157

[introduction.]

The concept of "decisive battles" was originated in the welter of propaganda activities at the U.S. Defense Department at the close of the war.

The Roots of the Concept

p In 1945 the U.S. Defense Department brought out A Brief History of World War II containing many fair and objective assessments which later vanished from official American publications. However, even this book showed a marked tendency towards distortion of facts. For example, its authors attempted to equate the significance of the battle off the island of Midway, or the Anglo-American landing in North Africa with that of the Battle of Stalingrad. "The news [of the victory off the island of Midway-Author] was the best to reach Americans in 1942 and was to be equaled only by the British and American landings in North Africa and the Russian victory at Stalingrad.”  [157•1 

p In 1948, the British military historian and theoretician General Fuller went as far as to compare the Nazi defeat at Stalingrad with the victory of Anglo-American troops in Tunisia in May 1943. Summing up the results of the battle of Stalingrad he wrote: "...The initiative finally passed from the Germans to the Russians, as three months later it passed into Anglo-American hands at the Battle of Tunis; for the surrender of von Arnim’s army in the Cape Bon Peninsula was the Stalingrad of North Africa.”  [157•2  The same idea was pushed by the beaten Nazi generals. "The drama in Africa and at Stalingrad,” they said, "served as a stern warning that the German people had reached the turning point of their history.”  [157•3 

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p The number of "decisive battles" was rising steadily. Midway, Guadalcanal, til Alamein, Tunis, Morocco, Stalingrad and the end of the fifth phase of the Battle of the Atlantic reversed the course of the Second World War, wrote the West German historians Hans-Adolf Jacobsen, and Hans Dolinger.  [158•1  Brigadier General Peter Young proceeds from the chronological principle; "Truly the tide had turned in those November days of 1942 when Montgomery emerged victorious from the field of El Alamein; when Eisenhower’s host set foot on the shores of North Africa; and when, ifter an epic defence, the Russians encircled their besiegers on the banks of the Volga.”  [158•2 

p In the main, the concept of "decisive battles" took shape in the mid-1960s, although it was quite clear even earlier that it was aimed at giving credit for the final victory to the battles fought and won by the Anglo-American allies and to the theatres where their troops were active. In other words, the authors of this concept tried to convince the reader that the decisive contribution to the defeat of the fascist-militarist bloc was made by Britain and the United States, ind not by the Soviet Union.

p Some historians put it even more bluntly, saying that their aim was to prove the crucial role of the United States in the Second World War. In his World War II Dupuy writes that he "has attempted to record the entire conflict hoping to orient the reader that he will be familiar with the outline of the vast picture while at the same time appreciating the decisive part played by the United States in the free world’s victory over the powers of totalitarianism"  [158•3  The first chapter in this book is entitled "Japan Attacks Pearl Harbor"’ as if to assign to the United States the role of "architect of victory”, which it was not in fact to fulfill.

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p Battles Lost and Won, written in the 1960s by Hanson Baldwin, military editor of The New York"Times, is conspicuous among the many books written on the subject. It describes eleven episodes of the war vastly varying in their importance: the Polish campaign of 1939, the Battle of Britain, the landing on the Island of Crete, the fighting for Corregidor, the Battle of Stalingrad, the fighting for the Tarawa Atoll, the landings in Sicily and Normandy, the sea battle in Leyte Gulf, the battles of the Ardennes and Okinawa.  [159•1 

p Western authors are not unanimous on the number of decisive battles, some counting up to twenty, others mentioning only five. But whatever the number, all of them attach particular importance to the theatres in which the armed forces of the United States and Britain took part. It is easy to see that Baldwin and those who share his views say nothing about the battles of Moscow and Kursk, and other important battles on the SovietGerman front. A notable exception is the Battle of Stalingrad which they consider crucial.

Of the battles which reversed the course of the war those authors most often mention three fought on land-at Stalingrad, at El Alamein and Tunis, md two sea battles: off the island of Midway and on the island of Guadalcanal.

