The most recent official commemorations of the Normandy landings occurred last week in France. For the first time Russia (as the successor state to the USSR) was not invited. Indeed, discredited and unpopular US and European politicians exploited the occasion to promote their own belligerent geo-political agendas. I found this aspect of the events distasteful, as I’m sure many veterans did. Operation Overlord was an astounding military achievement, a triumph of naval staff work and logistical organisation. It also displayed the skill, courage and endurance of the servicemen of the various nations involved (the UK, Canada and the USA being the main contributors). Moreover, the Anglo-American landings in France in June 1944 transformed Germany’s Western Front. Since the defeat of France in 1940, it had been an arena for dramatic air and sea battles, daring commando raids and acts of resistance. Once the Western Allies had got their forces ashore this metamorphosed into an immense series of land battles, involving huge groups of armies on both sides. This forced the German High Command to reinforce the Western Front, which added further strain to the already beleaguered German armed forces. But this strategic shift was not, as many British commentators seemed to suggest recently, a necessary precondition for victory over Germany. Indeed, it was understood in London and Washington, as well as Moscow, that by June 1944 the Red Army could win the war itself. Clearly, Soviet leaders welcomed the success of the Normandy landings, just as they had welcomed the diversion of German forces provoked by the campaigns of the Western Allies in North Africa (1942) and Italy (1943). Of huge importance, too, to the Soviet war effort was the vast material assistance provided by the British and Americans via the Lend-Lease arrangements. But the fact remains that, even if the Normandy landings had failed, the Soviet Union’s victory over Germany would not have been prevented, merely postponed.
Most Britons have an entirely warped view of the Second World War, most especially as to how Nazi Germany and its allies in Europe were actually defeated. In large part this is due to the dominance of American mass media output in Britain, including Hollywood films and syndicated TV programmes. That the Second World War should loom large in popular culture is probably, on balance, a good thing. There is much that is absolutely necessary for us to never forget, including the destruction of democracy in Italy, Spain, Germany, et al and the rise of militaristic tyrannical governments across Europe.
Of supreme importance, of course, is the Holocaust: the greatest crime against humanity of modern history, perhaps of any historical period. This monstrous campaign of horror and atrocity, along with the many other crimes of the Nazis, must always be remembered. Not only as mere commemoration but as an active and constant warning to future generations of the dangers of fascism. Also important, and this is where much of mainstream media effort is focussed, is to remember what it took – in terms of blood and treasure – for our own country, and those of our allies, to survive the Second World War and to emerge on the side of the victors. It needs to be said, however, that the way that British and American media fetishize the campaigns in north-west Europe (‘D-Day’, ‘Arnhem,’ etc.) does us a disservice. Some British people will also remember ‘El Alamein’ and ‘the Desert War.’ But most will know little if anything of the costly campaigns in Tunisia, for example, or Italy (never mind Britain’s land war against the Japanese in India and Burma). But in our collective understanding there is an even greater piece of the puzzle missing: the role of the USSR in defeating Nazi Germany.
This was not so at the time, of course, when everyone in Britain knew – from British Prime Minister Winston Churchill downwards – how crucial was the Red Army’s contribution to victory. Before the armies of the Western Allies landed in North Africa and then Sicily, it was painfully obvious that the only sizeable land forces engaged with the Germany Army were those of the Soviet Union. Hence Churchill’s searching around for other routes to defeat Germany from 1940 onwards. Whether ‘setting Europe ablaze’ via a combination of Commandos, the Special Operations Executive and Resistance, or his love-hate relationship with the so-called ‘strategic’ bombing of Germany (a protracted campaign [of dubious legality and morality] of aerial bombardment of German towns and cities, that failed to achieve the war-winning feats confidently expected of it by ideologues in the RAF).
