Blood tears and folly, p.58
Blood, Tears and Folly, page 58
Hitler prohibited any retreat. Mockingly he asked his ill-clad soldiers if they thought it would be less cold 50 miles to the rear. Field Marshal von Bock was not the only one to lose his job: all the Group commanders were fired, and so was Field Marshal von Brauchitsch, the army’s commander-in-chief. Grey-faced and noticeably disturbed as he came from a meeting with the Führer, Brauchitsch said: ‘I am going home. He has sacked me. I can’t go on any longer.’
Field Marshal Keitel, who spent his days truckling to Hitler’s ill-considered ideas, said: ‘What is going to happen now then?’
‘I don’t know; ask him yourself.’13
Hitler in command
Keitel didn’t have to ask. Hitler summoned him and read out an Order of the Day appointing himself to command the army. The date was 19 December 1941. From now on, Hitler would not have to argue with OKH, the army high command. As the Führer’s military adjutant, Schmundt, dryly remarked to the now inactive Bock, Hitler became busy acquainting himself with the tactical aspects of the German army’s commitments in Russia, North Africa, the Balkans, Western Europe and Scandinavia.
Like most good jokes, Schmundt’s remark was not far from the truth. Germany’s military commitments were not limited to the fighting fronts. Occupation armies in Scandinavia, France and the Low Countries, as well as those in Greece, Yugoslavia and Poland, absorbed a large proportion of manpower, and ensured a climate of terror for anyone Hitler’s regime frowned upon. In Poland ghettos had been created by walling off, and guarding, sections of the cities, and keeping Jewish families imprisoned in them. In Lodz, which the Germans renamed Litzmannstadt, over 300,000 Jews were kept on starvation rations14 and in conditions of squalor:
Re: use of fire-arms.
On 1 December 1941, I was on duty between 1400 and 1600 hours at Sentry Post No. 4 in Holstein Street. At 1500 hours, I saw a Jewess climb on to the fence of the ghetto, stick her head through the fence and attempt to steal turnips from a passing cart. I made use of my fire-arm. The Jewess received two fatal shots. Type of fire-arm: Carbine 98. Ammunition used: two cartridges.
Report of Wachtmeister Naumann, Litzmannstadt, 1st December 1941.15
Bock’s retirement did not last long. In mid-January 1942, Field Marshal von Reichenau, who had assumed command of Army Group South, died of a heart attack. Bock was sent to take over.
But Army Group South was not a welcoming spot for a man coming out of retirement. When Bock landed at the airfield at Poltava the temperature was 30 degrees below zero. He was amazed at the sight of his soldiers clad in multicoloured sweaters, Persian lamb coats and red earmuffs. These were clothes collected by desperate appeals to the German public.
The Nazi will falters
In December 1941 the threat from the T-34 had been to some extent reduced by a new German anti-tank gun. This 7.5-cm Pak 40, made by Rheinmettal-Borsig, was a bigger and superior version of the same company’s 5-cm gun, which had proved inadequate against the better Russian tanks.
In fact Krupp had made a far better 7.5-cm Pak 41 which utilized an amazing new technology. Its tapered bore squeezed the missile’s light alloy sheath so that it emerged from a muzzle measuring only 55 mm! But the missile required tungsten, a metal the German economy could not spare, so Krupp’s rival furnished Germany’s standard anti-tank gun for the rest of the war.16 The Soviet Union didn’t have the problems posed by this sort of gun technology. It didn’t have advanced metallurgy. It didn’t even have anti-tank guns. The Red Army used its 7.6-cm field guns against tanks.
