Monday, Sep. 04, 1989

Part 3 Desperate Years

By OTTO FRIEDRICH Research by Peggy T. Berman and Katherine L. Mihok/New York

Exiled Thucydides knew

All that a speech can say

About Democracy,

And what dictators do . . .

The habit-forming pain,

Mismanagement and grief:

We must suffer them all again.

-- SEPTEMBER 1, 1939, by W.H. AUDEN*

If one man could be singled out as Hitler's most resolute and effective antagonist, it was Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill. On the day the Germans attacked Poland, he was 64 years old and had held no Cabinet post in ten years. Yet in all the West, his was the voice that had most forcefully denounced Hitler, most prophetically warned that Britain must rearm to resist him. While Parliament approved the Munich agreement, Churchill called it "a total and unmitigated defeat." He said of Neville Chamberlain, "In the depths of that dusty soul, there is nothing but abject surrender."

Churchill was no hero to the House of Commons, though. Conservative regulars mistrusted him for his 20-year defection to the Liberals, while liberals blamed him for the ill-fated British intervention in Russia in 1918-19. He had a large ego and a sharp tongue, and he drank too much brandy, but he also had qualities that were to prove indispensable -- courage, eloquence, energy and a passionate determination to save British democracy. No sooner had the Germans invaded Poland than Chamberlain reluctantly invited his chief critic to No. 10 Downing Street and asked him to join the Cabinet; Churchill thereupon became First Lord of the Admiralty. "Churchill in the Cabinet," Goring said when he heard the news. "That means war is really on."

Unlike Chamberlain, Churchill was determined to go on the attack and persuaded his Cabinet colleagues to stage a spectacular landing in northern Norway. His original scheme was to intervene in the Russo-Finnish war, which Stalin had launched on Nov. 30, 1939. Finland's well-trained and determined army of 300,000 had fought the Red Army to a standstill. Churchill's plan was to land a British expeditionary force at the northern Norwegian port of Narvik, cut across to the Swedish iron mines at Gallivare (which provided Hitler with almost 50% of the iron he needed for his war machine), then join the Finnish resistance. Before Churchill could get his force under way, however, the Soviets overwhelmed the Finns in March 1940.

Still determined to intercept those shipments of Swedish iron ore flowing south from Narvik to Hitler, Churchill then worked out a plan to lay mines along the Norwegian coast and even to seize the main Norwegian ports. That was supposed to begin April 8, 1940, but Hitler learned of the plan. British troops were already embarked in Scotland when the news came that the Germans were moving to land in both Denmark and Norway.

The virtually unopposed conquest of Denmark took only a few hours. Casualties on both sides totaled 56. Norway offered somewhat more resistance. As a German naval task force steamed up the fjord leading to Oslo, the Oscarsborg Fort outside the capital opened fire with its turn-of-the-century German cannons and sank the heavy cruiser Blucher, killing more than 1,000 Germans. Among them were Gestapo agents under orders to seize King Haakon VII. Reprieved, the 67-year-old King fled northward on a railroad train, along with the national gold supply, 23 tons of it.

Churchill thought Britain's naval superiority would soon drive the Germans out of Norway. But though Britain commanded the high seas, the Luftwaffe controlled the air. And though Britain did land nearly 25,000 Allied troops in Norway, they were poorly equipped and had to be evacuated within weeks, as were King Haakon, his family and his gold. Said Churchill: "We have been completely outwitted."

Hitler had hoped to attack the Low Countries in the fall of 1939, as soon as possible after the conquest of Poland, but the plan was delayed first by objections from the German generals, then by bad weather, then by a bizarre twist of fortune. A Luftwaffe major who carried a set of the invasion plans in his briefcase was sitting in an officers club in Munster and bemoaning the long train trip to a planning conference in Cologne the next day; another major, who was getting too old for active duty, offered to fly him there so that he could log some more cockpit time for himself. The two set off in a new Messerschmitt scout plane, got lost in the clouds and crash-landed in Belgium. The Belgian authorities thus found themselves in possession of the entire German invasion plan -- but could not be certain that this was not all a German trick. Conversely, Hitler soon learned that the Allies knew of his plans -- but the furious dictator could not be certain whether they knew what they had.

