A Patriot's History of the Modern World

by Larry Schweikart

  Expansion and Extermination

  Japan’s incursion into China and Germany’s march eastward were both driven by a near-psychotic fear of running out of raw materials, most notably oil, in the run-up to war. Illustrating this perceived urgency, a 1939 telegram from the German Foreign Office to its Yugoslavian minister begged for new supplies with the words “Copper is a life and death matter…. A life and death matter!” but the phrase could have applied to oil, iron, or any of a dozen other raw materials.1 As early as 1935, Hjalmar Schacht, president of the Reichsbank and German economic minister, insisted, “Germany must have access to more raw materials and have it soon…. Nothing can stop [the deterioration of Germany’s standard of living] except much freer world trade, especially the acquisition by Germany of foodstuffs and raw materials.”2 Of course, Schacht did not mean free trade—in which Germany would have been the loser—but a managed trade in which Britain, France, and the United States would permit Germany to acquire more colonies. In the mid-1930s, Hitler had extracted favorable trade terms with Franco’s Spain, at one point even acquiring the lion’s share of Spanish iron ore, but, unable to provide credit, Germany lost that advantage to the British in 1939.

  Thanks again to Smoot-Hawley, Germany and other exporting nations like England saw access to American markets shut during the 1930s. Only through “harsh and discriminatory curtailment” of American imports could Germany pry open the U.S. market again, but this strategy risked much greater retribution by America.

  Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, trade had drawn the United States ever closer to Japan and China. In the 1920s, American trade in China was about $22 million, eclipsing Sino-Japanese trade, while Asian markets accounted for over half of the raw materials imported into the United States. Britain compensated for losses incurred thanks to Smoot-Hawley by increasing imports from her empire, while France likewise extracted trade from her colonies. But Germany possessed no such alternative. She could bully the Balkan states, but only after achieving a position of military superiority. Both America and Britain were hurt in trade on the Continent as the doors closed, but Germany and Japan were hurt far worse by their inability to trade with these giant economic blocs.

  Increasingly, Hitler’s obsession with raw materials and Lebensraum marched Germany toward war. “The final solution,” he argued, “lies in the expansion of living space with respect to the raw material and food supply of our people.”3 This dovetailed perfectly with the position—accepted across almost all strata of German society, not just among the Nazis—that Poland’s existence was illegitimate and unacceptable. Poland had not existed for 124 years, from 1795 to 1919, when it was carved out at Versailles from German and Russian territory. As early as 1922, General Hans von Seeckt, who had concealed the banned German General Staff under a new organization called the Truppenamt (“troop office”), was a radical anti-Pole. Seeckt worked without the knowledge of the Weimar government to negotiate with the Soviets to partition Poland in the future.4 As head of the army, he saw Poland as the linchpin of the Versailles agreement and as “France’s advance post of power.”5 “Poland’s existence,” he insisted, “is intolerable, and incompatible with Germany’s vital interests.”6 Nine years later, he repeated the sentiment, saying “Poland should be regarded as a principal and unconditional enemy.”7 Count Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzau, later the ambassador to Moscow, echoed Seeckt’s comments: “Poland has to be finished off.” Germany had attempted economically to do just that. From 1924 to 1930, Polish exports to Germany declined from 34.5 percent to 27 percent, but the Poles proved resilient and adapted their trade policies. Poland, like Germany, suffered from shortages of raw materials and began to look hungrily at the coal-producing state of German Silesia as a potential zone of annexation. Any thoughts of expansion, however, were hampered by Poland’s unsecurable borders, particularly with respect to their corridor through German territory to the Baltic Sea. The Locarno Pact (1925), which guaranteed French borders, said nothing about Poland’s borders, becoming a source of anxiety for the new Polish government and a window of opportunity for Germany.

  Within hours after the August 31, 1939, Gleiwitz incident—a phony attack staged by Germans posing as Poles on a German radio station at Gleiwitz, Upper Silesia—Hitler launched Fall Weiss (“Plan White”), the invasion of Poland. Wehrmacht forces crashed in on the north, south, and west of Poland. According to Allied defense plans, Poland should have been able to defend itself for two to three months, and the Poles estimated they could hold out at least twice that long. But that was against one enemy. As the Poles retreated to more defensible positions, expecting support from Britain and France (and indeed both declared war on Germany on September 3), they were smashed from the east by the Red Army on September 17. Britain and France did not declare war on Russia, and Polish forces were quickly crushed between two superior armies. On the first day of fighting, the Luftwaffe destroyed most of the Polish air force on the ground, and drove the remainder from the skies. Only 98 Polish planes survived and fled to friendly Romania. Polish mounted infantry proved no match for the panzers (tanks, which at the time were small and lightly gunned—but still superior to infantry without heavy weapons). By September 13, the Germans had eliminated most resistance in the west, and two weeks later Soviet armies mopped up the remaining eastern forces. On September 28, the Polish government collapsed (though it never officially surrendered), and administration of the former Second Polish Republic was divided up between the USSR and Nazi Germany. Throughout it all, the British and French, in what was deemed the “Phony War,” offered little assistance to Poland. Instead, they hunkered down to wait for the invasion of France they expected to come next.

