To Lose a Battle

by Alistair Horne

  As the Finns continued to defeat the apparently decrepit Soviet war machine, serious thoughts of intervention spread to the military planners. An expeditionary force landed at the Norwegian port of Narvik could lend a hand to the Finns by marching across northern Sweden, while at the same time a mortal blow would be struck at Hitler by depriving him of the Swedish iron-ore supplies essential to his war economy. Here would be a fine sideshow to distract Hitler’s gaze from France!

  On 15 January, Gamelin wrote to Daladier proposing the opening of a front in Scandinavia. Throughout the winter discussions volleyed back and forth between London and Paris, while the slopes at Chamonix became carpeted with British officers and men learning to ski. Briefly, Chamberlain with his declared anti-Communist bias favoured this happy means to ‘kill two birds with one stone’, but as the full gravity of the undertaking sank in, the British Government began to try to exercise prudence upon its more impetuous ally.15 Meanwhile – fortunately for all concerned – the Norwegian and Swedish Governments stalwartly rejected every overture for the expedition to pass through their territory. By March, however, Parliamentary pressure upon Daladier was such that, without consulting Britain, he informed the Finns that France would be prepared to brush aside Norwegian and Swedish objections. On the 11th, he told Halifax he would resign unless Britain toed the line. The French, wrote Ironside (the British C.I.G.S.) in disgust, ‘are absolutely unscrupulous in everything’, while the following day he recorded that the Chamberlain Cabinet – ‘a bewildered flock of sheep’ – had reluctantly acceded to the Narvik expedition. Then, on 13 March, Finland signed peace with Russia. By a matter of days, if not hours, Britain and France had been saved from a war with Russia as well as Germany. As Colonel Josiah Wedgwood remarked in the Commons, ‘It would have been the maddest military adventure upon which this country had ever embarked.’ But in France there was bitter disappointment; in his diary, Major Barlone recorded: ‘it is a heavy moral defeat for the Allies. I realize this when I talk to the men, who are bewildered by the inactivity of the Allies… We are disheartened.’ And this ‘moral defeat’ was enough to cause the fall of the Daladier Government.

  At the other extremity of the European war theatre, the sprightly General Maxime Weygand, commanding the French Army of the Levant, had been toying with schemes hardly less realistic than the Scandinavian adventure. Somehow Turkey and Greece would be brought into the war, the dismal Salonika front of the First World War would be reactivated, and a hundred Balkan divisions would loyally march with the Allies against Hitler’s ‘soft underbelly’. Here again was a bright prospect (encouraged by Gamelin) of saving French manpower and diverting the course of war from French soil. Much talk ensued. But neither Greece nor Turkey, nor any of the other Balkan powers, were much moved by Allied wooing; General Weygand received only two divisions of reinforcements throughout the Phoney War, while of his army he would be the only member to take part in the war of 1940.16

  Following the invasion of Finland, Weygand, a Catholic and politically very much to the Right, is to be found urging Gamelin by letter: ‘I regard it as essential to break the back of the Soviet Union in Finland… and elsewhere.’ From here sprang notions of striking (by bombers flying out of Weygand’s Syrian base) at the Caucasian oilfields which were fuelling both the Wehrmacht and the Red Army in Finland. Gamelin claims that he did his best ‘to deflect our thoughts from such an action’, though Weygand in his memoirs declares that he received, on 13 March, a memorandum from Gamelin which ‘advocated an attack on the oil-wells of the Caucasus’.

  As late as 17 April, Weygand was still corresponding with Gamelin about the operation, the planes for which, fortunately, were never available. (Meanwhile Walter Lippmann, passing through Paris, was helpfully offering the French Government his advice on how to breach Black Sea Traffic between Russia and Germany.) How, with the absurdly small bomber potential then available to both Britain and France, it was imagined that any raid on the Baku oil-wells could have caused more than a pin-prick is hard to imagine. The whole lunatic venture was well summed up by a poem by A. P. Herbert published at the time:

  Baku, or, The Map Game

  It’s jolly to look at the map

  And finish the foe in a day.

  It’s not easy to get at the chap;

  These neutrals are so in the way.

  But if you say ‘What would you do

  To fill the aggressor with gloom?’

