The War Widens: The Campaigns of 1942

In 1941 the strength of Japan’s army stood at 1.7 million men in fifty-one divisions. By 1945 this figure had increased to 5 million men in 140 divisions. At the peak of its expansion Japan controlled an area measuring 3,000 miles by 3,500 miles, much of it spread out across the Pacific Ocean with garrisons established on islands. Japan probably had the worst trouble of any belligerent country when it came to trying to produce armaments. The country, comprising of a range of islands, had a population approaching 73 million, but it had few natural resources of its own to speak of and no raw materials, which meant that everything from oil to iron ore had to be imported and later the Allied submarines took a huge toll on the convoys. The Japanese working population was around 33 million in 1944 working an average eleven-hour day and while the country produced some remarkable warships it only managed to build 70,000 aircraft between 1941 and 1945. The US Navy would by comparison accept 75,000 aircraft into service during the same period. The workforce of Britain and the Commonwealth numbered 20 million, worked a sixty-hour week and produced 135,000 aircraft and more than 160,000 tanks and other AFVs, mainly due to better production methods and access to raw materials. From 1931 until 1938 the Japanese only built 1,700 tanks and during the entire war they only built around 6,000 AFVs of all types, illustrating the Japanese military preference for warships and aircraft. For example, in the second half of 1942 Japan only built 500 tanks, fewer than Italy and only 10 per cent of Germany’s output of over 5,000 for the same period. Most of these were inferior designs but there was rumour of a 100-ton tank that never appeared, but had it been built the problem of how to move it and even for what purpose could never have justified the resources for its deployment.

The Anglo-American decision to defeat Germany first would lead to the European theatre of operations dominating the war as it had done in the First World War, but that is not to say that the war in the Far East was any less important. Japan occupied vast tracts of land in China along with Burma, Thailand and Malaya. Capturing the larger islands of Sumatra, Borneo and Mindanao gave them more land and occupying the greater northern end of New Guinea and Timor allowed them to operate aircraft from where multiple-engine bombers such as the ‘Betty’ G4M, with a range of 3,000 miles, could threaten Australia. The Pacific War was mainly conducted at sea with engagements on islands such as Saipan, Tarawa, Iwo Jima and Okinawa during the American island-hopping campaign of amphibious landings as they leap-frogged towards the main Japanese islands. Tanks were used in all theatres and those used by the Allies in the Far East were identical to those used in Europe and North Africa. The Japanese tended to use small, light tanks with low armour protection and small-calibre guns, which were used as infantry support. Although allied to one another in the so-called Pact of Steel, Japan was separated by thousands of miles from Italy and Germany and consequently they were unable to support one another’s campaigns directly. In fact, on several notable occasions each acted without informing the other of its intentions. For example, Hitler attacked Russia almost certainly without informing Italy or Japan, and Italy did not inform Germany of its intention to attack Greece. The Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor may have been guessed at by Germany but it is almost certain that they had not been told officially.

The Japanese Threat to Australia

Port Moresby was threatened and the Japanese landed on the island of Papua New Guinea; it seemed that an assault against Australia would be the next move by Japanese forces. Australia was becoming ever more isolated and the supply routes to and from the country were becoming increasingly vulnerable. This meant that essential war materials both to and from Australia, including armoured vehicles, could not be guaranteed. Further islands were occupied by the Japanese and on 19 February aircraft flying from bases on the Celebes islands bombed the harbour installations at Darwin. It was to be the first of sixty-two air raids that would be launched against the port and its environs over the next twenty-one months. Five days earlier the Japanese had parachuted 360 troops into southern Sumatra and naval activity pointed to the likelihood of an invasion of Australia. The threat was very serious but in the end it never materialised. Prior to the outbreak of Japanese hostilities the Australian military authorities, probably sensing the growing hostile attitude of Japan, had decided that they must produce their own tank design that would be built in Australia and be meant only for use by Australian troops. For this purpose an engineer was sent to America in early 1940 with a view to studying tank-building methods. By November that year the first specifications for the Australian tank had been drawn up. The vehicle was to be called the Australian Cruiser I ACI, which had guidelines concerning the weight limits that were to be within 16 to 20 tons imperial weight. The new tank was to be armed with a 2-pounder gun, comparable to many British-designed tanks at the time, had a road speed of at least 30mph and carried armour 50mm thick.

Australian Sentinel Project

The Sentinel project began with incredible speed and by January 1942, with little or no previous experience in these matters, the first designs for a wholly Australian-built tank had been drafted. The tank was a completely new design and the idea of Colonel W.D. Watson, a tank designer from Britain. The concept, although an original design, was actually a hybrid that had been conceived with the intention of building a tank within the capabilities of Australia’s wartime resources. Indeed, the first Mk I tanks went into production in August 1942, but eventual numbers built were never great.

The turret was a single one-piece casting which in itself was a remarkable feat of engineering given the fact that Australia lacked the heavy engineering plant to achieve this work and the experienced workforce to undertake the production. The hull was to be produced in the same manner, which further stretched an already strained manufacturing industry. In fact, at the time this work was being undertaken the country did not even have the ability to manufacture a motorcar. The casting method for hull and turret was chosen because it was considered to be a faster process than rolling armoured plate. The engine for the new tank also posed another problem, because all such automotive components had to be shipped in. The problem was solved by linking together three Perrier Cadillac ‘75’ V–8 cylinder petrol engines, along with American-built transmission, to provide a single unit with an output rating of 330hp at 3,050rpm. The power plant was mounted in the rear section of the hull, typical of tank design of the day, with two of the engines lying side by side and the third mounted behind them. The power from the engines was transferred forward through a Carden-style shaft to the clutch and a five-speed gearbox. This layout placed the drive sprockets at the front and the idler wheels at the rear. The vehicle could reach top speeds of 30mph on roads, as laid out in the specifications, and had an operational range of 200 miles, which was more than adequate for Australia’s needs for home defence.

The tracks used on the Australian Cruiser I AC1 were supplied by American manufacturers and were identical to the type used on the US Army’s M3 Lee and Grant medium tanks. The suspension had been intended to be of the type also used on the M3 tank, but in the end was a spring design using a horizontal-volute form, not unlike the type used on the French Hotchkiss H35 tank, except that at the top of each of the three sets of bogies with their two wheels, there was a small return roller to support the track. This gave a total of six road wheels on either side with three return rollers, in a configuration similar to the Canadian-built Ram II tank.

The project came to be known by the informal name of Sentinel and although Mk I to Mk IV would be listed, a Mk II Sentinel was never produced. The Mk I was armed with a 40mm-calibre 2-pounder main armament mounted in the turret, which had a full 360 degrees traversing capability. A Vickers .303in-calibre machine gun was mounted co-axially and while such a layout had produced poor results against German tanks, it was thought to be sufficient against those from Japan, which were very poorly armoured. A second Vickers machine gun was carried in a mounting in the centre of the glacis plate, firing forwards. The Mk I Sentinel was 20ft 9in long, 9ft 1in wide and 8ft 5in to the top of the turret, which gave it a higher silhouette profile than most Allied tanks in service at the time except for the US-built M3 medium tank.

Vehicle Name	Manufacturer	Production Date	Armament	Weight	Max. Speed
Cruiser Mk I AC1 (Sentinel)	New South Wales Railway Company	1942	40mm-calibre 2-pounder gun and a Vickers .303in-calibre machine gun	27.5 tons	30mph
Cruiser Mk III AC3 (Sentinel)	New South Wales Railway Company	1943	87mm-calibre 25-pounder gun and a Vickers .303in-calibre machine gun	29 tons	30mph
Cruiser Mk IV AC4 (Sentinel)	New South Wales Railway Company	1943	17-pounder gun and a Vickers .303in-calibre machine gun	30 tons	35mph

Despite being quite literally cobbled together from resources available, the Mk I Sentinel had armour protection that also met planning requirements and varied between thickness of 25mm and 65mm, which made it comparable to the Churchill Mk VIII and greater than the armour fitted to the Crusader Mk III, which had a maximum armour thickness of only 51mm. The Mk I Sentinel had a combat-ready weight of nearly 28 tons and was served by a standard tank crew of five men. However, the Mk I was not without its operational problems and, to put it politely, gave less than reliable service. Despite this, a total of sixty-six Sentinel Mk I tanks were built. The next model in the series should have been the Mk II, another light Cruiser-type tank, but mechanical problems with the prototype Mk I led to a delay and the project was abandoned in 1941, the same year that it was proposed. The Mk II was studied but it was considered too complicated and with the additional delays it never entered production. Thus production went straight from Mk I to Mk III, beginning in mid-1943. At this stage in the war the fighting in the Pacific was taking a distinct turn in favour of the Allies and some American-built tanks were being shipped to Australia. Despite this the Australian military decided to press ahead with the development of the Mk III Sentinel in July 1943.

The automotive equipment as fitted to the Mk III Sentinel was basically unaltered from the Mk I, and this eased production and avoided retooling in the factories. But obviously some alterations were made to the original design in order to create the Mk III. This centred mainly on changing the structure of the main armament and its layout. In place of the 2-pounder, the new Mk III was armed with a 25-pounder gun that was fitted into a modified turret that had the capacity to accept such a dramatic increase in size of weapon. Trials on this combination had been undertaken as early as June 1942 and it was the success of these that led to the Mk III. The turret was well designed, being well sloped to deflect anti-tank rounds and it was very spacious, which allowed the fitting of the 25-pounder while retaining a full 360-degree traversing capability. A Vickers .303in-calibre machine gun was mounted co-axially to the left of the main gun as on the Mk I. The bow-mounted machine gun was removed, however, in order to make room for stowage of the much larger shells fired by the 25-pounder. An earlier suggestion had mooted the idea of arming the Mk I with the 6-pounder anti-tank gun, but at the time all these weapons were urgently required by the troops fighting in the Middle East and none were ever made available even for trials and the suggestion was dropped.

On the Mk III the arrangement of the three Cadillac engines was changed to a semi-radial pattern and the layout was altered and made more compact. A further improvement was to fit a link to the single common crankcase. Following the introduction of the Mk III into service the Mk I Sentinels were either up-gunned or used for training and experimental armament improvement trials. Some of the tanks were modified to be fitted with the 17-pounder gun, comparable to the Sherman Firefly, and these were designated Mk IV Sentinels. The changes created a heavier and larger vehicle than the original design and as a result the version was never put into production. In March 1943 the tank served as a platform for further trials with a range of other weaponry, including the possibility of mounting two 25-pounder guns in a turret. This was to conduct recoil trials during firing and was never pursued beyond this experiment. The actual calibre of the 25-pounder is 87mm and, combined with the size and weight of the gun, it could not have been an easy task to fit one such weapon into a turret let alone two. Indeed, one is inclined to speculate how successful a version of the Sentinel with two 25-pounder guns would have been on the battlefield. Firing trials proved the feasibility of the project but it almost certainly would not have operated in the role of a standard tank but rather like an SPG but with a limited ammunition capacity.

The Mk III and Mk IV Sentinels were built in relatively small numbers by the New South Wales Railway Company at Chullora, where the Mk I had also been built. The entire production of the tank may have been very much an irregular affair and entire output never reached anywhere near the figure of 700 that records show was the number considered to be the force required by the Australian Army at the time to counter any Japanese invasion. Except for home service and experimental trials, no Sentinel tanks ever entered operational service proper and none were ever deployed overseas into battle against Japanese tanks. In fact, it would have been an interesting situation and no doubt a very much one-sided contest, especially with those Sentinels armed with 25-pounders engaging the much lighter Japanese tanks. As the American forces gathered strength and forced the Japanese back, so the pressure on Australia and the likelihood of invasion subsided. American-supplied tanks were sent to Australian forces serving in the Pacific theatre of operations and the need for the Sentinel tank passed. As a stopgap measure it had worked and provided the Australian forces with its own armoured vehicles. They had been shown to be comparable to some Allied armour at the time, but lacking proper resources and manufacturing facilities the design was left behind by improved developments. Despite that, they would undoubtedly have held their own against Japanese tanks, which were never built in great numbers or great quality, lacked heavy armament and had a limited range.

