The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (151 page)

“T
HE FINAL GERMAN VICTORY
over England is now only a question of time,” General Jodl, Chief of Operations at OKW, wrote on June 30, 1940. “Enemy offensive operations on a large scale are no longer possible.”

Hitler’s favorite strategist was in a confident and complacent mood. France had capitulated the week before, leaving Britain alone and apparently helpless. On June 15 Hitler had informed the generals that he wanted the Army partially demobilized—from 160 to 120 divisions. “The assumption behind this,” Halder noted in his diary that day, “is that the task of the Army is fulfilled. The Air Force and Navy will be given the mission of carrying on alone the war against England.”

In truth, the Army showed little interest in it. Nor was the Fuehrer himself much concerned. On June 17 Colonel Walter Warlimont, Jodl’s deputy, informed the Navy that “with regard to the landing in Britain, the Fuehrer … has not up to now expressed such an intention … Therefore, even at this time, no preparatory work of any kind [has] been carried out in OKW.”
¹
Four days later, on June 21, at the very moment Hitler was entering the armistice car at Compiègne to humble the French, the Navy was informed that the “
Army General Staff
is not concerning itself with the question of England. Considers execution impossible. Does not know how operation is to be conducted from southern area … General Staff rejects the operation.”
²

None of the gifted planners in any of the three German armed services knew how Britain was to be invaded, though it was the Navy, not unnaturally, which had first given the matter some thought. As far back as November 15, 1939, when Hitler was trying vainly to buck up his generals to launch an attack in the West, Raeder instructed the
Naval War Staff
to examine “the possibility of invading England, a possibility arising if certain conditions are fulfilled by the further course of the war.”
³
It was the first time in history that any German military staff had been asked even to consider such an action. It seems likely that Raeder took this step
largely because he wanted to anticipate any sudden aberration of his unpredictable Leader. There is no record that Hitler was consulted or knew anything about it. The furthest his thoughts went at this time was to get airfields and naval bases in Holland, Belgium and France for the tightening of the blockade against the British Isles.

By December 1939, the Army and Luftwaffe high commands were also giving some thought to the problem of invading Britain. Rather nebulous ideas of the three services were exchanged, but they did not get very far. In January 1940, the Navy and Air Force rejected an Army plan as unrealistic. To the Navy it did not take into account British naval power; to the Luftwaffe it underestimated the R.A.F. “In conclusion,” remarked the Luftwaffe General Staff in a communication to OKH, “a combined operation with a landing in England as its object must be rejected.”
⁴
Later, as we shall see, Goering and his aides were to take a quite contrary view.

The first mention in the German records that Hitler was even facing the possibility of invading Britain was on May 21, the day after the armored forces drove through to the sea at
Abbeville
. Raeder discussed “in private” with the Fuehrer “the possibility of a later landing in England.” The source of this information is Admiral Raeder,
⁵
whose Navy was not sharing in the glory of the astounding victories of the Army and Air Force in the West and who, understandably, was seeking means of bringing his service back into the picture. But Hitler’s thoughts were on the battle of encirclement to the north and on the Somme front then forming to the south. He did not trouble his generals with matters beyond these two immediate tasks.

The naval officers, however, with little else to do, continued to study the problem of invasion, and by May 27 Rear Admiral Kurt Fricke, Chief of the Naval War Staff Operations Division, came up with a fresh plan entitled
Studie England.
Preliminary work was also begun on rounding up shipping and developing landing craft, the latter of which the Germany Navy was entirely bereft. In this connection Dr. Gottfried Feder, the economic crank who had helped Hitler draft the party program in the early Munich days and who was now a State Secretary in the Ministry of Economics, where his crackpot ideas were given short shrift, produced plans for what he called a “war crocodile.” This was a sort of self-propelled barge made of concrete which could carry a company of two hundred men with full equipment or several tanks or pieces of artillery, roll up on any beach and provide cover for the disembarking troops and vehicles. It was taken quite seriously by the Naval Command and even by Halder, who mentioned it in his diary, and was discussed at length by Hitler and Raeder on June 20. But nothing came of it in the end.

To the admirals nothing seemed to be coming of an invasion of the British Isles as June approached its end. Following his appearance at Compiègne on June 21, Hitler went off with some old cronies to do the
sights of
Paris
briefly
*
and then to visit the battlefields, not of this war but of the first war, where he had served as a dispatch runner. With him was his tough top sergeant of those days,
Max Amann
, now a millionaire Nazi publisher. The future course of the war—specifically, how to continue the fight against Britain—seemed the least of his concerns, or perhaps it was merely that he believed that this little matter was already settled, since the British would now come to “reason” and make peace.

Hitler did not return to his new headquarters,
Tannenberg
, west of Freudenstadt in the Black Forest, until the twenty-ninth of June. The next day, coming down to earth, he mulled over Jodl’s paper on what to do next. It was entitled “The Continuation of the War against England.”
⁶
Though Jodl was second only to
Keitel
at OKW in his fanatical belief in the Fuehrer’s genius, he was, when left alone, usually a prudent strategist. But now he shared the general view at Supreme Headquarters that the war was won and almost over. If Britain didn’t realize it, a little more force would have to be supplied to remind her. For the “siege” of England, his memorandum proposed three steps: intensification of the German air and sea war against British shipping, storage depots, factories and the R.A.F.; “terror attacks against the centers of population”; “a landing of troops with the objective of occupying England.”

