AUTHR’S NOTE

This is a revised and substantially expanded version of the text used in Osprey’s illustrated history of the Russo-German conflict, Ostfront, published in 1998. It is a military history, which is not to say that it is solely concerned with generals and tanks, but that it incorporates almost every other historical discipline. Political history is obviously crucial to this story; but so is economic, social, religious and technological history, and not just of Germany and Russia but of all the belligerent nations in the Second World War.

The political transformation of eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union during the 1990s renders redundant both the phraseology and the spelling of earlier histories of this war. For instance, wartime German accounts refer to their enemies as ‘Russian’. Of course, their opponents came from all the constituent republics of the USSR. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics had a population of about 190 million in 1940: it included 170 discrete races, which spoke 140 different languages. However, 14 of these peoples made up 94 per cent of the total: 90 million Great Russians, 40 million Ukranians, and ten million White Russians. Many are now independent nations, but in the days of the USSR it was politically correct to call everyone ‘Soviet’. On the other hand, even President Gorbachev could slip up in public and say ‘Russian’ when he meant ‘Soviet’. This book uses the two expressions interchangeably. I have been equally haphazard with the expressions ‘Red Army’ and ‘Soviet Army’. The USSR’s army was officially re-titled the Soviet Army in 1944, but its opponents called them Reds until the end of the war, and subsequent publications tend to use both phrases indiscriminately.

Place names in this story are a minefield of linguistic and political traps. Stalin shifted the Polish frontier westwards after the war, so many German place names are now Polish. After storming the coastal fortress of Königsberg in 1945, the Soviets seized the area for themselves and renamed it Kaliningrad; it remains a political and geographic anomaly, still awaiting resolution today. German place names throughout the Baltic Republics have changed. Leningrad has reverted to being St Petersburg. The industrial centre of Kharkov is more correctly Char’kov when transliterated from Russian, and modern maps spell it in its Ukranian rendition, Harkiv. I have stuck to Kharkov, since this is the form used in most books published in the last 50 years, and I apply the same policy to other towns and cities.

Statistics are unavoidable in this narrative, but by nature unreliable. This conflict was won as much on the factory floors as on the battlefields, but few published sets of figures for German and Russian wartime manufacturing totals agree. There are similar problems assessing numbers of vehicles or aircraft actually serviceable at any given time. Many numbers that have been quoted in book after book turn out to have no reliable basis in original wartime documents. P. J. O’Rourke’s first law of social sciences says that ‘The more precise the figure, the more general the lie’. Unfortunately, numbers do matter. German intelligence persistently underestimated Red Army strength by about 20 per cent – a million men from 1943. Hitler never believed the summaries of Russian production he received, perhaps because they suggested he should start packing for South America right away. The salient point that will emerge is that Russian tank factories built more T-34s than the sum total of Panzer IIs, Panzer IIIs, Panzer IVs, Panthers, Tigers and other exotica that German industry assembled, and America built more M4 Shermans than the Russians built T-34s. For impressively long periods, even the British were building tanks and aircraft faster than the Germans. With almost the whole of the European coal and steel industry under its control, the German war economy failed miserably to provide the weapons its army required.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

‘Poland will be depopulated and settled with Germans ... As for the rest ... the fate of Russia will be exactly the same.’

ADOLF HITLER

For many German families the Second World War is synonymous with the Russian front. It was where the overwhelming majority of German servicemen fought, and where more than three-quarters of their 3.9 million dead lie buried.¹ In 1945 the Russian front came to Germany. It engulfed East Prussia and Saxony, and surged all the way to the Elbe, while two million Soviet soldiers stormed Berlin, the would-be capital of Hitler’s ‘Thousand Year Reich’.

The Second World War is known in Russia as ‘The Great Patriotic War’. If the war only became truly ‘patriotic’ after the invaders were exposed as genocidal enslavers and not the liberators many people had hoped them to be, there was no doubting its great scale. Hitler’s invasion pitted the largest national armies ever assembled against each other. The front stretched from the Arctic Circle to the shores of the Black Sea. Operations took place over unprecedented distances. German forces advanced more than 1,000 miles into the Soviet Union; at its greatest extent, their operational front stretched to nearly 2,000 miles. Individual campaigns took place over greater areas than previous wars. The gap smashed in the German lines by the Soviet winter offensive in December 1942 was wider than the entire Western Front in the First World War.

