacuation at Dunkirk and the bloodshed at Mers el Kebir. Hitler might have made a lasting peace with France by leaving her with Alsace Lorraine and her full territory, and returning her prisoners, asking only for a free hand in the east. What could Britain have done, faced in 1940 with an exclusion from a united Europe, as in 1962? What would have been Britain’s justification to the people of the United States for maintaining a war in the face of such determined goodwill? Would she still have been offered lend – lease by the Americans? Could she have blockaded France to prevent her supplying goods from the world market to Germany? Could she afford to continue the war? But Hitler thought that Britain would make peace anyway, now that France was down.

Whatever his policy options, Hitler was master of western Europe. He had achieved this by two main instruments. firstly, the German army, the best in the world, drilled and trained with iron Prussian discipline, brave, enthusiastic, skilful, well led, well armed, victorious and battle hardened. Secondly, the German air force, the Luftwaffe, armed with modern aircraft, superior to its enemies in both numbers and training, which had proved itself an essential element in battlefield victory. German Europe would be secured from invasion from the west while the German air force remained superior. When, in 1943, plans were laid to invade northern France from Britain, Lt. General Morgan (acting Chief of Staff to the supreme commander, allied expeditionary force) wrote ‘A definite and highly effective local superiority over the German fighter force will be an essential prerequisite of any attempt to return to the continent, since it is only through freedom of action of our own air forces that we can offset the many and great disabilities inherent in the situation confronting the attacking surface forces.’

Field Marshal Sir Bernard Montgomery wrote after the war that:

‘It is not possible to conduct successful offensive operations on land against an enemy with a superior air force, other things being equal. The enemy’s air force must be subdued before the land offensive is launched. The moral effect of air action is very great and is out of proportion to the material damage inflicted. In the reverse direction, sight and sound of our own air forces against the enemy have an equally satisfactory effect on our own troops. A combination of the two has a profound influence on the most important single factor in war – morale.’⁵

Thus vengeance on France seemed to Hitler to be a luxury that he could afford, for the west could not be invaded unless his air force was defeated, and even then, the incomparable German army would have to be overcome in battle. When, to Hitler’s irritation, the British, now under the redoubtable Winston Churchill (who was supported by one of the noblest of her kings, George VI), refused to heed the peace feelers that he put out, he decided, after a fatal⁶ delay, that the Luftwaffe could clear the skies over Britain for an invasion fleet to cross the narrow sea.

The story of the Battle of Britain is well known. A few fighter pilots, from many nations as well as Britain, denied air superiority to the Luftwaffe, inflicting disproportionate losses on the attackers. When German aircrew bombed London in error, Churchill ordered the bombing of Berlin in retaliation. This infuriated Hitler, and struck a deep chord in his furious soul: ‘When the British air force drops two or three thousand kilograms of bombs, then we will in one night drop 150, 230 or 400,000 kilograms! When they declare that they will increase the attacks on our cities, then we will raze theirs to the ground!’⁷

The Germans now transferred their attacks from airfields and radar stations to London, at the extreme range of their main fighter aeroplane, the Messershmitt Bfl09. As bomber losses mounted, the attacks on British cities were switched to the hours of darkness. All in all, during the Battle of Britain (July 10^th to October 30^th 1940), the Germans lost 1733 aircraft; the British lost 915.⁸ But production figures were also significant – even more so, if the German estimates of British losses and production are taken into account. The Germans estimated that British losses in fighters were twice their own.⁹ They also grossly underestimated British production. Between July 1940 and April 1941 they thought that their battered enemy had produced 6825 aircraft,¹⁰ while in reality they had made 14,761.¹¹ This was not all; during this period, 3555 aircraft were delivered from North America (of which 1279 were delivered direct to overseas commands and Dominion governments).¹² Britain acquired 18,316 aircraft, not 6825! This was a very serious miscalculation, for it led to a fatal complacency; aircraft production requires planning well in advance, as does pilot training. This was simply not done in time. Germany produced only 10,826 aircraft in 1940 and 11,776 in 1941.

