Winds of War (114 page)

The ambassador’s wife had written in an ornate finishing-school hand in green ink, with little circles over the
i’
s:

Dear Natalie:

I sent my daughter home three months ago to have her baby. Her room is empty, her husband works in the embassy, and all of us miss her so much!

If you can get home from Switzerland, nothing could be better. Otherwise, please consider coming here, where at least you would eat well, and the baby would be born on American “soil,” so to speak, among your friends. We would love to have you.

On this same morning, Bunky Thurston telephoned. Lufthansa had come across with an early reservation, as a special courtesy to him: one seat to Lisbon, September 17, four days off. No opening existed on Pan Am, he said, but they had put her high on the long Lisbon waiting list, and she would get any early vacancy.

“I’d suggest you go straight to the Lufthansa office on the Bahnhofstrasse, just two blocks down from the hotel, and grab yourself this ticket,” Thurston said. “There are various forms to fill out, which I can’t do for you, otherwise –”

“Wait, Bunky, wait.” Natalie was having trouble following him. She had awakened with a sore throat and a fever of over a hundred; she was groggy from the aspirins and depressed by her uncle’s letter, which had thrown her into a vortex of indecision. “I have a letter from Aaron. Can you spare a moment?”

“Shoot.”

She read him the letter.

“Well! They really got hot, didn’t they? Natalie, I can’t presume to make your decision. I know what Leslie Slote would say. Byron too.”

“I know. Play it safe, go straight back to Rome.”

“Exactly.”

“You’re wrong about Byron. Byron would tell me to get on Lufthansa.”

“Really? You know him better than I do. Whatever you decide, let me know if there’s any way I can help you,” Thurston said. “I hear Françoise honking. We’re spending a day in the country.”

Of all things, Natalie did not want to go back to Rome. It was the fixed idea she clung to. Heavily, dizzily, she dressed herself and set out to walk to Lufthansa. She kept swallowing, her throat rasping like sandpaper despite the aspirins. All the airline offices were in the same block. Air France, Pan American, and BOAC were closed and shuttered, the paint of their signs fading. The gilt of Lufthansa’s eagle, perched on a wreathed swastika, shone bright in the sun. The swastika made Natalie hesitate outside. Through the window she saw behind a bare counter in a hospital-clean office a tanned blonde girl in an azure and gold uniform, perfectly groomed, laughing with very white teeth. A tanned man in a checked sports jacket was laughing with her. Wall posters showed castles on river bluffs, and girls in Bavarian costume, and fat men drinking beer, and busts of Beethoven and Wagner hovering over a baroque opera house.

They saw her looking in at them, stopped laughing, and stared. Shivering a little from the fever, Natalie entered the Lufthansa office.

“Grüss Gott,”
said the girl.

“Good afternoon,” Natalie said hoarsely. “The American consul, Bunker Thurston, has made a reservation for me to fly to Lisbon on the seventeenth.”

“Oh? Are you Mrs. Byron Henry?” The girl switched smoothly to clear English.

“Yes.”

“Fine. Your passport?”

“Do you have the reservation?”

“Yes. Let me have your passport, please.”

The girl held out a manicured, scrubbed hand. Natalie gave her the passport, and the girl handed her a long form printed on coarse green paper. “Fill this out, please.”

Natalie scanned the form. “My goodness. What a lot of questions for an airplane ride.”

“Wartime security regulations, Mrs. Henry. Both sides, please.”

The first page asked for a detailed accounting of the passenger’s travels in the past year. Natalie turned over the form. The first question at the top of the page was

GLAUBUNG
(Foi) (Religion)
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Vater (Père) (Father) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Mutter (Mère) (Mother) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

A nerve spasm swept her. She wondered why Thurston had not warned her of the risky snag. Here was a quick decision to make! It was simple enough to write in “
Methodist”;
they had her mother’s maiden name in the passport, but “Greengold” wasn’t necessarily Jewish. How could they check? Yet, after Aaron’s troubles, what lists might she not be on? How could she be sure that the Königsberg incident had not been recorded? And what had happened to those Jewish neutrals at Königsberg whom the Germans had marched off? As these thoughts raced in her fevered mind, the baby gave a little jolt inside her.

