Commanders of World War Two by Bill Brady - HTML preview

CHAPTER TWELVE

HITLER

Hitler’s last testament, dictated in the Berlin bunker on 28th April 1945, while Russian shells rained into the Reich Chancellery overhead, opens, with the sentence; “Since 1914, when as a volunteer, I made my modest contribution in the Great War that was forced upon the Reich. At the outbreak of this conflagration, on 1st September 1939: I asked of no German man more than I myself was ready to perform during the four years of the Great War. I am from now on nothing more than the first soldier of the Reich. I have once more put on the coat that was most sacred and dear to me. I will not take it off again until victory is assured, or I will not survive the outcome”. Thirty-six hours after signing his last testament, still dressed in his German soldier's tunic he had indeed worn throughout the war, he put a loaded service pistol to his temple and pulled the trigger.

On his accession to the German presidency in 1934 he became chief of the German military. In 1938, by his creation of the OKW, he invested himself with supreme operational authority over the armed forces. And on 18th December 1941, when he dismissed Brauchitsch from command of the German army, he himself acceded to that post and thereafter exercised direct control of the German armies in the field. He was, moreover, to hold high command for a longer continuous period than any other German during World War Two. All three of the Army Group commanders in post at the outbreak, namely, von Leeb, von Bock and von Rundstedt, had been dismissed before the end, as had eleven out of the eighteen field-marshals he had created and twenty one of his thirty seven colonel-generals. None of his four wartime chiefs of staff, Halder, September 1939 - September 1942, Zeitzler, September 1942 - July 1944,  Guderian, July 1944 - March 1945, or Krebs (killed in the battle of Berlin), held office for more than three years. Keitel and Jodl alone equalled him in length of duty at OKW; and they were his functionaries, not independent decision-makers. Hitler was, therefore, supreme commander not only in name but in fact, and so indeed was 'the first soldier of the Reich'. 

Throughout World War One, he was continuously with his regiment, the 16th Bavarian Reserve Infantry, at the Western Front. This helps to explain why Hitler would speak years afterwards of “the stupendous impression produced upon me by the war, the greatest of all experiences”. All Hitler's biographers do agree in seeing him, from early manhood, as an individual set apart from others by his sense of difference, of unrecognized talent and frustrated fulfilment. He is, to social psychologists, a classic example of the lower middle-class enraged by the constrictions and closed doors of a settled social order which will make no room for anyone struggling to enter it from below except by connections and credentials that Hitler lacked or disdained to acquire. 

The squalor and misery of his Vienna years: the odd jobs, the attempts to become a recognised painter, the postcard hawking, the nomadism of furnished rooms, bachelor’s hostel, the yearning to be accepted. And then came August 1914, and on16th August Hitler went to war. His selection for the 16th Bavarian Reserve was seen as a key ingredient of Hitler's life, for the regiment was composed of exactly that class of young Germans to which Hitler had failed to be granted admission. They were, in high proportion, high-school boys, university students and trainees for the professions who, by deliberate policy of the German military authorities had not previously been drafted for military service. 

The significance of Hitler's role in the Regiment had a major effect on his personal development. An experience on which the Nazi party was to draw so heavily. Hitler, having been a soldier, was to become a commander. This goes far to explain both the nature of the war he had undergone and, in direct contrast to it, that of the war he was to direct. Of Hitler's three army group-commanders of 1939-41, Rundstedt, Bock, and Leeb, all brought back from the First World War an unbalanced view of its nature. So, too, did his longer-serving chief of staff, Halder, a gunner who had been a staff officer throughout, while even his two most talented field-marshals, Manstein and Kesselring, had been staff officers also. It may have been because Zeitzler had served as an infantry subaltern in the trenches that Hitler promoted him to be Halder's successor, and it was certainly in part because Rommel, Dietl, Model and Schorner had been outstanding junior leaders, significantly all were believing Nazis or popularly associated with the party, that he held them in such high regard. He was in consequence to give the former staff officer’s short shrift after 1939. By December 1941 Bock, Leeb and Rundstedt had all been sent packing, as was Halder shortly afterwards. And he was to accord no soldier thereafter equivalent status. If there was to be a successor, it would be himself. 