In the summer of 1941, with reports of German advances coming in to the Wolfsschanze, and generals telling each other that the Soviet Union was as good as conquered, Hitler had ordered cutbacks in artillery pieces, heavy infantry weapons, light infantry weapons and Flak. Only tanks escaped this axe. By December, production had fallen dramatically.17
Tank production had not been cut back but the wear and tear of Russian conditions was taking a toll, and the Soviet workers were determined to produce tanks in numbers that would overwhelm the invaders. In 1941, while the Germans manufactured 2,875 of the best tanks, Soviet factories turned out 4,135 of theirs.18
In Army Group Centre alone, no fewer than 21 generals were sent home before the end of 1941, including the acclaimed Guderian. From now onwards, Hitler used the army high command, OKH, to control the war on the Eastern Front. (All the other fronts were controlled by OKW, which Hitler also ran.) He said he wanted ‘to train the army in a National Socialist way’. When taking over the job he told Halder that he ‘knew no general who could do that as I want it done’. Only a politician such as Hitler could have remained concerned with indoctrination while on the verge of a military calamity.
Some said that only Hitler’s fanatical determination that the army should stand and fight saved it from total destruction that winter. ‘If they had once begun a retreat it might have turned into a panic flight,’ said one German general.19 Many historians also feel that Hitler’s stand-fast order was the best thing he could have done under the circumstances.20 It is a favourite situation for war game replays but, so great is the human element, it will always remain speculation.
Many veterans of the fighting in the Ukraine and the Baltic republics said that a saner political attitude to the conquered regions would have produced independent governments pleased to collaborate with the Germans. In the 1990s we can see that this might well have been the case. But, despite all the Nazi talk of ‘living space’ in the East, the German armies invaded the Soviet Union only because Hitler and his SS men wanted to murder the Jews and the ‘Bolsheviks’. Remove the atrocities and you remove the motivation for invading Russia in the first place. The Germans were getting all the supplies they needed from Russia before June 1941. When all their plunder is added up, it never equalled what they had been getting from the Soviet Union without fighting.
The future
Until December 1941 Germany had functioned on the unchanged peacetime economy for which Göring was largely responsible. Blitzkrieg was a triumph of technique and technology, and Hitler valued it because it could bring victory before its cost affected Germany’s economy. In fact Hitler’s plunder improved Germany’s living standard, providing his people with luxuries from far parts of Europe and foreign workers to slave for them. Then, in December 1941, came the failure at the gates of Moscow. Germans found their country locked in a war of attrition and faced the need to change to a war economy of the sort that Britain already had, and which the United States would experience very soon.
On 7 December the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and Malaya. No doubt there were many German soldiers freezing on the Eastern Front and saying, as Field Marshal von Bock noted mournfully in his diary: ‘How different would things be if the Japanese had attacked the Russians.’
To add to the dismay of such men, four days later Hitler declared war upon the United States. We now know that the leading Nazis – Hitler, Göring and Goebbels – had not the slightest idea of the potential strength of the USA. When they read the accurate economic projections that the Americans themselves published, they laughed them to scorn.
Once Hitler was in full control of the German war machine the major decisions were seldom good ones. But the German army cannot escape blame for its excesses or its failures. While Hitler’s foolish ideas may have contributed to the disaster of Barbarossa, the seeds of failure had been sown long before, when the entire planning staff of the German army wrongly assessed their enemy, and formulated a plan that could never have conquered him.
It is right to note the contributions of money and material that came to the Soviet Union from Britain and the United States. At the war’s end four out of six vehicles in use by the Red Army were from the West. America also sent 2,000 locomotives, 540,000 tons of rails and 13 million pairs of boots.21
However the bulk of the German army was defeated by the Red Army, using equipment made in their own factories. It was a gargantuan struggle. A calculation based upon the deployment of German divisions in combat per month shows that seven-eighths of all the fighting in which the Germans engaged in 1939–45 took place on the Eastern Front.22 In other words, only one-eighth of the entire German war effort was put into their campaigns in North Africa, Italy and on the Western Front.
The failure in December 1941 decided the outcome of the war. The Germans had tried to decapitate a sleeping bear, and by Christmas 1941 – with their army exhausted – had only succeeded in tormenting it. Once aroused, it would devour them. Mighty battles would be fought at Stalingrad, in the Caucasus and at Kursk, but the Germans could hope for nothing better than to slow the Russian advance and delay the inevitable defeat.
