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

Some ships ran out of anti-aircraft gun ammunition, but many attacks were beaten off. Men on the upper decks of the Polish destroyer Garland suffered shocking casualties from bomb near-misses. At Murmansk, the words ‘LONG LIVE POLAND’ were found scrawled on the ship’s upperworks in its crew’s blood; ‘They were hard men,’ a Merchant Navy officer said respectfully. All but seven ships of the convoy got through, and some 371 crewmen and gunners from lost vessels were rescued by extraordinary feats of courage and skill. Admiral Sir John Tovey, C-in-C of the Home Fleet, whose caution Churchill deplored, asserted that ‘the strategical situation was wholly favourable to the enemy’, but acknowledged that PQ16’s success was ‘beyond expectations’.

Yet the following month witnessed the most discreditable episode of the Royal Navy’s war. PQ17, comprising thirty-six ships, most of which were American, sailed from Iceland on 27 June, carrying 594 tanks, 4,246 vehicles, 297 aircraft and over 150,000 tons of military and general stores. The British knew from Ultra that the Germans planned a major effort against the convoy, including a sortie by capital ships codenamed Rosselsprung – ‘Knight’s Move’. Hitler had declared that ‘Anglo-American intentions…depend on sustaining Russia’s ability to hold out by maximum deliveries of war materials.’ At last, he recognised the importance of the Arctic convoys. The Admiralty assumed operational direction of PQ17 and its supporting units, because it had access to the latest Ultra intelligence, and experience showed that Tovey, at sea in his flagship, could not effectively control a large and widely dispersed force maintaining wireless silence.

Early skirmishes were of a familiar character. A Luftwaffe Condor took up station off Jan Mayen island on 1 July. He115 torpedo-carrying seaplanes made an unconvincing and unsuccessful attack, during which the US destroyer Wainwright charged headlong towards the attacking aircraft, firing everything it had. Yet on 3 July, the Admiralty ordered the convoy’s cruiser screen to turn away west, towards the German capital ships which it now believed were at sea. Next day three merchantmen were sunk. That evening, a disbelieving Captain ‘Jackie’ Broome, commanding the close escort, received a signal from London: ‘Secret and immediate. Owing to threat from surface ships convoy is to disperse and proceed to Russian ports.’ Thirteen minutes later, a further brief signal confirmed: ‘Convoy is to scatter.’ After reluctantly passing the order to his charges, Broome closed a merchantman and addressed its master through a loud-hailer: ‘Sorry to leave you like this, goodbye and good luck. It looks like a bloody business.’

Tirpitz indeed sortied briefly on 6 July, only to be ordered to return to Norway, to the disgust of its crew and escorts. A German destroyer captain wrote that day: ‘The mood is bitter enough. Soon one will feel ashamed to be on the active list…watching other parts of the armed forces fighting while we, “the core of the fleet” just sit in harbour.’ But the Germans had no need to risk their big ships: the Luftwaffe and U-boats sank twenty-four of PQ17’s merchantmen, struggling unprotected on lonely courses to Russia. Among their civilian crews, 153 men perished while British warships lost none. The shame of the Royal Navy was plain to behold, as were the disgust of the Americans and contempt of the Russians. It is indeed possible that PQ17 would have been destroyed by Tirpitz. But the navy’s response of ‘every man for himself’, the abandonment of the convoy by its escort, breached the tradition of centuries and inspired lasting mistrust within the merchant service, at a time when its morale was anyway precarious.

The decision resulted from a personal intervention by the First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir Dudley Pound. Pound already commanded scant confidence among his peers, and was in failing health. It is extraordinary that he was not sacked, but Churchill found him sympathetic, and thus he retained his post until shortly before his death in October 1943. A government minister, Philip Noel-Baker, was sent to Glasgow to address returning PQ17 survivors at St Andrew’s Hall. ‘We know what the convoy cost us,’ he told them. ‘But I want to tell you that whatever the cost, it was well worth it.’ He was howled down by embittered men. The government threw a censorship blanket over the entire episode, suppressing an eyewitness account by correspondent Godfrey Winn, who had sailed with the convoy. Only after the war was the magnitude of the Admiralty’s blunder revealed to the public.

