the Führer exulted in the progress of the campaign, which thus far had been a mere armoured victory ride. His infantry were scarcely called upon to fight, and losses were negligible. New swathes of Soviet territory fell into German hands. Through July the panzers swept on southwards towards Rostov, savagely mauling the Russian South Front as its formations sought escape across the Don. Hitler commissioned Friedrich Paulus, a staff officer eager to prove himself as a field commander, to lead Sixth Army in a dash for Stalingrad.
Most of Germany’s generals immediately recognised the folly of this move. The strategic significance of Stalin’s name-city was small, irrelevant to the main objective of clearing the Caucasus and securing its oil. Moreover, Hitler’s eagerness for a symbolic triumph was matched by the determination of Stalin to deny this to him. If Stalingrad fell, the Soviet leader feared a renewed German thrust in the north, against Moscow. He thus determined that the Volga city must be held at all costs, and committed to its defence three armies from his strategic reserve. The stage was set for one of the decisive battles of the war, a collision between the personal wills of the two dictators.
The spirit of many Russians was unbroken, but the catastrophes of spring and summer ate deep into morale. Some people nursed hopes that the Western Allies would relieve their plight. Pavel Kalitov, commissar of a partisan group in Ukraine, wrote on 8 July: ‘We are very happy because England is bombing Romania with such success, and the Americans are going to send a landing force to France.’ Such expectations were precious but spurious. British bombing received much more propaganda attention than its achievements justified, and the Second Front was still almost two years away. Until 1943, arms and food deliveries from the West made only a small contribution to matching enormous Soviet needs and commitments. Whatever Stalin’s people achieved in 1942, they must achieve almost unaided.
It is hard to exaggerate the sufferings of Russian soldiers in the face of the elements and their own leaders’ bungling, as well as the enemy. ‘The night was terribly dark,’ wrote Captain Nikolai Belov, describing his unit’s detrainment behind the front. ‘The whole battalion set off in the wrong direction. We walked in circles all night, 30 km in terrible mud.’ Two weeks on, he recorded: ‘We have only a couple of old rifles for the whole battalion.’ On 10 May, his unit took up positions near a village named Bolshoi Sinkovets: ‘We have had no food for two days. Everyone is starving.’ Two days later, the battalion was issued with forty-one rifles for five hundred men. On 17 May, it ‘speed-marched’ thirty miles, losing forty stragglers who could not keep up. This was unsurprising, since the men had not eaten for two days. Belov wrote: ‘Everyone is frustrated with the commanders – and not without reason.’ Day after day, their ordeal continued. ‘Arrived in Zelyonaya Dubrava, having marched 35 km during the day. It is unbearably hot, we are terribly tired. Again there is nothing to eat. Lots of men are unable to keep up. Sedov is crying. He is quite unable to walk.’ Belov’s men were reduced to grubbing in the fields for rotting potatoes left from the previous year’s harvest. Their first actions against the Germans resulted in murderous losses: on 15 July, he reported his company’s strength reduced to five men.
At midsummer 1942, the Western Allies’ view of Russia’s predicament remained bleak. A British intelligence officer wrote on 15 July: ‘I have the inescapable feeling that much as the Germans may have lost, the Red Army has lost more…Sevastopol was…a fair feat of Soviet arms and demonstrated the enormous power of the Red Army on the defensive – given the right conditions of terrain…[But it] is still not capable of dealing with the Germans in the open terrain of South Russia…On the whole the Germans have most things in their favour…They possess a better fighting machine…How far the Germans will be able to exploit their success will depend on the ability of the Red Army to retain some form of cohesion in retreat until they have gone back behind great natural obstacles or into country more suitable for the defence.’
