Death on the Don E-Book

Jonathan Trigg

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 518

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

Nazi Germany's assault on the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941, Operation Barbarossa, was the largest invasion in history. Almost 3.5 million men smashed into Stalin's Red Army, reaching the gates of Leningrad, Moscow and Sevastopol. But not all of this vast army was German; indeed, by the summer of 1942, over 500,000 were Romanians, Italians, Hungarians, Slovaks and Croatians – Hitler's Axis allies. As part of the German offensive that year, more than four allied armies advanced to the Don only to be utterly annihilated in the Red Army's Saturn and Uranus winter offensives. Hundreds of thousands were killed, wounded or captured, and the German Sixth Army was left surrounded and dying in the rubble of Stalingrad. Poorly equipped, often badly led and totally unprepared for the war, they were asked to fight. Drawing on first-hand accounts from veterans and civilians, as well as previously unpublished source material, Death on the Don tells the story of one of the greatest military disasters of the Second World War.

Leseprobe

First published in 2013This corrected edition published 2017

The History PressThe Mill, Brimscombe PortStroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QGwww.thehistorypress.co.uk

This ebook edition first published in 2013

All rights reserved© Jonathan Trigg, 2013, 2017

The right of Jonathan Trigg to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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EPUB ISBN 978 0 7509 5189 0

Original typesetting by The History Press

eBook converted by Geethik Technologies

Other books by this author also published by The History Press:

Hitler’s Legions series

Volume I – Hitler’s Gauls: The History of the French Waffen-SS

Volume II – Hitler’s Flemish Lions: The History of the Flemish Waffen-SS

Volume III – Hitler’s Jihadis: The History of the Muslim Waffen-SS

Volume IV – Hitler’s Vikings: The History of the Scandinavian Waffen-SS

Battle Stories series

Hastings 1066

CONTENTS

Prologue

Notes on the text

Acknowledgements

Introduction

  1.   The politics of the Axis

  2.   Waging war – economics and the military

  3.   Operation Barbarossa – the world holds its breath!

  4.   The death of the Ostheer – winter 1941–42

  5.   Hitler’s Case Blue

  6.   Stalingrad

  7.   Winter on the Don

  8.   Operation Uranus – the end of the Romanians

  9.   The Italians Turn – ‘Little’ Saturn ‘Phase 1’

10.   The last of the Axis – Hungary’s 2nd Army

11.   Counting the cost of the Don

12.   After the Don – the Axis regroups

13.   Aftermath

Appendix A

Romanian Army Order of Battle, Eastern Front, November 1942

Appendix B

Romanian Infantry Divisions and Recruiting Areas

Appendix C

German Casualties Eastern Front

Bibliography

PROLOGUE

After studying history at university and then going on to a career in the British Army in a first-rate infantry regiment, it is perhaps surprising that I came to actually writing military history rather later than people might imagine. Examining the reasons for this seeming mystery, I am quite sure that it was my experience in the army that effectively mothballed any nascent desire to become a serious student of war. At the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst (RMAS), in the (now defunct) compressed seven-month Standard Graduate Course for young officers, the few lessons in military history with extremely well-read civilian tutors were gratefully accepted opportunities for cadets, like myself, to snatch a few minutes of extra sleep to make up for the hours lost each and every night polishing boots and ironing every piece of clothing we possessed.

Arrival at my battalion, then, was like escaping purgatory, but as regards the study of war, it was no better. Infantry work is hard, physically demanding and all about detail, and an officer’s mess tends to reflect this. My own was, I am sure, pretty similar to most others, being filled with the same dedicated professionals who characterise the British Army and make it, rightly, envied and admired across the world. Physical fitness, integrity, knowledge of the job, commitment to your men and the regiment – and playing hard – were what we all strived for, and in that atmosphere a more cerebral reflection on conflict, its past and potential future, was anathema. At only one point did a relatively new commanding officer insist that his junior officers, including myself, write an essay on a military topic selected by him. I swear you could have heard the collective groans miles away – the project was not a success. My own treatise on the other European Union nations moving to a position of ‘paying’ the British Army in terms of providing logistics, supplies, intelligence, etc., as a form of ‘foreign legion’ to intervene in conflicts where they had no wish to place their own nationals in danger, did not play well.

Then, by some miracle, I was selected to attend the Junior Division of the British Army’s prestigious Staff College (JDSC) as the third youngest student on my course. This was a real opportunity for young officers like myself to reassess mankind’s addiction to war and where studying our trade was suddenly paid more than lip service. For the first time since I had joined the army six years earlier, I now became involved in earnest conversations with other officers discussing the endless tours of duty in our undeclared war in Northern Ireland and the lessons we could learn from the Falls Road and Crossmaglen, East Tyrone, the Short Strand, Divis Flats and the Bogside. Added to this was grave dissatisfaction and shame at the impotence of United Nations (UN) forces in Croatia and Bosnia – it was while I was at JDSC that I met some fellow officers who had been left powerless and unsupported in the face of horrendous brutality by all sides involved in those vicious civil wars, the get-out clause for both officialdom and senior command being ‘we have no UN mandate’ to intervene. It is to the eternal credit of my own Commanding Officer at the time of our tour in Croatia and Bosnia (even now I will not name him, just in case) that he gave every single one of us crystal-clear instructions that, UN mandate or not, we should be governed by our consciences and a solid sense of right and wrong. If we thought innocent lives were in danger, we were to act as those same consciences dictated. Our colonel was a good man and a great officer.

However, events on these operations resulted in a distinct sense of discomfort among some senior officers that they now possessed a generation of young commanders who were beginning to look beyond the Cold War and its certainties and wanted to begin to prepare for an altogether different era. I will never forget one senior officer in particular who came to see us at JDSC. After what had clearly been a good lunch, he proceeded to lecture an audience of young captains with the usual balderdash senior officers come out with when they had not bothered to think very much about what they were going to say beforehand. Well, it was a hot summer’s day; we had all been working extremely hard, and tempers were somewhat short. At one point, I seriously thought he was going to start screaming in rage as officer after officer demanded answers to pertinent questions – a solution to Ulster, the primacy of politics over the military and the future of BAOR (The British Army on the Rhine – the UK’s military commitment to NATO in mainland Europe and for decades the largest concentration of British forces). This was followed by questions on the nightmarish operational-tour system. In the end, he insisted that it was not ‘the place of young officers to ask questions or try to understand issues above their pay grade’.

