Disaster at Stalingrad: An Alternate History (14 page)

Among the capital ships the battle had broken into three parts.
King George V
and
Tirpitz
were slugging it out while
Washington
duelled with the two battlecruisers. The cruisers were pounding each other as they moved off on a northerly course. A destroyer had finally picked up Admiral Tovey, but the action was too hot to put him on another of the big ships. Admiral Carls was still unable to communicate with his ships. Each captain just fought it out.

The two German heavy cruisers were evenly matched with the Allied cruiser force. The three British ships concentrated on
Scheer
while
Wichita
took on
Prinz Eugen. Scheer
was bigger-gunned and more heavily armoured than the British heavy cruisers. Its shells were more powerful and destructive than those of the British 8-inch guns; its armour belt of 3.1 inches and turrets of 5.5 inches compared lethally to
Kent‘
s and
Cumberland’
s 1 inch for belt and turret. Their only advantage was that they had more than twice as many guns. In the end,
Scheer
was just plain luckier. It gutted
Cumberland
which burned and drifted away.

The big guns were gaining the upper hand in the other fights as well.
Tirpitz’
s remaining turrets were firing heavier metal than
King George V
and scoring hits at the waterline, piercing the armour belt and flooding interior compartments till the British ship slowed perceptibly. The German armour-piercing shells were better made, and their propellant more powerful. Watertight hatches failed as the big German shells gutted the British battleship. It slowed and began to settle.

Washington
had battered
Scharnhorst
into a wreck at closer and closer range with its 16-inch shells.
Gneisenau
was not in much better shape with turrets out of commission and fires raging below decks.
Washington’
s own armour had been largely proof against the smaller German guns. The Kriegsmarine would rue the day it had decided to postpone the
fitting
out of these two battlecruisers with 15-inch guns.
Washington
moved on past them to come up on
Tirpitz
from the stern where one turret had been knocked out. The two forward American turrets pumped a rapid salvo into the German ship at short range. The
Tirpitz’s
superstructure crumpled, spewing debris in every direction into the sea, shutting down the ship’s electrical system that controlled the guns. Fires were burning everywhere as the crew scrambled out of the wreckage dragging their wounded to the deck.
Washington
came up on the port quarter, firing at the unheard-of distance of half a mile. There were no misses at that range.

Tirpitz
was a dying beast, crippled but dragging itself forward on engines that still ran while every other ship’s function had been killed. The crew were spilling over the side as
Washington
fired again and again, tearing great jagged holes. Then
Tirpitz
perished in an explosion that broke its back and seemed to lift the ship from the centre. The German battleship broke in two and each part began to sink.
Washington
circled its fallen prey.
¹⁷

Carls was a realist and knew that
Tirpitz
was doomed as soon as
Washington
struck that first crushing blow. He ordered
Hipper
out of the fight and signalled by flag to
Scharnhorst
and
Gneisenau
to follow. Only
Gneisenau
was able to do so.
Scharnhorst
was adrift, its captain and other senior officers dead, its engines shattered. The surviving destroyers formed a rearguard on the heavy ships.
Kent
might well have gone the same way as
Cumberland
had not Carls pulled the German cruisers after him as he withdrew at top speed back to Norway. Light cruiser
Nigeria
had had little part in the fight among the heavies, but now would get in the last lick, following close on the retreating Germans to release a spread of torpedoes. Two struck
Prinz Eugen,
the last ship in line. The German cruiser stopped as its engines quit and the sea rushed in. In fifteen minutes it sank.
¹⁸

That was the last engagement in the struggle that would be named the Battle of 20° East. The only task left for both sides was to get their stricken survivors back to port. The remnants of the Home Fleet lingered only to save what they could and pick up survivors. For this the destroyers did yeoman work, picking up over 3,000 men from the sea, British, American and German. The Allies could claim victory since it was the Germans who abandoned the field, but the losses on both sides were numbing. It was a victory only on a very narrow counting of the points. For the Allies, the news that they had lost the battleship
King George V,
the carrier
Wasp,
heavy cruisers
Cumberland, London, Norfolk,
and
Tuscaloosa,
and five destroyers was grim. The British Cabinet was stunned.

