(7 of 9)
But Rommel, though clearly defeated, was still capable of a few surprises -- as the Americans found out. In February, even as the German field marshal had been chased into Tunisia, his forces launched a fierce attack on Allied forces and inflicted a humiliating defeat on the U.S. II Corps near the Kasserine Pass. It would take British, French and U.S. troops 10 days to undo the German counteroffensive, sustaining 10,000 casualties in the process, more than half of them American.
Nevertheless, the Axis was as good as routed in Africa. On May 12, 1943, the Americans and the British staged a gigantic pincers movement to win the battle for Tunisia -- the essential staging point for invading Sicily and Italy. Some 150,000 Axis soldiers were taken prisoner. The Germans, wrote General Dwight Eisenhower, commander in chief of U.S. forces in North Africa at the time, "were compelled after Tunisia to think only of the protection of conquests rather than their enlargement."
The Axis began to crack. In July, German and Russian armored units collided in the Kursk salient in what remains the greatest tank battle in history: 6,000 tanks, 4,000 aircraft, 2 million men. The Germans lost almost all their eastern-front panzer divisions just as the Allies under Montgomery and George Patton were landing on Sicily. Germany intervened in Italy after Mussolini was overthrown on July 25, 1943. (On April 28, 1945, partisan forces would shoot him dead and string up his body by the heels in the Piazza Loreto in Milan.) It would take the Allies nearly a year to fight their way into Rome. By then, the true second front in Europe was about to open; on June 6, 1944, the Allies landed in Normandy.
Everywhere the Nazis ruled, resistance flourished. Much of the subversion was supported by Britain's Special Operations Executive to further Churchill's goal of setting "Europe ablaze" with underground activity. But most of the resistance was fueled by patriotism and hatred of Nazi rule. Sabotage and guerrilla activity helped keep the Occupation forces off balance, and the resistance smuggled out information to the Allies and dispensed anti-German propaganda.
From France to the Soviet Union, Poland to Czechoslovakia, underground movements harried the Germans -- sometimes at a horrendous cost. On May 27, 1942, two Czechoslovak agents based in London who had been parachuted into Czechoslovakia five months earlier were activated. Their target: Reinhard Heydrich, "the Butcher of Prague," the SS Obergruppenfuhrer who was a major organizer of the Holocaust that was engulfing Europe's Jews. The Czechoslovaks killed Heydrich in a bomb attack as he drove into Prague, but the retribution was terrible: the Nazis murdered 1,300 Czechoslovaks immediately; 3,000 Jews were sent to Poland to be killed; and then the Germans razed the village of Lidice, butchering 199 men and sending 290 women and children to concentration camps, from which very few returned.