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Порталус

German Invasion of the Soviet Union, 1941

Дата публикации: 13 сентября 2007
Публикатор: Научная библиотека Порталус
Рубрика: RUSSIA (TOPICS) - Soviet Russia (1917-53) →
Источник: (c) http://russia.by
Номер публикации: №1189693095


Was it prudent for Germany to invade the Soviet Union in 1941?

Viewpoint: Yes, Germany invaded the Soviet Union when it did because the Soviet military leadership had been gutted; the Red Army was stunned by its losses in Finland; the Wehrmacht was at its zenith; and Joseph Stalin continued to believe in the Russo-German non-aggression pact of 1939.

Viewpoint: No, Adolf Hitler should have sent more forces to North Africa in 1941 and invaded the Middle East, providing his army with much-needed oil before attacking the Soviet Union.

___________________________

Russia proved for Adolf Hitler what Spain was for Napoleon Bonaparte between 1808 and 1813--a running sore that drained resources and gave nothing back. Whether Operation Barbarossa was the legitimate strategic option or an ideologically motivated exercise in genocide, the question remains whether Hitler would have been better advised to explore a Middle Eastern option. Hitler's trans-Atlantic ambitions depended on eventually acquiring bases on the North African coast. If Britain could not be directly invaded, then perhaps cutting its Mediterranean "lifeline" might bring the island empire to reason. More concretely, given what field marshal Erwin Rommel achieved in North Africa with Germany's military leftovers, the consequences of adding even a half dozen mobile divisions to his order of battle continues to engage war gamers and counterfactualists.
Analyzed at closer range, the Mediterranean scenario had significant drawbacks as well as inviting possibilities. Diplomatically, it involved balancing the claims and ambitions of Italy, Spain, and Vichy France--a task that proved well beyond the capacities of the Führer and his officials. Spain refused to participate without guaranteed compensation from France's colonial empire--on which Benito Mussolini also had designs. France was determined to maintain its position in North Africa. The resulting imbroglios were never resolved--only put on the back burner when Hitler turned toward Russia.
In specific military terms, committing significantly larger German forces to the Mediterranean in 1940-1941 would have created logistical problems that might well have proved insoluble given the shortcomings of the Italian navy. An expanded Afrika Korps (Africa Corps) that was kept supplied might reasonably be assumed capable of inflicting a decisive theater-level defeat on the British whether Rommel was in command or that post was assumed by a more senior panzer general--by no means improbable in the context of Barbarossa's postponement. What would happen, however, after a victory parade through Cairo? Britain had already proved able to survive losing control of the Mediterranean. Palestine and Iraq could offer no more than token resistance. What impact would such a run of victories have on the policies of Russia and the United States? Might the matériel costs of an expanded Mediterranean campaign--particularly tanks and aircraft--have significantly reduced already thin replacement margins? Like the steppe, the desert might have given nothing back, or it might have been a road to Axis victory.



Viewpoint: Yes, Germany invaded the Soviet Union when it did because the Soviet military leadership had been gutted; the Red Army was stunned by its losses in Finland; the Wehrmacht was at its zenith; and Joseph Stalin continued to believe in the Russo-German nonaggression pact of 1939.

If Germany's plans to create Lebensraum (living space) for Germans in the east made an invasion of the Soviet Union inevitable, then the summer of 1941 represented the perfect time to attack. In June 1941 the Soviet military was still reeling from its recent debacle in Finland and, as a result, found itself without allies. The Soviets also had to station considerable forces in Asia to guard against a possible attack from their eastern rival, Japan. Furthermore, the Soviets placed too much faith in a series of agreements, collectively known as the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact (1939), to keep peace between Germany and Russia into 1942 or perhaps even 1943. As a result, the Soviet military was caught completely by surprise by the German attack, code-named Operation Barbarossa, on the morning of 22 June 1941.

