The Second World War Page 31

  The fact that each different Einsatzgruppe interpreted its mission slightly differently suggests that there was no centrally issued instruction. Only from the month of August did total genocide become standard, with Jewish women and children also killed en masse. Also on 15 August, Himmler witnessed for the first time an execution of a hundred Jews near Minsk, a spectacle organized at his request by Einsatzgruppe B. Himmler could not bear to look. Afterwards, Obergruppenführer Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski underlined the point that on that occasion only a hundred had been shot. ‘Look at the eyes of the men in this Kommando,’ Bach-Zelewski said to him, ‘how deeply shaken they are! These men are finished for the rest of their lives. What kind of followers are we training here? Either neurotics or savages!’ Bach-Zelewski himself, suffering from nightmares and stomach pains, was later taken to hospital to be treated on Himmler’s orders by the head physician of the SS.

  Himmler made a speech afterwards to the men justifying their action and indicated that Hitler had issued an order for the liquidation of all Jews in the eastern territories. He compared their work to the elimination of bedbugs and rats. That afternoon, he discussed with Arthur Nebe, the Einsatzgruppe commander, and Bach-Zelewski alternatives to shooting. Nebe suggested an experiment with explosives, which Himmler approved. This proved a crude, messy and embarrassing failure. The next stage was the gas van, using carbon monoxide from the exhaust. Himmler wanted to find a method which was more ‘humane’ for the executioners. Concerned for their spiritual welfare, he urged commanders to organize social events in the evenings with sing-songs. Most of the killers, however, preferred to seek oblivion in the bottle.

  An intensification of the slaughter of Jews also coincided with the Wehrmacht’s increasingly brutal treatment and outright killing of Soviet prisoners of war. On 3 September, the insecticide Zyklon B, developed by the chemical conglomerate IG Farben, was used at Auschwitz-Birkenau for the first time in a test on Soviet and Polish prisoners. At the same time, Jews from Germany and western Europe transported to the eastern territories were being murdered on arrival by police officials, who claimed that this was the only way to cope with the numbers foisted on them. Senior officials in the German-occupied eastern territories, the Reichskommissariat Ostland (the Baltic states and part of Belorussia) and the Reichskommissariat Ukraine, had no idea what the policy was. This would only be made clear after the Wannsee conference the following January.

  14

  The ‘Grand Alliance’

  JUNE–DECEMBER 1941

  Churchill was notorious for his incontinent rush of ideas on prosecuting the war. One of his colleagues remarked that the trouble was that he did not know which of them were any good. Yet Churchill was not just a fox, in Isaiah Berlin’s definition. He was also a hedgehog, with one big idea right from the start. Britain alone did not stand a chance against Nazi Germany. He knew that he needed to bring the Americans in to the war, just as he had predicted to his son Randolph in May 1940.

  While never wavering over this objective, Churchill wasted no time in forming an alliance with the Bolshevik regime he had always loathed. ‘I will unsay no word that I have spoken about it,’ he declared in a broadcast on 22 June 1941, following news of the German invasion of the Soviet Union. ‘But all this fades away before the spectacle which is now unfolding.’ And he remarked later to his private secretary, John Colville, that ‘if Hitler invaded Hell, I would at least make a favourable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons’. His speech that evening, prepared with the American ambassador John G. Winant, promised the Soviet Union ‘any technical or economic assistance in our power’. It made a fine impression in Britain, in the United States and in Moscow, even though Stalin and Molotov remained convinced that the British were still hiding the true nature of Rudolf Hess’s mission.

  Two days later, Churchill instructed Stewart Menzies, the head of the Secret Intelligence Service, to send Ultra decrypts to the Kremlin. Menzies warned that ‘it would be fatal’. The Red Army did not possess effective cyphers, and the Germans would trace the source of the intelligence very quickly. Churchill agreed, but Ultra-sourced intelligence was passed on later, suitably disguised. An agreement on military cooperation between the two countries was negotiated soon afterwards, although at this stage the British government did not expect the Red Army to survive the Nazi onslaught.

