A Patriot's History of the Modern World (60 page)

Nor was evidence of Hitler's intentions lacking. For months British intelligence had been picking up key data that Germany was preparing for an invasion and warned Stalin repeatedly.
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He blew off these warnings as British provocations, suspecting the West was trying to start a war of mutual annihilation between his country and Germany. Repeated Luftwaffe incursions into Soviet air space were forgiven with mild protests, and the Wehrmacht's explanations for its troop concentrations in Poland were accepted at face value. Even more evidence came from the “Red Orchestra” ring of Soviet spies in Berlin; Rudolf Roessler, code-named “Lucy” in Switzerland; and German deserters, one of whom accurately furnished Barbarossa's exact attack date and time—but Stalin discounted them all. Even more astounding, Stalin refused to accept information from his own commanders that panzers had crossed into Soviet territory and were under fire.

According to Hitler's early writing in
Mein Kampf,
the destruction of the Soviet Union was a critical element in Germany's plans for a “Thousand Year Reich.” Others saw the situation differently based on their personal
perspectives. Albert Speer, later Hitler's minister of armaments and war production, felt oil was “a prime motive” behind the invasion, and it was certainly the target in 1942 for Case Blue, the summer offensive aimed at Stalingrad and the Baku oilfields. Hitler's generals repeatedly warned against invading the Soviet Union, but almost exclusively from an economic perspective since Hitler regularly dismissed their advice on military matters. Consistently lucky through his unbroken string of victories, Hitler had become “
Gröfaz
” (
Groösster Feldherr aller Zeiten—g
reatest military commander of all time). He told General Georg Thomas—who had prepared reports detailing the potential disastrous economic consequences of an invasion—to change his tune. Thomas's obedient new report envisioned an utterly depopulated Russia, the urban residents starved to death and rural dwellers forced eastward to create vast swatches of agricultural lands for exploitation by Germany.

Barbarossa featured a three-pronged pitchfork of invasion routes, and Hitler intended that Leningrad would fall first, followed by Moscow. Despite the enslavement and extermination planned for Russians, Hitler expected they would willingly help overthrow Stalin's regime (“We have only to kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down”). He was correct to an extent, and many Soviet inhabitants initially welcomed the Germans, particularly in the Baltic states recently absorbed by Stalin, Ukraine, White Russia, and among the Cossacks, Tatars, and other ethnic groups in the Crimea and southern Russia. Hitler's policies were self-defeating, however; they called for brutal treatment of civilians and confiscation of their supplies except in the Baltic states, and although Soviet
Hilfswillige
(willing helpers) became a large part of the Wehrmacht's strength on the Eastern Front, Soviet guerrillas or partisans more than made up for the anti-Soviet helpers.

Seeking to avoid Napoléon's fate and destruction at Russian hands, the Wehrmacht sent Army Group North after Leningrad, Army Group South through Ukraine toward Kiev, and Army Group Center through Smolensk to Moscow. But the Germans had no appreciation for the immensity of the Russian landmass, nor its bottomless pool of manpower reserves. Even as they invaded with 166 divisions (out of 210 divisions in the entire Wehrmacht), the Germans faced 316 total Soviet combat divisions (with about 190 in the immediate western districts). Making this more deceptive was the new Soviet doctrine of defense-in-depth, where echelons were staggered three to four hundred miles apart. And while the Germans could
count 3.9 million men in their invasion force, these forces included numerous lesser-trained, -equipped, and -motivated allied units supplied by Finland, Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, Croatia, Italy, and even one from Spain (later Latvian, Estonian, Lithuanian, Cossack, and Russian anti-Soviet units were added). Approximately 90 percent of Germany's mobile forces were dedicated to the Eastern Front, 3.05 million men and 3,350 of its 5,200 tanks.
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These were opposed by 23,700 Russian tanks.
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While the Soviet T-34, unknown to German intelligence in June 1941, was superior to any German tank at the time, the Russians had not solved the problems of tank unit command or control in battle. Whereas German commanders stayed in constant communication with their units through a unique throat radio microphone, eliminating exterior noise, Russian tankers still relied on pennants and hand signals—often useless on dusty battlefields or in storms.

