Review: Barbarossa: The Russian German Conflict 1941-1945

Barbarossa: The Russian German Conflict 1941-1945

By Alan Clark

(Published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1964, 1995, 2001)

Yesterday, the 22nd of June 2023,  was the 82nd anniversary of the launch of Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union by Nazi Germany, an event that sparked the most bloody, barbaric and titanic military struggle in world history, so I thought I would share a few reflections on my recent reading of Alan Clark’s history of the conflict, which was first written in 1964.

Clark was that very rare beast, a Tory M.P who I liked and respected. I well remember enjoying the 1993 television documentary Love Tory, which included details, with the full compliance of Clark and his long-suffering wife Jane, of his tangled sex-life, including dalliances with the wife of a top South African judge, as well as their two daughters, a trio referred to as ‘The Coven’ by Jane. The posthumous television dramatisation of his diaries, for along with Tony Benn, Clark was perhaps the greatest British diarist of the post-war period, starring John Hurt, was also highly entertaining.

As regards his private life, I suppose he had much in common with Boris Johnson, though he was much more likable. Plus, he lived in an actual castle, complete with drawbridge and moat. No ‘man of the people’ affectations from Alan. Though not a fully-fledged aristocrat, he was certainly, like Johnson, born with the proverbial silver spoon, his father being the leading art historian Sir Kenneth Clark, who wrote and presented, the 1969 BBC series Civilisation, a comprehensive history of western art, which is rightly seen as a landmark of British television. Henceforth, he would always be referred to by the impressive sounding title of Lord Clark of Civilisation.

Again, like Boris, Clark Jr often had a tangential relationship with the truth, his admission that he may have been ‘economic with the actualite’ temporarily bringing a whole new Anglo-French term into popular usage, following some dodgy dealers during his time at the Ministry of Defence. Somehow, his natural charm allowed him to get away with these personal and political misdemeanours. Clark was also a genuine maverick and free-thinker in a way that the arch-globalist Johnson would like to think he is, but simply isn’t.

I love the story of how, after Thatcher, who he, to his detriment greatly admired, (and to the point of sexual attraction: he once compared her to Eva Peron, though I can’t see it myself), had narrowly failed to secure enough votes to prevent a second ballot when challenged for the Conservative Party leadership and thus the post of Prime Minister, by Michael Heseltine in the autumn of 1990, he was one of the long parade of Tory dignitaries who were called into Number Ten Downing Street one by one to offer advice as to her future course of action. Almost to a man (and they were almost all men) they told her that her support amongst the parliamentary party, at a time when Conservative M.P’s alone decided who should lead the party, was collapsing, and she should therefore resign immediately. Clark, looking at the issue as a historian rather than as a practical politician, offered a contrary view: ‘You should stand,’ he told her. ‘Of course, you shall lose, but it will be magnificent!’ Sadly, Thatcher ignored this advice, and we were thus denied the enjoyment of Maggie’s final bunker-like denouement.

Even more, I will always love Clark for his very last speech in the House of Commons in 1999 when, after fruitless surgery, suffering from a brain tumour he knew would soon kill him, he was one of the few voices in British politics to denounce the then ongoing NATO bombing of Belgrade (and those who tell you that the current Russo-Ukraine conflict is the first major war in Europe since the 1940’s conveniently forget the deliberate destruction of socialist Yugoslavia by the western powers), calling the Serbs ‘a brave Christian people who have never injured, nor so much as threatened a British citizen.’

He was also an active supporter of animal rights, and thus opponent of blood sports, again, a rarity amongst members of the upper echelons of the Conservative Party.

So, I’ve long been a fan of Clark. I was, however, only dimly aware he was an accomplished military historian; and I admit that military history is not and never has been my usual reading matter. I therefore approached the 474 pages of Barbarossa, not counting Appendices, with some trepidation, fully accepting the possibility that it may join the list of the books on my bookshelves that sit there for years with a makeshift bookmark placed somewhere between their pages, before it becomes time for another space-creating cull and a trip to the near-by charity shop with a series of bin-liners attached to our shopping trolley.

But finish Barbarossa I did, and I found it to be a gripping read from first page to last. In fact, I enjoyed it so much that I intend to seek out a copy of his earlier, and more widely-known book, The Donkeys: a history of the BEF in 1915, about the struggle on the Western Front in World War One, a book that has done much to shape our view of that conflict.

