The Last Lion

by William Manchester

  If the Allies could solve the U-boat menace, their oil problem would solve itself. Not so, Hitler’s fuel problems. He had to now steal more than Polish and Ukraine wheat in order to move his armies. He needed a great deal more oil. The Ploesti oil fields—Churchill called Romanian oil the taproot of German might—located north of Bucharest supplied as much as 60 percent of Germany’s crude oil, enough to sustain a peacetime German economy, but not enough to power the Wehrmacht as well. Because the gasoline consumed by his mechanized forces taxed Germany’s modest refining capacity, the solution to Hitler’s oil problem lay farther east, in the Caucasus, or even in the Middle East. Each of the almost four thousand Wehrmacht tanks in Soviet territory quaffed enormous quantities of fuel simply standing still—more than twenty-two tons every eight weeks. Hitler’s tanks alone would need several hundred thousand tons of fuel to reach and hold the Caucasus. The vast spaces of the Ukraine and the Don Basin contained no petrol stations such as those in Belgium from which German tankers had helped themselves. The panzers were only the first drawdown on Hitler’s fuel supplies; his mechanized units, more than six hundred thousand vehicles in all, required thousands of times as much fuel as his tanks.

  On Hitler’s orders Luftwaffe fighter planes had been designed to fly on synthetic gasoline, which was refined from coal at two large plants in Leipzig and Stettin. But Hitler lacked the capacity to refine the gasoline he needed to move his armies. The Russian Baku oil fields—if he conquered them—would contribute to his mobility, but only in two years’ time, when new autobahns and railroads of the proper gauge were built in order to connect the Caucasus to Greater Germany. The northern Iraqi oil fields located near Mosul offered the same benefit as the Romanian and Caucasus oil fields, but following Rashid’s failed 1941 coup, Hitler had abandoned any thought of forcing his way into Mosul. Likewise, in Iran, the British had barred the door in August 1941 when British and Indian forces invaded Iran from Basra, while the Soviets poured in from the north. That war, if it could be called that, lasted six days, one day longer than a cricket test match. The British lost twenty-two killed. When Reza Shah fled the country, Churchill propped the Shah’s twenty-two-year-old son, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, on the Peacock throne.

  But in early 1942, with British and Soviet forces spread so thin, the doors to Iraq and Iran were virtually unguarded. If Hitler smashed through Baku in the north or the Suez in the south, the oil riches of the Middle East would be his for the taking. But he had no plans to do so, and for reasons that appeared to him to be strategically sound. In order to get to Iraq and Iran from the north, he would have to drive through Baku, that is, he would have to take Baku. Taking Baku would sate his oil needs and negate the need to proceed farther. But in February, with Rommel cruising toward Cairo, and the Japanese steaming into the Indian Ocean, Admiral Raeder convinced Hitler that the real strategic significance of the Middle East was not its potential source of oil for Germany but its importance to Britain: It was where the British got their oil, and where they were most vulnerable. Raeder, in a memo to Hitler, anticipated Churchill’s and Brooke’s concerns exactly: “Suez and Basra are the western pillars of the British position in the East. Should these positions collapse under the weight of concerted Axis pressure the consequences for the British Empire would be disastrous.”198

  Raeder and Rommel had long proffered a southern plan (Plan Sud), wherein Germany and Japan would link up in Basra or Tehran. Britain depended upon Persian* oil to fight its war and Persian railroads to supply Russia. If the Axis took Persia, Britain would lose its primary source of oil. Early in the year Churchill told Ismay, “The oil stringency, which is already serious in Germany and German conquered countries, makes the seizure of the Baku and Persian oil fields of vital consequences to Germany, second only to the need of successfully invading the British Isles.” Brooke seconded that motion when he told his diary, “All the motive [British] power at sea, on land, and throughout the Middle East was entirely dependent on the oil from Abadan…. If we lost the Persian oil, we inevitably lost Egypt.” Egypt lost meant Empire lost, and the war.199

