CHAPTER FOUR

CLIMAX

FOR HITLER’S PANZERS the summer of 1940 was a time of high celebration. The sun had never shone so brightly—literally, in the near-perfect weather, and metaphorically in the favors showering from an ostensibly grateful Führer. The tankers were not yet sufficiently well positioned to share in the cornucopia of gifts, decorations, and promotions at the very top that produced so many new field marshals that Rundstedt grumbled his new rank had been cheapened. They nevertheless finished well up in the victory sweepstakes. Kleist, Guderian, Hoth, and Hoepner were all promoted Generaloberst (General) with the same date of rank: July 19.

With a major expansion of mobile forces in the works, opportunities were opening at every level of command from division to platoon. The two Armored Troop Schools at Münster and Wuensdorf were well into their wartime stride as officer training establishments. Cadets were assigned after basic training with their unit—if they had no combat experience—followed by eight weeks of officer training. The branch school provided sixteen weeks of specialized technical and tactical instruction. Cadets then returned, usually to their original units, for a probationary period prior to being commissioned. In contrast to the Americans and to some degree the British, the German army believed that anyone unable to command and lead those he had served among as an enlisted man was unlikely to make a good officer. At higher levels there were training courses for new battalion commanders, second chances for salvageable officers with blotted copybooks, and useful training and staff appointments for those a bit long in the tooth or slow in reaction to be useful for field operations

Napoleon once said soldiers are led with baubles. For officers with “sore throats,” army slang for anyone seeming interested in the higher decorations worn around the neck, Rommel and most of his senior counterparts were as generous with recommendations as the High Command was in accepting them. And many an enlisted Panzermann could return home on a hero’s furlough with an Iron Cross on his chest.

The price of all this? Around 700 tanks permanently lost—most of them obsolescent, eminently expendable Panzer Is and IIs. Fewer than 50,000 killed in the entire Wehrmacht during the whole campaign. In most of the mobile units, losses had been low enough to foster nostalgia for absent friends rather than mutual speculation on who would be next.

The tankers stood down. Fifth and 7th Panzer Divisions prepared desultorily for an invasion of England that the High Command projected as a large-scale river crossing. The project was treated with appropriate seriousness at regiment and company levels—which is to say the Landser generally enjoyed themselves splashing in the water and messing around with boats. Other divisions, like 4th and 10th Panzer, drew duty in occupied France: deferential men, accommodating women, and ample sightseeing. Still more fortunate outfits went home promptly: 3rd Panzer to Berlin and 9th to Vienna, where their receptions were a good deal more enthusiastic than they had been when marching out in 1939.

I

IN THE FALL of 1940 Adolf Hitler had the opportunity to consolidate rule over a European empire unmatched since the days of Napoleon. Norway, the Low Countries, and northern France lay under German occupation. The government of Vichy France was eager to assume the role of a client state. Mussolini’s Italy and Franco’s Spain were vulnerable to German pressure. Nazi influence in the Balkans grew by the week. Josef Stalin still “trusted” his treaty partner to continue acting like a capitalist. Rational calculation, which excluded the Winston Churchills and Charles de Gaulles, allowed only one conclusion: the Third Reich was here to stay, at least for the foreseeable future. That conclusion had been shaped by the Wehrmacht—specifically its panzer divisions.

Blitzkrieg essentially meant convincing participants and observers—one’s own side and the home front included—that enemies faced inevitable and humiliating defeat. In a technological age, that no longer meant man-to-man physical superiority as it had in the Middle Ages, or even at times in the trenches of the Western Front. It spoke rather to the ability to use the means at one’s disposal so effectively that resistance seemed not merely futile but pathetic, without even the heroic element that traditionally informs last stands and forlorn hopes in Western military mythology. Prisoners usually look frightened and shabby compared to their captors—one reason why the current laws of war forbid showing their pictures. Even over a half-century’s distance, prisoners of blitzkrieg appear shocked out of their higher cognitive abilities. Their conquerors seem from another dimension, unmarked physically and psychologically—“overmen” in the original sense of Friedrich Nietzsche.

The disaster that overtook the western allies in May and June of 1940 has been ascribed to the erosion of national will and morale during the interwar years. It has been presented as the fruit of strategic and tactical doctrines inadequate to meet the German challenge. It has been described as reflecting shortcomings of organization, training, and intelligence. In the same context the German victory is presented as a faute de mieux improvisation: a combination of unpredictable chance, Allied mistakes, and the behavior of a few hard-driving panzer generals who presented their own high command with a series of faits accomplis. Far from prefiguring a new way of war, the successes of 1940 arguably led Germany down a dead-end road of operative hubris, emphasizing combat at the expense of strategy. In an age of industrialized mass war, lightning victories would prove a temporary and fatal anachronism.

Blitzkrieg’s real victor in 1940 was National Socialism. Hitler celebrated the successes of May and June in Nazi terms: as a triumph of will, informed by a consciousness of martial superiority that in turn depended on the racial superiority evoked and refined by the Third Reich. In that context, blitzkrieg played a central, arguably essential role in the “exterminatory warfare” that was Nazi Germany’s true contribution to modern war making. Some forewarning was given by the treatment of the West African troops the French deployed in large numbers during the campaign’s second half. The atrocities had historical roots: fear and resentment generated by French use of African “savages” in 1870 and 1914-18. The kind of close-quarters fighting in streets and woods characterizing many initial breakthroughs is not usually conducive to taking prisoners, and German soldiers were conditioned to be ruthless in combat. They arguably entertained as well a generalized sense that the war was, for practical purposes over, and regarded continued resistance as immoral because it was futile.

Neither direct orders nor wink-and-a nudge tolerance at higher levels sanctioned abuses that, rather than being systematic, tended to be situational by perpetrators, places, and times. After all allowances are made there is nevertheless no question that German soldiers, including men from the mobile divisions, disproportionately refused quarter to black combatants, disproportionately singled out black prisoners for brutal treatment including large-scale executions in non-combat situations, and justified themselves on racial grounds. Only the degenerate French would put subhumans into uniform, call them soldiers, and give them license to mutilate German wounded. It was an evil portent.

Another portent existed for those with wit or will to see. It is a familiar paradox that history’s greatest war was directed and controlled by civilians: Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Josef Stalin—and Adolf Hitler. Their styles ranged from Roosevelt’s Olympian position as ultimate decision maker and arbiter to Churchill’s hands-on interventionist approach. None eventually exercised more comprehensive control of their nation’s war effort than did Hitler. It is a downplayed irony that he achieved that position in the face of a military establishment that, since the eighteenth century, had been widely considered the driving wheel of a Prussia/Germany that was “an army with its own country.”

Whatever his motives, in front of Dunkirk, Adolf Hitler faced down the High Command on a military issue that was clearly in the operational sphere with no real elements of policy or politics. That had made him the first ever ruler of Prussia/Germany, king or kaiser, chancellor or president, to exercise direct control of the generals on their own ground. Hitler, convinced of his own military genius, determined to assert his authority at any price, saw the halt order as the capstone of a campaign he had shaped, in a war he had sought and initiated. It was the first step in what became a pattern of exercising direct command based on remarkable memory for details, adamant refusal to accept inconsistencies or discrepancies, and unshakable belief that decisions were best made spontaneously, with instinct processing data and will inspiring results. Well before the Reich’s downfall, micromanagement would become an analgesic—not only for Hitler, but for his generals as well.

Prognostication was eclipsed by reconfiguration. The expansion of Germany’s mobile forces initiated in the autumn of 1940 is generally and legitimately connected with Hitler’s parallel decision to invade the Soviet Union. The reorganization, however, had an army taproot as well. The 1940 campaign left no serious doubt that large-scale mobile operations were the wave of the future, and that foot-marching infantry and horse-drawn artillery belonged to a rapidly vanishing past. Manstein, who did not entirely waste his time as commander of an infantry corps, voiced a consensus in reporting that existing infantry divisions lacked the firepower to break through defenses and the mobility to exploit success. That rendered them dependent on the panzers, and created the risk of a two-tier army. Certainly as well any prospective adversary would imitate the Germans by massing tanks, motorizing infantry, and using air power in ground combat. A smaller army would be able to upgrade its standard divisions by increasing their motorization and adding assault guns, self-propelled antitank guns, and antiaircraft guns to the orders of battle.

That perspective shaped the army’s initial reaction to Hitler’s decision, announced as early as May 15, to shift military production to the Luftwaffe and the navy while reducing the army to 120 divisions. Twenty of these, the Führer declared, would be armored, and ten more motorized. On June 18 the General Staff agreed to create ten new panzer divisions despite the continued shortage of armored and unarmored vehicles of all kinds. Six weeks later, on July 31, Hitler held a conference on strategic priorities. There he announced his intention to invade Russia early in 1941—before then, if possible. The result was another shift in the army’s institutional emphasis: creating as many as possible combat-ready formations of any kind, in order to meet the mission’s geographic demands as well as its operational ones.

The configuration of the army being created for the invasion of Russia exacerbated the difference between the panzers and the rest. Most of the new panzer and motorized divisions were created by converting and expanding 14 of the 36 active infantry divisions created after 1933. That meant well over half the original peacetime army, the hard core of Germany’s ground forces, was now part of a technology-based elite that, for practical purposes after the invasion of Russia, would be increased only by the incorporation of the Waffen SS. The remaining active divisions that still marched to fight lost effectiveness by being heavily milked to stiffen the no fewer than sixteen “waves” of infantry divisions organized by summer 1941. Those toward the bottom of the list were scraping the barrel for cadres, weapons, and equipment, with much of the latter two coming from conquered and occupied countries. It was correspondingly obvious that the panzer and motorized divisions would have to do the serious work.

That would require a capacity for both assault and exploitation, and an improved level of sustainability. The most significant feature of the panzer arm’s reorganization was the shift in the balance of tanks and infantry in a panzer division. The panzer brigade was reduced to a single regiment, usually of two battalions and around 150 tanks. The motorized brigade, however, was increased to two two-battalion regiments and a motorcycle battalion, with one of the rifle battalions riding half tracks. This 50 percent reduction in armored strength was subsequently excoriated by theorists like B. H. Liddell-Hart and field soldiers like Guderian for increasing rear echelons at the expense of fighting power, and privileging wheels over treads. It is frequently attributed to Hitler’s fetishistic emphasis on numbers at the expense of everything else. In fact, the rebalancing had been considered after the Polish campaign, and confirmed in 1940. The motorcyclists had been effective as a swing force, able both to fight afoot and add punch to the reconnaissance battalion. There never seemed to be enough infantry, however, to cope with the near-simultaneous demands of breaking through defense lines, mopping up bypassed positions, securing exposed flanks, and consolidating captured ground in the face of counterattacks accompanying the armor.

It was certainly possible to increase the panzer division’s infantry and keep its tanks at the same number: fewer divisions but more powerful ones. Massed tanks, however, had been shown to pose problems of control that limited their effectiveness against reasonably well-defended positions, Gembloux being the prime example. The large numbers of rear-echelon vehicles required by a two-tank-regiment division had regularly led to traffic problems significantly hampering operations. Radios had their limits. So did the talents of commanders. The German way of war depended on a high average rather than erratic genius. The commander of a panzer division had to be more than “a good ordinary general,” but it flew in the face of experience to expect too many of them to be gifted battle captains in the mode of a Rommel. For the same reason of effective control, motorized divisions were kept at their existing strength: two three-battalion regiments with neither tanks nor half-tracks.

Fighting the French had also indicated that in armored war, quality was at least as important a force multiplier as numbers. Survivability was important both to sustainability and morale. The vulnerable Panzer Is and IIs were being replaced with the more formidable Panzer III coming off the Reich’s production lines. The repeatedly demonstrated shortcomings of the 37mm gun as a main armament led to its replacement in the G version by a 50mm gun whose 42-caliber barrel made it a rough counterpart of the 75mm gun mounted on the early versions of the US Sherman—that is to say, a general-purpose weapon useful in supporting infantry, effective against tanks, but not a real tank-killer. About 450 of this version were produced by February 1941, alongside 300 of an up-armored Model H. A number of older Panzer IIIs were also rearmed with the 50mm gun—a tribute to the generous design of the turret ring. The Panzer IV had been satisfactory overall; its E and F versions were distinguished primarily by increased side and frontal armor.

While scales of equipment varied a good deal in practice, a well-outfitted tank battalion of 1941 with German material had two or three light companies of 17 Panzer IIIs and 5 Panzer IIs, and one medium company of 10 Panzer IVs and 5 Panzer IIs. The Panzer IIs were filler, to be used and used up for reconnaissance and other secondary missions until enough IIIs and IVs became available. The tables reflected production figures that trailed far behind unit requirements. Hitler initially asked for as many as a thousand tanks a month. Minister for Armament and War Production Fritz Todt responded that it would cost two billion marks, require a hundred thousand skilled workers, and disrupt submarine and aircraft deliveries originally secured by cutting back the construction of new munitions plants.

The High Command received a similarly discouraging answer when it pressed for an increase in tank production from the 200 or so a month that remained standard. Goals of delivering 2,800 Panzer IIIs and IVs by April 1941 remained chimerical. In May 1941, plans were developed for a major production program: more than 34,000 vehicles to complete equipping the mobile divisions. The target date was 1944. Meanwhile, actual tank production reached a low of 120 in September 1940. One new panzer regiment was built around Panzer IIs originally adapted for underwater movement as part of the aborted preparations for invading Britain. As a point of comparison, as late as April 1941, material shortages and production problems meant that seven million rounds for the standard 105mm howitzer existed only as empty shell casings—no propellant, no explosive. By comparison the panzers were well off.

The numbers gap was filled in part by the factories of Bohemia. They continued the steady manufacture of enough 38(t)s to equip five divisions with three battalions, more than a hundred each, and keep 6th Panzer Division’s 35(t)s up to strength as well. But that 30 percent of its ground-force cutting edge went into battle in obsolescent tanks looted from a second-rate power is a clear sign that Wehrmacht planning agencies put more energy into preparing for the exploitation of Soviet resources than into providing the tools for their conquest.

