The Moscow Option

by David Downing

  Raeder acted on his opinions. On the evening of 8 December, without consulting his fellow Nazi barons, the Grand Admiral authorised German vessels in the Atlantic to attack any American ships engaged in activities prejudicial to the Reich’s war-effort. The following day U-186 sunk an American destroyer off the coast of Iceland. This was all Roosevelt needed. On 10 December the United States of America declared war on Germany and Italy.

  The attack on Pearl Harbor cast a ray of sunshine through the growing darkness of Churchill’s winter. The continuing German successes in Russia, the failure of ‘Crusader’, the accelerating debacle in the Far East ... all were compensated for by the American entry into the war. Within hours of the American declaration of war on Germany the British Prime Minister was inviting himself to Washington.

  Roosevelt did not wish to see him immediately, but was too tactful in saying so. Churchill ignored the hint; he was afraid that the American service chiefs might reach some conclusions of their own if his visit was delayed. On the night of 11 December he made the long journey north through blacked-out Britain to the Clyde, and there boarded the new battleship Duke of York for the cross-Atlantic voyage. This time he did not read Hornblower en route; he and the Chiefs of Staff were too busy drawing up plans for the continued prosecution of the war.

  The strategy outlined during the voyage comprised five basic elements. They were:

  1. The need to translate the enormous industrial potential of the anti-Axis alliance into military strength.

  2. The need to maintain communications, first and foremost those between the three Great Powers engaged in the struggle, and secondly those connecting these powers with their armies and raw material sources overseas.

  3. The continuance of the war against Germany by those means presently available: strategic bombing, encouragement of subversion in the occupied territories, propaganda, and blockade.

  4. The retention of vital positions in the Far East, notably Singapore.

  5. The tightening of the military ring around Axis- occupied Europe, by increasing aid to the Soviet Union, and by conquering North Africa and opening up the Mediterranean.

  Point 1, the realisation of military potential, was no problem for the United States. Two weeks after Churchill’s arrival Roosevelt announced the grandly-titled ‘Victory Programme’. In 1942 the US would produce 45,000 tanks, 45,000 aircraft, 20,000 anti-aircraft guns, 15,000 anti-tank guns and half a million machine-guns. And these figures would be doubled in 1943.

  Point 2 was rather more problematic. The enemy, though doubtless impressed by all this prospective production, could find consolation in the difficulties likely to be encountered in its transportation. For by the end of 1941 Allied communication lines were looking distinctly tenuous.

  Allied naval commitments seemed to be ever-expanding. They now included protecting the major convoy routes to Britain, Russia and the Middle East, holding off the rampant Japanese in the Pacific and Indian Oceans, and keeping a watchful eye on the remnants of the French fleet in Dakar and Casablanca. And while the commitments expanded the fleets shrunk. The back of the US Pacific Fleet had been broken at Pearl Harbor, and Churchill’s wish to reinforce the survivors with the Prince of Wales and Repulse had been rudely dashed by the sinking of the two ships on 10 December. From the east coast of Africa to the west coast of America the Allies had lost any semblance of naval superiority.

  Nor was this the worst of it. The British Mediterranean Fleet had suddenly become disaster-prone. First Ark Royal had been sunk, then Force K sailed into a minefield and lost three cruisers, and finally two battleships in Alexandria Harbour - Queen Elizabeth and Valiant - were disabled by Italian frogmen. The only capital ship still afloat in the Mediterranean was the battleship Barham, and this was badly needed in the Indian Ocean.

  Only in the Atlantic were the Allies holding their own, but here too the situation was soon to take another plunge for the worse. Balked by improved British radar in the latter half of 1941, Admiral Doenitz, the German U-boat Chief, was now busy organising ‘Operation Drumbeat’, a calculated carnage of those American merchant ships still sailing, alone and unescorted, the East Coast and Caribbean sea-routes.

