All Hell Let Loose (51 page)

That evening of the 12th, the Luftwaffe and Italian air force came again. A hundred bombers and torpedo-carriers launched attacks from every direction and altitude, designed to swamp the defence. Ships’ AA crews fired almost continuously; empty cases massed in heaps beside gun mountings; the brilliant sky became pockmarked with thousands of black puffs; the noise of screaming aircraft engines competed with the stammer and thud of every calibre of armament. The destroyer
Foresight
was sunk, the carrier
Indomitable
badly damaged by three armour-piercing bombs. Still short of the Sicilian Narrows, Syfret withdrew his capital ships westwards, leaving a close escort headed by six cruisers, commanded by Rear-Admiral Harold Burrough, to fight the convoy through to Malta.

Pedestal
’s agony now began in earnest. Within an hour of Syfret parting company, the Italian submarine
Axum
achieved a brilliant triple success: in a single attack, it sank Burrough’s flagship
Nigeria
and the anti-aircraft cruiser
Cairo
, also hitting the tanker
Ohio
. These losses wiped out the convoy’s Fighter Direction capability, for the two cruisers carried the only radio sets capable of voice communication with Malta-based planes. Then, as the light began to fade, with British ships losing formation and huddling into a scrum, the Luftwaffe came again. Ju88s sank the merchant ships
Empire Hope
and
Clan Ferguson
and crippled
Brisbane Star
. Soon afterwards, a submarine torpedo damaged the cruiser
Kenya
. In darkness in the early hours of 13 August, German and Italian motor torpedo boats launched a series of attacks which persisted for hours. The defence was feeble, because Burrough decided that to illuminate the battlefield with starshell would help the enemy more than his own gunners. The cruiser
Manchester
was fatally damaged, four more merchantmen sunk and a fifth hit. The only compensation for suffering such losses in the Mediterranean’s warm summer waters was that far more survivors could be rescued than in the Arctic or even the Atlantic.

At daybreak the Luftwaffe returned, sinking another merchantman.
Ohio
suffered further damage, but limped onward until renewed attacks later in the morning stopped her engines. Two more merchantmen were crippled, and had to be left behind with a destroyer escort. At 1600, in accordance with orders Burrough’s three surviving cruisers turned back for Gibraltar. Three merchantmen –
Port Chalmers
,
Melbourne Star
and
Rochester Castle
, the last with its deck almost awash – struggled to cover the final miles into Malta shepherded by small craft from the island. At 1800 on 13 August, as cheering crowds lined the old fortifications, they steamed into Grand Harbour. The Germans set about demolishing the stragglers, sinking the damaged
Dorset
and hitting
Ohio
yet again. By a miracle attributable partly to its rugged American construction, the tanker maintained way, towed by a destroyer and two minesweepers. On the morning of 15 August, the Catholic Feast of the Assumption of Our Lady,
Ohio
reached safety and began to offload. Her master, Captain Dudley Mason, was awarded the George Cross;
Brisbane Star
also completed the passage.

The
Pedestal
convoy delivered 32,000 tons of stores, 12,000 tons of coal and two months’ supply of oil; five merchantmen survived out of fourteen. The navy’s aggressive posturing dissuaded the Italian fleet from joining the battle. Mussolini’s battleships were anyway immobilised by lack of fuel, and RAF aircraft dropped flares over five cruisers which put to sea, convincing them that they faced unacceptable risk if they persevered. Lieutenant Alastair Mars, commanding the submarine
Unbroken
, extracted some revenge for British warship losses by torpedoing the
Bolzano
and
Muzio Attendolo
. But after the
Pedestal
battle was over, Commander George Blundell of the battleship
Nelson
looked back in deep gloom: ‘Most of us felt depressed by the party. Operation “M” for Murder we call it. “The navy thrives on impossibilities,” said the BBC. Yes, but how long can it go on doing so?’

The three-day drama of
Pedestal
was almost matched by the experiences and sufferings of other Malta convoys and their escorts. Not all those who sailed distinguished themselves: there were shameful cases of merchant ship crews abandoning their ships unnecessarily, of seamen scuttling for lifeboats while their vessels were still steaming. A disgusted Captain Brown of
Deucalion
, some of whose men quit their posts prematurely, said later, ‘I could never have imagined that any Britishers could have shown up in such poor colours.’ But the overall story is one of a fine endeavour. By the winter of 1942, the worst of Britain’s Mediterranean travails were over. Ultra decrypts enabled Allied warships and aircraft to wreak increasing havoc on Rommel’s supply line: Axis shipping losses in the Mediterranean rose from 15,386 tons in July to 33,791 in September, 56,303 in October, and 170,000 in the two months that followed. In November, Montgomery was victorious at El Alamein and the Americans landed in North Africa. The siege of Malta was relieved soon afterwards.

