The mounting conflict with Hitler revolved around the implementation of the ‘Barbarossa’ strategic plan that had been laid down the previous December in Directive 21. This in turn had emanated from the feasibility studies carried out during the summer by military strategists. Planning had, in fact, been initiated as we noted, by Halder on 3 July 1940 almost a month
The emphasis in Hitler’s ‘Barbarossa Directive’ in December, and in all subsequent strategic planning, had been on the thrusts to the north, to take Leningrad and secure the Baltic, with a further thrust to the south, to take the Ukraine.94 Even if unenthusiastically, the Army General Staff had accepted the significant alteration of what it had originally envisaged. According to this amended plan, Army Group Centre was to advance as far as Smolensk before swinging to the north to meet up with Leeb’s armies for the assault on Leningrad. The taking of Moscow figured in the agreed plan of ‘Barbarossa’ only once the occupation of Leningrad and Kronstadt had been completed.95
Already on 29 June Hitler was worried that Bock’s Army Group Centre, where the advance was especially spectacular, would overreach itself.96 On 4 July he claimed that he faced the most difficult decision of the campaign: whether to hold to the original ‘Barbarossa’ plan, amend it to provide for a deep thrust towards the Caucasus (in which Rundstedt would be assisted by some of Army Group Centre’s panzer forces), or retain the panzer concentration in the centre and push forward to Moscow.97 The decision he reached by 8 July was the one wanted by Halder: to press forward the offensive of Army Group Centre with the aim of destroying the mass of the enemy forces west of Moscow.98 The amended strategy now discarded Army Group Centre’s turn towards Leningrad, built into the original ‘Barbarossa’ plan.99 The ‘ideal solution’, Hitler accepted, would be to leave Leeb’s Army Group North to attain its objectives by its own means.100 However, Hitler was even now by no means reconciled to the priority of capturing Moscow — in his eyes, as he said, ‘merely a geographical idea’.101
The conflict with Army High Command, supported by Army Group Centre, about concentration on the taking of Moscow as the objective, continued over the next weeks. Hitler pressed, in revised operational form, for priority to be given to the capture of Leningrad, and now included in the south the drive to the industrial area of Kharkhov and into the Caucasus, to be reached before the onset of winter. At the same time, his ‘Supplement to Directive No.33’, dated 23 July, indicated that Army Group Centre would destroy the enemy between Smolensk and Moscow by its infantry divisions alone, and would then ‘take Moscow into occupation’.102
By late July Halder had changed his tune about the certainty and speed of victory. Early in the month he had told Hitler that only forty-six of the known 164 Soviet divisions were still capable of combat. This had been in all probability an overestimation of the extent of destruction; it was certainly a rash underestimation of the enemy’s ability to replenish its forces. On 23 July he revised the figure to a total of ninety-three divisions. The enemy had been ‘decisively weakened’, but by no means ‘finally smashed’, he concluded. As a consequence, since the Soviet reserves of manpower were now seen to be inexhaustible, Halder argued even more forcefully that the aim of further operations had to be the destruction of the areas of armaments production around Moscow.103
As the strength of Soviet defences was being revised, the toll on the German army and Luftwaffe also had to be taken into account. Air-crews were showing signs of exhaustion; their planes could not be maintained fast enough. By the end of July only 1,045 aircraft were serviceable. Air-raids on Moscow demanded by Hitler were of little effect because so few planes were available. Most of the seventy-five raids on the Soviet capital carried out over the next months were undertaken by small numbers of bombers, scarcely able to make a pinprick in Soviet armaments production.104 The infantry were even more in need of rest. They had been marching, and engaged in fierce fighting, for over a month without a break. The original operational plan had foreseen a break for recuperation after twenty days. But the troops had received no rest by the fortieth day, and the first phase of the campaign was not over.105 By this time, casualties (wounded, missing, and dead) had reached 213,301 officers and men.106 Moreover, despite miracles worked by Quartermaster-General Eduard Wagner’s organization, transport problems on roads often unfit even in midsummer for mechanized transport brought immeasurable problems of maintaining supply-lines of fuel, equipment, and provisions to the rapidly advancing army. Supplies for Army Group Centre required twenty-five goods trains a day. But despite working round the clock to convert the railway lines to a German gauge, only eight to fifteen trains a day were reaching the front line in late July and early August.107