The obvious centrality of the Red Army to winning the war helped move the British government to replace the anti-USSR propaganda, that had been so prevalent before 1941, with a sustained effort to foster increased mutual respect and understanding between British and Soviet peoples. For Churchill, and many in Westminster and Whitehall, this was a mere realpolitik alliance (my enemy’s enemy is my friend). But the new policy built, of course, on a natural popular sympathy in Britain for an invaded country. And there were plenty of people (not just informed Labour voters, socialists and trade unionists) who despised the now discredited Tory appeasers in Westminster. The very same people who, not too long before, had been hinting darkly at war with the USSR over Finland. It was widely remembered, too, that whereas Britain had abandoned the democratic Spanish Republic, during it’s life and death struggle with a fascist rebellion, the Republic had been actively supported by the Soviet Union.
This pro-Soviet opinion in Britain manifested itself in popular support for supplies of all kinds to be sent to the USSR but also for the opening of a Second Front on the continent of Europe. Incidentally, popular support for the Soviet Union was strong in the USA, too. Eric Hobsbawm noted that public opinion in the USA, from the late 1930s until the end of the Second World War, did not consider the Soviet Union to be the feared and despised dictatorship it would later become in American popular culture. (1)
To military planners in Moscow the Second Front meant an invasion of France in 1942 with around fifty divisions (at least 500,000 troops). They maintained that only such a large force could or would make a decisive difference to the strategic picture on Germany’s Eastern Front. But the Western Allies were simply not up to providing such a massive concentration of force for an invasion of France in 1942 or, as it turned out, in 1943. There were not fifty properly equipped or trained divisions idling somewhere and available for deployment, either in the UK or the USA.
The Americans were in the process of building a gargantuan infrastructure conveyor-belt that would in time produce dozens and dozens of fresh Army divisions. But, such were the training and manufacturing time frames, these new formations would only begin to become available in large numbers in the second half of 1943 and especially in 1944. Some American generals proposed throwing what was available, perhaps fifteen or twenty British and American formations, ashore in France in 1942. Even if they were destroyed in short order by the Germans, in some American minds the relief that such an operation might give to the Red Army was considered worth the sacrifice. This notion was vetoed by the more cautious British, however. British forces had been at war since September 1939, they had sustained many more casualties than the Americans and, in any case, the UK had a much smaller manpower pool from which to draw. The plan was dropped but in the American chief of the general staff, George Marshall, the Soviet premier, Joseph Stalin, always had an ally in favour of an early commitment to the Second Front.
In part, the American insistence on the centrality of an early invasion of north-western Europe was based on a general and uncomplicated strategic assessment of the war in Europe: that the Red Army was doing the bulk of the killing and dying against Germany and that the most direct way the US could contribute to the destruction of German forces was to do more of the killing (and dying) themselves. Stalin often needled Churchill (in his many telegrams, for example, but also when they met in-person) with the opinion that the Western Allies were fighting the war to the last Soviet soldier. And it was an indisputable fact (and this was true even when huge American and British armies were fighting on the continent of Europe in 1944-45) that the vast majority of German Army formations destroyed, were destroyed by the Red Army.
The Western Allies might have been compelled to wait for fresh forces to be properly trained and equipped before they could add their own armies to the weight of pressure against Germany in Europe but their goal was always to keep the USSR in the war. Even later in the conflict, when the outcome was no longer in doubt, few in London or Washington would have viewed the prospect of the Red Army ceasing to fight Hitler’s Germany with anything but dismay or even horror. Indeed, when Anglo-American armies were in a position to potentially take Berlin in 1945, the Anglo-American supreme commander, Dwight Eisenhower, decided against it, being more than happy to leave the German capital to be seized – at great cost – by the Red Army.
In 1941 and early 1942, as the German armies swept eastwards across the western USSR, many commentators in London and Washington feared that the Soviet Union would be forced to come to terms with Germany, either by a collapse of the Red Army on the battlefield or by a change of political regime in Moscow. To British and American military planners and political decision-makers it was absolutely imperative to keep the USSR in the war, and this included working to prevent Stalin signing a separate peace with Hitler (a prospect that in private Stalin – despite public pronouncements – intentionally never entirely ruled out).
If we consider the orders of battle for the various belligerents, we can see more clearly that the USSR staying in the war was absolutely crucial to the defeat of Germany. We need to remember that, overall, Germany raised 315 divisions during the course of the war. The division (between 10 or 15,000 men strong) was the building block of all large armies. Whether armoured, infantry or airborne, the division was composed of two or more brigades (each brigade made up of two or more battalions). The division was, in a sense, a self-contained mini-army with a variety of supporting arms, including artillery, engineers, signallers, etc. Two or more divisions formed a corps, two or more corps an army and two or more armies an army group.
