It is something of a cliché in the history of the Second World War to claim that Stalingrad, the graveyard of Germany’s Sixth Army in Russia, was the decisive turning point of the conflict: the moment when Hitler’s hopes of victory finally turned to ashes and the eventual triumph of the Allies became certain.
It is historian Saul David’s contention in this fine study, however, that another military catastrophe for Nazi power – the capitulation and capture of more than a quarter of a million men in Tunisia in May 1943 – represented a defeat for the Third Reich equal in magnitude to the disaster on the Don, but that the victory in Africa has been unjustly overlooked.
At the time, the Germans themselves had no doubt about the extent of the debacle in the desert. A worried Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels confided to his diary that ‘when you think that 150,000 of our best young people are still in Tunis, you rapidly get an idea of the catastrophe threatening us there. It’ll be on the scale of Stalingrad, and certainly also produce the harshest criticism among the German people.’
War Classics – The Influence of Sea Power Upon History 1660-1783