The Second World War

by Antony Beevor

Basic training was designed to destroy their individuality. Recruits were constantly insulted and beaten by their NCOs to toughen them up and to provoke them, in what might be called the knock-on theory of oppression, to take their anger out in turn on the soldiers and civilians of a defeated enemy. All of them had also been indoctrinated since elementary school to believe that the Chinese were totally inferior to the ‘divine race’ of Japanese and were ‘below pigs’.

The group ethos of the Imperial Japanese Army, instilled by collective punishment in training, also produced a pecking order between experienced troops and newcomers. Senior soldiers organized the gang-rapes, with up to thirty men per woman, whom they usually killed when they had finished with her. Recently arrived soldiers were not permitted to take part. Only when they had been accepted as part of the group would they be ‘invited’ to join in.

In London, on 27 May, the War Cabinet met again three times. The second meeting, in the afternoon, perhaps encapsulated the most critical moment of the war, when Nazi Germany might have won. This was when the developing clash between Halifax and Churchill came out into the open. Halifax was even more determined to use Mussolini as a mediator to discover what terms Hitler might offer to France and Britain. He believed that, if they delayed, the terms offered would be even worse. Churchill argued strongly against such weakening, and insisted that they should fight on. ‘Even if we were beaten,’ he said, ‘we should be no worse off than we should be if we were now to abandon the struggle. Let us therefore avoid being dragged down the slippery slope with France.’ He understood that once they started to negotiate, they would be ‘unable to turn back’ and revive a spirit of defiance in the population.

As soon as the War Cabinet meeting ended, Churchill called a meeting of the whole Cabinet. He told them that he had considered negotiations with Hitler, but he was convinced that Hitler’s terms would reduce Britain to a ‘slave-state’ ruled by a puppet government. Their support could hardly have been more emphatic. Halifax had been decisively outmanoeuvred. Britain would fight on to the end.

Instead of the 45,000 troops, which the Admiralty had hoped to save, the warships of the Royal Navy and the assorted civilian craft had taken off some 338,000 Allied troops, of whom 193,000 were British and the rest French. Some 80,000 soldiers, mostly French, were left behind due to confusion and the slowness of their commanders to withdraw them. During the campaign in Belgium and north-eastern France, the British had lost 68,000 men. Almost all their remaining tanks and motor transport, most of their artillery and the vast majority of their stores had to be destroyed. The Polish forces in France also made their way to Britain, prompting Goebbels to refer to them contemptuously as ‘the Sikorski tourists’.

On 10 June, Mussolini declared war on France and Britain, although well aware of his country’s military and material weakness. He was determined not to miss his chance to profit territorially before peace came. But the Italian offensive in the Alps, of which the Germans had not been informed, proved disastrous. The French lost just over 200 men. The Italians suffered 6,000 casualties, including more than 2,000 cases of severe frostbite.

The Poles formed the largest foreign contingent, with over 8,000 air force personnel. They were the only ones with combat experience, but their integration into the RAF was slow. Negotiations with General Sikorski, who wanted an independent Polish air force, had been complicated. But, once the first groups of pilots were brought into the RAF Volunteer Reserve, they rapidly proved their skill. British pilots often referred to the ‘crazy Poles’ because of their bravery and disdain for authority.

The parachute of one Polish pilot, Czesław Tarkowski, caught in an oak tree. ‘People with pitchforks and staves ran up,’ he recorded. ‘One of them, armed with a shotgun, was screaming “Hände hoch!” “Fuck off,” I answered in my very best English. The lowering faces immediately brightened up. “He’s one of ours!” they shouted in unison.’ Another Pole landed one afternoon in the grounds of a very respectable lawn tennis club. He was signed in as a guest, given a racket, lent some white flannels and invited to take part in a match. His opponents were thrashed and left totally exhausted by the time an RAF vehicle came to collect him.

