Part 3 War in Europe

By HOWARD ANDREW G. CHUA-EOAN

In Europe, both sides welcomed the attack on Pearl Harbor. Hitler, pleased that the industrial bulwark of the Allies was now preoccupied with an Asian enemy, almost immediately declared war on the U.S. Churchill and Stalin were relieved that America was finally a combatant.

By the beginning of December 1941, German troops were in Istra, a suburb only 15 miles west of Moscow. Ever since Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa at 4 a.m. on June 22, 1941, his forces had swept through Stalin's European empire. They took the half of Poland that had been partitioned to the Soviet Union in 1939, stripped off the Baltic states that Moscow had annexed just a year before, seized Belorussia, and were marching south into Ukraine. Stalin's generals were stunned. They had believed the idea of blitzkrieg was an unreliable bourgeois strategy. No one had expected such a lightning conquest.

By Oct. 16 Germans were 60 miles from Moscow, and the capital was in a panic. Muscovites were stampeding out of the city, packing railway stations, crammed into trucks, huddled in carts. By the end of the month, 2 million had evacuated eastward in what the Soviets still call "the big skedaddle."

In spite of what seemed to be inevitable doom, in spite of hundreds of thousands of fleeing party apparatchiks, Stalin remained in Moscow. In a speech on Nov. 6, 1941, the eve of the 24th anniversary of the Bolshevik takeover, he cast the enemy as beasts. "It is these people without honor or conscience, these people with the morality of animals, who have the effrontery to call for the extermination of the great Russian nation." Patriotic Russians would never let that happen. "No mercy for the German invaders," he said. In Red Square the next day, he again sought to rein in the panic and rally the country. Under a sky ringed with antiaircraft blimps, with artillery fire echoing and under constant threat of Luftwaffe attack, the Soviet leader evoked the glories of Russia's heroic past -- Alexander Nevsky, Tolstoy, Pushkin; he also, of course, included Lenin in this pantheon. "The enemy is at the gates of Moscow and Leningrad," he said. "The war you are waging is a war of liberation, a just war." He thundered, "May you be blessed by great Lenin's victorious banner. Death to the German invaders . . . Onward to victory!"

The tyrant's appeal transfigured a shell-shocked country. Suddenly a hopeless cause became the Great Patriotic War. Even those who hated Stalin -- like the novelist Victor Nekrasov -- remember rushing into combat crying "Za rodinu, za Stalina!" (For the motherland, for Stalin!). The reanimated Russians could also count on a perennial ally: Father Winter.

In early November, amid their second big push toward Moscow, the Germans were already suffering their first severe cases of frostbite. Soviet General (later Marshal) Georgi Zhukov reportedly noted that the enemy was perhaps too efficient: its soldiers had been supplied with the correct size boots. Russians, he said, knew enough to wear oversize footwear -- the better to stuff with wool and straw to protect toes against the cold. A popular Russian caricature of the time had the Fritzes -- as German soldiers were less than affectionately called -- wrapped in anything they could grab out of occupied civilian homes -- including women's shawls and feather boas. Hitler, expecting the war to be over by October, made Napoleon's mistake, neglecting to plan for the exigencies of a Russian winter.

Fighting the killing cold and the stiffening Russian resistance, the invaders' losses mounted. At the end of November, German sources were citing a casualty figure of 767,000, with 162,000 dead. The entire Western campaign of 1940 had cost the Wehrmacht only 156,000 casualties (with 30,000 dead).

On Dec. 2 Hitler proclaimed, "The Soviet Union is finished." But by then the Germans poised at the gates of Moscow were exhausted, cold and dispirited. On Dec. 5, as the Japanese sailed toward Pearl Harbor, the Soviet army launched a massive counterattack along a 560-mile front. The Fritzes were thrown back by its ferocity. A German reporter assigned to the front recalls coming upon a soldier staggering out of a wood screaming "Aah! Come and help me! I can't see. They've gouged out my eyes." Soldiers had attacked him with a knife, slashing his eyes but taking care to let him live. "There!" said one of the Russians. "Go to the other German dogs and tell them we'll destroy them all. We'll cut out their eyes and send what's left to Siberia . . . Now get going."