Hitler was electrified by his first view of a tank in 1934 (he had not seen one on the Western Front), and subscribed throughout the war to a trust in the power of new and 'secret' weapons to reverse its course. He died believing that it was only the failure of German inventors and German industry to deliver his `victory weapons' that had brought about his downfall. On 13th February 1945, he confided to a visiting doctor that “in no time at all I'm going to start using my victory weapons and then the war will come to a glorious end”. Hitler's faith in the capacity of weapons rather than human power to bring victory set him at the far side of a divide from the German generals who had directed World War One. Nevertheless, Hitler was not ultimately an opponent of the German generals who had preceded him in high command. Like them all he conceived of war as a test of will and national character, a Darwinian struggle for the survival of the fittest, and therefore an enterprise from which the outpouring of blood in streams could never be separated. In his political testament, he proclaimed that he died “with a joyful heart in the awareness of the immeasurable deeds and achievements of our soldiers at the front, of our women at home, the achievement of our peasants and workers, and the contribution, unique in history, of our youth”. That the war he fought had caused millions of men to suffer death and hundreds of thousands of women and children to be burned and bombed to death in the cities was not a reality from which he shrank. 

Hitler's calculation in 1939 was that he could defeat Poland before the French and British mobilized a serious counter-offensive, thereby guessing right about the dynamics of a two-front war when Schlieffen had guessed wrong, that diplomacy should then settle things in the West but that, if it did not, he stood an excellent chance of fighting himself out of trouble. The Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact of 22nd August 1939, which assured Russia's non-intervention, secured his back. His front he could hope to secure by negotiation, the West Wall or, failing all else, Blitzkrieg. Blitzkrieg was not a concept directly of Hitler's making nor, strictly, was his Polish victory an exercise in its form. The Polish army, surrounded on three sides by one enormously superior in men and equipment, was doomed to rapid defeat in any case; Russia's stab in the back merely sealed its fate. 

The three-week Polish campaign nevertheless practised the forces of Blitzkrieg, the panzer divisions and ground attack squadrons, in the operations of war itself so that when, in May 1940, they were committed to the test of Blitzkrieg proper they already enjoyed an advantage over their unpractised French and British opponents. But Blitzkrieg compounded that advantage. Essentially a doctrine of attack on a narrow front by concentrated armour, trained to drive forward through the gap it forced without concern for its flanks, Blitzkrieg was a formula for victory which owned no single father. The German tank pioneers, Lutz and Guderian foremost among them, had been avid students of the writings of the British 'apostles' of armoured warfare, Fuller and Liddell Hart. But it is a long step between the literary advocacy of a revolutionary doctrine, even from the conversion of influential individuals, and its acceptance by an organization as monolithic and set in its ways as the German army. The truth is, indeed, that the German army never was formally converted to Blitzkrieg, essentially a headline word applied retrospectively to spectacular events. What it adopted in reality was a form of organization, the large all-armour force, and a code of practice, the concentration of effort behind it, whose effect on the battlefield surprised no one more than many of those at its head.

So set in their ways were some of these generals, Beck, chief of staff until 1938, foremost among them, that the doctrine of armoured concentration might have found no acceptance at all had the army's tactical innovations of 1918, called 'infiltration', not anticipated what Guderian and his confederates preached. In that year the German army in the West abandoned its war-long reliance on the heavy artillery preparation and rigid barrage in favour of tactics altogether more fluid and instantaneous. Its gunners were belatedly trained to 'neutralize' the enemy's powers of resistance with a brief hurricane of fire, thereby denying the enemy the warning on which defenders had hitherto counted to reinforce a threatened trench sector. The infantry, meanwhile, were schooled to `infiltrate' rather than occupy the enemy's positions as the neutralizing bombardment closed. ‘Storm troops’ led the assault; elite 'interlocking' divisions penetrated the gaps made and consolidated the ground won. In four offensives: in March, April, May and June, 1918 these tactics worked brilliantly, up to a point. 

