Hitler

pressure from Göring, himself being pushed by the commander of the parachutist division, General Kurt Student. By the end of May, this too had proved successful. But it had been hazardous. And the German losses of 2,071 dead, 2,594 wounded, and 1,888 missing from a deployment of around 22,000 men were far higher than in the entire Balkan campaign. ‘Operation Mercury’ – the attack on Crete – convinced Hitler that mass paratroop landings had had their day. He did not contemplate using them in the assault the following year on Malta. Potentially, the occupation of Crete offered the prospect of intensified assault on the British position in the Middle East. Naval High Command tried to persuade Hitler of this. But his eyes were now turned only in one direction: towards the East.
    On 28 April, Hitler had arrived back in Berlin – for the last time the warlord returning in triumph from a lightning victory achieved at minimal cost. Though people in Germany responded in more muted fashion than they had done to the remarkable victories in the west, the Balkan campaign appeared to prove once again that their Leader was a military strategist of genius. His popularity was undiminished. But there were clouds on the horizon. People in their vast majority wanted, as they had done all along, peace: victorious peace, of course, but above all, peace. Their ears pricked up when Hitler spoke of ‘a hard year of struggle ahead of us’ and, in his triumphant report to the Reichstag on the Balkan campaign on 4 May, of providing even better weapons for German soldiers ‘next year’. Their worries were magnified by disturbing rumours of a deterioration in relations with the Soviet Union and of troops assembling on the eastern borders of the Reich.
    What the mass of the people had, of course, no inkling of was that Hitler had already put out the directive for the invasion of the Soviet Union almost five months earlier. That directive, of 18 December, had laid down that preparations requiring longer than eight weeks should be completed by 15 May. But it had not stipulated a date for the actual attack. In his speech to military leaders on 27 March, immediately following news of the Yugoslav coup, Hitler had spoken of a delay of up to four weeks as a consequence of the need to take action in the Balkans. Back in Berlin after his stay in Mönichkirchen, he lost no time – assured by Halder of transport availability to take the troops to the east – in arranging a new date for the start of ‘Barbarossa’ with Jodl: 22 June.
    Towards the end of the war, casting round for scapegoats, Hitler looked back on the fateful delay as decisive in the failure of the Russian campaign. ‘If we had attacked Russia already from 15 May onwards,’ he claimed, ‘… we would have been in a position to conclude the eastern campaign before the onset of winter.’ This was simplistic in the extreme – as well as exaggerating the inroads made by the Balkan campaign on the timing of ‘Barbarossa’. Weather conditions in an unusually wet spring in central Europe would almost certainly have ruled out a major attack before June – perhaps even mid-June. Moreover, the major wear and tear on the German divisions engaged on the Balkan campaign came less from the belated inclusion of Yugoslavia than from the invasion of Greece – planned over many months in conjunction with the planning for ‘Barbarossa’. What did disadvantage the opening of ‘Barbarossa’was the need for the redeployment at breakneck speed of divisions that had pushed on as far as southern Greece and now, without recovery time, had rapidly to be transported to their eastern positions. In addition, the damage caused to tanks by rutted and pot-holed roads in the Balkan hills required a huge effort to equip them again for the eastern campaign, and probably contributed to the high rate of mechanical failure during the invasion of Russia. Probably the most serious effect of the Balkan campaign on planning for ‘Barbarossa’ was the reduction of German forces on the southern flank, to the south of the Pripet marshes. But we have already seen that Hitler took the decision to that effect on 17 March, before the coup in Yugoslavia.
    The weaknesses of the plan to invade the Soviet Union could not be laid at the door of the Italians, for their failure in Greece, or the Yugoslavs, for what Hitler saw as their treachery. The calamity, as it emerged, of ‘Barbarossa’ was located squarely