⌠««WORLD WAR II, Page 24PART 3: Desperate YearsAfter conquering Poland, Hitler menaces the rest of Europe.Churchill's reply: "We shall never surrender"By Otto Friedrich
Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do . . .
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.
-- SEPTEMBER 1, 1939, by W.H. AUDEN
*copyright 1940 by W.H. Auden. Reprinted with permission of
Random House, Inc.
If one man could be singled out as Hitler's most resolute and
effective antagonist, it was Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill. On
the day the Germans attacked Poland, he was 64 years old and had
held no Cabinet post in ten years. Yet in all the West, his was the
voice that had most forcefully denounced Hitler, most prophetically
warned that Britain must rearm to resist him. While Parliament
approved the Munich agreement, Churchill called it "a total and
unmitigated defeat." He said of Neville Chamberlain, "In the depths
of that dusty soul, there is nothing but abject surrender."
Churchill was no hero to the House of Commons, though.
Conservative regulars mistrusted him for his 20-year defection to
the Liberals, while liberals blamed him for the ill-fated British
intervention in Russia in 1918-19. He had a large ego and a sharp
tongue, and he drank too much brandy, but he also had qualities
that were to prove indispensable -- courage, eloquence, energy and
a passionate determination to save British democracy. No sooner had
the Germans invaded Poland than Chamberlain reluctantly invited his
chief critic to No. 10 Downing Street and asked him to join the
Cabinet; Churchill thereupon became First Lord of the Admiralty.
"Churchill in the Cabinet," Goring said when he heard the news.
"That means war is really on."
Unlike Chamberlain, Churchill was determined to go on the
attack and persuaded his Cabinet colleagues to stage a spectacular
landing in northern Norway. His original scheme was to intervene
in the Russo-Finnish war, which Stalin had launched on Nov. 30,
1939. Finland's well-trained and determined army of 300,000 had
fought the Red Army to a standstill. Churchill's plan was to land
a British expeditionary force at the northern Norwegian port of
Narvik, cut across to the Swedish iron mines at Gallivare (which
provided Hitler with almost 50% of the iron he needed for his war
machine), then join the Finnish resistance. Before Churchill could
get his force under way, however, the Soviets overwhelmed the Finns
in March 1940.
Still determined to intercept those shipments of Swedish iron
ore flowing south from Narvik to Hitler, Churchill then worked out
a plan to lay mines along the Norwegian coast and even to seize the
main Norwegian ports. That was supposed to begin April 8, 1940, but
Hitler learned of the plan. British troops were already embarked
in Scotland when the news came that the Germans were moving to land
in both Denmark and Norway.
The virtually unopposed conquest of Denmark took only a few
hours. Casualties on both sides totaled 56. Norway offered somewhat
more resistance. As a German naval task force steamed up the fjord
leading to Oslo, the Oscarsborg Fort outside the capital opened
fire with its turn-of-the-century German cannons and sank the heavy
cruiser Blucher, killing more than 1,000 Germans. Among them were
Gestapo agents under orders to seize King Haakon VII. Reprieved,
the 67-year-old King fled northward on a railroad train, along with
the national gold supply, 23 tons of it.
Churchill thought Britain's naval superiority would soon drive
the Germans out of Norway. But though Britain commanded the high
seas, the Luftwaffe controlled the air. And though Britain did land
nearly 25,000 Allied troops in Norway, they were poorly equipped
and had to be evacuated within weeks, as were King Haakon, his
family and his gold. Said Churchill: "We have been completely
outwitted."
Hitler had hoped to attack the Low Countries in the fall of
1939, as soon as possible after the conquest of Poland, but the
plan was delayed first by objections from the German generals, then
by bad weather, then by a bizarre twist of fortune. A Luftwaffe
major who carried a set of the invasion plans in his briefcase was
sitting in an officers club in Munster and bemoaning the long train
trip to a planning conference in Cologne the next day; another
major, who was getting too old for active duty, offered to fly him
there so that he could log some more cockpit time for himself. The
two set off in a new Messerschmitt scout plane, got lost in the
clouds and crash-landed in Belgium. The Belgian authorities thus
found themselves in possession of the entire German invasion plan
-- but could not be certain that this was not all a German trick.
