The Second World War (27 page)

These figures confirmed, if the evidence were needed, that Crete had been a catastrophe. It had entailed the loss of two formed divisions of troops, New Zealand, Australian and British, urgently needed to fight the burgeoning war in the desert against Rommel’s expeditionary force. It had also added unnecessarily to the roll of humiliation which Hitler had inflicted on the British Empire, most of all because both he and his enemies knew by what a narrow margin his parachutists had been rescued from defeat. Had Maleme not been abandoned on the second day, had Freyberg’s counter-attack been launched two days earlier, the parachutists would have been destroyed in their foothold, the island saved and the first definitive check to Hitler’s campaign of conquest imposed in a blaze of spectacular publicity. As it was, the German war machine had been seen once again to triumph, in a new and revolutionary form, in the very centre of Britain’s traditional strategic zone, and against a principal instrument of its overseas power, the Mediterranean Fleet.

Yet, not only with hindsight, Crete could also be seen as a highly ambiguous victory. ‘Hitler’, Student recorded, was ‘most displeased with the whole affair.’ On 20 July he told his parachute general, ‘Crete proves that the days of the paratroopers are over. The paratroop weapon depends upon surprise – the surprise factor has now gone.’ He had refused to allow the German propaganda machine to publicise the operation while it was in progress and he now set his face against mounting operations of the same type in the future. Crete had killed 4000 German soldiers, most from the 7th Parachute Division; nearly half the 1st Assault Regiment had died in action. Gericke, who had come across the dropping zone of its III Battalion on 23 May, was appalled by the evidence of what had befallen it. ‘Frightful was the sight that met our eyes. . . . Dead parachutists, still in their full equipment, hung suspended from the branches [of the olive trees] swinging gently in the light breeze – everywhere were the dead. Those who had succeeded in getting free from their harness had been shot down within a few strides and slain by the Cretan volunteers. From these corpses could be seen all too clearly what had happened within the first few minutes of the battle of Crete.’ Not only the men but the whole structure of the airborne force had suffered disastrously; 220 out of 600 transport aircraft had been destroyed, a material loss quite disproportionate to the material advantage gained. The seizure of Crete had not been and would not prove essential to German strategy; a successful attempt on Malta, desired by OKW, would by contrast have justified any loss suffered by its mounting. The occupation of Crete, moreover, would involve the Germans in a bitter anti-partisan campaign, their conduct of which would blacken their name and lay the foundations of a bitter hatred of them not erased in the island to this day.

The British and Americans, both energetically raising parachute divisions, drew from Crete a conclusion different from Hitler’s: that it was that particular form rather than the underlying principle of airborne operations which had proved unsound. In their great descents on Sicily, Normandy and Holland, they would eschew Student’s practice of launching parachutists directly on to an enemy position in favour of landing at a distance from the objective and then concentrating against it. In Sicily and Normandy they would also risk large-scale airborne offensives only in co-ordination with a major amphibious assault from the sea, thus distracting the enemy from a concerted response against the fragile military instruments of parachute and glider. In Sicily and Normandy this careful reinsurance was to justify itself. In Holland, in September 1944, when they abandoned caution and essayed a Crete-style assault of their own, the disaster which overtook Montgomery’s parachutists was to prove even more complete than that suffered by Student’s. In the broad if not the narrow sense, therefore, Hitler’s appreciation of Operation
Merkur
was correct: parachuting to war is essentially a dicing with death, in which the odds are loaded against the soldier who entrusts his life to silk and static line. There is a possibility that a combination of luck and judgement will deposit him and his comrades beyond the jaws of danger, enable them to assemble and allow formed airborne units to go forward to battle; but the probability is otherwise. Of the four great parachute endeavours of the Second World War, two – Sicily and Normandy – managed to evade the probabilities, two – Crete and Arnhem – did not. The demise of independent parachute forces since 1945 is the inevitable outcome of that unfavourable reckoning.

