Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945

by Max Hastings

In 1942, by far the most alarming year of the U-boat war, 609 ships were sunk in the North Atlantic, a total of some 6 million tons. So prodigious was American shipbuilding capacity, however, that in the same period the Allies launched 7.1 million tons of ships, increasing their available pool of 30 million tons. Yet, as is the way of mankind, the Allies perceived most of the difficulties on their own side.

one statistical calculation suggests that in the second six months of 1941 alone, Ultra saved between 1.5 and 2 million tons of Allied shipping from destruction.

Throughout 1941–43, the key period of the Battle of the Atlantic, the Admiralty supplied 50 percent of all escorts, the Royal Canadian Navy (RCN) 46 percent, and American vessels made up the balance.

Many of Dönitz’s officers were fanatical Nazis; by 1943 their average age had fallen to twenty-three, while that of their men was two years lower: they were finished products of Goebbels’s educational system.

In 1944 an experienced U-boat captain ordered his officers to remove a picture of Hitler from a bulkhead, saying, “There will be no idolatory here.” He was denounced, accused of undermining the crew’s fighting spirit, arrested and executed.

But the Allies progressively raised their game: antisubmarine warfare techniques improved and escort numbers grew; naval radar sets profited from the introduction of cavity magnetron technology; escort groups gained from TBS—Talk Between Ships—voice communication, and even more from experience.

In March that year there was another breakdown of U-boat radio traffic decryption at Bletchley Park. In consequence, for two months half of all Atlantic convoys suffered attack, and one in five of their merchantmen were sunk.

In May 1943 47 U-boats were sunk, and almost a hundred in the year as a whole. Sinkings of German submarines by aircraft alone rose from 5 between October 1941 and March 1942, to 15 between April and September 1942, to 38 between October 1942 and March 1943. Dönitz found himself losing a U-boat a day, 20 percent of his submarine strength gone in a month. He was obliged to drastically curtail operations. There was a steep fall in merchant ship sinkings, so that by the last quarter of 1943 only 6 percent of British imports were lost to enemy action. The wartime Atlantic passage was seldom less than a gruelling experience, but for the rest of the war British and American forces dominated the ocean, challenged by a shrinking U-boat force with crews whose inexperience and waning morale were often manifest.

This was real enough, but German resource problems were much greater. Hitler never understood the sea. In the early war period, he dispersed industrial effort and steel allocations among a range of weapons systems. He did not recognise a strategic opportunity to wage a major campaign against British Atlantic commerce until the fall of France in June 1940. U-boat construction was prioritised only in 1942–43, when Allied naval strength was growing fast and the tide of the war had already turned. Germany never gained the capability to sever Britain’s Atlantic lifeline, though amid grievous shipping losses it was hard to recognise this at the time. 2.

The United States began to move massive supplies by other routes: half of all wartime American shipments reached Russia through its Pacific ports, a quarter through Iran, and only a quarter—4.43 million tons—via Archangel and Murmansk. The human cost of the Arctic convoys was astonishingly small by the standards of other battlefields: though 18 warships and 87 merchantmen were lost, only 1,944 naval personnel and 829 merchant seamen died serving on Arctic convoys between 1941 and 1945. The Germans lost 1 battleship, 3 destroyers, 32 U-boats and a substantial number of aircraft.

A PHENOMENON created by the strong emotions and fantastical experiences war brought upon Russia was a resurgence of religious worship, which Stalin did not seek to suppress.

Most of Germany’s generals, in the dark recesses of their souls, knew that they had made their nation and its entire army—it was a myth that only the SS committed atrocities—complicit in crimes against humanity, and especially Russian humanity, such as their enemies would never forgive, even before the Holocaust began. They saw nothing to lose by fighting on, except more millions of lives: it deserves emphasis that a large majority of the war’s victims perished from 1942 onwards. Only victories might induce the Allies to make terms. Hitler’s April directive for the summer operations called for a concentration of effort in the south; the objectives of Operation Blue were to destroy the Red Army’s residual reserves, seize Stalingrad and capture the Caucasian oilfields.

Most of Germany’s generals immediately recognised the folly of this move. The strategic significance of Stalin’s name city was small, irrelevant to the main objective of clearing the Caucasus and securing its oil. Moreover, Hitler’s eagerness for a symbolic triumph was matched by the determination of Stalin to deny this to him.

British bombing received much more propaganda attention than its achievements justified, and the Second Front was still almost two years away. Until 1943, arms and food deliveries from the West made only a small contribution to matching enormous Soviet needs and commitments.

