Until the summer of 1940, Hitler had run up a string of victories that were unprecedented in world history. He achieved most of them by the application of his remarkable political skills, and without the use of force.
Over the course of six years, beginning with his assumption of the chancellorship of Germany on January 30, 1933, Hitler got himself elected dictator of Germany less than two months later and put the state wholly under the Nazi party which he led; withdrew Germany from the League of Nations in October 1933; commenced massive secret rebuilding of German military power in 1934; introduced conscription in violation of the Versailles treaty in 1935; reoccupied the Rhineland in 1936, a German border region demilitarized under terms of the Versailles treaty; declared the treaty dead in 1937; seized the sovereign state of Austria and joined it to Germany on March 10, 1938; bullied the leaders of Britain and France into accepting his dismemberment of Czechoslovakia at the Munich conference, September 29–30, 1938, and occupied the remaining rump of the state—the Czech portions of Bohemia and Moravia—on March 15, 1939.
It was this last act of treachery that finally showed Neville Chamberlain, British prime minister, and Edouard Daladier, the French premier, that their policy of “appeasement” of Hitler was utterly misguided and that Hitler was a congenital liar. At Munich, Hitler had solemnly sworn that his final territorial aspiration in Europe was annexation of the Sudetenland, the German-speaking part of Czechoslovakia, and that he would assure the independence of the remainder of the state.
Britain and France now guaranteed the independence of Poland, the next victim on Hitler’s list. It was a hopeless gesture, since neither country could help Poland. That country’s fate was sealed on August 23, 1939, when the Soviet Union signed a nonaggression pact with Germany— inspired not by confidence in the peaceful intentions of Hitler but by desperation. Britain and France, who feared Communism, had refused to work with the Soviet Union to block Hitler during the early years when he could have been stopped with relative ease.
Bolstered by secret provisions of the Berlin-Moscow pact, which divided eastern Europe into German and Soviet spheres of influence, Hitler launched his armies against Poland on September 1, 1939. Poland had no chance whatsoever, being half-surrounded by German or German-held territory. The Polish army was enveloped from the first day. In addition, German General Heinz Guderian had developed a spectacular panzer arm, and German tanks cut through and rolled up Polish defenses with ease and unimagined speed in the first application of Blitzkrieg, or “lightning war.” Within three weeks Poland was defeated—and the Poles found their land partitioned between the Germans in the west and the Soviets in the east.
Britain and France declared war on Germany on September 3, 1939. The British took some action at sea, blockading German ports and pursuing German surface raiders, but were slow to put troops on the Continent, while France did virtually nothing on the Franco-German frontier. The fall and winter of 1939–1940 became known in the British Empire and the United States as the “phony war,” in France as the drôle de guerre, and in Germany as the Sitzkrieg.
Meanwhile, the Soviet Union took advantage of its pact with Germany to demand from Finland large cessions of territory as a buffer around the city of Leningrad (St. Petersburg) and elsewhere. The Finns refused and Soviet troops invaded on November 30, 1939. The Finns performed brilliantly in the “winter war,” but Soviet power was too great. Russians breached the main Finnish defensive line on February 11, 1940, and Finland capitulated on March 12, ceding the land Russia wanted.
The Allies—Britain and France—saw a chance to damage the German war economy by mining the territorial waters of Norway to prevent shipment of iron ore from northern Sweden during the winter through the Norwegian port of Narvik. This ore was vital to the German war effort, but could not be moved by way of the Baltic Sea in winter because the Gulf of Bothnia froze over. At the same time Hitler coveted the deep fjords of Norway as protected places to launch German surface ships, aircraft, and submarines against British supply lines. Both sides began plans early in 1940 to occupy Norway.
Hitler struck first, seizing Denmark in a swift coup de main and occupying key ports of Norway on April 9, 1940. The Allies contested the occupation of Norway and scored some successes, especially at sea. But German efforts were more ordered and decisive, and Allied forces soon withdrew, especially as the focal point of the war shifted to the Low Countries of Belgium, Holland, and Luxembourg and to France where Hitler launched his campaign in the west on May 10, 1940.