No Scientific Basis

p The said battles stand very far apart in regard to the scale and intensity of the lighting and, what is particularly important, their military and political impact. In their in-depth study of this problem Soviet historians put the spotlight on the following facts.

p At El Alamein in 1942, the British were confronted by four German and eight Italian divisions totalling 160 80,000 men. In the course of the successful British offensive the backbone of the joint German-Italian force avoided a debacle. By contrast the Nazi force at Stalingrad was more than one million strong. In the period between November 19, 1942 and February 2, 1943 alone, when the Soviet troops carried out their sweeping counteroffensive at Stalingrad, more than 300,000 German troops (thirty-two divisions and three brigades of Nazi Germany and her satellites) were completely destroyed and sixteen divisions were partially destroyed. The enemy lost more than 800,000 troops.  [160•1 

p The Battle of Stalingrad played the key role in turning the tide of the war and was followed up by many other successful operations. The battle of El Alamein did not and could not have had that impact on the entire course of the war.  [160•2 

p The losses of the Italo-German troops in Tunisia (May 1943) are often greatly exaggerated in the Western literature. Most of the Western authors put them at 250,000, and some American historians put them even higher. Robert Beitzell, for instance, contends that as many as 275,000 men surrendered at Tunis. Trying at the same time to minimise the role of the Battle of Stalingrad he says: "Psychologically and militarily, Stalingrad was the greater Allied victory. In terms of strategy and wastage of Axis resources, Tunis was more immediately productive.”  [160•3 

p Several years ago Basil H. Liddell Hart wrote that the actual number of troops taken prisoner (mostly emaciated and demoralised Italian soldiers) was much smaller. He quotes an operational report of Army Group Afrika dispatched to Rome on May 2, which said that prior to the fiercest fighting in this sector of the front the strength of the enemy force varied between 170,000 and 161 180,000.  [161•1  Another British historian, AJ.P. Taylor, sheds additional light on this issue when he writes: "The Allies took some 130,000 prisoners who swelled in postwar accounts to a quarter of a million.”  [161•2 

p Almost all Western historians refer to the landing of American Marines on the island of Guadalcanal in August 1942 as the start of the counter-offensive in the Pacific.  [161•3  This conclusion can hardly be justified, for the operation was in fact a tactical offensive and had a strategically defensive aim to reduce Japan’s military threat to Australia. And there is certainly no grounds for calling the fighting for Guadalcanal a "Stalingrad of the Pacific”, as Bauer does in his book.  [161•4 

p The battle off Midway on June 4-6, 1942, was one of the biggest sea engagements of the Second World War. In it a large Japanese naval force which struck the U.S. naval base on the island was defeated and made to withdraw. The Japanese lost four aircraft carriers, one heavy cruiser, and 332 aircraft (most of them sunk together with the aircraft carriers); the Americans lost one aircraft carrier, one destroyer and 150 aircraft.

p Despite her heavy losses, the Battle of Midway did not deprive Japan of her military superiority in the Pacific and in fact did not have a marked effect on the progress of the Second World War.  [161•5 

p It is noteworthy that American historians, including those in government service, took a more objective view of the Battle of Midway at the time, saving that "the 162 naval war in the Pacific changed from passive defensive to active defense”.  [162•1 

p The criteria that Western historians apply for judging the importance of battles in secondary theatres cannot be called scientific. For example, Hanson Baldwin has put the battle for Tarawa Atoll in the Pacific at the end of 1943 into the category of "decisive battles”. RearAdmiral S.E. Morison even called it "the seed b<ed of victory in 1945".  [162•2  But the scale of the military operations and the results achieved give no reason for such a sweeping conclusion, for the 12,000-strong American landing party broke the resistance of a small Japanese garrison, and that only after long and bitter fighting.

