Death on the Don: The Destruction of Germany's Allies on the Eastern Front 1941 - 1944 by Jonathan Trigg | eBook

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Death of the Don

The Destruction of Germany's Allies on the Eastern Front, 1941-44

By Jonathan Trigg

The History Press

CHAPTER 1

The politics of the Axis

The aftermath of the First World War – winners and losers

As with so much to do with the Second World War, the genesis of Hitler's 'unlikely alliance' on the Don in 1942 lay in the maelstrom of the First World War. Caught up on both sides of that horrendous conflict, the countries that would later become the Axis all suffered terribly, and each in its own way ended up a loser. For the Kingdom of Hungary, 1914 saw it as a co-partner in that gravity-defying relic of the Middle Ages, the Austro-Hungarian Habsburg Empire. Falling by accident into a war it was totally unprepared for, Hungary firstly lost hundreds of thousands of men on the battlefields of the East and was then utterly humiliated by the victors' justice of the Treaty of Trianon, Hungary's equivalent of the badly mishandled Treaty of Versailles that dealt with Imperial Germany (and the specifically Hungarian successor to the 1919 Treaty of St Germain, which initially broke up the Empire and created an independent Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland and Yugoslavia).

Signed on 4 June 1920, the Trianon Treaty was as much a recipe for future conflict as Versailles and St Germain had been. The warlike Magyars were stripped of their martial tradition. Their army was capped at a miniscule 35,000 men; no aircraft, tanks or heavy artillery were allowed; and their new Regent, Miklos Horthy, became an admiral without a fleet as Hungary's access to the Adriatic Sea disappeared. This 'new army', the Honved (Home Army), now defended a nation shorn of an astonishing two-thirds of its former people and the lands on which they lived. Under the Habsburgs, different ethnicities moved, merged and intermingled across the rolling plains of the Danube basin and the adjoining territories, so it was impossible for the cartographers of Trianon to separate the now-independent nationalities cleanly. The result was the worst of all outcomes. Ancient lands, long considered parts of historical Hungary, were parcelled out to her neighbours: 21,000 square miles of Transylvania went to the Kingdom of Romania, along with its population of 1.7 million ethnic Magyars, and 600,000 others went with the province of Ruthenia to the newly created state of Czechoslovakia. In all, Trianon resulted in more than 2.5 million Magyars living outside their homeland's new, truncated borders. The inevitable result was a population and a government simmering with resentment and determined to take back what they had lost no matter the cost. Their chance would come with the rise of Nazi Germany and its willingness to act as a power broker in the region, but Berlin's help would come with a price.

In 1914, surrounded as she was by the Habsburgs and their allies, the Bulgars, the Romanians played safe and stayed neutral. However, Romania was eventually persuaded to join the Allies by the seeming success of Tsarist Russia's Brusilov Offensives against the Austro-Hungarians in 1916 and presumptively declared war on the Central Powers of Germany and Austro-Hungary on 27 August 1916. Romania mobilised 750,000 men and sent the twenty-three divisions of her army into Hungarian Transylvania, expecting a quick and easy victory against a chastened enemy. Badly equipped and poorly led, they soon faced the might of no fewer than four German, Austrian and Bulgarian armies and were utterly routed. In just over four months, Bucharest had fallen, along with most of the rest of the country, as the remnants of the army fell back into Russia to escape annihilation. Saved by Germany's defeat and the Armistice, Romania counted the cost of victory – some 336,000 men killed and 120,000 wounded. As an ally of the victorious Allied powers, that blood price paid for the birth of Romania Mare (Greater Romania) as the country almost doubled in size overnight with Hungary's losses becoming Romania's gains. Vast new territories were added to Romania's Moldavian and Wallachian heartlands; Transylvania and its 5.5 million people (60 per cent of whom were in fact ethnic Romanians) came over, plus the former Imperial Russian provinces of Bessarabia and Bukovina (again mostly populated by Romanians) and, lastly, the ex-Bulgarian Dobruja region. Romania, now with a population 18 million strong, had become the regional power in the Balkans as it dwarfed its neighbours in Hungary and Bulgaria. As heady as this outcome was for Bucharest, it did not bring peace and prosperity, but instead fostered deep-seated hatreds with those same states that would plague Romania for the next twenty years or more and contributed in no small way to the disaster its armed forces suffered on the Don in 1942/43.

