Barbarossa - Part 5
In the dying, however, many millions more were killed, murdered, mutilated, bereft, displaced, brutalized, tortured and lost. Hitler and Stalin, and all those more equal than others, did not suffer in this period and had no idea just what it meant to be a soldier in Russia during winter and the rainy season. For all that the Russian troops were fresh, properly clothed and with superior tanks, by the end of February, after some 10 weeks fighting, the counter offensive came to a halt. Apart from materiel, the loss of life between 22nd June 1941 and 20th February 1942 was simply staggering. The Germans had seen how the Russians had attacked, with wave after wave of men, and it has been estimated that in this 8-month period the Russians lost 4 million men killed against German losses of about 1.2 million. As already suggested, the Germans could have lost more if not for Hitler's orders to stand fast no matter what. Hitler was, even before the Russian counter-offensive, already making plans for the next summer, tacitly acknowledging that the Germans had their limitations after all. With Leningrad and Moscow proving far too well defended for easy capture, Hitler looked towards one of the main objectives of his original plan. Relying so heavily on Romanian oil, he had all along had his eye on Russia's Caucasus oilfields. Capable at the time of producing 30 million tons of oil a year, they would solve all his fuel problems. And in the same general direction, give or take a few hundred miles, were the Donets industrial area and the Kuban granary. Single-minded in his madness of the pursuit of every Jew and undesirable, a pursuit which never let up, no matter what the fortunes at the battlefront, Hitler was capable of shrewdness in overall planning. It was in his interference in the execution that disaster always struck, none more tellingly than the story of the summer offensive of 1942 and the nemesis contained in the one word - Stalingrad.
With the utter exhaustion of both sides in February, the Germans were in terrible straits. Along the whole of the front from the Baltic to the Black Sea, out of 162 divisions, only 8 would have been capable of a sustained attack. The total number of operative tanks of the 16 armoured divisions was 140, less than the number needed to equip a single division! In looking at possible replacements, and the absolute minima needed in other areas to hold what had already been taken, in Europe and North Africa, Hitler only had one possible recourse and that was to his allies. There is a tendency to think of only three so-called Axis countries, Germany, Italy and Japan, but there were in fact at least 3 others who actively supported Hitler, namely Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia with its heavy ethnic German population. Hitler now sent emissaries to each and, by dint of stick and carrot, extracted from the latter three countries 13, 27 and 2 divisions respectively. For Italy, where Mussolini proved immune to Ribbentrop, Hitler had to make a personal appeal which, finally, brought him 9 divisions. Last of all there was the surprise, from a supposedly neutral country, of one division from Spain. None of the frontline German generals was too happy at these reinforcements, the fighting quality of most of which was dubious, but there were no others. By regrouping, however, for which the spring thaw gave them time, the High Command were able to rearrange their forces by the end of April so that the more seasoned were concentrated in the south where the offensive was to be taken.
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