In a January 1942 report -- part propaganda, part journalism -- the Soviet novelist Ilya Ehrenburg wrote of the winter battle: "The road is still long. From here to the extreme capes of Europe, to Finisterre, 'the end of the earth,' stretches the Kingdom of Death. It is a difficult road. But the Red Army continues its relentless march across the snow." By the time the spring thaw slowed the Russian counterattack, the Germans had been hurled entirely out of Moscow province. In the spring of 1942 they would still be close enough to threaten, but by then they had lost the battle to seize Stalin's capital.

To the north, Leningrad had been virtually sealed off from the rest of the country by a fierce German siege that would not be totally lifted for 880 days, until January 1944. On the eve of the attack on Pearl Harbor, / Leningrad's situation was even more desperate than the capital's. While the Germans outside Moscow were nearly exhausted by three unsuccessful attempts to take the city, Leningrad was not only being lashed by cannon fire and air raids but was also slowly being starved. Hitler had given orders that the city be completely eradicated after its surrender so that German occupying forces would not have to worry about supplying its civilian population.

Like Moscow, the city had been surprised by the speed of the Nazi blitzkrieg. Three weeks after the invasion, German forces were already 125 miles south of Leningrad. But where many Muscovites panicked, residents of the old imperial capital resolutely began building a network of barricades outside the city -- a million volunteers in a city of almost 3 million; many died as they labored, killed by Nazi bombs and machine-gun attacks. But in July and August they produced 340 miles of antitank ditches, 15,875 miles of open trenches, 400 miles of barbed-wire fences, 5,000 pillboxes and gun emplacements. These could not stop the Nazi juggernaut, but they did slow it down.

Most Leningraders volunteered not for love of Stalin. It was their city they were defending -- the cultural center of traditional Russia, home of Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoyevsky and Anna Akhmatova. The ordeal, however, required more than pride, certainly more than courage. The supply of food was erratic, and plummeted during the darkest moments of the war. On Dec. 23, 1941, for example, the whole city had just two days' supply of flour. At one point, rations were 1,087 calories for workers who had to man the city's strategic munitions plants, 581 calories for office workers, 684 calories for children. In reality, far less food was available -- and proper nutrition in cold weather requires about 3,000 calories a day for a man. The official report of deaths for December was 53,000, and the winter would take an even greater toll.

By then people were stripping glue off walls for protein. Tons of rotting sheep guts were boiled down into a rancid jelly and handed out as the meat ration. It was not uncommon to see people collapse from hunger while walking home through the snow, dying on the street. Some would remain covered beneath the snow until the spring. A factory chief remembers a worker asking him a final favor. "I know that today or tomorrow I will die," he said. "My family are in a very poor way -- very weak . . . Will you be a friend and have a coffin made for me?"

No other major city in the war would suffer as many civilian deaths as Leningrad. Not Dresden, which was virtually flattened by bombers and where 30,000 died in one night of air raids. Not even Hiroshima, where about 100,000 were killed by a single bomb. In Leningrad the official Soviet death toll for the two-winter-long siege was 632,253, mostly of starvation. Other sources put the figure at more than 1 million.

Leningrad was almost completely isolated: to the west was the Baltic Sea, to the east Lake Ladoga, to the south the advancing Wehrmacht, to the north the Finns, who, while not formally allied with Germany, were fighting their own war with the Soviet Union. But the city's defenders kept the enemy at bay and, again, winter helped. Lake Ladoga froze to a thickness that would support an escape route for hundreds of thousands of refugees -- and a way in for food. The Russian counteroffensive that began on Dec. 5, 1941, also relieved pressure on the city. By early 1942, though the blockade was not broken, the Germans could not hope to advance without a terrible fight. Besides, Hitler was turning his attention toward the Volga River and oil-rich Baku by the Caspian Sea. There a titanic struggle soon developed over the city that stood in his way: Stalingrad.

