Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945

by Max Hastings

On predominantly Greek-inhabited Cyprus, popular sentiment had hitherto been pro-Axis, because it was believed that a Nazi victory would free the island from British colonial rule. Now, however, a Cypriot wrote: “The supreme desire was for the defeat of the armies which had invaded Greek soil, to be followed by ‘the fruits of victory’—‘freedom,’ as promised by Churchill.” To the astonishment of the world, not only did the Greek army repel the Italian invasion, but by November its forces had advanced deep into Albania.

But the immediate outcome was that the invaders had defeated a larger Allied army, provided through Ultra intercepts with detailed foreknowledge of German intentions, plans and timetable.

The Balkans were incorporated wholesale into the Axis empire, much to its own detriment. Italy initially accepted responsibility for occupying the region, committing half a million troops who would eventually suffer heavier losses there than in North Africa. The Germans, in their turn, came to find Greece and Yugoslavia a crushing burden.

Vichy’s meddling in Iraq, and a growing German presence in Syria, convinced Churchill that Britain could not risk Nazi dominance of the Levant. He ordered Wavell to dispatch another force to occupy Syria, ruled by France since 1920 as a League of Nations “mandated territory” joined with Lebanon. Churchill and his commanders hoped that the defenders, outnumbered and outgunned, would offer only token resistance. Instead, however, in June 1941 Vichy forces fought hard. Their conduct highlighted the division and confusion of French loyalties, which had been apparent since the 1940 surrender and persisted until 1944.

Adm. René Godfroy, commanding a French squadron interned at Alexandria which resolutely resisted the Royal Navy’s blandishments to join its struggle, wrote to the Mediterranean C-in-C on 26 June 1940: “For us Frenchmen the fact is that a government still exists in France, a government supported by a parliament established in non-occupied territory and which in consequence cannot be considered as irregular or deposed. The establishment elsewhere of another government, and all support for this other government, would clearly be rebellion.”

There was deep bitterness about France’s predicament, which demanded scapegoats. Many Frenchmen considered their country betrayed by the British in June 1940, a sentiment intensified by the Royal Navy’s destruction of French capital ships at Mers-el-Kébir. There was self-hatred, which bred anger. Overlaid upon centuries-old resentment of perfide Albion, there was now the fresh grievance that Churchill had fought on after Pétain succumbed. The German occupiers of France were disliked, but so too were the British across the Channel, especially by French professional soldiers, sailors and airmen.

the Resistance became a significant force in France only in 1944, and made a negligible military contribution by comparison with the partisans of Russia and Yugoslavia.

Few French defenders of Syria in 1941 found anything distasteful about killing British, Indian and Australian invaders. British troops advancing into Syria found graffiti on the wall of an abandoned fort: “Wait, dirty English bastards, until the Germans come. We run away now, and so will you soon.”

The pattern of the desert war was established. The Germans held at least marginal air superiority, because most of the RAF’s best aircraft remained in England, obliging its desert pilots to fight the Luftwaffe’s Bf‑109s with inferior Tomahawks, Kittyhawks and Hurricanes.

They had numerical superiority of men and armour, but this advantage was nullified by weaknesses of command, tactics and equipment. German tanks were better. Mechanical failure imposed a battlefield toll even more serious than enemy action, and the British tank recovery and repair system was weak; petrol cans leaked; Cunningham’s army did not match the Afrika Korps’ skill in mixing panzers, antitank guns and infantry. Again and again, British armour exposed itself unsupported—and was destroyed: during Crusader, for instance, the 7th Armoured Brigade lost 113 of its 141 tanks.

The institutional weakness of the British Army produced commanders at every level who lacked energy, imagination and flexibility; most units deployed in the desert were poorly led and trained.

The Allies usually enjoyed a notable intelligence advantage through their breaking of Axis codes, but in 1941–42 Rommel was uniquely well-informed about British operations, thanks to his interception of the daily reports of the U.S. military attaché in Cairo, Col. Bonner Fellers.

The chief influence on the battlefield, however, remained the institutional superiority of the German army. This contributed more to Rommel’s successes, and his own generalship rather less, than the contemporary British media acknowledged and modern legend sometimes suggests.

The Eighth Army was comprised of a remarkable range of national contingents. Its New Zealand division—later a corps—was recognised as outstanding, reflecting all its nation’s virtues of resolution and self-reliance. Two Australian divisions were also highly rated, especially after the legend was established of the “Diggers’ ” stand at Tobruk.

