Published by H-German@h-net.msu.edu (January, 2009)

Dietrich Eichholtz. _Krieg um Öl: Ein Erdölimperium als deutsches Kriegsziel 1938-1943_. Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2006. 141 pp.

EUR 19.90 (paper), ISBN 978-3-86583-119-4.

Reviewed for H-German by Alison Frank, Harvard University

Towards a Great German Oil Empire

Dietrich Eichholtz does not mince words. From the first page of this powerfully argued book, his underlying argument is clear: "The imperialist interest in oil played a role in the occurrence, course, and outcome" of the Second World War (p. 7). More specifically, "[f]rom September 1939, petroleum was a short- and long-term war aim, as well as one of the most important means of waging the war itself" (p. 15). At the same time, in Eichholtz's telling, this is not a hair-raising tale about a dystopia that might have been; the Third Reich does not appear as an unstoppable juggernaut hurtling from one victory to another and narrowly, just narrowly, failing to secure not only world domination, but also a "great German oil empire" (p. 45). On the contrary, "in reality, the military and politicians found themselves caught up, on the one hand, in the myth of their own invincibility, in their delusions of world conquest, and in their ideological megalomania, and on the other hand in the world of raw facts, the impossibility of enforcing their hybrid strategic visions, and their military and political failures and disappointments" (p. 41). At the heart of this book lies a forceful demonstration of the great gap between so-called German elites' grandiose plans and their inability to overcome the mundane, but exigent, obstacles to realizing them.

Although his expertise in the field of energy history is indisputable, Eichholtz is not interested in oil for oil's sake.[1] Rather, he singles out the Third Reich's fuel problem to serve as _pars pro toto_ for its military and strategic planning. It was, after all, a problem that every European power preparing for war in the 1930s had to solve. The lessons of the Great War were clear: the relative inferiority of the fuel supply available to the German army, navy, and air force relative to that of the Allies had been decisive. In Lord Curzon's oft-cited opinion, "the Allied cause had floated to victory on a wave of oil."[2] If, in the words of a contemporary geologist, winning the First World War had been impossible "without gasoline for automobiles and airplanes, without oil for lighting in dugouts and on the homeland's flat soil, without diesel oil for submarines, and without lubricating oil for the innumerable machines in industry and transportation," the increasing demands of an enlarged navy, a powerful air force, and an increasingly motorized army made a petroleum-strapped victory even more unthinkable thirty years later.[3]

Nevertheless, in the 1930s, Germany seemed impossibly far from oil independence. Two-thirds of its oil consumption was covered by imports, most of them from North and South America. Adolf Hitler knew it would be difficult to reconcile the anticipated post-mobilization growth in demand with a nearly inevitable shortage in the event of a war-related blockade, and demanded in August 1936 that Germany complete the move to its own fuel production within eighteen months. Synthetic fuel production played a critical role.[4] But despite its frequent use of terms like "self-supply" and "autarky," the Nazi regime was "helpless and incompetent" (p. 9). The chaos and incoherence of energy policy from shortly before Hitler's rise to power until 1938 have been described in great detail by Titus Kockel ("no captain steered this ship," he notes with evident disdain).[5] Eichholtz's periodization therefore reflects not so much well-known political events on the domestic or international stage, but more specifically a turning point in Germany's oil policy that he, like Kockel, finds critical: only in the summer of 1938 did a concentrated attempt to follow a specific fuel policy emerge.

The key figure behind the new direction taken in 1938 was Hermann Göring, who pulled together a group of experts to develop plans to move Germany towards the goal of preparing to mobilize. At the core of this new "Four-Year-Plan" organization was the Reichsstelle für Wirtschaftausbau, led by Carl Krauch of I. G. Farben. Along with Krauch, the planning team included General Georg Thomas, and Alfred Bentz, a leading petroleum geologist and Göring's "Bevollmächtigte[r] für die Förderung der Erdölgewinnung" (Deputy for Petroleum Production).[6] Although they represented competing private interests and at times advocated incompatible strategies, these men could all agree that estimates for Germany's fuel needs in the case of war had to be dramatically increased. Likewise, they were seduced by dreams of a Greater Germany with control over the most significant fuel supplies in Europe and the Near East--a vision that Eichholtz describes as "dangerously illusory" (p. 14), "hubris," and "the loss of every sense of reality in the field of fuel" (p. 15). Despite the prominent role of I. G. Farben's chairman, Krauch, and its director, Ernst Rudolf Fischer, there was never any doubt that synthetic oil would need to be supplemented by petroleum gained through military exploits. The "Four-Year-Plan" men, whom Eichholtz calls the "masterminds of the future German oil empire" (p. 46) were, despite their expertise, "positively intoxicated by the early successes of the Wehrmacht" (p. 92).

Although the book's title might seem to imply that Germany waged war in order to secure access to oil, the narrative itself does not suggest that this was the case. On the contrary, the thirst for oil seems to have been as much driven by military success as it was an inspiration for military engagement. The attraction of oil was not its value on the world market, but its indispensability to achieving and maintaining expansive imperial power.

The chief of staff for military economy, Major General Georg Thomas, took Japan as his explicit model, noting that Japan "first carved out, according to plan, the basis for its war economy with the help of military operations in order then to proceed to the realization of its plans for world power" (p. 11). After introducing the fundamental fuel supply problem and outlining early successes in Austria, Poland, and on the western front, Eichholtz presents both phases of the process described by Thomas--planning and military operations--in sections devoted to specific geographical regions: Romania, Iraq, and the all-important Caucasus.

The greatest obstacle to developing a realistic fuel policy seems to have been Germany's early military successes; Hitler must have been pleasantly surprised to note that one year after the beginning of the war, Germany's fuel supplies exceeded their September 1, 1939 levels by 57 percent. Thanks to the Galician oilfields in southeastern Poland, the Polish campaign brought a net increase. Victories in the west were helpful not so much because of the diminutive oilfields in Pechelbronn (Alsace), but rather because of large quantities of stored oil found in refineries in Rotterdam, Antwerp, and La Rochelle. The annexation of Austria had brought newly discovered oilfields in the Vienna basin under German control. The Germans were able to increase production in those fields by more than twenty-one times. Could it be that German expertise would work similar wonders in the Galician oilfields, and even in Romania? Göring gave a speech on September 9, 1939, as German troops headed towards the Galician oilfields, in which he noted, "the Poles have only exploited 10 percent of their 'natural resources (_Erdschätze_),'" and boasted that "we will soon have a utilization of 100 percent" (p. 18). The lessons Göring and his group of economic experts gathered from the experiences of 1939 and 1940 encouraged them. First, Germany was able to extract more oil from conquered territories than the conquest itself had cost. Second, withdrawing forces had substantially damaged neither the Polish oilfields nor the western oil facilities.

Eichholtz's summation is sobering: "In the summer of 1940, German imperialism seemed to stand on the pinnacle of success, both militarily and economically. In reality, the German leadership had problems to solve that were more difficult than ever before" (p. 40).

With hindsight, it is easy enough to see signs of the dangers inherent in Göring and Hitler's heady plans for economic exploitation. Germany's early victories in Galicia were soon repulsed by a Soviet push into eastern Galicia that forced Germany to retreat to the border designated by the "friendship treaty" between the two powers--a border that lay west of the most productive Galician oilfields (Boryslav and Drohobych). More foreboding than this was the fact that despite their "great plans to modernize the _'polnische Wirtschaft'_ in the oil industry" (p. 20) ("Polish management" being a ubiquitous slur for sloppy, careless, or backward business practices), the German occupiers were not able to do more than just barely maintain Polish production at its prewar levels, in part because they neglected to invest in any kind of long-term reconstruction. A contemporary analyst made less of Germany's culpability for low Galician production levels than Eichholtz does here--the Petroleum Industry War Council in the United States was told in 1941 that "Poland's negligible oil industry, enemy-occupied and Nazi-dominated, has doubtless been mulcted to the limit."[7]

The most significant economic outcome of Germany's early military victories in Poland and western Europe was not, however, a direct improvement in oil supply in those territories, but rather the influence that the impression of German strength had on Germany's relations with Romania, which had been the fourth largest oil producer in the world in 1936. (That 1936 had represented Romania's all-time production peak would only become clear later.) Most Romanian oil companies were controlled by foreign capital. (French, British, and Dutch shareholders controlled 45 percent of the capital in Romanian oil companies, Romanians 43 percent, U.S.-Americans 9 percent, Italians 3 percent, and Germans only 0.2 percent.) After the war began, Germany had an advantage that those other countries did not: the bellicose and revisionist Romanian government saw its own best interest in an alliance with Germany--after all, "no one else, not even Great Britain, was in the position to arm the Romanian military" (p. 30). Thanks to its victories in Poland and elsewhere, Germany had arms to trade for oil--and that is exactly what it did, at extremely favorable rates. Eichholtz characterizes the behavior of German firms in Romania as imperialist--thanks to hostile takeovers and tremendous political pressure, German companies (such as Deutsche Bank) were able to secure control over formerly French and Belgian holdings in Romania. Soon the German share of control over Romanian oil production rose to 47 percent, leading Hermann Neubacher, Germany's "Special Representative for Economic and Transportation Issues" in Bucharest, to claim with pride that Romania had been turned into a "gas station" for the German military that "ran as smoothly as an automated machine" (p. 36)--a claim Eichholtz says was, in 1941, not exaggerated.

As in Galicia, German oil experts expected that their influence in Romania would lead to a dramatic increase in production. But here, too, they would be disappointed. In 1941, Romania accounted for 96.8 percent of German oil imports, and it remained the most important foreign source of oil for the German military until the summer of 1944. But Germany's declared goal of raising Romanian production was never realized, for several reasons. First, the fields were actually reaching the point of exhaustion. Second, Germany could afford to dedicate neither the capital nor the time required for successful exploration, drilling, and exploitation of new fields (the riskiest and most capital-intensive stage of oil production). Additionally, the same Romanian nationalism that made cooperation with Germany attractive (Hitler had promised Romania unspecified land in the Soviet Union as a reward for loyal alliance) made Romanian politicians reluctant to give up total control over their own natural resources.

The Middle East was at the center of all experts' plans for supplying the anticipated German empire with fuel after the war was over. Both Bentz and Ernst Rudolf Fischer, the director of I. G. Farben and head of the mineral oil section of the Reichswirtschaftministerium, prepared memoranda in 1941 in which they concluded that the oil reserves of the Near East (meant were Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Iran) would be absolutely critical.

Despite the appeal of a potential "peripheral" anti-British strategy (that is, drawing Britain's attention to the margins of its empire by carefully selected engagements), the contingent that supported destroying the British Empire rather than the Soviet Union was "by no means a lasting, consistent, or united, not to mention organized, fraction within the ruling class" (p. 54). Within the regime itself, the top priority was the "anti-Bolshevik crusade and colonial war" (p. 55), and the resources available to operations in the Middle East were limited. Eichholtz completely dismisses Winston Churchill's claim that the Germans barely missed securing control over Syria, Iraq, and Iran as "lying outside the realm of the possible"; Germany's half-hearted attempts to encourage uprisings in Iraq were nothing more than a "sad operetta war" (p. 79).

Galicia, Romania, Iraq, synthetic fuel production--all these played a role in Germany's fuel production plans. Nevertheless, it was the oilfields of the Caucasus that would prove decisive. In a monograph that is the starting point for any Anglophone researcher setting out to write a book about oil, Daniel Yergin notes that Hitler invaded the Soviet Union with the specific purpose of capturing the oil fields of the Caucasus.[8] Eichholtz's account, however, emphasizes that going after the oilfields of the Caucasus did more to increase fuel demand than fuel supply-- and that Göring's advisors foresaw this problem. In so doing, he does not undermine the importance of the fuel question to the planning and carrying out of Operation Barbarossa so much as reiterate that this operation was symptomatic of a regime that repeatedly created problems it could not solve.

In June 1941, Göring signed a document stressing that "'the main economic goal of the operation is to win for Germany as much food and petroleum as possible'" (p. 86). But what would really be required in order to gain control of the oil of the Caucasus? What seemed on the surface like a question of controlling territory (a traditional military goal) quickly became much more complicated. As Eichholtz explains, Germany would have not only to secure and use the fuel supplies it found in the Caucasus, but also to secure, repair, or create the infrastructure, tools, and equipment necessary to keep oil production and refining active. This would require the ongoing maintenance, construction, and repair of derricks, oil wells, refineries, pipelines, pumping stations, storage facilities, mixing and filling stations, reservoirs, barrels, tanks, railroads, and much more.

Eichholtz mentions dozens of studies examining disagreements between advocates of an attack on the Caucasus and advocates of an attack on Moscow and its surrounding armaments industry, nothing that such debates often occur "under the unserviceable premise that one of the two sides represented the 'right' strategy and the other the 'wrong' one" (p. 93). The problem they faced, however, had no good solution. German troops were exhausted and Soviet manpower seemed inexhaustible. Rather than choosing between two imperfect options, Hitler sent troops simultaneously south to the Caucasus and east towards Stalingrad. This decision "rested on a catastrophic self-delusion regarding the relative strength, and in particular regarding the material and moral potential of the Soviet Union" (p. 95). Germany's long string of military successes was abruptly cut off with the failed attack on Moscow. Nowhere, however, was the gap between "goals and means" as great as in the south, where Hitler hoped as late as December 1941 to gain control of the Caucasian oil wells before the end of the year. When the Germans reached Khadyzhensk (southwest of Maikop) in August 1942, they were horrified to find the oilfields in a condition much worse than even their most pessimistic imaginings had anticipated. Bentz visited the oilfields and reported, "[e]verything is broken. It is gruesome to look at. Every nail has to be brought along [from Germany]" (p. 125). For the next four months, the Technical Brigade Mineral Oil (TBM) worked desperately to return the oilfields to working condition: "The recklessness with which the German leadership adhered to its oil strategy becomes conspicuously apparent when one considers that in this time not a single major military unit was sent from the Caucasus to support the relief of Stalingrad" (p. 129). Ultimately, this dedication to the oilfields of the Caucasus would produce less than 1,000 tons of oil--most of it used locally by the TBM itself.

This book, though brief, is packed full of illustrative detail, rich footnotes, careful textual analysis of archival documents, and more than a little polemical language. Because it is in German, it does not lend itself to use in the U.S. classroom, which is a shame. Although it is devoted to a specific topic, its underlying argument stresses the vast gulf separating Hitler's grandiose plans for the German Reich and the thoughtless irresponsibility with which actions were taken to achieve goals for which no adequate preparations had been made.

Notes

[1]. Eichholtz's other works on the topic of oil include _Deutsche Politik und rumänisches Öl, 1938-1941_ (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2005), and _Die Bagdadbahn: Mesopotamien und die deutsche Ölpolitik bis 1918. Aufhaltsamer Übergang ins Erdölzeitalter_ (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2007).

[2]. Arthur J. Marder, _From the Dreadnought to Scapa Flow: The Royal Navy in the Fisher Era, 1904-1919_, vol. 2, _The War Years: To the Eve of Jutland_ (London: Oxford University Press, 1965), 332.

[3]. Ferdinand Friedensburg, "Das Erdöl auf dem Gebiet des galizischen und rumänischen Kriegsschauplatzes, 1914-1918,"

_Militärwissenschaftliche Mitteilungen_ 70 (1939): 455.

[4]. There is, not surprisingly, a considerable literature on Germany's fuel problems and strategies during the National Socialist period. On the role of I. G. Farben in particular, see Peter Hayes, _Industry and Ideology: I. G. Farben in the Nazi Era_ (Cambridge: University Press, 1987).

[5]. Titus Kockel, _Deutsche Ölpolitik, 1928-1938_ (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2005), 334.

[6]. Bentz is a leading figure in Kockel's monograph.

[7]. George A. Hill, Jr., _Trends in the Oil Industry in 1944 (Including United States Foreign Oil Policy): As Presented to the Petroleum Industry War Council, January 12, 1944_ (Washington, DC: Petroleum Industry War Council, 1944), 10.

[8]. Daniel Yergin, _The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money&Power_ (New

York: Simon and Schuster, 1991), 13.

The Fortele Aeriene Regale ale României (FARR, Royal Romanian Air Force; also known as Aeronauticã Regalã Românã, Royal Romanian Aeronautics) was still rebuilding when war began. Outnumbered and inadequately equipped, its pilots fought for Pyrrhic victories, and its antiaircraft ground crews inflicted most of the damage incurred by enemy aircraft. Approximately 500 Romanian flyers died in the war, a proportionally heavy total. The Industria Aeronauticã Românã (Romanian Aeronautical Industry) works at Brasov produced several serviceable aircraft, notably the IAR-80 and IAR-80A. Based, in part, on the Polish PZL-24, the IAR-80 was among the best European fighters when it entered service in 1939, but it soon lagged behind newer designs.

A reluctant Romania officially joined the Axis powers on 23 November 1940, and German Luftwaffe advisers trained and reorganized the FARR along German lines. Romania participated in Operation BARBAROSSA, the invasion of the Soviet Union, and in the August-October 1941 Odessa Campaign, fighter strength dropped by a fourth as spare parts for older British, French, and Polish aircraft were depleted. Planes of German or Romanian manufacture replaced them. FARR fighters and bombers aided the Romanian army's victories against the Soviets in Bessarabia and at Odessa in 1941, losing 862 men in less than 10 months, including ground-support and antiaircraft crews. Romanian pilots flew some 4,000 sorties in the Battle of Stalingrad from October 1942 to January 1943. The FARR lost 79 planes, most of them abandoned when airfields were overrun, while destroying 61 Soviet aircraft. Romanian women pilots of the Escadrilla Aviatie Sanitare won Red Cross medals for braving Soviet fighters and intense flak to airlift out casualties during these campaigns.

FARR pilots blunted the Soviet bombing of Romania, but a stronger enemy appeared beginning on 12 June 1942, when, in Operation HALPRO, U.S. bombers made Romania's Ploesti (Ploiesti) oil fields their target. When 178 unescorted American B-24 heavy bombers swept over Ploesti at low level on 1 August 1943 in Operation TIDAL WAVE, FAAR pilots claimed 20 of the 54 raiders shot down and lost just 2 fighters. Defending Romania's oil fields and cities then became the FARR's top priority. After Romania changed sides in September 1944, FARR pilots flew 4,300 missions for the Allies and dropped over 1,000 tons of bombs on its erstwhile Axis partners.

Romania's top-scoring ace of the war was Cãpitan Aviator de Rezervã Constantin Cantacuzino, with 43 confirmed and 11 probable victories; FARR's practice of awarding additional points for shooting down bombers raised his total to 69. Despite limitations in both the quality and the quantity of its aircraft, the FARR had been one of the most powerful eastern European air forces. By August 1947, however, Soviet-imposed restrictions reduced its postwar strength to fewer than 75 aircraft.

References

Axworthy, Mark. Third Axis, Fourth Ally: Romanian Armed Forces in the European War, 1841-1945. London: Arms and Armour Press, 1995.

Bernád, Dénes. Rumanian Air Force: The Prime Decade, 1938-1947. Carrollton, TX: Squadron/Signal Publications, 1999.

Butler, Rupert. Hitler's Jackals. Barnsley, UK: Leo Cooper, 1998.

Tarnstrom, Ronald. L. Balkan Battles. Lindsborg, KS: Trogen Books, 1998.

Viewpoint: Yes, the Germans were not organizationally or doctrinally prepared for the scale of warfare called for on the Eastern Front.

Viewpoint: No, failure in the East was not inevitable, but deteriorating morale, harsh weather conditions, and economic limitations helped to defeat the Wehrmacht in Russia.

Germany's defeat on its Eastern Front continues to generate controversy. Did the Reich miss opportunities to end the war on its own terms in the steppes of Russia? Or did Russian resources and Russian weather, Nazi Germany's structural and ideological nature, or specific errors in planning and shortcomings in execution, doom Operation Barbarossa before it began?

The question must be addressed in a German context because it was Germany that initiated hostilities. Whatever Joseph Stalin may have intended in the long run, he had no immediate intention of sending the Red Army westward in the summer of 1941. The spectrum of approach is further narrowed because German planners were well aware of the objective military potential of the Soviet Union. They were also convinced that their way of war made that potential irrelevant-speed and shock would paralyze the Soviet system, then force it to implode. All that was needed, in Adolf Hitler's words, was "to kick the door down."

This scenario was not an entirely unrealistic. Earlier German victories had been based on maintaining the initiative, staying inside their opponent's decision-action loops. To stand still in the summer of 1941 was to invite the emergence of just the kind of mass, attritional war Germany had little chance of winning. Such a "use it or lose it" situation offered little margin for fog or friction. At the most basic level, German military intelligence significantly underestimated the forces available to the U.S.S.R. That in turn led to harder fighting of longer duration than expected. German losses in personnel and equipment rapidly exceeded replacement capacities. These losses meant taking ever-greater risks to maintain the momentum that was at the heart of German strategy. It had the predictable result of conflict at high policy and command levels over which risks made the best sense, since the margin of error had shrunk to near zero. By December 1941, Barbarossa was gridlocked by negative synergy: the elements that had generated its initial successes were now proving counterproductive. Paradigm shifts, however, were not among the strong points of National Socialism, or of the Wehrmacht (German Armed Forces) high command.

The routine of war: A light AA gun mounted on a half-track carrier being used against ground targets in Russia, 1942. Division is SS Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler.

BY ROBERT L. BATEMAN III, U.S. MILITARY ACADEMY, WEST POINT

Viewpoint: Yes, the Germans were not organizationally or doctrinally prepared for the scale of warfare called for on the Eastern Front.

Germany attacked Russia on 22 June 1941. The final German operational plan, code-named Barbarossa, dictated a massive attack across a broad front. In this attack the Germans pushed forward along three divergent axes across the Ukraine and into Russia proper. Adolf Hitler attacked, firmly convinced that all that was required was "one solid kick and the whole rotten structure will come tumbling down." Despite recurrent and well-founded fears within the German military high command over the dangers of a two-front war, Hitler committed Germany to an all-out struggle for Lebensmum (living space) to the east. Six months later German forces were at the gates of Moscow, but they did not enter. Just as there were three axes of the German advance, there are as many views as to exactly why the Germans failed.

Generally speaking, most historians agree that in order for the Germans to win against Russia, their window of opportunity was open only from the start of the invasion until the onset of winter. Most also agree that Hitler's capture of Moscow may well have toppled the Soviets from power; warfare might have continued for some time after that point, but an eventual negotiated settlement on German terms would likely have ultimately resulted. Debate among historians and military theorists alike therefore centers upon the question of how these conditions might have been met or the specifics of why they were not.

One school of thought broadly contends that the Germans were, more or less, doomed. According to advocates of this position several complimentary factors contributed to their failure. The year 1941 saw one of the harshest winters on record. "General Winter" is historically the Russian's most able commander. Coupled with the effects of weather, adherents of this school of thought, was the massive economic potential of the Russians. This group contends that the sheer mass of manpower available to the Russians could not be overcome. Even as the Germans moved eastward, the Soviet system mobilized manpower reserves that poured in, providing a seemingly limitless pool of replacements. Finally, the German army sat at the end of an overextended and dangerously exposed logistics pipeline. Partisan warfare fueled by patriotic fervor, or merely hatred of the Germans exacerbated by their policies toward the "inhuman" Slavic peoples, created a "front behind the front," which further eroded the German war machine.

In contrast to this position is the idea that the Germans were organizationally and doctrinally incapable of succeeding in an offensive war across the distances involved on the Russian front. The famous Blitzkrieg (lighting war) of the German war machine could overwhelm the Poles, crush the Norwegians, and humiliate the French, but these were theaters of war quite different from the steppes of Russia. Various decisions made by the Germans in the allocation of national assets dictated that the effective range of the "blitz" was but a few hundred miles, not the eight hundred miles needed to achieve a capture of Moscow. Further, although the Germans had gone through a deliberate and thorough review of their Polish campaign, doctrinally focused historians note that the Germans did not continue this process after the fall of France in 1940. Rather, it appears that they rested upon their laurels and believed their own press releases about the invincibility of the armed forces of Nazi Germany. The "blitz" as it was represented in the popular imagination in 1940-1941 was in reality largely a product of the Nazi media machine.

Finally, some historians suggest that the Germans could have won were it not for a few crucial decisions. It is argued that there were actually several ways to beat the Russians, that the combination of the Soviet system and Russian people was not invincible. This line of reasoning attaches blame to several different sources: either it was the meddling of Hitler in operational planning or the recalcitrant independent streak evident in some German army leaders. This reasoning is rich, if counterfactual, historical terrain. It is all the more attractive to some for the very reason that none of the assertions can be absolutely proved or disproved, given the evidence that now exists.

Russia is a vast nation. In manpower, materiel, and raw resources the potential for the Soviet Union to create a military force for offensive action is staggering. If forced to wage a defensive war the Russians have recourse to two assets, the immense space of their territory and the inevitable onslaught of the brutal Russian winter. The combined effects of these elements have defeated all those who have attacked Russia since the days of Czar Peter the Great.

On 1 January 1941 the Russian armed forces numbered 4,207,000 men, 81 percent of whom were in the ground forces. While this number is indeed large, Soviet manpower is perhaps most eloquently illustrated by the number of soldiers the Soviets lost as prisoners to the initial German onslaught, manpower that they effectively wrote off and still managed stop the Nazis outside of Moscow. Prisoner figures are some of the only reliable numbers available from the beginning of the conflict; for various reasons the numbers of Soviets killed and wounded are difficult to accurately estimate. Between 22 June and 12 August the Russians lost some 390,700 men as prisoners west of their defensive line along the Dnieper river. Before the end of 1941 the Russians lost a total of 2,258,535 prisoners. Add to this staggering total the number of casualties they suffered in this same time frame, and one begins to comprehend the scale of warfare that the Soviets proved capable of waging. By way of comparison, the entire U.S. Army in 1939 stood at fewer than 150,000 soldiers, while the U.S. Army of 1999 is less than 480,000. Against such strength as the Russians presented, even at the outset, it is amazing that the Germans succeeded as much as they did.

It was not just in manpower that the Soviets dwarfed their opponents. On 22 June 1941 the Red Army had, in front of just one of the German axis of attack (that of German Army Group Center), an estimated 4,278 tanks. Even this large number was far below the strength that they should have had in place, an estimated 6,748 tanks of all types. Contemporary Western intelligence estimates and historians' analyses suggest a total armored force in excess of 22,000 tanks of all types. Accepting the fact that the majority of these tanks were antiquated, they still represent an incredible concentration of force. As any infantry soldier equipped with only small arms will relate, when their bullets are bouncing off the steel plate of a tank and its treads are about to roll over their head, they really do not feel that the tank is "outdated."

These tanks, antiquated and modern alike, were made by an industrial base with an enormous potential. The Russian war industry, or more accurately the industry that the Soviets reallocated toward war-materiel production, also spelled defeat for the Germans. Although the overall production of war materiel was relatively low prior to the German invasion, in the second half of 1941 the Russians accomplished something of a dual miracle. Not only did they physically remove huge portions of their industrial base from the western portion of the Soviet Union to safer areas around and behind north and east Moscow, they also managed to outproduce the fixed facilities of the Germans. From June through December 1941 the Soviets produced 4,177 tanks. Through 1942 they manufactured 24,700 tanks compared to the German total of 9,300 for the same period. This trend would only accelerate as the war progressed. Supplemented by logistically important vehicles such as trucks and locomotives provided by the United States through the Lend Lease program, the Soviets amassed the support materially critical to success in modern mobile warfare. By 1945 the Soviets had an estimated 665,000 vehicles in service, more than half of which were built in the United States. Over the course of the entire war the United States sent Russia some 427,000 trucks.

A military adage states that while amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics. Logistics wins wars. Support of this kind is crucial when operating in the open steppes of Russia. For the Germans there was only one major artery along which supplies could reliably flow from their start point to Moscow. Military forces operating in either direction had to account for and adapt to the poor infrastructure of the Soviet Union. Over the more than eight hundred miles of mostly open terrain the Germans intended to cross, the minimum straight line distance between the German start point and the Russian capital, there was little to support life, let alone concentrated military forces, upon the exposed expanses of the steppe. Exacerbating this issue was the requirement that forced the Germans to attack along three divergent axes in the first place. The sheer size of Soviet forces, combined with the available space over which they might maneuver, dictated that the Germans could not penetrate in a single penetration in depth. "Ignoring your flanks" may have been a viable concept when facing France's two hundred miles, but not across the entire length of the road to Moscow.

Finally, there is no denying the power of the Russian winter. In 1941 it arrived early and developed into one of the worst in memory. Winter warfare is one of the most miserable experiences man may inflict upon himself. In temperatures so extreme that engine blocks freeze when not in use, human life is exposed and fragile. The Germans, by failing to complete their operational or strategic goals prior to the onset of the Russian winter, were doomed to defeat.

Although they attacked with a total of 3.3 million men in the combat and supporting units, the Germans had only seventeen true Panzer (Armored) divisions and eleven motorized divisions committed to the offensive. The majority of the remainder of the 154 German divisions dedicated to Barbarossa were infantry. This fact alone is not reason enough to suggest failure, but when one conducts a detailed analysis of the equipment available to those armored, mechanized, and "traditional" infantry divisions, it is discovered that the Germans were ill prepared to conduct Barbarossa in the manner they believed they could. Their weakness stemmed from three foundations: a lack of a true doctrine of deep attack, a lack of sufficient appreciation for the logistic issues involved in a deep attack, and a general dearth of material support in all combat arms.

Despite the persistent search for hard evidence to the contrary, it now appears that the Germans never truly developed a single coherent document that advocated the concept known to history as Blitzkrieg. In fact, prior to the invasion of Poland in 1939 the term itself, although used periodically in various German professional military journals, did not have any doctrinally accepted definition. Its usage suggests that the term was used generically to describe a short war, not specifically as a description of the technique to be used to achieve that objective. Only after the success of the Polish invasion did the word come into widespread usage. Thereafter, both in Allied and especially in the Nazi controlled German media, Blitzkrieg came to describe events that had already happened, as though they were a part of a predefined plan in accordance with an inspired doctrine that the Wehrmacht developed before the war.

However, no such coherent doctrine ever existed. The doctrinal adjustments that were made by the Germans based upon their analysis of their own operations in the early part of the war did not fully envision the concept of an attack of the depth needed in operations against Russia. Blitzkrieg, as practiced by the Germans in the Low Countries and against France, used penetrating attacks and massed combat power but only to an operational depth of a few hundred miles. Their organizations were not structured to support sustained attacks, either in manpower or material support, any further than this.

There is no way to ignore the issue of logistics as it relates to the German ability to wage offensive warfare. Certainly, despite the fact that the German high command did not approve the creation of the first three Panzer Divisions prior to 1936, they recognized the importance of wheeled and tracked support vehicles. In simple terms, tanks win battles, but it is the trucks of the logistics elements that win campaigns and wars. Unfortunately for the Germans, it was in many ways a choice of one or the other. The Nazi regime, painfully aware of the civil unrest that had played such a large role in the collapse of the German war effort at the end of World War I, did not convert its national economy to a full war-production footing any earlier than 1942-1943. Thus, for the Wehrmacht, it became a choice between tanks or trucks. Perhaps their ultimate choice was the result of a cultural myopia. Alternately, it may have been the influence of the preponderance of former combat-arms officers at the upper end of the German command structure that chose tanks over trucks. In either case the end result of decisions made in this regard was that during Barbarossa, only those few Panzer and mechanized divisions were fully supported by internal- combustion-driven logistics. The rest of the Heer (German Army) marched on foot and was supported in the main by horse-drawn guns and wagons, thus limiting the practical range of any single German attack. It was, therefore, not possible for Barbarossa to penetrate all the way to Moscow in a single thrust. The force structure of the German army limited each successive attack to a depth of roughly two hundred miles.

Finally, while the majority of the German armored formations were admittedly more advanced than most of the Russians, the Germans only managed to amass a total of 3,582 armored vehicles of all types at the outset of the attack. (Remember that the total Soviet armored force numbered some 22,000, while those opposing German Army Group Center alone numbered 4,278.) This fact again points out prewar industrial and political limitations of the Germans and their effect upon the conduct of the war.

In the end it is difficult to escape the idea that the German attack of 1941 was doomed to failure. Although there are a host of explanations, one stands out beyond the others; the German military of 1941 was not designed to accomplish the Herculean task set before it. This doctrine had not changed to reflect the scale of warfare on the Eastern Front. Blitzkrieg was designed to defeat nations the size of France and Poland. Doctrine drives force structure, and as a result the German army did not develop the type of robust logistics needed to support deep attacks. Without this structure the Germans were forced into an operational plan that resembled four successive "mini-blitzkriegs" (although each was, on its own, the size of the original Blitz against Poland) with a short pause between each for resupply, consolidation, and reorganization. Operations, in turn, slowed to the point where it was nearly impossible to take Moscow before the Russians could collect themselves and build their own combat powers to defend the city. If Moscow was the key to the defeat of the Soviet Union, then the Germans failed because they were looking too far beyond the simple solution and instead were trying to break open a combination lock.

References

Omer Bartov, The Eastern Front, 1941-45: German Troops and the Barbarization of Warfare

(Basingstoke, U.K.: Macmillan in association with St. Anthony's College, Oxford, 1985);

Bartov, Hitler's Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich (New York: Oxford University

Press, 1992);

Antony Beevor, Stalingrad (London: Viking, 1998);

George E. Blau, The German Campaign in Russia: Planning and Operations, 1940-1942 (Washington, D.C.: Department of the Army, 1955);

Horst Boog, and others, Angriff auf die Sowjetunion (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1983), translated by Dean S. Mac-Murray and others as The Attack on the Soviet Union, volume 4 of Germany and the Second World War (Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press,1998);

Alan Clark, Barbarossa: The Russian-German Conflict, 1941-45 (New York: Morrow, 1965);

John Erickson, The Road to Stalingrad (London: Weidenfeld&Nicolson, 1975);

Joachim C. Fest, Gesicht des Dritten Reiches: Profile einer totalitateren Herrschaft (Munich:

Piper, 1963), translated by Michael Bullock as The Face of the Third Reich: Portraits of the Nazi Leadership (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1970);

Stephen G. Fritz, Frontsoldaten: The German Soldier in World War 11 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1995);

Bryan I. Fugate, Operation Barbarossa, Strategy and Tactics on the Eastern Front, 1941 (Novato, Calif: Presidio Press, 1984);

David M. Glantz and Jonathan M. House, When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995);

Frederick Kagan, "The Evacuation of Soviet Industry in the Wake of 'Barbarossa': A Key to the Soviet Victory," Journal of Slavic Military Studies, 8 (June 1995): 387-414;

Rolf-Dieter Miiller and Gerd R. Ueberschar, Hitler's War in the East, 1941-1945: A Critical Reassessment, translation of texts by Bruce D. Little (Providence, RL: Berghahn Books, 1997);

R. H. S. Stolfi, Hitler's Panzers East (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991).

BY MICHAEL S. NEIBERG, U. S. AIR FORCE ACADEMY, COLORADO

Viewpoint: No, failure in the East was not inevitable, but deteriorating morale, harsh weather conditions, and economic limitations helped to defeat the Wehrmacht in Russia.

No historical outcome is inevitable. Germany's failure to defeat the Soviet Union resulted from the inability of the Heer (German Army), and to a lesser extent the Luftwaffe (Air Force), to win three interrelated "battles": the battle of morale, the battle versus nature, and the battle of supply. These battles demonstrated serious structural weaknesses in the German military's Blitzkrieg (lighting war) doctrines. The Wehrmacht (German Armed Forces), designed to win short wars close to Germany, was ill-suited to win a war against Russia, but its defeat was not inevitable.

Of these three battles, Germany should have been well poised to win in the case of morale. In June 1941 the euphoric German army stood as conquerors of western Poland, Czechoslovakia, France, Norway, the Low Countries, the Balkans, Greece, and Crete. Historians talk of a "victory disease" that infected the German military, but in the spring of 1941 the Wehrmacht looked anything but diseased. With remarkably light casualties, it had enforced its will over any part of continental Europe that it coveted. It had driven England into constant invasion panics and had moved into North Africa. It stood in a strong position to capitalize on these successes by invading Russia.

The Red Army, on the other hand, stood in shambles. In the 1930s, Joseph Stalin's Great Purges had removed thousands of officers of presumed political unreliability, regardless of their military attributes. In all, Stalin removed 36,671 officers, including 403 of Russia's 706 brigade commanders, three of five marshals, all eleven deputy defense commissioners, and sixty of sixty seven corps commanders. Only 15 percent of these officers ever returned to service. Most were executed. These purges continued up to the eve of the German invasion. The Great Purges thus wiped out an entire generation of Russian military and intelligence leaders. Those who remained had to command in an atmosphere of constant fear and suspicion.

Furthermore, interwar changes to Soviet society produced enormous dislocations. Between 1929 and 1939 the U.S.S.R. went from being 18 percent urban to 33 percent urban. As many as fifteen million peasants were moved, many of them forcibly, to achieve this change. Millions more starved as a result of Stalin's agricultural policies. Yet this very group, the peasantry, filled the ranks of the Red Army. Almost half of them were ethnically non-Russian. Most felt a great deal of bitterness toward Stalin's regime for the dislocation and starvation that collective agriculture caused. The loyalty of both the officers and the soldiers was therefore suspect.

Lastly, in great contrast to Germany, Russia's recent military experiences had been disastrous. In November 1939, Russia invaded Finland, which the Nazi-Soviet Pact earlier that year had placed in the Soviet sphere of influence. The Red Army committed one million men against a 175,000-man Finnish army. By the end of March 1940, Finland had surrendered, but the Russians lost 200,000 men to Finland's 25,000. The debacle further isolated Russia (seen as a possible German ally after the Nazi-Soviet Pact) from potential allies such as Britain and the United States and went a long way toward convincing the German high command that a quick victory against the Soviet Union was likely.

Yet, the surprise German invasion of Russia motivated military and civilian, Russian and non-Russian, to incredible levels of sacrifice and activity. The barbarity of the German threat to their homeland rallied the Soviet people in a way that few could have predicted. An outside invasion created a level of internal unity that no Stalinist policy could achieve. Nazi ideology grouped all Slavs together as subhuman, thereby complicating attempts to exploit the internal divisions of Soviet society. German atrocities alienated non-Russians and made their cooperation with the invading Wehrmacht increasingly unlikely.

Early losses of men, land, and resources only served to strengthen Soviet will. Women and men too old for service dug tank ditches, served in anti-aircraft gun crews, and worked long hours in Soviet factories to keep supplies flowing to the fronts. To be sure, the Stalinist system brutally punished those who did not do their part, but there can be no denying the high level of motivation inside the Soviet Union. Stalin encouraged Soviet morale by taking the immensely important step of reopening Russian Orthodox churches, though not mosques or synagogues, in September 1943. For German soldiers, nourished on exaggerated dreams of quick victory and propaganda that dehumanized their Slavic enemies, the invasion proved to be a tremendous disillusion. Even their rapid early movements east produced few concrete results. The Russian steppes seemed endless and the supply of Russian soldiers inexhaustible. Winter brought frigid temperatures, snow, and frostbite; spring brought the infamous Russian mud. One German soldier wrote to his family in July 1942, "This war has ripped my joy away from me." German morale never completely collapsed, but the heady days of 1941 gave way to a darker, more pessimistic mood that contrasted sharply with the increasing confidence of the Red Army.

"General Winter and Colonel Mud," according to a familiar clichĂŠ, won the war for Russia. While this statement is surely an exaggeration, one can confidently say that the Soviets fought a more successful war against the brutal climate and harsh conditions of Russia than did Germany. Counting on a quick victory and expecting to be in control of Russian cities and resources before winter, the Germans made inadequate preparations for severe weather. Their soldiers lacked warm clothing and boots; their equipment lacked winter oils and antifreeze. Wehrmacht units were sometimes as far as two thousand miles away from German supply bases. As a result, many units had to virtually fend for themselves in the barren steppes. The Soviets also denied the Germans factories and housing. Whatever they could not dismantle and move east they destroyed.

Russian soldiers faced the same natural conditions, of course, but were better prepared to meet them. Some Russian units, like the Siberians who helped to break the siege of Moscow, were specially equipped and trained for winter warfare. The Red Army also benefited from its proximity to supply centers and a mostly sympathetic civilian population. Furthermore, many Russian soldiers had learned to deal with severe weather from a young age and knew how to cope with snow, rain, and mud.

The third "battle" that the Russians won was the battle of supply. Here Britain and the United States, though still suspicious of Stalin and the Soviets, played a critical role. Hitler's invasion of Russia made the Soviet Union an overnight ally in the war against Nazism despite long-standing tensions between Stalin and the West. Winston Churchill acknowledged both his deep dislike of the Soviet system and his new support for the Red Army thus, "I will unsay no word that I have spoken about [communism]. But all this fades away before the spectacle which is now unfolding." The Americans, too, offered support by extending the Lend Lease program to the Soviet Union in September 1941. American Lend-Lease aid provided the Russians with fifteen million pairs of boots, four million tons of food (much of it in the form of Spam), and thirty-four million uniforms. This aid allowed the Russians to clothe and feed their men and to focus their own industry on the production of artillery, tanks, and Katyusha rockets.

Soviet industry responded to the challenge. Despite the invasion, the Soviets were able to keep their industry operating by moving it east of the Ural Mountains. More than 2,500 factories, 80 percent of the total Soviet industrial base, were uprooted and reassembled hundreds, in some cases thousands, of miles east. Soviet authorities cajoled, coerced, and convinced a largely female civilian-labor force to work long, hard hours to keep factories operating. Failure to report to work was treated as military desertion. As a result, much to Germany's surprise, the Russians were able to vastly increase their production of military hardware and even out produce Germany in several key areas just a year after the invasion. In 1941, for example, the Russians built 8,200 combat aircraft. In 1943, after two years of German occupation, they had more than tripled production to 29,900 combat aircraft.

Germany, on the other hand, was never able to match Soviet levels of production. Their principal allies, Italy and Japan, were less industrialized than Germany and thus unable to provide the kind of economic assistance that Britain and the United States provided to Russia. Furthermore, the Nazis resisted putting the German economy on a full military scale until 1944. Hitler wanted to keep the civilian standard of living as high as possible to avoid the morale problems that he believed led to German collapse in 1918. Many German units therefore depended heavily upon hardware captured from their enemies, dramatically complicating supply problems. The Germans used 151 types of truck; the Russians used two.

The centralized Russian war-planning system allowed for a greater degree of control over the quality and quantity of military-hardware production. Germany did not even begin to develop a rational system until Albert Speer became armaments minister in 1943. Unlike Russia, where more than half of all industrial workers were women, Germany never called women to work in large numbers; Nazi ideology, which stressed women in traditional roles (notably motherhood), forbade it. Instead, the Nazis used laborers drafted from occupied territories and concentration-camp victims. The Nazis used more than seven million slave laborers during the war; these workers had a life expectancy of just four months, yet at one point they comprised 25 percent of the German labor force. Lastly, German production had to be divided between the Russian, Norwegian, North African (until 1943), Italian, Balkan, and French fronts.

Hitler's invasion of Russia in June 1941 seemed at the time to have a high probability of success. The Germans counted on it, the British feared it, and the Americans expected it. The Wehrmacht was battle-tested, confident, and eager. The Russians were internally divided, demoralized from the Finland fiasco, and poorly equipped. Nevertheless, few at the time saw how poorly positioned the German system was to deal with a war against not only the Red Army but against the unforgiving nature of Russia itself. This positioning, not historical inevitability, led Germany to defeat on the eastern front.

References

Omer Bartov, The Eastern Front, 1941-45: German Troops and the Barbarization of Warfare

(Basingstoke, U.K.: Macmillan in association with St. Anthony's College, Oxford, 1985);

Bartov, Hitler's Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich (New York: Oxford University

Press, 1992);

Antony Beevor, Stalingrad (London: Viking, 1998);

George E. Blau, The German Campaign in Russia: Planning and Operations, 1940-1942 (Washington, D.C.: Department of the Army, 1955);

Horst Boog, and others, Angriff auf die Sowjetunion (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1983), translated by Dean S. Mac-Murray and others as The Attack on the Soviet Union, volume 4 of Germany and the Second World War (Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press,1998);

Alan Clark, Barbarossa: The Russian-German Conflict, 1941-45 (New York: Morrow, 1965);

John Erickson, The Road to Stalingrad (London: Weidenfeld&Nicolson, 1975);

Joachim C. Fest, Gesicht des Dritten Reiches: Profile einer totalitateren Herrschaft (Munich:

Piper, 1963), translated by Michael Bullock as The Face of the Third Reich: Portraits of the Nazi Leadership (London: Weidenfeld&Nicolson, 1970);

Stephen G. Fritz, Frontsoldaten: The German Soldier in World War 11 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1995);

Bryan I. Fugate, Operation Barbarossa, Strategy and Tactics on the Eastern Front, 1941 (Novato, Calif: Presidio Press, 1984);

David M. Glantz and Jonathan M. House, When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995);

Frederick Kagan, "The Evacuation of Soviet Industry in the Wake of' Barbarossa': A Key to the Soviet Victory," Journal of Slavic Military Studies, 8 (June 1995): 387-414;

Rolf-Dieter Miiller and Gerd R. Ueberschar, Hitler's War in the East, 1941-1945: A Critical Reassessment, translation of texts by Bruce D. Little (Providence, RL: Berghahn Books, 1997);

R. H. S. Stolfi, Hitler's Panzers East (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991).

Less than a month after "Barbarossa" was launched, Army Group South had to replace half of its trucks with Russian horsedrawn "Panje-wagons" due to mechanical failure and lack of replacements.

