Disaster at Stalingrad: An Alternate History (4 page)

The men slept in the lullaby rocking of the train as it sped across the Ukraine, Poland, the Reich, and then into France. La Belle France. From the frozen hell of Russia the men would detrain into a dream world of a French spring. From frozen ground to soft beds, from frozen rations to warm bread, from Russians who were trying to kill them all the time, to French women who were willing to please a man, almost all the time. The 6th Panzer Division had been sent to France to re-equip and rebuild as a reward for its fine fighting record, an investment in future glory.

Hardly a man would argue that the division’s survival and success was due to its commander, General Erhard Raus. Not only had he beaten the Russians at every turn, but he had repeatedly rescued his men who had been cut off by the enemy. They had affectionately coined the slogan,
‘Raus zieht heraus!’
(‘Raus gets you out!’). Raus was an Austrian with a talent for armoured warfare that some men had compared to that of Rommel. Both had gone through the hard school of the Gebirgsjäger, or mountain troops, in the First World War and won their laurels. Both were also exacting trainers of men and had inculcated the Gebirgsjäger creed of aggressive initiative and high training to their men. The test had been battle. For Rommel it had been the sand of Africa. For Raus it had been the snow of Russia.

Raus could not afford to sleep. Already in his mind’s eye, he was seeing the transformation of his worn-out division into a resharpened sword. A thousand and one things needed to be done. The absorption of thousands of replacements, reception of hundreds of new fighting vehicles and heavy weapons, then training, training, training, and again training. He had made them lethal, and now they were to rest, rebuild. Already he was planning on making them even more lethal.

The commander of Army Group Centre, Field Marshal Günther von Kluge, counted himself lucky to have an operations officer with the brilliance of Colonel Henning von Tresckow. He had been one of the main architects, along with General Erich von Manstein, of the plan for the attack through the Ardennes in the 1940 campaign in the West that had destroyed France.

Tresckow was from an ancient Prussian military family and in June 1918 he had become the youngest lieutenant in the Imperial German Army at the age of seventeen. In the last few months of that war he won the Iron Cross First Class for his outstanding physical feats and the moral courage to take independent action. His superior at the time remarked, “You, Tresckow, will either become chief of the General Staff or die on the scaffold as a rebel.’
¹⁴

What few knew in 1942 was that Tresckow was a determined member of the plot to remove Hitler. A committed Lutheran Christian himself, he once said, ‘I cannot understand how people can still call themselves Christians and not be furious adversaries of Hitler’s regime.’
¹⁵
As early as 1938 he had said, ‘Both duty and honour demand from us that we should do our best to bring about the downfall of Hitler and National Socialism in order to save Germany and Europe from barbarism.’ In the 1941 campaign in Russia he had been sickened and appalled by the treatment of Russian POWs, the infamous Commissar Order, and the murder of Jewish men, women and children by the Einsatzgruppen as well as personal observation of the massacre of Jews at Borisov. His appeal to the then army group commander to take direct action had fallen on deaf ears.

Almost single-handedly he began to organize a plot to kill Hitler. He had made contact with like-minded men in Berlin and elsewhere, some of whom had already tried to kill Hitler, but the man had the devil’s own luck. At the same time he recruited into key positions in Army Group Centre a number of sympathetic officers.

He was immediately impressed with a visitor from Oberkommando des Heeres (OKH, Army High Command), the young Major Claus Graf von Stauffenberg who had already made a name for himself as the star of the General Staff. Born to an aristocratic Catholic family from southern Germany, Stauffenberg was descended from one of Germany’s greatest heroes, Field Marshal August Graf von Gneisenau, the soldier who had defied Napoleon’s legions at the moment of Prussia’s overthrow in 1806 and who in 1815 had rallied the beaten Prussian Army to fall on the French Emperor’s flank at Waterloo. The young Stauffenberg had grown up in a spirit of pious Catholicism, aristocratic traditions of service to the state, a classical education, and the aura of romantic poetry. One biographer described the 37-year-old count:

It was at this meeting that Tresckow concluded that his visitor was a ‘non-Nazi, and indeed saw Hitler and National Socialism as a danger’. The mass murder of the Jews had shocked him to the core of his being.
¹⁶

He would have been even more impressed if he had known that Stauffenberg kept a large portrait of Hitler behind his desk so that visitors could see that the man was mad. In discussing that madness, he had stated flatly to another officer, ‘There is only one solution. It is to kill him.’ At that time, though, he still thought that sort of thing would have to be accomplished by someone of more exalted rank.

