Disaster at Stalingrad: An Alternate History Read online

  Hitler further compounded these errors by becoming obsessed with taking the city of Stalingrad and condemned his 6th Army to be burned out in what was essentially Verdun on the Volga. Ironically the original planning did not emphasize any importance attached to the city itself other than as a location towards which 6th Army would be directed. The city fighting devoured men the way German mobile operations did not. The Germans called it the ‘Rats’ War’, Der Rattenkrieg, so vicious and remorseless it was. Homer, perhaps the most profound observer of men in war, captured the imagery and essence of that battle in lines written some 3,000 years before.

  Both armies battled it out along the river banks -

  They raked each other with hurtling bronze-tipped spears.

  And Strife and Havoc plunged in the fight, and violent Death -

  Now seizing a man alive with fresh wounds, now one unhurt,

  Now hauling a dead man through the slaughter by the heels,

  The cloak on her back stained red with human blood.

  So they clashed and fought like living, breathing men

  Grappling each other’s corpses, dragging off the dead.4

  Hitler again compounded the problems burdening his forces by his chronic inability to accumulate a reserve without immediately expending it. So, as 6th Army screamed for reinforcements, there were no available operational reserves on the Eastern Front. At the same time the Soviets were accumulating huge reserves. Herein is an insight into the nature of German and Soviet command. Hitler’s growing insistence that he make all important decisions, which rapidly devolved into reserving his permission to move even single divisions, hobbled his outstanding stable of generals. As Hitler curtailed the initiative allowed his generals, Stalin increased the command scope of his own team of talented officers. He also showed a much more balanced and shrewd strategic grasp, and listened to and often followed the advice of his leading commanders.

  What masked Hitler’s imposed burdens on his forces were their outstanding combat capabilities. German training and tactical and operational expertise were clearly superior to those of the Soviets. Air-ground coordination was a particularly lethal tactical combination.

  What resulted was that German resources dwindled as their forces continued to struggle beyond their culminating point. Soviet resources at the same time continued to grow, fed by a careful accumulation of reserves and the resources in material and supplies provided by their own relocated war industries and the arrival of increasingly large amounts of foreign aid, chiefly through the Arctic Convoys and through the Persian Corridor, with the transpacific route through Vladivostok beginning to come on line. Germany was inexorably losing the war of material. Ironically, it was not their inevitable defeat that strikes one but how close they actually came to winning, as Charles de Gaulle once observed.

  In 1944, General Charles de Gaulle visited Stalingrad and walked past the still-uncleared wreckage. Later, at a reception in Moscow, a correspondent asked him his impressions of the scene. ‘Ah, Stalingrad, c’est tout de même un peuple formidable, un très grand peuple,’ the Free French leader said. The correspondent agreed. ‘Ah, oui, les Russes . . .’ De Gaulle interrupted impatiently, ‘Mais non, je ne parle pas des Russes; je parle des Allemands. Tout de même, avoir poussé jusque‘à lá.’ (‘That they should have come so far.’).5

  ‘That they should have come so far’ offers a tantalizing hint at how close the issue actually was. What would it have taken, within the realm of rational options, for the game to have gone to the Germans is a question that always hangs in the air, with its answer just out of reach.

  The decision nodes, where events hung in the balance, are like the railway switching yards of history. The smallest change can send a train laden with the might of armies in a totally different direction. The changes then start branching exponentially.

  The great Theban general, Epaminondas called the great plain of Boeotia ‘the dancing floor of war’, a primal description of a blood-soaked ground that fully applied to that other blood-soaked ground between the Don and the Volga. The task of alternative history is to change the tune on that dancing floor, to see what unexpected fate the new beat and step will bring forth.

  Notes

  As we march down one of history’s roads not taken and into an alternative history of events, that history requires references in the form of endnotes to reflect its own literature - the memoirs, histories and other accounts that it would have generated. These have been added to the real references. The use of these alternative reality notes, of course, poses a risk to the unwary reader who may make strenuous efforts to acquire a new and fascinating source. To avoid frustrating, futile searches, the alternative notes are indicated with an asterisk (*) before the number.

