Poland, a country that they were in no position to assist militarily. In confident and
accurate expectation of Anglo-French impotence, Stalin had cut a deal with Hitler on
23 August 1939 which made the Soviet Union an active participant in, and beneficiary
of, Germany’s conquest of Poland. From 1939 to 1941, Moscow chose collaboration
rather than what would most probably have been a lonely and hopeless path of resistance.
Hitler was a statesman in a hurry. He had to stay ahead of the health problems, real
and imagined, that threatened his own mortality as well as the willingness and ability of
others to mobilize to oppose him. As a consequence, he knew that his ideal course of
fighting wars one at a time against isolated enemies might be impossible. And so it
proved. Britain and France did not fight directly for Poland, but neither did they seek to
make peace. However, with his new Soviet alliance providing tolerable security for
Germany in the East, after Poland Hitler enjoyed a strategic luxury denied his predeces-
sors in 1914. He could fight a one-front war in the West and, by destroying France and
possibly neutralizing Britain as a consequence, he would thereby set up the Soviet Union
for the isolated assault that was the most necessary step on his march to continental,
and later world, empire. But what happened in 1940–1 was that Germany’s inability to
conclude its war with maritime Britain obliged it to open the next phase of conquest,
against the Soviet Union, in the strategic context of a greatly undesired multi-front war.
Germany certainly did not intend to begin a general world war on 1 September 1939, and
indeed it did not do so, but the consequences of the short, victorious war against Poland
were ultimately to prove fatal for Hitler’s dreams of empire. Strategic history is not linear;
its course is unpredictable.
The strategic history of the war in Europe is one of paradox. In its three years of
typically successful aggression, until October 1942, Germany sowed the seeds, set the
stage, for its own eventual demise. This is not to claim that Germany could not still
have won after October 1942, but it is to suggest strongly that it had overreached with
its available and mobilizable assets. Hitler’s Reich behaved like a reckless gambler,
determined to play either to win all or to lose all. An important concept in Clausewitz’s
writing is the idea of ‘the culminating point of victory’ (Clausewitz, 1976: 566–73).
Somewhere on the road to Stalingrad, German arms passed that point. The deeper
they penetrated into Russia, the weaker they became. This is known as the loss of
strength gradient (Boulding, 1962: 245–7): military power diminishes with distance.
Unfortunately for German soldiers, their military system was characteristically casual
about logistics, while Hitler’s aim of conquest could accept no recognition of practical
material limits. Germany’s war in the East was one from which it could not with-
draw, politically, ideologically or militarily, even had Stalin offered it the opportunity
to do so.
The Russo-German War was the real World War II in Europe. Everything else that
occurred was secondary to that main event. The principal axis of Germany’s march
of conquest was eastwards. That march was not an opportunistic lunge during a brief
window of strategic opportunity; rather, it was the central purpose of the entire Nazi
enterprise. To understand the structure and dynamics of World War II, one has to grasp
the fact that for Hitler the realization of his vision of a great racial state mandated the
destruction of the Soviet Union. It can be difficult for British and American commen-
tators to accept the full implications of this historical reality. Although blood was spilt
in abundance all around Europe, and despite Germany’s sometimes reluctant dispersion
128 War, peace and international relations