A Patriot's History of the Modern World

by Larry Schweikart

  After the fall of France, the Army undertook a frantic expansion. Numbers increased through the Selective Training and Service Act (draft), passed in September, and 16 million men were classified. Roosevelt federalized the National Guard in September, and by July 1941, the Army’s strength had been brought to over 1.2 million men on paper, many of whom, however, remained little more than uniformed untrained mobs. This force suffered in leadership and quality as many of the best potential draftees opted to volunteer for the Navy, Marines, or Army Air Corps. Additionally, many of the National Guard officers were overage or physically unfit, and in their untrained state, leaders had to be trained alongside their men. No one knew exactly how many men would be needed, or whether the United States would go it alone: General Albert Wedemeyer postulated an army of 215 divisions in the fall 1941 Victory Program, assuming the USSR would shortly capitulate and the United States and Britain would be isolated. When the USSR survived the winter of 1941, General George Marshall and Secretary of War Henry Stimson decided that 89 divisions would be sufficient, although Japanese capabilities did not figure significantly into their calculations. These numbers are significant, even astonishing, given that the Soviets would routinely hurl 200 divisions into offensives against the Nazis, but U.S. military leaders determined that firepower, not manpower, would provide the critical edge.

  Although the German army had undergone a similar rapid expansion in 1937–39, it possessed cultural advantages the United States did not have. Membership in the Hitler Youth, mandatory since 1936, prepared boys for military service, and German army units were formed by locality to enhance unit cohesion. The United States adopted a policy of thoroughly mixing hometowns and states in units to lessen the effects on a locality if the unit suffered severely in battle—as had occurred so often in the Civil War—but this greatly reduced unit cohesion without extensive training. In fact, unit cohesion was largely ignored in U.S. planning, for as soon as trainees became proficient in their duties and required skills, the best men were siphoned off to form cadres for new units. Worse, the Army’s Specialist Training Program (ASTP) allowed 150,000 of the brightest (or most well-connected) men to continue college after induction (Robert F. Kennedy was one).

  In addition, the ultimate capping of the army’s size at 89 large divisions handicapped the maintenance of morale and effectiveness in the field. Divisions could not be rotated out of battle for rebuilding and training with replacements as in the German system, and the American replacement system resulted in excessively high casualties and reduced unit cohesion. Replacements received less training than original unit members, and when immediately assigned to a unit in combat, frequently became casualties before they could reach any state of effectiveness—sometimes they died before fellow squad members even learned their names. What the 89-division cap did do was ensure that the massive American industrial capacity would outperform all other combatants by leaps and bounds because it kept so many men in the workforce. Nonetheless, America’s huge industrial and military potential went almost unnoticed by European states facing a rampaging Nazi Germany.

  Having already seized Poland, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, Holland, France (and her North African territory), and Albania, and forced Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland into neutrality, the Axis powers became the beneficiaries of a bandwagon effect. Other nations—Hungary, Slovakia, and Romania—seeing the writing on the wall, joined the Tripartite Pact. Just as the Luftwaffe engaged the RAF in the skies over England, Italy pushed into Greece, sensing an easy conquest. That was an error which infuriated Hitler, who viewed the Mediterranean as an uninteresting sideshow. Greece fought off Mussolini’s troops, and the Italians were pushed back to their Albanian bases, holding on by the skin of their teeth. So far-reaching was this debacle that the official German history of World War II titled its chapter on this action “Mussolini’s Surprise Attack on Greece and the Beginning of the End of Italy’s Role as a Great Power.”59 British and Australian troops hurled the Italians back out of Egypt and East Africa, then went on the offensive against them in Libya. These efforts were substantially due to Churchill’s decision—against the advice of his war cabinet and the military—to reinforce Egypt with nearly half of Britain’s available tanks even though they required a journey around the Cape of Good Hope. In addition, a carrier-based air attack by the British against the Italian naval base at Taranto dealt heavy damage to the Italian fleet—a success the Japanese would study in preparation for their Pearl Harbor operation. At the Battle of Cape Matapan, off Greece, three Italian heavy cruisers were sunk and another battleship wrecked, forcing Italy’s navy essentially out of the war.60

