The Second World War (68 page)
A clash of personalities also contributed to the lack of a coherent strategy in the Pacific, almost entirely due to General MacArthur’s personal fixation with the Philippines and his determination to honour his promise ‘I will return.’ He insisted on a drive through New Guinea to clear the remaining Japanese forces, then he intended to prepare for the invasion of the Philippines. With his brilliant manipulation of the press, MacArthur managed to convince American public opinion that their great moral duty was to liberate their semi-colonial ally from the horrors of Japanese occupation.
The US Navy, with a much more practical plan, wanted to advance, island group by island group, towards Japan, cutting off supplies from all its far-flung garrisons and forces of occupation. Unable to resolve the impasse with MacArthur, the joint chiefs of staff compromised with a so-called Twin Axis policy which would follow both courses of action at once. Only the United States, with its astonishing output of ships and aircraft, was capable of achieving anything with such a prodigal dispersal of forces.
The fast-growing might of the United States in the Pacific did little to help the Chinese Nationalists, and the Twin Axis policy made them an even lower priority for resources. On the other hand, the marked turn in the fortunes of war by the end of 1942, especially at Guadalcanal, forced Tokyo to cancel plans for the Gog
Offensive, in which the China Expeditionary Army would advance into Szechuan and destroy the Nationalist government in Chungking.
AUGUST–SEPTEMBER 1942
S
talin was furious when he heard that Soviet forces had been pushed back to the outskirts of Stalingrad. ‘
What’s the matter with them
?’ he exploded on the telephone to General Aleksandr Vasilevsky, whom he had sent down to report back to the Stavka. ‘Don’t they realise that this is not only a catastrophe for Stalingrad? We would lose our main waterway and oil too!’ As well as Paulus’s forces threatening the north of the city, Hoth’s two panzer corps were advancing rapidly from the south.
Vasily Grossman, the first correspondent to reach the city smashed by the Luftwaffe, was as alarmed as everyone else. ‘
This war on the border
of Kazakhstan, on the lower reaches of the Volga, gives one the terrifying feeling of a knife driven deep.’ As he surveyed the bombed buildings with empty windows and burned-out trams in the street, he compared the ruins of the city to ‘Pompeii, seized by disaster on a day when everything was flourishing’.
On 25 August 1942, a state of siege was proclaimed in Stalingrad. The 10th NKVD Rifle Division organized ‘destroyer battalions’ of male and female workers from the Barrikady Ordnance Factory, the Red October Steel Works and the Dzerzhinsky Tractor Factory. Barely armed, they were sent into action against the 16th Panzer Division with predictable results. Blocking groups of Komsomol (Communist Youth) members with automatic weapons were positioned behind them to stop any retreat. North-west of the city, the 1st Guards Army was ordered to attack the flank of General Gustav von Wietersheim’s XIV Panzer Corps, which was awaiting reinforcements and supplies. The plan was to link up with the 62nd Army which was being forced back into the city, but the panzers, supported by Richthofen’s aircraft, pushed the 1st Guards back during the first week of September.
The Luftwaffe continued to smash the ruined city. It also bombed and strafed river ferries, paddle-steamers and small craft trying to evacuate civilians from the west bank across the Volga. Hitler, bent on the annihilation of the Bolshevik enemy, issued a new instruction on 2 September. ‘
The Führer commands
that on entering the city the entire male population should be eliminated since Stalingrad, with its convinced Communist population of one million, is particularly dangerous.’
The feelings of German soldiers were very mixed, as letters home indicated. Some were exultant at the approaching victory, some grumbled that, unlike in France, there was nothing to buy to send home. Their wives were asking for fur, especially Astrakhan. ‘
Please send me a present
from Russia, no matter what it is,’ pleaded one wife. With the RAF raids, news from home was not encouraging. Relatives complained at the increasing call-up. ‘When is all this
Schweinerei
going to end?’ Soldat Müller read in a letter. ‘Soon sixteen-year-olds will be sent into battle.’ And his girlfriend told him that she did not go to the
Kino
any more, as she found it ‘
too sad to watch the newsreels
with news of the Front’.
