by Herman Wouk
Conquer the south to the Turkish and Iranian borders;
Take Leningrad, and possibly Moscow;
The main objectives in Russia thus achieved, if the enemy still fights on, fortify the eastern line from the Gulf of Finland to the Caspian Sea, and go on the defensive against an emasculated foe.
Essentially then, the original Barbarossa goal now shifted to a slanting Great Wall of fortified positions from the Gulf of Finland to the great Baku oil fields on the Caspian, sealing off our “Slavic India.” Other vital benefits, if the campaign succeeded, would be cutting off Lend-Lease via the Persian Gulf, tilting Turkey to our side, and denying our enemies Persian oil. An advance to India might even be in the offing, if all went well, or a northward sweep east of the Volga to take Moscow from the rear. Admittedly, this was adventurous policy. We had failed once, and were trying again with weaker forces. But Russia was weakened, too. The whole grandiose drive of the German people under Hitler for world empire was only a pyramiding of gambles.
If only we could change the war balance by seizing Russia’s wheat and oil, and then stabilize the eastern front, two political solutions of the war could open up: an Anglo-Saxon change of heart at the prospect of facing our full fury, or a realistic peace by Stalin. Roosevelt’s fear of such a separate eastern peace governed all his war-making. And Stalin remained suspicious to the end that the plutocracies were planning to leave him in the lurch. It was uncertain right up to our surrender whether the bizarre alliance of our foes would not fall apart.
Why in fact did the Americans and British never grasp that only by letting us win against Russia could the world flood of Bolshevism be stemmed? Churchill at least wanted to land in the Balkans to forestall Stalin in middle Europe. If this was bad strategy, because we were too strong and the terrain too difficult, it was at least alert politics. Roosevelt would have none of it. Since he could not annihilate us, he wanted to help the Bolsheviks to do it. So he sacrified Christian Europe to American monopoly capital for a brief gluttonous feast, at the price of a new dark age now fast falling on the world.
Answers to Critics of Blue
After every war, the armchair strategists and the history professors have their pallid fun, telling those who bled in battle how they should have done it. Certain shallow criticisms of Case Blue have been repeated until they have taken on a false aura of fact. Stalingrad was a great and fatal turn in world history, and the record leading up to it should be clear.
Strategically, Blue was a good plan.
Tactically, Blue went awry, because of Hitler’s day-to-day interference.
Critics carp that the one acceptable objective of a major campaign is the destruction of the enemy’s armed forces. In the summer of 1942 Stalin had concentrated his armies around Moscow, assuming we would try to end the war by smashing the bulk of his forces and occupying the capital. Our critics assert we should have done so. This would indeed have been orthodox strategy. By striking south we achieved massive surprise. That too is orthodox strategy.
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE:Russian sources bear out Roon. Stalin was so positive that the attack in the south was a feint to draw off Moscow’s defenses, and he hung on to this idea so long, that only Hitler’s botch of the tactics saved Stalingrad, and possibly the Soviet Union.— V.H.
We are also told that the strategic aim of Case Blue was economic, ano therefore wrong. One must destroy the enemy’s armed force, then one can do as one pleases with his wealth; so the banal admonition goes. These critics miss the whole point of Blue. It was a plan to enforce a gigantic land blockade of the poor but governing north rump of the Soviet Union, by depriving it of food, fuel, and heavy industry. Blockade, if one can enforce it, is a tedious but tested way to humble an enemy. When Blue was planned, the Japanese were running wild in the Pacific and in Southeast Asia. We assumed that they would neutralize the United States for a year or more. Alas, the stunning early turnabouts at Midway and Guadalcanal freed Roosevelt to flood Lend-Lease aid to the Russians in 1942, past our blockade. That made a powerful difference.
Finally, critics contend that Blue’s double objective, Stalingrad and the Caucasus, required a stretching out of the southern front far beyond the capacity of the Wehrmacht to hold it, so that the outcome of the campaign was foredoomed.
But Stalingrad was not an objective of Case Blue. It became Hitler’s objective when he lost control of himself in September.
