Victor Henry shrank with embarrassment. Roosevelt laughed gaily, “Well, there you are. Every President does things a little differently.” He lit a cigarette in his long holder, and puffed. Boy Scouts in a brown mass went stepping by, with heads and bright eyes turned toward the President. He waved his hat at them. “So far this year, Pug, we’ve produced twenty percent more automobiles than we made last year. And Congress wouldn’t dream of giving me the power to stop it. Well? What about London? You didn’t suggest anybody.”
Victor Henry diffidently named three well-known rear admirals.
“I know them,” the President nodded. “The fact is, I was thinking of you.”
“It wouldn’t work, Mr. President. Our man’s opposite number in the Royal Navy will have flag rank.”
“Oh, that could be fixed up. We could make you an admiral temporarily.”
From the surprise, and perhaps a little from the beating sun overhead, Pug felt dizzy. “Mr. President, as you know, I just go where I’m ordered.”
“Now, Pug, none of that. Frankly, I like you right where you are. Deciding who gets what weapons and supplies is a big job. I’m glad you’re working on it, because you have sense. But think about London.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
Pug returned the veteran to his nursing home, and went back to a piled-up desk. He got through a high heap of work and walked home, to give himself a chance to think. The city lay in holiday quiet. Connecticut Avenue was almost empty, the evening air was sweet and clear.
Think about London!
Young couples on the benches in Dupont Circle turned and laughed, looking after the stocky man in Navy whites, striding along and humming a tune that had been popular before some of them were born.
“Hey, what the Sam Hill?” Pug exclaimed, as he entered the living room. “Champagne? And why are you gussied up like that? Whose birthday is it?”
“Whose birthday, you old fool?” Rhoda stood, splendid in a pink silk frock, her eyes glittering with tears. “Don’t you know? Can’t you guess?”
“I suppose I’m fouled up on my dates.”
“It’s Victor Henry’s birthday, that’s whose birthday it is.”
“Are you potted? Mine’s in March.”
“Oh, God, how dense the man is. Pug, at four o’clock this afternoon, Janice had a boy! You’re a grandfather, you poor man, and his name is Victor Henry. And I’m a doddering old grandmother. And I love it. I love it! Oh, Pug!”
Rhoda threw herself in his arms.
They talked about the great event over the champagne, downing a whole bottle much too fast. Janice and her baby were in fine shape. The little elephant weighed nine and a half whole pounds! Rhoda had raced up to the naval hospital for a look at him in the glass cage. “He’s the image of you, Pug,” she said. “A small pink copy.”
“Poor kid,” said Pug. “He’ll have no luck with the women.”
“I like that!” exclaimed Rhoda, archly giggling. “Didn’t you have marvellous luck? Anyway, Janice and the baby are coming to stay with us. She doesn’t want to take him back to Hawaii for a while. So that makes the house decision urgent. Now, Pug, just today I got that old lady in Foxhall Road to come down another five thousand! I say let’s grab it. That glorious lawn, those fine old elms! Sweetie, let’s enjoy these coming years, let’s wither in style, side by side, Grandma and Grandpa Henry. And let’s always have lots of spare room for the grandchildren. Don’t you think so?”
Victor Henry stared at his wife for such a long time that she began to feel odd. He heaved a deep sigh and made a curious upward gesture with both palms.
“Well, I’ll tell you, Grandma. I couldn’t agree with you more. The time has come. Let’s go to Foxhall Road by all means. And there we’ll wither, side by side. Well said.”
“Oh, how marvellous! I love you. I’ll call the Charleroi Agency in the morning. Now let me see what’s happened to the dinner.” She hurried out, slim silky hips swaying.
Pug Henry upended the champagne bottle over his glass, but only a drop or two ran out, as he sang softly:
But yes, we have no bananas,
We have no bananas today.
Three weeks later the Germans invaded the Soviet Union.
PART THREE
The Winds Rise
Barbarossa
(from WORLD EMPIRE LOST)
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE:The world still wonders, a quarter of a century later, why Adolf Hitler turned east in June 1941, when he had England hanging on the ropes from disastrous defeats in Africa and the Balkans, and from losses to U-boats, and when the United States was impotent to stop the knockout. It appeared then that Hitler had the Second World War all but won. With England mopped up, he could have proceeded to take on the Soviet Union in a one-front war, after digesting his amazing gains. Instead, sparing England, he turned east, unloosed the biggest and longest bloodbath in history, left his rear open to the Normandy landing, and destroyed himself and Germany.