The Polish campaign should have tipped off the Allies to new uses for two elements in the German arsenal. But it did not, and they hit the Allied forces in the west like a thunderbolt. The elements were the airplane and the tank.
German generals had discovered something that the leaders of other armies had not figured out—that airplanes and tanks were not weapons but kinds of vehicles. Vehicles could carry armor, guns, or people, making possible an entirely new military system built around them. Armies could consist of troops carried by airplanes or dropped from them, or of self-propelled forces containing tanks, motorized artillery, and motorized infantry. Air forces could include tactical aircraft, such as dive-bombers, that functioned as aerial field artillery, or strategic aircraft with long-range and heavy bomb-carrying capacity that could bomb the enemy homeland.
Heinz Guderian had built the panzer arm on the teachings of two English experts, J. F. C. Fuller and Basil H. Liddell Hart, whose ideas of concentrating armor into large units had been largely ignored in their own country. The German high command was as hidebound as the British leadership on this point, and fought Guderian’s ideas. It was the enthusiasm of Hitler for tanks that gave Guderian the opening to establish the army doctrine of putting all armor into panzer divisions, instead of dividing it into small detachments parceled out to infantry divisions, as remained the practice in the French and British armies.
In addition, Guderian won acceptance of the doctrine that panzer divisions had to be made up not only of tanks but of motorized infantry, artillery, and engineers, who could move at the speed of tanks and operate alongside armor to carry out offensive operations wherever the tanks could reach.
Erwin Rommel, who would become famous for his campaigns in North Africa, produced the best one-sentence description of blitzkrieg warfare: “The art of concentrating strength at one point, forcing a breakthrough, rolling up and securing the flanks on either side, and then penetrating like lightning deep into his rear, before the enemy has had time to react.”
This was a revolutionary idea to the armies of the world. Most military leaders thought tanks should be used as they had been employed in World War I—to assist infantry in carrying out assaults on foot against enemy objectives. For this reason, the best Allied tanks, like the British Matilda, were heavily armored monsters that could deflect most enemy fire but could move scarcely faster than an infantryman could walk. German tanks, on the other hand, were “fast runners” with less armor, but able to travel at around 25 miles an hour and designed for quick penetration of an enemy line and fast exploitation of the breakthrough thereafter into the enemy rear.
It is astonishing that Allied (and most German) generals did not see the disarming logic of Guderian’s argument. He pointed out, for example, that if one side had 2,100 tanks and dispersed them evenly across a 300-mile front to support its infantry divisions, the tank density would be seven per mile, not enough to be decisive except in local engagements. If the other side had the same number of tanks and concentrated them at a single Schwerpunkt, or main center of attack, the density would be as many tanks as could physically be fitted on the roads and fields in the sector. Such a concentration would be bound to break through. Defending tanks and antitank guns would be too few to destroy all the attacking armor, leaving the remainder to rush into the rear, with other motorized forces following to exploit the victory. This would inevitably destroy the equilibrium of the main line of resistance and force the entire front to disinte
grate.
Nevertheless, British and French armies persisted in spreading most of their tanks among their infantry divisions. Both remained under the delusion that battles would be fought all along a continuous line, and they could move tanks and guns to block any point where a few enemy tanks achieved a breakthrough. They did not understand the effect of massing large numbers of tanks for a decisive penetration at a single point.
The radical aircraft the Germans developed was not much to look at. It was the Junker 87B Stuka, a dive-bomber with nonretractable landing gear, an 1,100-pound bombload, and a top speed of only 240 mph. It was already obsolete in 1940, but the Stuka (short for Sturzkampfflugzeug, or “dive battle aircraft”) was designed to make pinpoint attacks on enemy battlefield positions, tanks, and troops. And, since the German Luftwaffe (air force) gained air superiority quickly with its excellent fighter the Messerschmitt 109, the Stuka had the sky over the battlefield largely to itself. The Stuka functioned as aerial artillery and was highly effective. It also was terrifying to Allied soldiers because of its accuracy and because German pilots fitted the Stuka with an ordinary whistle that emitted a high-pitched scream as it dived. The Allied air forces had not seen a need for such a plane and concentrated primarily on area bombing, which was much less effective on the battlefield.