  Churchill was encouraged by developments across the Atlantic. On 7 July, Roosevelt informed Congress that US forces had landed in Iceland to replace British and Canadian troops. On 26 July, the United States and Britain acted together to freeze Japanese assets in retaliation for their occupation of French Indochina. The Japanese wanted air bases from which to attack the Burma Road, along which arms and supplies reached the Nationalist Chinese forces. Roosevelt was keen to support Chiang Kaishek’s Nationalists, and a force of mercenary American pilots, known as the Flying Tigers, was recruited in the United States to defend the Burma Road from Mandalay along which their supplies came. But when the United States and Britain placed an embargo on the sale of oil and other materials to Japan, the stakes were raised much further. The Japanese were now within easy striking distance of Malaya, Thailand and the oilfields of the Dutch East Indies, which looked increasingly like their next objective. Not surprisingly, Australia also saw itself at risk.

  No suitor prepared as carefully as Churchill for his first wartime meeting with the American President in early August. Secrecy on both sides was effectively maintained. Churchill and his party, many of whom had no idea where they were headed, embarked on the battleship HMS Prince of Wales. The prime minister took with him some grouse shot before the season opened to entertain the President, as well as some ‘golden eggs’ of Ultra decrypts to impress him. He grilled Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt’s close friend and adviser who accompanied them, on everything he could tell him about the American leader. Churchill had no recollection of his first meeting with Roosevelt in 1918, when he had failed to make a good impression on the future President.

  Roosevelt, with his chiefs of staff, had also gone to some trouble for this meeting. Outwitting the press, he had transferred from the presidential yacht Potomac to the heavy cruiser USS Augusta. Then, with a strong escort of destroyers, they had sailed on 6 August to the rendezvous of Placentia Bay off Newfoundland. Warm relations rapidly developed between the two leaders, and a combined church service on the after-deck of the Prince of Wales, carefully stage-managed by Churchill, produced a deep emotional effect. Yet Roosevelt, although charmed and impressed by the British prime minister, remained detached. He had, as one biographer noted, ‘a gift for treating every new acquaintance as if the two had known each other all their lives, a capacity for forging a semblance of intimacy which he exploited ruthlessly’. In the interests of amity divisive questions were avoided, particularly Britain’s empire of which Roosevelt so disapproved. The joint document known as the Atlantic Charter, which they signed on 12 August, promised self-determination to a liberated world, with the implicit exception of the British Empire, and no doubt the Soviet Union.

  The discussions over several days had ranged far and wide, from the danger of Spain joining the Axis camp to the threat from Japan in the Pacific. For Churchill, the most important results included an American agreement to provide convoy escorts west of Iceland, bombers for Britain and an undertaking to give the Soviet Union massive aid to stay in the war. Yet Roosevelt faced a widespread reluctance within the United States to move towards war with Nazi Germany. During his return from Newfoundland, he heard that the House of Representatives had passed the Selective Service Bill, inaugurating the very first peacetime draft, by no more than a single vote.

  American isolationists refused to acknowledge that the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union was bound to widen the scope of the war far beyond Europe. On 25 August, Red Army troops and British forces from Iraq invaded neutral Iran, to secure its oil and ensure a supply route from the Persian Gulf to the Caucasus and Kazakhstan. During the summer of 1941, Britain�
�s fears of a Japanese attack on its colonies increased. On Roosevelt’s advice, Churchill cancelled an attack planned by the Special Operations Executive (SOE) on a Japanese freighter, the Asaka Maru, loading up in Europe with vital supplies for the Japanese war machine. Britain could not risk a war in the Pacific alone against Japan. Its first priority was to secure its position in North Africa and the Mediterranean. Until the United States entered the war, Churchill and his chiefs of staff could look no further than ensuring their country’s survival, creating a bomber force to attack Germany and helping to keep the Soviet Union fighting the Germans.