Jodl recognized that “the fight against the British Air Force must have top priority.” But, on the whole, he thought this as well as other aspects of the assault could be carried out with little trouble.

Together with propaganda and periodic terror attacks, announced as reprisals, this increasing weakening of the basis of food supply
will paralyze and finally break the will of the people to resist, and thereby force its government to capitulate.
†

   As for a landing, it could

However, thought Jodl, all this might not be necessary.

This was what Hitler thought too and he immediately set to work on his peace speech for the Reichstag. In the meantime, as we have seen, he ordered (July 2) some preliminary planning for a landing and on July 16, when no word of “reason” had come from London, issued Directive No. 16 for Sea Lion. At last, after more than six weeks of hesitation, it was decided to invade Britain, “if necessary.” This, as Hitler and his generals belatedly began to realize, would have to be a major military operation, not without its risks and depending for success on whether the Luftwaffe and the Navy could prepare the way for the troops against a far superior
British Navy
and a by no means negligible enemy Air Force.

Was Sea Lion a serious plan? And was it seriously intended that it should be carried out?

To this day many have doubted it and they have been reinforced in their opinions by the chorus from the German generals after the war. Rundstedt, who was in command of the invasion, told Allied investigators in 1945:

Blumentritt
, Rundstedt’s chief of operations, expressed similar views to Liddell Hart after the war, claiming that “among ourselves we talked of it [Sea Lion] as a bluff.”
⁸

I myself spent a few days at the middle of August on the Channel, snooping about from
Antwerp
to
Boulogne
in search of the invasion army. On August 15, at
Calais
and at
Cap Gris-Nez
, we saw swarms of German bombers and fighters heading over the Channel toward England on what turned out to be the first massive air assault. And while it was evident that the Luftwaffe was going all out, the lack of shipping and especially of invasion barges in the ports and in the canals and rivers behind them left me with the impression that the Germans
were
bluffing. They simply did not have the means, so far as I could see, of getting their troops across the Channel.

But one reporter can see very little of a war and we know now that the
Germans did not begin to assemble the invasion fleet until September 1. As for the generals, anyone who read their interrogations or listened to them on cross-examination at the Nuremberg trials learned to take their postwar testimony with more than a grain of salt.
*
The trickiness of man’s memory is always considerable and the German generals were no exception to this rule. Also they had many axes to grind, one of the foremost being to discredit Hitler’s military leadership. Indeed, their principal theme, expounded at dreary length in their memoirs and in their interrogations and trial testimony, was that if they had been left to make the decisions Hitler never would have led the Third Reich to defeat.

Unfortunately for them, but fortunately for posterity and the truth, the mountainous secret German military files leave no doubt that Hitler’s plan to invade Britain in the early fall of 1940 was deadly serious and that, though given to many hesitations, the Nazi dictator seriously intended to carry it out if there were any reasonable chance of success. Its ultimate fate was settled not by any lack of determination or effort but by the fortunes of war, which now, for the first time, began to turn against him.

   On July 17, the day after Directive No. 16 was issued to prepare the invasion and two days before the Fuehrer’s “peace” speech in the Reichstag, the Army High Command (OKH) allocated the forces for Sea Lion and ordered thirteen picked divisions to the jumping-off places on the Channel coast for the first wave of the invasion. On the same day the Army Command completed its detailed plan for a landing on a broad front on the south coast of England.

The main thrust here, as in the Battle of France, would be carried out by Field Marshal von Rundstedt (as he would be titled on July 19) as commander of Army Group A. Six infantry divisions of General Ernst
Busch
’s
Sixteenth
Army were to embark from the
Pas de Calais
and hit the beaches between
Ramsgate
and Bexhill. Four divisions of General Adolf Strauss’s
Ninth
Army would cross the Channel from the area of
Le Havre
and land between
Brighton
and the Isle of Wight. Farther to the west three divisions of Field Marshal von Reichenau’s
Sixth
Army (from Field Marshal von
Bock
’s Army Group B), taking off from the
Cherbourg
peninsula, would be put ashore in
Lyme Bay
, between Weymouth and Lyme Regis. Altogether 90,000 men would form the first wave; by the third day the High Command planned on putting ashore a total of 260,000 men. Airborne forces would help out after being dropped at Lyme Bay and other areas. An armored force of no less than six panzer divisions, reinforced by three motorized divisions, would follow in the second wave and in a few days it was planned to have ashore a total of thirty-nine divisions plus two airborne divisions.

Their task was as follows. After the bridgeheads had been secured, the
divisions of Army Group A in the southeast would push forward to the first objective, a line running between Gravesend and Southampton. Reichenau’s
Sixth
Army would advance north to
Bristol
, cutting off Devon and Cornwall. The second objective would be a line between
Maldon
on the east coast north of the Thames estuary to the
Severn River
, blocking off
Wales
. “Heavy battles with strong British forces” were expected to develop at about the time the Germans reached their first objective. But they would be quickly won, London surrounded, and the drive northward resumed.
⁹
Brauchitsch told Raeder on July 17 that the whole operation would be finished in a month and would be relatively easy.
*
¹⁰