When German panzers broke through enemy lines, they could employ both their own organic artillery and Stukas to shatter enemy positions or assist motorized infantry in attacks. It was a new way to win tactical engagements, and the Allies had nothing to match it.
2 THE CAMPAIGN IN THE WEST: 1940
GERMANY’S ORIGINAL PLAN FOR THE ATTACK IN THE WEST WAS ASTONISHINGLY modest. It aimed at no decision. It didn’t even anticipate a victory over France.
The initial proposal, produced on Hitler’s orders by the Oberkommando des Heeres (OKH), or army command, in October 1939, hoped merely to defeat large portions of the Allied armies and gain territory in Holland, Belgium, and northern France “for successful air and sea operations against Britain and as a broad protective zone for the Ruhr” industrial region east of Holland.
The plan resembled superficially the famous Schlieffen plan of World War I in that the main weight of the attack was to go through Belgium. Beyond that, the OKH’s plan was utterly different. Count Alfred von Schlieffen had intended to defeat the entire French army. His aim was to outflank Allied forces with a wide right hook that drove down southwest of Paris, then turned back and pushed—from the rear—the entire enemy army up against the Franco-German frontier, compelling it to surrender.
None of this was possible in 1940. In 1914 Schlieffen had counted on strategic surprise. In 1940 the Allies anticipated the Germans would come through Belgium because a direct attack across the French frontier was impossible. In the 1930s France had constructed the Maginot Line from Switzerland to Luxembourg, a barrier of interconnected reinforced concrete fortifications and casemated cannons that could not be overcome by a direct attack.
Once the Germans tipped their hand, the Allies intended to throw forward strong forces to meet the Germans in Belgium, though it was the wrong thing to do. The sensible course would be to remain in already prepared defenses along the Belgian frontier, or withdraw to the Somme River fifty miles south, form a powerful defensive line, take advantage of the Allies’ two-to-one superiority in artillery, and launch a counterstroke against the exposed southern flank of the Germans as they drove westward. The Allies might shatter the German army by such a move. Even if they didn’t, they would still be dug in and ready for an attack when and where it came.
But France had suffered great devastation in World War I and did not want to fight the next war on French soil. Also, the British and French hoped to gain the help of the Belgian and Dutch armies. With them, the Allies would have as many soldiers as the Germans. They expected to use the Dyle, a north-flowing river some fifteen miles east of Brussels, as the main defensive barrier, sending their most mobile forces forty miles farther east to the Meuse (Maas) River to slow the German advance.
The Allied leaders downplayed the glaring weakness of this plan. It required their main forces to abandon already built fortifications along the frontier, move rapidly to the Dyle, and dig a new defensive line in the two or three days they were likely to have before the Germans arrived.
OKH saw the Allied disadvantages and hoped German forces could break through the two river lines with powerful frontal assaults. But the Allies, even if defeated, might still retreat behind the lower Somme, and form a continuous front with the Maginot Line. That is why Hitler and the OKH didn’t expect a total victory in the west. They anticipated a stalemate, the same condition the Germans had to accept at the end of the autumn battles in 1914. The only improvement would be that the coast of northern France, Belgium, and Holland would be available to pursue a naval and air war against Britain.
When Erich von Manstein saw the plan he declared that it would be a crime to use the German army for a partial victory, leading to a long war of attrition. It would mean defeat, since the Allies, with control of the seas and access to unlimited resources from Asia, Africa, and America, had much greater capacity to win a long war than the Germans.
Manstein was chief of staff to Gerd von Rundstedt, commander of Army Group A, and he saw an opportunity that had escaped the OKH— a way to eliminate the Allies’ entire northern wing after it rushed into Belgium. This same move would open the door to a second campaign that could destroy the remainder of the French army.
