In deciding on campaigns and their timelines, in choosing the plans and increasingly taking control of their execution, Hitler had played the decisive role in Nazi Germany’s spectacular military success, just as he had done during the foreign policy triumphs before the war. His popularity had never been higher. In Germany, the public believed the war was over and they were allowed to enjoy their moment of glory. Until this point, Hitler’s ‘sixth sense’, his instinct, his tactical decisions and his gambler’s luck had not abandoned him. Quite simply, he had not put a foot wrong. But that was about to change.
By September 1940, the Luftwaffe had unknowingly gained the upper hand, winning the war of attrition by concentrating on British airfields and radar stations. However, following an RAF bombing raid on Berlin, Hitler ordered an attack on the London docks in retaliation; the London Blitz had begun, and the Luftwaffe switched its focus from the airfields to bombing strategic sites in British cities. The RAF soon recovered and the battle of attrition, in terms of the loss of aircraft, now turned the other way. Having lost a third of her aircraft in attacking Britain by day, the Luftwaffe was forced to switch to night raids, which were less accurate and caused far more ‘collateral damage’. Goering had failed; without air superiority, a naval invasion of Britain was impossible. It was a stalemate and Hitler soon lost interest; British bombers were an irritation, but Britain posed no immediate threat to Germany. Hitler was convinced that if he eliminated Britain’s last hope of an ally in Europe, namely Russia, then the game was surely up.cxc He stated, ‘They will only give up when we have smashed this last hope on the continent to smithereens… That is why Russia must now be defeated.’(15)
The heaviest bombing campaigns against London took place in May and June 1941; they destroyed most of the East End and 40 per cent of London overall, killing tens of thousands of civilians. But they were merely a murderous diversion, as Hitler had already informed his generals to prepare for the invasion of the Soviet Union. In retrospect it is Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union that has been portrayed as his greatest gamble, as an insane and unnecessary risk, and one that was doomed to failure (consider what happened to Napoleon!). Yet this is again history with the benefit of hindsight.
In 1941, other than Stalin, no one gave the Russians a chance. The Russians had been humiliated and beaten in the Russo-Japanese war in 1904–05; they had been defeated by the Austro-German armies during the First World War and they had even been beaten by the Poles in the Russo-Polish war of 1919–21. In addition, the civil war and Stalin’s purges had eliminated 80 per cent of the Red Army’s officer corps. However, the extent of Russian rearmament and the success of Stalin’s ‘Five Year Plans’ were not fully known by German military intelligence, and were even less evident to those in the West.cxci Here again Blitzkrieg was expected to deliver a knock-out blow as Nazi Germany did not have armament in depth and certainly did not believe it was embarking on what would be the most costly war of all time. Nor did Hitler believe he was embarking on a world war. Despite the increasing belligerence of the Roosevelt administration, the possibility of war with America seemed remote, and German foreign policy did all it could to keep it that way.cxcii
Nazi Germany was still not on a full war footing. In 1941 her war production was only a quarter of what it had been in 1918. In fact German war production during the Second World War never reached the level that was attained during the First World War. On this issue, Hitler fundamentally miscalculated. He again played a key role, this time by refusing to allow German women to be drafted into the factories, or in risking a rift with the workers by demanding a substantial increase in their working hours. German civilians were allowed to enjoy the luxuries of peacetime while foreign labourers from the occupied countries were press-ganged into service to make up the shortfall. Not until 1943, when it was too late, and Nazi Germany’s enemies had stolen a march on German armaments, did Goebbels make a huge propaganda spectacle of calling for ‘Total War’.(17)
The original plans for Operation Barbarossa had scheduled the invasion of the Soviet Union to begin in May 1941, giving the German army five months of Blitzkrieg to finish off the Red Army before the Russian winter set in. Nazi Germany mobilised 3.5 million troops, plus a further 1 million men from its Axis allies; German divisional strength was between 166 and 180 divisions; and they expected to face no more than 160–180 weak and technically inferior Red Army divisions.(18) But the German invasion had to be postponed by over a month and did not commence until 22nd June 1941 which was dangerously late if it was to succeed in taking Moscow before the start of the Russian winter. By August, the advance Panzer Groups III and IV reported that the German army had engaged between 330 and 350 Russian divisions, nearly double the number of divisions the Wehrmacht had been prepared to engage. However, by October, during Operation Typhoon and the thrust to take Moscow, the OKW (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht – Supreme Command of [German] Armed forces) was jubilant. On 8th October 1941 Alfred Jodl (Chief of Operational Staff at the OKW) recorded, ‘We have finally and without exaggeration won this war!’(20) By early December, the German military had taken over 3.3 million Red Army soldiers prisoner, and had destroyed as many Soviet divisions as had made up the entire Wehrmacht at the start of the Russian campaign.
