Disaster at Stalingrad: An Alternate History (3 page)

The logisticians on the Soviet General Staff were the most frightened of men. The reports they had to present to Stalin would have stunned a man with a lesser will or a more forgiving approach to failure than the
Vozhd.
²⁰
Not that Stalin did not worry. He too was frightened, but he was patient and steady. He had panicked in the opening days of the German invasion when the shock had sent him to cower at his
dacha
outside Moscow for two weeks. When a delegation from the Politburo arrived, he thought they had come to arrest him. Instead they begged him to take the state in hand again. Since then his grip had not so much as quivered.

He did not shoot the logisticians as he had the military intelligence officers who had tried to warn him of the German invasion. He had learned not to dispose of everyone who brought bad news. That only resulted in more bad news arriving in the form of nasty surprises. But their reports would have snapped the nerve of a lesser man.

The Soviets had barely survived 1941. Losses had been beyond enormous. The battles for Moscow alone had cost 2.5 million irrecoverable losses, a figure that would long remain a state secret, and at the same time millions of men of military age were now under German control.
²¹
Huge areas of the most productive parts of the western Soviet Union had been overrun by the Germans. Of those thousands of factories that had been evacuated to the Urals, many were still in the process of reconstitution. Soviet war production was in a potentially deadly trough.

Soviet territorial, population, agricultural and industrial losses had been staggering. Every index of production showed a collapse after 1940.

Key elements of industrial production had also collapsed compared to 1940. Of the 145,000 trucks supporting industry, barely 35,000 were still operational. Of the 58,400 metal-working lathes working in 1940, only 22,900 remained. Electric power had been reduced from 48 to 29 billion KwH. Ferrous sheet metal production, of which modern mechanized warfare devoured vast quantities, fell from 13.1 million tons to 4.5 million.

Agriculture was in even worse condition. Of the 150 million hectares of sown area in 1940, barely 67 million remained in Soviet hands. The cattle herd had fallen from 55 to 28 million. Horses were still essential for agriculture and for the Army to pull its artillery and wagons, and of the 21 million available in 1940, only 8 million remained. These losses led to a collapse of food production.

Unconsciously, not a few Soviet senior officers thanked God for the aid pouring in from the Western Allies. The British had made extraordinary efforts after the invasion of the Soviet Union. Churchill had said in the House of Commons that if Hitler had invaded hell he would find something favourable to say of the devil. Churchill loathed the Soviet Union as the totalitarian thug that it was, having attempted to strangle it in its cradle after the Bolshevik Revolution. Yet he recognized that the enemy of his enemy was for the moment his friend, and that Germany could not be defeated without the Russians. Otherwise the long night would close on Western civilization. Strategic necessity is rarely pretty.

This aid was sent by Arctic convoys at a time when British resources were being stretched to the limit after they had been driven from the continent at Dunkirk and in Greece. It was sent even though it meant starving the desperate struggle in the Western Desert that defended Egypt and the Suez Canal, the lifeline to the British Empire in India and beyond. Tanks that could have given short shrift to Rommel were winched off British ships at Murmansk and Archangelsk. The British people had almost no replacement clothing because of the vast amounts sent to Russia. By November 1941 locomotives by the hundreds and railcars by the thousands had been shipped to strengthen the Iranian State Railway as an additional route for aid to the Soviet Union. By that month, by Russian admission, British and American aid was exceeding Soviet production.
²²
Even though the loss of Malaya in early 1942 cut off the British supply of rubber, they shared their own precious reserve with the Soviets.

Despite this outpouring of aid, which left the British with a desperately slim inventory of their own, Stalin demanded more and more. He wanted 30,000 tons of aluminium immediately for the engines for Soviet tank and aircraft factories. He wanted a monthly quota of 500 tanks and 400 aircraft and belittled the equipment that was sent at such cost. Churchill firmly rebuffed these outlandish demands and stated to Stalin that any precipitate action would lead to disasters that would help only Hitler. Nevertheless, he did arrange for 5,000 tons of aluminium to be shipped from Canada with another 2,000 tons to follow each month.
²³