PQ18 did not sail until September 1942, when it lost thirteen ships out of forty, ten of them to air attack. Among naval ratings and merchant seamen alike, it was now agreed that the Arctic passage represented the worst ordeal of the war at sea. Winn questioned Commander Robert Sherbrooke, recovering from severe wounds received when he won a VC for his part in one of the battles, about the loss of Bramble, in which the correspondent had sailed with PQ17. Sherbrooke said: ‘There was just a sudden flash of light on the horizon and that was all.’ Thus did nemesis strike many ships. A seaman described meeting survivors of the cruiser Edinburgh and finding them ‘rather sad and twitchy chaps’. Some men who served on the convoys remained afterwards traumatised by their experiences.

In the winter of 1942 another reckless Admiralty decision was made: to run some single merchantmen to Russia unescorted, manned by volunteer crews lured by cash bonuses of £100 an officer, £50 a man. Five out of thirteen such ships arrived. Of the remainder, one ran aground on Spitzbergen where its survivors suffered weeks of appalling privation – most died of gangrene following frostbite, before a handful were rescued by a passing Norwegian ski patrol. On another ship, the Empire Archer, there was a riot among firemen – the sweepings of Scotland’s notorious Barlinnie jail – who gained access to rum intended for Archangel. Two sailors were stabbed before discipline was restored.

Even when ships reached Russia, they found little to cheer them. ‘The arrival in Kola Inlet was eerie,’ wrote one sailor. ‘It was December and pretty dark. There were great swirls of fog, black water and white snow-covered ice. The bare rocks on either side of the inlet were menacing and silence was broken only by constant sounding of mournful fog-horns of various pitches…I felt that if Hell were to be cold, this would be a foretaste of it.’ At Murmansk they remained subject to almost daily Luftwaffe attack. A bomb fell into the bunker of the freighter Dover Hill, where it lodged unexploded beneath twenty feet of coal. Her captain and crew laboured for two days and nights, removing coal in buckets, before with infinite caution they were able to hoist the bomb to the deck for defusing. Ashore, Russian hospitality was frigid, facilities negligible. Some British seamen arrived proclaiming an enthusiasm for their Soviet comrades-in-arms, which vanished amid the bleak reception. American sailors, denied every comfort to which they were accustomed, recoiled in disgust. The Allies were permitted to harbour no delusions that Western assistance merited Soviet gratitude. In the words of a Russian after the war, ‘God knows we paid them back in full – in Russian lives.’ Which was true.

The turn of the year proved the critical landmark of the campaign. Weather and the enemy – especially U-boats armed with acoustic homing torpedoes – ensured that service on Arctic convoys never became less than a miserable and alarming experience, but losses fell dramatically. In 1943 the Royal Navy was at last able to deploy escort carriers and powerful antisubmarine and anti-aircraft defences. The Germans, hard-pressed in Russia and the Mediterranean, were obliged to divert much of their air and U-boat strength from Norway. Hitler refused to sanction major warship attacks on convoys until an ill-judged sortie was attempted by Scharnhorst in December 1943, which resulted in its sinking off the North Cape by a British fleet led by the battleship Duke of York.

The US began to move massive supplies by other routes: half of all wartime American shipments reached Russia through its Pacific ports, a quarter through Persia, and only a quarter – 4.43 million tons – via Archangel and Murmansk. The human cost of the PQs was astonishingly small by the standards of other battlefields: though eighteen warships and eighty-seven merchantmen were lost, only 1,944 naval personnel and 829 merchant seamen died serving on Arctic convoys between 1941 and 1945. The Germans lost a battleship, three destroyers, thirty-two U-boats and unnumbered aircraft. Given their extraordinary opportunities for strategic dominance of the Arctic in 1942, what is remarkable is not how many Allied ships they sank, but how few.

