Winds of War (100 page)

The Grand Strategy Picture

Hitler’s world view was Hegelian. Nations, empires cultures, all have their season in history, the great Hegel taught us. They come, and they go. Not one is permanent but in each age one dominates and gives the theme. In this succession of world dominions, we recognize the evolving well of the God of history, the World Spirit. God therefore expresses and reveals himself in the will of those world-historical individuals, like Caesar, Alexander, and Napoleon, who lead their states to world empire. Conventional morality cannot apply to the deeds of such men, for it is they who create the new modes and themes of morality in each age.

This Hegelian world view is, of course, at the other pole from the petit bourgeois morality which expects great nations to behave like well-brought-up young ladies in a finishing school, and would hold a mighty armed people no different, in the rules applicable to its conduct, than some pale shoe clerk. The big bourgeois powers like France, England, and America built their strength and expanded their territory by actions indistinguishable from armed robbery. Having achieved their “manifest destiny,” they found it easy, of course, to scold a young vigorous Germany seeking to play its world role in turn. Adolf Hitler was not, however, a personality much impressed by such preachments.

In his program, the attack on Russia was the doorway through which Germany would enter world dominion. Russia was our India, to be conquered and exploited in British style. Germany had the will, the strength, the sense of destiny. She lacked only the food, the living space, and the petroleum. These things she had to take. Hitler’s view was that once rule of the European continent was firmly in Germany’s grasp, the Anglo-Saxon sea powers would perforce change their governments, choosing politicians who could get along with the new German world imperium.

The Center of Gravity

Clausewitz says, “We may . . . establish it as a principle that if we conquer all our enemies by conquering one of them, the defeat of that one must be the aim of the war, because in that one we hit the common center of gravity of the whole war.”

The attack on Russia, which aimed for control of the central landmass of the earth with its limitless manpower and natural resources, was the true strike at the center of gravity.

Much specious argument is offered that England was “really” the center of gravity, because she could raise another coalition to combat Germany. This is the writing of men obsessed by Napoleonic analogies. England was neutralized, and virtually out of the war, in the spring of 1941, except for the minor nuisance of her air raids. She no longer ruled the seas. Japan and America both surpassed her. They presented no immediate problem to Germany, though a reckoning with the United States always lay in the future.

If militarily England was through, why was she not surrendering? Obviously, because she hoped for deliverance from the Soviet Union, or the United States, or both. America was far off and almost unarmed. Russia, on the other hand, was rapidly rearming, at our very borders, and openly threatening the lifeblood of Germany at Ploesti. True, she was attempting to mollify us, in the usual crude fashion of Russian diplomacy, by sending wheat and oil; but in return she was receiving machinery for arming herself against us. To be dependent for long in this fashion on Stalin was intolerable.

Our bid for world empire was always a race against time. Germany was much smaller than its two great rivals, the Soviet Union and the United States of America. Its advantage lay only in its unity of purpose, its discipline, and the forceful leadership of Hitler. By 1941 it was clear that Franklin Roosevelt intended to get into the battle as soon as he could convert his industries to war, and delude his unwilling countrymen into following him; and it was equally clear that Stalin was only seeking a safe cowardly way to cut Germany’s throat at Ploesti. Hitler put the case plainly in frank and eloquent letter to Mussolini, on the eve of June 22: “Soviet Russian and England are equally interested in a Europe . . . rendered prostrate by a long war. . . . Behind these two countries stands the North American Union, goading them on. . . . I have therefore, after constantly racking my brains, finally reached the conclusion to cut the noose before it can be drawn tight.”

Was Barbarossa Sound?

The argument that Hitler should have finished off England first has no realistic basis.

