The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War

by Andrew Roberts

  Of course, in considering many of the errors made by Hitler, it is important to remember that there were usually generals, and not just Keitel and Jodl, who fully supported him, and provided telling arguments for him. There was no simple nexus of Hitler versus the High Command that post-war soldier–authors such as Manstein, Guderian and Blumentritt all too often posed. There was no German general who was always right, any more than the Führer was always wrong, and the campaigns that defeated Poland, Norway, France, Yugoslavia, Greece and Crete were all pored over and approved by Hitler, after all. (Apart from their timing in the greater scheme of conquest, all those campaigns were very successful.) It is also worth recalling that no general opposed the concept of Operation Barbarossa, about which Halder and Brauchitsch accepted the over-optimistic intelligence assessments as much as everyone else, and that Führer Directive No. 21 – ‘The armed forces of Germany must be prepared, even before the conclusion of the war with England, to defeat Soviet Russia in one rapid campaign’ – set out a two-front war as early as 18 December 1940, a full six months before the blow fell. Similarly, Manstein was initially in favour of Paulus trying to hold out in Stalingrad, Kluge opposed the central thrust on Moscow, and Bock generally supported Hitler’s strategy in Russia. The fact that they rarely spoke up simply shows that when dealing with Hitler the generals, for all their Iron Crosses and Knight’s Crosses, were generally as cowardly as so many others in Nazi Germany. They were also aspirational professionals who knew that gainsaying the Führer was not a good way to secure promotion.

  Of course the fact that the German generals often despised each other does not mean they could not have fought a more rational war than they did under Hitler, given a chief of staff more respected – or less lickspittle – than Wilhelm Keitel. As with any army, ambition played a part, as did sheer personality clashes. The personal antipathies described before the battle of Kursk between Zeitzler, Manstein, Kluge and Guderian – the last two having to be dissuaded from fighting a duel – were just one example of a phenomenon that was to dog the German High Command. The generals cannot be seen as a unified voice, and just as Zhukov, Konev and Rokossovsky were rivals, as more obviously were Patton, Montgomery and Bradley, so the dismissal of one German general was usually seen by the rest as an opportunity.

  As Alan Clark pointed out, ‘There is no evidence that Hitler ever changed his mind on questions of strategy either at the persuasion of his intimates in the Party or the senior officers of the Army.’28 If Hitler and certain generals agreed on something it was almost always because they agreed with him rather than vice versa. With the war effectively lost after Kursk, it was indeed fortunate that Hitler listened to so few of his good generals, and tended to dismiss the very best of them, otherwise the war could have dragged on into 1946 or later. Churchill’s dismissive remarks about the military genius and ‘master hand’ of Corporal Hitler were therefore entirely justified. By contrast, the Western Allies fought the war substantially by committee, with the American Joint Chiefs of Staff and the British Chiefs of Staff Committee creating grand strategy in conjunction with input from the politicians. This system produced fierce rows between politicians and Staff officers, and between Britons and Americans, but the traditions of gentlemanly interaction, open debate (within the obvious security parameters), freedom from fear, and an assumption that the synthesis of views was more likely to produce better results meant that the tensions that undoubtedly arose were generally creative ones.29 Even in the Stavka, where none of those assumptions applied, Stalin permitted a reasonable degree of free discussion on military affairs, so long as it did not stray into the political sphere, which was exclusively his. The catastrophe of 1941 undoubtedly sobered him, and showed him that men like Zhukov, Konev and Rokossovsky should be heeded if Russia was to survive. Hitler, meanwhile, put his own omniscience before the need to pay attention to his advisers, however high the stakes.