Japanese Vehicle Production

Within months of the attack on Pearl Harbor the Japanese appeared to be everywhere at once and the Allies were forced to retreat in order to avoid further mass surrenders such as that of the 80,000 British and Commonwealth troops when Singapore fell in February 1942 and the 76,000 American and Filipino troops when Bataan was taken in April the same year. Japan’s tank designs were largely obsolete, being consigned to the infantry support role. For the assault against Singapore, Lieutenant General Yamashita Tomoyuki with the Twenty-Fifth Army had 60,000 troops in three divisions supported by over 600 aircraft but only eighty tanks and forty armoured cars. In 1942 the Japanese tank forces were formed into three divisions but deployed in small ‘penny packet’ groups, and their tactics and design meant that they were unsuited for supporting any amphibious landings. During the fighting in the Philippines the American tanks had been destroyed by anti-tank guns, but elsewhere Allied tanks proved more than a match for the lightly armoured and armed Japanese tanks. The dense jungle and steep terrain was wholly unsuitable for tank movement, which restricted them to operations along roads or being used in ambush tactics, and by the end of May 1942 the Allies had no credible armoured force in the region. Like its German ally, Japanese troops seized abandoned vehicles and pressed them into service, including armoured vehicles if they had not been properly disabled. Troops on campaign simply took civilian trucks for transportation from plantations along with any military trucks they captured intact.

If Japanese tank production was not up to supplying vehicles then the motor industry was not much better for providing an expanding army. The Japanese motor industry did produce a full range of vehicles for the military, including 6x4 trucks with a 1.5-ton capacity such as the Isuzu Type 94, along with staff cars and half-track vehicles such as the IKEGAI Ko-Hi 5-ton, which were used as artillery tractors. In the 1920s and 1930s most vehicle production in Japan was undertaken using American technology. For example, in 1929 Japanese companies produced 437 cars but American companies built 30,000. In 1936 the introduction of the Motor Car Manufacturing Enterprise Law meant that half of all holdings in vehicle production plants must be Japanese. By 1939 the Foreign Exchange Control Law banned the production of foreign vehicles, which meant American vehicles. At the time Japan was almost entirely dependent on America for scrap metal for use in the production of vehicles, but as relations between the two countries worsened so this trade dried up.

Japan had invaded Manchuria in 1931 and further expansion into China in 1937 gave some access to raw material, such as coal, but Japan would always struggle to get sufficient supplies and this would have a telling effect. In the first year of the war against America, Japan produced 45,433 trucks between 1941 and 1942, of which half were designated for civilian use. Compared to other countries where vehicle production increased, Japan’s output actually declined year on year. Between 1942 and 1943 production of trucks dropped to 36,483 vehicles. From 1943 to 1944 output was down to 25,672 vehicles and a year later this had dropped to 21,743, which was less than half the figure at the start of the war. In the last five months of the war from April to August 1945 Japan’s truck production was 6,726 vehicles. To make up for this shortage the troops were compelled to use huge numbers of captured civilian vehicles and military trucks, which caused them the same problems in maintenance and spare parts as the Germans experienced.

United States’ Vehicle Production

By contrast, American industry brought new innovations in production and ideas to extend the service life of components. The introduction of rubber blocks and rubber-jointed tracks for tanks meant 3,000 miles of service compared to 600 miles for the all-metal jointed tracks as fitted to the German PzKw IV. The Americans also learned quickly and from the early riveted designs on the M3 Stuart light tank and M3 Lee-Grant medium tank they developed the M4 Sherman with a welded and cast construction, which would become the mainstay of the Allied tank force. The M5 light tank was an improved version of the M3; with its welded design and improved layout it would go on to serve to the end of the war after its introduction in 1942. The Americans also introduced a whole range of trucks and utility vehicles in a series called ‘WC’; these were designed and built by Dodge, which was based in the city of Detroit in Michigan. Some thirty-eight different types were developed, each with an identification code and intended for roles varying from the WC9 ambulance to the WC7 command car. The initials had specific meanings, with the letter ‘W’ standing for the year 1941 and ‘C’ being the 0.5-ton rating. In fact, the letter ‘C’ code was kept for the 0.75-ton and 1.5-ton 6x6 Dodge trucks.

Dodge

Dodge was established in 1914 and gained a reputation for building reliable trucks for a range of uses in all categories. It was in 1939 that the company produced its first prototype of a purpose-built military vehicle in the form of a 4x4 ½-ton vehicle in what was then the ‘VC’ series. Some designs were built in very small numbers while others were produced in their thousands, and between 1940 and 1942 the company produced some 79,771 ½-ton trucks. When America entered the war in 1941 the series became ‘WC’ and one of the truly outstanding features of the designs was the high degree of inter-changeability of its parts, which meant that maintenance was easier, and that spares could fit many vehicles. The designs varied in weight and size according to the intended role and served in all theatres and all branches of the US military. The WC56 was a 4x4 vehicle similar to the Willys Jeep but it was heavier and did not prove so popular with the troops, although it was still used in limited numbers. The WC56 measured 13.8ft long, 8.1ft high and 7.1ft wide. It weighed 2.5 tons and had a payload capacity of over 0.8 tons. The WC57 was designated as a command car and measured 14.6ft long, 6.8ft high and 6.5ft wide. The WC57 weighed 2.5 tons and had a weight capacity of more than a 0.75-ton payload; over 6,000 were built and used in Europe and the Far East.

Vehicle Name	Type	Manufacturer	Production Date	Armament/Payload	Weight	Max. Speed
WC51	Weapon Carrier	Dodge	1942–45	0.75 tons and .30in-calibre machine gun	2.5 tons	54mph
WC52	Weapon Carrier	Dodge	1942–45	0.75 tons and .30in-calibre machine gun	2.6 tons	54mph
WC54	Ambulance	Dodge	1942–45	0.75 tons	2.5 tons	54mph
WC56	Command car	Dodge	1942–45	0.75 tons	2.5 tons	54mph
WC57	Command car	Dodge	1942–44	0.75 tons	2.5 tons	54mph

One of the most widely used of the WC series of vehicles was the design referred to as ‘weapon carrier’, of which some 182,655 were built between 1942 and 1945. This was produced in two types known as the WC51 and WC52, both of which were 4x4 with a ¾-ton load rating classification and the only difference in design was that the latter version was fitted with an integral winch over the front bumper. Apart from this feature they were identical when one takes into account the additional weight of the winch on the WC52 version. The WC51 was produced in greater numbers, with 123,541 being built. The WC51 measured 5.6ft in height with the canvas cover removed but this increased to 7.1ft when it was erected. The vehicle weighed 2.5 tons and could carry a cargo payload of up to ¾ ton. When transporting troops it could carry six to eight men, including driver and co-driver, with weapons and personal kit. The WC52, of which 59,114 were built, was slightly heavier at 2.6 tons and measured 14.7ft long due to the front-mounted winch.

The WC54 ambulance served across Europe and Italy. The double doors at the rear made it easier to handle stretcher cases.

Dodge WC21 light cargo vehicle with a payload capacity of 1,300lb; it was one of the large range of utility trucks used by the US Army.

The WC51 and WC52 weapons carriers could carry heavy loads for their size or a squad of infantry. Weapons carriers were used across France and into Germany during 1944 and 1945.

Weapons carrier in the markings of the British 3rd Infantry Division.

Both vehicles were powered by a six-cylinder Dodge petrol T214 engine rated at 76hp at 3,200rpm, giving a road speed of around 54mph and an operational range of more than 130 miles. Transmission was four forward gears and one reverse and, being American designed, the vehicle was left-hand drive. Even when the larger 6x6 trucks entered service the WC51 continued to be used, mainly to carry supplies, leaving the larger vehicles to carry troops and heavier cargo loads as part of the specialist convoy systems that were developed to supply troops in Europe after the Normandy Landings in June 1944. The WC51 and the WC52 were versatile and could be armed with machine guns and other devices. They were used by other armies during the war, with Russia alone receiving 25,000 weapons carriers, where they were assigned to such duties as towing the ZIS–3 76mm calibre anti-tank gun.

Another of the most numerous WC designs was the purpose-built ambulance, designated as the WC54, with around 26,000 being built between 1942 and 1944. This was just one of the standard military ambulances used during the war and it served with the US Army Medical Corps in all theatres of operations. Its capacity to transport either four wounded as stretcher cases or seven seated casualties plus a medic made it an indispensable vehicle for the movement of casualties from the battlefield to rear areas and better hospital treatment. Indeed, wartime photographs show it on the beaches at Normandy and later during the campaign to push inland after the landings. The WC54 replaced the WC27 ambulance and some other older designs. It measured just over 16ft long with a wheelbase of 10ft 1in. The body was built from sheet metal and the vehicle measured 6ft 6in wide and 7ft 6in high, and weighed around 2.5 tons. During its production run the vehicle underwent some very minor design modifications, but all featured a heater for the comfort of the casualties. The vehicle had a fuel capacity of 30 gallons, the engine was the Model T214 six-cylinder petrol and it had a gearbox with four forward gears and one reverse.

The WC56 was used for liaison duties in the UK and after D-Day in Europe. The driver’s position of the WC56 command car was the same as commercial vehicles for ease of use.

The WC56 command car was used close to the front line to gather information. Probably the most famous person to travel in this type of vehicle was General Patton in the European campaign 1944. The WC57 command car. Another of the Dodge range of WC wheeled vehicles (above right).

The Friendly Invasion

The USA would supply hundreds of thousands of trucks and tanks as the war progressed, but in January 1942 it was still coming to terms with the fact that it was now involved in a global war. With the decision to defeat Germany having been made between Churchill and Roosevelt at the Arcadia Conference it was vital that US troops, equipment and aircraft were sent to Britain. The first troops arrived in April to be joined later by aircraft that would take part in the bombing campaign against Germany. The USAAF built its bases across Britain, with the main concentration in the Suffolk and Norfolk areas, and the army personnel were billeted in specially constructed camps. Large country estates were also commandeered and troops were billeted in the grounds, which were vast enough to serve as vehicle parks for the trucks and tanks. The 28th Infantry Division, the ‘Keystone’ Division, was sent to Wales where they took over various locations including Margam Park near Port Talbot and used the more than 800 acres surrounding the large manor house to practise training. The grounds of Dunster Castle in Devon were also taken over for the same purposes, as was the land around Bowood House in Wiltshire. Littlecote House in Berkshire would be used by the 101st Airborne Division; Braunston Park in Leicestershire was used by the 82nd Airborne Division; and at Saltram near Plymouth in Devon the estate, owned by the Parker family, was used by a number of specialist units along with the 4th Infantry Division and other infantry units. The grounds of Saltram were also used as a vast vehicle park and maintenance facilities were built to service the tanks and trucks. This was called the ‘friendly invasion’ by the British and they welcomed their American allies. Over the coming months millions of American service personnel arrived in Britain, with some based in Northern Ireland for training, and hundreds of thousands of trucks, tanks and artillery were brought over, along with millions of tons of supplies.

Littlecote House near Newbury in Berkshire, which was used by the 101st Airborne Division in the build-up to D-Day.

Saltram House near Plymouth in Devon which was used during the build-up for D-Day.

Tank inspection pit at Saltram House. It has been filled in but would have been deep enough for a man to stand in to look under a tank parked on the concrete.

Continuing German Operations in Russia

In Russia, where the German Army was still reeling from the powerful counter-attacks that had pushed it back from the outskirts of Moscow, Stalin was calling for the Western Allies to open a ‘Second Front’ by invading Europe. The Russians believed they were bearing the brunt of the fighting and would not accept that such a campaign could not be mounted until sufficient equipment and troops had been assembled to make it a success. The Western Allies, Britain in particular, wondered how much longer Russia could last after losing so much in the way of men and equipment. Forced to withdraw from its primary objective, the German Army was far from being defeated and proved as much by tightening its grip around Leningrad in the north, while in the south units of Army Group South had made the first moves in November 1941 to invest the city of Sevastopol in readiness for another siege. In December the Eleventh Army of General Erich von Manstein had attacked and forced the defenders back from their first line of defence, which comprised 2 miles of trenches, anti-tank ditches and minefields. The city lay on the coast in the Crimea, which itself was virtually an island, being attached to the Ukrainian mainland by only a narrow strip of land to the north. In such a position the city and its population, which included a defending garrison of 100,000 troops, had their backs to the sea. German operations against Kerch to the east led to the capture of 170,000 Russian troops, 250 tanks and 1,100 pieces of artillery, which could have been used to support Sevastopol. Manstein built up his forces, which included bringing forward railway-mounted guns including the massive 800mm calibre known as ‘Dora’, to shell the city. The city’s defenders had 600 pieces of artillery, thirty-eight tanks and only fifty-five aircraft. The Germans had 600 aircraft to bomb the city, artillery backed by rocket launchers called Nebelwerfers, and the support of their Italian allies along with Bulgarian and Romanian troops. Three rings of defences surrounded the city with minefields, pillboxes and concrete bunkers, all of which had to be broken through before Manstein’s forces could enter the city properly. The fighting continued until 3 July when the last of the city’s defenders surrendered, giving the Germans another 100,000 prisoners. The engagement had lasted 247 days and the Germans had fired 46,000 tons of artillery shells in addition to the aerial bombs dropped on the city.

