The Moscow Option (2 page)

In Russia, meanwhile, the bitter struggle raged on, leaving little time for such oratory. The Soviet leaders, who would have agreed wholeheartedly with Mussolini’s last sentence, were for the moment more concerned with such mundane matters as the desperate battle taking place in the Yelna salient east of Smolensk; the need to halt the German panzers that were now only eighty miles from Leningrad; and the disaster looming in the steppe south of Kiev.

But in Moscow itself, the only warring capital under threat of imminent seizure, spirits were higher than they had been two weeks before. Roosevelt’s envoy Harry Hopkins had only recently departed - he was now waiting for Churchill aboard
Prince of Wales
- and it had been widely assumed that he had offered bountiful American aid. More important perhaps, the good news from the central front compensated the Muscovites for the continuing flow of bad news from the more distant northern and southern fronts. The enemy was being held at Yelna! A fortnight before he had been only two hundred miles from Moscow. And he still was! Perhaps, the optimists wondered out loud, the tide had turned. Perhaps the worst was over.

Perhaps not. That night there would be a meeting of the Stavka, the supreme military-political command. The summonses would go out by telephone, and soon the long black cars would speed through Moscow’s empty and blacked-out streets, through the checkpoints and the fortress walls of Stalin’s Kremlin. The leaders of Soviet Communism and the Red Army would climb from their cars and walk swiftly up to the conference chamber from which the Soviet war effort was directed.

In that room, on that August night, there would be little talk of American aid; all present knew that in the months remaining before winter only the Red Army could save the Soviet Union. The discussion would be of divisions overrun, armies encircled, bridges fallen to the enemy, of days rather than years, of the struggle to survive.

In China too the war went on, but its instigators in Tokyo were now absorbed in the planning of more ambitious military projects. The American freezing of Japanese assets and a virtually complete oil embargo were proving more of a spur than a deterrent.
The Times
that day reported an article by the Japanese Finance Minister in the newspaper Asahi. In it he argued that Japan should go on with the construction of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. Withdrawal from China would invite a catastrophe; victory and success would make ‘all costs appear as nothing’. Another article, this time by the Vice-Director of the Cabinet Planning Board, urged the Japanese people to be content with the ‘lowest standard of living’, and to ‘abolish all liberalistic individualism for the sake of the race and the nation’.

These were more than empty words. The unfortunate inhabitants of Kagoshima in southern Kyushu could, had they but known it, have confirmed as much. For their city and its bay were being used, unknown to them and most of the participants, as a training ground for Operation ‘Z’, the planned attack on the US naval base at Pearl Harbor. Torpedo planes flew over the mountain behind the city, zoomed down across the railway station, between smokestacks and telephone poles before launching imaginary torpedoes at a breakwater in the harbour. The locals, unaware that the breakwater was standing in for Pearl Harbor’s Battleship Row, complained bitterly at the nerve-wracking antics of these hot-headed pilots.

II

At 11am Churchill’s train was puffing along the banks of the Dornoch Firth, a hundred miles short of its destination. In Novy Borrisov, three time-zones to the east, it was 2pm, and Field-Marshal Fedor von Bock was escorting Adolf Hitler from the Army Group Centre HQ to the car waiting to take him to the airstrip nearby. The Führer, having conferred with Bock and his panzer group commanders as to the military situation on Army Group Centre’s front, was returning home to the Wolfsschanze, his personal headquarters in the East Prussian forests near Rastenburg.

Watching the party make their way across the yellowed grass towards the waiting car were the two panzer group commanders, Generals Hoth and Guderian. They were enjoying a cup of the decent coffee available at Army Group HQ before returning to their own less exalted headquarters. They were also extremely confused. Why had the Führer not sanctioned a continuation of the march on Moscow? All his commanders thought it the correct course of action. If Hitler had come to argue for a different course then it would have been understandable. Mistaken, but understandable. Instead he had just listened, and then talked airily of Leningrad, the Ukraine, even Moscow itself. He had not committed himself to any one of them. He was clearly undecided. Why was he refusing to see the obvious?

