The first true Japanese disaster of the war came on a small island in the Solomon Archipelago. In July 1942, the Allies knew the Japanese had built an air base on Guadalcanal, but they didn’t know how many troops were there. The answer was very few. The speed of the Japanese advance through Southeast Asia had spread their resources thin, so when US Marines landed on August 7, they found the unfinished airfield defended by just 2,500 men, many of them construction workers.
If the Japanese had garrisoned the island properly, it would have been very difficult for the Americans to dislodge them. Within days, the Japanese launched relentless bombing raids against the newly named Henderson Field. On August 21, they attempted to reclaim the airfield by land. Underestimating the Americans, the Japanese launched a frontal assault under cover of darkness on Marine positions east of the airfield.
By mid-morning, all but 128 of the attacking force were dead. It set the tone for six months of some of the bloodiest land battles of the war. But Guadalcanal was an all-arms battle. Within a week of that first land engagement, the Japanese and US navies clashed in the seas of the eastern Solomons.
The naval battles continued for months, and the attrition was terrible. The US Navy lost 29 or 30 warships and thousands of sailors, but they did just well enough to interdict Japanese supply lines. The Japanese could only get supplies through by sending fast destroyers down the Slot at about 40 knots, and they had to do it overnight before American air power and warships could destroy them. The pattern continued until January 1943, when the Japanese high command gave the signal to evacuate.
In the first week of February, the remaining Japanese force, emaciated and distressed, was withdrawn, leaving behind 30,000 dead, some 800 aircraft damaged or destroyed, and at least 65 naval vessels lost. The Allies had defeated the Japanese in a major all-arms battle for the first time. After the Solomons, the Japanese were on the defensive. They could never again mount an offensive operation like that.
Guadalcanal was absolutely critical in turning the tide. It was often the case that the outcome of an action in one theater had a flow-on 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 able to focus all its attention on the Soviet Union.
Stalin met with Churchill in 1942 and urged him to open a second front. Churchill, under pressure from his chief of combined operations, Rear Admiral Louis Mountbatten, reluctantly agreed to a compromise: take a significant German-held port and hold it for at least two tides. That would show the Germans they were vulnerable, force Hitler to redistribute forces, and take some pressure off the Red Army. Operation Jubilee would be a large-scale special operations attack.
Almost 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, four on beaches east and west of Dieppe just before dawn, and the main attack on the city half an hour later. But the operation was too big and too complex to achieve surprise. It fell between two stools and ended disastrously.
Delayed for weeks by poor weather, the operation finally launched on the morning of August 19, 1942, and immediately ran into trouble. The flotilla of 237 vessels was sighted and engaged by a small German patrol, which alerted the land garrisons. German fast attack boats and aircraft targeted landing craft, and at one beach, only 18 of 250 commandos made it ashore. At another, German gun positions dug into the cliffs, which had not been spotted by Allied air reconnaissance, opened fire, and the Royal Regiment of Canada was annihilated, losing all but 60 of 543 men.
The main force landed under a smoke screen laid by British destroyers, but they were confronted with a situation that read like a throwback to Gallipoli. The British had used holiday snapshots to assess the suitability of Dieppe’s beaches for landing 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 one destroyer and 33 landing craft, and suffered more than 500 dead or wounded. The RAF, keen to engage the Luftwaffe, lost 106 aircraft to the enemy’s 48. British high command claimed the raid was a test, a necessary precursor to the great amphibious operations to follow.
It was true that lessons were learned that helped on D-Day, but it was also a post-hoc justification. The most important lesson was: don’t attack a port city head-on. It’s a massively bad idea. If Dieppe had been designed to appease Stalin, it had failed miserably and instead provided Hitler with another stunning victory.
For Russia, the relentless pressure continued. In June 1942, Hitler, having appointed himself supreme commander, turned his attention to the south and the city of Stalingrad. A significant industrial center, the city stood on the Volga, a major supply line delivering oil and military supplies from Persia to the northern parts of Russia. If the Germans could control Stalingrad and the river, they could starve Moscow of resources.