Strategy of Case Blue
Near Stalingrad, the rivers Don and Volga converge in a very striking way. The two great bends point their V’s at each other over a forty-mile space of dry land. The first phase of Blue called for capture of this strategic land bridge, so as to block attacks from the north on our southern invasion forces; also, to cut the Volga as a supply route of fuel and food to the north.
At the V of the Volga, a medium-sized industrial town straggled along the bluffs of the west bank: Stalingrad. We did not need to occupy it, we needed merely to neutralize it with bombardment in order to dominate the bottleneck. Our general plan was to thrust two heavy fast-moving pincers along the two arms of the enormous V of the Don, thus trapping and destroying most of the Soviet forces defending south Russia. The first pincer, the Volga Force —jumping off first, since it had the longer distance to go — would march down the upper arm of the Don. The second, the Caucasus Force, would advance along the lower arm. They would meet between the rivers, near Stalingrad. After defeating and mopping up the trapped forces, these two great army groups would divide responsibilities for the second or conquest phase. The Caucasus Force would wheel south, cross the Don, and drive down to the Black Sea, to the Caspian, and through the high passes to the borders of Turkey and Iran. The Volga Force would defend the dangerous flank opened up all along the Don, which would be manned during our advance by three satellite armies: Hungarian, Italian, and Rumanian.
Here was the weak link in Blue, and we knew it. But we had already lost nearly a million men in the war, and we were near the limit of German manpower. We had to use these auxiliaries on the flanks while the Wehrmacht struck ahead. But we did not plan that they should man the Don against a full assault by the Red Army. That happened only because the Fuhrer lost his head, and disrupted the timetable of the campaign.
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE:In editing Roon, I have omitted Manstein’s conquest of the Crimea and Sevastopol, and the failure of Timoshenko’s May attack against Kharkov. These big German victories weakened Russia in the south, making Blue a much more promising operation. I have called “Army Group A” Caucasus Force, and “Army Group8” Volga Force. The technical Wehrmacht designations are hard to follow, especially as regroupings occurred in mid-campaign.— V.H.
(From “Hitler as Military Leader”)
What Went Wrong
… Supreme Headquarters is an edgy place during a campaign. One waits in a map room for developments, day after day. The war seems to drag and drag. Out in the field is reality: hundreds of thousands of men marching over fields and through cities, moving masses of equipment, coming under fire. In Headquarters one sees the same faces, the same walls, the same maps, one eats in the same place with the same elderly tired men in uniform. The atmosphere is strained and quiet, the air stale. There is a remoteness and abstraction about this nerve center of the war. The perpetual tension of deferred hope gnaws at the heart.
At our advance headquarters at Vinnitsa in the Ukraine all this was doubly true. “Werewolf,” as Hitler named the installation, was a crude compound of log cabins and wooden huts in the open pine country near the southern River Bug. Socially, there was no relief. Physically, we could go splash in the slow muddy river, if we cared to expose our naked skins to clouds of stinging insects. The weather was blazing hot and sticky, too much so for Hitler even to walk his dog, his only exercise.
We moved there in mid-July, at the height of the campaign. Hitler did not take the heat well, strong sunlight bothered him, and altogether it was an uncomfortable situation. His digestion was worse than ever, his f
latulence a trial for everybody in a room with him. Even the dog, Blondi, was out of sorts and whiny.
But even before that, while we were still in our cooler and more comfortable compound in the East Prussian woods, he had already shown signs of strain and instability, by his drastic change of plan for the Caucasus Force and for the Fourth Panzer Army….
(From World Holocaust)
The faltering of Blue can be dated precisely to the thirteenth of July.
Hitler’s anxiety had been mounting day by day. He could not understand why we were not hauling in the hordes of prisoners that our great enveloping movements had yielded in 1941. Whether Stalin had learned at last not to order his troops to stand fast and be captured; or whether the southern armies were fading away before us in undisciplined rout; or whether the front was just weakly manned; or whether, finally, the Russians were resorting to their classic tactic of trading space for time, the fact was we were capturing Russians in the tens of thousands, instead of the hundreds of thousands.
