Roosevelt’s essential problem in 1941 was timing. He was playing from temporary weakness against an opponent playing from top strength. The weakness of the American President was both internal and external. Where the German people were united behind their leader, the American people, confused and nonplussed by Roosevelt’s supercilious and untrustworthy personality, were divided. Where Hitler disposed of the greatest armed forces on earth, at the peak of strength and fighting trim, Roosevelt had no Army, no Air Force, and a dispersed, ill- trained Navy. How then could the American President bring any weight to bear?
Yet he did it. He was well trained in the devices of impotence, having won the presidency in a wheelchair.
The first thing he had to do was strengthen Churchill’s hand. Only Churchill, the amateur military adventurer with his obsessive hatred of Hitler, would keep England in the war. Churchill was having a wonderful time playing general and admiral, as his memoirs relate. However, under his leadership the Empire was going down the drain. England’s one chance to save it lay in getting rid of its grand-talking Prime Minister, and electing a responsible politician to make peace with Germany. Had this occurred, the present world map would look unguessably different., but the pink areas of the British Empire would still stretch around the globe. Roosevelt’s masterstroke of Lend-Lease kept Churchill in power. The Americans sent the British precious little in 1941. But Lend-Lease gave this brave, beaten people hope, and wars are fought with hope.
Hope was also the main commodity Franklin Roosevelt sent the Soviet Union in 1941, though supplies started to trickle through in November in December.
Stalin knew the gargantuan industrial potential of America. That knowledge, and Roosevelt’s pledges of help, stiffened him to fight. He sensed that while Roosevelt would never sacrifice much American blood to save the Soviet Union, he would probably send the Russians all kinds of arms, so that Slav bravery and self-sacrifice could fight the American battle for world hegemony.
The Convoy Decision
Roosevelt’s instinct for subtle and breathtaking chicanery on a world scale was never better displayed than in his conduct on the question of the Atlantic convoys.
Most Americans were indifferent to the European war in May 1941. The soundest people were against intervening. Roosevelt managed to find an unpleasant name for them: “isolationists.” However, in the circles around him, his sycophants kept urging him to initiate convoying of American ships to England. Indeed, it made very little sense to keep loading up English ships, only to have America’s food and arms go to the ocean bottom.
Roosevelt obstinately refused to convoy. He had already received intelligence of the coming attack on Russia. In fact the whole world seemed to know it was coming, except Stalin. The last thing he wanted to do was interfere. He saw in it the inevitable slaughter of vast numbers of Germans. This prospect warmed his heart.
But an outbreak of war in the Atlantic could have halted Barbarossa. Hitler could have countermanded the orders until dawn on June 22. An order to stand down from Barbarossa would have been obeyed with great relief by the German General Staff.
Franklin Roosevelt understood what not too many other politicians of the time could grasp — that even Hitler in the last analysis depended on public opinion. The German people were not ready to commit plain suicide. News of war with the United States would have taken all the spiritual steam out of the drive on Russia. The German public had no understanding of America’s military weakness. Despite Goebbels’s propaganda, they remembered only that America’s entry into the last war had spelled defeat.
Roosevelt was ready for war with Germany, he ardently desired it, but not until we were embroiled with the tough gigantic hordes of Stalin. So he kept his own counsel, put off his advisers, and kept twisting and turning under the probes of the press about convoying. His one course to ensure war between Germany and Russia was to hold off the convoying decision. That was what he did. He baffled and dismayed everybody around him, including his own wife. But he gained his grisly aim on June 22, when Hitler turned east.
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: Roon’s defense of Barbarossa is unusual; most other Germany military writers do condemn it as the fatal opening of a two-front war. It seems Roon either played a part in designing the operation, or that the plan submitted by the Army Staff agreed with his own study made at Supreme Headquarters. Every man cherishes his own ideas, particularly military men.
The argument about the key role of the Ploesti oil fields is not emphasized in many other military histories. Hitler began planning to attack Russia as far back as July 1941. The nonaggression pact was then less than a year old, and Stalin was punctiliously delivering vast quantities of war materials, including oil, to Germany. Hitler’s act does look a bit like bad faith, if faith can be said to exist between two master criminals. The usual extenuation in German writings is that the soviet troop buildups showed Stalin’s intent to attack, and that Hitler merely forestalled him. But most German historians now concede that the Russian buildup was defensive. Hitler always regarded the attack on Russia to gain Lebensraum as his chief policy. It was natural for him to start planning it in July 1940, when his huge land armies were at maximum strength, with no other place to go. This was the big picture, and the oil supply problem may have been a detail. Nevertheless, Roon’s discussion illuminates Hitler’s problems. —
Chapter 45
June 22, 1941.
The players in our drama were now scattered around the earth. Their stage had become the planet, turning in the solar spotlight that illumined half the scene at a time, and that moved always from east to west.
At the first paling of dawn, six hundred miles to the west of Moscow, at exactly 3:15 A.M. by myriads of German wristwatches, German cannon began to flash and roar along a line a thousand miles long, from the icy Baltic to the warm Black Sea. At the same moment fleets of German planes, which had taken off some time earlier, crossed the borders and started bombing Soviet airfields, smashing up aircraft on the ground by the hundreds. The morning stars still twinkled over the roads, the rail lines, and the fragrant fields, when the armored columns and infantry divisions — multitudes upon multitudes of young healthy helmeted Teutons in gray battle rig — came rolling or walking toward the orange-streaked dark east, on the flat Polish plains that stretched toward Moscow, Leningrad, and Kiev.
A sad and shaken German ambassador told Foreign Minister Molotov in Moscow, shortly after sunrise, that since Russia was obviously about to attack Germany, the Leader had wisely ordered the Wehrmacht to strike first in self-defense. The oval gray slab of Molotov’s face, we are told, showed a very rare emotion — surprise. History also records that Molotov said, “Did we deserve this?” The German ambassador, his message delivered, slunk out of the room. He had worked all his life to restore the spirit of Rapallo, the firm alliance of Russia and Germany. Eventually Hitler had him shot.
Molotov’s surprise at the invasion was not unique. Stalin was surprised. Since his was the only word or attitude in Russia that mattered, the Red Army and the entire nation were surprised. The attack was an unprecedented tactical success, on a scale never approached before or since. Three and a half million armed men surprised four and a half million armed men. The Pearl Harbor surprise attack six months later involved, by contrast, only some thousands of combatants on each side.
Communist historians use events to prove their dogmas. This makes for good propaganda but bad record- keeping. Facts that are hard to fit into the party theories tend to slide into oblivion. Many facts of this most gigantic of land wars, which the Russians call