One consequence was the inability to provide three battalions of up-to-date tanks for more than three of the reconfigured divisions that went to war against the USSR. Three battalions provided organizational flexibility. Three battalions might sustain effectiveness by consolidating. Two were far more likely to reach a tipping point, especially in fast-paced offensive action without regular pauses for maintenance and regular replacement of losses. A second loser in the armaments sweepstakes was the assault gun force. Four of the first six batteries served in France. Their low silhouettes and high firepower proved their worth from the beginning of the campaign. Regiment Grossdeutschland had nothing but praise for its six organic Sturmgeschütz (StuGs) at Stonne for working hand in hand with the riflemen in street fighting, demolishing barricades, and carrying heavy weapons and ammunition. The gun’s limited traverse was not a problem in a direct-support role, while the vehicle’s presence alone gave a valuable boost to the foot soldiers’ morale.

The artillery, whose role in the West had been significantly limited compared to the Great War, was fully convinced and began training the first battalions (three six-gun batteries) in the summer of 1940. Service with the StuGs has been described as popular because it was the quickest way to decoration and promotion. The assault artillery did win more than 150 Knight’s Crosses, with lesser medals in proportion. But they were won the hard way, and throughout the war the guns were manned by volunteers.

Men were easier to find than equipment. Despite the support of two powerful branches of service, assault gun production remained limited—around 30 per month and not exceeding 50 until June 1941. As a result only two battalions every three months, later three every two months, joined the pre-Barbarossa order of battle. Instead of being assigned to divisions, as originally intended, they were held as army troops, sent where need was greatest—another reinforcement of armor’s elite, almost separate, status even when its crews wore artillery colors.

The emerging differentiation between the armored force and the rest of the army was further exacerbated by the absence of progress developing self-propelled antitank guns. The concept was simple enough: attach a gun to the chassis of an obsolescent tank, of which the army had an ample supply. Nevertheless by June 1941 the inventory of such vehicles amounted to about 150 of the 47mm Czech guns on Panzer I bodies mentioned in Chapter 3. Doing the same thing with captured French equipment does not seem to have even been considered at higher levels, though two tank regiments were eventually organized with French vehicles.

Antitank defense in general had a low practical priority in the run-up to Barbarossa. The near-useless 37mm towed gun was in the process of being more or less replaced by an excellent 50mm/62-caliber piece. Its early production runs were so small that they were issued to the infantry by two-gun sections. Infantry companies were issued small-bore antitank rifles: more sophisticated and less dangerous to their users than their World War I forebears, but effective only against the kind of light tanks that everywhere were being phased out of service. And doctrine expressly forbade using already scarce assault guns in an antitank role. The Landser in Russia would spend too long depending on well-placed hand grenades and overloads of nerve—or desperation.

In near-absolute contrast to its behavior after the Polish campaign, the German army in 1940-41 not merely accepted but enabled two massive disconnects: between a motorized/mechanized elite and everything else, and within that elite, between structure and equipment. Both cognitive dissonances were subsumed beneath a euphoria that exceeded even the “victory disease” that infected the Imperial Japanese Navy in the months between Pearl Harbor and Midway. Robert M. Citino describes a “literature of exaltation” that reflected the National Socialist intellectual structure of heroism and sacrifice. The Nazis’ crude racism was also not without its appeal; soldiers in all places at all times seek as many credible grounds as possible to assert superiority over their enemies. To interpret the army’s mentality to a double penetration by National Socialist culture and Nazified personnel is nevertheless to overlook its roots in professional pride. The high-tech, low-cost victories of 1939-40 lifted the German generals’ morale in ways incomprehensible to those who had not experienced the Western Front a quarter-century earlier. Places whose names had symbolized a generation’s sacrifice and a generation’s failure—Verdun, Ypres, Amiens—had fallen like beads pulled from a string, rating scarcely a line in official reports. The invasion of Britain had been a nonstarter, but that was easily rationalized by claiming special circumstances.

Citino accurately presents this pride in terms of satisfaction at what seemed the definitive culmination of decades and centuries of thought and effort: not merely a German way of war but a new paradigm of war itself. There was, however, another factor. The combination of mobility, firepower, and electronic communications developed and applied by the panzers was seen as merely the matrix, epitomizing and amplifying the warrior spirit of the new German soldier. Boldness, decisiveness, “necessary hardness”—these were the mainsprings of an unmatched triumph, facilitated perhaps by National Socialism but structured and inspired by the traditional bearer of German values: the army.

The exact balance of the developing synergy between Nazis and soldiers, the exact balance between values recently acquired and values long entertained, may legitimately be debated. The result, however, is clear: a level of hubris defying and denying the more balanced legacies of Frederick the Great, Moltke the Elder, and Hans von Seeckt. These men understood that Destiny is no man’s drudge and Bellona no man’s trull. It was a lesson their successors had yet to learn. The means of their instruction would be an army fundamentally flawed relative to its missions and flawed by design.

II

BARBAROSSA WAS AT bottom a strategic second choice, reflecting the Wehrmacht’s inability to knock Britain out of the war in the summer and fall of 1940. “Hot pursuit” by an improvised, airborne-tipped invasion immediately after Dunkirk was rejected as too risky. The army’s later invasion plans were too elaborate. Planned on a scale rivaling D-Day yet depending on an amphibious fleet improvised from fishing boats and barges, with thousands of horses included even in the first wave, Operation Sea Lion’s only military hope was a degree of naval and air superiority neither the Kriegsmarine nor the Luftwaffe were able to achieve.

Britain held on, and then counterattacked. By autumn 1940, British mobile forces were running rings around Hitler’s Italian ally in Africa. By spring 1941, British fighters were mounting sweeps over northern France. For Hitler, “smiting Britain’s continental sword from her hand” by overthrowing the Soviet Union became an increasingly attractive option.

The invasion of Russia was also a product of geopolitics. Even before 1939, Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia had sparred for advantage in east central Europe. Since the fall of Poland in 1939 the struggle had approached Cold War intensity. At stake was the oil of Romania, the wheat of Hungary, and strategic position for a conflict few in either Moscow or Berlin believed could be postponed indefinitely by the increasingly threadbare non-aggression pact the totalitarian rivals had concluded in 1939.

Ideology added a third element to the compound. Since its inception in the depths of Hitler’s psyche, National Socialism had rested on two principles: annihilating the Jews and securing “living space” for the German people. The annihilation of Soviet Russia was a step in both directions. Hitler—and many other Germans—saw the Communist government of the Soviet Union as having been created and sustained by Jews. And since at least the nineteenth century, German imperialism had been strongly attracted to a Russia perceived as a cornucopia of natural and human resources the “natives” would never be able to develop properly. All that seemed necessary, in Hitler’s words, was to “kick down the door,” and the whole rotten edifice would collapse.

A fourth contributor to Barbarossa was confidence. An air/ground assault on the Soviet Union was what the Wehrmacht knew it knew how to do. From the day when Hitler first summoned his senior officers to consider an invasion of the USSR, the operation’s feasibility was never seriously questioned. Halder spoke for his colleagues when he noted to himself, “What operational objectives could be secured? What strength do we have available?” It was just another day’s work.

Arguments periodically emerge that Barbarossa was a preventive operation, that Stalin had begun concentrating his armies forward in preparation either for a direct attack on Germany, or in order to take advantage of the collapse of capitalism he believed inevitable if war between Britain and Germany continued. Red Army Chief of Staff Georgi Zukhov did in fact urge Stalin to launch a preemptive strike in a memorandum submitted on May 15, 1941, but the Soviet dictator had no intention of taking such a risk. Aside from the impact of the 1930s purges on its officer corps and its self confidence, the Red Army was suffering the effects of rapid expansion—Stalin had created more than 100 new divisions since January 1939 alone—and a crash rearmament program that seriously destabilized an economy already oriented to military production. From Stalin’s perspective it made the sense of desperation to maintain an armed truce with Hitler as long as possible.

Whatever might be the Reich’s advantages on the levels of policy and strategy, the approximately 130 German infantry divisions in Barbarossa’s order of battle carried weapons looted from a half dozen armies. There were five divisions of Waffen SS, with greater reputations for ferocity than fighting power. Client states—Romania, Finland, Slovakia—provided between 20 and 30 more divisions of limited operational value. Occupied Europe was stripped of everything with four wheels and an engine to provide logistic support for this mixed bag. Trucks were purchased from Switzerland. Other trucks were requisitioned from French North Africa. And in the final analysis, sustaining the invasion still depended heavily on captured railroads whose track gauge had to be altered to fit Western rolling stock.

Traditional logistics were just the tip of an iceberg of improvisation. The army expected to sustain itself directly from the campaign’s beginning by utilizing captured Red Army resources and systematically exploiting the civil population. Whatever the military merits of this approach for foot- marching, horse-powered formations, its applicability to the mechanized troops was marginal. To cite only the most obvious example, German tanks had gasoline engines. In the West they had been able to refuel from local filling stations. In Russia such facilities were limited, and Russian gas was of sufficiently lower octane to be a positive risk for already overworked motors. If anything at all went wrong, solutions would have to be improvised. Meanwhile, the theater-level planning for Barbarossa virtually guaranteed problems.

Hitler based Operation Barbarossa on the assumption that success depended on shattering the USSR in one blow. His directive of December 18, 1940, could not have been plainer: the bulk of Russian forces in the west was to be destroyed in a series of bold operations. The generals concurred. They never proposed to match the Russians face-to-face, gun-for-gun, and tank-for-tank. Mechanized war depended on timing: a dozen tanks on the spot were preferable to 50 an hour later. Mechanized war depended on disruption: confusion produced entropy while discouraging resistance. And mechanized war depended on hardness. An enemy could not merely drop his weapon and raise his hands. He needed to feel defeat in his ductless glands—and in his soul. The close synergy between Nazi principles and military behavior demonstrated from the beginning of the Russo-German War was not entirely a consequence of shared racist values. It reflected as well the “way of war” the German army had been developing since at least 1918.

How best then to break the enemy comprehensively? The first operational study began in July 1940. It projected a dual strike, one directly on Moscow, the other on Kiev. This should be enough to destroy the Red Army and disrupt the Soviet state. The ultimate objective was a line: Rostov-Gorki-Archangel; anything to the east would remain “Indian country” until further notice. A parallel study projected three simultaneous assaults, toward Leningrad, Moscow, and Kiev. From the beginning, in other words, long before Hitler’s direct involvement, the army’s plans incorporated dispersion of the army’s striking power.

This was not a manifestation of ignorance, willful or otherwise. German planners were fully aware of the size of the Soviet Union. They had reasonable ideas of the kinds of changes it might impose on an operational approach designed for application against small countries. Attaché reports and clandestine reconnaissance flights provided information both negative (on such issues as the lack of roads appropriate for rapid movement) and positive (indicating significant recent buildup of industrial capacity on both sides of the Urals). A series of map exercises in early December 1940 indicated significant problems of overstretch, producing results much like those of a similar exercise in 1913: German forces hung up in the middle of Russia as the enemy massed for a general counteroffensive. The conclusion was that German forces were barely sufficient for the assigned mission. And that was at the beginning.

Germany’s overall mobilization might have been incomplete, but by the summer of 1941, 85 percent of men between 20 and 30 were serving in the Wehrmacht. The remainder were considered indispensable to the war economy. In May, Halder informed the Replacement Army that the initial battles would cost 275,000 casualties, with another 200,000 expected in September. The available replacement pool for the army was 385,000. Simple arithmetic indicated that the pool would be empty before autumn even given Halder’s optimistic time frame.

Shortfalls were certain in another crucial area. The success of mobile war as practiced in Germany depended heavily on air support in a context of air superiority. The planes need not always be present, but they had to be available. The Luftwaffe had exponentially more experience than the Red Air Force, along with significantly superior aircraft and tactics. The Luftwaffe was also fighting in the West and the Mediterranean, suffering steady attrition of planes and crews. It would be covering a far greater geographic area than in 1940, with corresponding extension of technical and logistical demands. Even in a short campaign, the ground forces were correspondingly likely to be depending on their own skills and resources a higher proportion of the time than ever before.

Planning for Barbarossa rolled on, moving from conceptions into details without a bump. Private reservations, expressed in such passive-aggressive ways as buying and reading Baron Caulaincourt’s memoirs of Napoleon’s disastrous 1812 campaign, did not prevent participation of the middle-ranking officers who would be the field commanders. What emerged, significantly independent of Hitler’s direct involvement, was a sophisticated version of what was essentially a military steeple-chase: three army groups lined up on the frontier, and at the starter’s barrage, going as fast as possible in three extrinsic directions. Instead of the single clenched fist of Frederick the Great, or the elder Moltke’s “moving separately and fighting together,” the projected operation resembled a martial artist spreading his fingers as he struck what was intended as a killing blow. Instead of being structured into a decisive point, soldiers, cities, and resources shifted priorities in an ever-changing kaleidoscope. The closest thing to prioritization was Hitler’s emendation of the army’s original plan to provide for Leningrad’s capture before mounting a decisive attack on Moscow. And all this was to be achieved on a campaign of four or five months’ duration.

Scholars and soldiers increasingly, one might say overwhelmingly, describe Barbarossa as fundamentally flawed, a program for defeat even in a narrow military context. But while its dysfunctional genesis may have been in the fever swamps of hubris and racism, a steel thread linked Barbarossa to the real world: the panzers. The Führer and his generals were convinced that the army of the Third Reich had developed a style of war not merely countering the historic Russian strengths of mass, space, and determination, but rendering them irrelevant: a heavyweight boxer confronting a sawed-off shotgun. In his December directive Hitler emphasized “bold armored thrusts.” The army’s map exercises concluded that mobile units would decide the campaign and the war. At every turn the structure of Barbarossa was an inverted pyramid, with the panzers at the tip. Va banque, all or nothing—the Reich’s fate rode with the tanks.

