Chapter 27

(JUNE 1941 GERMANY INVADES SOVIET UNION OPERATION BARBAROSSA)

In many respects the decision to invade Russia was the decision of a single man.

His military staff strongly advised him not to do anything about Stalin until after the British situation and the North African affair was put to bed. He listened, but not very politely and followed his instinct to attack the most dangerous enemy before Stalin could amass the amount of military might to defeat Hitler’s offense and conceivably mount a counter offensive to threaten German soil.

It is a bit of Monday morning quarterbacking to consider Hitler’s solitary decision to attack the Soviet Union six months before a declaration of war on the Axis by Franklin Delano Roosevelt bringing the might of American power into the conflict. In some respects, many historians attribute the move to a form of demented lashing out to push the world into greater chaos and cause as much misery as possible knowing that winning was no longer possible. On the other hand, it carried the markings of sheer genius because if he was successful in eliminating Stalin from the Equation before the Americans got into the nitty-gritty of the war in Europe, then he could devote his total military might to a defense of the Fatherland.

It was known that he listened to Rommel and he listened to Goebbels and they had both told him that they would lose the war no matter if the Americans were involved or not. It was more a matter of shrinking resources in manpower and in logistical support that could not keep up with the wartime consumption of assets. The heavily invested commercial interests in Germany saw the handwriting on the war and did their best to divest from the Third Reich in order to save their companies. The German people never saw losing as a possibility until the debacle at Stalingrad and after that they merely followed orders like a flock of geese being led to the butcher shop.

Of course, there was the well-publicized assassination attempt on the Fuhrer’s life and an ineffective measure of resistance from anti-Nazi citizens that wanted to end this chapter of German history as quickly as possible.

November 1942

In a way, it was entirely depressing to be sitting in my hotel room in war-torn Marseilles listening to the sound of German tanks clanking right down the middle of the city to the amazement of the small children and the complete horror of adults fully aware of the consequences of opposing the orders of the Fuhrer.

The increasing arrogance of my “watchers” was a red flag that told me to find other accommodations away from interference by the Gestapo. Things were changing rapidly down at city hall and only the most pro-Hitler police and militia were being promoted to take charge of the bureaucratic mess. The Vichy bunch was already shipped out to some unknown location inside Germany where they could do no harm from the Gestapo viewpoint.

One of my informants down at the courthouse was a girl called Francesca.

She was part French, part Italian and part Austrian.

She spoke French without an accent, Italian with a cosmopolitan air and Austrian like a barmaid in Vienna.

It was true that she was a bit plain in the face but her body was a Greek paradise. I had used her to get information and paid her for it. She had used me for what she needed and I was entirely in agreement with her demands.

Francesca had told me of her parent’s farm which was just outside of Trieste on the Italian side of the border. We had discussed the option of leaving together to the farm from Marseilles on several occasions and the fact that she was suddenly seen as a possible mistress for some Gestapo types made up her mind to get out of the city as soon as possible. It married up with my need to relocate sooner rather than later because it only took some citizen with a need for ready cash to denounce me to the Gestapo on some cooked-up frame about being a spy. I admit I had done some shady things but it fell far short of spying as I did not want to do something that would undermine the already optimal outcomes I knew would happen in the very near future.

With over a half million men, thousands of superior German tanks and a logistical chain that drained one-third of the Fatherland’s resources, the huge invasion began with the threat of American intervention looming on the horizon. The fact that Hitler was ever the optimist forced the General Staff to throw their customary caution to the wind and enthusiastically endorsed his plans for eliminating Stalin from the global chessboard.

The roar of thousands of tank engines roaring out in fierce unison along the customary main roads east into the Soviet hinterlands from the Polish border made the remaining birds of the region find an alternate habitat away from the noise of human civilization. I had been a part of such great sweeps of military hardware in the assault phase more than once at various times but in terms of only a few dozen tanks and not the numbers involved in the mad dash for the Kremlin walls by the Nazi hordes.

I remembered reading in a Military Science textbook that was known for accuracy that the total invasion force numbered close to 3,240,000 German and Nazi supporters from other aligned nations and that the total of German Armor was just short of 3,150 tanks. In that initial crossing of the line of demarcation that stretched from the desolation of the frigid Baltic Sea to the warmer waters of the Black Sea to the south, the tanks were in tip-top shape with all guns in perfect working order and engines and treads checked and re-checked with German precision for excellence of condition. More than two hundred tanks were left at the starting gate because of major problems with engines or turret issues. They were to be refurbished and added to follow-on reinforcement columns trailing in the ever lengthening supply line that would eventually be far too long to keep viable.

I knew that Stalin’s strategy was to be the “bouncing ball” that was always just out of reach and forced the German forces to advance deeper and deeper into the Motherland never to return to German soil ever again. The consumption of fuel to move the tanks was enormous. In retrospect, it would have been better to use force of arms without the tanks to advance into enemy territory and move the tanks on flat car rails until they were close to the objective rather than subject them to the normal attrition that extensive movement put on the treads and the energy of the tank crews.