Hubris by Alistair Horne

Author:Alistair Horne
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2015-09-21T04:00:00+00:00

PART THREE

Moscow, 1941

CHAPTER 10

General Summer

IN THE COURSE of 1941, hubris would lead Hitler into committing in quick succession the three greatest mistakes of his career, mistakes of historic and fatal proportions. First was Operation Barbarossa itself, the decision to invade the vast landmass of Russia; second was his tardy commitment to an all-out attack to capture Moscow—a mistake his predecessor Napoleon had made a century and a half earlier; third, and the most ruinous of all, was his declaration of war on the United States on December 11, a mere week after his offensive on Moscow had finally ground to a halt. These were red-letter decisions of terrifying consequence.

It was, however, well before the first Panzers rumbled into Soviet space that Hitler’s genius for war began to let him down, replaced by the hubris that would eventually destroy him and his hideous Third Reich. His strategic planning was grossly flawed. In the first place, his Barbarossa timetable had been disrupted by a quite unnecessary sideshow when he moved to crush Yugoslavia and clear the British out of Greece. That meant that, instead of starting his campaign in May, as soon as the quagmires of the spring rasputitsa (the twice-yearly mud season) had dried out and the short campaigning season had begun, Hitler delayed it until the last week in June. By a curious coincidence of history, he and Napoleon in 1812 set off within a day of each other. Napoleon delayed for the much more valid reason that he had to wait until the grasses of the steppe had grown sufficiently to fodder his horses. As it happened, it was not “General Winter” that defeated both Napoleon and Hitler, but “General Summer.” In the short but intense summer heat of 1812, the horses of Napoleon’s cavalry, as vital to his operations as the Panzers were to Hitler, perished from thirst and fatigue; Hitler’s Panzers would arrive before Moscow worn out and disabled, hors de combat from the dust of summer before the first snows even fell.

On the eve of Barbarossa, there was a fundamental disagreement between Hitler and his senior generals over strategic priorities. The Führer’s instructions were “Leningrad first, the Donetsk Basin [the great industrial area in eastern Ukraine] second, Moscow third.” He had no doubts that his invincible Wehrmacht could march on all three objectives at once. To him, Moscow was of “no great importance”; instead, he saw victory achieved through the destruction of the Red Army west of the capital. In the first crucial weeks and months of the campaign, Hitler would have his way. Initially, as in France, the campaign went superbly well. On the very first morning, Stalin’s unprepared air force lost over 1,200 aircraft, most of them on the ground, lined up wingtip to wingtip (many of the planes newly delivered).*

Hitler had been encouraged by the humiliation inflicted by the Finns on Soviet forces in the Winter War of 1939–40—a war triggered by Stalin’s desire for a defensive buffer. Employing the crude, post-1918 tactics

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