Chapter 14

BITTER VICTORY

Dresden bombing inferno, 1945. Source: bpk, Berlin / Carl Weinrother / Art Resource, NY.

On April 25, 1945, an American reconnaissance patrol met advancing Soviet troops in the vicinity of the medieval city of Torgau at the Elbe River. Though Wehrmacht remnants fought desperately against the Red Army so they could surrender to U.S. forces, the Sixty-ninth Infantry Division of the First Army succeeded in linking up with the Fifth Guard Army of the First Ukrainian Front, thereby effectively cutting Nazi Germany in two. On the next day, Second Lieutenant William Robertson ceremoniously shook hands with Lieutenant Alexander Silvashko on the destroyed bridge. The official photo of their smiling encounter, taken indoors a day later, was flashed around the world. U.S. correspondent Andy Rooney witnessed the fraternization of the elated troops at an impromptu concert by a female singer just freed from a POW camp by Russian soldiers, who accompanied her with harmonicas pillaged from the Hohner factory nearby.1 Though little known, this meeting at the Elbe signaled the joint Soviet-American triumph over the once-vaunted German army, and thereby the end of the Second World War in Europe.

Taking two and one-half years from Stalingrad to surrender, the ultimate victory of the Allies was perhaps less daring than Hitler’s exploits but nonetheless all the more definitive. In retrospect it may seem inevitable that the change of the war’s character from blitzkrieg to attrition should have favored the Grand Alliance, but for the participants the outcome remained long in doubt. Only through strenuous efforts at innovation did the Allies succeed in overtaking the German lead in technology, since the latter’s “miracle weapons” were finished too late to affect the outcome. No doubt the combined manpower, production capacity, and resources of the British, Soviets, and Americans were considerably larger than the matériel that Hitler’s generals could extract from occupied Europe, but these advantages needed to be deployed effectively in battle. While the British and the Russians were already fully engaged in the field when Germany declared war on the United States, the Americans, shielded by the Atlantic, had yet to mobilize their industries and train their troops effectively.² Allied victory was therefore no foregone conclusion but the result of an enormous concerted effort.

In the wake of this success, fierce arguments have developed about who deserves the actual of credit for the victory. Having absorbed countless self-congratulatory movie portrayals and specials on the History Channel, western audiences firmly believe that the D-Day landing in Normandy was crucial, largely ignoring the Soviet contribution. Based on their much larger losses, Russians and East Europeans in contrast point to the relentless assault of the Red Army as the decisive factor in winning the “Great Patriotic War.” Within the western countries, the British are convinced that they deserve praise for holding out alone, the French think that only the résistance and General de Gaulle liberated Paris, and the Americans, of course, believe that they played the most important part of all. Finally, interservice rivalries also muddy the waters, since the air force stresses the effect of strategic bombing, the army emphasizes land battles, the navy points to the sinking of submarines, and the intelligence services tout their code breaking. What gets lost in these arguments is the way in which these aspects had to fit together to succeed.3

Although the “Grand Alliance” between Britain, Soviet Russia, and the United States fought for humanitarian aims, the desperate nature of the struggle brutalized Allied warfare to such an extent that they also engaged in some morally questionable acts. Winston Churchill’s and FDR’s Atlantic Charter of August 1941 propounded high-flung principles by rejecting territorial gains and calling for self-determination, free trade, cooperation for social welfare, and liberation from want and fear as well as freedom of the seas and disarmament. But the Red Army had no compunction about murdering up to twenty thousand Polish officers, while the British and U.S. air forces invented a new kind of firestorm bombing against cities like Hamburg and Dresden, dramatized by Kurt Vonnegut and W. G. Sebald,⁴ which killed tens of thousands of civilians from the air. Moreover, the Americans dropped two atomic bombs to compel Japan to surrender. The high price of achieving victory through Red Army atrocities and systematic bombing of noncombatants threatened to erode the very values for which the Allies claimed to be fighting.⁵

Ultimately the success of the Grand Alliance derived from the superiority of communist and democratic forms of modernity over their dictatorial Nazi rival. While the organic modernity of the Nazi dictatorship possessed initial advantages in attacking its neighbors, in the long run it lacked the resources and political appeal to compete on the battlefield with the unlikely combination of forces of liberal capitalism and dictatorial communism. In spite of Stalin’s paranoia and mistakes, the Soviet Union ultimately produced more effective weapons and inspired more sacrifices for “Mother Russia” than the Third Reich could muster for the “fatherland.” Though democratic decision making was more cumbersome, Britain held out against Nazi air and submarine attacks. Requiring time to mobilize and placing a high value on human lives, the United States eventually brought its greater air and sea power to bear on the continent, while its armed forces were also engaged in the Pacific against Japan. The reasons for the victory of the antifascist alliance therefore lay in the greater efficacy of the communist and democratic visions of modernity.

TURNING THE TIDE

After the Allies stopped the Nazi advance, war nonetheless continued until the Axis powers were completely defeated, since both sides rejected a compromise settlement. Similar to Napoleon, Hitler needed to keep fighting in order to legitimize his rule, while the horrendous crimes of ethnic cleansing and racial genocide closed the door to any negotiated conclusion. To avoid another “stab-in-the-back” myth, the western Allies also proclaimed an “unconditional surrender” policy at the Casablanca Conference in January 1943 in order to make sure that Germany would never rise again. This formula was supposed to reassure the Soviets, who were bearing the brunt of the fighting on land, that the Anglo-American Allies would not conclude a separate peace in spite of their frustrating delay in invading France. Discouraging the anti-Nazi resistance movement within Germany, the refusal of an armistice forced the war to go on until Nazi Germany and its allies were finally conquered by force of arms.6 Since most casualties occurred in the last six months of the fighting, it also meant that millions more people would have to be killed.

