Hitler & Russia, by Joe Miranda

[bayonetbrant]

From a FB post at CounterFact Magazine.  Article by Joe Miranda

Hitler's Failure at Grand Strategy, by Joseph Miranda

In World War I, Kaiserine Germany and its Austro-Hungarian ally defeated Russia. Between 1914 and 1917 those Central Powers launched major offensives against Russia, gaining operational victories even while at the same time fighting another war on the western front. Russia was knocked out of the war in March 1918, after a final series of German offensives resulted in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which gave Berlin and Vienna control over vast territories and resources in the east.

So there was reason for Hitler to believe, in 1940-41, that earlier victory could be recreated even more swiftly and easily. His ground force had a proven mobile warfare doctrine, and his air force had operative command of the skies over Western and Central Europe. Further, with France defeated and occupied and Britain driven off the continent, for at least a few years Germany would effectively be fighting a one front war.

Beyond that, Hitler's Germany had potentially all of Europe behind it – Austria and Czechoslovakia had been directly incorporated into the Reich; the east European states of Hungary, Bulgaria, Italy, Romania and Croatia were allies, along with Finland as a cobelligerent. Several of those nations had fought against Germany in World War I, but were Axis partners this tie around.

Since Germany had defeated Russia in World War I – during which only two years were spent in concerted campaigning in the east –it didn't seem unrealistic to believe it could do the same in 1941. That idea was further reinforced by the great German victory in the west in 1940 in just seven weeks, a campaign the Germans had originally expected to last at least a year. Since the Kaiser's military had never been able to crack the nut of the western front in the First World War, the easy 1940 Nazi victory in the west seemed to further underscore how easy it would be in the east.

Hitler expected to win against the USSR and then consolidate before the British could rebuild and America could effectively enter the war. In sum, the conquest of the east would provide for the grand-strategic geopolitical dominance of Eurasia that – with its natural resources, industrial and population base – would allow Germany to counter Anglo-American oceanic dominance.

That was also the reason Hitler chose not to pursue a North African-Mediterranean strategy immediately after the fall of France. A campaign on the periphery of Europe, where Anglo-US naval and airpower could still be effectively deployed, seemed to him as if it would only play into his enemy strengths. Moreover, even if the Iraqi-Iranian oilfields were captured by the Germans, there would still be huge logistical issues in regard to moving the oil from there back to the Reich, while at the Anglo-Allies would still be left with the immense oil reserves of North America.

The start date for the attack on the USSR was pushed back from mid-May to 22 June 1941. The primary reason for that was the need to integrate all the captured Anglo-French trucks, railroad engines, petroleum stockpiles and assorted weaponry into the Wehrmacht. Without that materiel, Barbarossa wouldn't have gotten as far as it did in 1941. About 40 percent of the equipment in the German mechanized-class divisions came from those stocks.

Blaming the late start on the diversion of the Balkan campaign was a myth put into the historiographic stream by none other than Hitler himself, when he repeated mused about it in the months prior to his death in 1945. It was the explanation he preferred over one that emphasized his sending the Wehrmacht into a mission for which it hadn't been adequately prepared.

The original schedule for the invasion called for a German victory in nine to 17 weeks. In the event, the 17 week mark was reached late in October, when the Germans seemed finally poised to strike at Moscow. It's been argued, had Hitler stopped there for the winter, when the front was roughly on the line of Leningrad-Smolensk-Rostov, the Wehrmacht wouldn't have suffered its near-fatal defeat in front of the Soviet capital. That reversal cost the Germans not only irreplaceable casualties, but also irreplaceable vehicles and aircraft, and gave the Soviets an opportunity for a counteroffensive that came close to shattering the entire front.

All that set the stage for the German defeat in the east and thus in the wider war. On 21 June 1941 the Germans controlled Europe from the Pyrenees to the Soviet frontier, a situation unprecedented in history. By the close of that year, new conquests had added Soviet territory west of the line Leningrad-Moscow-Rostov. Hitler had indeed gained geopolitical depth for the Reich, as well as many of the desired resource areas.

It all led nowhere, though, because complete victory in Barbarossa proved impossible in a single year while the partial victory achieved was pyrrhic. The 1942 campaign ended in total defeat at Stalingrad and complete loss of German strategic initiative.

For Barbarossa to have worked, the Red Army had to be defeated by the end of 1941, either on the battlefield or via a political settlement. Stalin had his own geopolitical depth, however, in the industrial areas of the Urals and the expanses of Central Asia and Siberia. He could also rely on the oceanic powers, Britain and the US, to provide military assistance that came in the form of huge shipments of weapons, strategic materials and food.

The German operational victories of 1939-41 had provided a window of opportunity to reverse the larger strategic balance, but they weren't enough to be decisive at that level. By the end of 1942 the Anglo-American alliance was able to employ its seapower dominance to launch a counteroffensive, first in North Africa, then across the Mediterranean more broadly, and finally back into Northwest Europe.

The basic dilemma for Hitler came from the fact he tried to first win a military victory, after which command over Europe would presumably have allowed him to bring about a political settlement. It would've made more sense, at the grand strategic level, to first implement a political settlement, say by fully integrating Vichy France and Spain into the German alliance and economic systems, securing the Mediterranean littoral while Britain was still too weak to prevent that, and then mobilizing for a more broadly supported pan-European strike against the massive Soviet state in the east.

In the end, Hitler was unable to come up with a grand strategy to translate his initial military victories into a broader political order that would support his grandiose geopolitical vision. Within that grand strategic limitation lay the start of the defeat of his Reich.