Max Hastings Two-Book Collection: All Hell Let Loose and Catastrophe. Max Hastings
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Arctic or even the Atlantic.
At daybreak the Luftwaffe returned, sinking another merchantman. Ohio suffered further damage, but limped onward until renewed attacks later in the morning stopped her engines. Two more merchantmen were crippled, and had to be left behind with a destroyer escort. At 1600, in accordance with orders Burrough’s three surviving cruisers turned back for Gibraltar. Three merchantmen – Port Chalmers, Melbourne Star and Rochester Castle, the last with its deck almost awash – struggled to cover the final miles into Malta shepherded by small craft from the island. At 1800 on 13 August, as cheering crowds lined the old fortifications, they steamed into Grand Harbour. The Germans set about demolishing the stragglers, sinking the damaged Dorset and hitting Ohio yet again. By a miracle attributable partly to its rugged American construction, the tanker maintained way, towed by a destroyer and two minesweepers. On the morning of 15 August, the Catholic Feast of the Assumption of Our Lady, Ohio reached safety and began to offload. Her master, Captain Dudley Mason, was awarded the George Cross; Brisbane Star also completed the passage.
The Pedestal convoy delivered 32,000 tons of stores, 12,000 tons of coal and two months’ supply of oil; five merchantmen survived out of fourteen. The navy’s aggressive posturing dissuaded the Italian fleet from joining the battle. Mussolini’s battleships were anyway immobilised by lack of fuel, and RAF aircraft dropped flares over five cruisers which put to sea, convincing them that they faced unacceptable risk if they persevered. Lieutenant Alastair Mars, commanding the submarine Unbroken, extracted some revenge for British warship losses by torpedoing the Bolzano and Muzio Attendolo. But after the Pedestal battle was over, Commander George Blundell of the battleship Nelson looked back in deep gloom: ‘Most of us felt depressed by the party. Operation “M” for Murder we call it. “The navy thrives on impossibilities,” said the BBC. Yes, but how long can it go on doing so?’
The three-day drama of Pedestal was almost matched by the experiences and sufferings of other Malta convoys and their escorts. Not all those who sailed distinguished themselves: there were shameful cases of merchant ship crews abandoning their ships unnecessarily, of seamen scuttling for lifeboats while their vessels were still steaming. A disgusted Captain Brown of Deucalion, some of whose men quit their posts prematurely, said later, ‘I could never have imagined that any Britishers could have shown up in such poor colours.’ But the overall story is one of a fine endeavour. By the winter of 1942, the worst of Britain’s Mediterranean travails were over. Ultra decrypts enabled Allied warships and aircraft to wreak increasing havoc on Rommel’s supply line: Axis shipping losses in the Mediterranean rose from 15,386 tons in July to 33,791 in September, 56,303 in October, and 170,000 in the two months that followed. In November, Montgomery was victorious at El Alamein and the Americans landed in North Africa. The siege of Malta was relieved soon afterwards.
Holding the island since 1940 had cost the Royal Navy one battleship, two carriers, four cruisers, one minelayer, twenty destroyers and minesweepers and forty submarines. The RAF lost 547 aircraft in the air and another 160 destroyed on the ground. Ashore, Malta’s defence forfeited the lives of 1,600 civilians, seven hundred soldiers and nine hundred RAF personnel. Afloat, 2,200 warship crewmen, 1,700 submariners and two hundred merchant seamen perished. Thereafter, in 1943 and 1944, Allied dominance of the Mediterranean remained contested and imposed continuing losses, but strategic advantage tilted relentlessly away from the Axis. The Royal Navy’s critical responsibilities in the last two years of the war became those of escorting Allied armies to new battlefields, organising and protecting a succession of massive amphibious landings. If the threat from Germany’s submarines and aircraft persisted to the end – British warships suffered severely in the ill-fated autumn 1943 Dodecanese campaign – the Royal Navy had won the decisive battles of the European war at sea; not in actions between fleets, but by sustaining Britain’s global rights of passage in the face of air power and U-boats. In fulfilment of this responsibility, most of its captains and crews upheld the service’s highest traditions.