But the consequences of the Battle of Britain were not only complacency born of an underestimate of British production, and overestimate of British losses. The defeat of the German air force led their High Command to discount the value of strategic bombing, and to continue with an air force mainly limited to army co-operation. Britain, however, drew the opposite conclusion, seeing the battle as confirmation of the necessity of vigorously pursuing a general air policy, that is, an air force designed for strategic bombing, air defence, and naval and army support.¹³

There were other flaws that ran deeply hidden under the surface of the German position. Firstly, the British had identified and ‘turned’ all the German secret agents in Britain, and thereafter, throughout the rest of the war, all subsequent agents entering the country were either noted or greeted by British intelligence.

Secondly, as a corollary to this coup, the British had in their hands the secret of the German ‘enigma’ coding machines, which were used by the German armed forces as well as the railways. These devices were capable of encoding information in an incredibly complex manner, and there were millions of possible combinations. The machine itself had been on the open market from 1923 until its adoption by the German army and navy (who used different versions) in 1929.¹⁴ Although the Germans had modified the enigma machine considerably from its original design, the Poles had obtained one and had communicated a method of cracking the code to the French. This information was brought to Britain from France, and was studied assiduously by mathematicians and codebreakers of genius. These were established at Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire where, because of the time needed to calculate the correct settings before the daily, and sometimes thrice daily German changes, the world’s first programmable electronic computer was devised and built. By 1944 these brilliant men and women were routinely passing on German naval, air and military information from the highest level, including instructions from Hitler himself, often reading it before the intended recipients! The intelligence gained was used to advantage, although always with a cover story that would conceal the source of the information and allay German suspicions, or perhaps arouse them in an inappropriate area.

The advantage of surprise in warfare is incalculable; the German commanders, generally of the highest skill and professionalism, were to be deprived of this advantage for themselves, yet had it used against them in all the most considerable actions in the West. In any area of human antagonism, be it in law, in business, in sport or in war, the knowledge of your opponents innermost plans is a pearl of great price. This secret was known to the British as ‘ultra’.

Another weakness was soon revealed to all. Hitler’s ally, Italy, consisted of some 40 million vigorous, brave and industrious individuals, with an army of over 70 divisions and a modern battlefleet, apparently united under Mussolini and the Fascist party. But from the first shots Mussolini’s Italy was revealed as corrupt, her army antiquated, her industry inadequate, her treasury drained and her leaders bombastic and incompetent. The union of the disparate Italian regions was imperfect, and her citizens were more dedicated to province than to nation, and more to family than province. Her natural friendship with Britain and the United States (which harboured so many millions from her shores, who maintained a regular correspondence with their families in the homeland) was a further source of weakness. Her armies, soon deprived of the air cover of a few ancient biplanes, were swept aside, and her soldiers abandoned the one sided and unpopular struggle in droves, although many units fought with great courage and skill, especially the crews of torpedo boats and midget submarines. The fact that morale crumbles in the bravest of armies when they lack modern equipment, particularly tanks and aircraft, was demonstrated by the Poles in 1939, the French in 1940, the British and Americans in the Far East in 1942, and by the Germans themselves in 1945, (when what equipment they possessed was immobilised by lack of fuel). Italian units soon needed to be stiffened by Germans; and Italy sank rapidly into satellite status.

A further weakness in the German position was the utter determination of the British government to see the whole thing through until Nazism was finally extinguished in Germany. She could not be brought to terms by bombardment, however ferocious. Hitler presumed that British hostility was sustained by a powerful clique of Jews, for he could not appreciate, nor could any of his great officers of state, the absolute odium in which he was held, both in Britain and the United States. The Nazi elite sneered at ‘decency’, persecuted minorities, despised democracy, lauded war and murdered their opponents, yet seemed unable to fathom the disgust this attitude inspired in the great majority of the free people of the West.

For this reason Britain had embarked on a course which appeared to throw self-interest to the winds. She borrowed heavily from the United States, and the level of her gold and currency reserves was determined by that power, for although America would support democracy, she would not sustain a rival in trade. Britain was prepared to accept American industrial and financial aid on terms which meant the sale of all her remaining American assets, and which would inevitably lead to her post war dependence on the United States, and to American hegemony in the West. The future of her empire would be in the hands of the nation whose birth and whose very soul was anti-imperialistic. The uncertain future was mortgaged for the fight against Hitler.

