The Moscow Option (6 page)

Stalin was also making the most of Napoleonic parallels. On 17 October he had spoken to the Soviet people for the first time since the fall of the capital. Again they listened to the slow, toneless voice, its Georgian accent more pronounced than ever, describe the tragic situation of the Soviet Union in unnervingly matter-of-fact terms. Stalin talked of huge losses, but claimed that the enemy’s losses were larger still. He admitted the vast extent of the territories conquered, but reminded his audience of the still vaster expanses still available. He appealed to national pride, invoking those great Russians of the past whom Trotsky had once consigned to ‘the dustbin of history’. With Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union in the same camp, Stalin promised, the war could not in the long run be lost. It was a matter of time. He quoted Kutuzov’s dispatch to the Tsar in 1812:

“The loss of Moscow does not mean that Russia is lost. I regard it as my duty to save my army from destruction, to safeguard its means of life and to ensure the inevitable destruction of the enemy even if this entails the evacuation of Moscow. It is therefore my intention to retire through Moscow along the Ryazan road.”

‘We have taken the same road,’ said Stalin, somewhat inaccurately. Doubtless it would be a long and a hard one. But with this enemy - here he quoted a number of typical German untermensch references - there could be no dealings. Peace would only come with victory.

A dram of discretion is worth a pound of wisdom.
German proverb

I

On the evening of 16 September 1941 three fast Italian ocean liners slipped out of Taranto harbour. They were carrying fresh troops and equipment for the Axis armies in North Africa. It was a five-hundred-mile voyage to the safety of Tripoli harbour.

The liners’ departure was noted by a British submarine standing watch outside Taranto, and the information relayed to Naval HQ Malta. In the early hours of 17 September the submarine
Upholder
ducked under the Italian destroyer screen and sent two of the liners to the bottom. Yet again the fallibility of Rommel’s Mediterranean supply route had been crushingly underlined.

This was only one of many such disasters during the autumn of 1941 but for Admiral Weichold, German liaison officer with the Italian Naval Staff in Rome, it was the proverbial last straw. The losses at sea were becoming untenable, yet his superiors in Berlin seemed either unwilling or unable to take any measures to rectify the situation. In a desperate bid to elicit some sort of positive response Weichold lavishly doctored the loss statistics, appended his opinions, and dispatched the whole package to the Naval Command (Oberkommando der Kreigsmarine or OKM) in Berlin. It arrived on Grand-Admiral Raeder’s desk on the morning of Wednesday 24 September, a propitious moment. The next day Raeder was to attend a conference of the Reich’s war leaders, called by acting-Führer Goering to decide the future course of German strategy.

The conference was held at Goering’s Karinhall residence in eastern Germany. The Reich Marshal was enjoying his stint as Supreme Commander and had no intention of meeting his fellow service chiefs on ground of their choosing. Amidst the looted art treasures of occupied Europe and the baronial opulence of Karinhall he expected to enjoy a definite psychological advantage.

On the morning of the 25th the other leaders arrived at the airstrip ten miles away, and were driven through the forests to Goering’s ideal home by the side of the small Wuckersee. Those arriving included Jodl and Paulus for the OKW, Brauchitsch and Halder for the OKH, Raeder for the Navy, Jeschonnek as Goering’s Luftwaffe second-in- command, and Minister of Armament Production Dr Todt. They were given coffee in a reception room whose walls seemed literally plastered with paintings, and then led into the dining-hall that had been prepared for the conference.

Despite the long history of personal disagreements affecting virtually all those present the prevailing atmosphere was reportedly ‘workmanlike’. Halder noted in his diary, with characteristic acerbity, that ‘the mood of the conference was better attuned to the matters in hand than to the preposterous surroundings’. Halder of course was always something of a foreigner to the real Third Reich, which here at Karinhall reached a rare level of warped self- expression, blending feudalism, nouveau riche vulgarity and technical expertise. Outside the Hall, Goering’s newly- inherited SS guards stood watch among the extensive lily-ponds.