The British deliveries came from their own production and from their allocation of Lend-Lease aid from the United States. In late September 1941 the Anglo-American Supply Commission travelled to Moscow and was treated coldly. In consequence, Churchill asked President Franklin Roosevelt to increase aid to the Soviets. Roosevelt promised that from July 1942 until January 1943 the United States would deliver to Britain and the Soviet Union 1,200 tanks a month, rising to 2,000 a month thereafter. He promised aircraft deliveries of 3,600 a month as well.
²⁴

From October 1941 to 30 June 1942, the Soviets had received most of the promised 1.5 million tons of aid. Over 83 per cent of it came across the Atlantic to the Arctic ports of Murmansk and Archangelsk. The rest came first by ship and then overland through the Persian Corridor into Soviet Azerbaijan, and by a third route across the Pacific in Soviet ships from American ports, undisturbed by the Japanese who wished to stay out of the war with the Soviet Union.
²⁵
Most of the Soviet ships were in fact chartered American ships conveniently reflagged with the hammer and sickle.
²⁶

Soviet losses in the first year of the war had been so severe that Allied aid was vital. In 1941-2, Allied-provided (mostly British) tanks amounted to 15 per cent of the total Soviet tank force. The first Lend-Lease cargoes arrived at Russian northern ports in November 1941 carrying 59 Curtiss fighter planes, 70 M3 light tanks, 1,000 trucks, and 2,000 tons of barbed wire. Convoy PQ-16, which sailed in May 1942, delivered 321 tanks and 2,500 trucks in addition to huge amounts of general cargo. Most of the military equipment was employed in the areas closest to the ports - around Leningrad and Moscow - in order to minimize the already grinding strain on Soviet railways.

American-provided supplies and war materials far exceeded the tonnage of actual weapons. Already, American trucks and jeeps were becoming ubiquitous, coming in a stream that filled a vital gap left by Soviet losses and anaemic production.

It was precisely in these areas of sustenance and transport that Lend-Lease was so vital to the Soviet war effort. If soldiers are malnourished or cannot be moved expeditiously about the front, the importance of tank and other weapons production pales.

The Soviets had indeed made heroic efforts to maintain production, but 1941 had been devastating. Not only were large industrial areas lost, but 1,500 factories had been moved to the Urals ahead of the Germans and were out of production for many months. By early 1942 production had resumed on a large scale.

Whole new populations were drafted to replace lost industrial workers as factories ran around the clock. Women, ‘fighters in overalls’, shouldered much of this work. The Soviet bureaucracy was as indifferent to their welfare and safety as the generals were to their soldiers’ wellbeing. Yet out of this supreme achievement came 11,000 tanks in the first six months of the year.
²⁷
This concentration on weapons production came at a great price. The Soviets simply did not have the resources to build a balanced force.

Sustaining production and the forces in the field, however, was the vital Allied contribution to the Soviet war effort - specialty steels and other metals such as aluminium (without which the engines for Soviet tanks and aircraft could not have been made), machine tools, munitions, and the explosive components of munitions. The American chemical industry was able to produce almost immediately a huge volume of explosives that the Soviets simply could not have replaced. These were the calories of war.

Huge amounts of field telephone wire, radios, radar sets and other communications equipment were filling a void. The Soviets had a phobia about communicating by radio and preferred wherever possible to use telephone wire, which they could not have done without American aid. American Ford, Willys and Studebaker trucks and jeeps were making up the grave shortfall in Soviet production of these vehicles.

As important was the growing amount of food for a country whose most productive agricultural areas were now producing food for the Germans. American dehydrated eggs were soon known as Roosevelt’s eggs, a play on the word Russian word
yaitsa
which means both eggs and testicles. Canned spam and other meat called
tushonka,
stewed pork in gelatin, were becoming common along with beans, dried peas, butter, vegetable fat, oil and margarine, canned or dried milk, grits and coffee.
²⁸
Not a few amazed German soldiers would be lectured by their officers when they would capture a Studebaker truck filled with American canned food that the Americans would someday pay for all this.

The Americans, had they known, should have worried. Stalin was playing a deep strategic game. In December, when the Germans were within miles of the Kremlin, he had sternly reminded the panicking General Staff that the Germans were only a temporary enemy. The main enemy, the
glavny vrag,
was the United States. Lenin had so identified the Americans as the most dangerous of communism’s enemies, as did Hitler. It was this ideological legacy of the founder of Soviet power that legitimized Stalin in the eyes of the party and people, and the part about enemies he took with deadly seriousness.