The late spring and summer of 1942 would be a black time for the Soviet Union. An attempt to retake the Kerch peninsula in the Crimea failed. In May three Russian armies, the vanguard of a planned counteroffensive in Ukraine, were routed by German mechanized units in Kharkov. The Germans claimed to have captured 200,000 prisoners.

Those defeats were followed by two other stunning losses. On June 7 German forces supplemented by troops from Romania began a monthlong final offensive against the great Crimean port of Sevastopol, pounding it with Luftwaffe raids before sending infantry units to wage bloody street battles. By the beginning of July, the city collapsed. The fall of Rostov-on-Don, the so-called gateway to the Caucasus, was even more ominous. The siege was embarrassingly brief, and whole Soviet units reportedly fled in panic. Suddenly the way south to the oil fields of Baku was open. With German armies simultaneously dashing to cut off the Soviet supply line along the Volga, Stalin issued a stern "not a step back" decree to the Red Army. Deserters were to be shot on sight.

Stalingrad, a great sprawl of a city on the Volga, became the focal point of the struggle. It had originally been named Tsaritsyn, and during the bloody civil war it was successfully defended against the rightist White Army by Stalin himself, who gave it his name. The Russians knew that if they did not tie down the Germans at Stalingrad, the war would virtually be lost. Not only would the huge cities of the north be bereft of supplies from the fertile south, but the oil fields of Baku that fueled the Russian war machine would fall to the Wehrmacht.

From mid-July 1942 onward, the fighting intensified as the Germans advanced along the great bend of the Don River. Hitler ordered the German Sixth Army to conquer Stalingrad by Aug. 25. Stalin ordered the city to prepare for siege.

On Aug. 23 the Luftwaffe sent 600 bombers against the city, killing 40,000 civilians. On the same day, the Germans established a five-mile front to the north. Wrote the Soviet General Vassili Chuikov: "The enormous city, stretching for 30 miles along the Volga, was enveloped in flames. Everything around was burning and collapsing." Less than two weeks later the Germans rumbled into the western suburbs, and two months of the most ferocious street fighting of the war ensued. "Fierce actions had to be fought for every house, workshop, water tower, raised railway track, wall or cellar, and even for every heap of rubble," wrote the German General Hans Dorr. "The no- man's-land between us and the Russians was reduced to an absolute minimum."

The Germans, however, could never quite take all of Stalingrad. While they held air superiority, they were unable to knock out the powerful batteries of Russian artillery across the Volga. And beyond the Stalingrad cauldron, the Red Army was on the move. In late November 1942 the Russians encircled the city, trapping thousands of German and Romanian troops. Hitler had committed a strategic mistake. He had dissipated his military strength and caused tremendous logistical confusion by splitting up the offensive -- sending a huge strike force toward the Caucasus simultaneously with the drive toward Stalingrad.

By December one German soldier was writing despairing entries into his diary. Dec. 5: "Heavy snowfall. My toes are frostbitten. Gnawing pain in my stomach . . . There is very little food. All is lost. Constant bickering. Everybody's nerves are on edge." Dec. 12: "O God, help me return home safe and sound! God Almighty, put an end to all this torture!" With rations slashed in December, army horses were slaughtered and cooked.

The Germans in Stalingrad fought on through January, even as the Russian military ringed the city. Hitler had promised reinforcements, and in the second half of December launched a major tank assault on the Soviet blockade. It failed. Wrote Chuikov: "Up to the end of December, ((the Germans)) continued to live in hopes and put up a desperate resistance, often literally to the last cartridge. We practically took no prisoners, since the Nazis just wouldn't surrender." Not until Feb. 2, 1943, was the enemy defeated in Stalingrad. By then the Germans were more willing to surrender: 90,000 were taken prisoner.

