Deathride: Hitler vs. Stalin - The Eastern Front, 1941-1945

404 Pages·2010·3.33 MB·English

by  John Mosier

ALSO BY JOHN MOSIER
Grant: A Biography
Cross of Iron:
The Rise and Fall of the German War Machine,
1918–1945
The Blitzkrieg Myth:
How Hitler and the Allies Misread the Strategic
Realities of World War II
The Myth of the Great War:
A New Military History of World War I
DEATHRIDE
HITLER VS. STALIN:
THE EASTERN FRONT,
1941–1945
JOHN MOSIER
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Copyright © 2010 by John Mosier
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Mosier, John, date.
Deathride : Hitler vs. Stalin : The Eastern Front, 1941–1945 / John Mosier.—
1st Simon & Schuster hardcover ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. World War, 1939–1945—Campaigns—Eastern Front. 2. World War,
1939–1945—Germany. 3. World War, 1939–1945—Soviet Union. 4. Hitler,
Adolf, 1889–1945—Military leadership. 5. Stalin, Joseph, 1879–1953—Military
leadership.
I. Title. II. Title: Deathride.
D764.M736 2010
940.54’217—dc22 2010003334
ISBN 978-1-4165-7348-7
ISBN 978-1-4165-7702-7 (ebook)
CONTENTS
I Introduction: Pseudo-Reality and the Soviet Union
II Understanding the Evil Empires: Two Case Histories
III The Dictators’ Gamble
IV Into the Maelstrom: The First Seventeen Days
V Deep Battle: From the Breakthrough to the Fall of Kiev
VI The Campaign of Compromises: October–December 1941
VII The Hollow Victories of 1942
VIII The Planets and Paradoxes of 1942–1943
IX Summer 1943: The Turning Point
X Deadlock: The Great Retreat
XI Death of the Phoenix: The Last Eleven Months of the War
XII The War of Extermination: Allies, Partisans, Criminals
XIII Conclusions: False Victories, Mistaken Beliefs
XIVEpilogue: The Great Patriotic War and the Collapse
Notes
Index
Military history is nothing but a tissue of fictions and legends, only a form of
literary invention; reality counts for very little in such an affair.
Gaston de Pawlowski, Dans les rides du front
I
INTRODUCTION:
PSEUDO-REALITY AND THE SOVIET UNION
In appearance everything happens in Russia as elsewhere. There is no difference
except at the bottom of things.
Marquis de Custine, Letters from Russia (1839)¹
The war between Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler was a savage conflict that raged
over an enormous battlefront stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea. In less
than a year and a half, German, Hungarian, and Romanian armies penetrated into
the depths of the Russian heartland, reaching historic towns on the Volga and the
Don whose last experience of invasion had been centuries before. During the
course of the next two and a half years the Red Army retraced that journey in the
opposite direction, all the way to the Oder and the Danube, reaching cities whose
last experience of Russian soldiery had been almost precisely 140 years earlier,
during the Napoleonic Wars.
The enormous geographic scale of the conflict was more than matched by the
savagery of the fighting, the casualties sustained by the combatants, and the
appalling level of suffering inflicted on the hapless civilians of European Russia
and central Europe, whose peoples had not experienced such a series of
calamities since the Thirty Years War. The scale of suffering and ruin was so
vast as to be unimaginable. Hitler’s wicked and ghastly genocidal campaign
against European Jewry is almost submerged in this litany of horror and
depravity, even though that genocide was one of his two main goals.
Hitler’s other aim was the destruction of Bolshevism. Our loathing and
consternation regarding the Holocaust tends to make us see these two aims as
entirely separate. But before the outbreak of the war on September 1, 1939,
Hitler’s great public relations coup with his fellow Germans and Austrians was
to meld the two. Indeed from his public speeches in the 1930s, one could draw
the not unreasonable inference that his antipathy toward the Jewish people was
largely restricted to those who had espoused Bolshevism.²
A consideration of that complex notion lies outside the aims of this book, as
does the Holocaust itself. Suffice it to say that to accomplish those two tasks
Hitler was willing to see the Third Reich, that mighty state that he had spent
decades creating, destroyed. But today the prosperous, peaceful, and culturally
rich Jewish communities of Germany, Austria, central Europe, and the Baltic can
hardly be said to exist. But neither does the USSR.
That by the first week of May 1945, Hitler was already dead, his armies
destroyed, the cities of what he had intended to be a great imperial realm
shattered by American and British bombers, should not lull us into forgetting the
astonishing extent to which Hitler’s evil empire nearly triumphed.
Stalin, who planned his own holocaust in secret while basking in the world’s
admiration as the man who beat Hitler, survived his former ally by barely eight
years. By that time, the allegedly victorious citizens of the USSR, no less than
those of their client states, were beginning to envy the defeated Germans and
Austrians. Hitler had boasted that the empire he created would last a thousand
years. The one Stalin had forged collapsed before the millennium. The only
enduring legacy of both men is our memory of the mountains of corpses they left
behind.
Given the extent to which Hitler persuaded or tempted the citizens of Austria
and Germany, two of the world’s most culturally and intellectually advanced
nations, into carrying out his nefarious schemes, his infamy, and theirs, naturally
preoccupies us. We sometimes forget that Hitler’s chief adversary for the greater
part of the Second World War was in no way less wicked. When the historical
record is examined fairly, the difference between the depravity of the two men is
difficult to discern. Most of the perceived differences are a function of Stalin’s
one unquestionable triumph: the image of himself and of the state he largely
created.
In the decades since his death, the world has slowly come to an understanding
of his remarkable success in that endeavor, together with an awareness of his
innumerable crimes. There are still die-hard apologists to be found for the man
and his system, and not only in Russia, but by and large they are in pretty much
the same global circus as Holocaust deniers.
The sorry history of Stalin’s propagandistic triumphs, and its slow unraveling,
also lies outside the scope of this book. However, such an understanding is
necessary in order to comprehend the reality of the war between the two evil
empires. Stalin’s great trick was to convince the world that the Red Army had
beaten Hitler outright; at that task he succeeded brilliantly. That the state he
presided over was, in the words of one economic historian, a “victorious loser,”
is realized either imperfectly or not at all; one frequently has the impression that
the collapse of the Soviet state and its main satellites is seen as a natural event,