The Second World War Read online

The ridge was well defended, forcing the panzer divisions to a halt. Rommel expected a massive counter-attack on 1 September, but Montgomery did not want to risk his armoured formations in any more cavalry charges and held most of them in their positions, hull down. Only one armoured counter-attack was launched. Then Rommel received the worst possible news. The tankers on which he had counted had been attacked, with devastating results. Ultra had once again enabled the British to find them.

  Rommel was in an unenviable position, with his panzer divisions stuck in the open between the Alamein Line to the west and the British armour to the east and south, and continually attacked by the Desert Air Force. On 5 September, he ordered a withdrawal. Apart from an inept counter-attack by XXX Corps in the south, Montgomery failed to seize the opportunity offered to mount a devastating blow. But the repulse of the Afrika Korps, and the damage inflicted by the Desert Air Force, did much to boost Eighth Army morale.

  Rommel had extricated the bulk of his forces, but he knew that the tide of war in North Africa had turned irrevocably against him, even though he still had no idea of the threat to his rear being planned by Eisenhower.

  22

  Operation Blau–Barbarossa Relaunched

  MAY–AUGUST 1942

  Once the snows began to melt in the spring of 1942, the hidden horrors of the winter fighting emerged. Soviet prisoners were put to work burying the corpses of their comrades killed during the January offensive. ‘Now that it’s fairly warm during the day,’ a German soldier wrote home on paper taken from the pocket of a dead commissar, ‘the corpses are beginning to stink and it’s time to bury them.’ A soldier with the 88th Infantry Division wrote that, after capturing a village during a rapid thaw, the bodies of ‘around eighty German soldiers from a reconnaissance battalion appeared from under the snow with chopped off limbs and smashed in skulls. Most had then been burned.’

  Yet once the birch trees came into leaf and the sun began to dry out the waterlogged land, the morale of German officers experienced an extraordinary revival. It was as if the terrible winter had been little more than a bad dream, and now their run of victories would recommence. Panzer divisions were re-equipped, reinforcements absorbed into units, and ammunition dumps prepared for a summer offensive. The Grossdeutschland Infantry Regiment which had been reduced to a rump in the winter disaster was now expanded into a motorized division, with two panzer battalions and assault guns. Waffen-SS divisions were upgraded into panzer formations, but many ordinary divisions received little more than replacements. Tensions between the SS and the army increased. A battalion commander in the 294th Infantry Division wrote in his diary of ‘the great alarm which we all feel about the power and the importance of the SS… They already say in Germany that as soon as the Army returns home with victory, the SS will disarm it on the frontier.’

  Many soldiers who had been awarded the winter campaign medal were unimpressed. They referred to it as the ‘Order of the Frozen Flesh’. At the end of January, new instructions had been issued to those allowed home on leave. ‘You are under military law,’ it reminded them, ‘and you are still subject to punishment. Don’t speak about weapons, tactics or losses. Don’t speak about bad rations or injustice. The intelligence service of the enemy is ready to exploit it.’

  The troops’ cynicism increased with the belated arrival of civilian winter clothing, skiing outfits and women’s fur coats, which had been donated as a result of the appeal by Goebbels to provide warm clothes for the soldiers of the Ostfront. The smell of mothballs and images of the homes from which they had come only deepened the feeling that they were marooned on another planet in which filth and lice reigned. The sheer vastness of the Soviet Union was deeply unsettling and depressing. The same captain in the 294th Division wrote of the ‘endless uncultivated fields, no woods, only a few trees from time to time. Sad collective farms with destroyed houses. A few people, dirty, wearing rags, were standing by the railway track with indifferent faces.’

  While Stalin still expected that the Wehrmacht would make another thrust towards Moscow, Hitler had very different ideas. Knowing that Germany’s survival in the war depended on food and especially fuel, he intended to consolidate his hold on Ukraine and seize the oilfields of the Caucasus. It would be Stalin who stumbled first in this military danse macabre, and Hitler who would overreach himself eventually with catastrophic consequences. For the moment, however, everything seemed to go the Führer’s way.

