Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (47 page)

Regional independence movements would also have been encouraged to weaken the influence of London. ‘Radio Caledonia’ broadcast from Belgium in the summer of 1940, inciting Welsh and Scottish nationalists to rise up against their English oppressors. Goebbels would have promoted anything that might weaken the sense of British national identity in the defeated people. In 1941 Hitler said, ‘Our policy towards the nations inhabiting the vast expanse of Russia must be to encourage every form of discord and division.’ What went for the Soviet Union would certainly have applied to the Celtic fringe of Britain. Such propaganda is unlikely to have deceived many Scots, however. One Highlander on the beaches of Dunkirk was overheard telling a comrade: ‘If the English surrender too, it’s going to be a long war!’
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On the other hand, anyone believing that the independence of the Irish Free State would have been respected by the Nazis once the United Kingdom had fallen would soon have come in for a rude shock.

Another method by which the Nazis hoped to strip the British of their sense of national identity was architectural, an aspect of the New Order which deeply interested Hitler. As is well known, he spent many hours planning massive reconstruction programmes for Berlin and other German cities to be implemented once the war was won. The converse of this policy was architectural despoliation for the cities conquered by the Germans. In its memorandum ‘Plans for England’, Department III of the RHSA envisaged a symbolic architectural humiliation. ‘The Nelson Column represents for England a symbol of British naval might and world domination,’ stated the report. ‘It would be an impressive way of underlining the German victory if the Nelson Column were to be transferred to Berlin.’
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Long lists of British art treasures to be looted were drawn up and there can be little doubt that - had the British not been able to evacuate the National Gallery paintings from the North Wales mineshaft, where they were stored, safely to Canada - Goering would have denuded the country of its greatest works of art as he did across the rest of Europe. The Nazis also planned to return the Elgin Marbles to Greece.
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The eventual liberation of Britain is, of course, taken for granted in almost all of the books, films and plays which deal with the subject. Either through exhaustion on the Eastern Front, the American atomic bomb or Nazi economic overstretch and collapse, it is always assumed that a Nazi Britain would have eventually been freed, usually with New World help. This is the least likely part of the whole scenario, however. As we have seen, America came into the struggle in Europe only once Hitler had declared war on
her
. It is wishful thinking that she would have entered the war out of a sentimental attachment to the (at that time virtually non-existent) Special Relationship. And if the Royal Navy had fallen into German hands, or more likely been crippled or sunk, the United States would have had to face the combined German, Japanese, Vichy and possibly Italian fleets alone. Churchill refused to promise Roosevelt that the Royal Navy would sail to Canada in the event of a German invasion.
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Again, as we have seen, Hitler would have been able to invade Russia in his own time, without wasting crucial weeks on Yugoslavia and south-eastern Europe. America, even supposing she had wished to antagonise Nazi Germany while occupied with Japan in the Pacific, could not have supplied the English resistance on anything like the scale that Britain supplied the French and the Dutch. The sheer width of the Atlantic compared with the Channel would have seen to that. (When the US and Britain supplied the Soviet Union during the war, they had access to friendly Russian-held ports; there would have been no equivalent in an occupied Britain.) It is also worth bearing in mind that a large number of the scientists who later built the atomic bomb were resident in Britain in May 1940, and would have been captured in the event of a successful German invasion. If Hitler had himself developed a nuclear capacity, possibly in the late 1940s, a terrifying new factor would have entered the equation.

Thus when Guderian wrote in his memoirs that Hitler’s halt order of 24 May had ‘results which were to have a most disastrous influence on the whole future of the war’ he was very probably right.
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Everything would have depended on whether the Nazis would have been militarily able to hold down Britain by brute force. To gauge the answer one must remember the spirit abroad in this country during those vital months. As the author Margery Allingham wrote in 1941:

However, Colonel Gubbins’s Chief of Staff, Peter Wilkinson, may have been more realistic when in late May 1940 he gave the following orders to one of his officers, Douglas Dodds-Parker:

Michael Burleigh

What a task awaits us! We have a hundred years of joyful satisfaction before us.

ADOLF HITLER

 

 

 

