The first American boots hit the sand of Guadalcanal on August 7, 1942, expecting a heavily defended island. Instead, they found an unfinished airfield guarded by barely 2,500 men, many of them construction workers. The Japanese advance through Southeast Asia had been so fast and so ambitious that their resources were stretched impossibly thin. For the first time in the Pacific war, the Allies had caught them vulnerable.
Within days, the Japanese began a relentless series of bombing raids against the newly renamed Henderson Field. On August 21, they launched their first attempt to take it back by land. Underestimating American strength, a force of 1,000 men attacked the Marine positions in darkness. By mid-morning, all but 128 of them were dead.
That set the pattern for six months of the bloodiest fighting of the war. The battles were not confined to land. The Japanese and American navies clashed in the seas of the eastern Solomons within a week. The Americans lost 29 or 30 warships and thousands of sailors, but they did just enough to disrupt the Japanese supply lines.
Supplies could no longer reach Guadalcanal by conventional means. The only way the Japanese could get anything through was to load fast destroyers and race them down the Slot at 40 knots overnight, before sunrise exposed them to American air power. The attrition became unsupportable. In January 1943, the Japanese high command ordered an evacuation.
In the first week of February, the emaciated survivors were withdrawn, leaving behind 30,000 dead, some 800 aircraft destroyed or damaged, and at least 65 naval vessels lost. The Allies had won their first major all-arms battle against Japan. After the Solomons, the Japanese were firmly on the defensive. They would never again mount an offensive like it.
It was often the case in this war that an outcome in one theater had a ripple effect in another. The disastrous Allied raid on Dieppe came about because of a lack of action. With no Allied operations on the continent, Germany was free to focus entirely on the Soviet Union. Stalin was under intense pressure, and when he met Churchill in 1942, he demanded a second front in Europe.
Churchill lacked the resources for a full invasion, but under pressure from his chief of combined operations, Rear Admiral Louis Mountbatten, he reluctantly agreed to a compromise. The reasoning was simple: if the Allies could seize a significant German-held port and hold it for at least two tides, it would show Germany they were vulnerable, force Hitler to redirect forces away from Russia, and prove to Stalin that Churchill was doing his part. Operation Jubilee would be a large-scale special operations attack. Nearly 5,000 Canadian infantry, 1,000 British commandos, and 50 American Rangers, along with close to 100 support vehicles, would launch a frontal assault along a ten-mile stretch of heavily defended French coastline.
There would be five points of attack, relying on surprise. But special operations require stealth and speed, and this operation was too large and too complex for either. Delayed for weeks by poor weather, the operation finally launched on the morning of August 19, 1942. It ran into trouble immediately.
A small German patrol sighted the flotilla of 237 vessels and alerted the land garrisons. German fast attack boats and aircraft began targeting landing craft. At one beach, only 18 of 250 commandos made it ashore. At another, German gun positions dug into the cliffs, which Allied reconnaissance had missed, opened fire on an unsuspecting Royal Regiment of Canada.
They lost all but 60 of their 543 men. The main force landed under a smoke screen laid by British destroyers, only to face a situation that felt like a throwback to Gallipoli. The British had used holiday snapshots to assess whether Dieppe’s beaches could support tanks. Of the 27 tanks that made it ashore, most either had their tracks stripped on the shingle or became bogged on the steep gradient, easy targets for German anti-tank guns.
Without support or cover, the troops on the beach were completely exposed. Within hours, more than 3,300 Canadians and 275 commandos were killed, wounded, or taken prisoner. The Royal Navy lost a destroyer and 33 landing craft, with more than 500 dead or wounded. The RAF, eager to engage the Luftwaffe in open skies, lost 106 aircraft to the enemy’s 48.
British high command called the raid a necessary test, a precursor to the great amphibious operations to come. There is truth in that claim. The most important lesson learned was simple: never attack a port city head-on. D-Day succeeded in part because of that hard lesson.
But if Dieppe was meant to appease Stalin, it failed miserably. It handed Hitler another stunning victory, and for Russia, the relentless pressure continued. In June 1942, Hitler appointed himself supreme commander of the forces of the Reich and turned his attention to the south, to the city of Stalingrad. It was a significant industrial center, standing on the Volga River, a major supply line delivering oil and military supplies from Persia to northern Russia.
