HistoryExtrahttps://www.historyextra.comHome of Britain’s bestselling history magazine and award-winning podcast2026-01-16T14:50:47.000Zhourly12000-01-01T12:00+00:00Five things you (probably) didn’t know about the First World Warhttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/five-things-you-probably-didnt-know-about-the-first-world-war/2025-07-21T08:00:10.000Z1. The Germans were well organised – but unpractised
The German army is often depicted as an epic, unstoppable machine. There’s no doubt that, at the outbreak of the First World War, it was the most formidably organised military force on the planet – but organisation is only one element of success.
Germany’s failure to end the war in the west quickly before turning east to deal with Russia wasn’t for want of organisation. But, though the Schlieffen Plan laboriously set out and dictated how all of this would happen, one thing that Germany couldn’t do was practise.
Germany did not win the war in 1914 because achieving perfection while transitioning from theory to operations is impossible. The reality of deploying massive armies threw up all kinds of issues: supply lines grew too long as the advance was so rapid, and forces suffered major breaks in communication. In addition, an army of this size inevitably comprised largely inexperienced, terrified men seeing combat for the first time.
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2. Belgians fought Germany virtually alone at the start of the conflict
We know so much about the experiences of British troops in the trenches, but all too often we forget about the French and Belgian armies who fought on their home soil.
In the opening weeks of the war, the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) in France and Belgium was still relatively tiny – only about 60,000 men. During this period, the much larger Belgian army fought virtually alone – without the help of its allies – desperately battling to halt the massive German forces invading their country.
Similarly, at the outbreak of war, hundreds of thousands of Frenchmen immediately went into battle along a line stretching from Alsace all the way into Belgium, with territorials extending the Allied line far beyond the end of the British sector.
To illustrate this point, consider the battle of Mons on 23 August 1914. This clash is well known among British audiences – yet in truth it was tiny in scale, and just one component of the month-long battle of the Frontiers that raged along the Belgian-French and German-French borders.
3. Neutrality was a lie
Despite the protestations of non-combatant nations, complete neutrality was impossible to practise by 1914. Global trade had become the norm, with the result that no single power could produce all it needed to fight a war and supply vast armies on its own. Instead, it had to call on the resources and manufacturing capacity of nominally neutral nations to supply goods and materials.
On a more base and self-serving level, no forward-thinking imperialist nation could afford to be left out when the victors began dividing up the spoils of war. To this end, the likes of Turkey and Italy effectively picked sides as soon as war commenced, and merely delayed their entry into the fighting for as long as possible – or until they were promised the rewards they thought their contribution deserved.
4. The eastern front was just as important as the west
While fighting raged on the western front in France and Belgium, an equally enormous yet less-known war was simultaneously being waged to the east and in the Balkans. Armies numbering millions of troops clashed along the banks of the Drina river (now along the border between Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina), among the Masurian Lakes (today in Poland) and across the rolling hills of Galicia, straddling south-east Poland and western Ukraine.
Russians, Germans, Serbs, Austrians, Hungarians, Czechs, Slovaks, Slovenes, Romanians, Poles and more bled by their thousands for their respective kings and emperors. Their stories, experiences and voices have been largely written out of the narrative, their war relegated to mere ‘sideshows’.
However, the impact of these bloody battles in the east was profound, not only on the opening stages of the war but on its onward course. Nothing happened on one side of Europe without affecting the war on the other, and it’s impossible to fully understand the unprecedented scale of this conflict without grasping these events in the east.
5. Many 'German' soldiers weren't German
Large numbers of enemy soldiers facing the BEF in the first action at Mons weren’t really German at all. Instead, several of the regiments that charged the British positions on that day hailed from areas of Germany that had, prior to 1864, been part of Denmark, and a sizeable proportion of those troops were Danes. In total, around 30,000 Danes were conscripted into the German army during the war. Some 5,000 of them would not return from the conflict alive.
Alex Churchill's new book, co-authored with Nicolai Eberholst, is Ring of Fire: A New Global History of the Outbreak of the First World War (Bloomsbury). Alex and Nicolai are trustees of the Great War Group
This article was first published in the July 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
]]>Germany’s final gamblehttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/germanys-final-gamble/2018-03-16T16:36:38.000ZThis article was first published in the March 2018 issue of BBC History Magazine
On the night of 20–21 March 1918, anticipation, apprehension and hope hung over the lines in Picardy, France, where two great armies awaited an offensive expected to end nearly four years of war. On the German side, excitement was at fever pitch. Behind the front, a mighty force of 1.4 million men was arrayed. In the dark, 6,600 artillery pieces and 3,500 mortars were being pulled into position or undergoing final checks. The assault infantry of 32 divisions was quietly filing to jump-off points, ready to advance in the first wave.
British commanders, warned of the coming attack, felt supremely confident that they would halt it, but their men were less sure: “I could understand the feelings of prisoners of the 16th century who had been sentenced to have their heads chopped off at dawn,” fretted a veteran officer.
