The Allies

by Winston Groom

  Stalin, however, had a secret weapon he did not mention. It was the Russian winter, which had decisively defeated many a Russian invader, most notably Napoleon. It would soon become so cold that the oil in German tanks would freeze solid and the bolts on soldiers’ rifles would become impossibly stuck.

  Dissatisfied with the stalled condition of his blitzkrieg in the East, Hitler, the former World War I corporal, fired his top generals von Rundstedt and Walther von Brauchitsch and seized personal command of his armies, which were waiting grievously for the Russian spring. Here was where the Führer started to become visibly unhinged.

  * * *

  CHURCHILL ANXIOUSLY AWAITED General Auchinleck’s big offensive in the Western Desert to drive Rommel back into Tunisia. Already Churchill was dreaming of invading Sicily, the key, he thought, to a “second front” of sorts against Italy—and the possibility of a drive northward up the Italian boot into Austria and Germany.

  Churchill continued to parlay regularly with Franklin Roosevelt, whom he desired above all things to bring into the fight. But he could not as yet see how to do it.25

  General Auchinleck’s offensive, Crusader, at last got off in the dark and driving rain on November 18, 1941. The first three days produced hopeful results, and the surprised Germans recoiled from the British armor and mechanized infantry. Then, four days later, the British lost a terrific tank-on-tank battle at a place called Sidi Rezegh and withdrew to safety, having lost nearly a third of their tanks.

  In an effort to confuse and panic the British, Rommel pulled a stunt that Auchinleck himself compared with Jeb Stuart’s 1862 ride around McClellan during the American Civil War. He got his Afrika Korps in the British rear, taking many prisoners, cutting off British communications, destroying equipment, and generally disrupting everything.

  The armored battle continued to seesaw until General Cunningham reported that “further continuation of our offensive might result in the annihilation of our tank force, and endanger the safety of Egypt.” Auchinleck immediately flew to Cunningham’s desert headquarters and relieved him, placing General Neil Ritchie in charge with orders to continue the offensive.

  After more than a month, Rommel drew off to the west in retreat. The British relieved the siege of Tobruk and the four Allied divisions therein. Reported losses after a month’s fighting were about three thousand British killed, seventy-five hundred wounded, and seven thousand missing, for a total of seventeen thousand and five hundred lost. The Germans suffered a combined thirty-three thousand dead, wounded, or captured.

  Churchill and the army considered this a victory and exulted while Rommel somehow refitted, replaced, and replenished his vaunted Afrika Korps for another blow.

  In the meantime, the appalling events on December 7, 1941, convulsed the United States of America. The Japanese sneak attack on the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor prompted an immediate American declaration of war against Japan. Hitler, in one of the most ill-considered decisions of his reign, abided by his mutual defense pact with the Japanese and declared war on the United States.

  *1 The countries Spain, Ireland, Portugal, and Switzerland remained neutral. The rest were conquered.

  *2 After the war, when news of the German code-breaking operation at Bletchley became public, a rumor started circulating that Churchill had known of a German air raid on the city of Coventry that killed more than five hundred people but didn’t warn them because he was afraid the Germans might figure out that he was reading their wireless signals. There is nothing, however, to substantiate that hypothesis.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  In the opening months of 1942 Stalin was having a family crisis of sorts. He’d had one of his spacious dachas in the Moscow suburb of Zubalova repaired after bomb damage and moved in Svetlana, his sixteen-year-old daughter, along with the infant daughter of his son Yakov, who was presently trapped in a German POW camp, along with her nurse. Yakov’s wife, Yulia, per Stalin’s infamous Order 270, in which the families of soldiers taken prisoner were to be punished, was off to the gulag labor camps.

