The Second World War Page 47
Stalin received detailed warning of the coming German offensive in southern Russia by a stroke of luck, yet he rejected it as disinformation, just as he had dismissed intelligence on Barbarossa the year before. On 19 June, Major Joachim Reichel, a German staff officer carrying the plans for Fall Blau, was shot down in a Fieseler Storch plane behind Soviet lines. Yet Stalin, certain that the main German attack was aimed at Moscow, decided that the documents were fakes. Hitler was furious when told of this intelligence disaster and dismissed both Reichel’s corps and divisional commanders. But preliminary attacks to secure the start-line east of the River Donets for the first phase had already taken place.
On 28 June, the Second Army and Hoth’s Fourth Panzer Army attacked eastward towards Voronezh on the upper Don. The Stavka sent in two tank corps, but due to bad radio communications they milled about in the open and were gravely damaged by Stuka attacks. Stalin, finally convinced that the Germans were not heading for Moscow, ordered that Voronezh must be held at all costs.
Hitler then interfered with the plans for Operation Blau. Originally it would take three stages. The first was the capture of Voronezh. The next would see Paulus’s Sixth Army encircle Soviet forces in the great bend of the Don, then advance towards Stalingrad to protect the left flank. At that point the idea was not necessarily to capture the city, but to reach it or ‘at least have it within effective range of our heavy weapons’, so that it could not be used as a communications or armaments centre. Only then would Fourth Panzer turn south to join Generalfeldmarschall List’s Army Group A in its attack into the Caucasus. But Hitler’s impatience led him to decide that a single panzer corps was sufficient to finish the battle at Voronezh. The rest of Hoth’s panzer army should head south. Yet the corps left at Voronezh lacked the strength to overwhelm the ferocious defence. The Red Army showed how obstinately it could fight back in street-fighting when the Germans lost their advantages of armoured manoeuvre backed by air superiority.
Hitler dismissed his generals’ concerns, and at first Blau seemed to go triumphantly well. German armies advanced at great speed, to the fierce joy of panzer commanders. In the summer heat, the ground was dry and the going was good as they surged south-east. ‘As far as the eye can see,’ wrote a war correspondent, ‘armoured vehicles and half-tracks are rolling forward over the steppe. Pennants float in the shimmering afternoon air.’ On one day, a temperature of ‘53 degrees in the sun’ was recorded. Their only frustrations were that they were short of vehicles and frequently had to halt through lack of fuel.
Attempting to slow the German advance, Soviet aircraft dropped incendiaries at night to set the steppe on fire. The Germans pressed on. Dug-in Red Army tanks camouflaged themselves, but were rapidly outflanked and destroyed. Soviet infantrymen hidden in stooks of corn tried to fight back, but the panzers simply crushed them under their tracks. Panzer troops stopped in villages of thatched and whitewashed little houses, which they raided for eggs, milk, honey and fowl. Anti-Bolshevik Cossacks who had welcomed the Germans found their hospitality shamelessly abused. ‘For the local people, we come as liberators,’ wrote an Obergefreiter bitterly, ‘as liberators of their last seed corn, vegetables, cooking oil and so forth.’
On 14 July, forces from Army Groups A and B met up at Millerovo, but the huge encirclements which Hitler expected were not taking place. A certain realism had crept into Stavka thinking after the Barvenkovo pocket. Soviet commanders pulled their armies back before they were surrounded. As a result, Hitler’s plan to encircle and destroy the Soviet armies west of the River Don could not be fulfilled.
Rostov-on-Don, the gateway to the Caucasus, fell on 23 July. Hitler promptly ordered that the Seventeenth Army should capture Batum, while the First and Fourth Panzer Armies were to head for the oilfields of Maikop and to Grozny, the capital of Chechnya. ‘If we don’t take Maikop and Grozny,’ Hitler had told his generals, ‘then I must put an end to the war.’ Stalin, shaken to find that his predictions of another offensive against Moscow had been so wrong, and realizing that the Red Army lacked sufficient troops in the Caucasus, sent Lavrenti Beria down to put fear into his generals.
