Hitler's Charisma (31 page)

General Erich von Manstein now argued that the only way to have a chance of defeating the Allies in France—as opposed to creating a period of impasse—was to make Army Group A the dominant offensive force. He proposed that Bock’s Army Group B invade Belgium in an attempt to convince the Allies that they were the main German attacking force,
whilst the armoured units of group A further south would travel through the forest of the Ardennes, cross the river Meuse and make a dash for the Channel coast where the river Somme meets the sea. Huge numbers of British and French soldiers would then be trapped between the two pincers of group A and group B. However, as Professor Adam Tooze says, “This is an operation of unprecedented logistical risk and gives the opponents of Germany—Britain, France, Belgium and Holland—the chance, if they’re sufficiently well organised, to mount a devastating counterattack on Germany and on the pincer moving across northern France. And for this reason the Germans fully understand that if this plan fails they’ve lost the war … The gamble bears the possibility of total victory … but also a risk of catastrophic defeat, which they’re fully conscious of.”
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Despite—or most likely because of—the immenseness of the risk, this became the plan that Hitler favoured, after Manstein had lobbied him personally about it. The idea of armoured units operating at speed had been developed by General Guderian in his book
Achtung Panzer!
published two years before, and Halder had seen in Poland how important it was for armoured units to lead the attack. So there were various hands on the development of the final draft of Plan Yellow—and happenstance played a part too when the Allies found a copy of the original, conventional plan of attack after a German plane crashed in Belgium in January 1940. As a result the Germans felt it prudent to change the nature of the forthcoming offensive.

Nonetheless, the fundamental reason why this revolutionary approach to the invasion of France was adopted was the will of Adolf Hitler. Hitler always set a vision—in this case “invade the West”—and then sought ideas of how this could be implemented in detail from others. But what he had also done was to demonstrate time and again his attraction to the all-or-nothing gamble. The occupation of the Rhineland, the
Anschluss
, the Munich crisis—all involved risking the fate of Germany. Hitler saw his ability to take risks as another sign of the greatness of his leadership and had contempt for those who chose the safe options in life. “The men of Munich,” he said in August 1939, “will not take the risk.”
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It was precisely Hitler’s near addiction to risk that so disturbed traditional officers like Ludwig Beck. However, there were others who felt that this very quality meant that Hitler would be open to new ideas.

Another feature of Hitler’s leadership that underpinned all these discussions
about the invasion of France would come much more obviously to the fore after the Germans’ triumphant victory. Hitler offered Germans not only excitement and the chance to make history, but linked this with the idea that one should act now, today, this moment. Hitler often referred to the fact that he only had one brief life in order to accomplish his aims—and he feared he would not reach old age. He was in a hurry, and he conveyed that sense of urgency to everyone around him. And this was exacerbated by his lack of belief in an afterlife. The sub-text of many of his speeches around this period is clear—you have one life, you will die and be extinguished forever whether you spend your time taking huge and exciting risks with the intention of changing the world, or working quietly in an office. You decide. A boring life or a thrilling one—both lead to an eternity of nothingness. It was obvious which road Hitler wished to travel. As he said at the end of his 23 November speech to his generals, “I have decided to live my life so that I can stand unashamed when I have to die.”

