The German Way Of War
Messenger, Robert
THE GERMAN WAY OF WAR How two centuries of militarism came to an end on the Eastern Front. BY ROBERT MESSENGER THERE IS A GERMAN WAY OF WAR. Its distinctive characteristic is the muster of...
...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, fi ghting with an enthusiasm not seen on the Western Front since 1915, broke the morale of the German army...
...By mid-November, the Germans were only 40 miles from Moscow, but they were scarcely advancing thanks to stubborn Soviet resistance and the exhaustion of their ill-supplied troops...
...For my part, I do not believe that the German soldier as such has lost his honor...
...They believed Hitler when he said they would win easily, and they planned accordingly...
...There are two problems...
...They believed in this so implicitly that they never bothered to gather the operational intelligence to discern if it was true...
...One of the heroes of Moscow 1941 is Konstanty Rokossovski, the most able of the Soviet generals...
...The General Staff ’s rule of thumb was that a nation could produce two divisions (30,000 soldiers) for each million of its population...
...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...
...But Stalin did not want it to come for years...
...What’s more interesting is how the Lost Victory thesis originated...
...By September, Soviet dead and prisoners exceeded four million...
...But they are there...
...The route to Moscow was open, the Luftwaffe was pounding the capital, and the Soviet leadership was struggling to fi nd troops to defend it...
...They forced war on other nations, and with the exceptions of the quick wars of unifi cation against Austria in 1866 and France in 1871, their military skill battered their own state into submission...
...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...
...The initial efforts matched such numbers...
...Considering the battering German troops had taken in fi ve months of fi ghting, and the weakness of supply lines, it is just as likely the Battle of Moscow would have been the 1941 version of the Battle of Stalingrad...
...But it bears remembering that the German strategy for invading Russia was focused on destroying Soviet divisions...
...By early October, Leningrad and Sevastopol still held out, but they were sealed off by German troops and the regions around them were fi rmly in German control...
...If I have any complaint, it is that Bellamy has a weakness for deadpan comments: “The Japanese did their own, ill-advised version of Barbarossa, and attacked the greatest military and industrial power of the twentieth century, the United States...
...This is from the new Myth of the Western Front: The Nazi-Soviet War in American Popular Culture by Ronald Smelser and Edward J. Davies II...
...The two-month pause before the assault on Moscow is the key to the Lost Victory theory...
...American planners began accumulating reports from surviving German generals on how the fi ghting went...
...The lull in fi ghting allowed them to bring more armored divisions from the Manchurian frontier...
...That this fi nal devastation originated out of victory is only one of the many ironies of German history...
...Now we have already counted 360...
...Rokossovski, I don’t seem to have seen you around for some time...
...Where did you get to...
...Moscow’s industry had been moved east, and the Soviet government had planned for evacuation...
...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...
...NATO commanders wanted German help—in the form of a new German army, the Bundeswehr—defending Western Europe, and the founding of the Bundeswehr required offi - cers from the old army...
...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...
...Army offi cer who has spent decades bringing a critical mass of Soviet documentation on the war into English, including making translations of the Red Army staff ’s own studies of battles like Kursk and Lvov, and writing deeply detailed accounts of the Red Army at war...
...The drive on Moscow, code-named Typhoon, was to begin again...
...Nagorski and Braithwaite are both popularizers, part of the torrent of publishing on the war in the east which has followed the opening of Soviet and East German archives and the surprising international success of Antony Beevor’s superb Stalingrad (1998...
...For 34 days the Red Army kept up the attack across a front of almost 600 miles, forcing the Germans back between 50 and 150 miles...
...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...
...Nagorski is a well-regarded foreign correspondent who knows Russia from his postings, but The Greatest Battle bears too many of the marks of journalism: treating oral history and archival with equal weight, jumping from the general to the specifi c and back, presenting the anecdotal in favor of the analytical...
...The stage was set: On December 4 and 6, the Russians counterattacked north and south of Moscow...
...The place where Nagorski does score is in including the 1942 fi ghting where the Russians confronted dug-in German units...