Conversely, Hitler soon learned that the Allies knew of his plans
-- but the furious dictator could not be certain whether they knew
what they had.
Hitler decided to rethink the whole strategy. The French
defense was based on the "Maginot Line," a chain of fortifications
that stretched 200 miles along the frontier from Switzerland north
as far as Luxembourg. Built at a cost of $200 million (a
substantial sum at a time when a workman earned about $3 a day),
the Maginot Line was considered invulnerable; its strongest
outposts bristled with antitank guns, machine guns and barbed wire,
and boasted concrete walls 10 ft. thick as well as supply depots
100 ft. underground. To the north of the Ardennes Forest, which was
only lightly fortified because the French considered it
"impenetrable," a "Little Maginot Line" guarded the Franco-Belgian
border, but the French planned to march into neutral Belgium
themselves at the first sign of a German invasion.
The original German plan was to launch a frontal assault by
Army Group B on the Low Countries, just as in 1914, with a
secondary attack in the Ardennes by Army Group A. But General Erich
von Manstein, chief of staff for Army Group A, passionately argued
that this would only lead to stalemate in northern France, again
just as in 1914. By contrast, a strong armored offensive right
through the supposedly impenetrable Ardennes could lead to a
breakthrough all the way to the English Channel. The Allied armies
would be encircled and cut off; all France would lie open.
Manstein's memorandums never reached Hitler, but the two men met
at a dinner, and the Fuhrer was so impressed by the general's bold
plan that he ordered it adopted.
And so when 30 divisions smashed into the Low Countries at dawn
on May 10, 1940, an even larger force of 45 divisions more or less
vanished into the depths of the Ardennes Forest. The Dutch fought
bravely, but they were no match for Hitler's blitzkrieg with its
tanks, dive bombers, paratroops and mobile infantry. When the Dutch
defenders managed to hold the bridgeheads leading to Rotterdam, the
second city of the Netherlands, Hitler ordered that "this
resistance be broken speedily." A wave of bombers swept over the
city and showered it with 2,200-lb. bombs, killing more than 800
people and destroying some 25,000 houses in less than 15 minutes.
The French and British had no intention of defending doomed
Holland, but as they poured into neighboring Belgium, Hitler was
delighted. The Manstein plan was working perfectly. "When the news
came through that the enemy was moving forward along the whole
front, I could have wept for joy," he said later. "They had fallen
into the trap. It was vital that they believe we were sticking to
the . . . old plan, and they had believed it."
The day of the German invasion was also the day the British
government decided on a new leader. Chamberlain had been too
cautious, and he was already afflicted by the cancer that would
kill him in six months. Conservative backbencher Leopold Amery
threw down a challenge. Invoking the terrible words that Oliver
Cromwell had used in dissolving Parliament in 1653, he declared,
"You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing.
Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God,
go!" So many Conservatives then joined in an Opposition vote of
censure that Chamberlain felt he could not go on, and the
Conservatives turned to Churchill. He began with a stirring pledge:
"I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat. You ask,
what is our policy? I will say: It is to wage war . . . with all
the strength that God can give us. That is our policy."
In the Ardennes Forest the main German force encountered only
token opposition until it reached the French defenses just west of
Sedan on the swift-flowing Meuse River. Dive bombers soon pounded
those defenses into silence, and General Heinz Guderian's forces
quickly crossed the river. As they pushed westward, there was
little to stop them. General Erwin Rommel, commander of the 7th
Panzer Division, saw anarchy all around: "Civilians and French
troops, their faces distorted with terror, lay huddled in the
ditches, alongside hedges and in every hollow beside the road...
Always the same picture, troops and civilians in wild flight down
both sides of the road . . . a chaos of guns, tanks and military
vehicles of all kinds inextricably entangled with horse-drawn
refugee carts."
By May 16, in the first week of combat, Guderian's spearhead
of seven panzer divisions had knocked a hole 60 miles wide in the
French defenses; by May 20 the Germans had reached the cathedral
city of Amiens, farther forward than they had gone in all World War
I; that same day they reached the English Channel near Abbeville.
The main Anglo-French army in Belgium had been cut off. Even before
that final encirclement, the new French Premier, Paul Reynaud, who
was supposed to represent a more warlike spirit than the ousted
Edouard Daladier, telephoned Churchill and said, "We have been
defeated. We are beaten. We have lost the battle."
