A World at Arms (62 page)

Beyond the decimation of Russian prisoners of war and the killing of all the Jews, how did the Germans see the future of their new empire in the East? The policies applied by the Germans in occupied Europe are reviewed in
Chapter 9
, but some general things must be said here to relate the specifics already discussed to broader objectives. Moscow and Leningrad were to disappear. In addition to the Jews, the Gypsies were also to be slaughtered; and this program, like that against the Jews, was beginning to be implemented in 1941.
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The overwhelming majority of the newly conquered population was, of course, Slavic. The mentally ill, the sick, and the elderly among them were to be killed as the regime had begun to do within Germany itself. This “benefit” of German culture was already being extended on a massive scale to the occupied portions of the U.S.S.R., and there were here none of the obstacles which slowed down that program inside Germany.
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The bulk of the population was expected to be dramatically reduced by starvation. German estimates of the numbers run into millions as the cities in the Ukraine and the whole food-deficit area in the north were to be deprived of food, which was seized for the German army or shipped to Central Europe.
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The surviving peasants were to work in a retained collective farm system producing food for the Germans. But what about their future?

It is in this connection that one must see the experiments initiated in 1941 for the development of measures for the mass sterilization of individuals, without the standard surgical procedures earlier developed by modern medicine, and applied on a massive scale by the German medical profession since the beginnings of National Socialist rule.
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While the cruel experiments to develop cheap and quick techniques for mass sterilization were performed in concentration camps on Jewish as well as non-Jewish victims, it should be obvious that the intended victims of the measures, once these had been perfected, could not be the Jewish population, which was expected to have been exterminated by that time.
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It will also not do to assume that it was anticipated that these measures were developed with the slave laborers and prisoners of war imported into Germany during the war in mind, as this whole program was assumed to be a temporary aberration. It is my opinion in the absence of evidence to the contrary, and in view of the centralization of the experiments in the hands of Himmler’s SS, that the intended victims
of these procedures were segments of the Slavic population of occupied Eastern Europe, whose labor could still be utilized in anticipation of their disappearance from the scene.

But then, who was to live and work in the newly conquered areas? It is here that the settlement aspect of the
Lebensraum
ideology fits in. Tens of thousands of Germanic settlers were to be established in villages and would eventually spread out over the whole area. It was in this fashion that the new lands would be Germanized. Into this area would be directed a steady stream of German settlers, augmented by Dutch, Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish recruits into the upper ranks of the Nazi racial hierarchy.
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The very highest level would be provided by those higher ranking German officers (and other high officials who had acquired great merit in Hitler’s eyes) who would be and in some instances already were assigned estates in the East as part of Hitler’s large program of bribing his generals. This program has not been subjected to systematic investigation–the subject is clearly very sensitive–but enough is known about the huge sums given secretly to all the field marshals, four-star generals, and equivalent naval ranks, along with direct allocations of vast stolen estates, to show what the future held for Germany’s military leaders–and for the peoples of Eastern Europe.
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How did Stalin and his associates see the future of Eastern Europe? It was obviously their hope that the Germans together with their allies would be driven out as rapidly as possible. In the liberated areas, the Soviet system would be reestablished to whatever extent it had not been secretly maintained by partisans and the underground. As Stalin explained to Eden in December 1941, the Soviet Union might make some minimal adjustments in its June 1941 border with Poland but expected to keep the rest of its gains from the 1939 treaty with Hitler. In addition, the northern section of East Prussia and the Finnish port of Petsamo on the Arctic Ocean were to be annexed to the Soviet Union. Any territorial aspiration beyond these frontiers of the U.S.S.R. were not mentioned as yet, and the question of what was to be the precise post-war fate of the states of Eastern Europe (other than that there would be Soviet bases in Finland and Romania) was probably at this time still unclear in Stalin’s own mind. But it may be safely assumed that they would be so organized or controlled as to preclude any danger of their ever again providing a springboard, or allies, for invasion from the West.

As the Allies and the Axis looked to the continued war at the end of
1941, differing perceptions and priorities affected both groupings, though in all cases the gigantic struggle on the Eastern Front dominated everything. The British-Soviet talks and their outcome have already been reviewed. The refusal of Stalin to meet Roosevelt and Churchill meant that these two met without the Soviet leader; and having such a meeting right after the United States had been precipitated into the war was a special concern of Churchill’s. He and his military advisors were very much concerned lest the Americans, in view of the focus of American public attention on the dramatic events in the Pacific, might abandon the concept of defeating Germany first in favor of concentrating on the battle against Japan. With the desperate pleas of the Russians for supplies and for a second front in Western Europe, an American turn to the Pacific would be especially dangerous. Britain and the Soviet Union both had no alternative to concentrating on Germany first, and the Soviet Union might either collapse before a new German onslaught or make a separate peace if the Western Allies did not carry a heavy share of the fighting against Germany. From December 22 to January 14 the highest British and American leaders met in Washington in what was called the Arcadia Conference.
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Four major decisions were agreed upon by the British and Americans.
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First and most important, there was continued agreement on the need to defeat Germany first. In addition to the sending of United States troops to relieve British units in Iceland and Northern Ireland, there should be a landing in North Africa to preclude any German move into the area, meet the British forces advancing from Egypt, and establish a basis for further action against Germany. The raw material and shipping resources of the Western Allies would be pooled and allocated by joint agreement. There would be not only a local unified Allied command under Field Marshal Sir Archibald Wavell to meet the advancing Japanese in Southeast Asia, but a whole staff structure for the joint planning and conduct of war. This would be called the Combined Chiefs of Staff, meeting in Washington, with the British Chiefs of Staff represented by delegates in Washington when they were not present in person. And a side benefit of this structure was that it practically forced the Americans to adopt a regular format for inter-service coordination somewhat similar to the British Chiefs of Staff Committee, but called then and since the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

