The Second World War

by John Keegan

  A week later, on 20 October, he left in his command train, Amerika, to meet Pétain and Franco. The meeting with Franco took place on 23 October at Hendaye on the Franco-Spanish frontier. It has become famous in the diplomatic history of the Second World War for Hitler’s furious parting shot that he would ‘rather have three or four teeth extracted than go through that again’. Franco, supported by his Foreign Minister, Serrano Su¤er (‘Jesuit Swine’, in Hitler’s characterisation – he preserved a Benedictine catechumen’s defensive antipathy for the Society of Jesus), stonewalled throughout the hours of negotiation. When his train left at two in the morning, Hitler had not advanced an inch towards co-belligerency with Franco. Pétain, whom he met on 24 October, proved equally unresponsive, but nevertheless succeeded in convincing Hitler that they had had a meeting of minds. The marshal’s reputation, antiquity, soldierly bearing and evident patriotism were all to Hitler’s taste. Though Pétain had conceded nothing more than a promise to consult his government, which obeyed him automatically, Hitler decided to believe that they were united in a productive hostility to Britain.

  Hitler now had the outlines – despite Franco’s heel-dragging – of a larger coalition war to present to Molotov at his forthcoming visit. While he waited for the Soviet Foreign Minister to arrive, he was distracted by the errant behaviour of Mussolini, who chose this moment to mount an attack from Albania (occupied by the Italian army in April 1939) into Greece. Mussolini claimed to be motivated by the fear that the British would establish positions in Greece if he did not, and he certainly had legitimate strategic reasons for wishing to deny them naval and air bases any closer to his own along the Adriatic than those they already possessed in Egypt and Malta. However, his purpose in striking into Greece on 28 October was an egocentric wish to emulate Hitler. Once fulsome in praise of his political ‘genius’, Hitler, whose rise to power had trailed in the wake of his own, and who had sought domestic plaudits for the remilitarisation of the German Rhineland while Mussolini was conquering an overseas empire in Ethiopia, had cast him into the shadows by the triumphs of Blitzkrieg in Poland and France. Mussolini’s own abortive participation in the Battle of France (and the Battle of Britain, in which the Regia Aeronautica had briefly and ingloriously joined) had aroused the derision of neutrals and enemies alike. He was accordingly determined to win in Greece his share of the laurels which had fallen in disproportionate number to the Wehrmacht.

  The failure of his invasion of Greece – the tale of its miscarriage belongs in the next chapter – confounded and outraged Hitler as he awaited Molotov’s arrival. It not only upset his scheme to transform the Balkans into a satellite zone by peaceful diplomacy; it was also a provocation to the Soviet Union at a moment and in an area when and where he sought to lull its suspicions. Moreover, it had the immediately undesirable effect of furnishing the British with a pretext for returning to the continent. On 31 October Britain occupied Crete and the Aegean island of Lemnos with troops sent from Egypt, and in the next few days transferred air units to southern Greece, thus putting Romania’s Ploesti oilfields, his main source of supply, in danger of bombing attack.

  These developments provoked him to an outburst of contingency planning. He ordered OKH to prepare plans for capturing Gibraltar and occupying, if necessary, the French zone libre, and to prepare another plan for the invasion of Greece. These orders would result in the appearance of Führer Directives 18 (Felix), 19 (Attila) and 20 (Marita) on 12 November and 10 and 13 December. He also curtailed active consideration of Mussolini’s request for German assistance in his offensive against the British in Egypt. ‘Not one man and not one pfennig will I send to North Africa,’ he told – ironically – General Erwin Rommel. The Panzer units Mussolini wanted would instead be earmarked for intervention in Greece from positions inside Bulgaria, Germany’s First World War ally, which Hitler was now trying to coax into the Tripartite Pact, while Mussolini’s army was left to manage its desert campaign against the British as best it could.