Amazing German successes in the early weeks and months of Operation Barbarossa prove the utility of attacking when the Germans did. The Soviet Air Force lost 1,200 planes (one-quarter of its front-line strength) on the first day of the campaign; it lost 1,800 more in the next four days. In the first week German Army Group Center alone captured 324,000 Russians along with 3,300 tanks. By mid July it had taken another three hundred thousand prisoners and three thousand more tanks. Darker days were ahead for the Wehrmacht (German Army), but the seemingly incredible successes of June and July led General Franz Halder, chief of the Ober-Kommando der Wehrmacht (OKW, German General Staff) to write in his diary "It is, therefore, truly not claiming too much when I assert that the campaign against Russia has been won in fourteen days."

Why had the Russians been caught so badly off guard? German antagonism against the Soviets was no secret. Anyone who had read Hitler's Mein Kampf (My Struggle, 1925-1927), where he wrote of a war of annihilation against Slavic and Bolshevik Russia, or took a careful look at a map of eastern Europe, could readily see that German and Russian interests were in conflict. Why then were the Red Army and Air Force so terribly unprepared for the German invasion? The first part of the answer lies in the Great Purges that Joseph Stalin undertook in his own military in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Stalin mistrusted the ideological commitment of the Red Army's officer corps, and therefore sought to remove those officers whose politics he doubted, regardless of their military abilities.

The Great Purges removed 36,671 officers including 403 of Russia's 706 brigade commanders, three of five marshals, all eleven deputy defense commissioners, and sixty of sixty-seven corps commanders. At one point three successive commanders of the Soviet Air Force fell victim. Only 15 percent of purged officers ever returned to service; most were executed. These purges continued up to the eve of the German invasion. The Great Purges thus wiped out an entire generation of Russian military and intelligence leaders, and created tremendous instability inside the armed forces. Those who remained had to command in an atmosphere of constant fear and suspicion. The purges also touched civilians in key areas. Dozens of aircraft designers were purged for "sabotage" when experimental aircraft crashed, hampering Soviet efforts to gain an upper hand in aircraft design.

The purges also help to explain Russian embarrassment in the "Winter War" against Finland (30 November 1939-12 March 1940). Finland had achieved independence from Russia in 1917; the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact placed it inside the Soviet sphere of influence, and Stalin was determined to get it back. The Red Army committed 1,000,000 men and 1,000 planes against a 175,000-man Finnish army supported by fewer than 400, mostly obsolete, planes. Stalin seriously misjudged the Finns, who put up a fierce resistance and aroused the sympathy of the Western Allies (Britain and France) and the United States. Nevertheless, the Finns could not overcome Soviet numbers. By the end of March 1940, Finland had surrendered, but the Russians lost two hundred thousand men to Finland's twenty-five thousand.

Stalin's Finnish fiasco went a long way toward convincing the German high command that a quick victory against the Soviet Union was not only possible, but likely. According to David M. Glantz and Jonathan M. House in When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler (1995), the Soviets looked "hurried and amateurish" in Finland. They note that "everything possible went wrong." Soviet tactics were predictable and unimaginative. Inside the U.S.S.R., a new round of purges removed dozens more senior officers. In June 1941, 75 percent of Soviet officers had been in their current positions less than one year and the General Staff had gone through three different chiefs in the preceding eight months. The Soviets also reintroduced the cumbersome commissar system, which divided decision-making authority between military and party officials.

The Winter War also exacerbated the U.S.S.R.'s already tense relations with Britain and France. As a result of the invasion the League of Nations took the mostly symbolic step (its last, as it turned out) of expelling the Soviet Union. Britain and France saw the Winter War as further proof of their fears of growing links between Stalin and Hitler; they risked war with Stalin by supplying the Finns through Arctic convoys. The Russians were now completely without allies.

The Germans took advantage of Russian diplomatic isolation. Finland, seething for revenge, contributed 500,000 men to the German invasion and Romania, from whom Stalin had taken the Bessarabia region in 1940, fatefully contributed another 250,000. "When it's a question of action against the Slavs," Romanian prime minister Marshal Ion Antonescu told Hitler, "you can always count on the Romanians." Both the Finns and Romanians would later turn on the Germans, but in the summer of 1941 their cooperation meant an additional seventy-five divisions for Barbarossa.

