14

Sieges

I LIVED FOR a time in the late 1970s on Mikras Asias Street in the Zographou section of Athens. The neighbors sometimes talked of “Black Tuesday.” They were referring to Tuesday, May 29, 1453, when Constantinople fell. I gathered from residents that it was likely that an angel had rescued the emperor, Constantine XI Dragases Palaiologos, minutes before he supposedly charged to his death against the Islamic hordes. Constantine had been delivered and turned to stone, or perhaps he was still suspended in marbleized animation. One day he would once again wake up, become flesh, and lead Orthodox Greek-speaking Christians on a crusade to take back their millennium-old capital of Hellenism from the Turks, with Constantinople the center of a Greek Aegean lake.

Many elderly in the neighborhood had arrived in Zographou as refugees from Ionia after 1922, a half-century earlier, having fled a burning Smyrna ahead of a new Turkish army. They often went on to amplify Edward Gibbon’s account of the fall of Constantinople, with folk tales of the desperate survivors waiting inside beneath the dome of the Cathedral of Holy Wisdom for the arrival of an archangel who would save them before the Ottoman Janissaries burst through the great doors.

A half millennium had passed since the capture of Constantinople by the Ottomans, but my district of Athens, and much of Greece of the 1970s, still equated the siege of Byzantium with not just the collapse of Hellenism—the ancient idea of a Greek-speaking Mediterranean from Asia Minor to Egypt—but of civilization itself. Sieges against people resonate tragedy like no other manifestation of battle. The Fall of Constantinople or the Sieges of Vienna are more than battles. They become iconic of the fate of culture—history’s flashpoints or perhaps metaphors of conflict itself. The sieges of World War II were not much different, and took place in the Pacific, Asia, Russia, North Africa, and Europe.¹

IT IS EASY to calibrate in strategic terms and geographical diversity the importance of siegecraft in World War II. Hitler finally saw sieges as the only way of slowing down the Allied advances in 1944–1945. At various times declaring that Warsaw, Budapest, Kohlberg, Königsberg, Küstrin, Danzig, and Breslau had become Festungen (“fortresses”; sing. Festung) meant that the advancing Red Army might be bled white as it periodically bogged down in block-by-block fighting—a reverse Stalingrad many times over. By late 1944, Hitler the nihilist cared little whether the resulting collateral damage inordinately killed Poles, Czechs, Hungarians, or even Germans. In like manner, Hitler’s Atlantic port fortresses in the West, such as Brest, Calais, Dieppe, Dunkirk, Le Havre, and Saint-Malo, were never in mid-1944 expected to see ships again, or indeed even to survive, but only to disrupt Allied advances.

The civilian body count was often a savage reminder of the importance of siegecraft in the war. More than one million died at Leningrad amid mass starvation, epidemics, cannibalism, and daily barrages—a greater toll than any siege in history. There were over two hundred thousand Russians and Germans killed in the final siege of Berlin. More German women were likely raped there than during any siege of the past.²

The fighting inside a besieged Stalingrad proved to be the most costly single battle of World War II. At least 1.5 million Russians and Germans died over months of contesting the city’s rubble, comparable only to the World War I German attack on the fortress complex at Verdun. Indeed, the deadliest front of the war, the Eastern, ultimately hinged on taking just three cities: Leningrad, Moscow, and Stalingrad. That the triad survived may have explained the larger failure of Operation Barbarossa. The European war itself ended when Berlin was successfully captured—or rather besieged, bombed, and shelled into ruin. We remember names of less existential encounters, like the otherwise obscure strongholds at Corregidor and Tobruk, largely because sieges are always the stuff of mass surrender or heroic resistance, and can demoralize or inspire an entire people well beyond their strategic importance.

The mass death at Leningrad or the relentless destruction that rained down on Monte Cassino (January 17–May 18, 1944) might be explained by the spiking anger of the besiegers over their inability to capture or even bypass their targets. Although World War II attackers did not, in sixteenth-century fashion, catapult the heads of prisoners inside the walls of Sevastopol, they could fire, as the Germans did at Sevastopol, a huge 31-inch rail gun (“Gustav”) that blew apart far more flesh and bone with its fourteen-thousand-pound shells than any devilry that Demetrius I (“The Besieger”) or Mehmed II (“The Conqueror”) could conjure up. The horrors of Leningrad, from pestilence to cannibalism, were medieval.

Of Hitler’s Festung siege defenses, three were especially brutal: Budapest (December 29, 1944–February 13, 1945), Breslau (February 15–May 6, 1945), and Berlin (April 16–May 2, 1945). In all three, the retreating German armies vainly sought to create their own Leningrad or Stalingrad that might exhaust the Red Army amid the rubble and lead to better terms of surrender. Or the besieged thought that the Red Army could be slowed down enough to allow other Germans, both civilians and military, to reach British and American lines.

Furious German resistance was also predicated on nothing other than the fact that there were no other options, and surrender to the Soviet forces was felt to offer no better choice than fighting to the death. Somewhere around one million Soviet and Axis troops were killed, wounded, or missing in the fighting in and around Budapest, Breslau, and Berlin, with the Soviet victors losing more aggregate casualties (600,000?) than the besieged and defeated Germans (500,000?). German-occupied cities now fell in a way that Soviet ones earlier had not, largely because the Russian besiegers enjoyed not numerical parity, as had the Wehrmacht in 1941–1942, but rather overwhelming superiority at rates exceeding five to one.

The combination of siege and World War II immediately invokes two horrific names: Leningrad and Stalingrad. New force multipliers made the old agendas of previous invaders of Russia—whether the 1708 attack by Charles XII of Sweden or the grand failure of Napoleon in 1812—far more deadly for all involved. Totalitarian ideologies framed the struggle in Manichean terms unlike anything seen in the rivalries of the past. Hitler planned a war of Nazi extermination to either kill off or enslave the supposedly inferior race of Slavic Untermenschen of Russia and liquidate millions of Jews in his eastward path.

In turn, Russian resistance was couched in terms of communism’s existential defense against fascism. Lives were not spared when it was a question of the very survival of the state apparat. Both civilians and prisoners were considered fair game. Both states mobilized a level of forces against the enemy, and employed a degree of coercion against their own citizens on a scale unseen before: the Nazis intended to level their besieged targets, buildings as well as people. The Soviets in turn preferred to see their own entrapped citizens perish if the Wehrmacht might be delayed or stymied than declare a Leningrad or Stalingrad an open city, or systematically evacuate urban residents.

Before he faltered, Hitler had promised to wipe Leningrad off the map and implied the same for Moscow (“Moscow… must disappear from the earth’s surface”) and Stalingrad. Stalingrad only survived in the sense that the Russians won the rubble that was left of the city. Berlin was captured and all but destroyed. Germans in Berlin saw their impending defeat as a mirror of what they had wished to do to Leningrad, and expected commensurate vengeance from the Russians.

A failed effort to storm a stronghold often left the exhausted and depleted attackers in almost as dire circumstances as those in a captured city. Army Group North never quite recovered its momentum once Leningrad did not fall. By late 1941 the would-be besiegers of Moscow were for a time in danger of becoming the besieged. In a matter of weeks, the German Sixth Army went from virtually conquering Stalingrad to being virtually destroyed by the very attempt.³

The capture of a stronghold or city was often iconic quite aside from the cost to the doomed defenders. Britain suffered its two greatest psychological defeats in its long military history with the nearly inexplicable surrenders of Singapore and Tobruk, both the result of utter incompetence of the commanders in charge. Both Hitler and Churchill accepted that encircling cities could convey a sense of defeat in a way disproportionate to the cities’ actual strategic importance, and conversely that withstanding the siege could encourage a sense of salvation. Of the dozens of great and minor sieges in World War II, however, only two might have changed the outcome of the war. Had Leningrad quickly fallen by August 1941, or had Stalingrad on the arrival of the German Sixth Army promptly succumbed a year later, the Russian front would have looked quite different by late 1942.

Otherwise, even the dramatic fall of a Tobruk did not necessarily alter the ultimate course of the war. The capture of a Berlin or Breslau in 1945 was never really in doubt. Even the defeats at Singapore and Corregidor, as psychologically damaging as they were to the British and the Americans, did not much change the eventual outcome in the Pacific. That many German-controlled Atlantic ports survived until the war’s end, or that Sevastopol fell in 1942, ultimately did not alter the verdict of either the Western or the Eastern Front.

In the past, the collapse of entire civilizations—Carthaginian (146 BC), Jewish (AD 70), the Abbasid Caliphate (1258), Byzantine (1453), Al-Andalus (1492), and Aztec (1521)—often followed the capitulation of their capital or largest cities. It is understandable that even in the twentieth century the fate of a Leningrad, London, Malta, Moscow, or Stalingrad marked at least a temporary shift in the direction of the war. In most theaters of World War II, armies headed for capitals: the Nazis thought the fall of Paris doomed France just as the Allies did when they later bartered over who would storm Berlin. Operation Barbarossa aimed at taking Leningrad, Moscow, and Kiev.⁴

The majority of the major sieges of World War II proved successful—Berlin, Breslau, Budapest, Corregidor, Sevastopol, Singapore, and Tobruk. Yet the most decisive and lethal sieges, either by land or air, at Leningrad, Stalingrad, and Malta—replete with constant bombing—all failed. As a general rule, Axis sieges (e.g., Singapore, Corregidor, or Tobruk) were effective before mid-1942, when Germany, Italy, and Japan had air or naval superiority or at least rough military parity with their enemies. After that turning point, the Axis usually failed and the Allies took most of the strongholds they targeted or themselves survived when besieged, given the growing reversal in relative logistics and air power.

In all the changing landscapes of war—from submarines beneath the sea to bombers above twenty thousand feet—successful operations hinged on advantages in supply, logistics, aggregate experience, manpower, technology, morale, and generalship. At exception were the final redoubts of the Japanese and Germans when faced with overwhelming odds. The Allies assumed that their Axis enemies ensconced by 1944 in Singapore, Corregidor, and the Atlantic fortified ports would not surrender as they themselves had earlier when surrounded in these exact same fortresses. As a result, they often decided that they would not suffer much strategic disadvantage by simply delaying assaults until later in the war (e.g., Corregidor) or bypassing such fortresses (Singapore), many of which surrendered only at the end of the conflict.

While the widespread use of rebar and other forms of reinforced concrete helped the besieged, defenders also had recourse to their own artillery and air assets to neutralize air attack—flak, anti-aircraft guns, and fighter planes. Besieged populations could sometimes be resupplied by air or sea, or at least by ground or naval forces protected by air cover. As was frequent in the long history of siegecraft, better defense prompted an improved offensive response.⁵

There were plenty of sieges in World War I, but none where air power proved significant. Yet just two decades later, for the first time in history, fixed citadels and cities were subject not just to distant artillery, but also to regular and heavy aerial bombing. The Soviets, for example, would fire over a million shells into Berlin, but mostly after the city had almost been reduced to rubble by Allied bombers. Even if aircraft could not obliterate a city without sustained air superiority, planes could at least provide cover for the attacks of the besiegers and prevent relief columns from reaching the trapped garrison.⁶

Indeed, one reason why there were not even more sieges in World War II’s vast intercontinental arena of conflict was the preference for aerial destruction, a nihilistic siege by bombers without the costly use of ground troops. Hitler, who never invested in heavy bombers, talked of razing entire cities of the Soviet Union, but lacked the resources to wipe away Leningrad and Moscow in the manner that the Allies bombed the urban cores of Hamburg, Dresden, and Tokyo into rubble. There were numerous destructive “sieges” of this sort conducted against Cologne, Dresden, Hamburg, London, and most of the major Japanese cities, with a motive of destroying or terrorizing rather than capturing the urban core. Yet even among the debris of a bombed-out city, what little was left was not captured until infantry caught up with the planes and physically occupied the rubble.

