Condensed Notes: 1942-1944 Cracks in the Grand Alliance – Stalingrad to Italy
1. The Status Quo of the Eastern Front in 1942
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The Red Army had lost 3 million prisoners and 1 million dead by the spring of 1942. Stalin was certain that the Nazis would strike towards Moscow, where the German advance had been halted in December of 1941 only five miles from the capital, but Hitler had a different objective.
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He wanted the wheat fields, mines and oilfields of Russia’s south. He hoped to re-conquer and add to the great territorial conquests Germany had won in 1917-18 at Brest Litovsk. The southern dividing line between the new German empire and the Slavic “hordes” would be the Volga River.
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“Russia will then be to us”, he told Goebbels, “what India is to the British.” During the month of May the Germans captured 239,000 prisoners and destroyed 1200 Soviet tanks. On July 2nd, 1942 Sevastopol on the Crimean Peninsula fell to the Wehrmacht. The German army then advanced on the Caucasus Mountains.
2. Stalingrad: The Tide Turns
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Hitler planned to strike between the Black and Caspian Seas and reach Baku, the center of the Soviet oil industry. There an Eastern Wall would be built to defend Nazi gains and starve the Soviets of their lost food, energy and mineral capacity. A key target in this campaign was Stalingrad.
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Stalingrad sat along forty miles of the Volga river. It was the largest city in the USSR to bear Stalin’s name. The German attempt to capture the city was preceded by a bombardment that reduced the city to rubble, creating conditions in which an entrenched and desperate enemy could manage a determined resistance.
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From August of 1942 until January 30 of 1943 the Soviet and Nazi armies battled in the rubble. As the fighting intensified the Germans put more and more of their forces into the fray while entrusting the perimeter of their conquered lands to Italian, Hungarian and Romanian forces.
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The Soviets launched a tremendous attack on this weak outer shell in the winter of 1943. The shell collapsed and 110,000 German troops were forced to surrender along with their Field Marshall von Paulus on January 30, 1943. An additional 200,000 German soldiers had died in the effort to win the city.
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The Soviets had lost more than one million men in the battle, but the German army had been dealt a devastating blow. The Soviets now began a slow, grinding offensive, slowly battering the German forces westward towards Berlin.
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The victory was marked by the ringing of the Kremlin’s bells in Moscow. In Germany state radio played somber music for three days.
The victorious Russian commander, Chuikov wrote “Goodbye Volga, goodbye the tortured and devastated city. Will we ever see you again and what will you be like? Goodbye our friends. Lie in peace in the land soaked with the blood of our people. We are going west and our duty is to avenge your deaths.”
3. The Americans – Europe – And the Oceanic Life Line
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On December 11, 1941 Hitler declared war on the U.S - Foreign Minister Ribbentrop warned:
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“We have just one year to cut Russia off from her military supplies arriving via Murmansk and the Persian Gulf; Japan must take care of Vladivostock. If we don’t succeed and the munitions potential of the United States joins up with the manpower potential of the Russians, the war will enter a phase in which we shall only be able to win it with difficulty.”
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The German hope for victory rested in large part on denying the rich industrial output of the American economy free passage across the thousands of miles of ocean separating North America from Europe. Karl Donitz, the mastermind of U-Boat warfare, turned his growing forces against Allied shipping.
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With war declared the U-Boats enjoyed a season of Happy Hunting off the coast of the USA. Between January and March of 1942 German submarines sunk 216 US vessels totaling 1.25 million tons.
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By June the tonnage of sunken vessels had reached 4.7 million tons. Two hundred U-Boats hunted the oceans and fifteen more were added each month. The U-Boats were armed with a minimum of 14 torpedoes and a maximum of twenty two. They refueled at sea from support ships.
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By January of 1943 there were 400 submarines in the ocean and the American ability to ferry desperately needed supplies and soldiers to Europe was failing. Hitler was winning the war.