  Hitler finally grasped that fact in early 1942 and, executing an about-face, approved of Raeder’s Plan Sud, including that part of the plan that called for securing the Mediterranean flank by either capturing or destroying Malta. To that end, during March and April, the Germans dropped twice the tonnage of bombs on Malta than they had on London during the 1940 Blitz. Bombs formed only part of the peril faced by the Maltese. With London unable to supply the island, the threat of starvation was real, and imminent. “Above all, there was Malta,” Ismay later wrote. “To lose her would be almost as painful as to lose part of England itself.”200

  If Malta fell, Rommel could resupply at will and punch past Cairo and into Iraq. But unless Rommel got to Basra, Hitler’s oil options came down to Russian oil, or none. Stalin would have to fight the battle for his oil alone. Churchill had no say in the outcome. Yet he pondered a horrific means to deny Hitler the oil: Stalin might be persuaded (if the battle went against him) to destroy his own oil wells. The Baku fields were so saturated with petroleum that Churchill predicted that their destruction would result in “a conflagration on a scale not hitherto witnessed in the world.” Rumor in Berlin had it that British commandos were already on the ground, awaiting final orders to blow the Russian oil wells, a prospect that shocked Goebbels, who scribbled in his diary, “That’s exactly like them! They [the English] have proven themselves throughout the world as great destroyers of other people’s property.” Churchill quickly shelved the idea, not because of the insult Stalin might attach to the scheme, but because he and Roosevelt lacked the ships needed to make up the shortfall. In any case, Stalin had no intention of destroying his oil fields. The dictator summoned Nikolai K. Baibakov, deputy to the oil commissar. Cocking his thumb, Stalin pointed two fingers at Baibakov’s head and said, “If you fail to stop the Germans getting our oil, you will be shot. And when we have thrown the invader out, if we cannot restart production, we will shoot you again.”201

  Stalin understood that Russia’s only hope for salvation lay in the attrition of German men, machines, and fuel. Attrition formed the backbone of Churchill’s strategic vision as well. He intended to do his part in constructing a ring of steel around the Reich, a ring he could slowly tighten until nothing remained within it but Hitler’s bombed-out Chancellery—preferably with the Führer dead inside. Germany, vulnerable to naval blockade, its navy too small to break out into distant waters to procure needed resources, had to grow geographically in order to sustain itself, a process that in time, if Russia held on, would collapse upon itself. Churchill summed up his philosophy in a memo to the Chiefs of Staff that treated of RAF losses, but his words also applied to tanks, artillery, and men (especially if the men were Russian): “Indeed, like General Grant in his last campaign, we can almost afford to lose two for one, having regard to the immense supplies now coming forward in the future.” Churchill had read Ulysses S. Grant’s Civil War memoirs when he was thirteen; the utility of attrition as practiced by Grant had been lodged in Churchill’s psyche for more than fifty years. Yet Grant at Petersburg had been fighting his last campaign, and he was on the verge of victory; Churchill and Roosevelt had yet to fight their first campaign together as allies. The question that vexed Churchill throughout 1942 was, would American industrial output hit its stride before German armies arrived in the Caucasus?202

  Yet if Ismay, Dill, and many of the American planners were proven correct in their predictions of a German victory over the Soviets, Hitler’s fuel and food problems would solve themselves. The loss of Baku oil would cripple Russian industry and agriculture; further resistance would be futile. Famine, widespread and horrific, would follow. Hitler, victorious, would then turn westward, toward England.

  Churchill once told Colville that May was his least favorite month. But at least it ushered in good fighting weather, especially on the Continent, where in 1942 only two options for offensive action pres
ented themselves, “butcher and bolt” raids and RAF bombing. Whenever he summoned Brooke late at night, the CIGS presumed the Old Man had just cooked up another strategic initiative of likely dubious value to Brooke’s way of thinking, impossible to pull off, and costly in the execution. This was especially so on weekends when Churchill was at Chequers, recalled Sir Ian Jacob, because the hours and company Churchill kept at Chequers always caused a distressing sense of “anticipation” among the staff officers, especially if Dickie Mountbatten arrived bearing schemes. The staff called these sessions “the midnight follies.” During such weekends Churchill put forth ideas like a masting oak spews acorns, some to root but most destined to decay. The invasion of Norway—Operation Jupiter—had been of abiding interest to Churchill, for no other reason Brooke could discern than that Churchill once told him that “Hitler had unrolled the map of Europe starting with Norway, and that he [Churchill] would start rolling it up again from Norway.” Archie Wavell, a victim in North Africa of Churchill’s strategic misfires, believed “Winston is always expecting rabbits to come out of empty hats.” Churchill now looked to Madagascar, where, were the Japanese to secure a foothold, the entire Indian Ocean would be lost. As well, Madagascar was a French colony, intensely loyal to Vichy ever since Churchill had bombed the French fleet at Oran in July 1940. Here was a grand opportunity to block further Japanese adventures (not that Japan planned to go there) and pluck some real estate from the Vichy portfolio.203