It was becoming obvious already by the end of July that the revised ‘Barbarossa’ operational plan as laid down in Hitler’s Supplement to Directive No.33 could not be carried out before winter descended.108 Hitler interpreted this as demanding panzer support from Army Group Centre for the assault on Leningrad. Moscow could wait. Halder took the diametrically opposite view. Making Moscow the objective would ensure that the Soviets committed the bulk of their forces to its defence. Taking the city, including its communications system and industries, would split the Soviet Union and render resistance more difficult. The implication was that the capture of the capital would bring about the fall of the Soviet system, and the end of the eastern war.109 If the attack on Moscow were not pushed through with all speed, the enemy would bring the offensive to a halt before winter, then regroup. The military aim of the war against the Soviet Union would have failed.110
Hitler was still adamant that capturing the industrial region of Kharkhov and the Donets Basin and cutting off Soviet oil supplies would undermine resistance more than the fall of Moscow.111 But he was wavering. At this point, even Jodl and the Wehrmacht Operations Staff had been converted to the need to attack Moscow.112 Citing the arrival of strong enemy reinforcements facing and flanking Army Group Centre, Hitler now, on 30 July, cancelled the Supplement to Directive No.33.113 Halder was momentarily ecstatic. ‘This decision frees every thinking soldier of the horrible vision obsessing us these last few days, since the Fuhrer’s obstinacy made the final bogging down of the eastern campaign appear imminent.’114 But when Directive No.34 was issued the same day it offered Halder little comfort. Army Group Centre was to recuperate for the next attack; in the north the assault on Leningrad was to continue; and Army Group South was to destroy the enemy forces west of the Dnieper and in the vicinity of Kiev.115 The real decision — for or against the drive to Moscow — had effectively just been postponed for a while.116
In early August Hitler remained wedded to Leningrad as the priority. He reckoned this would be cut off by 20 August, and then troops and aircraft could be redeployed by Army Group Centre. The second priority for Hitler was, as before, ‘the south of Russia, especially the Donets region’, which formed the ‘entire basis of the Russian economy’. Moscow was a clear third on his priority-list. He recognized that in this order of priorities the capital could not be taken before winter. Halder tried unavailingly to get Brauchitsch to obtain a clear decision on whether to put everything into delivering the enemy a fatal blow at Moscow or taking the Ukraine and the Caucasus for economic reasons. He persuaded Jodl to intervene with Hitler to convince him that the objectives of Moscow
By now, Halder was realizing the magnitude of the task facing the Wehrmacht. ‘The whole situation makes it increasingly plain that we have underestimated the Russian colossus,’ he wrote on 11 August. ‘At the outset of the war, we reckoned with about 200 enemy divisions. Now we have already counted 360. These divisions indeed are not armed and equipped according to our standards, and their tactical leadership is often poor. But there they are, and if we smash a dozen of them, the Russians simply put up another dozen… And so our troops, sprawled over an immense front line, without any depth, are subjected to the incessant attacks of the enemy.’118
In his Supplement to Directive No.34, issued on 12 August, Hitler for the first time stated categorically that once the threats from the flanks were eliminated and the panzer groups were refreshed the attack on the enemy forces massed for the protection of Moscow was to be prosecuted. The aim was ‘the removal from the enemy before winter of the entire state, armaments, and communications centre around Moscow’, ran the directive.119 Three days later, however, Hitler intervened once more in the tactical dispositions by ordering panzer forces from the northern flank of Army Group Centre to help Army Group North resist a strong Soviet counterattack.120
