Disaster at Stalingrad

by Peter G. Tsouras

  Roosevelt knew the risk the Navy took. He had loved the service ever since his days as Assistant Secretary of the Navy in the First World War. Certainly more than the Army, the Navy had the affection of his heart. Chief of Staff of the Army General George C. Marshall on one occasion had to appeal to the President not to use the term ‘we’ when referring to the Navy and ‘them’ when referring to the Army. Yes, he loved the Navy. He also knew the Navy and he knew its valour was more adamant than the armour plate of its battleships. He finally made the decision. The Wasp would return to the Atlantic.

  King’s revenge was petty. Wasp was about to exchange its old Vought SB2U Vindicator dive-bombers for new Douglas SBD-3 Dauntlesses and replace its torpedo-bombers with Grumman TBF-1 Avengers. He decided that if he could not keep the carrier in the Pacific, he could at least keep the newer aircraft. He ordered the Wasp to proceed directly to Britain with its original compliment of Vindicators.12

  Upon reflection, King thought that there was some slight satisfaction to be found in seeing Wasp snatched back by the Royal Navy. Wasp had been designed simply because the United States had another 15,000 tons authorized for building aircraft carriers after the Enterprise and Yorktown were built, by the Washington Treaty of 1922 on limiting the size and number of warships in the major navies. It had only three-quarters the tonnage of those two carriers and half that of HMS Victorious. It was underpowered and had almost no armour or protection from torpedoes. And, like all American carriers, it had a wooden teak deck, unlike British carriers which had armoured decks.

  At least, King thought, Roosevelt had not been hornswoggled by Churchill into giving up one of the bigger carriers. If that had happened, his troubles would have been over, for the following towering rage would have stroked him out.

  Along the Donets east of Kharkov, 19 June 1942

  Major Joachim Reichel, Operations Officer of 23rd Panzer Division, was headed for XVII Corps forward command post to look over the division’s march area. He was not aware that the pilot of his Storch light observation plane had wandered over the front lines until a rifle bullet punched through the plane’s fuel tank. The plane landed near the Russian lines. They had barely landed and got out of the plane when an enemy patrol arrived. Reichel and the pilot were shot on the spot. The patrol leader was then horrified to find that Reichel’s uniform bore the red trouser stripes of a General Staff officer. He realized that he had just killed the most prized of all prisoners; strict orders had been issued to all Soviet units that such prisoners were to be kept alive and well treated. To hide the evidence of his blunder, the patrol leader had the men stripped of their uniforms and hastily buried.

  He had the good sense though to retrieve the map board and documents that Reichel had been carrying. When they were read by Timoshenko at his Southwest Front headquarters, he immediately had them flown directly to Moscow by special courier aircraft. They were the initial plans for Operation Blue. That night they were in Stalin’s hands. He dismissed them immediately as a deception. He pounded the table at his generals and insisted that Moscow was the target.

  Hitler, on the other hand, took the loss far more seriously. He became incoherent with rage and ordered the court-martial of the major’s division and corps commanders. The offensive of 68 German and 30 allied divisions had been profoundly endangered. At the urging of Bock and Paulus, he agreed to maintain the schedule for the offensive. It was simply too late to change. On the 22nd 6th Army had seized another bridgehead over the Donets at Kupyansk. Things were now going to happen automatically.

  Hvalfjord, Iceland, 27 June 1942

  Convoy PQ-17 departed the Icelandic port with 37 ships for the Soviet ports of Murmansk and Archangelsk. The holds of its ships were stuffed with 156,000 tons of cargo designed to keep the Soviets fighting — almost 600 tanks, 300 bombers, and 5,000 trucks, in addition to general cargo that included specialized vehicles, radar sets, steel plate, ammunition, and foodstuffs. A Soviet tanker was filled with linseed oil. The military equipment alone was enough to equip several fronts and an air army. It was the largest convoy yet. Twenty ships were American, twelve British, two Soviet, one Dutch, one Norwegian, and one Panamanian.13

  Sailing with the convoy was its close escort of six destroyers, four corvettes, three minesweepers, two antiaircraft ships, and four trawlers under the command of Commander J. E. Broome, RN, to provide antisubmarine and anti-air protection. Two submarines shadowed the convoy should it be threatened by German surface ships.

