War Stories III

by Oliver North

  When Hitler invaded Russia in the summer of ’41, President Roosevelt started making plans right away to help keep Russia from being knocked out of the war. FDR correctly anticipated that sooner or later, we were going to be involved. Immediately after the Germans started Barbarossa, the president sent Harry Hopkins, probably FDR’s closest advisor, on a secret mission to Moscow. Hopkins took me with him, to help him find out from the Russians what they really needed and to offer Lend-Lease aid to the Soviets.

  We left London in the middle of the night aboard a five-car train and we were the only passengers. This train went from London nonstop to northern Scotland. There, we boarded an RAF flying boat. Twenty-four hours later we were in Archangel, just south of the Arctic Circle. It was 30 July 1941.

  The Russians met us with motor launches and took us ashore. A Russian general and a colonel were our hosts. I met with the Russian generals and Hopkins met with Stalin. But the Russian generals didn’t want to tell me anything. I tried to find out about their tanks—whether we could improve on what they had. Their flat answer was, “No, we have a good tank.”

  And they did. Their T-34 was based on an American design that our military had rejected. They eventually made tens of thousands of them.

  I asked about artillery pieces—they replied, “We have good artillery.” Airplanes? “We have good airplanes.” But they knew that they didn’t have any fighters to match the Me-109—or that could climb fast enough to take on the German bombers. They finally agreed that we’d send P-40 aircraft to Russia. I think there were forty-eight airplanes to be in the first shipment to Russia. Then we had to figure how to get them there.

  I was in Moscow in when the Germans got to the city and we had to evacuate with the rest of Stalin’s government. The provisional capital had been moved from Moscow toward the Caucuses, and right about the time we were moving there, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.

  Washington then decided that we were losing too many ships trying to get cargo across the North Atlantic and into Murmansk and Archangel. The German U-boats were sending so many to the bottom that the aid just wasn’t getting through. I was told to find a different way to get the planes delivered to our Soviet “allies.”

  Somebody back in the Washington decided that the best way to deliver airplanes was for American pilots to pick them up at the factories and fly them to where they were needed. By the winter of ’41–’42 that’s how we delivered planes to the British—up through Newfoundland, Greenland, Iceland, Northern Ireland—then to England.

  But the best route for deliveries to Russia would be to fly them to Alaska and then across the Bering Strait into Siberia. Well, that just wasn’t realistic because the Russians weren’t about to let American pilots land in Siberia. As a rule they wouldn’t even let Americans into the country—they were too suspicious.

  But Washington wanted to know what airports were available and what facilities were there so that they could plan getting the planes to Russia. We went over to the Russian foreign office and met this very suave Russian colonel. We told him the message we got from Washington and said, “We want to get this information.”

  The Russian colonel said, “Well, we’re at war and this will take a little time.” The Russians stalled as the wires went back and forth between Washington and the Russian capital. Finally, someone figured out a way to do it. If the Russians wouldn’t let our people fly the planes into Siberia—let’s have the Russian pilots pick up the planes in Alaska.

  And it worked! One afternoon in September ’42, a P-40 fighter landed in Moscow. By October, there were P-39s, B-25s, and A-20s flying in—we really flooded them with equipment. The Russians wouldn’t allow Americans to fly into Russia, but American ingenuity found a way to get the planes to ’em anyway.

  Eventually, 7,926 aircraft were transferred to the Soviet Union through Fairbanks, Alaska. Dubbed Operation ALSIB—for the secret Alaska-Siberia route—it was a way for American pilots to ferry planes from factories throughout the U.S. to Great Falls, Montana. From there, aircraft destined for the Soviets headed north across Canada to Ladd Field in Fairbanks. There, Soviet pilots took possession of the planes and flew them across the Bering Straits, back to the USSR.

  By 1942, nearly all of the planes that the Russian received at Ladd Field had arrived there courtesy of American women. Not only did a labor force that contained millions of women build the planes—but also the aircraft often began their journey to war with an American woman at the controls.