The Shock of the Old

Twentieth-century horsepower was not a left-over from a pre-mechanical era; the gigantic horse-drawn metropolis of 1900 was new. In Britain, the most industrialised nation in the world in 1900, the use of horses for transportation peaked not in the early nineteenth century but in the early years of the twentieth. How could it be that horse transport expanded at the same time as trains pulled by 'iron horses'? The answer is that economic development and urbanisation went hand in hand with more horse-buses, horse-trams and horse-carriages. In addition, while train and ship carried goods over long distances, over shorter distances horse-drawn vehicles became ever more necessary. Thus visitors to London's Camden Market, on the site of a huge railway yard and interchange with the canal system, will note that many of the old buildings were stables. These were not there to house animals used for riding in nearby Regent's Park, but for draught animals. In 1924 the largest and most progressive British railway company, the London, Midland and Scottish, had as many horses as it had locomotives-10,000. By contrast it had just over 1,000 motor vehicles. In 1930 the London and North Eastern Railway railway had 7,000 steam locomotives and 5,000 horses, and only about 800 motor vehicles. There is no doubt though, that by 1914 in the great rich cities of the world, horse transport was giving way to the motor-powered buses, lorries and cars, and electric-powered trams.

In agriculture, the horsepower peak was to come later. For example, in Finland the horse population peaked in the 1950S because they were used in logging. The United States provides the most graphic example. Agricultural horsepower peaked in 1915 with more than 21 million on American farms, up from 11 million in 1880, a level to which it had returned by the mid-1930s. The US case is particularly interesting because at the beginning of the twentieth century it had highly mechanised agriculture, but this was horse-powered agriculture. We are apt to underestimate the implications of relying on horsepower in the countryside. At the peak of agricultural horse use in Britain and the USA, about one-third of agricultural land was devoted to the horses' upkeep: they were large consumers of grass, hay and grain. Mechanised agriculture helped the US to become the richest large nation in the world, and one that by the 1910s was by far and away the largest producer of motor vehicles.

In one area of twentieth-century life, the use of horses for transport was particularly remarkable. The Great War and the Second World War are seen as industrial wars, as feats of engineering and science and organisation. And so they were. Because of this both involved huge numbers of horses, which, like men, were conscripted. Every belligerent depended on them, as well as on mules and other beasts of burden. Before the Great War, the small British army had 25,000 horses but by the middle of 1917 the great new mass British armies had 591,000 horses, 213,000 mules, 47,000 camels and 11,000 oxen. In late 1917 there were 368,000 British horses and 82,000 British mules on the Western Front alone, hugely outnumbering British motor vehicles. This was not a question of a deluded commitment to cavalry. Only one-third of the British horses on the Western Front were for riding (and only some of these were in cavalry units)-the great majority transported the vast quantities of materiel required in modern war, particularly from the railheads to the front. The use of the animals was not an exceptional emergency measure to make use of Britain's existing horses. Horses were desperately needed, and Britain bought 429,000 of them and 275,000 mules from the US, and imported vast quantities of fodder too. Britain's ability to exploit world horse markets was crucial to its military power. In any case the British were not unique. The vast American armies pouring into Europe in 1918 equipped each of their very large infantry divisions with 2,000 draught horses, another 2,000 riding horses and no fewer than 2,700 mules: one horse or mule for every four men.

An even starker example of the continuing importance of the horse is provided by the Second World War. The German army, so often portrayed as centred on armoured formations, had even more horses in the Second World War than the British army had in the Great War. The horse was the 'basic means of transport in the Germany Army.' German rearmament in the 1930s involved mass purchase of horses such that by 1939 the army had 590,000, leaving 3 million others in the rest of the country. Each infantry division needed around 5,000 horses to move itself. For the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, 625,000 horses were assembled. As the war progressed the German horse army got ever larger as the Wehrmacht pillaged the agricultural horses of the nations it conquered. At the beginning of 1945 it had 1.2 million horses; the total loss of horses in the war is estimated at 1.5 million. Could it be that the Great War and the Second World War saw more horses in battle than any previous war? Could it be that the draught horse-to-soldier ratio also increased, despite the use of other forms of transport? Certainly the Wehrmacht embarked on its march to Moscow with many times more horses than Napoleon's Grand Armee. Indeed, it took longer to get there.

By David Edgerton

LINK

Compared to the stripped-down divisions left holding the defensive front, the German southern attack forces that assembled for Operation Blau seemed sleek and powerful. However, this appearance was deceiving. The divisions assigned to Army Group South (later divided into Army Groups A and B) suffered from many deficiencies that compromised their offensive and defensive capabilities.

In May 1942, most of the infantry divisions in Army Group South stood at about 50 percent strength. Although brought nearly up to strength over the next six weeks, the southern divisions had little time or opportunity to assimilate their new troops. Only one-third of the infantry divisions committed to the upcoming attack could be taken out of the line in early spring for rehabilitation; the remaining divisions stayed in their old winter defensive positions and tried to train and integrate their replacements even as they fought desultory defensive battles against minor Russian attacks. As a result, the general training standards in the southern assault forces were far below those of the 1939-41 German armies. Losses in officers, NCOs, and technical personnel during the 1941 winter battles had further sapped the combat abilities of the German forces. In fact, many German units now regretted the use of artillerymen, signalers, and other specialists as infantry during the winter months since they were so hard to replace. Moreover, even after strip-ping vehicles and equipment from the northern forces, Army Group South's divisions lacked their full complement of motor transport. According to a General Staff study in late May, the spearhead forces (those divisions that would actually lead the attacks toward Stalingrad and the Caucasus) would embark with only 80 percent of their vehicles, and the follow-on infantry divisions and supply columns would be slowed by shortages of both horses and vehicles. For all of the ruthless economies inflicted on their poorer relatives to the north, Army Groups A and B would therefore be more clumsy, be less mobile, and have less logistical staying power than the German armies that had launched Barbarossa a year before.

Army Group B had two distinct missions in Operation Blau: first, to carve its way eastward along the southern bank of the Don River some 300 miles to Stalingrad, and second, to post a defensive screen along its northern flank as it went, protecting its own rear and the further unfolding of Army Group A's attack to the south. Though not the decisive thrust (Army Group A would actually push into the Caucasus toward the strategic oil fields), Army Group B's mission was crucial to German success.

*
Army Group B's far-flung tasks could not be accomplished with the German divisions at hand. Consequently, the most critical jobs were given to the more powerful German armies, and the less-demanding tasks were allotted to a polyglot of allied contingents. The Sixth Army and the Fourth Panzer Army were to attack toward Stalingrad, while the veteran Second Army was to seize Voronezh and then form the link between Army Group Center's defensive front and Army Group B's flank pickets. The job of covering the long flank in between was handed to allied armies of lesser fighting value.

*
In the spring of 1942, Hitler prevailed on the Reich's military partners to provide additional combat forces to augment the German armies. Romania, Hungary, and Italy all reluctantly consented to deploy additional forces on the Eastern Front, though they each insisted that their contingents fight under their own army headquarters rather than as separate divisions in German corps and armies. By early August, thirty-six allied divisions were committed in the southern portion of the front, roughly 40 percent of the total number of Axis divisions in that region. Even though German liaison staffs were assigned to these forces, the combat effectiveness of the allied armies was generally poor. So by relegating the allied forces to purely defensive missions along the German flanks, the German High Command figured to minimize the demands placed on these forces while still conserving Wehrmacht divisions for crucial combat roles.

Through early summer, the forces posted along Army Group B's northern flank had little difficulty in fending off Soviet assaults. A Second Army afteraction report on 21 July 1942, following the defeat of Soviet counterattacks near Voronezh, was particularly reassuring. Written at the request of the General Staff's Training Branch in Berlin and circulated throughout the German Army's higher echelons, this report allayed lingering fears caused by the Red Army's winter successes in 1941-42. "Russian infantry in the attack is even worse than before," the report began. "Much massing, greater vulnerability to artillery and mortar fire and to flanking maneuver. Scarcely any more night attacks. This report brightened the prospects for successful defense along Army Group B's northern flank.

Despite this reassurance, Army Group B's left wing remained vulnerable. Hitler's own interest in this potential weakness began in early spring when he ordered that the Second Army be reinforced with several hundred antitank guns as an additional guarantee against the collapse of Blau's northern shield. In anticipation of its defensive operations, Second Army also had been assigned numerous engineer detachments, labor units, and Organization Todt work parties for general construction and fortification. After its successful attack on Voronezh in early July, Second Army attempted to fortify its portion of the exposed flank using these assets throughout the remainder of the summer.

To the east beyond Second Army, however, the Don flank was held by troops of the Hungarian Second Army, the Italian Eighth Army, and the Romanian Third Army. Other Romanian formations, temporarily under the command of Fourth Panzer Army, held the open flank south of Stalingrad. As expected, these forces proved to be mediocre in combat, leading German commanders to be even more uneasy about this long, exposed sector. By September, General Maximilian von Weichs, the commander of Army Group B, regarded his northern flank to be he so endangered that he ordered special German "intervention units" (Eingreifgruppen) rotated into reserve behind both the German- and allied-held portions of his left wing.

The use of intervention units was not new to German defensive doctrine. In fact, the Elastic Defense doctrine of 1917 and 1918 had required that intervention divisions be used to reinforce deliberate counterattacks against particularly stubborn enemy penetrations. In 1942, however, the role of these intervention units went beyond counterattack. They could also provide advance reinforcement "corsetting" to threatened sectors since, according to Weichs' explanation, the Russians "seldom were able to conceal preparations for attack." Thus, the intervention units could support faltering allied contingents, hopefully steeling their resistance until additional help could arrive.

In October, General Zeitzier, the new chief of the Army General Staff, began to echo Weichs' concerns. In a lengthy presentation to Hitler, Zeitzier argued that the allied lines between Voronezh and Stalingrad constituted "the most perilous sector of the Eastern Front," a situation that posed "an enormous danger which must be eliminated." Although Hitler made sympathetic noises, he refused to accept Zeitzier's conclusions and ordered no major changes to German deployments or missions.

Even though the Fuhrer rejected Zeitzier's recommendation that German forces withdraw from Stalingrad, he did authorize minor actions to help shore up the allied armies. One of these measures was the interspersing of additional German units (primarily antitank battalions) among the allied divisions. In accordance with Hitler's published defensive instructions, if the allied units were overrun, these few German units were to "stand fast and limit the enemy's penetration or breakthrough. By holding out in this way, they should create more favorable conditions for our counterattack." Another protective measure was the repositioning of a combined German-Romanian panzer corps behind the Romanian Third Army. This unit, the XLVIII Panzer Corps, consisted of only an untried Romanian armored division and a battle-worn, poorly equipped German panzer division. Weak as it was, this corps was not placed under the control of the Romanians or even Weichs. Rather, it was designated as a special Fuhrer Reserve under the personal direction of Hitler and therefore could not be committed to combat without first obtaining his release." Finally, from October onward, German signal teams were placed throughout the allied armies so the German High Command could independently monitor the day-to-day performance of those forces without having to rely on reports from the allies themselves. These and other measures were not executed without some friction, however: the Italians, for example, huffily rejected German suggestions for improving their defensive positions.

The allied units were not the only soft spots on the defensive flank. By autumn, several newly raised German divisions, hastily consigned to Army Group B in June in order to flesh out its order of battle, were also causing some concern. For example, barely days before its preliminary June attack on Voronezh to secure the German flank, Second Army had received six brand-new German divisions. Though game enough in their initial attacks, these units quickly began to unravel due Tu poor training and inexperienced leadership. In one case, the 385th Infantry Division reportedly suffered "unnecessarily high losses" including half of its company commanders and five of six battalion commanders in just six weeks, due to deficient training. This fiery baptism ruined these divisions for later defensive use. The loss of so many personnel in such a short period of time left permanent scars, traumatizing the divisions before time and battle experience could produce new leaders and heal the units' psychological wounds. Second Army assessed the situation on I October 1942 and informed Army Group B that these once-new divisions were no longer fully reliable even for limited defensive purposes and that heavy defensive fighting might well stampede them. Unless they could be pulled out of the line for rest and rehabilitation, these divisions, which accounted for nearly half of Second Army's total infantry strength, could only be trusted in the defense of small, quiet sectors.

The German southern offensive thus trusted its long northern flank to a conglomeration of listless allied and battle-weary German units. Like the forces farther north on the defensive front of Army Groups Center and North, these armies were stretched taut, manning thin lines with few reserves beyond insubstantial local forces. Barely strong enough to hold small probing attacks at bay during the summer and early fall, these armies lacked the strength to meet a major Russian offensive without substantial reinforcement.

Shielded by this doubtful defensive umbrella, Operation Blau made good initial progress. In fierce house-to-house fighting, General Friedrich Paulus' Sixth Army gnawed its way into Stalingrad, the projected eastern terminus of Army Group B's defensive barrier. Despite nagging shortages of fuel and other supplies, as well as Hitler's confused switching of forces and missions, Army Group A had cleared Rostov and penetrated the northern reaches of the Caucasus Mountains by late August.

At this point, the German campaign lost whatever coherence it might have possessed earlier. Forgetting that Army Group B's mission was but secondary to that of the advance toward the oil fields, Hitler became obsessed with capturing Stalingrad. Ordering not only Sixth Army but even the cream of Fourth Panzer Army into the city, Hitler committed the German forces to a prolonged battle of attrition for control of Stalingrad's rubbled streets and factories. By late autumn, Operation Blau had degenerated into a test of military manhood between Hitler and Stalin on the Volga.

Whatever the outcome of the battle for possession of Stalingrad, by October it was clear that another winter defensive campaign was imminent. As described earlier, Hitler's Operations Order I ordered winter defensive preparations on all parts of the front, though in that same directive he bade the Stalingrad fighting continue. Yet even the Sixth Army in and around Stalingrad began to take preliminary steps for a winter defense. After discussions with Sixth Army staff members, an Army High Command liaison officer dispatched a memorandum to Berlin in mid-October assessing the feasibility of fortifying a miniature "east wall" on the Volga steppes and recommending the transfer of additional engineer units to Paulus' command for that purpose.

The German defensive arrangements along the Don River held together only until 19 November, when a Red Army offensive flattened the Romanian Third Army northwest of Stalingrad and knifed southward toward the rear of the German Sixth and Fourth Panzer Armies.

A day later, another Soviet attack burst through the Romanian lines south of Stalingrad. On 23 November, these pincers met near Kalach, severing Sixth Army's land supply routes. The collapse of the Axis defenses along the Don River and the encirclement of Sixth Army transformed the situation of the southern front, casting the Wehrmacht forces there into a desperate struggle for their very survival.

The ensuing winter defensive battles in southern Russia can be divided into three separate phases. In the first phase, lasting from 19 November until 23 December 1942, the Germans scrambled to hold an advanced defensive line near the confluence of the Don and Chir Rivers from which they could support relief operations toward Stalingrad. Once the attacks to relieve Sixth Army were irretrievably repulsed, the focus of German defensive efforts shifted. During the second phase, lasting from the last week of December 1942 to mid-February 1943, German divisions fought to block another huge Soviet envelopment, this one aimed at the rear of the entire German southern wing near Rostov. Finally, from mid-February until the spring thaw, the third phase of the winter battles saw the restabilization of the front south of Kursk.

German defensive operations differed in each phase, and these differences reflected variations in the mission, the strength and composition of German forces, and the actions of the enemy. In no case, however, were these chaotic defensive actions conducted along doctrinal lines. Instead, from the initial collapse of the Romanian armies in November 1942 to the stabilization of the front in March 1943, German defensive operations were once again almost completely extemporaneous.

The first phase of fighting focused on the fate of the beleaguered German Sixth Army in Stalingrad. Ordered to stand fast and repeatedly assured by Hitler that Sixth Army would be relieved, General Paulus swiftly put his forces into a giant hedgehog defensive posture.

Establishing an effective defensive perimeter at Stalingrad was doubly difficult due to a desperate shortage of infantrymen (the bulk of whom had fallen in the earlier street fighting) and the lack of prepared positions. On the eastern face of the Stalingrad pocket, German troops continued to occupy the defensive positions built up during previous fighting for the city. However, the southern and western portions of the perimeter lay almost completely on shelterless steppes, and the hasty defenses there never amounted to more than a few bunkers and shallow connecting trenches. (Because the steppes were almost treeless, no lumber was available for building fires for heat or for constructing covered defensive positions.) Significantly, the subsequent Soviet attacks to liquidate the surrounded Sixth Army came almost exclusively from the south and west against the least well-established portions of the German defenses. On 23 November, well-built positions to the north of Stalingrad were rashly abandoned without orders by the German LI Corps commander, General Walter von Seydlitz-Kurzbach, who had hoped thereby to provoke an immediate breakout order from Paulus. This hasty action sacrificed the 94th Infantry Division, which was overrun and annihilated by Red Army forces during the movement to the rear, and also gave up virtually the only well-constructed defensive positions within the Stalingrad Kessel.

Sixth Army had difficulty in defending itself because of insufficient resources. Lack of fuel prevented the use of Paulus' three panzer and three motorized divisions as mobile reserves. Hoarding its meager fuel supplies for a possible breakout attempt, Sixth Army wound up employing most of its tanks and assault guns in static roles. Likewise, shortages of artillery ammunition and fortification materials hindered the German defense. The Luftwaffe's heroic attempts to airlift supplies into Stalingrad were hopelessly inadequate: since daily deliveries never exceeded consumption, the overall supply problem grew steadily worse in all areas. In some ways, the aerial resupply effort was counterproductive. Scores of medium bombers were diverted from ground support and interdiction missions to serve as additional cargo carriers, a move that emptied the skies of much-needed German combat air power at an extremely critical period.

For both tactical and logistical reasons, then, what the Nazi press dramatically called "Fortress Stalingrad" was, in reality, no fortress at all. Surrounded by no less than seven Soviet armies, Sixth Army was marooned on poor defensive ground without adequate forces, prepared positions, or stockpiles of essential supplies. Forbidden by Hitler to cut its way out of the encirclement, Sixth Army's eventual destruction was a foregone conclusion unless a relief attack could reestablish contact.

In response to this crisis, Hitler created Army Group Don under Field Marshal von Manstein on 20 November. Manstein was to restore order on the shattered southern front and, even more important in the short term, to direct a relief offensive to save Sixth Army. To accomplish this, Hitler promised Manstein six fresh infantry divisions, four panzer divisions, a Luftwaffe field division, and various other contingents.

Sixth Army's temporary aerial supply and eventual relief required the Germans to hold a forward defensive line along the Chir River, where the most advanced positions were only about forty miles from the Stalingrad perimeter. This line also covered the main departure airfields for the airlift and could serve as an excellent jumping-off point for a counterattack to link up with Sixth Army.

While Manstein worked out his plan for a relief attack, the Chir River line was held by whatever forces could be scraped together. Initially, these forces consisted of mixed combat units swept aside by the Russian offensive, alarm units called out from various support units, service troops, rear area security forces, convalescents, and casual personnel on leave. All these were formed into ad hoc battle groups and plugged into an improvised strongpoint defense along the Chir "like pieces of mosaic."

That this rabble managed to hold the Chir line, and even some bridgeheads on the eastern bank, was due as much to Soviet indifference as to German improvisation. Through early December, the Soviet High Command was content to tighten its coils around Stalingrad and made little effort to exploit the German disarray farther west. In so doing, the Soviets were avoiding their great strategic mistake of the previous winter, when Stalin's failure to concentrate forces on major objectives frittered away excellent opportunities to no decisive gain.

In mid-December, however, the fighting on the Chir front accelerated, with both sides committing substantial forces to this crucial area. On 12 December, Manstein began his relief attack toward Stalingrad. Intending to pin down German forces and to prevent reinforcement of the rescue effort, Soviet forces hurled themselves against the Chir line at several points. Meanwhile, the Germans reinforced the ragtag elements along the Chir with fresh units, most notably the reconstituted XLVIII Panzer Corps (11th Panzer Division, 336th Infantry Division, and 7th Luftwaffe Field Division). These mid-December defensive battles demonstrated both the capabilities and the limitations of German defenders during this phase.

The XLVIII Panzer Corps intended to hold its sector of the Chir front with two infantry divisions forward and a panzer division in reserve. The 336th Division was an excellent, full-strength unit that had recently arrived on the Russian Front from occupation duty in France. Even though reinforced somewhat with Luftwaffe flak and ground combat units, the division could only man its wide front by putting all its assets forward, holding only a handful of infantry, engineers, and mobile flak guns in reserve. Even so, the 336th Division formed "the pivot and shield" of the German defense. The 7th Luftwaffe Field Division, though well equipped and fully manned, was poorly trained and lacked leaders experienced in ground combat. Behind the infantry, General Hermann Balck's 11th Panzer Division, which had recently been transferred from Army Group Center after fighting in several tough defensive battles, assembled for duty as a mobile counterattack force. Although its infantry strength was fairly high, it (like other weakened divisions from the northern defensive front) had only a single battalion of Panzer Mark IVs in its entire tank regiment.

On 7 December, even as the Germans were still settling into position, Soviet tank forces penetrated the left flank of the 336th Division. The Germans had not yet had time to lay mines or erect antitank obstacles, and their few Paks could not be used effectively. (Though relatively flat, the steppes were crisscrossed by deep ravines that provided excellent covered approaches into the German positions.) Facilitated by the weakness of the German antiarmor defenses, Russian tanks forced their way through the thin infantry defenses, overran part of the division's artillery, and thrust some fifteen kilometers into the division rear. In a three-day running battle, the 11th Panzer Division carved up this Russian tank force with repeated counter-attacks against its flanks and rear. Despite the heady successes enjoyed by Baick's panzers and mechanized infantry (reports claimed seventy-five destroyed Russian tanks), the fighting was not all one-sided. For example, between 7 and 10 December, Russian tanks overran one infantry battalion of the 336th Division three different times.

Even tougher fighting followed. Beginning on 11 December, fresh Russian attacks charged against the Chir front, forcing several local penetrations. Though eventually broken by counterattacks and the fire of the 336th Division's artillery, these Soviet probes threatened to erode the German defenders by-attrition. In one case, a German battle group holding a bridgehead south of the Don-Chir confluence lost 18 officers and 750 men in ten days of combat. Breakthroughs in the 336th Division's front between 13 and 15 December produced an extremely confused situation, with groups of enemy and friendly troops finally so intermixed that German artillery could not be used effectively for fear of firing on its own forces. Moreover, Soviet tanks again broke through as far as the German artillery positions, overrunning some guns and knocking out others by direct fire. By nightfall on 15 December, the situation of the 336th Division had become so grave that, according to one staff officer, the division's continued survival depended "exclusively on outside help."

Again, the 11th Panzer Division saved the German position on the Chir. Harkening to desperate appeals from the 336th Division for additional antitank support, the 11th diverted three of its precious tanks to buttress the flagging infantry, while the balance of the German armor hammered the Soviet flanks. By 22 December, the Chir front was quiet as both sides slumped into exhaustion.

The battles on the Chir River had been a masterpiece of tactical improvisation by the Germans. Although regular combat troops were gradually brought into the fighting through reinforcement, the initial German defense had been conducted almost entirely by hastily organized contingents of service troops. While the performance of these units in no way matched that of regular combat veterans, their gritty stand fully vindicated the German Army's policies of training, organizing, and exercising rear-echelon alarm units on a regular basis.

Doctrinally, the committed German infantry forces in the XLVIII Panzer Corps' sector lacked the manpower and local reserves to conduct a competent defense in depth. Additionally, the German defense was throttled by Hitler's standing orders against tactical retreat, leaving the forward divisions little choice but to hold on to their initial positions even when penetrated or over-run. Short of antitank weapons, the German infantry forces were almost powerless against the Soviet armor. Had it not been for the availability of the 11th Panzer Division as a "fire brigade" counterattack force, the German defenders would almost certainly have been doomed to eventual annihilation in their positions clustered along the Chir.

The deft counterattacks by 11th Panzer Division repeatedly exploited speed, surprise, and shock action to destroy or scatter numerically superior Soviet forces. The generally open terrain provided a nearly ideal battlefield for mobile warfare, and the tank-versus-tank engagements almost resembled clashes in the North African desert more than they did other battles in Russia.

The Germans used simple command and control measures to conduct this fluid combat. According to General Balck's postwar accounts, command within the 11th Panzer Division was exercised almost entirely by daily verbal orders, amended as necessary on the spot by the division commander at critical points in the fighting. Liaison between the panzer units and the forward infantry divisions also was managed largely on a face-to-face basis. These casual arrangements were made possible in part by the rather simple coordination procedures that developed during the Chir fighting. The positions of the forward German infantry were well known and, due to Hitler's insistence, seldom changed. The broad sectors and relatively low force densities on both sides tended to leave units conveniently spaced. Balck's well-trained and experienced forces seldom operated in more than two or three maneuver elements. General Balck was thus able to truncate normal staff procedures largely because there were very few moving parts in the German machine, and even those were comfortably separated. However, the rude German control methods sacrificed many of the benefits of synchronization and close coordination. By General Balck's own admission, for example, little effort was made to integrate indirect fire with the German maneuver forces.

The German defensive efforts benefited from other favorable circumstances. The Soviet attacks on the Chir front were not conducted in overwhelming strength and were intended primarily as diversions to pin down German forces and to prevent reinforcement of the Stalingrad relief expedition. Also, the Russian assaults were piecemealed in time and space. Instead of a single, powerful attack in one sector, the Red Army forces jabbed at the Chir line for nearly two weeks with several smaller blows. As a result, the Germans were able to make the most of their limited armored reserves. Equally beneficial was the poor Soviet combined arms coordination in these battles. The Russian attacks were conducted mainly by tank forces, and the Soviet infantry played only a minor accompanying role. Therefore, the Germans concentrated their panzers solely on the destruction of the enemy armor and paid scarcely any attention to the enemy riflemen. This also greatly magnified German combat power, placing a premium on the superior tactical skill of the German tank crews while allowing the weaker German infantry to remain huddled in dugouts. Furthermore, the Red Army artillery remained amazingly silent throughout the battles, which left the Russian tank forces to fight without the benefit of suppressive fires. Soviet air power likewise was ineffective.

The German defensive successes on the Chir River were victories of a limited sort. First, despite their tactical virtuosity, even the German panzers were unable to wrest the operational initiative from the Soviets. Throughout the December actions, the Germans were compelled to respond to the uncoordinated Red Army blows by fighting a series of attritional engagements. The Russians retained complete freedom of maneuver and, in all likelihood, could have crushed the German resistance if they had been more skillful in massing or in coordinating their efforts. Second, even though the Germans inflicted serious losses on their enemies, they also suffered substantial casualties of their own. The hapless 7th Luftwaffe Field Division disintegrated during the Chir battles, and by mid-January, its ragged remnants had been amalgamated into other formations. The 11th Panzer Division, whose bold exploits saved the Chir position on several occasions, saw its combat power diminished by half from the beginning of December. Third, though driving back Soviet attacks, neither the 11th Panzer Division nor the balance of the XLVIII Panzer Corps was able to hold the ground that it won by counterattack. To defend terrain required infantry, and neither the panzer formations nor the overextended German infantry divisions had sufficient riflemen to conduct a positional defense. Conversely, German tanks performed best in fluid combat and were notably less successful when trying to drive Red Army troops from their consolidated positions. For example, the Soviets managed to hold a few well-entrenched bridgeheads on the western bank of the Don-Chir line despite repeated German armored attacks.

Although rebuffed by the skill and steadfastness of the German defenders, the Soviet attacks against the Chir River line succeeded in preventing reinforcement of Manstein's relief attack on Stalingrad. Under Manstein's concept, the XLVIII Panzer Corps was to have joined those elements of Fourth Panzer Army (LVII Panzer Corps) making the main relief attempt from farther south. However, as already seen, the XLVIII Panzer Corps had struggled just to stave off its own destruction and never entered into the offensive effort. Without that support and without even the full reinforcements that Hitler had originally promised, the German drive to open a corridor to Sixth Army had to be abandoned after 23 December. From that time on, the defensive battles in the south entered a new phase, with German defensive efforts shifting to the containment of a new major Soviet offensive attempt to sever the entire Axis southern wing.

The new Russian offensive began by scattering the Italian Eighth Army, which was still in position on the northern Don. Driving southward toward Rostov, the Soviets aimed at cutting the communications of both Army Group Don and Army Group A. Also, this attack directly enveloped the German defensive line on the Chir, making the German position there untenable. This not only spoiled all prospects for a renewed attack to free Sixth Army, but it also resulted in the eventual loss of the forward airfields supplying Paulus' encircled divisions.

In contrast to the earlier jabs against the Chir line, the new Russian advance swept forward on a broad front, brushing aside the counterattacks of the weak 27th Panzer Division (earlier posted behind the Italians as a stiffener) as if they were bee stings. Clearly, the sleight-of-hand defensive tactics used by the Germans so successfully on the Chir River were not sufficient to cope with this new threat.

Two major problems hampered German attempts to forge an effective defensive response to the ripening crisis. The first problem was the lack of fresh combat forces. The best units in the German Army, groomed in the spring of 1942 to carry out Operation Blau, were now either wintering uselessly in the Caucasus (Army Group A) or else withering away at Stalingrad or in vain attempts to relieve it (Sixth Army and Fourth Panzer Army). The various impromptu commands set up to defend the Chir and lower Don were barely adequate for that task alone and stood little chance in a set-piece battle against the massive new Soviet onslaught.

In addition, reinforcements could be shifted from other parts of the front only with difficulty. The drained units of Army Groups Center and North had been stripped of assets months earlier to provide resources for the Blau offensive and were hard-pressed to resist the Soviet attacks drumming against their own positions. Therefore, local commanders from the northern defensive front, who saw only their own pressing problems, opposed attempts to siphon reserves away from them. Only at the highest command levels could the assembly and transfer of reserves be accomplished fairly and effectively. In this case, however, the smooth redistribution of forces by Hitler and the Army High Command was handicapped by complex variations in the status and structure of German units.

By this point in the war, most German divisions had major discrepancies between their paper organization and their actual structure. This was due partly to unredeemed combat losses, partly to the German Army's de facto policy of propagating organizational peculiarities by constantly changing the divisional structure of newly forming units, and partly to the stripping of resources from some divisions for assignment elsewhere. Some frontline units, for example, had little or no motorized transport, substituting instead horse-drawn wagons or even bicycles for logistical and tactical mobility. Others were short their full complement of artillery or else had entire battalions fitted out exclusively with captured guns. Other divisions lacked reconnaissance units or even full infantry regiments that had been detached for antipartisan duties.

In addition to organizational oddities, German divisions also differed greatly in combat readiness due to fluctuations in their morale, training, replacement status, combat experience, fatigue, and quality of junior leadership. These eccentricities made centralized management of German forces extremely difficult, since nearly every division deviated in some way from its normal status. Since Hitler and the Army General Staff were not always aware of these organizational peculiarities, some confusion ensued when corps and army commanders, ordered to release divisions for emergency use elsewhere on the front, sometimes forwarded units that were unsuited for the particular missions for which they had been requested. In December 1942, the Army High Command initiated a new reporting system to correct this situation, requiring corps and army commanders to submit secret subjective evaluations of their divisions' combat worthiness on a regular basis. (Frontline commanders found it to be in their own interest to be as candid as possible in these assessments, since a frank statement of liabilities was considered to be some protection from having to feed additional forces into the "Stalingrad oven.") Such inventories made the paper management of the threadbare German resources more efficient, but the fundamental lack of adequate combat forces to cover the expanding Eastern Front crisis remained unresolved.

The second problem shackling German operations was the Germans' own Byzantine command arrangement. Afield in the southern portion of the Eastern Front were three autonomous army groups (Army Groups A, B, and Don). No single commander or headquarters coordinated the efforts of these army groups save for the Fuhrer himself. From his East Prussian headquarters, Hitler continued to render his own dubious brand of command guidance. Inspired by the success of his stand-fast methods the previous winter, the Fuhrer now balked at ordering the timely withdrawal and reassembly of the far-flung German armies, even truculently resisting the transfer of divisions from the lightly engaged Army Group A to the mortally beset Army Group Don. Hitler's opening response to the new Soviet offensive against the rear of the German southern wing was to decree a succession of meaningless halt lines, ordering the overmatched German forces to hold position after position "to the last man."

Field Marshal von Manstein, whose Army Group Don was to halt the Soviet offensive, confronted both of these major problems head-on. In a series of teletype messages to Hitler, Manstein pleaded for the release of several divisions from the idle Army Group A in the Caucasus in order to put some starch into the German defense. Though relenting too late to assist the relief attack on Stalingrad, Hitler at last ordered a few divisions and then finally all of First Panzer Army to move from Army Group A to Manstein's control."

Manstein also pressed Hitler about command authority. In late December, Hitler offered to place Army Group A under Manstein's operational control. However, this consolidation of authority was not consummated because, as Manstein later explained, Hitler "was unwilling to accept my conditions" that there be no "possibility of interference by Hitler or of Army Group A's invoking . . . decisions in opposition to my own." Less than two weeks later, furious that Hitler was still insisting on a no-retreat policy and forcing him to beg permission for each tactical withdrawal, Manstein presented the Fuhrer with an ultimatum. On 5 January, Manstein sent a message to the chief of the Army General Staff for Hitler's consideration: "Should . . . this headquarters continue to be tied down to the same extent as hitherto, I cannot see that any useful purpose will be served by my continuing as commander of Don Army Group. In the circumstances, it would appear more appropriate to replace me. . . ." Hitler chose to ignore Manstein's ultimatum, but he did at last concede a singular (though temporary) degree of autonomy and flexibility to Manstein for the conduct of defensive operations. Although Hitler's draconian stand-fast policy remained officially in effect, Manstein was allowed freedom of maneuver by means of a face-saving charade: instead of asking permission, Manstein would simply inform the Army High Command of Army Group Don's intention to take certain actions unless specifically countermanded, and Hitler by his silence would consent without actually abandoning his hold-to-the-last-man scruples.

As a result of this arrangement, Manstein conducted operations from early January until mid-February largely unfettered either by Hitler's customary interference or the rigid no-retreat dictum. No other German commander was allowed to enjoy these two privileges on such a large scale for the remainder of the war. As a consequence of this independence, German defensive operations during the second phase of the southern winter battles evinced a measure of flexibility, economy, and fluid maneuver unsurpassed on the Russian Front during the entire war.

While these command arrangements were being ironed out, the operational situation continued to deteriorate. Still more Soviet attacks had routed the Hungarians and the Italians, completing the disintegration of the entire original flank defensive line along the Don River east of Voronezh. By late January, hardly any organized Axis resistance remained between the surviving units of Army Group B (Second Army) at Voronezh and the hard-pressed forces for Army Group Don along the lower Don and Donets Rivers. The German Sixth Army, now in its death throes at Stalingrad, ironically provided one source of hope: the longer Paulus' troops could hold out, the longer they would continue to tie down the powerful Russian armies encircling them, thereby delaying the reinforcement of the widening Soviet attacks farther to the west.

Manstein's overall concept of operations was to combine the withdrawal of First Panzer Army units from the Caucasus with the establishment of a defensive screen facing northward against the onrushing Soviets. One by one, the First Panzer Army divisions were pulled through the Rostov bottleneck and redeployed to the northwest, extending the makeshift German defensive line ever westward. The Soviets could still outflank this line by extending the arc of their advance to the west and, in fact, did so even while maintaining frontal pressure along the Donets. Each of these wider envelopments, however, delayed the final decision and allowed Manstein to leapfrog more units into position. Moreover, the farther the Soviets shifted their forces to the west, the more tenuous the Russian supply lines became."

This operation was exceedingly delicate. Any major Soviet breakthrough or uncontested envelopment could cut through to the rail ganglia on which both Army Groups A and Don depended for their supplies. Army Group Don thus had to accomplish three tasks simultaneously: slow the Soviet frontal advance, shift units from east to west to parry Soviet envelopments, and preserve its forces by allowing timely withdrawals to prevent encirclement or annihilation.

These tasks had to be performed under several tactical handicaps. First, even with the gradual reinforcement by First Panzer Army, Manstein's forces remained generally inferior to those of the enemy. Discounting the late arrivals, most of the divisions of Army Group Don were extremely battle worn, having been in continuous combat for over two months. Too, the preponderance of the German forces were less mobile than the Soviet tank and mechanized forces opposing them, a factor that weighed heavily against Manstein's hopes of exploiting the Germans' superiority in fluid operations.

Second, many of Manstein's forces were grouped together under impromptu command arrangements. The German order of battle included several nonstandard control headquarters identified simply by their commanders' names, such as Army Detachment Hollidt, Group Mieth, and Battle Group Adam. Even many of the divisions assigned to the various headquarters lacked normal internal cohesion. For example, by January 1942, the 17th Panzer Division was conducting defensive operations with an attached infantry regiment (156th Infantry Regiment), which possessed neither the training nor the vehicles to allow it to cooperate smoothly with the division's tanks and organic Panzergrenadiers.

Similarly, in mid-January, two infantry divisions within Army Detachment Hollidt contained substantial attachments from two shattered Luftwaffe field divisions, while one so-called division (403d Security Division) was actually a division headquarters controlling several thousand troops whose furloughs had been abruptly canceled." These ad hoc forces generally lacked the precision that comes from habitual association and common experience, and this internal friction was magnified by the rapidly changing combat conditions confronting Army Group Don. Moreover, none of the improvised groupings were structured for sustained combat; therefore, they lacked the technical and support assets that normally would have serviced such large units.

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Third, though relatively fresh and well organized, the First Panzer Army divisions arriving from the Caucasus came with their own special problems. In Manstein's words, these forces suffered from the "hardening up process which inevitably sets in whenever mobile operations degenerate into static warfare." Their relatively inactive sojourn in the Caucasus from September to January had caused these "troops and formation staffs [to] lose the knack of quickly adapting themselves to the changes of situation which daily occur in a war of movement." The first symptom of this stagnation was the snail-like pace of the Caucasian disengagement. Having accumulated "weapons, equipment and stores of all kinds.. . which one feels unable to do without for the rest of the war," the divisions of First Panzer Army invariably requested "a long period of grace in which to prepare for the evacuation." When finally committed to combat along the Donets, these forces maneuvered lethargically at first, their earlier snap and elan dulled by the routine of prolonged positional warfare.

Finally, the Germans were plagued by the enormous mobility differential between their own infantry and panzer forces. In previous campaigns, this problem had been most evident in offensive operations, as during Barbarossa when the swift panzers had outrun their infantry support. In southern Russia in January and February of 1943, this disparity proved equally disruptive in defensive operations, vastly increasing the difficulty of orchestrating German maneuver.

Since the bulk of the German combat power consisted of infantry, of necessity the German defensive tactics were built on the less-mobile infantry forces. The infantrymen, their numbers frequently including engineers, flak units, and various alarm units, were disposed in forward defensive lines. Because of their standards of training. The training of tank crews never ceased, even in combat. In the 17th Panzer Division it was the practice to hold a critique after each engagement, in which successes and failures were discussed, just as after peacetime exercises." Equally important was the aggressiveness, imagination, and flexibility of the German leaders. Commenting on the operations of its improvised mobile rear guard, the 294th Division's after-action report explained that "the choice of a leader [was] especially important" since such units "[were] not led according to field manuals or even according to any fixed scheme."

Despite its aggressiveness and skillful use of mobile forces, Manstein's defense of the German southern wing was not a mobile defense in the classic sense. Army Group Don's forces could not be insensitive to the loss of territory, since to have done so would have endangered the vital rail lines leading through Rostov. Furthermore, the bulk of Manstein's formations were relatively immobile and could only be used in a succession of static defenses. Although playing an important role, the German panzer and motorized forces operated principally as intervention forces in support of the pedestrian infantry.

The German defensive method was thus actually a potpourri of tactical techniques. What set these battles apart from others was Manstein's style of control. What Manstein did, and what Hitler, as a rule, did not, was to provide firm operational guidance to his subordinates and then to allow those commanders to use their forces and the terrain to maximum advantage. The hard-pressed infantry forces, often composed of hastily assembled patchwork units without any real unit training, were best employed in static defenses from prepared positions. Mobile panzer and motorized bands delivered sharp counterattacks to help sustain the infantry defenses and, occasionally, kept the enemy off-balance with preemptive spoiling attacks. If the infantry's main positions became engulfed, the panzers and mechanized infantry helped the slower forces to disengage. The mobile formations also fought delaying actions while subsequent main positions were being organized. Major defensive lines were designated well in advance, allowing units to make deliberate plans for their withdrawals. (This practice alone added considerable coherence to German operations. Hitler usually procrastinated about allowing retreats until, when finally ordered, the withdrawals had to be done pell-mell to avoid encirclement.) For example, in fighting its way back from the Chir to the Donets in January, a distance of roughly 100 miles, Army Detachment Hollidt occupied no less than nine intermediate defensive lines. Its movement from the Donets to the Mius in February followed the same pattern.

In contrast to preferred German defensive methods, these battles were fought almost entirely without tactical depth. Indeed, the fluidity of the battles in southern Russia stemmed, in large measure, from the German inability to absorb the Soviet attacks within successive defensive zones. Lacking the forces to establish a deeply echelon defense, the Germans instead combined maneuver?including both lightning attack and withdrawal, with stubborn positional defense to give artificial depth to the battlefield. In this way, the Germans were able to brake major Soviet attacks, preventing catastrophic breakthroughs while still preserving the integrity and freedom of action of their own forces.

As with the XLVIII Panzer Corps' December battles on the Chir River, these tactics, like the traditional Elastic Defense, were essentially attritional. Russian attacks were contained or worn down one by one, and even though German units occasionally seized the tactical initiative by some aggressive riposte, the operational initiative remained with the Soviets. However often single German panzer divisions sallied in preemptive spoiling attacks, the Red Army's major maneuver units were never in danger of sudden annihilation.

This situation existed because the scarcity of German forces and the great distances in southern Russia kept German units dispersed. In blocking the Soviets' relentless broad-front advance, the Germans operated completely from hand to mouth and were therefore unable to engineer any operational massing of their own. Significantly, from the time of the cancellation in late December of the three-division Stalingrad relief attack until the conclusion of the winter battles' second phase in late February, all the German panzer divisions on the southern front were employed piecemeal to relieve local emergencies. No two panzer divisions ever combined their meager assets to make a concerted blow. For instance, Army Detachment Hollidt, which in mid-January fielded four panzer divisions, retained only one division under its own control and assigned the other three to its individual subordinate commands for "fire brigade" use in support of their infantry divisions. While effective in stemming local Russian attacks, this task organization made it impossible to concentrate powerful mobile forces for larger-scale operations.

Manstein appreciated this fact and, from mid-February, began laying the groundwork for a different employment of the German armor. The fresh SS Panzer Corps, just off-loading near Kharkov with two crack Waffen SS panzer divisions, together with other reinforcements formed the nucleus of an operational masse de manoeuvre. Convinced that casualties, mechanical breakdowns, and lengthening supply lines must have taken their toll of the Russians, Manstein foresaw an opportunity to seize the operational initiative with a counteroffensive of his own. Manstein's target was the Soviet armored spearheads, then still careening southwestward between Kharkov and Stalino.

The third phase of the winter campaign saw the restabilization of the southern front. The centerpiece of this phase was a strong German counterstroke by five panzer divisions against the Soviet flank south of Kharkov. Manstein's 22 February riposte completely surprised the Russians and, within days, had shattered the Soviet First Guards Army as well as several independent armored groups. As trophies, the Germans counted 615 destroyed enemy tanks and over 1,000 captured guns. The haul in prisoners, however, was disappointingly low: as always, the infantry-poor German panzer formations were unable to seal off the battlefield, and thousands of Soviet troops casually marched out of the German trap.

Despite its success, Hitler took little satisfaction in Manstein's Kharkov counteroffensive. As Hitler had admitted in his Fuhrer Defense Order of September 1942, his defensive ideas were of a pre-1917 vintage. Consequently, Hitler's own preference, first and last, was for a rigid no-retreat defense. He had been uncomfortable enough with Manstein's parry-and-thrust tactics in January and early February, but for all of its tactical dash, that style of defense had still been operationally conservative and had remained focused on denying the Russians access to certain critical areas. What rankled Hitler most was the purposeful relinquishing of terrain on an operational scale. When Manstein continued to give up ground, even after the Soviet drive showed signs of stalling on its own, while building up his reserve striking force, Hitler's nervousness increased. In the end, Manstein barely saved his counteroffensive plan from Hitler's shrill demands that the new reserves be thrown into battle piecemeal to prevent further territorial losses. And yet this very stratagem finally provided the basis for Manstein's counteroffensive, as the Russian advance eventually overextended itself and lay vulnerable to the hoarded German reserves. Hitler prized the holding of ground even over the annihilation of sizable enemy forces, however spectacular.

Bought breathing space by Manstein's successful counteroffensive near Kharkov, the other tattered German forces managed to patch together a continuous defensive line on the southern front. Army Detachment Hollidt, withdrawing by bounds from the Donets, moved into Army Group South's old defensive lines on the Mius River. Except for a series of salients north of Kharkov, the German southern armies in late March held again nearly the same positions from which the Blau offensive had begun the previous spring.

This line could easily have been forced at almost any point prior to the spring thaw at the end of March 1943. For example, the XXIV Panzer Corps, which, in fact, had no panzer units whatsoever, held the extreme southern portion of the German line with one infantry and two patchwork security divisions. These forces, whose sector ran for nearly 125 kilometers (including a stretch of Azov coastline), amounted to only fourteen understrength infantry battalions. A XXIV Panzer Corps after-action report noted that the two security divisions' organization, cohesion, and weaponry were so uneven that little could be expected from them. Fortunately, these units occupied old defensive works along most of their front and also were able to retrain and rehabilitate their forces due to the lack of renewed offensive action by the tired Soviets.