Hitler, having experienced Russian military incompetence, was convinced it would fall easily. But arrogance born of that sense of invincibility would lead to the single bloodiest battle in human history. The Germans reached the outskirts of Stalingrad on August 23, 1942. That day, they dropped more than 1,000 tons of bombs on the city.
Around 400,000 people were in the city, and during the first week, 40,000 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. They set about bombarding the city’s 54,000 military defenders. Then, on September 14, reasoning that Stalingrad was too large to encircle, Paulus’s troops entered the city and launched assaults to divide it into smaller blocks.
But the resistance was determined and unlike anything the Germans had experienced. Stalingrad was the first battle where modern small-unit tactics were used. The Germans, comfortable with clean and efficient Blitzkrieg warfare, proved less competent at vicious hand-to-hand street fighting, with every ruin a fortress and snipers at every turn. By October, German unit strength, which had been four to one stronger, plummeted.
By mid-November, although Paulus controlled nearly 90% of the city and had destroyed three-quarters of the Russian 62nd Army, he had lost close to 61,000 men, with over 12,000 killed 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 may have learned from the mistakes of the past.
They had. The Russians had been using the 62nd 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, and Germany’s mighty Sixth Army was surrounded. The Germans had the option to withdraw, but for Hitler, the battle was no longer just strategic.
Obsessed with capturing Stalin’s city, and against the advice of several key generals, he demanded Paulus fight on. Hitler had all the reflexes of a First World War trench soldier: don’t give ground at any cost. But this lack of elasticity of defense doomed the Third Reich. With leadership like that, he could not possibly have succeeded.
28,000 Germans perished in December as the Sixth Army, without food and close to running out of ammunition, began to succumb to another Russian winter. In mid-January, Paulus finally requested permission to yield. Hitler refused and instead encouraged him with the promise of promotion to field marshal. But Paulus had had enough.
On January 31, 1943, in sub-zero temperatures, he surrendered, and the remaining 91,000 members of the Sixth Army marched into captivity. It was an irreplaceable loss of manpower and equipment that would cost them dearly in the battles ahead. The initial British successes against the Italians in North Africa had come under General Claude Auchinleck. But the arrival of General Erwin Rommel and the formation of the Afrika Korps in late 1941 dramatically changed British fortunes.
Despite stemming Rommel’s advance toward Cairo at the first battle of El Alamein, Auchinleck was relieved of his command by a frustrated Winston Churchill in August 1942 and replaced by a relative unknown, Bernard Law Montgomery. Montgomery had supreme self-confidence. He was a gratuitous self-promoter, and he came in and put his stamp on the command. There was going to be no more retreats.
The next offensive would be successful. He immediately set about lifting Allied morale by bringing in new divisions with fresh officers, and he combined the new look with stirring addresses to the troops, declaring he would hit Rommel for six out of Africa. Under his command, the Eighth Army would be molded into a slick, disciplined unit with a solitary objective: push Rommel out of North Africa. It was a showdown between the charismatic new boy and the Desert Fox.
All too aware of his opponent’s fighting qualities, Montgomery would leave nothing to chance. He began a program of meticulous training. Second El Alamein was very much a set-piece battle. The troops were trained and rehearsed and trained and rehearsed.
Some battalion and brigade commanders built replicas of the positions they were going to attack and rehearsed their roles for weeks. Knowing Rommel was at the end of a very long supply chain, Monty ordered the desert air force to routinely attack German convoys undertaking the 400-mile journey from Tobruk, ensuring the Germans would be restricted in range and ammunition. He then launched an assault in two phases. The first, Operation Lightfoot, began on October 23 with a powerful artillery bombardment, followed by infantry divisions who carefully opened narrow corridors through the German minefields, through which the armored divisions could pass single file.