Why?
On this question, it seems to me that General von Roon, from the other side of the hill, sheds a lot of light. Since the American reader is more interested in operations in the west, I have greatly abridged this material. But I have tried to preserve the main thread of Roon’s analysis.—V.H.
_________
The Turn East
Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union is widely regarded as his great blunder, perhaps the greatest 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, an enigmatic and fearsome personality. The second and more important reason is that, in judging a military situation, laymen (and too many military men as well) seldom bother to get at the facts. Such judgment always begins by looking at a map. People are bored and confused by maps. Yet the key to Hitler’s turn east in June 1941 lies in cartography.
One has to look at a map of Europe, preferably a terrain map that clearly shows rivers and the raised areas of mountains.
And one has to bear in mind certain simple unchanging facts about war. War is a violent clash of energies. The energies are of three kinds: animal, mechanical, and chemical, as in the destructive process of fire. Until the seventeenth century, the animal energies of horses and men were decisive, although machines like catapults and crossbows were of some use. With the chemical energy of exploding gunpowder, a new factor was added. The American Civil War first reflected the industrial revolution, chiefly in the massive gain of troop mobility through railroads exploiting the chemical energies of a fossil fuel, coal; and also in guns with new ranges and accuracy, thanks to advanced metallurgy and design.
Industrial war came fully into its own in 1914-18. The German people, operating on interior lines, on a grid of railroads brilliantly designed by Moltke for the swift shuttling of armies, with an industrial plant planned and built for war, all but beat a coalition that included nearly the whole world. In 1918, the revolutionary possibilities of a new use of fossil energy, the petroleum engine, were disclosed by the British tanks at Amiens, and by air combat among flimsy scout planes. A few military men grasped these possibilities; but only one postwar politician really understood them, and that man was an obscure ex-foot soldier, Adolf Hitler.
Hitler saw that the British and French, the supposed victors, were so exhausted that world empire lay open to their successor; and that even a small nation, with massive bold use of the petroleum engine, especially in combined operations on the ground and in the air, could gain the prize.
The Situation on the Map
The drawback of horses in war is that they must have hay; Napoleon faltered at Borodino partly from a shortage of fodder. Similarly, a petroleum engine must have petroleum to burn. Adolf Hitler could never forget this simple fact, no matter how many armchair strategists and shallow-clever journalists did.
There was only one filling station available for the German war effort on the European continent, and that was the oil under Rumania. We could get no oi
l by sea. All of Hitler’s Balkan maneuvers and campaigns of 1940-41 therefore revolved around the Ploesti oil field. The war could not be won in the Balkans, but Germany might have lost it there.
A glance at the map shows that Ploesti, in the great plain drained by the Danube, lies dangerously near the Soviet border. Ploesti is a clear flat march from the Prut River of less than a hundred miles. But it is six hundred miles from Germany, and the Carpathian Mountains bar the way.
For this reason, when war between Hungary and Rumania threatened in July of 1940, Hitler acted fast to force a settlement. The Soviet Union did not like this. Russia, whether Czarist or Communist, has always stretched its bear claws toward the Balkan peninsula, and at the time Russia was sending vague threatening notes to Rumania. Hitler could not worry about Russian sensibilities, however, where his supply of petroleum was concerned. Without oil, the entire German war machine was but a mountain of dead iron.
But Russia’s conduct gave him pause. His pact with Stalin was just a truce. He so regarded it, and he had to assume that a ruthless butcher like Stalin so regarded it. The question was, when would Russia move? This, Hitler could only guess from Russia’s actions. In the Balkans, in the summer of 1940, while we were completing our brilliant campaign in France, the Soviet Union moved into Bessarabia, bringing the Red Army to the banks of the Prut, an advance averaging one hundred miles along a broad front toward our oil. Bulgaria, with a border only fifty miles from Ploesti, began at the same time to make territorial demands and military threats. In these gestures of Bulgaria against Rumania, we possessed hard intelligence that Russian intrigue was at work.
These ominous moves took place during the so-called “Battle of Britain.” Western newspapers and broadcasters virtually ignored them. Western historians still ignore them. Balkan politics have always confused and bored Westerners, 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 Führer 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 will 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 land mass 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 a 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 a frank and eloquent letter to Mussolini, on the eve of June 22: “Soviet Russia 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, wherever 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 destr
oy 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 had 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 his 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 metal—Franklin Roosevelt.
The Role of Roosevelt
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 their 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?