It was at that point that I realised that if I was to become a serious student of history, and the wars that dominate so much of that same history, then it was unlikely to be within the ranks of the British Army. Having said that, one of the few positives to come out the recent, and still unfinished, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is a real awakening among whole classes of young officers of the importance of military history to their own current situations and its relevance to finding a way to win with honour – long may that resurgence continue.

As for me, this is now the sixth military history book I have written and the fifth on the Second World War. Subject-wise, this volume is a significant departure personally, having focused, up until now, almost exclusively on the exploits and battles of Nazi Germany’s ‘second army’, the Waffen-SS, especially the large numbers of non-German nationals who, for a variety of reasons, ended up fighting in its ranks. Having written about the French, Belgian Flemish, Muslim and Scandinavian volunteers, I feel I have covered large tranches of that particular subject – perhaps the largest one left to me would be a volume on the hundreds of thousands of ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe who served in the ranks of the Waffen-SS.

As it is, my work has mainly focused on the fighting in the Soviet Union as that is where, to a large degree, the Waffen-SS fought their war. Writing on that mammoth campaign I have not touched on the Soviet victory at Stalingrad and the Don River offensives in anything more than a cursory manner – the SS were not involved – and it always seemed to me that this monumental battle had been covered and covered again by historians of the utmost skill, among whom Antony Beevor, for me, stands at the pinnacle. As ever, though, with history, certain stories draw you in remorselessly, and for me one such subject was the fate of Germany’s allies – among them the Romanians, Hungarians, Italians, Croats and Slovaks.

Before beginning this journey, I confess I knew little of them, and what I did know was the usual generalisations – that is, they were bit players in a Russo-German war, what forces they did have were throwbacks to a bygone age (all pitchforks and peasants) and when faced with real soldiers firing guns, they invariably took to their heels in an instant. This, according to the legend, was what happened at Stalingrad, and it sealed the fate of the German Sixth Army trapped in the city. The utter dreadfulness of the Axis allies was compounded by Hitler’s megalomania, as he continually refused to listen to the reasoning of his professional military advisers.

Then, following Paulus’ surrender, these allied forces disappeared from view, only to briefly reappear as the victorious Red Army rolled over their borders and imposed Soviet Communism on almost all of them. Needless to say, as I researched more, these myths began to fray and crack, and most ended up being shattered. That is not to say that there aren’t elements of truth in most of the suppositions that surround the war they fought – that, after all, is how legends usually start – but it is also clear that time and cliché have done their work of obfuscation well. I hope that this book, perhaps, goes a little way to shining a light on the tragedy of hundreds of thousands of young men, most flung into a war they neither understood nor really wanted, and in which so many of them found nothing but a cold, dark grave in the rich, black earth of the Soviet Union.

NOTES ON THE TEXT

As with every profession on the planet, that of arms has a language of its own – with acronyms and ways of thinking that are a closed world to everyone else. That, indeed, is partly the intent. Therefore, when trying to write about the armed forces of not one nation but nine there is an absolute need for a common baseline, and as a former officer I have opted to use what I know. I have used British Army military ranks and their spellings throughout for all personnel, including German and other Axis forces. Many readers might be used to reading Hauptmann and understanding it is a Captain in the German Army, but others might not.

On equipment and some (what I would think of as) common military terms, I’ve taken another path. In my view, words like ‘Blitzkrieg’ and ‘Panzer’ are well understood by more or less everyone who might read this book. So I have used them where appropriate. However, I have purposefully steered away from an over-reliance on obscure military terminology and, where possible, tried to ‘translate’ matters into understandable words and phrases; if this offends purists, I ask their indulgence.

One vexing issue is that of unit designation; i.e., when is an army not an army, and is ‘2nd’ correct or should it be ‘Second’? The latter is an issue of description, nothing more, and I have decided on German formations being numbered up to divisional level and then Roman numerals and written for corps and army. Soviet formations are numbered at all levels, and the same applies to the Axis. The former issue, though, is of great importance and one that requires clarity in order to fully understand the battles described in these pages. For example, if a Soviet Army ‘rifle division’ is attacking a Hungarian ‘light infantry division’, it might be thought that they were evenly matched, but that would be wrong. A Soviet rifle division would have an average strength of about 3,000 to 5,000 men – around the same size as a British Army brigade or a German regiment – while the Hungarians would number as many as 12,000 men. For this reason, I have included some detail about the orders of battle for opposing forces, and while this may seem tiresome at times, it is intended to highlight how many were facing how many and with what, so that an informed judgement can be made about their relative performance.

For measurements, I have opted for imperial when describing distances, but weapon calibres are given in British Army–standard metric form (i.e. 76mm).

All of the fighting described in the following pages occurs in what was once the Soviet Union and mostly in what are now the independent sovereign countries of the Ukraine and the Russian Federation. Given that the Cyrillic alphabet is different from the European alphabet, the translation of place names can be anomalous. There can be several to describe the same town, e.g. Nikolaweski, Nikolajewski, Nikolayevka. I have tried to use the name that is in most common usage to aid the reader in following the ebb and flow of campaigns on any present-day maps.

