Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (74 page)

The notion opens up a disturbing line of speculation. A linkage of German and Japanese power in India would have given to the Japanese war-plan an element of long-term strategic logic which it never possessed. Anglo-Saxon power and influence would then have been eliminated from Asia, certainly for years, perhaps for good. Even Australia would have been in peril, and perhaps forced to make
terms. South Africa, with its great mineral resources, would not then have been outside Hitler’s range. Britain and America, instead of being able to draw resources from five-sixths of the world and its oceans, would have been largely confined to an Atlantic sphere of operations. Victory, in these circumstances, would have seemed a wearily distant if not unattainable object, and the case for coming to terms with Hitler must then have seemed, even to Churchill, almost irresistible. Here we have one of the great ‘ifs’ of history.

But Hitler, without hesitation, rejected the glittering Alexandrine opportunity. He clung to his view that the ‘real’ war, the war he had always intended to wage, was against Russia. That was what fate and the ineluctable logic of race-destiny had placed him in charge of Germany to accomplish. The destruction of Russia was not, indeed, to be the end of the story. But without it the story had no meaning, and until it had been brought about Germany could not perform its preordained world-role. He was impatient to get on. On 31 July 1940 he told General Haider that Britain’s hope of survival lay in America and Russia. To destroy Russia was to eliminate both, since it would give Japan freedom of action to engage America. He seems to have thought that Roosevelt would be ready to intervene in 1942, and he wanted Russia removed from the equation before this happened. That, as he saw it, was the proper sequence of events. He told his generals on 9 January 1941 that once Russia was beaten Germany could absorb its resources and so become ‘invulnerable’. She would then have the power to wage wars against whole continents. With Japan tying down America in the Pacific, he would launch a three-pronged pincer, through the Caucasus, North Africa and the Levant, which would take Germany into Afghanistan and then into the British Empire at its heart, in India. Such a strategic conception was too risky with Russia on the flank.
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Hence within a few days of Pétain’s armistice, Hitler put his staff to work planning the Russian campaign.
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His original idea was to launch it that autumn, and he was only with great difficulty persuaded to drop so risky a scheme – the army, the generals pleaded, must have the whole of the dry season, from early May onwards, to engulf and annihilate Russian military power before the snows came. He took the final decision to strike in December 1940, after the re-election of Roosevelt, to him an event of peculiar ill-omen, and after Molotov had presented Stalin’s list of ‘interests’ which Hitler said made the Nazi—Soviet pact untenable ‘even as a marriage of convenience’. Thereafter he did not waver from his resolve to exterminate Bolshevism at the earliest opportunity. The descent into the Mediterranean was a regrettable sideshow, made necessary by Mussolini’s folly. He blamed it for what he later called
‘a catastrophic delay in the beginning of the war against Russia …. We should have been able to attack Russia starting 15 May 1941 and … end the campaign before the winter.’
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The assault was launched at the earliest possible moment after the southern campaign was over.

Surveying this watershed year of 1941, from which mankind has descended into its present predicament, the historian cannot but be astounded by the decisive role of individual will. Hitler and Stalin played chess with humanity. In all essentials, it was Stalin’s personal insecurity, his obsessive fear of Germany, which led him to sign the fatal pact, and it was his greed and illusion – no one else’s – which kept it operative, a screen of false security behind which Hitler prepared his murderous spring. It was Hitler, no one else, who determined on a war of annihilation against Russia, cancelled then postponed it, and reinstated it as the centrepiece of his strategy, as, how and when he chose. Neither man represented irresistible or even potent historical forces. Neither at any stage conducted any process of consultation with their peoples, or even spoke for self-appointed collegiate bodies. Both were solitary and unadvised in the manner in which they took these fateful steps, being guided by personal prejudices of the crudest kind and by their own arbitrary visions. Their lieutenants obeyed blindly or in apathetic terror, and the vast nations over which they ruled seem to have had no choice but to stumble in their wake towards mutual destruction. We have here the very opposite of historical determinism – the apotheosis of the single autocrat. Thus it is, when the moral restraints of religion and tradition, hierarchy and precedent, are removed, the power to suspend or unleash catastrophic events does not devolve on the impersonal benevolence of the masses but falls into the hands of men who are isolated by the very totality of their evil natures.

