Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who Turned the Tide in the Second World War (34 page)

Moreover, possessing much better trucks and supply services than before, the Red Army’s capacity for tactics of deep penetration and exploitation were at last feasible. (Proposals for such operations had been hammered out as early as 1935, only to be discarded in the purges.) And, ironically, while the Russian armies moved from stupefying Stalin-driven rigidity to greater flexibility, the German land forces abandoned
their historical
Bewegungskrieg
(fluid warfare) for a nonsensical clinging-on to every redoubt, because their Fuehrer had ordered no retreat—thus making the Soviet encirclements easier.
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By now, also, the Red Air Force’s ground attack squadrons were in control of the airspace above the battlefield. Above all, the Russian infantry—the Russian common soldier and his sergeant, really—had great experience of how to fight, house by house, street by street, hedgerow by hedgerow. Just as the Red Army had more and more tough, experienced divisions, the Germans had fewer and fewer.

While the Stavka ensured that all five army fronts would be constantly probing, to keep the enemy unsure, it then ordered the attacks, always in variegated timing (the Polotsk offensive on July 1, the Vilnius offensive on July 7, etc.), with the chief punch to be in the center, to capture Minsk and then to head westward to the Polish border. The fighting here was more ferocious than anything since Stalingrad, and the result was the same—an entire German army captured and another mauled. In the twelve days between June 22 and July 4, 1944, Army Group Centre lost twenty-five divisions and 300,000 men, in what Zaloga calls “the most calamitous defeat of all the German armed forces in World War II.” The overall German losses in Operation Bagration were a numbing 670,000 killed, wounded, or captured, though the Russian losses were even higher (178,000 killed and 587,000 wounded). Truly, the road from Moscow to Berlin ran with blood. The difference was that the USSR still had millions of men to draw upon, and for a single strategic purpose. And it was not fighting alone, because at long last the Anglo-American-Canadian armies were fully engaged in battle. By the time the Normandy campaign in the West was over, in August 1944, the Wehrmacht in France had lost another 450,000 men. Little wonder that Allied forward divisions were reporting that most of the German soldiers captured in the final year of the war were either older men or Hitler Youth, recruited in desperation to replace the depleted able-bodied battalions.

Now the ring was closing. When Bagration began, Soviet armies were about 750 miles from Berlin. At the same time, Patton’s armies in western Normandy were approximately 650 miles from Berlin. Two months later Paris was liberated, and Red Army units, which had moved a far greater distance, were looking at Warsaw from the other
side of the Vistula. Meanwhile, Allied armies in Italy were bumping up against the Gothic Line, well north of Rome. All of them were tired, slowing down, and needing replenishment from the vast supplies coming up from the rear. Yet all were consoled by the fact that in June 1944 the Third Reich had suffered colossal and irreversible defeats in the field. It was, as one historian puts it in the title of his recent book, “blitzkrieg no longer.”
⁶⁴
It had not really been lightning warfare for a while, but now it was truly over.

Thus, when Bagration ended in August 1944, with the Red Army’s hard-fighting frontline troops exhausted and adequate supplies of fuel, ammunition, and spare parts once again some way behind, everyone knew who had won this campaign. The Finns nimbly extricated themselves from Nazi thrall and signed a peace deal with Moscow in September, while in the south Romania and Bulgaria also parted company with the Thousand-Year Reich. Now it was on to Berlin, a story of astounding German resistance in the face of overwhelming odds.
⁶⁵
It was of course a hopeless resistance, like that in the West, but one still fueled by ideological passions that gripped Wehrmacht units as well as the soldiers of the Waffen-SS, and by a pathological fear that surrender would mean a death not unlike those the Germans had inflicted upon their own defeated foes on the Eastern Front in the preceding years. It was also gripped by revolting, and rising, atrocities against any domestic foes of the doomed Reich.
⁶⁶

