World War II Behind Closed Doors (26 page)

‘I was very hurt by what he said’, says Valentina, ‘because I wanted to be a woman. And I was hurt by his refusal. A Russian wouldn't have… well, wasted his time in such a way’.

But although there were clearly some Soviet women, like Valentina Ievleva, who were ready to have sex with foreign sailors, the experience of many British sailors was that a larger number were certainly not prepared to have a physical relationship. That was most definitely the experience of Eddie Grenfell and his comrades. They were taken by lorries every Tuesday from their camp to the nearby town to participate in a tea dance. ‘In this very large hall where we danced, at one end there was a proper orchestra [and] at the other end was a gramophone, so you could dance around. And at one end you were dancing a waltz, then [when] you got over to the gramophone it was a foxtrot, so you had to change your step…. There were all these Red Army girls, perfectly nice, they danced with us – but that was all’.

In fact, the problem for these British sailors was that there simply weren't enough girls to dance with – a ratio of one girl to every five or six men. And so the men danced with each other. ‘And I shall never forget it’, says Eddie Grenfell, ‘because I've never experienced it in my life before. Ginger Bailey – one of my friends from HMS
Edinburgh
[the ship he had sailed on before the
Empire Lawrence] –
he had a red beard. And the Russians loved red beards, you know, and he just never had a moment's peace because he had these smart Russian officers coming up to him and asking to dance with him’.

A VOYAGE TO NEW YORK

While the Allied sailors whiled away their time in the far north of the Soviet Union as they waited for their return convoys to form, a number of Soviet ships made the reverse journey from Murmansk to New York. And in the late spring of 1942 Maria Vetsheva was on board one of these Soviet merchantmen taking timber, as ballast, to America. Once across the Atlantic, they expected the ship to be loaded with military equipment for the return journey. She was one of four women on board, and worked as a cleaner and caterer: ‘Of course, for a woman on board a vessel it is very tough – lots of work, for one thing – and morally one should have willpower. I was very young and the captain instructed how one should act. He told me that the engine room and deck crew will be courting you but you should not break down…. One should protect oneself. If you defend yourself then they will respect you’.

‘Men and women have different psychology’, she says, ‘and a woman should have her pride. She should be a woman. And if she is proud then she will be more desired’. She had already witnessed, before the boat sailed, the consequences of not keeping this female ‘pride’ intact. A new girl, called Nina, had joined the ship as a caterer and shared a cabin with her. But early one morning Maria awoke to find Nina absent. When she went out on deck to search
for her room-mate, she saw her walking away from the cabin of one of the crew. Nina was drunk and naked, carrying her clothes in her hands: ‘And, of course, the master dismissed her and that afternoon she had to leave the vessel…. As they say, one black sheep soils the whole family’.

Maria Vetsheva arrived in New York in the late spring of 1942. It was her first trip abroad – and her first taste of capitalism. ‘We were kids there’, she says. ‘It was paradise’. They walked around Manhattan, and saw the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building. On Broadway and in Times Square they marvelled at the flashing neon signs and the advertisements – all completely new to them. But they could only look – not buy. Maria Vetsheva was given just $3.70 spending money during her three-month stay in New York. When she and a few of the other women from the ship visited Macy's on Seventh Avenue, they made straight for the shoe department and looked longingly at the expensive goods on offer, but it was all light years beyond Maria's reach. However, the staff took pity on the female Soviet sailors and gave each of them a pair of sandals – a souvenir from New York.

But Maria saw another side to immigrant life in America when she visited a club for people who had managed to leave Russia before the formation of the Soviet Union in 1922: ‘Of course, when they left they were young and now they were old. And they cried and they asked us to bring them some Russian soil and they said our children are no longer Russian…so they really missed their Motherland’. She claims that these experiences made her feel that, although America was a good place to visit, ‘it was impossible to live there’. ‘We missed our Motherland’, she says. ‘Like the words in the song: “Bulgaria is good but Russia is better”. This is the Russian spirit. We have this spirit, and that's good’.

