All Hell Let Loose: The World at War 1939-1945. Max Hastings
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to Kuibyshev, five hundred miles east on the Volga. Beria conducted a frenzy of shootings of ‘dissident elements’ in his prisons. One batch of 157 executed on 3 October included several women: Trotsky’s sister, Olga Kameneva, widow of prominent purge victim Lev Kamenev; a thirty-one-year-old air force major named Mariya Nesterenko; forty-year-old Aleksandra Fibich-Savchenko, wife of a senior ordnance officer. Moscow’s key installations and industrial plants were prepared for demolition. A quarter of a million people, mostly women, were set to work digging anti-tank ditches in the suburbs. Panic was reflected in widespread looting of shops. Beria found it convenient to depart for a visit to the safety of the Caucasus. The dictator himself was about to quit the capital.
Suddenly, however, on the evening of 18 October Stalin changed his mind. He stayed, temporarily moved his office to Air Defence headquarters in Kirov Street, and declared Moscow a fortress. Order on the streets was restored by a curfew and imposition of the usual brutal sanctions. On 7 November, by a brilliant propaganda stroke, units en route to the front were diverted to stage the traditional parade through the capital celebrating the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. That night came the first heavy snowfall of the year. The Germans, their operations crippled by the weather, lacked sufficient mass to make the final breakthrough; they languished outside the city, suffering rapidly increasing privations. Halder and Bock insisted that a further thrust should be made. More ground was gained: the advancing spearheads occupied some of Moscow’s outlying tram stations while aircraft and artillery bombarded the city.
Some Russians were sincerely moved by Stalin’s appeals for desperate measures in desperate circumstances. A Moscow plastics worker said: ‘The leader did not remain silent about the fact that our troops have had to retreat. He does not hide the difficulties that lie ahead for his people. After this speech I want to work even harder. It has mobilised me for great deeds.’ But sceptics were not lacking – it would be mistaken to exaggerate Russian unity and confidence in the winter of 1941. A Moscow engineer said: ‘All this talk about mobilising the people and organising civil defence just goes to show that the situation at the front is absolutely hopeless. It’s clear that the Germans will take Moscow soon and Soviet power will not hold out.’ Here was an echo of the despair that overtook some informed British people in 1940. Further south in Kursk province a woman said: ‘Shoot me if you like, but I’m not digging any trenches. The only people who need trenches are the communists and Jews. Let them dig for themselves. Your power is coming to an end and we’re not going to work for you.’
But amid such reluctant comrades, a bare sufficiency of patriots and fighters held the line and repulsed the invaders. By the end of November, the German advance had exhausted itself. ‘The Führer himself has taken charge,’ wrote Kurt Grumann, ‘but our troops walk around as if they were doomed. Our soldiers hack at the frozen ground, but the heaviest blows yield only enough earth to fill one’s fingernails. Our strength is decreasing every day.’ Quartermaster-General Eduard Wagner said: ‘We are at the end of our personnel and materiel strength.’ Germany’s fuel situation was so critical that its navy was virtually immobilised. The army’s supply system struggled to support spearheads three hundred miles beyond the forward dumps at Smolensk. A gallows joke circulated in German official circles: ‘Eastern campaign extended by a month owing to great success.’
In Berlin on 28 November, a conference of industrialists chaired by armaments supremo Fritz Todt reached a devastating conclusion: the war against Russia was no longer winnable. Having failed to achieve a quick victory, Germany lacked resources to prevail in a sustained struggle. Next day, Todt and tank-production chief Walter Rohland met Hitler. Rohland argued that, once the United States became a belligerent, it would be impossible to match Allied industrial strength. Todt, though an ardent Nazi, said, ‘This war can no longer be won by military means.’ Hitler demanded, ‘How then shall I end this war?’ Todt replied that only a political outcome was feasible. Hitler dismissed such logic. He chose to convince himself that the imminent accession of Japan to the Axis would transform the balance of strength in Germany’s favour. But the November diary of army chief of staff Franz Halder records other remarks by Hitler that acknowledged the implausibility of absolute triumph. For the rest of the war, those responsible for Germany’s economic and industrial planning fulfilled their roles in the knowledge that strategic success was unattainable. They drafted a planning paper in December 1941 entitled ‘The Requirements for Victory’. This concluded that the Reich needed to commit the equivalent of $150 billion to arms manufacture in the succeeding two years; yet such a sum exceeded German weapons expenditure for the entire conflict. Whatever the prowess of the Wehrmacht, the nation lacked means to win; it could aspire only to force its enemies to parley, together or severally.
