School of War - Ep. 9: David Stahel on the Eastern Front in WWII

Episode Date: December 14, 2021

Biography David Stahel is a senior lecturer of history at the University of New South Wales in Australia. His research focuses on European military history, specifically Nazi-Soviet warfare from 1941-1945. Stahel is the author of several books, including his latest, Retreat from Moscow: A New History of Germany's Winter Campaign, 1941-1942. Times 01:29 - Introduction 06:33 - Germany sends troops into the Soviet Union, summer 1941 12:24 - Flaws in Germany's plan 14:50 - "Cauldron" battle 22:10 - Culpability of German soldiers for atrocities during Operation Barbarossa 26:55 - Germans cede land to the Soviet Union, winter 1941-1942 29:38 - German's defensive position and strategy during the winter 39:11 - Ideology and military strategy 45:20 - Applicable lessons to strategists today Recorded on November 23, 2021

In the summer of 1941, Adolf Hitler launched the largest military operation in history before or since. Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union. Striking east, numerous German armies engaged in a breakneck war of maneuver, engaging in vast encirclements, breaking through resistance and pressing rapidly toward Moscow, leaving death and terror in their weight. By the winter, the offensive ground to a halt, and momentum shifted to the communists. This is the moment the world stood still, and convention holds that the Russian counteroffensive,

combined with Hitler's decision to declare war in the United States shortly after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, marked the turning point of the war. But today, I hope you'll indulge me in my guest as we both discuss the grim realities of warfare on the Russian step, but also explore an alternative theory, that Germans were doomed to defeat all but from the moment they crossed the line of departure into the east. It is a prescription for war, this Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.

December 7, 19, 23rd. a date which will live in infamy. The bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate. We continue to face a grave situation in Iran. And the people who knock these buildings down will hear all of us soon. We shall fight on the beaches. We shall fight on the landing grounds. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets.

We shall never surrender. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean, and thanks for joining School of War. I'm delighted to be joined today by, David Stahl. He's senior lecturer in European history at the University of New South Wales, speaking to us from across the Pacific in Australia right now. David, thanks for joining. Thank you very much for having me. You are the author most recently of a fascinating book, one of a series you've written on the general subject of Nazi Germany's war against the Soviet Union. The latest is called Retreat from Moscow, the new history of Germany's winter campaign,

1941 to 42. And we're going to talk about that today in the war on the Eastern Front more broadly. But before we do, I wonder, could you tell folks a bit about yourself? You know, how did you come to focus on the war? This is your fifth book on the subject. I understand you do some teaching for the Australian military. Just walk us through your life and career. I started out studying as an undergraduate at Monash University,

which is a big Melbourne University. And it was basically there that I discovered the Second World War and the interest I had with it. And one of the pieces of advice I got is if you want to pursue this, you're going to have to go overseas. And so I sort of started what has become the journey. And, you know, I ended up in the US. I ended up in England for my master's at King's College. They've got a wonderful war studies program. And from there, I made the jump to Germany.

Ended up living 11 years there. Obviously, learned German, got to know the archives, the libraries, the professors. And I'd probably say the one thing, you know, the old saying, the more you know, the more questions you have. that's probably been my evolution because I never would have thought. I mean, I went to tech school back in the day, so I was going to be a tradesman or something. But as I just kept going through those various academic rungs, I realized how much fascination I had. And, you know, living overseas, you really have to be committed. Learning a foreign language, you really have to be committed. But I met wonderful people. And as I started with the PhD, I always thought that would be the

most difficult thing I would ever do. But actually, because there was so much interest, I found it probably easier than some of the other degrees that I'd done. And yeah, got to the end of it and thought to myself, well, this is, this is maybe a career now. So, you know, it wasn't immediate. It took a while to get that. I think I wrote two more books while I was in Germany. And then I made the transition to the University of New South Wales, which is where I'm at. And just to pick up on your point there, the University of New South Wales has the contract for the Australian in Defense Force Academy. So I'm kind of in both worlds. I mean, a civilian university nominally, but I actually teach on a military base. Well, let me ask you a question that a,

foolish undergraduate might ask, but I'm asking it because I want to hear you kind of make the case. Why do we care about the German military? I mean, they lost, they were evil, they were up to no good. What does it profit us to go as deep as, for example, you have into the nature of their operations, their strategic thinking, the nature of the fighting man and the officer corps. What's the point? Can I just say your articulation there sounded like my father 20 years ago? A loving, wonderful man, but when I was doing this, he was like, what hell is this? The Germans lost the war. Everybody knows that. Who cares? But look, I think it's a really good question. And I think especially if I assume our audience, I mean, I think in military history, you can often be

