The German Way of War: How two centuries of militarism came to an end on the Eastern Front.
THERE IS A GERMAN WAY OF WAR.
Its distinctive characteristic is the muster of overwhelming force and a rapid advance into enemy territory. The successive Prussian and German states were surrounded (and felt themselves threatened) by vastly larger ones and so aimed at short, decisive wars of movement: the Bewegungskrieg--though the term blitzkrieg is more common in English. To Germany's leaders, both military and civilian, the offensive must ever be immediately taken to force a decision before the geographic predicament could be made to bear.
The history of the Prussian and German state through 1945 is one in which war is the main outcome of national policy. It was the country's principal export over two centuries. War was more than just "politics by other means"; it was, as the Comte de Mirabeau noted in 1788, "the national industry of Prussia." Though he formulated it most neatly with his quip that: "Where some states possess an army, the Prussian army possesses a state."
The operational excellence of the German and Prussian general staffs is the stuff of hundreds of excellent military histories. But this brilliant style of war, shaped by geographic and historical circumstance, masked an unhealthy strategic shortcoming: an inability to see national war as the last resort, sometimes even an unnecessary one.
They forced war on other nations, and with the exceptions of the quick wars of unification against Austria in 1866 and France in 1871, their military skill battered their own state into submission. Frederick the Great began the Seven Years War by marching into Saxony; Wilhelm II sent his corps into Belgium and Russia in hopes of maintaining German industrial and social prosperity; and Hitler repeatedly used the army as the crutch for mounting the steps in his climb to global power. Each ended in disaster. The German state never existed as anything other than a militaristic enterprise, which is why its skill led to repeated defeat and, ultimately, to its own devastation in 1945. That this final devastation originated out of victory is only one of the many ironies of German history.
In April 1941, Germany was master of Europe. She faced only an isolated and nearly helpless Great Britain. With time and effort, Britain could call on imperial reserves, but, since the abandonment of Greece and Crete, she had no means of meeting the German army in battle. Hitler had brilliantly employed both war and the threat of war to reach this height. Once he brought Britain to the peace table, created a permanent defensible barrier in the east, and settled the grand matter of Bolshevism, Germany would permanently dominate Europe and be--in Hitler's mind--one of three great global powers.
It was all bound up in Hitler's calculations. He felt that Britain fought on because she looked to the Soviet Union for eventual support. The Jews were behind it all and so he must settle all these questions once and for all in, yes, a rapid war of movement. The army would topple the Bolshevik regime, restore the terms of Brest-Litovsk, truly isolate Britain, and give the SS the scope for murdering and exiling the Jews.
That war would come in the east was never a question for Hitler or his generals. He had been calling for it from his earliest preaching. Less than a month after France formally surrendered to Germany, and with the preparations for an invasion of Britain underway, Hitler ordered the drawing-up of plans for an invasion of Russia in the spring of 1941. On December 18, 1940, Directive No. 21 authorized Operation Barbarossa.
The Soviet Union, too, was manically preparing for war, expanding the Red Army and producing innovative weapons like the T-34 tank and the Katyusha rocket-launcher. But Stalin did not want it to come for years. To keep the 1939 Hitler-Stalin pact in place, he was fully prepared to make huge concessions in 1941. Stalin assumed all the rumors of war were German saber-rattling in hopes of gaining the Baltic littoral as a defensive barrier against Russia and some of the fertile land of the Ukraine. Hitler could have had a great deal for the asking: Stalin had calculated Hitler's objective correctly, but not the genocidal ambitions, and so failed to grasp that Hitler's principal instrument of state was an army. He negotiated only if he thought the army was too weak to win.
The German invasion of the Soviet Union began on June 22, 1941. It involved three million men: 152 divisions in three army groups, 3,350 tanks, 2,000 airplanes, 7,000 pieces of artillery, 600,000 motorized vehicles, and 625,000 horses. The initial efforts matched such numbers. In three weeks, Army Group Centre advanced 400 miles and captured the whole of Belorussia. Russian armies lost nearly 5,000 tanks, nearly 10,000 artillery pieces, and 1,700 planes. The victories at Bialystok and Minsk were each comparable to the German victory over the combined French and British armies in May 1940.
German plans called for the destruction of the Red Army west of the Dnieper and Dvina Rivers--to prevent it from escaping into the hinterland of Russia--and the capture of Smolensk, the land bridge to Moscow. All went well, though the distances and the minimal Soviet infrastructure quickly caused trouble with the strategic schedule as the panzer divisions awaited the slow infantry and supplies. And Smolensk held out for 63 days.
Still, the German leadership was suffused with a sense of complete victory. Eleven days after the invasion began, the army chief of staff, Franz Halder, made a famous entry in his diary: "I am therefore not exaggerating when I say that the campaign against Russia was won in 14 days." This isn't the mad logic that it might seem in retrospect. The General Staff's rule of thumb was that a nation could produce two divisions (30,000 soldiers) for each million of its population. The Soviet Union prewar population was 190 million, and so should have produced an army of six million soldiers in 384 divisions. By September, Soviet dead and prisoners exceeded four million. In the first six months of fighting, the German army achieved 12--repeat, 12--great encirclements on a par with the victories at Sedan in 1871 and the Ardennes in 1940.
