A Patriot's History of the Modern World (61 page)

The Decisive Turn: Moscow, 1941

From the very beginning of Operation Barbarossa, Commander-in-Chief Hitler began wavering on his original battle plan. His armored forces proved too weak to maintain the momentum of an attack on all fronts, and when an encirclement of huge numbers of Soviet troops beckoned in
Ukraine, he overruled Guderian and diverted armor from the Moscow attack, sending it south to the east of Kiev. The resulting battle was one of true annihilation; the Soviet forces in the western Ukraine were destroyed, and more than 450,000 (possibly as many as 600,000) prisoners were taken. As a result of this deviation, however, General Franz Halder, head of the Army General Staff, and General Kurt Zeitzler, commander-in-chief of the Army, became convinced even before the Kiev battle had ended that the war would extend into 1942.
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Halder, of course, was right. The plan for a quick war had failed. Nevertheless, and still believing in victory, Guderian and the other commanders regrouped as fast as they could and resumed their push on Moscow, but with greatly reduced strength, having by then suffered a 53 percent loss in armor and a 22 percent loss in mechanized transport. Army Group North's panzer army was brought by rail to strengthen the attack on Moscow, thus ending all hopes of capturing Leningrad in 1941, but it too had been in constant combat since the campaign began and was seriously depleted.

Then the Germans needed to face the “Napoléon problem” of resupply in Russia. For its attack on Moscow, Army Group Center required twenty-seven trainloads of supplies per day in September but received only twenty-two; in October it required twenty-nine and received only twenty; and in November, only three trainloads per day reached it.
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Nonetheless, good leadership overcame those difficulties, and the resilient Germans created twin envelopments that bagged another 675,000 men in battles around Bryansk and Vyazma. Soviet forces defending Moscow were in great peril, but the German armored formations were critically worn down.

The first failure in Barbarossa came when Army Group North, still with armor, failed to seize Leningrad. Then, Army Group Center frittered away its resources on the Kiev encirclement, which regardless of its success, prevented Moscow from being taken before winter. Once snow was on the ground and the temperature dropped to 10 degrees below zero, it was too late. Despite throwing all they could at Moscow, the Germans were stopped as much by weather as by dogged Soviet defenses, built in desperation by some 150,000 Moscow inhabitants urged by Stalin to protect “Mother Russia.” Both sides counted divisional tank strength in dozens, and the Germans could not prevail in a strictly infantry battle. Weapons and vehicles froze, troops became rapidly exhausted in the extreme cold, and the supply system ground to a halt. The temperature dropped to 30 and 40 below zero, and a frantic call finally went out to the German civilian population to donate
winter clothing. Even then the supply system couldn't get the clothing to frontline units, and the
Winterhilfe
(winter help), as it was called, supplied with great fervor by German civilians, went for naught. Troops retreated to village huts, ceding the countryside to the Russians in their thick, warm boots and quilted uniforms. A German soldier, Siegfried Knappe, recorded his tribulations that winter:

Moreover, the drain of casualties during the first four months had exceeded what Colonel-General Halder had estimated, and replacements were not available for the decimated panzer and motorized divisions. Offensive warfare became impossible when shelter meant survival and even short periods outside meant frostbite or death by freezing. On top of that, Marshal Georgy Zhukov threw three new armies at the exhausted and frozen Germans on December 5, and catastrophe loomed.

