Max Hastings Two-Book Collection: All Hell Let Loose and Catastrophe. Max Hastings

in murderous losses: on 15 July, he reported his company’s strength reduced to five men.

      At midsummer 1942, the Western Allies’ view of Russia’s predicament remained bleak. A British intelligence officer wrote on 15 July: ‘I have the inescapable feeling that much as the Germans may have lost, the Red Army has lost more…Sevastopol was…a fair feat of Soviet arms and demonstrated the enormous power of the Red Army on the defensive – given the right conditions of terrain…[But it] is still not capable of dealing with the Germans in the open terrain of South Russia…On the whole the Germans have most things in their favour…They possess a better fighting machine…How far the Germans will be able to exploit their success will depend on the ability of the Red Army to retain some form of cohesion in retreat until they have gone back behind great natural obstacles or into country more suitable for the defence.’

      It is important to view the events of the year in context. In 1941, Russia suffered 27.8 per cent of its total war losses. But in 1942 Kharkov, the Crimea and Kerch peninsula disasters accounted for even larger casualties. When Stalingrad was added, the year as a whole cost Russia 28.9 per cent of its overall casualties in the conflict, 133 per cent of the Red Army’s front-line strength. Posterity knows that Stalin learned vital lessons: he started to delegate military decisions to competent generals, and the worst blunderers were dismissed. The weapons created by Russia’s industrial mobilisation and production beyond the Urals began to reach her armies, increasing their strength while that of the Axis shrank. But none of this was apparent to the world in the summer of 1942. Germany still seemed irresistible on the battlefield, Russia at its last gasp.

      Almost all British, and also later American, attempts to collaborate operationally with Stalin’s people foundered on the rocks of their ally’s secretiveness, incompetence, ill-will and paucity of means. The Royal Navy’s requests for the aid of Soviet warships and aircraft to cover British convoys approaching Murmansk and Archangel yielded meagre responses. In August 1942, an RAF Catalina delivered to north-west Russia two SIS agents, whom the Soviets had agreed to parachute into north Norway. Their hosts instead detained the two men incommunicado for two months before dropping them, still in summer clothing, inside Finland rather than Norway, where they were swiftly arrested, tortured and shot. Thereafter, the British recognised that cooperation with the Russians was an exclusively one-way proposition; that the consequences of placing Allied personnel at the mercy of Soviet goodwill were often fatal.

      Nonetheless, the Western governments went to extravagant lengths to preserve a semblance of unity. When Gen. Anders, who had suffered in Stalin’s prisons between 1939 and 1941, met Churchill in Cairo in August 1942, he vehemently denounced the Soviet Union: ‘There was, I said, no justice or honour in Russia, and not a single man there whose word could be trusted. Churchill pointed out to me how dangerous such language would be if spoken in public. No good, he said, could come of antagonising the Russians…Churchill closed the talk by saying that he believed Poland would emerge from the war a strong and happy country.’ Anders allowed himself to be persuaded that ‘We Poles were now going home (so we thought) by a different route, a longer one, indeed, but one with fewer hardships.’ The Western Powers exerted themselves to sustain this delusion.

      The Germans encountered the first units of the Stalingrad Front on 23 July, some eighty-seven miles west of the city. That night, Hitler made what proved the decisive blunder of the war in the east. He issued a new directive, declaring the objectives of Blue completed. Army Group A was ordered to overrun the Caucasus oilfields 745 miles beyond its existing positions – a longer advance than the German drive from the Siegfried Line to the Channel coast in May 1940. Its formations soon found themselves attempting to sustain a front five hundred miles wide with hopelessly inadequate forces, against stubborn Russian resistance. Meanwhile Army Group B commenced operations designed to close up to a line along the Volga and secure Stalingrad. Manstein was transferred northwards with five infantry divisions and the siege artillery he had used at Sevastopol, to end the tiresome resistance at Leningrad: following a change of policy, Berlin was now impatient to occupy the city. The next news from Sixth Army showed that its progress towards Stalingrad had become sluggish. Hitler, irked, ordered that Fourth Panzer Army should be diverted from the Caucasus to support Paulus. He thus divided his strength in a fashion which rendered each element of his forces too weak to attain its objectives.

