The Moscow Option

by David Downing

  The meeting lasted until dawn on the following day. The reason for its unusual length was simple. For the first time since the Germans crossed their frontier the Soviet leaders had a growing operational reserve. Attack was now one of the options. Stavka, unused to such military luxury, argued long and hard as to how they should use their newfound riches.

  General Walther Model had recently succeeded General Hoth as Commander of Third Panzer Army. That morning he was moodily drinking a cup of coffee in his Danilov headquarters. The telephone rang on the other side of the room, and a few seconds later an orderly approached Model.

  ‘It is Field-Marshal Brauchitsch from Lotzen, Herr General.’

  Model grimaced, and walked slowly over to the telephone. ‘Good morning, Herr Feldmarschall,’ he said. ‘What can we do for you this morning?’

  Brauchitsch affected not to notice Model’s insubordinate tone. ‘The Führer would like your appreciation of the situation on the Vologda front, Herr General. He is particularly perturbed at the apparent lack of progress in this sector and . . .’

  Model cut him off. ‘I submitted a full report to General von Küchler only yesterday.’

  ‘Naturally General von Küchler’s views are being ascertained,’ Brauchitsch continued smoothly, ‘but the Führer is also eager to know the views of the army commanders in this particular sector. General von Küchler, as you know, has other responsibilities to take care of.’ ‘Yes, yes . . . my view, as outlined in my report, is that the situation here is quite disastrous. The reinforcements we have received are quite inadequate. The new tank engines promised for early August have still not arrived. No one seems to know where they are. Fuel stocks are low, and deliveries are not keeping pace with consumption. The Russians are contesting every square yard of land as if it were their last and, according to our intelligence reports, the number of their formations in this sector is growing at an alarming rate. I could be more precise . . .’

  ‘No, that will suffice Herr General. What the Führer particularly wishes to hear from you is an estimated date for the capture of Vologda.’

  ‘I have failed to make myself clear,’ Model said, in a tone heavily laced with sarcasm. ‘As the situation stands at this moment there is every possibility that we shall not capture Vologda.’

  ‘The Führer will not be pleased to hear such a pessimistic evaluation!’

  ‘I am sure the Führer would prefer to know the truth of our situation here. An underestimation of the difficulties facing Army Group North can only hinder him in the exercise of his judgement.’

  ‘Of course,’ Brauchitsch replied rather stiffly. ‘But I feel he may not be completely satisfied that Army Group North is doing its utmost to overcome these difficulties. In any case, I shall report your opinions to him. Good day, Herr General.’

  Model replaced the telephone, a look of disgust on his face. ‘Office-boy!’ he muttered under his breath.

  That afternoon Hans Fischer was brewing tea in the small concrete blockhouse by the railway line. Twenty metres away the tracks crossed a tributary of the Tsna river in an area of dense pine forest. Fischer and his three companions had been detailed to guard this bridge, one of several hundred between Germany and the Volga front, and so safeguard the passage of the trains carrying essential supplies from one to the other. It was a boring job.

  Ten minutes earlier Fischer had sent Cullmann to fetch Dietz and Haller. The tea was now ready. Where were they? Fischer went outside. No one was in sight. ‘Heinz!’ he called out, fighting back a rising sensation of panic. It was his last word, as an arm grasped him round the waist and a knife bit into his throat.

  Lev Susaikov dropped the dead German, wiped his knife on his trousers, and waited. After a few minutes he was sure that there were no others. He beckoned his three comrades out of the pines. Across the railway bridge he could see the others also emerging from their cover.

  The partisans fixed and wired the explosives. It took fifteen minutes. Then they scrambled down the embankment to the river’s edge and waited. Half an hour later a train appeared. At the centre of the bridge the front wheels of the locomotive hit the detonators. The wooden trellis exploded in a dozen places. The locomotive, and twenty flat-cars loaded with Panzer IVs, slid gracefully down through a cloud of smoke into the river.

  In Baghdad two representatives of an older world were sipping their pre-dinner cocktails on Casey’s veranda.

  ‘We’ve been distributing Arabic translations of some of Hitler’s more telling utterances,’ the Minister of State was saying. ‘The Arabs are finding out that according to old Adolf they come just above the Jews and the monkeys in the Nazi pecking order. That should make them think twice about the beneficence of the Third Reich.’

  ‘Only the ones that can read,’ joked Alexander.