The Americans raised 91 divisions through the war, split between the Pacific and European Theatres, with around 60 serving in north-western Europe (and Italy) by the end of the conflict. Britain had 35 divisions in Europe in 1944 but only 25 by 1945 (though they often fought in armies commanded by British generals alongside Canadian and Polish formations). In contrast, when Germany invaded the Soviet Union the Red Army possessed 303 divisions and 22 separate brigades (around 5.5 million soldiers). Of these, 166 divisions (roughly 2.6 million) were stationed in the west of the USSR. Against this, at their peak, the Axis nations – Germany, Hungary, Rumania, along with sizeable contingents from Italy and Spain – fielded 181 divisions and 18 brigades (three million soldiers).
Many historians consider the very invasion of the USSR, in June 1941, to be the turning point of the war, after which Nazi Germany’s defeat in the Second World War was assured. Indeed, much scholarship in recent years has demonstrated how – in contrast to the German invasion of France, Belgium and Holland in May 1940 – the German strategy against the Soviet Union was woefully confused, its logistical capacity terribly inadequate (even for the short campaign that was envisaged) and how its ideological prejudices and rampant racism blinded senior figures to the strengths of the Red Army and exaggerated the strengths of the German Army.
Later in the war Hitler confided to the Finnish generalissimo, Carl Mannerheim, that if he had known in 1941 how many tanks the Red Army had, he would never have invaded. Indeed, Germany’s intelligence apparatus had failed to properly estimate the Red Army order of battle by a shocking order of magnitude. This disastrous failure was, in part, a symptom of a wider problem. Success bred complacency. Doubts were honestly expressed by some but the majority of senior officers were unwilling to risk being categorised by Hitler, or those closest to him, as being unduly negative. Some prominent officers had raised sensible concerns about the plans for the campaign against France only to have been proved spectacularly wide of the mark. It had been a chastening experience for some and not one others wished to share.
Amidst the calamities that afflicted the Red Army in the summer of 1941 there were some small Soviet successes. At Brest and Smolensk, Soviet forces offered significant resistance, stalling the German advance and inflicting serious casualties on Axis forces. There is often disdain or even contempt expressed by British commentators for what are alleged to be intentionally brutal and needlessly wasteful Red Army tactics. The Soviets, so it goes, fought the war simplistically and with a shocking neglect for their own troops that the Western Allies never countenanced. Whether it’s the massive human waves of poorly-armed infantry that simply overwhelmed the German positions by force of numbers, the plentiful but inferior equipment, or their callous and unimaginative generals. Much of this inaccurate and or exaggerated.
Indeed, British and American commanders did themselves, on occasion, preside over First World War-style casualties, take the four battles at Monte Cassino in Italy or the attritional fighting in Normandy (between June and August) as examples. The Red Army is sometimes accused of blithely accepting high casualties in every battle, however, which was clearly not the policy of the Western Allies. But Alexander Hill’s research suggests that while desperate measures were occasionally employed in extremis, the infantry-heavy tactics of the Soviet break-in battle (bear in mind the Red Army was doing the attacking from mid-1943 onwards and the attacker normally incurs heavier casualties) were a conscious decision to risk higher casualties at the decisive moment, in order to end the battle more quickly and thus save lives in the long-run. (2)
The Red Army, like its British and American counterparts, was also heavily committed to using tanks, aircraft and artillery to the fullest extent possible. And with each year that passed the Red Army had much better aircraft, artillery and tanks, too, coming from numerous Soviet factories. The famous T-34 tank had already been developed but was present only in relatively small numbers in 1941. By the summer of 1943 this had changed, tens of thousands of T-34s, alongside heavy tanks of the KV series, were entirely replacing the less well-armoured T-26 and BT series of tanks, for example. Soviet equipment, therefore, was often as good as, if not superior to, German equipment.
