Herman Wouk - War and Remembrance

by War

  V. H.

  Stalingrad fulfilled on the battlefield Spengler's prophetic vision of the decline of the West. it was the Singapore of Christian culture.

  The true tragedy of Stalingrad is that it need not have happened.

  The West had the strength to prevent it. It was not like the fall of Rome, or of Constantinople, or even of Singapore: not a world-historical crushing of a weak culture by a stronger one. On the contrary! We of the Christian West, had we but been united, could readily have repulsed the barbaric Scythians out of the steppes in their new guise of Marxist predators. We could have pacified Russia for a century and changed its essential menacing nature.

  But this was not to be. Franklin Delano Roosevelt's one war aim was to destroy Germany so, as to win unimpeded rule of the world for American monopoly capital. Rightly he perceived that England was finished. As for the menace of Bolshevism he was either blind to it, or saw no way to eradicate it, and decided that Germany was the competitor he could destroy.

  The great Hegel has taught us that it is irrelevant to challenge the morality of world-historical individuals. Morally, if one values' the Christian civilization now being swamped by Marxist barbarism, Franklin Roosevelt was unquestionably one of mankind's. archcriminals. But in military history, one regards only how well the political aim of a war leader was achieved. However shortsighted Roosevelt's aim, he certainly achieved the destruction of Germany.

  Sunset Glow

  Our second great assault on the Soviet Union, called "Case Blue,"* led to Stalingrad. it was an insightful concept, it was mainly Hitler's, and it came close to success. Hitler himself ruined it.

  The contrast of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Adolf Hitler in their warmaking is altogether Plutarchian. Spidery calculation versus all-out gambling; steadfast planning versus impulsive improvising; careful use of limited armed strength versus prodigal dissipation of overwhelming strength; prudent reliance on generals versus reckless overruling of them; anxious concern for troops versus impetuous outpouring of their lives; a timid dip of a toe in combat versus total war with the last reserves thrown in; such was the contrast between the two world opponents as they at last came to grips in 1942, nine years after they both took power.

  In retrospect the world sees Hitler as the disgusting 1945 figure in the bunker: Roosevelt's trapped victim, a disintegrating, trembling, unrepentant horror lost in dreams, maintaining his grip on a prostrate Reich by sheer terror. But this was not the Hitler of July 1942. Then he was still our all-masterful Fuhrer: a remote, demanding, difficult warlord, but the ruler of an empire unmatched by those of Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne, and Napoleon. The glow of German victory lit the planet. Only in retrospect do we see that it was a sunset glow.

  Case Blue

  TRANSLATOR'S NOTE: Case blue was the code name for the entire campaign. It is translated "blue" for the rest of this document. V.H.

  Case Blue was a summer drive to end the war in the east.

  Our great 1941 drive, Barbarossa, had aimed to destroy the Red Army and shatter the Bolshevik state in one grand threepronged summer campaign. We had tried to do too much at once. We had hurt the enemy, but the Russian is a stolid fatalist, with an animal ability to resist and endure. The Japanese unwillingness to attack Siberia-duly reported to.Stalin by his spy Sorge from our wnbassy in Tokyo-had enabled the Red dictator to denude his Asian front and hurl fresh divisions of hardy brutish Mongol troops at us. These winter counterattacks, though halting us in the snows outside Moscow, had petered out. When the spring thaw came we still held an area of the Soviet Union roughly analogous to the entire U.S.A. east of the Mississippi. Who can doubt that under such an occupation the flighty Americans would have collapsed? But the Russians are a different breed, and they needed one more convincing blow.

  Case Blue carried forward Barbarossa in its southern phase.

  The aim was to seize southern Russia for its agricultural, industrial, and mineral wealth. The theme was limited and clear: Hold in the north and center, win in the south. Granted that Hitler's continental mentality could not grasp the Mediterranean strategy, it was the next best thing to do. We were in it, and we had to attack.

  Moreover, it did not appear that we could fight the war to a finish without the Caucasus oil.

  Under all the muddled political verbiage of Hitler's famous Directive Number 41, rewritten by his own hand from Jodl's professional draft, the governing concepts of Case Blue were: 1.

  Straighten out the winter penetrations; 2. Hold fast, north and center, on the Leningrad-MoscowOrel line; 3. Conquer the south to the Turkish and Iranian borders; 4. Take Leningrad, and possibly Moscow; 5.

  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 Turkeys 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;e 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 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 sacrificed 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 onhodox 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 Hitter'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, and therefore wr
ong. One must destroy the enemy's armed force, then one can do as one pleases with his wealth; so the banal admonition Ooes. 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 fromfar 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 Vs at each other, over a forty-mile space of dry land. The first phase of Blue calw 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.theVolga Force-jumpingoff first'since ithadthe 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 voig-i 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 Mansteins 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 Group B" Volga Force.

  The technical Wehrmacht designations are hard to follow, especially as groupings 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 andthrough cities, moving masses of equipment, coming under fire. in Heads, quarters 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. Thereis 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 flatulence a trial for everybody in a room with him. Even the dog, Biondi, 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 armie$ 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 Rostovi Thus he hoped, by a tighter enveio ping move, to bag a supposed enormous Red Army force in the Don bend. The wholo Caucasus Force wheeled off on this mission.

  He even peeled off the Violga Force's panzer army, the doughty Fourth, and sent it clanking toward Rostov, too, although Halder 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 gotlo 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 arteriet, 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: 1. 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."

  2. The Volga Force was to resume the drive toward Stalingrad, with the Fourth Panzer Army rejoining it.

  3. 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. Halder, 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 meted away. Neither the upper bend of the Don, nor the crucial la
nd 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!