If Barbarossa had been a war game, all would have been over. Yet the Russians didn't play by quite the same rules. On August 11, Halder would write:
Overall, it is clearer and clearer that we have underestimated the Russian colossus, which had prepared itself for war with an utter lack of restraint which is characteristic of the totalitarian state. This is as true in the area of organization as it is of the economy, the area of transport and communications, but above all to pure military power. At the start of the war, we reckoned on some 200 enemy divisions. Now we have already counted 360. These divisions are definitely not armed and equipped in our sense, and tactically they are in many ways badly led. But they are there.
THE GERMANS DIDN'T HAVE A WAY to win the war if the Russians were willing to keep fighting. The Barbarossa plan supposed that, if the army groups won big battles and the SS killed the intelligentsia in large numbers, the state would collapse. The problem of enemy capitulation as a strategy is that it requires not the killing of large numbers of your opponent's armies but the desertion of your opponent's soldiers. The Germans lost in 1918 because, after Erich Ludendorff's spring offensives failed and killed a huge number of German soldiers, the appearance of four million fresh American troops, fighting with an enthusiasm not seen on the Western Front since 1915, broke the morale of the German army. Governments lose the will to fight when they lose the way to fight, the contrast between France and Britain in 1940: The vast French army quit and the tiny British one did not.
Hitler and his generals were relying on the Russians' welcoming them as liberators. They believed in this so implicitly that they never bothered to gather the operational intelligence to discern if it was true. In his 1952 memoir, Panzer Leader, Heinz Guderian recalled an old Russian general in Orël after the city fell to his troops in October 1941: "If only you had come 20 years ago we should have welcomed you with open arms. But now it is too late. We were just beginning to get on our feet and now you arrive and throw us back 20 years so that we will have to start from the beginning all over again. Now we are fighting for Russia and in that cause we are all united." The Germans also made little attempt to win the hearts and minds of the Russians, diverting all resources in the captured territories back to Germany, executing hundreds of thousands, and leaving the rest to starve.
This lack of a coherent strategic plan cannot simply be blamed on Hitler, as Germany's surviving generals were keen to do after the war. The Barbarossa plan, developed by the General Staff, called for a lightning three-month campaign that reached a line stretching from Rostov, along the Volga, to Archangel. This was from 750 to a thousand miles deep into Russia. There were no terms under which such a campaign was physically possible for an army that employed 3,350 tanks but 600,000 horses. Broken into three prongs, the campaign was successful in its most basic objectives--killing Soviet soldiers in battles of encirclement and executing Jews and subversive elements in the wake of the army's progress--but never came close to reaching its military objectives.
Germany's military leaders had been beguiled by success and by ideology. They believed Hitler when he said they would win easily, and they planned accordingly. Hitler fostered an air of competition amongst his military planners. It encouraged bold ideas and discouraged critique. As the German army was restored in the 1930s, its culture became politically aggressive as well. It was no longer focused on standing readiness to repel on two fronts--the culture inherited from Frederick--but employing Bewegungskrieg as an instrument of a global political policy. When Erich von Manstein's plan to invade France through the Ardennes proved breathtakingly successful, despite evidence that France was the stronger and better-prepared military power, hope replaced realistic expectation completely.
Barbarossa exposed the problem. The two dominant forces in the German state--Hitler and the army--achieved their purpose to no discernible gain. The Russians kept fighting, and the Germans kept getting further down the logistical road. The sheer success of the Germans in surrounding and cutting off Russian armies meant lengthy and costly mop-up operations--and underestimation of the problem of prisoners added to the troubles. The Russians may have been disorganized, badly led and armed, but they fought, and the toll of German machinery and men was increasingly burdensome. By August, the German advance had slowed from 20 miles a day to 5. It was obvious that the campaign could not continue on three fronts, and resources were focused away from Army Group Centre and the drive on Moscow to pursue the attacks on Leningrad in the north and Kiev and the Ukraine to the south, which would allow Army Group South to envelop Moscow from behind.
This is a moment much debated by historians. In their postwar memoirs, Germany's surviving military leaders propounded a theory that, by delaying the drive on Moscow, Hitler cost them the war. This "Lost Victory" is widely believed in and the stuff of popular military history books and the many what-if books the History Book Club likes to try to sell me: If only Hitler had allowed his generals to push forward, they would have been victorious.
There are two problems. The first is that the redirection was called for in the original invasion plan: A pause was viewed as necessary to reconstitute the divisions battered by the fighting and for the supply lines to catch up. The second is that there is no evidence that the capture of Moscow would have led to Soviet defeat. Yes, Moscow w