When Hitler and Franco began their discussions, the Caudillo’s torrent of words prevented his visitor from speaking, a state of affairs to which the Führer was not accustomed. Franco spoke of their comradeship in arms during the Spanish Civil War and his gratitude for all that Hitler had done, and evoked the ‘alianza espiritual’ which existed between their countries. He then expressed his deep regret for not being able to enter the war immediately on Germany’s side as a result of Spain’s impoverished condition. For much of the three hours, Franco rambled on about his life and experiences, prompting Hitler to say later that he would prefer to have three or four teeth pulled than go through another conversation with the Spanish dictator.

Hitler was also interested in the Portuguese Azores and Cape Verde Islands. The Azores did not just offer an Atlantic naval base for the Kriegsmarine. The OKW war diary later noted: ‘The Führer sees the value of the Azores in two ways. He wants to have them in case of America’s intervention and for after the war.’ Hitler was already dreaming of a new generation of ‘bombers with a range of 6,000 kilometres’ to attack the eastern seaboard of the United States.

Franco’s government, by then critically short of foodstuffs and fuel, could do little more than profess its support for the Axis and promise to enter the war at a later, unspecified date. That still did not stop Franco from considering his own ‘parallel war’, which consisted of invading Britain’s traditional ally, Portugal. Fortunately, it was a project which never came close to fruition.

Despite the easy victory, Hitler the Austrian was bent on vengeance against the Serbian population, whom he still regarded as the terrorists responsible for the First World War and all its ills. Yugoslavia was to be broken up, with morsels of territory given to his Hungarian, Bulgarian and Italian allies. Croatia, under a fascist government, became an Italian protectorate, while Germany occupied Serbia. The Nazis’ harsh treatment of the Serbs was to prove dangerously counter-productive, since it led to the most savage guerrilla war and interfered with their exploitation of the country’s raw materials.

Many of the Germans dropping south-west of Chania into what was known as Prison Valley faced a massacre as they fell right on to well-camouflaged positions. One group dropped on to the 23rd Battalion’s headquarters. The commanding officer shot five and his adjutant shot two from where he was sitting. Cries of ‘Got the bastard!’ could be heard in all directions.

Allied troops had killed 1,856 paratroopers. Altogether, Student’s forces suffered some 6,000 casualties, with 146 aircraft destroyed and 165 badly damaged. These Junkers 52 transports would be sorely missed by the Wehrmacht later in the summer during the invasion of the Soviet Union. Richthofen’s VIII Fliegerkorps lost another sixty aircraft. The Battle of Crete represented the greatest blow which the Wehrmacht had suffered since the start of the war. But, despite the Allies’ furious defence, the battle had then turned into a needless and poignant defeat. Bizarrely, both sides drew very different lessons from the outcome of the airborne operation. Hitler was determined never to attempt a major drop again, while the Allies were encouraged to develop their own paratroop formations, with very mixed results later in the war.

Roosevelt had recognized the threat posed by Nazi Germany even before the Munich agreement of 1938. Foreseeing the importance of air power in the coming war, he had rapidly inaugurated a programme to build 15,000 aircraft a year for the United States Army Air Corps. The assistant chief of staff of the US Army, General George C. Marshall, was present at the meeting to discuss this. Marshall, while agreeing with the plan, took the President to task for overlooking the need to increase their pitifully small ground forces. With little more than 200,000 men, the United States Army had only nine under-strength divisions, a mere tenth of the German army’s order of battle. Roosevelt was impressed. Less than a year later, he backed Marshall’s appointment as chief of staff, which took place on the day Germany invaded Poland. Marshall was a formal man of great integrity and a superb organizer. Under his direction, the US Army was to grow from 200,000 men to eight million in the course of the war. He always told Roosevelt exactly what he thought and remained impervious to the President’s charm. His greatest problem was Roosevelt’s frequent failure to keep him informed of discussions and decisions made with others, particularly those with Winston Churchill.

Churchill later said that the U-boat threat was the only thing that ever really frightened him during the war. At one stage he even considered seizing back the southern ports of neutral Ireland by force if necessary.