The street outside seemed far away and inviting. Natalie’s head swam and her throat seemed to be choking shut with bits of gravel. She dropped the green form on the counter. The Lufthansa girl was starting to write a ticket, copying data from the passport. Natalie saw her glance in puzzlement at the form, then at the man in the sports jacket, who reached into a pocket and said to Natalie in German, “Do you need a pen?”

“Give me my passport, please,” she said.

The girl’s eyebrows arched. “Is there something wrong?”

Too rattled to think of a deft answer, Natalie blurted, “Americans don’t ask people’s religion for travel purposes, and don’t give their own.”

The man and girl exchanged a knowing look. The man said, if you want to leave that blank, it is up to you. It is quite all right, Mrs. Henry.”

They both smiled slow queer smiles, the smile of the SS officer in Königsberg.

“I’ll take my passport, please.”

“I have started to write your ticket,” said the girl. “It is very hard to get passage to Lisbon, Mrs. Henry.”

“My passport.”

The girl tossed the maroon booklet on the counter and turned her back.

Natalie left. Three doors down, the Swissair office was open. She went in, and booked a flight to Rome the following morning. It was as Aaron Jastrow had said. Going back was as easy as descending a greased slope.

* * *

Chapter 49 - The March on Moscow

(from WORLD EMPIRE LOST)

The Geography of Barbarossa

In war, the event is all, and Germany lost the war. This has obscured her victories in the field. Her enemies never won such victories; they overwhelmed her in the end with numbers, and a cataract of machines.

Defeat also, quite naturally casts doubt on the conduct of the war by the loser. Thus we have wide agreement among military historians, regrettably including noted German generals like Guderian, Manstein, and Warlimont, that our plan for the invasion Russia was “vague” or “patched-up” or “without a strategic objective.” What is accomplished by this historical fouling of our own next, except a self-exculpation which should be beneath a soldier’s dignity? It is bad enough that we lost the war, and world empire, by a heartbreakingly slender margin. There is no reason to describe ourselves, in our greatest national effort, as unprofessional dolts into the bargain. Such lickspittle writing, catering to the prejudices of the victors, does honor to nobody and violates history.

I myself was detailed to temporary service on the planning staff of General Marcks, which in the fall and winter of 1940 worked out the original war games of the invasion of the Soviet Union and then drafted an operational proposal. I was therefore in the picture from the start. It was a bold conception, for the factors of space and time, for the numbers of men and quantities of supplies, and for the grandeur of the political stakes. In detail Barbarossa was almost too complicated to be grasped by any one human intelligence. Yet in overall vision, it was a simple plan. In this lay its merit and its strength. It was firmly rooted in geographic, economic, and military realities. Within the limits of risk inherent in all war, it was sound. Let the reader spend a moment of two studying the very simplified map I have prepared. Further on, in my operational narrative, there are more than forty situation maps from the archives. Here is the picture of the Barbarossa assault in a nutshell.

Line A was our main effort, or jump-off line in Poland. It was about five hundred miles long, running north and south from the Baltic Sea to the Carpathian Mountains. (There was also a holding action our of Rumania, intended to safeguard the Ploesti oil fields.)

Line C was our goal. Almost two thousand miles long, it ran from Archangel, on the White Sea, south to Kazan and then along the Volga to the Caspian Sea. Its farthest objectives were about twelve hundred miles from the starting point.

Line B was as far as we got in December 1941. The line runs from Leningrad on the Gulf of Finland, down through Moscow to the Crimea on the Black Sea, falling just short of Rostov on the Don. It is nearly twelve hundred miles long, and more than six hundred miles from where we started. We were apparently stopped by the Russians, therefore, about halfway. But that is not really so. We were halted at the last moment, in the last ditch.

