The Second World War (43 page)

The discussions over several days had ranged far and wide, from the danger of Spain joining the Axis camp to the threat from Japan in the Pacific. For Churchill, the most important results included an American agreement to provide convoy escorts west of Iceland, bombers for
Britain and an undertaking to give the Soviet Union massive aid to stay in the war. Yet Roosevelt faced a widespread reluctance within the United States to move towards war with Nazi Germany. During his return from Newfoundland, he heard that the House of Representatives had passed the Selective Service Bill, inaugurating the very first peacetime draft, by no more than a single vote.

American isolationists refused to acknowledge that the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union was bound to widen the scope of the war far beyond Europe. On 25 August, Red Army troops and British forces from Iraq invaded neutral Iran, to secure its oil and ensure a supply route from the Persian Gulf to the Caucasus and Kazakhstan. During the summer of 1941, Britain’s fears of a Japanese attack on its colonies increased. On Roosevelt’s advice, Churchill cancelled an attack planned by the Special Operations Executive (SOE) on a Japanese freighter, the
Asaka Maru
, loading up in Europe with vital supplies for the Japanese war machine. Britain could not risk a war in the Pacific alone against Japan. Its first priority was to secure its position in North Africa and the Mediterranean. Until the United States entered the war, Churchill and his chiefs of staff could look no further than ensuring their country’s survival, creating a bomber force to attack Germany and helping to keep the Soviet Union fighting the Germans.

A bombing offensive against Germany represented one of Stalin’s chief expectations of Allied assistance, as the Wehrmacht inflicted such devastating losses on the Red Army in the summer of 1941. He also demanded an invasion of northern France at the earliest possible moment to take pressure off the eastern front. In a meeting with Sir Stafford Cripps five days after the invasion, Molotov tried to force the British ambassador to specify the scale of the aid which Churchill appeared to be offering. But Cripps was in no position to do so. The Soviet foreign minister pressed him further two days later, after meetings in London between Lord Beaverbrook, Churchill’s minister of supply, and the Soviet ambassador, Ivan Maisky. It appears that Beaverbrook had discussed the possibility of an invasion of France with Maisky, without having consulted the British chiefs of staff. From then on, one of the key objectives of Soviet foreign policy was to pin down the British to a firm promise. The Russians suspected, with justification, that British reticence came from a belief that the Soviet Union could not hold out ‘
for much longer than
five or six weeks’.

A more serious failure of imagination on the Soviet side poisoned relations right up until early 1944. Stalin, judging the Allies by himself, expected them to launch a cross-Channel operation, whatever the losses and difficulties. Churchill’s reluctance to commit to an invasion of
north-west Europe aroused his suspicion that Britain wanted the Red Army to suffer the brunt of the war. There was, of course, a strong element of truth in this, as well as a strong streak of hypocrisy on the Soviet side since Stalin himself had hoped that the western capitalists and the Germans would bleed each other to death in 1940. But the Soviet dictator totally failed to understand the pressures under which democratic governments worked. He wrongly assumed that Churchill and Roosevelt enjoyed absolute power in their own countries. The fact that they had to answer to the House of Commons or Congress, or take account of the press, was in his view a pathetic excuse. He could never accept the idea that Churchill really might be forced to resign if he launched an operation which resulted in disastrous casualties.

Even after decades of obsessive reading, Stalin had also failed to understand the basis of Britain’s traditional strategy of peripheral warfare, mentioned earlier. Britain was not a continental power. It still relied on its maritime strength and on coalitions to maintain a balance of power in Europe. With the notable exception of the First World War, it avoided involvement in a major confrontation on land until the end of a war was in sight. Churchill was determined to follow this pattern, even though both his American and Soviet allies were wedded to the diametrically opposed military doctrine of a massive clash as soon as possible.

On 28 July, just over two weeks after the signature of the Anglo-Soviet agreement, Harry Hopkins reached Moscow on a fact-finding mission at Roosevelt’s request. Hopkins had to find out what the Soviet Union needed to continue the war, both immediately and in the longer term. The Soviet leadership took to him immediately. Hopkins questioned the relentlessly pessimistic reports from the US military attaché in Moscow who believed the Red Army would collapse. He was soon convinced that the Soviet Union would hold out.

