Disaster at Stalingrad: An Alternate History Page 6

  Barvenkovo Salient, 12 May 1942

  Working on the premise that it was not enough to strike while the iron was hot, but that one had to strike first to make the iron hot, Hitler determined to clean up a very dangerous salient in Army Group South’s front. That was the Barvenkovo Salient just south of the great industrial city of Kharkov. Sixth Army would attack from the north while 1st Panzer and 17th Armies would strike from the south pinching off the salient. The attack was scheduled for 18 May. The Soviets beat them to the punch.

  Marshal of the Soviet Union Semyon Timoshenko brought to Stalin the plan to strike out of the salient and encircle the enemy’s 6th Army with two fronts. He struck on 12 May, pressing 6th Army back as Paulus committed reserve after reserve. But the Germans were much more adept. In a masterful turnabout Bock counterattacked with 1st Panzer Army snapping off the spearhead Soviet armies. Bock’s troops eventually linked up with Seydlitz’s Hoch- und Deutschmeister Division. Timoshenko was not done, though. The trapped armies turned about and threw themselves at the blocking German divisions. A German division commander described what came next:

  The Russian columns struck the German lines in the light of thousands of white flares. Orders were bellowed by officers as commissars fired up the battalions. The Red Army soldier stormed forward with arms linked. Their hoarse shouts of ‘Urrah’ resounded terribly through the night.

  The first waves fell. Then the earth-brown columns turned away to the north.

  But there too they ran into the barricades manned by the mountain infantry. They now reeled back and charged into the German front without regard to losses. They slew and stabbed everything in their path, advanced another few hundred metres and then collapsed in the flanking German machine-gun fire. Those who were not dead staggered, crawled or stumbled back to the ravines of the Bereka.8

  For three nights they came before they broke. By 22 May, Timoshenko had lost two full armies and seen two more savagely mauled at cost of almost a quarter of a million men in prisoners alone against 29,000 German casualties. Hitler showered Friedrich Paulus with honours, and the press eagerly focused on his humble origins. From this moment Paulus seems to have developed a case of hero worship for his Führer. Congratulations poured in to the embarrassment of the self-effacing Paulus. One of them was in a letter from Major Stauffenberg, who had stood by his side through part of the battle. He wrote,

  How refreshing it is to get away from this atmosphere to surroundings where men give of their best without a thought, and give their lives too, without murmur of complaint, while the leaders and those who should set an example quarrel and quibble about their own prestige, or haven’t the courage to speak their minds on a question which affects the lives of thousands of their fellow men.9

  Hitler was now pouring reinforcements into Army Group South. Ten panzer and seven panzergrenadier divisions were transferred from Army Groups Centre and North as well as large numbers of infantry by reducing the establishment of most of their infantry divisions from nine to six infantry battalions. Army Group South swelled from 20 to 68 divisions and almost 1,500 tanks.10

  Hitler was preparing Thor’s Hammer itself to wield against the Soviets. In addition to the German reinforcements, he ordered that all their allies should concentrate their contingents to cover the long front that would be opened between the Donets and Don Rivers. So hundreds of thousands of Italians, Hungarians, Slovaks and Romanians gathered for the great offensive. The most powerful force was the Italian 8th Army of ten divisions including three Alpini or mountain divisions, elite units of the Italian Army.

  Oberkommando der Marine (OKM), Berlin, 15 May 1942

  ‘Wie dumm von mir!’ (‘How stupid of me!’) Dönitz exclaimed as he read the report forwarded from the German intelligence network in Switzerland. He was staggered, but now all the coincidences, the lost submarines and the Allied interception of various rendezvous between U-boats and oilers and supply ships, and the destruction of so many weather ships, all came together. He handed the report to the chief of his Operations staff whose eyes grew wide as he read the summary.

  Over the last few months, Germany’s naval ciphers, which are used to give operational orders to the U-boats, have been successfully broken. All orders are being read currently. The source is a Swiss American in an important secretarial position in the US Navy Department.

