A World at Arms (81 page)

It is in this context also that the obvious alternative to shipping must be mentioned. Many of the airplanes destined for Britain were being flown rather than shipped across the Atlantic; this was one of the first highly important military missions that the United States government entrusted to women pilots in World War II.
¹⁶⁹
Why not fly planes to the Soviet Union via Alaska and Siberia? If the Japanese did not interfere with ships once reflagged to Soviet ownership, they would be even less likely to interfere with airplanes once turned over to and then flown by Russian crews. The Japanese lacked not only the political incentive stopping Russian planes flying from American airports was a bit too close to inviting the flight of American planes from Russian airports but they also lacked most of the means. Here was a way to move Lend-Lease without use of shipping and without danger from the enemy (though some from the weather).
¹⁷⁰

For a considerable period of time the Soviet government refused to agree to this procedure. We do not know the reason, but it may have been a combination of suspicion of the United States and concern over the Japanese reaction. At the insistence of the Americans, Stalin finally agreed to reconsider in April 1942.
¹⁷¹
In the summer of 1942 this process was begun and, though slow and complicated to begin with, came to be of very great significance.
¹⁷²
Until the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the Canadians had always forbidden the construction of a highway connecting Alaska to the rest of the continental United States. In the face of the common danger, this obstacle was lifted, and at American expense the road known as the Alaska Highway was begun. Its main function in World War II was to supply the intermediate bases at which the thousands of planes delivered over the ALSIB (Alaska-Siberia) route made their intermediate refueling and service stops. This was surely an unanticipated by-product of World War II shipping shortages.
¹⁷³

If the Alaska Highway appears to be a very long way from the Soviet navy and shipping, the connection comes from the smallness of the
Soviet shipping pool which made it necessary for the Allies to use whatever means were at hand to move supplies and weapons to Russia. It was in the Baltic and the Black Sea that the Red navy itself played a significant role. In the Baltic, the Russian navy units based at Kronstadt were of importance in two ways. The possibility of Soviet ships coming out of the Gulf of Finland into the Baltic and interfering with Germany’s supply routes to Finland, her trade with Sweden, or her training of submarine crews always agitated the German navy. They therefore felt obliged at all times to lay mine barriers and to keep some fleet units and active submarines in the Baltic as a protection against that contingency. Here the failure of the initial German offensive in 1941 cost the Germans heavily in a way that has not always been recognized: the Baltic did not become a safe German lake as Berlin had confidently expected.

There was, however, a second way in which the Russian navy related to the original halting of the German onrush. At the northern end of the front, the Germans had cut off Leningrad, but they had not been able to clear the whole southern shore of the Gulf of Finland. The Red Army held on to a portion of the south shore: a segment which the Germans called the Oranienbaum Kessel and the Soviets referred to as the Coastal Operations Group. It could obviously survive only by receiving at least minimal reinforcements and supplies from the main defense of Leningrad, and this required the protection of the Soviet navy.

If this latter function of the Red Baltic Fleet was primarily one of army support, the same was true for most of the operations of the Soviet Black Sea Fleet. Its successful evacuation of the Odessa garrison, discussed in
Chapter 5
, was only one of many operations carried out by what was probably the most effective and efficient portion of Soviet naval forces in World War II. The Black Sea Fleet’s role in the Soviet winter counter-offensive in the Crimea has also been mentioned. There the fleet had not only reinforced the garrison but brought in other units, evacuated machinery, and generally organized under Black Sea Fleet Commander Admiral F.S. Oktyabrskiy a defense from which the British defenders of Singapore could have learned some very useful lessons. The amphibious assaults in December 1941 and January 1942 across the Kerch Straits and at Feodosyie succeeded while that at Yevpatoria failed. The German Forces on the Crimea as a result were strained but not, as the Russians had hoped, destroyed. It is, however, a reasonable conclusion that this was due more to the inexperience and confusion of the Red Army commanders in charge of the landing units and the effective if belated German resistance than to any failure of the Black Sea Fleet.
¹⁷⁴

The history of the fleet’s actions in the subsequent years of World
War II is, like that just recounted, essentially a part of the fighting on land and will therefore be dealt with in that context. The Soviet leaders had no reason to regret the portion of their resources allocated to the navy; though small and often forgotten by historians, its role was significant at precisely that portion of the Eastern Front where the Germans would make their greatest effort and suffer their greatest defeat at the hands of the Red army in 1942. The naval struggle in the Black Sea was both in kind and in distance far removed from the endless battles in the Atlantic, the Allied blockade of Japan in the Pacific, and the efforts to maintain a blockade of Germany against her resourceful attempts to breach the ring around her; but these were all inter-related portions of a struggle for control of the oceans which cover much of the globe and which claimed so many lives that slid beneath the seas.

^a
The Germans did occasionally use a kite from which a lookout, flying some 300 feet in the air, could provide a greatly increased radius of view for the submarine pulling him as it cruised on the surface. See Patrick Beesly,
Very Special Intelligence
(New York: Ballantine, 1977), p. 198.

^b
The OSS was reading the correspondence between Vichy and its embassy in Washington. On April 30, 1942, it provided President Roosevelt with Laval’s report to Ambassador Henry-Haye on his talk with U.S. Ambassador Leahy of 27 April 1942 (
FRUS
1942, 2: 181–2). The text, handed to Roosevelt in French, includes the following: “My policy is based on a reconciliation with Germany without which I cannot visualize any possibility of peace, neither for Europe nor for France nor for the world. I am certain that Germany will be victorious.” FDRL, PSF Box 166, OSS Donovan Reports, # 10.