At last, at 4.40am precisely, the German guns opened up all along the 50-mile attack front, firing the heaviest bombardment the world had ever known. To one German storm troop officer in the front line, it was a sudden “gigantic roar of annihilation”. The earth trembled. Jumping onto the parapet, he and his men “looked with wonder at the wall of fire towering over the English lines”.
This Spring Offensive was Germany’s last chance to win the war. The remarkable strategic swings of 1917 had led General Erich Ludendorff, the German army’s First Quartermaster General and its de facto operational commander, to this desperate gamble. In April that year, Germany’s long-term prospects, already dimmed by years of gruelling attritional combat and hunger at home, had been doomed by the United States’ entry into hostilities.
The American menace
Across the Atlantic, a millions-strong army was in training. Its fresh soldiers could be expected to flood the western front in 1919, providing Britain and France overwhelming strength against Germany’s own weary troops. Yet hope remained. Revolution in the east, the collapse of the Russian army over the summer of 1917 and a Bolshevik coup in November opened a narrow window to avert this fate.
In December, an armistice ended the fighting on the eastern front and Ludendorff was able to transfer more than half a million soldiers. “All that mattered,” he recalled, “was to get together enough troops for an attack in the west.”
Planning for the great offensive, codenamed Operation Michael, was complete in January 1918. Ludendorff positioned three powerful armies against the British Army’s southernmost sectors either side of the Somme river. Under army group commander Crown Prince Rupprecht, the 17th Army, a force of 21 divisions, had the main task of breaking through British Third Army’s lines and then advancing north-west. Together with its southerly neighbour, the Second Army (19 divisions), it would roll up the British towards the Channel. Another royal, Crown Prince Wilhelm of Prussia, oversaw 18th Army, which was to attack the British Fifth Army further south along the Somme with 27 divisions. It had the subordinate role of protecting the main attack’s left flank.
Unusually, Ludendorff refused to set any final objectives. Drawing on his experience of the eastern front, he hoped the offensive’s shock and speed would paralyse the enemy command and break its troops’ cohesion and morale. Restoring movement to the battlefield was the key aim; where German troops went afterward was of lesser importance.
To this end, Ludendorff obsessed about how to break through the fortified front. This was no easy task, as the French and British failures of 1917 had shown. “Concentrated preparation by massed artillery,” he recognised, “was of utmost importance.” To maximise the opening bombardment’s impact, a seven-phase fire plan of unparalleled sophistication was developed.
Enemy headquarters and telephone exchanges, as well as defensive positions, were identified by aerial reconnaissance and would be wiped out, paralysing the opposing force’s command. The guns ranged on these targets early and unobtrusively. To compensate for shortages, Ludendorff divided his 191 divisions into basically equipped ‘trench divisions’, tasked with holding territory, and 56 elite ‘assault divisions’, which would spearhead the attacks and were allocated enough horses to guarantee mobility, the best weaponry and the youngest and fittest soldiers. Their infantry was given four weeks’ instruction in innovative infiltration tactics. Secrecy and surprise were paramount.
At 9.40am on 21 March, after five hours in which 1,160,000 shells had pummelled enemy lines, the German infantry charged forward through thick fog. In the north, the main attack stalled in front of the well-organised defences of the British Third Army. Further south, however, the 18th Army won a major success. Its opponent, the British Fifth Army, was weak, with only 12 divisions to guard a 42-mile front. Worse, it was badly deployed.
The British had just adopted a German-inspired ‘defence-in-depth’, in which their front was divided into a Rear Zone (mostly notional due to labour shortages), a Battle Zone, where the main resistance could develop at a distance from enemy artillery, and a Forward Zone garrisoned with outposts to slow any attack. However, the system was poorly understood. The Germans stressed flexibility and immediate counterattacks. But far too many Fifth Army troops were deployed in the Forward Zone in a chain of loosely linked redoubts and machinegun posts, with no arrangements made for rapid assistance. As the first day of the offensive demonstrated, this was a recipe for disaster. In the Forward and Battle Zones, recalled an officer of the Second London Regiment, the troops’ “sense of loneliness was acute”.
“All communication was cut at an early hour; and each garrison was left to fight its fight against odds entirely unsupported… Their trenches were blown in, the wire in front torn and twisted into uselessness, their leaders and comrades killed or wounded, the few survivors, blinded by the mist, stunned by the tremendous explosions, were suddenly confronted by lines of grey-clad figures.”
Hardly surprising, then, that most positions fell quickly. One-third of the Fifth Army’s infantry was lost in the first 90 minutes of the attack. Some units did hang on grimly. ‘A’ Company of the 2/2nd Londons defended Travecy village in the Fifth Army’s Forward Zone for a desperate day-and-a-half before surrendering. Stranded and surrounded, at one point bombed by their own side, 60 survivors expended all their 200 trench-mortar shells, 400 grenades and 18,000 rifle and machinegun rounds defending their position.
