A World at Arms (2 page)

Certainly the original thesis that Germany deliberately initiated World War II on September 1, 1939, by a procedure that drew on Adolf Hitler’s “lesson” of Munich, namely that he would not be cheated of war again as had happened in 1938, has been confirmed by the detailed examination of the immediate origins of the war.
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An analysis of Soviet procedure in dealing with the German army in the 1939 Polish campaign by promptly and courteously returning all German prisoners of war captured by the Poles makes for an extraordinary contrast with the opposite handling of British and American prisoners held by the Germans in 1944–45.
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The description of the German decision to attack the Soviet Union has been confirmed by the new materials that have surfaced from both German and Soviet archives as a result of the effort of some to convert the German invasion into a sort of preventive move designed to forestall a planned invasion
by the Soviets invented by the advocates of this interpretation. From the German side we now have the project of the German army’s chief of staff, General Franz Halder, for an invasion of the Soviet Union still in the fall of 1940 with orders and preparations starting on June 3, even before the armistice with France.
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When Hitler decided on July 31 that the fall of 1940 would not allow for enough time to prepare and carry through the invasion, but that preparations for an invasion in 1941 should start, the general staff was already working on that. If there had been any concern about a Soviet invasion, why the willingness to wait?

From the Soviet archives there is plenty of confirming evidence for Stalin’s desperate efforts to join the Tripartite Pact and his refusal–even hours after the German invasion–to credit the obvious signs of German intentions.
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It is now known that Stalin not only received a summary of the German invasion plan from the government of the United States but even earlier from his own intelligence service, but that he refused to believe either warning and forbade his military advisors to take action against the German concentrations in the spring of 1941. As for the offensive projects imagined for him, it is difficult to square such concepts with the Soviet decision that the railways in the newly acquired Eastern portion of Poland were to be changed to the Russian wide railway gauge over seven years.

A subject that has needlessly cluttered the bookshelves has been the continued inability of some scholars to recognize that the critical issue was not whether the Germans could seize Moscow–or some other specific place–but whether the Soviet government, like that of Alexander I in 1812, could retain control of the unoccupied portions of the country and mobilize its human and material resources. Neither the Tsarist government of Nicholas II nor the Provisional Government of Alexander Kerensky had been able to do that, even though the Germans had not advanced in 1917 as far as they did in 1941 and 1942. As I pointed out in my book, the Soviet regime was fully prepared to carry on the war if Moscow were captured by the Germans. We now know of preparations for the demolition of important buildings in the capital if it actually fell.
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The accessibility of some, but by no means all, Soviet records has certainly enriched our understanding of the whole course of the fighting on the Eastern Front. Not only the defeat of the Soviet offensive on the central portion of the
front in the winter of 1942–43 (Operation “Mars”) but many other aspects of the bitter combat in that theater have been illuminated by the books of David Glantz and others.
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We now also have a much more reliable account of the enormous Soviet military casualties as well as a careful study of German military deaths.
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Two aspects of the war in the East need a further look: one on the basis of a reevaluation of events long known and the other on the basis of very important new information. The point that, like most authors, I have not stressed sufficiently is the general strategic significance for the course of the war on the Eastern Front as well as elsewhere of the success of the British in crushing the pro-Axis revolt in Iraq in May 1941 and the subsequent conquest of Syria from its Vichy French defenders. Had it been possible for the Germans to establish firm bases in either or both locations–as they very much hoped and as both Rashid Ali al-Gaylani in Iraq and the Vichy French authorities in Syria were quite willing to provide–the implications for subsequent developments would have been enormous. Could the Red Army have held in the Caucasus in 1942 with a German base in their rear and also in a position to cut the supply route through Iran? Would the Japanese have grasped the possibility of a meeting with their European ally in reality as opposed to the theoretical speculations on this subject?

An entirely different aspect of the war in the East has come to light with the declassification in 1996 of the British intercepts of reports by units of the German Order Police (Ordnungspolizei) on large-scale shooting of Jews in newly occupied portions of the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941. It turns out that essentially from the beginning of the campaign in the East, these units, containing about fifteen thousand men, were tasked with killing Jews in the same general areas in which until recently it had been believed that it was the Einsatzgruppen, the murder squads, that did all or most of the killing. Some had assumed that the approximately two thousand five hundred men of these latter units could hardly have been charged with killing the hundreds of thousands of Jews in the newly occupied Soviet territories, even with the assistance of pogroms by the local population that the Germans hoped for. Now that we know that close to twenty thousand men were engaged in the mass killing from the summer of 1941 on, the likelihood that they were so instructed before the invasion is far more likely–and the evidence was so read by the British government in the fall of 1941.
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This fits with the information
in the even more recently released early interrogations of Otto Ohlendorf, the head of one of the murder squads.
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This last is one of the mass of documents declassified as a result of the work of the Interagency Working Group established to implement the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure and Imperial Japanese Government Records laws of 1998 and 2000.
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Additional information on aspects of the war can be expected to emerge as scholars mine these newly accessible materials.

