Amongst those now flying over the Dutch coast were Junkers 88 bombers of III/KG 4. Leading the 9th Staffel was Oberleutnant Hajo Herrmann, a square-jawed, pale-eyed 25-year-old, who already had over twenty combat missions to his name as well as considerable experience of flying in Spain during the Civil War. A supremely calm and cool-headed individual, Hajo had taken off in the dark just before dawn from Delmenhorst, near Bremen in Northern Germany. One of his aircraft had crashed on take-off, killing all four of the crew. It had not been an auspicious start, but soon the pale crest of light spread from the east behind them. Flying low out over the North Sea and across the East Friesian Islands, they then turned west and later, altering course, flew south-west parallel to the Dutch coast, the twin Jumo engines thrumming in the now bright early-morning sky. Climbing sharply to some 12,000 feet, Hajo then led his squadron in a right-angled turn in towards the coast, to the airfield at Bergen aan Zee that lay just beyond the coastal dunes.
From 12,000 feet they made a diving attack. ‘We had achieved surprise,’ noted Hajo. ‘The Dutch fighters were unable to intercept us, and we left the dust behind without any damage to ourselves.’ The systematic and thorough destruction of the Dutch air force had begun.
Meanwhile, at the Führer HQ at Felsennet, artillery could now be heard. Hitler gathered his staff around him. ‘Meine Herren,’ he said, gesturing to the west, ‘the offensive against the Western powers has begun.’
Arriving at Felsennet at around 6 a.m. was General Franz Halder, the 55-year-old, crop-haired and bespectacled Chief of the General Staff of the army supreme command, the Oberkommando des Heeres, or OKH; the man, above all, responsible for the minutiae of the German operational plan of attack. At 7 a.m., the first reports began coming in. The Belgians, it seemed, had been warned of the attack at around 3 a.m., but the Dutch had been taken by surprise. Nonetheless, it seemed the Dutch had been quick to respond by blowing a number of bridges vital to the advance of Army Group B. Then better news: little resistance had been met at the Luxembourg border in the Ardennes, and border bridges had been captured according to plan.
It had been a particularly stressful time for Halder, who had been trying to manage the mercurial – and frankly, at times, insane – demands of the Führer, whilst also attempting to produce a plan for an offensive in the West that would not lead to the rapid annihilation of Germany. It was an extremely difficult hand to juggle, and one that had led him to consider leading a coup d’état and assassination attempt on Hitler. All positions of high command include their share of stresses and strains, but the pressure Halder found himself under was particularly intense. There were times when he had come very close to complete nervous collapse.
Born in Würzburg, in Bavaria, Halder came from a family with a long tradition of military service dating back some 300 years. Despite this, he had spent his career in a series of staff jobs, so that, although he had served throughout the First World War, he had never experienced frontline action or command himself. With a fastidious eye for detail and a reputation as an expert on training, he had first caught Hitler’s eye during the army manoeuvres of 1937. A year later, in September 1938, he was asked by General Walter von Brauchitsch, the Commander-in-Chief of the OKH, to become Chief of the General Staff. In light of his well-known anti-Nazi attitude, he had to think hard about whether to accept the post. Von Brauchitsch, however, who had worked with him in the Training Branch in 1930, appealed to him to accept.
After some soul-searching Halder did so, and by the summer of 1939 had developed a strong team with which he and von Brauchitsch hoped they could rival the combined armed forces high command – the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, or OKW – for influence. Halder was far from being alone in the army in his contempt for the Nazi High Command. Although both Feldmarschall Wilhelm Keitel, Chief of the OKW, and his Chief of Staff, General Alfred Jodl, were soldiers, they were considered yes-men, who were unable to curb Hitler and leading Nazi excesses. Not for nothing was Keitel known as ‘Lakeitel’ – lackey – a pun on his name.
