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History Vault. Recommended for you. Small aircraft carriers began to accompany allied convoys, using spotter planes to locate the German submarines, which had to spend most of their time on the surface in order to move with any reasonable speed and locate the enemy's ships.
By May the allies were building more ship tonnage than the Germans were sinking, while one U-boat was being sunk by allied warships and planes on average every day. The battle of the Atlantic was over. The most dramatic and most significant reversal of German fortunes came, however, on the eastern front.
The sheer scale of the conflict between the Wehrmacht and the Red Army dwarfed anything seen anywhere else during the second world war. From 22 June , the day of the German invasion, there was never a point at which less than two-thirds of the German armed forces were engaged on the eastern front. Deaths on the eastern front numbered more than in all the other theatres of war put together, including the Pacific. Hitler had expected the Soviet Union, which he regarded as an unstable state, ruled by a clique of "Jewish Bolsheviks" a bizarre idea, given the fact that Stalin himself was an antisemite , exploiting a vast mass of racially inferior and disorganised peasants, to crumble as soon as it was attacked.
But it did not. On the contrary, Stalin's patriotic appeals to his people helped rally them to fight in the "great patriotic war", spurred on by horror at the murderous brutality of the German occupation. More than three million Soviet prisoners of war were deliberately left to die of starvation and disease in makeshift camps.
Civilians were drafted into forced labour, villages were burned to the ground, towns reduced to rubble. More than one million people died in the siege of Leningrad; but it did not fall.
Soviet reserves of manpower and resources were seemingly inexhaustible. In a vast effort, major arms and munitions factories had been dismantled and transported to safety east of the Urals. Here they began to pour out increasing quantities of military hardware, including the terrifying "Stalin organ", the Katyusha rocket-launcher.
In the longer run, the Germans were unable to match any of this; even if some of their hardware, notably the Tiger and Panther tanks, was better than anything the Russians could produce, they simply could not get them off the production lines in sufficient quantities to make a decisive difference.
Already in December , Japan's entry into the war, and its consequent preoccupation with campaigns in the Pacific, allowed Stalin to move large quantities of men and equipment to the west, where they brought the German advance to a halt before Moscow.
Unprepared for a winter war, poorly clad, and exhausted from months of rapid advance and bitter fighting, the German forces had to abandon the idea of taking the Russian capital.
A whole string of generals succumbed to heart attacks or nervous exhaustion, and were replaced; Hitler himself took over as commander-in-chief of the army.
Hitler had already weakened the thrust towards Moscow by diverting forces to take the grainfields of the Ukraine and push on to the Crimea. For much of , this tactic seemed to be succeeding. German forces took the Crimea and advanced towards the oilfields of the Caucasus. Here again, acquiring new supplies of fuel to replenish Germany's dwindling stocks was the imperative.
But Soviet generals had begun to learn how to co-ordinate tanks, infantry and air power and to avoid encirclement by tactical withdrawals. German losses mounted. The German forces were already dangerously short of reserves and supplies when they reached the city of Stalingrad on the river Volga, in August Three months later, they had still not taken the city.
Stalingrad became the object of a titanic struggle between the Germans and the Soviets, less because of its strategic importance than because of its name. When the Germans moved their best troops into the city, leaving the rear to be guarded by weaker Romanian and Italian forces, the Soviet generals saw their chance, broke through the rearguard and surrounded the besieging forces.
Short of fuel and ammunition, the Germans under General Paulus were unable to break out. As one airfield after another was captured by the Red Army, supplies ran out and the German troops began to starve to death. On 31 January , refusing the invitation to commit suicide that came with Hitler's gift of a field marshal's baton, Paulus surrendered.
Some , German and allied troops were captured; more than , had been killed. It was the turning point of the war. From this moment on, the German armies were more or less continuously in retreat on the eastern front. The Red Army around Stalingrad was threatening to cut off the German forces in the Caucasus, so they were forced to withdraw, abandoning their attempt to secure the region's oil reserves.
In early July came the last great German counter-attack, at Kursk. This was the greatest land battle in history, involving more than four million troops, 13, tanks and self-propelled guns, and 12, combat aircraft. Warned of the attack in advance, the Red Army had prepared defences in depth, which the Germans only managed partially to penetrate.
A tragi-comic incident happened when an advancing Soviet tank force fell into its own side's defensive ditches; nearly tanks were wrecked, or destroyed by the incredulous Waffen-SS forces waiting for them on the other side.
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