  With no domestic raw materials, little martial ardor, and a tiny industrial base, Italy was more a liability than an asset to Hitler. He was forced to send forces to Libya in February 1941 to prevent Mussolini’s total defeat and expulsion from North Africa, involving Germany in a debilitating and long, seesaw campaign in North Africa. He picked up Bulgaria as yet another ally in April, but not one that would provide troops or take an active part in his campaign against Russia. Meanwhile the situation in Albania deteriorated, and Mussolini begged him for another intervention to save his ally. With British advisers in Greece aiding the Greek army against Mussolini and British agents active in Yugoslavia, Hitler’s southern flank was in disarray. On December 13, 1940 Hitler gave orders to plan Operation Marita (the invasion of Greece) to secure his southern flank and drive the British from the Balkans.

  The necessity to clear the Balkans of unfriendly forces became urgent on March 27, 1941, when the Yugoslav government was overthrown in a coup, replacing a German-friendly regent Prince Paul with a hostile King Peter II and taking Yugoslavia out of the Tripartite Pact they had joined two days earlier. Hitler immediately ordered Yugoslavia to be conquered at the earliest possible date. Although some historians have held that Hitler’s actions against Yugoslavia and Greece significantly delayed his timetable in Russia, thereby losing weeks of campaign time, others argue persuasively that Hitler’s stage-wise postponement of his attack on the Soviet Union from May 16 to June 22 was primarily because of inclement weather.61 In any case, Hitler attacked Yugoslavia and Greece on April 6, easily brushing aside Yugoslav defenders of their country and ending organized resistance in a week of fighting. Greece was more difficult with over 420,000 troops in the field, but they were no match for the heavy weapons, armor, and close-in fighter-bomber support of the Germans. Greece’s only hope lay in the British forces that had been concentrating there since mid-March, numbering more than 62,000 veterans from the British Desert Army in Libya and including the British 1st Armored Brigade, a New Zealand division, an Australian division, and seven squadrons from the RAF. Superior combined arms assaults by the Germans carried even the best defensive positions, including Thermopylae, forcing the British Commonwealth forces to the Peloponnesus, then from Greece altogether. By April 29 it was all over, the Greek armies had surrendered, and the British were on their way to Crete or back to Egypt.

  On May 20 the Germans assaulted Crete from the air, initially taking heavy casualties in their paratroop and glider forces. Nonetheless, the paratroopers hung on grimly, slowly clearing British positions singly and in small groups. The issue was in doubt until the second day, when the Germans began flying in reinforcements directly into Maleme airfield, which was not yet under full German control. In spite of horrendous casualties, they secured the airfield by nightfall, and a foothold on the island had been won. By June, when the British evacuation was completed, only 52 percent of the Commonwealth forces had been rescued. A myth arose about Crete to justify the Commonwealth losses: that the Germans suffered so heavily in airborne troops they never again carried out an airborne assault; however, over two years later Germany successfully employed parachute forces in the Aegean Sea’s Dodecanese Islands in a campaign wresting them from British control.

  As the battle for Crete unfolded, the German battleship Bismarck was sunk in the North Atlantic and the Axis suffered
a setback in the Middle East when a pro-Nazi coup in Iraq was scotched by British troops. Shortly thereafter, the Free French helped the British invade Syria and Lebanon, solidifying some of the region for the British. But a defeat in North Africa would render those minor victories irrelevant, and the longer-term threat, no matter how remote in hindsight, was that somehow the Japanese would subdue India and join with the Germans near Iraq or Iran. Soon the German general Erwin Rommel, the “Desert Fox,” would chase the British out of most of Libya, making even the most outlandish scenario seem possible.