The Royal Navy accounted the Russian convoys among its most formidable wartime challenges. It was the service’s misfortune that the professionalism and courage which characterised its performance were tarnished by the memory of PQ17. The Fleet Air Arm never distinguished itself in the north, partly for lack of good aircraft. Some of the navy’s most senior officers failed to display imagination to match the courage and seamanship of their subordinates. They refused to acknowledge, as Churchill and Roosevelt always acknowledged, that at any cost aid must be seen to be sent to Russia. If the supplies shipped in 1941–42 were of greater symbolic than material importance to the outcome of the war on the Eastern Front, they were a vital earnest of Western Allied support for the decisive campaign to destroy Hitler.

3 THE ORDEAL OF PEDESTAL

Between 1940 and 1943, the Mediterranean witnessed some of the bloodiest fighting of the Royal Navy’s war. British submarines, based on Malta when conditions there allowed, attacked Axis supply lines to North Africa with some success. Battle squadrons sought to assert themselves in the face of the Italian navy, U-boats and the Luftwaffe. Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham inflicted severe damage on the Italian fleet in his November 1940 carrier air strike against Taranto, and in the surface action off Cape Matapan on 28–29 March 1941. But every capital ship sortie into open waters within range of the enemy was a perilous venture, which took a harrowing toll. The carrier Illustrious was badly damaged by German bombing in January 1941. On 25 November that year, the battleship Barham blew up, with the loss of most of its crew, after being torpedoed by a German submarine. The battleships Queen Elizabeth and Valiant rested for seven months on the floor of Alexandria harbour after falling victim to an attack by courageous Italian human-torpedo crews on 19 December 1941. The Royal Navy, having lost five capital ships in a month, was for a time obliged to cede the central Mediterranean to the Axis. There was a steady drain of British cruiser and destroyer losses to mines, bombs and torpedoes. For some months in 1941, the navy suffered severely while holding open a sea link to besieged Tobruk, which was deemed symbolically if not militarily important.

The pervasive strategic reality was that the Royal Navy remained vulnerable in the Mediterranean until the British Army could gain control of the North African littoral, providing the RAF with bases. In 1942, the hazards were increased by German deployment of U-boat reinforcements. But Winston Churchill conducted the war effort on the basis that Britain must be seen to challenge the enemy at every opportunity, especially when the army accomplished so little for so long. Malta, within easy range of Axis Sicilian air bases, suffered almost three years of intermittent bombardment. In March and April 1942 the little island received twice the bomb tonnage dropped on London during the entire blitz; its people almost starved, and its resident submarine flotilla had to be withdrawn. The requirement to sustain Malta became a priority for the Royal Navy, and every supply ship had to be fought through in the face of air, U-boat and surface attack. Each convoy demanded a supporting fleet operation: there must be battleships in case Italian heavy units sortied, carriers to provide air cover, and cruiser and destroyer escorts. Each venture precipitated an epic battle. The most famous, or notorious, took place in August 1942, when Malta’s shortages of oil, aircraft and food attained desperate proportions: Operation Pedestal was launched to bring succour.

Vice-Admiral Edward Syfret took command of the battlefleet that sailed from the Clyde on 3 August, escorting fourteen merchantmen. Several of these were chartered American ships, notably the tanker Ohio, provided with British crews. All had been fitted with anti-aircraft armament manned by soldiers, and on the passage to Gibraltar the convoy intensively exercised both gunnery and manoeuvre. The ships that set forth on 10 August to make the Malta passage formed a mighty array: the battleships Nelson and Rodney; fleet carriers Victorious, Indomitable and Eagle; the old carrier Furious, ferrying Spitfires to reinforce the island as soon as the range narrowed sufficiently to fly them off; six cruisers; twenty-four destroyers and a flotilla of smaller craft. To one cadet aboard a merchantman it was ‘a fantastically wonderful sight’.

