Hitler (121 page)

What had vexed the army High Command was precisely what instantly fascinated Hitler: the bold and unexpected character of this plan. It is said that he had already been occupied with similar notions at the time he learned of Manstein's proposal. By mid-February, 1940, therefore, after a talk with the general, he ordered a reformulation of the plan of campaign. That decision was to prove crucial.

It was by no means numerical advantage or technological superiority that made the war in the West such a breath-taking victory. The forces that confronted one another on May 10 were nearly equal in strength; in fact the Allied side had a slight edge in numbers. Besides the 137 divisions of the Western powers, there were 34 Dutch and Belgian divisions. These confronted 136 German divisions. The Allied air forces had some 2,800 planes, the German air force barely 1,000 more than that. On the Allied side approximately 3,000 tanks and armored vehicles faced 2,500 on the German side, although most of the latter were organized in special armored divisions. But the decisive factor was the remarkable German plan of operations, which Churchill aptly called the strategy of the “scythe-cut”
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and forced the opponent to a “battle with reversed fronts.”

The German attack once again began with an onslaught against Holland, Belgium, and Luxembourg. No declaration of war was made, and the enemy air forces were destroyed on the ground. “Fortress Holland” fell in five days. Hitler himself had developed the idea of dropping small, highly trained units of parachute troops at strategically important points behind the front; this proved a decisive factor in the rapid victory. Similarly, the center of the Belgian system of defense collapsed when Fort Eben Emael, the key to the system of fortifications guarding Liège, was eliminated by one such unit, which landed inside the fort area in gliders. Meanwhile, the advance through Luxembourg and the Ardennes, again a complete surprise to the enemy, made rapid progress. By May 13 the tank formations were able to cross the Meuse at Dinant and Sedan. On May 16 Laon fell, on May 20 Amiens; and that same night the first formations reached the Channel coast. At times the advance proceeded so rapidly that the main units lost contact with the vanguard, and Hitler, suspicious as always, distrusted his own triumph. “The Führer is frightfully nervous,” Halder noted on May 17. “He is alarmed by his own success, doesn't want to risk anything, and consequently would prefer to stop us.” And on the following day: “The Führer is unaccountably fearful about the southern flank. He rages and shouts that we are on the point of ruining the whole operation and exposing ourselves to the dangers of defeat.”
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In fact there was no danger. When Britain's new Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, alarmed by the situation at the front, flew to Paris, General. Gamelin admitted to him that the majority of his mobile forces had already, fallen into the German trap. Gamelin, commander in chief of the Allied armies, tried to conjure up memories of past glories. In an Order of the Day for May 17 he repeated word for word General Joffre's proclamation before the first Battle of the Marne in September, 1914, calling upon the soldiers not to yield a foot of soil. But the Allied leaders did not succeed in collecting their retreating armies, building new lines, and organizing a counterattack. The Allied defeat would have been complete if General Guderian's tank spearhead had not received the order, on May 24, to stop in its tracks. It was at this time only a few miles south of Dunkirk and not in contact with the enemy. The German slowdown for forty-eight hours left the Allies a port and thus the chance to escape. Within a week, in one of the most daring improvisations of the war, with the aid of some 900 largely small ships, fishing boats, excursion steamers, and private yachts, nearly 340,000 men—the greater part of the Allied formations—were ferried to England.

The responsibility for the order to halt before Dunkirk has since been the object of extensive investigation. Some have held that Hitler himself deliberately let the majority of the British Expeditionary Corps escape in order to keep open the way for the compromise with England that he continued to hope for. But such a decision would have contradicted the war aim formulated in his memorandum. It would also have contradicted Directive Number 13 of May 24, which began: “Next goal of operations is the annihilation of the French, British and Belgian forces encircled in Artois and in Flanders by the concentric attack of our northern wing.... During this operation the task of the Air Force is to break all enemy resistance in the encircled parts and to prevent the escape of the British forces across the Channel.” Hitler's order to halt met with vehement opposition within the army High Command, but was approved by General von Rundstedt, the commander of Army Group A. Its underlying intention was rather to give a respite to the tank formations, exhausted by two weeks of fighting, and enable them to recoup their strength for the impending battle for France. Göring's boasts that his Luftwaffe would transform the port of Dunkirk into a sea of flames and sink every ship that tried to dock there reinforced Hitler in his decision. When the city, which had been undefended and within Guderian's reach ten days earlier, at last fell into German hands on June 4, Halder noted tersely: “Dunkirk taken, coast reached. Even the French are gone.”

