The Tide Turns: The Battles of Stalingrad, Alamein and Tunisia (23 August 1942-14 May 1943)

By Strategicus

Originally published in 1944, “[t]he events with which this volume deals form an episode with a certain organic unity and completeness. They include the almost indescribable battle of Stalingrad and the Russian recoil; but they also take in the events in North Africa. They describe, therefore, the ebb and flow of the tide which threatened the liberties of Western civilization; and for the first time they suggest that unity of design which victory postulates in every successful campaign.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: Arcole Publishing
• Release date: Apr 7, 2017
• ISBN: 9781787204461

Strategicus

Herbert Charles O’Neill (1879-1953) was a journalist, working variously on the editorial staff of The Daily Mail, as a columnist on The Spectator and Assistant Editor of The Observer. He was also an author, specialising in writing military books such as The Royal Fusiliers in the Great War (1922), and some ten books about WW2 under the pseudonym “Strategicus”, a name which he used whilst with The Spectator.

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Text originally published in 1944 under the same title.

© Arcole Publishing 2017, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.

Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

THE TIDE TURNS:

THE BATTLES OF STALINGRAD, ALAMEIN AND TUNISIA

(23 AUGUST 1942—14 MAY 1943)

BY

STRATEGICUS

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 3

PREFACE 4

MAPS 7

CHAPTER 1—The Battle of Stalingrad 8

CHAPTER 2—Victory at Alamein 26

CHAPTER 3—The Initiative in the Mediterranean 37

CHAPTER 4—Russia Hits Back 51

CHAPTER 5—The Initiative in the Pacific 63

CHAPTER 6—Towards Tripoli 78

CHAPTER 7—The German Cannae at Stalingrad 82

CHAPTER 8—Montgomery Captures Tripoli 88

CHAPTER 9—Russia Goes Forward 98

CHAPTER 10—The Battle of Mareth 112

CHAPTER 11—Penultimate Tunisia 122

CHAPTER 12—Air and Sea 129

CHAPTER 13—The Shape of Things Past 138

CHAPTER 14—Tunisian Finale 145

DEDICATION 160

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 161

PREFACE

The events with which this volume deals form an episode with a certain organic unity and completeness. They include the almost indescribable battle of Stalingrad and the Russian recoil; but they also take in the events in North Africa. They describe, therefore, the ebb and flow of the tide which threatened the liberties of Western civilization; and for the first time they suggest that unity of design which victory postulates in every successful campaign.

But, demonstrating the turn of the tide, they represented something that might well pass unnoticed, perhaps assumed and taken for granted, but of the very first importance in idea and in fact. With the fall of France the chance of the Allies surviving the challenge to their freedom appeared to sink out of sight. At best it might be a matter of faith; and its rational basis could be no more than an inference. During the crucial year that stretched between the fall of France and the German attack on Russia even inference seemed to betray the Allies. With Britain standing alone against the triumphant Wehrmacht what could be the rational hope of victory?

The question was not quite so rhetorical as it seemed; for until Germany attacked Russia the British blockade could not be ignored. Hitler had been warned before the war of the dangers of challenging the effects of a supreme sea power; and although he had made the fullest preparation possible to supply the sinews of a short war he could hardly provide for one of indefinite length.

With his failure in the Battle of Britain that prospect loomed ahead; and it seemed necessary to seize a sufficiently large and rich territory to enable the Reich to stand against a prolonged war. Hence the attack upon Russia; and, from what we now know of the narrowness of the margin that separated Germany from victory in the east, we can appreciate the extent of Britain’s contribution to victory. For it can hardly be doubted that Hitler would have defeated Russia if he had been able to concentrate the whole power of the Wehrmacht against her.

But with the attack upon Russia the possibility of an Allied victory began to take a more convincing shape; and, when Japan was called upon to assist Hitler by embroiling the United States and so damming the stream of supply to Britain, it could be realized that another blunder had been made. Victory still remained merely a matter of inference; and it is the special quality of the episode with which this volume deals that it added the first touch of factual confirmation. For when the United States and British armies landed in North Africa they seized the initiative for the Allies, and that body of doctrine on the penetrating effects of sea-power was seen to be no longer a matter of pure inference but a complex of generalizations founded upon experience.

