Russia at war

by Alexander C Werth

  [See The Year of Stalingrad, pp. 218-9.]

  As for the Legend, the press was no longer as reticent as it had been during the first half of September. "Heroic Stalingrad" and the "heroic defenders of Stalingrad" now became daily phrases in the press. Simonov, Grossman, Krieger, and many other Soviet writers and journalists depicted the pathos, the grim and heroic atmosphere of the Stalingrad Battle. It was not until later that anyone questioned whether these articles were first-hand.

  After the war, General Chuikov, in particular, debunked some of this reporting. But this was not always fair. Many Soviet reporters and, especially, photographers and cinema operators lost their lives at Stalingrad and in other battles.

  Early in September the Russian press had applied the word "Verdun" to Stalingrad, and this word was seized on by the world press. But by the end of September, the Soviet press dismissed the parallel as absurd. Thus Yerusalimsky wrote in Red Star of September 27

  that Stalingrad "by far exceeded Verdun", and pointed out that "Verdun was a first-class fortress; Stalingrad is not. Also, the Russian offensive in the east in 1916 diverted great German forces from Verdun;... now the opposite is true."

  October 1942 was, as Stalin was to say a year later, the month in which the Soviet Union was in even greater danger than she had been at the time of the Battle of Moscow. The Battle of Stalingrad was going badly and on October 14 the city was very nearly lost.

  There was also an acute deterioration in Anglo-Soviet relations. Wild accusations were hurled at Britain for playing a double game— which were not unrelated with the

  extremely critical position at Stalingrad about the middle of the month.

  The intensification of the Anti-British campaign (which had somewhat abated at the time of the Churchill visit and the Dieppe fiasco) had started some time before—to be precise, at the time of Wendell Willkie's visit to Moscow about September 20. Willkie had come as President Roosevelt's personal representative, and was made a great fuss of. His whole attitude to Russia contrasted, in Russian eyes, very favourably with Churchill's.

  Photographs of him in the company of Stalin and Molotov appeared in every paper, and the most was made of his public utterances. He was shown a number of war factories and was taken on a trip to the Rzhev sector of the front west of Moscow, where the Russians were fighting a particularly fierce and heartbreaking "diversionist" action against the Germans, and suffering heavy losses with very little to show for it.

  Several times Willkie clearly suggested that Roosevelt was all in favour of the Second Front that year, but he had met with opposition from the British generals, and from

  Churchill himself.

  I particularly remember the morning of September 26, just after his return from the

  Rzhev sector of the front, when he invited me to breakfast at the Soviet Guest House in Ostrovsky Lane. He was wearing a smart blue silk dressing gown with white spots, and was the picture of health and vigour. He looked like a man who would live to be ninety.

  How great his personal charm was everybody knows. The Russians were doing him

  proud; there was caviare for breakfast, and even grapes, the first I had seen that year.

  "It's a very tricky problem I'm up against," he said. "How is one to explain to the American public that the Russians are in a very grave situation but that their

  morale is first-rate for all that?... I know the country is full of the most appalling personal tragedies but, at the same time, if I were to repeat all the wild talk I heard at dinner yesterday from Simonov, Ehrenburg and Voitekhov, with all their abuse

  of the Allies, I think it would make a very bad impression in the States...

  There followed this striking illustration of the grave doubts that existed in Washington in the summer of 1942 about Russia's power of survival.

  "After all", said Willkie, "things are not as desperate as one thought they might be by now. Egypt is okay; the Russians are holding out, and even Stalingrad is still in their hands. I don't mind telling you that when I was leaving Washington five weeks ago, the President told me: '.... I just want to warn you. I know you've got guts, but you may get to Cairo just as Cairo is falling, and you may get to Russia at the time of a Russian collapse'."

