Codebreakers Victory (29 page)

Whatever his reasoning, the consequences were disastrous. His army leadership had been thinned in the 1930s by his ruthless culling of officers he suspected-of opposing him, an extended bout of paranoia in which more than half his senior commanders were executed. This bloodletting, as noted by the leading U.S. historian of the Soviet military, David M. Glantz, had "stifled military thought and analysis." If now he, the boss, said that war was not imminent, his cowed officers disregarded all other signs and agreed: the Germans were not coming.

The result was that when the German armies crossed the Russian borders at four fifteen a.m. on June 22, 1941, they found the Red Army unready for war. Aware of the great reaches into which the Russians could retreat, the German generals planned pincer movements that would envelop huge numbers of Red Army soldiery. Aided by the chaos among Soviet defenders and the reluctance of Stalin to permit withdrawals, the German armies sliced through and around the confused troops. At Minsk they captured three hundred thousand prisoners and large amounts of equipment. The encirclements were repeated at Kiev, at Smolensk. The Germans' northern army closed in on Leningrad and began the thousand-day siege that caused two million Russian deaths because of starvation and the effects of malnutrition. Pushing toward Soviet oil fields, the southern army penetrated into the Caucasus Mountains and overran much of the Crimea. In the first two months of the war almost one million Russian soldiers were taken prisoner and seven hundred thousand more were killed. The Germans controlled the western five hundred miles of the country and half of Ukraine's breadbasket. It began to look as though what Hitler had told his generals as they prepared the campaign would come true: "You have only to kick open the door and the whole rotten edifice will come crashing down."

While everything seemed to be going Hitler's way, however, serious problems were developing for the Germans. Russian soldiers were proving to be tougher fighters, putting up a more stubborn resistance, than the Germans had anticipated. Their do-or-die spirit was caused by more than love of country. The word had spread among Russian troops that if they surrendered, they would only end up being shot—if not by German soldiers, then by the SS Blackshirts who followed them. Hitler had told his generals that since they were fighting inferior Slavs, the war "cannot be conducted in a knightly fashion"; it must be waged with "unprecedented, unmerciful and unrelenting harshness." Since the Soviet Union was not a participant in the Hague Convention that set down humane behavioral rules for troops in combat, he said, German soldiers would not be prosecuted for flouting those rules. As ghastly tales of massacres filtered down to the Russian soldiers, they fought with a desperation that caused the German victories to be achieved at high costs.

Also hampering the German advances were the primitive roads and paucity of rail lines. Repeated delays in the armies' progress, General Gerd von Rundstedt told Liddell Hart after the war, "were caused by bad roads, and mud. The 'black earth' of the Ukraine could be turned into mud by ten minutes' rain—stopping all movement until it dried. That was a heavy handicap, in a race with time. It was increased by the lack of railways in Russia—for bringing up supplies to our advancing troops." The poor roads also prevented the Germans' encirclement maneuvers from being as successful as they had planned. Although they captured legions of prisoners, many thousands escaped before the rings could be closed.

As his own commander in chief, Hitler made a decision that his generals opposed but could not alter. That came when the Army of the Center, in late August as the days were growing shorter and the Russian winter loomed, wearily slogged through to the approaches to Moscow, so close that forward troops could see the sun reflecting off the towers of the Kremlin. Hitler, however, postponed the advance. His reasoning was that it was more important to step up the stubbornly resisted drive into Ukraine, to take over those prime farm and factory areas, than to capture a city important only for its symbolic meaning. No less than sixteen divisions were redeployed to the south. When his generals protested, Hitler informed them that they knew nothing about economics. Let Germany seize Russia's principal agricultural and industrial centers, he said, and then Moscow would fall into German hands with scarcely a struggle.

Reinforced, the southern offensive went well. The whole of Ukraine was opened up. The Donets Basin, supplying sixty percent of the Soviet Union's coal, was overwhelmed. The advances pushed toward the mountains of the Caucasus and the rich oil fields beyond. Hitler was jubilant. His planning had led to triumph.

Now his armies could turn back to the taking of Moscow. On October 2 they launched Operation Typhoon, which Hitler described as beginning "the last, great, decisive battle of the war."

It has been said it took four years and twenty million Soviet lives to correct Stalin's mistake. The turn toward remediation was about to come.

