The Moscow Option

by David Downing

  For the moment it did not seem to matter. The battle in the air went well for the Americans. Yamamoto’s caution had deprived the Japanese bombers of sufficient fighter support, radar had given the Americans ample warning, and the less experienced pilots under the veteran Fuchida found it hard to pierce the defences. Only a few hits were scored on the three carriers and none proved crippling. The surviving Japanese attackers turned for home, leaving the Americans with the brief illusion that the battle was going their way.

  But at this moment a stunned radar operator on Yorktown picked up another flight of aircraft approaching from the south-east. Fletcher’s fears had been justified. It must have been little consolation. The fleet was scattered across the sea in the aftermath of the attack; its fighter cover, in any case thinned almost to exhaustion, was dispersed and lacking altitude. The three carriers were virtually naked.

  The thoughts passing through Admiral Halsey’s mind at this moment will never be known. In minutes his expectations of victory must have turned to the nightmare knowledge of certain defeat. He did not have to suffer such thoughts for long. The Pearl Harbor veterans from Shokaku and Zuikaku came diving out of the sun at the helpless carriers, lancing in across the waves through the broken screen of covering ships. Enterprise was immediately hit by at least five 500lb bombs - three on the flight deck, one on the bridge, one on the rear of the superstructure - and two torpedoes close together amidships. There were several large explosions in quick succession and one enormous convulsion. A Japanese pilot later likened the sound to that of a motorbike revving up, and then bursting into life. Or, as in Enterprise’s case, into death. Within five minutes of receiving the first bomb the ship was on her way to the bottom, the flaming flight deck hissing into the sea. It was the fastest sinking of a carrier in naval history. There were only fourteen survivors.

  Yorktown was slightly more ‘fortunate’. Also claimed by several bombs and at least one torpedo the carrier shuddered to a halt, listing at an alarming angle. Fletcher had time to order the ship abandoned, and to transfer his flag to the destroyer Russell. Yorktown went under at 14.26.

  A mile away the Lexington was also in her death agonies. The target of Ryujo and Junyo’s less experienced pilots, she had only received three bomb hits. But on decks strewn with inflammable material it was enough. The fires, once started, proved impossible to control, and quickly spread down through the hangar deck. The engines were unaffected, but the engine-room was cut off by the flames. Explosion followed explosion, slowly draining the giant carrier of life. At 14.55 the ‘Lady Lex’ followed her sister carriers to the bottom.

  Their demise was not the end of the battle. In the daylight hours still remaining, and through the next day, the Japanese planes energetically attacked the American cruisers and destroyers as they fled eastwards for the shelter of the planes based on Oahu. Four heavy cruisers were sunk, the last of which, the Pensacola, went down at 13.30 on 29 May, some ten miles south of Disappearing Island. It was an apt postscript to the disappearance of an effective American naval presence in the Pacific Ocean.

  Chapter 8: Fall Siegfried

  What is the use of running when we are not on the right road?

  German proverb

  I

  Chief of the General Staff Colonel-General Franz Halder glanced out of the car window at the sunlight shimmering on the waters of the Mauersee and then turned back to the meteorological reports in his lap. In the eastern Ukraine the roads were drying; another two weeks and the panzers would be mobile along the entire Eastern Front. Fall Siegfried, scheduled to begin three weeks hence on 24 May, would not have to be postponed.

  The car, en route from OKH headquarters at Lotzen to the Führer’s headquarters near Rastenburg, left the sparkling Mauersee behind and dived into the dark pine forest. Halder looked at the OKW memorandum. Apparently Rommel was to assault Tobruk the following morning. With the forces at his disposal - forces, Halder reminded himself, that he could well make use of in Russia - he should have no trouble in taking the fortress. And then Egypt, Palestine, Iraq and the meeting with Kleist and Guderian somewhere in Persia? It was possible, perhaps even probable. Halder was not a man given to ‘grand plans’ - they smacked of amateurism - but he had to admit that this one had more than an air of credibility.

