The Moscow Option

by David Downing

  Nagumo now found it difficult to take a decision. There were too many imponderables. Kusaka tried to assist him. The first strike should be ordered back on to the flight deck, he urged. If there was an American carrier in the area - which he doubted - then Fuchida’s planes could be sent to destroy it. If not then a third strike could be launched against the Canal. Kido Butai had not come 9000 miles to be baulked by a pair of lock-gates.

  Kusaka’s confidence restored Nagumo’s. He agreed with his Chief of Staff. Unfortunately their conversation had taken ten minutes, and they would prove the most important ten minutes in Kido Butai’s glorious but short career.

  Wasp and Saratoga had launched their planes soon after 09.00. Fletcher had learnt something from the Midway battle, and he had sent the slower torpedo-bombers off ahead. They would pull the fighter defences down to the surface, and so maximise the chances of the dive-bombers.

  Fletcher knew he was outnumbered two to one in carriers and planes, but he also knew that he had surprise on his side. And this time there was none, of that false confidence which had preceded Midway; the crews knew what they had to do, knew that it was going to be extremely hard, and that they were going to do it anyway.

  By 10.55 the flights decks of the four Japanese carriers were almost full of planes loaded with high explosives. At that moment a fresh flight of enemy aircraft was sighted moving in from the west. This time there were more of them. Where were all these planes coming from? A chill of desperate uncertainty passed through the minds of the Japanese sailors.

  The American torpedo-planes bored in towards the Japanese carriers, through the vicious flak and the marauding Zeroes. One by one they went down, eliciting murmurs from Nagumo in praise of their reckless gallantry. ‘The Americans must be feeling desperate today,’ muttered the more prosaic Kusaka. Nagumo did not answer. Perhaps a dumb foreboding was growing in his consciousness. The torpedo-bombers had at least scattered his fleet, and the Zeroes had all been pulled down close to the water. Nagumo looked up, in time to catch the first glimpse of the American dive-bombers dropping out of the sun. Nemesis had arrived. It was 11.10.

  The 500 and 800-pound bombs lanced into the flight decks of all four carriers, tearing huge holes and starting blazing fires. The fuel and explosives in the densely-packed planes ignited. The Japanese firefighting teams were unable to contain the spreading flames. Burnt men lay screaming in agony amidst the charred corpses of their comrades.

  Some of the bombs had passed clean through the flight decks to explode on the hangar decks below. These triggered off more multiple explosions as the fires spread to the bomb and torpedo racks. Fuel lines ignited, sending rivulets of flame washing across the decks of the listing carriers.

  None of them had been hit by torpedoes, and none were damaged below the water-line, but only Shokaku’s engines and rudder were still working at 14.00, and only she would still be tenuously afloat at the end of the day. The still-burning hulk of this famous carrier would be sunk by its own destroyer escort on the following morning.

  Nagumo and Kusaka had abandoned the stricken Akagi within thirty minutes of the attack. From the bridge of the battleship Kirishima they watched the carriers of Kido Butai burn. Pearl Harbor, Ceylon, Midway, California - it had been a glorious morning. But now it was past noon, and the sun was commencing its downward turn. The Rising Sun would rise no more.

  Chapter 11: Panzers Three Miles from Jerusalem

  It may be a fire, tomorrow it will be ashes.

  Arab proverb

  And we shall save Jerusalem

  From Rommel’s grubby German hands.

  Eighth Army ditty, September 1942

  I

  Through the last week of July and the first fortnight of August Field-Marshal Rundstedt’s Army Group South had been moving south across the four hundred miles of open country between the Don and the Caucasus Mountains. Eleventh Army had crossed the Kerch Strait into the Kuban and was fighting its way down the Black Sea coast. On its left flank the stronger Seventeenth Army was marching in the wake of Kleist’s panzers towards the northern end of the mountain highway that led across to Sukhumi. In the centre, astride the main road and rail communications, First and Second Panzer Armies pushed south towards the Georgian Military Highway and the Caspian littoral respectively.