  The easy-going nature of this conversation was not being echoed at the Second Panzer Army HQ in Tabriz. Guderian had arrived at midday, having flown back from Shinak Pass in his Storch. There was no time for cocktails. The German situation in northern Persia seemed to be coming apart at the seams. First the failure to take the Pass the previous morning, then the debacle at Miandowab, and now news of British attacks on the main road south of Tabriz. The bridges on the frontier were still down, the Luftwaffe was still conspicuous by its absence. No supplies were getting through. No fuel, no ammunition, no reinforcements. All Guderian found waiting for him in Tabriz were fresh exhortations from OKH in Lotzen. ‘Fast-moving formations should advance to Kermanshah and cut the main Baghdad-Tehran highway.’ Did these people understand what was happening here? Had they seen these ‘highways’, or the state of the ‘fast-moving formations’? Had they any idea how this order was supposed to be carried out?

  Rommel would have understood Guderian’s rage. He also received orders from OKH. But that particular evening he had other matters to concern him. His eminent SS guest had apparently been assassinated in Hebron.

  The Field-Marshal arrived back in the city late that evening. The building reserved for his staff was surrounded by SS personnel, and the dead body of Adolf Eichmann was resting, as if in state, on the dining-room table.

  Bayerlein was waiting for Rommel. He pulled him into the operations room and shut the door. ‘They’ve gone berserk,’ he half-shouted, ‘They rounded up about four hundred Arabs, took them out of the town, and mowed them down with machine-guns. What are we going to do?’ Rommel sat down, took off his cap, rubbed his eyes. ‘Did they catch the assassin?’

  ‘No, of course not. They couldn’t catch anyone. Most of the Arabs they killed were women and children. And it must have been a Jew who did it anyway. The SS can’t tell the difference.’

  ‘How many of them are here in Hebron?’

  ‘SS? About forty.’

  ‘Right. We’ll arrest their commander, HaupsturmFührer Hanke. I’ll suggest to OKH that he be court-martialled, and the rest of them disciplined. I expect I’ll be told to mind my own business, but this is still an OKH area; the SS have no right to take action without my agreement. And I certainly would not have agreed to this madness. We’ll have every Arab in the Middle East gunning for us after this.’

  Rommel walked up to his sleeping quarters. Through the window he could see a bright crescent moon rising above the houses of Hebron. It had been a hard day. And a more decisive one than he yet knew. His reaction to the SS reprisal massacre would spark off a major crisis in the Army’s relationship with its Führer. Rommel himself would not escape unscathed. By the end of the year he would be commanding a panzer army on the Eastern Front.

  At the Wolfsschanze Hitler had emerged from his bed at the customary afternoon hour to hear of Eichmann’s assassination in Palestine. According to his adjutant the Führer took the news with apparent diffidence. If so it was one of his pre-storm calms. After glancing through the situation reports from Russia he summoned Brauchitsch from Lotzen.

  The Field-Marshal arrived an hour later. He had not yet heard of Eichmann’s unfortunate demise, and had no i
dea of the reason for this peremptory call to heel.

  Inside the map-room Hitler was studying the deployment of divisions on the Eastern Front. ‘The SS Totenkopf Division is to be transferred immediately to Palestine,’ he said, without looking up. ‘How soon can this be accomplished?’

  In a more prudent mood Brauchitsch would have picked a suitable figure out of his hat and left it for Halder to argue the matter at a later date. But on that particular afternoon the Field-Marshal was not feeling prudent. The tone of his conversation with Model was still irking him. This time he would stand up to Hitler.

  ‘SS Totenkopf is needed for the forthcoming Vologda attack, Mein Führer. General Küchler is already of the opinion that his forces are insufficient for the tasks allotted them. I do not think . . .’

  Hitler’s mood snapped. ‘All I hear from General Küchler is excuses. There are insufficient forces. There is insufficient fuel, insufficient ammunition. Insufficient everything. It’s all I hear from you generals. “We can’t make it.” You can’t make Vologda, you can’t make Jerusalem. Any minute now I shall be hearing from General Guderian that he can’t make Baghdad. And why can’t you make it? I’ll tell you why. You lack the necessary will. It is cowardice, that’s what it is. And you hide this cowardice behind obsolete strategic ideas. All this General Staff training, it is only an exercise in caution. Moscow - you had to take Moscow. Though Moscow is nothing, one more city, that’s all. And as a result the Russians are still fighting. If you had attacked in the south as I had ordered we would have been in the Caucasus six months ago, and there would have been none of these problems.’

