Disaster at Stalingrad: An Alternate History (6 page)
Read Disaster at Stalingrad: An Alternate History Online
Authors: Peter Tsouras
The pilots of Kampfgeschwader 30 (KG30 - Bomber Group 30) exulted in another victory. Below them the SS
Empire Elgar
staggered under the hits by their Ju 88 dive-bombers. It went down quickly, the British Valentine tanks filling its hold breaking loose and crashing into the bulkheads.
For the first time, the Germans had made a concerted effort to stop an Arctic convoy. The death of the
Empire Elgar
was one of nine out of thirty-five ships lost to aircraft, U-boats, and mines. The Ju 88 crews boasted six of the kills. None of the losses, however, compared to the destruction of the
Empire Elgar
in importance. This ship was a 2,847grt heavy lift vessel. It had been launched early in the year and completed in April at West Hartlepool in the United Kingdom. This was its first voyage. It was a very special ship, equipped with powerful derricks to unload heavy cargo, such as tanks, locomotives and aircraft, from other ships. It was intended to stay in the Russian northern ports where its derricks would be vital in unloading operations. The Russians had nothing like it in the way of heavy unloading derricks. Without it, getting cargoes ashore would be a time-consuming effort when every day counted in getting supplies and equipment to the hard-pressed Soviet forces.
The crew of
U-103
were preparing the nine pennants, each signifying a sunk ship, to fly on their return to Lorient. The men were in the best of moods. They had had a gloriously successful voyage in the Caribbean, and they were heading home to the comforts of soft French billets.
It was then that their captain was shocked out of his good mood when his signals officer handed him the latest Enigma decryption from OKM. The man was ashen-faced even under the normal pallor of a submariner denied sunlight. Schultze read, sucked in his breath, and muttered,
‘Lieber Gott!’
Then to the signals officer, ‘Müller, ask that the message be confirmed.’
‘I have,
Herr Kapitän.
It is confirmed.’
Schultze called over his executive officer and showed him the message. The younger man almost whispered the word ‘Loki’. The captain turned back to the signals officer. ‘You know what we must do with all outgoing transmissions now.’
The captain went to his cabin to think. Loki. The codename had been given to the captain, his executive officer and signals officer only orally. It was never to be printed or written down. It was the fail-safe code from OKM telling every U-boat that Enigma had been compromised, that the enemy was reading their mail. He had not thought much about the possibility so adamantly sure was the Navy that Enigma was unbreakable. Then he laughed to himself. The full import of the codename truly struck home. Loki in Norse and Germanic mythology was the trickster god brimming with deceit and betrayal.
Dönitz and Heydrich had jointly requested this meeting with Hitler at his headquarters in the pine forests of East Prussia. Dönitz thought it was fitting that he was accompanied into Hitler’s wolfs lair by a human wolf.
Neither was surprised when Hitler flew into a towering rage. It was as if his own child had been struck down. He raved that the plans for the entire 1942 campaign which would win the war had now been dashed. Dönitz had never seen him in such a fury. But when that rage subsided, he seemed to reach out to Heydrich for some consolation in a way Dönitz had never seen him act towards anyone else.
Dönitz was surprised then at how Hitler acted the role of proud father. He was even more impressed at how Heydrich played his part for all it was worth. He knew how to manage Hitler. He knew that you either had to bring good news, or if forced to bring bad news to sweeten it with solutions. Preferably you brought both.
In this case the sweetener to the bad news was that it was Heydrich’s own Sicherheitsdienst that had discovered the compromise of Enigma. By implication it was more than just patting himself on the back but an assertion that Hitler’s own SS had succeeded where the Luftwaffe and Army had let him down, and since Hitler was the personification of the German people they had by extension let the Reich down. It allowed Hitler to play the aggrieved father figure to every common German soldier who had died unnecessarily because of the failure of the generals.
True to his agreement with Dönitz, Heydrich cast his protection over the Navy, pointing out without any real evidence that had the other services implemented the advanced security fixes to their Enigmas that the Navy had, there would have been no compromises. The failure had been with their simpler systems. They had been broken, which gave the British the key to the more secure naval Enigma. Heydrich should have been a lawyer hypnotizing a jury he was so skilful at weaving truth, innuendo and outright fabrication into a story Hitler wanted to believe.
