World War II Behind Closed Doors (27 page)

For many of the troops who listened to these words, Stalin was almost a supernatural being. They had been brought up with propaganda newsreels in the cinema, and teachers in their schools, all spouting the same refrain: Stalin was more than a mere leader, he was a figure of ultimate certainty and trust. His presence, many believed, had inspired the defence of Moscow a year before and now his hopes would carry them forward towards Stalingrad.

And this time it was the Soviet forces that had the advantage of surprise. The Red Army had managed to keep preparations for the attack secret, deploying techniques of deception that went beyond anything previously seen in the war. Ivan Golokolenko,
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for example, an officer with the 5th Tank Army, was ordered to build phoney offensive positions: ‘There were fake bridges as well as fake areas of troop concentration far from the direction of the attack’. As for the real bridges needed to mount Operation Uranus, they went undetected by German reconnaissance aircraft: ‘Some of the bridges were built as underwater bridges. They were built at a depth of 50 to 70 centimetres down in the water. From the air it
was more difficult for the reconnaissance planes to spot the presence of such bridges’.

The Red Army had managed to keep the build-up of more than a million men secret from the Germans, who now watched in disbelief as Soviet forces burst through their flanks, pushing aside the Hungarian, Italian and Romanian forces that defended them. The bitterness that German soldiers of the 6th Army felt towards these allies, who they believed had not fought as fiercely as they should have, was still evident sixty years after the battle. ‘Heard the joke about the new Italian tank?’ one veteran of the 6th Army said. ‘It has six gears. Five of them reverse!’

But regardless of the disputed performance of the German allies, the Soviet forces themselves were now much improved, for Operation Uranus marked another turning point. Stalin had recently started taking more advice from his military experts, notably Marshals Zhukov and Vasilevsky, rather than trusting his own instincts as he had at the disastrous battle of Kharkov earlier in the year. Stalin would never be anything other than the decisive force in the formation of Soviet military strategy – but now, at least, he was listening to others. On 9 October he had even restored ‘unitary command’ to his generals, freeing them from ‘dual command’, which had necessitated frequent consultation with political officers. The result of this and other improvements in supply, tactics and administration was an astonishing success. Just four days after the launch of Operation Uranus, in a military manoeuvre of tactical brilliance two Soviet pincer thrusts from either side of the German line met up near Kalach. The 6th Army was now encircled – trapped in Stalingrad.

Their fate had not been helped by the seeming inability of Adolf Hitler to grasp what was happening. Unlike Stalin, who as the war went on interfered less and less with detailed tactical decisions, Hitler was travelling on the opposite trajectory. And before any response to Operation Uranus could be contemplated, the Führer had to be consulted. But the Führer had chosen exactly this time to take a break from his military headquarters at the Wolf's Lair in East Prussia and was relaxing at the Berghof in Bavaria,
1400 miles from the front line. Even when he heard the news of the Soviet offensive, he reacted slowly – what could the Red Army possibly achieve, he must have thought, against the demonstrably superior might of the German armed forces? These complacent feelings had been endorsed by the sycophantic General Zeitzler, newly appointed Chief of the Army General Staff, who had told him only the previous month that the Red Army ‘were in no position to mount a major offensive with any far-reaching objective’.
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As a result of all this, the initial German response to Operation Uranus was inadequate. And when the enormity of the problem facing the 6th Army was finally realized by the German leadership, the solution proposed was almost laughably optimistic. Hermann Göring promised Hitler that his Luftwaffe could mount an air bridge to supply the 6th Army until they were relieved by land forces. Such an action had successfully managed to supply German forces trapped at Demyansk earlier in the year, but that operation had been on a fraction of the scale now needed to supply the 6th Army. And while Göring's air bridge was supposed to keep the troops fighting inside Stalingrad, Field Marshal von Manstein was ordered to mount a relief operation on the ground in Operation Tempest. Both the air bridge and Operation Tempest were catastrophic failures. The 6th Army never received adequate supplies from the Luftwaffe – to the extent that by Christmas 1942 they were reduced to eating their own horses – and von Manstein's rescue mission was beaten back by the Red Army.

