The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (398 page)

The addition of the fourth wheel to Enigma, however, gave the
Kriegsmarine
a hefty advantage in the Atlantic. Compounding that advantage, the German radio intercept and monitoring service
(Beobachtungsdienst)
had broken the British merchant code, allowing the
Kriegsmarine
to listen in on Allied intra-convoy conversations, including Royal Navy situation reports, which tracked the location of U-boats. The accuracy of the British reports greatly distressed Dönitz, but the advantage was his. He knew what the British knew, but the British did not know that he knew. Adding the fourth wheel to the naval Enigma machines resulted in a renewed slaughter of Allied shipping. Between January and June of 1942, U-boats sent six hundred ships, eight thousand crewmen, and three million tons of shipping to the bottom, about one-third of the total tonnage lost since 1939. British, Allied, and neutral losses during the first three months of 1942 increased at a “murderous” rate, Alexander Cadogan told his diary, from 420,000 tons in January to 835,000 in March. The holds of a 7,000-ton freighter such as the American-built Liberty Ships held enough cargo to fill almost one hundred railroad freight cars. Each ship lost, therefore, was the equivalent of a mile-long freight train falling into the sea, taking with it enough supplies to feed, clothe, and fuel a small city or an army division for three weeks. Although American shipyards would launch 2,710 Liberty Ships by 1945, in mid-1942, the Germans were sinking them far faster than they could be launched.
¹⁹⁵

Yet, Hitler, ever fearful of a British invasion of Norway and the disruption of his supply of Swedish iron ore, played small with his U-boats. The Führer “sacrificed the glittering chances in the Atlantic,” Churchill later wrote, “and positioned every available surface ship and many a precious U-boat in northern Norwegian waters,” the area Hitler considered to be “the zone of destiny” in the war. He also stationed four new infantry divisions in Norway, bringing the total to eleven, more than 120,000 men. There they sat, and waited for the Englishmen who never came. Even though he used it as a bargaining tool, northern Norway truly topped Churchill’s list of invasion targets, a fact that Brooke knew only too well. But the three British military chiefs, unlike their German counterparts, could step back from their own interservice rivalries and unite in opposition to their leader’s latest questionable scheme. Germany’s best chance to secure its perimeter lay in an all-out assault in the Atlantic, but Hitler ignored Dönitz and shepherded his resources, not only in Norway but in the vicinity of the Canary Islands, off the northwest coast of Africa, in hopes of sinking an invasion fleet, which also never came. Had he not done so, had he thrown his boats all in, Allied losses would have been far more horrific. As it was, Churchill termed the U-boat menace “our worst evil.” By summer, with Russia in desperate need of supplies, it became Stalin’s worst evil as well.
¹⁹⁶

D
espite the shipping losses, one statistic above all others offered comfort to Churchill: American oil-refining capacity was twenty times that of Germany. America had more oil underground than it could pump. The war would someday come down to who could afford to bleed the most oil. America’s enormous industrial productive capacity came powerfully into play, but only as a function of America’s ability to pump—and
deliver
—oil. British factories ceased production without American oil. Tanks went nowhere without gasoline. The United States had enough capacity to pump oil and build factories, tanks, and airplanes far into the future. But with oil, as with food and weapons, delivery was hobbled by the lack of ships to get the oil to Britain and Russia. In May, during the “second happy time,” just six U-boats operating in the Gulf of Mexico sank sixty-six ships, of which more than half were oil tankers. The Allies could not afford to lose oil-toting vessels at that rate and expect—or hope—to relieve Russia. Ships, Hopkins now believed, were more important than their cargoes. A few weeks after the Gulf of Mexico massacre, U-boats sent four hundred thousand tons of Allied shipping to the bottom in just seven days, a rate, Churchill informed Roosevelt, “unexampled in either this war or the last, and if maintained evidently beyond all existing replacement plans.”
¹⁹⁷

If the Allies could solve the U-boat menace, their oil problem would solve itself. Not so, Hitler’s fuel problems. He had to now steal more than Polish and Ukraine wheat in order to move his armies. He needed a great deal more oil. The Ploesti oil fields—Churchill called Romanian oil the taproot of German might—located north of Bucharest supplied as much as 60 percent of Germany’s crude oil, enough to sustain a peacetime German economy, but not enough to power the Wehrmacht as well. Because the gasoline consumed by his mechanized forces taxed Germany’s modest refining capacity, the solution to Hitler’s oil problem lay farther east, in the Caucasus, or even in the Middle East. Each of the almost four thousand Wehrmacht tanks in Soviet territory quaffed enormous quantities of fuel simply standing still—more than twenty-two tons every eight weeks. Hitler’s tanks alone would need several hundred thousand tons of fuel to reach and hold the Caucasus. The vast spaces of the Ukraine and the Don Basin contained no petrol stations such as those in Belgium from which German tankers had helped themselves. The panzers were only the first drawdown on Hitler’s fuel supplies; his mechanized units, more than six hundred thousand vehicles in all, required thousands of times as much fuel as his tanks.

On Hitler’s orders Luftwaffe fighter planes had been designed to fly on synthetic gasoline, which was refined from coal at two large plants in Leipzig and Stettin. But Hitler lacked the capacity to refine the gasoline he needed to move his armies. The Russian Baku oil fields—
if
he conquered them—would contribute to his mobility, but only in two years’ time, when new
autobahns
and railroads of the proper gauge were built in order to connect the Caucasus to Greater Germany. The northern Iraqi oil fields located near Mosul offered the same benefit as the Romanian and Caucasus oil fields, but following Rashid’s failed 1941 coup, Hitler had abandoned any thought of forcing his way into Mosul. Likewise, in Iran, the British had barred the door in August 1941 when British and Indian forces invaded Iran from Basra, while the Soviets poured in from the north. That war, if it could be called that, lasted six days, one day longer than a cricket test match. The British lost twenty-two killed. When Reza Shah fled the country, Churchill propped the Shah’s twenty-two-year-old son, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, on the Peacock throne.