Hitler decided to rethink the whole strategy. The French defense was based on the "Maginot Line," a chain of fortifications that stretched 200 miles along the frontier from Switzerland north as far as Luxembourg. Built at a cost of $200 million (a substantial sum at a time when a workman earned about $3 a day), the Maginot Line was considered invulnerable; its strongest outposts bristled with antitank guns, machine guns and barbed wire, and boasted concrete walls 10 ft. thick as well as supply depots 100 ft. underground. To the north of the Ardennes Forest, which was only lightly fortified because the French considered it "impenetrable," a "Little Maginot Line" guarded the Franco-Belgian border, but the French planned to march into neutral Belgium themselves at the first sign of a German invasion.

The original German plan was to launch a frontal assault by Army Group B on the Low Countries, just as in 1914, with a secondary attack in the Ardennes by Army Group A. But General Erich von Manstein, chief of staff for Army Group A, passionately argued that this would only lead to stalemate in northern France, again just as in 1914. By contrast, a strong armored offensive right through the supposedly impenetrable Ardennes could lead to a breakthrough all the way to the English Channel. The Allied armies would be encircled and cut off; all France would lie open. Manstein's memorandums never reached Hitler, but the two men met at a dinner, and the Fuhrer was so impressed by the general's bold plan that he ordered it adopted.

And so when 30 divisions smashed into the Low Countries at dawn on May 10, 1940, an even larger force of 45 divisions more or less vanished into the depths of the Ardennes Forest. The Dutch fought bravely, but they were no match for Hitler's blitzkrieg with its tanks, dive bombers, paratroops and mobile infantry. When the Dutch defenders managed to hold the bridgeheads leading to Rotterdam, the second city of the Netherlands, Hitler ordered that "this resistance be broken speedily." A wave of bombers swept over the city and showered it with 2,200-lb. bombs, killing more than 800 people and destroying some 25,000 houses in less than 15 minutes.

The French and British had no intention of defending doomed Holland, but as they poured into neighboring Belgium, Hitler was delighted. The Manstein plan was working perfectly. "When the news came through that the enemy was moving forward along the whole front, I could have wept for joy," he said later. "They had fallen into the trap. It was vital that they believe we were sticking to the . . . old plan, and they had believed it."

The day of the German invasion was also the day the British government decided on a new leader. Chamberlain had been too cautious, and he was already afflicted by the cancer that would kill him in six months. Conservative backbencher Leopold Amery threw down a challenge. Invoking the terrible words that Oliver Cromwell had used in dissolving Parliament in 1653, he declared, "You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!" So many Conservatives then joined in an Opposition vote of censure that Chamberlain felt he could not go on, and the Conservatives turned to Churchill. He began with a stirring pledge: "I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat. You ask, what is our policy? I will say: It is to wage war . . . with all the strength that God can give us. That is our policy."

In the Ardennes Forest the main German force encountered only token opposition until it reached the French defenses just west of Sedan on the swift-flowing Meuse River. Dive bombers soon pounded those defenses into silence, and General Heinz Guderian's forces quickly crossed the river. As they pushed westward, there was little to stop them. General Erwin Rommel, commander of the 7th Panzer Division, saw anarchy all around: "Civilians and French troops, their faces distorted with terror, lay huddled in the ditches, alongside hedges and in every hollow beside the road . . . Always the same picture, troops and civilians in wild flight down both sides of the road . . . a chaos of guns, tanks and military vehicles of all kinds inextricably entangled with horse-drawn refugee carts."

By May 16, in the first week of combat, Guderian's spearhead of seven panzer divisions had knocked a hole 60 miles wide in the French defenses; by May 20 the Germans had reached the cathedral city of Amiens, farther forward than they had gone in all World War I; that same day they reached the English Channel near Abbeville. The main Anglo-French army in Belgium had been cut off. Even before that final encirclement, the new French Premier, Paul Reynaud, who was supposed to represent a more warlike spirit than the ousted Edouard Daladier, telephoned Churchill and said, "We have been defeated. We are beaten. We have lost the battle."