If Germany controlled Stalingrad and the river, they could starve Moscow of what it needed to keep fighting. Having witnessed Russian military incompetence on several occasions, Hitler was convinced the city would fall easily. The Germans reached the outskirts on August 23, 1942. On that day, they dropped more than 1,000 tons of bombs on the city.
There were around 400,000 people inside. In the first week, 40,000 of them died. Stalingrad had been rebuilt as a showcase of communist achievement, but by the time General Friedrich Paulus’s Sixth Army arrived, it was a sea of twisted rubble. The Germans began bombarding the city’s 54,000 military defenders with everything they had.
On September 14, reasoning that the city was too large to encircle, Paulus’s troops entered Stalingrad itself. They planned to divide it into smaller blocks and defeat them piecemeal. But the resistance was unlike anything the Germans had experienced. This was the first battle fought with modern small-unit tactics.
The defenders used half-destroyed houses and piles of rubble as fortresses, with snipers at every turn. The Germans, comfortable with clean and efficient Blitzkrieg warfare, proved less competent at vicious hand-to-hand street fighting. By October, German unit strength, once overwhelmingly superior, had plummeted. By mid-November, Paulus controlled nearly 90 percent of the city and had destroyed three-quarters of the Russian 62nd Army.
But he had lost close to 61,000 men, with over 12,000 dead and 45,000 wounded. Thousands more were missing. Despite the losses, Paulus and his commander-in-chief believed victory was imminent. What neither considered was that the Soviets had learned from their past mistakes.
The Russians had been using the 62nd Army as a decoy, a goat on a chain, to keep the Germans distracted while they prepared a counterattack. When it came on November 19, it was brutal. Six heavily armored Soviet armies attacked from the north, smashing through the Axis flank. A day later, three more drove up from the south.
Over a million troops, 800 tanks, and 1,000 aircraft laid waste to half a million Axis support forces. Just four days later, the two Soviet spearheads met at Kalach. Germany’s mighty Sixth Army was surrounded. The Germans had the option to withdraw.
But for Hitler, the battle was no longer simply strategic. Obsessed with capturing Stalin’s city and against the advice of several key generals, he demanded Paulus fight on. Twenty-eight thousand Germans perished in December as the Sixth Army, without food and nearly out of ammunition, began to succumb to another Russian winter. In mid-January, Paulus finally requested permission to yield.
Hitler refused, instead promising him promotion to field marshal. Paulus had had enough. On January 31, 1943, in sub-zero temperatures, he surrendered. The remaining 91,000 members of the Sixth Army marched into captivity.
It was an irreplaceable loss of manpower and equipment that would cost Germany dearly in the battles ahead. In North Africa, the British had enjoyed initial success against the Italians under General Claude Auchinleck. But the arrival of General Erwin Rommel and the Afrika Korps in late 1941 changed everything. Despite stemming Rommel’s advance toward Cairo during the first Battle of El Alamein, Auchinleck was relieved of command by a frustrated Winston Churchill in August 1942, replaced by a relative unknown named Bernard Law Montgomery.
Montgomery had supreme self-confidence. He was a gratuitous self-promoter, and he immediately put his stamp on the command. There would be no more retreats. The next offensive would be successful.
He brought in new divisions with fresh officers and delivered stirring addresses to the troops, declaring he would hit Rommel for six out of Africa. Under his command, the Eighth Army was molded into a slick, disciplined unit with a single objective: push Rommel out of North Africa. All too aware of his opponent’s fighting qualities, Montgomery left nothing to chance. He initiated a program of meticulous training.
Troops were trained and rehearsed for weeks, building replicas of the positions they would attack. Knowing Rommel was at the end of a very long supply chain, Montgomery ordered the Desert Air Force to routinely attack German convoys undertaking the 400-mile journey from Tobruk, restricting the Germans in both range and ammunition. He then launched his assault in two phases. Operation Lightfoot began on October 23 with a powerful artillery bombardment, followed by infantry divisions who carefully opened narrow corridors through the extensive German minefields.
The armored divisions passed through single file. The plan went like clockwork, but the German defenses were more difficult than expected. The Eighth Army ground its way forward under heavy fighting. On the night of November 1, Montgomery launched the second phase, Operation Supercharge.
Again, infantry cleared the way for the armor, which drove forward with surprising speed. Rommel, his army depleted and his petrol almost finished, warned Hitler that his forces faced annihilation. Hitler, as he had done in Russia, ordered Rommel to stand or die. It was a characteristic mistake.