It is salutary to compare the scale of operations on the Russian front with those in western Europe. In August 1944, 38 Allied divisions fighting on a 75-mile front in France encircled 20 German divisions; after 27 days’ combat, they destroyed the German forces in Normandy and took 90,000 prisoners. At the same time the Soviet forces mounted three offensives. Along the borders of Romania 92 Soviet divisions and 6 tank/mechanized corps attacked 47 German and Romanian divisions on a frontage of 450 miles; they encircled 18 German divisions and took 100,000 prisoners in a week. Meanwhile, 86 Soviet divisions and 10 tank/mechanized corps attacked across southern Poland and destroyed nearly 40 German divisions in the process. The third Soviet offensive, which had been under way since 22 June, involved 172 divisions and 12 tank/mechanized corps in an advance of 400 miles along a 600-mile front; it overwhelmed 67 German divisions, of which 17 were never to reappear on the German order of battle.

By late 1944 there were 91 Allied divisions in France, Belgium and the Netherlands, facing 65 German divisions across a 250-mile front. In the east, 560 Soviet divisions were fighting 235 German divisions across a 2,000-mile front, driving them rapidly westwards. So there is a strong argument that the Soviet Union had already won the war by 1944, whether the western Allies finally opened a second front or not.²

The human cost of the war is so beyond the experience of western Europeans or Americans that it is hard to imagine. To compare the scale of casualties, about 2.5 per cent of the British population was killed or injured during the Second World War; American casualties were 0.6 per cent. In the USSR, the death toll is currently estimated at ten million military and 17 million civilian deaths, representing nearly 20 per cent of the pre-war population. Every three months, the Russians lost more men than America lost in the whole war. Another statistic gives pause for thought. Twice as many soldiers were killed on the Eastern Front in 1941–45 than in all the theatres of war of 1914–18 put together. By mid-1943 the German High Command calculated it was losing 3,000 men per day, every day, most of them in Russia.

Neither side limited its killing to military personnel. The War in the East was a biblical war of conquest conducted with 20th-century technology. As it was Hitler’s war, there was never any prospect of it ending in a conventional peace treaty. The German dictator intended far more than just moving a border here and annexing a province there. He was not going to accept reparation payments or negotiate a treaty in the wake of military victory. Hitler planned nothing less than a war of extermination, eliminating the Communist regime, the Jews, and indeed most of the population of eastern Europe. He and his followers regarded the Slavic peoples as sub-humans, to be enslaved or exterminated by the superior, Aryan race: the Germans. The conquered territories would become German colonies, with new German cities linked to the Reich by Autobahn and railroad. The Russian steppe was to be dotted with German soldier-colonists establishing what the Nazis regarded as brave outposts of civilization in a barbarous land. This was total war, in its purest and most horrific form. One side or the other would be annihilated.

The full extent of Hitler’s grotesque war aims was known only to the upper echelons of the Nazi hierarchy. After the war, many German generals would persuade both the Nuremberg prosecutors and western military historians that they had not known of these aims. In 1945 British and American officers found it difficult to accept that fellow officers and gentlemen – who had fought a largely ‘clean’ war in the west – could have been implicated in the horrors being reported in the east. Unfortunately, more recent investigation has exposed the disagreeable truth that the German Army was indeed deeply implicated. Heinrich Himmler, chief executor of the ‘Final Solution’, described the Holocaust as ‘a page of Glory in our history which has never been written and never is to be written’. However, the days are long past when the SS could serve as the alibi of a nation. It is now a matter of record that a disturbingly high number of German Army and police units participated in the slaughter of Jews, gypsies, Communist government officials, their families and other civilians. The Hamburg Institute for Social Research organized a controversial exhibition in 1995 that revealed the extent of army involvement. Pro-German forces raised in the Baltic States, the Ukraine, Croatia, Slovakia, Romania and Hungary took part with varying degrees of enthusiasm too.

The Wehrmacht High Command was invited to the Berghof by Hitler on the eve of the attack on Poland in 1939. The loss of so much territory to Poland under the terms of the Versailles Treaty had never been accepted by the Germans, and they would probably have gone to war to recover it even if Hitler had never come to power. But Hitler invested the campaign with far more than territorial objectives. His address to the generals anticipated both the nature of German rule in the east and the nature of his war against the USSR:

One officer recorded in his diary how Hermann Göring literally danced with glee at Hitler’s words.

The German Army treated Soviet prisoners-of-war with extraordinary and unprecedented cruelty. A Russian soldier captured by the Germans had less chance of surviving captivity than British or American servicemen captured by the Japanese, who had a 40 per cent mortality rate in the jungle prison camps. Five million Soviet servicemen were taken prisoner in the Second World War, and three million of them died: a mortality rate of 60 per cent. By contrast, the death rate of British and American soldiers captured by the Germans in the Second World War was 3.6 per cent.

