War Stories III (10 page)

By 7 December 1941, the day that the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, the German army held a front that ran in a nearly straight line from Leningrad on the Gulf of Finland due south to the Crimea on the Black Sea. At that point, German troops controlled more than 40 percent of Russia's population, a near equal percentage of Soviet agricultural production, and more than half of the USSR's coal and steel capacity.

Yet, once the ground froze, the winter-ready Red Army was able to launch a series of limited counter-offensives. Zhukov pushed Army Group Center back from the gates of Moscow—prompting Hitler to fire von Bock and a host of his generals—including Brauchitsch, his army commander in chief. Also among those relieved was Heinz Guderian—father of Germany's Panzer blitzkrieg tactics.

Hitler appointed himself commander in chief of the army, and as his troops froze in defensive “hedgehogs” along the 1,100-mile front, he began concocting a revised grand strategy for 1942. His goals were mind-boggling. First, to finish off “the Bolshevik menace” for good in 1942—before the
Americans, against whom he had declared war on 11 December—could open a western front in Europe. Second, capture the oilfields, mines, and rich agricultural lands along the Volga River and the ridges of the Caucasus—all the way to Baku on the west shore of the Caspian Sea. And third, in concert with the Italians, seize Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Iraq, and the oilfields of Saudi Arabia.

The first major action after the spring thaw—the destruction of a Red Army counter-offensive at Kharkov—gave Hitler reason for optimism. By 1 June 1942, the Wehrmacht had captured nearly 240,000 Russian troops and destroyed over 1,200 tanks. But regrettably for the Axis soldiers who had to carry out the rest of the scheme, Hitler seriously underestimated the effect American industrial, agricultural, and military mobilization would have on his adversaries. By 28 June, when the ground was finally dry enough to launch his southern offensive—codenamed Blue—massive quantities of food, clothing, ammunition, aircraft, and trucks from America were already reaching Russia.

 

Heinz Guderian

And after the offensive was already well under way and Wehrmacht troops were bounding southeastward at twenty to thirty miles a day, the Führer made another strategic blunder. He decided that seizing a single city—Stalingrad—named for his Soviet nemesis—was more important than any other part of his offensive.

On 23 July Hitler ordered Army Group B—now commanded by General Maximilian von Weichs—to seize Stalingrad and force a crossing of the Volga. The resulting exhaustive campaign, which lasted from 21 August 1942 until 30 January 1943, would pit nearly two million Germans and their Romanian and Italian allies against 3.5 million Russians in the bloodiest battle of World War II.

Maria Faustova served in the Red Army Signal Corps during the merciless engagement. She was one of a handful of survivors in her unit.

Russian losses on the Eastern Front were staggering. But by the time German field marshal Friedrich Paulus surrendered the 91,000 survivors of his 6th Army on 30 January 1942, more than 145,000 of his soldiers lay dead in the rubble of Stalingrad. The Red Army had also destroyed Hitler's 4th Panzer Army, the 3rd and 4th Rumanian Armies, and the 8th Italian Army—inflicting on the Wehrmacht and their Axis allies nearly 1.5 million killed, wounded, prisoners, and missing.

Adolf Hitler's dreams of world conquest died in the rubble of Stalingrad. The German army would never recover from its first major defeat. And Hitler's worst nightmare had come true: America was now in the war.

 

Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus

CHAPTER 4

PLUNGED INTO WAR 1941

E
very American born before 1930 that I have interviewed for
War Stories
remembers exactly where they were and what they were doing when they learned that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. They recall the date—Sunday, 7 December 1941—who they were with, and that on the radio President Roosevelt called it “a day of infamy.” They all also recollect knowing that, whether we wanted to be or not, America was now at war.

Yet, for those already fighting in the great cataclysm of World War II, the day passed like so many before and after. The fact that the United States was now a combatant didn't alter the agony and bloodshed a bit. Few of the combatants already engaged were even aware that the attack on Pearl Harbor had happened—nor could they foresee what it would mean for the outcome of the struggle.

For Wehrmacht and Russian soldiers locked in a frozen death-grip at Leningrad, the date of 7 December 1941 was just another day of pounding each other with artillery and hoping to survive sub-zero temperatures. At the center of the Eastern Front, despite Red Army losses of nearly two million dead and an equal number taken prisoner, Zhukov's 1st Shock Army
was in the second day of a two-week counter-attack through snowdrifts that would keep the Germans from storming the gates of Moscow. In the Crimea, Army Group South were moving their unit into position for another failed assault on Russian defenses at Sevastopol.

 

Even before the U.S. entered the war, FDR and Churchill were preparing a strategy to defeat Hitler when they met off Argentia, Newfoundland, in August 1941.

It was much the same for participants in every other theater of war. In the North Atlantic, a Royal Canadian Navy corvette escorting a convoy from the U.S. to Britain collided with a merchantman in the midst of a German U-boat attack—sending twenty-three sailors to an icy death. In North Africa, Erwin Rommel's 240-day siege of the Australians at Tobruk was in its last horrible hours as Field Marshal Claude Auchinleck's British armored columns smashed into the Afrika Corps in Operation Crusader. And in China, Chiang Kai-shek's battered and poorly equipped army—barely holding the Nationalist Chinese “capital,” Kunming—was under relentless air attack from other Japanese bombers.

But if “Pearl Harbor Day” was unremarkable to the soldiers, sailors, and airmen already fighting, bleeding, and dying in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the North Atlantic—it was anything
but
routine to the leaders of those countries.
Though it would take Congress another full day to declare war on Japan, Canada did so that very afternoon.