Steven D Mercatante

Why Germany Nearly Won: A New History of The Second World War in Europe
Author: Steven D. Mercatante
Publisher: Rowman and Littlefield
Publishing Date: 2012
Pgs: 408
Dewey: 940.5421 MER
Disposition: Irving Public Library - South Campus - Irving, TX
_________________________________________________
REVIEW MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS

Summary:
Challenging the myths that have grown up around the German war machine and economy and the Soviet preparedness, this study looks at the numerous places where German, and Soviet, planning, action, and historical events could have swung the eventual outcome of the war down a different path. Steven D. Mercatante then offers an entirely new perspective on the Second World War in Europe. He demonstrates how Germany, through its invasion of the Soviet Union, came within a hair's breadth of cementing a European-based empire that would have allowed the Third Reich to challenge the Anglo-American alliance for global hegemony. From Hitler’s rise and the grab for Lebensraum, from Poland, to France, to Russia, points are shown all along the way that could have shifted advantages later in the war more in favor of the German military machine.

_________________________________________________
Genre:
History
Military
Europe
Germany
War

Why this book:
I love history.
_________________________________________________
Favorite Quote:
The primary military lesson to emerge from events in Eastern Europe during 1941 to 1942 was that when the German army concentrated its armored forces, and concomitantly, relied on maneuver-based warfare it was nearly unbeatable, even in facing overwhelming numerical odds. Accordingly Soviet successes up to early 1943 remain tied to what Germany chose to do as much as stemming from the direction in which the Soviet Union attempted to steer the war. German failures stem from a variety of interlocking elements including German mistakes, strategic, political, operational, logistical, and so on, coupled with the red armies highly aggressive defensive effort and attempts to fight in a deep operational style when on the offensive. The interplay between a Red Army learning to fight and an organizationally devolving and fragmenting Wermacht making just enough mistakes to hamstring its own efforts, thus perhaps, best lays the foundation for understanding the state of the war on Germany's Eastern front during the winter of 1942 and 1943.

Hmm Moments:
The local responsibility and movement ability inherent in Auftragstaktik have been lost. Too much political questioning of every move, American anyway.

German plans relied more and more on wishful thinking the further East they advanced.

One of the myths that we read, learn, and are taught is that the German forces had an advantage over the Soviets in wheeled and tracked vehicle inventory. This appears to be just that, a myth. Though they did have Panzer IVs in the field, they also had a motley assortment of older models and even some horse drawn artillery pieces. In this, they were similar to the Soviets. Though the myth of the Panzer invincibility seems to have been tested severely by the Soviet T-34 tank.

The German industrial might at the start of WWII was largely a myth as well. They were not in so much better shape than their neighbors. They seemed to have difficulty making up the losses incurred invading Poland and, then, the losses taken in France and the Low Countries. The pellmellness of the blitzkreig meant that foolish chances were taken regularly and while they paid off hugely in the early years of the war, the bill came due.

Effectively Stalin gutted the Red Army’s officer corps just before the German invasion. It's amazing that the Germans ran out of steam when they did otherwise there's no telling how far they might have gone.

If Hitler and others had sidelined Halder and his Moscow obsession and concentrated on the oil and other mineral resources of the Ukraine and Trans-Caucasia region, we could be living in a much different world today. If we were living at all. Indeed, Halder’s notion of attacking Moscow seems almost a prove-he’s-better-than-Napoleon rather than a real strategic objective. And the whole idea of sapping the Red Army’s strength in battle rather than thru sucking away their resources is lunacy.

So, far from the Soviet industrial buildup being a reaction to German invasion and, consequent to the power of the American/Allied Lend-Lease program, Stalin had started modernizing Soviet industry, and collectivizing and gulaging and killing his own people, as early as 1936 or earlier. And while the invasion and lending may have played a part, the Soviet Union was already on the path to becoming an industrial superpower over the forced relocation of workers and brute force tactics of the Five Year Plan...and the next Five Year Plan, and so on, and so on, which isn’t how it was taught in most previous histories.

If you fight a battle of annihilation, with the destruction of your enemy as your objective, what do you have left when the battle is over...even if you’ve won. By investing that much in destroying him, you’ve effectively destroyed the warfighting capability of your own troops. Would have made more sense to have grabbed at the resources and starved those armies, effectively annhillating them via starvation as opposed to fighting them and believing that you were going to destroy them because your troops were better.

The Germans had the Soviets in the North and the South. And Hitler and his command staff allowed their Moscow obsession to overcome strategic doctrine and they refocused on the Soviet capital. I submit that the Soviets could’ve lost Moscow and it wouldn’t have made any bigger difference than any of their other losses. The Nazis overvalued Moscow while the Soviets fought like hell, but they were going to fight like hell for every inch of ground before they gave it up to the Germans. You’ll get that when your commanders are telling you that you and your families will be executed if you retreat. They would have continued to fight until Stalin and the Communist Party’s hold on the populace broke.

