Max Hastings Two-Book Collection: All Hell Let Loose and Catastrophe

On 8 September the encirclement of Leningrad became complete, its siege formally commenced. Next day, Stalin dispatched Zhukov to relieve Voroshilov. His unexpected arrival by light aircraft prompted a petty farce: for fifteen minutes guards at the city’s front

headquarters beside the Smolny Institute declined to admit him, for lack of a pass. ‘Well, that’s the army for you,’ shrugged Zhukov later, but at the time he was probably less philosophical. Voroshilov, flown back to Moscow, dared to denounce Stalin to his face, shouting: ‘You have yourself to blame for all this! You’re the one who annihilated the Old Guard of the army; you had our best generals killed!’ When Stalin demurred, the old revolutionary seized a salver bearing a roast suckling pig and smashed it down on the table. Voroshilov was fortunate to escape a firing squad.

Zhukov reorganised Leningrad’s defence, countermanding Voroshilov’s order to scuttle what was left of the Baltic Fleet in the harbour; through the years ahead, the warships’ guns provided critical support for the land forces. The general launched a series of thrusts against the Germans which climaxed on 17 September, cost thousands of lives, and foundered amid devastating artillery fire. A marine officer, Nikolai Vavin, described an attempt to reinforce the island fortress of Oreshek on Lake Ladoga: ‘Our guys just didn’t have a chance. The Germans quickly spotted us from the air – and it became a mass execution. The enemy’s planes first bombed and then machine-gunned us. Out of my own landing group of two hundred men, only fourteen reached the shoreline.’ Faced with protests from his officers about the futility of such attempts, especially from the Nevsky bridgehead on the east bank of the Neva, Zhukov remained implacable: ‘I said attack!’ Casualties soared, while medical facilities for the wounded were almost non-existent. Zhukov placed blocking units – zagradotryady – behind the front, to shoot down his own men who attempted to flee, a practice that became institutionalised in the Red Army. German propaganda loudspeakers taunted the doomed assailants on the battlefield: ‘It’s time to assemble at your extermination points again – we shall bury you on the banks of the Neva.’ Then the next barrage fell upon Soviet troops milling helplessly in their positions.

For weeks, the Russians remained oblivious of the fact that the Germans had no intention of launching a ground attack on Leningrad, nor even of accepting its surrender. Zhukov acquired a prestige in Stalin’s eyes as saviour of the city, rooted in failure to understand that it had not been seriously assaulted. In a moment of fantasy, German staff officers in Berlin discussed the possibility of making a propaganda gesture by inviting the United States to accept the 2.5 million inhabitants of Peter the Great’s capital as refugees. Hitler, instead, set out to starve them to death. Professor Ernst Ziegelemeyer of Munich’s Institute of Nutrition – one of many scientists who provided satanic counsel to the Nazis – was consulted about practicalities. He agreed that no battle was necessary; it would be impossible for the Russians to provide their beleaguered citizens with more than 250 grams of bread a day, which could not sustain human life on a protracted basis: ‘It is not worth risking the lives of our troops. The Leningraders will die anyway. It is essential not to let a single person through our front line. The more of them that stay there, the sooner they will die, and then we will enter the city without trouble, without losing a single German soldier.’

Hitler declared: ‘Petersburg – the poisonous nest from which, for so long, Asiatic venom has spewed forth into the Baltic – must vanish from the earth’s surface. The city is already cut off. It only remains for us to bomb and bombard it, destroy its sources of water and power and then deny the population everything it needs to survive.’ The first major Luftwaffe attack on Leningrad destroyed the waterside Badaev warehouses, holding most of the city’s food stocks; melted sugar ran along a neighbouring road, and fires burned for days. The citizens quickly understood their plight. A woman named Elena Skryabina wrote in her diary: ‘We are approaching the greatest horror…Everyone is preoccupied with only one thought: where to get something edible so as not to starve to death. We have returned to prehistoric times. Life has been reduced to one thing – the hunt for food.’

Pravda correspondent Lazar Brontman described in his diary how citizens made soup and bread with grass. Once such fare was accepted as a norm, he said, ‘grass cakes found their own price in the market’. A single match cost a rouble, which caused many people to ignite their kindling with magnifying glasses under the sun. One of Brontman’s writer friends was eccentric enough to cling to his household pet, ‘probably the only surviving dog in Leningrad’. Bicycles provided the sole means of civilian transport. Since water supplies now depended on hydrants, women washed clothes in the street while passing military vehicles weaved between them. Every vestige of vacant soil was tilled for vegetables, each plot marked with its owner’s name. Fuel was desperately short, because the city was invested before the inhabitants could make their annual pilgrimages to collect firewood from outlying forests.