The German military, in stark contrast to the Russian, sat at the height of its power. It had conquered Czechoslovakia, western Poland, Norway, Yugoslavia, Greece, Crete, the Low Countries, and, most remarkably, France, all with light casualties. German commanders believed that their faith in armor and Blitzkrieg (Lightning War) had been vindicated. The vast and featureless Russian steppes, many thought, would be ideal tank country. Germany had 3,500 tanks ready for the invasion. Unlike Russian tanks, the German Panzers were connected by radio to other combat arms and experienced in conducting successful combined operations. The supreme confidence of the Wehrmacht led to a belief that the incompetent Russians, humiliated by the Finns, would be little more than the next in a long line of victims.

The Germans also benefited from the threat posed to Russia by Japan, a cosignatory of the Anti-Comintern (Communist International) Pact of 1936. Relations between the Soviet Union and Japan had been tense since Japan soundly defeated Russia in the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905). Soviet and Japanese troops clashed again (with thirty thousand combined dead) in 1939 as Japanese influence in Manchuria continued to grow. A truce in April 1941 eased tensions, but the threat of a Japanese attack remained a distinct possibility until the Japanese struck Pearl Harbor in December. The summer of 1941, as rising tensions between Japan and the United States increasingly turned Japanese attentions away from Russia, therefore represented a final chance for Germany to take advantage of the Japanese threat to eastern Russia.

While Hitler counted on military and diplomatic help from Finland, Romania, and Japan, Stalin erroneously counted on his pact with Hitler to maintain peace. For many years after the war Soviet historians argued that Stalin signed the pact to buy time to prepare his nation to fight Germany. Few historians make that argument today. Stalin made remarkably few preparations for war with Germany, even as tensions between the two nations increased throughout early 1941. In order to appear nonthreatening, Stalin forbade frontier military districts from taking, in the words of Glantz and House, "measures vital for their own survival." The Soviets arrayed their forces in a line across the frontier instead of concentrating them in areas of greatest military utility. Stalin also ordered his air force not to respond as German planes flew three hundred reconnaissance missions over Soviet lines.

Stalin believed that the Germans were using troop buildups in the east to cover Hitler's next step, an invasion of England. As such, he refused to believe British intelligence reports, as well as a report from a communist agent in Japan, that an invasion of Russia was imminent. The Soviets were not yet willing to trust the British, nor for that matter their own intelligence, and were thus blind to German ambitions. Stalin's fear of a war with Germany even led him to continue grain and mineral shipments to Germany up to the morning of the invasion. The German strike hit Russia at precisely the right time.

The Germans made many mistakes in their campaign against Russia, but timing was not among them. The summer of 1941 represented Germany's best chance to achieve total surprise. If anything, Germany waited too long to strike. An attack earlier in the summer might have given the Wehrmacht enough additional time to capture Russian cities before the onset of the dreaded Russian winter. In the words of Glantz and House, Operation Barbarossa caught the Russians "poorly arrayed, trained and equipped." Soviet leadership, paralyzed by purges, could not make up the difference. Only the tremendous sacrifices of the Soviet people achieved that end and defeated the German invaders.

-- Michael S. Neiberg, U.S. Air Force Academy, Colorado


Viewpoint: No, Adolf Hitler should have sent more forces to North Africa in 1941 and invaded the Middle East, providing his army with much-needed oil before attacking the Soviet Union.

Prudence is not a virtue normally associated with Adolf Hitler. Nor did he decide to invade the Soviet Union in June 1941 after cautious or judicious contemplation of the project. Hitler's prejudices convinced him that a German attack on the "Judaeo-Bolshevik" state would bring it crashing down in weeks. However, even the Führer's army planners estimated that five months at most would be needed to destroy the Red Army. Hitler, nonetheless, hardly wished for a campaign doomed to failure, but factors pointed in that direction prior to the start of Operation Barbarossa.