Dönitz shrewdly let Heydrich do all the talking. He was further amazed at the man’s ruthless backstabbing of Goring, the great rival to his own boss, Himmler. He was playing a deadly hand, undermining Goring. Having heard of Hitler’s comment about Heydrich being the ideal of the son he never had, the SS man obviously had the son’s role of heir apparent in mind.
12
Finally Hitler asked the obvious question. ‘How fast can we change the codes?’
Heydrich was ready with the answer.
Immediately,
mein Führer.
We have The Lorenz SZ40 Schlüsselzusatz [cipher attachment] for the standard Lorenz teleprinters. It is far more complex than even the Enigma machines. They are already being installed to communicate between OKW and its major commands and should be operational any day now. This was planned some time ago.
But we lose a priceless opportunity to turn the tables on our enemies if we suddenly stop using Enigma. Yes, we can change the codes, but we must continue to use Enigma and feed the enemy false information to manipulate him into putting his head into a noose. You remember it was your approval of our plan to trick Stalin into purging his generals that paid such dividends. I ask you now to listen to the Grossadmiral describe the noose he has in mind.
Hitler leaned over to give Dönitz his complete attention.
Heydrich convened a meeting of the Wehrmacht and services chiefs of communication and intelligence as well as the finest minds in German cryptology. The lovely villa, set in a leafy Berlin suburb, was the perfect out of the way setting for a conference. He had used it in January for another conference on the Jewish question. He expected this conference to go as well.
He surveyed the room with a stare that most men could not meet. He needed to exert a moral ascendancy over the lot of them. He began.
‘Meine Herren,
we are here to discuss the extent of the Enigma compromise and the outline of Operation Waterloo. The Führer has entrusted me and the Sicherheitsdienst with complete authority in this matter.’ Not a peep from the faces at the table.
‘You will see in Grossadmiral Dönitz’s report the distressing number of coincidences that have occurred involving the loss of U-boats and other ships.’ He looked at the Luftwaffe’s communications chief and went on,
The Luftwaffe has its own record of coincidences as you can see in the Reichsmarschall’s report, the most damaging of which have been the evasion of our fighters by Bomber Command’s raids. Then there is the steady loss of transport aircraft shuttling troops and vital cargo to Rommel’s army in Africa. You will also note that the Italians, who use the much simpler commercial version of Enigma as their naval code machine, have suffered very heavy naval losses, for example at the battle of Cape Matapan and in their shipping convoys to North Africa, where in each case the enemy seems miraculously to appear.
He looked now directly at the chief of Fremde Heere Ost (FHO, Foreign Armies East), the Wehrmacht’s chief of intelligence for the Eastern Front, Colonel Reinhard Gehlen. Heydrich knew that Gehlen was in the midst of a major reorganization of the FHO to which he had just succeeded as chief having been its deputy for most of the last year. He was drawing in a stream of very talented men - linguists, geographers, anthropologists, lawyers and able junior officers. Here obviously was a serious man. Fortunately, he did not know how serious. Gehlen was a member of the group planning to assassinate Hitler.
‘Herr Oberst,
we have not heard from OKH on this matter.’
Gehlen stood:
Herr Obergruppenführer,
the
Amis
[Western Allies] and the Soviets may be allies, but a deep gulf of suspicion divides them. All of these instances of compromised intelligence, these coincidences of losses, involve only operations conducted by the British and Americans. We see no such pattern with the Soviets. If, and I say if only conditionally the
Amis
were providing the Russians with critical intelligence derived from Enigma, they certainly have made no use of it.
We have scoured our records of Enigma messages sent by OKW and the Army and have found a number of instances where, had the Russians known of the intelligence contained in them, compromise would have provided them splendid opportunities to disrupt our operations seriously. In no instance do we see them doing so. It is our conclusion that the
Amis
are not sharing operational or strategic intelligence based on any compromise of Enigma with the Russians.
Gehlen, of course, was not aware that Stalin had refused to believe the major piece of decrypted intelligence - the plan for the German attack on the Soviet Union - when the British sent it to him. The British had provided the intelligence but not the source of that intelligence. After that they had offered nothing derived from listening in on Enigma. Heydrich looked at him coldly, ‘You are sure of this,
Herr Oberst?’