  This was Bletchley Park’s worst nightmare, that sharing with the notoriously lax Americans would compromise their work.

  The operations officer in turn handed the report to the chief of the Naval Communications Department. The man’s face went into shock and then righted itself. He stated with vehemence, ‘Continuous current reading of our radio traffic is out of the question.’

  Dönitz’s reply could have been carved from ice, ‘You will notice that the agent has been verified. Read it aloud so everyone can hear.’ With clenched teeth, the signals officer read that the agent ‘was related to our Military Attaché, and often travelled to London with the US Navy delegation, so he should be well informed’.

  The man looked up. ‘Herr Admiral, this cannot be true. The system is just too complicated to break, with almost an infinite number of settings on the machine. We have even had the codebooks printed in water-soluble ink on pink paper to make them easy to destroy to prevent capture.’

  Dönitz remained the only calm man in the room. ‘I call your attention to the obvious answer to all these bewildering coincidences in the loss of so many boats.’ He read on,

  ‘The British Naval Intelligence Office are giving a lot of help to the Royal Navy in the fight against the U-boats. A special office has specialized in dealing with codebreaking since war broke out. For several months it has been very successful. They can now read German Admiralty orders to the U-boat commanders. This is a great help when it comes to hunting for U-boats.’

  I would say that last sentence is an understatement. In light of this, meine Herren, it would seem reasonable to assume that this is exactly what has happened. The enemy has taken possession of the keys and reads the orders currently for the U-boat rendezvous.11

  He looked at the staff. ‘Change the damned codes.’

  Then he turned to his aide and said, ‘Get me Heydrich on a secure line at once.’

  Heydrich was in the air from Prague within the hour after receiving Dönitz’s call. The admiral was waiting for him as his car sped to the naval headquarters at two in the morning. Dönitz whisked him to his office and showed him the reports. Even Heydrich’s impassive expression was broken as he read on.

  ‘You know, Dönitz, we can turn this to our advantage. I destroyed the best of Stalin’s senior officers with just such an opportunity to deceive the enemy.’ He leaned back in his chair. ‘You know, that if the enemy has broken the naval Enigma code, they surely have broken the less complex Luftwaffe and Army Enigmas. Oh, how dicke [fat] Hermann will squirm.’

  The irony was that Heydrich was only half right. Indeed, the British had broken Enigma and were reading the Luftwaffe and Army’s traffic, but the addition of a further rotor to the naval Enigma machines had slammed the door shut for the British codebreakers at Bletchley Park. Since February they had been unable to read any naval Enigma messages.

  It did not occur to Dönitz that all the coincidental losses he cited had occurred before the upgrade of naval Enigma only two months before. For Heydrich, though, the thought of what this knowledge could do to his enemies within the Reich leadership was like a sweet taste on his tongue. Dönitz was struck by how vulpine the man looked at that moment; his normally ice blue eyes burned like those of a carnivore closing in for a kill.

  Arctic Convoy PQ-16, 25 May 1942

  The pilots of Kampfgeschwader 30 (KG30 - Bomber Group 30) exulted in another victory. Below them the SS Empire Elgar staggered under the hits by their Ju 88 dive-bombers. It went down quickly, the British Valentine tanks filling its hold breaking loose and crashing into the bulkheads.

  For the first time, the Germans had made a conc
erted effort to stop an Arctic convoy. The death of the Empire Elgar was one of nine out of thirty-five ships lost to aircraft, U-boats, and mines. The Ju 88 crews boasted six of the kills. None of the losses, however, compared to the destruction of the Empire Elgar in importance. This ship was a 2,847grt heavy lift vessel. It had been launched early in the year and completed in April at West Hartlepool in the United Kingdom. This was its first voyage. It was a very special ship, equipped with powerful derricks to unload heavy cargo, such as tanks, locomotives and aircraft, from other ships. It was intended to stay in the Russian northern ports where its derricks would be vital in unloading operations. The Russians had nothing like it in the way of heavy unloading derricks. Without it, getting cargoes ashore would be a time-consuming effort when every day counted in getting supplies and equipment to the hard-pressed Soviet forces.