  Well, we might drop a bomb on Baku,

  Or what about bombs on Batum?

  Refrain: I’m all for some bombs on Baku,

  And, of course, a few bombs on Batum.

  Meanwhile, as fervid brains in various Allied councils played ‘The Map Game’, in apparently blissful indifference to realities on the other side of the Rhine, fighting soldiers up at the front did sometimes also wonder precisely what form Hitler’s plans for the spring might be taking.

  Chapter 7

  The Sickle and the Reaper

  ‘Quiet, friend Sancho!’ replied Don Quixote, ‘Even more than other subjects, affairs of war are subject to continual change.’

  CERVANTES, Don Quixote

  His Majesty, Chance…

  FREDERICK THE GREAT

  Long before the war Hitler, the corporal who had endured the miseries of four years of static warfare on the Western Front, nurtured dreams of smashing France in what Mein Kampf predicted would be ‘one last decisive battle’. To Rauschning he declared that ‘with an unprecedented application of all means at his command, with the most ruthless dispatch to the front of all reserves, he would nail victory to his mast in one gigantic knock-out blow’. Veiled in mystical imprecision, Hitler’s inchoate ideas as to how this was to be achieved repeatedly sent his military advisers scurrying for shelter. The overcoming of their objections and the evolution of one of the most brilliant war plans of all time is in itself an extraordinary story, in which Chance plays a part of high importance.

  When war had come in 1914, Germany possessed her long-prepared Schlieffen Plan ready to roll into instant action against France while Russia was still mobilizing her unwieldy forces. But in 1939, never expecting that, on their past performance, Daladier and Chamberlain would honour their guarantee to Poland, Hitler had not instructed his General Staff to give thought to any comparable strategy. In the first place, he had no Russian foe to worry about. His generals had, however, by no means recovered from the dreadful shock of finding themselves once again at war with France and Britain when, on 12 September, Hitler told Colonel Schmundt, his chief military adjutant, that he intended attacking in the West immediately the Polish campaign was ended. On 27 September, Poland capitulated after Gamelin had conclusively shown that no threat would confront Germany from the west. At five o’clock that afternoon, Hitler held a meeting of the commanders-in-chief of the three Wehrmacht services in the map room of the new Chancellery.1 Without any preamble, and without seeking any opinion from this constellation of military experts, Hitler gave his views for an offensive against France – this year, and as soon as possible. Casting to the winds his recent promises to respect their neutrality, Hitler pronounced that the offensive would pass through Belgium and the Dutch appendix of Maastricht. By way of justification, he pleaded the vulnerability of Germany’s Ruhr and alleged evidence of French collusion with the Belgian General Staff. After the minimum of discussion, tossing into the fire the scrap of paper on which he had scribbled down his notes for the meeting, Hitler dismissed those present and instructed the Army leaders to draft an operational plan.

  Directive Yellow

  News of Hitler’s decision was promptly greeted with wide protest in the Army. General Ritter von Leeb, commanding Army Group ‘C’ along the Rhine and rated as the leading defensive theoretician of the old school, was outraged at the ‘lunacy’ of breaching Dutch and Belgian neutrality, and (to Brauchitsch) condemned Hitler’s simultaneous ‘peace offer’ to the Allies as ‘simply deceiving the German people with lies’. Moved more by pragma
tic than moral considerations, his fellow Army Group commanders, Rundstedt and Bock, declared that any early offensive would have little likelihood of success. Halder was convinced that the motorized and armoured divisions which had fought in Poland could not possibly be reorganized before mid November,2 while the troops which had stood defensively on the Rhine were not up to scratch, and there were serious shortages of ammunition and equipment. Even the impetuous Goering had his doubts, based on the probability of bad flying weather.

  The studied view of the Army (O.K.H.) at this time was that there could be no prospect of a successful offensive against France until the spring of 1942.