When it comes to mass casualties, the figures for the battles for territory between the Allied and the Central Powers from 1914 to 1918 pale into virtual insignificance when compared against the war between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, which began less than a quarter of a century after Revolution had led to Russia’s early exit from ‘The War to End All Wars.’ This latter war was not so much a war for territory, though the Red Army and Soviet people were of course defending their homeland from invading forces, but a war of annihilation. Hitler’s racial theories, which treated the Slavic peoples, like the Jews, as under-mensch, literally sub-humans, whose fate and suffering was therefore of no consequence, made this inevitable. Their lands, including those of the highly fertile Ukraine, and it’s worth noting that Barbarossa is replete with the names of battlefields which are once again regularly appearing on our news outlets, were, once its inhabitants had been erased from the face of Earth, to be re-settled by those of the best National Socialist racial-stock, by the members of the SS and their families, with their head Heinrich Himmler openly musing that within a few generations nobody would care, or perhaps even know, that these geographical areas had ever been anything but Germanic/Nordic settlements.

Clark is unstinting in his descriptions of the brutality of the conflict, for which he rightly blames, primarily, Nazi racial theories. Like others before and since, he notes that their fanatical anti-Slavic views probably hampered rather than helped the German war effort. A more compassionate attitude to the inhabitants of the newly conquered territories during the first six months of the war as the Wehrmacht swept all before it, and seemed destined for the early victory that Hitler expected, may have won over large sections of local populations hostile to Stalin. In Ukraine, the Holodomor famine, which, rightly or wrongly, was widely perceived as being the result of a deliberate policy of the Soviet government as part of Stalin’s drive to ;‘eliminate the Kulaks as a class,’ was still a recent event, having occurred barely a decade earlier; and the Baltic countries, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, had only, forcibly, been incorporated into the Soviet Union a year before the Nazi invasion. Of course, some members of the population did voluntarily sign up for the National Socialist cause, and in some areas the advancing German forces were initially welcomed as liberators. But the Nazi treatment of the peoples’ of these seemingly vanquished nations, the casual destruction of entire villages, the rape and murder of women and children, the use of the men-folk as slave labour for the Reich, ensured that in the main the Nazi advance was met by fanatical resistance, from both the Red Army and from rapidly formed ‘Workers Battalions’, resistance that within a few months, as shown in letters home that are referenced by Clark, already had the rank and file of the Wehrmacht opining that they were fighting not under-mensch as their leaders had promised, but rather uber-mensch, supermen (and women) who were prepared to continue to fight on fearlessly with hands, feet and teeth, even after their last round of ammunition had been spent.  

As well as thrilling, and disturbing, Clark’s account is well balanced. For one thing, he openly admires the fighting qualities and courage of the ordinary soldiers on both sides of the conflict.  And as well as powerfully invoking the atrocities committed by the Nazis, he also, towards the end of the book, addresses the issue of the violent excesses of the Red Army, particularly when it breached the borders of the Reich itself from 1944 onwards, including the well documented mass rape of German women. But, as he points out, these excesses were an ad-hoc, though brutal affairs, where individual soldiers and units did what conquering warriors, filled with the adrenalin of victory in battle have always done, took their fill of revenge and the spoils of war. This is not, Clark makes clear, to excuse these actions. But it was of a different order to the actions of the Nazis, whose ideology led them to see the destruction of entire races of people as not only justifiable in times of war, but as desirable in and of itself. There was no ideological; justification for the rape of German womanhood by Soviet soldiers, and we at least have instances, though not enough, of such departures from the norms of socialist morality being swiftly and severely punished by the political commissars of the CPSU, when and if such actions became known to them.

Without explicitly stating the case, which might have proved difficult for such a firm believer in Thatcherite ‘free’ market economics, Clark’s account of the vital industrial dimension of the conflict reveals the superiority, at least in times of war, of Soviet centralised planning over the rather chaotic mish-mash that operated in the Third Reich, at least until the belated, too belated, embrace of ‘Total War’ which was signalled by Goebbels following the catastrophic defeat at Stalingrad in early 1943. Despite massive early losses, in machinery as in human life, the Soviet Union, with workers often dismantling entire plants and transporting them eastwards as they were forced to retreat, were soon turning out weapons of war on a scale that the German economy was never able to match, even with the vast resources of slave labour that their victories afforded them access too. It is also a historical fact, though it is beyond the scope of Clark’s book, that the British coalition government under Churchill succeeded in committing more of the industrial capacity of the UK to the needs of war than was managed by the Nazi regime in Germany, largely because Churchill sensibly left economic matters mainly to his temporary Labour Party partners. Hitler’s ideological aversion to the idea of women working, still less fighting, again until too later in the war, was also a factor, albeit one of many, in their eventual defeat.

