Disaster at Stalingrad: An Alternate History
Page 32
That he would be travelling down this road today was something that had not been overlooked. Canaris had kept a finger on his every movement, something he kept Fölkersam constantly aware of. The major looked at his watch again just as the black car with its SS flags turned round a bend in the road. ‘Just like clockwork, indeed.’ he said to himself. The car was without escort, an act of bravado Heydrich had used as he had driven through the streets of Prague. ‘You make this too easy.’
The car slowed as it approached the checkpoint. Fölkersam’s men jumped to attention, as the major met the car just as it stopped. He gave a terrific Hitler Gruss stiff-armed salute. ‘Herr Obergruppenführer, my apologies . . .’
The rear passenger window unrolled. Heydrich’s long face coldly looked at him. Fölkersam never forgot the look he saw on that face in the moment before he shot it between the eyes.
Stalingrad, 23 November 1942
Evil now walked through the ruins of Stalingrad savouring his victory. Around him stretched a vast sea of broken brick and concrete, with only the department store shell in any recognizable form. From its balcony flew a huge swastika. The only thing to mar Hitler’s triumph was the smell of rotting corpses, though the snow had done much to cover it. In an act of personal cruelty, he had ordered that the captured commander of the Soviet defence be there to watch him strut his triumph and rub it in the abject man’s face. Manstein had been appalled and personally offered Chuikov his apologies.
Hitler motioned his SS bodyguard and the flock of sycophants to stand back as he walked into the square in front of the building. It was obvious that Goring, Himmler and Bormann were disappointed that they could not share this historic moment and be photographed at his side. It was not sentiment, but the opportunity to be seen as sharing in the victory and ultimately inheriting it.
It could have been lucky for them, though, if they had taken their chance to hang well back in the crowd. Oberjäger Pohl’s instructions were to take out as many of these others as he could after killing Hitler. His presence had been passed off to the SS security detail as cover for any Soviet snipers who might have been left behind. He had a clean shot now from a rubble pile 300 yards away as Hitler conveniently stepped out from the crowd.3
That same thought occurred to Zaitsev. He was hiding in a large pipe about the same distance from Hitler but to the north. Now his sights centred on the forehead of the Fascist beast. He adjusted for the cold wind that was whipping through the ruins. The image of one of his mother’s icons flashed through his mind. It was St George spearing the dragon.4
The cold wind, Russia’s last desperate resistance, cut through Hitler’s greatcoat. But for Hitler it only served to excite the Wagnerian moment as it drove grey clouds through the sky. He could picture the Valkyries riding through the storm-tossed sky with the bodies of the new German heroes thrown over their saddles being borne to Valhalla. Again he had been right, and all his generals had been wrong. He could feel the power surge in him.
Then nothing. His head exploded. Two bullets were fired at the same instant. Pohl’s hit him in the forehead, and Zaitsev’s through the right temple. Blood and brains sprayed over the rubble.
The crowd heard the double crack and watched as Hitler’s body twisted and jerked and then fell to the ground. For that stunned instant no one moved. In that suspended time Pohl’s sight centred on Himmler, who stood out with his flock of retainers. He fired at the moment when the crowd surged forward. It was a hard shot as bodies flowed around him, but the Reichsführer threw his arms back as a bullet went through his right eye.5
Zaitsev, less familiar with the Nazi hierarchy, merely kept firing at the gaudiest of the uniforms milling around. Goring was conspicuous with his white overcoat and flashing baton; his peacock preening was his undoing. A Russian bullet struck him in the chest, and he fell with such a thud that he made the rubble bounce and brought down two of his aides. Manstein stepped aside as another Nazi party bigwig in his flashing uniform fell in front of him. He felt strong arms on him as Stauffenberg and his own aide pulled him back to the shelter of the building as the horde of courtiers fled for their cars. Major von Boeselager caught one of them by the arm, put a pistol to his stomach and fired. Martin Bormann screamed and careered off to stumble and fall amid the rubble.
