by John Keegan
Reasoned opposition came not from the ground commanders but from the representatives of their sister and (to some degree) competing services, the navy and air force. Goering, as head not only of the Luftwaffe but also, however improbably, of the economic planning authority, was concerned by the economic effort a war with Russia would entail. He continued to believe, moreover, in the benefits to be won by sustaining an air offensive against Britain. Goering had confronted Hitler with his arguments on 13 November, immediately after Molotov’s visit to Berlin, forecasting that the course on which Russia seemed bent would draw it into war with Britain, an outcome from which Germany was bound to benefit. Meanwhile, he advocated, Germany should maintain its current strategy. When Hitler turned the economic argument against him, however, claiming that Russian conquests would supply the food and oil needed to beat Britain down, he withdrew his objections and thereafter largely co-operated in the Barbarossa preparations.
Raeder, Hitler’s Grand Admiral, was a more persistent opponent. He saw Hitler the day after Goering, raised the danger of fighting a two-front war, rightly emphasising that Germany’s leaders had always sought to avoid such a strategic predicament, and urged that no new enterprise should be undertaken until Britain was beaten. Raeder had influence with Hitler. It was he who had advocated the attack on Norway, the success of which had reinforced his prestige. It was also he who had persuaded Hitler to prepare invasion plans against Britain, and who had then deflected the Führer from undertaking Sealion by warning of the likelihood of its miscarriage. He had already produced alternatives to Barbarossa – notably Felix, the plan to hamstring Britain in the Mediterranean by capturing Gibraltar – and he was also proposing initiatives in the Balkans and towards Turkey, which would put pressure on Britain at the Mediterranean’s eastern end. Goering shared his strategic outlook. They were both attracted by the opportunities presented by seizing French North Africa, so that Italy could be supported in Libya and Britain outflanked in Egypt. Raeder went further: he wanted to take the Atlantic islands – the Azores, Canaries and Cape Verde islands, Spanish and Portuguese possessions – which would give Germany control of the western mid-Atlantic, particularly since he was outraged at what he called ‘the glaring proof of [America’s] non-neutrality’. However, while Hitler was excited by the prospect of bringing the Atlantic islands under German control, he continued to set his face inflexibly against the idea of adding the United States to the list of his enemies. Within a year, his curious concept of honour between allies would prompt him to follow Japan into war with America. In the autumn of 1940, however, even as he withdrew from the thought of risking thirty-six of the Wehrmacht’s best divisions on the turbulent tides of the Channel, he clung as if by the force of dogma to the principle of placating Britain’s natural co-belligerent in the face of almost any provocation she might offer. Russia he would brave in its lion’s den; the United States he would not confront at all.
There was more than strategic calculation to this diversity of policy. He had no admiration for the American people, as he did for the British, nor did he fear their military power in the immediate term. He did not, indeed, view the United States as a military power at all. It was its commercial and productive capacity which figured in his ‘correlation of forces’, and he did not believe that that capacity could be brought to bear against Germany until the war had run its course much further. However, it was precisely because his attitude to America was devoid of ideological content that he chose to disregard all provocation she might offer him in the months while Barbarossa was in the making. The maintenance of diplomatic, if not friendly, relations with the United States was a necessary simplification of the strategic balance sheet that would allow the preordained struggle with the Soviet Union to be brought on and carried through with the least possible diversion of effort.