Furthermore, this episode brought to the touchstone of fact the heady racial dogmas which Hitler had revived. All his policies founded upon the conviction that the Germans are a superior race, and that racially and politically other nations must fall before them, were seen to be sheer fiction. In that bloody and confused struggle that took place in the ruins of Stalingrad the Russians accepted battle on the terms dictated by the Germans and not only fought them to a standstill but eventually inflicted on them the greatest defeat in their history. This could not be explained away by the suggestion that the Russians were so inferior a race that they were beyond feeling, because the victory of Stalingrad showed beyond a doubt that the Russians were capable of a generalship which was of at least as high an order as that of the great German staff. It could then be realized that the German advance had been skilfully shepherded into a position that provided the opportunity for the successful Russian counterattack.

This aspect of the situation was perhaps less convincing to the general public than the witness of a spirit among the Russians that can correctly be described as invincible. It is not only in the currency that there is a tendency to inflation; it is equally evident in the use of words. But the struggle among the rubble of Stalingrad can justly be described as epic; and nothing can detract from that. It descended to almost animal levels as the Germans attempted to wrest from the Russians the victory they needed. But, at whatever level it took place, the Russians were always superior to the Germans; and, although the material body of Stalingrad seems to have been as near as possible lost, its soul emerged triumphant from the ruins.

That is a demonstration which makes this episode for ever significant, since it demolished once for all the stupid theories of a Herrenvolk. But there was more to come. When the Western Allies landed in North Africa they demonstrated their power to plan an expedition exceeding in complexity and scope anything which Hitler had been able to contrive. Hitler affected to deride the staunchness of the Russians; but it was the skill of the Western Allies he despised. Here at one stroke they gave the world a proof that in perfect secrecy they could for months plan, and in a few days carry out, an operation of unprecedented complexity. When the word ‘armada’ was used to describe this great expedition an unintentional proof was afforded of its unprecedented nature; for the Spanish Armada was in no respect even distantly comparable to this expedition which brought thousands of men across the Atlantic in a sea that was supposed to be controlled by the enemy, and others by air from England.

War, said Jomini, is a ‘fearful and impassioned human drama’; and this statement, commonplace as it has become, tended to be overlooked as its actual expression was encountered. The landings in North Africa were not launched without long and careful negotiations between the United States and representatives of the France which, though under the heel of the conqueror, had never lost heart; and they were not carried out without the active co-operation of many Frenchmen who had as little connection with General de Gaulle as with the Left in Britain. Out of this arose one of the most painful chapters in French history; and it seemed at times as if Frenchmen were more intent upon exacting vengeance upon all who had in any way collaborated with the Germans than upon defeating the Germans. One by one those who had been responsible for the preparations for the landings disappeared from the news until, long before this book was completed, most of them had ceased to be known. They had worked and risked much that the lives of the Allied soldiers might be risked as little as possible. These forgotten Frenchmen deserve a gratitude which only posterity will pay. Even Giraud was gradually pushed into the background. In the place of those who had laboured to such purpose for the liberation of the French North African provinces a host of Communists began to make their voices heard. The épuration was so clearly political rather than national that the observer could only wonder increasingly how France could be rebuilt on such foundations.

It was against this background that the exploitation of the Alamein victory took place; and, when this most memorable march in history had carried Montgomery up to the mountain ‘box’ in the north of Tunisia in which Arnim had taken refuge, none could have imagined that within three weeks an even greater surrender than that of Stalingrad would have taken place.

