1. THE NAZIS’ OVERCONFIDENCE
Western Allied industrial, maritime and air power were fundamental to destroying the German war machine. But to win, it was crucial to take ground and destroy the forces holding it, and on this score, it was the eastern front where the Wehrmacht was broken most emphatically.
For me, it was Hitler and his generals’ underestimation of the Red Army, coupled with their ideology-suffused faith in their own superiority, that were most decisive to German defeat. Not all commanders succumbed to this mindset during the run-up to the invasion of the Soviet Union, but many did. Their military intelligence substituted hard facts about the Red Army with arrogant, racially coloured assumptions of chaos and incompetence. All of this blinded them to the Red Army’s true strength, and to the perilously uneven state of their own forces.
The Red Army’s initially calamitous response to the invasion looked set to prove the Germans right. But the German advance took increasingly grievous losses to Soviet resistance, and its mobility was progressively eviscerated by the country’s immense distances, harsh environment and often ramshackle transport infrastructure. By the time the Germans reached the gates of Moscow in December 1941, the blitzkrieg was already exhausted, and with it expired their one chance of decisive victory.
Over the following 18 months, the Wehrmacht strove repeatedly to regain the initiative – most famously at Stalingrad – but failed to do so to any decisive extent.
All the while, the Red Army’s own fighting power burgeoned on all counts. It was fuelled by immense if brutally executed feats of Soviet industrial production, and increasingly by vast economic aid from the United States. Following further German failure at Kursk in July 1943, the Red Army pressed forward inexorably, and the Wehrmacht was never again able even to attempt to claw back the advantage.
Ben Shepherd is reader in history at Glasgow Caledonian University and the author of Hitler’s Soldiers: The German Army in the Third Reich (Yale, 2016)