It wasn’t only a question of bare numbers when it came to the Soviets production of the material needs of war either. These were weapons of a very high calibre. Clark shows very well, from the point of view of the ordinary German soldier as well as of the military High Command and the Nazi leadership, the initial shock when their seemingly invincible Panzer divisions first encountered, during the first great Soviet counter-offensive of December 1941, the brand-new Russian T-34 tanks. For a Wehrmacht whose morale was already being sapped by their first Russian winter, for some of them the first of four, for which they were ill-prepared both psychologically and in terms of clothing and equipment, this was final confirmation, if any was needed, that the USSR was not France.

Indeed, Clark expresses the opinion that even if there had been no Western Front, if this had been a straight fight between the Soviet Union and Germany, such was the terrain, the climate, and the vast reserves of manpower and resources at the disposal of the former, ultimately the Red Army and their civilian axillaries would still have triumphed, or at the very least fought the Wehrmacht to a bloody stalemate.

If he were alive today, I believe Alan Clark would, as German tanks once more burn on the Steppes of Ukraine, be strongly warning Europe of the folly in following the United States in risking an escalation of the current war in the into a wider conflict between Russia and NATO.

The Donkey’s was seen as ‘Revisionist’ history when it was first published, though its central thesis of brave warriors being needlessly slaughtered through poor leadership, on both sides, is now standard. Barbarossa too does not always follow the received wisdom, either of the time it was first published or of the present day. This is particularly true in Clark’s assessment of Hitler as a military leader. Most historians see the German Fuhrer as an untrained dilettante whose military meddling’s severely damaged the cause of the Wehrmacht’s campaign in the East, perhaps even costing it victory through his decision to divert the main thrust of his forces towards the oil fields of the Caucuses, rather than making straight for Moscow late in 1941. Clark’s view is that military commanders are generally more cautious than they need to be, that Hitler’s contrary elan was usually more successful than would have been the actions advised by his Field Marshal’s and Generals, and that in disputes between the Nazi leader and the German High Command, Hitler was in general more often right than wrong. On the question of Moscow, he points out that such was the level of resistance mounted by almost the entire population in the major cities of Russia, there is no guarantee that German forces would have triumphed there any more easily than they triumphed at Leningrad or Stalingrad. All that can be said with certainty about an early Battle for Moscow, according to Clark, is that its result, whichever way it went, would likely have ended the war much earlier than it did eventually end.

Clark also addresses the standard ‘Mad Dictator’ thesis, showing through excerpts from the regular, eventually nightly, military conferences, that apart from in the very last weeks of the war, when he had become completely delusional, moving now largely none-existent Divisions around his map in his bunker conference room, Hitler remained completely rational throughout hostilities. He wasn’t always right, but based on the available transcripts, the military decision-making of Hitler, that ‘terrible-titan’ as Clark describes him, was based on rational, understandable, sound logical reasoning.

There is less about Stalin in the book, I suppose because less is known, or at least was known at the time it was written, about Stalin’s role in the leadership of his armed forces. He does praise the Soviet leader’s foresight and guile in keeping back reserves for future use even when it seemed there would be no future in which to use them. But all in all, it seems, despite his purge of the leadership of his armed forces before the war, once it began, unlike Hitler, he was prepared to leave military matters to the experts. Any political threat his Generals might pose could be dealt with as and when required, as of course happened with the Soviet Union’s greatest of all military leaders, Marshall Zhukov, who was initially acclaimed a Hero of the USSR, then disgraced, then rehabilitated, before finally ending his days quietly and modestly, once more out of favour with the Soviet leadership. In the Soviet Union, unlike in Germany, no old-school military establishment managed to sustain itself through the years of totalitarian dictatorship. A Soviet equivalent of the July 1944 bomb plot against the head of the Party and the Nation, would have been unthinkable.

The conflict which began on June 22^nd 1941 was, as already stated, the most brutal and titanic conflict in the history of warfare. It takes a great book to covey, even in the smallest way, some inkling of what it must have been like to have been involved, and even to live through it was to be involved, in that conflict. It also takes a great book to make the minutiae of military tactics and the hardware produced and deployed in pursuit of victory exciting to a reader, like me, who has little experience of reading of such matters. In Barbarossa Clark succeeds on both counts, as well as conveying superbly the vital and fascinating political and industrial dimensions of the struggle.  Magnificent, to use one of Clark’s favourite words.

And for anybody who has fond memories of the author as a political speaker, the voice throughout these thrilling pages is unmistakably that of the late, great Alan Clark.

Anthony C Green, June 2023