The Second World War (54 page)

After a rough crossing in heavy seas, the
Duke of York
finally reached the United States on 22 December. Welcomed by Roosevelt, Churchill was installed in the White House, where he proved an exhausting guest over the next three weeks. But he was in his element, and he received a rapturous reception when he addressed Congress. The two leaders could hardly have been more different. Roosevelt was undoubtedly a great man, but while deploying charm and a contrived impression of intimacy to great effect, he was essentially rather vain, cold and calculating.

Churchill, on the other hand, was passionate, expansive, sentimental and mercurial. His well-known ‘black dog’ depressions almost suggest a form of bipolar disorder. Their greatest difference lay in their attitudes to empire. Churchill was proud of his descent from the great Duke of Marlborough and remained an old-fashioned imperialist. Roosevelt regarded such attitudes as not just outdated but profoundly wrong.
Roosevelt also believed that he despised realpolitik, yet showed himself constantly ready to bend smaller countries to his will. Anthony Eden, now foreign secretary again, soon observed drily on the difficulties of the triangular relationship with the Soviet Union that ‘
United States policy
is exaggeratedly moral, at least where non-American interests are concerned.’

The British delegation was reassured by the American chiefs of staff that ‘Germany first’ was still their policy. This decision was also influenced by the problem of shipping shortages. Because of the huge distances involved, each vessel could make only three round-trips a year to the Pacific theatre. But the lack of shipping also meant that the build-up of American forces in Britain for a cross-Channel invasion would take longer than imagined. This problem would start to be solved only once the ‘Liberty ship’ building programme got under way, mass-producing transports.

The United States, with its own entry into the war, was about to become much more than ‘the great arsenal of democracy’. The Victory Program, originally suggested by Jean Monnet, one of the few Frenchmen whom the American administration truly respected, was already starting. Working on a plan to increase US forces to more than eight million men, and with generous estimates of the armaments, aircraft, tanks, munitions and ships needed to defeat both Germany and Japan, American industry began to convert to all-out war production. The budget ran to £150 billion. The military munificence would become staggering. As one general remarked: ‘
The American Army does not
solve its problems, it overwhelms them.’

Lend–Lease to the Soviet Union had also been approved by Congress in October. In addition, $5 million of medical supplies were provided through the American Red Cross. Roosevelt pushed hard on deliveries to the Soviet Union. Churchill, on the other hand, had fuelled Stalin’s suspicions by making extravagant promises of aid and then failing to deliver. On 11 March 1942, Roosevelt said to Henry Morgenthau, his secretary of the Treasury, that ‘
every promise the English
have made to the Russians, they have fallen down on… The only reason we stand so well with the Russians is that up to date we have kept our promises.’ He wrote to Churchill: ‘
I know you will not mind
my being brutally frank when I tell you that I think that I can personally handle Stalin better than either your Foreign Office or my State Department. Stalin hates the guts of all your top people. He thinks he likes me better, and I hope he will continue to do so.’ Roosevelt’s rather arrogant and exaggerated confidence in his influence over Stalin was to become a dangerous liability, especially towards the end of the war.

Stalin wanted Britain to recognize the Soviet Union’s claim to eastern Poland and the Baltic states occupied after the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact,
and had put pressure on Anthony Eden to agree. At first the British had refused to discuss this flagrant contradiction of the Atlantic Charter’s insistence on self-determination. But Churchill, afraid that Stalin might still seek a separate peace with Hitler, raised the possibility with Roosevelt that they should perhaps agree to this. Roosevelt rejected the suggestion outright. Then, paradoxically, it was Roosevelt who was to create the greatest distrust with Stalin with an unrealizable promise. In April 1942, without having studied the matter, he offered the Soviet leader a Second Front later that year.

General Marshall was horrified by Churchill’s access to the President in the White House, knowing Roosevelt’s tendency to formulate policy behind the backs of his own chiefs of staff. He was even more appalled when he subsequently discovered in June 1942, on another of Churchill’s visits, that Roosevelt had agreed to his plan for landings in North Africa, Operation Gymnast, which many senior American officers saw as a British scheme to save the empire.