Wallowing in a wasteland
Determined to push forward, Ludendorff reinforced 18th Army’s success in the south. At first, this paid dividends. The Germans had targeted the British Army because they rated it as too tactically clumsy to survive fast-paced mobile warfare. Sure enough, its army and corps commanders, under intense pressure, soon lost control of the battle. Their troops, outmatched by the enemy’s ability to infiltrate between their positions, fell into helter-skelter retreat.
Yet on 23 March, just three days into the offensive, Ludendorff overreached. Assuming the British already defeated, he dissipated his force’s strength by ordering attacks northwest, west and south-west. This was a fateful error. The crucial rail hub at Amiens, through which half of all the British Army’s supplies passed, lay 40 miles ahead. If the Germans were to win the war, it was here they needed to concentrate their efforts. As a senior British general anxiously observed, it was the only place whose capture would “force the Allies to discuss terms of peace”.
Ludendorff’s blindness to operational objectives meant a priceless opportunity was missed. In the following days, the Germans wasted their strength pushing in three directions to destroy the British, prise them from their French allies and eliminate French reserves. They overran a huge area: by 5 April, when the offensive ended, 1,200 square miles had been captured. No advance on this scale had been seen on the western front since 1914.
Yet it was all worthless. The German armies wallowed in the wasteland devastated by the Somme battle in 1916, trailing grossly overstretched supply lines and with an intact enemy to their front. As for Amiens: after belatedly designating it an objective on the offensive’s sixth day, the Germans came within 7 miles. But promptly dispatched French reinforcements and determined British resistance saved the city.
Casualties had been extraordinarily heavy. 178,000 British and 34,000 French soldiers had been lost, nearly half of whom (90,000) were prisoners. Ominously for the Germans’ ability to continue offensive action, their 239,800 killed, missing and wounded included a particularly high proportion of veteran officers and elite assault troops.
Ludendorff continued to seek a decisive victory. On 9 April, he launched the ‘Georgette’ offensive in Flanders, to the north. The sector was crucial, for it guarded the Channel ports, and this time the assault targeted a valuable objective, the British Army’s second rail centre at Hazebrouck. The German attack force was smaller than in March, with 2,000 guns and 26 divisions, but it faced a weak defence of eight British and one demoralised Portuguese division. This latter broke on first contact. The German advance spread panic and inflicted a further 112,000 casualties on the Allies, prompting the usually unflappable British commander-in-chief, Sir Douglas Haig, to issue an emotional appeal to his men to stand fast for “the safety of our homes and the freedom of mankind”.
However, already the tide was turning. Shocked by the Germans’ near success in dividing their armies in March, the Allies had appointed a general-in-chief, Ferdinand Foch, better to co-ordinate their defence. American troops were being embarked at an accelerated rate, with 117,200 shipping for Europe in April – more than in February and March combined. Most important, at the front morale held firm. Among the British rank and file, “the will to beat the enemy” was, reassured their army’s postal censor, “as firm and definitely expressed as ever”. Prisoners under German interrogation criticised their commanders as incompetents but remained convinced of their own martial superiority. “In the English army,” reported one bemused intelligence officer, “the opinion is widespread that, under German leadership, English soldiers could conquer the whole world.”
Hope fizzles out
The Germans were now under considerable pressure. Ludendorff had learnt nothing. As in March, he failed to concentrate his forces, blowing any chance of taking Hazebrouck. After weeks of continuous combat, his men were tired: three-quarters of divisions engaged in ‘Georgette’ had already fought in ‘Michael’. Their infantry was depleted, and a shortage of horses impeded their mobility.
Most seriously, morale and discipline were shaken. Already during the March operations, troops stopping to plunder British depots for food and alcohol had delayed advances. As casualties mounted through April – the Germans lost 86,000 men – commanders started to suspect their soldiers had lost the heart to go forward. The chief of IX Reserve Corps, a formation deployed in ‘Georgette’, perceptively analysed his men’s mood. “They had too much hope that this great blow in March would end the war,” he observed. “Now the disappointment is here, and it is great. It is the main reason why even attacks well-prepared with artillery fizzle out as soon as our infantry goes beyond the heavily bombarded zone.”
The Germans’ final offensives in 1918 offered the ultimate display of their tactical prowess – and their strategic bankruptcy. After a month’s pause in operations, on 27 May 5,263 guns suddenly obliterated French defences on the Chemin des Dames, and 25 infantry divisions attacked. ‘Blücher’ – the offensive was named hubristically after the great Prussian general of Waterloo – was diversionary; Ludendorff merely sought to draw Allied forces south so he could try again for a big victory in Flanders. However, when his troops pushed up to 14 miles, achieving the furthest advance ever in a single day on the western front, the general could not resist expanding the operation. The result was predictable: another exposed salient was added to those created by the ‘Michael’ and ‘Georgette’ offensives.