wrong-footed at just how well-read your audience actually are. But if we assume that people really don't know much about it. The first thing I would say there is if one just has an anecdotal understanding of the Second World War, and I do that with my first year course, we used to teach a Second World War first year course, and I would ask them, who is this? And I would put up a picture of Romel. And I would get a sea of hands. They knew who Romel was. And then I would say, well, for those of you who don't know, this guy is the Africa core commander. That's probably where it's most famous. And he commands no more than three German divisions. Then I put up a picture of a guy named Fida von Bok, for whom many people have no idea who that is, they certainly couldn't

recognize him. In all the years that I did that, I got one student once who put up his hand and knew who he was. Fita von Bok in the same year, Rommel goes to North Africa in 1941, Romual commands three divisions. Buck commands 75, and he's one of three army commanders. It's really to make the point that the war that we understand that we fight as Anglo-Americans is really going to be fought and one on the Eastern Front, and yet we know so very little about it. And that's not in any way meant to diminish Australia's contribution or America's contribution. Of course, we're fundamental to the outcome. But in terms of the blood cost of this war, that is going to be waged by the Red Army.

And we are talking millions and millions of men. Keep in mind, D-Day, they get onto the continent in June of 1944, three years after this mulching machine in the East has really taken the best of the vanguard. So understanding why we have success in the theaters that we do is fundamental to understanding, A, the German war and B, where is that German war being fought? Because it's not being fought in North Africa. I mean, yes, but the overwhelming bulk is the Eastern Front. Well, that leads us nicely into the way I wanted to actually start talking about your book, which covers the sort of Russian winter offensive of 41 and 42. But I wanted to step back

and talk about the Eastern Front more broadly a bit. Could you talk a bit about the scale of thing, which I think, you know, even for those of us who know a little bit about the war, it's, you know, it's stunning, really, to contemplate. You know, you think about the American decision, Marshall's decision, midway through the war to limit the U.S. Army at 90 ground combat divisions. So that's going to be the whole U.S. Army. How many divisions do the Germans take into Russia in the summer of 41 without even getting to the Russians, so we can talk about too? So Operation Barbarossa basically includes about 150 divisions. Some of will say 140. It can depend on whether you're counting security divisions and mountain divisions and so on.

But that's the number we're looking at. And again, if we have the benchmark of Rommel, that's three divisions. So it really gives you an idea. That equates to in real terms about 3.2 million men. And that's before you start counting Axis allies. So the Soviets, sorry, so the Finns are also in this war. advance with about 450,000 men in total. The Romanians have 320,000 men.

The Slovakians will come with 40,000, the Italian send a core of 40,000, the Hungarian send a core of 40,000. We get close to 4 million by the end. And as you say, that's before you start counting the Soviets. So it's in terms of scale, in terms of numbers, it's huge. One core in Rommel's Africa Corps, there are 44 cores on the Eastern Front for the Germans.

So when I was younger, if I met a German veteran and asked where in the war did you serve, almost inevitably he would have served in the east. And so talk us through the launch of the campaign in the summer, through to the point where your book picks up in December. It's broadly a story of German advance and Russian retreat. What else would you say about this phase of the fighting? What is the war like in the east in the summer and fall of 41? Yeah, that's a really important point. I think that the one thing we've got to try and understand about the Eastern Front, and it's going to be very important for understanding the winter as well, is how do we understand success? That's such an important point. A lot of people just start writing their book, and success seems to be self-evident. Isn't it just clear? Whoever's doing the advancing must be being successful. The problem with that is it assumes that both sides have the same starting point, the same resource base, the same population.

size and so on. And that's not the case. And one of the things that I was always interested when I first started to encounter Barbarossa was how people could write large amounts about, oh, how, give you mind, this is the 90s when I first started reading books that were written in the 70s or in the 80s, typically. They would talk about how successful the German army was, how it carries all before it, the huge numbers of Soviet prisoners of war and someone. And in all of this discussion, I was always waiting for the part where they explained, yes, okay, that may all be true. But then why is Barbara Rosser, which is explicitly a six to ten week campaign, why do they never, with all this apparent success, achieve any real success?

How come the Red Army is never annihilated? And it's only when I really started looking at this more seriously as a postgraduate, and certainly by the time I was doing my PhD, that I became very interested and quite convinced of the idea that if you really want to understand war, you need to have some kind of benchmark. You just can't go on, well, this was unprecedented victories, therefore in and of itself, it must be successful. And I got into looking at what were the war directives, what were the Germans seeking to achieve with Barbarossa? And in a nutshell, they are quite explicit about destroying the Red Army in the border areas. These large encirclements will close in places like

Minsk and so on, destroy the Red Army as they understood it. And then the rest of the campaign would just be exploitation, and hence it would be over in the summer. And without going into a big long history of Barbarossa, that clearly does not happen. But there's a flip side to it, and that is we need to ask the question, not just how much are the Soviets losing, but what are these German victories costing the Wehrmacht? And in that sense, one last little caveat, if I said before, there's 150 German divisions in Barbarossa, very important to understanding what happens is the overwhelming bulk of those are just infantry divisions. That means they march into the Soviet Union.