But that was clearly not the whole story. When pressed, Maria revealed that she and her comrades feared that if they had decided to stay and seek political asylum in America then, ‘For sure we would be returned. If we had valuable brains, then we would be received with our valuable knowledge, but there were too many people like us. We would be returned and then there would be
Siberia and life would be over. So one had not only patriotic feelings but also fear, of course’. And so it was with a mixture of feelings that Maria watched the skyscrapers of New York City recede in the distance as her ship left America in August 1942. She felt envy for the lifestyle of the capitalists, but was certain in her own mind that a combination of homesickness and straightforward ‘fear’ meant that her decision not to defect had been the right one.

Her merchant ship, the
Friedrich Engels
, was making the long journey back to Murmansk without the protection of a convoy. In the immediate aftermath of the disastrous PQ17, the few Soviet and other merchant ships that made the journey did so alone. All seemed to go well until they reached the northern coast of Norway. Suddenly, out of the fog, appeared a German heavy cruiser, the
Admiral Scheer
, with its guns turned on the Soviet merchantman: ‘We were quickly gathered together and ordered to burn all the documents’. Minutes passed and still the German ship did not fire. ‘Then suddenly we came into very thick fog and we stopped the engines. No motion, no noise – like we are dead…. We stood there for forty minutes, and then the captain reversed course for about two hours’. Once they had cleared the fog banks they found the German warship had vanished. An officer on Maria's ship explained that he believed he knew why the Germans had not attacked. The crew of the
Admiral Scheer
must have mistakenly believed that this one merchantman was the lead vessel in a larger convoy. So the Germans clearly hadn't wanted to alert the other ships by firing just on this one.

This was by some measure the most frightening moment of Maria Vetsheva's life: ‘They [the Germans] are aiming at you with all sorts of cannons… and we looked overboard and knew that the water was cold – and we just looked at our own death’. Back in the Soviet Union the stress and pressure of the journey – in particular the memory of the encounter with the German warship – became too much for Maria. ‘I had a nervous breakdown’, she says. ‘I was sick for a very long time. It's the most frightening thing when a person is not in control – if they had hit us with just one torpedo we would sink, and this anticipation is very frightening…. You
look into death's eye and your death is looking at you. Every seaman knows what I'm talking about’.

FIGHTING THE GERMANS ON THE VOLGA

As Maria Vetsheva was wrestling with her emotions in the Arctic Sea, Joseph Stalin was watching with growing anger the German advance in Operation Blue. In just two months the 6th Army covered some 400 miles, reaching the city of Stalingrad on the river Volga during the last week of August 1942. German soldiers were exultant. It seemed as if the new strategy of their High Command – attempting to capture the raw resources of the Soviet Union in the south instead of a direct assault on Moscow – would succeed. The Volga was, they believed, the boundary of their new empire. Now, they felt, they had practically won the war. ‘The Volga! It was within our grasp’! said Joachim Stempel, an officer in the 6th Army. ‘The Volga was a very impressive sight in the autumn sun – a river of a width that we don't know in Germany. And this incredible view into the depths of Asia – nothing but forests, more forests, plains and the endless horizon. It was an inspirational feeling…. We thought it can't take much longer now – we're here’.

At whatever cost, Stalin was not prepared to give up the city that bore his name; Hitler, equally intransigent, announced on 30 September that it was certain that Stalingrad would fall into German hands. That autumn this one place became a microcosm of the immense destructive capacity of modern warfare. The Germans launched bombing raids on a scale not previously seen on the Eastern Front, and their artillery bombarded the city to rubble. By October there was little left standing. But still the Soviet forces, led by Major General Vasily Chuikov of the 62nd Army, would not surrender the ruins of Stalingrad on the western bank of the Volga.

Chuikov's tactics played perfectly to Soviet strengths. He called on his troops to stay as close as possible to the German front line.
That meant that it was hard for the Germans to use their artillery or bombers. ‘Don't get too far from the enemy’, says Anatoly Mereshko, who worked in Chuikov's headquarters. ‘That was our motto. The gap between you and the enemy should not be more than 50 or 100 metres’.