  Hitler paused for breath. Brauchitsch waited for the tirade to continue. But to his surprise the Führer now spoke calmly, in an almost friendly fashion.

  ‘It has been a great responsibility. I realise that. You are tired, no longer able to perform the tasks that are necessary. What we need now is a pitiless dedication to National Socialist principles, not the professional ability that is learnt in the staff colleges. I am the only one who can lead the Army in this manner, so I am relieving you of your command.’

  ‘As you wish, Mein Führer.’

  Brauchitsch departed. The Führer of the German Reich turned back to the huge wall-map. The armies of the Wehrmacht were chess-pieces spread across his global board. Now the world would be given reason to tremble.

  In England 12 September was a fine late summer day. At Lords the cricket season came to a close, with the Australian Air Force trouncing the RAF by 277 runs. Across North London Tottenham were hitting six goals past Charlton Athletic. In Doncaster Sun Chariot won the St Leger at nine to four.

  General Brooke had not noticed any of this. He had, as usual, been working all day, and looking forward to a Sunday at home with his wife. He was just preparing to leave when a summons arrived from the Prime Minister. Apparently there were vital matters to discuss.

  Within an hour Brooke was seated in the back of a car en route for Chequers. It had been a hard week, but a satisfying one. The Americans were beginning to arrive in strength at last, both in Britain and the Middle East. They had already dealt the Japanese a sharp blow off Panama. And the Germans had been stopped by Monty and Jumbo Wilson. Leaning back in his seat, freed from the minutiae of work, Brooke felt a sense of relief. Though his mind warned him that it was not yet time for unrestrained optimism, he could not help feeling that the worst was over. ‘We are going to win,’ he murmured to himself.

  At around 9.30pm the car pulled in outside the front entrance of Churchill’s residence. The PM, resplendent in his green and gold dragon dressing-gown, ushered Brooke into his study. ‘I’ve been thinking about the reconquest of Egypt,’ he exclaimed, as Brooke lowered himself into the proffered armchair.

  Notes and References

  (Facts amidst the Fiction)

  The proverbs quoted at the head of chapters 3, 5(Kuybyshev), 5(Tokyo), 5(Berchtesgaden), 9 and 12 are all to be found in the International Thesaurus of Quotations (Penguin, 1976). The other chapter quotes come from the following sources - chapter 1: from ‘Pledging My Time’, Blonde on Blonde (CBS, 1966); chapter 2: quoted in Werth, A. Russia At War (Barrie and Rockliff, 1964); chapter 4: quoted in Watts, A. The Way of Zen (Pelican, 1962); chapter 5 {London)Washington): from ‘The Note-Books’, The Crack- Up (Penguin, 1965); chapter 6: from The Waltz; chapter 7 quoted in Bryant, A. The Turn of the Tide (Fontana, 1965); chapter 8: a joke not used in the final screened version of Go West, quoted in Adamson, J. Groucho, Harpo, Chico and sometimes Zeppo (Coronet, 1974); chapter 10: from ‘Ambulance Blues’, On the Beach (Reprise, 1974); chapter 11: from Penguin Dictionary of Modern Quotations (Penguin, 1971).

  The ‘Eighth Army ditty’ and Victor Serge quote heading chapters 12 and 13 are purely fictitious.

  Very selective bibliographies of certain topics appear below under the relevant chapters. Certain books, however, do not fit into convenient geographical categories, and some that I have relied upon extensively are: Liddell Hart, B. History of the Second World War (Cassell, 1970); Parkinson, R. Blood, Toil, Tears and Sweat (Hart-Davis MacGibbon, 1973); Bryant, A. The Turn of the Tide (Fontana, 1965); Roskill, S. The War At Sea (vol 2) (HMSO, 1957); Bekker, C. The Luftwaffe War Diaries (Macdonald, 1967).

  Chapter 1

  I

  Churchill is supposedly reading the report submitted by the Thompson Committee on 15 July 1941. The intercepted Japanese message is quoted in Feis, H. The Road to Pearl Harbor (Princeton, 1950), p. 249. All other quotes are from The Times, New York Times and Daily Mirror of 4 and 5 August 1941.