III

CONCENTRATION OF FORCE and effort were not dominant characteristics of Hitler’s Reich. The Führer had initially reacted to Italy’s debacle in North Africa and its frustrated invasion of Greece with the amused malice the Germans call Schadenfreude. His interests in the Mediterranean involved encouraging support for Germany’s Atlantic ambitions on the part of Vichy France and Falangist Spain, and attracting Balkan support for the developing attack on the Soviet Union. Neither end was best served by Italian-initiated upheavals that challenged the status quo by open-ended claims to enlarged spheres of influence. They were served even worse, however, by open-ended military catastrophe.

The Italian defeat in Greece created opportunities for Britain to negotiate a Balkan front of its own, supporting it by stationing planes on Greek bases. The oil fields of Romania were only the most obvious potential target. If the Italians were driven from North Africa, the stresses on British shipping would be reduced by the reopening of the Mediterranean. The French North African colonies might reconsider their allegiance to Vichy. An Italy subject to air and naval strikes would face the consequences of a loss of prestige that could potentially lead to the collapse of the Fascist system itself.

Hitler grew correspondingly determined to take action. As early as July 1940, the High Command had suggested dispatching a panzer division to North Africa. Spanish veteran Wilhelm von Thoma, sent to evaluate the situation, reported any serious mobile operations would require at least four divisions for an indefinite basis. In the run-up to Barbarossa, that proposal had no chance. As the Italian situation continued to deteriorate, the commitment of ground forces in the Mediterranean basin nevertheless seemed necessary.

The General Staff responded by projecting a large-scale mechanized offensive in the Balkans, to be mounted in the spring of 1941—quick in, quick out. Hitler entertained hopes that its threat would be sufficient: that the Greek government would reject British support and Yugoslavia would align itself with the Axis. Hitler sweetened the latter prospect by offering to exchange Yugoslavia’s copper, zinc, and lead for modern weapons. The former prospect grew increasingly remote, particularly as Greece observed the steady movement of German planning missions and combat aircraft—specifically the ground-support specialists of VIII Air Corps—into Bulgaria and Romania. When Romania, Hungary, and Yugoslavia formally joined the Axis in November 1940, allowing German troops transit rights across their territory, the question regarding war became not if but when. Even then it was not until the first arrival of British ground troops in Greece on March 7 that the German redeployment began in earnest.

From the beginning, the Balkan operation had been planned around the panzers. This flew in the face of Great War experience, of unpromising terrain, limited road networks, undeveloped infrastructures, and just about every other common-sense reservation that prudent staff officers could conceive. In another context, however, the projected force structure reflected, more clearly than at any time since the occupation of Austria, Hitler’s conception of the ideal relationship between diplomacy and force. He sought to expand the basis for war in the eastern Mediterranean, to secure the southern flank of his forthcoming attack on the USSR, and to sequester Balkan economic resources for German use. None of those ends was best achieved by the use of force as a first option, and Hitler was correspondingly willing to keep talking. But time was an enemy when wasted. Even at the last minute, the panzer divisions could be turned loose to crush both local opposition and the burgeoning British presence in Greece—immediately and unmistakably, not least to discourage intervention by the Soviet Union, perhaps Turkey as well.

The actual deployment underwent a series of changes that both illustrated German skill in operational planning and reinforced confidence in the skill’s applicability to the wider Russian stage. The final dispositions put a worked-in command and staff team on the Greek frontier: List’s 12th Army and Kleist’s renamed Panzer Group 1. With three panzer divisions and two motorized ones plus Grossdeutschland and two similarly configured claimants to elite status, the SS Leibstandarte and the Luftwaffe’s Hermann Göring Brigade, Kleist was expected to overrun Greece from a standing start.

On March 27 the situation changed utterly. A coup deposed the Yugoslav government. Hitler responded with Operation Punishment: the destruction of Yugoslavia with “merciless harshness.” Kleist swung his group 90 degrees and, beginning on April 8 as the Luftwaffe eviscerated Belgrade, drove into Yugoslavia’s side with the force of a knife thrust. Breaking through initially stubborn resistance and scattering two Yugoslav armies, the group drove north as another panzer corps came south from Hungary into Croatia. Belgrade was the objective. What remained of it capitulated on April 12. The Yugoslav army, its morale shaken by recent political events, divided along ethnic lines. Lacking modern equipment, it never had much of a chance. In a week the panzers had shattered its fighting spirit and its fighting power alike by speed and shock, in terrain regarded as less suitable even than the Ardennes for mobile warfare, and without breaking a military sweat. The major challenge to the rear echelons was coping with the thousands of Yugoslavs trying to surrender. On April 14 the Yugoslav government called for terms.

A country was dismembered; a stage was set for more than a half century of civil war; and the panzers were responsible. Kleist’s divisions were pulled into reserve as quickly as possible for redeployment to the Russian frontier, with a collective sense of a job well done that suggested favorable prospects for the future. The new divisions and the new commanders had performed well compared to the standards of 1940. A continuing tendency to outrun the infantry had no significant tactical consequences; the tanks alone spread demoralization wherever they went. Logistics posed occasional problems, but the fighting ended before they metastasized. Total German casualties were 150 dead, 400 wounded, and 15 missing. Nothing emerging from Yugoslavia, in short, inspired any last-minute second thoughts about another operation against a Slavic army and culture.

Kleist’s turn to Yugoslavia left a suddenly diminished 12th Army the task of dealing with Greece. The initial German commitment to a Balkan blitz is indicated by an order of battle that even without the panzer group included a motorized corps headquarters, the first-rate 2nd and 9th Panzer Divisions, and the Leibstandarte motorized brigade of the Waffen SS—with Richthofen’s Stukas flying close support. The Viennese tankers overran a Greek motorized division, seized Salonika, and took 60,000 prisoners, all in four days. The 9th Panzer Division, the Leibstandarte, and the Stukas on the Germans’ other flank scattered an entire Yugoslav army, and then turned south into the plains of Thessaly. It took until April 12 to break through Greek, Australian, and New Zealand resistance and the British 1st Armored Brigade and cut off the strong Greek forces reluctant to retreat from Albania. But yet again, once through the forward defenses, the panzers set the pace. Never out-fought, the Greek army was increasingly overmatched. On April 21 the British decided to evacuate.

From the perspective of the Anzacs and the tankers, the rest of the campaign was a long fighting retreat, enduring constant air attack and bloodying the Germans where they could. For the panzers it was more of a mop-up, with the lead role played by 5th Panzer Division. Transferred from Kleist’s group after the fall of Yugoslavia, it was bloodied at Thermopylae where a rear guard knocked out 20 of its tanks as they moved through the still- narrow pass. Recovering, the division pursued the British south, crossed the Isthmus of Corinth, and took more than 7,000 prisoners on the beaches of Kalamata, men left behind when the ships were withdrawn.

IV

THE BALKAN OPERATION also laid the groundwork for a legend. On February 12, 1941, Erwin Rommel was appointed commander in chief of German troops in Libya. It was a fancy title for a force composing only one of the new panzer divisions, the still-organizing 15th, a scratch brigade grandiloquently titled 5th Light Division (later upgraded as the 21st Panzer Division), and another mixed bag that became the 90th Light Division. Renamed the German Africa Corps (Deutsches Afrika Korps) it would make two years of history.

Hitler seems initially to have made his choice of commander as much on grounds of Rommel’s availability as from any intuitive sense that he was giving a wider stage to a budding genius. German intervention in North Africa was originally intended as a minimum-scale holding operation. No senior panzer general suggested Rommel might be more useful against Russia; no one requested him as a corps commander in a mobile force needing a half dozen new ones. Instead he was dispatched to a sideshow that he would move to history’s center stage by a spectacular succession of battlefield victories—the first of them enabled by the drawdown of British forces in the desert in favor of the campaign in Greece.

There are fashions in generalship as there are in clothing. For a quarter century after World War II, Rommel was considered a paragon of mobile war at the tactical and operational levels. In the next quarter century, military historians and professional soldiers have judged him with a sharper pencil. Nevertheless there remains an Erwin Rommel for every military writer’s taste. There is the muddy-boots general leading from the front, inspiring his men by sharing their hardships as he led them to victory. There is the brilliant opportunist, master of forcing mistakes and exploiting them, dancing rings around British generals with courage and character but no imagination. There is the master of war on a shoestring, using Germany’s military leftovers to frustrate and challenge the major land effort of a global empire. There is the soldier, making war by the rules, upholding the army’s honor albeit serving a criminal regime. And there is the maverick, defying his superiors, his allies, and the Führer himself to fight and win his way.

In Britain these images ameliorate two years of humiliation. In the United States they play into idealized concepts of what a real general should be. There is, however, another side to the scale. That one depicts a general whose leadership style generated as much confusion as success. It presents a commander consistently overreaching his operational capacities, and correspondingly indifferent to issues of logistics and sustainability. It highlights an extensive, long-term network of connections between Rommel and Hitler—not least a publicity machine that critics describe as creating a myth from lucky breaks and obliging enemies. What emerges is a good corps commander, challenged beyond his talent by the problems of war-making at higher levels.

The desert war’s principal contribution to the panzer mystique is its status, affirmed alike by Rommel’s critics and supporters, as a “clean” war. Explanations include the absence of civilians and the relative absence of Nazis; the nature of the environment, which conveyed a “moral simplicity and transparency”; and command exercised on both sides by prewar professionals, encouraging a British tendency to depict war in the imagery of a game and a corresponding German pattern of seeing it as a test of skill and a proof of virtue.

The nature of the fighting also diminished the close-quarter actions that are primary nurturers of mutual bitterness. Last stands, as opposed to stubborn defenses, were uncommon. Usually a successful German attack ended with a compound breakthrough. With tanks seeming to appear everywhere on the position, with no effective means of close defense, capitulation was an acceptable option. The large numbers of troops usually involved also inhibited both on-the-spot killings and post-action massacres. Hard war did not necessarily mean cold murder. Surrender offered and accepted correspondingly became part of the common law of the desert.

Creating preconditions for surrender was another problem. The two-year seesaw conflict across North Africa has been so often described in so much detail that it is easy to exaggerate its actual impact on Hitler’s panzers. The campaign involved only three mobile divisions and never more than around 300 tanks at any one time. Technically the Germans maintained a consistent, though not overwhelming, superiority—reflecting as much the flaws in British tank design as the qualities of the German vehicles. The Panzer III, especially the L version with the 50mm/62-caliber gun, was the backbone of Rommel’s armor, admirably complemented by the Panzer IV, whose 75mm shells were highly effective against both unarmored “soft-skinned” vehicles and unsupported infantry, even when dug in.

Not until the arrival in autumn 1942 of the US M3 medium did the balance begin to shift. With a 37mm high-velocity gun in its turret and a sponson-mounted 75mm, the M3 was a poor man’s Char B without the armor of its French counterpart, with a high silhouette that made it difficult to conceal, and with a gasoline engine that caught fire easily. But there were a lot of them, and their reinforcement in time for El Alamein by more than 300 Shermans definitively tipped the armor balance in Allied favor. The Sherman’s mid-velocity 75mm gun, able to fire both armor piercing and high-explosive rounds, made it the best tank in North Africa—except possibly for the later marks of Panzer IV, who brought their even higher velocity 75mm gun on line in numbers too small—never more than three dozen—to make a difference.

Nor was the Afrika Korps a chosen force, the best of the best. Its medical preparation consisted of cholera and typhus inoculations. Its equipment was Wehrmacht standard, with the addition of a few hundred sun helmets—most of them soon discarded in favor of field caps—and a few thousand gallons of camouflage paint in varying shades of brown. But the Germans had confidence in themselves and their officers, in their training and in their doctrine. Their divisions were teams of specialist experts trained to fight together, combining and recombining as the situation changed. Assembling them was like working with a child’s set of Legos: individual pieces, once fastened together, would hold even if the construction seemed awkward.

That flexibility proved vital. German doctrine based on avoiding tank-on-tank combat meant that when it occurred it was likely to be a close-quarters melee. German gunnery training after the 1940 campaign stressed snap shooting and rapid fire—not least because of the limited effect of single hits on French armor plate. The British for their part during much of the campaign remained committed to destroying German armor by direct action, and their tanks were usually fast enough to counter the tactical maneuvering effective in 1940.

Rommel and his subordinates in consequence recast the section of the panzer-war handbook that addressed antitank operations. In their developed and ideal form, German positions were structured by interlocking antitank-gun positions supported by infantry, the panzers deployed behind them. Contrary to belief at the time, which eventually acquired the status of myth, the 88mm gun was not a standard element of German antitank defense in the desert. Its high silhouette made it vulnerable; its limited numbers made it an emergency alternative. The backbone of German defenses was the 50mm gun, able to knock out any British tank that could move well enough to survive in desert conditions. By 1942 these were being supplemented and replaced in turn by 75mm pieces, heavy and difficult to move but effective even against the new American Grants and Shermans. Eventually the 90th Light Division would be configured as a virtual antitank formation, with 75mm Pak 40s assigned at rifle company level.

British tanks repeatedly and obligingly impaled themselves on the German guns. Robert Crisp, a South African-born officer serving with the Royal Tank Regiment, observed that British tank design and British tactical doctrines reflected a mentality that wanted to make a tank that was as much like a horse as possible, then use it as horses had been used in the Charge of the Light Brigade. As Rommel once asked a captured British officer, “What does it matter if you have two tanks to my one, when you spread them out and let me smash them in detail?”

British armor enmeshed and worn down by the antitank guns was disproportionately vulnerable to counterattacks from flank and rear by panzer forces numerically inferior but with the advantage of surprise—an advantage enhanced by the ubiquitous clouds of dust obscuring desert battlefields as powder smoke had done in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe. Superior numbers were unnecessary. Properly timed, a single hard tap could shatter an already-confused British armored brigade like glass. Success depended on timing, and for that the excellent German radios were important. But even more important were situational awareness, initiative, and mutual confidence—the infantrymen and antitank crews knowing they were not being sacrificed; the artillery concentrated to provide fire support; the tankers confident the screening forces would hold while they moved into position. Time and again, from Operation Battleaxe in 1941 through Operation Crusader in November 1941 to the Battle of Gazala in May-June 1942, the technique worked—and set up the attacks that became Rommel’s signature.