  Even though distracted by unwelcome developments on the margin of his empire and thrashing apparently between strategic options, nevertheless throughout October and November Hitler remained fundamentally preoccupied by the decision for an eastern campaign. ‘What will transpire in the east’, he told Bock, his army group commander in Poland, in early November, ‘is still an open question; circumstances may force us to step in to forestall any more dangerous developments.’ However, he was sustaining his transfer of divisions from west to east, while both OKW and OKH proceeded with the drafting of plans. ‘Political discussions have been initiated’, he minuted to his commanders on the eve of Molotov’s visit, now arranged for 12 November, ‘with the aim of establishing what Russia’s position will be. . . . Irrespective of the outcome of these discussions, all the preparations orally ordered for the east are to continue.’ By 11 November, therefore, it was clear that only if Molotov came bearing guarantees of Russia’s acquiescence in Hitler’s mastery of the continent could Hitler be deterred from mobilising for the eastern offensive.

  Molotov came in no acquiescent mood. Despite the extent of Hitler’s military victory and the power of his armed forces, the Soviet Union, he quickly made clear, was determined to hold Germany strictly to the terms of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (which defined their respective spheres of influence in eastern and southern Europe), to pursue its own interests as a great power and to demand knowledge of Germany’s intentions in its relationship with third parties. Ribbentrop, at a preliminary meeting with Molotov, disclosed the German side of the bargain on offer: Russia was to share in the despoiling of the British Empire in return for siding with the Tripartite Pact powers. The Soviet Union would be free to expand southwards towards the Indian Ocean while Japan completed its conquests in Asia and Germany extended its area of control into Africa.

  Molotov showed himself uninterested. At his subsequent meetings with Hitler, he insisted on the letter of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and on Russia’s freedom to pursue its traditional interest in the Black Sea region. The Soviet Union wanted to annex Finland, which had been assigned to its sphere by the pact. It wanted to guarantee Bulgaria’s frontiers (apparently whether or not Bulgaria asked for such a guarantee), thereby challenging Germany over control of that country. It also wanted a revision of the Montreux Treaty of 1936 to improve its rights of passage between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean via the Turkish Straits. Molotov demanded to know what spheres of interest the Tripartite Pact delimited between Germany, Italy and Japan, particularly Japan, its old enemy in Asia. In a final exchange with Ribbentrop, conducted in the German Foreign Minister’s air-raid shelter during an RAF night attack, he revealed that Russia’s interest in the Baltic did not stop with the annexation of Finland (Russian, of course, between 1809 and 1918) but included the question of Sweden’s continuing neutrality and control of the Baltic exit to the North Sea, most sensitive of all Germany’s home waters. As a parting shot, when Ribbentrop tried to remind him of how greatly Russia would profit by assisting in the dismemberment of the British Empire, whose defeat was at hand, Molotov asked, ‘If that is so, then why are we in this shelter and whose are those bombs which are falling?’

  Next morning Molotov left for Moscow. Although he had been in Berlin only forty-eight hours, his visit had lasted long enough to convince Hitler that ‘the final struggle with Bolshevism’, which had been a leitmotiv of his political creed since the earliest days of his ‘struggle’, could not now be deferred. In the last week of his life, he still recalled the outrage Molotov’s intransigence aroused in him: ‘He demanded that we give him military bases on Danish soil on the outlets to the North Sea. He had already staked a claim to them. He demanded Constantinople, Romania, Bulgaria and Finland – and we were supposed to be the victors.’ Memory only marginally exaggerated the reality. When the draft of a proposed treaty written by Molotov reached Berlin on 25 November, it contained clauses requiring the withdrawal of German troops from Finland (an agreement allowing them to use
Finnish territory had been signed on 12 September) and allowing the Soviet Union to acquire bases in Bulgaria. Hitler instructed Ribbentrop to make no reply.

