In the months between November 1942 and July 1943 the Red Army broke the back of the German war effort. Though German forces fought well in retreat, it was retreat none the less. The Soviet armed forces developed the strategy of ‘deep battle’, heavy frontal assault on the enemy line with tanks and aircraft and rockets, backed up with large reserves and a solid base of supply. Though Soviet air forces toyed with the idea of bombing German cities, they abandoned it in favour of the destruction of the enemy armed forces, which remained the target of first priority. The German and Soviet armies fought wars on the classical principles of combat.
Not so the two western Allies. For much of the war Britain had little realistic prospect of defeating Germany on land. Instead Britain adopted a more indirect strategy: containing German and Italian forces in the Mediterranean, while the British navy imposed a blockade and protected the flow of American supplies to Britain, and the Royal Air Force bombed German cities in the hope of wearing down German economic power and the resistance of the population. There were Americans who also hoped to avoid a bloody land battle and high losses by concentrating on air and sea power, Roosevelt among them. The United States air forces joined the bombing offensive in 1943 with the aim of crippling the German home economy and the flow of war supplies. Yet it was impossible in the end to avoid the strategy of force confronting force. The bombing offensive almost ground to a halt in the face of effective German resistance in the winter of 1943 and was only resumed seriously when long-range fighters were introduced to fight the enemy air force. During 1944 the bombing of Germany depended on prior victory over the German air force. The Atlantic shipping lanes faced disastrous losses in 1942 and 1943 until the two Allied navies decided to fight the submarine directly rather than try to sail round it. In two months, April and May 1943, the German submarine offensive was fought to a standstill with long-range aircraft, escort carriers, and advanced radar detection equipment.
During 1943 the British came reluctantly to accept the argument that there was little choice but to fight the German army too, face to face. Stalin constantly harried his western Allies to produce the ‘Second Front’ to relieve Soviet forces. Neither bombing nor the Mediterranean strategy promised to defeat the German army in the short term. When Stalin met Churchill and Roosevelt at Teheran in November 1943 he extracted from them the promise that in the spring of 1944 their forces would invade north-western France and take the war to Hitler. They finally did so on 6 June 1944, in an operation of extraordinary complexity and high risk. It was only possible as a genuinely combined operation. Its purpose was to land a large army in France, but naval power was needed to ship and supply it, and air power was recruited to bomb bridges and railways and to keep the German air force neutralized. Even with the advantage of surprise and overwhelming fire-power from air and sea the bridgehead remained vulnerable. German resistance was finally worn down by August and a long retreat began westwards and eastwards into the Reich. Germany finally surrendered on 8 May 1945.
The Second World War was everything expected from the lessons of the First. It was a total war from the start. The sheer expense and complexity of modern weaponry made exceptional demands on the economy; so too did the global scale of the war, which forced the creation of armed forces on a scale unimaginable even half a century before. The major European powers devoted two-thirds of their industrial output to war, and more than half the national product. Women were brought in to replace men. By 1945 over half the German workforce was female; in Britain over one-third. In Germany and the Soviet Union women kept peasant agriculture going as the men were recruited to fight. Economic effort on this scale reflected the harsh and uncompromising nature of the conflict. Each side saw the war as a struggle for survival, democracy against fascism, fascism against communism, race against race. The fundamental stakes in the contest were used to justify measures of extraordinary desperation and brutality. The assumption that civilians were now both instruments and victims of war became the norm. Throughout German-occupied Europe, Jewish communities were first forced into ghettoes and camps, and then, from the summer of 1941, systematically exterminated. Hitler and his racist companions argued that the war had been fomented by Jewish intrigue and that a state of war existed between German and Jew that legitimized genocide. Other ‘lesser races’, Poles, Russians, Serbs, suffered indiscriminate victimization and killings. Across Europe an active resistance to the German occupation developed, and for five years a shadow war of civilian terrorist and German police and military forces ran alongside the conventional conflict. The result of the war directed against civilians was loss of life on an unprecedented scale. In Russia civilian losses totalled at least 7 million; in Poland almost 6 million, many of them Jews; in Yugoslavia 1.7 million. German civilian losses were 2.3 million, only slightly less than the number of German soldiers who died.
A large number of German civilian dead were the victims of bombing. Though Douhet’s vision of the knock-out blow from the air never materialized, neither side scrupled to attack targets which involved civilian deaths. British strategy for much of the war was based on the view that bombing was the one means of destroying German war capability. Unable to hit precise targets because of enemy defences and poor navigation aids, British Bomber Command switched in 1942 to attacks on industrial centres by night. In July 1943 the attack on Hamburg produced the first firestorm—a heat of such intensity that everything was destroyed in the path of the fire. The American Eighth Air Force joined the attack on Germany during 1943 with daylight attacks on key industrial targets, though in practice even ‘precise’ attacks produced wide civilian damage. During 1944 the bombing diverted over half the German fighter aircraft and absorbed one-third of heavy gun, optical, and electronic equipment production. During 1944 German oil supplies were reduced to a fraction, while the planned output of aircraft and tanks was cut by more than one-third. These losses constituted a severe limitation on the fighting power of German forces, already stretched taut. On the home front bombing caused widespread demoralization and disruption. Air attacks killed an estimated 600,000 Germans, and destroyed or damaged 90 per cent of the residential housing in Germany’s major cities.
World History