  I suggested to Willkie that the President was not perhaps being as competently informed from Moscow as he might be (I had in mind the pessimists at the US Embassy,

  particularly General Michela and Colonel Park), to which Willkie nodded. Speaking of the Second Front, he thought it was taking a terrible risk to postpone it till 1943; for what if Russian offensive capacity was meantime reduced to nothing? (This, incidentally,

  showed that if the Russians told Churchill something about their planned counter-

  offensive, they hadn't told Willkie anything about it—why spoil his Second Front

  fervour?).

  The same day he made a statement to the Anglo-American press in which he spoke with

  real emotion of the great Russian spirit of self-sacrifice he had observed everywhere; and then he uttered the famous phrase which was going to cause a lot of trouble:

  Personally I am now convinced that we can help them by establishing a real Second Front in Europe with Great Britain at the earliest possible moment our military

  leaders will approve. And perhaps some of them will need some public prodding.

  The Russians took him at his word, and stick-in-the-mud British Blimps (modelled on

  Low) began to appear in Russian cartoons. Churchill was furious, since Willkie's

  statement had, in his view, undone much of the good of his own visit a month before, when he thought he had convinced the Russians that the Second Front in the near future was impossible. And although Stalin knew about "Torch" (which Willkie perhaps did not) the Russian press embarked on a savage anti-British campaign during October, when the situation at Stalingrad looked particularly desperate.

  On October 6, barely a week after the Willkie statement, Yefimov published in Pravda a vicious cartoon of a number of bald-headed and walrus-moustached Blimps sitting round a table and facing two dashing young soldiers in American uniform. These two were

  labelled "General Guts" and "General Decision", while the Blimps were called "General What-if-they-lick-us", "General What's-the-hurry", "General Why-take-risks", and so on.

  On the same day Stalin answered the three-point questionnaire sent him by Henry

  Cassidy, the A.P. correspondent. In his answer he said that the Second Front "occupied a place of first-rate importance in the current situation"; that "the aid of the Allies to the Soviet Union has so far been little effective", and that it was essential that the Allies

  "fulfil their obligations fully and on time"; and, finally, in reply to Cassidy's question:

  "What remains of the Soviet capacity for resistance?" Stalin said:

  I think that the Soviet capacity of resisting the German brigands is in strength not less, if not greater, than the capacity of Fascist Germany, or of any other aggressive power, to secure for itself world domination.

  Molotov added fuel to the flames by resorting to a curious trick. For nine months there had been lying in his folders a Note on war-crimes from the Czech Government and the French National Committee and endorsed by Governments of other Nazi-occupied

  countries. He now replied to this Note and, in the last paragraph he said:

  The Soviet Government considers it essential that any of the leaders of Nazi

  Germany who happens to be in the hands of States fighting against Hitler Germany

  be tried without delay by a special People's court, with all the rigour of the criminal law.

  This Note was published on October 15 (one of the grimmest days in the Stalingrad

  fighting). Its meaning was rubbed in four days later when Pravda published a violent editorial on Rudolf Hess:

  So it now appears that Rudolf Hess arrived in England dressed as a German

  airman; therefore, he is not being
treated as one of the chief war criminals, but is, instead, being treated as a mere "war prisoner". So it was enough for this notorious war criminal to dress up... in order to evade his responsibility for his countless crimes, and thus to turn England into a sanctuary for gangsters.

  Not to treat Hess as a war criminal, Pravda went on, was to treat him as "the representative of another State, as Hitler's envoy." And then came the story of "Hess's wife":

  It is not accidental that Hess's wife should have appealed to certain British

  representatives to be allowed to join her husband. It would seem from this that Frau Hess does not consider him a prisoner-of-war. It is time we found out whether Hess is a criminal .. .or the plenipotentiary representative of the Nazi Government in

  England, with all the privileges of immunity.

