Disaster at Stalingrad: An Alternate History (26 page)

Churchill read Stalin’s message to the cabinet. ‘I received your message on 7 September. I realise the importance of the safe arrival in the Soviet Union of convoy PQ-18 and the need for measures to protect it. Difficult though we find it at present to assign extra long-range bombers for the purpose, we have decided to do so.’
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Convoy PQ-18 had been in the planning stage before the destruction of PQ-17. The Soviets had provided a long list of desperately needed supplies and equipment. The Anglo-American losses with PQ-17 and from the Home Fleet had not deterred Stalin at all from acting as if PQ-18 was inevitable. By finally agreeing to an earlier Allied planning proposal to provide long-range bomber support, he hoped to encourage them to push forward with the convoy. Churchill announced:

He did not say that Roosevelt had told him that there was growing opposition, especially from the US Navy, to resuming the convoys. He had enough reasons of his own to avoid sending another convoy. Politically it would be impossible. The country had been stunned by the tragedy of the convoy and then the drubbing given to the Home Fleet. He would meet intense resistance across the political spectrum if they were resumed so soon.

In any case, Stalin would have to be satisfied with the excuse of the danger of continuous daylight of the Arctic summer. That would give them perhaps three months more before they had again to grasp that painful nettle.

Corporal Werner Halle, 71st Motorized Regiment (29th Motorized Division), and the rest of his battalion got their first hot meal in a long time. They had seen hard fighting and even harder losses. Halle recorded in his diary that ‘we were frequently without company or even platoon leaders . . . each one of us, this may sound hard but this was the way it was, could easily guess that he might be the next to go ...’

They had been fighting in the southern suburban towns of Krasnoarmeisk and Kuperosnoye, attacking along the seam between 62nd and 64th Armies. The 14th and 24th Panzer and 29th Motorized Divisions of XLVIII Panzer Corps attacked straight towards the southern suburbs of Stalingrad in order to split the two Soviet armies and cut the city off from the south in accordance with Paulus’s decision of the 7th. The attack had slowed to a crawl in the narrow streets, where:

Nevertheless, the Germans fought on. They had not far to go. The next morning Halle and his comrades broke through the rest of the way to the Volga at Kuperosnoye. Stalingrad was now cut off from the south, and all river traffic stopped below the German foothold on the bank. Now 62nd Army would be defending the city alone.
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By now 62nd Army’s commander, Anton Lopatin, had given up all hope of holding the city and decided to abandon it. He gave the order but was defied by his chief of staff, General N. I. Krylov, who then notified Khrushchev and Yeremenko. They immediately relieved Lopatin and put Krylov in temporary command. Now they had to find a new commander.

The attack of the Turkish 8th Division along Georgia’s Black Sea coast towards the port of Batumi was more a victory parade than a battle. The native Georgians in the province of Adjara had converted to Islam when conquered by the Ottoman Empire in 1613 and joyously welcomed the Turks. The Soviet 47th Mountain Division guarding the port murdered their Russian officers and commissars and went over en masse to the Turks. The division had recently been re-raised after being destroyed in 1941. It had been filled mostly with ethnic Turks from Azerbaijan. As a result the Turkish 8th Division’s entry into the outskirts of Batumi triggered joyous celebrations in Istanbul and Ankara and not a few very discreet ones in Baku.

Things suddenly got deadly serious for the 8th Division as it found the Soviet Black Sea Fleet naval personnel in the port of much sterner stuff. They got even sterner when Gorskhov’s flotilla escaping from Sukhumi arrived to add more troops to the battle as well as a determined new commander in the vice admiral. He could only hold on and resist to the end, hoping against hope that the sudden collapse of the North Caucasus Front could be repaired in time to relieve the garrison. Against the Russian sailors, the Turks threw some of the finest battalions in their army in tactics reminiscent of the First War. Gradually, the once beautiful city of Batumi was reduced to a stinking, corpse-filled rubble.
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Turkish 3rd Army’s main attack towards the Tiflis valley ground forward ‘despite the frustrations of the difficult terrain, bad weather, and inadequate air support’. General de Angelis was in his element though. This Austrian officer was a brilliant tactician and under his command XLIV Corps, Turkish III Corps, and the legions of former Red Army POWs outmanoeuvred the exhausted Soviet 45th Army and trapped large numbers of its men who promptly surrendered. Many of them were Muslim natives of the Transcaucasus, not overly fond of Russians. Only the Georgians fought on tenaciously, though they had no love for the Russians. The Turks were the enemy of their blood, who had tormented them for 500 years. They tolerated the Russians because they had saved Georgia from extinction by the Ottomans and Persians at the beginning of the 19th century and been its protective big brother ever since. In that part of the world what happened hundreds of years before was like yesterday.

De Angelis had forcibly to protect his Russian and Georgian prisoners from the troops of his Chechen-Ingush Legion. They could have taught the Einsatzgruppen a lot, and it was only the armed intervention of the Jägers that saved the POWs from torture and mass murder.
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To the east, the Soviet 71st Army defending the approaches to Yerevan had stopped the Turkish 2nd Army cold just within the border in bitter and costly fighting. Further to the southeast, however, native Azeri Turks provided vital intelligence and outright assistance to the invading Turks, and Soviet 72nd Army crumbled as its Azeri conscripts threw up their hands and surrendered by the thousands to their countrymen in the Azeri Legion. The stouter units were swamped with massed infantry attacks. By the 10th, the Turks were crossing the Arak River above and below Dzhulfa. The town fell almost without a fight.

