The heaviest fighting of the war remained on the eastern front after the failure of a Blitzkrieg in Russia, which spared England from any threat of invasion, and the resistance movements throughout Europe was given fresh encouragement. The Russians had lost three million prisoners in 1941, and the USSR lost 63 percent of its coal production and 68 percent of its iron. However, the Russian resistance was far greater than expected, and in spite of initial considerable success, the advance on Moscow was stopped by October. The Soviets launched their counteroffensive on 5 December 1941, striking north and south of Moscow, which led to the first German retreat order of the war on the next day in the face of the threat of a Russian envelopment, while Hitler had neither expected nor planned for winter warfare.
The German military proved unable to repeat the earlier successes of waging rapid mobile warfare dislocating enemy forces before full mobilisation could take effect to induce an operational collapse. The Soviets had wrested the initiative from the Germans, in spite of earlier heavy losses, and continued marshalling numerical superiority in the favour. Stalin called for a general offensive on all fronts from Leningrad to the Crimea in early January 1942, although Soviet forces, who suffered from acute shortages of food, fuel and ammunition, were spread so thinly across almost one thousand miles of front that there could be little chance of success. The Russian counteroffensive continued until 18 April 1942, and although the attack did not attain Stalin’s totally unrealistic objective of a successful general offensive on all fronts, it was a major achievement for the Red Army. The Germans were forced back approximately 100 to 250 kilometres, and Hitler was obliged to place the entire front on the defensive. Soviet forces either faced against German strongpoints, were worn down and beaten back, or they advanced through the spaces between them and were encircled by skillful counterattacks, rather than concentrating on decisive points of attack, and consequently suffered defeats at Kharkov, and then the Crimea, and the Leningrad front that put the Germans into effective offensive positions.
In addition to tenacious resistance, other factors contributed to Soviet Russia’s defence. A pact of mutual assistance in July 1941 led to supplies from Britain, and then from the US from November by Arctic convoys to Archangel and Murmansk, after the lend lease act was formally extended to the Soviet Union, which received $11.2 billion worth of supplies in the course of the war, which was comparable to the $13.5 billion sent to Britain. Supplied reaching Russia in 1943 doubled the 1942 amount, as losses in transit from enemy bombers and U-boats decreased from twelve to one percent. The combination of the large local production relocated to east of the Urals and Siberia and Lend Lease material resulted in providing Soviet forces greater mobility, as well improved communications, and eventual air superiority. Stalin also made an appeal to Russian nationalism, with a vigorous appeal to Russian patriotism. Moreover, winter conditions broke when the Germans were still 30 miles from Moscow and besieging Leningrad.
The failure of Operation Barbarossa to subdue the Soviet Union within weeks and requiring acquiring critical fuel supplies led to planning for a major offensive toward Astrakhan on the Caspian Sea, between the Don and the Volga, prior to advancing south toward the Caucasus. Hitler planned for a new offensive on 5 April 1942 that was dictated by his ideological and economic predilections and paid little attention to the more traditional strategic and political considerations of the General Staff. He was determined to seize the oil fields of the Caucasus, claiming that Germany would be unable to continue the war without acquiring additional oil supplies, and that the Russians would be forced to sue for peace once they had lost their principal source of fuel.
The key to the whole situation to the situation on the eastern front, and the most vulnerable point, was Stalingrad on the western bank of the Volga River, which was to be neutralised as a vital industrial centre as well as a communications and transportation hub for oil, wheat and manganese. This city was also an artery in the Lend-Lease system receiving supplies from Iran, and also covered the flank of the advance into the Caucasus and controlled the land bridge between the Volga and the Don, as well as the route north to Moscow, thus composing a hub for river traffic supplying Soviet forces in the south. Taking over Stalingrad would cover the German advance’s southern flank, as well as deal a psychological blow to the Soviet war effort. During this time, Stalingrad also potentially composed a centre of resistance against the German Army Group Centre, from which Soviet offensives could be staged, and drew units from this army group that maintained the central front during 1942 that strained its reserves. The Soviet offensive Operation Mars, staged from late October until 20 December around the Rzhev salient in the vicinity of Moscow that did not lead to any tangible Russian advantages, prior to shifting resources to the south to counter the German offensives there.
Hitler determined to deploy two separate army groups to seize both objectives on 28 June 1942 in the Case Blue summer offensive into southern Russia, consisting of Operation Edelweiβ in an advance toward the oil fields by the Caspian Sea, and Operation Fischreiher to seize Stalingrad. Army Group A pressed toward the Caucasus oil fields, and Army Group B pressing toward Stalingrad following a swift eastward advance, and reaching the outskirts of the city in August 1942, followed by constant bombing from 25 August, which contributed to enabling preparing defensive works among the damaged buildings. The advance was then stalled in the face of mounting casualties in bitter urban fighting, but Hitler would dismiss any objections about the feasibility of occupying this city. This offensive staged from 28 June to 24 November then advanced toward Maikop and Grozny to seize the Caucasus oil production in Baku to sustain Germany’s war effort, while denying these resources for the Soviet war industry, as well as deny the Soviets access to the Black Sea where they could receive western allied Lend-Lease aid resupplies. Army Group South was divided into two parts in late July, with the second half becoming Army Group B to protect the rear of the main attack by shielding the narrow stretch of territory between the Don and the Volga rivers. Army Group B was further divided to deploy the Sixth Army to advance east to the Volga, while the Fourth Panzer Army reinforced Army Group A in its drive toward the Caucasus, which reached Maikop on 8 August, and as far as Mozdok on 2 September, sixty miles from the Grozny oilfield, and the outskirts of Ordzhonikidze by 10 November, where the Georgian military highway extended to Tiflis and Iran that served as a source of incoming Lend-Lease supplies. Hitler later ordered Army Group B to advance toward Stalingrad to seize rather than bypass this major industrial centre, and then cross the Volga and advance south to Astrakhan on the Caspian Sea. These decisions thus shifted a converging attack onto one objective on widely separated ones, since Hitler misinterpreted Soviet withdrawal for weakness, and committed Axis forces to exceedingly unreasonable expectations.
The German armies advanced while the Soviet armies retreated in the south, prompting Stalin to establish a front at Stalingrad, and the German lines of communication became increasingly and seriously overextended as German forces approached and then entered the city by 13 September 1942, and wearing themselves out in suicidal frontal assaults in the ruins that had been caused by Luftwaffe bombing and created various defensive positions. It did not serve any vital strategic purpose, since German troops controlled the Volga to the north and to the south, and therefore was also not essential to the conduct of the campaign in the Caucasus since it could have become isolated. Nevertheless, Hitler considered the battle for Stalingrad to have become a question of prestige, in addition to eliminating this industrial centre and communications hub on the Volga River.
The final objective of the German offensives was Leningrad which, as the breeding ground of Bolshevism, had to be destroyed. This key city was to remain besieged from 1941 to 1944. Three regiments of the Spanish Blue Division took part during this eight hundred and seventy-two day siege as its most notable contribution, following its initial arrival at the front line at Novgorod on 28 September 1941 among twenty-one major battles and other minor clashes, until they were recalled from the eastern front on 13 October 1943. A volunteer Blue Legion remained until March 1944, while other volunteers who refused to return to Spain remained serving in the German army until the end of the war. These troops along with a squadron of fighter aircraft were deployed as a sign of goodwill to the Nazi regime for its support for the Falangists during the Spanish Civil War, on the condition that Spanish forces would only be deployed against the Soviet Union in order not to antagonise the western Allies, as well as retaliating against Soviet support for the communists during the civil war. The armies of the central sector were ordered to hold their ground. The generals were appalled by Hitler’s directive, for it ran against all the basic principles of their military training.