They have horses. There are 600,000 horses in Barbarossa. It's only 30 or so divisions that are motorized or panzers. So this Bevegungskrie, this war of movement that the Germans fight absolutely depends on a finite, small number of divisions. And these early battles take a very high toll on them, very high toll. Boudarian, who's one of these Panzer Group commanders, there are four in the Soviet Union, is down to a quarter of his strength by the end of the summer.

And that really tells a story, because if the Germans can no longer keep advancing, then what is the Eastern Front? It is a huge high-intensity war with millions of men fought against a nation that is engaged in forced mobilization on a colossal scale. In fact, the Soviet army will have more men by the end of 1941 than it had on the 22nd of June. So for all these apparent German successes of huge numbers, the Red Army is still growing in size. That's not to say the quality is there, but the Germans also don't have the quality. Their panzer groups are being worn down. So is the flaw then or the mistake conceptual or in execution?

That is to say, was the German notion to encircle these Russian armies and destroy them basically correct, but they failed to execute it? Or was there something just broken in the plan itself that even had it had been successful? well, they would still not have carried the day? I think we need to understand that on a couple of levels, and I always like the idea of looking at things, you know, so tactically, operationally, strategically. I'm sure many of you all, your listeners will have a good sense of what those different stages are.

But the mantra always was that Germans were very good tactically, and I think that's very true. And older historiography said they were very good operationally. I'm more critical of that. But I think most people say the Germans were terrible strategically. So to answer the question, yes, they're very good. very good. They are actually able to encircle forces. And if there wasn't this unending strategic sort of space in the Soviet Union, unlike in the French campaign, perhaps that would be enough.

But the reality is the Soviet population is as large as it is. It is as disparate. It is such a large country. And remember, the Soviet Union is an expanding funnel. So as you advance east, you're going to have to stretch your forces, not just in terms of depth, but in terms of their sort of lateral movements. And that pulls the Germans sort of apart, and it makes it much more difficult to form up these operational sort of fists that are going to break through each time. So the Germans are losing men in terms of attrition,

just by the sheer fighting in the movement east, but they're also having to stretch their forces. And that just means that there's a finite distance to which they can really advance. And that's just in terms of combat power. If you also look at the logistics of it, the German plans are very clear. They really state quite unambiguously, we can advance about 600 kilometers before the system will break down. Without train lines and other such things, and that's heavy infrastructure. The Germans know about that too, but their idea is, well, it's kind of simple.

The train lines in the Soviet Union are bigger. You just knock the pins up, push the lines closer together, knock them back down again, and the train will run. except the reality is, of course, the Soviets destroyed a huge amount of their own infrastructure. The resourcing for the groups who are going to conduct this railroad conversion wasn't very good. And ultimately, that just does not work the way the Germans plan. Talk about this notion of cauldron battle. And I suppose what I'm interested in is what is the experience of that kind of fighting like? Because it really is something on this scale and at this speed new under the sun.

I mean, encirclement has been around for as long as there's been organized warfare. But what is cauldron battle? What's it like to be stuck in the pocket? You know, what's the purpose of the exercise? How does this actually work? That's a really, I think, important point because it's hard for us to really visualize what this experience must be. But again, if you look at the eastern front and imagine we are talking, you know, a thousand plus kilometers of distance, there's no way.

And older maps misrepresented this. You would see a line north to south. Here's where the Germans are. And that is, that is, that is, that is deceptive. Really what's going on, because you have to imagine this is also 1941, which is to say big swamps, large, virgin forests that don't exist today. You just can't push forces through those. So what ultimately happens is the German advance is taking place on roads. The Germans push through on the borders.

So in, for the, for example, army group center, they have two Panzer groups. They push through with Herman Horton the north and Guderian in the south. And the idea is you drive to a point, in this case Minsk, to link them up. They do actually enact a slightly smaller incirclement before that, but let's keep this simple. Now, we call that the Battle of Minsk, and that could suggest to people, well, it's all happening in this city called Minsk, the capital of Belarus today. But actually, it really should be termed the Battle of Belarus, because it's taking place on this country-scale. scale. It's a, you know, it's a republic of the Soviet Union, but today a country. When they finally link up, you end up with 300,000 Soviet prisoners of war. Again, that suggests

something to us. Oh, yeah, a great German victory. It happens in 10 days. It's basically over in the latter part of June. What a great German success. But that's where you could be quite wrong if you didn't, if you just explored this battle from, again, operational strategic files, you would get that picture. It's a great German success. But then you have to do, and this is one of the things that I found so illuminating and did in all the books, including the retreat from Moscow book, is I spent a lot of time looking for reading German letters, German diaries. You can get a very different perspective of the great German success. Because ultimately what's happening is the forces that do the encirclement, the back half of that encirclement is the motorized and panzer groups. They close up behind the Soviets. What do the Soviets do? Command and control breaks down. And the natural inclination of forces that have been encircled, if they're even aware that they have been encircled, which isn't always the case for the Soviets. They don't always know what's going on. But most of them, and this will be the story of 1941, are trying to get out of the encirclement.

