TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/120291/12029910.000

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                                                                                PEARL HARBOR, Page 62

PART 3

War in Europe


As Japan and the U.S. square off in the Pacific, a nightmare
descends on the Continent

By HOWARD ANDREW G. CHUA-EOAN


    In Europe, both sides welcomed the attack on Pearl
Harbor. Hitler, pleased that the industrial bulwark of the
Allies was now preoccupied with an Asian enemy, almost
immediately declared war on the U.S. Churchill and Stalin were
relieved that America was finally a combatant.

    By the beginning of December 1941, German troops were in
Istra, a suburb only 15 miles west of Moscow. Ever since Hitler
launched Operation Barbarossa at 4 a.m. on June 22, 1941, his
forces had swept through Stalin's European empire. They took the
half of Poland that had been partitioned to the Soviet Union in
1939, stripped off the Baltic states that Moscow had annexed
just a year before, seized Belorussia, and were marching south
into Ukraine. Stalin's generals were stunned. They had believed
the idea of blitzkrieg was an unreliable bourgeois strategy. No
one had expected such a lightning conquest.

    By Oct. 16 Germans were 60 miles from Moscow, and the
capital was in a panic. Muscovites were stampeding out of the
city, packing railway stations, crammed into trucks, huddled in
carts. By the end of the month, 2 million had evacuated eastward
in what the Soviets still call "the big skedaddle."

    In spite of what seemed to be inevitable doom, in spite of
hundreds of thousands of fleeing party apparatchiks, Stalin
remained in Moscow. In a speech on Nov. 6, 1941, the eve of the
24th anniversary of the Bolshevik takeover, he cast the enemy
as beasts. "It is these people without honor or conscience,
these people with the morality of animals, who have the
effrontery to call for the extermination of the great Russian
nation." Patriotic Russians would never let that happen. "No
mercy for the German invaders," he said. In Red Square the next
day, he again sought to rein in the panic and rally the country.
Under a sky ringed with anti aircraft blimps, with artillery
fire echoing and under constant threat of Luftwaffe attack, the
Soviet leader evoked the glories of Russia's heroic past --
Alexander Nevsky, Tolstoy, Pushkin; he also, of course, included
Lenin in this pantheon. "The enemy is at the gates of Moscow and
Leningrad," he said. "The war you are waging is a war of
liberation, a just war." He thundered, "May you be blessed by
great Lenin's victorious banner. Death to the German invaders
. . . Onward to victory!"

    The tyrant's appeal transfigured a shell-shocked country.
Suddenly a hopeless cause became the Great Patriotic War. Even
those who hated Stalin -- like the novelist Victor Nekrasov --
remember rushing into combat crying "Za rodinu, za Stalina!"
(For the motherland, for Stalin!). The reanimated Russians could
also count on a perennial ally: Father Winter.

    In early November, amid their second big push toward
Moscow, the Germans were already suffering their first severe
cases of frostbite. Soviet General (later Marshal) Georgi Zhukov
reportedly noted that the enemy was perhaps too efficient: its
soldiers had been supplied with the correct size boots.
Russians, he said, knew enough to wear oversize footwear -- the
better to stuff with wool and straw to protect toes against the
cold. A popular Russian caricature of the time had the Fritzes
-- as German soldiers were less than affectionately called --
wrapped in anything they could grab out of occupied civilian
homes -- including women's shawls and feather boas. Hitler,
expecting the war to be over by October, made Napoleon's
mistake, neglecting to plan for the exigencies of a Russian
winter.

    Fighting the killing cold and the stiffening Russian
resistance, the invaders' losses mounted. At the end of
November, German sources were citing a casualty figure of
767,000, with 162,000 dead. The entire Western campaign of 1940
had cost the Wehr macht only 156,000 casualties (with 30,000
dead).