Guderian's tanks raced up the coast, seized Boulogne, seized
Calais, neared Dunkirk, then were ordered to halt. Guderian
protested but was told that it was Hitler's personal order, an
important miscalculation that has never been fully explained. "The
Fuhrer is terribly nervous," Chief of Staff Franz Halder wrote in
his diary. "Frightened by his own success, he is afraid to take any
chance and so would rather pull the reins on us."
The British were already thinking about evacuating France, and
Dunkirk, about 50 miles away, was the only port that remained open
to them. They hoped to rescue perhaps 45,000 men in the two days
they estimated they might have left. But Guderian's tanks did not
move, and more British troops kept pouring into Dunkirk. While the
Royal Navy sent 165 ships, many of which could not enter the
shallow harbor, London issued an emergency call for everything that
could float -- yachts, fishing boats, excursion steamers,
fire-fighting boats, some 850 vessels in all. The first 25,000 men
reached England by May 28, and then the bizarre rescue fleet
hurried back for more.
By that time the Luftwaffe was bombing and strafing the beach,
and Dunkirk was in flames. R.A.F. fighter planes raced across the
Channel to defend the departing soldiers, who often had to stand
in water up to their necks while machine-gun bullets spattered
around them. A paddle-wheel steamer, Fenella, took aboard 600
soldiers, then was hit by a bomb. Most of the survivors were
evacuated onto another paddle steamer, Crested Eagle, but a dive
bomber set it afire, and most of the men aboard perished. A
hospital ship marked with large red crosses rode at anchor off the
beach all one day until a bomb went down its funnel and scattered
bodies all over the harbor.
For nine days, often under heavy fire, the ships steamed to and
fro as the great evacuation continued. By June 4, when it ended,
some 200,000 British troops had been rescued, along with about
140,000 Allied forces, mostly French. British losses: 40,000 left
behind, dead or taken prisoner. To many of the French, the
evacuation was a British betrayal, a flight, the abandonment of an
ally. To the British, it was a miracle and the only route to
national survival.
With 60 remaining divisions, the French tried to form a new
defensive line along the Somme, but after having lost about 40
divisions plus almost all British forces, they were seriously
outnumbered, as well as outgunned and outgeneraled. The Germans had
not only their panzer units but also 130 infantry divisions. On
June 7 the French commander Maxime Weygand told the government,
"The battle of the Somme is lost," and advised it to ask for an
armistice. Premier Reynaud declared, "We shall fight in front of
Paris," but the government itself fled to Tours and then Bordeaux.
Left behind was an undefended Paris facing the almost
unthinkable prospect of Nazi occupation. The Parisians responded
with wild flight. With cars, bicycles, baby carriages, nearly 2
million of them (some 65% of the city's population) choked the
roads to the south. "I fly over the black road of interminable
treacle that never stops running," author-aviator Antoine de
Saint-Exupery wrote of watching refugees from his plane. "Where are
they going? They don't know. They are marching toward a ghost
terminus which already is no longer an oasis."
The Germans marched into deserted Paris on June 14. Reynaud
fled to England, leaving the government in the hands of Marshal
Henri Petain, 84, who was still revered as the man who had defended
Verdun during World War I under the watchword, "They shall not
pass." But on June 17 he asked Hitler for an armistice. Hardly
noticed in the debacle was an appeal from London one day later by
an obscure French general named Charles de Gaulle, who, in a speech
that was to become the rallying cry for the Resistance, asked all
Frenchmen to fight on under his leadership: "France has lost a
battle! But France has not lost the war!"
Hitler's terms seemed mild: Germany would occupy and rule the
northern half of France and its Atlantic coast; the southern half
could remain an autonomous state under Petain, with its capital in
the sleepy resort town of Vichy. But he insisted that the armistice
be signed in Compiegne, just outside Paris, in the same railroad
car where Marshal Foch had made the Germans sign the armistice in
1918, the site marked by a stone tablet placing blame for the war
on "the criminal pride of the German empire." CBS correspondent
William Shirer, who was standing nearby, reported that Hitler's
face was "afire with scorn, anger, hate, revenge, triumph." Once
the armistice was signed, Hitler had the stone blown up and the
train shipped to Germany. (After World War II the French replaced
the stone and restored the train, which stands there in the gloomy
forest to this day.)