Chuikov, with the instinct bred in the Rattenkrieg, bolted in the confusion. He paused at the corner of a ruined building, took a deep breath, and laughed. ‘Zaitsev! God bless you, my boy!’6
Appendix A
Forces in the Battle of 20° East
Germans
German Fleet (Admiral Carls)
Battlegroup 1 (Admiral Schniewind)
Battleship Tirpitz
Heavy Cruiser Admiral Hipper
Destroyer Flotilla 5 Friedrich Ihn, Friedrich Eckoldt, Karl Galster
Destroyer Flotilla 6 Theodor Riedel, Hans Lody, Erich Steinbrinck
Battlegroup 2 (Admiral Kummetz)
Heavy cruisers Lützow, Admiral Scheer
Destroyer Flotilla 8 Richard Beitzen, Z-24, Z-27
Battlegroup 3 (Admiral Ciliax)
Battlecruisers Scharnhorst, Cneisenau
Heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen
Light Cruiser Flotilla 1 Leipzig, Nürnberg
Destroyer Flotilla 8.1 Z-28, Z-29, Z-30
U-boat Flotillas 1, 7, 10, 11, 13, 14
Luftflotte 5
KG 26 42 He 111
KG 30 103 Ju 88
StG 5 30 Ju 87
KFlGr 906 15 He 115
JG 26 109 Fw 190
Allies
Home Fleet (Admiral Tovey)
Battleships Duke of York, King George V, Washington
Cruisers Cumberland, Nigeria , Kent
Destroyers 14 ships
Aircraft carriers Victorious (42 aircraft), Wasp (75 aircraft)
1st Cruiser Squadron (Admiral Hamilton)
Heavy cruisers London, Norfolk, Wichita, Tuscaloosa
6th Destroyer Flotilla Somali, Wainwright, Rowan
Convoy PQ-17, Close Escort (Commander Broome)
Destroyers Fury, Keppel, Leamington, Ledbury, Offa, Wilton
Corvettes Lotus, Poppy, La Malouine, Dianella
Minesweepers Halcyon, Salamander, Britomart
ASW trawlers Lord Middleton, Lord Austin, Ayrshire, Northern Gem
AA ships Palomares, Pozarica
Submarines P.614, P.615
Appendix B
Soviet Forces in Operation Uranus
Notes
Introduction, ‘The Dancing Floor of War’
1 Edward R. Stettinius, Jr., Lend-Lease: Weapon for Victory (New York: Macmillan, 1944), pp. 208, 215.
2 T. H. Vail Motter, The Persian Corridor and Aid to Russia (Washington, DC: Center for Military History, 2000), p. 4.
3 ‘Khrushchev Remembers’, The Glasnost Tapes, 1990.
4 Homer, The Iliad, tr. Robert Fagles (New York: Penguin, 1990) p. 16.1001-5.
5 William Craig, Enemy at the Gates: The Battle for Stalingrad (New York: Penguin, 2001), p. xi.
Chapter 1, Führer Directive 41
1 Paul Carell, Hitler Moves East 1941-1943 (New York: Bantam Books, 1967), p. 479.
2 Joel Hayward, ‘Too Little Too Late: An Analysis of Hitler’s Failure in 1942 to Damage Soviet Oil Production’, Journal of Strategic Studies, Vol. 18, No. 4, 1995, p. 2.
3 Carell, Hitler Moves East, pp. 479-80.
4 wikipedia.org/wiki/Stavka, accessed 7 June 2012. ‘Stavka was the term used to refer to a command element of the armed forces from the time of the Kievan Rus.’
5 Geoffey Jukes, Stalingrad to Kursk (Barnsley: Pen & Sword, 2011), pp. 78-9.
6 Carell, Hitler Moves East, p. 480.
7 Anthony Beevor, Stalingrad (New York: Penguin, 1999), pp. 69-70.
8 ‘Annex 5 to Report by the C-in-C, Navy, to the Führer, 13 April 1942’, in 3 Fuehrer Conferences on Matters Dealing with the German Navy 1942, Office of Naval Intelligence, Washington, DC, 1946, pp. 65-6.
9 *Aaron T
. Davis, Hitler and Directive 41: Decisive Decisions of World War II (Los Angeles: Ronald Reagan Center for Strategic Issues, 2004), p. 82.
10 Vail Motter, The Persian Corridor and Aid to Russia, Appendix, Tables 2, 7, 10.
11 Zehra Onder, Die tiirkische Aussenpolitik im Zweiten Weltkrieg (Munich, 1977) p. 150.
12 John Gill, ‘Into the Caucasus: The Turkish Attack on Russia in 1942’, in Peter G. Tsouras, ed., Third Reich Victorious (London: Greenhill, 2002), p. 149.
13 Gill, ‘Into the Caucasus’. pp. 149-50.
14 *Franz Baron von Oldendorf, ‘Hitler’s Grand Turkish Gesture’, Journal of Second World War Studies, Vol. XXII, p. 832.
15 Adolf Hitler, Hitler’s Table Talk, 1941-1944, ed. H. R. Trevor-Roper (New York: Enigma Books, 2000), pp. 554-5.
16 Mathew Hughes & Chris Mann, Inside Hitler’s Germany: Life Under the Third Reich (New York: MJF Books, 2000), p. 184.
17 *Ivan Chonkin, The Life of Andrey Vlasov: Patriot and Liberator (New York: Hudson Press, 1982), pp. 119-22.