The Germans removed their tanks to reinforce operations further south. The besiegers, less numerous than the defending Russian troops, dug themselves into bunkers and gun emplacements for the winter. Every movement towards their lines by either attacking soldiers or fleeing civilians was met with annihilating artillery, mortar and machine-gun fire. Captain Vasily Khoroshavin, a thirty-six-year-old Soviet battery commander, wrote to his wife on 25 October: ‘I have received a letter from you and I cannot describe the pleasure it gave. Today is the sixth that I am spending in the cellar of a mason’s shop only accessible by crawling. I sit here directing fire while mines and shells explode around me, shaking the earth. It is impossible to get out for water. Hot tea is our greatest luxury, and rations are brought to us by night. Yesterday a shell exploded between me and a reconnaissance man, shredding the tails of my greatcoat. I was unhurt, except that my gas mask case hit me on the head.’ Khoroshavin was less fortunate three months later, when another German salvo killed him.

‘All our soldiers on the front look like ghouls – emaciated by hunger and cold,’ wrote one of them, Stepan Kuznetsov. ‘They are in rags, filthy, and very, very hungry.’ Thereafter, the saga of Leningrad focused not on the battlefield, but on the struggle for survival among its inhabitants, which many lost. German artillery shelled the city daily, at hours most likely to catch victims in the open: 0800–0900, 1100–1200, 1700–1800, 2000–2100. The bread ration for civilians fell below the level the murderous Professor Zigelemeyer deemed necessary for existence: a daily minimum of a hundred tons of supplies a day had to reach the city across Lake Ladoga, and there was often a shortfall: on 30 November, for instance, only sixty-one tons got through. Loaves were baked with mouldy grain salvaged from a ship sunk in the harbour, from cottonseed oilcake, ‘edible’ cellulose, flour-sack and floor sweepings, horse oats.

Through October and November, conditions worsened steadily: German guns and bombers pounded streets, schools, civic buildings, hospitals. For countless citizens, starvation beckoned: they began to boil wallpaper to extract its paste, to cook and chew leather. As scurvy became endemic, an extract was produced from pine needles to provide vitamin C. There was a plague of thefts of ration cards – mere money had become redundant. Pigeons vanished from the city squares as they were caught and eaten, as too were crows, gulls, then rats and household pets. At an art academy, old Professor Yan Shabolsky sent for his star pupil, eighteen-year-old Elena Martilla. ‘Lena,’ he said, ‘things are getting very bad here. I don’t expect to survive this. But someone must make a record of what is happening. You are a portrait artist – so draw pictures of Leningrad’s people under siege – honest pictures, showing how they are suffering in these diabolical circumstances. We must preserve this for humanity. Future generations must be warned of the absolute horror of war.’

Thereafter Elena Martilla roamed the streets, making such quick sketches as cold and weakness allowed of faces stretched, drawn, sunken, hollowed by deprivation no other modern European civilisation had experienced on such a scale. She noticed that many adults responded by closing down emotionally, becoming passive and withdrawn, apparently sleepwalking. Children, however, became unnaturally alert: a small boy delivered a vivid, witty running commentary on a Luftwaffe attack to his terrified adult companions in a shelter. She wrote: ‘It was as if that boy had aged fifty years in as many days – his face looked so old, and through this unnatural ageing I felt that he had been robbed of the innocence of childhood. It was horrifying to hear his natural curiosity welded to the ghastly machinery of war…I looked more closely into his face – and saw an uncanny wisdom in it. What I glimpsed in that moment shook me: I realised that a little child could look like a sage old man. Amid the agony we were suffering, something extraordinary had briefly come to life.’

Most Leningraders, deprived of power, heat, light and employment, eked out a hibernatory existence amid mounting snow and rubble; their lives and metabolic processes slowed like the fading of an old clockwork gramophone. In Svetlana Magaeva’s apartment building, an old woman named Kamilla grew steadily more enfeebled, though neighbours burned furniture in her stove to preserve a flicker of life. One morning, she suddenly rose from her bed and embarked upon a frenzied search of every cupboard and crevice for food. Frustrated, she took plates and dishes from her cabinet and dropped them one by one on the floor. Then she fell on her hands and knees, and searched the fragments for breadcrumbs. Soon afterwards, Kamilla died.

By December, the outside temperature had dropped to –30 degrees Celsius, and starvation was killing tens of thousands. The bread ration shrank to 125 grams. Some people mechanically continued their work: at the city’s Zoological Institute, fifty-year-old beetle expert Axel Reichardt worked on his magnum opus The Fauna of the Soviet Union, until one day he was found lying dead on a mattress in his office. Sasha Abramov, an actor at the Musical Comedy Theatre, where the cast were almost too weak to walk to performances, expired during an interval, wearing his costume as one of Dumas’s three musketeers. Elena Skryabina wrote: ‘People are so weak with hunger that they are completely indifferent to death; they perish as if they are falling asleep. Those half-dead people who are still around do not even pay any attention to them.’ Stiffened corpses lay in the streets until they were piled onto sledges for disposal in shell craters. German intelligence, monitoring the city’s agony with clinical fascination, calculated that 200,000 people had died in three months.