In the last days before the fall of France, Churchill had
summoned up his most heroic eloquence to rally his beleaguered
people. "We shall go on to the end," he told Parliament on June 4.
"We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans
. . . we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we
shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds,
we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in
the hills; we shall never surrender." And again on June 18: "Let
us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves
that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a
thousand years, men will say, `This was their finest hour.'"
Hitler could not believe it. The French had been defeated, the
war won, and the British must see reason. In a speech to the
Reichstag, he jeered at the idea of Churchill's fighting on in
Canada, but he offered to make peace. "I can see no reason why this
war must go on," he said. Churchill decided not even to answer,
leaving it to Lord Halifax to declare, "We shall not stop fighting
until freedom is secure." Hitler was again lying. Just three days
before his "peace speech" on July 19, he had officially told his
commanders, "I have decided to prepare a landing operation against
England."
Operation Sea Lion, it was called, a military feat that nobody
had accomplished since William the Conqueror in 1066. The army's
plan called for 90,000 men to storm ashore on a front extending 200
miles from Ramsgate to Lyme Bay, to be followed by 170,000 more
troops within two days. But the navy balked. It did not have enough
ships for such a broad front, and those it did have would be
overwhelmed by the stronger British fleet. And who had control of
the skies? If there was any doubt, said Goring, his Luftwaffe could
smash the Royal Air Force within a few weeks. Hitler thereupon
ordered the Luftwaffe "to overcome the British air force with all
means at its disposal," so that the invasion could begin Sept. 15.
Adlertag (Eagle Day) was Goring's name for the first massive
bombing raids on Aug. 13. Some 1,500 Luftwaffe warplanes swept
across R.A.F. airfields in southeast England, badly damaging five
of them and knocking out one. R.A.F. fighters downed 47 of the
attackers. The next day the Luftwaffe was back, then the day after,
and so began the Battle of Britain, the first ever to be fought
entirely in the skies, anxiously watched by ordinary citizens
below. Goring had roughly 1,400 bombers and nearly 1,000 fighters,
the R.A.F. defenders fewer than 900 fighters. The opposing planes
were roughly equal, the German Messerschmitts with a slightly
faster rate of climb, the British Spitfires and Hurricanes more
maneuverable. (The British also had some secret weapons: a radar
warning system that the Germans greatly underestimated, and the
Operation Ultra computer that broke most German military codes,
particularly those of the Luftwaffe.) The outnumbered British
fought with a kind of desperation that inspired Churchill to say
of them, "Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by
so many to so few."
Here is one of them, Richard Hillary, remembering his first
kill: "We ran into them at 18,000 ft., 20 yellow-nosed
Messerschmitt 109s, about 500 ft. above us . . . Brian Carbury, who
was leading the section . . . let go a burst of fire at the leading
plane. (I) saw the pilot put his machine into a half roll and knew
that he was mine. Automatically, I kicked the rudder to the left
to get him at right angles, turned the gun-button to FIRE and let
go in a 4-sec. burst . . . He seemed to hang motionless; then a jet
of red flame shot upward, and he spun out of sight . . . My first
emotion was one of satisfaction . . . He was dead, and I was alive;
it could so easily have been the other way around."
The essential German goal was to knock out the R.A.F., and
though the Luftwaffe was taking heavy losses, so were the defenders
and their bases. Then there occurred another one of those almost
accidental twists. Two German bombers on their way to attack
aircraft factories at Rochester strayed over central London and
dropped their bombs on the hitherto unattacked capital. Churchill
promptly ordered several retaliatory raids on Berlin. Hitler,
unaware of his increasing success against the R.A.F. installations,
made the mistake of ordering further retaliations against London.
And so, while the R.A.F. won a vital reprieve, the citizens of
London had to undergo the blitz, the greatest bombardment any city
until then had ever suffered.
Goring himself watched from the heights of France's Cape
Gris-Nez as the first armada of 300 bombers and 650 escorting
fighters set out for London on Sept. 7. They concentrated on the
densely populated East End and the Thames docks -- killing some 300
civilians and seriously injuring 1,300 -- and when it ended Goring
telephoned his wife to say "London is in flames." Nor was London
the only target. The Luftwaffe subsequently pounded Liverpool,
Birmingham, Coventry, Bristol.