  It would have been strange if he had thought differently, for half the ‘Grand Plan’ was in the briefcase on the seat beside him. Based on the unconsummated sections of Fall Barbarossa, drafted by the OKH operations section to Halder’s specifications, redrafted to the Führer’s specifications, tested by war games at Lotzen, Fall Siegfried was designed to end the war against the Soviet Union and create the conditions for the destruction of British power in the Middle East. It was a lot of weight for a single plan to carry.

  For five months the front line in the East had barely shifted. The first and most important reason for this was the unreadiness of the Wehrmacht to fight a war in Russian winter conditions. The enemy might have been virtually nonexistent on some fronts, but tanks do not run in sub-zero temperatures without anti-freeze, without calks or snow-sleeves for their tracks, without salve for frozen telescopic sights. The supply system could not carry these and other essentials, plus food, clothing, ammunition and fuel a thousand miles from Germany overnight. Something had to be sacrificed, and OKH preferred to forgo a few hundred square miles of snow rather than have its forces freeze to death. As a result of this policy the Germans had suffered few casualties during the winter, either from the winter or the cold.

  The second reason for the Army’s immobility during these months was a need for time to make up the losses incurred in the summer and autumn of 1941. Compared to the Red Army figures Wehrmacht casualties had been light, but they still amounted to over three-quarters of a million men and a vast amount of hard-to-replace military equipment. The panzer divisions had suffered particularly badly from the appalling road conditions, and many more tanks had been written off in this way than had been put out of commission by enemy action. Bringing these divisions back to full strength occupied the tank-factories and the training instructors for the better part of the winter.

  If the condition of the Army necessitated a breathing- space, its leaders were convinced that they could get away with such a period of inactivity. The revised estimates of Soviet strength submitted to Halder by General Kinzel, head of Foreign Armies (East) Intelligence, showed that the 1941 estimates had been grossly optimistic. There had been a fifty per cent error in the manpower figure, and the extent of industrialisation in the areas beyond the Volga had not been realized. But, and here was the encouragement for Halder, Kinzel reported that the losses and disorganisation suffered as a result of the German advance had dealt a temporarily crippling blow to Soviet war industry. It was true that the enemy had managed to evacuate a large number of industrial concerns to the Volga-Ural region, but these could not possibly be fully operational before the summer. It was extremely doubtful, Kinzel concluded, that any significant rise in the Red Army’s strength would occur before the autumn. The seizure of the Caucasus oilfields, he added in an appendix, would greatly retard a possible Soviet recovery.

  So, Halder had reckoned, the Army in the East could afford to sit still for five months. In that time he had tried to do something about German armament production, though with little success. The German war industry, contrary to popular myth but consistent with the general economic chaos of National Socialism, was, with the exception of its Italian counterpart, the most inefficient of those supplying the war. The whole business, in true Nazi fashion, was shared about between the interlocking baronies which made up the German leadership. These worthies - Todt, Goering, Funk, Thomas at OKW, Milch at OKL - competed for resources, priority, prestige, the Führer’s ear, and between them achieved far less than their more single- minded counterparts in Kuybyshev and the West. Halder, who had no aptitude for threading his way through such a jungle hierarchy, could only attempt to win over the head monkey. But Hitler, as alre
ady noted, had no interest in such mundane matters as long-term production statistics. Porsche’s designs for giant tanks and miniature tanks excited him, but they were only designs. Halder wanted more Panzer IIIs and IVs, not super-weapons for winning the war in 1947. He would get neither. The one time Hitler deigned to speak on the subject it was to assure his Chief of the General Staff that the war would be over by 1943, so there was no cause to worry. How this tied in with Porsche’s drawing-board fantasies was not explained. Halder was sent back to Lotzen to scheme the final defeat of the Soviet Union in 1942.

