Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa—meaning “Red Beard,” the nickname of the Holy Roman emperor Frederick I—consisted of an eight-page typescript dated December 18, 1940, and initialed by Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel (head of the Wehrmacht high command), General Alfred Jodl (head of the high command’s operations staff), Major General Walter Warlimont (Jodl’s top aide, who had prepared the document’s first draft), and one other person (illegible).12 Hitler had a mere eight copies prepared, of which four, along with the original, went into the safe. One copy each went to the army commander and the air force commander, and two to the general staff. A mere ten days later, Soviet military intelligence in Berlin delivered word of the existence of the supersecret signed directive.13
IDÉES FIXES
On December 23, 1940, Stalin had one of the largest groups ever in his office, more than thirty military-industrial functionaries. “We were all captivated at how simply, amiably, and with such deep knowledge Stalin conducted the meeting,” recalled Akaki Mgeladze (b. 1910), who at age twenty-eight, after being released from house arrest, had been named head of Georgia’s oil trust. “We were elated and felt such a rush of creative power and energy that we were ready to move mountains.”14 Besides ramping up oil supplies, discussion ensued about the M-105 airplane engine, which had 1,000 horsepower. “If we had a plethora of engines like the M-105,” Stalin instructed those gathered in his Little Corner, “we could talk to that scumbag differently.”15
That same day, the upper ranks of the Soviet army, air force, and navy gathered for a large-scale conference that lasted until December 31. For a modern army, doctrine was as important as size and technological base. A “defense in depth” assumed that the invader would inexorably breach the front lines, so it sacrificed territory, erecting defenses back from the front, aiming to contain the blow by wearing the enemy down. A further option, “mobile defense,” involved counterattacks from depth before the enemy’s advance had been fully contained, in order to cut off the enemy’s frontline tank divisions from its second- and third-line infantry. Such operations required tremendous skill and speed, real-time battlefield intelligence, and sophisticated use of armored divisions to pierce the enemy assault.16 “Forward defense” meant massing units on the frontier in fortified regions, absorbing and halting the initial blow, then taking the fight to enemy territory.
Soviet military doctrine had long been predicated on forward defense, and assumed that there would be about two weeks between an outbreak of hostilities, characterized by limited skirmishes, and any German ability to engage with the massive force of a full mobilization. During this interval, the Red Army would absorb the charge, then seize the initiative in a quick counteroffensive, inflicting several rapid defeats and thereby disrupting the enemy’s mobilization.17 But the USSR had some 2,500 miles of borders to defend against Germany and its Axis partners from the White Sea to the Black. The Red Army had forward-deployed some of its very best forces—20 of its 29 mechanized corps, almost 80 percent of its newest tanks, and more than half of its most advanced aircraft. This could leave them dangerously exposed if, as had happened to France, the Germans punched through in numbers and carried out an encirclement behind the penetrated lines.18 The Soviets had ample reserves in the rear that could be brought into battle quickly, but the Germans were preconcentrating truly massive forces on the frontier.
Some sharp critiques of the Soviet military doctrine had been buried in the terror.19 Stalin forbade consideration of anything other than an attack. Soviet theorists who had warned of the superiority of defense in depth—such as Alexander Verkhovsky, the former war minister in the Provisional Government who had joined the Reds—had exposed themselves to charges of treason for advocating the sacrifice of territory (even Minsk and Kiev).20 Tukhachevsky had leveled precisely these charges against his intellectual nemesis, the strategist Alexander Svechin, in 1930–31, when Svechin was eventually arrested in the so-called Springtime Operation.21 The survivor Shaposhnikov, too, firmly, albeit less stridently than Tukhachevsky, advocated for the offensive posture of forward defense.
