Of course Hitler’s true crises with the generals only began once events had very definitely taken a negative turn, in September 1942, just after the battle of Stalingrad had begun. The German generals were as guilty as their Führer of fetishizing that struggle, thereby destroying the opportunity for a controlled withdrawal which was the Sixth Army’s only hope. On 24 September 1942, as we saw in Chapter 10, Hitler dismissed General Franz Halder for criticizing his personal involvement in the Eastern Front, and replaced him with the more subservient General Kurt Zeitzler. He then sacked Field Marshal Wilhelm List and took personal command of Army Group B, without the precaution of leaving the Wolfschanze and actually visiting the army group’s headquarters himself. For a dictator whose word was law, it would always be difficult to get objective advice, but to sack those who did give it was yet another blunder. With Keitel and Jodl in their key posts at OKW, the last thing the Führer needed in late 1942 was any more sycophancy.
Having received Rommel’s news, during El Alamein, that his tanks could not prevent a breakthrough by Montgomery, Hitler issued another ‘Stand or die’ order, which was largely disregarded by Rommel – who doubted the Führer’s sanity when he received it – but which nonetheless reveals the mentality of Hitler, whose regard for human life was reflected in the Nazi ideology that whereas the nation was all, the individual – barring the Führer himself – was worthless. The entire battle of Stalingrad was fought on that basis.
Hitler’s disagreements with the generals – particularly Manstein – over the withdrawal of the Seventeenth Army from the Kerch Straits bridgehead in late 1942 and early 1943 reflected a deeper dichotomy over future strategy. Hitler wanted to leave the force in place so that the Caucasus could be recaptured when the tide of fortune turned; the generals had written off the oil-rich region, wanting to use the saved Seventeenth Army to plug the growing gaps in the Ukrainian front. If the Caucasus had not fallen in 1941 or 1942, it was hardly likely to in 1943, yet to recapture the Kerch peninsula would be very costly. Similarly Hitler wanted to leave large German and Romanian forces in the Crimea rather than evacuate them while there was still time, in the hope that the land connection with them could be re-established even after it was cut off by the Red Army.
Hitler’s strategic arguments were not unsound – the Crimea would be used to bomb the Romanian oilfields, Turkey might join the Allies if she fell – but this was not a case of Hitler’s optimism versus the generals’ realism.21 Instead it sprang from a completely different Weltanschauung. Hitler felt that every risk must be taken to win the war, because losing it meant certain death for him, whereas a structured withdrawal leading to ultimate defeat signalled only lengthy prison terms for his generals, even those directly connected with war crimes, like Manstein. They were thus playing for drastically different stakes. (In the event, despite the long official sentences they received, Kesselring served only five years, Manstein and List four, Guderian, Blumentritt and Milch three and Zeitzler eighteen months.)
Very often, of course, the policy choices were not clear cut between Hitler on one side and his generals on the other, but were debated between the generals on both sides of the argument with Hitler deciding. Even though Hitler very often came down on the wrong side, he was rarely ever reminded of this. In September 1942, after Jodl had recalled the Führer’s error with regard to the width of front given to List in the Caucasus, he was temporarily snubbed. Hitler avoided Jodl’s company at mealtimes, ‘refused ostentatiously to shake hands’ and gave orders that he be replaced, though this did not happen. ‘A dictator, as a matter of psychological necessity, must never be reminded of his own errors,’ Jodl concluded to Warlimont, ‘in order to keep up his self-confidence, the ultimate source of his dictatorial force.’22 Since Hitler was also the ultimate – indeed sole – source of their prestige and power, it was not in Keitel’s or Jodl’s interests to undermine that self-confidence, and it does not seem to have happened again. As a result the Führer never learnt from his mistakes, and so continued to make much the same ones for two and a half years after Stalingrad. This would have been inconceivable in the Western Alliance, where Generals Brooke and Marshall felt under no obligation to refrain from pointing out earlier errors made by Churchill and Roosevelt, and vice versa.