Holding the island since 1940 had cost the Royal Navy one battleship, two carriers, four cruisers, one minelayer, twenty destroyers and minesweepers and forty submarines. The RAF lost 547 aircraft in the air and another 160 destroyed on the ground. Ashore, Malta’s defence forfeited the lives of 1,600 civilians, seven hundred soldiers and nine hundred RAF personnel. Afloat, 2,200 warship crewmen, 1,700 submariners and two hundred merchant seamen perished. Thereafter, in 1943 and 1944, Allied dominance of the Mediterranean remained contested and imposed continuing losses, but strategic advantage tilted relentlessly away from the Axis. The Royal Navy’s critical responsibilities in the last two years of the war became those of escorting Allied armies to new battlefields, organising and protecting a succession of massive amphibious landings. If the threat from Germany’s submarines and aircraft persisted to the end – British warships suffered severely in the ill-fated autumn 1943 Dodecanese campaign – the Royal Navy had won the decisive battles of the European war at sea; not in actions between fleets, but by sustaining Britain’s global rights of passage in the face of air power and U-boats. In fulfilment of this responsibility, most of its captains and crews upheld the service’s highest traditions.

A phenomenon created by the strong emotions and fantastical experiences war brought upon Russia was a resurgence of religious worship, which Stalin did not seek to suppress. At Easter 1942, Moscow’s overnight curfew was lifted, and Dr Sof’ya Skopina attended the great Orthodox cathedral in Moscow’s Elokhovskaya Square. ‘We arrived at 8 p.m. There was a small queue to bless the
kulich
[Easter bread] and eggs. An hour later there was such a crowd that one couldn’t turn and no air to breathe. Amid the throng, women screamed, “They’ve crushed me! I’m going to faint!” The atmosphere grew so humid that moisture ran down the columns. Candles passed from one person to another sent smoke curling into spirals. There were many young people (I don’t know why they had come there). Some mums came with their kids, and a lot of military men. There were people even sitting on the cross with the picture of Christ. It was like a football crowd. At 11 p.m. a priest appeared and announced that “Our friends the British are about to arrive.” We could no longer breathe and went outside, where we saw several cars drive up. It was the British [Embassy delegation].’

Army nurse Evdokiya Kalinichenko wrote in May: ‘We’re having a little break, for the first time this month. We’ve made the wounded men comfortable, dried ourselves out, had a wash in a real
banya
[bath house]. We’ve been on so many roads. All kinds of roads … Mostly country roads, often mud-bound, rutted and degraded by rain, holes, bumps. One’s heart breaks when the vehicle jolts: most of the passengers are gravely wounded, and for some such jolting can be fatal. Now, however, it is so quiet around us that it is hard to believe there is war anywhere on the planet. We wander about in the woods and gather bunches of flowers. The sun shines, the sky is blue. We keep peering upwards by force of habit, but see only passing clouds. We think the Germans have at last been stopped and won’t try to go any further – they’ve learnt their lesson on the approaches to Moscow.’

Kalinichenko hoped too much, too soon. Though the Russians had mass, and could replace their horrific 1941 losses, they still lacked the combat power and logistical support to sustain deep penetrations. The New Year offensive by five
fronts
or army groups, personally directed by Stalin, petered out even before the spring thaw arrested movement. The Germans held their line south of Leningrad, maintaining the threat to the city; they moved to cut off the Volkhov front and destroy Second Shock Army. Its commander Lt. Gen. Andrey Vlasov was captured, and subsequently raised a Cossack ‘Russian Liberation Army’ for the Nazis.

In the Crimea, the Germans blocked the western exit from the Kerch peninsula, trapping a vast Russian army, then counter-attacked. Between 8 and 19 May, Manstein achieved another triumph, shattering the Crimean
front
and taking 170,000 prisoners. Seven thousand survivors took refuge in limestone caves until the Germans blasted the entrances with explosives and pumped in gas. Lt. Gen. Gunther Blumentritt, who became a Wehrmacht army commander, wrote of the Russians rather as he might have described wild beasts he could not respect, but grudgingly feared:

