The Storm of War - Andrew Roberts [97]
The early nineteenth-century Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz was the acknowledged guru of the German High Command, but was he actually read by them? Kleist thought not. ‘Clausewitz’s teachings had fallen into neglect by this generation,’ he told Liddell Hart after the war. ‘His phrases were quoted but his books were not closely studied. He was regarded as a military philosopher, rather than as a practical teacher.’ Kleist believed that Schlieffen’s writings ‘received much greater attention’, which was undoubtedly true in Hitler’s case. As for Clausewitz’s maxim that ‘War is nothing but the continuation of politics by other means,’ Kleist believed that ‘Under the Nazis we tended to reverse Clausewitz’s dictum, and to regard peace as a continuation of war.’85 Certainly, Clausewitz’s many Cassandrine warnings about the dangers of invading Russia – he had personally witnessed Napoleon’s nemesis in the retreat from Moscow from the Russian side – went unheeded. In his chapter on the ‘Interdependence of the Elements of War’ in his magnum opus On War, he had written:
Within the concept of absolute war, then, war is indivisible, and its component parts (the individual victories) are of value only in relation to the whole. Conquering Moscow and half of Russia in 1812 was of no avail to Bonaparte unless it brought him the peace he had in view. But these successes were only a part of his plan of campaign: what was still missing was the destruction of the Russian army. If that achievement had been added to the rest, peace would have been as sure as things of that sort ever can be. But it was too late to achieve the second part of his plan; his chance had gone. Thus the successful stage was not only wasted but led to disaster.86
It was a vital part of Clausewitz’s message, but not one quoted by many generals – including Kleist – in 1941–42 when it needed to be.
Hitler was having severe doubts about the wisdom of prioritizing the drive on Moscow over what were – for him – some even more important targets. ‘Modern warfare is all economic warfare,’ he stated, ‘and the demands of economic warfare must be given priority.’87 His desire to take the cereal crops of the Ukraine, the oil of the Caucasus and the coal of the Donets region – and thus simultaneously deny them to Stalin – led him to make the key error of not pushing on to Moscow, but instead driving south to take Kiev. The Clausewitzians on his General Staff wanted to defeat the enemy’s main force, and take Moscow as soon as possible, but Hitler’s more economics-based grand strategy prevailed. By dispersing his forces for these various tasks, he threw away his chance of taking Moscow, but he did not suspect so at the time, believing that that too was attainable before the onset of winter. Yet Moscow was the nodal point of Russia’s north–south transport hub, was the administrative and political capital, was vital for Russian morale and was an important industrial centre in its own right.
On 21 August, Hitler sent Bock a new directive stating that:
The army’s proposal for the continuation of the operations… does not correspond with my plans. I order the following… The most important objective to be achieved before the onset of winter is not the occupation of Moscow, but the taking of the Crimea, the industrial and coal region of the Donets Basin and the severing of Russian oil deliveries from the Caucasus area, in the north the encirclement of Leningrad and link-up with the Finns.88
This Directive