    On Dec. 2 Hitler proclaimed, "The Soviet Union is
finished." But by then the Germans poised at the gates of Moscow
were exhausted, cold and dispirited. On Dec. 5, as the Japanese
sailed toward Pearl Harbor, the Soviet army launched a massive
counterattack along a 560-mile front. The Fritzes were thrown
back by its ferocity. A German reporter assigned to the front
recalls coming upon a soldier staggering out of a wood screaming
"Aah! Come and help me! I can't see. They've gouged out my
eyes." Soldiers had attacked him with a knife, slashing his eyes
but taking care to let him live. "There!" said one of the
Russians. "Go to the other German dogs and tell them we'll
destroy them all. We'll cut out their eyes and send what's left
to Siberia . . . Now get going."

    In a January 1942 report -- part propaganda, part
journalism -- the Soviet novelist Ilya Ehrenburg wrote of the
winter battle: "The road is still long. From here to the extreme
capes of Europe, to Finisterre, `the end of the earth,'
stretches the Kingdom of Death. It is a difficult road. But the
Red Army continues its relentless march across the snow." By the
time the spring thaw slowed the Russian counterattack, the
Germans had been hurled entirely out of Moscow province. In the
spring of 1942 they would still be close enough to threaten, but
by then they had lost the battle to seize Stalin's capital.

    To the north, Leningrad had been virtually sealed off from
the rest of the country by a fierce German siege that would not
be totally lifted for 880 days, until January 1944. On the eve
of the attack on Pearl Harbor, Leningrad's situation was even
more desperate than the capital's. While the Germans outside
Moscow were nearly exhausted by three unsuccessful attempts to
take the city, Leningrad was not only being lashed by cannon
fire and air raids but was also slowly being starved. Hitler had
given orders that the city be completely eradicated after its
surrender so that German occupying forces would not have to
worry about supplying its civilian population.

    Like Moscow, the city had been surprised by the speed of
the Nazi blitzkrieg. Three weeks after the invasion, German
forces were already 125 miles south of Leningrad. But where many
Muscovites panicked, residents of the old imperial capital
resolutely began building a network of barricades outside the
city -- a million volunteers in a city of almost 3 million; many
died as they labored, killed by Nazi bombs and machine-gun
attacks. But in July and August they produced 340 miles of
antitank ditches, 15,875 miles of open trenches, 400 miles of
barbed-wire fences, 5,000 pillboxes and gun emplacements. These
could not stop the Nazi juggernaut, but they did slow it down.

    Most Leningraders volunteered not for love of Stalin. It
was their city they were defending -- the cultural center of
traditional Russia, home of Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoyevsky and Anna
Akhma tova. The ordeal, however, required more than pride,
certainly more than courage. The supply of food was erratic, and
plummeted during the darkest moments of the war. On Dec. 23,
1941, for example, the whole city had just two days' supply of
flour. At one point, rations were 1,087 calories for workers who
had to man the city's strategic munitions plants, 581 calories
for office workers, 684 calories for children. In reality, far
less food was available -- and proper nutrition in cold weather
requires about 3,000 calories a day for a man. The official
report of deaths for December was 53,000, and the winter would
take an even greater toll.

    By then people were stripping glue off walls for protein.
Tons of rotting sheep guts were boiled down into a rancid jelly
and handed out as the meat ration. It was not uncommon to see
people collapse from hunger while walking home through the snow,
dying on the street. Some would remain covered beneath the snow
until the spring. A factory chief remembers a worker asking him
a final favor. "I know that today or tomorrow I will die," he
said. "My family are in a very poor way -- very weak . . . Will
you be a friend and have a coffin made for me?"

    No other major city in the war would suffer as many
civilian deaths as Leningrad. Not Dresden, which was virtually
flattened by bombers and where 30,000 died in one night of air
raids. Not even Hiroshima, where about 100,000 were killed by
a single bomb. In Leningrad the official Soviet death toll for
the two-winter-long siege was 632,253, mostly of starvation.
Other sources put the figure at more than 1 million.

    Leningrad was almost completely isolated: to the west was
the Baltic Sea, to the east Lake Ladoga, to the south the
advancing Wehrmacht, to the north the Finns, who, while not
formally allied with Germany, were fighting their own war with
the Soviet Union. But the city's defenders kept the enemy at bay
and, again, winter helped. Lake Ladoga froze to a thickness that
would support an escape route for hundreds of thousands of
refugees -- and a way in for food. The Russian counteroffensive
that began on Dec. 5, 1941, also relieved pressure on the city.
By early 1942, though the blockade was not broken, the Germans
could not hope to advance without a terrible fight. Besides,
Hitler was turning his attention toward the Volga River and
oil-rich Baku by the Caspian Sea. There a titanic struggle soon
developed over the city that stood in his way: Stalingrad.