Notoriously ill-disciplined out of the line, and sometimes poorly officered, they deserved their formidable reputation, especially for night operations. “The Australians regarded themselves as the best fighters in the world,” wrote a British officer. “They were.” He added that their units were held together by “mateship,” almost always a stronger motivation for successful soldiers than any abstract cause.

The same might be said of Indian units: the Indian Army sometimes displayed remarkable courage and fighting skill, but its performance was uneven. The British justly esteemed the prowess of their beloved Gurkhas, but not every man or battalion excelled. For all its white officers’ complacency about their men’s loyalty to the king emperor, the Indian Army was a force of mercenaries.

The men who fought the desert war suffered fewer hardships than those serving in Russia, Burma or the Pacific, but water shortages imposed chronic discomfort. “The flies plague us in millions from the first hour in the morning,” wrote an Italian officer. “The sand always seems to be in our mouths, in our hair and in our clothes, and it is impossible to get cool.”

In their tanks, the temperature often rose above 110 degrees Fahrenheit. Opening hatches merely allowed sand and dust to swirl in.

For Mussolini’s soldiers, from the outset the North African campaign was a nightmare. The usual hazards of war were rendered almost unendurable by Italian shortages of food, ammunition, vehicles, medical supplies and belief in their cause.

Churchill’s attempt to exploit Africa as a battlefield against the Axis had thus far served only to make Rommel a hero, and grievously to injure the morale and self-respect of the British people at home. It was fortunate indeed that the desert was not the cockpit of the war; that events elsewhere, on the Russian steppe, had drastically diminished the significance of British failure.

Germany embarked upon an attempt to fulfil the most ambitious objectives in its history, to push back the frontiers of Slavdom and create a new empire in the east. The Nazis argued that they were merely following the historic example set by other European nations in pursuing Lebensraum, living space, by seizing an empire in the territories of savages.

“Many, perhaps most Germans, and certainly most German intellectuals, saw the First World War as a battle for cultural survival against the converging forces of Russian barbarism and, far more subversive, the decadent civilisation of the West, embodied no longer by French aristocrats but by the materialist societies of the Anglo-Saxon world. This belief was taken over in its entirety by the Nazis and provided the bedrock of their own philosophy.”

It did not occur to Hitler, after his victories in the west, that it might be more difficult to overcome a brutalised society, inured to suffering, than democracies such as France and Britain, in which moderation and respect for human life were deemed virtues.

Several commanders argued that a conquered population which was treated mercifully would be more manageable than one which gained nothing by accepting subjection. Such objections were framed in pragmatic rather than moral terms; when Berlin rejected them, the critics lapsed into acquiescence and faithfully executed Hitler’s orders.

The Soviet Union on the eve of Hitler’s invasion was the most rigorously regulated and policed society in the world. Its machinery of domestic repression was much more elaborate, and in 1941 had killed far more people, than that of Nazism: 6 million peasants perished in the course of Stalin’s programme of enforced industrialisation, and vast numbers of loyal comrades had fallen victim to his paranoia. Germans, other than Jews, had greater personal freedom than did any Russian. Yet Stalin’s tyranny was less adequately organised to defend itself against foreign enemies than against its own people. The Red Army’s formations in the west were poorly deployed, in a thin forward line. Many of its best commanders had been killed in the 1937–38 purges, and replaced by incompetent lackeys. Communications were crippled by lack of radios and technical skills; most units lacked modern arms and equipment. No defensive positions had been created, and Soviet doctrine addressed only offensive operations. The dead hand of the party crippled efficiency, initiative and tactical prudence.

Hitler rejected the urgings of his best generals to make a single thrust towards Moscow, insisting upon a simultaneous drive into Ukraine, to secure its vast natural and industrial resources. This is sometimes described as a decisive strategic error. It seems more plausible, however, to question whether Germany had the economic strength to fulfil Hitler’s eastern ambitions, in whichever way these were addressed.

Charles Lindbergh proclaimed: “I would a hundred times rather see my country ally herself with Britain, or even with Germany with all her faults, than the cruelty, the Godlessness and the barbarism that exist in Soviet Russia.”

