The Second World War (65 page)

Hube’s 16th Panzer Division waved and cheered the aircraft on their return, and the Stukas sounded their sirens in reply. By late afternoon, Strachwitz’s panzer battalion was approaching the Volga just north of the city. But then it came under fire from anti-aircraft batteries with their 37mm guns depressed in the ground role. The young women operating the guns, many of them students, fought on until they were all killed. Panzer commanders were shaken and uneasy when they discovered the sex of the defenders.

The Germans had gone all the way from the Don to the Volga in a single day, and it seemed a great achievement. They had now reached what they considered to be the border of Asia as well as Hitler’s ultimate objective, the Arkhangelsk–Astrakhan line. Many felt that the war was as good as
over. They took triumphant photographs of each other posing on their tanks, and also snaps of the smoke clouds rising from Stalingrad. A Luftwaffe fighter ace and his wingman, spotting the panzers below, performed victory rolls.

One commander, standing on the top of his panzer on the high western bank of the Volga, gazed across the river through his binoculars. ‘
We looked at the immense steppe
towards Asia, and I was overwhelmed,’ he remembered. ‘But then I could not think about it for very long because we had to make an attack against another anti-aircraft battery that had started firing at us.’ The bravery of the young women became a legend. ‘This was the first page of the Stalingrad defence,’ wrote Vasily Grossman, who heard first-hand accounts very soon afterwards.

In that summer of crisis for the Grand Alliance, Churchill decided that he had to visit Stalin to explain, face to face, the reasons for the suspension of convoys and why a Second Front was impossible for the moment. He was also enduring strong criticism at home, after the fall of Tobruk and heavy losses in the Battle of the Atlantic. Churchill was not therefore in the best frame of mind for a series of gruelling meetings with Stalin.

He flew from Cairo via Teheran to Moscow, where he arrived on 12 August. Stalin’s interpreter watched Churchill inspecting the guard of honour with his chin thrust forward, looking ‘
intently at each soldier
as if gauging the mettle of the Soviet fighting men’. It was the first time that this staunch anti-Bolshevik had set foot on their territory. He was accompanied by Averell Harriman, who represented Roosevelt at the talks, but had to get into the first car alone with the dour Molotov.

Churchill and Harriman were taken that evening to Stalin’s gloomy and austere apartment in the Kremlin. The British prime minister asked about the military situation. This played into Stalin’s hands. He accurately described the very dangerous developments in the south just before Churchill had to explain why the Second Front was to be postponed.

Churchill began by describing the great build-up of forces in the United Kingdom. He then spoke of the strategic bombing offensive with the massive raids on Lübeck and Cologne, knowing that they would appeal to Stalin’s thirst for revenge. Churchill tried to convince him that German forces in France were too strong to launch a cross-Channel operation before 1943. Stalin protested vigorously, and ‘disputed the figures Churchill had cited concerning the size of the German forces in Western Europe’. He said contemptuously that ‘someone who was unwilling to take risks could never win a war’.

Hoping to deflect Stalin’s anger, Churchill then outlined plans for landings in North Africa, which he was persuading Roosevelt to accept
over General Marshall’s head. He seized a piece of paper and drew a crocodile, to illustrate his idea that they would be attacking the ‘soft underbelly’ of the beast. But Stalin was not satisfied with his substitute for a Second Front. And when Churchill mentioned the possibility of an invasion of the Balkans, Stalin immediately sensed that his real purpose was to preempt their occupation by the Red Army. Yet the meeting ended in a better atmosphere than Churchill had expected.

But the next day the Soviet dictator’s bitter condemnation of Allied perfidy, and Molotov’s bullet-headed repetition of all his accusations, angered and depressed Churchill so much that Harriman had to spend several hours trying to restore his spirits. On 14 August, Churchill wanted to break off talks and avoid the banquet prepared in his honour that evening. The British ambassador, Sir Archibald Clark Kerr, a genial eccentric, just managed to change his mind. But Churchill insisted on attending dressed in his ‘siren suit’, an overall which Clark Kerr compared to a child’s rompers, when all the Soviet functionaries and generals would be wearing their dress uniforms.