  The original Barbarossa directive had laid down that ‘the final objective of the operation is to erect a barrier against Asiatic Russia on the general line Volga-Archangel’, but had made no mention of the Caucasus. Halder, however, was committed to the conquest of the Caucasus by the Karinhall ‘Grand Plan’ decision. And he doubted if an advance to the Volga would produce results to justify the probable cost. There were no important industrial centres apart from Gorkiy west of the great Volga bend. Accordingly he ignored the Archangel-Volga line, and drafted a plan for the conquest of the Caucasus. Army Group Centre would make only a limited advance, Army Group North would take Vologda and Konosha and so cut the railways which carried Allied supplies from Murmansk and Archangel to the Volga-Ural region. Army Group South, with the bulk of the panzer forces, would move south-eastwards down the Don-Donetz land corridor, secure the land- bridge between Don and Volga west of Stalingrad, and then advance south into the Caucasus.

  This plan was presented to Hitler at Berchtesgaden on 4 April. It was not well received. Unknown to Halder, Jodl had also prepared a Siegfried and Hitler had found his more amenable. Halder was treated to its salient points, though not the name of its author, and was told to redraft the OKH plan with the following objectives: the Caucasus and the attainment of a line Lake Onega-Vologda-Gorkiy- Saratov-Astrakhan. He should bear in mind that a further advance to the Urals might prove necessary.

  Hitler gave no reasons for this obsession with miles of steppe and forest. Instead he treated Halder to a lecture on the German need for the Caucasian oil. The Chief of the General Staff noted in his diary that ‘the Führer’s accident does not seem to have dimmed his appetite for statistics’.

  At Lotzen, through the last fortnight of April, Halder’s staff struggled to produce a Siegfried to the Führer’s taste. In the end a three-stage plan was agreed. In the first stage Army Group Centre, augmented by Sixteenth Army and Fourth Panzer Army (all the panzer groups had been upgraded to army status), would attack along the front between the Oka river and Bologoye to attain a line Chudovo-Rybinsk reservoir-Volga-Gorkiy-Ryazan. Having thus secured a salient bound by the Volga and Oka rivers, Second and Fourth Panzer Armies would strike southwards with Fourth Army while Second, Sixth and First Panzer Armies struck east to meet them. Eventually a quadrilateral bounded by Ryazan, Gorkiy, Stalingrad and Rostov would be occupied, the line Hitler demanded manned by the infantry, and the armour released for Stage 3, the conquest of the Caucasus. In the far north Third Panzer Army and Army Group North would be advancing to the ordained Vologda-Onega line.

  It was an audacious plan, and made more so by the same lack of reserves with which OKH had launched Barbarossa. But that, the dubious Halder reassured himself, had succeeded. The testing of the plan by war game, at Lotzen on 2 May, emphasised the narrowness of the margins but still prophesied success. Hitler proved happy with the new drafting, but could not resist making a few minor alterations. The operation orders were sent out.

  On 17 May, the day 20th Panzer reached the coast at Buq-Buq in North Africa, Hitler addressed his Eastern Front commanders at the Wolfsschanze. It was his usual practice to meet them half-way, but Russian distances were great and he had no intention of climbing aboard another plane. He treated the assembled company to a verbose summary of the war situation. Rommel would be in Cairo ‘in a few days’, the U-Boats were sinking more Allied merchant ships each month than they could build in six, the Japanese were proving too strong for the effete Americans. All that he asked of those present was that they deliver the final crushing blow to the disintegrating colossus in the East. That achieved, the bulk of the Wehrmacht could return to the West, there to offer a decisive deterrent to Anglo- Saxon intervention in the affairs of Europe. The war would be effectively won.

  The generals listened to this glowing picture, were given no chance to ask questions, and dispersed. It was the first time most of them had seen Hitler since the accident. ‘He looks older,’ Guderian wrote to his wife, ‘and his left hand shakes terribly.’

  II

  In Kuybyshev Stalin did not need meteorological reports to know that the period of the spring thaw was drawing to a close: he had only to look out of the window. Soon the Germans would renew their advance, and there seemed precious little chance of stopping the initial onslaught.

  But there were few signs of despair, either among the leaders gathered around the table in Kuybyshev’s Governor’s Palace or among the population at large. The devastating blows dealt by the invader had not split the Soviet Union asunder. Rather, the empty barbarism of Nazi occupation policies had served to emphasise the positive side of Stalin’s totalitarianism. Life in Soviet Russia was certainly harsh, but at least the harshness seemed to serve a purpose. The dream born in 1917, that had soured in the succeeding years, seemed more relevant in 1942 than it had since the days of Lenin.