Even while the news of his flawed victory in Crete was reaching him, Hitler’s thoughts were engaged with events far away. Indeed, at the height of the battle he had been preoccupied with two quite unrelated matters: the abortive sortie of his ‘wonder’ battleship
Bismarck
into the North Atlantic and the flight on 10 May of his deputy, Rudolf Hess, bearing an unauthorised offer of peace to the British.
Bismarck
’s destruction on 27 May could be represented by his propaganda machine as a sort of epic; Hess’s crazed initiative – which puzzled the British quite as much as it mystified his fellow Nazis – continued to enrage Hitler for weeks and months afterwards. He had Goebbels describe it as the result of ‘hallucination’; but the defection struck him a personal blow. Hess was not only an ‘old fighter’ but his amanuensis, who had taken down
Mein Kampf
from dictation during their incarceration at Landsberg after the Munich
Putsch
of 1923; he was also a comrade-in-arms from the List Regiment, a society of ‘young Germans’ whose brotherhood during the First World War had brought Hitler the one truly fulfilling experience of his lonely and confused youth.

Memories of the sacrifice offered by the List Regiment in the
Kindermord bei Ypern
, perhaps aroused by Hess’s flight, must have put the devastation of 7th Parachute Division and the destruction of the 1st Assault Regiment into perspective. Hitler was himself the survivor of a massacre in 1914 even more extensive than the parachutists had suffered in May 1941. No other division of the Wehrmacht, in Poland, Norway, the Low Countries, France and the Balkans, had suffered losses approaching those of Student’s elite. However, not only were such losses commonplace by First World War standards; they also counted for little beside the strength which had accrued to the Wehrmacht since the war had begun. The Wehrmacht’s losses thus far in twenty-one months of war had, by the standards of twentieth-century bloodletting, been inconsiderable: in Poland 17,000 dead and missing; in Scandinavia 3600; in France and the Low Countries 45,000; in Yugoslavia 151; in Greece and Crete less than 5000. On the other hand, the strength of the German army had risen since September 1939 from 3,750,000 men to 5,000,000; the Luftwaffe numbered 1,700,000, including anti-aircraft (flak) and parachute troops; and the navy 400,000. The Nazi Party’s army, the Waffen-SS, had increased from 50,000 to 150,000 men. The most striking assertion of strength was in the army. On mobilisation for war in September 1939, the
Feldheer
(field army) had included 106 divisions, of which ten were armoured and six motorised; by June 1941, on the eve of Barbarossa, the roll had increased to 180 infantry, 12 motorised and 20 Panzer divisions. The multiplication of armoured formations had been achieved by halving the number of tanks each contained. For all that, the German army, with the airfleets which supported it, was not only larger but disproportionately stronger in every way – in weapons, in reserves, above all in operational skill – than in 1939. Hitler’s rearmament programme of 1935-9 had merely lent military weight to his adventures in foreign policy; his war-making had permeated the whole of German society. One German male in four was now in uniform; most had directly experienced victory, had trodden the soil of occupied territory and had seen soldiers of the victor nations of 1918 taken into captivity. The red-white-black and swastika flag had been raised ‘from the Meuse to the Memel, from the Belt to the Adige’, as the national anthem proclaimed it should fly, and German soldiers now stood ready to carry it even deeper into the zone of conquest Hitler had worked out as his own: into Stalin’s Russia.

The Balkan campaign, often depicted by historians as an unwelcome diversion from Hitler’s long-laid plan to attack the Soviet Union and as a disabling interruption of the timetable he had marked out for its inception, had been in fact no such thing. It had been successfully concluded even more rapidly than his professional military advisers could have anticipated; while the choice of D-Day for Barbarossa had always depended not on the sequence of contingent events but on the weather and objective military factors. The German army found it more difficult than expected to position the units allocated for Barbarossa in Poland; while the lateness of the spring thaw, which left the eastern European rivers in spate beyond the predicted date, meant that Barbarossa could not have been begun very much earlier than the third week of June, whatever Hitler’s intentions.

The outlook for Barbarossa nevertheless rested on German over-optimism. ‘Massive frontier battles to be expected; duration up to four weeks,’ Brauchitsch had written at the end of April 1941, ‘but in further development only minor resistance is then still to be reckoned with.’ Hitler was more emphatic. ‘You have only to kick in the door,’ he told Rundstedt, commanding Army Group South, on the eve of Barbarossa, ‘and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down.’ Hitler’s prognosis was in part ideologically determined; he was committed to a view of Soviet Russia which represented its citizens as the crushed and brutish creatures of a Bolshevik tyrant, 200 million Calibans quailing under the eye of a Prospero corrupted by absolute power. There was irony in this mirror image. But Hitler’s belief that Soviet communism had a hollow centre was supported not only by prejudice but also by realities: in 1939 the giant Red Army had performed lamentably against minuscule Finland; and that humiliation was explained in turn by the massacre of its senior officers – far more complete than any war could have inflicted – instituted by Stalin in 1937-8.