After Japan’s signature of the Tripartite Pact in September 1940, Chiang, like Stalin, had seen that the chances of Japan fighting America were increased and he was greatly encouraged by the prospect. China’s survival now lay in the hands of the United States, even though Chiang sensed that the Soviet Union would also end up as part of an anti-fascist alliance. The world, he foresaw, was about to polarize in a more coherent way. The three-dimensional game of chess would finally become two-dimensional.

Some revisionist historians have tried to suggest that all this constituted a real plan to attack Germany, thus somehow attempting to justify Hitler’s subsequent invasion. But the Red Army was simply not in a state to launch a major offensive in the summer of 1941, and in any case Hitler’s decision to invade had been made considerably earlier. On the other hand, it cannot be excluded that Stalin, alarmed by the rapid defeat of France, may have been considering a preventive attack in the winter of 1941 or more probably in 1942, when the Red Army would be better trained and equipped.

Stalin’s appeasement of Hitler had continued with a large increase in deliveries to Germany of grain, fuel, cotton, metals and rubber purchased in south-east Asia, circumventing the British blockade. During the period of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, the Soviet Union had provided 26,000 tons of chromium, 140,000 tons of manganese and more than two million tons of oil to the Reich. Despite having received well over eighty clear indications of a German invasion – indeed probably more than a hundred – Stalin seemed more concerned with ‘the security problem along our north-west frontier’, which meant the Baltic states. On the night of 14 June, a week before the German invasion, 60,000 Estonians, 34,000 Latvians and 38,000 Lithuanians were forced on to cattle trucks for deportation to camps in the distant interior of the Soviet Union. Stalin remained unconvinced even when, during the last week before the invasion, German ships rapidly left Soviet ports and embassy staff were evacuated.

The only fierce resistance encountered was from the massive fortress of Brest-Litovsk on the border. The Austrian 45th Infantry Division suffered heavy casualties, far more than in the whole campaign for France, as its storm groups tried to winkle out the tenacious defenders with flamethrowers, tear gas and grenades. The survivors, suffering terribly from thirst and without medical supplies, fought on for three weeks until wounded or out of ammunition. But on their return in 1945 from German imprisonment their incredible courage did not save them from being sent to the Gulag. Stalin had ordered that surrender constituted treason to the Motherland.

On the Soviet side, Beria’s NKVD massacred the inmates of its prisons near the front so that they would not be saved by the German advance. Nearly 10,000 Polish prisoners were murdered. In the city of Lwów alone, the NKVD killed around 4,000 people. The stench of decomposing bodies in the heat of late June permeated the whole town. The NKVD slaughter prompted Ukrainian nationalists to begin a guerrilla war against the Soviet occupiers. In a frenzy of fear and hatred, the NKVD massacred another 10,000 prisoners in the areas of Bessarabia and the Baltic states, seized the year before. Other prisoners were forced to march eastwards, with NKVD guards shooting any who collapsed.

Stalin understood that the Soviet peoples were far more likely to lay down their lives for their country than for any Communist ideology. Knowing that patriotism is shaped by war, Stalin perceived that this invasion would revive it. Nor did he conceal the gravity of the situation, even if he did nothing to acknowledge his part in the catastrophe. He also ordered a people’s levy – narodnoe opolchenie – to be set up. These militia battalions of ill-armed cannon-fodder were expected to slow the German panzer divisions, with little more than their bodies. The terrible suffering of civilians caught up in the fighting

More than 600,000 horses, assembled from all over Europe, just like for Napoleon’s Grande Armée, formed the basis of transport for the bulk of the Wehrmacht in the campaign. Ration supplies, ammunition and even field ambulances depended on horse-power. Had it not been for the vast quantities of motor-transport which the French army had failed to destroy before the armistice – a subject which provoked Stalin’s bitter anger – the German army’s mechanization would have been limited almost entirely to the four panzer groups.