    The late spring and summer of 1942 would be a black time
for the Soviet Union. An attempt to retake the Kerch peninsula
in the Crimea failed. In May three Russian armies, the vanguard
of a planned counteroffensive in Ukraine, were routed by German
mechanized units in Kharkov. The Germans claimed to have
captured 200,000 prisoners.

    Those defeats were followed by two other stunning losses.
On June 7 German forces supplemented by troops from Romania
began a monthlong final offensive against the great Crimean port
of Sevastopol, pounding it with Luftwaffe raids before sending
infantry units to wage bloody street battles. By the beginning
of July, the city collapsed. The fall of Rostov-on-Don, the
so-called gateway to the Caucasus, was even more ominous. The
siege was embarrassingly brief, and whole Soviet units
reportedly fled in panic. Suddenly the way south to the oil
fields of Baku was open. With German armies simultaneously
dashing to cut off the Soviet supply line along the Volga,
Stalin issued a stern "not a step back" decree to the Red Army.
Deserters were to be shot on sight.

    Stalingrad, a great sprawl of a city on the Volga, became
the focal point of the struggle. It had originally been named
Tsaritsyn, and during the bloody civil war it was successfully
defended against the rightist White Army by Stalin himself, who
gave it his name. The Russians knew that if they did not tie
down the Germans at Stalingrad, the war would virtually be
lost. Not only would the huge cities of the north be bereft of
supplies from the fertile south, but the oil fields of Baku that
fueled the Russian war machine would fall to the Wehrmacht.

    From mid-July 1942 onward, the fighting intensified as the
Germans advanced along the great bend of the Don River. Hitler
ordered the German Sixth Army to conquer Stalingrad by Aug. 25.
Stalin ordered the city to prepare for siege.

    On Aug. 23 the Luftwaffe sent 600 bombers against the
city, killing 40,000 civilians. On the same day, the Germans
established a five-mile front to the north. Wrote the Soviet
General Vassili Chuikov: "The enormous city, stretching for 30
miles along the Volga, was enveloped in flames. Everything
around was burning and collapsing." Less than two weeks later
the Germans rumbled into the western suburbs, and two months of
the most ferocious street fighting of the war ensued. "Fierce
actions had to be fought for every house, workshop, water tower,
raised railway track, wall or cellar, and even for every heap
of rubble," wrote the German General Hans Dorr. "The
no-man's-land between us and the Russians was reduced to an
absolute minimum."

    The Germans, however, could never quite take all of
Stalingrad. While they held air superiority, they were unable
to knock out the powerful batteries of Russian artillery across
the Volga. And beyond the Stalingrad cauldron, the Red Army was
on the move. In late November 1942 the Russians encircled the
city, trapping thousands of German and Romanian troops. Hitler
had committed a strategic mistake. He had dissipated his
military strength and caused tremendous logistical confusion by
splitting up the offensive -- sending a huge strike force toward
the Cauca sus simultaneously with the drive toward Stalingrad.

    By December one German soldier was writing despairing
entries into his diary. Dec. 5: "Heavy snowfall. My toes are
frostbitten. Gnawing pain in my stomach . . . There is very
little food. All is lost. Constant bickering. Everybody's nerves
are on edge." Dec. 12: "O God, help me return home safe and
sound! God Almighty, put an end to all this torture!" With
rations slashed in December, army horses were slaughtered and
cooked.

    The Germans in Stalingrad fought on through January, even
as the Russian military ringed the city. Hitler had promised
reinforcements, and in the second half of December launched a
major tank assault on the Soviet blockade. It failed. Wrote
Chuikov: "Up to the end of December, [the Germans] continued
to live in hopes and put up a desperate resistance, often
literally to the last cartridge. We practically took no
prisoners, since the Nazis just wouldn't surrender." Not until
Feb. 2, 1943, was the enemy defeated in Stalingrad. By then the
Germans were more willing to surrender: 90,000 were taken
prisoner.