Yet the superior operational plan was not alone responsible for the German successes. When Hitler's armies turned south, after completing the encirclement maneuver at the Channel coast, they encountered a discouraged, broken enemy whose defeatism had been only magnified by the debacle in the north. The French command was operating with formations that had already been beaten, with divisions that had been dispersed, had deserted, or had simply passed into dissolution. As early as the end of May a British general called the French army a rabble without the slightest discipline.
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Millions of refugees aimlessly tramped the roads, dragging carts heaped high with possessions, blocking the movements of their own troops, carrying them along into the confusion, overtaken by German tanks, driven into panic by the bombs and the screams of the Stukas. Every step toward organized military resistance was submerged in the indescribable chaos. The country had been prepared for defeat but not for collapse. From the French headquarters in Briare there was only a single telephone link to the troops and to the outside world, and that was not in operation between twelve and two o'clock in the afternoon because the postmistress went to lunch at this time. When General Brooke, commander in chief of the British Expeditionary Force, asked about the divisions assigned for the defense of “Fortress Brittany,” General Weygand, the newly appointed supreme commander, shrugged resignedly: “I know they're a pure figment of the imagination.” Many commanding generals stared at their maps as if these were a blank wall. It was in fact as if the sky were falling down upon France.

Although the German planning for the Battle of France had provided for scarcely any reactions on the enemy's part, and although the directives seemed to suggest extensive marching drills rather than a campaign, Hitler was nevertheless surprised by the speed of the advance. On June 14 his troops marched through the Porte Maillot into Paris and lowered the tricolor from the Eiffel Tower. Three days later Rommel covered 150 miles in a single day. And when Guderian on the same day reported that he had reached Pontarlier with his tanks, Hitler wired back to ask whether it was not a mistake: “You probably mean Pontailler-sur-Saone.” But Guderian reported back: “No mistake. I am myself in Pontarlier on the Swiss border.” From there he advanced northeast and broke into the Maginot Line from the rear. The defensive line that had dominated France's strategy and all her thinking fell almost without a fight.

With the German victory now tangible, Italy rushed in to help. Mussolini hated, as he was wont to say, the reputation of unreliability that clung to his country, and he wanted to banish it by “a policy as straight as a sword blade.” But the matter was not so simple. His decision to stay out of the war for the present had started to waver in October, in view of the German triumphs in Poland. In November he had regarded the idea that Hitler might win the war as “utterly intolerable.” In December he had said to Ciano that he “openly wished for a German defeat.” He had informed the Dutch and the Belgians of the date set for the German attack. Early in January, 1940, he wrote to Hitler, advising him against his present course. As the “dean of dictators” Mussolini tried to turn Hitler's momentum toward the East:
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Nobody knows better than I, who possess nearly forty years of political experience, that politics makes its own tactical demands. This also applies to revolutionary politics.... Therefore I understand your... having avoided the second front. In Poland and the Baltic region, therefore, Russia has become the great gainer from the war, without risking anything. But I, who am a revolutionary by birth and have never changed my views, tell you that you cannot constantly sacrifice the principles of your revolution in favor of the tactical requirements of a momentary political situation. I am convinced that you may not lower the anti-Semitic and anti-Bolshevistic banner that you held high for twenty years... and I am only doing my absolute duty when I add that a single further step to extend your relations with Moscow would have devastating consequences in Italy....