  On 7 May, Manstein’s Eleventh Army in the Crimea counter-attacked the Soviet forces attempting to advance out of the Kerch Peninsula. Sending in his panzers on the flank, he surrounded them. Many fought bravely and were buried in their trenches by German tanks, twisting and turning on their tracks to force the earth in. The disaster which ensued over the next ten days–almost entirely the making of Stalin’s favourite commissar, Lev Mekhlis–led to the loss of 176,000 men, 400 aircraft, 347 tanks and 4,000 guns. Mekhlis tried to put the blame on the troops, especially the Azeris, but the terrible losses created a great hatred in the Caucasus. Mekhlis was demoted, but Stalin soon found him another post.

  According to German accounts, soldiers from central Asia were the ones most likely to desert. ‘They have been hurriedly and badly trained, and sent to the front line. They say that the Russians stay behind them and force them forwards. They crossed the river during the night. They were walking in the mud and water up to their knees and looked at us with shining eyes. Only in our prison could they feel free. The Russians are undertaking more and more measures on preventing desertion and absconding from the battlefield. Now there are so-called guard companies, which have only one task: to prevent their own units from retreating. If it really is this bad, then all the conclusions about the demoralization of the Red Army are true.’

  An even greater disaster than Kerch soon followed. Marshal Timoshenko, supported by Nikita Khrushchev, had proposed in March that the armies of the South-Western and Southern Fronts should disrupt any offensive against Moscow, by mounting a pincer attack on Kharkov. This was supposed to coincide with the break-out from the Kerch Peninsula to relieve the embattled garrison of Sebastopol.

  The Stavka had little idea of German strength, having assumed that their forces were still facing the battered units of the winter. Soviet military intelligence had failed to spot the great increase in the strength of Army Group South, even if many of the forces diverted there consisted of Romanian, Hungarian and Italian formations, all of which were under armed and ill equipped. Hitler’s relaunch of Barbarossa was to be named Fall Blau (Operation Blue). The Germans were aware of Timoshenko’s preparations for an offensive, although it came earlier than they had expected. They were planning their own attack south of Kharkov to cut off the Barvenkovo Salient, which the Red Army had carved out in the January offensive. This plan was codenamed Operation Fridericus and was the preparatory phase to Blau.

  On 12 May, five days after the failed attack from the Kerch Peninsula, Timoshenko’s offensive began. The southern pincer of his attack broke through a weak security division and advanced fifteen kilometres on the first day. Soviet soldiers were amazed by the evidence of German plenty in the positions they captured, with luxuries such as chocolate, tins of sardines and meat, white bread, cognac and cigarettes. But their own casualties were heavy. ‘It was terrible’, wrote Yuri Vladimirov from an anti-aircraft battery, ‘to pass the heavily injured men who were dying from loss of blood and who were begging for help loudly or quietly and we were unable to do anything.’

  The northern part of the offensive was ill coordinated and attracted constant attacks by the Luftwaffe. ‘We advanced from Volchansk towards Kharkov and could see the chimneys of the famous tractor plant,’ wrote a soldier with the 28th Army. ‘The German aviation would not leave us in peace, they bombed us incessantly from three in the morning until nightfall with a lunch-break of two hours. Everything was destroyed by the bombs.’ There was confusion among the commanders and a lack of ammunition. ‘Even the military tribunal had to
fight,’ the soldier added.

  Timoshenko realized that he had hit the Germans while they were preparing their own offensive. But he did not suspect that he might be heading into a trap. Generalleutnant Paulus, a talented staff officer who had never commanded a formation, was taken aback by the severity of Timoshenko’s attack on his Sixth Army. Sixteen of his battalions were badly mauled in the fighting, under heavy spring rains. But Generalfeldmarschall von Bock saw the opportunity for a major victory. He persuaded Hitler that Kleist’s First Panzer Army could move to cut off Timoshenko’s forces in the Barvenkovo Salient from the south. Hitler leaped at the idea and claimed it for his own. On 17 May, Kleist struck just before dawn.