But with huge American and Canadian subsidies, the progressive imperial decline in finance and industry was temporarily reversed, and Britain’s main weakness disappeared. British factories could produce armaments to their full, and considerable, capacity, and the products of American industry began to flood in. These industries would now begin to supply an army which would ultimately consist of some 47 divisions, 11 of them armoured, and although these were also required in the Far and Middle East, they represented a force which Germany had continually to guard against, for they might raid anywhere from Stavanger to Bordeaux. “He that commands the sea”, wrote Bacon, “is at great liberty, and may take as much or as little warre as he will.”¹⁵ For the army in 1940, the ‘warre’ taken was necessarily little. Although the imperial army could recruit from many warlike peoples in India, and would receive valuable additions from the brave ‘Free French’ forces of Charles de Gaulle, from the Poles, the Czechs, the Dutch, the Belgians and others who had escaped to Britain, and above all, from Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa, it simply could not match the German army in numbers, equipment, morale or efficiency.

The navy commanded the sea, but could not end the war on its own. It might deny the seas to Germany for all but the most hazardous and clandestine of trade, but it was itself vulnerable to shore based aircraft and to submarines. Battleships, once the lords of the oceans, were in deadly peril unless they were protected from the torpedo and the bomb, as were all other vessels. Land based aeroplanes made any approach to a coast without air cover hazardous. The navy, like the army, could scarcely operate at all without protection from aerial attack.

But the air force was different. It could directly attack enemy territory. Like the light cavalry of the Huns and the Magyars, it could send out raiding parties to burn and destroy deep within enemy territory. It could not be stopped by city walls, garrisons or armies. It could single out for destruction industries, transport, military installations and ships. It was the only armed force possessed by Britain that could strike directly at Germany. Some thought it might eventually win the war on its own by a massive bombardment that would destroy cities, industries and morale alike. The Royal Air Force itself, jealous of its independence from the other armed services, had readily embraced the strategic bombing theory; it found a ready ear among those who dreaded trench warfare, and among those who perceived that the expense of heavy bombers seemed considerably less than that of capital ships and huge armies.

The bombing of cities had been dreaded before the war, and its destructiveness overrated. Guernica had been destroyed by bombers in the Spanish civil war. But Guernica was small and had been undefended. When bombers were opposed by intense anti-aircraft gunfire, they had to fly high, or be decimated. When opposed without a large fighter escort by enemy fighter planes, they were forced to fly at night (bitter British and American experience was to prove that no defensive armament could reasonably protect unescorted day bombers against the ravages of enemy fighters). At high altitude, and at night, navigation was difficult and accuracy of aim almost impossible. There would be no more Guernicas until the arrival of better navigational aids, bombing accuracy and air superiority – unless the target was so huge that it could not be missed.

Nevertheless, the British persisted in their bombing campaign, because they could do little else. Between July 1940 and the end of May 1941, some 18,000 tons of bombs were dropped, nearly 4000 tons being on industrial towns.¹⁶ Although extremely irritating to the German High Command and the Nazi elite, these attacks were costly to Britain in men and materials, and inaccurate. By the end of 1940 the Germans had dropped nearly 35,000 tons on Britain. They had dropped over 22,000 tons during 1941,¹⁷ but most of this was in the early part of the year. Hitler was turning his attention eastwards.

For various reasons the Soviet Union had always been at the centre of Nazi plans, and Nazi philosophy. It was, first of all, a great danger militarily; it was heavily armed, and still arming; it was the largest state in the world, and its potential, which was still in the process of being realised, was enormous.

The Soviet Union had also begun advancing westwards, after a twenty-year lull. Since the Nazi – Soviet pact, she had absorbed eastern Poland, occupied the Baltic States – Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania – had seized Northern Bukovina and Bessarabia from Rumania, and after a short, inglorious war, had annexed Finnish territory in order to secure strategic bases and to push the Finnish frontier further from Leningrad (St. Petersburg).¹⁸ The Soviet Union had crept too close to vital German interests in Scandinavia and the Ploesti oilfields in Rumania for Germany’s comfort.