 

But at a conference at the Brenner Pass on March 18, 1940, Hitler succeeded without any special effort in dispelling Mussolini's disgruntlement and in rekindling his partner's old admiration and lust for loot. “Neither can it be denied that the Duce is fascinated by Hitler,” Ciano wrote, “a fascination which involves something deeply rooted in his makeup.”

From that point on, Mussolini's determination to take part in the war grew steadily. It would be humiliating, he said, “to remain with our hands folded while others write history. It matters little who wins. To make a people great it is necessary to send them to battle even if you have to kick them in the pants.”
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Against the will of the King, of industry, of the army, even against the will of some of his influential fellow Fascists in the Grand Council, he began working toward Italy's entry into the war. Early in June, 1940, Marshal Badoglio opposed the order to begin offensive operations. His soldiers, he said, “did not even have a sufficient number of shirts.” Mussolini dismissed the argument: “I assure you that it will all be over with by September. I need several thousand casualties to be able to take my place at the peace table as a belligerent.” On June 10 the Italian army launched its attack but quickly ground to a halt on the outskirts of the border town of Menton. Indignantly, the Italian dictator declared: “It is the material I lack. Even Michelangelo had need of marble to make statues. If he had had only clay, he would have become a potter.”
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Only a week later events overtook his ambitions, when President Lebrun entrusted Marshal Petain with the formation of a new French government. As his first official act, Petain transmitted to the German High Command, through the Spanish government, his request for an armistice.

Hitler received the news in the small Belgian village of Bruly-le-Pêche, near the French border, where he had set up his headquarters. A famous photograph has preserved his reaction: his right foot raised as he danced a joyful jig, laughing, slapping his thigh. And it was here, in the context of an exuberant toast, that Keitel for the first time hailed him as the “greatest generalissimo of all times.”

 

There is no denying that the successes were unprecedented. In three weeks the Wehrmacht had overrun Poland; in something more than two months it had overwhelmed Norway, Denmark, Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg, and France, driven the British back to their island, and effectively challenged the British fleet. And all this was accomplished with comparatively small casualties. The campaign in the West had cost the German side 27,000 lives, compared with 135,000 dead on the enemy side.

The successes of the campaign cannot be attributed solely to Hitler's personal merits as a commander; but they were also not entirely the product of luck, shrewd counsel, or the enemy's failures. The importance of armored formations had been recognized in. France and elsewhere during the thirties, but only Hitler had drawn the necessary conclusion and equipped the Wehrmacht with ten armored divisions—against some resistance. He had recognized France's weakness and demoralized impotence far more acutely than his generals, who were still caught up in outmoded notions. And no matter how small his personal contribution to Manstein's plan of campaign may have been, he immediately grasped its importance and changed the whole concept of German operations accordingly. He showed that he had an eye for unconventional possibilities, all the keener because of his lack of background and hence of bias. He had studied military literature long and intensively; his bedside reading throughout almost the whole of the war consisted of naval records and manuals of military science. He used his stupendous memory of matters military for purposes of self-display. The almost lunatic sureness with which he could rattle off tonnages, calibers, ranges, or specifications of various weapons systems frequently staggered and irritated his entourage.

At the same time, he was also able to apply such knowledge imaginatively. He had a keen sense of the potentialities of modern weapons, he knew where to commit them and where they would be most effective. This was coupled with remarkable insight into the psychology of the enemy. All these qualities found expression in the accurately placed surprise strokes, in the correct predictions of tactical countermeasures, and in the lightning grasp of favorable opportunities. The plan for the coup against Fort Eben Emael came from Hitler, as did the idea of equipping dive bombers with sirens whose scream was devastating.
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Similarly, in defiance of the views of many experts, he insisted on providing tanks with long cannon. With some justice he has been called the “most informed and versatile specialist in military technology of his age.”
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Unquestionably, he was not just the “commanding corporal” that some of the haughty apologists for the German generals have depicted.