It was thus imperative, Roosevelt considered, to end the Nazi nightmare in Europe as soon as could be achieved—something that would never be accomplished by opportunistic operations in the eastern Mediterranean and Aegean, however much Churchill and the British Foreign Office feared an eventual Sovietization in central Europe.
Churchill, too, was all for finishing the war as swiftly as possible; he merely saw the challenge differently. Imaginative, impetuous, and excitable, he was pulled in all directions, as General Brooke noted in his diary—but least of all in the direction of a cross-Channel landing and campaign. When writing his epic, six-volume memoirs of the conflict, Churchill would title his fifth volume Closing the Ring. The “Theme of the Volume” (a mantra he liked to insert in the frontispiece to each work) was the story of “How Nazi Germany was Isolated and Assailed on All Sides.”
Could Hitler and his regime be swiftly toppled by being “isolated,” however? In the excitement of the summer of 1943, Churchill was minded to think so. The Germans would surely cave in once they saw—like the Italians—the game was up, and only destruction faced their nation if they sought to fight on. His July 19 minute to his chiefs of staff maintained the “right strategy for 1944” would be to pursue the Germans “certainly to the Po,” after Husky, with the option of attacking westward to the south of France or northeastward toward Vienna, “and meanwhile to procure the expulsion of the enemy from the Balkans and Greece.” Moreover, rather than launch a costly cross-Channel assault, to prepare an Allied invasion of Norway, to be mounted “under the cover of ‘Overlord.’” Encirclement around the fringes of mainland Europe, he’d considered, would lead to “Hitler and Mussolini” being “disposed of in 1944.”2
It was this vision—tantamount to fantasy, unfortunately—that had come to obsess the Prime Minister, and which underlay his latest, enlarged mission to North America: some 230 men embarked on the Queen Mary to take Churchill’s latest strategy to Quebec, which they reached on August 10.
It was a mission, however, that the President was determined to preempt by insisting on meeting Churchill first—in private. The British must be held to the only policy that would actually defeat Nazi Germany, rather than merely ringing it. This meant a spring 1944 cross-Channel invasion, with no holds barred—and no more backtracking by the British. Once the two men got together at Hyde Park, the President had decided, moreover, he would have to use his trump card.
As Roosevelt prepared to meet his recalcitrant ally, Hitler had meantime asked Dr. Goebbels to fly from Berlin to the Wolf’s Lair to “discuss the whole situation from every point of view.”3
The Führer, Goebbels found when he arrived on August 10, had decided to abandon his main Axis ally. The new Badoglio government would “betray” Germany, he was certain, despite its assurances of loyalty to the Axis Pact. A telephone conversation between Churchill and Roosevelt had been intercepted, and both Goebbels and Hitler were scornful. “These plutocrat leaders imagine things in Italy as being much more positive for them than they really are. The Führer knows every trick in the book, though,” Goebbels noted with evil satisfaction in his diary. “German troops are now streaming into Italy”—in fact, German flags were already flying over Mantua and Genoa. “There’s no danger of anything too terrible happening. The Führer is absolutely determined he’s not going to surrender Italy as a battlefield. He has no intention of letting the Americans and the British get to northern Italy. The worthwhile part of the country, at least, will remain in our possession.”4
Having overcome his initial panic and fury over Mussolini’s arrest, Hitler now actually welcomed, he said, the impending capitulation of Italy: a nation that had no national will, he felt, beyond the popular fascist speeches of the Duce. Mussolini no longer impressed him, in retrospect. The Duce had failed to declare war in September 1939, when his intercession might have gotten England to back away from world war; moreover, at home in Italy, Mussolini had failed to crush the monarchical, aristocratic conservative elements who considered him a fly-by-nighter.
To maintain his power, a dictator must be perceived by his own people to be ruthless, Hitler understood—and by preparing to crush the forces of Italy and move Wehrmacht troops immediately to occupy the entire Italian peninsula, the Führer would be seen to be asserting his absolute will—Aryan, egalitarian, merciless. Actions that would speak louder than any words.
Was Hitler assuming too much of his Volksgenossen—his fellow citizens?
In 1943 Hitler would only appear in public twice—an isolation at his headquarters that filled Dr. Goebbels, as a master of public relations, with disappointment, even anxiety. Yet the Führer seemed to know better than his chief propagandist that he had no need to show himself in public, or even inspect his troops. With drums, banners, swastikas, and film and press fanfare, he had as Führer given the German Volk what they yearned for: order, authority, a new place—a supreme place—in the European sun; a sense of belonging to a dynamic, productive community with rational if draconian goals—and sufficient pride in their country’s history and extraordinary military achievements to defend it and its conquests now to the death, literally. He was therefore confident he had the willing, even enthusiastic, obedience of his troops—troops who would fight all the harder and more effectively without the hindrance of an always-unreliable Axis ally. Italy’s military missteps in Greece and North Africa in 1941 had dragged German forces into a southern theater of war that had distracted from the Führer’s main priority, the defeat of Russia—in fact were now affording the Western Allies a possible stepping-stone into Europe. Without the millstone of Italian allies, however, that stepping-stone could be transformed into a Sumpf: a bog, where the Western Allies could become enmeshed, ensnared, mired. If, that was, the Allies could be tempted into further fighting in the Mediterranean and Aegean.
