Stalin vs. His Own Military

Tukhachevsky

Soviet dictator, Joseph Stalin, fearing opposition to his rule from within his military, purged his senior office ranks in the 1930s.  Among those slain were officers M. N. Tukhachevsky and V. K. Triandafillov.  These two “had pioneered the … ideas of deep battle and deep operations … concepts that involved mechanized forces penetrating [to the] heart” of an opposing force’s strength.[1]  

Triandafillov

These two officers represented the core of new conceptual thinking about operational warfare in the Red Army.  They, along with many of the others who perished, had what was sorely lacking in Stalin’s forces after the purge—battlefield experience.  (Ironically, their concepts were incorporated into the U.S. Army ‘AirLand Battle’ doctrine in the 1980s, the operational doctrine employed to such great effect in the defeat of Saddam Hussein’s forces in the Persian Gulf War, and which probably had, in the late 1980s, a sobering effect on Soviet military thinking, and may have contributed to the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991). Their loss precipitated the immediate “reorganization of the Red Army and [the] breakup of armored formations.[2]  The cost of their loss to the Red Army was not fully realized until the onset of Germany’s operation BARBAROSSA in World War II.  To defend against the assault, Stalin, lacking the operation insight of comrades Tukhachevsky and Triandafillov, placed his heavy forces at the very front of his defenses, thereby blunting their effectiveness and ensuring their destruction.

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[1] Williamson Murray and Allan R. Millet, A War to Be Won: Fighting the Second World War (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2000), 112.

[2] Ibid.

The Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact

Stalin

The Nazi-Soviet Pact was a World War II political agreement—a treaty--enacted on 23 August 1939 between Hitler and Stalin, which Hitler flagrantly violated on 22 June 1941 when he ordered Nazi troops to invade Soviet territory. 

Hitler

Ostensibly, the pact was intended, by Hitler, to prevent a possible Soviet intervention on the side of Britain and of France should these two nations “honor their treaty obligations to come to the aid of Poland in case she were attacked.”[1] For Hitler, it meant that, a week later when his forces fell upon Poland, the Russians would not take up arms nor assist in any material way, French or British efforts to retrieve the situation. For Stalin, it meant concessions from Hitler of large tracts of territory, or at least a German concession of Soviet “rights” in certain countries of Eastern Europe, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia, for example. In effect, it gave Stalin a ‘buffer zone’ between the Soviet frontier and German-controlled territory. After a period during which the Germans seemed to holding the pact in little regard, Hitler violated its terms with the operational commencement of operation Barbarossa, Germany’s 1941 blitzkrieg attack on the Soviet Union.

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[1] William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1960), 541.

Decisive Operations: The Normandy Campaign and the Fate of Hitler’s Germany

General Eisenhower

“Decisive operations,” according to the United States Army doctrine, “lead directly to the accomplishment of a commander’s purpose.”[1] The problem with the Army manual from whence that statement is lifted is that it uses the word “decisive” twenty-two times but never defines it. That one sentence, just quoted, is the closest it comes. The absence of a clear definition of the term leaves readers to interpret it as they see fit. Decisiveness, then, probably has much in common with beauty: its quality seems to mostly in the eyes of its beholder.

Like beholders of beauty, observers of military history can and do offer compelling descriptions of what they see. ‘Decisiveness’ seems to be one of their favorite terms, though some may be hesitant to use it overmuch. One historian, Williamson Murray, avoided the term ‘decisive’ in all his analyses of the Normandy campaign, though he did refer to it as “a great success.”[2] In calling the campaign a “flawed triumph,” it was almost as if Murray was saying that OVERLORD could have been decisive if it hadn’t been for the generals that fought it—““It was in the tragic nature of life,” he wrote, “and in the fact that no general can ever make perfect decisions that victory in Europe would not come until May 1945.” Max Hastings, on the other hand, called OVERLORD “the decisive western battle of the Second World War, the last moment at which the German army might conceivably have saved Hitler from catastrophe.”[3]

Still another historian, Cornelius Ryan, also believed that D-Day, the start of the Normandy campaign, was the decisive battle of the war. He called it “the battle … that ended Hitler’s insane gamble to dominate the world.”[4] More expansively, he observed that—

“Germany was still far from beaten, but the Allied invasion would be the decisive battle. Nothing less than the future of Germany was at stake, and no one knew it better than Rommel.”[5]