The panzers’ offensive tactics in the desert followed and extended patterns established in Europe. Speed, shock, and flexibility repeatedly proved devastating against a British opponent whose reaction times were sluggish, whose tactics were uninspired, and whose coordination was so limited that desert humor described it as existing only when the commanding officers involved had slept with each others’ wives before the war—a significant handicap, one might think, to multiunit operations.

Encirclement was, however, likely to prove chimerical. There were no obvious terrain features or cultural sites with deep meaning to encourage last stands. Even Cairo was not Verdun. The wide-open terrain and the Germans’ always limited “desert sense” facilitated breakouts, the most familiar examples being the French at Bir Hacheim and 201 Guards Brigade at Knightsbridge. The British were even more completely motorized than the Germans, and correspondingly able to outrun them. The “Gazala gallop” of May 1942 may not have been heroic, but it did preserve much of 8th Army to fight again at El Alamein.

British defense systems were also far more formidable than anything encountered even in France during Case Red. The often-derided “boxes” developed as fixed position at mid-campaign usually featured elaborate minefields to disable vehicles, complex barbed wire systems to frustrate infantry, and defenders ready to fight to the limit, like 5th South African Brigade at Sidi Rezegh and 150th Brigade’s stand in the Cauldron during Gazala. Losses in both men and vehicles incurred while overrunning these positions were likely to be high and, given the theater’s low priority for replacements, permanent.

If the Afrika Korps did not want to conquer itself to death, an alternate approach must be developed. Rommel would respond by taking flexible movement to the operational level. His first major offensive, in April 1941, was undertaken despite a direct order to the contrary. Once the vulnerability of the thinly manned British positions was exposed, the battle became an exercise in deep penetration on a level not seen even in France. Columns became lost in broken, poorly mapped terrain, or were deceived by mirages. Engines overheated in 120-degree temperatures. Sandstorms slowed rates of march. But the German tanks, artillery, antitank guns, and motorized infantry wove tactical tapestries that baffled their counterparts.

Rommel seemed to appear everywhere he was needed, driving and inspiring. Benghazi fell on April 3. With the British reeling backward and the fortress of Tobruk besieged, Rommel set the next objective as the Suez Canal. His spearheads reached the Egyptian frontier. When the massive counterattack of Operation Crusader rolled the Germans back in turn, Rommel checked the drive, and then swung completely behind the British. This “dash to the wire” overextended his forces so badly that his own staff called it off while Rommel was out of touch at the front.

This time the pendulum swung all the way back to Rommel’s original starting point around El Agheila. Two weeks later he counterattacked, taking the British by surprise and forcing them back 350 miles to the partially prepared Gazala line. Both sides reinforced as best they could, but again it was Rommel who struck first. On May 26, 1942 his last great offensive began. A month later the port of Tobruk and its 30,000 man garrison were in German hands. Eighth Army, what was left of it, had retreated to the El Alamein line. In Cairo, rear-echelon commandos were burning documents. In London, Churchill faced—albeit briefly—a vote of no confidence on the House of Commons.

Gazala was by any standards a striking victory. But by most standards the Axis troops were fought out. Men and equipment were worn to breaking points, depending on captured fuel and supplies for momentum. Down to fifty tanks at the sharp end, Luftwaffe support left behind in the wake of the ground advance, Rommel was nevertheless convinced that only by attacking could his force sustain the initiative. To halt was to be attacked by massively superior forces, and another backward swing of the desert pendulum might well be the final one. Better to try ending the process altogether: roll the dice, take the British off balance, and regroup in Cairo.

“Attack” had worked for Rommel in North Africa as it had in France. It had been the armored force’s mantra since the beginning. It was a keystone of the German approach to war-making. This time under a new commander, Bernard Law Montgomery, 8th Army held. At Ruweisat Ridge on July 1, the panzers broke in. For the first time in the desert, they failed to break through. An end run was stopped cold at Alam Halfa by a mixture the Germans had patented: combined-arms tactics in a context of air supremacy. By this time Rommel’s health had declined sufficiently that he returned to Germany, partly to recover and partly to lobby for more of everything. Rommel informed his doctor, “Either the army in Russia succeeds in getting through . . . and we in Africa manage to reach the Suez Canal, or . . .” He accompanied his unfinished sentence with a dismissive gesture suggesting defeat.

The stalemate at El Alamein is frequently described as the final, fatal consequence of either Rommel’s fundamental ignorance of logistics or his culpable carelessness in supervising them. He thus epitomizes a senior officer corps whose tactical and operational proficiency manifested tunnel vision, with caste pride, misunderstood professionalism, or exaggerated vitalism relegating administration to those unsuited to command troops in combat.

When Halder asked Rommel what he would need to conquer Egypt and the Suez Canal, Rommel replied that another two panzer corps should do. When Halder asked how Rommel proposed to supply that force, Rommel replied that was Halder’s problem. Rommel was being neither arrogant nor insouciant. He was expressing the mentality of the German army as reorganized after 1933. Even Halder declared after the war that quartermasters must never hamper the operational concept. Rapid expansion encouraged a more pragmatic, hands-on ethic than had been the case prior to the Great War. The pace Hitler demanded encouraged focusing on the operational level of war. Planning in turn revolved more than ever around operational considerations; the logisti cians were called in afterward.

Rommel saw as well as anyone on either side of the war that victory in the desert depended on supply. He also understood that he had relatively little control of his logistics. Germany was a guest in the Mediterranean, depending on Italian goodwill and Italian abilities to sustain a small expeditionary force. From his arrival, Rommel successfully cultivated Italian senior officers and gained the confidence of Italian fighting formations. The Ariete Armored Division was close enough in effectiveness to its German stablemates to be virtually the Afrika Korps’ third panzer division for much of the campaign. Italian infantry, artillery, and engineers time and again were the fulcrum on which the lever of Rommel’s mobile operations depended.

The Italian army was not as retrograde in its understanding of mobile war in tactical and operational contexts as is frequently assumed. By 1940, Italian theorists had studied German successes in Poland and France and developed a doctrine of guerra di rapido corso (fast-moving war). Strategically, however, their generals considered Rommel’s focus on Cairo and the Suez Canal as culpable overextension. The Wehrmacht High Command understood the Mediterranean theater’s strategic function was to cover the German southern flank during the decisive struggle in Russia. North Africa was an outpost, best secured by a flexible defense.

On the other hand, Hitler had been reappraising Germany’s strategic prospects ever since Pearl Harbor. The German navy was calling for systematic cooperation with Japan in a campaign designed to produce a junction in the Indian Ocean that would bring about the final collapse of the British Empire. For Hitler, the war’s globalization only confirmed his decision for a 1942 campaign against the Caucasian oil fields. Hitler saw the Japanese conquests in Asia as weakening Britain’s imperial position sufficiently that the presence of Axis troops in the southern foothills of the Caucasus would convince Britain to negotiate, and leave Russia to be finished off before the industrial potential of the United States, which Hitler admitted he had no idea how to defeat, could be developed and deployed.

If America’s entry into the war threatened the Reich with grand-strategic encirclement, the military situation provided a window of opportunity—six to eight months, perhaps—for consolidating Germany’s position in a continental redoubt of the kind depicted by geopoliticians like Halford Mackinder and Karl Haushofer. Mastery of what they called the “Heartland”—the Eurasian landmass—would set the stage for eventual mastery of the world.

Rommel had a complementary strategic vision. He believed, especially given the growing imbalance in material resources between Germany and its opponents, the best approach in North Africa involved maintaining the offensive at operational levels, taking advantage of German leadership and fighting power to demoralize the British, keep them off balance, and eventually create the opportunity for a decisive blow. That was a common mind-set among Germany’s panzer generals as the war reached its middle stages. Rommel, though anything but an “educated soldier” in the traditions of the German General Staff, took the concept one level higher. He realized British strength would continue to be renewed as long as North Africa remained the primary theater where Britain could deploy modern ground forces. Yet he was also convinced that through operational art he could conquer Egypt and eventually move northeast toward the Caucasus, providing the southern pincer of a strategic double envelopment that would secure the oil fields of south Russia and drive across Iraq and Persia, breaking permanently Britain’s power in the Middle East.

The prospect of Rommel at the head of a full-blooded Axis drive into the Middle East continues to engage counterfactual historians. It is a staple chapter in the alternative histories that show Germany winning World War II. But a crucial prerequisite for large-scale offensive operations in the Middle East was Axis maritime superiority in the Mediterranean. The Germans could make no significant contributions. The Italian navy had suffered heavy losses that its construction and repair facilities could not replace. Air power was no less vital, and here too the burden would have fallen on an Italian air force whose effectiveness was steadily declining. Obsolescent aircraft, lack of fuel, and indifference at senior levels proved a fatal trifecta. As for the Luftwaffe, those human and material resources not deployed to Russia were increasingly being reassigned to home defense.

Any Middle East offensive mounted from the Mediterranean would require a port. Alexandria, even if captured relatively undamaged, would be no more than the starting point for an increasingly long line of communication over terrain even more formidable, and less developed, than Russia. The survivability of German and Italian trucks in the mountains of Syria and the deserts of Iraq was likely to be less than on the Rollbahns of the Soviet Union. The Middle East lacked anything like a comprehensive, developed railway network. The problem of securing a thousand miles and more of natural guerilla/bandit country would have daunted the most brutal Nazi specialists in genocide.

The final damping factor of a Middle East campaign was its dependence on a successful drive through southern Russia to the Caucasus. Should Rommel’s panzer strength be doubled, without regard for the demands of the Russian front, or for how the additional tanks and trucks would be supplied, the offensive through Egypt would nevertheless remain a secondary operation. If German tanks did not appear in the southern passages of the Caucasus by early winter, any successes Rommel might achieve were likely to prove all too ephemeral. And yet the question remains: What might Rommel have achieved with a couple of additional panzer divisions, a little more gasoline . . . ?

V

THE BARRAGE OPENED with Teutonic precision at 3:30 AM on June 22, 1941. A half hour earlier, Luftwaffe bombers had crossed into Russia to strike major air bases. Earlier still, special operations detachments had infiltrated Russian territory, setting ambushes and seizing bridges. As dawn broke, three million men crashed forward under an umbrella of more than a thousand planes.

The Russians were taken completely by surprise at all levels. A train carrying Russian goods had crossed into Germany shortly after midnight. One unit of the Red Army reported it was under attack only to receive the response, “You must be insane!” Stalin suffered a nervous collapse. Foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov confronted the German ambassador: “Surely we have not deserved this!”

Martin van Creveld’s careful calculations have long since discredited the long-standing argument that the Balkan operation delayed Barbarossa by a significant amount of time—enough, perhaps, to set up the Germans’ eventual defeat by “General Winter.” Instead the unexpectedly rapid collapse of Yugoslavia made it possible to transfer and refit the mobile divisions ahead of the originally projected schedule. The reason their transport was not expedited was the slow arrival of the motor vehicles for the panzers’ rear echelons. There was no point in rushing movements from the Balkans when trucks and related equipment were still arriving at what Halder called the last moment: the end of May and early June. Drivers and unit mechanics had scant time to get acquainted with their vehicles’ quirks even had they nothing else to do—an unlikely circumstance in the context of the great invasion.

Spring also came late to western Russia in 1941. Thaws were heavy; streams and rivers overflowed; ground was soft. Here was a case when losing time in the short run meant saving it in the long run—especially given the ramshackle nature of the mobile divisions’ supply columns.

The scale of Barbarossa and the subsequent operations of the Russo-German War preclude continuing at the level of detail presented earlier in the text. It is correspondingly useful to begin with a scorecard. Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb’s Army Group North included Panzer Group 4. Erich Hoepner had three panzer and three motorized divisions, with two corps headquarters. One was commanded by Erich von Manstein. Restored to favor, in the coming weeks Manstein would emerge as a rising star of the armored force. Bock’s Army Group Center had two panzer groups. Number 3, under Hermann Hoth, had three panzer and three motorized divisions. Panzer Group 2 was Heinz Guderian’s: five panzer and three motorized divisions, plus Grossdeutschland. Guderian was also assigned the army’s only horse cavalry division—an apparent contradiction in technological terms that reflected the potential threat from the waterlogged Pripet Marshes on his flank. Rundstedt commanded Army Group South, with five panzer and three motorized divisions along with the Leibstandarte, all under Kleist’s Panzer Group 1.

As in France, the command relationships between panzer groups and field armies were left ambiguous—a situation that would contribute significantly to friction and ill- will as Barbarossa developed. In contrast to 1940, however, each group was assigned a number of infantry divisions: two for Hoepner, three for Hoth, no fewer than six each for Guderian and Kleist. As early as February, Hoth protested that the infantry would slow his advance and block the roads for the panzers’ rear echelons. Bock and Guderian were unhappy for similar reasons. Bock’s comment that his superiors did not seem to know what they wanted reflected Halder’s ongoing concern about the mobile formations getting too far ahead of the marching masses. But in 1941, Guderian commanded more infantry than panzer divisions, and had fewer tanks than in the previous year. In 1940 his corps frontages rarely exceeded 15 miles; in Russia, the norm for his group would be 80 and more. Precisely how the infantry was supposed to cope remained unaddressed.

The generally accepted rule of thumb is that an attack needs a local advantage of three to one in combat power to break through at a specific point—assuming rough equality in “fighting power.” On June 22, tactical surprise produced a degree of operational shock denying conventional wisdom. The Red Air Force lost almost 4,000 planes in the war’s first five days—most of them destroyed on the ground. Other material losses were proportional. Command and control at all levels seemed to disintegrate. The Germans were nevertheless encountering not an obliging enemy, but one caught between two stools. The impact of Stalin’s purges on the officer corps has recently been called into question on the basis of statistics indicating that fewer than 10 percent were actually removed. The focus on numbers overlooks the ripple effects, in particular the diminishing of the mutual rapport and confidence so important in the kind of war the Germans brought with them.

At the same time, in response to substandard performances in Poland and Finland, the Red Army had restored a spectrum of behaviors and institutions abolished after the revolution of 1917, designed collectively to introduce more conventional discipline and reestablish the authority of officers and senior NCOs. These changes did not sit well with a rank and file appropriately described as “reluctant soldiers.” Nor did they fit well on officers who were themselves profoundly uncertain of their positions in the wake of the purges..

