Importance is in the eye of the beholder. In the early 1980s, a television documentary about the eastern front aired internationally. The program was titled “The Great Patriotic War” for Russian viewers, “The Unforgettable War” for West Germans, and “The Unknown War” for U.S. audiences.77
When thinking of World War II, Americans generally focus on England and Normandy, placing all other areas a distant second. The tendency is understandable. Of the five million American troops sent overseas, most served in Britain and France. The United States was simply closer to the Old World than to the East, geographically, politically, and historically. The dominant language in the United States was and remains English.
Of course, Western Europe was only a part of the picture. A state of war existed in North Africa for nearly a decade. Most of the fighting and dying happened east of Berlin. Compared to the duration of combat in France, Americans fought twice as long in Italy and four times as long in the skies over Germany.
As reflected by the following list, the war was truly global. Below are the ten most significant military engagements in Europe and North Africa, listed in chronological order and selected for their respective military and political consequences for the entire hemisphere.
1. POLAND (SEPTEMBER 1–OCTOBER 6, 1939)
France and Britain did not declare war when Germany annexed Austria in 1938 or marched into Prague in 1939, but they drew the line when Hitler made threatening demands for Polish territory. It hardly mattered.
Fixated on demonstrating his military might, Hitler intended to take Poland by force. With all risk of Russian intervention eliminated by the unsavory Nazi-Soviet Pact signed a week earlier, the German Wehrmacht slipped its hand around Poland, with the navy in the Baltic to the north, two armies to the northwest, three to the southwest, and one to the south in Slovakia. In the morning darkness of September 1, the hand closed.
Committed to holding the highly populated west, the Polish military lost unity within hours. Luftwaffe dive bombers severed lines of communication, and tank brigades split armies into isolated pockets. Defending tenaciously, the Poles managed only one successful assault, when two German divisions attempted to cut off the retreat of an entire Polish army. Any chance of survival disappeared when the Soviets attacked from the east on September 17. Fighting officially ended on October 5.
Partitioned for the fourth time in two centuries, Poland suffered nearly 100,000 military and civilian casualties, a fraction of the 5.5 million it would eventually lose in the war. British and French promises of military intervention never materialized. The Polish government escaped and found exile in London, only to be compromised years later during Allied conferences. Citizens who survived went on to endure a lifetime of occupation, five years under the Nazis, and more than forty under the Soviets.
Blitzkrieg was only the beginning of a six-year war in Poland.
The Poles may have surrendered in five weeks, but they put up a harrowing fight. Germany lost more dead conquering Poland than the United States would later lose taking Iwo Jima.
2. FRANCE (MAY 10–JUNE 22, 1940)
Of the six countries Hitler rapidly invaded and conquered in the spring of 1940, five were targeted for their geographic location. Hitler had to invade the Nordic countries of Denmark and Norway, he reasoned, to protect Germany’s northern border and access the Atlantic. Luxembourg, Belgium, and Holland were simply in the way of his only true adversary in the West.
As Hitler contended in Mein Kampf, “France is and will remain the implacable enemy of Germany.” Noting France’s stubborn survival during the First World War, imposing reparations, and occupying the Rhineland against international will: “What France has always desired, and will continue to desire, is to prevent Germany from becoming a homogenous Power.”78
More accurately, France simply did not want Germany to invade again, having involuntarily hosted the Huns in 1870 and 1914. Many credited this fearful and defensive posture as one of the main reasons the country fell so quickly in 1940.
Militarily, France was the zenith of Hitler’s success. Never before and never again would Nazi Germany conquer a country of comparable wealth and military size. The improbable and rapid victory also gave Germany submarine pens along the Atlantic, large amounts of cash indemnities, coal and bauxite deposits, and a base for future aircraft and missile operations against Great Britain.
Hitler celebrated the fall of France with a well-documented tour of Paris.
To further humiliate the defeated French, Hitler stipulated that the surrender proceedings take place in a historic railway coach in Compiègne, the same railcar in which Germany signed the armistice of surrender to end the First World War.