It’s important not to underestimate the role played by US and UK supplies sent to the USSR. British tanks played a role in the Moscow counter-offensive, for example, London having sent 187 Matildas and 259 Valentines to the Soviet Union by the end of 1941. These were not entirely obsolete models, either, and in any case helped replenish the tank parks of Soviet formations at a time when domestic tank production was still in a dip, given the decision to transfer a large portion of its industrial plant out of the path of the German advance much further east, often beyond the Ural Mountains. Also useful were the 700 fighter aircraft sent from the UK to the USSR in the same time period (forming around 10% of Soviet fighter strength at the time). When the uprooted Soviet manufacturing plant was re-established it would, alongside increased tank production elsewhere, produce copious numbers of Soviet tanks in 1943 and 1944.
The USSR, like the UK and USA, relied on quantity as well as quality. As the war progressed, the Germans produced ever more powerful anti-tank guns, for example, and much heavier tanks like the Tiger and King Tiger. Yet, roughly speaking, for each Tiger (the Tigers only ever formed a small percentage of overall German tank production) that was manufactured in Germany, several US Shermans and Soviet T-34s were produced. The same could be said for almost every other class of military item: artillery, small arms, aircraft, trucks and lorries, merchant shipping and warships. In what had become a total war, therefore, the Germans were totally outproduced, completely outmanufactured, by the far vaster industrial capacities of the USSR, the USA and the British Empire.
Various modern studies of the impact of supplies sent under Lend-Lease have shifted the emphasis from the bulk of materiel provided, to the qualitative impact of certain items once deployed on the battlefield. For Alexander Hill, this is especially the case with certain vehicles and specific pieces of equipment (sent in huge numbers) that allowed certain Soviet formations to move with a speed of manoeuvre and co-ordination of effort that had formerly only been displayed by the German panzer formations. These included reliable radio sets, of all sizes, so that communications were hugely improved at all levels, and rugged cargo and troop-carrying trucks and lorries, that could move formations of Soviet infantry or armour at speeds they could not achieve without them. (3)
The USSR was keen to accept anything and everything that would help the war-effort, including tinned foodstuffs. There were canning firms in the USA that made a small fortune from supplying the Red Army with spam, for example. Anglo-American aid therefore undoubtedly strengthened Soviet forces when they needed it the most. And continued to do so up to the end of the war in Europe in May 1945.
In the summer of 1942, the German Army demonstrated that it still had the potential to mount strategic offensives, when Hitler ordered massive attacks in the southern half of the Eastern Front. These campaigns were designed to seize vast industrial and natural resources, especially oil, without which Hitler felt Germany could not sustain its war economy in the long-term. Again, the initial German victories were impressive but this time there was far fewer Soviet disasters, most Red Army formations fought stubborn rearguard actions and many more withdrew in relatively good order than before. And so, yet again, German generals gained much ground without imposing a strategic – war-winning – defeat on the Red Army.
There were two main thrusts, one aimed at the Baku oilfields in the Caucasus with the other reaching out to protect its flank along the Don River. It was this second operation that inveigled Axis forces into the battle for Stalingrad. Stalingrad, now a byword for the brutality and suffering of the Eastern Front, was really an unnecessary defeat as the city could and should have been screened. But the political significance of a city bearing Stalin’s name tempted Hitler into ordering its capture. It proved a disastrous and costly battle, that sucked in far too many German divisions. Even precious panzer formations (designed for, and experienced in, mobile warfare in open terrain) were torn to pieces in a static meat-grinder urban battle, that destroyed almost the entire Sixth Army.
Then, with German strength frittered away in this urban fighting, an impressively planned and executed Soviet counter-offensive broke through the Axis lines, encircled Stalingrad (forcing the surrender of over 200,000 half-starved, half-frozen German soldiers) and forced German commanders to entirely rethink their strategic plans. Though the Caucasus had to be abandoned, lest the forces there were cut-off, one of the better German commanders – Erich Manstein – oversaw a series of counter-thrusts which restored the balance, for the time being anyway. But Stalingrad had been a thorough defeat for Germany. And though Berlin would spin it as a heroic setback that had cost the enemy dear, most of their senior officers knew better.
