All Hell Let Loose_ The World at War 1939-1945 - Max Hastings [191]
Hitler’s confidence revived: he dismissed Germany’s losses in the previous year’s fighting, and accepted the view of Colonel Reinhard Gehlen, Eastern Front intelligence chief, that Stalin’s reserves were exhausted. By August, German weapons output would regain full momentum, following a disastrous July 1941 decision, rescinded only in January 1942, to cut arms and ammunition production in anticipation of victory. It was extraordinary that Hitler retained the loyalty and obedience of his officers after the strategic madnesses of the previous campaign and the privations of winter. In the Crimea in January 1942, an embittered German soldier itemised his diet: one hot meal a day – cabbage soup with potatoes in it – half a loaf of bread every second day, some fat, a little cheese and hard honey.
Yet even on such fare, the Wehrmacht remained a formidable fighting force. Most of Germany’s generals, in the dark recesses of their souls, knew that they had made their nation and its entire army – it was a myth that only the SS committed atrocities – complicit in crimes against humanity, and especially Russian humanity, such as their enemies would never forgive, even before the Holocaust began. They saw nothing to lose by fighting on, except more millions of lives: it deserves emphasis that a large majority of the war’s victims perished from 1942 onwards. Only victories might induce the Allies to make terms. Hitler’s April directive for the summer operations called for a concentration of effort in the south; the objectives of Operation Blue were to destroy the Red Army’s residual reserves, seize Stalingrad and capture the Caucasian oilfields.
Stalin misjudged German intentions: anticipating a new thrust against Moscow, he concentrated his forces accordingly. Even when the entire Blue plan was laid before him, after being found on the body of a Wehrmacht staff officer killed in an air crash, he dismissed it as disinformation. But Russia’s armies remained much stronger than Hitler realised, with 5.5 million men under arms and rapidly increasing tank and aircraft production. Criminals and some political prisoners were released from the gulag’s labour camps for service – 975,000 of them by the war’s end. Berlin estimated Russia’s 1942 steel output at eight million tons; in reality, it would attain 13.5 million tons.
The first phase of Blue, expected to take three weeks, began on 28 June with an assault towards the Don. Against Stalin’s armies, Hitler deployed 3.5 million Germans and a further million Axis troops – Italians, Romanians, the Spanish ‘Blue’ Division dispatched by Franco as a goodwill gesture – with spectacular initial success. When Pravda correspondent Lazar Brontman arrived in Voronezh, three hundred miles north-west of Stalingrad, at first he found the city relaxed and secure in its remoteness from the enemy. He was amused one evening by the droll spectacle of scores of women in the park dancing with each other in the absence of male partners. Women also policed the city: Brontman observed that they directed traffic more efficiently than men, but used their whistles too much.
Within days, however, the mood darkened dramatically. Further west the Russian line broke, precipitating yet another headlong retreat. German bombers began to pound Voronezh’s streets, ‘ironing the city without meeting resistance’, and prompting a great exodus of fugitives. Profiteers who owned vehicles charged desperate people three, four, five thousand roubles for the privilege of a ride eastwards. One by one,