How Hitler Could Have Won World War II
Table of Contents
1 GERMANY'S OPPORTUNITY FOR VICTORY
2 THE CAMPAIGN IN THE WEST: 1940
17 KASSERINE AND THE - END IN AFRICA
List of Maps
Introduction
AROUND 400 B.C. THE GREAT CHINESE STRATEGIST SUN TZU BRUSHED IN THE characters for the most profound sentence ever written about warfare: “The way to avoid what is strong is to strike what is weak.”
Adolf Hitler knew nothing of Sun Tzu. But for the first seven years of his dictatorship of Germany, from 1933 to 1940, he avoided strength, struck at weakness, and achieved such stunning success that he was on the threshold of complete victory.
After 1940, however, Hitler abandoned a course of action that would have completed his victory. He attacked frontally into the strength of the Soviet Union, allowed Britain and the United States time to build immense military power, and was unable to prevent them from striking into Germany's weakness. The collision of the Allies and Germans brought on the most titanic clash in history. But the outcome had already been foreshadowed by Hitler's fatal mistakes in 1940 and thereafter. By 1945 Germany was shattered and Adolf Hitler dead.
Hitler was one of the most evil monsters the world has ever known. But he was also a skilled politician. His political mastery boosted him into power and allowed him to hide his wickedness behind great economic, territorial, and military advances that he gained for Germany. Hitler did not seek rational goals, however. His aims were those of a maniac. He believed he could elevate the German people into a “master race” through restriction of marriages and sexual relations only among “Aryans,” refusing to recognize that Europeans had been interbreeding for a millennium and there could be no such thing as a pure “race” of Aryans or anything else. He wanted to gain
Lebensraum,
or living space, for the German people in Russia and Ukraine, and intended to kill or starve millions of Slavs living in those lands. Beyond this Hitler wanted to kill whole categories of peopleâJews, Gypsies, persons with mental and physical disabilities, and anyone who objected to his desires.
Hitler possessed great skill in spotting and exploiting the vulnerabilities of opponents. Using these gifts, Hitler gained an unparalleled string of victories that commenced with his installation as German chancellor in January 1933 and ended in the summer of 1940, when his victory over France convinced him he was an infallible military genius. He did not see that the victory came not from his own vision, but from that of two generals, Erich von Manstein and Heinz Guderian.
Believing Britain would no longer be a major problem, Hitler turned his attention to killing Jews and other peoples he despised, and to the destruction of the Soviet Union.
From this point on, these twin drivesâwar against Soviet Russia and perpetration of the Final Solutionâconsumed most of Hitler's attention and the vast bulk of the resources and manpower of the German Reich.
This course led straight to his destruction. It did not have to be. Hitler's strategy through mid-1940 was almost flawless. He isolated and absorbed state after state in Europe, gained the Soviet Union as a willing ally, destroyed France's military power, threw the British off the Continent, and was left with only weak and vulnerable obstacles to an empire covering most of Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. This empire not only would have been unassailable from the outside, but would have put him into the position, in time, to conquer the world.
This did not happen. Hitler's paranoias overwhelmed his political sense. He abandoned the successful indirect strategy of attacking weakness, which he had followed up to the summer of 1940, and tried to grab
Lebensraum
directly and by main strength. He was unable to see that he could achieve these goals far more easily and with absolute certainty by in-directionâby striking not what was strong but what was weak.
Even after Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, he might have gained a partial victory if he had not possessed two more lethal defectsâ insistence on offensive solutions to military problems when his strength was inadequate, and attempting to keep all the territory he had seized when retreat would have preserved his forces. These failings led to disastrous offensivesâStalingrad, Tunisia, Kursk, the Bulgeâand “no retreat” orders that destroyed huge portions of his army.
The way to victory was not through a frontal attack on the Soviet Union but an indirect approach through North Africa. This route was so obvious that all the British leaders saw it, as did a number of the German leaders, including Alfred Jodl, chief of operations of the armed forces; Erich Raeder, commander of the German Navy, and Erwin Rommel, destined to gain fame in North Africa as the Desert Fox.
After the destruction of France's military power in 1940, Britain was left with only a single armored division to protect Egypt and the Suez Canal. Germany had twenty armored divisions, none being used. If the Axisâ Germany and its ally Italyâhad used only four of these divisions to seize the Suez Canal, the British Royal Navy would have been compelled to abandon the Mediterranean Sea, turning it into an Axis lake. French North AfricaâMorocco, Algeria, and Tunisiaâcould have been occupied, and German forces could have seized Dakar in Senegal on the west coast of Africa, from which submarines and aircraft could have dominated the main South Atlantic sea routes.