One result was a significant decline in training standards that were already mediocre. Western images are largely shaped by German myths describing the Russian as a “natural fighter,” whose instincts and way of life made him one with nature and inured him to hardship in ways foreign to “civilized” men. The Red Army soldier did come from a society and a system whose hardness and brutality prefigured and replicated military life. Stalin’s Soviet Union was a society organized for violence, with a steady erosion of distinctions and barriers between military and civilian spheres. If armed struggle never became the end in itself that it was for fascism, Soviet culture was nevertheless comprehensively militarized in preparation for a future revolutionary apocalypse. Soviet political language was structured around military phrasing. Absolute political control and comprehensive iron discipline, often gruesomely enforced, helped bridge the still- inevitable gaps between peace and war.

The winter campaign in Finland during 1939-40 had shown that Russian soldiers adapted to terrain and weather, remained committed to winning the war even in defeat, and maintained discipline at unit levels under extreme stress. But a combination of institutional disruptions and prewar expansion left too many of them ignorant of minor tactics and fire discipline—all the things the German system inculcated in its conscripts from the beginning. The Rotarmisten, the Red soldiers, would fight—but too often did not know how to fight the Germans.

The quality of Soviet tanks in the summer of 1941 has often been misrepresented. The Red Army fielded about 24,000 of them on June 22, 1941. More than 20,000 dated from the mid-1930s. The major types were the T-26 infantry tank, 9.5 tons with either a 37mm or a 45mm antitank gun; and the BT-7 “fast tank,” a 14-ton Christie model with a 45mm gun whose road speed of 45 miles per hour had been bought at the expense of armor protection. Frequently and legitimately described as obsolescent, these tanks were nevertheless a reasonable match for anything in the German inventory, one for one, on anything like a level field.

The Red Army’s institutional behavior prior to Barbarossa could not have been less suited to providing that level field had it been designed by the Wehrmacht. Since the 1920s the USSR had been developing sophisticated concepts of mobile armored warfare, and using the full resources of a command economy to produce appropriate equipment. By 1938 the Soviet order of battle included four tank corps and a large number of tank brigades whose use in war was structured by a comprehensive doctrine of “deep battle” that included using “shock armies” to break through on narrow fronts and air-supported mobile groups taking the fight into the enemy’s rear at a rate of 25 or 30 miles a day. But in November 1939 these formations were disbanded, replaced by motorized divisions and tank brigades designed essentially for close infantry support.

One reason for this measure—the public one—was that the Spanish Civil War had shown the relative vulnerability of tanks, while large armored formations had proved difficult to control both against the Japanese in Mongolia and during the occupation of eastern Poland. Reinforcing operational experience were purges that focused heavily on the armored forces as a potential domestic threat. Not only were the top-level advocates of mobile war eliminated, including men like Mikhail Tukhachevsky; all but one commander at brigade level and 80 percent of the battalion commanders were replaced—and many of those they had replaced had succeeded men purged earlier.

German successes in 1940 combined with the running down of the purges to encourage reappraisal already inspired by the Red Army’s dubious performance in Finland. Beginning in 1940 the People’s Commissariat of Defense began authorizing what became a total of 29 mechanized corps, each with two tank divisions and a motorized division: 36,000 men and 1,000 tanks each, plus 20 more brigades of 300 T-26s for infantry support! The numbers are mind-boggling even by subsequent standards. Given the Soviets’ intention to equip the new corps with state-of-the-art T-34s and KV-1s, the prospect is even more impressive. Reality was tempered, however, by the limited number of the new tanks in service—1,500 in June 1941—and tempered even further by maintenance statistics showing that 30 percent of the tanks actually assigned to units required major overhauls, while no fewer than 44 percent needed complete rebuilding.

That left a total of around 7,000 “runners” to face the panzer onslaught. It might have been enough except for, ironically, a command decision that played directly into the Soviet armored force’s major weaknesses. Recently available archival evidence shows that, far from collapsing in disorganized panic, from Barbarossa’s beginning the Red Army conducted a spectrum of counterattacks in a coherent attempt to implement prewar plans for an active defense ending in a decisive counteroffensive. The problem was that the mechanized corps central to these operations were too cumbersome to be handled effectively by inexperienced commanders, especially given their barely adequate communication systems. Their efforts were too often so poorly coordinated that the Germans processed and described them as the random thrashings of a disintegrating army. Most of the prewar Soviet armored force, and more than 10,000 tanks, were destroyed in less than six weeks.

Yet even in these early stages the panzers were bleeding. War diaries and letters home described “tough, devious, and deceitful” Russians fighting hard and holding on to the death. What amounted to a partisan war waged by regular soldiers was erupting behind a front line at best poorly defined. Forests and grain fields provided favorable opportunities for ambushes. Isolated tanks could do damage before they were themselves destroyed. Casualties among junior officers, the ones responsible for resolving tactical emergencies, mounted as the Germans found themselves waging a 360-degree war.

In Poland and France, terrain and climate had favored the panzers. From Barbarossa’s beginnings they were on the other side. Russian road conditions were universally described as “catastrophic” and “impossible.” Not only impressed civilian vehicles but army trucks sacrificed suspensions, transmissions, and oil pans in going so makeshift that armored cars balanced precariously on the deep ruts. Russian dust, especially the fine dust of sandy Byelorussia, clogged air filters and increased oil consumption until overworked engines gave in and seized up. Personal weapons required such constant cleaning that Soviet hardware, especially the jam-defying submachine guns, unofficially began replacing Mausers and Schmeissers in the rifle companies.

The earlier major campaigns had lines of communication short enough to return seriously damaged tanks to Germany. Divisions needed to undertake no more than field repairs. Russian conditions demanded more, and maintenance units proved unequal to the task. Not only was heavy equipment for moving disabled vehicles unavailable; workshops began running short on replacement parts almost immediately. Too often the result was a tank cannibalized for spares, or blown up before being abandoned.

Then conditions worsened. By early July episodic storms became heavy rains that turned dirt roads to bottomless mud and made apparently open fields impassable morasses. A first wave of vehicles might get through, but attempts at systematic follow-up usually resulted in traffic jams regularly described in words like “colossal.” Dust and mud combined to make fuel consumption exponentially higher than standard rates of usage. Empty fuel tanks as well as breakdowns began immobilizing the panzers. Though figures vary widely, the histories and records of the panzer divisions in Army Groups South and Center present rates of attrition eroding combat-effective strengths to levels as low as 30 or 40 percent. Even small-scale Russian successes—three tanks knocked out here, a half dozen there; one searing encounter that left 3rd Panzer Division 22 tanks weaker in just a few minutes—had disproportionate effects on diminishing numbers.

Vehicle losses were only part of the panzers’ problem, and arguably the lesser part. Effectiveness decreased as men grew tired and made the mistakes of fatigue, ranging from not checking an engine filter to not noticing a potential ambush site. Infantrymen constrained to leave their trucks to make corduroy roads from tree trunks, motorcyclists choked with dust that defied kerchiefs soaked with suddenly scarce water, and tankers trying to extract their vehicles from mudholes that seemed to appear from nowhere were a long way from blitzkrieg’s glory days. There were still plenty of volunteers for high-risk missions. But by its third week Barbarossa had already cost more lives than the entire campaign in the West. And Moscow was a long way off.

With supply columns increasingly vulnerable to ambushes and concentrating on bringing up material, the panzer troopers helped themselves to what was available. Stress and fatigue synergized with ideologically structured racism to underpin behavior that from the beginning caused levels of bitterness noticed even in German official reports. It usually began by “requisitioning” food: portable items like chickens, eggs, fruit, and milk; stores of grain; cattle and hogs for impromptu butchering. Looting was regularly accompanied by destruction, and the effect on the victims was compounded by personalized meanness: smashing dishes, ripping up clothes and bedding, using boots and rifle butts in place of words and gestures.

The Germans as well found themselves facing “colossal” tanks against which German panzers and antitank guns seemed to have no effect. The T-34 disputes the title of the war’s best tank only with the German Panther. Its design, featuring sloped armor, a dual-purpose 76mm gun, and a diesel engine and Christie-type suspension allowing speeds up to 35 miles per hour, set standards in the three essentials of protection, firepower, and mobility. Germans sometimes confused the T-34 with the BT-7. Few made that mistake a second time. Distributed in small numbers and manned by poorly trained crews, from Barbarossa’s beginnings not only did the T-34 prove impervious to German armor-piercing rounds at fifty feet and less; it ran rings around Panzer IIIs and IVs used to dominating in speed and maneuverability.

More frightening, because it could not be mistaken for anything else, was the KV-I. At 43 tons, it was undergunned with a 76mm piece. It was mechanically troublesome and not particularly maneuverable. But with armor up to four inches thick, the KV did not have to move very often. Panzer Group 4 initially found the dense northern forest a greater obstacle than the Russian army. Manstein’s new LXVI Panzer Corps covered almost 100 miles in four days, crossing Lithuania in a knife-thrust that carried it into Daugavpils and across the vital Dvina River bridges. The course for Leningrad seemed well set. Then the KVs made an appearance. The 37mm guns were useless. Mark IV rounds made no impression from front or sides. Six-inch howitzer shells burst harmlessly on the plating. One KV rolled right over a bogged-down 35(t), crushing it like a tin can. Another, in an often-told vignette, held up the entire 6th Panzer Division of Georg-Hans Reinhardt’s XLIV Panzer Corps for two days, blocking a key crossroads, defying even 88mm rounds until, in an attack coordinated by a full colonel, pioneers were able to shove grenades into the turret.

Initially Leeb gave Hoepner a free hand. His group remained unattached to either of the armies and was allowed to make its own way forward. But more and more KVs appeared in the van of Soviet counterattacks. Sixth Panzer Division’s 35(t)s engaged them at 30 yards. They overran the 114th Motorized Regiment, leaving in their wake a trail of crushed and mutilated bodies that sparked and fueled stories of unprovoked massacre. First Panzer Division’s command post was caught so badly by surprise that the staff and commander used their pistols. The roads, few, narrow, and unpaved, had a way of disappearing entirely. Closely flanked by forests and swamps, they channeled and constrained German movement and were ambush magnets even for demoralized stragglers. Tanks, trucks, and half-tracks lurched from village to village as bemused officers discarded useless maps and sought directions from local civilians who offered only blank stares and shrugged shoulders.

Nor could towns be bypassed readily. Clearing them took time and lives. As the panzers approached Pskov their purportedly supporting infantry was mopping up in Daugavpils, 60 miles to the rear. Leeb’s repeated reaction was to halt the armor despite vehement objections from Hoepner and his corps commanders that operations were being sacrificed to tactics. And Leningrad seemed ever farther away.

In contrast to Leeb’s sector, Army Group South had ample open ground in front of it. Rundstedt used his infantry to make the initial breakthrough on a 50-mile front, and by the morning of June 23 the Landser were past the frontier positions. Breakout was another matter. The commander of the Southwestern Front (the Soviet counterpart of a German army group), Colonel General M. P. Kirponos, had four infantry armies and six mechanized corps under his hand, and understood how to use them. Panzer Group 1 met resistance featuring large-scale counterattacks better organized, and fighting withdrawals more timely, than those facing its counterparts. Not until early July would the panzer spearheads crack Soviet defenses and erode Soviet command and control to a point where one can speak of systematic maneuver operations beginning. Even then Soviet attacks regularly threw the Germans off balance.

Army Group Center’s sector is usually referenced as the site of Barbarossa’s greatest initial success. Panzer Groups 2 and 3 drove so deeply into the Soviet rear on each side of the fortress of Bialystok that on Day 2 of the offensive, Halder spoke of achieving complete operational freedom. On June 28, Hoth’s and Guderian’s spearheads linked up at Minsk in history’s greatest battle of encirclement. The Germans claimed 5,000 tanks and 10,000 guns destroyed or captured. A third of a million Russians were dead or wounded; another third of a million were on their way to German POW camps.

Seen from the sharp end, the situation was less spectacular and less tidy. The mobile forces so far outpaced the marching divisions that the “pocket” was in many places no more than a line on a headquarters map. Red Army units might have been cut off but they neither surrendered nor dissolved. “Worse than Verdun,” grimly noted one infantry colonel. Russian soldiers filtered through and broke through the purported encirclement in numbers that set German generals quarreling. Guderian and Gunther von Kluge, commanding 4th Army in Guderian’s wake, reprised the earlier debate in France by disagreeing over whether it was best advised to seal the Minsk pocket tightly or continue driving along the high road to Moscow. Bock and Halder could see the advantages of both prospects too clearly to decide on either.

The High Command’s decision to make another army headquarters responsible for clearing the pocket and put Kluge temporarily in command of both panzer groups (and confusingly retitled his command 4th Panzer Army for that period) has been interpreted as simplifying the command structure, and as braking the overaggressive panzers. Both were Band-Aids that did nothing to resolve the fundamental issue of overstretch. What they did was signal a level of indecision that encouraged Hitler to extend his direct involvement with operational issues.

To a degree the generals’ behavior in these critical weeks reflected the ambiguities of the matrix established 70 years earlier by Helmuth von Moltke. While he stressed the importance of realizing that “no plan survives first contact with the enemy,” he also asserted that the original plan needed to be good enough to allow improvisations within its overall framework. What held this dialectic together were the nineteenth century’s limitations on mobility and shock. Subordinate formations—armies and corps—lacked the fighting power to achieve decisions separately, but could not usually move far enough away from each other to create real risks—at least when properly commanded.

The internal combustion engine and the radio had changed those parameters—but to what degree? When exactly did the “artistic” daring and initiative postulated by the “German way of war” cross the line into chaotic solipsism? Or had that question lost its relevance to war-making through what would later be called a paradigm shift?