  II

  The meeting at Novy Borrisov did indeed occur, and ended as inconclusively as described. Dr Werner Sodenstern is a fictitious character. Hitler had confirmed Goering as his successor on 22 June 1941.

  Chapter 2

  The three basic sources I used for the purely military side of the German-Russian war were: Seaton, A. The Russo- German War (Barker, 1971), Carell, P. Hitler’s War on Russia (Harrap, 1964); Clark, A. Barbarossa (Hutchinson, 1965).

  I

  Quotes from Führer Directives 21, 32, 33 and 34 are taken from Hitler’s War Directives ed. Trevor-Roper, H. (Pan, 1966). The findings of the Zossen war-game are reported in Goerlitz, W. Paulus and Stalingrad (Methuen, 1963). The German supply situation in the summer of 1941 is exhaustively discussed in Leach, B. German Strategy against Russia (Clarendon, 1973).

  II

  The situation in Moscow in the summer and autumn of 1942 is described in Werth, Russia at War; Cassidy, H. Moscow Dateline (Houghton Mifflin, 1943); Mann, M. At the Gates of Moscow (Macmillan, 1963).

  Chapter 3

  Principal sources used for North African War: Playfair, I.S.O. The Mediterranean and the Middle East Vol III (HMSO, 1963); The Rommel Papers ed. Liddell Hart, B. (Collins, 1953); Barnett, C. The Desert Generals (William Kimber, I960); Moorehead, A. The Desert War (Hamish Hamilton, 1965); Carell, P. The Foxes of the Desert (Macdonald, 1960); Strawson, J. The Battle for North Africa (Batsford, 1969); Connell, J. Wavell (Cassell 1964/9) and Auchinleck (Cassell, 1959); Mellenthin, F. W. Panzer Battles (Cassell, 1955).

  II

  Rommel’s war with the insect world is quoted in The Rommel Papers, pp. 149-50.

  III

  Churchill’s telegram to Auchinleck, and the latter’s reply, are quoted in Churchill, W. S. The Second World War Vol 6 (Cassell, 1964) pp. 23-4.

  Chapter 4

  For the events leading up to the Pacific War see particularly Feis, H. The Road to Pearl Harbor (Princeton, 1950) and Toland, J. The Rising Sun (Cassell, 1971).

  II

  The telegram delivered to von Ribbentrop is quoted in Feis, Road to Pearl Harbor, p. 329.

  Chapter 5

  Kuybyshev

  The evacuation of Soviet industry is described in some detail in Werth, Russia at War.

  Tokyo

  Captain Yorinaga is a fictitious character, but the information he gathers together was actually available to the Japanese Navy in the s
pring of 1942.

  Chapter 6

  The attack on Malta is based upon contingency plans discussed in Playfair, Mediterranean and Middle East; Bekker Luftwaffe War Diaries; Edwards R. German Airborne Troops (Macdonald and Jane’s, 1974); Kesselring, A. Memoirs (William Kimber, 1953); Ciano’s Diaries 1939-43 (Heinemann, 1947).

  II

  Lieutenant Johnston is a fictitious character.

  Chapter 7

  II

  The Middle East Defence Committee Report was actually submitted on 9 May 1942, and is quoted in Playfair, Mediterranean and Middle East, p. 203.

  III

  Principal sources consulted for the political situation in the Arab world were: Hirszowicz, L. The Third Reich and the Arab East (Routledge and Regan Paul, 1966); Schechtman, J. The Mufti and the Führer (Yoseloff, 1965); Stephens, R. Nasser (Pelican, 1971); Sadat, A. Revolt on the Nile (Wingate, 1957); Warner, G. Iraq and Syria 1941 (Davis- Poynter, 1974).

  VI

  German/Italian occupation policy in Egypt is based on plans discussed by Hirszowicz in chapter 12 of Third Reich and Arab East.

  VII

  Rommel’s conquest of Egypt is based on the plans he drew up shortly before the First Battle of Alamein. See the sketch- map on p. 259 of The Rommel Papers.

  Chapter 8

  My version of the Battle of Midway naturally relies on the numerous accounts available of the real battle. The best of these is Fuchida, M. and Okumiya, M. Midway: The Battle that Doomed Japan (Hutchinson, 1957). Another book I relied on was J. D. Potter’s biography of Yamamoto, Admiral of the Pacific (Heinemann, 1965).

  I