Although Stalin is often hailed as the savior of Moscow, it was Zhukov who was his instrument. Forty-five years old during the battle for Moscow, the stout Georgy Konstantinovich Zhukov was born in a one-room cabin in Kaluga Province near Moscow. His father, a shoemaker, typified the plight of the lower class Russian and was arrested by the Czar's Okhrana for supporting the 1905 revolution. Zhukov received no education until he was ten years old, when he was apprenticed to his uncle, a furrier in Moscow. There he learned to read and worked until drafted into the Czar's army in July 1915. The cavalry agreed with him, and he became a noncommissioned officer (NCO), winning two St. George crosses for his bravery and exploits in
the First World War. In many ways, Zhukov was the ideal NCO. He felt the training was exemplary, and although discipline was brutal, individuals like him became the backbone of the Army.
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As an enlisted soldier he developed those traits that characterized him later: he was proud, demanding, and tenacious. Coupling his personality with his physical appearance, that of a relatively short NFL offensive lineman who has been in many scrapes, he became an intimidating force in the Red Army. When his squadron was taken over by Bolsheviks in February 1917, Zhukov was elected chairman of the soldiers' committee. The following year he joined the 4th Moscow Cavalry Regiment of the Red Army, and while fighting against Admiral Aleksandr Kolchak and the White armies in 1919, Zhukov was allowed to join the Communist Party. In 1920 he became a sergeant-major and a platoon leader and was soon promoted to squadron commander. In the demobilization of the Red Army that reduced its strength from 5.5 million men to 562,000, Zhukov's squadron was retained, with him as its commander. Thereafter he rose steadily through the ranks. In 1938 he was appointed to command the 1st Soviet Mongolian Army Group, then promoted to chief of staff after a highly successful war game, whereupon he was sent to Leningrad after the Nazi invasion to prevent it from being taken. Within a month, the German advance was brought to a halt. Stalin tapped him again to defend Moscow, and in October he took charge of its defenses. By December 4, Zhukov's men halted the German advance after a twenty-day battle that cost Hitler 155,000 men and almost all remaining tanks in Army Group Center.

Then came Zhukov's famous counterattack. Stalin released three armies for the Moscow sector and the Germans were overrun, abandoning large amounts of equipment. Hitler ordered “fanatic resistance,” sacked his best panzer generals, Guderian and Erich Hoepner (plus all three army group commanders), and named himself commander-in-chief of the army. Zhukov wasn't finished: in January and February he plunged ten more armies into the battle, along with additional armor. With the entire front collapsing and the Soviets advancing as much as sixty-five miles, Hitler issued his famous “Not one step backwards” order on January 2, 1942 (he would issue the same order again at El Alamein some nine months later): “The present situation demands that we cling to every town and village, retreating not a step, fighting to the last cartridge, to the last grenade.”
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Against all odds, the Germans held, suffering another half million casualties in the winter battle. It would not be until von Manstein's counterstroke
at Kharkov in the late winter of 1943 that the Germans would win a winter battle, and that would be their only one. In Zhukov's counteroffensive, Stalin's contributions yielded poor results, showing he often was little better than Hitler at military meddling. He ordered a general offensive, which failed (leaving the historical Soviet records deafeningly silent about the battles within the offensive, most likely because they showed Stalin's decision was incorrect).
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Two other great command personalities were involved in the defense of Moscow: Marshal Ivan Stepanovich Konev, commanding the Kalinin Front that conducted the most successful counterattack, and Marshal Konstantin K. Rokossovsky, a Polish-born general commanding the 16th Army directly in front of Moscow. Konev, a year younger than Zhukov and born in a peasant village, joined the Communist Party and served during the Russian Civil War. Konev was sent to Mongolia to dislodge the Japanese from the Nomonhan area; upon failing, he was replaced by Zhukov. Zhukov's subsequent success earned him Konev's everlasting hatred, a feeling that became mutual. Stalin observed this, using the rivalry to his advantage and to keep the more successful Zhukov in line.

Marshal Rokossovsky, born in 1896, the same year as Zhukov, had been orphaned at age fourteen when he enlisted in the Russian army. Like the others, he joined the Communist Party, then rose steadily in the Red Army during the Russian civil war. Arrested during the Great Purge, he endured extensive interrogations by the NKVD, lost many of his teeth and all of his fingernails, yet survived. Restored to command in 1940, Rokossovsky displayed substantial initiative and independence, participating in the defense of Moscow. Zhukov then transferred him to the Don Front in 1942, where he orchestrated the decisive breakthrough that doomed the German 6th Army at Stalingrad.