Churchill returned triumphant from the United States, yet soon, exhausted and ill, he was weighed down by a fresh series of disasters. On the night of 11 February 1942 and during the following day, the German battle-cruisers
Scharnhorst
and
Gneisenau
along with the heavy crusier
Prinz Eugen
accomplished their ‘Channel dash’ from Brest back to home waters in bad visibility. Numerous attacks along the way by RAF bombers and Royal Navy motor torpedo boats failed. The country was dismayed and angry. There was even a mood of defeatism in many corners. Then, on 15 February, Singapore surrendered. British humiliation appeared complete. Churchill, the revered war leader, now found himself attacked on all sides, by the press, in Parliament and by the Australian government. To make matters worse, large meetings and demonstrations began to demand ‘A Second Front Now’ to aid the Soviet Union–the one offensive operation which Churchill could not and did not want to undertake.

Yet the greatest threat at that time had nothing to do with British military failures. The Kriegsmarine had just changed its Enigma settings by adding an extra rotor. Bletchley Park was unable to decipher a single transmission. Dönitz’s wolfpacks, now fully deployed in the North Atlantic and along the North American seaboard, began to inflict a level of losses which answered Hitler’s dreams. Altogether 1,769 Allied and 90 neutral ships were sunk in 1942. After Churchill’s euphoria at America’s entry into the war, Britain faced starvation and collapse if the Battle of the Atlantic were lost. Not surprisingly, with all the problems and humiliations heaped upon him, he greatly envied Stalin’s success in repelling the Germans from Moscow.

The Red Army’s great achievement in the Battle for
Moscow in
December was soon undermined by Stalin himself. On the evening of 5 January 1942, he summoned a meeting of the Stavka and the State Defence Committee at the Kremlin. The Soviet leader had become intoxicated with revenge and persuaded himself that the moment had come for a general offensive. The Germans were in disarray. They had not prepared for the winter and would not be ready to repel a major attack until spring came. As he walked up and down his office, puffing on his pipe, he insisted on his plan to launch massive encirclement operations of the central front opposite Moscow, in the north round Leningrad to break the siege, and in the south against Manstein’s army in the Crimea, in the Donbass, and to recapture Kharkov.

Zhukov, who had not been told of Stalin’s instructions to the Stavka, was horrified. In a conference with Stalin, he argued that the offensive should be concentrated on the ‘Western axis’ near Moscow. The Red Army lacked sufficient reserves and supplies, especially of ammunition for a general advance. After the Battle for Moscow, the armies involved had suffered heavy losses and were exhausted. Stalin listened, but ignored all Zhukov’s warnings.
‘Carry out your orders
!’ he said. The meeting was over. Only later did Zhukov discover that he had been wasting his breath. Behind his back detailed instructions had already been issued to front commanders.

The German army was indeed battered and suffering badly. Wearing clothes looted from peasants, its frostbitten soldiers, with unkempt beards, noses peeling and cheeks burned by the cold, were unrecognizable from those who had advanced eastwards the previous summer, singing marching songs. German troops followed the local practice of sawing off the legs of the dead to thaw them over a fire in order to pull off the boots. Even wrapping their footwear in cloth could be insufficient to ward off frostbite on sentry duty. Frostbitten limbs, unless treated quickly, soon became gangrenous and had to be amputated. Army surgeons in field hospitals, overwhelmed by the casualty rate, simply threw the sawn-off hands and legs outside into piles in the snow.

Yet opponents always underestimated the German army’s ability to recover from disaster. Discipline, which had been on the verge of breakdown, had been rapidly re-established. During the chaotic retreat officers had improvised
Kampfgruppen
of infantry mixed with assault guns, pioneers and a few panzers. And by the first week in January, at Hitler’s insistence, villages had been turned into strongpoints. When the ground was frozen too hard to dig trenches, they used explosives or shells to blast craters, or they created mortar pits and firing points behind packed snow and ice reinforced with logs. Sometimes they were reduced to shovelling
snow with their rifle butts. German soldiers had still not received any winter clothing. They hoped to strip Soviet casualties of their padded jackets before they froze solid, but in the hard frosts that seldom proved possible. Dysentery, from which almost all soldiers suffered, was a double curse when one was forced to drop one’s trousers in such temperatures. And eating snow to rehydrate usually made things worse.

