Short History of World War II - James L. Stokesbury [78]
Three army groups were assigned to achieve this. Army Group North under General Ritter von Leeb was to attack toward Leningrad, Army Group Center under General von Bock was to head for Smolensk, and Army Group South under General von Rundstedt was to drive for Kiev. In discussion of the plan, Hitler’s generals said they would prefer that the central drive be directed right on Moscow, some 200 miles farther on than Smolensk, but Hitler decided to go for the nearer objective, and keep his options open so that units might be diverted to the north or south as necessary. In this discussion lay the seeds of much future argument and recrimination. The plans were finalized, and troops and commanders allotted in January of 1941, everything to be ready by May 15.
Two things were especially remarkable about the concept. One was the magnitude of it; here were the Germans proposing to take on the largest state in the world, and telling themselves they would knock it out in eight to twelve weeks at the most. The Luftwaffe was a bit uncertain, bothered by the problems of distances, and the Foreign Office was opposed, not from any military qualms, but because von Ribbentrop was the architect of the Russo-German rapprochement. The army remained quite confident, however, that the Russians would give them little trouble.
The other surprising thing was that the Germans were operating in a military intelligence vacuum; they had little idea of how big the Russian Army was, or what its equipment was like, or how good it was. The Russians had showed poorly against Finland, and Hitler insisted on regarding them as Untermenschen, subhumans. For all their reputation for thoroughness, the Germans were remarkably casual about what they were likely to encounter in the Red Army.
Russia was indeed walking soft after the fall of France. Her military experts too had regarded the French Army as the greatest in the world, and the apparent ease with which Germany had overrun it had had a sobering effect on the Russian Army and government. Stalin did not back the Yugoslavs when they appealed for his support, and the Soviets generally took a restrained attitude on the whole Balkan question. They were busily tidying up in other areas, though, and did achieve, in April, a treaty of neutrality with Japan, a major clearing of their flanks that was of great help. The general failure of the Axis powers to concert their diplomatic and military moves was one of their chief shortcomings throughout the war. Stalin himself clung to the hope of peace; he dismissed the German concentration in Poland as merely spring maneuvers and troop rotation. Both the British and the United States governments warned Russia that an invasion was imminent, but Stalin regarded this as a western trick designed to embroil Russia with Germany. He resolutely refused to send out an alert to his armed forces. Not until the early morning hours of June 22 did a war warning go out to the Red Army; most units never got it.
Though both sides disposed of massive forces, neither one was in overwhelming strength. The Germans had about 188 divisions, including a weak fourteen of the Rumanian Army, and a good twenty of the Finnish Army, which called this the Continuation War. Nineteen of the German were armored, but the increase in Panzer divisions was achieved by taking the available tanks and thinning them out through more formations. It looked better on paper, but probably weakened the fighting capacity of the armor. At this time, German industry was operating at well below peak strength; in fact it was at almost peacetime levels of production. Germany had still not faced up to the likelihood of a long war. All of these divisions totaled just over 3,500,000 men, about a million of them non-Germans. There were 3,350 tanks, 7,200 guns,