By January 1941 the Oberkommando des Heeres (OKH, German army high command) knew that the automobile industry would produce only two-thirds of the vehicles stipulated for delivery by that spring. Even the extensive use of trucks captured from 1939 to 1941 still left the army 2,700 trucks short of its needs for Barbarossa. Given the difficulties in providing feed for the 600,000-750,000 horses assembled for the campaign, the shortages and multiplicity of vehicles in the German army presaged problems. As the Wehrmacht (German Army) moved east, it could easily be foreseen that increasing numbers of trucks would break down, that providing parts for many different models would grow ever more difficult, and that feed, fodder, and grass for horses would diminish with increasing mud, cold, and snow. These challenges strongly suggested delay of Barbarossa until 1942, while large numbers of uniform-model vehicles and spare parts were manufactured.

While the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW, German General Staff) would assemble nearly 3,700 armored fighting vehicles for the 1941 campaign, most were obsolete German or reconditioned Czech models. Of the armored fighting vehicles dedicated to Barbarossa, less than 20 percent were modern: 440 new Panzerkampfwagen (PzKw) IV tanks and 250 Sturmgeschütze assault guns. Hitler had ordered all PzKw III tanks upgraded from a short 37mm to a long-barreled 50mm gun. To his rage, however, the Führer later discovered that the army ordnance office had ignored his directive and the 965 PzKw IIIs assigned to the Eastern Front went to war with inadequate firepower. By June 1941 most German vehicles had been subjected to severe stress in two or three major campaigns since September 1939. Delaying Barbarossa until 1942 would have allowed delivery of 4,300 new, more powerful tanks and self-propelled guns, as well as a thousand improved PzKw IIIs. Finally, unlike the Panther tank, development of the powerful Tiger began before encounters with Soviet armor in 1941. Sufficient Tigers for two or three battalions would have been combat-ready by the fall of 1942, enough to have a small but perhaps significant influence on a postponed Operation Barbarossa.

In May 1940-June 1941, the Luftwaffe (German Air Force) suffered heavy losses over France, Britain, and Crete. As a result, although the OKW was to launch an offensive over a far larger area than it had previously, German aircraft strength for Barbarossa was no greater than at the start of the Western campaign in May 1940: some 2,800 planes were available, of which many were in serious need of repair. Given the far greater need for air transport, reconnaissance, and ground-attack missions over the vast spaces of Russia and Ukraine, such weakness counseled delay in the German attack. Germany produced some 11,800 military aircraft in 1941 but 15,600 the following year. With no heavy aircraft losses from Barbarossa in 1941 and 4,000 additional aircraft received in 1942, the Luftwaffe would have been far better prepared if the invasion had been postponed for a year.

Unusually heavy rains in March and April 1941 caused severe flooding in eastern Europe, forcing the postponement of the invasion from 15 May to 22 June. Unlike Hitler's optimistic forecasts, OKH estimated the campaign would last at least until late October, possibly even early December. Autumn rains would bring the rasputitza mud in September, turning the dirt roads of the Soviet Union into glutinous rivers. Six weeks or so after that, the ferocious Russian winter would begin. The actual weather conditions of spring 1942 would have allowed Barbarossa's initiation five to seven weeks earlier.

What most undermined the success of Barbarossa were petroleum shortages. These not only helped prevent the Wehrmacht from reaching its Arkhangel'sk-to-Astrakhan-line objective. They left German forces crippled by oil shortages and stranded deep in enemy territory during the brutal winter and paralyzing spring thaw. Hitler's perverse but effective orders against retreat helped salvage the German position on the Eastern Front. Afterward, ingenuity and efficiency allowed the Wehrmacht to operate effectively until late 1944 with oil derived from synthetic manufacture, Romania and the small fields in Austria, Poland, the Baltic states, Hungary, and Albania. But the low point of Axis fuel supplies occurred in November-December 1941, precisely when the Germans most needed fuel to reach Moscow and, failing that, to maneuver during the subsequent Soviet winter counteroffensive. Lack of oil also severely reduced German synthetic rubber production for tire manufacture. Huge sources of oil, however, lay relatively close at hand to the Germans in the spring of 1941. If they had captured them that summer and fall, they would have been far better prepared to invade the Soviet Union in 1942.