The German Kharkov counteroffensive and the tenuous restabilization of the southern front ended the winter campaign's third phase. As the crisis subsided, Manstein's independence from Hitler's close control also evaporated. Hitler's patience with Manstein had actually begun to wane in early February. Then, alarmed by the enormous swatches of territory being surrendered by Manstein's forces, Hitler reasserted his personal authority over Army Group Don on 12 February 1943 with Operations Order 4, which ordered Manstein to reestablish a solid, stand-fast front on the Mius-Donets line. In fact, only Manstein's promise to Hitler to recover much of the lost ground with the Kharkov counterstroke, together with the awkwardness of switching field commanders in the midst of such a confusing battle, probably saved Manstein from being relieved.

With the dissipation of Manstein's autonomy came a reassertion of all Hitler's defensive nostrums, and the fragile German defenses taking shape along the southern front reflected this. Once again, the standard defensive guidance became "no retreat; hold to the last man!".

General Walther Nehring, supervising the improvement of his XXIV Panzer Corps positions, displayed the uncomfortable blend of traditional defense and Hitlerian caveat that had become doctrinal practice. In an 18 March 1943 defensive order to his units, Nehring directed the improvement of positions in depth, the careful coordination of artillery fire support, and the siting of clusters of antitank weapons behind the main positions in perfect accord with the Elastic Defense system in Truppenfiihrung. However, Nehring's instructions also ordered compliance with Hitler's benumbing provisos: "Penetrating enemy elements are instantly to be thrown back by immediate counterattack and the HKL [main line of resistance] regained. Evasive maneuver before the enemy or evacuation of a position without my [Nehring's] special order is forbidden."

German defensive practice therefore had gained little from the lessons of the previous year. Despite the strained battles on the northern defensive front, the disaster at Stalingrad, the desperate fights between the Volga and the Mius Rivers, and finally Manstein's brilliant operational riposte at Kharkov, the German armies on the Eastern Front looked forward to future defensive fighting still handicapped by Hitler's rigid constraints. Even so, German Army units continued to review their own tactical methods and to suggest modifications to defensive doctrine within the limits established by the Fuhrer's guidance.

German army field marshal who was given command of Army Group B in 1942. Born in Dessau, Germany, on 12 November 1881 into an old and established Roman Catholic family, Maximilian Weichs zur Glon joined the 2nd Bavarian Heavy Cavalry Regiment in July 1900 and would maintain an association with the cavalry for most of his military career. He attended the War Academy in 1910 and served in several positions as a General Staff officer during World War I.

After the war, Weichs was selected to continue in the Reichswehr, the new German army. He then held several cavalry related positions. Promoted to Generalmajor (U.S. equiv. brigadier general) in April 1933, he took command of the 3rd Cavalry Division at Weimar, which became the 1st Panzer Division in 1935. Weichs was promoted to Generalleutnant (U.S. equiv. major general) in April 1935 and to General der Kavallerie (U.S. equiv. lieutenant general) in October 1936. His career suffered a temporary setback when he and 15 other generals were "retired" by Adolf Hitler following the Fritsch Affair.

Weichs was recalled to duty for the 1939 Polish Campaign that began World War II. He commanded the XIII Corps and enjoyed success at Kutno and Warsaw. Given command of the new Second Army, he participated in the Battle for France under Field Marshal Karl Rudolf Gerd von Rundstedt in the mop-up phase and was promoted to colonel general in July 1940. He commanded the forces invading northern Yugoslavia in April 1941, and after occupying Zagreb, Sarajevo, and Belgrade, he received the Yugoslav surrender on 18 April.

Second Army then moved east and participated in Operation BARBAROSSA, the invasion of the Soviet Union, as part of the southern flank of Army Group Center. Weichs fought in the battles for the Bialystok pocket, Gomel, and Bryansk. He fell ill in November and did not return to duty until January 1942, at which time his Second Army was on the northern wing of Army Group South. His forces captured Voronezh in July 1942. Weichs received command of Army Group B when Hitler divided Army Group South into two army groups in July 1942.

Army Group B eventually consisted of the Second and Sixth German Armies, the Fourth Panzer Army, the Second Hungarian Army, the Eighth Italian Army, and the Third and Fourth Romanian Armies. Not only was Weichs short of German troops, but Hitler also stripped him of half his motorized transport to support Army Group A. As the Sixth Army under General Friedrich Paulus invested Stalingrad, Weichs worried about the ability of his Axis allies to protect his flanks, and he called attention to this concern.

In November, when the Soviets launched their encirclement of Stalingrad, Weichs had no reserves, and Hitler refused his request to withdraw Sixth Army westward. Although restoring the situation was beyond the means Weichs had available, Hitler showed his lack of confidence in him by assigning most of Army Group B in late November to the newly created Army Group Don, commanded by Field Marshal Erich von Manstein. Weichs was promoted to field marshal in February 1943, but his remaining forces were distributed between Army Group Center and Army Group Don. He was transferred to the Führer Reserve on 10 July.

Weichs's retirement was short-lived. He was recalled on 26 July and named both commander in chief, Southeast, and commander in chief, Army Group F. With responsibility for all Axis forces in the Balkans, he was forced to contend both with growing guerrilla activity and with the Italian defection in September 1943. Weichs performed well, conducting several successful antipartisan operations. He also kept open supply lines for vital raw materials going to the Reich.

With the collapse of Romania and the defection of Bulgaria in August and September 1944, Weichs successfully extricated German forces in the Balkans with minimal losses. By January 1945, the remnants of Army Group F were fighting in Hungary. Hitler retired him in March. The aristocratic Weichs, despite his deep religious beliefs, remained loyal to the Führer and had the latter's respect, though not his full confidence, until the very end of the war.

Weichs was held as a prisoner after the war and was one of the defendants at the International War Crimes Tribunal, but he was released due to poor health in 1948 before the trial took place. He died in Burg Rösberg/Bonn on 27 September 1954.

References

Borchert, Klaus. Die Generalfeldmarschälle und Grossadmiräle der Wehrmacht. Woelfersheim-Berstadt, Germany: Podzun-Pallas Verlag, 1999.

Brett-Smith, Richard. Hitler's Generals. San Rafael, CA: Presidio, 1977.

Mitcham, Samuel W., Jr. Hitler's Field Marshals and Their Battles. Chelsea, MI: Scarborough House, 1990.

Moll, Otto E. Die deutschen Generalfeldmarschälle. Rastatt/Baden, Germany: Erich Pabel Verlag, 1961.

LINK

LINK

Wolfram Wette. _The Wehrmacht: History, Myth, Reality_. Translated by Deborah Lucas Schneider, preface by Peter Fritzsche, and foreword by Manfred Messerschmidt. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006. xix + 372 pp. Abbreviations, notes, index. $29.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-674-02213-3.

Reviewed for H-German by Donald S. Detwiler, Department of History,

Southern Illinois University at Carbondale

New Light on the Darkest Chapter in German Military History

For over a generation after the Second World War, German atrocities in western Poland, the Balkans and the Soviet Union were generally attributed to the SS. The German Army was widely regarded as having refrained from actions contrary to the laws of war. However, the army's role came under increasingly critical scrutiny during the 1960s and 1970s. In 1979, the Military History Research Institute of the Ministry of Defense of the Federal Republic of Germany began publication of its projected ten-volume history of the war, a series providing a peerlessly objective, comprehensive and authoritative account of _Germany and the Second World War_.[1] The first three volumes, on the origins and early phases of the conflict, revealed the army's full complicity in planning and executing a ruthless war of aggression, and the fourth volume, on the background and course of the war against the Soviet Union through early 1942, documented the participation of the army in an unprecedented war of annihilation. The publication of this volume, reissued as an affordable paperback, triggered outrage in some German circles-especially among those who saw the Cold War as a virtual extension of their country's heroic but tragically unsuccessful anti-communist crusade against the Soviet Union.[2] But the controversy over this 1,172-page monument of historical scholarship did not engage the general public, nor did increasingly critical works published during the following years. A fundamental change in German public opinion came only in the 1990s, with the traveling Wehrmacht Exhibition of photographs assembled by the Hamburg Institute for Social Research, which illustrated the German Army's involvement in atrocities previously attributed to the SS and its auxiliaries.

In this fine work, Wolfram Wette explains how the German Army came to play its terrible role in the East, how that role was downplayed or denied during the postwar period, and how it has recently become more widely acknowledged in Germany. His approach is clearly indicated by the subtitle of the original German edition: _Feindbilder, Vernichtungskrieg, Legenden_.[3] To understand why the German army's senior generals were prepared to engage in an unprecedented war of extermination--something utterly contrary to the law of war and their own military tradition--the book begins with an analysis of the German perception of Russia since the beginning of the twentieth century and then shows how, in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution and the German defeat in the First World War, ideologically radical nationalists conflated anti-communism and antisemitism into the sinister image of Jewish-Bolshevism--a conception Adolf Hitler adopted and intensified, but by no means invented.[4] Wette writes that in the course of the 1920s and 1930s, the perception of the Soviet Union as a mortal threat came to be accepted by most of the leaders of the German Army, so that, by spring 1941, those with misgivings about Hitler's impending attack on Russia were isolated and "unable to change the course of official policy in any phase of the war" (p. 23).

Turning to antisemitism in the German military, Wette describes antisemitic bias in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Prussian officer corps. Jews did not receive regular or (after 1885) even reserve officers' commissions in the Prussian Army (though they occasionally did in the Bavarian and Saxon armies). The traditional antisemitism of the nineteenth century was confessional rather than racial; persons of Jewish descent whose forebears had adopted Christianity and become assimilated into German society-like the family of Fritz-Erich von Lewinski, who took the name Erich von Manstein by adoption-were not subject to the discrimination endured by Jewish relatives (pp. 74-75). By the end of the nineteenth century, however, a radical variant of racial antisemitism emerged, based on racial ideology. It found increasing acceptance in the German Army during World War I, as illustrated by the notorious Jewish census of autumn 1916: the Prussian minister of war ordered statistics to be gathered on the number of Jewish soldiers serving in the Prussian Army. The results belied the antisemites' assumption that the Jews were not doing their part, so the findings were not released during the war. Only later did it become known that the statistics demonstrated that, proportionally, as many Jews bore arms during the war as non-Jews (p. 37). But the rumors generated by the Jewish census reinforced the tide of racial antisemitism, which, after Germany's defeat, was intensified by allegations by right-wing politicians and former military leaders. General Erich Ludendorff, former chief of staff in the German Army's supreme command, was among the most conspicuous proponents of the myth that Jews joined with socialists and Bolsheviks to undermine the war effort, with the consequence that Germany had in fact not been defeated at the front, but stabbed in the back. It was thus no accident, Wette notes, that when Hitler emerged with his allegation that Jews and Bolsheviks were Germany's most dangerous enemies, Ludendorff joined him in the attempt to overthrow the republican government in 1923 and, after its failure, ran for and was elected to the Reichstag, where he served as a National Socialist deputy until 1928. Wette recounts that during the period 1918-33, antisemitism persisted in the German Army, that militarism flourished among veterans' groups and patriotic associations and that fanatical nationalism and racial antisemitism led to a wave of assassinations. In 1925 widespread respect for the military was reflected by the election as president of the aged Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg. When Hitler became head of state and supreme commander of the Armed Forces upon Hindenburg's death, its members promptly took a solemn oath of obedience to him personally.

Within less than a year, well before the enactment of the Nuremberg Laws, the commanding general of the German Army, Baron Werner von Fritsch, directed that officers should marry only women of "Aryan" descent. Early in 1939, the High Command of the Wehrmacht began an indoctrination program for the rank and file of all three service branches. One instructional text circulated among the troops was a vitriolic diatribe against the Jews, rehashing antisemitic propaganda since the Jewish census of 1916, and concluding that the struggle against Judaism was necessary in the quest "for a new and more just world order" (pp. 84-88). The ideological solidarity reflected in Fritsch's antisemitism and the adoption of this training program did not mean that there was no friction between Hitler and his generals during the 1930s. "Members of the military elite expressed doubts about Hitler's radical war strategy," Wette writes, "as General Ludwig Beck did, for example, in 1938" (p. 153). Shortly after the war began, protest arose from two senior generals "against the liquidations carried out by the SS forces that had marched into Poland with the German army" (p. 101).[5] In Serbia, on the other hand (invaded in spring 1941), Wette points out, the German Army took matters into its own hands, killing thousands and "disguising the measure as the 'execution of hostages'" (p. 103). All of Serbia's Jews were dead within a year.

However, the crucial test of the unconditional loyalty of the German military leaders to Hitler and his radical ideological goals was to come with the campaign against the Soviet Union. Twelve weeks before the attack, Hitler summoned to the Reich chancellery the approximately 250 generals commanding the three-million-man force that would invade Russia. In an almost two-and-a-half hour speech he made it clear that the forthcoming struggle, code-named Operation Barbarossa, would be drastically different from the war in the West. The Wehrmacht was to ignore the traditional comradeship-in-arms between soldiers of opposing armies, for this was to be a war of annihilation with the goal of exterminating the "Bolshevist commissars and the Communist intelligentsia" (p. 91).

Wette writes that in the postwar trial of the German High Command at Nuremberg, participants in Hitler's conference testified that commanders had afterwards protested that Hitler's planned extermination would violate their soldierly principles and undermine discipline, whereupon Field Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch, the Commander in Chief of the Army, had agreed to convey their misgivings to higher authority and had actually tried to bring about a change in policy through the Chief of the High Command of the Wehrmacht, Wilhelm Keitel, but did not succeed (p. 92). Although research on this episode in the 1960s led to the testimony in question being discounted as self-exculpatory, further study at the Military History Research Institute in Freiburg during the 1970s and 1980s confirmed that there had indeed been objections, even though they had not deterred the preparation by the High Command of the Armed Forces (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, or OKW) and the High Command of the Army (Oberkommando des Heeres, or OKH) of a series of orders subsequently judged to have been criminal.[6] On April 28, 1941, the OKH ordered army collaboration with the SS in the campaign: special SS units had sole responsibility for carrying out their missions, but were under the authority of the army with respect to marching orders, food and shelter. In other words, the German Army was to cooperate in carrying out the kind of mission against which two generals had bitterly protested in Poland in 1939 and about which some expressed misgivings following Hitler's conference. Hitler's decree of May 13 on the exercise of court-martial jurisdiction in the area of Barbarossa licensed such harsh conduct toward civilians that German soldiers knew they could treat civilians as they pleased without punishment. On May 19, the OKW called upon soldiers to eliminate all resistance ruthlessly, particularly Bolshevik agitators, partisans, saboteurs and Jews (p. 94). And an OKW order of June 6 with an OKH supplement of June 8 directed that political commissars should be summarily shot.

Among concrete cases of Wehrmacht involvement in massacres were two in the early months of the Russian campaign near Kiev, in the area controlled by Field Marshal Walter von Reichenau's Sixth Army, accompanied by SS Special Command 4a under SS-Colonel Paul Blobel (p. 113). The circumstances of the August 1941 massacre are documented because of futile efforts to prevent it by a German Army staff officer. On August 20, 1941, in Belaya Tserkov, two German Army chaplains informed the First General Staff Officer of the 295^th Infantry Division, Lieutenant Colonel Helmuth Groscurth, of the pitiful plight of children brought to their attention by soldiers who had heard them crying in a school in which they had been locked for days without food. At the school, Groscurth was informed by an SS sergeant that the children were to be shot, as their parents had been. Groscurth arranged for a postponement while he appealed the decision. When he telephoned the staff of Army Group South he was referred to the headquarters of the Sixth Army, from which he elicited a promise that a decision would be sought by evening from the army's commander. Reichenau promptly decided that the action should be effectively concluded, but contacted Blobel and ordered it postponed because it had not been properly handled. He directed that the SS-colonel go with a representative of the Sixth Army High Command to Belaya Tserkov the following morning. The next day the children were executed. In a letter to his brother a few months later, Groscurth wrote of Reichenau and his like: "One can't view the responsible people with anything but the deepest contempt. Because this is so, Germany will be destroyed; I no longer have the slightest doubt of that" (pp. 107-111).

The Babi Yar massacre near Kiev in September 1941 was "the largest single case of mass murder that took place under the aegis of the German Army, namely the high commander of the Sixth Army, Field Marshal von Reichenau, during its war of conquest and annihilation against the Soviet Union," according to Wette.[7] A few days after the occupation of Kiev, downtown buildings were blown up, killing hundreds of members of the Wehrmacht. On September 26, SS and Wehrmacht officers met and decided that as a reprisal the majority of the Jews in Kiev should be killed. In trial testimony long afterwards, a former SS officer at the meeting described the division of labor between the SS and Wehrmacht by saying that "We had to do the dirty work. I will never forget how ... [Brigadier General Kurt] Eberhard said to us in Kiev, '_You_ have to do the shooting'".[8] However, Wette continues, "not only did the general have no objections to the plan for the massacre as such, but, given the ongoing arson attacks, he was actively promoting it, as an SS report to Berlin confirms: 'The Wehrmacht welcomes the measures and requests a radical approach'" (p. 115). At Babi Yar, as the SS subsequently reported, 33,771 were shot to death on September 29 and 30 (pp. 112-117). This action was followed in October and November 1941 by the first major ghetto massacres, carried out under the orders of Brigadier General Anton von Bechtolsheim, the Wehrmacht commander in Belorussia, ostensibly to eliminate resistance. However, as Wette points out, the Soviet partisan movement became a serious factor only in 1943. During the initial phase of the German occupation, in 1941-42, when 100 Russian "partisans" were reported killed for every German casualty, Wehrmacht reports equated Jews with partisans, masking the fact that "the Jewish population represented the most significant group of victims in these operations" (pp. 127-128).

In a report to the OKW on the situation in the occupied Ukraine at the beginning of December 1941, Brigadier General Hans Leykauf estimated that 150,000 to 200,000 Jews had been executed. He acknowledged that this action represented the "'elimination of superfluous mouths to feed,'" but pointed out that it also had economic disadvantages: "If we shoot the Jews, let the prisoners of war die, and condemn a considerable part of the urban population to starvation, and if we are further going to lose a part of the rural population to hunger next year, then the question that must be answered is: Who exactly is supposed to produce [anything of] value here?'" (p. 126). Leykauf's reference to the fate of Russian POWs in German captivity touches on one of the most terrible atrocities of the Second World War, the Wehrmacht "allowing more than 3 million Soviet prisoners of war to starve to death" (p. 244). No less indelible a stain on the record of the Wehrmacht was the killing of some 46,000 Italian military internees and prisoners of war (p. 224).

Regarding Hitler's relationship with his generals and their acquiescence in and support of measures that were actively opposed by at least a few of their peers, Wette points out a bond between the supreme commander and his highest-ranking officers that became generally known only decades after the war: Hitler's very generous gifts. Grants of land or money to reward outstanding service had been traditional in Europe through the early twentieth century, but they were bestowed ceremoniously with publicity. Hitler's gifts, on the other hand, were made privately and discreetly on personal occasions, such as a birthday or a wedding.[9] Turning from the senior generals to the German armed forces as a whole, Wette notes that of some twenty million men (about half the male citizens of Germany) who served during the war, no more than two million were volunteers (p. 158). Although the overwhelming majority were conscripts, most of them served loyally and many with strong conviction.

The initial point of departure for the postwar legend of the guiltless German Army was the final Wehrmacht Report of May 9, 1945, issued under the authority of the new Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces, Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz, who had succeeded Hitler as German head of state. Little more than six months later, on the eve of the opening of the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg, two former field marshals and three former generals submitted a memorandum on "The German Army from 1920 to 1945" for consideration by the tribunal in the impending prosecution of the German "General Staff and High Command" as a criminal organization-at the suggestion of a prominent member of the U.S. staff for the Nuremberg trials, Major General William J. Donovan, wartime director of the recently dissolved Office of Strategic Services (OSS), who opposed prosecution of "German Army field commanders (who were 'just doing their duty')."[10] The memorandum argued that the army had been against the National Socialist party and the SS, disapproved of most of Hitler's important decisions and opposed war crimes. The defense of the generals on trial at Nuremberg was largely based on the image of the German armed forces reflected in the final Wehrmacht Report and in this memorandum. Former Wehrmacht officers tended to take its contents at face value. For many, the credibility of this stance was reinforced by the rejection, in the final verdict of the International Military Tribunal, of the indictment. Nonetheless the verdict assigned members of the high command responsibility for the suffering of millions. Consequently, the tribunal formally recommended bringing them to trial.

This recommendation was followed in subsequent trials conducted under American aegis at Nuremberg from December 1946 to April 1949, including Case 12, United States of America vs. Wilhelm von Leeb, et al., "The High Command Case" (December 1947 to October 1948). Thirteen senior officers were indicted and, after the suicide of one, twelve were tried and ten convicted. Among the charges were the murders or deportations of Allied prisoners of war captured along the coasts of Greece and western Europe. Two defendants, Admiral Otto Schniewind and Field Marshal Hugo Sperrle, were acquitted altogether and the rest of them were acquitted of committing "crimes against peace," insofar as none had been involved, at a policy level, in conspiracy to commit aggression. One of them, von Leeb, sacked by Hitler for urging retrenchment to a stronger line on the northern Russian front, was convicted only of "crimes against humanity" and sentenced to time served. The remaining ten, convicted of war crimes as well as crimes against humanity, received sentences ranging from five years to life.[11]

Three months before the verdicts in the High Command Case, the Berlin Blockade and Airlift had begun, setting the stage for a transformation of relations between the western Allies and their recent enemy. A symptom of and contributing factor to this transformation was a program initiated at the end of the war, when U.S. Army historians began interrogating senior German prisoners of war for operational and other information to be used in writing the official history of the conflict. Within a few years, many of Hitler's former generals became civilian employees of the U.S. Army, under the overall supervision of the former Chief of Staff of the Army, General Franz Halder, in what became known as the German Military History Program.[12] Wette points out the irony of Wehrmacht officers reproducing their view of the war at the behest of the Allies. Under Halder, the authors of the military studies tended to distinguish the bitter but decent form of warfare waged by the army's troops from the criminal operations of the SS and to attribute the German Army's defeats to problems beyond the generals' control, not least of all Hitler's dilettantism and refusal to accept competent military advice. Thus, as Wette observes, Wehrmacht leadership defended themselves with a pre-emptive view of their roles based on source material restricted from the view of some scholars until the 1960s or later. In the 1950s and 1960s quite a few of the leading German officers who had participated in this project began to go public with their own memoirs and works on various aspects of the war. Many of them, Wette observes, tended to treat Hitler as a rank amateur who spoiled the work of the professionals, as suggested by the title chosen by Manstein for his book, Lost Victories.[13]

More important for the public image and the self-esteem of the Wehrmacht elite than its semi-acquittal at Nuremberg, according to Wette, were two public declarations made early in 1951. The first came on January 23 from the new NATO Supreme Commander, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, well known to have had harsh words for the Wehrmacht in the past. At a press conference in Frankfurt, he announced that he, for his part, did not believe that the German soldier as such had lost his honor, adding that he had come to the conviction that there was "a real difference ... between German soldiers and officers as such and Hitler and his criminal gang." The second important declaration came on April 5, 1951, when Chancellor Konrad Adenauer made a statement formally vindicating blameless German soldiers who had served their country honorably in a speech to the Bundestag in connection with a revision of the constitution of the Federal Republic entitling former career soldiers of the Wehrmacht to government-funded retirement. Eisenhower's statement and Adenauer's pronouncement "may be regarded," Wette writes, "as marking the end of the postwar period as a time of humiliation, impotence, and a lack of professional opportunities for the former Wehrmacht elite" (p. 237).

These developments did not occur in a vacuum; they reflected the West German political atmosphere at the time, as illustrated by an incident recounted by Wette.[14] In fall 1952 Wilhelm Kappe, a war criminal convicted by the British for murdering a Russian POW, escaped from prison to the home of relatives in Aurich in Lower Saxony. When Wilhelm Heidepeter, a merchant who was head of the Social Democrats in the city council, learned of this, he reported it to the police. Heidepeter was verbally and physically threatened, and then stripped of his party offices, with no objection raised in the German press. Although the British High Commissioner for Germany, Ivone Kirkpatrick, stated that Kappe had been convicted of murdering an Allied citizen, many Germans demanded the release of "so-called war criminals." The U.S. High Commissioner for Germany, John J. McCloy, received death threats for refusing to pardon war criminals held on death row at Landsberg. In the course of the 1950s this mood did not change.

The Bundeswehr, established in 1955, was inevitably comprised of Wehrmacht veterans.[15] However, its founders saw to it that its institutional character was quite different from that of the traditionally conservative German Army infused with the authoritarian spirit of Prussian militarism. Under the leadership of reformers, particularly Wolf von Baudissin, the Federal Republic was to have an army of citizens in uniform with rights and privileges, even for soldiers in the lowest ranks, that would have been unthinkable in the Wehrmacht.[16] However, the background of the overwhelming majority of its personnel (and virtually all of its officers) led many to identify themselves with the German military tradition as they understood it. Many lacked interest or understanding of the democratic program of the reformers. In response, Christian Democrat Kai-Uwe von Hassel issued a "Traditions Decree" in 1965. It avoided dealing with most of the issues in the heated debate between reformers and traditionalists, but praised the members of the resistance who had participated in the plot of July 20, 1944, in terms, Wette notes, "to which the majority of Wehrmacht veterans were by no means receptive" (p. 264).

In the context of the bitter armaments controversy at the beginning of the 1980s, increasingly serious public criticism of the Bundeswehr's understanding of its relationship to the Wehrmacht emerged, as reflected in the practice of occasionally naming barracks for generals who had been fervent National Socialists. Social Democratic defense minister Hans Apel took the important step of issuing on a second "Traditions Decree" in 1982 explicitly acknowledging that the armed forces had been misused in part through their own responsibility and that the Bundeswehr could not draw its military tradition from such an unjust regime. Christian Democrat Manfred Wörner, who succeeded Apel after the fall of Helmut Schmidt's government less than two weeks later, declared in his inaugural speech that he would dump the new decree as soon as possible, as he was stridently urged to do by traditionalists in the Bundeswehr, veterans' organizations and the right-wing press. As it turned out, however, he did no such thing-in all likelihood, Wette writes, because a growing number of scholarly publications had prevented him from making the opposite case. Traditionalists in the Bundeswehr had to observe the new guidelines, but veterans' organizations "challenged the politically unwelcome findings of academic military historians and were not above attacking their reputations, even demanding the dismissal of Manfred Messerschmidt, then the chief historian at the [Defense Ministry's] Military History Research Institute" (p. 266).

Further studies in the 1980s and early 1990s rendered the image of an innocent Wehrmacht altogether untenable, so in a speech to Bundeswehr commanders in November 1995 another conservative minister of defense, Christian Democrat Volker Rühe, reaffirmed the 1982 decree unequivocally, explicitly disavowing the Wehrmacht as a source of tradition for the Bundeswehr. Several months earlier, the Institute for Social Research opened the Wehrmacht exhibit. Viewed by hundreds of thousands in thirty-three German and Austrian cities, its graphic depictions of Wehrmacht involvement in atrocities, together with the publicity it triggered, contributed to a breakthrough in German public consciousness.[17] Toward the end of the book, Wette recounts the renaming in Rendsburg of the Bundeswehr barracks previously named for a Wehrmacht general. In 2000, Fritz Stern gave an address at the ceremony, honoring a soldier, Anton Schmid, whose heroic decency in rescuing Lithuanian Jews led to his execution.[18]. In 1994 (two years after the initial publication of Wette's study), the barracks at the general staff college of the Bundeswehr in Hamburg were renamed in honor of von Baudissin, the principal advocate of reform in the postwar German armed forces.[19] In his conclusion, Wette notes "a major process of reorientation" as the generations that conducted and experienced the war have passed away, allowing the dispersion of the myth of the Wehrmacht (p. 296). Measured by the values of contemporary civil society rather than those of Germany's earlier martial culture, Wette concludes, "only the resistant minorities in the Wehrmacht who in one way or another refused to be a part of the war of annihilation may hope to command respect."[20]

Wette closes with the affirmation that "the legend of the Wehrmacht's 'clean hands' now belongs to the past" (p. 297). For most Germans today, especially those of the younger generation, this may well be true, but many older Germans and non-Germans continue to hold the Wehrmacht in considerable esteem. Some of those who do may criticize Wette's study for what they see as a blanket condemnation of an army in which millions served without cause for reproach, accusing him of tarring all German soldiers with the same brush. But that misses the point entirely. The book is not, as suggested by the ill-chosen English subtitle, about the Wehrmacht's history, myth and reality in general, but rather, as indicated by the subtitle of the original German edition, specifically about its ideological perception of the enemy, its participation in a war of annihilation and its postwar legend of innocence. In this concise monograph, one of Germany's most distinguished military historians provides a carefully argued and extensively documented study of the Wehrmacht as an institution: its cultural roots and ideology; its role, in Hitler's words, as one of the pillars of the Third Reich; its dedicated participation in Hitler's war of annihilation; the establishment and cultivation of the postwar legend of its innocence; and, finally, the belated acknowledgment throughout Germany of its criminal past, as formally demonstrated by the official disavowal of its traditions by the Bundeswehr.

As a contribution to the literature on German history, Wette's work can be said to complement and provide a kind of sequel to the late Gordon A. Craig's magisterial study, The Politics of the Prussian Army 1640-1945 (1955), because the last third of his book, extending to the beginning of the twenty-first century, is devoted to the post-1945 cultivation of a positive image of the Wehrmacht, followed by its erosion during the past three decades. In his preface to the English edition, Peter Fritzsche explains the importance of Wette's contribution to a clear understanding of the Wehrmacht's criminal role in the war. The foreword by Manfred Messerschmidt, former chief civilian historian of the Military History Research Institute, translated from the original edition, concludes with the observation that "Wette's book ... represents a necessary step in the early stages of reconceiving the past .... [and] demonstrates how the findings of earlier critical studies can be incorporated into a new overall picture" (pp. xvi-xvii).

Although this work is a landmark in German military historiography, the English edition can unfortunately be recommended only with a serious caveat. Though readable, it lacks the felicity and precision of Wette's masterfully crafted monograph, often failing to convey if not distorting significant nuances in his treatment of complex issues. Moreover, because of mistakes and omissions throughout the volume, several of which are noted below, meticulous scholars citing the work may wish to refer to the German edition or, at the very least, check any passage cited in the English translation to verify its fidelity to the original.[21]

Notes

[1]. Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt, _Das Deutsche Reich und der Zweite Weltkrieg_, vols. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5/1, 5/2, 6, 7, 9/1, and 9/2 (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1979-2005). Seven volumes have been published in English translation: _Germany and the Second World War_, ed. Military History Research Institute (Oxford: Clarendon Press): vol. 1, The Build-Up of German Aggression (1990); vol. 2, _Germany's Initial Conquests in Europe_ (1991); vol. 3, _The Mediterranean, South-East Europe, and North Africa 1939-1941_ (1995); vol. 4, _The Attack on the Soviet Union_ (1998); vol. 5, _Wartime Administration, Economy, and Manpower Resources_, Part I, 1939-1941 (2000), Part 2, 1942-1944/5 (2003); vol. 6, _The Global War: Widening of the Conflict into a World War and the Shift of the Initiative 1941-1943_ (2001); and vol. 7, _The Strategic Air War in Europe and the War in the West and East Asia, 1943-1944/5_ (2006). The translation of "Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt" as "Military History Research Institute"-despite "Forschungsamt" literally meaning "Research Office"-is reminiscent of the usage adopted in the postwar Anglo-American translation of Documents on German Foreign Policy , Series C (1933-1937) and Series D (1937-1941), in which "Auswärtiges Amt" (literally, "Foreign Office") was rendered in English as "Foreign Ministry" because, as explained to me by the last American editor-in-chief of the series, the late Howard M. Smyth, the British insisted that there was really only one Foreign Office in the world-the one in London.

[2]. Horst Boog, Jürgen Förster, Joachim Hoffmann, Ernst Klink, Rolf-Dieter Mueller, and Gerd R. Ueberschär, _Der Angriff auf die Sowjetunion_ (Frankfurt: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1991).

[3]. Wolfram Wette, _Die Wehrmacht. Feindbilder, Vernichtungskrieg, Legenden_ (Frankfurt: S. Fischer Verlag, 2002), the edition cited here. In 2005 a paperback edition was published in Frankfurt by the Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag.

[4]. Wette's treatment of this theme can be read as a kind of sequel to his monograph on the cultural and ideological background of World War II, published in translation under the title "Ideology, Propaganda, and Internal Politics as Preconditions of the War Policy of the Third Reich," as part 1 of _Germany and the Second World War _, vol. 1, pp. 9-155; the German original is available in the updated, unabridged paperback reprint of the opening volume of the Military History Research Institute series: Wilhelm Deist, Manfred Messerschmidt, Hans-Erich Volkmann and Wolfram Wette, _Ursachen und Voraussetzungen des Zweiten Weltkrieges_ (Frankfurt: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1989), pp. 23-208. At Freiburg since 1998, Professor Wette was affiliated with the Military History Research Institute from 1971 to 1995.

[5]. These were General Johannes Blaskowitz, commander of the Eighth Army in south Poland, and General Georg von Küchler, commander of the Third Army that invaded Poland from East Prussia. The vigor with which Blaskowitz pursued his allegations earned him the enmity of Heinrich Himmler and accounts for his not having been promoted to field marshal, despite his seniority and ability, whereas Küchler was advanced to that rank in June 1942 (Mark M. Boatner III, _Biographical Dictionary of World War II_ [Novato: Presidio Press. 1996], pp. 45-46 for Blaskowitz and pp. 295-296 for Küchler).

[6]. Whereas Wette writes in the German edition (on p. 97) that this further study was undertaken "in den 70er und 80er Jahren im Militärgeschichtlichen Forschungsamt Freiburg i. Br." (i.e., "in the 70s and 80s at the Military History Research Institute in Freiburg im Breisgau"), the English edition states (on p. 92) that it was done "in the Military History Research Institute (Potsdam)." Because the reference to the 1970s and 1980s is deleted and Potsdam has been

substituted for Freiburg, the English edition implies that the further study in question could not have been undertaken before the 1990s (insofar as the institute was moved from Freiburg to Potsdam only after German unification). A more serious flaw in the translation is the deletion of Wette's reference to the finding regarding this incident published in Germany and the Second World War, vol. 4, _The Attack on the Soviet Union_ (cited above in note 1). Note 7 on p. 316 of the English edition of Wette's book omits his summary (in note 8 on p. 308 of the German edition) of the passage (on p. 498 of vol. 4) where Jürgen Förster wrote that "it was probably at a joint breakfast of the Army High Command with the senior commanders that the first protests were voiced against Hitler's ideologically motivated conduct of the war. But that protest was primarily directed against the exclusion of the courts martial, which the commanders feared might lead to a slackening of discipline and good order. It is exceedingly doubtful whether the army and field commanders seriously considered compelling Hitler to relinquish his demands by threatening collective resignation. After all, there was agreement on the view that political commissars in the Red Army did not have combatant status." In other words, like terrorists in the early twenty-first century, they were regarded as not being entitled to formal proceedings in a military court-martial, and no supreme court in the Third Reich had the standing to rule otherwise.

[7]. My translation from pp. 115-116 of the German edition (cited in note 3 above) because the English edition mistranslates the phrase, "während ihres Eroberungs- und Vernichtungskrieges gegen die Sowjetunion" to read "during its campaign against the Soviet Union" (p. 112).

[8]. The English edition incorrectly translates Eberhard's rank of "Generalmajor" as "major general" rather than "brigadier general," the corresponding rank in the American and British armies. Throughout the book, the rank of general officers is mistranslated. The succession of ranks of flag officers in the German Army (compared to the U.S. Army) was "Generalmajor" (U.S. brigadier general), "Generalleutnant" (U.S. major general), "General der Infanterie," "General der Artillerie," and so on (U.S. lieutenant general), "Generaloberst" (U.S. general) and "Generalfeldmarschall" (U.S. general of the army). The ranks of generals in the Bundeswehr have cognate designations to corresponding American ranks.

[9]. This is explained in Thomas Scheben, "Review of Gerd R. Ueberschär

and Winfried Vogel, _Dienen und Verdienen - Hitlers Geschenke und seine

Eliten_," H-War, H-Net Reviews, January, 2000, at

http://www.h-net.msu.edu/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=12723949617727 .

(Published by S. Fischer Verlag in Frankfurt in 1999, the book was reprinted in 2006 as a paperback by Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag.) Scheben also mentions that the family of Field Marshal von Leeb still owns Bavarian forestland worth over a million dollars that Hitler gave him during the war. In _Hitler and His Generals: The Hidden Crisis, January-June 1938_ (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1974), Harold C. Deutsch documented that Hitler personally gave General Walther von Brauchitsch 80,000 RM to induce his wife to agree to a secret divorce (preventing a public scandal that would have precluded him from succeeding Werner von Fritsch as Commanding General of the German Army).But the earliest published report on Hitler's practice of giving lavish gifts to others of which I am aware was a German magazine article in 1980 by Peter Meroth, "Vorschuß auf den Endsieg," _Stern_ 25 (June 12,

1980), pp. 86-92. In 1992, Gerhard L. Weinberg speculated on how average

soldiers during the last weeks of the war might have felt had they been aware of the "gifts" routinely given to members of the high command, suggesting the role of bribery as a fertile field of study for understanding German army cohesion despite its material disintegration in the last weeks of the war, in addition to fear of the military justice system ("Some Thoughts on World War II," _Journal of Military History_ 56 (1992): pp. 659-668).

[10]. Telford Taylor, _The Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials: A Personal Memoir_ (New York: Knopf, 1992; paperback repr., Boston: Little, Brown Back Bay Books, 1993), p. 148. The OSS was dissolved by Harry Truman's executive order of September 20, 1945 (ibid., p. 239). Donovan saw the Cold War coming, regarded the Germans as potentially valuable allies, and vigorously sought to have all but the very top military leaders exonerated. As recounted by Taylor on pp. 145-149, 180-186, and 236-240, the categorical rejection of Donovan's approach by the chief U.S. prosecutor, Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, led to his abrupt departure from Nuremberg within two weeks of the submission of the memorandum on the German Army, which had been signed by Brauchitsch (Commander-in-Chief of the Army, 1938-41), Manstein (an army group commander on the Russian front, 1942-44), General Franz Halder (Army Chief of Staff, 1938-42), Lieutenant General Walter Warlimont (Deputy Chief of Operations of the High Command of the Wehrmacht throughout the war), and Lieutenant General Siegfried Westphal (Chief of Staff of the High Command on the western front, 1944-45). As he recounts in his memoir, Taylor played a central role in the preparation and presentation of the General Staff and High Command case at the International Military Tribunal. He subsequently served as chief prosecutor in the follow-on trials conducted by the U.S. Army in Nuremberg from December 1946 to April 1949, including the High Command Case (1947-48). His personal memoir does not deal with the later trials, which he treated concisely in Nuremberg Trials: War Crimes and International Law (New York: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1949).

[11]. Like the two field marshals, Albert Kesselring and Manstein, whom the British tried and convicted in the late 1940s, they were released in the 1950s. The Manstein case had been particularly controversial in Britain, where, Wette writes, "former Prime Minister Winston Churchill went so far as to contribute to a fund so that Manstein would be able to pay two British defense attorneys" (p. 225).

[12]. On the program and the more than 2,500 studies it produced, see James A. Wood, "Captive Historians, Captivated Audience: The German Military History Program, 1945-1961," Journal of Military History 69 (2005): pp. 123-147. For a 24-volume selection of archival facsimiles of the English translations of 213 of the studies, see _World War II German Military Studies_, ed. Donald S. Detwiler; Charles B. Burdick and Jürgen Rohwer, associate editors (New York: Garland, 1979). Charles B. Burdick of San Jose State University was attached, as a young U.S. Army reserve officer, to the Historical Division's German group coordinated by Halder.

[13]. Erich von Manstein, Lost Victories, ed. and trans. Anthony G. Powell (London: Methuen, and Chicago: Regnery, 1958; Novato: Presidio Press, 1994). Among other such works available in English cited by Wette are Franz Halder, Hitler as Warlord, trans. Paul Findlay (New York:

Putnam, 1950); Karl Dönitz, Memoirs: Ten Years and Twenty Days, trans. R. H. Stevens with David Woodward (Cleveland: World Publishing Co., and London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1959; Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1990); Heinz Guderian, Panzer Leader, trans. Constantine FitzGibbon (New York: Dutton, 1952; New York: DaCapo Press, 1996); Albert Kesselring, A Soldier's Record, trans. Lynton Hudson (New York: Morrow, 1954); and Siegfried Westphal, _The German Army in the West_ (London: Cassell, 1952). Dönitz was responsible for the Final Report of the Wehrmacht of May 9, 1945, and Manstein, Halder, and Westphal were three of the five signers of the generals' memorandum of November 19, 1945.

[14]. The episode was initially described in an article entitled "Das ganz normale Grauen [Everyday Horror]" in the newsweekly Der Spiegel 16 (April 14, 1997), pp. 64-67, by Norbert Frei, author of _Adenauer's Germany and the Nazi Past: The Politics of Amnesty and Integration_, trans. Joel Golb (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002).

[15]. In 1958 over 12,000 officers in the Bundeswehr had served in the Wehrmacht. All officers from the rank of colonel upward were screened by a board of review comprised of thirty-eight public figures named by the president of the Federal Republic on the nomination of the federal

government and approved by the Bundestag. To criticism that all the higher officers in the Bundeswehr had been in the Wehrmacht, Adenauer is said to have responded that NATO did not want any eighteen-year-old generals from him ("Geschichte der Bundeswehr" (last revised January 5, 2007), _Wikipedia, die freie Enzyklopädie_, at http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundeswehr. Adenauer's comment about NATO was an allusion to the fact that the Bundeswehr was not an independent force under German command, but integrated into NATO under an American supreme commander. On the establishment of the Bundeswehr, see Donald Abenheim, _Reforging the Iron Cross: The Search for Tradition in the

West German Armed Forces_ (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989).

[16]. Not only may Bundeswehr soldiers file complaints under guaranteed "whistle-blower" protection, but they also have the right to appeal directly to a special office of the Bundestag (whether or not they have chosen to seek redress through official military channels).

[17]. For a concise account of the Wehrmacht Exhibition and its public impact, together with consideration of the criticism of flaws in it and references to the relevant literature as well as links to related websites, see, in addition to the discussion in Wette's book, "Verbrechen der Wehrmacht" (last revised November 6, 2006), _Wikipedia, die freie Enzyklopädie_, at

http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wehrmachtsausstellung.

[18]. In her report on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, Hannah Arendt (quoted on pp. 279-280 by Wette) wrote of the impact of the testimony of a Jew telling what Schmid had done for him: "During the few minutes it took Kovner to tell of the help that had come from a German sergeant, a hush settled over the courtroom; it was as though the crowd had spontaneously decided to observe the usual two minutes of silence in honor of the man named Anton Schmidt [sic]. And in those two minutes, which were like a sudden burst of light in the midst of impenetrable, unfathomable darkness, a single thought stood out clearly, irrefutably, beyond question-how utterly different everything would be today in this courtroom, in Israel, in Germany, in all of Europe, and perhaps in all countries of the world, if only more such stories could have been told" (Hannah Arendt, _Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil_, rev. and enl. ed. [New York: Viking, 1964], p. 231). Ten years after the initial appearance of the volume under review, Wette saw to it that more such stories were indeed told in _Retter in Uniform. Handlungsspielräume im Vernichtungskrieg der Wehrmacht_, ed. Wolfram Wette (Frankfurt: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 2002).

[19]. _Die Geschichte der Generalleutnant-Graf-von-Baudissin-Kaserne (GBK)_ (Stand vom 06.03.2006), at

http://www.fueakbw.de/index.php?ShowParent=430&show_lang=de.

[20]. Translated by the reviewer from Wette, Die Wehrmacht (pp. 288-289), because of the mistranslation in the English edition, where, on p. 296, one reads that "only those few resistance fighters in the Wehrmacht who protested against extermination in one way or another deserve our respect," a rendering that suggests that the translator was oblivious to the fact that open protest against extermination by a resistance fighter would have been suicidal in the Third Reich. Wette did not write of "those few resistance fighters" who "protested," but of "die widerständigen Minderheiten der Wehrmacht, die sich dem Vernichtungskrieg auf diese oder jene Weise verweigert haben." In addition, near the top of p. 297 of the English edition one reads that the officers involved in the conspiracy against Hitler were "anti-democratic," but the German original states (on p. 289) that they were "keine Demokraten," that is, "no democrats," a significant distinction, particularly in the context of Wette's carefully nuanced conclusion.