  The 1st Cruiser Covering Force was also ordered to rendezvous with the convoy on 2 July and remain with it until the 4th or ‘as circumstances dictate’.14 Four cruisers, HMS Norfolk and London and USS Wichita and Tuscaloosa, and three destroyers were commanded by Rear Admiral L. H. K. Hamilton, RN. The admiral was more than pleased to have the two American cruisers with his covering force. Each had nine 8-inch guns compared to eight for his two Royal Navy cruisers. Also, the American ships were newer, with much thicker armour on belt, turret and deck. He knew how thin-skinned his own ships were in comparison. He was worried about HMS London in which he carried his flag. The ship had already been repaired once for significant stress damage that had led to hull cracks and popped rivets.

  A third layer of defence was added by the distant covering force of the battleships HMS Duke of York and King George V and USS Washington, heavy cruisers HMS Cumberland, Kent, and Nigeria, aircraft carriers HMS Victorious and USS Wasp, and fourteen destroyers. The American ships had been redesignated TF.99, commanded by Rear Admiral R. C. Giffen, USN, who had his flag aboard Washington. Tovey was prepared to sortie with the only two Royal Navy battleships left in the Home Fleet. The only other battleship was HMS Nelson which had just completed repairs in May but was scheduled to return to the Mediterranean as a vital escort to the Malta convoys.

  The fact that the United States had been in the war barely six months presented another problem with the crews of some of its merchant ships. Suddenly confronted with a global naval war and its supply demands, America’s pool of experienced seamen was inadequate and had to be filled out with what were perhaps unkindly referred to as ‘mercenaries and an international mob of cutthroat nomads’. Thus it was fortuitous that each merchant ship was also provided with naval guncrews to man its antiaircraft defences. One ship in particular was a problem child. The SS Troubadour, a 22-year-old, British-built, 5,808-ton steamer that now flew the Panamanian flag. As soon as America entered the war, ‘its seventeen-nation crew of ex-convicts and the rakings of the US deportation camps’, promptly scuttled it. One month before at New York its ammunition magazine had been deliberately flooded.15

  The British had their own problems despite the hard school of the first two years of the war. The rule was that a seaman’s wages were stopped when his ship was sunk, a morale builder if there ever was one. Qualified seamen were in such short supply that the government began conscripting men for the Merchant Navy. Retired men in their seventies were called back, and teenagers too young for the Royal Navy found work at sea. At one point, the British would become so desperate as to recruit inmates from Glasgow’s notorious Barlinnie Prison to act as firemen for a £100 bonus. ‘The men broached a consignment of rum intended for the Russian-based minesweeper flotilla and [the report continued with typical British understatement] a disturbance ensued.’ Clearly the convoy would have more to worry about than the Germans and the Arctic.16

  Voronezh, 28 June 1942

  This large city, only 280 miles south of Moscow, was both a major armaments centre and the junction linking vital north-south rail lines that ran between Moscow and the Volga basin and the river routes that linked Moscow with the Black and Caspian Seas. At the confluence of the Voronezh and Don rivers, Voronezh commanded numerous river crossings over the Don as well. Stalin fully expected 4th Panzer and 2nd Armies to attack from the area of Kursk north towards Orel and Moscow. On the morning of the 28th, those two German armies instead attacked towards Voronezh, 120 miles distant.

  Stalin s
till clung to the notion of Moscow as the German objective; only now he believed the attack would be from the direction of Voronezh! However much the Germans worried that Major Reichel’s misfortune had let the cat out of the bag, they could not have asked for a more dangerously misleading appreciation of their intentions. For the Germans, however, possession of Voronezh was to guard the northern flank of Army Group South’s offensive. After it was quickly taken, 4th Panzer Army would rush down the west bank of the Don cutting off Timoshenko’s Southwest Front. It would be another great encirclement as in 1941, but this one would break the back of the Red Army.

  The spear tip of the German attack was the new 24th Panzer Division created from the conversion of German cavalry units. It struck like a thunderbolt with the VIII Fliegerkorps providing direct support. The panzers overran several Soviet rifle divisions then bounced the first barrier, the Tim River, driving over the bridges as men tore away the burning demolition fuzes. Almost the first man over the bridge was the division commander, ahead even of his panzer regiment. That evening the panzers raced into the village of Yefrosinovka. The German commander could only exclaim, ‘What’s going on here?’ He saw ‘a forest of signs at the entrance of the village, radio trucks, staff horses, trucks’. They had found by chance the headquarters of the Soviet 40th Army. Most of the headquarters personnel barely escaped, but they had lost their equipment, and now 40th Army was leaderless.17

  As 4th Panzer Army reached the halfway point to Voronezh, 6th Army launched its attack northeast from Volchansk with General der Panzertruppen Leo Freiherr Geyr von Schweppenburg’s XL Panzer Corps, the other arm of the great encirclement of a great part of Timoshenko’s Southwest Front that Hitler had been so confident of. His orders were to link up with 4th Panzer Army’s XLVIII Panzerkorps under General Kempf. Everyone expected that another huge haul of prisoners would result, as it had time and time again since the Germans first crossed the Soviet border on 22 June 1941.