The Attack Concept

During the spring of 1941, our intelligence reported that the Red Army was massing in the west, near the line cutting Poland in two. This menacing pileup of armed Slavs threatened to inundate Europe with Bolshevism. It was a main reason for the Führer’s decision to launch his preventive war, and certainly justified all our earlier planning.

This menacing disposition of Stalin’s forces nevertheless pleased us, because he was giving up the great Russian advantage of maneuvering space, and crowding the Red Army within reach of a quick knockout blow. Stalin was superior both in numbers and equipment. Our best information was that we would be marching with about one hundred fifty divisions against perhaps two hundred, with about thirty–two hundred tanks against as many as ten thousand, and with an unknown disadvantage in aircraft. Obviously, then our hope lay in superior training, leadership, soldiers, and machines, and in the swift decisive exploitation of surprise. After Finland, this seemed a reasonable risk.

The strategic aim of Barbarossa was to shatter the Soviet state in one colossal summer stroke, and to reduce its fragments to disarmed socialist provinces garrisoned and ruled by Germany, from the Polish border to the Volga. The primitive land east of the Volga, the frozen Siberian deserts and the empty forests beyond the Urals, could then be cordoned off or taken at leisure. From those remote areas no existing bomber could reach Germany, a vital factor to consider.

Operationally, we expected to break through the thick crust at the western border with three huge simultaneous lightning attacks – two to the north of the marshland, one to the south – and encircle and mop up the broken forces within a couple of weeks. Thus, the main bulk of the Red Army would cease to exist almost at the outset.

This we estimated we could do; but we knew that would not be the end. We realized the enemy would maintain heavy reserve forces between the borders and Moscow, and that at some point these forces would dig in. We also knew that the stolid Slav fights best in defense of his fatherland. We therefore expected, and planned for, a second big central campaign during the first part of July, probably in the region behind the Dnieper-Dvina line, to round up and destroy these reserve forces. Finally, we expected that as we penetrated to the line Leningrad-Moscow-Sevastopol, we would encounter a last-ditch surge of Russian resistance (as we did), including a
levée en mass
of the populations of the capital and the other big industrial cities lying along this spinal column of the Soviet Union. Once we broke that spine, nothing lay beyond, in our judgment, to the Archangel-Volga line which was our goal, except for a gigantic mop-up of a panic-stricken population, with perhaps some minor partisan warfare.

This was, of course, a difficult undertaking, a gamble against odds. The battlefield was Soviet Russia itself, a funnel-shaped landmass five hundred miles wide at one end, seventeen hundred miles wide at the other. The northward slope of the funnel lay along the Baltic and the White seas; the southward slope, along the Carpathian Mountains and the Black Sea. Our forces had to fan out into the vast level monotony of the Russian plain, stretching our lines of communication and thinning our front as we went. This we expected, but we were surprised by the primitiveness of the roads and the wildness of the countryside. Here our intelligence was faulty. This was not terrain suited for blitzkrieg. In fact, the very inefficiency and low standards of Communist Russia proved a formidable defensive factor. They had not troubled to build decent highways, and their railroad beds were defective and – deliberately, of course – of a different gauge than ours.

____________

TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: In Roon’s view, German staff plans for attacks on other countries are always defensive and hypothetical; but the other fellow always does something stupid or evil that triggers off the plan. Historians still debate Stalin’s intentions in 1941, but it seems he had no offensive plans. The Soviets were frightened to death of the Germans, and did everything possible, to the last moment, to appease them and keep them from attacking. – V.H.

____________

Cutting the Pie

Barbarossa clicked from the start, despite various problems. All along the front, we achieved surprise. This will remain a supreme wonder in the annals of warfare. Guderian records how German artillerymen around Brest-Litovsk, poised to start a barrage on the unsuspecting Bolsheviks before dawn, watched the last Russian supply train chug faithfully out of the Soviet Union into our sector of Poland. Nothing could show more clearly how Stalin and his henchmen were fooled by the Führer’s adroit politics. Western writers now call this a “perfidious attack,” as though, at the outset of a struggle to the death, Germany could afford parlor-game niceties.