7
Napoleon and Hitler destroyed themselves in attempting to conquer Russia. While the former did so in response to new political circumstances, the latter had always planned such a conquest – it was essential for the realization of the Nazi dream. Nevertheless, secretly both men were nervous at such an enterprise yet emboldened by previous military successes and increasing megalomania.
Each invaded Russia in what appeared to be overwhelming strength, with better equipment and commanders than their opponents. Their armies came from all over Europe. Each planned to attack Moscow and St Petersburg-Leningrad; the latter with the aid of the Swedes in the Emperor’s case, with that of the Finns in the Führer’s. Each opened their offensives too late in the year, Napoleon delaying because he thought the Tsar might come to heel, Hitler because he had to deal unexpectedly with Greece and Yugoslavia, and each having to contend with unusually severe winters. Each invaded over too wide a front, the former’s troops so spread out as to deprive him of all control of his lukewarm Austrian allies, the latter with three army groups aiming at three separate objectives, weakening the impact of his overall onslaught.
By 1811 the French had firm evidence that the Continental System was inflicting serious damage on the British economy. Not only had Britain lost her European markets but those in South America were saturated and unable to take any more British goods. The Royal Navy’s counter-measures against the blockade infuriated the United States, President Madison’s declaration of war against Britain in 1812 depriving her of the North American markets as well. The Thames was full of ships laden with unsold goods. Cotton-mills, iron-foundries and shipyards laid off their hands. There was a run on the pound, paper currency being discounted at 18 per cent, and many banks closed their doors. Widespread unemployment was accompanied by high bread prices as a result of bad harvests in 1809 and 1811. There were riots and mob violence, ‘Captain Lud’ and his followers smashing the textile machinery which was putting so many men out of work. It was essential that all Europe should co-operate in enforcing the Continental Blockade if the Emperor was to win the victory which appeared to be within his reach.
Yet Russia was suffering almost as much as Britain from the blockade, unable to sell her grain, iron, copper and potassium, her timber, leather, hemp, pitch and tallow, all of which had a British market. The Tsar spoke publicly of the collapse of Russian commerce. Even so, Napoleon demanded that he seize all neutral ships entering the Baltic ports, which meant commercial ruin. Alexander refused, turning a blind eye to secret trading with Britain – it was rumoured that at Riga it stayed just as it was in normal years.
In any case, a very uneasy relationship had developed between France and Russia. Not only had the Tsar failed to help the Emperor against Austria in 1809 but he had refused to allow Napoleon to marry his sister. On the other hand, he was alarmed by the increase in the Grand Duchy of Warsaw’s territory which had been one of the consequences of 1809, fearful that the French might restore the Kingdom of Poland. He was also angered by the Emperor’s marriage to Marie Louise and the new Franco-Austrian alliance. The friendship struck up at Tilsit had evaporated. If Napoleon still considered Alexander more intelligent than any other European monarch, he also thought him a decadent Byzantine (un vrai Grec du Bas-Empire), so superficial and false that one could never tell if he was sincere or not. For his part the Tsar was deeply apprehensive of his former friend’s overweening ambition and dreams of world conquest, listening now to Talleyrand’s warnings. In December 1811 Alexander formally withdrew from the Continental System, whereupon the Emperor annexed Oldenburg, whose Grand Duke’s consort was the Tsar’s sister. The annexation was not, however, intended to provoke Alexander, its real purpose being to close the last weak spot on the German sea-coast.
