The last letter from Russia received by gunner lieutenant Jasper Monckeburg’s family in Hamburg was dated 21 January 1942: ‘Forty per cent of our men have got oozing eczema and boils all over their bodies, particularly on their legs…Our duty periods stretch over forty-eight hours, with two or three hours’ sleep, often interrupted. Our lines are so weak, twenty to thirty-five men per company over two kilometres, that we would be completely overrun if we, the artillery, did not stem the onslaught of the enemy, who are ten or twelve times stronger.’ After repulsing one Russian attack, infantrymen carried the lieutenant into his bunker: ‘Since I had been lying for 4½ hours in the snow – 35 degrees of frost – I could no longer feel hands or legs and was completely unable to stand…If it weren’t for this swinish cold!’ Monckeburg was killed a few days later.
Gen. Gotthard Heinrici, visiting Berlin in February, was struck by Hitler’s indifference to eyewitness accounts of the enormous tragedy unfolding in the east. The Führer chose to discuss only technical issues such as the design of anti-tank defences. When once he spoke of the Russian winter, it was with flippancy: ‘Luckily nothing lasts for ever, and that is a consoling thought. If, at this present moment, men are being turned into blocks of ice, that won’t prevent the April sun from shining and restoring life to these desolate places.’ A German soldier named Wolfgang Huff wrote on 10 February 1942, at Sinyavino in Russia: ‘Dusk is falling. The crack of artillery fire – and white smoke rises above the forest. The harsh reality of war: gruff cries of command, struggling with ammunition through the snow. And then a surprising question – “Did you see the sunset?” Suddenly I thought: how grievously we have broken the peace and tranquillity of this land.’
Throughout February, at Stalin’s orders his armies threw themselves again and again at the German positions – and were repulsed with huge losses. The Soviet supply system was close to collapse, and many soldiers existed at the extremities of privation. 2.66 million Russians had been killed in action. But the campaign had cost the German army almost a million casualties, together with 207,000 horses, 41,000 trucks and 13,600 guns. On 1 April, its high command judged only eight of 162 divisions in Russia to be ‘attack ready’. Just 160 tanks were serviceable among sixteen panzer formations. As Hitler anticipated, when spring came his armies would once more roll forward and win victories. But the critical reality of the first year of war in the east was that Russia remained undefeated.
Near Tula, an old woman gave Vasily Grossman and his little party potatoes, salt and some firewood. Her son Vanya was fighting. She said to Grossman, ‘Oh, I used to be so healthy, like a stallion. The Devil came to me last night and gripped my palm with his fingernails. I began to pray: “May God rise again and may his enemies be scattered”…My Vanya came to me last night. He sat down on a chair and looked at the window. I said to him, “Vanya, Vanya!” but he didn’t reply.’ Grossman wrote: ‘If we do win this terrible, cruel war, it will be because there are such noble hearts in our nation, such righteous people, souls of immense generosity, such old women, mothers of sons who, from their noble simplicity, are now losing their lives for the sake of their nation with the same generosity with which this old woman from Tula has given us all that she had. There is only a handful of them in our land, but they will win.’
The British people, awed by Russian resistance, embraced the Soviet Union as an ally with an enthusiasm that dismayed and even frightened their own ruling caste. At a humble level, such sentiment was manifested by an elderly London cockney who said in an East End pub, ‘I never believed them Roosians was ’arf as black as they was painted. Seems to me a lot of them is better off than some of us. Here’s to ’em, anyway.’ In loftier circles, and assisted by exclusion from the media of all discussion of Soviet barbarities, intellectual apologists extolled the virtues of Stalin’s society. The Republicans’ 1940 US presidential candidate Wendell Willkie wrote in his contemporary book One World: ‘First, Russia is an effective society. It works. It has survival value…Second, Russia is our ally in this war. The Russians, more sorely tested by Hitler’s might even than the British, have met the test magnificently…Third, we must work with Russia after the war…There can be no continued peace unless we learn to do so.’ British academic Sir Bernard Pares wrote in the Spectator about his nation’s ‘grateful recognition of the immense burden shouldered by a great and gallant people in our common struggle against the forces of evil, together with the earnest wish that after the war there should be a continuation of this close friendship, without which no peace in Europe is possible’.
Pares applauded a new account of Soviet society published by an American admirer: ‘It is a picture of…fallible human beings, ready to learn from their mistakes, amidst enormous difficulties…trying to build up in one of the most backward countries in Europe a new human society in which the chief consideration of the State goes to…the great mass of the population.’ Many people happily swallowed such nonsense, nodding that the war proved the superiority of the Soviet system. A friend told British soldier Henry Novy, ‘It hasn’t half shown up Communism…no other country could have done it, only a Communist country, with the people really behind it.’
It was probably true that only Russians could have borne and achieved what they did in the face of the 1941 catastrophe. It was less plausible to attribute this to the nobility of communist society. Until Barbarossa, Stalin sought to make common cause with Hitler, albeit to attain different objectives. Even when Russia became joined with the democracies to achieve the defeat of Nazism, Stalin pursued his quest for a Soviet empire, domination and oppression of hundreds of millions of people, with absolute single-mindedness and ultimate success. Whatever the merits of the Russian people’s struggle to expel the invaders from their country, Stalin’s war aims were as selfish and inimical to human liberty as those of Hitler. Soviet conduct could be deemed less barbaric than that of the Nazis only because it embraced no single enormity to match the Holocaust. Nonetheless, the Western Allies were obliged to declare their gratitude, because Russia’s suffering and sacrifice saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of young British and American soldiers. Even if no exalted assertion of principle – instead, only a grapple between rival monsters – caused Russia to become the principal battleground of the war, it was there that the Third Reich encountered the forces that would contrive its nemesis.
8
America Embattled
The people of the United States observed the first twenty-seven months of the struggle in Europe with mingled fascination, horror and disdain. The chief character in J.P. Marquand’s contemporary novel So Little Time says: ‘You could get away from the war for a little while, but not for long, because it was everywhere, even in the sunlight. It lay behind everything you said or did. You could taste it in your food, you could hear it in music.’ Many saw the conflict, and the triumphs of Nazism, as reflecting a collective European degeneracy. There was limited animosity towards the Axis, and some active support for Hitler in German ethnic communities. A Princeton poll on 30 August 1939 found that while 68 per cent of Americans thought that US citizens should not be permitted to enlist in the Wehrmacht, 26 per cent believed they should retain that option. Very few wanted to see their nation join either side in a bloodbath an ocean apart from their own continent. A Roper poll in September 1939 asked how the US should frame policy towards the warring nations. Among respondents, 37.5 per cent favoured eschewing partisanship, but continuing to sell goods to all parties on a cash-and-carry basis; some 23.6 per cent opposed any commercial traffic with any combatant; just 16.1 per cent favoured a modification of neutrality to offer aid to Britain and France if they were threatened with defeat. Interventionism enjoyed most support in the southern and western states.
For half the previous decade, President Franklin Roosevelt had been expressing dismay about his people’s reluctance to acknowledge their own peril. On 30 October 1939, he wrote to US London ambassador Joseph Kennedy: ‘We over here, in spite of the great strides towards national unity during the past six years, still have much to learn of the “relativity” of world geography and the rapid