  This the British did, in a May 5 raid, executed by the 5th Commando at Diego Suarez, on Madagascar’s northern tip. It was carried off with total surprise. Vichy forces on the island, however, incited by Admiral Darlan, who told them to never forget Oran, turned the affair into a guerrilla war and fought the British for months. The flash-bang success of the St-Nazaire and Madagascar raids—as they saw them—emboldened both Churchill and Mountbatten who, as chief of Combined Operations, cooked up plans some distance removed from the watchful gaze of the military chiefs, but close enough to Churchill to whet his appetite for action.

  By May the Russians had been dug in for six months within artillery range of the German army. The Red Army had the benefit of short supply lines, along which rolled the new and innovative T-34 tanks, steel behemoths armed with 76mm cannons and, most important, built with sloping armored surfaces. No other tank in the world was so designed. The sloped profile effectively doubled the protection offered by the T-34’s steel armor; German anti-tank shells simply bounced off. The T-34 tank kept the Russians in the game that year, as did the Soviet conscripts who marched down frozen roads in seemingly infinite numbers, for, as the Germans had learned throughout the autumn, when the Red Army lost an entire division, even an entire army, another appeared almost at once. In late February, with all of Europe clenched in winter’s grip, Hitler had told Goebbels that “snow had become physically repulsive to him.” By March, Goebbels asked his diary, “Will this winter never end? Is a new glacial age in the offing?” Hitler now grasped that the plight of German troops was “a catastrophe” of the very sort that had befallen Napoleon. Yielding to reality for a change, Goebbels called upon German citizens to donate warm clothing for the troops.204

  The Führer waited for the “majestic coming of spring,” when he intended to preside over a thaw that would flow with fresh blood. He had promised as much when he made his declaration of war upon America: “The beginning of winter only will now check [our] movement; at the beginning of summer it will again no longer be possible to stop the movement.” It was a boast typical of Hitler, to be sure, but one taken seriously in Moscow, London, and Washington. By the late spring of 1942, Roosevelt, Marshall, Ismay, and the man in charge of U.S. war plans, Dwight Eisenhower, all thought it a fair bet that Russia would either be defeated or sue for peace by autumn, as the new Soviet government had done in early 1918. Brooke and Churchill thought otherwise, for a simple yet overriding reason: after almost a year of carnage that left more than a million troops on each side killed or wounded, neither Stalin nor Hitler could call a stop to the battle without risking a loss of prestige in the eyes of their own people, and possible political extinction at the hands of their disillusioned cohorts. No, the business would be settled with finality one day, either in Moscow or Berlin.205

  Spring brought no relief to Russian civilians, who had so far had the worst of it, especially in Leningrad, where, under siege since late August and lacking coal, food, and oil, more than two hundred thousand perished by early May. Hitler had ordered the complete destruction of the city and its nine million inhabitants, including six million refugees who had fled the countryside for the supposed safety of Leningrad. The Wehrmacht was ordered not to accept a surrender if one was offered. The composer Dmitri Shostakovich managed to escape with his family and a suitcase that contained his almost completed Seventh Symphony, Leningrad. He was one of the very few.