You could almost hear in the General Staff building the loud crack all the way from the Caucasus. It was the deep, grinding snap of collapse. With the fall of Sukhumi and Dzhulfa, the Soviet control of the vast region of mountains, exotic peoples, and oil suddenly had been fatally wounded. With Dzhulfa, the main route to the Persian Corridor and the last major source of Allied aid was severed. There were over a half million Soviet troops in the region and no way to sustain them if the Germans and Turks eventually linked up at Baku.

Less than two weeks before, the situation seemed to have passed beyond the danger stage as the Germans were clearly exhausting themselves. The land was too vast, their forces too few, and the Soviet defenders too stubborn. It helped the defenders too that a major reorganization on the 1st had rationalized their forces. All forces had been put under the single command of General I. V. Tiulenev’s Transcaucasian Front. The North Caucasus Front had been downgraded to a group while the strong Northern Group had been created to block Kleist’s 1st Panzer Army from crossing the Terek River and overrunning the Grozny oilfields and taking Ordzhonikidze and its vast stocks of Allied supplies and equipment.

The Northern Group’s four armies with eighteen rifle and two cavalry divisions, two rifle corps, and seven brigades had been slowing Kleist to a snail’s pace. Its persistent counterattacks had driven the Germans back to their foothold on the eastern side of the Terek at Mozdok. A good part of its tank force was made up of British Valentines and American M3 Stuart light tanks. The Valentines tended to burst into flames, a matter that Stalin brought up with Churchill, suggesting that the Soviet use of diesel in their T-34s was superior.

Kleist resumed his attacks on the 11th and met the same determined resistance, but by the next day the Soviets seemed to be in much weaker strength. In the night two of their armies had begun withdrawing. One was being sent to staunch the open wound left by the encirclement of the Northern Group due to the fall of Sukhumi and the other to retake Dzhulfa.

Breaking contact with half your force and reshuffling the rest of it to cover the same front is one of the most difficult manoeuvres any army can make. It can succeed, though, if the enemy does not interfere. That was a break that Kleist was not about to give. Luftwaffe reconnaissance reported the roads leading south filled with Soviet troops. General Traugott Herr’s 3rd Panzer Division was Kleist’s spearhead. He divided his command into combined arms battlegroups (
Kampfgruppen
) and drove his panzers right into the confusion of the Soviet passage of lines and transformed it into a bloody rout.

At this point Kleist was presented with an operational dilemma. He had multiple missions: to seize the oilfields at Grozny and to take Ordzhonikidze and the high mountain passes of the eastern Caucasus to open the road to Baku. He had reached that point where all three of these locations were within his grasp. His 3rd Panzer was within 36 miles of Ordzhonikidze and 13th Panzer about the half that distance from Grozny. It was time he asked army group headquarters to put on alert the parachute battalion that had been prepared for just this moment. Upon the approach of German forces, the Soviet garrison of Grozny was under Stalin’s orders to destroy the oilfields. Only a surprise descent gave a chance of saving them for the fuel-thirsty German armies fighting from Voronezh to Mozdok.

For Stalin the loss of Sukhumi entailed another and perhaps even more serious loss - Beria. He needed a replacement. For that he reached into the second tier of the NKVD chiefs and plucked out Victor Abakumov. He had survived the purge of the NKVD in 1937-8 because he had been single-mindedly ruthless in carrying it out. Single-minded and ruthless were just the qualities Stalin was looking for.

With Stalin’s approval, Abakumov liquidated Beria’s senior lieutenants and replaced them with his own. When he personally cleaned out Beria’s safe, he found a document that really caught his attention. It was a file, and not just any file but Stalin’s, prepared by the tsar’s secret police, the Okrana. It was not the file of a suspect or revolutionary. It was that of an informer. From Beria’s notes, it became clear that this file in the hands of the NKVD and the senior staff of the Red Army had prompted preparations for a coup that Stalin preempted with the purges that had decapitated both organizations.
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For Abakumov, whether Stalin had been a traitor to the communist party was a matter of indifference. He would have served the tsar as diligently had he provided a ladder to power. Still, this poisonous document could prove useful. Who knew what course the war would take, and betting men were putting their money on the Germans.

‘Everybody off!’ men were shouting at the Pacific Fleet sailors in the railcars that had just pulled into a siding at the town’s rail yard. The men were all volunteers for the front and were to join the 2nd Battalion, 1047th Regiment of the 284th Rifle Division stationed there, 139 miles west of Sverdlovsk in the Urals.
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They got a hearty welcome from the Red Army soldiers who were amused by the sailor’s blue and white striped collarless shirt, the Navy’s emblematic
telnyashka,
under their pea jackets.

It was something that 27-year old Warrant Officer Vassili Grigorievich Zaitsev had come to take great pride in ever since he had been conscripted into the Red Navy in 1937. He had worked as a payroll clerk for the last four years, earning a promotion for his diligence and reliability. Like so many of his comrades he had volunteered for the front as soon as the war had started, but only recently had his request and that of so many others in the Pacific Fleet been approved to join the fighting at Stalingrad.

Zaitsev had grown up in the foothills of the Ural Mountains where his grandfather had taught him to shoot and hunt. The old man came from a long line of hunters and was devoted to Vassili, his favourite grandson, to whom he passed his vast experience of stalking and marksmanship. Bullets were expensive and had to be used with care. One shot, one kill, was the old man’s method. Young Vassili became an expert shot, never wasting a bullet and became so good at building hides that even his grandfather could not find them. To him tracking an animal was like reading a book. Like all bureaucracies the Red Navy failed to exploit this talent. Instead, because Vassili had taken accounting courses, they thought him a perfect payroll clerk. Some things never change.

However, anyone who got to know the payroll clerk would be struck by several things: ‘his modesty, the slow grace of his movements, his exceptionally calm character, and his attentive gaze. His handshake was firm, and he pressed your palm with a pincer-like grip.’
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