Paulus was now ordered to capture Stalingrad with the Sixth Army, while his left flank along the Don would be protected by the Fourth Romanian Army. His infantry divisions had been marching for sixteen days without a rest. And Hoth’s XXIV Panzer Corps, which had raced south towards the Caucasus, was now turned round to assist the attack on Stalingrad. Manstein was amazed to hear that his Eleventh Army, having secured the Crimea, was to be sent north for a new offensive on the Leningrad front. Once again Hitler was failing to concentrate his forces, at the very moment when he was trying to seize a huge new expanse of territory.
On 28 July, Stalin issued his Order No. 227 entitled ‘Ni shagu nazad’–‘Not one step back’–drafted by Colonel General Aleksandr Vasilevsky. ‘Panic-mongers and cowards must be destroyed on the spot. The retreat mentality must be decisively eliminated. Army commanders who have allowed the voluntary abandonment of positions must be removed and sent for immediate trial by military tribunal.’ Blocking groups were to be set up in each army to gun down those who retreated. Punishment battalions were strengthened that month with 30,000 Gulag prisoners up to the age of forty, however weak and under-nourished. In that year, 352,560 prisoners of the Gulag, a quarter of its whole population, died.
The brutality of Order No. 227 led to scandalous injustices when impatient generals demanded scapegoats. One divisional commander ordered a colonel whose regiment had been slow in the advance to shoot somebody. ‘This is not a trade union meeting,’ the general said. ‘This is war.’ The colonel selected Lieutenant Aleksandr Obodov, the much admired commander of their mortar company. The regimental commissar and a captain from the NKVD Special Detachment arrested Obodov. ‘Comrade commissar I’ve always been a good man,’ said Obodov, unable to believe his fate. ‘The two arresting officers wound themselves up into an anger, and began to shoot him,’ a friend of his recorded. ‘Sasha was trying to brush the bullets off with his arms as if they were flies. After the third volley, he collapsed on the ground.’
Even before Paulus’s Sixth Army reached the great bend in the River Don, Stalin had set up a Stalingrad Front and put the city on a war footing. If the Germans crossed the Volga, the country would be split in two. The Anglo-American supply line across Persia was now threatened, just after the British had cancelled further convoys to northern Russia. Women and even schoolgirls were marched out to dig anti-tank ditches and berms to protect the oil-storage tanks beside the Volga. The 10th NKVD Rifle Division had arrived to control the Volga crossing points and bring discipline to a city increasingly seized by panic. Stalingrad was now threatened by Paulus’s Sixth Army in the Don bend, and by Hoth’s Fourth Panzer Army, suddenly sent back north by Hitler to accelerate the capture of the city.
At dawn on 21 August, infantry from the LI Corps crossed the Don in assault boats. A bridgehead was secured, pontoon bridges built across the river, and the following afternoon Generalleutnant Hans Hube’s 16th Panzer Division began to rattle over. Just before first light on 23 August, Hube’s leading panzer battalion, commanded by Oberst Hyazinth Graf Strachwitz, advanced towards the rising sun and Stalingrad, which lay just sixty-five kilometres to the east. The Don steppe, an expanse of scorched grass, was rock hard. Only balkas or gullies slowed their headlong advance. But Hube’s headquarters suddenly halted, having received a radio message. They waited with their engines switched off, then a Fieseler Storch appeared, circled and landed beside Hube’s command vehicle. General Wolfram Freiherr von Richthofen, the brutal and shaven-headed commander of the Fourth Luftflotte, strode over. He told Hube that on orders from Führer headquarters the whole of his air fleet was to attack Stalingrad. ‘Make use of us today!’ he told Hube. ‘You’ll be supported by 1,200 aircraft. Tomorrow I cannot promise you any more.’ A few hours later, German tank crews waved enthusiastically as they saw the massed squadrons of Heinkel 111s, Junkers 88s and S
tukas flying over their heads towards Stalingrad.
That Sunday, 23 August 1942, was a day Stalingraders would never forget. Unaware of the proximity of German forces, civilians were picnicking in the sun on the Mamaev Kurgan, the great Tatar burial mound which dominated the centre of a city which stretched for over thirty kilometres along the curve of the Volga’s west bank. Loudspeakers in the streets broadcast air-raid warnings, but only when anti-aircraft batteries began firing did people begin to run for cover.
