by David Wragg
It soon became clear that Italy was completely unprepared for war and that in all probability many members of the armed forces had little appetite for it. After the raid on Taranto put three Italian battleships out of action, half the battle fleet, for the loss of just two aircraft, Hitler was shocked. He might have accepted such losses, albeit reluctantly, from a major naval battle, but that this had happened while the ships had been safely moored in a well protected port was beyond belief. His reaction was that the offending British warship, the aircraft carrier HMS Illustrious, had to be destroyed. A crack Luftwaffe unit, Fliegerkorps X, with extensive experience of anti-shipping operations, was moved to Italy at New Year 1941. It was this force that surprised the carrier and other units of the Mediterranean Fleet on 10 January 1941, causing such serious damage to the carrier that she had to limp into Malta for repairs, where she prompted such heavy aerial bombardment compared to what had been experienced in the first seven months of war with Italy, that it became known as the ‘Illustrious Blitz’, with the worst day of raids on 16 January.
Again, that spring, German troops had to take over from the Italians in Greece and Yugoslavia, even though this meant delaying the planned invasion of the Soviet Union, Operation Barbarossa, that had been so important to Hitler’s plans. This was not a simple matter of delaying an operation, it was a matter of starting so late that the chances of attaining its objectives before the onset of the Russian winter were lost. The Germans were completely unprepared for the severity of the Russian winter, and had outrun their supply lines, and so this became the decisive front in the Second World War in Europe.
Yet, could the Italian fleet, or at least its most modern units, have helped make up the shortfall in Plan Z? The four modern battleships would have made up for the lack of the Plan Z ships, or would they?
While the Germans effectively took over northern Italy after Italian surrender, to have done so before hand would have been difficult. After Italian surrender, many Italians continued to fight alongside the Germans, often for a variety of motives, some of which were undoubtedly political while others may have felt uncertain about their prospects under the Allies. While it is open to question whether they would have stood by while the Germans took over the Regia Navale, or at least the best parts of it, it was also the case that the situation in 1943 was not the situation in 1940 or even 1941. As it was, the Germans had to content themselves with just a handful of Italian submarines after Italian surrender.
Even if the Germans had been able to ‘acquire’ the Italian warships, what would have happened then? No doubt the four ships of the Impero-class, 35,000 tons displacement and capable of 30.5 knots, with their nine 15-inch guns, would have been a good replacement for the Bismarck after she was sunk in May 1941, and given the Kriegsmarine the heavy ships it needed. They could even have transferred the crews of the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, since the Italian ships had a heavier armament, but, unfortunately, the Italian ships did not have radar. By 1942, the shortage of fuel was becoming a serious issue, but in 1941, getting the ships out of the Mediterranean would have been difficult with Force H in the way of any Axis ships trying to make a dash for the Atlantic. Only if most of the Italian battle fleet had made a bid for the open seas through the Straits of Gibraltar would there have been any chance of success.
Indeed, at one stage, Hitler had contemplated seizing the British outpost of Gibraltar, itself difficult to defend from a determined attack. There was even a code-name for this, Operation Felix. But to have done this, he needed the support of his ally, the Spanish dictator Franco. Franco was determined at all costs not to involve Spain in the Second World War. His country had been ravaged during the Civil War, and wartime shortages affected even neutral nations, making recovery difficult. The schisms in Spanish society were still deep and any external distraction could have opened the way for renewed internal unrest. Spain could not even have allowed German forces access across its territory without becoming involved. Spain would not have been an asset to the Axis at the time, with its armed forces in a poor state and fit for little more than internal security duties. Internal communications in Spain at the time were poor, with bad roads and a dilapidated railway system, using a broader gauge, at 5 ft 6 ins, than in most of Europe, including Germany and France. This would have meant that an invasion would, for the most part, have had to be by sea, with few good landing positions for paratroops on Gibraltar other than the race course, which was quickly converted into an airfield by the British.
