The Year of the Masters of War
Part 14: Conclusion
1944 came to end not with a crash but rather quietly actually, with Italian operations in the Balkans coming to a successful end some months prior to the new year and the Germans suddenly taking over the bulk of the war effort and of the reclamation conquered Italian territories in Anatolia. The last weeks of the year marked a period of quiet as Italians, Germans and Soviets all took stock of the situations they found themselves in and made plans for the future. All three had faced surprises and shocks during the year and the first priority was to be how to work around these to achieve the most favorable effect.
The Germans began the year very promisingly, pushing south to within a short drive of Helsinki. The Finns were on the verge of disaster, their armed forces nearly split into three distinct parts with no way of directly helping each other. Soviet intervention, possible despite the initiation of the Italian Balkan offensive, slowly turned the tide. The Germans were brought down by their conservative operational art, which gave the Finns and Soviets the opening they needed to counterattack and drive the Germans back. The German position subsequently collapsed and only recovered in northern Finland, anchored on one side by the northern tip of the Gulf of Bothnia and on the other wide by the northwest corner of the White Sea that made Kola a peninsula. In the process of this humiliating and shocking defeat, the Germans lost approximately one hundred and fifty brigades, totaling perhaps over four hundred thousand men. At the same time that the Germans were taking such horrific casualties in Finland, the Eastern Front was hemorrhaging strength not only northward, to remake the Finnish line, but also southward, as the Germans felt that the Italians were not secure in their positions or some such nonsense. Germans strategists failed to realize that the Italians had control in the Balkans. Throughout the year, the Soviets proved themselves consistently superior to the Germans in their warfaring talents.
The Soviets, in turn, were quite inferior to the Italians in waging war. Failing to recognize the Balkans as a trap of epic proportions, despite indications the Italians were thinking in such terms during the previous two years, the Soviets dedicated over half a million men to holding the line in Illyria and to garrisoning various Aegean and Adriatic Sea ports. Still hardly conversant in the attributes of sea power, particularly of dominant sea power, because of their continental focus, the Soviets failed to realize their vulnerability. Sustained naval air assault opened breaches in the ring of Soviet garrisons and maritime transport deposited, over the course of operation, a total of six or seven corps along the Balkan periphery from Athens to Istanbul to Vylkove. Reacting to these significant threats to their rear, the Soviets then left themselves open to the hammer blow from the five Italian armies which had been sitting quietly in Illyria. The result was a blitzkrieg from the northwest and a swinging back and forth in the east in which the Soviets never swung quite hard enough to save themselves. In the end, the Balkans was cleared of Soviet troops. The Soviet Union lost an entire theater of war, approximately three hundred brigades in eighty divisions totaling more than five hundred thousand soldiers. The Italians showed themselves to be the masters of war in the Balkans.
The shocks of the year for the Italians came from the performance of their German allies. German catastrophe in Finland, particularly after such near success, stunned the Italians. The Germans could bungle even nearly guaranteed victory. Their simultaneous division to dedicate an unwanted and unnecessary forty or so divisions to the Balkans resulted in the further denigration of their understanding of strategy. Germany more closely resembles a ball-and-chain weighing Italy down rather than any sort of useful friendly polity. The German willingness to push into Anatolia and out of Dacia into the Ukraine softened some opinions within the Italian strategic community, but as a whole the Italians judged that it was too soon to judge the Germans on this. It could yet end in a properly German disaster.
The Soviets, of course, experienced the worst shock of the year. Their defeat in Balkans reduced the size of their army by perhaps even a fourth. Italian intelligence estimated that the Soviets were fielding twelve hundred brigades at the beginning of the year but only about nine hundred by its end. This, however, does not take Soviet allies into consideration, such as the Mongols, or apparently the Persians, Finns and British. Nine hundred brigades, of course, still represented an enormous army. The entire German army after the disasters of Finland fielded about one thousand fifty brigades. They were only another disaster away from parity with the Soviets. German clients—the Norwegians, Luxembourgish and Slovaks—together contributed another sixty or seventy brigades. The entire Italian army, to deal with all commitments, weighed in at slightly over two hundred brigades. Of course, the Axis powers had such other commitments. Italy had to garrison Spain and manned a frontline in Africa; Germany had to garrison the entirety of Western Europe and Sweden. Thus across Eastern Europe, by the end of the year there was probably a rough parity in actual armed forces between the two blocs.
Rough parity was not promising to the Axis. As Clausewitz asserted, the defensive was the stronger form of warfare. Any invasion would only serve to gradually weaken the attacking power, while the defender would simply be pushed closer and closer back to his centers of supply. The culminating point of victory was a constant Damocles’ sword above the heads and necks of any attacker. The Italians already faced this phenomenon once in the Ukraine, in early 1941 when Graziani launched his reckless push into the Soviet Union at Germany’s declaration of war. The Italians were stronger at the beginning of 1945—much stronger—but the geographic problem remained the same. The Soviet Union was vast, very vast. For an invader, the sheer scale of the country was as much as obstacle as any armed force determined to defend it.
Yet Mussolini hoped to knock the Soviet Union out of the war if it was at all possible. The strategic situation was different enough in early 1945 as opposed to early 1941 to make it seem plausible. The Germans were already present in Anatolia and the Ukraine. The Soviets had just lost a quarter of their entire army and were also committed to supporting the Finns in the far northern theater. They were committed to an offensive of sorts in southern Poland as well. If the Italians acted correctly, there seemed to be the opportunity to overstretch the Soviets and initiate the breakdown of the entire Soviet defensive system. However, if history taught anything it was that invading the vast expanses of Russia, particularly from the west, was risky, very risky.
Yet what was war, if not inherently risky? There is no such thing as riskless war. The innate dialectic of will and force in war guaranteed that.
The map at the end of the year.