The dinner in the magnificent Catherine Hall lasted until after midnight, with nineteen courses and constant toasts, mostly initiated by Stalin who came round to clink glasses. ‘
He has got an unpleasantly
cold, crafty, dead face,’ General Sir Alan Brooke wrote in his diary, ‘and whenever I look at him I can imagine him sending off people to their doom without ever turning a hair. On the other hand there is no doubt that he has a quick brain and a real grasp of the essentials of war.’

Clark Kerr had to use all his charm and persuasion again the next day. Churchill was infuriated by Soviet accusations of British cowardice. But after the meeting was over Stalin invited him back to his office for supper. The atmosphere soon changed, loosened by alcohol and a visit by Stalin’s daughter Svetlana. Stalin became friendly, with jokes on both sides, and Churchill suddenly viewed the Soviet tyrant in a completely new light. He convinced himself that he had turned Stalin into a friend, and left Moscow the next day full of glee at his success. Churchill, for whom emotions were often more real than facts, had failed to see that Stalin was even more successful than Roosevelt when it came to manipulating people.

At home there was more bad news awaiting him. On 19 August, Combined Operations commanded by Lord Louis Mountbatten had mounted a major raid on Dieppe on the northern coast of France. Operation Jubilee was launched with just over 6,000 men, most of whom were Can adian troops. They also included some Free French forces and a US Ranger battalion. In the early hours, the eastern assault force ran into a German convoy, and this gave the Wehrmacht warning of the attack. A destroyer and thirty-three landing craft were sunk. All the tanks put ashore were
destroyed, and the Canadian infantry were trapped on the beach by the heavy defences and barbed wire.

The raid, which cost over 4,000 casualties, produced harsh, even if obvious, lessons. It convinced the Allies that defended ports could not be taken from the sea, that landings had to be preceded by massive aerial and naval bombardment and, most important of all, that an invasion of northern France should not be undertaken before 1944. Once again, Stalin would be furious about the postponement of what he regarded as the only valid Second Front. Yet the disaster did create one major advantage. Hitler believed that what he would soon call his Atlantic Wall was virtually impregnable, and that his forces in France could easily defeat an invasion.

In the Soviet Union, news of the Dieppe raid prompted hopes that it was the start of the Second Front, but optimism soon turned to bitter disappointment. The operation was seen as just a weak sop to foreign opinion. The Second Front became a double-edged weapon in Soviet propaganda, both a symbol of hope for the population at large and a way to shame the British and Americans. Red Army soldiers were more cynical. When opening tins of American Lend–Lease Spam (which they called
tushonka
–or stewed meat), they would say ‘
Let’s open the Second Front
.’

Unlike their comrades in southern Russia, the morale of German forces around Leningrad was not high. Their failure to strangle ‘the first city of Bolshevism’ rankled deeply. The harshness of the winter had been replaced by the discomforts of the marshes and swarms of mosquitoes.

The Soviet defenders, on the other hand, gave thanks that they had survived the famine of that terrible winter, which had killed nearly a million people. Major efforts were made to clean up the city and remove the accumulated filth which threatened an epidemic. The population was put to work planting cabbages on every spare plot of ground, including the whole of the Champ de Mars. The Leningrad Soviet claimed that 12,500 hectares of vegetables had been planted in and around the city in the spring of 1942. To prevent another famine next winter, the evacuation of civilians restarted across Lake Ladoga, and over half a million left the city, to be replaced by troop reinforcements. Other preparations included a stockpiling of supplies and the laying of a fuel pipeline across the bottom of Lake Ladoga.

On 9 August, in a great coup to build morale,
Shostakovich’s
Seventh (Leningrad) Symphony was played in the city and broadcast around the world. German artillery attempted to disrupt the performance, but Soviet counter-battery fire reduced it to insignificance, to the joy of Leningraders. They also took great comfort from the fact that the relentless Luftwaffe attacks on shipping across Lake Ladoga were
weakened by the destruction of 160 German aircraft.

Soviet intelligence knew that the Germans under Generalfeldmarschall von Manstein, with his newly arrived Eleventh Army, were about to launch a major assault. In an operation codenamed Nordlicht, Hitler ordered Manstein to smash the city and link up with the Finns. To disrupt the attack, Stalin ordered the Leningrad and Volkhov Fronts to make another attempt to crush the German salient, which reached up to the southern shore of Lake Ladoga, and thus break the siege. This was known as the Sinyavino Offensive, which began on 19 August.