A Soviet winter offensive was launched in the south on 29 December 1941 as an elaborate operation to relieve besieged Sevastopol in the Crimea, with landings from the eastern and southern sides of the Kerch Peninsula, which were countered with German counterattacks with superior air power and artillery that drove them back to the east of Kerch by 7 May 1942, which fell on 15 May. A major advance on the southern flank, without any pressure being applied in the centre, meant that the Germans would be caught between the bulk of the Red Army and the Black Sea, opening up the possibility of a devastating counterattack. Operation Störfang, the final offensive on Sevastopol launched on 2 June, and ended with German and Romanian troops seizing control of the city on 29 June, with the final Soviet resistance in the Crimea ending between 2 and 4 July. Although German forces hereafter secured the right flank along the Black Sea that reinforced an anticipated advance toward the Caucasus, this success at the cost of heavy losses reduced German resources for Case Blue at a critical time, and did not reinforce confidence that allied troops would protect the flank of German troops on the continued drive toward the Caucasus, since Romanian troops lacked modern weaponry, and constantly needed German logistical support. The hard pressed and undersupplied Wehrmacht was called upon to fight along a dangerously extended front. There again lacked any concentration on a single objective, rather than three separate offensives against objectives, which did not have a close strategic relationship. Hitler dismissed all objections, imagining his self-delusion that the Russians were close to defeat, while Ninth Army was fighting a massive defensive army on the Rkhev salient to the north of Stalingrad during November 1942, which prevented reserves from supporting the German troops at Stalingrad who became trapped therein. The Soviet general staff sought to eliminate the Rkhev salient in Operation Mars to remove this possibility of becoming a staging area toward a renewed assault on Moscow, and Operation Uranus to isolate the Sixth Army at Stalingrad. Whereas the offensive at Rhhev was stalled, greater success was achieved at Stalingrad, where Axis forces became bogged down, while the Russians maintained its defences at heavy costs to tenaciously maintain these German forces invested, and preclude advances in other directions
The Sixth Army that advanced on Stalingrad, led by General Friedrich von Paulus, became the largest operational German formation on the eastern front,. Preliminary bombing prior to advancing armoured columns supported by infantry collapsed building structures, which inadvertently created defensive positions in which tanks could only navigate through with difficulty in confined spaces. The Soviet General Vasily Chikov, who was appointed the commander of the Stalingrad garrison, chose to negate the German advantages of air and artillery power by pressing defences as close as possible to German positions so that they would be a liability to the attackers, and formed small infantry units to stage small scale attacks through the city ruins. Excessively bitter street fighting at Stalingrad continued, while supplies for the German forces diminished, and the Russians managed to launch a counteroffensive on 19 November, Operation Uranus that was designed to break the Axis front flanks around Stalingrad, in which Soviet forces broke through poorly equipped Romanian, Hungarian and Italian troops attached to Army Group B north of Stalingrad, and the weakened German Fourth Panzer Army to the south. The troops of the Third Romanian Army deployed north of the Volga and the Fourth Romanian Army deployed to the south were especially underequipped, lacking modern ant-tank weapons, mechanised transport, mobile reserves and air support, which made them incapable of resisting a double Soviet envelopment of Stalingrad ultimately leading to joining forces at Kalach on the Don River on 23 November.
Operation Uranus was successfully completed with the utmost secrecy, and Soviet forces were unexpectedly empowered with independently making deep and rapid advances, rather than maintaining close communications with flanking unit. 220,000 German troops of the Sixth Army out of the approximately 265,000 Axis troops who occupied ninety percent of the city were trapped in what became a defensive cauldron. Hitler refused to allow to break out in a “no retreat” order issued on 24 November, while believing that the Soviets lacked the necessary reserves for a major counteroffensive, which proved to be completely flawed decision making. During this time, German troops remained hundreds of kilometres away from Caucasus oil fields, and also facing relentless Soviet resistance against them. Meanwhile, the Luftwaffe was unable to air supply sufficient supplies to the besieged troops as Soviet forces continued advancing into the surrounded city where they remain entrenched. The Sixth Army required seven hundred tons of supplies every day to survive, whereas Luftwaffe transport staff could only manage to transport a maximum of three hundred and fifty tons per week, and the most successful single day delivery was 289 tons on 13 December. The Soviet forces meanwhile reinforced their siege of Stalingrad in Operation Little Saturn that struck the Second Hungarian Army and the remainder of the Eighth Italian Army in December.
Field-Marshal Erich von Manstein launched Operation Winter Storm on 12 December in an offensive attempt to break through to the besieged troops to create a corridor to reach them, and culminated in breaching the Soviet defences on 18 December. However, German forces which only managed to reach forty-eight kilometres from the city in the face of overwhelming Soviet opposition blocking their advance, and were forced to retreat on 23 December. While Soviet forces remained threatening the besieged troops at Stalingrad, Hitler remained refusing General Friedrich Paulus’s request to attempt a breakout as casualties continued mounting to the ongoing fighting, insufficient shelter from the winter elements, and lack of supplies.
Regardless of Hitler’s demands to hold Stalingrad at all costs since it had become encircled, Hitler’s demands to hold Stalingrad at all costs became increasingly untenable. The failure of Operation Winter Storm to break the siege and not staging Operation Thunderclap to allow for the withdrawal of Axis troops from Stalingrad, along with the failure of the Luftwaffe to resupply the Sixth Army since this was beyond its capabilities in addition to appalling weather conditions, technical failures and Soviet anti-aircraft fire, along with Soviet air superiority. Airlifting supplies into the city that would require seven hundred tons daily for their survival never exceeded ninety tons. Axis troops were running out of fuel, ammunition, and food as Soviet troops continued advancing increasingly further into the city, and two hundred and sixty-six transport aircraft were lost during the attempted airlift to the besieged troops until 22 January, which proved to be irrecoverable losses for the Luftwaffe. Paulus, who Hitler promoted to Field-Marshal on 30 January as a weak pretext for refusing to capitulate, surrendered the approximately 91,000 surviving Axis troops on 31 January 1943 to General Zhukov. The remaining Germans forces who had become separated from the others surrendered on 2 February, while 11,000 stragglers attempted to avoid capture until March when order in Stalingrad was restored. Approximately 100,000 German troops perished at Stalingrad, and only approximately five percent, or fewer than six thousand, survived captivity in Soviet prisoner-of-war camps. The German troops were further placed on the defensive as they were forced to retreat from the Caucasus, as the German lost the momentum of their advance, and the Red Army first changed from strategic defence to offence all along the front south of Leningrad, and would gain an offensive superiority.
Paulus, who Hitler promoted to Field-Marshal on 30 January as a weak pretext for refusing to capitulate, surrendered his troops on 31 January 1943 to General Zhukov. The remaining Germans forces who had become separated from the others surrendered on 2 February, while 11,000 stragglers attempted to avoid capture until March when order in Stalingrad was restored. The German troops were further placed on the defensive as they were forced to retreat from the Caucasus, as the German lost the momentum of their advance, and the Red Army first changed from strategic defence to offence all along the front south of Leningrad, and would gain an offensive superiority. The Russians had shown that the Germans could be beaten, and Nazi propaganda about Slav sub-humans and the weakness and decadence of the Soviet state began to ring hollow. The Russians had shown that the Germans could be beaten, and Nazi propaganda about Slav sub-humans and the weakness and decadence of the Soviet state began to ring hollow, while there was also greater political alienation from Nazi Germany in Romania, Hungary and Italy, where political leadership shifted their national priority toward ensuring their national survival by planning to enter into peace negotiations with the Allies, as confidence in the viability of the Axis war effort was severely undermined.
The entry of the U.S. into the war before this time also made Germany’s position more perilous. The war took on a wholly different dimension with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour on 7 December 1941, which followed the precedent that the British had set on their naval attack at Taranto, and also discouraged the Italian military from attacking Malta by sea and stage an amphibious invasion, as much of its fleet was left disabled, which was further weakened by a Royal Navy raid on Cape Matapan that disabled Italy’s only modern operational battleship, and sank three cruisers and two destroyers in March 1941. Malta was otherwise subjected to Italian air attacks, while the Italian military was unwilling to focus their efforts on convoys supplying the Axis forces in northern Africa, while Italian ships lacked air cover and facing perpetual fuel shortages, while Malta remained operational as an allied base in the central Mediterranean Sea.