On the subject of the Soviet Union, I am aware that not all members of the Soviet armed forces were Russians; there were well over one hundred different nationalities and ethnic groups that fought with distinction alongside the Russians. But for ease, I have occasionally used the term to cover everyone. The same applies to the campaign. I have referred in the book to the ‘Russian Front’ when the fighting was in the Ukraine, Belarus or the Baltic States; again, I have done this for ease of understanding and to aid the flow of the text. Finally, a note on language: French has accents; German has the umlaut; and Romanian, Hungarian, Bulgarian, Croatian and Russian have their own unique linguistic intonations. I have tried to get these right; if I have failed, I apologise. Also, I have chosen to use popular spellings rather than strictly correct ones where I have deemed it appropriate – so I have spelt the name of the head of the Luftwaffe (German Air Force) as Hermann Goering rather than Hermann Göring but used Führer (Leader) rather than Fuehrer as Adolf Hitler’s common title. One last time, I crave the reader’s indulgence.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I have been very fortunate in being able to build up a network of individuals, many in far-flung places, who are willing to help me in any way they can, be it with research, photographs, translations or, indeed, sound advice and critical commentary. They have been invaluable in bringing this book to fruition and helping this subject be exposed to the cold light of day after so long in the shadows. Hope Hamilton is one such individual. An excellent writer herself, she has been more than generous with her time and expertise, and I recommend to readers her own book on the tragic fate of the Italian Army’s famed Alpini Corps during the Don battles: Sacrifice on the Steppe. Some of her own relatives served and suffered in the Alpini, and the first-hand accounts she relates are vivid and absorbing. I have liberally quoted from the book and extend my gratitude to her. As usual, I also did a lot of background reading, and yet again both Antony Beevor and the incomparable Paul Carell, whose pioneering work from the 1960s, Hitler’s War on Russia, which examined the war with the Soviet Union from a German viewpoint, should be required reading for everyone studying the period.

Eyewitness testimony is still the ‘holy grail’ of this type of work, and the growing power of the Internet is an incredible tool in reaching out and contacting people who otherwise would stay unknown and unappreciated. As usual, Jimmy McLeod has been an enormous help both in this regard and with his ‘little black book’ of contacts, and on many occasions these conversations led to written primary sources – in this context, usually in the form of fading unit diaries, after-action reports and citations. Dry on the page, they speak volumes if you read between the lines.

As ever, several people helped me with proofreading and with the text. They have also made suggestions and amendments and corrected mistakes – my father, Robert, has a particular eye for this allied to a very patient demeanour – to improve the flow of the writing. I thank them all for their assistance. While, I have, of course, made every effort to achieve absolute accuracy, if there are any errors then they are entirely of my own making.

With regard to my immediate family, my wife, Rachel, has been far too busy with work, family and a new kitchen to be involved with another of her husband’s odd ‘projects’, while sport, school and various technical devices have taken over the lives of our children. Nevertheless, I will persevere with them and leave a copy of this book in each of their rooms in the hope that out of sheer desperation and/or boredom they will flick through a few pages and maybe an arrow of interest will strike home!

INTRODUCTION

At 3.15 a.m. on 22 June 1941, Adolf Hitler, the Austrian-born founder and dictator of Nazi Germany, launched the greatest invasion force ever assembled in world history against the only Communist state on the face of the planet in an operation code named Fall Barbarossa (Case Barbarossa). These two giants of state repression – Hitler’s Third Reich and Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union, hitherto bound together for two years by an unlikely Non-Aggression Pact – would now fight to the death in a war that would write a whole new chapter on the bestiality of mankind as well as come to define the future course of world history for well over half a century. Hitler’s war – and this was one man’s war – was also a new type of conflict. Europe and Asia were used to wars of conquest, fought for land, resources, power and prestige, but in the Russo-German struggle these factors were secondary. This war was fought for one reason and one reason only: race. Hitler’s world view, his Weltanschauung (Belief), was clearly expressed by his acolyte Heinrich Himmler, the sociopathic head of the SS, in a pamphlet he wrote entitled Die SS:

… as long as humans have existed on earth, war between humans and sub-humans has become a rule of history. As far back as we can see this Jewish-led battle has become the natural course of life on this planet.

In other words, whereas Karl Marx saw all history as a struggle between different classes, the Nazis saw all history as a war between races – a Rassenkrieg (Race war). The prize for the victor was world domination and all that came with it – power and riches for eternity – while for the losers the abyss of total genetic extinction beckoned. By 1941, Hitler had spent almost a decade convincing the German people that they were the standard bearers of the ‘Aryan race’ and were destined to be the masters of the globe – the Herrenvolk (Chosen People). Most other north-western Europeans were also members of Hitler’s imaginary Aryan people – the Scandinavians, the Dutch, the Flemish, the English (not the Celtic British, though) – while ranged against them were the Slavs and Asiatics (inhabitants of the Soviet Union and Poland). Most dangerous of all were the Jews. In Hitler’s fevered imaginings, it was the Jews who were the spiders at the centre of a worldwide web that, through deceit, malevolence and the underhanded manipulation of capitalism and inferior races, was intent on the corruption of Aryan bloodlines and the eventual destruction of the race. The only way this racial extinction could be avoided was to take action and wipe out the enemy – not just defeat him but annihilate him; physically expunge his seed from the face of the earth. Hitler may well have sent his forces into the Soviet Caucasus to capture the oilfields of Baku and Grozny, but oil was not a goal in itself; rather, it was a means to an end, and that end was supremacy for one people – the Aryans – and the utter eradication of everyone else, the so-called inferior races. This meant that the driving force behind Nazism as a creed was not just thuggery but also violence at a genocidal level. Over time, this doctrine came to dominate the Nazi regime through what can be described only as an ‘addiction to murder’ as a direct tool of the state. No better example of this can be seen than in the Generalplan Ost (General plan East). This document, drawn up by Heinrich Himmler on the direct orders of Hitler himself, laid out a clear blueprint for the Soviet Union after its envisaged defeat by the German armed forces. In stark, bureaucratic terminology, it stated that 75 per cent of Belarusians and 64 per cent of Ukrainians were to be starved, worked to death or forcibly expelled from their lands to make way for waves of Aryan German settlers. For the Poles, the figure was even higher, at 80 per cent. At a weekend party just before Operation Barbarossa, Himmler went so far as to publicly tell some fellow guests:

The purpose of any future Russian campaign will be to decimate the Slavic population by thirty millions.

This was a monstrosity of such immense proportions that, even at the time, it could not be comprehended by most people as anything other than rabid talk and hyperbole. But over time, and so often repeated, it became a mantra and created an ideological basis for the Russo-German conflict. This enabled Hitler and his henchmen to convince the German people into uniting behind his megalomaniac vision so that the forces positioned on the Soviet Union’s borders on the eve of Operation Barbarossa were in no doubt as to the rightness of their cause and the justice of their mission. That the mission would lead to racial slaughter was not even a point of discussion. The basic, and rather frightening, fact that Hitler was committing a nation of 80 million people to a do-or-die struggle with a country of almost infinite space and resources peopled by some 190 million and with the largest armed forces in the world, could therefore be conveniently forgotten. Without doubt, this system of belief, coupled with the immense internal power of a totalitarian state, helped sustain the German people when Hitler’s promised victory of 1941 did not materialise and the casualty lists from the fighting during that first horrendous winter began to grow.