The overwhelming significance of this titanic campaign stands out. If one couldn’t defeat the German army in the field in Russia, as well as weakening it in North Africa, Italy, and France, then the war would not be won. Victory at sea and victory in the air, as critical and absolutely necessary as they were, simply were not enough. One of them gave protection to the Allied lines across the seas. The second gave aerial protection for the vital counterattack points of Britain and North Africa and allowed the buildup of the thousands of Allied bombers that would cripple the Third Reich’s industries and infrastructure. If Hitler refused to surrender, though, somebody’s army had to crush Germany’s formidable ground forces, march into the Fuehrer’s bunker, and end the war. In the main, it was the Red Army that did it. As a consequence, 85 percent of all Wehrmacht losses occurred on the Eastern Front.

Clearly, the Germans had never anticipated that Russian soldiers
would be so tough, and that Russian designers and engineers would supply those soldiers with increasingly effective weaponry. And, with a few exceptions mentioned below, they also ignored the geographic folly of what they were attempting. One of those exceptions was Halder. Before he was dismissed as army chief of staff, he had repeatedly voiced concern about this overstretch. His famous diary entry (see
this page
), on having reckoned with around 200 Soviet Army divisions at the onset of war and now counting at least 360, is followed by this lament: “Time … favors them, as they are near their own resources, while we are moving further and further away from ours. And so our troops, sprawled over an immense frontline, without any depth, are subjected to the incessant attacks of the enemy. Sometimes these are successful, because too many gaps must be left open in these enormous spaces.” A month later, Halder was retired, von Rundstedt had been dismissed for suggesting a winter pullback, and the fatal advances toward Stalingrad and the Caucasus were going ahead. By 1943 and 1944, many more generals had come to realize that they had occupied too much space, but if they spoke out or retreated from their fronts, they too would be dismissed.

Halder’s replacement as army chief of staff from 1942 until 1944 was Kurt Zeitzler. Long after the war was over, Zeitzler sat down and made some geographic calculations in an intriguing essay called “Men and Space in War.” When Barbarossa began, the Ostfront was approximately 438 miles long. By Christmas 1941 the Wehrmacht had advanced 625 miles and, with its allies, held a front of about 1,125 miles, with significantly smaller manpower totals. By the summer of 1942 they spanned 1,250 miles, by which time Zeitzler was pleading for Hitler to give up space—but in vain. By the end of 1942 the Eastern Front was roughly 1,800 miles long, while at the same time German troops had to garrison an Atlantic Wall that encompassed 1,250 miles, and Danish-Norwegian coasts stretching to about 1,500 miles. That still left the North African boundaries, the Balkan coasts, Crete, Rhodes, and other islands. (It is perhaps no coincidence that the hyperenergetic Zeitzler had a nervous breakdown in July 1944, and could only write about this fatal overstretch long afterward.) In theory, all the fronts of the Nazi empire were defensible, provided the Wehrmacht had the sort of technological and tactical superiority over its foes that for generations
the Roman army possessed against the barbarians outside its gates. But that was never true for Germany in the air and at sea during the Second World War, and by 1943–44 operational and logistical superiority on land was also distinctly moving to the Allied side.
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Strange though the comparison might initially seem, the Ostfeldzug resembled another epic, long-lasting campaign of the Second World War: the Battle of the Atlantic. They took place in roughly the same latitudes, one in the western reaches of Germany’s military endeavor, the other on its eastern extremities. Hitler’s twin enemies here, Britain and the Soviet Union—and their respective warlords, Churchill and Stalin—regarded their struggle as existential. By continuing to fight on despite early disasters, each of them drained German resources (armaments, steel, ball bearings, trained personnel, detection equipment, air cover) to the west or the east. Then the RAF bombing of German cities and factories exacerbated the Third Reich’s resources dilemma, even before the Americans joined in. Russia’s land effort was always connected, distantly but definitely, to Britain’s naval and aerial actions, because each forced Berlin into allocation decisions.