The armies of World War II sometimes besieged the same cities that, given the timeless referents of history and geography, had always been strategic linchpins in past wars. Replace the Ottoman Janissaries with the Luftwaffe and the Regia Aeronautica, and some four centuries later the walls of Malta once more were battered by the invader. Hitler may have been encouraged, and at times confused, by the successful Napoleonic assault on Moscow, and perhaps by the earlier conflagration set by the Crimean Tatars in 1571 that engulfed the city. Sevastopol had never been bombed before the arrival of the Germans, but it had been besieged, shelled, and captured by Western Europeans in 1855.⁷

THE GERMAN ENCIRCLEMENT of Leningrad was the longest and most lethal siege in history at 872 days. When it began on September 8, 1941, Leningrad was the largest city—at 2.5 million inhabitants—ever to endure complete envelopment. Yet amid Nazi bombing, artillery strikes, starvation, disease, the cold, and the desperate effort to evacuate the blockaded city, Leningrad nevertheless was among the first major sieges of the twentieth century to fail.⁸

Nearly four million Russian soldiers were killed, wounded, went missing, or were captured in the fighting in and around Leningrad and on the nearby Baltic front during the siege. Indeed, the Red Army suffered 14 percent of all its World War II casualties defending the single city and key port on the Gulf of Finland. Russian dead in and around Leningrad were four times greater than the death toll of all Americans lost in World War II.⁹

The Siege of Leningrad

Leningrad—known as St. Petersburg before 1914 and then Petrograd between 1914 and 1924—also may have been the first major attempt of attackers, since the final days of Tenochtitlán (1521), to extinguish rather than to seize a city, although Hernán Cortés, unlike Hitler, originally had not planned to kill its inhabitants altogether. “The Fuehrer has decided to erase the city of Petersburg from the face of the earth,” read a Nazi directive. “We propose to closely blockade the city and erase it from the earth by means of artillery fire of all caliber and continuous bombardment from the air.”¹⁰

Even the Romans who had leveled Carthage and the Ottomans who sacked Constantinople did not envision killing all the besieged as Hitler planned at Leningrad (“I have no interest in the further existence of this large population point after the defeat of Soviet Russia”). In the end the opposite occurred, and Leningrad ground down Hitler’s Army Group North into a shell of its former self even as Pearl Harbor, the Japanese ascendency in the Pacific, the Stalingrad nightmare, Kursk, and the Italian campaign all took world attention away from besiegers and the trapped citizenry at Leningrad who were dying in the thousands per day and in obscurity.¹¹

Three German army groups were poised for the attack on the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. Army Group North—the Sixteenth and Eighteenth Armies and the Fourth Panzer Army—led by the purportedly anti-Nazi Field Marshal Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb, was the smallest. Yet it perhaps had the best chance of obtaining its objectives. Some twenty-nine divisions of about 655,000 infantry and air personnel stormed through the Baltic states and the northwestern border of the Soviet Union. Simultaneously, the Finns—the most capable of the Germans’ European allies—approached southward toward Leningrad with perhaps a quarter million of their own troops. The latter had fought the Russians to a standstill in 1939, and yet in the continuation of that war in 1941 were never given adequate military equipment by the Germans.

Colonel General F. I. Kuznetsov’s “Baltic Special Military District,” whose charge was the defense of Leningrad, was inadequately equipped and poorly led. Initially Kuznetsov (soon to be relieved in August) commanded less than half the invaders’ number, or about 370,000 total troops. The Russians, however, enjoyed the advantage of fighting on familiar ground. For a while, they drew on the vast manpower and munitions industries of Leningrad itself. The defenders began the battle with an impressive number of tanks, artillery pieces, and planes. That said, General von Leeb in the days preceding his arrival before the city, assumed that the Luftwaffe would have at least softened up Leningrad. That may have been an odd conjecture, given that Luftwaffe bombers, despite enjoying air superiority, had never really broken the will of any Russian city. For example, German air forces would conduct ninety major raids on Moscow and drop over fifty thousand incendiaries in achieving almost no strategic results.¹²

The five-hundred-mile route of advance of Army Group North, from staging areas around Königsberg in East Prussia to the suburbs of Leningrad, was somewhat shorter than the Wehrmacht’s central axis to Moscow or the southern path to Kiev and on to the distant Caucasus. The pathway was well known to Germans who had reached within a hundred miles of Petrograd (St. Petersburg) in March 1918. Unlike Hitler’s other two Army Groups, Central and South, Group North’s divisions passed much of their way on sympathetic ground. The people of the recently Russian-occupied Baltic states saw von Leeb’s troops as liberators. Lithuanians, Latvians, and Estonians anticipated the German arrival by staging insurrections against Soviet occupiers, as if new foreign authoritarians might be better than old totalitarians.

The Finnish national army had proved itself against the Russians and was the most knowledgeable of Hitler’s allies of the Soviet way of war, and yet also abided by the Finnish unwritten understanding with Stalin that after 1940 neither the Finns nor the Russians would enter into the heartland of each other. Finnish General Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim’s sixteen divisions were to approach Leningrad from the north to occupy the shore of Lake Ladoga—the immense body of fresh water on the city’s northeastern border and the largest lake in Europe—and to stop both escape from and supply to the city. In a historic decision, the Finns would not directly besiege Leningrad but rather sought to reclaim only surrounding territory lost to the Russians in the 1939 border war.¹³

Leningrad was a major port. The Russian Baltic fleet would be routed and destroyed, and thus the city’s imported supplies cut off. Army Group North, in turn, could, and would in part, be supplied through the Gulf of Finland by maritime transport far more easily than could the other German army groups to the south by rail or road. The greatest naval defeat of the European theater was the panicked Soviet naval evacuation from nearby Tallinn, Estonia, between August 27 and 30, 1941. German—and to a lesser extent Finnish—bombing, coastal artillery barrages, surface attacks, and mines killed over twelve thousand Russian seamen and evacuees. The Germans and Finns sank sixteen warships and about sixty transport vessels, and completely shut off Leningrad’s access to the sea. The two main ports on the Gulf of Finland, Helsinki and Tallinn, remained Axis-held for nearly the entire siege of Leningrad.¹⁴

Lake Ladoga became Leningrad’s only remaining lifeline by autumn 1941. But just as Hernán Cortés finally turned Lake Tenochtitlán against the besieged Aztec capital, so too the Germans believed that they could use Lake Ladoga as a barrier and so make their blockade that much tighter. Such thinking, however, was predicated on taking the city before the lake froze over. When that did not happen, the lake became a land bridge from Russian lines to the city limits.¹⁵

Von Leeb’s original plan had assumed that Group North would race through Estonia and hit nearby Leningrad on the run. The armored assault led by the Fourth Panzer Army would surprise the city in the way Warsaw, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Brussels, Paris, Belgrade, and Athens had all been shocked into capitulation. In Hitler’s mind, German control of the shores of the Baltic ensured iron ore imports from Sweden, which were essential to German industry. Army Group North, and the Finns on their own ground, would need only to station residual forces to oversee the quick starvation of Leningrad’s population, as shelling and bombing reduced the city to rubble. Hitler’s initial directives to Army Group North were clear that Leningrad had to be captured; the Baltic coast had to be secured; Soviet naval power had to be destroyed; and Kronstadt had to be leveled—all before the final assault on Moscow.¹⁶

As Operation Barbarossa began, Army Group North moved at the rate of more than twenty miles a day through the Soviet-occupied Baltic states, covering the first 280 miles in just two weeks. Von Leeb finally slowed in mid-July. Yet German progress never ceased entirely. By early August, the Germans were only sixty or so miles from Leningrad. Despite worn-out equipment, exhausted and dead horses, mounting losses, and unexpectedly stiff Soviet defenses, at the beginning of September some Panzers were camped just thirty miles outside of Leningrad, days away from taking the city. In adopting a strategy of “active defense,” Mannerheim’s Finnish forces then dug in, waiting to hook up with Army Group North on the shores of Lake Ladoga, about twenty miles north of the city.¹⁷

By mid-September only seven miles separated the German front to the south from the city limits. Given the unexpectedly ferocious resistance, a baffled Hitler now began to have second thoughts and ordered Army Group North to adopt static siege positions around Leningrad. Perhaps the daily bombing, shelling, and starvation would destroy Leningrad without a frontal assault, and save German troops for the impending attack on Moscow. Hitler’s armies were so far unbeaten. He had no intention of sending them into street-by-street fighting, given that almost every other targeted enemy city had surrendered or capitulated almost as soon as the Panzers appeared at the city limits. At Leningrad, Hitler would avoid inducing the quagmire that he would endure a year later at Stalingrad.

Nazi logisticians figured that they might still be on the way to Moscow by mid-October, as if their worn-out forces could mount another major offensive as autumn wore on. But, along with his later diversions of elements of Army Group Center to the Kiev front, the sudden cancellation of a direct assault on Leningrad would become one of Hitler’s additional miscalculations. Bombing and shelling civilians, as well as ensuring starvation and disease, was not the same thing as entering and occupying a city.

The ensuing siege of Leningrad would soon turn premodern. By February 1942, on some days ten thousand city residents perished from exposure, starvation, and infection. Sporadic cannibalism broke out. Plagues spread. Corpses remained unburied. In a diary entry dated December 23, 1941, Valery Sukhov lamented: “Papa barely walks. Mama staggers. We’re hoping for January. In the evening I sat down to draw. I forgot about everything. A week ago I began to study German. We cooked soup from carpenter’s glue and ate all of the starch.… Papa is prepared to eat the corpses of those killed in the bombardment. Mama refuses.”

Power, water, and sewage services failed. Due to prior evacuation, military enlistments, and death, the city shrank to a fourth of its prewar population. Hitler congratulated himself on not wasting German soldiers in running street battles. The truth was that he was squandering forces that were never designed for static siege operations and running out of time as the cold weather worsened. In November 1941 both the Fourth Panzer and recently added Third Panzer Armies were pulled out and sent southeastward for the planned final assault on Moscow. That transfer was confirmation that Operation Barbarossa had essentially failed. According to the plans of the frustrated German High Command, the fate of Leningrad would now have to wait until 1942, although it was still confident of the final outcome: “Early next year we enter the city (if the Finns do it first we do not object), lead those still alive into inner Russia or into captivity, wipe Leningrad from the face of the earth through demolitions, and hand the area north of the Neva to the Finns.”¹⁸

Hitler, for all his fantasy talk about a superior race of Übermenschen, miracle weapons, and the role of willpower, ironically had no idea of the mettle of the Russian people, who had suffered enormously before the war from Stalin’s purges, state-induced famines, and brutal industrialization, and could withstand hardship in a way that perhaps only the Japanese could match. Nor did he appreciate the talent of the residents of Leningrad itself, which in terms of civic achievement, scientific excellence, university life, and cosmopolitan culture was the equal of any European city.¹⁹

While the conditions inside Leningrad were horrific, the besiegers also by November 1941 were suffering terribly from the fierce cold and lack of shelter. The swamps, marshes, lakes, and rivers around Leningrad in summertime had seemed to aid the Germans’ lines of circumvallation. But by winter they froze and offered porous holes in the besiegers’ defenses, especially when bad weather often grounded the Luftwaffe. Skilled Soviet engineers were able to craft an ice road (“The Road of Life”) across Lake Ladoga, sending in tons of supplies from eastern Russia during the winter months and bringing out over one million half-starved city residents. Finally, Hitler never developed any comprehensive strategy about whether it was wiser to storm, blockade, or bypass Soviet centers of resistance. Because Germans started and then interrupted sieges in ad hoc fashion, transferring armies northward and southward while firing generals, Leningrad, Moscow, and Stalingrad all survived.²⁰

Resistance at Leningrad doomed over one million Russians. But Stalin accepted that human catastrophe as part of the cost of saving the greater Soviet state, itself nearly fatally exposed to German aggression as a result of Stalin’s own nonaggression pact with Hitler. Had Stalin declared Leningrad an open city, as the Allies had Athens, Brussels, and Paris, he would have abetted the German drive on Moscow, and Leningrad’s citizens likely would have been slaughtered with little chance of fraternization with the occupiers. As long as Leningrad was besieged, a fourth of German forces were for all practical purposes tied down far from the pivotal fronts around Moscow, and later in the Crimea and at Stalingrad, where the war would be won or lost. The suffering and survival of Leningrad, a city famous for both its St. Petersburg tsarist heritage and its later eponymous communist vanguard status, served as a powerful global symbol of resistance to fascism.