Only the technocrats who knew the economic and industrial secrets of the Reich were undeluded. The manpower situation remained desperate, and Germany was increasing aircraft output by sustaining production of obsolescent types.

Again and again, German advances were delayed or halted by lack of fuel—the First Panzer Army found itself immobilised for three weeks, conceding a precious breathing space to Stalin’s commanders.

The value of medals as incentives was acknowledged: by 1945 the Red Army had issued 11 million, against the U.S. Army’s 1.4 million.

The battle was fought in conditions that enabled Russian soldiers to display their foremost skill, as close-quarter fighters. There was no scope for sweeping panzer advances or imaginative flanking manoeuvres. Each day, German soldiers, guns and tanks merely sought to batter a path to the Volga yard by yard, through mounds of fallen masonry in which Russians huddled, cursed, starved, froze, fought and died.

Bombardment had wrecked the city, but as the Western Allies would later discover, ruins create formidable tank obstacles, and are more easily defended than open streets and intact buildings.

It was Hitler’s ill-fortune that the battle perfectly suited the elemental spirit of the Red Army.

Conditions in Leningrad progressively eased, though Russia’s second city remained under bombardment. Its inhabitants were still desperately hungry, but most received just sufficient food to sustain life. In March 1942, the authorities launched a campaign to clear the streets of snow, debris and rubble, in which hundreds of thousands of citizens participated.

Cats, almost of all which had been eaten, suddenly became useful again, to dispel a plague of rats: an entire trainload of feline warriors was dispatched to the city.

Only in January 1944 did the Red Army launch the assault that finally pushed back the Germans beyond artillery range of the city. But Leningrad’s fate was decided in the spring of 1942, when it became plain that its surviving inhabitants could be fed. It was officially stated that 632,253 people died in the course of the siege, but the true figure is assumed to be at least a million.

Strategically, the northern struggle was much less important than the battle for Stalingrad. Nonetheless, Leningrad’s experience was at least as significant in showing why the Soviet Union prevailed in the Second World War. It is unthinkable that British people would have eaten one another rather than surrender London or Birmingham—or would have been obliged by their generals and politicians to hold out at such a cost. Compulsion was a key element in Leningrad’s survival, as in that of Stalin’s nation. If the city’s inhabitants had been offered an exchange of surrender for food in February 1942, they assuredly would have given up. But in the Soviet Union no such choice was available, and those who attempted to make it were shot. Both Hitler and Stalin displayed obsessive stubbornness about Leningrad. That of Stalin was finally rewarded, amid a mountain of corpses. A people who could endure such things displayed qualities the Western Allies lacked, which were indispensable to the destruction of Nazism. In the auction of cruelty and sacrifice, the Soviet dictator proved the higher bidder.

Operation Mars, which began on 25 November 1942, is almost forgotten, because it failed. Some 667,000 men and 1,900 tanks attempted an envelopment of the German Ninth Army which cost 100,000 Russian lives, and was repulsed. A battle that elsewhere in the world would have been deemed immense was scarcely noticed amid the eastern slaughter.

Five days later, Soviet tanks completed a perfect double envelopment behind Paulus’s Sixth Army: Zhukov’s spearheads met east of the Don crossing at Kalach. Many times in the course of the war the Russians achieved such encirclements; many times also, the Germans broke out of them. What was different here was that Hitler rejected the pleas of Sixth Army’s commander for such a retreat.

Then they stuck. Manstein urged Paulus to defy Hitler and break out to join him, as was still feasible. The Sixth Army’s commander refused, condemning 200,000 men to death or captivity. Manstein’s forces were spent, and he ordered a general retreat.

The Red Army achieved stunning advances in the first months of 1943, gaining up to 150 miles in the north, before coming to a halt beyond Kursk. Soviet generalship sometimes displayed brilliance, but mass remained the key element in the Red Army’s successes. Discipline was erratic, and units were vulnerable to mass panics and desertions. Command incompetence was often compounded by drunkenness.

The balance of advantage on the Eastern Front had shifted decisively and irrevocably against Germany. The power of the Soviet Union and its armies was growing fast, while that of the invaders shrank. In 1942, Germany produced just 4,800 armoured vehicles, while Russia built 24,000. The new T-34 tank, better than anything the Germans then deployed save the Tiger, began to appear in quantity—Chelyabinsk, one of Stalin’s massive manufacturing centres in the Urals, became known as Tankograd. That year also, Russia built 21,700 aircraft to Germany’s 14,700. The Red Army deployed 6 million men, supported by a further 516,000 NKVD troops. In the winter fighting of 1942–43, Germany lost a million dead, along with vast quantities of matériel.