Yet the privileged escaped most of the suffering. Zhukov was recalled to Moscow when it became plain that there would be no battle, leaving Leningrad in the hands of party officials who ate prodigiously throughout the siege. It became a characteristic of Russia’s war that corruption and privilege persisted, even as tens of millions starved and died. Some functionaries were evacuated by air, as was the city’s most famous resident, the composer Dmitry Shostakovich, who completed elsewhere his Seventh ‘Leningrad’ Symphony, which became a symbol of the experience. For the dignitaries who stayed, bread, sugar, meatballs and other cooked food remained readily available at a canteen in the Smolny Institute, with access to a private heated cinema. Rumours circulated about the Party’s shameless cynicism and privileges: an anonymous pamphleteer signing himself ‘The Rebel’ printed a leaflet that was found in the streets: ‘Citizens, down with the regime that lets us die of starvation! We are being robbed by scoundrels who deceive us, who stockpile food and leave us to go hungry. Let us go to the district authorities and demand more bread. Down with our leaders!’ The NKVD devoted immense effort to identifying ‘The Rebel’, and in December 1942 extracted a confession from a fifty-year-old factory worker named Sergei Luzhkov, who was dispatched to his inevitable fate before a firing squad.

At the end of 1941, the freezing of Lake Ladoga opened a more resilient link to the outside world: the legendary six-lane ice highway created by 30,000 civilian workers. Four thousand lorries were soon shuttling along this ‘Road of Life’, but few of the incoming supplies – initially seven hundred tons a day – reached ordinary citizens. On Stalin’s orders, a renewed attack was launched to break the German encirclement, which failed with the usual heavy losses. A radio operator on the Volkhov front east of the city, Nikolai Nikulin, wrote: ‘I learned what war was really like. One quiet night I was sitting in my icy hole, unable to sleep because of the cold, scratching my lice-infested body, crying from weakness and misery…In an empty German dugout I found some potatoes, frozen hard as stones, made a fire and boiled them in my helmet. With food in my stomach, I gained spirit. I started to change after that night, developing defence mechanisms, an instinct for self-preservation, staying power. I learned how to find grub…Once a horse that was pulling a sledge near us was killed by a shell. Twenty minutes later, little was left of it save the mane and guts, because smart guys like me dismembered it. The driver hadn’t even recovered from the shock – he just sat on his sledge clutching the reins.’ Twenty Soviet divisions were destroyed in attempts to relieve Leningrad; their only significant success was recapture of the north-eastern junction at Tikhvin on 9 December, which made it possible to move supplies to a railhead within distant reach of the city.

Extreme hunger persisted: on 13 January, after hours of queuing in the snow Elena Kochina had just collected her pitiful ration when a man behind her seized the bread, thrust it into his mouth and sought to gobble it down. In blind fury, the desperate mother turned and threw herself upon him: ‘He fell to the ground – I fell with him. Lying on his back, he tried to cram the whole piece of bread into his mouth at once. With one hand I grabbed him by the nose, turning it aside. With the other I tried to tear the roll out of his mouth. The man resisted, but more and more weakly. Finally, I succeeded in retrieving everything he hadn’t managed to swallow. People watched our struggle in silence.’

Lidiya Okhapkina had her ration cards stolen, a misfortune that threatened her little family with imminent death, so narrow was the margin of survival. That night, for the first time in her life the despairing woman fell on her knees and prayed to the deity whose existence Stalin’s regime denied: ‘Have mercy O God on my innocent children.’ Next morning came a knock on her door. She opened it to find a Red Army soldier she had never seen, bearing a parcel from her husband, fighting hundreds of miles away, containing a kilo of semolina, a kilo of rice and two packets of biscuits. These proved to represent the difference between life and death for her family. Others were less fortunate. In the first ten days of January, the NKVD reported forty-two cases of cannibalism: corpses were found with thighs and breasts hacked off. Worse, the weak became vulnerable to murder not for their meaningless property, but for their flesh. On 4 February a man visiting a militia office reported seeing twelve women arrested for cannibalism, which they did not deny. ‘One woman, utterly worn out and desperate, said that when her husband fainted through exhaustion and lack of food, she hacked off part of his leg to feed herself and her children.’ The prisoners sobbed, knowing that they faced execution.

In February, by far the worst month of the siege, 20,000 people a day were reported to be dying; amid the weakened population, dysentery became a killer. There were queues at street taps for water, and fires burned unchecked for lack of means to put them out. The Musical Comedy Theatre closed, and supplies of coffins ran out. Many of those with energy to read turned to War and Peace, the only book that seemed capable of explaining their agony. Those who survived had not merely exceptional will, but also commitment to a routine: washing themselves, eating off plates, even continuing academic studies. The authorities considered transporting civilians to safety on trucks returning empty across Lake Ladoga. Some mothers and babies indeed travelled, and often died en route; but Stalin rejected a wholesale evacuation, for prestige reasons. Leningrad’s ordeal became a display of fortitude such as only a tyranny could have enforced, and probably only Russians could have endured.