  Timoshenko rang Moscow to ask for reinforcements, but had not yet grasped the danger of his position. Finally, on the night of 20 May, he persuaded Khrushchev to telephone Stalin to request that the offensive be cancelled. Khrushchev was put through to the dacha at Kuntsevo. Stalin told Georgii Malenkov, the secretary of the Central Committee, to speak to him. Khrushchev demanded to speak to Stalin himself. Stalin refused and told Malenkov to find out what he wanted. When Stalin heard the reason he shouted that ‘Military orders must be obeyed,’ and instructed Malenkov to end the call. Khrushchev’s hatred for Stalin is said to have dated from this point, and led to his passionate denunciation of the dictator at the XX Party Conference in 1956.

  It took another two days before Stalin allowed the offensive to be called off, but by then the bulk of the 6th and 57th Soviet Armies had been surrounded. The encircled troops made desperate attempts to break out, even charging with linked arms, and the massacre was terrible. Corpses piled up in waves in front of the German positions. The skies had cleared, allowing the Luftwaffe perfect visibility. ‘Our pilots work night and day in their hundreds,’ wrote a soldier in the 389th Infantry Division. ‘The whole horizon is shrouded in smoke.’ Despite the battle, Yuri Vladimirov was able to listen to a lark singing on a hot, cloudless day. But then he heard the cry of ‘Tanks! Tanks coming!’ and he ran to hide in a trench.

  The end was close. To avoid immediate execution, commissars stripped off their own distinctive uniforms and took those of dead Red Army men. They also shaved their heads to look more like an ordinary soldier. On surrendering, the troops stuck their rifles with bayonets fixed into the ground. ‘It looked like a magical forest after a big fire in which all the trees had lost their leaves,’ wrote Vladimirov. He considered suicide, in his filthy, lice-ridden state, knowing what lay ahead, but allowed himself to be rounded up. Among the abandoned helmets and gas-masks, they gathered up the wounded and carried them on improvised stretchers made out of rain capes. The German soldiers then marched the hungry and exhausted men off in columns, five men wide.

  Some 240,000 men were taken prisoner, along with 2,000 field guns and the bulk of the tank forces deployed. One army commander and many other officers committed suicide. Kleist observed after the battle that the area was so clogged up by the corpses of men and horses that his command vehicle had trouble getting through.

  This second Battle of Kharkov represented a terrible blow to the Soviet Union’s morale. Khrushchev and Timoshenko were sure that they would be executed. Even though they had been friends they started to accuse each other, and Khrushchev had what appeared to be a nervous breakdown. Stalin, in characteristic fashion, simply humiliated Khrushchev by tapping out the ash from his pipe on Khrushchev’s bald crown, saying that it was a Roman tradition for a commander who had lost a battle to pour ashes on his head in penance.

  The Germans were jubilant, but the victory produced one dangerous effect. Paulus, who had wanted to withdraw during the early stages of the battle, was awed by what he assumed to have been Hitler’s perspicacity in ordering him to stand fast while Kleist prepared the fatal blow. He had a passion for order and was imbued with respect for the chain of command. These qualities, combined with his renewed admiration for Hitler, were to exert a major influence at the critical moment six months later at Stalingrad.

  Despite the danger threatening the Soviet Union’s very survival that year, Stalin remained preoccupied with post-war frontiers. The Americans and British rejected his demands that they should recognize the Soviet border of June 1941, which included the Baltic states and eastern Poland. But in the spring of 1942 Churchill had second thoughts. He considered agreeing to his claim as an inducement to keep him in the war, despite its flagrant contravention of the Atlantic Charter which guaranteed self-determination. Both Roosevelt and his secretary of state, Sumner Welles, indignantly refused to support Churchill’s proposal. Yet later in the war it would be Churchill who would oppose Stalin’s imperial project, and Roosevelt who would accept it.

  Relations between the western Allies and Stalin were bound to be fraught with suspicion. Churchill especially had promised far more military supplies than Britain was able deliver. And the American President’s disastrous assurance to Molotov in May that they would launch a Second Front before the end of the year did more to poison the Grand Alliance than anything else. Stalin’s paranoid tendencies persuaded him that the capitalist countries simply wanted the Soviet Union to be weakened while they waited.

  The manipulative Roosevelt had told Molotov, via Harry Hopkins, that he was in favour of opening a Second Front in 1942, but that his generals were against the idea. Roosevelt, it seems, was prepared to say anything to keep the Soviet Union in the war, whatever the consequences. And when it became clear that the Allies had no intention of launching an invasion of northern France that year, Stalin felt that he had been tricked.