The Wehrmacht’s combat performance remained superior to that of the Red Army: until the end of the war, in almost every local action the Germans inflicted more casualties than they received. But their tactical skills no longer sufficed to stem the Russian tide. Stalin was identifying good generals, building vast armies with formidable tank and artillery strength, and at last receiving large deliveries from the Western Allies, including food, vehicles and communications equipment. The 5 million tons of American meat that eventually reached Russia amounted to half a pound of rations a day for every Soviet soldier. Allied food shipments probably averted a starvation catastrophe in the winter of 1942–43.

Of the Red Army’s 665,000 vehicles in 1945, 427,000 were American-built, including 51,000 jeeps. The United States provided half the Red Army’s boots—loss of livestock made leather scarce—almost 2,000 railway locomotives, 15,000 aircraft, 247,000 telephones and nearly 4 million tyres. “Our army suddenly found itself on wheels—and what wheels!” said Anastas Mikoyan with a generosity uncharacteristic of Stalin’s ministers. “When we started to receive American canned beef, fat, powdered eggs and other foodstuff...

The Soviet Union suffered 65 percent of all Allied military deaths, China 23 percent, Yugoslavia 3 percent, the United States and Britain 2 percent each, France and Poland 1 percent each. About 8 percent of all Germans died, compared with 2 percent of Chinese, 3.44 percent of Dutch people, 6.67 percent of Yugoslavs, 4 percent of Greeks, 1.35 percent of French, 3.78 percent of Japanese, 0.94 percent of British and 0.32 percent of Americans.

Within the armed forces, 30.9 percent of Germans conscripted into the Wehrmacht died, 17.35 percent of the Luftwaffe (including paratroopers and ground personnel), 34.9 percent of the Waffen SS. Some 24.2 percent of Japanese soldiers were killed, and 19.7 percent of naval personnel. Japanese formations committed against the Americans and British in 1944–45 lost far more heavily—the overall statistics are distorted by the fact that throughout the war a million of Hirohito’s soldiers remained in China, where they suffered relatively modest losses. One Russian soldier in four died, against one in twenty British Commonwealth combatants and one in thirty-four American servicemen. Some 3.66 percent of U.S. Marines died, compared with 2.5 percent of the U.S. Army and 1.5 percent of the U.S. Navy.

gaucherie

While Winston Churchill saw himself conducting a struggle to preserve the greatness of the British Empire, most of his fellow countrymen yearned instead for domestic change, most vividly anticipated in the Beveridge Report, published in November 1942, which laid the foundations of Britain’s postwar welfare state.

There was a striking contrast between the attitudes of European and Asian peoples, who sought social and constitutional change as a reward for victory, and that of Franklin Roosevelt’s fellow countrymen, who were largely content with the society they had got.

It is striking to contrast such modest ambitions, common to most soldiers of the democracies, with the martial enthusiasm of some of Hitler’s men, especially those of the Waffen SS, which persisted in surprising degree until the last months of the war.

It is an enduring enigma how a German army overwhelmingly composed of conscripts, as much citizen soldiers as were their Allied counterparts, should have shown itself consistently their superior. Part of the answer must lie in the supreme professionalism of the officer corps and its combat doctrine; through the ages Germany had produced formidable soldiers, and under Hitler their performance attained its zenith, albeit in an unspeakable cause. Beyond this, the role of compulsion became almost as important as it was in Stalin’s armies. German soldiers who fled a battlefield or deserted knew they were subject to execution, a sanction imposed with increasing frequency as the Nazi empire crumbled. The Wehrmacht shot nothing like as many of its own men as did the Russians, but by 1945 penal executions ran into tens of thousands. Allied commanders, desperate to persuade their own men to try harder, often lamented their inability to impose deterrent capital sentences on deserters.

America built almost 48,000 aircraft and 25,000 tanks in 1942, against Germany’s 15,400 planes and 9,200 tanks. In 1939, just 29 shipyards were building for the U.S. Navy; by 1942 there were 322, which would deliver over 100,000 new ships and small craft to the U.S. Navy and Maritime Commission before VJ-Day came.

The Higgins boats—designated as LCVPs, Landing Craft, Vehicle, Personnel—were ordered in large numbers. The population of New Orleans grew by 20 percent in 1942, largely because of the influx of workers needed to build his boats, for which his company received orders worth $700 million.

