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and one anti-aircraft – had been lost by the Wehrmacht, as well as two Romanian divisions, a Croat regiment, service troops and members of the German construction unit known as the Organisation Todt. ‘The destruction of these divisions was bound to alter the whole balance of power on the Eastern Front,’ commented Mellenthin with some understatement. Zeitzler agreed, writing in 1956 that Stalingrad ‘was the turning point of the entire war’.78 The historian Nigel Nicolson considered Stalingrad to be ‘even worse than 1812, for at least Napoleon’s army was retreating: from Stalingrad there was no retreat. The nearest comparison might be if the British Expeditionary Force had been totally destroyed at Dunkirk.’79 With the remains of the Sixth Army in captivity, German strength in southern Russia was halved; moreover, the half-million men whom Zhukov had detailed to besiege Stalingrad were now available for other duties, and would be directed against Manstein, who was busy withdrawing, often asking for permission from the OKW only after he had given his orders. Manstein owned a pet dachshund that raised its paw when it heard the command ‘Heil Hitler’, but he himself showed a more independent spirit.

Stupidly, the Nazis attempted to pretend that the Sixth Army had not been captured at all, but had died fighting the Bolsheviks. ‘True to its oath of allegiance to fight to the last breath,’ a communiqué from the OKH announced on 3 February, ‘the Sixth Army under the exemplary command of Field Marshal Paulus has succumbed to the superiority of the enemy and unfavourable circumstances… Generals, officers, non-commissioned officers and men fought shoulder to shoulder down to the last bullet.’ Nonetheless, ‘the sacrifice of the Sixth Army was not in vain.’80 As the truth filtered back, especially after the Soviets paraded the POWs through the streets of Moscow in front of the world’s media, the credibility of German communiqués was further undermined.

Superlatives are unavoidable when describing the battle of Stalingrad; it was the struggle of Gog and Magog, the merciless clash where the rules of war were discarded. Merely staying alive in the frostbitten winter of 1942/3 was an achievement, but the two vast armies fought each other hand to hand and house to house throughout it, with a desperation and on a scale never before seen in the annals of warfare. Around 1.1 million people died in the battle on both sides, with only a few thousand civilians still there out of the half-million who had lived there before the war.

Charles de Gaulle’s (necessarily very private) comment when he visited the area in November 1944 on his way to Moscow to meet Stalin – ‘Un grand peuple’ – referred to the Germans, for having got that far and endured that much.81 Today it is impossible not to agree with him, however appalling the decision-making of their High Command, and especially their Supreme Warlord. Yet in the street battles of Stalingrad it had been the Russian fighting man who had prevailed, defending his Motherland. The unbelievably dogged resistance shown by the ordinary Russian soldier had delivered victory. Operation Barbarossa had indeed, as Hitler had predicted, made ‘the world hold its breath’ and it was only after Stalingrad that it could finally begin to exhale.

11

The Waves of Air and Sea

1939–1945

Such is the U-boat war – hard, widespread and bitter, a war of groping and drowning, a war of ambuscade and stratagem, a war of science and seamanship.

Winston Churchill in the House of Commons, 26 September 19391

The British politician the 2nd Viscount Hailsham once said that ‘The one case in which I think I can see the finger of God in contemporary history is Churchill’s arrival at the premiership at that precise moment in 1940.’2 Another candidate for the intervention of the Almighty in the Second World War might be the Allied cracking of the German Enigma codes, producing a stream of decrypts known by their British special security classification, Ultra. This allowed the Allies for much of the war to read many of the