The balance of 1942

The last day of 1942 brought one more battle – in the Barents Sea German warships failed to destroy a convoy bound for Murmansk – and one important decision in Tokyo. Looking back, the Allies had reason for cautious optimism. A year earlier Japan had been beginning its march across Asia and the Pacific, and the Red Army had barely pushed the Germans back from Moscow. In the summer of 1942 the Axis powers reached their greatest extent of the whole war: from the Atlantic to the Volga and the Caucasus, from Burma to the Solomon Islands. In the autumn the initiative began to pass into Allied hands.

The end of the year is often summed up in the words: “Rommel is trapped in Tunisia, the Germans are encircled at Stalingrad, and the Japanese seem ready to abandon Guadalcanal.” Two of these three statements need qualifying. Rommel was not yet in Tunisia: on 31 December his army stood at Buerat in Tripolitania, several hundred kilometres from the Tunisian border, while in Tunisia an Axis bridgehead under Colonel General Hans-Jürgen von Arnim was consolidating. The 6th Army was indeed encircled, and the attempt to relieve it had failed. As for Guadalcanal, the Japanese did not so much “seem ready” as had just taken the decision: on 31 December, at a conference in the presence of the Emperor, Imperial General Headquarters agreed to evacuate the island.

The Axis at its height

The first half of the year belonged to Japan. Within a few months Singapore, Java, Rangoon, Bataan and Corregidor fell. The Japanese empire stretched from the borders of India to New Guinea, and Japanese carriers ventured into the Indian Ocean. In North Africa Rommel took Tobruk and reached El Alamein, about a hundred kilometres from Alexandria. In the east the Germans, after their victories at Kharkov and in the Crimea, launched Case Blue: in the summer they reached the Volga at Stalingrad and drove deep into the Caucasus, towards the oil of Grozny and Baku.

In the Atlantic the U-boats were enjoying their best period. Operation Drumbeat carried the war to the American coast, and convoy PQ 17 became the symbol of disaster on the Arctic route. According to Stephen Roskill’s British official history, in 1942 the Allies and neutrals lost 1,664 ships of nearly 7.8 million gross register tons from all causes, some 6.3 million of them to submarines – the worst year of the whole war at sea. At the same time American shipyards were beginning to build more than the Germans could sink, which some historians regard as having been decisive as early as the autumn of 1942.

Turning points

The first cracks appeared in the Pacific. In the Coral Sea in May the Japanese were for the first time forced to turn back from their objective, and in June at Midway they lost four fleet carriers. Admiral Chester Nimitz gained what the Americans had lacked for half a year: time. In August the Marines landed on Guadalcanal. For four months the battle for Henderson Field was fought there on land, at sea and in the air, and both sides suffered heavy losses in ships. In December the exhausted 1st Marine Division was relieved by Army troops, who attacked Mount Austen, while the Japanese soldiers on the island were starving. In New Guinea the Australians pushed the Japanese back along the Kokoda Track to the north coast, where in December Gona and Buna village fell, although fighting for the remaining Japanese strongpoints went on into January.

In North Africa General Bernard Law Montgomery first repulsed Rommel at Alam el Halfa and then, in October and November, won the Second Battle of El Alamein. On 8 November the Americans and British landed in Morocco and Algeria (Operation Torch). Admiral François Darlan went over to the Allies, and Vichy France lost its empire: in December French Somaliland joined Free France, and Darlan himself fell to an assassin. The Allies lost the run for Tunis: the Germans and Italians brought troops into Tunisia by air and sea, threw the Allies back from Tebourba, and on Christmas Eve General Dwight Eisenhower called off the offensive after the rain had turned the fields into mud. Rommel, meanwhile, abandoned his positions at El Agheila and continued to fall back westwards.

The most important decision came on the Volga. The Battle of Stalingrad drew General Friedrich Paulus’s 6th Army into months of street fighting. On 19 November the Red Army launched Operation Uranus and within four days had trapped in a pocket, by various estimates, between 250,000 and 330,000 Axis soldiers. The airlift delivered only a fraction of the supplies needed, and Field Marshal Erich von Manstein’s relief attempt, Operation Winter Storm, halted a few dozen kilometres from the pocket. The Soviet offensive on the middle Don shattered the Italian 8th Army and threatened Rostov, forcing the Germans to start thinking about withdrawing from the Caucasus. In accordance with Adolf Hitler’s will, the encircled troops were to fight to the end.

