All Hell Let Loose_ The World at War 1939-1945 - Max Hastings [331]
Just praise has been lavished upon the ingenuity and success of British and American deception operations in World War II, but less attention has been paid to the matching achievement of Soviet maskirovka, literally ‘camouflage’. This became progressively more sophisticated in 1943, and attained its zenith in deluding the enemy about the objectives of Bagration. Large resources were committed to building dummy tanks, guns and installations, to persuade the Germans that the main Russian thrust would come in north Ukraine, where fake roads and crossings were also created. Meanwhile, Soviet formations facing Army Group Centre maintained static defensive deployments; reinforcements moved up only by night under rigorous blackout, and until the last moment were held thirty to sixty miles behind the front. Zhukov’s intentions were revealed on a strict need-to-know basis, to only a handful of senior officers. The Germans identified 60 per cent of the Soviet forces facing Army Group Centre, but missed the vital Guards Tank Army, and supposed they would meet only 1,800 tanks and self-propelled guns, instead of the real 5,200. The Wehrmacht’s eastern intelligence chief, the highly regarded Reinhard Gehlen, was entirely misled by the Russian maskirovka, as skilful and significant as similar Anglo-American operations before D-Day. The collapse of Hitler’s residual illusions in the east waited only upon Russian readiness to strike.
Around the world that spring, cynicism persisted about the modest Anglo-American contribution to the struggle, compared with that of the Soviets. The Polish corps commander in Italy, Gen. Władysław Anders, wrote gloomily in mid-April: ‘The course of the war is still the same; the Red Army continues to gain victories and the British are either being defeated, as in Burma, or, together with the Americans, have stuck fast in Italy.’ The Western Allied invasion of Normandy is customarily described as the Second Front; yet in southern Europe around one-tenth of Hitler’s army, including some of its best formations, was already embattled on a mountain line south of Rome, and on the coast further north. Successive Allied attacks on German positions around Monte Cassino were characterised by lack of coordination and imagination, indeed incompetence. The sixth-century Benedictine monastery was battered into rubble; thousands of tons of bombs and shells were expended; many British, Indian, New Zealand and Polish lives were lost; but still the Germans held on.
The Anglo-American corps that landed on the coast further north at Anzio in January, in fulfilment of Churchill’s personal vision, was confined to a narrow perimeter which the Germans attacked fiercely and repeatedly. ‘So back we go to World War I,’ wrote a young officer of a Scottish regiment holding the line there. ‘Oozing thick mud. Tank hulks. The cold, God, the cold. Graves marked by a helmet, gashed with shrapnel. Shreds of barbed wire. Trees like broken fishbones …’ The routines of trench life and incessant bombardment dulled men’s senses. ‘Efficiency in general and combat efficiency in particular suffer when individuals remain too long and too constantly under the gun,’ wrote US Lt. Col. Jack Toffey. Behind the front, existence under siege became bizarrely domesticated: ‘This beachhead is the craziest place I have ever seen,’ a US signals officer wrote to his brother in New Jersey. ‘The boys have their own private horses, chickens, livestock, bicycles and everything else that the civilians left.’ Some men planted vegetable gardens.
In February, the Germans launched