12
The Furnace: Russia in 1942
A phenomenon created by the strong emotions and fantastical experiences war brought upon Russia was a resurgence of religious worship, which Stalin did not seek to suppress. At Easter 1942, Moscow’s overnight curfew was lifted, and Dr Sof’ya Skopina attended the great Orthodox cathedral in Moscow’s Elokhovskaya Square. ‘We arrived at 8 p.m. There was a small queue to bless the kulich [Easter bread] and eggs. An hour later there was such a crowd that one couldn’t turn and no air to breathe. Amid the throng, women screamed, “They’ve crushed me! I’m going to faint!” The atmosphere grew so humid that moisture ran down the columns. Candles passed from one person to another sent smoke curling into spirals. There were many young people (I don’t know why they had come there). Some mums came with their kids, and a lot of military men. There were people even sitting on the cross with the picture of Christ. It was like a football crowd. At 11 p.m. a priest appeared and announced that “Our friends the British are about to arrive.” We could no longer breathe and went outside, where we saw several cars drive up. It was the British [Embassy delegation].’
Army nurse Evdokiya Kalinichenko wrote in May: ‘We’re having a little break, for the first time this month. We’ve made the wounded men comfortable, dried ourselves out, had a wash in a real banya [bath house]. We’ve been on so many roads. All kinds of roads…Mostly country roads, often mud-bound, rutted and degraded by rain, holes, bumps. One’s heart breaks when the vehicle jolts: most of the passengers are gravely wounded, and for some such jolting can be fatal. Now, however, it is so quiet around us that it is hard to believe there is war anywhere on the planet. We wander about in the woods and gather bunches of flowers. The sun shines, the sky is blue. We keep peering upwards by force of habit, but see only passing clouds. We think the Germans have at last been stopped and won’t try to go any further – they’ve learnt their lesson on the approaches to Moscow.’
Kalinichenko hoped too much, too soon. Though the Russians had mass, and could replace their horrific 1941 losses, they still lacked the combat power and logistical support to sustain deep penetrations. The New Year offensive by five fronts or army groups, personally directed by Stalin, petered out even before the spring thaw arrested movement. The Germans held their line south of Leningrad, maintaining the threat to the city; they moved to cut off the Volkhov front and destroy Second Shock Army. Its commander Lt. Gen. Andrey Vlasov was captured, and subsequently raised a Cossack ‘Russian Liberation Army’ for the Nazis.
In the Crimea, the Germans blocked the western exit from the Kerch peninsula, trapping a vast Russian army, then counter-attacked. Between 8 and 19 May, Manstein achieved another triumph, shattering the Crimean front and taking 170,000 prisoners. Seven thousand survivors took refuge in limestone caves until the Germans blasted the entrances with explosives and pumped in gas. Lt. Gen. Gunther Blumentritt, who became a Wehrmacht army commander, wrote of the Russians rather as he might have described wild beasts he could not respect, but grudgingly feared:
Eastern man is very different from his Western counterpart. He has a much greater capacity for enduring hardship, and this passivity induces a high degree of equanimity towards life and death…Eastern man does not possess much initiative; he is accustomed to taking orders, to being led. [The Russians] attach little importance to what they eat or wear. It is surprising how long they can survive on what to a Western man would be a starvation diet…Close contact with nature enables these people to move freely by night or in fog, through woods and across swamps. They are not afraid of the dark, nor of their endless forests, nor of the cold…The Siberian, who is partially or completely Asiatic, is even tougher…The psychological effect of the country on the ordinary German soldier was considerable. He felt small and lost in that endless space…A man who has survived the Russian enemy and the Russian climate has little more to learn about war.
Manstein favoured bypassing the fortress of Sevastopol, but Hitler insisted on its capture. The 1,350-ton 800mm giant siege gun ‘Big Dora’ was brought forward, utilising enormous labour because it could move only on twin railway tracks. Franz Halder dismissed Dora, an example of wasteful Nazi industrial effort on prestige weapons, as ‘an extremely impressive piece of engineering, but quite useless’. Its seven-ton shells and 4,000-strong crew contributed much less to the capture of the city than the dogged efforts of Manstein’s