because superstition made frontoviks, as Russians termed fighting soldiers, reluctant to wear identity capsules, the Red Army’s equivalent of dog tags. A further 320,000 men were evacuated sick or wounded. But this butcher’s bill seemed acceptable as the price of a victory that changed the course of the war.
The Allied world rejoiced alongside Stalin’s people. ‘The killing of thousands of Germans in Russia makes pleasant reading now,’ wrote British civilian Herbert Brush on 26 November 1942, ‘and I hope it will be kept up for a long time yet. It is the only way to convert young Germans. I wonder how the Russians will treat the prisoners they capture…it will show whether the Russians are really converted to civilised life.’ The answer to Brush’s speculation was that many German prisoners were killed or allowed to starve or freeze, because the contest in barbarism had become unstoppable.
The Red Army achieved stunning advances in the first months of 1943, gaining up to 150 miles in the north, to halt beyond Kursk. Soviet generalship sometimes displayed brilliance, but mass remained the key element in the Red Army’s successes. Discipline was erratic, and units were vulnerable to outbreaks of panic and desertion. Command incompetence was often compounded by drunkenness. Captain Nikolai Belov recorded scenes during an attack that were not untypical:
The day of battle. I slept through the artillery bombardment. After about 1½ hours, I woke and ran to the telephone to check the situation. Then I ran up the communication trench to 1st Rifle Battalion, where I found its commander Captain Novikov and chief of staff Grudin dashing about with pistols in their hands. When I asked them to report, they said they were leading their men to attack. Both were drunk, and I ordered them to holster their weapons.
There were piles of corpses in the trenches and on the parapets, among them that of Captain Sovkov, whom Novikov had killed – I was told that he had shot a lot of [our own] soldiers. I told Novikov, Grudin and Aikazyan that unless they joined the forward company, I would kill them myself. But instead of advancing towards the river, they headed for the rear. I gave them a burst of sub-machine-gun fire, but Novikov somehow found his way back into the trench. I pushed him forward with my own hands. He was soon wounded, and Grudin brought him in on his back. Both of them, notorious cowards, were of course delighted. Assuming command of the battalion myself, in the evening I crossed the Oka river to join the leading company of Lieutenant Util’taev. When night fell, I advanced with three companies, but the assault failed.
The fundamental cause of the disasters which befell the German armies in Russia in the winter of 1942–43 was that they had undertaken a task beyond their nation’s powers. The Wehrmacht was saved from immediate disaster only by the generalship of Manstein. Hitler had said grudgingly back in 1940, ‘The man is not to my liking, but he is capable.’ Manstein was almost certainly the ablest German general of the war. In March he stabilised his line, launched a counter-attack which retook Kharkov, and checked the momentum that had borne forward the Soviet spearheads from the Volga to the Donets, thus securing Hitler another breathing space.
But for what? The balance of advantage on the Eastern Front had shifted decisively and irrevocably against Germany. The power of the Soviet Union and its armies was growing fast, while that of the invaders shrank. In 1942, Germany produced just 4,800 armoured vehicles, while Russia built 24,000. The new T-34 tank, better than anything the Germans then deployed save the Tiger, began to appear in quantity – Chelyabinsk, one of Stalin’s massive manufacturing centres in the Urals, became known as Tankograd. That year also, Russia built 21,700 aircraft to Germany’s 14,700. The Red Army deployed six million men, supported by a further 516,000 NKVD troops. In the winter fighting of 1942–43, Germany lost a million dead, along with vast quantities of materiel.
The Wehrmacht’s combat performance remained superior to that of the Red Army: until the end of the war, in almost every local action the Germans inflicted more casualties than they received. But their tactical skills no longer sufficed to stem the Russian tide. Stalin was identifying good generals, building vast armies with formidable tank and artillery strength, and at last receiving large deliveries from the Western Allies, including food, vehicles and communications equipment. The five million tons of American meat that eventually reached Russia amounted to half a pound of rations a day for every Soviet soldier. Allied food shipments probably averted a starvation catastrophe in the winter of 1942–43.
Of the Red Army’s 665,000 vehicles in 1945, 427,000 were American-built, including 51,000 jeeps. The US provided half the Red Army’s boots – loss of livestock made leather scarce – almost 2,000 railway locomotives, 15,000 aircraft, 247,000 telephones and nearly four million tyres. ‘Our army suddenly found itself on wheels – and what wheels!’ said Anastas Mikoyan with a generosity uncharacteristic of Stalin’s ministers. ‘When we started to receive American canned beef, fat, powdered eggs and other foodstuffs, this was worth a lot of extra calories.’ Mikoyan believed that Lend-Lease supplies shortened the war by a year to eighteen months.
It was plain to Hitler’s commanders that victory in the east was no longer attainable. The only issue for Germany was how long its armies could withstand Russia’s relentlessly growing strength. When spring prompted the melting of the Volga’s ice, among a host of horrors revealed by the thaw were the bodies of a Russian and a German, victims of Stalingrad, clasped in a death embrace. Yet already that German’s living compatriots were more than three hundred miles westward, embarked upon a retreat that would never be reversed.
13
Living with War
1 WARRIORS
The experience of war was extraordinarily diverse. The Eastern Front, where 90 per cent of all Germans killed in combat met their fate, overwhelmingly dominated the struggle against Hitler. Between 1941 and 1944, British and American sailors and airmen fought at sea and in the sky, but relatively small numbers of Western Allied ground troops engaged the Axis in North Africa, Italy, Asia and the Pacific. Much larger Anglo-American forces spent those years training and exercising: when 1st Norfolks went into action at Kohima in June 1944, for instance, it was the battalion’s first battle since leaving France through Dunkirk in May 1940. Many other British and American units experienced equally protracted delays before joining the fray. The conflict was a pervasive circumstance for the peoples of Britain and its white dominions, and to a lesser extent the United States, but it imposed serious peril and hardship on only a relatively small minority of men ‘at the sharp end’ of ground combat. At sea, fatalities in most naval battles were counted in hundreds. In the sky, aircrew suffered high proportionate losses, but these were dwarfed by those of the eastern land campaign.
The Soviet Union suffered 65 per cent of all Allied military deaths, China 23 per cent, Yugoslavia 3 per cent, the USA and Britain 2 per cent each, France and Poland 1 per cent each. About 8 per cent of all Germans died, compared with 2 per cent of Chinese, 3.44 per cent of Dutch people, 6.67 per cent of Yugoslavs, 4 per cent of Greeks, 1.35 per cent of French, 3.78 per cent of Japanese, 0.94 per cent of British and 0.32 per cent of Americans. Within the armed forces, 30.9 per cent of Germans conscripted into the Wehrmacht died, 17.35 per cent of the Luftwaffe (including paratroopers and ground personnel), 34.9 per cent of the Waffen SS. Some 24.2 per cent of Japanese soldiers were killed, and 19.7 per cent of naval personnel. Japanese formations committed against the Americans and British in 1944–45 lost far more heavily – the overall statistics are distorted by the fact that throughout the war a million of Hirohito’s soldiers remained in China, where they suffered relatively modest losses. One Russian soldier in four died, against one in twenty British Commonwealth combatants and one in thirty-four American servicemen. Some 3.66 per cent of US Marines died, compared with 2.5 per cent of the US Army and 1.5 per cent of the US Navy.
A modest number of those fighting contrived to enjoy the war, usually when their own side was winning – Germans and Japanese in the early years, Americans and British thereafter. Young people who relished adventure found this readily available. Lt. Robert Hichens of the Royal Navy wrote in July 1940: ‘I suppose