It was the Axis Kursk Offensive of 1943 that sacrificed the strategic initiative to the Red Army. German planners looking at maps saw that the bulge in the Soviet lines around Kursk contained a large number of Red Army formations. They wanted to pinch it out at the base and capture or destroy the Soviet divisions thereby cut off within the bulge. And if it had been carried out immediately it would have been a less difficult operation. But Hitler delayed the start of the battle more than once, including to allow more of the newer tanks and tank destroyers to be deployed with the attacking formations. The Red Army High Command had not been idle during these delays, either, far from it. The Kursk salient was on obvious target for the Germans to Red Army staff officers. But Moscow had also received a great deal of intelligence revealing German preparations for an offensive there. From their own sources, of course, but also from Britain (via top secret decrypts of German communications [codenamed Ultra by the British and made famous around the world since the first disclosures of the existence and purpose of Bletchley Park were made known in the 1970s]).
The Red Army demonstrated many of the ways in which had changed for the better during the Kursk battles. The defences designed and constructed in the salient were truly impressive. Layer upon layer of cleverly-sited defensive works, designed to cut down infantry and destroy tanks in large numbers, had been swathed in vast, deep fields of anti-personnel and anti-tank mines. Better equipped, better trained, and possessing much more confidence now in their training, their officers and the high command, front-line Red Army units knew they could survive being surrounded. They knew that if they held out they would inflict more losses on the enemy. But they also had much more confidence that they would be successfully relieved when (rather than if) their comrades counter-attacked.
Held in reserve for just this kind of counter-attack, were powerful formations of Soviet armour and infantry, who could also reinforce sectors under pressure and or set upon any German units that breached a section of the line in any depth. Above the battlefield an organised and powerful concentration of Soviet air power ensured that the Luftwaffe did not have free rein, which came as an unpleasant surprise to German Army formations (who had been able to count on local air superiority more often than not in the past).
From north and south then, the attacking German formations, fielding hundreds of tanks, pushed through these deeply layered defences at appalling cost. Mines, anti-tank guns, ground-attack aircraft, infantry squads trained to kill tanks, all destroyed their share of German armour – including the new Panthers, Tigers and Ferdinands that Hitler had demanded be deployed. And where German units broke through, they were attacked by fresh Soviet infantry and armour. These large-scale clashes are why the Battle of Kursk is commonly called the largest tank battle in history. Despite the heavy losses, the German attacks continued to make progress and there are historians who contend that if the front-line German generals had been given their head, the north and south prongs would have linked up and cut off the Kursk salient.
Certainly, in his memoirs, Manstein said he believed there was scope to destroy a significant portion of Red Army forces before he was ordered back on the defence. Others disagree, asserting that Soviet reserves outweighed any reinforcements the Axis might have been able to bring in, and that therefore a prolonged battle would have ended with the same result. Hitler ordered the attacks to cease when he heard news of the Anglo-American invasion of Sicily. Immediately, he demanded first-rate formations be sent to Italy from the Eastern Front. These orders, on top of the losses suffered in a month of brutal combat around Kursk, meant there was simply no capacity for further attacks. Indeed, the Axis would never again have the combat power to take the strategic initiative; from Kursk on, they were forced to adopt a defensive strategy.
It was the Soviet offensives of July to August 1944, not the Anglo-American seaborne invasion of France, that delivered the next decisive blow against Germany. Operation Bagration, the liberation of Belorussia and the destruction of Germany’s Army Group Centre (850,000 men grouped in four armies) was the fruit of a three year-long transformation of the Red Army. The Red Army’s senior generals were now proven battle-winners, amongst them Georgy Zhukov, Ivan Konev and Konstantin Rokossovsky. The offensive was launched along a 500 mile front on June 23rd 1944 and involved nearly two million Soviet troops.
Maskirovka (Soviet deception methodology, which included myriad intelligence operations, systematic and comprehensive physical camouflage, the creation of decoy formations with false signals traffic and so on) was exploited to the maximum extent. It was an effort to compare with the brilliance of the campaign to sow confusion ahead of D-Day in the West – Operation Fortitude. The Germans were thereby convinced that the next Soviet blow would land further north, facing Army Group North Ukraine. The German High Command decided that Army Group Centre’s allotment of the crucial panzer divisions – the heavily-armed, mobile formations that could plug gaps and restore battlefronts – would be reduced accordingly. It was to prove a costly decision.