The British and Americans continued to fear Soviet defeat until the end of 1942: they were slow to comprehend the losses and miseries of the invaders. As 1941 drew to a close, two million German soldiers, their tunics lined with newspaper and straw to compensate for the clothing they lacked, were in straits almost as dire as those of Russia’s people. Hans-Jürgen Hartmann wrote from Kharkov: ‘I have often wondered what this Christmas might be like. I always cast out the war from my imaginary picture, or at least push it to the very edges. I conjured up special words for the occasion. Christmas, homeland, longing, joy and hope. Yet these words, always sincere and heartfelt, became increasingly strange and precious to me. They evoked something timeless, precious – and yet, in the conditions of the Eastern Front, seemed scarcely believable any more…How brutal this war is becoming. It is now a total war, a war against women, children and old people – and that is the greatest horror.’

Franz Peters and some comrades wandered into a church in a little town; the communists had ripped out its altar, but the Germans clustered around the hole where it had stood, and began carolling. ‘I have never heard “Silent Night” sung with such fervour…Many of us were moved to tears.’ Karl-Gottfried Vierkom read aloud to his comrades a card sent by his mother from Germany: ‘When I finished, there was complete silence. Far away from this terrible disaster – which no one imagined possible when we first entered Russia – something else still existed. Was there still a Christmas somewhere, where people peacefully exchanged gifts, gathered around the tree and went to Midnight Mass?’

In Berlin there was no place for such sentimentality, which was anyway grotesque at a time when systematic barbarism was being perpetrated by the same German soldiers in Russia who sang carols and nursed self-pity. Hitler, enraged by the repulse before Moscow, appointed himself to replace Walther von Brauchitsch as army C-in-C. He repeated to Model his draconian injunctions against yielding ground. Gen. Hoepner, one of many advocates of a strategic disengagement, wrote: ‘There is a serious cost to one’s nerves fighting against the enemy and one’s own supreme commander at the same time.’ A few days later Hoepner joined a long list of commanders in the east, including von Rundstedt and Guderian, sacked for alleged lack of steel.

Model, a blunt soldier’s general and dedicated Nazi, addressed the threat of disaster with energy and success. By mid-January, the Soviets had ceased to win ground; on the 21st, to the amazement of his demoralised officers Model launched a counterblow at the Russian flank west of Moscow. His staff asked what reinforcements he could deploy. ‘Myself!’ he declared irrepressibly – and this sufficed. Everywhere he improvised, dashing from unit to unit, often under fire, urging local commanders first to stand, then to strike back. Desperate expedients were employed to enable men to keep fighting in temperatures of –40 degrees Celsius: heated shelters were established, for recuperation between the few hours of exposed activity that were all a soldier could endure; ‘snow shacks’ were built around aircraft engines, to warm them through the night so the Luftwaffe could fly once more. In the last days of January and the first of February, Model’s troops inflicted repeated repulses and heavy casualties on the Russians, still seeking to push forward in the Rzhev salient.

Horrors afflicted both sides. War correspondent Vasily Grossman met a peasant carrying a sack of frozen human legs, which he proposed to thaw on a stove in order to remove their boots. Fritz Langkanke of the SS Das Reich Division described how a dead Russian, frozen stiff, became wedged under the wheels of his armoured car: ‘I grabbed a saw, wriggled underneath and began cutting away his arms. As I did this, our two faces came close together and with the sawing motion he suddenly began to move. I froze in horror. It was only in response to the saw’s action, but it seemed for a moment he was shaking his head at me.’

Wolf Dose, a German soldier supervising a POW work detail outside Leningrad, described with bleak detachment the fate of a Russian who collapsed while gathering wood outside a dugout: ‘He lay for a while in the frozen snow, at –20 degrees Celsius. He recovered somewhat…lifted himself up. But the cold had a strange effect on him. He threw himself forward [into the dugout] with such sudden vigour that he landed right on top of the stove. He just lay there, stunned, his skin burning away. Someone managed to pull him off and laid him on the ground. His head was resting on some of the wood he had gathered; his charred hand was soldered onto one of the pieces. He groaned quietly.’ Then someone hauled the man to his feet. ‘Because of the shock of the sudden movement, he emptied the contents of his intestines into his trousers, which swelled up and burst. I saw his thin, distended abdomen covered in blood, excrement and remains of clothing…His eyes stared into empty space. His face had a strange blue-green hue…One only hopes that a quick shot will bring his misery to an end.’

Men on both sides became inured to such sights, for each was overwhelmingly preoccupied with his own salvation. Dose shrugged: ‘Russia, a country full of cruelty, must be cruelly treated.’ The Red Army struggled to regain the initiative, but again and again was thrown back. The Wehrmacht’s iron professionalism was unbroken. Gen. Gotthard Heinrici asserted that the Russians had repeated the earlier German mistake of seeking to advance on too wide a front, and Zhukov was of the same opinion. It is unlikely that the Russians had the strength or skill to inflict absolute defeat on the Germans that winter, whatever course they had adopted. But Stalin’s clumsy interventions, matching those of Hitler, removed even such a possibility. The Soviet Twenty-Ninth Army, cut off west of Rzhev, fought almost to the last man. There was no repeat of the mass surrenders of the previous summer, not least because Zhukov’s soldiers now knew the fate awaiting them if they accepted captivity. The Germans claimed that 26,000 Russians died in the Rzhev battle, about as many men as Britain’s army lost in three years of North African campaigning. Evidence of the human cost lay everywhere. ‘As we picked our way through the carnage, the hard frozen bodies clinked like porcelain,’ wrote a wondering German officer, Max Kuhnert. But the Russians never grudged losses; what mattered to them was that the front had been pushed back 175 miles from Moscow. Between 22 June 1941 and 31 January 1942, Germany suffered almost a million casualties, more than a quarter of all the soldiers originally committed to Barbarossa. For the rest of the winter, the invaders dug in to hold their ground and rebuild their armoured formations.

