‘There’s only one duty: to Germanize this country by the immigration of Germans and look upon the natives as Redskins.’
ADOLF HITLER
After the war many German generals recorded their dismay and bewilderment that Germany had plunged into Russia in 1941 without defeating or making peace with Britain. For a generation of soldiers who had been junior officers in the First World War, this was the height of foolishness. It was widely believed that Germany’s defeat in 1918 was the result of fighting on two fronts at once. However, it is difficult to find much evidence that the generals opposed a two-front war in 1941. In fact, the German Army’s senior leadership agreed that it would take a five-month campaign to destroy the Soviet Army, occupy the major cities of the western USSR and march into Moscow. Nor were they alone in this assessment: in London, the joint intelligence committee predicted that Moscow would fall within six months. In Washington, President Roosevelt received even earlier estimates of German victory. In 1941 the only military figures who believed the Russians could win a war with Germany were Stalin’s senior commanders.
Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union was not an opportunistic swipe at the last major opponent left on the board, prompted by his forces’ inability to cross the English Channel. Since the First World War he had dreamed of destroying Russia, seizing the western republics of the USSR as ‘living space’ (Lebensraum) for a new German empire. It was sketched out interminably in his book, Mein Kampf. German generals who said, after 1945, that they had been surprised when Hitler ordered them to the east were being disingenuous. Perhaps they were maintaining the army’s avowedly apolitical stance, adopted in the 1920s to mask its blind indifference to the fate of the Weimar democracy.
In Mein Kampf Hitler stated several pre-conditions necessary for Germany to begin its drive to the east. He wanted an agreement with the British, an alliance with the Italians and the destruction of France’s military power. If the Führer added new justifications in 1940, claiming that the USSR represented an immediate military threat to Germany, he was really excusing himself from attempting the invasion of Britain. The only surprise in Hitler’s policy towards the USSR had been his temporary alliance with Stalin, the Nazi–Soviet Pact, that consigned Poland to oblivion in 1939. Even before the Luftwaffe failed to subdue the RAF above southern England in the Battle of Britain, Hitler ordered Field Marshal von Brauchitsch to prepare new plans for an invasion of the USSR, but they remained no more than feasibility studies while the German generals peered across the Dover straits, contemplating Operation Sea Lion, the proposed amphibious assault across the English Channel. Hitler’s navy chief, Admiral Raeder, expressed his deep unease at the prospect. The grievous losses suffered by the Kriegsmarine off Norway ruled out any serious attempt to frustrate what he knew would be a vigorous reaction by the Royal Navy. And the flat-bottomed Rhine barges, the only available means of shipping the German Army to Kent, would be vulnerable to any sort of seaway, let alone enemy attack. The Luftwaffe continued to mount sortie after sortie against British airfields, unaware that British industry was already building more aircraft and more tanks per month than the German factories. Hitler prevaricated, conscious of the enormity of his decision. An unsuccessful invasion of England would spell the end of his regime, and him.
While Hitler pondered his options, Mussolini ordered an invasion of his own. On 28 October 1940, the Italian army in Albania invaded Greece, Il Duce already planning a grand Roman victory parade through Athens. It was not to be. The Greeks counter-attacked and drove the invaders back across the border.
In November Hitler was still unable to bring himself to issue the detailed orders requested by his generals. The OKH (Oberkommando des Heeres – Army High Command) had been told to prepare plans for an invasion of Russia, but no objectives or timetable had been laid down. This reflected Hitler’s failure to persuade two potential allies to join his crusade against Bolshevism. He had tried to secure active military cooperation from Vichy France, but this had come to nothing. General Franco – whose forces had received so much aid from Germany and Italy in the civil war – stubbornly refused to allow Axis forces into Spain to attack Gibraltar and thus win the campaign in the Mediterranean. The most he would offer was a division of volunteers for service in Russia.
In December 1940 the Italian Army of Libya was demolished by a far smaller British and Commonwealth force. Italian soldiers surrendered in droves and Italy’s African empire looked poised to vanish. The Greeks continued to drive back the Italians in Albania. The future of the Fascist regime in Italy looked bleak. Hitler realized that he would have to intervene to rescue his ally from the consequences of his folly. On 13 December he issued orders for the invasion of Greece, to take place early in the spring of 1941.
