Evelyn Waugh sarcastically named his ‘Sword of Honour’ trilogy after the ‘Sword of Stalingrad’ that was given to the people of that city as a decoration for their endurance during the Second World War. The main character, Guy Crouchback, like Waugh himself, was unimpressed with this presentation. I have all sorts of problems with Evelyn Waugh, whose sharp, witty writing is undermined by his enduring affection for a feudal ideal that celebrates tradition, hierarchy, Catholicism and innate family quality. Doesn’t sound so bad? In doing so, he also directly denigrates things like the middle-class as a whole, colonials and any notion of equal opportunity. It isn’t surprising, then, that someone like myself – a New Zealander, with no aristocratic connections, who has been the beneficiary of a generous state education system – can find his writing as frustrating as it is, at times, hilarious. He’s also borderline misogynist, although maybe the main reason his scathing portraits of female characters come across that way is that he is nasty to everyone, but lacks insight into and empathy for women.
But in making fun of the Sword of Stalingrad he pointed directly at one of the Second World War’s stranger incongruities: the necessity of promoting an alliance with a dictator who was as bad as Hitler. The Sword of Stalingrad was, however, not for Stalin but for the people of Russia, who endured far greater suffering than those of Britain. How do we measure suffering, or, for that matter, dictatorial nastiness? I don’t plan on answering that, but we can look at one Soviet citizen caught up in the unpleasantness of the war, and how she coped with it.
On 13 September 1942, the Soviet steamer S.S. Stalingrad was part of a convoy bound for a Russian port, carrying a cargo of munitions from Tyne in Northern England. U-408, a German submarine, attacked the convoy, and hit the Stalingrad amidships with a torpedo that sank the nine-year-old vessel within minutes. Twenty-one of the eighty-seven strong crew were killed, but the majority were saved by the convoy escorts. Evgenia Pusireva was among the survivors.
After floating for 45 minutes in the freezing waters of the North Atlantic, mingled with the spilt fuel-oil of broken ships, Pusireva was rescued by a British minesweeper (a small warship), and from there to a larger British naval vessel ‘clad only’, as a later report remarked ‘in a blanket’. Now confined, without clothes, in the grey corridors of an alien ship filled with foreign men, she did not succumb to cold and exhaustion but rather rallied herself and her comrades. She could speak some English, and volunteered immediately to serve as an interpreter for the medical officer, and then organized five other women rescued from the Stalingrad to help out around their new domicile. As the internal British Foreign Office citation for her honorary MBE remarked, her calmness, dignity and work ethic were ‘an example to all on board, British and Russian’.
For a few years, Ms Pusireva and others like her collaborated in a global war, the alliances of which only become more complicated and troublesome the more we look back at them. She also ‘fought’ on a front that, from the British perspective, was one of the most dangerous and costly: being a British civilian sailor was more dangerous than serving in any of the military services, and the war irrevocably destroyed Britain’s previously dominant merchant marine. Russia’s civilian population, and their military forces, suffered higher casualties than Britain or the US, and matched China, Japan and Germany in terms of overall devastation (as judged subjectively by my standards – but how can we judge them any other way?). The ‘Sword of Stalingrad’ was for her, not for Stalin. But sadly, her name is not the one we associate with Russia during the Second World War.
Source: Foreign Office Records, National Archives (UK)