rendered prostrate by a long war.... Behind these two countries stands the North American Union, goading them on.... I have therefore, after constantly racking my brains, finally reached the conclusion to cut the noose before it can be drawn tight."
Was Barbarossa Sound?
The argument that Hitler should have finished off England first has no realistic basis.
Hitler resembled Caesar in his determination to take, wherever it could be found, the lands and the resources his nation wanted. He was like Alexander in his broad vision of a new peaceful world order. But in his strategy he was Napoleonic, for like Napoleon his central problem was that he was surrounded by enemies. The Napoleonic solution was to use speed, energy, surprise, and extreme concentration of his forces at the attack point, in order to knock off his foes one at a time. This was what Hitler did. He always had a brilliant if somewhat adventurous sense of grand strategy; only his dilettantish interference in tactical operations, and his inability to be soldierly in the clutch, were ruinous.
In May of 1940 he had allotted a mere two dozen divisions in the east to confront the more than two hundred divisions of the Red Army, while he finished France and drove the disarmed British remnant off the continent. it was a fantastic gamble, but a perspicacious one.
Stalin, who might have taken Berlin, proved only to happy to let Germany destroy France, while he grabbed lond in the Baltic and the Balkans.
In 1941 the Soviet Union had grown much stronger. It had moved within a hundred miles of Ploesti. It had gained control of the Baltic Sea. It had massed on its borders, confronting Germany and its conquered Polish territory, more than three million soldiers. And it was demanding a free hand in the Dardanelles, Bulgaria, and Finland.
These demands, brought by Molotov in November 1940, were the last straw.
Hitler felt he really had only three choices. He could shoot himself, leaving the German people to negotiate a surrender; he could attempt the inconclusive task of subjugating England with the carnage of a Channel crossing, opening himself meantime to a treacherous assault from the east; or he could ignore neutralized, prostrate England, and attempt to realize his entire historic aim, in the hour of his greatest strength, in one devastating blow. Barbarossa was the solution: a one-front Napoleonic thrust, not the opening of a true two-front war.
Unprejudiced military historians of the future will never be able/ to fault Hitler for turning east. From the start he was playing against odds. He lost his well-calculated risk through a combination of operational errors and misfortunes, and the historic accident that at this hour he was opposed by a ruthless, spidery genius of the same metal-Franklin Roosevelt.
The Role of Roosevelt
Roosevelt's essential problem in 1941 was timing. He was playing from temporary weakness against an opponent playing from top strength.
The weakness of the American President was both internal and external.
Where the German people were united behind their leader, the American people, confused and nonplussed by Roosevelt's supercilious and untrustworthy personality, were divided. Where Hitler disposed of the greatest armed forces on earth, at their peak of strength and fighting trim, Roosevelt had no Army, no Air Force, and a dispersed, ill-trained Navy. How then could the American President bring any weight to bear?
Yet he did it. He was well trained in the devices of impotence, having won the presidency in a wheelchair.
The first thing he had to do was strengthen Churchill's hand.
Only Churchill, the amateur military adventurer with his obsessive hatred of Hitler, could keep England in the war. Churchill was having a wonderful time playing general and admiral, as his memoirs relate.
However, under his leadership the Empire was going down the drain.
England's one chance to save it lay in getting rid of its grand-talking Prime Minister, and electing a responsible politician to make peace with Germany. Had this occurred, the present world map would look unguessably different, but the pink areas of the British Empire would still stretch around the globe. Roosevelt's masterstroke of Lend-Lease kept Churchill in power. The Americans sent the British precious little in 1941. But Lend-Lease gave this brave, beaten people hope, and wars are fought with hope.
Hope was also the main commodity Franklin Roosevelt sent the Soviet Union in 1941, though supplies started to trickle through in November and December.
Stalin knew the gargantuan industrial potential of America. That knowledge, and Roosevelt's pledges of help, stiffened him to fight.
He sensed that while Roosev would never sacrifice much American blood to save the Soviet Union, he would probably send the Russians all kinds of arms, so that Slav bravery and selfsacrifice could fight the American battle for world hegemony.
The Convoy Decision
Roosevelt's instinct for subtle and breathtaking chicanery on a world scale was never better displayed than in his conduct on the question of the Atlantic convoys.
Most Americans were indifferent to the European war in May 1941.
The soundest people were against intervening. Roosevelt Managed to find an unpleasant name for them: "isolationists." However, in the circles around him, his sycophants kept urging him to initiate convoying of American ships to England.
Indeed, it made very little sense to keep loading up English ships, only to have America's food and arms go to the ocean bottom.
Roosevelt obstinately refused to convoy. He had already received intelligence of the coming attack on Russia. In fact the whole world seemed to know it was coming, except Stalin. The last thing he wanted to do was interfere. He saw in it the inevitable slaughter of vast numbers of Germans. This prospect wormed his heart.
But an outbreak of war in the Atlantic could have halted Barbarosso. Hitler could have countermanded the orders until dawn on June 22. An order to stand down from Barbarossa would have been obeyed with great relief by the German General Staff.