In the immediate aftermath of the war, rumors mounted that Stalin had diabolically seen some strategic advantage in not making sacrifices to save or completely evacuate the city. As a result, the architects of Leningrad’s miraculous survival grew in stature even within the Communist Party. Stalin struck back. Many of those whose brilliance had saved Leningrad from Hitler were either executed or exiled in the so-called Leningrad Affair, a bitter footnote to the resistance.²¹

The Germans for their part never disengaged from the Baltic front. After the siege began, German forces, despite haphazard reinforcements, insidiously shrank. The Red Army always grew. Army Group North had occupied the least amount of Mother Russia’s territory of all Hitler’s pincer groups. It eventually was to be besieged itself by an enemy that became better equipped and better led, even as it endured far more dead and wounded. For the Russians, Leningrad was both a victory and a holocaust; for the Germans, it was another fork on the highway to oblivion.²²

THE NAME STALINGRAD still invokes horror. Yet when Operation Barbarossa began in June 1941, few in the German army had ever heard of the city. Certainly it was not a major strategic objective as were Kiev, Leningrad, and Moscow. Today Stalingrad is renamed Volgograd (“Volga City”), a provincial city of about a million people, largely unknown outside of Russia.

The attack on Stalingrad (also formerly known as Tsaritsyn) was never a conventional siege. Or rather it soon became two sieges. The first was the German near-encirclement of the Russian city between August 19 and November 22, 1942, by a huge army from the northern wing of Army Group South, led by General, and eventually Field Marshal, Friedrich Paulus. In early August, his army with surprising speed and economy reached the key Volga River as part of a larger plan to capture or destroy—or both—the riverside industrial city of Stalingrad. That way, Paulus, as part of the more northern wing of Army Group B, could next pivot southward along the banks of the Volga, clean up pockets of resistance, and protect the flank of Army Group A of Army Group South.

Under the general outlines of Hitler’s Case Blue plan, laid out in a Führer Directive of April 1942, the two recombined armies, after cutting off the Volga River, would then advance in tandem to expropriate Soviet oil supplies from the Caucasus and Caspian Sea fields. Supposedly, the Russians, bewildered that the main German thrust of 1942 had not focused on their sizable but stalled armies around Leningrad and Moscow, would lose the major source of their fuel. Yet the Germans persisted in the same flawed assumption that large Russian cities could be rapidly stormed or forced to surrender, releasing the besiegers to move on to rejoin the general envelopment of trapped Soviet armies.

What doomed Case Blue was not just the stubbornness of the Stalingrad defense. First was the foolhardiness of Hitler’s dividing the limited forces of Army Group South roughly in half, as if Germans by 1942 had the resources all at once to take the city, cut the Volga River, and capture and exploit the oil of the Caucasus before reaching the Caspian Sea. Expanding and thinning the front, while battle still raged along a now 1,500-mile Russian axis, as well as in North Africa, and over the skies of Germany itself, would prove strategic lunacy.

Second, that error of splitting German forces was compounded by fighting for weeks amid the rubble of Stalingrad, when for all practical purposes the aims of General Paulus’s Sixth Army had already largely been met: much of the traffic on the Volga had been disrupted, and Stalingrad was rendered mostly uninhabitable and unproductive. Paulus could have redirected his army southward to rejoin Army Group South or to have established a defensive shoulder, well before it was encircled. Hitler’s orders to take Stalingrad at all costs seemed to have contradicted his original strategic objectives “to finally destroy the active fighting strength remaining to the Soviets and to take away as far as possible their most important resources of war.” That required the Wehrmacht to “unite all available forces in the southern sector, with the objective of annihilating the enemy forward of the Don, and then gain the oil fields in the Caucasus region and the passage over the Caucasus itself.”²³

By late 1942, Hitler finally had begun to worry about America’s involvement in the Allied cause and was eager to make additional American logistical capability irrelevant, in the way the German High Command had tried in early 1918. Hitler sought to gain the resources of the Soviet Union, knock it out of the war, and hold a defensive line along the Volga before the industry of the United States revived both Britain and Russia. Joseph Goebbels noted in his diary on March 20, 1942, on the eve of the Case Blue offensive, that Hitler “is determined under all circumstances to end the campaign at the beginning of next October and to go into winter quarters early. He intends possibly to construct a gigantic line of defense and to let the eastern campaign rest there.… Our position toward what remains of Russia would then be like that of England toward India.” Goebbels apparently failed to note that Britain for centuries had governed the huge population of India with a modest constabulary, in part because of clever statecraft of the sort that would have disgusted the Nazis.²⁴

Stalingrad, however, soon became emblematic of the conditions that had previously stalled all German armies in the East. For a second time, the Wehrmacht, birthed in a wintry climate, did not prepare well for the Russian cold. German generals complained constantly of the poor Russian roads, even as their plans hinged on relying on the worst of them in the south. When German armies ground to a halt, Hitler, a captive of maps, intervened directly, ordering impossible offensives and no retreats, while diverting tens of thousands of soldiers in sudden new directions, without any knowledge of the living hell that his soldiers faced. He seemed to think that the nightmare of winter 1941 was long over, its lessons learned and never to be repeated, especially far to the south of Moscow.²⁵

The besiegers of Stalingrad soon became the besieged in late November. Two huge Soviet pincers (dubbed the Stalingrad and Don fronts) targeted the Sixth Army’s northern and southern flanks, which were poorly guarded by the ill-equipped subordinate Romanian Third and Fourth Armies. The ensuing Operation Uranus was a vast Soviet effort to spring the trap far to the German rear, near the city of Kalach. Unlike the earlier and incomplete German efforts of the Sixth Army to cut off Stalingrad at the Volga River, the Russian ring soon formed a 360-degree encirclement. The Sixth Army became separated from its supplies and was soon pulverized by massive artillery barrages in subzero weather that made reliable air support impossible. Equally important, Hungarian, Italian, and Romanian allied forces along the Don River were threatened, collapsed, and suffered catastrophic losses that were to lead to political repercussions back home.

The Sixth Army was surrounded from November 23, 1942, to its final surrender on February 2, 1943. The combination of cold, hunger, and disease—typhus most prominently—proved as lethal as the Russians. If the Sixth Army was one of Hitler’s premier armies, its workmanlike administrator Friedrich Paulus was not one of Hitler’s more imaginative field generals. In fact, by any definition Paulus was not a field general at all. He was a respected staff officer who had never held a major battle command in his life. By summer 1942, those far more gifted had either been killed, captured, fired, forcibly sent into retirement, bought off, or were stationed far from the strategic nexus of the war. Paulus perhaps combined the worst two traits for dealing with the mercurial Hitler. He whined in private about Hitler’s erratic behavior, yet he took no action to nullify it and salvage his army—in the manner, for example, of General Paul von Kleist, commander of Army Group A, who would ignore Hitler’s orders, save the surrounded German Eighth Army in March 1944, and thereby would be relieved, or of General Erwin Jaenecke, who would be dismissed and put on trial for refusing to sacrifice the trapped Seventeenth Army in the Crimea. Paulus was not liked by his staff and was later blamed by his officers for failing to use the brief window of possible escape from the pocket.²⁶

The Soviet commander at Stalingrad, General Vasilii Chuikov, was a brawler who bivouacked with his men. While Paulus lamented that his once-mobile divisions were mired in a rat’s war (Rattenkrieg), General Georgy Zhukov, the ultimate architect of the Soviet counteroffensive, stood up to Stalin to ensure his plans for Operation Uranus were carried out as he envisioned. In terms of imagination and daring, Operation Uranus, conceived in haste and desperation, was far more logical an operation than the complex and carefully planned Case Blue. Hitler’s greedy authorship of multiple agendas, in trademark fashion, had ensured that a huge army either could have taken Stalingrad and cut off the key Volga supply route, or could have reached the Caspian Sea and deprived Stalin of much of his oil, but it could not quite do both. By attempting both, it could do neither. In terms of Hitlerian nihilism, it would have made far more sense in September to focus on bombing the Soviet oil hubs of Grozny and Baku than to keep hitting the rubble of Stalingrad.²⁷

Even without accurate intelligence about the Soviet buildup, General Paulus had at least warned Hitler of such a nightmare scenario as early as September, as his own siege of the city stalled and the Sixth Army’s supply lines lengthened. Hitler was so close to winning a key siege that in his exuberance he completely forgot that the Sixth Army was soon to be outnumbered by the defenders, and without reliable supplies with winter approaching. Most of his generals seemed to have lacked all historical perspective that a failed siege often meant not the withdrawal but the ruin of the attacker.

By late December 1942, efforts of General Erich von Manstein’s Army Group Don (Operation Winter Storm) to reach the entrapped Sixth Army ended. His failure was due to Hitler’s continued interference in day-to-day operations, as well as bad weather that hampered air supplies. The inexperienced Paulus also did not initiate a simultaneous breakout from his entrapment. And even the highly regarded “fireman” Manstein apparently did not fully grasp the difficulty of advancing to Stalingrad at a time of growing Russian strength. Either Paulus feared to act independently of Hitler’s edicts, or he was too paralyzed in depression over his own self-induced predicament. Like most forlorn German generals, he blamed the Luftwaffe: “What should I say, as supreme commander of an army, when a man comes to me, begging: ‘Herr Generaloberst, a crust of bread?’ Why did the Luftwaffe say that it could carry out the supply mission? Who is the man responsible for mentioning the possibility? If someone had told me that it was not possible, I would not have reproached the Luftwaffe. I would have broken out.” But it was hardly difficult for a German general to doubt Hermann Goering’s ludicrous bombast that he could supply the Sixth Army completely by air even given bad weather, Soviet air defenses, and too few planes.²⁸

Hitler may have talked grandly of Stalingrad as a Festung, but, in fact, as one veteran put it, “one could not speak of a ‘fortification’ anywhere. The term ‘Fortress Stalingrad’… must have sounded like pure irony, if not bloody sarcasm, to the encircled troops.” On February 2, 1943, between ninety and a hundred thousand near-starving besieged besiegers surrendered—all that was left of Germany’s once grand three-hundred-thousand-man Sixth Army. Thousands of stragglers were found amid the ruins for weeks thereafter and Soviet and German recordkeeping in any case was not always complete. The few left who went into Soviet captivity were famished and cold, many were sick, and nearly nine out of ten soon died.²⁹

All but six thousand German prisoners perished in Russian camps. The survivors were only returned to Germany in September 1955, following an embassy from West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. Aside from those who surrendered, Stalingrad had cost the Axis coalition another 150,000 to 200,000 dead and missing, including tens of thousands of lost Hungarians, Italians, and Romanians. When the failed Case Blue offensive essentially ended in November 1942, Army Group South’s various divisions of Group A had in addition suffered yet another three hundred thousand casualties. The Soviets, as customary before 1944, suffered even greater losses, perhaps all told over a million killed, wounded, missing, or taken prisoner.