American participation in the war became a decisive change to the course of the war at this time. The United States enacted embargoes on iron, steel and petroleum to Japan in 1940, in reaction to Japan’s aggression toward Indochina, which drastically affected the Japanese economy, whereas Japan would not stage aggression against the Soviet Union and seize resources in Siberia following signing a neutrality pact with the Soviet Union on 13 April 1941, which also served the interests of the USSR to face Germany in the west, following Germany’s invasion of the Balkans. The United States also aggravated the situation in the summer of 1941 when it placed an embargo on oil as well. In response, the Japanese fleet launched a surprise attack on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor while, hoping to destroy the U.S. Pacific fleet and shock the U.S. into quick compliance with the shift of power in the Pacific. The United States declared war on Japan and its European Allies after this attack. Germany in turn declared war on the United States on 11 December 1941, while abysmally underestimating American war waging potential as a mongrel nation of materialists who were not suited for making effective use of their vast human and material resources over two distant war theatres. Hitler was also determined to stop the flow of supplies across the Atlantic, in addition to intending to oblige his Japanese Allies with whom he planned to cooperate following the anticipated destruction of the Soviet Union. He was also convinced that sooner or later the Americans would declare war on Germany, and he wanted to attack first, while having greatly underestimated America’s potential war waging resources in an audacious gamble, much as he had done with the Soviet Union.
The fighting between the U.S. and Germany was initially in what became the battle of the Atlantic. U-boats began appearing off the eastern coast of the U.S. in January 1942 to threaten American shipping, and concentrated raids on convoys crossing the Atlantic, entering the Mediterranean and sailing to Murmansk in attempts to cut off the supply and reinforcement of the Allies destroying Lend-Lease products delivered to Britain, the Soviet Union and the Middle East. U-boats were able to cause havoc against inexperienced American crews off the east coast of the United States between January and July 1942, with their operations being reinforced by the introduction of a new version of “Enigma” in February whose “Triton” code the specialists at Bletchley Park were unable to crack until December. In August the “Interlocking Convoy System” was introduced, which greatly increased the efficiency of convoy defence and which made optimum use of aerial reconnaissance and radar. This resulted in a reduction of losses, which had reached 600,000 tons in July, when a total of three million tons had been sunk in the span of seven months.
During the next phase from August 1942 to May 1943, U-boats concentrated on attacking convoys in the north Atlantic where they were out of range of protecting aircraft, but the tide was beginning to turn against the U-boats by May 1943, when of the 118 in service 38 failed to return. The Allies lost a total of 7,699,000 tons and were able to build 7,182,000 tons during 1942. At the same time, the Germans were building U-boats faster than the Allies could sink them, and were proving to be the most dangerous weapon, while German surface vessels were withdrawn from the Atlantic in 1942 when they were subject to Allied air attacks, and did not play any significant part in the war thereafter, while Germany’s submarine warfare was decisively on the offensive in late 1942, and reached a peak of sinking 768,000 tonnes of allied shipping in November.
Prime Minister Churchill and President Roosevelt decided at the Casablanca Conference in January 1943 to prioritise war efforts on the Battle of the Atlantic during 1943, and thus delay an invasion of France until the following year, when they would be enabled with using Britain as a staging area for the invasion of the continent after having had eliminated the U-boat threat. During this time when Admiral Dönitz as the naval commander of the Germany’s naval commander of the U-boat arm, succeeded Admiral Raeder following the latter’s failure to deploy surface warships with sufficient effectiveness against allied supply convoys, Germany’s naval strategy concentrated on attempting to cut off American supply and reinforcements to the European Allies by destroying Lend-Lease supplies going to Britain, Russia and the Middle East, and to prevent American rearmament, with the first U-boats appearing off the eastern coast of the U.S. a month after Japan struck at Pearl Harbour.
The Allied offensive against U-boats continued with deploying greater amounts of naval resources, as well as adopting new technology and tactics. One matter of concern to the Allies was the “air gap” in the central North Atlantic where air cover was lacking owing to the range of distances to be patrolled over the ocean between ports in North America and in the U.K. A massive increase in the numbers of Canadian warships enabled allowing higher numbers of escort vessels defending merchant ships sailing across the North Atlantic, but allied air power based in the U.S., Canada, Iceland, and the U.K. could not yet close a thousand kilometre air gap, which remained leaving shipping vulnerable to U-boat attacks in a narrowed space, while refitted vessels that could carry aircraft and long range bombers, such as the B-24 Liberators, remained lacking. German naval codebreaking and the Allies diverting ships and fuel resources for evasive manouevres to the Operation Torch landings in northern Africa were further weaknesses that led to higher numbers of ships sunk by U-boats, which sank a total of 704,000 tonnes of allied shipping in March 1943 worldwide, including 484,000 tonnes in the Atlantic. However, the Allies were able to counter this threat through the development of new tactical, military and technological developments.
In order to overcome this difficulty of escort ships being unable to leave merchant ship convoys unprotected to attack U-boats, the British Royal Navy created “support groups” consisting of highly trained U-boat hunter vessels using the latest short-wave radar and heavier depth charges. The support groups could range freely in pursuit of U-boats, unlike the escort groups, and became fully operational in March 1943 and reduced the threat of U-boats attacking in packs. American B-17 Flying Fortress bombers inflicted great damage to the German submarine yards at Vegesack in March 1943, and heavy daylight raids were made on the concrete submarine pens at coastal bases in occupied France, but these bombings had little appreciable effect on U-boat operations. Allied Ultra intercepts that had cracked German Enigma codes enabled the Allies to detect the general locations of U-boat movements, but they could not pinpoint their attacks with sufficient rapidity due to code changes and time needed to decrypt messaging. Other forms of technology were introduced, including equipping convoy ships and aircraft with improved ten-centimetre radar to detect U-boats on the surface. and ASDIC sonar equipment that enabled gauging and bearing of submerged U-boats by revealing their approach, which improved the effectiveness of anti-submarine weaponry. New weapons, such as the “Hedgehog” salvo firer for depth charges and the airborne homing torpedo, greatly increased the chances of a kill. The high frequency radio direction finder (HF/DF or “Huff-Duff”) that became readily available in 1943 was invaluable to the escort vessels and aircraft that enable intercepting U-boat radio messaging from up to twenty-five kilometres, and ten centimetric radar made it possible to track the U-boats on the surface.
Other innovations were the use of aircraft carriers with destroyer escorts, and very long-range aircraft, including B-24 Liberators, Whitley bombers, and Sunderland and Catalina flying boats, which nearly filled the gap in mid-Atlantic, attacked U-boats before they could submerge and broke up undersea “wolf packs” that were applied against shipping convoys, and accounted for roughly half of U-boat losses. Above all, the outstanding seamanship and courage of the escorts and support groups was a match for the exceptional skill and bravery of the U-boat crews, which allowed for the U.S. to act with military power in Europe making the Atlantic safe for convoys. Nevertheless, one U-boat was lost for every 10,000 tonnes sunk in May 1943, after one U-boat was lost for 100,000 tonnes sunk a short time beforehand.
The Allies won the battle of the Atlantic in the face of intolerable levels of losses, as the net increase of U-boats for the previous three months were eliminated. The numbers of allied vessels began to be reduced while an effective supply line was established between the U.S. and Britain, as not any allied merchant ship was attacked in the North Atlantic during the summer of 1943. U-boats were withdrawn from that war theatre on 24 May, until improved countermeasures and equipment could become available to compensate for the allied advantages that German intelligence were unable to detect, while U-boats were vulnerable to radio traffic detection, and lacked reliable air cover from the Luftwaffe. The effectiveness of waging submarine warfare was further undermined by the losses of experienced personnel. The North Atlantic would hereafter become a logistical path for the eventual invasion of continental western Europe while the Allies were fighting a war of attrition against Nazi Germany that was faced with increasingly diminishing resources. The Mediterranean Sea also became comparatively safe, with only eighty thousand tons of shipping being lost out of the 2,500 vessels that were used in the invasion of Sicily, following earlier Allied advances in North Africa where the Axis were the weakest, which in turn opened the way for the allied invasions of Italy and southern France.
