The corruption and corrosion of the Number Two man in the Third Reich was making steady progress.
Mussolini promised Goering to send two Italian divisions to Russia in March if the Germans would give them artillery, but his concern about his ally’s defeats on the Eastern front grew to such proportions that Hitler decided it was time for another meeting to explain how strong Germany still was.
This took place on April 29 and 30 at Salzburg, where the Duce and Ciano and their party were put up in the baroque Palace of Klessheim, once the seat of the prince-bishops and now redecorated with hangings, furniture and carpets from France, for which the Italian Foreign Minister suspected the Germans “did not pay too much.” Ciano found the Fuehrer looking tired. “The winter months in Russia have borne heavily upon him,” he noted in his diary. “I see for the first time that he has many gray hairs.”*
There followed the usual German recital sizing up the general situation, with Ribbentrop and Hitler assuring their Italian guests that all was well—in Russia, in North Africa, in the West and on the high seas. The coming offensive in the East, they confided, would be directed against the Caucasus oil fields.
When Russia’s sources of oil are exhausted [Ribbentrop said] she will be brought to her knees. Then the British … will bow in order to save what remains of the mauled Empire …
America is a big bluff …
Ciano, listening more or less patiently to his opposite number, got the impression, however, that in regard to what the United States might eventually do it was the Germans who were bluffing and that in reality, when they thought of it, “they feel shivers running down their spines.”
It was the Fuehrer who, as always, did most of the talking.
Hitler talks, talks, talks [Ciano wrote in his diary]. Mussolini suffers—he, who is in the habit of talking himself, and who, instead, practically has to keep quiet. On the second day, after lunch, when everything had been said, Hitler talked uninterruptedly for an hour and forty minutes. He omitted absolutely no argument: war and peace, religion and philosophy, art and history. Mussolini automatically looked at his wrist watch … The Germans—poor people—have to take it every day, and I am certain there isn’t a gesture, a word or a pause, which they don’t know by heart. General Jodl, after an epic struggle, finally went to sleep on the divan. Keitel was reeling, but he succeeded in keeping his head up. He was too close to Hitler to let himself go …12
Despite the avalanche of talk or perhaps because of it, Hitler got the promise of more Italian cannon fodder for the Russian front. So successful were he and Keitel with all the satellites that the German High Command calculated it would have 52 “Allied” divisions available for the summer’s task—27 Rumanian, 13 Hungarian, 9 Italian, 2 Slovak and one Spanish. This was one quarter of the combined Axis force in the East. Of the 41 fresh divisions which were to reinforce the southern part of the front, where the main German blow would fall, one half—or 21 divisions—were Hungarian (10), Italian (6) and Rumanian (5). Halder and most of the other generals did not like to stake so much on so many “foreign” divisions whose fighting qualities, in their opinion, were, to put it mildly, questionable. But because of their own shortage of manpower they reluctantly accepted this aid, and this decision was shortly to contribute to the disaster which ensued.
At first, that summer of 1942, the fortunes of the Axis prospered. Even before the jump-off toward the Caucasus and Stalingrad a sensational victory was scored in North Africa. On May 27,1942, General Rommel had resumed his offensive in the desert.* Striking swiftly with his famed Afrika Korps (two armored divisions and a motorized infantry division) and eight Italian divisions, of which one was armored, he soon had the British desert army reeling back toward the Egyptian frontier. On June 21 he captured Tobruk, the key to the British defenses, which in 1941 had held out for nine months until relieved, and two days later he entered Egypt. By the end of June he was at El Alamein, sixty-five miles from Alexandria and the delta of the Nile. It seemed to many a startled Allied statesman, poring over a map, that nothing could now prevent Rommel from delivering a fatal blow to the British by conquering Egypt and then, if he were reinforced, sweeping on northeast to capture the great oil fields of the Middle East and then to the Caucasus to meet the German armies in Russia, which already were beginning their advance toward that region from the north.