On July 13, Hitler suddenly decided to divert the entire eastward campaign away from the Stalingrad land bridge, southwest toward Rostov! Thus he hoped, by a tighter enveloping move, to bag a supposed enormous Red Army force in the Don bend. The whole Caucasus Force wheeled off on this mission. He even peeled off the Volga Force’s panzer army, the doughty Fourth, and sent it clanking toward Rostov, too, although Haider bitterly opposed piling so much armor against one minor objective. The Volga Force slowed to a standstill, very low on gasoline, for the main supplies had to go to this adventure of catching Russians.
The huge power thrust captured Rostov and netted some forty thousand prisoners. But precious time had been lost, and the whole Blue plan was in disarray. The Caucasus Force and the Fourth Army were milling around Rostov, choking the transit arteries, and creating unimaginable difficulties in improvised organization and supply.
At this critical point Adolf Hitler sprang on our stupefied Headquarters his notorious and catastrophic Directive Number 45, perhaps the worst military orders ever issued. It abrogated the Blue plan altogether. A responsible General Staff would have analyzed, war-gamed, and organized such an operation for months, or even for a year. Hitler airily scrawled it all out in a day or two, and so far as I know, all by himself. If Jodl helped him with it, he never boasted of it!
In essence, Directive Number 45 consisted of three points:
A mere assertion(contrary to known fact) that the first aim of the campaign had been achieved: i.e., that the Red Army in the south had been “largely destroyed.”
The Volga Force was to resume the drive toward Stalingrad, with the Fourth Panzer Army rejoining it.
The Caucasus Force under List was to proceed southward at once, with additions to its original difficult task, such as securing the entire Black Sea coast.
This was Hitler’s last attack directive. It was at this point that we at Supreme Headquarters began to lose heart, though in the field things still looked rosy. Haider, the Army Chief of Staff, was scandalized. He noted in his diary — and he said baldly to me — that these orders no longer bore any resemblance to military realities.
The conditions for carrying out our summer campaign in any reasonable form had now melted away. Neither the upper bend of the Don, nor the crucial land bridge, had been secured. The Caucasus Force, the lower pincer of the Don phase, had been scheduled to move south only when the Don flank stretching to Stalingrad was secure. Now the two great forces were to separate and operate in different directions with unsecured flanks — leaving a constantly widening gap between them as they pursued diverse missions!
Moreover, the Blue plan had called for Manstein’s Eleventh Army, which had conquered the Crimea and captured Sevastopol, to cross to the Caucasus and support List in his drive. But Hitler, in his glee at the capture of Rostov, had decided that things were going too well in the south to waste Manstein there; and he had ordered Manstein to take most of his army eleven hundred miles north to attack Leningrad!
Hitler’s numbered directives end with Number 51, dated late in 1943; but in fact, after this fatal Number 45, they trail off in defensive measures. This was his final wielding of the initiative. Lack of experience, and the strain of arrogating to himself all the political and military authority of Germany, had told at last on a high-strung temperament, a very adept mind, and a fearsome will. The order was madness. Yet only in our innermost HQ councils was the picture clear in all its folly. The Wehrmacht obeyed, and marched off into the remotest depths of southern Russia on two separate roads to its sombre fate.
Arrival at Stalingrad
With awesome inevitability, the tragedy now began to unfold.
The Caucasus Force performed wonders, marching across vast steppes blazing with midsummer heat, climbing to the peaks of snowcapped mountain ranges, investing the Black Sea coast, and actually sending patrols as far as the Caspian Sea. But it fell short of its objectives. What Hitler had ordered was beyond its manpower, its firepower, and its logistical support. The force stood still for as much as ten days at a time, for want of gasoline, and of supply trucks to bring up the fuel. At one point, with true Greek irony, gasoline was even being brought to the Caucasus Force on the backs of camels! List’s great armies stalled in the mountains, harried by elusive tough Red units, and unable to advance.