In addition, Soviet military forces had just begun to recover from Stalin's Great Purge of 1937–38, in which 3 of 5 Soviet marshals, 13 of 15 army commanders, 50 of 57 corps commanders, and 154 out of 186 division commanders were executed. On the other hand, Stalin knew that the post-Purge leadership was intimidated and ideologically pure, and would suicidally throw itself at the enemy should he order it.
⁶⁸

The German army, however, had its own problems, starting with the panzer divisions, whose tanks were woefully undergunned. Then there was the army's transport—still horse-drawn as of 1941. Only in Hitler's imagination was the army mechanized. The German industrial base was much too small to support a war machine like the one Hitler demanded on an across-the-board basis. It could, for short bursts, produce large numbers of specific items, but had no chance to compete with another controlled economy such as Russia's, which dwarfed the Nazis' in raw materials and manpower. Moreover, the sheer lack of manpower for such breathtaking offensives doomed the Germans in a war of attrition. In Russia, Germany needed to win quickly, especially before winter arrived, or the numbers would simply catch up with them.

Consequently, the inadequate manpower and mechanization soon became obvious. Horse-drawn infantry units could not keep up with the armored spearheads that ranged far in advance, sending back hundreds of thousands of prisoners, unarmed, but often with negligible supervision and guards. With no provisions for such volumes of prisoners, many starved, but many escaped to join partisan bands. And even when the infantry caught up and helped to form stop lines in encirclement battles, hundreds
of thousands of Red Army soldiers slipped through the thin lines. Supply vehicles and tankers returning from the front for supplies and fuel in rear areas had to pass through unsecured zones, where these thin-skinned vehicles and their escorts were often destroyed by roving Soviets. And then snow fell early in Moscow, on October 7, and the long Russian winter began for the unprepared German soldiers. Guderian sent an inquiry for immediate winter clothing, receiving the reply that it would be issued in “due course.” He never received any.

Yet the Wehrmacht's weaknesses initially were masked by the staggering number of enemy POWs, aircraft destroyed, and territory gained. In the early stages, Germany encountered unimaginable success, matched (or surpassed) only by the Japanese onslaught in the Pacific. The Luftwaffe claimed to have destroyed 1,489 Soviet aircraft (later the figures proved that in fact more than 2,000 were destroyed) against the loss of only 35 German planes.
⁶⁹
Then British and American Lend-Lease aid poured in, constituting a critical resource. From 1941 to 1942, for example, the best-performing Soviet fighter, the British Hawker Hurricane, was not even the best fighter in the RAF (that was the Spitfire). More Hurricanes saw service in the Red Air Force than any other plane, including Russian-made aircraft.
⁷⁰
As Alexander Hill noted, “even aid that might seem like a drop in the bucket in the larger context of Soviet production for the war played a crucial role in filling gaps at important moments during this period.”
⁷¹
With only 670 tanks (out of a total of 1,731) available to defend Moscow in 1941–42 (having lost 10,000 tanks in the first month alone!), the arrival of even 466 subpar British tanks by the end of the year proved dramatic for the Red Army.
⁷²
Soviet factories fell behind production schedules, turning out only 3,200 medium and heavy tanks in the last six months of 1941. Even the final volume of the official Soviet history of the “Great Patriotic War,” published in 1965, admitted that Allied support “was not inconsequential, especially the supply to troops and the rear of automotive transport, fuels and lubricants,” but tanks, aircraft, and artillery pieces were small in number and outdated.
⁷³

The Soviet invasion of Finland had led the Roosevelt administration to exclude Russia from aid, but after the German invasion of the USSR, Roosevelt revisited the ban, and permitted exports through Britain. For a nation supposedly self-sufficient, requests coming from the USSR were odd and inflated: 3,000 fighter aircraft, 3,000 bombers, sonar, antiaircraft guns, aluminum, and rubber. Stalin's “commanding heights” apparently were not
as high as he wished. After the September/October conference in Moscow, attended by Averell Harriman, FDR's special envoy to Europe and coordinator of the Lend-Lease Program, for the United States, and Lord Beaverbrook for Britain, the Western nations committed to providing 1.5 million tons of supplies to the USSR within six months. Promises of future raw material deliveries from the Soviets were accepted as payment.