With no hope of aid, Yugoslavia and Greece would have been forced to come to terms. Since Hitler gained the support of Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria, Germany would have achieved control of all southeastern Europe without committing a single German soldier.
Once the Suez Canal was taken, the way would have been open to German armored columns to overrun Palestine, Transjordan, the Arabian peninsula, Syria, Iraq, and Iran. This would have given Germany unlimited supplies of the single commodity it needed most: oil.
As important as oil was for the conduct of modern war, the greatest advantages of German occupation of the Arab lands and Iran would have been to isolate Turkey, threaten British control of India, and place German tanks and guns within striking distance of Soviet oil fields in the Caucasus and along the shores of the Caspian Sea. Turkey would have been forced to become an ally or grant transit rights to German forces, Britain would have had to exert all its strength to protect India, and the Soviet Union would have gone to any lengths to preserve peace with Germany because of its perilous position.
Germany need not have launched a U-boat or air war against British shipping and cities, because British participation in the war would have become increasingly irrelevant. Britain could never have built enough military power to invade the Continent alone.
Unless the strength of the Soviet Union were added, the United States could not have projected sufficient military force across the Atlantic Ocean, even over a period of years, to reconquer Europe by amphibious invasion in the face of an untouched German war machine. Since the United States was increasingly preoccupied with the threat of Japan, it almost certainly would not have challenged Germany.
Thus, Germany would have been left with a virtually invincible empire and the leisure to develop defenses and resources that, in time, would permit it to match the strength of the United States. Though Britain might have refused to make peace, a de facto cease-fire would have ensued. The United States would have concentrated on defense of the Western Hemisphere and the Pacific. Even if the United States had proceeded with development of the atomic bomb, it would have hesitated to unleash it against Germany.
This book is about the opportunities Hitler possessed that might have led to victory. But such was not to be, because of his inability to see the indirect way to victory, and his fixation on frontal assault of the Soviet Union.
1 GERMANY'S OPPORTUNITY FOR VICTORY
EARLY ON THE MORNING OF MAY 10, 1940, THE GREATEST CONCENTRATION OF armor in the history of warfare burst across the eastern frontiers of Belgium and Luxembourg. In four days, 1,800 tanks in seven panzer, or armored, divisions broke through the French main line of resistance on the Meuse River. Seven days later they reached the English Channel 160 miles away and cut off the most powerful and mobile of the French and British forces, who were now in Belgium. Those Allied soldiers who did not surrender were forced to evacuate by sea at Dunkirk.
A month later France capitulated, and the British were thrown onto their islands with few weapons and only twenty-one miles of the Channel to keep them from being conquered as well.
Germany had achieved the most spectacular, rapid, and overwhelming military victory in the twentieth century. It dominated Europe from the North Cape of Norway to the Mediterranean Sea and from Poland to the Atlantic. Victory lay within the grasp of the German dictator, Adolf Hitler.
Yet at this moment of his greatest successâwith only feeble barriers remaining before he could create a virtually invincible empire embracing Europe, North Africa, and the Middle EastâHitler turned away and embarked on a course that led to the destruction of the “Thousand-year Reich” in only five years.
A number of high-command German officers saw the opportunities open in 1940 and urged Hitler to seize them. Hitler considered them, but in the end turned them down. After the victory over France, Hitler focused his attention on destruction of the Soviet Union and carrying forward his schemes to destroy the Jews and other peoples he hated.
Hitler came to this decision by an incredibly convoluted and illogical process. Since Britain refused to sign a peace treaty, and since invading Britain would be extremely hazardous given the strength of the Royal Navy and the weakness of the German navy, Hitler concluded that the only way to overcome Britain would be to destroy the Soviet Union. Hitler decided that Russia was Britain's chief remaining hope for assistance, its “continental dagger,” and once the Soviet Union was destroyed, the British would see reason and give in.
This, of course, was entirely wrong. The British were relying on the United States, not Russia, for their salvation. “I shall drag the United States in,” British Prime Minister Winston Churchill told his son after France fell. And the American president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, was doing everything he could to help. But Roosevelt had to play a cagey game. A majority of the American electorate was deathly afraid of getting into another war in Europe, and wanted to isolate the country behind its two oceans. Only a minority recognized the terrible danger of Adolf Hitler and realized the United States would have to enter the war if Nazi Germany was to be defeated.