Only weeks had elapsed since the Royal Navy’s Arctic humiliation, and the service felt on its mettle: a destroyer captain, Lt. Cmdr. David Hill, said: ‘There was a strong touch of desperation and bloody-mindedness following PQ17.’ One of the Pedestal destroyer flotillas, led by ‘Jackie’ Broome, had endured that ghastly experience. A host of German and Italian eyes, watching Gibraltar from Spain and North Africa, saw the fleet sail. Axis commanders were undeceived by a feint convoy which sailed simultaneously from Alexandria, trailing its coat in the eastern Mediterranean. ‘I felt indeed that some of our party were entering the narrow seas on a desperate venture,’ wrote George Blundell of the battleship Nelson, ‘and prayed to the Ruler of Destiny for his favour.’

On the 11th, amid a still, azure sea Furious began flying off its Spitfires, which set course for Malta, 550 miles distant, where most arrived safely. But now the first disaster struck. In the western Mediterranean, Asdic was confused by freak underwater conditions created by the confluence of warm seas with colder Atlantic currents: ships were thus acutely vulnerable to submarine attack. Even as the fighters were being launched, a salvo of torpedoes fired by U-73 struck Eagle, which sank in eight minutes with the loss of 260 of her complement of 1,160 men. ‘She presented a terrible sight as she heeled over, turned bottom up and sank with horrible speed,’ wrote an awestruck witness. ‘Men and aircraft could be seen falling off her flight deck as she capsized…It makes one tremble. If anyone took a good film of it, it should be shown throughout the country…I remember thinking of the trapped men.’ That evening Furious, its flight deck now empty, turned for home and safety. One of her escorts, the destroyer Wolverine, spotted an Italian submarine and raced in to ram; the Axis boat sank, but Wolverine suffered severe damage.

At 2045 the first enemy air attack was launched against Pedestal, by thirty-six Heinkel 111s and Ju88s flying from Sicily. These achieved no hits, and four German aircraft fell to the intense AA barrage. Next day at noon, a much more serious strike took place, by seventy bombers and torpedo-carriers with fighter escort. The ensuing battle lasted two hours. The freighter Deucalion was damaged and later sunk off the Tunisian coast by a torpedo-bomber, despite gallant efforts to save the ship by her master, Captain Ramsay Brown. During the afternoon, the convoy survived a submarine ambush unscathed. The destroyer Ithuriel rammed and sank another Italian boat, at the cost of crippling herself.

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.

12

The Furnace: Russia in 1942

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:

Eastern man is very different from his Western counterpart. He has a much greater capacity for enduring hardship, and this passivity induces a high degree of equanimity towards life and death…Eastern man does not possess much initiative; he is accustomed to taking orders, to being led. [The Russians] attach little importance to what they eat or wear. It is surprising how long they can survive on what to a Western man would be a starvation diet…Close contact with nature enables these people to move freely by night or in fog, through woods and across swamps. They are not afraid of the dark, nor of their endless forests, nor of the cold…The Siberian, who is partially or completely Asiatic, is even tougher…The psychological effect of the country on the ordinary German soldier was considerable. He felt small and lost in that endless space…A man who has survived the Russian enemy and the Russian climate has little more to learn about war.

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.’

It is important to view the events of the year in context. In 1941, Russia suffered 27.8 per cent of its total war losses. But in 1942 Kharkov, the Crimea and Kerch peninsula disasters accounted for even larger casualties. When Stalingrad was added, the year as a whole cost Russia 28.9 per cent of its overall casualties in the conflict, 133 per cent of the Red Army’s front-line strength. Posterity knows that Stalin learned vital lessons: he started to delegate military decisions to competent generals, and the worst blunderers were dismissed. The weapons created by Russia’s industrial mobilisation and production beyond the Urals began to reach her armies, increasing their strength while that of the Axis shrank. But none of this was apparent to the world in the summer of 1942. Germany still seemed irresistible on the battlefield, Russia at its last gasp.

