A World at Arms (39 page)

Romania, the country at the other end of the front of any prospective attack on the Soviet Union, might, in German eyes, be sympathetic for the same reason as Finland: both had recently lost territory to the Soviet Union and both could hope to reclaim that territory only in alliance with the Third Reich. That in both instances it had been Germany which had enabled the Soviet Union to seize the areas in question was ironic but irrelevant. The situation of Romania was, however, different from
that of Finland in three very important respects. In the first place, Romania was a major source of oil, vastly more important to Germany than Finland’s nickel. While Hitler at one point in 1940 claimed that Germany could do without this oil,
²⁶³
the reality is that she did need it and Hitler conducted his military policy accordingly.

Secondly, unlike Finland with its stable democratic order, Romania was torn by periodic internal rivalries which repeatedly threatened to break into violent struggles affecting the cohesion of the state. From the German point of view, stability was the key prerequisite for effectiveness in the war; and Berlin therefore left the Finns to keep their democracy for the time being while propping up the regime of Romania against internal dissidents, even when these were the Iron Guardists who were much more sympathetic to National Socialism and maintained clandestine ties to various German agencies, especially in Himmler’s SS empire.

Finally, and most urgently, Romania was in the throes of being pressured by her Hungarian and Bulgarian neighbors into giving up to them territory she had acquired at the end of World War I. The Hungarians, encouraged from Moscow,
²⁶⁴
were especially eager to seize what they could and appeared willing to go to war if Romania would not yield peacefully. Hitler had, of course, not only encouraged the Soviet Union to make its own territorial claims on Romania and had urged the Romanians to grant them, but he had seen the cessions as the just punishment for a Romania which had compromised itself.
²⁶⁵
He originally thought the Soviet actions pointing toward the Bosporus as primarily of concern to Italy;
²⁶⁶
Romania, he expected, would have to concede territory to Hungary and Bulgaria as well as the Soviet Union.

As the Romanian-Hungarian negotiations appeared likely to eventuate in a war, however, Hitler became very concerned. Great pressure was put on the Hungarians to refrain from war.
²⁶⁷
Once hostilities began, there was no way to anticipate the outcome. In the process the Romanian oil wells might be destroyed or seized by the Soviet Union. Neither idea fit in with his plans; and at the same meeting of July 31 in which he explained to his military advisors his intention of attacking the Soviet Union the following year with Finland and Romania as allies, he also explained that he intended to settle the dispute between Hungary and Romania himself and then to give Romania a guarantee.

Several important effects flowed from the implementation of this decision to involve a reduced but German-guaranteed Romania in the intended German operation against Russia. The Romanians and Bulgarians came to an agreement in direct negotiations at Craiova, an agreement that was reaffirmed after World War II and defines the border
between the two countries today. The Hungarian-Romanian conversations, on the other hand, did not produce an agreement, so the German and Italian governments jointly drew a new border in the Vienna arbitration of August 30. They awarded a substantial portion of Transylvania to Hungary; not enough to satisfy Hungary but too much for Romania to become reconciled to.
^h
The Axis partners then guaranteed the new borders of Romania, a step certain to annoy the Soviet Union who saw this guarantee as directed against herself.
²⁶⁸

While in German eyes the promised defense of Romania was indeed directed against the Soviet Union, it was as a part of the planned invasion of the country–not as some special protection for Romania–that the guarantee must be understood. The Germans intended to occupy Romania, during August prepared to send military units there, and did dispatch the first ones in September 1940 so that they could prepare for the attack on Russia the followingyear.
²⁶⁹
When the Soviets, however, first demanded and then seized some Romanian islands in the Kilia channel of the Danube in October, Berlin declared itself disinterested.
²⁷⁰
These pieces of “guaranteed” Romania were obviously not needed for Germany’s future operations.