It was one of the darkest moments of the war for the Allies and correspondingly one of the brightest for the Axis. But Hitler, as we have seen, had never understood global warfare. He did not know how to exploit Rommel’s surprising African success. He awarded the daring leader of the Afrika Korps a field marshal’s baton but he did not send him supplies or reinforcements.* Under the nagging of Admiral Raeder and the urging of Rommel, the Fuehrer had only reluctantly agreed to send the Afrika Korps and a small German air force to Libya in the first place. But he had done this only to prevent an Italian collapse in North Africa, not because he foresaw the importance of conquering Egypt.
The key to that conquest actually was the small island of Malta, lying in the Mediterranean between Sicily and the Axis bases in Libya. It was from this British bastion that bombers, submarines and surface craft wrought havoc on German and Italian vessels carrying supplies and men to North Africa. In August 1941 some 35 per cent of Rommel’s supplies and reinforcements were sunk; in October, 63 per cent. By November 9 Ciano was writing sadly in his diary:
Since September 19 we had given up trying to get convoys through to Libya; every attempt had been paid for at a high price … Tonight we tried it again. A convoy of seven ships left, accompanied by two ten-thousand-ton cruisers and ten destroyers … All—I mean all—our ships were sunk … The British returned to their ports [at Malta] after having slaughtered us.13
Belatedly the Germans diverted several U-boats from the Battle of the Atlantic to the Mediterranean and Kesselring was given additional squadrons of planes for the bases in Sicily. It was decided to neutralize Malta and destroy, if possible, the British fleet in the eastern Mediterranean. Success was immediate. By the end of 1941 the British had lost three battleships, an aircraft carrier, two cruisers and several destroyers and submarines, and what was left of their fleet was driven to Egyptian bases. Malta had been battered by German bombers day and night for weeks. As a result Axis supplies got through—in January not a ton of shipping was lost—and Rommel was able to build up his forces for the big push into Egypt.
In March Admiral Raeder talked Hitler into approving plans not only for Rommel’s offensive toward the Nile (Operation Aïda) but for the capture of Malta by parachute troops (Operation Hercules). The drive from Libya was to begin at the end of May and Malta was to be assaulted in mid-July. But on June 15, while Rommel was in the midst of his initial successes, Hitler postponed the attack on Malta. He could spare neither troops nor planes from the Russian front, he explained to Raeder. A few weeks later he postponed Hercules again, saying it could wait until after the summer offensive in the East had been completed and Rommel had conquered Egypt.14 Malta could be kept quiet in the meantime, he advised, by continued bombing.
But it was not kept quiet and for this failure either to neutralize it or to capture it the Germans would shortly pay a high price. A large British convoy got through to the besieged island on June 16, and though several warships and freighters were lost this put Malta back in business. Spitfires were flown to the island from the U.S. aircraft carrier Wasp and soon drove the attacking Luftwaffe bombers from the skies. Rommel felt the effect. Three quarters of his supply ships thereafter were sunk.
He had reached El Alamein with just thirteen operational tanks.* “Our strength,” he wrote in his diary on July 3, “has faded away.” And at a moment when the Pyramids were almost in sight, and beyond—the great prize of Egypt and Suez! This was another opportunity lost, and one of the last which Hitler would be afforded by Providence and the fortunes of war.
THE GERMAN SUMMER OFFENSIVE IN RUSSIA: 1942
By the end of
the summer of 1942 Adolf Hitler seemed to be once more on top of the world. German U-boats were sinking 700,000 tons of British-American shipping a month in the Atlantic—more than could be replaced in the booming shipyards of the United States, Canada and Scotland. Though the Fuehrer had denuded his forces in the West of most of their troops and tanks and planes in order to finish with Russia, there was no sign that summer that the British and Americans were strong enough to make even a small landing from across the Channel. They had not even risked trying to occupy French-held Northwest Africa, though the weakened French, of divided loyalties, had nothing much with which to stop them even if they attempted to, and the Germans nothing at all except a few submarines and a handful of planes based in Italy and Tripoli.