At his trial at Nuremberg, SS-Obergruppenführer von dem Bach-Zelewski said: ‘If, for decades, a doctrine is preached that the Slav race is an inferior race, and that the Jews are not even human at all, then such an explosion is inevitable.’ About three million Germans were captured by the Russians during the war, and a third of them died. However, this is an average that conceals the extent of Russian revenge in the early part of the war. More than half the total of German prisoners were captured in 1945, and most of them survived, even if imprisoned for ten years, as most of them were. However, only a relative handful of the men captured in 1942–43 saw Germany again: of the approximately 100,000 members of the 6th Army that surrendered at Stalingrad, only one in 20 survived to be repatriated in 1955.

If the role of Adolf Hitler is central to the nature and the course of the War in the East, that of his enemy and eventual nemesis, Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili – or Stalin, as the world knew him – was hardly less important. There was considerable truth to the idea that ‘only Stalin got us into this mess, and only Stalin can get us out’, although it was not a sentiment to voice in Russia if you valued your life. Stalin bears personal responsibility for the weakness of the Soviet armed forces in 1941, and the readiness of the Russian and Ukranian peasantry to welcome a foreign invader who promised to drive out the Communists and abolish the collective farms. It was on his orders that countless soldiers were sacrificed in premature, over-ambitious offensives beyond the operational abilities of the army that Stalin had beheaded in 1937. Yet as the war progressed, Stalin learned to listen to his best generals, to rely on them rather than the Party apparatchiks whose political reliability was no substitute for military competence. Enigmatic and inhuman, the workaholic Stalin visited neither the front lines nor the factories; indeed, he seldom left the Kremlin.⁴ From his Spartan office there, he exerted a steadily more decisive grip on the war. The former revolutionary appointed himself Marshal of the Soviet Union, and strode about in glittering uniforms surrounded by bemedalled officers in big hats. The legend of Stalin the military chief took root and, reason notwithstanding, endures to this day in Russia. Only Stalin could have forced through the industrialization of the USSR in the 1930s with such brutal lack of concern over the human cost. If they had been aware of his methods, one suspects the Nazi leadership would have thoroughly approved. As it was, Hitler and his henchmen had no idea the Soviet Union had already won the arms race by 1939. The greatest achievement of Stalin’s regime was to win it a second time, to remove so much of Soviet heavy industry to safety in 1941 and still manage to increase output beyond that of German industry, which had most of western Europe under its control.

‘Truth’, the proverb says ‘is the daughter of Time’, and only with the passage of years has a balanced account of Hitler’s War in the East become feasible. Post-war Soviet accounts were created to feed the vanity of Stalin. As soon as the tide of battle had turned, the ageing tyrant, who had never served in any army, strove to create a myth of military genius just as Hitler had done. Successive ‘histories’ sought to demonstrate Stalin’s military genius. After his death, Khruschev demanded similar treatment, necessitating a complete revision of Soviet history, and another radical overhaul was required after his overthrow. After the ‘decades of stagnation’, President Mikhail Gorbachev swept away the surviving gerontocracy and instituted reforms intended to improve the system. Unfortunately for him and his regime, they led to the disintegration of the Soviet empire that Stalin had established in eastern Europe. The Soviet Union only outlasted its former satellites by less than two years before it splintered along ancient national boundaries. The Baltic States escaped to join the west; the Ukraine is still trying to follow suit, although Belarus remains stuck in a time-warp. As the political geography of eastern Europe has been transformed, so the history of the Great Patriotic War has been liberated from the dead hands of Communist functionaries.

For the 50-year period that the Soviet history of the war was massaged to suit the ruling clique, western readers relied heavily on German accounts of the War in the East. Some are classics of war literature, and others are extremely valuable for the light they cast on German grand strategy and on the operational realities of armoured warfare across enormous battlefields. Yet, as will be seen, even a commander of indisputable brilliance like Von Manstein was capable of twisting the facts. His literary sleight of hand in Lost Victories was as hard to detect as his shift of Panzer divisions to the south of Kharkov in 1943, and no less effective. The common impression given by German accounts is that the Soviets enjoyed insurmountable numerical and material superiority, yet had it not been for Hitler’s lunatic decisions, German professionalism could have defeated the ‘Asiatic hordes’. There is a degree of truth here, but it is far from the whole story. Some of the generals who advanced this thesis had also entertained the hope, fostered by Goebbels, that the western Allies might strike a deal with Hitler and join forces with the Wehrmacht against the Communists.