While Hoth and Guderian were savouring their cups of coffee and sharing their misgivings, the Führer’s party reached the Borrisov airstrip and the four-engined FW200 reconnaissance plane that was to carry it back to Rastenburg. Bock bid his superiors farewell with a characteristically unconvincing ‘Heil Hitler’, and the Führer, Field-Marshal Keitel and their SS bodyguard climbed aboard the plane. Within minutes the FW200 was rolling down the dirt runway and into the sky.

Rastenburg was 280 miles away to the west. The FW200 gained height and flew over the outskirts of what remained of Minsk, over the German construction gangs widening the gauge of the Molodechno railway, over fields strewn with the flotsam of war and the still-smouldering remains of villages caught in the path of the German advance. Had the Führer deigned to look down on this panorama of destruction he would doubtless have been much gratified. Perhaps he might have hummed a few bars of
Gotterdammerung
. But he didn’t look down. Hitler was a nervous flier, and preferred not to be reminded of the distance separating him from
terra firma
.

About thirty miles from its destination one of the plane’s four engines cut out. The pilot was probably not overly worried by this development. It would make the landing slightly more difficult, but if he had not been an extremely able pilot he would not have been flying Hitler’s plane.

But worse was to come. As the dry plains of Belorussia gave way to the lakes and forests of Masurian Prussia the weather took a dramatic turn. Rastenburg was in the grip of a summer thunderstorm, and as the plane neared the airfield it was suddenly encased in sheets of driving rain.

The pilot must have considered flying on to Konigsberg, a further sixty miles to the north-west, but chose not to do so. It must be presumed that a surfeit of confidence in his own ability lay behind this decision. If so, he must have felt momentarily justified as the plane touched down without apparent mishap.

But split-seconds later the pilot must have realised his mistake. The poor visibility had distorted his sense of distance. He had landed too far down the runway.

He tried to brake too rapidly. The four-engined plane went into an uncontrollable skid, slewed off the runway and careered across the wet grass. One of the wings smashed into an unfortunately placed fire-tender. With an enormous jolt the FW200 spun in a tight circle and stopped.

Seconds later airstrip staff were removing bodies from the stricken plane and carrying them through the rain to the buildings two hundred yards away. The pilot, Field- Marshal Keitel and one of the SS guards were dead. Hitler was unconscious but alive.

At first there seemed no signs of serious injury. But once the Führer had been taken indoors it was discovered that the rain pouring down his face was not rain at all. It was sweat. A heavy fever was developing, the breathing was shallow and rapid. Occasionally a spasm would seize the legs and head, arching them backwards.

The Führer was driven swiftly through the dark dripping forest to the medical unit attached to his headquarters. There, in the centrally-heated alpine chalet, he was examined by the resident staff and his personal physician, the dubious Dr Morell. They could not reach an adequate diagnosis, and soon the wires to Berlin were humming with top-secret orders for specialist assistance.

Later that evening a number of Germany’s most distinguished consultant physicians arrived at the Wolfsschanze. One of them, Dr Werner Sodenstern, was considered to be Germany’s leading brain specialist. He diagnosed multiple minor haemorrhages in the medulla and brain stem. They had probably been caused by the Führer’s head coming into forceful contact with his padded headrest. The injuries were unlikely to be fatal, and there was no damage to the main part of the brain. There was every chance that the Führer would recover, with his faculties unimpaired. But there was no way of knowing when. No special treatment was possible or necessary. Hitler needed intravenous saline to support the blood tone, and complete rest.

Sodenstern admitted that such cases were rare, and that medical science was still trying to understand them fully. It might be days, weeks or even months before the Führer finally emerged from the coma. But the healing process had to be allowed to run its natural course. If it were hurried by either the patient or his advisers the consequences would probably be severe.

For an unknown length of time Nazi Germany had lost the political and military services of its Führer.

The eminent doctors had not been the only passengers on the plane from Berlin. Hitler’s acolytes, the ‘barons’ of Nazi Germany, were also gathering at the scene of the disaster. The injuries might still prove fatal, in which case a struggle for the succession would have to take place. If the Führer survived it would presumably be necessary to re-arrange the delineation of authorities until such time as his recovery was complete.

