War and Remembrance (110 page)

“Damn right. Now we get the Japs,” said Aster.

When the evening was over and Janice was left alone, her head reeled with wine, and she was feeling in delighted girlish confusion that the death of her husband was behind her, and that she truly loved two men.

* * *

(from World Holocaust
by Armin von Roon)

TRANSLATOR
’
S NOTE
:
General von Roon’s discussion of Stalingrad concludes the strategic analysis section of
World Holocaust.
The original book sketches all campaigns and battles to the end of the war. But as it happens, this subsequent ground is covered briefly, and with much more anecdotal interest, in the epilogue to Roon’s magnum opus: a personal memoir of his dealings with Adolf Hitler called “Hitler as Military Leader.” This gives interesting glimpses of the Fuhrer in decay during the mounting collapse of Germany on all fronts. My translation continues with excerpts from the memoirs, adding only Roon’s essay on the Battle of Leyte Gulf.

I have taken some liberties with Roon’s writing on Stalingrad. Seen in isolation, the battle was a senseless five-month grinding of whole German armies to hamburger in a remote industrial town on the Volga. One needs the context of the 1942 summer campaign to grasp what happened there. But Roon’s Case Blue analysis is so fogged with names of Russian cities and rivers, and with German army movements, that American readers cannot get through it. So I have inserted some passages of “Hitler as Military Leader” to illuminate the picture, employing only the words of Armin von Roon, and I have tried to cut out as many confusing technical and geographical references as possible.
—
V.H.

Stalingrad fulfilled on the battlefield Spengler’s prophetic vision of the decline of the West. It was the Singapore of Christian culture.

The true tragedy of Stalingrad is that it need not have happened. The West had the strength to prevent it. It was not like the fall of Rome, or of Constantinople, or even of Singapore: not a world-historical crushing of a weak culture by a stronger one. On the contrary! We of the Christian West, had we but been united, could readily have repulsed the barbaric Scythians
out of the steppes in their new guise of Marxist predators. We could have pacified Russia for a century and changed its essential menacing nature.

But this was not to be. Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s one war aim was to destroy Germany so as to win unimpeded rule of the world for American monopoly capital. Rightly he perceived that England was finished. As for the menace of Bolshevism he was either blind to it, or saw no way to eradicate it, and decided that Germany was the competitor he could destroy.

The great Hegel has taught us that it is irrelevant to challenge the morality of world-historical individuals. Morally, if one values the Christian civilization now being swamped by Marxist barbarism, Franklin Roosevelt was unquestionably one of mankind’s archcriminals. But in military history, one regards only how well the political aim of a war leader was achieved. However shortsighted Roosevelt’s aim, he certainly achieved the destruction of Germany.

Our second great assault on the Soviet Union, called “Case Blue,”
^*
led to Stalingrad. It was an insightful concept, it was mainly Hitler’s, and it came close to success. Hitler himself ruined it.

The contrast of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Adolf Hitler in their war-making is altogether Plutarchian. Spidery calculation versus all-out gambling; steadfast planning versus impulsive improvising; careful use of limited armed strength versus prodigal dissipation of overwhelming strength; prudent reliance on generals versus reckless overruling of them; anxious concern for troops versus impetuous outpouring of their lives; a timid dip of a toe in combat versus total war with the last reserves thrown in; such was the contrast between the two world opponents as they at last came to grips in 1942, nine years after they both took power.

In retrospect the world sees Hitler as the disgusting 1945 figure in the bunker: Roosevelt’s trapped victim, a distintegrating, trembling, unrepentant horror lost in dreams, maintaining his grip on a prostrate Reich by sheer terror. But this was not the Hitler of July 1942. Then he was still our all-masterful FUHRER: a remote, demanding, difficult warlord, but the ruler of an empire unmatched by those of Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne, and Napoleon. The glow of German victory lit the planet. Only in retrospect do we see that it was a sunset glow.

Case Blue was a summer drive to end the war in the east.

Our great 1941 drive, Barbarossa, had aimed to destroy the Red Army
and shatter the Bolshevik state in one grand three-pronged summer campaign. We had tried to do too much at once. We had hurt the enemy, but the Russian is a stolid fatalist, with an animal ability to resist and endure. The Japanese unwillingness to attack Siberia — duly reported to Stalin by his spy Sorge from our embassy in Tokyo — had enabled the Red dictator to denude his Asian front and hurl fresh divisions of hardy brutish Mongol troops at us. These winter counterattacks, though halting us in the snows outside Moscow, had petered out. When the spring thaw came we still held an area of the Soviet Union roughly analogous to the entire U.S.A. east of the Mississippi. Who can doubt that under such an occupation the flighty Americans would have collapsed? But the Russians are a different breed, and they needed one more convincing blow.