The doctrine of blitzkreig evolved progressively, in the course of Germany’s 1939–40 campaigns in Poland and France. But in 1941, Hitler explicitly committed himself to destroy Russia by waging a ‘lightning war’. His armed forces, and Germany’s economy, lacked the fundamental strength to accomplish anything else. The Wehrmacht’s plan for Barbarossa was overwhelmingly dependent for success on accomplishing the defeat of Stalin’s armies west of the Dnieper–Dvina river line. The deeper within the country heavy fighting took place, the graver became the logistical difficulties of supplying Hitler’s troops, with few railways and inadequate numbers of trucks, which consumed precious fuel merely to deliver loads. The key battles of the 1940 French campaign took place within a few hours’ drive of the German border; now, instead, the Wehrmacht was committed to a struggle thousands of miles from its bases.

Few soldiers of the German army who survived the winter of 1941 ever regained the faith in their leadership that was forfeited by that experience. They saw Russian soldiers advancing to attack on skis, clad in quilted snowsuits such as they themselves lacked. German weapons and vehicles froze, while those of their enemies worked. Stalin’s soldiers never matched the tactical proficiency of the Germans: their attacks relied on the exploitation of mass and a willingness to sacrifice lives. But Soviet artillery was formidable, and their aircraft increasingly effective. The new katyusha multiple rocket-launcher and the T-34, probably the best tank of the war, shocked the Germans and heartened the Russians, though the first time katyushas were used men of both sides fled in terror. Wehrmacht officer Helmut von Harnack wrote: ‘The fact that we did not bring this campaign to a finish, and go on to take Moscow, is a massive blow for us. The lack of foresight about the weather…is of course an important reason. But the truth is we totally underestimated our opponent. He showed a strength and resilience we did not believe him capable of – indeed, resilience greater than most of us imagined humanly possible.’

Stalin’s personal direction of Russia’s 1941 campaigns inflicted disasters which at times threatened to become irreversible. His refusal to yield ground was responsible for the loss of many of the 3.35 million Russian soldiers who passed into German captivity that year. But his people revealed a will to fight, and a willingness to die, that owed little to ideology and much to peasant virtues, a visceral devotion to Mother Russia, and the fruits of compulsion. Soldier Boris Baromykin described the execution of a comrade from a Central Asian republic, charged with unauthorised withdrawal from his position: ‘The poor fellow was standing just a couple of metres from me, peacefully chewing a piece of bread; he could only speak a few words of Russian and had no idea what was going on. Abruptly the major heading the military tribunal read out an order: “Desertion from the front line – immediate execution,” and shot him in the head. The guy collapsed in front of me – it was horrible. Something inside of me died when I saw that.’

But Baromykin, acknowledging the chaos of one of their retreats, ‘like a herd of desperate cattle’, added: ‘The only thing holding us together was fear that our commanders would shoot us if we tried to run away.’ A soldier shot by his comrades as he attempted to desert swore at them as he lay dying in the dust: ‘They’ll kill the lot of you.’ He glimpsed Nikolai Moskvin, the unit’s political officer. ‘And you, you bloodstained commissar, they’ll hang you first.’ Moskvin drew his revolver and finished the man off. He wrote in his diary: ‘The boys understood; a dog’s death for a dog.’ To discourage desertion, the Red Army adopted a new tactic: dispatching groups of men towards the German lines with their hands in the air, who then tossed a shower of grenades. This was designed to provoke the Germans to fire on others who attempted to surrender in earnest.

The ruthlessness of the Soviet state was indispensable to confound Hitler. No democracy could have established as icily rational a hierarchy of need as did Stalin, whereby soldiers received most food; civilian workers less; and ‘useless mouths’, including the old, only a starvation quota. More than two million Russians died of hunger during the war in territories controlled by their own government. The Soviet achievement in 1941–42 contrasted dramatically with the feeble performance of the Western Allies in France in 1940. Whatever the limitations of the Red Army’s weapons, training, tactics and commanders, Soviet culture armoured its forces to meet the Wehrmacht with a resolution the softer citizens of the democracies could not match.

‘This is no gentleman’s war,’ admitted Wehrmacht Lt. von Heyl in a letter to his family. ‘One becomes totally numb. Human life is so cheap, cheaper than the shovels we use to clear the roads of snow. The state we have reached will seem quite unbelievable to you back home. We do not kill humans but “the enemy”, who are rendered impersonal – animals at best. They behave the same towards us.’ The spectacle of starving prisoners dehumanised Russians in the eyes of many Germans, in a fashion that destroyed any instinct towards pity. A Wehrmacht soldier wrote: ‘They whined and grovelled before us. They were human beings in whom there was no longer a trace of anything human.’