The Germans were at first bemused and then distressed to discover that they had come to the ends of the earth only to find it protected by people who fought with a personal ferocity they had not encountered before. Helmut Waltz,
²⁸
a soldier in the German 305th Infantry Division, recalls fighting through a ‘desert of rubble’ and seeing a Red Army soldier shooting a German officer at close range so that ‘his head was open and I could see his brain, on the right, left and in the middle – there was water but no blood. He looked at me and then he fell into the rim of the crater’. Waltz witnessed, during the course of one day in Stalingrad that October, the destruction of his entire company of more than seventy men: ‘Nobody was left – they were all either dead or wounded. The whole company was gone’. The German forces were sustaining so many casualties that, as Joachim Stempel put it, ‘it was possible to work out that soon there won't be anyone left. And we knew that the Russians at night were taking people [reinforcements] across the Volga, but we had nothing left, so we had to keep going. Nailed to the spot’.

Even today, if you walk the hills around Stalingrad just after the winter snow has melted, you can see fragments of bone littering the fields. The human losses here were immense. No one knows exactly how many people died at Stalingrad, but the best estimate is that the Red Army lost nearly five hundred thousand and the Germans around two hundred thousand. And to put those figures in the context of the Western Allies, in this one battle the Soviet Union suffered more dead than either the British or the Americans did in the entire war.

It was against this background that Stalin reviewed the course of the war in a speech on 7 November 1942.
²⁹
‘At the start of this year’, he said, ‘during the winter, the Red Army inflicted heavy blows on the German-fascist troops. Having repulsed the German
attack on Moscow, it took the initiative itself, went on to the offensive and forced the German soldiers westward, liberating a number of areas of our country from German slavery. The Red Army therefore showed that under certain advantageous circumstances it can destroy the German-fascist troops’. After this optimistic version of the history of the first six months of 1942, Stalin went on to give a more sobering version of what had happened since: ‘But in the summer, the situation on the front altered for the worse. The Germans took advantage of the absence of a second front in Europe, and they and their allies gathered all their reserves, threw them against our Ukrainian front and pushed through it. With the cost of heavy losses the German-fascist soldiers succeeded in moving towards the south and causing a threat to Stalingrad, the coast of the Black Sea, Grozny and the approaches to Transcaucasia…. However, having been stopped at Stalingrad and having lost tens of thousands of troops, the enemy has hurled into action fresh divisions, exerting his last efforts. The fight on the Soviet-German front is growing in intensity. On the resolution of this fight depends the fate of the Soviet State, the freedom and independence of our country. The Red Army bears most of the burden of the war against Hitler's Germany and her allies’. Stalin's bitterness at the lack of a second front was evident both in the overall tone of his speech and in the bald statement that the Red Army was currently bearing ‘most of the burden’. But the day before, in a speech made to the Congress of Soviet Deputies, he had been a good deal more explicit, warning the Western Allies that: ‘The absence of a second front against fascist Germany may end badly for all freedom-loving countries, including the Allies themselves’.

Just two days later, 8 November, the Western Allies did launch a second front – of a kind – with Operation Torch, the invasion of North Africa. This was not, of course, what Stalin had always explicitly understood as a ‘second front’ – by that he meant a substantial cross-Channel invasion that would draw German forces directly away from the war in the East. And although, in pursuit of Operation Torch, around six hundred ships had crossed the
Atlantic carrying nearly a hundred thousand men, Stalin believed this Allied effort was insignificant compared to the great struggle that the Red Army faced: ‘Why were they able to do this?’ he asked rhetorically. ‘Because the absence of a second front in Europe enabled them to carry out this operation without any risk’.
³⁰
He emphasized that whilst the Red Army were facing 240 enemy divisions in the East, the Western Allies were confronting a total of ‘only 15 German and Italian divisions’.

This difference in scale between the Soviet and Allied contributions to the war was further emphasized, as far as Stalin was concerned, by the launch of Operation Uranus on 19 November 1942. More than a million Red Army soldiers took part in this attempt to cut off the German forces in Stalingrad, and they all listened as their leader's words were read to them at six o'clock on the morning of the attack. ‘Today you start an offensive’, Stalin told his troops, ‘and your actions will decide the fate of the country’.