On the evening of 7 September, even though the advance into Stalingrad appeared successful, Hitler went into an unprecedented rage. General Alfred Jodl had just come back to the Führer headquarters at Vinnitsa from a visit to Generalfeldmarschall List, the commander-in-chief of Army Group A in the Caucasus. When Hitler complained about List’s failure to achieve what he had ordered, Jodl replied that List had done what he had been told. Hitler screamed: ‘
That is a lie
!’ and stormed out of the room. He then gave orders that stenographers should take down every word said at the daily situation conference.
General Warlimont of the OKW staff, who returned after a short absence, was struck by the dramatic change in atmosphere. Hitler greeted him with a ‘
long stare of burning hate
’. Warlimont later claimed to have thought: ‘This man has lost face; he has realized that his fatal gamble is over.’ Other members of Hitler’s staff also found that he had become completely withdrawn. He no longer ate with his staff or shook their hands. He seemed to distrust everyone. Just over two weeks later Hitler dismissed General Halder as chief of the general staff.
The Third Reich had achieved its greatest occupation of territory. Its forces spread from the Volga to France’s Atlantic coast, and from the North Cape to the Sahara. But now Hitler became obsessed with the capture of Stalingrad, mainly because it bore Stalin’s name. Beria referred to the battle there as ‘
a confrontation between two rams
’ since it had become a matter of prestige for both leaders. Hitler above all grasped at the idea of a symbolic victory at Stalingrad, to replace the looming failure to seize the Caucasian oilfields. The Wehrmacht had indeed reached the ‘culminating point’, where its offensive had run out of steam and it was no longer able to defeat subsequent attacks.
Yet in the anxious eyes of the outside world, nothing appeared capable of stopping a German advance into the Middle East from both the Caucasus and North Africa. The American embassy in Moscow expected a Soviet collapse at any moment. In that year of disasters for the Allies, most people failed to recognize that the Wehrmacht had become dangerously
over-extended. Nor did they appreciate the resolve of the battered Red Army to fight back.
As the 62nd Army pulled back to the edge of the city, General Yeremenko, the commander of the Stalingrad Front, and Khrushchev its chief political officer, summoned Major General Vasily Chuikov to their new headquarters on the east bank of the Volga. He was to take over command of the 62nd Army in Stalingrad.
‘
Comrade Chuikov
,’ said Khrushchev, ‘how do you interpret your task?’
‘We will defend the city or die in the attempt,’ Chuikov replied. Yeremenko and Khrushchev said that he had understood correctly.
Chuikov, with a strong Russian face and a shock of crinkly hair, proved to be a ruthless leader, ready to hit or shoot any officer who failed in his duty. In the mood of panic and chaos, he was almost certainly the best man for the task. Strategic genius was not needed in Stalingrad: just peasant cunning and pitiless determination. The German 29th Motorized Division had reached the Volga on the southern edge of the city, cutting the 62nd Army off from its neighbour, the 64th Army commanded by Major General Mikhail Shumilov. Chuikov knew that he had to hang on, wearing the Germans down, whatever the casualties. ‘Time is blood,’ as he put it later, with brutal clarity.
To block the increasing attempts by troops to escape back across the Volga, Chuikov ordered Colonel Sarayan, commander of the 10th NKVD Rifle Division, to place pickets on every crossing point to shoot deserters. He knew that morale was collapsing. Even an assistant political officer had unwisely written in his diary: ‘
Nobody believes that Stalingrad
is going to hold out. I don’t think that we will ever win.’ Sarayan, however, was outraged when Chuikov then told him to deploy the rest of his troops for combat duty, under his orders. The NKVD did not take kindly to any army officer assuming control over its men, but Chuikov knew that he could withstand any threats. He had nothing to lose. His army was down to 20,000 men, with fewer than sixty tanks, many of which were immobile, so they were towed to fire positions to be dug in.
Chuikov had already sensed that German troops did not like close-quarter fighting, so he intended to keep his lines as near to the enemy as possible. This proximity would also hinder the Luftwaffe bombers, afraid of hitting their own men. But perhaps the greatest advantage was the damage they had already done to the city. The landscape of ruins which Richthofen’s bombers had created would provide the killing ground for their own men. Chuikov also made the right decision in keeping his heavy and medium artillery on the east bank of the Volga, to fire across at German troop concentrations as they formed up for attacks.