Kent
took
Duke of York
in tow and gathered up the remnants of the Home Fleet to sail home to Scapa Flow. Tragically, on the way home they encountered the wolf pack they had barged through two days before. Lieutenant Hans-Günther Kuhlmann acquired the British battleship through the periscope of
U-166.
It was barely making 8 knots, about what a merchant ship might make. How perfect, Kuhlman thought. The escorts coursed alongside the battleships and carrier, but now there was that perfect gap.
‘Torpedo los
,’ he said, and two torpedoes shot out of the bow tubes in a burst of bubbles. Both hit. The great ship was mortally wounded and would slowly sink. Kuhlman and the other U-boat captains forbore to attack the destroyers that came alongside the settling battleship to take off the crew. But they did circle the remaining capital ships and dart in repeatedly to attack. Here again the escorts proved their worth, dashing back and forth to depth-charge the enemy.
Victorious
had a few planes left that managed to dodge the damaged portions of the hull to take off and assist in spotting the U-boats. In the end
Duke of York
was avenged when depth charges smashed open
U-155
and
U-514.
Still, the Kriegsmarine had come out well ahead.
¹⁹

Without a doubt the two battles - Bear Island and 20° East - had been an Allied strategic disaster of the first order. The losses suffered by the Allies were only the beginning of the dividends the operation would pay the Germans. To add insult to injury the Germans were to make enormous propaganda points by filming the arrival in German ports of the fifteen captured Allied merchant ships and their cargoes and the parading of their crews.
²⁰

Dönitz flew in late at night to report to Hitler. The leader of the Third Reich kept very late hours so the admiral was ushered right in to see him. Hitler was waiting for him, a report in his hand. The only other man in the room was Heydrich. The look on Hitler’s face was grim. He looked up over his bifocals and said, ‘The British are claiming a victory over our fleet. The BBC is saying nothing else. It is Jutland all over again, Dönitz. Our fleet sailed out and ran home after getting beaten.’

Without hesitation, Dönitz replied, ‘Then may God grant the British another such victory!’

Hitler looked puzzled. Dönitz immediately pointed out that the Allies, and particularly the British, had suffered a strategic catastrophe. They had lost the entire convoy and in such a way to discredit them not only with the rest of the world but with their own people. The naval battle south of Bear Island had gutted the Home Fleet, and embarrassed the Americans with the loss of their carrier while under British command. It was sure to lead to dissent between them or an outright falling out. ‘I would also wager,
mein Führer,
that it will be next to impossible for them to recruit merchant crews for another convoy. We have slammed the door to Russia shut for you.’ Dönitz was happy to have this time alone with Hitler. He was fortunate that Goring had grown weary and retired or he would be greedily claiming all credit for the Luftwaffe.

While Hitler paused to consider this, Dönitz opened his valise to show Hitler the preliminary reports on the war booty on the captured ships taken from their manifests. He began reading off the lists till Hitler’s eyes grew bright with greed. ‘Five thousand tons of aluminium, 2,500 Studebaker trucks and a year’s worth of parts, 22,000 tons of explosives, 40,000 tons of food; and a myriad of other precious resources that would feed war’s voracious appetite.

Heydrich deftly added more lustre to the Kriegsmarine’s accomplishment by praising it for originating and planning this operation. How fat Goring would pout the next day as Hitler sang the Navy’s praises. He added slyly, ‘Do not forget,
mein Führer,
that this victory was won on the Americans’ national day of independence. Salt in the wound, salt in the wound.’

By now Hitler’s imagination was racing to the moon with the consequences of this victory.

The encirclement had been perfectly executed. The Germans had thrust into the wide steppe between the Donets and Don after seizing crossings on the former river three weeks before. Here Hitler hoped to trap and destroy the last of Stalin’s reserves.

Geyr’s XL Panzer Corps arrived at Stary Oskol only to find the wide grassy and empty steppe inside their
Kessel
was empty of Soviet forces.
¹
Against all expectations the enemy had flown and had even been able to carry away their heavy equipment. The Germans had grown too used to being able to encircle vast numbers of Soviet troops who had been nailed to the ground and unable to manoeuvre by Stalin’s refusal to allow his commanders any tactical flexibility. This was indeed something new.

Geyr immediately reported the enemy retreat and requested permission to strike directly for the Don River and capture its crossings. Paulus refused and ordered, ‘You will swing north to link up with the Fourth Panzer Army coming down from Voronezh.’
²

The defences of the great Soviet naval base and fortress of Sevastopol had finally been cracked wide open by Manstein’s 11th Army after three weeks of crushing bombardment by the greatest concentration of heavy artillery seen so far in the war. The guns and heavy mortars had smashed bunkers, cupolas and galleries one after another. The 88mm flak guns of the 18th Flak Regiment earned fame by firing their flat-trajectory high-velocity shells directly through the gunports and apertures of the Soviet defences.