The battle that turned the tide in the East took place at Stalingrad, which became legendary because of the fierceness of the fighting and the number of casualties, approaching two million. Once known as Tsaritsyn, this city was an important industrial center that controlled the Volga crossing and shielded the routes to the oil fields in the Caucasus. After relentless Luftwaffe attacks, the German Sixth Army under General Friedrich Paulus reached its outskirts on August 23, 1942. Owing to the desperate resistance of the Soviet soldiers, militia members, and civilians, including women, the Wehrmacht tactics of mobile tank and Stuka (dive-bomber) warfare soon proved useless. The savage house-to-house fighting that developed in the burned-out hulks of buildings and factories, conducted by small arms, sniper fire, and mortar grenades, neutralized the tanks and artillery. In spite of incurring big losses, German forces gradually gained control of 90 percent of the city on the west bank. Realizing its symbolic significance, Stalin committed all available reinforcements, making this the decisive battle for superiority on the southern front.7

On November 19 the Red Army launched a well-planned counterattack that cut through both German flanks, therefore bottling up the invaders in Stalingrad. After resupplying and deploying his defenders on the eastern bank of the Volga, Marshal Georgy Zhukov shattered the overstretched Romanian, Hungarian, and Italian forces north and south of the city. With a gigantic pincer movement, emulating blitzkrieg tactics, he cut the Sixth Army off from the rest of the German lines. Though some of his officers wanted to break out of the pocket, Hitler refused, since Göring assured him that the Luftwaffe could keep supplying the encircled army, while General Erich von Manstein also argued that he would be able to relieve them by a ground attack. Obsessed with not withdrawing, Hitler announced in a rabid speech at the Berlin Sportpalast that the Germans would never leave, thereby publicly committing himself. As a result about twenty-one divisions with some 250,000 German soldiers and auxiliary forces found themselves trapped, not only without a way out but also with slim prospects of relief. What started out as a great Wehrmacht victory was turning into a crushing defeat.⁸

The Red Army prevailed at Stalingrad by employing more equipment, fighting harder for its imperiled homeland, and making superior tactical decisions. The German air force proved incapable of supplying the encircled army with sufficient ammunition, fuel, and food in order to keep it in fighting shape, losing about one-third of its eastern-front planes. Moreover, the Soviet commanders anticipated Manstein’s relief offensive in December and stopped it well short of linking up with the Sixth Army. When the Red Army tightened its ring, the former attackers now became defenders in a destroyed city, bereft of any resources to sustain the fighting. With the arrival of winter, they not only starved but also froze. Nonetheless, the ferocious house-to-house combat continued with both sides giving no quarter and suffering intensely. Russian diary entries and last letters flown out to Germany show the increasing confidence of Red Army soldiers and the growing desperation of the Wehrmacht.9 On February 2, 1943, Paulus finally disregarded Hitler’s order and surrendered with less than half of his original troops still alive. In Stalingrad the Nazi war machine met its match, never to recover.

As a substitute for opening a second front in Europe, as Stalin kept demanding, the western Allies tried to relieve the pressure on the Soviets by landing in North Africa on November 8, 1942. An unregenerate imperialist, Churchill had long been pushing for Operation Torch in order to secure British supply lines in the Mediterranean and to make sure that the French colonial forces, including sizable naval units, would not support the fascists. The Allies landed tens of thousands of troops in the Moroccan and Algerian ports of Casablanca, Oran, and Algiers, intending to push on to Tunisia. Still trying to remain loyal to the Vichy government, French troops initially resisted, but they were rapidly overwhelmed by the superior naval, air, and ground forces of the combined British and American assault. Though Admiral Darlan and General Giraud wavered, eventually most of the French troops joined the Allies when Hitler ordered the occupation of the rest of mainland France.¹⁰ Even if only a sideshow to the continental battles, the North African landing, which secured control of the Mediterranean shipping lanes, was the first success on land for the western Allies.

The North African campaign was significant because it drove the Axis forces out of Africa and opened the door for a subsequent attack on the European mainland. By October 1942 British general Bernard Montgomery had succeeded in defeating the legendary Afrika Korps under Erwin Rommel, the “Desert Fox,” in the Second Battle of El Alamein, stopping once and for all the German threat to Egypt and the Suez Canal. A month later the successful landing opened a second North African front, pressuring German and Italian forces from two sides. After building up their strength, the British and Americans broke the stalemate with their April offensive, sending the fascists into full flight. Though the Axis lacked the airpower and shipping to defend the Italian colonies in North Africa, Hitler repeated the Stalingrad mistake and refused to pull out as many men and as much matériel as possible. On May 13, 1943, the remaining Germans and Italians surrendered in Tunis, giving up 275,000 POWs at one stroke. Many of them were fortunate enough to be shipped to the United States, where they waited out the rest of the war in relative comfort. The African fiasco was another drastic Axis defeat that opened the door for the Allies to invade Italy.11

Though thousands of miles apart, the Stalingrad and North African successes decisively changed the trajectory of the war from Axis aggression to Allied victory. In the desperate battle at the Volga River, the Wehrmacht and its allies were beaten at their own game, outgunned, outfought, and outmaneuvered, losing both the strategic initiative and their faith in ultimate victory. For all the exploits of the Desert Fox, the German-Italian forces were also defeated in the North African campaign, due to inferior weapons, lower numbers. and embattled supply lines. Furiously seeking to stave off complete disaster, the Nazi master propagandist Joseph Goebbels spoke on February 18, 1943, to a selected audience in a Berlin arena. He acknowledged a broad “crisis” on the entire eastern front, praised the trapped “heroes of Stalingrad” as defenders of European culture against the Jewish-Bolshevik threat, and appealed to everyone not to lose faith in the Führer and to redouble their efforts. Raising passions to a fever pitch, he queried rhetorically: “I ask you: Do you want total war? If necessary, do you want a war more total and radical than anything that we can even imagine today?” The electrified crowd shouted back “Yes! Yes!” and broke into “unending stormy applause.” But feverish fanaticism would prove unable to stop superior force.12

WEARING DOWN THE REICH

The Allied victories during 1942–43 revealed the superiority of communist and democratic modernity in a drawn-out struggle of attrition. While lightning strikes favored the well-oiled Nazi war machine, the prolongation of the conflict brought the Allied advantage in resources, manpower, and weapons into play. For the Axis powers, Albert Speer tried to organize production more efficiently and to increase the exploitation of conquered Europe, but crucial raw materials under his control, such as oil, were limited, and hydrogenation of synthetic fuels from coal remained costly and time-consuming. In contrast, the Allies were able to rely on a surprising increase in output of war matériel by Russian factories hastily relocated east of the Ural Mountains, continued British manufacturing supported by the British Empire, and the enormous capacities of the United States, once fully converted to Fordist mass production of military goods.¹³ It took time to coordinate these efforts, to train the troops in the available arms, and to employ new weapons successfully on the battlefield. But ultimately this discrepancy proved decisive.