During 1811 Napoleon moved more and more troops into northern Germany and the Grand Duchy of Warsaw, with concentrations nearer and nearer the Russian frontier. While he dismissed Fouché’s warnings about overt hostilities with seeming contempt, he had moments of realism as well as megalomania. Later he claimed he had not wanted war with Russia. ‘I knew as well as anyone that Spain was a gnawing cancer which had to be healed before embarking on a such a dreadful war whose first battle would be fought 500 leagues from my frontier … I would have been a fool if I’d begun the war of 1812 to get something I could have had by peaceful negotiation.’ Yet he was clearly speaking with conviction when he promised Fouché that Spain would collapse once he had stamped out British influence at St Petersburg, or the Comte de Narbonne that a single terrible blow at the heart of the Russian Empire would deliver ‘this blindly apathetic mass’ (of serfs) into his hands. He also told Narbonne that when Moscow had fallen and theTsar had made peace or had been murdered by his subjects, or when a new state had taken the place of the Russian empire, a Franco-Russian army would be able to march out from Tiflis, invade India and destroy British rule – ‘It will have to be an expedition on an enormous scale, I admit, but it’s feasible in the nineteenth century.’ In saner moments he shrank from the conflict. As late as 1812, when the Russians demanded that the French withdraw their troops from Prussia, although he bellowed at the ambassador ‘You’re behaving just like the Prussians before Jena’, he still did not quite dare to declare war, hoping until the very last moment for a peaceful solution.
The Emperor summoned an august assembly to meet him at Dresden in the spring of 1812. Among those who came were the Austrian emperor and the Kings of Prussia, Bavaria and Saxony, together with a host of lesser sovereigns. It was the pinnacle of Napoleonic glory. Yet only the King of Saxony accepted the situation and was truly loyal. Observers at Dresden detected an air of repressed fury at such outlandish dominance, while it was clear that all too many Germans loathed the sight of French troops. But the Russians would not come to heel.
Some Prussian officers were unable to stomach their king’s alliance with Napoleon against the Russians, their former allies. Thirty resigned their commissions in disgust and took service with the Tsar. Among them was Major von Clausewitz, whose new employer speedily found him a staff appointment.
Even before Napoleon’s Russian campaign two important allies deserted him. Turkey, deeply resentful of his proposal that Russia should take Moldavia and Wallachia, made peace with the Tsar at Bucharest on 28 May, releasing Russian troops for service against the French. Worse still was the defection of the former Marshal Bernadotte, who had been made Crown Prince of Sweden. The Swedes had lost Finland to Russia, their traditional enemy, only in 1809, together with its substantial Swedish ruling class, while the French had marched into Swedish Pomerania in 1811 to enforce the blockade. The Emperor calculated that the Crown Prince would seize any opportunity of ingratiating himself with his future subjects; that in return for regaining Finland, Estonia and Pomerania he would be only too willing to attack Russia from the north, occupying St Petersburg. But Bernadotte, an amalgam of smooth cunning and ruthless ambition, had not only always disliked him, but like Fouché and Talleyrand, foresaw his ruin. At Bucharest, as official arbiter between Russia and Turkey, he reached an understanding with the Russians and the British, who agreed to let him have Norway in place of Finland. In August Bernadotte met the Tsar at 
in Finland, agreeing that because of the emergency 3,000 Russian troops sent to help him conquer Norway should return to reinforce Wittgenstein. In consequence St Petersburg was saved; Napoleon later claimed that it could have fallen to a single Swedish cavalry patrol.
The ‘Grande Armée’ which assembled in Germany numbered approximately 675,000 troops. Only a third were French; 50,000 came from the Emperor’s Italian kingdom, 30,000 from Naples, over 150,000 from the Confederation of the Rhine, 60,000 from the Grand Duchy of Warsaw, 30,000 from Austria. There were Swiss, Danes and Croats, even Portuguese and Spaniards. (The latter had to be disarmed when they started shooting their French officers.) They were accompanied by 150,000 horses (including cavalry), 30,000 wagons and 1,200 cannon. However, when Napoleon crossed the Niemen on 24 June it was with only 250,000 men. He advanced on a front 50 miles broad, the Austrians to the south-east, where he had little control over them. The invasion was divided into three principal army groups, one under the Emperor himself, another under Eugène de Beauharnais (Josephine’s son) and the third under Jerome Bonaparte – supervised by Marshal Davout.
Napoleon had delayed too long at Dresden, hoping that Tsar Alexander would be cowed by news of the spectacle. He compounded his tardiness by spending almost three weeks at Vilno – the Russians had destroyed their supply depots, and he was anxious to replace them.