The bones of contention, or perhaps the pawns on the board, were the panzer and motorized divisions, consistently and haphazardly shifted among higher commands, now as fire brigades cleaning up the rear, now as spearheads restoring momentum at the front—and always eroding their fighting power. But the panzer generals understood better than their more conventional superiors that the battles of the frontier were no more an end in themselves than their predecessors in 1914 had been. They understood as well, albeit more viscerally than cerebrally, the volcano’s rim on which the campaign was dancing. No matter the initial victories’ costs and successes, they were the first stages of a campaign whose outcome depended on the armored force maintaining its cohesion, its mobility, and its focus. Intelligence was reporting new Soviet forces occupying positions on the road to Moscow. The schoolboy wisdom of running faster to restore balance after stumbling seemed all too applicable.

Before the officially sanctioned date of July 3, Hoth and Guderian sent their tanks toward the next geographic objective: the Dvina-Dnieper line—more than 300 miles distant. By this time it was clear to everyone involved that the gaps between panzer groups and infantry armies could only grow wider. The Soviet forces still active behind the panzers’ axes of advance could only grow larger. In a sense Panzer Groups 2 and 3 were replicating Rommel’s behavior in the desert. Just as logistics was a rear-echelon problem, so was cleaning up whatever the armor left behind.

From the beginning of this phase the panzers encountered resistance stronger than expected. Stalin had assigned Marshal Semyon Timoshenko to organize the defense, concentrate reserves, and, above all, counterattack at every opportunity. Timoshenko was no master of mobility but he was a hard man even by Soviet standards. His tanks and riflemen made the Germans pay for their tactical victories. A battalion of the 35th Panzer Regiment occupied the town of Staryi Bychoff on the Dnieper, only to be pinned down by a defense that cost 33 men and nine tanks—the regiment’s heaviest losses in a single day since the start of the war. Its report describes the Russians as “hard-fighting, very brave soldiers.” The Red Air Force reappeared in strength, and with new material. Nine Il-2 Sturmoviks, a formidably armored ground attack plane, gave Rommel’s old division a taste of its French medicine on July 5, delaying the advance most of a day. One Il-2 took more than 200 ground-fire hits and made it home. Rain and terrain slowed the Germans as well. On one 50-mile stretch of road in Hoth’s sector, 100 bridges in succession failed to take the strain of tanks and trucks. The often-overlooked pioneers were correspondingly vital for both panzer groups: bridging flooded rivers, repeating the job when the bridges collapsed, and all the time keeping watch for die-hard Soviet stragglers.

The Germans were winning on an increasingly frayed shoestring. Third Panzer Division was down to a third of its authorized tank strength. Fourth Panzer Division sent a staff officer all the way back to Germany in search of spare parts. A single tank battalion of 7th Panzer Division reported no fewer than five lieutenants killed in a few days—shot through the head by snipers who had a free hand because the riflemen’s trucks could not keep up with the tanks. The motorized artillery as well was having increasing difficulty keeping pace, especially the heavy corps and army battalions so valuable for taking out Soviet prepared defenses. The result was increasing reliance on the Luftwaffe, and the air crews gave their best. Richthofen’s VIII Air Corps, its Stukas using an early version of the cluster bomb, climaxed three weeks of constant effort by taking two of Hoth’s divisions across the Dvina on July 8. The medium bombers of Air Fleet 2 hammered roads and rail junctions and interdicted troop movements—but against increasing fighter opposition that drew more and more German fighters into the air battle.

The tank and the airplane might be the Wehrmacht’s concept of an ideal couple. But like most couples, stress brought out the worst sides of both partners. The ground units’ war diaries contain an increasing litany of complaints about Russian aircraft being “masters of the skies,” about the damage to tankers’ morale from repeated attacks by low-flying Soviet aircraft, about Stuka strikes promised but never delivered. The Luftwaffe responded by describing the soldiers as “outrageously spoiled” by direct air support, and too quick to halt or even retreat in the face of opposition if German planes were not overhead. Richthofen himself upbraided his ground-pounding opposite numbers for refusing to recognize that in order to be effective, air power must be concentrated and could not be distributed piecemeal.

These arguments have been common in the air-ground relations of all armed forces, from North Africa through Korea and Vietnam, down to Desert Storm. Nevertheless they highlight the growing erosion of the German mobile forces, to the point where maneuver would become their only viable option.

And yet the panzers kept advancing—as far as 100 miles a day for some units. When movement stalled, group, corps, and division commanders probed for weak spots. When none existed, the colonels, captains, and sergeants created them. As Hoth smashed the Russian right, Guderian crossed the Dnieper south of Mogilev, and the panzers sought once more to create a giant pocket by meeting at Smolensk. With Soviet defenses in shreds and Soviet mobile formations scattered, the first German troops entered Smolensk late on July 15.

Eleven days later the German High Command declared the Smolensk pocket closed. The call was premature, but German skills showed to particular advantage against the major counterattacks mounted beginning in late July. German tank companies took advantage of Soviet inexperience to knock out two or three dozen T-34s at a time. On August 5, Bock announced the end of the fighting, the capture of another 300,000 prisoners, and the destruction of more than 3,000 tanks and almost as many guns.

It was the climax of a series of virtuoso performances that combine to make a case that the relative tactical and operational superiority of the panzers over their opponents was never greater than in the first half of July 1941, on the high road to Moscow. Guderian spoke of attacks going in like training exercises. Guderian’s senior subordinates in turn praised his common sense and goodwill, the Fingerspitzengefühl, and not least the unflagging energy that marked him a master of mechanized war at the operational level. If Hoth lacked his stablemate’s flair (and his gift for securing headlines), his handling of Panzer Group 3 produced results at the same level.

These successes were, however, the point of the spear—or better said, the tip of an iceberg. Army Group Center’s mobile forces had by now outrun their logistics to a degree impossible for even the most operationally minded generals to overlook. Losses in tanks continued to mount. Rifle companies were shrinking to the strength of platoons. As a result, for the first time in the campaign, the panzers lacked the strength to force the pace of engagements. Instead they were increasingly constrained to wear down Soviet attacks and throw them off balance before counterattacking themselves. That pattern would become characteristic of German tactics and operations in the second half of the Russo-German War. Its systematic appearance at this early stage was another of Barbarossa’s many warning signs.

VI

LIKE THE GIANT Antaeus of classical mythology or the Green Knight of medieval English lore, the Red Army seemed to derive strength from being knocked down. Initial estimates had allowed for around 200 Soviet divisions. By the end of the Smolensk operation, more than 300 had appeared on German charts. The USSR outproduced Germany in tanks during 1941. But in six weeks, the best Soviet commanders had been discredited, the best Soviet formations had been eviscerated, thousands of tanks, guns, and aircraft had been destroyed, and tens of thousands of square miles overrun. Was it entirely wishful thinking that sustained the German belief that one more strike would finish the job? And was that viewpoint underpinned by an unacknowledged but growing sense of the panzers as an ultimately wasting asset, best employed to their limits while they could still shape the campaign?

As early as July 8, Hitler had informed the Chief of Staff of his intention to divert mobile forces north and south with open options: to reinforce the attack on Leningrad, to cooperate with Army Group South in capturing Kiev, and to regroup for a drive on Moscow. Depending on the operational situation, this represented a flat denial of the concept of the decisive point. It also represented the downplaying of the moral importance of Moscow. The city’s loss would be a prestige victory and an ideological triumph for National Socialism—a double body blow to the Soviet Union.

A fable with many versions in many languages describes a donkey starving to death because he is unable to choose among a half dozen full mangers. Franz Halder was no folklorist, but on July 23 he informed Hitler that the Russians had been decisively weakened—not decisively defeated. Every new operation had to begin by breaking enemy resistance, but overall infantry strength was down by 20 percent, and the panzer divisions averaged 50 percent short of establishment.

On the other hand, Kiev was the transportation and communications hub for the great industrial centers of southwest Russia. Leningrad, Lenin’s city, was arguably more the USSR’s moral center than was the official capital. Its capture would give Germany control of the Baltic Sea, create a united political and military front with Finland, and free Panzer Group 4 for employment against Moscow.

And if the enemy’s army was considered the primary objective, as opposed to resources and territory, the pickings were likely to be easier on the wings than by continuing headlong into a sector the Soviets must defend at all costs, and where their counterattacks indicated they were doing just that. The pace of Army Group Center’s advance was slowing perceptively enough to cause concern. At the same time, that advance was creating an increasingly exposed salient. Securing its flanks, especially the southern one, was a defensible response, especially in the context of those suddenly emerging reserves Wehrmacht intelligence had asserted the Red Army did not possess.

Rundstedt, whose army group could expect to benefit massively from a southern option, argued in public for the importance of continuing the drive on Moscow. He and Leeb, however, also had a particular sense of what they were on the verge of accomplishing with just a few of the right kinds of resources. Reduced to its essentials, the revised plan projected sending elements of Panzer Group 2 south with the mission of enveloping and destroying the Soviet forces engaging Rundstedt’s left. Hoth’s Group would turn north to assist in capturing Leningrad, then swing toward the Volga in cooperation with Panzer Group 4. Army Group Center would continue advancing on Moscow with infantry and sort out its rear areas and logistics until the mobile divisions returned.

When the Army High Command asked whether the campaign now sought economic objectives or destruction of Soviet military forces, the answer was “both.” It would be oversimplified hindsight to describe Hitler as playing his senior generals against each other. It would be an equal oversimplification to describe the generals as blindly obsessed with their respective places in the history of war. Both factors were undeniably present—and it must be particularly emphasized that generals without high levels of alpha ambition are likely to be liabilities in senior command. What is significant about the decisions made as the Smolensk pocket closed is the underlying consensus that affirmed them: a conviction that the panzers could still move fast enough and strike hard enough to make ultimate choices unnecessary. Barbarossa’s second stage would be predicated on what might be called a postmod ern construction: a “flexible Schwerpunkt.”

Depending on perspective, that placed the panzers in the role of either a chameleon placed on a plaid shirt, or a cartoon character running through a china shop shattering one glass after another by flicking his finger. In a month, XLI Panzer Corps had fought its way across 650 miles of forest and swamp to within 100 miles of Leningrad. Air supply sustained the final stage of an advance that by July 14 had thrown two bridges across the Luga River, the last major natural barrier before a city that was only two days’ march away—on the maps. But Leeb was a cautious general; the Soviet defense was desperate; and Reinhardt’s depleted divisions lacked the fighting power to overrun a city with two and a half million inhabitants. For armored forces, getting into a city was far less a problem than getting out of it—especially given the constrained time frame in which the attack on Leningrad was conceptualized.

Had Manstein’s corps been directly involved, the story might have played out differently. Instead Leeb and Hoepner had turned Manstein southeast toward Novgorod and the Moscow-Leningrad railroad. It was the kind of maneuver operation basic to panzer doctrine, in which Manstein possessed unusual skill—and which the Soviets were determined to frustrate. A well-executed counterattack cut off 8th Panzer Division and took out half of its 150 tanks in the four days Manstein required to break the 8th free. Pushing slowly forward, the corps eventually also bogged down along the Luga River.

As for the projected reinforcement by Panzer Group 3, not until August 16 was Army Group Center formally ordered to transfer four of its mobile divisions to Army Group North—a consequence of increasingly forceful debates between and among Hitler and the relevant generals. The new arrivals proved just enough to encourage Leeb and Hoepner and not enough to turn the tide in their sector. With both of Hoepner’s corps immobilized on the Luga, when Hoth’s divisions finally arrived, Leeb committed them to strengthen his thinly manned front as opposed to reinforcing one of Hoepner’s corps as a striking force. On September 8, Hoepner nevertheless renewed his group’s attack.

Schlisselburg, widely regarded as a keystone of the defense, fell after heavy and expensive fighting. The Russians threw in everything they had. First Panzer Division engaged tanks literally fresh from factory assembly lines. But the city held—and the Army High Command grew increasingly insistent on transferring Panzer Group 4 south for the drive against Moscow. Sixth Panzer Division was ordered south on August 18. By the twenty-fifth the front had “stabilized” in a blockade that plunged Leningrad into three years of horror as Hitler ordered the starving of the city his tanks failed to conquer.

Army Group North’s series of tactical victories between June and September neither camouflage nor compensate for unhandiness at the operational level. Leeb has come under especially heavy criticism for repeatedly halting or slowing the armored spearheads to allow the infantry to close up: a fits-and-starts process that gave the Soviets time to improvise Leningrad’s defense. The dispersion of Hoepner’s panzers in the first half of July further diminished blitzkrieg’s prospects in the northern sector. Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb, in short, will never go down as a master, or even an apprentice, of mobile war.

In Leeb’s defense, arguably even more than in Barbarossa’s other sectors, logistics and rear security controlled the pace and nature of operations in the north. The first phase of the German advance had been through the relatively developed territory of the Baltic states: Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania, which had been occupied by the Red Army in 1940 and were as yet relatively spared the blessings of Marxism-Leninism. The Germans benefited from overrunning large amounts of stockpiled Red Army supplies, and from capturing a number of major bridges and rail connections undamaged. Crossing into the USSR proper meant entering a literal wilderness, historically left undeveloped to provide a glacis for Russia’s northern capital. The near-literal absence of infrastructure made exploiting local resources nearly impossible: there were no surpluses, however meager, to requisition, confiscate, or steal.

That put a rapid, unexpected burden on a supply system stretched to move its own bases forward into the northern wasteland. It was not mere reflex caution that led Leeb to insist repeatedly on the necessity for bringing the infantry forward as the price of the next advance. Guerilla activity in Army Group North’s rear grew so serious that beginning on August 5, the entire 8th Panzer Division was withdrawn from the front and assigned to anti-partisan duties on the line of communications.

Developments in Army Group South followed a different pattern. Kleist shook off the initial Russian counterattacks, broke through an improvised “Stalin Line” on July 5, and started his tanks toward Kiev. In their wake marched the infantry of 6th Army, who were intended to do the heavy work of actually capturing the city. Fighting through strong resistance, especially by units officially overrun and reported as scattered, Panzer Group 1 had its first sight of Kiev’s skyline on July 10.