As well as half a million troops, the civilian population of Leningrad stood at more than two and a half million people, including 400,000 children. Führer headquarters decided that it did not want to occupy the city. Instead the Germans would bombard it and seal it off to let the population starve and die of disease. Once reduced, the city itself would be demolished and the area handed over to Finland.

Many Soviet, especially Ukrainian, citizens had not expected the horrors of a German occupation. In Ukraine, numerous villagers at first welcomed German troops with the traditional gift of bread and salt. After Stalin’s enforced collectivization of farms and the terrible famine of 1932–3, which had killed an estimated 3.3 million people, hatred for the Communists was widespread. Older, more religious Ukrainians had been encouraged by the black crosses on the German armoured vehicles, thinking that they represented a crusade against Godless Bolshevism.

Officers from the Abwehr sensed that, with the vast areas to be conquered, the Wehrmacht’s best strategy would be to recruit a Ukrainian army of a million men. Their suggestion was rejected by Hitler, who did not want weapons given to Slav Untermenschen, but his wishes were soon quietly ignored, both by the army and by the SS, both of whom began to recruit. The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, on the other hand, whose members had been helping the Germans just before the invasion, were suppressed. Berlin wanted to crush their hopes for an independent Ukraine.

In May 1940, during the invasion of France, Himmler had written a paper for Hitler entitled ‘Some Thoughts on the Treatment of Alien Populations in the East’. He suggested screening the Polish population so that the ‘racially valuable’ could be Germanized, while the rest were turned into slave labour. As for the Jews, he wrote: ‘I hope completely to erase the concept of Jews through the possibility of a great emigration to a colony in Africa or elsewhere.’ At that stage, Himmler considered genocide – ‘the Bolshevik method of physical extermination’ – to be ‘un-German and impossible’.

As well as in Lithuania, Latvia and Belorussia, the mass killings spread across Ukraine, often assisted by local men recruited as auxiliaries. Anti-semitism had greatly increased during the great Ukrainian famine because Soviet agents had started rumours suggesting that Jews were primarily responsible for the starvation, so as to deflect responsibility away from Stalin’s own policies of collectivization and dekulakization. Ukrainian volunteers were also used for guarding Red Army prisoners. ‘They’re willing and comradely,’ a Gefreiter wrote. ‘They represent a considerable relief for us.’

Although the Hungarian army attached to Rundstedt’s Army Group South did not take part in mass killings, the Romanians attacking Odessa, a city with a large Jewish population, committed appalling atrocities. Already in the summer of 1941 Romanian troops were said to have killed about 10,000 Jews when seizing back the Soviet-occupied areas of Bessarabia and the Bukovina. Even German officers regarded the conduct of their ally as chaotic and unnecessarily sadistic. In Odessa, the Romanians killed 35,000.

It has been estimated that more than one and a half million Soviet Jews escaped the killing squads. But the concentration of most of the Soviet Union’s Jews in the western parts, especially in cities and large towns, made the work of the Einsatzgruppen much easier. The Einsatzgruppen commanders were also pleasantly surprised by how cooperative and often eager to help their army counterparts proved to be. By the end of 1942, the total number of Jews killed by SS Einsatzgruppen, Ordnungspolizei, anti-partisan units and the German army itself is estimated to have exceeded 1.35 million people.

On 25 August, Red Army troops and British forces from Iraq invaded neutral Iran, to secure its oil and ensure a supply route from the Persian Gulf to the Caucasus and Kazakhstan.

Roosevelt’s decision to aid the Soviet Union was genuinely altruistic as well as munificent. Soviet Lend–Lease took time to get under way, much to the President’s exasperation, but its scale and scope would play a major part in the eventual Soviet victory (a fact which most Russian historians are still loath to acknowledge). Apart from high-quality steel, anti-aircraft guns, aircraft and huge consignments of food which saved the Soviet Union from famine in the winter of 1942–3, the greatest contribution was to the mobility of the Red Army. Its dramatic advances later in the war were possible thanks only to American Jeeps and trucks.