Inside the conference room Brauchitsch opened the proceedings with a report, written by Halder, on the current situation of
Fall Barbarossa
. It was as thorough and detailed as any of Halder’s reports, but the gist was relatively simple. The Soviet Union had not admitted defeat, and was unlikely to do so while it commanded an army and an industrial base east of Moscow, but its offensive capacity was now virtually non-existent, and was likely to remain extremely limited throughout 1942. As things now stood Halder foresaw few difficulties in reaching the original objective of
Barbarossa
- a line from Archangel to Astrakhan - and in conquering the Caucasus during the spring and summer of 1942 with the forces presently available. It would be possible to withdraw limited air and armoured formations from the East for the duration of the winter months, perhaps even permanently.

Halder’s report did not suggest alternative employment for those forces no longer vital to the outcome of the war in the East, but their possible deployment in the Mediterranean theatre had been discussed even before the invasion of the Soviet Union. In Directive 32, issued on 11 June 1941, the Führer had stated that ‘after the destruction of the Soviet armed forces ... the struggle against British positions in the Mediterranean and Western Asia will be continued by converging attacks launched from Libya through Egypt, from Bulgaria through Turkey, and in certain circumstances also from Transcaucasia through Iran.’ These attacks were to be launched in November 1941.

This had been an over-optimistic forecast, as the report on
Fall Barbarossa
’s progress amply demonstrated. The way to the Caucasus was not yet clear, the forces necessary for operations against the still-uncommitted Turks were not yet available. The war against the British would have to be continued, for the time being, by the Axis forces in North Africa.

Here, however, there were problems. Raeder, with Weichold’s report in his briefcase, proceeded to outline them. The situation as described (by Weichold) is untenable. Italian naval and air forces are incapable of providing adequate cover for the convoys . . . The Naval Staff considers radical changes and immediate measures to remedy the situation imperative.’

Having thus struck a necessary note of urgency, the Grand- Admiral treated the assembled company to an abridged history of the German presence in the Mediterranean. He recalled how he and the Reich Marshal - a nice diplomatic touch - had urged a greater concentration of strength in this theatre during the previous autumn, but had been unable to convince the Führer that such a course was the correct one. Hitler had wished, ‘quite rightly’, to deal with the Eastern threat first. Once the Russian colossus had been struck down, then, and only then, would the time have arrived for a decisive reckoning with the obstinate British. This he had told Raeder in May. Now, the Grand- Admiral argued, that time had arrived.

Raeder had done his homework. His bulging briefcase also contained a copy of the report submitted by General von Thoma in October 1940 on the situation in North Africa. Four panzer divisions, von Thoma had concluded, would suffice for a successful invasion of Egypt. General Rommel already had two at his disposal; he should be given a further panzer corps from the Eastern front. With such a force, Raeder submitted, Rommel could drive the British out of the Middle East.

Of course, the transportation and supply of these new units could not be undertaken in those prevailing circumstances described by Weichold. The island fortress of Malta must first be neutralised by air assault and then captured. This, he added, with a deferential glance in Goering’s direction, was a task for the Luftwaffe. Here was a chance for its bomber squadrons and elite airborne units to write another page in their glorious history. The Navy, alas, could offer little assistance, but those U-boats which could be spared would be sent to the Mediterranean and the experience gained during the planning of ‘Sea Lion’ would be made available to those planning the invasion of Malta.

Raeder concluded with a review of the glittering prizes such a strategy would win. Malta’s fall would lead to the capture of Egypt; the oil of the Middle East would then be there for the taking. The Mediterranean would become an Axis lake; the southern flank of the Reich would be forever secure. India would be within reach, particularly if satisfactory arrangements could be made with the Japanese at some future date. Britain, deprived of oil and empire, would be finished. America, without British help, would be unable to bring its resources to bear across the wide Atlantic. The war would be won.

