A World at Arms (54 page)

Others were eager to join Japan in war with the United States. The Germans and Italians had been asked by Japan to join in and enthusiastically agreed.
³⁵⁸
Mussolini had already promised to join in on December 3 and now did so,
³⁵⁹
an extraordinary situation given Italy’s string of defeats.
³⁶⁰
Hitler had repeatedly urged the Japanese to move against Britain and was positively ecstatic that they had acted at last.
³⁶¹
The idea of a Sunday morning air attack in peacetime was especially attractive to him. He had started his campaign against Yugoslavia that way a few months earlier; here was an ally after his own heart. Now there would be a navy of battleships and aircraft carriers to deal with the Americans.
^l
His own navy had been straining at the leash for years and could now sink ships in the North Atlantic to its heart’s content. Since the Japanese had not told Hitler precisely when they planned to move, he had just returned to East Prussia from the southern end of the Eastern Front, where he had dealt with a crisis caused by a Soviet counter-offensive, when the news of Pearl Harbor reached him. It would take a few days to organize the proper ceremonies in Berlin on December 11, but that did not have to hold up the open hostilities he was eager to begin. In the night of December 8-9, at the earliest possible moment, orders were given to sink the ships of the United States and a string of countries in the Western Hemisphere.
³⁶²
Two days later Hitler told an enthusiastic Reichstag the good news of war with America.
³⁶³
Those who really believed that Germany had lost World War I because of a stab-in-the-back, not defeat at the front, were certain that it was American military power which was the legend. For once the unanimity in the Reichstag mirrored near unanimity in the government of the Third Reich. The German government’s only worry was that the Americans might get their formal declaration of war in before they could deliver one themselves; they would get their way.
³⁶⁴

President Roosevelt asked for and obtained declarations of war against Germany and Italy from Congress in response to the German and Italian
declarations, steps which those countries had followed up by a treaty with Japan promising never to sign a separate peace.
³⁶⁵
When Romania, Hungary, and Bulgaria also declared war on the United States, the President tried to get these declarations withdrawn. Perhaps the peoples of those countries could live quite happily without having a war with the United States. But the effort to persuade them of this truth failed, and in June the Congress reciprocated.
³⁶⁶
The whole world was indeed aflame.

^a
This massive buildup made the Germans especially anxious in the spring of 1941 to avoid having Soviet boundary and other commissions travelling around in the area immediately to the west of the border.

^b
Note that Hitler also held that the German casualties would be fewer than the number of workers tied up in the synthetics industries; that one group of Germans was alive and the other dead or wounded was evidently not important to him (Weinberg,
Germany and the Soviet Union,
p. 165, n 3 I). If that was his attitude toward the allegedly superior Germans, his view of the so-called sub-humans may be easier to understand. See also
Das Deutsche Reich und der Zweite Weltkrieg,
4: 989.

^c
The shipment of rubber was especially important because a small proportion of natural rubber was still needed in the process of making “Buna,” the German synthetic rubber, from coal.

^d
The refusal of Turkey to assist Germany as much as Berlin would have liked during the Near East campaigns of May and June 1941 is discussed below.

^e
There is surely some symbolic significance in the fact that the most voluminous secret file of the German embassy in Rome (Quirinal) is the one on the “purchase” in Italy of art objects for Hitler and Göring. See Bonn, Pol. Archiv, Botschaft Rom (Quir.) Geheim 527/40 in 44/4, British consideration in December 1940 of possible armistice terms for Italy, if these were asked for, already include reference to a quick German occupation of the country (see PRO, FO 371, R,9066/6849/22).

^f
It deserves to be noted that Hitler was
not
prepared to take advantage of the difficult situation of Italy to work out an agreement with Vichy France. Now that Mussolini was desperate for such an agreement, and Hitler could no longer assert that Italy’s demands and interests interfered with a German-French accommodation, it became clear that it was Hitler’s fundamental opposition to the French which precluded an agreement on
any
terms. See Admiral Weichold, “Schicksalskampf der Achse im Mittelmeer 1940-1943,” Part I, pp. 228-29, BA/MA, Nachlass Weichold, N 316/1. On Hitler’s continued high opinion of Mussolini, see Jochmann,
Hitler, Monologe,
21/22 July 1941, p. 43.

^g
On January 11, 1941, and again later, the Germans severely damaged the aircraft carrier
Illustrious
which had launched the Taranto raid and now had to be withdrawn from the Mediterranean.

^h
Hitler was originally willing to send such a small force called a
Sperrverband
or blocking unit, to North Africa because he did not at that time contemplate an offensive there as he did against Greece. Occupying Greece and holding in North Africa looked like the way to sustain Mussolini while he was preparing the attack on the Soviet Union.

ⁱ
There is some irony in the fact that key Italian Admiralty cypher books were generally not broken by the British whose signals intelligence came from the reading of German air force enigma code machines and those enigma machines the Germans had either given or sold to no one else could do what they themselves had only been able to accomplish with great difficulty. There is an unconsciously humorous record of these matters in documents in the files of the State Secretary in the German Foreign Ministry on Italy; Woermann for Ribbentrop, “U.St.S.Pol. Nr. 256gRs,” 1 April 1941, and “Nr. 261gRs,” 3 April 1941 (AA, St.S., “Italien,” Bd. 4, fr. B001669-70, B 001673); Memorandum by Weizsäcker, “St.S. Nr. 293,” 2 May 1941, and Woermann for Ribbentrop, “V.St.S.Pol. Nr. 422g Rs,” 15 May 1941 (St.S., “Italien,” Bd. 5, fro B000847, B000894–95.