  Myths of the Nazi War Machine

  In retrospect—especially after the fall of France in 1940—the German blitzkrieg took on an aura of inevitability that in fact was not warranted. Hitler had ramped up his arms program dramatically in the late 1930s, but it still had fallen far short of what was necessary to carry on aggressive warfare. Once the initial stimulus of employment through conscription washed through, the Nazi economic “miracle” stalled. Production fell short of the demands of all military branches, even the vaunted Luftwaffe. Only thirty U-boats, including coastal units, were operational and on station when war broke out in September 1939, dropping to twenty-two in February 1941. The rate of delivery of new boats during the first half of 1940 was only two per month, increasing only to six per month during the second half.8 War arrived far too quickly for the German Navy, or Kriegsmarine, and the “Z” naval expansion plan of 1939, calling for ten battleships, four aircraft carriers, and effective striking abilities in the Atlantic Ocean by 1946, was scrapped the instant the shooting started.

  The Luftwaffe was little better off, in spite of Herman Göring’s holding the position of “minister without portfolio” since 1933. As such, Göring headed both the Luftwaffe and, after 1936, directed the Four-Year Plan, allowing him to give special consideration to his air force’s matériel needs. Yet at the time of the remilitarization of the Rhineland in March 1936, not a single German fighter plane was truly operational—some planes had no ammunition and those that did lacked synchronization gears to fire through propellers.9 Bad luck followed the Luftwaffe; General Walther Wever, Germany’s main proponent of strategic bombers and the man responsible for the Luftwaffe’s rapid buildup under Göring, was killed in an airplane crash in 1936. His successor Ernst Udet, the highest-scoring ace to survive World War I, hated paperwork, and as chief of the Technical Office, began sixteen aircraft production programs, all of which failed. Greatly depressed and holding himself responsible for the Luftwaffe’s lack of development, he committed suicide in 1941. After the fall of France, the Luftwaffe was dropped to fifth in the priority list in armament planning, and would decline steadily as a functional force in comparison to the Allies.

  Shortages took their toll across service lines. Production of machine guns was curtailed in 1939, as was production of tanks. Th
e Luftwaffe saw its aircraft goals cut by over two thousand in 1940. At various times, German industry suffered from severe shortages in steel and nonferrous metals (particularly copper); production of all mortar shells stopped in the spring of 1939; and output of heavy artillery was cut almost in half, to 460 guns per year. Even Hitler’s pet ammunition production project had fallen woefully short of its quotas to the point that the General Staff calculated that the army’s ammunition was sufficient for only two weeks’ worth of fighting. Many of the deficiencies arose because the eternal meddler, Hitler, kept changing priorities to pet projects. The ammunition crisis of World War I was seared in the memory of the former infantry corporal, and he increasingly micromanaged production planning. One month after the invasion of Poland, Hitler’s Führerforderung (Leader’s Challenge) gave priority to ammunition, raising production of some types of howitzer shells eightfold, and most ammunition production was to be increased by an average of 500 percent.10 Such reallocations came at the expense of other weapons programs, including tank development. Many higher-ranking German officers privately referred to the army as a Schaufensterarmee (store window or display army), one that looked good from the outside, but lacked substance. Critical equipment was in short supply—machine guns, artillery, transport, tanks, proper clothing—everything needed to keep a modern army in the field. The German economy was simply not large enough to outfit an army going from 150,000 men with no heavy equipment to two million completely mechanized troops in five years.

  All these problems could have been solved with time, but Hitler did not give his military that precious commodity. It didn’t help that Germans tended to be engineering perfectionists. For example, many parts for a Tiger I tank developed in 1942 could not be used on a Tiger II produced two years later. As a result of excellent engineering, the German Panther and Tiger tanks were the best in the world for their time, far superior to the American Shermans and in armor and firepower the equivalent or superior of the Russian T-34. The problem was, the Americans built 60,000 Shermans, the Soviets 40,000 T-34s (and later, fielded the new IS-2, specifically designed to defeat German Tigers and Panthers), while the Germans produced only 6,132 Panthers and 1,840 Tigers.

  Two viselike realities ensnared Hitler as he prepared for war, both of his own making. Each new burst of armaments further solidified western opposition against him, thereby further confirming in his mind that Germany needed to rearm. German freedom—German survival—demanded that he arm his military to the hilt, yet it was increasingly clear that the Reich could not outproduce even Britain and France, let alone the United States. Just prior to the Battle of Britain, in June 1940, the United States agreed to deliver 10,800 aircraft over the next year and a half, complementing Britain’s existing fleet of 15,000, in contrast to total 1940 German production of 7,829 aircraft.11 Between 1940 and the end of 1941, America shipped more than 7,000 aircraft to Britain while ramping up to an astounding production total of almost 85,000 airplanes by 1943. Indeed, the United States had mobilized its air industry immediately after the fall of France, not after Pearl Harbor, providing the foundations for the Allies’ winged victory.