However, this utter fanaticism regarding the politics of race may have been good news in propaganda terms at home – every nation wants to be told it’s special and one-of-a-kind – but was clearly going to be a massive handicap in any Nazi attempt to build a major global alliance of friendly states with which to win the war. It was going to be incredibly difficult to shake hands with a nation that you also trumpeted as being ‘racially inferior’ and of lower standing. Occasionally, this paradox would be circumvented with utter farce, such as the intellectual ‘licence’ that allowed the Nazis to claim the Japanese and Nepalese were in reality Aryans and that the Muslim Albanians were descended from Dark Age Ostrogoth cavalrymen. But this skill in alliance-building was something the Allies, brilliantly led by British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, succeeded at superbly. Churchill, a fervent anti-communist, was even prepared to ally himself with Stalin, a dilemma on which he famously commented:

If Hitler invaded hell I would make at least a favourable reference to the devil in the House of Commons.

However, it would not be true to say that the Germans were alone as they stormed the western frontiers of the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941. Alongside the Wehrmacht as it streamed eastwards were troops from no fewer than six allied nations, plus contingents from six other non-belligerent nations. In this latter category, Heinrich Himmler’s armed SS – the Waffen-SS – managed to recruit a few thousand men from across occupied Scandinavia and the Low Countries, and Franco’s fascist Spain sent a full division of volunteers, nicknamed the Blau Division (Blue Division) on account of the colour of the shirts they initially wore.

But it was Germany’s allied nations, the ‘Axis’ powers, that made by far the greatest contributions, although from the start those contributions were unequal. Finland, for example, joined only as an attempt to recover the territories it had lost to the Soviets in the Winter War of 1939–40. The Finns advanced to their old borders and then dug in and waited, refusing to invade the Soviet Union just in case events did not turn out as they hoped.

As for the Bulgarians, they weren’t enthusiastic about attacking their traditional Russian allies either and didn’t even officially declare war on the Soviets. The Bulgarian Army subsequently marched south and not east as it captured disputed lands from the defeated Greeks and fought a fierce anti-guerrilla war across Thrace and Macedonia. As far as Bulgaria was concerned, the country’s national interests were best served by territorial expansion at the expense of its neighbours and not by arousing the wrath of its powerful Slavic cousin.

It would be in the south, though, where the vast majority of Germany’s Axis allies would make their mark. During the vast campaigns in the Ukraine and southern Russia, the armies of Romania, Hungary, Italy, Slovakia and Croatia would fight against an enemy with a long memory and a developed taste for revenge. Soldiers from these latter states, often hating one another far more than the Russians they faced in battle, initially made up less than 10 per cent of the entire invasion force. They were usually given nothing more than secondary tasks by German commanders, the major exceptions to that rule being the immensely costly victories by Romanian forces at Odessa and Sevastopol. However, the failure of Operation Barbarossa at the very gates of Moscow, and the subsequent massive Soviet winter counter-offensives, changed all that. The Ostheer (German Army East) did manage to stand firm in the blizzards and ice and fight the Red Army, but the losses were breathtaking, with over 1 million men killed, wounded or missing. In essence, the original Wehrmacht, the conquerors of Denmark and Norway, France, the Low Countries and the Balkans, died in Russia in 1941.

The beginning of 1942 brought Hitler another chance to finish the assault in the East, but all the reports from the military planners of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (Supreme High Command - OKW) made uncomfortable reading for the Führer. The best brains the German staff had all agreed: Nazi Germany was physically unable to repeat the scale of the original three-pronged offensive of 1941 and would even struggle to adequately assemble a single major assault force. Searching for a solution, Hitler’s answer was to belatedly turn to his allies and demand they commit totally to the war in the Soviet Union. The result was a major influx of troops from Romania, Italy and Hungary, as all together the ‘Axis big three’ committed 750,000 men to that summer’s drive to conquer the oil-rich Soviet Caucasus. The offensive, code named Fall Blau (Case Blue), failed, and another Russian winter would find the ill-equipped Axis allied armies stretched thin and shivering on the banks of the River Don to the north and south of Stalingrad, where the German Sixth Army was being ground into meat.

Then, under the direction of General Zhukov, the defender of Moscow, the Red Army prepared for its winter counter-offensives, its target nothing less than the complete annihilation of the allied armies and all of Germany’s forces in southern Russia. With under-strength units holding impossibly long sections of front, short of heavy weapons, ammunition and all manner of modern military kit, the only hope of salvation for the Romanians, Hungarians and Italians if the Soviets did attack was the existence of powerful mobile reserves. Two corps – the XXXXVIII Panzer Corps and Corps Kramer – fulfilled this role, and in the vanguard were the elite of the Romanian and Hungarian armies, the 1st Romanian Panzer Division and the 1st Hungarian Armoured Field Division. On the shoulders of these men lay the burden of victory or defeat. They would fail. When the blows came, first against the Romanians in Operation Uranus and then against the Italians and Hungarians, the front line was shattered and the armoured pride of the Axis allies rode to its death and destruction. The defeat of the Romanian and Magyar tankers, and their German allies, sealed the fate of all four Axis allied armies on the Don. With no reserves left and Soviet troops pouring through to the rear, the Romanians, Hungarians and Italians disintegrated as the survivors retreated pell-mell to the west. In a little over ten weeks, the military might of Nazi Germany’s allies was put to the sword as all of them suffered the worst ever defeats in their nation’s histories.

