Max Hastings Two-Book Collection: All Hell Let Loose and Catastrophe

The men who fought the desert war suffered fewer hardships than those serving in Russia, Burma or the Pacific, but water shortage imposed chronic discomfort. ‘The flies plague us in millions from the first hour in the morning,’ wrote an Italian officer. ‘The sand always seems to be in our mouths, in our hair and in our clothes, and it is impossible to get cool.’ Armoured officer Pietro Ostellino wrote in August: ‘Even the climate has begun to make us lose hope. All day we suffer an infernal heat while the shade is rendered useless by a constant suffocating wind. It seems as though the valley has become a furnace. After eight in the evening the wind drops, but…we suffocate.’ In their tanks, the temperature often rose above 40 or 50 degrees Celsius. Opening hatches merely allowed sand and dust to swirl in.

British soldiers received a water ration of two pints a day, together with copious issues of tea brewed in old fuel tins on fires of mingled petrol and sand. They ate chiefly bully beef, biscuits and canned fruit. The Germans rejoiced in captures of Eighth Army rations, which they preferred to their own, especially the generous issues of cigarettes. ‘We…slowly make ourselves become Tommies,’ wrote Wolfgang Everth wryly during one of Rommel’s advances. ‘Our vehicles, petrol, rations and clothing were all English. I…breakfasted off two tins of milk, a tin of pineapple, biscuits and Ceylon tea.’

Men learned that the desert was perilously nuanced terrain on which to move and fight. ‘Smooth yellow sand, attractive to the uninitiated, was deadly,’ wrote a British officer. ‘Unless it was of short duration and taken at speed the truck would bog to the axles. Pebbly going was usually good, but sometimes it was a deceptive crust with soft sand underneath which only the experienced eye could detect at a distance. In some places the desert was smooth and firm as a race-track for miles on end and in every direction; in others it was treacherous as treacle.’ Both sides were sometimes confused by their enemies’ use of captured transport. Again and again, British troops received unwelcome surprises from approaching British vehicles and even tanks which proved to be driven by Rommel’s men. The Italian Bologna Division was panicked one day by the sight of a column of British trucks in their midst, until they discovered that it carried Germans.

Between offensives, there were long intervals of boredom, training and preparation. ‘The chief occupation of soldiers in wartime is hanging around doing nothing, though preferably purposefully,’ wrote a British soldier. Men dug incessantly, laid minefields, patrolled and conducted sniping duels. They suffered from desert sores, jaundice, dysentery. Both sides learned to curse khamsins, sandstorms that reduced vision to a few yards and drove yellow grit into every crevice of vehicles, equipment and human bodies. Italians called them ghibli. Pietro Ostellino wrote home: ‘You would think it impossible to take two and a half hours to cover the two hundred metres which separated the mess from my tent but that is the truth. I have never seen a night so dark: you stopped for a moment to clear your eyes and immediately lost your bearings. When finally I got to my tent I found everything under five centimetres of sand. At any moment, the canvas seemed likely to blow away.’

Even during long lulls between battles there were few diversions save the arrival of mail, every soldier’s obsession. Many men wrote home almost daily, because there was nothing else to do. The act of writing maintained a link with their other lives which became ever more precious as the passage of months extended into years. Eighth Army’s soldiers were granted occasional brief leaves in Cairo, a city they learned to hate. Olivia Manning, who later became famous as author of The Balkan Trilogy, arrived there as a refugee from Greece in April 1941: ‘The unreality had something to do with the light…It was too white. It flattened everything. It drained the colour out of everything. It lay on things like dust…we were shocked by the colourless summer delta. The squalor of the delta shocked us horribly – not only the squalor, the people’s contentment with squalor. For weeks we lived in a state of recoil.’

Having been abroad since 1939, Manning gazed curiously at the throng of British soldiers in the streets: ‘Sweat shining, hair bleached to sameness, the pink burn of English skin disguising differences; much of a size, not tall…Their worn, thin, washed-out khaki was wrinkled with heat. Dark patches of sweat showed between their shoulder blades and under their arms.’ Officers found consolations in the smart rendezvous of Egypt: ‘Groppi’s at Cairo and Pastroudi’s at Alexandria stay in the mind,’ wrote one. ‘There is a splendid decadence in having morning coffees and éclairs amid gilt mirrors and all the kitsch of affluence.’ Other ranks, however, knew only Cairo’s sordid bars and brothels, which inflicted alarming disease rates on Eighth Army.