The scale of this immense conflict is difficult to comprehend. A maximum of 35 million men were available to the Soviet armed forces in 1941. About 25 million of them served and of these 13.7 million were killed. Another 7 million civilians died. The Germans lost about 2 million soldiers on the Eastern Front, and another 2 million German civilians disappeared in the flight of refugees before the westward advance of the Red Army at the end of the war.
On 22 June 1941, Hitler, the compulsive gambler, made his greatest wager. Like many such men he was perhaps seeking his end.
26
The War for Oil
See that the Enemy gets no Petrol.
‘If the Invader Comes’, government leaflet 1940
The countries that fought the First World War had grown strong from the coal and iron-ore dug from their own soil. But the development of oil-fired ships and the internal combustion engine shuffled the cards and dealt them afresh. The oil age was slow to start. For many years oil was something that came from whales or was made from coal to fill oil lamps in mansions and peasant huts.
As kerosene became a better and cheaper lamp oil, the mining and production of it became an extremely profitable industry. The wide availability of paraffin, kerosene, oil and petroleum encouraged experiment with internal-combustion engines which had started with coal dust as fuel. Unlike the cumbersome steam engines which needed heavy boilers, these new power plants could be made small and lightweight to power cars, trucks and even aircraft. Oil could do everything coal could do, including generate electrical power. As the twentieth century got under way, advanced nations needed oil, and without it they would revert to unthinkable hardship.
It is tempting to depict the Second World War as nothing but a struggle for oil.1 The war in the Pacific was clearly motivated by Japan’s need for oil. The United States, self-sufficient in oil at the time, hoped that a threat of embargo would force Japan to cease its aggressive moves into Asia. It didn’t. Instead, Japan, a nation without sources of oil or other energy, embarked upon its war in the Pacific in order to seize the rich wells of the Dutch East Indies and Burma. The Dutch oil technicians demolished the drilling machinery, and when the Japanese got the oil flowing again, the United States navy’s submarines struck at the Japanese tankers sent to collect it.
Britain had no oil sources, and when war in Europe began, 90 per cent of her oil was coming across the Atlantic from the United States, Venezuela and Trinidad. The other 10 per cent was obtained from the Middle East, but the Mediterranean became too dangerous for such traffic and the route around the Cape too long, so by 1940 virtually all Britain’s oil was coming across the Atlantic.2 To save tanker space, most of it was refined before being shipped, and refining in Britain dwindled to almost nothing. Britain’s wartime oil supplies depended upon the Royal Navy defeating the U-boats in the Battle of the Atlantic.
For many centuries petroleum has been used by those fortunate enough to find natural bitumens on the earth’s surface. Such substances are mentioned in the Bible. But it was the use of kerosene in lamps that first made oil a household necessity. In 1900 Russia and the USA were producing most of it, but in 1908 oil was discovered in the Middle East. At first gasoline was an unwanted side-product, but the coming of the motor car and the First World War together changed oil mining from a profitable industry to one of strategic importance.
The British pioneered oil exploration in the Middle East and the industry was stimulated when the 1917 revolution in Russia reduced supplies from eastern Europe. The Twenties and Thirties saw motor cars being mass-produced, and farm tractors replacing horses. Gas pumps were to be seen in the most remote towns and villages in America and Europe.
By 1939 the sources in Iran, Iraq and Bahrain were all to a greater or lesser extent under British control and they were crucial to her war effort. A pipeline brought fuel from Iraq to Haifa so that the Royal Navy’s ships could fight in the Mediterranean. The same pipeline supplied British forces in Palestine and North Africa, supplemented by some crude oil from Egyptian wells that went to a refinery at Suez. In 1940, Iran produced approximately 10 million barrels of oil per day, Iraq 4 million, and Bahrain 1 million.
Iran’s output was sent to North Africa, as well as to South Africa, India and Western Australia. Aviation spirit from Iran and Bahrain was used by the RAF in the Middle East, and some was supplied to the Soviet Union, which could not make high-quality fuels.