In Russia at War, the British journalist Alexander Werth recalls one sight in devastated Stalingrad at the time of the German capitulation: horse skeletons with uneaten bits of meat clinging to them; an enormous frozen cesspool; and, creeping into a cellar, the figure of a German soldier, his face a "mixture of suffering and idiot-like incomprehension." "The man," recalled Werth, "was perhaps already dying. In that basement into which he slunk there were still 200 Germans -- dying of hunger and frostbite. 'We haven't had time to deal with them yet,' one of the Russians said. 'They'll be taken away tomorrow, I suppose.' "

The Germans had lost the battle of Stalingrad. The tide of the Russian war had turned against the Third Reich.

Almost immediately after Operation Barbarossa was launched in June 1941, Stalin began imploring Churchill -- and, after Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt -- to open a second front in Europe to draw German forces away from Russia. The pressure from Moscow was especially intense during the battle for Stalingrad. Even after the German advance was halted and reversed in 1943, Stalin continued to declare that as mighty as the revived Red Army was, it could not win the war on its own.

The Soviets took some -- but not much -- comfort in British and later American operations in North Africa. Until the invasion of Italy in July 1943 and D-day in June 1944, the fighting in Libya, Tunisia and Egypt was the only major military distraction for the Third Reich.

North Africa was not originally Germany's theater of war. But the stunning defeat of 200,000 Italian soldiers in Libya by a force of 30,000 from the British empire forced Hitler to send reinforcements to the region in February 1941. The brilliant Erwin Rommel, who had helped lead German forces in the lightning conquest of France in 1940, quickly turned back the Allied advance in Libya and in April besieged an Australian division in the strategic seaside fortress of Tobruk as troops from Britain and New Zealand retreated to Egypt. Rommel called Tobruk's defenders nothing but rabble and promised that the panzers of his fabled Afrika Korps would soon be parked by the Suez Canal.

But the "rats of Tobruk," as the Australians called themselves, would hold out against Rommel for 242 days. Attack after attack failed to dislodge them. In the first week of December, just as the Pacific war began, an Allied thrust threatened to encircle Rommel's forces. To avoid falling into a trap, the Germans withdrew from Tobruk. In the last confusing battle over the fortress, 38,000 Axis soldiers were killed; the Allies lost 18,000.

The "Desert Fox," however, was far from finished. Orchestrating an intricate withdrawal, he then prepared for a counterattack. Hitler sent him an entire air corps, detached from the Russian front. The two divisions of the Afrika Korps were resupplied and refreshed, and in June 1942 Rommel captured Tobruk -- earning from the Fuhrer the rank of field marshal. Egypt, Suez and the oil of the Middle East now seemed within his grasp. Hitler, warned by more cautious advisers to be wary about proceeding toward Cairo, nonetheless ordered that operations "be continued until the British forces are completely annihilated . . . The goddess of fortune passes only once close to warriors in battle. Anyone who does not grasp her at that moment can very often never touch her again."

And so destiny brought Erwin Rommel face to face with the man who would prove to be his nemesis: Bernard Montgomery. By July 1942 the Germans had pushed the British out of Libya. All that stood between the Nazis and Alexandria was the strongpoint at the arid village of El Alamein, 70 miles to the west. A worried Churchill sent Montgomery, an eccentric, bullheaded disciplinarian, to head the Eighth Army. In spite of frantic pleas from London, Monty -- as the Ulsterman asked his soldiers to refer to him -- took his time, rebuilding troop morale and stocking up on ammunition. Churchill wanted him to counterattack by September 1942. Montgomery chose to wait until Oct. 23. By that time the Eighth Army outnumbered Axis forces 195,000 men to 104,000 and had more than 1,000 tanks to Rommel's 500.

