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Chapter XI: D-Day, April-August 1943.
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Chapter XI: D-Day, April-August 1943.
By spring 1943, the Allies were pushing Germany and its allies into a corner and, unlike the Axis powers, the Allies actually coordinated their efforts. The Soviet winter offensive of 1942, for example, came within a month of the landings in Rimini. Hitler responded by diverting forces from Italy to the Eastern Front and later weakened garrison forces in France and Yugoslavia to cover his losses in the east.
The Western Allied bombing campaign also intensified and underwent specialization, diminishing the bombings of apartment blocks and the killings of civilians (though they never stopped, instead continuing until the end of the war since people like Bomber Harris defended them as a way to break civilian morale). They targeted chokepoints instead. The British started to target bridges, railway stations, shunting yards, supply depots and began to mine internal waterways during night time raids, heavily relying on De Havilland Mosquitos as tactical bombers. These attacks weren’t too accurate by modern standards, but they nevertheless hurt the German war effort. After the success of Operation Chastise – more commonly known as the British “Dam Busters raid” – the US Air Force chose to emulate it. They carried out daytime “precision” bombings against these dams which delayed their reconstruction by three months and caused electricity blackouts that lasted well into 1944. Beyond that, the USAAF started to bomb Germany’s electrical grid in general and also targeted coal mines, power plants, oil wells, oil refineries, factories producing synthetic oil, storage depots, pipelines and other POL infrastructure resources (POL meaning petroleum, oil and lubricants).
In January 1943 in the Tripoli Conference in Italian Libya, Churchill, Roosevelt, Reynaud, Mussolini and Chiang Kai-shek convened and announced their demand for the Axis powers’ unconditional surrender to convince the paranoid Stalin of their intentions and their commitment to the “Grand Alliance” as Churchill had dubbed the Allied powers (Stalin refused to show up out of anger about the absence of a new front in northern France and because he wouldn’t meet with Chiang Kai-shek since he supported Mao Zedong). It was also the first occasion US President Franklin D. Roosevelt and fascist leader Benito Mussolini met, with Mussolini making an impression by using battleship Littorio as his flagship for the occasion. Mussolini thought Roosevelt was intelligent as well as charming, sometimes to the point of being slick, a bourgeois trait that Il Duce didn’t appreciate. He also detected a faked politeness from the US President, which was caused by the fact that Roosevelt didn’t know what to make of Mussolini. His analysis of Il Duce was summed up by his statement that “the Duce is a man of many faces: intelligent, sometimes charming, other times loud, impetuous and bombastic, and later pensive and brooding.” In February 1943, the four Western leaders met with Stalin in the Damascus Conference in the office of the French High Commissioner there, unsurprising since Syria was a French mandate. The Soviet leader proved to be able to puzzle them all with his sometimes charming, other times aggressive behaviour and his macabre sense of humour. Mussolini and Stalin instantly disliked each other, and not only for ideological reasons, but they nonetheless respected each other as superb politicians and ideologues. It was the first time these five leaders met. The United States, Soviet Russia, Great Britain, Italy and France – collectively known as the “Big Five”, or “Old Alliance” because they had been allies in WW I too – planned their final strategy to defeat Germany. More specifically, under American and Soviet pressure, the Big Five agreed to landings in northern France that were to take place in August 1943. Mussolini and Churchill had consistently advocated Balkan landings, but came out as the losers because Reynaud sided with Roosevelt and Stalin.
In June 1943, the Red Army launched a spring offensive, known as Operation Chichagov in propaganda. It was named after an early nineteenth century Russian general from the Napoleonic Wars and Governor-General of Moldavia and Wallachia in 1812. The name choice was a part of the propaganda campaign to drum up nationalistic rather than class based sentiments, with Stalin believing the former to be more effective. Knowing that the Allies were far removed from Berlin, the Soviets could leisurely allow themselves to let an advance on the German heartland wait and instead pursue traditional Russian Balkan interests. For a country that officially adhered to an internationalist, anti-imperialist ideology, it was being very nationalist and imperialist. It would also be much more brutal than anyone in the British Empire, the French Empire and even the Italian Empire could imagine. These were the same colonial empires that Roosevelt ironically distrusted while falling for the charms of a tyrant that would easily make Mussolini look like a pacifist, the same Italian leader that had crushed Libyan revolts in the 1920s and had used chemical weapons on the Ethiopians. After retaking Bessarabia, the NKVD would summarily execute tens of thousands and deport many more to Siberia to do slave labour in the gulag.
Operation Chichagov, known to Stavka as the Jassy-Kishinev Offensive during its planning stages, involved 1.7 million men, 4.500 tanks, 1.100 assault guns, 30.000 artillery guns and 3.500 aircraft. After the Dnieper-Dniester Offensive Operation, Army Group South had been further reduced from 1 million to 800.000 men; its armour and air forces were easily outnumbered 3:1. When it seemed ever more likely that Romania would be invaded, King Michael attempted a palace coup against the country’s leader, Ion Antonescu. This coup d’état failed and the Romanian King was placed under house arrest, while Antonescu and commander of Army Group South Friessner conducted Romania’s defence. Antonescu summoned all available reserves and greatly relaxed physical requirements that would get conscripts rejected: everyone who could point and shoot would do, and thusly Romania managed to rally an additional 300.000 men. Anticipating the Soviet offensive on Romania, Friessner also got reinforcements diverted from Army Groups North and Centre. In the meantime, the Germans and Romanians had managed to blow up pretty much every bridge across the Dniester. They fought a strong defence in the hills of Bessarabia and held the Red Army back at the river Prut and turned the Focșani Gap into a deadly bottleneck. To everyone’s surprise, the Germans and Romanians not only held but proved themselves superior on a tactical level and by July 1943 the Soviet offensive had petered out, sooner than expected by Stavka.