The Dora and the Gustav

The Dora, along with the Gustav, was the largest-calibre railway artillery piece ever built and had originally been developed by the Krupp company with the specific intention of bombarding the French Maginot Line. In his book Lost Victories, Field Marshal Erich von Manstein, who commanded the German Eleventh Army in the operations against Sevastopol, described Gustav as: ‘A miracle of technical achievement. The barrel must have been 90 feet long and the carriage as high as a two-storey house. Sixty trains had been required to bring it into position along a railway specially laid for the purpose. Two anti-aircraft regiments had to be in constant attendance.’ He went on to say of the Gustav railway gun: ‘The effectiveness of the cannon bore no real relation to all the effort and expense that had gone into making it.’ In other words, the whole thing was a ghastly drain on resources.

The Gustav railway gun had been developed by Krupp in response to a query raised by Hitler in 1936 in regard to what size calibre artillery pieces would be required to reduce the French defensive fortifications of the Maginot Line. The German Army High Command had also enquired of Krupp as to the size of weapons required to pound the Maginot Line and Krupp had postulated weapons in the calibre of 70cm, 80cm and even 100cm. Despite the fact that no orders had actually been placed, the design team assumed that the weapon was required and set about designing the Gustav and Dora. Drawings were prepared and presented to the Army Weapons Office in 1937, which approved them and the building programme started. No one could have foreseen the difficulties in producing such massive weapons, but there were so many that Krupp’s production schedules for standard weaponry went awry. Instead of having the guns ready for 1940, as promised, it was 1941 before they could be assembled and test fired for proof. Adolf Hitler was present at one of the field trials, accompanied by Heinz Guderian and Dr Muller of Krupp, who informed Hitler that the 80cm-calibre Gustav could be used against tanks. To this statement Guderian was stunned and later stated: ‘For a moment I was dumbfounded as I envisaged the mass-production of “Gustavs”.’ He quickly explained to Hitler that the gun could be fired, but could never engage an individual target because it required forty-five minutes to reload after firing. In fairness, what Dr Muller probably meant was that Gustav could be used to break up massed armoured attacks by tanks, rather than being used as a true anti-tank gun.

The Gustav gun was dispatched to Sevastopol in 1942 to participate in the siege of the city. It required a crew of more than 1,400 men for its operation and defence, in addition to the anti-aircraft units. The Gustav was formally known as the ‘80cm K (E)’ and was built in sections to allow it to pass the railway loading gauge. The fully assembled weapon was over 140ft long, 33ft wide and 38ft high, and weighed 1,328 tons. It took some three weeks to assemble the weapon and prepare it ready for firing. The Gustav was assembled using a four-rail double track, with two outer tracks for the assembly crane. The two halves of the bogie units were placed into position and the gun carriage was built up on top. The barrel, which came in two sections, was assembled by inserting the rear half into the jacket, and connecting the front half by means of an enormous junction nut, and mounting the whole assembly on the cradle. The gun was dismantled into breech ring and block, the two barrel sections, jacket, cradle, trunnions and trunnion bearings. All of these sections were transported on special flatcars. The mounting was split longitudinally for movement and dismantled from the top downwards. The sections were transported on additional flatcars hauled by trains.

The Gustav fired two types of shells, one of which was the 4.7-ton high-explosive shell and had a range of around 29 miles. The second type of shell was the 7-ton concrete-piercing shell, which could be fired out to ranges of over 23 miles. During its deployment at Sevastopol the Gustav fired between sixty and seventy rounds and one of the concrete-piercing shells penetrated through some 100ft of rock at Severnaya Bay and destroyed a Russian ammunition stockpile. The Gustav was later moved to Leningrad, but the siege there had been lifted by the Russians before it could be made ready.

At the other end of Russia at the same time the campaign against the city of Leningrad was bogged down in stalemate with 300,000 Germans holding the southern end of the isthmus and the Finns holding the northern end. The Finns and Germans had not joined their front lines to cut off the southern edge of Lake Ladoga, which left the Russians in possession of Lednevo with its railway links and Novaya Ladoga with road links from where supplies could be transported into the besieged city. The Finns may have been allies of Germany but as far as they were concerned they had re-conquered the territory they had lost in 1940 during the war against Russia and they were satisfied. They were not prepared to go any further and this left open the water route into Leningrad. The Russians had built defences but with a population of 3 million the problem was feeding the people. In October 1941 the city was being supplied with 1,000 tons of food daily brought in by ship from Novaya Ladoga, but when the waters froze in November that rate dropped to half the capacity. The problem was compounded when a German attack captured a stretch of the rail link at Tikhvin and severed the route into Lednevo.

The Communist Party secretary in Leningrad, Andrei Zhdanov, ordered that a route be cut through dense forest so that trucks could carry supplies from the railhead at Zaborye to Novaya Ladoga, from where convoys could continue to Lednevo and across the waters of the lake. The route that was hacked through the forest to connect Zaborye to Novaya Ladoga covered a distance of 50 miles and had been created in just over four weeks, from 9 November to 6 December. It was a prodigious feat of work by labourers, many of whom were on the point of collapse from hunger. The terrain was so steep in places that the trucks had to be physically pushed up the inclines. Even so, the best distance they could manage to cover was 25 miles per day. There was some news when a Russian counter-attack seized back the railhead at Tikhvin, which shortened the route the trucks had to take and, with the waters of Lake Ladoga frozen, the trucks drove across the icy surface. By January 1942 there were up to 400 trucks daily driving the treacherous 20-mile route across the frozen surface of Lake Ladoga from Lednevo to Osinovets from where they could continue overland to Leningrad or the railhead could take supplies direct to the city. The civilians called it the ‘Road of Life’, but to the drivers who risked crashing through the ice it was the ‘Road of Death’. Only seven months earlier some fifty-four trains had removed almost 1.2 million works of art and national treasures from the city in a month-long operation to prevent them from being captured by the Germans. By the time of the first thaw in April 1942 some 53,000 tons of supplies such as fuel and ammunition and a further 42,500 tons of food had been driven across the Lake Ladoga ice road. The siege of Leningrad would last for a total of 890 days and would not be relieved until 13 January 1944. The suffering of the people and the military defenders was enormous, with an estimated 1.5 million being killed or dying of starvation. The struggle to save the city and keep it supplied was one of the greatest examples of logistics during the war, but it was overshadowed by events at Stalingrad where entire armies would be wiped out. Andrei Zhdanov declared that ‘We must dig Fascism a grave in front of Leningrad’. The cost to the German Army and its Italian and Finnish allies is not known, but the fact that the operation tied down so many troops, tanks, trucks and other equipment certainly assisted by preventing them from being deployed elsewhere.

The Capture of Tobruk

Two weeks after Manstein’s troops had captured Sevastopol, Rommel and his Afrika Korps in North Africa were adding to the German Army’s victories by capturing the defensive positions of El Duda and Belhamed outside the town port of Tobruk. He also captured British supply depots near Bardia and the airfield at El Adem. Sensing the victory that had eluded him several months earlier, he wrote:

Evidence of the British defeat could be seen all along the roads and verges… Vast quantities of material lay on all sides, burnt-out vehicles stood black and empty in the sand. Whole convoys of undamaged British lorries had fallen into our hands, some of which had been pressed into service immediately by the fighting troops, while others were now awaiting collection by the salvage squads.

Some of the vehicles that fell into German hands would have been trucks such as the Morris CS8 built by Morris Commercial Cars based in Birmingham. There were about 26,000 of these useful little vehicles built in three main versions, with production beginning in 1937. Nicknamed ‘Gin Palaces’ by the troops, they were used as radio vehicles by the Royal Corps of Signals. They were also used to transport supplies and troops (for which purpose they were fitted with wooden slatted seats) and even to evacuate the wounded. The CS8 was fitted with a petrol 3,498cc six-cylinder engine rated at 60hp. Two fuel tanks, each with an 11-gallon capacity, gave the vehicle an operational range of 220 miles on roads. Some were produced with a very basic roof and doors of canvas, while later versions were fitted with steel doors. The rear body was built up from wooden slats with a tailgate that dropped down to make loading and unloading easier.

British Vehicles used by the German Army in North Africa

Vehicle Name	Type	Manufacturer	Production Date	Armament	Weight	Max. Speed
CS8	Truck	Morris Commercial Cars	1937	N/A	0.9 tons	37mph
4x2 PU 8cwt	Truck	Morris Commercial Cars	1936	N/A	1.8 tons	50mph

Other abandoned vehicle types captured would have been the 4x2 Morris PU 8cwt, many of which had already fallen into German hands at Dunkirk in 1940. They should have been wrecked to prevent their being used by the Germans, but such actions were not always totally destructive and beyond draining the sump and running the engine until it seized up not much else could be done to render them useless. To good mechanics and engineers it would not have proved much of a problem to get the vehicle back on the road. In the desert, vehicles were pressed into a variety of roles, some for which they were never intended and invariably carried loads far exceeding their design limitations. The Morris PU 8cwt was used by the British and Australian troops as radio trucks and supply trucks, and those captured intact by the Germans were put to the same use. The basic PU 8cwt was 12ft 9in long and 6ft 3in wide. Built between 1936 and 1941, with Canada producing many, they were also used in India. The vehicle weighed 1.8 tons and the six-cylinder 60hp engine gave a road speed of around 50mph. Like other military vehicles it was versatile and could carry troops, supplies and even tow light anti-aircraft guns. With so many of their own vehicles being delivered by convoy, the Germans eagerly seized on the opportunity to supplement their fleet of vehicles, which by then were in great need of replacement or extensive servicing.

It had taken Rommel almost six months to reach this point having started his offensive on 21 January at El Agheila, which was where Operation Crusader had pushed him back to. In typical fashion Rommel had not wasted time and effort but acted swiftly and although he had only 560 tanks, of which 332 were German (the rest being Italian or captured vehicles), he mounted his offensive. The British Eighth Army, commanded by Lieutenant General Neil Ritchie, was equipped with 850 tanks including Matilda Mk IIs, Valentines and M3 Stuarts, but also, more importantly, 167 M3 Grants armed with 75mm guns, which would prove to be invaluable to the British. The Free French garrison at the defensive position of Bir Hakeim (sometimes written as Bir Hacheim) was held by troops of the French Foreign Legion commanded by General Pierre Koenig. German sappers worked to clear a way through the minefields and the Luftwaffe pounded the position with some 1,300 sorties. On 3 June the Italian Trieste Division and the German 90th Light Division attacked the position but the French held. Over the next week the Germans allowed the French no respite and attacked or probed the defences day and night. Bir Hakeim was virtually surrounded except for a narrow corridor. The British had been ordered by Ritchie to support the French defenders and on the evening of 10 June, under cover of darkness, General Koenig led his command of 2,700 men out of the position and through the desert to rendezvous with a fleet of British trucks that had been sent out to bring them back to safety. When Rommel’s troops entered Bir Hakeim on 11 June all he found were 300 men who were too seriously wounded to be evacuated and the graves of 600 other defenders. On the same day he attacked east out of the position known as ‘the Cauldron’, which lay to the north of Bir Hakeim and from where on 5 June he had launched an attack that had inflicted 6,000 casualties on the British and destroyed 150 tanks. This latest attack forced the British to retreat and over the following week Rommel’s Afrika Korps and the Italians captured more ground so that by 17 June he was threatening Tobruk itself.

