The Second World War Read online

  Food was indeed power, both for the corrupt individual and for the Soviet state, which had long used it to coerce submission, or to take revenge upon unfavoured categories of people. Industrial workers, children and soldiers received a full ration, but others, such as wives who did not work and teenage children, received only a ‘dependant’s’ ration. Their ration card became known as the ‘smertnik’–the death card. With a truly Soviet attitude to hierarchy, they were considered ‘useless mouths’, while Party bosses received supplementary rations to help their decision-making on behalf of the common good.

  ‘Our situation with food is very bad,’ Vasily Churkin noted in late October when defending the line near Shlisselburg on Lake Ladoga. ‘We get 300 grams of bread that is as black as earth, and watery soup. We feed our horses with birch twigs with no leaves on them, and they die one after another. Locals from Beryozovka and our soldiers leave just the bones on a horse that’s fallen down. They chop off pieces of meat and boil them.’

  Soldiers were far better off than civilians, and those who had families in the city waited for winter with mounting anxiety. Frightful stories of cannibalism began to circulate. Churkin recorded how ‘Our corporal Andronov, a tall, broad-shouldered fellow, full of energy, made a mistake for which he paid with his life. The chief of supplies sent him in a vehicle to Leningrad under some pretext. At that time in Leningrad they were more starved than we were, and most of us had families there. The vehicle with Andronov was stopped on the way. In the vehicle they found canned food, meat, and cereal, which we had taken from our own meagre rations [to send to our families]. The tribunal sentenced Andronov and his chief to death. His wife with a small child were in Leningrad. People say that their neighbour ate the child, and the wife lost her sanity.’

  The starving city needed hard frosts so that the ice on Lake Ladoga was strong enough to support trucks bringing in food supplies across the ‘ice road’. Great risks were taken in the first week of December. ‘I saw a Polutorka truck,’ Churkin wrote. ‘Its hind wheels had fallen through the ice. In it were sacks with flour, they were dry… Its cabin pointed up, its front wheels stood on the ice. I passed about a dozen Polutorka trucks loaded with flour that froze into the ice. They were the pioneers of the “Road of Life”. There was no one by the trucks.’ The inhabitants of Leningrad would have to wait a little longer for the stockpiles already assembled. At the lakeside settlement of Kabona, Churkin saw that ‘all along the bank, stretching for so many kilometres that one couldn’t even see the end, lay an enormous amount of sacks with flour and boxes with foodstuffs prepared to be sent across the ice to starving Leningrad’.

  By the beginning of December, many German commanders in Army Group Centre realized that their exhausted and frozen troops could not now take Moscow. They wanted to withdraw their depleted forces to a defensible line until the spring, but such arguments had already been overruled by General Halder on the instructions of Führer headquarters. Some began to think of 1812 and the terrible retreat of Napoleon’s army. Even with the mud now frozen hard, the supply situation had failed to improve. With temperatures dropping to below minus 20 degrees Centigrade, and often with zero visibility, the Luftwaffe was grounded most of the time. Like airfield ground crews, motorized troops had to light fires under the engines of their vehicles before they could hope to start them. Machine guns and rifles froze solid because the Wehrmacht did not have the right oil for winter warfare, and radios failed to work in the extreme temperatures.

  Artillery and transport draught horses brought from western Europe were unused to the cold and lacked forage. Bread arrived frozen solid. Soldiers had to cut it up with hacksaws and thaw it out in their trouser pockets before they could eat it. The weakened Landser could not dig trenches in the iron-hard ground, without having melted it first with large bonfires. Few replacements had arrived for their jackboots, which had fallen to pieces after so much marching. There was also a shortage of proper gloves. Frostbite casualties now exceeded the number of those wounded in battle. Officers complained that their soldiers had started to look like Russian peasants because they had stolen the winter clothing of civilians, sometimes even forcing them at gunpoint to hand over their boots.