The Tsar’s forces were heavily inferior, consisting of 200,000 men at most, divided into two main groups under commanders scarcely of the same metal as Napoleon’s marshals. Barclay de Tolly, defending the road to St Petersburg, was too cautious; Prince Bagration, defending the road to Moscow, too pugnacious. Kutuzov, soon to be appointed overall commander, was even more timid than Barclay, too old for his job at sixty-eight and aptly named ‘The Dowager’ by the Emperor. With Kutuzov was Carl von Clausewitz. It was a summer of burning heat, and on both sides men began to drop. Clausewitz, in his study of the campaign, says there was so little water that he could not wash for a week on end, and frequently had to drink out of muddy puddles.
When Napoleon recommenced the campaign over a fortnight later his army had dwindled to 182,000 men because of disease, hunger and lack of fodder for the horses. He could have had many more. The Poles assumed he was going to restore their kingdom until he told a delegation from the Diet at Warsaw that while he admired their patriotism, he had guaranteed Austria’s occupation of Galicia. The last thing he wanted was a Polish national rising. When this was generally realized countless Poles who would otherwise have sacrificed everything for him stayed at home.
After Bagration had been savaged by Davout he joined forces with Barclay to defend Smolensk. This fell to the French on 17 August, whereupon the Russians set fire to it and retreated towards Moscow, creating a desert as they went. Fearful for his capital, the Tsar replaced Barclay with Kutuzov, ‘The Dowager’, with orders to fight a battle whatever the cost. Kutuzov chose an extremely strong position at Borodino in the fields in front of the river Moskva, with a huge fortified battery linked to strong redoubts on both flanks and protected by a deep ravine in front. By now the Emperor’s troops had dwindled still further to 133,000, while the Russians had 120,000. Both armies had each about 500 cannon. At 4.00 a.m. 7 September in a thick fog the French attacked all along the line. It was a slugging match fought, according to Clausewitz, without finesse and as mere trial of strength, which lasted for twelve hours. During what Napoleon called ‘the most terrible of my battles’ the Russians were driven from their position in a series of ferocious charges by Murat, Ney and Eugène de Beauharnais, and had their flank turned by the iron Davout. Yet at 4.00 p.m. they still held part of the field. The Emperor might have broken them if he had used the Guard, but he was keeping it for an emergency. By now he had lost 30,000 men – including 40 generals. If he renewed the attack he knew he would suffer still more casualties at the hands of the Russians, who he admitted were very brave soldiers. In Clausewitz’s opinion he was justified, Although he had won only a ‘half-victory’; with barely 100,000 effectives left, he simply could not afford to lose more men, while his opponents were very unlikely to seek another battle. The way to Moscow, his goal, lay open. He let them withdraw unmolested. They had suffered 50,000 casualties, among them Prince Bagration.
On 14 September the Grande Armée entered Moscow. The same night fires were started, probably on the governor’s orders, and within a few days four-fifths of the city burnt to the ground. Most of the population had already been evacuated. Napoleon installed himself in the Kremlin, expecting the Tsar to beg for peace now that he had lost his capital. Alexander simply sat in his other capital of St Petersburg – thanks to his alliance with Sweden – waiting for the winter. On 13 October the first frost set in. A week later the Emperor marched out of Moscow with an army of 80,000 men and 50,000 camp followers. On 24 October Kutuzov tried to bar his way at Malojaroslavets some seventy miles west of Moscow, but was beaten off. Napoleon was withdrawing by the way he had come; it was a desert, but he had adequate provisions in his wagon train. He underestimated the Russian winter. When the Grande Armée staggered into Smolensk on 9 November, expecting to find food and clothing, there were neither, due to sheer administrative incompetence. The nightmare march had to go on. The snow fell unrelentingly and the temperature dropped mercilessly. Not only did this freakishly bitter cold kill countless men, but it destroyed all vegetation, depriving the horses of their fodder so that they died from starvation as well. The wagon trains were abandoned together with their provisions. Kutuzov surrounded Davout at Krasnov and he had to be rescued by the Imperial Guard. (The Russian