Production figures show the drastic extent of Allied superiority, which continued to increase during the second part of the war while Axis production could not keep up. The basic size of the competing economies was disparate enough: In 1942 the Allied GNP per person was 2.4 times larger than that of the Axis, and this advantage grew to 3.1 times during 1944. Similarly Allied countries made 2.9 times more steel than the Axis powers, increasing to 3.4 times three years later. As a result the Allies outproduced their fascist enemies in all significant weapons categories: From 1942 to 1944 the Allies manufactured 184,200 tanks compared to only 39,600 of the Axis, giving them a 4.7-fold edge. In fighter airplanes the difference was somewhat smaller, 299,500 versus 114,600, yet still amounting to 2.6 times greater. But in artillery the gap was once again larger, 1,209,000 versus 395,000, that is, 3.1 times larger. In other weapons such as rifles, machine guns, and so on the Allied advantage was generally around threefold.14 Moreover, the quality of Allied arms gradually caught up and in some cases, such as the Russian T-34 tank, even proved superior.

The German command sought to compensate by using submarine warfare so as to keep the Allies’ superior amounts of supplies from reaching the battlefield. Britain proved particularly vulnerable to a naval counterblockade, since it received 75 percent of its food, 95 percent of its petroleum products, and 30 percent of its iron ore by sea. Moreover, all American war matériel had to be ferried across the Atlantic. While the Royal Navy quickly managed to sink German battleships like the Bismarck, Churchill worried about the U-boats, whose stealthy attacks came close to interdicting British shipping. Since Hitler had not realized the significance of this weapon despite the pleas of Admiral Karl Dönitz, the Germans initially had merely fifty or so submarines at their disposal, only one-third of which could be on station at any time. Preying on convoys with “wolf-pack” tactics, the U-boats nonetheless managed to sink about seven million tons of commercial shipping in the crucial year of 1942 alone. As the official history of the Royal Navy commented afterward, the Battle of the Atlantic turned into “a close struggle for bare survival.”¹⁵

Though Dönitz built up his fleet, during 1943 the Allies quelled the submarine threat by shattering German confidence through the sinking of 242 U-boats. This success was largely due to the strategic help of the United States, which provided longer-distance cover, and the occupation of Iceland, which allowed airplanes to patrol the North Atlantic routes. Changed tactics, such as more warship escorts for convoys, the use of planes to drop depth charges, and the development of sonar and radar to spot submarines, shifted the odds against the attackers, who thereafter failed to return from every third mission, on average. The mass-production techniques of U.S. shipyards also allowed more standardized “liberty ships” to be built each month than could be sunk by enemy raiders. German countermeasures, such as speeded-up building programs, an improved design for the snorkel, allowing boats to remain submerged longer, and the construction of supersubs, came too late. Though the submarines sank altogether almost 15 million tons of shipping, the Allies built 46.5 million tons at the same time. Allied antisubmarine measures were so effective that the U-boats became “iron coffins,” suffering overall losses at an incredible rate of 75 percent.16

The Allied leadership in turn resorted to strategic bombing in order to hamper German war production and undercut morale. Initially the British flew raids in retaliation for attacks on England and as a psychological boost, showing that they were serious about fighting the Nazis. When daytime attacks incurred too many losses because of fighter harassment and antiaircraft guns, the RAF switched to dispersed nighttime raids on military and civilian targets that were less precise but safer. The U.S. Air Force preferred attacking strategic targets during daytime instead, hoping to knock the Germans out of the war by destroying ball-bearing and synthetic-fuel plants and puncturing reservoir dams. Although carpet bombing by thousands of planes created enormous damage on the ground, it also proved quite dangerous for the air crews, leading many planes to crash. To reduce such losses the British and Americans developed a new strategy of starting “firestorms” by dropping incendiary bombs on the crowded medieval parts of cities that would burn thousands of houses and civilians.¹⁷ Doing much damage, these devastating attacks nonetheless failed to break German morale.

Though at first disappointing, saturation bombing eventually helped win the war by limiting Germany’s war production and bringing its transportation to a standstill. German defenses such as the interceptor aircraft and the fifty thousand flak guns all over the Reich were initially fairly effective in punishing attackers, causing the loss of about eighty-one thousand pilots and aircrew. Meanwhile civilians huddled in air-raid shelters, praying not to be hit, and then workers quickly rebuilt destroyed factories or relocated them in the safer countryside. But these countermeasures could not keep pace with the relentless Allied attacks. Even if they were unable to interdict war production completely, the massive raids on Hamburg and the Ruhr Basin that cost tens of thousands of German civilian lives did slow increases of war production after May 1943, thereby depriving the Axis of potential arms. Ultimately, however, it was the destruction of the railroads, bridges, and canals that brought down the Third Reich. Altogether the bombing razed scores of ancient cities like Cologne and killed about six hundred thousand civilians, going vastly beyond what could be called “collateral damage,” since the one thousand bomber raids also involved an element of revenge.18

The intelligence war also strongly favored the Allied side owing to the breaking of the German code, called Enigma. In the beginning the Nazis could rely on human information from fascist sympathizers and had some success in deciphering British codes, but it took too much time for the information to be useful in the field. In contrast, the Polish secret service had procured a copy of the German encrypting machine, an electromechanical typewriter that could produce 1,253 trillion permutations. The subsequent capture of a trawler and submarine gave the Allies access to the key tables, enormously facilitating their task. At Bletchley Park in the United Kingdom an entire unit worked on decoding Enigma intercepts (classified as Ultra Secret), helped by the brilliant mathematician Alan Turing and other Cambridge dons. Since most military orders were telegraphed through the airwaves, German messages could be intercepted, sent to “Ultra,” and decoded within a few hours.¹⁹ This deciphering in real time was an enormous operational advantage, since the Allies were apprised of German plans and devised countermeasures without the enemy being aware of it.