Of course, a gung ho scenario could have had the Italian battle fleet in German hands and Malta bombarded and then invaded. This could have worked if the Italians had pressed ahead with the operation in summer 1940, but it was politically unlikely that the Germans would have been able to take Malta even in 1941. After the heavy losses amongst German paratroops and glider-landed troops during the invasion of Crete, Hitler banned further airborne operations, and such a means of assault would have been necessary to take Malta because of the few good landing places for an amphibious assault.
In essence, with Mussolini failing to keep in step with him, Hitler had to face the fact that his ally was almost as much a liability as an asset. Italy gave the Germans well-located bases, such as the airfields in Sicily used by Fliegerkorps X, but little else. After the Allies landed in Italy, even this asset was lost and it simply meant that Germany had yet another front on which to fight.
CHAPTER TEN
Could Plan Z have been Achieved?
Plan Z was intended to enable the German Navy, the Kriegsmarine, play its major part in winning a war with the United Kingdom. It would have given the Germans mastery of the seas in the sense that they would tie down the entire Royal Navy, and indeed the British would be neutralised at sea and unable to obtain the food, fuel, raw materials and war materiel that they needed to remain in the war. It was never intended to be a complete rerun of the plans entertained by Imperial Germany to become the dominant maritime power in Europe, and not just the dominant continental power.
On the other hand, had Plan Z achieved its objectives, had Germany gained the much wanted Lebensraum in the east, as well as the food, fuel and raw materials of the eastern territories, as well as unifying the German communities scattered throughout Europe and providing an enlarged pool of dedicated manpower, Germany would soon have been able to consider absolute maritime domination and if not world domination, at least domination of Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
If a sense of realism had dawned, Germany would have not only happily accepted Japanese domination of the Far East and even, perhaps, Siberia and India, but also American domination of the Americas. On the other hand, would a sense of reality have dawned? After all, the Germans had been heavily involved in South America between the two world wars.
The question arises, could Plan Z ever have been achieved? Could it have attained its goals?
KRIEGSMARINE V LUFTWAFFE V ARMY
Although it was not allowed to function fully effectively, the Wehrmacht was the overall high command of the armed forces, in effect a form of defence ministry. It suited Hitler to allow each of his service chiefs to function independently and for him to become Supreme Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces. Even before the attempt on his life, he did not encourage, indeed he was deeply suspicious of, any attempt by the armed forces’ chiefs to meet and plan for fear that they might become a unified opposition to his plans. This was the paranoia of a dictator.
Of the armed forces, the old school of army officers were the most suspicious of Hitler. The Heeres, or Army, had been the dominant service and had included members of the best Prussian families, all very much old school. The Kriegsmarine, or War Navy, as Hitler had renamed the old Reichsmarine, had been very much the second service and it had been the Kaiser elevating it to equal status with the Army before the First World War that had helped provide a basis for achieving the aims of Weltpolitik. Having suffered mutiny in 1918 and after the end of the First World War, senior naval officers were enthusiastic abo
ut Hitler. Nevertheless, they had also learnt an important lesson about keeping out of and above politics during the difficult days of 1919 and 1920.
The only service that was deeply politicised was the Air Force, the Luftwaffe, and then possibly only at the very top. The Luftwaffe had been kept a secret until1935, and alone amongst the armed services owed both its birth and its autonomy from the two traditional services to Hitler. More than that, the Air Minister, Hermann Goering, was a close political intimate of the Fuhrer and designated his successor until almost the very end of the Reich. This friendship probably accounted for the small naval air arm, reduced to flying reconnaissance aircraft off battleships and cruisers, being incorporated into the Luftwaffe once the Second World War started.