Fighting on the western front primarily took place in the air during this time, while the fighting in northern Africa would not lead to a direct outcome toward ending the war, and the battle of the Atlantic was a defensive from the allied viewpoint, and therefore bombing attacks were the only means the western Allies had at their disposal of striking at Germany itself. The British Bomber Command developed different schemes for bombing Germany at the beginning of the war without prior knowledge of the effectiveness of German air defences. There were also serious doubts as to whether they could find, let alone hit, the appointed targets. There was no satisfactory way of assessing likely physical damage, and also no way at all of judging the effect on enemy morale. Bombing by day was deemed too dangerous, but bombing by night was hopelessly ineffective. Daylight raids on shipping in the early stages of the war proved very costly and the results were disappointingly meager, and night actions were hardly more promising.
Accuracy was of little importance, and the result was “area bombing,” or the indiscriminate dropping of bombs by night. It was designed to undermine enemy morale by destroying workers’ housing that would have adverse effects on the German economy, without concern for hitting specific worthwhile targets. With there not being sufficient available force for an invasion of the continent and the naval blockade was ineffective, air attacks remained the only way to strike at Germany by undermining the civilian population’s support for the regime. However, bombings by the RAF initially caused minimal damage while accuracy was a major problem due to the existing technology. The new direction-finding Oboe system was not operational until the end of 1942, and centimetric radar for target identification (H2S) was first used in January 1943. Bomber Command failed to solve the problem of precision bombing in 1942, and was thus faced with whether to choose continuing with area bombing, or halting the bomber offensive altogether. In such circumstances, more of the same seemed to be the only choice. Nevertheless, there was a substantial increase in war industrial production in Germany in 1943 and 1944, and that the bombing raids did not have any serious effects on civilian morale.
However, the bomber offensive of 1942 had the positive result of forcing the Luftwaffe onto the defensive, and it now devoted most of its resources to the struggle for air supremacy over the Reich. It was possible to send only a few bombing raids to England, none of which had any serious effect on Britain’s war potential. The major problem for the Germans was protecting a vast area to protect with only limited resources, and it was clear that, as in the Soviet Union and in North Africa, they were losing the strategic initiative in the air war.
The British bomber offensive was started by Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris, who was appointed as the chief of the RAF bomber command in February 1942, as the only way the British could attack Germany directly. British Blenheim bombers raided shipping to deny the Germans the use of coastal waters. After Germany invaded Russia, British bombing strategy was directed to destroying any target that would help the Soviet Union’s ground forces, including by making night raids on German rail junctions and war plants to disrupt supply lines from July 1941 to February 1942. This was then followed by concentrating targeting German supplies, such as steel works and other production centres. Harris also maintained area bombing of civilian areas, which he believed could win the war by itself by destroying German cities as war production centres and demoralise the civilian population to induce a surrender, while contending with increasingly effective German air defences consisting of a combination of radars, searchlights, anti-aircraft batteries firing tracer shells, and night fighters organised in zones covering the approaches to Germany and its major cities that inflicted heavy casualties.
Altogether 900,000 personnel were now serving in flak units in the west, operating seventy-five percent of Germany’s 8.8 centimetre Flak 18 anti-aircraft guns, otherwise known as “88” anti-aircraft batteries that were used in conjunction with powerful searchlights that would illuminate bomber formations. The Himmelbett radar network system was used to detect and locate bombers from different ranges, detecting height, speed and direction of bomber formations composed of these guns operating in conjunction with powerful searchlights and radar stations that extended from France, Belgium, Holland, Germany, Denmark and northern Italy. which could detect range, speed, direction and size of bomber streams that allowed for ground controllers to direct night fighters. Two engine Junker 88s used as night fighter aircraft were equipped with the “Lichtenstein” radar direction finders, and equipped with Schragemusik two-set cannon mounted at a forty-five degree angle on their fuselage tops that would fire upward into the vulnerable undersides of bombers. Apart from deploying dedicated night fighters when they were available as a result of shortages, daytime fighters flying above bomber formations using visual identifications without on board radar were also employed as “wild boar” units that would fly high above allied bomber streams, and depend on searchlights to illuminate targets to enable visual identification.
Disagreements between the British and the Americans over bombing strategy led to a compromise solution during discussions on the conduct of the war at the Casablanca Conference in January 1943, and ultimately induce unconditional surrender. The British and the American delegates agreed on a combined bombing offensive to destroy Germany’s military, economy and industry, while weakening civilian resolve to maintain the war effort. The American Eighth Air Force stationed in England applied precision bombing of designated industrial targets using the Norden bombsight and B-17 bombers flying in tight formations with greater onboard defensive firepower than British bombers. Their daylight raids over France in the summer of 1942, often with heavy RAF fighter protection, showed that precision bombing could bring satisfactory results at a low cost. There were later heavy losses over Germany when the Germans were increasing fighter production, and were therefore also withdrawing fighters from other theatres to fight the air battle over Germany as Luftwaffe resources became increasingly overextended. The American Eighth Air Force would apply precision daylight bombing attacks, while the British Bomber Command would attack the same targets with area attacks at night to prepare for a forthcoming invasion of France by striking at key military targets and installations. The Pointblank Directive calling for around the clock British radar guided night time area bombing and American daylight precision bombing with increasingly longer range fighter escorts, beginning with striking at various targets in Germany during “Big Week” from 20 February 1943. British and American bombing primarily designated attacking targets in the Ruhr valley as Germany’s industrial heartland from March to June 1943, with inconclusive results due to rate of reconstruction and effective German air defences.
The Americans were considerably more successful than the British with precision bombing, including while concentrating on German synthetic fuel industrial facilities as a means of depriving the German armed forces of mobility for aircraft, tanks and U-boats, these attacks had limited effects on German industry, and were also subject to German air defences while lacking fighter escorts that could not reach the bombing target destinations. American attacks in August shifted from targeting U-boat pens to aircraft production in Regensburg and ball bearing production in Schweinfurt on 17 August 1943 and a second raid on Schweinfurt on 14 October in the longest-range bombings in a deep penetration attack without fighter escorts led to heavy losses to German fighters. These attacks demonstrated that B-17 formations could not be self-defending against coordinated German fighter aircraft defences. With the three divisions of the Eighth Air Force becoming decimated in October 1943, or thirteen percent of its attacking aircraft and approximately 1,500 aircrew within a week, while they were subject to attacks by German fighter aircraft. Although the ball-bearing production at Schweinfurt was reduced by two-thirds, full production was restored within four months. Long range missions were then suspended from October 1943 to February 1944, when the USAAF attacked a series of centres of the German aircraft industry with the use of new tactics and technology, including long range fighter escorts, particularly the Mustang P-51, improved radar and communications equipment, and improved training, while the Luftwaffe had endured heavy losses of air crews, regardless of improved aircraft production, and were to face heavier allied bombing raids as the USAAF applied technical and numeral advantages.
