Short History of World War II - James L. Stokesbury [77]
“The Auk,” as he was fondly known to those who served under him, was now given the supplies and reinforcements that Wavell had lacked. Rommel, on the other hand, was starved as the Germans put everything they had into the attempt to finish off Russia before the winter. Late in November the British attacked. They managed to surprise the Germans and Italians, but Rommel got his reserves up quickly and there was hard fighting for two weeks, with small armored columns blundering into each other, before the Germans broke. The chase then went streaming away to the west. Early in December, the long siege of Tobruk was lifted, and by the end of the year, the Axis were all the way back at El Agheila again. It was practically the only bright spot in the whole world that New Year’s Eve. The Germans were deep in Russia, and the Japanese running rampant in Southeast Asia. Rommel immediately began preparing his reply; soon the disasters would be universal.
13. The Invasion of Russia
ADOLF HITLER’S DECISION to invade Soviet Russia brought the first of the two great neutrals into the war. In terms of its long-range consequences, still being worked out, Hitler’s choice may well have been the single most important political decision of the twentieth century. From a generation after the fact, it seems incredible that he could have believed Germany was strong enough to defeat Russia as well as all her other enemies: Britain, the Commonwealth, and an increasingly hostile United States. Not only did he think he could do it, he very nearly succeeded.
Neither partner to the Russo-German Nonaggression Pact was wholly satisfied with it. The Russians were not quite as subservient as the Germans thought they should be, and the Germans were far more successful in the West than the Russians wanted them to be. Russian pressure on Finland and Rumania threatened German sources of raw materials. As early as the end of July in 1940, Hitler said that he really wanted to settle affairs with Russia. However, the Battle of Britain was just getting underway then, and Hitler realized the desirability of avoiding a winter campaign. He decided to wait until the spring. In August, the German high command began military planning, but just on a contingency basis. The Russian Foreign Minister, Vyascheslav Molotov, visited Hitler in Berlin in November of 1940. That was the famous occasion when Hitler told him Britain was finished, and Molotov replied, “Then whose bombers are those overhead, and why are we in this bomb shelter?” Hitler tried unsuccessfully to convince Russia that she should turn her attention eastward. The Russians and the Japanese had already engaged in heavy fighting in Mongolia, but rather than allow this to blow up into a full-scale war, both sides by 1940 were negotiating and damping down the flames. The Japanese felt betrayed by Germany when it signed the Nonaggression Pact, and the Russians did not want to be further involved in eastern Asia when things looked so chancy in Europe. Hitler’s urgings therefore fell on deaf ears. Russia continued to entertain both Baltic and Balkan ambitions.
In December, Hitler issued Fuehrer Directive No. 21, in which he set out the basic lines of Operation Barbarossa, which was the code name for the destruction of Russia. Frederick Barbarossa had been the great medieval Emperor who had led the German contingent to the East on the Third Crusade. Apparently, Hitler forgot that he died there.
As it evolved through the winter, Barbarossa called for a two-stage operation. In the first, the main elements of the Russian forces would be encircled and destroyed as close up to the frontier as might be managed. The second phase was to be a rapid pursuit of whatever remnants were left, and the establishment of a line that ran roughly from Archangel in the north to the Caspian Sea in the south. The Russians were to be definitively finished off by the end of this stage. For the longer-range future, the