p It should be noted that the concept of "decisive battles" is shared by far from all Western historians. Some of the less biased researchers attach primary importance to the fighting on the Soviet-German front. Looking back on the Battle of Stalingrad Henry Michel (France) writes that "Soviet historians are quite right when they regard this brilliant success of the Red Army as the decisive victory which turned the tide of the Second World war".  [162•3  A similar thought about the significance of the Battle of Stalingrad was voiced by H. Heiss at an international seminar devoted to the fortieth anniversary of this great event (held in West Berlin in June 1982). AJ.P. Taylor writes: "The fig-Ming strength of the German army was and always remained on the Eastern front.”  [162•4 

Though few and far between, fair and objective assessments do crop up in the works of American historians, too. In an article published in The American Historical Review, Louis Morton writes: "Fought quite sepaiutely from the war in the West, the Soviet-German war was by all odds the biggest, bloodiest, most decisive theatre 163 of World War II, dwarfing the Allied effort in the West and involving vast armies along a front stretching over a thousand miles.”  [163•1  Such assessments undoubtedly help get a more correct and objective view of the size and nature of the American contribution to the victory over the aggressors.

Unavoidable Contradictions

p Over the past ten years the concept of "decisive battles" has undergone some changes.

p On the one hand, some of the Western historians have renounced the old contention that only the Battle of Stalingrad was of crucial significance to the outcome of the Second World War as a whole. The prevalent view today is that the battles of Moscow and Kursk were also crucial to the victory. In his book, The Crucial Years 1939-194 7, Hanson Baldwin has reversed his previous stance and writes that "the Battle of Moscow undoubtedly was a turning point in World War II-more so than Stalingrad".  [163•2  "The German invasion of Russia and the greatest land battle in the history of warfare that followed produced global political, psychological, and military results,"  [163•3  he writes, summing up the situation at the end of 1941.

p On the other hand, attempts are being made to put a more attractive complexion on the concept of decisive battles and make it sound more credible.

p A good illustration of this point is the host of publications brought out in the 1970s on the crucial battles of the Second World War. These include Henry Maule’s study The Great Battles of World War II  [163•4  and the book 164 Decisive Battles of the 20th Century  [164•1  edited by N. Frankland and C. Dowling. Maule singles out thirteen battles (Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain, Keren, Cyrenaica, the Battle of Moscow, Midway, Guadalcanal, El Alamein, the Battle of Stalingrad, Ancio, Imphal, Normandy, Rangoon); Frankland and Dowling name 14 (the battles of the Atlantic, of Britain, France, the Battle of Moscow, Pearl Harbor, Singapore, Midway, El Alamein, the Battle of Stalingrad, the Battle of Kursk, Schweinfurt, Imphal-Kohima, Normandy, Leyte). As we see, the battles of Moscow, Stalingrad and Kursk, also the Battle of Britain, the Allied landing in Normandy are all bracketed with operations of much lesser significance (near Keren in Eritrea, in Cyrenaica, etc.).

p Maule gives full credit for the victory of the Soviet troops near Moscow to Britain. He writes: "Had Hitler not committed Germany to fighting on two fronts,... Moscow must have fallen.”  [164•2  Harrison Salisbury, who as co-author of Decisive Battles penned the section on the Battle of Moscow, though given to inventions (that the exact strength of the Soviet forces in the offensive was not known, or that Stalin was rumoured to have fled Moscow), dismisses as untrue the story about the cold weather being the cause of the Nazi defeat at Moscow. "...H December Hitler had abandoned his offensive, blaming the severe winter weather. What was happening, however, was not a weather blitz. It was a fastmoving Soviet offensive which for the first time since Hitler had begun his career was compelling the Wehrmacht to reel back. "  [164•3 

p Hanson Baldwin, by contrast, is trying, just as the Hitler generals did before him, to interpret the rout of the Nazi troops as solely due to natural conditions, "There was always one more river to cross; the endless horizon 165 stretched on and on. The land, the people, the climate and the environment were psychologically oppressive to men from Western Europe.... The cold had been, perhaps, the greatest enemy of all....”  [165•1  The same slant cuts across the book by the British historian’David Irving.  [165•2  But the very fact that Salisbury and Baldwin, known as experts on the Soviet-German front developments, give almost at the same time two distinctly different reasons for the defeat of the Nazi troops at Moscow testifies to the level of American research on the issue and makes it difficult for the reader to find out the truth.