Tank divisions were by their nature 'storm' and `follow-on' forces in one. It was this evident capacity of theirs to fight and advance at the same time that impressed Guderian and his like; Hitler supported these Young Turks and by May 1940 their beliefs were in the ascendant. A new plan inspired by one of them, von Manstein, had, with Hitler's endorsement, supplanted another, much less adventurous, proposed by the traditionalists of the general staff. The freshly blooded field army stood in the slips. Victory beckoned on the far side of the West Wall. Its dimensions exceeded the expectations even of those most committed to the Blitzkrieg idea. The original general staff plan, codenamed 'Yellow', had proposed that, were Hitler to insist on attack in the West, it should have as its objective no larger piece of territory than the frontier area occupied by the French field army and its allied British Expeditionary Force. 'Sickle Stroke', as the Manstein-Hitler variant was codenamed, had a far more ambitious aim. 

It committed the armoured forces to drive a corridor from the Ardennes in southern Belgium to the Channel coast near Abbeville, so cutting off the Anglo-French defenders from their base in the heartland of France, while a second armoured thrust through the Low Countries encircled them in a pincer movement. Ironically the Allied war plan might have been designed precisely to further the success of this bold enterprise. It enjoined that the Anglo-French field army should, at Germany's first violation of Belgian neutrality, advance headlong into the Belgian Lowlands, trusting to the strength of the Maginot Line to protect them on their Ardennes flank. 'Sickle Stroke', however, located the German centre of armoured effort exactly at the point where the Maginot Line stopped, in territory deemed `untankable' by the Allied high command, and therefore at a point where neither fortification nor troops of high quality opposed it. The troops occupying the threatened sector, were, by the worst of bad luck, troops of the poorest quality. Hitler, whose decision to risk war in the West boasted in November 1939 to his generals, that he was going “to smash France to smithereens”. To smithereens was what three days of fighting reduced the French army in mid-May 1940. By 19th May, the German tank spearheads were at Abbeville. Two weeks later the British Expeditionary Force had fled the coast of France, the French field army was encircled and defeated and the French heartland lay open to Hitler's panzer columns. What ensued was scarcely war, so little so that on 15th June, ten days before the paralysed French government accepted an unavoidable armistice, Hitler had already issued orders for the disbandment of thirty-five divisions, about one-quarter of the army's war strength. 

During the rest of the summer he tinkered with plans for the invasion of Britain, believing meanwhile that she would sue for peace. When it became clear she would not, he committed the Luftwaffe to the destruction of the Royal Air Force and, as that effort faltered, to direct attack on the British cities. But his real commitment during the glorious mid-months of 1940 was to exultation in his astonishing victory. Its fruits were all the sweeter for the evident consternation it caused his generals, twelve of whom on 19th July, he casually elevated to the rank of field-marshal. No such number had ever been created before, except by Napoleon. But no campaign of Napoleon's, had been so spectacular in its results as Hitler's of September 1939May 1940. In twelve weeks of fighting, perhaps a little more if the Norwegian side show of April is included, the Germans had destroyed two major European armies, gobbled up four smaller and inflicted on Britain the greatest humiliation in its history since the secession of the American colonies 170 years earlier. 

Little wonder that he set himself to enjoy the summer of 1940. It was the first holiday he had permitted himself since the ecstatic early days of power. Then he had bathed in the adulation of simple people, as he and his inner circle toured the mountain villages and market towns of South Germany of his old regiment in Flanders, inspecting the Maginot Line and making his first trip to Paris, "the dream of my life", where he brooded over Napoleon's tomb, and exclaimed at the magnificence of the Opera. But, if outwardly at ease, Hitler was inwardly preoccupied. Britain, though refusing to make peace, could not enlarge the war. Russia, pacified by a division of the spoils in the east, was a war-making power as great as Germany. The threat it posed to German primacy in Europe, characterized as the 'Red' or 'Slav menace' in his ranting years, never ceased to obsess him; it took equal and sometimes greater place beside his crazed denunciations of Jewry. At a meeting with his generals on 31st July 1940, called to consider the invasion of Britain, he alarmed them by advancing stronger arguments for invading the Soviet Union.

 As summer drew into autumn, the arguments for what would be codenamed `Barbarossa' grew to seem more compelling. Britain, he was convinced, was postponing a settlement in the expectation that she would be saved by the United States; but the United States would abandon its neutrality only if Russia continued to pose the threat of a two-front war. In November 1940 Hitler came to his decision. A visit to Berlin by Molotov, the Russian Foreign Minister, on 12-13 November dissolved any remaining hope that he would 'come to a satisfactory understanding with the Soviet Union. Its appetite for influence in the Balkans and Near East was revealed to equal his own. On 27th November Hitler issued orders to the commander of his air force that he had decided to attack Russia.