3. THE BATTLE OF BRITAIN (JULY 10–SEPTEMBER 17, 1940)
When Hitler’s “Nordic cousins” rejected his appeal for a peace agreement after the fall of France, he intended to teach them a lesson: “Since England, despite its hopeless military position, still shows no signs of willingness to come to terms, I have decided to prepare a landing operation against England and if necessary to carry it out.”79
Invasion first required control of the air. The Luftwaffe promised to deliver, calculating it would take a mere four days to obliterate the RAF’s fighter command.80
The ensuing battle uncovered several German oversights. Their twin-engine bombers—Heinkel 111s and Junkers 88s—were slow and easy targets with modest payloads. The Stuka JU-87 dive bomber, though menacing with its whaling siren, had the speed of a crop duster. The Messerschmitt 109 was an excellent fighter, but its fuel capacity barely got it to London and back. Yet the weakest aspect of the Luftwaffe was strategy. Bombing ports and ships, followed by airstrips and finally cities, the German air force never eliminated the British radar sites.
Outnumbered four to one, British fighters were able to survive by pinpointing their efforts with an early warning system. In just over two months, the RAF lost 1,100 aircraft to the Germans’ 1,800. Thanks to rescue operations on their home turf, though, the British only lost 550 pilots compared to 2,500 German crewmen. On September 17, 1940, Hitler postponed the invasion of Britain indefinitely, choosing instead to punish Britain by way of “the Blitz”—nightly air raids that would last until May 1941 and kill more than 40,000.
The Battle of Britain was numerically an intermediate affair. Both sides replaced their material and crew losses quickly. Britain’s resolve fueled a great deal of national pride and a considerable amount of American admiration. Ironically, Germany may have also benefited. Hitler lacked the landing vessels and warships to mount an amphibious assault in force. Any Nazi flotilla likely would have succumbed to an immensely superior British navy.81
St. Paul’s Cathedral provides a background for a December 1940 bombing of London.
The Battle of Britain was an international fight. RAF pilots included volunteers from Australia, Belgium, Canada, Czechoslovakia, France, Ireland, Jamaica, New Zealand, Palestine, Poland, Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), South Africa, and the United States.
4. BARBAROSSA (JUNE 22, 1941)
The largest invasion of all time, ten times larger than D-day, the Third Reich offensive into the Soviet Union instantly and completely altered the course of the war. It revealed the absolute limits of blitzkrieg, opened the bloodiest theater of the war, and broke the Nazi-Soviet alliance.
The attack began at 3:00 a.m. June 22, 1941. The front stretched from the Baltic to the Black Sea, a span of more than a thousand miles. Amassed were more than a million horses and vehicles. Three-fourths of the German armed forces—plus divisions from Finland, Hungary, and Romania—totaled nearly four million men. In a letter to his confidante Benito Mussolini, Hitler called the order to launch Operation Barbarossa the hardest decision of his life: “We have no chance of eliminating America. But it does lie in our power to exclude Russia.”82
Hitler was optimistic. Thinking he could “crush Soviet Russia in a quick campaign,” he believed a short, massive assault would break the Bolshevik experiment, “and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down.” Such was his confidence that winter gear was not procured for the operation.83
The plan, such as it was, entailed three great army groups: one to push northeast to capture Leningrad, one to head straight for Moscow, and one to progress southeast to the oil fields of the Caucasus.
At first, the blitzkrieg seemed to be working its deadly will. In six months the Soviets suffered more than 2.7 million casualties and 3.3 million captured, tolls never seen before in history. But the Soviets were able and willing to tolerate such bloodshed—and induce a fair number of deaths in return—while denying Hitler all of his objectives.84
The eastern front became a meat grinder for the German army from which there was no break during four years of fighting.
What was supposed to be a six-week operation for the Third Reich turned into nearly two hundred weeks of overextended, unfocused slaughter. Of all the war’s military and civilian dead, most were destined to perish between Berlin and Moscow.
Hitler could have picked a better operation code name. Barbarossa was a twelfth-century crusader who died on his way to the Holy Land. While attempting to ford a river on horseback, he fell off midstream and drowned. Barbarossa might have survived had he not been weighted down with armor.
5. STALINGRAD (AUGUST 23, 1942–FEBRUARY 2, 1943)
Though enduring delays and setbacks, Germany was still on the advance a year into the Soviet invasion. Nowhere had the Third Reich suffered a true reversal. Yet on the approach to the oil-rich Caucasus, Hitler decided to take Stalingrad. It would be his undoing.