Following that order condemned Rommel to stand on the defensive for a couple of extra days, allowing the British to affect their breakthrough. At midday on November 4, Rommel’s last defenses caved in. That evening, he received orders from Hitler to withdraw. Churchill was elated.
After months of indecisive attritional warfare, the Allies had finally claimed a lasting victory. After El Alamein, the Germans were essentially on their way out of North Africa. And dealing with North Africa started the Western Allies thinking about their re-entry into Western Europe. But if jungle warfare was the most difficult form for Allied troops to adapt to, Burma was the most difficult place in which to undertake it.
It was a large country covering more area than France, with almost no transport infrastructure, subject to constant monsoonal rain, covered in impenetrable jungle, and home to a dazzling array of tropical diseases. In 1942, the Japanese ejected the British from the country. The British very much wanted Burma back but didn’t know how to do it. The Americans wanted northern Burma so they could reopen the Burma Road, essential for getting supplies to the 45 Chinese divisions fighting the Japanese.
A very unusual person came to the fore with a potential solution. His name was Orde Wingate, and he had a reputation for irregular warfare. Wingate proposed forming a small force of fast-moving troops, supplied by air, who would take on the Japanese in their own element, the jungle. He was a proponent of long-range penetration by columns behind Japanese lines to wreak havoc in the rear areas.
The Japanese would then have to divert troops from the front line to deal with the threats in their rear. He graphically called it having your hand in the enemy’s belly. With Churchill’s blessing, British commanders ordered Wingate to create a small force for the task. Based around groups of British, Indian, and Gurkha troops, augmented with commandos, radio signalers, medics, and native Burmese guides, Wingate’s 77th Brigade of a little more than 3,000 men became known as the Chindits.
By the beginning of February 1943, after months of grueling training, they were ready for their first independent raid behind enemy lines. It was a radical idea: infiltrate forces behind Japanese lines in columns that moved like the fingers of a hand, then came together like a fist to attack a target, then dispersed again to move on to the next objective. For Operation Longcloth, Wingate divided his guerrillas into two groups, each consisting of several self-contained columns of around 450 men. Each man carried 60 pounds of equipment through mountainous Burmese jungle where torrential rain produced seas of mud, rivers swelled into places up to a mile wide, and dense thickets of prickly bamboo slashed clothes and flesh.
Disease took its toll. Wingate’s biggest problem, however, was the air drops intended to supply his troops. Five days of rations were commonly spread across ten when drops came in short or failed to materialize. Despite painfully slow progress, by the beginning of March they had moved well into active Japanese territory across the Chindwin River.
One group attacked the Mandalay-Myitkyina railway at Chaitton, inflicting serious damage, while another cut the same railway between Wetho and Indaw to the north. The Japanese response was swift. Two divisions totaling 30,000 men were immediately dispatched to deal with the intruders. The Chindits pressed on, avoiding contact with large enemy formations, eventually crossing the Irrawaddy River, destroying whatever they could find before they were ordered to withdraw.
Of the initial force of 3,250, over 800 perished, and a considerable number of the survivors were so debilitated by disease that they never saw combat again. His detractors called it a failure. But they made a terrible mistake in that judgment. The Chindits proved that British soldiers could fight successfully against the Japanese in the Burmese jungle.
More importantly, they convinced the Japanese that their defensive posture in Burma wouldn’t work. If 3,000 men could infiltrate behind their lines, perhaps the next expedition would be five or six times bigger and cause absolute mayhem. That potential threat convinced Japanese generals in Burma to invade India at Imphal in March 1944. It was their shattering defeat in that venture that marked the beginning of the unraveling of the Japanese occupation of Burma, and ultimately all of Southeast Asia.
The rapid fall of Poland and the Low Countries had given Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s master of propaganda, ample opportunity to eulogize the Nazi regime. But the rapid and clinical defeat of France was an even bigger propaganda windfall. Following the panzers into Paris was Goebbels’s own army of photographers and writers, capturing Hitler’s every move on his triumphant tour of victory. Public support for the war and the Nazi leadership soared to dizzying heights.
But by 1943, with no end in sight, German enthusiasm began to falter. The losses in Africa, along with the disaster at Stalingrad, had compounded a flagging public morale. At home, Goebbels saw only growing apathy. He genuinely believed the continuity of the consumer economy was harming the war effort.