p The attempt first made by N. Frankland to make out the American bombing raid on the ball-bearing plant at Schweinfurt on October 14, 1943, as one of the decisive battles of the Second World War, merits special attention. He writes about the American losses in that raid: out of the 291 bombers 60 aircraft did not return to base, 120 were damaged. According to Frankland, this air raid played a decisive role for two reasons: first, the Americans picked out an objective of great importance to the German war effort; second, the heavy losses of the American air force in that raid prompted radical change in the bombing tactics which enabled the Allies to reduce their losses in the future, increased the effectiveness of their air offensive which exposed Germany "to the threat of catastrophic destruction".  [165•3 

p It must be admitted that some Western historians maintain a more level-headed approach on the question of bombing attacks. Liddell Hart writes: "Until 1944 the strategic air offensive had fallen far short of the claims made for it, as an alternative to land invasion, and its effects had been greatly overestimated. The indiscriminate bombing of cities had not seriously diminished munitions production, while failing to break the will of the opposing peoples and compel them to surrender, as 166 expected.”  [166•1  The arguments offered by Taylor sound still more cogent: "In 1942, the British dropped 48,000 tons of bombs, and the Germans produced 36,804 weapons of war (heavy guns, tanks and aircraft). In 1943, the British and Americans dropped 207,600 tons of bombs; the Germans produced 71,693 weapons of war. In 1944, the British and Americans dropped 915,000 tons; the Germans produced 105,258 weapons of war.”  [166•2  Munitions production in Germany began to decline in the second half of 1944 primarily as the result of the Soviet army advance which deprived the Third Reich of some of its key sources of raw materials.

p The attempts to update the concept of decisive battles only proves its insolvency. For example, none of the modernised versions of this concept contain so much as a reference to the Byelorussian offensive of the Soviet armed forces (June 23-August 29, 1944) which was much more massive than all the major operations of the Western Allies in the land theatres of the war and is unmatched in the history of any other country.

p The aim of the operation (codenamed Bagration) was to rout the Army Group Centre, to free Byelorussia and to support the actions of the Western Allies in Normandy as part of Allied cooperation against the Nazi bloc.

p On June 6, 1944, Stalin wrote to Churchill: "The summer offensive of the Soviet troops, to be launched in keeping with the agreement reached at the Tehran Conference, will begin in mid-June in one of the vital sectors of the front.... Between late June and the end of July the operations will turn into a general offensive of the Soviet troops.”  [166•3 

p When the Soviet army mounted the offensive in Byelorussia the Nazis fielded sixty-three divisions and three brigades, with a total of 1,200,000 troops, more than 9,500 guns and mortars, 900 tanks and assault guns, about 1,350 aircraft. The enemy defence lines were from 167 250 to 270 km deep, complete with a far-flung system of field fortifications and natural frontiers. The operation was carried out by four Fronts, which included nineteen field armies and two tank armies (166 divisions), also a number of other units and formations. Its total strength was 2,400,000 men, 36,000 guns and mortars, 5,200 tanks and self-propelled guns, and more than 5,000 aircraft. Acting in close cooperation with the Soviet troops were partisans. Actions of the Fronts were coordinated by GHQ Supreme Command representatives Marshal Zhukov and Marshal Vassilevsky.