In terms of disasters, fewer surviving Germans surrendered at Stalingrad than would give up within six months in Tunisia (perhaps over 230,000 Italians and Germans) to the British and Americans. Moreover, the surrender of the survivors at Stalingrad per se was not comparable to the horrendous encirclements that the Soviets suffered in 1941, such as the Kiev cauldron (665,000 Russians captured) or the Vyazma and Bryansk pockets (650,000). Immediately prior to Stalingrad the Soviets in July and August alone had lost another six hundred thousand prisoners, seven thousand tanks, and six thousand artillery pieces to the encirclements of Army Group South.³⁰

Yet the unique melodramatics of Stalingrad made it far worse than all prior or subsequent mass surrenders on the Eastern Front, and in fact the worst military moment in Germany’s history. Unlike Stalin, who was on the defensive while forming massive new armies, Hitler was waging an offensive without reserves. All that could be said for Case Blue was that the strategic aims were so ambitious that even Stalin—who as a Marxist-Leninist materialist supposedly would have anticipated an offensive to steal resources and end the Soviet means of production—was initially surprised that the 1942 offensive had not targeted either Moscow or Leningrad.

In the context of historic German defeats, the German disaster at Stalingrad was reminiscent of, but far worse than, Napoleon’s rout of the Prussians at the Battle of Jena-Auerstedt in 1806. Before Stalingrad, the German Army had stalled but had not suffered outright defeat. After Stalingrad it never conducted a clear-cut, sustainable offensive campaign again. As Joachim Wieder, a survivor of the battle put it: “Drifting through the snowstorm, this was the wreck of Sixth Army that had advanced to the Volga during the summer, so confident of victory! Men from all over Germany, doomed to destruction in a far-off land, mutely enduring their suffering, tottered in pitiful droves through the murderous eastern winter. They were the same soldiers who had formerly marched through large parts of Europe as proud conquerors.”³¹

Before Stalingrad, German morale had recovered from the disaster of late autumn 1941 when blitzkrieg had stalled at Leningrad and Moscow. After February 1943, however, survival, not victory, was the only hope on the Eastern Front. Stalingrad entered the realm of the surreal—a distant Soviet outpost some sixteen hundred miles by land from Berlin, little known to the public back home, where a huge German army had not been just mauled or been forced to retreat or suffered terrible casualties but had simply been swallowed whole.

The captured General Paulus and other high officers offered the Soviets a propaganda coup, and were soon to broadcast defeatist warnings on Soviet radio. Even the Soviets could not initially grasp the magnitude of their destruction of the Sixth Army. Yet the Red Army after Stalingrad eventually earned a reputation for invincibility that lasted for most of the war. “You cannot stop an army which had done Stalingrad,” became a common Russian refrain. In contrast, for the German veterans of Stalingrad, the defeat became accepted as “the turning-point of the war.”³²

When the second year of the Russian offensive began in spring 1942, Hitler had faced a reckoning. His armies had suffered enormous losses in 1941: over 1.1 million casualties, with 35 percent of the original army that entered Russia in June 1941 now gone. Such attrition was not fully replaced by mid-1942. German forces were now half a million men fewer in number than the force that began Operation Barbarossa. In the first six months of Barbarossa, the Germans only added a hundred thousand troops to the army on the Eastern Front; the Soviets in contrast increased their military by well over three million. The German army at times was capable of killing Red Army soldiers at unimaginable rates of seven or eight—but not thirty—to one.³³

By early 1943, much of the Germans’ cobbled-together motor transport had been destroyed or worn out and the majority of its horses were dead, at a time when the Allies were beginning to rush shipments of thousands of trucks to motorize the Red Army. The once-backwater Italian effort in North Africa had grown into an open German sore that siphoned off vital resources from Russia to the Afrika Korps, in a doomed effort to prevent the loss of North Africa. As the disaster of Stalingrad ended, Soviet munitions production increased, even as diversions of German air power from the Eastern Front spiked to protect the homeland. Yet while the Sixth Army stalled to the north at Stalingrad, an orphaned Army Group B of some fifty divisions, led by General Maximilian von Weichs, reached the Volga. Its twin, Army Group A under Field Marshal Wilhelm List, got close to Grozny, some of its soldiers on August 21, 1942, climbing Mt. Elbrus, the highest peak in the Caucasus. By October 1942 the Luftwaffe was sporadically bombing some of the oil fields around Grozny—a strategy that had it begun earlier might have done far more damage to Soviet oil production. The subsequent campaign at Stalingrad doomed all that effort. In sum, blitzkrieg, dying at Stalingrad in 1942, would soon be entombed in 1943.³⁴

Both Goering and Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels in their postsurrender broadcasts tried immediately to invoke history’s glorious last stands to romanticize the catastrophe, as if Stalingrad, as an official Nazi communique put it, was “one of the most treasured possessions in German history.” General Manstein’s invocation of the last stand of the Spartan defenders at the pass of Thermopylae in 480 BC was pathetic and mendacious, as if the Sixth Army was battling for freedom and consensual government on its home ground rather than for National Socialism abroad. But in the end, the proper classical allusion is Thucydidean. Indeed, Stalingrad proved to be Germany’s fatal wound in the manner of the Athenian Empire’s disastrous defeat in far-off Sicily (415 BC), so famously summed up in The Peloponnesian War: “At once most glorious to the victors, and most calamitous to the conquered. They were beaten at all points and altogether; all that they suffered was great; they were destroyed, as the saying is, with a total destruction, their fleet, their army, everything was destroyed, and few out of many returned home.”³⁵

THE FORTIFIED EASTERN Libyan harbor of Tobruk changed hands four times during the war. Before 1940 and after 1943 the port was little known and of no real strategic importance, as it is a backwater today for the occasional visitor to war-torn Libya. But for a brief two and a half years, Tobruk became renowned as the center of fierce Allied-Axis fighting along the Libyan-Egyptian border.

The Italians initially surrendered Tobruk to the British on January 22, 1940. The British and Dominion forces then held it heroically against attacks, as the port served as a key British base of operations for seventeen months until June 21, 1942, when a German and Italian army under Colonel-General Erwin Rommel stormed the city. But just five months after Rommel’s feat, the Germans themselves abandoned Tobruk on November 12, 1942, as Rommel’s forces fled westward in hasty retreat after their defeat at the second battle of El Alamein.³⁶

Tobruk’s value was that it was almost exactly halfway in the vast 650-mile mostly empty seaside expanse between the British port of Alexandria to the east and the Italian harbor at Benghazi to the west. Each side saw its alternating possession of Tobruk as proof that it had reached a point halfway to its destination, whether British-held Alexandria or Axis-occupied Benghazi. Along the huge Libyan and Egyptian coastal battlefront, it offered the only developed harbor where sizable ships could unload.³⁷

For the Axis, Tobruk was also at the end of a near-perfect north-south vertical line across the Mediterranean, from German-held Athens through Crete to North Africa. Nothing much had changed from antiquity, when Tobruk was known as Antipyrgos—directly “opposite from Pyrgos,” the key ancient Greek port in southern Crete. For the British as well, Tobruk marked an equally straight but quite different latitudinal supply route from Alexandria to Malta. The war in a desolate eastern North Africa hinged on supplying fuel, food, and ammunition along these two antithetical lines, given that there was little support to be had from either indigenous towns or the desert.

After the Germans’ capture of Tobruk on June 21, 1942—one of the last great victories of the Axis—Rommel dreamed of using the port and its captured stocks to supply his smaller army in a reenergized race eastward. For a brief moment in midsummer 1942, Germany saw second-chance glimpses of grand victory. The old fantasy of grabbing the British naval base at Alexandria, Egypt, and cutting off entirely the British in Cairo now seemed to seduce the Germans. From there, Rommel thought that he might even storm the Suez Canal and cut off Britain from its direct routes to its Middle East oil supplies. And Rommel dreamed even more grandly that his tiny Afrika Korps then could continue eastward to join a victorious Army Group South descending from the Black Sea and the Caucasus. If the German armies met in the oil-rich Middle East, then both Russia and Britain would be denied almost all their Persian Gulf or Caspian Sea oil. Or so Rommel imagined after his brilliant capture of Tobruk with its ample supplies, without much serious reckoning that his wild dreams were largely dependent on the continuous captures of such Allied stocks, while the Allies assumed that they could replace far more than they lost.³⁸

The initial Italian surrender at Tobruk in 1940 and the final British recapture of the port in November 1942 are today little remembered. Even the heroic British and Commonwealth resistance to Rommel’s early failed efforts to storm the port is often forgotten. Instead, Tobruk is most famous for its second fall, the dramatic but rapid surrender to a returning Rommel on June 21, 1942. The British collapse riveted the world, largely because the unthinkable suddenly had become the inevitable.

Despite the odds and problems of supply, Rommel in late May 1942 had risked another battle against the defensive line extending south from Gazala, west of Tobruk, on the Mediterranean coast, to draw out the British Eighth Army under General Neil Ritchie. Rommel maneuvered his armor next to enemy minefields, dubbed “the Cauldron.” With his flank protected, he waited for Ritchie’s counterattack and then blew apart most of the British armor with the Afrika Korps’ veteran anti-tank gun batteries. The beaten British backed off from their fortified Gazala line. After the Luftwaffe and artillery had blasted a hole in Tobruk’s defenses, Rommel poked right through and captured the port on June 21 from the bewildered South African General Hendrik Klopper.

The effect of Rommel’s sudden victory was stunning. Churchill was in Washington planning grand strategy with his new wartime American ally, only to be humiliated by the shock of Tobruk. The disaster was too reminiscent of the disgrace of the fall of Singapore (February 15, 1942), in sharp contrast to the grim (and ultimately successful) resistance of the civilians and soldiers of a defiant Russian Leningrad, even as they suffered hundreds of thousands of deaths. The news would cause Churchill to return home to a motion of censure from Parliament. Although the resolution was easily defeated, the debate was a sign of popular outrage that once again a sizable Commonwealth force had quit rather than fight to the death.³⁹

Until the fall of Tobruk, the Allies had dreamed that the tide of war might be already turning. The Battle of Midway (June 4–6, 1942) had checked the advance of the Japanese fleet. The Germans had split their forces and the northern contingents were nearing Stalingrad but were meeting stiff resistance from the Red Army. The Italians and the Germans had failed in their first assault on Tobruk and had retreated back to El Agheila.⁴⁰

Rommel should not have been able to take the city. Although he commanded about eighty thousand German and Italian troops, total respective British and Axis forces in the theater were about equal at around 120,000 men. The British also had nearly twice as many tanks and armored vehicles and over two hundred more aircraft, and the Luftwaffe was insidiously losing air superiority. While most of Rommel’s supplies and reinforcements were running low, Tobruk was stocked full of food, fuel, and ammunition. By mid-1942, supporting naval gunfire along the coast was more often British than Italian. Malta still held out. The British had received new American Grant medium tanks with 75 mm guns that were superior to any of Rommel’s early-model Panzers. The Americans promised much more, and there was already talk of a late autumn Anglo-American landing to the west in Algeria and Morocco. All that said, the British remained in awe of Rommel and often praised him as a “splendid military gambler.” Churchill gushed, “we have a very daring and skillful opponent against us, and, may I say across the havoc of war, a great general.” The Afrika Korps fought with an élan lacking among the defenders of Tobruk. And it did not help the British cause that their various Dominion troops often served under commanders who were not their own.⁴¹

Churchill was not shy of what might follow Tobruk in his bleak assessment to the House of Commons:

Rommel has advanced nearly four hundred miles through the desert, and is now approaching the fertile Delta of the Nile. The evil effects of these events, in Turkey, in Spain, in France, and in French North Africa, cannot yet be measured. We are at this moment in the presence of a recession of our hopes and prospects in the Middle East and in the Mediterranean unequalled since the fall of France. If there are any would-be profiteers of disaster who feel able to paint the picture in darker colours they are certainly at liberty to do so. A painful feature of this melancholy scene was its suddenness.⁴²

Yet in terms of casualties or strategic ramifications, the fall of Tobruk was hardly like the sieges of Leningrad or Stalingrad. There were few civilians in the city and almost none were either British or German. Collateral damage was limited. More important, Rommel failed in North Africa, even after his capture of Tobruk. The effects of the port’s capture were instead again psychological. The heroic and successful resistance in 1941 and 1942 was merely a prelude to tragedy. Tobruk also raised the specter that the disaster at Singapore five months earlier might not have been a fluke but symptomatic of a British—or indeed Western democratic—propensity to give up rather than fight on. That Tobruk also shortly followed the American surrender at Corregidor on May 6, 1942, shook the entire alliance.