[21]. Wette's original work successfully filled the need for an authoritative, even-handed, impeccably scholarly treatment of its very controversial subject, but the English version is so badly flawed that it can be recommended only with reservations. Lest the errors in the translation mentioned so far leave the impression that the Harvard University Press edition, despite occasional lapses, can be depended upon to be generally faithful to the German original, here are five further examples of the kinds of mistakes that make necessary the caveat with which this review unfortunately has to be concluded: on p. 38, lines 4 and 5, General Erich Ludendorff's political advisor, Colonel Max Bauer, is called "a spokesman for the extreme right-wing Pan-German Party," rather than "a spokesman in the supreme army command for the extreme right-wing Pan-German Party." The failure to translate and include in the sentence the prepositional phrase "in the supreme army command" (i.e., "in der OHL," on p. 47 of the original edition) indicates that Bauer served as a spokesman for a political party, presumably in the kind of public role that partisan spokesmen have. Such a role would have been out of the question for him as a general-staff officer. On p. 84 one reads: "In 1935 Fritsch became commander in chief of the Wehrmacht," whereas Wette wrote of his having been made "commander in chief of the army" (i.e., "Oberbefehlshaber des Heeres," on p. 89 of the original edition), not of the armed forces (the Wehrmacht, which included the navy and air force in addition to the army, of which Werner von Blomberg at the time was commander in chief). On p. 117, in a description of the mass shootings at Babi Yar, "drei Gruppen von Schützen, mit insgesamt etwa 12 Schützen" (on p. 121 of the original edition) is translated "three groups of soldiers, with about twelve men in each." A few lines later, the sentence, "Die Schützen standen jeweils hinter den Juden und haben diese mit Genickschüssen getötet," is translated "The soldiers stood behind them and killed them with shots to the base of the skull." To begin with, there were about twelve riflemen altogether in the three groups, not twelve in each. But far more important is the mistranslation of "Schützen." This German word means "riflemen," not "soldiers," the German word for which is "Soldaten." The mistranslation of "Schützen" as "soldiers" tells the reader that the killers were German Army soldiers, whereas in fact they were members of the SS. That the killing was to be done by SS members rather than army personnel was spelled out two pages earlier, on p. 115, where it is stated that the Wehrmacht city commandant, Brigadier General Eberhard, told the representative of the SS, "You have to do the shooting" (with the "you" in italics). On p. 142, in the passage where Wette writes (on p. 143 in the original edition) of Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke having successfully led the wars of unification, the translator has inserted a phrase (not in the German original), apparently with the intention of helpfully informing the reader that this was done under Germany's "first Kaiser, the former King Wilhelm I of Prussia." However, Wilhelm I was by no means the "former" King of Prussia. When he reluctantly assumed the title of German Kaiser, he proudly remained King of Prussia, as did his heirs. On p. 297, the translation states that "most German citizens now feel respect for soldiers who deserted from the Wehrmacht, and those 'defeatists' and 'underminers of morale' who refused at some point to follow their leaders during the war," whereas Wette wrote not of "defeatists" ("Defätisten"), but of "conscientious objectors" ("Wehrdienstverweigerer," on p. 289 of the original edition), who were criminalized during the Third Reich.

H-NET BOOK REVIEW

Published by H-German@h-net.msu.edu (February, 2007)

The Soviets used term "Shturmovoi Tank" (Assault Tank) for the KV-2.

German tank vanguard attack plan and positions of three soviet KV-1 tanks at Krasnogvardeysk (Gatchina) near Leningrad (St Petersburg).

Raseiniai

When Operation Barbarossa began, the Red Army was equipped with 508 KV tanks (Zaloga&Grandsen 1984:125). So effective was its armour that the Germans were incapable of destroying it with their tanks or anti-tank weapons and had to rely on air support and anti-aircraft artillery (flak) or 105 mm howitzers to knock them out. On 23-24 June, a single KV-2 effectively pinned down elements of the German 6th Panzer Division for a full day at the bridgeheads of the Dubissa River below Raseiniai, Lithuania, playing a prominent role in delaying the advance of Panzergruppe 4 on Leningrad (Zaloga&Grandsen 1981:10-12) until it ran out of ammunition and the crew was forced to abandon the tank and withdraw.

Krasnogvardeysk

On August 14, 1941, the vanguard of the German 8th Panzer Division approached Krasnogvardeysk (Gatchina) near Leningrad (St Petersburg), and the only Soviet force available at the time to attempt to stop the German advance was five well-disguised KV-1 tanks, dug in within a grove at the edge of a swamp. KV-1 tank no. 864 was commanded by the leader of this small force, Lieutenant Zinoviy Kolobanov.

German forces attacked Krasnogvardeysk from three directions. Near Noviy Uchkhoz settlement the geography favoured the Soviet defenders as the only road in the region passed the swamp, and the defenders commanded this choke point from their hidden position. Lieutenant Kolobanov had carefully studied the situation and readied his detachment the day before. Each KV-1 tank carried twice the normal amount of ammunition, two-thirds being armour-piercing rounds. Kolobanov ordered his other commanders to hold their fire and await orders. He did not want to reveal the total force, so only one exposed tank at a time would engage the enemy.

On August 14, the German 8th Panzer Division's vanguard ventured directly into the well-prepared Soviet ambush; with Kolobanov's tank knocking out the lead German tank with its first shot. The Germans falsely assumed that their lead tank had hit an anti-tank mine, and failed to realize that they were ambushed. The German column stopped, giving Kolobanov the opportunity to destroy the second tank. Only now did the Germans realize they were under attack, but failed to find the source of the shots. While the German tanks were firing blindly, Kolobanov knocked out the trailing German tank, thus boxing in the entire column.

Although the Germans correctly guessed the direction of fire, they could only spot Lieutenant Kolobanov's tank, and now attempted to engage an unseen enemy. German tanks moving off the road bogged down in the surrounding soft ground, becoming easy targets. 22 German tanks and 2 towed artillery pieces fell victim to Kolobanov's No. 864 before it ran out of ammunition. Kolobanov ordered in another KV-1, and 21 more German tanks were destroyed before the half-hour battle ended. Total number of destroyed German tanks reached 43, and this was done by five Soviet KV-1 (two more remained in reserve).

After the battle, the crew of No. 864 counted a total of 135 hits on their tank, none of which had penetrated the KV-1's armour. Lieutenant Kolobanov was awarded the Order of Lenin, while his driver Usov was awarded the Order of the Red Banner. Later on, former Captain Zinoviy Kolobanov was again decorated by Soviet authorities, despite having been been convicted and downgraded after the Winter War for "fraternizing with the enemy." After the end of WWII Lt. Kolobanov served in the Soviet occupation zone in Eastern Germany, where he was convicted again when a subordinate escaped to the British occupation zone, and was transferred to the reserves.

The battle for Krasnogvardeysk was covered up by Soviet propaganda. A monument dedicated to this battle was installed in the village of Noviy Uchkhoz in 1980, at the place where Kolobanov's KV-1 was dug in, due solely to the demands of the villagers. Unfortunately it was impossible to find a KV-1 tank, so an IS-2 heavy tank was installed there instead.

It must be said, however, the Soviet victory was the result of a well-planned ambush in advantageous ground, and more importantly, technical superiority: most of the German tanks in this battle were Panzer IIs, armed with 20 mm guns, and a few Panzer IIIs armed with 37 mm KwK 36 L/46.5 guns. The German tank guns had neither the range nor the power of the 76 mm main gun of a KV-1, and the narrower track width of the German tanks caused them to become trapped in the swampy ground.

LINK

American Perspectives on Eastern Front Operations in World War II
Colonel David M. Glantz
Foreign Military Studies Office,
Fort Leavenworth, KS.

This paper was prepared for delivery at the first Soviet-American collegium on the problems of World War II history, held in Moscow on 21-23 October 1986. Thereafter the article was published in the August 1987 issue of the Soviet Academy of Sciences Journal Voprosy Istorii [Questions of History].

One's view of historical reality is inevitably flawed. While most historians strive to preserve or recreate an objective picture of historical forces and events, a variety of factors affect their work all of which tend to warp objective reality and produce a subjective view of history. This process is inevitable, and it poses to the historian the principal challenge of his profession, a challenge which he seldom totally overcomes.

One of the most potent factors affecting objectivity is that of parochialism--in its milder form simply limited perspective--a narrowness of view produced by a natural concern for one's own history and reinforced by the remoteness of events occurring in distant lands. Parochialism on the part of historians also responds, in part, to demand - the demand of their reading public who are parochial in their own right and who seek information concerning their own past. Cultural and ideological differences that exist between governments and peoples exacerbate this tendency. These differences color the interpretation of events and tend to stifle understanding between peoples already separated by space and time.

The availability of sources upon which to base historical accounts contributes to the emergence of a parochial view. A historian must use what sources are available to him, and if those sources are limited, so also will his perspective be limited. Good historians will acknowledge those limitations as they reconstruct the events of the past.

A more extreme form of parochialism or limited perspective is bias, which can be either unintentional or intentional. Unintentional bias is a result of the same forces that produce a parochial view. Intentional bias can be a manifestation of the historian's own internal beliefs or the product of ideological or political influence on the historian from external institutions, such as governments, religious bodies, or economic entities. Bias, especially in the deliberate form, creates a more twisted, and hence more harmful, view of historical events than simple parochialism. While parochialism implies that a historian was unable to tap a wide variety of sources, bias indicates that a historian selected the sources he would use and ignored those which did not fit into his preconceived notion of past events. In the former case, distortion of history, although regrettable, is natural and often hard to detect. In the latter case such distortion is unnatural, reprehensible, and usually obvious to the discerning reader.

Few twentieth century events have escaped the effects of parochialism and bias. Among the more important periods most severely affected by these phenomena is that of the Second World War, in particular the war on the Eastern Front--the Russo-German War. Diverging perspectives, parochialism, and outright bias from all quarters have obscured or distorted the history of the war and helped to produce long-standing misunderstandings and animosities. In fact, it is safe to say that we are still far from achieving an objective picture of the war, if in fact such a picture is achievable. The lack of objectivity has left a legacy of misunderstanding concerning the political and military events of the war. More important, since perceptions and policies of the present are based, in part, upon a correct understanding of the past, many of those perceptions and policies are founded on less than solid ground.

This paper focuses on only a narrow segment of World War II experiences --experiences on the Eastern Front--within the context of the war in general. In particular, it describes the U.S. perspective on the war and how events on the Eastern Front fit into that overall view of war. Further it surveys the forces (sources) that have shaped the current American perspective on that important segment of World War II combat, specifically what Americans have been taught or have read about the war. Finally the paper investigates the accuracy of that perspective in light of existing source materials. Thus, in essence, this is a critique of Eastern Front war historiography, a critique which will hopefully broaden the perspective and understanding of American and foreign readers and historians alike.

The American View of World War II

The American view of the war reflected the circumstances surrounding U.S. involvement in the war as well as long term historical attitudes toward European politics in general.1 Despite strong public sentiment for assisting beleaguered Western democracies, after war broke out in 1939 equally strong neutralist sentiments blocked active U.S. participation in the war. As the American public noted with growing concern the fall of France in 1940, the expulsion of British forces from the continent at Dunkirk, and the struggle for supremacy in the air over Great Britain, the U.S. government was able to lend assistance to England short of actually joining the war. The German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, while lamented as an extension of the war, in some quarters was also viewed positively as it clearly diverted German interest from Britain toward what most assumed would be a more formidable opponent for the hitherto undefeated German war machine to deal with. Additionally, Germany now faced a two-front war, and Anglo-Soviet war cooperation against Germany was bound to ensue. In a sense, the German decision to attack the Soviet Union strengthened the hand of American neutralists who could point to the reduced need for U.S. intervention, an argument quickly silenced by the extensive German advance in the East, which for a time seemed to threaten the viability of the Soviet Union. The war itself in the East was a shadowy affair signified by maps of the Soviet Union overlaid by large arrows and clouds of black representing advancing Nazi forces. Little detail of the conflict was available, setting a pattern which would endure during the future years of war.

Only the brash Japanese surprise attack on U.S. facilities at Pearl Harbor overcame this initial American reluctance to become actively involved in war. This act unleashed American's emotions to an extent that earlier American lukewarm commitment to the survival of the western democracies was converted almost overnight into a broad American commitment to rid the world of the menace posed by the Berlin-Tokyo axis. While early in the war the U.S. government's principal concern was for assisting in the defeat of Nazi Germany, the very fact that the Japanese surprise attack had catalyzed American war sentiments led to ever increasing U.S. attention to the war in the Pacific, a war which soon dominated U.S. newspaper headlines.

The combination of the U.S. government's focus on defeating Germany "first" and the reality of fending off Japanese advances in the Pacific set the tone for the U.S. perspective on the war and focused as well the attention of the U.S. press and public on those two themes. Hence U.S. military strategy involved the attaining of footholds on the European continent as a means for achieving the ultimate destruction of Germany while the realities of war in the Pacific and the overwhelming public sentiment to crush the nation which had provoked the hostilities in the first place drew American forces inexorably across the Pacific. The competing aims of America's two-front war, in the end, diluted the government's efforts to first deal with Nazi Germany and perhaps attenuated the achievement of victory in Europe. At a minimum, it made the establishment of a "second front" in Europe a more formidable task and led to the series of Allied operations in North Africa, Sicily, and Italy, preceded by a sobering test of Allied capabilities to land directly in France, conducted at Dieppe in August 1942. Military planners and the general public alike were transfixed by foreign locales such as Tobruk, El Alamein, Oran, Kasserine, Palermo, Salerno, and Anzio where America's military strategy unfolded.

Driven by popular demand and the inertia of ongoing operations, America's war in the Pacific in the summer of 1942 changed in nature from a defensive one to an offensive one complete with alternative strategies for the defeat of Japan. The names Guadalcanal, Midway, New Guinea, and a host of hitherto obscure islands dominated U.S. awareness--governmental and public alike.

It is axiomatic that where one's forces operate, one's attention follows; and where one's father, husband, or son fights and possibly dies, dominates a families thoughts. Human ties usually dwarf geopolitical considerations, and the piece of the mosaic of war with which a government or a public is involved naturally becomes the dominant piece. The remainder of that mosaic, for most remains a shadowy context of one's own struggle recognized as important only by the most perceptive of observers.

Thus, America's perspective on war remained riveted to the path undertaken by American forces in Europe and across the Pacific. To the earlier place names of combat were added the names Normandy, Falaise, Metz, and Aachen in Europe and Iwo Jima, the Philippines, and Okinawa in the Pacific. As U.S. military efforts increased in scope; and as Axis power diminished, the impact of those operations on the American public's memory increased. Throughout this process the war elsewhere, the real global context for American military operations, remained cloudy and obscure, the obscurity reinforced by a lack of specific information as to what was occurring, in particular at the public level.

The war on the Eastern Front, however unfairly, was a part of this shadowy context. It is clear Americans knew in general about the war ln the East. They knew it was a massive struggle with vast implications for the success of Allied strategy in the West. The names Leningrad, Moscow, Stalingrad, and Kursk were familiar ones, and Americans could appreciate the impact of Soviet victories at each location. But that was perhaps of the sum of American understanding. Certainly, there was little in the American military experience to condition Americans to conceive of operations as large as those occurring in the East, and what is not experienced cannot be fully appreciated. Hence, the tendency of Americans (and others) to equate Stalingrad with El Alamein and Kursk with Anzio. The comparison in terms of result (victory) masked the issue of the contrasting scale and scope of these operations. As the issue of the second front became a focal point of dispute among the wartime allies, this context plus the real allied difficulties in effecting such a landing made the Allied decision to open such a front in France in 1944 reasonable and understandable to the American public.2

During the last year of war the American public's (and government's) attention was captured by the successful Normandy operation and the ensuing breathtaking advance across France. Likewise, the German counterstroke in the Bulge and the 1945 Allied advance into Germany dominated American public awareness. Concurrent and massively successful Soviet operations in Belorussia, Rumania, East Prussia, Poland, and Hungary were noted as part of a continuous, slow, but inexorable Soviet advance toward Germany. As before, details of the Soviet operations were lacking, hence they tended to recede into the background as a adjunct to successful Allied operations in the West and in the Pacific as well. In a sense, America's attentions were focused on the two great oceans and operations adjacent to them. The struggle in continental Europe remained remote, geographically and psychologically. The same tendency helped to relegate to obscurity Soviet participation in the final stages of the war with Japan (the Manchurian operation).3

Thus the war on the Eastern Front was acknowledged but never fully appreciated in wartime by the bulk of Allied public opinion. Initially the war served the function of distracting German military attentions from England eastward. Later the Red Army locked the German Army in a struggle which enabled the other Allies to reestablish themselves on continental Europe. Ultimately, the Red Army joined in the final victory assault on the German Reich. The American public appreciated the role played by the Soviet people; and, in fact, genuine feelings of warmth resulted. Americans, likewise, seemed to understand the suffering involved in such a struggle. Yet, despite these feelings, the details of those operations in the East remained obscure; and, hence, a full realization of their importance was lacking. This tendency persisted into the postwar years when it combined with other factors to create a sort of mythology surrounding the events of the war in the East.

Postwar American Perspective on Eastern Front Operations

If American wartime impressions of combat on the Eastern Front were vague and imprecise, there was some improvement in that picture during the first decade and a half after war ended. However, during that period a new tendency emerged that colored almost all future works describing events on the Eastern Front. That tendency was to view operations in the East through German eyes and virtually only German eyes. From 1945 to 1958 essentially all works written in English or translated into English about events on the Eastern Front were written by German authors, many of whom were veterans of combat in the East, works moreover, based solely on German sources.

This German period of war historiography embraced two genre of works. The first included memoirs written during those years when it was both necessary and sensible to dissociate oneself from Hitler or Hitler's policies. Justifiable or not, the writers of these memoirs did just that and essentially laid blame on Hitler for most strategic, operational, and often tactical failures. Thus, an apologetic tone permeated these works. Officers who shared in the success of Hitler's armies refused to shoulder responsibility for the failures of the same armies. Only further research will judge the correctness of their views.

The first of the postwar memoirs to appear in English was the by now classic work, Panzer Leader, by Heinz Guderian.4 Guderian's work, which casts considerable light on strategic and operational decisions while Guderian was a panzer group commander in 1941 and later when he became Chief of Staff in 1944, set the tone for future treatment by German generals of Hitler's leadership. Guderian laid at Hitler's feet principal responsibility for all failures of the German Army and for the dismantling of the German General Staff. The German General Staff was portrayed as both used and abused by Hitler throughout the war. Guderian's message was best conveyed by the chapter heading he chose for the section of the Polish War of 1939 which read, "The Beginning of the Disaster." As in most subsequent works, Guderian included little Soviet operational data.

One of the most influential postwar German war critiques was General von Mellenthin's Panzer Battles published ln English in 1956.5 Mellenthin's work, an operational/tactical account of considerable merit, echoed the criticism of Hitler voiced by Guderian and showed how Hitler's adverse influence affected tactical operations. Beyond this, Mellenthin's work adopted a didactic approach in order to analyze operations and hence educate officers. Throughout the book are judgments concerning military principles and assessments of the nature of the Soviet fighting men and officers, most of which have been incorporated into the current "body of truth" about Soviet military capabilities. Hence, Mellenthin made such judgments as these: the Russian soldier is tenacious on defense, inflexible on offense, subject to panic when facing unforeseen eventualities, an excellent night fighter, a master of infiltra- tion, a resolute and implacable defender of bridgeheads, and neglectful of the value of human life.6 As was in the case of Guderian, Mellenthin's experiences against the Red Army encompassed the period before spring 1944 and reflected impressions acquired principally during years of German success.

Mellenthln's work, written without benefit of archival materials, tended to treat tactical cases without fully describing their operational context. Opposing Soviet units, as in Guderian's work, were faceless. Mellenthin's classic account of XXXXVIII Panzer Corps' operations along the Chir River after the encirclement of German 6th Army at Stalingrad stands as an example of the weaknesses of his book.7 In it he describes the brilliant operations of that panzer corps in fending off assaults by Soviet 5th Tank Army's units which included first the 1st Tank Corps and later 5th Mechanized Corps. On 7-8 December 1942, 11ch Panzer Division parried a thrust of 1st Tank Corps at State Farm 79 while on 19 December, 11th Panzer checked the advance of 5th Mechanized Corps. Despite the vivid accounts of these tactical successes, Mellenthin only in passing describes the operational disaster that provided a context for these fleeting tactical successes. For, in fact, while Soviet 5th Tank Army occupied XXXXVIII Panzer Corps' attention, to the northwest Soviet forces overwhelmed and destroyed the Italian 8th Army and severely damaged Army Detachment Hollidt. Moreover, Mellenthin did not mention (probably because he did not know) that Soviet 1st Tank Corps had been in nearly continuous operation since 19 November and was under strength and worn down when it began its march across the Chir.8

Similar flaws appear elsewhere in Mellenthin's work, many of which result from a lack of knowledge of opposing Soviet forces or their strengths.9

Of equal importance to Mellenthin's work, but written from a higher level perspective, was the memoir of Eric von Manstein entitled Lost Victories.10 An important work by an acknowledged master at the operational level of war, Manstein's book viewed operations from 1941 to early 1944 at the strategic and operational level. Manstein's criticism of Hitler reflected active disputes which ultimately led to Manstein's dismissal as Army Group South commander. Manstein's account of operations is accurate although again Soviet forces are faceless, and opposing force ratios are in conflict with those shown by archival materials of Fremde Heeres 0st (Foreign Armies East), Gehlen's organizations, and of the OKH (the Army High Command).11 Again Soviet superiorities are overstated.

These three basic memoirs dominated historiography of World War II in the 1950's and continue to be treated as authoritative works today even as unexploited archival materials challenge an increasing number of facts cited in the three works. Other works appeared in English during this period but were generally concerned with individual battles or operations.12 Whether coincidental or not, most of these unfavorable accounts of Soviet combat performance appealed to an American audience conditioned by the Cold War years. Notably, few German commanders of the later war years, a period so unpleasant for German fortunes, wrote memoirs; and the works of those who did (for example, General Heinrici) still remain as untranslated manuscripts in the archives.

The second genre of postwar works included the written monographs based upon debriefings of and studies by German participants in operations on the Eastern Front. For several years after war's end the Historical Division of USEUCOM supervised a project to collect the war experiences of these veterans relating to all wartime fronts. Literally hundreds of manuscripts were assembled on all types of operations. All were written from memory without benefit of archival material. The Department of the Army published the best of these short monographs in a DA pamphlet series in the late forties and early fifties.

These pamphlets were of mixed quality. All were written from the German perspective, and none identified Soviet units involved in the operations. Some were very good, and some were very inaccurate. All require collation with actual archival materials. All are still in use and are considered to be as a valuable guide to Soviet operational tendencies. A few examples should suffice to describe the care that must be employed when using these sources.

In 1950 a DA Pamphlet appeared assessing Allied airborne operations. The distinguished group of German officers who wrote the pamphlet were directed by Major General Hellmuth Reinhardt. The pamphlet critiqued German and Allied airborne experiences. In its chapter on Allied airborne landings in World War II was a subsection entitled, Reflections on the Absence of Russian Air Landings, which began with the following statement:

It is surprising that during World War II the USSR did not attempt any large-scale airborne operations. . . its wartime operations were confined to a commitment of small units.... for the purpose of supporting partisan activities and which had no direct tactical or strategic effect.13

The study went on to mention a rumored air drop along the Dnieper in 1943 but could provide few details of the drop.

A little over a year later Reinhardt discovered his error and put together another manuscript describing the extensive airborne operations the Soviets conducted within the context of the Moscow counteroffensive and adding details to his description of the abortive Soviet Dnieper airborne drop in 1943.14 Recently the Office of the Chief of Military History republished the original pamphlet describing the lack of Russian airborne activity. Reinhardt's revised manuscript remains unpublished.

A DA pamphlet entitled German Defensive Tactics against Russian Break-throughs contained similar errors.15 In a chapter describing a delaying action conducted between 5-24 August 1943 the authors mistakenly stated that German forces abandoned the city of Khar'kov on 18 August when, in fact, the correct date was 23 August.16 Such errors intermixed with accurate date cast serious doubt on the validity of these works as a whole. Despite these errors, most the pamphlets have been reprinted; and they remain one of the basic sources of data about the Red Army. Moreover, they provided impressions of the characteristics of the Russian soldier which have become an integral part of our current stereotype of the Soviet soldier.

- One of the principal deficiencies of all genres of German postwar accounts of fighting on the Eastern Front written during the 1950's was the almost total absence of Soviet operational data. The forces German army groups, armies, corps, and divisions engaged appeared as faceless masses, a monolith of field grey manpower supported by seemingly endless ranks of artillery and, by the end of the war, solid columns of armor. The facelessness of these Soviet masses, lacking distinguishable units and any individually concerning unit mission or function, reinforced the impression conveyed in these German works that Soviet masses, inflexibly employed in unimaginative fashion, simply ground down German power and finally inundated the more capable and artfully controlled German forces. The Soviet steamroller plod into eastern Europe leaving in its wake endless ranks of dead and wounded. That psychological image of the Soviets portrayed in German works has persisted ever since. Moreover, this panorama of operations against a faceless foe clouds the issue of correlation of forces and enables the writers to claim almost constant overwhelming enemy force superiority, whether or not it really existed. All of these memoirs and pamphlets appeared before German archival materials were available, hence they were written without benefit of the rich archival data on Soviet forces and operational methods found in these wartime archives.

In the 1960's reputable trained historians began producing accounts of action on the Eastern Front. These works were better than the earlier ones but still lacked balance. They were based primarily on German sources but did contain some material on the Soviets obtained from German archival sources. Some were written by individuals who spent considerable time in the Soviet Union during the war.

Alexander Werth drew upon his experiences in the wartime Soviet Union to produce Russia at War and a number of shorter works.17 Although these writings contained little operational data they did present the Soviet perspective as they focused on the suffering and hardship endured by the Russian people and on the resulting bravery as they overcame those conditions.

Alan Clark's survey account of the war in the East, entitled Barbarossa, contained more operational detail.18 However, it still lacked any solid body of Soviet data. Moreover Clark displayed a tendency others would adopt - that is to cover the first two years of war in detail but simply skim over events during the last two years of war. In fact, of the 506 page book, over 400 pages concern the earlier period. This reflected an often expressed judgment that there was little reason to study operations late in the war because the machinations of Hitler so perverted the ability of German commanders to conduct normal reasonable operations.

The U.S. Army Center for Military History made a commendable effort to correct this imbalance by publishing Earl Ziemke's work entitled Stalingrad to Berlin.19 This work, given the available source material, was a sound and scholarly one. Ziemke surveyed operations from November 1942 to the close of war, generally from a strategic and high level operational perspective. While relying on German sources, he based his research on German archival materials and did include material from the, by now, emerging Soviet accounts of operations. In so doing Ziemke expanded the American view of the war in the East and began to dispel some of the more serious errors found in earlier German accounts.

Ziemke and others who followed him with writings on the Eastern Front were helped immeasurable by Soviet historians work on the war--work which began in the late 1950's and accelerated in the 1960's. Those new works, about which I will have more to say later, although of mixed quality, added a new but essential dimension to historiography of the war. Most good historians took cognizance of them in their work. By the 1970's enough of these works existed to provide a more balanced vision of the war.

In the early seventies Paul Carell, a German author writing under a pen name, finished publication of a two volume study of Eastern Front operations entitled Hitler Moves East and Scorched Earth.20 These works, written in appealing journalistic style, contained more German operational detail and tapped numerous accounts by individual German officers and soldiers who served in tactical units. Although Carell's works were heavily German in their perspective, they did contain an increased amount of Soviet materials. Their lively narrative form has made them influential works among the reading public.

In a more scholarly vein, Col. Albert Seaton published two works, The Russo-German War and The Battle of Moscow which projected Ziemke's work down to the tactical level.21 By exploiting the official records of particular German divisions Seaton added a new dimension to the descriptions of war at the tactical level. Like Carell, Seaton tempered his German perspective somewhat by using data from a limited number of Soviet sources.

The works of John Erickson have been the most influential ones to appear since 1960. They have broken the stranglehold which the German perspective had over Eastern Front historiography and have integrated into that historiography a comprehensive description of the Soviet perspective on the war, particularly at the strategic and operational levels. His first work, the Soviet High Command, for the first time shed light on the events of the summer of 1941.22 His subsequent two books, The Road to Stalingrad and The Road to Berlin, recounted in considerable detail the course of war from June 1941 to May 1945.23 The principal value of these works derives from the fact that they distill information from literally thousands of Soviet works on the war and create from that information a detailed, sometimes frenetic, account of operations in the East. The overwhelming impact of the narrative on the reader reflects the overwhelming scale and scope of war in the East.

Erickson's works critically assess the Soviet sources and reject those that conflict with the most influential and accurate German records. The magnitude of Erickson's research efforts precluded his checking on the accuracy of every tactical detail found in Soviet accounts. Therefore, in some instances, Erickson's details do conflict with reputable German accounts. In addition, Erickson has accepted Soviet data concerning correlation of forces which, in some instances, have been inflated, in particular regarding German strength. Dispute these minor faults Erickson's effort to produce a Soviet view of the war has accomplished the major feat of providing readers with more balanced sources upon which to reach judgments concerning combat in the East. Unfortunately the size and complexity of Erickson's works precludes their appeal to a broad readership among the general public. Future historians will have the task of integrating Erickson's view with those of the host of other memoir writers and historians who wrote from the German perspective.

Across the span of time from 1945 to the present, despite the work of Erickson and a few others, the German view of war on the Eastern Front has predominated. In part, this has resulted from a natural American parochialism that tended to discount or ignore the importance of operations in the East in the overall scheme of war. During the earlier postwar period the German view prevailed by default. Numerous German accounts appeared, and nothing in the way of Soviet material appeared to contradict them. By the 1960's, when Soviet accounts began to appear, the German view was firmly entrenched. Moreover, the cold war atmosphere often prompted out of hand rejection of the Soviet version of war. The German view, sometimes accurate, often apologetic or accusative, and usually anti-Soviet, prevailed. As a result, this view was incorporated into high school and college textbooks and into the curriculum of U.S. military educational institutions. Most important, is provided a context within which to judge the contemporary Soviet military. Only today is that view increasingly being challenged. Those challenges are made possible by intensified Soviet publication efforts, efforts that are slowly raising from obscurity details of Soviet operations on the Eastern Front. These Soviet publication efforts, however, must overcome serious barriers if they are to produce a view which can complement the German perspective and produce a more balanced picture of war on the Eastern Front.

Soviet Sources: Perceptions and Reality

American perceptions of the war on the Eastern Front have been shaped in part by the course of Soviet historiography on the war. As stated earlier, the Soviet reticence of address operations in detail during the immediate postwar period left the field open for the German perspective, which in turn predominated. Soviet efforts to set the record straight began in the late 1950's and continue today but have only partially tempered that German view.

Three principal barriers exist to block or inhibit Soviet historical efforts from influencing the American perspective. The barriers are, in sequence: a lack of knowledge in the West concerning Soviet historical work, the language barrier, and a basic distrust of the credibility of Soviet works. The first two of these barriers are mechanical and can be easily addressed. The third is more fundamental and more difficult to overcome.

Most Americans and Westerners are soon unaware of the scope of Soviet historical efforts. They assume that the Soviet reticence to talk openly of operational matters, characteristic of the period prior to 1958, continues today. In fact, Soviet historical efforts have increased geometrically, and Western audiences need to be educated to that fact. The fact that most of these works are only in Russian inhibits that education. To remedy this problem more Americans need to learn Russian (an unlikely prospect), or more Soviet works will have to appear in English. Increased research by American military historians using Soviet sources can also contribute to overcoming this first barrier. The second barrier is a physical one regarding language. If a source cannot be read, it makes little difference whether or not it is available or, for that matter, credible. The only remedy to this barrier is more extensive translation and a publicizing of Soviet sources by their use in more detailed historical monographs.,

The third barrier, involving credibility, is more fundamental. It is, in part, an outgrowth of ideological differences which naturally breed suspicion on the part of both parties. It is also a produce of the course of Soviet war historiography which itself is subject to criticism, depending on the period during which the Soviet sources appeared.

In the immediate postwar years, from 1945 to 1958 few Soviet military accounts appeared about operations on the Eastern Front.24 Those that did appear were highly politicized and did not contain the sort of operational detail which would make them attractive to either the casual reader or the military scholar. Indeed, they were of little use to the military student (Soviet or foreign), which may, in part, explain their paucity of accurate detai1.

Beginning in 1958 more accurate and useful accounts began appearing in a number of forms. From its inception, Soviet Military History Journal has Bought to publish high quality articles on relevant military experiences at all levels of war.25 The journal after 1958 immediately began investigation of a series of burning questions, perhaps the most important of which was an investigation of the nature of the initial period of war, (Nachalny period voini), a topic noticeably ignored in earlier Soviet work. Military History Journal has since focused on practical, realistic questions within a theoretical context. It has personified the Soviet penchant for viewing military affairs as a continuum within which individual issues must be viewed in a historical context.

In 1958 the first Soviet general history of the war appeared, Platonov' History the Second World War.26 This volume, for the first time, addressed Soviet wartime failures which had been almost totally overlooked in earlier years. For example, it openly referred to the abortive Soviet offensive at Khar'kov in May 1942, a subject hitherto apparently too sensitive to talk about. Platonov offered few real details of these failures but did break the ice regarding a candid reference to failures in general which represented a quantum leap in the candor of Soviet sources.

At the same time Soviet authors resumed a wartime tendency to teach by use of combat experience. Kolganov's Development of Tactics of the Soviet Army in the Great Patriotic War, published in 1958, contained a thorough review of wartime tactics by combat example.27 This didactic work sought to harness experience in the service of education and did so by drawing upon a wealth of tactical detail, some of it relating to failure as well as success. Kolganov's accounts, although fragmentary, seemed to affirm a Soviet belief that one learns from failure as well as success; and, if one is to be educated correctly (scientifically), details must be as accurate as possible in both cases.

After 1958 a flow of memoir literature, unit histories, and operational accounts began that has continued, and, in fact, intensified, to the present. The Soviets have sought to capture the recollections of wartime military leaders at every level of staff and command. These include valuable memoirs of individuals at the STAVXA level (Shtemenko, Vasilevsky, Zhokov), front level (Rokossovsky, Konev, Meretskov, Yerememko, Bagramyan), army level (Moskalenko, Chuikov, Krylov, Batov, Galitsky, Grechko, Katukov, Lelyushenko, Rotmistrov), and at the corps level and below.28 Soviet military historians have logged the experiences of many Soviet units including armies, tank armies, corps (tank, mechanized, and rifle), divisions, and even regiments and separate brigades, although with a few notable exceptions.29 Memoir literature has also extended into the realm of the supporting services (air, navel, engineer, signal, etc).

Over time some excellent operational studies have appeared focusing on major operations (Moscow, Stalingrad, Kursk, Belorussia), on lesser operations (Novgorod-Luga, Eastern Pomerania, Donbas), and on specific sectors in larger operations.30 Written by academic historians (Samsonov) or military historians (Zhilin, Galitsky, Sidorenko) many of these are first rate works containing massive amounts of, for the most part, accurate detail. Building upon the memoirs, unit histories, and operational studies were valuable functional works which distilled the sum total of those experiences. These studies included general military histories and histories of operational art (Semenov, Strokov, Bagramyan, Krupchenko), operational and tactical studies based on combat experiences (Radzievsky, Kurochkin), studies on the use of armored and mechanized forces (Rotmistrov, Babadzhanyan, Radzievsky, Losik), treatices on operational art and tactics (Sldorenko, Savkin, Reanichenko), and studies on numerous other topics relating to combat support.31

New general histories of the Great Patriotic War and World War II, have appeared since 1960. A six volume history of the war in the East provided a more candid view of political issues of the war than earlier war histories and added some operational details hitherto not revealed.32 Its size, however, limited coverage of lower level operational or tactical detail. An eleven volume history of World War II was politically less candid but did add another measure of detail to accounts at the strategic and operational levels.33

Thus it is apparent that massive amounts of Soviet military data concerning operations on the Eastern Front do exist. Moreover, the sum total of that information, as Erickson has demonstrated, forms an impressive picture of operations in the East. On balance much of that information is accurate as well.

There are however, some problems with these sources, just as is the case with German sources, that must be critiqued if one wishes to prevent creating a Soviet bias similar to the earlier German bias I described.

First, Soviet works tend to contain a high political or ideological content. In essence, they are intended to indoctrinate as well as teach. In theory, of course, war, in all its detail, is a continuum of the political and, hence, ideological context. Thus the political content is understand- able, if not obligatory. A critical reader must recognize what is political and what is not and must not allow his judgment of the one to affect his judgment of the other. He must also realize that many of these works, especially the briefer and more popular ones, are written to inspire. Thus, interspersed with operational and tactical fact are inevitable examples of individual or unit self sacrifice and heroism (which may or may not be accurate). The tendency of the Western reader is to note the often romanticized single act and reject also the account of action surrounding it.

Soviet military works written before 1958 were highly politicized and focused heavily on the positive role of Stalin in every aspect of war.34 Correspondingly, operational and tactical detail was lacking. After 1958 the political content of military works diminished as did emphasis on the "cult of personality," leaving more room for increasing amounts of operational and tactical detail. Since that time the political content of military works has varied depending on the nature of the work and the audience it intended to address. Hence the briefer the article and the less sophisticated the audience, the higher was the political content. First-rate operational and tactical studies limited political coverage to the role of the party structure in planning and conducting operations.

Soviet military writers also have tended to accentuate the positive, to cover successful operations in more detail than unsuccessful ones. Thus, until recently, little was written about the border battles of June-July 1941, about the Khar'kov and Kerch operations in May 1942, about the Donbas and Khar'kov operations of February-March 1943, and about the warning stages of many successful operations.35 Likewise, few unit histories have appeared of armies which operated on secondary directions in the period 1943-1945.36

The Soviets in the early sixties began noting these failures, saying, for example, that in May 1942 Soviet forces launched an offensive at Khar'kov but the offensive was unsuccessful. This is certainly correct but not very helpful to one who wishes to learn from failures. As time has passed more material has appeared concerning these failures (for example, a chapter from Moskalenko's Na yugozapadnom napravlenil (On the southwestern direction) provides considerably more detail on the Khar'kov disaster.

A similar pattern emerged in Soviet treatment of their own airborne experiences, which were notable for their lack of success. There were few references to those failures prior to 1964. Yet by 1976 most of the unpleasant details were public, although romanticized a bit.

Very naturally Soviet interpretation of operations have often differed sharply from the German. In fact, over time differences in interpretation have appeared within the circle of Soviet military writers. In the case of memoir material this takes the form of debates over the rationale for and the outcome of operations - debates conducted by competing memoirs.37

One is struck in Soviet accounts by the accuracy of facts, principally concerning unit, place, and time. Soviet sources in this regard invariable match up with the operational and tactical maps found in German (or Japanese) unit archives. It is apparent in some cases that Soviet military historians have made extensive use of such German archival materials in preparing their own studies.38 Less unanimity exists over what actually occurred at a given place and at a given time. Just as is the case in some German accounts, towns abandoned by the enemy were "taken after heavy fighting," and units driven back in disarray simply "withdrew to new positions."39

Especially striking are those frequent cases where low level Soviet accounts precisely match German accounts. In a history of the 203rd Rifle Division the author described the operations of that unit in the frenetic post-Stalingrad days of December 1942 when Soviet forces pressed German units southward from the Don and Chir Rivers toward the rail line running from Tatsinskaya to Morozovsk.40 The 203rd Rifle Division was ordered to advance by forced march about 50 kilometers, cross the Bystraya River, and reach an encircled Soviet armored force at Tatsinskaya. The author described the action as the worn division, by now running short of ammunition, reached the ridge line north of the Bystraya. There it confronted an advancing force of German armor and infantry dispatched north of the river. The German force, estimated at 15 tanks, struck two regiments of the 203rd Rifle Division which, because of ammunition shortages, were forced to withdraw several kilometers. Just as he was fearing for the fate of his division the Soviet divisional commander contacted a nearby antitank company which provided the division supporting fire. Miraculously the German force broke contact and withdrew south of the river. This Soviet account did not mention the designation of the German unit.

In a casual interview with a former lieutenant from 6th Panzer Division, which fought along the Bystraya River in late December 1942, I asked the lieutenant about his unit's operations on the day of the events described by the Soviet account.41 He responded that 6th Panzer dispatched an armored kampfgruppen north of the Bystraya with about 15 tanks and supporting infantry in order to disrupt the Soviet advance to and across the river. He was in the task force. The force struck a Soviet unit, elements of which withdrew after desultory firing. The German unit pursued a short distance until it came under fire from an undetected Soviet artillery unit, fire which stripped the infantry away from the tanks. Fearing the loss of critical armored assets left unprotected by infantry, the Germans withdrew south of the river.

This isolated incident is often typical of the complementary nature of Soviet and German (and Japanese) accounts regarding unit, place, and time. It also vividly underscores the necessity, or at least the desirability of having both sides of the story.

A major discrepancy between Soviet and German sources concerns the number of forces at the disposal of each side. Examination of both sources and German archival material indicates several tendencies. First, Soviet accounts of their own strength seem to be accurate and reflect the numbers cited in documentation of Fremde Heeres 0st.42 Conversely, Soviet sources tend to exaggerate the strength of German forces they opposed. Moreover, Soviet exaggeration of German strength regarding guns and armor is even more severe than in regards to manpower. In part, this results from the Soviet practice of counting German allies, auxiliary forces, and home guards (Volksturm) units. But even counting these forces, Soviet estimates of German strength, when compared with the strengths shown by OKH records, are too high.43 Just as the Germans exaggerate when they cite routine Soviet manpower preponderance of between 8:1 and 17:1, so also do Soviet sources exaggerate Soviet-German strength ratios as being less than 3:1 and often 2:1 up to 1945 when higher ratios were both justified and recognized by Soviet sources. For example, the Japanese armored strength of about 1500 tanks cited in Soviet works on Manchuria exceeded tenfold the actual Japanese armored strength, which, in addition, was comprised of armored vehicles scarcely deserving of the name (and apparently, for that same reason, never used in the operation).

Soviet sources also adversely affect their own credibility with regards to wartime casualty figures. The earlier practice of totally ignoring casualties has begun to erode, but one must look long and hard to find any loss figures, indicating that this is still obviously a delicate question for Soviet writers. Gross figures do exist for large scale operations (Berlin, S.E. Europe, Manchuria), and one can infer casualties from reading divisional histories which sometimes give percentages of unit fill before and after operations and company strengths.44 Comprehensive coverage of this issue, however, does not exist; and the reader is left to reach his own conclusions (One of which is that the Soviet author has something to hide).

Thus, in addition to the general American (and Western) ignorance of the existence of Soviet source material and the presence of an imposing language barrier, Americans question the credibility of Soviet sources. While this questioning was once valid, it is increasingly less valid as time passes. Soviet sources have some inherent weaknesses; but these weaknesses, over time, have been diminishing. Unfortunately, the American perception of Soviet sources remains negative; and, hence, the American perception of the Eastern Front has changed very little. Only time, more widespread publication of candid operational materials (some of it in English), and more extensive use of those materials by American military historians will alter those perceptions. That alteration will likely be painfully slow.

Conclusions: The Reconciliation of Myths and Realities

The dominant role of German source materials in shaping American perceptions of the war on the Eastern Front and the negative perception of Soviet source materials have had an indelible impact on the American image of war on the Eastern Front. What has resulted in a series of gross judgments treated as truths regarding operations in the East and Soviet (Red) Army combat performance. The gross judgments appear repeatedly in textbooks and all types of historical works, and they are persistent in the extreme. Each lies someplace between the realm of myth and reality. In summary, a few of these judgments are as follows:

- Weather repeatedly frustrated the fulfillment of German operational aims.

- Soviet forces throughout the war in virtually every operation possessed significant or overwhelming numerical superiority.

- Soviet manpower resources were inexhaustible, hence the Soviets continually ignored human losses.

- Soviet strategic and high level operational leadership was superb. However, lower level leadership (corps and below) was uniformly dismal.

- Soviet planning was rigid, and the execution of plans at every level was inflexible and unimaginative.

- Wherever possible, the Soviets relied for success on mass rather than maneuver. Envelopment operations were avoided whenever possible.

- The Soviets operated in two echelons, never cross attached units, and attacked along straight axes.

- Lend lease was critical for Soviet victory. Without it collapse might have ensured.

- Hitler was the cause of virtually all German defeats. Army expertise produced earlier victories (a variation of the post World War I stab in the back. legend).

- The stereotypical Soviet soldier was capable of enduring great suffering and hardship, fatalistic, dogged in defense (in particular in bridgeheads), a master of infiltration and night fighting, but inflexible, unimaginative, emotional and prone to panic in the face of uncertainty.

A majority of Americans probably accept these judgments as realities . In doing so they display a warped impression of the war which belittles the role played by the Red Army. As a consequence, they have a lower than justified appreciation for the Red Army as a fighting force, a tendency which extends, as well, to the postwar Soviet Army. Until the American public (and historians) perception of Soviet source material changes, this overall perception of the war in the East and the Soviet (Red) Army is likely to persist.

Close examination of Soviet sources as well as German archival materials cast many of these judgments into the realm of myth. Recent work done on Eastern Front operations has begun to surface the required evidence to challenge those judgments.45 Continued work on the part of American historians, additional work by Soviet historians, joint work by both parties, and more extensive efforts to make public Soviet archival materials is necessary for that challenging process to bear fruit.

It is clear that no really objective or more complete picture of operations on the Eastern Front is possible without extensive use of Soviet source material. Thus definitive accounts of operations in the East have yet to be written. How definitive they will ultimately be depends in large part on the future candor and scope of Soviet historical efforts.

In the interim it is the task of American historians, drawing upon all sources, Soviet and German alike, to challenge those judgments and misperceptions which are a produce of past historical work. It is clear that the American (Western) perspective regarding war on the Eastern Front needs broadening, in the more superficial public context and in the realm of more serious historical study. Scholarly cooperation among Soviet and American historians, research exchange programs involving both parties, and expanded conferences to share the fruits of historical research would further this end and foster more widespread understanding on both sides.

Endnotes
1. This view is drawn from a review of newspaper coverage of the war by the New York Times but, more important, by local newspapers as well. It is also based on ten year's experience in teaching and listening to a generation of postwar students at the U.S. Military Academy, The U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, and the U.S. Army War College.