partisan hero, Davidov, described them as ‘passing through our Cossacks like four-decker men-of-war through fishing smacks’.) On 25 November the starving Grande Armée and its pathetic followers reached the Beresina. Napoleon confused the Russians as to where he meant to cross by brilliant feinting; two bridges, each 160 feet long, were built over the frozen river with house timber from the village of Studienka – a heroic feat in which most of the sappers died from cold or drowning. Victor held off Wittgenstein’s force on one bank, Ney and Oudinot beating back those of Admiral Tchitchagov on the far side, while the Emperor crossed. Next morning the rearguard and camp followers jammed the bridges attempting to follow him; one bridge collapsed and thousands drowned, Russian cannon continuing to bombard the other – at least 30,000 souls perished. The cold grew even more lethal, killing 20,000 in three days alone. Napoleon abandoned his army at Molodechno on 5 December, returning to France by fast sleighs and carriages; totally unexpected, he reached the Tuileries a fortnight later, telling the French in a reassuring bulletin, ‘The Emperor’s health has never been better.’ His return had been prompted by a coup in his absence, led by the half-crazy Republican general Malet, who very nearly succeeded in seizing Paris; what alarmed him especially was that no one had rallied to his son’s defence, revealing the unpopularity of his régime. (The men behind the plot seem to have been both Republicans and Royalists who hoped to restore first the Republic, then Louis XVIII.) Moreover, he could only hold Austria and Paris in check from Paris. He left Murat in charge of the army with instructions to defend the left bank of the Niemen from Vilno where there was plenty of food, clothing and ammunition. However, Murat lost his nerve and did not stop retreating until he was well inside Germany.
The Grande Armée had suffered 380,000 casualties; the rest were broken men. Jomini rejects Napoleon’s claim that he had been beaten only by the burning of Moscow and the cold – ‘I have annihilated armies but flames, ice, numbness, death, these I could not conquer’ – arguing that the Grande Armée was destroyed by its commander, not by the winter. Certainly he made disastrous mistakes; he should have restored the Kingdom of Poland, he ought not to have lingered for so long at Moscow, he might have halted his retreat at Smolensk. Yet the Emperor himself thought it ‘the best, the most skilful, the most cleverly led and most methodical of all the campaigns I have commanded’.
No less an authority than Clausewitz supports him in this opinion in Vom Kriege, believing that anyone who admires Bonaparte’s earlier campaigns should admire this one too. ‘His campaign did not miscarry because he advanced too swiftly, or too far as is generally believed, but because the only means of success failed … It was only by reaching Moscow with the force of his blow that Bonaparte could hope to shake the courage of the Government, the loyalty and steadfastness of the people.’ It had failed because neither government nor people were shaken by the French onslaught. Although he concedes that Napoleon made a mistake in invading Russia, this greatest of military philosophers thinks he had no choice.
Instead of burdening himself with an interminable costly defensive war in the east such as he had on his hands in the west. Bonaparte attempted the only means to gain his object: by one bold stroke to extort a peace from his astonished adversary.
Moreover Clausewitz – who, after all, was on Kutuzov’s staff – thought that the Emperor had had at least some chance of winning:
If Bonaparte in the year 1812, either before or after taking Moscow, had been able to give the Russian Army of 120,000 on the Kaluga road a defeat, such as he gave the Austrians in 1805 and the Prussian Army in 1806, then the possession of that capital would most probably have brought about a peace although an enormous tract of country still remained to be conquered.
He also makes the point that ‘General Winter’ wreaked nearly as much havoc on the Russians as on the French, stating that the army which pursued Napoleon (and in whose ranks he was serving) left Kaluga 120,000 strong and reached Vilno with 30,000 effectives; he comments: ‘Everyone knows how few men were lost in actual combats during that period.’ Again and again he stresses that the French almost won – ‘In the Russian campaign, the complete defeat of the Russian Army was the last blow required: the Emperor Alexander had no other army at hand and, therefore, peace was the certain consequence of victory.’