Moreover, the plan appealed to Hitler’s desire to surprise his enemy. “The factor of surprise is half the battle,”
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said Hitler later. “That’s why one cannot go on repeating an operation indefinitely, simply because it has been successful.” And Hitler had recognised as early as October 1939, long before he heard of the Manstein plan, that his opponents in the West were particularly vulnerable to the unexpected. “The Führer emphasises that we must not fall back into the tactics of linear battles of the [First] World War,” wrote General von Bock in his diary on 25 October, “that we had to force the enemy through fast, sharp attacks and swift advances of motorised and tank units to operate and act quickly, [something] which was not in the nature of both the systematic French and the ponderous Englishman.”
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It was this insight that was to prove vital in the battle to come. Subsequent wargaming of the Manstein plan at the German army headquarters at Zossen confirmed that the whole offensive turned on one single question: how soon would the Allies recognise that the main thrust of attack was not through Belgium but the Ardennes? If the Germans were not across the River Meuse in eastern France in four days then the British and French would have time to realise what was happening and divert substantial forces to stop them. It was already clear in the planning stage that the city of Sedan, which straddled the Meuse, would be crucial. Take
Sedan and be across the Meuse swiftly and there was no insuperable natural obstacle facing Army Group A all the way to the French coast at the bay of the Somme. (Here, in the context of the decision of the German leadership to embrace this radical version of Plan Yellow, history also played a part. The German armed forces existed in the shadow of the First World War and Manstein’s plan was a chance to avenge that loss—not just to defeat the French but to humiliate them.)

Ultimately, Hitler hoped, it did not matter if the Allies possessed more tanks than the Germans—as long as those tanks remained in the wrong place. This, of course, was the aspect of the gamble that was to pay off spectacularly. The Allies were brimming with over-confidence about the fight to come and this over-confidence was to prove their undoing. So arrogant was General Maurice Gamelin, the commander of the French armed forces, that he had told his senior officers back in September 1939 that if the Germans attacked in the spring of 1940 then he was certain of victory.
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Equally confident of victory was Adolf Hitler. Indeed, one of the many remarkable aspects of the planning for the attack on France was that the one constant throughout all of the variations of tactics and strategy was Hitler’s certainty that all would come well. General Halder recorded in his diary on 17 March that Hitler was “manifestly confident of success”
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—this against a background of deep anxiety from many individual German commanders. On 14 February Halder wrote that Generals Guderian and von Wietersheim “plainly show lack of confidence”
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in the operation, and on 25 February he headed his entry on a meeting with Fedor von Bock, who was to command Army Group B in the attack, with the single word, “Worries.”
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Before Plan Yellow went ahead Hitler sprang another surprise on the Allies—the Germans invaded Denmark and Norway. Hitler knew it was essential for the health of the German war machine to protect iron ore supplies from neutral Sweden, most of which reached Germany via the Norwegian port of Narvik. There had long been rumours about a possible Allied attack in Scandinavia and, as it transpired, the German action, starting on 9 April, coincided almost exactly with an attempt by the British to mine Norwegian waters.

On land the Germans triumphed in Denmark within hours and made swift gains in Norway, but at sea the
Kriegsmarine
lost more than
a dozen warships. Nonetheless, despite this success for the Royal Navy, Allied soldiers failed to defeat the Germans in Norway and the subsequent controversy about the failure of the Norwegian campaign led to the resignation of Chamberlain and the appointment of Winston Churchill as British Prime Minister on 10 May 1940—coincidentally the same day that the German invasion of France and the Low Countries began.

The Wehrmacht attacked the Allies with 112 divisions, less than 10 per cent of them armoured, and to begin with both the British and French thought that the Germans were behaving exactly as expected. The early movement of Bock’s Army Group B into neutral Belgium confirmed to General Gamelin that his assessment that the main thrust of attack would be in the north was correct. One French officer who saw him that day remembers Gamelin walking about humming with a contended expression on his face.
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It seemed logical, to the French and British, that the Germans would attack both into Belgium and Holland in order to gain air bases from which to attack Great Britain.