Hitler’s attitude towards Russia, by contrast, was suffused by ideology, drawn from many sources – racial, economic, historical – and fermented by his own rancours and ambitions into a self-intoxicating potency. He was obsessed, perhaps most of all, by the ‘story’ of German history: how the Teutonic tribes, alone among the peoples on Rome’s western borders, had resisted the power of the empire, beaten it down, raised warrior kingdoms of their own and then turned eastward to carry their standards into the Slav lands. The epics of the Teutons, as Varangian bodyguards of the Byzantine emperor, as Viking venturers on the northern seas and founders of princedoms along the Russian rivers, first outposts of ‘civilisation’ in the east, as Norman conquerors of England and Sicily, as knights of the Baltic shore, formed a theme to which he returned night after night in the monologues which passed for his ‘table talk’. The survivals and implantations of German settlers east of consolidated Deutschtum’s central European front – in Poland, Hungary, Romania, Czechoslovakia, even in Russia proper, outside the Baltic states, where 1.8 million German colonists were living as late as 1914 – evoked in him feelings of the ‘manifest destiny’ of the German race akin to those of the British, as they contemplated the diaspora of the English-speaking peoples about the oceanic world, in Victoria’s heyday. Yet while the British saw the bounds of their world destined to grow wider and wider still, as if by the operation of some beneficently divine hand, Hitler was conditioned, by his obsession with the tribulations of the Germans, to see them as a people under threat, from which they were to be preserved only by unrelenting struggle.
The threat was manifold and amorphous, but it lay in the east, its instruments were the ‘motley of Czechs, Poles, Hungarians, Serbs and Croats, etc.’ (the ‘etc.’ included all the diverse Slav and non-Slav peoples of Russia), ‘and always the bacillus which is the solvent of human society, the Jew’, and its permanent trend was towards the fragmentation and subjection of the German nation. Bolshevism, which he was determined to see as directed by Jewry, in his lifetime invested that threat with unifying and aggressive force. ‘Cosmopolitan’ Judaism denied the principles of racial singularity and purity which stood at the pinnacle of his value system; Bolshevism, by its espousal of the cause of the ‘masses’, itself a term of contempt, and its substitution of faith in economic forces for trust in the warrior’s strong arm, repudiated the creed of aristocratic populism on which Hitler had founded his appeal to his folk. ‘Jewish Bolshevism’ had therefore to be confronted head on, its dominions wrested from its leaders by brute force, and the ‘life space’ (Lebensraum) thus liberated settled with the ‘higher peoples’ – Germans of the Reich proper, Germans of the eastern settlements, associated ‘Germanics’ of northern Europe – who, if they did not win supremacy in war, were fated to subjection and enslavement by the myriad hordes of their inferiors.
‘Irrevocable and terrible in its finality’, as David Irving, Hitler’s biographer, has characterised his Barbarossa decision, it was therefore ‘one he never regretted, even in the jaws of ultimate defeat’. However, though the decision was certainly fixed by December 1940, six months were to elapse before the forces necessary to implement it were set in motion. In the meantime a sequence of events centred on the Balkans, where German and Soviet power politics were most directly engaged against each other, was to distract his attention from the inception of the coming campaign. For all its appalling risk, Barbarossa was characterised by a certain ‘stark simplicity’: which would prove the stronger on the field of battle, the Wehrmacht or the Red Army? In the Balkans, during the months while the German army’s divisions completed their redeployment to the start-lines from which Barbarossa would be launched, Hitler found himself embroiled in the complexities of an ancient strategic quandary: which way to throw his power among small states, militarily insignificant in themselves, which might nevertheless, by invoking the help of stronger protectors, disrupt the smooth unrolling of his chosen strategy?
SEVEN
Securing the Eastern Springboard
‘Crossroads of Europe’ is a catchphrase designation for the Balkans, conveying little more than unfamiliarity with the region by those wh
o use it. The Balkans, spined and herringboned by some of the highest mountains on the continent, offer few highways, and none deserving to be called a path of conquest. No single power, not even the Roman Empire at its height, has dominated the whole region: cautious generals have consistently declined to campaign there if they could. It has been a graveyard of military operations ever since the Emperor Valens succumbed to the Goths at Adrianople in 378.