  Soviet Azerbaijan, 30 June 1942

  Over 2,000 trucks had rolled out of the American-built truck assembly plant at Andimeshk that month and crossed the Persian border by rail into Soviet Azerbaijan where they were reloaded into Soviet boxcars. Three more assembly plants were under construction. Some 120 A-20 Havoc bombers had been flown in and transferred to Soviet aircrews. Overall, 92,000 tons of Allied cargoes had been sent to the Soviets that month by this route. That was 47 per cent of all aid. In contrast, the deliveries to the Soviet Far East across the Pacific amounted to only 15.6 per cent of all aid. If anything happened to the Arctic route, it seemed that the Persian Corridor could more than pick up the slack. Clearly, the OKM staff had been prescient in its predictions of the danger presented by the Persian Corridor.18

  Kirkenes, Norway, 30 June 1942

  Goring had been as good as his word. He had heavily reinforced Colonel General Hans Stumpff’s Luftflotte 5, which already had concentrated 264 aircraft in northern Norway. Barely a week ago 115 Focke-Wulf Fw 190 fighters of Jagdgeschwader 26 (JG 26 — Fighter Group 26) arrived from France only days behind the hurried arrival of their ground crews. The airfields around Bardufoss and Banak were fully able to accommodate them.

  The Fw 190 outclassed even the latest British Spitfires and added a fighter element that was directly meant to counter Hitler’s fear of the enemy’s aircraft carriers. Goring had focused on the Führer’s anxiety in this matter and gave him his word that the Luftwaffe would take care of the aircraft carriers. In addition to the Fw 190s, Stumpff’s force included 74 reconnaissance aircraft, mostly from KG 40 based in Trondheim, 103 Junkers Ju 88 bombers, 30 Junkers Ju 87 Stuka dive-bombers of Stukageschwader 30 (StG 30), and 42 Heinkel He 111 torpedo-bombers of KG 26. The Navy had another 15 Heinkel He 115 torpedo-bombers on floats, almost the only combat aircraft Goring had allowed it to possess. The only aircraft that probably could not be used to strike at the convoy at distances of 150 miles or more was the Stuka with its limited range of 310 miles. The other bomber aircraft all had ranges exceeding 1,200 miles.

  With JG 26 came General der Jagdflieger Adolf Galland. Goring had sent him to coordinate Luftwaffe operations. It was a shrewd choice. The 26th had been the command in which he had so distinguished himself that Goring had appointed him as inspector-general of all the Luftwaffe’s fighters, essentially a staff job since the Jagdgeschwadern were not under his operational command. He had led the pilots of the 26th in the Battles of France and Britain, achieving ninety-six kills in air-to-air combat. For that and his leadership of JG 26 he was awarded the Diamonds to his Knight’s Cross with Oak Leaves and Swords.19

  Rösselsprung would not be the first time he had worked with the Kriegsmarine. Shortly after his promotion he had prepared and executed the German air superiority plan (Operation Donnerkeil) for the Kriegsmarine’s Operation Cerberus, from his headquarters at Jever. The Navy had been very appreciative; not a single ship suffered damage from air attack, and Luftflotte 3 shot down forty-three British planes.20 Galland’s presence would do much to facilitate cooperation between the Kriegsmarine and Luftwaffe in the coming operation.

  CHAPTER 5

  The Battle of Bear Island

  Hvalfjord, Iceland, 1 July 1942

  At two in the morning the cruiser covering force put to sea to shadow PQ-17. In command was Rear Admiral Louis ‘Turtle’ Hamilton, of whom it was said that he was a ‘bachelor wedded to the White Ensign, courteous, unflappable and popular’. He was also an aggressive commander who believed along with Churchill that the best place for the German surface fleet was on the bottom. That was about all he agreed on with Churchill, castigating him for his failure to use the RAF to help clear the sea of Kriegsmarine vessels rather than bombing Germany.1 He had been heartened to know that the USS Wasp would add its airpower to that of HMS Victorious in this operation.