  The American Shadow

  Temporarily forgotten in the conquest of Europe was Hitler’s long-range concern about a war with the United States. The notion that the United States would have avoided the war in Europe if not for some nefarious scheme by FDR to manipulate Japan into attacking and drawing America in via the “back door to war” completely ignores the entire dynamic of why Hitler engaged in the moves he did. Since 1928, his writing was quietly obsessive about American power. In his “Second Book,” Hitler warned that the reason “the American Union is able to rise to such a threatening height is not based on [its millions of people] but on the fact that [it possessed millions of] square kilometers of the most fertile and richest soil…inhabited by [millions of] people of the highest racial quality.”12 Despite his misreading of the racial component of the United States, he swerved into a telling truth, that the “individual quality of these people [gives them] a cohesive, inclusive commitment to fight the struggle for survival.”13 Indeed, the “significance of the menacing American hegemonic position appears to be determined primarily by the quality of the American people,” he observed (emphasis ours).14 He fumed that “whatever the Germans in North America achieve specifically, it will not be credited to the German people, but is forfeited to the body of culture of the American union.” Germans abroad, he claimed, were “only the cultural fertilizer for other peoples.”15

  Hitler’s early views of the United States were in large part shaped by German writer Karl May’s stories of the American frontier and Indians; his limited reading on American immigration history; the conspicuous numbers of American-made autos in the Weimar Republic; and finally, the 1940 American movie The Grapes of Wrath.16 He watched the film many times and “assumed that it represented the whole United States for all time.”17 Hitler himself never visited the United States, and rarely talked to anyone who had. In any event, he remained torn between the notion that the United States had risen to its position of international power due to Nordic influences on the one hand, and on the other that its “mongrelization” through immigration and black slavery had made it corrupt and weak. The latter view was apparent in his comments about the American Civil War. He observed, “the Southern States were conquered against all historical logic,” and when “the principle of slavery and inequality were destroyed in the war, [it also destroyed] the embryo of a future truly great America.”18

  It was this image of a weakened United States that finally won out in Hitler’s mind. After Pearl Harbor, he said, “I’ll never believe that an American can fight like a hero,” and added, “I don’t see much future for the Americans.” America “is a decayed country.”19 Once lashed to this mast, Hitler had to reverse his views of American industrial potential, which he had previously admired. Once war was declared, he thereupon considered U.S. economic power a figment of Franklin Roosevelt’s imagination. His assessments were reinforced when Rommel easily defeated the American 2nd Corps at Kasserine Pass, Tunisia. Only later in the war, after he was delivered many stinging lessons by American forces, did Hitler occasionally return to his 1928 views of American productive might.

  Taken in this light, Germany’s entanglement in Russia was entirely predicated on the premise that Germany was already confronting an Anglo-American alliance, and that Hitler was de facto at war with the United States before Pearl Harbor. The sheer disparity in industry and resources alone meant that for Germany to succeed, Hitler had to capture the Russian oil fields as well as Romania’s.

  The World by a Thread

  After the fall of Poland, Britain and France did little to attack Germany, although they made plans to support Finland in its defense against the Soviet Union. By doing so, Britain and France could kill two birds with one stone—repel the Soviet invasion of Finland that started on November 30, 1939, and shut off the supply of raw materials from Sweden to Germany. Working leisurely, by late January of 1940 Britain had put together a plan for three simultaneous operations, one in northern Norway, another in southern Norway, and a third in southern Sweden. Britain would command a joint force of 100,000 British and 50,000 French and Polish troops, backed by the Royal Navy. The departure date was set for March 13,20 but at the last moment, the Finns capitulated to the Soviets, and the plan was scrapped.

  Meanwhile, Norway had come to Hitler’s attention. There had been absolutely no German plans to invade Norway at the outbreak of war, but with obvious British activity to aid the Finns, Hitler convened a staff on February 5, 1940, to plan a way to secure the iron ore route that ran through the Norwegian port of Narvik. The operation was given the code name Weserübung (Weser [a river in northern Germany] practice). Then came the incident on February 14 involving the German tanker Altmark, which was carrying 300 British seamen who had been taken prisoner by the German pocket battleship Graf Spee in December 1939. The Altmark entered Norwegian waters,
and the Norwegian government permitted it to proceed to Germany. In spite of Norwegian protests and protection of the Altmark by Norwegian torpedo boats, Royal Navy warships entered the fiord where the Altmark lay at anchor, sent a party aboard, and secured the British prisoners. Norway’s unwillingness or inability to defend its sovereignty and neutrality against British intruders incensed Hitler. He demanded the Wehrmacht’s planning for the invasion of Norway be accelerated.

  Chief of Staff Alfred Jodl recommended General Nikolaus von Falkenhorst to command the effort. Hitler interviewed von Falkenhorst, telling him to take a couple of hours and come back with ideas on how to take Norway. Von Falkenhorst immediately went to a bookstore, purchased a Baedeker’s travel book on the country (he had never been there), made some sketches, wrote down ideas, and returned to present them. Hitler approved von Falkenhorst’s plans and ordered him to build a staff and make preparations immediately. Von Falkenhorst’s scheme soon expanded to include both Norway and Denmark, both operations to occur simultaneously. Help and intelligence were obtained from Vidkun Quisling, a pro-Nazi Norwegian defense minister, and the invasion took place on April 9.