Tanks on the attack
Subsequent attacks in June and mid-July failed to improve the position. By these operations’ end, the Germans had inflicted another 220,000 losses on the Allies and stood on the Marne river, just 40 miles from Paris. Yet they had lost the war.
On 18 July, two French armies suddenly counterattacked, deploying hundreds of tanks against which the Germans had no answer, and a rout ensued. This was the start of a relentless retreat that led directly to capitulation on 11 November 1918.
Did Ludendorff’s great gamble ever stand a chance of success? The German army’s official history argued that German forces simply lacked the strength to win a decisive victory. And, as their numerical advantage in the west in March 1918 rested on just 13 divisions, it had a point. Thanks to the arrival of 500,000 US troops, Allied combat strength overtook that of the Germans in mid-June.
Nevertheless, the Spring Offensive was dangerous. In April, Haig feared for Calais and the Germans came very close to capturing key rail hubs, whose loss would have paralysed the British Army. Improved Allied co-operation under Foch and the influx of fresh Americans helped thwart them.
But, at root, Ludendorff bore blame for the German failure. Through strategic myopia and refusal to set firm objectives, he squandered slim chances to force a decision. He also underestimated the defenders’ resilience. Though poorly led and pushed back, British soldiers kept fighting. In the end, German troops folded first. Tired, despondent and defeated, facing unbeatable numbers and under constant attack, hundreds of thousands would surrender from the summer, bringing the war to its now inevitable conclusion.
Alexander Watson is professor of history at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is the author of the Wolfson History Prize-winning book, Ring of Steel. Germany and Austria-Hungary at War, 1914-1918 (Allen Lane, 2014).
For more on the First World War, listen to the drama series Home Front, which is currently airing on Radio 4.
]]>Operation Barbarossahttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/operation-barbarossa/2016-06-09T08:00:00.000ZBestselling military historian Antony Beevor discusses the events of Operation Barbarossa, the 1941 German invasion of the Soviet Union that was to play a pivotal role in the eventual outcome of the Second World War.
]]>Barbarossa and Britainhttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/barbarossa-and-britain/2011-06-18T19:52:44.000ZIt was one of the biggest cock-ups in modern history. By noon on day one about a quarter of the Red Air Force, over 1,200 planes, had been destroyed – many of them still sitting on their runways, wing to wing.
Operation Barbarossa, named for the legendary 12th-century emperor, began just before dawn on 22 June 1941. Over three million German troops surged into the Soviet Union along a front of more than one thousand miles. Hitler’s Panzers thrust through unprepared defences and curled, pincer-like, around shocked and leaderless Soviet troops: hundreds of thousands surrendered en masse. In Soviet Cold War military doctrine, Barbarossa was characterised as a surprise attack, yet the German build-up had been evident for months before June 1941. The real intelligence failure was not one of information but assumptions, and the errors were made at the very top – by the veteran Soviet leader Josef Stalin.
Stalin had no illusions about the underlying enmity between Nazism and communism or about Hitler's appetite for living space in the east. He had tried to divert the führer westward against Britain and France through the Nazi-Soviet pact of August 1939 but this apparently brilliant act of Realpolitik – which earned him Time magazine's accolade of 'Man of the Year' – boomeranged spectacularly when the Wehrmacht smashed the French army in May 1940. Although Britain still held out, Hitler was now free to turn east, years earlier than Stalin had expected.
Stalin could see what was coming but he got the timing all wrong. In 1938 Hitler had waged a war of nerves for months over Czechoslovakia, similarly in 1939 before he invaded Poland, and Stalin expected something similar in 1941. Desperately playing for time, he was determined not to give the führer any excuse to invade – hence his failure to put Soviet defences on full alert. Instead Barbarossa began without warning. When General Georgii Zhukov phoned at 4am with the news, all he heard was heavy breathing. “Comrade Stalin,” he kept asking, “do you understand?”
Sunday 22 June 1941 was the start of a brutal struggle that took the German army to the gates of Moscow and deep into the Caucasus before ending up, in1945, in the ruins of Berlin. In the process, about 28 million Soviet citizens died, roughly one-seventh of the prewar population. In the siege of Leningrad alone more Russians lost their lives than the total British and American war dead put together.
Yet Russia’s war is still poorly understood in Britain and the west. Epic battles such as Stalingrad and Berlin have become celebrated but, for the most part, the eastern front remains a sideshow to our familiar story of Dunkirk, Alamein, Normandy and Arnhem. Yet Winston Churchill had no doubt that Russia’s survival was vital for Britain in the dark days of 1941 and 1942.