The United Kingdom of Italy, not even a half century old at the outbreak of the First World War, was initially a member of the Central Powers alliance alongside Germany and Austria-Hungary but very wisely decided to stay out of the conflict in 1914 as it snowballed out from the Balkans and engulfed most of Europe and Russia. Unfortunately for Italy, this outburst of political sanity did not last long, and in May 1915 Italy was persuaded by the Allies to abandon her neutrality and attack Austria-Hungary in return for the promise of future territorial gain once the war was won. The specific carrot that was dangled in front of Rome's nose was a juicy swathe of Austrian imperial provinces on Italy's northern border, starting with Trentino and Fiume and sweeping down Dalmatia on the eastern side of the Adriatic. In the same spirit of flag-waving nationalism that had burst forth across Great Britain, France, Germany and the other combatants the previous year, the recruiting offices in Italy were swamped as the country called up its youth to the colours. In all, some 5.6 million men would be mobilised – as it turned out, more than one million more than it managed to sign up in the Second World War. With disturbing echoes of what would happen some twenty-five years later, poorly trained, ill-equipped and often badly led Italian soldiers advanced bravely towards their enemy and were cut to pieces. In what would go down in Italian folklore as Il Guerra Bianca (The White War) – given that it was often fought in the snow among white limestone crags – a staggering 689,000 Italian soldiers were killed and 1 million more wounded at Caporetto and in other disastrous battles against the Austro-Hungarians. Winners though they were officially, the war left the nation traumatised and suffering a distinct sense of injustice as the victory of 1918 did not deliver all that was promised. The Trentino was indeed handed over, along with some other minor adjoining territories, but crucially, the major city and port of Fiume and the Dalmation coast were not. Instead, they went to the brand-new Kingdom of the South Slavs: Yugoslavia.

For Nazi Germany's other Axis allies of the early 1940s, the First World War was a mixed blessing. Bulgaria ended up on the wrong side and lost its province of Dobruja to Greater Romania and its Aegean coastline to Greece, leaving it landlocked and staring at Bucharest and Athens, especially, with ill-disguised loathing. Monarchist Spain stayed neutral throughout, and Finland (an Imperial Russian province beforehand) managed to break away from the disintegration of the Tsars and gain its independence after a nasty little war with the newly born Communist Russia. The Slovaks, ever restless under Habsburg rule, managed to escape that yoke only to become second-class citizens in a new union with their Czech neighbours; Prague and Bratislava were not natural bedfellows. The Croats, too, although one of the Kaisertreu (most loyal) peoples in the Austrian Empire, gained their freedom from the Habsburgs only to mirror the Slovaks in being compulsorily tied into a new country – the Serb-dominated Yugoslavia in their case – where they were very much the junior partner and made to feel it.

Politics in the inter-war years

The response of the Croats, and to a lesser degree the Slovaks, to their new status was a surge in nationalist sentiment that bordered on ethnic bigotry and political extremism. The ethnic Croat and Bosnian-born lawyer Anté Pavelic founded the ultra-nationalist Ustase – the Croatian Revolutionary Movement – as a radical terrorist organisation committed to winning Croatian freedom through a campaign of bombings and assassinations, the most infamous of which was the murder of the Yugoslav king, the Serbian Alexander I, in Marseilles in 1934. The Serb-led Yugoslav reaction to Pavelic's terror tactics was one of often harsh oppression that fed a growing polarisation of opinion within the country throughout the late 1930s.

For the Slovaks, it was the often-heard put down 'the Czechs have culture whilst the Slovaks have agriculture' that fed a simmering resentment about Czech domination of the infant state and its institutions, including the professional and much-admired Czech Army. This tension led to calls for autonomy and self-government as the 1930s went on but did not give rise to the same sort of communal violence as was the case in Yugoslavia. Even after the Munich Conference gave the green light for Germany to effectively dissolve the Czech state, there was little in the way of mass agitation for independence. Never one to take no for an answer, Hitler ended up summoning the leaders of the nationalist Slovak Peoples Party to Berlin in March 1939 and telling them that if they did not break away immediately and declare independence, he would allow the Hungarians to invade them. The Slovaks declared the followed day.

The inter-war years in the far north were overwhelmingly a time of peace, as the Finns got used to their newly won independence and began to feel their way as a multi-party democracy. As a visible sign of their success at these endeavours, they even got to host the Olympic Games in 1940.

The same could not be said for Catholic Spain, which was engulfed from 1936 to 1939 by an incredibly vicious civil war between the age-old forces of right and left that tore the country asunder, killing hundreds of thousands in battle and retribution.

The kingdom of the Bulgars did not suffer Spain's horrendous fate, but the battle between the forces of tradition and those of social change that gripped most of Europe in the 1920s and 1930s also had its impact on clannish Bulgaria. The wartime Tsar Ferdinand's abdication (like their Russian counterparts, the Bulgars called their monarch a Tsar) ushered in the rule of his son, Boris III, and the beginnings of true democratic government. However, that path was far from smooth as attempted assassinations and coups became the norm, with even the Prime Minister, Aleksandur Stamboliyski, getting himself killed in June 1923 (the poor man was brutally tortured, one of his hands was cut off and he was decapitated, with his head sent to Sofia in a box of biscuits as proof of his death). Boris eventually stepped in and made himself dictator in April 1935, an act that ushered in a period of relative stability, albeit under authoritarian rule with no room for any opposition.

As for royalist Italy, its political system struggled in vain to respond to the bitter mood of the nation and satisfy popular grievances. A flurry of shaky coalitions came and went until, in 1922, through a combination of bluff and bluster that was very much his trademark, the populist ex-socialist agitator Benito Mussolini was offered power in Rome and a new political creed came to the world's attention – Fascism. Through the careful use of propaganda, political repression and actual reforms, Mussolini became the 'model dictator' of Europe, and even Hitler would look to emulate him until he realised, too late as it happened, that it was all a mirage created by a master of illusion. The signs were there though for all who had eyes to see. Committed to provide the Italian people with an outlet for their frustrated sense of national glory, Mussolini adopted a bombastic foreign policy that would all too often end in fumbling military intervention and subsequent humiliation. The result was a growing switch around in the previous 'big brother, little brother' relationship with the German leader, with Italy increasingly the tail of the German dog.