The result of what has become known as the ‘Fuhrer System’, the lack of coordination between the services and the constant attempts by the individual service chiefs to catch the Fuhrer’s attention and curry favour with him, was that each considered only its own needs. It was a case of divide and rule. Inter-service rivalry is a fact of life in every country, and attempts to dispense with it in unified armed forces have only worked in countries either with small and insignificant armed services or where one service is dominant, as in land-locked Switzerland, for example. Nevertheless, properly managed and controlled, inter-service rivalry can be a force for good, a case of establishing an effective esprit de corps, but left to its own devices and without control and coordination, it is destructive.
Unbridled inter-service rivalry was the situation in Germany in 1938.
It was not that the Wehrmacht did not have the means of coordinating activity. Hitler had created a new level of command with the Wehrmacht, for which the full title was the Oberkommando Wehrmacht, OKW, and within its organisation was a military-economic office. On the day the Munich Agreement was signed in October 1938, its director, Major-General Georg Thomas, received a telephone call telling him that he was to initiate preparations for war against Great Britain, with a target date of 1942, a full year before the earliest date promised by Hitler to the Kriegsmarine. Time was running out.
Preparation for war does not consist of manpower and equipment alone. In modern warfare, the nation’s infrastructure such as railways and airfields and roads all make a difference. The American Civil War was the first in which railways were used, while the start of the First World War has often been referred to as being dependent on the railway timetables. The absence of port handling facilities in Malta during the Second World War was a major drawback when the convoys, or what was left of them, arrived. Then, there is industry, which needs to be placed on a war footing. It is both a question of having the right capacity and enough of it for the war needs of the day, and of a system for directing raw materials, fuel and labour. If food supplies are likely to be uncertain or simply insufficient, or to become too expensive, thus causing industrial and social unrest, rationing is necessary.
On 14 October 1938, Goering gathered together the senior officers of the Luftwaffe and senior managers from the aircraft industry in the conference hall of his Air Ministry. He referred obliquely to the ‘world situation’, and then told his audience that the Fuhrer had ordered a gigantic programme against which ‘previous achievements are insignificant’.
Hitler wanted nothing less than a fivefold increase in the size of the Luftwaffe and as quickly as possible. Meanwhile, the Kriegsmarine was to accelerate its own expansion and the Army was to procure offensive weapons in large quantities, with special emphasis on heavy artillery and armoured vehicles. Industry was to place top priority on production of fuel, rubber and explosives, while railways, canals and roads were to be improved. These targets nevertheless left each of the armed services with considerable freedom to decide what they would like to do.
The results were predictable. The senior officers went away and set the planners to work. The army already had a four year programme to complete, begun in 1936 and due to end in 1940. The soldiers did not take long. On 20 October, the Army declared that in 1939, it would need 4.5 million tons of steel, a quarter of total German output. This increase in demand from just one of the armed forces was so out of step with the capability of industry and so unthinking of the demands of other sectors of the economy, that in fact it was not achieved until 1942 when the Battle of Stalingrad was at its height, and when it was already too late. In late twentieth and early twenty-first century Europe, the perception of Germany is one of efficiency with everything working well. In the inter-war period, it was an impoverished country, bankrupted by the strains of ‘the war to end all wars’ and by post-war reparations, and then by the worldwide depression. While much attention has focussed on the autobahns, the railways were in a poor state, Indeed, one of the early benefits of the invasion of the Low Countries and France was that the Germans were able to lay their hands on much-needed railway rolling stock.
As for Goering’s pride and joy, the Luftwaffe, its fivefold expansion meant that within four years it was intended to have 21,750 aircraft, making it the largest peacetime air force in the world. The decision had been taken to abandon four-engined heavy bomber development in production in favour of light and medium bombers, and especially the Junkers Ju88 of which a force of no less than 7,000 was envisaged. The reasons for this were partly that light and medium bombers were quicker and cheaper to build, and partly because these were the type of bombers most useful in the concept of blitzkrieg, ‘lightening war’, which meant fast-moving advances spearheaded by the Panzer tank divisions with overwhelming close air support. Now, the Luftwaffe also wanted 800 Heinkel He177 heavy bombers, which would be protected by a heavy concentration of long-range escort fighters in addition to the Messerschmitt Bf109 interceptors.