Yet, though the Balkans do not offer easy passage to conquerors, it is the fate of the peoples who inhabit them to be campaigned over. For, precisely because the region is a jumble of mountain chains and blind valleys, where even the rivers must negotiate defiles and gorges impassable by man or beast, it marks a natural barrier between European and Asian empires. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when Islam was on the march, the Balkans were the battleground where Turk fought Habsburg. In the nineteenth, when Turkey had fallen sick, they offered the fronts on which her enemies – Austria, Russia and their satellites – drove the Ottomans back upon their Anatolian fastnesses. And possession of the coasts of the Balkans and their archipelagos – the Ionian islands, the Dodecanese, the Cyclades – have been contested by power-seekers even longer and more consistently; for, as Sicily does in miniature, and Malta on yet a smaller scale, the Balkans dominate the sea-passages and seas by which they are washed. Venice, greatest of Italian city-states, made herself mistress of the Adriatic by control not of her own lagoon but of the fortress harbours which run the length of the Adriatic’s Balkan shore – Zara, Cattaro, Valona – and the Ionian islands at its mouth. In her heyday, Venice also extended powerful tentacles into the eastern Mediterranean by her occupation of the Greek Peloponnese and its satellite islands of Naxos, Crete and Cyprus. The Turks, whatever the ebb and flow of their military fortunes, always assured themselves of an ultimate base of Balkan power by clinging to possession of the Bosphorus, channel of communication between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. In the face of bribes, threats and direct attack – by the Russians in the nineteenth century, the emergent Balkan states in the early twentieth, the British and French in the First World War – Turkey clung limpet-like to Istanbul (the Constantinople and Byzantium of old) in the sure knowledge that it was control of the ‘the Straits’ which in European eyes made her a power to be reckoned with and not, as she would become if she relinquished it, merely a Levantine appendage.
Because the Balkans form both a land barrier and a maritime base, or cluster of bases, at the point where Asia meets Europe and the Mediterranean the Black Sea, the strategy of any commander drawn into the area will tend to be both ‘continental’ and ‘maritime’, and the one will run at cross-purposes with the other. This, as Professor Martin van Creveld, the closest student of German war-making in the months between the fall of France and the inception of Barbarossa, has pointed out, is precisely the complication into which Hitler fell at the end of 1940. His Balkan policy thitherto had been to allow Italy to play the great power in its relations with the maritime and historically ‘Italian’ sphere of influence – Albania, Greece, Yugoslavia – while drawing the inland zone – Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania – into Germany’s. Hungary and Romania had fallen willingly under his sway, signing the Tripartite Pact and allowing German troops to be stationed on their territory; Bulgaria had proved more resistant, but for reasons of understandable caution, not hostility. Yugoslavia had successfully trodden a middle path, insisting on its neutrality but averting a breach with the Axis. Then Britain’s persistence in belligerence had upset his Balkan scheme. Having failed in his efforts to beat down her air defences in the Battle of Britain, as a preliminary to an invasion in which he did not fully believe, Hitler subsequently acquiesced in the Italian attack on Greece (of which he was probably forewarned at his meeting with Mussolini at the Brenner Pass on 4 October), because Britain, whose sole remaining continental ally was Greece, thereby came under increased strategic pressure from another direction. He had calculated that the offensive should diminish Britain’s capacity to prosecute its war in Egypt with the Italian Libyan army, and thereby strengthen the ‘pincers’ he was seeking to construct by drawing Spain and Vichy France into his anti-British alliance.
This complex, but also tentative, strategic design was compromised by the humiliating failure of the Italian offensive. Before the invasion of 28 October, Hitler was considering the dispatch of a German intervention force to North Africa and had actually sent a senior officer (Ritter von Thoma, whom the British would later know well as an opponent) to study the problem of deploying an ‘Afrikakorps’. Once the miscarriage of Mussolini’s invasion of Greece became apparent, however, Hitler felt constrained to rescue his ally – who had anyhow refused the help of an Afrikakorps – from humiliation, even though direct German intervention against Greece, which required the acquisition of bases in Bulgaria, would alarm the Russians at precisely the moment he was keenest to allay their anxieties (or even, had Molotov brought assurance of acquiescence in German continental hegemony to Berlin on 12 November, agree binding non-aggression terms with them). Mussolini’s Greek adventure thus had the direct effect of driving Hitler into heightening his war effort against Britain, though in her Mediterranean empire rather than against her coasts; it also had the indirect effect of committing him to a seizure of territory – useful but not essential to the launching of Barbarossa – which made any agreement of ‘spheres of influence’ between him and Stalin impossible. In that respect the Greek campaign was to be decisive in determining the future course of the Second World War.