  Women, children and old men were forced out into the snow from their log cabins, or izbas, where the soldiers ripped up the floors to search for their reserves of potatoes. It might have been less cruel to kill their victims than to force them to starve or freeze to death, half stripped of their clothes in what was turning out to be the most savage winter for years. Conditions for Soviet prisoners were worst of all. They died in their thousands from exhaustion on forced marches westwards through the snow, from starvation and from disease, mainly typhus. Some were reduced to cannibalism in their dehumanized state of abject suffering. Each morning, their guards made them run for a few hundred metres, beating them. Any who collapsed were shot immediately. Cruelty had become addictive in those who had total control over beings they had been taught to despise and hate.

  By 1 December, German heavy artillery was finally within range of Moscow. On that day Generalfeldmarschall von Kluge’s Fourth Army began the final assault on the city from the west. The icy wind created deep snow-drifts, and the soldiers became exhausted trudging through them. But with a surprise artillery barrage and some air support from the Luftwaffe, his XX Corps managed to break through the 33rd Army towards the Minsk– Moscow highway. The rear of the adjacent Soviet 5th Army was also threatened. Zhukov reacted immediately, and threw in all the reinforcements he could put together, including the Siberian 32nd Rifle Division.

  Late on 4 December, the Red Army’s position was restored. The German infantry was collapsing from exhaustion and the cold. The temperature had dropped below minus 30 degrees Centigrade. ‘I cannot describe to you what this means,’ a Gefreiter in the 23rd Infantry Division wrote home that day. ‘First the appalling cold, blizzards, feet soaked through and through–our boots never dry out and we are not allowed to take them off–and secondly the stress from the Russians.’ Kluge and Bock knew that they had failed. They tried to console themselves with the idea that the Red Army too must be at its last gasp, as Hitler had so often insisted. They could not have been more wrong. During the last six days, Zhukov and the Stavka had been preparing a counter-attack.

  With leaders such as Zhukov, Rokossovsky, Lelyushenko and Konev, a new professionalism was starting to have an effect. This was no longer the sclerotic organization of June, in which commanders, terrified of arrest by the NKVD, did not dare show the slightest initiative. The unwieldy formations of that period had also been abandoned. A Soviet army now consisted of little more than four divisions. For the time being, the corps level of command had been stripped out to improve control.

  Eleven new armies had been formed behind the lines. Some included ski battalions and the well-trained Siberian divisions, properly equipped for winter warfare, with padded jackets and white camouflage suits. The new T-34 tank, with its broad tracks, could cope with ice and snow far better than the German panzers. And in contrast to German equipment, Soviet weapons and vehicles had the right lubricants to resist the low temperatures. Red Army aviation regiments assembled on airfields round Moscow. With their Yak fighters and Shturmovik ground-attack aircraft, they were to achieve air superiority for the first time while most of the Luftwaffe remained frozen to the ground.

  Zhukov’s plan, approved by Stalin, was intended to eliminate the two German salients either side of Moscow. The main one to the north-west contained the German Fourth Army and the depleted Third and Fourth Panzer Armies. The southern one, just east of Tula, was held by Guderian’s Second Panzer Army. But Guderian, sensing the danger, was starting to pull back some of his forward units.

  At 03.00 hours on Friday, 5 December, Konev’s newly formed Kalinin Front moved against the north side of the main bulge with the 29th and 31st Armies attacking across the frozen Volga. Next morning, the 1st Shock Army and the 30th Army advanced due west. Then Zhukov sent another
three armies, including Rokossovsky’s reinforced 16th Army and Vlasov’s 20th Army, in against the southern side. He intended to cut off the Third and Fourth Panzer Armies. As soon as a gap opened, Major General Lev Dovator’s 2nd Guards Cavalry Corps charged in to create mayhem in the German rear. The hardy Cossack ponies could cope with the snow a metre deep and soon caught up with the German infantry struggling to retreat through it.

  To the south, the 50th Army attacked the northen flank of Guderian’s Second Panzer Army from Tula, while the 10th Army advanced from the north-east. Pavel Belov’s 1st Guards Cavalry Corps supported by tanks struck into the German rear. Guderian moved fast, and managed to extricate the majority of his forces. But he was not able to restore the line as he had hoped, because the South-Western Front then sent the 13th Army and an operational group against the Second Army on his southern flank. Guderian had to pull back another eighty kilometres. This left a large gap between him and the Fourth Army on his left.

