The next day, Roosevelt’s latest brainstorm to help Britain was signed into American law. Unlike Nazi Germany, the UK was not de facto bankrupt and had been buying American supplies and war matériel under a program known as cash and carry (paying up front and assuming responsibility for transportation). But Britain had begun to run low on cash, and Roosevelt introduced the idea of Lend-Lease (“An Act to Promote the Defense of the United States”), which allowed him to “sell, transfer title to, exchange, lease, lend, or otherwise dispose of, to any such government [whose defense the President deems vital to the defense of the United States] any defense article.” The law soon would be applied to China, too. Hitler ordered stronger efforts “to bring Japan into active operations in the Far East as soon as possible,” so that “the focal point of the interests of the United States will be diverted to the Pacific.”103
Also on March 11, 1941, a long-gestating refinement of the Soviet war plan was submitted. A month before, Zhukov, following his replacement of Meretskov as chief of staff, had ordered the chief of the operations directorate, Major General Alexander Vasilevsky, to revise the main mobilization orders (which dated to November 1937) that accompanied the war plan. Known as the Mobilization Plan for 1941 (MP-41), it was based upon a wartime strength of 300 fully equipped divisions, including 60 tank divisions, and 8.7 million troops—a doubling of the already recently doubled Red Army—which were to come into existence by January 1942.104 Tactically, this mobilization plan for an army that did not yet exist in this size was based upon extreme forward defense and a quick Soviet counteroffensive (approximately two thirds of the divisions were to be stationed in the western military districts). MP-41 reflected Stalin’s vision of a possible war: all offense and all in, with wishful-thinking production targets for tanks and aircraft, little allotment for second- and third-echelon strategic reserves for a protracted battle, and the war not commencing this year.
Now, the new war plan itself, occupying some fifteen pages on defense commissariat stationery, in exquisite penmanship, was marked, as per custom, “Top Secret. Very Urgent. Exclusively Personal. The Only Copy.” Following the experience of the January war games, it reconfirmed Kiev as the main axis of hostilities, making explicit, unlike previous war plans, that “Germany will most likely deploy its main forces in the southeast, from Siedlce [in eastern Poland] to Hungary, in order to seize the Ukraine by means of a blow to Berdichev and Kiev.” This conclusion reflected the accumulating Soviet intelligence reports. But the southern axis was definitively assumed to be the main thrust of the German attack because the anticipated quick Soviet counteroffensive would have a far easier time navigating enemy territory below the Pripet Marshes. It traced the Soviets’ long-standing favored strike line, the so-called Lvov protrusion, on the Kraków-Katowice salient, where German defense lines were not as formidable as in East Prussia and where the terrain was conducive to tank armies.105 Massed in Ukraine, Red Army forces, after blasting through, were to encircle, from behind, the German armies concentrated farther north, while severing links with Germany’s Balkan allies, oil, and foodstuffs farther south. The text, however, admitted that “the general staff of the Red Army does not possess documentary data on the plans of likely adversaries either in the West or in the East.”106
Timoshenko and Zhukov discussed the draft at length in the Little Corner on March 17, with a large number of military and industrial officials, and again on the 18th in a narrower group. They had already beseeched Stalin for authorization to summon Soviet reservists immediately, to fill out the existing divisions in frontier districts. A decree approved the call-up of 975,870 reservists during the course of 1941, in phases, through the fall, but the despot insisted it be done quietly, under the pretext of training exercises. Troops were shipped in trains boarded up with plywood, and even the commanders did not know their points of disembarkation.107 Beyond wanting to deny warmongers on the German side any excuse to attack, Stalin continued to adhere to the widespread belief that even though, in summer 1914, imperial Russia’s mobilization had been defensive and precautionary, it had inexorably led the country to war.108
INHIBITIONS
