The Second World War

by John Keegan

  The Red Army’s great manoeuvre, however, began outside Moscow on 5 December. Reinforcements had been found from new waves of conscripts and from the output of her mobilised factories; a few tanks had even arrived by Arctic convoy from Britain, heralds of a source of supply which would become a flood – of trucks, food and fuel – as Western aid developed. Yet the most important source of reinforcement to Zhukov was already in existence: the Siberian force, from which Stalin – who had made only small withdrawals from it previously – had brought ten divisions, 1000 tanks and 1000 aircraft in October and November. That he felt free to do so was chiefly the result of reassurances transmitted by one of the most remarkable espionage agents in history, Richard Sorge, a German but also a Comintern operative who, as a confidant of the German ambassador in Tokyo, was privy to top-secret German-Japanese confidences and so able to assure Moscow (perhaps as early as 3 October) that Japan was committed to war against the United States and therefore would not use its Manchurian army to attack the Soviet Union in Siberia.

  Had Japan decided otherwise – and its historic quarrel rather than its focus of strategic ambition lay against Russia, not America – the Battle of Moscow of December 1941 must have been fought as a Russian defensive, instead of as an offensive, and would almost certainly have resulted in German victory. As it was, Stalin’s reinforcements had raised Zhukov’s Western Front to a strength equal in numbers, if not equipment, to Army Group Centre’s, and in consequence the outcome was the first Russian victory of the war. On the morning of 5 December, the Stavka plan mirrored those by which Hitler’s marshals had inflicted such bloody wounds on the Red Army in the summer. Zhukov was to drive headlong at the Germans opposite Moscow, while Konev’s Kalinin Front and Timoshenko’s South-Western Front drove up from the south. Kluge and Hoepner, commanding the Fourth Army and the Fourth Panzer Army (as Panzer Group 4 had been renamed), decided that they could force their troops no further forward and had gone over to the defensive. Accordingly they were inert when the Russians struck. In the north, the deepest advance was made by Lelyushenko’s Thirtieth Army, which advanced as far as the Moscow-Leningrad highway, threatening Panzer Group 3’s link with the Fourth Army. By 9 December it had reached Klin and with the neighbouring First Shock Army seemed poised to bring off an encirclement. The Sixteenth and Twentieth Armies, commanded by Rokossovsky and Vlasov, operating closer to Moscow, matched their progress and on 13 December retook Istra, close to the Moscow-Smolensk highway up which Army Group Centre’s axis of advance from the frontier had lain.

  To the city’s south, the Thirtieth and Fortieth Armies attacked Guderian’s Panzer Group 2 and by 9 December menaced its main line of supply, the Orel-Tula railway. Guderian’s Tula position formed a salient; on its opposite face the Soviet Fiftieth and Tenth Armies succeeded in separating Guderian from Kluge’s Fourth Army and driving both away from the Moscow approaches – a displacement widened after 16 December when the Soviet Thirty-Third and Forty-Third Armies joined in.

  By Christmas Day 1941 the Russian armies had retaken almost all the territory won by the Germans in the culminating stages of their drive on Moscow. Not only had the Ostheer lost ground; its leaders had also lost their Führer’s confidence. He had dismissed generals in droves. On 30 November Rundstedt insisted on resigning in protest at his treatment by OKH; Hitler, on a visit to his headquarters, recognised the justice of his protest but accepted his resignation nevertheless. (Reichenau, who replaced him, died almost immediately of a heart attack.) On 17 December he replaced Bock with Kluge at Army Group Centre and on 20 December dismissed Guderian for preparing to withdraw his Panzer group from its exposed position. He also dismissed Hoepner from the Fourth Panzer Army (between October and December 1941 Panzer groups were redesignated Panzer armies) for unauthorised retreat, and the commanders of the Ninth and Seventeenth Armies. Thirty-five corps and divisional commanders were dismissed at the same time. Most dramatically of all, on 19 December, Hitler relieved Brauchitsch as commander-in-chief of the army. Like Bock, Brauchitsch was ailing; but that was not the reason for his removal. Hitler had come to believe that only his own unalterable will could save the Ostheer from destruction. He therefore announced that Brauchitsch would not have a successor but that the Führer would himself directly act as the army’s leader.