That did not keep him from bargaining for every ton of wheat, fats, aviation fuel or aluminium, every bullet, truck or plane he could squeeze from the Americans. The myriad influential Americans sympathetic to the Soviet Union would pressure their government into pouring forth the materials of war.

They did not work alone. Inside the US Government, agents of the NKVD, Soviet military intelligence (GRU) and members of the Communist Party of the United States (CPUS) worked directly on orders from Moscow. Roosevelt’s chief advisor, Harry Hopkins, who played a critical role in the Lend-Lease talks, was a Soviet agent. Most important of them was Dexter White, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, who had got himself appointed to oversee all Lend-Lease shipments to his master in the Kremlin. White ensured that the US armed forces were not allowed to make any inquiries on the operational use or performance of any of the equipment sent to the Soviets. The Soviets refused to allow the Americans to send observers and technicians to the Eastern Front.
²⁹

The Soviets were all too often non-cooperative or even hostile to Britons and Americans working in the Soviet Union on Lend-Lease aid; some of them were arrested to disappear into the Soviet
gulag.
Those naval and merchant marine personnel who arrived in Soviet northern ports discovered that they were not out of danger once they had docked. The main port of Murmansk was regularly bombed by the Luftwaffe from bases in Northern Norway. Then they were shocked by what they experienced at the hands of their allies. They often found the Russians charming but terrified of being seen to fraternize with Westerners by the NKVD. Added to that was the abject poverty seen in the ports, the zombie-like slave labour from the
gulag
and German POWs used to unload ships, the brutal medical care, ‘the numerous petty formalities, the passes and visas, the plethora of guards and the prohibition of movement’, all of which strained the morale of everyone involved. It certainly killed any flirtation with communism in many of them.
³⁰

Grossadmiral Erich Raeder had much to think about in his long flight from Rome to Berlin that morning.
¹
He was not distracted by the beauty of the mountains before him or the Isonzo River, a silver trickle between the peaks, a vertical battlefield where hundreds of thousands of Italians had been slaughtered in eleven battles against the Austrians in the Great War.

For Raeder, who had commanded the Kriegsmarine since 1928, the problem uppermost in his mind was Hitler’s dilettante approach to naval warfare.
²
The man was as clueless as Napoleon had been about naval power, and it was naval power that kept Britain in the war. The emperor had commented ruefully, ‘Wherever wood can swim, there I am sure to find this flag of England,’
³
a sentiment Hitler by this time no doubt shared. And as with Napoleon it was likely to be his undoing.

When the war started the Kriegsmarine could array against the might of the Royal Navy only 11 cruisers or larger ships, 21 destroyers, and 57 U-boats. The Navy did not even have its own aviation arm. It had to depend on Göring’s Luftwaffe. The overbearing Reichsmarschall had jealously declared, ‘Everything that flies belongs to me.’
⁴
Not surprisingly, Goring allocated barely 5 per cent of the Luftwaffe’s aircraft to support the Navy despite its complex requirements. Raeder had counselled Hitler against going to war with Great Britain until the German naval building programme was completed in 1945. Otherwise, he had bluntly told Hitler, the Kriegsmarine’s only option in a naval war with the Royal Navy was to die gloriously.

Raeder just shook his head at how easily Hitler was influenced by men like Hermann Goring, who never lost an opportunity to disparage the Navy in favour of his precious Luftwaffe. Before the war, Hitler had taken a great interest in naval matters and a great pride in the heavy ships slipping off the German shipyard ways. As the war had sunk in the mire of Russia, his enthusiasm had become merely sympathy for the Navy’s problems that yielded not a Reichsmark of further resources. Now his meetings with Raeder were more likely to provoke a denunciation of the Navy as being a relentless futility since the war with Denmark in 1864 with the shining exception of the U-boats. He had threatened to scrap all the heavy surface ships. Raeder had responded in a memorandum that stated bluntly, ‘England, whose whole warfare stands or falls with its control of its sea communications, will consider it as good as won if Germany scraps its ships.’
⁵

