World War II Behind Closed Doors (19 page)

Regardless of these alcohol-fuelled antics, the sheer power and single-mindedness of Stalin's demand that Britain must recognize the Soviet borders of 1941, reiterated again and again during the meetings in the Kremlin, did have an effect on Eden. He wrote to Churchill on 5 January 1942 that he was clear that ‘this question is for Stalin [the] acid test of our sincerity and unless we can meet him on it his suspicions of ourselves and [the] United States Government will persist’.
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Eden then outlined the ‘case for immediate recognition’, although he added that ‘I realise, of course, that [the] great difficulty with [the] United States Government must be [the] apparent conflict with [the] Atlantic Charter’.

When Eden's suggestion reached Churchill, he was incensed and rejected Stalin's demands. ‘We have never recognised the 1941 frontiers of Russia’, Churchill wrote, ‘except de facto. They were acquired by acts of aggression in shameful collusion with Hitler’.
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Churchill also reminded Eden of the circumstances in which the Soviet Union had become an ally of the British, writing that ‘they entered the war only when attacked by Germany, having previously shown themselves utterly indifferent to our fate and, indeed, they added to our burdens in our worst danger’. He ended his note by saying: ‘But there must be no mistake about the opinion [of] any British Government of which I am head; namely, that it adheres to those principles of freedom and democracy set forth in the Atlantic Charter and that these principles must become especially active whenever any question of transferring territory is raised’.

Churchill could not have been clearer – the principles of the Atlantic Charter, signed only a few months before, were paramount. No changes in borders could be made without the free and fair consent of the populations concerned. It was a ringing endorsement of the fundamental values for which Britain was ostensibly fighting the war. They were also words that would come back to trouble Churchill as the war progressed.

STALIN'S MISPLACED OPTIMISM

Buoyed by the success of the Red Army in holding the Germans outside Moscow, Stalin announced to his High Command (the Stavka) on 5 January that Soviet forces should simultaneously attempt to relieve Leningrad in the north, challenge Army Group Centre near the Soviet capital, and mount a major offensive in the south towards the city of Kharkov. It was a plan so wildly optimistic as to be almost a fantasy. Marshal Zhukov and the Soviet Deputy Premier Nikolai Voznesensky tried to explain to Stalin why his ideas were flawed, but to no avail. Zhukov wanted the Red Army to reinforce Moscow, but Stalin announced: ‘Let us not sit down in defence’, and ordered his major spring offensive to go ahead.

Countless examples on the ground demonstrated that whilst the Red Army had achieved limited gains in the winter snow outside Moscow, Soviet units were still not in a position to mount a successful massive strategic offensive. Their units lacked the equipment, experience and, crucially, the tactical know-how to defeat the Germans in a vast, sweeping military manoeuvre. Take the experience of Vasily Borisov, for example.

After taking part in the successful defence of Moscow, Borisov and his unit were sent in early spring to support the Soviet 33rd Army on the southwest front. But almost immediately they found themselves encircled by the Germans. In conditions that once again allowed the soldiers of the Wehrmacht to use their tactical advantage in armoured warfare, the Germans managed to trap an entire Soviet army. For several weeks Borisov and his comrades tried to fight on, as the Germans gradually tightened the ring around them. ‘The Germans were dropping leaflets, telling us to surrender’, says Vasily Borisov. ‘And a deadline was set [by the Germans]. Those who did not surrender would get killed by artillery and machine guns’. The scenes inside the encirclement were the stuff of nightmares: ‘There were a lot of wounded people on carts – some of them didn't have limbs. There was blood and parts of dead bodies, and everywhere dead horses. You would see
a wounded man with his guts out asking us to either kill him or give him a hand grenade so that he could kill himself.’

Borisov's commander ordered the surviving members of the unit to assemble in a meadow within a wood. He intended, somehow, to mount a breakout. But the Germans opened fire and the Soviet commander was shot in his legs. Borisov watched as he took his pistol from his holster and held it to his head. ‘I'm not going to surrender alive’, his commander said. And then he pulled the trigger and fell down dead. ‘We felt very bad’, says Borisov. ‘We felt it was the end for us’.