  Chapter 1

  Führer Directive 41

  The Wolfsschanze, Führer Headquarters, Rastenburg, East Prussia, 4 April 1942

  As Hitler read through the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW - Headquarters of the Armed Forces) Operations Staff briefing for Operation Blau (Blue), the plan for the 1942 summer campaign, the angrier he got. The Wehrmacht’s Operations chief, Colonel General Alfred Jodl, had become attuned by now to Hitler’s body language and braced himself.

  ‘This is not what I want!’ Hitler said. He fumed at the plan and its General-Staff trained officers, so steeped in the traditions from Scharnhorst to Schlieffen, the very system that Hitler had concluded was manifestly inferior to the intuitive judgement of his genius. Behind that contempt was the rage that so many of these generals, as well as the senior commanders at the front, had obeyed his orders grudgingly and with the most obvious of reservations. ‘No! No! No! I will have no more of these vague, elastically framed tasks!’

  By that he meant the mission orders on the Auftragstaktik principle that granted the commander in the field great leeway and initiative in exactly how he executed those orders. Freedom of action was the last thing he wanted to give Field Marshal Fedor von Bock, commander of Army Group South. The last time he had done that for his senior officers was in Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union the previous June. And what had they done with that freedom of action? They had failed to take Leningrad and Moscow and were stunned by the Russians’ winter counteroffensive. Their precious General Staff methods failed them when the Russians came howling through the snow to throw them back in panic, that brother to blood-stained rout. The whole army would have come apart at the seams if he, Adolf Hitler, who had held no more than a corporal’s rank in the Great War, had not issued his stand fast and fight it out order. He had saved the army through this act of sheer will.

  Now they were back to their old tricks. Freedom of action be damned. It was only their way of giving themselves the leeway to fail and then blame it on him. His attitude to the professional army was becoming indistinguishable from what he had once told an acquaintance was the way to deal with the opposite sex. ‘When you go to a woman, take a whip.’ Now he would hold the whip over the Army’s generals.

  ‘I want no generalities, Jodl. Do you hear me? I want this plan in exacting detail.’ Jodl attempted to explain that senior commanders were traditionally given the initiative to plan their own methods. The look on his Führer’s face made Jodl instinctively take a step backwards.

  Hitler snatched the plan out of Jodl’s hands and said, ‘I will deal with the matter myself,’ and stormed off, leaving the man shaken.1

  The conception of Operation Blau was Hitler’s. It was his child, and he now had to take it severely in hand after it had been spoiled into sickliness by the Army and Wehrmacht Operations staffs. He would make a man of it. It had the audacity and ambitious sweep of Barbarossa, but this time he would control it and force it to victory. He went to the map of the Soviet Union and swept his fingers across its south. Here, he said to himself, between the Donets and the Don, we will engage and destroy the bulk of the remaining Soviet field forces.

  And all this was to be only the opening move to quench Germany’s insat
iable thirst for oil. Hitler had been driven in so many of his schemes by an obsession with economic resources, and oil was above all his focus. Oil was vital not only for the Wehrmacht but for the very existence of modern Germany, and Germany had no oil. Its synthetic oil production could not come close to meeting demand, and Romanian oil could not either. The only remaining source within Hitler’s grasp was in the vast mountainous region of the Soviet Caucasus and Transcaucasus between the Black and Caspian Seas.

  The two oilfields at Maikop in the Kuban east of the Black Sea and Grozny, capital of the Chechens, in the mountains produced about 10 per cent of all Soviet oil. South of the mountains in the Transcaucasus, however, lay the richest oilfields of all around the capital of Soviet Azerbaijan at Baku on the Caspian Sea. These fields produced 80 per cent of Stalin’s oil, about 24 million tons by 1942.2 Transcaucasia, which included the Soviet republics of Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan, was also the location of the richest manganese mines in the world, supplying the Soviet Union with 1.5 million tons annually, half of its needs.