Just as Hitler had thought that Britain would give up after
the fall of France, he now thought that nightly bombing would make
the English rise in revolt against Churchill's pursuit of the war.
(It was a miscalculation that the Allies were to repeat in their
subsequent bombing of German cities.) Londoners instead took pride
in their ability to endure the blitz, to spend long hours in the
subway bomb shelters, to put out the fires and go on with their
lives. "I saw many flags flying from staffs," Edward R. Murrow
reported to America one night over CBS radio. "No one told these
people to put out the flag. They simply feel like flying the Union
Jack . . . No flag up there was white."
The R.A.F. not only shot down many of the German bombers but
also kept smashing the German invasion fleet being assembled in
France. On one September night 84 barges were hit. Hitler was
finally convinced. On Sept. 17 he formally decided "to postpone Sea
Lion indefinitely." But the Battle of Britain went on. Between July
and November, the Germans lost 1,733 aircraft, the British 915.
Though the blitz continued until the following spring, costing
about 30,000 lives in London alone, the essential result was that
for the first time, Hitler's military power had been beaten back.
If the German navy was unable to achieve an invasion of
England, though, it seriously threatened to starve the embattled
island by cutting its lifelines to the west. Britain needed to
import by sea nearly a million tons of supplies every week -- food
and fuel as well as weapons. For this it required the services of
some 3,000 merchant ships, and in this summer of 1940, Admiral Karl
Donitz's submarine fleet not only acquired access to the Atlantic
at the captured French naval base in Lorient but also started a
lethal new tactic known as wolf packs. Instead of one lone U-boat
sniping at an Allied convoy, three or more subs would attack
simultaneously from different directions. On the night of Sept. 21,
for example, a wolf pack attacked a convoy of 41 ships and sank
twelve; the following month, in two successive nights, wolf packs
torpedoed 32 out of 84 ships -- without any German losses. "The
only thing that ever really frightened me during the war,"
Churchill wrote later, "was the U-boat peril."
There had never been any period of "phony war" during what came
to be known as the Battle of the Atlantic. Though Donitz's undersea
fleet was small -- his 56 U-boats in 1939 included only 22 large
oceangoing craft -- the submarines not only torpedoed without
warning but also seeded Britain's sea-lanes with thousands of
magnetic mines. In the first four months of the war, the Germans
sank 215 ships (748,000 tons); by the following spring the toll was
460. One sub even slipped into the supposedly impregnable Scottish
base at Scapa Flow and torpedoed the battleship Royal Oak, with a
loss of 833 lives.
Only in surface combat could the Royal Navy claim that Britain
still ruled the waves. One of Germany's pocket battleships, the
Graf Spee, sank nine British vessels (with no loss of lives), but
three cruisers finally trapped it off the coast of Uruguay. Though
the four ships' gun duel was a draw, the damaged Graf Spee finally
took refuge in Montevideo. To avoid capture, the captain scuttled
his ship; then he committed suicide. Germany's last hope for a
warship that could fight off British attackers was the 42,000-ton,
30-knot battleship Bismarck, which put to sea in March 1941 with
eight 15-in. guns and six aircraft. In its first encounter with
British pursuers, it blew up the battleship Hood, killing 1,416
crewmen. But a British seaplane managed to torpedo the Bismarck and
cripple its steering gear; that enabled other warships to close in
and sink it.
Hitler had yet other resources, or so he thought. Italy, still
considered one of the great powers, had finally joined the war in
the last days of the fall of France. Mussolini had achieved almost
no success in his effort to grab a piece of southeastern France,
failing to get more than a couple of miles into the playgrounds of
the Riviera. But he had nearly half a million Italian and colonial
troops in northern and eastern Africa, which he hoped to make part
of a new Roman empire.