  Stalin’s other son Vasily—a “crafty little brat,” according to his father—was a pilot in the Soviet air force, a raconteur, and a drunkard who brought a wide variety of acquaintances to the dacha, including “actors, athletes, and fellow pilots” to drink and dance. Stalin was furious when he learned that Vasily regularly used his status as the dictator’s son to curry favor from senior officers, such as spiffy quarters, home-cooked meals, and use of a car. He was even less impressed when the ace pilot V. Tsukanov, Vasily’s personal flying instructor who had been handpicked by Stalin, reported to the boss that Vasily “is an able flier but will always get into difficulties because of his drinking.”1

  In response to this feedback, Stalin grounded Vasily to a desk as an “aircraft inspector.” But wary superiors saw to it that promotions came regularly, and almost before anyone knew it Vasily was a lieutenant general. On those frequent occasions when he was drunk, he would sometimes shoot his revolver at crystal chandeliers in restaurants; he also preyed on the wives of friends and fellow pilots. During this time, he introduced Russia’s famous screenwriter and journalist Aleksei Kapler to his little sister Svetlana.2

  A pretty, smart, shy red-haired teenager, Svetlana had been on the outs with her father for a year. Someone had showed her a British magazine story about her mother Nadya’s suicide. Svetlana had been told that she’d died of peritonitis and was both horrified and resentful that the truth had been kept from her. Worse, she somehow suspected that her father may have had some hand in it.

  Although Svetlana was the favorite of his children, on those occasions when he saw her Stalin was now very strict, especially about her clothing, which he thought was too revealing. Stalin installed an NKVD agent to shadow her everywhere, ostensibly for her protection but also to ensure she did not get into “trouble.”

  Trouble came in the form of brother Vasily’s friend. The nearly forty-year-old Kapler was a spellbinding raconteur and ladies’ man. For the first time in her life Svetlana fell in love.

  * * *

  MUCH AS ROOSEVELT AND CHURCHILL were discovering for themselves, world affairs did not slow down during periods of Stalin’s family drama. At present, 3.5 million German soldiers were swarming over the western Soviet Union. Ferocious resistance and the Russian winter blunted the lightning speed of the Nazi blitzkrieg. But still the Germans came on, and 2 million Russian soldiers were dead. Hitler now controlled all the Soviet Republics in the western borderlands: Belorussia, Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. Fully half of Russia’s industrial and agricultural output was now under German occupation, as was nearly half its population.

  Hitler installed Nazi governments in every nation, state, city, town, and village. Then he began wiping out the population. The purpose of the invasion was ostensibly to obtain Lebensraum, or living space, for the German people. More to the point, Hitler wanted Pflanzensraum, or growing space, for crops to make Germany self-sufficient. So he needed to remove (i.e., liquidate) the collective farmers from their collective farms.

  Stalin seemed hapless and helpless against the onslaught. Dmitry Pavlov, the commanding general of Stalin’s Western Front defenses, and his entire staff were recalled to Moscow, where they were charged with treason for “cowardice, inaction, mismanagement, deliberate disorganization of the troops,” and summarily sentenced to be executed. Per Politburo orders, all their wives and children were sent to labor camps. As ever, Stalin dealt ruthlessly with those he perceived as failures. The generals asked to be taken back to the front to fight as ordinary soldiers, as atonement for their sins and errors. Stalin had them shot anyway and distributed the execution order, signed by himself, throughout the army. This was the kind of grisly terror employed to keep underlings obedient. When Averell Harriman, a messenger from President Roosevelt, praised the bravery of the Russian soldiers in their fight against H
itler, Stalin replied with ironic understatement, “It takes a very brave man to be a coward in the Russian army.”3

  * * *

  WHEN JOSEPH E. DAVIES, the former U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, received word of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, he happened to be having lunch with Ivy Litvinov, the wife of the new Soviet ambassador to the United States, Maxim Litvinov. “Thank God!” Davies blurted out, startling the Russian, whose immediate reaction was that war between the Americans and the Japanese was a bad thing, since it might interfere with the shipment of war materials to the Soviet Union. This was the kind of shortsighted communist reasoning the Americans and British had to put up with.4

  Roosevelt and virtually all of the U.S. diplomatic corps were besotted with the idea that the Soviets would now declare war on Japan, which would put the squeeze on the upstart island nation. But as it turned out that was wishful thinking. Stalin had always kept a wary eye on the Japanese, who had sunk two navies sent by the czar in the early part of the century, and who now glared at Russia across the Sea of Japan, bristling with guns and planes and ships and soldiers.