Between March and July 1943, Hitler delayed the Operation Zitadelle attack on Kursk for a hundred days, partly because of Speer’s promises that the new Panther tanks would be coming on line in large numbers by then. The complete loss of surprise, formerly the Germans’ best weapon in the days of Blitzkrieg, was disastrous. The Russians knew where and roughly when they would attack, and prepared accordingly.
Although Hitler can hardly be blamed for sleeping through the D-Day landings, Rundstedt’s defence of Normandy in June 1944 was badly hampered by him. Indeed he could hardly have helped the Allies better had he been working for them. The compromise he effected between Rundstedt’s desire to deploy inland and Rommel’s to fight on the beaches created the worst of both worlds, by muddying the response and separating the commands disastrously. Even in mid-July Hitler was still convinced that the main Allied attack was to be expected at the Pas de Calais, and refused to allow his powerful forces there to be transferred southwards. He therefore completely fell for both the Norwegian and the Calais parts of the Allied deception plans, Operations Fortitude North and South.
On 17 June 1944, at a meeting with Rommel and Rundstedt, Hitler blamed his troops in France for weakness and cowardice, refused to allow withdrawals and announced that secret weapons would win the war instead. Yet he had also spent the war undermining the secret-weapon programmes, by ordering the jet-aircraft programme to concentrate on producing bombers rather than fighters, and by stop-starting the V-1 and V-2 weapons programmes.
Hitler’s continual merry-go-round of sackings and reinstatements of senior generals was bewildering for the High Command and demoralizing for the troops, who could only conclude that they were being badly led by their generals, which was not generally the case. The sacking of Manstein, instead of giving him complete control of the Eastern Front, was a significant blunder. Yet even subservience could not protect some commanders: on 28 June 1944 Hitler sacked Field Marshal Ernst Busch as commander of Army Group Centre, replacing him with Model. A week later he replaced Rundstedt with Field Marshal von Kluge, who was convalescing after a car crash. Then on 10 July he refused Model assistance from Army Group North to strengthen his attempts to keep the Russians out of the Baltic, and on 5 September he reappointed Rundstedt as commander-in-chief west, only a few weeks after his replacement by Kluge. Some field marshals commanded all three army groups in Russia in the course of a few months; for a man who prided himself on his ‘unalterable will’, Hitler changed his mind all the time.
The 20 July Plot made Hitler understandably wary about the loyalty of his generals, but also made him unwarrantably certain of his own destiny and indestructibility, a disastrous combination. By Christmas Day 1944, despite the Ardennes offensive having recaptured 400 square miles, it was clear that Antwerp would not fall and that the attack could not move much further. In yet another ‘Stand or die’ order, Hitler insisted that there would be an Alsace offensive in the New Year, which never materialized. By refusing Model the possibility of retreating from the area around Houffalize, the German Army was once again left powerless to reconstitute itself further to the east. By the end of the offensive, the US First Army had crossed into the Fatherland itself, east of St Vith.
March 1945 saw Hitler sack Rundstedt as commander-in-chief west yet again, after the US III Corps had succeeded in crossing the Ludendorff Bridge over the Rhine at Remagen. He then visited the Eastern Front on 12 March, at Castle Freienwalde on the River Oder, where he told his commanders that ‘Each day and each hour is precious,’ because he was about to unleash a new secret weapon, without disclosing its nature.23 This was because he had run out of them – the last V-2 landed a fortnight later – unless he meant the new U-boats that were still far fro
m seaworthy. (It was probably just another morale-boosting lie.) By that time he had indeed decided to unleash a new secret weapon, on the German people themselves for betraying him by losing the war, because on 19 March he ordered the destruction of all factories and food stores on all fronts, a policy that was thankfully ignored by Albert Speer and all but the most fanatical Nazis. Nine days later Hitler again dismissed perhaps the best of his battlefield commanders, Heinz Guderian, and replaced him with the utterly undistinguished General Hans Krebs. Charlie Chaplin’s Great Dictator could hardly have done better than that. Towards the end of the war fanatical Nazi generals such as Krebs, Schörner and Rendulic were promoted, not so much for their military competence as for their ideological loyalty.