This book does not attempt to cover every battle of the war in detail. Certain battles, for instance Stalingrad and Kursk, receive more extended treatment, while other major actions are relegated to a paragraph or two. However, it is important to note that in terms of combat losses, no single battle or campaign dominated the history of the Russian front. German losses mounted at a remarkably consistent rate from June 1941 until 1945; on a graph of losses against time, the greatest battles appear as small deviations in a generally smooth upward curve. The German Army in the east (the ‘Ostheer’) was depleted by month-on-month attrition that consistently exceeded the flow of replacements.⁵ It is in this context that the many brilliant feats of arms by generals such as Von Manstein, Guderian or Model should be seen. They won some spectacular victories against numerically superior forces, and some of their operations are still studied in military academies, and for good reason, but they did not arrest the overall progress of the war.

Nevertheless, the battles of Stalingrad and Kursk were recognized at the time as battles of special significance. The former was a defeat of unparalleled magnitude for the German Army. Germany had accelerated its call-up to provide the manpower for the 1942 offensive in Russia. The complete and utter failure of Hitler’s strategy left the Ostheer no prospect of realizing the German dictator’s boundless objectives in the east. Hitler quietly agreed to pull back his forces opposite Moscow into more defensible positions. Even he now accepted that the swastika would never fly above the Kremlin. Kursk was another disaster for the Germans. Although their casualties in the battle, especially tank losses, are wildly exaggerated in almost every English language account, its political impact is beyond dispute. For the first time in the Second World War a major strategic offensive mounted by the Wehrmacht in summer had been brought to a halt. As successive Russian offensives drove back the front line in the late summer of 1943, Germany’s allies opened negotiations with Moscow. Only inside the concrete bunkers of the ‘Wolf’s Lair’ could you fail to know which way the wind was blowing.⁶

CHAPTER ONE

HITLER AND THE WEHRMACHT 1941

‘There’s only one duty: to Germanize this country by the immigration of Germans and look upon the natives as Redskins.’

ADOLF HITLER

After the war many German generals recorded their dismay and bewilderment that Germany had plunged into Russia in 1941 without defeating or making peace with Britain. For a generation of soldiers who had been junior officers in the First World War, this was the height of foolishness. It was widely believed that Germany’s defeat in 1918 was the result of fighting on two fronts at once. However, it is difficult to find much evidence that the generals opposed a two-front war in 1941. In fact, the German Army’s senior leadership agreed that it would take a five-month campaign to destroy the Soviet Army, occupy the major cities of the western USSR and march into Moscow. Nor were they alone in this assessment: in London, the joint intelligence committee predicted that Moscow would fall within six months. In Washington, President Roosevelt received even earlier estimates of German victory. In 1941 the only military figures who believed the Russians could win a war with Germany were Stalin’s senior commanders.

Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union was not an opportunistic swipe at the last major opponent left on the board, prompted by his forces’ inability to cross the English Channel. Since the First World War he had dreamed of destroying Russia, seizing the western republics of the USSR as ‘living space’ (Lebensraum) for a new German empire. It was sketched out interminably in his book, Mein Kampf. German generals who said, after 1945, that they had been surprised when Hitler ordered them to the east were being disingenuous. Perhaps they were maintaining the army’s avowedly apolitical stance, adopted in the 1920s to mask its blind indifference to the fate of the Weimar democracy.

In Mein Kampf Hitler stated several pre-conditions necessary for Germany to begin its drive to the east. He wanted an agreement with the British, an alliance with the Italians and the destruction of France’s military power. If the Führer added new justifications in 1940, claiming that the USSR represented an immediate military threat to Germany, he was really excusing himself from attempting the invasion of Britain. The only surprise in Hitler’s policy towards the USSR had been his temporary alliance with Stalin, the Nazi–Soviet Pact, that consigned Poland to oblivion in 1939. Even before the Luftwaffe failed to subdue the RAF above southern England in the Battle of Britain, Hitler ordered Field Marshal von Brauchitsch to prepare new plans for an invasion of the USSR, but they remained no more than feasibility studies while the German generals peered across the Dover straits, contemplating Operation Sea Lion, the proposed amphibious assault across the English Channel. Hitler’s navy chief, Admiral Raeder, expressed his deep unease at the prospect. The grievous losses suffered by the Kriegsmarine off Norway ruled out any serious attempt to frustrate what he knew would be a vigorous reaction by the Royal Navy. And the flat-bottomed Rhine barges, the only available means of shipping the German Army to Kent, would be vulnerable to any sort of seaway, let alone enemy attack. The Luftwaffe continued to mount sortie after sortie against British airfields, unaware that British industry was already building more aircraft and more tanks per month than the German factories. Hitler prevaricated, conscious of the enormity of his decision. An unsuccessful invasion of England would spell the end of his regime, and him.