More important, the United States and Britain had tacitly committed to delivering supplies and equipment through northern Russian ports, thereby adding American and British naval protection to the aid. This in turn permitted Soviet factories to shift their efforts from submarine production to tanks. Americans and British naval units provided convoy protection, minesweepers, fueling, and other naval support the USSR was incapable of offering. When the war began in June, the Soviets had only two minesweepers in the entire Northern Flotilla. American and British ships exponentially increased the minesweeping capability in a few months, in no small part due to British-supplied ASDIC (sonar), the first many Soviet officers had ever seen. U.S.-supplied Airacobras proved one of the USSR's best fighters and were easily the most successful of the Lend-Lease planes sent to Russia.

Most tanks shipped by the British and Americans in late 1941 and early 1942 were vastly inferior to Russian models, but they saw action nonetheless, both at Moscow and as late as Kursk, in 1943, when 20 percent of Soviet armor still consisted of Lend-Lease tanks.
⁷⁴
Where the Wehrmacht remained an army reliant on horse transportation, however, American jeeps, Studebakers (350,000 of them), and Dodge trucks turned the Red Army into a modern, mobile force. Indeed, “Studebaker” and “Villies” (Willys) became familiar words to Russians who survived the Great Patriotic War.
⁷⁵

Armor got the glory, of course—especially on the Eastern Front—but in myriad other ways, America and Britain fortified the Soviet military, delivering more than 23,000 field telephones in 1942; more than 250,000 miles of cable, critical metal-cutting machinery, presses, compressors, and heavy machine tools; and setting up the Soviets with gun-laying radars they did not possess. Some forty imported machine tools to a single aviation factory in July of 1942, for example, allowed the plant to reach full capacity in a mere two months. These tools, like the airplanes and tanks, arrived at a key juncture in the fight when Soviet production was struggling. Military experts estimate that between 50 percent and 60 percent of all Soviet military
supplies came from the United States or Britain; the amount supplied by America alone was equal to between 4 and 8 percent of Soviet GDP.

Nevertheless, Soviet wartime production, especially for a nation in the throes of economic collapse and facing utter annihilation, proved remarkable. Stalin moved every factory he could eastward, well beyond the capability of the Luftwaffe to touch them. More important than the contributions of Soviet manufacturing in the war, however, was the sheer size and, before long, professionalism of the Red Army. Stalin hoarded his reserves, at one time holding a full four armies back. While conscripts were dumped into battles such as Stalingrad without rifles, by 1943 most Soviet units were not only equipped and trained, but well equipped and trained. Backed by massed artillery unseen even by American ground forces, Red infantry repeatedly overwhelmed the Germans. Panzer production could not begin to keep up with the armor pouring out of Russian factories (and supplemented by Lend-Lease trucks and tanks).

Whatever the strength of American and British support for the Soviets, Hitler's own policies managed to produce vast numbers of new enemies when different policies might have delivered armies of allies. The invasion of Russia triggered an ideological struggle between the Nazis' incompatible goals of exterminating Jews and enslaving Slav
Untermenschen
(subhumans) and the enlistment of Russians and minorities anxious to throw off the Communist yoke. The plan to feed the Wehrmacht from Russian sources—and have excess food shipped back to Germany—admitted “there can be no doubt that many millions of people will die of starvation [in Russia].”
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Soviet civilians were therefore caught in a vise between starvation from Stalin's policies and starvation from the Nazis' stripping their land. Torn between a foreign dictator and a domestic one, many Russians opted for the devil they knew. Hitler was determined to make the war against the Russians a war of extermination against Bolshevism, and to that end all political officers, commissars, or other Communist Party officials were to be shot on sight.
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This policy ensured that Communists would fight fanatically to the death and force as many other Soviet soldiers as possible to do likewise.