World Battlefronts: PROSPECT FROM THE FORTRESS

Prussian military science made one-front war an axiom. Otto von Bismarck never deviated from the axiom and thereby gained an empire. Wilhelm II disregarded it and thereby lost the empire. Adolf Hitler based his strategy on it. Now, fretting over the map of beleaguered Europe, the Führer could see how completely his plans for one-front war had been thwarted.

He and his generals had plotted long and carefully, but they had not left margin enough for the imponderables. They had miscalculated and might still be miscalculating Russian strength. They had overestimated their own air power, had not foreseen the emergence of British-American air power. They had been caught short by their weaknesses in southern Europe. Adolf Hitler might well ponder the words of Prussian Karl von Clausewitz, father of modern strategy:

“War is the province of chance. In no other sphere of human activity has such a margin to be left for the intruder, because none is in such constant contact with it. It increases the uncertainty of every circumstance and deranges the course of events.”

First Front. Russia was still the first front, massive and man-consuming. The Wehrmacht found no rest at the Dnieper, only more blood, battle and bafflement. The Red Army crunched through Zaporozhe, grappled fiercely for Gomel, Kiev and Melitopol, crashed through the German lines between the key cities, battered at the flank of the enemy’s Dnieper loop, threatened with disaster his powerful forces in the Crimea.

For the Russians the gains were racked up at heavy cost in blood and treasure. At the momentous conference of U.S., British and Soviet diplomats, they were an added argument for a “second front” in the west. But the British and Americans could point without apology to their share in the coalition war. A “second front,” matching the Russian effort, would come when the Nazi heartland had been properly softened. The Allied argument was one of timing and method. In that, Adolf Hitler could take scant comfort.