  In that role he lectured and terrorised his generals to stand. Over Mannerheim, his Finnish ally, whose soldiers had marched in parallel with Leeb’s to the gates of Leningrad (and also made an advance into Arctic Russia further north) he could not prevail; the marshal, once a tsarist officer, was prudently determined to hold no more territory than his country had possessed before the Winter War. Against his own commanders, however, he used the lash of implied incompetence and imputed cowardice. Führer Directive No. 39, issued on 8 December, had announced that the Ostheer would go over to the defensive, as several of its formations had already done; where it would defend was the Führer’s prerogative. ‘Do you plan to drop back thirty miles? Do you think it isn’t all that cold there, then?’ he recalled asking those he saw as fainthearts. ‘Get yourself back to Germany as rapidly as you can – but leave the army in my charge. And the army is staying at the front.’

  The spectre of ‘Napoleonic retreat’ afflicted Hitler in those days of mid-December and early January – the spectre of losing not only the line won but hundreds of thousands of men on the road to the rear and, most disabling of all, the army’s heavy equipment. ‘Save at least the army, whatever happens to its guns,’ he recalled the falterers pleading to him. Convinced that withdrawal would lose both – ‘How do you think you’re going to fight further back if you haven’t got any heavy weapons?’ – he bullied and remonstrated down the telephone from Rastenburg (he did not shift his headquarters to Russian territory until the following year), until, by force of personality and threat of professional extinction, he infused the commanders at the front with a determination to hold against the Red Army and the Russian winter as inflexible as his own. By mid-January 1942, the worst was over: Army Group South’s front was holding; Army Group Centre’s was penetrated by a large salient north of Moscow but stabilised; Army Group North was entrenched on the fringe of Leningrad, which its artillery was slowly battering to pieces. The Red Army’s winter reinforcements sustained a sporadic offensive but, advancing too often in human waves, were diminishing in numbers and force. Hitler had already begun to think of the spring and of the battle he would fight to destroy Stalin’s Russia for good.

  TEN

  War Production

  The German armoured pincers which encircled and crushed the Soviet armies in western Russia in June, July and August 1941 were instruments of military victory such as the world had never seen; but they were not instruments of total victory. Although they destroyed one of the Soviet Union’s principal means of making war, its mobilised front-line defences, they did not succeed in destroying its industrial resources in the European provinces. Even while the Panzers were on the march, an evacuation soviet, directed by the economic expert A. I. Mikoyan, was rapidly uprooting factories from their path, loading machinery, stocks and workforces on to the overstretched railways, and shipping them eastward to new locations beyond the Panzers’ reach. The strategic relocation of industry had begun long before the war, with the effort to make the output of the new industrial and raw-material zones beyond the Urals and elsewhere equal that of the traditional centres around Moscow, Leningrad and Kiev and in the Donetz basin. Between 1930 and 1940 new metallurgical plants were opened at Magnitogorsk, Kuznetsk and Novo-Tagil, industrial complexes at Chelyabinsk and Novosibirsk, aluminium works at Volkhov and Dnepropetrovsk, coalfields at Kuznetsk and Karaganda and a ‘second Baku’ oilfield in the Urals-Volga region, together with no less than thirty trans-Ural chemical plants. The pace of equalisation was slow; but by 1940, when the Donetz basin produced 94.3 million tons of coal, the Urals and Karaganda fields were producing 18.3 million.

