Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who Turned the Tide in the Second World War (25 page)

O
n February 20, 1943, little more than a month after the Casablanca conference, units of the U.S. Army a few hundred miles away had their first serious encounter with the Wehrmacht. The grinding battles that followed took place in and around a strategic, stony mountainous
route in southern Tunisia known as the Kasserine Pass. If anything could be termed the American army’s baptism by fire in the Mediterranean/European theater of war, it was this. The U.S. Army II Corps had, unfortunately, bumped into the Wehrmacht’s most aggressive panzer general, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, a person who held to the tactical principle that when one was being pushed backward by superior enemy forces, the only sensible response was to retreat a little, regroup, then ruthlessly counterattack, relying on his men’s sheer professionalism and superiority of fighting experience to intimidate and overcome more numerous but (he could assume at this point) half-green troops. Most other German generals would have agreed, and it was their long-standing operational doctrine: fight as hard as possible, fall back if the position becomes untenable or is in danger of being outflanked, reorganize and combine depleted units, and then strike again, just as the foe is taking a rest. Stunningly bold in their aggressive blitzkrieg attacks between 1939 and 1942, the Germans also showed themselves to be the world’s best defensive fighters for the last three years of the war.
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The newly recruited American troops had never before encountered this form of warfare, nor had many of their commanders—and they were facing a mere six-battalion attack. The historian Rick Atkinson’s laconic but brilliant account captures their collapse so well. We do not know whether the cynical lieutenant who muttered “Into the valley of death rode the six hundred” himself survived the subsequent slaughter, but the subaltern had it right and his overconfident superiors had it wrong. The GIs, along with an unfortunate battalion of the Leicester Regiment nearby, paid the price.
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From the enormous number of immediate postbattle analyses and the many later histories, it is clear that
much was wrong in the Anglo-American armies in Tunisia. At the top, chains of command were far too entangled, midlevel generals were absurdly optimistic one day but then lost their nerve and blamed their subordinates the next, and there were extensive failures in communication. At the bottom, there were far too many green troops who sited themselves in the wrong positions, were shocked by the astounding noise of enemy howitzer fire, and, when they observed a sister unit running away, joined in the retreat, abandoning their heavier weapons and staggering through the desert thornbushes and stones. They were badly beaten.

At the end of the week, the Allied troops, though pushed well back, held off Rommel’s assaults. Overall, 30,000 GIs had been committed to the Kasserine fight, and 6,000 of them were lost, a majority of them captured, to spend the rest of the war in camps in Germany. General Lloyd Fredendall’s U.S. Army II Corps lost 183 tanks, 104 half-tracks, more than 200 guns, and 500 jeeps and trucks. The Germans suffered a mere 201 dead.

But this was not the fall of France; nothing like it. Eisenhower moved more units and better commanders in from Algeria, Montgomery’s Eighth Army was coming in from the east, and Rommel’s forces simply ran out of fuel and ammunition. But it had been a shock, and a preview for the Americans of how hard this foe would fight. Fredendall was very soon replaced by the more aggressive and highly ambitious George Patton.

Apart from MacArthur’s calamitous defeat in the Philippines in early 1942, it was probably the most humiliating smack in the face that the American army received in the Second World War. And yet, in some respects, it was unsurprising. Man for man, the German troops were simply much more experienced, and this was true when they fought more battle-hardened British troops, too. Shortly before the fight for the Kasserine Pass, a considerable force of Argyll Highlanders and the West Kent Regiment had moved into a valley at Jefna, also in Tunisia, only to encounter the heavily camouflaged 21st Parachute Engineer Battalion under Major Rudolf Witzig in the hills above. The British contingent, not spotting the formidable enemy positions, was routed by a German contingent one-tenth its size. Witzig had already fought with distinction in France, on Crete, and in Russia, and had led
the famous paratroop drop that captured the supposedly impregnable Belgian fortress of Eban Emael in May 1940, allowing the panzer breakthrough.
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Compared to Stalingrad, fighting in North Africa was easy. No one in the Western armies had forces with battle experiences comparable to Witzig’s.

General Fredendall’s units were simply the fifth—or was it the seventh or tenth?—national army to experience the most uncomfortable military situation of the Second World War: being attacked by Wehrmacht forces who struck hard at first, and if necessary struck hard again in a later counterattack, to shock the enemy, dislocate his communications, weaken his morale, and paralyze his high command. On most occasions, the first, blindingly fast assault was enough. If resistance on the ground began to grow, the German units pulled back—but only to prepare to strike again. This, at least, had been the story from 1939 until the end of 1942.

Even knowing of the Third Reich’s final and total defeat, a historian writing about these events seventy years later can only wonder at what Williamson Murray termed in his book “German military effectiveness.”
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The Wehrmacht blew apart a large, gallant, but highly disorganized Polish army within two weeks, in September 1939. There are reasons to discount the significance of this extremely lopsided fight,
except
that all of the components of this new way of warfare were deployed: the Luftwaffe immediately took control of the air, destroyed Polish air bases and scattered army columns, then proceeded to devastate Warsaw; the fourteen mechanized divisions swept past the badly emplaced Polish infantry, brushed aside the cavalry, and raced toward all the major targets—Lodz, Cracow, Lwow. While masses of Polish soldiers were being steadily herded into encircled positions, one of the armored divisions of Walther von Reichenau’s Tenth Army raced to the outskirts of Warsaw in a week. Soon it was all over.