While Hitler pondered his options, Mussolini ordered an invasion of his own. On 28 October 1940, the Italian army in Albania invaded Greece, Il Duce already planning a grand Roman victory parade through Athens. It was not to be. The Greeks counter-attacked and drove the invaders back across the border.

In November Hitler was still unable to bring himself to issue the detailed orders requested by his generals. The OKH (Oberkommando des Heeres – Army High Command) had been told to prepare plans for an invasion of Russia, but no objectives or timetable had been laid down. This reflected Hitler’s failure to persuade two potential allies to join his crusade against Bolshevism. He had tried to secure active military cooperation from Vichy France, but this had come to nothing. General Franco – whose forces had received so much aid from Germany and Italy in the civil war – stubbornly refused to allow Axis forces into Spain to attack Gibraltar and thus win the campaign in the Mediterranean. The most he would offer was a division of volunteers for service in Russia.

In December 1940 the Italian Army of Libya was demolished by a far smaller British and Commonwealth force. Italian soldiers surrendered in droves and Italy’s African empire looked poised to vanish. The Greeks continued to drive back the Italians in Albania. The future of the Fascist regime in Italy looked bleak. Hitler realized that he would have to intervene to rescue his ally from the consequences of his folly. On 13 December he issued orders for the invasion of Greece, to take place early in the spring of 1941.

Five days later he issued Directive 21, ordering Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of Russia, to be launched on 15 May 1941. The objective was to destroy the Red Army in western Russia, armoured forces advancing rapidly to block any attempt to retreat into the hinterland. German forces were to push as far east as a line from Archangel to the River Volga, bringing the remaining Russian industries in the Urals within range of the Luftwaffe. Hitler assumed that defeat on such a scale would lead to the overthrow or collapse of the Communist regime. Whom or what he thought he might negotiate with at that point was never really addressed, since the extermination of millions of Soviet civilians was explicitly included in German plans. Although his senior commanders would win great victories by sticking to the precepts of the military theorist Carl von Clausewitz, they tended to overlook his conclusions on total war. ‘Russia’, Clausewitz wrote, ‘is not a country that can be formally conquered.’ He thought it too large to be occupied by the armies of the early 19th century, and certainly not by the 500,000 men Bonaparte had employed in 1812. Clausewitz argued that only internal disunity could bring Russia down. Yet by pursuing Hitler’s racist vision, the German Army did not stoke dissent in the USSR; it left the people no choice but to fight or die.

The German diversion to Greece turned into an offensive throughout the Balkans after a coup d’état in Belgrade orchestrated by British agents. Prince Paul, the regent of Yugoslavia, had made his peace with Hitler, signing a pact with Germany and allowing German troops passage for their forthcoming assault. But the Yugoslav army, led by General Simović, seized power on the night of 26–27 March in the name of the young King Peter. Simović probably intended to steer a more neutral path, rather than throw in his lot with the British and Greeks, as they hoped, but Hitler did not even wait to speak to him. The German forces were ordered to attack with ‘merciless harshness’. Nazis did not do nuance. A more diplomatically astute policy might have divided the artificial Yugoslav state along the lines that re-emerged in the 1990s. As it was, some Croat units effectively changed sides once the invasion was under way.

The invasion of Greece and Yugoslavia began on 6 April. Systematic bombing of Belgrade was reported to have killed 17,000 people, an estimate that has been repeated ever since, but it appears extraordinarily high given the numbers and types of aircraft and their bomb loads. The Yugoslav forces had neither the men, the motivation nor the equipment to survive a conventional battle with the Germans and Yugoslavia surrendered on 17 April. Meanwhile, German troops raced into Greece, making deadly use of their air superiority, and crushed everything in their path. Greece surrendered on 20 April, and the British Commonwealth forces that had landed there began yet another withdrawal to the sea, hammered by German air attacks. At the same time, a detachment of German mechanized troops deployed to Italy’s aid in North Africa launched its counter-attack. Under the inspiring leadership of Erwin Rommel, the Germans drove the British back into Egypt.

The Balkan adventure had been another spectacular triumph for German arms, but it imposed a significant delay on the invasion of Russia. At the end of May Operation Barbarossa was postponed until 22 June.