Hitler’s decision to invade Russia was the most fateful of his career. It destroyed his regime, and him with it. It was also one of the most important in modern history, for it brought Soviet totalitarianism right into the heart of Europe. But it was a gamble that might have succeeded. It is vital to grasp why it did not do so. Hitler claimed early in 1945 that the five or six weeks’ delay in launching the invasion accounted for his failure to take Moscow and destroy Stalin’s regime before the winter came. But at the time he did not feel constrained by so tight a timetable. The truth is, he grievously underestimated Russian military capacity. There is an old and wise diplomatic saying: ‘Russia is never as strong as she looks. Russia is never as weak as she looks.’ Hitler ignored it. He was not alone in his contempt for the Red Army. As noted, the British and French general staffs rated its performance below Poland’s. This view appeared to
be confirmed by the Finnish campaign. It was generally believed that the purge of 1937–8 had destroyed its morale. Admiral Canaris, head of the German intelligence service, the
Abwehr
, believed Heydrich’s claim that his organization had deliberately framed Tukhachevsky and all the other able Soviet officers.
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It was partly on the basis of Canaris’s misleading estimates that Hitler thought the Russian campaign would be an easier proposition than the conquest of France. The Red Army, he told the Bulgarian Ambassador, Dragonoff, was ‘no more than a joke’. It would be ‘cut to pieces’ and ‘throttled in sections’. In December 1940 he estimated that ‘in three weeks we shall be in St Petersburg’.
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Though the Japanese were his allies, he made no attempt to possess himself of their far more sober estimates of Russian fighting capacity, especially in tank-warfare, based on their bitter experience in May-June 1939. German staff-work, which had been very thorough as well as brilliant in preparation for the French campaign, took the Soviet campaign lightly – there was a feeling of euphoria that Germany had at last broken out of the iron ‘strategic triangle’ formed by France-Poland–Czechoslovakia, and that it could now roam freely. General Marcks, the chief planner, thought it would require nine weeks at best, seventeen at worst, to destroy Soviet military resistance. The argument that Russia would withdraw into her vastness, as in 1812, was rejected on the grounds that Stalin would have to defend the industrial regions west of the Dnieper. It would prove beyond her organizational capacity to bring into play her 9–12 million reserves: Marcks thought that the Russians would at no point possess even numerical superiority.
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This was exactly the advice Hitler wanted, since it reinforced his belief he could wage war on the cheap. The
Blitzkrieg
was as much an economic as a military concept, based on Hitler’s view that Germany could not sustain prolonged war until she possessed herself of Russia’s riches. ‘Operation Barbarossa’, as it was called, was to be the last
Blitzkrieg.
It was cut to the bone. Even in 1941 Hitler was not prepared to put the German economy on a full war-footing. Since the occupation of Prague he had become suspicious of the will of the German people to wage total war, and he was reluctant therefore to drive women into the war-factories or to cut civilian production and consumption more than was absolutely necessary to attain his military objectives. As a result, Barbarossa was seriously underpowered in terms of the magnitude of its objectives: there were elements of 153 divisions involved, but only 3,580 tanks, 7,184 guns and 2,740 aircraft. For purposes of comparison, the Soviet offensive in January 1945 on the Berlin front alone employed 6,250 tanks, 7,560 aircraft and no less than 41,600 guns.
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Much of the German transport was horse-powered and lack of mobility proved an increasing handicap as
the campaign proceeded. The Germans found themselves fighting a Forties war with late-Thirties weaponry, and not enough even of that.