4. Stalin and Soviet Demands For A Second Front – North Africa Fails to Qualify
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Stalingrad had removed 20 German divisions from the war. The battle had claimed the lives of a further 200,000 German soldiers but 200 Axis divisions were still at war in the Soviet Union. Stalin implored the British and American allies to open a second front in Europe.
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Churchill was not keen on the idea – he suggested an invasion of North Africa in place of a cross-Channel invasion of France. American military leaders were opposed. General Eisenhower wrote the North African plan was ‘strategically unsound” and that it would “have no effect on the 1942 campaign in Russia. We should not forget,” he wrote, “the prize is to keep 8 million Russians in the war.”
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Stalin was livid at the news. He wrote to Churchill “the Soviet government cannot acquiesce in the postponement of a Second Front in Europe until 1943.”
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North Africa was defended by more Italian troops than German. While the Anglo-American invasion proceeded, the Germans added 36 divisions to their attack in the Soviet Union – 6 German divisions were in place in North Africa.
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Churchill and Roosevelt declared, at a conference in Casablanca, that after victory in N.Africa, an invasion of Sicily and then the Italian peninsula would follow. Stalin was, again, furious. He wrote Roosevelt –
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“I consider it my duty to state the early opening of a Second Front in France is the most important thing. I must give a most .emphatic warning… of the grave danger with which further delay in opening a second front is fraught.”
5. The Battle of the Atlantic Is Won – Italy is Invaded
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American shipyards began producing “baby flat-tops” miniature aircraft carriers that held 24 planes on their decks. These planes flew above, along and ahead of convoys searching for U-Boats that were not true submarines. The U-Boats could only remain underwater briefly before, during an after an attack.
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To reach attack stations, to overtake prey, to replenish their air supply they were obligated to steam on the surface and there they were fragile and vulnerable. The planes began to destroy the submarines using aerial reconnaissance, sonar and radar.
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German submarines were destroyed in such numbers that Donitz ordered all but a handful of U-Boats out of the North Atlantic by May, 1943.
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Between June and September of 1943 sixty-two convoys comprised of 3,546 merchant vessels crossed the Atlantic without the loss of a single ship.
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The victory at sea did not lead to an invasion of France. Eight Allied divisions landed in Sicily in July of 1943. Meanwhile the Soviets contended with 185 Axis divisions, four million enemy soldiers along a front stretching 2,000 miles.
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Sicily fell quickly, Allied troops moved to continue their advance up the Italian peninsula, but Hitler had poured 16 divisions into the country. Defending mountains laced with rivers the Germans fought bloody battles over the next 18 months as American and British forces slowly slogged their way north.
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Pulitzer Prize winning historian David Kennedy describes the invasion of Italy as “a needlessly costly sideshow. It inflicted 188,000 American casualties, as well as 123,000 British.” German forces held the peninsula with 20 divisions – none transferred from the Eastern front.
NAME: _______________________________ DATE:________ PER:______
Europe 1942-44 Stalingrad to Battle of the Atlantic & Italian Invasion
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In 1941, the Stalin was able to halt the German strike toward what city?
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What was Hitler’s true objective of the Russian invasion?
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By May of 1942 what was Hitler’s successes? Then July 1942.
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Why would Hitler build an “Eastern Wall”?
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A key target of this invasion, is what Russian city located on the Volga River?
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How long did the battle of Stalingrad last?
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When the Russians persevered in Stalingrad what were the German losses?
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Russian losses?
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What was the Germany’s hope for victory relating to the US?
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What success did Germany have between January and March 1942?
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By January 1943, how many German U-boats were in the North Atlantic?
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Russian wanted a second front opened in Europe. Where did the Allies eventually plan invasions after the Casablanca Conference?
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What was Stalin’s reaction?
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What was the German U-Boat’s vulnerability?
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How did the US take advantage of this vulnerability?
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The Italian Campaign as eventually successful but at what price?
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