While always keeping the Atlantic Wall as strong as possible, ensuring there were enough divisions stationed in France to defeat any attempt at a Second Front, he would now lure the British and Americans to the south of Festung Europa, Hitler told Goebbels. He would thereby buy time without taking great losses, or facing a real threat to the Reich itself: the Vaterland. True, in the probable event of Italian surrender to the Allies, vital German divisions and air force groups would have to take over the positions hitherto held by Italian units in the Mediterranean and Aegean, stretching from Sardinia to Samos—forces that could not then be used on the Eastern Front. But with no-nonsense German military control not only of Italy and of the eastern Adriatic—from Slovenia to Albania, Greece and Crete, with all their airfields—the Western Allies would be at a disadvantage. Given the mountainous terrain and the fighting efficiency of Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe units, the Americans and British would be hard put to form a Mediterranean front that had any hope anywhere of reaching Germany.
With every week and every month the Western Allies would be held in the Mediterranean Sumpf. Germany would thus have time, Hitler calculated, to finish the development of the Third Reich’s secret weapons—long-range rockets and ballistic missiles—and to deploy them, from January 1944 onwards.
Roosevelt had boasted that America was the arsenal of democracy. But as Führer of the Third Reich he would show how, using not only slave labor in Germany but products manufactured in France and the occupied countries for the Third Reich, the Third Reich was the arsenal of Europe. Not even mass RAF night raids and U.S. Air Force daylight bombing could turn the tables. Allied air force losses in conducting mass raids of German cities were unsustainable in the long run. Under the leadership of Albert Speer, the production of German armaments was being dispersed away from big cities, while evacuation of families would deny the Allies the collapse of German civilian morale.
Hitler’s fascination, in fact obsession, with the minutiae of weaponry might be mocked by some of his generals, but in a war of numbers, it was the quality of weapons that counted, along with the sheer discipline of German Wehrmacht soldiery in combat. U.S. and British indust
rial output might statistically outstrip that of the Third Reich, but the technical truth was, he sneered, their weapons were inferior, their soldiery less ruthless, and the demands of their various theaters of war too global. By contrast, now that Italy’s ill-fated campaign in North Africa was over, the Third Reich had the advantage: cohesion. A single continent as its battlefield, with Germany at its epicenter—its high command able to furnish reinforcements in any direction, especially if Goebbels, Göring, and other senior officials could squeeze out still more military personnel from the workforce, and more slave labor from the occupied countries—including Italy now.
With the Japanese reaffirming their pact with Berlin, and drawing an ever more significant portion of U.S. and British military effort to the Far East and Pacific, the chances of the Western Allies mounting a Western Front—at least a successful Second Front—if they were tied down in the Mediterranean were, in Hitler’s mind, distinctly dim.
Goebbels was thus delighted by the führer he’d met at the Wolfschanze. It was no mask of confidence Hitler was putting on for his generals, his headquarters staff, or his visitors in the high and late summer of 1943, the Reich minister judged: it was real.
The South Tyrol, annexed by Italy from the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918, would be occupied by German forces and henceforth become part and parcel of the Third Reich. “We just have to keep our nerve and not be distracted by the enemy’s panic-machine,” Goebbels noted. “Whatever they cook up in Washington and London, they won’t find consuming as easy as preparing. It’ll take quite a while for the Italian crisis to sort itself out.” The Führer was determined to hold the Alps and Italy as far as the Po, but “the rest of Italy is worth nothing,” intrinsically, Goebbels recorded—adding, though, that “in private and in the greatest secrecy,” Hitler had stated he would not only try and arrest Marshal Badoglio, King Emmanuel, and “the whole baggage” in Rome, but was planning to “defend the Reich as far south in Italy as possible,”5 as he’d confided to Goebbels already in June.6
This latter intention would have the gravest implications for the Allies—who could decode high-grade German communications from Hitler’s headquarters, but not read Hitler’s mind. “The fundamental principle of our war strategy is to keep the war as far as possible from the borders of the homeland,” Goebbels noted on August 10. “It is absolutely the right principle,” he reflected. “As long as we can master the war in the air”—especially with better Flak and new jet fighters—“the German people can be trusted to stick it out for a pretty long time.” The harvest in Germany looked good, with more that could be brought in from occupied countries. Using slave labor, the outlook for the Third Reich was thus far more positive than the way the foreign press was depicting it. If the Western Allies could be lured to commit themselves to all-out war on the Southern Front rather than a Second Front, they could be savaged—perhaps even repelled—by the sheer professionalism and ruthless energy of the Wehrmacht. Certainly the Allies could be held at bay, far from the Reich, and in close combat—with London and the British Isles, meantime, under aerial bombardment by secret weapons: “our planned measures to be taken in the coming months.”7 “With regard to our countermeasures against the British,” Goebbels confided, “the Führer thinks they can be launched in great numbers by January or February [1944] at the latest. He’s going to set upon London with a fury never witnessed before. He’s anticipating great things from our missiles. They’ve been fully tested; we just have to accelerate production to the level we need. So we have to be patient.”8
As for the Eastern Front, moreover, Hitler seemed confident the Russians could be held—indeed had been beaten badly, in effect, at Kursk. As such they could be thrashed again that winter, if the Western Allies were kept at bay in the south.9 “It will take time, and we have to be patient,” Goebbels repeated10—Hitler interested in why Stalin had recently withdrawn his two ambassadors, Litvinov and Maisky, from Washington and London.