 

 

Winning at Moscow, Stalingrad and Kursk

 

When, despite warnings, the Russian armies had been surprised and shattered during the opening phases of the war, Moscow's intelligence cadres could do little to stem the devastating series of Nazi conquests. Yet the information they supplied soon began to have consequences. As the Germans prepared to resume their assault on Moscow, Bletchley Park succeeded in breaking a new eastern-front Enigma cipher, whose messages revealed in detail the German order of battle. Reading these decrypts, Churchill asked Stewart Menzies, his chief of intelligence, "Are you warning the Russians of these developing concentrations?" When Menzies affirmed this was being done, Churchill nevertheless added, "Show me the last five messages you have sent."

A more vital contribution to the defense of Moscow came from Sorge. A big question hanging over the Soviets was whether Japan, as the third main partner in the Axis, would enter the war against Russia. The likelihood seemed good, given the long history of rancor between the two. To guard against this eventuality, the Soviets had to keep many divisions in the Far East. Now Sorge presented convincing evidence that an attack on Russia did not fit into the plans of the Japanese; their intentions were directed southward toward the English, Dutch and Americans.

From Switzerland, the Red Three confirmed Sorge's information. San-dor Rado quoted the Japanese ambassador in Bern as saying, "There can be no possible question of a Japanese attack against the Soviet Union until Germany wins a decisive victory on the Eastern Front"—i.e., until Moscow falls.

By then, Stalin and his generals had enough confidence in their informants to rush eighteen divisions, half of the Eastern command, by rail to Moscow, with additional divisions drawn from Siberia and Outer Mongolia. Richard Overy, in his excellent history
Russia's War,
described how, suddenly in the days just before Stalin and his commander in chief, Marshal Georgi Zhukov, were planning their December 5 counteroffensive, the streets of Moscow were filled with "tough, fresh-faced 'Siberian boys,'" to whom bitter cold seemed a natural element. The arrival of divisions from the East added a powerful cutting edge to the new divisions Zhukov was skillfully organizing and training. Overy commented, "It was not the tough winter conditions that halted the German army but the remarkable revival of Soviet military manpower after the terrible maulings of the summer and autumn."

To have masses of fresh Russian troops coming at them in subzero weather surprised and shocked the Germans. Their own initiative was stalled. Instead of occupying the buildings of Moscow, the German soldiers were forced to endure the ravages of the Russian winter in open country. Many of them wore only summer uniforms. To equip the troops for winter war had been considered a defeatist attitude—the Russian edifice was supposed to have collapsed well before winter set in. The German army would be debilitated by more than 133,000 cases of frostbite.

Not only was the German advance stopped. The Russian counteroffensive harried the Germans into a retreat that almost ended in a rout. Stalin could tell the people of Moscow that the German attempt to encircle the capital had failed. The only sour note in this initial success came when Stalin grew too ambitious. Over Zhukov's objections, he ordered a broad offensive that would also relieve the siege of Leningrad. As did an ill-prepared attempt to retake the city of Kharkov, the attack failed. Russian losses ran into the hundreds of thousands.

In the spring of 1942 came the second important contribution by pro-Soviet informants. Roessler received and conveyed to Moscow the whole ten pages of Hitler's Directive 41. The directive showed the Soviets the plans for Hitler's summer offensive. His armies would have two goals. One was to capture the Volga port city of Stalingrad—a victory that would have the symbolic value of seizing Stalin's namesake. At the same time the city's capture would protect the left flank of the divisions driving south to achieve the other goal: the final conquest of the Caucasus, which would assure the Germans control of the region's oil fields.

Again Stalin rejected the informants' warnings. Certain that the Germans would resume their assault on Moscow, he refused to allow the capital's reserve forces to be sent to the relief of Stalingrad. And again his secret sources were proved right. The Germans ignored Moscow, closed in on Stalingrad and drove a deep salient into the Russian lines in the south.

In August 1942, when the situation became desperate, Stalin once more called on Zhukov to bail him out. After touring the battle site and studying intelligence about the forces arrayed against him, the marshal worked with his staff to devise a daring plan: they would enclose the German encirclers in a still wider encirclement.

