Such lickspittle writing, catering to the prejudices of the victors, does honor to nobody and violates history.
I myself was detailed to temporary service on the planning staff of General Marcks, which in the fall and winter of 1940 worked out the original war games of the invasion of the Soviet Union and then drafted an operational proposal. I was therefore in the picture from the start. It was a bold conception, for the factors of space and time, for the numbers of men and quantities of supplies, and for the grandeur of the political stakes. In detail Barbarossa was almost too complicated to be grasped by any one human intelligence. Yet in overall vision, it was a simple plan. In this lay its merit and its strength. It was firmly rooted in geographic, economic, and military realities. Within the limits of risk inherent in all war, it was sound. Let the reader spend a moment of two studying the very simplified map I have prepared. Further on, in my operational narrative, there are more than forty situation maps from the archives. Here is the picture of the Barbarossa assault in a nutshell.
Line A was our main effort, or jump-off line in Poland. It was about five hundred miles long, running north and south from the Baltic Sea to the Carpathian Mountains. (There was also a holding action our of Rumania, intended to safeguard the Ploesti oil fields.)
Line C was our goal. Almost two thousand miles long, it ran from Archangel, on the White Sea, south to Kazan and then along the Volga to the Caspian Sea. Its farthest objectives were about twelve hundred miles from the starting point.
Line B was as far as we got in December 1941. The line runs from Leningrad on the Gulf of Finland, down through Moscow to the Crimea on the Black Sea, falling just short of Rostov on the Don. It is nearly twelve hundred miles long, and more than six hundred miles from where we started. We were apparently stopped by the Russians, therefore, about halfway. But that is not really so. We were halted at the last moment, in the last ditch.
The Attack Concept
During the spring of 1941, our intelligence reported that the Red Army was massing in the west, near the line cutting Poland in two. This menacing pileup of armed Slavs threatened to inundate Europe with Bolshevism. It was a main reason for the Fuhrer’s decision to launch his preventive war, and certainly justified all our earlier planning.
This menacing disposition of Stalin’s forces nevertheless pleased us, because he was giving up the great Russian advantage of maneuvering space, and crowding the Red Army within reach of a quick knockout blow. Stalin was superior both in numbers and equipment. Our best information was that we would be marching with about one hundred fifty divisions against perhaps two hundred, with about thirty–two hundred tanks against as many as ten thousand, and with an unknown disadvantage in aircraft. Obviously, then our hope lay in superior training, leadership, soldiers, and machines, and in the swift decisive exploitation of surprise. After Finland, this seemed a reasonable risk.
The strategic aim of Barbarossa was to shatter the Soviet state in one colossal summer stroke, and to reduce its fragments to disarmed socialist provinces garrisoned and ruled by Germany, from the Polish border to the Volga. The primitive land east of the Volga, the frozen Siberian deserts and the empty forests beyond the Urals, could then be cordoned off or taken at leisure. From those remote areas no existing bomber could reach Germany, a vital factor to consider.
Operationally, we expected to break through the thick crust at the western border with three huge simultaneous lightning attacks — two to the north of the marshland, one to the south — and encircle and mop up the broken forces within a couple of weeks. Thus, the main bulk of the Red Army would cease to exist almost at the outset.
This we estimated we could do; but we knew that would not be the end. We realized the enemy would maintain heavy reserve forces between the borders and Moscow, and that at some point these forces would dig in. We also knew that the stolid Slav fights best in defense of his fatherland. We therefore expected, and planned for, a second big central campaign during the first part of July, probably in the region behind the Dnieper-Dvina line, to round up and destroy these reserve forces. Finally, we expected that as we penetrated to the line Leningrad- Moscow-Sevastopol, we would encounter a last-ditch surge of Russian resistance (as we did), including a
This was, of course, a difficult undertaking, a gamble against odds. The battlefield was Soviet Russia itself, a funnel-shaped landmass five hundred miles wide at one end, seventeen hundred miles wide at the other. The northward slope of the funnel lay along the Baltic and the White seas; the southward slope, along the Carpathian Mountains and the Black Sea. Our forces had to fan out into the vast level monotony of the Russian plain, stretching our lines of communication and thinning our front as we went. This we expected, but we were surprised by the primitiveness of the roads and the wildness of the countryside. Here our intelligence was faulty. This was not terrain suited for blitzkrieg. In fact, the very inefficiency and low standards of Communist Russia proved a formidable defensive factor. They had not troubled to build decent highways, and their railroad beds were defective and — deliberately, of course — of a different gauge than ours.
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: In Roon’s view, German staff plans for attacks on other countries are always defensive and hypothetical; but the other fellow always does something stupid or evil that triggers off the plan. Historians still debate Stalin’s intentions in 1941, but it seems he had no offensive plans. The Soviets were frightened to death of the Germans, and did everything possible, to the last moment, to appease them and keep them from attacking. — V.H.
Cutting the Pie
Barbarossa clicked from the start, despite various problems. All along the front, we achieved surprise. This will remain a supreme wonder in the annals of warfare. Guderian records how German artillerymen around Brest- Litovsk, poised to start a barrage on the unsuspecting Bolsheviks before dawn, watched the last Russian supply train chug faithfully out of the Soviet Union into our sector of Poland. Nothing could show more clearly how Stalin and his henchmen were fooled by the Fuhrer’s adroit politics. Western writers now call this a “perfidious attack,” as though, at the outset of a struggle to the death, Germany could afford parlor-game niceties.
With this advantage in hand, Barbarossa proceeded according to plan. The Luftwaffe caught the enormous frontline Red air force on the ground and wiped it out in a few hours. In the center and in the north our armored pincers advanced by timetable, with the infantry rolling forward in their support. Six days saw us in Minsk and at the Dvina, bagging nearly half a million prisoners and thousands of guns and tanks. Only in the south did Rundstedt encounter some real resistance. Elsewhere, the Red Army was like a huge thrashing body with a head. Stalin was invisible and silent, paralyzed in the throes of melancholia.
Two more weeks, and a second vast armored encirclement had closed around Smolensk, two-thirds of the way along the main Moscow road. In the north we had overrun the Baltic states, turning the Baltic into a German lake, and were rapidly approaching Leningrad through wild terrain. Rundstedt’s drive in the south had picked up steam and was nearing Kiev. We had rounded up several hundred thousand more prisoners. The Russians fought bravely and stubbornly in little pockets, but operationally we were no longer encountering the organized resistance of a national force. According to all reports from the field and the picture developing at Supreme headquarters, we had once again won a war — or, more exactly, a grand police action — in three weeks, and were engaged in mop- up: Poland, France, and now the Soviet Union.
Of course, such a massive advance had taken its toll of men, supplies, and wear and tear on machines. A pause for consolidation ensued, lasting to mid-August. Some writers claim this was a “fatal display of irresolution,” but they obviously know nothing of logistics. This pause was part of our original timetable. Far from being irresolute,