On a map the idea seemed reasonable. A heavily industrialized metropolis, Stalingrad guarded a key north-south rail line and a deep westerly bend to the Volga River, both of which fed Baku’s oil to the Soviet Union. The city also loomed over any advance into southeast Russia. For Hitler, the chance to shame the city’s namesake was an added incentive. In August 1942 a third of a million Axis troops charged through the Ukraine to smash the city against the Volga. Joseph Stalin ordered his town to be held at all costs. Hell was about to open a branch office.
Germans made quick progress to the outskirts, but the head of their formations dissolved when entering Stalingrad’s narrow streets. Progress was suddenly measured not in miles but in blocks. To add force to the blow, Hitler pushed in more troops, dangerously overcommitting himself.
Both sides poured in reserves, but the Soviets had the advantage of much shorter supply lines. Three months into the battle, just as the brutal Russian winter set in, the Soviets smashed through the Axis flanks and encircled the overcommitted troops. Outside the hardening cordon, German tank commander Erich Von Manstein led an attack to break through and rescue the Sixth Army, but Hitler forbade the Sixth from attempting a breakout to meet the panzers.
German forces laid siege to Stalingrad in the late summer of 1942 but fell victim to the brutal winter that shortly followed.
As the noose tightened, fighting within the city became nothing short of animalistic. Squads of men hunted each other, block by block, room to room, preferring to kill silently with knives and spades but resorting more often to submachine guns and grenades. Flamethrowers were particularly effective in the sewers. Snipers ruled open ground. Tanks hid among the rubble and scythed away at moving targets. Artillery set fire to everything, and the city was wrapped in a perpetual shroud of smoke, noise, and stench. During the battle, ruptured oil tanks bled into the Volga, and at times the river itself was on fire. Luftwaffe transport planes were shot out of the sky—rations stopped coming in, and the German wounded could not get out. In due course, the rat population exploded and grew fat on corpses.85
Two months later, with no hope of escape or resupply, a fraction of the original German force surrendered. The rest were dead, wounded, or missing. It was the first major defeat of the Third Reich on land anywhere. Germany lost a fourth of its manpower on the eastern front as well as any reasonable chance to take Leningrad, Moscow, or the oil fields Hitler’s war machine so desperately needed. From Stalingrad onward, Hitler’s mental and physical health began a precipitous decline, and he was rarely seen in public again.86
Germany lost more soldiers in and around Stalingrad than the United States lost in Europe during the entire war.
6. SECOND EL ALAMEIN (OCTOBER 23–NOVEMBER 4, 1942)
For the British army the war began with a string of humiliating defeats: France and Norway in 1940, Greece and Crete in 1941, Malay and Singapore in 1942. Aside from liberating Abyssinia, the war had been a bust.
North Africa was no better. Irwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps harassed and beat the British Eighth Army out of Libya, then chased it into Egypt. It appeared as if Alexandria would fall, then perhaps Cairo and the Suez Canal. In full retreat, British commander Gen. Claude Auchinleck ordered a halt just west of the shore city of El Alamein, fifty miles from the critical port of Alexandria. It was an ideal move. For Rommel to get beyond this point would require a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, or more correctly, a Desert Fox to squeeze through a bottleneck.
Protected on the north by the Mediterranean and on the south by the impassible chasm of the Qattara Depression, Auchinleck’s Australians, New Zealanders, South Africans, and British stood astride a forty-mile pass, the only avenue into Egypt. In July 1942, Rommel tried to push through and failed. In September he tried and failed again. All the while his forces dwindled while his opponent’s grew.
Though Claude Auchinleck did most of the preparation work, Bernard Montgomery received most of the credit for the Allied victory at Second El Alamein.
By October, the Eighth Army outnumbered the Germans and Italians more than two to one in men and tanks and owned near complete mastery of the air. After a lengthy wait and extensive planning, the new (and supposedly aggressive) Eighth Army commander Gen. Bernard Montgomery finally decided to start boxing. He jabbed with the left on the south side of the line, forcing the Axis to protect its flank. As soon as the left feint made contact, Montgomery smashed with his right. Initially, the British took heavy losses, but knowing that attrition was a fight Rommel could not win, Monty kept punching.
Down to a few dozen operational tanks, nearly surrounded, running low on everything, Rommel disengaged and began a long trek back across Libya and into Tunisia. Monty cautiously and ineffectually pursued.