With the infantry and heavy artillery a hundred miles to the rear, III Panzer Corps commander Eberhard von Mackensen nevertheless considered storming the city with the two panzer divisions and one motorized division coming on line. Sixth Army CO Walther von Reichenau, anything but battle-shy, compared the prospect of fighting house-to-house in Kiev to Verdun—not least because of the constant losses his infantry were already taking from persistent air and ground attack. It was Hitler, however, who pulled the plug, forbidding a direct attack on Kiev for the present and freeing Mackensen’s corps for what seemed a far more promising mission.

The other two mobile corps of Panzer Group 1 had turned south of Kiev toward Uman. Red Army counterattacks, heavy air strikes, and poor weather slowed and disrupted the operation. Mutual envelopment operations at times left troops uncertain who was encircling whom. Nevertheless between July 16 and August 3, Kleist’s group created and sustained a pocket that, when cleared, yielded more than 100,000 prisoners—no mean bag even by the standards of Minsk and Smolensk. Large numbers of Russians managed to escape a trap that, like the others in Barbarossa, never fully closed. They did so at the expense of their organization and much of their equipment as the Red Army began a full-scale retreat from Bessarabia and the western Ukraine, abandoning the Dnieper River line. An enraged Stalin ordered the dismissal of some generals, and the execution of others.

Uman was no more than second prize in the blitzkrieg lottery. Halder and Rundstedt originally projected an even bigger encirclement in the area of Kirovograd, one cutting off the entire Soviet force west of the Dnieper. That had exceeded the panzers’ capacity. But with most of the Soviet front in apparent disintegration, with the Romanians advancing on Odessa and the Black Sea coast, the military prospects of a “southern strategy” began to match Hitler’s original economic visions—particularly when the major alternative involved a direct assault on Moscow in the best traditions of the Great War. Blitzkrieg was about creating opportunities and seizing them. Panzer Group 1 had begun Barbarossa with the lowest force-to-space ratio of the four. The increasing development of the southern front had increased the distances among possible objectives. But Rundstedt, Kleist, and the mobile corps commanders had done well—better than well—playing cape-and-sword with the Red Army. Suitably reinforced, they could finish the job.

Orders might be given, but mobile war German style depended on informed consent. The pivotal figure in the developing shift of operational focus was Heinz Guderian. He was considered firmly in the Moscow camp—so firmly that on August 23 he flew to Hitler’s Rastenburg headquarters with the intention of protesting in person against the projected reassignment of his group. By his own account at least he made a compelling presentation. Hitler then responded with his reasons for the Kiev option. Guderian’s self-described reluctance to make a scene in the face of a firm decision need not be taken at face value. But nor should his critics’ descriptions of careerism overriding principle be accepted without modification.

Guderian was at best a medium-sized fish in what had suddenly become a very big pond. His focus since June 21 had been to his front: operational and tactical. During the discussion Hitler had asked him a question: Did Guderian’s men have one more great effort in them? Guderian answered yes—if given an objective whose importance was self-evident. Kiev was not Moscow. But keep Panzer Group 2 together, give its commander a free hand, and there was a solid chance of completing the operation before the autumn rains shut down southern Russia entirely. Hitler conceded the point, and Halder flew into an enduring rage at what he called Guderian’s capitulation.

In Guderian’s terms, that was just another sign that the Chief of Staff might talk the talk of mobile war, but could never walk the walk. When matters grew dark, it was time to step on the gas. It is always ill-advised to throw spitballs at an adversary armed with rocks. Guderian began his move south minus one of his corps, transferred at Halder’s orders. But with massive Luftwaffe support, Panzer Group 2 broke the Soviet front within days. Third Panzer Division’s commander Walther Model was one of a rising new breed of hard-charging risk-takers willing to make bricks without straw and mobile war with only a few tanks. In a tactical tour de force, a battle group of the 3rd Panzer Divsion captured a key bridge over the Desna River on August 26, motorcyclists and half-tracks shooting their way across as German and Soviet pioneers dueled under the roadbed for control of the demolition apparatus.

The panzers drove south, shrugging off poorly coordinated flank attacks. As he had done in France, Guderian chivied subordinates mercilessly. Soviet commanders at all levels were bewildered by the speed of the German advance and the ability of the Germans to be where they were not expected. By September 7, Panzer Group 2 had opened a twenty-mile operational gap between the Southwestern Front and its right-flank neighbor the Bryansk Front.

Meanwhile, Panzer Group 1 struck for the Dnieper. The first permanent bridgehead came at Kremenchug. Then, on August 25, the 13th Panzer Division captured an intact bridge at Dnepropetrovsk, opening a way into the Soviet rear. Semyon Budenny, commanding the Southwestern Front, was an old-line horse cavalryman, an anachronism in the internal- combustion era. But he knew well enough what mobile troops could achieve in empty space. He requested permission to retreat—and was promptly replaced. Stalin’s determination to hold the line in part reflected the ongoing battle for Kiev, which fully justified Reichenau’s grim prediction. It was street by street and house by house, with the Germans making little progress. Stalin ordered Kiev held and threw in reinforcements, as the Germans began turning two breakthroughs into one envelopment.

Facing massive counterattacks around Dnepropetrovsk, Kleist feinted north and drove through Kremenchug. The starring role went to one of the new formations: 16th Panzer Division, under another newcomer, Hans Hube. Crossing the Dnieper on September 11, by the thirteenth the division was 20 miles into the Soviet rear with two more divisions in close support. Again Stalin ordered Kiev held: no retreat without his authorization. Panzer Group 1 was down to half strength and less in tanks, but on the cusp of the kind of objective Guderian had described to Hitler. Hube led from the front as his tanks overran an army headquarters whose commander was constrained to escape through a window. The Luftwaffe, with V Air Corps supporting Kleist and II Air Corps supporting Guderian, pounced on every Soviet effort to establish blocking points and scoured the sky clean of Soviet aircraft. On the evening of September 16—at 1820, to be exact—3rd and 16th Panzer Divisions met to close the Kiev pocket at Lokhvitsa, more than 120 miles behind the city itself.

Kiev was the third of Barbarossa’s major pocket battles, and the greatest. Serious resistance ended around September 24; mopping up took ten days longer. German official figures give more than 800 tanks and almost 3,500 guns captured, along with more than 650,000 prisoners. Salvaging the equipment and transferring the men took weeks. Kiev was also the smoothest of the envelopments. Leakage was minimal—only around 15,000 Soviet soldiers managed to escape across the steppe. Panzer Group 1 was worn thin, like a long-used knife blade. Winter was close enough for Rundstedt to recommend suspending operations. On October 1, Kleist’s men, renamed the 1st Panzer Army, instead turned south first to the Sea of Azov, then toward Rostov and the oil fields of the Caucasus, 180 degrees away from the revitalized attack on Moscow the High Command was calling Operation Typhoon.

The upgrading of Panzer Group 1, and eventually all the rest, to army status was more than cosmetic retitling. On one hand it was positive: a recognition that the mobile forces’ effectiveness depended heavily on the kind of autonomy denied when they were subordinated to army commanders rather than reporting directly to the army groups. In particular the tension between Guderian and Hoth and their nominal superior von Kluge had contributed significantly to a level of friction and delay clearly unaffordable in the circumstances of the Russo-German War. On the other side of the coin, establishing the higher panzer headquarters as armies downgraded their specialist function. Increasingly they would be used in the same way as other armies, commanding mixed bags of mobile and marching divisions, occupying sectors as often as conducting mobile operations—in short, following the patterns developing in Army Group North but on a larger scale.

Kiev remains a subject of controversy among scholars and soldiers. One school argues that the operation was a digression. It did not end the war; the USSR did not collapse. Instead, Kiev (and Leningrad) further strained an already overextended panzer force. Kiev arguably delayed the attack on Moscow by a month, giving the Red Army and General Winter time that could not have been bought in battle. But Kiev also destroyed or neutralized massive Soviet forces that would have been available against the right flank of the Moscow offensive. Nor could Stalin and his generals overlook the near-free strategic hand Kiev gave Rundstedt in southern Ukraine: diversion of strength and attention is usually a two-way process. And as Robert M. Citino dryly puts it, “Can any battle that nets 665,000 prisoners be considered a mistake?” Even the USSR’s deployable resources, human and material, were not infinitely renewable.

Kiev was a crucial benchmark in another, no less decisive way. On September 24, a series of explosions shook the city. Preset, remote-controlled demolitions started fires that destroyed much of what remained intact after the fighting. Hitler ordered retribution. The army enthusiastically cooperated not for the first time in such exercises, but in a visible, spectacular way that made its position on the Jewish question unmistakable. Its culmination was the shooting of more than 30,000 Jews at Babi Yar—an operation that would have been impossible without army-supplied transport, administration, and area security.

Events in Kiev reinforced the growing awareness among Russians who had worked and sacrificed to build a Soviet future that the Germans were no less committed to destroying that future. The Soviet people did not become overnight the united and determined force of Communist myth. Panic, looting, wildcat strikes—a general breakdown of law and order prevailed in Moscow during the fighting. Well before then, however, it was increasingly obvious that whatever might be wrong with the USSR, it was nothing the Germans could fix—or wanted to.

Stalin’s obscene treatment of his own people had created a significant opportunity the Germans failed to utilize. Stalin himself acknowledged the possibility in a speech of May 1945. Prospects for extending individual and local cooperation with occupation into a call for a joint war against Soviet tyranny nevertheless foundered from the beginning on Nazi-structured racism. Hitler forbade any consideration of Slavs as allies. Independently of Hitler, atrocities became a rear-area norm. Soldiers took snapshots of mass hangings and mass shootings, often sending them home to their families. Such messages as “1,153 Jewish looters shot,” or “2,200 Jews shot,” grew into boasts of 20,000, 30,000 shootings and more.

These body counts had little to do with actually fighting partisans. The vast, consistent discrepancy between the numbers of weapons seized and people executed make that point eloquently. The perpetrators submitted detailed reports to Berlin in codes so simple that British intelligence had been reading them since 1939. The information went unpublicized because the British government believed its release would jeopardize other code-breaking operations deemed vital to the war effort—especially the decryption of German raidio messages by the ULTRA operation.

Nor was the work confined to Nazi organizations. Einsatzgruppen, Waffen SS, and army “ field-grays” came together in a common cause across occupied Russia. While generals like Leeb and Bock offered token protests, Reichenau called for “severe and just retribution against subhuman Jewry” and for a campaign of terror against all Russians. Hoth issued a more extreme version. Guderian declared he “made the order his own.” Manstein, promoted to army command in the Crimea, took up his new post by demanding the eradication of partisans and “Jewish Bolsheviks.”

Arguably more crucial to the war’s metastasizing brutalization were the junior officers. In 1939 about half still came from more or less traditional sources: the educated middle classes broadly defined. With the outbreak of war, combat experience became the dominant criterion. There was less and less time to provide more than basic instruction to officer candidates who saw their survival to date as prima facie proof of skill and luck, and who tended to regard training courses in the Fatherland as an opportunity for unauthorized rest and recreation. After the fall of 1942, any German over sixteen could become an army officer if he served acceptably at the front, demonstrated the proper character, believed in the Nazi cause, and was racially pure. The Waffen SS was more overtly egalitarian, but its basic criteria were essentially the same.

This relative democratization in good part reflected the growing synergy between National Socialist ideology and the demands of the front. Hitler wanted young men “as tough as leather, as fleet as grey-hounds, and as hard as Krupp steel,” correspondingly unburdened by reflection or imagination. The Red Army at its best did not offer sophisticated tactical opposition. What division and regimental commanders wanted in subordinates was tough men physically and morally, those willing to lead from the front and publicly confident in even the most desperate situations. One might speculate, indeed, that a steady supply of twentysomething lieutenants with wound badges and attitudes helped older, wiser, and more tired majors and colonels to suppress their own doubts about Hitler and his war. And men with such conditioning were more likely to encourage than restrain aggressive behavior against “others” and “outsiders.”

VII

IN OTHER WARS Kiev was a victory for the ballad-makers. In this one it was no more than the first step to what the General Staff regarded as the campaign’s finale: a drive for Moscow that Halder expected to force Russia out of the war on any terms Germany chose to impose. Hitler, who had been considering the prospect of continuing operations into 1942, found no difficulty accepting an audacity that matched, perhaps even exceeded, his own. A new directive of September 6 acknowledged Moscow as the focal point of the campaign’s next stage.

The blitzkrieg team was frayed. The Luftwaffe’s operational losses had been compounded by the problems of maintenance at improvised forward air strips, and crew fatigue the system refused to recognize. The 2nd Air Fleet, Army Group Center’s opposite number, had approximately 170 single-engine fighters, about the same number of bombers, and 120 ground attack planes. The artillery’s material losses had been limited, but its horses were dying, its vehicles were breaking down, and its ammunition reserves were limited. The infantry was tired. Average divisional strengths had been reduced by a quarter—more in the rifle companies. Morale was still high; and to some degree the shortage of men was compensated by material. Increasing numbers of 50mm antitank guns, effective against T-34s, were coming on line. Army Group Center had 14 battalions of the assault guns that had demonstrated their worth over and over again in all sectors. In the final analysis, however, the attack on Moscow would go as far as the panzers could carry it.

The code name was Typhoon, and reality approached rhetoric. The initial intention had been to redeploy 4th Panzer Group on Hoth’s left and launch a two-pronged attack. The rapid victory at Kiev enabled Guderian’s group to be brought up on the right. When the number was finalized, Bock had fourteen panzer and eight motorized divisions, more than 1,000 tanks on a 500-mile front. The panzers were not what they had been on June 21. Casualties had been heavy and replacements inadequate. But they remained the cream of the army: tempered but not yet brittle, respecting their enemy but still convinced they had the Soviets’ measure.

Guderian’s panzer divisions were still at about half their assigned tank strength. The situation in Groups 3 and 4 was better. Two of Hoepner’s divisions had even enjoyed full, albeit brief, refits in France. The problem was sustainability. Shifting Panzer Groups 2 and 4 quickly and smoothly showcased the quality of German staff planning and traffic management, but it came with a price in wear and tear. Hitler had ordered engine production allocated to new vehicles, and the army group had received only 350 replacements. The shortage of other vehicles exceeded 20 percent. Fuel consumption was outstripping the Reich’s production capacity. Existing supplies remained difficult to move forward due to the still-inadequate rail system.