Operation Barbarossa began in the small hours of 22 June 1941 with the roar of 6,000 guns. By late morning, the Luftwaffe had destroyed 890 Russian aircraft, 668 of which were caught on the ground. By 12 July some 6,857 Russian aircraft had been put out of commission, with the loss of 550 German aeroplanes.
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Over three million German and Axis troops, including Finns, Romanians, Hungarians, Italians and Slovaks, divided into three Army Groups, North, Centre and South, crossed the frontier in the direction of respectively Leningrad, Moscow and the Ukraine. The fundamental intention was to annihilate the Red Army west of the Dvina-Dnieper line. Their advance was so swift that as early as 3 July Franz Halder, the Chief of General Staff, noted in his diary that ‘the Russian campaign has been won in the space of two weeks’. He then turned his mind to the matter of denying the Russians the economic resources for future recovery; the ongoing irritant of Britain; and a possible thrust through the Caucasus to Iran.
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This confidence was reflected in armaments policy. On 14 July 1941, Hitler decreed a shift in priorities away from the army and in favour of the navy and Luftwaffe.
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As is well known, Halder’s optimistic assessment was gradually belied by events on the ground. Maps showing roads failed to correspond with the reality of tracks that in the heat generated clouds of dust, or else, following rainfall, mired vehicles in mud. The panzer and motorised infantry may have chugged and clanked ahead regardless of mechanical fatigue, but the infantry and horse-drawn supplies lagged increasingly far behind.
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Heavily laden infantrymen marched across a monotonous landscape where the incomprehensible distances made them by turns angry and despondent and where flies and stinging insects unerringly homed in on their sweat. Nor did the vast numbers of Russians taken captive - for example, 300,000 at Smolensk, 650,000 at Kiev, 650,000 at Vyazma and Bryansk (most of whom would perish in desolate conditions) - seem to entail a slackening of enemy resolve. Indeed, the Soviets seemed to find new troops with ease, whether from Siberia or in the shape of hastily improvised citizen militias.
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Stalin’s Order Number 270 stiffened the resolve of would-be deserters by sanctioning the arrest of their families; at the very least, the relatives of soldiers who surrendered were to be deprived of all state assistance. Generals such as Pavlov whom Stalin blamed for his own mistakes were shot. Civilian productive capacities were rapidly converted for military purposes, with bicycle factories soon producing flamethrowers, while vast plants and their workforces were dismantled and evacuated to the Urals, western Siberia, Kazakhstan and Central Asia. For example, in late December 1941, the Zaporozhstal steel works in the Ukraine was relocated to near Chelyabinsk in the Urals in the space of six weeks, despite the fact that the ground had to be heated up before foundations could be laid, or that cement froze in temperatures of -45 degrees centigrade.
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The consequences for the Germans of this massive effort have been aptly described as ‘an economic Stalingrad’.
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Soviet resistance was compounded by German miscalculation. In late July, and against the advice of those generals who wished to concentrate offensive operations upon Moscow, Hitler halted Army Group Centre at Smolensk, diverting its flanking armour to the assault on Leningrad and a drive to the Donets Basin and Caucasus in the south. By 11 August, a less confident Halder noted the disturbing existence of Russian divisions the Germans had somehow failed to count, divisions ‘not armed and equipped according to our standards ... but there they are, and if we smash a dozen of them, the Russians simply put up another dozen’.
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Operation Typhoon, the resumption of Army Group Centre’s push on Moscow, commenced in October, perilously close to the onset of winter. By early December temperatures fell to below -30 degrees centigrade so that grease and oils congealed and the ground hardened. Inadequately clothed soldiers stuffed newspaper or propaganda leaflets into their overalls and huddled miserably around fires which consumed precious stocks of gasoline. Axes glanced off frozen horse meat. Hitler refused to countenance the notion of tactical withdrawal, sarcastically asking a general who advocated such a strategy: ‘Sir, where in God’s name do you propose to go back to, how far do you want to go back? ... Do you want to go back 50 kilometres; do you think it is less cold there?’
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After coming so close to Moscow, in late December exhausted and panic-stricken German troops, pursued by fresh Siberian divisions wearing winter-quilted overalls and equipped with tommy-guns, finished up 280 kilometres away from the Soviet capital. The Blitzkrieg strategy of destroying the Russians before the onset of winter had failed; a long war of attrition ensued. Speaking to Bormann on 19 February, Hitler observed: ‘I’ve always detested snow, Bormann, you know. I’ve always hated it. Now I know why. It was a presentiment.’
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Having blunted Soviet winter offensives by ordering fanatical resistance, Hitler scaled down his ambitions for the 1942 summer campaign (Operation Blue), aiming to make one major push towards the oilfields of the south. He realised that he needed the natural resources of this region in order to make the transition from the failed Blitzkrieg to what was becoming a long war of attrition against a global coalition of the major powers. As he said: ‘If I don’t get the oil in Maikop and Grozny, I’ll have to liquidate this war.’
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Hitler again fatefully interfered in the disposition of his forces, by dividing them between different objectives - that is, the oil in the south and a final showdown with Soviet reserves west of the Volga. He followed Stalin in transforming the battle for Stalingrad into a real and symbolic contest of wills. Every pile of charred bricks and each level of gutted buildings had to be contested with cannon, grenades, flamethrowers and sniperfire. The Central Station was taken and retaken by the two sides fifteen times in three days. While Paulus’s troops tried to clear the Russian defenders out of the rubble, the Soviet pincers closed around them at a depth that made relief impossible, and which, following the Luftwaffe’s failure to supply the pocket from the air, eventuated in the surrender of Paulus and 90,000 men.
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After Stalingrad, Hitler’s Finnish, Hungarian and Romanian allies began to urge a compromise peace. But on 4 July 1943 he again went on to the offensive, this time on a comparatively restricted 150 kilometres front to pinch out the Kursk salient. What developed into the largest tank battle of the Second World War resulted in the strategic initiative passing to the Soviets, who thenceforth dictated the pace of events.

As both a final reckoning between two antagonistic ideological systems and a politico-biological crusade against Jews and Slavic ‘Untermenschen’, the German invasion of the Soviet Union had a fundamentally different character from the campaigns in the West. This can be demonstrated by the fact that whereas 3.5 per cent of Western Allied prisoners of war died in German captivity between 1939 and 1945, 31.6 per cent, or one million Germans, died in Soviet captivity and a staggering 57 per cent or 3,300,000 Russians died either in, or
en route
to, poorly improvised German camps or directly at the hands of SD or Wehrmacht executioners, the majority before the summer of 1942.
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Hitler set the tone, as in his address on 30 March to about 250 generals: ‘We must get away from the standpoint of soldierly comradeship. The Communist is from first to last no comrade. It is a war of extermination.... The struggle will be very different from that in the west. In the east toughness now means mildness in the future.’
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Directives and guidelines, suffused with Nazi ideology, notably the decree on military justice of 13 May 1941 and the infamous Commissar Order of 6 June, issued by senior army commanders before the invasion, served to blur the line between conventional and racial-ideological warfare, converting the Wehrmacht into a more or less willing accomplice in the depredations of the SS and its multifarious police cohorts.
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