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In the short run, however, Germany won significant victories, and expected more.
protect and guarantee her all-important oil supplies for what turned out to be the rest of the war.
The 8.6 million tons of Iranian and 4.3 million tons of Iraqi oil that fuelled Britain’s ships and tanks each year did not.
Yet at Placentia Bay this spirit of help and co-operation was massively extended, aided by an instantly good personal rapport that sprang up between Roosevelt and Churchill,
German tanks were simply better than British ones at that stage of the war,
It is sometimes forgotten that, despite Churchill’s inspiring leadership in the Second World War, defeats such as Greece, Crete, Singapore and now Tobruk caused him serious political worries even as late as mid-1942.
For a man who prided himself on his historical knowledge, Hitler learnt little from the past.
while he was influenced by the idea that an unnamed Führer could ‘crush all resistance’ largely by the effort of his will to victory, ‘like a force of nature’,
consciousness of his declining energy levels
In a sense he was right; it was hard and nasty but did not last, and once the worst was over its residue evaporated.
In 1941 the USSR had more soldiers and more tanks than, and the same number of aircraft as, the whole of the rest of the world’s armed forces combined.
idea that Germans were so superior to Slavs as human beings that mere numerical inferiority meant nothing.
rank as one of Hitler’s most serious errors.’
as late as 22 June,
so in a sense the very speed of the defeat of Greece led to the late date for Barbarossa.
‘simplistic in the extreme’.
The weather of 1941 was not kind to Adolf Hitler.
could not invade
‘evinced an unshakeable optimism and were quite impervious to criticism or objections.’16
‘Militarily and politically the war was lost when Hitler attacked Russia in 1941, without having peace in the West.’
the world’s largest country –
The answer might be that it was Keitel’s most important duty to have known the facts of Russian military and economic strength before invading, and as OKW chief of staff he was one of Germany’s three most senior strategists.
Hitler did not want an adviser who knew more about grand strategy than he, and might therefore oppose his ideas.
‘and look what a muddle I got into merely because I was weak and let myself be talked into things. I
Far from a ‘muddle’, Keitel faced the noose, which he deserved for the brutal orders he signed before the invasion of Russia.
The fact that Keitel was a pathetic excuse for a senior officer is important in establishing how Hitler established such dominance over an officer corps that was, despite the débâcle of 1918, still proud of its long-term heritage and pre-eminent place in German society.
Hitler had long been a master of disinformation, and this time he used it against his own generals.
‘You have only to kick in the door, and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down.’
sheer bloody-mindedness of the ordinary Russian soldier – the frontovik
Their forefathers had suffered horribly in the past for the Romanovs, now they would suffer no less horribly for their Bolshevik successors: ‘Stalinism was indeed Tsarism with a proletarian face.’
‘We National Socialists must hold unflinchingly to our aim in foreign policy,’
‘namely, to secure for the German people the land and soil to which they are entitled on this
Ukrainian grain, the raw materials of the Urals and even Siberian timber.
enlargement of our people’s living space in Europe.’
all preparations for the East which have been verbally ordered will be continued.’
‘London via Moscow’,
Hitler invaded vast Russia partly in order further to isolate tiny Britain
it is explicable in terms of his own racial theories, as well as in the light of the Luftwaffe’s defeat in the battle of Britain the previous summer.
Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with the Bolsheviks that had been very advantageous to Berlin,
Zionist–Bolshevik conspiracy,
geographical limits were set for the operation: ‘We shall fight until Russia’s military power no longer exists.’
Economic imperatives thus neatly dovetailed with ideological, strategic, racial and opportunistic ones; indeed every factor pointed to an invasion, save one: logistical reality.
The stakes might have increased exponentially over the years, but his gambler’s instinct never left him.
Red Army still failed to group its thirty-nine armoured divisions together in independent corps and armies, but rather distributed them evenly among infantry divisions,
did not lack military experience, but they understandably did fear Stalin’s anger if they took bold decisions that later met with failure.
In mid-May 1941, 170 divisions, that is more than 70 per cent of the total strength of the Red Army, were stationed beyond the 1939 borders of the USSR.
but in building fortifications that proved worthless and roads and railways that were soon being used by the Germans.
Stalin Line
Soviet dispositions are all the more inexplicable considering that Barbarossa was the worst-kept secret of the Second World War, and Stalin received no fewer than eighty warnings of Hitler’s intentions over the previous eight months.
Churchill was a double-crossing
