The Moscow Option by David Downing Read Free Book Online Page B

railway carriage in which the conquests and the deaths could be translated into those cold words so beloved by the politicians. But it hardly mattered. The German troops settled down to endure a winter of occupation, many of them in the relative warmth of the larger Soviet cities. The coming spring would see an end to it, once and for all. The shouts of defiance emanating from Gorkiy could be safely dismissed as empty rhetoric.
     
    VI
    Churchill was more hopeful. On 9 October he had spoken to the House of Commons in characteristic vein:
    “The twisted crosses now flaunt themselves along the streets of the Russian capital. Yet, for all this, it would be a rash and foolish man who would assume the defeat of Russia. Perhaps the Nazi leaders, during those long cold Berlin nights, the sound of British bombs loud in their ears, will remember with a chill that Napoleon too entered Moscow on the threshold of winter . . .”
    Stalin was also making the most of Napoleonic parallels. On 17 October he had spoken to the Soviet people for the first time since the fall of the capital. Again they listened to the slow, toneless voice, its Georgian accent more pronounced than ever, describe the tragic situation of the Soviet Union in unnervingly matter-of-fact terms. Stalin talked of huge losses, but claimed that the enemy’s losses were larger still. He admitted the vast extent of the territories conquered, but reminded his audience of the still vaster expanses still available. He appealed to national pride, invoking those great Russians of the past whom Trotsky had once consigned to ‘the dustbin of history’. With Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union in the same camp, Stalin promised, the war could not in the long run be lost. It was a matter of time. He quoted Kutuzov’s dispatch to the Tsar in 1812:
    “The loss of Moscow does not mean that Russia is lost. I regard it as my duty to save my army from destruction, to safeguard its means of life and to ensure the inevitable destruction of the enemy even if this entails the evacuation of Moscow. It is therefore my intention to retire through Moscow along the Ryazan road.”
    ‘We have taken the same road,’ said Stalin, somewhat inaccurately. Doubtless it would be a long and a hard one. But with this enemy - here he quoted a number of typical German untermensch references - there could be no dealings. Peace would only come with victory.
     

Chapter 2: Premature Crusade
     
    A dram of discretion is worth a pound of wisdom.
German proverb
     
    I
    On the evening of 16 September 1941 three fast Italian ocean liners slipped out of Taranto harbour. They were carrying fresh troops and equipment for the Axis armies in North Africa. It was a five-hundred-mile voyage to the safety of Tripoli harbour.
    The liners’ departure was noted by a British submarine standing watch outside Taranto, and the information relayed to Naval HQ Malta. In the early hours of 17 September the submarine Upholder ducked under the Italian destroyer screen and sent two of the liners to the bottom. Yet again the fallibility of Rommel’s Mediterranean supply route had been crushingly underlined.
    This was only one of many such disasters during the autumn of 1941 but for Admiral Weichold, German liaison officer with the Italian Naval Staff in Rome, it was the proverbial last straw. The losses at sea were becoming untenable, yet his superiors in Berlin seemed either unwilling or unable to take any measures to rectify the situation. In a desperate bid to elicit some sort of positive response Weichold lavishly doctored the loss statistics, appended his opinions, and dispatched the whole package to the Naval Command (Oberkommando der Kreigsmarine or OKM) in Berlin. It arrived on Grand-Admiral Raeder’s desk on the morning of Wednesday 24 September, a propitious moment. The next day Raeder was to attend a conference of the Reich’s war leaders, called by acting-Führer Goering to decide the future course of