These worries about innate British and American equivocation would vanish a little more than four months later, 350 miles to the east in Egypt at the second battle of El Alamein. There the British army, far better equipped and under newly assigned General Bernard Montgomery, stopped an ill-supplied Rommel for good. The Afrika Korps had taken their key port at Tobruk. But the victory won little more than a cratered harbor without ships and just enough supplies to reach El Alamein and defeat.

UNLIKE TOBRUK, THE formidable Soviet naval base at the tip of the Crimean Peninsula at Sevastopol may have been the most impressive fortified citadel in the world by the outbreak of World War II. The stronghold, made famous during the nineteenth-century Crimean War, had once taken the British, French, and Turks a year to storm it despite the allies’ unquestioned naval superiority on the Black Sea and well before its twentieth-century massive concrete and steel fortifications.⁴³

Sevastopol was protected by the Soviet Black Sea fleet, not large by blue-water standards and often poorly maintained, but preeminent within the confines of a quasi-inland sea. Even if the paltry Axis naval forces had controlled the Black Sea approaches, it was nearly impossible to stage amphibious landings. Steep cliffs bristling with casements loomed above the harbor. Unlike at Singapore and Corregidor, the large-caliber artillery batteries of Sevastopol easily could be aimed out to sea as well as inland. The permanent arsenal was beefed up with over four hundred mobile artillery pieces and still more mortars and anti-aircraft guns.

The landward routes of attack were mined, fortified with artillery and bunkers, and bordered by dense forests and uneven terrain. The Soviet Independent Coastal Army under Major General Ivan Petrov had over one hundred thousand Soviet troops burrowed into the fortifications. The besieging Axis forces of General Erich von Manstein—given the preparations for the impending dual offensives aimed at the Volga and the Caspian Sea—enjoyed only a two-to-one numerical superiority over the entrenched defenders. Manstein was under pressure to take the city quickly and join the German drive to the south. Yet Manstein’s numerical edge was due only to the presence of Romanian allies under Major General Gheorghe Manoliu. Time was on the side of the defenders—and it was not clear in a strategic sense whether the fortress was even worth the cost of taking it.

An exasperated Army Group South had wisely considered bypassing Sevastopol in the initial invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, after attempting and then failing to surprise and storm the base. By November, Sevastopol was cut off by land. For the next eight months it remained isolated, except for occasional supply by sea. The city posed no threat to the German advance except for a few Soviet bombers that the Germans feared might disrupt the planned assault on the Caucasus oil fields to the east.

Even as Army Group North remained static far to the north at Leningrad, Hitler in early 1942 demanded Sevastopol’s immediate capture, given his obsessions with preserving and expanding his oil supplies and the resistance of iconic enemy cities. After the failures to take Leningrad and Moscow in 1941, Hitler was also adamant that the Wehrmacht should now successfully storm any enemy city that it approached or surrounded. To isolate the garrison by sea, Manstein had only a motley collection of Italian boats and small submarines that were of little aid to some light German craft. If he could not cut off the city’s maritime lifelines, he instead relied on air power that at least might hamper convoys to the city and ensure that Russia’s Black Sea fleet could not shell the besiegers. The lack of simultaneous land and sea operations cost the Germans dearly in blood and time.

Sevastopol and indeed the entire Black Sea were not critical to the strategic calculus of World War II. The base offered few long-term advantages in advancing Germany’s aims in 1942. Given British control of the eastern Mediterranean, there was little chance of supplying the Wehrmacht through the Black Sea (which Hitler had dismissed as “merely a frog pond”). The Crimean Peninsula itself was a dead end, well off the track of Army Group South’s main supply routes from Eastern Europe to the Caucasus. Sevastopol was a relatively small city without much industrial importance. The Soviet defenders had crafted the far better strategy of drawing in and tying down nearly two hundred thousand Axis troops for over a year. In the fashion of the nonsensical Norway garrisoning, the Germans remained sidetracked. They eroded their strength in Crimean fighting that offered no hope of achieving the favored German goals of either destroying huge Soviet armies by encirclement or securing Germany’s oil needs.⁴⁴

That said, after nearly a year of Russian resistance, somehow General Manstein’s German Eleventh Army, along with his Romanian and some Italian allies, surrounded Sevastopol and stormed the impregnable fortress in a mere month without much help from the sea. Manstein had two initial advantages. He at first enjoyed easy air superiority. The Luftwaffe’s Fliegerkorps VIII was in good shape after recovering from its losses of 1941. Stukas and medium bombers, in round-the-clock preparatory assaults, had within days sunk or damaged most Soviet ships. They destroyed almost all power and water services inside the garrison. Whereas the Germans had adequate rail supplies from their Romanian supply depots, the Russians in the very first two weeks of the siege lost the ability to bring in adequate supplies and reinforcements by sea or land. The besieged could only hope that the Luftwaffe itself might run short on fuel and ordnance, or that the Case Blue campaign might eventually force Hitler to transfer planes away from Sevastopol.

Manstein also thought he had secret weapons of a sort: huge artillery guns designed to destroy even the thickest Russian concrete bunkers. To complement his arsenal of over eight hundred Axis artillery pieces, the Germans had the largest artillery batteries in the world: six GAMMA mortars (420 mm), three Karl-Gerât mortars (600 mm), along with the surreal 800 mm “Gustav” cannon that could fire shells in some cases heavier than seven tons—an explosive payload more than three times larger than those carried on the later V-2 guided missiles. The Germans also had twelve large but more quickly firing and less awkward 280 mm coastal howitzers and an additional twelve 14-inch howitzers.⁴⁵

Yet once again German gigantism—the huge mortars and rail guns required thousands of man-hours of labor to assemble the platforms and fire shells—still could not substitute for a messy ground assault. The final victory would eventually cost the Germans over twenty-five thousand casualties, and a month’s delay for the Eleventh Army in participating in Case Blue. No accurate records exist of how many Soviet defenders were killed or taken prisoner when the city fell on July 4. Of the more than a hundred thousand Russian soldiers garrisoning the stronghold, only a few, mostly officers, escaped. The bastion and indeed the city itself were left in rubble, hit by more than thirty thousand tons of artillery shells, the largest German bombardment of the war.⁴⁶

The Germans never fully benefited from Sevastopol as either a major supply or naval base. The prolonged absence of Manstein’s army from the Case Blue offensive was sorely felt by autumn. Sevastopol played no real role in the later German offensives of 1942 or during the Wehrmacht’s retreats of 1943–1944. About two years after its capture, in May 1944, surrounded German and Romanian forces hastily abandoned Sevastopol by sea and air.⁴⁷

One of the most brutal and impressively conducted sieges of World War II resulted in almost no strategic advantage for the victors.⁴⁸

UNTIL 1940, GERMANY had never enjoyed direct access to the Atlantic Ocean. As a result, its wartime strategies in both World War I and II were obsessed with the capture and defense of such major and well-protected harbors on the western coasts of France and Belgium as La Rochelle, Saint-Nazaire, Lorient, Brest, Saint-Malo, Cherbourg, Le Havre, and Antwerp. The notorious 1914 German Septemberprogramm memo of the philosopher Kurt Riezler, which had floated possible terms to be imposed on Western Europeans in anticipation that they would lose World War I, had included provisions for German annexation of northern French coastal territory, an apparently ingrained strategic desire of the later German Reich.⁴⁹

After the June 1940 defeat of France, Admiral Karl Doenitz began to redeploy most of his U-boat fleet in what would soon be fortified pens at Brest, Lorient, Saint-Nazaire, La Pallice (La Rochelle), and Bordeaux. German submarines were freed from the bottleneck in the North and Baltic Seas, with easy access to the convoy routes of the Atlantic and Mediterranean. The reinforced concrete U-boat shelters at Lorient were huge, self-contained, and immune from almost any imagined Allied attack.⁵⁰

As the later 1944 Allied invasion of Western Europe loomed, Hitler was intent on denying the British and Americans use of these key deepwater ports. As early as March 23, 1942, in fear that the recent entry of the United States into the war might lead to an early Allied landing in France, Hitler had ordered all the key harbors on the Atlantic to serve as the linchpins of a new Atlantic Wall. None was ever to be surrendered: “Fortified areas and strongpoints will be defended to the last man. They must never be forced to surrender from lack of ammunition, rations, or water.” The Calais area—given its proximity to Great Britain, the most likely focus of any Allied amphibious invasion—was so heavily fortified that early on British planners looked for alternative landing sites, while deluding the Germans into constantly investing even further sums and manpower in its defense.⁵¹

The rationale of the German Atlantic Wall strategy was not necessarily that thousands of fortifications built on the beaches and cliffs would repel invaders at the shore. Rather, if the Allies survived the beaches and moved inland, the French coastal ports were to be turned into self-contained killing traps. Continuing the work of the French before the war, the Germans invested the harbor fortresses with reinforced concrete bunkers, coastal artillery, and underground supply depots, and surrounded them with vast mine fields on land and at sea. Their capture would become so costly that the Allies simply would either avoid besieging them, or, if they succeeded in taking the harbors, the invaders would find them ruined to the point of being useless. Either way, the Allied expeditionary armies would then die on the vine for want of supplies.⁵²

For the most part, the Germans were both successful in denying the Allies use of these harbors and unsuccessful in stopping the Allied advance. In the initial weeks after the D-Day invasion, few ports supplemented the two Allied Mulberry piers (the American-designated Mulberry A was destroyed in a June 19 storm) that were towed to Normandy and erected three days after the landings in expectation of initial fierce German defense of the French and Belgian ports. Until the November 1944 opening of Antwerp, logistics plagued the Allies and caused a marked slowdown in the British and American advances.⁵³

Sieges of the Atlantic ports fell into two broad categories: the few harbors that the Allies attempted to storm in 1944 (and in every case eventually succeeded in capturing), and the rest that they bypassed, given that taking a likely ruined port was soon discovered not to be worth the effort. Cherbourg, in the Cotentin Peninsula (along with Le Havre) was the largest deepwater harbor nearest the Normandy landings. Invasion planners naturally deemed Cherbourg’s docks critical to fuel the post-invasion advance, even after the Americans showed brilliant ad hoc abilities in July to unload up to fifteen thousand tons per day directly onto Omaha Beach during low tides.

The Americans made rapid progress in advancing from the area around Utah Beach to surround Cherbourg. Indeed, the port surrendered on June 29, just three weeks after the D-Day landings. The victory immediately gave some hope that the other Atlantic ports might quickly follow suit. Yet the German navy commander at Cherbourg, Rear Admiral Walter Hennecke, had so wrecked the harbor infrastructure and docks—an action that earned him the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross—that the port could not be used to bring in freight until mid-August, and then never in quantities that had been earlier envisioned.⁵⁴

General Patton’s Third Army, activated on August 1, 1944, almost two months after the Normandy landings, was originally assigned to capture the Brittany ports to the south and west, especially the key harbor at Brest. Yet after the unexpected Allied breakout during Operation Cobra and the chance of trapping an entire German Army Group at Falaise, Patton split his forces. Most of Third Army headed east, while VIII Corps was assigned the capture of Brest, in the opposite direction from Germany.

The rapidly advancing Americans thought that they might catch the Germans unawares and grab the more distant Brest within a week, and with it solve much of the growing Allied supply dilemma in a single bold swoop. But General Troy Middleton of VIII Corps soon discovered that the Germans predictably had already beefed up Brest’s natural defenses, stockpiled vast amounts of ammunition, and were busy destroying the harbor facilities. The fighting soon degenerated into house-to-house skirmishing and a siege assault on the inner massive walls of the old city, as each side reverted to the role of medieval besiegers and besieged.