Britain’s new friend
On the day Barbarossa began Churchill spoke on BBC radio, reiterating his detestation of communism but insisting that any enemy of Hitler was Britain’s friend. Or, as he put it more colourfully to an aide: “If Hitler invaded Hell, I would at least make a favourable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons.” His justification was partly moral – Hitler was “a monster of wickedness” – but he warned listeners that there was a “deeper motive” than mere “blood-lust” behind the führer’s unprovoked attack: “His invasion of Russia is no more than a prelude to an invasion of the British Isles,” which could be mounted with impunity once the Soviet state had been destroyed.
Today we assume that the Battle of Britain had been decided in 1940 but Churchill wasn’t so confident in 1941. On 1 July he told President Roosevelt in a top-secret telegram: “I am asking that everything here shall be at concert pitch for invasion from 1 September.” British intelligence reckoned that the Russians would survive only three to six weeks against the army that had sliced through France.
We now know that, although the Germans made it to the outskirts of Moscow (marked today by a monumental tank-trap), Russia survived the onslaught of 1941. In retrospect it’s tempting to assume that Hitler’s Wehrmacht would inevitably meet the same fate as Napoleon’s Grande Armée – overwhelmed by the vastness of Russia and by the country’s greatest military supremo, ‘General Winter’.
But the story of 1941 was repeated the following year. Stalin believed that the successful counterattack outside Moscow in December 1941 presaged the disintegration of the invaders. Predicting “the total defeat of the Nazi forces in 1942,” he ordered massive offensives all along the front. His Hitler-like hubris exposed and exhausted his army, laying it open to new German offensives from May 1942.
This time Hitler followed his instinct, avoiding Moscow and driving south-east into the Caucasus. Again the Red Army reeled back. Despite Stalin’s frantic order “Not One Step Back” – brutally enforced by blocking battalions – the encircled Soviet troops surrendered in droves.
Although today our eyes tend to focus on Stalingrad, what worried Churchill and Whitehall in the summer of 1942 was the possibility that the Wehrmacht would thrust on to Iraq and the Persian Gulf, threatening Britain’s oil supplies. If that happened, neutral Turkey would probably throw in its lot with Hitler, maybe allowing a link-up with Rommel’s Afrika Korps which was steamrollering towards the Suez Canal. The rampaging Germans might even join forces with the Japanese, to threaten India from the west as well as the east.
Nightmares perhaps, but all too vivid in the fevered atmosphere of that summer. In 1941 Russia’s collapse would have exposed the British Isles to the Nazi war machine; in 1942 the whole British empire seemed in jeopardy.
This was why Churchill made an epic trip to Moscow in August 1942. Stalin had been demanding a Second Front – a cross-channel attack to relieve the pressure on the Red Army. Having concluded even before the disaster of the Dieppe Raid that this would be a suicide mission, Churchill believed he had to give Stalin the bad news face-to-face – and then sweeten it with a confidential briefing about the landings planned as an alternative in Morocco and Algeria. But he and his key military adviser General Sir Alan Brooke also wanted to make their own assessment of whether the Caucasus would hold. Brooke, in particular, was far from confident, judging that the door “seemed to be wide open for the Germans to walk through” into the Middle East.
These are now the forgotten ‘what ifs’ of the Second World War because Hitler never made it across the Caucasus mountains. Instead he was sucked into the epic battle in the cauldron of Stalingrad which turned into a monumental disaster, one that could not be concealed from his people. Having trumpeted the imminent conquest of Stalingrad, the Nazi media suddenly had to admit that the German Sixth Army had surrendered. For Germans, writes historian Ian Kershaw, “Stalingrad was the greatest single blow of the war” – a psychological as well as a military turning point.
The battle of Alamein – the long-awaited victory of British empire forces over Rommel’s Afrika Korps – had been fought a couple of months earlier, in November 1942. But Stalingrad was a much greater conflict, involving nearly two million men, not 300,000, and it mattered more in the overall balance of the war. To make the point in another way: in the three years between June 1941 and June 1944, from the opening of Barbarossa until D-Day, 90 per cent of the German army’s battle casualties (killed, wounded, missing and prisoners) were inflicted by the Red Army.
So the battle for Russia was vitally important for Britain and its empire. Just how important for the outcome of the war compared with other factors remains a matter of debate among scholars. For instance, Britain might have gone under without American financial aid via Lend-Lease, which covered more than half of its balance of payments deficit during the war. On the other hand, if Britain had succumbed in 1940, the Second World War might have turned out very differently for Russia and even America. And the British and American bomber offensive, whatever its impact on German production and morale, forced Hitler to divert much of the Luftwaffe to home defence, so denying vital air cover to his armies in the east as well as the west.
The debate will go on but it is clear that Operation Barbarossa, which began so dramatically 70 years ago this month, deserves a central place in any reckoning. And that raises a larger point about the way our country marks the great anniversaries of the Second World War. As we commemorate the heroism of British veterans – in the Battle of Britain or the Battle of the Atlantic, in the deserts of north Africa or the mud of France and Germany – we should remember our allies as well. Seventy years on, we need an international perspective on this truly global war.