Hitler resembled Caesar in his determination to take, where it could be found, the lands and the resources his nation wanted. He was like Alexander in his broad vision of a new peaceful world order. But in his strategy he was Napoleonic, for like Napoleon his central problem was that he was surrounded by enemies. The Napoleonic solution was to use speed, energy, surprise, and extreme concentration of his forces at the attack point, in order to knock off his foes one at a time. This was what Hitler did. He always had a brilliant, if somewhat adventurous, sense of grand strategy; only his dilettantish interference in tactical operations, and his inability to be soldierly in the clutch, were ruinous.

In May of 1940 he had allotted a mere two dozen divisions in the east to confront the more than two hundred divisions of the Red Army, while he finished France and drove the disarmed British remnant off the continent. It was a fantastic gamble, but a perspicacious one. Stalin, who might have taken Berlin, proved only too happy to let Germany destroy France, while he grabbed land in the Baltic and the Balkans.

In 1941 the Soviet Union had grown much stronger. It had moved within a hundred miles of Ploesti. It had gained control of the Baltic Sea. It massed on its borders, confronting Germany and its conquered Polish territory, more than three million soldiers. And it was demanding a free hand in the Dardanelles, Bulgaria, and Finland. These demands, brought by Molotov in November 1940, were the last straw.

Hitler felt he really had only three choices. He could shoot himself, leaving the German people to negotiate a surrender; he could attempt the inconclusive task of subjugating England with the carnage of a Channel crossing, opening himself meantime to a treacherous assault from the east; or he could ignore neutralized, prostrate England, and attempt to realize this entire historic aim, in the hour of his greatest strength, in one devastating blow. Barbarossa was the solution: a one-front Napoleonic thrust, not the opening of a true two-front war.

Unprejudiced military historians of the future will never be able to fault Hitler for turning east. From the start he was playing against odds. He lost his well-calculated risk through a combination of operational errors and misfortunes, and the historic accident that at this hour he was opposed by a ruthless, spidery genius of the same mettle – Franklin Roosevelt.

The Role of Roosevelt

Roosevelt’s essential problem in 1941 was timing. He was playing from temporary weakness against an opponent playing from top strength. The weakness of the American President was both internal and external. Where the German people were united behind their leader, the American people, confused and nonplussed by Roosevelt’s supercilious and untrustworthy personality, were divided. Where Hitler disposed of the greatest armed forces on earth, at the peak of strength and fighting trim, Roosevelt had no Army, no Air Force, and a dispersed, ill-trained Navy. How then could the American President bring any weight to bear?

Yet he did it. He was well trained in the devices of impotence, having won the presidency in a wheelchair.

The first thing he had to do was strengthen Churchill’s hand. Only Churchill, the amateur military adventurer with his obsessive hatred of Hitler, would keep England in the war. Churchill was having a wonderful time playing general and admiral, as his memoirs relate. However, under his leadership the Empire was going down the drain. England’s one chance to save it lay in getting rid of its grand-talking Prime Minister, and electing a responsible politician to make peace with Germany. Had this occurred, the present world map would look unguessably different., but the pink areas of the British Empire would still stretch around the globe. Roosevelt’s masterstroke of Lend-Lease kept Churchill in power. The Americans sent the British precious little in 1941. But Lend-Lease gave this brave, beaten people hope, and wars are fought with hope.

Hope was also the main commodity Franklin Roosevelt sent the Soviet Union in 1941, though supplies started to trickle through in November in December.

Stalin knew the gargantuan industrial potential of America. That knowledge, and Roosevelt’s pledges of help, stiffened him to fight. He sensed that while Roosevelt would never sacrifice much American blood to save the Soviet Union, he would probably send the Russians all kinds of arms, so that Slav bravery and self-sacrifice could fight the American battle for world hegemony.

The Convoy Decision

Roosevelt’s instinct for subtle and breathtaking chicanery on a world scale was never better displayed than in his conduct on the question of the Atlantic convoys.

Most Americans were indifferent to the European war in May 1941. The soundest people were against intervening. Roosevelt managed to find an unpleasant name for them: “isolationists.” However, in the circles around him, his sycophants kept urging him to initiate convoying of American ships to England. Indeed, it made very little sense to keep loading up English ships, only to have America’s food and arms go to the ocean bottom.