Stalin, emerging from the Kremlin fortress, was shocked by the sights he saw. A state of siege was declared and NKVD rifle regiments marched in to clear the streets, shooting looters and deserters on sight. Order was brutally restored. Stalin then decided that he would stay, and this was announced on the radio. It was a critical moment, and the effect was considerable. The mood turned from mass panic to a mass determination to defend the city at all costs. It was a phenomenon similar to the change of heart during the defence of Madrid five years before.

The suffering of civilians was even greater. They were crushed between the cruelty of the Germans and that of their own Red Army and partisans, ordered by Stalin to destroy any buildings which the Germans might use for shelter. In any newly liberated areas, NKVD troops seized peasants who might have collaborated with the Germans. Nearly 1,400 people were arrested during January, even though the dividing line between survival and collaboration was hard to define.

Despite his apocalyptic diatribes against the Jews, he does seem to have been remarkably reluctant to hear details of mass killings, rather as he shied away from any image of suffering in battle or from bombing. His desire to keep violence abstract was a significant psychological paradox in one who had done more than almost anyone else in history to promote it.

By the end of 1942, close to four million Jews from western and central Europe as well as the Soviet Union would be killed in the extermination camps, along with 40,000 Roma. The active participation of the Wehrmacht, officials in almost every ministry, a large part of industry and the transport system spread the guilt to a degree which German society took a long time to acknowledge in the post-war years.

Although a certain amount of sympathy had been shown to Jews when they were forced to wear the yellow star, once the deportations began Jews became non-persons in the eyes of their fellow citizens. Germans preferred not to dwell on their fate. This, they later persuaded themselves, was due to ignorance when it was in truth much closer to denial. As Ian Kershaw wrote: ‘the road to Auschwitz was built by hatred, but paved with indifference’.

In the Dutch East Indies, the Japanese military authorities were furious to find that most of the oil installations had been destroyed before surrender. The Dutch and other Europeans faced a terrible revenge. In Borneo and Java, almost all the white male civilians were shot or decapitated, and many of their wives and daughters gang-raped. Both Dutch and Javanese women were forced into comfort houses and given a daily ‘quota of twenty enlisted men in the morning, two NCOs in the afternoon and the senior officers at night’.

In Washington, uncertainty reigned in the offices of the Main Navy Building. The desire to hit back was overwhelming, but the badly battered Pacific Fleet needed to exercise caution. Fleet Admiral Ernest J. King, the new commander-in-chief, was famously irascible. He was furious that the British had persuaded General Marshall and Roosevelt to adopt the ‘Germany first’ policy, which meant that the Pacific theatre was obliged to go on to the defensive. British officers felt that King was a confirmed anglophobe, but their American counterparts reassured them that Admiral King was not prejudiced. He simply hated everybody.

Many soldiers who had been awarded the winter campaign medal were unimpressed. They referred to it as the ‘Order of the Frozen Flesh’. At the end of January, new instructions had been issued to those allowed home on leave. ‘You are under military law,’ it reminded them, ‘and you are still subject to punishment. Don’t speak about weapons, tactics or losses. Don’t speak about bad rations or injustice. The intelligence service of the enemy is ready to exploit it.’

The Russians are undertaking more and more measures on preventing desertion and absconding from the battlefield. Now there are so-called guard companies, which have only one task: to prevent their own units from retreating. If it really is this bad, then all the conclusions about the demoralization of the Red Army are true.’

The manipulative Roosevelt had told Molotov, via Harry Hopkins, that he was in favour of opening a Second Front in 1942, but that his generals were against the idea. Roosevelt, it seems, was prepared to say anything to keep the Soviet Union in the war, whatever the consequences. And when it became clear that the Allies had no intention of launching an invasion of northern France that year, Stalin felt that he had been tricked.