Professor David Reynolds's books include In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War (Penguin 2005). His film Uncle Joe, about Stalin and Churchill, will air on BBC Four in June.
Five key moments in Russia’s war
From terror in Moscow to triumph in Berlin
1) The battle for Moscow was a close-run thing. Panic gripped the capital in mid-October 1941 – and Zhukov's successful counterattack in December was only possible because Stalin knew, from agents in Tokyo, that Japan would remain neutral. This enabled him to move fresh divisions from Siberia.
2) Stalingrad is now a byword for heroism: holding the city was vital for Russia's war. But Zhukov's counterattack around the rear of Hitler's Sixth Army was equally important, not least because Stalin – hitherto a bungling meddler – had finally learnt to let his generals fight in their own way and their own time.
3) Kursk in July 1943 is rarely remembered in the west, compared with Stalingrad but this was the biggest tank battle in history. And Soviet victory marked the beginning of the Red Army's inexorable drive west. Stalingrad turned the tide; Kursk opened the floodgates.
4) Bagration was the Soviet offensive in Belarus, launched in June 1944. In the west it is overshadowed by D-Day, which took place two weeks earlier, but it was at least as important. In a month the Red Army advanced 400 miles to the edge of Warsaw.
5) The battle for berlin was a gut issue for Russians. Three army groups blasted through ferocious German resistance in three weeks. While Stalin stripped the city of its wealth, his soldiers were free to loot and rape. Berlin was payback time for all that the Soviet peoples had suffered from the Germans.
Britain and Russia’s war
Stalin had dug his own hole and Britain could do little to help
Soviet-era historians, guided by the regime, took a fiercely nationalist view of the ‘Great Patriotic War’, playing down the contribution of Russia’s allies. But it is now clear that American and British aid amounted to ten per cent of Soviet GDP in 1943 and 1944 – a not insignificant contribution.
Much of this assistance was shipped hazardously in some 40 British convoys to Russia’s Arctic ports, costing 92 merchant vessels and 18 warships. So serious was the sea and air threat from the Germans that Churchill stopped the convoys on several occasions in 1942 and 1943 – much to Soviet anger.
But Stalin never understood the importance of the Royal Navy and the merchant marine to the survival of Britain, an island empire. Similarly, he and his generals tended to underestimate the challenge of mounting a ‘Second Front’ on the beaches of France, sometimes comparing a crossing of the English Channel to vaulting over a big river such as the Dnieper.
In the summer of 1942 British opinion polls regularly indicated 60 per cent support for an invasion of Hitler’s Europe that year to aid “our gallant Russian allies”. But the public did not appreciate the weakness of the British army, which had to be invented as a major fighting force almost overnight after the fall of France. It took years to mobilise and train effective combat troops, not to mention producing supplies and equipment, especially good tanks. And the US army had started to gear up for war a year later than Britain.
So ‘Second Front Now’ was an easy slogan but very hard to deliver. Churchill was probably too wary about crossing the channel. Even in June 1944 he feared another Dunkirk. But an invasion of France in 1943 could easily have been a disaster.
Russia’s war mattered vitally to the British but there was little that Britain could do to decide the outcome. Stalin had dug his own hole in 1939-41; he then had to dig himself out of it, at a huge cost to the peoples of the Soviet Union.
Discover more learning from week one of the HistoryExtra Academy course on D-Day and the Normandy Campaign
Video lecture: The Decision, with Taylor Downing – watching time 11 mins Churchill and D-Day: did the prime minister oppose the Normandy landings? – reading time 8 mins Podcast: D-Day: everything you wanted to know – listening time 54 mins When and why did the US get involved in WW2 – reading time 9 mins
This article was first published in the June 2011 issue of BBC History Magazine
]]>Did the Soviet Union win the war?https://www.historyextra.com/membership/did-the-soviet-union-win-the-war/2008-08-09T14:01:17.000ZSince the publication of Richard Overy's book Russia's War in 1997 it has been fashionable to assert that the Soviet Union's contribution to the military defeat of Nazi Germany and her allies far outstripped that of Britain and the United States. At the time of the battle of El Alamein in October 1942 there were four German divisions in North Africa and 179 in Russia. In late 1944, there were 65 German divisions in north-west Europe opposed to 91 British and American divisions, and 235 German divisions on the Eastern Front opposed to 560 Soviet divisions. At least 70 per cent of German battle casualties occurred on the Eastern Front.
The losses Germany and her allies suffered in terms of those killed and prisoners of war are probably the best means available of estimating the comparative contribution of the various allied powers. The United States suffered 250,000 fatalities in the Second World War. The Soviet authorities claimed a death toll of 25 million, but nobody would pretend that Russia's contribution to the defeat of the Nazis was a hundred times greater than that of the US. The financial burden of the war is equally unhelpful as a way of calculating the contribution of various belligerents. Labour costs were much higher in the US than in either Russia or Japan, though in areas such as the manufacture of explosives, superior technology made output per man-hour greater in the US. Many American planes were, weight for weight, much more complex than rival aircraft, but on the other hand the famous Schmeisser sub-machine gun used by the German army had three times more components than the British Sten gun and was thus in terms of labour and tooling significantly more expensive to manufacture, and other German mass-produced weapons were similarly complex.