Suppose all this information had persuaded Hitler to delay Barbarossa. He could not and his enemies would not have remained inactive. What might have been the possibilities for a strategy leading to a 1942 invasion of Russia? Since Hitler's objectives would still have been the defeat of Britain and destruction of the Soviet Union, the situation in the period of November 1940-March 1941 points toward a variant of the Mediterranean strategy advocated by Admiral Erich Raeder.

With hindsight, it seems such a successful strategy would have required three major elements: capture of Gibraltar, acquisition of bases in Morocco and French West Africa and/or on the Spanish Atlantic coast and the Canaries, and possibly invasion of Portugal and its Atlantic islands; contested or uncontested advances through Turkey to the southwest border of the Soviet Union, along the eastern Mediterranean coast to Suez and across Iraq to the Persian Gulf; and relief of Italian forces in Libya, followed by a counteroffensive to the Nile. Of these, the third operation would have been least significant. If successful, all three would have improved vastly OKW ability to wage the Battle of the Atlantic and gain Mediterranean dominance. They also would have allowed seizure of the Middle East oil fields, while denying their production to Britain, and to position German forces to capture the Soviet Caucasus oil fields in mid 1942.

Such campaigns might have begun with a January 1941 attack on Gibraltar. Obviously, Spanish cooperation would have been highly desirable. Still, if the Spanish had resisted, the weak Spanish armed forces could not have effectively resisted a blitzkrieg across the Iberian peninsula. Madrid's acquiescence would have brought serious consequences in Vichy France and Rome, if bought with guarantees for Spain of African territory that the French wanted to retain, but that the Italians were determined to gain. Given their weakness at the time, it would have been relatively easy to placate the Italians, especially with the promise of British territory in the Mediterranean, the Middle East, and Africa. Satisfying both the French and Spanish would have been more difficult, given Madrid's insistence on obtaining French Morocco and western Algeria. Various and sufficient inducements, however, lay at Hitler's disposal: the return of French prisoners of war, partial evacuation of German-occupied France, and guarantees of Belgian Wallonia, French Switzerland, and the Channel Islands, combined with firm offers of British West Africa and the northern Belgian Congo. Even the implementation of German and Italian plans to create huge African empires would have left plenty to throw to the jackals.

Of course, the British would have not remained inert following any German activity against Gibraltar and their intelligence would have alerted them to many details of Axis plans. German moves into the Atlantic in 1941 would almost certainly have prompted American counteractions, too. Probably the Germans only could have sustained a landing on the Canaries and that action, as Raeder argued, would have succeeded only before the Gibraltar operation. The Germans almost certainly could have gained bases along the Iberian coast and as far south in Africa as Dakar. These would have allowed the OKW to direct far more effective attacks on Britain's maritime lifelines and begun the process of driving the Royal Navy out of the Mediterranean.

The Germans actually overran the Balkans in the spring of 1941. The next steps would have been more difficult: a move into Asiatic Turkey; entrance of Axis warships into the Black Sea; and significant assistance to the anti-British Iraqi uprising in April-May 1941. Most difficult would have been response to Turkish rejection of demand for transit. Possibly the argument of force majeure, coupled with promises of Cyprus and Kurdish Iraq, and a sphere of influence in the Caucasus and Soviet Central Asia, would have sufficed. On the other hand, the Turks might have decided to fight, backed by British and American promises of arms.

The Luftwaffe could have prevented much foreign aid from reaching the ill-equipped Turks. Furthermore, Britain's need to protect the Atlantic islands, evacuate their expeditionary force from Greece, as well as to defend their position in North Africa and the Middle East, would have left them little to send to Turkey. Yet, even on their own, the Turks could have presented ferocious resistance and continued guerrilla warfare indefinitely. Nonetheless, as the Wehrmacht demonstrated elsewhere, it could have overcome such opposition. Nor would logistical realities and the state of Turkish communications have supported the advance of more than fifteen German panzer and motorized divisions--possibly as few as nine or ten--to the borders of Syria, Iraq, the Soviet Union, and Iran. As the Afrika Korps (Africa Corps) demonstrated, however, just two or three German mobile divisions moving in separate columns through Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, and the Sinai to Suez, across Mesopotamia to Basra and Abadan, and thrusting from Anatolia up to the frontiers of Georgia and Armenia could have torn British defenses in the Middle East to shreds.