But whatever the cold validity of these reasons for attacking the Soviet Union, ambition, prejudice and hatred seem to have always directed Hitler’s glare eastward. Adolf Hitler felt himself to be a genius, guided by fate, an avenger of the two million German soldiers who fell in the Great War. It was from the east that the poison of Bolshevism had spread, and it was in the east that the Jews still sat in triumph. The fall of France would be nothing in revenge compared to the destruction of the November criminals in their own nest, and the supplanting of the inferior Slavs by the Germans. Germany would then be unassailable by America, and Britain would be overwhelmed. If he did not accomplish these things before he grew too old, no one would.¹⁹

But first Mussolini, his great ally, was in trouble. Driven helter skelter across north Africa by the British, and thrown ignominiously out of Greece and back into Albania by the Greeks, he had made the Greeks an ally of Britain, who might soon bomb the Ploesti oilfields from Greek bases. During April 1941 arrangements were made for German forces to pass through Yugoslavia, Hungary and Bulgaria and to conquer Greece. The satellites (including Italy) received their instructions. At the last moment Serb officers toppled King Peter of Yugoslavia, who had been a reluctant satellite anyway, and severed the country’s connection with the Axis powers, as Germany, her satellites and Japan termed themselves. Hitler decreed that they should be suppressed with ‘merciless harshness’ for this insult to himself and the Third Reich. Yugoslavia, her Serb, Croat and Slovene population deeply divided, was occupied in 10 days; Greece followed rapidly. The British were bundled out of Greece. An airborne invasion of Crete followed, which was successful, but suffered heavy losses in very severe fighting. Hitler was appalled by the casualties, and drew the lesson that airborne assaults were too expensive. But it was not the method of their arrival on the battlefield that was at fault; due to the ‘Ultra’ codebreakers at Bletchley Park, the paratroopers had been expected by the British; and they had landed on New Zealand troops, always formidable in battle.

Hitler’s plans to tear the Soviet Union apart had been delayed from May to June 1941; they were now set for June 22nd. The Soviet forces were to be prevented from retreating into the vast depths of Russia by encirclement on the borders; they would be seized by the pincers of his armoured divisions, and devoured by the following infantry. The Soviet army, which the German High Command believed had been emasculated by Stalin’s purges of its officers, would be ruined; they had shown, by their initial defeat in Finland in 1940, that they were surely no match for the German war machine, the Wehrmacht. Yet the Finnish operation had merely shown that Stalin had not prepared properly; when, after the initial failure, the assault was renewed, the finns, despite fighting bravely and skilfully, were hopelessly defeated.

Hitler might have noted an operation on the other side of the vast Soviet Union, in 1939. There, a border clash between satellites had drawn in Russian and Japanese forces and had escalated into a full scale battle, in which the elite Japanese Kwantung army had been heavily defeated. But the Japanese army, before its sweeping victories over western forces in 1941 and 1942, had been much underrated. The Soviet commander in that affair had been Georgi Zhukov (1896-1974), later deputy supreme commander of the Soviet forces under Stalin.

On June 22nd German forces drove headlong into Russia. After a campaign that appeared to have largely gone according to plan, Hitler announced, on October 2nd, that Russia had been defeated. Vast encirclements had been made, netting some 2.5 million prisoners. The Soviet air force had been smashed, with some 14,500 aeroplanes lost, and 18,000 tanks and 22,000 guns had been destroyed or captured. Moscow, indeed, was in a panic.²⁰