In the meantime, Rommel's forces were being interdicted by the Royal Air Force -- and by Hitler, who had again begun to skim off reinforcements for the / Russian front. On the night of Oct. 23-24, under a full moon, the British opened fire on German positions with at least 900 artillery pieces, creating such powerful shock waves that some Axis soldiers were stunned to death. As fate would have it, Rommel was not on hand to rally his demoralized troops. A month earlier, he had gone home for treatment of a stomach disorder. Alarmed, Hitler ordered the still ailing Rommel back immediately. By Oct. 25, however, 90% of the Afrika Korps's tanks had been destroyed. Though commanded to fight to the death, Rommel ordered his army to retreat on Nov. 4.

"It may almost be said," wrote Churchill, "that before Alamein we never had a victory. After Alamein, we never had a defeat." The Germans in North Africa were in irreversible retreat. Four days after the end of the battle of El Alamein, American tanks and soldiers landed around the Moroccan port of Casablanca to join the British in mopping-up operations against the remaining Axis presence.

But Rommel, though clearly defeated, was still capable of a few surprises -- as the Americans found out. In February, even as the German field marshal had been chased into Tunisia, his forces launched a fierce attack on Allied forces and inflicted a humiliating defeat on the U.S. II Corps near the Kasserine Pass. It would take British, French and U.S. troops 10 days to undo the German counteroffensive, sustaining 10,000 casualties in the process, more than half of them American.

Nevertheless, the Axis was as good as routed in Africa. On May 12, 1943, the Americans and the British staged a gigantic pincers movement to win the battle for Tunisia -- the essential staging point for invading Sicily and Italy. Some 150,000 Axis soldiers were taken prisoner. The Germans, wrote General Dwight Eisenhower, commander in chief of U.S. forces in North Africa at the time, "were compelled after Tunisia to think only of the protection of conquests rather than their enlargement."

The Axis began to crack. In July, German and Russian armored units collided in the Kursk salient in what remains the greatest tank battle in history: 6,000 tanks, 4,000 aircraft, 2 million men. The Germans lost almost all their eastern-front panzer divisions just as the Allies under Montgomery and George Patton were landing on Sicily. Germany intervened in Italy after Mussolini was overthrown on July 25, 1943. (On April 28, 1945, partisan forces would shoot him dead and string up his body by the heels in the Piazza Loreto in Milan.) It would take the Allies nearly a year to fight their way into Rome. By then, the true second front in Europe was about to open; on June 6, 1944, the Allies landed in Normandy.

Everywhere the Nazis ruled, resistance flourished. Much of the subversion was supported by Britain's Special Operations Executive to further Churchill's goal of setting "Europe ablaze" with underground activity. But most of the resistance was fueled by patriotism and hatred of Nazi rule. Sabotage and guerrilla activity helped keep the Occupation forces off balance, and the resistance smuggled out information to the Allies and dispensed anti-German propaganda.

From France to the Soviet Union, Poland to Czechoslovakia, underground movements harried the Germans -- sometimes at a horrendous cost. On May 27, 1942, two Czechoslovak agents based in London who had been parachuted into Czechoslovakia five months earlier were activated. Their target: Reinhard Heydrich, "the Butcher of Prague," the SS Obergruppenfuhrer who was a major organizer of the Holocaust that was engulfing Europe's Jews. The Czechoslovaks killed Heydrich in a bomb attack as he drove into Prague, but the retribution was terrible: the Nazis murdered 1,300 Czechoslovaks immediately; 3,000 Jews were sent to Poland to be killed; and then the Germans razed the village of Lidice, butchering 199 men and sending 290 women and children to concentration camps, from which very few returned.

The resistance movements, however, received spectacular encouragement from the Allied strategic bombings of Germany. The British, still furious about the Luftwaffe's indiscriminate attacks on London and such targets as Coventry and Liverpool in the war's early days, launched gigantic carpet bombings of the Third Reich's industrial and urban centers. In May 1942 the R.A.F. sent the first 1,000-bomber mission over Germany, pulverizing 300 acres of central Cologne. The head of the bomber command, Air Marshal Arthur ("Bomber") Harris, told his men that if their mission succeeded, "the most shattering and devastating blow will have been delivered against the very vitals of the enemy." The R.A.F. lost only 40 of the 1,096 planes involved.