A young Red Army soldier described his first dawn attack in a letter home. ‘
The air filled with
a humming, thundering, howling of shrapnel, the ground was shaking, smoke enveloped the battlefield. We crawled on without stopping. Forward, forward only, otherwise death. A piece of shrapnel cut my lip, blood covered my face, endless pieces of shrapnel were falling from above like hail, burning one’s hands. Our machine gun was already working, fire increased, one couldn’t raise one’s head. A shallow trench was our protection from the shrapnel. We tried to go forward as fast as we could in order to leave the zone of fire. Aircraft started droning above. Bombing began. I can’t remember for how long this hell went on. A word went round that German armoured vehicles had appeared. We panicked but the vehicles turned out to be our own tanks ironing the barbed-wire fences. We soon reached this wire and were met with a horrendous fire. It was there that I saw a killed soldier for the first time, he was lying headless along the ditch blocking our way. Only then did it occur to me that I could also get killed. We jumped over the dead man.

‘We left the inferno of fire behind. In front of us was an anti-tank trench. From the side somewhere, sub-machine guns were clattering. We ran, bent double. There were two or three explosions. “Hurry up, they’re throwing grenades,” Puchkov shouted. We ran even faster. Two dead machine-gunners were pressing at a log as if trying to crawl over it, they were blocking our way. We left the trench, ran across a flat space and jumped into [another trench]. A dead German officer was lying on the bottom, his face in the mud. It was empty and quiet here. I’ll never forget this long earthen corridor with one wall lit by the sun. Bullets were whistling everywhere. We didn’t know where the Germans were, they were both behind us and in front of us. One of the machine-gunners jumped up to see but was immediately killed by a sniper. He sat down as if lost in thought, his head bent to his chest.’

Soviet losses were heavy–114,000 casualties including 40,000 dead–but to Hitler’s fury this pre-emptive strike completely wrecked Manstein’s operation.

Still obsessed with the oilfields of the Caucasus and with the city which bore Stalin’s name, Hitler felt sure ‘
that the Russians were finished
’, even though far fewer prisoners had been taken than expected. Now established in his new Führer headquarters, codenamed Werwolf, outside Vinnitsa in Ukraine, he was tormented by flies and mosquitoes and became increasingly restless in the oppressive heat. Hitler began to grasp at symbols of victory, rather than military reality. On 12 August he had told the
Italian ambassador
that the Battle of Stalingrad would decide the outcome of the war. On 21 August, German mountain troops scaled the 5,600-metre-high Mount Elbrus, the greatest mountain in the Caucasus, to raise the ‘Reich’s battle flag’. Three days later the news that Paulus’s panzer vanguard had reached the Volga raised the Führer’s spirits still further. But then on 31 August he was enraged when Generalfeldmarschall List, the commander-in-chief of Army Group A in the Caucasus, told him that his troops were at the end of their strength and facing much greater resistance than expected. Disbelieving List, he ordered an attack on Astrakhan and the seizure of the western coastline of the Caspian Sea. He simply refused to accept that his forces were inadequate for the task and short of fuel, ammunition and supplies.

German soldiers in Stalingrad, on the other hand, remained highly optimistic. They thought that the city would soon be in their hands, and they could then return home. ‘
Anyway, we will not be taking
up winter quarters in Russia,’ wrote a soldier in the 389th Infantry Division, ‘as our division has rejected any winter clothing. We should, God willing, see you dear ones again this year.’ ‘
Hopefully the operation
will not last too long,’ a motorcycle reconnaissance Gefreiter with the 16th Panzer Division remarked casually after commenting that the Soviet women soldiers they had captured were so ugly that you could hardly look at their faces.

Sixth Army headquarters became increasingly anxious about their long supply lines which stretched back over the River Don for hundreds of kilometres. The nights, Richthofen noted in his diary, had suddenly become ‘
very cool
’. Winter was not far off. Staff officers were also concerned about the weak Romanian, Italian and Hungarian armies guarding the right bank of the Don to their rear. Red Army counter-attacks had pushed them back in a number of places to seize bridgeheads across the river which would play a vital part later.