Meanwhile, on August 23 the Volga Force, driving on toward Stalingrad, reached the riverbank north of the city, and the neutralization phase began with heavy air and artillery bombardment. Resistance was at first meager. For a day or two it looked as though Stalingrad might fall to a coup de main. But it did not happen. We were at a far stretch ourselves, and Stalingrad held against the first shock.
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE:These dry words of Roon scarcely convey the reality as the Russians saw it.
The advance of the Sixth Army on Stalingrad was apparently the most terrifying event of what the Russians call the Great Patriotic War. The army commanders, the populace, and Stalin himself were astounded at this renewed powerful thrust of the Germans into the vitals of their country. The August twenty-third bombardment was one of the most horrible ordeals by fire the Russians ever endured. Some forty thousand civilians were killed. The flaming streets of the town literally “ran with blood.” All communication with Moscow was cut off. For several hours Josef Stalin believed that Stalingrad had fallen. But though the city was to undergo one of the worst punishments in the history of warfare thereafter, that was the low point.
Most military writers conclude that if Hitler had not interfered with the Blue plan, the Volga Force would have reached the river weeks earlier, while Stalin was still under the delusion that the southern attack was a feint. Stalingrad would have fallen, a fruit of the massive initial surprise, and the whole war might have gone differently. Hitler disembowelled the Blue campaign by the diversion to Rostov.— V.H.
Catastrophe at Stalingrad
As previously stated, the capture of Stalingrad was not a military necessity.
Our aim was to take the land bridge between the rivers, and to deny the Soviets the use of the Volga as a supply route. Now we were at the Volga. All we had to do was invest the city and bombard it to rubble. After all, we invested Leningrad for more than two years. About a million Russians fell in Leningrad streets from starvation, and for all intents and purposes of the war, the city was a withered corpse. There was no military reason not to treat Stalingrad the same way.
But there was increasing political reason. For as the Caucasus Force came to a halt in the wild mountain passes despite all Hitler’s savage urging; as Rommel stalled at El Alamein, failed in two assaults, and at last underwent the grinding assault of the British; as the RAF increased its barbaric fire raids on our cities, slaughtering thousands of innocent women and children and pulverizing important factories; as our U-boat losses suddenly and alarmingly shot up; as the Americans landed in North Africa with world-shaking political effect; as all these chickens came home to roost, and Adolf Hitler’s great summer
flush of triumph waned, and the first cracks in his gigantic imperium appeared, the embattled Fuhrer felt a more and more desperate need for a prestige victory to turn all this around.
STALINGRAD!
STALINGRAD, bearing the name of his strongest foe! STALINGRAD, symbol of the Bolshevism he had fought all his life! STALINGRAD, a city appearing more and more in world headlines as a pivot of the war!
The capture of Stalingrad became for Adolf Hitler an unbelievably violent obsession. His orders in the ensuing weeks were madness compounded and recompounded. The Sixth Army, which with its mobile striking power had won an unbroken string of victories in Poland, France, and Russia, was fed division by division into the meat grinder of Stalingrad’s ruined streets, where mobile tactics were impossible. Slav snipers mowed down the veterans of the great Sixth in a house-to-house “rat war.” The Russian General Staff poured in defenders across the Volga to keep up this annihilation, while methodically preparing a stupendous counterstroke against the weak satellite armies on the Don flank. For Josef Stalin had finally grasped that Hitler, with his obsessive cramming of his finest divisions into the Moloch-maw of Stalingrad, was giving him a glorious opportunity.
Late in November the blow fell. The Red Army hurtled across the Don into the Rumanian army, guarding the flank of the Volga Force, northwest of Stalingrad. These unwarlike auxiliaries gave way like cheese to a knife. A similar attack routed the Rumanian flank corps in our Fourth Panzer Army, on the southern flank. As the attack developed into December, the Russians smashed into our lines all along the Don where Italians and Hungarians were protecting the Sixth Army’s rear; and a steel trap closed on three hundred thousand German soldiers, the flower of the Wehrmacht.