^c
In July 1943 the chief in Martinique, Admiral Robert, was ordered by Vichy to scuttle the remaining war and merchant ships there, but the crews mutinied and went over to de Gaulle. For German interception of the relevant orders and reports, see 0 KM, Chef MND III, x B Bericht Nr. 29/43, 21 July 1943, pp. 14–15, NA, RG 457, SRS 548, Vol. 16.

^d
Note the memorandum by Admiral Walter Gladisch on a trip to occupied France in October 1942 which reflects his talk with Dönitz on October 15, 1942. It is clear that Dönitz at that time was in no way concerned about the possibility that the Allies might close the air gap in the Atlantic with long-rangeplanes or escort carriers and that he had no comprehension of the possibilities open to the United States. (“Informationsreise Frankreich Oktober 1942,” BA/MA, PG 71838.)

^e
It is worth pointing out that the Japanese Navy Minister in pre-war conferences in Tokyo had argued that the estimate of annual shipping production of 400,000 tons the first year, 600,000 the second, and 800,000 the third was “too optimistic.” The reality was about half that projected. Nobutake Ike (ed.),
Japan’s Decision for War
(Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Univ. Press, 1967), p. 189.

^f
I have been unable to locate information on Japanese imports from Latin America after December 1941. Several of the South American countries continued to have diplomatic relations with Japan, but it does not appear that the Japanese had much success in obtaining materials from them. The trade between Japan and the Soviet Union in the period December 1941–August 1945 also awaits investigation.

^g
The breach in the blockade created by Soviet assistance to Germany has been discussed in Chapter 2. In February 1943 the British Ministry of Economic Warfare calculated that, with the sole exception of flax and hemp, the Germans had obtained more grain, oil, chrome, tin, rubber,
etc.
by trade with the Soviet Union than as a result of invasion. PRO, N 1293/75/38, FO 371/36958.

8

THE WAR IN EUROPE AND NORTH AFRICA 1942–1943: TO AND FROM STALINGRAD; TO AND FROM TUNIS

THE GERMAN SUMMER OFFENSIVE

As it became increasingly obvious to the Germans in the fall of 1941 that the campaign in the East was not likely to be completed that year, they began to think about 1942 operations. For a while in September, October and November, there were still hopes of seizing both the industrial area around Moscow and the oil fields of the Caucasus by the end of the year. Even before the Red Army defeated the Germans at the southern end of the front and drove them out of Rostov, all German hopes of taking the Caucasus in 1941 had vanished. Similarly, once the euphoria of early October had been offset by the reality of heavy fighting in November, the Germans realized that even if a final push enabled them to seize the immediate Moscow area, there was no prospect of going any further. The dramatic turn in December, when the German spearheads had been first halted and then overwhelmed and pushed back, made it obvious that any 1942 campaign would start a substantial distance away from where the Germans had envisioned as late as early November 1941.

There were additional complications affecting any German offensive plans for 1942. Casualties among the men and horses in the armies fighting the Soviet Union had not been replaced by the trickle of replacements; and while a major effort was made to build up new divisions, provide more men and conscript additional horses, there were simply not enough of either to restore the army to its June 1941 strength. The shortage of horses was doubly serious because the enormous losses of vehicles in the winter made the infantry divisions even more dependent upon horse–drawn transport than before; this alone made a war of movement on more than one segment of the front at a time quite impossible.

The July 1941 shift of industrial production from priority for the army
to priority for air force and navy had been replaced in January 1942 by a renewed emphasis on the needs of the army, but this step could not make itself felt in substantial additional production adequate even to make up for the losses of the 1941 campaign until the summer of 1942 at the earliest. The death of the Minister of Munitions, Fritz Todt, in January 1942 was so “convenient” and took place in such an unlikely manner that deliberate sabotage of his plane by a member of Hitler’s entourage is likely. In any case, the new man in charge of war production, Albert Speer, quickly proved himself efficient and unscrupulous, both important qualifications in National Socialist Germany. He managed to increase production of war materials, but even so the German army had fewer tanks and the German air force no more planes in June 1942 than in June 1941.
¹
Furthermore, the continued drain of the war at sea and in the air with Britain and the United States made it impossible for Germany to concentrate her production on the weapons for the East at the same time as she had to divert forces to other areas of combat.

These factors combined to make two choices clear for Hitler and his advisors. The army could remain on the defensive in the East or it could launch an offensive on
one
sector of the front; the 1941 option of striking in several sectors of the front simultaneously had vanished under the blows of the Red Army and the needs of other theaters. There is no evidence that an essentially defensive stand in the East in 1942 was ever seriously considered. The alternative Mediterranean strategy which the German navy had urged repeatedly had no appeal for Hitler, who saw the Mediterranean as Italy’s sphere of expansion while the East was Germany’s. If von Brauchitsch ever had a strategic concept before his retirement as Commander-in-Chief of the army in December 1941 it has vanished without a trace. General Halder, the army Chief of Staff who now had to work ever more closely with Hitler, certainly never supported any alternative strategy of his own; on the contrary, his vision was if anything more narrowly land–locked than Hitler’s.

The only choice to be made, therefore, was where to strike in the East, and on that subject there was an unusual degree of unanimity. Army Group South had managed to hang on to the most coherent defensive line during the winter fighting, and the weather there would be suitable for German offensive operations earlier than further north. It was therefore assumed, only partly correctly as it turned out, that the preliminary operations considered necessary in the south, the clearing of the Crimea and the destruction of the Izyum pocket, could be finished long before the preliminary operations that would be needed in the
center and north could be carried out. A major attack on the southern portion of the front would, therefore, allow more time for a summer offensive .