...The German army lost a half-million soldiers and 1,500 tanks...
...only men endure...
...Germany’s military leaders had been beguiled by success and by ideology...
...He had been calling for it from his earliest preaching...
...This was from 750 to a thousand miles deep into Russia...
...Bellamy’s focus is on leadership and decisionmaking, and it complements Erickson’s books in every way...
...The German army left 4 million men on the battlefi elds of Eastern Europe, but they killed 27 million...
...Bellamy is particularly skilled at presenting troves of information and analysis in digestible fashion: In terms of the Second World War as a whole, it could be argued that Stalingrad was not the turning point because once the United States became involved, Germany had no chance of winning, anyway...
...Typhoon ground to a halt until the winter came and freed the German army of the trouble of mud, but the Russian winter brought an astounding new set of problems: Guns jammed as their oils weren’t viscous in such cold, fi res had to be lit under a tank’s oil pan each morning, and soldiers lacked winter uniforms...
...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...
...In three weeks, Army Group Centre advanced 400 miles and captured the whole of Belorussia...
...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 Soviet Union prewar population was 190 million, and so should have produced an army of six million soldiers in 384 divisions...
...Stalin’s expectation was to relieve both Leningrad and Sevastopol and win the war immediately...
...It was a Soviet victory over something that had menaced Europe for two centuries...
...Now we are fi ghting for Russia and in that cause we are all united...
...To keep the 1939 Hitler-Stalin pact in place, he was fully prepared to make huge concessions in 1941...
...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...
...Wilhelm II sent his corps into Belgium and Russia in hopes of maintaining German industrial and social prosperity...
...At the start of the war, we reckoned on some 200 enemy divisions...
...It focuses on just seven months: from the phoenix-from-the-ashes victories at Kharkov and Gazala in May 1942 to the shattering defeats of December at Stalingrad and Alamein...
...But its goal was less the Soviet capital than the next good place to kill Russian soldiers...
...She faced only an isolated and nearly helpless Great Britain...
...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...
...The Russian counterattack was a stirring moment for a battered nation, and a great victory, but the Red Army still had another year of painful lessons to learn before it mastered mechanized warfare...
...But the Germans were struggling, too...
...What can’t be overstated, though, is the difference of six months: When the lines stabilized at the end of December 1941, Germany was facing three enemies, two of which had nearly endless reserves to throw into total war...
...Stalin was a barbarous man, and in the end, that is what it took to fi nally draw the curtain on the German Way of War...
...I was arrested, Comrade Stalin...
...THE GERMANS DIDN’T HAVE A WAY to win the war if the Russians were willing to keep fi ghting...
...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...
...If Barbarossa had been a war game, all would have been over...
...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...
...Called in to see Stalin, Rokossovski was greeted: “Well...
...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...
...In the fi rst six months of fi ghting, the German army achieved 12—repeat, 12—great encirclements on a par with the victories at Sedan in 1871 and the Ardennes in 1940...
...After the catastrophic defeat at Stalingrad, with German forces and those of their allies stretched to the limit, there was no hope of a German victory in the east...
...The Germans fell back...
...and Hitler repeatedly used the army as the crutch for mounting the steps in his climb to global power...
...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...
...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...
...His troops suffered for the ambition...
...Army might have to fi ght over the same ground and against the same enemy as Hitler’s army...
...It was an extraordinary feat, equal to anything done by the troops before Moscow...
...MOSCOW IS ONE OF THE DEFINING battles of World War II, the fi rst legitimate defeat dealt to the German army...
...Next came Hitler’s decision in July 1942 to split Operation Blau [the summer 1942 offensive] and, furthermore, to let himself be diverted to the lesser aim of capturing Stalingrad, rather than the Caucasus, the oilfi elds, and access to the wider world...
...the end result jumps hither and yon amongst subjects, some unnecessary...
...The majority of Glantz’s books are published by the University of Kansas Press, which has a dynamite program of scholarship on World War II...
...The Napoleonic resonance of being caught deep in Russia with winter coming on wasn’t lost on Germany’s highly intellectualized students of war...
