On August 19, Churchill drove out past the pyramids to the front lines, about 130 miles through the desert from Cairo, and down to Montgomery’s headquarters by the sea. He arrived in the late afternoon at bathing time, where thousands of British soldiers were “disporting themselves” on the beach. Churchill wondered aloud why the War Department went to the expense of issuing the men white bathing trunks when they could just as easily go naked. Then he reflected on his own experience in this same desert forty years earlier, when military medical opinion was that the African sun was very dangerous to the skin and “must be kept away at all costs.” “Spine pads” were attached to all tunics, which had to be tightly buttoned at all times cuff to neck; it was a military offense to appear outside without a pith helmet. Now, as he watched the soldiers in only swim trunks, he judged that the sun “apparently did them no harm.”
Montgomery said an attack from Rommel was imminent, and that it would fall on his communications flank to take Cairo. They drove into the desert to the prospective battlefield, where the German Afrika Korps lay only a few miles away. Every crevice, every swale, every dune and hummock was packed with camouflaged tanks or artillery pieces: a grand and terrible spectacle. Montgomery was planning a nasty surprise for Rommel when he attacked under the impression that the Eighth Army was reeling. They returned to Montgomery’s headquarters under the hard desert stars. That night, Churchill went to sleep peaceful as a baby, drenched in the solace of “the reviving ardor of the Army.” Everyone said what a great change had come since Montgomery took command. “I could feel the truth of this with joy and comfort.”22
Before departing—reluctantly—on the eve of the battle with Rommel, Churchill once more violated his policy against directly interfering with a military operation. He told General Alexander, the theater commander, to arm every staff officer and each of the thousands of clerks, lorry drivers, cooks, and bottle washers with rifles and drill them into defensive positions alongside the Nile in case Rommel broke through. It was the duty of every man in the army, Churchill had said, “to die for his country.” Then he flew back to England.
Once back at the War Office, Churchill turned his attention to Operation Torch, the British-American landings in North Africa. The British had understood that the invasion would include landings in French-held Algeria as well as French Morocco. But at the last moment the American chiefs of staff balked on grounds that because of the sinking of the French fleet the British would likely be no more welcome in Algiers than they would be in French Morocco, which could be trouble. Churchill vehemently disagreed; it took two weeks of haggling to resolve the issue in Churchill’s favor, with the invasion set for eight weeks’ time.
* * *
IN THE MEANTIME, the British Eighth Army languished in the North African desert, waiting for an attack from Erwin Rommel. It came, as predicted by Ultra, on August 31, 1942. Churchill telegraphed to both Roosevelt and Stalin: “Rommel has begun the attack for which we have been preparing. An important battle may now be fought.” For his part, Montgomery declared, “What I now needed was a battle that could be fought in accordance with my ideas.”23
As expected, Rommel tried to turn the British southern flank. When that proved too difficult, he attempted to punch a hole in the middle of the British line. The German plan was to let the anticipated British counterattack succeed to an extent, then blow past it with a powerful force, get into the rear of the Eighth Army, then destroy its communications, its stores, and ultimately the Eighth Army itself. But as it happened things didn’t work out that way.
First off, Montgomery refused to take the bait. Instead of counterattacking, he drew up a hundred tanks on a ridge facing the Germans and dared Rommel to come on. “The swine will not attack,” the German commander telegraphed his boss, Mediterranean commander Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, in a rage. Wherever the German tanks and troops plunged forward, they were met with a wall of steel. Montgomery had given the order that under no circumstance were troops or units to withdraw. “We would fight on the ground we held,” Montgomery said later, “and if we couldn’t stay there alive, we would stay there dead.” After a week of attacking, Rommel backed off. Not only was his attack not getting anyplace fast, but out on the Mediterranean the Royal Air Force had sunk three large fuel tankers destined for the Afrika Korps. The German commander was all too aware that you can’t fight a battle between armor with an empty tank.24
Next it was Montgomery’s turn. It took some time after Rommel’s attack to reorganize and resupply the Eighth Army. But on the full moon of October 23, Montgomery gave the order for a thousand heavy artillery pieces to open up a three-hour barrage, announcing that General Bernard Montgomery and Co. were advancing into the German lines.