2. Despite efforts by the Communist Parties of the United States and Great Britain to publicize the Soviet role in war.

3. Americans also believed, and still believe, the use of the atomic bomb in early August 1945 rendered Soviet operations in Manchuria superfluous.

4. H. Guderian, Panzer keader, (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1957) First edition published in 1952.

5. F. von Mellenthin, Panzer Battles: A Study of the Employment of Armor in the Second World War, (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1972) First edition published in 1956.

6. Ibid., 185-186, 209, 233-234, 292-304. Mellenthin did, however, note the tremendous improvements in Soviet armored capability during wartime and noted, "The extraordinary development of the Russian tank arm deserves the very careful attention of students of war."

7. Ibid., 175-185.

8. One of the few Soviet accounts of action along the Chir River is found in K. K. Rokossovsky, ea., Velikaya pobeda na Volge (The Great Victory on the Volga), (Moskva: Voenizdat, 1960), 307-309. An indicator of reduced 1st Tank Corps strength is apparent from German situation maps, see Lagenkarte XXXXVIII Pz-Kps, 7.12.42 through 12.12.42.

9. Particularly in Mellenthin's brief account of operations in the Donbas in February 1943. The map and text provide incorrect positions for two divisions of II SS Panzer Corps.

10. E. von Manstein, Lost Victories, (Chicago, Ill: Henry Regnery, 1958).

11. Manstein cites force ration as being 8:1 in favor of the Soviets opposite Army Groups Don and B and 4:1 against Army Groups Center and North. Fremde Heeres 0st documents dated 1 April 1943 give the ratios of just over 2:1 against Army Groups South and A and 3:2 against Army Groups Center and North. The overall German estimate of Soviet superiority on that date was just under 2:1. See Fremde Heeres 0st Kraftegegenuberstellung: Stand 1.3.43.

12. For example, H. Schroter, Stalingrad, (London: Michael Joseph, 1958).

13. DA Pamphlet No. 20-232, Airborne Operations: A German Appraisal, (Department of the Army, October 1951), 36.

14. H. Reinhardt, "Russian Airborne Operatio

PANZERGRENADIER TACTICS

I thought this bit on PANZERGRENADIER TACTICS might prove of some interest, as probably the German Motorised/Panzergrenadier divisions were amongst the most versatile of the War.

Guderian always accepted that tanks could not operate alone effectively. Despite anti-infantry weaponry-usually machine guns-a tank was always vulnerable to small groups or even lone infantrymen if they were determined enough. This vulnerability was increased if the infantry had access to decent anti-tank guns or devices, but even poorly-equipped foot soldiers could prove a real danger if they had the requisite courage. Finnish tank-killing infantry destroyed about 1600 Soviet AFVs/Tanks during the Winter War of 1939-40, mostly using Molotov cocktails or even petrol filled vodka bottles. Tanks proved particularly at risk in broken terrain, such as forests and urban areas and the Finns exploited this.

When Tanks were fighting through defensive lines or moving through landscape that provided the enemy with good cover, they needed accompanying infantry to go in first to clear the way or make a breakthrough in the enemy line so the Tanks could then exploit. Thus the Panzergrenadier might very often have to fight like a conventional infantryman. Conversely, in a fast-moving advance that usually characterised German Blitzkriegtactics he might find himself carried by a halftrack, lorry or motorcycle, or in extreme circumstances, hanging from the tank itself, ready to dismount and engage anything that slowed the Tank. Whenever tanks bypassed points or 'pockets' of stiff enemy resistance, it was the job of the Panzergrenadier to clear up these pockets.

Although the classic image of the Panzergrenadier is intimately associated with the SD KFZ 251 half-tracked armoured personnel carrier, there were never enough of these vehicles to equip panzergrenadier formations to full strength. The concept of a carrier-borne attack into the heart of the enemy's defences accompanying the tanks was the ideal, but the reality was somewhat more mundane. Most Panzergrenadiers were transported in soft-skinned vehicles like trucks and motorcycles. These were very vulnerable and thus caution was required when following tanks. There were no half-tracks available in the Polish campaign, and later in the War very few Pazergrenadier divisions had a full complement of these vehicles. Even within the Panzer divisions, only 1 battalion in 2 would be so equipped.

Therefore instead of driving into the midst of the enemy position, the Panzergrenadiers. normally debussed at a forming-up point or start line away from the enemy's line of sight. They then attacked in the conventional manner of infantry supporting tanks. The key tactical advantage was that because of their motorisation, they could be brought into battle as soon as they were needed.

It was only at the time of Barbarossa in 1941 that large numbers of SD KFZ 251s became widely available and enough to equip full battallions of Panzergrenadierswithin a Panzer division. Now, the Germans could experiment with fighting directly from their half-tracks. Although the SD KFZ 251 provided decent protection against small arms fire, they only had 13mm of armoured plate. Thus they became vulnerable to even the smallest calibre anti-tank weapon and suffered accordingly. Due to heavy losses suffered amongst half-tracks when accompanying Tanks into the heart of a battle, the Germans fairly quickly resorted to debussing at least 400m or so in front of enemy positions, when using the SD KFZ 251. Nonetheless, under certain tactical conditions, the half-track could provide a useful firing position.

At the lowest level, the basic Panzergrenadier unit was the gruppe or squad, usually about 12 men mounted in a half-track or often a truck. The squad was led by a squad leader, usually a junior NCO eg a corporal, who was armed with a machine pistol and was responsible for the squad to the platoon commander. On the move, he also commanded the vehicle and fired the vehicle mounted machine gun, usually an MG 34/42. His rifle-armed assistant was normally a lance-corporal and could lead the half squad if it was divided. The squad contained 2 light machine-gun teams, each of 2 men, four rifle-armed infantrymen and the driver and co-driver. The driver was also responsible for the care of the vehicle and expected to remain with the transport. A Panzergrenadier platoon was made up of 3 squads, with the platoon HQ in a separate vehicle. The HQ troop consisted of a platoon commander, usually a junior officer but sometimes a sergeant, a driver, a radio-operator, 2 runners, a medic and usually some form of anti-tank gun.

When the squad was transported by a half-track, the vehicle was mounted from the rear. The deputy squad leader was responsible for closing the door, thus he would sit towards the rear of the vehicle and the squad leader would sit at the front.

These vehicles were open-topped, and on the move it was usual for one man to scan the skies constantly for aircraft, whilst others kept a watch on both sides of the vehicle. When a platoon was driving together, close order, for the convoy was usually 5-10m apart in column or even abreast in open country. In combat, however, the gaps were extended to beyond 50m, and ragged lines or chequered formations were used. If the whole battalion was deployed, the preferred formation was often an 'arrowhead'. On the whole, troop-carrying vehicles rarely averaged more than 30km per hour road speed. Even under ideal conditions, a panzer division was not expected to advance more than 20km in a day.

The SD KFZ 251, drivers were prepared to simply ignore or drive through small arms fire, but the presence of enemy artillery or anti-tank guns usually saw them seek cover. The squad's machine-gunners might well engage targets on the move, as could the rest of the squad if necessary from the sides. Often when advancing, the SD KFZ 251s, could utilise a motorised version of fire and movement, advancing, stopping and firing to cover other half-tracks. A halted half-track provided a good firing position but was vulnerable. As a result, it was not recommended to stop for more than 15-20seconds in hostile terrain. The normal dismounting procedure was via the rear of the vehicle. However, in emergencies, the squad might well jump over the side as well as out of the back. This was often performed on the move at slow speeds. Once dismounted, the Panzergrenadiers fought as normal infantry. Improvements in Soviet anti-tank defences as the war advanced meant that the Panzergrenadiers often had to precede the tanks, or a mixed force of tanks and soldiers might move forward to clear enemy defences.

One of the most important German formations developed during the Soviet campaign was the PULK, a contraction of Panzer und lastkraftwagen, meaning tanks and trucks. This was a hollow wedge of tanks inside which moved the mororized infantry. The point of the wedge was formed by the best tanks and the sides by other tanks and self-propelled guns. When the wedge pierced the enemy defences, it widened the gap as it passed through. The Panzergrenadiers were then able to spread out and attack remaining areas of resistance from the flanks and rear. If the enemy's weakest point had not been identified, the PULK could advance as a blunt quadrangle. Once a weak spot was found, the formation could incline left or right, its corner becoming the 'point of advance'.

Although the Panzergrenadiers key role was co-operation with Tanks they could fight on their own. The very flexibility was a vital component of their value. They could fight as infantry offensive and defensive actions, assault vital strongpoints, seize bridges and clear urban or wooded areas in which the Tanks were at risk. Essentially the Panzergrenadiers was part of an all-arms team. His role grew out of the German acceptance that the Tank could not win battles alone. To quote Wilhelm Necker in 1943: 'The Germans at an early stage in the war and even before the war understood the special weakness of the tank: its dependency on terrain and the fact it cannot occupy, but can only strike hard and break through lines. For this reason, the actual tank force was cut down to the minimum and the division reinforced with various other units, the most important being the Panzergrenadier.'

Fleischer, Wolfgang: "Die motorisierten Schutzen und Panzergrenadiere des deutschen Heeres, 1935-1945. Waffen-Fahrzeuge-Gliederung-Einsatze", Podzun Pallas Verlag, Wolfersheim, 2000,

Riemann, Horst: "Deutsche Panzergrenadiere",
Mittler&Sohn Verlag, Herford, 1989,

Scheibert, Horst: "Panzergrenadiere, Kradschutzen und Panzeraufklarer 1935 - 1945", Podzun Pallas Verlag, Friedberg, ca. 1984,

Lucas/Cooper: "Panzergrenadiere im 2.Weltkrieg",
Motorbuch Verlag, Stuttgart, 1.Auflage, 1981,

Redmon/Cuccarese: "Panzergrenadiers in action", Broschur, Squadron/Signal Publications, (engl.) Carrollton, Texas, USA, 1980,

Senger-Etterlin,F.: "Die Panzergrenadiere, Geschichte und Gestalt der
mechanisierten Infanterie 1930 - 1960", Lehmanns Verlag, Munchen, 1961

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Peter Shaw's model of a Class 52 (Austerity class) Locomotive

The defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945 was perhaps the most significant event in modern history. From the defeat of Germany, evolved the world we know today. Significantly the freedom we have to express our opinions and to debate topics such as this are the direct result of the actions of millions of brave men and women who fought to defeat Hitler's regime. We owe a great debt to the many who paid the ultimate sacrifice for what we take for granted today.

As much as the defeat of Germany was achieved by force of arms from the Allied nations, defeat also came from within. Germany was not adequately prepared for war in 1939, and the early victories were achieved through the relatively new tactics of Blitzkrieg, modern equipment, superb training and leadership, ineptitude of the enemy and plain good luck.

Significantly Germany's ill preparedness for war manifested itself in the first months of war and by December 1940 was readily apparent in the German transport system which was buckling under the demands of the German armed forces. This was no more apparent than with the Reichbahn, the German railways, an amalgamation of the former state railway systems.

The Reichbahn was forced to absorb a vast network of railways in varying condition, and locomotives and rolling stock that were often incompatible. As there were few common designs the new railway system was burdened by operational problems, increased and often duplicated costs and a maintenance headache of mammoth proportions.

Much of the plant and equipment was built in the late nineteenth century and the early 1900's and had not been modernized because of the Great War, the chaos of the Weimar republic and the Depression. As much as a massive modernization programme was begun, with a view of upgrading track and other facilities, the construction of standardized locomotives and rolling stock, it was not complete by the beginning of war. This problem grew as the war progressed as they advanced deeper into the Soviet Union. Because of the restricted loading gauge and the increased demands of the German forces, the Reichbahn was forced into a never ending cycle of building more locomotives and rolling stock to achieve the task.

With the invasion of the Soviet Union the demands on the railways reached crippling proportions, culminating in the coal shortage of winter 1941/1942. There was no shortage of coal, but a lack of coal wagons which had been appropriated by the Wehrmacht and due to the chaotic conditions at the railheads behind the front these wagons were simply tipped off the tracks to allow space for the following trains.

Equally problematic for the Germans were the loss of over 100,000 trucks and 200,000 horses between the opening of Barbarossa and March 1942. These losses were to have an impact against the chances of success some six months later at Stalingrad.

It was clear such a situation could not continue otherwise the rail system would soon collapse. Albert Speer (Minister for Armaments and Munitions Production) and Erhard Milch (Director of Air Armament&state secretary in the Air Ministry) were charged with setting the railways right, and with brutal efficiency they cleared out the railway administration, sacking the incompetent heads of the railways and throwing out the rule book. To alleviate some of the operational problems, longer and heavier trains were run at faster speeds. An accelerated programme of converting the Russian broad gauge system to the German standard gauge system, the construction of longer passing loops and new railway yards was set in motion.

Short term measures alleviated the crisis, but only a massive construction programme would provide a permanent solution. The effects of the enforced intervention was highly visible in 1943 with the construction of over 4,500 locomotives and nearly 52,000 freight wagons. As formidable as these figures may seem they were never enough to resolve the crisis that engulfed the Deutsche Reichsbahn from 1939 to 1945.

Rheinmetal Borsig were charged with building a family of Austerity class locomotives, all based on standardized designs. One of these locomotives was so successful over ten thousand were built and many remained in service until the end of steam operations in Europe.

All these measures were only partially or such successful as the demands from the various fronts, in particular the Eastern Front, continued to place undue strain on a system that was not designed for such traffic. To transport a fully equipped panzer division could require up to three hundred trains. Multiply that out over the entire Eastern front, coupled with the normal supply demands and it is easy to see why the German railways could not keep up with the demands of war.

In addition the railways had to compete for labour, cope with the burden of transporting Jews, which coincidentally often had priority over trains heading for the front. Until the bombing campaign against the railways intensified in 1943 the system held together. Most aiming points for these raids were on the town centres, where the central railway stations and yards were situated, so as the bombing tempo increased, so did the damage and disruption.

As much as the emergency measures freed up the traffic to and from the Eastern front it was obvious the chain of patched up railway lines leading to the railhead on the river Chir over 100 kilometers west of Stalingrad were incapable of supporting German forces. The track was not well ballasted or in good condition, slowing trains considerably. The Luftwaffe used four trains per day, but this was not enough and many supplies, especially fuel were flown into German held airbases. Further compounding the problems were a rail yard too small to cope with the traffic and the resulting congestion placed great strain on the largely horse drawn vehicles supplying German troops in Stalingrad.

This situation was compounded in late October 1942 when it was obvious the Soviets were preparing an offensive against the flanks of the German forces. To reinforce the 3rd Romanian army, Hitler ordered the 6th Panzer division with two infantry divisions to transfer from France on the 4th November. Nearly one thousand train loads were required for this move east and it was nearly one month later these forces arrived, long after the Soviet offensive had surrounded Paulus' 6th army.

The situation was hardly better in the buildup for Operation Citadel, with lengthy delays of moving the troops and equipment forward. On a smaller scale the sheer difficulties in transporting the new Tiger tanks to the front caused delays, that were only resolved with a combination of ingenuity, skill and a lot of sweat.

By mid 1943 the Allied bomber offensive was causing very real disruption for the railways. Although damage could be repaired relatively quickly by experienced crews, damage was becoming cumulative in some areas where bombing was frequent. Of added concern were the rising casualties amongst train crews, mechanical and maintenance staff along with the various administrative branches that kept the trains running. While the personal strength reached over one and a half million by the end of 1943, the replacement of skilled personal was not easy, as a consequence the standard of maintenance gradually declined and the accident rate which had been on the rise since the beginning of the war, worsened.

This was compounded in early 1944 when after the defeat of the Jagdwaffe in February-March, American fighters after completing escort duties were allowed to attack targets of opportunity. They were so successful in shooting up anything that moved, the Deutsche Reichsbahn reported in June the daily average number of trains wrecked in May by marauding Allied fighters was over forty trains per day! This loss rate was outstripping German production of locomotives and rolling stock, already in decline to the increasing demands of the German armed forces. Now repair crews had to range far and wide over the German countryside, clearing train wrecks and repairing track. The destruction of railway bridges became a further dislocation as these were harder to repair. Another grave concern was the massive loss of experienced train crews, placing further strain on the overburdened system. A worse situation existed in the occupied countries, especially France where the railway system had been damaged beyond repair by Allied airpower in preparation for the D-Day landings. Without the railways the German army was forced to endure lengthy and dangerous road marches attempting to reach the battlefronts.

Fortunately for the Deutsche Reichsbahn Allied air support for the invading forces diverted much airpower away from German targets, however day and night bombing of German cities continued to pummel the railway system. Though the railways operated right till the collapse of the Third Reich, the ability to adequately supply German armed forces in the chaos of the collapse was no fault of the railway crews and staff who performed Herculean efforts to keep the trains running.

The German railways, like German industry was not prepared for war in 1939, and incompetence and poor planning led to the crisis of early 1942. The efforts to alleviate the situation, while tackled with vigour and considerable expense would never make up the shortfalls of the early war years, ensuring the German armed forces could never be adequately supplied to fight a protracted war.

A common factor soon appeared, especially on the Western front, where German armoured columns were forced to drive to the battlefronts because the railways were no longer operational.

By war's end the German railways were a barely functioning shambles, though some services were still operating remarkably efficiently. With the flow of spare parts, replacement troops, fuel, munitions and rations slowed to a trickle by the collapse of the railways the effectiveness of German forces decreased dramatically.

Six years earlier the German railways were hard pressed to supply Germany's war needs and they never were able to. Without an adequate supply chain, no nation can win a war.

The American railroad system

The American railroad system was blessed with a generous loading gauge and consequently with fewer train movements could move greater tonnage. Thus America won the tonnage per mile war, which was to be a critical factor in 1944.

Another factor was the wear and tear on track and equipment. All combatants during the war experienced a decline in the efficiency of their railway systems under the increased traffic demands, America included. By the end of the war, many US railroads were in a bad way from these demands. Consequently in the immediate post war period many railroads were forced to spend heavily on track and plant repairs, replacement of locomotives and rolling stock without any assistance from the US government which was spending its tax dollars on airports and highways.

Consequently some railroads went into insolvency or were forced to amalgamate with their competitors. The replacement of worn out engines was another problem and proved to be prohibitive. Companies were faced with replacing large numbers of steam locomotives, not a cheap option by any stretch of the imagination. Diesel locomotives were a cheap option and the railroads embarked on a massive dieselization programme. Unfortunately for the railroads a lot of the first generation diesels weren't much good and they were forced to replace them within ten years. This was an expense many companies could not afford, indirectly leading to more bankruptcies and forced amalgamation of some railroads.

In consequence the demands of America's war effort had large scale and long terms effects on the US railroads and that was without the dropping of one bomb on the US mainland.

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By Greg Borisko

By the end of July, 1941, the Wehrmacht was on the verge of winning a quick, decisive victory over the Soviet Union. Army Group North had swiftly overrun the Red Army's frontier defenses and had advanced rapidly along the approaches to Leningrad. Army Group Center had also been successful. In short order, both Army Groups had crashed through the frontier defenses and, in the course of their advances, encircled huge numbers of Soviet troops. Army Group South's accomplishments were less spectacular. Progress was slow compared to the other two army groups because of heavy concentrations of Soviet manpower. However, these Soviet forces were effectively pinned down. Stalin was unwilling to lose the resources located in the Ukraine and Donets Basin, which the German Army Group South would have likely captured had Soviet forces been shifted to the north. With two of the best months for campaigning ahead, Germany seemed poised to overwhelm the Soviet colossus in the space of a summer. On the edge of victory though, the German high command became paralyzed over what the next course of action should be. By the time a firm decision was made, the war in the east could not be so easily won. The root of the German problem lay in a lack of strategic direction and an increasingly chaotic command and control system in the highest echelons of the Army. Individual personalities only added to this chaos.

Planning of Operation Barbarossa took a number of forms after the defeat of France and the Luftwaffe's inability to subdue the RAF as the prelude to a full scale amphibious assault on Britain. The major conflict in the planning phase was the gulf between what the Wehrmacht's planners and Hitler believed should be the primary goal of the offensive. The Army High Command (OKH- Oberkommando das Heeres) sought to make Moscow the focus of the upcoming offensive. This proposal adhered to traditional concepts about the conduct of war. OKH correctly assumed that the Soviet Union would concentrate their strength in defense of the capital. Moscow was more than just the capital of the Soviet Union; it was an important industrial center, and major communication and transportation hub. The capture of Moscow would have effectively isolated the greater part of the western Soviet Union from the extensive manpower and physical resources of the Far East. The capture of Moscow would have potentially eliminated the greater part of Soviet military forces in the field and made re-supply, reinforcement and replacement of those remaining more difficult.

The reason for the conflict between OKH and Hitler was that Hitler's attention lay elsewhere. He was far less concerned with purely military objectives. Economic and ideological objectives dominated Hitler's thinking. After the successful conclusion of the battles on the frontiers, Hitler believed the Wehrmacht should strive to capture Leningrad, the birthplace of Bolshevism and capture the resource-rich Ukraine and Donets Basin. Achieving these dual goals would result in the political and economic collapse of the Soviet state. In Hitler's mind the capture of Moscow need not be pursued.

At the beginning of August, these differing visions regarding the further prosecution of the war came into conflict. At a conference at Army Group Center's headquarters in Borisov (August 4, 1941), Hitler met with a number of the commanders from this army and a representative from OKH. The field commanders argued that Moscow should be the objective of the next phase of the campaign. Hitler, however, disagreed, designating Leningrad as the primary objective with either Moscow or the Ukraine to follow. The next goal of Barbarossa now appeared to be set and the campaign would once more move forward. However, German strategy shifted again within the days of this conference.

OKH developed a new plan which argued that a dual goal could be accomplished. Specifically, OKH called for a simultaneous offensive against both Moscow and the Ukraine. Army Group North's attack on Leningrad would be postponed. Army Group Center's thrust along both these axes was to be accomplished by splitting General Heinz Guderian's Panzer Group Two. Guderian, with part of his armour group and supporting infantry was to drive south to aid in the encirclement of Kiev. The remainder of his group would support the main thrust on Moscow conducted by General Herman Hoth's Third Panzer Group. Parts of Guderian's armoured group would replace elements of Hoth's that had been dispatched to Army Group North. Unfortunately, Guderian had not been informed by OKH of this plan to split his Panzer Group. This new operational vision conformed to yet another change in Hitler's strategic focus. Over the course of August, Hitler increasingly saw both the threat and potential of the Ukraine and Crimea. The threat was that the Crimea could become a base for Soviet strategic bombing of Ploesti, Germany's primary source of oil in Rumania. The potential to avoid such strategic bombing lay in gaining the resource rich Ukraine, Donets Basin and Crimea.

After three weeks of delays and strategic indecision, the OKH plan was ready to be presented to Hitler. However on August 23 personality conflicts intervened. On that date, Guderian met with Hitler. Although Guderian stated his case to Hitler about the importance of continuing the advance on Moscow, Hitler would not consider this course having focused on the Ukraine. Eventually, Guderian was told to prepare for the thrust southward. True to his personality, Guderian only requested that his panzer group be kept whole. Hitler agreed. In one act, Guderian had wrecked any hope of pursuing an advance on Moscow in August. Whether Guderian made this request because of ego (being excluded from the main drive on Moscow) or for legitimate military reasons (concentration of force), any hope of the Wehrmacht securing victory in 1941 was lost (see references to Fugate and Guderian below). Only at the end of September did the belated attack on Moscow begin. By then, the lateness of the season and the growing weakness of the Wehrmacht ensured that they would not capture Moscow.

This episode illustrates a problem that would plague German military operations: secrecy between the general staff, field commanders and Hitler. On this occasion, the OKH failed to communicate its plan to commanders in the field and/or to Hitler. Had this plan been communicated to all levels of the command structure, the Kiev battle might not have taken place in isolation but been accompanied by an advance on Moscow. As it was, the head of the OKH, General Halder, became outraged with Guderian. Their relations, Guderian recalled in "Panzer Leader", never improved.

A further problem was the tendency to present overly optimistic reports to Hitler concerning enemy forces. At the August 4 meeting with Hitler, Guderian gave the impression that the Red Army was defeated yet a coherent, stubborn defense was still opposing the Wehrmacht all along the front. Halder, too, was overly optimistic when dealing with Hitler. At the beginning of August, Halder implied that the Red Army was all but defeated yet in the privacy of his diary admitted that fresh Soviet formations were entering the battle on a regular basis. Hitler seized on such rosy thinking and manipulated it to his purposes. At the Orsha Conference (a high level German command meeting held on November 13, 1941, during which the decision to go for Moscow or not should be made in 1941 or to put the Wehrmacht on the defensive for the winter) he turned Halder's earlier rosy assessments into a rational for continuing the push on Moscow despite the onset of winter and the exhaustion of the Wehrmacht (Erickson and Dilks).

Despite winning important victories at the onset of Operation Barbarossa, Hitler and the Wehrmacht were unable to capitalize on their initial successes. The lack of a firm, shared strategic vision to pursue after the initial frontier battles was a blunder of major proportions. Hitler, in particular, was detrimental to his own cause. By placing ideological and economic goals above those of a purely military nature, Hitler's ideas led to the division of his forces. Without concentration, the Wehrmacht was neither strong enough to capture both Leningrad and the Ukraine as Hitler hoped nor take Moscow as OKH argued. Moreover, the Red Army, though it had suffered severe early losses, had not been defeated. Recognizing this, the logical course of action should have been to begin the attack on Moscow in August. Because the majority of Soviet forces were being concentrated for the defence of the capital, their defeat would have allowed Hitler's goals to be achieved more easily in 1942. His repeated clashes with both OKH and field commanders over the course of August was symptomatic of the friction that would paralyze the Wehrmacht later in the Barbarossa campaign and throughout the rest of the war.

Bibliography

Barbarossa by John Erickson and David Dilks - (Difficult to get - provides a good, succinct discussion of the Orsha Conference pp 214-215.)

The Road to Stalingrad by John Erickson

Thunder on the Dnepr by Bryan I. Fugate and Lev Dvoretsky (pp 229-237)

The Decisive Battles of the Western World, 1792-1944 by J.F.C. Fuller - (out of print)

Panzer Leader by Heinz Guderian (pp. 199-202)

History of the Second World War by B.H. Liddell Hart

Lost Victories by Erich von Manstein (Manstein's book provides a reference for the difficulties faced by field commanders as the war progressed. In particular, see the chapter "Hitler as Supreme Commander".)

Makers of Modern Strategy from Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age by Peter Paret

Moscow to Stalingrad: Decision in the East by Earl F. Ziemke and Magna E. Bauer

About the Author

Greg Borisko has been wargaming since the early 80's. He started playing board games (especially Squad Leader) and proceeded to computer games. He is something of a military historian, actually getting Master's in the field, though nobody in the real world really cares. So, Greg went back to technical school to learn electronics. He's married, the father of a dog who may not be of this world and the father to a wonderful little boy. Plans are already in the works to indoctrinate the child to be a fan of the Boston Bruins and Red Sox - just like his dad. Greg recently took a job as a research technician at the University of Saskatchewan where he will be working on radar systems.

In 1940 the German Army started with a huge bunker complex, Wolfsschanze (Wolf's Lair), in the dark woods, east of Rastenburg (now Ketrzyn). Finally the whole complex measured 2.5 km from West to East and 1.5 km from North to South, which makes for a surface of about 3.5 square km, or in other words a complex of 350 ha.

We have projected the plan of this complex on a 1 : 25 000 map from 1938. The squares on the map are 1 x 1 km. The biggest bunker was the bunker where Hitler spent most of his time from September 1941 till November 20, 1944.

In one of the smaller buildings Claus Graf Schenk von Stauffenberg tried to assassinate Hitler with a time-triggered bomb on July 20, 1944. Hitler survived and Colonel von Stauffenberg and accomplices were executed that same day in Berlin.

During the German retreat in January 1945, they attempted to blow up the bunkers, however the concrete was so strong that even today there is still a lot to be seen on the site.

The remains of the complex are located in Poland at the hamlet of Gierłoż (German: Forst Görlitz) near Kętrzyn (German: Rastenburg), although at the time of operation this area was part of the German province of East Prussia, the southern part of which was assigned to the People's Republic of Poland after 1945. It consisted of a group of bunkers and fortified buildings in a thickly wooded area, surrounded by several rings of barbed wire and defensive positions. The complex was served by a nearby airfield. It was built for the 1941 German invasion of the Soviet Union, codenamed 'Operation Barbarossa' (22 June 1941), and abandoned on 25 January 1945 as the Soviet army front line troops approached Wegorzewo (German: Angerburg) located only 15 km away. Hitler arrived on the night of 21 June 1941, and departed for the last time on 20 November 1944. He spent over 800 days there, off and on, during World War II.

The original bunker system was constructed by Organisation Todt, but the enlargement of Wolfsschanze was never finished; the expansion work was stopped only a few days before the Russian advance to Wegorzewo pressured German forces to blow up the entire Wolfsschanze bunker complex just prior to the Wehrmacht retreat westward.

The Wolfsschanze was the location of the failed assassination attempt on Hitler which was carried out by Claus von Stauffenberg on 20 July 1944.

The whole complex was severely damaged by the demolitions carried out during the German retreat because Hitler thought it was too valuable to allow the Soviets to use. Clearance of the large minefields around the site set up by the Germans was carried out from 1945 to 1956 by the Polish Army. Today the complex is a museum, open all year long. Despite the damage, the site remains to this day a notable tourist attraction. A monument to the July 20 plotters can also be found on the site.

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The Versailles Treaty in 1919 prohibited Germany from having an army of more than 100,000 men, all restricted to long-term enlistments (twenty-five years for officers and twelve for other ranks). These troops were organized into seven infantry and three cavalry divisions which conformed to very rigid tables of organization prescribed by the treaty. The infantry divisions each controlled recruiting and training within their particular military district or Wehrkreis. There were in addition two superior commands (Gruppenkommandos) that were responsible for higher-level administration and training. Although the army was prohibited from having a general staff, an agency called the "Troop Office" (Truppendienst) covertly carried out general staff functions, among them conducting secret preparations for general mobilization of a much larger army on the day when Germany could openly rearm once more.

The basic army expansion plan was simple. When mobilization was proclaimed, each unit in the army would be filled up to 300 percent of official strength with new recruits and promptly divide itself in three. So each division would expand into three new divisions, each having a cadre of about one-third regular soldiers to train, season, and steady the new recruits, many of whom would already have had some training through various covert preparatory programs. As a result, Germany would be able to field about thirty divisions quickly. This was the plan in existence when Hitler came to power at the end of January 1933. And it was the plan with which Hitler was able to create the seemingly unstoppable Wehrmacht of 1939-1942. The critical period for the expansion of the Reichswehr into the Wehrmacht was 1934-1935. During this period, while, for example, the old 1st Infantry Division was fissioning into the new 1st, 11th, and 21st Infantry Divisions, Germany was for a time without an effective army. Some astute diplomacy, coupled with a good deal of cowardice in France and Great Britain, enabled Hitler to squeak by without a military showdown, so that, with the addition of some armored divisions, by 1936 the Wehrmacht numbered forty divisions. Over the next few years as Hitler expanded Germany territorially, the army expanded further. What with the Anschluss with Austria (which brought in a half-dozen new divisions) and the annexation of the Sudetenland, by the end of 1938 Germany had fifty-one active divisions. Meanwhile, of course, as men were passed out of the active army and into the reserve, Germany's mobilization potential began to rise.

Of course, this mass army needed officers; fifty-one divisions required about 100,000 of them. There were about 4,000 available from the old Reichswehr, including medical personnel, and 1,000 or so from the former Austrian army, a pool obviously insufficient to meet the need. Recalling thousands of former World War I officers and commissioning many NCOs (after all, the Reichswehr had been highly selective) helped, but was still not enough. In the end, an efficient system of officer-training camps was established. All of this expansion of the army occurred at the same time that the navy was growing and the new air force (the Luftwaffe) was being created, which put further strains on Germany's manpower, not to mention the needs of Hitler's small but growing bodyguard, the Waffen SS. In order to regulate manpower management, on the eve of World War II Hitler fixed an annual allocation of personnel, with the army to get 66 percent of all new recruits (including about six thousand for the Waffen SS), the navy, 9 percent, and the air force, 25 percent.

Recruitment and training were the responsibility of the Wehrkreis. This system was extremely efficient. For example, Austria's six million inhabitants, who constituted a single Wehrkreis, yielded sixteen infantry divisions, a panzer division, seven Alpine divisions, and seven depot and reserve divisions in the course of the war, not to mention recruits for the air force and the navy. Divisions in the field received replacements from their Wehrkreis of origin and were often sent back home to recuperate their strength. The 26th Infantry Division, from the XXI Wehrkreis in the Rhineland, was more or less destroyed in combat nine times, each time being restored back to strength by fresh drafts from the Rhineland.

In addition to an efficient mobilization system, the German Army raised units by "waves." Each wave consisted of a number of newly raised or newly reorganized divisions, all of which were organized and equipped in precisely the same way. The idea was that in an army of literally hundreds of divisions all a senior commander had to know about an outfit was its wave, since that would tell him when it was raised, and hence how much training it had (older units having more than new ones), what its manpower and equipment allocations were, and how it was organized.

For example, 2nd Wave divisions were raised from reservists in August 1939, on a T/O&E (table of organization & equipment) similar to that of the prewar 1st Wave, with fewer light machine guns and no mortars. The 3rd Wave, raised at that time from the Landwehr (militia), was like the 1st Wave, with fewer engineers, signalmen, and other combat support elements. The 4th Wave, raised simultaneously from newly conscripted manpower, was like the 2nd but lacked a lot of combat support elements, and the 5th Wave, raised from older reservists during the Polish campaign (September-October 1939), had mostly Czech equipment. Waves contained from four to twenty-two divisions. The first thirty-two waves (divisions raised up to the autumn of 1944) were numbered, but the half dozen or so subsequent ones received glorious names, perhaps so that the men would not wonder what happened to the guys in the previous thirty-two waves. This was the system with which the German armed forces began World War II. Despite some obvious faults, it was logical and orderly. However, mounting casualties, the deteriorating strategic and political situation, and the peculiar internal political character of the Third Reich soon began to create problems.

Probably the biggest flaw in Germany's mobilization and manpower management arrangements was the desire of various leaders (both political and military) to build "private" armies for political purposes.

Heinrich Himmler's Waffen SS was the first and most obvious example of this. Originally a relatively small contingent of Nazi party troops earmarked as Hitler's personal bodyguards and triggermen, the Waffen SS soon expanded into a self-contained army approaching 10 percent of Germany's military manpower by late 1944, but including fully 25 percent of the panzer and mechanized divisions. So desperate did Himmler become for manpower that he secured a monopoly on recruitment of the Volksdeutsch, the numerous German residents, in other nations, and then began to recruit from "Germanic non- Germans" such as Swedes, Danes, and Dutchmen, then from "Non- Germanic Aryans" such as Frenchmen, Belgians, Spaniards, and Italians, and finally from the very "Untermenchen" themselves, the allegedly inferior Slavic Croatians, Bosnians, and Ukrainians, and African, Asian, and Indian prisoners of war, not to mention Arab volunteers. In fact, about the only people not consciously used were Jews and Gypsies, although some of them got in anyway, disguising themselves as Germans in order to hide among their enemies.

The Luftwaffe proved yet another drain on Germany's manpower. Hermann Goring very early established the notion that anything associated with the air was part of his air force, including not merely aircrews and base personnel, but also antiaircraft, parachute, and air base security troops, not to mention his own personal bodyguard. However, since the Luftwaffe eventually lost air superiority, it gradually came to have far more men than it needed. Adamantly opposed to transferring these troops to the army, Goring secured Hitler's permission to organize them into Luftwaffefeldivisionen, (air force field divisions). Fully twenty-two of these were raised. Commanded by erstwhile airmen, with no veteran cadres, virtually all of them disintegrated upon their first contact with the enemy, mostly in Russia. Of course, some air force units did perform well, the eleven parachute divisions and the "Hermann Goring Panzer-Parachute Division," which was the largest division ever committed to combat (so large, in fact, it was later split into two). But, as with the Waffen SS formations, these units were oversized, with more men (and better men) and more equipment than comparable regular army divisions.

This was an extremely inefficient use of manpower and equipment. Germany raised about 761 divisions during the war (about 670 army, 48 Waffen SS, 40 Luftwaffe, and 3 Navy); the imprecision is due to the fact that a great many "divisions" were raised during the closing weeks of Hitler's Gotterdammerung, few of which had very many troops. About 110 of these were destroyed in action and fully 1 73, virtually all army, were disbanded due to severe losses. This was an enormous waste. New divisions consumed manpower and equipment that would have best been used to rebuild the cadres, however depleted, of old ones. The 22 Luftwaffefeldivisionen had sufficient manpower and equipment to have restored 100 regular army infantry divisions to full strength, considering "normal" losses. Imagine the possible beneficial effects of distributing among the regular army divisions the physically and intellectually superior personnel who composed the bulk of the manpower funneled into the air force and Waffen SS divisions, even allowing for the allegedly inferior qualities of the many "Untermenchen" which the latter contained.

German Welle Lists

1939

1.Welle (standing army): 1st, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th, 11th, 12th, 14th, 15th, 16th, 17th, 18th, 19th, 21st, 22nd, 23rd, 24th, 25th, 26th, 27th, 28th, 30th, 31st, 32nd, 33rd, 34th, 35th, 36th, 44th, 45th, 46th

2.Welle: 52nd, 56th, 57th, 58th, 61st, 62nd, 68th, 69th, 71st, 73rd, 75th, 76th, 78th, 79th, 86th, 87th

3.Welle: 206th, 207th, 208th, 209th, 210th, 211th, 212th, 213th, 214th, 215th, 216th, 217th, 218th, 221st, 223rd, 225th, 227th, 228th, 231st, 239th, 246th

4.Welle: 251st, 252nd, 253rd, 254th, 255th, 256th, 257th, 258th, 260th, 262nd, 263rd, 267th, 268th, 269th

5.Welle: 93rd, 94th, 95th, 96th, 98th

6.Welle (czech equipment): 81st, 82nd, 83rd, 88th

Conversions from grenz/polizei(1939): 50th, 60th, 72nd, 205th, 311th

1940

7.Welle (jan 1940): 161st, 162nd, 163rd, 164th, 167th, 168th, 169th, 170th, 181st, 183rd, 196th, 197th, 198th, 199th

8.Welle (jan/feb 1940): 290th, 291st, 292nd, 293rd, 294th, 295th, 296th, 297th, 298th, 299th

"Oberrhein" Divisions (feb 1940): 554th, 555th, 556th, 557th

These divisions were disbanded after the French campaign

9.Welle (mar 10, 1940): 351st, 358th, 365th, 372nd, 379th, 386th, 393rd, 395th, 399th

These divisions were disbanded after the French campaign

10.Welle (may 1940, not completed): 270th, 271st, 272nd, 273rd, 276th, 277th, 278th, 279th, 280th

11.Welle (july 1940): 121st, 122nd, 123rd, 124th, 125th, 126th, 129th, 131st, 132nd, 134th, 137th

12.Welle (aug 1940): 97th, 98th, 100th, 101st, 102nd, 106th, 110th, 111th, 112th, 113th

13.Welle (oct 1940): 302nd, 304th, 305th, 306th, 319th, 320th, 321st, 323rd, 327th

14.Welle (nov 1940): 333rd, 335th, 336th, 337th, 339th, 340th, 342nd

1941

15.Welle (apr 1941): 702nd, 704th, 707th, 708th, 709th, 710th, 711th, [/size][/size]712th, 713th, 714th, 715th, 716th, 717th, 718th, 719th

16.Welle (Juni 1941): 201.-204.Sich.Div. (202.Sich.Div. disbanded)

17.Welle (Dez.1941): 328.-331.ID

18.Welle (Jan.1942): 383.-385., 387., 389.ID (385.disbanded)

19.Welle (März 1942): 370.. 371., 376., 377.ID

20.Welle (Juli 1942): 38., 39., 65.ID

21.Welle (Okt.1943): 349., 352., 353., 357., 359., 361., 362., 367. Dez.: 363., 364. (364. formation abandoned - elements to 367.)

22.Welle: 271., 272., 275., 276., 277., 278.ID

23.Welle: 52., 388., 390., 391., 394.FAD

24.Welle: Schatten-Divisionen Mielau (becomes 214.ID), Wahn (389.), Milowitz (331.), Demba (68.)

25.Welle: 77., 84., 85., 89., 91., 92.

26.Welle: Schattendivisionen Böhmen (198.), Neuhammer (34.), Ostpreußen (65.), Wildflecken (715.)

27.Welle: 59., 64., 226., 232., 237.

28.Welle: Schattendivisionen Jütland (19.), Schlesien (94.), Münsingen (543.), Grafenwöhr (544.), Ostpreußen 1 (561.), Ostpreußen 2 (562.)

29.Welle: 541., 542., 544., 547., 548., 549., 551., 553., 558., 559., 561., 543., 545., 546., 550., 552.

30.Welle: 12., 16., 19., 36., 560., 563,

31.Welle: Breslau, Döllersheim, Groß-Born, Mähren, Rhön

32.Welle: 564.-588. (all used to rebuild destroyed divisions)

33. Welle, formed January 1945

Schatten-Divisionen of the 34. Welle, formed 26 February 1945.

Formation of the 35. and last Welle on 29 March 1945.

Source: Verbände und Truppen der Wehrmacht und Waffen-SS im Zweiten Weltkrieg 1939 1945 : Die Waffengattungen - Gesamtübersicht

Biblio Verlag - Osnabrück 1977

Georg Tessin

What and why were they called 'Wave' divisions?

They weren't really called wave divisions, wave (or welle in German) simply refers to the organizational period or time slot a given unit was formed in under the auspices of the overall Wehrmacht mobilization plan. A dritte-welle divisionen refers to a division formed during the third wave of mobilization, formed in August of 1939.

The Germans mobilized divisions due to strategic reasons in blocks. You could compare this with waves in an attack.

The divisions of the waves differed in composition and equipment (sometimes also within the wave).

So there was the 1.-4.Welle (wave) at the beginning of the war for the attack on Poland, then they needed formations to protect the occupied countries, then for the attack on Norway and France, then Barbarossa.... and so on. So the German army "grew" in waves.

The so called "Schattendivisionen" (shadow divisions). They were named after the Truppenübungsplatz (training ground) where they were formed. They never got the full strength and were used to fill up shaken divisions on the front. They didn't see combat.

Alan E. Steinweis and Daniel E. Rogers, eds. The Impact of Nazism: New Perspectives on the Third Reich and Its Legacy. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003. xvii + 260 pp. Bibliography. $49.95 (cloth), ISBN 0-8032-4299-9.

Reviewed by Hilary Earl, Department of History, Wilfrid Laurier University.
Published by H-German (January, 2004)

If an essay collection is difficult to review, a Festschrift is usually impossible. The latter frequently lacks cohesion because its organizing principle is more often than not a person and not an historical question or issue. Honoring an eminent scholar--while admirable--does not generally lend itself to an integrated historical analysis, especially when the contributors have only the honoree in common. The Impact of Nazism: New Perspectives on the Third Reich and its Legacy, a collection of essays edited by Alan Steinweis and Daniel Rogers in honor of the pre-eminent German scholar Gerhard Weinberg, is an exception. The contributors of this volume, all scholars in their own right, are also former students of Weinberg and thus their research and his, have much in common.

As the title suggests, the book is a collection of thirteen essays devoted to an examination of the impact of Nazism on various individuals, national groups, social institutions, and political movements. While the essays are not clearly delineated by chapters (this is not unexpected as one essay does not a chapter make), themes can be easily identified. Not surprisingly, many of the essays deal specifically with the effects of Nazi racial and population policy on various groups in and outside of Germany. For instance, Johnpeter Horst Grill, in "The American South and Nazi Racism," offers an examination of the ways in which Nazi racial policy influenced the debate about social equality in the southern United States, especially the discourse about the place of African Americans in American society. His study finds that for those people who already harbored racist attitudes, Nazi racial policy was embraced as an example to emulate, whereas for liberals whose tendency it was to promote social equality and justice, the opposite was true. Alan Steinweis' "Antisemitic Scholarship in the Third Reich and the Case of Peter-Heinz Seraphim" takes a longer view than Grill in his study of the lingering effects of Nazi antisemitism on the German academy. In his examination of the ways in which German scholars contributed to the persecution of European Jewry, Steinweis concludes that the antisemitic "scholarship" of contemporaries such as Seraphim--a leading Nazi Jewish scholar--had a profoundly negative impact on the development of Nazi racial policy during the Third Reich as well as a lasting effect in contemporary Germany which manifested in the absence of the legitimate study of Jewish life and culture in universities until relatively recently.

Two essays on the impact of population and resettlement policy, "A Reassessment of Volksdeutsche and Jews in the Volhynia-Galicia-Narew Resettlement" by Valdis Lumans and "The Volksdeutsche of Eastern Europe and the Collapse of the Nazi Empire, 1944-1945" by Doris Bergen, are particularly illuminating. Lumans offers a reassessment of his earlier analysis (1993) of the role of resettlement policy on the origins of the "Final Solution" in light of recent scholarship on the subject. In particular, Lumans challenges Goetz Aly's position about the functionalist origins of the Holocaust, acknowledging the important but nonetheless limited role local officials played in the execution of Nazi racial policy in the region, while emphasizing the centrality of Berlin in the decision-making process. Bergen, on the other hand, offers a case study of the immediate and long-term effects of population policy on the ethnic Germans of eastern Europe which, in her view, was disastrous. She notes that the ethnic Germans of this area found their fate intimately linked to, and affected by, the German war effort and the regime's genocidal policy in more than material ways. Not only did Nazi resettlement policy cause a permanent shift of population transfers and ethnic boundaries, it also caused the erasure of ethnic coexistence. During the earlier years of the war, the Nazis emphasized racial hostility and competition, but at war's end, when it was fairly clear that the Germans would lose, ethnic Germans who had benefited from the earlier policy simply refused to abandon these ideas and found themselves, as a result, struggling to find a satisfactory place within their new communities.