  Litvinov met next day with the U.S. secretary of state Cordell Hull to give him the news. When the Russian informed Hull that Stalin did not “at this time” wish to enter into a war with Japan, Hull lied to him: “I now have information that Japan is under the strictest commitment to Germany to attack Russia.” Litvinov absorbed the statement without comment.5

  Hull then proceeded to threaten Litvinov by suggesting that if Russia did not declare war on Japan, “there will be a constant flow of criticism” about why the United States is aiding Russia. That didn’t work either, so Roosevelt conceived the idea of arranging a special conference in the British-held fortress at Singapore to discuss the matter. But before anything could actually be decided, the Japanese invaded supposedly invincible Singapore and captured an entire British army of eighty-two thousand men. And there the matter rested until 1945.6

  As a kind of consolation prize, however, and to show that he was not unaware of his country’s image in the West, Stalin dropped the “Internationale” as the Soviet Union’s national anthem on grounds that its threat of a worldwide communist uprising might unsettle his newfound allies.

  * * *

  BY LATE FALL MOST OF the Moscow government and its war machine—including five hundred factories and companies and a quarter million skilled workers—had been evacuated to a remote area behind the Ural Mountains, eight hundred miles to the east. Dynamite was placed in all of the important buildings including the Kremlin, so that if the city fell nothing would be left for the Germans.

  Roosevelt’s emissary Averell Harriman reported that the Germans were so close he could see the flashes of their antiaircraft guns at night. A special train for high government officials and diplomats was waiting on a siding for the five-day trip, equipped with neither a dining car nor drinking water, let alone a lounge car or toilet. Then, at the last moment, Stalin refused to go.7

  He and Harriman got down to business then and there. Stalin asked what exactly the United States was willing and able to provide in the way of assistance; at that point, the Soviet treasury was empty, he told Harriman.

  The American envoy said that President Roosevelt was working to include the Soviet Union in its Lend-Lease program, and then returned to the United States with a grocery list of stupendous dimensions—everything from field telephones to undersea cable along with every imaginable type of weapon, ammunition, and transport vehicle. Two weeks later, Congress voted to give Lend-Lease status to Russia and the supplies began pouring out, thousands upon thousands of tanks, trucks, rail equipments, warplanes, and machinery of all description.

  Getting these things from U.S. ports to Russia, however, was problematic. On average, the United States lost one-quarter of its convoy ships in a typical Atlantic crossing. Take, for example, a convoy of forty-five U.S. cargo ships that steamed eastward in the North Atlantic for the Russian port of Archangel. German U-boats sank twenty-two and damaged eleven, which were then abandoned and destroyed. Two had returned to port with engine trouble. Ten reached their destination. Granted, this is an extreme example, but most convoys did not get through without some kind of scrape.*1

  In the initial days of the invasion Stalin’s confidence had faltered. He huddled in his dacha without hope. It was an apt time for him to engage in some self-reflection, for the enormous woes of the Russian army had mostly been caused by the Soviet premier himself, beginning with the mass executions of his top military officers during the show trials and purges of the late 1930s. But beyond that, Stalin had allowed the Soviet military to lapse into a state resembling malaise. According to one of his biographers Stalin, who had been bombarded for months with accurate intelligence on Hitler’s preparations, “now ascribed early German successes to the factor of surprise!”