Five days later he issued Directive 21, ordering Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of Russia, to be launched on 15 May 1941. The objective was to destroy the Red Army in western Russia, armoured forces advancing rapidly to block any attempt to retreat into the hinterland. German forces were to push as far east as a line from Archangel to the River Volga, bringing the remaining Russian industries in the Urals within range of the Luftwaffe. Hitler assumed that defeat on such a scale would lead to the overthrow or collapse of the Communist regime. Whom or what he thought he might negotiate with at that point was never really addressed, since the extermination of millions of Soviet civilians was explicitly included in German plans. Although his senior commanders would win great victories by sticking to the precepts of the military theorist Carl von Clausewitz, they tended to overlook his conclusions on total war. ‘Russia’, Clausewitz wrote, ‘is not a country that can be formally conquered.’ He thought it too large to be occupied by the armies of the early 19th century, and certainly not by the 500,000 men Bonaparte had employed in 1812. Clausewitz argued that only internal disunity could bring Russia down. Yet by pursuing Hitler’s racist vision, the German Army did not stoke dissent in the USSR; it left the people no choice but to fight or die.
The German diversion to Greece turned into an offensive throughout the Balkans after a coup d’état in Belgrade orchestrated by British agents. Prince Paul, the regent of Yugoslavia, had made his peace with Hitler, signing a pact with Germany and allowing German troops passage for their forthcoming assault. But the Yugoslav army, led by General Simović, seized power on the night of 26–27 March in the name of the young King Peter. Simović probably intended to steer a more neutral path, rather than throw in his lot with the British and Greeks, as they hoped, but Hitler did not even wait to speak to him. The German forces were ordered to attack with ‘merciless harshness’. Nazis did not do nuance. A more diplomatically astute policy might have divided the artificial Yugoslav state along the lines that re-emerged in the 1990s. As it was, some Croat units effectively changed sides once the invasion was under way.
The invasion of Greece and Yugoslavia began on 6 April. Systematic bombing of Belgrade was reported to have killed 17,000 people, an estimate that has been repeated ever since, but it appears extraordinarily high given the numbers and types of aircraft and their bomb loads. The Yugoslav forces had neither the men, the motivation nor the equipment to survive a conventional battle with the Germans and Yugoslavia surrendered on 17 April. Meanwhile, German troops raced into Greece, making deadly use of their air superiority, and crushed everything in their path. Greece surrendered on 20 April, and the British Commonwealth forces that had landed there began yet another withdrawal to the sea, hammered by German air attacks. At the same time, a detachment of German mechanized troops deployed to Italy’s aid in North Africa launched its counter-attack. Under the inspiring leadership of Erwin Rommel, the Germans drove the British back into Egypt.
The Balkan adventure had been another spectacular triumph for German arms, but it imposed a significant delay on the invasion of Russia. At the end of May Operation Barbarossa was postponed until 22 June.
The staggering success of Blitzkrieg in Poland in September 1939 and then France and the Low Countries in 1940 took everyone by surprise. No army in Europe had managed to resist the combination of Panzer divisions and dive-bombers – the Germans had apparently perfected the recipe for victory. What the defeated Allies did not know is that the speed and apparent ease of the German success was as much a surprise to most German officers as to their enemies. The breakthrough in 1940, the armoured offensive through the Ardennes and the subsequent storming of the Meuse, had been opposed by the General Staff. General von Manstein had been demoted from his position as Field Marshal von Rundstedt’s chief of staff for advocating this strategy with such impertinence, and was posted to an infantry corps in the rear. Hitler’s generals had recommended a scaled-down Schlieffen plan, the famous right-flanking manoeuvre that had nearly brought Germany victory in 1914. This is precisely what the British and French High Commands expected them to do, and led the French to deploy their best units to the Belgian frontier, with orders to fight the decisive battle as far inside that country as possible.