They go east, they go south, they go north. They are breaking into these panza groups, or these panza divisions, motorized divisions, and they are a very thin veneer of this so-called cauldron. The actual, the extent to which it's hermetically sealed is a bit of a joke. And they suffer very real losses. And that's what I was talking about before. People say to me, oh, where do they lose? Are they winning all the battles? What do you mean they lose men?

Yes, overall, the German army doesn't lose very many men. If you just ask how many of the 3.2 million died in 1941, not that many. But if you look at where are they dying, their infantry elements, the motorized infantry that go along with the Panzer divisions, there's not a lot of them. They are also specialized troops in a lot of ways. And they are day after day after day in combat. And so they definitely suffer losses. And it's not just the losses in terms of the combat.

Just the constant movement up and down the front on very bad roads. These are very, you know, sandy roads. They often talk about driving in a cloud. Imagine what that does to your radiator because they're 19, or actually probably 1930s designed air filters and things. It just gets into the engine. They try to flush it out with a lot of oil, but it doesn't work. And once you start losing mobility, you are also hammed.

strong in terms of your ability to respond to these waves of Soviets who are constantly trying to break out of your encirclements. So, cauldron battles are on the one hand, a great German mechanism for success, but incredibly frightening if you actually experienced one, especially if you're on the eastern edges of them. And so talk a little bit more then about the German soldier of this moment. I mean, they are, this is a mass army. The only way you can raise that many men from a population base of about 80 million is to have a huge number of your youth in military service, which is another problem, I'm not going to go off on a tangent here, but if you imagine that the German war effort requires obviously a lot of workers and you're fielding huge armies,

this is part of the reason why this campaign absolutely needs to be, what it was planned to be, a short campaign, because these men need to come back and go into the factories. there's a whole parallel war being fought against Great Britain, which requires completely different armaments, aircraft and, you know, U-votes and such things. So if this war continues, that's a real problem. So a lot of them are sort of 18 through to the late 20s. As to how ideological it is, that's become a real debate within my field of sort of German military history. The old debates used to be, is the Vermont a criminal organisation? Well, unambiguously, yes.

But remember, if you go back even 30 years ago, oh, no, no, no, no, the criminal organizations were the SS. Then there was the Vermacht. And, of course, you know, the German generals didn't know what was going on. Well, that's all been turned on its head by some wonderful historiography of the last 30 years. And so the question now becomes, well, how far down the pyramid does that filter? We know that, you know, a lot of those men who would be 18 went to national socialist schools, were in the Hitler youth and so on because they were young enough to have,

had a formative years being exposed to that. But again, not all of them. I mean, if you go to places like Berlin, that tended to be a hotbed of the sort of communists back in the day, where they all converted. And I've done a few projects looking at German soldiers letters. I did a book actually last year called Soldiers of Barbarossa, which just basically took, you know,

I think we looked at about 250 different guys in their various collections and tried to get a bit of a snapshot of who are these guys. What are they right about? And there is a lot of ideological terms being used. But again, how ideologically and how does that equate, like with the thing we always think of is how criminal are they? Are they shooting? Are they on board with the mass murder of Soviet Jews, which is going to be a feature of

Operation Barbarossa as well, not from the planning stages, but certainly by the early weeks. And there's evidence of that, but at the same time, there's a lot of letters. Zagai has done a study in Germany, and he would say about 1% talk about that. But the big caveat there is, if you were engaged in that, would you write your wife? Would you write your mother about what you've been up to in the east? You'd have to come from a very national socialist family to do that, I think. So, well, let's stick with this for a second. So there has been this sort of healthy corrective over the course of the last generation or so.

I mean, you look at the, you know, on one level, very good World War II movies that come out in the, you know, 60s and the 70s, Germans are generally portrayed as, you know, on the whole, pretty good chaps. know, on the other side, of course, but, you know, their officers are basically trustworthy, frustrated camp commandants and the like of the POW camps and the great escape and things like that. There's always a kind of sinister Gestapo character who comes in and sort of, you know, is clearly a baddie. But the Germans are treated fairly respectfully. To what extent is the average German infantrymen engaged in what we would understand to be atrocities, whether against the Jews or Russian civilians or however?

That's such a good question. So my take on a lot of that, debate is we, again, in the same way that I say, if you understand, well, we have to understand the benchmark for success. Well, to understand criminality, I think we have to have a sense of what are we talking about? And a lot of the works that engage with this, we'll talk about the big touchstone events that we all know about. We know that Operation Barbarossa includes this Holocaust. So that's a natural area. And we know that there's an anti-partisan warfare and therefore there's a lot of killing behind the front. But there's other parts to Operation Barbarossa,

which we really need to grapple with in order to try and determine this question of individual German soldier culpability for criminal activity. So one of the problems with Barbarossa operational is it's not well resourced in terms of providing the men with food. The supply lines are overtaxed and they're basically spending their time

trying to bring ammunition and fuel forward. So what does that lead for the average German soldier? Well, they have to live off the land. That's the terms that they use. And if you're living off the land in an extremely impoverished part of the world, that means as they come through in waves, basically, it's not all sort of north-south, the Germans just move through and then there's no more Germans.