On 2nd December, the reconnaissance battalion of the 258th Infantry Division reached the Moscow suburb of Khimiki, just 12 kilometres from the city centre. German soldiers reported seeing the golden domes of the Kremlin through their field binoculars. Later the same day the first blizzards of the Russian winter hit and temperatures dropped to minus 35 degrees centigrade. The Luftwaffe was grounded, tank turrets froze solid, guns jammed and engine oil congealed. The Germans started losing more men to frostbite than to bullet wounds. In one division 1,200 men reported with frostbite in a single day and in another, 350 men had to have limbs amputated. The German offensive ground to a halt on 5th December.(21)
There had been no ‘plan B’ in the event the Blitzkrieg failed to take Moscow and finish off the Soviet Union by the time the hard Russian winter set in. German infantrymen joked that apparently only two men didn’t know it got cold in Russia in the winter: Napoleon and Hitler. Out of the snow blizzards engulfing Moscow, the Red Army suddenly appeared in strength with new formations, and attacked along a 155-kilometre front with guns that weren’t jamming and tanks running on engine oils that did not congeal. They took the Wehrmacht completely by surprise and pushed them back 200 kilometres in three weeks.
The German generals at the OKW were in consternation, if not outright panic. How was this possible? They urged Hitler to issue the order for an immediate retreat.cxciii Hitler would have none of it. He dismissed them, disgraced them and then proceeded to take over command of the army. At this juncture Hitler kept his nerve. He began personally calling divisional commanders at the front. ‘You know perfectly well that it’s just as cold thirty miles back. The eyes of the German people are on you.’(22) He relied on their loyalty, their sense of honour through the personal oath of allegiance they had sworn to him, and upon his own ability to inspire his men to go the extra mile — to squeeze the last ounce of determined resistance from them. When two of his army generals went to see Hitler at his headquarters to plead for a retreat they were in for a rude awakening. Hitler told them, ‘In God’s name where are you thinking of retreating to? How far? Well!? Do you plan to drop back thirty miles? Do you think it isn’t all that cold there then? And do you imagine your transport and supply problems will be any better there? And if you retreat, do you intend to take your heavy weapons with you; can you take them?’ When one of the generals replied, ‘No, it can’t be done Mein Führer,’ Hitler replied, ‘So you’re planning to leave them to the Russians. And how do you think you’re going to fight further back if you haven’t got any heavy weapons? Are you planning just to retreat to the Reich frontier or what? Where do you plan to call a halt? Well? Get back to Germany as rapidly as you can — but leave the army in my charge. And the army is st
aying at the front.’(23)
Stalin would have had the men shot and, towards the end of the war, so would Hitler. It had been a characteristic display of the power of the Führer’s will. In the final days of 1941, the line held. The Führer’s refusal to allow a tactical retreat, along with the continuing high morale, discipline and professionalism of the German army, prevented a rout. At that point Hitler’s willpower was an asset, but his taking overall command of the military, attending to all the minutiae, and now refusing to listen, even to his brightest and best generals, increasingly became a liability. In time, willpower alone would not be enough.
On the home front, Winterhilfe (winter help) was organised for the troops by Goebbels. People donated their overcoats and winter clothes, and knitted socks for the troops at the front. It was shambolic, but it strengthened a sense of national unity and resolve. It had transpired that the ‘Bolshevik menace’ was not to be so easily defeated; the national community was going to have to dig deep to support its boys at the front. As long as they did, they were assured Germany could not fail to win through, being encouraged to look at what had already been achieved. Nevertheless, Goebbels’ diary entries betray the fact that both he and Hitler were taken aback by the resilience of the Red Army. It was clearly not at all what they had expected. He wrote, ‘We obviously quite underestimated the Soviet shock power and, above all, the equipment of the Soviet army. We had nowhere near any idea of what the Bolsheviks had available… He (Hitler) has suffered a great deal over this. It is a very serious crisis…’ In another entry, some months later, he wrote, ‘The whole war with Finland in 1940 — just like the Russian invasion of Poland, which was carried out with ancient tanks and weapons, and badly uniformed soldiers — was just one whole gigantic deceptive manoeuvre, since the Russians already possessed equipment that could only be compared with German and Japanese equipment.’(24) Military intelligence has long been said to be a ‘contradiction in terms’ and clearly German intelligence had failed to uncover the true state of Soviet preparedness, or the speed of her rearmament. It was a catastrophic failure, and one that Hitler compounded by what was unquestionably his greatest mistake of the war.