The Awakened Giant

When France fell in 1940, FDR concluded that Britain stood alone and would have to be saved. Although the United States remained at peace, it was already producing as much military equipment as any of the major combatants engaged in the war, and it was understood that any excess would be sold—or given—to Britain. Churchill explained to Roosevelt that Britain would pay what it could, then, “when we can pay no more you will give us the stuff all the same.”
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He was right. England's special relationship with the United States became stronger than ever. French diplomat Charles
Maurice de Talleyrand had once observed, “Every Englishman who ever goes there [America] is home….; no Frenchman ever is.”
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Long before Churchill assumed office—in 1939 before the invasion of Poland—Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain had informed Roosevelt that the British Empire could not afford to keep a major fleet in the Far East, and requested the United States take over patrol duties of the Pacific. Unbeknownst to the American public, or even anyone in the U.S. Navy, Roosevelt agreed to do it. Britain transferred all but two battleships and their auxiliaries to the Atlantic, leaving one carrier in the Indian Ocean. America was left as the protector of the helpless east of India.

Without the backdrop of the European war, Japan's actions seemed to be little more than aggression from another regional power. But when it looked as though the Soviet Union might fall or Germany would take Egypt, an awesome threat loomed. If the Japanese seized Malaya, Burma, and the Dutch East Indies, the Axis powers would command most of the world's natural resources and become superpowers threatening the United States. Before Pearl Harbor, American attention in the Far East, while focused on China in its diplomacy, was geared strategically to supporting the British base at Singapore and American outposts in the Philippines. Since the 1920s, America's War Plan Orange, which outlined strategies to be used in the event of war with Japan, assumed the Philippines would be the key to victory. But the series of plans (which morphed through five variations over time) never solved the problem of how to actually defend them. Manila would have to be held long enough for the U.S. Navy to arrive and secure the sea lanes, but the Navy never possessed the capability (even on paper) to relieve the islands in time. As early as the 1920s, FDR, then assistant secretary of the navy, thought it “more than probable” the Philippines would fall and called it “dangerous in the extreme” to count on acquiring another base in the Far East to replace them. He thought once the Philippines fell, the American public would demand action to guarantee a base there.
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Two events made the American entry into war nearly inevitable. First, in September 1940, after the Vichy French government signed its armistice with Germany, Japan knew that France could not—and Nazi Germany would not—protect the French possession of Indochina, and Japan was able to convince the Vichy regime to give it the right to station troops in Indochina. Then came Russia's threatened collapse in 1941—and the prospect of Britain going it alone against the Axis. Those events convinced FDR that if war was coming against Japan, better sooner than later. He had increased
trade sanctions against Japan in the spring and summer of 1941 and declared an oil embargo immediately after the Germans invaded Russia. Sales of scrap iron, airplanes, machine parts, and aviation gasoline were also all halted.
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All new oil exports to Japan ended in July, but by then the Japanese had already accepted the “southern strategy” of getting their oil from the Dutch East Indies by conquest. Acquiring this “Southern Resource Area,” as the Japanese called it, would necessarily involve war with Britain and the United States. Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, who commanded Japan's Combined Fleet, gained permission to plan and train for an attack on the American fleet at Pearl Harbor in the spring of 1941 (although final permission from the emperor was not secured until November).
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Japan's strides toward war took a leap in October; following the U.S. rejection of a Japanese plea for a summit, Prime Minister Fumimaro Konoe resigned and General Hideki Tojo, the war minister and a strong proponent of war with America, was appointed in his place. Emperor Hirohito, anxious to reach a diplomatic solution, instructed Tojo to “go back to blank paper” for a new overture to the United States. The State Department contrasted Tojo's new attempts at negotiations with Japan's apparent relentless march toward Singapore, and blasted an alert out to all American Pacific bases:
“BEST INTELLIGENCE SUGGESTS JAPAN MIGHT ATTACK RUSSIA OR BRITISH AND DUTCH COLONIES IN THE EAST INDIES.”
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