The Moscow Option (11 page)

The Soviet military situation was far from enviable. The Red Army, its ranks thinned by the autumn battles, its morale lowered by constant retreat and the loss of the capital, its supply channels thrown into confusion by the loss of the Moscow railway node, had only been saved from complete disaster by the early arrival of winter and the transfer of some eighteen crack divisions from the Far East. These fresh troops, accustomed to the rigours of winter, had been deployed mainly in the Mius, Voronezh and Vladimir sectors. There were not enough of them to throw the Germans back but, with the help of the conditions and an enemy reluctance to mount any determined attacks, they had succeeded in stabilising the line.

But for how long? It was glumly recognised that winters do not last for ever, even Russian winters. It seemed highly unlikely that the Red Army would be able to cope with a renewed German offensive once conditions again became conducive to mobile operations. And so the measures being taken in Kuybyshev, like those under discussion in Washington, were primarily long-term defensive measures. Stalin too was playing for time. If the Soviet Union could somehow avoid the knock-out punch, then there was a good chance of winning the bout on points.

These points were now being totted up out of reach of the rampant Wehrmacht, first and foremost by the enlarging of the industrial base east of the Volga.

This process had been underway since the early ‘30s. The Soviet leadership had, unknown to the Nazi devotees of the blitz solution, demonstrated a rare prescience. Stalin had been preparing for this war for over a decade. By 1941 a substantial proportion of Soviet industry was located east of Moscow, and as the war began more industrial concerns were shifted, machine by machine, in the same direction.

As the panzers rolled through Belorussia, Soviet trains rolled east across the steppe carrying tank factories, steel mills, diesel plants and other vital equipment to the Volga, Ural, Siberian and Central Asian regions.

In the winter of 1941-2 this process went on, as those areas likely to be overrun in the coming spring and summer were denuded of industrial plants necessary for the continued prosecution of the war. This exodus even took precedence, in terms of rail capacity, over the movement of supplies to the hard-pressed troops in the front-line.

The major problem involved in this evacuation of industry was the time consequently lost to production. For example the huge aircraft factories of Voronezh, moved east in November and December, could not be expected to resume full production until May. The same applied to the Moscow aviation industry. Overall, only that thirty-five per cent of aircraft production already situated in the Urals would be turning out planes in the first five months of 1942. It was going to be a thin year for the Red Air Force, no matter how promising the prospects might be for 1943.

Industry could at least be evacuated; mines and agricultural land were not so mobile. New sources of production would have to be found. The food situation was difficult rather than impossible, largely because the loss of vast producing areas had been matched by the loss of most of the mouths they usually fed. The oil situation, though, was potentially critical. The probably imminent loss of the Caucasian oilfields - currently contributing eighty-six per cent of the Soviet output - could only be compensated for by the rapid expansion of the recently developed fields in the Volga and Ural regions. The story was the same with most of the mineral products. Old mines had to be reopened or expanded, new sources prospected and exploited. In certain crucial cases - aluminium, lead, the high-octane fuels and quality blending agents necessary for the production of aviation fuel - insufficient sources were available. The necessary quantities would have to be brought in from abroad.

But the Soviet Union’s greatest problems in this period concerned transportation. The Red Army had few motor vehicles and had lost the means of producing many more. The railways suffered from a different malaise. The radial network was centred on the capital, and the loss of the Moscow hub had severely weakened the ability of the Red Army to switch its troops from front to front. To move an army from Tikhvin to Rostov now took four times as long as it had previously taken. The north-south line furthest to the west in Soviet hands ran from Yaroslavl to Gorkiy before winding its way interminably south to the Don at Liski. It was a single-track line for most of its length, with a correspondingly low carrying capacity.

In December work had begun on a new track, running from Kazan to Stalingrad down the west bank of the Volga, but on reflection the Soviet leaders decided that the line was rather too close to the front line, and top priority was then given to the construction of a north-south line between the Volga and the Urals, running south from Balezino to Chkalov via Izhevsk and Ufa. Further south the line connecting Orsk to Guryev on the Caspian was completed in March, so allowing the transport of Baku oil by tanker and rail to the Ural region. Through the extremes of a continental winter thousands of Soviet men, women and youths worked in merciless conditions to lay these miles of track.

The one compensating feature in this desperate outlook, and one for which the Soviet planners could claim the credit, was the country’s continued accessibility to the outside world. The Konosha-Kotlas railway, built during 1940-1, and connecting Murmansk and Archangel to the Urals area by way of Kirov, was an invaluable resource. Even should the Finns and Germans make a more determined effort in the Far North and capture Murmansk, the thin line from Archangel, running through the pine forests south to Konosha, would probably prove beyond their reach.

Already it was in heavy use. The first Allied convoy had docked in Murmansk harbour the previous September, and had been followed by others at roughly fifteen-day intervals. In mid-October Cripps and Hopkins had met Stalin in Gorkiy and taken away the Soviet Union’s Christmas list, and in the succeeding months British and American ships had been loaded with everything from lump sugar to aluminium, from field telephones to lard, that would keep the Soviet Union in the war.

Unfortunately this route was only viable through the perpetual darkness of the Arctic winter; the perpetual light of summer would give the Luftwaffe and Kriegsmarine units stationed in northern Norway too much of an edge. So the other two major ingress routes were of considerable importance. One ran up the new Trans-Iranian railway from Basra to Mianeh, thence on by road and another railway into the Caucasus. The other consisted of American ships flying the hammer and sickle and sailing under the eyes of the Japanese and into Vladivostok. Clearly neither offered a long-term guarantee. A German advance into the Caucasus, a shift in Japanese policy, and there would be a cork in each bottle.