  For years before the German invasion, Stalin consistently interfered and meddled with military matters to the detriment of Russian defense. For example, he intervened to impose the exclusive manufacture of a certain type of tank gun that he recalled from the World War I era. It was far too large a caliber to be of any use on present Soviet tanks, but the proper guns had been taken out of production, wasting precious time and resources. Stalin—who had never had military experience or training, let alone command of an army—put the people’s commissar for armaments in prison right before the German attack and caused the navy to build battleships that would prove ineffective. Everyone was afraid to contradict him, for fear of being shot or sent to Siberia. He stupidly dissolved his army’s only tank corps in 1939; by the time it was resurrected a few days before the German attack, it was too late to be put effectively into action. He also kept the Soviet air force far too near the frontier; German bombing of the runways meant the planes were either destroyed on the ground or, because the runways had been ruined, captured by the fast-moving Germans.8

  Meanwhile, the infantry was kept in static enclaves along the frontier, which were easily overrun by Hitler’s tanks and mobilized forces. The most infamous example of this was at Kiev, the capital city of Ukraine, where a Russian army of seven hundred thousand lay in the city or its outskirts while a two-pronged German assault rolled steadily toward them. The commanding general wanted to withdraw but Stalin ordered him to stand fast.

  It was about this time that Stalin issued his notorious Order 270, which made surrendering to the Germans a crime of “treason on the Motherland,” punishable by all the grim weights the word “treason” embodied. Plus, he decreed, the families of those found guilty would also be punished. The order was read to every individual unit of the armies, down to platoon level. For years after the war ended, millions of returning Russian POWs were treated as pariahs.

  As the Nazi juggernaut approached, the chief of staff in Kiev read the writing on the wall and sent a special message over the head of the commanding officer and his political commissar, pleading for a withdrawal to save the army. Stalin accused him of being a “panicmonger” and once more ordered them to hold on.

  In the end, nearly the entire army was either captured or killed. It was considered the largest encirclement in the history of warfare. Some six hundred thousand Russian soldiers became prisoners of war. Both the commanding officer and the chief of staff died trying to break out.

  Before the war, a member of the General Staff Academy had warned of all these potential errors in a book on new military strategies. But he was imprisoned until 1956 for the crime of being right. According to Stalin’s biographer Ronald Hingley, “So catastrophic were the…calamities, [and] so directly did they stem from Stalin’s directives and policies, that he [Stalin] could hardly have rendered Hitler better service if he had been an agent in German pay all the time.”9

  Now, however, after his initial psychotic fit and the consequent tactical and strategic errors, Stalin had gotten a grip on himself. His later-to-be-infamous spy in Tokyo, Richar
d Sorge, informed the Kremlin that the Japanese had no plans to attack Russia. That happy news freed Stalin to order his armies in the Far East to move to the Soviet front between Moscow and Leningrad. Marshal Zhukov had even begun to talk of an offensive.

  There were five Russian armies fighting outside Moscow, holding the Germans at bay. They fought furiously until being ultimately surrounded but fought on to the death. When the exhausted but victorious Germans prepared to claim Moscow as their prize, Stalin unleashed five fresh Russian armies on them from the Far Eastern Front—“Lads with fat, red faces wearing newish white sheepskin coats,” and armed with the powerful new T-34 tanks.10

  Stalin had stumbled upon a surprisingly effective strategy. After their long, arduous battles with the initial Russian armies, the Germans had become temporarily worn out, and thus were unprepared for an entirely new onslaught. The result was defeat and ultimately stalemate outside the gates of Moscow and Leningrad. At around this time, Stalin received Time magazine’s vaunted Man of the Year award—presumably, in part, for at least fighting back against the Nazis.

  This was the new strategy then: to sacrifice one large fighting force to wear the enemy down, then hit him with a fresh bludgeon just when he thinks he’s won. It works if you have the manpower and are willing to use it. Stalin did.

  The Germans were in a state of disbelief. General Franz Halder, chief of staff of the German army, wrote in his diary: “When the war began we had 200 divisions against us. Now, after the bloody losses they have suffered, we estimate that the number of [Russian] divisions is 360. Even if we smash a dozen of them the Russians will organize another dozen.”