  In the vast tracts of occupied Russia, that area of forests and marshland which stretched northwards from the borders of the Ukrainian steppe, the partisans were emerging from their winter retreats. Though still under-organised their presence would be increasingly felt in the months ahead, particularly by those unfortunates detailed to guard the long German supply-lines. In the Ukraine, where the Germans had been initially welcomed as liberators by a significant section of the population, such activity was rendered difficult by the openness of the terrain. But already the cruelties of the occupation had made active collaboration the exception rather than the rule. The loyalty of the non-Russian citizens of the Caucasus, who were yet to learn the realities of German rule, was still to be tested.

  On the thousand mile frontier of unoccupied Russia the Red Army awaited the coming offensive. Despite losses exceeding eight million it was still the largest army in the world. It was also one of the worst-equipped and definitely the least-trained. Those few experienced troops who had survived the fires of 1941 were spread too thinly among the copious ranks of raw recruits; only the Siberian divisions of the Far Eastern Army were coherent, well-organised military units. And they had suffered most heavily in the bitter struggles of early winter.

  The new Red Army leadership offered some consolation for the poor state of those it had to lead. Most of those who had lost the battles of 1941, whether through incompetence or misfortune, had been replaced. Those in command in the spring of 1942 had either proved themselves extremely adept or extremely fortunate. Much had been learned, many obsolete theories cast aside. Most important of all, given the political realities of the Soviet system, Stalin himself had learnt from his mistakes. No more Soviet armies would be ordered to stand their ground while the panzers cut it from under their feet.

  Still, strategic savoir faire was of limited use to an army that had a severely limited supply of tanks and aircraft. The evacuation of the Gorkiy and Kharkov tank production plants had effectively halved Soviet tank production in the first five months of 1942. The removal of the Voronezh aircraft industry had a serious effect on plane production. Though both tanks and planes were being produced in the Ural region in quantities which would have shocked the Germans, for the coming campaign they were still in pitifully short supply.

  So this was the material at Stavka’s disposal for averting Hitler’s next ‘crushing blow’. A large, inexperienced Army, sound leadership, insufficient armour, and an Air Force which could hardly hope to challenge the Luftwaffe for control of the Russian skies. How should it be used?

  Just as
Hitler and Halder had their list of objectives to gain, so Stalin and Stavka had a list of objectives to hold. Not surprisingly the lists were similar. But fortunately for the Soviet Union, and ultimately for the world, they were not the same. The priorities were different.

  The Soviet decisions were taken at a routine Stavka meeting late in the evening of 4 April 1942. Those present included Stalin, Molotov, Shaposhnikov, Timoshenko, Budenny and Zhukov. The last-named argued that the greatest threat to the continued existence of the Soviet Union lay in a German advance beyond the line of the Volga. Behind that river, Zhukov continued, Soviet war industry was being rebuilt. In the cities of the great Volga bend - Kazan, Ulyanovsk, Syrzan, Kuybyshev itself - and in those to the east and south, in the Urals, Siberia and Soviet Central Asia, the foundations were being laid for eventual victory. Nothing must be allowed to disturb this construction. Though there was now little hope that the Germans could be pushed back by Soviet arms alone, the growing power of the United States and the continued defiance of Britain would eventually diminish the German presence on Soviet soil. Then these new foundations would prove their worth. As the German power decreased the Soviet power would rise. Then would be the time to march west.

  As Zhukov outlined his case Stalin, as was his habit, walked up and down behind the lines of seated generals and marshals, puffing pipe smoke out into the room and occasionally stopping to gaze out of the window at the moonlit Volga. Every now and then a sharp report was audible inside the room, as another stretch of ice cracked in the thawing river.

  Shaposhnikov raised the question of the Caucasus. ‘Can these industries east of the Volga maintain their production without the Caucasian oil?’