Hitler

to the south. Hitler’s view was, however, that the Red Army was close to the end of its tether. He pressed all the more for a speedy advance.
    His impulsive, though sometimes unclear or ambiguous, command-style caused constant difficulties for the operational planners. But the essential problem was more far-reaching. Hitler felt compelled by twoimperatives: time, and material resources. The offensive had to be completed before the might of Allied resources came fully into play. And possession of the Caucasian oil-fields would, in his view, both be decisive in bringing the war in the east to a successful conclusion, and provide the necessary platform to continue a lengthy war against the Anglo-Saxon powers. If this oil were not gained, Hitler had said, the war would be lost for Germany within three months. Following his own logic, he had, therefore, no choice but to stake everything on the ambitious strike to the Caucasus in a victorious summer offensive. Even if some sceptical voices could be heard, Halder and the professionals in Army High Command had favoured the offensive. But the gap, already opened up the previous summer, between them and the Dictator was rapidly widening. What Hitler saw as the negativity, pessimism, and timidity of Army High Command’s traditional approaches drove him into paroxysms of rage. Army planners for their part had cold feet about what increasingly seemed to them a reckless gamble carried out by dilettante methods, more and more likely to end in disaster. But they could not now pull out of the strategy which they had been party to implementing. The German war-effort had set in train its own self-destructive dynamic.
    The risk of military disaster was seriously magnified by Hitler’s Directive No.45 of 23 July 1942. Thereafter, a calamity was waiting to happen. Unlike the April directive, in which Halder’s hand had been visible, this directive rested squarely on a decision by Hitler, which the General Staff had sought to prevent. The directive for the continuation of ‘Blue’, now renamed ‘Operation Braunschweig’, began with a worryingly unrealistic claim: ‘In a campaign of little more than three weeks, the broad goals set for the southern flank of the eastern front have been essentially achieved. Only weak enemy forces of the Timoshenko armies have succeeded in escaping envelopment and reaching the southern bank of the Don. We have to reckon with their reinforcement from the Caucasus area.’
    Earlier in the month, Hitler had divided Army Group South into a northern sector (Army Group B, originally under Field-Marshal von Bock, then, after his sacking, under Colonel-General Freiherr von Weichs) and a southern sector (Army Group A, under Field-Marshal Wilhelm List). The original intention, under his Directive No.41 of 5 April, had been to advance on the Caucasus
following
the encirclement and destruction of Soviet forces in the vicinity of Stalingrad. This wasnow altered to allow attacks on the Caucasus and Stalingrad (including the taking of the city itself) to proceed
simultaneously.
List’s stronger Army Group A was left to destroy enemy forces in the Rostov area, then conquer the whole of the Caucasus region alone. This was to include the eastern coast of the Black Sea, crossing the Kuban and occupying the heights around the oil-fields of Maykop, controlling the almost impenetrable Caucasian mountain passes, and driving south-eastwards to take the oil-rich region around Grozny, then Baku, far to the south on the Caspian Sea. The attack on Stalingrad was left to the weaker Army Group B, which was expected thereafter to press on along the lower Volga to Astrakhan on the Caspian. The strategy was sheer lunacy.
    Only the most incautiously optimistic assessment of the weakness of the Soviet forces could have justified the scale of the risk involved. But Hitler took precisely such a view of enemy strength. Moreover, he was as always temperamentally predisposed to a risk-all strategy, with alternatives dismissed out of hand and boats burned to leave no fall-back position. As always, his self-justification could be bolstered by the dogmatic view that there was no alternative. Halder, aware of more realistic appraisals of Soviet strength, and the build-up of forces in the Stalingrad area, but unable to exert any influence upon Hitler, was by now both seriously concerned and frustrated at his own impotence. On 23 July, the day that Hitler issued his Directive No.45, Halder had