  A blueprint for ‘cauldron’ battles

  The documents to which he devoted himself in the first weeks of December were military, not diplomatic. On 5 December the plans for a Russian campaign which OKW and OKH had been preparing separately since June and August respectively were brought together for joint staff discussion under his auspices at the Chancellery. OKW’s plan, prepared by Lossberg and still codenamed ‘Fritz’, agreed with that submitted by OKH (it had been completed by General Friedrich von Paulus, the future defender of Stalingrad) in accepting that the encirclement of the Red Army close to Russia’s borders was the precondition for success. The danger of engulfment by the vast spaces of the Russian interior had dominated German General Staff thinking since the previous century. That danger had prompted Schlieffen, the author of Germany’s war plan for 1914, to eschew the option of striking eastward against the tsar’s army – believed though it then was to be as inferior to the German army as Hitler held the Red Army to the Wehrmacht – in favour of attacking France. Schlieffen had recalled 1812, when Napoleon’s failure to defeat the Russians in their borderlands had first drawn him to Moscow and then condemned him to drag the Grand Army back again through the winter snows. Hitler too recalled the retreat from Moscow, which had destroyed the Grand Army, but he believed that the Red Army could itself be destroyed by deep armoured thrusts through and behind its frontier positions, creating ‘cauldrons’ in which its fighting units would be rendered down to inert pulp. OKH’s plan was a blueprint for such cauldron battles: the three army groups of the western triumph (to be entitled North, Centre and South) would direct themselves respectively on Leningrad, Moscow and Kiev; but, on their march to the Baltic, the capital and the Ukraine, their Panzer spearheads would encircle the Red Army in three great pockets, which the follow-up infantry would then reduce piecemeal.

  Lossberg’s OKW plan was even more insistent on this point, and, though it was considered on 5 December apparently only in the form of verbal comments from Jodl, the OKW operations officer, it greatly influenced the trend of the discussions. Halder’s advocacy of the OKH plan laid great emphasis on the need to strike for and capture Moscow at an early stage. There was a degree of traditionalism in this accordance of priority, but Halder justified it, with considerable reason, by reference to the centralism of the Soviet system. Under Stalin, all authority was concentrated in Moscow; moreover, the Russian transport system, which in that largely roadless land meant the railways, was also centred on the capital. So, too, by German intelligence estimates, was much of the country’s industry. Halder’s war diary reveals that the General Staff believed 44 per cent of Soviet war production facilities to be located in the Moscow-Leningrad region, 32 per cent in the Ukraine and only 24 per cent east of the Ural mountains. This industrial intelligence was faulty; but the rest of Halder’s analysis was correct. It was disquieting, therefore, that even on 5 December 1940 Hitler showed himself already more drawn to Lossberg’s ‘Fritz’ proposals which argued for postponing a final drive on Moscow until Army Group North had encircled the Russians in its sector against the Baltic coast and Army Group South had created a great ‘cauldron’ in the Ukraine. ‘In terms of the weapons,’ Hitler remarked, ‘the Russian soldier is as inferior to us as the French. He has a few modern field batteries, everything else is old, reconditioned material . . . the bulk of the Russian tank forces is poorly armoured. The Russian human material is inferior. The armies are leaderless.’ Hitler was well informed about the damage Stalin’s monstrous purge of experienced generals had done to the Red Army’s high command; the Sicherheitsdienst (SD) (the Nazi security service) had, indeed, supplied the NKVD (as the KGB was then known) with much of the evidence to incriminate them. By contrast, the Abwehr (the intelligence branch of the German armed forces) had failed altogether to identify the progress Soviet military industry had made in the development of new and advanced armoured vehicles, particularly the T-34 tank, which would shortly establish itself as the best tank in any army.

  In the two weeks that followed the Chancellery meeting, OKH laboured to transform its draft plan into a Führer Directive. Jodl co-operated in the task, lending to it some of OKW’s thinking derived from Lossberg’s ‘Fritz’. Nevertheless the emphasis on Moscow persisted until Hitler ordered a redrafting which directed Army Group Centre (which had Moscow as its objective) to lend armour to Army Group North for its encirclement of the Russian armies in the Baltic region. ‘Only after this, the most urgent task, has been accomplished, followed by the capture of Leningrad . . . are the offensive operations to be continued with the object of seizing the vital transport and armaments centre, Moscow.’ Führer Directive 21, when issued on 18 December, actually included an instruction for Army Group Centre to ‘swing strong units of its mobile forces to the north, in order to destroy the enemy forces fighting in the Baltic area, acting in conjunction with Army Group North . . . in the general direction of Leningrad’. The directive also included a codename for the Russian operation. It was to be known, after the medieval emperor who legend held, lay sleeping in a Thuringian mountain ready to come to Germany’s aid in her hour of need, as Barbarossa.