Guderian's tanks raced up the coast, seized Boulogne, seized Calais, neared Dunkirk, then were ordered to halt. Guderian protested but was told that it was Hitler's personal order, an important miscalculation that has never been fully explained. "The Fuhrer is terribly nervous," Chief of Staff Franz Halder wrote in his diary. "Frightened by his own success, he is afraid to take any chance and so would rather pull the reins on us."

% The British were already thinking about evacuating France, and Dunkirk, about 50 miles away, was the only port that remained open to them. They hoped to rescue perhaps 45,000 men in the two days they estimated they might have left. But Guderian's tanks did not move, and more British troops kept pouring into Dunkirk. While the Royal Navy sent 165 ships, many of which could not enter the shallow harbor, London issued an emergency call for everything that could float -- yachts, fishing boats, excursion steamers, fire-fighting boats, some 850 vessels in all. The first 25,000 men reached England by May 28, and then the bizarre rescue fleet hurried back for more.

By that time the Luftwaffe was bombing and strafing the beach, and Dunkirk was in flames. R.A.F. fighter planes raced across the Channel to defend the departing soldiers, who often had to stand in water up to their necks while machine-gun bullets spattered around them. A paddle-wheel steamer, Fenella, took aboard 600 soldiers, then was hit by a bomb. Most of the survivors were evacuated onto another paddle steamer, Crested Eagle, but a dive bomber set it afire, and most of the men aboard perished. A hospital ship marked with large red crosses rode at anchor off the beach all one day until a bomb went down its funnel and scattered bodies all over the harbor.

For nine days, often under heavy fire, the ships steamed to and fro as the great evacuation continued. By June 4, when it ended, some 200,000 British troops had been rescued, along with about 140,000 Allied forces, mostly French. British losses: 40,000 left behind, dead or taken prisoner. To many of the French, the evacuation was a British betrayal, a flight, the abandonment of an ally. To the British, it was a miracle and the only route to national survival.

With 60 remaining divisions, the French tried to form a new defensive line along the Somme, but after having lost about 40 divisions plus almost all British forces, they were seriously outnumbered, as well as outgunned and outgeneraled. The Germans had not only their panzer units but also 130 infantry divisions. On June 7 the French commander Maxime Weygand told the government, "The battle of the Somme is lost," and advised it to ask for an armistice. Premier Reynaud declared, "We shall fight in front of Paris," but the government itself fled to Tours and then Bordeaux.

Left behind was an undefended Paris facing the almost unthinkable prospect of Nazi occupation. The Parisians responded with wild flight. With cars, ( bicycles, baby carriages, nearly 2 million of them (some 65% of the city's population) choked the roads to the south. "I fly over the black road of interminable treacle that never stops running," author-aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupery wrote of watching refugees from his plane. "Where are they going? They don't know. They are marching toward a ghost terminus which already is no longer an oasis."

The Germans marched into deserted Paris on June 14. Reynaud fled to England, leaving the government in the hands of Marshal Henri Petain, 84, who was still revered as the man who had defended Verdun during World War I under the watchword, "They shall not pass." But on June 17 he asked Hitler for an armistice. Hardly noticed in the debacle was an appeal from London one day later by an obscure French general named Charles de Gaulle, who, in a speech that was to become the rallying cry for the Resistance, asked all Frenchmen to fight on under his leadership: "France has lost a battle! But France has not lost the war!"

Hitler's terms seemed mild: Germany would occupy and rule the northern half of France and its Atlantic coast; the southern half could remain an autonomous state under Petain, with its capital in the sleepy resort town of Vichy. But he insisted that the armistice be signed in Compiegne, just outside Paris, in the same railroad car where Marshal Foch had made the Germans sign the armistice in 1918, the site marked by a stone tablet placing blame for the war on "the criminal pride of the German empire." CBS correspondent William Shirer, who was standing nearby, reported that Hitler's face was "afire with scorn, anger, hate, revenge, triumph." Once the armistice was signed, Hitler had the stone blown up and the train shipped to Germany. (After World War II the French replaced the stone and restored the train, which stands there in the gloomy forest to this day.)