Perhaps Hitler was engaging in wishful thinking in turning toward the Soviet Union, concocting a theory of the close connection of Britain to Russia to justify what he wanted to do anyway. He hated Communism, feared the growth of a powerful industrial state that was proceeding apace under Joseph Stalin, and wanted to seize a large segment of Russia and Ukraine. Besides, he could
reach
the Soviet Union, while he couldn't reach Britain.
Actually, Hitler did
not
want to destroy Britain, and this played a role in his decision to turn eastward. He admired the British Empire and wanted to reach an understanding with it. However, Hitler's conditions were that Britain would keep its empire while Germany would have a free hand on the Continent. Britain could never accept such a settlement, however, because it could not survive as an independent power if Germany controlled the European continent.
Hitler would listen to no criticism. His senior advisers knew the war in the west had been only half-won, and few thought it could be finished on the plains of Russia in the east. The Soviet Union was so vast that a war there could expand into limitless spaceâplacing potentially impossible demands on the German war machine. A war against Russia would be nothing like the war in the west, where distances were limited, populations concentrated, objectives close, and the Atlantic Ocean a finite boundary.
On the advice of General Erich von Manstein, Hitler had changed the
Schwerpunktâ
or main weightâof the attack from northern Belgium to the Ardennes, when the top German generals had advised otherwise. This decision had given Germany its greatest victory in history. Since the senior military leadership had been wrong, and he (and Manstein) right, Hitler concluded that he could rely on his “intuition.” This intuition told him to downgrade the war against Britain and carry out the two desires that had obsessed him from the early 1920sâdestroying the Soviet Union and the Jews of Europe.
Hitler's belief in
Lebensraum
was based on his idea that the German people needed more land to produce more food. Classical economics had long since proved that industrial states could
buy
grains and other foods for their people and did not need additional farmland. But Hitler paid no attention. Besides, the idea of more land resonated with the German people. Their parents and grandparents had sought expansion into central and eastern Europe in the early years of the century; this was one of the underlying causes for World War I, which Germany had lost. In
Mein
Kampf
Hitler wrote that Germany was not a world power in 1914â1918 because it could not feed its people, and would not become a world power until it was able to do so.
Hitler's compulsion to destroy the Jews and other categories of people rested on no logical basis, only on the most malignant of prejudices. He made the Jews scapegoats for every problem that Germany facedâeven the rise of the Soviet Union, whose revolution he falsely claimed had been carried out and sustained by Jews.
Hitler's political savvy warned him to avoid getting openly involved in this pogrom of hate and murder, however, and he left its operation mostly to underlings, especially Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich of the
Schutzstaffel
or SS.
In the butchery that followed, Hitler and his willing German executioners killed 6 million Jews in what is now called the Holocaust, perhaps a million Poles and Gypsies, thousands of persons who had mental or physical disabilities or who objected to his ideas, and 7.7 million Soviet civilians. This does not count the 9.1 million Allied personnel killed in battle (7.5 million Soviets), and 5 million Soviet soldiers who died in prisoner-of-war camps or were murdered by their captors.
Aside from their horror, the killings of civilians and prisoners of war deprived Germany of the labor and mental contributions of potentially valuable workers and took immense amounts of transportation, resources, personnel, and energy badly needed for the war effort.
It is easy enough to assert that Hitler was mad. He most certainly was. His fixation on these two monstrous, irrational goals proves it. But Hitler also was in part a sensible person, possessed of great intelligence and superior political skills. His fantastic success up to mid-1940 demonstrates this.
Many of the men who served Hitler believed they might tap the sane part of Hitler's mind and deflect the mad part, and in this way lead Germany to a successful outcome of the war. The events in Hitler's headquarters from mid-1940 onward are a rolling drama of this attempt. While a number of far-sighted officers saw the way to succeed and tried to convince him, toadies catered to Hitler's prejudices. Sometimes Hitler listened to one, sometimes to the other, and sometimes to no one but himself.
Until the summer of 1940, Hitler had run up a string of victories that were unprecedented in world history. He achieved most of them by the application of his remarkable political skills, and without the use of force.