If Hitler had not been a National Socialist he would probably not have unleashed the Second World War, but equally he might possibly have won it. There was nothing inevitable about the Allies’ victory in the conflict of 1939–45, for as John Stuart Mill observed in On Liberty: ‘It is a piece of idle sentimentality that truth, merely as truth, has any inherent power denied to error of prevailing against the dungeon and the stake.’ Many of his worst strategic blunders were the result of his ideological convictions rather than military necessity. As Kleist told Liddell Hart after the war, ‘Under the Nazis we tended to reverse Clausewitz’s dictum, and to regard peace as a continuation of war.’ It is not difficult to construct a narrative of the Second World War in which a Chiefs of Staff committee of German generals did not make the blunders Hitler did, and it makes somewhat chilling reading.
Of course it is easy today to fight the Second World War with 20/20 hindsight, ridiculing Hitler for errors that at the time might have seemed – especially in the absence of critical advice – like the best options available. He did not have all the intelligence and information we do; he was not privy to the enemy’s thinking as we are. But even Stalin allowed himself to be persuaded in the Stavka, so long as it did not look as if he was being overruled. A Chiefs of Staff committee over which Hitler and Göring had little influence, but which drew on the collective talents of generals such as Manstein, Halder, Brauchitsch, Rundstedt, Rommel, Guderian, Student, Senger, Vietinghoff, Bock and Kesselring, should have directed Germany’s strategy after 1939, and Raeder and Dönitz her naval strategy, with Hitler concentrating on visiting the fronts, the wounded and bomb-sites, threatening neutrals, making morale-boosting speeches and doing everything in his diplomatic power to prevent the United States from declaring war.
It is impossible to say whether the German generals would have made the same or perhaps some quite different but no less disastrous errors. Perhaps the subjugation of 193 million Russians by 79 million Germans was simply a mathematical impossibility, and so Germany could never have won the war under any circumstances. If Hitler had taken a junior role after Barbarossa, it is likely that all that would have happened would have been that the war would have gone on even longer and claimed yet more lives. Hitler’s defeat was intimately tied up in the political nature of Hitlerism, in particular his refusal to retreat, his belief in the power of his unfettered will and his constant upping of the stakes, which had worked well for him in Weimar domestic politics in the 1920s and in his international brinksmanship in the 1930s. Boldness, unpredictability and Blitzkrieg had served him superbly until late 1941, but were not enough, especially once his blunders ensured that his willpower came up against Allied air power and Russian armoured power. ‘Allied air power was the greatest single reason for the German defeat,’ claimed Albert Kesselring, with Blumentritt and others agreeing.24 They were wrong, of course, as Russian ground-based power in fact tolled the death knell of Nazism. But together these two factors found the limits of how far fanaticism and Blitzkrieg could get a nation. And the answer, as we saw in Chapter 10, was the windy cornfields outside the village of Prokhorovka. But no further.
Of course, having declared war against the United States in December 1941 Hitler had no hope of winning the war anyway, because a nuclear bomb was being successfully developed in New Mexico, and Germany was far from achieving one. With the United States effectively uninvadable, however long the war took the side which possessed atomic weaponry first would perforce win, and that was always going to be the Allies. Had D-Day failed, as it easily might have, the horrific prospect beckoned of the Allies being forced to win the war in Europe the same way as they ultimately had to in Japan, with German cities being obliterated as fast as new bombs could be produced, until the Nazis – or their successors – eventually surrendered.