Still, perhaps the Germans would not reach Baku, perhaps the Japanese Navy had its hands full enough already. The Americans continued to load ships in Chesapeake Bay. The one commodity they could not hoist aboard the freighters was determination. If the Soviet Union could continue the war - would it?

The answer was yes. German policy in occupied Russia had more than made up for any shortage of Soviet resolve. If a modus vivendi could ever have been reached with Stalin, if the rifts could ever have been deepened between the Soviet people and its leadership, then by December 1941 such possibilities no longer existed. There were too many frozen corpses swaying on village-square gallows. There could be no peace with such an enemy. The cost of war could not exceed the cost of submission.

The depths of bestiality plumbed by Hitler’s aryans were naturally most apparent in the occupied regions. And here the fight was only just beginning. Stalin’s speech of 3 July 1941 had decreed the formation of partisan units in those areas overrun by the enemy and those soon to suffer a similar fate. Deep in the forests and marshes of European Russia bases had been prepared, albeit inadequately, for the struggle to come. And, as the Germans advanced, these bases acted as focal points for the thousands scattered in the panzers’ slipstream. For weaponry these proto-partisans could rely on the enormous tonnage of discarded arms littering the vast fields of battle.

In late 1941 and early 1942 many trained officers were parachuted into occupied territory to organise the raw material into efficient partisan units. In this first winter of the war little action was taken against the occupying power, only selective raids calculated to elicit German reprisals and so cement the local population’s loyalty. For similar reasons there were many executions of those inclined to collaborate with the new masters. Most of the time the partisans were too busy establishing their bases and arranging for supplies, and to the German field commanders they were as yet little more than a minor irritation.

Given time they would become more, much more. ‘Given time’. How often must Stalin have muttered those words? The crippled Soviet engine was firing fit to burst on its remaining cylinders. It would get there, given time. Stalin, pacing the floor of the Governor’s Palace in Kuybyshev, could only watch its painstaking progress and wait. Armaments, railways, foreign aid, partisans. All would prove their worth. ‘Given time’.

Tokyo

Unless you enter the tiger’s den you cannot take the cubs.
Japanese proverb

In Tokyo and Berlin the problems confronting the planners were the reverse of those troubling their counterparts in London, Washington and Kuybyshev. The Germans and the Japanese had the initiative but not the resources in depth; they had to maximise the advantages offered by the one before the threat implicit in the other could be brought to bear against them. But while the German military chiefs had reached agreement on the broad outlines of their strategy for the first half of 1942, the Japanese had yet to take the necessary decisions.

It was becoming urgent that they did so. The first phase of the strategic blueprint drawn up in November 1941 was nearing completion. As February passed into March the Japanese forces had either reached or were approaching those military frontiers deemed necessary for the defence of the Co-Prosperity Sphere. Inside those frontiers there remained a few pockets of resistance, but they were isolated and soon to be reduced. Then the Rising Sun would hold sway over the oceans and islands from the Andamans to the International Date Line, from the Kuriles to the Arafura Sea. On the Asian mainland the Army would reign supreme from Rangoon to the northern borders of Manchukuo. Except, of course, for China. And this, surely, was the time to settle the China ‘Incident’ once and for all, while the world was held at arms’ length by Japanese control of the seas.

This had been the original plan, but the sweeping victories had increased the appetite for more. Now it was argued that to hand back the initiative to the enemy was both temperamentally impossible and strategically unwise. The most should be made of the current Japanese superiority, in expanding further the perimeters of the defensive shield, in hindering the enemy’s attempts to create a countervailing force.

So it was decided that offensive operations would continue. But in which direction? There was no shortage of alternatives. To north, south, east and west new prizes studded the horizon. Which should be pursued?

To the north lay the half-crippled Soviet Union, fully engaged in a life-and-death struggle with Japan’s German ally. The Red Army forces in the Far East were known to be weak, and there was every chance that they would grow weaker still. The Japanese Army leadership was eager for action against the old enemy; memories of the costly border skirmishes in 1938-9 still rankled. But in early 1942 there were not the troops available for a full-scale invasion of Siberia; the most that could be expected of the Kwangtung Army’s sixteen divisions was the conquest of the Soviet Maritime Provinces. Nor were climatic conditions propitious, particularly in view of the appalling terrain involved. The Army was willing to wait for spring, perhaps even summer. By then the Germans would have finished off the job west of the Urals and the Japanese could take Siberia virtually unopposed.

The Naval General Staff was not considering action against the Soviet Union, for the simple reason that its role in such an endeavour would be minimal. It was much more concerned with the likely American use of Australia as a base for mounting counter-offensives against the Japanese positions in South-east Asia. The island continent should be conquered, so as to avert this probable danger. But unfortunately for the Naval General Staff the Army vetoed the idea, claiming that there were insufficient divisions available for such a daunting task.

Yamamoto’s Operations Chief, Captain Kuroshima, was more interested in the possibilities of a westward drive into the Indian Ocean. This would serve a valuable double purpose. In negative terms it would secure the Japanese rear for a showdown with the Americans in the Pacific, in positive terms it would push the British out of the Indian Ocean and make possible a link-up between Japanese and German forces in the Middle East area. The latter, as we shall see, was discussed by the two powers involved in February, with important consequences. But for the moment Kuroshima was also stymied by the Army’s opposition. There were not enough troops available for the conquest of Ceylon. In any case, it would be better to wait for the post-monsoon period in autumn, when an advance from Burma into Bengal could divide the enemy forces in the area. Kuroshima had to be satisfied with a mere raid into the Indian Ocean, to be carried out by
Kido Butai
in late March and early April.