The World at War (26 page)

CAPTAIN EYTON-JONES

About the tenth day we saw an aeroplane – still didn't see us though we had our sails up. On the morning of the 13th somebody shook me and said, 'Hey, Captain, we see lights,' and I looked round and I saw some green lights which looked to me like Brighton Pier. So I said, 'We'll burn a flare.' A few minutes later they burnt another flare and after a bit I saw the green lights getting closer, more visible. After a bit I saw a red light above the green and then it dawned on me that it was a hospital ship. They got alongside and we boarded that ship, which we found out afterwards was the
Oxfordshire.
They put a rope ladder over and the crew tumbled up; they nearly went mad with excitement. Eventually I was left in the boat with only the lady passenger. I said, 'Would you send something down that we can send the lady up with,' because the lady was very weak and so they put a sling down and two men came down and we hauled the lady on board. Then they sent a sling down hooked on to the boat and hauled it on board. After thirteen days when you couldn't lay out or even sleep decently I thought it the most wonderful thing to lie down in the scupper under the bulwark. Then all of a sudden, 'Hey, there's another bastard down here,' and two students picked me up and asked, 'What are you doing down there?' They hustled me along to the canteen down into the hospital bay and they put all our men, fifty-six at that time, into bunks and they were all whistling and shouting, almost hysteria, and then some of the sisters from the hospital came round with cans of tea, buns, it was the most wonderful drink we'd ever had, because we were practically dehydrated. In the thirteen days you didn't perspire, nature completely stopped, and the average loss of a man per weight per day was about two and a half pounds. How long one could have survived I don't know, but we'd sailed five hundred and thirty miles in those horrible conditions and survived within a hundred miles of Sierra Leone, and all I had to go by was the pole-star, using my finger to think how high it was above the horizon.

CAPTAIN ROBERTS

When I first went to Liverpool I got hold of a number of
escort commanders and I asked them what they did when a U-boat attacked by night. The answer in most cases was, 'Well, what can you do? It's a very difficult thing and we can't see them.' The radar of course in those days was very elementary and we had very few sets, but in fact there was one escort commander who had the idea, which is still absolutely relevant, that when an attack of which there is no warning takes place all the escorts should do the same sort of thing on a planned schedule at exactly the same time, so that it had the maximum effect over the broad ocean around that convoy. This of course was then Commander
Frederick 'Johnny' Walker in the little corvette
Stork.
His escorts, on the word 'Buttercup', went away from the convoy, thinking that the U-boat would then be chasing away from the convoy having fired a torpedo, but I thought it cannot be they are outside, they must have been among them. I talked to C-in-C Western Approaches Admiral Noble about this and he agreed. I said I will set up an
operation which will be based on the fact that when they fire they are inside the convoy. This was called 'Raspberry' and for some time it was quite successful.

LIEUTENANT COMMANDER KRETSCHMER

When I was
depth-charged I had to go to the surface because water was coming into the boat and everything was over. I couldn't move and was lying in a large patch of oil listing to starboard and being fired at by two destroyers from the port side – without success, I must say – so there were waterspouts all around the boat. Their forty-millimetre pom-poms had fuses against aircraft so they didn't harm the boat very much, only the paint was off, but still the aft part of my boat went under and that part of my crew which was on the aft deck was thrown into the water and I couldn't do anything about them. I wanted to give them every chance to be picked up and go into captivity and this I could only do by asking one of the destroyers, which was my friend Donald MacIntyre, about four o'clock in the morning, my Morse lamp sending the signal that part of my crew was floating in the water, and I asked him to pick them up. He drew alongside these people and lighted his searchlights so I could see through my glasses their heads and how they went aboard.

CHAPTER 10
BARBAROSSA

Operation Barbarossa started with the invasion of the USSR on 22 June 1941 and ended on 5 December with the German Army on the defensive in the face of determined Soviet counter-attacks. Stalin had ignored all indications that an attack was imminent, including strongly worded warnings from the British. Some Russian historians suggest that Hitler correctly anticipated an imminent Soviet attack to seize the vital oilfields of Romania and that some, at least, of the early catastrophes that overtook the Red Army were the result of being concentrated forward for attack rather deployed in depth for defence. The Germans, however, had grossly underestimated the ruthless adaptability of a Soviet regime they had expected to collapse like a rotten building once the door was kicked in, as well as the mobilisation potential of the Red Army and the extent to which patriotic fervour against the invader would submerge the hatreds and divisions within the Soviet Empire. The basic premise of Barbarossa was that German forces would have won complete operational freedom within five to six weeks following the collapse of the Red Army. When this did not occur Hitler lost his nerve and first weakened the central thrust towards Moscow in order to pursue economic-strategic goals in the south, then halted an advance on Leningrad in the north that might have succeeded in order to bolster the central front. The Soviets, meanwhile, had learned from Richard Sorge in Tokyo (see Chapter 2) that the Japanese would not attack and brought west the Siberian Army, well-trained and far better equipped for winter fighting than the Germans. The pattern for the rest of a war that was characterised by almost unimaginable cruelty and sacrifice on both sides was set by the staggering fact that by the end of 1941, despite having lost four and a half million soldiers (equivalent to the entire German Army) and half a
million square miles of territory with seventy-five million inhabitants, the Soviets took the offensive and sustained it through the winter.

