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By Root 1585 0

Hitler knew this perfectly well, of course; when Halder remarked that the Russians boasted 10,000 tanks, the statement ‘unleashed a more than quarter-hour retort from Hitler, in which he cited from memory the Russians’ annual production for the last twenty years’.12 Inherent in Hitler’s concept of the Aryan master race, however, was the idea that Germans were so superior to Slavs as human beings that mere numerical inferiority meant nothing. This may also explain why when the Japanese Foreign Minister, Yosuke Matsuoka, visited Berlin in April 1941 Hitler threw away a perfect opportunity to force the USSR herself to fight a war on two fronts. Instead of confiding his plans to Tokyo, and offering the Japanese whatever they wanted territorially in the east in exchange for attacking Russia simultaneously with him, he made absolutely no mention of his plan, and made no attempt to recruit the Japanese into what he knew would be the greatest enterprise of his life. Yet drawing off scores of Russian divisions from the Leningrad, Moscow and Stalingrad fronts in order to protect Siberia and other eastern assets from a Japanese attack would have been invaluable to Germany in 1942 and 1943. If Japan had captured Siberia – which was by no means strategically unthinkable – Russia could have been denied her huge fuel deposits there. Japan was a member of the Axis, after all, and one for whom Hitler was willing to go to war with America eight months later. ‘His failure to secure the collaboration of the Japanese against the Soviet Union’, writes Roosevelt’s biographer Conrad Black, ‘must rank as one of Hitler’s most serious errors.’13

Another major handicap was to have invaded as late as 22 June, by which time the days were already starting to shorten, in a campaign where time was going to be of the essence in covering the vast distances before Russia’s autumn mud and winter snow forced an end to movement. The invasion was originally scheduled to be ready for 15 May, although that was not settled upon as the date for the attack. Once Halder had assured him that transport would be ready, Hitler chose 22 June for the attack, since any date much earlier than that would have run up against weather problems in that unusually wet spring. The invasion of Greece had always been planned to take place in conjunction with that of Russia and did not therefore lead to the postponement of Barbarossa. Re-equipping tanks that had driven too fast down bad Balkan roads took time, so in a sense the very speed of the defeat of Greece led to the late date for Barbarossa. Although Hitler was to blame the pushing back of the 15 May date to 22 June as a reason for his defeat, claiming that he could have won before the onset of winter, his biographer Ian Kershaw has rightly described that as ‘simplistic in the extreme’.14 It was too wet to invade very much earlier, with heavy tanks and trucks going down rutted, basic roads. The weather of 1941 was not kind to Adolf Hitler. It is often assumed that he should not have indulged in his Balkan, Greek and Crete campaigns in April and May because they delayed his assault on Russia. In fact it was because he could not invade Russia before June that he was able to indulge himself in south-west Europe and the Mediterranean at all.

At least Hitler cannot be accused of being alone in his desire to ‘settle scores with the Bolsheviks’. When he held his last major military conference before the invasion, at the Reich Chancellery on 14 June – with the generals arriving at different times to allay suspicions – not one of them complained that it would open up a potentially disastrous two-front war along the lines of the one they had all, without exception, fought in and lost less than a quarter of a century before. Perhaps they thought that by then it was too late to alter the Führer’s mind; maybe for career reasons they did not want to seem unenthusiastic; perhaps for each other’s morale they did not want to point out the giant pitfalls; but the fact remains that no doubts or criticisms were expressed, and the Wehrmacht leaders,