  The imminent success of this enterprise would place an additional strain on the already serious Allied shipping situation. By January 1942 the British had lost both the option of sending ships through the Mediterranean and thirty-five per cent of their pre-war merchant tonnage. Thus there were more miles to cover and less ships to cover them. As a result only forty to fifty thousand troops could be dispatched overseas each month, a figure that barely covered the natural wastage through injury and illness. Even this level of transportation had only been sustained by the borrowing of American ships, a practice which would now have to cease. For the Americans, though naturally in a better situation than the British, had barely enough ships to meet their own needs, and this number was to be further depleted by ‘Drumbeat’s’ ominous roll. To sum up this picture of Allied marine gloom, by February 1942 there was barely sufficient shipping to form the necessary convoys and barely sufficient naval forces to protect them. Further setbacks would be calamitous.

  The hopes expressed in Point 2 could be generously described as optimistic; those expressed in Points 4 and 5 were merely naive. The chances of stemming the Japanese onslaught in South-east Asia were slim indeed; already their forces were racing down the Malay peninsula towards Singapore and island-hopping their way towards the East Indian oil-wells. Perhaps Burma could still be held, but little else.

  Churchill, however, had as much misplaced faith in the garrison of Singapore as he had previously had in the ill- fated Prince of Wales and Repulse. He brushed aside suggestions that reinforcements bound for the island should be redirected to Burma. As a consequence both would fall to the enemy.

  This sad process was still unfolding; the situation in North Africa could better be described as unravelling. The failure of ‘Crusader’ and the need to send troops to the Far East had set in motion that course of events most feared in London. Malta was now in direst peril. Should it fall Egypt would surely follow. And the threat from the Caucasus was likely to loom larger with the coming spring. It was now not so much a question of tightening the ring around Axis Europe as of holding it desperately shut. Any hopes of a joint Anglo-American landing in Northwest Africa would have to be placed in cold storage for the indefinite future.

  So where should those forces that were available be committed? To the British it was obvious - in the Middle East and the Indian Ocean. These were the areas of potential crisis; these were the areas that had to be held. The enemy still held the initiative; in Russia, the Middle East, the Far East. His armies were still moving forward, and they had to be stopped. Until such time as they were, all else was clearly secondary.

  Unfortunately the Americans, as Churchill and his party discovered on reaching Washington, were unaware of the escalating peril. Their service chiefs, who considered the military initiative a god-given right, were understandably loth to admit that it rested with the enemy. Consequently they had devised plans for utilising an initiative they did not possess. The East Indies would be held, North-west Africa invaded. As soon as possible.

  Churchill, with rare tact, explained that the failure of ‘Crusader’ had rendered a North-west Africa operation inadvisable. There was not enough shipping, he explained, to countenance this operation, the supply of the Middle East and the retention of footholds in the Far East.

  The Americans were not convinced that the general situation was as lamentable as the British said it was. But, amidst the prevailing honeymoon spirit, they agreed to put their disagreements aside for the time being. Churchill was reasonably satisfied. He was confident that time and a few more unexpected jolts would produce a more realistic approach. And the British representatives on the new Combined Chiefs of Staff Committee would naturally be on hand to hasten their new ally down the road to wisdom.

  Kuybyshev

  Better to turn
back than to lose your way.

  Russian proverb

  One crucial decision was taken by the British and Americans in Washington. They would continue with, and seek to expand, the programme of economic and military aid to the Soviet Union. Philanthropy was not the motive. The Western allies had realised that only the Red Army could hope to tie down the bulk of the Wehrmacht for the year it would take to bring the resources of the United States to bear. Any additional strain imposed on Anglo-American shipping was a small price to pay for keeping the Soviet Union in the war.

  If it could be done. In early January Stalin’s government moved further east to Kuybyshev on the Volga, and so rejoined the rump of the administration and the foreign diplomatic corps. Kuybyshev was situated closer to the centre of unoccupied Russia; it was also likely to remain unoccupied rather longer than Gorkiy, which was little more than a hundred miles from the front line.

