Winds of War (41 page)

Early in this strange twilight period, the Führer delivered his “outstretched hand” peace speech to the Reichstag. Like most of his political moves, it was cleverly conceived. Had the Allies swallowed it, we might have achieved surprise in the west with a November attack, which Hitler had ordered when Warsaw fell, and which we were feverishly planning. But by now the Western statesmen had developed a certain wariness toward our Führer, and their response was disappointing. In the event this did not matter. A combination of bad weather and insoluble supply problems forced one postponement after another on the impatient Führer. The intent to attack France was never at issue, but the date and the strategy kept changing. In all, the attack day was postponed twenty-nine times. Meanwhile preparations went forward at an ever-mounting tempo.

Our staff’s favorite comic reading as we worked on
Fall Gelb
– “Case Yellow,” the attack on France – came to be the long, learned articles in French newspapers and military journals, proving that we were about to cave in under economic pressure. In point of fact, for the first time our economy was really getting moving. Life in Paris, we gathered, was gayer and more relaxed than before the war. The British Prime Minister Chamberlain epitomized the Western frame of mind by stating, “Hitler has missed the bus.” In the enforced half-year delay German industrial war production began to rise and – despite the never-ending confusion and interference in the Führer’s headquarters – a new and excellent strategy for the assault on France was at last hammered out.

Distraction in Finland

The sitzkrieg lull was temporarily enlivened when the Soviet Union attacked Finland.

Stalin’s unvarying policy after signing the Ribbentrop pact was to seize whatever territory he could, while we were at war with the democracies, to strengthen his position for an eventual showdown with us. Hitler had already given him huge concessions in the Baltic states and in Poland, to buy a free hand against the West. But like all Russian rulers, Czarist or Bolshevik, Stalin had a big appetite. This was his chance to take over the Karelian Isthmus and dominate the Gulf of Finland. When his emissaries failed to get these concessions from the proud Finns by threats, Stalin set out to take them by force. The rights of Finland were, as a matter of course, to be trampled upon.

But to the world’s surprise, the Russian dictator got in trouble, for the attack went badly. The vaunted Red Army covered itself with disgrace, revealing itself in Finland as an ill-equipped, ill-trained, miserably led rabble, unable to crush a small well-drilled foe. Whether this was due to Stalin’s purges of his officer force in the late thirties, or to the traditional Russian inefficiency added to the depressant effect of Bolshevism, or to the use of inferior troops, remained unclear. But from November 1939 to March 1940, Finland did bravely fight off the Slav horde. Nor did the Russians ever really defeat them militarily. In the classic manner of Russian combat, the handful of Finnish defenders was finally drowned in a rain of artillery shells and a bath of Slav blood. Thus Stalin’s goal was achieved, at ruthless cost, of shaping up the Leningrad front by pushing back our Finnish friends on the Karelian Isthmus. This move, it must be confessed, probably saved Leningrad in 1941.

After the Finnish victory during Christmas – the classic battle of Suomussalmi in which nearly thirty thousand Russians were killed or frozen to death, at a cost of about nine hundred Finnish dead – it was impossible to regard the Soviet army as a competent modern adversary. Much later, Hermann Göring was to call the Finnish campaign “the greatest camouflage action in history,” implying that the Russians in Finland had pretended to be weak in order to mask their potential. This was just an absurd excuse for the failures of his Luftwaffe in the east. In point of fact, Stalin’s Russia in 1939 was militarily feeble. What happened between that time and our final debacle on the eastern front at Russian hands is the subject of a later section, but their performance in Finland certainly misled us in our planning.

Sitzkrieg Ends: Norway

Much vociferous propaganda went on in the Western democracies about the attack on Finland, and about sending the Finns military aid. In the end they did nothing. However, the opening of the Finnish front did force Hitler to face up to a genuine threat in the north: the British plot to seize Norway. Of this we had hard intelligence. Unlike many of the “plots” and “conspiracies” of which our German armed forces were accused at the Nuremberg trials, this British plot certainly existed. Winston Churchill openly describes it in his memoirs. He acknowledges that the British invasion was laid on for a date ahead of ours, and then put off, so that we beat the British into Norway by the merest luck, by a matter of days.