The Morris Commercial 15cwt truck was a general-purpose vehicle for carrying supplies and troops.

Driver’s position for the Morris Commercial 15cwt truck with basic controls.

Tobruk, so essential for supplying the Allies, had eluded Rommel the year before, but was now at his mercy. The garrison at Tobruk comprised 35,000 men, including Indian, South African and British troops, with sufficient supplies of food and ammunition to last for at least ninety days. On 18 June, aircraft of the Luftwaffe began to bomb the positions, sappers cleared the mines and tanks of the 21st Panzer Division attacked defences held by the 2nd/5th Mahrattas. Lacking anti-tank guns and heavy support, the Indians were overwhelmed but the survivors fought on with the Cameron Highlanders until they were forced to surrender. Realising that they could not hold, Major General Henry Klopper, commanding the Tobruk garrison, ordered supplies to be destroyed. Fuel, oil and ammunition were blown up but even so, when the garrison finally surrendered on 21 June, Rommel reaped a rich harvest including 5,000 tons of supplies, 2,000 vehicles and, most importantly, 500,000 gallons, amounting to over 2,200 tons, of much-needed fuel. It was shattering news to the Allies and Churchill in particular, who confided to Roosevelt that its loss was ‘one of the heaviest blows I can recall during the war’. Hitler promoted Rommel to the rank of field marshal and the way was open to Cairo and the Middle East with its oil supplies. Roosevelt reacted to the news by immediately sending 300 of the new Sherman tanks to help the British and Commonwealth troops.

Morris Commercial truck used by the British Army in North Africa but the Germans also used captured vehicles for their own transportation of supplies and troops.

Morris Commercial truck with 7th Armoured Division badge. This vehicle was used throughout the North Africa campaign.

The British forces in North Africa did not collapse as might have been expected, but instead, under General Sir Claude Auchinleck (nicknamed ‘the Auk’ by the troops), as commander-in-chief Middle East and also as the field commander of the Eighth Army, took up positions called ‘boxes’. There were several of these strongly defended positions, so called because of their all-round defence, and the largest of these enclosed El Alamein in a wide sweeping arc that ran from the coast east of the town, continued south and then ran west before moving northwards back to the coast. Cairo, and Rommel’s prize, lay 150 miles farther east, but first he had to smash these boxes. He sent in the 15th and 21st Panzer Divisions to attack the Deir el Shein box on 1 July. This was held by the 18th Indian Brigade and the German tanks captured the positions the same day. The 90th Light Division followed a feature known as the Miteirya Ridge to the south of El Alamein, skirted the defences and advanced towards the box held by the 4th Armoured Brigade. The Germans became tangled in a minefield, and artillery fire from the El Alamein defensive perimeter added to their losses. Auchinleck had sent 155 tanks of the 7th Armoured Division to positions south of the Deir el Munassib box, held by the New Zealand Division. In the centre the 1st Armoured Division was positioned to counter any attacks there and the 6th New Zealand Brigade held the Bab el Qattara box.

The Italian Ariete Division attacked the New Zealanders’ positions on 3 July but rather than wait for them to come close the New Zealanders moved out and forced the Italians back. Over the next week both sides made thrusts, such as the Australian attack on 10 July against positions held by the Italian Sabratha Division, which fell back. The next day was no better for the Trieste Division, which abandoned its position at Tel el Eisa when the Australians attacked. By 14 July Auchinleck still had 400 tanks he could commit to battle while Rommel was down to only thirty serviceable tanks. With so much armour the British had the advantage in firepower. Even so, the German tank crews fought on determinedly. Rommel’s artillery had run out of ammunition and his Italian allies were crumbling fast and so could not be relied on for support. On 21 July Auchinleck mounted a night attack but at Deir el Shein, formerly held by the 18th Indian Brigade, his tanks ran into an ambush and anti-tank guns and mines claimed eighty-seven Valentine tanks either destroyed or damaged, which had to be abandoned. The fighting continued until the end of July, with Rommel receiving supplies and reinforcements, but Auchinleck was reluctant to engage in another battle so soon. He wanted to wait for his reserves to build up but Churchill saw this as weakness and decided that he would replace ‘the Auk’ with someone who was more aggressive and willing to take risks. For the time being, at least, the war in the desert was at a stalemate once more. Meanwhile, the war continued in Russia.

The M3 Medium Tank

The M3 Lee, or Grant, was another American-built tank, like the earlier M3 Honey light tank, which had been battle-proven before America entered the war proper and demonstrated to the US Army what their tanks were capable of achieving in combat. America was not involved in the war in Europe in 1939 but that did not prevent military observers from taking an interest in developments and sending reports to various departments. One such observation from 1939 reported that tank guns at the time were proving inadequate, especially those in the 37mm-calibre bracket. Events of 1940, with the overrunning of Western Europe spearheaded by panzer divisions, confirmed this, and American designers began to examine ways of fitting guns of 75mm calibre into tanks. The problem was that turret designs of the time were not capable of supporting such a large-calibre gun and so an alternative method was devised. This alternative was known as a sponson mounting, a design more commonly used on warships, but while this solved the problem of getting a large gun into a tank it raised the problem of how to traverse the weapon. By their very design, sponson mountings permit only a limited traverse, whereas a turret can traverse through 360 degrees for all-round protection.

In July 1940 the US Ordnance Committee, which advised on such matters, designated that a new tank design using the sponson method for mounting a 75mm gun should be developed and termed it the M3 medium tank. Previous contracts for other tank designs were cancelled and the Chrysler Corporation of Michigan was awarded the contract to produce the M3 tank. The company already had experience of building vehicles for the military and for this project it acquired a site on which to build a purpose-built tank factory at Warren in Michigan. By the end of the war the company had produced around 25,000 armoured vehicles, including 3,352 of the new M3 tanks.

A British tank commission sent to America in June 1940 faced obstacles in purchasing tanks because American producers believed that Britain was about to surrender following the country’s defeat at Dunkirk. They were therefore reluctant to build a tank to British specifications. Undeterred, the British delegation decided that the M3 medium tank would suit the needs of the British Army and an order was placed with the Pullman Company and the Pressed Steel Company. These companies would eventually build 500 and 501 M3 tanks respectively. Other companies such as Baldwin would produce a further 1,220 and Alco built 685 M3 tanks. Not all of these were destined for Britain and Canada, and later Russia was also supplied with the tank. What did make a significant difference was that for the first time the same mass-production methods used to build civilian cars were applied to building tanks. This greatly eased assembly and speeded up the production rate.

Vehicle Name	Manufacturer	Production Date	Armament	Weight	Max. Speed
M3 (Lee I)	Pullman Company and the Pressed Steel Company	1940	75mm M2 or M3 gun in sponson, 37mm gun and up to 3x .30in-calibre machine guns	27.5 tons	21mph
M3A1 (Lee II)	Pullman Company and the Pressed Steel Company	1942	75mm gun, 37mm gun and 3x or 4x .30in-calibre machine guns	32 tons	26mph
M3A2 (Lee III)	Pullman Company and the Pressed Steel Company	1942	75mm gun, 37mm gun and 3x or 4x .30in-calibre machine guns	27.2 tons	26mph
M3A3 (petrol) (Lee IV)	Pullman Company and the Pressed Steel Company	1942	75mm gun, 37mm gun and 3x or 4x .30in-calibre machine guns	30 tons	29mph
M3A3 (diesel) (Lee V)	Pullman Company and the Pressed Steel Company	1942	75mm gun, 37mm gun and 3x or 4x .30in-calibre machine guns	30 tons	26mph
M3A4 (Lee VI)	Pullman Company and the Pressed Steel Company	1942	75mm gun, 37mm gun and 3x or 4x .30in-calibre machine guns	29 tons	30mph
M3A5 (Grant II)	Pullman Company and the Pressed Steel Company	1942	75mm M2 or M3 gun in sponson, 37mm gun and up to 4x .30in-calibre machine guns	28.6 tons	25mph

The M3 was built in several versions, including the standard M3A1 design through successive models to reach the M3A5, and then afterwards was used on other variants to produce the M7 ‘Priest’ SPG, a vehicle recovery model, workshop vehicles and even vehicles for use in mine-clearance roles. In service with the British Army the M3 was known by two names: the ‘Lee’ after General Robert E. Lee and the ‘Grant’ after General Ulysses S. Grant, who had been commanders during the American Civil War. The M3 was the Lee I; the M3A1 the Lee II; the M3A3 as the Lee IV; M3A3 (fitted with a diesel engine) the Lee V; and the M3A4 the Lee VI. These versions kept the original small cupola-type turret mounting a .30in-calibre machine gun on top of the turret of the 37mm gun. This was the design also used by the US Army but the British did not much care for a tank with such a prominent profile at 10ft 3in high. The M3A5 version had machine-gun cupola removed and this design was called the Grant II. The Grant I was produced by Pullman and the Pressed Steel companies using a turret of British design and it was this version that was used at the Battle of Gazala on 27 May 1942, where for the first-time tanks of the Eighth Army stood anything like a chance against the German PzKw IVs.

Jake Wardrop was serving with the 5th Royal Tank Regiment and remembered: ‘new tanks were arriving now and they were super, the finest things we had ever seen. They had a nine-cylinder radial engine, were quite fast and had a crew of six … The gun was a 37mm and the bottom one a 75mm …’ In action the tanks acquitted themselves well, being able to dish out punishment to the German tanks and withstand the fire from anti-tank guns. The crews were concerned about being resupplied with fuel and ammunition to keep up the fight. One tank commander recalled how relieved he was when ‘The ammunition and petrol lorries duly reached us, after a fairly adventurous journey. All the Grants were refilled with ammunition, and the light squadron was brought in a troop at a time to fill up with petrol.’ The troops called the battle the ‘Gazala Gallop’ and of the 167 Grants committed almost half were knocked out, mainly by the powerful 88mm anti-tank gun. By October 1942 a further 350 M3s were in the theatre where 210 were present at the Battle of El Alamein, along with 270 M4 Sherman tanks.

The basic M3 had armour protection between 13mm and 37mm and was 18ft 6in long, 8ft 11in wide and 10ft 3in high. This would be reduced by 3in when the upper machine-gun cupola was removed. Typically a Wright Continental R–975-EC2 nine-cylinder petrol engine developing 340hp at 2,400rpm was fitted at the rear. This gave a road speed of up to 26mph and 16mph cross-country with an operational range of 120 miles on roads. Armament comprised either an M2 or an M3 75mm-calibre gun fitted into a sponson mounted on the right-hand side of the tank and, while elevation was good, the ability to traverse was restricted. The upper turret mounted either an M5 or M6 37mm-calibre gun with a co-axial .30in-calibre machine gun, both of which were good against light vehicles, which left the 75mm gun for the tanks. The upper cupola was also fitted with a .30in-calibre machine gun for other light targets or infantry. Some versions, such as the M3A4 Lee VI, were equipped with two additional .30in-calibre machine guns in the front glacis plate to make the tank an armoured weapons platform. When the M4 Sherman tank became available in greater numbers they replaced the M3, which the British removed from North Africa and deployed to India and the Far East where they in turn replaced the Matilda Mk II, Valentine and lighter M3 Honey. The M3 medium tank was declared obsolete in early March 1944 but it was still useful in other roles such as for training purposes.

The German Panzerkampfwagen IV (SdKfz 161)

Until the deployment of the American-built M3 Lee-Grant and M4 Sherman tanks to the desert the Germans had the most powerful tank in the theatre in the shape of the Panzerkampfwagen IV. The prototype Panzerkampfwagen IV had appeared in 1937 and, built in various models, it would remain in production throughout the war. Indeed, it has the distinction of being the only tank to continue to be built and serve in action from 1939 to 1945. In all some 8,540 gun tanks were built of which around 3,774 Ausf. H were built, making it the most numerous model produced. In addition there were hundreds more chassis produced for other roles such as the Sturmpanzer assault gun, which was armed with a 150mm gun and the Panzerbeobachtungswagen (observation post tank). The Panzer IV had the specialist designation of SdKfz 161 and the Ausf. H was produced by three companies – Krupp-Gruson, Vomag and Nibelungenwerke – between April 1943 and July 1944. There were a further 161 chassis completed for the Ausf. H tank that are understood to have been used on other projects including SPGs. The company of Nibelungenwerke on its own built a further 1,758 Ausf. J tanks between June 1944 and March 1945, which made them among some of the last tanks to be produced in a collapsing Germany. The Ausf. J had a larger fuel tank but it was still armed with the 7.5cm-calibre KwK40 L/48 for which eighty-seven rounds of ammunition were carried.