Beginning on July 24, 1943, Hamburg was savaged six times in 10 days. Fire storms created by British incendiary bombs raised flames whirling at 100 to 150 m.p.h., with temperatures of 1000 degreesC at their cores. Eight hundred thousand people were left homeless, and some 50,000 were killed. Cities throughout Germany, including Berlin, were similarly razed. The mass bombings would alternate between British night attacks and American daytime raids, coming almost daily by the war's end.

Death came in many guises in the war. Soldiers were slaughtered at the battlefront. Guerrillas perished in ambushes. Civilians were killed by bullets, bombs and artillery shells, disease and, as in Leningrad, starvation. But Europe was afflicted with an even greater evil. Hitler and his toadies, obsessed with purity and genealogies and with nurturing a superior race, set out to realize their nightmare vision with murderous efficiency.

On Jan. 20, 1942, at 56-58 Am Grossen Wannsee in suburban Berlin, 15 top government officials, including five representatives of the SS, met to discuss the "final solution" to the Jewish problem. The meeting had originally been set for Dec. 9, 1941, but the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor prompted its postponement. The main work of the Wannsee conference lasted no more than 90 minutes and covered little new ground; the outlines of the policy had been discussed among high officials since before the war began. Rather, the meeting had been convened to give official status to the final solution, to ensure that the bureaucracy recognized its importance and that government officials provided what was needed -- railcars, camp guards, chemicals, arrangements for disposing of Jewish property.

Since Kristallnacht on Nov. 9-10, 1938, the number of German Jews herded into concentration camps or forced into exile had risen dramatically. As the armies of Operation Barbarossa swept across Russia, units of the SS's special mobile killing squads, the Einsatzgruppen, systematically combed occupied territory for local Jews. In the Lithuanian city of Vilna, 19,311 Jews were killed in September and October 1941. In two days at the end of September 1941, 33,771 Kiev Jews were herded to the suburban ravine of Babi Yar and machine-gunned by the SS and Ukrainian collaborators. November 1941 saw the first experimental large-scale gassing of concentration-camp internees: 1,200 prisoners from the infamous Buchenwald camp were killed. Later, the mass murders were concentrated in six death camps, all on Polish soil; in the most notorious of them, Auschwitz, 2 million people perished. Uprisings were put down ruthlessly. The most famous occurred in 1943 in the Warsaw ghetto, where, at one point, almost 400,000 Jews had been penned up since November 1940. Only , 70,000 Jews remained in the ghetto by the time of the uprising, and more than 56,000 of them were shot, burned alive or deported to Treblinka.

The Jews were not the only victims of Nazi race hatred. Hitler's scorn for the Slavs guaranteed bestial treatment of Russian prisoners of war; of 5 million POWs, more than 3 million died. Gypsies, Poles, homosexuals and mental patients too would be detained, persecuted and killed. But the Jews were the principal target: by the war's end 6 million would be dead.

The Nazis, of course, never referred to the policy as genocide. To distance the leadership from even the slightest link to murder, no public discussion was permitted. That did not mean that the Third Reich was ashamed of its final-solution policy. Heinrich Himmler, the chicken farmer who rose to become Reichsfuhrer of the SS and chief architect of the final solution, called the killings "an unwritten and never to be written page of glory in our history." He said, "We had the moral right, we had the duty with regard to our people, to kill this race that wanted to kill us."

He spoke in October 1943. The superior Aryan race, he said defiantly, would win the war. Nature ensured that Nazi victory was inevitable. By then, the tide of war had already shifted: the Russians were marching inexorably westward; Italy was a shambles; North Africa was lost. But one of the war's greatest acts of inhumanity remained a virtual secret. The methodical extermination of millions in the six Polish death camps was just nearing its terrible climax.