  The Red Army was still short of tanks and artillery, but with the new armies it was now close to German manpower strengths on the Moscow front. Its main advantage was the element of surprise. The Germans had completely discounted reports from Luftwaffe pilots of major military formations moving behind the lines. They also had no reserves. And with heavy fighting south-east of Leningrad and the withdrawal of Army Group South to the Mius, Bock could not obtain reinforcements from the flanks. The sense of precariousness even reached down to a supply Obergefreiter in the 31st Infantry Division. ‘I don’t know what’s wrong,’ he wrote home. ‘One simply has a bad feeling that this vast Russia is just too much for our strength.’

  By 7 December, the battle for the main salient was going well. It looked as if the Soviet objective of trapping the Third Panzer Army and part of the Fourth might succeed. But the advance was slow, to Zhukov’s intense frustration. The armies involved were held up by trying to eliminate every enemy strongpoint, defended by improvized German Kampfgruppen or combat groups. Two days later Zhukov ordered his commanders to stop frontal attacks, and to bypass centres of resistance so as to get well into the German rear.

  On 8 December, a German soldier wrote in his diary: ‘Are we going to have to pull out? Then God have pity on us.’ They knew what that would mean in the open snowfields. The retreat all along the front was marked by burning villages, set on fire as they struggled to withdraw through deep snow. Their route became littered with vehicles abandoned from lack of fuel, horses dead from exhaustion and even wounded men left behind in the snow. Hungry troops hacked lumps of frozen flesh from the flanks of the horses.

  Siberian ski battalions swooped out of the freezing mists to harry and attack. With grim satisfaction, they noted the totally inadequate equipment of the Germans, reduced to wrapping themselves in the mittens and shawls of old women looted from the villages or straight off their backs. ‘The frosts were exceptionally severe,’ wrote Ehrenburg, ‘but the Red Army Siberians grumbled: “Now if a real frost set in, that’d kill them off at once.”’

  Their revenge was fierce after what they had heard of German treatment of prisoners and civilians. Virtually unhindered by the Luftwaffe, Red Army aviation fighters and Shturmovik regiments harried the long columns of retreating troops, black against the snow. Raiding groups from Belov’s and Dovator’s Guards Cavalry Corps struck deep in the rear, attacking depots and artillery batteries with drawn sabres. Partisans raided supply lines, sometimes linking up with the cavalry. And Zhukov decided to drop the 4th Airborne Corps by parachute behind the German front lines. Soviet troops felt no pity for the frost-bitten and lice-infested German infantry.

  German field hospitals were having to amputate increasing numbers of limbs as untreated frostbite led to gangrene. With temperatures below minus 30, blood froze instantly in wounds, and many soldiers suffered intestinal problems from sleeping on the ice-hard ground. Almost all suffered from diarrhoea, an even worse affliction in such conditions. Those who could not move by themselves were doomed. ‘Many of the wounded shoot themselves,’ a soldier noted in his diary.

  Frozen weapons often failed to work. Tanks had to be abandoned from lack of fuel. A fear of being cut off spread. More and more officers and soldiers began to regret their treatment of Soviet prisoners of war. And yet despite the constant thoughts of 1812 and a sense that the Wehrmacht was now accursed like Napoleon’s Grande Armée, the retreat did not quite become a rout. The German army, especially on the edge of disaster, often surprised its enemies by the way it fought back. Improvised Kampfgruppen, formed at gunpoint by Feldgendarmerie rounding up stragglers in a retreat and led by determined officers and NCOs, managed to hold firm, with a mixture of infantry, pioneers and assorted weapons such as flak guns and the odd self-propelled gun. On 16 December, one group which had broken through an encirclement finally reached German lines. ‘There’s an enormous number of men suffering from nervous collapse,’ one of them noted in his diary. ‘Our officer is in tears.’