For Mussolini’s soldiers, from the outset the North African campaign was a nightmare. The usual hazards of war were rendered almost unendurable by Italian shortages of food, ammunition, vehicles, medical supplies and belief in their cause. A transport driver, Vittorio Vallicella, kept a diary which is an unflagging tale of woe. The campaign was hopeless, he said, ‘not because of our incompetence or the enemy’s courage, but because the other side was so much better organised’. He added bitterly: ‘This is “the war of the poor” wished upon us by the Fascist hierarchy, comfortably ensconced in Rome’s Palazzo Venezia.’

Vallicella claimed to have seen only one Italian ambulance in all his time in Africa; he complained bitterly of lack of leadership at every level, from supreme headquarters in Rome down to his own unit’s officers: ‘How many times have we veterans saved their bacon. Our ally’s divisions are much more aggressive, with vastly superior fire power and manoeuvrability, led by officers who really lead. Many of our own officers have been sent home wounded or sick.’ Italian soldiers resented the disparity between their meagre rations – soup, bread, a little jam, the occasional lemon – and those of officers, who enjoyed wine and mineral water flown in from Italy. They cherished rare glimpses of home comforts, such as a visit from Red Cross girls bringing parcels sent by well-wishers at home: ‘After nearly twenty months it is wonderful to see these lovely women bringing useful gifts.’

Their best source of decent food, however, was the enemy: ‘For those lucky enough to return alive from a night patrol there was booty: jars of jam and fruit, packets of biscuits and tea, tins of corned beef, bottles of liqueurs, cigarettes, sugar, coffee, shirts, trousers, casual shoes, towels, lavatory paper, medicines like aspirin and quinine, condensed milk, jerseys made from real wool, compasses and every other kind of equipment under the sun. Such things never featured in our own supplies.’ When Vallicella caught malaria, he prayed that it might be something worse, to justify his repatriation to Italy – and was disappointed. Where most men thrilled to receive mail from home, he was dismayed to learn from his family letters that those at home knew little about ‘the hell we were in’. He was rash enough to voice aloud the view that without armour and rations it was impossible to fight, which caused him to be threatened with a firing squad. Only the intervention of his colonel saved his life.

Wavell began the Middle East war with 80,000 troops under his command. By the time Auchinleck, his successor, launched Operation Crusader in November 1941, he fielded 750,000, albeit most committed to garrison, logistical and support tasks across the theatre. After pushing Rommel back to El Agheila, the British anticipated a lull, and set about refitting their armoured units. But the Axis forces, having escaped destruction, regrouped with remarkable speed. When Pietro Ostellino emerged from the long and bloody Crusader mêlée, ‘I had the pleasant surprise of finding my kit, which I thought had fallen into English hands. It was aboard a truck which managed to escape the enemy encirclement. I finally got to sleep on my camp bed. I was in tatters after ten days without even washing my hands. I got rid of all the dirt as well as lice – some of these are still with me, but a little petrol should get rid of them. Clean, I feel a new man.’

Most of the Axis army shared Ostellino’s reinvigoration. On 21 January 1942, the British were rudely surprised when Rommel launched a new offensive, with devastating effect. Within three weeks he advanced almost three hundred miles eastwards before familiar logistical problems obliged him to halt. Neil Ritchie, now Eighth Army’s commander, set about creating strong defensive positions – the so-called Gazala Line, based upon brigade ‘boxes’ protected by mines and wire. He intended Rommel to dissipate his strength assaulting these, then to commit British armour, as usual superior in numbers, to press his advantage.

This gambit failed miserably: Ritchie had neglected to study his enemy’s commitment to deep penetration and flanking operations. When Rommel attacked on 26 May, Ritchie’s ‘boxes’ proved too widely separated to provide mutual support. For some days a Free French brigade staunchly defended the southernmost, at Bir Hacheim, but was then forced to withdraw. German armour manoeuvred with its usual skill: ‘We could never fire more than a couple of shots at any one tank before it was hidden by dust and the Germans were keeping just outside our range,’ wrote a frustrated British tank officer. Then his squadron was ordered to charge. ‘Ten to one we don’t make it,’ muttered a tank commander. He noted the look of disgust on his loader’s face as the man thrust another round into the smoking breech – he had been married a few weeks before leaving England. ‘I felt sorry for him.’ Then they began to fire: ‘Driver left-halt. Two-pounder traverse right – steady, on. Three hundred, fire!’ Within seconds of their own shot, in the words of the tank commander,

there was a tremendous crash. I felt a sharp pain in my right leg, heard the operator groaning, and said, ‘Driver, advance.’ Nothing happened. The shell, an 88mm, had exploded in his stomach…At the time I realised only that the engine had stopped, the Tannoy internal communication set had broken down, air was escaping from the high pressure pipes and clouds of acrid smoke were coming up from inside. It all happened in a moment. Then we were out of the tank and running towards another one. It was our squadron leader, who had stopped to rescue us; my gunner was already on the tank, the operator had disappeared on another, but I could only hobble because my leg wobbled uncontrollably beneath my weight. I was terrified they would go without me. The Germans shelled me as I ran. The ground opened up at my feet and I staggered as the blast struck me, but I was not hurt. I hurled myself onto the tank, dizzy and exhausted as we moved off to safety. The gunner was beside me smiling cheerfully though his right arm was smashed to bits below the elbow. Bones gleamed white through the blood and his fingers dangled on shreds of skin. He was bleeding badly so we fixed up a tourniquet and I gave him my syringe of morphia. We talked about going home.