Assuming that the British would be fully occupied at home,
Mussolini sent some 80,000 men from Libya across the border into
Egypt to threaten British control of the Suez Canal. The British,
outnumbered nearly 3 to 1, counterattacked, and most of the
ill-equipped Italians promptly surrendered. The British could
probably have captured all of eastern North Africa, but Churchill
instead withdrew much of his force to help defend Greece, which
Mussolini had vainly tried to conquer the previous fall. Hitler
sent one of his ablest tank commanders, General Rommel, to rescue
the Italians in North Africa, and "the Desert Fox" soon pushed the
weakened British back into Egypt.
In the Balkans, meanwhile, a British-backed coup overthrew the
pro-German government of Yugoslavia in March 1941. Hitler was so
angered that he decided almost overnight to invade, and he
conquered his prey in about a week. While he was at it, he took
over the bungled Italian invasion of Greece and subdued that
country in less than a month. Of the 62,000 men Churchill had
rashly sent to Greece, fewer than 20,000 were ultimately evacuated;
the rest were killed or captured.
And so, in May 1941, Hitler stood master of Europe. It was an
incredible achievement. Less than ten years before, he had tricked
and blustered his way into the leadership of a penniless and
disarmed nation. Now, from the Pyrenees to the Arctic Circle, from
Brittany to Warsaw to Crete, this ex-corporal ruled virtually
unchallenged over more of Europe than any man had governed since
the days of the Roman Empire. And his friends and allies ruled in
Moscow, Tokyo, Rome, Madrid. His only remaining enemy, Britain, was
badly mauled and begging the U.S. for supplies.
But the U.S. remained stoutly neutral, isolationist. Though
most Americans favored the British, polls consistently showed that
75% to 80% strongly opposed U.S. involvement in the war. The U.S.
did appropriate $13 billion in Lend-Lease aid to Britain in 1941,
but when Churchill asked for 50 obsolete World War I destroyers to
replace those lost in the Battle of Britain, he had to sign over
Western Hemisphere bases in exchange. Besides, the U.S. was
embarrassingly weak, boasting an Army of barely three divisions and
an Air Force with just over 300 fighters.
In Hitler's moment of supreme triumph, in the spring of 1941,
he boldly made his supreme error, the error that was to destroy
him. He decided to invade Soviet Russia. Exactly why he made this
catastrophic miscalculation will never be known for sure. In part
it was ideology. He had begun his political career by attacking the
Bolsheviks, and he dreamed of Germany's finding Lebensraum by
colonizing the vast lands to the east. He had written in Mein
Kampf: "When we speak of new territory in Europe today, we must
think principally of Russia and her border vassal states. Destiny
itself seems to wish to point out the way to us here . . ."
In part, too, it was a matter of paranoia. Hitler suspected
that Churchill fought on largely because he hoped to inveigle
Stalin into joining him. And Hitler was himself so treacherous that
he could not believe Stalin was not planning to betray him. Stalin
intensified those suspicions by his own aggressiveness. On
virtually the day the Germans occupied Paris, the Soviets seized
the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. A few weeks
after that, they demanded and got Rumania to give up its provinces
of Bessarabia and northern Bukovina. Hitler saw this as a threat
to his access to Rumania's rich oil fields, but for the time being
he was too preoccupied to counterattack. And then Hitler finally
became a victim of his own successes. He could not believe that
backward Russia, which had had trouble subduing Finland, could
resist the invincible Wehrmacht.
Even before the Battle of Britain, Hitler wanted his generals
to start planning an invasion of Russia in the fall of 1940. They
managed to talk him into delaying until the following May. Germany
signed a trade agreement with the U.S.S.R. as late as January 1941,
but a month earlier Hitler had told his commanders, "The German
armed forces must be prepared to crush Soviet Russia in a quick
campaign." The battle plan called for some 148 divisions -- more
than 3 million men -- to attack in three main drives along a
1,000-mile front. One army group would strike northward, toward
Leningrad; another army group from the Warsaw area would move north
of the Pripet Marshes toward Moscow, which Hitler planned to level
and leave forever uninhabitable; the southernmost group, from
Rumania, would storm across the Ukraine toward Kiev and Stalingrad.
"Operation Barbarossa" would smash Russia within six months.