  Though female pilots were barred from flying military aircraft outside the continental U.S. during World War II, more than 1,000 WASPs—Women Air Service Pilots—ferried planes from factories to airbases around the United States. Within hours of installing the last rivet, WASPs would take off—sometimes on a 3,000-mile transcontinental delivery trip.

  One of the largest airplane manufacturers was Bell Aircraft. At its Buffalo, New York, plant, Bell manufactured the P-39 Airacobra. This maneuverable single-seat fighter with its nose-mounted cannon and wing-mounted machine guns became a favorite of the Soviet pilots. Thousands of them were flight-ferried from Buffalo to Great Falls by WASPs like Betty Shea—who loved the challenge of piloting fighters with Russian markings 1,600 miles across America.

  BETTY SHEA, WOMEN AIR SERVICE PILOT

  Bell Aircraft Factory, Buffalo, New York

  24 November 1941

  Flying had been my dream since I was a little girl. The government started the CPT—the Civilian Pilot Training program—in 1938. I got in during’39 while I was in college and got my private pilot’s license. As soon as I could, I signed up for the WASP program, took a test, and was accepted. It was perfect for me—I was from Buffalo and I had been around Bell aircraft since I started flying.

  I was only in my very early twenties when I became a ferry pilot. We weren’t trained in formation flying so we generally flew on our own. I was a loner and liked to have that airplane—with a red star, the Russian emblem, on it—out there by myself. The plane was essentially ours until we got it to Great Falls—about a twelve- to fourteen-hour flight—depending on the weather. A typical route: Buffalo to Niagara Falls to South Bend to remain overnight—then the next day to Bismarck and on to Great Falls, where the men would take them to Alaska for turnover to the Russians.

  Once, one of the girls crashed and burned at Bismarck. There was a lot of suspicion that it was sabotage. The FBI, the Flight Safety people—everybody came to Bismarck to try and figure it out. I was pretty sure that the airplanes were all right but there was a lot of apprehension. I guess that’s understandable after a friend goes down and nobody can find out why. It’s a terrible thing.

  A few weeks after the crash, I was in a flight of two—about twenty minutes out of Great Falls. I was tucked under the wing of my flight leader and he had just called me on the radio to tell me that there was thunderstorm activity in the Great Falls area—when my engine suddenly quit.

  Afterwards, someone asked me, “Weren’t you afraid?” The answer to that is no. It gets your attention pretty fast, but we were well trained in emergency procedures, and in that kind of a situation, you just start doing what you have to do in the cockpit. I was working trying to get the engine restarted but it just didn’t catch. I didn’t want to lose the plane so by trying to start it I ended up waiting a little too long to get out.

  Just before bailing out I grabbed ten bucks out of my purse and jammed it in my pocket. I also had a little compass in my purse, but it was left in the airplane.

  When I was a little girl, my uncle, a pilot, had told me, “If you have to bail out, after you jump, count to three—one thousand one, one thousand two, one thousand three. Then pull your ripcord. That way your parachute won’t get caught by the plane on the way down.”

  I remember jumping out of the airplane and counting, “one thousand one, one thousand two,” and some inner voice said, “Pull it!” So I pulled the D-ring on the parachute. It deployed and I swung once and came down in what is now a lake
outside of Hobson, Montana, at six o’clock at night on June 19. I got out pretty late, but safely.

  I was down in this big crater, so I picked myself up, rolled up the parachute, climbed up to a road, and waited for someone to come by to take me into Hobson, Montana, and then to Great Falls.

  As to my airplane, it could have been sabotage. Flight Safety investigators said that it looked as if someone had put impurities in the gasoline. But I was flying again a week later.

  The aircraft delivered by the ALSIB “backdoor route to Russia” would soon become a critical component in wartime aid to the Soviets. But in the winter of 1941–42, the 2.5 million Russians surrounded in Leningrad had to fend for themselves.