Franklin Roosevelt understood what not too many other politicians of the time could grasthat even Hitler in the last analysis depended on public opinion. The German people were united behind him and ready for any sacrifice, but they were not ready to commit plain suicide.
News of war with the United States would have taken all the spiritual steam out of the drive on Russia. The German public had no understanding of America's military weakness. Despite Goebbels's propaganda, they remembered only that America's entry into the last war had spelled defeat.
Roosevelt was ready for war with Germany, he ardently desired it, but not until we were embroiled with the tough gigantic hordes of Stalin. So he kept his own counsel, put off his advisers, and kept twisting and turning under the probes of the press about convoying.
His one course to ensure war between Germany and Russia was to hold off the convoying decision. That was what he did. He baffled and dismayed everybody around him, including his own wife. But he gained his grisly aim on June 22, when Hitler turned east.
TRANSLATOR'S NOTE: Roon's defense of Barbarossa is unusual; most other German military writers do condemn it as the fatal opening of a two-front war. it seems Roon either played a part in designing the operation, or that the plan submitted by the Army Staff agreed with his own study made at Supreme Headquarters.
Every man cherishes his own ideas, particularly military men.
The argument about the key role of the Ploesti oil fields is not emphasized in many other military histories. Hitler began planning to attack Russia as far back as July 1940. The nonaggression pact was then less than a year old, and Stalin was punctiliously delivering vast quantities of war materials, including oil, to Germany. Hitler's act does look a bit like bad faith, if faith can be said to exist between two master criminals. The usual extenuation in German writings is that the Soviet troop buildups showed Stalin's intent to attack, and that Hitter merely forestalled him. But most German historians now concede that the Russian buildup was defensive. Hitler always regarded the attack on Russia to gain Lebensroum as his chief policy
. it was natural for him to start planning it in July 1940, when his huge land armies were at maximum strength, with no other place to go. This was the big picture, and the oil supply problem may have been a detail.
Nevertheless, Roon's discussion illuminates Hitter's problems.-V.H.
NE 22, 1941JU The players in our drama were now scattered around the earth. Their stage had become the planet, turning in the solar spotlight that illumined half the scene at a time, and that moved always from east to west.
At the first paling of dawn, six hundred miles to the west of Moscow, at exactly 3:15A.m. by myriads of German wristwatches, German cannon began to flash and roar along a line a thousand miles long, from the icy Baltic to the warm Black Sea. At the same moment fleets of German Planes, which had taken off some time earlier, crossed the borders and started bombing Soviet airfields, smashing up aircraft on the ground by the hundreds. The morning stars still twinkled over the roads, the rail lines, and the fragrant fields, when the armored columns and infantry divwons-multitudes upon multitudes of young healthy helmeted Teutons in gray battle rigme rolling or walking toward the orangestreaked dark east, on the flat Polish plains that stretched toward Moscow, Leningrad, and Kiev.
A sad and shaken German ambassador told Foreign Minister Molotov in Moscow, shortly after sunrise, that since Russia was obviously about to attack Germany, the Leader had wisely ordered the Wehrmacht to strike first in self-defense. The oval gray slab of Molotov's face, we are told, showed a very rare emotion-surprise. History also records that Molotov said, "Did we deserve this?" The GERMAN ambassador, his message delivered, slunk out of the room. He had worked all his life to restore the spirit of Rapallo, the firm alliance of Russia and Germany. Eventually Hitler had him shot.
Molotov's surprise at the invasion was not unique. Stalin was surprised. Since his was the only word or attitude in Russia that mattered, the Red Army and the entire nation were surprised. The attack was an unprecedented tactical success, on a scale never approached before or since. Three and a half million armed men surprised four and a half million armed men. The Pearl Harbor surprise attack six months later involved, by contrast, only some thousands of combatants on each side.
Communist historians use events to prove their dogmas. Ts makes for good propaganda but bad record-keeping. Facts that are hard to fit into the Party theories tend to slide into oblivion. Many facts of this most gigantic of land wars, which the Russians call Velikaya Otechestvennaya Voina, 'The Great Patriotic War"-'Second World War" is not a phrase they favor-may never be known. The Communist historians assert that Stalin was to blame for neglecting intelligence warnings, and that is why the German surprise attack was successful. It is a very simple way to look at the amazing occurrence. So far as it goes, it is true.
Sunlight touched the red Krembn towers, visible from the windows of Leslie Slote's flat, and fell on an opened letter from Natalie Henry in Rome, lying on his desk by the window.
Slote had gone to bed very late and he was still asleep. Natalie had sent him a joyous screed, for suddenly Aaron Jastrow had received his passport! He actually had it in hand and they were getting ready to leave on a Finnish freighter sailing early in July; and going by ship would even enable Aaron to retrieve much of his library. Knowing nothing of Byron's action at the White House, Natalie had written to thank Slote in effervescent pages. The news astonished the Foreign Service man, for in Italy he had felt he was encountering the cotton-padded stone wau that was a State Department specialty. In his answer, which lay unfinished beside her letter, he took modest credit for the success, and then explained at length why he thought the rumored impending invasion of Russia was a false alarm, and why he was sure the Red Army would crush a German attack if by chance one came.