On 28 July, Stalin issued his Order No. 227 entitled ‘Ni shagu nazad’ – ‘Not one step back’ – drafted by Colonel General Aleksandr Vasilevsky. ‘Panic-mongers and cowards must be destroyed on the spot. The retreat mentality must be decisively eliminated. Army commanders who have allowed the voluntary abandonment of positions must be removed and sent for immediate trial by military tribunal.’ Blocking groups were to be set up in each army to gun down those who retreated. Punishment battalions were strengthened that month with 30,000 Gulag prisoners up to the age of forty, however weak and under-nourished. In that year, 352,560 prisoners of the Gulag, a quarter of its whole population, died.

Chuikov, with a strong Russian face and a shock of crinkly hair, proved to be a ruthless leader, ready to hit or shoot any officer who failed in his duty. In the mood of panic and chaos, he was almost certainly the best man for the task. Strategic genius was not needed in Stalingrad: just peasant cunning and pitiless determination.

‘Russians in the German army can be divided into three categories,’ a prisoner told his NKVD interrogator. ‘Firstly soldiers mobilized by German troops, so-called Cossack [fighting] platoons which are attached to German divisions. Secondly Hilfsfreiwillige [known as ‘Hiwis’] made up of local people or Russian prisoners who volunteer, or those Red Army soldiers who desert to join the Germans. This category wears full German uniform, and has ranks and badges. They eat like German soldiers and are attached to German regiments. Thirdly, there are Russian prisoners who do the dirty jobs, kitchens, stables and so on. These three categories are treated in different ways, with the best treatment naturally reserved for the volunteers.’

The morale of Soviet soldiers was improving. ‘I often think of the words of Nekrasov that the Russian people are able to bear everything that God is able to throw at us,’ wrote one soldier. ‘Here in the army one can easily imagine that there is no force on earth which can do away with our Russian strength.’ German morale, on the other hand, was suffering badly. ‘It’s impossible to describe what is happening here,’ a German corporal wrote home. ‘Everyone in Stalingrad who still possesses a head and hands, women as well as men, carries on fighting.’ Another acknowledged that ‘the [Soviet] dogs fight like lions’. A third even wrote home: ‘the sooner I am under the ground, the less I will suffer. We often think that Russia should capitulate, but these uneducated people are too stupid to realize it.’

German commanders and staff officers had long been acutely conscious of how weakly held their flanks were. Their left rear along the Don was held by the Romanian Third Army, and the sector to their south was defended by the Romanian Fourth Army. Neither of these formations was well armed, their men were demoralized and they lacked anti-tank guns. Hitler had dismissed all warnings, claiming that the Red Army was at its last gasp and was incapable of launching an effective offensive. He also refused to accept estimates of Soviet tank production. The output of Soviet men and women workers, in improvised and unheated factories in the Urals, had in fact reached over four times that of German industry.

All the conflicting rumours over the past few months about Allied intentions, and his obsession with the final capture of Stalingrad, had meant that the OKW was completely unprepared for a new front. The big question was how the Vichy regime would react to an Allied invasion of its North African colonies. Ribbentrop joined the train at Bamberg, and urged Hitler to let him make overtures to Stalin through the Soviet ambassador in Stockholm. Hitler rejected the suggestion out of hand. The idea of negotiating at a moment of weakness was unthinkable.

Despite Roosevelt’s request to keep the Free French in ignorance, Churchill had asked General Ismay to call General Pierre Billotte, de Gaulle’s chief of staff, to warn him of the invasion just before the troops began to land. But Billotte decided not to wake de Gaulle, who had gone to bed early. When de Gaulle heard the news next morning, he was incandescent with rage. ‘I hope the Vichy people will throw them into the sea,’ he stormed. ‘You don’t get France by burglary!’ But by the time he had lunched with a soothing Churchill, de Gaulle had calmed down. That evening he made a broadcast fully in support of the Allied operation.

The Italian attitude to the war against the Soviet Union was very different to the German. Italian officers were shocked by the Germans’ racist attitude towards the Slavs, and when they took over from Wehrmacht units they made much greater efforts to feed the Russian prisoners employed on heavy duties. They also made friends with the local villagers who had been stripped of clothing and foodstuffs by the Germans.