Carl Friedrich Goerdeler had been immensely relieved to draw Tresckow into the Berlin-centred move against Hitler. A World War I veteran, former mayor of Leipzig, and a conservative monarchist, he had had a distinguished career in government and economics. He had also become one of the chief organizers of the anti-Hitler plotters and had been designated by the group to assume the office of chancellor after Hitler’s removal. He had travelled overseas extensively, warning everyone he could of the dangers of Hitler, including Churchill. He had passed on to the British government his opinion that ‘the Führer had “decided to destroy the Jews, Christianity, Capitalism’”.
¹⁷

A number of the anti-Hitler plotters were monarchists like Goerdeler. The problem for them was not the restoration of the monarchy but upon whom to place the imperial crown. The old Kaiser had died in exile in the Netherlands. Crown Prince Wilhelm, his oldest son, was passed over. He had too much baggage. He had been too enthusiastic an early supporter of Hitler, although he distanced himself after the Night of the Long Knives. His oldest son and heir, Wilhelm, had been killed in France in 1940 while serving in the German Army. His younger son, Ludwig (Louis) Ferdinand (1907-94), unlike all his male ancestors, had not received a military education and was widely travelled, having lived in the United States for a while, becoming a friend to Henry Ford and an acquaintance of President Roosevelt. Returning to Germany, he became an avowed anti-Nazi.

Goerdeler concluded that, after the chaos of National Socialism, the German people would look back to the Second Reich as a time of stability and prosperity and associate that with the monarchy. For the prince’s sake, he would do nothing to draw him into the plot. Ludwig would remain on the shelf as a possibility.
¹⁸

For the U-boat crew somewhere in the North Atlantic, their kill of an American merchant ship off Iceland had been ecstatic. The captain had ordered a round of schnapps to each man since it was their boat’s first sinking. The boat was one of the hundreds produced by German yards and now infesting the waters between Britain and North America. Many ranged ever farther, to the Mediterranean, the South Atlantic, and beyond to the Indian Ocean. A few even reached Japan to carry vital high-value war supplies to their ally.

Yet, while the taste of the liquor was still in the mouths of this crew, the sound of the dying ship as it broke up and sank stopped every man in his celebration. The groans and shrieks of rending metal were all too human as they echoed through the water and the U-boat’s hull. It was like a wounded man in no-man’s-land screaming out his death agonies, something all too common to their brothers fighting in Russia. Like the German infantry, the
Landser,
they would get used to it.

For the Allies the war had reached a crisis. In the first months of 1942, the Germans had sunk an average of over 500,000 tons of shipping each month. Imports into Britain fell by 18 per cent compared to 1941.
¹⁹
At the same time, both Britain and the United States were giving priority to shipments of war materials to the Soviet Union. The strain on resources was simply not sustainable.

Two events in the murky world of cipher decoding had thrown the Allies into their precarious position. The German Navy’s B-Dienst (Beobachtungs-dienst, Surveillance Service), and the xB-Dienst (Decryption Service), which had already broken the main British naval cipher by 1935, had broken Allied Naval Cipher No. 3 in February. This was the system by which the British, Canadians and Americans coordinated their efforts in the Atlantic. The U-boat killings soared. Now the Germans could see into the Allies’ convoy communications, while the Allies were suddenly blinded. The British had largely broken the German Enigma cipher system by early 1942 and even the more complex German naval version.
²⁰
Then the German Navy cipher department added another layer of complexity to its Enigma machine by adding a fourth wheel that baffled the British codebreakers at their Bletchley Park centre. Shipping losses soared.
²¹

Admiral Ernest King was in a foul mood, a normal setting for the man. His own daughter joked, ‘He is the most even-tempered person in the United States Navy. He is always in a rage.’ This angry temperament made him the most disliked senior officer of the war, but he concentrated his loathing especially against the British ally of the United States. General Ismay, Churchill’s military chief of staff, described him as ‘tough as nails and carried himself as stiffly as a poker. He was blunt and stand-offish, almost to the point of rudeness. At the start, he was intolerant and suspicious of all things British, especially the Royal Navy; but he was almost equally intolerant and suspicious of the American Army.’