  The distances involved were immense, supply a continuous problem, but the German advance was living on its own momentum. Across the dry steppe, through fields of waving corn and man-high sunflowers, towards the distant cloud above snow-capped Mount Elbruz, the German tide flowed forward, leaving its customary trail of burning villages, rotting corpses, and vehicles which had finally succumbed to one bad road too many.

  The German High Command had estimated that there were twenty Russian divisions in the Caucasus, but so far they had seen little to substantiate such a figure. Small groups of Red Army soldiers and tanks hindered the panzer spearheads at all the difficult river-crossings, but melted away into the south once the Germans had secured bridgeheads on the southern banks. In Lotzen it was thought that the Red Army would make its stand at the entrance to the mountain passes; until then the problems were all logistic ones - water, vehicle maintenance, the ever-recurrent shortages of fuel.

  The last-named had not been alleviated by the capture of the Maikop and Grozny oilfields, on 2 and 12 August respectively. Both had been put out of action by the retreating Red Army. The oil storage tanks had been destroyed and all vital plant equipment removed. It would be several months before any of the precious black fluid could be brought to the surface, always assuming that the German supply network could stand the additional burden of moving the necessary equipment.

  This was well appreciated in Kuybyshev, and preparations were already being made for the destruction of the Baku fields. If, as was now feared, the Red Army failed to hold the line of the mountains, the Germans would find no functional oil-wells on the other side.

  The Caucasus was only one of three fronts on which the Soviet Union was fighting for its life. The Japanese attack in the Far East, though no surprise, had been thoroughly depressing. The relative ease with which Rokossovsky had thrown back the invaders in the Mongolian border region was encouraging, but the closing of Vladivostok, at a time when the volume of American aid coming in through the port was rising steeply, was a hard blow. And successful or not, the war in the Far East was now tying down twenty Red Army divisions.

  These could well have been used on the third crucial front, forty miles south of Vologda. Since the final fall of Yaroslavl in mid-July 3rd Panzer and Sixteenth Army had been trying to reach the important railway junction. The strong Red Army positions on the Danilov ridge had been successfully stormed on 24-25 July, but little further progress had been made in the weeks following. This front was now acting as a magnet to the German and Soviet High Commands; both were throwing in reserves they could ill afford, raising the stakes without changing the ratio of forces.

  It was not yet apparent, but the dangerous game in progress south of Vologda was more dangerous to the Germans. The bulk of the panzer force was now tied up either here or in the distant Caucasus, leaving the long line from Gorkiy to Stalingrad manned almost exclusively by infantry formations. This was only safe as long as the Red Army had no armoured reserve.

  It was building one. Soviet industry, after all the problems involved in the vast removal programme, was at last getting back into its stride. New tanks and planes were starting to pour steadily off the Ural and Siberian assembly lines. In Kuybyshev this was felt to be a trump card. Regardless of the likely fall of the Caucasus this card would be there to play. As long as Hoth could be held south of Vologda for another two or three months, then the long winter nights would see a resumption of the Arctic convoys and the alleviation of the most worrying shortages. And then, perhaps, advantage could be taken of that long thin German line stretching from Gorkiy to the south.

  In the Wolfsschanze such eventualities were not under consideration. Victory was still taken
for granted. Certainly Halder was getting worried, and Hitler was getting more than annoyed, at the time it was taking to accomplish this inevitable victory. By mid-August Vologda was proving more than an irritation or a nuisance, it was a symbol of German frustration.

  This feeling was deepened in the third week of August by the stubborn Russian resistance in the Ordzhonikidze region, at the northern end of the Georgian Military Highway. By 19 August Kleist’s panzers had been battering their armoured heads against a wall for five days without making more than an appreciable dent. Hitler, a thousand miles away in his forest lair, ranted and raved and attacked the furniture. Halder, with rather more thoughtfulness, began to consider the unwelcome possibility of another winter of war.

  II

  In the first week of August Rommel had finally bridged and crossed the Suez Canal. The South African battle-groups had withdrawn across Sinai in good order, and the full might of Panzerarmee Asien moved forward in their wake along the coast and Bir Gifgafa roads. The British airstrips at Jebel Libni, Bir Rod Salim and El Arish were repaired and enlarged to accommodate Rommel’s Luftwaffe support. The German supply corps began the arduous task of carrying the necessary supplies across eighty miles of desert. By 16 August Rommel felt ready to attack.