Red Army partisan bands, operating behind German lines, were organised and equipped to attack Axis transport hubs and lines of communication. The same targets were bombed by hundreds of Soviet aircraft. An unprecedentedly massive artillery bombardment fell on the German front lines and then the Red Army tanks and infantry moved in to attack.
Too often, in the past, a Soviet penetration of German lines had run out of steam before it could force a crushing defeat on the enemy. The Germans had become masters of improvising in defence. Once they had managed to slow or stop an initial Red Army attack, they called up their panzer formations to seal the breach or cover a retreat to more defensible positions. In this way, most German formations might survive a battle more or less intact, though often with terrible losses. And though, generally – more often than not, anyway – territory had been lost to the Soviets, the defensive line was painstakingly pieced back together and the basic cohesion of the German armies maintained.
As the generals of the Western Allies had also learnt, break-in was easier than breakthrough. With air superiority and massed artillery, Soviet and Western armies could often smash a hole in one part of the German front. Tanks and motorised or mechanised infantry would then be pushed in to expand the hole, with a view to breaking through – en masse – to the enemy rear. But tanks needed replenishment of fuel and ammunition, their drivers needed rest, infantrymen had to be kept supplied with food and ammunition. Engineers needed to be brought up to remove obstacles, clear minefields and replace destroyed bridges, medical and logistical troops needed access to the frontline formations. And all the while, the Germans could be counted on to be fighting back ferociously. Maintaining the flow of essential supplies to the attacking forces, ensuring exhausted formations were replaced by fresh ones, was a huge task that required sound generalship and consistently excellent staff work. It’s not surprising, then, that sometimes generals and their staffs failed to turn a break-in into a breakthrough.
Operation Bagration, and the follow-up offensives, had been requested by the Western Allies, so as to tie-down German forces on the Eastern Front and minimise the scale of reinforcements the Germans could send westwards, to support their attacks on the Anglo-American bridgehead in Normandy. Clearly, the Soviet offensives would have gone ahead eventually anyway but the exact timings were discussed and agreed upon with Eisenhower. The summer Soviet offensives, that began in late June 1944 with Bagration, killed 520,000 German troops. When you add in the 300,000 wounded and 192,000 prisoners-of-war, the total German casualties totalled over one million German personnel. It was a great victory, a crushing blow, one which significantly shortened the war in Europe. The cost to the Red Army and the Soviet Union, however, was huge: 180,000 soldiers killed or missing, around 600,000 sick or wounded, with 3000 tanks and over 800 aircraft lost.
During Bagration the breakthrough was achieved in spectacular fashion, the Germans were given no time to recover, the diminished number of panzer divisions available to Army Group Centre were unable to blunt the Soviet spearheads and restore the situation. Soviet logistical preparation had been superb. Supply dumps of fuel, ammunition and all kinds of other supplies had been set up, reserve formations of fighting troops were trained, equipped and ready. Able to sustain the advance for longer, therefore, Red Army formations drove deep into the rear of the German positions, even surprising more than one German general in his headquarters and sweeping-up rear echelon troops before they had chance to retreat. 28 of 34 German divisions were destroyed, whole German armies were broken in battle and the once mighty Army Group Centre had been smashed to pieces. It remains Germany’s largest military defeat and was the outstanding military achievement of the Second World War. Belorussia was liberated and Soviet forces were now free to advance into Poland, Lithuania and Rumania.
The courage and skill of the British, American and other Allied forces that fought in Normandy, Italy and so on is not in doubt. My own paternal grandfather fought in Tunisia, Sicily and mainland Italy and saw some of the most brutal fighting of the war. There was ferocious fighting in Normandy and, following the breakout from there in August 1944, in hard-fought battles in Holland and Germany itself.
The crucial difference with the Red Army’s role in the war is not the courage of its soldiers, the efficacy of its equipment and tactics, or the skill of its generals, it is the sheer scale of the Soviet contribution. As all historians agree, seven out of eight German servicemen killed in the Second World War were killed by the Red Army. The strategic threat posed to the German Army by the Red Army was immense and absolutely required that the bulk of Germany’s military effort be focussed on its Eastern Front.