In its movement and colour, in its emotional appeal and in its enduring significance, this confused episode was the most remarkable of the war. The foundation of Hitler’s theories was undermined. The basis of faith and inference upon which the Allies relied and upon which alone the attitude of the great democracies could be justified, was confirmed and placed for ever beyond question. And most remarkable of all, it now became evident beyond all concealment or disguise that Hitler is the main architect of the situation that implies his downfall. With each desperate throw his outlook deteriorated fundamentally. It was now realized that, when he had moved against Russia, victory first became practicable for the Allies; and that when he declared war on the United States, he made it certain, short of some lapse of equal magnitude on their part. It was this episode that wrote that comment upon the Führer’s leadership—almost in a single month, November 1942, which saw the encirclement at Stalingrad and the landings in French North Africa. The rest of the episode did but add confirmation.

This volume has, however, been much the most difficult to write. It is comparatively easy to produce an article commenting upon the various phases of the different campaigns as they occur; but to establish the detail is quite another matter. There are numerous accounts of the Russian campaigns, issued with authority; but when one comes to attempt to extract the actual facts it is discovered that, even when they are of cardinal importance, the official summaries are remarkably reticent. Every effort, however, has been made to track down such facts; and all I can say in this connection is that I hope that they are, in general, correct. Certainly no time or labour has been spared that promised to yield results.

April 4th, 1944.

MAPS

1. THE CLIMAX OF THE GERMAN EASTERN OFFENSIVE

2. THE BATTLE OF ALAMEIN

3. THE LANDINGS IN NORTH AFRICA

4. SCOPE OF THE RUSSIAN RECOIL

5. ALLIED REACTIONS IN THE PACIFIC

6. THE MARCH OF THE EIGHTH ARMY

7. RUSSIA’S WESTWARD ADVANCE

8. THE BATTLES OF MARETH AND WADI AKARIT

9. THE LAST BATTLES IN TUNISIA

CHAPTER 1—The Battle of Stalingrad

‘Stalingrad will be taken—you may be sure of that.’ HITLER, September 30th, 1942.

At some point all great modern wars appear to degenerate into a phase of attrition. The original design is to concentrate greater masses of trained men and the material destruction than ever before; and Germany, who put science into the mobilization of the nation’s strength, and has given more of her vital energies to the control of the monster, sees the danger of reproducing the fate of Frankenstein. The writings of her generals are perfectly frank about this. There is the amplest discussion of how to assure to the monster a short lease of life so that the necessity and strain of keeping it under control will be of limited duration; and the result of their best military thought is to make their monster larger and more powerful than that of any other nation and to release it from the laboratory before rival creations can be set in motion. But, in this as in the last war, the German Frankenstein found that the monster had escaped from control.

When this point is reached the generals, who have exerted themselves to the utmost to place the maximum possible number of men and machines on the field of battle and would clearly prefer that they were alone of that mind, set themselves, unconsciously or by design, to the task of thinning down the enemy’s forces at the risk of thinning down their own. It must be admitted that the impulse may be unconscious since the result is what, with the utmost seriousness, they have condemned as the abdication of intelligent control and a lapse of which they must on no account be guilty. And it is a remarkable fact that, putting themselves to the work with full seriousness and with an ascetic devotion to duty, modern scientific men sow death so clumsily, so slowly, and so expensively. Compare the death-roll of a few weeks’ influenza epidemic with the butchery of these terrible positional battles, and one can only reflect on the limits of man’s capacity.

German military doctrine naturally plays with the theory of other sorts of battle, the Cannae, in which it is hoped this monster will justify its creation by swiftly putting an end to his opponent; but in the field the Germans tend to drift into terrible attrition battles. At times, the great generals of history have encouraged this tendency by seizing a strong position and, like Belisarius, encouraging their opponent to waste his strength against it. The drift to attrition battles showed itself at Verdun, on the Somme and at Passchendaele in the last war. But if Britain has the excuse that she is not a military nation, Germany has none.

It was this impulse that drove the Germans to Stalingrad. When it was found that the battle had escaped from control, every vestige of sense and tradition should have impelled them to break it off and adopt some other means to gain their ends; and it is certain that the best minds of the General Staff came to that conclusion. But that decision was particularly hard for the Germans who are most prone to fall into situations that need it; for Hitler’s single-track megalomaniac mind it was impossible.

