A World at Arms (83 page)

Stalin, on the other hand, was more willing to listen to his military experts than before, especially on one key point. Shaposhnikov had been replaced (for health reasons that were very real) on June 26, two days
before the start of the German offensive, by General, later Marshal, Vasilevsky as Chief of the General Staff. At his insistence, it would appear, the forces in the southern area were ordered on or about July 6 to make fighting retreats instead of being halted in place to be surrounded and destroyed as had happened in 1941.
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Although there were some signs of internal trouble in the Red Army and desperate measures were resorted to in order to maintain morale, cohesion, and discipline, the fact remains that units of the army either retreated coherently or at least could be pulled together again. The Germans had conquered a large and in part very rich area by the end of July, but the capture of between 100,000 and 200,000 prisoners in three encirclement battles showed that the great victory which Hitler trumpeted to his officers in Directive 45 of July 23, 1942, was in part illusory. The Soviet Union had indeed been dealt a blow, but the assertion that the goals of the summer offensive had been “reached for the most part” would sound increasingly silly in the following weeks.
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This euphoric view of developments was, however, honestly believed at German headquarters, at least by Hitler himself, and on the basis of this belief, new operational orders were issued.
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These provided for operations conducted simultaneously rather than in sequence. Divisions of the 1th Army as well as the heavy siege artillery, just being freed for new deployment after the capture of Sevastopol, were sent north to take Leningrad instead of being sent eastward into the North Caucasus as contemplated at one point. Even more dramatically, the bulk of the forces of Army Groups A and B, which had originally been assigned to the advance eastwards so that they could prepare for and shield a
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offensivesouthward into the Caucasus, were now headed south immediately with only the German 6th Army directed eastwards toward Stalingrad. To put it crudely, of the five German armies available in the south, one was sent to the Leningrad front, one toward Stalingrad, and three (4th Panzer, 1st Panzer and 17th) toward objectives in the Caucasus area. As the latter headed in this direction, they made the great advances to be described shortly, but the 6th Army was left not only practically by itself but for a while without even the minimum of supplies needed to move at all. Hitler’s personal role in this eccentric set of
operations, a role made even more emphatic by his simultaneous insistence on measures to cope with what he considered likely steps by the Western Allies to assist their beleaguered Russian ally, may have set the stage not only for the curious German deployment of forces but for the extraordinary reactions of Hitler subsequently when things began to go very obviously wrong.

At first it certainly looked as if all were going swiftly in favor of the Germans and disastrously for the Soviet Union and its allies. By the end of July the three armies headed south and southeast were across the lower 150 miles of the Don and at two places had cut the railway connecting the North Caucasus area with Stalingrad. In the first two weeks of August, German troops, moving through some of the richest agricultural area of the Soviet Union, seized the city of Krasnodar, and occupied the first of the oil field areas–that near Maikop-which were a major goal of the whole 1942 operation.
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The installations had been wrecked by the Russians, but the Germans expected to fix them while their forces rushed on to the other oil fields, those at Grozny, 200 miles further east and those at Baku, an additional 300 miles away. But they would never reach either of these objectives.
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As the Germans raced across the plains of the North Caucasus area and into the foothills of the mountains themselves, they were able to make dramatic advances because the Red Army was still retreating; but in this process the balance began to shift. On the German side, not only were there supply difficulties as the units covered great distances from their bases in the Ukraine, but the spearheads became smaller even as they were increasingly separated by vast distances. By late August, German forces trying to push their way into the Soviet naval base of Novorossysk were 300 miles away from those which had captured Mozdok on the road to Grozny; between those spearheads, others were trying to force the Caucasus passes to seize Tuapse and Sukhumi on the Black Sea. At each of these points steadily smaller and more exhausted German assault units faced the stiffening resistance of a Red Army summoned to desperate exertions by its government.

In the face of the German advance, the Soviet leadership was trying hard to pull together a Red Army which threatened to dissolve into headlong flight. Because so many of the reserves available to the Stavka had been concentrated behind the Central front to defend Moscow, much of the reinforcement went to the defense of Stalingrad and came to play a significant role in slowing the German advance in that direction. Moving units to the two main Soviet commands trying to stem the German onrush further south, the Black Sea Group in the west and the
North Group in the east, both under the Transcaucasus Front, was both difficult and slow. Some reinforcements did get there, partly by rail and partly by sea, but a substantial proportion came from the south, that is, from the border with Turkey.

For some time, the Turkish government had watched developments to the north with a combination of anxiety and greed. There was, or at least seemed to be, the possibility that if the Soviet Union fell apart under German blows, some of the areas with Turkic population might fall to Turkey. There was, however, the alternative possibility that an expanding and aggressive Germany might then be poised on the northern as well as the European border of Turkey and demand the right to drive across the country into Syria and Iraq, both now under British military control. In June of 1942, with the surrender of Tobruk after a two-day siege even while the Germans were blasting their way into Sevastopol, it looked for a moment as if the Germans might show up on Turkey’s southern border as well! This situation, however, changed in July and early August as the British held at El Alamein. Whatever else Turkey might or might not do, it was certainly not about to join the Axis. Under these circumstances, the Soviet high command ordered seven divisions and four brigades from the Turkish border north to face the Germans.
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THE BRITISH AIR OFFENSIVE