Britain’s production of tanks fell from 8,600 in 1942 to 4,600 in 1944, of artillery pieces from 43,000 to 16,000. The United States eventually provided 47 percent of the British Empire’s armour, 21 percent of small arms, 38 percent of landing ships and landing craft, 18 percent of combat planes and 60 percent of transport aircraft. So great became American capacity that deliveries to Britain amounted to only 11.5 percent of U.S. 1943–44 production: 13.5 percent of aircraft, 5 percent of food, and 8.8 percent of guns and ammunition. British industry meanwhile focused on heavy bombers—the strategic air offensive engaged around one-third of national output, which does much to explain why Britain attached such importance to its achievements and shortcomings.

It seemed plausible to both sides that Rommel might reach Cairo, and Egypt be lost to the Allies. The strategic impact of such a blow would have been limited, because the Axis lacked resources for exploitation. But the cost to British prestige, already badly tarnished, would have been appalling.

Since 1939 Churchill’s armies had suffered repeated defeats—indeed humiliations—often by smaller enemy forces. Spirits at home were low. Churchill’s people had grown morbidly sensitive about the contrast between the heroic struggle waged by the Russians and their own nation’s feeble battlefield showing. A British victory was desperately needed, and only in the desert was this attainable. The defeat of the Afrika Korps in Egypt was scarcely relevant to the war’s outcome, but had become an issue of immense importance to morale, and was perceived as such by the prime minister.

But what mattered was that Rommel was denied a breakthrough—although, given the opposing forces’ respective strengths and detailed Allied foreknowledge of German intentions, it would have been disgraceful had he achieved one. In the first days of August Churchill arrived in Cairo with Gen. Alan Brooke, to see for himself how things stood. He sacked Auchinleck, who was replaced as Eighth Army commander by Brooke’s nominee, Lt. Gen. Sir Bernard Montgomery, and as Middle East C-in-C by Gen. Sir Harold Alexander. A month later, on 30 August, Rommel attacked at Alam Halfa. Montgomery, provided by Ultra with full details of German plans, drove him back. The general then addressed himself to training Britain’s troops for his own offensive. He had two critical advantages: large U.S. tank reinforcements were arriving and the Desert Air Force had gained dominance of the sky. THE VOLUME of Ultra intelligence was now increasing dramatically, with critical influence in every theatre. In earlier years, decrypts were priceless, especially to the naval war, but their flow was erratic. From mid-1942 onwards, with a few important breaks, the Allies became privy to much of their enemies’ signal traffic; the penetration of German and Japanese ciphers made a massive contribution to victory. Beyond the achievements of British and American decrypters, it was a secondary miracle that the Axis powers never seriously suspected that their most secret communications were being accessed by the enemy. ...

The Ultra achievement owed much to three Polish mathematicians, led by Marian Rejewski, who conducted critical early work on the German Enigma code machine between 1932 and 1939, after acquiring a commercial example of the ciphering device. The French assisted, providing the Poles with a list of 1931 Wehrmacht keys, acquired from a German source. Ironically, through Rejewski served with the Polish army in Britain between 1943 and 1945, he was never told of the rich fruits of his own pioneering achievements. In 1939 the Poles presented both the British and the French with reconstructed Enigma machines. The following year, these enabled the British Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park to begin to break some German and Italian messages.

The heart of its operation was Colossus, the electromechanical bombe which dramatically speeded exploration of multiple mathematical possibilities. The codebreaking teams were dominated by some hundreds of brilliant academics, most of them mathematicians and German-speakers. The most influential personalities, both in their early thirties, were Alan Turing, sometimes described as the father of the computer, and Gordon Welchman.

The picture of enemy operations provided by Ultra was always incomplete, but it offered a reliability no intelligence provided by spies could match. For instance, the Allies could launch D-Day on 6 June 1944 confident that the enemy was still oblivious of their objective and timing.

Full Anglo-American intelligence-sharing began only in 1943. The United States had broken the Japanese diplomatic cipher before the war, but their handling of Ultra never matched the interservice integration achieved by the British, partly because of army-navy rivalry.

No codebreaking achievement could eliminate the difficulties of assaulting strongly defended enemy positions. But the collective contribution of U.S. and British cryptanalysts to the war effort was greater than that of any other such small body of men in history.

Rommel’s army inhabited the same environment, but was prey to increasing gloom about its predicament. It bears emphasis that its most numerous component was Italian, not German, and like most of his countrymen, Vittorio Vallicella was dejected: