How Hitler Could Have Won World War II (10 page)

Meanwhile, a newly arrived British motorized brigade had occupied Mechili. While Rommel sent a small force to the sea at Derna to close the Via Balbia in both directions, he sent his main force from east and west against the British brigade at Mechili on April 8, forcing its surrender. He then rushed tanks on to Derna, where German forces captured many more prisoners, including General Neame and General O'Connor, who had come back from Egypt to assist Neame. Their unescorted car had run into Germans on the Via Balbia.

By April 11, 1941, the British had been swept entirely out of Cyrenaica and over the frontier into Egypt, except for two divisions that shut themselves up in the port of Tobruk, which the Italians had built into a fortress before the war, and which the Royal Navy could supply by sea.

Rommel had won by deceiving the British into believing his forces were much stronger than they were, and he moved with great speed, bewildering the British and causing their forces to disintegrate.

Rommel had too little power to undertake a heavy assault against Tobruk, yet he insisted on mounting several attacks, all of which failed against the resolute Australian and British garrison.

The date of Rommel's eviction of the British from Libya, except Tobruk, is significant. The campaign against Yugoslavia and Greece had been launched on April 6, and German forces were already scoring decisive successes, indicating that the campaign would soon be completed.

Rommel had handed Hitler an entirely unexpected victory that left the Africa Corps poised within striking distance of the Suez Canal. All that would now be required to win Egypt would be the swift transfer, as soon as the Greek campaign ended, of two panzer divisions to reinforce Rommel. The British were reeling from defeats in Greece and Libya, and could not have withstood a concerted attack.

The garrison at Tobruk could have been blocked by Italian divisions, braced by a few German tanks. With an offensive launched against the Egyptian delta, the British could not have mounted an offensive from that fortress.

Admiral Raeder and the naval staff recognized what Rommel had achieved, and proposed to Hitler “a decisive Egypt-Suez offensive.” If Rommel had been reinforced, he almost surely would have occupied Egypt long before the end of 1941.

Unfortunately for the Germans, none of this happened. Hitler didn't recognize the gift that Rommel had handed him and turned his gaze once more on the Soviet Union.

In his appraisal of his first campaign, Rommel came to virtually the same conclusions that Admiral Raeder had reached half a year previously.

“It is my view,” he wrote, “that it would have been better if we had kept our hands off Greece altogether, and rather created a concentration of strength in North Africa to drive the British right out of the Mediterranean area.”

The air forces employed in Greece should have been used to protect convoys to Africa, he added. Malta should have been taken instead of Crete. Powerful German motorized forces in North Africa could then have seized the whole of the British-occupied Mediterranean coastline, as well as the Middle East as sources for oil and bases for attack on Russia.

“This would have isolated southeastern Europe. Greece, Yugoslavia, and Crete would have had no choice but to submit, for supplies and support from the British Empire would have been impossible.”

Rommel blamed his superiors in the army high command. He was right in noting the reluctance of the senior generals to endorse a full-scale operation in Libya. But at the time Rommel didn't know it was Hitler who had rejected a Mediterranean strategy, and Brauchitsch and Halder had adjusted their viewpoint to conform. The silence of Brauchitsch, Halder, Jodl, and Keitel in the presence of Rommel's incredible gift speaks volumes, either about their lack of vision or about their fear of Hitler.

8 BARBAROSSA

THE PURPOSE OF MILITARY STRATEGY IS TO DIMINISH THE POSSIBILITY OF RESISTANCE. It should be the aim of every leader to discover the weaknesses of the enemy and to pierce his Achilles' heel. This is how battles and wars are best won.

Such advice goes back at least to Sun Tzu in the fifth century B.C., but it is extraordinarily difficult for human beings to follow. The attack against the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, is the most powerful example in the twentieth century of how a leader and a nation—in this case Adolf Hitler and Germany—can ignore clear, eternal rules of successful warfare, and pursue a course that leads straight to destruction.

Attacking Russia head-on was wrong to begin with, because it guaranteed the greatest resistance, not the least. A direct attack also forces an enemy back on his reserves and supplies, while it constantly lengthens the supply and reinforcement lines of the attacker. The better strategy is to separate the enemy from his supplies and reserves. That is why an attack on the flank is more likely to be successful.

Nevertheless Hitler could still have won if he had struck at the Soviet Union's weakness, instead of its strength.

His most disastrous error was to go into the Soviet Union as a conqueror instead of a liberator. The Soviet people had suffered enormously at the hands of the Communist autocracy for two decades. Millions died when the Reds forced people off their land to create collective farms. Millions more were obliged to move great distances and work long hours under terrible conditions in factories and construction projects. The secret police punished any resistance with death or transportation to horrible prison gulags in Siberia. In the gruesome purges of the 1930s, Joseph Stalin had systematically killed all leaders and all military officers who, in his paranoid mind, posed the slightest threat to his dictatorship. Life for the ordinary Russian was drab, full of exhausting work, and dangerous. At the same time, the Soviet Union was an empire ruling over a collection of subjugated peoples who were violently opposed to rule from the Kremlin.

Vast numbers of these people would have risen in rebellion if Hitler's legions had entered with the promise of freedom and elimination of Soviet oppression. Had Hitler done this, the Soviet Union would have collapsed.

Such a policy would not have given Hitler his
Lebensraum
immediately. But once the Soviet Union had been shattered, he could have put into effect anything he wanted to with the pieces that remained.

Hitler followed precisely the opposite course of action. His “commissar order” called for the instant shooting down of Communist party agents in the army. He sent
Einsatzgruppen—
or extermination detachments—to come behind the army and rout out and murder Jews. He resolved to deport or allow millions of Slavs to starve in order to empty the land for future German settlers.

Two days before the Germans struck, Alfred Rosenberg, Hitler's commissioner for the regions to be conquered, told his closest collaborators: “The job of feeding the German people stands at the top of the list of Germany's claims in the east. . . . We see absolutely no reason for any obligation on our part to feed also the Russian people.”

The genuine welcome that German soldiers received as they entered Soviet towns and villages in the first days of the campaign was quickly replaced by fear, hatred, and a bitter guerrilla war behind the lines that slowed supplies to the front, killed thousands of Germans, and increasingly hobbled the German army.

As wrong as this policy was, Hitler's actual military plans were so false strategically that they could only succeed if the Red Army collapsed from internal stress. That, in fact, is what Hitler counted on. He did not expect to win by a superior method or concept, but by relying on the Russian army to disintegrate after a series of initial battles.

Great generals don't win wars in this fashion. They don't depend upon their enemies to make mistakes or give up. A great general relies upon his
own
ideas, initiative, skill, and maneuvers to put the enemy in a position where he must do the general's bidding. A great general wins his battles
before
he fights them. He obligates the enemy to take positions he cannot defend or from which he cannot extricate himself.

Hitler's greatest strategic mistake was his refusal to concentrate on a single, decisive goal. He sought to gain—all at the same time—three widely distant objectives: Leningrad, because it was the birthplace of Russian Communism; Ukraine and the Caucasus beyond, for its abundant foodstuffs, 60 percent of Soviet industry, and the bulk of the Soviet Union's oil; and Moscow, because it was the capital of the Soviet Union and its nerve center.

Hitler wanted
all
of them. Indeed, he expected to reach the line Archangel–Caspian Sea in 1941. That is 300 miles
east
of Moscow, and only about 450 miles from the Ural Mountains. But Germany did not have the strength to achieve all these goals in a single year's campaign. At best, it had the strength to achieve one.

Hitler scorned such a limitation, and ordered Army Group North to go for Leningrad, Army Group Center for Moscow, and Army Group South for Ukraine. These objectives, spread over the entire western face of the Soviet Union, could not possibly be coordinated. Leningrad is 940 airline miles from Odessa on the Black Sea. Each army group would be required to conduct a separate campaign. Because resources were to be divided in three directions, no single effort would have the strength to achieve a war-winning decision.

The task Hitler set for Germany was almost inconceivable. He hoped to seize a million square miles of the Soviet Union in 1941, a region the size of the United States east of the Mississippi. The campaign in the west, on the other hand, had been fought out in an area of 50,000 square miles, roughly the size of North Carolina or New York State. Therefore, the ratio of space to men was twenty times greater in the east than in the west.

Field Marshal Brauchitsch, commander of the army, and General Halder, chief of staff, wanted the primary objective to be Moscow, with forces concentrated in the center. They contended that conquest of Leningrad, Ukraine, and the Caucasus depended on defeating the Red Army. The main body of this army, or an essential part of it, would be met on the road to Moscow.

Stalin would be compelled to fight for Moscow. It was the hub of railroads, mecca of world Communism, headquarters of the highly centralized government, and a great industrial center employing more than a million workers.

Moreover, an attack into the center of the Soviet Union would turn the nation's vastness—generally thought of as its greatest asset—into a liability. Once the Germans possessed Moscow's communications node, Red Army forces on either side could not coordinate their efforts. One would be cut off from aid and succor to the other, and the Germans in the central position between the two could have defeated each separately.