Throughout 1940 and 1941 Hitler had been reluctant to react to increasing US provocations and retaliate against American shipping, concerned not to unnecessarily stoke up anti-German feelings among the US population. He was fully aware that the overwhelmingly majority of US citizens were opposed to getting involved in another European war and he had no desire to gift Roosevelt the opportunity he wanted to take America into the war. However, this position was made increasingly untenable by Roosevelt’s moving towards full involvement, in what over the course of 1941 had become an undeclared war in the Atlantic, in support of British convoys. The US had repeatedly breached its own neutrality laws by harassing German merchant shipping by passing their details to the Royal Navy; the most flagrant example of which was the US navy’s involvement in the sinking of the German merchant ship the Rhineland in the Gulf of Mexico in conjunction with the Royal Navy. Furthermore, the US was now clearly acting as a belligerent nation in supplying ever-increasing amounts of arms to Britain and by relieving British occupying troops in Iceland from May 1940, which allowed the Royal Navy more resources to escort the Atlantic convoys and confront the German U-boat menace. Hitler, as a keen student of Germany’s failures in the First World War, was acutely aware that US involvement at the end of the First World War had tipped the balance in that conflict. However, his fury at Roosevelt’s giving continued succour to Churchill’s determination to keep Great Britain in the fight against Nazi Germany meant the Führer was having increasing doubts as to the viability of German efforts to keep America out of the conflict. After all his own logic for going to war against the Soviet Union had in part been to cut off Britain’s last hope of linking arms with an ally on the Continent. If Japan were now to get involved in a war with the US, Hitler thought that this would force the US to divert resources away from its assistance of Britain in the Atlantic toward the main theatre of battle with Japan in the Pacific. Negotiations with Japan as to an alliance against the US intensified but the ultimate agreement that was signed only compelled Nazi Germany to declare war on the US if Japan herself was attacked. In the event the reverse was to occur, freeing Germany of any obligations to assist Japan. And although there are indications that Hitler hoped the Japanese would open a second front against the Soviet Union in the east, the Japanese gave no commitments on this at all. Hitler therefore gambled that should a conflict break out between the US and Imperial Japan, it would not only deflect US support for the UK in the Atlantic but that the UK would also have to commit more forces to protect its colonial interests in the Far East. In the last resort he took the view that a U-boat war in the Atlantic could not be won if Germany could not attack the ‘arsenal of democracy’, which was the only thing keeping Britain in the fight.
On 7th December 1941, while the German Wehrmacht stood freezing and stalled before the gates of Moscow, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. At this point Nazi Germany still had no military convention with Japan requiring her to declare war on the US if Japan herself had not been attacked. Hitler took the decision to throw Nazi Germany’s lot in with Japan, with no commitment from Japan to assist Germany in any theatre of war, and announced it to the world in an eighty-eight minute speech, listing Germany’s ‘heroic’ exploits and America’s ‘provocations’ before a packed Reichstag in Berlin on the afternoon of 11th December. Hitler now made the same mistake as the German Admiralty had done during the First World War; he believed German U-boats would be able to blow out of the water any, and all, US merchant and military ships attempting to aid Britain. He relished the fact that the gloves were finally off, allowing the German navy to handle US navy provocations aggressively. It was a cheap thrill for a man who could not tolerate a challenge to his authority, but it was to prove a desperately expensive one.cxciv Having already dangerously underestimated the power of Russian arms, Hitler now compounded Germany’s problems by declaring war on the largest economy in the world; against the country that had invented mass production, just as Germany had begun to realise she was losing the war of production in armaments against the Soviet Union. Japan had no intention of taking on both the United States and the Soviet Union at the same time; they would take on the US and the Germans could keep hammering away at the Russians. What Hitler least expected was, despite the United States having just been attacked by Japan, President Roosevelt immediately focused 80 per cent of the United States war effort against Nazi Germany.