Puzzled, Hitler and Goebbels wondered if there was an opportunity to cleave the Allies apart. Stalin could not defeat the Wehrmacht without the Western Allies mounting a Second Front—something that, if the Allies still balked at such a mission, might well lead to a breakdown in the Allied alliance far more momentous than the looming collapse of the Axis Pact. “We have to let our apples ripen. It would be a real irony of world history if we were to be courted by both the Soviets and the Anglo-Americans in this situation—which is not inconceivable,” Goebbels noted. “It sounds absurd, but it is a possibility. In any event we’ve got to do our best to work on the current difficulties between them. As long as we don’t have a disaster on the Eastern Front, our situation will be secure.”11
If Germany’s Eastern and Southern Fronts were held, and the enemy’s air offensive was parried, Germany would remain politically and militarily in the ascendant. “The Führer is very optimistic,” Goebbels described, “perhaps too optimistic. But it’s good to see him in such good form. Either way we’re going to put everything we can, to the last breath, into the struggle.” He hadn’t seen Hitler looking so fresh and on such a high for ages—“he told me that as soon as things get dangerous, all his aches and pains disappear and he feels healthy as never before.”12
A renewed German peace with Stalin, as in the Ribbentrop Pact of 1939? It didn’t seem likely, as things stood. But over time?
Providing the Soviets were willing to leave Germany in control of the Ukraine—with its all-import grain harvest, and the Donets Basin, with its huge reserves of coal—the Führer seemed willing to parley. In the meantime 1943, far from being a verlorene Jahr, a lost year, the Third Reich would remain in almost complete military control of the whole of Europe—moreover able to deal with Jewish and Resistance problems more ruthlessly than ever.
This, then, was Hitler’s strategy—one that was far more effective in the short term than his enemies or even his own generals admitted, then or later.13 Mussolini’s arrest and the probable defection of the Italians as his Axis ally were removing the biggest burden from Hitler’s back—not increasing it, as so many assumed in their excitement. Winston Churchill and his British parliamentary colleagues, especially Anthony Eden, were known to be pressing for exploitation in the eastern Mediterranean. This was all to the good, as Goebbels had joyfully discussed with Hitler. Dissension among the Allies would make the Führer’s task the simpler,14 with no sign of Stalin willing to confer with his Western counterparts—only ever-increasing scolding in the Moscow press at the failure of the Western powers to mount a Second Front.
Just one thing could thus imperil the Führer’s warplan: American insistence on the mounting of a massive, all-out cross-Channel invasion of northern France in 1944, in coordination with the Soviets, that would crush Germany between them—Hitler’s age-old nightmare.
Churchill on the Wrong Warpath
* * *
With hundreds of advisers and staff officers, Churchill arrives in New York in May 1943 aboard the Queen Mary (here bringing back U.S. troops two years later) to oppose agreed-upon U.S.-British strategy.
On Capitol Hill he inveighs against a cross-Channel Allied invasion before 1945 or 1946, citing impossible odds.
Axis Surrender in North Africa
* * *
In Tunisia, a quarter million Axis troops in North Africa surrender to Eisenhower on May 12, 1943, the culmination of the President’s “great pet scheme.” For FDR this proves the Allies are on the road to military victory in Europe; for Churchill it means the Allies should stay in the Mediterranean.
Reading Churchill the Riot Act
* * *
Churchill is intransigent; the U.S. secretary of war accuses the British of cowardice. The President takes the Prime Minister to Shangri-la to fish, while the U.S. chiefs of staff work on Churchill’s military team. Eventually FDR has to give Churchill a talking-to. Following the invasion of Sicily and southern Italy, U.S. troops will be withdrawn to England for a definite 1944 D-day. Churchill is furious.
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br /> Sicily—and Kursk
* * *
On July 10, 1943, the Western Allies take the war to Europe, invading Sicily. The magnitude of the landings stuns Hitler—who calls off Operation Citadel, his great summer battle on the Eastern Front to destroy Stalin’s Soviet armies at Kursk.
The Fall of Mussolini
* * *
With Italian troops running from the Allies in Sicily, Hitler flies to Italy to encourage Mussolini to fight on rather than surrender. Six days later, the Duce is arrested by his own people. The Germans will have to fight for Italy instead.
Churchill Returns—Yet Again
* * *
Once again Churchill returns to Hyde Park, this time with his daughter Mary, to persuade FDR to abandon U.S. strategy for an Allied cross-Channel invasion in 1944. The Prime Minister is convinced it will be a disaster, and that better results will be obtained from Mediterranean operations.
Commander in Chief Page 35