Hitler envisaged a short war and ordered preparations for Barbarossa to be complete by 15th May 1941. In the meantime, disturbances in the Balkans supervened to postpone its inception. Mussolini's decision to attack Greece in October, of which he had deliberately given Hitler no warning, so embarrassed the Führer by its failure that he was prompted to consider lending the Italians assistance, as in the following February he was to do in the Western Desert by sending Rommel and the Afrika Korps to bolster their defence of Libya against the British. An anti-German coup in Yugoslavia in March then made up his mind for him. It smacked of British influence, also strong in Greece, and was therefore not to be tolerated. In April he unleashed a Blitzkrieg against both countries, which culminated in a spectacular, though costly, airborne capture of Crete in May. Whether or not the Balkan diversion robbed Hitler of the time and good weather in which he might have brought his 'short war' against Russia to a successful conclusion in 1941 is now disputed. Some military historians have argued that Barbarossa could, for strictly operational reasons, not have started any sooner than it did. Certainly it seems more significant to striking a judgment that Barbarossa was itself a flawed plan; it hovered uncertainly between the aim of destroying the enemy's armies and the aim of neutralizing his capital.

Barbarossa, when eventually unleashed on 22nd June 1941, at once achieved enormous encirclements. By 1st July, von Bocks Army Group Centre had surrounded three hundred thousand at Minsk, and by 19th July it had encircled one hundred thousand more at Smolensk. Hitler assured the German people that “the foe is broken and will never rise again”. Events were to prove that the Russians were far from broken. Assisted by a delayed winter, which left the approaches to Moscow bogged in autumn, they reinforced the Moscow front, fought the invaders to a standstill in early December and turned them back. The Russians soon ran out of steam and the Germans, though bereft of winter clothing and equipment, halted the Russian counter offensive and redeployed. 

By 22nd July 1942, the Germans had reached the Volga and Stalingrad on 23rd August. By that date the spearheads of Army Group South were pushing into the Caucasus, had planted the German flag on the summit of Mount Elbrus, highest peak in Europe, and were only 300 miles from Baku, the centre of Russian oil production. In thirteen months Hitler's armies had advanced 1 200 miles, taken nearly four million Russian soldiers prisoner, driven the Soviet government to the brink of flight from Moscow, caused the relocation of one-third of Soviet industry east of the Urals, and brought the richest areas of Russia's agricultural land under occupation and exploitation. Victory again seemed certain. 

But on 19th November, the Russians penetrated the German line north and south of Stalingrad, in which bitter fighting had raged since September, and encircled the city. Thus began the Sixth Army's struggle for survival, which was to endure in conditions of mounting deprivation until the following February. While the battle lasted Hitler had thoughts for no other concern. Believing Göring's assurance that the Luftwaffe could supply the Sixth Army by air, and refusing to issue its commander Paulus with authority to break out, he devoted all his energies to retrieving his lost prize. But an effort by Manstein to break through to the city in December failed, the Russians widened the scope of their attacks and by 1st February, as the Sixth Army's resistance came to an end, the southern army groups had been pushed back behind the Don, retaining only Rostov as a bridgehead in the great swathe cut by their summer advances. Stalingrad marks, in broad retrospect, both the high point and end of Hitler's war. Certainly his confidence in his power to command either the enemy or his generals was so shaken by the defeat that he gave little of himself to the discussions on how best to recoup the army's fortunes in 1943. 