More than six weeks passed before over twenty-thousand surviving Germans surrendered Brest on September 19. But the Allied effort was largely for naught. The port facilities had been blasted into ruin. By the time the harbor was repaired, Brest had already been rendered largely irrelevant by the impending capture of the far larger and more strategically located port at Antwerp to the north and its growing distance from the advancing American front. It probably would have been far more effective for the Germans to have initially blown up the harbor, and then evacuated the garrison so it could join in the defense of Normandy.

After the dual debacles at Brest and Cherbourg, the Allies de facto conceded that the nihilistic strategy of the Germans made it hard to justify the costs of frontal assaults. As a result, they began skipping further sieges of many of the coastal ports. Until Antwerp was ready for shipping in November 1944, the Allies continued to bring in supplies at the sole British Mulberry, directly onto the Normandy beaches, and, after August, at Marseilles (an undeniable dividend of the Operation Dragoon invasion of southern France), but still continued to grow short of supplies. In ironic fashion, the Allies also figured that German strategy could be turned on its head: thousands of German troops could be bottled up defending port cities at precisely the time when Germany’s fading resistance was in desperate need of such manpower.⁵⁵

After the messy fighting in Brest, the next key port, La Rochelle, was cut off in early September and blockaded. But otherwise the diehard garrison was left alone until the German 265th Division surrendered the city at war’s end on May 8, 1945. Saint-Nazaire and Lorient followed the same “Atlantic Pocket” strategy of La Rochelle: both were surrounded by the Allies by mid-August 1944, but never stormed. Saint-Nazaire, in fact, was the last German-held French city to capitulate at the war’s end.

The strategically important ports at Saint-Malo and Le Havre were belatedly besieged in September 1944. Both were among the most formidable strongpoints in the Germans’ Atlantic Wall, and their defenses had been vastly upgraded to the point of making them nearly invulnerable to the effects of naval gunfire, land artillery, and aerial bombing. Nevertheless, the Allies now tried the tactic of burying the citadels under massive bombardments, in hopes that they could avoid the losses incurred at Cherbourg and Brest, and still rebuild the harbor facilities out of the rubble. The first hope came to fruition; the second did not. Saint-Malo was attacked in early August 1944 and immediately proved unassailable, prompting a horrendous incendiary bombing that ruined the city. When the Americans entered the harbor on August 17, the historic old port was little more than rubble.

Le Havre was likewise literally reduced to ruins. Its surviving garrison of twelve thousand Germans was captured in just three days after the final assault (September 10–12). Although the British losses were light, the port was left in shambles and of little value in supplying the last ten months of the war effort. General Montgomery considered the northernmost French Channel ports at Boulogne, Calais, and Dunkirk critical to supply the advance of the British army and far easier to besiege. Yet in the end, they too mostly followed the prior frustrating paradox of either being bypassed until the war’s end (Dunkirk, September 15, 1944–May 9, 1945) or subjected to so much firepower as to be rendered useless. Even those few ports that were captured in September 1944 and taken with only moderate losses (e.g., Boulogne, September 17–22, and Calais, September 22–October 1) brought little advantage to the Allies, given the wreckage of their harbors.

Much of the Allied confusion over whether to storm or bypass the French ports resulted from the uncertain status of Antwerp, less than two hundred miles as the crow flies from central London. Along with Rotterdam (not liberated until May 5, 1945), it had traditionally served as one of the two great European harbors on the Atlantic. At first, it seemed that with the capture of both Antwerp proper and Brussels in August 1944 the Allies now had less need for the French ports. Antwerp was intact. Its huge size and proximity to the industrially rich German Ruhr (little over 120 miles distant) offered hopes that the Allies might still reach Germany before winter 1944. But General Montgomery had failed to secure the Scheldt estuaries in early September. And without control of these long approaches to the harbor, ships could not in safety reach the otherwise secure docks at Antwerp. A costly and tragically unnecessary battle then ensued from October 2 to November 8 to free up the estuaries and gain unfettered access to the Belgian port. Only after November 12 were the majority of Allied supplies able to pass through Antwerp, largely due to the heroism of the Canadian attackers. With the full use of Antwerp, and the invaluable harbor at Marseilles on the Mediterranean, the once-pressing need either to storm French harbors to the south or to ensure the rapid repair of those already in Allied hands mostly passed.⁵⁶

All the German coastal garrisons—at one point encompassing over four hundred thousand troops—were trapped. And all would eventually surrender. But key questions were never answered about the wisdom of besieging them: how quickly, at what cost, and to whose profit? The Allied besiegers, in efforts to gain the ports without massive losses, were faced with dilemmas, whether immediately and at great risk to assault the harbor fortresses, or to bomb them first into rubble, or to blockade these strongpoints and bypass them altogether.

The proper answer hinged on intangibles, and again was never properly addressed, explaining why the single surviving artificial Mulberry harbor remained in service for eight months until early 1945. If the harbors were rendered useless to the Allies, their garrisons were in turn rendered useless to the eventual defense of the German homeland. General Rundstedt was on record that he thought Hitler’s stand-and-die orders doomed tens of thousands of German soldiers in the ports who otherwise might have offered key manpower in defense of the Reich, “We subsequently lost 120,000 in these concrete posts. When we withdrew from France I always considered this to be a tragic waste of useful manpower. As for the Atlantic Wall, it had to be seen to be believed. It had no depth and little surface. It was sheer humbug.” According to the wartime Berlin diaries of the White Russian aristocrat Marie Vassiltchikov, the sham fortifications apparently had been sold to the German public as a viable obstacle to the Allies. On June 6, 1944, she noted, “The long-awaited D-Day! The Allies have landed in Normandy. We had been told so much about the famous Atlantikwall and its supposedly impregnable defences; now we shall see!”⁵⁷

ISLAND CITADELS OFTEN required the attacker to undertake amphibious operations or to build a land bridge from the mainland, as Alexander the Great had done to capture the island city of Tyre (332 BC). Yet the fate of these fortresses usually hinged not so much on the nature of the fortifications and the size of the garrison, as on the relative strategic situation at the time and the nature of the defenders: trapped Axis and Russian forces rarely ever gave up, British and Americans often did. The degree of naval and air superiority in the vicinity made resupply either reliable or impossible, and so the redoubt became either a fortress or a tomb.

Tiny Malta (just 100 square miles in size, with 250,000 people in 1940) should never have survived, just as it should never have withstood the overwhelming forces of the Ottoman sultan Suleiman the Magnificent that failed to capture the Christian stronghold in 1565. On June 10, 1940, modern Malta was first attacked by Mussolini’s air forces not long after Italy opportunistically declared war on the Allies. Over three thousand Italian and German bombing missions were to follow against what Il Duce called “Malta nostra.” Within a year, a bombed-out Malta was reduced to a lonely, isolated Allied island in an Axis lake. The northern Mediterranean coast—Spain, France, Italy, Yugoslavia, Greece, and Turkey—was either in Axis hands or nominally neutral but pro-German. In mid-1942, Rommel was forcing the British out of Libya and back to Egypt. The African shoreline was still mostly either in German or Italian hands, or left to the collaborationist Vichy French.⁵⁸

The other historical stepping-stones of invasion from Europe to Africa and vice versa—Crete and Sicily—were likewise Axis held. So were Corsica and Sardinia. After the collapse of France in June 1940, and the extinction of the French Mediterranean fleet, Malta was without secure sea-lanes. In terms of relative size, the Italian fleet now outnumbered vulnerable British Mediterranean naval forces that lacked air superiority any time they dared to steam between Gibraltar and Alexandria. Even before the French collapse, the British and French had pondered abandoning Malta altogether. Britain already had lost almost all hope, given that Malta’s air force of three obsolete biplane Gloster Gladiators—dubbed Faith, Hope, and Charity—provided no deterrent. Almost every major event of the Mediterranean war between 1940 and 1942—the loss of the French fleet; the control of Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia by Vichy France; the entrance of Italy into the war; the Axis invasions of North Africa; the establishment of enemy bases in Sicily and Crete; the appearance of German U-boats in the Mediterranean—made things seem even more hopeless for Malta.⁵⁹

The island’s formidable ramparts had always required an invader to obtain regional naval supremacy, and to have adequate supplies to ensure an amphibious landing, blockade, and occupation. That was difficult in any age, as the Ottomans in 1565 had learned after their failed efforts against the outnumbered defenses of the Knights Hospitaller. Even modern air and naval power did not really change that age-old calculus. While the Germans and Italians nearly destroyed the air forces of Malta, regular British aircraft resupply by carriers ensured that the Luftwaffe never quite achieved aerial supremacy. The Axis never landed any troops on the island. For all his braggadocio, Mussolini had no serious plans of invasion after his dramatic declaration of war.⁶⁰

There were two air sieges of Malta. The first was Italian led, framed around Mussolini’s efforts in 1940 to secure Libya. Despite the initial inability of the British to supply the island with modern warplanes or to base capital ships safely at Valletta, the Italians failed utterly in all their half-hearted efforts between June and December 1940. Their naval, air, and land forces lacked sufficient fuel, supplies, and expertise systematically to bomb the city into submission, defeat the British fleet, or land forces on the island. The Italian navy had neither independent air capability nor expertise at night operations; despite some heroic efforts, it would not win any of its three early major encounters with the British fleet at Taranto, Calabria, and Cape Matapan. As long as British-held Gibraltar and Suez governed both the entry and exit of the Mediterranean Sea, it was nearly impossible for either Germany or Japan to send sizable forces to join the Italian war effort in the Mediterranean.⁶¹

Malta’s brief reprieve from Mussolini mostly ended in February 1941 when Erwin Rommel started operations in Libya with his Afrika Korps to save the stalled Italians. German bases in Sicily (just 90 miles from Malta) and, by June 1942, in Tripoli (220 miles distant) meant that succor for Malta from the west was nearly cut off, while German-held Crete interdicted aid from the endangered British in Egypt.

Malta was saved by unforeseen events. The successful airborne conquest of Crete (May 20–June 1, 1941) proved so costly (nearly 7,000 German casualties) that Hitler was reluctant ever again to stage a Mediterranean parachute assault. Nonetheless it seemed inexplicable that the Führer, who by the end of 1941 had sent hundreds of thousands to their deaths in a foolhardy invasion of Russia, would not dare to risk a fraction of such forces in a much more likely victory at Malta, which had far fewer defenders, was far smaller than Crete, and was far more strategically important in terms of transporting supplies southward by rail from northern Europe and on by ship to North Africa.

The Germans lacked not only aircraft carriers but also any major surface ships in the Mediterranean, and were not eager to send U-boats near Gibraltar. After the Allies’ invasion of Sicily (July 1943) and even before the Operation Dragoon landings in southern France (August 1944), U-boat activity sputtered and then ceased almost entirely. While nearly half a million tons of Allied merchant shipping were lost to U-boats in the Mediterranean, including twenty-four Royal Navy ships, Allied east-west sea-lanes in the Mediterranean between Alexandria and Gibraltar were never completely cut off, even though they were far longer and more tenuous than the north-south Axis traffic between southern Europe and North Africa.⁶²

Finally, the arrival of the new US ally meant that Allied naval and amphibious forces would be in North Africa by November 2, 1942, just eleven months after both Germany and Italy had declared war on America. Growing Allied power would finally end Malta’s isolation and eventually doom U-boat operations and the occasional breakout of the Italian fleet. The US carrier Wasp had already helped bring additional Spitfire fighter aircraft to Malta on two occasions in spring 1942. One of the reasons why the Axis failed in North Africa was their control of only two (Crete and Sicily) of the five modern Mediterranean choke points (the remaining being the more strategically positioned Gibraltar, Malta, and Suez) that were critical for supply between Europe and North Africa. Had Hitler taken Gibraltar, Malta would have been doomed.