They're constantly coming through because, again, they're advancing on roads. They come into villages, the first wave often take what they need. But then there's going to be a second, a third, a fourth, a fifth, wave. And as these men come through, and you can see it in their letters and diaries, they're like, oh, we walk into these villages and every time it's the same thing. They're throwing their hands up and crying, oh, we have no food, we have no food. But you only have to go through their little hovels a little bit because they always hide stuff. And of course, these people are doing that because they want something to live on through the winter. The men take what they need,

or what they want, sometimes a lot more than just what they need. They say, oh, it's going to be a great feast tonight. We've got three chickens. And we know where to find all. these things. Now, the consequences of that behavior are very clear. There is mass hunger and starvation in the winter of 41, 42. Now, to what extent would that class as criminal activity? I guess this is an individual question. Some people say, yeah, but the Germans had to eat too. Right. Yes. At the same time, they are an invading army, and they don't just often take what they need. They take as much as they can possibly get. And there's a very clear consequence. And it's not just food as well. When they start getting into the colder months, they're taking clothes. They take farming implements. If they've got

horses, well, we can use those to replace them. And these are impoverished people. They are taking the very means by which these people depend to survive. And so I kind of class this as secondary criminality, because the act itself isn't intended to kill or necessarily even harm the person. But that will be the very real consequence. And you don't have to look too far into German letters before. Some of them have that sense. They have a very real sense of, well, these people, I wonder what they're going to do. Or these people, they've nothing anymore.

The infrastructure in the cities is also being removed. There's hospitals, of course, but they're closed off now to everyday people. Medicines aren't distributed. Again, the big sort of organized factories, they lose most of the equipment that they need to function. So the consequences, the mass starvation, it's basically preordained and it's caused by individual Germans. It isn't the Ironszats group and the specialized group that are going out and shooting Jews, but you could say the average soldier had no association with that. This is the level at which the average German soldier very much does and they themselves are

doing it, not just consuming the food, but stealing it, stealing the clothes. And when it comes to the winter, they'll be the one saying, well, look, you know, it's pretty hard because this family is now being kicked out, but there's not enough room in this village anyway, and we need to ensure our own security, so they're going to have to go somewhere else. And then, of course, when the winter comes, you document how once the Germans are in the defensive

and oftentimes seating ground to the Russians, the policy of, and you're going to pronounce this better than me, but of the Wuston zone and creating a sort of desert space in the front of German lines is applied across the front. So here you're engaged in really acts of totally, warfare, right? You're burning villages, you're eliminating anything in the way of resources that Soviet soldiers might avail themselves of. Or structures for observation. I mean, it's a flattening of the landscape, right? Absolutely. Yeah, no, that's a really good point. You know, I think

the interesting thing is a lot of people think of the sort of scorched earth policies as being something in the latter part of the war, but you're 100% right. That's happening already in 1941. It's happening with the Soviets when they're withdrawing, which is also part of the problem. They're also contributing into the destruction of the environment. But the Soviet scorched earth policies really pale by comparison, at least in 1941, by what the Fairmark will do in December, January, 4142. They are much more thorough. And in some ways, that's part of, you know, maybe we get onto it,

but it's part of the reason why I see the winter of 4142 is being perhaps different from some of the more the older accounts. you know, it's not necessarily the case is what I argue in the book, that it's, you know, we have this kind of narrative that it's all chaos and disaster for the Germans in the winter of 41, 42. Now, there are definitely elements of that, but that's got this sort of inflated notion in our head. The reality is somewhat different. And part of that coming to terms with the reality is it's not just the Germans who suffer that way. People will always say to me, yes, but the Soviets have better uniforms, but you imagine trying to live in the winter for a week. Just because you have

a great winter uniform doesn't mean it's not freezing. It's not like the Soviet Army don't suffer, huge numbers of frostbite cases. Yes, the Germans have worse uniforms, no question. But typically they are, because they're on the defensive, they are inhabiting villages or they try and occupy bunkers. They will move in the open when they are moving back to the next set of villages or the next bunker system, such as they're often occupying Soviet bunkers that have formerly been built. You can't really build in the winter because the ground is too frozen. But the Germans move from these occupied positions, and they will destroy anything that they occupy. So as the Soviets move forward, there's a lot of Soviet soldiers who spend most of the

winter literally in the open. Some units of the Soviets, even with better uniforms, have higher levels of frostbite. Some years ago, I remember a wise instructor in our infantry course for the Marines in Quantico explaining to me how if your goal is to kill the enemy, being on the offense versus being on the defense are essentially interchangeable activities. They're both ways to kill the enemy. And circumstances may require you to be on the one or the other. And so the argument you make, and correct the wording of this if I'm getting you wrong, but you're presenting almost sort of a mirror image of the conventional wisdom, which let's say it runs