None of this was particularly new, or welcome, to the OKH leaders, whose mental boundaries rarely stretched beyond the confines of continental Europe. All through 1941 they had been receiving complaints from Rommel about his supply problems, but as Halder in particular both distrusted these extra-continental activities and lacked confidence in the reckless Rommel the complaints had been happily shoved into the business-continually-pending tray. Now that the campaign in the East was all but over Halder was reluctant to admit that the pending was over, and that this ‘general gone stark mad’ should be given new forces to ‘fritter away’.

Still, the Chief of the General Staff had no positive alternatives to offer, and it was obviously inadvisable, as Raeder ironically interjected, to ‘fritter away’ the months of grace granted the Wehrmacht by its success in Russia. Halder retreated into negatives, acidly noting that he doubted the capability of the Luftwaffe and the Italians to wrest Malta from the British.

This was a psychological error in the grand General Staff tradition. Goering might not have risen to the bait of Raeder’s flattery, but the Army’s scarcely concealed derision was another matter. The Reich Marshal noted OKH’s lack of ideas, quoted Führer Directive 32, and agreed with Raeder that he had all along been a strong supporter of a greater German commitment in the Mediterranean area. Malta would present no problem to the Luftwaffe, even with Italian assistance.

Jodl, who seems during these months to have transferred his dog-like devotion from the Führer to his deputy, concurred. Brauchitsch, as usual, went with the majority. The basic outline of Raeder’s plan was accepted by the Conference.

Concrete decisions were then taken. The Navy would deploy an extra twenty U-boats in the Mediterranean; the Luftwaffe would bring Air Fleet 2 from Russia to support Air Fleet 10 in Sicily, Crete and Cyrenaica. OKH agreed to transfer a panzer corps from the Eastern front to North Africa, beginning at the end of November. General Student, who had commanded the airborne invasion of Crete, would travel with Goering and Jodl to Rome, to discuss the assault on Malta with Mussolini and his Chief of Staff General Cavallero. Strenuous efforts would be made to ensure that the island received no fresh supplies, and as the success or failure of British attempts to run in convoys from the east would largely depend on who held the Cyrenaican airfields, Rommel was to be given explicit instructions to take no offensive action that might result in their capture by the enemy. General Paulus was detailed to carry these instructions to Rommel in person.

The conference broke up, the leaders went for a walk around the lily-ponds. Raeder, aided and abetted by his habitual adversary Goering, had carried the day. The OKH leaders, though somewhat disgruntled, could find comfort in the fact that no one had challenged their handling of the war in the East. Only Admiral Doenitz, C-in-C U-boats, who was not invited to the meeting, found nothing to applaud in the Karinhall decisions. He considered the decision to move U-boats from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean the height of folly. And time would prove him right.

II

As the German service chiefs sat in comfort beneath Goering’s chandeliers, Erwin Rommel was gazing down from his Storch reconnaissance plane at the vast expanse of the Western Desert. He had been in Africa for nine months, and in that time he had first pushed the British back four hundred miles to the Egyptian frontier and then repulsed Wavell’s attempt to regain the lost ground by means of Operation ‘Battleaxe’. The only blemish on this excellent record was the continuing presence of a British garrison in Tobruk, some seventy miles behind the front line.

Since June there had been a lull in the desert fighting, as each side sought to build up its strength; the British in order to succeed where ‘Battleaxe’ had failed, Rommel in order to capture Tobruk. In the meantime the Germans were laying a formidable minefield on the Sollum-Sidi Omar front line.

Rommel, though, had other preoccupations during this period. August seems to have been principally taken up with a campaign against the insect pests frequenting his headquarters. First mosquitoes, and then flies, took to pestering the panzer group commander. Fleas preferred the other officers, but the bed bugs were less particular. ‘My bed is now standing in tins filled with water,’ he wrote to his wife Lucie on 27 August. Three days later a more permanent solution was discovered, I’ve been free of the bugs ever since I had petrol poured over my iron bedstead, and had it set aflame. They must have been in the framework,’ he triumphantly reported.