MarkN wrote: ↑18 Feb 2019, 17:46
The idea of
short and
long only comes into play
after BARBAROSSA had failed and, instead of hugs and kisses at the Urals in November 1941, it was tears and sorrow at Berlin in 1945.
Tooze wages of destruction disagrees.
Here was the perverse
logic of Barbarossa in a nutshell. The conquest of the oilfields of the
Caucasus, 2,000 kilometres deep in the Soviet Union, was not treated
as the awesome military-industrial undertaking that it was. It was
inserted as a precondition into another gargantuan industrial plan
designed to allow the Luftwaffe to fight an air war, not against the Soviet
Union, but against the looming air fleet of Britain and the United States.
Everything depended on deciding
the battle, as in France, in the first weeks of the campaign. This was the
assumption on which Barbarossa was premised. 78 A massive central
thrust towards Moscow, accompanied by flanking encirclements of the
Soviet forces trapped in the north and south, would allow the Red Army
to be broken on the Dnieper-Dvina river line within 500 kilometres of
the Polish-German border. The Dnieper-Dvina river line was critical
because beyond that point logistical constraints on the German army
were binding. 79 These limitations on Germany's new style of 'Blitzkrieg 1
had not been obvious in 1940, because the depth of operations required
by Manstein's encircling blow (Sichelschnitt) had never exceeded a few
hundred kilometres. The entire operation could therefore be supplied
by trucks shuttling back and forth from the German border. On the
basis of their experience in France, the Wehrmacht's logistical staff
calculated that the efficient total range for trucks was 600 kilometres,
giving an operational depth of 300. Beyond that point the trucks them¬
selves used up so much of the fuel they were carrying that they became
inefficient as a means of transport. Given the vast distances encountered
in the Soviet Union, an operational depth of 300 kilometres was absurdly
restrictive. To extend the range of the logistical system, the Wehrmacht
therefore split its motor pool into two segments. One set of trucks
would move forward with the Panzer units and would ferry fuel and
ammunition from intermediate dumps that would be resupplied by the
main fleet operating from the borders of the General Government. By
this expedient, it was hoped that the initial logistical range could be
extended to 500 kilometres. By happy chance, this coincided exactly
with the Dnieper-Dvina line. Haider, the army's chief of staff, was
clearly aware of the fundamental importance of this constraint. In his
diary at the end of lanuary 1941 he noted that the success of Barbarossa
depended on speed. 'Speed! No stops! Do not wait for railway! Do
everything with motor vehicles.' There must be 'no hold ups', 'that alone
guarantees victory'. 80
The doubts, interestingly, were of two kinds. There were
at least some officers who questioned the feasibility of the operation
itself. Significantly these included Field Marshal Fedor von Bock, com¬
mander of Army Group Centre, to whom fell the awesome task of
crushing the main body of the Red Army en route to Moscow. By the
end of January 1941, Bock was so concerned about the scale of the
mission assigned to his army group that he forced Haider, the chief of
army staff, to concede that there was a distinct possibility that the
Red Army might escape beyond the Dnieper-Dvina line. What would
happen in this eventuality was the key question. One of the earliest war
games done to test the Barbarossa plan concluded that unless both the
destruction of the Red Army and the capture of Moscow could be
accomplished within a matter of months, Germany would face a 'long-
drawn-out war, beyond the capacity of the German armed forces to
wage'.
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.