The staggering success of Blitzkrieg in Poland in September 1939 and then France and the Low Countries in 1940 took everyone by surprise. No army in Europe had managed to resist the combination of Panzer divisions and dive-bombers – the Germans had apparently perfected the recipe for victory. What the defeated Allies did not know is that the speed and apparent ease of the German success was as much a surprise to most German officers as to their enemies. The breakthrough in 1940, the armoured offensive through the Ardennes and the subsequent storming of the Meuse, had been opposed by the General Staff. General von Manstein had been demoted from his position as Field Marshal von Rundstedt’s chief of staff for advocating this strategy with such impertinence, and was posted to an infantry corps in the rear. Hitler’s generals had recommended a scaled-down Schlieffen plan, the famous right-flanking manoeuvre that had nearly brought Germany victory in 1914. This is precisely what the British and French High Commands expected them to do, and led the French to deploy their best units to the Belgian frontier, with orders to fight the decisive battle as far inside that country as possible.

Unfortunately, Hitler overruled his cautious generals. The Panzer divisions raced through the Ardennes and blew a hole in the Allied front that could not be sealed. It did rather help that the French army neglected to retain any significant forces in reserve, a clunking error of judgement that should not be overlooked when seeking to explain the worst defeat in its history.

The great victory in France had two important consequences, neither of which would be apparent until German forces were deep inside the Soviet Union in 1941. Firstly, the German High Command believed that their tactics represented nothing less than a military revolution: a clear break with the experience of the First World War when the defence had held every advantage. ‘Blitzkrieg’ (the term was invented by the Allies to describe what had been done to them) reversed the situation. Fast-moving tank formations with air support could bypass centres of resistance, drive deep behind the front line and overwhelm the defence. The parallel with the stormtroop tactics of 1915–18 was not accidental. Unfortunately for Germany, the similarities between the 1918 Kaiserschlacht offensive and Operation Barbarossa would not end there. Hitler shared the generals’ conviction that the technology and tactical methods that brought victory in France had universal application. Yet he drew a second conclusion: that his intuitive leadership, grounded in his front-line experiences in the First World War, gave him a unique insight into military affairs. It was he who had insisted on the victorious strategy of 1940, not the General Staff. When the campaign in Russia began to falter in 1941, Hitler would have the confidence to overrule his commanders again, eventually appointing himself as the commander-in-chief.

The overwhelming bulk of the German Army consisted of foot soldiers. In June 1941 the German Army fielded 175 infantry divisions, 21 Panzer divisions and 15 motorized infantry divisions. Two-thirds of the infantry divisions that took part in the invasion of Russia relied on horse-drawn wagons to carry their supplies. Most field artillery batteries were horse-drawn too, so the infantry marched at the same pace as their fathers did in 1914. Each German infantry regiment included teams of soldiers tasked with looking after the horses. Their deadly modern machine-guns and mortars were taken into position and supplied by horse-drawn wagons. The Germans were not able to use the railways, because it took months to convert the Russian wide-gauge track to European gauge, and the Soviets evacuated or destroyed most of their rolling stock. So the strategic mobility of most German units was no greater than that of Napoleon Bonaparte’s Grande Armée of 1812.

German infantry divisions consisted of three infantry regiments, each of three battalions, and an artillery regiment with 36 105mm guns and 12 150mm guns. The anti-tank Abteilung consisted of three companies, each of 12 37mm guns. The infantry battalions had three infantry companies of about 180 men, a machine-gun company – three pairs of 7.92mm general-purpose machine-guns – and a mortar company with three pairs of 81mm mortars.

The Panzer divisions had been reorganized since the French campaign, their tank strength reduced to free up enough vehicles to double the number of divisions. By June 1941, each Panzer division included two or three battalions of tanks (with an average total strength of about 150 vehicles); four (sometimes six) battalions of truck-mounted infantry (designated Panzergrenadier in 1942); one reconnaissance battalion on motorcycles; an artillery regiment with 36 105mm guns; three self-propelled anti-tank companies with a dozen or so 37mm or 50mm guns mounted on obsolete tank chassis; plus armoured reconnaissance squadrons, engineer and anti-aircraft companies.

German tank regiments were supposed to include two companies of Panzerkampfwagen (PzKpfw or Panzer) IIIs, armed with 37mm or 50mm guns, and one company of Panzer IVs with a short-barrelled 75mm gun intended for direct-fire support of the infantry. However, in 1941 the Panzer divisions fielded a total of 3,648 tanks (as opposed to the 2,445 of 1940) but only 1,000 were Panzer IIIs and there were only about 450 Panzer IVs. Although the diminutive Panzer I had disappeared from front-line service, many tank battalions were still equipped with Panzer IIs armed with a 20mm gun; others relied on the Czech-built Panzer 35 and Panzer 38(t).