So it came about that the German Army drifted into an episode which was to bring it to the greatest defeat it had suffered up to that moment by means of so prolonged and terrible a bloodletting that the recoil brought it almost to the verge of disaster.

Now that it is possible to reconstruct this heroic battlepiece, in outline at least, it can be recognized that it is and may remain unique. In its manner of development, its emotional background, its majestic texture, its prolongation, its demonstration of military art, and its decisive character it stands alone in a war which has been prolific in precedents.

The battle began on August the 23rd when the Panzer force of General Paulus had made its position across the Don secure. But it began, as we now know, when it should have ended. There was a chance that he might achieve success before Rostov had fallen when a crossing of the Don was first effected at the point nearest the Krasnodar-Stalingrad railway. It was a success achieved by surprise; but Bock, quite rightly, built upon that secure foundation for the rapid capture of the city. The surprise near Tsimlyansk could not, however, be exploited, and, whereas it had been hoped Stalingrad might be taken by manœuvre, Bock found himself held to a month of bitter, desperate fighting before he could even establish a bridgehead across the Don opposite Stalingrad.

The battle of Stalingrad was, therefore, in a real sense undesigned. It grew out of the frustrations of the German Command in the Don basin and took shape almost independently of Bock’s desire and design. As can now be seen it developed almost as little by the knowledge or wish of the Russian Staff. It was, in fact, the resultant of two major reluctances; but, whereas in the first phase the Russians controlled the general lines of the pattern, in the final phase they were its masters. So true is this that it came to be recognized as a fateful battle. The Germans had designed it as a mere incident in a grandiose plan of campaign; it became the central episode and, at length, the campaign itself.

It is tempting to imagine that history, the great plagiarist, had here staged a new Verdun; and indeed Tsaritsin, the earlier Stalingrad, had been called the ‘Red Verdun’. The battle inevitably came to be referred to in Russia as a ‘Verdun’. But no such emotional crisis ever coloured that struggle on the Meuse. Here, on the Volga, were fought out the hysterical tensions of Hitler, ever hounding on his helpless troops to attempt the reduction of the symbol he had promised first himself and then the German people; here the native Russian stubbornness came aflame in fresh levels of active strife; here two fanaticisms met in a death grapple; here frenzies and fears, brutality and anguish, the impulses of aggression and the call of the soil fought through days and weeks of indescribable horror and destruction.

No-one can study this battlepiece without recognizing its majestic quality. If we inevitably feel the deeper appeal of the heroism of the Russian soldiers, at least we cannot fail to realize that the burden laid by Hitler upon his wretched dupes was one to which no-one would commit the meanest animal. Life was carried on at such levels as defy all description, and, if it is easier to see the multiple difficulties of the Russian troops fighting under so great a numerical disadvantage, against a pitiless bombardment from the skies, with their backs to a river that made supplies precarious and far from sufficient, the Russians themselves have shown us in the Stalingrad film to what a state the German soldiers were reduced. Brutes indeed they were, but brutes with disciplined courage and endurance.

The battle of Stalingrad is notable also for a striking exhibition of military art. The Russian Staff, whatever its anxieties and preoccupations, maintained effective control over the major development of the German plan; and, when it realized that Bock was set on taking Stalingrad, preparations were made to inveigle him into a battle of the sort most repugnant to the German military mind. Little by little the lines of the design were filled in as it was realized that the Germans were bent upon capture of Stalingrad at all costs. The Russian Staff concentrated the forces and the material to entangle Bock in the worst form of positional warfare, a prolonged street battle. The Germans were unable to exert any effective control of the battle; and, as all the German theorists maintain, the area in which any skill was possible was progressively narrowed. German military theory, which bristles with conceptions such as ‘Cannae’, the ‘battle of annihilation’, the ‘battle without a morrow’, seeks to discover the means by which such clear-cut decisive battles can be shaped and won. The single or double envelopment is the invariable ingredient of all such plans. Even where the tactical manœuvre involves a breach of the centre the attempt to envelop one or both parts of the flanks of the breach is the ultimate purpose. But in street fighting manœuvre is almost entirely ruled out. As the battle of Stalingrad developed it can be seen that Bock’s plan was to envelop from the north-west and the south-west; and, only when this manœuvre had been decisively checked, was the attack in the centre begun. The scope of generalship had already been limited and the battle fell back upon mere fighting ability and skill in minor tactics.