Viewed objectively, the battle meant little. Rommel was down to a pittance of resources when the fight commenced. Days after it ended, the Allies had landed in Northwest Africa, dooming the Axis either way. But for the British Empire it was a soul-saving victory, “the greatest in military history.” El Alamein also catapulted Montgomery to the top of Allied command, where he would simultaneously help and hinder the war effort with his absolute carefulness and monumental ego.
The United States played a significant role in the British victory at El Alamein. Nearly half of Montgomery’s tanks were American-made Grants and Shermans.
7. KURSK (JULY 5–23, 1943)
As the war neared its fourth anniversary, the Third Reich was already dying. North Africa was lost, as was the Atlantic. But an opportunity presented itself on the Russian steppes in the shape of a large bend in the Soviet front lines.
Around the rail junction of Kursk, nearly one hundred miles across, a large horseshoe salient bulged westward into Nazi-held territory; five Soviet armies were at risk. Desperate for a victory, Hitler aimed to slice this salient at its base, attacking from both sides, capturing everyone and everything inside.
For once the Soviet high command anticipated Hitler’s moves almost exactly. Inside the salient, citizens and soldiers constructed hundreds of miles of overlapping trenches, dug countless tank traps, and laid four hundred thousand mines. Some areas of the defensive belt were forty miles across. The plan was to lure the Germans into the deadly quagmire, wait for the offensive to wear down, and then crush it with counterattacks.87
The nearly three-week-long battle of Kursk included some thirteen thousand armored vehicles and twelve thousand aircraft.
The Germans obliged. North and south of the salient, more than 900,000 Germans launched their pincer move, armed with 2,900 tanks and assault guns, 10,000 artillery pieces, and 2,000 aircraft. On schedule, the offensive broke down, battered by antitank guns, swarmed by infantry, tangled in barbed wire. In turn, the counterattacks came, with Soviet forces totaling twice the number of German soldiers and weapons. But it was no mopping up.
Most of the Germans fought their way out, fiercely inducing 50 percent casualties on the Soviets and higher. For every German killed or wounded, there were more than three Soviet casualties. For each German tank destroyed, the Soviets lost more than five.88Altogether, Kursk involved approximately three million combatants with more than four hundred thousand casualties, making it one of the largest and bloodiest battles ever. The Germans viewed the battle as a minor setback, especially compared with the simultaneous invasion of Sicily. The Soviets considered Kursk to be an absolute triumph, the first authoritative combat victory over the Third Reich.
Time would validate the Soviet position. Kursk was the last great German offensive on the eastern front. The Soviets soon replaced their losses; the Germans could not. Most important, Kursk signaled the beginning of a general Nazi retreat that would last twenty months and not stop until the fall of Berlin.89
Involving more than seven thousand tanks, Kursk remains the largest tank battle in history.
8. NORMANDY (JUNE 6, 1944)
For two years Churchill argued against a cross-channel attack. Better to go into North Africa, he argued, to gain valuable combat experience and to spread the Germans thin. North Africa turned into Sicily, then Italy, and nearly Greece, Yugoslavia, and northern Norway. Fearing a slaughter reminiscent of the First World War, the prime minister wanted the Allies to go anywhere but France. On June 6, 1944, his fears dissipated.
There were several mistakes. Roughly 90 percent of the U.S. airborne troops failed to hit their drop zones, with some “sticks” (plane or gilder loads) drifting more than twenty miles off course. Most of the amphibious tanks either sank or were blasted off the beaches. Landing craft off Omaha Beach initially unloaded troops more than a quarter mile from shore.
But predictions of 70 percent casualties proved wildly inflated. Overall, the rate was closer to 15 percent, mostly because Operation Overlord was unquestionably the best-planned military operation of the entire war. Secrecy had more than one million men in complete isolation for weeks. Deception plans had Hitler believing, even weeks after the initial landings, that Calais was the true invasion point. Ten sea lanes had been swept of mines. Artificial harbors called “Mulberries” were brought in. Bomb runs had destroyed French rail lines as far as three hundred miles inland. The Allies had a fifty-to-one advantage in aircraft. It was the heaviest ship-to-shore bombardment and largest amphibious landing in history.
In ten days more than four hundred thousand men and ninety thousand vehicles came ashore.