Vehicle Name	Manufacturer	Production Date	Armament	Weight	Max. Speed
SdKfz 161 Ausf. H	Krupp-Gruson, Vomag and Nibelungenwerke	1943–44	7.5cm-calibre KwK40 L/48 and 2x MG34 machine guns	25 tons	25mph
SdKfz 161 Ausf. J	Nibelungenwerke	1944–45	7.5cm-calibre KwK40 L/48	25 tons	25mph

The basic Panzer IV Ausf. H measured around 23ft long, 9.4ft wide and 11.5ft to the top of the turret. It was fitted with a rear-mounted Maybach HL120TRM V–12 diesel engine with six forward and one reverse gear, which developed 300hp at 3,000rpm to give road speeds of up to 25mph on roads and 12mph cross-country. The Panzer IV had a combat range of about 125 miles when operating on roads and could cope with vertical obstacles 2ft high, span gaps of over 7ft wide and ford water obstacles more than 2ft deep. It was armed with a 7.5cm KwK40 L/48 gun for which eighty-seven rounds of ammunition was carried. Secondary armament comprised of two MG34 machine guns, one mounted co-axially with the main gun and the other in a ball mount fitted to the right-hand side of the hull with 2,800 rounds of ammunition carried.

Among the characteristics that identified the Ausf. H from earlier versions was an increase in the level of armour plate to a maximum of 80mm and other internal modifications that were not immediately obvious. Externally, a cupola mount for a machine gun was fitted on the turret and the four return rollers were changed to an all-steel design. There were eight road wheels with the drive sprocket fitted to the front and the idler wheel to the rear. The turret had a full 360-degree capability and was powered by an electric motor. The gun could elevate to +20 degrees and depress to −8 degrees, allowing it to engage a wide range of ground targets.

The Ausf. H was fitted with brackets to allow sections of armour plate to be attached to the sides to protect the road wheels from anti-tank projectiles. These armour plates were called Schurzen and had been used on the Ausf. G and were also used on the Ausf. J version. Similar attachments were fitted around the sides of the turret; these were permanently attached, but did not hinder traverse. It was explained that the side plates were often lost in battle and certainly one of the plates on the left-hand side was invariably left off the vehicle where the fuel filling point was. This would have been a tactical decision because to remove and replace the plate would have increased refuelling time and so it was usually left off the vehicle. Versions of the Panzer IV served in all theatres of the war, from Poland in 1939, France 1940 and Russia from 1941 onwards, along with the campaigns in North Africa and Italy. It is believed that when the Allies landed in Normandy on 6 June 1944, most of the estimated 748 Panzer IV tanks in service with the nine panzer divisions in France were Ausf. H. During the war versions of the Panzer IV were also supplied to Germany’s allies, including Hungary and Bulgaria.

This Ausf. H version of the PzKw IV is armed with the 75mm gun and is of the type used in France and Russia.

This is the late-build Ausf. J of the PzKw IV armed with 75mm gun.

The PzKw IV was used by several armies after the war including Middle Eastern forces and had a crew of five. It served on all fronts and was supplied to Germany’s Romanian and Hungarian allies fighting in Russia.

The M4 Sherman Tank

The M4 Sherman was the third American-built tank to be used by the British Army in North Africa, where it was given its baptism of combat experience before America had committed troops to any theatre of war proper. The Sherman entered service in 1942 and by the time of what was to later become known as the First Battle of El Alamein, which began on 23 October 1942, there were some 270 in service with the British Eighth Army along with 210 M3 Lee-Grant tanks. These were among the first vehicles built and the British would go on to take into service a total of 17,000. Other Allied armies such as the Canadians, Free French and Polish would all be equipped with the Sherman and even the Russians took delivery of 4,102, some of which they fitted with the 76.2mm gun, which was also fitted to the T–34. The Sherman tank was built by three main manufacturing plants, Ford, Chrysler and General Motors, and by the end of the war they, along with subsidiary factories, had produced some 49,234 tanks between them. The M4 was produced in fourteen different versions and was used on various experimental concepts, not all of which were developed to service stage. Using the same technique to build tanks as commercial motorcars on the assembly line using prefabricated parts, it has been calculated that a Sherman tank could be assembled in thirty minutes, compared to the tens of thousands of hours for German tanks.

Selected Models of the M4 Sherman Tank

Vehicle Name	Manufacturer	Production Date	Armament	Weight	Max. Speed
M4 Sherman	Ford, Chrysler and General Motors	1942	75mm gun and 3x machine guns	29.8 tons combat weight	24mph
M4A2 Sherman	Chrysler and General Motors	1943	75mm gun and 3x machine guns	30.8 tons combat weight	29mph
M4A3 Sherman	Chrysler and General Motors	1944	76mm gun and 3x machine guns	29.8 tons combat weight	26mph
M4A3E2 Sherman ‘Assault Tank’	Chrysler and General Motors	1944	7in gun	37.5 tons combat weight	22mph
M4A4 Sherman	Chrysler and General Motors	1943	75mm gun and 3x machine guns	34.8 tons	26mph
M4A6 Sherman	Chrysler and General Motors	1943	75mm gun and 3x machine guns	31.7 tons combat weight	30mph

Tank production in America was beginning to get under way in mid-1940 at around the same time that the Armoured Force, commanded by Brigadier General Adna R. Chaffee, was being created. The 1st Armoured Corps was activated in early July and comprised the 1st and 2nd Armoured Divisions based at Fort Knox, Kentucky, and Fort Benning, Georgia, respectively. More units followed so that by 1943 sixteen armoured divisions had been formed, each with their own tank battalions, infantry battalions and artillery support. Most would see action in north-west Europe and serve in many campaigns. The 2nd Armoured Division, nicknamed ‘Hell on Wheels’, served in North Africa, Sicily and all the European campaigns. There were also separate ‘non-divisional’ tank battalions and these tended to serve in the Pacific theatre, although some did serve in Europe. Among the new tank designs being considered was a project known as T–6, which incorporated a 75mm gun fitted into a new cast turret, which would allow a full all-round traverse capability of 360 degrees. The M3 Lee-Grant was being produced but this new design had a number of benefits and after consideration it was standardised in September 1941 as the M4 medium tank but commonly known as the ‘Sherman’.

The Sherman tank was an evolving and changing design, and this affected its weight and dimensions, which changed to meet the variants being developed from the original basic model. The first production M4 weighed 29.8 tons but the later M4A6 weighed 31.7 tons and the M4A3E2 ‘Assault Tank’, armed with a 7in gun in a turret, weighed 37.5 tons. Some 254 of these heavyweight versions, nicknamed ‘Jumbo’, were built and ready in June 1944. The basic M4 Sherman measured 19ft 4in long, 8ft 7in wide and 9ft to the top of the turret. It was armed with a 75mm gun, for which ninety-seven rounds of ammunition were carried, with a .30in-calibre machine gun co-axially mounted. An additional .30in-calibre machine gun was mounted in the front of the hull and a removable machine gun, either a .30in- or .50in-calibre machine gun could be mounted on the turret roof. Different engines were fitted to various models and this affected the speed accordingly; for example, the original M4 was fitted with a Continental R–975-C1 nine-cylinder radial giving road speeds of up to 24mph, while the M4A6 was fitted with an Ordnance RD 1829 nine-cylinder radial, which produced speeds of up to 30mph.

To deal with the heavier German tanks the Americans had proposed fitting a 90mm gun on to the Sherman but that would have meant designing a completely new turret. The British approached the problem by investigating the possibility of a 76mm-calibre gun firing a 17lb shell fitted into a modified turret. In October 1943 engineers at Woolwich succeeded and once other technical details had been sorted it was decided to fit 600 M4A4 Sherman tanks with the Mk IV L/55 76mm gun for which seventy-eight rounds of ammunition would be carried inside the tank. The Americans had initially resisted the idea of using the Firefly but some 160 vehicles were made available to them and the design was in service with crews trained in readiness for the Normandy Landings on D-Day, 6 June 1944.

The Firefly weighed 32.7 tons and measured 25ft 6in long and 9ft 4in to the top of the turret. Armour protection was 13mm to 75mm and an operational range of 125 miles with a road speed of 22mph, which made it a match for the Tiger tanks in the hedgerows of the Normandy countryside known as the Bocage. One of the most famous of all German ‘tank aces’ to fall victim to the Firefly was Michael Wittmann, who met his fate in close action during the Normandy campaign in 1944. One of the variants to be based on the chassis of the M4 Sherman was a design that became known as the M7 SPG and this served extensively across Europe and also in North Africa, to a lesser degree. The pilot models for new M7 SPG were produced by the American Locomotive Company in June 1941 with the project number T–32 appended and sent to the army for trials at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland. These trials were successful and proved the system to be workable with remarkably few design faults, and led to the army placing an order for 600. The only real criticism levelled at the T–32 design was that the configuration lacked an anti-tank capability. This was rather unfair because the design was intended to be what the artillery classified as a howitzer, which meant that it was to be used to provide fire support, with the weapon firing ammunition at high angles of trajectory. The barrel of the weapon could be depressed to a sufficiently low angle to engage enemy tanks, but this would be of little purpose when tanks would be in support to protect it against attack; furthermore, one would suppose that anti-tank guns dedicated to the role of destroying enemy tanks would be contained within the unit structure. As a weapon the SPG was nothing new in service, but it was the flexibility that the design gave to the artillery that made it important during the Second World War. In fact, all fighting nations would deploy their own form of SPGs that were based on the chassis of existing and proven tank designs. The advantage of the newly developed American design, however, was the speed it was produced, which made it quite extraordinary. In fact, within only eight months of the pilot models of the T–32 appearing the new weapon was standardised as the M7 Howitzer Motor Gun Carriage and accepted by the US Army in February 1942. Five months later a batch of 100 of these new vehicles was dispatched to the British Eighth Army in North Africa, but unfortunately the ship carrying them was sunk by a U-boat, and it looked as though the British Army would be denied the opportunity of giving another American AFV its baptism of fire.

The M7 Howitzer Motor Gun Carriage

The American Locomotive Company had already tooled up its factory to begin building the M7 and using the assembly-line technique had produced sufficient vehicles to allow another ninety to be sent out as replacements for those lost on their way to the British Army. These guns were sent by convoy and in September 1942 were handed over to units in the front line, including the 11th Regiment Royal Horse Artillery, which was serving with the 1st Armoured Division. Only two months later, in November, the 5th Regiment Royal Horse Artillery, also serving with the 1st Armoured Division, deployed their M7 SPGs and used them to engage and destroy German anti-tank guns, which had been well dug in to fire at British tanks during the final battles of El Alamein. The gunners of the Royal Artillery were impressed with the new American guns, and, typically for the British Army, nicknamed the gun ‘Priest’ because of the pulpit-like mounting for the 12.7mm heavy machine gun. In view of its success in battle the British Tank Commission in America requested that a further 5,500 M7 Priest SPGs be delivered by the end of 1943. Even with all its industrial might this was an optimistic request for America’s armaments industry and it was realised that there was no way that this number of guns could be supplied to the British Army as well as those of the US Army, especially after events in December 1941. In the end the actual numbers entering service with the British Army would fall short of the requested amount.

Other Adaptations of the Sherman M4

The Sherman was not the best tank used during the war but it was certainly the most numerous and was very important for a number of reasons. It was adaptable and was used in all theatres of the war from Europe to the island-hopping campaigns in the Pacific against the Japanese, where the temperatures and humidity were greater than even the desert of North Africa. The Sherman ‘Crab’ was a development into a specialist role being fitted with large cylinders or rotating drums with heavy chains at the front of the tank which rotated to beat the ground as the vehicle advanced to pound a path through minefields. This was used during the Normandy campaign in 1944. Rocketlaunching frames were fitted above the turret and these were known as ‘Calliope’, but probably the most unusual concept was that used by the 1st Coldstream Guards in 1945 when they fitted their Sherman tanks to fire 60lb aircraft rockets from either side of the turret. This was called ‘Tulip’ and was certainly used during the Rhine crossing. Extemporised launching rails were fitted to the turret and, although not accurate and with a range of about 800yd, the rockets would have demoralised the enemy.