The defects were most pronounced in the air, where Goering’s
Luftwaffe
, which had already revealed grave weaknesses during the Battle of Britain campaign, failed either to provide effective ground support over the whole front or to bomb Stalin’s war-factories. Goering proved an increasingly idle and incompetent leader; both his chief technical officer and his staff chief were eventually driven to suicide by the exposure of their bunglings.
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But the responsibility was also Hitler’s, for failing to provide aircraft in sufficient quantity. Equally to blame was Nazi procurement policy, which was statist and bureaucratic and totally unable to produce a satisfactory heavy bomber. It is a significant fact that all the best Second World War aircraft, such as the British Mosquito and the American Mustang (P. 51), were the products of private initiative rather than government and air staff.
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Hitler allowed the
Luftwaffe
to become the most party-dominated and totalitarian of his armed services, and dearly did he pay for it.

He also contributed his own quota of mistakes, which grew progressively as the campaign proceeded. Barbarossa was over-optimistically conceived, and its crushing early successes led Hitler to compound his error by assuming the campaign was nearly over. Russia had overwhelming weapons superiority at the start of the war: seven to one in tanks, four or five to one in aircraft.
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But Stalin’s refusal to heed warnings of the attack, his insistence that Soviet units be placed in strength right up against the frontier, and hold their ground at any cost, led to staggering losses. Before the end of the year the Germans had taken 3.5 million prisoners and killed or wounded another million.
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Most of these big German successes came in the first month of the campaign. By 14 July Hitler was convinced that the war was won, and gave orders for war production to be switched from army to naval and air force orders.
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Tank production actually slowed to one-third of the 600 tanks a month originally scheduled. He hoped to start pulling back some infantry divisions at the end of August, with armour following in September, leaving only fifty to sixty divisions to hold a line Astrakhan-Archangel, and to conduct punitive raids to and over the Urals. Then he would begin his descent on the Middle East and on into India.

This appreciation proved absurdly sanguine. In the second half of July Hitler decided, for economic reasons, to plunge into the Ukraine. The drive to Moscow was put off for two months. It did not actually begin until 2 October. The same day General Guderian, Hitler’s best tank commander, noticed the first snowflakes. The
heavy rains began four days later. The big frosts followed early, in the second week of November. The offensive slowed down. German tanks got to within twenty miles of the centre of Moscow in the north, and within thirty miles on the west. But the temperature dropped progressively, first to 20, then 60 below zero. The report Quartermaster-General Wagner produced on 27 November was summed up by General Haider in one sentence: ‘We have reached the end of our human and material forces.’
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Then, on 6 December without warning and in considerable strength, the Russians counter-attacked.

At this stage it was clear Barbarossa was a failure. A completely new strategy was needed. Hitler’s response was to sack Brauchitsch and take over operational command himself. He immediately issued orders forbidding tactical withdrawals. This quickly became a settled policy, inhibiting any kind of flexibility in manœuvre. The defensive battles in which the
Wehrmacht
then engaged, through the worst of the winter, cost it over a million casualties, 31.4 per cent of the strength of the eastern army. It never recovered its
élan.
The era of the
Blitzkrieg
was over, two years after it began. The offensive was resumed in the spring. On 21 August the Germans reached the summits of the Caucasus, though they never got to the oilfields to the south. Two days later they penetrated Stalingrad on the Volga. But by then Germany’s offensive capacity, in the widest sense, was exhausted. The future consisted entirely of bitter defensive warfare.

The switch from attack to defence was marked by Hitler’s increasing interference in the details of the campaign. He now regularly gave direct orders to army groups, to the staffs of particular sectors, even to divisional and regimental commanders. There were furious rows with senior officers, many of whom were dismissed; one was shot. In the winter of 1941, wrote Goebbels, Hitler ‘very much aged’. ‘His underestimation of the enemy potentialities,’ noted General Haider, ‘always his shortcoming, is now gradually assuming grotesque forms.’
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He sacked the commander of one army group, taking over detailed control himself. He refused to speak to Jodl. Eventually he quarrelled with all his commanders-in-chief, all his chiefs-of-staff, eleven out of eighteen of his field-marshals, twenty-one out of forty full generals, and nearly all the commanders of all three sectors of the Russian front.
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