A World at Arms (43 page)

Stalin evidently anticipated German demands and wanted to prepare both the Soviet public and leadership for the concessions he expected to have to make to obtain a new agreement.
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He appears not to have recognized that Hitler had as a rule found it preferable to attack at a time of his own choosing and without preliminary negotiations; instead Stalin assumed a period of discussion and negotiations. There is some evidence suggesting that he was prepared to make not only further economic offers but to give up all or part of Lithuania–a not unreasonable anticipation of German demands had any been intended.
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Certainly there were no plans for a Soviet preventive attack into the German buildup; the Germans never considered such Soviet action likely; they found no evidence of such a project after the invasion; and they were assured by their own military observers in the Soviet Union before June 22 that there were no signs of aggressive intentions.
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Stalin appears to have believed in the basic Marxist perception of National Socialism as a tool of German monopoly capitalism with a central rivalry for markets, raw materials, and investment opportunities with other capitalist states. There would be no sense in attacking Russia in this perception if all Germany needed from her would be made available. The very precision of warnings from others as well as his own agents and even from within the German embassy staff in Moscow appears to have convinced him that this was all provocations and plants, designed by the Germans to provoke him or by the Allies to involve him in war with Germany on their side. It all made him all the more determined to hold back, and hence the German attack would come as a complete and shattering surprise.
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In the final days before the attack, Hitler gave more attention to the British than to the Soviet reaction to his intended move. At times he thought the British might quit fighting;
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at other times he thought they might take advantage of the situation to try to reconquer the Channel Islands, which he planned to keep permanently and now ordered fortified more heavily to cope with any British landing attempt.
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In a pep talk to his army and navy leaders on June 14, he insisted that there was no alternative to an attack on the Soviet Union now, that the figures on Soviet strength were of no importance, and that Germany had to be ready to deal with the United States subsequently.
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As recent research has shown, weather and general logistic issues, not the Balkan campaign of spring 1941, led Hitler to set the date for the attack at June 22.
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In the last days before the invasion, his big worry–as in August 1939–was the possibility that his prospective enemy might approach Germany
with a big offer at the last minute and thus create propaganda difficulties for the German home front. Neither he nor the German Foreign Minister was to be accessible to the Soviet ambassador in Berlin, and the Germans were greatly relieved that the latter had only routine questions to ask at a time when Molotov’s attempt to reopen talks could be evaded easily by the German ambassador in Moscow.
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The substantive worries in German headquarters in the final weeks before the attack concerned preparations for the operations which were to follow upon the anticipated swift victory over the Soviet Union. The resources of German industry were to be shifted from the army to the air force and navy for the war against Great Britain and also against the United States. A big program of landing ship construction was to be carried out in the fall of 1941 for an invasion of England in 1942.
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In the meantime, German forces were to strike across Turkey, Egypt and the Caucasus into the Near East. There they would control the key oil resources and gain access to the Indian Ocean.
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The big battleship navy could then be built to deal with the United States, while the air force would batter England. Hitler was so enthusiastic and eager about these prospects that to the consternation of the army leadership he ordered the first major shift of production from the army to the air force on June 20, 1941.
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Like the Soviet Union, Germany was in for a big surprise.

Early in the morning of June 22, 1941, German forces struck across the border of the Soviet Union while the German air force attacked Russia’s planes on the ground. Everywhere the Germans achieved tactical surprise; at first Moscow could not believe the reports from the frontier and thought these were provocations. In a few hours it became evident to the most determined dreamers in the Soviet capital that this was for real, that they had waited in vain for Germany to make demands, and that they were now in a battle for their lives. The Red Army already knew.

Before the vast and grim battles on the Eastern Front can be examined, other developments which had occurred since the summer of 1940 must be reviewed: the German projects during the period of their preparations to attack Russia, the Italian disasters of the fall and winter of 1940 and the German rescue efforts, the ongoing war in the Atlantic and the increasing United States involvement in it, and finally the decision of Japan to expand the war in East Asia.

While moving forward with plans and preparations for the invasion of
the Soviet Union scheduled for the early summer of 1941, the German government tried to use the intervening months to put together a combination against Great Britain that might assist in striking at that country even as German bombers pounded its cities, and German surface ships and submarines destroyed its shipping. For a short time in the fall of 1940, the German government toyed with the idea of lining up France and Spain into an anti-British alliance.

The Germans thought for a while, and argued among themselves endlessly, that it might be possible to engage France in the struggle against England by promising minimal concessions in occupied France and territorial compensation at the expense of Great Britain for colonial concessions France would have to make to Germany, Italy, and Spain. In the process, German leaders repeatedly discussed such projects with the Vichy French, and on one occasion Hitler himself met with Pétain.