On 1 February 1943 the 6th Army surrendered at Stalingrad. Much to Hitler's fury, Field Marshal Paulus was captured alive by the Red Army. Hitler had promoted him to field marshal just two days before, in a clear signal that he should take his own life, since no German field marshal had ever previously been taken prisoner. Instead, Paulus became one of over ninety thousand Axis soldiers taken at Stalingrad.

It was a defining victory for the Red Army and for Stalin's leadership. But the cost had been so huge, the battles so bloody, that there was little feeling of sustained joy. Instead, many Soviet people felt that Stalingrad was symbolic of their virtual abandonment by
the Western Allies. ‘It was obvious to us that the burden of the war was carried on the shoulders of the Soviet Union’, says Grigory Obozny,
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a member of the NKVD during the war. ‘If the second front had opened in 1942 then things would have gone differently because 1942 was a difficult time…. We knew that only we could win the war, and only by sacrificing our own lives. So this is definitely why we felt that we won the war. It was clear to everyone that we were the leading force’.

In an attempt to shame the West into opening a second front, the Soviet creative community was told in the autumn of 1942 to try to influence foreign public opinion. ‘Artists, writers and journalists were given an assignment’, says cartoonist Boris Yefimov,
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‘to appeal to our colleagues abroad. Writers had to send letters to English writers, musicians to English musicians [and so on], all asking the question: where is the second front?’

Yefimov, as one of the Soviet Union's leading cartoonists, wrote to his famous counterpart in Britain, David Low. He received an answer a month later, explaining that ‘whilst England had great military power, this power was only “potential” as he described it’. Having now witnessed personally the equivocation of the West on this most vital subject for the welfare of the Soviet Union, Yefimov decided to fight back in 1942 with the weapon he was most familiar with – the cartoon – and created a number of visual attacks on the British. The first featured six fat British generals in a military conference. Each carried a different caption, reading: ‘General Don't Hurry, General What if We Get Beaten’ and so on. Opposite them across the table were two colonels, on their helmets the words ‘Courage’ and ‘Determination’. ‘The implication was that in England there were proponents as well as opponents of the second front’, says Yefimov. ‘This cartoon was sent, and Stalin approved it, and it was published in
Pravda
. Such a delicate issue as the discontent with our Allies needed Stalin's approval’.

Yefimov then felt that Soviet discontent about the lack of a second front could be personified in dislike and distrust of one person – Winston Churchill. ‘There was a feeling of disappointment about Churchill's behaviour’, he says. ‘My feelings about
Churchill were commonplace. He was seen as a man whom it was difficult to trust…. He had the reputation of a cunning, cynical politician’. And so Yefimov drew a variation of the first cartoon which included an attack on Churchill. The overweight generals remained from the original version, but the two brave colonels were replaced with a caricature of Churchill next to two bottles of whisky, and happy not to open a second front: ‘It was just characteristic of Churchill. Everyone knew that Churchill started every morning by drinking a big portion of whisky…. It wasn't a secret to anyone that he had a weakness for drinking. I didn't see anything humiliating about it for Churchill as he didn't hide it – the fact that he liked to have a drink in the morning’.

This harsher attack on the Western Allies, specifically targeting Churchill, would also have had to be approved by Stalin, and it is significant that he was prepared to let such ridicule be published in the Soviet press. It is one more example of the importance that the Soviet leadership in general and Stalin in particular attached to the opening of the second front. ‘Everyone used to say that the Americans were delaying the opening of the second front in order to wear out both the Germans and the Russians’, says Vasily Borisov, by now a member of the NKVD. And this was clearly Stalin's suspicion as well. Vladimir Yerofeyev,
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a Soviet diplomat who worked for a time as a translator for him, recalls the Soviet leader expressing his views on the subject immediately after the war to a French visitor to the Kremlin: ‘Stalin said we had been hopeful that the second front would be opened, but it was opened [only] at the moment when our allies felt threatened by our presence in Europe, when they were concerned that we would penetrate too far into Europe’.