Stalin, in 1940, tempted Hitler toward peace with an offer of surrendering the Ukraine. If Germany would have taken that and let the Russian Bear relax back toward hibernation, the world would be a much different place today. Effectively, a Cold War would have happened in Eastern Europe, giving Germany time to rebuild, reapportion, and absorb the lands conquered. I do wonder what that would have meant for the rest of the European theater with a Germany freed from ongoing conquest in the USSR. But, they couldn’t give up their unstrategic war of annihillation.

Hitler stripped men and material from the drives on Leningrad and the Caucus to bolster the armies advancing on Moscow. Effectively, he triggered the standoffs at Leningrad and Stalingrad.

It’s like the logistics weren’t considered at all in Barbarossa. Near the penultimate turning points at Moscow, the German Army was continuing to make conquests that were geographical in nature and, then, almost immediately lose those gains to counterattacks. No consolidation. No bivouacking for winter. No pushing the necessary supplies forward to soldiers in the field. Failure. The myth of the German war machine in World War 2.

After putting his Eastern Front generals in a mixed strategy of blitz on one hand and encircle and destroy on the other, both methods fell flat after initial success. Hitler sacked the on-the-ground leadership and lead the armies by edict. Add those three factors to the refusal to allow the commanders to withdraw to defensible 1941 winter positions and Soviet chances rose accordingly. The failure to focus arose again in the campaign season of 1942. They did shift their focus toward the mineral and oil producing regions of Baku, but they still played the destroy the enemy army card instead of the strategic land grab that would have both strengthened them and weakened their enemy.

Wisdom:
If Germany had put aside their racism and gone as liberators, that would have been a large factor in their Soviet military adventurism.

Juxtaposition:
Imagine if Hitler hadn’t turned production more toward artillery and the Kreigsmarine in 39 and 40. Imagine if that had all been aimed at more modern tanks and planes.

For every idea that Hitler micromanaged and drove the armies with his megalomania, there’s the idea that too many of the highest ranking German generals had an old school Prussian idea of destroying the opposing army in the field rather than seizing strategic objectives that would have starved and hamstrung the abilities of an opposing modern army.

When the history of the war in North Africa comes up, it invariably focuses on El Alamein, Tobruk, Monty, and the British Army and/or Rommel. This underestimates the impact of the landings in Morrocco and Algeria that brought, yes, British, but also, American and French forces into play, as well as Patton and Bradley. Without those landings, the decision in North Africa may have dragged on significantly and hinged ultimately on who held Malta.

The Unexpected:
I never realized how close Barbarossa came to genuinely conquering the Soviet Union. Based on the numbers, if the Nazis had used a more strategic mindset as opposed to the war of annihillation pretext, they should have won. Those numbers follow: the Red Army was down to 27 experienced and well equipped divisions, 90 million of a prewar population of 171 million Soviet citizens were within occupied territory, hundreds of thousands of square miles had fallen into Nazi hands, 40% of the Soviet skilled labor force was within the conquered territory, 47% of prewar agricultural lands, 41% of the rail network, 63% of coal production, 68% of steel production, and 60% of aluminum output. Based on that alone, the domestic armaments industry of the Soviet Union was kaput. And the raw material influx to Nazi Germany should have been tremendous. ...if they could have gotten it going, and the only way to do that would have been to consolidate the holdings. Which Stalin gave them an opportunity to do when he quietly sued for peace, which fell on deaf ears because they were still caught up in the idea that they were going to completely destroy the Red Army. The Red Army despite having only those 27 ready divisions had tremendous unskilled and ill-equipped soldiers and more every month.

Halder lost his job, but he was as off the strategic importance of modern warfare as Hitler was. Probably a good thing that he wasn’t replaced earlier in the war.

Missed Opportunity:
Hitler, Halder, et al, were idiots. If they had let their Moscow obsession go, if they had allowed the army to enter winter quarters and hunker down in a defensive position instead of playing a lines on a map game with the lives of their soldiers, the war in the USSR may, MAY, have had a significantly different complexion in the spring of 1942.

There are so many places in history as presented by this book where if the generals on the ground had acted to do what was strategically right or if they would have backed them up with logistics and reserves the war on the Eastern front with the Soviet Union may have had a much different outcome.
_________________________________________________
Pacing:
For non-fiction, this was well paced.

Questions I’m Left With:
I wonder how Stalin’s Red Army purges line up with the German-Soviet military training exercises of the mid-30s. How much distrust Stalin placed on those who got “too close” with their opposite numbers? Looks like massive guilt by association if that was the trigger...along with Stalin’s massive mental issues.

