troops from the east, where they had successfully daunted the warlords of Japan. The Germans were ordered by Hitler to stand fast and fight rather than retreat, a decision which is approved by most military experts – a defeat would certainly have become a rout. Forming ‘hedgehogs’ around fortified centres, often supplied by air, they held firm and anxiously awaited the arrival of spring.
When spring finally came, the Germans had suffered over eleven hundred thousand casualties, most in the savage, hard fought battles of the summer and autumn.26 The Russians had suffered far more heavily; some three million had been captured in the great encirclement battles of 1941 – a million more had been killed.27 A winter offensive had moved the Germans back from Moscow. But Russia, west of a line drawn from near Leningrad in the North, through Briansk to Kharkhov and Tagranog in the Ukraine, was occupied by Germany and her Italian, Hungarian and Rumanian allies. The agricultural and industrial heart of Russia was gone. How could Stalin feed and arm his remaining soldiers? The answer was that whole factories had been uprooted and moved to the east in front of the German onrush, and the gigantic output of American industry and agriculture, supplemented by supplies from hard pressed Britain, had filled the gap. This had been made possible by the most vital of all the advantages possessed by Britain – sea power. But Hitler was not aware of the full extent of this vast movement of goods and resources, or of the survival of Russian industry. One more campaign must surely suffice to bring him victory; one more summer, and Germany would strike down the Slavs forever.
Great events had unfolded further east. On December 7th, the Japanese surprised the American fleet at Pearl Harbour in Hawaii with an attack by carrier borne aircraft, crippling the battleships which, unprepared, lay at anchor on that Sunday morning. The Japanese aimed to establish a wide defensive perimeter around the home islands which the United States, after suffering heavy losses, would eventually tire of attacking and concede to Japan. But they failed to destroy the installations at Pearl Harbour and the carriers, which had been absent, escaped. And the surprise attack ensured that the American people would be utterly determined to use their vast strength to bring Japan to utter ruin, at whatever cost.
The Japanese made vast strides across the Pacific; ill armed and demoralised British and Indian units were brushed aside, and Singapore was surrendered to inferior forces who were about to retreat for want of supplies. If the surrender had been partly intended to save the lives of Singapore’s civilians, it was ineffective, for it was followed by a precautionary massacre of 5000 Chinese.28 The Americans were driven from the Philippines by March 1942, after hard fighting at Bataan and Corregidor.
But the Japanese had the same hidden weakness as the Germans – the allies had cracked their codes. At Midway, in June 1942, this intelligence coup was put to good use. A Japanese fleet was located, and four aircraft carriers destroyed, in a desperate air battle with the always formidable navy of the United States. Japan had shot her bolt. Her industry, soon to be assailed by American bombers and starved by American submarines, could not make good the losses in ships or highly trained pilots. She would eventually be encircled and ruined by fleets that included over a hundred aircraft carriers, and devastated by a rain of fire from giant American bombers.
But all this was in the future when, on December 11th 1941, Germany declared war on the United States. She did not need to do so. The Tripartite Pact, signed on September 27th 1940, required Germany, Japan and Italy to ‘assist one another with all political, economic and military means if one of the contracting powers is attacked by a power at present not involved in the European War or in the Chinese – Japanese conflict…’29 Japan had clearly been the aggressor, as had Germany in Russia, and the Japanese had not felt obliged to join in on that occasion. Nevertheless, Hitler thought that the United States and Germany were effectively at war anyway. By this act of folly he solved what might have resulted in a serious dilemma for President Roosevelt; with the American public fired to anger about the Japanese attack, might it not have been harder to spare both forces and production for the British war against Germany? And a German declaration of war against the United States could have been used as a bargaining counter for a Japanese attack on Russia. Hitler could now expect a build up of activity in the west. The German economy, already flat out30, would need to have its priorities right.
Yet Hitler’s war situation in April 1942 did not, despite the active intervention of the United States, appear to him to be alarming. He expected to defeat the Soviet Union in one more summer campaign that would penetrate to Baku and capture the huge oilfield there. He already had the resources of all Europe at his disposal. The British were under attack from German submarines, the U Boats, aided by Focke Wulf Condor aircraft and mines. He was sinking more merchant ships each month than were being built31. By April 1942 the British had lost 2915 ships in the war, of which 1282 had been sunk by submarines; (509 had been sunk by Condors and 362 by mines to the end of 1941).32 The U Boat fleet, starting the war with a total of 59 boats, now had 130 operational.33 German cryptographers had broken the Admiralty’s codes in 1941, and were reading the planned routes of convoys. The British lost the ability to read the German Navy code shortly afterwards.34
The German surface fleet had not fared so well; a pocket battleship (Graf Spee) and a battleship (Bismark) had been sunk while attempting commerce raiding, while the battle cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau had been deterred from attacking convoys by escorting battleships.35
In the air, the situation certainly should have given the Germans much cause for concern. Total Luftwaffe strength had fallen from 3692 in March 1940 to 3582 in March 1941 and 2872 in March 1942.36 In 1941 Germany had made only 11,776 aircraft; British production was 20,094 with 2135 received from North America.37 The Soviet Union made 15,735. But here again German intelligence was faulty, estimating Russian production at 5000 per annum in 1939 and 1940, when in fact it was over twice as much38; and calculating it to be 1150 per month (13,800 per annum) in March 1942, when in 1942 the Soviet Union produced over 25,000 aeroplanes.39 The German air ministry had aquired a new technical director, field Marshal Erhard Milch (1892-1972) in November 1941, and he desperately sought to increase production; however, between January and the end of April 1942 only 4645 aircraft were produced, of which 1460 were fighters. These were being destroyed at a high rate in Russia, the Mediterranean and in the west; and in these four months Britain produced 8118 aeroplanes, and in addition received 671 from North America.40 Of ominous import for Germany’s cities and industries, 390 of these were the new four-engined heavy bombers, the Stirling, the Halifax and the Lancaster.
The desperate situation of Russia had, together with the introduction of new navigational aids, prompted a renewal of Bomber Command’s offensive against Germany. Something – everything – had to be done to keep Russia in the war. Britain, however, was in no position to invade the continent and open a ‘second front’. Only in the air could she do anything to relieve Russia’s agony. On February 14th 1942 a new directive, to bomb the ‘industrial areas’ of Essen, Duisburg, Dusseldorf and Cologne, was issued to the command by the air staff.41 The attempt at ‘precision’ bombing was abandoned. This was the commencement of ‘area’ or ‘carpet’ bombing, in which hundreds of thousands of men, women and children were made homeless,
