How the period ended

The end of the beginning

At the end of 1943, the position of Adolf Hitler’s Germany looked remarkably different from that of the end of 1941. In December 1941, Hitler’s empire had stretched from the Atlantic seaboard of France as far east, nearly, as Moscow. By the end of 1943 the western border remained, but in the east the limit of German expansion was moving slowly, but remorselessly, westwards.

Much had happened between 1939 and 1943. Germany’s star, so long in the ascendant, was at last beginning to wane. The reasons for this are several. First, the entrance of the United States into the war in December 1941 changed the whole strategic complexion of the conflict. Hitler’s presumptive decision, taken on 11 December 1941, to declare war on the USA is still a curious one. Was it a foolish and ultimately fatal decision or rather a natural response to what was something of an inevitability?

President Roosevelt’s support of the British war effort to date had been considerable, and American sympathy was clearly on the side of the British and against Nazi Germany. The USA’s actions, before the German declaration of war, were hardly the actions of a state intent on maintaining her neutrality. The Lend-Lease Act, whereby Britain’s productive shortfall in war materials was redressed on a pay-later arrangement, dramatically altered Britain’s military fortunes when she was at a particularly low ebb. However, Roosevelt still had many dissenters at home, who opposed American participation in the war in Europe. Hitler’s decision removed any reason for hesitancy, as did the Japanese strike at the US Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, which provided ample demonstration, if one were needed, that the USA could no longer sit on the sidelines.

Through the early months of 1943, the western allies were preparing their plans and harboring the resources necessary to launch Operation Overlord, the invasion of occupied France. At the end of 1943, Hitler’s European empire was still a mighty edifice. Already, however, its borders were being rolled back in the east and in the south. The Red Army success at Stalingrad in early 1943, and in August 1943 in the enormous tank battle of Kursk, would prove significant (see The Second World War (5) The Eastern Front in this series).

The German attack on the Kursk salient was the last major offensive that Germany mounted in the east. The offensive, originally planned for early May 1943 – the first time that the ground was sufficiently hard to bear large-scale movement of heavy equipment after the spring thaw – was delayed considerably. Only in early July did Hitler give the order to commence the attack. Hitler’s reluctance to commit his forces sooner was based on a belief that the longer he delayed, the stronger his armored formations would be. Also greater numbers of the new Panther tank could be deployed. Large quantities of new weapons were produced by Germany’s now almost fully mobilized economy, but the delay also gave the Soviets additional breathing space to reorganize, reequip, and prepare their defenses in depth.

The net result may be seen as sweeping away many of the assumptions on which the Second World War was grounded. The German Wehrmacht, the instigator of fast, maneuver-style Blitzkrieg, was committed by its Commander-in-Chief to an attritional assault on prepared enemy positions, and in doing so played to their strengths not those of the Germans. Hitler, increasingly assuming more and more direct control over his armies in the field, was now, apparently, turning his back on the audacious thinking that had characterized much of his success between 1939 and 1943. After Kursk the German army fought a long, slow retreat that would climax in the battle for Berlin itself, the capital of the Reich that was to have lasted 1,000 years.

In July 1943 the first major Allied incursions into occupied Europe occurred when the Allies invaded Sicily. Two months later, in September, they landed on the Italian mainland and began their drive north. The German forces made the most of the difficult terrain and the narrow Italian peninsula to ensure that the Allied advance would be slow, and that German troops would not be driven out of Italy until the general surrender in 1945. However, the physical presence of Allied troops on European soil was significant and indicative of the turn of the tide.

In June 1944 came two events of enormous significance for Hitler’s Reich. The first, on 6 June 1944, was the Allied assault on Normandy: Operation Overlord or D-Day as it has entered the popular lexicon. This was the opening of the second front that Stalin had long demanded to take the pressure off the Red Army. Although it had taken far longer than Stalin had hoped, and caused considerable tension with the ‘Grand Alliance’ as a result, the Normandy landings now obliged Hitler and his increasingly hard-pressed forces to face their strategic nightmare – a war on two fronts.

While the fighting in Italy did tie down large numbers of valuable German troops and resources, Italy was always unlikely to be a decisive theater of operations. As if to demonstrate the problems and conflicting priorities of such a war, the Soviets launched their largest offensive to date on 22 June, the third anniversary of the start of Operation Barbarossa. This new offensive, Operation Bagration, succeeded in destroying Army Group Center and was a massive blow for the Wehrmacht.

Hitler’s empire shrank progressively from June 1944, as the Soviets advanced relentlessly from the east and the British–American–Canadian–Free French forces from the west. All was effectively lost for Germany, but her resistance did not slacken. In the fighting in the east, the Germans fought bitterly for every inch of ground. The knowledge of what the Soviets would exact in revenge for German behavior in the east and, for many, a fundamental ideological struggle between communism and national socialism underpinned the ferocious struggle. In the west, too, the German resistance was stiff and the Allies gained ground only slowly. British General Bernard Montgomery’s plan to end the war quickly, by seizing the vital bridges over the Rhine in Operation Market Garden, was a failure and compelled the Allies to edge forward inch by inch.

In December 1944, Hitler showed again, briefly, that there still existed an offensive capability in the German war machine, launching an attack toward the Belgian port of Antwerp, from where the Allied advance was being provisioned. This campaign in the Ardennes became known as the ‘Battle of the Bulge’ and demonstrated once again the tactical capability of the German army. However, Germany was fast losing the ability to sustain an offensive and the fighting in the Ardennes soon petered out with no German success.

Although the German forces kept fighting until May 1945, it was a futile battle against the odds. The Soviets gave no quarter in their struggle to defeat Nazi Germany: having experienced firsthand the commitment and brutality of Nazi racial ideology, they paid the Germans out in kind. Perhaps appropriately, the Allies decided at the Yalta Conference of early 1945 that it would be the Red Army that captured Berlin, despite the astounding progress being made by the Allies in the west. The Germans made the Soviets fight for the capital, inflicting in excess of 100,000 casualties, but the Red Flag was raised on the Reichstag, a dominant image of the Second World War.