In February 1945 the Führer confessed to Martin Bormann that before invading Russia he had ‘pondered long and anxiously over Napoleon and his experience’. It is inconceivable that he had not studied Clausewitz’s analysis of the 1812 campaign in Vom Kriege. Yet while this study could be taken in an encouraging sense, it had to be admitted that the campaign ended in defeat. The great theorist was at his most obscure and ambiguous in dealing with the subject. He had ‘acquired a philosophical mode of expression without developing a truly philosophical mind’ is Liddell Hart’s comment. ‘Not one reader in a hundred was likely to follow the subtlety of his logic or to preserve a true balance amid such philosophical jugglery. But every one could catch such ringing phrases as: ‘we have only one means in war – the battle.’ In the circumstances there could have been no more dangerous authority to follow. Unluckily, no other German military theorist of even remotely comparable calibre had written about 1812.
Hitler also explained to Bormann that, although he had always opposed war on two fronts, there was no hope of invading Britain. Meanwhile time was on Russia’s side. The only chance had been to forestall her by taking the initiative. After all, Clausewitz had written of the necessity to bring a conflict ‘completely to an issue before the worst time arrives, or of gaining at least in the meantime some advantage. And if the Russians were no longer apathetic serfs, it was probable that most of them detested Stalinism. However vast their country, it was infinitely more centralized than in 1812, while problems of distance and extended communications could be surmounted by motorized transport, by rail and by air.
In his diary for 16 June 1941 Goebbels explains more fully why the Führer was invading the Soviet Union:
Moscow intends to keep out of the War until Europe is exhausted and bled white. Then Stalin will move to bolshevise Europe . . Russia would attack us if we were weak and we should face a two-front war, which we are avoiding by this pre-emptive strike. Only then shall we have our rear protected. I estimate the fighting capacity of the Russians even lower than does the Führer.
Goebbels adds that the Soviet Union had to be beaten before Germany could begin an all-out assault on Britain, using the Luftwaffe on a massive scale. ‘Bolshevism must be destroyed and with it England will lose her last possible ally on the European mainland.’
Despite his long-term plans for the conquest of eastern Europe and his much vaunted contempt for the Soviet Union, Hitler had, like the Emperor, moments of uneasiness. Goebbels describes him just before declaring war on Russia as living ‘under an indescribable strain’; on the eve of the declaration he writes: ‘The Führer seems to lose his fear as the decision comes near.’
Until he announced them, very few had guessed at Hitler’s real intentions about Russia. He let no one into his confidence even if, when provoked by Stalin’s foreign policy, he would shout that his life’s mission was war with the Soviet Union. Yet, as Goebbels discerned, he was terrified by the prospect of a war on two fronts. There were moments when he thought that the Russians might help him overwhelm Britain, even if it was as early as July 1940 when first he told his military leaders that he meant to attack Russia in spring the following year envisaging a campaign which would destroy the Soviet Union completely. Understandably, Hitler was always nervous about Stalin’s long-term intentions. Russia had not only swallowed up eastern Poland but in June 1940 took advantage of German preoccupation with France to seize Bessarabia and the northern Bukovina from Romania, which seriously alarmed the Führer, since it threatened his oil-supplies. Russia also had an eye on Finland, from whence came her nickel. Hitler moved troops into Romania as ‘military advisers’; into Finland on the pretext they were in transit to Norway. Then Franco’s refusal to allow German forces through Spain stalemated him over Britain. However, an even stronger Axis front might at last frighten Churchill into making peace, or topple him. In November 1940 he invited the Soviet Union to join with Germany, Italy and Japan, offering Istanbul with the Straits of Gallipoli and Persia. But the Russians demanded too much, far more than was offered; in addition, they insisted on being given bases in Bulgaria, recognition of their interests in Finland, Romania and Turkey, a naval base in Denmark, the Arab oil fields as well as those of Persia, together with the withdrawal of all German troops from Romania and Finland.