Why Auschwitz was Never Bombed

Auschwitz

In the Second World War, there was a day in the Pacific theater that, for Americans, shall forever live in ‘infamy.’ If that be so, there was a space of about four and a half years, in the European theater that, for all rational peoples of the Earth, shall forever live in the shock of horrific astonishment. That space of time, from 14 June 1940 to January 1945,[1] marks the period of operation of Nazi Germany’s most notorious extermination camp—Auschwitz. That which brought infamy, in the former instance, was ultimately buried underneath the radioactive rubble of two atomic bombs. In the latter, no bombs were dropped; not atomic ones, not conventional ones, not candy bombs, not even the first leaflet. No pilot flew over it to take pictures. The debate over whether to bomb Auschwitz—or at least the rail access to the camp—surfaced during the last months of the war and continues to this day. Why wasn’t it bombed? Should the Allies have done so? Though the issues are complicated, the possible answers can be summed up under three heads—those given strictly from the standpoint of military operations, those that stem from political considerations, and those that proceed from moral judgments.

As to the first, if we may skip straight to the bottom line, an Allied military strike upon Auschwitz was not an operational imperative. By the summer of 1944, quite a bit was known about German concentration camps, in general, and the Auschwitz camp, in particular. Reports on these camps had been carried in many western newspapers. Typical of these was an August 1944 London Times article concerning Oswiecim—the Polish version of the name Auschwitz.[2] Among the sources for Allied information was the Polish government in exile in London, which “had informed the Allied governments about the existence of Auschwitz as a concentration camp for Poles and about the executions that had taken place there in May 1941.”[3] Other significant information was obtained from a Polish agent in January 1944, much of whose report remains[4] classified,[5] part of which stated that—

Favorite TV Shows of the Past: Perry Mason

Paulus at Stalingrad

Paulus

The question is sometimes asked, in reference to the German defeat at Stalingrad, was Nazi General Friedrich Paulus the right man for the job; could someone else have pulled off a defense or a breakout?

Paulus enters the story relatively late and some historians have labeled him a “question mark,” noting his success in a string of staff assignments, but also that he had never held an operational command.[1] A telling indication of his abilities is in the apparent concern of his peers about his “disposition,” and that this, along with his lack of command experience could be problematic for Sixth Army, “under Hitler’s thumb” as it was.[2] His competency, at first at least, appears to be beyond question as Soviet forces retreated before his army on the southwest front as operation BLAU got underway. The question seems to be, as General Bock was then warning[3]—before being fired—was whether this was due to the general success of the operation, or whether the new Soviet tactic of trading space for time merely gave German commanders the illusion of success when, in reality, danger loomed.

My assumption is that Paulus was working from a position of some disadvantage, in a strategic sense, owing to Hitler’s fuzzy thinking relative to the campaign’s operational objectives. He seems to have been given the Stalingrad mission late in the game as well as suddenly—for that is how the situation is described, that “suddenly, on 19 July, Hitler reoriented the offensive from the Caucasus to Stalingrad.”[4] Moreover, he was provided “relatively weak” reinforcements and was, like everyone else, blind to the reality of Soviet defenses in and around the city.[5] All of this would naturally have had a corrosive effect on his own operational planning. To this may be added the observation that, while the Germans seemed more oriented towards conquering territory, the Soviets were actually, by this time, focused on destroying the Wehrmacht and, with it, Germany’s war fighting capability. Indeed, this was the central objective of the two major operations, URANUS and MARS, unleashed in September.[6]

Hitler's Colossal Display of Military Incompetence at Stalingrad

A Stalingrad is what happens whenever Austrian corporals start running things.

What could the Germans have done to save the Stalingrad Campaign? The short answer is practically anything different from what they actually did. The most obvious thing that Germany could have, indeed, should have done differently was to have avoided the leadership issues that beset her military command structure—which was all Hitler’s doing, of course. Failures of leadership exacerbated each and every other problem the Germans had.