something like, you know, tremendous German success in the summer because they're gaining ground, and then failure in the winter because they're losing. Your point is, sure, operational success of a sort in the summer and fall with the gaining a gram, but strategic failure because the costs are simply too high and ultimately the goal is not achieved. And then in the winter, when they're thought to be losing, actually because of the costs that they're imposing on the Russians in the defense, you know, this may go too far, but for the first time since the summer, they're actually exacting a cost that may, this is the part part goes too far,

that may in the long run help them in the overall struggle. But I guess you would say that the mistakes they've made in the summer already have kind of made that a foregone conclusion. They're just kind of delaying things. Yeah. So that's well said. I mean, again, if we understand German success is built on a finite number of units, these mobile operational units,

these have been largely lost by the end of the summer. and the ability for them to restore that isn't just about how many tanks can Germany produce because people can say, oh, but by 940, 344, they're producing lots of tanks. You need to look at the holistic resourcing. So one of the key things is trucks, and that is the thing that the Germans really do not have enough of. In fact, even Barbarossa is kind of a remarkable story for how much motorization Germany is able to bring to bear.

And don't forget the fact that they have scoured Europe. I mean, it's a remarkable story. go to Switzerland and buy something like 12,000 trucks and they go through south-east in Europe, which they're just occupied, and they're pulling trucks out of everywhere. So once you've lost a lot of these, and we're talking hundreds of thousands, the ability to replace them isn't about, well, how many more can we produce? Because you're just, you're just, you know, it's a drop in the bucket, really. Germany does not have that productive capability. So once you've lost this, Franz Halder writes it in his diaries, says the army we had of June 22nd.

June 22nd, 1941, we will never have again. And in that sense, he's quite right. So these have very real implications. But again, to pick up your point, if the standard that I use to understand success in Barbarossa is looking at what are the Germans seek to achieve and then basically being able to say, as good as their operations may have been, they certainly do not equal that strategic goal. Well, the inverse is true of the winter.

So in order to be consistent and, I guess, fair, my starting point for the winter was to say, okay, what is the German war directive? What are they seeking to do in the winter? And there are very helpfully is a new German war directive issued on the 8th of December. Keep in mind the Soviet counteroffensive starts on basically the 5th of December. But that's also not what people really think. So yes, that is our start date. But these are multiple Soviet reserve armies that are in a sense well behind the front. And the first attack is literally just one division out of 75 being attacked on the 5th of December. So the Germans have no sense that these reserve armies even exist and they have no understanding of what's about to come. They think, okay,

our offensive is finally ground to an end. We cannot really seize Moscow or encircle it. So I guess that's the winter quarters now. And on that same day that they're calling it off, there is this attack. I think it's the 36 motorized infantry division somewhere north of Moscow gets hit by what they would think is a local attack. Over the days, this keeps building because more and more Soviet forces are arriving at the front. And it's also starting to affect Guderian. He's well south of Moscow. And it suddenly starts to dawn on them. This is a general offensive. My God, the Soviets had not just reserves. They have a lot of reserves. And so on the 8th of December, this war directive is issued. It basically calls an end to German offensive operations. That was already basically the case in

practice, but now it is formalizing that. And it is very helpfully setting out what do they mean by a defensive operation? Actually, I've got to wording here somewhere, but not that it really matters. They're fundamentally interested in, yeah, here we go. I've got it right in front of me. The severe weather, winter weather has come surprisingly early in the east. That's actually not true. It wasn't early at all, but that's what the German said. And the consequent difficulties in bringing up suppliers compel us to abandon immediately all major offensive operations and go over to the defensive. The way in which these defensive operations are to be carried out will be decided in accordance with the purpose which they are intended to serve and then it lists the key point

to hold areas which are of great operational or economic importance to the enemy. What does that mean in layperson's terms? It means the Germans must hold large population areas. This is fundamental to the east because that is where all the infrastructure you require to hold out in this very vast and very barren landscape is going to be found. So if you imagine to sustain a big professional army, you need things like logistics, the trains are all going to go, that roads are all going to go to the big cities. But the cities have got, you know, radio stations and airfields, hospitals, they've got heated barracks, warehouses, they've got mechanical workshops, industrial kitchens. And all the, you know, radio stations, you know, radio stations, you know,

things to look after the soldiers, everything from postal communication to cinemas, that we're having army brothels, all of that stuff is in these big population centres. The Germans identify that early on. And if you then ask the simple question, do they manage to hold these large population centers? The answer is yes. Most of the big areas that they understand we need to defend north to south across an 800-kilometer long front for army group center, they will hold most of them. They will lose one called Kalinan in the very north, but that's right on the front lines at the beginning of the Soviet offensive anyway. And another one called Kaluga. But if you look at Rejjief and Smolensk and Vyazma and Bryansk and Oral and Kursk, they hold them.