It is important to view the events of the year in context. In 1941, Russia suffered 27.8 per cent of its total war losses. But in 1942 Kharkov, the Crimea and Kerch peninsula disasters accounted for even larger casualties. When Stalingrad was added, the year as a whole cost Russia 28.9 per cent of its overall casualties in the conflict, 133 per cent of the Red Army’s front-line strength. Posterity knows that Stalin learned vital lessons: he started to delegate military decisions to competent generals, and the worst blunderers were dismissed. The weapons created by Russia’s industrial mobilisation and production beyond the Urals began to reach her armies, increasing their strength while that of the Axis shrank. But none of this was apparent to the world in the summer of 1942. Germany still seemed irresistible on the battlefield, Russia at its last gasp.
Almost all British, and also later American, attempts to collaborate operationally with Stalin’s people foundered on the rocks of their ally’s secretiveness, incompetence, ill-will and paucity of means. The Royal Navy’s requests for the aid of Soviet warships and aircraft to cover British convoys approaching Murmansk and Archangel yielded meagre responses. In August 1942, an RAF Catalina delivered to north-west Russia two SIS agents, whom the Soviets had agreed to parachute into north Norway. Their hosts instead detained the two men incommunicado for two months before dropping them, still in summer clothing, inside Finland rather than Norway, where they were swiftly arrested, tortured and shot. Thereafter, the British recognised that cooperation with the Russians was an exclusively one-way proposition; that the consequences of placing Allied personnel at the mercy of Soviet goodwill were often fatal.
Nonetheless, the Western governments went to extravagant lengths to preserve a semblance of unity. When Gen. Anders, who had suffered in Stalin’s prisons between 1939 and 1941, met Churchill in Cairo in August 1942, he vehemently denounced the Soviet Union: ‘There was, I said, no justice or honour in Russia, and not a single man there whose word could be trusted. Churchill pointed out to me how dangerous such language would be if spoken in public. No good, he said, could come of antagonising the Russians…Churchill closed the talk by saying that he believed Poland would emerge from the war a strong and happy country.’ Anders allowed himself to be persuaded that ‘We Poles were now going home (so we thought) by a different route, a longer one, indeed, but one with fewer hardships.’ The Western Powers exerted themselves to sustain this delusion.
The Germans encountered the first units of the Stalingrad Front on 23 July, some eighty-seven miles west of the city. That night, Hitler made what proved the decisive blunder of the war in the east. He issued a new directive, declaring the objectives of Blue completed. Army Group A was ordered to overrun the Caucasus oilfields 745 miles beyond its existing positions – a longer advance than the German drive from the Siegfried Line to the Channel coast in May 1940. Its formations soon found themselves attempting to sustain a front five hundred miles wide with hopelessly inadequate forces, against stubborn Russian resistance. Meanwhile Army Group B commenced operations designed to close up to a line along the Volga and secure Stalingrad. Manstein was transferred northwards with five infantry divisions and the siege artillery he had used at Sevastopol, to end the tiresome resistance at Leningrad: following a change of policy, Berlin was now impatient to occupy the city. The next news from Sixth Army showed that its progress towards Stalingrad had become sluggish. Hitler, irked, ordered that Fourth Panzer Army should be diverted from the Caucasus to support Paulus. He thus divided his strength in a fashion which rendered each element of his forces too weak to attain its objectives.
But August 1942 was another season of Russian catastrophes. One of Stalin’s favourites, the old Bolshevik warhorse Marshal Semyon Budyonny, presided over a series of shambolic defeats in the northern Caucasus. Sixth Army wrecked Russian forces on the Don east of Kalach, taking 50,000 prisoners; an entire Soviet tank army collapsed, with crews abandoning their vehicles in panic. On 21 August, Paulus launched a dash from the Don to the Volga, blasting a path through the defenders with waves of dive-bombers. In two days, his forces reached the river nine miles north of Stalingrad. The city’s capture seemed imminent, and he dispatched to Hitler a draft of his plans for Sixth Army’s move into winter quarters. Far to the south, on 9 August mountain troops took Maikop, most accessible of the Caucasian oilfields, where Russian demolitions proved so thorough that it was deemed necessary to bring equipment from Germany to drill new