German savagery reconciled Stalin’s nation to the savagery of its own leaders: Hitler’s invasion united tens of millions of Russians who had hitherto been alienated by ideological and racial differences, purges, famines, institutionalised injustice and incompetence. The ‘Great Patriotic War’ Stalin had declared became a reality that accomplished more for the cohesion and motivation of his peoples than any other event since the 1917 Revolution. Even Hitler’s SS became reluctantly impressed with the Soviets’ indoctrination of their own soldiers. Whatever delusions persisted in Berlin, on the battlefield almost every German soldier now recognised the magnitude, perhaps the impossibility, of the task to which his nation was committed. Panzer officer Wolfgang Paul acknowledged: ‘We have blundered, mistakenly, into an alien landscape with which we can never be properly acquainted. Everything is cold, hostile and working against us.’ Another soldier wrote home: ‘Even if we capture Moscow, I doubt whether this will finish the war in the east. The Russians are capable of fighting to the very last man, the very last square metre of their vast country. Their stubbornness and resolve are quite astonishing. We are entering a war of attrition – and I only hope in the long run Germany can win it.’

The last letter from Russia received by gunner lieutenant Jasper Monckeburg’s family in Hamburg was dated 21 January 1942: ‘Forty per cent of our men have got oozing eczema and boils all over their bodies, particularly on their legs…Our duty periods stretch over forty-eight hours, with two or three hours’ sleep, often interrupted. Our lines are so weak, twenty to thirty-five men per company over two kilometres, that we would be completely overrun if we, the artillery, did not stem the onslaught of the enemy, who are ten or twelve times stronger.’ After repulsing one Russian attack, infantrymen carried the lieutenant into his bunker: ‘Since I had been lying for 4½ hours in the snow – 35 degrees of frost – I could no longer feel hands or legs and was completely unable to stand…If it weren’t for this swinish cold!’ Monckeburg was killed a few days later.

Gen. Gotthard Heinrici, visiting Berlin in February, was struck by Hitler’s indifference to eyewitness accounts of the enormous tragedy unfolding in the east. The Führer chose to discuss only technical issues such as the design of anti-tank defences. When once he spoke of the Russian winter, it was with flippancy: ‘Luckily nothing lasts for ever, and that is a consoling thought. If, at this present moment, men are being turned into blocks of ice, that won’t prevent the April sun from shining and restoring life to these desolate places.’ A German soldier named Wolfgang Huff wrote on 10 February 1942, at Sinyavino in Russia: ‘Dusk is falling. The crack of artillery fire – and white smoke rises above the forest. The harsh reality of war: gruff cries of command, struggling with ammunition through the snow. And then a surprising question – “Did you see the sunset?” Suddenly I thought: how grievously we have broken the peace and tranquillity of this land.’

Throughout February, at Stalin’s orders his armies threw themselves again and again at the German positions – and were repulsed with huge losses. The Soviet supply system was close to collapse, and many soldiers existed at the extremities of privation. 2.66 million Russians had been killed in action. But the campaign had cost the German army almost a million casualties, together with 207,000 horses, 41,000 trucks and 13,600 guns. On 1 April, its high command judged only eight of 162 divisions in Russia to be ‘attack ready’. Just 160 tanks were serviceable among sixteen panzer formations. As Hitler anticipated, when spring came his armies would once more roll forward and win victories. But the critical reality of the first year of war in the east was that Russia remained undefeated.

Near Tula, an old woman gave Vasily Grossman and his little party potatoes, salt and some firewood. Her son Vanya was fighting. She said to Grossman, ‘Oh, I used to be so healthy, like a stallion. The Devil came to me last night and gripped my palm with his fingernails. I began to pray: “May God rise again and may his enemies be scattered”…My Vanya came to me last night. He sat down on a chair and looked at the window. I said to him, “Vanya, Vanya!” but he didn’t reply.’ Grossman wrote: ‘If we do win this terrible, cruel war, it will be because there are such noble hearts in our nation, such righteous people, souls of immense generosity, such old women, mothers of sons who, from their noble simplicity, are now losing their lives for the sake of their nation with the same generosity with which this old woman from Tula has given us all that she had. There is only a handful of them in our land, but they will win.’

The British people, awed by Russian resistance, embraced the Soviet Union as an ally with an enthusiasm that dismayed and even frightened their own ruling caste. At a humble level, such sentiment was manifested by an elderly London cockney who said in an East End pub, ‘I never believed them Roosians was ’arf as black as they was painted. Seems to me a lot of them is better off than some of us. Here’s to ’em, anyway.’ In loftier circles, and assisted by exclusion from the media of all discussion of Soviet barbarities, intellectual apologists extolled the virtues of Stalin’s society. The Republicans’ 1940 US presidential candidate Wendell Willkie wrote in his contemporary book One World: ‘First, Russia is an effective society. It works. It has survival value…Second, Russia is our ally in this war. The Russians, more sorely tested by Hitler’s might even than the British, have met the test magnificently…Third, we must work with Russia after the war…There can be no continued peace unless we learn to do so.’ British academic Sir Bernard Pares wrote in the Spectator about his nation’s ‘grateful recognition of the immense burden shouldered by a great and gallant people in our common struggle against the forces of evil, together with the earnest wish that after the war there should be a continuation of this close friendship, without which no peace in Europe is possible’.