Thereafter, an entire part of the Western Desert—or so it seemed—began to rise up from its camouflaged haunts and surge forward with a roar, like a wave of prehistoric beasts. Tanks, self-propelled guns, tractors towing artillery, armored cars, trucks filled with infantry, and infantry afoot arose from their desert concealments and headed for a break in the vast German minefield that British engineers were trying to create.
Breaking the minefield was easier said than done, and for a time the attack stalled. The Afrika Korps violently counterattacked—but without the services of Erwin Rommel, who had gone back to Germany on medical leave. The battle seesawed up and down for several days, with commensurate loss of life. On October 26, the day after Rommel hastily resumed his command, an Australian and New Zealand infantry division, supported by several British divisions, broke the enemy line while the RAF shot down what few German planes were sent to assist Rommel. When these had been disposed of, the Germans were unable to re-form their units for attack, because British airpower would obliterate them.
Hitler issued another of his famous “fight and die to the last man” orders, but nobody in the Afrika Korps paid attention. By November 4 British armor was pursuing the German tanks and infantry trucks over open desert. What became known as the Battle of El Alamein had been won by Montgomery, and Rommel’s army was in full retreat toward Italian-held Tunisia, more than a thousand miles to the west. If things went according to Churchill’s and Montgomery’s plan, the Germans and Italians would be met there by an American army commanded by General George S. Patton, which was supposed to go ashore in Morocco and Algeria in five days’ time.
The Eighth Army had lost nearly five thousand men, but Rommel’s army lost more: nine thousand killed, thirty-five thousand taken prisoner, five hundred tanks lost. Eleven Afrika Korps divisions ceased to exist.
In Churchill’s mind, Alamein was a crucial turning point of the war. “It might almost be said,” he wrote, “that before Alamein, we never had a victory. After Alamein we never had a defeat.”25
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Almost immediately after the German defeat at Stalingrad in February 1943, Field Marshal Erich von Manstein, now in charge of all German troops in Russia, decided to reorganize his forces and stage a massive surprise attack on the Red Army. His reasoning was that the war-weary Soviets would be in vulnerable disarray after the ordeal of the onerous siege. The new battle was to be fought in the vicinity of the city of Kursk, about 330 miles south of Moscow near Russia’s border with Ukraine, where the Red Army line bulged out into a salient. About a million Germans faced more than 2 million Russians. By comparison, when Napoleon invaded Russia in 1812 he brought half a million men to fight nearly a million Russians.
At the same time Stalin, who had consistently pushed the Soviet armies to attack, now called for an all-out assault on the Germans. He was talked out of this by his own great general Zhukov, who in Stalin’s mind had become a rival. Zhukov insisted that a well-prepared defense in depth was the better way: let the Germans come on until they were “bled white.” (The Germans had in fact used a similar tactic in the First World War at Verdun—except that it was the Germans who were “bled white” instead.) That
lesson was not lost on Zhukov, whose plan was to defend ground fiercely, then fall back to the next position; when the exhausted Germans thought they had won the battle, he would then unleash an overwhelming counterattack upon them.
Stalin was not pleased with this stratagem but gave way after Zhukov was backed by all of his generals and the State Committee of Defense. Soon, Manstein’s attack on the Russian salient near Kursk became apparent, just as Zhukov had predicted. Fifty German divisions—850,000 men—were drawn up in front of the spot by early April. But weeks went by, and no attack was forthcoming. Hitler had gotten cold feet.
It was by then a well-established principle in both armies that massive attacks were likely to be successful only after careful preparation. This was on Hitler’s mind when he postponed Manstein’s operation. His mistake was that it also gave the Russians time to prepare their defenses.