American bombing attacks then shifted the priority in June 1943 to German aircraft and ball-bearing production that operated largely independently of the British Bomber Command. Although the results of the bombing offensive would not prove to be decisive to varying degrees until 1944, a direct consequence was diverting Luftwaffe squadrons from the eastern front, leaving only twenty-seven percent of German aircraft on this front in 1943, where the bulk of the ground fighting was taking place, and allowed for the Soviet air force to achieve air supremacy during the battle of Kursk, which included deploying the Ilyushin Sturmovik IL-2 aircraft that proved to be devastating against German tanks. Hitler’s attempt to re-establish German military initiative following the defeat at Stalingrad ended in failure, and faced relentless Soviet counterattacks with enormous reserves of personnel and material. The most significant was at Prokhorovka, where German forces advanced into a Soviet counterattack position that led to the greatest tank battle in history on 12 July, where the German forces inflicted heavy losses on Soviet armour, but could not hold this ground due to casualties among the infantry from Soviet defences. Hitler then ordered tank forces to be withdrawn from the Kursk battle on 13 July in reaction to the invasion of Sicily on 10 July to reinforce defences in Italy, while the Soviet forces in Operation Kutozov drove forces from the north that threatened the German rear echelons of the Ninth Army, which eliminated the possibility of encircling Soviet forces, while further attempted advances would be threatened by established Soviet defences. German forces hereafter proved to be incapable of launching any further major offensives on the eastern front. Failing to reacquire an advantageous position at Kursk led to a prolonged fighting retreat, along with permanently losing air superiority, along with material supply and numbers of troops. Further German resilience would ultimately become increasingly overwhelmed through prolonged attrition.
War effort demands that was imposed on Nazi Germany became increasingly unsustainable, and Goebbels calling for “total war” on 8 February 1943 was essentially merely a propaganda expression to encourage sacrifices for greater concentrated determination for defensive purposes to face the increasingly greater difficulties the regime was facing in continuing the prolonged conflict by marshalling diminishing resources. The armaments industry hereafter became reorganised under Albert Speer as the armaments industry, aiming at increased standardisation and efficiency, which led to increased production numbers and reduced Allied bombing effectiveness on disrupting industrial capacity, and decreeing the conscription of workers from the occupied areas to be contribute to labouring the armaments industries. Speer countered the increasingly more destructive effects of Allied aerial bombing of heavy industry by dispersing primarily light industry assets producing components in countryside areas to mitigate the effects of area bombing, and setting up alternative factories to pre-fabricate major assemblies for offensive vehicles, among which many were built deep underground, from 1943 onward. Coal and steel production remained stable until September 1944, until the loss of the Silesian coal fields, while the highly developed rail and canal systems remained reasonably intact, which unbeknownst to Allied military planners, constituted a key element that contributed to ensuring continued production and distribution, while goods remained pillaged from the occupied territories and Germany was facing threatening military situations that continually undermined available resources.
The momentum of the war on land was maintained on the eastern front, with continued Soviet advances against Nazi Germany following their victory at Stalingrad, which aggravated the failure of the Case Blue offensive into the Caucasus. However, Stalin demanded too many simultaneous offensives, leading to failures to exploit deep exploitations of advances without causing overextended lines of communications and logistics, while Soviet forces sought to take advantage of the defeat at Stalingrad during February and March 1943 by advancing against the German Army Group South. German troops abandoned Kharkov on 14 February, which became the first major city retaken by the Soviets after Stalingrad. Manstein exploited Soviet weaknesses to retake Kharkov by 14 March and Belgorod on 18 March during the Donets Campaign. Manstein consequently restored a stable front in the south that halted the Soviet advance along the Donets River, as Soviet forces lacked fuel, ammunition and reinforcements to withstand concentrated German forces. This recovery of German military fighting power led to Stalin considering offering a compromise peace settlement with Nazi Germany through Swedish diplomats as neutral intermediaries, which apparently involved restoring the 1914 borders. In any case, Hitler would not contemplate reaching a peace settlement with the Soviet Union, and Soviet forces pressed their own advantages, with far greater resources in terms of personnel, artillery and tank superiority.
Soviet advances toward the north formed a bolstered salient around the city of Kursk on the Voronezh front, extending 250 kilometres from north to south, and 160 kilometres from east to west. Hitler reacted to this presence of a staging area for further Soviet advances by ordering the launch of Operation Citadel as a drive on this Soviet advance by deploying Army Groups Centre and South to envelop this salient from 4 to 17 July 1943, which would compose a final attempt to reacquire the initiative on the eastern front, at a time when German forces on the eastern front were at the limits of their potential endurance, and would be thus deployed into a massive gamble to attempt to launch a knock out blow during a single operation against a bulge in the German front lines. The Soviet advance positions would ultimately hold owing to well prepared defences due to intelligence intercepts, including the Soviet Supreme High Command receiving reports from Rudolf Roessler, a member of the Lucy spy ring operating out of Switzerland, and Ultra intercepts provided by British intelligence. Following this defeat at Kursk where the German forces shifted into what became a trap with extensive elaborate defences, consisting of eight successive defensive belts composed on mine field and anti-tank positions in depth and concentrated artillery. The battle began on 5 July, with German forces only advancing between eight and fifteen kilometres in six days of fighting. The invasion of Sicily on 10 July led to Hitler ordering the withdrawal of the Second SS Panzer Corps to be redeployed to Italy to counter the western allied invasion. The Fourth Panzer Army retreated to its initial position on 18 July, having failed to reach operational objectives, and German dispositions would hereafter permanently shift to the defensive during staggered retreats, after having failed to overwhelm bolstered Soviet defences that inflicted enormous losses.
Nazi Germany’s earlier military capabilities could not be restored and sustain the ongoing war effort, while the population remained deceived about accurate information about the realities of a degenerating war effort through skillful application of propaganda controlling the national narrative and imposing widespread censorship, in addition to suppressing access to accurate information and freedom of expression and the press through repressive legislation that was maintained throughout the war years when deteriorating military strategic situations on different fronts demonstrated how sustaining the war effort became increasingly adverse. The separate setbacks that the Axis powers faced during 1943 definitively shifted the tide of the war in the Allies’ favour, as was marked by the Battle of Midway in the Pacific from 3 to 6 June that shifted the naval war in the Pacific from passive defensive to active defence by restoring the balance of naval power that had been lost at Pearl Harbor, and the Battle of El Alamein and the invasion of French possessions in northern Africa that opened a new southern front threatening the Axis powers in Europe, while the fighting on the eastern front remained indecisive, and the bombing campaign from the west would aggravate Germany’s war waging potential. The Allies possessed considerably greater material advantages, and inexorably made further advances in the face of the Axis being reduced to launched limited tactical offensives. The invasion of northern Africa, and then Sicily, and then Italy threatened the Axis war waging ability in Italy and Germany, which remained threatened by aerial bombardments that demonstrated their increasingly severe destructive potential.
The British strategy of bombing civilian areas included staging a combined ten day raid on Hamburg as a major port and industrial centre. Operation Gomorrah from 24 July to 2 August 1943 led to horrific results with the purpose of destroying an entire city, which entailed applying hitherto acquired area bombing techniques. Diversionary raids scattered the defenders, while Pathfinder aircraft marked the target, followed by streams of Halifax and Lancaster heavy bombers along with American B-17s striking at separately timed intervals dropping predetermined amounts of bomb combinations in sequences, ranging from high explosives to create debris, incendiaries to set it alight, and then additional high explosives to deter the firefighters, and then more incendiaries along with phosphorus to spread the blaze along with delayed action bombs to disrupt rescue and recovery efforts. Worst of all was a devastating meteorological phenomenon known as a firestorm on the night of 27-28 July. The German radar systems were disabled by streams of British bombers flying in several ways in close formations in a narrow sector blocked detecting with the Laminetta method, consisting of dropping bundles of tin foil that blinded radar for German night fighter control system. Between forty and fifty thousand were killed, and a further forty thousand were injured; sixty-one per cent of dwelling places were destroyed. The heat from incendiaries falling in great concentration in an area of twenty-two square kilometres reached a thousand degrees Centigrade, causing an immense suction which in turn resulted in winds of over a hundred and fifty miles per hour that uprooted trees, destroyed houses and flung people into the flames when approximately seventy percent of the city was obliterated. However, only ten per cent of the city’s industrial capacity was affected and Hamburg returned to ordinary functions within a remarkably short space of time. The postwar estimate was that Hamburg had lost 1.8 months of production, which was made up elsewhere.
