Duffy Christopher. Red Storm On The Reich (ENG)

Подождите немного. Документ загружается.

tion of Germany. What I venture to call the 'Yalta Period of

German History' emerged as a recognisable entity, and it gave

a new relevance to the strategic calculations of 1945. Likewise

I had to take cognizance of certain historical themes which have

already acquired fresh interest for the new Germans, namely

the loss of extensive territory to eastern neighbours, and the

slaughter and suffering of German civilians in 1945, which

reached dimensions that are still little understood in Western

Europe.

In this sense Red Storm on the Reich became a partial response

to the formidable challenge set by Andreas Hillgruber:

The mighty happenings between the autumn of 1944 and the

spring of 1945 still demand a description and treatment which

keeps in view the events on the world historical stage, and

yet illustrates the sufferings, deeds, ambitions and failings

of men as individuals. This must be one of the most difficult

tasks which lie before historians.

With stupendous effort historians have researched the de-

cline of the democratic Republic, the rise of the National

Socialist movement and its Führer, and the foundation of the

Third Reich and its structures. Perhaps the last great demand

on this historiography will be to form a comprehensive pic-

ture of the collapse of the battle fronts, the conquest of eastern

Central Europe, and the shattering of the Third Reich and

the fall of the Germanic east, together with all the things that

these developments mean. (Zweierlei Untergang: Die Zerschla-

gung des Deutschen Reiches und das Ende des europäischen ]uden-

tums, Berlin, 1986)

In its completed form Red Storm on the Reich stands as an

atrocious book, in the literal sense of that term. I have limited

the story of destruction as far as I could to that of landscape

and machines, and I hope that I have given no satisfaction to

lovers of the pornography of violence, but I cannot conceal the

INTRODUCTION

fact that I found many of the passages difficult to write, and

difficult to live with after they had been set down on paper.

I must acknowledge my debt to Charles Dick of the Soviet

Studies Research Centre, based at Sandhurst. Directly through

his advice, and indirectly through his good cheer, he enabled

me to carry this book through to completion. Count von Brühl

(16th Panzer Division) provided very encouraging hospitality

and information, and further assistance came from veterans

who prefer to remain anonymous.

NOTES:

Distances on the maps are given in kilometres.

Colonel-general is a German and Soviet rank coming between

full general and field-marshal.

INTRODUCTION

PART I

Total War

CHAPTER 1

The Evolution of

Total War

The Berlin Sportpalast, 18 February 1943

GOEBBELS: 'Do you desire total war?'

AUDIENCE: 'Ja!'

ESSENTIALLY, the Second World War was won and lost on the

Eastern Front. Only nations which were spared the experience

of that holocaust have been able to regard the Second World

War as somehow more light-hearted than the Great War, and

a fit subject for adventure stories and comedies.

Statistics by their nature carry little emotional impact, but a

few figures bear some repetition. Russian deaths in the Great

Patriotic War exceed 27 million. This makes up about 40 per

cent of all the people killed in the Second World War, and

equates to at least ten souls for every metre of ground between

Moscow and Berlin. At least seven million of the Russians who

died were civilians, and 3.25 million were soldiers who perished

in German captivity.

On its side, the Soviet military effort accounted for the greater

part of the 3.25 million German military fatalities in the war.

Approximately 3 million further German troops were captured

by the Russians, and about one-third of them did not survive

the ordeal. Altogether the German human sacrifice on the East-

ern Front came to around 10 million killed, missing, wounded

or captured, and the loss of equipment amounted to some

48,000 tanks, 167,000 artillery pieces and nearly 77,000 aircraft.

Historians have striven to explain how humanity could have

come to this pass. They have identified a first turning point in

the late eighteenth century, when the young French Republic,

at war with most of Europe, created a mass army through the

mechanism of conscription. The French had three-quarters of

a million men under arms in 1794, and by 1815 literally millions

of troops had been mobilised by Napoleonic France and by the

successive enemy alliances. Just as important was the impulse

of nationalism, which powered the ragged armies of the French

Revolution and then provoked a spirited reaction among the

other peoples of Europe, especially in Spain, Russia and a num-

ber of the states of Germany.

Altogether the continual fighting between 1792 and 1815 es-

tablished that warfare had ceased to be the exclusive affair of

kings, the ruling circles and the professional armies. In former

times defeated states had been able to buy off their victors by

making over frontier fortresses, trading concessions or other

small coinage of the currency of international relations. Now

the price of defeat could amount to the extinction of a regime

or state.

The next two centuries brought important social and eco-

nomic advances, and many of them had a significant military

dimension. Seemingly unlimited cannon fodder for the Mil-

lionenheeren—the mass conscript armies—was provided by five-

or tenfold increases in population. These probably had less to

do with burgeoning fertility than with simple improvements in

the conditions of everyday life, which caused infant mortality

to fall.