Almost all British, and also later American, attempts to collaborate operationally with Stalin’s people foundered on the rocks of their ally’s secretiveness, incompetence, ill-will and paucity of means. The Royal Navy’s requests for the aid of Soviet warships and aircraft to cover British convoys approaching Murmansk and Archangel yielded meagre responses. In August 1942, an RAF Catalina delivered to north-west Russia two SIS agents, whom the Soviets had agreed to parachute into north Norway. Their hosts instead detained the two men incommunicado for two months before dropping them, still in summer clothing, inside Finland rather than Norway, where they were swiftly arrested, tortured and shot. Thereafter, the British recognised that cooperation with the Russians was an exclusively one-way proposition; that the consequences of placing Allied personnel at the mercy of Soviet goodwill were often fatal.

Nonetheless, the Western governments went to extravagant lengths to preserve a semblance of unity. When Gen. Anders, who had suffered in Stalin’s prisons between 1939 and 1941, met Churchill in Cairo in August 1942, he vehemently denounced the Soviet Union: ‘There was, I said, no justice or honour in Russia, and not a single man there whose word could be trusted. Churchill pointed out to me how dangerous such language would be if spoken in public. No good, he said, could come of antagonising the Russians…Churchill closed the talk by saying that he believed Poland would emerge from the war a strong and happy country.’ Anders allowed himself to be persuaded that ‘We Poles were now going home (so we thought) by a different route, a longer one, indeed, but one with fewer hardships.’ The Western Powers exerted themselves to sustain this delusion.

The Germans encountered the first units of the Stalingrad Front on 23 July, some eighty-seven miles west of the city. That night, Hitler made what proved the decisive blunder of the war in the east. He issued a new directive, declaring the objectives of Blue completed. Army Group A was ordered to overrun the Caucasus oilfields 745 miles beyond its existing positions – a longer advance than the German drive from the Siegfried Line to the Channel coast in May 1940. Its formations soon found themselves attempting to sustain a front five hundred miles wide with hopelessly inadequate forces, against stubborn Russian resistance. Meanwhile Army Group B commenced operations designed to close up to a line along the Volga and secure Stalingrad. Manstein was transferred northwards with five infantry divisions and the siege artillery he had used at Sevastopol, to end the tiresome resistance at Leningrad: following a change of policy, Berlin was now impatient to occupy the city. The next news from Sixth Army showed that its progress towards Stalingrad had become sluggish. Hitler, irked, ordered that Fourth Panzer Army should be diverted from the Caucasus to support Paulus. He thus divided his strength in a fashion which rendered each element of his forces too weak to attain its objectives.

But August 1942 was another season of Russian catastrophes. One of Stalin’s favourites, the old Bolshevik warhorse Marshal Semyon Budyonny, presided over a series of shambolic defeats in the northern Caucasus. Sixth Army wrecked Russian forces on the Don east of Kalach, taking 50,000 prisoners; an entire Soviet tank army collapsed, with crews abandoning their vehicles in panic. On 21 August, Paulus launched a dash from the Don to the Volga, blasting a path through the defenders with waves of dive-bombers. In two days, his forces reached the river nine miles north of Stalingrad. The city’s capture seemed imminent, and he dispatched to Hitler a draft of his plans for Sixth Army’s move into winter quarters. Far to the south, on 9 August mountain troops took Maikop, most accessible of the Caucasian oilfields, where Russian demolitions proved so thorough that it was deemed necessary to bring equipment from Germany to drill new wells. Army Group A’s spearheads began pushing east for the Caspian; Seventeenth Army was directed southwards through the mountains towards the Black Sea.

The entire Caucasian advance was hamstrung by Hitler’s orders to divert available fuel and ammunition supplies to Paulus. Among the Nazi hierarchy in Berlin, however, there was another surge of optimism. Rommel was at the gates of Cairo; armaments production was rising; Germany’s Japanese allies had achieved extraordinary triumphs, and the implications of American naval successes at the Coral Sea and Midway were barely comprehended. Dönitz’s U-boats were devastating Atlantic convoys; an Italian submarine commander reported that he had sunk an American battleship, and was decorated by Mussolini for his flight of fantasy. German civilian morale revived.