Roosevelt’s decision to aid the Soviet Union was genuinely altruistic as well as munificent. Soviet Lend–Lease took time to get under way, much to the President’s exasperation, but its scale and scope would play a major part in the eventual Soviet victory (a fact which most Russian historians are still loath to acknowledge). Apart from high-quality steel, anti-aircraft guns, aircraft and huge consignments of food which saved the Soviet Union from famine in the winter of 1942–3, the greatest contribution was to the mobility of the Red Army. Its dramatic advances later in the war were possible thanks only to American Jeeps and trucks.

In contrast, Churchill’s rhetoric of assistance was never matched by results, largely because of Britain’s poverty and the urgency of its own immediate needs. Much of the material provided was obsolete or unsuitable. British army greatcoats were useless in the Russian winter,
steel-studded ammunition boots accelerated frostbite, the Matilda tanks were distinctly inferior to the Soviet T-34, and Red Army aviation criticized the second-hand Hurricanes, asking why they had not been sent Spit-fires instead.

The first important conference between the western Allies and the Soviet Union began in Moscow at the end of September after Lord Beaverbrook and Roosevelt’s representative Averell Harriman reached Arkhangelsk aboard the cruiser HMS
Lincoln
. Stalin received them in the Kremlin, and began to list all the military equipment and vehicles the Soviet Union needed. ‘
The country that could produce
the most engines would ultimately be the victor,’ he said. He then suggested to Beaverbrook that Britain should also send troops to help defend Ukraine, an idea which clearly took Churchill’s crony aback.

Stalin, unable to drop the matter of Hess, proceeded to quiz Beaverbrook about Hitler’s deputy and about what he had said when he reached England. The Soviet leader again caused surprise when he suggested that they should discuss the post-war settlement. Stalin wanted recognition of the 1941 Soviet frontier which encompassed the Baltic states, eastern Poland and Bessarabia. Beaverbrook declined to become involved in a subject which struck him as decidedly premature, with German armies less than a hundred kilometres from where they were sitting in the Kremlin. Although he did not know it, Guderian’s Second Panzer Army had begun the first phase of Operation Typhoon against Moscow the day before.

British diplomats were irritated by Stalin’s jibes that their country ‘refused to undertake active military operations against Hitlerite Germany’, while British and Commonwealth troops were fighting in North Africa. But in the Soviets’ eyes, when faced with three German army groups deep in their country, the fighting around Tobruk and the Libyan frontier hardly even qualified as a sideshow.

Soon after the German invasion of the Soviet Union, Rommel had begun to plan a new attack on the besieged port of Tobruk, which had become the key to the war in North Africa. He needed it to supply his troops and to eliminate the threat to his rear. Tobruk was now held by the British 70th Division, reinforced with a Polish brigade and a Czech battalion.

During the desert summer, with its mirage shimmer of the desert under a blazing sky, a sort of phoney war had developed, with little more than the odd skirmish along the wire of the Libyan frontier. British and German reconnaissance patrols chatted to each other by radio, on one occasion complaining when a newly arrived German officer forced his men to open fire after a tacit ceasefire had been arranged. For the infantry on both sides, life was less amusing under such conditions, with just a litre of water a day
for drinking and washing. In their trenches, they had to cope with scorpions, sand-fleas and the aggressive desert flies which swarmed over every piece of food and every inch of exposed flesh. Dysentery became a major problem, especially for the Germans. Even the defenders of Tobruk were short of water, as a Stuka attack had wrecked the desalination plant. The town itself was badly battered by shellfire and bombing, and the harbour half full of sunken ships. Only the determination of the Royal Navy kept them supplied. Members of the remaining Australian brigade began bartering war loot for beer as soon as a ship arrived.

Rommel had a much greater problem of resupply across the Mediterranean. Between January and late August 1941, the British had managed to sink fifty-two Axis ships and damage another thirty-eight. In September the submarine HMS
Upholder
sank two large passenger ships carrying reinforcements. (Afrika Korps veterans began to call the Mediterranean the ‘
German swimming pool
’.) The Axis failure to invade Malta in 1940 was now shown to have been a major mistake. The Kriegsmarine especially had been dismayed earlier in the year when Hitler insisted that the airborne forces should be used against Crete rather than Malta, because he feared Allied raids against the Ploesti oilfields. Since then, the constant bombing of airfields on Malta and the Grand Harbour of Valletta had not proved an effective substitute for outright capture.