Hitler continued to rail against what he perceived as a weak-willed General Staff, who had never supported his decisions to go to war over Czechoslovakia, Norway, France and Russia, boasting that he had ‘conquered all of Europe anyway’. He increasingly came to rely on his inner will and instinct, going against all the advice given by his best generals and the facts that lay on the ground. He clearly believed men schooled in the art of war were no match for the ‘Führer’s instinct’. By February 1942, the Soviet counter-offensive petered out. In the spring, Hitler told the generals to forget Moscow, head south-east to the Caucasus, and take control of the region’s much-needed oil fields. The operation was to take place in two stages; firstly they planned to cut-off the major supply artery of the river Volga at Stalingrad, then the army would retake Rostov on the Don and push south into the Caucasus and the Baku oilfields. Once again German armour made huge advances. In May, at the second Battle of Kharkov, over 200,000 Red Army troops were killed and a further 240,000 taken prisoner. In July, the Wehrmacht took Sevastapol in the Crimea and Voronezh on the Don. The setbacks of the last winter were forgotten. The troops advanced in exultant mood, one member writing, ‘Armoured vehicles and half tracks are rolling forward over the steppe. Pennants float in the shimmering afternoon air. Commanders stood fearlessly erect in their turrets, one arm raised high, waving their companies forwards.’(26) The Germans had reached the vast flat and expansive Russian step
pe, their panzers throwing up huge dust clouds in their wake as they sped further eastwards. Another solider recalled, ‘We started one morning on the Don and then we were on the Volga.’ They stopped calculating the vast distances they were covering, and few spared a thought for logistics and supply problems, or for the Russian offensives that might come with the onset of winter. On the afternoon of 23rd August, the panzer crews looked up into the sky to see wave after wave of bombers, over 1,200 aircraft in all, heading for Stalingrad.cxcv Antony Beevor in his suburb history of the battle for Stalingrad wrote, ‘A mass of shadows passed across the steppe. On their return, the Stuka pilots sounded their sirens to greet the advancing troops. The panzer crews waved back exultantly.’(27) The only thing slowing the advance of the panzers was a lack of fuel. Hitler kept looking at the maps spread out across the table at Führer Headquarters and his eyes darted back and forth between the advancing front lines and the oil fields in the Caucasus. His impatience was tangible. In his overexuberance he made a fateful decision: to combine the two-phase attack on Stalingrad and Rostov into one offensive. This attempt to take all the objectives at once hugely reduced the concentration of forces, spreading his troops and armour dangerously thin, and throwing Guderian’s core tactics for the successful implementation of Blitzkrieg out of the window.(28)
On the day the Germans reached the Volga and looked across the endless Russian steppe from Stalingrad and beyond, the first Russian penal battalions — from Stalin’s reinvigorated command for ‘not one step backward’cxcvi — arrived at their forward positions on the Volga. A merciless struggle of annihilation was about to enter its bloodiest phase. In 1942, the German armaments industry produced 6,180 tanks while the Soviet Union produced 24,997. Once America entered the war on the side of Soviet Russia, she shipped enormous quantities of military equipment to her ally in the war against Nazi Germany. Between 1943–45, the US shipped 7,056 tanks, 14,795 aircraft, 375,883 trucks and 51,503 Jeeps to the Soviet Union. Furthermore, every Red Army soldier marched in one of over 15 million US-made and supplied boots.(29) Both sides believed the other was close to exhaustion. However, Stalin’s generals warned him that the Germans were not spent yet. Stalin now massed forces at Stalingrad; refusing to countenance the loss of the city that bore his name, a stand would be made here that would underscore his ‘not one step backwards’ order in the blood of millions. The Germans, as one company commander noted, no longer had ‘enough troops to push forward along the whole front,’ but still clung to the hope that the Red Army must now be drawing on the last of its reserves.(30) A decisive point was being reached. The test of will and resources came at Stalingrad. The battle was the largest single military engagement in history. It consumed nearly 1 million lives, maimed millions more, and saw hundreds of thousands perish as prisoners of war. The mistakes made in the lead up to the disaster were directly attributable to Hitler himself. Changing the initial ‘two-stage offensive’ plans and overstretching his forces were fatal errors, and Hitler’s refusal to let the Sixth Army retreat and escape encirclement, insisting they fight to the last man and the last bullet, was as enormously costly as it was tactically irrelevant. The Germans had in any case been able to largely cut the vital river supply route of the Volga by airpower alone, even before they reached it by land. Hitler had lost sight of the all-important priority of reaching and securing the Baku oilfields in his impatience to take the city that bore Stalin’s name. Stalingrad became a personal test of wills between Hitler and Stalin, with neither willing to countenance retreat, let alone defeat. But willpower alone could not defeat fresh Russian divisions, nor could it bring the German Sixth Army food and ammunition when it became encircled and could not be sufficiently resupplied by air.
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