All in all, the prospects at this point, in Hitler’s eyes, were rosy. One remark indicated, however, that an early end to the conflict was not in sight. Hitler told Goebbels in passing — his assumption would soon prove disastrously misplaced — that all necessary precautions had been made for wintering the troops in the east.142
By this time, in fact, Hitler and the Wehrmacht leaders had already arrived at the conclusion that the war in the East would not be over in 1941. The collapse of the Soviet Union, declared an OKW memorandum of 27 August, approved by Hitler, was the next and decisive war aim. But, the memorandum ran, ‘if it proves impossible to realize this objective completely during 1941, the continuation of the eastern campaign has top priority for 1942’.143 The military successes over the summer had been remarkable. But the aim of the quick knock-out blow at the heart of the ‘Barbarossa’ plan had not been realized. In spite of their vast losses, the Soviet forces had been far from comprehensively destroyed. They continued to be replenished from an apparently limitless reservoir of men and resources, and to fight tooth and nail in the proclaimed ‘Great Patriotic War’ against the aggressor. German losses were themselves not negligible. Already before the ‘Battle of Kiev’, casualties numbered almost 400,000, or over 11 per cent of the eastern army.144 Replacements were becoming more difficult to find. By the end of September, half of the tanks were out of action or in different stages of repair.145 And by now the autumn rains were already beginning to turn the roads into impassable quagmires. Whatever the successes of the summer, objective grounds for continued optimism had to be strongly qualified. The drive to Moscow that began on 2 October, seeking the decisive victory before the onset of winter, rested on hope more than expectation. It was a desperate last attempt to force the conclusive defeat of the Soviet Union before winter. It amounted to an improvisation marking the failure of the original ‘Barbarossa’ plan rather than its crowning glory.146
Hitler’s own responsibility for the difficulties now faced by the German army is evident. Whereas Stalin learnt from the calamities of 1941 and came to leave military matters increasingly to the experts,147 Hitler’s interference in tactical detail as well as grand strategy, arising from his chronic and intensifying distrust of the Army High Command, was, as Halder’s difficulties indicated, intensely damaging. The tenacity and stubbornness with which he refused to concede the priority of an attack on Moscow, even when for a while, at the end of July, not just the army leadership but his own closest military adviser, Jodl, had accepted the argument, was quite remarkable. After the glorious victories of 1940, Hitler believed his own military judgement was superior to that of any of his generals. His contempt for Brauchitsch and Halder was reinforced on every occasion that their views on tactics differed from his. Conversely, the weeks of conflict, and the bewildering way in July and August in which directives were arrived at, then amended, undermined the confidence in Hitler not just of the hopelessly supine Brauchitsch and of Halder’s Army General Staff, but also of the field commanders.
But the problem was not one-sided. Certainly, as we have seen, the invasion of the Soviet Union was Hitler’s own idea — and that at the height of the triumph in summer 1940. But far from dismissing the idea as illusory, vainglorious, or risky to a degree that courted outright disaster, the army’s feasibility studies that summer had underwritten the proposition. The tension between the conflicting conceptions of the eastern campaign was still inwardly unresolved as far as Halder was concerned when Hitler’s Directive No.21 was issued on 18 December 1940, indicating Moscow as a secondary rather than primary objective. The conflict of the coming summer months was prefigured in this unresolved contradiction even before the campaign had started. If reluctantly, Army High Command had apparently accepted the alternative strategy which Hitler favoured. Strategic planning of the attack in subsequent months followed from this premiss.