The Kriegsmarine, determined not to be outdone, wanted a warship construction programme that would enable it to compete with the Royal Navy within six years, that is by 1944. Nor would it stop in 1944. The plan would continue so that by 1948, the Kriegsmarine would have 797 vessels, costing 33 million Reichmarks. This fleet would include six battleships and eight cruisers, as well as the initial figure of 249 U-boats. This materialised as Plan Z, and was approved by Hitler on 27 January 1939.
Such a massive fleet was indeed a shock to the German industrial system. Shipyards needed to be expanded to provide the building capacity needed. Massive new dry docks were needed at Hamburg and Wilhelmshaven. The island of Reugen was selected as a naval base, for which it would need to be hollowed out. It was not just the demand for steel and other metals presented by the construction programme, the construction programme itself and then the facilities for maintaining such a huge fleet also added to the demand.
Put bluntly, the country simply could not afford these programmes. Industry simply could not deliver, even if it stopped exporting and made the deteriorating balance of payments situation even worse. The predicament that faced the German leadership at this time was stark. The country could not afford to expand military production to the scale required, or even maintain existing production, but could not risk going to war without the equipment included in the programmes.
Even in August 1938 before the revised plans were prepared, the Reichsbank stated that: ‘the means of a peacetime economy are no longer sufficient, one must instead begin to reach for the tougher measures of the war economy.’1 This meant that civilian demand had to be curtailed, that economic and industrial planning and control had to be imposed. Many of the measures needed were those which Stalin and the Communists would have understood, and were in complete contrast to the mobilisation of US industry after Pearl Harbour. To drive the new regime, Goering created a new Reichsverteidigungsrat, Reich defence council, while the planning came from Major-General Thomas in the OKW.
The first meeting of the Reich Defence Council was on 18 November 1938, a little more than a month after Goering had demanded a massive increase in armaments. Thomas and his colleagues drafted Goering’s opening speech. Those present were left in no doubt about the appalling economic
situation, with the conflicting demands of rearmament and exports, the undermining of the public finances and the growing danger of inflation. Foreign exchange reserves were ‘non-existent’. Despite this terrible position, nothing short of a crisis, the Fuhrer had called for a trebling of armaments production, so armaments production had to be trebled! Industry had to be mobilised for war.
Most wartime economies rely to a greater or lesser extent on the direction of labour. This started in Germany even before war began. At the meeting on 18 November, Goering announced that the entire population was registered on a national card index administered by General Kurt Deluege, the chief of the SS police. Labour offices would direct every adult in the country to their most productive form of labour. Tax administration would be simplified to release labour, and so too would the legal system. Construction projects sanctioned by the Fuhrer would be completed, but everything else would shut down. Factories would be inspected to ensure that they were operating at maximum efficiency. Only those motor vehicles of interest to the military could be produced. There would be strict pricing guidelines for all public contracts, and not just those for the military.
Oddly, in the light of what came later after the war began, the Jewish community was expected to make its full contribution, partly through a new wealth tax, but it was also clear that they would be meant to work. Acts of violence and destruction such as Kristallnacht would have no place in the mobilised German economy. It was even suggested that the entire population would be expected to make a special sacrifice through a single surrender of wealth to the nation.
Once again, it was another example of the old saying ‘Communists nationalise property, Fascists nationalise people’, and this was the gist of it.
In December 1938, Goering appointed Fritz Todt to head the entire construction sector and ensure that rearmament was the absolute priority. By spring 1939, out of a total turnover in the construction industry of 12 billion Reichsmarks, no less than half was reserved for the Wehrmacht, 20 per cent for industry and 10 per cent for public construction projects, leaving just 20 per cent for housing, and even this was seized and allocated to accommodation for workers in the defence industries.