If the Soviet reaction to Germany’s assertion of predominance in the Balkans was a displeased growl, Italy reacted rather more vehemently. In the summer of 1940, Mussolini had hoped to be able to pull off a quick invasion of Yugoslavia and Greece. When the Italians checked about their plans with the Germans in early August, however, they received a prompt and firm veto. The Germans, who had just decided to settle the Hungarian-Romanian dispute in order to keep the Balkans quiet until they could use them as a basis for attacking the Soviet Union, certainly did not want Italy to initiate an upheaval in that portion of Europe.
²⁷¹

The German argument to Rome for holding back was not, however, honest. Instead of taking Mussolini into their confidence–probably for fear of immediate leaks from Rome–they merely stressed the supreme importance of keeping the Balkans quiet. When the Italians a few weeks later learned from the newspapers that German troops had been sent to Romania, they were livid. To Mussolini and Ciano it looked as if Germany had held them back so that Germany could move forward without regard for Italian interests in Southeast Europe. They accordingly decided that the next time Italy wanted to act in that part of Europe, they would tell the Germans afterwards and not beforehand. The Italian
adventure in Greece has to be seen in this context as one more outgrowth of Germany’s decision to move East.

Finally, the decision to attack the Soviet Union in the spring of 1941 also meant that there were several months available during which Germany could try to work out some new combinations in Western Europe if Britain did not leave the war. The German government would make a number of such efforts in the fall of 1940, and these will be described in the next chapter; but it must always be remembered that all these projects in the West, as well as the ones in the Mediterranean which grew out of Italy’s disasters in Greece and North Africa, were carried forward by the Germans under a self-imposed deadline. The clock was running for the next big land operation–to the East.
²⁷²

The spectacular events of April to September 1940 not only brought Germany temporary control of Central and West Europe but set the framework for the balance of the war. The British decided to fight on and to emphasize bombing as their main military contribution to the defeat of Germany. The United States began to confront the danger ahead and to build up the military and naval power needed in a world vastly more dangerous than its people had ever imagined, and quite possibly under a leader who would need an unprecedented third term to do so. The Japanese decided that their opportunity to seize Southeast Asia had come and that they would go to war with the United States rather than abandon that project. The Soviet Union hoped that peace would now be made while she reaped the benefits still to be gotten from her deal with Berlin. The German government still looked forward to its long-term ambition of world naval power but decided to realize its aims of seizing vast lands from the Soviet Union in the immediate future. The next five years of war would see the decisions made in the last months of its first year carried out.

^a
The French had ordered large numbers of planes from the U.S. only to have assembly shifted from Brest in Brittany to Casablanca with resultant delays. The main beneficiaries of the French orders came to be the British who took over their orders in the U.S., but 40 American fighters ended up on the French aircraft carrier
Béarn,
which spent the war at Martinique in the West Indies. See John M. Haight, Jr.,
American Aid to France
, 1938-1940 (New York: Atheneum, 1970), chap. 9. There is a useful survey of the air war in the Western campaign using recently opened French archives in Lee Kennet, “German Air Superiority in the
Westfeldzug,
1940,” in F.X.J. Homer and Larry Wilcox (eds.),
Germany and Europe in the Era of the Two World Wars: Essays in Honor of Oron James Hale
(Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1986), pp. 141-55. Key documents on the British air effort in PRO, AIR
8/287
.

^b
There have been attempts to explain Soviet policy in 1939–40 as one of reclaiming the 1914 border of Russia, but neither in the Polish nor the Romanian situation did Stalin pay attention to that line. The advocates of this explanation merely reveal their ignorance of European historical geography.

^c
As a boy in England at the time, I recall this comment being repeated by our school teachers in regard to the hunting rifles lent them by the headmaster for their service in the Home Guard.

^d
The Germans could also strike at Britain by air from bases in Norway, but distance as well as weather and supply problems combined to make this a lesser threat.

^e
The victor of the Battle of Britain, Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding, was promptly dismissed. The subject awaits a full scholarly investigation.