      But August 1942 was another season of Russian catastrophes. One of Stalin’s favourites, the old Bolshevik warhorse Marshal Semyon Budyonny, presided over a series of shambolic defeats in the northern Caucasus. Sixth Army wrecked Russian forces on the Don east of Kalach, taking 50,000 prisoners; an entire Soviet tank army collapsed, with crews abandoning their vehicles in panic. On 21 August, Paulus launched a dash from the Don to the Volga, blasting a path through the defenders with waves of dive-bombers. In two days, his forces reached the river nine miles north of Stalingrad. The city’s capture seemed imminent, and he dispatched to Hitler a draft of his plans for Sixth Army’s move into winter quarters. Far to the south, on 9 August mountain troops took Maikop, most accessible of the Caucasian oilfields, where Russian demolitions proved so thorough that it was deemed necessary to bring equipment from Germany to drill new wells. Army Group A’s spearheads began pushing east for the Caspian; Seventeenth Army was directed southwards through the mountains towards the Black Sea.

      The entire Caucasian advance was hamstrung by Hitler’s orders to divert available fuel and ammunition supplies to Paulus. Among the Nazi hierarchy in Berlin, however, there was another surge of optimism. Rommel was at the gates of Cairo; armaments production was rising; Germany’s Japanese allies had achieved extraordinary triumphs, and the implications of American naval successes at the Coral Sea and Midway were barely comprehended. Dönitz’s U-boats were devastating Atlantic convoys; an Italian submarine commander reported that he had sunk an American battleship, and was decorated by Mussolini for his flight of fantasy. German civilian morale revived.

      Only the technocrats who knew the economic and industrial secrets of the Reich were undeluded. The manpower situation remained desperate, and Germany was increasing aircraft output by sustaining production of obsolescent types. General Halder wrote in his diary on 23 July: ‘The chronic tendency to underrate enemy capabilities is gradually assuming grotesque proportions.’ In September, German difficulties mounted swiftly. Troops in the southern mountains encountered snowstorms, and repeated changes of objective wreaked havoc with operations. Again and again, German advances were delayed or halted by lack of fuel – First Panzer Army found itself immobilised for three weeks, conceding a precious breathing-space to Stalin’s commanders. Almost all available Luftwaffe support was diverted to Stalingrad, heedless of the cost to operations elsewhere. On 12 September, the first German troops entered the city.

      Along the length of the front, Russian soldiers and civilians alike understood little of the Germans’ huge difficulties, seeing only the miseries imposed upon their own people by battlefield failure, slaughter and starvation. On 23 October Commissar Pavel Kalitov wrote in dismay from Logovo, on receiving the order for yet another retreat: ‘The civilians are howling. Everything is to be evacuated. Everywhere there is weeping, tears, grief. Just think of it: winter is about to begin, they must go out into the cold with their little ones…Where are they to go? Our units are falling back. The Germans are exploiting a weak point in our line. Our newspapers often use such phrases as: “under pressure of superior enemy forces”. But what about us? Why are we unable to mass such “superior forces”? What is wrong? The past sixteen months have taught us many lessons. It is so hard to abandon settlements…More victims, more bloody torture, more curses levelled at us. [The peasants say]: “That’s what they are like, our protectors.”’

      An old woman spoke scathingly to Vasily Grossman about her country’s rulers: ‘These fools have allowed [the enemy] to reach the heart of the country, the Volga. They’ve given them half of Russia.’ From the Kremlin came new slogans: ‘Not a step back…The only extenuating circumstance is death.’ Stalin, facing disaster with half the European Soviet Union in German hands, made an appointment with reality which proved critical. In September he named Zhukov as the nation’s Deputy Supreme Commander, then dispatched him to oversee the defence of Stalingrad, and prepare a major counter-offensive. He recognised the need to subordinate ideology to military necessity: the prohibited word ‘officer’ was restored to the Red Army, and unit commanders were