The loss of hundreds of thousands of men and vast amounts of scarce equipment sent shock waves through the Axis. The Italians, Croatians and Hungarians effectively abandoned the Eastern Front, and the Romanian and Slovak contribution was greatly reduced. Only in late 1944, as the by now all-conquering Red Army approached their homelands, did they rouse themselves to one final military effort. It would not be enough. With defeat staring them in the face, they deserted Nazi Germany and switched sides; Italy had already done so a full year earlier. In the last months of the war, Romanians, Slovaks, Bulgarians and even Finns found themselves fighting their old comrades-in-arms, but even this last-ditch conversion did not save them, as Stalin had absolutely no intention of letting off the hook his all-too-recent enemies. Peace brought occupation, retribution and the advancement of Soviet Communism as monarchies and governments fell one by one to be replaced by pliant dictatorships, all controlled from the Kremlin – the spider in the communist web. Only Finland and Italy escaped the shadow of the Iron Curtain, more than anything else protected by their geography from the terrible fate of the rest.

So why did the likes of Romania and Hungary – mortal enemies far happier being at each other’s throats than anyone else’s and the former a strong ally of France – end up on the Axis hook? It was that same issue of geography that had dictated so much of their history. Caught as they were between the two giants of the totalitarian world, more or less every country in Europe had to choose sides as general war engulfed the continent. Politics, history and personality all played their parts in who chose whom, and it was Hitler who played the canniest hand, first dangling safety from possible Nazi aggression and then a share in the spoils of future victory to a clutch of nations still effectively reeling from the aftermath and perceived injustices of the First World War. Every one of those countries then took their own paths as they lined up with the Ostheer – or not, in the case of the Bulgars.

For Mussolini’s Fascist Italy, it was little more than a distraction of resources from their main war effort in the North Africa theatre, while for Romania, Hungary and Slovakia, the Eastern Front was the focus of all their military activity. The Nazis’ failure to defeat the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa was, therefore, as much a disaster for the Axis allies as it was for Germany. Drawn into a war of attrition across the vastness of the Russian landscape, the glaring weaknesses of the Axis armed forces were fully exposed as they were cajoled into pouring ever more military resources into the field for the huge gamble that was the Wehrmacht’s summer offensive of 1942. The reality, though, was that Hitler had chosen his friends poorly. The creaking monarchies and authoritarian states that made up the Axis in Europe were never militarily or economically powerful enough to tip the balance on the Eastern Front in the Wehrmacht’s favour, and the cataclysm on the Don in the winter of 1942/43 – alongside the loss of their own Sixth Army – condemned the Germans to eventual defeat in the war.

Often overshadowed by that latter horror of Stalingrad, the disaster on the Don that befell the hundreds of thousands of frozen Romanian, Hungarian, Italian and Croatian conscripts and volunteers was every bit as dramatic and bloody as the battle for that stricken city on the Volga River and just as full of consequences for Europe for the next sixty years and more.

This, then, is the story of that momentous campaign and the men who fought it.

CHAPTER 1

THE POLITICS OF THE AXIS

The aftermath of the First World War – winners and losers

As with so much to do with the Second World War, the genesis of Hitler’s ‘unlikely alliance’ on the Don in 1942 lay in the maelstrom of the First World War. Caught up on both sides of that horrendous conflict, the countries that would later become the Axis all suffered terribly, and each in its own way ended up a loser. For the Kingdom of Hungary, 1914 saw it as a co-partner in that gravity-defying relic of the Middle Ages, the Austro-Hungarian Habsburg Empire. Falling by accident into a war it was totally unprepared for, Hungary firstly lost hundreds of thousands of men on the battlefields of the East and was then utterly humiliated by the victors’ justice of the Treaty of Trianon, Hungary’s equivalent of the badly mishandled Treaty of Versailles that dealt with Imperial Germany.1

Signed on 4 June 1920, the Trianon Treaty was as much a recipe for future conflict as Versailles and St Germain had been. The warlike Magyars were stripped of their martial tradition as their army was capped at a miniscule 35,000 men; no aircraft, tanks or heavy artillery were allowed; and their new Regent, Miklos Horthy, became an admiral without a fleet as Hungary’s access to the Adriatic Sea disappeared. This ‘new army’, the Honved (Home Army), now defended a nation shorn of an astonishing two-thirds of its former people and the lands on which they lived. Under the Habsburgs, different ethnicities moved, merged and intermingled across the rolling plains of the Danube basin and the adjoining territories, so it was impossible for the cartographers of Trianon to separate the now-independent nationalities cleanly. The result was the worst of all outcomes. Ancient lands, long considered parts of historical Hungary, were parcelled out to her neighbours: 21,000 square miles of Transylvania went to the Kingdom of Romania, along with 1.7 million ethnic Magyars, and 600,000 others went with the province of Ruthenia to the newly created state of Czechoslovakia. In all, Trianon resulted in more than 2.5 million Magyars living outside their homeland’s new, truncated borders. The inevitable result was a population and a government simmering with resentment and determined to take back what they had lost no matter the cost. Their chance would come with the rise of Nazi Germany and its willingness to act as a power broker in the region, but Berlin’s help would come with a price.

In 1914, surrounded as she was by the Habsburgs and their allies the Bulgars, the Romanians played safe and stayed neutral. However, Romania was eventually persuaded to join the Allies by the seeming success of Tsarist Russia’s Brusilov Offensives against the Austro-Hungarians in 1916 and presumptively declared war on the Central Powers of Germany and Austro-Hungary on 27 August 1916. Romania mobilised 750,000 men and sent the twenty-three divisions of her army into Hungarian Transylvania, expecting a quick and easy victory against a chastened enemy. Badly equipped and poorly led, they soon faced the might of no fewer than four German, Austrian and Bulgarian armies and were utterly routed. In just over four months, Bucharest had fallen, along with most of the rest of the country, as the remnants of the army fell back into Russia to escape annihilation. Saved by Germany’s defeat and the Armistice, Romania counted the cost of victory – some 336,000 men killed and 120,000 wounded. As an ally of the victorious Allied powers, that blood price paid for the birth of Romania Mare (Greater Romania) as the country almost doubled in size overnight with Hungary’s losses becoming Romania’s gains. Vast new territories were added to Romania’s Moldavian and Wallachian heartlands; Transylvania and its 5.5 million people (60 per cent of whom were in fact ethnic Romanians) came over, plus the former Imperial Russian provinces of Bessarabia and Bukovina (again mostly populated by Romanians) and, lastly, the ex-Bulgarian Dobruja region. Romania, now with a population 18 million strong, had become the regional power in the Balkans as it dwarfed its neighbours in Hungary and Bulgaria. As heady as this outcome was for Bucharest, it did not bring peace and prosperity, but instead fostered deep-seated hatreds with those same states that would plague Romania for the next twenty years or more and contributed in no small way to the disaster its armed forces suffered on the Don in 1942/43.