The British Navy and Air Force had been unable to prevent Germany’s two battle cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau and the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen from dashing up the English Channel in full daylight and making their way safely home from Brest.* Hitler had feared that the British and Americans would certainly try to occupy northern Norway—that was why he had insisted on the dash from Brest so that the three heavy ships there could be used for the defense of Norwegian waters. “Norway,” he told Raeder at the end of January 1942, “is the zone of destiny.” It had to be defended at all costs. As it turned out, there was no need. The Anglo–Americans had other plans for their limited forces in the West.
On the map the sum of Hitler’s conquests by September 1942 looked staggering. The Mediterranean had become practically an Axis lake, with Germany and Italy holding most of the northern shore from Spain to Turkey and the southern shore from Tunisia to within sixty miles of the Nile. In fact, German troops now stood guard from the Norwegian North Cape on the Arctic Ocean to Egypt, from the Atlantic at Brest to the southern reaches of the Volga River on the border of Central Asia.
German troops of the Sixth Army had reached the Volga just north of Stalingrad on August 23. Two days before, the swastika had been hoisted on Mount Elbrus, the highest peak (18,481 feet) in the Caucasus Mountains. The Maikop oil fields, producing annually two and a half million tons of oil, had been captured on August 8, though the Germans found them almost completely destroyed, and by the twenty-fifth Kleist’s tanks had arrived at Mozdok, only fifty miles from the main Soviet oil center around Grozny and a bare hundred miles from the Caspian Sea. On the thirty-first Hitler was urging Field Marshal List, commander of the armies in the Caucasus, to scrape up all available forces for the final push to Grozny so that he “could get his hands on the oil fields.” On that last day of August, too, Rommel launched his offensive at El Alamein with every hope of breaking through to the Nile.
Although Hitler was never satisfied with the performance of his generals—he had sacked Field Marshal von Bock, who commanded the whole southern offensive, on July 13 and, as Halder’s diary reveals, had constantly nagged and cursed most of the other commanders as well as the General Staff for not advancing fast enough—he now believed that the decisive victory was in his grasp. He ordered the Sixth Army and the Fourth Panzer Army to swing north along the Volga, after Stalingrad was taken, in a vast encircling movement which would enable him eventually to advance on central Russia and Moscow from the east as well as from the west. He believed the Russians were finished and Halder tells of him at this moment talking of pushing with part of his forces through Iran to the Persian Gulf.15 Soon he would link up with the Japanese in the Indian Ocean. He had no doubt of the accuracy of a German intelligence report on September 9 that the Russians had used up all their reserves on the entire front. In a conference with Admiral Raeder at the end of August his thoughts were already turning from Russia, which he said he now regarded as a “blockadeproof Lebensraum,” to the British and Americans, who would soon, he was sure, be brought “to the point of discussing peace terms.”16
And yet, as General Kurt Zeitzler later recalled, appearances even then, rosy as they were, were deceptive. Almost all the generals in the field, as well as those on the General Staff, saw flaws in the pretty picture. They could be summed up: the Germans simply didn’t have the resources—the men or the guns or the tanks or the planes or the means of transportation—to reach the objectives Hitler had insisted on setting. When Rommel tried to tell this to the warlord in respect to Egypt, Hitler ordered him to go on sick leave in the mountains of the Semmering. When Halder and Field Marshal List attempted to do the same in regard to the Russian front, they were cashiered.