Rokossovsky’s 16th Army and General Andrei Vlasov’s 20th Army attacked north of Moscow and, when a gap opened, the 2nd Guards Cavalry Corps, supported by tank and ski battalions, forced into it. But, as Zhukov had warned, the Germans were no longer disorganized. Soviet forces soon found that instead of surrounding the Germans, they themselves were cut off. Some German formations were bypassed, but they stood and fought, supplied by air. The largest
Kessel
consisted of six German divisions encircled around Demyansk on the Leningrad highway towards Novgorod.

Even further to the north-west, General Kirill Meretskov’s Volkhov Front tried again to break the siege of Leningrad, using the 54th Army and the 2nd Shock Army. Stalin bullied him into a premature attack, with untrained formations and artillery which lacked gunsights, until General Voronov flew up with a consignment. The 2nd Shock Army advanced across the River Volkhov and rapidly penetrated into the German rear, threatening to cut off the German Eighteenth Army. But the advance was slowed by German counter-attacks and the winter conditions. ‘
In order to beat a path
through the deep snow, they had to form columns in ranks of fifteen. The first rank went forward, trampling the snow, which in places came up to their waists. After ten minutes the front rank was withdrawn and took up position at the rear of the column. The difficulty of movement was increased because from time to time they would come across half-frozen patches of bogs and streams covered with a thin layer of ice.’ With soaked and frozen feet, they suffered heavy frostbite casualties. Their illfed horses were exhausted, so they had to carry the ammunition and supplies themselves.

General Vlasov, who had so recently been lauded for his part in the defence of Moscow, was sent by Stalin to take command. Vlasov was promised reinforcements and supplies but none came until it was too late. Ammunition was dropped by parachute but most fell behind German lines. Vlasov’s army was soon cut off entirely in the frozen marshes and birchwoods. Meretskov warned Stalin of the impending disaster. Not long after the spring thaw, the 2nd Shock Army had virtually ceased to exist. Some 60,000 men were lost. Only 13,000 escaped. An embittered Vlasov was eventually captured in July. The Germans soon persuaded him to form a Russian Liberation Army, or ROA. Most of those who volunteered
joined purely to avoid starvation in the prisoner-of-war camps. Stalin’s reaction to Vlasov’s betrayal revealed his misleading obsessions from the Great Terror and purge of the Red Army: ‘
How did we miss him
before the war?’ he asked Beria and Molotov.

Stalin’s emissaries, including the sinister and incompetent commissar Lev Mekhlis, simply harried front commanders, blaming them for every shortcoming, even though the lack of supplies and vehicles was not their fault. Nobody dared tell Stalin of the chaos caused by his ludicrously ambitious plan, which extended even to recapturing Smolensk. German reinforcements brought in from France were thrown straight into the fighting, still with no winter equipment, while many of the Soviet divisions were reduced to little more than 2,000 men each.

The attempt to create a major encirclement around Vyazma failed. Zhukov even had part of the 4th Airborne Corps dropped behind German lines, but the Luftwaffe struck back at their airfields round Kaluga, which the Germans knew well, having only just abandoned them. Down the whole of the eastern front, from Leningrad to the Black Sea, the German strongpoints succeeded in preventing any major breakthroughs. In the Crimea, Manstein managed to bottle up a Soviet amphibious invasion of the Kerch Peninsula attempting to break his siege of Sebastopol.

The greatest crisis came at Rzhev where the German Ninth Army was in danger of encirclement. General Walther Model, who became one of Hitler’s favourites with his pitiless energy, was sent in to take command. Model demonstrated not only great physical courage, but also on other occasions moral courage in the way he stood up to Hitler. He immediately launched a counter-attack that caught the Soviet forces on the wrong foot. This succeeded in restoring the front line and in trapping the 29th Army. But the encircled Red Army soldiers, told of the fate awaiting them if taken prisoner by Model’s troops, fought to the end.

Another favourite of Hitler, Generalfeldmarschall von Reichenau, who had been appointed commander-in-chief of Army Group South after Rundstedt’s dismissal, had already become a different sort of casualty. On 12 January, he had gone for his morning run near his headquarters at Poltava. At lunch he felt unwell and collapsed from a heart attack. Hitler immediately ordered that Reichenau should be flown back to Germany for treatment, but the field marshal died on the way. Shortly before his death, Reichenau, whose Sixth Army had assisted the SS
Sonderkommando
in the massacre of Babi Yar, had persuaded Hitler to appoint his chief of staff Generalleutnant Friedrich Paulus to take over command of the Sixth Army.