by Herman Wouk
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 Roosevelt 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 self-sacrifice 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 warmed his heart.
But an outbreak of war in the Atlantic could have halted Barbarossa. 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 grasp—that 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 Hitler merely forestalled him. But most German historians now concede that the Russian buildup was defensive. Hitler always regarded the attack on Russia to gain Lebensraum 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 Hitler’s problems.—V.H.
45
JUNE 22, 1941.
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 3:15 A.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 divisions—multitudes upon multitudes of young healthy helmeted Teutons in gray battle rig—came rolling or walking toward the orange-streaked 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. This 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 Oteche-stvennaya 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 Kremlin 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 wall 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 saw 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 knew 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 bombed-out 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. Nearly 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.”
Berel said, “Once we do, we may not be able to stop till we’re in Siberia.”
“Then let it be Siberia.”
“Siberia! God Almighty, Mendel, I don’t want to go to Siberia,” said the wife, patting the peevish baby.
“Do you remember how the Germans acted in Warsaw?” Mendel said. “They’re wild animals.”
“That was the first few weeks. They calmed down. We kept out of the way and we were all right, weren’t we?” the father said calmly. “Give me more tea, please. Everybody expected to be murdered. So? The typhus and the cold were worse than the Germans.”
“They killed a lot of people.”
“People who didn’t follow the rules. With the Germans, you have to follow the rules. And keep out of their sight.”
“Let’s leave today.”
“Let’s wait a week,” said the father. “They’re three hundred kilometers away. Maybe the Red Army will give them a good slap in the face. I know the manager in the railroad ticket office. If we want to, we can get out in a few hours. Siberia is far off, and it’s no place for a Jew.”
“You don’t think we should leave today?” said the son.
“No.”
“All right.” Mendel sat down and opened his book.
“I’m putting food on the table,” said his wife.
“Give me a cup of tea,” said her husband. “I’m not hungry. And make that baby stop crying, please.”
Clever though he was, Berel Jastrow was making a serious mistake. The Germans were jumping off nearer Minsk than any other Soviet city, bringing another surprise, compared with which even their invasion of Russia has since paled in the judgment of men.
Bright morning sunshine bathed the columns of soldiers that crawled like long gray worms on the broad green earth of Soviet-occupied Poland. Behind the advancing soldiers, out of range of the fire flashes and smoke of the cannonading, certain small squads travelled, in different uniforms and under different orders. They were called Einsatz-gruppen, Special Action Units, and they were something unparalleled in the experience of the human race. To place and understand these Special Action Units, one needs a brief clear picture of the invasion.
Much of the European continent in that area is a low-lying, soggy saucer almost like everglades, spreading over thousands of square miles. This big swamp, the Pripet Marshes, has always confronted western invaders of Russia. They have had to go south or north of it. Adolf Hitler’s generals, intending to break the Soviet state with one sharp blow in a few summer weeks, were hitt
ing north and south of the great swamp at the same time.
But the Special Action Units had no military purpose. Their mission concerned the Jews. From the time of Catherine the Great, Russia had compelled its millions of Jews to live in the “Pale,” a borderland to the west, made up of districts taken in war from Poland and Turkey. The revolution had ended the Pale, but most of the Jews, impoverished and used to their towns and villages, had stayed where they were.
The border defense belt held by the Red Army, from the Baltic to the Black Sea, was therefore precisely where most of the Soviet Union’s Jews lived. The Special Action Units were travelling executioners, and their orders were to kill Russia’s Jews without warning and without regard to age or sex. These orders were unwritten; they came down from Adolf Hitler through Göring and Heydrich to the “Security Service,” Germany’s federal police, which organized the units. These squads had collateral orders to shoot summarily all commissars—political officers—of the Red Army. But these latter orders were on paper.
There were four Special Action Units in all, placed to follow close on the three giant prongs of the German assault.
Army Group South, composed of Germans and Rumanians, was striking into the Ukraine, south of the marshes and along the Black Sea into the Crimea. With them came two Special Action Units, for here the Jewish settlement was dense.
Army Group Center was setting forth on the straight short road Napoleon took—Minsk, Smolensk, Vyazma, Borodino, Moscow. This road points north of the great swamp like an arrow for the capital. It passes between the headwaters of two rivers, one flowing north and the other south, the Dvina and the Dnieper. Military men call it the dry route and greatly favor it. With this main central thrust travelled another Special Action Unit.