18 *Ibrahim Sayyid, Nazi Propaganda in the Muslim World (New York: International Press, 1987), pp. 121-23. Nazi propaganda was finding a receptive audience, especially in the Arab world which was becoming more and more agitated by the increasing Jewish settlement in the British Mandate of Palestine.
19 Gill, ‘Into the Caucasus’, p. 149.
20 Vozhd is a Russian term that means great war leader. In the movie Enemy at the Gates, the English wording used by the character representing Khrushchev to convey the emotional meaning of the term is ‘the boss’, with all the connotations of a Mob boss.
21 This figure of 2.5 million irrecoverable losses was provided by Russian military historians to the author in a symposium at the Moscow Military History Institute in July 1992.
22 This statement was made by Russian military historians to the author in a symposium at the Moscow Military History Institute in July 1992.
23 Richard Woodman, Arctic Convoys 1941-1945 (Barnsley: Pen Ɛt Sword, 2011), pp. 13-14.
24 Woodman, Arctic Convoys, p. 14.
25 . Albert L. Weeks, Russia’s Life-Saver: Lend-Lease Aid to the USSR in World War II (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2010), p. 142.
26 Alyona Sokolova, ‘American Aid to the Soviet Union’, Vladivostok News, 17 April 2005, www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1385548/posts, accessed 15 February 2012.
27 Beevor, Stalingrad, p. 223.
28 Weeks, Russia’s Life-Saver, p. 122.
29 Weeks, Russia’s Life-Saver, p. 43.
30 Woodman, Arctic Convoys, p. 345.
Chapter 2, A Timely Death
1 Grossadmiral (Grand Admiral) was the German naval rank equivalent of a British admiral of the fleet or a United States fleet admiral.
2 Under the Weimar Republic, the German Navy was called the Reichsmarine; Hitler renamed it the Kriegsmarine.
3 Peter G. Tsouras, The Book of Military Quotations (St Paul: Zenith, 2005), p. 396.
4 German Naval History, www.german-navy.de, accessed 17 April 2012.
5 Erich Raeder, Grand Admiral (New York: Da Capo, 2001), p. 374.
6 David Irving, The Destruction of Convoy PQ-17 (New York: Simon et Schuster, 1968), pp. 4, 10.
7 Woodman, Arctic Convoys, p. 65.
8 Alan E. Steinweiss and Daniel E. Rogers, The Impact of Nazism: New Perspectives on the Third Reich and its Legacy (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 2003), pp. 186-8.
9 Raeder, Grand Admiral, pp. 255-65.
10 Jägers were elite light infantry trained to operate in difficult terrain.
11 Tsouras, Book of Military Quotations, p. 229.
12 Vasili Ivanovich Chuikov, The Battle for Stalingrad (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964), p. 14.
13 Michael K. Jones, Stalingrad (Barnsley: Pen Ɛt Sword, 2007), p. 76.
14 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henning_von_Tresckow.
15 Peter Hoffmann, The History of German Resistance 1933-1945 (Macdonald and Janes, 1977), p. 265
16 Peter Hoffmann, Stauffenberg: A Family History 1905-1944 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University, 2008), pp. 163, 168.
17 Peter Hoffmann, Carl Goerdeler and the Jewish Question, 1933-1942 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 115.
18 *Friedrich von Heinzen, Hoch! Hoch! Dreimal Hoch! Ludwig I, Ein Leben (Frankfurt: Rolf Martin, 1996), p. 109.
19 Hugh Sebag-Montefiore, Enigma: The Battle for the Code (New York: John Wiley, 2000), p. 218.
20 wikipedia.org/wiki/Enigma_machine, accessed 18 February 2012. ‘Enigma was the codename for a system of electro-mechanical rotor cipher machines used for the encryption and decryption of secret messages. Although Enigma had some cryptographic weaknesses, in practice it was only in combination with procedural flaws, operator mistakes, captured key tables and hardware, that Allied cryptanalysts were able to be so successful.’
21 Sebag-Montefiore, Enigma, p. 218.
22 Irving, The Destruction of PQ-17, p. 1.
23 Winston Churchill, The Second World War (New York: Penguin, 1985), Vol. IV, p. 98.
24 Raeder, Grand Admiral, p. 359.
25 www.german-navy.de/kriegsmarine/ships/destroyer/zerstorer1936a/z24/history.html, accessed 21 Feb 2012. Destroyer Flotilla 8 consisted of Z-24, Z-25 and Hermann Schoemann.
26 Horvitz, Leslie Alan; Catherwood, Christopher, Encyclopedia of War Crimes and Genocide (New York: Facts On File, 2006), p. 200; Bryant, Chad Carl, Prague in Black: Nazi Rule and Czech Nationalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 2007), p. 140.
