Hitler's Panzers (22 page)

BARBAROSSA WAS AT bottom a strategic second choice, reflecting the Wehrmacht’s inability to knock Britain out of the war in the summer and fall of 1940. “Hot pursuit” by an improvised, airborne-tipped invasion immediately after Dunkirk was rejected as too risky. The army’s later invasion plans were too elaborate. Planned on a scale rivaling D-Day yet depending on an amphibious fleet improvised from fishing boats and barges, with thousands of horses included even in the first wave, Operation Sea Lion’s only military hope was a degree of naval and air superiority neither the Kriegsmarine nor the Luftwaffe were able to achieve.

Britain held on, and then counterattacked. By autumn 1940, British mobile forces were running rings around Hitler’s Italian ally in Africa. By spring 1941, British fighters were mounting sweeps over northern France. For Hitler, “smiting Britain’s continental sword from her hand” by overthrowing the Soviet Union became an increasingly attractive option.

The invasion of Russia was also a product of geopolitics. Even before 1939, Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia had sparred for advantage in east central Europe. Since the fall of Poland in 1939 the struggle had approached Cold War intensity. At stake was the oil of Romania, the wheat of Hungary, and strategic position for a conflict few in either Moscow or Berlin believed could be postponed indefinitely by the increasingly threadbare non-aggression pact the totalitarian rivals had concluded in 1939.

Ideology added a third element to the compound. Since its inception in the depths of Hitler’s psyche, National Socialism had rested on two principles: annihilating the Jews and securing “living space” for the German people. The annihilation of Soviet Russia was a step in both directions. Hitler—and many other Germans—saw the Communist government of the Soviet Union as having been created and sustained by Jews. And since at least the nineteenth century, German imperialism had been strongly attracted to a Russia perceived as a cornucopia of natural and human resources the “natives” would never be able to develop properly. All that seemed necessary, in Hitler’s words, was to “kick down the door,” and the whole rotten edifice would collapse.

A fourth contributor to Barbarossa was confidence. An air/ground assault on the Soviet Union was what the Wehrmacht knew it knew how to do. From the day when Hitler first summoned his senior officers to consider an invasion of the USSR, the operation’s feasibility was never seriously questioned. Halder spoke for his colleagues when he noted to himself, “What operational objectives could be secured? What strength do we have available?” It was just another day’s work.

Arguments periodically emerge that Barbarossa was a preventive operation, that Stalin had begun concentrating his armies forward in preparation either for a direct attack on Germany, or in order to take advantage of the collapse of capitalism he believed inevitable if war between Britain and Germany continued. Red Army Chief of Staff Georgi Zukhov did in fact urge Stalin to launch a preemptive strike in a memorandum submitted on May 15, 1941, but the Soviet dictator had no intention of taking such a risk. Aside from the impact of the 1930s purges on its officer corps and its self confidence, the Red Army was suffering the effects of rapid expansion—Stalin had created more than 100 new divisions since January 1939 alone—and a crash rearmament program that seriously destabilized an economy already oriented to military production. From Stalin’s perspective it made the sense of desperation to maintain an armed truce with Hitler as long as possible.

Whatever might be the Reich’s advantages on the levels of policy and strategy, the approximately 130 German infantry divisions in Barbarossa’s order of battle carried weapons looted from a half dozen armies. There were five divisions of Waffen SS, with greater reputations for ferocity than fighting power. Client states—Romania, Finland, Slovakia—provided between 20 and 30 more divisions of limited operational value. Occupied Europe was stripped of everything with four wheels and an engine to provide logistic support for this mixed bag. Trucks were purchased from Switzerland. Other trucks were requisitioned from French North Africa. And in the final analysis, sustaining the invasion still depended heavily on captured railroads whose track gauge had to be altered to fit Western rolling stock.

Traditional logistics were just the tip of an iceberg of improvisation. The army expected to sustain itself directly from the campaign’s beginning by utilizing captured Red Army resources and systematically exploiting the civil population. Whatever the military merits of this approach for foot- marching, horse-powered formations, its applicability to the mechanized troops was marginal. To cite only the most obvious example, German tanks had gasoline engines. In the West they had been able to refuel from local filling stations. In Russia such facilities were limited, and Russian gas was of sufficiently lower octane to be a positive risk for already overworked motors. If anything at all went wrong, solutions would have to be improvised. Meanwhile, the theater-level planning for Barbarossa virtually guaranteed problems.

