Grand Delusion: Stalin and the German Invasion of Russia By: Gabriel Gorodetsky

This is an interesting look at Soviet decision-making during the period leading up to the German invasion.  It draws on a lot of recently released Soviet-era material, and contains a number of interesting tidbits. Stalin made a lot of blunders in this period, primarily in underestimating what the Germans were capable of. For example, with Germany embroiled with France and England during the Phony War, he felt strong enough to squeeze the Germans on raw materials. The Soviets delivered only about 15 percent of the grain they had promised the Germans during this period, and similar amount of coal and oil products. Stalin even suspended delivery of war materials to Germany when Germany failed to deliver coal and military equipment. Soviet deliveries became much more reliable after the German invasion of Norway and Denmark, and especially after the fall of France. By that time though, Hitler understood that Stalin was not a partner to rely on to the extent of leaving himself vulnerable to that type of arm-twisting.

There was a real possibility of a temporary military alliance between Germany and the Soviet Union in the fall of 1940 and early 1941. They could have split the remnants of the British empire between themselves, with the Japanese and Italians taking chunks commensurate with their perceived power. The idea was batted around extensively, but the Soviets and Germans could never come close to agreeing on a division of the spoils.

As and interesting sidelight, Schulenburg, the guy that came close to assassinating Hitler in 1944, tried hard to bring an actual Soviet/German military alliance into being, to the point of going on an unauthorized private mission to try to bring that alliance into being.

As war approached, Stalin realized that the Soviet army was nowhere near ready for war. He didn't expect to be ready before 1943, though even postponing a German attack until 1942 would help a lot. Stalin miscalculated in the Balkans, assuming that the Yugoslavs would tie up the Germans for at least two months, making it too late in the year for them to invade in 1941. It actually took 10 days for the Germans to take Yugoslavia.

Gorodetsky sees no evidence that Stalin intended to launch a pre-emptive attack in 1941. As a matter of fact, Stalin was desperately trying to avoid a war that he felt Churchill was trying to trick him into. He was aware of the German buildup in the east, but he thought that it was the result of a split between Hitler and the German military and that the most likely course of events was a buildup followed by an attempt by the Germans to extract concessions, possibly including some form of Soviet support for Germany's war with Britain. Gorodetsky claims that Churchill shared that view up to the point of the attack.

Among the stranger tidbits in the book is an attempt in 1940-41 by the Soviets and Italians to form a tacit alliance to share influence in the Balkans and presumably keep the Germans out. It floundered because the Italians simply didn't have the military power to make it stick, while the Soviets weren't willing to go to war with Germany over the Balkans.

The book is full of little insights into why the various countries and personalities of World War II reacted the way they did, and how their actions affected one another. For example, it points out that Japan sought an agreement with the Soviets in late 1940 which would have freed up troops that presumably would have been used in China or in an earlier move on the British and Dutch Far East colonies. The Soviets wanted more than the Japanese were willing to concede, and the Japanese were not willing to take on even a weakened Britain with the Soviets at their back.

The Soviet/Japanese equation is interesting in that it means that Japan suddenly became much more capable of pulling off the kinds of attacks that it pulled off after Pearl Harbor when the Soviets became embroiled with the Germans. Of course Britain also became much stronger while Germany was embroiled in the Soviet Union, but in 1941 and 1942 much of that power was used in the Middle East, while the rest was used to get convoys to the Soviet Union.

 

 

The Code Book: The Evolution of Secrecy From Mary, Queen of Scots to Quantum Cryptography By: Simon Singh

 

This is a good introduction to the history of codes and code-breaking. It looks at the Vigenere cipher thought for many centuries to be unbreakable, and shows how to break it. It does a very good job of explaining how the German Enigma machines worked and how the Allies cracked the resulting codes. That's a much more complicated story than I was aware of, with numerous variations on the basic Enigma machine for the various German armed forces, and a more complicated cipher for communication between Hitler and his generals. (The Allies broke that one too.) It also does a good job of explaining newer developments like Public Key cryptography. It doesn't go too deeply into the consequences of broken codes in the real world, but it explains the codes themselves very well. It also reproduces the full text of the three Beale Ciphers, the third, still unbroken one of which supposedly reveals the location of $20 million in gold hidden during the 1800's and even spends a chapter discussing the ways in which writings in the various dead languages like Minoan were translated, a process that resembles code cracking a great deal.

 

Plotting Hitler's Death: The Story of the German Resistance By: Joachim Fest

This is a very detailed look at the efforts of the German opposition to overthrow or kill Hitler. After reading it, I am struck by several facts. First, Hitler was incredibly lucky to survive until the end of the war. Given the people who were trying to kill him, and their degree of access, it is very surprising that they did not succeed in one of their numerous attempts. If there are a multitude of universes based on historical events, there are not likely to be many where Hitler survived into 1945. He was even lucky in the July 1944 assassination attempt. One of the two bombs in Stauffenberg's briefcase was not armed because someone wandered into the room as he was trying to arm it. Had both bombs been armed, Hitler would have died along with everyone else in the room when they went off.

The second thing that stood out was that some elements of the German opposition were very moral people. That was their motivation for opposing Hitler, but it was also a major weakness in terms of them actually taking action. Some major figures in the opposition debated endlessly and wrestled with their own consciences over whether or not it was morally right to kill Hitler. While admirable in some situations, that trait made most of them poorly suited to dealing with the ruthless politics of Nazi Germany.

 

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