Borisov made for the woods, where, he says, the Germans ‘hunted them like rabbits’. He was one of only three survivors out of the hundreds who tried to conceal themselves that day. And Borisov himself only came through the experience because he ran deep into the woods and managed to eke out an existence amongst the trees and undergrowth for thirteen months until the Red Army recaptured the area in spring 1943. Initially he lived off ‘dead animals – we washed this rotting food and grilled it on the fire’. But soon he and a few other survivors made contact with local villagers and either were given food or, on occasion, stole it.

The experience of Vasily Borisov and men like him, together with the destruction of the Soviet 33rd Army, should have given Stalin cause to think carefully about his endorsement of Marshal Timoshenko's proposed massive offensive in the south, which was due to begin in early May. But he continued to ignore all warnings and ordered that it should continue as planned.

Many of the Red Army soldiers who massed in preparation for the Kharkov offensive blithely shared Stalin's optimism. Boris Vitman,
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an officer in the Soviet 6th Army – central to the offensive – remembers that at headquarters ‘those who were planning the operation were certain that it would be completely successful and the mood was very cheerful…the idea was that by 1943 the war would be finished’.

The Kharkov offensive was predicated on the assumption that the Germans were planning their own spring offensive around Moscow. But this assumption was wrong. The Germans were
actually gathering their forces together in the very area around Kharkov into which the Red Army sought to attack. Soviet forces began to advance towards the German line on 12 May. Initially they believed that the lack of resistance they encountered was the result of the preceding Soviet artillery bombardment. But this was yet another misinterpretation – when they passed through the German front line they saw that the defences were empty. The barrage had destroyed nothing. As the Soviet troops advanced further, they still did not meet any resistance. ‘We kept marching and marching’, says Vitman. ‘We did not give much thought to the fact that there were no Germans around. We thought we were marching towards Berlin’.

Several Soviet armies (the 21st, 28th, 38th and 6th in the north, and the 57th and 9th in the south) moved blithely forward into a trap – for the further they marched, the easier it was for the Germans to mount a successful encirclement action. And once their prey had committed themselves far enough, the Germans pulled the noose tight. On 19 May General Paulus, commander of the German 6th Army, made a counter-attack in the north that took the Soviets by surprise. As the encirclement closed, the Red Army soldiers fought desperately to try and find a way out. ‘They [the Red Army] couldn't believe how much ground we had made up in the rearguard of the advance of their troops’, says Joachim Stempel,
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an officer with the German 6th Army. ‘[There was] the sight of thousands of Russians, who were trying to escape – a heaving mass of them – trying to reach freedom, shooting at us and being shot back at. Then, with a lot of shouting, trying to find gaps through which they could escape, and then being repulsed by the hail of bullets from our artillery and guns…. The most horrifying pictures and impressions were the ones immediately after the attempted break outs; awful, horrible wounds and many, many dead’. It was clear that the Soviet plan had led to disaster. On 28 May Marshal Timoshenko ordered a halt to the offensive, but it was too late. Most of the Red Army soldiers who had taken part in the attack were trapped in what became known as the ‘Barvenkovo mousetrap’, and the Germans took over two hundred thousand Soviet prisoners.

It is hard to overestimate the significance of the German victory at Kharkov. Stalin in particular had shown himself utterly inept as a military thinker. He had, after all, not just agreed and championed the initial plan of attack, but had refused the Soviet High Command's request on 18 May that the 9th Army be allowed to attempt to break out of the encirclement. But it wasn't just Stalin who was to blame for the catastrophe of Kharkov. Throughout the Red Army there had been failures in leadership, failures in intelligence, failures in strategy and failures in battlefield tactics. And perhaps even more significantly, despite the fact that – unbeknownst to them – the Red Army had attacked straight into mass German troop formations, there were at least three Soviet soldiers on the battlefield to every two Germans. What Kharkov starkly demonstrated was that the Soviet Union could not win this war merely by superiority of numbers.