Manstein favoured bypassing the fortress of Sevastopol, but Hitler insisted on its capture. The 1,350-ton 800mm giant siege gun ‘Big Dora’ was brought forward, utilising enormous labour because it could move only on twin railway tracks. Franz Halder dismissed Dora, an example of wasteful Nazi industrial effort on prestige weapons, as ‘an extremely impressive piece of engineering, but quite useless’. Its seven-ton shells and 4,000-strong crew contributed much less to the capture of the city than the dogged efforts of Manstein’s infantry. The defenders were also pounded from the air. A Luftwaffe dive-bomber pilot, Captain Herbert Paber, wrote: ‘One explosion next to another, like poisonous mushrooms, shot up between the rocky hideouts. The whole peninsula was fire and smoke – yet in the end thousands of prisoners were taken even there. One can only stand amazed at such resilience … That is how they defended Sevastopol all along the line … The whole country had to be literally ploughed over with bombs before they yielded a short distance.’

When the city finally fell on 4 July after a siege of 250 days, the NKVD’s units were among those which escaped, after massacring all their prisoners. The dreadful losses in the Crimea were attributed to the incompetence of the Soviet commander, Stalin’s favourite Lev Mekhlis, who rejected pleas for units to be allowed to dig in as a symptom of defeatism. The only redeeming feature of the disaster was that Mekhlis was sacked. Sevastopol cost the Germans 25,000 dead and 50,000 tons of artillery ammunition. The attackers were again impressed by the stubbornness of the resistance.

Meanwhile further north, as the ground dried out after the thaw, on 12 May Gen. Semyon Timoshenko launched a thrust by South-Western
Front
towards Kharkov, which failed disastrously. Yet again, a German counterattack encircled the Russians, and yet again Stalin refused to permit a retreat, causing the loss of more than a quarter of a million men. The army commander and some of his officers shot themselves rather than accept captivity. The survivors were driven eastwards in rout. One man said, ‘We wept as we retreated. We were running anywhere to get away from Kharkov; some to Stalingrad, others to Vladikavkaz. Where else would we end up – Turkey?’

Hitler’s confidence revived: he dismissed Germany’s losses in the previous year’s fighting, and accepted the view of Colonel Reinhard Gehlen, Eastern Front intelligence chief, that Stalin’s reserves were exhausted. By August, German weapons output would regain full momentum, following a disastrous July 1941 decision, rescinded only in January 1942, to cut arms and ammunition production in anticipation of victory. It was extraordinary that Hitler retained the loyalty and obedience of his officers after the strategic madnesses of the previous campaign and the privations of winter. In the Crimea in January 1942, an embittered German soldier itemised his diet: one hot meal a day – cabbage soup with potatoes in it – half a loaf of bread every second day, some fat, a little cheese and hard honey.

Yet even on such fare, the Wehrmacht remained a formidable fighting force. Most of Germany’s generals, in the dark recesses of their souls, knew that they had made their nation and its entire army – it was a myth that only the SS committed atrocities – complicit in crimes against humanity, and especially Russian humanity, such as their enemies would never forgive, even before the Holocaust began. They saw nothing to lose by fighting on, except more millions of lives: it deserves emphasis that a large majority of the war’s victims perished from 1942 onwards. Only victories might induce the Allies to make terms. Hitler’s April directive for the summer operations called for a concentration of effort in the south; the objectives of Operation
Blue
were to destroy the Red Army’s residual reserves, seize Stalingrad and capture the Caucasian oilfields.

Stalin misjudged German intentions: anticipating a new thrust against Moscow, he concentrated his forces accordingly. Even when the entire
Blue
plan was laid before him, after being found on the body of a Wehrmacht staff officer killed in an air crash, he dismissed it as disinformation. But Russia’s armies remained much stronger than Hitler realised, with 5.5 million men under arms and rapidly increasing tank and aircraft production. Criminals and some political prisoners were released from the gulag’s labour camps for service – 975,000 of them by the war’s end. Berlin estimated Russia’s 1942 steel output at eight million tons; in reality, it would attain 13.5 million tons.

The first phase of
Blue
, expected to take three weeks, began on 28 June with an assault towards the Don. Against Stalin’s armies, Hitler deployed 3.5 million Germans and a further million Axis troops – Italians, Romanians, the Spanish ‘Blue’ Division dispatched by Franco as a goodwill gesture – with spectacular initial success. When
Pravda
correspondent Lazar Brontman arrived in Voronezh, three hundred miles north-west of Stalingrad, at first he found the city relaxed and secure in its remoteness from the enemy. He was amused one evening by the droll spectacle of scores of women in the park dancing with each other in the absence of male partners. Women also policed the city: Brontman observed that they directed traffic more efficiently than men, but used their whistles too much.