In the terrible emergency, there was for a short time a plan, previously mentioned, to send two British divisions to the Caucasus front; but the British disaster in North Africa made that project impossible. Instead, there was beginning in mid-July a project under the code–name “Velvet” to send a combined British-United States air force to help support the Russian army in the Caucasus. Though at first welcomed by Stalin, it was subsequently rejected by him. As soon as it appeared that the Red Army could hold the Germans, he did not want any British or American forces operating from Soviet bases.
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Although the Western Allies could not make a landing in Western Europe in 1942 and thereby reduce pressure on the Eastern Front, as Churchill explained to Stalin in August, the very fact that this possibility existed restrained Germany from concentrating all its forces on the Eastern Front. Hitler believed that it was much too risky to denude the West,
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and even ordered the transfer of one crack division from the East against the contingency of operations in the West or in Norway.
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When Churchill was in Moscow in August to explain to Stalin the
impossibility of a landing in Western Europe that year at a time when the situation on the southern portion of the Eastern Front was particularly grim, other ways of helping alleviate the terrible pressure on the U.S.S.R. were naturally discussed.
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Ironically the recent disaster of the convoy PQ 17 and the shipping needs for the forthcoming “Torch” operation in Northwest Africa meant that the convoys to Murmansk were being temporarily suspended. The Torch operation itself, however, would provide relief for the Soviet Union, and after initial doubts Stalin recognized this. A point on which Stalin’s views fitted in with the thinking of Churchill as well as the plans, intentions, and capabilities of the British was his insistence on the maintenance and if possible expansion of the British bombing campaign against Germany.
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The Royal Air Force had begun bombing Germany in 1940 and had done so on a slowly increasing scale in 1941. It was, however, an effort with much smaller effects than anticipated. Two of the reasons for this either were or soon became evident; the third was not understood until much later in the war. First, there was simply the inadequate number of planes. Throughout 1941 and into 1942, there were never more than 300-400 bombers available and many of them were of the smaller two-engine variety. Only the massive commitment of human and material resources to this effort in the winter of 1941–42 could make a substantial difference as, beginning in 1942, there was a higher proportion of the larger four–engine bombers and a slow increase in the total as new planes more than replaced those lost to the enemy, the weather and accidents. The second reason was that the bomber, forced by anti-aircraft fire to fly high above the target and unable to see through the cloud cover, rarely was able to drop a bomb accurately on a small target and even when there were no clouds rarely hit the target. This fact, that bombs generally missed whatever installation or factory they were aimed at, did not become apparent until late in 1941 as it became obvious that the bombing offensive was having little effect on the German war economy. The third reason, not understood until the last months of the war, was that in a well–functioning industrial society, most damage to factories and other installations can be repaired fairly rapidly so that only repeated bombing of the same place can have more than temporary effect.

In early 1942 there had been a real crisis in Britain’s consideration of the bombing offensive, and the decisions then made largely set the pattern for the balance of the European war. Here was the one way in which Britain could try to strike at Germany effectively so that the pressures of the Prime Minister’s personal inclination,
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combined with those of practicality in a war then going disastrously badly for the country and
the insistence of a Soviet ally who was bearing the brunt of the burden of fighting. As the only visible realistic alternative to abandoning all offensive action against Germany for the foreseeable future, the internal debate was resolved in favor of a new bombing directive of February 14, 1942, which called for aiming points in built up areas, not dockyards and factories. The cities of Germany would be levelled, her air force obliged to defend its home, and German industry incapacitated in the process. A new commander, Arthur Harris, took over Bomber Command on February 22 and assumed, entirely correctly, that this was the program he was supposed to carry out.
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The new commander had the support of his government and quickly launched his crews on a new set of operations.
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At the end of March, a massive raid destroyed large parts of the city of Lubeck; a month later it was the turn of Rostock.
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The German response was to try to retaliate by attacks on British cities rather than a shift to the defense, a posture then still consonant with the German air force’s own preference.
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There was controversy at the highest levels of the British government over the advantages and prospects of a continued focus on area bombing of German cities, a focus of which Churchill’s scientific advisor, Lord Cherwell, was perhaps the most influential advocate.
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Whatever the doubts, the program went forward. The careful marshalling of all available airplanes, including many from training units, for the 1000 airplane raid on Cologne at the end of May, marked a new stage. The destruction was considerable and the whole concept caught the imagination of a British public at a time of constant defeats.
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It marked a real break in Hitler’s confidence in the Luftwaffe when its first reports proved ridiculous.
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It has yet to lead observers to question whether the term “success” should be applied, as it so often still is, to Hitler’s original building up of a German air force in violation of the 1919 peace treaty and in a world practically without heavy bombers.

In the summer and fall of 1942, there were also suggestions that the bombing offensive might serve not only as an interim form of support for the Soviet Union until a major landing on the continent proved possible but that Great Britain ought so to increase its bomber force that an invasion by a large land army would not be needed. Although for a while Churchill appears to have considered this possibility seriously, especially in June 1942 when the surrender of Tobruk and the whole series of disasters in land fighting in North Africa and Southeast Asia raised questions about Britain’s ability to field effective land forces, that concept was pushed aside. A major air offensive would continue against Germany, only temporarily shifted to the Mediterranean in support of
“Torch,” but as an aid to a comprehensive effort in which armies would play a major role.
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In August 1942, 38 percent of Germany’s fighters were on the Western Front and 43 percent in the East; by April of 1943, 45 percent were in the West and 27 percent in the East. This was one field in which the Western Allies could provide their hard–pressedally with some relief even as they themselves struggled, as described in the preceding chapter, to keep the sea lanes open.

Those sea lanes were, of course, essential for any supplies from her allies to reach the Soviet Union, and during 1942 the pace of deliveries did improve, most of the increase coming via the Persian Gulf and the Pacific. Roosevelt in particular tried to get shipments expedited, and as there were difficulties between United States Ambassador William Standley and the Russians, the President had former Ambassador Joseph E. Davies sounded in October 1942 about taking another turn at the embassy. When Davies refused, the President kept Standley there but insisted both on adherence to the unconditional aid policy followed since 1941 and the role of those he trusted to carry it out, especially General Philip R. Faymonville as Lend-Lease Representative to the Soviet Union.
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