Richthofen’s aircraft started to carpet-bomb the city in relays. ‘In the late afternoon’, he wrote in his diary, ‘began my two-day major assault on Stalingrad with good incendiary effects right from the start.’ Petroleum-storage tanks were hit, creating fireballs and then huge columns of black smoke which became visible from more than 150 kilometres away. A thousand tons of bombs and incendiaries turned the city into an inferno. The tall apartment buildings, the pride of the city, were smashed and gutted. It was the most concentrated air assault during the whole war in the east. With refugees swelling the population to around 600,000, some 40,000 are estimated to have been killed in the first two days by air attack.
Hube’s 16th Panzer Division waved and cheered the aircraft on their return, and the Stukas sounded their sirens in reply. By late afternoon, Strachwitz’s panzer battalion was approaching the Volga just north of the city. But then it came under fire from anti-aircraft batteries with their 37mm guns depressed in the ground role. The young women operating the guns, many of them students, fought on until they were all killed. Panzer commanders were shaken and uneasy when they discovered the sex of the defenders.
The Germans had gone all the way from the Don to the Volga in a single day, and it seemed a great achievement. They had now reached what they considered to be the border of Asia as well as Hitler’s ultimate objective, the Arkhangelsk–Astrakhan line. Many felt that the war was as good as over. They took triumphant photographs of each other posing on their tanks, and also snaps of the smoke clouds rising from Stalingrad. A Luftwaffe fighter ace and his wingman, spotting the panzers below, performed victory rolls.
One commander, standing on the top of his panzer on the high western bank of the Volga, gazed across the river through his binoculars. ‘We looked at the immense steppe towards Asia, and I was overwhelmed,’ he remembered. ‘But then I could not think about it for very long because we had to make an attack against another anti-aircraft battery that had started firing at us.’ The bravery of the young women became a legend. ‘This was the first page of the Stalingrad defence,’ wrote Vasily Grossman, who heard first-hand accounts very soon afterwards.
In that summer of crisis for the Grand Alliance, Churchill decided that he had to visit Stalin to explain, face to face, the reasons for the suspension of convoys and why a Second Front was impossible for the moment. He was also enduring strong criticism at home, after the fall of Tobruk and heavy losses in the Battle of the Atlantic. Churchill was not therefore in the best frame of mind for a series of gruelling meetings with Stalin.
He flew from Cairo via Teheran to Moscow, where he arrived on 12 August. Stalin’s interpreter watched Churchill inspecting the guard of honour with his chin thrust forward, looking ‘intently at each soldier as if gauging the mettle of the Soviet fighting men’. It was the first time that this staunch anti-Bolshevik had set foot on their territory. He was accompanied by Averell Harriman, who represented Roosevelt at the talks, but had to get into the first car alone with the dour Molotov.
Churchill and Harriman were taken that evening to Stalin’s gloomy and austere apartment in the Kremlin. The British prime minister asked about the military situation. This played into Stalin’s hands. He accurately described the very dangerous developments in the south just before Churchill had to explain why the Second Front was to be postponed.
Churchill began by describing the great build-up of forces in the United Kingdom. He then spoke of the strategic bombing offensive with the massive raids on Lübeck and Cologne, knowing that they would appeal to Stalin’s thirst for revenge. Churchill tried to convince him that German forces in France were too strong to launch a cross-Channel operation before 1943. Stalin protested vigorously, and ‘disputed the figures Churchill had cited concerning the size of the German forces in Western Europe’. He said contemptuously that ‘someone who was unwilling to take risks could never win a war’.
Hoping to deflect Stalin’s anger, Churchill then outlined plans for landings in North Africa, which he was persuading Roosevelt to accept over General Marshall’s head. He seized a piece of paper and drew a crocodile, to illustrate his idea that they would be attacking the ‘soft underbelly’ of the beast. But Stalin was not satisfied with his substitute for a Second Front. And when Churchill mentioned the possibility of an invasion of the Balkans, Stalin immediately sensed that his real purpose was to preempt their occupation by the Red Army. Yet the meeting ended in a better atmosphere than Churchill had expected.
