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By Root 1747 0

all errors made could be directly blamed on him rather than on his myrmidons. ‘Anyone can do the little job of directing operations in war,’ he stated. ‘The task of the Commander-in-Chief is to educate the Army to be National Socialist. I do not know any Army general who can do this in the way that I want it done. I have therefore decided to take over command of the Army.’116 Eastern operations were now to be directed exclusively through OKH, the Army High Command based at Zossen outside Berlin, while the responsibilities for other theatres were devolved entirely upon OKW, Hitler’s planning staff in overall control of the German armed forces. This had the (wholly foreseeable) effect of making the two organizations compete for resources for their respective theatres, rather than acting in relative tandem as hitherto. Hitler had long used this method of playing off Reich institutions and individuals against one another in peacetime – the Four Year Plan Office versus the Economics Ministry, for example, and Göring versus Himmler. This led sometimes to creative tension and useful competition, and sometimes to inefficiency and difficulties, but never to disaster. In wartime, however, the policy was far more dangerous. The very next day, 20 December, Hitler issued a ‘Stand or die’ order to Army Group Centre, admitting that ‘Talk of Napoleon’s retreat is threatening to become reality.’117 Like Napoleon, he had managed to wound and anger the Russian bear, but not to kill it.

For ordinary German soldiers, the sheer scale of Russia was hard to comprehend. There were rivers so wide that the average German artillery piece could only just fire across them. The weather alternated from blistering heat to wind-chilled blizzards rolling off the endless steppes. The vast distance from home demoralized all but the most fanatical German stormtroopers, many of whom had to march on foot for thousands of miles. They had been victorious so far, it was true, but as one German tank commander commented as they drove further and further into that enormous country: ‘If this goes on, we will win ourselves to death.’118

The Russians also had some technical advantages. The excellent Katyusha mortar had come into service on 15 July 1940, the same month as their standard battle tank, the T-34, which Guderian thought ‘the best battle tank in any army up to 1943’. The T-34 was just about capable of taking on the Panzer Mark IV, and there were to be a much greater number of them made. Otherwise the obsolete Russian tanks were no match for the German (and captured French) tanks, even though the German Army Ordnance Office had ignored the Führer’s direct order to provide the Panzer III with a 50mm cannon. Sometimes Soviet tank crews had only had a few hours’ training before being flung into battle. (At the time of Barbarossa, three-quarters of Russian officers had been with their units for less than a year.) 119 The Russian cavalry horse, described as the ‘shaggy little Kirkhil ponies from Siberia’, could withstand temperatures of –30 Celsius. Moreover, Russian field artillery was generally superior to German. The Soviets also had a tactical doctrine that trusted to the steady application of heavy pressure by infantry and tanks working in conjunction. This is what had broken the Mannerheim Line, and what had won General Zhukov the battle of Khalkin Gol against the Japanese in 1939. The Russians had not had the opportunity to practise it against the Germans so far, having been in retreat for so long, but in December 1941 all that was about to change.

The Russians also had the inestimable advantage of Stalin’s sheer ruthlessness. In the first six months after Barbarossa, the Soviet Government moved 2,593 industrial concerns eastwards in 1.5 million railway wagons and trucks, at the same time that 2.5 million troops were being moved in the opposite direction. The operation has been described as an ‘economic Stalingrad’ in its sheer size and importance. Industrial centres were being founded so fast that the Russians ran out of things to call them, and a town actually