A second, but equally important focus of the book includes those essays devoted to issues of the internal organization of the Third Reich, especially the role of the military and paramilitary organizations in the functioning of the state and the execution of the "Final Solution." In one essay of particular interest to this reviewer, Edward Westermann's "Shaping the Police Soldier as an Instrument for Annihilation," Westermann offers a new interpretation of the reasons for the behavior of the police units on the eastern front, in the genocidal campaign that began with Operation Barbarossa in June 1941 and culminated in the European-wide murder of the Jews. Largely in response to the debate generated by Goldhagen's so-called ordinary Germans and Browning's ordinary men, but also building on his earlier work on Police Battalion 310,[1] Westermann posits an alternative explanation for why German policeman became exceptional killers. The answer is, in part, organizational. The forced militarization of the German police, coupled with their merger into the SS and subsequent indoctrination, meant that when the time came to carry out the racial war in the east in 1941, the Nazis found themselves with police battalions that were already well prepared "instruments of annihilation." Westermann's conclusions are reinforced in a subsequent article by David Yelton, "The SS, NSDAP, and the Question of Volkssturm Expansion."

A third theme of the collection, the nature and functioning of power in the Third Reich, is highlighted in a comparative essay by Alan Wilt on the High Command structures of Germany, Britain and the United States. Here, Wilt emphasizes Hitler's influence on the command structure of the German military and the negative impact this had on military strategy and ultimately the outcome of the war. Yelton's essay on the creation and expansion of the Volkssturm, on the other hand, clearly illustrates the polycratic nature of the regime and the fierce competition that resulted from it, in this instance between the NSDAP (Bormann) and the SS (Himmler). The collection fittingly ends with a lengthy discussion of the legacy of Nazism in the legal, economic and political arenas in the context of war's end and the emergence of the fledgling Federal Republic. Daniel Rogers's concluding essay about the confrontation by the postwar German Chancellors with the Nazi past (particularly the Holocaust) suggests that the challenges posed by such a negative history have not yet disappeared. Because the troubling legacy of Nazism has not dissipated over time, what is certain, according to Rogers, is that at the highest levels of government the debate about the place of the Third Reich and its genocidal policy in German history will remain ambiguous.

Admittedly, this collection contains a wide variety of essays on divergent aspects of the history of the Third Reich. As a result, it is perhaps not as focused as a collection that is devoted to a single theme might otherwise be. Nonetheless, The Impact of Nazism is an important book for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the high level of scholarship by the authors of this collection and the substantial contribution to the field of modern German history that each author makes individually and the book makes collectively. There is no doubt that the essays highlighted here add new insight into persistent and vexing questions about the place of the Third Reich in German history, the nature and functioning of the Nazi state, and the development and impact of population, racial, and foreign policy. Whether you are interested in the character of European fascism and the impact that Nazism had on fascist movements outside of Germany or the ways in which Germans confronted their recent past, there is an essay here for virtually everyone. On a more personal level, the book might be more appropriately titled, "Gerhard Weinberg's Legacy" which, in the form of a coterie of young, enthusiastic, and committed scholars, is indeed an impressive and important one. I recommend this book to anyone interested in learning more about how Nazism impacted a wide-range of people in different countries and in different aspects of their lives. I also recommend it to those who teach advanced level courses on the history of the Third Reich because many of the essays here could be easily incorporated into various themes of such a course. Finally, the collection should be read by experts whose research intersects with the contributors of this book because, as I have suggested, the essays in this collection indeed add new perspectives to old interpretive questions of the functioning and legacy of the Third Reich.

Note

[1]. Edward Westermann, "'Ordinary men' or 'ideological soldiers'? Police Battalian 310 in Russia, 1942," in German Studies Review 21 (February 1998), pp. 41-68.

Evan Mawdsley. _Thunder in the East: The Nazi-Soviet War 1941-1945_. London: Hodder, 2005. xxvi + 502 pp. Abbreviations, maps, photographs, notes, bibliography, index. $35.00 (cloth), ISBN-13 978-0-340-80808-5.

Karl-Heinz Frieser. _The Blitzkrieg Legend: The 1940 Campaign in the West_. With John T. Greenwood. First published as _Blitzkrieg-Legende: Der Westfeldzug 1940_ (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1995). Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2005. . xx + 507 pp. Abbreviations, maps, photographs, notes, bibliography, index. $47.50 (cloth), ISBN 1-59114-294-6.

Reviewed for H-German by James V. Koch, Old Dominion University

Empirical Approaches to Military History

The world does not lack for military histories of World War II, general or specific. Hence, when new ones appear, it is legitimate to ask, do they really provide new information, insights or interpretations? Both Frieser's look at the astonishing six-week 1940 German campaign in the West that drove France out of the war and Mawdsley's examination of the titanic 1941-45 German/Soviet battle on the Eastern front meet that test. Both provide new data, or at least bring together in one book data that have been dispersed over many locations. Further, both authors look at these campaigns a bit differently than previous researchers and prod us to reformulate our understanding of critical aspects of these battles. Even so, neither is likely to have much effect on how these battles are written about in the historical surveys that college students and others read. They appeal primarily to specialists who continue to dissect these campaigns, both of which are classics in the realm of conventional land warfare.

Frieser argues persuasively that Germany took several huge risks by attacking France, Britain, Belgium and the Netherlands (the Western Allies) on May 10, 1940. Germany was unprepared for anything more than a very short war and chose a strategy (thrusting through the supposedly impenetrable Ardennes, crossing the Meuse, and driving to the Atlantic Coast) that could have been frustrated in a half-dozen ways by the Western Allies, especially France. France, however, was led by sclerotic political and military leaders, often lacked the desire to fight and was almost always tardy in its actions. Sometimes French sloth was measured in hours (the failure to occupy and defend a critical bridge over the Semois River) and sometimes in days (the failure to mount a timely counter attack against the German Sedan bridgehead). Alas, for France, this was a campaign that was decided in its first five days. By May 14, the Germans had exited from the Ardennes, crossed the Meuse on a wide front, expanded their bridgehead and were driving to the Atlantic Coast, which they would reach on May 20.

This story of the _Sichelschnitt_ drive to the coast and the encirclement of Allied troops by the Germans has been told many times, often by participants such as Heinz Guderian and Erich von Manstein, or by gifted storytellers such as Andre Beufre and Alistair Horne.[1] Where Frieser's account excels is in his highlighting of the numerous risks the Germans assumed and in describing small unit actions and individual heroics that turned individual engagements into German victories. Frieser's status as a Bundeswehr officer no doubt enhanced his ability to recover and describe these critical points in the German thrust (for example, when an enterprising and brave German _Feldwebel_ of the Tenth Panzer Division captured a key set of bunkers across the Meuse River on May 13, 1940).

The 1940 campaign in the West usually is described as an example of _Blitzkrieg_, a term Frieser asserts has been bastardized by both the press and military people. The 1940 campaign, he argues, was not planned as a "lightning war" and the Germans had minimal ability to carry one out. If _Sichelschnitt_ turned out to be "lightning war," this result was largely a function of French incompetence, German luck at critical points and the actual insubordination of German commanders in the field such as Guderian and Erwin Rommel. Still, Frieser is not the first to make these points.[2]

Frieser's narration of _Sichelschnitt_ is buttressed by extensive data--including production numbers, weapon comparisons and useful logistical information in addition to troop numbers and dispositions. The data and discussion serve to underline both the numerical and the marginal qualitative equipment inferiority of the Wehrmacht in 1940 relative to its Allied opponents. More than anything else, Frieser relates German successes to their reliance upon mission-oriented tactics (_Auftragstaktik_) that gave individual German commanders down to the squad level objectives to be accomplished and then accorded them great discretion in determining how best to fulfill them. Frieser contrasts this with the French tendency to give commanders detailed, rather inflexible orders often based upon rehearsed map exercises. The dynamic nature of the battlefield and the distinct communications disadvantage of the French (few radios) generated numerous disasters for them. Indeed, the French military field headquarters at the Chateau de Vincennes did not possess a single radio and therefore the front-line troops might not receive new orders for as long as forty-eight hours.

Similarly, Mawdsley's examination of the largest continuous land battle ever fought---the life or death struggle between Germany and the Soviet Union--presents extensive data to support his description of this campaign. Indeed, except for David Glantz, no other published source on the Eastern front has presented such detailed troop, equipment and economic data in such an accessible fashion.[3] However, where Frieser describes small unit actions and even the actions of individual soldiers, Mawdsley's approach is broader. He focuses on armies, not individuals, unless they were in command (for example, Friedrich von Paulus or Georgi Zhukov). Where Frieser's story bubbles with anecdotes, Mawdsley's vista is more expansive, and his attention focuses on huge battles such as Moscow, Leningrad, Stalingrad and Kursk. In the course of these analyses, however, he does offer several provocative views, for example, that the 1937-38 Soviet purges did not destroy the Soviet Army's leadership cadre, and that Zhukov was the outstanding military commander of the entire war. Mawdsley also pays considerable attention to major topical issues such as the Soviet economy and partisan warfare.

The more Olympian focus of this book is understandable, since the 1941-45 campaign on the Eastern front, when compared to the 1940 German invasion of the West, eventually involved six times as many personnel, generated almost one hundred times as many casualties (if civilians are included) and lasted about thirty times as long. If one wants the story of the exploits and agony of individual Eastern front soldiers, then one should look elsewhere.

Mawdsley's strength is as an explicator of the major forces that determined the outcome of this, the most destructive land battle of all time. He sets the scene for all major battles, describes the strategic options available to the participants, briefly describes the course of these battles, totes up the results and discusses their implications. In this, his approach does not differ markedly from existing histories of the eastern front such as John Erickson, Glantz and Glantz and Jonathan House,[4] except that Mawdsley often provides more targeted supporting data and his conclusions may therefore be less susceptible to quibbles than other efforts.

Mawdsley believes that he has written a history that neither relies predominantly on German sources (as did most early Western histories such as those by Alan Clark and Paul Carell), nor exclusively on Soviet sources (most of which are suspect on one count or another).[5] As he notes, "[t]he general histories of the Nazi-Soviet war, even the larger ones, have focused on one side or the other" (p. xxi)--including reputable works that incorporated Soviet sources such as those of Alexander Werth, Earl Ziemke and Erickson.[6] His own work, he argues, is a "balanced" history because he has no ax to grind, although he confesses to being a historian of Russia.

The increased availability of Russian sources over the past two decades and the continuing pioneering work of Glantz (who has published more than thirty volumes on the Eastern front) and the estimable work of Mueller and Ueberschaer[7] enable Mawdsley to provide a variety of reinterpretations of earlier histories noted above. Sometimes this reconsideration occurs when he shines light on events that the Soviets preferred to hide (examples include two unsuccessful offensives led by Zhukov in 1942) and other times via his skillful expose of the self-supporting narratives of German generals who in the postwar years attempted to blame their failings on Adolf Hitler.

Setting aside the treasure trove of valuable data Mawdsley provides, the most valuable portions of the book emerge when he asks salient questions that arise from the entire campaign, for example, why did it take the Soviet Union, which enjoyed numerical superiority and frequent equipment superiority over Germany, so long to defeat the Germans? Additionally, did Soviet ability to out-produce the Germans and demographically overwhelm them ultimately determine the outcome? With respect to the first question, he concludes that political blindness, frequently inept leadership, and the backwardness of the Soviet Union and its peoples in 1941 were critical. With respect to both the first and second questions, he notes Mark Harrison's argument that military issues determined the war until 1942; after that, economic and demographic issues did.[8] Glantz, however, believes that the evolution of Soviet military doctrine and the command structure were most the important influences on the outcome.[9] Mawdsley concludes both were important.

Mawdsley is one of the first military historians to pay substantial attention to Joseph Stalin's speeches. The previous tendency has been to regard them as rank propaganda. Mawdsley demonstrates that Stalin's utterances actually contain substantial information and should not be ignored by anyone who wishes to know what was going on in Soviet minds.

The superbly productive work of David Glantz and the not yet completed ten-volume _Milit채rgeschichtliches Forschungsamt_ series entitled _Germany and the Second World War_ have done the most to advance our understanding of many specific aspects of the Eastern front, often relying upon difficult to access Russian and German sources. Still, Mawdsley's effort, which has the advantage of being able to rely upon this fine work, is now the state-of-the-art general history of the Eastern front.

Serious students of the 1940 campaign in the West or the 1941-45 German/Soviet conflict, will want these books. Both extend our knowledge and improve our understanding of what actually happened and why.

Notes

[1]. Heinz Guderian, _Panzer Leader_, tr. Constantine Fitzgibbon (New York: Dutton, 1952); Erich von Manstein, _Lost Victories_, ed. and tr. Anthony G. Powell (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1958); Andre Beufre, _1940: The Fall of France_ (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1968); Alistair Horne, _To Lose a Battle: France 1940_ (London: MacMillan, 1969).

[2]. Clive Ponting, _1940: Myth and Reality_ (London: H. Hamilton, 1990).

[3]. David M. Glantz, _Companion to Colossus Reborn: Key Documents and Statistics_ (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2005).

[4]. John Erickson, _The Road to Stalingrad: Stalin's War with Germany_ (New York: Harper and Row, 1976); idem, _The Road to Berlin: Continuing the History of Stalin's War with Germany_ (Boulder: Westview Press, 1983); David M. Glantz, _Colossus Reborn: The Red Army at War, 1941-1945_ (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2005) and idem and Jonathan M. House, _When the Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler_ (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1995).

[5]. Alan Clark, _Barbarossa: The Russian-German Conflict 1941-45_ (New York: Quill, 1965); Paul Carell, _Hitler Moves East 1941-43_, tr. Ewald Osers (Winnipeg: J. J. Federowicz Publishing, 1991).

[6]. Alexander Werth, _Russia At War, 1941-1945_ (New York: Dutton, 1964); Earl F. Ziemke, _Stalingrad to Berlin: The German Defeat in the East_ (New York: Military Heritage Press, 1968).

[7]. Rolf-Dieter Mueller and Gerd R. Ueberschaer, _Hitler's War in the East: A Critical Assessment_ (New York: Berghahn Books, 2002).

[8]. Mark Harrison, ed., _The Economics of World War II: Six Great Powers in International Comparison_ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

[9] Glantz, _Colossus Reborn_, passim.

In the months leading up to Operation Barbarossa (Hitler's code name for the attack on the Soviet Union) there had been over 500 violations of Soviet airspace by German photo reconnaissance aircraft. On the 21st June 1941 Hitler attacked - his plan to crush the Soviet Union in 10 weeks. Initially the attack exceeded the wildest dreams of the German generals. The fall of Smolensk to the Germans on July 16, 1941 placed Moscow in danger. Hitler then discontinued the drive to Moscow, ordering the Germans to stand in place - it seemed to postpone the final blow but consequently Moscow received a reprieve during those crucial weeks. When the belated and ill-timed German assault on Moscow (code - named Operation Typhoon) began at 05:30 hours on September 30, 1941 the Russian weather turned foul.

The rainy season (rasputitsa), made any activity difficult, with the roads turning muddy so only large vehicles could move and air operations from grass fields becoming nearly impossible.

For Operation Typhoon to achieve success, a quick victory over the Russians west of Moscow became urgent. The rasputitsa ended each fall with the arrival of winter frosts and this created a great challenge, especially trying to keep men and machines in fighting condition in the advancing cold. The winter turned out to be Russia's most trusted ally.

Despite its reduced numbers, the Soviet Air Force (VVS) played an active role in the period prior to the final German offensive. During Operation Typhoon the VVS, sensing that the final assault had commenced, then began to reassert itself, boldly attacking advancing German troops and armour by day and night.

Night bombing, mostly by PO-2 Biplanes in the tactical zones, became common place during Operation Typhoon. Bombing missions were sometimes carried out in extreme weather but ideal conditions were the long moonlit or starry nights.

The Polikarpov PO-2 was a 1927 design, powered by a single 115 hp engine giving a top speed of 81 mph and a range of 280 miles but it made a significant impact on the German troops by maintaining a sustained air presence over the battle zone, continuously harassing the Germans. The PO-2 was highly manoeuvrable and the slow speeds made night interception by the fast German fighters a difficult undertaking. The VVS pilots would often stop their engines and glide to the target, dropping their bombs by hand.

The night attackers, nicked named "sewing machines" or "duty sergeants" forced the enemy on all fronts to take precautions, lose sleep, and on occasion suffer the loss of a storage or fuel depot.

Soviet women pilots, the so-called "Night Witches", acquired considerable fame in this dangerous pursuit.

In October 1941 Soviet women pilots were organised into combat regiments by Marina Raskova, a famous Russian aviatrix. In 1938 she had received acclaim for flying an ANT-37 across the vast terrain of the Soviet Union (eleven time zones!) to achieve a women's record of 3,672 miles in 26 hours, 29 minutes. Raskova, who was later killed in action and buried in the Kremlin wall, called for volunteers for women's air regiments over the Moscow radio. The women were to be front line pilots, like men, and there were to be three air regiments, each with three squadrons, mechanics and armament fitters.

The training base was in a small town called Engels on the River Volga, North of Stalingrad. Here they were issued with men's uniforms - which were far too big - many stuffing their boots with newspaper and tying belts around their waists. With Maj Marina Raskova as Commander and Maj Yevdokia Bershanskaya as 2nd in command women went through an intense training schedule - 2 years work into 6 months. Marina Raskova and Yevdokia Bershanskaya had to assess the volunteers, and most wanted to fly fighters.

In all, VVS women pilots flew more than 24,000 sorties during the war - sixty eight receiving the Gold Star, Hero of the Soviet Union award.

The girls never wore parachutes and, after discussing it amongst themselves, had agreed if captured they may have to shoot themselves. This is exactly what Alina Smirnova did. When she crash landed she lost her sense of direction and when some people ran towards her, she thought they were Germans and shot herself.

586th Fighter Regiment

The women had trained in PO-2 aircraft and found the conversion to the powerful, single seater Yak-1 very difficult. The instructors could only drum into them the characteristics and limits of power and control before their first flight. The 586th Women's Fighter Regiment was first to go to the front. Commanded by Tamara Kazarinova, they flew the Yak-7B and Yak-1, totalling 4419 operational sorties, and credited with 38 victories.

The principal role of this regiment was to drive off enemy bomber formations before they reached their targets. Encounters with Messerschmitt 109s escorting the bombers were common.

Squadron Commander Olga Yamshchikova flew 93 sorties, scored three confirmed victories, and after the war became the first Soviet woman to fly jet aircraft when she became a test pilot.

Lilya Litvyak and Ekaterina Budanova both flew with the 586th. Maj Tamara Kazarinova noted they had a flair for individual combat so they were both transferred to join the men of the 73rd Fighter Regiment who were involved with some furious battles over Stalingrad. The City of Stalingrad had been continuously bombed by enemy aircraft, the city burning for many kilometres, and smoke hung over the city like a blanket. Over a million people died in the Stalingrad battle, for Germany it was the first great disaster of the war. This was a different kind of combat for the girls, joining the Free Hunters and seeking out fighters.

When the women arrived, male pilots found it difficult to accept them. Many refused to have them fly as their wingman, some later relenting after the women proved they were more than capable. Many commanders wanted to protect them even though they continuously proved their abilities. The women flew their missions together.

Both Lilya Litvyak and Ekaterina Budanova became fighter aces. Ekaterina Budanova was credited with eleven victories, and Lilya Litvyak scored twelve official victories and three shared in her year with the 73rd Fighter Air Regiment before her Yak was lost on August 1, 1943.

The women's 586th Fighter Regiment was heavily drawn into the most crucial battle of the war, to be fought at Kursk.

It was 2.20 am on Monday, July 5, 1943 when the Germans commenced an attack that was to develop into the greatest tank battle of the war. Fortunately "Lucy" - a complex spy ring, had forewarned the Russians of the battle plans. Together the two fronts had more than 1.3 million men, 20,000 field guns and 3500 tanks; 4000 aircraft of both sides were operating over an area only 12 miles by 30 miles. It was not unusual for 300 fighters to be involved in combat.

German airmen were always surprised to encounter VVS women pilots in active combat roles. One Luftwaffe pilot, Maj. D B Meyer, remembered being attacked near Orel by a group of Yak fighters. During the ensuing air duel the jettisoned canopy of Meyer's fighter struck the propeller of one of the pursuing Yaks, forcing it to crash. Upon landing Meyer found his dead adversary to be a woman - without rank insignia or parachute.

588th Night Bomber Regiment

The 588th Night Bomber Regiment (Night Witches) later received the honour of the 46th Guards Bomber Aviation Regiment - the first women's regiment to receive this honour, placing them among the elite of the fighting units. The 46th Guards Bomber Aviation Regiment first arrived over the Southern Front in May 1942, commanded by Yevdokia Bershanskaya. Fighting from the Kuban to Berlin, this all women's regiment flew 24,000 combat missions and dropped 23,000 tons of bombs from the then battle weary PO-2 biplanes.

Twenty three of its fliers and navigators became heroes of the Soviet Union for their dangerous work, including flights on the night of July 31st 1943, when four of their two seaters were shot down over the Blue Line (the secured German Sector of the Kuban bridgehead) by a German Junkers Ju 88 bomber.

This regiment remained entirely female throughout the war.

587th Dive Bomber Regiment

The 587th Dive Bomber Regiment later received the honour of the 125th Guards Bomber Aviation Regiment. The regiment did not go into battle until January 1943, delayed because of an abrupt change of aircraft. The crews had trained on the two-seater SU-2 but at the last minute were allocated the three seater PE-2 dive bomber instead, the regiment consequently having to wait for additional training and personnel.

The PE-2 had a crew of three - pilot, navigator, and a radio operator/gunner. The aircraft had two fixed machine guns firing forward and a swivelling machine gun in an acrylic bubble behind the navigator. The pilot had an armoured seat in the cockpit with the navigator behind, also in an armoured seat. The radio operator sat at the rear in the fuselage. When the aircraft was fully loaded with fuel and bombs the navigator used to help pull back on the stick to get the nose off the ground.

Later during the war the regiment began to receive male replacements. There were not enough women trained to fill the positions.

The Krupp Kfz 81 (L2H43) had an air-cooled 'Boxer' engine and an all-independent suspension; it was used in a number of different roles, including prime mover for the 20-mm (0.78-in) anti-aircraft gun.

From the very outset, with the German Blitzkrieg on Poland, such warfare relied on mobility to push home the attack. During these early years much reliance was placed on the speed and efficiency of armoured thrusts backed by a mobile supply line. Unfortunately for the Germans, much of their supply line was still horse drawn and the number of available motor transport vehicles was totally inadequate for the task. To compensate for this inadequacy, many civil trucks were conscripted into service along with the few surviving vehicles of the Polish army. In contrast with this, the British Expeditionary Force that landed in France in 1939 was a fully mechanized formation. During the evacuation of Dunkirk very few vehicles could be rescued. They were thus captured (along with many different types of French trucks) by the Germans and pressed into service, leading to yet more spare parts problems. After this the German logistics department tried to rationalize matters in a standardization programme involving the Schell system, but even this never reached its target before the end of the war.

Invasion of USSR

The German Army, much like its Russian opponent, depended on horses more than trucks for transportation. While the horses allowed the troops to drag their heavy weapons and artillery along with them as they trudged across the battlefield, the trucks were needed to speed supplies, and troops, to areas where enemy troops (especially mechanized ones) were breaking through. Truck losses were heavy for the Germans. They never had enough trucks and they worked them hard, to the point that those unarmored vehicles often found themselves under fire. The worst period for German truck drivers was the first eight months of 1944. Between the battles in Russia and the Allied invasion of France in June, the Germans lost 109,000 trucks. This was 39 percent of what the German armed forces had and equal to their entire production during 1943. The losses were not only due to battle damage, but also to a chronic lack of spare parts. Moreover, the Germans looted several hundred thousand vehicles from occupied territories, further complicating their parts problems. Some units had over twenty different vehicle types, and many of the non-German vehicles were no longer produced. This further complicated the parts shortage, causing many basically sound vehicles to be abandoned because of the lack of common parts.

Only one mechanized foreign army has operated in Russia and it was a sobering experience. The Russians have always relied on "General Mud" and "Marshal Winter" to assist their armed forces in repelling the enemy. The spring mud was particularly difficult. Russia had few hard-surfaced roads; most were dirt tracks. During the spring rains (and melting of the winter snow) these dirt roads turned into deep mud. The Russians were accustomed to dealing with the problem, although even they tended to just not travel until the mud dried out. Horse-drawn vehicles were specially designed (lightweight and with the axle high off the ground) to better traverse the mud and Russian drivers knew from experience where the mud was shallow (and more trafficable).

The Germans got quite a shock during the spring of 1942, and by 1943 had stolen all the Russian horse-drawn vehicles they could find. German motor vehicles were another matter, and an ingenious solution was devised. The rear wheels of trucks were replaced with a tracklaying mechanism (like on a bulldozer). This was similar to the armored "half-track" personnel carriers the Germans and Americans used in large quantities for their mechanized infantry. The German half-track trucks accounted for one third of their truck production in 1943.

German Trucks in Russia

German trucks were very poor for difficult terrain. Most of them look like civilian stuff and a quick look at the specifications confirm this. Poorish ground clearance, tires unsuitable for off-road, too many trucks were 4 x 2 (only rear axle driven), suspension components quite delicate. This is in direct contrast with American trucks: rugged and durable design, adequate ground clearance, most trucks all-wheel-driven etc.

Some of German trucks from the beginning were not built specifically for the Army. They were civilian trucks and took over when the war started. More than 10000 civilian trucks were taken by the Army in Germany alone, in 1939.

Others were trucks confiscated from the defeated armies or from civilians of occupied Europe.
Preferred by the German command were the 6 x 4, but the demand was so big, that they used everything they got.

With so many models over 2000 vehicle types requiring over 1,000,000 spare parts repairs became very difficult.

Not only that but many of these trucks would have later to be modified to handle the low octane of the Russian fuel.

And because of the lousy Russian roads the bad state of the German trucks they required more fuel per kilometer then in Europe. As such the amount that was budgeted by the German army was only about 70% of that required.

In practice German infantry division structure sat on the fence ...being nowhere near enough mobility to keep up with the Jones but far to much in other sense .....consider the following

Germans went into Barbarossa with 600,000 vehicles and each infantry army requires about 23,000 vehicles while each motorized army requires < 70,000 vehicles By comparison to later war years the same infantry army would have only 12,000 vehicles....did it have half the mobility , No.

What the Germans ought to have done was have motorized armies and horse drawn armies tha5t way they could have 7 [historically 4 ] motorized armies with 44-46 motorized infantry divisions and 19 Pz divisions , while the rest of the army [9 armies] hobbled along with mostly horsedrawn wagons and a few trucks mopping up the remains.

WWII German trucks Production

The following info is from a book on the Militaerfahrzeuge of the Wehrmacht as are the quantities produced

Light Trucks: leichte Lastkraftwagen[le.Lkw]

Medium Trucks: mittel Lastkraftwagen (m.Lkw)

Heavy Trucks: schwere Lastkraftwagen (s.Lkw)

Nowhere was the murderousness of Hitler's new order more apparent than on the Eastern Front, where Spanish Republicans also fought against the German armies. Ironically, some had originally been evacuated as young people from the war-torn north of Spain in 1937 and sent to the Soviet Union (among other destinations) to protect them from the massive aerial bombing then being inflicted on Republican cities by Franco's Nazi and Fascist backers. There were about 3,000 child refugees from Republican Spain in the Soviet Union. Some 2,000 adults came later, mainly in the diaspora of 1939. These were mostly military and political personnel connected to the Spanish communist movement. All, without exception, were flung into the Soviet Union's vast and harsh industrial mobilization for war following the German invasion of June 1941. Those Republicans who served as combatants did so mainly in guerrilla units, a few were pilots, and other Republican men and women served as soldiers and nurses in the defence of Leningrad and Moscow. They also fought and died at Stalingrad. Of some 700 Republican combatants on the Eastern Front, about 300 were killed, including the only sons of Republican Spain's two pre-eminent women politicians: the iconic communist leader Dolores Ibárruri (Pasionaria), whose 22-year-old son Rubén died at Stalingrad in September 1942, and Margarita Nelken, the art critic, writer, social reformer, and parliamentary champion of Spain's landless poor, whose son Santiago was killed in action in the Ukraine in January 1944, also aged 22.

#

This blind eye was turned in spite of the fact that Spain had functioned as a valuable Axis resource virtually throughout the Second World War, for all its formal status as a non-belligerent. Indeed, its value to Hitler derived precisely from that status. Franco, who did not break off diplomatic relations with the Third Reich until VE day on 8 May 1945, provided Hitler with strategic raw materials, food, and labour. He also allowed the refuelling and supplying of U-boats, provided Germany with radar, air reconnaissance, and espionage facilities within Spain and access to Spanish propaganda services in Latin America. This assistance stemmed from a deep ideological affinity between Francoist Spain and Nazi Germany. This was manifest in the Gestapo's strong influence over the Spanish police apparatus and in the way the Falangist press was permitted to relay Nazi propaganda material as if it were news. The best-known consequence of the affinity, however, was the dispatch in 1941 of the Falangist Blue Division, as a result of which some 47,000 Spanish troops would fight with the armies of the Third Reich on the Eastern Front. A less well-known consequence was Franco's complaisance in allowing the Nazis to strip prisoner-of-war status from the thousands of Spanish Republican prisoners in their power, thus permitting them to be sent from the stalags to concentration camps.

It was the Franco regime's refusal to recognize the prisoners' Spanish nationality that opened the way to deportation. Indeed, the Nazi authorities announced their policy on 25 September 1940, during the visit to Germany of Franco's second-in-command, Ramón Serrano Suñer, the Spanish Interior (and by October 1940 also Foreign) Minister who was also head of the fascist single party, the Falange. Republican Spaniards were subsequently confined in many different concentration camps: Dachau, Oranienburg, Buchenwald, Flossenburg, Ravensbrück, Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, Neuengamme, and, above all, Mauthausen. Most of the Republican prisoners bore on their camp uniforms the blue triangle of the stateless. But some had the red triangle denoting political deportees, notoriously classified by the Nazi bureaucracy as Nacht und Nebel: prisoners whose active anti-fascism condemned them to explicit obliteration, as if into the 'night and fog' of Wagnerian allusion for which the policy was named.

Of all the camps, Mauthausen was the Republicans' own particular heart of darkness: 7,200 were incarcerated there, of whom 5,000 died - half of all the Spaniards who perished in Nazi camps. Mauthausen is also a camp for which an exceptional visual record survives: photographs taken mainly by the camp authorities. As the war turned inexorably against Germany, the order was issued for them to be destroyed, but a considerable number were spirited away by a group of Republican prisoners, including two Catalans, Antonio García and Francisco Boix. The young Boix, who as a 16-year-old in 1936 Barcelona had photographed the energy and hopeful mobilization of the socialist and communist youth to which he belonged, managed at the beginning of 1945, through the solidarity network within the camp, to smuggle out a large quantity of pictures with a group of teenage Spanish inmates who were hired to work in a private quarry in the village of Mauthausen.

Around 10,000 Spanish Republicans died in Nazi camps - which is as many, if not more, than the number who died fighting in the Second World War (the latter figure is notoriously difficult to calculate; estimates - covering both uniformed fighters and irregular combatants - vary from 6,000 to 10,000).

Oberst Mölders 'recieves' a report.

Klaus Schmider.

The Journal of Military History.

Jan 2009. Vol. 73, Iss. 1; pg. 231, 19 pgs

Abstract (Summary)

Schmider reviews four books edited by Kurt Braatz. These are: Feindberuhrung. Erinnerungen 1939-1945 by Julius Meimberg; Falkenjahre. Erinnerungen 1910-2003 by Wolfgang Falck; Mein Flugbuch. Erinnerungen 1938-2004 by Gunther Rall, and Nachte im Bomberstrom. Erinnerungen 1920-1950 by Paul Zorner.

Klaus Schmider

Feindberßhrung. Erinnerungen 1939-1945. By Julius Meimberg. Ed. Kurt Braatz. Wang, Germany: Verlag NeunundzwanzigSechs, 2002. ISBN 3-980-7935-1-6. Photographs. Bibliography. Source notes. Pp. 352. euro39.80.

Falkenjahre. Erinnerungen 1910-2003. By Wolfgang Falck. Ed. Kurt Braatz. Wang, Germany: Verlag NeunundzwanzigSechs, 2003. ISBN 3-980-7935-2-4. Photographs. Bibliography. Source notes. Pp. 351. euro39.80.

Mein Flugbuch. Erinnerungen 1938-2004. By Günther Rail. Ed. Kurt Braatz. Wang, Germany: Verlag NeunundzwanzigSechs, 2004. ISBN 3-980-7935-3-2. Photographs. Bibliography. Source notes. Pp. 375. euro39. 80. 1

Nächte im Bomberstrom. Erinnerungen 1920-1950. By Paul Zorner. Ed. Kurt Braatz. Wang, Germany: Verlag NeuundzwanzigSechs, 2007. ISBN 978-3-980-7935-9-9. Photographs. Bibliography. Source notes. Pp. 335. euro39.80.

Abschuß! Von der Me 109 zur Me 262. Erinnerungen an die Luftkämpfe beim Jagdgeschwader 5 und 7. By Walter Schuck. Aachen: Helios, 2007. ISBN 978-3938208-44-1. Photographs. Bibliography. Pp. 248. euro38.50.

Fighter pilots are warriors with a difference. Members of a select and highly trained caste, they wage their war physically removed from the battlefields on the ground and the squalor and horror prevailing there. Their mission is as much about surviving in an environment alien to the human presence as it is about taking the fight to the enemy. When the latter does occur, only in the rarest of cases with they experience the killing of an enemy in the same traumatic way as an infantryman or even a tanker. The elite characteristics of this fraternity are replicated many times over among those individuals who make up their inner circle: those who by common consent have reached the degree of proficiency which makes them deserving of the label "ace". Historians and publicists writing up the air power side of almost any twentieth century conflict have rarely been able to extricate themselves from the "pull" emanating from this group. This may have as much to do with (often deceptive) notions of chivalrous one-on-one combat among the clouds, which tend to be more appealing to our imagination than the realties of total war2, as with the fact that in their case the specific impact a single individual has had on the course of a campaign or war can actually be assessed with an accuracy normally not found in other fields of modern war. Looking back on nearly 100 years of organised air warfare, it is not difficult to identify the national subchapter of this elite fraternity which has formed the image of the successful fighter pilot in the popular imagination to a greater degree than any other: while "The Few" of the RAF's Fighter Command are certainly unique insofar as their association with one specific historic event is concerned, a select number of their brothers in arms of the Jagdwaffe - the Luftwaffe's fighter arm - would go on to a place in history buttressed by feats dwarfing those of any other air force before or since. Aided by a unique set of circumstances (on the job training in Spain and Poland; lack of a rotation system; the sheer number of aircraft churned out by the Allies after 1941; as well as - initially - superior tactics), they achieved scores which by far outstripped those of their Allied adversaries.3 A scrupulously thorough system of bookkeeping ensured that most of these claims would stand the test of time remarkably well. Once the war had ended, the survivors were able to carve out for themselves a niche in post-war German society which even the most vociferously anti-Wehrmacht critics had until very recently not attempted to assail.4 This was partly due to the collective self-immolation of the Jagdwaffe in attempting to defend German cities from the Allied bombing offensive in the last two years of the war. Just as important, unlike other German veterans (especially U-boat sailors or members of the Waffen SS) they were never compelled by choice or force of circumstance to rally round individuals closely associated with the defunct regime in order to preserve or establish their corporate identity.5 Once the number two man of the regime and Luftwaffe commander-in-chief Hermann Göring - whose claim to being a member of the military profession had always been a very tenuous one anyway6 - had committed suicide in his Nuremberg cell, the Jagdwaffe's potentially most compromising link with the recent past was to all intents and purposes effectively severed. It would, however, be disingenuous to ignore the fact that this process was not substantially aided by the wholesale torching of the Luftwaffe's operational records in April 1945. 7 As a result, the public image of the Jagdwaffe was very much set in stone by a couple of early accounts penned by veterans as well as a number of sympathetic Western historians and publicists who followed suit in the 1960s and 1970s. Among the former the trailblazer was Adolf "Dolfo" Galland, Inspector General8 of the Jagdwaffe from November 1941 to January 1945, whose Die Ersten und die Letzten (The First and the Last)9 very much set the tone for future publications. He was closely followed by Gerd Gaiser 's fictionalised memoirs of his time with a fighter wing in the West10 which is best described as the Luftwaffe's equivalent of (and precursor to) Lothar-Günther Buchheim's Das Boot, which would take the bestseller charts by storm in the 1970s.11 In different ways, both Galland and Gaiser stressed the desperate plight of a force caught in a vice between Anglo-American air superiority in 1943/45, on the one hand, and its own incompetent leadership on the other.12 Proverbially speaking, the history of the German fighter force was best summed up in the adage "there was a bitch (Göring) in the chorus, but the show had to go on." The group of sympathetic outsiders referred to above was made up of publicists whose admiration would occasionally tip over into out-and-out hero-worship13; some of these books, such as the valuable work done in recent times by John Weal for Osprey14, as well as the two biographies produced by Peter Hinchliffe15 are obviously the result of painstaking research in family archives and interviews with veterans; their main flaw resides in the authors' (or publishers'16) refusal to provide even a skeleton of source notes.

In view of the general dearth of primary sources on the rise and fall of the wartime Luftwaffe, it is hardly surprising that the close to 40 or so memoirs by veterans of the Jagdwaffe already published17 to date have been mined quite consistently by popular historians for the contribution they might make towards filling in holes left by missing records. It has to be said, however, that academic historians have been rather slow to follow this lead18, a fact which can no doubt be traced back to the failings usually associated with this kind of source: highly idiosyncratic focus; excessive use of literal speech when the conversation described took place half a century ago; a certain unreliability when it comes to timings and locations; too large a time gap between the events at the centre of the narrative and the process of actually committing them to paper. Most German scholars in particular have shown a reluctance bordering at times on aversion when it comes to tapping memoirs in general and those of Wehrmacht veterans in particular. This is no doubt a consequence of the realisation that the accounts penned by senior-ranking POWs for the U.S. Army's Historical Division in the early years of the Cold War, and which had a major impact on the writings of the first post-war generation of historians, had been aimed not so much at prettifying as at distorting the historical record.19 Even so, there are indications that the resulting dependence on official records as the only source to be trusted may have gone a little too far in recent years. After all, it's well worth remembering that other historians faced with a similar dearth of primary sources as historians of the Luftwaffe, have been much less squeamish about tapping memoirs written either by military leaders or common soldiers.20

The books under review here go a long way towards reducing any lingering inhibitions on the part of readers weaned on scholarly treatises. Kurt Braatz, in particular, has gone to remarkable lengths in providing aids which will allow the reader to put the author's story in a meaningful context. Each volume boasts more than a hundred footnotes (a large part of which refer back to primary sources) provided by the editor and a similar number of photographs. Towards the back of the book, the reader will find a bibliography, the author's wartime résumé and a table giving the location and date of each air combat kill. Last but not least, paper and binding are of a quality which puts the finished products of most major publishing houses to shame.

The volume penned by Julius "JuIe" Meimberg struck this reviewer as the one which comes closest to communicating to his readers the raw emotions unleashed by war. This is probably due to three reasons. First, unlike the other authors in the series, he devotes only a few pages to his life prior to joining the Luftwaffe and none at all to his post-war career, thus allowing him to focus almost exclusively on wartime events. In addition, his flying career was interrupted by two lengthy hospital stays (July 1941-April 1942, February 1943-August 1943) brought about by serious injuries sustained in the course of his duties. The changed circumstances he encountered on each of his returns to active duty throw into stark relief for the reader the way in which the air war over Europe had been evolving and make for an even sharper focus.

Finally, he shows a slightly greater inclination than some of the other authors to free himself from the shackles of old loyalties and give the reader a warts and all picture of the war in the air: his depiction of some of his superiors' actions in particular show that Hermann Göring was by no means the only "bitch in the chorus" of the wartime Jagdwaffe (pp. 210-212, 278-279). His genuine affection for his squadron leader Hans "Assi" Hahn is tempered by the realisation that the latter had a truly callous side and was not above acting the part of a triple-bully if it suited him. Readers of Len Deighton will probably find themselves reminded of the main character of his short story "Winter's Morning."21 As far as Meimberg's own feelings are concerned, he allows the reader deeper insights than many other veterans. Both the intoxicating exhilaration of the first kill (p. 91), as well as the consequences of the stress of finding himself in command of a unit perpetually on the brink of extinction, are described with brutal clarity (p. 264). Even conscious decisions to avoid combat when facing hopeless odds are freely admitted to (pp. 299-300).

Meimberg joined Jagdgeschwader (JG) 222 just in time to take part in the lightning campaign that saw Western Europe come under German occupation. He subsequently served both in the Battle of Britain and during the initial phase of the RAF's "non-stop" offensive against the Luftwaffe in France. At the time of his first, near-fatal crash he had already achieved a total of 14 kills. In the nine months between his return to JG 2 and his second confinement in hospital, he accounted for a further 20 Allied planes in the skies of Western Europe and Tunisia. During this phase, veterans of the Jagdwaffe such as himself, while slowly realising that they were fighting an enemy endowed with seemingly unlimited industrial resources, could still take to the skies in the knowledge that in terms of training, tactics and (since the advent of the Focke-Wulf 190 A) technology, they still enjoyed an appreciable edge over both the USAAF and the RAF. By the late summer/early autumn of 1943 this phase of the war was but a receding memory, with the. Jagdwaffe not just giving way as it lost its bases on the ground, but increasingly coming off second best in terms of air combat, too. The part of the book in which he deals with his impressions of the last 20 months of the war in Europe (pp. 249-339) is by far the most gripping. After a brief interlude in Italy, where his injuries still limited his combat sorties to a minimum, he soon found himself in command of a Gruppe (three squadrons) of Jagdgeschwader 53 tasked with giving air cover to the German armies awaiting the Allied invasion in Normandy. The story of the Luftwaffe's role in this campaign will no doubt be perpetually associated in the public imagination of the Anglo-American world with Colonel Priller's lone strafing attack on Sword Beach23 to the exclusion of anything else, recent publications on the subject24 not- withstanding. Meimberg gives a brutally vivid account of how a German fighter Gruppe tried to interpose itself between the German troops on the ground and the might of Allied air power. The successes they achieved had to be weighed against the fact that by early September the unit in question had been decimated not once, but twice. This process was then repeated over the Ardennes and during the last battles over Germany. Throughout that time, the Kommandeur and a couple of veteran fellow pilots proved that they had lost none of their fighting skills (caught taxiing on the ground by low-flying Thunderbolts on a December morning in 1944, Meimberg took off and in quick succession dispatched three of them), but with their unit collapsing around them, these victories counted for little. The pressure on what remained of the Jagdwaffe increased sharply in the spring of 1944 as the USAAF undertook a deliberate campaign to destroy the Luftwaffe fighter arm. One of the most provocative elements of Meimberg's memoir is his charge (pp. 283, 287-290, 294) that this campaign featured the deliberate machine-gunning of German pilots parachuting from their disintegrating aircraft. He would not be the only German airman to suggest that the shooting of Luftwaffe aircrew was a result of a deliberate policy adopted by the Eighth and Ninth (U.K.-based) and Fifteenth (Italy-based) U.S. Army Air Forces.25 Until now, many U.S. accounts of the European air war have given scant attention to the USAAF's campaign to destroy the Jagdwaffe, much less address the claim by some German airmen that there was a deliberate targeting of parachuting Luftwaffe aircrew and that this practice raises the question of to what extent this escalation was directed or at least condoned by some of the senior or medium-ranking commanding officers of the three U.S. Army Air Forces.26 The fact that similar charges have not been levelled at British pilots is also noteworthy in this context.27 Until now, our knowledge of how the German side reacted to the belief that its pilots were being deliberately targeted has been limited to recollections from some German veterans who admit that the idea of retaliation was discussed amongst the pilots either privately28 or at the level of sub-units.29 Meimberg now allows us a unique glimpse into how the Luftwaffe's leadership reacted to this perceived escalation. According to him, Generalleutnant Josef "Beppo" Schmid30, during a whirlwind tour of several fighter groups, gave a pep talk in which he incited the men to retaliate in kind, without however, making clear whether this statement was to be treated as an order or not.31 Meimberg's attempt to dissuade his men from taking their cue from this was met with open insubordination by one of his pilots, another prominent ace. It is the unprecedented honesty of vignettes like these and Meimberg's refusal to follow the consensus established between old comrades and cemented by the politics of the Cold War which should earn his book a well-deserved place among the minority of World War Two memoirs which are held in equally high regard by both historians and literary critics.32

Wolfgang Falck is very much the odd man out in this collection on account of a career path which at a deceptive first glance will probably appear downright boring to many air power buffs raised on a diet of constant dog fights and three-digit kill figures. Already promoted to Kommandeur of a Gruppe of Bf 110s during the Phoney War of 1939-40, Falck was soon shunted off to a number of assignments which first reduced his operational sorties to a minimum and then terminated them altogether: wing commander of the Luftwaffe's first night fighter wing, a task which amounted to creating the Luftwaffe's night fighter arm from scratch (1940/42); heading a provisional command tasked with setting up the fighter defense of the Ploesti oilfields in Romania (1943); deputy to the general officer commanding the night fighter arm (1943), and finally, operations officer on the staff of Air Fleet Reich (1943/44). In view of the high-level tidbits somebody in senior staff positions will always be privy to, the air power historians of World War II owe Kurt Braatz a major debt for talking Falck into putting pen to paper notwithstanding the fact he was well into his nineties at the time. With the caveat in mind that even the most well rounded memoir will always be a poor substitute for the Lufwaffe's documentary record, Falck's attempt to retrace steps taken 60 years ago has by and large succeeded. The book reads extremely well and even readers unfamiliar with, say, the meticulous training process a German army officer cadet aspiring to be a flier had to go through in the early 1930s never feel left behind. It goes without saying that the author covers a lot of ground already analysed by others and thus anyone familiar with the works of Horst Boog and Gebhard Adders will find little that is genuinely new in the chapters on the creation and inner workings of the German night fighter arm (pp. 157-235). Having said that, there are some real gems. The chapter on his flight training in the Soviet Union in 1932 (pp. 23-41) has real flavour and puts a question mark against the supposed secrecy of this project. His eyewitness report of the dissolution of a Czech air force unit in March 1939 (pp. 99-100) is priceless and reminded this reviewer of a similar scene reproduced in the feature film "Dark Blue World" (directed by Jan Sverak, 2001). A genuinely new addition to the scholarship on the July plot should be his account of how Stauffenberg quizzed him on the likely reaction of Air Fleet Reich to the implementation of "Plan Walküre" on the eve of the attempted coup, without, however, letting him in on the secret; his account of how events unfolded at Air Fleet Reich's HQ in the hours and days after the count's bomb went off is equally riveting (pp. 279-285). On the human side, Falck's treatment of his immediate superior, General Josef Kammhuber, is remarkably fair, notwithstanding a major falling out between the two in 1944 which lasted well into the 1980s.

