Inferno - Max Hastings [195]
At midsummer 1942, the Western Allies’ view of Russia’s predicament remained bleak. A British intelligence officer wrote on 15 July: “I have the inescapable feeling that much as the Germans may have lost, the Red Army has lost more … Sevastopol was … a fair feat of Soviet arms and demonstrated the enormous power of the Red Army on the defensive—given the right conditions of terrain … [But it] is still not capable of dealing with the Germans in the open terrain of South Russia … On the whole the Germans have most things in their favour … They possess a better fighting machine … How far the Germans will be able to exploit their success will depend on the ability of the Red Army to retain some form of cohesion in retreat until they have gone back behind great natural obstacles or into country more suitable for the defence.”
It is important to view the events of the year in context. In 1941, Russia suffered 27.8 percent of its total war losses. But in 1942 Kharkov, the Crimea and the Kerch Peninsula disasters accounted for even larger casualties. When Stalingrad was added, the year as a whole cost Russia 28.9 percent of its overall casualties in the conflict, 133 percent of the Red Army’s frontline strength. Posterity knows that Stalin learned vital lessons: he started to delegate military decisions to competent generals and the worst blunderers were dismissed. The weapons created by Russia’s industrial mobilisation and production beyond the Urals began to reach her armies, increasing their strength while that of the Axis shrank. But none of this was apparent to the world in the summer of 1942. Germany still seemed irresistible on the battlefield, Russia at its last gasp.
Almost all British, and also later American, attempts to collaborate operationally with Stalin’s people foundered on the rocks of their ally’s secretiveness, incompetence, ill-will and paucity of means. The Royal Navy’s requests for the aid of Soviet warships and aircraft to cover British convoys approaching Murmansk and Archangel yielded meagre responses. In August 1942, an RAF Catalina delivered to northwest Russia two SIS agents, whom the Soviets had agreed to parachute into northern Norway. Their hosts instead detained the two men incommunicado for two months before dropping them, still in summer clothing, inside Finland rather than Norway, where they were swiftly arrested, tortured and shot. Thereafter, the British recognised that cooperation with the Russians was an exclusively one-way proposition; that the consequences of placing Allied personnel at the mercy of Soviet goodwill were often fatal.
Nonetheless, the Western governments went to extravagant lengths to preserve a semblance of unity. When Gen. Władysław Anders, who had suffered in Stalin’s prisons between 1939 and 1941, met Churchill in Cairo in August 1942, the Pole vehemently denounced the Soviet Union: “There was, I said, no justice or honour in Russia, and not a single man there whose word could be trusted. Churchill pointed out to me how dangerous such language as I was using would be if spoken in public. No good, he said, could come of antagonising the Russians … Churchill closed the talk by saying that he believed Poland would emerge from the war a strong and happy country.” Anders allowed himself to be persuaded that “we Poles were now going home (so we thought) by a different route, a longer one, indeed, but one with fewer hardships.” The Western Allies exerted themselves to sustain this delusion.
THE GERMANS encountered the first units of the Stalingrad front on 23 July, some eighty-seven miles west of the city. That night, Hitler made what proved the decisive blunder of the war in the east. He issued a new directive, declaring the objectives of Blue completed. Army Group A was ordered to overrun the Caucasus