At a field hospital, he recovered consciousness after an operation to hear falling bombs and the terrific din of Tobruk’s anti-aircraft guns. ‘There were so many wounded that the floor was covered with patients on stretchers, the reek of anaesthetic filled the air and people were groaning or shouting in delirium as they died. The heat and stuffiness were quite appalling. My right leg was in plaster to the hip, the other was smothered in dried blood. There were no sheets and the blankets scratched.’

Both sides suffered heavy tank losses in confused fighting around ‘the Cauldron’ in the centre of the British line, but by 30 May the Germans had gained a decisive advantage. The British were forced into headlong retreat. A South African and Indian force was left to defend Tobruk, while the remainder of Eighth Army fell back into Egypt. Rommel bypassed Tobruk, then on 20 June turned and assaulted its defences from the rear, where the line was weakest, and soon broke through. The South African commander, Maj. Gen. Hendrik Klopper, surrendered next morning. By nightfall on the 21st, all resistance had ended. More than 30,000 prisoners fell into Axis hands. Only a few units made good their escape to Eighth Army.

Vittorio Vallicella was among the first Axis troops to reach the port of Tobruk. ‘What a shock to find there hundreds of Senegalese [French colonial troops] who, at the sight of our little band, leap to their feet raising their hands in token of surrender,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘How extraordinary that they should do this to poorly armed men far fewer than themselves. With surprise but also respect, we gaze fascinated at these poor black soldiers who serve rich England, who have come from afar to take part in a war, when perhaps they don’t even know for whom or for what they are fighting.’ Exploring the town, the Italians were astonished by the comfort of the English quarters, with their showers, every officer’s bed with its mosquito net, and a surfeit of supplies. They delighted in the discovery of luxuries: tinned plums and boxes of what Vallicella at first took for dried grass. His sergeant explained that this was tea, a real treat. Some Arabs found plundering the dead were shot. Several men killed themselves by wandering into minefields. The Germans quickly placed guards on all the British food dumps, which the Italians interpreted as a slight on themselves: ‘Even here our allies want to lord it over us.’ For a brief period, victory at Tobruk raised Italian as well as German morale. ‘We hope this nightmare is at an end,’ wrote Vallicella. ‘We have only one thought: Alexandria, Cairo, the Nile, pyramids, palm trees and women.’

During early-summer operations, the Germans had suffered just 3,360 casualties, the British 50,000 – most of these taken prisoner. Much of Auchinleck’s armoured force had been destroyed. Churchill, in Washington to meet Roosevelt, was shocked and humiliated. The end of June 1942 found the British occupying a line at El Alamein, back inside Egypt. One of Auchinleck’s soldiers wrote: ‘The order came to us, “Last round, last man.” This was chilling. It was curious to see that this legendary phrase of heroic finality could still be used. Presumably it was intended to instil a steely resolve…But being interpreted, it meant that there was no hope for Tobruk and that we were being left to our fate – the very reverse of morale building…We were a downcast, defeated lot.’ Britain’s fortunes in the Middle East, and the global prestige of its army, had reached their lowest ebb. Churchill’s attempt to exploit Africa as a battlefield against the Axis had thus far served only to make Rommel a hero, and grievously to injure the morale and self-respect of the British people at home. It was fortunate indeed that the desert was not the cockpit of the war; that events elsewhere, on the Russian steppe, had drastically diminished the significance of British failure.

6

Barbarossa

At 0315 Berlin time on 22 June 1941, Russian border guards on the Bug river bridge at Kolden were summoned by their German counterparts ‘to discuss important matters’, and machine-gunned as they approached. Wehrmacht sappers tore away charges laid on the railway bridge at Brest-Litovsk, then waved forward the assault units at 0330. German special forces – ‘Brandenburgers’ who included some Russian-speakers – had been parachuted or smuggled across the lines during the preceding days, and were already at work sabotaging communications behind the front. Some 3.6 million Axis troops began to advance into the Soviet Union on a nine-hundred-mile front from the Baltic to the Black Sea, smashing into the defences with devastating effect. A Russian, the poet David Samoilov, said later, ‘We were all expecting war. But we were not expecting that war.’ Divisions and soon whole armies dissolved in the Germans’ path, so that collapses and surrenders characterised the first weeks of the Red Army’s campaign. A Soviet officer wrote of an exchange with a comrade: ‘Kuznetsov informed me, with a tremble in his throat, that the only thing left of the 56th Rifle Div was its number.’ This was merely one among a thousand such disasters.

Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union was the defining event of the war, just as the Holocaust was the defining act of Nazism. Germany embarked upon an attempt to fulfil the most ambitious objectives in its history, to push back the frontiers of Slavdom and create a new empire in the east. The Nazis argued that they were merely following the historic example set by other European nations in pursuing Lebensraum, living space, by seizing an empire in the territories of savages. The British historian Michael Howard has written: ‘Many, perhaps most Germans, and certainly most German intellectuals, saw the First World War as a battle for cultural survival against the converging forces of Russian barbarism and, far more subversive, the decadent civilisation of the West, embodied no longer by French aristocrats but by the materialist societies of the Anglo-Saxon world. This belief was taken over in its entirety by the Nazis and provided the bedrock of their own philosophy.’

Millions of young Germans had been conditioned since childhood to believe that their nation faced an existential threat from the Soviet Union. ‘The situation is ideal for the Bolshevists to launch their attack on Europe in furtherance of their general plan for world domination,’ wrote an ardent Nazi Luftwaffe pilot, Heinz Knoke, in 1941. ‘Will Western capitalism, with its democratic institutions, enter into an alliance with Russian Bolshevism? If only we had a free hand in the west, we could inflict a shattering defeat on the Bolshevist hordes despite the Red Army. That would save Western civilisation.’ Imbued with such logic, Knoke was thrilled to find himself participating in the invasion of Russia. So were some more senior officers. Hans Jeschonnek, the Luftwaffe’s chief of staff, was chastened by the 1940 failure against Britain, a campaign which he thought ill-suited to his force’s capabilities. Now, he exulted, ‘At last, a proper war again!’

Eighteen-year-old Henry Metelmann, a Hamburg locksmith turned tank driver, wrote later: ‘I accepted as natural that it was a German duty for the good of humanity to impose our way of life on lower races and nations who, probably because of their limited intelligence, would not quite understand what we were on about.’ Like many young Germans at that stage of the war, he viewed his deployment to the east without trepidation. ‘Few of us realised the serious situation we were in. We looked on this journey, if not the whole war, as one great adventure, an opportunity to escape the boredom of Civvy Street, a lesser object being to fulfil a sacred duty to our Führer and Fatherland.’

Much of Hitler’s strategy, insofar as it was planned rather than the product of opportunism, derived from the knowledge that time favoured his enemies, empowering them to arm and coalesce against him. As part of Stalin’s deterrent strategy, before Barbarossa the German military attaché in Moscow was allowed to visit some of the vast new weapons factories under construction in Siberia. His reports, however, had the opposite effect to that which was intended. Hitler said to his generals: ‘Now you see how far these people have already got. We must strike at once.’ The destruction of Bolshevism and the enslavement of the Soviet Union’s vast population were core objectives of Nazism, flagged in Hitler’s speeches and writings since the 1920s. Overlaid on them was the desire to appropriate Russia’s enormous natural resources.

Stalin probably intended to fight his menacing neighbour at some moment of his choosing. If Germany had become engaged in a protracted attritional struggle against the French and British on the Western Front in 1940, as Moscow hoped, the Russians might have fallen upon Hitler’s rear, in return for major territorial concessions from the Allies. Stalin’s generals prepared plans for an offensive against Germany – as they did also for many other contingencies – which could conceivably have been launched in 1942. As it was, however, in 1941 his armies were unfit to meet the almost undivided attentions of the Wehrmacht. Though progressively mobilising – Russia’s active forces doubled in size between 1939 and the German invasion – they had scarcely begun the re-equipment programme that would later provide them with some of the best weapons systems in the world.

In Hitler’s terms, this made Operation Barbarossa a rational act, enabling Germany to engage the Soviet Union while its own relative advantage was greatest. Hubris lay in its underestimate of the military and industrial capability Stalin had already achieved; reckless insouciance about Russia’s almost limitless expanses; and grossly inadequate logistical support for a protracted campaign. Despite the expansion of the Wehrmacht since the previous year and the delivery of several hundred new tanks, many formations were dependent on weapons and vehicles taken from the Czechs in 1938–39 or captured from the French in 1940; only the armoured divisions were adequately provided with transport and equipment. It did not occur to Hitler, after his victories in the west, that it might be more difficult to overcome a brutalised society, inured to suffering, than democracies such as France and Britain, in which moderation and respect for human life were deemed virtues.

