Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

While this was going on at Stalingrad from December 1942 through January 1943, another Soviet offensive, striking down from the northeast toward Rostov, was trying to cut off the whole German force in the Caucasus by capturing the city of Rostov and thus closing the bottleneck north of the Sea of Azov. The German withdrawal from the Caucasus began on the first day of 1943. With extraordinary skill the Germans succeeded in keeping the Rostov passage open, although by January 23rd it was no more than 30 miles wide. The German Sixth Army at Stalingrad, although frozen, starved, and hardly able to fight for lack of supplies, was not permitted to surrender because, as soon as it did so, the three Soviet armies which had surrounded it would be freed to drive west and close the Rostov passage. On January 23rd General Friedrich von Paulus, commanding the Sixth Army, accepted Hitler’s radio order to fight to the last man in order to gain time. A week later Hitler promoted him to field marshal, and two days later he surrendered. Of 270,000 Germans originally surrounded, over 100,000 were dead, 34,000 had been evacuated by air, and 93,000 surrendered. Ten days after Paulus’s surrender, the Germans abandoned Rostov. For the next two weeks it looked as if a new Soviet offensive from Voronezh might cut off the whole of German Army Group South, but Field Marshal von Manstein succeeded in reestablishing a stable defensive line by April 1st, just about at the line where the German offensive of 1942 had begun eleven months earlier. But, in that eleven months, Hitler had lost about 38 German divisions, an equal number of satellite divisions, had reduced all German divisions from nine battalions to six, had failed to capture the Caucasus oil fields, Moscow, or Leningrad, and had not been able to cut the Murmansk railway.

Over that railway, and by other routes, a growing flood of American supplies was flowing to the Soviet armies. By October 1942, 85,000 trucks had arrived, with the result that the Soviet Army from that date to the end of the war had greater mobility than the Germans. Luftwaffe forces on the eastern front had 2,000 planes in the campaign of 1941, 1,300 at the opening of the campaign of 1942, and could hardly be kept at 1,000after the end of that campaign. Allied pressure in the west made it necessary to reduce the portion of the German Air Force allotted to the east, with the result that Germany had only 265 operational planes on the Russian front on May 1, 1944. At the same time, American supplies, including planes, flowed into the Soviet Union in an amazing flood. The German U-boats were unable to prevent this flow of goods, although they did sink 77 out of 2,660 vessels loaded with Lend-Lease supplies. Many of these sinkings occurred on the frightful Murmansk route.

In 1941 and 1942 the Allies sent the Soviet Union almost 2,000,000 tons of supplies. This was followed by over 4,500,000 tons in 1943 and a total of over 15,000,000 tons worth $10,000,000,000 before the end of the struggle. Included in the final total were 375,000 trucks, 52,000 jeeps, 7,056 tanks, 6,300 other combat vehicles, 2,328 artillery vehicles, 14,795 aircraft, 8,212 antiaircraft guns, 1,900 steam locomotives, 66 diesel locomotives, 11,075 railway cars, 415,000 telephones, 3,786,000 vehicle tires, 15,000,000 pairs of military boots, 4,478,116 tons of food, and 2,670,371 tons of petroleum products. In contrast with this, the German armored divisions were kept idle for lack of fuel for weeks at a time as early as 1942, and both operational and training flights of the Luftwaffe were drastically curtailed from 1942 onward. The lack of fuel was so acute that Hitler decided, late in 1942, to decommission most of the surface vessels of the German Navy. When Grand Admiral Raeder protested too vigorously, he was removed from his position as head of the navy, and replaced by the U-boat specialist Admiral Karl Doenitz, in January, 1943.

All these events should have made it clear that Germany could not possibly win the war, but for the next two years Hitler and his immediate associates became increasingly fanatical, increasingly merciless, and increasingly remote from reality. Anyone who audibly doubted their insane vision of the world was speedily liquidated.

Closing in on Germany, 1943-1945

The year 1943 represented the turning point in the European struggle as the year 1942 had seen the turning point in the Pacific. In 1943 North Africa was freed from the Nazi grasp in May, Sicily was overrun in July and August, the southern part of Italy was occupied, and the German armies were pushed backward from eastern Europe. As a consequence, the Mediterranean was opened to Allied traffic, and Italy was forced to surrender in September 1943.

These were the obvious events of this critical year 1943, open to public view and hopeful in their implications for the future. But the role of this year as a turning point in the conflict with Germany was much greater than this, for, behind the scenes, the military successes of the year forced decisions on strategic plans and postwar projects whose implications are still being worked out today. And still very much behind the scenes, these strategic and postwar plans revealed deep fissures and rivalries among the three Allied Powers.

Rivalries among the members of a coalition are always to be expected and are usually, and necessarily, kept secret during the war itself. In the Second World War they were most significant in the year 1943. In the years before 1943 these disputes were more concerned with strategic decisions than with postwar planning, while in the later years, when strategy had been set, postwar plans were the chief causes of disputes. The year 1943, however, had its full share of both, since the major strategic decisions were made in that year, and these decisions, in themselves, played a major role in determining the nature of the postwar world.

In the years 1941-1943 the chief strategic questions were concerned with two problems: (1) Should the European war against Germany continue to receive priority over the Pacific war against Japan? and (2) Should Germany be attacked, indirectly, by aerial bombardment, blockade, and guerrilla forces or should Europe be invaded with large infantry forces, either from England directly across the Channel to western Europe or from the Mediterranean through southern Europe? The answers given to these strategic questions, especially the last one, played a major role in establishing the postwar political settlement in Europe.

In the earlier years a certain direction was given to postwar planning by Roosevelt’s proclamation of the Four Freedoms in January 1941, and the Anglo-American publication of the Atlantic Charter in August 1941. When the stunning news of Pearl Harbor reached London on December 7, 1941, Foreign Minister Eden was just leaving for Moscow. It was decided that he should go anyway but that Prime Minister Churchill should go simultaneously to Washington to do all he could to prevent popular, anti-Japanese feeling in the United States from reversing the agreement that the military defeat of Germany must have priority over the defeat of Japan. In Washington, at what was called the Arcadia Conference (December 22, 1941-January 14, 1942), the exuberant prime minister found no desire to change the agreed military priorities, and was able to plan intensified military activity along the lines already established. At the same time Roosevelt presented him with a draft for a public “Declaration of the United Nations.” This document declared that the twenty-six signatory states were fighting “to defend life, liberty, independence, and religious freedom and to preserve human rights and justice in their own lands as well as in other lands, and that they are nowengaged in a common struggle against savage and brutal forces seeking to subjugate the world.” Each signer promised “to employ its full resources and to make no separate armistice or peace” in the struggle for victory over Hitlerism.