...Andrew Nagorski is unfortunate in his timing, for his good book is completely overshadowed by Braithwaite’s great one...
...Well, if they want a war of extermination, they shall have it...
...The climate called for exonerating the German army...
...the hardest stones cannot bear it for long...
...In his November 6, 1941, speech marking the anniversary of the Russian Revolution, Stalin vowed that the Soviet Union would give back in kind: “The German invaders want a war of extermination against the peoples of the USSR...
...As the German army was restored in the 1930s, its culture became politically aggressive as well...
...From that point of view 7 December 1941, whether in eastern front terms, with the Moscow counteroffensive, or in global terms, with Pearl Harbor, was the turning point...
...He has simply engaged less profoundly than Braithwaite, and his material is less integrated...
...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...
...Even Hitler realized that the war would not be over in 1941...
...The Germans began in barbarism and the Russians replied in kind...
...What comes through on every page of Absolute War is the utter inhumanity of the German-Soviet war...
...This is a marvelous portrait of a people taken to war by a barbaric regime against a barbaric invader...
...This overwriting tic disturbs an otherwise excellent text, though it is more than offset by one of the great boons of recent military history publishing: Absolute War has a suffi ciency of maps...
...Hitler fostered an air of competition amongst his military planners...
...Robert Messenger is a senior editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...The next was Moscow in December 1941...
...This is a moment much debated by historians...
...There were no terms under which such a campaign was physically possible for an army that employed 3,350 tanks but 600,000 horses...
...it was, as the Comte de Mirabeau noted in 1788, “the national industry of Prussia...
...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...
...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...
...Nor were the German affl ictions lost on the Soviet leadership, which sensed that the enemy was stretched to breaking...
...A bad move, as it turned out...
...At each point there was less room for maneuver...
...Nagorski is following Russian historians (and Marshal Zhukov’s lead) in dating the Battle of Moscow from late September to the spring offensives, and he gives a fuller picture of the fi ghting before both armies settled down to await the spring thaw...
...The panzers went on the attack on September 30 and the main assault, by straight-legged infantry pulling their guns with horses, began on November 2. What followed was another pair of textbook-perfect battles of encirclement: Vyazma and Bryansk, where 1.25 million Soviet troops were cut off and more than a million captured or killed...
...Nearly 10 Russians died each minute that the war lasted, 14,000 each day...
...Stalin laughed and got down to the business of the day...
...The campaigns in the north and south were huge successes...
...It encouraged bold ideas and discouraged critique...
...The numbers are diffi cult to digest...
...Bellamy emphasizes 1941 and 1942, as these were the years when the course of the war was set and are most informed by the latest scholarship...
...desire for information, there was a secondary effort at rehabilitating the German army, establishing it as an entity separate from Nazism...
...In stepped generals like Halder, Guderian, and Manstein, with bestselling memoirs that portrayed an honorable German military fi ghting bravely and being defeated by Hitler’s madness, not Red Army troops...
...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...
...These divisions are defi nitely not armed and equipped in our sense, and tactically they are in many ways badly led...
...I think in this regard of the indefatigable David Glantz, a former U.S...
...Braithwaite is a former British ambassador in Moscow, and the extent of his knowledge and engagement with the city and country is evident on every page...
...Soviet units had been able to hold their ground more tenaciously and use the superiority of the T-34 tank to advantage...
...But now it is too late...
...In the 1950s, it began to look like the U.S...
...In four years of terrible slaughter, the Red Army did not just defeat Hitler and National Socialism, but also put an end to Prussian militarism...
...We knew, pretty well, how the war was won...
...Sometimes this is done with originality and brilliance, but more often it just buries better works, whose main fl aw is no longer being new...
...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...
...Still, the German leadership was suffused with a sense of complete victory...
...So it is hardly surprising that two new books focus on this epic encounter: Andrew Nagorski’s The Greatest Battle and Rodric Braithwaite’s Moscow 1941...
...Each ended in disaster...
...Hitler and his generals were relying on the Russians’ welcoming them as liberators...
...He was denounced during the purges of the late 1930s, but refused to “confess”—even under torture...