    In Russia at War, the British journalist Alexander Werth
recalls one sight in devastated Stalingrad at the time of the
German capitulation: horse skeletons with uneaten bits of meat
clinging to them; an enormous frozen cesspool; and, creeping
into a cellar, the figure of a German soldier, his face a
"mixture of suffering and idiot-like incomprehension." "The
man," recalled Werth, "was perhaps already dying. In that
basement into which he slunk there were still 200 Germans --
dying of hunger and frostbite. `We haven't had time to deal with
them yet,' one of the Russians said. `They'll be taken away
tomorrow, I suppose.' "

    The Germans had lost the battle of Stalingrad. The tide of
the Russian war had turned against the Third Reich.

    Almost immediately after Operation Barbarossa was launched
in June 1941, Stalin began imploring Churchill -- and, after
Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt -- to open a second front in Europe to
draw German forces away from Russia. The pressure from Moscow
was especially intense during the battle for Stalingrad. Even
after the German advance was halted and reversed in 1943, Stalin
continued to declare that as mighty as the revived Red Army was,
it could not win the war on its own.

    The Soviets took some -- but not much -- comfort in
British and later American operations in North Africa. Until the
invasion of Italy in July 1943 and D-day in June 1944, the
fighting in Libya, Tunisia and Egypt was the only major military
distraction for the Third Reich.

    North Africa was not originally Germany's theater of war.
But the stunning defeat of 200,000 Italian soldiers in Libya by a
force of 30,000 from the British empire forced Hitler to send
reinforcements to the region in February 1941. The brilliant
Erwin Rommel, who had helped lead German forces in the
lightning conquest of France in 1940, quickly turned back the
Allied advance in Libya and in April besieged an Australian
division in the strategic seaside fortress of Tobruk as troops
from Britain and New Zealand retreated to Egypt. Rommel called
Tobruk's defenders nothing but rabble and promised that the
panzers of his fabled Afrika Korps would soon be parked by the
Suez Canal.

    But the "rats of Tobruk," as the Australians called
themselves, would hold out against Rommel for 242 days. Attack
after attack failed to dislodge them. In the first week of
December, just as the Pacific war began, an Allied thrust
threatened to encircle Rommel's forces. To avoid falling into
a trap, the Germans withdrew from Tobruk. In the last confusing
battle over the fortress, 38,000 Axis soldiers were killed; the
Allies lost 18,000.

    The "Desert Fox," however, was far from finished.
Orchestrating an intricate withdrawal, he then prepared for a
counterattack. Hitler sent him an entire air corps, detached
from the Russian front. The two divisions of the Afrika Korps
were resupplied and refreshed, and in June 1942 Rommel captured
Tobruk -- earning from the Fuhrer the rank of field marshal.
Egypt, Suez and the oil of the Middle East now seemed within his
grasp. Hitler, warned by more cautious advisers to be wary about
proceeding toward Cairo, nonetheless ordered that operations "be
continued until the British forces are completely annihilated
. . . The goddess of fortune passes only once close to warriors
in battle. Anyone who does not grasp her at that moment can very
often never touch her again."

    And so destiny brought Erwin Rommel face to face with the
man who would prove to be his nemesis: Bernard Montgomery. By
July 1942 the Germans had pushed the British out of Libya. All
that stood between the Nazis and Alexandria was the strong
point at the arid village of El Alamein, 70 miles to the west.
A worried Churchill sent Montgomery, an eccentric, bullheaded
disciplinarian, to head the Eighth Army. In spite of frantic
pleas from London, Monty -- as the Ulsterman asked his soldiers
to refer to him -- took his time, rebuilding troop morale and
stocking up on ammunition. Churchill wanted him to counterattack
by September 1942. Montgomery chose to wait until Oct. 23. By
that time the Eighth Army outnumbered Axis forces 195,000 men
to 104,000 and had more than 1,000 tanks to Rommel's 500.