The M4 chassis was used by the Canadians to produce the RAM and Kangaroo carrier, and other projects based on the same chassis design resulted in the M7 SPG with a 105mm gun, known by the British Army as the ‘Priest’. A flame-thrower version, known as the ‘Adder’, of the Sherman was developed and it influenced a number of overseas designs including the Australian ‘Sentinel’ and the Argentinian ‘Nahuel’. The British Army did use the M7 for a time but later went on to adopt a Canadian-developed SPG that used the 25-pounder field gun and was known as the ‘Sexton’. This was built initially at the Montreal Locomotive Works in Canada and was another design based on the M4 chassis. One of the powerful versions of the Sherman was a British design called the ‘Firefly’ and fitted a 17-pounder anti-tank gun in replacement of the 75mm gun. The original gun could defeat most German tanks but against the heavier types such as the Tiger and Panther it was ineffective. It was for this reason that the British developed the Firefly.

The M4 Sherman tank influenced many designs and was itself developed in many variations.

The Sherman served as the backbone to many armoured units. The Germans called it the ‘Tommy Cooker’ because it caught fire easily, often killing the crew. It was armed with the 17-pounder anti-tank gun to become the Firefly which could destroy the heavy German tanks such as the Tiger I.

The Sexton SPG armed with 25-pounder field gun was used in Italy and across Europe during 1944.

Vehicle Name	Manufacturer	Production Date	Armament	Weight	Max. Speed
M7 Howitzer Motor Gun Carriage	American Locomotive Company	1942 onwards	105mm howitzer and a .50in-calibre machine gun	22.6 tons	26mph
M7B1	Pressed Steel Car	1944–45	105mm howitzer and a 50in-calibre machine gun	22.3 tons	25mph
M7B2	Federal Machine and Welder Company	1945	105mm howitzer and a .50in-calibre machine gun	21.6 tons	26mph

SPGs had been proven in earlier battles, but what made the M7 Priest so special was the fact that it was the first such design of any significance to enter service with the Allies. The M7 had actually come into being as a result of experiments to mount a 75mm howitzer on the chassis of a light tank in order to produce an SPG. This was very much the same way that Germany had produced the anti-tank Panzerjäger 1 SPG, with a 47mm gun mounted on the chassis of a PzKw I in 1940. Another series of trials involved a 105mm-calibre gun being mounted on the chassis of an M3 Lee-Grant medium tank, which was in series production at the time and was used by the British Army. From these trials it was decided to develop the M7 using the chassis of the M4 Sherman as opposed to the lighter M3 medium tank. During the development phase the basic system initially comprised an M1A1 105mm howitzer on its standard field mount being mounted on to a modified M4 medium tank with an open top and high-sided superstructure. The early production run of the M7 was based on the M3 medium tank chassis but it was supplanted by using the chassis of the M4A3 Sherman.

The M7, as based on the M4 chassis, was 19ft 9in long, 9ft 5in wide and 9ft 7in to the top of the machine-gun mounting in the ‘pulpit’. To the right-hand side of the superstructure was a ring mount for a .50in-calibre machine gun. This stood proud from the hull and, with its armoured covering, looked not unlike the pulpit in a church, thereby leading to the term ‘Priest’, which soon gained widespread use. The M7 was powered by a Continental Model R–975-C1, nine-cylinder radial petrol engine which developed 350hp at 2,400rpm to produce a maximum road speed of 26mph and 15mph cross-country. It had an operational range of 125 miles on roads and could scale vertical obstacles of 2ft high, cross gaps of over 7ft unaided and ford water obstacles of 4ft deep.

The entire series of M7 vehicles, including variants, was armed with a single 105mm howitzer for which sixty-nine rounds were carried ready to use. For close defence and protection against low-flying aircraft, there was a single .50in-calibre machine gun, for which 300 rounds were carried. The main armament could elevate between −5 degrees and +35 degrees and had a traverse capability of 15 degrees right of centre line and 30 degrees left of centre line to give a 45-degree traverse in total without the requirement of having to move the vehicle’s position. The problem causing the limited amount of traverse to the right was due to the fact that the driver’s position to the left of the hull was in line with the breech mechanism as the weapon was moved. The M7 was protected by armour varying in thickness between 12mm and 60mm, and the vehicle had a combat-ready weight of 22.6 tons. It was served by a crew of seven men who operated in an open-topped fighting compartment and only the driver’s position was under armour in the front of the hull.

With the introduction of the M7B1 version, and as production numbers increased, the Pressed Steel Company was engaged to maintain output, but the American Locomotive Company remained the main producer and built 3,314 M7s. The Pressed Steel Company produced 826 M7s of which around 450 were the M7B1 version. The only real difference between the original M7 and the M7B1 version was that the later design was slightly lighter. Some of this was due to the different engine, a Ford GAA V–8 that developed 450hp at 2,600rpm and achieved slightly reduced road speeds. The M7B1 version had a combat-ready weight of 22.3 tons and obstacle clearances were virtually identical to those capable with the M7. The traverse and elevation of the main armament was unaltered and could fire high-explosive rounds out to ranges of almost 11,000yd and other types of ammunition to ranges of around 11,500yd. The M7B1 was still served by a crew of seven men, as was the third version, known as the M7B2. Only 127 versions of this model were built by the Federal Machine and Welder Company, giving a total wartime production of 4,267 M7s of all types. The only real difference between this last version and the two preceding versions was the fact that the machine-gun ‘pulpit’ stood slightly higher. When in service with the British Army the 105mm gun was not without its problems and some M7 Priests were modified to remove the armament and the distinctive ‘pulpit’, and this led to them being nicknamed ‘defrocked priests’. These unarmed versions were used for transport and observation roles for other artillery batteries. The British Army eventually developed a comparable SPG based on the Canadian-built Ram Cruiser tank, which mounted a 25-pounder gun and was known as the Sexton SPG. This break in use allowed the Americans to be supplied with all stocks of 105mm ammunition and in turn made logistical re-supply in the British Army much easier. The Americans did develop a trial programme of their own using the 25-pounder gun and produced the T–51 GMC in July 1942. The experiment was not a success and the programme was dropped.

The Valentine Tank

It could be said that the Valentine tank was made for the war in the desert because that is where many of them ended up serving with the British Eighth Army in North Africa. It was not much to look at and was certainly not a heavyweight in armour or weaponry, but it was capable of remarkable feats of endurance. For example, after the Battle of El Alamein in November 1942 some Valentine tanks in service with the 23rd Armoured Brigade were driven 3,000 miles on their owns tracks as they pursued the Afrika Korps westwards.

Vehicle Name	Manufacturer	Production Date	Armament	Weight	Max. Speed
Infantry Tank Mk III (Valentine)	Vickers	1940 onwards	Mk I to Mk VII: 2-pounder gun and .303in machine gun	16 tons	15mph

The 2-pounder gun was not very powerful but the Germans still used them against the British when they captured examples of the tanks. The Valentine was also fitted with a new superstructure and 25-pounder field gun to serve as an SPG called the Bishop. It was used in North Africa but its 2-pounder gun was limited.

The Valentine was used to develop some specialist vehicles, including ‘swimming tanks’ or duplex drives for D-Day.

Valentines in North Africa travelled 3,000 miles on their tracks after El Alamein.

In the mid-1930s the British Army realised that two types of tank would be necessary in any future war: a fast cruiser and a slow-moving infantry tank. The Vickers company went it alone and developed their own infantry tank, which was moderately well armoured but faster than the War Office type. The design was submitted for approval on 14 February 1938 (St Valentine’s Day), from which came the name Valentine. The War Office did nothing for over a year but then in July 1939, sensing the impending outbreak of war, ordered Vickers to build 275 of the new tanks without delay. The first tanks, officially designated Infantry Tank Mk III, entered service in May 1940 and were among the first vehicles to make good some of the losses of tanks abandoned at Dunkirk. Production continued until early 1944, by which time 8,275 had been built. The Canadian Pacific Railway workshops built 1,420, most of which, along with 1,300 British-made tanks, were sent to Russia. In British service the Valentine saw action in North Africa, Madagascar and the campaign in the Far East. Even after it was replaced as a battle tank the chassis were serviceable and these were converted for use as the basis for a number of specialist vehicles such as bridge-layers, flame-throwers and swimming tanks. It was also used for the Bishop self-propelled 25-pounder gun and the Archer self-propelled 17-pounder gun.

The Valentine layout was conventional, with the driver at the front, engine at the rear and fighting compartment in the middle. Suspension was unusual in that it employed six road wheels on each side in two three-bogie units. The final-drive sprocket was at the rear and had a characteristic centre reduction unit that revolved backwards at high speed when the tank was moving. The turret design changed throughout its service from the early model which was operated by a two-man crew and then later a three-man crew, but it would always be cramped. The main armament was originally a 2-pounder gun, but the tank was up-gunned with later versions being armed with a 6-pounder (57mm calibre) and then to a 75mm gun. The Russians believed the 2-pounder guns of the Valentines sent to them were better suited to shooting sparrows and replaced them with 76mm guns, a move that must have made the turret more cramped than ever.

The Valentine weighed 16 tons and measured 17ft 9in long, 8ft 7in wide and 6ft 8in high. The early versions were fitted with an AEC A190 six-cylinder engine of 131hp to give road speeds of 15mph and an operational range of 110 miles. The design went through a succession of changes in specification during its production life, and depending on the type, was served by a crew of either three men or four. The Mk I and Mk II both had a two-man turret and the Mk III had a three-man turret with all types being armed with a 2-pounder gun. And this remained the same until the appearance of the Mk VIII, which was essentially a modified Mk III, but armed with 6-pounder gun mounted in a two-man turret. The Mk IX and Mk X Valentines were also armed with a 6-pounder gun but the Mk XI was armed with a 75mm gun. Secondary armament was usually a single 7.92mm-calibre machine gun but some versions armed with the 6-pounder gun omitted this weapon. The amount of ammunition carried on the tank depended on the armament but typically some seventy-nine rounds were carried for the 2-pounder gun and 1,500 rounds for the machine gun; armour protection was between 7mm and 65mm.

Führer Directive 42 and Operation Blau

Things were about to change in the North African desert and thousands of miles away in Russia decisions were also being made that would alter the whole course of the war. At the time that changes in command were being made in the British Army, Hitler was ordering a change of strategy in Russia, where his armies spread across the country’s vastness. There had been some reverses but on the whole the war was still going favourably for Germany, and Hitler had plans for Army Group South, and set for it a huge target, which if successful, could have weakened Russia’s ability to fight. In April Hitler announced Führer Directive 42 or Operation Blau (Blue), and ordered preparations to be made. From the rear echelon he ordered huge troop movements to the south along with fifty-one divisions supplied by his Bulgarian, Italian and Romanian allies. Italian support amounted to 229,000 troops and 1,100 pieces of artillery along with an alpine corps complete with 20,000 mules for the operation. When the movements had been completed there were nine of the nineteen panzer divisions in Russia under Field Marshal Fedor von Bock’s command, along with four of the ten motorised divisions and half of all infantry divisions. In other words, Army Group South had 50 per cent of all the German Army’s resources at its disposal.

With so much weaponry, equipment, troops and support available for the campaign ahead, senior officers believed it would be successful. Any doubts they may have harboured about turning south instead of pushing on eastwards appeared to be without foundation and failure was never considered an option. The opening moves saw a wide sweeping pincer movement against the city of Voronezh, some 300 miles to the south of Moscow, and other sizeable towns such as Staryy, Oskol, Millrovo and Morovsk were captured as the Sixth Army continued its advance towards its Operation Heron target of Stalingrad. From here Hitler could launch Operation Edelweis, the strike towards the oilfields of the Caucasus. He had every faith in the Sixth Army under General Friedrich von Paulus, after all they had been successful in every campaign in which they had participated so far. The Sixth Army had been victorious in Poland and marched through Paris in 1940 and in 1941 they had been present when Operation Barbarossa was launched. If the Sixth Army could help capture the vital resources, the Russian Army would be crippled by lack of fuel while the Germans would have enough to be self-sufficient. From early July to early August the Germans moved forward to try to encircle the city of Stalingrad. During that time they had captured the city of Rostov with its massive industrial centre. The advance was opposed by the Russians who put up enough resistance to cover a planned, orderly withdrawal. Hitler was jubilant, proclaiming: ‘The Russians are in full flight! They are finished!’ But it was to prove the undoing of the Germans in Russia and would change the course of the war.