...It was the country’s principal export over two centuries...
...Moscow 1941 is full of such moments...
...Here, in the depths of Russia where they are most needed, a publisher—three cheers for Alfred A. Knopf—has spent the money on dozens of operational maps...
...Russian armies lost nearly 5,000 tanks, nearly 10,000 artillery pieces, and 1,700 planes...
...Barbarossa exposed the problem...
...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...
...In April 1941, Germany was master of Europe...
...While the last 20 years have brought reams of information to light, they don’t fundamentally alter Erickson’s picture of the fi ghting...
...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...
...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...
...The Russians kept fi ghting, and the Germans kept getting further down the logistical road...
...This isn’t the mad logic that it might seem in retrospect...
...Frederick the Great began the Seven Years War by marching into Saxony...
...IN ENGLISH, THE MODERN STUDY OF the war between Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia began 30 years ago with John Erickson’s Road to Stalingrad: Stalin’s War with Germany (1975...
...Or “He was not a happy fi eld marshal...
...In all, 2,500 reports were written by 700 different generals in a project overseen by none other than Franz Halder...
...Hitler’s order to soldiers to die where they stood, against his generals’ advice, saved the situation, though at great cost...
...Governments lose the will to fi ght when they lose the way to fi ght, the contrast between France and Britain in 1940: The vast French army quit and the tiny British one did not...
...Bellamy quotes the words of a German lieutenant describing the Battle of Stalingrad: “Animals fl ee this hell...
...It’s an achievement made all the more impressive by Bellamy’s willingness to share the credit: In his preface he refers to Absolute War as a “modern” history rather than a “new” one, as he acknowledges standing on the shoulders of Erickson and a great deal of ongoing archival and scholarly work in both German and Russian...
...Moscow was a place the Red Army was prepared to defend in force...
...And Smolensk held out for 63 days...
...Yet the Russians didn’t play by quite the same rules...
...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...
...In their postwar memoirs, Germany’s surviving military leaders propounded a theory that, by delaying the drive on Moscow, Hitler cost them the war...
...These are the words of a former student of Erickson’s, Chris Bellamy, whose Absolute War: Soviet Russia in the Second World War is a lively and resoundingly clear account of how the war was planned and managed...
...But now we know infi nitely more about how it was run...
...He negotiated only if he thought the army was too weak to win...
...The second is that there is no evidence that the capture of Moscow would have led to Soviet defeat...
...21 authorized Operation Barbarossa...
...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...
...Its distinctive characteristic is the muster of overwhelming force and a rapid advance into enemy territory...
...One of their regulars is Robert Citino, whose Death of the Wehrmacht: The German Campaigns of 1942 picks up where Nagorski and Braithwaite leave off, telling the story of the German army’s recovery from the disaster outside of Moscow...
...I was sitting in prison...
...The operational excellence of the German and Prussian general staffs is the stuff of hundreds of excellent military histories...
...The Red Army lost 11.5 million soldiers, and 15.5 million civilians died in the territories occupied by the German army...
...The fi rst was Smolensk, in July 1941, which fatally delayed the German advance...
...The Russian rasputitsa (“the time when roads dissolve”) had set in, and it was increasingly diffi cult to advance at all, much less on a timetable, or to supply forward units...
...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...
...Moscow was still under threat as he spoke, but Stalin’s vow would be fulfi lled...
...Absolute War is not a full picture of the war: We are on page 497 of a 690-page book when the battle for Stalingrad begins...
...Braithwaite repeats “an oft-repeated story...
...Though he formulated it most neatly with his quip that: “Where some states possess an army, the Prussian army possesses a state...
...The Greatest Battle Stalin, Hitler, and the Desperate Struggle for Moscow that Changed the Course of World War II by Andrew Nagorski Simon & Schuster, 384 pp., $27 Moscow 1941 A City and Its People at War by Rodric Braithwaite Vintage, 448 pp., $15.95 Absolute War Soviet Russia in the Second World War by Chris Bellamy Knopf, 848 pp., $40 It was all bound up in Hitler’s calculations...