Nothing came of these projects for several reasons. Although some elements in the German navy, diplomatic service, and army favored an accommodation with France, Hitler himself always remained skeptical. He was reluctant to make any concessions, always suspicious of the French, including those most inclined to go with Germany, and forever looking for evidence that the French were really as awful as he had always believed. The December 13, 1940, dismissal of Laval by Pétain confirmed all his prejudices, and if there had ever been a real opportunity for an accommodation, there was none thereafter. There was, furthermore, now a little reluctance on the French side. It was increasingly obvious in the fall of 1940 and thereafter that the quick defeat of Great Britain, a defeat of which the Vichy leaders were perhaps even more certain than the Germans, was not about to take place. Though American aid to Britain was clearly as yet a trickle, there was every reason to believe that it would grow; and whatever those in charge of the French government thought of England, they did not want to get into an open war with the United States. The fact that the Germans, instead of making concessions which might strengthen the position of French advocates of an accommodation, went out of their way to antagonize the French public, placed the would-be collaborators in an impossible position. The German annexation of Alsace-Lorraine followed by large-scale expulsions of inhabitants loyal to France across the new border was guaranteed to sour the atmosphere. Hardly had the uproar over this outrage begun to dim than the Germans began deporting German Jews and dumping them in France as well. On top of all this, there were the chicaneries of the occupation, the imposition of enormous financial exactions, and the retention of almost all the French prisoners of war.
The longer all these processes lasted, the less the possibility of a new start.
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The Spaniards had initially shown some enthusiasm for joining the war on Germany’s side only to meet with disinterest at first.
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In the face of strong British efforts to discourage their entrance,
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they had held to their preference for going to war for some time.
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By the time the Germans began to be interested in bringing them in to strike added blows at England, however, some Spaniards were beginning to have doubts. These doubts were strongly reinforced by German demands for bases not only in the area of French Morocco that Spain wanted for herself but in the Spanish Canaries. Whatever Franco might have been willing to concede in regard to his aspirations for former French colonies, he was absolutely unwilling to consider giving up one of the Spanish Canary Islands as the Germans insisted, to say nothing of trading Spanish Guinea or the island of Fernando Po to the Germans.
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The most pro-Axis of his associates, Serrano Suñer, came back from his talks with German leaders in September 1940 very much disillusioned,
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and at the same time the desperate economic situation inside Spain was hardly conducive to military experiments. In mid-October Franco dropped his Foreign Minister, the somewhat Anglophile Juan Beigbeder Atienza, and replaced him with Suñer, but from all evidence he did this in order the more readily to carry out Beigbeder’s policy of keeping out of the war unless the Germans completely changed their approach.
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As became clear to Franco when he met Hitler at Hendaye on the border of Spain and occupied France, the Germans still wanted Spanish bases, were not inclined to agree to all of Spain’s colonial demands, and–of increasing importance as the British blockade kept Spain on short rations–were not in a position to supply Spain in a long war.
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All the detailed and complicated German plans for an assault on Gibraltar and for subsequent deployment into Northwest Africa turned out to be in vain.
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The repeated German demands that Spain enter the war on their side were met with evasions and postponements from the Spanish side and the Spanish refusal was passed on to the British.
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The new policy of Spain could not be changed by pleadings from Rome; in fact, the Italian defeats of the winter of 1940–41 probably reinforced Franco’s disinclination to enter the conflict. He would try to keep the Germans from becoming so angry as to invade Spain by extending his prior support of German submarine warfare to the refueling of German surface ships,
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but no messages from Berlin could make him take the
step to open war on the Axis side without assurances of colonial booty, material supplies, and an abandonment of German demands for Spanish bases.
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Franco was still enormously impressed by the great German victory in the West and could not see a real prospect for Britain to win,
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but he also doubted that Germany would win as quickly as Hitler and von Ribbentrop kept telling him. Spain was in no condition for a long war, but she would fight any country that attacked her.
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The Germans for now gave up on Spain. They were extremely concerned that promises of concessions of French colonial possessions to Spain would leak out and precipitate the defection of those colonies from Vichy to de Gaulle. Berlin was in fact pushing for Vichy reconquest of the territories which had already defected to the Free French leader and could hardly expect much to come of the reconquest plans if such areas were subsequently to be turned over to other powers.
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Moreover, in anticipation of the planned invasion of the Soviet Union, Berlin thought a British landing on the Iberian peninsula possible–a concern similar to the German worry about British operations toward the Channel Islands and Norway–and intended to launch an invasion of Spain on their own at the first sign of such a diversionary operation by the British.
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Hitler had only unpleasant thoughts and nasty comments about Franco Spain as he turned his attention to the Eastern campaign; the possibility that Germany’s own demand for Spanish territory to use against the United States and for Germany’s colonial empire might have affected the views of a proud nationalist never occurred to him.

The German project for a harmonized alignment of France, Spain, and Italy against Britain in the West was not only limited in time by the need to move forces east for the attack on the U.S.S.R., but it was hampered and eventually aborted in part because of the new step Italy took in reaction to a portion of the German preparations for that invasion. The Germans had very firmly told the Italian government in August 1940 that they wanted the Balkans kept quiet and that Italy was not to move against Yugoslavia and Greece.
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Hardly had the Italians reconciled themselves to this restriction than they learned of German troops being sent into Romania. Since the Germans had not informed the Italians that this, like the delivery of arms to Finland, was an outcome of their decision to go to war with the Soviet Union, it was not surprisingly read in Rome as part of a new German forward strategy in the Balkans. Italy was to keep quiet while Germany took over Southeast Europe.

This was not the reason Italy had gone to war as Germany’s ally: to restrain her demands on France so that the latter could be brought out
of the war, and to restrain her own advances in the Balkans so that the Germans could take over there. Mussolini was very angry to hear of the German move into Romania a few days after his meeting with Hitler on October 4;
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as he explained to Ciano on October 12: “Hitler always faces me with a
fait accompli.
This time I am going to pay him back in his own coin. He will find out from the papers that I have occupied Greece. In this way the equilibrium will be reestablished.”
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