Unfortunately, Hitler overruled his cautious generals. The Panzer divisions raced through the Ardennes and blew a hole in the Allied front that could not be sealed. It did rather help that the French army neglected to retain any significant forces in reserve, a clunking error of judgement that should not be overlooked when seeking to explain the worst defeat in its history.
The great victory in France had two important consequences, neither of which would be apparent until German forces were deep inside the Soviet Union in 1941. Firstly, the German High Command believed that their tactics represented nothing less than a military revolution: a clear break with the experience of the First World War when the defence had held every advantage. ‘Blitzkrieg’ (the term was invented by the Allies to describe what had been done to them) reversed the situation. Fast-moving tank formations with air support could bypass centres of resistance, drive deep behind the front line and overwhelm the defence. The parallel with the stormtroop tactics of 1915–18 was not accidental. Unfortunately for Germany, the similarities between the 1918 Kaiserschlacht offensive and Operation Barbarossa would not end there. Hitler shared the generals’ conviction that the technology and tactical methods that brought victory in France had universal application. Yet he drew a second conclusion: that his intuitive leadership, grounded in his front-line experiences in the First World War, gave him a unique insight into military affairs. It was he who had insisted on the victorious strategy of 1940, not the General Staff. When the campaign in Russia began to falter in 1941, Hitler would have the confidence to overrule his commanders again, eventually appointing himself as the commander-in-chief.
The overwhelming bulk of the German Army consisted of foot soldiers. In June 1941 the German Army fielded 175 infantry divisions, 21 Panzer divisions and 15 motorized infantry divisions. Two-thirds of the infantry divisions that took part in the invasion of Russia relied on horse-drawn wagons to carry their supplies. Most field artillery batteries were horse-drawn too, so the infantry marched at the same pace as their fathers did in 1914. Each German infantry regiment included teams of soldiers tasked with looking after the horses. Their deadly modern machine-guns and mortars were taken into position and supplied by horse-drawn wagons. The Germans were not able to use the railways, because it took months to convert the Russian wide-gauge track to European gauge, and the Soviets evacuated or destroyed most of their rolling stock. So the strategic mobility of most German units was no greater than that of Napoleon Bonaparte’s Grande Armée of 1812.
German infantry divisions consisted of three infantry regiments, each of three battalions, and an artillery regiment with 36 105mm guns and 12 150mm guns. The anti-tank Abteilung consisted of three companies, each of 12 37mm guns. The infantry battalions had three infantry companies of about 180 men, a machine-gun company – three pairs of 7.92mm general-purpose machine-guns – and a mortar company with three pairs of 81mm mortars.
The Panzer divisions had been reorganized since the French campaign, their tank strength reduced to free up enough vehicles to double the number of divisions. By June 1941, each Panzer division included two or three battalions of tanks (with an average total strength of about 150 vehicles); four (sometimes six) battalions of truck-mounted infantry (designated Panzergrenadier in 1942); one reconnaissance battalion on motorcycles; an artillery regiment with 36 105mm guns; three self-propelled anti-tank companies with a dozen or so 37mm or 50mm guns mounted on obsolete tank chassis; plus armoured reconnaissance squadrons, engineer and anti-aircraft companies.
German tank regiments were supposed to include two companies of Panzerkampfwagen (PzKpfw or Panzer) IIIs, armed with 37mm or 50mm guns, and one company of Panzer IVs with a short-barrelled 75mm gun intended for direct-fire support of the infantry. However, in 1941 the Panzer divisions fielded a total of 3,648 tanks (as opposed to the 2,445 of 1940) but only 1,000 were Panzer IIIs and there were only about 450 Panzer IVs. Although the diminutive Panzer I had disappeared from front-line service, many tank battalions were still equipped with Panzer IIs armed with a 20mm gun; others relied on the Czech-built Panzer 35 and Panzer 38(t).
The motorized infantry divisions were smaller than the standard divisions, with six instead of nine infantry battalions, but all mounted in trucks. Their artillery pieces were towed by lorries or half-tracked prime movers. Their reconnaissance units included motorcycles and armoured cars. In 1942 a battalion of self-propelled guns or tanks was added, and half-track armoured personnel carriers appeared in greater numbers, but in the initial campaign they were essentially infantry units, albeit with greater mobility.