The dispatch of a German corps or small army to Libya in February 1941 would have served more of a political end than a military purpose. The limited port capacity of Tripoli and Benghazi, the distance from Bizerte's better facilities to Egypt, the lack of railroads in Libya and the narrow traversable North African coastal plain would have combined to make a large campaign in the region impractical. Furthermore, an operation across the Middle East to Egypt would have rendered it unnecessary. Salvaging the Italian position in Tripolitania, however, would still have helped in the aforementioned negotiations with the Spanish and French, shored up Benito Mussolini's then-shaky regime, and allowed the Italian army to recover its pride through a German-assisted counteroffensive into Cyrenaica, followed by an advance to the Nile Delta in the summer of 1941. After linking with the German corps moving simultaneously through the Sinai, the Italian portion of the Axis North African army might have advanced down the Nile to rescue their forces still holding out in northern and southern Ethiopia. The reestablishment of Italian East Africa over the fall and winter of 1941-1942 would have proved of little strategic consequence. Axis bases along the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean coast of Somalia, however, would have permitted aeronaval operations in the Arabian Sea and helped block the Mozambique Channel. If Japan had gone to war under these circumstances with the United States and the British Empire in December 1941, such a German presence in East Africa--along with the presence recently established in the northern Persian Gulf--would have posed a great threat to Allied interests in the Indian Ocean and possibly led to European-Asian Axis thrusts across India from either side in 1942.

Such campaigns would have greatly improved the chance for a successful German invasion of Russia. While the British would have sabotaged Middle Eastern oil facilities before withdrawing, the Germans, Italians, and French would have had time prior to Barbarossa to restore some production and arrange transport to the Black Sea and the eastern Mediterranean. In 1941, Iranian fields produced 6.7 million metric tons of oil, Iraqi fields a little more than half that much, and those in Egypt pumped out 1.3 million tons. That year, natural and synthetic oil production of Axis Europe totaled sixteen million metric tons. For their industries and transport to operate at capacity, the Axis needed about ten million tons more. While the Axis could have restored quickly only a fraction of the production of fields they could have seized in 1941, by mid 1942 they could have been getting two to three million tons and restored full output by 1943. That amount would have more than satisfied Axis needs for an invasion of Russia. While oil had been discovered in Arabia in 1938, production began only after 1945. If the Axis had begun extraction in 1942-1943, it would have gained a huge oil surplus.

In any case, for ten to fifteen Axis divisions and a Luftwaffe air corps along the Turkish-Iranian border with the Soviet Union in May 1942, the Soviet oil fields at Maikop, Grozny, and Baku would have been no more than 250 air miles distant. While the Caucasus Mountains would have placed an imposing barrier between the German army in northeastern Turkey and northwest Iran, a summer advance probably would have brought them to Baku in several weeks, to the more northern Soviet oil fields by August and to Astrakhan, Stalingrad, and Rostov by September. In the meantime, the Luftwaffe could have destroyed the productive capacity of the Maikop and Grozny fields. Seizing them intact would have mattered little to the Germans if already in possession of Egyptian and Mesopotamian petroleum. German air attacks would have denied the Red Army and Soviet industry most of their oil after mid 1942. As it was, because of the disruptions caused by the German invasion, Soviet oil production fell from thirty-three million tons in 1941 to twenty-two million in 1942 to eighteen million in 1943. If the Germans had captured the Caucasus-Caspian oil fields, the Soviets still would have possessed significant known petroleum resources in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Bashkir, and the Kashpir shale region. Damage to the rail system, pipelines, refineries, and oil equipment factories would have made extraction, refining, and transport difficult, and it is likely that the Soviets would have faced severe oil shortages by late 1942.

Of course, postponing Barbarossa until 1942 would have granted Stalin time to restore much of the damage to his armed forces from the purges and to gain much modern armament. The shock from the German victories of May 1940 onward had already prompted the Soviets along those lines. Eleven more months would have allowed many improvements in the Red Army and Air Force. The army would have received 1,000 more KV-1 and perhaps 2,500 additional T-34 tanks, which would have given even the counterfactual improved panzer forces of 1942 a terrible shock. Unlike 1941, a year later the air force would have flown new Yak, MiG and LaGG fighters, as well as the deadly Sturmavik attack aircraft. These improvements would have presented the Germans with formidable foes, unlike the antiquated Soviet aircraft they faced in 1941.

