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

The contrast between these two underground movements was a sharp one, but to Churchill and Roosevelt these differences were largely ignored in favor of the more immediate question of which was more willing to fight the Axis. The answer to that question, in Churchill’s opinion was Tito. For this reason Churchill at Teheran made the fateful suggestion that the Allied supplies going to Yugoslavia be shifted from Mihajlović to Tito and that Russia should send a military mission to Tito to join the British military mission already there. These suggestions were accepted by the Big Three apparently without any clear idea of what this change in policy meant, but it was a change filled with significance since it meant that the Communists would control Yugoslavia in the postwar period. This outcome was certainly not intended by at least two of the Big Three, but they were willing to overlook obvious facts in their eagerness to defeat Germany. Among these obvious items was the fact that Mihajlović represented the forces of royalism, of Serb centralism, and of social conservatism, while the Partisans represented the forces of republicanism, of South Slav federalism, and of social revolution.

Mihajlović’s reluctance to continue guerrilla attacks on the Axis forces lost him British support but was, from his point of view, the only possible tactic. Every guerrilla attack on the Germans was answered by German reprisals on the Serbs in which thousands were massacred, undefended villages were destroyed, and hundreds of peasants had to flee to the mountains where they were recruited into Partisan bands. Tito, who had no desire to maintain the previous social, economic, or ideological structure of Yugoslavia, had no desire to avoid German reprisals which simultaneously destroyed the old social structure and provided recruits for his Partisan forces. Accordingly, Tito was more willing to fight Germans, and thus won the right to Allied support at Teheran. But Tito’s willingness to fight Germans was only slightly more eager than that of Mihajlović, since the chief aim of each was to keep his forces strong enough to take over Yugoslavia when the Axis was driven out. Moreover, neither group, even with Allied supplies, was sufficiently strong to drive the Axis out of the country or to take over control of any significant parts of the country. The Italian forces in Yugoslavia were defeated by the Anglo-American victory in Italy itself, while the German forces were ultimately expelled by the advance of Soviet and Bulgarian forces from the east in the winter of 1944-1945. Nevertheless, the Teheran decision to shift Allied supplies from the Chetniks to the Partisans was of major significance in forming postwar Europe.

The Allied leaders parted after the Cairo and Teheran conferences in hopeful moods and proceeded to direct their full energies to military matters. Thus, there was no other important meeting until the Second Quebec Conference in September 1944, and no other meeting of the Big Three until Yalta in February 1945. The nine months following Teheran were devoted to military matters of which the chief was Overlord , begun on D-Day, June 6, 1944.

The preparations for Overlord were among the most elaborate in military history. The planning, under British General Frederick E. Morgan, occupied almost a year before Eisenhower came to England to take command in January 1944. The preparatory work involved the accumulation of enormous manpower and supplies in England, extensive intelligence work and retraining of troops, detailed planning on a very large scale, the accumulation of much special equipment, including over 5,000 escort vessels and landing craft, two artificial floating harbors, numerous block ships and caissons for emergency piers, and strenuous exertions to overcome the German Air Force and submarine fleet before the project began.

The Eighth American Air Force had been established in England in August 1942, but had not delivered the full impact of its attack because of constant diversion of men and planes to North Africa and the Mediterranean. At Casablanca in January 1943, the divergent British and American ideas on aerial bombardment were reconciled in what was called the “Combined Bomber Offensive.” The Americans believed that Germany could be crippled to the point of paralysis by precision daylight bombing on strategically chosen plants of German industry; the British, who felt that daylight bombing would be too costly, placed their hopes in nighttime saturation bombing of whole areas, thus destroying civilian morale and exhausting German manpower as well as destroying military facilities. The Combined Bomber Offensive sought “round-the-clock” bombing of Germany by allowing each Ally to concentrate on its special type of attack. Gradually the very heavy casualties suffered by the Americans in daylight raids, along with recognition that “precision bombing” was far too inaccurate to fulfill the goals set for it, plus technical advances such as radar and radio-locating which improved the precision of night bombing brought the Americans to some extent to the British point of view.

The Combined Bomber Offensive shifted its targets several times, and at the beginning of 1944 concentrated on the elimination of German fighting planes. This was achieved by killing off German pilots faster than they could be trained, a goal which was greatly assisted by the fact that fuel supplies in Germany were not sufficient to permit adequate training flights. In spite of Allied bombing on factories, German production of fighter planes rose steadily in 1944 and was at 2,500 a month just before D-Day. But pilot training, from lack of gasoline, had been cut from 260 to 100 hours and even in some cases to 50 hours. As a result, losses of planes from accidents were almost as high as losses from Allied action and, in February 1944, reached the extraordinarily high figure of 1,300 planes, half of the month’s production of new planes. In the meantime, losses of American bombing planes on raids over Germany were approaching 10 percent, and in one case, over the ball-bearing factory at Schweinfurt, reached 25 percent of the planes sent. In the early months of 1944 a series of raids on Berlin was launched with the deliberate purpose of provoking the German fighter forces into combat so that they could be destroyed. This was a complete success. On the last of these raids the Allied bombers were not attacked by German fighters at all, and by June the Allies had won complete aerial supremacy over Germany.

A similar result, somewhat earlier and not so conclusive, was reached in the antisubmarine warfare. In this effort, thanks to radar and combined air and sea attacks, the U-boats were driven completely from the North Atlantic. The turning point occurred in May 1943, when 30 percent of the German submarines which put to sea failed to return. The number of Allied ships torpedoed fell from 141 in March 1943 to 19 in June 1944 and only 3 in August 1944. At the same time the Allied shipbuilding program was growing so rapidly that even in 1943, after losses had been subtracted, it increased by almost 11 million tons.

The Germans were poorly prepared to cope with any Allied landing in the west. Two-thirds of their forces were fighting in Russia and eastern Europe, and the rest had to be spread from the Aegean to the Pyrenees and thence north to Norway and Finland. The drain on German manpower and vital materials was so great that the country grew steadily weaker. Still it fought on, the leaders becoming more and more ruthless and more and more remote from reality until finally they ‘were living in an insane frenzy of hatred, suspicion, and frustration. Lack of manpower, particularly of trained hands, and lack of materials, even of such ordinary commodities as concrete or steel, made it impossible to strengthen the German defenses to the necessary degree. Above all, lack of gasoline made it impossible even to withdraw equipment before the advancing Russians. In the last two months of 1943, the German armies lost almost a thousand tanks and half as many self-propelled guns to Soviet forces. Repairs became as difficult to achieve as new construction. In June 1943 the Germans had 2,569 operational tanks and 463 under repair; in February 1944 the corresponding figures were 1,519 and 1,534.