Faced with the dilemma of what to do in Russia now that blitzkrieg had failed, German planners came to the only conclusion possible given their history, training, and assumptions: launch another blitzkrieg campaign. In the operational plan for 1942, however, they departed from tradition and past practices in two key areas: first, it was to be an exceedingly complex operation based on a series of sequential actions directed from the top, and, second, little decisionmaking freedom was to be accorded field commanders. Moreover, success would be assured only if the enemy cooperated once again in his destruction. Since the distances involved were so great, the supply situation so tenuous, and the necessary manpower insufficient, in order to achieve a maximum concentration of force at crucial points the campaign was planned as a series of mutually supplementary partial attacks, staggered from north to south. The aim, in short encirclements modeled on Vyazma and Bryansk, would be to seize Voronezh, then destroy enemy forces west of the Don to prepare the way for an advance to Stalingrad. Having neutralized, although not necessarily seized, this industrial and communications center and cut the Volga supply line, only then would German forces move into the Caucasus. At the conclusion of this operation, which Hitler expected by the end of October, German troops would immediately go into winter quarters; haunted by the frightful death toll of the previous winter, the Führer was determined that strong defensive positions be prepared. All plans for after the operation in the Caucasus, he told Mussolini at the time, would have to be shelved since all would depend on the outcome of that battle. As with the blitzkrieg of the previous summer, it was an allor-nothing gamble on a short campaign, but, in the spring of 1942, the discrepancy between his aims and his military power was even greater than the year earlier.58
With Directive No. 41, Hitler indicated both his intention to make the eastern front the decisive theater of operations—“The war will be decided in the east,” Halder noted in late March—and the fact that, even with a victory in the summer offensive, he had no clear idea how to extract Germany from the war. The first point, given the altered circumstances in the spring of 1942, was not self-evident since a German victory in the east would not necessarily be decisive. With the failure of Barbarossa and the entry of the United States into the war, Hitler’s freedom of action was seriously constrained. Still, he had several conceivable options at his disposal, although none offered much certainty. He might, theoretically, have gone over to the strategic defensive and used the time fully to mobilize the German war economy and develop new weapons. Goebbels, in fact, referred in late March to a report he received indicating that German research “in the realm of atomic destruction has now proceeded to a point where its results may possibly be made use of in the conduct of this war…. It is essential that we be ahead of everybody, for whoever introduces a revolutionary novelty into this war has the greater chance of winning it.” Or Hitler might have ordered an increase in weapons such as U-boats or antiaircraft guns that might have significantly affected the outcome of the war in the Atlantic or over the skies of Germany. He might also have built on Japanese successes and revived the Mediterranean strategy rejected the previous year, in hopes of striking east through Egypt to acquire the oil fields of the Middle East and link up with Japanese forces in India. The naval leadership did propose a plan, which Halder sarcastically dismissed, to redirect German efforts against the British Empire and the oil of the Middle East, but, although Hitler found it intriguing, it was ultimately rejected, not least because of force limitations and its failure to offer a quick solution to the problem of economic constraints.59
Although senior military leaders complained privately of “utopian plans for an offensive,” the striking fact was that none could offer a convincing alternative strategy, especially since the Germans possessed neither the manpower, the materiel, nor the economic resources to conduct a strategic defense. Nor, given the psychological impact of the events of the recent winter, was a resumption of the assault on Moscow a viable option, especially since that operation had largely been Halder’s idea and disaster had evidently been averted only by Hitler’s resolve. Both at the OKH and among field commanders, concerns were expressed that Army Group South lacked the resources to occupy the enormous area between the Black and the Caspian Seas, while Fromm regarded the proposed operation as a “luxury” inappropriate to a “poor man.” General Thomas warned of “the disproportion between war requirements and the capacity to meet them” and demanded that German military operations in the summer of 1942 take account of the fuel situation, but he could offer nothing beyond that. Speer merely observed that, if Germany had to fight another winter in Russia, then it would have lost the war. None, however, could offer a convincing alternative, nor did any have any impact on Hitler, who observed with asperity in late May, “Again and again so-called experts… declared: that is not possible, that can’t be done…. There are problems that absolutely have to be solved. Where real leaders are present, they have always been solved and will always be solved.”60
This operational problem, however, concealed a larger dilemma. If the goal of the war in the Soviet Union was Lebensraum, how was this to be achieved? The Germans no longer had the resources to conquer European Russia, if they ever had. If the Red Army could avoid being drawn into encirclement battles, the destruction of the enemy forces would prove to be beyond German capabilities. At best, then, Hitler might hope to destroy sufficient numbers of Soviet units to hold the remnants of Stalin’s regime at bay. At the same time, the Soviet Union’s Western allies were steadily assembling their massive economic and military resources to use against Germany. For their part, the Germans found themselves increasingly dependent on their allies, Italy, Rumania, and Hungary, nations that could marshal far fewer resources than those of the enemy coalition. Once again, the Germans confronted their basic dilemma, how to do more with less. Even as they won on the operational level, they failed to find a way to translate these triumphs into a strategic victory, a conundrum that grew the more the Germans achieved success on the battlefield as they had to disperse their scarce resources over a wider area.
Realistically, the only two alternatives left to Germany in early 1942 were to end the war politically, an option Hitler refused to countenance, or to create as rapidly as possible the preconditions for fighting a long war. Operation Blau, which aimed to acquire the oil and raw materials necessary for German survival and deny these equally vital resources to the Soviets, was, thus, an operational attempt to pass through the danger zone before the Western allies could intervene on the Continent. As Hitler understood, perhaps the most serious consequence of the altered strategic situation was to put Germany under an extraordinary time pressure. With the American entry into the war, a concrete threat of a second front had now materialized, and, in order to avoid the strategic encirclement of Germany, as in World War I, a victory in the east was needed “to clear the tables.” Halder, despite his misgivings and fear that losses in 1942 would be greater than the entire cohort of young men to be drafted into the army, recognized the bloody logic of the Ostkrieg: the Caucasus operation, he concluded, was “an inescapable necessity.” That spring, Goebbels began alerting the German public to the meaning of the coming summer offensive. In an article in Das Reich, the propaganda minister stressed the importance of ideals but underscored that this was also “a war for raw materials.”61