In the last days before the fall of France, Churchill had summoned up his most heroic eloquence to rally his beleaguered people. "We shall go on to the end," he told Parliament on June 4. "We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans . . . we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, 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 fight in the hills; we shall never surrender." And again on June 18: "Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will say, 'This was their finest hour.'

Hitler could not believe it. The French had been defeated, the war won, and the British must see reason. In a speech to the Reichstag, he jeered at the idea of Churchill's fighting on in Canada, but he offered to make peace. "I can see no reason why this war must go on," he said. Churchill decided not even to answer, leaving it to Lord Halifax to declare, "We shall not stop fighting until freedom is secure." Hitler was again lying. Just three days before his "peace speech" on July 19, he had officially told his commanders, "I have decided to prepare a landing operation against England."

Operation Sea Lion, it was called, a military feat that nobody had accomplished since William the Conqueror in 1066. The army's plan called for 90,000 men to storm ashore on a front extending 200 miles from Ramsgate to Lyme Bay, to be followed by 170,000 more troops within two days. But the navy balked. It did not have enough ships for such a broad front, and those it did have would be overwhelmed by the stronger British fleet. And who had control of the skies? If there was any doubt, said Goring, his Luftwaffe could smash the Royal Air Force within a few weeks. Hitler thereupon ordered the Luftwaffe "to overcome the British air force with all means at its disposal," so that the invasion could begin Sept. 15.

Adlertag (Eagle Day) was Goring's name for the first massive bombing raids on Aug. 13. Some 1,500 Luftwaffe warplanes swept across R.A.F. airfields in southeast England, badly damaging five of them and knocking out one. R.A.F. fighters downed 47 of the attackers. The next day the Luftwaffe was back, then the day after, and so began the Battle of Britain, the first ever to be fought entirely in the skies, anxiously watched by ordinary citizens below. Goring had roughly 1,400 bombers and nearly 1,000 fighters, the R.A.F. defenders fewer than 900 fighters. The opposing planes were roughly equal, the German Messerschmitts with a slightly faster rate of climb, the British Spitfires and Hurricanes more maneuverable. (The British also had some secret weapons: a radar warning system that the Germans greatly underestimated, and the Operation Ultra computer that broke most German military codes, particularly those of the Luftwaffe.) The outnumbered British fought with a kind of desperation that inspired Churchill to say of them, "Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few."

Here is one of them, Richard Hillary, remembering his first kill: "We ran into them at 18,000 ft., 20 yellow-nosed Messerschmitt 109s, about 500 ft. above us . . . Brian Carbury, who was leading the section . . . let go a burst of fire at the leading plane. ((I)) saw the pilot put his machine into a half roll and knew that he was mine. Automatically, I kicked the rudder to the left to get him at right angles, turned the gun-button to FIRE and let go in a 4- sec. burst . . . He seemed to hang motionless; then a jet of red flame shot upward, and he spun out of sight . . . My first emotion was one of satisfaction . . . He was dead, and I was alive; it could so easily have been the other way around."

The essential German goal was to knock out the R.A.F., and though the Luftwaffe was taking heavy losses, so were the defenders and their bases. Then there occurred another one of those almost accidental twists. Two German bombers on their way to attack aircraft factories at Rochester strayed over central London and dropped their bombs on the hitherto unattacked capital. Churchill promptly ordered several retaliatory raids on Berlin. Hitler, unaware of his increasing success against the R.A.F. installations, made the mistake of ordering further retaliations against London. And so, while the R.A.F. won a vital reprieve, the citizens of London had to undergo the blitz, the greatest bombardment any city until then had ever suffered.

Goring himself watched from the heights of France's Cape Gris-Nez as the first armada of 300 bombers and 650 escorting fighters set out for London on Sept. 7. They concentrated on the densely populated East End and the Thames docks -- killing some 300 civilians and seriously injuring 1,300 -- and when it ended Goring telephoned his wife to say "London is in flames." Nor was London the only target. The Luftwaffe subsequently pounded Liverpool, Birmingham, Coventry, Bristol.