  The strengths of the three main Allied nations were very different, but they each contributed something vitally necessary for overall victory. Without all three in the mix, that victory might not have arrived until much later in the 1940s, if at all. Britain, by refusing Hitler’s peace overtures in 1940, winning the battle of Britain, cracking the Enigma code, keeping open the sea-lanes during the battle of the Atlantic, bombing German industry enough to blunt Speer’s economic miracle and providing an unsinkable aircraft carrier (a giant version of Midway or Malta) from which the liberation of western Europe could be effected after D-Day, forced Germany into a two-front war, even if the western one was to be found along the shores of the Mediterranean for much of the war, rather than in the Low Countries. The British Army had a less happy war than the Royal Navy and the RAF, especially in the early stages, with bad tactics during the fall of France and Malaya, bad strategy during the Greek and Cretan débâcles, bad equipment in the early North African campaigns, bad intelligence at Dieppe and Arnhem, and bad weather in Italy. It only really hit its stride – ably supported by excellent Commonwealth contingents – at the battle of El Alamein, which, as well as being the British Empire’s first major land victory over Germans of the war, was also its last. From D-Day onwards in Europe, and certainly in Slim’s campaigns in Burma in 1944–5, the British Army did well, but by then its troops had been fighting for five years. It is hard not to escape Sir Alan Brooke’s conclusion that the brightest and the best British soldiers had been killed in the First World War (although that fails to explain why the Germans were so good in the Second). In all, the United Kingdom lost 379,762 military killed and 571,822 military wounded in the war, with around 65,000 civilians killed.30 ‘For every American who died, the Japanese lost 6 people, the Germans 11, and the Russians 92.’ The figures for every Briton killed are four Japanese, seven Germans and sixty Russians.31 Far from being a cause of embarrassment, of course, it should be a cause of congratulation to Roosevelt, Churchill, Marshall and Brooke that they ended the war with such little (relatively speaking) carnage among their countrymen.

  It was the Russians who provided the oceans of blood necessary to defeat Germany, and it cannot be reiterated enough that out of every five Germans killed in combat – that is, on the battlefield rather than in aerial bombing or through other means – four died on the Eastern Front. It is the central statistic of the Second World War. The full cost to the Russians amounted to the truly obscene figure of around twenty-seven million dead soldiers and civilians, though it needs to be borne in mind that much of the responsibility for the catastrophe lay with Stalin himself. If he had not signed the Nazi–Soviet Pact; if he had not trusted Hitler so totally; if he had not wiped out much of the Red Army officer corps in the purges of 1937–8; if he had not gone to war with Finland; if he had not sent his troops so far forward after his hyena-like pounce on eastern Poland; if he had not refused to allow strategic withdrawals after Barbarossa: the list of his blunders is long and galling and led to the deaths of millions. Moreover, although the Russians bled the most by far, if one is to take a broader-based criterion of war effort, which includes the war at sea and the air war over Germany, the western Allies’ contribution meant that the Reich was unable to concentrate as much as 60 per cent of its total armaments against the Russians, even in the make-or-break months of late 1941.32

  It is true the American contribution was made not primarily in blood – 292,100 military dead, 571,822 wounded, and negligible numbers of civilian casualties – but in the production and distribution of armaments, the overall financing of the conflict, the size of forces mobilized and the successful campaigns fought, often in places that American strategists did not want to be. The US spent $350 billion on the war, even more than Germany and as much as the USSR and Britain combined. She also mobilized 14.9 million Americans, more than Germany’s 12.9 million and twice Japan’s 7.4 million. She bore the lion’s share of the war in the Pacific and provided two-thirds of the forces at Overlord and the subsequent fighting in the west. The Eighth Army Air Force bombed Germany relentlessly, wh
ile the US provided many of the boots, trucks and armaments with which the Russians held back and eventually prevailed over the Germans. Much as nationalist historians like to present their own countries as central to victory, thereby belittling the contribution made by the others, the Second World War was a genuine team effort which required the full exertions of all three major partners for victory, each in their different but complementary ways.