  The Soviet military situation was far from enviable. The Red Army, its ranks thinned by the autumn battles, its morale lowered by constant retreat and the loss of the capital, its supply channels thrown into confusion by the loss of the Moscow railway node, had only been saved from complete disaster by the early arrival of winter and the transfer of some eighteen crack divisions from the Far East. These fresh troops, accustomed to the rigours of winter, had been deployed mainly in the Mius, Voronezh and Vladimir sectors. There were not enough of them to throw the Germans back but, with the help of the conditions and an enemy reluctance to mount any determined attacks, they had succeeded in stabilising the line.

  But for how long? It was glumly recognised that winters do not last for ever, even Russian winters. It seemed highly unlikely that the Red Army would be able to cope with a renewed German offensive once conditions again became conducive to mobile operations. And so the measures being taken in Kuybyshev, like those under discussion in Washington, were primarily long-term defensive measures. Stalin too was playing for time. If the Soviet Union could somehow avoid the knock-out punch, then there was a good chance of winning the bout on points.

  These points were now being totted up out of reach of the rampant Wehrmacht, first and foremost by the enlarging of the industrial base east of the Volga.

  This process had been underway since the early ‘30s. The Soviet leadership had, unknown to the Nazi devotees of the blitz solution, demonstrated a rare prescience. Stalin had been preparing for this war for over a decade. By 1941 a substantial proportion of Soviet industry was located east of Moscow, and as the war began more industrial concerns were shifted, machine by machine, in the same direction.

  As the panzers rolled through Belorussia, Soviet trains rolled east across the steppe carrying tank factories, steel mills, diesel plants and other vital equipment to the Volga, Ural, Siberian and Central Asian regions.

  In the winter of 1941-2 this process went on, as those areas likely to be overrun in the coming spring and summer were denuded of industrial plants necessary for the continued prosecution of the war. This exodus even took precedence, in terms of rail capacity, over the movement of supplies to the hard-pressed troops in the front-line.

  The major problem involved in this evacuation of industry was the time consequently lost to production. For example the huge aircraft factories of Voronezh, moved east in November and December, could not be expected to resume full production until May. The same applied to the Moscow aviation industry. Overall, only that thirty-five per cent of aircraft production already situated in the Urals would be turning out planes in the first five months of 1942. It was going to be a thin year for the Red Air Force, no matter how promising the prospects might be for 1943.

  Industry could at least be evacuated; mines and agricultural land were not so mobile. New sources of production would have to be found. The food situation was difficult rather than impossible, largely because the loss of vast producing areas had been matched by the loss of most of the mouths they usually fed. The oil situation, though, was potentially critical. The probably imminent loss of the Caucasian oilfields - currently contributing eighty-six per cent of the Soviet output - could only be compensated for by the rapid expansion of the recently developed fields in the Volga and Ural regions. The story was the same with most of the mineral products. Old mines had to be reopened or expanded, new sources prospected and exploited. In certain crucial cases - aluminium, lead, the high-octane fuels and quality blending agents necessary for the production of aviation fuel - insufficient sources were available. The necessary quantities would have to be brought in from abroad.

  But the Soviet Union’s greatest problems in this period concerned transportation. The Red Army had few motor vehicles and had lost the means of producing many more. The railways suffered from a different malaise. The radial network was centred on the capital, and the loss of the Moscow hub had severely weakened the ability of the Red Army to switch its troops from front to front. To move an army from Tikhvin to Rostov now took four times as long as it had previously taken. The north-south line furthest to the west in Soviet hands ran from Yaroslavl to Gorkiy before winding its way interminably south to the Don at Liski. It was a single-track line for most of its length, with a correspondingly low carrying capacity.