Hitler’s Germany never successfully completed the switch from coal to oil. Bereft of its colonies, and always short of foreign exchange, Germany turned to its scientists for a solution to the energy problem. (Table 7, p. 588, indicates how well they performed.) Using techniques which no other country ever mastered, coal was transformed into synthetic oil so that in 1940 the Germans made about 4.25 million tons of it, of which a great deal was refined into aviation spirit. To the total there was added a little oil from Austria and other small sources. Germany’s bountiful supply of high-quality coal and lignite (brown coal) was used whenever possible; for instance Germany’s electricity supply came from coal.
Hitler’s long-term oil supplier was Romania, and he guarded this source with anxiety all through the war. When, in July 1940, Hungary and Romania argued and came close to blows, he quickly settled their differences. Later, when Russia and Bulgaria quarrelled with Romania, again he played peacemaker to secure his flow of oil.
Hitler’s friendship pact with Stalin in the summer of 1939 gave him access to oil from the Soviet Union. When the French and British governments realized just what effect this would have in strategic terms, they panicked. At a meeting of the Anglo-French Supreme War Council late in 1939 it was decided simply to bomb (neutral) Russia’s oil wells without the formality of declaring war.
France’s Armée de l’Air assigned five squadrons of Martin Maryland bombers, flying from north-eastern Syria, to bomb Batum and Groznyy. A light Gallic touch was added by the use of the codenames Berlioz, César Franck and Debussy for the targets. The RAF were to use four squadrons of Bristol Blenheims and a squadron of antiquated single-engine Vickers Wellesley bombers flying out of Mosul in Iraq.
To prepare for this night bombing mission, the target area was photographed. On 30 March 1940 a civilian Lockheed 14 Super Electra took off from the RAF airfield at Habbaniyah in Iraq with British commercial markings and registration. Its crew wore civilian clothes, and carried false identity papers. They were members of RAF 224 Squadron which was equipped with the Lockheed Hudson, the military version of the Electra. They took photographs of Baku without any difficulty, but when, on 5 April, the photographic mission went to Batum oilfields the Soviet antiaircraft gunners were ready for them. The Electra returned with only three-quarters of the target on negatives. All the pictures obtained went to GHQ Middle East in Cairo to be made into ‘mosaics’ and for target maps to be drawn up from them. The Lockheed Electra returned to England and landed, at RAF Heston on 9 May 1940, the eve of the great German assault.
The German assault on France and the ensuing armistice and confusion put an end to all ideas of a bombing attack on the Soviet Union. In the aftermath of the defeat, on 16 June a signalman of 9 Panzer Division was searching through the contents of a captured French army train when he found the plans for the attack. Here were all the documents, carelessly typed, annotated and scrawled through: ‘ATTAQUE AERIENNE DU PETROLE DU CAUCASE. Liaison effectuée au G.Q.C. Aérien le avril 1940.’
The big rubber stamps saying ‘TRES SECRET’ made it even more tantalizing. So did the absence of a date. Gleefully the Germans published the documents together with all the exchanges about the Anglo-French plan to invade Norway on the pretence of helping the Finns. It made good propaganda, and looking at these documents now makes one question the sanity of the Western leaders who sanctioned such mad ventures.3
The trump card that supplies of Soviet oil provided to Hitler was recognized by just about everyone but the Führer himself. He became convinced that the Soviets were stirring up these frequent quarrels involving Romania and suspected that it was all part of a cunning strategy that would provide the Russians with an excuse to annex the Romanian oilfields. These suspicions were given new encouragement when, in June 1940, Russia annexed Bessarabia, a part of Romania. Not only did Stalin have the excuse that this had been Russian territory until the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, but this annexation was in accord with the Stalin-Hitler agreement,4 and yet still it rankled with Hitler.
Romania and its oilfields were never far from his thoughts, and when, in 1941, the British occupied the Mediterranean islands of Lemnos and Crete he immediately saw these places as bases from which the RAF could strike at Romanian oilfields. Urgent plans were laid for dislodging the British. Hitler’s anxieties were not allayed until Greece and Crete were occupied by German forces.