  The struggle between the Donets and Don was meant only to clear the way for the simultaneous thrust across the Caucasus to the oilfields of Baku on the coast of the Caspian and farther north to Astrakhan at the mouth of the Volga. Oil was what Germany and the Soviet Union both needed. With this stroke he would take it and at the same time deprive the enemy of it. As a bonus, the route for Allied supplies to the Russians from Persia would be severed at the moment when it seemed to be reaching the tonnage of aid sent by the Arctic convoys.

  His imagination took flight as he dictated to his secretary ten single-spaced pages of minute directions for the upcoming offensive. As he finished he could see Stalin being dragged in a cage through the Brandenburg Gate to celebrate his triumph.

  The Kremlin, Office of the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the USSR, 7 April 1942

  Stalin had unconsciously divined Hitler’s plan for the summer offensive. All you had to do was look at the map. The wide open steppe that stretched from the Donets to the Volga and beyond fairly beckoned to a mechanized invader. Yes, it would be a drive to the south that the Germans would try, then across the mountains of the Caucasus. This region was rich in economic targets, and he knew of Hitler’s obsession with such booty. But then he made a further divination that obscured the spot-on accuracy of the first. He believed that, before heading south, Hitler would drive on Moscow for the decisive battle to take the ancient Russian capital. Only then, Stalin concluded, would he turn to the Caucasus. He did not know that, two days before, Hitler had issued Führer Directive No. 41, that ordered just such an attack to the south as the primary German effort for 1942.

  The directive was based on the conclusion that the ‘enemy in his anxiety to exploit what seemed like initial successes has spent during the winter the bulk of his reserves earmarked for future operations.’3 The Stavka, or command element of the armed forces of the Soviet Union,4 had indeed accumulated eleven new reserve armies as a strategic reserve. Georgi Zhukov, the most brilliant and successful of Stalin’s generals, urged him to concentrate that force to destroy the German Army Group Centre. Instead, Stalin distributed them across five fronts for the defence of Moscow.5 The Germans had done their best to make Stalin’s wish father to that thought. They had conducted numerous reconnaissance missions over Moscow and left detailed city maps to be captured by Soviet patrols. It was all Stalin needed to continue to deceive himself. It was a remarkable achievement in self-deception in the face of the accurate intelligence to the contrary from a number of highly placed Soviet agents of proven veracity.

  Hitler’s directive instead stated that the centre of the front was to be held on the defensive ‘while all available forces are concentrated for the main operation in the southern sector, with the objective of annihilating the enemy on the Don and subsequently gaining the oilfields of the Caucasian region and the crossing of the Caucasus itself.’6 Hitler’s emphasis at this point was clearly on securing the oil of the Caucasus. He said plainly, ‘If we don’t secure Maikop and Grozny, then I must put an end to the war.’ The city of Stalingrad on the Volga did not loom at all in the scale of things for Hitler. Its only importance was as a war armaments centre and Volga crossing, both of which would be lost to the Soviets if the city were simply bypassed.7

  The Wolfssehanze, 13 April 1942

  ‘Yes!’ said Hitler has he took off his spectacles. ‘This is just the sort of analysis I need.’ He then read it out loud to the officers assembled at the Führer Naval Conference.

  In their endeavour to support Soviet Russia, Great Britain and the United States will make every effort during the coming weeks and months to increase shipment of equipment, materiel, and troops to Russia as much as possible. In particular the supplies reaching Russia on the Basra-Iran route will go to the Russian Caucasus and southern fronts. All British or American war materiel which reaches Russia by way of the Near East and the Caucasus is extremely disadvantageous to our land offensive. Every ton of supplies which the enemy manages to get through to the Near East means a continuous reinforcement of the enemy war potential, makes our own operations in the Caucasus more difficult, and strengthens the British position in the Near East and Egypt.8