Stalin, as usual, refused to take responsibility for his mistakes. Instead, Marshal Timoshenko, one of the few people who had so far survived ‘friendship’ with Stalin, was removed from front-line command and sidelined. And Nikita Khrushchev, the chief political commissar responsible for the attack, was recalled to Moscow to face Stalin. ‘I was very depressed’, said Khrushchev. ‘We had lost many, many thousands of men. More than that, we had lost the hope we had been living by…. To make matters worse, it looked as if I were going to have to take the blame for it personally’.
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Khrushchev, who had worked slavishly for Stalin since the early 1930s, knew well that the Soviet leader ‘would stop at nothing to avoid taking responsibility for something that had gone wrong’. And so he reported to the Kremlin with a sense of foreboding.

Stalin toyed with him. He acted as if he had not yet decided Khrushchev's fate. On the one hand, Khrushchev bore – Stalin clearly intimated – a large share of the responsibility for the disaster at Kharkov. On the other, he remained utterly loyal and was always happy to be the butt of any cruel joke Stalin cared to devise. Khrushchev was to escape the torture chambers of the Lubyanka, but he did not escape humiliation. Some months later, while senior military commanders watched, Stalin emptied his pipe on top of
Khrushchev's bald pate. The Soviet leader explained that he was following an ancient tradition: ‘When a Roman commander lost a battle, he lit a bonfire, sat down in front of it and poured ashes on his own head’.
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THE ALLIED RESPONSE

But it was not just the Soviets who were tasting defeat in the early months of 1942 – so were their Western Allies. On 15 February 1942, Lieutenant General Arthur Percival surrendered Singapore to the Japanese, and seventy thousand British and Allied soldiers marched into Japanese captivity. Churchill described the event as ‘the worst disaster and largest capitulation in British history’.
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In March, the Americans too suffered a heavy defeat at Japanese hands in the Philippines – an event that necessitated the humiliating flight of the American commander, General Douglas MacArthur.

It was at this most difficult time, when the Allies were facing setbacks in almost every theatre of war, that Churchill sent a significant telegram to Roosevelt. On 7 March 1942 the British Prime Minister made a volte-face from the strong sentiments of principle he had expressed just two months before in his note to Eden. ‘The increasing gravity of the war’, wrote Churchill to the American President, ‘has led me to feel that the principles of the Atlantic Charter ought not to be construed so as to deny Russia the frontiers she occupied when Germany attacked her’.
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This sudden desertion of the moral position he had so recently and so boldly upheld was caused, as he saw it, by practical necessity: ‘Everything portends an immense renewal of the German invasion in the spring and there is very little we can do to help the only country that is heavily engaged with the German armies’. Churchill now tried to argue that since the Soviets had already occupied the Baltic states and Poland before Britain and America signed the Atlantic Charter, their desire to retain this territory at the end of the war could conceivably be considered legitimate. It was a flawed argument, of course, since the population of the Baltic states and
eastern Poland had never, in free and fair elections, consented to become Soviet citizens. And, of course, just weeks before Churchill had himself confirmed in his note to Eden that Soviet occupation of these territores was in breach of the Charter.

Churchill's attempt at joining two positions that were logically unbridgeable came to nothing. But the fact that he even attempted such circumlocution is significant because it demonstrates just how early in the relationship – when it still seemed that the Soviet Union might lose – he was prepared to break the principles of self-determination within the Atlantic Charter.

His new position did not escape strong censure from the Americans. Sumner Welles, Under-Secretary of State, said that ‘The attitude of the British government is not only indefensible from every moral standpoint, but likewise extraordinarily stupid’.
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Welles's reading of Stalin's character was that the Soviet leader demanded more when he saw weakness in negotiation, and the danger of offering the Soviets any concession over territory was that, once conceded in one instance, more demands would surely follow. These concerns were shared by others in the British War Cabinet, and the decision was finally taken to refuse the Soviet demand that any treaty signed now should contain details of postwar borders. In particular, Roosevelt's administration was not about to desert the Atlantic Charter at this stage of the war, no matter what the difficulties.