  Fatal Misjudgment

  Just as Nazi Germany and fascist Italy seemed unstoppable in Europe, Japan had continued its expansion from Manchuria southward into Longzhou, China, nearly closing off avenues for allied support of Chiang Kai-shek. The Yunnan–Vietnam Railway still allowed supplies to come from Haiphong, Indochina, to Kunming, China, and Japan took steps to seal off this lifeline. After repeated requests to the Vichy government to close the railway in French Indochina, Japan threatened invasion and Vichy gave the Japanese basing rights inside Indochina. Japanese forces quickly exceeded the parameters of the agreement. French troops fought back, but were overwhelmed and by the end of September 1940, northern Indochina was in Japanese hands.

  Franklin Roosevelt, looking at the ominous developments in Europe, recognized that it would not take much for the United States to be isolated facing both Nazi Germany and Japan alone. Britain was barely holding its own behind the moat of the English Channel, while the USSR was still allied with Germany (though acting like a neutral). Communists in the United States were singing Germany’s praises because of the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact, and the leftists in Roosevelt’s administration only tepidly supported American rearmament.

  All that changed overnight on June 22, 1941, when Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union. True to his words in Mein Kampf, he sought to crush Bolshevism once and for all. A few overtures to bring the USSR into the Axis had taken place in November 1940, but contrary to some recent claims by historians, those were short-term expedients at best. Hitler had no intention of permanently allying with Bolsheviks and Jews, as he characterized the Soviet Union.62 Behind the scenes, Hitler had told his generals a full year earlier that the defeat of France “finally freed his hands for his important real task: the showdown with Bolshevism.”63

  Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union came as no surprise to anyone except Stalin, who had deluded himself into thinking the Germans wouldn’t attack until 1942 at the earliest. He had given Hitler no reason to invade; the Soviet Union had been furnishing Germany with raw materials and food religiously since the partition of Poland, and had stood aside when Hitler gobbled up the remainder of eastern Europe, the Balkans and Greece. Although he said on May 5, 1941, that “war with Germany is inevitable,” Stalin continued Soviet economic aid to the Nazis unabated.64

  Nor was evidence of Hitler’s intentions lacking. For months British intelligence had been picking up key data that Germany was preparing for an invasion and warned Stalin repeatedly.65 He blew off these warnings as British provocations, suspecting the West was trying to start a war of mutual annihilation between his country and Germany. Repeated Luftwaffe incursions into Soviet air space were forgiven with mild protests, and the Wehrmacht’s explanations for its troop concentrations in Poland were accepted at face value. Even more evidence came from the “Red Orchestra” ring of Soviet spies in Berlin; Rudolf Roessler, code-named “Lucy” in Switzerland; and German deserters, one of whom accurately furnished Barbarossa’s exact attack date and time—but Stalin discounted them all. Even more astounding, Stalin refused to accept information from his own commanders that panzers had crossed into Soviet territory and were under fire.

  According to Hitler’s early writing in Mein Kampf, the destruction of the Soviet Union was a critical element in Germany’s plans for a “Thousand Year Reich.” Others saw the situation differently based on their personal perspectives. Albert Speer, later Hitler’s minister of armaments and war production, felt oil was “a prime motive” behind the invasion, and it was certainly the target in 1942 for Case Blue, the summer offensive aimed at Stalingrad and the Baku oilfields. Hitler’s generals repeatedly warned against invading the Soviet Union, but almost exclusively from an economic perspective since Hitler regularly dismissed their advice on military matters. Consistently lucky through his unbroken string of victories, Hitler had become “Gröfaz” (Groösster Feldherr aller Zeiten—g reatest military commander of all time). He told General Georg Thomas—who had prepared reports detailing the potential disastrous economic consequences of an invasion—to change his tune. Thomas’s obedient new report envisioned an utterly depopulated Russia, the urban residents starved to death and rural dwellers forced eastward to create vast swatches of agricultural lands for exploitation by Germany.