  But nothing would deflect Hitler. On 9 October, Warlimont relayed to the O.K.H. that Hitler had fixed 25 November as the date of the offensive. The next day Hitler delivered to Halder a 58-page memorandum, to urge on the reluctant O.K.H. in its detailed planning. Riding roughshod over all technical objections, Hitler declared that ‘General Time’ was on the side of the Allies, not Germany. Giving specific details for the first time he proposed that the main weight of the Panzer forces should advance on both sides of Liège, the objective of the offensive being to occupy territory on the Channel for the further prosecution of the war against England. In view of the modest limits of this goal, it seemed as if Hitler was still voicing more a wild personal desire than any calculated plan when he spoke once again of the ‘final military annihilation’ of the enemy. Working, for all their lack of enthusiasm, with the speed characteristic of the German General Staff, Halder and the O.K.H. produced their first plan, with the code name of ‘Deployment Directive Yellow’ (Aufmarschanweisung Gelb) by 19 October. Fundamentally, it consisted simply of an enveloping movement on Ghent, designed to separate the B.E.F. from the French, if possible, while securing air and sea bases for employment against the British Isles. The question of how the campaign would be continued in order to obtain a decision against the Allies, once the Channel had been reached, was left entirely open.

  Erroneously, historians have described the first O.K.H. Gelb draft as a variation on the Schlieffen theme, but in fact it was nothing of the sort. Schlieffen had prescribed a great Cannae battle of annihilation in which, after crashing through Belgium and striking to the west of Paris, the German Army would swing southwards to roll up the French forces from the rear and crush them against Switzerland and the Jura; on the other hand Halder’s axis of advance lay west-north-west, and eschewed any such bold and far-reaching strategic conception as Schlieffen’s.

  It was manifestly a bad plan, so conservative and uninspiring that it might well have been thought up by a British or French General Staff of the inter-war years, and through its many imperfections glimmered the half-heartedness of the O.K.H. and the Army commanders. Arguments leaped back and forth as to where the Panzer divisions were to be deployed. Hitler was far from satisfied. To an unreceptive Halder he began proposing visionary schemes of ‘special operations’ in which airborne troops would capture the Meuse crossings north of Liège, and cut off the Belgium Army retreating from Ghent. On 22 October he shocked Halder by announcing his intention of advancing the date of the Western offensive to 12 November. Then, at another conference three days later, Hitler suddenly asked Brauchitsch whether a main attack on the southern Meuse only might be able to ‘cut off and annihilate’ the enemy. Almost casually he injected the name of Amiens into the discussion, and then with a red pencil sketched on the map a line running from the Meuse south of Namur to the French Channel coast. According to Bock, Brauchitsh and Halder appeared ‘utterly astonished’. They were then packed off to reconsider the O.K.H. plan. Meanwhile, that same day a most portentous event occurred within the Army itself: Colonel-General Gerd von Rundstedt, a sixty-four-year-old officer called back from retirement to command Army Group South during the Polish campaign, arrived in Koblenz on the Rhine to take over the newly created Army Group ‘A’, facing Luxembourg and the Ardennes country of southern Belgium. With him came his Chief of Staff, a brilliant and impulsive lieutenant-general who, born Erich von Lewinski, had later adopted the name of von Manstein. From this day on, two channels of thought began to flow, coincidentally and quite independently of each other, which would eventually funnel together – at Sedan.

  On 29 October the O.K.H. produced its revised plan. As before, the centre of gravity (Schwerpunkt) of the attack remained with Bock’s Army Group ‘B’ in the north, but to meet the point Hitler had raised on the 25th, it had shifted somewhat to the south, so that the Fourth Army with four Panzer divisions would now cross the Meuse both north and south of Namur. The plan still, however, envisaged a frontal attack with the same limited objectives. Hitler still remained only partially satisfied, and the next day he revealed to Jodl, the O.K.W. Chief of Operations, a ‘new idea’ which would make use of the east-west Arlon gap in the Ardennes to reach Sedan, on the Meuse and just over fifty miles south of Namur, striking at it with one Panzer and one motorized division. It was the first time that the fateful name of Sedan was mentioned in German councils of war. But Jodl did not bother to pass on this latest brainwave of the Führer’s to the O.K.H.3