Despite bad weather, the Red Army renewed its offensive in September and finally subdued the tenacious Germans and Romanians in October. After that they proceeded to overwhelm the defenders, who were forced to withdraw to the northwest of Romania, behind the Carpathian Mountains. Ironically, by stopping King Michael’s coup, Antonescu was actually delaying the inevitable for the Hungarians that he hated so much. Knowing his army couldn’t operate without oil, Hitler ordered an ill-fated counteroffensive to retake Bucharest and the Ploiesti oilfields in December. It produced a long salient that the Germans had to withdraw from due to the inevitable Soviet counterattack, ultimately bringing about only negligible gains. Hitler now had to rely on small scale oil production at the Balaton Lake, some small sources in Austria, Poland, Moravia and Yugoslavia and synthetic oil. Only half of the Wehrmacht’s needs could be met.
Anticipating Stalin’s move to overrun the Balkans as early as the Damascus Conference – using their own intelligence as well as decrypted German Enigma messages – Mussolini and Churchill knew they had to act if they wanted any kind of influence on the Balkans after the war. Churchill practically begged Roosevelt to conduct an amphibious landing in Dalmatia, but Mussolini went a step further by boldly stating he would do it with or without American help. He forced Roosevelt’s hand: Roosevelt couldn’t allow inter-Allied rivalries to become public, never mind letting his British and Italian allies fail and get driven back into the sea ignominiously. The attack started on May 9th 1943, with the Regia Marina providing the bulk of the naval support.
Fully utilizing America’s phenomenal logistical capabilities, the US managed to support simultaneous airborne landings on the Croatian islands of Brac, Hvar, Vis and Solta, which controlled the waters around the Croatian port and shipbuilding centre of Split. The Yugoslav garrisons were small and many ethnically Croatian soldiers, Bosnian, Montenegrin and Slovene soldiers surrendered without putting up a fight. As a result of wartime policies, Yugoslavia’s Serb elites had further strengthened their power. That essentially turned the country into a “Greater Serbia” even more than before, alienating the country’s minorities. Just before the invasion, supply drops to the Croatian Ustashe increased dramatically and the Croats stepped up their partisan war against the Serbs and Germans. They attacked economic and military targets – such as power plants, factories, mines, bridges, communications facilities and command and control installations – all over Croatia and parts of Bosnia. The response by Serbian SS units was brutal, consisting of ethnic cleansing, to which the Ustashe responded with their own bloody massacres of ethnic Serbs, a fact to which the Allies turned a blind eye (Yugoslavia was the only place in the European theatre comparable to the Eastern Front in terms of atrocities). The climax was an attack by 3.000 Croat resistance fighters on an ammunitions and fuel depot right outside Split, to which the local German commander responded by sending in a German SS brigade that was defending the port.
Not an hour later, one Italian assault division and one US infantry division overwhelmed the weakened garrison and seized control of several docks so reinforcements could be brought in. But the Allies weren’t out of the woods yet because enemy forces in the city resisted fiercely, turning a task that should have been completed in a few hours into one that would take almost two days. It was among the worst urban fighting the Western Allies had seen thus far. While the Allies were fighting from the inside to the edge of the city, the edge of the city was under attack from the outside by constant pinprick raids from the Ustashe. The Allies took Dalmatia in about one month, but didn’t progress further. Crucial was that the Luftwaffe could resupply German forces from the air despite Allied interdiction and later also Red Air Force attacks from Romania. Also, the railway network was so limited that most supplies had to get to the front by truck, which wasn’t easy because many roads weren’t solid and turned to mud whenever it rained. It took two divisions dedicated to logistics to support one frontline division. Eighteen divisions had been deployed to Dalmatia within one month, but only six of those were true combat divisions. The Americans would come to see the Dalmatian campaign as a useless sideshow, but despite its small size it was still a thorn in Germany’s side thanks to strong cooperation with the Ustashe.
August 1st 1943 then finally saw the opening of the second front that Stalin so desired. It was preceded by a short but intense phase of low altitude aerial bombing against German coastal defences, destroying German radar installations. The 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions, numbering 13.000 men, landed to the west and southwest of Cherbourg at Octeville and Equeurdreville-Hainneville. The British 6th Airborne Division, numbering 11.000 men, landed east of Cherbourg near Tourlaville. Many of the paratroopers grossly overshot their landing zones due to the prevailing strong winds, but that had the positive effect of confusing the Germans and fragmenting their response. Additionally, the German Panzer reserves couldn’t be released without Hitler’s consent, but the insomniac Führer had been put to sleep by a teaspoon of barbiturates administered to him by his quack of a physician Theo Morell. To slow the enemy ability to launch counterattacks against the to-be-established beachhead, the airborne forces seized control of bridges, road crossings and terrain features, blocking many approaches to the landing area. Others, who were too far away from their objectives, maximized their opportunities, doing everything they could to create as much confusion as possible among the Germans.
The amphibious landings commenced at 7:00 AM on August 1st 1943, D-Day, under cover fire from a huge Allied fleet and with massive air cover, though the air wasn’t uncontested. The Luftwaffe posed a serious challenge and when Hitler unleashed the Panzer reserves the Allied beachhead around Cherbourg came under siege. The Allied position remained tenuous, but a continued Allied naval presence and vigorous aerial campaign allowed it to survive.