Both the Battle of the Atlantic and the great struggle across the Eastern Front were battles of attrition, grinding on for year after year, swaying backward and forward, with each side pulling in more and more reinforcements, introducing newer weapons, employing the latest intelligence, fighting at the northern and southern fringes but always needing to get control of the central area. Across the early years of 1941 and 1942, these great naval and military struggles for Europe unfolded with extraordinarily heavy losses—though never enough to push any combatant out of the war, as had happened earlier to countries such as Poland, France, Norway, and others. The deeper resources of the great powers made for a larger and longer war. Only in mid- to late 1943, however, did the conclusion become clear: Doenitz’s U-boats could not win in the Atlantic, nor could Manstein’s panzers win in Russia. The defeated German forces, land, air, and naval, would still remain dangerous and would still fight very well, but their days of going forward were over. Gone, too, were any hopes of negotiating some sort of 1918-style
compromise peace. The “unconditional surrender” demanded at Casablanca meant just that.

Second, in neither the Atlantic nor the Ostfront campaign did any single wonder weapon transform the course of the fighting. The Battle of the Atlantic was not won
particularly
by Enigma, nor by the Hedgehog and the homing torpedo/depth charge, nor by miniaturized radar, nor by long-range aircraft and escort carriers, nor by operational research, nor by Liberty-ship construction output, nor by the hunter-killer groups, nor by the Leigh Light, nor by the bombing of the U-boat pens and shipyards. But by the middle of that decisive year of 1943, they all came together to help turn the tide; the historian who overemphasizes any one of these aspects distorts the larger, holistic account. In much the same way, the Great Patriotic War was not won chiefly or overwhelmingly by superior Red Army intelligence, or by increasing aerial supremacy, or by the T-34-85 tanks, or by the PaK units and the minefields and the river-crossing battalions, or by better logistical support, or by better fighting morale. Victory required all these elements, and they needed to be organized. But it took time to assemble the various pieces, just as it takes time to bring together an orchestra and train it to deliver a fine performance.

By 1943, the British Admiralty, and especially its Western Approaches Command, had at last achieved that satisfactory level. By around the same time, perhaps a little later, the Stavka and the forward operating army groups under Zhukov and Vasilevsky had done the same. Given the sheer number of armies, divisions, regiments, air groups, partisan cells, engineer battalions, railway and bridging teams, and behind them transport managers, production planners, and factory leaders, the overall organizational feat of this badly damaged Russian state was simply astounding, and is still not fully recognized in the West even today. By contrast, while the Germans fought extraordinarily well in all theaters of war, added a special racially driven ferocity to their fighting on the Eastern Front, and produced some first-class weapons for that grim campaign, the full and efficient orchestration of all the pieces in the Third Reich’s Ostfeldzug never occurred. Those despised, Jew-ridden, bolshevized, peasant-heavy, and backward Slavs, those fragile serfs of the inept Communist regime, actually managed to organize
the way to victory better than the famously efficient Prussians and the fanatical Nazi
Supermenschen
.

One final thought: it may be many years before historians are allowed to mine the archival sources that will disclose the full story of the middlemen and organizations that contributed to the turning of the tide in the Great Patriotic War. We know how the great land battles in the east unfolded, and we have good biographical details on a figure as eye-catching as Zhukov.
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And we have a better idea nowadays about how Stalin and the Stavka ran the show. But what about the lesser-known contributors to the Soviet victory? Who were the problem solvers in that part of the story, the equivalents to the innumerable players on the Anglo-American side whose tales are so readily accessible? Clearly they existed and made enormous contributions in the three years between Barbarossa and Bagration, creating ever-smoother feedback loops between the top and bottom levels of the Soviet war machine and producing, eventually and after many setbacks, the instruments for the Red Army’s smashing victory. Their achievements are manifest, but their own histories are not yet known to the world.