The United Kingdom of Italy, not even a half century old at the outbreak of the First World War, was initially a member of the Central Powers alliance alongside Germany and Austria-Hungary but very wisely decided to stay out of the conflict in 1914 as it snowballed out from the Balkans and engulfed most of Europe and Russia. Unfortunately for Italy, this outburst of political sanity did not last long, and in May 1915 Italy was persuaded by the Allies to abandon her neutrality and attack Austria-Hungary in return for the promise of future territorial gain once the war was won. The specific carrot that was dangled in front of Rome’s nose was a juicy swathe of Austrian imperial provinces on Italy’s northern border, starting with Trentino and Fiume and sweeping down Dalmatia on the eastern side of the Adriatic. In the same spirit of flag-waving nationalism that had burst forth across Great Britain, France, Germany and the other combatants the previous year, the recruiting offices in Italy were swamped as the country called up its youth to the colours. In all, some 5.6 million men would be mobilised - as it turned out, more than one million more than it managed to sign up in the Second World War. With disturbing echoes of what would happen some twenty-five years later, poorly trained, ill-equipped and often badly led Italian soldiers advanced bravely towards their enemy and were cut to pieces. In what would go down in Italian folklore as Il Guerra Bianca (The White War) – given that it was often fought in the snow among white limestone crags – a staggering 689,000 Italian soldiers were killed and 1 million more wounded at Caporetto and in other disastrous battles against the Austro-Hungarians. Winners though they were officially, the war left the nation traumatised and suffering a distinct sense of injustice as the victory of 1918 did not deliver all that was promised. The Trentino was indeed handed over, along with some other minor adjoining territories, but crucially, the major city and port of Fiume and the Dalmation coast were not. Instead, they went to the brand-new Kingdom of the South Slavs: Yugoslavia.

For Nazi Germany’s other Axis allies of the early 1940s, the First World War was a mixed blessing. Bulgaria ended up on the wrong side and lost its province of Dobruja to Greater Romania and its Aegean coastline to Greece, leaving it landlocked and staring at Bucharest and Athens with ill-disguised loathing. Monarchist Spain stayed neutral throughout, and Finland (an Imperial Russian province beforehand) managed to break away from the disintegration of the Tsars and gain its independence after a nasty little war with newly born Communist Russia. The Slovaks, ever restless under Habsburg rule, managed to escape that yoke only to become second-class citizens in a new union with their Czech neighbours; Prague and Bratislava were not natural bedfellows. The Croats, too, although one of the Kaisertreu (most loyal) peoples in the Austrian Empire, gained their freedom from the Habsburgs only to mirror the Slovaks in being compulsorily tied into a new country – the Serb-dominated Yugoslavia in their case – where they were very much the junior partner and made to feel it.

Politics in the inter-war years

The response of the Croats, and to a lesser degree the Slovaks, to their new status was a surge in nationalist sentiment that bordered on ethnic bigotry and political extremism. The ethnic Croat and Bosnian-born lawyer Anté Pavelic founded the ultra-nationalist Ustase – the Croatian Revolutionary Movement – as a radical terrorist organisation committed to winning Croatian freedom through a campaign of bombings and assassinations, the most infamous of which was the murder of the Yugoslav king, the Serbian Alexander I, in Marseilles in 1934. The Serb-led Yugoslav reaction to Pavelic’s terror tactics was one of often harsh oppression that fed a growing polarisation of opinion within the country throughout the late 1930s.

For the Slovaks, it was the often-heard put down ‘the Czechs have culture whilst the Slovaks have agriculture’ that fed a simmering resentment about Czech domination of the infant state and its institutions, including the professional and much-admired Czech Army. This tension led to calls for autonomy and self-government as the 1930s went on but did not give rise to the same sort of communal violence as was the case in Yugoslavia. Even after the Munich Conference gave the green light for Germany to effectively dissolve the Czech state, there was little in the way of mass agitation for independence. Never one to take no for an answer, Hitler ended up summoning the leaders of the nationalist Slovak Peoples Party to Berlin in March 1939 and told them that if they did not break away immediately and declare independence, he would allow the Hungarians to invade them. The Slovaks declared the followed day.

The inter-war years in the far north were overwhelmingly a time of peace, as the Finns got used to their newly won statehood and began to feel their way as a multi-party democracy. As a visible sign of their success at these endeavours, they even got to host the Olympic Games in 1940.

The same could not be said for Catholic Spain, which was engulfed from 1936 to 1939 by an incredibly vicious civil war between the age-old forces of right and left that tore the country asunder, killing hundreds of thousands in battle and retribution.

The kingdom of the Bulgars did not suffer Spain’s horrendous fate, but the battle between the forces of tradition and those of social change that gripped most of Europe in the 1920s and 1930s also had its impact on clannish Bulgaria. The wartime Tsar Ferdinand’s abdication (like their Russian counterparts, the Bulgars called their monarch a Tsar) ushered in the rule of his son, Boris III, and the beginnings of true democratic government. However, that path was far from smooth as attempted assassinations and coups became the norm, with even the Prime Minister, Aleksandur Stamboliyski, getting himself killed in June 1923.2 Boris eventually stepped in and made himself dictator in April 1935, an act that ushered in a period of relative stability, albeit under authoritarian rule with no room for any opposition.