Meanwhile, considerable damage was inflicted in Germany in bombing attacks throughout the country as the British primarily aimed at destroying cities and the Americans targeted the armaments industries, but war industrial production continued increasing. The appointment of Albert Speer as the armaments minister in February 1942 led to extending the earlier created system of war production committees that were chaired by industrialists. Speer leading a central planning committee initiated a rationalisation of production techniques and scheduling to allocate raw materials and labour to firms deemed best suited to undertake specific tasks, which led to immediate and spectacularly rapid overhauling of industrial capacity that had hitherto been vastly underutilised. In spite of the Allied bombing offensive, the production of heavy panzers increased sixfold between 1941 and 1944, and that of aircraft by three hundred and fifty per cent, while industry partially shifted toward production for defensive purposes to defend against Allied bombing attacks. Industrial production reached its peak in 1944, following Speer having contrived the reconstruction and dispersal of industry that had been concentrated in twenty-seven larger works arranged on production, technical and economic lines. Industry was spread over 729 medium and small plants, with some being located underground, such in tunnels, caves or disused mines, or hidden in forests, ravines and villages that were admirably camouflaged, and therefore made Allied air observation difficult, as well as their spying and sabotage, as well as at enormous risk to forced labourers who were subjected to dangerous and inhumane working conditions. However, this decentralisation of industrial production nevertheless restricted potentially substantially greater productivity, in spite of productivity having increased.
Regardless of the measurable effects and inaccuracy of area bombing that did not lead to immediate results, the allied bombing campaign in Germany induced diverted productive capacity, as well as manpower from other productive capacities as two million personnel were engaged in anti-aircraft defences, while many others were responsible for clearing the effects of the destruction, and hundreds of thousands of workers were produced anti-aircraft equipment, which amounted to a third of heavy gun, optical and electro-technical production by 1944. A considerable amount of work hours were also lost for maintaining the German war economy as a result of air raid alarms and worsened productive performance by the workforce. Production from 1943 began accumulating losses in output, disruption to long-term planning, and requiring planning for improvised solutions, which ultimately undermined potentially greater amounts of available material and manpower for Germany’s combat effectiveness as a direct result of diminishing economic resources. Allied bombing of Italian cities likewise resulted in the Italian economy in a state of economic collapse by 1943, in addition to causing widespread demoralisation of the population that became increasingly hostile to the fascist regime.
The Soviets consistently maintained the initiative following the destruction of a large proportion of German armoured units, and then began exploiting their advantage by pursuing the retreating Germans. Operation Kutozov on 12 July 1943 in the Orel salient north of Kursk, and eliminated this salient altogether by 18 August. This development would undermine Army Group Centre that had hitherto been implacable from during 1941, while composing the primary defensive bulwark preventing a Soviet advance toward Germany. A further Soviet offensive on the Voronezh and Steppe fronts was launched in August, Operation Rumyantsev, south of the Kursk salient. German forces would hereafter remain on the defensive in the face of increasingly greater Soviet production of resources and marshalling personnel.
Considerable Soviet advances followed as Soviet forces launched the Belgorod-Kharkov Offensive, including retaking Belgorod on 5 August, Kharkov on 23 August 1943 and Smolensk on 25 September. The Soviet advance was eventually held at bay on the Dnieper River line in October 1943, where German forces could potentially regroup for defensive purposes, prior to the Soviets making subsequent significant advances that increasingly undermined the German war effort. Numerous crossings were made over the Dnieper by Soviet troops between 23 and 30 September. German troops in the Crimea were isolated by 23 October as a result of advances to the north, which culminated in the German defensive line from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea becoming increasingly tenuous by the beginning of 1944. On the northern front, the Soviets had taken Petsamo and advanced to the Norwegian border, where they halted by mid-October 1944, which resulted in the loss of the Karelian Isthmus. The northern fronts of the Red Army were then also free to devote all their energies to operations against the German Army Group North. The Soviet counterattack against Finland led to peace negotiations in the face of diminishing Finnish resources, and further setbacks for Nazi Germany took place in the Mediterranean.
The invasion of Sicily, Operation Husky, began with an airborne assault on the night of 9–10 July 1943, followed by a seaborne assault, while the Axis were deceived into presuming that the allied invasion from northern Africa would take place in Sardinia and Greece with only a feint attack on Sicily. This was partly due to the success of Operation Mincemeat, whereby a corpse was dressed in a Royal Marine uniform with planted false documents that was floated to Spain, which led to German forces being diverted to the expected invasion targets. Although gliders and paratroopers were dropped off course, the Axis forces struggled to contain them in the ensuing chaos, while the seaborne landing troops were met with desultory resistance that was poorly coordinated.
This development marked a decisive stage in the increasingly critical internal political crisis in Italy. The Italians had suffered a series of shattering defeats in North Africa and had committed 227,000 ill-equipped and ill-trained troops to the eastern front where they were treated with undisguised contempt by the Germans. Italian strategy was inept, while the state leadership was taking advantage of the possibility of acquiring the spoils of war following the fall of France, and establishing Italy’s power as Mussolini had pledged. An enormous effort was invested in campaigns in Greece and the Soviet Union where the national interest was never at stake, whereas Malta, essential to the command of the Mediterranean, was heavily bombed by Italian and German aircraft to maintain Axis supply routes to northern Africa and interdict allied shipping, while also aiming to destroy the island’s defences against air attacks and allied air power based there. Although Mussolini was Commander-in-Chief as well as Minister for all three services, he had only a skeleton staff which failed to coordinate the efforts of the armed forces, and inter-service rivalry was intense. This resulted in Italy’s cities being left open to air attack for lack of anti-aircraft defences, and the navy was destroyed from the air having refused to build the aircraft carriers without which enemy bases could not be attacked from the air. The army was poorly trained and its officer corps was top-heavy. War industry failed to provide the tanks, trucks and guns which the army desperately needed to fight a modern war. Italy’s army was using obsolete rifles and guns. The air force lacked long range bombers and its fighters were too few and too slow. The navy lacked modern equipment, such as radar, and was desperately short of fuel. Another major problem was that Mussolini found it increasingly difficult to find a justifiable reason why Italy was fighting the war, which became increasingly unsustainable in view of the losses in the Mediterranean and the eastern front, as his regime remained losing credibility. Allied air superiority over Italy was prevalent, and industry functioned at less than half of its capacity, and the military faced shortages of fuel and ammunition.
Italian anti-fascist sentiment had been reviving by 1942. Communists and socialists began clandestine operations and started an underground press. Republicans, radicals and liberals joined together to form the Party of Action. A new Christian Democratic Party (DC) was formed with the support of the Vatican. Meanwhile, the king, Victor Emmanuel he enjoyed the loyal support of the army which had never been seriously tempted by the fascists, and both the king and the army favoured a military government to replace Mussolini who had led the country to national disaster through the alliance with Nazi Germany. Moreover, a group of prominent fascists, including Mussolini’s son-in-law and Foreign Minister, Ciano, along with the king, decided that it was necessary to remove Mussolini from office in order to negotiate a peace settlement with the Allies, which would preserve the military and the monarchy. The Chief of the General Staff recommended surrender when the Allies landed in Sicily. Mussolini came back empty-handed from what proved to be his last meeting with Hitler on 19 July 1943 when he tried to persuade Hitler to send German troops from the eastern front to Italy, while the German and Italian generals recommended that the Axis had to evacuate Italy to the Po valley where a defence in depth could be erected for the industrial north, as the Italian peninsula could not be defended against Allied naval power.