Roosevelt obstinately refused to convoy. He had already received intelligence of the coming attack on Russia. In fact the whole world seemed to know it was coming, except Stalin. The last thing he wanted to do was interfere. He saw in it the inevitable slaughter of vast numbers of Germans. This prospect warmed his heart.

But an outbreak of war in the Atlantic could have halted Barbarossa. Hitler could have countermanded the orders until dawn on June 22. An order to stand down from Barbarossa would have been obeyed with great relief by the German General Staff.

Franklin Roosevelt understood what not too many other politicians of the time could grasp – that even Hitler in the last analysis depended on public opinion. The German people were not ready to commit plain suicide. News of war with the United States would have taken all the spiritual steam out of the drive on Russia. The German public had no understanding of America’s military weakness. Despite Goebbels’s propaganda, they remembered only that America’s entry into the last war had spelled defeat.

Roosevelt was ready for war with Germany, he ardently desired it, but not until we were embroiled with the tough gigantic hordes of Stalin. So he kept his own counsel, put off his advisers, and kept twisting and turning under the probes of the press about convoying. His one course to ensure war between Germany and Russia was to hold off the convoying decision. That was what he did. He baffled and dismayed everybody around him, including his own wife. But he gained his grisly aim on June 22, when Hitler turned east.

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TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: Roon’s defense of Barbarossa is unusual; most other Germany military writers do condemn it as the fatal opening of a two-front war. It seems Roon either played a part in designing the operation, or that the plan submitted by the Army Staff agreed with his own study made at Supreme Headquarters. Every man cherishes his own ideas, particularly military men.

The argument about the key role of the Ploesti oil fields is not emphasized in many other military histories. Hitler began planning to attack Russia as far back as July 1941. The nonaggression pact was then less than a year old, and Stalin was punctiliously delivering vast quantities of war materials, including oil, to Germany. Hitler’s act does look a bit like bad faith, if faith can be said to exist between two master criminals. The usual extenuation in German writings is that the soviet troop buildups showed Stalin’s intent to attack, and that Hitler merely forestalled him. But most German historians now concede that the Russian buildup was defensive. Hitler always regarded the attack on Russia to gain Lebensraum as his chief policy. It was natural for him to start planning it in July 1940, when his huge land armies were at maximum strength, with no other place to go. This was the big picture, and the oil supply problem may have been a detail. Nevertheless, Roon’s discussion illuminates Hitler’s problems. –V.H.

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Chapter 45

June 22, 1941.

The players in our drama were now scattered around the earth. Their stage had become the planet, turning in the solar spotlight that illumined half the scene at a time, and that moved always from east to west.

At the first paling of dawn, six hundred miles to the west of Moscow, at exactly 3:15
A.M
. by myriads of German wristwatches, German cannon began to flash and roar along a line a thousand miles long, from the icy Baltic to the warm Black Sea. At the same moment fleets of German planes, which had taken off some time earlier, crossed the borders and started bombing Soviet airfields, smashing up aircraft on the ground by the hundreds. The morning stars still twinkled over the roads, the rail lines, and the fragrant fields, when the armored columns and infantry divisions - multitudes upon multitudes of young healthy helmeted Teutons in gray battle rig - came rolling or walking toward the orange-streaked dark east, on the flat Polish plains that stretched toward Moscow, Leningrad, and Kiev.

A sad and shaken German ambassador told Foreign Minister Molotov in Moscow, shortly after sunrise, that since Russia was obviously about to attack Germany, the Leader had wisely ordered the Wehrmacht to strike first in self-defense. The oval gray slab of Molotov’s face, we are told, showed a very rare emotion - surprise. History also records that Molotov said, “Did we deserve this?” The German ambassador, his message delivered, slunk out of the room. He had worked all his life to restore the spirit of Rapallo, the firm alliance of Russia and Germany. Eventually Hitler had him shot.