Within days, however, the mood darkened dramatically. Further west the Russian line broke, precipitating yet another headlong retreat. German bombers began to pound Voronezh’s streets, ‘ironing the city without meeting resistance’, and prompting a great exodus of fugitives. Profiteers who owned vehicles charged desperate people three, four, five thousand roubles for the privilege of a ride eastwards. One by one, the city’s factories and government offices shut down. When its inhabitants learned that the Germans were only thirty miles away, Brontman wrote that Voronezh was ‘psychologically prepared for surrender’, and indeed the city was overrun a few days later.

The advancing panzers were delayed by rain and mud more than by the Red Army, and in early July reached their initial objectives. Stalin mandated the only authorised Russian strategic retreat of the war: when the Germans continued their advance east beyond Voronezh, they found themselves attacking empty space. Russian forces escaped from an intended envelopment at Millerovo, prompting Hitler to sack Bock for the second time, then splitting his Army Group South into two new commands, A and B, commanded respectively by List and Weichs. But the Führer exulted in the progress of the campaign, which thus far had been a mere armoured victory ride. His infantry were scarcely called upon to fight, and losses were negligible. New swathes of Soviet territory fell into German hands. Through July the panzers swept on southwards towards Rostov, savagely mauling the Russian South
Front
as its formations sought escape across the Don. Hitler commissioned Friedrich Paulus, a staff officer eager to prove himself as a field commander, to lead Sixth Army in a dash for Stalingrad.

Most of Germany’s generals immediately recognised the folly of this move. The strategic significance of Stalin’s name-city was small, irrelevant to the main objective of clearing the Caucasus and securing its oil. Moreover, Hitler’s eagerness for a symbolic triumph was matched by the determination of Stalin to deny this to him. If Stalingrad fell, the Soviet leader feared a renewed German thrust in the north, against Moscow. He thus determined that the Volga city must be held at all costs, and committed to its defence three armies from his strategic reserve. The stage was set for one of the decisive battles of the war, a collision between the personal wills of the two dictators.

The spirit of many Russians was unbroken, but the catastrophes of spring and summer ate deep into morale. Some people nursed hopes that the Western Allies would relieve their plight. Pavel Kalitov, commissar of a partisan group in Ukraine, wrote on 8 July: ‘We are very happy because England is bombing Romania with such success, and the Americans are going to send a landing force to France.’ Such expectations were precious but spurious. British bombing received much more propaganda attention than its achievements justified, and the Second Front was still almost two years away. Until 1943, arms and food deliveries from the West made only a small contribution to matching enormous Soviet needs and commitments. Whatever Stalin’s people achieved in 1942, they must achieve almost unaided.

It is hard to exaggerate the sufferings of Russian soldiers in the face of the elements and their own leaders’ bungling, as well as the enemy. ‘The night was terribly dark,’ wrote Captain Nikolai Belov, describing his unit’s detrainment behind the front. ‘The whole battalion set off in the wrong direction. We walked in circles all night, 30 km in terrible mud.’ Two weeks on, he recorded: ‘We have only a couple of old rifles for the whole battalion.’ On 10 May, his unit took up positions near a village named Bolshoi Sinkovets: ‘We have had no food for two days. Everyone is starving.’ Two days later, the battalion was issued with forty-one rifles for five hundred men. On 17 May, it ‘speed-marched’ thirty miles, losing forty stragglers who could not keep up. This was unsurprising, since the men had not eaten for two days. Belov wrote: ‘Everyone is frustrated with the commanders – and not without reason.’ Day after day, their ordeal continued. ‘Arrived in Zelyonaya Dubrava, having marched 35 km during the day. It is unbearably hot, we are terribly tired. Again there is nothing to eat. Lots of men are unable to keep up. Sedov is crying. He is quite unable to walk.’ Belov’s men were reduced to grubbing in the fields for rotting potatoes left from the previous year’s harvest. Their first actions against the Germans resulted in murderous losses: on 15 July, he reported his company’s strength reduced to five men.

At midsummer 1942, the Western Allies’ view of Russia’s predicament remained bleak. A British intelligence officer wrote on 15 July: ‘I have the inescapable feeling that much as the Germans may have lost, the Red Army has lost more … Sevastopol was … a fair feat of Soviet arms and demonstrated the enormous power of the Red Army on the defensive – given the right conditions of terrain … [But it] is still not capable of dealing with the Germans in the open terrain of South Russia … On the whole the Germans have most things in their favour … They possess a better fighting machine … How far the Germans will be able to exploit their success will depend on the ability of the Red Army to retain some form of cohesion in retreat until they have gone back behind great natural obstacles or into country more suitable for the defence.’