Unlike Britain, Germany had continued with a large consumption economy. Goebbels’s attempts to control that frivolity had been stopped by Hitler, who in some ways understood morale better even than Goebbels. But in the aftermath of Stalingrad, it was clear Germany needed a renewed effort to win the war. There would need to be much more economic mobilization.
Having been locked in a bitter struggle for control within the Nazi hierarchy for months, Stalingrad presented Goebbels with an opportunity to arrest the slide in public support and convince Hitler to give him greater influence over the economy. He took that opportunity on February 18 at the Berlin Sportpalast. In front of a hand-picked audience of 14,000 fanatical Nazis, Goebbels delivered an hour-long oration of astonishing power and passion that would profoundly influence German policy until the end of the war. Goebbels made it clear that Germany was the only nation capable of defeating the Jewish communist conspiracy.
The fate of the free world, he said, was in the hands of the German people. He called for total war, a war quite unlike anything anyone had seen before. He was greeted with a rapturous reception. It meant ever greater demands on the German war economy, ever greater demands on manpower.
That was the only way Germany felt it could win the war. The total war speech was a tour de force, the apotheosis of Goebbels, the great high point of his career, and one of the greatest rhetorical set pieces in all of the Third Reich. Transmitted live on radio and screened in movie houses around the country, Germans listened and watched as their handpicked countrymen screamed in frenzied agreement. With a carefully staged mandate from the people, Goebbels and Hitler were able to push the limits of power in the Third Reich as never before.
Within months, Panzer III battle tanks were being produced twice as quickly. The output of munitions workers went up by an average of 60 percent. Weapons production increased by 130 percent. But it was the final sentence of Goebbels’s speech, a line he had used in 1932 just prior to Hitler’s rise to the chancellorship, that signaled a change in the way Germany’s war in the east would be conducted.
The gloves were off. The war with Russia would take on a new sinister dimension. Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia had lost sight of any political objective they could gain from fighting one another. They were fighting simply to annihilate each other, not merely as political entities, but possibly even as national identities.
This was a war completely beyond any form of political control. The objectives were utterly unlimited, and no method was beyond bounds. This was absolute war brought to life. As he was pursued south following the fall of Stalingrad, Germany’s General Erich von Manstein, arguably the Wehrmacht’s most effective strategic thinker, maintained his composure.
He engaged in less a retreat than a tactical withdrawal, falling back on his centers of supply and slowly building his operational reserves. In late February, he stunned the unsuspecting Soviets with a withering counter-strike. By mid-March, he had recaptured the city of Kharkov. A brilliant backhanded move that created a huge bulge in the Soviet defensive line, a bulge that became known as the Kursk salient.
What followed was a stalemate, with both sides unsure how to proceed. Kursk was a much-debated operation within the German high command. Even Hitler accepted this would not be a heroic battle. This was going to be nasty.
But it was a battle they had to have. They had suffered the defeat at Stalingrad, and the 1943 fighting season offered an opportunity to at least push back somewhere. After weeks of discussion, with many senior officers counseling for a prolonged hiatus to regroup and rearm, Hitler, desperate to lift morale at home and restore respect for his armies, dismissed their advice and ordered Operation Citadel, a final attempt to crush the Soviets at Kursk. If the Germans were in two minds about whether to attack, the Russians were in two minds about how to defend against it.
By May 3, it was evident to the Soviet high command that they had a problem. There was a real possibility the Germans would attack the salient. Stalin wanted to seize the initiative and get back onto the offensive. Marshals Zhukov and Vasilevsky had the opposite idea.
They saw an opportunity. Where the German generals had failed to hold sway with their Führer, the Russian counterparts had more success. Certain the attack would follow the tried and tested Blitzkrieg formula, they convinced Stalin to hold fast. It was a gamble that needed luck, and they got it.
Operation Citadel was slated to begin in April, offering the Russians little chance to prepare. But unwilling to risk another Stalingrad, Hitler cautiously decided to wait until the all-new Panther tank rolled off the production line. It was a catastrophic mistake. By the time the battle finally commenced in July, the Russians had pinpointed the most likely German attacking zones and turned the salient into a fortress.
They had prepared resources and people 100 kilometers back from the line, and their factories were starting to turn out more and more of the brutally effective T-34 in numbers that would ultimately wear down whatever the Germans threw at them. On July 4, a German force consisting of 777,000 men and 2,500 tanks faced an enemy that outnumbered it three to one. The plan was for the Ninth Army to break through Soviet defenses 50 miles north of Kursk with infantry and artillery, while 65 miles south, the Fourth Panzer Army would crack the Red Army defenses with a full-blooded armored thrust. The Germans expected to reach the city within a week.
