1 WAR GAME JANUARY 2, 1941: THE KREMLIN The end of 1940 was grim. Two armies, one clad in gray, the other in khaki, were destroying the Old World. They had thrown themselves at Europe abruptly and ferociously, like ants attacking a cake left on a garden table. And like ants, they arrived in geometrically impeccable columns, never questioning their right to devour the trophy. The ants were of two different species. The grays took orders from the German Fhrer, Adolf Hitler; the khakis closed ranks around the Soviet leader, or vozhd, Joseph Stalin. Having been dismissed by cultured European politicians, cartoonists, and sketch writers as pests that could be stamped out by the civilized world in a flash, the ants had proved their worth by 1940. France crumbled under the wheels of German tanks in less than three weeks. The British force on the continent, expected to save the day, was decimated at Dunkirk. As headlines shouted about the impending demise of these two great powers, pillars of the West since the days of the Crusades, smaller European nations such as Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Norway wriggled under German occupation, their cries unheard by the panicking world. At the other end of the continent, the Red Army grabbed Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia and tore away chunks of Poland, Finland, and Romania. In both the west and the east, killings were performed speedily and expertly: troops swept through the ancient cities, blind to decorum, and the punitive squads followed immediately to scavenge, to cleanse, to kill. Hitlers men looked for Jews and Communists; Stalins went for the "exploiting classes." The proud and elaborate European order, which had taken centuries to create, was smashed in less than a year, because the two armies acted in accord. Hitler let Stalin do what he wanted to on the fringes of Europe, and Stalin turned a blind eye to the plight of the West and even reined in his fifth column abroad, the fanatically anti-Nazi Comintern. But this was not a partnership of equals - Hitler snatched the best pieces, and Stalin collected the crumbs. Kaunas was a poor match for Paris, the port of Riga didnt fare nearly as well as that of Rotterdam, and Romanian Cabernet hardly deserved the name when compared to the French varieties. At the end of 1940 a weird lull fell over Europe. The two armies had reached an impasse. Germanys hunger could not be sated by the annexation of the few lesser countries, like Yugoslavia and Greece, that were still stubbornly maintaining their sovereignty. The Germans had to launch a spectacular conquest to justify their roll across Europe; that was what all other empires had done at the peak of their might, and that was what Adolf Hitler had promised the German people. They had few options. One was to invade Britain, another the Middle East; yet another was to strike at the Soviet Union. At the end of 1940 nobody knew which path Hitler would choose. Vir Excerpted from Stalin's Folly: The Tragic First Ten Days of World War Two on the Eastern Front by Constantine Pleshakov All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