Hitler based Operation Barbarossa on the assumption that success depended on shattering the USSR in one blow. His directive of December 18, 1940, could not have been plainer: the bulk of Russian forces in the west was to be destroyed in a series of bold operations. The generals concurred. They never proposed to match the Russians face-to-face, gun-for-gun, and tank-for-tank. Mechanized war depended on timing: a dozen tanks on the spot were preferable to 50 an hour later. Mechanized war depended on disruption: confusion produced entropy while discouraging resistance. And mechanized war depended on hardness. An enemy could not merely drop his weapon and raise his hands. He needed to feel defeat in his ductless glands—and in his soul. The close synergy between Nazi principles and military behavior demonstrated from the beginning of the Russo-German War was not entirely a consequence of shared racist values. It reflected as well the “way of war” the German army had been developing since at least 1918.

How best then to break the enemy comprehensively? The first operational study began in July 1940. It projected a dual strike, one directly on Moscow, the other on Kiev. This should be enough to destroy the Red Army and disrupt the Soviet state. The ultimate objective was a line: Rostov-Gorki-Archangel; anything to the east would remain “Indian country” until further notice. A parallel study projected three simultaneous assaults, toward Leningrad, Moscow, and Kiev. From the beginning, in other words, long before Hitler’s direct involvement, the army’s plans incorporated dispersion of the army’s striking power.

This was not a manifestation of ignorance, willful or otherwise. German planners were fully aware of the size of the Soviet Union. They had reasonable ideas of the kinds of changes it might impose on an operational approach designed for application against small countries. Attaché reports and clandestine reconnaissance flights provided information both negative (on such issues as the lack of roads appropriate for rapid movement) and positive (indicating significant recent buildup of industrial capacity on both sides of the Urals). A series of map exercises in early December 1940 indicated significant problems of overstretch, producing results much like those of a similar exercise in 1913: German forces hung up in the middle of Russia as the enemy massed for a general counteroffensive. The conclusion was that German forces were barely sufficient for the assigned mission. And that was at the beginning.

Germany’s overall mobilization might have been incomplete, but by the summer of 1941, 85 percent of men between 20 and 30 were serving in the Wehrmacht. The remainder were considered indispensable to the war economy. In May, Halder informed the Replacement Army that the initial battles would cost 275,000 casualties, with another 200,000 expected in September. The available replacement pool for the army was 385,000. Simple arithmetic indicated that the pool would be empty before autumn even given Halder’s optimistic time frame.

Shortfalls were certain in another crucial area. The success of mobile war as practiced in Germany depended heavily on air support in a context of air superiority. The planes need not always be present, but they had to be available. The Luftwaffe had exponentially more experience than the Red Air Force, along with significantly superior aircraft and tactics. The Luftwaffe was also fighting in the West and the Mediterranean, suffering steady attrition of planes and crews. It would be covering a far greater geographic area than in 1940, with corresponding extension of technical and logistical demands. Even in a short campaign, the ground forces were correspondingly likely to be depending on their own skills and resources a higher proportion of the time than ever before.

Planning for Barbarossa rolled on, moving from conceptions into details without a bump. Private reservations, expressed in such passive-aggressive ways as buying and reading Baron Caulaincourt’s memoirs of Napoleon’s disastrous 1812 campaign, did not prevent participation of the middle-ranking officers who would be the field commanders. What emerged, significantly independent of Hitler’s direct involvement, was a sophisticated version of what was essentially a military steeple-chase: three army groups lined up on the frontier, and at the starter’s barrage, going as fast as possible in three extrinsic directions. Instead of the single clenched fist of Frederick the Great, or the elder Moltke’s “moving separately and fighting together,” the projected operation resembled a martial artist spreading his fingers as he struck what was intended as a killing blow. Instead of being structured into a decisive point, soldiers, cities, and resources shifted priorities in an ever-changing kaleidoscope. The closest thing to prioritization was Hitler’s emendation of the army’s original plan to provide for Leningrad’s capture before mounting a decisive attack on Moscow. And all this was to be achieved on a campaign of four or five months’ duration.