Kursk, the eventually abortive and by Hitler much postponed offensive which resulted, was the brainchild of his new chief of staff, Zeitzler, rather than his own. Defeats and setbacks in other sectors shook his confidence also; the destruction of Rommel's army in Africa, the reversal of fortune in the Atlantic battle, the beginning of co-ordinated Allied air attacks on the Reich, the Anglo-American invasion of Italy and the overthrow of Mussolini. But it was the humiliation in Russia that cut deepest. The proof supplied by Kursk that his military instinct was superior to that of his generals, as represented by Zeitzler, restored some of his confidence; he bolstered it with his growing trust in the war-winning qualities of secret weapons his scientists were developing. Vilification of his faithless and gutless allies also served as a ready reinforcement of his sense of solitary indispensability. And the physical isolation of his headquarters ensured that he confronted reality only in self-administered doses. Somehow or other, as the disasters of 1943 gave way to the looming crises of 1944 - deeper Russian advances in the east, the menace of Anglo-American invasion in the west - he sustained his capacity to think, plan, command. The officers' plot of July 1944 sealed his conviction that he could trust no one but himself to fight the war to its end. Thereafter all military decisions were made by him alone. Many were made in the closest detail. Even in the last week of his life his staff were radioing precise operation orders from the Berlin bunker to units - by then, mere fragments, if not figments - whose movements he continued to plot on his situation map. Late in the evening of 29th April 1945, nineteen hours before his suicide, he signalled OKW to ask five categorical questions: 'Where are Wenck's spearheads? When do they attack? Where is the Ninth Army? In which direction is Ninth Army breaking through?' 

The nominal size of the formations concerned apart, these were messages of the sort with which Hitler the messenger might have dodged, from shell hole to shell hole, across the Flanders front thirty years before. The world for him had come full circle. Incarcerated in an underground shelter, with enemy shells blasting and infantry fighting a few hundred yards distant, he was surrounded by military command, maps, map tables, phones, and by worried officers who looked to him to bring it to an end. Flight or surrender they knew he would not countenance. The consequent expectation of his suicide in the bunker as the Battle of Berlin neared its climax.  He would represent his suicide as a soldier’s death.

Until now Hitler had refused to see the reality of events. The "Battle for Berlin" was the last major European engagement in World War Two and perhaps the most controversial; because the result of this battle was of immense proportions; not only for the major powers but for the entire world. By the spring of 1945, the war had moved beyond the point where all previous wars had ended and German military strategy to all intents and purposes had ceased to exist. The German armed forces which had seemed irresistible for the first years of the war were being smashed by superior strength; they were now outnumbered, outgunned and outmatched on every front. The Battle of Berlin undoubtedly ranks along with Leningrad, Stalingrad, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki as an example of the horror and destruction accomplished by modern warfare.

As the allied armies pushed into Germany from east and west, it finally became clear to more and more Germans that the Third Reich which was supposed to last for a millennium was nothing more than an illusion. In this, the sixth year of war, Germany had suffered four million casualties; the cream of the nation's manpower. Towards the end of this agonising conflict, devastating thousand bomber raids on German cities had become common place. Most German civilians had long ceased to believe in the Nazi propaganda promising "miracle weapons" which would dramatically reverse the tide of defeat. There were few left in the German military who were genuinely convinced that Hitler’s Reich could still win the war; the Reich which had until only recently occupied most of Europe and had driven deep into Russia to the very gates of Moscow; the Reich that had gained control of more territory than that of the Holy Roman Empire had now shrunk almost to the suburbs of his capital city

Hitler’s once powerful and superbly trained troops had been reduced to a mere shadow of the elite panzer forces which had stormed into the Soviet Union in 1941. The dreadful catastrophes of Stalingrad and Kursk had devoured whole army groups and inflicted unsustainable losses. The decimated and war weary Wehrmacht, fighting desperately to survive and prevent total defeat was near to total collapse. In the four winters of fighting in the east their equipment had been destroyed or left disabled in the vast terrain of the Russian snows; serving as eerie reminders of their dictator's vision which had gone horribly awry.

Hitler’s purge after the assassination attempt on his life in July 1944 accelerated the decline of the army's officer corps and brought further irreplaceable losses. By now nearly the entire established army command had either been dismissed or committed suicide, been executed, or were interned in concentration camps. Following the July plot, no one had dared to suggest to the Führer that the Russians might one day threaten Berlin; for fear that this would have been construed as defeatism and a criticism of Hitler’s conduct of the war. Therefore, the organisation for the defence of Berlin was an unbelievable mess and any chance of saving the capital had long since vanished. The coming battle for Berlin, however, could no longer be ignored by Hitler who was by this stage acutely aware that he neither had the manpower nor equipment to accomplish its defence. The remaining strength was not enough to affect the outcome of the battle, but was enough to prolong the agony. For Hitler, isolated under six metres of earth and concrete and out of sight of the destruction rolling in on him there was to be no respite. Now in the last days of his life, Allied victory was no longer in doubt.