^f
According to the official
German
statistical annual, the
Statistische Jahrbuch für das Deutsche Reich
1941/42, there were almost 3,800,000 inhabitants of whom about 25,000 were assumed to be French settlers

^g
It should be noted that the British government was making contingency plans to occupy the Cape Verde Islands and the Azores if the Germans moved into Spain and Portugal. See Smyth,
British Policy and Franco’s Spain,
pp 139-54; C 8361/75/41, PRO, F0371/24511; C 7429/13/41, FO 371/24515.

^h
After World War II Romania received the ceded territory back; the nationality conflicts in the area continue to agitate both nations.

4

THE EXPANDING CONFLICT, 1940–1941

The months immediately following the great decisions of the summer of 1940 look like a time filled by a series of unrelated and unconnected events, ranging from diplomatic travels by Hitler as far as the border of Spain on the one side of the globe to a conflict between Thailand and French Indo-China on the other. In between there were struggles in the Balkans and Near East, anxious diplomatic activities by the Soviet Union, new initiatives by the United States, and fighting on and below the surface of the oceans. The time from the summer of 1940 to the summer of 1941 in Europe and from the summer of 1940 to the end of 1941 in the Pacific can best be understood if it is seen as the first working out of the choices made in July and August of 1940–as these implementations interact with each other and as they were affected by the independent initiatives of others, especially Italy.

One of the most fateful of those decisions of the summer of 1940, and one which drew others in its train, was the German decision to attack the Soviet Union. This project not only entailed a number of preparations by Germany but also established a time limit for other German initiatives. As will be seen, German moves in regard to Spain, Southeast Europe and the Mediterranean were very much affected by the recognition in Berlin that forces would be needed for the attack on the Soviet Union in the spring of 1941 and that major troop commitments elsewhere had to be brought to a conclusion by that time.
¹
Over and over again Hitler stressed the need to concentrate the nation’s striking forces for a particular blow, and the diversion of power over several theaters of war in the latter part of the War reflects the loss of German initiative in the conflict.

The military planning itself had begun in the summer of 1940. By the end of July, the decision had been made to attack in the spring of
1941 rather than in the fall of 1940. This new schedule made it possible for the Germans to develop the physical preparation of the logistic basis on the ground in the eastern reaches of German-occupied Europe as well as the theoretical preparations in the staffs of the army, the air force, the over-all high command, and eventually the navy over a period of several months. The physical effort ordered in August consisted of improving the railway and communication system in an area of limited rail and road networks and of building up supply stocks for the forthcoming operation.
^a
Since it was assumed that the whole campaign would be completed in the summer and early fall of 1941, no preparations were made for winter fighting–a lack that cost the Germans dearly when the fighting went very differently from their expectations.

The staff planning consisted of a number of alternative proposals, developed to some extent independently in the summer and fall of 1940 by different headquarters, eventually molded together primarily in the army general staff with considerable influence from Hitler personally, and issued in a general directive on December 18, 1940, with more detailed implementing military orders following in January of 1941.
²
Not entirely resolved in these plans were the main directions of offensives between the initial attack and the assumed final positions; there was, however, no argument over two concepts. These were that heavy initial blows would be struck in such a fashion as to cut off and destroy large Soviet forces in the area closest to the border in order to preclude their retreating to new lines in any systematic trading of space for time, and that the goal was a line roughly from Archangel on the Arctic Ocean in the north to Astrakhan on the Caspian Sea in the south. The experience, mobility, aggressiveness, and excellence of staff and equipment of the Germans were assumed to be sufficiently superior to the Red Army and air force to make it possible to complete this operation in two or three months. It was assumed that the Soviet system would collapse under the German hammer blows; and, as will be discussed subsequently, the Germans were so certain of victory in this, the easier of their campaigns as compared with the prior one in the West, that much attention in the staffs would be given in the weeks immediately before the attack to those operations which were to ensue upon its successful conclusion.