Scholars and soldiers increasingly, one might say overwhelmingly, describe Barbarossa as fundamentally flawed, a program for defeat even in a narrow military context. But while its dysfunctional genesis may have been in the fever swamps of hubris and racism, a steel thread linked Barbarossa to the real world: the panzers. The Führer and his generals were convinced that the army of the Third Reich had developed a style of war not merely countering the historic Russian strengths of mass, space, and determination, but rendering them irrelevant: a heavyweight boxer confronting a sawed-off shotgun. In his December directive Hitler emphasized “bold armored thrusts.” The army’s map exercises concluded that mobile units would decide the campaign and the war. At every turn the structure of Barbarossa was an inverted pyramid, with the panzers at the tip.
Va banque
, all or nothing—the Reich’s fate rode with the tanks.

CONCENTRATION OF FORCE and effort were not dominant characteristics of Hitler’s Reich. The Führer had initially reacted to Italy’s debacle in North Africa and its frustrated invasion of Greece with the amused malice the Germans call Schadenfreude. His interests in the Mediterranean involved encouraging support for Germany’s Atlantic ambitions on the part of Vichy France and Falangist Spain, and attracting Balkan support for the developing attack on the Soviet Union. Neither end was best served by Italian-initiated upheavals that challenged the status quo by open-ended claims to enlarged spheres of influence. They were served even worse, however, by open-ended military catastrophe.

The Italian defeat in Greece created opportunities for Britain to negotiate a Balkan front of its own, supporting it by stationing planes on Greek bases. The oil fields of Romania were only the most obvious potential target. If the Italians were driven from North Africa, the stresses on British shipping would be reduced by the reopening of the Mediterranean. The French North African colonies might reconsider their allegiance to Vichy. An Italy subject to air and naval strikes would face the consequences of a loss of prestige that could potentially lead to the collapse of the Fascist system itself.

Hitler grew correspondingly determined to take action. As early as July 1940, the High Command had suggested dispatching a panzer division to North Africa. Spanish veteran Wilhelm von Thoma, sent to evaluate the situation, reported any serious mobile operations would require at least four divisions for an indefinite basis. In the run-up to Barbarossa, that proposal had no chance. As the Italian situation continued to deteriorate, the commitment of ground forces in the Mediterranean basin nevertheless seemed necessary.

The General Staff responded by projecting a large-scale mechanized offensive in the Balkans, to be mounted in the spring of 1941—quick in, quick out. Hitler entertained hopes that its threat would be sufficient: that the Greek government would reject British support and Yugoslavia would align itself with the Axis. Hitler sweetened the latter prospect by offering to exchange Yugoslavia’s copper, zinc, and lead for modern weapons. The former prospect grew increasingly remote, particularly as Greece observed the steady movement of German planning missions and combat aircraft—specifically the ground-support specialists of VIII Air Corps—into Bulgaria and Romania. When Romania, Hungary, and Yugoslavia formally joined the Axis in November 1940, allowing German troops transit rights across their territory, the question regarding war became not
if
but
when
. Even then it was not until the first arrival of British ground troops in Greece on March 7 that the German redeployment began in earnest.

From the beginning, the Balkan operation had been planned around the panzers. This flew in the face of Great War experience, of unpromising terrain, limited road networks, undeveloped infrastructures, and just about every other common-sense reservation that prudent staff officers could conceive. In another context, however, the projected force structure reflected, more clearly than at any time since the occupation of Austria, Hitler’s conception of the ideal relationship between diplomacy and force. He sought to expand the basis for war in the eastern Mediterranean, to secure the southern flank of his forthcoming attack on the USSR, and to sequester Balkan economic resources for German use. None of those ends was best achieved by the use of force as a first option, and Hitler was correspondingly willing to keep talking. But time was an enemy when wasted. Even at the last minute, the panzer divisions could be turned loose to crush both local opposition and the burgeoning British presence in Greece—immediately and unmistakably, not least to discourage intervention by the Soviet Union, perhaps Turkey as well.