Any longer, they reasoned, would give the Soviets the opportunity to grind the attack down. Which is exactly what happened. In the north, after a week’s fighting, the Ninth Army had penetrated only between 8 and 12 kilometers. It was a battle of attrition, very costly to the Germans, even more costly to the Soviets.
But the Soviet losses could be more easily replaced. To the south, the Fourth Panzer Army failed to do any better. Bogged down in minefields, faced by a seemingly endless line of Russian tanks and battle-hardened troops no longer fearful of their enemy, the German advance ground to a halt. After just 12 days, the largest tank battle in history was over.
The actual losses at Kursk are hotly debated, and on the surface they appear to favor the attackers. Up to 1,200 German tanks and assault guns were lost as opposed to a staggering 6,000 for the Russians. Casualties also seemed disproportionately high on the Russian side, with over 700,000 compared to Germany’s 110,000. But while the Russians, backed by the industrial might of the United States, would recover and recover quickly, the German losses of machinery and men would never be replaced.
It was the beginning of the end. After Stalingrad and Kursk, the notion that Germany could draw a line of defense and hope to maintain it became increasingly implausible. By 1943, the tide of the war had clearly turned. The Battle of the Atlantic, with all its twists and turns, was perhaps the most crucial battle of the war.
If not, it was certainly the longest, beginning on September 3, 1939, and continuing for 2,074 days and nights until Germany surrendered on May 8, 1945. With a paucity of natural resources, Britain was heavily dependent on imports. Everything from food to clothing, oil, and metals was brought to the British Isles by ship. The Atlantic was in effect Britain’s lifeline.
While the Allies’ survival did not hinge on winning the Battle of the Atlantic, it was totally dependent on them not losing it. Both Germany and Britain had made strategic mistakes in the 1930s. Germany had initially given priority to building battleships and had neglected to fully develop their submarine fleet. Britain had placed too much confidence in new detection technology like sonar and their intelligence-gathering services, and had neglected the development of long-range aircraft that could serve as spotters for Atlantic merchant fleets at the crucial midway point.
The Germans were the first to realize their mistake. By mid-1942, Admiral Karl Dönitz, commander of the German submarine fleet, had close to 200 operational U-boats at his command, while the British scrambled to find whatever ships they could to defend their convoys. The key strategy for the Allies was the protection of merchant shipping by formation into convoys, guided according to where the threat was seen. As the Germans concentrated their boats to find targets, the Allies tried to work out where the U-boats were to move the convoys away from them.
By late 1942, the Allies appeared to be losing. In all, over 1,600 Allied merchant ships were sunk that year, accounting for nearly 8 million tons of shipping. With one ship lost every four hours, Britain’s total imports dropped to just two-thirds of pre-war levels. Unless those losses could be stemmed, Britain would very soon be starved into surrender.
Submarines could attack unseen and were very difficult to detect. Once detected, they were good at evading and could come and reattack. The Germans had also set up a sophisticated system for working out where the targets were and concentrating U-boats for mass wolfpack attacks. Despite advances in technology, the beginning of 1943 saw little change.
The Allies’ greatest losses occurred in the central Atlantic, an area beyond aircraft range known as the Black Pit. But March 1943 saw a dramatic change. Allied escort commanders began thinking attack far more than protect when facing U-boats. They were encouraged by the creation of support groups, additional escort ships that could pursue U-boats while the escorts protected the merchant ships.
It was the decision to divert Allied air resources in March, particularly new long-range aircraft like the American Liberator, Catalina, and Flying Fortress to hunt the submarines, that turned the tide. Fitted with a new centimetric radar system that could spot a U-boat’s conning tower miles away, day or night, the three months to the end of May saw a dramatic turnaround. Those three months saw 96 U-boats sunk, 56 in May alone, and close to 75 percent of those kills came from the air. The Allies had stemmed the tide.
While they may not have won the Battle of the Atlantic, they did not lose it. The Allies prevailing in the Atlantic allowed the remainder of the war to be fought. The invasion of Europe could not have been achieved if Britain had not been supplied and sustained.
By enabling the logistics, enabling the North American industrial machine to provide all the resources needed to fight an industrial war, the Battle of the Atlantic was central.