The plan went like clockwork, but the German defenses proved more difficult than expected. Amidst heavy fighting, the Eighth Army slowly ground its way forward. On the night of November 1, Montgomery launched the second phase, Operation Supercharge. Again, the infantry cleared the way for the armored divisions, which drove forward with surprising speed.
Rommel, his army depleted and his petrol almost finished, warned Hitler that his army faced annihilation. Hitler, as he had done in Russia, ordered Rommel to stand or die. The main mistake at El Alamein was characteristically un-Rommel-like: he followed Hitler’s order to remain in place, which condemned him 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, and 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. It was a turning point for the western forces. 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.
If jungle warfare was the most difficult form for Allied troops to adapt to, Burma was the most difficult place to undertake it. A large country covering more area than France, Burma had an almost complete lack of transport infrastructure, constant monsoonal rain, mountainous terrain, and impenetrable jungle, home to a dazzling array of tropical diseases. In 1942, the Japanese ejected the British from the country. The British very much wanted to take Burma back, but didn’t know how.
The Americans wanted North Burma so they could reopen the Burma Road, essential to get supplies to the 45 Chinese divisions fighting the Japanese. Yet despite Burma’s strategic importance, no country wanted to fight there. 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 arrived in India in 1942 and 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 had always been a proponent of long-range penetration by columns behind Japanese lines to wreak havoc in their rear areas. The Japanese would then have to divert troops from the front line to deal with these issues. He poetically called it having your hand in the enemy’s bowels.
With Churchill’s blessing, Wingate set about creating a small force. 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 several months of grueling training, they were ready for their first independent raid behind enemy lines. It was a very radical idea: infiltrate forces behind Japanese lines in Burma, go in like the fingers of a hand in columns, then at certain points come together like a fist, attack a target, and then disperse again.
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 the mountainous Burmese jungle, where torrential rain produced seas of mud, rivers swelled to places up to a mile wide, and dense thickets of prickly bamboo slashed clothes and flesh to ribbons. Disease took its toll. But Wingate’s biggest problem was the air drops intended to supply his troops.
Five days’ rations were commonly spread across ten when drops came in short or failed to materialize. Although progress was painfully slow, 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 Endor 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 suggested it was a total failure, but they made a terrible mistake in that judgment.
The Chindits proved that British soldiers could fight in the Burmese jungle successfully against the Japanese. 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.
And 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 the French in 1941 was an even bigger propaganda windfall. Following the panzers into Paris was Goebbels’s own army of photographers and writers who captured Hitler’s every move on his triumphant tour.
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. In defeating the Sixth Army, the Russians had mobilized their entire economy and population against the German threat.
At home, Goebbels saw only growing apathy. He genuinely saw that the continuity of the consumer economy was harming the war effort. Unlike Britain, Germany had continued with a large consumption economy. Goebbels’s attempt to control all that frivolity was stopped by Hitler.
Hitler in some ways understood morale better than Goebbels. But in the aftermath of Stalingrad, it was clear Germany needed a renewed effort if it was going to win the war. There needed 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 not only arrest the slide in public support but also 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 economic and military 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 was in the hands of the German people.
It was a battle, he said, that would require great sacrifice. He called for total war, a war quite unlike anything anybody has seen before. He was greeted with rapturous reception. This meant ever greater demands on the German war economy and manpower, and that was the only way Germany felt it could win the war.
The total war speech was a tour de force. It was 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 screamed 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 as never before.
Within months, Panzer III battle tanks were being produced twice as quickly. The output of workers in munitions went up by an average of 60%, and weapons production increased by 130%. 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. “Now, people, rise up, and let the storm break loose!