  Barbarossa featured a three-pronged pitchfork of invasion routes, and Hitler intended that Leningrad would fall first, followed by Moscow. Despite the enslavement and extermination planned for Russians, Hitler expected they would willingly help overthrow Stalin’s regime (“We have only to kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down”). He was correct to an extent, and many Soviet inhabitants initially welcomed the Germans, particularly in the Baltic states recently absorbed by Stalin, Ukraine, White Russia, and among the Cossacks, Tatars, and other ethnic groups in the Crimea and southern Russia. Hitler’s policies were self-defeating, however; they called for brutal treatment of civilians and confiscation of their supplies except in the Baltic states, and although Soviet Hilfswillige (willing helpers) became a large part of the Wehrmacht’s strength on the Eastern Front, Soviet guerrillas or partisans more than made up for the anti-Soviet helpers.

  Seeking to avoid Napoléon’s fate and destruction at Russian hands, the Wehrmacht sent Army Group North after Leningrad, Army Group South through Ukraine toward Kiev, and Army Group Center through Smolensk to Moscow. But the Germans had no appreciation for the immensity of the Russian landmass, nor its bottomless pool of manpower reserves. Even as they invaded with 166 divisions (out of 210 divisions in the entire Wehrmacht), the Germans faced 316 total Soviet combat divisions (with about 190 in the immediate western districts). Making this more deceptive was the new Soviet doctrine of defense-in-depth, where echelons were staggered three to four hundred miles apart. And while the Germans could count 3.9 million men in their invasion force, these forces included numerous lesser-trained, -equipped, and -motivated allied units supplied by Finland, Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, Croatia, Italy, and even one from Spain (later Latvian, Estonian, Lithuanian, Cossack, and Russian anti-Soviet units were added). Approximately 90 percent of Germany’s mobile forces were dedicated to the Eastern Front, 3.05 million men and 3,350 of its 5,200 tanks.66 These were opposed by 23,700 Russian tanks.67 While the Soviet T-34, unknown to German intelligence in June 1941, was superior to any German tank at the time, the Russians had not solved the problems of tank unit command or control in battle. Whereas German commanders stayed in constant communication with their units through a unique throat radio microphone, eliminating exterior noise, Russian tankers still relied on pennants and hand signals—often useless on dusty battlefields or in storms.

  In addition, Soviet military forces had just begun to recover from Stalin’s Great Purge of 1937–38, in which 3 of 5 Soviet marshals, 13 of 15 army commanders, 50 of 57 corps commanders, and 154 out of 186 division commanders were executed. On the other hand, Stalin knew that the post-Purge leadership was intimidated and ideologically pure, and would suicidally throw itself at the enemy should he order it.68

  The German army, however, had its own problems, starting with the panzer divisions, whose tanks were woefully undergunned. Then there was the army’s transport—still horse-drawn as of 1941. Only in Hitler’s imagination was the army mechanized. The German industrial base was much too small to support a war machine like the one Hitler demanded on an across-the-board basis. It could, for
short bursts, produce large numbers of specific items, but had no chance to compete with another controlled economy such as Russia’s, which dwarfed the Nazis’ in raw materials and manpower. Moreover, the sheer lack of manpower for such breathtaking offensives doomed the Germans in a war of attrition. In Russia, Germany needed to win quickly, especially before winter arrived, or the numbers would simply catch up with them.

  Consequently, the inadequate manpower and mechanization soon became obvious. Horse-drawn infantry units could not keep up with the armored spearheads that ranged far in advance, sending back hundreds of thousands of prisoners, unarmed, but often with negligible supervision and guards. With no provisions for such volumes of prisoners, many starved, but many escaped to join partisan bands. And even when the infantry caught up and helped to form stop lines in encirclement battles, hundreds of thousands of Red Army soldiers slipped through the thin lines. Supply vehicles and tankers returning from the front for supplies and fuel in rear areas had to pass through unsecured zones, where these thin-skinned vehicles and their escorts were often destroyed by roving Soviets. And then snow fell early in Moscow, on October 7, and the long Russian winter began for the unprepared German soldiers. Guderian sent an inquiry for immediate winter clothing, receiving the reply that it would be issued in “due course.” He never received any.