The accompanying Industrial Revolution went through two

phases. The first was a 'heavy' revolution, which bore images

of coal, coke, jets of steam and the grinding and clanking of

pieces of heavy metal. By the middle of the nineteenth century

the process of industrialisation was spreading fast from Britain

to many areas of continental Europe, and 1849 saw the first

operational movement of troops by rail, when the tsar of Russia

sent forces to help the Austrian emperor to put down a rebellion

in Hungary.

CHRISTOPHER DUFFY

The Industrial Revolution furnished armies with mass-

produced weapons that were at once precisely manufactured

and cheap. In the second half of the century almost every span

of five years brought radical changes in the technology of kill-

ing: the first rifled small arms and artillery gave unprecedented

increases in accuracy and range in the 1850s; and over the next

three decades single-shot breech-loaders, magazine rifles and

the Maxim gun produced successive and significant increases

in the rate of fire. By the end of the century high explosives,

'smokeless' powders and barbed wire were all available for

military use.

We associate the second, or 'light' Industrial Revolution with

oil, the internal-combustion engine and electricity. In warfare

the effect was felt in the dimensions of speed, range and con-

trol. The first man-carrying mechanical aircraft took to the air

in 1903, and within eight years the Italians were employing

bomber aircraft in Libya. The first tanks were seen in 1916.

They were slow, thin-skinned and unreliable, but they were

used with increasing force and effect, and by the end of the

Great War they had established a claim to be considered, at the

very least, as an important adjunct of modern warfare.

In the Great War it was still very difficult to coordinate the

action of the new weapons and forces. However, a solution

was at hand by the 1930s, and it was provided by compact,

reliable and long-range field radios—which became a vital in-

gredient of the blitzkrieg style of warfare. It was probably no

coincidence that Heinz Guderian, the creator of the German

Panzer arm, had specialised experience of signals. Taken together,

the products of the 'light' Industrial Revolution gave skilled com-

manders the means of overcoming the defensive firepower which

had dominated most battlefields in the Great War.

Notions about the purpose and general conduct of warfare

were strongly influenced not just by increases in technical po-

tential but by the example of Napoleon and the reading, or

rather the misreading, of the writings of the Prussian military

philosopher Karl von Clausewitz (1780-1831). Military activity

RED STORM ON THE REICH

focused on a search for victory in the big battle—finding the

main body of the enemy and destroying it in short order by

the maximum application of force.

Spontaneous popular nationalism, which we have noted at

the beginning of the nineteenth century, was increasingly taken

under political guidance, and it assumed a particularly potent

form when it was reinforced by military victories. These pro-

cesses were harnessed by Piedmont-Sardinia and Prussia to

form the new united nations of Italy (1870) and Germany (1871).

Still more disquieting in the long term was the rise of total-

itarian ideologies of the left and the right in the twentieth cen-

tury. These were secular religions that overthrew traditional

notions of authority which had represented continuity and had

been willing to allow some limitation on the power of the state.

No such restraints were observed in Leninist-Stalinist Russia,

or in Nazi Germany, where the old certitudes were overset by

defeat in the Great War, the harsh Versailles peace settlement,

and subsequent financial crises which destroyed the economic

order twice over.

Early in the Great War statesmen and generals learned to

familiarise themselves with a scale of 'acceptable' casualties

which far exceeded anything previously known in Western

warfare. Another psychological barrier was crossed at the same

time, when in 1915 the Turks massacred about 1.5 million Ar-

menians, which proved that it was technically possible to take

action against an entire racial stock. Hitler referred specifically

to this episode on 22 August 1939, in his instructions to SS units

for the imminent campaign in Poland: 'Who now talks of the

Armenians?'

Such was the background of technical advance and moral

regression which shaped the war on the Eastern Front between

1941 and 1945. Seeking to convey the character of that struggle,

commentators have compared ft with a combat between tribes

of insects, or creatures from warring planets. The images differ,

but they all remind us that we are touching on an episode of

unprecedented scale and ferocity.

CHRISTOPHER DUFFY

CHAPTER 2

The War Until 1945

The Little War, 1939-41

THE SECOND WORLD WAR took some time to assume its global

character. For the Germans the first campaigns were a series

of expeditions from an invulnerable heartland. They invaded

and defeated Poland in the autumn of 1939 with the collusion,

and later the active participation, of the Soviet Union. In the

West the 'Phoney War' gave way on 10 May 1940 to an all-out

German offensive, and within eleven days the leading forces

of Army Group A carved their way to the English Channel.

The greater part of the British Expeditionary Force escaped by

way of the port of Dunkirk, at the price of abandoning its heavy

weapons and equipment, and the French gave up the fight on

25 June.

It is instructive to see the uncut version of the German film

Triumph in the West, which was released after this second blitz-

krieg. The editors hark back repeatedly to the monuments and

grievances of the Great War, and there is relief as well as ju-

bilation in the welcome that was given to the returning troops.

The impression is that of closing an old book rather than open-

ing a new one.