The 110,000-man Soviet garrison had been decimated. Now panic flew among the survivors:

MAP №3 OPERATION BLUE FIRST STAGES MAY—JULY 1942

Manstein attributed this action to the Soviets’ complete contempt for human life as he described the garrison’s fight to the death. Perhaps he should have considered that it was the German record for the barbaric treatment of their prisoners that made a fight to the bitter end preferable to German captivity. It requires no wisdom at all to give an enemy such determination.

Manstein had a very useful blind eye. Not only was he indifferent to the treatment of Soviet prisoners, but he had obeyed Hitler’s infamous Commissar Order to shoot all captured communist officials. He had also lent thousands of his own Army troops to help the SS Einsatzgruppen massacre Jews. Resisting these orders might endanger his goal of becoming Chief of Staff of the Army. Complying with them could only facilitate his ambition. That, and his crushing of Sevastopol, convinced Hitler and those around him that in Manstein he had found a very hard man. And to this very hard man, he would give a field marshal’s baton.
⁴

This was also the man who had put his career on the line in 1934 in protest over the dismissal from the Army of one of his officers who was classified as a
Mischling
because he had a Jewish grandparent. For him a German was someone who was of German culture, especially one who put his life in service of the country as a soldier.
⁵

The speed of the Blitzkrieg was taking any freedom of action out of Bock’s hands as
Grossdeutschland
Motorized, 16th Motorized, and 24th Panzer Divisions all bounced bridges over the northern Don, their advance elements in between the retreating Russian columns. The speed of their advance surprised the Soviet bridge guards. At Semiluki, on the way to Voronezh, the Soviet engineers had lit normal fuzes which were burning as the Germans started to cross. Corporal Hempel of the reconnaissance battalion jumped into the water to rip out the fuzes, the last one barely 8 inches from 125 pounds of explosive.

Grossdeutschland’
s assault-gun units, with infantry riding on the vehicles, quickly penetrated into Voronezh as far as the railway marshalling yards but were driven back by a strong Soviet counterattack. The ease of the penetration convinced Bock that the city could be seized quickly and still allow him to swing his panzers south to trap Timoshenko’s retreating forces before they could cross the Don.
⁶

This was the first action of
Grossdeutschland
as a division. It had been formed as an elite infantry regiment from the
Wachtregiment/Berlin,
the Army’s guard formation for the German capital, in 1939. The name, meaning Greater Germany, had been chosen because recruits came from all over the country; it was not based on a single locality like most of the rest of the infantry divisions. It had distinguished itself in France and in Russia in 1941, in the latter campaign suffering 4,070 casualties and completely turning over its strength. Reorganized as the Army’s elite division in early 1942, it was decreed that:

The result was a military instrument as sharp and deadly as the spear of Achilles, as shown in the daring valour of men like Corporal Hempel.

Chief of the Soviet General Staff General Boris Shaposnikov picked up the phone to call Stalin. He had been the bearer of nothing but bad news since the war began, but Stalin kept him on when so many other messengers had been shot. Shaposnikov was a former tsarist officer, general staff trained, who had thrown in his lot with the Bolsheviks and in the ensuing years had never got on Stalin’s bad side by posing any sort of a threat.

‘Comrade Stalin, we are just getting word from the British that their convoy has been destroyed.’

Stalin cut in. ‘Well, they always overreact these capitalists, so melodramatic about losses. So, how many ships did they really lose?’

‘All of them, Comrade Stalin.’

There was quiet on the other end of the line for a very long time. Stalin felt just as he had when he had been told that the Germans had attacked on 22 June 1941. He could feel the same sort of paralytic shock seeping through his body, the same feeling that had cast him into such a trough of depression that he had hid in his
dacha
for the first ten days of the war. Foreign Minister Molotov had had to announce to the people the news of the invasion. Without Stalin, the communist leadership had panicked and lost its nerve. They were so frightened that they instinctively called upon the Almighty for help and begged the Russian Orthodox Patriarch of Moscow to address the nation the next day. The cleric delivered a rousing patriotic appeal to defend the Russian lands as their ancestors had done against Tatar, Pole, Swede, Frenchman and German. It was a great speech, but it was not Stalin’s.

Finally Stalin spoke. ‘All, you are sure, all?’

‘Yes, every one. Those that were not sunk were captured by the Germans. It gets worse. The British were defeated by the German fleet in a battle in the Norwegian Sea and lost several battleships.’