  Hitler and Brauchitsch

  Meanwhile, as October ended, Hitler was becoming thoroughly aware of the O.K.H.’s opposition towards his designs. On 5 November, the deadline for ordering the attack to begin on the 12th, Brauchitsch was summoned to the Chancellery for a sulphurous meeting. The Army C.-in-C. was a fifty-eight-year-old artilleryman, much decorated during the Great War (when he too had served his time at Verdun) and with a distinguished subsequent record. Of outstanding intelligence, he was also a quiet and withdrawn man, painfully correct in his external relations. Although emotional and rather too highly strung, his Junker upbringing led him to abhor violent scenes. He had a conscience and a will, but could hardly be described as combative. Both as a soldier and a man, in every way he excelled the third-rate Keitel, the O.K.W.’s Württemberger Chief of Staff, but none of his attributes were of any assistance in standing up to Hitler. Furthermore, though not a Party man, he was under some obligation to the Nazi hierarchy for having eased his divorce in 1938, the same year that he succeeded Werner von Fritsch4 as C.-in-C. His new wife was a rabid Nazi, who exerted a dominant influence upon him. Brauchitsch’s stormy sessions with the Führer in the past left him exhausted, and he tended more and more to retreat behind a passive line of ‘military obedience’. But on 5 November he confronted Hitler fortified by a tour of the front two days previously, during which all his senior commanders had unanimously and vigorously declared that the Army was not ready to launch a major offensive. To Hitler he now read out a memorandum presenting the Army’s views. When Brauchitsch warned him against underestimating the French, Hitler held up his hand:

  Herr Generaloberst, I should like to interrupt immediately here, because I hold quite different views. Firstly, I place a low value on the French Army’s will to fight. Every army is a mirror of its people. The French people think only of peace and good living, and they are torn apart in Parliamentary strife. Accordingly, the Army, however brave and well trained its officer corps may be, does not show the combat determination expected of it. After the first setbacks, it will swiftly crack up…

  Though shaken, Brauchitsch rashly continued. In Poland, he said, the German assault troops had not matched up to the infantry of 1914; there were incidents where discipline had failed, which led one to question whether the troops would be up to the stresses of a campaign in the West. At this, Hitler lost all self-control. Brauchitsch was heaping ‘monstrous reproaches’ upon his Army. Where had there been acts of indiscipline? Hitler demanded ‘concrete examples’. He then vented his rage upon Brauchitsch and the Army commanders; they had never been loyal to him, and the ‘spirit of Zossen’5 had become synonymous with defeatism. Rudely, Hitler dismissed Brauchitsch, and dictated a note sacking him – which he later destroyed. Brauchitsch tottered to his car, arriving back at Zossen in a state of total incoherence. In fact, he never substantiated his charges of ‘indisci
pline’, and Hitler never forgave him for the slurs he had cast upon his new young Army; the waning influence of the O.K.H. in Nazi war councils had receded another notch. Quite unaffected by the memorandum Brauchitsch had delivered, Hitler ordered Keitel to proceed with troop movements for an attack on the 12th, as planned. But two days later, bad weather forced Hitler to delay the attack. It was the first of twenty-nine such postponements. On 9 November an enraged Hitler once again had to call off operations, this time until 19 November.

  Brauchitsch’s interview of 5 November represents a high point in the O.K.H.’s opposition to Hitler. Well before the war began, Hitler had already shorn his General Staff of much of its power. Although adorned with the title of Supreme Warlord, the Kaiser before him had never possessed so much influence over military affairs as did Hitler; in fact, soon after 1914 he had become the virtual prisoner of the Great German General Staff. Hitler, on the other hand, had swiftly reduced his O.K.W. to little more than a drafting office entirely subservient to himself as Supreme Commander of the Wehrmacht. In military circles, O.K.W. was liberally translated as Oben Kein Widerstand (‘no resistance at the top’). Of the Saxon, Keitel, scornfully nicknamed Lakeitel (a diminutive of ‘lackey’) it was said that he received the appointment after the O.K.W. C.-in-C., Blomberg,6 had remarked disparagingly to Hitler: ‘He’s nothing but the man who runs my office.’ Hitler immediately replied: ‘That’s exactly the man I’m looking for.’ And so, for the remainder of the war, Keitel ran Hitler’s ‘office’ as a kind of pliable chief clerk, while below the O.K.W., the C.-in-C.s and their staffs of the three Services possessed a mere shadow of the independence they had enjoyed in Imperial days.