Even the rankest amateur strategist could see the growing danger to the German armies in southern Russia as Soviet resistance stiffened in the Caucasus and at Stalingrad and the season of the autumn rains approached. The long northern flank of the Sixth Army was dangerously exposed along the line of the upper Don for 350 miles from Stalingrad to Voronezh. Here Hitler had stationed three satellite armies: the Hungarian Second, south of Voronezh; the Italian Eighth, farther southeast; and the Rumanian Third, on the right at the bend of the Don just west of Stalingrad. Because of the bitter hostility of Rumanians and Hungarians to each other their armies had to be separated by the Italians. In the steppes south of Stalingrad there was a fourth satellite army, the Rumanian Fourth. Aside from their doubtful fighting qualities, all these armies were inadequately equipped, lacking armored power, heavy artillery and mobility. Furthermore, they were spread out very thinly. The Rumanian Third Army held a front of 105 miles with only sixty-nine battalions. But these “allied” armies were all Hitler had. There were not enough German units to fill the gap. And since he believed, as he told Halder, that the Russians were “finished,” he did not unduly worry about this exposed and lengthy Don flank.
Yet it was the key to maintaining both the Sixth Army and the Fourth Panzer Army at Stalingrad and Army Group A in the Caucasus. Should the Don flank collapse not only would the German forces at Stalingrad be threatened with encirclement but those in the Caucasus would be cut off. Once more the Nazi warlord had gambled. It was not his first gamble of the summer’s campaign.
On July 23, at the height of the offensive, he had made another. The Russians were in full retreat between the Donets and upper-Don rivers, falling rapidly back toward Stalingrad to the east and toward the lower Don to the south. A decision had to be made. Should the German forces concentrate on taking Stalingrad and blocking the Volga River, or should they deliver their main blow in the Caucasus in quest of Russian oil? Earlier in the month Hitler had pondered this crucial question but had been unable to make up his mind. At first, the smell of oil had tempted him most, and on July 13 he had detached the Fourth Panzer Army from Army Group B, which had been driving down the Don toward the river’s bend and Stalingrad just beyond, and sent it south to help Kleist’s First Panzer Army get over the lower Don near Rostov and on into the Caucasus toward the oil fields. At that moment the Fourth Panzer Army probably could have raced on to Stalingrad, which was then largely undefended, and easily captured it. By the time Hitler realized his mistake it was too late, and then he compounded his error. When the Fourth Panzer Army was shifted back toward Stalingrad a fortnight later, the Russians had recovered sufficiently to be able to check it; and its departure from the Caucasus front left Kleist too weak to complete his drive to the Grozny oil fields.*
The shifting of this powerful armored unit back to the drive on Stalingrad was one result of the fatal decision which Hitler made on July 23. His fanatical determination to take both Stalingrad and the Caucasus at the same time, against the advice of Halder and the field commanders, who did not believe it could be done, was embodied in Directive No. 45, which became famous in the annals of the German Army. It was one of the most fateful of Hitler’s moves in the war, for in the end, and in a very short time, it resulted in his failing to achieve either objective and led to the most humiliating defeat in the history of German arms, making certain that he could never win the war and that the days of the thousand-year Third Reich were numbered.
General Halder was appalled, and there was a stormy scene at “Werewolf” head
quarters in the Ukraine near Vinnitsa to which Hitler had moved on July 16 in order to be nearer the front. The Chief of the General Staff urged that the main forces be concentrated on the taking of Stalingrad and tried to explain that the German Army simply did not possess the strength to carry out two powerful offensives in two different directions. When Hitler retorted that the Russians were “finished,” Halder attempted to convince him that, according to the Army’s own intelligence, this was far from the case.
The continual underestimation of enemy possibilities [Halder noted sadly in his diary that evening] takes on grotesque forms and is becoming dangerous. Serious work has become impossible here. Pathological reaction to momentary impressions and a complete lack of capacity to assess the situation and its possibilities give this so-called “leadership” a most peculiar character.
Later the Chief of the General Staff, whose own days at his post were now numbered, would come back to this scene and write:
Hitler’s decisions had ceased to have anything in common with the principles of strategy and operations as they have been recognized for generations past. They were the product of a violent nature following its momentary impulses, which recognized no limits to possibility and which made its wish-dreams the father of its acts …17
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany Page 145