Case Blue carried forward Barbarossa in its southern phase. The aim was to seize southern Russia for its agricultural, industrial, and mineral wealth. The theme was limited and clear:
Hold in the north and center, win in the south.
Granted that Hitler’s continental mentality could not grasp the Mediterranean strategy, it was the next best thing to do. We were in it, and we had to attack. Moreover, it did not appear that we could fight the war to a finish without the Caucasus oil.

Under all the muddled political verbiage of Hitler’s famous Directive Number 41, rewritten by his own hand from Jodl’s professional draft, the governing concepts of Case Blue were:

1. Straighten out the winter penetrations;
   
2. Hold fast, north and center, on the Leningrad-Moscow-Orel line;
   
3. Conquer the south to the Turkish and Iranian borders;
   
4. Take Leningrad, and possibly Moscow;
   
5. The main objectives in Russia thus achieved, if the enemy still fights on, fortify the eastern line from the Gulf of Finland to the Caspian Sea, and go on the defensive against an emasculated foe.
   

Essentially then, the original Barbarossa goal now shifted to a slanting Great Wall of fortified positions from the Gulf of Finland to the great Baku oil fields on the Caspian, sealing off our “Slavic India.” Other vital benefits, if the campaign succeeded, would be cutting off Lend-Lease via the Persian Gulf, tilting Turkey to our side, and denying our enemies Persian oil. An advance to India might even be in the offing, if all went well, or a northward sweep east of the Volga to take Moscow from the rear. Admittedly, this was adventurous policy. We had failed once, and were trying again with weaker forces. But Russia was weakened, too. The whole grandiose drive of the German people under Hitler for world empire was only a pyramiding of gambles.

If only we could change the war balance by seizing Russia’s wheat and
oil, and then stabilize the eastern front, two political solutions of the war could open up: an Anglo-Saxon change of heart at the prospect of facing our full fury, or a realistic peace by Stalin. Roosevelt’s fear of such a separate eastern peace governed all his war-making. And Stalin remained suspicious to the end that the plutocracies were planning to leave him in the lurch. It was uncertain right up to our surrender whether the bizarre alliance of our foes would not fall apart.

Why in fact did the Americans and British never grasp that only by letting us win against Russia could the world flood of Bolshevism be stemmed? Churchill at least wanted to land in the Balkans to forestall Stalin in middle Europe. If this was bad strategy, because we were too strong and the terrain too difficult, it was at least alert politics. Roosevelt would have none of it. Since he could not annihilate us, he wanted to help the Bolsheviks to do it. So he sacrified Christian Europe to American monopoly capital for a brief gluttonous feast, at the price of a new dark age now fast falling on the world.

After every war, the armchair strategists and the history professors have their pallid fun, telling those who bled in battle how they should have done it. Certain shallow criticisms of Case Blue have been repeated until they have taken on a false aura of fact. Stalingrad was a great and fatal turn in world history, and the record leading up to it should be clear.

Strategically,
Blue was a good plan.

Tactically,
Blue went awry, because of Hitler’s day-to-day interference.

Critics carp that the one acceptable objective of a major campaign is the destruction of the enemy’s armed forces. In the summer of 1942 Stalin had concentrated his armies around Moscow, assuming we would try to end the war by smashing the bulk of his forces and occupying the capital. Our critics assert we should have done so. This would indeed have been orthodox strategy. By striking south we achieved massive surprise. That too is orthodox strategy.

TRANSLATOR’S NOTE:
Russian sources bear out Roon. Stalin was so positive that the attack in the south was a feint to draw off Moscow’s defenses, and he hung on to this idea so long, that only Hitler’s botch of the tactics saved Stalingrad, and possibly the Soviet Union.
—
V.H.

We are also told that the strategic aim of Case Blue was
economic, ano
therefore wrong. One must destroy the enemy’s armed force, then one can
do as one pleases with his wealth; so the banal admonition goes. These critics miss the whole point of Blue. It was a plan to enforce a
gigantic land blockade of the poor but governing north rump of the Soviet Union,
by depriving it of food, fuel, and heavy industry. Blockade, if one can enforce it, is a tedious but tested way to humble an enemy. When Blue was planned, the Japanese were running wild in the Pacific and in Southeast Asia. We assumed that they would neutralize the United States for a year or more. Alas, the stunning early turnabouts at Midway and Guadalcanal freed Roosevelt to flood Lend-Lease aid to the Russians in 1942, past our blockade. That made a powerful difference.

Finally, critics contend that Blue’s double objective, Stalingrad and the Caucasus, required a stretching out of the southern front far beyond the capacity of the Wehrmacht to hold it, so that the outcome of the campaign was foredoomed.