    In the meantime, Rommel's forces were being interdicted by
the Royal Air Force -- and by Hitler, who had again begun to
skim off reinforcements for the Russian front. On the night of
Oct. 23-24, under a full moon, the British opened fire on
German positions with at least 900 artillery pieces, creating
such powerful shock waves that some Axis soldiers were stunned
to death. As fate would have it, Rommel was not on hand to
rally his demoralized troops. A month earlier, he had gone home
for treatment of a stomach disorder. Alarmed, Hitler ordered
the still ailing Rommel back immediately. By Oct. 25, however,
90% of the Afrika Korps's tanks had been destroyed. Though
commanded to fight to the death, Rommel ordered his army to
retreat on Nov. 4.

    "It may almost be said,'' wrote Churchill, "that before
Alamein we never had a victory. After Alamein, we never had a
defeat." The Germans in North Africa were in irreversible
retreat. Four days after the end of the battle of El Alamein,
American tanks and soldiers landed around the Moroccan port of
Casablanca to join the British in mopping-up operations against
the remaining Axis presence.

    But Rommel, though clearly defeated, was still capable of
a few surprises -- as the Americans found out. In February,
even as the German field marshal had been chased into Tunisia,
his forces launched a fierce attack on Allied forces and
inflicted a humiliating defeat on the U.S. II Corps near the
Kasserine Pass. It would take British, French and U.S. troops
10 days to undo the German counteroffensive, sustaining 10,000
casualties in the process, more than half of them American.

    Nevertheless, the Axis was as good as routed in Africa. On
May 12, 1943, the Americans and the British staged a gigantic
pincers movement to win the battle for Tunisia -- the essential
staging point for invading Sicily and Italy. Some 150,000 Axis
soldiers were taken prisoner. The Germans, wrote General Dwight
Eisenhower, commander in chief of U.S. forces in North Africa
at the time, "were compelled after Tunisia to think only of the
protection of conquests rather than their enlargement."

    The Axis began to crack. In July, German and Russian
armored units collided in the Kursk salient in what remains the
greatest tank battle in history: 6,000 tanks, 4,000 aircraft,
2 million men. The Germans lost almost all their eastern-front
panzer divisions just as the Allies under Montgomery and George
Patton were landing on Sicily. Germany intervened in Italy after
Mussolini was overthrown on July 25, 1943. (On April 28, 1945,
partisan forces would shoot him dead and string up his body by
the heels in the Piazza Loreto in Milan.) It would take the
Allies nearly a year to fight their way into Rome. By then, the
true second front in Europe was about to open; on June 6, 1944,
the Allies landed in Normandy.

    Everywhere the Nazis ruled, resistance flourished. Much of
the subversion was supported by Britain's Special Operations
Executive to further Churchill's goal of setting "Europe ablaze"
with underground activity. But most of the resistance was
fueled by patriotism and hatred of Nazi rule. Sabotage and
guerrilla activity helped keep the Occupation forces off
balance, and the resistance smuggled out information to the
Allies and dispensed anti-German propaganda.

    From France to the Soviet Union, Poland to Czechoslo
vakia, underground movements harried the Germans -- sometimes
at a horrendous cost. On May 27, 1942, two Czechoslovak agents
based in London who had been parachuted into Czechoslovakia five
months earlier were activated. Their target: Reinhard Heydrich,
"the Butcher of Prague," the SS Obergruppenfuhrer who was a
major organizer of the Holocaust that was engulfing Europe's
Jews. The Czechoslovaks killed Heydrich in a bomb attack as he
drove into Prague, but the retribution was terrible: the Nazis
murdered 1,300 Czechoslovaks immediately; 3,000 Jews were sent
to Poland to be killed; and then the Germans razed the village
of Lidice, butchering 199 men and sending 290 women and children
to concentration camps, from which very few returned.

    The resistance movements, however, received spectacular
encouragement from the Allied strategic bombings of Germany. The
British, still furious about the Luftwaffe's indiscriminate
attacks on London and such targets as Coventry and Liverpool in
the war's early days, launched gigantic carpet bombings of the
Third Reich's industrial and urban centers. In May 1942 the
R.A.F. sent the first 1,000-bomber mission over Germany,
pulverizing 300 acres of central Cologne. The head of the bomber
command, Air Marshal Arthur ("Bomber") Harris, told his men that
if their mission succeeded, "the most shattering and devastating
blow will have been delivered against the very vitals of the
enemy." The R.A.F. lost only 40 of the 1,096 planes involved.