Finally, the Allies also proved more adept at psychological warfare than the Nazis because they employed modern advertising methods and appealed to more humane values. The Third Reich controlled its media through the Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, headed by Joseph Goebbels. He excelled at mass rallies and press direction, but when he found it hard to keep emotions at a fever pitch by these methods, he turned to entertainment as a morale booster during the war. In contrast, the decentralized effort of the Allies relied more on a “strategy of truth” and the self-mobilization of the media. Helped by Weimar émigrés, Hollywood movie directors produced a stream of propaganda films on government orders and also as commercial ventures. Both sides sent entertainers to the front, whose songs sometimes even cut across the front lines, like Lale Anderson’s “Lili Marleen.” In the contest between pro-Axis radio propagandist Lord Haw-Haw and pro-Allied commentator Sefton Delmer, the BBC ultimately had the upper hand because its news reports proved more reliable.20

LIBERATING THE WEST

The military leader who brought the superiority of Allied modernity to bear on the battlefield was General Dwight D. Eisenhower. He was born into a poor but devout German-American family and grew up in rural Kansas. As a West Point graduate, he became an engineer and tank commander during World War I without seeing frontline duty. As his leadership potential was gradually realized during the interwar years, he was put in charge of general-staff planning for a victorious strategy against Japan and Germany during World War II. In 1942 he was appointed commander of U.S. troops in the European theater and after the successful operations in North Africa elevated to supreme commander of Allied forces in Europe a year later. Eisenhower was a careful planner, a capable organizer, and a persuasive mediator in disputes about strategic questions such as whether to establish a second front in France, the Balkans, or Italy. Less flamboyant than Douglas MacArthur or George S. Patton, the affable “Ike” nonetheless became the mastermind of Anglo-American victory.²¹

On July 10, 1943, a combined British-American force invaded Sicily with 160,000 troops, ferried on three thousand vessels. Having gained control of the air and seas, the Allies quickly increased this army to 450,000 men, who routed Italian and German defenders within thirty-eight days, though the personal rivalry of vainglorious generals such as Montgomery and Patton complicated the operation. The Italians lost 132,000 men and the Germans 32,000 men killed, wounded, or captured, but the Wehrmacht managed to withdraw 53,000 other soldiers to the mainland. The political repercussions were even more important than control of the island. In a surprise move, the Fascist Grand Council voted seventeen to nine to oust the dictator Mussolini and install Marshal Pietro Badoglio as prime minister. Even the Duce’s son-in-law, Foreign Minister Ciano, agreed to depose him. While publicly proclaiming his Axis loyalty, Badoglio secretly negotiated an armistice with General Eisenhower, signed on September 3. The Allied strategy seemed to be paying off when Italy officially switched sides and declared war on Nazi Germany on October 13.22

Yet the Italian campaign turned out to be disappointing because it resulted in endless fighting, which proved a diversion from rather than a decisive contribution to ending the war. Landing at the tip of the Italian boot at Salerno, Taranto, and Bari, the Allies liberated the South without encountering much resistance and pushed on to Naples. But an irate Hitler refused to give up and quickly ordered the confused Italian forces to be disarmed and interned. Under the command of Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, the Germans, now freed from negotiating with their Italian partners, quickly scratched together another army that fought with skill and determination. Moreover, in a daring mission on September 12, 1943, SS Obersturmbannführer Otto Skorzeny freed Mussolini from captivity on Gran Sasso Mountain and brought him back behind German lines. Though broken, the Duce reestablished an Italian puppet government, the so-called Republic of Salo, which continued to fight on the German side and pursued even more radical Fascist policies. The Allied advance thereafter bogged down, taking almost two more years to reach Lombardy.²³

The ground war in Italy saw some ferocious fighting because the difficult terrain negated most Allied advantages. The Apennine Mountains and the narrowness of the long peninsula made it possible for the defenders to construct formidable positions like the Gustav Line, which had to be taken by infantry assault. American forces trying to bypass such defenses by landing farther up the peninsula, behind German lines, got bottled up in the Anzio beachhead, near Rome, while the monastery on top of Monte Cassino changed hands several times in fierce combat. Declared an open city to save its treasures, Rome was finally liberated in June of 1944 and Florence captured in the fall. But the Wehrmacht always succeeded in reestablishing another defensive position such as the Gothic Line, supported by artillery. Because the D-Day landing in France diverted experienced troops, it took until April of 1945 for the Allies to finally break through into the plains of Lombardy and for the Germans in Italy to surrender. On either side the struggle cost over 50,000 lives and over 330,000 casualties.24 The Italian campaign contributed to the attrition of Nazi Germany by tying down troops but failed to be decisive in the end.

Only the invasion of France delivered the crushing blow that opened up the road to Nazi Germany and established a second front in Europe equal to the front in the East. So much has been written and so many movies made about Operation Overlord that it is hard to distinguish fact from fiction. The attack was delayed because the German defenses of the Westwall looked so formidable that the Allies decided not to land at the Pas de Calais right across the Channel but rather chose the more lightly defended Normandy coast instead. Marshaling an armada big enough to be confident of victory took, nonetheless, many months to complete. On June 6, 1944, the biggest invasion force ever, consisting of twelve thousand airplanes, seven thousand ships, 17,000 paratroopers, and 160,000 soldiers transported by boats finally hit the beaches from Utah to Sword. Though the American, British, Dominion, and French armies of 2.8 million in thirty-five divisions were vastly superior in number, the landing was nonetheless a military challenge because they needed to ferried across the treacherous channel. Wading to shore, the first waves of attackers had to scale steep cliffs in order to silence the big guns in pillboxes, firing from above. While Wehrmacht defenders fought tenaciously, Hitler held his armored reinforcements back because he believed that the main cross-Channel invasion would come elsewhere. This crucial delay allowed the landing forces to establish and secure their initial beachheads.²⁵