Just as Hitler had thought that Britain would give up after the fall of France, he now thought that nightly bombing would make the English rise in revolt against Churchill's pursuit of the war. (It was a miscalculation that the Allies were to repeat in their subsequent bombing of German cities.) Londoners instead took pride in their ability to endure the blitz, to spend long hours in the subway bomb shelters, to put out the fires and go on with their lives. "I saw many flags flying from staffs," Edward R. Murrow reported to America one night over CBS radio. "No one told these people to put out the flag. They simply feel like flying the Union Jack . . . No flag up there was white."

The R.A.F. not only shot down many of the German bombers but also kept smashing the German invasion fleet being assembled in France. On one September night 84 barges were hit. Hitler was finally convinced. On Sept. 17 he formally decided "to postpone Sea Lion indefinitely." But the Battle of Britain went on. Between July and November, the Germans lost 1,733 aircraft, the British 915. Though the blitz continued until the following spring, costing about 30,000 lives in London alone, the essential result was that for the first time, Hitler's military power had been beaten back.

If the German navy was unable to achieve an invasion of England, though, it seriously threatened to starve the embattled island by cutting its lifelines to the west. Britain needed to import by sea nearly a million tons of supplies every week -- food and fuel as well as weapons. For this it required the services of some 3,000 merchant ships, and in this summer of 1940, Admiral Karl Donitz's submarine fleet not only acquired access to the Atlantic at the captured French naval base in Lorient but also started a lethal new tactic known as wolf packs. Instead of one lone U-boat sniping at an Allied convoy, three or more subs would attack simultaneously from different directions. On the night of Sept. 21, for example, a wolf pack attacked a convoy of 41 ships and sank twelve; the following month, in two successive nights, wolf packs torpedoed 32 out of 84 ships -- without any German losses. "The only thing that ever really frightened me during the war," Churchill wrote later, "was the U-boat peril."

There had never been any period of "phony war" during what came to be known as the Battle of the Atlantic. Though Donitz's undersea fleet was small -- his 56 U-boats in 1939 included only 22 large oceangoing craft -- the submarines not only torpedoed without warning but also seeded Britain's sea- lanes with thousands of magnetic mines. In the first four months of the war, the Germans sank 215 ships (748,000 tons); by the following spring the toll was 460. One sub even slipped into the supposedly impregnable Scottish base at Scapa Flow and torpedoed the battleship Royal Oak, with a loss of 833 lives.

Only in surface combat could the Royal Navy claim that Britain still ruled the waves. One of Germany's pocket battleships, the Graf Spee, sank nine British vessels (with no loss of lives), but three cruisers finally trapped it off the coast of Uruguay. Though the four ships' gun duel was a draw, the damaged Graf Spee finally took refuge in Montevideo. To avoid capture, the captain scuttled his ship; then he committed suicide. Germany's last hope for a warship that could fight off British attackers was the 42,000-ton, 30-knot battleship Bismarck, which put to sea in March 1941 with eight 15-in. guns and six aircraft. In its first encounter with British pursuers, it blew up the battleship Hood, killing 1,416 crewmen. But a British seaplane managed to torpedo the Bismarck and cripple its steering gear; that enabled other warships to close in and sink it.

Hitler had yet other resources, or so he thought. Italy, still considered one of the great powers, had finally joined the war in the last days of the fall of France. Mussolini had achieved almost no success in his effort to grab a piece of southeastern France, failing to get more than a couple of miles into the playgrounds of the Riviera. But he had nearly half a million Italian and colonial troops in northern and eastern Africa, which he hoped to make part of a new Roman empire.