  In December work had begun on a new track, running from Kazan to Stalingrad down the west bank of the Volga, but on reflection the Soviet leaders decided that the line was rather too close to the front line, and top priority was then given to the construction of a north-south line between the Volga and the Urals, running south from Balezino to Chkalov via Izhevsk and Ufa. Further south the line connecting Orsk to Guryev on the Caspian was completed in March, so allowing the transport of Baku oil by tanker and rail to the Ural region. Through the extremes of a continental winter thousands of Soviet men, women and youths worked in merciless conditions to lay these miles of track.

  The one compensating feature in this desperate outlook, and one for which the Soviet planners could claim the credit, was the country’s continued accessibility to the outside world. The Konosha-Kotlas railway, built during 1940-1, and connecting Murmansk and Archangel to the Urals area by way of Kirov, was an invaluable resource. Even should the Finns and Germans make a more determined effort in the Far North and capture Murmansk, the thin line from Archangel, running through the pine forests south to Konosha, would probably prove beyond their reach.

  Already it was in heavy use. The first Allied convoy had docked in Murmansk harbour the previous September, and had been followed by others at roughly fifteen-day intervals. In mid-October Cripps and Hopkins had met Stalin in Gorkiy and taken away the Soviet Union’s Christmas list, and in the succeeding months British and American ships had been loaded with everything from lump sugar to aluminium, from field telephones to lard, that would keep the Soviet Union in the war.

  Unfortunately this route was only viable through the perpetual darkness of the Arctic winter; the perpetual light of summer would give the Luftwaffe and Kriegsmarine units stationed in northern Norway too much of an edge. So the other two major ingress routes were of considerable importance. One ran up the new Trans-Iranian railway from Basra to Mianeh, thence on by road and another railway into the Caucasus. The other consisted of American ships flying the hammer and sickle and sailing under the eyes of the Japanese and into Vladivostok. Clearly neither offered a long-term guarantee. A German advance into the Caucasus, a shift in Japanese policy, and there would be a cork in each bottle.

  Still, perhaps the Germans would not reach Baku, perhaps the Japanese Navy had its hands full enough already. The Americans continued to load ships in Chesapeake Bay. The one commodity they could not hoist aboard the freighters was determination. If the Soviet Union could continue the war - would it?

  The answer was yes. German policy in occupied Russia had more than made up for any shortage of Soviet resolve. If a modus vivendi could ever have been reached with Stalin, if the rifts could ever have been deepened between the Soviet people and its leadership, then by December 1941 such possibilities no longer
existed. There were too many frozen corpses swaying on village-square gallows. There could be no peace with such an enemy. The cost of war could not exceed the cost of submission.

  The depths of bestiality plumbed by Hitler’s aryans were naturally most apparent in the occupied regions. And here the fight was only just beginning. Stalin’s speech of 3 July 1941 had decreed the formation of partisan units in those areas overrun by the enemy and those soon to suffer a similar fate. Deep in the forests and marshes of European Russia bases had been prepared, albeit inadequately, for the struggle to come. And, as the Germans advanced, these bases acted as focal points for the thousands scattered in the panzers’ slipstream. For weaponry these proto-partisans could rely on the enormous tonnage of discarded arms littering the vast fields of battle.

  In late 1941 and early 1942 many trained officers were parachuted into occupied territory to organise the raw material into efficient partisan units. In this first winter of the war little action was taken against the occupying power, only selective raids calculated to elicit German reprisals and so cement the local population’s loyalty. For similar reasons there were many executions of those inclined to collaborate with the new masters. Most of the time the partisans were too busy establishing their bases and arranging for supplies, and to the German field commanders they were as yet little more than a minor irritation.

  Given time they would become more, much more. ‘Given time’. How often must Stalin have muttered those words? The crippled Soviet engine was firing fit to burst on its remaining cylinders. It would get there, given time. Stalin, pacing the floor of the Governor’s Palace in Kuybyshev, could only watch its painstaking progress and wait. Armaments, railways, foreign aid, partisans. All would prove their worth. ‘Given time’.