  Hitler’s summation was simple, ‘This reads like an annex to my Directive 41. I congratulate the naval staff. Its conclusions fully support that directive.’9

  He had every reason to give praise. By midsummer of 1941, it had become apparent to both Moscow and London that the Germans were thrusting towards the Caucasus. The British and Russians jointly occupied Iran in August, ousted the pro-Axis shah, and began to prepare the ports, oilfields, railways and roads to receive supplies and equipment. After Pearl Harbor large numbers of American troops began arriving to serve in auxiliary capacities for the British as American ships began to reach Persian Gulf ports. From January to April 45,000 tons of cargo originating from the USA and Canada had been transferred to the Soviets. Britain contributed another 2,500 tons. In May alone the tonnage was expected to double, almost equalling the tonnage sent by one Arctic convoy. The first American Douglas A-20 Havoc light bomber was flown into Persia in February. By April another 38 had arrived with monthly deliveries of about a hundred a month scheduled. The Americans built a truck assembly plant which began work in April and was scheduled to assemble almost 400 that month and over a thousand a month thereafter.10 The Persian Corridor was beginning to swell with cargoes headed for the Soviet Union just as Hitler had determined that that door to the Caucasus must be slammed shut.

  German Embassy, Ankara, 15 April 1942

  Franz von Papen, the German ambassador to the Republic of Turkey, had every reason to feel satisfied. General Emir Erkilet had just told him that ‘participation in the war against Russia would be very popular in the Army and in many sectors of the population’.11 The pro-German element in the Turkish Army was becoming more assertive, with encouragement coming from Berlin. Germany had been plying the Turks with reasons to enter the war on its side for over a year. Noted military historian John Gill observed,

  In an especially well-received measure, the Führer wrote a personal letter to Turkish President Ismet Inönü recalling the comradeship of the First World War, the common interest in reducing British influence in the Mediterranean and the shared concerns about the USSR. These efforts culminated in a treaty of friendship signed by the unsuspecting Turks on 18 June 1941, only four days before the invasion of the Soviet Union.12

  MAP №1 THE PERSIAN CORRIDOR

  The poorly equipped Turkish Army became the recipient of huge amounts of captured French and Soviet equipment, especially artillery and machine guns. German training teams were actively at work with the Turks to bring their army out of its World War I mindset into something vaguely resembling readiness for modern war. If the Turks were to join the Axis, they had to be prepared to contribute effectively.

  Papen had assured the Turkish leadership that Turkey would have ‘a leading place in the Axi
s new order’, and that Germany would ensure that important ‘territorial rectifications’ would be made in Thrace, the Dodecanese Islands, northern Syria and Iraq all the way down to Mosul, and even in the Crimea. Especially attractive was the promise of Turkish territorial expansion into parts of the Caucasus inhabited by ethnic Turks, the Azeris, and even into Central Asia with its Turkic Uzbeks, Turkmen, Kazakhs and Kyrghiz. This had great appeal to the Pan-Turanism of important elements in Turkish society.13

  Probably the most important encouragement was a remarkable gesture by Hitler to transfer all of the Muslim prisoners captured from the Red Army, most of whom were of Turkic origin, to Turkey for ‘internment’. These numbered over a quarter million of the over three million Soviet POWs taken in the great encirclement battles of 1941. The gesture by Hitler had come about because of the visit to the Eastern Front at the height of the German rampage in 1941 by a group of senior Turkish officers arranged by Colonel Ali Fuat Erden. They were aware of the death by starvation that awaited Soviet POWs and pleaded with Hitler to spare their fellow Turkic Muslims.14

  Hitler had been impressed by the opportunities. He had looked upon the Turks positively as former allies from the First War but had come to see them in another light after the recent visit of an Arab delegation. The Arabs had told him that the Germans really should be Muslims because it fitted their nature better. He had not known much of Islam before this encounter but was now intrigued by it. He pondered the history of Europe and concluded that the defeat of the Arab invasion at Poitiers (Tours) in AD 732 had been a great lost opportunity for the Germans.