Soviet greed made up Hitler’s mind. Like Napoleon, he was going to strike at Britain through Russia. On 18 December 1940 he issued Führer Directive No 21, ‘Operation Barbarossa’ – ‘The final objective of the operation is to erect a barrier against Asiatic Russia in the general line Volga-Archangel. The last surviving industrial area of Russia can then, if necessary, be eliminated by the Luftwaffe.’ (The Soviet Union beyond the Urals was to become part of the Japanese Empire.) The operation was originally timed for 15 May 1941 but was postponed on account of the Yugoslav and Greek campaigns. (The Führer was very conscious of the Emperor’s disastrous delay, ordering ‘reputable historians’ to state publicly that Napoleon had set out a day later than his own troops.) When they crossed the Russian border on 23 June his armies took the Soviet forces completely by surprise, despite Western attempts to warn Stalin; on being informed by the German ambassador that the two countries were at war, Molotov gasped, ‘What have we done to deserve this?’ At dawn three German army groups struck along a 1,500-mile front; in the centre Field Marshal von Bock drove towards Moscow with 930 tanks; in the south-east Field Marshal von Rundstedt raced towards Kharkov and Kursk with 750, and in the north-east Field Marshal von Leeb towards Leningrad with 570. Finland was to attack from the north, its army joining up with Leeb.
Hitler had an uneasy relationship with the men who were leading Operation Barbarossa. The Wehrmacht commander-in-chief Field Marshal von Brauchitsch saw himself as military adviser to the Head of State, while the Führer regarded him as a subordinate officer bound to obey orders. What complicated matters further was Brauchitsch’s contradictory character – that of an intelligent soldier who was excessively cautious, a man both weak and stubborn. He was also a product of the Great War, naturally inclined to a defensive outlook. This was an attitude shared by the three army group commanders, Rundstedt, Bock and Leeb, who were all in their sixties. Leeb, a Bavarian nobleman and an expert on defensive strategy – described by Johannes Popitz as ‘almost fossilized’ – was appalled at the very idea of war with Russia. General Halder, Chief of the General Staff, had even more reservations about Hitler, whom he secretly despised. Icily obstinate, he regarded Moscow as the campaign’s primary objective. Ultimately such men (with the partial exception of Rundstedt) were incapable of working with the Führer. Had their places been filled – as they were later to be – by such men as Model and Schörner, who were totally in sympathy with him, the invasion might well have succeeded.
The Field Marshals saw Moscow as the goal. Hitler disagreed. He told Halder, ‘Only completely ossified brains, absorbed in the ideas of past centuries, could see any worthwhile objective in taking the capital.’ He informed a group of generals in August 1941 that even if they had read Clausewitz, they did not understand wartime economics. ‘I too have read Clausewitz and remember his axiom “first destroy the enemy’s army and then occupy his capital”.’ But by itself Moscow was not enough. In the different circumstances of 1941 he must not only capture Leningrad but cut Russia off from its Caucasian oil and Ukrainian grain, and from its industries in the Donets Basin.
The German invaders and their allies numbered 3 million men – 118 infantry divisions, 19 panzer divisions and 15 motorized divisions. They faced 178 divisions, of which 40 were motorized and 20 cavalry. Their 3,550 panzers confronted 10,000 Russian tanks, of which 2,000 were excellent though the rest were obsolete. On paper the Luftwaffe’s 3,350 aircraft were outnumbered by 12,000 Soviet planes, but these were unquestionably inferior. The Russians suffered from three crippling disadvantages. First, they had had no proper warning. Second, they were grouped in echelon, three army groups one behind another – the hindmost 250 miles from the frontier. Third, their officer corps was thoroughly demoralized; more generals and colonels had died in the purge of 1936-8 than were to die during the entire war.
German troops were explicitly ordered to use the utmost brutality. The Geneva Convention did not apply in Russia, and captured Russians must not be treated like other prisoners-of-war – commissars were to be ‘shot out of hand’. This order was issued by the German High Command on 6 June. A supplement to Führer Directive No. 33 informed the troops that they would only be able to hold down large areas of territory ‘by striking such terror into the population that it loses all will to resist’.
At first the invaders drove all before them, capturing 150,000 prisoners, 600 guns and 1,200 tanks in ten days. General Halder, an inveterate pessimist, confided to his diary on 3 July: ‘It would probably be no exaggeration to say that the campaign against Russia has been won within the first fortnight.’ Rundstedt entered Kharkov in September, while the whole of the Crimea (save Sevastopol) would be in German hands by mid-November.