The Luftwaffe had made an enormous contribution to the German victory in France. During the critical breakthrough at Sedan, the German armoured commanders had gambled that air power could substitute for the heavy artillery they would not have time to push through the Ardennes forest. While Messerschmitt Bf-109s dominated the Allied fighters, German twin-engine bombers and Junkers Ju-87 ‘Stukas’ delivered accurate bombing attacks that knocked out most French artillery and pulverized strongpoints defending the Meuse. The massive French heavy tanks, armoured leviathans immune to infantry anti-tank guns, were destroyed by air attacks while on trains carrying them to the front.
The close coordination between ground and air forces was to be repeated in the attack on Russia. Yet German production policy was so haphazard that the losses over France and in the Battle of Britain had not been made good. Hitler launched the attack on the USSR with about 200 fewer aircraft than he had been able to deploy for the attack in the west in 1940. The Luftwaffe had a total of 1,945 aircraft available for Operation Barbarossa. Luftflotte 3 had some 660 aircraft in France and Belgium; 190 aircraft were retained for defence of German airspace; Luftflotte 5 was in Norway, and the 10th Air Corps in the Mediterranean. The total in the east included 150 transports and about 80 liaison aircraft. Some 1,400 combat aircraft took part in the initial attack on 22 June: 510 twin-engine bombers (Dornier Do-17, Junkers Ju-88, Heinkel He-111); 290 Junkers Ju-87 dive-bombers; 440 Messerschmitt Bf-109 single-engine fighters; 40 Messerschmitt Bf-110 twin-engine fighters; 120 reconnaissance aircraft (Junkers Ju-86, Focke-Wulf Fw 189, etc.).
Germany’s allies provided nearly 1,000 additional machines, but of varying quality. Finland had 230 fighters, 41 bombers and 36 dedicated ground-attack aircraft; Romania provided 423 aircraft and Italy supplied about 100 aircraft to support its forces attached to Army Group South in July 1941. The Hungarian contingent was backed by two air regiments; together with the Croatian Air Legion, this added another 60 aircraft.
Three aspects of the German Air Force deserve comment here. There were no four-engined heavy bombers of the sort entering service in the USA and UK; promising designs like the Dornier Do-19 and Junkers Ju-19 had been cancelled in 1937. The Heinkel He-177, the only heavy bomber under development, was hamstrung by a demand for dive-bombing capability and would never be successful. Long-range attacks on Soviet industrial centres – or the rail network – would not be possible. Secondly, the provision of fewer than 200 transport aircraft to service military forces from the Baltic Sea to the Crimea was clearly inadequate. Thirdly, German aircraft production and pilot-training programmes barely sufficed to keep the Luftwaffe at its then size: if the air force suffered heavy losses in fighters, bombers or transports, it would not be able to replace them with any speed. The Luftwaffe, like the army, was not ready for a prolonged conflict.
Almost a third of German infantry divisions remained in western and southern Europe, leaving 120 for the invasion of Russia. This is an extraordinary number of men to leave out of the equation in a war to the death. A total of 38 divisions enjoyed peacetime garrison duties from Germany to the Low Countries and France. Eight divisions had an even easier time in Norway, which would retain an enormous occupation force until the end of the war. Seven divisions had a less cushy time in the Balkans, where the local resistance could be vicious in the extreme. German forces were supported by 14 Finnish, 14 Romanian, four Italian and two Slovak divisions. Spain provided enough volunteers to create the ‘Azul’ (Blue) Division, which was incorporated into the German Army as the 250th Division in July 1941. Hungary provided its ‘Rapid Corps’ of three brigades, including 160 light tanks. The allied contingents were a useful source of extra manpower, but multiplied Germany’s existing logistic problems. They all had different equipment, requiring different sets of spares, and German units were already filled out with a staggering variety of captured vehicles. Motor transport units drove a mixture of lorries drawn from all across German-occupied Europe. Most of the allied forces did not cross the Soviet frontier until July, and many were used for rear-area security when they did. German strategy also had to ensure that the mutually hostile Hungarian and Romanian contingents were kept apart. They had spent much of the 1930s preparing to fight each other, similar to the Slovaks and Hungarians, who had actually fought a border war.