The Russo-Finnish war made the problem of Norway acute, because England and France could use “aid to Finland” as a perfect pretext for landing in Norway and driving across Scandinavia. This would have been disastrous for us. The North Sea, bracketed by British bases on both sides, would have been closed to our U-boats, choking off our main thrust at sea. Even more important, the winter route for ships bringing us Swedish iron ore lay along the Norwegian coast. Deprived of that iron ore, we could not have gone on fighting for long. When the High Command convinced Hitler of these risks, he issued the order for “Weser Exercise,” the occupation of Norway, and postponed Case Yellow once again.

It is a sad commentary that Admiral Raeder, at the Nuremberg trials, was convicted of “a plot to occupy neutral Norway,” when the British who sat in judgment had plotted the same thing themselves. Such paradoxes have enabled me to bear with honor my own experience at Nuremberg, and to regard it as not a disgrace at all, but rather a political consequence of defeat. Had the war gong the other way, and had we hanged Churchill for plotting to occupy Norway, what would the world have said? Yet what is sauce for the goose should be sauce for the gander.

Our occupation of Norway, a surprise overwater move virtually under the guns of a highly superior British fleet, was a great success; not, however, because of Hitler’s leadership, but in spite of it. We took heavy losses at sea, especially of destroyers that we sorely missed when the invasion of England was later planned. But the price was small compared to the gain. We forestalled the British, opened up a much wider coastline to counter the blockade, and secured the Swedish iron ore supply for the rest of the war.

Mistakes in Norway

Hitler’s amateurishness showed up badly in Norway. It cropped up again and again in every campaign, tending only to get grosser as time went on.

The mark of the amateur in any field is to lose one’s head when the going gets hard. What marks the professional in his competence in an emergency, and almost the whole art of the soldier is to make sound judgments in the fog of war. Hitler’s propensity to lose his head took two forms: calling a panicky halt to operations when they were gathering momentum, and changing the objective in mid-campaign. Both these failings appeared in Weser Exercise. I give details in my Norway operational analysis, of his hysterical insistence day after day that we abandon Narvik, the real key to the position; his wild sudden scheme to capture the port of Trondheim with the luxury liner
Bremen
, and so forth. Why then was the occupation of Scandinavia a success? Simply because General Falkenhorst, once in Norway, ignored the Führer’s interference, and did a fine professional job with good troops and a sound plan.

This interference from above, incidentally, was to haunt operations to the end. Adolf Hitler had used all his political shrewdness over many years to gain control of the armed forces, not stopping at strong-arm methods. There is no question that this man’s lust for power was insatiable, and it is certainly regrettable that the German people did not understand his true nature until it was too late. The background of this usurpation will be sketched here, as it significantly affected the whole course of the six-year war.

How Hitler Usurped Control of the Army

In 1938, he and his Nazi minions did not scruple to frame grave charges of sexual misconduct against revered generals of the top command. Also, they took advantage of a few actual unfortunate lapses of this nature; the details need not be raked over in this account. Suffice it that the Nazis managed to topple the professional leadership in a bold underhanded coup based on such accusation. Hitler with sudden stunning arrogance then assumed supreme command himself! And he exacted an oath of loyalty to himself throughout the Wehrmacht, from foot soldier to general. In this act he showed his knowledge of the German character, which is the soul of honor, and takes such an oath as binding to the death.

Our staff, muted and disorganized by the disgusting revelations, and pseudo-revelations about our honored leaders, offered no coherent resistance to this usurpation. So the strict independence of the German army from German politics, which for generations had kept the Wehrmacht a strong stabilizing force in the Fatherland, had come to an end; and the drive wheel of the world’s strongest military machine was grasped by an Austrian street agitator.