  Maybe the story of Hess's wife was a pure invention; or maybe it had been planted on the Russians by some diplomatic tipster. The purpose of this violent anti-British campaign is still not clear, and there are several possible explanations: the most pleasant is that Stalin knew about "Torch", and was trying to mislead the Germans —to make them think that there was nothing to worry about in the west. Certainly, the German press had an orgy of hee-hawing over the Anglo-Soviet quarrel over Hess. But there are also other possible explanations: things at Stalingrad were going badly, and a scapegoat was necessary, and, in any case, many Soviet leaders had a bee in their bonnet about "Lady Astor", the

  "Cliveden Set" and other alleged British supporters of a deal with Hitler at Russia's expense. Although these were mentioned occasionally, the Hess article was the most

  vicious anti-British attack throughout the war, and it certainly stirred up a great deal of anti-British feeling in Russia. The day the article appeared, I remember seeing a Polish officer standing in a queue outside one of the Gastronome shops in Moscow; people

  started shouting at him, "Instead of queuing up for delicacies, you English had better do a little fighting." When he explained that he was a Pole, they left him alone.

  The only comic relief was provided by the British Ministry of Information paper

  published in Moscow, the Britansky Soyuznik. A day or two after the Pravda editorial on Hess, amongst a lot of notes on culture in England was a photo of "Madame Hess" giving a lunch-time piano recital at the London Royal Exchange. It was, actually, Dame Myra Hess, but how were the Russians to know that this was not Hess's wife playing to London bankers and stockbrokers?

  The British reaction to the "sanctuary for gangsters" editorial were so sharp that the Russians decided not to persist in their campaign, though the bad humour persisted. At a public lecture given by Professor Yudin, one of the Party's great ideologists, on October 28, he argued that the reasons for the absence of the Second Front were entirely political: that unfortunately there were very strong Munichite influences inside the British

  Government. He almost suggested that the purpose of the Hess article had been to stir up British public opinion, so that it should insist that the "Munichites" be thrown out of the British Government. Asked why the British Government was incapable of breaking this

  resistance, he said: "I am not suggesting that Churchill cannot break it, but—". He shrugged his shoulders.

  At the same time, however, Yudin was very optimistic about the outlook at the front; thanks to the resistance of Stalingrad, the Germans had already lost their summer

  campaign, and he was confident that neither the Japs nor the Turks would budge now. He already declared that Stalingrad would prove the great turning-point in this war.

  He even alluded to some peace-feelers the Germans had put out via Japan, but said that it no longer depended on Germany when the war would end; whether or not there was

  going to be a Second Front, the Soviet Union would fight on till the final defeat of Germany.

  At the end of October the whole tone of the Russian press became, indeed, much more

  optimistic. The communiqués and the press reports in the middle of the month had dwelt on the extreme seriousness of the situation; but by the end of October the worst seemed to be over. On October 28 Alexandrov wrote in Pravda:

  The defence of Stalingrad has held up the Germans for three months. This means

  that at Stalingrad they lost the most precious time they had this year for offensive operations.

  In other words, the terrible danger that the country had felt in July and August had already been averted. Not that Stalingrad itself was necessarily out of danger yet, and nearly the whole of the Northern Caucasus was in German hands. Although they had

  been held up at Mozdok on the way to Baku and had not advanced much beyond

  Novorossisk on the Black Sea, the Germans suddenly scored a major success on

  November 2 by breaking through to Nalchik on the way to Vladikavkaz, the northern

  terminus of the Georgian Military Highway—the gate into Transcaucasia.

  Even so, the whole atmosphere in Moscow on the eve of the 25th anniversary of the

  October Revolution was distinctly optimistic. Something had clearly changed since the grim months of July and August. The biggest front-page publicity was given, on

  November 6, to the "Oath of the Defenders of Stalingrad" addressed to Stalin:

  ... The enemy's aim was to cut our Volga waterway and then, by turning south to the Caspian, to cut off our country from its main oil supplies... If the enemy succeeds, he can then turn all his strength against Moscow and Leningrad...

  Even at that stage, Stalingrad still said "if he succeeds", and not "if he had succeeded".