One of the first inklings we have that a disaster named Stalingrad was waiting to happen is when we read Williamson Murray’s and Allan R. Millet’s analysis of the prelude to operation BLUE. “The target of the upcoming offensive, write the two historians, would be the Caucasus oil field, in order to cripple the Soviets and relieve the petroleum shortages that had plagued the Reich’s war effort.”[1] Okay, so far, so good—a legitimate strategic objective and, given the operational circumstances, a reasonable course of action. But then we read, “Stalingrad was also an objective …” (emphasis added).[2]

This indicates, as do so many of his decisions, that Adolf Hitler, the former Austrian corporal, as Churchill often described him, was clearly in over his head when it came to conducting military operations. The suggestion is that, with the Fuehrer, Stalingrad was an after-thought: that he was of two minds about what he wanted to accomplish in operation BLUE; that he could do two things at once and do both of them well. This, despite his dwindling resources, despite the setbacks of the previous year’s much heralded operation BARBAROSSA, despite the growing contention amongst his senior commanders, despite the sandy foundations of his government’s legitimacy—a fanatically misguided faith in German racial superiority—and despite his stubborn refusal to recognize that, in war, the enemy always has a say-so in what transpires. As Messrs. Murray and Millet put it, the fuzziness over the operational objectives—the “divergence of the [simultaneous] drives … east and … south” was producing a “malignant influence” over the Wehrmacht’s operations.[3]

Everything rises or falls on leadership; and, to make matters worse, there were other issues amongst Hitler’s senior officers. There was probably considerable jealousy towards Manstein—there usually is whenever a single officer is simply, and inarguably, more competent than his peers. But that was by no means all. “There was,” according to Murray and Millet, “in ordinate squabbling in the German high command.”[4] Bock, Halder, and Keitel were at each other. Somewhere between 9 and 16 July—in the middle of a major operation—Hitler fired Bock, his “overall field commander”—for the second time in less than a year! [5] That was still not all. If Hitler’s operational command of the German Army wasn’t bad enough for Germany, on 16 July the Austrian corporal relocated the command elements of the German high command (OKW) and the Army (OKH) “to Vinnitsa in the Ukraine” so that he could assume direct control of “both Army groups.”[6] This would be like President Obama, in addition to his duties and responsibilities as president, were to also name himself chief of staff of the U.S. Army as well as secretary of defense and chairman of the joint chiefs of staff. Unimaginable! In all this, by the way, Hitler was making the very same mule-headed mistakes he made in the wake of outcome of BARBAROSSA beginning to tip against him. To the Fuehrer, BARBAROSSA’s failure was his generals’ fault—not reality slapping him in the face—so he fired them and started running their commands himself—which is actually what he was doing anyway, which is exactly why they were failing. (He would do the same thing yet again, in 1944, as his “Atlantic Wall” crumbled and he began to lose Western Europe to the Allies).

Hitler could perhaps have spent a little less time taking in the air and scenery at Berchtesgaden, especially whenever major combat operations were in progress. (This tendency of his shows up again on D-Day when he was again at his mountain retreat and could not be reached for several hours—letting an opportunity slip by). There was an instance, early in the battle for Stalingrad, where Hitler, beginning to appreciate the seriousness of the situation, decided to return to his headquarters in East Prussia, in Rastenburg. His travel took two days during which time he was “out of contact with the OKH,” his senior army commanders—in the middle of one of the most significant battles of the war.[7]

It would have helped things tremendously if Hitler had not gotten the Wehrmacht involved in hot wars on two fronts—not in Eastern and Western, which situation he wanted to avoid at all costs, but in Eastern Europe and North Africa. Think of the tremendous strain on his lines of communications. Field Marshal Jodl described it this way, when he was put in overall charge of the east—“The Wehrmacht was exhausted … the territory they had seized was more than could be held by the size of the army which occupied it.”[8]

Among other things that could have helped retrieve the situation, Hitler should not have sent Paulus’ 6th Army into the city. His attacking forces were of insufficient strength to overcome Soviet defenses. Of course, he had no idea of Soviet strength in and around the city because of the failures of his intelligence apparatus. At any rate, once the situation with Paulus in the city became known, Hitler should have authorized their withdrawal immediately … but retreat was anathema to Hitler. The decision to airlift continuous support to them until such time that they could effect a breakout only ensured that there would be no breakout, for the Luftwaffe was too under-resourced to bring off that kind of an operation.

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[1] Williamson Murray and Allan R. Millet, A War to Be Won: Fighting the Second World War (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2000), 275.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid, 281.
[4] Ibid, 280.
[5] Ibid, 279.
[6] Ibid, 280.
[7] Ibid, 287.
[8] Nikolai Poroskov, “Stalingrad: The Battle that Broke Hitler’s Back,” Russian Life 45, No. 6 (2002), 34-44, http://search.proquest.com/docview/224002619?accountid=8289, (accessed 25 June 2012).