Expanding recklessly on the canine analogy, the two big dogs of the Balkan world in the inter-war years were Romania and Hungary – deadly enemies forever staring at each other over the much-disputed Transylvanian border, the former's large ethnic Magyar population acting as a latent 'fifth column' that caused Bucharest no end of sleepless nights. Romania needed friends, and given her past she naturally turned to her greatest ally from the First World War – France – and another state that had done well from Trianon – Czechoslovakia. Arms deals, often the progenitors of national alliances, were signed, and French and Czech aircraft and weapons became the mainstay of the Romanian armed forces. Diplomatic co-operation was close, but the rise of Nazi Germany drove a wedge between them as Paris, Prague and Bucharest struggled to formulate a response to the looming European superpower to the north. To a political intriguer and conspirator like Hitler, this complex web of enmity, deceit and fear was a home from home he sought to turn to his advantage.

1939–40 Alliances and war in the West

Hitler's attitude to alliances and international diplomacy changed dramatically over time. Never a man with a natural affinity for personal friends or political partners, at first for him it was about dictatorships with a common ideology sticking together as much for protection as anything else, hence his devotion to Fascist Italy. This view led to the establishment of the 'Pact of Steel' in May 1939 between Rome and Berlin, setting out joint co-operation on economic and military matters amongst other things, and then to the most eye-catching diplomatic coup of the inter-war era – the signing of the 'Molotov-Ribbentrop Non-Aggression Pact' on 23 August 1939 guaranteeing peace and friendship between Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany. Named after the two foreign ministers who negotiated it – Vyachelsav Molotov and Joachim von Ribbentrop – the Pact stunned the world, as these two avowed ideological enemies metaphorically smiled and hugged each other. What the world did not know was that the Pact contained a set of ultra-secret clauses that effectively divided up Eastern Europe and the Balkans between them into respective spheres of influence where each would have a free hand to do as they wished.

A week later, the clandestine protocol reared its head for the first time when Nazi Germany invaded Poland and ignited the Second World War. Not only did Moscow not utter a peep in protest: just a fortnight later, the Red Army rolled across Poland's eastern border, condemning Warsaw to defeat and partition. This was the first concrete manifestation of those secret clauses. Three months on, at midnight on 29 November, Berlin reciprocated by twiddling its thumbs, after the following statement from General Kirill Afanasievich Meretskov of the Red Army was read out to the 250,000 men he commanded:

Comrades, soldiers of the Red Army, officers, commissars and political workers! To fulfil the Soviet Government's, and our great Fatherland's will, I hereby order that the troops in Leningrad Military District are to march over the frontier, crush the Finnish forces, and once and for all secure the Soviet Union's north-western borders and Lenin's city, the crib of the revolution of the proletariat.

Finland, a nation of just 4 million people, was being invaded by the armed might of the Soviet Union. The rest of Scandinavia, and indeed the world, looked on horrified and transfixed as a supremely confident Red Army swept forward against an enemy it outnumbered many times over and who were equipped with little more than a handful of First World War anti-tank guns and obsolete aircraft. They expected an easy victory over the Nordic minnows. However, the courageous Finns stood their ground and inflicted devastating reverses on the ill-prepared Soviets – nowhere more so than the utter annihilation of the Red Army's 44th Division in the snow at Suomussalmi in late December. By the time hostilities ended on 13 March 1940, the Red Army had been forced to commit more than a million troops to the fighting and Stalin had been personally humiliated. Not that this stopped him from annexing Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia in June that year to fulfil another clause in the Pact.

The fall of France and the partition of Romania

When France fell on 22 June 1940, Romania was stripped of her erstwhile allies and totally at the mercy of the vultures surrounding her. Moscow struck first, annexing Bessarabia, northern Bukovina and Hertza, the Red Army marching through Cernauti past sullen crowds of ethnic Romanians. Hungary and Bulgaria were the next beneficiaries, Ribbentrop and his Italian counterpart, Count Galeazzo Ciano, forcing Bucharest to accept the so-called 'Second Vienna Award' that gave 16,790 square miles of northern Transylvania to Budapest, and all of southern Dobruja to Sofia. Altogether, Romania lost 33 per cent of its land mass and population.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Death of the Don by Jonathan Trigg. Copyright © 2013 Jonathan Trigg. Excerpted by permission of The History Press.
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Death on the Don: The Destruction of Germany's Allies on the Eastern Front 1941 - 1944

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The Destruction of Germany's Allies on the Eastern Front, 1941-44

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Death on the Don: The Destruction of Germany's Allies on the Eastern Front 1941 - 1944

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Death of the Don

The Destruction of Germany's Allies on the Eastern Front, 1941-44

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