Page 297 - The Chief Culprit

242 y e Chief Culprit

When he received reports that the German army was preparing to invade, Stalin simply
did not believe them. Molotov said before the invasion: “One must be an idiot to attack us.”
According to Stalin’s calculations, an attack on the USSR would have meant suicide for Hitler
and his empire. is calculation was entirely confirmed by the results of the war. e ques-
tion is not whether Stalin was afraid of Hitler or not. Stalin had no reason to be afraid. Stalin
considered Hitler and his generals to be reasonable people, and reasonable people would not
embark on such an adventure, with Britain on their back. Reasonable people could not plan
to crush the Ural and Siberian industrial complexes using long-range bombers, especially
when they had no such bombers. Here we must ask a different question: why did Hitler at-
tack the USSR?
Hitler signed Open Directive No. 21 ordering Operation Barbarossa—the attack on
the Soviet Union—on December 18, 1940: “ e end goal of the operation is the creation of
a protective barrier against Asian Russia along the line Volga-Astrakhansk. In this manner, in
case of need the last industrial region the Russians have left in the Urals could be paralyzed
using aviation.” Since Germany invaded the USSR on June 22, it was impossible to reach
the Volga line before the autumn rains. German tanks had a short motor operating time, and
therefore on the way to Moscow the entire German army inevitably had to stop for two to
three weeks for the overall repairs of tanks (replacement of engines, transmissions, pistons,
and so forth). If Moscow had been taken in August, they would have had to continue to-
ward the Volga line, and for this another stop would have been needed for the overall repair
of tanks and the recovery of the troops’ fighting capacity. It would have been impossible to
reach the Volga even by September. In October, there would be rain and mud. Even if they
could have successfully reached the Volga line in September, it was impossible to bomb the
Urals from this position: there were few air bases on the right bank of the Volga. First, they
would have to be built, which was hard to do: in October, the area was a bare wet steppe, in
November, a bare frozen steppe.
If Hitler had been able to build air bases on the right bank of the Volga River, he still
would not have been able to bomb the industry centers of the Urals. e German Do-17, Ju-
88, and He-111 bombers were created for completely different tasks. eir missions had been
the destruction of small-scale, mostly mobile targets in the area of battle and in the enemy’s
near rear. ese bombers were created for short-range flights, had a small bomb-carrying
capacity, and could act only at low and medium altitudes. To reach the Urals and return, the
bombers Hitler had in 1941 had to take with them plenty of fuel and no bombs at all. If
Hitler’s bombers had a sufficient radius of action, even then they could not have bombed the
Urals. Germany was running out of fuel. In August 1941, it already had so little fuel that it
had to halt large-scale operations.
If there had been enough fuel in October, November, and later on it could not have
been delivered to the Volga-area airbases, which were not yet built anyway. Delivery of even
one hundred tons of fuel, where there were no roads, across a distance of one thousand kilo-
meters, demanded huge expenditure of fuel and of lubricant materials. Fuel transport had to
run on something too. e tractors had to cross the steppes. Even if fuel had been supplied
to the non-existing airbases, bombs had to be supplied as well. ousands of tons of bombs
were not enough for such an operation. But the delivery of even 100,000 tons of bombs to
the non-existent air bases on the Volga would have required a tremendous amount of fuel.