blunder in world history. For this view, there are two reasons. The first is, that people are as yet unable to think clearly about Adolf Hitler, especially Americans. Yet this tense obscure maneuvering around Rumanian petroleum was much more crucial than all the romantically headlined dogfights in the English skies. Authors who chew over and over the Battle of Britain invariably wonder at Adolf Hitler’s marked lack of interest in it. None of them seem to know enough military chronology and cartography to appreciate that the Fuhrer had his eye, all during that inconclusive air skirmish, on the vital lowlands of the Danube.
Late in July, with the “Battle of Britain” barely started, Hitler ordered General Jodl to begin staff work on an invasion of the Soviet Union, to be set for late 1940 or the spring of 1941. Western writers often cite this move as conclusive proof of the German leader’s “perfidy.” But this comes of not looking at maps or studying chronology. Had Hitler not taken this precaution after Russia’s tightening squeeze play on Ploesti, he would have been guilty of criminal neglect of his nation’s interests.
The Grand Strategy Picture
Hitler’s world view was Hegelian. Nations, empires cultures, all have their season in history, the great Hegel taught us. They come, and they go. Not one is permanent but in each age one dominates and gives the theme. In this succession of world dominions, we recognize the evolving well of the God of history, the World Spirit. God therefore expresses and reveals himself in the will of those world-historical individuals, like Caesar, Alexander, and Napoleon, who lead their states to world empire. Conventional morality cannot apply to the deeds of such men, for it is they who create the new modes and themes of morality in each age.
This Hegelian world view is, of course, at the other pole from the petit bourgeois morality which expects great nations to behave like well-brought-up young ladies in a finishing school, and would hold a mighty armed people no different, in the rules applicable to its conduct, than some pale shoe clerk. The big bourgeois powers like France, England, and America built their strength and expanded their territory by actions indistinguishable from armed robbery. Having achieved their “manifest destiny,” they found it easy, of course, to scold a young vigorous Germany seeking to play its world role in turn. Adolf Hitler was not, however, a personality much impressed by such preachments.
In his program, the attack on Russia was the doorway through which Germany would enter world dominion. Russia was our India, to be conquered and exploited in British style. Germany had the will, the strength, the sense of destiny. She lacked only the food, the living space, and the petroleum. These things she had to take. Hitler’s view was that once rule of the European continent was firmly in Germany’s grasp, the Anglo-Saxon sea powers would perforce change their governments, choosing politicians who could get along with the new German world imperium.
The Center of Gravity
Clausewitz says, “We may… establish it as a principle that if we conquer all our enemies by conquering one of them, the defeat of that one must be the aim of the war, because in that one we hit the common center of gravity of the whole war.”
The attack on Russia, which aimed for control of the central landmass of the earth with its limitless manpower and natural resources, was the true strike at the center of gravity.
Much specious argument is offered that England was “really” the center of gravity, because she could raise another coalition to combat Germany. This is the writing of men obsessed by Napoleonic analogies. England was neutralized, and virtually out of the war, in the spring of 1941, except for the minor nuisance of her air raids. She no longer ruled the seas. Japan and America both surpassed her. They presented no immediate problem to Germany, though a reckoning with the United States always lay in the future.
If militarily England was through, why was she not surrendering? Obviously, because she hoped for deliverance from the Soviet Union, or the United States, or both. America was far off and almost unarmed. Russia, on the other hand, was rapidly rearming, at our very borders, and openly threatening the lifeblood of Germany at Ploesti. True, she was attempting to mollify us, in the usual crude fashion of Russian diplomacy, by sending wheat and oil; but in return she was receiving machinery for arming herself against us. To be dependent for long in this fashion on Stalin was intolerable.
Our bid for world empire was always a race against time. Germany was much smaller than its two great rivals, the Soviet Union and the United States of America. Its advantage lay only in its unity of purpose, its discipline, and the forceful leadership of Hitler. By 1941 it was clear that Franklin Roosevelt intended to get into the battle as soon as he could convert his industries to war, and delude his unwilling countrymen into following him; and it was equally clear that Stalin was only seeking a safe cowardly way to cut Germany’s throat at Ploesti. Hitler put the case plainly in frank and eloquent letter to Mussolini, on the eve of June 22: “Soviet Russian and England are equally interested in a Europe… rendered prostrate by a long war…. Behind these two countries stands the North American Union, goading them on…. I have therefore, after constantly racking my brains, finally reached the conclusion to cut the noose before it can be drawn tight.”
Was Barbarossa Sound?
The argument that Hitler should have finished off England first has no realistic basis.
Hitler resembled Caesar in his determination to take, where it could be found, the lands and the resources his nation wanted. He was like Alexander in his broad vision of a new peaceful world order. But in his strategy he was Napoleonic, for like Napoleon his central problem was that he was surrounded by enemies. The Napoleonic solution was to use speed, energy, surprise, and extreme concentration of his forces at the attack point, in order to knock off his foes one at a time. This was what Hitler did. He always had a brilliant, if somewhat adventurous, sense of grand strategy; only his dilettantish interference in tactical operations, and his inability to be soldierly in the clutch, were ruinous.
In May of 1940 he had allotted a mere two dozen divisions in the east to confront the more than two hundred divisions of the Red Army, while he finished France and drove the disarmed British remnant off the continent. It was a fantastic gamble, but a perspicacious one. Stalin, who might have taken Berlin, proved only too happy to let Germany destroy France, while he grabbed land in the Baltic and the Balkans.
In 1941 the Soviet Union had grown much stronger. It had moved within a hundred miles of Ploesti. It had gained control of the Baltic Sea. It massed on its borders, confronting Germany and its conquered Polish territory, more than three million soldiers. And it was demanding a free hand in the Dardanelles, Bulgaria, and Finland. These demands, brought by Molotov in November 1940, were the last straw.
Hitler felt he really had only three choices. He could shoot himself, leaving the German people to negotiate a surrender; he could attempt the inconclusive task of subjugating England with the carnage of a Channel crossing, opening himself meantime to a treacherous assault from the east; or he could ignore neutralized, prostrate England, and attempt to realize this entire historic aim, in the hour of his greatest strength, in one devastating blow. Barbarossa was the solution: a one-front Napoleonic thrust, not the opening of a true two-front war.
Unprejudiced military historians of the future will never be able to fault Hitler for turning east. From the start he was playing against odds. He lost his well-calculated risk through a combination of operational errors and misfortunes, and the historic accident that at this hour he was opposed by a ruthless, spidery genius of the same mettle — Franklin Roosevelt.
The Role of Roosevelt