The senior officers of the Wehrmacht flattered themselves that they represented a cultured nation, yet they readily acquiesced in the barbarities designed into the Barbarossa plan. These included the starvation of at least thirty million Russians, in order that their food supplies might be diverted to Germany, originally a conception of Nazi agriculture chief Herbert Backe. At a meeting held on 2 May 1941 to discuss the occupation of the Soviet Union, the army’s armament planning secretariat recorded its commitment to a policy noteworthy even in the context of the Third Reich:

1 The war can only be continued if the entire Wehrmacht is fed from Russia in the third year.

2 If we take what we need out of the country, there can be no doubt that many millions of people will die of starvation.

Barbarossa was therefore not merely a military operation, but also an economic programme expected to encompass the deaths of tens of millions of people, an objective which it partially attained. Some generals protested against orders requiring their men to participate in the systematic murder of Soviet commissars, and rather more questioned Hitler’s invasion strategy. Maj. Gen. Erich Marcks, the brilliant officer responsible for early planning, proposed that the decisive thrust should be delivered north of the Pripyet marshes, because Russian deployments anticipated an assault further south. Several commanders argued that a conquered population which was treated mercifully would be more manageable than one which gained nothing by accepting subjection. Such objections were framed in pragmatic rather than moral terms; when Berlin rejected them, the critics lapsed into acquiescence and faithfully executed Hitler’s orders.

Industrialised savagery was inherent in Barbarossa. Goering told those charged with administering the occupied territories: ‘God knows, you are not sent out there to work for the welfare of the people in your charge, but to get the utmost out of them, so that the German people can live.’ Col. Gen. Erich Hoepner, the fifty-five-year-old cavalryman commanding Fourth Panzer Group, said: ‘The war with Russia is a vital part of the German people’s fight for existence. It is the old fight of German against Slav, the defence of European culture against the Muscovite-Asiatic flood, and the repulse of Jewish Bolshevism. This war must have as its goal the destruction of today’s Russia – and for this reason it must be conducted with unprecedented harshness. Every clash, from conception to execution, must be guided by an iron determination to annihilate the enemy completely and utterly.’ From June 1941 onwards, few German senior officers could credibly deny complicity in the crimes of Nazism.

The Soviet Union on the eve of Hitler’s invasion was the most rigorously regulated and policed society in the world. Its machinery of domestic repression was much more elaborate, and in 1941 had killed far more people, than that of Nazism: six million peasants perished in the course of Stalin’s programme of enforced industrialisation, and vast numbers of loyal comrades had fallen victim to his paranoia. Germans, other than Jews, had greater personal freedom than did any Russian. Yet Stalin’s tyranny was less adequately organised to defend itself against foreign enemies than against its own people. The Red Army’s formations in the west were poorly deployed, in a thin forward line. Many of its best commanders had been killed in the 1937–38 purges, and replaced by incompetent lackeys. Communications were crippled by lack of radios and technical skills; most units lacked modern arms and equipment. No defensive positions had been created, and Soviet doctrine addressed only offensive operations. The dead hand of the Party crippled efficiency, initiative and tactical prudence.

Stalin dismissed many warnings from his own generals as well as from London about the impending invasion. The 10 May parachute descent on Britain of Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess, in pursuit of a lone peace mission, increased Soviet fears of British duplicity, and suspicion that Churchill intended a bilateral deal with Hitler. Stalin also rejected explicit intelligence about Barbarossa from Soviet agents in Berlin and Tokyo, scrawling across one such report from Beria: ‘You can tell your “source” from the German Air Headquarters that he can go and fuck his mother. This is not a source, but a disinformant. I.St.’ The Luftwaffe played its part in Berlin’s deception operations by dispatching five hundred bombers against London on 10 May, inflicting 3,000 casualties, days before most of its squadrons redeployed eastwards.

The huge troop movements preceding Barbarossa became the stuff of café gossip on the streets of Europe: writer Mihail Sebastian was telephoned by a friend in Bucharest on 19 June who said, ‘The war will begin tomorrow morning if it stops raining.’ Yet Stalin forbade every movement that might provoke Berlin, overruling repeated pleas from his commanders to alert the front. He ordered anti-aircraft defences not to fire on Luftwaffe overflights of Soviet territory, of which ninety-one were reported in May and early June. Himself a warlord of icy purpose, Stalin was confounded by the apparent perversity of Hitler’s behaviour. Under the terms of the Nazi–Soviet Pact, Germany was receiving enormous material aid from Russia: supply trains continued to roll west until the very moment of the invasion; the Luftwaffe’s aircraft were largely fuelled by Soviet oil; the Kriegsmarine’s U-boats had access to Russian port facilities. Britain remained undefeated. Stalin thus refused to believe that Hitler would precipitate a cataclysmic breach with him, and was personally responsible for the fact that the German onslaught, no surprise to his senior commanders, caught the defences unprepared. Georgy Zhukov, chief of the general staff, dispatched an alert order to all commands late on 21 June, but this reached them only an hour before the Germans attacked.