Roosevelt and Churchill promised on 17 July that Italy would have an honourable place in the European family of nations if the fascists were deposed, while the Allies occupied Sicily and were invading southern Italy, with subsequent pressure being applied by bombing Rome on 19 July. Italian decisionmakers were conscious of Italy having been economically unprepared for war, as well as the results of its military defeats and how Nazi Germany was in the course of losing the war, which was becoming increasingly apparent in view of the losses Nazi Germany was facing on the eastern front, including the considerable setbacks at Stalingrad and Kursk along with enormous pressures on available resources relating to personnel and material, subjected to relentless Allied aerial bombing that reduced its resources, and the opening of a new southern front on Sicily, which drastically contributed to shifting the course of the war against the Axis powers. The Fascist Party Grand Council met on 24 July and proposed asking Victor Immanuel to assume his constitutional role in the decision-making process, and invited the monarch to oust Mussolini in an attempt to salvage whatever benefits for a postwar Italy from the western Allies. Mussolini visited the king the following day, and was not only dismissed but placed under arrest, as were many other leading fascists.
Marshal Pietro Badoglio, a former Chief of Staff who had been dismissed after the failure of the campaign in Greece in 1941, was appointed Prime Minister. He promptly proclaimed a state of emergency, banning all political parties, including the fascists, until the end of the war. Secret negotiations were then initiated with the western Allies to define the military position while avoiding an immediate military occupation by Nazi Germany. Mussolini was bundled into an ambulance and kept into custody at a hotel. Fascism was thus toppled in a bloodless coup. Following the end of the allied occupation of Sicily on 11 August with remaining Axis troops evacuating to Italy over the Straights of Messina, Italy then later surrendered unconditionally on 3 September 1943 during the western Allies northward advance.
The majority of the German forces that filled the vacuum left by the Italian surrender came from occupied France, as well as from Yugoslavia and Albania, and were replaced by reserves from Germany, which in turn left fewer reserves to reinforce the eastern front. During the same time, the unprecedented scales of British and American aerial offensives during 1943 and 1944 reduced German industrial capacity to supply the Russian and Italian fronts, as well as drawing the majority of German fighter aircraft toward the west, which contributed to giving the Soviet air force superiority on the eastern front. Mussolini was rescued from custody through an airborne commando assault on 12 September, and was installed as the head of the Italian Social Republic puppet government under German control in Salerno on 23 September, with military forces loyal to this regime fighting local resistance. A separate rump Italian government governing the south from Brindisi with supporting military forces placed under Allied command declaring war on Germany on 13 October. German divisions were then shifted from France and the Balkans to replace the Italian troops who had surrendered and reinforce the defence of the new southern front.
As the Allies maintained their air offensive on the western front, an audacious American low-level daylight bombing attack was made on the heavily defended Ploesti oil refineries in Operation Tidal Wave, deploying 148 B-24 bombers from Benghazi, Libya on 1 August 1943 as part of the “oil campaign” to destroy these resources that were vital to sustain its war effort, which contributed approximately thirty percent of Germany’s national industrial capacity. However, this bomber stream that passed over Albania, Greece, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and then into Romania was marred by mechanical, navigation and communications difficulties and had only caused temporary damage in the face of heavy air defences. Six out of nine refineries were struck, and only caused an overall forty-six percent reduction in their annual production capacity, with only one refinery being put of service for the remainder of the war, while three others were missed altogether, and production was recovered rapidly. Not any other such large-scale low-level daylight attacks would take for the remainder of the war due to the heavy losses, with only eighty-eight aircraft returning to Benghazi out of the one hundred and sixty-three that took part in the attack, in which fifty-three were destroyed.
American Fifteenth Air Force staged four additional attacks on these refineries in April and May 1944 in preparation for the Normandy landings to weaken continued German mechanised warfare. A subsequent P-38 dive bombing raid on Ploiesti was on 10 June 1944 did not cause much damage, in contrast to enormous bombing raids staged by the RAF attack 18 August with a subsequent American bombing attack on the following day that ended the refining processes. Losing access to this primary source of oil altogether, constituting fifty percent of Germany’s requirements, left Germany desperately short of fuel for mechanised warfare and industrial production, which became permanent for the remainder of the war as a result of the Soviet invasion. These requirements could not be supplied by alternative sources, such as synthetic oil production from coal and lignite, which were especially weakened by allied bombing of synthetic fuel production plants between May and September 1944 that reduced German fuel production by an estimated eighty-five percent. Moreover, producing synthetic fuel was a lengthy and costly process, in terms of financial and material resources, requiring as much as twenty-two tonnes of brown coal or 4.5 tonnes of hard coal to produce one ton of gasoline. In contrast, the Allies had a practically unlimited access to oil production and natural gasoline from different sources worldwide. Strategic bombing aimed at destroying Germany’s oil industry that fuelled its war industry would thus compose its greatest contribution to the ultimate defeat, which Speer recognised in May 1944 when he informed Hitler that fuel production was greatly jeopardised, soon after the western allied bombing campaign had targeted this weakness that precluded supplying energy for air and land forces, which had a direct impact on their operations. The western Allies also reinforced this advantage by having achieved air superiority during the spring of 1944, which allowed for increasing numbers of bombers escorted by long range fighters to further neutralise German air power, which were further weakened by fuel shortages for training purposes and interceptor flights.
As Nazi Germany’s resources were undermined on separate fronts, future military strategy as well as the political future of Europe was partially decided during this time at the Teheran Conference of the Big Three Allies, the U.K., the U.S.S.R. and the U.S. in November 1944. Stalin received a commitment that the invasion of France would take place in May or June of 1944. There was tacit agreement that the Curzon Line, the demarcation line between Poland and Bolshevik Russia that had been set in the First World War, should form the approximate frontier between the Soviet Union and Poland. The Big Three also agreed that Germany should be dismembered, but they could not agree how it should be done, and the western powers agreed that the Soviets had a right to demand “friendly governments” in the bordering states.
The Russians continued their relatively unabated advance after the victory at Kursk on the eastern front, during a time when Axis and Soviet forces became approximately evenly matched in terms of their total amounts of military material, with the Soviets having had doubled the numbers of their personnel, with high numbers of reserves who remained stationed in the Far East. German losses on the eastern front would increase rapidly, and were also fighting a two front war following the invasion of Sicily, after having had lost the initiative in the east. The Soviet autumn offensive began along the Sea of Azov, and would ultimately led to crossing the Dnieper at forty different crossing points by the end of 1943. As the Red Army approached the Dnieper, the remaining German forces in the Crimea were trapped, leading to retaking Sevastopol on 12 May 1944. The Soviets continued pushing Manstein’s Army Group South towards the Romanian border, and Kluge’s Army Group Centre was pushed back across the Dnieper.
An offensive in the north to lift the siege of Leningrad was launched on 14 January 1944. Leningrad was finally free from danger on 17 January, after 890 days of isolation and horrific privation, and the Germans driven back to the frontiers of the Baltic states. Odessa was retaken on 10 April 1944, and Sevastopol on 12 May. Meanwhile, Hitler refused the eastern front generals’ demands for retreat to disengage from the Soviets and retreat to more defensible front lines, which only led the German armies continuing to be forced to retreat westward in the spring of 1944 by sheer force of attrition, while German generals were denied the opportunity to apply superior tactical skills that were overruled by Hitler’s directives to not yield ground.
A second Soviet offensive between Lake Ladoga and Lake Onega in mid-June 1944 that advanced a hundred miles to the Finnish defences, until fighting ceased on 4 September. Finland initiated peace negotiations with the Soviet authorities on 14 September 1944, which was followed by signing the Moscow Armistice on the 19 September. Finland was granted the 1940 frontiers, but was also forced to cede the ore fields in Petsamo peninsula, lease the Porkala naval base, and was required to pay the equivalent of three hundred USD million dollars in reparation within six years, allow Soviet troops free passage through Finland, and arrest a list of war criminals to be prosecuted by allied court authorities. Fighting between Finland and Germany ensued on September 28 due to German 20th Mountain Army troops not having evacuated from Finnish territory in Lapland within a two week deadline set as one of the armistice terms, with fighting continuing until 27 April 1945 as German troops fought a rearguard action while retreating into occupied Norway. The Russians were able to mount an offensive in the direction of Königsberg on 16 October 1944. Before being forced to retreat by a German counteroffensive in Prussia, the Red Army had heaped a bestial revenge on the civilian population, which had been refused permission to evacuate by Erich Koch, the former Reichskommissar for Ukraine who was then in charge of the Königsberg Home Guard (Volkssturm).