But in early 1942, with British and Soviet forces spread so thin, the doors to Iraq and Iran were virtually unguarded. If Hitler smashed through Baku in the north or the Suez in the south, the oil riches of the Middle East would be his for the taking. But he had no plans to do so, and for reasons that appeared to him to be strategically sound. In order to get to Iraq and Iran from the north, he would have to drive through Baku, that is, he would have to
take
Baku. Taking Baku would sate his oil needs and negate the need to proceed farther. But in February, with Rommel cruising toward Cairo, and the Japanese steaming into the Indian Ocean, Admiral Raeder convinced Hitler that the real strategic significance of the Middle East was not its potential source of oil for Germany but its importance to Britain: It was where the British got
their
oil, and where they were most vulnerable. Raeder, in a memo to Hitler, anticipated Churchill’s and Brooke’s concerns exactly: “Suez and Basra are the western pillars of the British position in the East. Should these positions collapse under the weight of concerted Axis pressure the consequences for the British Empire would be disastrous.”
¹⁹⁸

Raeder and Rommel had long proffered a southern plan
(Plan Sud),
wherein Germany and Japan would link up in Basra or Tehran. Britain depended upon Persian
^*
oil to fight its war and Persian railroads to supply Russia. If the Axis took Persia, Britain would lose its primary source of oil. Early in the year Churchill told Ismay, “The oil stringency, which is already serious in Germany and German conquered countries, makes the seizure
of the Baku and Persian oil fields of vital consequences to Germany, second only to the need of successfully invading the British Isles.” Brooke seconded that motion when he told his diary, “All the motive [British] power at sea, on land, and throughout the Middle East was entirely dependent on the oil from Abadan…. If we lost the Persian oil, we inevitably lost Egypt.” Egypt lost meant Empire lost, and the war.
¹⁹⁹

Hitler finally grasped that fact in early 1942 and, executing an about-face, approved of Raeder’s
Plan Sud,
including that part of the plan that called for securing the Mediterranean flank by either capturing or destroying Malta. To that end, during March and April, the Germans dropped twice the tonnage of bombs on Malta than they had on London during the 1940 Blitz. Bombs formed only part of the peril faced by the Maltese. With London unable to supply the island, the threat of starvation was real, and imminent. “Above all, there was Malta,” Ismay later wrote. “To lose her would be almost as painful as to lose part of England itself.”
²⁰⁰

If Malta fell, Rommel could resupply at will and punch past Cairo and into Iraq. But unless Rommel got to Basra, Hitler’s oil options came down to Russian oil, or none. Stalin would have to fight the battle for his oil alone. Churchill had no say in the outcome. Yet he pondered a horrific means to deny Hitler the oil: Stalin might be persuaded (if the battle went against him) to destroy his own oil wells. The Baku fields were so saturated with petroleum that Churchill predicted that their destruction would result in “a conflagration on a scale not hitherto witnessed in the world.” Rumor in Berlin had it that British commandos were already on the ground, awaiting final orders to blow the Russian oil wells, a prospect that shocked Goebbels, who scribbled in his diary, “That’s exactly like them! They [the English] have proven themselves throughout the world as great destroyers of other people’s property.” Churchill quickly shelved the idea, not because of the insult Stalin might attach to the scheme, but because he and Roosevelt lacked the ships needed to make up the shortfall. In any case, Stalin had no intention of destroying his oil fields. The dictator summoned Nikolai K. Baibakov, deputy to the oil commissar. Cocking his thumb, Stalin pointed two fingers at Baibakov’s head and said, “If you fail to stop the Germans getting our oil, you will be shot. And when we have thrown the invader out, if we cannot restart production, we will shoot you again.”
²⁰¹

Stalin understood that Russia’s only hope for salvation lay in the attrition of German men, machines, and fuel. Attrition formed the backbone of Churchill’s strategic vision as well. He intended to do his part in constructing a ring of steel around the Reich, a ring he could slowly tighten until nothing remained within it but Hitler’s bombed-out Chancellery—preferably with the Führer dead inside. Germany, vulnerable to naval blockade, its navy too small to break out into distant waters to procure needed resources, had
to grow geographically in order to sustain itself, a process that in time, if Russia held on, would collapse upon itself. Churchill summed up his philosophy in a memo to the Chiefs of Staff that treated of RAF losses, but his words also applied to tanks, artillery, and men (especially if the men were Russian): “Indeed, like General Grant in his last campaign, we can almost afford to lose two for one, having regard to the immense supplies now coming forward in the future.” Churchill had read Ulysses S. Grant’s Civil War memoirs when he was thirteen; the utility of attrition as practiced by Grant had been lodged in Churchill’s psyche for more than fifty years. Yet Grant at Petersburg had been fighting his last campaign, and he was on the verge of victory; Churchill and Roosevelt had yet to fight their first campaign together as allies. The question that vexed Churchill throughout 1942 was, would American industrial output hit its stride before German armies arrived in the Caucasus?
²⁰²

Yet if Ismay, Dill, and many of the American planners were proven correct in their predictions of a German victory over the Soviets, Hitler’s fuel and food problems would solve themselves. The loss of Baku oil would cripple Russian industry and agriculture; further resistance would be futile. Famine, widespread and horrific, would follow. Hitler, victorious, would then turn westward, toward England.