Hitler was in a state of euphoria.²¹ Who could now fail to see the hand of fate in his existence? His politics had been formed in the slums of Vienna; during the Great War, fear and fervour, the exhilaration of patriotism and danger had created an almost religious rapture, and the 1918 offensive had made the ‘most tremendous impression’ of his life,²² which October and November 1918, and his own gassing and temporary blindness, had blackened into a frenzy of hatred and revenge. He had been re-born, to lead a party and a nation. He had re-occupied the Rhineland, had seized the Sudetenland, had ‘reunited’ Austria with the Reich, had absorbed Czechoslovakia, smashed Poland, humiliated France, chased Britain from Europe, and reversed Versailles. Now he had Russia under his heel, and the Jews and communists who ruled the sub-human Slavs were in his power. He was the greatest German of all time, feared from the British Isles to the Pacific Ocean. He had all Europe in his power. He numbered Italy, Hungary, Rumania, Bulgaria, Finland, Spain and the mighty and warlike military empire of Japan as his allies. The shiftless artist, who had read of Caesar in his dingy Viennese lodgings, had now become greater than Caesar. Surely some destiny had appointed him? He was finally justified in his world outlook by his tremendous success, and the adulation of millions. The Fuehrer, never noted for his openness to suggestion and argument, was now beyond all earthly advice.

Now, in the East, terrible events unfolded. The motive was neither a simple brutality nor a greed for profit, but a mixture of pseudo-science and all embracing revenge. The Russian steppes were lit ‘by the lights of perverted science’;²³ millions of men and women were massacred; some were simply butchered or shot, while others were killed in a less ‘brutalising’ manner.²⁴ The commissar was shot for what he had become; the Slav because his village resisted, or out of sheer disgust at his being a Slav. But the Jew and Jewess, (the descendant perhaps of the converted Khazars), was shot because his or her whole race was proscribed. Neither beauty nor age, nor past deeds, neither a blameless or a shameful life, neither tallness nor shortness, yellow or black hair, blue or dark eyes, could save a Jew. They had been doomed in 1918; now, after 23 years, came vengeance.

But in the dark fabric of Hitler’s and Himmler’s dreams, a tiny rent appeared, and grew in size and importance with each passing day; the Russians were still fighting. Despite huge casualties, they fought on in a bitter and savage war. They supported the communist regime which had appeared, only months before, to be a cruel slavery. They might have supported a liberator. They might have risen in revolt if the Ukraine had been promised liberty. But all were involved in the slaughter or oppression, being either communists or Jews or Slavs. All were antagonised; they were now enemies, dedicated to revenge upon vengeance. And winter approached.

Had Hitler now sought to uncover a human purpose in natural events, he might have been struck with fear. The Russian winter of 1941–2, which he had not expected his troops to have to endure, and for which they were therefore ill prepared, was at times the worst for 250 years. Not only did tanks have to have fires lit under them for two hours before they would start, but the firing pins of rifles shattered. From the beginning of December came an average of 60 degrees Fahrenheit of frost.²⁵

Having stalled within sight of the Kremlin, Hitler’s armies were now forced on to the defensive by Russian counter attacks with fresh troops from the east, where they had successfully daunted the warlords of Japan. The Germans were ordered by Hitler to stand fast and fight rather than retreat, a decision which is approved by most military experts – a defeat would certainly have become a rout. Forming ‘hedgehogs’ around fortified centres, often supplied by air, they held firm and anxiously awaited the arrival of spring.

When spring finally came, the Germans had suffered over eleven hundred thousand casualties, most in the savage, hard fought battles of the summer and autumn.²⁶ The Russians had suffered far more heavily; some three million had been captured in the great encirclement battles of 1941 – a million more had been killed.²⁷ A winter offensive had moved the Germans back from Moscow. But Russia, west of a line drawn from near Leningrad in the North, through Briansk to Kharkhov and Tagranog in the Ukraine, was occupied by Germany and her Italian, Hungarian and Rumanian allies. The agricultural and industrial heart of Russia was gone. How could Stalin feed and arm his remaining soldiers? The answer was that whole factories had been uprooted and moved to the east in front of the German onrush, and the gigantic output of American industry and agriculture, supplemented by supplies from hard pressed Britain, had filled the gap. This had been made possible by the most vital of all the advantages possessed by Britain – sea power. But Hitler was not aware of the full extent of this vast movement of goods and resources, or of the survival of Russian industry. One more campaign must surely suffice to bring him victory; one more summer, and Germany would strike down the Slavs forever.