Where to begin, he thought? The Führer takes no serious interest in the Mediterranean, that which the British themselves call ‘the sea of decision’. Take the Suez Canal and you mortally wound the British, more even than by taking London. He had urged Hitler to send Rommel to North Africa to march on Suez shortly after the fall of France but had been ignored. In the end, Hitler had sent this remarkable general there, but only to stop the Italians being flung out of North Africa on their ear. Yet, the Canal was still within Germany’s grasp as Rommel made himself a legend handing the British one defeat after another. The problem was Malta, though, that island in the centre of the sea from which the British savaged Rommel’s seaborne logistics. Raeder had begged Hitler to take it, but after the heavy losses in the airborne and seaborne invasion of Crete the year before, he was loath to risk it. Consultations with the Italian naval staff over just such an operation were what had taken him to Rome. The Italians were not enthusiastic. He was not surprised. They did not like to get hurt, and the war for them so far had entailed nothing but hurt and humiliation. They would follow only if Germany led. And Hitler was not so inclined.

Even more distressing was Hitler’s failure to understand the concept of a balanced fleet. He was all enthusiasm for the U-boats that were savaging the Allied merchant fleets under the command of the remarkably able Admiral Karl Dönitz, but he had nothing but contempt for the surface fleet. He remembered Germany’s huge investment in its First War navy which fought only one major battle and then rusted away to mutiny in 1918.

Earlier in the war,
Graf Spee and Bismarck
had savaged enemy shipping only to be hunted down and sunk. Now that Hitler had got himself stuck in a war with the Soviet Union, he had even less interest. If anything, the demands of the Eastern Front were voracious competitors for the same industrial production and fuel. The loss of those ships had made Hitler shy of risking the remaining heavy ships to the point they were under so many restrictions that decisive engagement of the enemy was largely avoided. Raeder did not want to lose them either, but was willing to take more risks, especially in the North Atlantic, to achieve decisive result.

Only the U-boats found favour in Hitler’s eyes. That was due to Dönitz, whom Raeder had appointed Commander of Submarines in 1935. Almost alone among senior naval officers he had advocated a relentless attack on the soft shipping of the enemy and had revived the wolfpack tactics of the First War, vastly improving their capabilities with stronger, more hardy boats and advanced communications, especially the unbreakable naval Enigma cipher. Although Germany had begun the war with fewer than sixty boats, their success triggered a vast expansion of construction so that now they roamed the seas as the terror of the Allies, and like their wolfish namesake, pulling down one victim after another.

Hitler may not have appreciated the surface navy much, but he was not about to let its ships rust away. His fears of an Allied invasion of Norway prompted him to state at the Führer naval conference of December 1941 that, ‘The German fleet must . . . use all its forces for the defence of Norway. It would be expedient to transfer all battleships there for this purpose. The latter could be used for attacking convoys in the north, for instance.’ Not surprisingly, Hitler stated at the Führer naval conference of 13 February 1942, ‘Time and again Churchill speaks of shipping tonnage as his greatest worry.’ Slowly his concern for an Allied invasion was replaced with the necessity to disrupt the Allied convoys to Russia. By this time most of the Navy’s capital ships had been concentrated there. The next month he issued orders that more submarines and aircraft were to be stationed in Norway to destroy the convoys.
⁶
He had fixated on an Allied invasion of Norway which the British had cleverly encouraged. That led him to declare, ‘Every ship not stationed in Norway is in the wrong place.’ He was right but for the wrong reason.
⁷

Raeder realized that he was not going to be chief of the German Navy much longer. Sooner or later he would have to offer Hitler his resignation. Who would he recommend as his successor? His preference was for Admiral Rolf Carls, Commander Naval Group North, a man with the breadth of understanding to command the Navy. Second was Karl Dönitz. He worried about Dönitz on two counts. The man had concentrated so much on submarine warfare that Raeder felt he would let the surface fleet wither away. Also troubling was Dönitz’s enthusiastic support of National Socialism and his near worship of Hitler. He was far more political than Raeder believed proper. He had said publicly ‘in comparison to Hitler we are all pip-squeaks. Anyone who believes he can do better than the Führer is stupid.’
⁸
So enthusiastic was he that he was referred to as Hitler Youth Dönitz.