As for royalist Italy, its political system struggled in vain to respond to the bitter mood of the nation and satisfy popular grievances. A flurry of shaky coalitions came and went until, in 1922, through a combination of bluff and bluster that was very much his trademark, the populist ex-socialist agitator Benito Mussolini was offered power in Rome and a new political creed came to the world’s attention – Fascism. Through the careful use of propaganda, political repression and actual reforms, Mussolini became the ‘model dictator’ of Europe, and even Hitler would look to emulate him until he realised, too late as it happened, that it was all a mirage created by a master of illusion. The signs were there though for all who had eyes to see. Committed to provide the Italian people with an outlet for their frustrated sense of national glory, Mussolini adopted a bombastic foreign policy that would all too often end in fumbling military intervention and subsequent humiliation. The result was a growing switch around in the previous ‘big brother, little brother’ relationship with the German leader, with Italy increasingly nothing but the tail of the German dog.

Expanding recklessly on the canine analogy, the two big dogs of the Balkan world in the inter-war years were Romania and Hungary – deadly enemies forever staring at each other over the much-disputed Transylvanian border, the former’s large ethnic Magyar population acting as a latent ‘fifth column’ that caused Bucharest no end of sleepless nights. Romania needed friends, and given her past she naturally turned to her greatest ally from the First World War – France – and another state that had done well from Trianon – Czechoslovakia. Arms deals, often the progenitors of national alliances, were signed, and French and Czech aircraft and weapons became the mainstay of the Romanian armed forces. Diplomatic co-operation was close, but the rise of Nazi Germany drove a wedge between them as Paris, Prague and Bucharest struggled to formulate a response to the looming European superpower to the north. To a political intriguer and conspirator like Hitler, this complex web of enmity, deceit and fear was a home from home he sought to turn to his advantage.

1939–40 Alliances and war in the West

Hitler’s attitude to alliances and international diplomacy changed dramatically over time. Never a man with a natural affinity for personal friends or political partners, at first for him it was about dictatorships with a common ideology sticking together as much for protection as anything else, hence his devotion to Fascist Italy. This view led to the establishment of the ‘Pact of Steel’ in May 1939 between Rome and Berlin, setting out joint co-operation on economic and military matters amongst other things, and then to the most eye-catching diplomatic coup of the inter-war era – the signing of the ‘Molotov-Ribbentrop Non-Aggression Pact’ on 23 August 1939 guaranteeing peace and friendship between Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany. Named after the two foreign ministers who negotiated it – Vyachelsav Molotov and Joachim von Ribbentrop – the Pact stunned the world, as these two avowed ideological enemies metaphorically smiled and hugged each other. What the world did not know was that the Pact contained a set of ultra-secret clauses that effectively divided up Eastern Europe and the Balkans between them into respective spheres of influence where each would have a free hand to do as they wished.

A week later, the clandestine protocol reared its head for the first time when Nazi Germany invaded Poland and ignited the Second World War. Not only did Moscow not utter a peep in protest: just a fortnight later, the Red Army rolled across Poland’s eastern border, condemning Warsaw to defeat and partition. This was the first concrete manifestation of those secret clauses. Three months on, at midnight on 29 November, Berlin reciprocated by twiddling its thumbs, after the following statement from General Kirill Afanasievich Meretskov of the Red Army was read out to the 250,000 men he commanded:

Comrades, soldiers of the Red Army, officers, commissars and political workers! To fulfil the Soviet Government’s, and our great Fatherland’s will, I hereby order that the troops in Leningrad Military District are to march over the frontier, crush the Finnish forces, and once and for all secure the Soviet Union’s north-western borders and Lenin’s city, the crib of the revolution of the proletariat.

Finland, a nation of just 4 million people, was being invaded by the armed might of the Soviet Union. The rest of Scandinavia, and indeed the world, looked on horrified and transfixed as a supremely confident Red Army swept forward against an enemy it outnumbered many times over and who were equipped with little more than a handful of First World War anti-tank guns and obsolete aircraft. They expected an easy victory over the Nordic minnows. However, the courageous Finns stood their ground and inflicted devastating reverses on the ill-prepared Soviets – nowhere more so than the utter annihilation of the Red Army’s 44th Division in the snow at Suomussalmi in late December. By the time hostilities ended on 13 March 1940, the Red Army had been forced to commit more than a million troops to the fighting and Stalin had been personally humiliated. Not that this stopped him from annexing Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia in June that year to fulfil another secret clause in the Pact.

The fall of France and the partition of Romania

When France fell on 22 June 1940, Romania was stripped of her only major ally and totally at the mercy of the vultures surrounding her. Moscow struck first, annexing Bessarabia, northern Bukovina and Hertza, the Red Army marching through Cernauti past sullen crowds of ethnic Romanians. Hungary and Bulgaria were the next beneficiaries, Ribbentrop and his Italian counterpart, Count Galeazzo Ciano, forcing Bucharest to accept the so-called ‘Second Vienna Award’ that gave 16,790 square miles of northern Transylvania to Budapest, and all of southern Dobruja to Sofia. Altogether, Romania lost 33 per cent of its land mass and population.

1940 – The Axis is born

Despite all of this, and the advantages the Pact brought Germany, Hitler was already set on the future destruction of the Soviet Union. His only real questions were ‘when’ and ‘how’. These questions were partly addressed on 18 December 1940, when a top secret order – Directive No.21 – was sent out from Hitler’s headquarters in Berlin to the most senior officers in the Wehrmacht3 and was named after a twelfth-century, German-born, Holy Roman Emperor – Frederick Barbarossa. In the space of a single page, it laid out possibly the most audacious and risky military adventure ever planned – the invasion and destruction of the largest country on the planet, the Soviet Union:

The German Armed Forces must be prepared to crush Soviet Russia in a quick campaign (Operation Barbarossa) even before the conclusion of the war against England.

It also included in section two the role envisaged for any German allies:

II. Probable Allies and their Tasks:

On the flanks of our operation we can count on the active participation of Romania and Finland in the war against Soviet Russia.

The High Command will, in due time, concert and determine what form the armed forces of the two countries will be placed under German command at the time of their intervention.

2. It will be the task of Romania, together with the forces concentrating there, to pin down the enemy facing her and, in addition, to render auxiliary services in the rear area.

3. Finland will cover the concentration of the redeployed German North Group (parts of the XXI Group) coming from Norway and will operate jointly with it. Besides, Finland will be assigned the task of eliminating Hangö.

