All Hell Let Loose_ The World at War 1939-1945 - Max Hastings [89]
During early-summer operations, the Germans had suffered just 3,360 casualties, the British 50,000 – most of these taken prisoner. Much of Auchinleck’s armoured force had been destroyed. Churchill, in Washington to meet Roosevelt, was shocked and humiliated. The end of June 1942 found the British occupying a line at El Alamein, back inside Egypt. One of Auchinleck’s soldiers wrote: ‘The order came to us, “Last round, last man.” This was chilling. It was curious to see that this legendary phrase of heroic finality could still be used. Presumably it was intended to instil a steely resolve … But being interpreted, it meant that there was no hope for Tobruk and that we were being left to our fate – the very reverse of morale building … We were a downcast, defeated lot.’ Britain’s fortunes in the Middle East, and the global prestige of its army, had reached their lowest ebb. Churchill’s attempt to exploit Africa as a battlefield against the Axis had thus far served only to make Rommel a hero, and grievously to injure the morale and self-respect of the British people at home. It was fortunate indeed that the desert was not the cockpit of the war; that events elsewhere, on the Russian steppe, had drastically diminished the significance of British failure.
Barbarossa
At 0315 Berlin time on 22 June 1941, Russian border guards on the Bug river bridge at Kolden were summoned by their German counterparts ‘to discuss important matters’, and machine-gunned as they approached. Wehrmacht sappers tore away charges laid on the railway bridge at Brest-Litovsk, then waved forward the assault units at 0330. German special forces – ‘Brandenburgers’ who included some Russian-speakers – had been parachuted or smuggled across the lines during the preceding days, and were already at work sabotaging communications behind the front. Some 3.6 million Axis troops began to advance into the Soviet Union on a nine-hundred-mile front from the Baltic to the Black Sea, smashing into the defences with devastating effect. A Russian, the poet David Samoilov, said later, ‘We were all expecting war. But we were not expecting that war.’ Divisions and soon whole armies dissolved in the Germans’ path, so that collapses and surrenders characterised the first weeks of the Red Army’s campaign. A Soviet officer wrote of an exchange with a comrade: ‘Kuznetsov informed me, with a tremble in his throat, that the only thing left of the 56th Rifle Div was its number.’ This was merely one among a thousand such disasters.
Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union was the defining event of the war, just as the Holocaust was the defining act of Nazism. Germany embarked upon an attempt to fulfil the most ambitious objectives in its history, to push back the frontiers of Slavdom and create a new empire in the east. The Nazis argued that they were merely following the historic example set by other European nations in pursuing Lebensraum, living space, by seizing an empire in the territories of savages. The British historian Michael Howard has written: ‘Many, perhaps most Germans, and certainly most German intellectuals, saw the First World War as a battle for cultural survival against the converging forces of Russian barbarism and, far more subversive, the decadent civilisation of the West, embodied no longer by French aristocrats but by the materialist societies of the Anglo-Saxon world. This belief was taken over in its entirety by the Nazis and provided the bedrock of their own philosophy.’
Millions of young Germans had been conditioned since childhood to believe that their nation faced an existential threat from the Soviet Union. ‘The situation is ideal for the Bolshevists to launch their attack on Europe in furtherance of their general plan for world domination,’ wrote an ardent Nazi Luftwaffe pilot, Heinz Knoke, in 1941. ‘Will Western capitalism,