The motorized infantry divisions were smaller than the standard divisions, with six instead of nine infantry battalions, but all mounted in trucks. Their artillery pieces were towed by lorries or half-tracked prime movers. Their reconnaissance units included motorcycles and armoured cars. In 1942 a battalion of self-propelled guns or tanks was added, and half-track armoured personnel carriers appeared in greater numbers, but in the initial campaign they were essentially infantry units, albeit with greater mobility.

The Luftwaffe had made an enormous contribution to the German victory in France. During the critical breakthrough at Sedan, the German armoured commanders had gambled that air power could substitute for the heavy artillery they would not have time to push through the Ardennes forest. While Messerschmitt Bf-109s dominated the Allied fighters, German twin-engine bombers and Junkers Ju-87 ‘Stukas’ delivered accurate bombing attacks that knocked out most French artillery and pulverized strongpoints defending the Meuse. The massive French heavy tanks, armoured leviathans immune to infantry anti-tank guns, were destroyed by air attacks while on trains carrying them to the front.

The close coordination between ground and air forces was to be repeated in the attack on Russia. Yet German production policy was so haphazard that the losses over France and in the Battle of Britain had not been made good. Hitler launched the attack on the USSR with about 200 fewer aircraft than he had been able to deploy for the attack in the west in 1940. The Luftwaffe had a total of 1,945 aircraft available for Operation Barbarossa. Luftflotte 3 had some 660 aircraft in France and Belgium; 190 aircraft were retained for defence of German airspace; Luftflotte 5 was in Norway, and the 10th Air Corps in the Mediterranean. The total in the east included 150 transports and about 80 liaison aircraft. Some 1,400 combat aircraft took part in the initial attack on 22 June: 510 twin-engine bombers (Dornier Do-17, Junkers Ju-88, Heinkel He-111); 290 Junkers Ju-87 dive-bombers; 440 Messerschmitt Bf-109 single-engine fighters; 40 Messerschmitt Bf-110 twin-engine fighters; 120 reconnaissance aircraft (Junkers Ju-86, Focke-Wulf Fw 189, etc.).

Germany’s allies provided nearly 1,000 additional machines, but of varying quality. Finland had 230 fighters, 41 bombers and 36 dedicated ground-attack aircraft; Romania provided 423 aircraft and Italy supplied about 100 aircraft to support its forces attached to Army Group South in July 1941. The Hungarian contingent was backed by two air regiments; together with the Croatian Air Legion, this added another 60 aircraft.

Three aspects of the German Air Force deserve comment here. There were no four-engined heavy bombers of the sort entering service in the USA and UK; promising designs like the Dornier Do-19 and Junkers Ju-19 had been cancelled in 1937. The Heinkel He-177, the only heavy bomber under development, was hamstrung by a demand for dive-bombing capability and would never be successful. Long-range attacks on Soviet industrial centres – or the rail network – would not be possible. Secondly, the provision of fewer than 200 transport aircraft to service military forces from the Baltic Sea to the Crimea was clearly inadequate. Thirdly, German aircraft production and pilot-training programmes barely sufficed to keep the Luftwaffe at its then size: if the air force suffered heavy losses in fighters, bombers or transports, it would not be able to replace them with any speed. The Luftwaffe, like the army, was not ready for a prolonged conflict.

Almost a third of German infantry divisions remained in western and southern Europe, leaving 120 for the invasion of Russia. This is an extraordinary number of men to leave out of the equation in a war to the death. A total of 38 divisions enjoyed peacetime garrison duties from Germany to the Low Countries and France. Eight divisions had an even easier time in Norway, which would retain an enormous occupation force until the end of the war. Seven divisions had a less cushy time in the Balkans, where the local resistance could be vicious in the extreme. German forces were supported by 14 Finnish, 14 Romanian, four Italian and two Slovak divisions. Spain provided enough volunteers to create the ‘Azul’ (Blue) Division, which was incorporated into the German Army as the 250th Division in July 1941. Hungary provided its ‘Rapid Corps’ of three brigades, including 160 light tanks. The allied contingents were a useful source of extra manpower, but multiplied Germany’s existing logistic problems. They all had different equipment, requiring different sets of spares, and German units were already filled out with a staggering variety of captured vehicles. Motor transport units drove a mixture of lorries drawn from all across German-occupied Europe. Most of the allied forces did not cross the Soviet frontier until July, and many were used for rear-area security when they did. German strategy also had to ensure that the mutually hostile Hungarian and Romanian contingents were kept apart. They had spent much of the 1930s preparing to fight each other, similar to the Slovaks and Hungarians, who had actually fought a border war.