” The gloves were off, and 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 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 and engaged in what was less a retreat than a tactical withdrawal. Falling back on his centers of supply, he slowly built his operational reserves, quietly strengthening his forces to the point where, in late February, he stunned the unsuspecting Soviets with a withering counter-strike. By mid-March, he had succeeded in recapturing 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 German high command. Even Hitler himself accepted that this was not going to be a pretty heroic battle. This was going to be nasty.
But it was a battle they had to have because of the defeat at Stalingrad. After weeks of discussion with his senior officers, many of whom counseled 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 had been in two minds about whether to attack, the Russians were in two minds about how to defend. By May 3, it was evident to the Soviet high command that there was a very real possibility the Germans would attack the salient.
Stalin had the idea: we need to seize the initiative, 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 the Führer, their Russian counterparts had more success.
Certain that an 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. For the Soviet Union, it was deep operations. A hundred kilometers back from that line, they had resources prepared, people prepared, factories starting to turn out more and more T-34s, that not particularly glamorous but absolutely brutally effective Russian tank, in numbers that would ultimately slowly wear down whatever the Germans could throw 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. In this way, 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 and inflict heavy losses, which is exactly what happened.
In the north, the Ninth Army struck, and after a week’s fighting, they had only penetrated between 8 and 12 kilometers. It was an attritional battle, very costly to the Germans, even more costly to the Soviets. But the losses, while greater for the Soviets, could be more easily replaced. What you saw there were the two very different models of fighting the Second World War.
The Germans were seeing one last opportunity for the sharp quick strike, the sickle cut of Blitzkrieg. The Soviet Union was saying, “Okay, let them attack. Let them exhaust themselves, and at that point, we will fight back. ” 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. While the actual losses at Kursk are hotly debated, whatever the numbers, they appear on the surface to favor the attackers. Up to 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 for Germany. After Stalingrad and after 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 Second World 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 her survival, along with it the hopes of Europe, did not hinge on the Allies winning the Battle of the Atlantic, it was totally dependent on them not losing it. The Battle of the Atlantic was the war-long campaign to ensure the supply to the United Kingdom and from the United Kingdom to a number of campaigns from North America.
It was the vital logistic battle of the war. Whether it failed or succeeded on either side really determined the course of the war, and how well it was going profoundly influenced what each side could be doing in other campaigns. Both Germany and Britain had made strategic mistakes in the 1930s which affected the early outcomes of the war at sea. Germany had initially given priority to building battleships and had neglected to fully develop their submarine fleet.
Britain had placed too much confidence in the development of new detection technology like sonar, along with their intelligence gathering services, and had neglected the development of long-range aircraft that could act as spotters for the Atlantic merchant fleets at the crucial midway point. The Germans were the first to realize their mistake. By mid-1942, Admiral 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 Battle of the Atlantic was the protection of merchant shipping by their formation into convoy.
Groups of merchant ships proceeded on controlled routes, protected by as many escorts as were available, and guided according to where the threat was seen. As the Germans were concentrating their boats to find targets, the Allies were trying to work out where the U-boats were in order to move the convoys away from them. It was a battle that by late 1942 the Allies appeared to be losing. In all, over 1,600 Allied merchant ships were sunk in that year alone, accounting for nearly 8 million tons of shipping.
With one ship being lost every four hours, Britain’s total imports dropped to just two-thirds of pre-war levels. It became clear that unless those losses could be stemmed, Britain would very soon be starved into surrender. While aircraft and surface ships accounted for some of those losses, by far the main culprit was Dönitz’s fleet of U-boats. Submarines could attack unseen, were very difficult to detect, and once detected, good at evading and could come and reattack.
The Germans also set up a pretty sophisticated system for working out where the targets were and for concentrating the U-boats to do mass attacks, or wolfpack attacks, on their targets. Despite advances in technology and the introduction of new weapons, the beginning of 1943 saw little change. The Allies’ greatest losses were occurring in the central Atlantic, an area beyond aircraft range that became 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. But 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 out 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% 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 didn’t 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 what was an industrial war, the Battle of the Atlantic was central.