MAJOR GENERAL WALTHER WARLIMONT

Deputy Chief of Wehrmacht Operations

On 29 July 1940 I first heard about Hitler's intentions to go to war with Russia, after the French campaign and the triumphant victory. We were of a good mood since we believed that Chief of Operations Staff General Alfred Jodl would come and announce promotions for his Staff Officers too. But this assumption soon vanished when he arrived with a very closed face and ordered that the doors were shut up and sentries had to be before these doors. And when we were sitting all together, all the live officers including him, without any introduction he started to tell that Hitler had resolved to go to war with Russia. Was a great shock for all of us and we at once began to raise our objections against this, asking him how it would be possible to protect the German life against the British Air Force when the bulk of German forces would have been shifted to the east, and what at all should be the aim of this new campaign after a treaty had been closed just one year ago, and many more questions. He answered to all of them but none of his answers could persuade us that Hitler's intention was to the well-being of the German Reich. Finally he said, 'We have to take in mind that in the short or long term it will be necessary to go to war with Russia in order to crush Bolshevism. At most it is better to begin the war as soon as possible because now we are at the height of our military strength and it will not be necessary to cause the German people to another war within a short period.'

DR GRIGORI TOKATY

Lecturer at the Zhukovsky Academy of the Soviet Air Force
First of all we were not ready to start a war, we were weak. Stalin wanted to gain time and at the same time to direct Germany against England. The other aspect was that while doing this he displayed his complete mistrust to the British – the British warned us, that must mean that they try to put us against Germany – that's the main reason he neglected the warnings. I belonged to a leading military academy and naturally the process of war in the west used to be discussed daily. We were not fools; we knew what was going on. We anticipated that Germany will turn against us sooner or later. As far as the general public was concerned the Soviet Telegraph Agency Press made two denials that German aircraft tried to fly over our territories, and these incidents created a mood in Moscow. One must remember that Russians are Russians, Moscow is Moscow; you have rumours more than anywhere else, and rumours are usually inclined to exaggerate, so there were really bunches of population that thought immediately tomorrow we'll be attacked. People kept this under the surface: we did have a centralised propaganda machine which did not allow any other public statement, and central propaganda said there is no danger, so everybody kept quiet. But there was great unease.

SIR JOHN RUSSELL

British Minister in Moscow

I think the people in Russia always had a fear that the Germans might be going to attack them. There's a very deep-lying mistrust in the Russian people for the Germans, going way back through history. But the government, the Soviet government, was so determined not to admit the possibility that any speculation about it was suppressed.

HANS KEHRL

Nazi industrialist

We had the greatest trade agreement we had ever had and the Russians delivered promptly and from an economic point of view everything seemed to be in order. I personally made negotiation with them for putting up a synthetic-fibre mill in Russia and the treaty was signed by the 15th of June 1941 and the first ten million marks in gold were to be shipped on the 1st of July 1941.

MAJOR GENERAL WARLIMONT

I was convinced before the war started that it was a great disaster, a great wrong. Even after the campaign in Poland my conviction didn't change because on 3rd September, the third day of our going to war, the Western Powers had declared war on Germany. After the campaign in France in 1940 my conviction became uncertain, but when I heard one or two months after the armistice with France that now Hitler was to go with Russia, the old conviction came up again and it was at this moment that I changed the place of living for my family, moved them from Berlin to the place where are today.

CAPTAIN EKKEHARD MAURER

German Army

The morning of 22nd June 1941 my battalion commander and myself, I was his Adjutant, at the time were in our foxholes very close to the barbed wire and just before the artillery barrage began he whispered over to me something like, 'Don't ever forget 22nd June 1941 at three-fifteen in the morning.' Then he paused for a moment and said, 'Well, I don't think I have to tell you not to forget because you won't forget it anyway. At this very moment the worst decline, the worst disaster of German history in many centuries, is going to begin.'

DR TOKATY

I think the right mood was deep depression, deep disillusionment, so many people simply cried. Through the 1930s we were told that the Red Army will never fight on its own territory and the very
first shot will be made on enemy territory, then suddenly on the 22nd we were told the enemy smashed right down our forces. People couldn't understand how this could happen. Within a few hours I'd been talking to a person who worked inside the Kremlin and he told me that inside the Kremlin they were really frightened because that we were not prepared, that our armed forces had been wiped out and there was nothing to stop the Germany Army. About one month after the war started the government issued a secret order, demanded to begin evacuation of the main strategic centres at once at any cost. It gave a clear impression that the government did not believe that they will be able to stop the enemy, so we have panic and the frightful feeling that we will be defeated very deeply rooted in the centre. We anticipated that the Germans would arrive here and we will be unable to defend Moscow.

SIR JOHN RUSSELL

From June 1941 until October 1941, when the government evacuated Moscow and went down to
Kuibyshev, it was a funny sort of atmosphere because the shock of realising that the Germans had betrayed them was sinking in and of course the Soviet government had to do a great adjustment and we, from being a hostile or semi-hostile foreign capitalist power, suddenly became friends, and the second 'Fascist–Imperialist' war suddenly became the 'Struggle for the Defence of the Motherland', and there was a great deal of adjustment, psychologically, to be done all round.

AMBASSADOR W AVERELL HARRIMAN

President Roosevelt's Special Envoy to Europe

After the meeting when the Atlantic Charter was issued Roosevelt and Churchill agreed that there should be a joint mission. Churchill appointed Beaverbrook and Roosevelt myself, and we went together to Moscow and we both agreed to give a certain amount of aid to the Soviet Union. A great deal of it came out of Britain because what we might have given to Britain we diverted
to Russia, so it was an extremely generous act on the part of the British government – but it was important for Britain to keep Russia in the war. There we saw Stalin, we had three long talks with him and then the great banquet happened. At first Stalin was very rough with us. He said, 'The paucity of your offers proves that you want us to be defeated in the war.' But after he'd finally gotten everything he could out of us he said, 'This is very generous,' he was very complimentary about what we were trying to do and he gave us this big banquet. That was in early October 1941; the Germans were very close to Moscow but I gained the impression that Stalin was going to hold out – he was a great war leader in spite of the horror of his tyranny. He had tremendous spirit and gave confidence to the Russian people.