  The British were dug in behind extensive minefields on the two main roads leading into Palestine. The New Zealand Division and 1st Armoured Division held the narrow Jiradi defile and the vital Rafah crossroads ten miles further to the east. 50th Division and 2nd Armoured Division were deployed astride the Umm Katef bottleneck on the inland route. The South Africans and the green 44th Division were in reserve. Montgomery was determined that the Germans would have to fight for every inch. ‘He has no more divisions than we have’ he told his divisional commanders, ‘let’s hit him for six!’

  Early on 17 August 20th Panzer attempted unsuccessfully to rush the Jiradi Pass. Only a few tanks broke through the defending New Zealanders’ fire, and these were destroyed at the eastern exit by the Grants of 1st Armoured Division. Rommel realised that he would have to flush out the defenders position by position, and the dismounted 14th Motorised began this task that afternoon. Both sides suffered heavily in the numerous hand-to-hand encounters.

  The Germans were making little more progress on the inland route. A frontal attack by 7th Panzer on the Umm Katef defences floundered in the minefields and was beaten back. Cruewell’s attempt to outflank the position by pushing 15th Panzer down the El Quseima road came closer to success; the German tanks were only halted by 4th Armoured Brigade and the timely arrive of a South African brigade.

  The Germans seemed to be finding it difficult to operate without the luxury of an open desert flank. Or so Montgomery complacently believed. But unfortunately for the British the German commander was aloft in his Storch reconnaissance plane, searching the terrain for a way out of his dilemma. He found one. On the night of 19-20 August 15th Panzer advanced slowly along the dry bed of the Wadi Hareidin, considered impassable by the British command, and turned north into the soft underbelly of the Rafah crossroads defensive complex. Through the morning a confused tank battle was fought in the dunes south of the crossroads, and 1st Armoured Division, despite inflicting heavy losses on 15th Panzer, was thrown back in the direction of Rafah town. This allowed Cruewell to lead a battle-group north-west through Kfar Shan to the eastern end of the Jiradi defile. The 4th and 5th New Zealand Brigades were now trapped between Cruewell’s tanks and a renewed push by 14th Motorised from the west. Several frantic hours followed before nightfall allowed the New Zealanders the chance to break out along the coastline to the east.

  The northern flank of the British position was crumbling. Montgomery realised as much, and threw in the reserve 44th Division between Rafah and Khan Yunis as a temporary stop-gap. But worse was to come. 7th Panzer’s tank regiment had been fed along the Wadi Hareidin in 15th Panzer’s tracks, and on reaching the Palestine frontier turned south towards El Auja, fifteen miles behind the British position at Umm Katef. This was one of Rommel’s finest moves, a classic example of the double encirclement enacted from a central thrust. It nearly paid off. Unfortunately for Rommel Ariete proved unequal to the task of completing the encirclement. Advancing up the El Quseima road the lightly-armoured Italian tanks were severely punished by the heavier Grants and Shermans. While the South Africans doggedly resisted 7th Panzer’s advance above the El Auja road, 50th and 2nd Armoured Divisions evacuated Umm Katef and pulled back to the east and safety. Rommel was left cursing the presence of Ariete and the consequent absence of 21st Panzer. Who needed allies?

  The Red Army could have done with some help. Field- Marshal Rundstedt, in an attempt to break the deadlock in the Caucasus, had loaned Kleist one of Guderian’s panzer corps. The additional divisions had made all the difference. After a day-long battle for the small mountain village of Kazbegi, the motorised infantry and the Stukas had at last cleared a path for the tanks through the upper Terek valley, and by evening on 20 August 9th Panzer had penetrated the entrance to the Krestovyy Pass. Next morning the panzers were rumbling down into the heart of Georgia, a mere sixty miles from Tbilisi.

  Four days earlier units of Seventeenth Army had captured the port of Sukhumi, trapping two Soviet armies between themselves and the advance of Eleventh Army down the Black Sea coast. On the other German flank Guderian’s spearhead had been making similar good progress, reaching Kuba, a hundred miles from Baku, on 20 August.