However, Leeb was held up in Estonia. Hitler had ordered Bock in the centre to send the panzer groups on his flanks south and north to help Rundstedt and Leeb, despite his protests. In consequence Bock was held up at Smolensk for two months. The Führer has been criticized for this, but he was probably justified. Bock needed to overhaul and refit his tanks, while reinforcements enabled Rundstedt to make his spectacular gains – the Russians were taken completely by surprise, attacked from unexpected directions in daunting strength. In the north Leeb was able to make progress, capturing Schlüsselburg (Petrokepost), supposedly the key to Leningrad: however, he was then told to seal off the city instead of capturing it. The panzers were returned to Bock so that he could resume his advance on Moscow at the end of September in ‘Operation Typhoon’. He now had 2,000 tanks, and faced little more than infantry.
However, German losses by 8 October were estimated at over half a million men – more than the entire casualty rate between September 1939 and the opening of Operation Barbarossa in June 1941. The autumn rains, which had begun two days earlier, turned the unmetalled Russian roads into rivers of mud, disrupting supplies – as in 1812, Smolensk was the furthest limit for depots – and slowing down the panzers. Yet Bock and his centre army group ground forward, the elimination of two Soviet pockets at Vyazma and Bryansk netting another 600,000 prisoners by the end of October. The Russian government fled from Moscow, where rioting broke out. Nevertheless Stalin stayed, appointing General Zhukov to command the defences. Just as Clausewitz had observed of the Emperor, the Führer and indeed almost everyone else – including probably the majority of informed Russians – thought that Russia would collapse with the centre of its nerve system. Bock began what he believed would be the final push on 15 November, starting from positions sometimes as close as forty miles away. But already there were frosts, and the rain was turning to snow. Bock used his armour recklessly, and too many tanks were knocked out or broke down. Operation Typhoon began to run out of steam, even if some units came within 20 miles of Moscow. Eventually Guderian, directing Bock’s panzer onslaught in heavy snow, had only 50 tanks left out of 600. The temperature was 35 degrees below and most of them could not fire their guns. On 5 December he went over to the defensive.
By now the German High Command estimated its casualties at 3 million men, killed, wounded, diseased or frostbitten – the snow killed more than the enemy, the wounded freezing to death in their hospital beds. The troops had no proper winter clothing, Hitler having told them they would be back in Berlin in time for Christmas. The mud of autumn had changed into rock-hard ground, rain into terrible blizzards. In these temperatures oil froze in the sumps, rendering tanks and lorries immobile until fires were lit beneath their engines. Even telescopic sights were unusable. Not only did mechanized transport suffer but as in Napoleon’s day vast numbers of horses died from hunger, unable to reach the grazing beneath the snow. (It is seldom appreciated how much the Wehrmacht depended on horsed transport, especially supply wagons, during the first half of the war.)
The Russians, who knew how to handle such conditions, had started to counter-attack. Troops in winter white, many of them Siberians on skis, smashed through the German positions all along the thousand-mile front. Cossacks carrying their own fodder operated just as they had in 1812, cutting communications and supply lines, spreading panic and penetrating almost as far as Smolensk. Often it was impossible to fire rifles or cook food, men losing hands and feet, ears or noses from frostbite.
The three army group commanders were dismissed for withdrawing without permission. In all nearly fifty senior officers lost their commands. Brauschitz, who had had a heart attack from worry, was sacked on 19 December – whereupon Hitler appointed himself operational commander-in-chief of the Wehrmacht. By mid-December Guderian had withdrawn fifty miles, complaining of shockingly high losses, that his men could ‘do no more’. He was dismissed immediately. Hitler’s orders were that there must be noretreats; the line must be held. General Jodl particularly admired ‘Halt-Order’, he believed that but for the Führer the Wehrmacht would have suffered the same fate as the Grande Armée. Grouped in ‘hedgehogs’ – bastion towns such as Kursk, Taganrog and Novgorod – supplied from the air, linked by radio and going to each other’s assistance but letting the enemy bypass them, the Wehrmacht managed to hold the Red Army, whose counter-offensive petered out in January 1942. It too lost many thousands of men, just as Kutusov’s army had lost three-quarters of its effectives in 1812. Its front now consisted of a long line of exposed salients which would be very vulnerable to counter-attack.