After two months of struggling through hedgerows, the Allied breakout into Brittany opened northern France to the invading forces. In a logistical masterpiece, the Anglo-American troops built two provisional harbors through which they landed a million soldiers within ten days, thereby achieving numerical superiority on the battlefield. While Montgomery was pushing east along the coast, U.S. general Omar Bradley broke through the German lines to the southwest in early August, trapping German garrisons in the important ports of Cherbourg, Brest, and St. Nazaire. Instead of organizing a retreat, Hitler ordered German divisions to counterattack south of Caen, where Patton’s forces encircled them in the pocket of Falaise, pulverizing helpless tanks with airpower. Though many Germans escaped, forty divisions were destroyed and fifty thousand men captured, freeing the way to the French capital. On August 15, the Allies landed a second invasion force on the Mediterranean coast in Provence, which began racing up the Rhone Valley to threaten the Wehrmacht from the rear. Disobeying explicit orders, General Dietrich von Choltitz surrendered Paris on August 25, sparing the French capital destruction by declaring it an open city.26

The rest of France was liberated in short order, but then a pause slowed the Allied advance for several months. The surviving German units hastily withdrew toward their own border, while the Allies mopped up the Wehrmacht pockets holding on to the French ports. Crossing river estuaries, the British and Canadians conquered most of Belgium in September. But Holland remained in Nazi hands, slowly starving, because its source of food was cut off. Although some generals were pressing to continue a rapid advance, Eisenhower, who was responsible for overall strategy, realized that the Allies had outrun their supplies and needed to rest and repair before the final push into the Reich. Even though German resistance stiffened once again in places like the Hürtgen Forest, the Allies gradually managed to reach the Siegfried Line, the fortified border of the Reich. In October they captured Aachen, the first German city to fall into Allied hands, and installed an occupation regime. While Montgomery’s attempt to secure the Rhine crossings in Operation Market-Garden fell short, the Allies had liberated all of France in half a year, a truly impressive feat.²⁷

The Allies won the French campaign because they succeeded in translating their material superiority into battlefield performance. Though they also suffered heavy casualties, the Allied armies routed the Wehrmacht by destroying eighteen hundred tanks, killing 240,000 Germans, and taking 350,000 prisoners. Several reasons explain their triumph: They held a clear command of the air as well as the seas; they possessed more tanks, cannon, and even jeeps; and they had larger numbers of troops at their disposal. In the savage fighting, their soldiers also acquired that battle hardness necessary for defeating an experienced enemy, who was gradually losing faith in his own superiority. The Ultra intercepts let the Allied commanders know in advance what their enemies were planning, making a crucial difference in preparations for D-Day. They could draw on a multinational force with units from Poland, Canada, and Australia fighting side by side. Finally, local resistance movements like the French maquis supported their advance with intelligence and partisan attacks.28 No wonder democratic modernity ultimately prevailed.

WINNING THE EAST

In spite of the important contribution of the western Allies, the Second World War was ultimately decided on the eastern front, where the scale of the battles was larger, the losses on both sides were greater, and the psychological effects more discouraging for the Wehrmacht.²⁹ It is understandable for Anglo-American veterans to insist on their own bravery and for novels, films, and television specials to celebrate the liberation of France. In contrast, the East European sites were remote, few western journalists were attached to the Red Army, and no battlefield tourism has developed that might be comparable to that of Normandy. Only in the former Soviet Union are the exploits of the Russian commanders regularly commemorated on May 9 of each year, bemedaled Red Army veterans praised, and huge monuments erected to recall the millions of dead. While German officers and soldiers attributed their defeat to the superior matériel of the West, they continued to wonder about their inability to stop the Russian advance in the East. The Red Army ultimately triumphed because the communists had also developed an invincible version of military modernity.

The Battle of Kursk, the largest tank engagement ever, provides some clues. In the aftermath of Stalingrad the Red Army had captured this important railroad hub, thrusting far into the German lines. But holding on to Orel in the North and retaking Kharkov in the South, the Wehrmacht intended to straighten out its front by pinching off the Russian salient. On July 5, 1943, 2,900 German tanks, 10,000 artillery pieces, and 900,000 troops attacked 5,100 Russian tanks, 25,000 cannons, and 1.9 million soldiers. While making some initial gains, Operation Citadel soon bogged down because the Red Army defenses were too formidable. Though the Germans used some of their newest weapons and best units, the Russian lines proved impenetrable, since the defenders were willing to die in larger numbers than the attackers. Unable to achieve a decisive breakthrough, Hitler abandoned the attack, having lost 3,000 tanks, 1,400, planes and half a million men dead, wounded, or captured. While it suffered even greater losses, the Red Army gained the strategic initiative, pushing the Germans back to the Dnieper River by early fall.30

The victory at Kursk showed that the Soviets had succeeded in blunting German blitzkrieg tactics with deep defense, relying on superiority in numbers and matériel. From 1942 on, the Russians out-produced the Reich in crucial armaments such as numbers of tanks, artillery, and airplanes. Moreover, they were helped by American Lend-Lease supplies, ranging from jeeps to infantry boots. While some of the new German weapons like the Tiger tank were superior, they often broke down in the field, whereas the Soviet T-34s proved more suited to the Russian climate, and the Wehrmacht had no defense against the Katyusha rocket launchers. With sufficient preparatory time, the Red Army also developed a method for stopping the German tank spearheads with minefields, coordinated artillery, and deep deployment, supported by airpower. In infantry combat, Russians, fighting for their homes, were more ready to sacrifice their lives, wearing down resistance by attacking in endless waves.³¹ Though sustaining heavier losses, the Red Army had grown capable of defeating the Wehrmacht in open field battle by the summer of 1943.