The postponement of Barbarossa caused by the Balkan campaign was once advanced as the primary explanation for the failure of the ensuing campaign in 1941. In fact the spring thaw came late that year, reducing most roads to a sea of liquid mud throughout May. Many river valleys were still flooded at the beginning of June. So an earlier assault was unlikely to have made much faster progress; and in any case, Hitler’s strategic indecision once the invasion was under way cost far more time. As we will see, his armies got to within 200 miles of Moscow, then sat down for six weeks until they resumed the advance. However, the Balkan campaign involved a lot of mileage for German motor transport and tanks. Von Kleist’s 1st Panzer Group, the cutting edge of Army Group South, would begin Barbarossa with nearly a third of its tanks at workshops in Germany. The airborne invasion of Crete had been a pyrrhic victory for the Luftwaffe, with the effective destruction of its élite 7th Airborne Division. The assault on Crete had been extremely costly in aircraft as well as paratroopers: 146 Junkers Ju-52s were destroyed and another 150 damaged in May 1941. This spelt the end – at least in the short term – of German airborne operations. The possible contribution of Germany’s superbly trained paratroopers to Barbarossa is one of the more intriguing ‘what ifs’ of the campaign. One mission discussed before the battle for Crete was for airborne forces to help the Panzer divisions hold the outer ring of a ‘pocket’ until the infantry could arrive; something that the hard-pressed mechanized forces might have found valuable in the summer of 1941.1 In the event, the reconstituted airborne division was employed as conventional infantry on the Leningrad front from late 1941 to early 1943. It was a shocking waste of superbly aggressive soldiers.
German hopes rested on a relatively small section of the total forces deployed. The success or failure of Hitler’s planned knock-out blow in Russia would depend on 19 Panzer divisions. (Two, the 15th and 21st, were with Rommel in North Africa.) Their task would be to repeat their success of 1940, breaking through the enemy front line to trap the Soviet forces between the hammer and anvil. Thanks to the reorganization there were now twice as many Panzer divisions as in 1940, but they would be operating across a vastly greater area. Paris is little more than 200 miles from the German frontier. On 21 May 1940 the front line extended from the Channel coast to the Meuse – a distance of 250 miles. Yet in Russia the front line would expand from 800 miles to about 1,500 miles as the Germans reached Moscow. The supply lines would stretch back for 1,000 miles.
The German forces had many strengths: combat experience in Poland and France allied to excellent training methods had created a highly professional army, brimming with confidence. The Luftwaffe had one of the world’s best fighter aircraft, and its aircrew were superbly trained. Morale was extremely high, and from the front-line soldiers to the General Staff there were few men who doubted Hitler’s judgement when he said that one good kick would bring down the whole rotten edifice of Russian Communism.
The weaknesses of the German forces were less evident. There were no new bomber aircraft being developed to replace the existing fleet; the tanks were neither well armed nor well protected by comparison with the latest Soviet types; mechanized units were equipped with dozens of different types of vehicles, which shared few common parts and had to be returned to Germany for maintenance. Hitler effectively had two armies: a small mechanized core of some 35 armoured or motorized divisions, and a large unmechanized mass of old-style infantry divisions dependent on horse transport.
The Germans planned to win victory in the east in one intensive Blitzkrieg campaign. Since the Russians would be beaten before their famously cold winter set in – enough senior officers had served on the Eastern Front in the First World War to remember just how cold it could be – OKH decreed that the army would not require winter clothing. Some quantities of cold weather gear were supposed to be ordered, but only for the 60 or so divisions earmarked for occupation duties. Only one top commander demurred - Field Marshal Milch quietly ignored a direct order from Hitler and set about organizing winter uniforms for all 800,000 Luftwaffe personnel he suspected would still be needed in Russia as the snows started to fall. Army units would not be so lucky.