The failure to take Moscow is sometimes attributed to Hitler’s meddling. He has been compared to a hysterical back-seat driver. Halder, Chief of the General Staff, complained of his constantly interfering which, as a somewhat pedantic professional, he regarded as a personal insult; after the war, in Hitler als Feldherr, he exaggerated Hitler’s military shortcomings. On the other hand, the Führer considered that he had been let down by his generals. Liddell Hart apportions the blame equally, commenting that ‘the most fatal factor had been the way that Hitler and his top generals had wasted the month of August in arguing as to what should be their next move – there was an amazing state of mental haziness on the topmost level of the German Command’.
Liddell Hart’s verdict is that Operation Barbarossa failed to succeed, but only just, because the German army’s mobility depended on wheels instead of on tracks. On the muddy roads of a Russian autumn the lorries which carried the petrol, spare ammunition and food could not keep up with the tanks – ‘If the panzer forces had been provided with tracked transport they could have reached Russia’s vital centres by the autumn in spite of the mud.’ He stresses that had the Soviet Union possessed roads comparable to those in France or even Yugoslavia it would have been overrun almost as quickly, and it owed its survival to ‘continued primitiveness’. A further factor which he cites was that the Germans had underestimated the enormous reserves of Russian manpower, quoting Halder’s diary in mid-August – ‘we reckoned with 200 divisions, but now we have already identified 360’.
Undoubtedly another contributory cause was the lack of communication at personal level between Hitler and his generals already referred to.
Opinions will always vary about the Führer’s military abilities, yet he coped better with the December crisis than his generals. The three army group commanders, all elderly rather than middle-aged, were more susceptible to cold because of their years; they were on the spot, and since they were men not entirely without compassion, they were badly shaken by the appalling temperature and the sufferings of their troops. In Germany (save for one swift visit to Mariupol) the Führer could afford a more detached view. He later told Albert Speer, ‘I knew that any retreat would mean the fate of Napoleon.’ And, like the Emperor, he was indifferent to the fate of his soldiers.
According to Clausewitz, it is always dangerous to attack experienced troops when they are in a strong position, and would-be attackers should have special equipment. Hitler may have been aware that his troops were padding their tunics and trousers with newspaper, wrapping themselves in sacks, in the absence of winter clothing, but he knew that their weapons were as good as those of the Russians, while he had the Luftwaffe with which to supply the ‘hedgehog’ bastion-towns. Above all, he trusted in their fighting qualities to repel the counter-attack.
Napoleon insisted that 1812 had been his most brilliant campaign – even though he had cried at the crossing of the Beresina, ‘This is what happens when one makes mistake after mistake!’ What destroyed him was neither the winter nor the burning of Moscow but the Russian army’s survival. If not exactly the Emperor’s finest hour, the Russian débâcle was, in many observers’ opinion, the Führer’s. The otherwise hostile General von Tippelskirch considered it ‘his one great achievement’. Tippelskirch continues, ‘At that critical moment the troops were remembering what they had heard about Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow and living under the shadow of it. If they had once begun a retreat it might have turned into a panic flight.’ Hitler was justified in claiming he had saved the German army from the fate of the French 130 years before, even if, unlike the Emperor, he had sometimes been able to supply his troops from the air.
Neither leader was able to bring himself to cut his losses after the failure of his troops, or to accept that he had been defeated. Napoleon stubbornly refused to surrender territory or to withdraw from Germany, while the Führer would never for a moment – not even during 1944 – contemplate restoring Russia’s frontier as it was before Operation Barbarossa. Both were incapable of rational compromise, an incapacity which meant their doom.
He began to believe that there was something superhuman in his own faculties, and that he was privileged to deny that any laws were made for him … He became a deity to himself; and expected mankind not merely to submit to, but to admire and reverence, the actions of a demon.
Lockhart, The History of Napoleon Buonaparte, 1829
But Germany … will be Germany only when it is Europe as well. Without power over Europe we must perish. Germany is Europe.
Hitler to Hermann Rauschning, August 1932