Malta-based ships and planes eventually took a heavy toll on Axis convoys. As the war changed with the entry of the Soviet Union and then the United States into the conflict, the logistics of the Mediterranean also radically shifted. By late 1942 over a quarter of all Axis supplies to North Africa were being destroyed by Malta-based planes and ships. In the fighting over and around Malta, over five hundred Axis planes were lost. More than two thousand Axis merchant ships were sunk, and over seventeen thousand sailors and airmen were killed.

The British also paid a high price to keep and strengthen Malta: two carriers, one battleship, two cruisers, nineteen destroyers, and almost forty submarines. Controversy still exists over whether it was Malta-based forces, or the coming of the Americans and the huge Allied fleet in November 1942, or the continued German drain on the Eastern Front that explained the disintegration of Axis supply lines. But without Malta, the Allies would have had little reliable air deterrent in the central Mediterranean. The Axis generals were right that the survival of Malta helped finish their efforts in North Africa. The bombed-out ruins of Malta were once again more proof that in the landscape of twentieth-century siegecraft, air power could level a city without guaranteeing either its capture or extinction.⁶³

SINGAPORE, THE BRITISH island bastion at the tip of the Malay Peninsula, was often dubbed the Gibraltar of the Pacific. But it was hardly that, either in terms of strategic importance or impregnability. Although the base was praised as a showcase British port fortress, and likewise autonomous from the surrounding Malaysian mainland, Singapore was no strategic choke point. To enter the Mediterranean from the west, every ship had to pass within about eight miles of Gibraltar’s defenses. In contrast, there were ways of navigating between the Australian and Asian continents, and the Pacific and Indian Oceans, without entering the straits near Singapore. After the Japanese capture, the Allies simply bypassed the fortress for the entire duration of the war, apparently finding the Japanese bases there no obstacle to dismantling the Japanese overseas empire.⁶⁴

As was the case with many pre–World War II island fortresses, Singapore reflected the age of the battleship. Its five huge 15-inch naval guns, armed with large stocks of armor-piercing shells to be aimed at incoming capital ships, were designed to face seaward, into an increasingly empty ocean. The huge batteries could bar the approach of battleships like the Yamato or Musashi that never came. But they could not so easily stop a more likely landward attack from the mainland or naval air attacks from distant carriers or fighters based in Southeast Asia. Its fighter forces, like those at Malta, were both out of date and too few. Depression-era Britain had apparently determined that it could only protect its home waters and have a respectable presence in the Mediterranean if it mostly shorted its Pacific bases, and Singapore in particular.⁶⁵

All that said, Singapore need not have fallen, at least not as quickly as it did in February 1942. Initially, it was resupplied with some relatively modern Hawker Hurricane fighter planes by British carrier forces. The overall commander of the fortress’s defenses, Lieutenant General Arthur Percival, a decorated veteran of World War I with notable interwar service, had at least a hundred thousand Dominion defenders, almost a third of them British and Australians.

In contrast, Japanese general Tomoyuki Yamashita—who would be executed by Allied courts for war crimes after the war—headed down the Malay Peninsula with only thirty-five thousand Japanese attackers, slogging the arduous 650-mile trek from Thailand at the rate of ten miles per day. By the time they neared the island fortress, they had been worn out by the jungle and harassing attacks. Yamashita’s forces approached the city with only a fourth of the numbers of the defenders, who were still relatively battle ready. In the history of siegecraft, such numerically inferior attackers almost never successfully stormed a fortress city. Those who tried, from the Athenians at Syracuse to the Germans at Moscow, usually met with disaster. Yet Yamashita prevailed.

Morale explains much of his success. For most of December 1941 and February 1942, Yamashita insidiously beat British forces back to Singapore, a bewildering experience for the once confident Dominion troops, who had come to fear the jungle (and had bizarrely assumed that the largely urban Japanese were better equipped, as Asians, to navigate through it). The appearance of Japanese air forces, especially Mitsubishi fighters and two-engine bombers, added to British insecurities. The Japanese pilots usually bested the dwindling number of British Hawker Hurricanes that had been flown in as reinforcements, more than two years after these planes had played such a prominent role in saving Britain from the German Luftwaffe. In short order and despite heroics, the fortress’s obsolete original fleet of Swordfish and Wildebeeste bombers and Brewster Buffalo fighters all proved veritable “flying coffins.” The British were stunned that they had already matched the supposedly indomitable Luftwaffe, and yet with two additional years of experience were ill-prepared for the supposedly less-sophisticated Japanese.⁶⁶

Inexplicably, on the eve of the outbreak of the Pacific war, the British—who had staged a brilliant naval air assault on Italian battleships at Taranto over a year earlier, and had just sunk the Bismarck in late May 1941 in part due to carrier aircraft slowing down the German battleship’s escape—had sent to Singapore two frontline ships (Force Z) without air cover. The almost new battleship HMS Prince of Wales and the old but still powerful battle cruiser HMS Repulse, along with four destroyers, might have proved formidable with 14- and 15-inch batteries against Japanese capital ships in a classical engagement like the Battle of Jutland.

Yet three days after Pearl Harbor, both ships were blasted apart about a hundred miles north of Singapore by at least eighty-two Indochina-based Japanese torpedo and dive bombers—a horror that led to subsequent British despair in holding the base itself. Much of Singapore’s defenses rested on fantasies that the British were innately superior to the Japanese, and that their ships and planes were better built and manned. In fact, just the opposite was true, given superb first-generation Zero pilots and the fact that by February 1942 Japan had the largest aircraft carrier fleet in the world. The British, who had invented the aircraft carrier in 1912, had forgotten their own axiom that battleships without air cover were negligible assets. It proved tragic irony that Admiral Sir Tom Phillips, one of the few British high officers who had not appreciated the vulnerability of capital ships to air power, was killed by Japanese bombers and torpedo planes. Singapore was quickly exposed as a sad paradox: a huge naval base without a single major warship.⁶⁷

Japanese soldiers suddenly went from backward Asiatics to Pacific supermen. Lieutenant General Percival came to believe that his forces simply could not stop the advance of the implacable Japanese on land, in the air, or by sea, and that there was not much point in fighting further once he ran out of space to retreat. In truth, by the time Yamashita had isolated the island of Singapore from the mainland and crossed over on February 8, his army was nearly exhausted by the jungle and sick. Yet once the Japanese easily made their way over the narrow channel and landed on the island city-state, it took only a week to force a British collapse. When Percival surrendered, British-led forces had suffered only five thousand killed or wounded in the defense of the island. Over one hundred thousand soldiers of various sorts were still able-bodied, equipped with over seven hundred artillery pieces, and field guns.

A distant and disheartened Winston Churchill found all this disgraceful. Although he had unwisely allowed Force Z to proceed to Singapore without the aircraft carrier HMS Illustrious (disabled in the Caribbean), and foolishly sought to defend Singapore by sending only piecemeal reinforcements, he nevertheless later wrote that the loss of his favorite ships depressed him as few other events of the war: “In the war I never received a more direct shock.… As I turned over and twisted in bed the full horror of the news sank in upon me.”

Churchill famously remarked of the surrender that it was “the worst disaster and largest capitulation in British history.” In truth, it was not quite the worst British military catastrophe (here one can think of a long litany, such as Yorktown, New Orleans, Passchendaele, Gallipoli, the Somme, or Dunkirk), but rather the most humiliating surrender. Apparently, Churchill had reckoned that the British at Singapore might fight like the heroic besieged in Russia, where, for example at Leningrad, over twenty times more Russian civilians and soldiers would die in saving their city than those at Singapore did in losing it.⁶⁸

In Percival’s defense, Singapore was a colonial metropolis that had grown with refugees to at least half a million residents, and whose food and water supplies were finite. He apparently believed that continued resistance was not only futile, but threatened the survival of thousands of civilians. If not Yamashita’s force today, a greater Japanese expeditionary force would arrive in the near future, given that the chances of a British or American rescue fleet on the horizon were nil.

The British might not have surrendered so readily had they been suspicious of the far worse specter of Japanese savagery to follow for both civilians and their own prisoners. Well over fifty thousand Chinese were subsequently executed by the secret police of the victorious Japanese, especially during the infamous Sook Ching Massacres. Few Europeans or Americans this early in the war quite fathomed that their own capitulation to the Japanese ensured the slaughter of thousands of Asians, who were condemned by their friendship to the enemies of the so-called Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.⁶⁹

Percival—pale, thin, bucktoothed, non-photogenic—may have been easily caricatured after his ignominious surrender as a deer-in-the-headlights fossil, but there was also truth to his image as a British colonial apparatchik with no clue of the ferocity or modern resources of his enemy, and bewildered that his race and nationality no longer conferred any inherent deference. He seemed to have thought that relative power in the East had ossified around 1920, and had no clue of what the Japanese had achieved in air power and naval power twenty years later. As for the siege itself, Percival had not in any serious fashion fortified the island’s coastline. He had misjudged the location of the main thrust of the enemy attack, stubbornly convinced the Japanese would land on Singapore’s northeastern shore. Nor did he have much idea of the symbolic importance of Singapore’s survival in steadying British forces in the Pacific during the dark days of early 1942.⁷⁰

To be fair to Percival, it is also difficult to imagine a British-held Singapore surviving much longer than did Corregidor. If the American stronghold in the Philippines was more isolated, it was also a more defensible fortress, and characterized by better leadership, higher troop morale, and far more effective integration of native troops. Yet it also fell just three months later.

Britain’s “Singapore Strategy” of predicating forward British Pacific defense on the great naval base was inherently flawed, given the paucity of the actual forces at its disposal. Preliminary prewar discussions between the Americans and the British concerning forward basing some US ships at Singapore failed due to mutual suspicions and shared ill-preparedness. But even had Singapore hosted a greater Allied surface fleet, the idea that one or two British and American carriers would have defeated the finest and largest carrier fleet in the world in the first days of World War II in the Pacific was unlikely.⁷¹

At the time of Singapore’s fall, there were only four major active Allied capital ships—three American carriers and one battleship—operating in the eastern Pacific. By late 1942 only one surviving American carrier was left operational. All available Allied fighters were mostly inferior in number and quality to the Japanese. Tactical blunders and strategic obtuseness had doomed Singapore; yet there was truth to Percival’s complaint, when a prisoner of the Japanese: “I lost because I never had a chance.” Singapore could have been saved for a while in 1942, but it is hard to see how it could have survived for long, given the dominance of the Imperial Japanese Navy.⁷²

Ironically, for the duration of the war, the Japanese found little strategic advantage in holding Singapore other than its propaganda value. There were closer bases for staging operations against India and Burma, and far better ones for defending Japan. Other than serving as an Axis submarine base, and its chief strategic importance as a depot for invaluable Malayan tin and rubber (then 60 percent of the world’s supply), Singapore proved a Japanese Norway, tying down thousands of occupation troops in an increasing backwater of the war. The advancing Americans and British in 1944–1945 bypassed it altogether to focus on islands closer to the Japanese mainland. Singapore, in the manner of the French Atlantic ports, did not surrender until September 1945. The British found it much as they had left it in February 1942, albeit without tens of thousands of civilians who had been executed during the brutal Japanese occupation.⁷³

IN CONTRAST TO Singapore, the Philippines were closer to both China and Japan. Manila was just seven hundred miles from Hong Kong, and nineteen hundred miles distant from Tokyo itself. The islands were key to the Japanese naval supply routes of its envisioned new Pacific Empire. For the Japanese in early 1942, capturing a huge American base was strategically and even psychologically far more critical than acquiring British Singapore.

Corregidor (Fort Mills) was the largest and most important of the four small islands that the Americans had fortified (along with Forts Drum, Hughes, and Frank) to guard the entrance to the vast Manila Bay and to ensure veritable administrative control of the entire Philippine archipelago. On the eve of the Pearl Harbor attacks, the American general in charge of the Philippines, the legendary Douglas MacArthur, had marshaled about seventy thousand troops, including some twenty-five thousand Americans. The bulk of his forces were stationed on the island of Luzon, ringed around the Philippine capital at Manila. Unlike Malaya, the Philippines had already been granted a transition to independence and the Americans had little experience as a colonial power. The result was a closer relationship between native forces and foreign occupiers.