  A bombing offensive against Germany represented one of Stalin’s chief expectations of Allied assistance, as the Wehrmacht inflicted such devastating losses on the Red Army in the summer of 1941. He also demanded an invasion of northern France at the earliest possible moment to take pressure off the eastern front. In a meeting with Sir Stafford Cripps five days after the invasion, Molotov tried to force the British ambassador to specify the scale of the aid which Churchill appeared to be offering. But Cripps was in no position to do so. The Soviet foreign minister pressed him further two days later, after meetings in London between Lord Beaverbrook, Churchill’s minister of supply, and the Soviet ambassador, Ivan Maisky. It appears that Beaverbrook had discussed the possibility of an invasion of France with Maisky, without having consulted the British chiefs of staff. From then on, one of the key objectives of Soviet foreign policy was to pin down the British to a firm promise. The Russians suspected, with justification, that British reticence came from a belief that the Soviet Union could not hold out ‘for much longer than five or six weeks’.

  A more serious failure of imagination on the Soviet side poisoned relations right up until early 1944. Stalin, judging the Allies by himself, expected them to launch a cross-Channel operation, whatever the losses and difficulties. Churchill’s reluctance to commit to an invasion of north-west Europe aroused his suspicion that Britain wanted the Red Army to suffer the brunt of the war. There was, of course, a strong element of truth in this, as well as a strong streak of hypocrisy on the Soviet side since Stalin himself had hoped that the western capitalists and the Germans would bleed each other to death in 1940. But the Soviet dictator totally failed to understand the pressures under which democratic governments worked. He wrongly assumed that Churchill and Roosevelt enjoyed absolute power in their own countries. The fact that they had to answer to the House of Commons or Congress, or take account of the press, was in his view a pathetic excuse. He could never accept the idea that Churchill really might be forced to resign if he launched an operation which resulted in disastrous casualties.

  Even after decades of obsessive reading, Stalin had also failed to understand the basis of Britain’s traditional strategy of peripheral warfare, mentioned earlier. Britain was not a continental power. It still relied on its maritime strength and on coalitions to maintain a balance of power in Europe. With the notable exception of the First World War, it avoided involvement in a major confrontation on land until the end of a war was in sight. Churchill was determined to follow this pattern, even though both his American and Soviet allies were wedded to the diametrically opposed military doctrine of a massive clash as soon as possible.

  On 28 July, just over two weeks after the signature of the Anglo-Soviet agreement, Harry Hopkins reached Moscow on a fact-finding mission at Roosevelt’s request. Hopkins had to find out what the Soviet Union needed to continue the war, both immediately and in the longer term. The Soviet leadership took to him immediately. Hopkins questioned the relentlessly pessimistic reports from the US military attaché in Moscow who believed the Red Army would collapse. He was soon convinced that the Soviet Union would hold out.

  Roosevelt’s decision to aid the Soviet Union was genuinely altruistic as well as munificent. Soviet Lend–Lease took time to get under way, much to the President’s exasperation, but its scale and scope would play a major part in the eventual Soviet victory (a fact which most Russian historians are still loath to acknowledge). Apart from high-quality steel, anti-aircraft guns, aircraft and huge consignments of food which saved the Soviet Union from famine in the winter of 1942–3, the greatest contribution was to the mobility of the Red Army. Its dramatic advances later in the war were possible thanks only to American Jeeps and trucks.

  In contrast, Churchill’s rhetoric of assistance was never matched by results, largely because of Britain’s poverty and the urgency of its own immediate needs. Much of the material provided was obsolete or unsuitable. British army greatcoats were useless in the Russian winter, steel-studded ammunition boots accelerated frostbite, the Matilda tanks were distinctly inferior to the Soviet T-34, and Red Army aviation criticized the second-hand Hurricanes, asking why they had not been sent Spit-fires instead.

  The first important conference between the western Allies and the Soviet Union began in Moscow at the end of September after Lord Beaverbrook and Roosevelt’s representative Averell Harriman reached Arkhangelsk aboard the cruiser HMS Lincoln. Stalin received them in the Kremlin, and began to list all the military equipment and vehicles the Soviet Union needed. ‘The country that could produce the most engines would ultimately be the victor,’ he said. He then suggested to Beaverbrook that Britain should also send troops to help defend Ukraine, an idea which clearly took Churchill’s crony aback.