Anglo-American amphibious operations clearly had a significant impact on German strategy and dispositions, of course, especially as these grew in scale and ambition, from the small-scale campaign in Sicily, through the larger one in Italy to the massive commitment that had unfolded in France by the autumn of 1944. These demanded a German redeployment of formations over and above the raising of poor quality static coastal defence divisions; they necessitated the transfer west of battle-hardened and capable formations.
The transfer of such elite divisions diminished the Germans’ ability to strike back at the Red Army in counter-offensives (such as those around Kharkov in 1942), which had alternately spoiled Soviet offensive plans, stabilised the front or temporarily retook some militarily crucial or politically desirable piece of territory. The German Army’s ability to mount war-winning offensives might have vanished by the autumn of 1943 but its ability to counter-attack had remained intact. Not least because German commanders there could still rely on sufficient panzer and panzer-grenadier divisions – including the powerful Army and Waffen-SS ‘super-divisions’ – to provide the mobility and striking power that was needed to inflict local defeats on the Red Army.
The requirement to reinforce other theatres of the war, by stripping formations from the Eastern Front, began with very small numbers in 1941, to Greece, Yugoslavia and North Africa, for example. Later, by the autumn of 1943, it required a couple of dozen in Italy, too. But it was only when it became obvious to German leaders that the Western Allies were certain to land there in 1944, that the number of divisions in France (and the Low Countries) was increased to 50.
In the crucial years of the war, therefore, when the German Army was held back by the Red Army, the efforts of British and American military forces in the field were significant but not decisive. Even by the time Germany’s Western Front had been built-up to the point of maximum effort by the Western Allies, the number of German divisions required to sustain it was dwarfed (proportionately) by those required to maintain the front against the Red Army.
This disparity, and the German Army’s obvious inability to defeat the Red Army in late 1944, led Hitler to gamble on an offensive against the Western Allies in Belgium. A victory there, he wildly surmised, might provide important military breathing space in the West and, more importantly, might so divide Britain and the USA politically, that perhaps even an end to hostilities with the Anglo-Saxon powers might be possible. It was madness, of course, but the offensive went ahead. By doing so, Hitler threw away Germany’s last, carefully built-up, strategic reserve and weakened German defences in the East into the bargain. And all to no strategic purpose. Thereafter, there was definitely no stopping or even significantly slowing the Red Army advance.
If the allied landings in Normandy had failed, then various German divisions would have been transferred eastwards. But these too, in time, would have been destroyed by the Red Army. The war’s duration would have been extended, of course, and many more Red Army soldiers would have died. What cannot be in question, however, is that by the summer of 1944 Germany was doomed. And, though it could be delayed, the victory of the Red Army over German forces in eastern Europe could not be prevented. Operation Overlord was a fine, even spectacular, achievement and is worthy of commemoration. But we do a disservice to the memory of those who died, in all armies but especially the Red Army, if we do not acknowledge the historical realities of the war against Germany. To deliberately ignore the crucial contribution of the Soviet Union to victory in the Second World War is intellectually dishonest and, when it is employed as part of anti-Russian propaganda to justify another Western war against Russia, morally reprehensible.
15/06/2024
Dave Savage is Convenor of Preston & South Ribble People’s Assembly and Secretary of Stop the War, Preston & South Ribble.
References
- Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes, The Short Twentieth Century, 1914-1991 (London, 1995), p. 176.
- Alexander Hill, The Red Army & the Second World War (Cambridge, 2017), p. 576.
- Ibid, p. 436.
Further Reading
Alexander Hill, The Red Army & the Second World War (Cambridge, 2017).
Paul Adair, Hitler’s Greatest Defeat, The German Collapse, 1944 (London, 1994).
Geoffrey Roberts, Stalin’s General, The Life of Georgy Zhukov (London, 2013).
Sonke Neitzel, Tapping Hitler’s Generals, Transcripts of Secret Conversations 1942-45 (London, 2013)
Sodalis 