Pares applauded a new account of Soviet society published by an American admirer: ‘It is a picture of…fallible human beings, ready to learn from their mistakes, amidst enormous difficulties…trying to build up in one of the most backward countries in Europe a new human society in which the chief consideration of the State goes to…the great mass of the population.’ Many people happily swallowed such nonsense, nodding that the war proved the superiority of the Soviet system. A friend told British soldier Henry Novy, ‘It hasn’t half shown up Communism…no other country could have done it, only a Communist country, with the people really behind it.’

It was probably true that only Russians could have borne and achieved what they did in the face of the 1941 catastrophe. It was less plausible to attribute this to the nobility of communist society. Until Barbarossa, Stalin sought to make common cause with Hitler, albeit to attain different objectives. Even when Russia became joined with the democracies to achieve the defeat of Nazism, Stalin pursued his quest for a Soviet empire, domination and oppression of hundreds of millions of people, with absolute single-mindedness and ultimate success. Whatever the merits of the Russian people’s struggle to expel the invaders from their country, Stalin’s war aims were as selfish and inimical to human liberty as those of Hitler. Soviet conduct could be deemed less barbaric than that of the Nazis only because it embraced no single enormity to match the Holocaust. Nonetheless, the Western Allies were obliged to declare their gratitude, because Russia’s suffering and sacrifice saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of young British and American soldiers. Even if no exalted assertion of principle – instead, only a grapple between rival monsters – caused Russia to become the principal battleground of the war, it was there that the Third Reich encountered the forces that would contrive its nemesis.

8

America Embattled

The people of the United States observed the first twenty-seven months of the struggle in Europe with mingled fascination, horror and disdain. The chief character in J.P. Marquand’s contemporary novel So Little Time says: ‘You could get away from the war for a little while, but not for long, because it was everywhere, even in the sunlight. It lay behind everything you said or did. You could taste it in your food, you could hear it in music.’ Many saw the conflict, and the triumphs of Nazism, as reflecting a collective European degeneracy. There was limited animosity towards the Axis, and some active support for Hitler in German ethnic communities. A Princeton poll on 30 August 1939 found that while 68 per cent of Americans thought that US citizens should not be permitted to enlist in the Wehrmacht, 26 per cent believed they should retain that option. Very few wanted to see their nation join either side in a bloodbath an ocean apart from their own continent. A Roper poll in September 1939 asked how the US should frame policy towards the warring nations. Among respondents, 37.5 per cent favoured eschewing partisanship, but continuing to sell goods to all parties on a cash-and-carry basis; some 23.6 per cent opposed any commercial traffic with any combatant; just 16.1 per cent favoured a modification of neutrality to offer aid to Britain and France if they were threatened with defeat. Interventionism enjoyed most support in the southern and western states.

For half the previous decade, President Franklin Roosevelt had been expressing dismay about his people’s reluctance to acknowledge their own peril. On 30 October 1939, he wrote to US London ambassador Joseph Kennedy: ‘We over here, in spite of the great strides towards national unity during the past six years, still have much to learn of the “relativity” of world geography and the rapid annihilation of distance and purely local economics.’ Given the strength of isolationism, however, between 1939 and 1941 he felt obliged to act with circumspection in aiding Britain. In many respects a cautious politician, he had to manage what one of his supporters called ‘the most volatile public opinion in the world’. White House familiar Robert Sherwood wrote: ‘Before the advent of calamity in Western Europe and of Winston Churchill, the Allied cause did not have a good smell even in the nostrils of those who hated Fascism and all its evil works.’

The writer John Steinbeck spent some weeks in the spring of 1940 sailing down the Pacific coast of South America, from whence he wrote to a friend on 26 March: ‘We haven’t heard any news of Europe since we left and don’t much want to. And the people we meet on the shore have never heard of Europe and they seem to be the better for it. This whole trip is doing what we had hoped it might, given us a world picture not dominated by Hitler and Moscow, but something more vital and surviving than either.’ Like many liberals, Steinbeck was convinced America would eventually have to fight, but viewed the prospect without enthusiasm. ‘If it weren’t for the coming war, I could look forward to a good quiet life for a few years,’ he wrote on 9 July.