...The victories at Bialystok and Minsk were each comparable to the German victory over the combined French and British armies in May 1940...
...His interest is what set victory and defeat in motion for both sides, and his book is one of the very best single volumes yet written about the Nazi-Soviet confl ict...
...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...
...But instead of pulling back to defensive lines and preparing to wait out winter in safer quarters, the Germans pushed on: Generals like Hermann Hoth and Fedor von Bock wanted the glory of capturing Moscow, though Bock in his diary wondered how an army was to fi ght a war of movement when it took 24 horses to pull a single artillery piece...
...The Red Army also had its fi rst successes: securing the road over Lake Lagoda, Leningrad’s sole supply line, and then on November 29 recapturing Rostov in the south...
...The history of the Prussian and German state through 1945 is one in which war is the main outcome of national policy...
...Popularizers build out archival scholarship with human interest from survivors’ accounts and oral history...
...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...
...A case can be made that the envelopment of Kiev in late September was the greatest feat of German arms in any war...
...The case dragged on as they sought his confession until, in March 1940, he was released as part of a general amnesty for offi cers...
...The German invasion of the Soviet Union began on June 22, 1941...
...Hitler purged the army’s leadership and placed himself in direct control of operations...
...Stalingrad was the last of a series of checks, which progressively narrowed German options...
...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...
...The fi rst 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 fi ghting and for the supply lines to catch up...
...That war would come in the east was never a question for Hitler or his generals...
...Hitler had brilliantly employed both war and the threat of war to reach this height...
...The Barbarossa plan, developed by the General Staff, called for a lightning threemonth campaign that reached a line stretching from Rostov, along the Volga, to Archangel...
...It is a work of military history that balances the social, artistic, and political...
...Then there was the evacuation and re-establishment of Soviet industry—the “economic Stalingrad...
...The Russians may have been disorganized, badly led and armed, but they fought, and the toll of German machinery and men was increasingly burdensome...
...A fi ne time you chose to go to prison...
...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...
...On December 18, 1940, Directive No...
...The fresh troops from Siberia had dispersed an exhausted opponent, one almost beyond the power of resisting...
...Stalin even dared to order the traditional public celebration of the Russian Revolution with a military parade in Red Square on November 7. Units marched in review and then straight on to the front...
...When the Germans took the fi eld again in spring 1942 they quickly won victories at Kharkov and Kerch as resounding as those of the fi rst months of Barbarossa...
...Nearly two million German soldiers were mustered with 14,000 guns and a thousand tanks...
...Where neither book scores is in depicting the great Soviet evacuation: More than 1,500 factories were packed up and moved by rail— and another 500 by truck—while trains moved 2.5 million soldiers to the front...
...War was more than just “politics by other means...
...When Dwight D. Eisenhower was touring Germany as the fi rst head of NATO in 1951, he issued a statement drawing a line between the German army and Hitler: “I have come to know that there is a real difference between the regular German soldier and offi cer and Hitler and his criminal group...
...With its follow-up, The Road to Berlin (1983), Erickson’s remains the best— deepest, clearest—overall account of the war on the eastern front and can be recommended to any reader wanting to know how the war was fought...
...However, from December 1941, while it had gained a breathing space, Russia could still lose—or just collapse, as by all the normal rules it should have done in 1942...
...He felt that Britain fought on because she looked to the Soviet Union for eventual support...
...In his 1952 memoir, Panzer Leader, Heinz Guderian recalled an old Russian general in Or?l 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...
...Yes, Moscow was the center of authority in a totalitarian country, but the regime survived other heavy blows...
...Beyond the U.S...
...When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler (1995) contains a fi rst-rate operational narrative of Typhoon and the Soviet counteroffensives that isn’t any less clear for being much shorter than Nagorski and Braithwaite...
...Is a consideration of Hitler’s and Stalin’s sexual skills relevant, or pages on the family who embalmed Lenin...
...The two dominant forces in the German state—Hitler and the army— achieved their purpose to no discernible gain...
Vol. 13 • February 2008 • No. 22