The city of Stalingrad proper stretched for about 15 miles along the western bank of the River Volga, but its environs extended much farther. At its widest point it spread out over 4 miles and so its shape was linear, which would force any attacker to spread his forces wide. That is exactly what von Paulus did and although his troops would eventually capture some 90 per cent of the city it never made any incursions across the Volga and the east bank of the river remained in Russian hands. The city had a number of factories, including three that were very important: the Barrikady, the Red October and the Tractor Factory. The distances the Germans expected to cover were enormous and placed great strain on supply lines, men and machines. The 4th Panzer Army, commanded by General Hermann Hoth, had to cover more than 20 miles to help support General Ewald von Kleist’s 1st Panzer Army, and faced fierce Russian resistance in the Don Basin. The two forces met but the Russians had withdrawn, leaving nothing of any consequence to be captured. Kleist later remarked that in his opinion, ‘Fourth Panzer Army could have taken Stalingrad without a fight at the end of July, but it was diverted to help me crossing the Don. I did not need its aid, and it simply got in the way.’ In fact the amount of traffic on the roads was so heavy that it caused congestion and traffic jams leading to delays as each unit tried to get its vehicles through on less than perfect roads. Hitler then ordered Hoth to return to the thrust on Stalingrad, adding to the mileage that was to be covered, and Kleist continued southwards towards the oilfields.

The Russians were not entirely unaware that a major offensive was about to be launched because they had come into possession of a full set of detailed plans outlining Operation Blau. They had gained the papers when the aircraft in which Major Reichel, chief of operations for the 23rd Panzer Division, was in made a forced landing close to Russian lines. The capture of such sensitive documents seemed too convenient to Stalin, who held the belief that the Germans still planned to attack Moscow. Despite their appearance to the contrary, Stalin dismissed the captured plans as a plant to deceive the Russians by subterfuge. Nevertheless, when the German attack came and the Russians realised what the object of the attack was they immediately mobilised the one resource they had in ample supply – manpower. A civilian labour force initially made up of 90,000 was put to work between August and September, and was set the task of building defences. The work continued day and night without pause, such was the urgency to halt the Germans. More workers joined and eventually they constructed 100,000 defensive positions including 70,000 pillboxes, using concrete and bricks. They dug 500 miles of anti-tank ditches, 200 miles of anti-infantry obstacles and 1,000 miles of trenches for their own infantry. Roads and mountain passes were blocked. The tanks and infantry of von Kleist were stopped and the Caucasian oilfields were safe.

Italians used thousands of ponies and mules to move heavy loads such as this artillery unit.

General von Paulus and his Sixth Army with twenty-five divisions, 2,000 pieces of artillery and 500 tanks supported by the VIII Fliegerkorps, capable of flying 1,000 sorties per day, were at the gates of Stalingrad. Facing them, the garrison commander, Lieutenant General Vasili Chuikov, who had replaced General Alexander Lopatin, had a force of 54,000 men in the Sixty-Fourth Army supported by 900 pieces of artillery and mortars and 110 tanks. On taking up his command he reported to his superior, General Andrei Yeremenko, that ‘We shall hold the city, or die there’. The city had been invested ready to be besieged and from 24 August heavy fighting patrols were being sent out to probe the Russians’ defences, but the first serious attack was not made until 14 September. The combined weight of the attack with Hoth’s troops brought the total strength to 200,000 men. Tanks entered the city in support of the attack and the Russians defended every building, street and cellar. The Germans were not used to fighting in such conditions and tanks are totally unsuited to fighting in built-up areas with buildings all around. Once they had entered the city the Germans did not withdraw and poured more men and reserves into capturing it. The Russians did not evacuate the civilians and they were able to bring reinforcements and supplies into the city by ferry across the River Volga. These boats were attacked by German aircraft and bombarded by artillery but the supply lines into the city kept operating. By the end of the battle these boats, known as the Volga Flotilla, had made 35,000 crossings to bring in supplies and 122,000 men and had evacuated the most seriously wounded. The fighting continued throughout the rest of the month by which time the Russians had lost 80,000 men killed and wounded.

The Beginnings of a Second Front

As the Germans were approaching the outskirts of Stalingrad, the Western Allies were putting a plan in action to launch a limited attack on the French coast. On 19 August an Anglo-Canadian force including fifty-one US rangers and some French commandos landed at Dieppe in an action called Operation Jubilee. The object of the operation was to make an assault in order to gain experience in trying to capture a port installation, which would be needed to support an amphibious landing. The Western Allies had been harangued by Stalin to launch a second front by attacking in the west, but they just did not have the supplies or specialist vehicles and equipment to undertake such an assault in 1942. Furthermore, they had no experience in large-scale amphibious landings. The attack against Dieppe was designed to give the Allies experience at all levels, including how important it was to get armour ashore from the landing craft. The bulk of the force was infantry and was made up by 4,963 troops from the Canadian 2nd Infantry Division supported by a squadron of twenty-eight Churchill tanks. The Germans later remarked that they considered the attack to be serious because it was too large to be an ordinary commando raid, and when they saw that it was an attempt to land a force on a beach they knew it was too small to be the anticipated invasion. The infantry managed to move inland away from the beach and fighting was fierce, but against defensive positions held by superior numbers, and even with air cover, they could only do their best. The operation collapsed as the casualty rate among the British and Canadian infantry mounted and the Royal Navy lost more vessels.

The first landings had been made before 5 a.m. but by 9 a.m. it was becoming clear that the operation was foundering. Major General Roberts, commanding the Canadians, organised for the RAF to provide air cover to allow the infantry to withdraw. At 11 a.m. the landing craft approached the shore to embark the men and by midday the operation was all but finished. It was an unmitigated disaster, with the Canadians losing 900 men killed and a further 3,367 wounded and taken prisoner. The British lost 275 killed, wounded and taken prisoner. Two of the tanks had sunk in deep water as they were landed, a number became bogged down in the shingle and fifteen made it to the sea wall and began to move off the beach before being halted by obstacles. The Germans lost 519 killed and wounded. In the grand scheme of things, compared to events on the Russian front, the Dieppe raid was a small pinprick. The Allies had learned many lessons from the mistakes made at Dieppe and they would correct some by the time of their next attempt at amphibious assault. The Germans had learned not to underestimate the Allies’ resolve to invade Europe. Indeed, the Allies came to realise the limitations of ordinary armour and recognised the importance of developing special armoured vehicles to break through defences and also that a port installation was vital for supplies to be ferried in to support the assault. The episode was a failure but it demonstrated to Stalin that his Western Allies were making some kind of effort.

The Defence of Stalingrad

At Stalingrad the populace was mobilised to build barricades, women soldiers served on anti-aircraft guns and to a man they were resolved to defend the city come what may. The German situation looked strong but in reality they were at the end of a very long and consequently very fragile supply line. Furthermore, they had no reserves of anything to speak of. In their advance to invest the city, tanks and other AFVs had spearheaded the attack followed by the supply convoys with the infantry bringing up the rear. Even so, the advance had been so fast that it had outpaced some of the supply columns. The Russians continued to fall back, avoiding battle and this further added to the Germans’ false sense of victory and they pressed on ever deeper into Russia. Hitler asked General Kurt Zeitzler, a specialist in logistics, for his assessment of the situation and was given the cautionary notice to take care of the positions held to the north of Stalingrad where the Italians, Hungarians and Romanians held the line. He also pointed out that the southern sector and the Sixth Army’s right flank was also exposed. The Germans had never before had to fight in such conditions where men hid among the ruins of buildings, and the battle was costing them 20,000 killed and wounded per week. The streets were strewn with rubble, which reduced the tanks to a crawl and exposed them to anti-tank weapons.

Stalin proclaimed a policy of ‘Not one step backward’ and that there was ‘no land beyond the Volga’. In other words the Russian Army had to stand and fight where it was. Snipers took their toll and battles ebbed backwards and forwards, with buildings changing hands many times. Using the ferries the Russians were able to move 122,000 men into the city to carry on the fight but this was only the tip of the iceberg as the greater proportion of men, vehicles, supplies and weapons amounting to twenty-seven infantry divisions and nineteen armoured divisions were sent to assembly areas in readiness for the attack. When the River Volga froze, the ice bridge allowed more traffic to flow, like Lake Ladoga at Leningrad. The build-up continued until mid-November, by which time the Russians had built up a force of 1 million men, 900 tanks, thousands of trucks and 13,500 pieces of artillery supported by 1,100 aircraft. The Germans were running out of fuel to the degree that between September and November the tanks of the 22nd Panzer Division could not operate. Finally, the preparations were complete and the Russians launched Operation Uranus on 19 November, attacking the Romanian positions to the north of the city, just as Zeitzler had predicted and tried to warn against. The powerful T–34 tanks, which the Germans had already encountered, were used in large numbers; the Romanians had no defence against them and fled their positions. The collapse left a 50-mile-wide gap in the German lines and the Russians poured through.

The attack to the south of Stalingrad was equally powerful and the Russians streamed through the German lines. Their advance was so fast that German Army military police directing the flow of traffic became confused and could not tell the difference between friend and foe. Russian troops on trucks seized bridges and secured them. On 23 November the two arms of the Russian pincer movement met up 30 miles west of Stalingrad and the Germans inside the city were surrounded and cut off. The Russians believed they had trapped 75,000 men but the figure was much higher; they had actually succeeded in cutting off 250,000 men. There was no chance of moving reinforcements into the city to support them but the Russians could move with almost total impunity and they were getting stronger every day. Three days after the attack von Paulus made an assessment of his situation and estimated that he had food for only six days and fuel and ammunition stocks were running critically low. Von Paulus signalled Hitler asking that he be allowed to fight his way out of the city. Hitler forbade such a move and told him that supplies would be flown into the beleaguered city. This was a monumental task but Herman Goering believed his Luftwaffe could do it. The trapped Sixth Army needed at least 120 tons of fuel and 250 tons of ammunition each day to continue. Other supplies such as medical aid and food would push this figure up to 600 tons needed by each army.

The Churchill was capable of speeds up to 15mph on roads. The British Churchill armed with 6-Pounder main gun. It was used in the flame-thrower role as the ‘Crocodile’.

The Luftwaffe would have to fly from bases at Tatsinskaya and Morozovsky, a three-hour round flight, which meant aircraft could only fly one mission per day. There were 225 Ju 52 transport aircraft but they were slow and lumbering, which made them vulnerable to attack by fighters. To support the operation He III bombers were pressed into service and although they were faster than the Ju 52 aircraft they could only carry 1.5 tons of supplies. The claim that the trapped Sixth Army could be supplied by air depended on all aircraft being serviceable and airfields inside the city being held by German forces. The best they could achieve was eighty serviceable aircraft per day and when the Russians captured the airfields the amount of supplies that could be flown in fell to less than 60 tons per day. The attempt to airlift supplies cost the Germans 488 aircraft shot down or crashed. Field Marshal Erich von Manstein, now commanding the newly formed Army Group Don, formulated Operation Winter Storm, which was intended to break into the city to relieve the Sixth Army. By now the Russians had pushed 80 miles west past Stalingrad but General Hoth with his 4th Panzer Division began his mission on 12 December. In his column he had a convoy of trucks carrying 3,000 tons of supplies. They battled on against Russian attacks, worsening weather conditions and rugged terrain. His progress slowed and finally on 23 December Hoth was ordered to withdraw. He was 30 miles short of his destination and the Sixth Army was effectively abandoned to its fate. The distance between the German front line and Stalingrad grew longer each day as the Russians continued to advance. The Sixth Army, now depleted, somehow continued to fight on but groups were surrendering. Finally the Germans surrendered on 31 January 1943. The fighting had cost the Germans 150,000 killed and the Russians took a further 100,000 prisoner. The Germans had lost so much equipment it was calculated that it could have supplied 25 per cent of the German Army in the field. They had suffered their worst defeat but there was more to come as the Western Allies mounted operations before the fall of Stalingrad. It had been a costly demonstration of how important good logistical support was to a modern army.