  He had been more than pleased at the enthusiasm and cooperation of his two American cruiser captains. His orders were not to engage any force heavier than his. Unfortunately that order was a conundrum of sorts. Of the seven major German ships that were expected to challenge the convoys, according to the report from Sweden, only two, Hipper and Prinz Eugen, matched his own 8-inch guns. The problem was that both ships were part of task forces that included ships with heavier guns. In effect, his orders were not to fight anything larger than a destroyer. He would see about that.

  ‘Anything larger’ was to be handled by the Home Fleet covering force following at a distance of 200 miles.

  In issuing his operations order, Hamilton directed that, ‘The primary object is to get PQ-17 to Russia, but an object only slightly subsidiary is to provide an opportunity for the enemy’s heavy ships to be brought to action by our battlefleet and cruiser covering force.’ He also clearly stated that, ‘It is not my intention to engage any enemy unit which includes Tirpitz, which must be shadowed at long range and led to a position at which interception can be achieved by the Commander-in-Chief.’2 Now, only if the Germans would cooperate, he could pull off the classic role of the cruiser and pull Tirpitz towards its destruction at the hands of the battleships. Any other group of German ships he would not hesitate to fight it out with.

  Reporting aboard Wichita was Admiral Giffen’s flag lieutenant ‘for temporary additional duty’, whose job it was to write an ‘hour by hour chronicle’ of the voyage. Lieutenant Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., USNR, was an intelligent and perceptive man, and his chronicle would do much to untangle the events that were to come.3

  That night Fairbanks recorded the address of the executive officer in the hangar deck aft on the coming operation to the entire crew who listened with ‘solemn, tense faces’. Later that evening Captain H. W. Hill gathered his officers in the wardroom and in an impersonal command tone reminded them of the importance of the convoy to the war effort, that it was worth $700,000,000, and that there was intelligence that there was likely to be a knock-down, drag-out naval battle to protect it. Now that they had this warning, they were to do their utmost. Discipline had to be perfect. Fairb
anks then recorded that Hill ‘leaned on the table and smiled: “Do you realize, I’ve been in the Navy since before many of you were born?” His eyes glistened visibly as he went on, “All my life I’ve been studying, training, and waiting for this one moment — and now it’s come!” He sighed, wagged his head, and with a wave added, “Good luck to you all!’”4

  Both sides were rolling for the whole pot; every available heavy ship had put to sea. The Germans were determined to destroy the convoy. The Allies were equally determined to defend the convoy and fight it out with the Germans. The British particularly were haunted by the lost opportunity in the great naval battle of the First World War at Jutland in 1916 when the German High Seas Fleet was allowed to escape and serve as a threatening fleet in being for the rest of the war. For too long the German surface fleet centred on the Tirpitz had filled the same role as its ancestor.

  The determination to prevail is vital in any military or naval contest, but there were concrete obstacles in its way. The closer the Allied forces approached Norway, the closer they came to the reach of Luftflotte 5’s aircraft. For the two Allied carriers to support the big ships, they in turn had to come within range of the same German aircraft and that included JG 26’s Fw 190s, at that time the finest fighters in the world.

  And therein lay a problem. The Vindicator dive-bombers aboard Wasp were already obsolete before the war. Their crews disparagingly referred to them as Vibrators or Wind-indictors. The Royal Navy had taken over a French order for Vindicators and renamed the aircraft the Chesapeake and had to up-gun and up-armour the aircraft. Aircrews referred to it as the Cheesecake. They were withdrawn from British service in late 1941. The Wasp’s fighter squadron was equipped with Grumman F4F Wildcats. Its torpedo-bombers were the Devastator TBD-1, nicknamed the Torpecker by its crews. It was slow and scarcely manoeuvrable, with light defensive weaponry and poor armour relative to the weapons of the time; its speed on a glide-bombing approach was a mere 200mph, making it easy prey for fighters and defensive guns alike. The aerial torpedo could not even be released at speeds above 115mph. Torpedo delivery requires a long, straight-line attack run, making the aircraft vulnerable, and the slow speed of the aircraft made them easy targets for fighters and antiaircraft guns.5 Wasp’s air wing counted 75 aircraft–27 F4F fighters, 33 Vindicators, and 15 Devastators.