The fundamental ability of the Soviet forces to resist a German invasion, however, rested on their political and military leadership, as well as on the capacity of Soviet industry to support and resupply them. It is less certain that these factors would have been improved between 1941 and 1942. Stalin would have remained the same man, with all his ideological handicaps. He may well have been as much the victim of his own self-deception and Hitler's trickery in 1942 as he was in 1941. A great many of the nonmaterial deficiencies of the Red Army and Air Force were remedied only after the early successes of Barbarossa pointed out the dire necessity for such changes. Modern aircraft caught on the ground too far forward in 1942 would have been destroyed just as easily as their obsolete predecessors were in 1941. Even thousands more T-34s would have made only a marginal difference to Red Army resistance in 1942 if still employed according to retrograde concepts. Nor would aircraft or tanks, however well-designed, have done much to stop the Germans if the Soviets lacked fuel and lubricants. If the thousands of Soviet officers released from the Gulag in 1941 after the German invasion instead had languished for another year under the merciless care of the Narodny Kommisariat Vnutrennikh Del (NKVD, People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs), how many would have still been alive or fit to return to duty? All this evidence suggests that a 1942 Operation Barbarossa might have succeeded.

This counterfactual scenario raises the question of German and Italian choices in December 1941. Had Hitler already established the position described above, such a decision on his and Benito Mussolini's part would not have had the disastrous consequences it historically did. For Hitler to destroy the Soviet Union in 1942, it would have been better to avoid war with the United States. Franklin D. Roosevelt, however, still would have continued his assistance to Britain and extended Lend Lease aid to the Soviets. While loss of the Middle East oil fields and refining plants would have severely limited British operations in the Indian Ocean, American, Mexican, and Venezuelan oil would have continued to supply the British war effort with the fuel and synthetic rubber it required. Thus, British and American power to damage the Germans would still have been formidable. The Allies' need to divert forces to defend against a Japanese onslaught in 1942, however, would have proved valuable to Hitler on the eve of his invasion of Russia. If the necessary prerequisite for a Japanese attack on Southeast Asia and the Pacific had been an Axis war declaration on the Americans, it may have been wise for the European dictators to comply.

Even if a variant of Operation Torch, the Allied invasion of North Africa, took place in late 1942, it would have faced the firm Axis position in the eastern Atlantic and West Africa. Thus, Torch might have failed, or succeeded only if carried out well south of Morocco. If the Allies reached North Africa, it probably would have been only in late 1943. If so, Hitler would have had two seasons to destroy the Soviet Union, or to force Stalin to make peace and withdraw over the Urals.

-- Brian R. Sullivan, Vienna, Virginia


The Night Sky

The bombing of Moscow began exactly one month after war started. The four million citizens of the city had been prepared for its coming by a series of practice air-raid alarms, and half an hour before the first explosive, a one-thousand-pounder, dropped in front of the Kremlin gates, practically everyone in the city was sitting in a shelter. . . .

The Germans dropped everything they could unload from two hundred planes that night, coming over the city in waves at half-hour intervals for five and a half hours. Thousands of fire bombs about the size and shape of prizewinning cucumbers were showered on buildings and streets. Weeks of training in fire-fighting had its results when city fire-fighting brigades and citizens posted on every roof of the city prevented Moscow from burning to the ground. As fast as the incendiaries fell they were snuffed out with sand or by dunking them into barrels of water which had been placed on top floors and rooftops. Occasionally a fire would get started, and its fiery red glow would flare up for a short time and then die down as it was brought under control.

During all this time explosive bombs were whistling downward, blasting into buildings and tearing craters in streets. The raid was directed at the entire city, the Kremlin not excepted, and for miles in all directions the sound of exploding bombs rocked and jarred the night. The hailstorm of fire bombs came down without letup for three hours, and the only times bombs were not falling were when the raiders, their racks empty, streaked back towards the west. There was only a short interval of time before a new wave of fully loaded planes came in from the northwest to dump their loads.