  Churchill found himself bearing the brunt of Stalin’s resentment over unfulfilled promises. Although both he and Roosevelt had been wildly imprudent, Stalin refused to acknowledge any genuine difficulties. The losses suffered by the Arctic convoys to Murmansk never entered his calculations. The PQ convoys, which had started to sail from Iceland to Murmansk in September 1941, faced appalling dangers. In winter, the ships were coated in ice, and the seas treacherous, but in summer, with the short nights, they were vulnerable to German air attack from bases in northern Norway as well as from the constant U-boat menace. A quarter of the ships in PQ-13 in March were sunk. Churchill forced the Admiralty to send PQ-16 in May, even if it meant that only half the ships got through. He was under no illusions about the political consequences of cancelling it. In the event, only six out of thirty-six ships went down.

  The next convoy, PQ-17, the largest yet sent to the Soviet Union, turned into one of the greatest naval disasters of the war. Faulty intelligence had suggested that the German battleship Tirpitz, together with the Admiral Hipper and Admiral Scheer, had left Trondheim to engage the convoy. This prompted the First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir Dudley Pound, to order the convoy to scatter on 4 July. It was a catastrophic decision. Altogether twenty-four ships out of thirty-nine were sunk by aircraft and U-boats, with the loss of nearly 100,000 tons of tanks, aircraft and vehicles. Following the loss of Tobruk in North Africa, and combined with the German advance into the Caucasus, the British began to think that they might lose the war after all. All further summer convoys were suspended, to Stalin’s great displeasure.

  Once the Soviet forces on the Kerch Peninsula had been destroyed, Manstein turned his Eleventh Army against the port and fortress of Sebastopol. Massive artillery and air bombardment with Stukas failed to dislodge the defenders, who fought on from caves and tunnels deep in the rock. At one stage, the Germans are said to have used chemical weapons to dislodge them, but this is far from certain. The Luftwaffe was determined to deal with harassing attacks from Red Army bombers. ‘We are really going to show the Russians’, wrote an Obergefreiter, ‘what it means to play with Germany.’

  Soviet partisans harried the German rear, and one group blew up the single railway track across the Perekop Isthmus. Anti-Soviet Crimean Tatars were recruited to help hunt them down. Manstein brought up an 800mm monster of a siege gun mounted on railway wagons to pound the ruins of the great fortress. ‘I can only say that
this is no longer a war,’ wrote a motorcycle reconnaissance soldier, ‘but just the destruction of two world views.’

  Manstein’s most effective tactic was to launch a surprise attack in assault boats across Severnaya Bay, outflanking the first line of defence. The soldiers and the sailors of the Black Sea Fleet fought on. Political officers summoned meetings to tell them that they had been ordered to stand and die. Anti-aircraft batteries were switched to an anti-tank role, but gun after gun was blown out of action. ‘The explosions blended into a huge continuous one,’ recorded a member of the marine infantry. ‘You could no longer distinguish individual blasts. Bombing would begin early in the morning and finish late at night. Bomb and shellbursts buried men and we had to dig them out again to continue fighting. Our telephone linesmen were all killed. Soon our last anti-aircraft gun was hit. We took up “infantry defence” in bomb craters.

  ‘The Germans pushed us back to the sea and we had to use a rope to get down to the bottom of the cliffs. Knowing we were there, the Germans threw over the corpses of our comrades killed in the battle, as well as burning barrels of tar, and grenades. The situation was hopeless. I decided to push along the shore to Balaklava and swim across the bay during the night and escape to the hills. I organized a group of marine infantry. But we did not manage to make it for more than a kilometre.’ They were captured.

  The Battle for Sebastopol lasted from 2 June until 9 July, and German losses were also heavy. ‘I lost many comrades at my side,’ wrote an Unteroffizier as it ended. ‘Once in the middle of a battle I began to cry for one like a child.’ When it was finally over, an exultant Hitler promoted Manstein to field marshal. He wanted Sebastopol to become the major German naval base in the Black Sea and the capital of a completely Germanized Crimea. But the vast effort to take Sebastopol, as Manstein himself observed, reduced the forces available to Operation Blau at a critical time.