Stalin fought off the tendrils of paralysis. He was the
Vozhd;
he summoned power from deep within. His mind raced to all the possible strategic and political consequences of the disaster. Would Churchill survive this catastrophe? Stalin despised him as an anticommunist to the bone, but he knew that the Englishman would fight Hitler to the death. He was not so sure of anyone who might succeed him. The NKVD
⁸
analysis said that none of them had the will or ability of Churchill. It would be all too easy for the British to make a separate peace if they were led to it by a well-meaning fool.

Then what about the Americans? Roosevelt had never shown the hostility to the first communist country that Churchill had and had been cooperative and helpful. How would his domestic enemies, none of whom were in the socialist camp, damage him with this defeat?

These questions all pointed to the central issue - the continuance of aid. That aid was becoming vital to the war effort. His propaganda apparatus could trumpet the heroic feats of Soviet production all it wanted, but he knew that Canadian and American aluminium was vital to the making of tank and aircraft engines, that American aviation fuel was keeping a larger and larger part of the Red Air Force in the air, that American trucks were becoming essential to create any sort of mobility in both battle and logistics.

How then was the Soviet Union to continue to receive this aid? The Persian Corridor and the Pacific route were the only substitutes, and neither was in any condition to take up the slack immediately. He would have to encourage the British and Americans to concentrate their shipments through those two routes. Persia was by far the more important. Shipments through there would go directly to most threatened part of the front, just to the north of the Caucasus, in that wide almost empty space between the Don and Volga.

He would have to order the communist parties and sympathizers in the Allied countries to support Churchill and Roosevelt and address the deepest condolences to both leaders with saccharin words of sympathy and thanks from the Soviet people. Yes, and they would give the strongest encouragement not to let this setback stop the convoys. Look at all the setbacks the Soviet Union had suffered and yet was fighting on. He would give the entire world-wide propaganda apparatus a good crank, a very good crank.

Beyond that there was the central problem of how to get by now that the materials from the Arctic route had been stopped. He stopped to consider how prescient he must have been to have ordered the ‘secret railway’ built, that ran from Saratov, north of Voronezh, down the east bank of the Volga to Leninsk only some dozen miles east of Stalingrad. It had been built so quickly that there had been no time to lay a track bed; the sleepers were laid directly on the ground. It was single-tracked with sidings for trains to wait as others passed. Part of the Trans-Siberian Railway had had to be dismantled to find the resources for it, but it had been done. If the Germans succeeded in taking Voronezh and its marshalling yards, he would still have an alternative route to bring Allied war materials from Persia to the threatened Moscow front.
⁹

Admiral King had always been careful to hide his temper from the President. But now he was in full warpaint and feathers. ‘Mr President, the loss of the
Wasp
reduces our carrier strength by a full 20 per cent! We have only four carriers left, and the Essex Class won’t be coming into service until late this year and next year.
¹⁰
I tell you, sir, we can no longer support both the Arctic convoys and hold the Japanese at bay, much less go over to the attack.’

He had just done what Franklin Roosevelt abhorred. He had asked the President to choose. King now envied Marshall. The general had figured out early as Chief of Staff that Roosevelt liked to employ an informal, bantering, almost jovial approach, which would allow him later to say that he had not really made a commitment. Marshall had used his stiff and formal manner to underline the finality of any decision that he asked Roosevelt to make, a decision he could not back out of later.

Now King was pressing the President in just the same manner, no more ‘our’ Navy wink-winks, nod-nods. But Roosevelt needed it both ways. He far more than King realized the centrality of keeping both the British and the Russians in the war. And in a way he was as much an Anglophile as King was an Anglophobe. He was a comfortable member of that transatlantic community of class, culture and belief. Churchill and he were two gentlemen who saw that Western civilization was at stake.

In a way, Roosevelt was also like Stalin in that he realized as a war leader that setbacks and cruel defeats must be endured and overcome. He was not like Stalin, though, in that he was answerable to the people, and the people were influenced by the press, and a very powerful part of the press were the Hearst papers owned by a Roosevelt-hater of the first order. He wistfully thought how nice it would be to have William Randolph Hearst shot.

But King would not let go of the issue. ‘How many times must we pull the British bacon out of the fire, sir?’

Roosevelt straightened up in his wheelchair:

He looked at King as if to tell him to who was boss. The admiral got the hint.

In the end, the chiefs agreed that aid to Britain and the Soviet Union must continue but that the Russian supplies would have to go by way of the Persian Corridor and the Pacific Route. There was no alternative, but it would take time for both those avenues to begin to funnel the volume of material that had been sent through the Arctic to Murmansk. That Roosevelt and Stalin had arrived at the same conclusion was due to the iron logic of their predicament.
¹¹