The air defense was in action continuously for those five and a half hours. Searchlights by the hundreds stabbed their beams into the sky, most of them being concentrated in a ring around the city. Anti-aircraft guns cracked and boomed all night long from another circle, filling the night with dazzling star-bursts. This city defense formed a complete circle around Moscow. The ring was about three miles deep, with alternating sections of searchlights and anti-aircraft artillery. The defense was concentrated five miles from the center of the city, and had a circumference of about fifty miles. . . .

For the first and only time, the Luftwaffe flew low over Moscow. The planes, when caught in searchlight beams, were usually at heights of about 1,000 feet, although I saw one plane, which looked like a huge silver moth, at five hundred feet. At the peak of the raid I saw a plane, caught in the web of five searchlight beams, suddenly nose-up and apparently come to a dead stop in the air. It had been hit by fire from one of the quick-shooting rooftop cannon. There was an explosion, the plane shook like a leaf in a storm, and a moment later it nosed down and plummeted to earth like a dead duck. Halfway down it burst into flame. A moment later a parachute fluttered open and drifted slowly downward with a figure of a man dangling like a puppet from its harness. Just after the first parachute, a second one streaked downward, unopened. It fell like a stone in the street. . . .

Source: Erskine Caldwell, All Out on the Road to Smolensk (New York: Duell, Sloan, & Pearce, 1942), pp. 57-63.

FURTHER READINGS


References


Omer Bartov, The Eastern Front, 1941-1945: German Troops and the Barbarisation of Warfare (Basingstoke, Hastings, U.K.: Macmillan in association with St. Anthony's College, Oxford, 1985);

Bartov, Hitler's Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991);

Antony Beevor, Stalingrad (London & New York: Viking, 1998);

Peter Chamberlain and Hilary L. Doyle, Encyclopedia of German Tanks of World War Two: A Complete Illustrated Directory of German Battle Tanks, Armoured Cars, Self-propelled Guns, and Semi-tracked Vehicles, 1933-1945 (London: Arms & Armour Press, 1978);

R. L. DiNardo, Mechanized Juggernaut or Military Anachronism?: Horses and the German Army of World War II (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1991);

John Ellis, World War II: The Encyclopedia of Facts and Figures (Camp Hill, Pa.: Military Book Club, 1995);

John Erickson, The Road to Stalingrad (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1975);

Joachim Fest, Gesicht des Dritten Reiches: Profile einer totalitateren Herrschaft (Munich: Piper, 1963); translated by Michael Bullock as The Face of the Third Reich: Portraits of the Nazi Leadership (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1970);

Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt, ed., Germany and the Second World War, 6 volumes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990-1998; New York: Oxford University Press, 1990-1998);

Stephen G. Fritz, Frontsoldaten: The German Soldier in World War II (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1995);

David M. Glantz, Stumbling Colossus: The Red Army on the Eve of World War (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998);

Glantz and Jonathan M. House, When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995);

Norman J. W. Goda, Hitler, Northwest Africa, and the Path toward North America (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1998);

J. M. A. Gwyer, Grand Strategy, volume 3, June 1941-August 1942, edited by James Ramsay Montagu Butler (London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office, 1957-1976);

F. H. Hinsley and others, British Intelligence in the Second World War: Its Influence on Strategy and Operations, 3 volumes (London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office, 1979-1988);

B. R. Mitchell, International Historical Statistics: Europe 1750-1988, 4th edition (London: Macmillan, 1998; New York: Stockton Press, 1998);

Rolf-Dieter Müller and Gerd R. Ueberschär, Hitler's War in the East, 1941-1945: A Critical Reassessment, translated by Bruce D. Little (Providence, R.I.: Berghahn, 1997);

Bernd Wegner, ed., From Peace to War: Germany, Soviet Russia and the World, 1939-1941 (Providence, R.I.: Berghahn, 1997);

Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991).

Опубликовано на Порталусе 13 сентября 2007 года

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