Mussolini’s Greek venture
Mussolini’s venture into Greece was an operation Hitler was justified in believing ought to have succeeded. The Greek army was greatly outnumbered and was obliged to divide its forces so as to defend Thrace – the coastal strip at the head of the Aegean – against Bulgaria. On paper it should have been overwhelmed in the opening stage of the invasion; but Italy’s forces were also divided, by the garrisoning of Ethiopia and Libya, and it could therefore deploy only a fraction of its much larger army on the Albanian-Greek frontier. The Italian army of 1940 was not, moreover, what it had been in 1915. Then, committed to war on a single, equally mountainous front against Austria, it had fought courageously in one offensive after another, and not without effect. By October 1917 its efforts had impelled the Austrians to appeal for help to the Germans lest its twelfth offensive on the Isonzo succeed in breaking through. Under Mussolini, however, Italian formations had been reduced in size in order to increase their number, a typical demagogic act of window-dressing. The divisions which Mussolini launched into Greece on 28 October 1940 were therefore weaker in all arms, but particularly in infantry, than their Greek equivalents; they were also weaker in motivation. Mussolini’s reasons for seeking war with Greece went no further than a desire to emulate his German ally’s triumphs, settle trifling old scores with Greece, reassert Italy’s interest in the Balkans (he was piqued that Romania, an Italian client, had accepted German protection for its Ploesti oilfields earlier in October) and secure bases from which his British enemy’s eastern Mediterranean outposts might be attacked. None of these reasons counted for much with his soldiers. They began their assault through the Epirus mountains without enthusiasm; even the Alpini regiments, Italy’s best troops, appeared in poor heart. Their Greek opponents, by contrast, defended with a will. General John Metaxas, head of government, was enabled early in the campaign to transfer forces from Thrace to the Albanian front, thanks to Turkey’s warning to the Bulgarians that its thirty-seven divisions concentrated in Turkey-in-Europe would be used if Bulgaria tried to profit from Greece’s difficulty. In the meantime the Greeks allowed the Italian attackers to wear themselves out in frontal attacks on their mountain positions. When their own reinforcements arrived, they counter-attacked, on 14 November, and drove the invaders back in confusion. Mussolini summoned reserves from all over Italy, some of which were flown to Albania in German aircraft, but by 30 November the Greeks opposed fifteen of his division
s with eleven of their own, his whole invading force had been thrown back inside Albania and the Greek counter-offensive was still gathering strength.
Hitler, who had already ordered OKW on 4 November to prepare an operational plan for a German offensive against Greece, was by then committed to its launching. For all the diplomatic difficulties it would cause – affront to Yugoslavia, Greece’s neutralist neighbour, anxiety to Turkey, which was even more strongly determined to remain neutral, alarm to Bulgaria, which shrank from offending Russia by granting Germany the bases the Greek operation required – and for all the military difficulties the operation entailed, particularly those of committing mechanised formations to the least ‘tankable’ terrain in Europe, he now saw no means of avoiding the initiative, except at the price of conceding his British enemies strategic and propaganda advantages he could not allow them. Mussolini, for better or worse – and Hitler was never to waver in his loyalty to the founder of fascism – was seen by the world as his political confederate as well as military ally. Hitler was determined to rescue him from humiliation at the hands of the Greeks, all the more so because he rightly held the Greeks in high esteem as soldiers; he was also determined to deny the British long-term possession of bases on Greek soil, from which they could menace his extraction of Balkan resources – foodstuffs, ores, above all oil – essential to his war effort.