Great events had unfolded further east. On December 7th, the Japanese surprised the American fleet at Pearl Harbour in Hawaii with an attack by carrier borne aircraft, crippling the battleships which, unprepared, lay at anchor on that Sunday morning. The Japanese aimed to establish a wide defensive perimeter around the home islands which the United States, after suffering heavy losses, would eventually tire of attacking and concede to Japan. But they failed to destroy the installations at Pearl Harbour and the carriers, which had been absent, escaped. And the surprise attack ensured that the American people would be utterly determined to use their vast strength to bring Japan to utter ruin, at whatever cost.

The Japanese made vast strides across the Pacific; ill armed and demoralised British and Indian units were brushed aside, and Singapore was surrendered to inferior forces who were about to retreat for want of supplies. If the surrender had been partly intended to save the lives of Singapore’s civilians, it was ineffective, for it was followed by a precautionary massacre of 5000 Chinese.²⁸ The Americans were driven from the Philippines by March 1942, after hard fighting at Bataan and Corregidor.

But the Japanese had the same hidden weakness as the Germans – the allies had cracked their codes. At Midway, in June 1942, this intelligence coup was put to good use. A Japanese fleet was located, and four aircraft carriers destroyed, in a desperate air battle with the always formidable navy of the United States. Japan had shot her bolt. Her industry, soon to be assailed by American bombers and starved by American submarines, could not make good the losses in ships or highly trained pilots. She would eventually be encircled and ruined by fleets that included over a hundred aircraft carriers, and devastated by a rain of fire from giant American bombers.

But all this was in the future when, on December 11^th 1941, Germany declared war on the United States. She did not need to do so. The Tripartite Pact, signed on September 27^th 1940, required Germany, Japan and Italy to ‘assist one another with all political, economic and military means if one of the contracting powers is attacked by a power at present not involved in the European War or in the Chinese – Japanese conflict…’²⁹ Japan had clearly been the aggressor, as had Germany in Russia, and the Japanese had not felt obliged to join in on that occasion. Nevertheless, Hitler thought that the United States and Germany were effectively at war anyway. By this act of folly he solved what might have resulted in a serious dilemma for President Roosevelt; with the American public fired to anger about the Japanese attack, might it not have been harder to spare both forces and production for the British war against Germany? And a German declaration of war against the United States could have been used as a bargaining counter for a Japanese attack on Russia. Hitler could now expect a build up of activity in the west. The German economy, already flat out³⁰, would need to have its priorities right.

Yet Hitler’s war situation in April 1942 did not, despite the active intervention of the United States, appear to him to be alarming. He expected to defeat the Soviet Union in one more summer campaign that would penetrate to Baku and capture the huge oilfield there. He already had the resources of all Europe at his disposal. The British were under attack from German submarines, the U Boats, aided by Focke Wulf Condor aircraft and mines. He was sinking more merchant ships each month than were being built³¹. By April 1942 the British had lost 2915 ships in the war, of which 1282 had been sunk by submarines; (509 had been sunk by Condors and 362 by mines to the end of 1941).³² The U Boat fleet, starting the war with a total of 59 boats, now had 130 operational.³³ German cryptographers had broken the Admiralty’s codes in 1941, and were reading the planned routes of convoys. The British lost the ability to read the German Navy code shortly afterwards.³⁴

The German surface fleet had not fared so well; a pocket battleship (Graf Spee) and a battleship (Bismark) had been sunk while attempting commerce raiding, while the battle cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau had been deterred from attacking convoys by escorting battleships.³⁵