This was the situation in Nazi Germany in 1945. So why did the Germans knowing that the cause was irretrievably lost continue the unequal struggle against hopeless odds; and why did they not bring the war to a swift end thereby sparing unnecessary suffering? The answer to this question is that even at this late stage the Germans were still dominated by their dictator Adolf Hitler who demanded, and got, absolute obedience. His will alone was all that counted, and that was the most critical single factor for the continuation of the war. Citing Frederick the Great, he informed his generals that it was the strength and determination of the leadership which decided whether wars were won or lost. While he lived, Germany would go on fighting as he repeatedly said "until five past midnight”. 

He was convinced that the Soviets, having suffered enormous losses, had overextended themselves and had no operational reserves left. Therefore, the remaining, severely weakened Russian armies would easily be destroyed. Hitler constantly underestimated his enemies and frequently dismissed German intelligence reports of the massive troop concentrations being built up against them. In refusing to accept that the war was as good as lost, his interference in operations became more and more irrational. He repeatedly departed from original plans and these miscalculations would cause enormous logistical problems and fatal delays; all of which led to the great German disaster at Berlin in April 1945. 

Guderian, Hitler’s foremost panzer general, always claimed that Hitler was never capable of visualising anything larger than a division, which represented the limit of his competence. He was, however, circumspect when he made these comments; anyone who objected to Hitler’s meddling was either silenced or ruthlessly eliminated. So, rather than argue with their leader the German generals who came into contact with Hitler chose to fall in line with his insane plans; despite being shocked at the decrepit extent of his physical decline. It is a biological fact that when the territory of an animal is threatened, it will fight to the death, regardless of the odds, and so it is with man.  

In 1940, when driven back into their island, the British had good and sound reasons to accept an accommodation with Hitler. However, the British, seemingly illogically in the circumstances of the time, chose to fight on. That same deep animal instinct now took possession of the Germans. Hitler’s somewhat fanciful scheme was to continue the war in the hope that Churchill’s grand, if somewhat fragile alliance, consisting of Great Britain, the USA, and the USSR, would ultimately collapse. He reasoned that his enemies would become exhausted, quarrel amongst themselves and eventually agree to a negotiated peace. Surely, he argued, the Western Powers would realise that bolshevism was their real enemy and join Nazi Germany in the common crusade. When you consider the advent of the cold war shortly after World War Two ended, this may suggest that he was not all that far wrong in hoping for this split. Therefore, rejecting the advice of his generals and refusing to leave Berlin, he awaited the dramatic turn of events that would hopefully save his crumbling empire.

As anticipated by Hitler, the western allies were in total disagreement on how the war should end. Supreme Commander General Eisenhower reminded the British that they were living on an overdraft and that they could only continue to do so on the bank's terms. Henceforth, the Americans, who were providing most of the logistical backing and with more than twice the number of troops in the field as the British, would call the tune. So, regardless of the policy the British urged, the American view was bound to prevail; British strategy was indeed in chains. The Supreme Commander then proceeded to shock his British Allies by announcing in March 1945, that his objective was no longer a direct thrust to take Berlin; they would continue their advance on a broad front which would facilitate surrounding and isolating German forces in the Ruhr. This would subsequently be acknowledged by friend and foe alike as a major tactical blunder; General Eisenhower seemed unable to comprehend that Berlin had become the strategic centre of Europe. British Prime Minister Churchill, on learning of this development, and being fully aware that the Germans in the West were finished; urged Roosevelt to order Eisenhower to make a bold thrust towards Berlin. The British Prime Minister was horrified at the prospect of leaving the German capital to be taken by the Russians. He knew that if the Red Army conquered Berlin; half of Europe would immediately become communist and there was every possibility that in a few years" time the other half would also be gobbled up. 

But Churchill’s appeal to the dying President Roosevelt was in vain; as were British optimistic hopes of an equal voice in the Alliance. Perhaps the rationale behind this is that unlike their British counterparts, most American generals were not trained to consider political objectives as part of military strategy. American tradition schooled their officers never to usurp civilian supremacy; politics were to be left to the politicians. In giving the Red Army free rein to take Berlin, Eisenhower claimed that he was avoiding politics; insisting it was based on ‘purely military’ factors. But, in effect he was doing just the opposite. History was to prove that Eisenho