This document, for the first time, acknowledged the need and desire for allies to assist Germany in its war plans, and the framework to deliver that assistance was the ‘Tripartite Pact’ and the ‘Axis’ – so-called because the alliances were often described in geographically directional terms. Despite this, Hitler had no real interest in bringing together a Napoleon-type multi-national army with which to destroy the Soviet Union, or of sharing out what he foresaw as the spoils of such a victory. This was incredibly short-sighted, especially given Japan’s potential ability to attack the Soviet Far East and force Moscow into a war on two fronts. His main interests lay in little more than securing his flanks, especially in the south, and increasingly in safeguarding the economic raw materials needed to wage that self-same war, e.g. Swedish iron ore, Yugoslav bauxite and, above all, Romanian oil.

That oil was now in the safe-keeping of the Romanian Prime Minister, General Ion Antonescu. Antonescu, a short, dapper man, with a forceful character and strongly held views, at first governed with the support of the fascist ‘Iron Guard’ movement, or ‘The Legion of the Archangel Michael’ to give it its proper title, and on behalf of the young King Michael. However, the Iron Guard proved to be more of a problem than a solution for the headstrong general. The feeling was mutual, and in late January 1941 the Legion launched a coup to try to seize total power by force. With the support of the army, and the tacit accord of Hitler, Antonescu crushed the Iron Guard, arresting hundreds of them and killing any who resisted. The leaders fled to Germany where Hitler kept them in reserve in case Antonescu betrayed him. For the moment the Nazi dictator had chosen the general – or the Conducator (Leader) as he now styled himself – over the fascists.

Founded on the Pact of Steel, the Axis expanded at breakneck pace, being signed by Imperial Japan on 27 September 1940, Hungary on 20 November then Romania three days later, and Slovakia four days after that. Bulgaria followed suit, and Yugoslavia eventually joined in March 1941, only for the act to trigger a popular anti-German revolt that saw the Wehrmacht invade and conquer the country in a lightning two-week invasion. Carved up between the victors, the newly independent state of Croatia – now in the genocidal grasp of Pavelic and his Ustase – showed its gratitude by signing up in June.

The Axis was now a political fact, erected from nothing in less than a year. Berlin now sought to extract military and economic advantages from it.

__________

1   And the specifically Hungarian successor to the 1919 Treaty of St Germain, which initially broke up the Empire and created an independent Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland and Yugoslavia.

2   He was brutally tortured, one of his hands was cut off and he was decapitated, with his head sent to Sofia in a biscuit box as proof of his death.

3   The name given to the German armed forces, made up of the Heer, army; Kreigsmarine, navy; and the Luftwaffe, air force.

CHAPTER 2

WAGING WARECONOMICS AND THE MILITARY

War, and the making of war, has always been reliant on money and the equipment and resources that money buys. The industrialisation of war that really took hold with the 1914–18 conflict saw the increasing role of strategic raw materials and the factories that converted those inputs into the outputs needed for modern conflict, namely tanks, guns, aircraft and the whole paraphernalia of combat.

In this crucial regard, Nazi Germany could hardly have picked more unsuitable allies, while Churchill could not have picked any better.1 Apart from Germany, none of the Axis nations were industrial powerhouses, indeed most were mainly rural and economically pretty backward. The almost total lack of military-industrial capacity in countries such as Italy, Hungary and Romania would directly contribute to the annihilation of their forces in Russia. Those same forces ranged along the Don River in the winter of 1942 relied utterly on a steady flow of supplies, ammunition and weaponry in order to hold the line against an increasingly capable Red Army, and that supply chain, which included necessities such as trucks, tanks, aircraft and artillery, was incredibly poor, as the Axis allies’ home economies were unable to fulfil the needs of their frontline troops.

Italy was a relatively advanced European state, although as befits a football-mad nation the country was ‘a tale of two halves’. In the north, clustered in the Po River valley and adjoining regions, were Italy’s industrial heartlands. Here there was a potentially strong armament manufacturing infrastructure based on the automotive industries, such as Ferrari and Milan’s Alfa Romeo, but as the names suggest these were niche producers, when Italy needed more mass manufacturers such as the giant Fiat works in Turin. But in the south of the country, it was a wholly different story. A soldier in the Sherwood Foresters Regiment, Private Whitmore, who fought in the ‘boot’ of Italy in 1943 with the Allied invasion force, said of the lower half of the country:

Oh, terrible, terrible it was. It was worse than being in the Peak District of Derbyshire. The village people of southern Italy were very crude, no toilets, no nothing. What I can remember, there were houses they lived in, would have had a bed in that corner and a couple of nanny goats sleeping in this corner and a few chickens in that corner, and that would be it. The road would lead up into the hills out of the village, a lane sort of thing, and each side of this lane was absolutely swarming with flies all buzzing round piles of human excreta. I’ve never seen anything like it, there were no toilets anywhere and possibly I think that was why so many of us were sick.

Italy also had very limited access to natural resources that made it heavily dependent on imports, for example in 1940 its annual requirement for crude oil was 8.5 million tonnes, of which only a miniscule 100,000 tonnes was sourced by Italy, and the national reserves were only enough for a single year. In contrast, Germany produced 8 million tonnes and Britain 12 million tonnes in the same year. The figures for coal production were even worse. The vast underground coalfields of the Ruhr valley and German Silesia produced 365 million tonnes for Germany’s ever-hungry furnaces, while the pits of Wales and northern England delivered not much less at 224 million tonnes. For Italy, home production stood at a paltry 4.4 million tonnes. That same coal was vital for the production of the steel which was the base component of most military equipment. Again Italy fell short as it had to import fully half of the 4.8 million tonnes of steel it needed in 1940. This shortfall meant that in the first year of the war Italy was only able to manufacture 250 tanks and just over 2,000 aircraft. In the same year, Britain produced 1,399 tanks and Germany 1,643, while the Nazis also turned out almost 11,000 aircraft and Britain an impressive 15,000. Mussolini would never admit it in public, but privately, as late as 1939 on the very eve of conflict, he was asking Hitler for the immediate delivery of no less than 170,000 tonnes of materiel in a desperate bid to re-equip the Italian armed forces in time for the coming war. Hitler had to decline, unable as he was to satisfy even his own generals’ demands.