If, however, we use casualties inflicted by the Allies as our measure of comparative contribution, we have to consider more than German military casualties. The Germans provided the bulk of the Axis and pro-Axis forces engaged on the Eastern Front, supported by troops from Romania, Hungary, Finland and Italy. In Africa, Britain’s main opponent was initially Italy. By October 1943, the British and Americans had accumulated 546,930 Italian prisoners of war and the Russians, 19,648, though it is possible that rather more Italian soldiers had died on the Eastern Front than in Africa. If we factor in the dead and prisoners of war of Germany’s European allies we find that a total of 6,560,000 German, Italian, Romanian, Hungarian and Finnish combatants were killed or taken prisoner – 66.5 per cent on the Eastern Front.
These however are military – uniformed – casualties. The British and Americans also invested massively in operations that involved inflicting civilian casualties, forcing the Germans to devote 30 per cent of their artillery production to the manufacture of heavy anti-aircraft guns. The Soviet Air Force carried out raids on German cities on a much smaller scale – much the worst attack was on Tilsit in April 1943 when 104 civilians were killed, in comparison with the 35,000 who died in the Hamburg Raids later in the year. With civilian air raid casualties factored in, the Soviet contribution to German casualties falls to 61 per cent.
The war in the Far East raises new problems of comparability. The difficulties of terrain, climate and distance made the Burma and Pacific campaigns an astonishing – and expensive – logistic achievement, but only three campaigns, all of them in 1945, involved Japanese armies of more than 100,000. These were Okinawa, Luzon and, the largest of all, the defence of Manchuria against the sudden onslaught of the Russians in August 1945, in which 84,000 people died and 590,000 prisoners of war were taken. The Russian offensive opened three days after the A-bomb destroyed Hiroshima and the Japanese army in Manchuria knew that the war was lost.
Prior to August 1945 only a handful of Japanese soldiers had ever surrendered to the Allies. It would seem reasonable to place the troops in Manchuria who surrendered to the Russians in the same category as the troops in Malaya and the Philippines who surrendered later according to the terms of the capitulation of the Japanese government. Japan lost 1,134,000 military personnel in the course of fighting with British Empire and US forces, and 500,000 civilians were killed in the bombing of Japanese cities. This makes the toll, in fatalities and prisoners of war inflicted on the enemy, east and west, about equal for the western Allies and for Russia.
This is very much a crude round-figure calculation, taking no account of the fact that the Americans had to travel much further from their borders to engage the enemy. There is, however, one aspect of the logistics of the war that cannot be overlooked. It would become impossibly complicated if we attempted to factor in the relative cost of, say, an American-manufactured tank compared to a Russian-manufactured tank, but some account has to be taken of the fact that a great deal of equipment used by the Soviet armed forces would not have been available if the British and Americans had not, at vast expense, supplied it to them.
Soviet pilots in US planes
Britain and America between them provided 12 per cent of the Soviet armed forces’ aircraft and nine per cent of their tanks. Both the second and third highestscoring Soviet fighter aces shot down most of their victims while piloting American-built Bell P-39 fighters. The Americans also supplied most of the aluminium the Russians needed to build their own aircraft and a large proportion of the boots and cloth for uniforms needed to dress their soldiers. Moreover, the Americans supplied four-fifths of the trucks the Red Army needed for its advance all the way to Berlin.
The transportation of this material occasioned the loss of 558,961 tons of western merchant shipping, mostly on the Arctic run to Murmansk, which involved the Royal Navy in battles that were on a much larger scale than any fought by the Soviet navy. Much of the supply from the United States was via ports in the Persian Gulf, half way round the world from the American coast. Between October 1943 and September 1944 there were 201 sailings for Russia from American ports in comparison with 313 sailings for the Pacific theatre, which was only half the distance from Los Angeles, as was the Persian Gulf. At least one sixth of the material resources expended by Soviet Russia in resisting Germany can be credited to British and American supplies, and bearing in mind the effort involved in bringing these supplies to Soviet ports it seems not unreasonable to make a reduction of one sixth to the Russian side of the equation. The Soviet contribution to defeating Germany and her European allies was about equal to that of Britain and the United States: her contribution to the defeat of Germany and her allies, including Japan, was more like 46 per cent of the total Allied effort.
One final point. There was nothing in Russia’s war effort comparable to the Battle of the Atlantic, or to the raids by over 1,000 four-engined bombers carried out by both the RAF and the USAAF in 1945, but the battle of Kursk is recognised as the greatest tank battle in history. Most of the tanks destroyed were Russian ones, whereas German losses were scarcely greater than at the Battle of El Alamein. Counting Italian armour in the latter battle, more Axis tanks were lost at El Alamein than at Kursk.