In itself this was not a catastrophic turn. Hitler was far from a military ignoramus. He had had four years in the field as a foot soldier, and there are worse ways to learn war. He was a voracious reader of history and of military writings. His memory for technical facts was unusual. Above all, he did have the ability to get to the root of a large problem. He had almost a woman’s intuition for the nub of a matter. This is a fine leadership trait in war, always providing that the politician listens to the soldiers for the execution of his ideas. The combination of a bold political adventurer, a Charles XII personality risen from the streets to weld Germany into a solid driving force, and our General Staff, the world’s best military leadership, might well have brought us ultimate success.

But Hitler was incapable of listening to anybody. This undid him and ruined Germany. Grand strategy and incredibly petty detail were equally his preoccupations. The overruling axiom of our war effort was that Hitler gave the orders. In a brutal speech to our staff in November 1939, prompted by our efforts to discourage a premature attack on France, he warned us that he would ruthlessly crush any of us who opposed his will. Like so many of his other threats, he made this one good. By the end of the war most of our staff had been dismissed in disgrace. Many had been shot. All of us would have been shot sooner or later, had he not lost his nerve and shot himself first.

Thus it happened that the strength of the great German people, and the valor of the peerless German soldier, became passive tools in Hitler’s amateur hands.

Hitler and Churchill: A Comparison

Winston Churchill, in a revealing passage of his memoirs on the functioning of his chiefs of staff, expresses his envy of Hitler, who could get his decisions acted upon without submitting them to the discouragement and pulling apart of hide-bound professional soldiers. In fact, this was what saved England and won the war.

Churchill was exactly the kind of brilliant amateur meddler in military affairs that Hitler was. Both rose to power from the depths of political rejection. Both relied chiefly on oratory to sway the multitude. Both somehow expressed the spirit of their peoples, and so won loyalty that outlasted any number of mistakes, defeats, and disasters. Both thought in grandiose terms, knew little about economic and logistical realities, and cared less. Both were iron men in defeat. Above all, both men had overwhelming personalities that could silence rational opposition while they talked. Of this strange phenomenon, I had ample and bitter experience with Hitler. The crucial difference was that in the end Churchill had to listen to the professionals, whereas the German people had committed itself to the fatal
Führerprinzip
.

Had Churchill possessed the power Adolf Hitler managed to arrogate to himself, the Allied armies would have bled to death in 1944, invading the “soft underbelly of the Axis,” as Churchill called the fearful mountains and water obstacles of the Balkan peninsula. There we would have slaughtered them. The Italian campaign proved that. Only on the flat plains of Normandy did the Ford-production style of American warfare, using immense masses of inferior, cheaply made machinery, have a chance of working. The Balkans would have been a colossal Thermopylae, won by the defenders. It would have been a Churchill defeat compared to which Gallipoli would have been a schoolboy picnic.

With a Führer’s authority, Churchill would also have frittered away the Allied landing craft, always a critical supply problem, in witless attempts to recapture the Greek islands and to storm Rhodes. In 1944 he nagged Eisenhower and Roosevelt to commit these wild follies until they both stopped talking to him.

Churchill was a Hitler restrained by democracy. If the German nation ever rises again, let it remember the different ends of these two men. I am not arguing for the goose gabble of parliamentarians. By conviction I have always been a conservative monarchist. But whatever the civilian structure, let our people hereafter entrust military affairs to its trained generals, and insist that politicians keep hands off the war machine.

____________

TRANSLATOR’S NOTE
: This very jarring and distorted comparison of Hitler and Churchill omits the crucial difference, of course. By the common verdict of historians, even most German ones, Hitler was a ruthless adventurer bent on conquest and plunder, while Churchill was a great defender of human liberty, dignity, and law. It is true that Churchill tended to interfere in military matters. Politicians find that temptation hard to resist.