Halder’s plans for the Polish campaign had been exemplary. He had hoped that the swift success of the eighteen-day conflict might well convince the Western powers to come to terms; certainly, he was keenly aware that Germany was far from ready for a clash with Britain and France at that time. Defeating a militarily weak country like Poland was one thing; victory over Britain and France was quite another.
Thus it was a shock to learn that Hitler wanted to turn his attention on the West immediately. The Führer’s gamble that Britain and France would not declare war if he invaded Poland had backfired. They had done as they had promised and now Germany was faced with having to deal with them. It was unavoidable, and as far as he was concerned the sooner he got on with it the better, before the Allies became too strong. Britain, especially, may have been slow to rearm, but that would surely be accelerated now. And both Britain and France had, thanks to their sea lanes and overseas possessions, far greater access to the raw materials needed for war than did Germany. The only way the Third Reich could match them was by further expansion themselves – in the east. Even Hitler understood, however, that it would be foolish to advance on Russia before the threat of the Western powers had been resolved.
And so it was that the Führer had found himself in a quandary entirely of his own making. Setting out his rather woolly intentions in a memorandum issued on 9 October, the Führer announced that his aim was to defeat as much as possible of the French army and of any forces fighting on their side, and at the same time to win as much territory as possible in Holland, Belgium and northern France from which they could successfully conduct an ‘air and sea war against England’.
As Chief of Staff of the OKH it was Halder’s task to draw up a plan of attack, and yet the very idea of such an attack so soon and with winter approaching appalled him. What the Führer had not fully realized was that despite their success in Poland, the eighteen-day campaign had showed up startling deficiencies, not least a severe shortage of just about everything, but especially vehicles and ammunition. It had also demonstrated that many of the divisions were far from fully trained. In many cases, discipline had been poor too. Yet now Hitler wanted to wage war with France, who had the world’s biggest army, and Britain, who had the biggest navy, at the same time, and with winter on its way.
The majority of the Wehrmacht officer corps thought, as Halder did, that the plan was insane. Even Keitel, normally the first to kowtow to Hitler, urged the Führer to reconsider, and, when he refused, offered his resignation. This too was refused. Halder had tried to dissuade Hitler by producing a draft plan that, like the German advance in 1914, saw them making a thrust through Belgium to the coast. So unimaginative was it, he hoped it would show Hitler the senselessness of such an offensive.
It did nothing of the sort, however. Hitler stuck to his guns, and with mounting impatience. It was at this point that Halder took on the mantle of the central figure in Nazi resistance, hatching at Zossen, the headquarters of the OKH south of Berlin, a plan for a coup d’état and Hitler’s assassination that involved a number of leading officers, including General Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb, commander of Army Group C, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, the head of the Abwehr – the military intelligence service – and General Carl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel, Deputy Chief of Staff of Operations at OKH. For Halder, however, the plot produced a terrible crisis of conscience. He did not want to act without sufficient support – yet getting that support was an extremely risky task. Increasingly, he came to believe that assassinating the Führer was probably the best option and so through Canaris began planning to plant some explosives at one of his meetings with Hitler. He even took to carrying a loaded pistol in his pocket so that he might gun him down himself.
In the meantime, and with his nerves worn thin, he continued preparations for the Western offensive, producing a second plan at the end of October, which in essence was the same, but included a second simultaneous thrust further south. This was deliberate heel-d
ragging, and Hitler knew it. In the Reich Chancellery on 5 November, von Brauchitsch had tried to explain that his field armies were simply not ready for a major offensive in the west, only for Hitler to erupt into one of his uncontrollable rages. Von Brauchitsch had been left stupefied, and later confessed to Halder that he was unable to deal with Hitler’s iron and maniacal will. Yet von Brauchitsch rarely stood up to Hitler, which was just as the Führer wanted it. In part this was because of his fear of Hitler but also because the Führer had agreed to pay von Brauchitsch’s first wife a substantial divorce settlement that the army Chief had not been able to afford himself. He was thus literally in Hitler’s debt.