AD Harvey is the author of Body Politic: Political Metaphor and Political Violence (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007)
Figures for casualties are mainly from the Encyclopedia Americana, though see also Das Heer 1933–1945: Entwicklung Des Organisatorischen Aufbaues by Burkhart Müller-Hillebrand (Frankfurt, 1969) and The National Archives, (Kew, HO 213/1881).
For statistics for Lend-Lease supply and Soviet domestic production see Collision of Empires: Britain in Three World Wars 1793–1945 by AD Harvey (London, 1994), and Soviet Planning in Peace and War 1938–1945 by Mark Harrison (Cambridge, 1985)
A question of timing
Richard Overy argues that the statistics alone do not convey the importance of the Soviet armed forces in decisive moments of the war
It may be fashionable now to argue that the Soviet Union’s contribution to the defeat of Germany in the Second World War ‘far outstripped’ that of the other major Allied powers. However it is unlikely that any serious historian of the Second World War would ignore the substantial contribution made by all three – the Soviet Union, the United States and the British Commonwealth and Empire – to the defeat of Germany and her allies and Axis partners. Nonetheless, the Soviet contribution is not to be lightly set aside.
First it is well to be clear about what is being compared. The American war effort was divided of necessity between Europe and the Pacific. Defeat of Japan was costly and the cost was borne almost entirely by the forces of the United States, assisted by British, Indian and Australasian contingents. The Soviet Union made virtually no contribution to this sector of the war save a brief and belated assault on Manchuria in the last week of the Pacific War. The British war effort was devoted for much of the first three years of the war to defeating Italy in East and North Africa and the Mediterranean naval war. Again it is common knowledge that the Soviet Union contributed nothing to the defeat of Hitler’s Italian partner.
In both these important theatres the western Allies’ role was entirely their own, and no one would deny that victory here was also a necessity, but it did mean inevitably that the western powers had to divide their effort.
It is on the defeat of Germany and her smaller allies and co-belligerents (Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, Finland) that the argument about the Soviet contribution is based. For the Soviet Union this was, for obvious geopolitical reasons, the only war they could fight, a straight contest with the bulk of the German armed forces on land, by far the largest element of German mobilised manpower.
There are various ways in which the relative contribution of the three Allies might be measured, but mere statistics tell little. A comparison of losses inflicted on Germany by the three major Allies is all but meaningless as a measurement because it takes no account of change through time or the special circumstances in which, for example, millions of German POWs entered American and British captivity in the last months of the war. Losses say little about battle performance, fighting power and strategic insight. Indeed anyone ignorant of the outcome of the war might view Soviet losses (estimated at 27 million dead) as an indication that the Soviet Union must have lost the war.
The critical issue is surely what might have happened in 1941–2 if the Soviet Union, for all the crudity of its war-making and the terrible sacrifice of soldiers and equipment through tactical ineptitude, had decided – as surely any other state would have done – to give up the fight or had been decisively beaten in the field. Under these circumstances it is difficult to see how Britain and the United States could possibly have created a large enough force to reconquer Europe against a German army with perhaps 200 or more divisions around the European perimeter. Bombing would have done something but by then German arms production would have been diverted to large-scale air and submarine production to keep the west at bay.
Soviet strategy
The argument is not about body counts but about the capacity of the Soviet Union to reform its armed forces, expand its military production and rethink its operational strategy in 1942. This laid the foundation for eventual victory and no juggling with the figures will disguise the fact that the great bulk of German armed forces were allocated to the task of first conquering the Soviet Union and then, when the plan went wrong, keeping it at bay. During this crucial period the British and American direct contribution was very small.
No one would deny that Lend-Lease was important (its significance is positively assessed in Russia's War) but this got going only in 1943; Alamein tied down a tiny German force (two-thirds were Italian in the battle); bombing in 1942 had scarcely begun to do what it achieved by 1944–5. Later in the war US and British contributions became larger, and the Soviet Union could not have defeated Germany on its own, as Stalin once claimed to Marshal Zhukov, but the critical battles from Stalingrad to Operation Bagration, in 1944, made the task for the western Allies much easier. Even so Normandy was no walkover, against a much smaller force than anything on the Eastern Front.
Number-crunching tells us interesting things about the war effort, but like a comparison of economic resources, it does not tell us enough. The Soviet contribution to the defeat of the Axis powers as a whole was clearly more modest; but the contribution made in the critical turning-point year of 1942 to holding Germany’s advance and inflicting the first major defeats was a decisive element in the victory over Hitler’s huge armed forces.
Richard Overy is a professor of history at Exeter University. He is author of Why the Allies Won (Cape, 2007)
This article was first published in the August 2008 edition of BBC History Magazine
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