The long-awaited invasion of Europe began with the landings at Normandy on June 6,1944.
Unfortunately for the Allies, post-landing planning was not nearly as precise. Secondary objectives were not clearly defined. The countryside was a maze of hedgerows, making offensive coordination nearly impossible. But a solid beachhead had been established in Nazi-occupied territory, and the end of the war in Europe could be measured in months rather than years.
Often seen in the United States as a primarily American operation, the Allied airborne and landing troops on D-day included eighty-three thousand Americans plus eighty-eight thousand British and Canadians.
9. BATTLE OF THE BULGE (DECEMBER 16, 1944–JANUARY 16,1945)
Though Hitler visualized launching grand counterattacks until the day he died, his last true offensive mimicked his greatest battlefield success. The outcome, however, did not.
Pulling resources from the eastern front, against the advice of his senior staff, Hitler ordered three panzer armies into the Allied lines on Germany’s western border. Assembling in only five days, cloaked under cloudy skies and frigid weather, the Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh German Armies rammed directly into the middle of the Allied front, once again using the “impassible” Ardennes as the entry point.
German forces stalled the Allied offensive with a reprise of the invasion of France in a surprise attack through the Ardennes in December 1944.
By Christmas Eve the German bulge had reached sixty-five miles into the Allied lines. But clearing skies brought five thousand Allied aircraft and a tenacious American counterattack. The ill-prepared Germans lacked the fuel and ammunition for an extended fight and rapidly lost everything they had gained.
On a map, the front line looked almost exactly the same after the battle as before it started. But the fight involved one million men and cost the Allies more than 70,000 casualties. The Germans suffered more than 120,000 dead, wounded, or missing. The Second Ardennes also critically weakened Germany’s east and west fronts, expediting the downfall of the Third Reich. Most likely, Hitler’s late commitment to the Ardennes campaign allowed for greater Soviet progress into Central Europe than would have otherwise been achieved.
Allegedly, the German commanding officer, Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, had so little faith in the Ardennes offensive, he put his second in command at the head of affairs and spent the first part of the battle reading novels and drinking cognac.
10. BERLIN (APRIL 16–MAY 2, 1945)
By mid-January 1945, the Allies in the West had recovered lost ground from the Bulge, and the Soviets to the east had launched their last final offensive in a driving snowstorm outside Warsaw. The vise was beginning to close.
In rapid succession, Warsaw fell, or what was left of it. In a matter of weeks the Soviets reached the Oder River, the old German border, and began to spread north and south to consolidate their gains. Terrorized German citizens fled to Berlin, only to be struck by thousand-bomber raids. February 13 brought the fall of Budapest and the Dresden fire bombings. By the ides of March the Americans and British began crossing the Rhine.
Then on April 16, four days after the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Soviets entered Germany with more than two million soldiers and began to destroy everything. Looting became widespread, as did murder and arson. The Soviets also conducted rampant molestation. It is believed that 80 percent of all females in and around Berlin were brutally and repeatedly violated by Soviet troops.90
The savagery continued into the city center. Artillery battered the remnants of the capital as the Red Army entered from the north and south. The Reichstag was their target, not the Chancellery four hundred yards away, under which Hitler committed suicide on April 30.
On May 7 Gen. Alfred Jodl signed an unconditional surrender to the Allies at Eisenhower’s headquarters in Reims, France. Angered that the Americans and British should receive capitulation before the Soviets, Stalin demanded an “official” surrender ceremony be held the following day in Berlin.
Yet one of the most significant events in the battle for the German capital occurred nearly a month before its downfall. On April 11, General Eisenhower ordered the western Allies to halt along the Elbe River, just seventy miles from Berlin, and allow the Soviets to enter the city first. Done to prevent possible deaths from friendly fire between the east and west fronts, and to concentrate on taking as much of southern Germany as possible, Eisenhower’s decision infuriated the British and a fair number of Americans. The disappointment soon fostered a widely held belief that the U.S. high command “gave up” Berlin to placate Stalin and thereby lost the first pivotal battle in the Cold War.91
Before the fall of Berlin, friendly fire had occurred between the Soviets and the Americans. On March 18, near the German capital, U.S. fighter pilots engaged eight “Focke-Wulf 190s.” The single-engine fighters were in fact Soviet air force aircraft, six of which were lost, resulting in two deaths.