Von Brauchitsch, like Keitel, offered his resignation, and as with the Chief of OKW, it was refused; Hitler, who mistrusted the OKH and had as much contempt for his generals as they did for many leading Nazis, had no-one obvious to replace him with. Instead, he recognized that the Commander-in-Chief of the army would not dare to stand up to him again. Like all bullies, Hitler had an innate ability to sniff out other men’s weaknesses.
It was after von Brauchitsch’s dressing down on 5 November that Halder had cut his ties with the resisters. On the return trip to OKH headquarters from the Reich Chancellery, von Brauchitsch, pale as a ghost, had told Halder that Hitler had raged against the ‘spirit of Zossen’. Panicking, Halder mistakenly believed the Führer had somehow got wind of the plot and immediately ordered von Stülpnagel to destroy all the relevant documents.
It marked a significant turning point in Halder’s life. Recognizing his total unsuitability as an assassin and revolutionary, he now decided to embrace the coming offensive wholeheartedly. If he could not prevent it, then at least he could do all in his powers to ensure it was as successful as possible.
Nonetheless, Halder was initially extremely dubious that a main thrust through the Ardennes had much chance of success. General von Manstein, during his time as Chief of Staff of Army Group A, had produced seven different drafts, which he submitted to OKH between October and January, and each draft contained the same essential concept: that if they could take the French by surprise and get across the Meuse, then a fast panzer thrust could blaze a way through France before the French troops could react.
It was a bold and daring plan that was dependent on far too many variables for comfort: that the extremely complicated logistic operation through the Ardennes would go to plan; that Allied air forces would not detect it; that the French would be surprised; that the French would not be able to recover sufficiently; that untried and untested panzer units could cut such a swathe. For the methodical, cautious Halder, this made it fatally flawed, and so he put von Manstein’s memos to one side and did not pass them on to the OKW, knowing that if he did so the Führer would instantly latch on to such an adventurous idea purely because it was daring and because it ran counter to the more methodical approach Halder and the OKH had already put forward. Halder understood Hitler well enough to recognize that Manstein’s plan would almost certainly appeal to the Führer’s go-for-broke mentality. Furthermore, Hitler had even suggested a thrust through Sedan himself, not through any genius of military thinking, but rather because Sedan had witnessed the French surrender during the Franco–Prussian War in 1870 and had always fascinated him.
At the beginning of the year, however, two events happened that turned Halder’s plans on their head. The first was on 10 January, when a German aircraft made a forced landing near Mechelen in Belgium. On board was a Luftwaffe operations officer with copies of the latest German offensive plans, which still held that a thrust through the Low Countries was to be the main point of attack. Realizing how important the documents were, the German officers hastily tried to burn them. They were captured, however, before the documents had been destroyed. Suddenly, the Allies had the details of the German plans laid out before them.
Hitler was incensed when he found out, but it soon proved to be of far greater benefit to the Germans than the Allies. The incident prompted a rapid response from the Allies, who began enormous troop movements, going on to the alert all along the front and moving reserves forward, all of which was watched and noted by Luftwaffe reconnaissance planes. And what this showed was that the Allies had been expecting a German attack exactly as outlined in Halder’s plans.
The second event happened a few weeks later on 2 February, when General Schmundt, Hitler’s military aide, visited Army Group A and was given copies of von Manstein’s plan by Generals Günther Blumentritt and Henning von Tresckow. At the end of January, von Manstein had been sidelined by being given a phantom corps that had yet to be organized. Frustrated by such treatment of a man they greatly admired, Blumentritt and von Tresckow urged Schmundt to visit von Manstein and talk to him about his ideas, which he did right away. He then passed the plans to Hitler. Just as Halder had suspected, the Führer lapped them up immediately.