The postponement of Barbarossa caused by the Balkan campaign was once advanced as the primary explanation for the failure of the ensuing campaign in 1941. In fact the spring thaw came late that year, reducing most roads to a sea of liquid mud throughout May. Many river valleys were still flooded at the beginning of June. So an earlier assault was unlikely to have made much faster progress; and in any case, Hitler’s strategic indecision once the invasion was under way cost far more time. As we will see, his armies got to within 200 miles of Moscow, then sat down for six weeks until they resumed the advance. However, the Balkan campaign involved a lot of mileage for German motor transport and tanks. Von Kleist’s 1st Panzer Group, the cutting edge of Army Group South, would begin Barbarossa with nearly a third of its tanks at workshops in Germany. The airborne invasion of Crete had been a pyrrhic victory for the Luftwaffe, with the effective destruction of its élite 7th Airborne Division. The assault on Crete had been extremely costly in aircraft as well as paratroopers: 146 Junkers Ju-52s were destroyed and another 150 damaged in May 1941. This spelt the end – at least in the short term – of German airborne operations. The possible contribution of Germany’s superbly trained paratroopers to Barbarossa is one of the more intriguing ‘what ifs’ of the campaign. One mission discussed before the battle for Crete was for airborne forces to help the Panzer divisions hold the outer ring of a ‘pocket’ until the infantry could arrive; something that the hard-pressed mechanized forces might have found valuable in the summer of 1941.¹ In the event, the reconstituted airborne division was employed as conventional infantry on the Leningrad front from late 1941 to early 1943. It was a shocking waste of superbly aggressive soldiers.

German hopes rested on a relatively small section of the total forces deployed. The success or failure of Hitler’s planned knock-out blow in Russia would depend on 19 Panzer divisions. (Two, the 15th and 21st, were with Rommel in North Africa.) Their task would be to repeat their success of 1940, breaking through the enemy front line to trap the Soviet forces between the hammer and anvil. Thanks to the reorganization there were now twice as many Panzer divisions as in 1940, but they would be operating across a vastly greater area. Paris is little more than 200 miles from the German frontier. On 21 May 1940 the front line extended from the Channel coast to the Meuse – a distance of 250 miles. Yet in Russia the front line would expand from 800 miles to about 1,500 miles as the Germans reached Moscow. The supply lines would stretch back for 1,000 miles.

The German forces had many strengths: combat experience in Poland and France allied to excellent training methods had created a highly professional army, brimming with confidence. The Luftwaffe had one of the world’s best fighter aircraft, and its aircrew were superbly trained. Morale was extremely high, and from the front-line soldiers to the General Staff there were few men who doubted Hitler’s judgement when he said that one good kick would bring down the whole rotten edifice of Russian Communism.

The weaknesses of the German forces were less evident. There were no new bomber aircraft being developed to replace the existing fleet; the tanks were neither well armed nor well protected by comparison with the latest Soviet types; mechanized units were equipped with dozens of different types of vehicles, which shared few common parts and had to be returned to Germany for maintenance. Hitler effectively had two armies: a small mechanized core of some 35 armoured or motorized divisions, and a large unmechanized mass of old-style infantry divisions dependent on horse transport.

The Germans planned to win victory in the east in one intensive Blitzkrieg campaign. Since the Russians would be beaten before their famously cold winter set in – enough senior officers had served on the Eastern Front in the First World War to remember just how cold it could be – OKH decreed that the army would not require winter clothing. Some quantities of cold weather gear were supposed to be ordered, but only for the 60 or so divisions earmarked for occupation duties. Only one top commander demurred - Field Marshal Milch quietly ignored a direct order from Hitler and set about organizing winter uniforms for all 800,000 Luftwaffe personnel he suspected would still be needed in Russia as the snows started to fall. Army units would not be so lucky.

CHAPTER TWO

THE RED ARMY

‘How can you have a revolution without firing squads?’

V. I. LENIN

Until Stalin had most of its members murdered, it had been assumed before the war that the Main Military Council would exercise supreme command of the Red Army; however, Stalin established a new ‘High Command Headquarters’ (Stavka Glavno Komandovaniya, abbreviated hereafter to StavkaStavka