His Anglophobia was so pronounced that he had ignored British suggestions after Pearl Harbor to black out American coastal cities and run merchant shipping in more easily protected convoys. The result had been a staggering loss of 2,000,000 tons of shipping in the months after Pearl Harbor.

Now the British were trying to organize the first major British-American naval effort of the war, the escort of a large convoy to Russia to be provided in part by an American battleship and heavy cruisers. King had finally agreed to this against his every Anglophobic instinct, and he knew no good would come of placing American ships under the Royal Navy’s command.

He especially did not like the British First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir Dudley Pound, who had the reputation of being something of a back-seat driver. It did not help when Pound remarked to King in May that ‘These Russian convoys are becoming a regular millstone round our necks.’
²²
That attitude was already causing friction with the commander of the Home Fleet, Admiral Sir John ‘Jack’ Tovey. Unlike King, Pound’s staff found their boss easy to work with, despite his habit of dozing off at meetings. He was suffering from a degenerative hip condition which robbed him of sleep. Infinitely more serious was the brain tumour that the Royal Navy’s examining physician did not report.

So King gritted his teeth as the USS
Washington,
one of the Navy’s two new North Carolina Class battleships, sailed as flagship of Task Force 39 (TF.39) along with the heavy cruisers
Wichita
and
Tuscaloosa,
the aircraft carrier
Wasp,
and four destroyers, in support of the Arctic convoys to Russia. The
Washington
was one of the most formidable battleships in the world at 36,000 tons and armed with nine 16-inch guns. It would join Tovey’s force of the battleship
Duke of York
(38,000 tons and ten 14-inch guns), heavy cruisers
Cumberland, London,
and
Norfolk,
light cruiser
Nigeria,
aircraft carrier
Victorious,
and five destroyers.

The reason that King had to force himself to send TF.39 and its heavy ships to escort the Russia-bound convoys lay under camouflage nets in the fjord at Trondheim. These ships were what Admiral Raeder would have called a fleet in being, that ever-present threat that forced the British to keep a strong home fleet.

The menace anchored at Trondheim was the 43,000-ton battleship
Tirpitz,
sister ship to the lost
Bismarck,
and armed with nine 15-inch guns. Laid down in 1936 and commissioned in February 1941, it was the first battleship with a welded hull and armour. With it were the heavy cruisers
Hipper, Lützow
and
Admiral Scheer,
each with six 11-inch guns. A half-dozen destroyers balanced out this force. Combined with some of Admiral Dönitz’s submarines and attack aircraft from Goring’s Luftwaffe, these ships loomed as a constant threat to any convoy that dared make the long voyage to Russia.

As soon as
Tirpitz
had been sent to Trondheim in January, Churchill had made clear the import of its presence. He demanded:

Another German task force anchored even farther north at the port of Narvik. The twin battlecruisers
Scharnhorst
and
Gneisenau
(nine 11-inch guns) and heavy cruiser
Prinz Eugen
(eight 8-inch guns), and four destroyers.
Scharnhorst
and
Gneisenau
were battleships in everything - tonnage and armour - but their guns. Production problems led to the postponement of their fitting out with 15-inch guns. These ships had been stationed in France, but the Royal Air Force (RAF) had too great an interest in bombing them. At the same time Hitler wanted them stationed in Norway to prevent any Allied landings. In a bold dash codenamed Operation Cerberus they had slipped through the English Channel unharmed.
²⁴
The British codebreakers at Bletchley Park were still struggling to overcome the latest security upgrade of Enigma and so were unable to warn the Royal Navy of the German plan.

Originally Raeder wanted the two battlecruisers refitted with 15-inch guns, but Hitler would not approve the resources required. Instead of a stay in German yards then, they were sent to Narvik in Norway, to join Destroyer Flotilla 8 and U-boat Flotilla 11, to complicate British efforts to escort convoys to Russia.
²⁵
The crews were none too happy about that. France had been the cushiest posting in the entire Wehrmacht, with good food, pleasant weather and friendly French women. In Narvik they were discovering what the crews of the capital ships and submarines at Trondheim already knew. The food was awful, the weather foul and the Norwegian women hated them.