The only criticism which could be made of this fine book is one which applies to many memoirs: this concerns events which either at the time or today may have seemed only marginally relevant to the author and are accordingly given short shrift, without realising that 50 years in the future a reader lacking his background knowledge but bringing with him a different set of priorities would tend to see it rather differently. In this case, rather oblique references to the set of circumstances which allegedly led the Luftwaffe to choose the Me 109 over the Heinkel 112 (pp. 94-95), to hour-long debates with his brother-in-arms Adolf Galland about the Luftwaffe's general crisis (p. 258) or to Wolfram von Richthofen "cunningly avoiding" being appointed Luftwaffe chief of staff in August 1943 (p. 262) belong in this category.

Of the five authors under review here, Günther Rail is easily the best known. Finishing his active career as a Gruppenkommandeur and the third ranking ace with 275 confirmed kills, he then went on to a second career as a wing commander, staff officer and C-in-C of the post-war Luftwaffe. In 2002, journalist Jill Amadio published a book on his life purporting to be both a memoir and an "authorized" biography; it appeared to have been based on a series of interviews. Its lack of footnotes, moreover, made it difficult to discern whether any crosschecking against primary or secondary sources had taken place.33 The memoirs are considerably more extensive, much better structured and supported by more than a hundred footnotes. In view of the relevance which his post-war experiences would obviously have for historians of the Cold War, Rall has devoted about a third of the book (pp. 222-334) to his time with the Bundeswehr's air force.

Even though he never says so in so many words, it would appear that the future general belonged to the rarest breed of World War II fighter aces: rather than having to nerve himself to close with his target until a collision seemed inevitable, he had both the eyesight and the situational awareness to use deflection shooting, which enabled him to calculate the spot where his quarry and his shells would meet in airspace even while twisting and turning in a gut-wrenching dogfight. In addition, flying against the Russian air force when it was at its most vulnerable in terms of tactics and training (1941/42)34 certainly helps to explain a score which was sensational by even the most exacting standards. He spent the last year of the war back in Germany, fighting the USAAF, even though a combination of old and new injuries was to limit him mainly to command and training assignments. Luckily for the reader, Rail knows better than to treat him to a litany of aerial victories. He is obviously blessed with a good sense of observation, and much of the book is taken up by describing some of the fascinating encounters he had throughout his career: these feature a captured Soviet fighter pilot, future top ace Erich "Bubi" Hartmann as an overconfident rookie, a Gruppenkommandeur not above depriving his wingman of a kill so he could get a shortcut to the Iron Cross; Adolf Hider on the brink of realising the war may no longer be winnable; or post-war encounters with the survivors of the flight of Thunderbolts who deprived him of his left thumb during his last dogfight.

In taking stock of his life as a soldier and flier, Rail faced a peculiar challenge. While the other authors reviewed here went back into civilian fife after 1945, he chose not just to resume his military career in 1955, but did so together with a sizable group of fellow veterans of his own unit (Jagdgeschwader 52)35, thus extending the old ties of loyalty into the post-war world. In addition, his senior rank and diplomatic position as a member of NATO's Supreme Council in 1974-75 must have posed an additional check on any desires to write the unvarnished truth, warts and all. While his attempt to give an honest account while still protecting the innocent is essentially a balancing act, it would be churlish to deny that it is gracefully executed. Unlike Meimberg, he does not raise the issue of German pilots being killed in their parachutes and he is not entirely comfortable discussing the professional demise of two fellow JG 52 veterans: the ostracism suffered by top ace Hermann Graf on his return to Germany36 and the refusal of the Bundeswehr to accept him as one of its pilots are discussed so briefly as to be virtually unintelligible to outsiders, while the sacking of General Herman Krupinski in 1976 (in circumstances not entirely dissimilar to his own fall from power) is not mentioned at all.37 Having said that, the account he gives of the Luftwaffe's handling of the Starfighter crisis in the 1960s is thorough, balanced and fair and not devoid of some harsh criticism (pp. 265-291). Back in the world of World War II, aviation enthusiasts used to the Erich Hartmann hagiography of Toliver and Constable will be in for a minor shock. In just a couple of paragraphs, Rail paints a much more nuanced picture of the world's most successful fighter pilot than they did in 300 pages. A truly exceptional pilot and fighter, he also comes across as a somewhat tragic figure who was propelled by his success into roles he didn't seek and only rarely managed to fill out - a classic example, perhaps, of the wartime Luftwaffe's policy of giving accelerated promotion to those officers who had shown themselves to be gifted dogfighters, rather than inspiring leaders or good administrators. Last but not least, Rail is also honest enough to admit that the Jagdwaffe was not an institution where flying, fighting and comradeship were the only factors determining pilots' lives: the presence of a minority (small or not) of dyed-in-the-wool National Socialists in his unit does not seem to have constituted a source of friction, but the same cannot be said of the Nazi Party's harassing of his wife for aiding Viennese friends in their flight abroad in 1938 (pp. 150-151, 154, 180).

The second night fighter pilot of this group regales us with an account from the trenches of the struggle for control of Germany's night-time skies. Paul Zorner joined Nachtjagdgeschwader 1 in July of 1942, and though rising to command a Gruppe (three squadrons) of night fighters, flew against RAF Bomber Command until the last day of the war. His 59 confirmed kills were achieved in just over 100 combat sorties, making him and his radar operator one of the most cost-effective teams of the entire Wehrmacht. He quite freely admits that he was privileged both in being teamed up with a radar operator endowed with above-average skills as well as being given the chance to fine-tune his flying skills in the 16 months he spent as an instructor and a transport pilot after finishing his basic training in June 1940. The account of how he gained his fighter wings (pp. 118-140) is a real eye-opener just for the insight it gives the reader into the degree to which fuel shortage had crippled Luftwaffe pilot training as early as the winter of 1941/42. The chapters on his time with four different front-line night fighter wings (pp. 143-299) are a vivid reminder of the improvised, even hopscotch, affair which the Luftwaffe's attempt to ward off night-time raiders essentially was. The main fighter used, the Messerschmitt 110, was barely capable of catching a Lancaster in level flight once the latter had jettisoned its ordnance; in the lumbering Dornier 217, Zorner once found himself in the peculiar position of being challenged to a veritable dogfight by the bomber - a Vickers Wellington - he had just intercepted, only emerging as the victor by the narrowest of margins. It is at this point that any reader more or less familiar with the subject would expect the author to dwell at length on the subject of the Heinkel 219 "Uhu" (Night Owl), which, though far superior to any of the other planes used by the Luftwaffe at night, was never built in large numbers because of the policy of Erhard Milch, State Secretary of the Reich Air Ministry, of sticking with tried and trusted models. This omission on his part is a puzzling one, since he must at least have had an inkling from other pilot's reports of the Night Owl's performance. The same could be said of the threat posed (or lack thereof) by British night fighters attempting to provide Bomber Command's heavies with close escort in 1943-45. Although he makes occasional references to comrades in arms falling prey to these, he never indicates whether this played an appreciable role in reducing his own or his unit's fighting effectiveness. Given the technological limitations of the period, it is fairly obvious that the attempt at night-time bomber escort would always have a more limited impact than the same tactic by day, but since this is still a topic debated among air power historians, a word or two on it from "the other side" would have been useful.

The author's skills in bringing the past alive shine through on a number of occasions, but especially so when he has to bring home to a generation of readers used to night-time air travel across countries lit up like Christmas trees, the horror of finding oneself over a blacked-out countryside with no working navigational aids and fuel-starved engines and weighing the relative pros and cons of taking to one's parachute or attempting a blind crash landing (esp. pp. 83-90, 227-229). Other more mundane conflicts such as covering up for a subordinate's negligence (pp. 230-232), dealing with the Luftwaffe's equivalent of the "Lack of Moral Fibre" categorization (pp. 265-267) or conflicts with superior officers (pp. 267-268), are also competently treated, thus giving the reader a well-rounded impression not just of air combat, but also of the daily problems associated with command of a small front-line unit in the Luftwaffe in the last two years of the war.

Walter Schuck's account of his career as Jagdgeschwader 5's top scorer offers a slightly different perspective on life in the wartime Luftwaffe to that offered in the four previous books. Unlike his peers, Schuck entered wartime training as a lowly Gefreiter (corporal) and went on to fight for two full years as an NCO pilot with Jagdgeschwader 5. Even though the Luftwaffe (unlike many Western air forces) was enlightened enough to give flight training to corporals who showed aptitude, this needs to be set against the fact that the author only got his commission after having proven himself in the most spectacular fashion (i.e., by accounting for 125 enemy aircraft). This makes for an interesting contrast with the rapid promotion given to many officers who had shown themselves to be successful dogfighters.

Ably assisted in this endeavour by aviation enthusiast Horst Kube, Schuck takes the reader on a journey to what was arguably the most self-contained theater of air warfare in Europe: the extreme northern tip of the Nordic peninsula, where the borders of Norway, Finland and the USSR abutted each other and where following the repulse of a German attempt to take Murmansk in the summer of 1941, the front soon became fairly static. Potentially neuralgic objectives on both sides of the frontline (the port of Murmansk and the nickel mines of Kolosjoki) forced both sides to retain a strong military presence in the area until the capitulation of Finland and the retreat of the German 20. Gebirgsarmee (Mountain Army) into Norway in September 1944. In the air, the Jagdwaffes contribution was limited most of the time to one or two Gruppen of Jagdgeschwader 5. Their pilots had to fly aircraft which, more often than not, were hand-me-downs from units flying and fighting in the Eastern Front's main theater down south. Their duties included providing air cover for the ground troops, intercepting incoming air raids, as well as escorting or attacking coastal convoys the arrival of which was key to maintaining large bodies of troops in an area largely devoid of all-weather roads. In addition to this, almost from the very beginning they were dwarfed in terms of sheer numbers by their Soviet adversaries. The one thing they had going for them was the significant edge they enjoyed over their adversaries in training and tactics as well as - initially - a degree of technological superiority. Even though something of a backwater by the standards of the Eastern front, Russian attempts to force Finland out of the war before the final push for Berlin led to a maximum effort on the part of the Red Air Force throughout the summer months of 1944. It was during this time that the freshly minted lieutenant really came into his own, claiming more than 80 kills over a 12-week period. Shortly after leaving Petsamo and retreating with his unit into northwestern Norway, Schuck was asked to join one of the new jet units currently under training in Germany. In this capacity he went on to score a further eight kills, taking him to a total of 206. He finished his war when he flew into British-occupied Fassberg on 9 May 1945 from a Czech airfield.38

The author's disarming honesty manifests itself in a number of places, whether it is the vivid description of his first dogfight, where he made every mistake in the book (pp. 48-49), a violent confrontation with another pilot over a mistake he had made in combat (p. 90) or his problems in adjusting to new responsibilities upon his promotion to squadron commander in July 1944 (pp. 164-167). His description of the circumstances which led to the sinking of the German battleship Tirpitz in a Norwegian fjord by the RAF are of special interest since he is in all likelihood the last surviving witness to the aftermath of this controversial affair. At the time, attention centred on the sins of omission allegedly perpetrated by JG 5's wing commander, Major Heinrich Ehrler, who was subsequently court-martialed and found guilty of dereliction of duty. Schucks account gives added plausibility to a version of events already well established over the last few decades: in this scenario it is the notoriously poor liaison between the local Luftwaffe and Kriegsmarine commands39 which brings about a sequence of events which allows the British bomber force to slip through.

Last but not least, there is also room in Schucks chronicles for a brief appearance by one of the Luftwaffe's political commissars (the Nationalsozialistische Führungsoffizier, or National Socialist leadership officer). Endowed with much more limited functions and less authority than their Soviet counterparts, the NSFOs usually had to rely on their own war records to earn the respect of the men they were supposed to advise. In this particular instance, a hapless NSFO who fails to pass the test ends up being tossed out of a window after he had unwisely questioned JG 5's recent combat record - it is to the author's credit that he does not attempt to picture this incident as being a reflection of anything more transcendental, like a disagreement over politics.

Thanks to the book's high-quality paper, the reader can make the most of the well over 250 photographs and eight excellent maps supplied by the author. The latter in particular are a major bonus to anyone not already thoroughly familiar with the geography of the northern reaches of the Nordic countries. The former give a vivid impression of what it must have been like to fly operationally in a region where geography and climate could pose a greater challenge than fighting the enemy.

An agenda for future research

Reading these five books left the reviewer with a lingering wish for more of the same. Kurt Braatz, for one, should feel encouraged to cast his net a little wider and maybe include in his gallery the recollections of a type of pilot much more representative of the 1943/45 Luftwaffe: substantially younger than a Rall or Schuck, trained in barely half the time given to them only one or two years earlier, cast into the furnace of air warfare in 1944 and a survivor against all statistical odds. In addition, many ideas for future avenues of scholarly research suggested themselves, with a comparison of the criteria used for promotion by the major air forces of World War II and an experiential military history of the Luftwaffe40 being just two of them. While the latter would essentially have to be started from scratch and would be a daunting undertaking to say the least, the gems to be found in the recently released minutes of MI-19's systematic eavesdropping on German POWs should certainly be enough to give the idea a major boost.41

The startling contrast between Rall's and Meimberg's accounts on the subject of German aircrew being machine-gunned in their parachutes, together with the scant research undertaken on this subject so far42, should make this an interesting field of research. While it is important to emphasise that according to the existing international conventions of the 1940s, machine-gunning a parachuting pilot did not constitute a war crime43, we now have some indication that, technically aboveboard or not, at least some USAAF senior officers were both aware of and uncomfortable with it.44 The sheer number of cases also suggest that this phenomenon cannot be explained away simply by referring to the "heat of combat."45 How and why this state of affairs was arrived at, and whether it originated from the lower ranks (possibly as retaliation for the first reports of Allied airmen being lynched by German civilians)46 or as a suggestion/oral order47 from higher command, should be a subject well worth exploring.

Finally, it is well worth remembering that the debate of the last 15-20 years over the degree to which the German armed forces were in the grip of National Socialist ideology has so far essentially been limited to the army and (to a lesser extent) the Kriegsmarine. Hitler's saying that he had "a monarchist navy, reactionary army and National Socialist Luftwaffe," while an obvious oversimplification seems hardly surprising, since the air force was the only service with a service chief who himself hailed from the ranks of the NSDAP's "alte Kämpfer" (old fighters). The extent to which the elite among the Luftwaffe's ground forces (especially the Hermann Göring division and some of the Fallschirmjäger units) perceived themselves as political soldiers and were prepared to display a particular ruthlessness in combat48 seems to suggest that Göring's endeavours in this regard might have enjoyed at least a modicum of success.49 In the case of the fighter arm, a similar trend may well have been favored by the extent to which successful aces were given the VIP treatment and enrolled in the German propaganda machinery the moment they returned from the front. At the same time, the arbitrary and increasingly hysterical accusations from a commander in chief quite obviously out of his depth may well have gone a long way towards halting or reversing such a process after 1941. In any case, further research into the subject would appear to be a worthwhile endeavour.

1. Available in English as My Logbook: Reminiscences, 1918-2006 (Wang, Germany: Editions Twenty-nine Six, 2007). ISBN 978-3-980-7935-8-2. Photographs. Bibliography. Source notes. Pp. 373. US$55.00.

2. For examples of how fragile the spirit of chivalry could sometimes turn out to be, see the order given to Fighter Command in August 1940 to shoot down German air-sea rescue planes marked with the Red Cross, as well as the attack by German fighter bombers on the RAF Officers' Hospital in Torquay on 25 October 1942. Unlike the first case, which can be traced back to Winston Churchill, the origins of the Torquay mission and how the pilots who carried it out were briefed has remained a mystery due to the loss of the war diaries of the commands which were likely to have been involved in the operation Jagdgeschwader 2, Jagdfliegerführer 3, Höherer Jagdfliegerführer West, Luftflotte 3). The known facts have been summarised by FC. Rexford Welsh, "RAF Officers' Hospital Torquay, "After the Battle Magazine, Nr. 1 18: 34-43.

3. A total often pilots achieved more than 100 kills against the Western air forces, while in Russia nine reached or exceeded a score of 200. The most successful pilot of each group (Hans Joachim Marseille with 158, Erich Hartmann with 352 kills) took just over two years to attain his respective score. On the Allied side, the top British and U.S. aces who flew against the Luftwaffe achieved 34 and 28 "kills" respectively, with their Soviet peer claiming 62. The very nature of Second World War fighter combat made it all but inevitable that overclaiming would occur on all sides; in order to insure against this, the paperwork relating to each claim (especially reports by witnesses) had to be passed on to the Reichsluftfahrtministerium in Berlin, which retained the right to deny confirmation. For an interesting discussion of how some aces showed a greater tendency to overclaim than others and even managed to hoodwink the system, see the recent exchange in the discussion board ofwww.ww2.dk.

4. In 2004, a minority of Bundestag deputies belonging to the Green and Socialist (i.e., the former ruling party in East Germany) parties submitted a motion calling for the name of Second World War ace Werner Mölders to be removed as the honorific title of the Bundeswehr's Jagdgeschwader 74. The outcome of the issue came to hinge on the verdict of an expert opinion Gutachten) to be produced by Lieutenant Colonel Dr. Wolfgang Schmidt of the Historical Research Institute of the German Armed Forces (the Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt, or MGFA). In the MGFA's 50 years of existence, it has gone a long way towards redeeming the idea of an officially sponsored, but independent, military history in Germany capable of resisting - unlike its predecessor in the inter-war years - attempts at political manipulation. Schmidt's recommendation (still accessible on www.mgfa.de in August 2008) that Mölders was indeed not representative of the Bundeswehr's spiritual core values was essentially arrived at by, on the one hand, accepting every accusation at face value while routinely dismissing positive testimony as "unproven" or "partisan". In addition, the document was so littered with omissions and half-truths that the idea of a politically motivated hatchet job cannot be dismissed out of hand. Without a doubt, the Molders-Gutachten will remain a truly unique blot on the otherwise exemplary record of the MGFA in promoting the study of scholarly military history in post-war Germany. Readers of the Journal wishing to acquaint themselves with all the aspects of this affair should turn to Hermann Hagena, Jagdflieger Werner Mölders. Die Wërde des Menschen gehtßber den Tod hinaus (Aachen: Helios, 2008).

5. The loyalty shown by the survivors of the U-boat arm to their former C-in-C, Admiral Karl Dönitz, can be traced back to a number of factors. Quite apart from the fact that at the beginning of the war he was still a fairly junior commander (his rank was the equivalent of a colonel), his sentencing at Nuremberg drew heavy criticism not just from his own men but naval commanders of other - including former enemy - countries as well. In addition, though his failures in leadership in the second half of the war contributed to the horrific losses among U-boat crews during that time, unlike Göring, he never berated his men for failing to achieve the impossible. The best known case of veterans rallying to defend "their" admiral occurred in the wake of the publication of Lothar-Günther-Buchheim's Das Boot (Munich: R. Piper &c Co. Verlag, 1973) and the screening of the feature film (1981) based on it. See Michael L. Hadley, Count Not the Dead: the Popular Image of the German Submarine (Montreal Sc Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1995), 140-171. On the question of the reinsertion of German veterans into post-war civil society in general, see James Diehl, Thanks of the Fatherland: German Veterans after the Second World War (Chapel HiU: University of North Carolina Press, 1993).

6. On joining Hider's government as Reichskommissar für die Luftfahrt, Göring still held his post-1918 military rank of Hauptmann (captain) in the reserves. In order to provide him with some political muscle in the upcoming struggle with the army over the control of the newly created Luftwaffe, he was promoted to General der Infanterie (i.e., full general) on 30 August 1933. Such a blatant act of political favoritism was without precedent in the entire history of Prussia and Germany.

7. The only war diaries of operational Geschwader-size units available to researchers in the Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv (Freiburg) are fragments of the records of Jagdgeschwaders 3 and 77.

8. Until 1 September 1943, this was inclusive of the Schlachtflieger (Stukas and other close air support aircraft).

9. Adolf Galland, Die Ersten und die Letzten. Die Jagdflieger im Zweiten Weltkrieg (Munich: Schneekluth Verlag, 1953; numerous reprints). The book's cult status was once again brought home to this reviewer during a recent virtual shopping trip at a second-hand book shop on the World Wide Web. The asking price for the one paperback copy available (an unsigned reprint) was 205 UK ($310).

10. Gerd Gaiser, Die sterbende Jagd (Munich: Carl Hanser, 1955). The author did his best to obfuscate the identity of the fighter wing in question by providing characters and geographical locations with fictional names, but the available evidence points very strongly either to Jagdgeschwader 1 or Jagdgeschwader 11 (the former being the parent unit of the latter).

11 . Even though the paperback edition alone sold a respectable 100,000 copies in five years, today Gaiser's book is mostly remembered by scholars of post-1945 German literature. The main reason for its limited impact may well lay in the profusion of 1940s Luftwaffe jargon which makes it a challenging read for all uninitiated readers.

12. Even though for more than 30 years Göring's image as an incompetent buffoon rested largely on Galland's self-serving memoirs, recent scholarship has gone a long way towards confirming his devastating judgement. See for instance Horst Boog, Die deutsche Luftwaffenführung 1 9351945. Führungsprobleme, Spitzengliederung, Generalstabausbildung (Stuttgart: Schöningh, 1982); Kurt Braatz, Gott oder ein Flugzeug. Leben und Sterben des Jagdfliegers Günther Lützow (Moosburg: NeunundzwanzigSechs, 2005), esp. pp 269-369; Ernst Stilla, "Die Luftwaffe im Kampf um die Luftherrschaft. Entscheidende Einflußgrifen bei der Niederlage der Luftwaffe im Abwehrkampf im Westen und öber Deutschland im Zweiten Weltkrieg unter besonderer Berßcksichtigung der Faktoren Luftröstung, Forschung und Entwicklung und Human-Ressourcen" (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Bonn, 2005), esp. chapter 11.2.

13. For obvious examples, see Raymond F. Toliver and Trevor J. Constable, Horrido! (London: Arthur Barker Ltd., 1968) on the Jagdwaffe aces in general, as well as the biography of Erich Hartmann produced by the same authors: The Blond Knight of Germany (London: Arthur Barker, 1970). It has to be said that the first book in particular still has its uses as an introduction to the general subject area.

14. For a complete list of Mr. Weal's work, the reader is referred to his publishers' website: www.ospreypublishing.com.

15. Peter Hinchliffe, Schnaufer, Ace of Diamonds: the Biography of Heinz Wolfgang Schnaufer, Germany's Top-Scoring Night Fighter of World War Il (Stroud, U.K., and Charleston, S.C.: Tempus Publishing, 1999) as well as Peter Hinchliffe, The Lent Papers (Bristol, U.K. : Cerberus Publishing, 2003).

16. For a particularly scandalous instance of a publisher literally eviscerating a piece of promising scholarship, see Ulf Balke, Der Luftkrieg in Europa. Die Einsätze des Kampfgeschwaders 2 (Koblenz: Bernard&Graefe Verlag, 1990/91).

17. Only a handful of these have so far been translated into English. Apart from Galland, there are: Heinz Knoke, / Flew for the Führer (London: Evans Brothers, 1953); Ulrich Steinhilper, Spitfire on My Tail: a View from the Other Side (London: Independent Books, 1987); Adolf Dickfeld, Footsteps of the Hunter (Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada: JJ. Fedorowicz, 1992); Norbert Hannig, Luftwaffe Fighter Ace: From the Eastern Front to the Defence of the Homeland (London: Grub Street, 2004).

18. An important exception was made by Ernst Stilla in his recent Ph.D. dissertation on the defeat of the Jagdwaffe in the last two years of the war. While the bulk of his sources are of primary nature (whether private papers or surviving official documentation), many of his key points, which address the Luftwaffe's lackadaisical approach to the management of human resources, are effectively supported by the written testimony of surviving veterans of the fighter arm. Stilla, "Kampf um die Luftherrschaft." Stilla's work complements Horst Boog's account of the strategic dimension of the bombing campaign against Germany in volume 7 of the MGFAs multi-volume history of the Second World War. The best account so far of the tactical dimension of the big air battles of 1943X45 from a German point of view is that offered by Donald Caldwell & Richard Müller, The Luftwaffe over Germany: Defense of the Reich (London: Greenhill, 2007).

19. Bernd Wegner, "Erschriebene Siege. Franz Haider, die Historical Division und die Rekonstruktion des Zweiten Weltkrieges im Geiste des deutschen Generalstabes", in Ernst Willi Hansen, Gerhard Schreiber and Bernd Wegner, eds., Politischer Wandel, organisierte Gewalt und nationale Sicherheit. Beiträge zur neueren Geschichte Deutschlands und Frankreichs. Festschrift für Klaus-Jürgen Müller (Munich: DVA, 1995): 287-302.

20. For an excellent analysis of the uses memoirs can have for historians of both early and late modern military history, see Yuval Noah Harari, "Military Memoirs: A historical overview of the genre from the Middle Ages to the Late Modern era", War in History 14, 3 (2007): 289-309.

21.In his short story collection Declarations of War (London: Jonathan Cape, 1971; numerous reprints).

22. A fighter Geschwader had a nominal strength of around 120 aircraft and was the equivalent of the USAAF's Group or the RAF's Wing.

23. As immortalized in the feature film, "The Longest Day" (20th Century Fox, 1961).

24. According to Donald Caldwell, The JG 26 War Diary, Vol. II, 1943-1945 (London: Grub Street, 1998), 296, the fighter units of Luftflotte 3 opposed the establishment of the Allied bridgehead with more than 10,000 sorties in the first three weeks alone. It goes without saying that this number was dwarfed many times over by Anglo-American air power.

25. For several instances where Slovak, Bulgarian and Hungarian fliers were killed in this manner by pilots subordinate to the Fifteenth Army Air Force, see Hans-Werner Neulen, Am Himmel Europas. Lufttreitkräfte an deutscher Seite 1939-1945 (Munich: Universitas, 1998), 143, 146, 173-174, 200.

26. Stephen L. McFarland and Wesley Phillips Newton, To Command the Sky: the Battle for Air Superiority over Germany, 1942-1944 (Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press; rev. ed., 2002), is probably the best account of how the leadership of the USAAF in early 1944 shifted its operational focus from strategic bombing to inflicting wholesale attrition on the Luftwaffe's fighter arm. Despite the obvious relevance of this aspect of U.S. fighter tactics to their chosen subject, the authors fail to address it even in passing.

27. Despite the savagery of the fighting there, few such incidents were reported from the Russian front. One German fighter ace who had faced both Americans and Soviets in the air even made a point of dwelling at some length on this remarkable discrepancy in his memoirs: Heinz Ewald, Esau (privately published, 1990), 63. It needs to be borne in mind, however that in view of the average altitude at which most air combat in the East (2,000-2,500 m) took place, the victorious pilot usually had much less time in which to target his vanquished adversary.

28. See Robert Jung, Auf verlorenem Posten. Die Geschichte eines jungen Jagdfliegers (Mainz: Self-published, 1993): 65-66, 80-81 for the recollections on the subject of a veteran of Jagdgeschwader 300.

29. At some point in late 1944, the pilots of the I. Gruppe of Jagdgeschwader 26 even appear to have held a vote to decide their future course of action in the matter. According to testimony collected by the author of JG 26' s unit history, the notion was rejected. See Caldwell,/G 26 War Diary, Vol. 2: 465.

30. From September 1943 to November 1944, General Officer Commanding of I. Jagdkorps, i.e. the subcommand of Luftflotte Reich tasked with countering the Eighth AAF's raids into western and central Germany. Schmid's name is usually associated with the abysmally poor intelligence he supplied on the RAF before and during the Battle of Britain, while employed as head of intelligence in the 5th Abteilung of the Luftwaffe's General Staff.

31. Meimberg's account is supported by the manner in which the regime around the same time "encouraged" the murder of Allied air crew who had parachuted from their aircraft: rather than issue an unambiguous directive, the different police organisations of the Reich were told not to "interfere" with any altercations that might ensue between Allied air crew and German civilians. This subject still awaits scholarly treatment. The evidence so far gathered by the authors of www.flieger-lynchmorde.de would seem to indicate, however, that in the majority of cases (about 300), the perpetrators were not civilians traumatised by the recent destruction of their homes, but police and party officials.

32. Among the titles that come to mind are Milovan Djilas, Wartime (New York and London: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1977); as well as Samuel Hynes, Flights of Passage: Reflections of a World War II Aviator (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1988); and George MacDonald Fraser, Quartered Safe Out Here (London: Harper & Collins, 1992).

33. Jill Amadio, Günther Rail : a Memoir: Luftwaffe Ace and NATO General: the Authorized Biography (Santa Ana, Calif.: Tangmere Productions, 2002)

34. One hundred of Rail's 275 victories were achieved during this time period.

35. The quite disproportionate number of JG 52 veterans holding key positions in the 1960s and 1970s Luftwaffe would make for a worthy subject of research in itself.

36. The propaganda machine of the Nazi regime had used Hermann Graff to great effect at the peak of his career (in October 1942, he was the first pilot to reach the magical mark of 200 confirmed kills), with his working-class background being seen as a major bonus. Released from captivity in the USSR in 1949, he was denounced three years later by Hans Hahn for supposedly having collaborated with the Soviets.

37. Rall lost his position in 1974 as a result of a private trip he had taken to South Africa being misrepresented in the media. Krupinski found himself caught up in the frenzy of the "Rudel Affair" two years later. In attempting to make light of a social visit to the "Immelman" wing by top Stuka ace and neo-nazi sympathiser Hans-Ulrich-Rudel, he drew a comparison between Rudel on the one hand, and the communist past of Herbert Wehner (Social Democratic Party leader in the Bundestag) on the other. His assumption that he was talking off the record was to prove sadly mistaken. For more details, see Donald Abenheim, Reforging the Iron Cross: the Search for Tradition in the West German Armed Forces (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988), 256-263.

38. Anyone wishing to take up the story from this point can refer to the memoirs of one of his Allied hosts, French Flight Lieutenant Pierre Clostermann, The Big Show: the Greatest Pilot's Story of World War II (London: Cassell, 2005), 309-311.

39. Throughout most of the war, the slipshod cooperation between Kriegsmarine and Luftwaffe stood in stark contrast to the much better track record of the Luftwaffe and the army. For an analysis of the reasons behind this, see Sönke Neitzel, Der Einsatz der Luftwaffe öber dem Atlantik und der Nordsee 1939-1945 (Bonn: Bernard Sc Graefe, 1995).

40. A genre already well established for aircrew on the Allied side. For the British experience, see Edward Smithies, War in the Air: the Men and Women Who Built, Serviced and Flew Warplanes Remember the Second World War (London: Viking, 1990), while John C. McManus, Deadly Sky: the American Combat Airman in World War II (Novato, Calif: Presidio Press, 2000) has provided many valuable insights for the U.S. side. The seminal Mark K. Wells, Courage and Air Warfare: the Allied Aircrew Experience in the Second World War (London: Frank Cass Co., 1995) makes copious use of interviews and memoirs to elucidate how the RAF and USAAF tackled the problem of upholding morale in the face of mounting losses in 1942-44.

41. Sönke Neitzel, ed., Tapping Hitler's Generals: Transcripts of Secret Conversations, 1942-45 (Barnsley, U.K.: Pen 6c Sword, 2007) is the first study to fully exploit the potential of this new type of primary source. MI-19 was the branch of British Intelligence specifically charged with obtaining information from enemy POWs.

42. The only half-hearted attempt at analysis made so far are the memoirs of Luftwaffe interrogator Hans-Joachim Scharff. See Raymond F. Toliver, ed., The Interrogator: the Story of Hans-Joachim Scharff Master Interrogator of the Luftwaffe (Atglen,Pa..: Schiffer, 1997),200-228.They are remarkable as much for what they reveal as for what they obviously try to hide, a fact made understandable by the author having emigrated to the U.S. in 1954 and taking up American citizenship soon after.

43. The few ineffectual attempts made in the interwar years to provide a framework of international law for the new arena of air power had mainly concerned themselves with limiting the bombing of civilian dwellings and never even got round to addressing the combatant status of a pilot parachuting into territory where he was likely to be rescued by his own side. The ambiguities of this issue are nicely highlighted by an attempt on the part of Generaloberst Alfred Jodl of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht in June 1944 to limit the scope of reprisals threatened against Allied air crew who had parachuted or crash-landed after having been "caught in the act" of perpetrating alleged war crimes. While he admitted that strafing civilians and killing parachuting Germans constituted cases which warranted reprisals, the strafing of Luftwaffe air

The First World War version of General Winter

The German army was designed to fight in Western and Central Europe, a land with a dense network of good roads, teeming cities, and many small farms. It found itself on the Russian steppes, table-flat grasslands with few roads, almost all of them miserable, and with great distances between settlements. Now, driving deep into Russia and the Ukraine, it encountered the continental climate, something vastly different from the sea-tempered climate of the rest of Europe. To the German troops, the autumn rains were like what Noah must have witnessed from the ark. Roads became liquid. The rivers, fantastically long and wide by western European standards, flooded the surrounding land. German tanks, trucks, and even horse-drawn carts bogged down. The history of the 98th Wehrmacht division recorded, "The modern general service carts with their rubber tires and ball-bearing mounted wheels had long since broken up under the stress of the appalling tracks, and been replaced by Russian farm carts."

Worse was yet to come.

Winter descended with a ferocity that was unknown to anyone west of Russia. The German troops were completely unprepared. Supply of winter clothing had been forbidden, because that would cast doubt on the General Staff prediction that the Soviet Union would collapse before the first snow.

Hitler ordered his troops to concentrate on taking Moscow. Winter had frozen the mud, and the Germans strove mightily to take the city and get shelter from the arctic weather. But there were difficulties.

In spite of his weaknesses as a general, Stalin was a competent, ruthless civil administrator. He managed to get most of the key factories in western Russia moved behind the Urals, and now they were producing a new tank, the T 34. The T 34 was the best tank to appear in all of World War II and far better than Germany's best, the Pz KW IV. And the forces defending Moscow had a new leader, Marshal Georgi K. Zhukov, who had commanded the defenders of Leningrad. Zhukov launched a counteroffensive, using troops from the Soviet Far East and as many T 34s as he could get. The Germans were pushed back from Moscow and all along the line.

Stalin used the winter respite from German attack to court-martial defeated generals. At least one army commander and 10 major generals were executed.

(November 20, 1885-July 16, 1960)

German General

Jovial Kesselring was an accomplished defensive tactician who contested U.S. forces for possession of Italy during World War II. He was also the only senior German commander whom Adolf Hitler did not remove from command. His success on land is even more impressive considering that Kesselring was previously an aerial strategist.

Albert Kesselring was born in Marktsheft, Bavaria, on November 20, 1885, the son of a schoolmaster. After attending the Classical Grammar School, he joined the army as an artillery officer in 1904. Throughout World War I, Kesselring performed staff functions and was also trained as a balloon observer. He was subsequently retained by the postwar Reichswehr and by 1932 had advanced to colonel. His open, friendly demeanor led to the less-than-flattering sobriquet of "Smiling" Albert. The turning point in Kesselring's career happened in 1933 following the ascent of Adolf Hitler to power as Germany's chancellor. Hitler commenced a covert rearmament that year, and by 1935 a new air force-the Luftwaffe-was born. Kesselring, acknowledged as a brilliant administrator, was then tapped to serve as a high-ranking official within that organization, and he acquired his pilot's license at the age of 48. In 1936, he became Luftwaffe chief of staff following the death of Gen. Walter Wever in a plane crash. As such he promoted new classes of bombers and fighters that made Germany's air arm the most advanced in the world. More important, he helped pioneer and codify the close-air support tactics necessary to assist land units-the essence of blitzkrieg warfare. By 1937, his exceptional performance resulted in a promotion to general, and he departed staff functions to command Luftflotte I (Air Fleet) the following year.

World War II commenced with a German attack upon Poland, and Kesselring's aircraft played a decisive role throughout that successful campaign. His bombers wreaked havoc ahead of German tank columns, and he developed the mass-bombing tactics that gutted Warsaw. In the spring of 1940, Hitler's attention turned west, and Kesselring, now commanding Luftflotte II, became actively engaged in the campaign against the Low Countries and France. Both were speedily overcome thanks in part to his excellent aircrews and equipment. However, the Luftwaffe was stunned after encountering British Supermarine Spitfires over Dunkirk, which extracted a heavy toll from Kesselring's previously unstoppable armadas. Consequently, thanks to Marshal Hermann Gรถring's mismanagement of airpower, the British escaped from Dunkirk with their army intact. That summer the Luftwaffe was pitted against the Royal Air Force (RAF) for control of the skies over England. Both sides fought with marvelous tenacity and courage, but German losses were approximately twice as large as England's. Kesselring originated the strategy of bombing RAF airfields as a direct way of stripping British aerial defenses, but, with Gรถring, he eventually approved Hitler's shifting of priorities from military to civilian targets. This proved a gross strategic miscalculation, for it granted the hard-pressed British Fighter Command the time needed to regroup and finally win the battle. Consequently, the Germans canceled their intended invasion of England. Hitler was nonetheless pleased by Kesselring's performance as an air chief, and in July 1940 he was elevated to field marshal. The following spring he transferred his refurbished command to Poland in anticipation of invading Russia. Throughout the summer and fall, waves of his bombers spearheaded Gen. Fedor von Bock's armored columns during the drive to Moscow. His talents were suddenly required on another front, and in the fall of 1941 Kesselring established new headquarters at Rome.

Now situated as commander in chief South, Kesselring accepted responsibility for conducting the war in North Africa. His mission also included shoring up the flagging defenses of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, as well as coordinating supplies and offensive moves by German forces. His brilliant but mercurial subordinate, Gen. Erwin Rommel, proved difficult to restrain at a distance, yet the British were nearly run out of Egypt. But lengthening supply lines posed difficult problems, and Kesselring advocated capturing the British-held island of Malta. He then began an 11-day aerial offensive against airfields, port facilities, and defenses, but Hitler suddenly canceled the invasion, sending most of Kesselring's aircraft to Russia. Within six months, U.S. forces under Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower had landed in Algeria and began pressing east while victorious British forces under Field Marshal Bernard L. Montgomery advanced to the west. Rommel was caught between the pincer, and Kesselring helped orchestrate an effective rear-guard action. However, an ambitious and possibly decisive counterblow was lost when Rommel's attack through Kasserine Pass was not properly supported by forces under Gen. Hans-Jurgen Arnim. By May 1943, it no longer mattered, as Allied forces captured the whole of Tunisia and all German forces stationed there. The focus of war now shifted to Italy.

Given the gravity of the situation, Kesselring arrived in Sicily to direct its defense personally. When the Allied invasion materialized that July, it proved unstoppable, but he nonetheless executed a brilliant fighting withdrawal whereby 100,000 German soldiers and 10,000 vehicles were evacuated to the mainland. He then spent several weeks preparing for the defense of Italy, a rugged, mountainous peninsula that neutralized most Allied advantages in tanks and manpower. Over the next 20 months, Kesselring proved himself a master at defensive tactics. American forces under Gen. Mark Clark landed at Salerno on September 9, 1943, which partly caught the defenders by surprise, but Kesselring rushed men and tanks to the threatened zone and nearly pushed the Allies into the sea. For the remainder of the war, German forces gave ground slowly and in good order, making their enemy pay heavily for every inch of terrain. Snug in their positions along the well-prepared defensive position designated the Gustav Line, Kesselring's men defied several hard-pressed attempts to evict them. From November 1943 to May 1944, the strong points around Monte Cassino under Gen. Fridolin von Senger und Etterlin were an embarrassing thorn in Clark's side. Frustrated by a lack of success, the Allies tried mounting an end run around the Germans by landing at Anzio, near Rome. Kesselring reacted with his usual promptness and the beachhead was contained. It was not until May 1944 that the Germans forcibly abandoned the Gustav Line, which enabled the Americans to finally enter Rome. The defenders, meanwhile, fell back to prepared positions called the Gothic Line, and the entire bloody process repeated itself. Despite numerical superiority and command of the air and sea, the Allies would not push the remaining Germans out of Italy until war's end. Kesselring's excellent eye for defensive terrain, and his masterful shifting of resources, were decisive factors in maintaining that agonizing pace.

In March 1945, Hitler summoned Kesselring from Italy to succeed Gerd von Rundstedt as commander in chief West. His orders were to hold everywhere and drive the Allies back, but Germany's position was essentially hopeless. Following a few stiff rearguard actions, Kesselring surrendered to the Americans at Saalfield on May 6, 1945. By that time he was one of few high-ranking German officials that Hitler had not sacked. After the war, Kesselring was imprisoned and charged with war crimes. Apparently, several units under his command executed 332 Italian citizens in retaliation for partisan activities. Kesselring was found guilty and condemned to death, but his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment by Prime Minister Winston Churchill. This was done apparently at the behest of several Allied commanders. He gained an early release on account of poor health in October 1952 and retired to private life to write his memoirs. Kesselring died at Bad Nauheim on July 16, 1960, hailed by his former enemies as one of Germany's top commanders. His far-sighted aviation policies as the Luftwaffe's chief administrator should not be overlooked.

Bibliography

Barnett, Correlli, ed. Hitler's Generals. New York: Grove Weidenfield, 1989; Botjer, George F. Sideshow War: The Italian Campaign, 1943-1945. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1996; Brett-Smith, Richard. Hitler's Generals. London: Osprey, 1976; Chant, Christopher, ed. Hitler's Generals and Their Battles. London: Salamander Books, 1977; Fraschka, Gunter. Knights of the Reich. Atglen, PA: Schiffer, 1994; Humble, Richard. Hitler's Generals. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1974; Kesselring, Albert. The Memoirs of Field Marshal Albert Kesselring. London: Kimber, 1974; Lucas, James S. Hitler's Commanders: German Bravery in the Field, 1939-1945. London: Cassell, 2000; Lucas, James S. Hitler's Enforcers. London: Arms and Armour, 1996; Macksey, Kenneth. Kesselring: German Master Strategist of the Second World War. Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 1996; Mitcham, Samuel W. Hitler's Field Marshals and Their Battles. Chelsea, MI: Scarborough House, 1990.

Romanian forces advance towards the battle front, utilizing German SDKFZ 251 armored personnel carriers, June 1944.

Romania provided more troops to the German cause than all other Axis satellites combined, and more than 1.2 million Romanian men served under arms by mid-1944. The Armata Românã (Romanian army) fought first for the Axis powers and then for the Allies. Most senior officers were political appointees who relied on outmoded tactics of massed frontal assaults-an approach that was reinforced both by the paucity of modern communications equipment and by the fact that the army was composed primarily of uneducated peasants. Strict boundaries existed between officers and enlisted ranks, and punishments were brutal. Campaigns on foreign soil for dubious benefits diminished morale and efficiency, but the soldiers were tenacious when they believed they were fighting in the interest of Romania instead of for Germany.

The Frontier and Mountain units were the elite troops, composed of experienced professional border guards. The Cavalry Corps also performed with skill and élan. In fact, Romania fielded the largest horse-mounted cavalry contingent in Europe, and half of the 8-million-head national herd was lost in the war.

Equipment was a hodgepodge, much of it of World War I vintage. Some 1,000 Romanian artillery pieces were fitted with barrel sleeves to standardize on 75 mm ammunition. The frontline Romanian infantry was armed with Czechoslovakian ZB30 light machine guns and ZB24 rifles, the Czech version of the German Mauser, and Romania produced many weapons of its own, including the respectable Orita submachine gun. Although the Germans promised modern equipment, they generally delivered only older weapons.