British intercepts of Italian naval codes provided rich rewards. On 9 November, K Force sailing from Malta, with the light cruisers HMS
Aurora
and
Penelope
and two destroyers, struck a Tripoli-bound convoy. Although the convoy was escorted by two heavy cruisers and ten destroyers, the British force dashed in at night using radar. In less than thirty minutes the three Royal Navy warships sank all seven freighters and a destroyer without suffering any damage. The German Kriegsmarine was livid, and threatened to take over control of Italian naval operations. The Afrika Korps adopted a similarly patronizing view of its allies. ‘
One has to treat the Italians
like children,’ a Leutnant in the 15th Panzer Division wrote home. ‘They are no good as soldiers, but they are the best of comrades. You can get anything from them.’

After all the delays and waiting for supplies which never came, Rommel planned his strike against Tobruk for 21 November. He disbelieved Italian warnings that the British were about to launch a major offensive, yet he felt compelled to leave the 21st Panzer Division between Tobruk and Bardia just in case. This would probably have left him with insufficient forces for a successful attack on Tobruk. In any case, on 18 November, three days before his planned assault on the port, the newly named British Eighth Army, commanded by Lieutenant General Sir Alan Cunningham, crossed the Libyan frontier in Operation Crusader. Having made
approach marches at night under strict radio silence, and concealed by day with sandstorms and then thunderstorms, the Eighth Army achieved total surprise.

The Afrika Korps now consisted of the 15th and 21st Panzer Divisions, and a mixed division which was later renamed the 90th Light Division. This formation included an infantry regiment, largely made up of Germans who had been serving in the French Foreign Legion. Yet due to malnutrition and sickness the 45,000-strong Afrika Korps lacked 11,000 men in its front-line units. The disastrous supply situation also meant that its panzer divisions, with 249 tanks, badly needed replacements. The Italians fielded the Ariete Armoured Division and three semi-motorized divisions.

The British, on the other hand, were for once plentifully supplied, with 300 Cruiser tanks and 300 American Stuart light tanks, which they called ‘Honeys’, together with more than a hundred Matildas and Valentines. The Western Desert Air Force possessed 550 serviceable aircraft against only seventy-six for the Luftwaffe. With such advantages, Churchill expected a long-awaited victory, especially since he badly needed something to show Stalin. But, although the British were at last fully equipped, their weapons were decidedly inferior to those of the Germans. The new Stuarts and the Cruiser tanks with their two-pounder guns did not stand a chance against the German 88mm gun, ‘the long arm’ of the Afrika Korps, which could knock them out well before they were in range to fire back. Only the British 25-pounder field gun was impressive, and commanders had finally learned to use it over open sights against German panzer attacks. The Germans called it the ‘Ratsch-bum’.

The British plan was to concentrate XXX Corps, with the bulk of the armour, in an attack north-westwards from the Libyan frontier. These forces were to defeat the German panzer divisions and then advance to Tobruk to break the siege. The 7th Armoured Brigade was to lead the 7th Armoured Division’s thrust to Sidi Rezegh, on the escarpment south-east of Tobruk’s defensive perimeter. On the right, XIII Corps was to engage the German positions close to the coast at the Halfaya Pass and Sollum. Ideally, the Eighth Army should have waited until Rommel had begun his attack on Tobruk, but Churchill refused to allow General Auchinleck to delay any longer.

The 7th Armoured Brigade reached Sidi Rezegh, occupied the airfield and captured nineteen aircraft on the ground before the Germans had time to react. But the 22nd Armoured Brigade on its left received a surprise battering from the Ariete Division, while the 4th Armoured Brigade on its right found itself up against parts of the 15th and 21st Panzer Divisions attacking south from the Via Balbia coast road. Fortunately for the British, the Germans were short of diesel. Fuel consumption for all vehicles
was heavy in such terrain. A New Zealand officer described the Libyan Desert as ‘
a bare flat plain
tufted with camel thorn, with wide acres of barren rock scree, stretches of soft sand, and shallow twisting wadis’. It also increasingly resembled a military rubbish dump, with discarded ration tins, empty oil barrels and burned-out vehicles.