Assuming that the British would be fully occupied at home, Mussolini sent some 80,000 men from Libya across the border into Egypt to threaten British control of the Suez Canal. The British, outnumbered nearly 3 to 1, counterattacked, and most of the ill-equipped Italians promptly surrendered. The British could probably have captured all of eastern North Africa, but Churchill instead withdrew much of his force to help defend Greece, which Mussolini had vainly tried to conquer the previous fall. Hitler sent one of his ablest tank commanders, General Rommel, to rescue the Italians in North Africa, and "the Desert Fox" soon pushed the weakened British back into Egypt.

In the Balkans, meanwhile, a British-backed coup overthrew the pro-German government of Yugoslavia in March 1941. Hitler was so angered that he decided almost overnight to invade, and he conquered his prey in about a week. While he was at it, he took over the bungled Italian invasion of Greece and subdued that country in less than a month. Of the 62,000 men Churchill had rashly sent to Greece, fewer than 20,000 were ultimately evacuated; the rest were killed or captured.

And so, in May 1941, Hitler stood master of Europe. It was an incredible achievement. Less than ten years before, he had tricked and blustered his way into the leadership of a penniless and disarmed nation. Now, from the Pyrenees to the Arctic Circle, from Brittany to Warsaw to Crete, this ex-corporal ruled virtually unchallenged over more of Europe than any man had governed since the days of the Roman Empire. And his friends and allies ruled in Moscow, Tokyo, Rome, Madrid. His only remaining enemy, Britain, was badly mauled and begging the U.S. for supplies.

But the U.S. remained stoutly neutral, isolationist. Though most Americans favored the British, polls consistently showed that 75% to 80% strongly opposed U.S. involvement in the war. The U.S. did appropriate $13 billion in Lend-Lease aid to Britain in 1941, but when Churchill asked for 50 obsolete World War I destroyers to replace those lost in the Battle of Britain, he had to sign over Western Hemisphere bases in exchange. Besides, the U.S. was embarrassingly weak, boasting an Army of barely three divisions and an Air Force with just over 300 fighters.

In Hitler's moment of supreme triumph, in the spring of 1941, he boldly made his supreme error, the error that was to destroy him. He decided to invade Soviet Russia. Exactly why he made this catastrophic miscalculation will never be known for sure. In part it was ideology. He had begun his political career by attacking the Bolsheviks, and he dreamed of Germany's finding Lebensraum by colonizing the vast lands to the east. He had written in Mein Kampf: "When we speak of new territory in Europe today, we must think principally of Russia and her border vassal states. Destiny itself seems to wish to point out the way to us here . . ."

In part, too, it was a matter of paranoia. Hitler suspected that Churchill fought on largely because he hoped to inveigle Stalin into joining him. And Hitler was himself so treacherous that he could not believe Stalin was not planning to betray him. Stalin intensified those suspicions by his own aggressiveness. On virtually the day the Germans occupied Paris, the Soviets seized the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. A few weeks after that, they demanded and got Rumania to give up its provinces of Bessarabia and northern Bukovina. Hitler saw this as a threat to his access to Rumania's rich oil fields, but for the time being he was too preoccupied to counterattack. And then Hitler finally became a victim of his own successes. He could not believe that backward Russia, which had had trouble subduing Finland, could resist the invincible Wehrmacht.

Even before the Battle of Britain, Hitler wanted his generals to start planning an invasion of Russia in the fall of 1940. They managed to talk him into delaying until the following May. Germany signed a trade agreement with the U.S.S.R. as late as January 1941, but a month earlier Hitler had told his commanders, "The German armed forces must be prepared to crush Soviet Russia in a quick campaign." The battle plan called for some 148 divisions -- more than 3 million men -- to attack in three main drives along a 1,000-mile front. One army group would strike northward, toward Leningrad; another army group from the Warsaw area would move north of the Pripet Marshes toward Moscow, which Hitler planned to level and leave forever uninhabitable; the southernmost group, from Rumania, would storm across the Ukraine toward Kiev and Stalingrad. "Operation Barbarossa" would smash Russia within six months.