Unlike Singapore’s defenses, MacArthur’s air arm was more formidable, with some 107 newer model P-40 fighters and thirty-five B-17 bombers, as well as additional but admittedly obsolete aircraft. But MacArthur also assumed that his more forward forces might be hit in any future war well before the American fleet at Pearl Harbor was endangered, and thus could be resupplied from Hawaii. The brilliance of the Japanese Pearl Harbor attack was in first striking the supposedly safest of American Pacific bases, and the nerve and supply center for the more exposed outposts of US naval and land power.

On the first day of the war, Major General Lewis Brereton’s air forces in the Philippines were caught on the ground. Eighteen B-17s (51 percent of his force) and sixty-three P-40s (59 percent) were destroyed, nearly wrecking American air effectiveness before the siege had even begun. By mid-December 1941, due to constant aerial combat and evacuations of the remaining bombers to Australia, the Americans had little else but antiquated P-35 fighters. The same story proved true of the Philippines’ naval forces. Japanese bombing quickly took out most of the supplies and (often defective) torpedoes essential for the effectiveness of the islands’ twenty-nine submarines, which were quickly redeployed to Australia.⁷⁴

After the initial Japanese landing on December 22, north of Manila, the forty-three-thousand-man army of General Masaharu Homma (executed by firing squad for war crimes after the war rather than hanged, as was General Yamashita, the conqueror of Singapore) quickly captured Manila. In such a worst-case scenario, the Americans had counted on a rugged fighting retreat through the Bataan Peninsula and the denial of all entry into Manila Bay. In the unfortunate words of an initially overconfident General MacArthur that would haunt him later, “Homma may have the bottle, but I have the cork.” In fact, MacArthur was inside the bottle, and Homma had the stopper.⁷⁵

For a short siege, Corregidor (“The Rock”) was almost invincible. Its mere 1,735 acres bristled with fifty-six heavy artillery weapons, anchored by two 12-inch guns that could hit approaching ships at a seventeen-mile distance with nine-hundred-pound projectiles. Even more impressive were 12-inch mortars in sunken pits that had greater utility against enemies on the mainland. The other smaller island fortresses were likewise protected by massive reinforced concrete bunkers—and, in the case of Fort Drum, even larger 14-inch guns. Such ossified weapons, however, were hardly effective in a new age of air power, mechanized assault, and mobile batteries. Instead, as was true of Singapore, the American big guns reflected the defensive and often colonial mentality of a distant and bygone age. The usual turn-of-the-century threats to colonial outposts were the dreadnoughts of other Western fleets, and not overland attacks by Asian ground troops.⁷⁶

Even before evacuations from Bataan, there were over five thousand troops manning the fortress. Corregidor was a veritable fortress with a sixty-mile labyrinth of underground tunnels and an array of interconnected passages, and roads, and even a twenty-mile electric trolley line. Lateral passages were stocked with food, ammunition, and gasoline. But like the British defenses at Singapore that had fallen just weeks earlier, the nature and deployment of Corregidor’s four-decade-old batteries were ill suited against shelling and bombing, or against invasion launched from its rear on the Philippine mainland.

There were other problems also similar to Singapore’s. While the larger batteries were ample, most of their ammunition was armor-piercing shells intended to shred warships, not dug-in infantry. And the typically flatter trajectories of many of the bigger guns were not as suitable for hitting nearby land targets. Corregidor had never been fully fortified and armed in anticipation of air attack. The two largest guns, for example, were still exposed on concrete pads and appeared from the air as veritable shooting targets. Corregidor was the land version of hugely impressive but largely irrelevant battleships such as the Bismarck, Tirpitz, Musashi, and Yamato.

Unlike conditions at Malta, there were not to be friendly fleets, much less convoys, anywhere in the surrounding Philippine seas to resupply the bastion for an extended defense. Any rare attempts at supplying Corregidor by sea usually failed to pierce the Japanese naval blockade. Pearl Harbor was over five thousand miles distant, and still in shock from the December 7 attacks. By January 1942 the Japanese enjoyed de facto air and naval superiority over most of the Pacific west of Hawaii.⁷⁷

Inflicting some twenty thousand Japanese casualties after four months of fighting may have justified the Americans’ dogged defense. Yet had Corregidor survived longer, there was still no immediate likelihood that American naval, air, and land forces would have broken through to save the islands. That task would require three more years of American preparation and overwhelming air and naval supremacy.

The Philippines were so deeply embedded in the American psyche—partly from the habit of playing the neocolonial occupier after the post-Spanish-American insurrection, partly due to a costly put down of Philippine insurrections, partly in self-congratulatory pride from shepherding the Philippines to its promised independence—that both its defense and later liberation transcended strict military logic. At the beginning of the war, Dwight Eisenhower, who had served as an assistant military liaison to the Philippines under General Douglas MacArthur, remarked of the US obligations to the Philippines: “In spite of difficulties, risks, and fierce competition for every asset we had, a great nation such as ours, no matter how unprepared for war, could not afford cold-bloodedly to turn its back upon our Filipino wards, and the many thousand Americans, troops and civilians in the Filipino Archipelago. We had to do whatever was remotely possible for the hapless islands, particularly by air support and by providing vital supplies.”⁷⁸

Once Bataan fell, Corregidor’s population swelled from nine thousand to over fourteen thousand. It was almost impossible to feed the large number of noncombatant civilians. The fortress’s tiny earthen runway was too small and exposed for reliable airlifts, even if there had been relief from the nearby Philippine islands not yet occupied by the Japanese. When the fortress fell on May 4–5, 1942, after a veritable four-month siege, over eleven thousand captives were dispersed to Japanese prison camps all over Asia and to the Japanese mainland. Somewhere around a thousand of the defenders were killed, and another thousand wounded.

CORREGIDOR, LIKE SINGAPORE, accurately reflected the larger truth about the sieges of World War II. British, American, and Italian forces more often surrendered their positions rather than face annihilation. In contrast, Japanese and Russian defenders, often Germans as well, were more likely to resist to the end. No side had a reputation for a particular mastery of siegecraft in the manner of the Athenians during the age of Pericles, the imperial Romans, or the Ottomans. Instead, brute force, not art, determined whether a fortress held out or fell, and the side with the most bombs, shells, guns, and soldiers—and the will to use them without worry over civilian casualties—usually won.⁷⁹

Sieges, like all other modes of war, were also mirrors of the ebb and flow of the World War II battlefield. After 1943 the Axis did not conduct a single major successful siege, in contrast to a prior record of successes at Corregidor, Singapore, Sevastopol, and Tobruk. Why Singapore and Corregidor fell, while Malta survived, is not explained entirely by the prewar neglect of these fortresses’ defenses, given that Malta was poorly garrisoned through much of 1939 and 1940. That said, its greater proximity to Britain allowed eventual reinforcements impossible in the Pacific, where the Japanese fleet posed a far greater comparative threat than the Italian in the Mediterranean. When the Axis or Allies were ascendant, they were more likely to win sieges, and when the war seemed to go poorly, then both were more likely to lose them.

Completing full encirclement also increased the chances of a successful siege. Leningrad survived largely because of the open pathway through Lake Ladoga. The Russian presence on the eastern bank of the Volga made it difficult for the Germans to completely surround Stalingrad. The Germans never reached the eastward perimeter of Moscow. Equally important were the differences in morale, expertise, and will-power. For example, all things being equal, the Japanese probably would have taken Malta, while the Italians could have taken neither Singapore nor Corregidor.⁸⁰

The democracies rarely talked of defending a city or garrison “to the last man.” When Churchill hinted of such sacrifice for those trapped at Singapore or Tobruk, no one took him too seriously, as they did similar orders from Hitler, Stalin, and the Japanese militarists. No Russian supreme commander perhaps would have been ordered out of an iconic Leningrad or Stalingrad with his family in the manner MacArthur was directed to leave Corregidor.⁸¹

Selecting the proper target counted a great deal. Deft German diplomacy and concessions might have won the Spanish over to a joint attack on Gibraltar at least before November 1942. Had the Japanese bypassed Singapore and the Philippines and used those assets first to take Pearl Harbor, they would have done far more damage to the American Pacific Fleet and allowed a breathing space to consolidate occupation and exploitation of resource-rich islands. Moscow, not Stalingrad, was the better prize. Who occupied Tobruk was not nearly as important as who occupied Malta, Gibraltar, Alexandria, and Suez.

Why we speak of a siege of Malta or Leningrad, but not commonly of a siege of Metz or Aachen, may depend on intangibles, such as the target’s relative emblematic status, its special relationship to the battlefield, the tactical and strategic consequences of a siege, when the fighting occurred, and who were the combatants. The war was in the balance at Malta, not so much at Aachen by October 21, 1944, whose fate was predetermined when the Americans neared the city. The world knew of the iconic cities of Leningrad and Moscow, less so of Metz.

The canard in World War II that permanent, fixed, and linear defenses rarely could withstand attack proved largely true. Despite the formidable reputation of the great barrier walls, all of them were breached, sometimes easily so. The Maginot Line (1940), the Atlantic Wall (1944), and the Siegfried Line (1945) were parachuted over, bypassed, outflanked, or simply plowed through. Had Hitler invested as much thought and expense in taking Stalingrad or Leningrad as he had in building the Atlantic and West Walls, or had the French spent as much on investments in their armored armies as on the Maginot Line, the early course of the war might have turned out somewhat differently.⁸²

Following World War II, there was once again the expectation in the age of guided missiles and motorized armies that besiegers would no longer attempt to batter their way into strongholds and cities. Yet both successful and failed blockades remained as common as ever, from a surrounded Berlin (1948–1949) that survived and Dien Bien Phu (1954) that did not, to the unconquerable defenders at Khe Sanh (1968), Dubrovnik (1991–1992), and Sarajevo (1992–1996).

The sieges of World War II remind us that while the technologies of the attackers and the attacked had changed from antiquity, their respective aims have always remained the same. Because most government, industry, commerce, military hubs, and transportation are urban enterprises, major cities—especially on the Eastern Front where there were no intervening seas—were natural targets in World War II.⁸³

Had the Allies captured the major French Atlantic ports intact in June 1944, their armies might have crossed the Rhine by December. Had the Allies held Singapore and Corregidor, the Pacific war would have proceeded differently. The survival of the Soviet cities of Leningrad and Stalingrad, and the British garrison on Malta, changed the course of the war.

PRIOR TO THE twentieth century, artillery was mostly stationary, given its size and weight, and the absence of internal combustion engines. Only at sea could ships move large-caliber guns with any speed, largely to be used against other ships. Even after the advent of combat aircraft in World War I, high-explosive weapons were limited to bombs and rockets, given that the weight of shells and barrels, and the recoil of artillery larger than calibers of .40 mm were too great for most fighter and bomber airframes.

The armies of World War I, however, had marked a revolution by adapting gasoline engines to chassis with wheels or tracks to move large guns, often cross-country apart from major roads. In the past history of warfare, artillery had been static and with difficulty sought to target mobile infantry; now guns were moved at speeds as fast or faster than that of foot soldiers. As is noted in Part Five, because artillery by 1939 fired more rapidly with deadlier shells, the combination of a new mobility and deadliness made big guns the most effective weapons of the war. Equally ominous for infantry, improved shelling was not just confined to larger, more mobile guns; at the other end of the spectrum, a new generation of light mortars, with ever-larger-caliber shells, meant that there often was no divide between artillery and small-arms fire. The World War II foot soldier could become a shooter of both small bullets and large shells.

Big guns killed the greatest number of ground troops in a war that was supposed to be mobile and fluid, thereby liberating foot soldiers from the previous nightmares of the trenches and the likely death sentence of constant shelling. Given that reality, it was no surprise that of all the major weapons systems of the war, from ships to airplanes, the belligerents produced more artillery, mortars, and tanks than all other weapons combined.