Allied forces advanced, as planned, into Belgium in order to engage the enemy. By 14 May, at the battles of Hannut and Breda, the French had more than held their own against the Germans. However, there were already signs that action could be expected elsewhere. By 12 May, reports of the massive advance of German Army Group A through the Ardennes forest had reached the Allies, though this was initially dismissed as a flanking manoeuvre to support the main area of conflict in Belgium. But soon it was obvious that the Germans were threatening Sedan and intended to cross the River Meuse. On 13 May, Gamelin learnt that some German units had already crossed the Meuse to the north of Sedan, via the weir at Houx. That same day the Luftwaffe launched an intense and concentrated bombardment in Sedan. And by 14 May the Germans had succeeded in crossing the Meuse at several places along the river. It was devastating news for the French. One officer witnessed the commander of the north-eastern front, General Alphonse-Joseph Georges, break down in tears as he said “there have been some failures”
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at Sedan. The next day, the Prime Minister of France, Paul Reynaud, rang Winston Churchill at 7:30 in the morning. Churchill picked up the phone by his bedside to hear Reynaud say “evidently under stress” the words, “We have been defeated … We are beaten; we have lost the battle.”
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It was an extraordinary moment in military history. Almost, as Paul-Émile
Caton put it in the title of his book about the Battle for France,
Une Guerre Perdue en 4 Jours
—“A War Lost in 4 Days.”
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And it is scarcely possible to exaggerate the effect of this swift triumph over the Allies on the collective German psyche. Erwin Rommel, who had petitioned Hitler to be allowed command of a panzer division in the attack, remarked that what had happened was “hardly conceivable.” Tanks from his 7th Panzer division, a spearhead unit of Army Group A, “had broken through and were driving deep into enemy territory. It was not just a beautiful dream. It was reality.”
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This “beautiful dream” had been made possible not only by Hitler’s insistence on the adoption of the risky Manstein plan and a catalogue of failures by the Allies, but by the use of an innovative method of command—one previously developed by the Prussian Army and which now meshed perfectly with the way Hitler operated his own leadership. The Prussian Army, as Professor Robert Citino says, developed a “certain kind of military culture” that arose out of “Prussia’s geography, traditions, and position within Europe and relative lack of resources. So this was a state that almost always tried to fight so-called ‘short and lively’ wars, a term in fact coined by Frederick the Great in the eighteenth century. ‘Short and lively’ wars which were translated into relatively rapid victories over the enemy’s main force within the first six or eight weeks of the fighting … I think this was always what set Germany apart from its neighbours, it was a state that was crammed into a relatively uncomfortable spot in Central Europe with a relatively low base of resources and certainly a smaller population than the coalition of enemies that Germany could potentially be fighting.”
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This necessity to fight “short and lively” wars in turn meant that commanders on the battlefield could never rely on tried and tested defensive tactics. As Citino says, “Frederick the Great back in the eighteenth century laid out Prussian tactical doctrine in a pithy sense: the Prussian army always attacks. He had a standing order for his cavalry forces that they must always get their charge in first and not wait to be charged by the enemy. That notion of a kind of bulldog level of aggression coupled with a rapidity of manoeuvre had been a German tradition for a good long time.”

In parallel with this “bulldog” approach to war, the German army developed a concept of
Auftragstaktik
or mission command. More so than
any of their opponents, the German army practised delegation. Battlefield commanders were given objectives to fulfil but thereafter permitted a level of independent decision-making that was unheard of in the British or French armies. Rommel’s own actions during the invasion of France perfectly exemplify the German method of making war. Units of Rommel’s 7th Panzer were amongst the first to cross the River Meuse at Houx on 12 May—much to the astonishment of the Allies, since around the hamlet of Houx the Meuse runs through a deep gorge which makes this ideal defensive territory. Soldiers of the French Ninth Army had dug in on the opposite bank ready to fight. But a series of decisions Rommel and his men made on the spot—from setting fire to several houses to create a smokescreen, to organising a rope and pulley system over the river—helped make the crossing of the Meuse a possibility. Above all, Rommel was following the Prussian doctrine of acting swiftly and with surprise. The French commanders had anticipated that they would have several days to prepare their defences, having blown up all the bridges over the Meuse. Thanks to Rommel’s speed of movement they had only hours.

Rommel, though an exceptional general, was in reality doing no more than was expected of all German battlefield commanders—even down to NCOs. As General Manstein wrote after the war, “The German method is really rooted in the German character, which—contrary to all the nonsense talked about ‘blind obedience’—has a strong streak of individuality and, possibly as part of its Germanic heritage, finds certain pleasure in taking risks.”
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