  In April 1943 Churchill ordered the War Cabinet to ‘popularise’ the phrase ‘British Commonwealth and Empire’, an inversion of the hitherto commonly used ‘British Empire and Commonwealth’ but a move which at least retained the word ‘empire’.33 Yet whereas Churchill was fighting for an empire in which by 1945 very many senior British decision-makers besides himself no longer believed, and Stalin for an equally doomed system, before deliberately initiating a Cold War that his country was eventually to lose, Roosevelt fought for a future which actually came to pass, that of United States ‘soft’ hegemony, with military bases around the world, generally unfettered access to global markets, and a Pax Americana that has lasted to the present day. When Churchill told the V-E Day crowds in London ‘This is your victory!’ and they roared back ‘No, it’s yours!’ they would both be proved wrong: in fact it turned out to be the recently deceased President Roosevelt’s.

  The world was fortunate that it had men of the calibre of Roosevelt and Churchill, and even Stalin, for all his blunders, when it was threatened by Adolf Hitler. If Germany had managed to maintain all it had occupied by the summer of 1941, and had not invaded Russia, she would have had as large a population as the United States – even if, for the first generation at least, only around 60 per cent of them spoke German as their first language. Harnessing this vast population of hard-working, well-educated Europeans to the ambitions of the Reich, Hitler could have built the world’s most formidable superpower. It was fortunate for mankind that he was too impatient and too convinced a Nazi – Operation Barbarossa stemmed primarily from ideological rather than military imperatives – to put in the years of hard work necessary to consolidate his 1940 windfall. In personal terms, although Hitler was easily able to bully and swindle fearful and naive men such as Schuschnigg, Hácha, Chamberlain and Daladier, when he came up against men of the calibre of Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Josef Stalin he found he had more than met his match.

  Allied grand strategy was forced on the three major players by circumstance as much as by choice. The Russians simply had to survive as best they could at the start of the war, and only after the German reverses at Stalingrad in January 1943 and Kursk that July could they start to impose their will upon the battlefield, which they eventually did with great vigour, especially in their annus mirabilis of 1944. The destruction of Army Group Centre during the Bagration offensive in the summer of that year was as decisive as anything seen in the history of warfare, and utterly dwarfed the contemporaneous Operation Overlord. Advances on the Eastern Front were still costly, however, for even by 1945 there – unlike in the west – the Germans always inflicted more losses on their opponents than they suffered themselves.

  Similarly, there was no real choice for the Americans even after Japan unleashed war on them on 7 December 1941 and then Hitler declared it four days later. They theoretically could have pursued a Pacific First policy, but General George C. Marshall rightly considered that while it would be relatively easy to defeat Japan after a German surrender, the opposite was not necessarily the case. Similarly the strategy whereby American forces first engaged German forces in North Africa, then Sicily, then Italy before finally squaring up to them in north-western France was effectively forced on the Joint Chiefs of Staff by the British, who vetoed any recrossing of the Channel before 1 May 1944, which for operational reasons had to be further postponed to 6 June. The clashes between the British and the American policy-makers over the timing of Operation Overlord were titanic, but both sides knew that without British consent the Normandy landings could not have been undertaken any earlier.

  Nor should they have been. After the Germans introduced an extra rotor to the Enigma machine in February 1942, the Allied navies were plunged into the dark over Kriegsmarine movements in the battle of the Atlantic for almost a year. No landings in north-west Europe could be attempted with supply lanes at the mercy of the U-boat fleet. That battle was not won until May 1943, by which time a quarter of a million Germans had surrendered in Tunisia and plans were well under way for the invasion of Sicily. Marshall might have complained about being led ‘down the garden path’ by Brooke and Churchill, but at the Casablanca Conference of January 1943 there was no possibility of crossing the Channel in any significant numbers that year, as he had to acknowledge, and the war could not be simply suspended until enough men had been assembled in southern England for Overlord. Sicily followed Africa logically, just as Italy followed Sicily. What were not necessary were the long and costly campaigns north of Rome once Overlord had taken place, let alone the superfluous attack on the South of France in mid-August 1944.