On the Western Front, some 2.5 million of Stalin’s 4.7 million active soldiers were deployed – 140 divisions and forty brigades with more than 10,000 tanks and 8,000 aircraft. Hitler launched against them 3.6 million Axis troops, the largest invasion force in European history, with 3,600 tanks and 2,700 aircraft of superior quality to those of the Russians. Under the overall command of Field Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch, the Germans struck in three army groups. Hitler rejected the urgings of his best generals to make a single thrust towards Moscow, insisting upon a simultaneous drive into Ukraine, to secure its vast natural and industrial resources. This is sometimes described as a decisive strategic error. It seems more plausible, however, to question whether Germany had the economic strength to fulfil Hitler’s eastern ambitions, in whichever way these were addressed.

Many German people were shocked, indeed appalled, by news of the invasion. Goebbels wrote: ‘We must win and win quickly. The public mood is one of slight depression. The nation wants peace, though not at the price of defeat, but every new theatre of operations brings worry and concern.’ A young translator at the Soviet Embassy in Berlin, Valentin Berezhkov, recorded a notable experience during his confinement with the rest of his delegation after the outbreak of war. He was befriended by a middle-aged SS officer named Heinemann, who took him out to a café for a drink, where they were embarrassed to be joined by six other SS men. Heinemann hastily covered himself by saying that his guest was a relation of his wife’s, engaged in secret work that he could not discuss.

They talked about the war for a while, until the SS officers declared a toast to ‘Our victory.’ Berezhkov raised his glass ‘To our victory’ without attracting unwelcome attention. Heinemann was desperately anxious that his son, who had just joined the SS, should not perish in Russia, and was also short of cash to fund medical treatment for his wife. Berezhkov gave him a thousand marks from the Embassy safe, knowing that the Russians would not be allowed to take large sums with them when they were repatriated. At their parting Heinemann, who helped to organise the mission’s eventual evacuation in the exchange of Moscow and Berlin diplomats, gave the Russian a signed photo of himself, saying, ‘It may so happen that some time or other I’ll have to refer to the service I rendered to the Soviet Embassy. I hope it won’t be forgotten.’ The two never heard of each other again, but Berezhkov always wondered if the German, even though an SS officer, secretly apprehended his nation’s defeat in Russia.

Such misgivings did not extend to most of Hitler’s young soldiers, still flushed with the triumphs of 1940. ‘We were uncritically enthusiastic, proud to be alive in times we regarded as heroic,’ wrote twenty-one-year-old paratrooper Martin Poppel. He thrilled to the prospect of fighting in the east: ‘Our destination is Russia, our objective is war and victory…We’re desperate to be involved in the great struggle…There’s no country on earth that exerts such magnetic attraction on me as Bolshevist Russia.’ The Germans struck from East Prussia into Lithuania, from Poland towards Minsk and Kiev, from Hungary into Ukraine. Almost everywhere, they smashed contemptuously through Soviet formations, destroying planes wholesale on the ground – 1,200 in the first twenty-four hours.

In the Baltic republics, the invaders were bewildered to be greeted as liberators, with offerings of flowers and food. During the preceding weeks, Beria’s NKVD had made tens of thousands of arrests and consequently millions of enemies among Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians. Retreating Russian troops faced harassment and sniper fire from local inhabitants. Many civilians fled into the wilds until Stalin’s forces were expelled. ‘These days bogs and forests are more populated than farms and fields,’ wrote Estonian Juhan Jaik. ‘The forests and bogs are our territory while the fields and farms are occupied by the enemy.’ He meant the Russians, and they were soon gone.

Latvians seized three towns from their Soviet occupiers before the Germans arrived; by the end of 1941 Estonian partisans claimed to have captured 26,000 Soviet troops. In Ukraine likewise, the Red Army suffered at the hands of local guerrillas as well as the Germans. Ukrainian Polish teenager Stefan Kurylak was among a host of his countrymen who welcomed the expulsion of the Russians. One of their last acts in his village beside the Dniester was casually to hack down his best friend Stasha, fifteen years old, who had incurred their suspicion. The Germans’ arrival prompted widespread celebration among Ukrainians on both sides of the Soviet border. ‘As there seemed no doubt as to who the victors would be,’ wrote Kurylak, ‘our people…began to cooperate in every possible way with the German “liberators”…Some…even raised right arms to them smartly in the Nazi salute.’