  Apart from this reservation, the tone was confident throughout. After enumerating all that the defenders of Stalingrad had achieved and the losses the Germans had suffered there, they recalled Stalin's role in the defence of Tsaritsyn (the old name of Stalingrad) during the Civil War, and they declared themselves firmly convinced that, "fighting as we are under your direct guidance... we shall strike another smashing blow at the enemy and drive him away from Stalingrad."

  The Oath to "dear Joseph Vissarionovich" did not go so far as to say that Stalingrad would be held; but the way in which they associated the city with the name and prestige of Stalin made failure extremely unlikely.

  In sending you this letter from the trenches, we swear to you, dear Joseph

  Vissarionovich, that to the last drop of blood, to the last breath, to the last heart-beat, we shall defend Stalingrad... We swear that we shall not disgrace the glory of Russian arms and shall fight to the end. Under your leadership our fathers won the Battle of Tsaritsyn. Under your leadership we shall win the great Battle of

  Stalingrad.

  The whole tone of the Oath was so confident that there was now, if anything, a tendency to underrate the dangers Stalingrad was still facing; nevertheless, people still felt instinctively that the worst was over, and this instinct proved right. The letters people were getting from soldiers in Stalingrad greatly contributed to the optimism. These were not official missives like the "Oath", each word of which had no doubt been carefully vetted by the political big-shots on the spot, but private letters; and in these it was clear that, despite the fearful mental and bodily strain, Russian soldiers were becoming

  immensely proud of being in Stalingrad. To the Germans, on the other hand, the idea of being sent to Stalingrad was becoming increasingly terrifying.

  Not only had the Soviet press been conducting an anti-British campaign in October, but the Churchill-Stalin correspondence during this period was far from cordial. Stalin

  acknowledged the arrival of the PQ 18 convoy at Archangel rather curtly; he also

  dismissed Churchill's estimate of German aircraft production as inaccurate; and in reply to Churchill's long letter of October 9 pressing him to accept an Anglo-American air force in the Caucasus (but also informing him that the Arctic convoys would have to be cut down) Stalin merely said: "Your message of October 9 received. Thank you. J.

  Stalin."

&nbs
p; However, with the situation in the Caucasus deteriorating (Nalchik had been captured by the Germans on November 2) Stalin, in his letter of November 8 showed renewed interest in the offer of twenty Anglo-American squadrons for the Caucasus.

  In view of all the unpleasantness, especially in October, between the Soviet and British Governments (Churchill was particularly furious about the Hess outburst) Stalin's

  November 6 broadcast came as a pleasant surprise to the Western Allies. No doubt he

  knew by this time that Operation "Torch" had already started and that Rommel was in retreat in the Western Desert. He repeatedly stressed the importance of the Anglo-American-Soviet alliance, though he sounded ironical about the British in Libya, where they were fighting "only four—yes, four—German and eleven Italian divisions." He also said that, if only there were a Second Front, the Germans would by now have been driven back to Pskov, Minsk and Odessa. He spoke with satisfaction of the great improvement in the Russian fighting, and of the enormous progress made by the Soviet industries in the east. He also argued that the Germans had failed in their main objective which was not the occupation of the Caucasus (this was only their "secondary" objective) but the encirclement of Moscow from the east, after the fall of Stalingrad.

  His Order of the Day on November 7 followed much the same line; without alluding

  either to "Torch" or to the coming Russian offensive, it used, however, a phrase which enormously cheered— and intrigued—the Russians: "There will be a holiday in our street, too," meaning "it will soon be our turn to rejoice".

  The news of the North African landing two days later created a big impression in

  Moscow. Without understanding the enormous organisational complexity of the landing, people had the pleasant feeling that things in the west were at last on the move—not that this was quite the same as the "Second Front" they had hoped for. Later, in Stalingrad, I was told that the news of the North-African landing was flashed to all the army units and had a very good effect. In his second letter to Cassidy, dated November 13, Stalin