With Rundstedt’s approval, Manstein proposed that the main weight of the German attack be shifted to Army Group A and the Ardennes, a heavily forested region of low mountains in eastern Belgium and northern Luxembourg. He advocated that the vast bulk of Germany’s ten panzer divisions be concentrated there to press through to Sedan on the Meuse River, cross it before a substantial French defense could be set up, then turn westward and drive through virtually undefended territory to the English Channel. This would cut off all the Allied armies in Belgium and force them to surrender.
Manstein urged that a major decoy offensive still should be launched into northern Belgium and Holland under Army Group B, commanded by Fedor von Bock. Bock’s armies should make as much noise as possible to convince the Allies that the main effort was coming just where they expected it. This would induce them to commit most of their mobile forces to Belgium. The farther they advanced, the more certain would be their destruction.
“The offensive capacity of the German army was our trump card, and to fritter it away on half-measures was inadmissible,” Manstein wrote.
Manstein asked Heinz Guderian whether tanks could negotiate the hills and narrow roads of the Ardennes. Guderian studied the terrain, replied yes, and became an ardent apostle of Manstein’s plan.
But the OKH did not, and stonewalled for the next three months. Walther von Brauchitsch, commander of the Germany army, and Franz Halder, chief of the army staff, did not like the idea of their plan being tossed out, and they did not share Manstein and Guderian’s enthusiasm for tanks. They thought like orthodox soldiers and believed crossing a major stream such as the Meuse required moving up infantry and artillery, and a carefully worked-out coordinated assault. This would take time, time the French could use as well to build a strong defensive line.
Manstein and Guderian were certain the Meuse could be breached quickly with only panzer divisions and Luftwaffe bombers, and they believed speed would guarantee that the French would not have time to bring up enough troops to stop them. Speed also would ensure that few enemy units would be in place to block the panzers as they drove right across France to the Channel.
In November 1939 Hitler directed that a new panzer corps of three divisions, the 19th under Guderian, be attached to Army Group A with Sedan as its target. Since the OKH had not told Hitler of Manstein’s plan, he probably made the decision because he saw that Sedan was the easiest place to cross the Meuse. In any event, OKH ignored Manstein’s bolder strategy.
A
t the end of November, still without changing the northern focus of the offensive, OKH did move up behind Army Group A’s assembly area the 14th Corps of four motorized infantry divisions. These divisions had no tanks, but were almost as fast as the panzer divisions and could be of invaluable help in securing the flanks if the panzers were able to break out to the west.
On January 10, 1940, a staff officer of a German airborne division made a forced landing in Belgium. When captured, he was carrying orders he was only partially able to burn which gave away a large part of the German operations plan (Fall Gelb or “Case Yellow”). Many leaders on the Allied side concluded afterward that this was the event that caused the German high command to change its strategy. But it was not so. On January 25, at a commander-in-chief’s conference with all army group and army commanders, the plan remained the same. On the Allied side, the commanders were not certain whether the captured orders were authentic or a plant. They also did not change their plans.
“Quite unconsciously,” Manstein observed, “the German and Allied high commands had agreed that it was safer to attack each other head-on in northern Belgium than to become involved in a venturesome operation—on the German side by accepting the plan of Army Group A, on the Allied side by avoiding a conclusive battle in Belgium in order to deal a punishing blow to the southern flank of the German offensive.”
Manstein’s barrage of requests to change its strategy had become a nuisance to OKH, and on January 27, 1940, saying Manstein was due for promotion, it appointed him commander of 38th Corps, an infantry outfit with only a walk-on role in the upcoming campaign. The OKH hoped Manstein would conveniently disappear, but he used the appointment to make a decisive change in German strategy.
On February 17, Manstein was summoned to Berlin to report to Hitler for an interview and luncheon, along with other newly appointed corps commanders. Lieutenant Colonel Rudolf Schmundt, chief adjutant to Hitler, had been apprised of Manstein’s proposals, and he arranged for Manstein to talk privately with Hitler after the meal.
How Hitler Could Have Won World War II Page 2