In the two areas where pure intellect had an appreciable influence on the outcome of the war, the cracking of codes at Bletchley Park and in the Far East and the creation of a nuclear bomb at Los Alamos, the Allies won the battle of the brains. ‘It is comforting to be reassured’, as John Keegan has put it, ‘that our lot were cleverer than the other lot.’25
In December 1941, Germany, with her population of 79 million, Japan (73 million), Italy (45 million), Romania (13.6 million) and Hungary (9.1 million), faced the combined onslaught of the USSR (193 million), USA (132 million), Great Britain (48 million), Canada (11.5 million), South Africa (10.5 million), Australia (7.1 million) and New Zealand (1.6 million). These figures do not count India and China, which both made very significant contributions to the Allied victory, or the French, who did not.26 After Italy had changed sides in 1943, that left roughly 175 million Axis facing 449 million Allies, or two and a half times their numbers. With the Allies also controlling two-thirds of the global deposits and production of iron, steel, oil and coal from 1941 onwards, victory should have been assured. Yet it was not until May 1945 that Germany bowed to her conquerors, and it took two nuclear bombs to force the Japanese into the same posture three months later. The sheer, bloody-minded determination of both Axis nations was one reason for the length of time they were able to hold out against the Allies, but the high quality of their troops, especially the Germans, was the other. The statistics are unequivocal: up until the end of 1944, on a man-for-man basis, the Germans inflicted between 20 and 50 per cent higher casualties on the British and Americans than they suffered, and far higher than that on the Russians, under almost all military conditions.27 Although they lost because of their Führer’s domination of grand strategy as well as the sheer size of the populations and economies ranged against them, it is indisputable that the Germans were the best fighting men of the Second World War for all but the last few months of the struggle, when they suffered a massive dearth of equipment, petrol, reinforcements and air cover.
The problem with invading Russia was always going to be as much logistical as military. In the early stages of Barbarossa, the Germans defeated the Russians virtually wherever they engaged them, almost regardless of the numbers involved. Yet the problem of bringing up infantry fast enough behind the Panzer spearheads, especially with the 1941 muddy season coming in the autumn, was daunting. A two-season war, on the other hand, in which Leningrad and Moscow were captured in 1942, risked facing full Russian mobilization, of ultimately 500 divisions. The bold thrust against Moscow – the political, logistical and communications hub of European Russia – was thus still the best option for Hitler. If an entire Panzer group had gone around behind (that is, to the east of) Moscow in September 1941, the city just might have fallen, although of course it would have been defended street by street as Stalingrad was and Leningrad very nearly had to be. The key difference was that the Russians were able constantly to resupply Stalingrad across the Volga, which would not have been the case had Guderian and Hoth encircled Moscow.
As well as its dire implications for Russian morale, the fall of Moscow would have hampered the Soviets’ ability to concentrate their reserves and to supply other cities in the region. Distance, transportation (plagued by partisans), logistics, mud and snow, and the marshalling – if with monstrous wastage – of overwhelming Russian manpower were the reasons why the Germans failed, yet had Fedor von Bock been allowed to continue Army Group Centre’s advan
ce on Moscow with his full force in early August 1941 even these might have been overcome. There was always the chance of a political collapse, especially had Stalin been forced to flee Moscow on the special train he had made ready for himself on 16 October 1941, to seek safety beyond the Urals. Beria privately suggested the move at the time, but did not propose it at the Stavka. In the absence of a Japanese invasion from the east, Hitler would probably have offered a post-Stalin regime peace terms that allowed it to rule everywhere east of the Urals, a far harsher version of the peace of Brest-Litovsk which the Bolsheviks signed with the Kaiser in 1918. In reality, of course, the Russians’ ability – despite losing around half their heavy industry – to churn out vast numbers of T-34 tanks and mobilize almost 25 million troops, which were better led and equipped by the month, was decisive, especially considering that 70 per cent of the Luftwaffe had to be detailed to deal with the RAF and USAAF Combined Bomber Offensive from the west.
If different counsels had prevailed at Führer-conferences, such as Brauchitsch’s at Dunkirk, Galland’s during the battle of Britain, Manstein’s at Stalingrad, Rommel’s before El Alamein, Guderian’s before Kursk and any number of other generals’ on any number of other occasions, the Reich would have been in a better position to prosecute the war. But Hitler could not have left soldiering to the soldiers. A Führer had to be a superman, equal to any calling, and for such a spectacular know-all as Hitler – with views on everything, a love of military history and an impressive recall of military facts – the prospect of taking a back seat in a world war, like Kings George VI and Victor Emmanuel III, was an emotional and psychological impossibility. Fortunately, Nazi philosophy contained within it, once translated on to the military plane, the seeds of its own destruction. An expansionist nationalist German without a Nazi worldview – another Bismarck, say, or a Moltke – would probably not have defeated the USSR either, but he would have made the war go on even longer and claim even more lives.
The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War Page 72