Many more months elapsed before the Allies saw that the tide of war had turned. In 1942, the Axis would enjoy spectacular successes. But it is a critical historical reality that senior functionaries of the Third Reich realised as early as December 1941 that military victory had become impossible, because Russia remained undefeated. Some thereafter nurtured hopes that Germany might negotiate an acceptable peace. But they, and perhaps Hitler also in the innermost recesses of his brain, knew the decisive strategic moment had passed. Gen. Alfred Jodl, the Führer’s closest and most loyal military adviser, asserted in 1945 that his master understood in December 1941 that ‘victory could no longer be achieved’. This did not mean, of course, that Hitler reconciled himself to Germany’s defeat: instead, he now anticipated a long war, which would expose the fundamental divisions between the Soviet Union and the Western democracies. He aspired to achieve sufficient battlefield success to force his enemies to make terms, and he clung to this hope until April 1945. Since the Western Powers and the Russians shared morbid and persistent fears of each other seeking a separate peace, Hitler’s speculation was at least a little less fanciful than it might now appear. Only time would show that the struggle was destined to be fought out to the end; that the rupture he anticipated between the West and the Soviet Union would indeed take place, but too late to save the Third Reich.
7
Moscow Saved, Leningrad Starved
Those who fought the war saw its turning point in late 1942, when Japanese advances in the Pacific were checked, and the Germans eclipsed at Stalingrad and in North Africa. For months before those events, the Allied nations endured a diet of almost unbroken ill tidings, which the United States’ entry into the conflict could not deflect. Konstantin Rokossovsky, the most glamorous as well as one of the most formidable of Stalin’s generals, was commanding Sixteenth Army north of Moscow. In mid-November he told a reporter, ‘Soon the Germans will start to get washed out and the time will come – we’ll be in Berlin.’ His words later seemed prescient, but at the time few people around the world grasped the gravity of the Wehrmacht’s predicament in Russia, the fact that some of Hitler’s closest advisers already believed his bid for global domination doomed.
German forces were still thrusting forward north and south of Moscow, but losing momentum. On 17 November, a Wehrmacht division broke and fled in the face of an attack by new Soviet T-34 tanks. Fresh Russian armies were taking the field; the invaders were running out of armour, fuel, men and faith. A young SS officer wrote: ‘Thus we are approaching our final goal, Moscow, step by step. It is icy cold…To start the [vehicle] engines, they must be warmed by lighting fires under the oil pan. The fuel is partially frozen, the motor oil is thick and we lack anti-freeze…The remaining limited combat strength of the troops diminishes further due to the continuous exposure to the cold…The automatic weapons…often fail to operate because the breechblocks can no longer move.’ If a man spat, the moisture froze before reaching the ground. A single regiment reported 315 frostbite cases. On 3 December Hoepner, commanding Fourth Panzer Group, reported: ‘The offensive combat power of the Corps has run out. Reasons: physical and moral over-exertion, loss of a large number of commanders, inadequate winter equipment…The High Command should decide whether a withdrawal should be undertaken.’
Again and again the Germans threw themselves at the Russian positions – and again and again they were repulsed. Georgy Osadchinsky saw a group of German tanks and supporting infantry mill in confusion before a railway embankment they could not pass, as Soviet guns wreaked havoc. Tank after tank caught fire, and the survivors began to retreat. He watched a German soldier flounder helpless in the snow on all fours,