  Now was the moment, thought the Führer, for his masterstroke. On the morning of 21 August, as the 9th Panzer crews threw snowballs at each other in the high mountains, Student’s Airborne Corps, fresh from its Maltese triumph, took off from airstrips in the Grozny area. Its mission was to capture the lucrative Baku oilfields intact.

  This operation, code-named Schwarz Gold, was ill- conceived and ill-prepared. Everything had been rushed. Intelligence of both the terrain and the local Red Army strength was inadequate. The airborne officers and troops were insufficiently briefed. There was not enough fighter support; Luflotte IV was fully engaged on the Georgian Military Highway. Student protested that the operation was suicidal, but to no avail. Hitler was in no mood to listen. ‘The Reich cannot do without the Baku oil,’ he told the Airborne leader. The Germans could not afford to trust the local Azerbaijan population to protect their main source of wealth, nor could they risk Guderian arriving too late to prevent the destruction of the vital installations. There could be no repetition of the Maikop and Grozny experiences. Surprise was essential, Hitler insisted. There was no time for exhaustive preparations, and in any case there was no need. There could not be more than a handful of Russian battalions in Baku. And Guderian would be arriving in thirty-six hours at the most. All Student’s men had to do was to land without breaking their legs and then stand guard around the largest wells. What could go wrong?

  Everything. There were four divisions of the Soviet Ninth Army in Baku, and another three blocking Guderian’s path at Kilyazi, fifty miles to the north. It would be four days before the panzers arrived.

  They were four long days. Student’s paratroopers dropped out of their Ju52s onto the Aspheron peninsular, and into a panorama of exploding oil installations. General Tyulenev, commanding the Caucasus Front, had issued the demolition orders at dawn that day.

  There was no chance for the fallschirmjager to interfere with the destructive process, for no sooner had they landed than they were assaulted by Red Army infantry and tanks. The drop had not been well concentrated, and isolated German pockets of varying size were soon struggling for survival against a numerically superior enemy.

  The next day brought some relief, for a nationalist demonstration inside the city swiftly escalated into a fully-fledged Azerbaijan revolt, and the Red Army found its hands full. But Student’s force would never be the same again; by the time Guderian’s tanks arrived on the evening of 23 August the fallschirmjager had suffered forty per cent casualties. The Airborne Corps destroyed on Cyprus in May 1943 had already b
een crippled outside Baku.

  Hitler’s rage at the failure of Schwarz Gold was only slightly mollified by Kleist’s triumphal entry into Tbilisi on 23 August. The Red Army had already been driven from the city, partly by local Georgian nationalists, mostly by the imminence of the German arrival. NKVD men liberally adorned the lamposts of Pushkin Street.

  Leaving these scenes of celebration behind, 3rd Panzer Corps turned west towards the Black Sea and 48th Panzer Corps east down the Kura valley. At 16.30 on 26 August the latter met the leading units of Guderian’s 46th Panzer Corps at Yevlakh. The Caucasus had been effectively conquered. The only Black Sea port still held by the Red Army was Batum, close to the Turkish border, and that too would fall within a few days.

  It was now time, Hitler thought, for the Turks to make up their minds. On 27 August he dispatched his last offer to the dilatory leaders in Ankara. If Turkey joined the Axis they could regain the lands stolen by the Allies in the 1920s - Armenia and Mosul. If not . . . the consequences were unstated, but unlikely to be pleasant.

  Ill

  It was late in the evening of 28 August. Franz von Papen, ex-Chancellor of Germany and now Ambassador to Turkey, waited outside Ismet Inönü’s study in the Presidential Palace in Ankara. He had been waiting for some time, and trying to make sense of the muffled argument raging on the other side of the closed door.

  At 10.35pm the door opened and out stepped Chief of Staff Fevzi Cakmak and Assistant Chief of Staff Asim Gunduz. The former was smiling, the latter grim and tight-lipped. Von Papen felt relief. The Turks were joining the war!

  The Ambassador was ushered into Inönü’s sumptuous study. The President looked exhausted. Obviously his arguments, and those of his supporter Gunduz, had failed to make any impression on Cakmak. Von Papen wondered what the Chief of Staff had threatened the President with. His resignation, or something more? The resignation would have been enough.