    Beginning on July 24, 1943, Hamburg was savaged six times
in 10 days. Fire storms created by British incendiary bombs
raised flames whirling at 100 to 150 m.p.h., with temperatures
of 1000 degreesC at their cores. Eight hundred thousand people
were left homeless, and some 50,000 were killed. Cities
throughout Germany, including Berlin, were similarly razed. The
mass bombings would alternate between British night attacks and
American daytime raids, coming almost daily by the war's end.

    Death came in many guises in the war. Soldiers were
slaughtered at the battlefront. Guerrillas perished in ambushes.
Civilians were killed by bullets, bombs and artillery shells,
disease and, as in Leningrad, starvation. But Europe was
afflicted with an even greater evil. Hitler and his toadies,
obsessed with purity and genealogies and with nurturing a
superior race, set out to realize their nightmare vision with
murderous efficiency.

    On Jan. 20, 1942, at 56-58 Am Grossen Wannsee in suburban
Berlin, 15 top government officials, including five
representatives of the SS, met to discuss the "final solution"
to the Jewish problem. The meeting had originally been set for
Dec. 9, 1941, but the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor prompted
its postponement. The main work of the Wannsee conference lasted
no more than 90 minutes and covered little new ground; the
outlines of the policy had been discussed among high officials
since before the war began. Rather, the meeting had been
convened to give official status to the final solution, to
ensure that the bureaucracy recognized its importance and that
government officials provided what was needed -- railcars, camp
guards, chemicals, arrangements for disposing of Jewish
property.

    Since Kristallnacht on Nov. 9-10, 1938, the number of
German Jews herded into concentration camps or forced into exile
had risen dramatically. As the armies of Operation Barbarossa
swept across Russia, units of the SS's special mobile killing
squads, the Einsatzgruppen, systematically combed occupied
territory for local Jews. In the Lithuanian city of Vilna,
19,311 Jews were killed in September and October 1941. In two
days at the end of September 1941, 33,771 Kiev Jews were herded
to the suburban ravine of Babi Yar and machine-gunned by the SS
and Ukrainian collaborators. November 1941 saw the first
experimental large-scale gassing of concentration-camp
internees: 1,200 prisoners from the infamous Buchenwald camp
were killed. Later, the mass murders were concentrated in six
death camps, all on Polish soil; in the most notorious of them,
Auschwitz, 2 million people perished. Uprisings were put down
ruthlessly. The most famous occurred in 1943 in the Warsaw
ghetto, where, at one point, almost 400,000 Jews had been penned
up since November 1940. Only 70,000 Jews remained in the ghetto
by the time of the uprising, and more than 56,000 of them were
shot, burned alive or deported to Treblinka.

    The Jews were not the only victims of Nazi race hatred.
Hitler's scorn for the Slavs guaranteed bestial treatment of
Russian prisoners of war; of 5 million POWs, more than 3 million
died. Gypsies, Poles, homosexuals and mental patients too would
be detained, persecuted and killed. But the Jews were the
principal target: by the war's end 6 million would be dead.

    The Nazis, of course, never referred to the policy as
genocide. To distance the leadership from even the slightest
link to murder, no public discussion was permitted. That did not
mean that the Third Reich was ashamed of its final-solution
policy. Heinrich Himmler, the chicken farmer who rose to become
Reichsfuhrer of the SS and chief architect of the final
solution, called the killings "an unwritten and never to be
written page of glory in our history." He said, "We had the
moral right, we had the duty with regard to our people, to kill
this race that wanted to kill us."

    He spoke in October 1943. The superior Aryan race, he said
defiantly, would win the war. Nature ensured that Nazi victory
was inevitable. By then, the tide of war had already shifted:
the Russians were marching inexorably westward; Italy was a
shambles; North Africa was lost. But one of the war's greatest
acts of inhumanity remained a virtual secret. The methodical
extermination of millions in the six Polish death camps was just
nearing its terrible climax.