The German army and economy could support a drive on Moscow. Though 560 miles east of the frontier, it was connected by a paved highway and railroads.

This would have still been a direct, frontal assault against the strength of the Red Army, but the ratio of force to space was so low in Russia that German mechanized forces could always find openings for indirect local advances into the Soviet rear. At the same time the widely spaced cities at which roads and railways converged offered the Germans alternative targets. While threatening one city north and another city south, they could actually strike at a third in between. But the Russians, not knowing which objective the Germans had chosen, would have to defend all three.

Hitler understood that he could not defeat the entire Red Army all at once. But he hoped to solve the problem by committing two of his four panzer groups, under Heinz Guderian and Hermann Hoth, to Army Group Center, commanded by Fedor von Bock, with the aim of destroying Red Army forces in front of Moscow in a series of giant encirclements
—
Kesselschlachten,
or caldron battles. The Russians, to his thinking, could be eliminated in place.

Army Group Center was to attack just north of the Pripet Marshes, a huge swampy region 220 miles wide and 120 miles deep beginning some 170 miles east of Warsaw that effectively divided the front in half. Bock's armies, led by the panzers, were to advance from East Prussia and the German-Russian frontier along the Bug River to Smolensk.

Army Group North under Wilhelm von Leeb, with one panzer group under Erich Hoepner, was to drive from East Prussia through the Baltic states to Leningrad.

Gerd von Rundstedt's Army Group South, with the last panzer group under Ewald von Kleist, was to thrust south of the Pripet Marshes toward the Ukrainian capital of Kiev, 300 airline miles from the jump-off points along and below the Bug, then drive to the industrial Donetz river basin, 430 miles southeast of Kiev.

The first great encirclement was to be in Army Group Center around Bialystok, fewer than sixty miles east of the German-Soviet boundary in Poland, the other around Minsk, 180 miles farther east. The two panzer groups were then to press on to Smolensk, 200 miles beyond Minsk, and bring about a third
Kesselschlacht.
After that, Hitler planned to shift the two panzer groups north to help capture Leningrad.

Only after Leningrad was seized, according to his directive of December 18, 1940, ordering Barbarossa, the German attack on the Soviet Union in 1941, “are further offensive operations to be initiated with the objective of occupying the important center of communications and of armaments manufacture, Moscow.”

Hitler, however, showed his intention of gaining all three objectives by directing that, when the caldron battles were completed (and Leningrad presumably taken), pursuit was to proceed not only toward Moscow but also into Ukraine to seize the Donetz basin.

In summary, Hitler's original directive required massive strikes deep into the Soviet Union in three directions by three army groups, followed by a shift of half the army's armor 400 miles north to capture Leningrad, then a return of this armor to press on Moscow, while Army Group South continued to drive into Ukraine, over 700 miles from the German-Soviet frontier.

This was impossible. In the event, Hitler made the task worse because he seized an opportunistic chance to destroy a number of armies in the Ukraine around Kiev and abandoned his original strategy. Once the caldron battles were completed in Army Group Center, he sent only one panzer group north toward Leningrad, and ordered the other south to help seal the enemy into a pocket east of Kiev.

Army Group North did not have enough strength to seize Leningrad. By the time the diverted panzers got back on the road to Moscow, the rainy season had set in, then the Russian winter. As a consequence the strike for Moscow failed as well. With insufficient armor remaining in the south, the effort to seize all of Ukraine and open a path to the oil of the Caucasus also collapsed.

Hitler, by trying for too much, and then altering his priorities by sending a panzer group from the center into the Ukraine, failed everywhere. These failures meant Germany had lost the war. By December 1941, there was no hope of anything better than a negotiated peace. This Hitler refused to consider.

Hitler's plan rested on two false assumptions. The first was that he would have time enough (even without the shift of panzers to the Ukraine) to switch armor to the north then back to the center in time to win a decisive victory before the rains and snows of autumn. Distances were simply too great, Russian roads and climate too poor, and Red Army resistance too intense for such a plan to have had any hope of success. As Guderian summarized the campaign to his wife on December 10, 1941, “The enemy, the size of the country, and the foulness of the weather were all grossly underestimated.”

The second great mistaken assumption was that after destroying the Red Army in caldron battles, Stalin would be unable to create any more armies. That is, once the
Kesselschlachten
were over, the Soviet Union would collapse, and the Germans could occupy the rest of the country at their leisure and without resistance. But Hitler did not count on the resilience of Soviet leadership and the willingness of the Russian people to defend their homeland. Moreover, Hitler's ally Japan refused to attack Siberia, allowing Stalin to release a quarter of a million soldiers to rush west to fight the Germans at a crucial moment.