In the first weeks of Barbarossa, the Wehrmacht achieved some of the greatest victories in the annals of war. Entire armies were enveloped and destroyed, notably at Białystok, Minsk and Smolensk. Stalin’s soldiers surrendered in tens and hundreds of thousands. Russian aircraft losses mounted daily. Twenty-year-old pilot Heinz Knoke, a dedicated Nazi, described the exhilaration of strafing: ‘I never shot as well as this before. My Ivans lie flat on the ground. One of them leaps to his feet and dashes into the trees. The remainder forget to get up again…Smiling faces all around when the pilots report. We have dreamed for a long time of doing something like this to the Bolshevists. Our feeling is not exactly one of hatred, so much as utter contempt. It is a genuine satisfaction for us to be able to trample the Bolshevists in the mud where they belong.’

Ivan Konovalov, one of thousands of Stalin’s pilots surprised by dive-bombers on his airfield, wrote: ‘All of a sudden there was an incredible roaring sound. Someone yelled “Take cover!” and I dived under a wing of my plane. Everything was burning – a terrible, raging fire.’ Alexander Andrievich, a supply officer, came upon the remains of a Soviet unit shattered by air attack: ‘There were hundreds upon hundreds of dead…I saw one of our generals standing by a crossroads. He had come to review his troops and was wearing his best parade uniform. But his soldiers were fleeing in the opposite direction. He stood there forlorn and alone, while the troops flooded past. Behind him was an obelisk, marking the route of Napoleon’s invasion in 1812.’ The Deputy Political Officer of the 5/147th Rifles led his men into action shouting, ‘For the Motherland and Stalin!’ and was among the first to fall.

In brilliant sunshine, German troops in shirtsleeves rode their tanks and trucks in triumphant dusty columns across hundreds of miles of plains, swamps, forests. ‘We were following Napoleon’s invasion route,’ Major General Hans von Griffenberg wrote later, ‘but we did not think that the lessons of the 1812 campaign applied to us. We were fighting with modern means of transport and communication – we thought that the vastness of Russia could be overcome by rail and motor engine, telegraph wire and radio. We had absolute faith in the infallibility of Blitzkrieg.’ A panzer gunner wrote to his father, a World War I veteran, in August 1941: ‘The pitiful hordes on the other side are nothing but felons who are driven by alcohol and the threat of pistols at their heads…a bunch of arseholes…Having encountered these Bolshevik hordes and seen how they live has made a lasting impression on me. Everyone, even the last doubter, knows today that the battle against these sub-humans, who’ve been whipped into frenzy by the Jews, was not only necessary but came in the nick of time. Our Führer has saved Europe from certain chaos.’ An artillery battery commander wrote on 8 July: ‘We launch wonderful attacks. There’s only one country one’s got to love because it is so marvellously beautiful – Germany. What in the world could compare with it?’ This officer was killed soon afterwards, but his enthusiasm no doubt cheered his final days.

The advancing armies streamed through towns and cities reduced to flaming desolation either by German guns or by the retreating Soviets. Thousands of casualties overwhelmed Russian field hospitals, arriving in trucks or carts, ‘some even crawling on their hands and knees, covered in blood’, in the words of medical orderly Vera Yukina. ‘We dressed their wounds, and surgeons removed shell fragments and bullets – and with little anaesthetic remaining, the operating theatre resounded to men’s groans, cries and calls for help.’ After the first five days of war, 5,000 casualties were crammed into one Tarnopol hospital intended for two hundred. Along the length of the front, stricken soldiers for whom there were no beds lay in rows on bare earth outside medical tents. Columns of prisoners tramped in bewildered thousands towards improvised cages, their numbers astounding their captors – and the audience in the Kremlin private cinema, when Stalin and his acolytes viewed captured German newsreels. A twenty-one-year-old translator, Zarubina Zoya, wrote: ‘When the commentator announced the number of Soviet troops killed or captured there was an audible gasp in the room, and one army commander close to me gripped the seat in front of him, rigid with shock. Stalin sat in stunned silence. I will always remember what appeared next on the screen – a close-up of our soldiers’ faces. They were just young kids, and they looked so helpless, so utterly lost.’