The ruthlessness of the invaders was swiftly revealed. In France in 1940, more than a million French prisoners were caged and fed; in Russia, by contrast, prisoners were caged only to perish. First in hundreds of thousands, soon in millions, they starved to death in accordance with their captors’ design, and inability to cope with such numbers even had they wished to do so—the Reich’s camps had capacity for only 790,000. Some prisoners resorted to cannibalism. Many German units killed POWs merely to escape the inconvenience of supervising their more protracted end.

A total of around 300,000 Russian soldiers are believed to have been killed by their own commanders—more than the entire toll of British troops who perished at enemy hands in the course of the war.

It is hard to exaggerate the magnitude of the eastward evacuation of key factories and workers, the fortitude of those who carried it out, and the importance of its success. Russia’s industrial migration eventually embraced 1,523 undertakings, including 1,360 major plants. Fifteen percent were transferred to the Volga, 44 percent to the Urals, 21 percent to Siberia and 20 percent to Soviet Central Asia, in 1.5 million railway wagon loads. Some 16.5 million workers embarked on new lives in conditions of appalling privation, labouring eleven hours a day, six days a week, initially often under open skies. It is hard to imagine that British or American workers could have established and operated production lines under such handicaps.

The 1941 industrial evacuation proved one of the crucial achievements of Russia’s war. Every Soviet citizen over fourteen was declared eligible for mobilisation for industrial labour. With civilian rations cut to starvation levels, only the produce of private vegetable gardens enabled millions to survive.

Though astonishing industrial output was achieved amid chronic hunger, it would be mistaken to idealise this: production of a Soviet aero engine required five times as many man hours as its U.S. counterpart. Yet the evacuation represented part of what a British intelligence officer once called “the Russian genius for piecemeal improvisation.” Another feature of total war was the wholesale deportation of minorities whose loyalty was deemed suspect. Stalin accepted the drain on vital transport resources needed to remove—for instance—74,225 “Volga Germans” from their own little republic to remote Kazakhstan. Later, they would be followed by many more such outcasts, notably Chechens and Crimean Tatars.

SINCE THE 1917 REVOLUTION, the population of the Soviet Union had endured the horrors of civil war, famine, oppression, enforced migration and summary injustice. But Barbarossa transcended them all in the absolute human catastrophe that unfolded in its wake, and eventually became responsible for the deaths of 27 million of Stalin’s people, of whom 16 million were civilians.

215,000 Soviet citizens died wearing German uniforms.

The strength of many formations was badly reduced: by autumn, 20 percent of the original invasion force was gone, and two-thirds of its armour and vehicles; only thirty-eight tanks remained in one panzer formation, and barely sixty in another. A division commander wrote of the importance of reducing losses “if we do not intend to win ourselves to death.”

Germany’s fuel situation was so critical that its navy was virtually immobilised. The army’s supply system struggled to support spearheads 300 miles beyond the forward dumps at Smolensk. A gallows joke circulated in German official circles: “Eastern campaign extended by a month owing to great success.”

IN BERLIN on 28 November, a conference of industrialists chaired by armaments supremo Fritz Todt reached a devastating conclusion: the war against Russia was no longer winnable. Having failed to achieve a quick victory, Germany lacked resources to prevail in a sustained struggle.

For the rest of the war, those responsible for Germany’s economic and industrial planning fulfilled their roles in the knowledge that strategic success was unattainable.

In 1942, the Axis would enjoy spectacular successes. But it is a critical historical reality that senior functionaries of the Third Reich realised as early as December 1941 that military victory had become unattainable, because Russia remained undefeated.

He aspired to achieve sufficient battlefield success to force his enemies to make terms, and he clung to this hope until April 1945. Since the Western Allies and the Russians shared morbid and persistent fears of each other seeking a separate peace, Hitler’s speculation was at least a little less fanciful than it might now appear.

in June 1941 Finland’s army, reequipped by Hitler, joined the assault on the Soviet Union. German troops thrust from northern Norway to reach positions within thirty miles of Murmansk. The Finns showed no enthusiasm for advancing much beyond their 1939 frontier, but on 15 September, with their aid the Germans completed the encirclement of Leningrad. The ensuing siege of the city—the tsars’ St. Petersburg, with its elegant avenues, baroque palaces and seaside quays—became an epic that continued for more than two years. It assumed a character unique in its horror, and cost its defenders and citizens more lives than Britain and America together lost in the entire war.