  The city was surrounded by German armies and three Finnish corps, except for Lake Ladoga to the east, where in winter a rail line had been thrown across the ice in order to keep Leningrad from dying. Still, the people of Leningrad were starving to death at a rate of more than two thousand per day, and would do so for another nine months, until the Soviets punched through a narrow land corridor. With water and sewer lines smashed, epidemics raged. German heavy artillery and bombers pummeled the city day and night. By the time the siege was finally lifted in January 1944, more than a million bodies filled communal graves, more fatalities than British and America casualties, military and civilian, combined, for the entire war. Even Dr. Goebbels flinched at the carnage and the stories of cannibalism, confessing to his diary that a Russian deserter’s report that “a great part of the population was feeding on so-called human flesh jelly… is so revolting that it makes one’s stomach turn to read it.” In their dietary need for fat during the horrific winter of 1942, hundreds of thousands of Russians, from Leningrad to the Black Sea, added a touch of axle grease or crankcase oil to whatever rotten food scraps and bones found their way into cook pots. Even if not one more Russian died as a result of Hitler’s eastern designs—and almost twenty million would—Leningrad, by the spring of 1942, served up to Joseph Stalin the requisite justification to smash and burn Germany back into the distant hunter-gatherer past whence it came.206

  Yet he lacked the means to do so. Churchill could promise Stalin only three convoys every two months made up of twenty-five or thirty-five ships each. And even that promise soon proved impossible to keep. With the Arctic days lengthening to more than twenty hours, German air and sea forces based in Norway simply waited near the Arctic Circle for fat targets to heave into view, with the result, Brooke lamented to his diary, that tanks and munitions Britain desperately needed in North Africa ended up at the bottom of the Arctic Ocean. A bitter Stalin reiterated his demands that Churchill and Roosevelt make good on their promise to draw off German troops from the Russian front by an attack in France. But Churchill and Roosevelt lacked the ships even to carry American troops to Britain. Each ship that sailed for Russia reduced by one the number available for Operation Bolero, the buildup of U.S. forces in Britain in preparation for a cross-Channel foray. Each ship that sailed from America to Britain meant one fewer ship to transport to Cairo the troops and tanks that Churchill needed to build a reserve against Rommel, or for deployment to the rest of the Middle East, or India, should the need arise. The final battles of the European war would someday take place on land. Yet, as Churchill had told Molotov during a tutorial on naval power, the war would be won or lost on the oceans. “Everything,” Churchill told Roosevelt, “turns upon shipping.”207

  Hitler’s generals had advised him the previous year not to fight a two-front war, the classic nightmare of Prussian military strategists. Yet his gamble had so far paid off handsomely. In fact, his war was a one-front war, the Eastern Front. He had to keep a weather eye on Norway, North Africa, the Atlantic, and the Mediterranean and that obstinate rock, Malta. But in the east he had no enemy at his back. Since December, he h
ad faced two enemies at his front—winter, the destroyer of armies, and the Red Army. Neither, by May, had destroyed the Wehrmacht. The early spring rasputitsa, the twice-annual Russian wet season, had halted movement as effectively as the cold of winter, yet warm and dry weather was now spreading northward from the Black Sea in ever widening circles. In early May, the German line in northern Russia was anchored just outside Leningrad, where the swamps were still frozen and snow continued to fall. In the center, the line lunged eastward from Smolensk to encompass Rzhev and Vyazma in a huge salient—a bulge. The roads there remained muddy but would dry within the month. Hitler’s Führer Directive No. 41 of April 5 stipulated that the line in central Russia—the Moscow front—be held, while in the north, Leningrad be taken. Farther south, the Ukraine front ran from just east of Orel, Kursk, and Kharkov—where the Red Army had forged its own salient—south to the Sea of Azov. In this sector, General Fedor von Bock (who had been called out of retirement) commanded Hitler’s Army Group South, which consisted of six German armies, three of them armored, and two satellite armies. This organization was so massive that within weeks it was divided into two army groups, A and B, each with a different objective. Here in the Ukraine, as famously described by Igor Stravinsky, “the violent Russian spring that seemed to begin in an hour and was like the whole earth cracking” had arrived with all its promise. White birch and oak forests wore thin veils of green, and mushrooms pushed through the still damp soil. Ukraine’s rivers and streams ran high from the winter snowmelt and spring rains.208