  However, Barbarossa stimulated nothing less than ‘a second
industrial revolution in the Soviet Union’, in John Erickson’s words. In August to October 1941, 80 per cent of Russian war industry was on the move eastward. The German advance had overrun 300 Soviet war-production factories, and would eventually bring the whole immovable extractive resources of western Russia, particularly the rich coal and metal mines of the Donetz basin, into German hands; but it was not rapid enough to prevent the evacuation eastward of the greater part of Soviet engineering industry from Leningrad, Kiev and the regions west of Moscow. In the first three months of the war the Soviet railway system, while transporting two and a half million troops westward, brought back eastward the plant of 1523 factories for relocation in the Urals (455 factories), Western Siberia (210), the Volga region (200) and Kazakhstan and central Asia (more than 250). The effort was both extraordinary and perilous. On 29 September 1941 the Novo-Kramatorsk heavy-machine-tool works received orders to strip down its workshops; within five days all its machinery, including the only 10,000-ton presses in the Soviet Union, were loaded on to wagons under German bombing, while the 2500 technicians had to march on the last day to the nearest working railhead twenty miles away.

  Ninety factories were evacuated from Leningrad, including the heavy tank works, the last shipments being made by barge across Lake Ladoga after the city was cut off by land from the rest of Russia. When similar German advances interrupted evacuations from the Donetz basin, all workable plant, including the gigantic Dnieper dam, was dynamited. In the teeth of this appalling industrial turbulence, Soviet economic managers succeeded in bringing the relocated plants back into production after an almost miraculously brief delay: according to Erickson, on 8 December ‘the Kharkov Tank Works turned out its first twenty-five T-34 tanks [at Chelyabinsk in the Urals], just short of ten weeks after the last engineers left Kharkov, trudging along the railway tracks.’

  These beginnings of Russia’s ‘second industrial revolution’ were the worst of news for the Wehrmacht, even though it remained unaware of them for months to come. The worm in the apple of Hitler’s spectacular campaigns of 1939-41 was that they had been fought from an economic base too fragile to sustain a long war, but with effects on the will of his enemies which ensured that the war would inevitably lengthen into a do-or-die struggle unless he could quickly crown it with a swift and decisive victory. Hitler’s Germany, behind the panoply of the Nuremberg rallies and the massed ranks of the Wehrmacht, was a hollow vessel. As a producer of capital goods in 1939 she stood equal to Britain, with about 14 per cent of world output, compared to 5 per cent for France and 42 per cent for the United States, even in her still depressed condition. When British invisible earnings were added into her gross national product, however, Germany’s output declined to third place below the British and American (excluding the Soviet Union); and when allowance was made for access to essential raw materials, including non-ferrous metals but particularly oil, the size of the German economy appeared smaller still.

  German economic strategy, quite as much as its military one, was therefore geared to the concept of Blitzkrieg. The need was for a quick victory to spare German industry the pressure of producing weapons and munitions in quantity; once the war protracted, and Hitler decided upon the necessity of attacking Russia, German economic strategy changed. On the material front the drive was to lay hands on the extractive resources of the enemy, including those of the Balkans but particularly the coal, metal and (above all) oil-bearing regions of south Russia (together with the vast agricultural wealth of the Ukraine). On the industrial front the emphasis shifted in two different directions. Until 1942 Hitler had been adamant that the military effort should not depress civilian living standards or curtail the output of consumer goods; between January and May 1942, at the insistence of his Armaments Minister, Fritz Todt, and then (after Todt’s accidental death) Dr Albert Speer, he accepted that military output as a proportion of gross national product would have to rise. However, while Todt and Speer introduced centralised measures of economic control which did indeed begin to raise output at a spectacular rate (for example, armaments, as a proportion of industrial production, increased from 16 per cent in 1941 to 22 per cent in 1942, 31 per cent in 1943 and 40 per cent in 1944), they did not commit Germany to attempt to match the production of their enemies’ economies in quantitative terms. German war-economic philosophy rested on the concept that the country’s weapons output should and could outdo the enemy’s primarily in quality.