On 2-3 July 1941, following the start of the invasion of the Soviet Union, Romanian and German troops crossed the flooded Prut River to reclaim lands seized from Romania by the Soviet Union the previous year. The Soviet Ninth, Twelfth, and Eighteenth Armies opposed them. In northern Bukovina, elements of Third Army encountered weak opposition, and by 9 July, they secured that province, which had also been seized by the Soviet Union in 1940. To their southeast, the Romanian Fourth Army lost 9,000 men vainly trying to enlarge a bridgehead at Falciu, but it successfully crossed into Bessarabia near Iasy (Jassy) and advanced on the capital of Kishinev (Chisinau to Romanians).

The Soviet II Cavalry Corps, led by tanks, counterattacked savagely in the Cornesti Massif highlands on 10 July, smashing Romania's 35th Reserve Division. Crack troops of the Frontier Division halted the breakthrough, and the 1st Armored Division turned the Soviet flank. By 26 July, Romania again possessed Bessarabia and northern Bukovina, at a cost of 22,000 casualties. Most Romanians believed their war was over.

Instead, the Romanian government dispatched 18 divisions to capture the Soviet Black Sea port of Odessa. The siege of Odessa, from early August to mid-October, cost 70,000 to 100,000 Romanian casualties, but it was the most significant victory ever achieved independently by an Axis satellite. Romanian soldiers fought in the Crimea, the Caucasus, and the southern USSR. The Germans sometimes had to rescue their allies, but on other occasions, Romanians saved German troops, as at the Kuban bridgehead on 7 April 1943.

Romanian engineers helped build the bridge over the Dnieper at Berislav, the longest bridge ever constructed under fire. On 1 September 1942, the Romanian 3rd Mountain Division and the German 46th Infantry Division captured beachheads on the Kerch (Kersch) Peninsula in the largest amphibious assault undertaken by the European Axis powers during the war. Romanian Brigadier General Ion Dumitrache won Germany's Knight's Cross for capturing Nalchik on 2 November 1942, the farthest point of Axis advance in the Caucasus. At least 16 Romanian officers received the Knight's Cross, more than were awarded to any other non-German Axis power. Additionally, 25 soldiers won the Order of Michael the Brave, Romania's highest award for valor.

Performance declined as disgruntled soldiers increasingly believed they were fighting Adolf Hitler's war. They failed to construct adequate defenses at Stalingrad, and the Soviet armored counteroffensives tore through their lines. Although they then repeatedly blunted the Soviet advance, they lacked the means to halt it. Flaws in the army had become glaringly apparent after Odessa. Its 75 mm artillery and 37 mm antitank guns lacked sufficient range and firepower. The infantry had not been trained to cooperate with the tanks, and it did not have motorized transport to keep up with them. The lack of a mobile reserve remained one of Romania's greatest military deficiencies throughout the war, and supplies and equipment were often carried by horses. Although obsolete Czech R-2 and French R-35 tanks were gradually replaced with upgraded German PzKpfw IIIs and a few PzKpfw IVs, plus captured U.S. Lend-Lease M-3 tanks and Soviet T-60s, virtually all were inadequate against Soviet heavy tanks.

Two-thirds of Romania's field army was lost at Stalingrad. Demoralized replacements, many recruited from prisons, were pushed steadily back toward the Prut. On 23 August 1944, Romania renounced its membership in the Axis pact. Soon, more than a half million Romanian soldiers were fighting against their former allies.

Using outdated tactics and weapons against powerful, modern enemies cost Romania approximately 410,000 casualties, 120,000 of them during the war's final eight months. Another 130,000 troops disappeared into Soviet prison camps, where many died.

References

Axworthy, Mark. Third Axis, Fourth Ally: Romanian Armed Forces in the European War, 1841-1945. London: Arms and Armour Press, 1995.

Bennighof, Mike. "Romania on the Offensive: The Eastern Front, 1941-42." Strategy&Tactics, no. 206 (November-December 2000): 4-15.

Butler, Rupert. Hitler's Jackals. Barnsley, UK: Leo Cooper, 1998.

Tarnstrom, Ronald L. Balkan Battles. Lindsborg, KS: Trogen Books, 1998.

Published by H-German@h-net.msu.edu (January, 2009)

Michael Jones. _Leningrad: State of Siege_. New York: Basic Books, 2008. 352 pp. $27.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-465-01153-7.

Reviewed for H-German by Lee Baker, Department of History, University of Cincinnati, Raymond Walters College

Understanding Human Misery through Human Experiences

In this book, Michael Jones uses memoirs, interviews, and museum resources to reconstruct a picture of Leningrad during one of the most brutal sieges of warfare, a siege designed not to capture the city but to kill its inhabitants through starvation, disease, bombardment, and neglect. It reflects not traditional military history--an odd type of human study because it tends to ignore the people involved, instead recounting unit movements, strategies and tactics, equipment, and the role of leadership at the highest levels of command--but newer scholarship, which focuses more on the people involved in epic struggles between nations. This new approach includes not only the experiences of soldiers, as they have always played a large role in military history, but of civilians and noncombatants as well.

The experiences of civilians who experience wars as armies approach their cities, attack, and pass through offer much material of interest to military historians and general readers as well. Military personnel have never been the only people affected by war, and civilians have in fact borne the brunt of the violence in most past wars, especially during the pre-modern period.

The absence of their experiences except as mere chronicle has thus loomed as a large hole in the usefulness of military history. In this book, which belongs to the new genre, civilians figure prominently. The testimony of children, grandmothers, and elderly men adds a poignancy to the dreadful story about the siege of Leningrad that other histories generally miss. In essence, the siege was a gigantic murder operation rather than a military operation, and Jones creates a vivid picture of what this gruesome experience was like. This work is an excellent place to begin the study of the siege of Leningrad, but readers will have to look elsewhere for an explication and analysis of battles for Leningrad and its eventual relief.

As the Germans rapidly approached the city during the summer of 1941 and the impending disaster neared, Jones believes that two men deserve the lion's share of blame for the dire circumstances facing the inhabitants: Joseph Stalin and Kliment Voroshilov (for whom the much-vaunted super-heavy KV tanks were named), the marshal long responsible for the city's defense.

Voroshilov was an old Bolshevik ally of Stalin's, all the way back to the Russian Revolution and Civil War. According to Jones, neither man had any appreciation of military affairs and both shared low opinions of military experts. For Leningrad, such attitudes presaged disaster. The city was simply unprepared for war at even the most elementary level. The one man who could have made a difference--Mikhail Tukachevsky, who had been responsible for Leningrad becoming a major center of arms production before the war--had fallen victim to the machinations of Voroshilov and Leningrad Communist Party boss Andrei Zhadanov. He was denounced as an enemy of the people and executed during the purges of the 1930s. Jones makes much of the supposed resulting weakness of the Red Army and attributes a large part of the blame for its poor performance in 1941 to the decimation of experienced officers, especially because this practice created a vacuum of able leadership among field divisional officers. Recent scholarship has tended to de-emphasize the effects of the purge, but Jones is nonetheless right to argue that the purges had some effect, even if upon morale rather than upon combat readiness. This portion of the book, however, makes a larger and more interesting point: it was not the generals who won the battle of Leningrad, but rather the people of that great city. Their victory came despite the incompetence of their political and military leadership.

The indomitable spirit of the population of Leningrad was eventually supported by Georgi Zhukov, whom Stalin dispatched as overall commander of the city's defenses in place of Voroshilov and his cohort. This change in leadership did not mean, however, that matters changed overnight, and the botched evacuation of children is an example of this continuing failure.

According to witnesses cited by Jones, this episode turned many of the city's inhabitants against their city government. Zhukov may have been one of the best commanders of the war, but Jones does not exempt him from severe criticism for his direction of the defense of Leningrad, calling his assumption of command a "poisoned chalice" (p. 124) because of Zhukov's insistence on defending and attacking from the Nevsky bridgehead, which became a charnel house for the Red Army. Even after Zhukov was recalled to help defend Moscow, Zhadanov continued to press the defense of the bridgehead and thus continued to lose thousands of men who could have been utilized better elsewhere.

Jones spends much of his time relating the utter incompetence of city authorities and the disillusionment this incapacity caused among city residents. He cites instances where corrupt officials, such as hospital directors and their wives, illegally hoarded food and held splendid feasts during the famine. Communist Party officials were no different, and he carefully chronicles how they feathered their own nests with food intended for hospitals, soldiers, and the starving, even fleeing the city when they could. Cannibalism is a major theme of the hunger stories related in the book and despite its relative rarity, Jones devotes considerable space to this macabre crime, carefully reporting both specific instances and punishments meted out for such desperate barbarism. He chronicles, as part of this desperation, the failures of city authorities to distribute adequately not only food, but even ration cards, and at one point marvels that bread rations were increased at just the moment when the failure of electrical plants shut down the city's water network and thus the bakeries.

These episodes, he believes, were symptomatic of the city's utter failure to do its job. Indeed the NKVD (People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs) spent its time not ensuring that the city did its job, but rather hunting down "counterrevolutionaries" and thus wasted both its efforts and the lives of Leningrad residents. Even the fabled "Ice Road," the supply line across Lake Ladoga that has loomed so large in the myth of the siege, is decried as the "Road of Death" due to botched evacuations and the incompetence that accompanied its construction and use. The only bright spot in this dark landscape of bungled and lost opportunities was the performance of Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony during August 1942, which revitalized the city's spirit in unimaginable ways and convinced many people that Leningrad would again be free.

General readers will find this book fascinating and hard to put down; specialists should find it an excellent model for the writing of more effective popular histories.

The Genesis of BARBAROSSA

by David James Ritchie

When Stalin and Hitler entered into their nonaggression pact in the summer of 1939, both knew the agreement would one day be bro­ken. Curiously, each held an unshakable belief that he would be the one to break it while his oppo­site number could be trusted to hold his end of the bargain until the last. Meanwhile, such were the benefits of military, political and economic cooperation, that each felt it in his best interest to keep the agreement for the foreseeable future.

The cynical marriage of convenience between Germany and Russia, however, was unstable to its foundation. Hitler, Stalin and the men who served them retained their mutually hostile political faiths. More­over, both nations had essential interests lying within or threatened by the sphere of influence conceded to the other in the secret protocols to the 1939 pact. Stalin wanted to reclaim the former Russian Grand Duchy of Finland for the Soviet state. This development threatened all of Scandinavia, which Germany depended upon for 50% of the high-grade iron ore needed to fuel its war industries. Further, the sovietization of Russia did not change the long-standing Russian hunger to exer­cise political control over the Slavic peoples in the Balkans and wrest the Dardanelles from Turkey. The former interest threat­ened German access to Rumanian oil and Yugoslavian coal, tin and bauxite. The latter would release Soviet sea power in the Medi­terranean, an eventuality feared by every Western power.

By the summer of 1940, the two nations were actively preparing for war.

Stalin expected the peace between them to last for just two more years. By 1942, the Red Army would have completed a massive reorganization and rearmament program. Then, he would strike. Hitler, with his arm­ies fresh from victory in the West, had no intention of waiting until 1942. Goaded by Russia's destabilization of Rumania (the source of half of the oil needed to fuel Ger­many's war machine), Hitler intended to strike in the fall of 1940. When this proved impossible, he set 15 May 1941 as the date for the start of operations against Russia.

From the start, Hitler and his top mili­tary men knew that they had to defeat Rus­sia quickly. They never planned to campaign more than one season inside Russia. Thus, keeping to the techniques that worked so well in the first year of the war, Hitler ordered his military planners to prepare a plan for a lightning campaign that would destroy the Red Army before it could retreat into the Russian hinterland. With the Red Army destroyed, the Wehrmacht could overrun European Russia more or less at leisure.

The Challenge

In planning a campaign against soviet Russia, German planners had to wrestle with four key factors.

1.The Red Army: Little was known in the West about the Red Army. Though thought to be large, it was also believed to be quite weak. This perception was based in part on the performance of "the Russian steam­roller" during World War I. More important to German planners was the recent elimina­tion of 35,000 of the Red Army's officer corps (most of the senior commanders and half of the intermediate grades) during Sta­lin's 1938 purge, and the humiliation suf­fered by the Soviets at the hands of tiny Finland during the Winter War of 1939-40. OKH (Army) Chief of Staff General Franz Halder and his staff were unanimous in their contempt for the Red Army as an offensive weapon. Still, its defensive capabilities could be considerable. Therefore, it had to be destroyed on the frontier. For this to happen, its areas of concentration had to be pinpointed.

2. The Objectives: European Russia's most important natural resources were concentrated in the south, in the black-loam country of the Ukraine that produced much of the nation's food; in the Donets Basin, with its mazes of coal pits and iron ore mines; and in the Caucasus, which pro­duced much of the nation's oil and natural gas. Industrial production was scattered among a dozen or so major cities, of which the most important were Moscow, Lenin­grad, Kharkov, Gorki and Stalingrad. Important naval targets included the great fortress at Sevastopol (main base for the Black Sea Fleet), Leningrad (where the Baltic Fleet had its main base in the fortress of Kronstadt) and the Arctic ports of Mur­mansk and Archangel (through which Rus­sia could receive aid from the West). Finally, both Moscow and Leningrad were impor­tant political objectives.

Since Germany lacked the strength to go for all of these objectives at once, any plan of campaign would have to prioritize them. Since the main objective of the cam­paign was to smash the Red Army, the intrinsic value of any given objective might have to be evaluated as less important than how hard the enemy would fight for it. Thus, an objective for which the enemy would have to fight on terms favorable to the Wehrmacht might have to be sought first, while more important objectives were left for later.

3. The Terrain: Russia was, at this time, far less developed than western and central Europe. Much of northern Russia consisted of swampy forests, cut by numerous small, sandy-bottomed streams. Southern Russia was flatter and more open; much of the soil was black loam, far different from the sandy soil of the north; the main obstacles were steep-sided ravines, called balkas, which tended to appear out of nowhere, even on the flat, open steppe.

From the frontier area to the vicinity of Gomel, north and south were separated from each other by the Pripet Marshes, a vast network of bogs, fens and forests that was virtually impassable to modern motor­ized and mechanized forces. This daunting obstacle would force the right (southern) wing of any invasion force to operate inde­pendently of its left (northern) wing until the two moved east of Gomel. This forced independence raised the question of which wing was more important. Should both be given equal weight and the available strength be divided between them? Or should the weight of the advance be placed on one side of the Pripet Marshes? If so, on which side? The answers to these ques­tions depended on the territorial objectives sought and the type of battle planned.

4. The Communications Network: The road and rail network in European Russia was the worst in Europe. Russian rail lines used a wider gauge than European Stand­ard, and double-tracked lines were few and far between. While the north-central part of European Russia had rail communications that might be termed adequate, hardly any rail network existed at all in southern Rus­sia - just trunk lines connecting the biggest cities and industrial centers.

If the rail system was bad, the road net­work was an abomination. Except around Moscow, roads tended to be unpaved, with weak wooden bridges unsuited to heavy vehicles. The northern roads were sandy-bottomed affairs, unable to absorb much rain before becoming quagmires. The few goods roads converged on Moscow, the nexus of European Russia's communica­tions system. The Moscow nexus could be reached from the west by following either of two routes: the southern route through Galicia and the western Ukraine to Kiev and thence north along the high road through Bryansk and Kaluga; the northern or "dry" route running along the Smolensk Highway through Minsk to the "Orsha Gap" (a ridge of high ground around the town of Orsha that threads its way between the Pripet Marshes and the marshes south of Lake Ilmen) and thence to Moscow via Smolensk and Vyazma. Any plan of campaign had to evaluate the feasibility of its objectives in light of the strange configuration and many shortcomings of this communications net­work.

Unfortunately for the Wehrmacht, little current information was available on any of these considerations. German planners had, for 20 years, been preoccupied with military action against Czechoslovakia, Poland and France. They had failed to study Russia. Thus, they were forced to rely on old 1917 vintage survey maps, the recent experience of the Finns, the memories of officers who had served in Russia during the days of the Black Reichswehr (e.g. in the 1920's) and whatever information could be gathered by German diplomatic personnel. The resulting estimate of enemy capabili­ties by the renowned German "profession­als" was one of the most hopelessly inaccurate military evaluations in history.

A Babel of Plans

From the very start, the weaknesses of the German military command system conspired to subvert planning for the inva­sion of Russia. First, two headquarters were in charge of planning. The oldest, the Army High Command (OKH), was heir to the systems and traditions of the Great German General Staff, historically the crea­tor of strategic and operational plans for the entire Armed Forces. The second was the Armed Forces High Command (OKW), a sort of cabinet to Hitler, which had gained influence since the Army's foot-dragging over the campaign in the West in the fall of 1939. During the second half of 1940, both the OKH and the OKW worked out sepa­rate plans for what would be called Bar­barossa, the German invasion of Russia.

In fact, the OKH developed not one, but two separate plans. When OKH Opera­tions Division Chief Colonel Hans Greiffen­berg submitted his draft plan to Halder on 27 July 1940, it focused on southern Russia, where the open steppes could be used as a vast tank battlefield on which to destroy the Red Army. Halder, however, misled by a false intelligence report from Colonel Eberhard Kinzel's Foreign Armies East, believed that the Red Army's main strength was north of the Pripet Marshes. This, combined with Halder's doubts about bas­ing operations in backward and unstable Rumania, was enough to kill any examina­tion of the southern strategy for the moment.

Rejecting Greiffenberg's initial work, Halder ordered a new plan prepared - one that would place the main advance north of the Pripet Marshes. Still not content, Halder hedged his bets. If his own staff's new plan again approached the problem "incorrectly," he would have another plan ready - one more in line with his own ideas on how Russia should be beaten. Thus, on 29 July, Halder ordered 18th Army Chief-of­-Staff Major General Erich Marcks to make his own independent study. Marcks was to work strictly alone, without drawing on 18th Army or OKH resources. But when Marcks and Halder met on 1 August to dis­cuss preliminary findings, Marcks pre­sented a concept for a campaign whose main effort was south of the Pripet Marshes. Halder again overrode the judgment of a subordinate and ordered Marcks to prepare a plan with its main axis of advance north of the Pripet.

Never known for original thinking, Halder preferred his own variation on the old Schleiffen Plan, which had failed against France in 1914! First, a massed mobile force would scythe along the Baltic coast toward Leningrad. At some point, it would wheel southeast to envelop Moscow. With the capture of the Soviet capital and the final destruction of the Red Army's main strength north of the Pripet, the great wheel would turn southwest to pin the remainder of the Red Army against the Car­pathians and the Black Sea. There, its back to the sea, the Red Army would be destroyed in a grand battle of annihilation far greater than anything envisioned by the revered Schleiffen.

This grotesque concept, far more out­landish than anything ever conceived in the mind of Adolf Hitler, would require the forces involved to make an unbroken march of 1600 kilometers, twice the distance cov­ered in Schleiffen's failed plan and four times that covered in the longest sustained drive in the war. In addition, Halder's great wheel would carry the motorized spear­heads through some of the worst marshes in Europe before they got as far as Mos­cow. More sensible heads prevailed upon Halder to drop this ridiculous concept. His alternative was to steal a different concept - this time from Napoleon. If Halder couldn't duplicate the "brilliant" concept of the great Schleiffen, then he would instead make a direct advance along the Smolensk Highway, just like Napoleon did in 1812!

Even as Halder imposed his uninspired and impractical views on his subordinates, Hitler developed his own concept for a cam­paign far different from what had been con­sidered. In some ways, it was the most interesting of all, calling for 120 + Axis divi­sions to destroy the Red Army in a two-pronged envelopment. The southern prong would drive on Kiev and thence down the Dnieper while the northern prong would drive along the Baltic Coast. The two would then turn inward to attack Moscow during a second phase of operations. These drives would be followed by subsidiary operations to capture the Caspian port of Baku and the Caucasus oilfields.

In the event, neither Halder's nor Hitler's concept was adopted. Instead, the German war plan was a hybrid, incorporat­ing elements of both concepts along with bits and pieces of three separate plans developed by the OKH and OKW.

The Marcks Plan

On 4 August, Marcks presented Halder with his plan for operations against Russia. It included a strong attack into the Ukraine to capture Kiev and protect the Rumanian oil fields, but placed the main effort north of the Pripet Marshes. Marcks proposed that the Wehrmacht "destroy the coordination of the Soviet states" by capturing Moscow, "the economic, political and spiritual center of the USSR." Since the best route to Mos­cow was Minsk-Orsha-Smolensk-Vitebsk, Marcks rejected Halder's "great wheel" concept in favor of a drive straight down the Smolensk Highway. A subsidiary force would move on Leningrad via Pskov. Once the Army's front was east of the Pripet, the northern force would assault Moscow while the southern force protected its right flank or drove on Kharkov, as the situation war­ranted.

The plan's ultimate aim was a line from Archangel through Gorki to Rostov. Marcks projected that this line could be reached in a campaign of 9 to 17 weeks, dur­ing which 110 infantry divisions, 24 panzer divisions, 12 motorized divisions and one cavalry division committed to the operation would face 96 enemy rifle divisions, 23 cavalry divisions and 28 mechanized brigades.

Marcks' fundamental assumption was that the Red Army was substantially weaker than any past Russian Army according to Marcks:

"Because the Russians no longer possess the superiority of numbers they had in the [First] World War, it was likely that, once the long extended line of their forces has been broken through, they will be unable to concentrate of coordinate countermeasures. Fighting in isolated battles, they will soon succumb to the superiority of the German troops and leader­ship."

Halder accepted Marcks' plan with two main caveats. First, he cautioned that it was "politically unsafe" to launch the Kiev drive through Rumania and that this feature of the plan might have to change. Some of the troops allocated to the Kiev axis might, in fact, be redeployed to support the drive along the main (Moscow) axis. Second, in order to keep the main advance on Moscow from being drawn northward, he proposed making the force advancing on Leningrad independent of that advancing on Moscow. The Marcks' plan, with these modifica­tions, was presented to Hitler on 5 Decem­ber 1940.

Meanwhile, on 29 October, the OKH Operations Division submitted its revised plan calling for a main drive on Moscow through Smolensk with subsidiary opera­tions on the northern and southern flanks of the main drive. By that time, Halder was already working out his variations to the Marcks' plan, and the OKH staff work rep­resented just so much wasted effort.

The Paulus Development

On 3 September 1940, General Friedrich Paulus became OQI (Quartermaster General of the German General Staff. This was the same position held by Erich Luden­dorff while he was virtual ruler of Germany during the First World War; it put Paulus in charge of planning for the invasion of Rus­sia. Wasting no time, on 3 September Paulus gave Halder his own study of the proposed campaign, concentrating on deployment, maneuver and logistics. This new study built on the Marcks Plan, but went into far more detail.

Paulus divided the German forces into three separate army groups, each with its own axis of advance and each assigned to encircle and destroy specific enemy forces in the first days of the operation. To facili­tate these encirclement battles, each army group's mechanized and motorized troops would not be parceled out among the vari­ous armies; instead, they would be com­bined into independent panzer groups, each commanded by a general with proven expe­rience in handling mobile formations. The initial projected lineup was:

AGS: Rundstedt's Army Group South, operating on the Kiev axis, would have the 6th, 17th and 12th Armies and Kleist's Pan­zer Group 1. All forces except 12th Army were to deploy in Poland; 12th Army was to deploy in Rumania.

AGC: Bock's Army Group Center, operat­ing on the Moscow axis, would control the 4th and 9th Armies, Guderian's Panzer Group 2 and Hoth's Panzer Group 3. Bock's force was to be by far the strongest of the army groups.

AGN: Leeb's Army Group A, operating on the Leningrad Axis, would control the 16th and 18th Armies and Hoepner's Panzer Group 4.

Alarmingly, this study showed that, after clearing the Baltic States, taking Smolensk and breaching the Dnieper line by about Day 20 of the campaign, the Army would have to halt for three weeks to refit and resupply. Not until Day 40 of the campaign would the Army be ready to begin "the decisive advance on Moscow." Paulus concluded his study by warning that the Red Army must under no circumstances be allowed to with­draw intact behind the Dnieper. In this event, the plan of campaign would have failed, and the situation would have to be reevaluated.

The Lossberg Study

On 19 September 1940, Col. Walter Warlimont's National Defense Division of the OKW submitted its proposal for the new campaign. Prepared by Lieutenant Colonel Bernhard von Lossberg (and now known as "the Lossberg study"), the OKW plan set four objectives for a campaign in the East:

1. To crush enemy forces in Western Russia.

2. To keep battle-worthy enemy elements from withdrawing into the interior.

3. To cut Western Russia off from the sea.

4. To capture the most important Russian resource areas.

5.

Like Paulus's development of the Marcks' Plan, this plan employed three army groups (North, Center and South). While making an advance on Moscow through Smolensk, the main operational objective, it also pro­vided for a northward diversion of part of AGC to aid AGN should that army group's progress prove unsatisfactory. The plan also featured a southward drive by German and Finnish forces through Karelia.

Of all the German studies, only Lossberg's really tried to address the shortcom­ings of the Russian road and rail network. Lossberg stated flatly that "all German operations must be supported in their later stages by reliable Russian railways, because in the vast spaces a transport sys­tem based only on roads will be insuffi­cient." There were only two ways in which this condition could be met:

1. By capturing enough enemy rolling stock and locomotives to fully use exist­ing track.

2. By converting Russian track to European Standard Gauge.

Either method would lead to difficulties. One way to lessen them was to use sea power. If the Wehrmacht could quickly cap­ture and repair the eastern Baltic ports and eliminate the Soviet Baltic Fleet, most of AGN's logistical requirements could be met by sea, freeing engines and rolling stock to support the other two army groups. During the campaign's second phase, sea-lifted supplies could fuel the advance to the Volga, Gorki and Archangel.

The OKW plan's use of sea supply marked the first time that planners had con­sidered the effects of sea power on the cam­paign. An almost total ignorance of the sea had always been a failing in the German High Command, but never more notably than now. At this time, the Navy was not even aware that an invasion was planned, and the OKM staff had not been involved in the planning process. The OKH studies completed so far might have been written by men who believed that the world ended at the seashore. The OKW study changed all that.

The Final Plan

On 5 December, Halder showed Hitler his final OKH plan for the invasion of Soviet Russia. Halder's plan assumed that: 1) the main weight of Soviet deployment was north of the Pripet Marshes (false), and 2) the Red Army couldn't withdraw east of the Dnieper-Dvina River Line without sacrificing the economic infrastructure necessary to make war (also false). In light of these assumptions, Halder proposed an attack by three army groups, two north and one south of the marshes. The three groups would cut up, encircle and destroy the Red Army forces west of the Dnieper-Dvina Line, then drive on Kiev in the south, Len­ingrad in the north and Moscow in the cen­ter. The main thrust would be against Moscow, and the Wehrmacht's final objec­tive would be the so-called A-A Line, a 2000-kilometer long defensive line stretch­ing from Archangel on the White Sea to Astrakhan on the Black Sea.

Hitler agreed in principle with the plan, but emphasized that the zones of the two flanking army groups must be cleared before the center army group moved on Moscow. Further, Hitler proposed that, as per the OKW plan, part of the center army group be used to help the northern army group clear the left flank of the invasion force prior to the final drive on Moscow. Hitler agreed to Halder's proposal that the offensive be launched on 15 May.

Finally, on 18 December, Hitler issued Directive Number 21, outlining the final plan of Operation Barbarossa, the attack on the Soviet Union. The order confirmed the Halder plan of 5 December, but modified it to allow a diversion of part of AGC to help AGN secure its flank before starting the drive on Moscow. First priority was given to clearing hostile forces from the Baltic Coast and capturing Leningrad and the Soviet naval base at Kronstadt. The Luftwaffe was to gain air superiority before turning to close support of the Army. As per the OKW Plan, a subsidiary offensive would be launched from Finnish soil.

Soviet War Plans

While the Germans developed their various invasion plans, the Soviets concen­trated on rebuilding the Red Army. Deci­mated by the Great Purge, it had performed badly in Finland. The purge had killed its top leaders along with most of the men who had gained modern combat experience against the Germans in Spain. With the loss of its leadership, the Army could not resist a civil­ian plan to break up its experimental large armored formations and attach their tanks to the infantry. When the success of the German panzers in the West showed this to have been a serious mistake, the Red Army hurriedly began forming new tank divisions. These were to be combined with motorized rifle divisions into new mechanized corps (each containing two tank and one motor­ized rifle division), a process that was still incomplete when the Germans crossed the frontier on 22 June 1941.

Stalin, who unquestionably called the shots in most military matters, was extremely sensitive to Russia's weakness and ordered a number of steps in late 1940 to strengthen the Red Army. Production of new weapons, especially T-34 and KV tanks, was accelerated. On 15 August, the Red Army reintroduced the principle of single-command to the armed forces. For the first time since the start of the Great Purge, the Military Commissars (renamed Zampolits - Deputy Commanders for Political Affairs) were subordinated to mili­tary commanders instead of being coequal. Then, on 15 September, the system of mili­tary conscription was extended to include 19 to 20-year-olds. On 12 October, the Red Army got a new, tougher disciplinary code, which, among other things, made it a court-martial offense for an officer not to use his sidearm to enforce obedience when required. Finally, on 31 October, the Red Army commissioned a revision of its Field Service Regulations to reflect the lessons learned in the Winter War (a task that would still be underway in June of 1941).

While the Red Army rebuilt, Stalin played possum. Increasingly, during latter part of 1940 and the first half of 1941, the Soviet Union made only the mildest of pro­tests as Germany extended its influence throughout the Balkans. While maintaining its foreign policy positions, the Soviet Union ceased to press its claims aggres­sively. Instead, Stalin made every effort to ensure that his country would not antago­nize Germany into attacking. The time, it seemed, was not yet ripe for provoking war over what the Soviets thought of as their essential interests. That would not happen until 1942, when the Germans could be faced on equal terms.

Stalin's policy placed major constraints on Soviet war planning. Unless and until Germany initiated a war, the Red Army would not fight. Moreover, fearful of doing anything that would provoke Hitler, the Soviet strongman vetoed most defensive arrangements that would have increased the strength of the Red Army near the fron­tier. Thus, Soviet planners were faced with the unenviable task of designing a defense with few troops against a threat from Europe's premier military force, the Wehr­macht.

Compounding this task was the chilling effect of the Great Purge on initiative. Red Army officers, often promoted to fill newly vacated positions requiring skills and train­ing far above anything they possessed, were simply unwilling to make any risky decisions. Better stick with a bad plan then risk rousing NKVD interest. Don't do any­thing without specific orders. Initiate no changes. Make no decisions. These were the techniques by which officers survived in the hellish atmosphere of the day.

Thus, the Soviet war plan was less a plan for achieving a defined objective than a reactive expression of Soviet military doc­trine. That doctrine, product of 20 years of growth and experimentation (during which the Red Army was one of the most innova­tive in Europe), held that any future war would be fought on foreign soil. Even if the war began with a foreign invasion, the Red Army would quickly expel the enemy and carry on the battle on his side of the frontier.

The specific methods for turning back any invasion and carrying the fight to the enemy were part of the Soviet echelon structure. The Red Army in 1940-41 con­sisted of three main echelons, defined by their distance from the frontier. Each echelon had a specific task:

First Echelon: The First Echelon's 56 divi­sions and two brigades were deployed between five and 50 kilometers from the frontier, positioned to halt or blunt an enemy attack. Theoretically, this echelon's infantry formations would dig in directly in front of an advancing invasion force and let themselves be destroyed in order to slow it down. Meanwhile, the echelon's mecha­nized corps would further slow the invader by attacking his flanks.

Second Echelon: The Second Echelon's 52 divisions were deployed between 50 and 100 kilometers from the frontier, in position to move up and support the First Echelon by the second or third day of hostilities. These forces were to develop strong coun­terstrokes that would finally halt the enemy and drive him back across the frontier.

Third Echelon: The Third Echelon was made up of the individual military district reserves of 62 divisions and was positioned between 50 and 400 kilometers from the frontier, from where it could be committed during the first week of operations. The Third Echelon was to rein­force the Second Echelon's counterstroke and carry it deep into enemy territory.

The Soviet belief that a German invasion could be halted by strong counterattacks may have been reasonable in theory, but it ignored the current state of the Red Army and the restrictions under which it was forced to operate by the need to keep from antagonizing Hitler. Since Stalin was unaware of just how committed Hitler was to the attack on Russia, he could not simply assume that war was inevitable in 1941. Thus, he continued his policy of refraining from provocation until too late. Part of this policy involved the refusal to mobilize reserves prior to the initiation of warfare, lest such a move prove to be provocative.

The Soviet mobilization system of this era was unique. To save money on its stand­ing army, the state maintained three sepa­rate classes of military formations, each accounting for about one third of the Red Army's available units:

Category A: These formations were kept at 80% or more of their paper strength and could be up to full strength in a matter of hours. Most, but by no means all, First Echelon divisions were of this category.

Category B: These formations were kept at about 30% to 50% of their paper strength. Theoretically, these units could be quickly brought up to full strength by drawing on pre-assigned personnel residing near their bases and special stocks of equipment kept mothballed for this purpose. Some First Echelon and most Second Echelon forma­tions were Category B divisions.

Category C: These formations were little more than cadres. Kept at 5% to 10% of their paper strength, they were to be fleshed out during mobilization in the same fashion as Category B divisions. Most of the Third Echelon and part of the Second Eche­lon were made up of Category C units.

In addition to these standing units, the Red Army had a roster of "second formations," which consisted of "invisible" divisions formed by officer cadres from Category A, B and C divisions. Under this unusual sys­tem, each and every Soviet divisional, regi­mental and battalion commander and chief-of-staff (COS) had two peacetime dep­uties. During wartime, one of these depu­ties was automatically detached to an invisible division in which he held his old commander's job. When the old division moved out, the deputy remained in camp along with the rest of the invisible division's officer cadre. Within days of the unit's departure, the camp was again full, this time the base of a "second formation" filled with reservists. As in the case of Category B and C formations, these divisions were outfitted from huge stocks of stored mate­rial and equipment (most of it quite old - some of it completely outmoded). After a few weeks spent taking equipment out of mothballs and relearning forgotten military skills, the new division was ready to move out.

Using this system, the Soviets planned, during the first month of war, to develop a strategic reserve equal in size to the army already in the field. These low-quality reserve formations would be thrown into the battle as line-holders to replace burnt-out First and Second Echelon forma­tions, which would then be rebuilt with reservists and with refurbished or factory-fresh equipment. These rebuilt formations would become the strategic reserve for a new phase of operations, in the unlikely event that the Third Echelon offensive had failed to utterly defeat the enemy.

Confident in these arrangements, the Soviet High Command felt that it could, with some certainty, envision the outcome of any invasion. Operating at first as a sponge, the Red Army would soak up all the damage that the Wehrmacht could dish out, meanwhile making localized counterattacks to distract and slow the enemy. As new ech­elons moved up, local counterattacks would be developed into operational counter­strokes and, finally, into a great strategic offensive that would crush the enemy and drive him back to his home ground. For this purpose, two great bulges in the Soviet fron­tier must be held, the Lvov Salient in Galicia and Bialystock Salient in Belorussia. Using these as springboards, the Red Army would be able to get behind advancing enemy troops to either side of the salients, cutting them off and ensuring their destruction.

Lessons Ignored

By the beginning of 1941, both sides had readied plans for fighting the war that would start in June. On the German side, the plan was a blueprint for a specific offensive operation aimed at smashing the Red Army. On the Soviet side, the plan was much less specific and more reactive. Nei­ther plan would change much before the guns spoke, yet both contained serious flaws of which the planners were aware, and which should have prompted a major rethinking of their basic premises. Interest­ingly, the flaws in both plans were shown in separate wargames held at OKH headquar­ters and at the Commissariat for Defense in Moscow.

The German games were held first. From 29 November until 7 December (after Halder had already submitted his plan to Hitler) Paulus ran a series of three war-games that explored the problems associ­ated with the invasion of Russia. The game dealing with the frontier battles gave the expected results. However, the game on the exploitation phase (from the break­through at the frontier to the Kiev-Minsk-­Lake Peipus Line) revealed one potential difficulty: as Russia's vast space multiplied the effects of mobility, the infantry divisions kept falling further and further behind the faster panzers. Even so, results were pretty much as expected.

Then came the vital third game dealing with the drive from the line Kiev-Minsk-­Lake Peipus to Moscow and the subse­quent march to the Archangel-Astrakhan (A-A) Line. The results here were not as expected. The problem this time was both unambiguous and devastating: once deep inside Russia, the German spearheads couldn't be adequately supplied. Rail com­munications were too primitive, and there weren't enough good roads (or vehicles) to use motor transport. Worse, there weren't enough reserves to do the job.

Paulus's games were followed on 17-20 December by a four-day wargame con­ducted by the German General Staff. Two topics received special attention in this game: 1) logistics and 2) infantry-panzer coordination. The game was conducted using Halder's plan of 5 December (but without Hitler's changes that would clear the flanks before advancing to Moscow) and the Soviet capital was the main attack's objective from the start. It also assumed a forward deployment of Soviet forces, which were presumed to be inferior to the invader in numbers and quality of tanks, artillery and planes and which lacked the mobility and command control of the German forces. In other words, it stacked the deck to get the desired results.

For all that, the game's conclusion was that the huge force scheduled for commit­ment in the East would be "barely suffic­ient" to achieve its main objectives, and that the final assault on Moscow would be made by units already exhausted from fight­ing their way east from Smolensk, all reserves having been committed by that time. In his summation of the game, Paulus noted that reaching the so-called A-A Line was quite beyond German manpower and supply capabilities and that, in fact, the sup­ply system would break down once the Dvina-Dnieper Line was reached.

It is important to remember at this point that these depressing findings show­ing that Operation Barbarossa would not work were based on what can only be called best-case analysis. The mobilized strength of the Red Army and its stocks of tanks and planes were underestimated by 50% or more - and still the plan failed. Yet, there is no evidence that Hitler was ever told of either the full extent or the seriousness of this failure.

The Soviet wargames were more pub­lic - and even more devastating. Following an annual conference with members of the Communist Party's Central Committee, senior Red Army commanders and staff members played a series of wargames in January 1941. Conducted under the direc­tion of People's Commissar for Defense Semyon K. Timoshenko, the games involved two separate teams: a Red Team (consisting of Western Special Military Dis­trict Commander Colonel D.G. Pavlov and his COS, Major General V.E. Klimovskikh) and a Blue Team (consisting of Kiev Special Military District Commander General G.K. Zhukov and Baltic Special Military District Commander Colonel General F.I. Kuznet­sov). In the first of two games, the teams played out the defense of Belorussia and the Bialystock Salient. In the second, they switched sides and played out a defense of the Lvov Salient.

The results were shocking. In the first game, Zhukov's Blue (Axis) force soundly defeated Pavlov's Red (Soviet) force when Pavlov tried the "forward strategy" favored by the Soviets. As per current Red Army plans, Pavlov (sometimes called, quite seriously, "the Soviet Guderian") tried to use the Bialystock Salient as a springboard from which to launch massed armored strikes against his opponent. Zhu­kov cut up and destroyed most of Pavlov's forces and was in a fair position to break through to the east when the game was stopped and a Red victory was declared. The game's actual result (not that declared by Timoshenko) was amazingly similar to what occurred during the first two weeks of the German invasion. When the two teams switched sides, Pavlov copied Zhukov's methods and broke up the Red defenses in the Lvov Salient.

Despite attempts to cover up the embarrassing failure of the Red Army's plans, Stalin pried the truth out of Red Army COS General Kirill S. Meretskov at a meeting in the Kremlin on 13 January 1941. When Stalin refused to accept outright lies concerning the games' results, Meretskov was finally reduced to spouting some glib nonsense about wargames having no win­ners or losers! The excuse didn't wash. Meretskov lost his job to Zhukov and Stalin ordered that Soviet war plans be revised. The Red Army was still reluctantly trying to decide what to substitute for a comfortable doctrine with which it had lived for 20 years when the German panzers blasted that doc­trine to chaff in the summer of 1941.

The Test of Experience

The Soviet war plan failed on the very first day of the German attack. Even as surprised front-line troops were being overwhelmed by coordinated combined-arms attacks, senior Red Army com­manders in Moscow were insisting that the irrelevant and inoperable plan be imple­mented all along the front. As a result, tens of thousands of tankers were killed in futile counterattacks made under a hail of aerial bombs. At the same time, more tens of thousands of their foot-slogging brethren were side-stepped by the panzers, which refused to oblige them by attacking their prepared positions. Most of the bypassed troops were eventually surrounded and captured without having materially affected the outcome of the battle. Within ten days, the West Front's doom was sealed, and the Red Army was on a roller coaster ride to disaster that would continue until the fall rains slowed the pace of operations and gave it a chance to catch its breath.

These events are well known in the West. What is not so well known (or at least understood) is that, while the operational part of the war plan failed, the mobilization plan succeeded brilliantly. On the first day of the war, 22 million Soviet citizens were called up. By mid-August, a shaken Halder was writing that the German Army, which had expected to face fewer than 200 Soviet divisions, had already identified 360 such divisions on the fighting front. Within a year, and despite having suffered the worst mili­tary disasters in history, the Red Army had attained a marginal superiority over the enemy in manpower and weapons and had stabilized the front. A year later, it was able to go over to the offensive more or less per­manently. It had taken far longer than expected, but the echelon system had finally blunted the enemy attack and then turned the tide.

Although the failure of the German war plan wasn't as immediately spectacular as that of the Soviet war plan, in the end, it was far more absolute. While all the plans considered by the German High Command recognized that the destruction the Red Army was the first and most important goal of the campaign, the attainment of that goal eventually became less important to Ger­man planners than the mere occupation of territory.

The overall fault was Hitler's. He approved the final plan, and it was he who left the second phase objectives vague. The culprit, however, was Halder. Each time that Hitler decided on a move that delayed his cherished advance on Moscow, Halder schemed to have the decision overturned. Each time Halder orchestrated fresh Army opposition to some new decision, time was wasted rehashing the same old arguments. Each time things came to a standstill in this fashion, the Red Army received a new lease on life. And so it went throughout the sum­mer. Hitler decreed; Halder delayed; the Red Army escaped.

At the last, the Germans did occupy immense tracts of territory, including most of the Soviet Union's vital resources. On the surface, at least, Operation Barbarossa appeared to be a clear, if not complete, suc­cess. But the Germans were never able to deal the battered Red Army that final crush­ing blow that would have ended the war. Thus, the German war plan must be consid­ered a failure. Germany could not fight the long war of attrition that was the necessary result of its failure to destroy the Red Army in 1941.

Could the Germans have won with their plan? Possibly. Had Hitler been able to keep his generals' minds on the business of crushing the enemy, the Barbarossa plan need not have been wrecked so completely. Had Halder not completely distorted the planning process, it might not have been forever plagued by arguments over the fate of Moscow. So thin was the German margin of failure that either of those eventualities could have brought success. On the other hand, had more attention been paid by both men to the findings of Paulus, the entire campaign might never have taken place.

The most widely used rocket of the war, the Russian M-13132-mm weapon came as a disagreeable surprise to German troops on the Smolensk front in July 1941. It continued to serve in the Red Army until 1980.

The most widely used of all the Soviet war rockets during World War II was the M-13 132-mm (5.2-in) weapon. It was designed during the late 1930s, and when the Germans invaded the Soviet Union in 1941 there were only a few production launchers and a small stock of rockets to hand. These were pressed into service as an emergency measure and first went into action on the Smolensk front in July 1941, when they caused near-panic among the hapless German troops, This is hardly surprising, for in a period of under 10 seconds a single M-13 battery could swamp a large area in high explosive to an extent hitherto unseen in warfare.

These first M-13 batteries were very much special units. The launchers for the M-13 fin-stabilized rockets were carried by ZiS-6 6x6 trucks with rails for 16 rockets. The rails were known as 'Flute' launchers to the Soviet troops as a result of their perforated appearance, but they soon gained the name Katyusha, and at one time were known as 'Kostikov guns' after their supposed designer. For security purposes the launchers were usually shrouded in tarpaulins when not in use, and the crews were culled from Communist party members in order to maintain tight security. But it was not long before the M-13 launchers were in widespread use and their secrets became common knowledge.

The basic M-13 rocket had a range of about 8000 to 8500 m (8,750 to 9,295 yards). The usual warhead was of the HE fragmentation type, and as always with fin-stabilized rockets accuracy was not of a high order. But as the M-13s were usually used in massed barrages this last mattered only little, Later versions of the M-13 used a form of efflux diversion to introduce more spin for increased accuracy, but this measure reduced the range slightly. As mentioned above, the first launcher type used 16 rails and was known as the BM-13-16, but when supplies of Lend-Lease trucks became available they too were used as Katyusha carriers. Several types of truck, including Studebakers, Fords, Chevrolets and Internationals were so used, along with STZ-5 artillery tractors and other vehicles. These BM-13-16 launchers had no traverse and only limited elevation, and were laid by pointing the carrier vehicle towards the target. Some carrier vehicles used steel shutters to protect the cab and crew during the launching sequence.

As the war progressed more types of M-13 warhead were introduced, including armour-piercing to break up tank formations, flare for night illumination, incendiary and signal. One variation was the M-13-DD, which used two rocket motors burning together at launch to produce a possible range of 11800 m (12,905 yards), and this rocket was launched from the upper rails of the launcher only. The M-13-DD had the greatest range of all solid propellant artillery rockets in World War II.

After 1945 the M-13 rocket batteries remained in Red Army use right up to 1980, when they were finally replaced by later models.

Specification M-13

Dimensions: length 1.41m (55,9 in); body diameter 132 mm (5.2 in)

Weights: overall 42.5 kg (93,7 lb); propellant7.2 kg (15.87 lb); explosive 4.9 kg (10.8 lb)

Performance: initial velocity 355 m (1,165 ft) per second; range 8500 m (9,295 yards)