Unlike those of the previous century, modern armies were highly complex in their mechanization and aeronautical features. In Russia, an army could attack along a front as long as four hundred miles—but only with a stupendous amount of preparation. Stalin had at long last grasped this after immersing himself in military planning with his generals. Zhukov himself wrote that Stalin had become “master of the basic principles of the organization of frontline operations and the deployment of frontline forces. He controlled them completely and had a good understanding of major strategic problems. He was a worthy Supreme Commander.”1
In the meanwhile, Stalin had set out, at home and abroad, to reconfigure his image as a godless, bloodthirsty tyrant into something more palatable to a wartime public. He perceived correctly that if he let up on stringent control over the Soviet population and strict adherence to Marxist doctrine, the Russian people would endure their hardships and more happily fight harder for the Motherland.
In his quest to become popular, Stalin was aided by Hitler himself, whose monstrous policies were even worse than Stalin’s now. While they were in the Soviet Union, it is estimated that including the SS and other murderous groups, the Nazi armies killed between 15 and 30 million citizens, almost as many as Stalin during his twenty years as dictator. Those who survived were prone to gravitate to the least monstrous of the monsters.
Stalin relaxed his harsh Communist policies regarding the Russian Orthodox religion, which was (or had been) the national church for centuries; during the past twenty years, the Communists had murdered tens of thousands of priests. He also liberalized the suppression of nationalism in the conquered Soviet states such as Georgia, Ukraine, and the western “-stans,” allowing the people to celebrate their nationalities and customs, a practice that had been strictly forbidden under communism.
Stalin also relaxed the tight restraints he had placed on intellectuals and intellectual activity. Ever since the revolution poets, authors, and even composers of classical music, such as Dmitri Shostakovich, had been threatened, imprisoned, and sometimes faced the firing squad for anything perceived by the authorities as counterrevolutionary. Now, with specific reservations, some of their patriotic poetry and other writing was read over the radio. Shostakovich was permitted to write patriotic musical compositions, some of which remain well regarded for their beauty and stirring emotion.
Stalin even relaxed his approach to certain forms of private enterprise. Peasants arriving in cities with a sack of vegetables or a pig slung over their backs were no longer subject to arrest and imprisonment; they were now allowed to trade or even accept cash for their produce. There was an ulterior government motive for this, of course. The Germans occupied so much Russian territory that the loss of the great harvests of wheat, grain, sugar beets, and stock from Ukraine, Belarus, and other massive Soviet territories was putting severe pressure on the government to ensure a regular food supply. So for Stalin these peasant entrepreneurs filled an important gap.
As a sop to his allies, Stalin very publicly dismantled the Comintern—the international organization responsible for infiltrating, agitating, and sowing communism throughout the world—which was viewed as a subversive threat by Western nations. Stalin’s efforts to remake his public image worked. By 1943 most everyone was feeling somewhat kindly toward Uncle Joe, whose heroic people, under his steady leadership, were defeating the Nazi scourge.
None of this would last long after the war. Although the Comintern had been publicly dismantled by Stalin, its apparatus was kept firmly but quietly in place, and put back in use to subvert and enslave eastern European nations after peace was declared. Likewise, the Communist boot was returned squarely onto the neck of the Russian Orthodox Church as soon as the war was over. There was a new clampdown on intellectuals, and would-be capitalists faced stiff punishment for peddling fruit and vegetables without authority. Any signs or sentiments of nationalism in the provinces once more became grounds for sentencing to the gulags. Stalin was certain that nationalism was a mortal threat to Marxism—a view that was unequivocally vindicated forty-five years later when East Germans began tearing down the Berlin Wall that had kept them penned in for more than a generation. After his 1942 Man of the Year cover, Stalin would grace several more Time magazines during his lifetime, but the photo editors returned to portraying his expression as menacing.