Recent years have seen other important works on the systematic killing of Jews using both newly accessible materials and the essential recognition of the centrality of this aim to the German conduct of the war. While some of these works have added to the understanding of the German army’s role in what has come to be called the Holocaust, others have traced the process of German decision making or the involvement of local collaborators in the murder program.
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It is safe to assume that there will be considerable further work by scholars on this facet of wartime developments.
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The fighting in North Africa continues to draw the attention of both scholars and the public, but beyond adding detail and local color, new works have not altered our understanding of the course of events. The relationship of that campaign to the survival of the Jewish community in the British Mandate of Palestine is never considered. That Erwin Rommel was given by Hitler an estate stolen from the local Jewish community is mentioned but never related to the expectation that his conquest of Palestine was to enable the Germans to kill all Jews there before turning the area over to Italy. Similarly, the significance of control of the Indian Ocean for the ability of the British Eighth Army to be reinforced and supplied remains as absent from the new literature as it was from the old.
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Of importance for an understanding of subsequent events in the Mediterranean and Southeast Europe is a newly located document on Hitler’s reaction to the Axis defeat in Tunisia in May 1943.
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It sheds light on both Hitler’s concern about the situation in Italy and his early interest in
a German military occupation of Hungary, an operation that would actually come ten months later in March 1944.

The war in Europe in 1944 has certainly attracted much attention from scholars. The question whether the Red Army’s halt before Warsaw during the Polish uprising there was a deliberate choice to enable the Germans to crush forces loyal to the Polish Government-in-Exile or the result of unrelated military and logistical developments at the front will continue to agitate people interested in those dramatic events. Since the Red Army crossed the Vistula both above and below Warsaw, and since Stalin refused landing rights to British and American planes trying to bring supplies to the Poles fighting in the city’s streets, I remain convinced of the former interpretation.

The publication of the diary of Georgi Dimitrov, a close associate of Stalin’s, provides new insights into that leader’s thinking about many aspects of events during the war. We thus see Stalin suspicious about Yugoslav Marshal Tito’s negotiations with the Germans.
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This is especially ironic in view of the ongoing argument about Churchill’s shifting of support to Tito being or not being influenced by a Soviet mole in the British SOE intelligence organization.

The fighting in the West in 1944 has been the subject of much study in England and the United States even though it was on a far smaller scale than the struggle in the East. Recent work on the Normandy invasion certainly adds to our understanding of that key event, but it hardly alters the general picture.
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An exception may be the successful American defeat of the German counter-offensive at Mortain, which owed less to signals intelligence than has previously been believed.
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The attention devoted to the siege of Bastogne and the role of the 101st Airborne Division in that fight has unjustifiably overshadowed the critical part that the 7th Armored Division played in the defense of St. Vith at the northern front of the German offensive, but no one has managed to minimize Field Marshal Montgomery’s foolishness in his public claiming of success when it was actually his failure to drive into the German bulge from the North that enabled so much of the attacking force to avoid encirclement. The German winter offensive further south, Operation Northern Wind (Nordwind), has begun to receive more attention but is still not properly fitted into the broader picture. An interesting aspect of all these battles is that, contrary to much literature claiming some sort of superiority
for the fighting ability of the German army, in many cases American infantry in inferior numbers and without adequate armored support held and then defeated the German units they faced.

The war at sea continues to receive the attention it deserves, but in this case also details improve our understanding but do not appear to call for any major revisions. The point that has been too frequently overlooked is that the enormous resource allocation by the Germans to the construction of hundreds of submarines created a significant drain on Germany’s ability to produce the tanks and guns that its forces fighting on the Eastern Front so desperately needed. The air war has recently attracted much attention in Germany because of the way it enables some to imagine the German people as victims in the war. Rather than recognize the foolishness of insisting on building an air force in violation of treaty and law in a world without heavy bombers, those in the glass house who threw bombs as well as stones claimed astonishment when others shifted from dropping leaflets to also dropping bombs. This story may not be accurate but it is telling: A few German soldiers entered the Paris studio of Pablo Picasso in the summer of 1940 and saw there some of his preliminary sketches for his famous picture “The Bombing of Guernica.” One of the soldiers asked, “So you did this?” and Picasso answered, “No, you did.”

Two aspects of the air war have received important new studies. Tami Davis Biddle has looked into the way in which the theory and practice of strategic bombing developed in the years between the two wars and during the conflict itself.
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The very large and important role of German anti-aircraft defenses from the prewar period into the last days of fighting is brought out in a book by Edward Westermann.
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On the German last-minute recruitment of kids and the elderly into a sort of home guard militia, the Volkssturm, as well as the preparations for a largely failed underground movement in occupied Germany, there are now excellent studies.
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In this connection, we can also see more clearly how the Western Allies came to believe in a serious German effort to hold out for a considerable period of time in a southern redoubt and why General Eisenhower was influenced by that possibility.
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The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor continues to attract conspiracy theorists without producing a shred of evidence–an obvious sign for the theorists that the conspiracy was diabolically clever. The critical point that has escaped all too many observers is the connection between two factors for which the evidence has long been available. On the one hand there are the records declassified in the 1970s that show how the intercepts of German messages to their submarines in the Atlantic were utilized to avoid incidents–when they could as easily have been utilized to create incidents on an almost daily basis. On the other hand, there is the enormous amount of time that President Roosevelt personally invested in the endless negotiations with Japan. It was clearly his hope that if the Japanese government could be stalled until those in Tokyo could see the Germans losing rather than winning, they would stay out of jumping into a wider war on the losing side. The converse of this tactic–which came within two weeks of working–has been illuminated by new information on the German side. It has become clear that one reason Hitler drove the German army forward on the Eastern Front toward Moscow in late November–early December 1941 was precisely because he was afraid that the Japanese–whom he had been urging forward for months–might not take the plunge.
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In this context it is easier to understand the enthusiasm that Hitler expressed to Joseph Goebbels, as revealed by the newly published portions of the latter’s diary, about Japan’s action as well as Hitler’s own immediate order to initiate hostilities with the United States.
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