And that's really what the Germans are seeking to do. So although people can say to me, yeah, but they're losing, they're falling back all the time, the Germans are very real that not every position, not every bridge, not every tiny little creek is a strategic position they need to defend. They've identified what they need to defend. And if we then just ask that basic question, do they manage it? Yeah, they hold them. They hold them through the winter. That's what they set out to do.

So the Germans actually achieve their strategic goal for the winter in a way they never achieved their strategic goal for the summer. The operations equal the strategic conception. Again, that's not true of the winter. And if you ask the, I know I'm talking a lot now, but this will be my final point. That's really interesting. If you ask the opposite question. So what were the Soviets seeking to achieve in the winter of 41, 42? And did they achieve that?

Well, they is of January. Originally, they just have goals of pushing back the Germans. So in that sense, in December, they do achieve their goals, but they're very modest goals, just pushing them back from Moscow. And then they get very ambitious. They start to realize, wow, we're doing so well. And the Stavka start coming up with crazy plans. They basically have a small encirclement that's going to be centered on this town called Vyazma. I know this is very hard without really good geography, but let's just say they're trying to do the small encirclement on a place called Vyazma, and they want to do a much larger one that's going to be centered on Smolensk.

That larger one is trying to destroy, it's actually in the Stavka Plan, army group center. That is six German armies, I can't actually remember off the top of my head how many cores and 70 plus divisions. So it's incredibly bold. And if you just ask the question, do they encircle Army Group Center? No. Do they eliminate any of those armies?

No. Do they destroy a single German corps? No. They cut off a number of German divisions, but those German divisions, while quite broken down because of the experience, they've managed to break through and get back to German lines.

In other words, the Soviets never destroy a major German formation in this war. And so do they achieve their strategic goal? Definitely no. Now, I know that's not the only way to understand the winter, but that's a pretty good indicator in terms of who's achieving their goals. The only other way to understand it, I think, is to look at just sheer losses. And that also paints a picture. The Germans, through the winter of 41, 42, lose 263,000 casualties.

That's huge for the Germans. They really can't afford that. But if you then ask the question, how many did the Soviets lose in that same three-month period? They lose 1.6 million. That is a frightening number. And for all that the Soviet population is bigger than the German population, they can't afford that. At that attrition rate, they will never get to Berlin.

It's phenomenally expensive. In fact, there are orders from Zhukov as early as the first days of December saying, stop attacking German fortified positions. What are these guys doing? That's the consequence of having, though, a lot of force generation, which restores the numbers in the Red Army, but doesn't mean you've got good NGOs or officers. And so they are leading them into disasters. And one theme of the book that I found to be really thought-provoking is this question of ideology.

So over and above the question of incompetence or maybe kind of intermingled with it, you point out both the Germans and the Soviets because the nature of their regimes, the nature of their politics influences the strategic decision-making and perhaps decision-making at lower levels as well, just the investment in spectacle. and prestige, the notion of, you know, losing ground as something cowardly and gaining ground as something good, that this has, you know, as it were, deleterious effects on actual military efficiency. I thought that was a really interesting kind of point of view. It often bothers me not to just sort of wander into other debates here, but one does come across people making

arguments, for example, in the field of international relations that, you know, nations operate according to a kind of ruthless necessity and that everyone, generally speaking, has a pretty clear picture of what the actual dangers are in the world and what the actual advantages are that they might obtain. And there's often not quite enough credit given to the way in which people's worldviews really do muddy up their vision and influence their vision,

their vision of the world and the decisions they make as a consequence. And that seems to be very much in evidence here. Yeah, look, I mean, there's a pragmatism as well, but you're right. I mean, that's, I think, one of the big problems. And I think it's an area where in the scholarship, we need to do more work. We have a lot of work that talks about ideology, but I think that the connection between ideology is often used in literature that discusses criminality.

So the Holocaust and the criminal Varmacht people will then look at that angle. If what we're interested in is more than military, I wonder, how does that cross over? So, you know, I read a lot of this literature that talks about the criminality because I think it's very important. It's, there's a direct relationship. These are the same men who are doing these things. But I've always been fascinated by perhaps more operational military issues. And an article I did a couple of years ago talked about what is national socialist military thinking? Like, what does it mean to say that?

If there is a national socialist worldview, how does that translate into the way in which military professionals will filter information to do the things that they want to do. And as I say, I think we're at the sort of beginning stages of understanding that. It's a lot about trying to quantify culture, which is hard, right? It's easy to quantify the strengths of a Panzer Division, just go into those files and look at the number of the amount of fuel they have. But quantifying culture is difficult, both because it's a difficult concept, but there's also so many individuals.

and we don't have very much information. I mean, people would say to me, we do have a lot of information about the Denmark. Yes, at a basic level, we do. But if we're talking about who were the German generals, this might surprise your audience, but we're talking about in the German army, 1,800 men who achieve German general status.