On the twenty-seventh anniversary of the October Revolution, Stalin described the offensives that liberated Russia and drove the Nazis from Eastern Europe during 1944 as the “ten great blows.” In its inexorable advance the Red Army used its superiority in manpower (6.5 million to 4.3 million), tanks (5,600 to 2,300), guns (90,000 to 54,000), and airplanes (8,800 to 3,000) to good advantage. The Soviets mounted the first offensive along the Dnieper River to liberate the Ukraine from occupation and exploitation. Next they attacked in the North, freeing Leningrad from its encirclement, which had cost 1.1 million lives largely due to starvation. Then they switched to the South, moving toward Odessa and the Crimea, forcing those Axis forces to surrender. Thereafter they again moved north against Finland, compelling Germany’s ally to sue for peace. But they struck the most important blow on the central front in the Bagration offensive, when the Red Army encircled thirty German divisions at Minsk, recaptured Belarus, and thrust deep into Poland. Though stubbornly fighting, the Wehrmacht proved incapable of stopping this methodical advance.32

The basic pattern of combat was repeated time and again in a lethal dance that followed a fixed choreography. Helped by partisan harassment, the Red Army would build up its forces, attack on a front of a hundred miles or so, break through the lines in several places, stream forward, and rout the defenders. Ignoring the advice of his generals, Hitler would refuse to retreat, issuing “scorched earth” and “stand or die” orders in a frantic effort to stabilize the front. The Soviet troops would bypass German “hedgehog” positions to be eliminated later and continue to surge ahead until encountering a new defensive line constructed by Axis reserves far in the rear. This systematic approach was never daring enough to unhinge the entire eastern front in one bold stroke, but it ultimately shattered the morale of the Wehrmacht, which, try as it might, proved unable to stop the continual Russian advance. Sarcastically the demoralized soldiers encouraged each other with slogans like “Forward comrades, we have to retreat!” While withdrawing, the Germans exacted fearsome losses from the Russians, but these were never big enough to halt the advance.³³ Hitler’s stubborn refusal to adopt a flexible defense hastened his defeat.

On August 1, 1944, the Polish Home Army, an underground resistance movement led by General Tadeusz Bor-Komorowski, rose up in Warsaw in order to chase the Nazis out and liberate the capital before the Russians arrived. Without any heavy arms, tens of thousands Polish patriots battled against the occupiers in city houses and sewers, fighting spiritedly to regain their freedom. Though the Red Army had reached the eastern bank of the Vistula, the Russian generals failed to cross over to relieve the embattled Poles. Stalin did not want an independent, nationalist Polish government, preferring instead the communist puppets of the Polish Committee for National Liberation, whom he had just installed in Lublin. For sixty-three days the Poles battled mechanized forces and ruthless SS troops in fierce house-to-house fighting, but they were eventually forced to surrender, since the Red Army provided neither air cover nor ground support. About sixteen thousand Polish resistance fighters were killed and another six thousand wounded, though the Germans also suffered heavy casualties. During the uprising 85 percent of the city was destroyed, and two hundred thousand civilians died.34

The concurrent Soviet offensives during 1944 targeted the Balkans and the Baltic countries instead so as to drive the Germans out of their eastern conquests and split off their allies. The summer attack in southwestern Ukraine encircled about twenty German and Romanian divisions trying to defend the vital oil fields and thereby forced Romania to switch to the Allied side. Crossing the Danube, the Red Army then compelled Bulgaria to capitulate and linked up with Tito’s partisans to liberate Belgrade in October. As a result, Nazi occupiers in Greece were cut off, while Soviet armies began to lay siege to Budapest in December. During the fall the Red Army also recaptured the Baltic states such as Estonia, Latvia, and most of Lithuania, trapping the German Army Group North under Guderian in Courland because Hitler refused his pleas to withdraw. Finally the Soviets also chased the remaining German troops out of Finland, forcing them to flee into Norway.³⁵ These Soviet victories dissolved the Nazi alliance system by overthrowing pro-fascist governments and forcing countries to change sides.

The collapse of Hitler’s empire plunged Eastern Europe into a chaotic transition, marked by conflicting emotions of joy and fear. The liberated Slavic populations celebrated the arrival of the Red Army, and the freed concentration-camp survivors were relieved that their ordeal was finally over. But those countries like Hungary and persons like the Russian soldiers of the Vlasov army, who had collaborated with the Germans, experienced the arrival of Soviet troops as new repression, characterized by violent retribution. Facing defeat, the civilian German occupiers started to flee in droves, trying to relocate their war industries and salvage some of their spoils by returning to the Reich. At the same time non-German collaborators also sought to escape, since they feared the vengeance of the partisans or the resistance who now gained control. Order dissolved in the dangerous interregnum between the departure of the Wehrmacht and the arrival of the Red Army, a time when authority vanished and private scores could be settled. In this confusing transition, nationalist leaders and socialist functionaries began to quarrel over the future orientation of their liberated countries.36

FORCING SURRENDER

Allied advances from the West and East to the borders of the Reich initiated the final round of the war for control of Germany itself. Russian atrocities in East Prussian districts, which were reconquered by the Wehrmacht, allowed Goebbels to proclaim an Endkampf in order to mobilize all possible resources for staving off the impending defeat. Nazi leaders still hoped for miracles either from the arrival of new, more powerful weapons or from a breakup of the enemy coalition after FDR’s death, as in the Seven Years’ War. National Socialist Party fanatics were ready to perish in a Wagnerian Götterdämmerung, taking the entire country down with them, while ordinary Germans were beginning to make plans for life after the Third Reich and imprisoned members of the resistance were praying for liberation before it was too late.³⁷ In contrast, Allied commanders were confident of ultimate victory, wondering only whether the Russians or the Americans would be the first to arrive in Berlin. Meeting at Yalta in February 1945, Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin already started to stake their claims for a coming postwar order in Europe.