National communist parties were also supported by the Red Army as it would advance westward, which initiated postwar political circumstances, as the Soviet Union would eventually establish hegemony over eastern Europe following further fighting on the eastern front. While the Soviets were now assured of victory in central Europe, they could afford to decide how best to control Poland. On 26 April 1943, the Soviets broke off diplomatic relations with the Polish Government in London and sponsored a rival, communist-dominated Union of Polish Patriots in Moscow and an underground parliament, the National Patriotic Council (KRN). On 21 July they sponsored the Polish Committee of National Liberation, later to be known as the Lublin Committee. Two days later Stalin told Churchill that he intended to use the Committee to administer liberated Poland, and on 27 July 1944, the Soviets broke with the London Poles and recognized the National Committee of Liberation in Lublin as the legitimate Government of Poland. At the beginning of August, Stalin demanded of Mikolajczyk, the Polish Premier heading the Polish government-in-exile in London, that included members of the Lublin Committee in his Government which was to be purged of undesirable reactionary elements.
Soviet military advances continued following amassing greater amounts of forces, which had peaked in strength during 1943 and then remained the same, while German forces were diminishing to an extent of a two to one advantage for the Soviets across the eastern front as a whole, in addition to improved tactics by dealing successive blows in different directions that had taken place during 1943 and early 1944. A decisive major Soviet summer offensive against the German Army Group Centre, Operation Bagration, began during the night of 19-20 June 1944 with large-scale partisan activities, with approximately 10,000 explosions along the railway junctions, bridges and other strategic transportation points supplying Army Group Centre from the rear that severely disrupted supplies and reinforcements to threatened sections of the front, which forced German forces to retreat along narrow corridors along partisan controlled roads and railways, where they could be blocked and destroyed by advancing Red Army units.
The main offensive began on 22 June in a salient in Belarus on the approximately two thousand long eastern front with a depth of four hundred kilometres and width of six hundred kilometres, aiming at reducing this salient, with the initial assault targeting Vitebsk, and then Mogilev and Bobruisk to the south, and then advancing toward Minsk as the last capital city in German control. Hitler’s orders that there should be not be any withdrawals, and that certain designated strong points should be defended to the last man resulted in the Red Army cutting off part of the Third Panzer Army and encircling the Ninth Army, while the Fourth Army was trapped at Minsk. Field Marshal Busch, who commanded Army Group Centre, had asked Hitler for permission to withdraw in order to shorten his front, but had been treated to a long tirade about generals who could only look over their shoulders. Busch was then determined to show his loyalty to Hitler by refusing to allow any retreat and maintain rigid defences, and thus gave the Soviets the opportunity they were seeking completely to destroy Army Group Centre, having advantages of nearly four to one in troops, ten to one in artillery that simultaneously bombarded German positions from the front and the rear in “rolling double barrages” that were coordinated with infantry movements, and eight to one in tanks and self-propelled guns that pushed through openings breached by infantry without threats to their flanks, with masses of supporting Soviet aircraft. While Stalin had ceded more authority for Soviet officers to act independently, Hitler limited German officers’ decision-making authority that proved to be an additional disadvantage, as German troops were forbidden to retreat, even in mobile tactical withdrawals, when an invasion of France was expected to take place during the summer of 1944, and therefore the eastern front was to be held at all costs with certain strongholds that were rendered indefensible, which were either overwhelmed or were not of any strategic importance and were bypassed altogether while not contributing to the overall defensive efforts. Vitebsk was encircled was by 24 June when it was too late for a withdrawal with Hitler’s consent, with further German troops trapped at Brobuisk on 27 June, while the allied landings in Normandy and Italy, and expected advances on the southern end of the eastern front made reinforcements unavailable to sustain static Army Group Centre’s defensive positions in the face of Soviet breakthroughs that increasingly reduced the ability of German forces to stage strategic manouevres as available resources continued diminishing.
Army Group Centre lost approximately fifteen percent of its divisions, eighty-eight percent of its tanks, and thirty-three percent of its artillery in the most serious defeat they had suffered to date, being effectively destroyed. This central thrust was then followed by further Soviet offensives between 16 and 18 July toward Riga in the north and Warsaw to the south. Army Group North became trapped in the Baltic states by a Soviet advance that reached the Gulf of Riga on 31 July. Hitler refused to allow them to withdraw, which resulted in trapping twenty-six divisions in Courland. Ten divisions were evacuated by sea in early 1945, whereas the remaining sixteen divisions fought on until the end of the war. The encirclement of German forces at Minsk and inducing their surrender on 3 July 1944 effectively led to the destruction of Army Group Centre, which opened the way to further advances toward the Baltic and East Prussia. Ukraine was overrun in July, and the Soviets were able to establish two bridgeheads across the Vistula, with the nearest located roughly thirty miles south of Warsaw in early August 1944, and then reached the outskirts of Warsaw by 1 August. Operation Bagration ended on 19 August, having led to completely liberating Belarus and shattering the German front line in the biggest defeat in German military history, which opened the shortest invasion route toward Nazi Germany. Whereas the German general staff advocated retreating to shorter stabilised defence fronts that were to lead to concentrated resources to recover operational capability, Hitler overruled the autonomy of the military leaders and imposed directive No. 63 on 3 September forbidding any withdrawal without his expressed authorisation, which aggravated continued undermined mobility and stifled the possibility of effective communications between central military authorities and regional commanders who feared harsh repercussions for following unrealistic orders.
The Red Army shifted their next offensive southeastward into Romania on 20 August, which surrendered upon a coup on 23 August 1944, and then declared war on Germany as part of the armistice agreement, with the remnants of the Romanian army attacking Hungary to recover Transylvania, which had been ceded in 1940. The Germans did not have any other choice than to withdraw from Romania as quickly as possible, The Soviet army entered Bucharest on 30 August, and seized control of Germany’s primary source of oil. The Russians were now prepared to advance into Bulgaria, although the country had declared war only on the western powers while providing a staging area for German military operations in the Balkans and against the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union declared war on Bulgaria on 5 September. The Bulgarians replied by instantly calling for an armistice and when this request was refused, they declared war on Germany. The Patriotic Front, in which the communists played a leading role, seized power on 9 September, and declared war on Germany. Bulgarians, traditionally pro-Russian, gave the Red Army a moderately enthusiastic welcome when Russian troops entered Sofia on 18 October 1944. Bulgarian troops were hereafter combined with Soviet troops to be deployed in Yugoslavia, where Belgrade was liberated on 20 October by combined Soviet army and Yugoslavian partisan troops. Following the incursions into Romania and Bulgaria, the Soviets then turned northwest towards Hungary, thus cutting off the German army group in Greece. Belgrade was taken by Soviet troops and Yugoslav partisans on 20 October, thus forcing the Germans to retreat further west. At the beginning of October, the Red Army advanced across Hungary, which Hitler had ordered occupied on 19 March 1944 as a warning to the Romanians to prevent them from capitulating to the Soviets. In the face of overwhelming opposition, the Hungarian government accepted an armistice with the Soviet Union on 11 October 1944, and most of Hungary came under Soviet occupation by the end of the month and faced a counterattack from the German Army Group South. Soviet forces continued advancing toward Vienna, and Hungarian troops fighting with the Russians against the Germans besieged Budapest from December, until German forces surrendered the city on 11 February 1945.
Minute paper exercise:
Announce requiring students about a topic to address in the form of summarising a specific element of the contents or address a specific question in writing
Collect the writing samples, and redistribute them among groups or pairs of students for their independent discussion.
The instructor uses their discretion to comment on and evaluate the contents while the exercise is in progress to provide immediate feedback.
Wrap up with giving feedback random samples as a class as a whole to compare the students’ findings.
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