Through October and November, conditions worsened steadily: German guns and bombers pounded streets, schools, civic buildings, and hospitals. For countless citizens, starvation beckoned: they began to boil wallpaper to extract its paste, to cook and chew leather. As scurvy became endemic, an extract was produced from pine needles to provide vitamin C. There was a plague of thefts of ration cards—mere money had become redundant. Pigeons vanished from the city squares as they were caught and eaten, as too were crows, gulls, then rats and household pets.

Thereafter Elena Martilla roamed the streets, making such quick sketches as cold and weakness allowed of faces stretched, drawn, sunken, hollowed by deprivation no other modern European civilisation had experienced on such a scale. She noticed that many adults responded to their desperation by closing down emotionally, becoming passive and withdrawn, apparently sleepwalking. Children, however, became unnaturally alert: a small boy delivered a vivid, witty running commentary on a Luftwaffe attack to his terrified adult companions in a shelter. She wrote: “It was as if that boy had aged fifty years in as many days—his face looked so old, and through this unnatural ageing I felt that he had been robbed of the innocence of childhood. It was horrifying to hear his natural curiosity welded to the ghastly machinery of war … I looked more closely into his face—and saw an uncanny wisdom in it. What I glimpsed in that moment shook me: I realised that a little child could look like a sage old man. Amid the agony we were suffering, something extraordinary had briefly come to life.”

Yet the privileged escaped most of the suffering. Zhukov was recalled to Moscow when it became plain that there would be no battle, leaving Leningrad in the hands of party officials who ate prodigiously throughout the siege. It became a characteristic of Russia’s war that corruption and privilege persisted, even as tens of millions starved and died. Some functionaries were evacuated by air, as was the city’s most famous resident, the composer Dmitry Shostakovich, who completed elsewhere his Seventh Leningrad Symphony, which became a symbol of the experience. For the dignitaries who stayed, bread, sugar, meatballs and other cooked food remained readily available at a canteen in the Smolny Institute; they also had access to a private heated cinema. Rumours circulated about the party’s shameless cynicism and privileges: an anonymous pamphleteer signing himself “the Rebel” printed a leaflet that was found in the streets: “Citizens, down with the regime that lets us die of starvation! We are being robbed by scoundrels who deceive us, who stockpile food and leave us to go hungry. Let us go to the district authorities and demand more bread. Down with our leaders!” The NKVD devoted immense effort to identifying “the Rebel,” and in December 1942 extracted a confession from a fifty-year-old factory worker named Sergei Luzhkov, who was dispatched to his inevitable fate before a firing squad.

In the first ten days of January, the NKVD reported forty-two cases of cannibalism: corpses were found with thighs and breasts hacked off. Worse, the weak became vulnerable to murder not for their meaningless property, but for their flesh. On 4 February a man visiting a militia office reported seeing twelve women arrested for cannibalism, which they did not deny. “One woman, utterly worn out and desperate, said that when her husband fainted through exhaustion and lack of food, she hacked off part of his leg to feed herself and her children.” The prisoners sobbed, knowing that they faced execution.

Horrors afflicted both sides. War correspondent Vasily Grossman met a peasant carrying a sack of frozen human legs, which he proposed to thaw on a stove in order to remove their boots.

But the Russians never grudged losses; what mattered to them was that the front had been pushed back 175 miles from Moscow. Between 22 June 1941 and 31 January 1942, Germany suffered almost a million casualties, more than a quarter of all the soldiers originally committed to Barbarossa.

But his people revealed a will to fight, and a willingness to die, that owed little to ideology and much to peasant virtues, a visceral devotion to Mother Russia, and the fruits of compulsion.

To discourage desertion, the Red Army adopted a new tactic: dispatching groups of men towards the German lines with their hands in the air, who then tossed a shower of grenades. This was designed to provoke the Germans to fire on others who attempted to surrender in earnest.

The ruthlessness of the Soviet state was indispensable to confound Hitler. No democracy could have established as icily rational a hierarchy of need as did Stalin, whereby soldiers received the most food; civilian workers less; and “useless mouths,” including the old, only a starvation quota. More than 2 million Russians died of hunger during the war in territories controlled by their own government. The Soviet achievement in 1941–42 contrasted dramatically with the feeble performance of the Western Allies in France in 1940. Whatever the limitations of the Red Army’s weapons, training, tactics and commanders, Soviet culture armoured its forces to meet the Wehrmacht with a resolution the softer citizens of the democracies could not match.