I repeat,
Herr Obergruppenführer,
there is no intelligence reporting that even hints that the Russians know Enigma has been compromised or have received intelligence derived from that compromise. This is backed by the fact that there is no correlation between highly revealing operational information being transmitted and the Soviets suddenly taking advantage of it.
Heydrich rejoiced, not that anyone at the table would have noticed.
Heydrich had planned to return to Prague the day after the conference, but yesterday’s revelation by Gehlen changed his mind. The first thing the next morning, Heydrich flew to Hitler’s headquarters with Gehlen in tow. He let the intelligence officer brief Hitler then took the credit for sorting out the mess and establishing the fact that the British were not passing any intercepted information to the Soviets. Hitler burst out laughing. ‘You see the humour, don’t you,
meine Herren?
The British are keeping the secret of our summer offensive better than we have!’
He looked more relaxed now than anyone had seen him for months. The crushing Soviet counterattack before Moscow last December, the near collapse of the front, and then the constant crises through the winter had worn him down. Now he leaned back in his stuffed chair and gloated.
You see, this mess has confirmed a great strategic truth that I have spoken of before. The British and the Bolsheviks are natural enemies. Otherwise the British would have fallen all over themselves to give the Russians all the information they could. They want to help them only so far, and even that far is because that gangster Churchill has kept them in this war that is not in the interest of the British Empire.
Heydrich and Gehlen settled in for another one of Hitler’s monologues:
You see, when we had them on their backs after Dunkirk, I offered them peace. I ask you, has a victor ever been more generous all through history? The English are our cousins. Only fellow Aryans could have created something as powerful as the British Empire. War with Britain I maintained was racial fratricide. And had anyone but Churchill been in power, they would have seen the reason of it all and accepted my offer to guarantee the integrity of the British Empire. And there would have been British troops fighting in Russia alongside their race brothers against the Bolshevik scum.
Had their King Edward still been on the throne, we would have had that accommodation. He was a man of vision and a secret friend to us. His wife, that American woman, introduced him to our friends in Britain. Did you know, Gehlen, that in 1940 while serving as a British liaison with the French, he was actually working for us, delivering their plans? Had Churchill been thrown out, the king was willing to resume the throne under the guidance of a Reichsprotektor. Churchill must have got wind of something or why else would he have exiled him to be governor of Bermuda. They will not let Edward back into their damned island.
13
The first war where
Englander
fought
Deutscher
was an obscenity. I know. I fought them. Hard as nails. Stout Aryan fighting men. You know, in the thirties before we came to power, I met one of their parliamentary leaders, a young man named Harold Macmillan. We discovered that we had been directly opposite each other in France. I sketched the map of the area and he agreed I was spot on. I related to him how stupid it was for us to have fought each other and told him of just such an example why it was so. At the end of 1914, when both sides started digging in, one of our West Saxon regiments was directly across from a British regiment from Wessex. We tried to tell them that it was absurd for the same tribesmen, West Saxons all, to be fighting each other. Even then the English were set on being unreasonable. But I tell you that, once I have sorted out Stalin, the English will come hat in hand to us and throw Churchill to the wolves.
At last he paused and put away his memories. Gehlen noticed that two hours had passed. Hitler stood up to indicate that their meeting was over. He extended his hand to the SS man. ‘Your timing was perfect, Heydrich. I am leaving on 1 June to establish my headquarters in Ukraine with Army Group South.’ As the two left, Hitler said to him, ‘You have done such a good job with the Czechs, I had thought to appoint you to get the French in hand, but now after this Enigma business, I think I have something even more important in mind for you.’ He almost added to the end of the sentence the words ‘my son’.
Heydrich flew back to Berlin with Dönitz a well satisfied man. He would spend the night in the capital completely unaware of how satisfied he should have been. Had he remained in Prague, he most likely would have been dead. Two soldiers from the Czech army in exile in Britain were waiting to kill him. The British had sent them because Heydrich had been far too successful in exploiting Czech industry to support the German war effort. It should have been easy. Heydrich took the same route like clockwork every day. Only, that day, he had been at the Wolfsschanze. They would not get a second chance. In the coming days Heydrich would not often be in Prague, and the two Czechs were quickly betrayed.