Over the course of six years, beginning with his assumption of the chancellorship of Germany on January 30, 1933, Hitler got himself elected dictator of Germany less than two months later and put the state wholly under the Nazi party which he led; withdrew Germany from the League of Nations in October 1933; commenced massive secret rebuilding of German military power in 1934; introduced conscription in violation of the Versailles treaty in 1935; reoccupied the Rhineland in 1936, a German border region demilitarized under terms of the Versailles treaty; declared the treaty dead in 1937; seized the sovereign state of Austria and joined it to Germany on March 10, 1938; bullied the leaders of Britain and France into accepting his dismemberment of Czechoslovakia at the Munich conference, September 29â30, 1938, and occupied the remaining rump of the stateâthe Czech portions of Bohemia and Moraviaâon March 15, 1939.
It was this last act of treachery that finally showed Neville Chamberlain, British prime minister, and Edouard Daladier, the French premier, that their policy of “appeasement” of Hitler was utterly misguided and that Hitler was a congenital liar. At Munich, Hitler had solemnly sworn that his final territorial aspiration in Europe was annexation of the Sudetenland, the German-speaking part of Czechoslovakia, and that he would assure the independence of the remainder of the state.
Britain and France now guaranteed the independence of Poland, the next victim on Hitler's list. It was a hopeless gesture, since neither country could help Poland. That country's fate was sealed on August 23, 1939, when the Soviet Union signed a nonaggression pact with Germanyâ inspired not by confidence in the peaceful intentions of Hitler but by desperation. Britain and France, who feared Communism, had refused to work with the Soviet Union to block Hitler during the early years when he could have been stopped with relative ease.
Bolstered by secret provisions of the Berlin-Moscow pact, which divided eastern Europe into German and Soviet spheres of influence, Hitler launched his armies against Poland on September 1, 1939. Poland had no chance whatsoever, being half-surrounded by German or German-held territory. The Polish army was enveloped from the first day. In addition, German General Heinz Guderian had developed a spectacular panzer arm, and German tanks cut through and rolled up Polish defenses with ease and unimagined speed in the first application of
Blitzkrieg,
or “lightning war.” Within three weeks Poland was defeatedâand the Poles found their land partitioned between the Germans in the west and the Soviets in the east.
Britain and France declared war on Germany on September 3, 1939. The British took some action at sea, blockading German ports and pursuing German surface raiders, but were slow to put troops on the Continent, while France did virtually nothing on the Franco-German frontier. The fall and winter of 1939â1940 became known in the British Empire and the United States as the “phony war,” in France as the
drôle de
guerre,
and in Germany as the
Sitzkrieg.
Meanwhile, the Soviet Union took advantage of its pact with Germany to demand from Finland large cessions of territory as a buffer around the city of Leningrad (St. Petersburg) and elsewhere. The Finns refused and Soviet troops invaded on November 30, 1939. The Finns performed brilliantly in the “winter war,” but Soviet power was too great. Russians breached the main Finnish defensive line on February 11, 1940, and Finland capitulated on March 12, ceding the land Russia wanted.
The AlliesâBritain and Franceâsaw a chance to damage the German war economy by mining the territorial waters of Norway to prevent shipment of iron ore from northern Sweden during the winter through the Norwegian port of Narvik. This ore was vital to the German war effort, but could not be moved by way of the Baltic Sea in winter because the Gulf of Bothnia froze over. At the same time Hitler coveted the deep fjords of Norway as protected places to launch German surface ships, aircraft, and submarines against British supply lines. Both sides began plans early in 1940 to occupy Norway.
Hitler struck first, seizing Denmark in a swift coup de main and occupying key ports of Norway on April 9, 1940. The Allies contested the occupation of Norway and scored some successes, especially at sea. But German efforts were more ordered and decisive, and Allied forces soon withdrew, especially as the focal point of the war shifted to the Low Countries of Belgium, Holland, and Luxembourg and to France where Hitler launched his campaign in the west on May 10, 1940.
The Polish campaign should have tipped off the Allies to new uses for two elements in the German arsenal. But it did not, and they hit the Allied forces in the west like a thunderbolt. The elements were the airplane and the tank.
German generals had discovered something that the leaders of other armies had not figured outâthat airplanes and tanks were not weapons but kinds of
vehicles.
Vehicles could carry armor, guns, or people, making possible an entirely new military system built around them. Armies could consist of troops carried by airplanes or dropped from them, or of self-propelled forces containing tanks, motorized artillery, and motorized infantry. Air forces could include tactical aircraft, such as dive-bombers, that functioned as aerial field artillery, or strategic aircraft with long-range and heavy bomb-carrying capacity that could bomb the enemy homeland.