  North Atlantic, 25 May 1942

  The crew of U-103 were preparing the nine pennants, each signifying a sunk ship, to fly on their return to Lorient. The men were in the best of moods. They had had a gloriously successful voyage in the Caribbean, and they were heading home to the comforts of soft French billets.

  It was then that their captain was shocked out of his good mood when his signals officer handed him the latest Enigma decryption from OKM. The man was ashen-faced even under the normal pallor of a submariner denied sunlight. Schultze read, sucked in his breath, and muttered, ‘Lieber Gott!’ Then to the signals officer, ‘Müller, ask that the message be confirmed.’

  ‘I have, Herr Kapitän. It is confirmed.’

  Schultze called over his executive officer and showed him the message. The younger man almost whispered the word ‘Loki’. The captain turned back to the signals officer. ‘You know what we must do with all outgoing transmissions now.’

  The captain went to his cabin to think. Loki. The codename had been given to the captain, his executive officer and signals officer only orally. It was never to be printed or written down. It was the fail-safe code from OKM telling every U-boat that Enigma had been compromised, that the enemy was reading their mail. He had not thought much about the possibility so adamantly sure was the Navy that Enigma was unbreakable. Then he laughed to himself. The full import of the codename truly struck home. Loki in Norse and Germanic mythology was the trickster god brimming with deceit and betrayal.

  The Wolfssehanze, Rastenburg, East Prussia, 25 May 1942

  Dönitz and Heydrich had jointly requested this meeting with Hitler at his headquarters in the pine forests of East Prussia. Dönitz thought it was fitting that he was accompanied into Hitler’s wolfs lair by a human wolf.

  Neither was surprised when Hitler flew into a towering rage. It was as if his own child had been struck down. He raved that the plans for the entire 1942 campaign which would win the war had now been dashed. Dönitz had never seen him in such a fury. But when that rage subsided, he seemed to reach out to Heydrich for some consolation in a way Dönitz had never seen him act towards anyone else.

  Dönitz was surprised then at how Hitler acted the role of proud father. He was even more impressed at how Heydrich played his part for all it was worth. He knew how to manage Hitler. He knew that you either had to bring good news, or if forced to bring bad news to sweeten it with solutions. Preferably you brought both.

  In this case the sweetener to the bad news was that it was Heydrich’s own Sicherheitsdienst that had discovered the compromise of Enigma. By implication it was more than just patting himself on the back but an assertion that Hitler’s own SS had succeeded where the Luftwaffe and Army had let him down, and since Hitler was the personification of the German people they had by extension let the Reich down. It allowed Hitler to play the aggrieved father figure to every common German soldier who had died unnecessarily because of the failure of the generals.

  True to his agreement with Dönitz, Heydrich cast his protection over the Navy, pointing out without any real evidence that had the other services implemented the advanced security fixes to their Enigmas that the Navy had, there would have been no compromises. The failure had been with their simpler systems. They had been broken, which gave the British the key to the more secure naval Enigma. Heydrich should have been a lawyer hypnotizing a jury he was so skilful at weaving truth, innuendo and outright fabrication into a story Hitler wanted to believe.

  Dönitz shrewdly let Heydrich do all the talking. He was further amazed at the man’s ruthless backstabbing of Goring, the great rival to his own boss, Himmler. He was playing a deadly hand, undermining Goring. Having heard of Hitler’s comment about Heydrich being the ideal of the son he never had, the SS man obviously had the son’s role of heir apparent in mind.12

  Finally Hitler asked the obvious question. ‘How fast can we change the codes?’

  Heydrich was ready with the answer.

  Immediately, mein Führer. We have The Lorenz SZ40 Schlüsselzusatz [cipher attachment] for the standard Lorenz teleprinters. It is far more complex than even the Enigma machines. They are already being installed to communicate between OKW and its major commands and should be operational any day now. This was planned some time ago.