  To shore up the Leningrad defenses—and prepare for a counter-attack in the spring, Stalin sent forty-six-year-old Georgy Zhukov to hold the line against Wilhelm von Leeb’s Army Group North. Stalin had relieved the politically reliable and competent Zhukov as chief of staff because he had recommended the evacuation of Kiev before the garrison could be surrounded. By the time Kiev fell, a quarter of a million Russian and Ukrainian soldiers were dead—and more than 650,000 others were prisoners of war.

  To ensure that the Leningrad did not suffer the same fate, Zhukov mobilized the population to dig more than 600 miles of earthworks, 400 miles of anti-tank ditches, and thousands of bunkers. In November 1941, 10,000 of Leningrad’s residents died of starvation. In December the number was 50,000. And by January 1942, with temperatures falling to 40 degrees below zero, the monthly toll reached a gruesome 120,000 dead. One million civilians ultimately perished in the long and bitter siege—but Zhukov’s defenses held.

  As the siege of Leningrad began, Hitler issued Führer Directive No. 35—reinforcing Fedor von Bock’s Army Group Center—and ordering that all available resources be used to advance on Moscow in what he called Operation Typhoon. When Russian pilots reported that German Panzers were closing on the capital, panic ensued. On 10 October, Stalin recalled Zhukov from Leningrad and ordered him to repeat for Moscow what he had done in the north.

  Though more than a million Muscovites had been evacuated to Stalin’s “provisional capital” at Kuibyshev, 500 miles to the east, Zhukov organized the remaining population. In an extraordinary feat of manual labor—most of it performed by women with picks and shovels, often under air and artillery attack—they planted nearly a half-million mines and dug hundreds of miles of trenches, tank traps, and bunkers.

  As at Leningrad, Zhukov’s defenses held. By the first week of December, the German offensive against Moscow was spent—and the exhausted Wehrmacht soldiers, still clad in summer uniforms and forbidden by Hitler to withdraw, began to dig in and prepare as best they could for the dreaded Russian winter.

  Hitler shaking hands with Fedor von Bock.

  By 7 December 1941, the day that the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, the German army held a front that ran in a nearly straight line from Leningrad on the Gulf of Finland due south to the Crimea on the Black Sea. At that point, German troops controlled more than 40 percent of Russia’s population, a near equal percentage of Soviet agricultural production, and more than half of the USSR’s coal and steel capacity.

  Yet, once the ground froze, the winter-ready Red Army was able to launch a series of limited counter-offensives. Zhukov pushed Army Group Center back from the gates of Moscow—prompting Hitler to fire von Bock and a host of his generals—including Brauchitsch, his army commander in chief. Also among those relieved was Heinz Guderian—father of Germany’s Panzer blitzkrieg tactics.

  Hitler appointed himself commander in chief of the army, and as his troops froze in defensive “hedgehogs” along the 1,100-mile front, he began concocting a revised grand strategy for 1942. His goals were mind-boggling. First, to finish off “the Bolshevik menace” for good in 1942—before the Americans, against whom he had declared war on 11 December—could open a western front in Europe. Second, capture the oilfields, mines, and rich agricultural lands along the Volga River and the ridges of the Caucasus—all the way to Baku on the west shore of the Caspian Sea. And third, in concert with the Italians, seize Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Iraq, and the oilfields of Saudi Arabia.

  The first major action after the spring thaw—the destruction of a Red Army counter-offensive at Kharkov—gave Hitler reason for optimism. By 1 June 1942, the Wehrmacht had captured nearly 240,000 Russian troops and destroyed over 1,200 tanks. But regrettably for the Axis soldiers who had to carry out the rest of the scheme, Hitler seriously underestimated the effect American industrial, agricultural, and military mobilization would have on his adversaries. By 28 June, when the ground was finally dry enough to launch his southern offensive—codenamed Blue—massive quantities of food, clothing, ammunition, aircraft, and trucks from America were already reaching Russia.

  Heinz Guderian

  And after the offensive was already well under way and Wehrmacht troops were bounding southeastward at twenty to thirty miles a day, the Führer made another strategic blunder. He decided that seizing a single city—Stalingrad—named for his Soviet nemesis—was more important than any other part of his offensive.