Chapter 3, The Second Wannsee Conference
1 Chuikov, The Battle for Stalingrad, p. 14.
2 Carell, Hitler Moves East, p. 483.
3 With the annexation of Austria to the Reich, its army of eight divisions was incorporated directly into the German Army bringing with them the lineages and traditions of the old Imperial Austrian Army.
4 Peter G. Tsouras, The Great Patriotic War : An Illustrated History of Total War: Soviet Union and Germany, 1941-1945 (London: Greenhill, 1992), p. 79.
5 David Glantz, Armageddon in Stalingrad, September-November 1942, The Stalingrad Trilogy, Vol. 2 (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas, 2009), p. 14.
6 Friedrich Paulus, wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Paulus, accessed 18 February 2012.
7 *Edward M. Williams, ‘Soviet Equipment Employed by the Germans in WWII’, US Army Magazine, Vol. XX, No. 3, 25 February 1966.
8 Paul Carell, Stalingrad: The Defeat of the German 6th Army (Atglen, PA: Schiffer, 1993), p. 36.
9 Beevor, Stalingrad, pp. 67-8.
10 Jukes, Stalingrad to Kursk, p. 81.
11 Sebag-Montefiore, Enigma, pp. 269-70.
12 Robert Gerwarth, Hitler’s Hangman: The Life of Heydrich (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), p. 50. Heydrich and Himmler’s ‘relationship was one of deep trust, complementary talents and shared political convictions’. Heydrich was fundamentally loyal to Himmler.
13 British television documentary, Edward VIII: The Traitor King, first aired by Channel 4 in 1995.
14 1940-1944 insurgency in Chechnya, wikipedia.org/wiki/1940-1944_Chechnya_insurgency#cite_note-history.neu.edu-4, accessed 13 March 2012.
Chapter 4, Race to the Don
1 *Henning von Tresckow, Manstein und Hitler: Entscheidung 1942 (Frankfurt: Ernst Janning, 1962), p. 87.
2 Beevor, Stalingrad, pp. 69-70.
3 wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U-boat_flotillas, accessed 20 Feb 2011. The German U-boat flotillas in France were: Brest: 1st and 9th; Lorient: 2nd and 10th; St-Nazaire: 7th and 6th; La Rochelle: 3rd Flotilla; Bordeaux: 12th (+ Italian submarines). The German U-boat flotillas in Norway were: Bergen: 11th; Trondheim: 13th; Narvik: 14th.
4 Dudley Pope, 73 North: The Defeat of Hitler’s Navy (New York: Berkeley Books, 1958), pp. 98-9.
5 *Jason Colletti, The Führer Naval Conferences (Annapolis, MD: Naval Association Press, 1988), p. 199.
6 Irving, Destruction of Convoy PQ-17, pp. 24-31.
7 *Albert Adlinger, The Devil’s
Twins: Heydrich and Dönitz (London: Mayfair et Sons, 1973), p. 121.
8 Irving, Destruction of Convoy PQ-17, p. 24.
9 Irving, Destruction of Convoy PQ-17, p. 31.
10 Sebag-Montefiore, Enigma, pp. 203-4.
11 *Alistair Williams, Former Naval Person: Churchill and the Naval War (London: Blackstone, 1955), p. 129
12 *Desmond Richardson, Decision of Ill-Omen: The Wasp in the Battle for the Arctic Convoy (New York: D. H. Dutton Press, 1949), p. 32.
13 Irving, Destruction of Convoy PQ-17, p. 300.
14 Signal from C-in-C Home Fleet to Admiralty and Rear-Admiral Hamilton, originating at 11:55 a.m. GMT, 22 June 1942, cited in Irving, Destruction of Convoy PQ-17, p. 35.
15 Irving, Destruction of Convoy PQ-17, pp. 31-2.
16 David Wraag, Sacrifice for Stalin: The Cost and Value of the Artic Convoys Re-Assessed (Barnsley: Pen Ɛt Sword, 2005), p. 216.
17 Carell, Stalingrad, pp. 58-9.
18 Vail Motter, The Persian Corridor and Aid to Russia, Appendix, Tables 4, 7, 10.
19 wikipedia.org/wiki/Knight‘s_Cross_of_the_Iron_Cross, accessed 1 Mar 2012. ‘The Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross (Ritterkreuz des Eisernen Kreuzes, often simply Ritterkreuz) was a grade of the 1939 version of the 1813-created Iron Cross (Eisernes Kreuz). The Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross was the highest award of Germany to recognize extreme battlefield bravery or successful military leadership during World War II. It was second only to the Grand Cross of the Iron Cross (Großkreuz des Eisernen Kreuzes) in the military order of the Third Reich.’