In the air, the situation certainly should have given the Germans much cause for concern. Total Luftwaffe strength had fallen from 3692 in March 1940 to 3582 in March 1941 and 2872 in March 1942.³⁶ In 1941 Germany had made only 11,776 aircraft; British production was 20,094 with 2135 received from North America.³⁷ The Soviet Union made 15,735. But here again German intelligence was faulty, estimating Russian production at 5000 per annum in 1939 and 1940, when in fact it was over twice as much³⁸; and calculating it to be 1150 per month (13,800 per annum) in March 1942, when in 1942 the Soviet Union produced over 25,000 aeroplanes.³⁹ The German air ministry had aquired a new technical director, field Marshal Erhard Milch (1892-1972) in November 1941, and he desperately sought to increase production; however, between January and the end of April 1942 only 4645 aircraft were produced, of which 1460 were fighters. These were being destroyed at a high rate in Russia, the Mediterranean and in the west; and in these four months Britain produced 8118 aeroplanes, and in addition received 671 from North America.⁴⁰ Of ominous import for Germany’s cities and industries, 390 of these were the new four-engined heavy bombers, the Stirling, the Halifax and the Lancaster.

The desperate situation of Russia had, together with the introduction of new navigational aids, prompted a renewal of Bomber Command’s offensive against Germany. Something – everything – had to be done to keep Russia in the war. Britain, however, was in no position to invade the continent and open a ‘second front’. Only in the air could she do anything to relieve Russia’s agony. On February 14^th 1942 a new directive, to bomb the ‘industrial areas’ of Essen, Duisburg, Dusseldorf and Cologne, was issued to the command by the air staff.⁴¹ The attempt at ‘precision’ bombing was abandoned. This was the commencement of ‘area’ or ‘carpet’ bombing, in which hundreds of thousands of men, women and children were made homeless, blasted and incinerated, and the industrial infrastructure of Germany was dislocated. Nine days later, Arthur Harris took over as Commander in Chief. He began to plan a raid on a German city by a thousand bombers. In the meantime, the Billancourt Renault factory, which it was estimated produced 18,000 lorries per annum for the German army, was bombed on March 2nd/3rd by 235 aircraft; some 300 bombs hit the factory, causing an estimated loss of production of nearly 2300 lorries. In a series of attacks on industrial areas, Kiel (5 times), Wilhelmshaven, Essen (8 times), Cologne (4 times), Lubeck, Hanau, Lohr, Hamburg (twice), Dortmund (twice), Emden, Augsberg and Rostock (4 times) were attacked by the end of April. Lubeck and Rostock were both utterly devastated by fire, Goebbels reporting that community life in Rostock had ended. The word ‘Terrorangriff’ was used for the first time.⁴² Altogether, between February 14^th and the end of April, RAF Bomber Command conducted some 86 operations in seventy-five nights, including mine-laying, shipping attacks and major industrial raids, losing over 230 aircraft – considerably less than production. An Empire air training scheme meant that trained aircrew would be available to man the bombers which the factories were beginning to pour out; by the end of the war, Britain would have trained nearly 300,000 aircrew, of which some 120,000 were pilots, after commencing the war with an output of only some 5800 pilots per year.⁴³ Although, of course, the British training and production figures were unknown to the Germans, they knew the rate of British losses over Germany, and they knew that the attacks were on an increasing scale of weight and accuracy. And they knew that the United States was making preparations to enter the war in the air over the Reich. Clearly, they needed to do something.

But it was the German army that was most obviously in need of the iron fruits of production. Despite the armoured force that had terrorised the west, the vast majority of the army consisted of infantry, marching on foot with horse drawn guns. The losses in Russia had ‘demodernised’ the army further, and it would fight the rest of the war in the east with insufficient tanks and guns. Tank production was 5290 in 1941, but none were as good as the soviet T34 or heavy KV tanks, of which 6243 were made in 1941.⁴⁴ Hitler would not be aware of this until the great clash at Stalingrad later in the year.

Thus by April 1942 Germany had entered into a war of grinding attrition; of submarines, aircraft, tanks, guns, lorries, bombs, shells, explosives, cartridges, bullets and boots; of picks, shovels, gauges, instruments, radio and radar equipment, and optical lenses; of maintenance fitters, skilled and unskilled factory workers, of gunners, sailors, pilots, tank crew and infantrymen; and of housing, bedding, cooking utensils and even crockery. All were being consumed on a huge scale. Her war production was flat out, but inefficient; there were many faults in organisation and leadership, with the armed services competing with each other for capacity. By April 1942 prioritised, efficient production had become a life and death problem for Nazi Germany.