  But we lose a priceless opportunity to turn the tables on our enemies if we suddenly stop using Enigma. Yes, we can change the codes, but we must continue to use Enigma and feed the enemy false information to manipulate him into putting his head into a noose. You remember it was your approval of our plan to trick Stalin into purging his generals that paid such dividends. I ask you now to listen to the Grossadmiral describe the noose he has in mind.

  Hitler leaned over to give Dönitz his complete attention.

  56–58 Am GroBen Wannsee, Berlin, 26 May 1942

  Heydrich convened a meeting of the Wehrmacht and services chiefs of communication and intelligence as well as the finest minds in German cryptology. The lovely villa, set in a leafy Berlin suburb, was the perfect out of the way setting for a conference. He had used it in January for another conference on the Jewish question. He expected this conference to go as well.

  He surveyed the room with a stare that most men could not meet. He needed to exert a moral ascendancy over the lot of them. He began. ‘Meine Herren, we are here to discuss the extent of the Enigma compromise and the outline of Operation Waterloo. The Führer has entrusted me and the Sicherheitsdienst with complete authority in this matter.’ Not a peep from the faces at the table.

  ‘You will see in Grossadmiral Dönitz’s report the distressing number of coincidences that have occurred involving the loss of U-boats and other ships.’ He looked at the Luftwaffe’s communications chief and went on,

  The Luftwaffe has its own record of coincidences as you can see in the Reichsmarschall’s report, the most damaging of which have been the evasion of our fighters by Bomber Command’s raids. Then there is the steady loss of transport aircraft shuttling troops and vital cargo to Rommel’s army in Africa. You will also note that the Italians, who use the much simpler commercial version of Enigma as their naval code machine, have suffered very heavy naval losses, for example at the battle of Cape Matapan and in their shipping convoys to North Africa, where in each case the enemy seems miraculously to appear.

  He looked now directly at the chief of Fremde Heere Ost (FHO, Foreign Armies East), the Wehrmacht’s chief of intelligence for the Eastern Front, Colonel Reinhard Gehlen. Heydrich knew that Gehlen was in the midst of a major reorganization of the FHO to which he had just succeeded as chief having been its deputy for most of the last year. He was drawing in a stream of very talented men - linguists, geographers, anthropologists, lawyers and able junior officers. Here obviously was a serious man. Fortunately, he did not know how serious. Gehlen was a member of the group planning to assassinate Hitler. ‘Herr Oberst, we have not heard from OKH on this matter.’

  Gehlen stood:

  Herr Obergruppenführer, the Amis [Western Allies] and the Soviets may be allies, but a deep gulf of suspicion divides them. All of these instances of compromised intelligence, these coincidences of losses, in
volve only operations conducted by the British and Americans. We see no such pattern with the Soviets. If, and I say if only conditionally the Amis were providing the Russians with critical intelligence derived from Enigma, they certainly have made no use of it.

  We have scoured our records of Enigma messages sent by OKW and the Army and have found a number of instances where, had the Russians known of the intelligence contained in them, compromise would have provided them splendid opportunities to disrupt our operations seriously. In no instance do we see them doing so. It is our conclusion that the Amis are not sharing operational or strategic intelligence based on any compromise of Enigma with the Russians.

  Gehlen, of course, was not aware that Stalin had refused to believe the major piece of decrypted intelligence - the plan for the German attack on the Soviet Union - when the British sent it to him. The British had provided the intelligence but not the source of that intelligence. After that they had offered nothing derived from listening in on Enigma. Heydrich looked at him coldly, ‘You are sure of this, Herr Oberst?’

  I repeat, Herr Obergruppenführer, there is no intelligence reporting that even hints that the Russians know Enigma has been compromised or have received intelligence derived from that compromise. This is backed by the fact that there is no correlation between highly revealing operational information being transmitted and the Soviets suddenly taking advantage of it.

  Heydrich rejoiced, not that anyone at the table would have noticed.