  The starting date for Barbarossa lay in June 1941, many months in the future; all that Führer Directive 21 prescribed by way of timing was a stipulation that preparations preliminary to the attack deployment were to be ‘concluded by 15 May 1941’. After December, however, Hitler amended the Barbarossa plan little, if at all. On 7-9 January 1941 he assembled his commanders at the Berghof to hear his justification, in detail, for a switch of strategic effort to the east. There he indicated that his objectives lay as far away as Baku, on the Caspian, the centre of the Russian oil industry which German forces had penetrated in 1918. Early in March (before 3 March) he issued instructions to Jodl which assigned all but the immediate operational zone of the Wehrmacht to the responsibility of the SS and ‘Reich Commissioners’ appointed by himself; the implication, as he made clear in a speech to 250 senior Wehrmacht commanders at the Chancellery on 30 March, was that ‘special measures’ (execution, or deportation) were to be taken against Communist Party functionaries and ‘hostile inhabitants’. Otherwise – although, in the words of Walter Warlimont, deputy chief of OKW’s operations staff, ‘during January and February the forthcoming Russian campaign gradually absorbed the efforts of the entire Wehrmacht’, in redeployment, creation of military infrastructure and detailed offensive planning by army group, army, corps, divisional, regimental and battalion staffs – the objects and objectives of Barbarossa were altered not at all. The decision to which Hitler had set his hand in December 1940, which had been in the forefront of his mind since his overthrow of France in June, and which had in truth dominated his ‘world outlook’ since the day he had set out to take power in Germany nearly twenty years earlier, was to remain the fixed point of all he thought and did throughout the first half of 1941, however much supervening events might work to alter it.

  The ‘1812 factor’

  Hitler’s certainty of purpose was not matched among his entourage. Numbers of his senior commanders and staff officers were intimidated by the ‘1812 factor’. Halder and Brauchitsch, when first discussing the project on 30 July, concluded: ‘The question whether, if a decision cannot be enforced against England and the danger exists that England allies herself with Russia, we should first wage against Russia in the ensuing two-front war, must be met with the answer that we should do better to keep friendship with Russia. A visit to Stalin would be advisable . . . we could hit the English decisively in the Mediterranean, drive them out of Asia.’ However, though Halder continued to utter warnings of the dangers throughout the autumn, he did not carry opposition to the sticking-point; Brauchitsch, who had been terrorised by his one open difference of opinion with Hitler after the Polish campaign, altogether lacked the nerve to do so. Jodl, who early had his o
wn doubts, suppressed them when he detected the inflexibility of Hitler’s intention, and on 29 July browbeat Warlimont, his deputy, and the three section chiefs of OKW’s operations staff into quelling their own. Manstein and Guderian, rising commanders who were to shine in Russia, were disquieted by the ‘1812 factor’ of space swallowing numbers, and Bock, as a very senior officer, expressed something of this to Hitler when the Führer visited him in hospital on 3 December: Russia, he suggested, was ‘an enormous country whose military strength was unknown’ and ‘such a war might be difficult even for the Wehrmacht’, thus offending his leader without deflecting him. Ewald von Kleist, the senior Panzer general, claimed (but after the war): ‘Most of us generals realised beforehand that if the Russians chose to fall back there was very little chance of achieving a final victory without the help of [a political] upheaval.’ Although that may have been their outlook, nevertheless they collectively kept it to themselves. The army may have been intimidated by the technical difficulties of an advance to the White Sea, the shores of the Caspian and the banks of the Volga – Hitler’s ‘AA’ (Archangel-Astrakhan) line, 1600 miles east of Warsaw, nearly 2000 from Berlin, marked the area of conquest he believed would bring about Russia’s collapse – but they did not differ fundamentally from him in perceiving the Russian war as inevitable, nor (unless in intensity of feeling) in welcoming a confrontation with the Bolshevik and Slav enemies of Germany.