But the next day the Soviet dictator’s bitter condemnation of Allied perfidy, and Molotov’s bullet-headed repetition of all his accusations, angered and depressed Churchill so much that Harriman had to spend several hours trying to restore his spirits. On 14 August, Churchill wanted to break off talks and avoid the banquet prepared in his honour that evening. The British ambassador, Sir Archibald Clark Kerr, a genial eccentric, just managed to change his mind. But Churchill insisted on attending dressed in his ‘siren suit’, an overall which Clark Kerr compared to a child’s rompers, when all the Soviet functionaries and generals would be wearing their dress uniforms.
The dinner in the magnificent Catherine Hall lasted until after midnight, with nineteen courses and constant toasts, mostly initiated by Stalin who came round to clink glasses. ‘He has got an unpleasantly cold, crafty, dead face,’ General Sir Alan Brooke wrote in his diary, ‘and whenever I look at him I can imagine him sending off people to their doom without ever turning a hair. On the other hand there is no doubt that he has a quick brain and a real grasp of the essentials of war.’
Clark Kerr had to use all his charm and persuasion again the next day. Churchill was infuriated by Soviet accusations of British cowardice. But after the meeting was over Stalin invited him back to his office for supper. The atmosphere soon changed, loosened by alcohol and a visit by Stalin’s daughter Svetlana. Stalin became friendly, with jokes on both sides, and Churchill suddenly viewed the Soviet tyrant in a completely new light. He convinced himself that he had turned Stalin into a friend, and left Moscow the next day full of glee at his success. Churchill, for whom emotions were often more real than facts, had failed to see that Stalin was even more successful than Roosevelt when it came to manipulating people.
At home there was more bad news awaiting him. On 19 August, Combined Operations commanded by Lord Louis Mountbatten had mounted a major raid on Dieppe on the northern coast of France. Operation Jubilee was launched with just over 6,000 men, most of whom were Can adian troops. They also included some Free French forces and a US Ranger battalion. In the early hours, the eastern assault force ran into a German convoy, and this gave the Wehrmacht warning of the attack. A destroyer and thirty-three landing craft were sunk. All the tanks put ashore were destroyed, and the Canadian infantry were trapped on the beach by the heavy defences and barbed wire.
The raid, which cost over 4,000 casualties, produced harsh, even if obvious, lessons. It convinced the Allies that defended ports could not be taken from the sea, that landings had to be preceded by massive aerial and naval bombardment and, most important of all, that an invasion of northern France should not be undertaken before 1944. Once again, Stalin would be furious about the postponement of what he regarded as the only valid Second Front. Yet the disaster did create one major advantage. Hitler believed that what he would soon call his Atlantic Wall was virtually impregnable, and that his forces in France could easily defeat an invasion.
In the Soviet Union, news of the Dieppe raid prompted hopes that it was the start of the Second
Front, but optimism soon turned to bitter disappointment. The operation was seen as just a weak sop to foreign opinion. The Second Front became a double-edged weapon in Soviet propaganda, both a symbol of hope for the population at large and a way to shame the British and Americans. Red Army soldiers were more cynical. When opening tins of American Lend–Lease Spam (which they called tushonka–or stewed meat), they would say ‘Let’s open the Second Front.’
Unlike their comrades in southern Russia, the morale of German forces around Leningrad was not high. Their failure to strangle ‘the first city of Bolshevism’ rankled deeply. The harshness of the winter had been replaced by the discomforts of the marshes and swarms of mosquitoes.
The Soviet defenders, on the other hand, gave thanks that they had survived the famine of that terrible winter, which had killed nearly a million people. Major efforts were made to clean up the city and remove the accumulated filth which threatened an epidemic. The population was put to work planting cabbages on every spare plot of ground, including the whole of the Champ de Mars. The Leningrad Soviet claimed that 12,500 hectares of vegetables had been planted in and around the city in the spring of 1942. To prevent another famine next winter, the evacuation of civilians restarted across Lake Ladoga, and over half a million left the city, to be replaced by troop reinforcements. Other preparations included a stockpiling of supplies and the laying of a fuel pipeline across the bottom of Lake Ladoga.
On 9 August, in a great coup to build morale, Shostakovich’s Seventh (Leningrad) Symphony was played in the city and broadcast around the world. German artillery attempted to disrupt the performance, but Soviet counter-battery fire reduced it to insignificance, to the joy of Leningraders. They also took great comfort from the fact that the relentless Luftwaffe attacks on shipping across Lake Ladoga were weakened by the destruction of 160 German aircraft.