To give the planners time to organize the counteroffensive, they needed the defenders inside Stalingrad to hold out for forty-five days. The Russians were up to the harrowing task. Under their commanders Vasily Chuikov and Andrei Yeremenko, they burrowed into the city's ashes and rubble and allowed the Germans' Sixth Army and Fourth Panzer Army only yard-by-yard, house-by-house advances, with tremendous casualties on both sides. Yeremenko set an example for his men by continuing to command even after being wounded seven times. At night, Russian boats and, after the river froze over, sleds crossed the mile-wide Volga to ferry in supplies and carry out the wounded. To help fend off the Germans, Russian artillery and rocket launchers fired from across the Volga. At a critical moment Stalin relented and allowed the Thirteenth Guards Division to be rushed to the city, just in time to stop a last German push that had cut a narrow corridor through to the river and split the defenders into two pockets of holdouts.

In his planning, Zhukov enjoyed a distinct intelligence advantage. He knew both the makeup and the placement of the armies facing him. The German commanders, by contrast, were blind. As a result, Zhukov was able to assemble a far larger concentration of attack forces than the Germans thought possible.

He was also aware of a major weakness in the German line. Hitler's armies, worn down by an attrition rate that totaled more than a million casualties by March 1942, could no longer rely entirely on German manpower to carry out the ambitious campaigns asked of them. Hitler resolved to fill the voids by ordering into combat the armies of satellite nations and his Axis partner. As General Paul von Kleist later recalled of the forces deployed along the Volga, "When I pointed out the risks of leaving such a long flank exposed, he said he was going to draw on Romania, Hungary, and Italy for troops to cover it. I warned him, and so did others, that it was rash to rely on such troops, but he would not listen." When Hitler's chief of staff suggested abandoning the now useless city and shortening the German line, he shouted, "I won't leave the Volga!"

Zhukov saw that the non-German armies were less experienced and not well armed. "Above all," he wrote in his memoir, "their soldiers, and many of their officers, had no desire to die for interests alien to them in far-away Russia."

The Stalingrad defenders gave him his forty-five days to arrange his divisions for his huge pincer movement. Zhukov knew where to hit. On November 19 his armies swept forward against the Romanian army assigned to hold the left flank. It collapsed in hours. From the south Zhukov's armor struck the Romanian army on the other flank and crushed it. Within four days the pincers had met, closing some 330,000 Germans inside the destroyed city.

The Sixth Army's General Friedrich von Paulus, a fastidious man abandoned in an abattoir, asked permission to try to break through the Russian enclosure. Hitler ordered him to stand fast and, to strengthen his resolve, promoted him to field marshal. Paulus was also assured that he would be supplied from the air and that a powerful German thrust would punch through the Russians to his rescue.

In London on December 8, Menzies was again reviewing Bletchley Park decrypts with Churchill. The messages dealt with German plans to regain the initiative around Stalingrad. "Is any of this being sent to Joe?" Churchill asked. Menzies replied that every bit of useful information Bletchley could pull out of the air was being relayed to Stalin.

The odds were too great against the Germans. Their offensive to supply von Paulus an escape route faltered. Airborne supplies dwindled as the Russians shot down the transports. The troops inside Stalingrad endured for seventy-two deadly days. When on February 2, 1943, Paulus surrendered, only ninety-one thousand of his troops remained alive to be locked into Siberian prison camps. Fewer than five thousand were to survive the war.

All during this tense time the stream of secret information flowing into Moscow's Central Bureau was at flood stage. The German conspirators were transmitting to Roessler the decisions of the German high command, often with an elapsed time of ten hours or less. The Red Three were so overwhelmed by the scope of traffic to be transmitted that Rado had to find and train additional helpers to handle it. The faithful members of the Red Orchestra, trying to answer the countless questions the Moscow bureau directed to them, jeopardized themselves by transmitting for five hours or more nightly, giving German counterespionage teams ideal opportunities to home in on them with direction-finding equipment. From Britain, in addition to inputs from Churchill and British intelligence, the Cambridge volunteer agents delivered piles of documents, including Cairncross's and Long's summaries from Bletchley Park, to their spymaster in London. These were reduced to reels of microfilm and dispatched by diplomatic couriers to Moscow. The Russians showed their appreciation by returning their usual largesse of laudatory letters, money and medals.