So if you imagine major general is the lower level. We have a huge number. You ask me as a military historian, how much do I know about any of those men? I know a fraction. And even the men who I try to investigate, because I, you know, for the book, retreat from Moscow, I'm not just interested in Hitler or the commander of army group center, Bok initially and then guy named Kluge.

I want to know about who are these six army commanders. And then I want to start to know about who are these core commanders. It gets very hard to get information. And that's really important in terms of being able to say to what extent are these guys ideologically affected. And as I started this answer, I sort of said, there's also a problem. pragmatism. Maybe there's not a lot of time for this, but as one of the important points, we all know that there's the famous halt order, the Hitler issues, right? Halt order, 18th of

December, right, no one will retreat any further. That's just it. If you want to retreat, you must get my permission. Keep in mind, it's an 800-kilometer long front. And one of the fascinating things about this book was, how does that work in practice? Is it just simple as you issue a hold order because that's what the historiography will tell you, certainly, even good books until very recently would say, well, actually, it did seem to work. And I was always very skeptical of this because it doesn't work in 1944 just because Hitler issues a hold order, people don't just hold. And the situation is extremely desperate in some areas of the front. And basically what's happening is this becomes quite clear when you do start to do very detailed work on the core and

divisional level, and even, again, individual soldiers' letters and diaries, they start talking about, well, we're engaged in a retreat, unofficially. Or there's a great report from the commander of intelligence in army group center guy named Geersdorf. He writes a memoir after the war, and it's already in that memoir that he's saying a lot of people just make up reports that they're under attack by overwhelming odds and then fall back, because you're not allowed to attack. But then, of course, nobody really knows if you're under attack. In other words, these guys get their local intelligence realize, my God, we're about to be hit. We can't hold here.

We must pull back five kilometers. We're not allowed to. But really, will anybody see on a 1-1-1-thousal scale map that, you know, whether there's two or three kilometers being held? No one can tell. And frankly, I'm not just going to stand here and get all my men killed. So, yeah, we're pulling back. And at different levels, that becomes apparent to divisional commanders,

core commanders, army commanders, and even Kluger. And he's unofficially authorizing this. these things. He's arguing with Hitler. Please give us more flexibility. Hitler says absolutely no. And then quietly on the side, we know he's doing it. So, you know, it speaks to, it's not as dogmatic as people think, oh, it's all ideological. It's all the Wehrmach, Hitler gave an order. And the German army, everyone follows an order. They don't. There's also a degree of pragmatism, which again, complicates the story. But also, it makes it more interesting as well. For purposes of time, I think we'll have to leave

the operational story pause. Perhaps we can come back to it at some point in the future. The war in the East stretches on. One more question for you, though, David. You teach officers today. What about your work about the German Army, about the Second World War, do you think is applicable for folks in the profession of arms or folks who work in strategy and national policy concerning the military today? I mean, this is a long time ago. All the technologies changed. What makes it worthy of study? I would say the one thing that I'm able to sort of agree with my students is, you know, the dangers of institutionalization. And I say I can agree with that because I think that's as much a problem for an academic. You know, we come out of a very liberal tradition and all of the, you know, the life of the mind, which is wonderful.

And at the same time, I deal with, you know, officer cadets who are young guys whose lives are very much controlled by what they've signed up. to. And yet in both areas, because they're sort of so all-consuming in a lot of ways, I think there's a very real danger. And this is a, I think, an important point for their future careers of, you know, Australian army culture being what it is can be wonderful so long as the culture is good. But the reality is, and certainly in the last few years, there's been a number of stories about we would have thought our army would be better, i.e. we've had our own, you know, war crimes and so on that have come out of Afghanistan among our most elite forces and so on. And I think that the instructive point there was,

as this stuff now comes out, multiple people say, yeah, I saw it going on and I knew it was wrong, but I didn't do anything about it. So my point to my cadets when they know these things, they're in the Australian media, is to say, that's exactly right, but it's easy not to do something. And I think it's so important to recognize that you are institutionalized in the same way I am an academic. And sometimes it requires me to look out and say, well, maybe this is not how the real world really is or should be. That's, I think, both what we learn from looking at the German army or armies in the Second World War generally, but I think it's also a very real phenomenon in our modern lives. Thanks for that. And, you know, I'll tell you, I walked away from reading

your book with a simpler, we'll say, maybe simplistic takeaway, which is, when we're recording this, I'll say for the record on Tuesday, November. the 23rd. And there were reports of Russian forces or certainly their equipment being masked in the vicinity of Ukraine. And I come across this commentary from time to time that like, gosh, though, it was a pretty tight window here before winter sets in. And, you know, then we'll have a bit of a reprieve from the possibility of any action. And sort of want to respond, not so fast guys. Not sure that's really fully accurate. David Stahl, author of retreat from Moscow. Thank you so much for joining.

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