But by this time, however, the situation had greatly changed. The long winter months had proved more beneficial to the Germans than the Allies: ammunition stocks had been replenished, more tanks and aircraft had been built, training of raw divisions had been carried out. And spring was around the corner. The OKH had successfully managed to stall Hitler, their cause helped by a particularly vicious winter that even the Führer could tell was no help to offensive plans. Indeed, the excuse of poor weather came to Halder and von Brauchitsch’s rescue time and time again; by 10 May, the attack date had been postponed no fewer than twenty-nine times. Even better, Hitler was also now considering an attack in Denmark and Norway first, before an offensive in the west. The Führer had recognized during the winter months the importance of Norway as the only route through which much-needed Swedish iron ore could reach Germany. This in turn meant the offensive in the west would take place in early summer, when conditions were far more favourable. Furthermore, rather than revealing German plans, the Mechelen incident had paradoxically shown Allied intentions instead, and that was something that could be used to the Germans’ advantage.
And that wasn’t all. War games at the beginning of February had shown Halder that Guderian’s and von Manstein’s plans for a deep panzer thrust might just work after all. Finally, the French, it seemed, had been very slow to respond to recent German regrouping movements along the front: intelligence suggested they had taken between ten and fourteen days to pick this up. Thus if the main French defences through the Ardennes could be reached in under that time, the French could be caught out. ‘Surprise may now be regarded as assured,’ he noted with confidence in his diary after a February Führer conference.
The methodical, careful, and rather unimaginative original plan would probably avoid any quick defeat. In fact, it would almost certainly lead to the long drawn-out attritional war that those veterans of the First World War so dreaded. The von Manstein–Guderian go-for-broke plan, on the other hand, might lead to a very quick and disastrous defeat. Yet, it might – might – just give them the emphatic victory they needed: certainly, Halder now realized, it was the only plan that had a possible chance of success. Thus by the end of February, when Halder submitted his latest plans for Case Yellow, he had completed his dramatic volte face: Army Group B would noisily thrust into Holland and northern Belgium with the support of the majority of the Luftwaffe, while the panzers of Army Group A would hurry through the Ardennes and attack the French across the Meuse. With luck, the Allies would be coaxed into a trap, rushing forward to meet the northern thrust, while the main German attack burst through the back door around Sedan, ensnaring the bulk of the Allies’ northern front in a huge encirclement before they had time to effectively respond.
Halder might have been convinced, and so too von Brauchitsch, but it was palpably clear that the majority in the army believed it was a fatally flawed plan that had not one chance of succeeding. On 17 March, Guderian and the senior commanders of Army Group A had a conference with Hitler at the Reich Chancellery. Guderian was the last of the army and corps commanders to brief Hitler on his plan. On the fourth day after
the advance began, he told the Führer and his army group superiors, he would reach the Meuse. By the end of the fifth he would have established a bridgehead across it.
‘And then what are you going to do?’ Hitler asked.
‘Unless I receive orders to the contrary, I intend on the next day to continue my advance westwards.’ He added that in his opinion he should drive straight to the Channel coast.
General Busch, who commanded Sixteenth Army consisting almost entirely of infantry divisions, said, ‘Well, I don’t think you’ll cross the river in the first place!’ He was speaking for almost all Army Group A’s senior officers, including its commander, von Rundstedt.
Hitler, visibly tense, turned to Guderian, waiting for his response.
‘There’s no need for you to do so in any case,’ Guderian replied. The last thing he wanted was slow, cumbersome, infantry divisions lacking almost any mechanized transportation getting in his way.
Not only were most of Army Group A against the plan, but so too was much of Army Group B. Its commander, Generaloberst von Bock, called in on Halder in his Berlin apartment and pleaded with him to abandon it entirely. ‘You will be creeping by ten miles from the Maginot Line with the flank of your breakthrough,’ he told Halder, ‘and hope the French will watch inertly! You are cramming the mass of the tank units together into the sparse roads of the Ardennes mountain country, as if there were no such thing as air power! And you then hope to be able to lead an operation as far as the coast with an open southern flank two hundred miles long, where stands the mass of the French Army!’ This, he added, transcended the ‘frontiers of reason’.
The Battle of Britain Page 5