The morning after Hitler invaded Norway in April 1940, reporters crowded into FDR’s office and asked if this brought the US closer to war. The president chose his words as carefully as ever: ‘You can put it this way: that the events of the past forty-eight hours will undoubtedly cause a great many more Americans to think about the potentialities of war.’ Roosevelt avowed reluctance to run for a third presidential term in 1940, and intimated that only world crisis, and explicitly the fall of France, persuaded him to do so. ‘The question of whether Roosevelt would run,’ wrote Adolf Berle, one of the president’s intimates, on 15 May that year, ‘is being settled somewhere on the banks of the Meuse River.’ The president’s equivocation was probably disingenuous since, like most national leaders, he loved power. Posterity is assured that no American was better qualified to direct the nation through the greatest emergency in world history, but an insistent minority of Roosevelt’s countrymen, notably including the business community, rejected this proposition at the time. Donald Nelson, who later became overlord of America’s industrial mobilisation, wrote: ‘Who among us except the President of the United States really saw the magnitude of the job ahead?…All the people I met and talked to, including members of the General Staff, the Army and Navy’s highest ranking officers, distinguished statesmen and legislators, thought of the defensive program only as a means of equipping ourselves to keep the enemy away from the shores of the United States.’

Rearmament had begun in May 1938, with Roosevelt’s $1.15 billion Naval Expansion Bill, followed by the November 1939 Cash-and-Carry Bill, modifying the Neutrality Act to allow belligerents – effectively, the French and British – to purchase American weapons. Roosevelt presided at a meeting of service chiefs at the White House, during which he instructed them to prepare for war and a large expansion of the armed forces. In 1940 he pushed through Congress a Selective Service Act imposing military conscription, and a $15 billion domestic rearmament programme. He delivered a personal message to the legislature declaring that he wanted the US to build 50,000 planes a year. This prompted a terse note from his chiefs of staff signed by the navy’s Admiral Harold ‘Betty’ Stark: ‘Dear Mr. President, – GREAT – Betty (for all of us).’ The US Army expanded from 140,000 men in September 1939 to 1.25 million two years later, but all three chiefs of staff knew that their services remained lamentably ill-prepared to fight a big war. Many members of the armed forces as well as of the civilian community remained unconvinced either that their nation should engage, or that it would.

Young Americans conscripted under the Selective Service Act sulked in their camps: ‘An army post in peacetime is a dull place,’ wrote Carson McCullers in a 1941 novel. ‘Things happen, but then they happen over and over again…Perhaps the dullness of a post is caused most of all by insularity and by a surfeit of leisure and safety, for once a man enters the Army, he is expected only to follow the heels ahead of him.’ Journalist Eric Sevareid described how Roosevelt was ‘slowly gathering together a reluctant, bewildered and resentful army. No civil leaders dared call them “soldiers” – as though there were something shameful in the word…Few made so bold as to suggest that their job was to learn to kill.’

The hesitant military build-up included purchase of an additional 20,000 horses. ‘The US Army started far too late to prepare seriously for World War II,’ wrote Martin Blumenson. ‘As a result, the training program, the procurement of weapons, and virtually all else were hasty, largely improvised, almost chaotic, and painfully inadequate throughout the intensely short period of mobilization and organization before and after Pearl Harbor.’ Lt. Col. Dwight Eisenhower, commanding an infantry battalion at Fort Lewis, Washington, told his men: ‘We’re going to war. This country is going to war, and I want people who are prepared to fight that war.’ But such rhetoric merely earned him the derisive nickname ‘Alarmist Ike’.

Many intellectuals disdained Europe’s war because they perceived it as a struggle between rival imperialisms, a view reflected in Quincy Howe’s 1937 tract England Expects Every American to do His Duty. They found it easier to contemplate an explicitly American crusade against fascism than one that allied them with the old European nations, recoiling from association with the preservation of the British, and for that matter French and Dutch, empires. They disliked the notion that the honour and virtue of the United States should be contaminated by association. They questioned whether a war fought in harness with old Tories could be dignified as a moral undertaking. The left-wing Partisan Review asserted: ‘Our entry into the war, under the slogan of “Stop Hitler!” would actually result in the immediate introduction of totalitarianism over here.’

The treasurer of Harvard, William Claflin, told the university’s president: ‘Hitler’s going to win. Let’s be friends with him.’ Robert Sherwood noted the number of businessmen such as Gen. Robert Wood, Jay Hormel and James Mooney likewise convinced of Hitler’s impending triumph, and thus ‘that the United States had better plan to “do business” with him’. At a meeting at the US Embassy in London on 22 July, senior diplomats agreed there was an even chance that Britain might still be unconquered by 30 September, but this tepid vote of confidence implicitly acknowledged a similarly plausible prospect that Churchill’s island might by that date be occupied. In the September 1940 Atlantic Monthly, Kingman Brewster and Spencer Klaw, editors respectively of the Yale and Harvard student papers, published a manifesto asserting students’ determination not to save Europe from Hitler.

The British read such declarations with understandable dismay. While their prime minister pinned all his hopes of ultimate victory on US belligerence, in the summer of 1940 his exasperation at the paucity of American aid was matched by scepticism about whether some Washington decision-makers could even be entrusted with British confidences. Churchill wrote on 17 July, opposing disclosure of sensitive defence information: ‘I am not in a hurry to give our secrets until the United States is much nearer to the war than she is now. I expect that anything given to the United States Services, in which there are necessarily so many Germans, goes pretty quickly to Berlin.’ He modified this view only when it became plain that frankness was indispensable to secure American supplies.