Developments in Europe and North Africa

The lesson of Stalingrad and how important it was to supply ammunition and fuel to an army was not lost on the Allies but the Germans did not appear to have learnt anything from the experience. No army could continue to lose weapons, vehicles and troops in the same way as Germany was and still expect the army to function. Yet here was Hitler still urging his forces to go on with depleted resources and minimal supplies reaching them. Production of trucks and tanks was a problem for Germany and the shortfall affected deliveries of supplies of food and fuel for the tanks. During 1942 the German factories produced 59,000 trucks for an army of 8 million deployed to three fronts: Russia, Western Europe and North Africa. By comparison, in the same period over 400,000 horses were sent to Russia, which explodes the propaganda myth of the motorised German Army that was widely broadcast at the time. Another move made by the Western Allies as the events at Stalingrad were being fought out was Operation Torch, an amphibious force to land a mainly largely American force on the North African coast of French Morocco and Algeria. This was launched on 8 November, eleven days before the Russians launched Operation Uranus at Stalingrad, and it would show Stalin what they were capable of achieving, and should have also served as a warning to Hitler of what to expect in Europe.

The forces comprised 65,000 American troops who had never been in combat before and other forces including Free French took the number of troops to 107,000 with tanks and trucks and supplies. Convoys to support the operation sailed from America direct to North Africa and maintained the supply line. Supplies, especially fuel, were vital for the army to continue to operate. To highlight this, as one American general remarked: ‘My men can eat their belts, but my tanks gotta have gas.’ During the Torch Landings several commanders emerged such as General George S. Patton and Mark Clark, both of whom had seen service in the First World War, and Omar Bradley who was too late to see action in the First World War but was very active between the wars. In fact Torch was his first front-line command and other generals would become prominent in other theatres and campaigns such as Mark Clark in Italy and Patton in North Africa, Sicily and Europe. The Americans had hoped for a quick campaign but after a week of fighting the French Vichy troops had put up a resistance and killed almost 1,400 American troops. They had 210 ancient tanks that were no match for the modern American designs, which included the Sherman and anti-tank guns. With the success of these new landings in North Africa the Germans were now faced with an improbable situation of fighting on two fronts on two separate continents, with each having to be supplied. The Germans responded to the Torch Landings by sending 17,000 reinforcements with General Jürgen von Arnim to the area, along with supplies and the first of the new Tiger tanks armed with the deadly 88mm gun. When Rommel was informed of the Allied landings he wrote in his diary that ‘This spells the end of the army in Africa’. As usual he was correct but he still fought a hard campaign right to the end.

Four months before the amphibious landings of Operation Torch the month of July started badly for the British Eighth Army, which was on the back foot and waiting for Rommel to make his next move, surely the knockout blow. With minimal resources he had achieved the seemingly impossible, to the delight of Hitler who promoted him to field marshal. It was all very different from his position in May when he was within twenty-four hours of surrendering due to lack of water, but he had only been able to achieve these latest results by using the huge stocks of supplies he had captured at Tobruk. However, he was down to only fifty-five German tanks and thirty Italian tanks. The British had made preparations and Lieutenant General Eric Dorman-Smith oversaw the construction of defensive positions just outside the railway junction of El Alamein, which lay a few miles inland from the Egyptian coast. The British had lost 138 in the fighting of 13 June and after the Battle of Mersa Matruh on 26 June they had around seventy-five tanks capable of engaging in battle and had retreated to take up their positions at El Alamein. It was these and the prepared defences that the wave of Rommel’s attack would break. The Russians were fighting on a single front but the British Army was stretched to its limit trying to maintain a defensive force in Britain to protect against any threat, and, along with the Americans, had to fight a completely separate war against the Japanese in the Pacific and try to stem the advance into India. These forces in all of these theatres had to be supplied with everything from troop reinforcements to vehicles, tanks, weapons, fuel and ammunition.

Rommel ordered the attacks to be halted and on 2 July, under concentrated artillery fire and harrying by the RAF, they retired. Like their counterparts in Russia, the Afrika Korps was at the end of a very long and fragile supply line that was being attacked by units of special forces, such as the LRDG and Special Air Service, which penetrated deep behind his lines. Rommel was strengthened by the arrival of reinforcements and 260 tanks. Auchinleck launched a number of attacks mainly directed against the weaker Italian forces, which made Rommel divert his tanks to support them. This put a strain on his vehicles and used up fuel, which was in short supply. By 11 July both sides were exhausted and stood facing one another like two boxers in a ring, each knowing that one of them had to make a move.

In August Churchill flew to Cairo and replaced General Auchinleck with General Harold Alexander, and when Lieutenant General William ‘Strafer’ Gott, the first choice for taking over the Eighth Army, was killed on 7 August, General Sir Alan Brooke, Commander Imperial General Staff (CIGS), suggested that General Bernard Montgomery be appointed to the position. The British were also receiving reinforcements, replacement tanks, supplies and the new, more powerful 6-pounder anti-tank gun. The Germans were still facing difficulties with their supplies getting through and on one occasion a convoy of six tankers was intercepted and four were sunk. Even though greatly reduced, Rommel was still able to make preparations and his tank force totalled 203 battleworthy vehicles. Each side began to lay vast numbers of mines, which claimed many victims such as an Italian force that became entangled in a British minefield. Eventually the Germans laid almost 250,000 anti-tank mines with 14,500 anti-personnel mines, which took a toll on the infantry who referred to these minefields as the ‘Devil’s Gardens’. To clear paths through these minefields the British used Matilda Mk II tanks called ‘Scorpions’ which were fitted with chain flail devices to explode the mines. Some M3 Lee-Grant medium tanks were also converted to this role and were also known as Scorpions. Infantrymen using their bayonets to probe the ground to locate the mines were used and specialist Royal Engineers using mine-detector devices identified where the mines were laid.

On 30 August the Germans attacked using the 15th and 21st Panzer Divisions supported by the Italians, including the Littorio and Ariete Divisions. Things did not go well and they sustained heavy losses. Rommel was very ill but he still remained active, and on 1 September he visited the forward area to see how the battle was progressing. He witnessed air attacks on his forces by the RAF and the destruction caused him to make the decision to retire. He had been promised an emergency airlift of fuel but he needed much more than could be flown in if he was to keep up his offensive. The fuel crisis was his main problem, which he pointed out on 27 August when he said that ‘The whole battle depends on it’. Montgomery had more than 700 tanks available to him, of which 400 were in his defensive positions supported by screens of 6-pounder anti-tank guns, and all this blunted Rommel’s attack. By the evening of 2 September the Germans only had sufficient fuel for 60 miles of operational service. The Battle of Alam el Halfa had cost him fifty tanks and 400 trucks along with fifty-five anti-tank guns. The British had lost sixty-seven tanks and seventeen anti-tank guns. Montgomery had only been in Egypt for two weeks and here he was blunting the Germans in his first action against Rommel.

Montgomery was pleased with the way his men had fought at the Battle of Alam el Halfa and seeing that his foe was not going to advance further he called off the battle. Montgomery may have been pleased but he was far from satisfied and spent the coming weeks training his army and building up his resources ready to deliver the knockout blow that would put the Germans into full retreat. Rommel’s health was deteriorating and, believing that the British would not be in a position to attack until December, he took the opportunity to return to Germany on 23 September, leaving matters in the hands of General Georg Stumme, who had arrived in Egypt on 19 September. Lieutenant Colonel Friedrich von Mellenthin, serving on Rommel’s staff, summed up the position by describing the battle as ‘the turning point of the desert war’. He continued by saying that it was the ‘first in a long series of defeats on every front which foreshadowed the defeat of Germany’.

Montgomery now set about planning his attack, which would be a three-pronged assault in three phases. The main attack would be made in the north, with diversionary attacks in the south; dummy tanks, trucks and fuel dumps all made from inflatable models, canvas and empty crates gave the impression of a build-up there. Radio signals added to this and kept the Germans guessing where the main thrust would come. In the north the British moved the XXX Corps forward, supported with artillery, trucks, engineers and all the attendant supplies. Finally, on 23 October at 9.40 p.m., two months earlier than Rommel had predicted, Montgomery launched his attack with an opening artillery barrage from 1,000 field guns. On average his forces were twice as strong as the German forces. He had 195,000 troops compared to a combined Italo-German Army of 104,000. He had more than 1,000 tanks, around 422 of which were M3 Lee-Grant and M4 Shermans, and in anti-tank guns he had over 1,400 of all calibres. The Germans had about 600 tanks, half of which were Italian and only thirty-eight PzKw IV capable of matching the Sherman. Artillery comprised 800 anti-tank guns, of which only eighty-six were of the powerful 88mm calibre and a further 500 field guns. The two sides were almost on parity in aircraft, with the RAF having 530 to the Luftwaffe’s 500. The difference came in the fact that the Germans had only 350 serviceable aircraft and their fuel shortages restricted the operational readiness, which actually meant that the RAF had air superiority.

While moving between locations in his staff car on 24 October, General Stumme was attacked by aircraft. Stumme was uninjured but died a few days later from a heart attack. Rommel returned to the front line but by that time his forces had taken a terrible mauling by tanks, artillery and particularly air attacks. For example, by the evening of 25 October the 15th Panzer Division was down to only thirty-one tanks, having lost eighty-eight in the fighting in only forty-eight hours. Montgomery kept up the pressure and units were entering the battle as his strategy unfolded. At an engagement at Tel El Aqqaqir on 2 November British artillery contributed to the 117 German tanks destroyed in the fighting. Rommel assessed the situation and declared it hopeless, ordering his troops to withdraw. They fell back 60 miles to Fuka. On 4 November he informed Hitler of his decision, who immediately exploded in a rage and forbade any retreat. The Germans conducted a fighting retreat and beat off an attack by 200 tanks, and then Hitler changed his mind and allowed the Afrika Korps to retreat. The Italians were short of food, water and ammunition, and surrendered in their tens of thousands. The Germans commandeered the Italian vehicles so that they could withdraw, all the while being pursued. Rommel had nothing to turn and fight with and his forces were now in headlong retreat. Over the next few days the rearguard units, including the 21st Panzer Division, destroyed their last tanks. The weather broke and torrential rain turned tracks into a sea of mud so that the trucks carrying the infantry could only trundle along at little more than walking pace. Their saving grace was that the weather grounded the RAF and Montgomery kept in contact but maintained a distance just in case Rommel could muster a counter-attack. Passing through Sidi Barrani, another 80 miles back, German sappers destroyed bridges and roads in the rear. The Battle of El Alamein was over and had cost the Germans 50,000 killed, wounded or taken prisoner. They had lost hundreds of trucks and 450 tanks, the Italians had been forced to abandon seventy-five tanks through lack of fuel, and over 1,000 pieces of artillery had been destroyed or captured. Montgomery had lost 13,500 killed and wounded, 500 tanks knocked out and 100 pieces of artillery destroyed. Figures for the loss of British tanks vary, with some sources claiming that of the 500 tanks lost only 150 were beyond repair. Other sources claim that 600 were knocked out, of which 350 could be repaired, and a third source claims that 200 tanks were destroyed and 300 were repaired. A more accurate amount can probably be gained by drawing an average from the three figures.

In a speech he made in November 1942 Winston Churchill said of the Battle of El Alamein: ‘Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.’ He could have been speaking for all of the Allies, including Stalin and Roosevelt, as together the campaigns and operations were forcing the Germans back on all fronts. Even so, the leaders realised that there was still a long way to go before Germany was beaten. Montgomery knew the Germans had lost the battle but had not lost the war in North Africa, but he was determined to complete his orders from Churchill, which were to ‘Destroy the German-Italian Army commanded by Field Marshal Rommel’. It would take time, but with Allied forces in the west waiting to receive the retreating Afrika Korps he was confident that the outcome was inevitable and Churchill’s orders would be fulfilled. The opposing sides had ‘see-sawed’ back and forth, east and west, across the desert five times, covering thousands of miles. The vehicles were worn out and the troops exhausted.