If the implementation of the basic strategic concepts of preparing for major blows against the Germans while trying to hold back the Japanese was to suffer a major setback by the series of disasters to British and
American forces in North Africa, the Atlantic, and Southeast Asia in the ensuing months, one decision reached almost by default as a result of the Washington meeting was to provide the glue which held the two Allies together in spite of great and repeated friction. The personal cooperation of Roosevelt and Churchill, the common aim of defeating the Axis, and the joint determination to fight on regardless of setbacks and defeats were, of course, pre-condition sfor the success of the Anglo-American alliance. But given past–and continuing-suspicions, diverging strategies and perceptions, alterations in relative contributions to the common cause, and differing visions of the future, there would always be opportunities for friction which could have sundered the effective working relationship of the two powers. It was in this regard that Sir John Dill came to play a central role in the war.

Churchill had decided to replace Dill as Chief of the Imperial General Staff by General Alan Brooke because he had lost confidence in him. The Prime Minister had arranged his promotion to field marshal as a consolation prize, and planned to send him into effective military retirement as provincial governor to Bombay. He took Dill along to Washington while the new Chief of the Imperial General Staff remained in London. It quickly became apparent that Dill’s personal qualities not only made him more acceptable to the Americans than most British generals but gave him the special friendship and trust of Marshall, Hopkins, and Roosevelt himself. He became first the acting and eventually in October 1942 the permanent head of the British military mission in Washington and from that position was to play a key role in maintaining the working relationship of the British and Americans until his death in November 1944.
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The equestrian statue by his grave in Arlington National Cemetery, the only such monument in a final resting place for American soldiers, reflects the esteem in which he was held and the sense of loss he left behind.
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If the British and Americans had worked out a machinery for running their part of the war and the rudiments of a strategy for winning it, the Axis powers in those same weeks discussed the elements of their strategy and of military coordination but were less successful in implementing either. There was, as already explained, agreement that the way to victory lay in a meeting of the German and Japanese forces in the Middle East and Indian Ocean. The leadership in both countries, but especially that of the two navies, saw quite clearly that control of the Indian Ocean was essential to an Axis victory. This was not only an effective route for communication and exchange of goods between them. It was obviously preferable to the possible use of Japanese diplomatic pouches across the Soviet Union for mail,
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or the hazards of a northern seaway across
the Arctic Ocean around Siberia,
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or the risks of trying to run blockade-breaking ships between Germany and Japan across oceans dominated by the Allies
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–a shipping procedure that made the hazards of the convoys to Murmansk look simple by comparison.

Even more important than the ease of transport over an Axis controlled Indian Ocean was the possibility of shifting the oil resources of the Middle East from the Allied to the Axis side. Along with the Japanese conquest of Southeast Asia with its rubber, tin, and oil then under way, there would be a fundamental alteration in the world situation with the Axis controlling the bulk of the basic raw materials and the Allies living on short rations. Furthermore, both China and the Soviet Union would be more effectively cut off from the outside world, China by the closing of any route for supplies from Britain and the United States, and the Soviet Union by the loss of the route across Iran. Here were the rosiest of prospects.
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But not only would the Germans and Japanese find their efforts to implement such a strategy held back by the resistance of their enemies, they faced other complications, many of their own making. The Axis hopes of beating Britain first, unlike the Allied ones of defeating Germany first, were hopelessly hampered by the divergence between Germany and Japan on the best way to do this. And while the Japanese ambassador to Germany could welcome the reorganization of the German high command in December 1941 because he correctly saw Hitler as the most pro-Japanese of the German leaders,
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the fact remains that the difficulties of establishing understanding between the partners in the Tripartite Pact make the frictions between Britain and the United States and even between either and the Soviet Union look minor by comparison. In addition, as will become evident in the next chapter, the Japanese could not agree among themselves as to the direction in which best to exploit their initial victories: westwards into India, southwards into Australia, or eastwards into Hawaii and Alaska.

On only one point the leadership on both sides had an equivalent sense of certainty now that the war had become truly global. The United States and Britain, along with others, had asserted in the United Nations Declaration of January 1, 1942, approved at the Arcadia Conference, that they would fight on to victory and not make any separate armistice or peace. A couple of weeks earlier, the Germans, Japanese, and Italians had signed a similar agreement in treaty form. Certainly the Japanese, rushing from victory to victory, had no thoughts of peace. The Italians had effectively lost their independence because of Mussolini’s blundering. The Germans did not see the problems on the Eastern Front, after their defeat in the Battle of Britain, as any reason to contemplate
peace either in the East or, after the victory over Russia which they now confidently anticipated for 1942, in the West. In September 1941 Hitler told his companions that he would fight on for ten years rather than make peace,
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while Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop, always in his Fuhrer’s footsteps, asserted that Germany was ready for a thirty-year swar.
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^a
It is generally overlooked that the German army of World War II relied primarily on horses for transport,
not
vehicles. A preliminary survey in R. L. Di Nardo and Austin Bay, “Horse-Drawn Transport in the German Army,”
JGH
23, (1988), 129-42.

^b
The units attacking from Romania were under Army Group South, but for easier comprehension of the campaign are referred to separately.