Worse than this, from the German point of view, the Russian Command came to make ineffective the great numerical concentration against them. At the end of August it was estimated that there were about a million men at Bock’s disposal before Stalingrad; but this figure would include the whole front from the north-west to the south-east; and when the enemy became entangled in street fighting, after some success in his plan of envelopment, apart from the ability to substitute a worn unit for one that was fresher, the numbers became of little effect. They could not be deployed against the small sector their success and their failure had created. So obvious was this to the German Command that, at the beginning of October, it began to be suggested that the remaining work would be done by artillery. Numbers had ceased to have decisive value; they fell back upon weapons. But it scarcely needs to be said that artillery could never do what was requisite at Stalingrad.

By that time, in fact, it had become more evident that the Germans had lost control of the battle. For some time the German people had become impatient of the long-drawn-out battle. They had been so fed upon ‘blitz’ successes and promises of swift decisions that the passing of the invaluable weeks without any suggestion of a decision could not fail to arouse misgiving. The most interesting feature of the complaints, however, is the early date at which they began. It was at the end of August that suggestions were first heard in Germany that the High Command had only determined to reach the Volga line. By the third week in September the Frankfurter was found declaiming that the destruction of Stalingrad’s strategic position was imminent, and Dittmar, the spokesman of the High Command, was heard expounding the Russians’ ability to defer a decision. On September the 30th Hitler responded to this growing mood of disillusionment by assuring his hearers that ‘Stalingrad will be taken. You may be sure of that.’ In fine, this was a battle which was created by German mistakes and the propaganda machine, which never boggled at eating its own words, made heavy going of living down assurances that were all the more trusted for being latent and implicit.

The battle of Stalingrad became one of the decisive battles of the war. It was, perhaps, the decisive battle, the decisive battle of an epoch and an ideological revolution. At least it became the grave of the dearest of all German delusions—the invincibility of the Wehrmacht. Defeat passes, but having been defeated does not pass. As this amazing battle dragged on the only vestiges of skill that could be discerned were those of the Russian Command who prevented any strengthening of the southern concentration by developing their attack on the Rzhev sector and between the Volkhov and the Neva. If these offensives could not immediately affect the issue at Stalingrad they undoubtedly drew in reserves which might have relieved the worn-out units on the Stalingrad front, or might have strengthened the counterattack of Manstein when the Russians had struck back in their majestic envelopment. And as the battle ebbed and flowed about the ruins of Stalingrad new tides were washing up against Hitler’s ‘Fortress Europe’. The Eighth Army struck when the position of Stalingrad seemed almost desperate; and, before Stalin launched his great counterattack, the Allies had seized the initiative by an operation which may rank as the greatest amphibious operation in history.

The present chapter, however, is confined to the German attack upon Stalingrad. It was not met by a passive defence or the history of the war might have been very different. It was challenged by the most active and continuous defensive; and the Russian success depended upon the fact that the counterattacks were immediate. Before the enemy had time to consolidate their positions they were subjected to reactions so violent and skilful that effective progress was measured in yards. From the beginning of the battle for Stalingrad up to the Russian counterattack the ninety days’ fighting had carried the enemy to the Volga only on some parts of the sector. Progress, measured on that scale, was at the rate of about half a mile a day. It was, however, neither steady nor continuous. At times, in the ruined city, a day’s fighting would yield merely a few yards. Occasionally the Germans and their satellite troops had to traverse these few yards many times before they were left in possession of them. When it is remembered that on the opening day of the battle the Germans began that massed attack from the air which was generally reserved