  Stalin, unable to drop the matter of Hess, proceeded to quiz Beaverbrook about Hitler’s deputy and about what he had said when he reached England. The Soviet leader again caused surprise when he suggested that they should discuss the post-war settlement. Stalin wanted recognition of the 1941 Soviet frontier which encompassed the Baltic states, eastern Poland and Bessarabia. Beaverbrook declined to become involved in a subject which struck him as decidedly premature, with German armies less than a hundred kilometres from where they were sitting in the Kremlin. Although he did not know it, Guderian’s Second Panzer Army had begun the first phase of Operation Typhoon against Moscow the day before.

  British diplomats were irritated by Stalin’s jibes that their country ‘refused to undertake active military operations against Hitlerite Germany’, while British and Commonwealth troops were fighting in North Africa. But in the Soviets’ eyes, when faced with three German army groups deep in their country, the fighting around Tobruk and the Libyan frontier hardly even qualified as a sideshow.

  Soon after the German invasion of the Soviet Union, Rommel had begun to plan a new attack on the besieged port of Tobruk, which had become the key to the war in North Africa. He needed it to supply his troops and to eliminate the threat to his rear. Tobruk was now held by the British 70th Division, reinforced with a Polish brigade and a Czech battalion.

  During the desert summer, with its mirage shimmer of the desert under a blazing sky, a sort of phoney war had developed, with little more than the odd skirmish along the wire of the Libyan frontier. British and German reconnaissance patrols chatted to each other by radio, on one occasion complaining when a newly arrived German officer forced his men to open fire after a tacit ceasefire had been arranged. For the infantry on both sides, life was less amusing under such conditions, with just a litre of water a day for drinking and washing. In their trenches, they had to cope with scorpions, sand-fleas and the aggressive desert flies which swarmed over every piece of food and every inch of exposed flesh. Dysentery became a major problem, especially for the Germans. Even the defenders of Tobruk were short of water, as a Stuka attack had wrecked the desalination plant. The town itself was badly battered by shellfire and bombing, and the harbour half full of sunken ships. Only the determination of the Royal Navy kept them supplied. Members of the remaining Australian brigade began bartering war loot for beer as soon as a ship arrived.

  Rommel had a much greater problem of resupply across the Mediterranean. Between January and late August 1941, the British had managed to sink fifty-two Axis ships and damage another thirty-eight. In September the submarine HMS Upholder sank two large passenger ships carrying reinf
orcements. (Afrika Korps veterans began to call the Mediterranean the ‘German swimming pool’.) The Axis failure to invade Malta in 1940 was now shown to have been a major mistake. The Kriegsmarine especially had been dismayed earlier in the year when Hitler insisted that the airborne forces should be used against Crete rather than Malta, because he feared Allied raids against the Ploesti oilfields. Since then, the constant bombing of airfields on Malta and the Grand Harbour of Valletta had not proved an effective substitute for outright capture.

  British intercepts of Italian naval codes provided rich rewards. On 9 November, K Force sailing from Malta, with the light cruisers HMS Aurora and Penelope and two destroyers, struck a Tripoli-bound convoy. Although the convoy was escorted by two heavy cruisers and ten destroyers, the British force dashed in at night using radar. In less than thirty minutes the three Royal Navy warships sank all seven freighters and a destroyer without suffering any damage. The German Kriegsmarine was livid, and threatened to take over control of Italian naval operations. The Afrika Korps adopted a similarly patronizing view of its allies. ‘One has to treat the Italians like children,’ a Leutnant in the 15th Panzer Division wrote home. ‘They are no good as soldiers, but they are the best of comrades. You can get anything from them.’

  After all the delays and waiting for supplies which never came, Rommel planned his strike against Tobruk for 21 November. He disbelieved Italian warnings that the British were about to launch a major offensive, yet he felt compelled to leave the 21st Panzer Division between Tobruk and Bardia just in case. This would probably have left him with insufficient forces for a successful attack on Tobruk. In any case, on 18 November, three days before his planned assault on the port, the newly named British Eighth Army, commanded by Lieutenant General Sir Alan Cunningham, crossed the Libyan frontier in Operation Crusader. Having made approach marches at night under strict radio silence, and concealed by day with sandstorms and then thunderstorms, the Eighth Army achieved total surprise.