Trying to find gracious words about Natalie's pregnancy, he had given up and gone to bed. By the time his alarm clock woke him, his letter was out of date; but he did not yet know it.
Peering out of the window, he -,aw the usual morning sights of Moscow: a hazy blue sky, men in caps and young women in shawls walking to work, a crowded rusty bus wobbling up a hill, old women standing in line at the milk store, more old women queueing at a bread store. The Kremlin loomed across the river, huge, massive, still, the walls dark red in the morning sun, the multiple gold domes gleaming on the cathedrals.
There were no air raid alarms. There were as yet no loudspeaker or radio reports. It was a scene of tranquil peace. Stalin and Molotov were waiting a while before sharing their astonishment with the people they had led into this catastrophe. But at the front, several million Red Army men were already sharing it and trying to recover from it before the Germans could kill them all.
Knowing nothing of this, Slote went to the embassy with a light heart, hoping to dispose of some overdue work on this quiet Sunday. He found the building in a most un-sabbathlike turmoil; and there he learned, with a qualm in his gut, that once again the Germans were coming.
The sunrise slid westward to Minsk. Its first rays along a broad silent street fell on a clean-shaven workingman in a cloth cap and a loose worn suit dusted all over with flour Had Natalie Henry been walking this street, she could not possibly have recognized her relative, Berel Jastrow. Shorn of a beard, the broad flat Slavic face with its knobby peasant nose gave him a nondescript East European look, as did the shoddy clothing. He might have been a Pole, a Hungarian, or a Russian, and he knew the three languages well enough to pass as any of these. Though over fifty, Berel always walked fast, and this morning he walked faster. At the bakery, on a German shortwave radio he kept behind flour sacks, he had heard Dr. Goebbels from Berlin announce the attack, and in the distance, just after leaving work, he had heard a familiar noise: the thump of bombs. He was concerned, but not frightened.
Natalie Henry had encountered Berel as a devout prosperous merchant, the happy father of a bridegroom. Berel had another side.
He had served on the eastern front in the Austrian army in the last war.
He had been captured by the Russians, had escaped from a prison camp, and had made his way back through the forests to Austrian lines.
In the turmoils of 1916 he had landed in a mixed German and Austrian unit.
Early in his army service he had learned to bake and to cook, so as to avoid eating forbidden foods. He had lived for months on bread, or roasted potatoes, or boiled cabbage, while cooking savory soups and stews which he would not touch. He knew army life, he could survive in a forest, and he knwe how to get along with Germans, Russians, and a dozen minor Danubian nationalities, Anti-Semitism was the normal state of things to Berel Jastrow. It frightened him no more than war and he was just as practiced in dealing with it.
He turned off the main paved avenue, and walked a crooked way through dirt streets and alleys, past one-story wooden houses, to a courtyard where chickens strutted clucking in the mire, amid smells of breakfast, woodsmoke, and barnyard.
'You've finished work early," said his daughter-in-law, stirring a pot on a wood-burning oven while holding a crying baby on one arm. She was visibly pregnant again; and with a kerchief on her cropped hair, and her face pinched and irritable, the bride of a year and a half looked fifteen years older. In a corner, her husband in a cap and sheepskin jacket murmured over a battered Talmud volume. His beard too was gone, and his hair cut short. Three beds, a table, three chairs, and a crib filled the tiny hot room. All four dwelled there. Berel's wife and daughter had died in the winter of 1939 Of the spotted fever that had swept bombedout Warsaw. At that time the Germans had not gotten around to walling up the Jews; and using much of his stored money for bribes, Berel Jastrow had bought himself, his son, and his daughter-in-law out of the city, and had joined the trickle of refugees heading eastward to the Soviet Union through back roads and forests.
The Russians were taking in these people and treating them better than the Germans had, though most had to go to lonely camps beyond the Urals. With this remnant of his family Berel had made his way to Minsk, where some relatives lived. Nea
rly all of the city's bakers were off in the army, so the Minsk bureau for aliens had let him stay.
"I'm home early because the Germans are coming again." Accepting a cup of tea from the daughter-in-law, Berel sank into a chair and smiled sadly at her stricken expression. "Didn't you hear the bombs?"
"Bombs? What bombs?" His son closed the book and looked up with fright on his pale bony face. "We heard nothing. You mean they're fighting the Russians now?"
"It just started. I heard it on the radio. The bombs must have come from airplanes. I suppose the Germans were bombing the railroad.
The front is very far away."
The woman said wearily, shushing the wailing baby as it pounded her with a little fist, "They won't beat the Red Army so fast."
The son stood. "Let's leave in the clothes we're wearing."
'And go where?" his father said.
"East. f Berel said, "Once we do, we may not be able to stop till we're in Siberia."
"Then let it be Siberia."
"Sibe God mighty, Mendel, I don't want to go to Siberia," said the wife, patting the peevish baby.
Herman Wouk - The Winds Of War Page 84