  On 23 July Hitler ordered Army Group B—now commanded by General Maximilian von Weichs—to seize Stalingrad and force a crossing of the Volga. The resulting exhaustive campaign, which lasted from 21 August 1942 until 30 January 1943, would pit nearly two million Germans and their Romanian and Italian allies against 3.5 million Russians in the bloodiest battle of World War II.

  Maria Faustova served in the Red Army Signal Corps during the merciless engagement. She was one of a handful of survivors in her unit.

  MARIA FAUSTOVA, SOVIET SOUTHERN ARMY

  Stalingrad, Russia

  2 February 1943

  I wanted to become a teacher of Russian language and Russian literature and dreamed of becoming a literary scholar. My family and I lived in Stalingrad—it used to be called Tsaritsyn—but it had it had been renamed. One of my grandfathers lived in Moscow and I planned on going there to continue my studies. But when the Germans invaded, those dreams were over—and so was my youth.

  I first learned we were at war on the morning of June 22, 1941. We heard it on the radio and there was a call for volunteers. I told my parents that I wanted to help defend our country and so on July 23, a month after the war had started, I signed up. I was given a month of training with other new recruits and assigned to the Signal Corps as a radio operator.

  During the fighting of 1941 and early 1942, I didn’t see any action, though we all followed the news of what was happening to the people of Leningrad and Moscow. But in the spring of 1942, the Germans came for us.

  There were a few bombing raids in the winter, when the Germans tried to knock out some of the factories along the Volga River, but starting in July of ’42 it got very bad, with many air raids. The bombing went on day and night, every day—not just on the factories and military installations—but on the apartments where we lived. The attacks were terrifying—but not as bad as what came next.

  In August, the Germans broke through our defenses and into the city. Many civilians were killed—and the Stukas strafed them as they tried to get across the river. The battles were horrible.

  I was a radio operator for a rifle regiment and one afternoon in September, an enemy tank unit broke through our front line and started coming down the street toward us. We were in the basement of a wrecked building and didn’t have any place to hide. The Germans surrounded us, but after dark we were able to go through the cellars from one smashed building to another and move our headquarters to the basement of another bombed-out building.

  We were trying to hold the center of the city, but almost no one was left. The Germans bombed and shelled us every day, trying to bring the buildings down on our heads. There were only walls of the buildings, and we hid in basements. It was like hell. All the people around me were dying, one after the other.

  By winter it was terrible for everyone. There was no electricity, no way to stay warm. M
any days we had no food. Some of the wounded froze to death waiting for treatment. The civilians who couldn’t get away hid in the basements with us, and it was even worse for them. My grandfather died of starvation and cold in January. My mother and sister were starving as well. Whenever I could I would bring them some of my Army rations—mostly bread.

  The fighting was brutal—from one basement to another. I don’t think that there was a single building that wasn’t badly damaged. The city was turned to rubble—and we lived in it like rats.

  Often we had no idea where the Germans were. If you went inside a building, the Germans could be in the basement. That’s how we lived—right alongside the enemy.

  It seems like every day we would have to move—and always there was the roar of gunfire, mortars, rockets, bombs, and artillery. It was our artillery and Katusha rockets that finally saved us.

  By January, we had more than 7,000 guns and thousands of Katusha launchers firing around the clock. That’s how we fought our way back into the center of the city—behind a wall of fire from the rockets and artillery. By the time that the Germans surrendered at the end of January, we had been merged into the 35th Guard Division because everyone else was dead. We only had 124 people left—out of 15,000—but we had beaten the Germans.

  Russian losses on the Eastern Front were staggering. But by the time German field marshal Friedrich Paulus surrendered the 91,000 survivors of his 6th Army on 30 January 1942, more than 145,000 of his soldiers lay dead in the rubble of Stalingrad. The Red Army had also destroyed Hitler’s 4th Panzer Army, the 3rd and 4th Rumanian Armies, and the 8th Italian Army—inflicting on the Wehrmacht and their Axis allies nearly 1.5 million killed, wounded, prisoners, and missing.