Indeed, the Soviet victory at Stalingrad only served to increase Stalin's desire for an immediate second front. For whilst the German 6th Army had been destroyed, the task facing the Red Army remained gargantuan. German Army Group A had skilfully retreated from the Caucasus and continued to represent a formidable force in the southern sector of the front. The Soviets still had to fight over nearly 1000 miles of their own territory just to force
the Germans back to the June 1941 border. And then there was another worry, less of a practical nature but more insidious, for the Soviet leadership. Was the Red Army trapped in a disastrous cycle in which it could hold – even defeat – the Germans in the winter, but would then be pushed back by the Wehrmacht in the spring and summer? The Red Army had won victories in the winter of 1941 at the gates of Moscow and now in the winter of 1942 at Stalingrad, but everyone remembered all too clearly the failures of the Soviets at Kiev and Minsk in the summer of 1941 and the disaster of the spring offensive at Kharkov in 1942. What chance would the Red Army now have in the spring and summer months of 1943, once the steppes hardened and the Germans could play to their military strengths once more?

THE WESTERN ALLIES, THE SECOND FRONT
AND KATYN

Such was Stalin's concern about the challenges and dangers the Red Army would face in 1943 that on 14 December 1942, as Roosevelt and Churchill were about to meet at the Casablanca Conference, he almost pleaded for the Western Allies to fulfil what he regarded as their absolute commitment to the second front. ‘I feel confident’, he wrote, ‘that no time is being wasted, that the promise to open a second front in Europe, which you, Mr President, and Mr Churchill gave for 1942 or the spring of 1943 at the latest, will be kept and that a second front in Europe will really be opened jointly by Great Britain and the USA next spring’.
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In mid-February Churchill replied, on behalf of the Americans as well as the British, that the long-awaited cross-Channel invasion would take place in August or September 1943, but that the exact timing would depend on ‘the condition of German defensive possibilities…’.
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This was still consistent with the assurance the British Prime Minister had given the previous August, when he met Stalin in Moscow, that ‘the British and American governments were preparing for a very great operation in 1943’. But Stalin
would thus not get the second front he craved by ‘the spring of 1943 at the latest’, and his feelings of suspicion and bitterness continued to fester. And it was in this uneasy period in the weeks immediately after the Soviet victory at Stalingrad that the alliance between the Western Allies and the Soviet Union was to be further tested – almost to breaking point – by the discovery of a crime that the Soviet Union had committed three years before, in the spring of 1940.

On 9 April 1943, Joseph Goebbels wrote in his diary that ‘Polish mass graves have been found near Smolensk. The Bolsheviks simply shot down and then shovelled into mass graves some 10,000 Polish prisoners’. Radio Berlin announced the news to the world two days later. Eight mass graves had been found in the depths of the Katyn forest, varying in depth from 6 to 11 feet, and each was crammed with human remains. Every one of the victims had been killed by a shot in the back of the head. And by their uniforms and clothing they were all clearly Poles – the majority of them Polish officers.

The Germans did all they could to publicize the crime. Dimitry Khudykh,
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then a teenager living nearby, was one of a group of Russian civilians whom the Germans took up to the forest to witness their gruesome discovery. ‘We saw the exhumation’, he says, ‘and the stench was terrible…there were bodies in coats and the Germans were feeling in these bodies, checking the pockets, removing flasks and watches and setting up a museum [near by]. The faces [of the bodies] were black’. He viewed this macabre sight with a certain amount of insouciance: ‘We were young, we were not particularly interested. We had seen death inflicted by the Germans. We had seen that Russian prisoners of war were dying in the camps’.

Taken at face value, the German discovery showed evidence of a terrible war crime. Agents of the Soviet Union had apparently murdered the officers of an ally. For the Polish press in Britain – and indeed for the Polish government in exile – it was obvious that the Soviets had a case to answer. They knew all too well the prehistory of this crime: that in the aftermath of the Soviet invasion
of eastern Poland, officers and other members of the Polish elite had been imprisoned and that subsequently the majority of them had disappeared in the spring of 1940. Since then there had been no letters from them, no sightings or contact of any kind. The Polish government in exile also remembered the evasive and, they now suspected, immensely cynical way in which the Soviet authorities, and Stalin in particular, had dismissed all enquiries about the whereabouts of the officers.