In contrast to France, where the Germans had surprised everyone
by being relatively "correct," the conquest of Russia was to be
even more ruthless than that of Poland. "This struggle is one of
ideologies and racial differences," Hitler told his generals, "and
will have to be conducted with unprecedented, unmerciful and
unrelenting harshness. All officers will have to rid themselves of
obsolete ideologies." More specifically, Hitler announced that he
was assigning Heinrich Himmler, head of the dreaded SS, to carry
out "special tasks" in the "liquidation" of all "commissars,"
meaning anyone in a leadership position. Beyond that, Hitler
planned to plunder the conquered land of its resources and food.
"This year, between 20 and 30 million persons will die of hunger
in Russia," Goring casually observed. "Perhaps it is well that it
should be so, for certain nations must be decimated."
Hitler's impulsive attack on Yugoslavia had delayed his
invasion of Russia by a month -- which was to become critically
important when the first snows began to fall. But the Germans
expected little trouble when they rescheduled Operation Barbarossa
for June 22.
Despite all the German troop movements, despite sharp words
between the two regimes, the supposedly crafty and suspicious
Stalin foresaw nothing. The very night before the attack, Foreign
Minister V.M. Molotov called in the German ambassador, Count
Friedrich von der Schulenberg, and said the Soviets were "unable
to understand the reasons for Germany's dissatisfaction."
Schulenberg said he would try to find out. A few hours later, at
dawn, he returned to the Kremlin with a message from Berlin. It
accused the Soviets of violating the Nazi-Soviet pact, massing
their troops and planning a surprise attack on Germany. "The
Fuhrer," it concluded, "has therefore ordered the German armed
forces to oppose this threat with all the means at their disposal."
When Schulenberg finished reading, the amazed Molotov said, "It is
war. Do you believe that we deserved that?"
Even as he spoke, German artillery had already started firing,
and tanks were rolling eastward. For a time, everything went as
Hitler planned. The Red Army was caught by surprise, and hundreds
of thousands of soldiers fell prisoner. Within three weeks the
German line had moved forward some 400 miles, to Smolensk and
almost to Leningrad. But with the central army group in striking
distance of Moscow, Hitler delayed its advance to concentrate on
capturing the industrial and agricultural resources of the Ukraine,
and it was not until October that he began a new drive on the
capital. And the Soviets proved tougher than expected. The Germans
originally estimated Soviet strength at about 200 divisions; Moscow
eventually fielded nearly 400 on the Western front -- roughly 6
million men.
And cold rain began falling. "The infantryman slithers in the
mud, while many teams of horses are needed to drag each gun
forward," one German general recounted. "All wheeled vehicles sink
up to their axles in slime." The first snow fell on Oct. 6. A month
later, the temperatures fell below zero. Tank engines began to
freeze. The troops, who had been issued no winter clothing,
suffered frostbite.
On Dec. 1 Hitler ordered the start of an all-out drive on
Moscow, which the Wehrmacht now surrounded on three sides, only 20
to 30 miles outside the city. One infantry unit got as far as the
suburb of Khimki, from which the Germans could actually see the
towers of the Kremlin, but that was as far as they could go before
Soviet tanks drove them out again. And all along the front, the
Soviet defenders held fast. Then, on Dec. 6, the Soviets somehow
produced 100 new divisions and launched a counteroffensive that
sent the Germans reeling back 50 miles by the end of the month.
Moscow was saved.
Back in Berlin, the Nazi authorities were fretting over another
problem. In the early years of Nazism, one of Hitler's goals had
been to harass Germany's half a million Jews into leaving. Now he
was planning a more extreme policy: rounding up and killing every
Jew in all of German-occupied Europe. Himmler's special commandos
had shot tens of thousands of Jews in Poland, but the Nazis sought
more efficient methods. Himmler's deputy, Reinhard Heydrich,
summoned representatives of all major government departments to the
Berlin suburb of Wannsee to inform them of what he called "the
final solution." This required the creation of six giant
extermination camps in Poland: Auschwitz, Treblinka, Maidanek,
Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor. The Wannsee conference was called for
Dec. 9 but had to be put off for six weeks because of the
extraordinary news from the Pacific. On Dec. 7 the Japanese had
bombed Pearl Harbor.
One of the few men overjoyed by that news was Churchill. "So
we had won after all," he thought on hearing it. "How long the war
would last or in what fashion it would end no man could tell, nor
did I at this moment care. Once again in our long island history,
we should emerge, however mauled or mutilated, safe and