Goebbels, Himmler and Boorman had arrived with the doctors, having been informed of the accident by their resident representatives at the Wolfsschanze. There had been attempts to reach Goering at Veldenstein Castle, but he was not expected back from Paris until later that evening. Colonel-General Jodl, Head of Operations in the OKW (Supreme Command of the Armed Forces) under the late Keitel and Hitler himself, was already there. Grand-Admiral Raeder, Commander-in-Chief of the Kriegsmarine (Navy or OKM), Field-Marshal Brauchitsch, Commander- in-Chief of the Army (OKH), and Colonel-General Halder, Chief of the Army General Staff, had all been informed and were expected.

All these men wielded great power in Nazi Germany, but all were ultimately responsible to Hitler and Hitler alone. There was no complex hierarchy - just the Führer and his subordinates. Each had an empire within the empire. When their areas of authority overlapped it was Hitler who decided the boundaries. Or had done until now. In the weeks ahead his subordinates would either have to learn the art of co-operation or, more likely, leave each other well alone.

One man did have nominal authority over the others for, only six weeks earlier, Hitler had nominated Reich Marshal Goering as his successor. But it remained to be seen whether Goering had the personal stature, or indeed the inclination, to make his new-found authority more than nominal. It seemed more likely that he would delight in the trappings of power than exercise himself unduly in the wielding of it.

He did, however, take the chair in the Wolfsschanze conference room the following morning. Also present were ReichsFührer SS Himmler,. Generals Jodl, Brauchitsch and Halder, Grand-Admiral Raeder, Party Chief Boorman and Propaganda Minister Goebbels. Foreign Minister Ribbentrop, whom no one but Hitler could stomach, had not been invited, nor yet informed of the accident.

The records of this meeting did not survive the destruction of Berlin, but the memoirs of Halder and Raeder, who alone outlived the war, agree on all but the insignificant details. The first matter discussed - the reason for the meeting - was the Führer’s condition. Should the German people, and hence the world, be informed of the accident? Such news would provide a definite morale boost for the enemies of the Reich. Could the whole business be hushed up? Did too many people know already? A compromise was decided upon. News of the accident would be released, but the severity of the Führer’s condition would be played down. A broken leg, a broken arm - Goebbels’s Ministry would decide the details. Hitler rarely made public appearances now in any case. Hopefully he would be fully recovered before the next one scheduled, the traditional speech to mark the opening of the Winter Help Relief Campaign on 4 September. If not, then new excuses could be dreamed up by the Propaganda Ministry. Those who knew the truth would be sworn to silence on pain of death.

The second item on the agenda concerned the replacing of the dead Keitel. It was agreed that Colonel-General Jodl should succeed him to the post of Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces, and that Colonel-General von Paulus, the Army Quarter-Master General, should succeed Jodl as OKW Head of Operations.

No other decisions of importance were taken at the meeting. No one was yet ready to cross the boundaries Hitler had laid down between them. Things would remain as they were, ‘as the Führer would have wished them’, and as he would doubtless expect to find them when he returned.

This, though predictable, was crucial. For in effect it offered the Army, as Hitler would never have done,
carte blanche
in the East. No one knows, of course, what the Führer would eventually have made of the confusion witnessed by Bock, Hoth and Guderian at Novy Borrisov on 4 August. He later told Brauchitsch in a fit of anger that he would have taken Kiev before resuming the march on Moscow. That way, he claimed, the Soviet Union would have been brought conclusively to its knees by the end of November. Perhaps this, like many of Hitler’s later outbursts, was merely hindsight working its insidious way through his warped mind. But it is unlikely. Both his adjutant, Colonel Schmundt, and Jodl told others in the following months that Hitler had indeed set his mind on the capture of Kiev. If so his crash in the Rastenburg rain profoundly altered the course of the war, if not its final outcome.

On 5 August the newly-promoted Jodl kept remarkably quiet about his unconscious master’s predilections. His reason was simple enough. He agreed with Brauchitsch, Halder, Bock, Guderian, Hoth and practically everyone else who mattered that Moscow should be the primary objective of the Army in the East. When the Army Group Centre generals declared that Hitler had not made a decision before leaving Novy Borrisov, Jodl did not contradict them. He agreed that those, like himself, who had never been undecided should now implement their decision. The march on Moscow should be resumed at the earliest possible date.