The main German offensive was scheduled to begin October 2. Panzer Group 4 would follow the secondary road Roslavl-Moscow, then pivot left toward the Smolensk-Moscow highway. Panzer Group 3 would break through in the north and swing right. The two groups would meet at Vyazma in another by-now standard encirclement. The sting in Typhoon’s tail, with apologies for the mixed metaphor, would be provided by Guderian. Panzer Group 2 would jump off two days earlier, break through to the northeast toward Orel-Bryansk, and create a second pocket. The one-two punch would shatter the Soviet central front and open for a second time the road to Moscow. Whether the city would be enveloped or captured by a knife-thrust up the middle was left to contingency. It would be a race against the weather, against Soviet ability to reinforce, and against the Germans’ growing spectrum of losses and shortages. Success depended—again—on speed and shock. Also—Panzer voran!

The Germans’ opponents were a mixture of worn-down veterans and grass-green conscripts. Most divisions were at half strength in men, less in equipment. All but a few of the tanks were old models, the same ones the Germans had already destroyed by hundreds. Higher headquarters lacked trained staff officers and mutual confidence. The Red Army did not expect the Germans to mount another all-out drive so close to the coming of the autumn rains. When air reconnaissance reported a massive German armored column advancing from Smolensk, the NKVD sought the crews’ arrest for inciting panic.

The Germans did well enough on that score by themselves. Panzer Group 2 started 17th and 18th Panzer Divisions northwest toward Bryansk. Fourth Panzer Division advanced 80 miles northeast toward Orel in 24 hours, covered 150 miles in four days, and took the city’s defenses so completely by surprise on October 3 that streetcars were still running when the tanks interrupted service. Casualties were fewer than 200 men. Bryansk fell on October 7, and 17th Panzer Division trumped 4th by overrunning an entire Front headquarters.

Hoepner’s group in Typhoon’s center was able to concentrate 560 tanks in two corps on a mere 50-mile front. The Soviets were simply pushed out of the way, and by October 5, Hoepner was ready to commit his reserve of two panzer and two motorized divisions: the third corps he had not had at Leningrad. Hoth’s group had fewer and less powerful tanks than Hoepner. Its supply problems were greater due to inferior roads. Constant counterattacks slowed its pace. Nevertheless Panzer Group 3’s spearheads found the junction between two Soviet armies, drove a wedge between them, and captured intact a number of major bridges over the Dnieper. Hoth’s promotion to army command under Rundstedt on October 5 had no effect on the well- worked-in staff that welcomed Reinhardt from XLI Panzer Corps. Dependable rather than spectacular, he had raised and shaped 4th Panzer Division, led his corps through France and Russia, and was part of the panzer family.

The Red Air Force responded to Typhoon in force, the Sturmoviks doing particular damage to tank formations. Guderian recorded personally dodging a series of attacks by low-flying bombers. The panzer groups’ initial successes nevertheless owed much to Richthofen’s Stukas, and to the bombers who interdicted road junctions and rail lines, harassed troop columns, and disrupted communications to the point where the Soviets failed to grasp what was happening to them as it happened. The tanks were used up in small-scale counterattacks. The artillery was overrun in position; the infantry held its ground until cut off.

Infantry-armor cooperation was closer in the initial stages of Typhoon than at any previous time during Barbarossa. The foot- marchers secured the panzers’ flanks by pinning Soviet frontline divisions in place, then crushing them with set-piece attacks that cost lives but inhibited orderly withdrawal even after Stalin was persuaded to authorize retreat late on October 5. The next evening, Group 3’s 7th Panzer Division cut the Moscow highway at Vyazma from the north. At midmorning on the seventh, Hoepner’s 10th Panzer entered the city from the south, closing a pocket containing 30 Soviet divisions from five armies. Elements of three more armies were enveloped when the infantry divisions of the German 2nd Army linked up with Guderian’s panzers at Bryansk on the seventh and eighth.

The trapped Russians fought with by-now predictable desperation. The Germans were no less determined, and this time the infantry was close behind the tanks. Fighting continued until the end of October. When final accounts were tallied, the booty included 6,000 guns and mortars, 1,300 tanks, and almost 700,000 men. Another 300,000 Soviet soldiers died anonymously or just disappeared. A 300-mile gap had been torn in the Soviet line, and no reserves were available to throw in. They had been sent to oppose Army Group South—an overlooked consequence of the battle for Kiev. Zukhov described the situation bluntly: The panzers’ way was wide open; nothing could guarantee against their sudden appearance before Moscow.

The High Command and Adolf Hitler agreed. And then the same generals who had for weeks been focused on Moscow with laserlike intensity decided that the time had come to end the war on the flanks. Third Panzer Group, now 3rd Panzer Army, was sent northeast to cut the Moscow-Leningrad railway. Guderian’s rechristened 2nd Panzer Army was ordered to send a corps southeast toward Kursk. The rest of it would join Hoepner and take Moscow—when, that is, the mobile divisions were no longer needed to secure the pockets, and once they could refuel.

Fourth Panzer Division lost two days in Orel with dry tanks and had to “borrow” 3rd Panzer’s fuel allotment to push a weak battle group up the Tula highway. The tactical sun was shining on October 6 when 34th Motorcycle Battalion pulled off another of the Husaresstücke (hussar stunts) by now routine for the panzer bikers by seizing an unde molished bridge. When the tanks crossed, the situation changed. An ambush of T-34s knocked out ten of 35th Panzer Regiment’s tanks and drove the Germans back across the bridge.

The advance resumed the next day, but the Germans were unable to reinforce and develop their success despite unusually strong air and artillery support. Fuel remained in short supply. The year’s first snowfalls began on October 7. And 4th Panzer faced a different kind of opposition. The Red Army had begun awarding the title “Guards” to formations that distinguished themselves in combat. The 1st Guards Rifle Corps was not what Guards would become. But it put stones in the Germans’ road for four days—time enough to construct a defensive line that held up the panzers for two more weeks.

In Hoepner’s sector the only division initially available to take the Moscow road was Das Reich, the 2nd SS Motorized. This was the first time the panzer arm entrusted a Waffen SS division with a vital mission, but the men in black were stopped by a roadblock backed by a couple dozen T-34s and 30 BT-7s. Not until October 13 did the advance resume. By that time Zukhov had brought up enough troops to form the Mozhaisk Line near the 1812 battlefield of Borodino. Rain and snow, thaws and freezes, were turning the ground to mud and transforming the overall logistic situation from precarious to desperate. Breaking the Mozhaisk Line took two weeks, first to last. When it was done, five panzer divisions were 80 miles from Moscow as the crow flies. For two weeks more they got no farther.

Had it been available, 3rd Panzer Army might well have been too much for the hard-tried Ivans. But instead of enveloping the Mozhaisk Line’s nearly open left flank, its divisions were advancing through the mud in the wrong direction. The veteran 1st Panzer Division covered 50 miles in five days to take Kalinin on October 14—but it was moving extrinsically, away from Moscow, as ordered.

Guderian’s 2nd Panzer Army managed to scrounge enough fuel and ammunition to send XXIV Panzer Corps toward Tula on October 29. In fact the spearhead was a battle group formed from the 35th Panzer Regiment, brought up to 80 tanks by giving it most of the corps’s runners, a rifle company in half-tracks attached from 3rd Panzer Division, and several truck-mounted companies of the Grossdeutschland Regiment. Commanding the mixed bag was Colonel Heinrich Eberbach, a scar-faced veteran of World War I and among the best of the third-generation panzer leaders emerging from Barbarossa. The one available road to Tula began disintegrating immediately, with maximum speed falling to ten or twelve miles per hour: low-gear driving that was itself an extra strain on overworked trucks. The Russians had blown the bridges and laid minefields everywhere. Eberbach’s task force nevertheless advanced 50 miles in five days, and on October 30 he sought to take Tula by storm. The garrison, a mixture of local militia and NKVD troops, threw the Germans out and back in desperate fighting and bought time for reinforcements to pin 2nd Panzer Army in place outside the city till mid-November.

The battle for Tula highlighted the frontline consequences of long-term overextension throughout Army Group Center. It was not merely a matter of wrestling more supplies forward. The mobile units were declining in effective, deployable strength to a point where commanders were not merely halting units but cannibalizing them. It was common practice to strip out men and vehicles to form ever-weaker spearheads that might still be able to move but found it increasingly difficult to fight, even against the kind of amateur opposition initially faced in Tula. The shock, it might be said, was too small to create awe—and the confusion on which the panzers had depended since 1939.

The Germans had two choices. One was to go into what amounted to winter quarters, comprehensively refit, and prepare for another offensive in 1942. Kluge was already implementing that approach on his own initiative, tightening the 4th Army’s lines and shifting de facto to the defensive. The alternative was to make one last, absolutely final try for Moscow before winter began in earnest. The distance was so close. The army had come so far. Von Bock urged pushing on. The High Command concurred—and convinced a more or less dubious Hitler.

The mind-set can be ascribed to ambition. Halder, Bock, Guderian, and their subordinates were concerned, not to say obsessed, with their personal places in history. Linked to that, though not as often noted, were stress and fatigue. Living conditions had been primitive even in headquarters. Leading from the front meant taking risks. Guderian was not the only senior officer who had faced Soviet fire, and it impugns no one’s courage to say that experience is never shrugged off. The operational environment, in short, was anything but conducive to balanced judgment and cold reason in the pattern of the elder Moltke.

The senior staff officers’ conference held at Orsha on November 13 declared the situation extremely serious and criticized the notion of another large-scale offensive. Halder’s response that it was necessary to trust to “soldier’s luck,” and his later statement that “these battles are less a question of strategic command than a question of energy” seem, in hindsight, at best a desk general’s heroic vitalism, and at worst, hubris in the classical Greek sense. But Halder was no fool. The Russians had repeatedly conjured armies from resources just as repeatedly described as exhausted by German intelligence. What might they achieve given even four uninterrupted months?

Experience and myth alike, moreover, taught what a Russian winter meant for soldiers—especially a winter spent in the open. Neither the military nor the political leadership had concerned itself with providing winter clothes and equipment for a campaign expected to be finished by autumn. Now coats, gloves, and scarves were collected haphazardly—many extorted from Europe’s Jews—and piled up at railheads, taking priority behind fuel and ammunition. Eventually the survivors of the winter of 1941-42 would receive a medal. Its wearers dubbed it the Gefrierfleischorden: the frozen meat medal.

When the ground began freezing, there was a certain rejoicing from generals to privates. “Now [we] can afford to take risks,” Bock declared. Instead the panzers lurched forward, measuring progress as much by the onset of winter as by desperate Soviet resistance. Tank crews lit fires under engines in the morning to thaw them enough to turn over. More and more vehicles already held together with spit and tape gave up the ghost. Aircraft had been withdrawn to Reich and the Mediterranean; all that remained was VIII Air Corps with fewer than 100 fighters and 200 strike aircraft—paper strengths heavily eroded by fuel shortages and frozen engines.

Reinhardt swung south, captured Klin, and reached the Moscow-Volga Canal on November 27, but was promptly ejected from the small bridgehead. The panzer army went over to the defense on November 30, supplies, men, and equipment exhausted by determined Soviet defenders. Guderian made a final attempt to envelop Tula, and on December 2 also shifted to the defense under heavy Soviet pressure and recurring blizzards. Hoepner’s attack ground to a halt within sight and sound of Moscow. Its frontline units had no food, no gasoline, no ammunition, and almost no one left in the ranks able to pull a trigger. On the evening of December 1, a reconnaissance patrol reached the train station at Khimki—twelve and a half miles from Moscow: the closest the Germans would get. It might as well have been a hundred and twelve.

On December 5, with the temperature at 25 degrees below zero, the Red Army counterattacked. Its rear echelons disintegrating, Army Group Center fell back. Panzer Army 3 fought itself to near destruction covering Bock’s left. Sixth Panzer Division expended the last of its 35(t)s and most of its other vehicles, converted its transport to local farm wagons, and reorganized what remained of its panzer regiment as a provisional infantry battalion.

Hitler’s immediate responses were to issue a general “no retreat” order, and declare war against the US. The latter decision was the least debated; Hitler had to ask where Pearl Harbor was. The former decision reflected Hitler’s fear that the army might unravel completely if subjected to the strain of a long retreat. Guderian responded by flying to Hitler’s East Prussian headquarters. Met with a “hard, unfriendly” stare, for five hours he made the case for local withdrawals and a flexible defense. Hitler recommended using heavy artillery to blast foxholes into the frozen ground. Guderian described the likely result as so many washtubs. The conversation declined from there. On December 26, Guderian was relieved of command.

Hoepner was next among the senior panzer officers to feel the axe. On January 8 he ordered what was left of a hard-pressed infantry corps to pull back while the option remained. Hitler screamed of an idiotic decision, of criminal betrayal, of cowardice in the face of the enemy. Hoepner was relieved of command, denied a pension, and refused authorization to wear his uniform in public. In farewell, he announced that his behavior was based on responsibility to God and duty to his army and his people.

This was the same general who in May 1941 spoke of defending against “Jewish Bolshevism” as justifying a “battle for existence” against the Soviet Union. Panzer Group 4 had not merely implemented Hitler’s order to shoot political commissars out of hand. Hoepner’s command had been highly praised by the commander of Einsatzgruppe 4 for its close cooperation in “special missions.” Comment might seem superfluous—except that Erich Hoepner became active in the military opposition to Hitler, and was executed on August 8, 1944. He died hard, at the end of a strangling rope in Plötzensee prison.

Other senior generals were dismissed at the same time, including all three army group commanders. They provided the scapegoats deemed necessary to focus blame away from the Führer, “the greatest warlord of all time.” In fact the Red Army was years away from possessing the capacity to mount a sustained, coordinated offensive at any season, much less the depths of winter. The Germans gave ground under pressure, but were able to hold the roads and control the supply centers. By the end of February, they had more or less restored local stability along the front. On both sides, staff officers returned to their drawing boards. First sergeants counted the dead. Neither was underemployed.