The war in the air

In February 1942 Arthur Harris, an advocate of night area bombing of German cities, took over RAF Bomber Command. Lübeck and Rostock were followed, on the night of 30–31 May, by the first thousand-bomber raid, on Cologne. In the summer American daylight bombers appeared over Europe – the Eighth Air Force’s first B-17 raid, on Rouen in August – and in the autumn a dispute flared over whether to bomb by day or by night. In the spring the Luftwaffe retaliated with reprisal raids on historic English cities, and in December American bombers from Egypt attacked Naples. In the years that followed the air war over Germany was to assume dimensions that no one could yet imagine in 1942.

The Holocaust

The year 1942 was the most terrible year of the Holocaust. In January the Wannsee Conference agreed on the organisation of the “Final Solution”. In occupied Poland Operation Reinhard got under way: the extermination camps at Bełżec, Sobibór and Treblinka swallowed the populations of one ghetto after another, above all in the Great Deportation from the Warsaw Ghetto in the summer. According to a telegram sent by Hermann Höfle on 11 January 1943, by the end of 1942 a total of 1,274,166 Jews had been brought to these three camps and to Majdanek. At the same time mass shootings continued in the east, as did deportations from all over Europe to Auschwitz. Raul Hilberg estimated that some 2.7 million Jews were killed in 1942 alone.

The truth about this was reaching the West ever more clearly: through the Bund Report, the accounts of the Polish underground and the mission of Jan Karski. On 10 December the Polish government sent its allies a note on the mass extermination of the Jews, and on 17 December the Allied governments issued a joint declaration condemning the crime. No concrete rescue measures followed, however. In occupied Poland the Council to Aid Jews, “Żegota”, was founded on 4 December, and at the end of November the Germans began expelling Polish peasants from the Zamość region, a foretaste of the implementation of Generalplan Ost. In February 1942 the Union of Armed Struggle (ZWZ) was renamed the Home Army.

The coalition and the home fronts

On 1 January 1942 twenty-six states signed the Declaration by United Nations in Washington, pledging not to make a separate peace. In May Britain and the USSR concluded a treaty of alliance, and in August Winston Churchill went to Moscow to explain to Joseph Stalin that there would be no second front in Europe that year. Instead, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Churchill chose North Africa. The alliance was unequal and full of mistrust, but it survived the worst year.

Total war was changing the lives of civilians. In the United States civilian car production came to an end, and from 1 December petrol was rationed nationwide. In the spring, under Executive Order 9066, more than 110,000 Americans of Japanese descent were removed to camps. In Britain the Beveridge Report gave people a picture of the country they were to fight for. On 2 December the first controlled nuclear chain reaction was achieved in Chicago – few knew of it, but it heralded the weapon that was to end the war with Japan. In occupied Europe and the occupied territories of the USSR there was hunger, terror and deportation to forced labour in the Reich.

Its place in the war

On 10 November, after El Alamein, Churchill cautiously said that this was not the end, nor even the beginning of the end, but “perhaps, the end of the beginning”. By the end of December that verdict seemed apt. The Axis powers were not yet beaten: Germany ruled almost the whole of Europe, the Japanese fleet was still powerful, and Tunisia was to cost the Allies many more months of fighting. But the strategic initiative had passed to the Allies on every front at once, and the industrial output of the United States and the USSR outstripped the capacity of Germany and Japan.

The weeks that followed brought the outcomes that December had foreshadowed. In January 1943 Roosevelt and Churchill met at the Casablanca Conference, where the demand for the unconditional surrender of the Axis powers was announced and the decision was taken to strike at Sicily. On 2 February the last German troops in Stalingrad surrendered. At the beginning of February the Japanese evacuated Guadalcanal in Operation Ke, and in May the Axis forces in Tunisia surrendered. The year 1942 went down in history as the year in which the balance of the war tipped in the Allies’ favour.