  Without complete air superiority and massive aerial bombardment, next to impossible to achieve before the Mustang fighter came on stream in sufficient numbers in early 1944, Normandy might have been a disaster. It also needed a great deal of work done on the Mulberry Harbours and Pipeline Under The Ocean (PLUTO), which was not finished until 1944 either. The intelligence deception operations Fortitudes North and South needed to mature, which they did triumphantly that year. Above all, the Wehrmacht needed to be bled white in Russia, which was also not the case before 1944. (And no invasion was possible once the Channel weather became unpredictable in mid-September.) A defeat in the west, with the Allies being flung back into the sea – which could even have happened on 6 June 1944 with prompter Panzer action by a unified German command – might have set back the liberation of Europe, at least from the west, by years. Had the Allies not liberated western Europe in the mid-1940s, the same form of Soviet totalitarian tyranny would have been installed there as oppressed the people of eastern Europe until 1989.

  The Allied armies furthermore needed to be bloodied in a series of victories before they could possibly meet the main body of the Wehrmacht in open battle, as opposed to the under-resourced Afrika Korps which had nonetheless managed to do so well at Tobruk, the Kasserine Pass and elsewhere. A supreme effort such as the Ardennes offensive, conducted against green Allied troops in 1942 or 1943, might well have succeeded, especially with the fuel and air cover available to the Germans in those years. Until quite late on in the war, therefore, the Allies had their essentially reactive grand strategies imposed on them by Hitler’s force majeure, always responding to the Führer’s iron whim. It is therefore not by chance that this book has tended to concentrate on his thoughts, his actions and his regular, colossal blunders.

  Hitler’s anti-Semitism, culminating in the Holocaust, was central to his Nazism but it did nothing to aid Germany’s chances of winning the war, and possibly a great deal to retard them. The Reich devoted a great amount of effort, especially in terms of transportation, in its effort to render Europe Judenfrei. Quite apart from the sheer moral issue involved, which obviously had no bearing on Hitler, the Holocaust was a military mistake, tying up railway stock and (admittedly relatively few) SS troops, but above all denuding Germany of millions of potentially productive workers and potential soldiers. German Jews who had fought bravely for the Kaiser – Hitler’s own Iron Cross First Class had come because his Jewish regimental adjutant petitioned GHQ hard for it – were not only not called up for the Volkssturm, they were gassed. Between 1939 and 1944 the German labour force shrank from thirty-nine million to twenty-nine million people, a disastrous 26 per cent fall at a time when a massive increase in production was vital for victory.34 When production was being badly hampered by a lack of intelligent, educated, hard-working people, Hitler massacred some six million Europeans Jews, an action that would be self-evidently self-defeating, except in the diseased mind of a Nazi fanatic. Similarly, for id
eological reasons the Wehrmacht did not recruit women, while the Red Army called up between 1 million and 1.5 million of them, with the only difference in women’s benefits being that they received 100 grams more soap than the men.

  For all the military defeats on the European Continent to both the east and west by 1945, there was one thing that could still have won Hitler a stalemate, or even the war. In June 1942, the German physicist Werner Heisenberg reported to Hitler that an amount of uranium ‘no larger than a pineapple’ would be enough to destroy a city.35 Yet the Jewish and German émigré scientists who had the knowledge and genius necessary to split the atom were by then working in New Mexico, rather than for Heisenberg in the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Dahlem. Hitler’s Nazism had also lost him that last, albeit always slim, chance of victory. It was said of Emperor Napoleon III that his name was both his making and his undoing. Similarly, Hitler won his revolution because of his drive, willpower, impulsiveness, philosophy and policies, which seemed – however wrongly – to offer Germany hope in the 1930s. Yet it was precisely these same phenomena that led to his destruction the following decade.

  On the evening of 4 February 1942 Adolf Hitler was entertaining Heinrich Himmler at the Berghof when the conversation got round to Shakespeare. It was probably Hamlet and King Lear to which the Führer was referring when he said that it was a:

  misfortune that none of our great writers took his subject from German Imperial history. Our Schiller found nothing better to do than to glorify a Swiss crossbowman! The English, for their part, had a Shakespeare, but the history of his country has supplied Shakespeare, as far as heroes are concerned, only with imbeciles and madmen.36