^j
It should be noted that the German Minister to Yugoslavia, now recalled to Berlin, warned against this step (
German Documents,
D, XII, No. 259). Ribbentrop insisted on Gert Feine remaining as charge in Belgrade, where the German legation was destroyed in the raid but he survived (HZ, ZS 891).

^k
There is a file in the records of the German embassy in Rome (Quir.), Geheim 89 (1941), entitled ”Vorfuhrung der Chiffriermaschine “Enigma’” (Demonstration of the “Enigma” Code Machine). It deals with the request of the Technical and Commercial School in Rome of March 13, 1941, for the loan of an enigma machine regularly offered for sale in Italy so that it could be shown at an exhibition. Included is a sales brochure in Italian, appropriately illustrated, that had been printed in Berlin. The Germans refused to provide a sample machine with the claim that it was not available for loan or sale!

^l
Hitler considered the Japanese fleet superior to that of the United States. See
Goebbels
Tagebucher,
1 February 1941, 4: 486.

5

THE EASTERN FRONT AND A CHANGING WAR, JUNE TO DECEMBER, 1941

When Germany and her allies invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, the war changed in several ways. One change that not everybody recognized right away but that is certainly clear in retrospect is that from that date until the end of the war in Europe in May, 1945, the majority of the fighting of the whole war took place on the Eastern Front: more people fought and died there than on all the other fronts of the war around the globe put together. This was due to three factors which will be the theme of much of the rest of this account of the conflict: the massive size of the forces engaged, the nature of the fighting which made it unlikely that the two sides would return to peaceful relations, and the ability of Germany’s enemies to stick together and thereby insure Germany’s eventual defeat.

The attack on the Soviet Union was launched in the early hours of June 22 and was a total surprise. There had been a last-minute alert to Soviet units on some sectors of the front, but orders generally were to hold fire in case this was all a German provocation. The German air force, using about 60 percent of its total strength, employed over 2700 war planes; in carefully planned strikes that morning it destroyed a large portion of the Soviet air force on the ground, damaged its forward fields, and shot down most of the Red Air Force planes that got into the air.
¹
The combination of surprise with experience in prior campaigns enabled the German air force to destroy over 4000 Soviet planes in the first week of the campaign. The resulting near total German control of the air did not last long, but it was in effect in the early months of fighting and greatly facilitated the advance of Germany’s ground forces.

The German army with over three million men together with more than half a million soldiers of countries allied with Germany (and over 600,000 horses) attacked according to plans that had been carefully
worked out in the preceding months.
^a
In the far north, German mountain divisions struck across the Finnish-Soviet border in the hope of seizing Murmansk and the Kola peninsula. On the rest of the Finnish front, the Finnish army with attached German units would attack a few days later to cut the railway from the Soviet Union’s important port at Murmansk south, as well as striking on both sides of Lake Ladoga toward Leningrad and that city’s connections with the interior of the country. At the southernmost end of the land front, the German 11th together with the Romanian 3rd and 4th Armies attacked soon after across the Pruth river into Bessarabia.

The main attacks were launched on June 22 by three German Army Groups, North, Center and South.
^b
In the first days, German Army Group North with three armies struck into the Baltic States, overrunning Lithuania in a few days, crossing the river Dvina at several places, and controlling most of Latvia by the end of the first week of July. On the Central front, essentially the part of the border between the Baltic States and the Prijpet Marshes, Army Group Center with four armies crashed through the Soviet forces facing them and seized the eastern Polish territories annexed by the Soviet Union in 1939 in the first two weeks of fighting. Army Group South with three armies in addition to the 1th drove across the southern part of the pre-war Polish territories into the pre-1939 Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.

The striking element in these rapid advances was not the large areas overrun so much as the huge Soviet forces enveloped and destroyed by rapid armored thrusts followed by an experienced and effectively fighting infantry. The Germans very much wanted to destroy as much of the Red Army as close to the border as possible, hoping that such terrific initial blows would topple the whole Soviet structure. The one thing they did not want was a long campaign with a need to drive the Russians back slowly and frontally for hundreds, even thousands, of miles. To some extent, the German concept worked on the central portion of the front where in two large encirclement battles over 300,000 Russian soldiers were captured, but in both north and south, Soviet troops were pushed back rather than cut off. Soviet losses in dead and wounded men, in equipment and transport, were huge.

These dramatic victories gave the German leadership at the very top the impression that they had accomplished what they had set out to do, that is, to destroy Soviet military power with one hard blow. Recognizing
but not understanding the implications of the determined fight most Red Army men put up, whether surrounded or being driven back, the Germans believed they had won the critical battle. On July 3, the German Army Chief of Staff, General Franz Halder, wrote in his diary: “On the whole, one can say that the assignment of smashing the mass of the Russian Army before the Dvina and Dnepr [rivers] has been fulfilled...!t is probably not too much to say when I assert that the campaign against Russia has been won within two weeks.”
²
On the same day, he replied to congratulations for his birthday (June 30) with the comment that the “Russians lost this war in the first eight days.”
³

This impression of victory was heightened by the events of the first two weeks of July. In further great encirclement battles Army Group Center, now increased to five armies, swept into central Russia, grabbed another 300,000 prisoners even as it seized the cities of Orsha and Smolensk on the road to Moscow, and already striking beyond Smolensk on both sides of that route. Simultaneously Army Group North rushed into Estonia and the outer defences of Leningrad, while Army Group South headed for Kiev and the rich agricultural and industrial areas in the Dnepr bend area of the Ukraine. It certainly looked to the German leadership as if little but mopping up remained to be done. To the German troops in the field who faced continued fighting, the brave resistance of the Red Army, the continued appearance of new formations, and the steady wear and tear on their own vehicles and equipment, things did not always look so rosy; but those at the top still believed that all was going well.