As the years passed, Stalin also used the war as a pretext to organize mass deportations of citizens who clung to national identities. Thus, in 1942 and 1943 millions of Chechens, Kalmyks, Ingushes, Karachays, Meskhetians, Tatars, and other groups were either “liquidated” to extinction—some by units of the Soviet army—or deported beyond the Urals to Siberia or remote places in Central Asia (often in U.S. Lend-Lease trucks or packed inhumanely into railroad cattle cars). For Stalin, according to Ronald Hingley, the redistribution of entire populations was no more than a “minor administrative adjustment”—and the fact that the “freight was, as ever, liable to perish in transit” merely an incidental inconvenience of a necessary action by the state.2
The man principally responsible for carrying out the disposition of the so-called freight was Lavrenty Beria, described in the London Daily Telegraph as “Stalin’s depraved executioner.” Beria in 1938 had taken over the NKVD, the Soviet secret police, from his boss Nikolai Yezhov, a drunkard and homosexual predator, whom it was Beria’s pleasure to shoot in the basement of the Lubyanka, the Soviet prison and torture chamber used by the NKVD.
The history of the secret police in Soviet Russia does not have many commendable chapters. The original iteration, the Cheka, had killed off so many people it actually put a dent in the Russian population. Many felt a shudder of relief when Stalin and the Politburo replaced it with the OGPU, which began its own binge of torturing and executing Russian citizens. Then came the NKVD, which, when Stalin decided to purge the country of anyone with an uncommunistic thought in his head, restarted the slaughter on an unprecedented scale.
Ironically, Stalin selected Beria to rein in the Great Terror that he had unleashed a year earlier. Beria, a tight-lipped, beady-eyed, smallish man, got the job after he faked and “broke up” a phony assassination plot against Stalin and executed the unfortunate “perpetrators.” At the time he was chief deputy of the NKVD. What Stalin did not know then was that Beria was a serial rapist and a practicing sadist who enjoyed personally beating and killing people suspected of being enemies of the state.
Stalin seemed to enjoy this bloody chaos, defending it as “necessary.” He befriended Beria, who once posed for a photograph at Stalin’s dacha with twelve-year-old Svetlana bouncing on his knee. At the Yalta Conference Stalin jokingly introduced Beria to a startled President Roosevelt as “My Himmler,” a reference to the war criminal Heinrich Himmler, head of the Nazi Gestapo.
Stalin may not have personally gone to the dreaded Lubyanka to see how the sausage was made—but he knew what was going on and had his hand in a lot of it. It wasn’t necessarily information from Beria, either; Stalin had back channels and, to quote his biographer Robert Service, “daily c
ollaboration with Beria was like being tied in a sack with a wild beast.”3 On occasion, Beria would have drinks at Stalin’s dacha. There, the two would make veiled, knowing references to departed associates, producing a tremendous, warped sense of power in both of them.
* * *
OVER TIME, IT BECAME NOTICEABLE to anyone dealing with Joseph Stalin that just the tiniest thing that annoyed him was grounds for that person to disappear. This yielded a strong current of fear—of terror—in those who might have reason to come into contact with him.
That fear apparently did not extend to his children, each of whom disappointed him in different ways. Yakov had let himself be captured and then shot by the Germans. Vasily remained an overpromoted drunkard and ne’er-do-well who was a Soviet air force general at the age of twenty-three. He was divorced several times with much acrimony, but Stalin somehow was able to remain cordial with him.
After her lover was sent to the gulags by her father, Svetlana chased after Lavrenty Beria’s son for a while. But when he remained married she settled on a university student in her class. He was Jewish; Stalin did not like Jews and would not approve the marriage. “Do what the hell you like,” was the best she could get out of him. She wasn’t allowed to bring her husband home. She had a child, also named Joseph, but the marriage didn’t last and she remained more or less estranged from her father.
The Allies Page 39