Rapid technical change made it more difficult still to decide on a fixed strategy. In the end strategic options owed a great deal to the experience of the last war. When British and French planners sat down in the spring of 1939 to draw up a common war plan they opted for a war of attrition and blockade, such as had brought them victory in 1918. They eschewed the established conventions of war, the concentration of all military forces on the destruction of the enemy forces, in favour of an indirect strategy, using naval strength to isolate Germany from the world market, bombing to wear down domestic morale and economic power, and the Maginot line as an unbreachable rampart against which German armies would hurl themselves until, weakened by the blood-letting and undermined economically, the western Allies would kick in the German door. This was almost exactly the position in the summer of 1918, without the trenches, and it promised a slow if remorseless victory, with low losses. The outlook in Germany and the Soviet Union was quite different, for both states had suffered defeat because of declining economic strength and crumbling morale; both feared attrition war, even if the long land frontiers in the east had permitted the construction of an effective defensive wall. The military in both states continued to follow Clausewitz: force against force, in pursuit of the decisive battle. For this the German strategy of the mailed fist, the hard core of tanks and aircraft, was essential. It was what Ludendorff needed when Germany launched the last abortive offensive in the spring of 1918. National mobilization was to provide the means lacking in the Great War to strike a blow of annihilating power.
In 1939 Britain and France had had enough. Hitler’s determination to revive German power and transcend the limitations imposed in 1919 threatened the fundamental interests and security of the British and French empires. When Hitler refused to abandon further expansion in eastern Europe, in the belief that Britain and France were too weak and divided to obstruct him, he provoked in both states a wave of patriotic indignation and urgent military preparation. When he threatened Poland in August 1939, after months of escalating tension, Britain and France were braced for war. Within two days of the German invasion of Poland on 1 September Britain and France declared war. The two contrasting strategies were unleashed: German armies and air forces smashed Polish resistance in two weeks with a vast pincer movement spearheaded by armoured divisions, supported by waves of bombing aircraft; Britain and France sat on the Mag-inot line, and set in motion the slow wheels of blockade.
It is tempting to argue that, with the current state of military technology, German choices were the right ones. Of course, in the end Germany was defeated by the very battlefield strategies she had pioneered in the early years of war, though attrition warfare, particularly bombing, played its part. But in the opening campaigns German forces were unstoppable. They confounded all those predictions that modern weapons favoured the defence, and indeed offensive operations always prevailed, even against the fixed fortifications of the Maginot line, or the Atlantic Wall, or, in 1945, Germany’s own Westwall built to keep the Allies out in 1939. The rapid armoured thrust, backed up by motorized infantry and large tactical air forces, defeated The Netherlands, Belgium, France, and the British army in May and June of 1940. So successful was the modern battle of annihilation (Vernich-tungsschlacht) that in the summer of 1940 Hitler began to plan a great blow against the Soviet Union using the same battle plan on a vast scale. Ever since the 1920s Hitler had harboured vague plans to carve out a new Germanic empire from the Eurasian heartland. Here was to be found Lebensraum for German settlers, and vast economic resources in what became known as the ‘Great Economic Area’ to provide Germany with the sinews of superpower status. In June 1941 Hitler unleashed Operation Barbarossa against an unprepared Soviet state. In a matter of weeks Soviet forces were close to defeat, destroyed in a series of devastating blows based on the pattern practised so successfully in Poland. Only early mud and snow, and exceptionally heavy losses inflicted by determined Soviet resistance, prevented German victory by the end of 1941. As it was, Hitler felt confident enough that Soviet strength had been expended to declare war on the United States following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December.
The following summer German forces once again drove deep into Soviet territory searching for final victory. Though the Red Army in the south was pushed back to the Volga at Stalingrad and to the very foothills of the Caucasus Mountains, the rest of the Soviet front held. In the south German armies conquered large areas of steppe but could not pin down their enemy to a decisive engagement. When the Red Army finally stood to fight, it was at Stalingrad, where German mobile tactics were much less effective, and where the winter weather and long supply lines weakened German fighting power. In November carefully garnered reserves were hurled at the taut German front, using tanks and aircraft as the German forces did. Stalingrad was encircled and the German forces there forced to surrender. Slowly the Red Army learned to adopt the technology and tactics of the enemy. Tank and air forces were strengthened and organized into tank armies and air fleets. Better radio communications and radio intelligence transformed battlefield performance and knowledge of enemy movements. When German forces renewed the offensive in the summer of 1943 either side of the town of Kursk they were faced with a Soviet force that made the most of up-to-date equipment and better training, and fought with a ferocious patriotism. German assaults were blunted, and then the architect of Soviet revival, Georgii Zhukov, ordered a series of heavy armoured thrusts that broke the German front.
World History