Nazi hopes for so-called miracle weapons were not entirely misplaced, but these potentially deadly arms arrived too late and in too small numbers to affect the outcome. Surprised by the quality of Allied arms, German engineers improved existing designs, constructing prototypes of a superheavy tank, the Maus. At the same time, they also ventured into entirely new areas. Messerschmitt started to develop turbojet fighters like the Me 262, which were much faster than piston-engine aircraft. But a combination of lack of jet fuel, pilot losses, and transportation bottlenecks kept most of these planes from flying and deciding the outcome of combat in the air. Another such project was rocket development, headed by Werner von Braun, who designed ballistic missiles capable of crossing the Channel and delivering payloads of up to one thousand kilos of explosives. Used against London, the V-2 terrorized the British capital but was not precise and numerous enough to make a strategic difference. Fortunately, the Nazis did not assign the development of atomic bombs sufficient priority to produce an operable weapon for mounting on missiles by the end of the war.38

Running out of manpower, a frantic Hitler tried to raise a national militia in October 1944, called the Volkssturm according to the Prussian precedent of 1813. Since the regular replacement process of the Ersatzheer (army reserves) no longer produced sufficient soldiers to make up for the millions of dead, wounded, and captured, he ordered the Nazi Party to organize a paramilitary defense force by mobilizing all males from sixteen-year-old boys to sixty-year-old grandfathers in a last-ditch attempt to boost morale. Lacking sufficient uniforms, the militia was identified by black armbands and supplied with rifles, submachine guns, and antitank grenades. Harangued by party functionaries but badly trained, these civilians were ordered to create antitank barriers and destroy bridges so as to defend their towns. Some of the thrown-together units were even sent to the front in order to stop the Russian advance. Looking bedraggled, this Volkssturm was a far cry from the confident Wehrmacht troops of five years earlier. Instead, it was a pathetic effort to stop the invaders that had little military value and only increased the number of pointless casualties.³⁹

The Allies were surprised that many Germans continued to fight in the face of certain defeat. Not all of them did, since in the West some courageous commanders surrendered their cities rather than have them destroyed, while entire units deserted. But especially in the East, the Wehrmacht battled desperately because its soldiers instinctively feared that they would suffer retribution for their wartime atrocities. Many were also scared of the roving police squads of the army and SS, called Kettenhunde, who combed the front and the rear, summarily shooting anyone accused of defeatism. Invoking the threatening vengeance by the Soviet Army’s “Asiatic hordes” with examples of real Red Army atrocities, Goebbels appealed not only to fanatical Nazis but also to ordinary Germans to defend their homes. Finally, soldiers above all battled from a “feeling of loyalty, a sense of responsibility and comradeship” in an unspoken survival pact that made them dependent on each other.40 As a result, a strange disconnect developed between the growing realization of impending doom and the continued commitment to fight. Cynical veterans quipped: “Enjoy the war, the peace will be terrible.”

In the West, the Battle of the Bulge, the final German counteroffensive, temporarily halted the invasion of the Reich. Hoping to repeat his initial success, Hitler gambled his last reserves on a daring plan to split the British and American forces by again attacking in the Ardennes and recapturing the port of Antwerp. Starting on December 15, thirteen Wehrmacht divisions with about 340 tanks and 1,600 cannon assaulted a weakly defended section of the American lines, achieving complete tactical surprise because of the bad weather that inhibited air reconnaissance. Though unanticipated resistance by American GIs slowed the Germans down, they advanced about fifty to seventy miles, surrounded a U.S. airborne division in Bastogne, and got about halfway to the Channel coast. But eventually the offensive stalled, and American counterattacks, led by General Patton, managed to push the Wehrmacht back, with each side losing about one hundred thousand men.⁴¹ By the end of January 1945, the Allies were once again advancing and threatening the Siegfried Line. By using up his last available armored forces and Luftwaffe planes, Hitler left the door to Germany proper wide open.

The ensuing conquest of western Germany turned out to be surprisingly easy, since the depleted and demoralized Wehrmacht offered only sporadic resistance. The Allies breached the fabled Westwall of bunkers, pillboxes, and tank traps in February 1945. Advance units of the Ninth Armored Division captured the bridge at Remagen and established a beachhead on the east side of the Rhine, while General Montgomery managed to cross at Wesel and Rees. As a result, the British enveloped the Ruhr Basin, the industrial forge of Germany, from the north, while American armor surrounded it from the south, closing the trap at Lippstadt on April 1. Though clearing the pocket took another three weeks, the Allies captured over 325,000 prisoners and drove Field Marshal Walther Model to commit suicide. Since the Germans were no longer capable of a coherent defense, Eisenhower readjusted his plans, pushing forward toward Leipzig in order to link up with the Red Army at the Elbe River. While the British fanned out to conquer the northern plain, American units turned southward to prevent the establishment of a Nazi mountain redoubt.42

In contrast, the final offensive of the Red Army in the East involved much heavier fighting with huge losses on both sides. Soviet forces had about a six-to-one advantage in manpower, tanks, airplanes, and guns, but the Wehrmacht defenders bitterly battled for every kilometer of German soil. On January 12, Marshal Zhukov started the Vistula-Oder offensive, finally taking Warsaw, then overrunning Pomerania and rapidly advancing to the Oder River, cutting off East Prussia, which held out until early April. In the South the Red Army captured Budapest in February and moved on to Vienna, which surrendered in mid-April. In the ensuing Battle of Berlin a confident Red Army of about 2.5 million soldiers as well as twenty thousand tanks and self-propelled artillery faced a ragtag force of regular army, SS, Volkssturm, and Hitler Youth units of about one-fifth its size. When Soviet troops started their final offensive on April 16, they crossed the Oder River to the north, the middle, and the south and encircled the Reich’s capital, trapping the rest of the Wehrmacht at the Seelow Heights, their last defensive position.⁴³