After spending some time during the so-called Phony War assessing how they could do even better during their next battles, the German
panzers, infantry, and air forces struck westward and northwestward in the spring of 1940. The smaller armies of Denmark, Belgium, and the Netherlands were engulfed, perhaps understandably, but the swift Nazi takeover of Norway—in the Royal Navy’s front yard—was astounding. Even more astounding, in one of the epic battles in the long military history of western Europe the massive French army was crushed and a half-trained British Expeditionary Force bundled out of the continent only a month or so later. Evidently the Wehrmacht’s swift defeat of Poland was no fluke. After all, the French had larger ground forces than Germany (sixty-five active divisions for the French, compared to fifty-two active divisions for the Germans) and more tanks, including some heavier ones.
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The French had been preparing for two decades to counter a German attack in the West, and they would be joined by the British Expeditionary Force and a Belgian army reluctantly sucked into this war. But the French air force was weak and outdated, and so the Luftwaffe dominated the air. The unorthodox German panzer thrust through the Ardennes dislocated the French high command, which simply could not keep up with the pace and boldness of Heinz Guderian’s advances toward the Channel—even his Wehrmacht superiors and Hitler himself were unnerved as they watched this unexpectedly fast victory, fearing the panzers might go too far and get trapped.

By June 1940 France was done for, and Britain stood alone. The whole geopolitical and military shape of the war was transformed. Stalin was amazed and anxious, knowing that his purge-weakened armies were nowhere near ready to fight. The American government was transfixed. Mussolini rushed to join Hitler. The Japanese recalculated their
options. The European war was not even ten months old, and the world had been turned upside down. Little wonder the term “lightning war” seemed so appropriate.

For Britain and its partners, 1941 was no better. Yugoslavia’s political tilt against the Axis that spring had been punished by an enormous, swift invasion that carried on through the southern Balkans to overwhelm Greece and then capture Crete in a bold parachute attack. Was there a particular British regiment that was pushed out of Norway, then pushed out of France, only to be pushed out of Crete in May 1940, a fate magnificently imagined by Evelyn Waugh in his great wartime trilogy?
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If so, that regiment might well have been pulled back to Egypt, where soon it would have encountered the fast-moving and highly dislocating assaults of Rommel’s Afrika Korps. By that time, of course, the much larger Operation Barbarossa had begun, and German panzers were slicing through the Ukraine, leaving millions of Russian soldiers to be rounded up and herded to their fate. Really, the American soldiers crushed in the Battle of the Kasserine Pass had little to apologize for; it was simply their turn to get beaten up.

What follows in the rest of this chapter are two related questions. The first is why the Germans were so good operationally and tactically, and if they were that good, how on earth did one defeat them? The second is more general: did offensive warfare stand a better chance of claiming victory than any defensive strategy whatever? Assuming bold leadership and well-trained troops in the attacking army, would this phenomenon of lightning war almost always succeed—or was it critically affected by other factors such as time, space, and sheer numbers? It makes sense to treat the second, more general question first before looking at the reasons for the Wehrmacht’s performance in the Second World War; by doing so we can arrive at a better understanding of why the land battles in western Europe, Russia, and the Mediterranean unfolded the way they did. The history of warfare is littered with examples of swift and spectacularly successful campaigns—probably nothing in modern times equals the achievements of Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan in the rapid overthrow of enemies and the extensive conquest of lands. No doubt the wide-open spaces across which they chiefly fought explain a great deal; with a decisive leader and mobile shock forces, an army could travel a long way in a week. This may also
explain, conversely, why Europe’s topography of mountain chains, dense forests, extensive swamps, and numerous rivers made complete control by any one power so very difficult.
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Aware of these constraints, the Romans kept to their limits, while the later Holy Roman Empires of Charlemagne and the Hapsburgs were those of a large regional power. The wars of the Middle Ages were chiefly slug-it-out affairs, and the arrival of newer defensive fortification designs after 1500 put the emphasis upon laborious siege warfare.

Even in Europe, there were historic exceptions: dramatic and swift campaigns that threw the enemy off balance, because the attacking army was so well trained and motivated that geographic obstacles seemed to shrivel. The Duke of Marlborough’s dramatic march up the Rhine from the Netherlands to upper Bavaria (the Battle of Blenheim, 1704) is a good example. A half century later, Frederick the Great often stunned his enemies by the speed at which he switched his armies from one front to another, and sometimes divided his forces so that while one half contested the field of battle, the other was making a flank attack obscured by hilly terrain. Napoleon’s capacity for moving armies—very large armies, and at high speed—is legendary, and in 1866 and 1870 Helmuth von Moltke the Elder hit the Austrians and French so fast and decisively that those wars ended very swiftly.
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