The world watched the unfolding drama with fascination and profoundly confused sentiments. In America, arch-isolationist Charles Lindbergh proclaimed: ‘I would a hundred times rather see my country ally herself with Britain, or even with Germany with all her faults, than the cruelty, the Godlessness and the barbarism that exist in Soviet Russia.’ Warwickshire housewife Clara Milburn found herself prey to bewilderment, writing on 22 June: ‘So now Russia will get a bit of what she gave Finland – and perhaps a lot more. Mr. Churchill broadcast tonight and said we must stand by Russia. I suppose we must, as she is now against the enemy of mankind. But I wish we need not when I think of her ways, which are not our ways.’ On 1 July a Bucharest streetcar driver, seeing Mihail Sebastian with a newspaper in his hand, asked about the German advance. ‘Have they entered Moscow?’ ‘Not yet. But they will for sure – today or tomorrow.’ ‘Well, let them. Then we can make mincemeat of the yids.’

Euphoria overtook Berlin. Halder, the Wehrmacht’s chief of staff, declared on 3 July: ‘I think I am not exaggerating when I say that the campaign…has been won in fourteen days’; Hitler spoke of a victory parade in Moscow by the end of August. Former doubters in high places felt themselves confounded by Soviet command incompetence, the ease with which thousands of Russian aircraft had been destroyed, the effortless tactical superiority of the invaders. At the front Karl Fuchs, a tank gunner, exulted: ‘The war against these subhuman beings is almost over…We really let them have it! They are scoundrels, the mere scum of the earth – and they are no match for the German soldier.’ By 9 July Army Group Centre had completed the isolation of huge Soviet forces in Belorussia, which lost 300,000 prisoners and 2,500 tanks. Russian counterattacks delayed the capture of Smolensk until early August – a setback that afterwards proved significant, because it cost the Wehrmacht precious summer days – and the Red Army maintained strong resistance in the south. But when the forces of Bock and Rundstedt met at Lokhvitsa, east of Kiev, on 15 September, two entire Russian armies were trapped and destroyed, with the loss of half a million men. Leningrad was besieged, Moscow threatened.

The ruthlessness of the invaders was swiftly revealed. In France in 1940, more than a million French prisoners were caged and fed; in Russia, by contrast, prisoners were caged only to perish. First in hundreds of thousands, soon in millions, they starved to death in accordance with their captors’ design, and inability to cope with such numbers even had they wished to do so – the Reich’s camps had capacity for only 790,000. Some prisoners resorted to cannibalism. Many German units killed POWs merely to escape the inconvenience of supervising their more protracted end. Gen. Joachim Lemelsen protested to the high command: ‘I am repeatedly finding out about the shooting of prisoners, defectors or deserters, carried out in an irresponsible, senseless and criminal manner. This is murder. Soon the Russians will get to hear about the countless corpses lying along the routes taken by our soldiers, without weapons and with hands raised, dispatched at close range by shots to the head. The result will be that the enemy will hide in the woods and fields and continue to fight – and we shall lose countless comrades.’

Berlin was indifferent. Hitler sought to conquer as much land, and to inherit as few people, as his armies could contrive. He often cited the precedent of the nineteenth-century American frontier, where the native inhabitants were almost extinguished to make way for settlers. On 25 June Police General Walter Stahlecker led Einsatzgruppe A into the Lithuanian city of Kaunas behind the panzers. A thousand Jews were rounded up and clubbed to death by Lithuanian collaborators at Lietukis garage, less than two hundred yards from Army HQ. Stahlecker reported: ‘These self-cleansing operations went smoothly because the army authorities, who had been informed beforehand, showed understanding for this procedure.’

The Soviets, for their part, shot many POWs as well as their own political prisoners; when their retreating forces abandoned a hospital where 160 German wounded were held, these were killed either by smashing in their heads or throwing them from windows. A German platoon which surrendered after a Soviet counterattack on the Dubysa river on 23 June was found next day when the Russians were again driven back. They were not only dead, but mutilated. ‘Eyes had been put out, genitals cut off and other cruelties inflicted,’ wrote a shocked German staff officer. ‘This was our first such experience, but not the last. On the evening [after] these first two days I said to my general, “Sir, this will be a very different war from the one in Poland and France.”’ Whether or not the Germans’ atrocity story was true, a culture of massacre would characterise the eastern struggle.

Stalin delegated to Molotov, who strove to overcome his stutter, the task of informing the Russian people that they were at war, in a national broadcast at 1215 on 22 June. In the days that followed, the Soviet warlord met repeatedly with his key commanders – there were twenty-nine sessions on the day of the invasion – and made some critical decisions, notably for an evacuation eastwards of industrial plant. The NKVD embarked on wholesale executions and deportations of ‘unreliable elements’, which included many people who merely bore German names. All privately owned radios were confiscated, so that Russians became dependent on broadcast news relayed into factories and offices ‘at strictly determined times’. For some days, Stalin clung to an absurd, self-justificatory flicker of hope that the invasion represented a misunderstanding. There is fragmentary evidence that NKVD agents in neutral countries sought to explore with German interlocutors the possibility of further negotiations, which were spurned.