So, if German Army Group North hadn’t called a pause to wait on Leeb’s Panzer Army...if Leeb hadn’t lollygagged his way across the Dvina River...and if Leeb hadn’t held his Panzer Army up for 6 days for infantry support when there was ample infantry support ahead of him with the rest of Army Group North, the German Army Group North would have been in Leningrad ahead of Soviet reinforcements and the siege of Leningrad wouldn’t have happened because by the time supporting Soviet elements, which in our world were in place ahead of the German arrival, would have shown up to find the city fallen and in Nazi hands. Without the Siege of Leningrad, how much different would Nazi Germany vs USSR gone?

Imagine if the Germans had invaded the Soviet Union and come as liberators and instead of destroyers God knows how it would have turned out?

Was Rommel’s brilliance a function of the ineptness of Montgomery and his predecessors in Egypt? Would his presence on the Eastern Front have made a difference? Would his use of armor have played out differently in the different geographic realities of the western Soviet Union as opposed to North Africa? Would he have just been one more German general fed into the meat grinder on the Eastern Front alongside his men and machines?

Conclusions I’ve Drawn:
Many histories seem to either downplay or overplay the opening of the second front on D-Day. Based on the way this reads and actions and reactions along the Eastern Front, by both Germans and Soviets, without that second front, this war may have drug on for many many years even with the missteps by both Soviet and German commanders and leadership.

A lot of myth clouds perceptions of how World War 2 played out strategically. To the point, that much of it is never taught or learned by modern students.

Author Assessment:
I would read other studies written by this author.
_________________________________________________… (mais)

Kind of a different and interesting book. Mercatante is not a trained historian, but a lawyer whose hobby is military history and who has a Web site devoted to his passion. Heh, imagine that. Nevertheless, his book got a couple of favorable blurbs from other historians, including a couple of professors at the Canadian and Marine staff colleges. So it went on my wish list, and the Mistress of Science gave me a copy for Christmas.

I think "flawed but interesting" about covers it. And, for sufficiently avid military history readers, the interesting probably outweighs the flawed. The book is exclusively about the war against Germany, by which I mean even Italy gets light coverage. And it's almost exclusively about tactics and logistics; you could extract an operational history from it, but it'd be a brief one, and politics and leadership is almost untouched on. The latter may be a mercy, given that when he does touch on politics, he generally gets it wrong. The notion that Roosevelt sold out Eastern Europe at Yalta in order to secure Middle East oil rights for American business is not even a caricature of the truth.

So now and then a random bit of nonsense gets dropped into the narrative. Fortunately, these are few. Mostly the book is loaded with statistics to support what Mercatante presents as novel and revisionist interpretations:

Brute force was not the key to victory and it's now how the Allies won. Germany had no business winning the battle of France if this was the case. Well, that's not actually novel, but probably correct in at least a number of instances.
Germany really could have won the war, or at least fought it to a stalemate, if Hitler had had his way and Germany had put priority on seizing the economic resources of southern Russia. Interesting thesis, and Mercatante makes as good a case as I expect to see. Not sure yet if I buy it, but it's plausible.
The Red Army in 1945 was heavy on firepower and lean on infantry. It was improved weapons and tactics that gave Russia military success, including mobility through Lend-Lease trucks. Maybe. That the Red Army was lean in infantry by 1945 seems pretty clear, When you lose more troops than your enemy even in your greatest victories -- Russia lost more men in the Stalingrad campaign than Germany, and may have even run up a negative balance in Bagration -- infantry is going to get scarce. It astonished me to keep reading comparative casualty figures for the Eastern Front. Russian casualties were incredible. A striking statistic: Russia lost more men in a month fighting its way into East Prussia than Germany lost in the first five months of Barbarossa. And that was another Soviet victory.
Allied air power was crucial; the strategic bombing campaign was all that allowed Russia to become the grave of the Wehrmacht. I buy this, but I think Tooze made the case already.
Germany was never going to be able to sustain an army in Africa large enough to conquer the British there, and would have done much better to adopt a defensive strategy and put the resources on the Eastern Front. Well, that's a novel thesis. I think Germany could actually have closed the Mediterranean on the cheap with a little more intelligent strategy.
German leader excelled at the operational art but stunk at grand strategy. I agree, but I think Murray and Millett already made this case.
Hitler's strategy for the Ardennes was not quite as stupid as his general later claimed. The idea being that giving the western Allies enough of a setback to stabilize the Eastern Front until the Type XXI U-boats were ready really was Germany's only hope at this point. Again, I don't think Mercatante is the first to suggest this.

The book has the feel of being self-published, but a much better job than most. Still, Mercatante could have used a better editor. The text is unnecessarily dense in places -- though the subject matter was never boring, the book managed to occasionally plod as a result -- and he persistently misuses apostrophes, causing the text to lose it's sense of being professionally written. ;)

Not a good history for the general reader; Mercatante assumes a lot of background knowledge about the general course of the war.… (mais)