If Dönitz’s political enthusiasm unsettled Raeder’s concept of a nonpolitical, professional naval officer, his attitude towards the Jews appalled him. Raeder was firmly in the Christian tradition of the German Navy and fought relentlessly to protect the Navy from Nazi neo-paganism. As a Christian gentleman and naval officer, he had also gone toe to toe with Hitler himself to defend Jewish naval officers and those with partial Jewish blood and even obtained their reinstatement in the Navy.
⁹

Against these black marks was the undeniable fact that Dönitz was a brilliant officer and was commanding the Navy’s only successful operation. Still . . . for the Navy’s sake, and perhaps its soul, it would have to be Carls who would succeed him.

Raeder was jolted out of his concentration as the starboard engine flamed. Then the plane went into a steep dive.

Ramushevo burned on both banks of the mile-wide Lovat River. On the east bank the reinforced Panzerjäger battalion of the 3rd SS Division
Totenkopf
had broken through the last of the encircling Soviet units that had hemmed in an entire German corps in the Demyansk Pocket. On the west bank, the Jäger divisions of General Walther von Seydlitz-Kurzbach had hammered through five Soviet defence lines to relieve the pocket. Now only the river separated them. It would not be long before German pioneers put a pontoon bridge across.
¹⁰

On the east bank, the SS were mopping up the last of the Russians still holding out in the ruins. No prisoners. Tough did not do them justice. They were hard as Krupp steel with a ruthlessness not seen since the Mongols. When the division was formed in 1939, its enlisted ranks were filled with concentration camp guards. Now 80 per cent of them were killed, wounded or missing, but the Soviets had paid many times over.

Krupp steel aside, their losses would have been 100 per cent if had not been for the new automatic rifles that many of them had been issued as a test. This was the Maschinenkarabiner 1942 (MKb 42, quickly dubbed by the troops as the Sturmgewehr - assault rifle). The new weapon effectively outranged the Soviet submachine gun, but at the same time was far more deadly in close combat than the German bolt-action rifle. It also filled the role of a light machine gun and was reliable in the worst cold of the Russian winter. Armed with this weapon, the SS simply shot their way through every Soviet unit in their path.

It would have done them no good if Seydlitz’s Silesian and Würtemberger Jäger had not fought their way through to the river. These were elite light infantry, and they had broken through Soviet defence after defence in a month’s vicious fighting over ground that froze, thawed, and froze again as the Russian winter fought with spring. Seydlitz’s tactical handling of the relief had been brilliant, and his physical courage exemplary. He was the scion of a great military family whose famous ancestor was Frederick the Great’s superb cavalry general and often second-in-command. At the battle of Zorndorf against the Russians in 1758, the king had issued an ill-informed order to Seydlitz, who commanded the other flank of the Prussian Army. He replied, ‘Tell the king that after the battle my head is at his disposal, but meantime I hope he will permit me to exercise it in his service!’
¹¹
His descendant was no less determined to use his own judgement.

His ancestor had also been famously known for charging full tilt between the descending blades of two windmills. Seydlitz had inherited that trait as well.

General Vasili Ivanovich Chuikov was chafing at his inaction. The war was almost a year old, and he had seen none of it. At the beginning of May he was finally due to return from the Soviet military mission in China. He had requested immediate assignment to the front. ‘I wanted to get to know the nature of modern warfare as quickly as possible, to understand the reasons for our defeats and to try to find out where the German Army’s tactical strength lay and what new military techniques it was using.’
¹²

While in China he and the other officers chafed to get back to the Motherland in its peril as the news of one disaster after another was announced. Chuikov was born a peasant, had thrown in his lot with the Bolsheviks in 1917, and risen through rough talent. A distinguished record put him on the road to success and two tours in China as an advisor to the Nationalist Army followed. He had commanded an army in the invasion of eastern Poland in 1939 and another in the war against Finland in 1940 when failure was clinging to everyone else. He learned a great lesson, concluding that an orthodox military approach would not work in an unorthodox situation. He had been bold enough to write up a summary of why Finnish tactics had been so effective and recommended countermeasures.
¹³

He had done so well that Stalin had sent him to China as part of the military mission to advise Chiang Kai-shek and personally briefed him as a mark of his favour. That favour was prized as much as his disfavour was deadly. Four years before Stalin had slaughtered his senior officer corps in fear of a coup led by the brilliant Marshal of the Soviet Union Mikhail Tukhachevsky, the creator of Soviet mechanization in warfare and the concept of deep battle. Luckily for Chuikov, he had not been a part of the great man’s clique and survived when all around him were being shot or sent to the camps.