Holed up in the Führerbunker in central Berlin, a desperate Hitler could no longer stave off his downfall. Declaring cities like Breslau as fortresses did prolong local resistance but also assured their destruction through bombing and artillery fire. Having lost seven hundred thousand soldiers in January and February on the eastern front alone, the Führer could only move paper armies about that lacked equipment and fighting strength. Beating back General Walther Wenck’s relief attempt, the Red Army began to shell the city of Berlin, advancing inexorably in bloody hand-to-hand combat toward the center. After marrying Eva Braun, a despondent Hitler committed suicide on April 30, blaming the “world Jewish conspiracy” for the defeat in his testament. While Nazi leaders like Goebbels followed his example or sought to hide like Himmler, remnants of German forces tried to break through to the West. Ending the pointless bloodshed, General Helmut Weidling finally surrendered Berlin on May 2. Glad that the fighting was over, survivors in the city now experienced some of the rape, pillage, and murder that the Nazis had themselves committed all over the continent.44

The capitulation of the remaining German forces ended World War II in Europe after almost six years of incredible suffering and bloodshed. Though the Wehrmacht still controlled Norway, Denmark, pieces of northern and southern Germany, Courland, Bohemia, as well as parts of Austria and northern Italy, the meeting of U.S. and Russian forces at the Elbe and the fall of Berlin signaled that further resistance was pointless. Various regional commanders therefore surrendered to the advancing Allies from May 1 on. Bypassing Göring and Himmler as traitors, Hitler had appointed Admiral Dönitz his successor as president, who vowed “to save Germany from destruction by the advancing Bolshevik enemy.” But when Eisenhower insisted on “unconditional surrender,” General Alfred Jodl agreed at Reims that “all forces under German control [were] to cease active operations at 23:01 hours Central European Time on May 8, 1945.”⁴⁵ Not to be outdone, Marshal Zhukov repeated the ceremony with Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel in Berlin-Karlshorst a day later. The second time around, there was no doubt that conquered Germany had definitely lost the war.

CAUSES OF VICTORY

Pitting the three great ideologies of the twentieth century against each other, the Second World War was in many ways a conflict for control of Europe between opposing visions of modernity. Instead of just competing for electoral success, the fascists, communists, and democrats engaged in mortal combat, trying to prevail by force rather than by propaganda. Conventional explanations of Allied victory stress the heroism of the troops, the brilliance of strategic decisions, the superiority of weapons, and the wealth of economic resources. Other interpretations instead focus on Axis blunders in arms development, choice of strategy, or political coordination.46 But on a deeper causal level, the outcome was also determined by the differing potential of the conflicting modernities, because their implications determined the military capabilities and policy decisions of the combatants. It was the particularly aggressive expansionism of fascism that forced its communist and democratic competitors into collaborating in spite of their fundamental ideological differences. But in the end this unlikely Grand Alliance did prevail.

Though seemingly dynamic, the organic modernity of the Nazis ultimately proved self-defeating because it fundamentally disregarded human life. In the chaos after World War I and onward through the Great Depression, fascism appeared as the wave of the future by promising to create a national community with forceful action. Indeed, this vision appeared to have many advantages: the leadership principle allowed for quick decisions, the public acclamation suggested unity, the militarization of the economy prepared for war, the cult of manliness extolled sacrifice for the fatherland, and the racist rhetoric identified scapegoats on whom failures could be blamed. But the Nazi system also had large flaws that proved deleterious: Hitler’s charisma permitted no correction of his political and strategic errors, the suppression of dissent eliminated alternatives, the racist persecution wasted manpower, and the ruthless exploitation of the conquered countries inspired resistance. Mistaken strategies and lack of resources as well as disregard of allies and obsequious subservience were no accident but rather the logical result of the basic character of Nazi ideology.47

In spite of social upheaval and intense suffering, the resiliency of communist modernity surprised not only the Russians themselves but also astounded foreign observers. Initially, Stalin’s dictatorial paranoia and the bloodletting of the Great Purges, especially among the Red Army generals, brought the Soviet Union to the brink of collapse in 1941. But the preceding collectivization and industrialization had created an economic base, educational reforms had trained capable weapons designers, and the decision to shift production behind the Urals had allowed Russia to outproduce Germany. Moreover, Nazi aggression forged political unity by inspiring Soviet citizens to fight for the motherland, the rodina, no matter what they thought of communism or the Bolshevik Party. The existential threat of ethnic cleansing also roused members of other nationalities and even some women to take up arms, with about twenty-seven million sacrificing their lives. While western Lend-Lease helped, the emancipatory core and rational bent of Marxist ideology, which harked back to the Enlightenment, made it easier to believe in the justness of its cause.⁴⁸

The democratic version of modernity, which in the depression seemed to be on its way out, also proved more capable of sustaining the conflict than its critics had predicted. No doubt France collapsed from internal weakness and British appeasement hardly prepared the United Kingdom for the assault of the Luftwaffe and the raids of the U-boats. But the appointment of the brilliant orator Winston Churchill helped stiffen the Royal Air Force and Navy’s resistance enough to hold out. While isolationism made it difficult for President Roosevelt to help Britain, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor as well as Hitler’s declaration of war spurred the United States to mobilize on an unprecedented scale. Though it took considerable time to make a difference, the addition of huge American manpower, massive Fordist war production, and Hollywood’s propaganda effort eventually helped reverse the tide of war. But in the end, it was the defense of the ideal of freedom, the public debate to correct mistakes, and the ability to coordinate strategic decisions between the United States and the United Kingdom that inspired domestic determination and gained international support.49

For the relieved survivors of May 1945, liberation from Nazi tyranny nevertheless left a bitter taste, since the paroxysm of violence among the contending ideologies came close to destroying Europe during the war. Within the continent alone the fighting had killed about forty million soldiers as well as civilians, with many more wounded and traumatized. Moreover about another thirty million uprooted people were on the move, with survivors leaving the concentration camps, DPs trying to get back home, POWs released from prison camps, and ethnic Germans fleeing from the East. Prefigured by the brutality of the First World War, ideological propaganda, bureaucratic planning, and technological innovation had produced a peculiarly modern murderousness. To defeat the vicious fascist aggressors, even the Allies had felt compelled to resort to methods that might be considered a violation of human rights such as the firestorm bombing of German cities and the use of nuclear bombs against Japan. Scorched-earth tactics, saturation bombing, and racial genocide had unleashed so savage a violence that it left much of the European continent in ashes.⁵⁰