In extension of his purge of the party and secret police (NKVD), which had assured his political primacy, Stalin had then accused, tried, convicted and executed for treachery over half the senior commanders of the Red Army. The first to go was Tukhachevsky, his chief of staff, the leading representative of that group of former tsarist officers who had convincingly turned coat during the Civil War of 1918-20 and thereafter provided the army with the professional leadership of which it was in such dire need in the era of post-war reconstruction. He had given firm evidence of his commitment to the new Russia. It was he who had led the offensive against Warsaw in 1920 and put down the Kronstadt rising of 1921. He had also pioneered the creation of the army’s tank arm and the organisation of the large mechanised corps whose existence had by 1935 put the Red Army at the very forefront of modern military development. Perhaps because of his very strategic radicalism, he was singled out for extinction at the outset of the military purge and shot, with seven other generals, on 11 June 1937.

The shootings thereafter were to proceed apace. By the autumn of 1938 three out of five of the Red Army’s marshals were dead, thirteen out of fifteen army commanders, 110 out of 195 divisional commanders and 186 out of 406 brigadiers. The massacre of those in administrative and politico-military appointments was even more extensive: all eleven deputy commissars for defence were shot, seventy-five out of eighty members of the Military Soviet, and all military district commanders, together with most of their chiefs of political administration – those party commissars whose function was to ensure that soldiers should not take decisions or commitments which might attract the disfavour of the party.

It was difficult to detect any pattern in Stalin’s bloodlust. The purge certainly exterminated many of the ex-tsarists who had thrown in their lot with the Bolsheviks after 1917; yet it did not spare the chief of staff, Yegorov, whose proletarian credentials were impeccable, who was replaced by Shaposhnikov, a graduate of the Imperial General Staff College. Nor was it the case that commanders suffered worse than commissars, since the ‘politicals’ were executed in even greater numbers than the ‘soldiers’. If there was a clue to Stalin’s murderous motives, it seemed to lie in the history of personal rancours and alliances formed during the Civil War. Just as the principal victims of the party purge were those who had opposed or not assisted Stalin’s aggrandisement of his role as First Secretary after Lenin’s death, so the principal victims of the military purge were those who had been identified with Leon Trotsky’s command of the Red Army in its struggle with the Whites. The anti-Trotsky faction had been centred on the First Cavalry Army, commanded by S. M. Budenny and K. E. Voroshilov, which had recalcitrantly conducted its own strategy during the struggle against the Whites in South Russia where Stalin was political commissar, in 1918-19, and signally failed to assist Tukhachevsky in the abortive advance on Warsaw in 1920. The First Cavalry Army had been an aberrant element in Trotsky’s – and Tukhachevsky’s – anti-White war; but it had been the military instrument associated with Stalin’s early struggle against Trotsky, and its old comrades, in the years of his triumph, therefore stood high in his favour. The four men whom the purge elevated to high place in the Soviet military command after the purge, Budenny, S. K. Timoshenko, L. Z. Mekhlis, G. I. Kulik, were all First Cavalry Army officers and veterans of the southern Russian campaign. Voroshilov, already Defence Commissar before 1937 but much enhanced in power by Tukhachevsky’s fall, was also a First Cavalry Army man.

Their advancement was not to Russia’s military advantage. Budenny had a fine moustache but no military brain. Mekhlis, the chief commissar, seemed, in Professor John Erickson’s words, to have ‘combined a monumental incompetence with a fierce detestation of the officer corps’. Timoshenko was at least competent, but a political rather than a military commander. Kulik, head of ordnance, was a technological reactionary who opposed the distribution of automatic weapons to soldiers on the grounds that they were incapable of handling them and halted the production of anti-tank and anti-aircraft guns. Voroshilov was worst of all; in 1934, apparently for no better reason than Tukhachevsky’s advocacy of the independent armoured force, he argued: ‘It is almost axiomatic that such a powerful force as the tank corps is a very far-fetched idea and we should therefore have nothing to do with it.’ Immediately after Tukhachevsky’s removal, he abolished all tank formations larger than a brigade.