p Taking part in this gigantic battle on both sides were 3,600,000 troops (more than 250 equivalent divisions) armed with 47,000 guns and mortars, more than 6,000 tanks, about 6,500 aircraft. Upon completion of the operation the Soviet troops advanced 550-600 km, drove the enemy out of Byelorussia, entered Poland and reached the suburbs of Warsaw. Army Group Centre was routed: 17 divisions were smashed and others were reduced to half of their strength. About 2,000 enemy aircraft and vast amounts of other ammunition were destroyed.

p The success of Operation Bagration drastically changed the strategic situation in Europe, the decisive theatre of the war. The odds were now heavily against the Axis. The rout of the largest concentration of Nazi troops disorganised the Wehrmacht defences over the entire Soviet-German front, inflicted irreplaceable losses in personnel (up to 500,000 men), and brought nearer the day when the Soviet armed forces would break through to the vital centres of Germany, deep into the Balkans and in the direction of Czechoslovakia. The time was not far off when Germany would dispatch to the SovietGerman front the last of its reserves which could otherwise have been used against the Allies in Normandy.

p The fascist bloc found itself in the clutches of a severe political crisis. The resistance movement became much stronger than before in the Nazi-occupied countries which the Soviet Union was approaching or had already set foot ia In August-September 1944, the fascist regimes were overthrown in Romania and Bulgaria. The two countries 168 lofi immediately took the side of the anti-Hitler coalition, which meant further curtailment of raw material supplies to the war-devastated German economy. The German political scene was one of tension, which climaxed in an attempt on Hitler’s life on July 20, 1944. The growing international prestige of the Soviet Union and the Soviet Army gave inspiration to all those who were fighting against the fascist invaders, and further eroded the moral and political fibre of the Axis.

p The Byelorussian operation is occasionally mentioned in the Western literature. Earl Ziemke, for example, devotes a whole chapter to it in his book. He speaks about the moral crisis of the Wehrmacht and concludes that "once he [the German soldier] could not even imagine the ultimate disaster-now he expected it"  [168•1  The British historian Alan Reid writes that the rout of Army Group Centre in the Byelorussian operation removed "forever the last vague hope of ever stemming the Russian tide".  [168•2  Nevertheless these two and other bourgeois authors are clearly’disinclined to give a fair assessment of the Byelorussian operation and its place in the Second World War. It may be recalled that the Soviet armed forces carried out more than 50 strategic operations by groups of Fronts, the Byelorussian operation being one of them.

Soviet historians give credit to the sizable contribution made by the United States, Britain and other Western Allies to the victory over the aggressors. In spite of the vast difference in the social systems of the USSR and the capitalist members of the anti-Hitler coalition, they could successfully work together in the struggle against the common enemy, look for and find mutually acceptable solutions on many disputed questions. British airmen, American seamen, French tankmen, other Allied forces fought courageously in the sky over the English Channel, at Bir Hakeim, Midway, El Alamein, in the waters of the Atlantic and in the Ardennes. The working people of the 169 capitalist countries, members of the anti-Hitler coalition, and of their colonies helped to achieve an overwhelming superiority over the fascist bloc in the military and economic spheres. People of different nationalities, political views and persuasions were working in war industries and fighting on the battlefield, forging the grand victory. However, it so happened that the Soviet Union, the Soviet people and their armed forces made the decisive contribution to the defeat of the aggressors, as was recognised by many wartime political and military leaders in the West, by many of those who did the actual fighting and by a number of Western historians. "None can gainsay the gigantic effort by Soviet society nor gloss over the grievous hurts inflicted upon it, that numbing catalogue of bestiality, devastation, hardship and illumitable private griefs,” writes J. Erickson.  [169•1  This fact has been reaffirmed in comprehensive studies and has been borne out by a great number of documents to the satisfaction of any unprejudiced reader. The objective assessment of the decisive contribution of the USSR to the victory over the aggressors is of overriding importance for the correct understanding of the results and lessons of the war, for the conclusions that we still draw from its history.