  Hitler at first reacted in disbelief to the news of the Soviet offensive, having convinced himself that reports of new armies were a bluff. He could not understand where they had come from. Humiliated by this totally unexpected turn in the fortunes of war after all the recent claims of victory over the Slav Untermensch, he was angry and baffled. Instinctively, he fell back on his visceral creed that the will would triumph. The fact that his men lacked proper clothing, ammunition, rations and fuel for their armoured vehicles was almost irrelevant to him. Obsessed with Napoleon’s retreat of 1812, he was determined to defy a repetition of history. He ordered his troops to stand fast even though they were incapable of digging defensive positions in the rock-hard ground.

  With all attention in Moscow fixed on the great struggle to the west of the capital, news of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor did not make much impact. But the effect was considerable in the city of Kuibyshev, where all the foreign correspondents were held (still under firm instructions from Soviet censors to put a Moscow dateline on all their articles). Ilya Ehrenburg observed with amusement how ‘the Americans in the Grand Hotel came to blows with Japanese journalists’. For the Americans and Japanese, that would truly be the least of it.

  16

  Pearl Harbor

  SEPTEMBER 1941–APRIL 1942

  On 6 December 1941, just as the Soviet counter-attack round Moscow began, US Navy cryptanalysts deciphered a message between Tokyo and the Japanese ambassador in Washington. Although the final section was missing, the import was abundantly clear. ‘This means war,’ Roosevelt said to Harry Hopkins, who was in the Oval Office that evening when the signal was brought in. The President had only just sent a personal message to Emperor Hirohito urging his country to draw back from the conflict.

  Over at the War Department, the head of intelligence passed the intercepts to Brigadier General Leonard Gerow of the War Plans Division, with instructions to warn bases in the Pacific. But Gerow decided to do nothing. ‘I think they have had plenty of notification,’ he is recorded as saying. This was because both US Navy and US Army headquarters in the Pacific had been told on 27 November that war was imminent. This intelligence had also been based on Magic intercepts of Japanese diplomatic signal traffic.

  Curiously, or perhaps significantly, no warning had come from the Kremlin, despite Roosevelt’s desire to help the Soviet Union. One can only speculate about Stalin’s motives, but he refused to pass on to the Americans Richard Sorge’s intelligence before the Battle for Moscow that the Japanese were planning to make a surprise attack on American forces in the Pacific. Yet one of the most striking coincidences of the Second World War was the decision by President Roosevelt on 6 December 1941, the day before the Japanese attack, to go ahead with the project to research an atomic weapon.

  In the first week of September, Japan’s military leaders had forced Emperor Hirohito to accept their decision to go to war. His only protest had been to read them a poem in favour of peace written by his grandfather. But Hirohito’s position as commander of the arm
ed forces was extremely ambivalent. His opposition to the war was not moral, but simply reflected a fear that it might fail. The extreme militarists, mainly junior and middle-ranking officers, believed that the country had a divine mission to forge an empire under the euphemistic title of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, or what the far-sighted American ambassador in Tokyo had warned in 1934 would be a ‘pax japonica’. By November 1941, he feared that the military were prepared to lead their country to ‘national hara-kiri’.

  The Japanese drive for imperial expansion had produced conflicting priorities: the war in China, fear and hatred of the Soviet Union to the north and the opportunity to seize the French, Dutch and British col onies to the south. The foreign minister Matsuoka Yosuke had arranged a Japanese–Soviet neutrality pact in April 1941, shortly before Hitler’s invasion. Once German armies were advancing rapidly eastwards, Matsuoka did an about-turn and advocated a strike north against the Soviet rear. But senior officers in the Imperial Japanese Army opposed this plan. They remembered their defeat at Zhukov’s hands in August 1939, and most preferred to finish the war in China first.

  The occupation of French Indochina in 1940 had been undertaken primarily to stop supplies to Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist armies, but this proved to be the decisive step towards the ‘strike south’ strategy, advocated mainly by the Imperial Japanese Navy. Indochina provided an ideal base from which to seize the oilfields of the Dutch East Indies. And following the American and British embargo imposed on Japan in retaliation for their occupation of Indochina, the commander of the Imperial Fleet, Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku, had been warned that his ships would run out of fuel within a year. Japanese militarists felt that they had to go forward to seize all they needed. To go back involved an unbearable loss of face.