  The ‘quality war’

  This concept proved difficult to implement in aircraft production, where both types and individual models of propeller-driven aircraft fell progressively behind their British and American equivalents after 1942. The German aircraft industry never produced a satisfactory strategic bomber; as early as 1934 the Luftwaffe had decided not to make an effort to develop this type of aircraft. Its single-seat fighters had reached the limit of their development in 1943. Its heavy fighters were all failures. By contrast, its first jet-propelled fighter, the Me 262, was a spectacular success, and if Hitler had encouraged its early production in quantity it would have confronted the Allied strategic bombing campaign with a severe challenge. German tanks, designed for serial development from a basic model, were also of the first quality, as were German small arms. For example, the MP-40 sub-machine-gun, known to Allied soldiers as the Schmeisser, was both the best of its kind in use in any army and one of the simplest to produce. German design engineers had simplified its components so that almost all could be produced by repetitive stamping, only the bolt assembly and barrel having to be machined.

  German ‘secret weapons’ were also a testimony to the success of the ‘quality’ philosophy. Though Germany’s electronics industry failed to match the achievements of the British, which consistently produced better radar equipment of every sort and supplied the scientific and technological basis for American industry’s advances in that field, and though its nuclear weapons programme was an abject failure, its success with pilotless weapons and advanced submarines was impressive. The perfection of the schnorkel air-breathing system for submarines, though it came too late in the war to revitalise the U-boat campaign, introduced a method of operation which all post-war navies adopted and used until the coming of the nuclear-powered boat; while the development of the hydrogen-peroxide propulsion system, allowing a submarine in theory to cruise submerged indefinitely, in a sense anticipated the principle of the nuclear-powered submarine. Its pilotless weapons, the V-1 ‘flying-bomb’ and the V-2 rocket, were respectively the first operational cruise and ballistic missiles. All modern equivalents of the two types descend from them, largely because their German designers emigrated to one or other of the superpower states.

  Germany’s limited success in running a ‘quality’ war economy must, however, be balanced against other factors. In the first place, Hitler’s requirement that levels of civilian consumption should be maintained in the teeth of military output could not be observed by mid-1944. Thereafter the German standard of living fell sharply, both in absolute terms – as imports began to decline and the strategic bombing campaign bit deeper – and as a proportion of a declining gross national product. Gross national product, moreover, had risen only slowly during the war, from 129 billion to 150 billion Reichsmarks between 1939 and 1943, and then only as a result of emergency or extraordinary factors. Working hours were increased; imports of raw materials, goods or credit were exacted from the occupied territories by requisition or on terms of trade highly favourable to Germany; and the German labour force was swelled by an import of foreign labour – some induced, some conscripted, some enslaved – equivalent to a quarter of its pre-war size, or nearly 7 million people. Since Germany was not wholly self-supporting before the war, this workforce was at first fed by imported agricultural produce, but when food imports declined sharply after 1944 the swollen labour force became a charge on the war economy rather than a benefit to its structure.

  The economic strangulation of Germany in the autumn of 1944, when the whole o
f its occupation area in the west and the remains of its conquests in the east were lost in the four months of June to September, manifested itself in a sharp and devastating fall in the index of war production. The general index (1941-2 = 100) fell from 330 to 310 between June and November, the index of ammunition production from 330 to 270, the index of explosive from 230 to 180. Oil, without which the army’s tanks could not move or the Luftwaffe’s aircraft fly, suffered an even more catastrophic decline in output from the synthetic-oil plants. In May, when imports made their last contribution to consumption, supply exceeded consumption for the first time in the war; by September, as a result of the Allied bombers’ ‘oil offensive’, production from the synthetic-oil plants was only 10,000 tons, one-sixth of consumption, which itself had been reduced by stringent economy from 195,000 tons in May. Only the onset of bad weather and disagreements between the bomber chiefs spared the oil plants from further sustained attack and so averted the total interruption of oil supply before Christmas 1944. Germany narrowly escaped defeat by economic effect alone in 1944; as it was, a revival of production at the main Pölitz synthetic refinery released enough oil for its armies to go down fighting on the Rhine and in Berlin the following spring.