The first major German assault began on 13 September, the day after Hitler had forced Paulus to name a date for the capture of the city. Paulus, suffering from a nervous tic as well as from chronic dysentery, estimated that his forces would take it in twenty-four days. German officers had encouraged their men with the idea that they could sweep through to the bank of the Volga in a great charge. Richthofen’s Luftwaffe squadrons had already begun their bombardment, mainly with Stukas screaming down. ‘
A mass of Stukas
came over us,’ a Gefreiter in the 389th Infantry Division wrote, ‘and after their attack, one could not believe that even a mouse was left alive.’ Clouds of pale dust from smashed masonry mingled with the smoke from buildings and the burning oil tanks.
Exposed in his headquarters on the Mamaev Kurgan, Chuikov was out of contact with his divisional commanders because of telephone lines cut by the bombing. He was forced to take his staff in a crouching run to a bunker cut deep into the bank of the Tsaritsa River. Although most German attacks had been slowed by fierce resistance, the 71st Infantry Division broke through into the centre of the city. Yeremenko had the unenviable task of informing Stalin by telephone, when he was in the middle of a conference with Zhukov and Vasilevsky. Stalin immediately gave orders that the 13th Guards Division commanded by Major General Aleksandr Rodimtsev, a hero of the Spanish Civil War, should cross the Volga to join the fighting in the city.
Two of Sarayev’s NKVD rifle regiments managed to hold the 71st Infantry Division during 14 September, and even retook the central railway station. This gave just enough time for Rodimtsev’s guardsmen to start their crossing that night, in a mixture of rowing boats, pinnaces, gun-boats and lighters. It was a long and terrifying journey under fire, for the Volga at Stalingrad was 1,300 metres wide. As men in the first boats neared the western side, they could see German infantrymen silhouetted against the flames of blazing buildings on the high bank above them. The first Soviet soldiers ashore charged straight up the steep slope into the attack, lacking even the time to fix bayonets. Joining up with the NKVD riflemen on their left, they pushed the Germans back. As more battalions landed, they fought forward to the railway line at the base of the Mamaev Kurgan, where a bitter battle continued for its 102-metre summit. If the Germans took it, they could control the river crossings with their artillery. The hill was to be churned by shellfire for three months, with corpses buried and disinterred again and again.
Clearly a number of the NKVD riflemen thrown into the front line cracked under the strain. The Special Detachment reported that ‘
the blocking unit of the 62nd Army
arrested 1,218 soldiers and officers between 13 and 15 September, of whom 21 were executed, ten imprisoned and others
sent back to their units. Most of the troops arrested are from the 10th NKVD Division.’
‘
Stalingrad looks like
a cemetery or a heap of garbage,’ a Red Army soldier wrote in his diary. ‘The entire city and the area around it are black as if painted with soot.’ Uniforms on both sides were hard to distinguish as they became impregnated with dirt and masonry dust. And on most days the smoke and dust was so thick that the sun could not be seen. The stench of bodies rotting in the ruins mixed with that of excrement and burned iron. At least 50,000 civilians (one NKVD report says 200,000) had failed to cross the Volga or been stopped, now that priority was given to the evacuation of the wounded. They huddled, starved and thirsty, in cellars of the ruined buildings as the battle went on above them, the ground shuddering from explosions.
Life was far worse for those trapped behind German lines. ‘
From the very first days
of the occupation,’ the Special Detachment of the NKVD reported later, ‘the Germans started eliminating the Jews left behind in the town as well as Communists, Komsomol members and people suspected of being partisans. It was mostly German Feldgendarmerie and Ukrainian auxiliary police who were searching for Jews. Traitors from among the local population also played a significant role. To find and kill the Jews they checked apartments, basements, shelters and dug-outs. Communists and Komsomol members were searched for by the Geheime Feldpolizei, which was actively helped by traitors of the Motherland… There were also acts of savage rape of Soviet women by Germans.’