In contrast to France, where the Germans had surprised everyone by being relatively "correct," the conquest of Russia was to be even more ruthless than that of Poland. "This struggle is one of ideologies and racial differences," Hitler told his generals, "and will have to be conducted with unprecedented, unmerciful and unrelenting harshness. All officers will have to rid themselves of obsolete ideologies." More specifically, Hitler announced that he was assigning Heinrich Himmler, head of the dreaded SS, to carry out "special tasks" in the "liquidation" of all "commissars," meaning anyone in a leadership position. Beyond that, Hitler planned to plunder the conquered land of its resources and food. "This year, between 20 and 30 million persons will die of hunger in Russia," Goring casually observed. "Perhaps it is well that it should be so, for certain nations must be decimated."

Hitler's impulsive attack on Yugoslavia had delayed his invasion of Russia by a month -- which was to become critically important when the first snows began to fall. But the Germans expected little trouble when they rescheduled Operation Barbarossa for June 22.

Despite all the German troop movements, despite sharp words between the two regimes, the supposedly crafty and suspicious Stalin foresaw nothing. The very night before the attack, Foreign Minister V.M. Molotov called in the German ambassador, Count Friedrich von der Schulenberg, and said the Soviets were "unable to understand the reasons for Germany's dissatisfaction." Schulenberg said he would try to find out. A few hours later, at dawn, he returned to the Kremlin with a message from Berlin. It accused the Soviets of violating the Nazi-Soviet pact, massing their troops and planning a surprise attack on Germany. "The Fuhrer," it concluded, "has therefore ordered the German armed forces to oppose this threat with all the means at their disposal." When Schulenberg finished reading, the amazed Molotov said, "It is war. Do you believe that we deserved that?"

Even as he spoke, German artillery had already started firing, and tanks were rolling eastward. For a time, everything went as Hitler planned. The Red Army was caught by surprise, and hundreds of thousands of soldiers fell prisoner. Within three weeks the German line had moved forward some 400 miles, to Smolensk and almost to Leningrad. But with the central army group in striking distance of Moscow, Hitler delayed its advance to concentrate on capturing the industrial and agricultural resources of the Ukraine, and it was not until October that he began a new drive on the capital. And the Soviets proved tougher than expected. The Germans originally estimated Soviet strength at about 200 divisions; Moscow eventually fielded nearly 400 on the Western front -- roughly 6 million men.

And cold rain began falling. "The infantryman slithers in the mud, while many teams of horses are needed to drag each gun forward," one German general recounted. "All wheeled vehicles sink up to their axles in slime." The first snow fell on Oct. 6. A month later, the temperatures fell below zero. Tank engines began to freeze. The troops, who had been issued no winter clothing, suffered frostbite.

On Dec. 1 Hitler ordered the start of an all-out drive on Moscow, which the Wehrmacht now surrounded on three sides, only 20 to 30 miles outside the city. One infantry unit got as far as the suburb of Khimki, from which the Germans could actually see the towers of the Kremlin, but that was as far as they could go before Soviet tanks drove them out again. And all along the front, the Soviet defenders held fast. Then, on Dec. 6, the Soviets somehow produced 100 new divisions and launched a counteroffensive that sent the Germans reeling back 50 miles by the end of the month. Moscow was saved.

Back in Berlin, the Nazi authorities were fretting over another problem. In the early years of Nazism, one of Hitler's goals had been to harass Germany's half a million Jews into leaving. Now he was planning a more extreme policy: rounding up and killing every Jew in all of German-occupied Europe. Himmler's special commandos had shot tens of thousands of Jews in Poland, but the Nazis sought more efficient methods. Himmler's deputy, Reinhard Heydrich, summoned representatives of all major government departments to the Berlin suburb of Wannsee to inform them of what he called "the final solution." This required the creation of six giant extermination camps in Poland: Auschwitz, Treblinka, Maidanek, Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor. The Wannsee conference was called for Dec. 9 but had to be put off for six weeks because of the extraordinary news from the Pacific. On Dec. 7 the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor.

One of the few men overjoyed by that news was Churchill. "So we had won after all," he thought on hearing it. "How long the war would last or in what fashion it would end no man could tell, nor did I at this moment care. Once again in our long island history, we should emerge, however mauled or mutilated, safe and victorious."