To Lose a Battle (25 page)

Though shaken, Brauchitsch rashly continued. In Poland, he said, the German assault troops had not matched up to the infantry of 1914; there were incidents where discipline had failed, which led one to question whether the troops would be up to the stresses of a campaign in the West. At this, Hitler lost all self-control. Brauchitsch was heaping ‘monstrous reproaches’ upon
his
Army. Where had there been acts of indiscipline? Hitler demanded ‘concrete examples’. He then vented his rage upon Brauchitsch and the Army commanders; they had never been loyal to him, and the ‘spirit of Zossen’
⁵
had become synonymous with defeatism. Rudely, Hitler dismissed Brauchitsch, and dictated a note sacking him – which he later destroyed. Brauchitsch tottered to his car, arriving back at Zossen in a state of total incoherence. In fact, he never substantiated his charges of ‘indiscipline’, and Hitler never forgave him for the slurs he had cast upon his new young Army; the waning influence of the O.K.H. in Nazi war councils had receded another notch. Quite unaffected by the memorandum Brauchitsch had delivered, Hitler ordered Keitel to proceed with troop movements for an attack on the 12th, as planned. But two days later, bad weather forced Hitler to delay the attack. It was the first of twenty-nine such postponements. On 9 November an enraged Hitler once again had to call off operations, this time until 19 November.

Brauchitsch’s interview of 5 November represents a high point in the O.K.H.’s opposition to Hitler. Well before the war began, Hitler had already shorn his General Staff of much of its power. Although adorned with the title of Supreme Warlord, the Kaiser before him had never possessed so much influence over military affairs as did Hitler; in fact, soon after 1914 he had become the virtual prisoner of the Great German General Staff. Hitler, on the other hand, had swiftly reduced his O.K.W. to little more than a drafting office entirely subservient to himself as Supreme Commander of the Wehrmacht. In military circles, O.K.W. was liberally translated as
Oben Kein Widerstand
(‘no resistance at the top’). Of the Saxon, Keitel, scornfully nicknamed
Lakeitel
(a diminutive of ‘lackey’) it was said that he received the appointment after the O.K.W. C.-in-C., Blomberg,
⁶
had remarked disparagingly to Hitler: ‘He’s nothing but the man who runs my office.’ Hitler immediately replied: ‘That’s exactly the man I’m looking for.’ And so, for the remainder of the war, Keitel ran Hitler’s ‘office’ as a kind of pliable chief clerk, while below the O.K.W., the C.-in-C.s and their staffs of the three Services possessed a mere shadow of the independence they had enjoyed in Imperial days.

Once, during the Second World War, Churchill is reputed to have grumbled in aggravation against the Chiefs of Staff system:

It leads to weak and faltering decisions – or rather indecisions. Why, you may take the most gallant sailor, the most intrepid airman, or the most audacious soldier, put them at a table together – what do you get?
The sum of their fears.

This was indisputably Hitler’s view about
his
military advisers, and, as the success of each new gamble proved their ‘fears’ to be groundless, so he listened to them less and less. In the long run, the diminished influence of her General Staff was to prove one of the great weaknesses of Germany’s superb military machine in the Second World War. Certainly, the influence of the O.K.H. was never to stand as high again after the Brauchitsch-Hitler interview of 5 November 1939.

Halder and the ‘Resistance’

Behind the O.K.H. opposition to Hitler’s plans for a Western offensive in the autumn of 1939, there lay a complexity of motives which, because of its bearing on the evolution of
Gelb
, needs to be examined. It borders on the whole question of the German ‘resistance’. At the time of the Czech crisis of 1938, the ‘resistance’ movement, such as it was, resided principally among the conservative elements of the Army who had always regarded Hitler as an upstart and a guttersnipe, and who were now thoroughly alarmed as to where his policies would lead the nation. At their head stood the Army Chief of Staff,
⁷
the honourable Colonel-General Beck, who was forced to commit suicide after the bomb plot of 20 July 1944. Had France and Britain stood firm over Czechoslovakia, the ‘resistance’, so we are told, would have taken action against Hitler. But Hitler triumphed, and the ‘resistance’ lost much of its impetus as well as many of its adherents in high places, while another devastating blow was struck at its prestige by Hitler’s
coup
in pulling off the non-aggression pact with Russia.

Beck had resigned before Munich, depriving the ‘resistance’
of its mainspring. He was succeeded in office, reluctantly, by General Franz Halder, an artilleryman three years younger than the new Army C.-in-C., Brauchitsch. Coming from an old military family which had provided Bavaria with soldiers for many generations, Halder set a precedent as the first Bavarian Catholic to break the traditional Prussian, Protestant hegemony and to become Chief of Staff. A shrewd, quick-witted and precise-minded intellectual with a passion for mathematics and botany (Shirer says Halder with his mild features and pincenez reminded him more of a university professor), he had had a brilliant career as a staff officer, in which capacity he had passed more of the First War on the static Western front than in the East. In the autumn of 1939, he could definitely be counted a man of the ‘resistance’, but he possessed neither the determination nor the Army following to assume Beck’s mantle. He was not one to take risks, either military or political, nor was he entirely devoid of professional ambition. Whenever he contemplated practical means for ridding Germany of the evil of Hitler, Halder was confronted with the choice of having to resort either to a political
putsch
, against which his traditionalist sense of honour and obedience as a German officer revolted, or to assassination, which his Christian conscience overruled. Here, in the dilemma of Halder, lay the essential tragedy of what was both best and most ineffective in the German ‘resistance’ as a whole. So instead of sharper weapons, Halder – as far as
Gelb
was concerned – settled for those of procrastination and obstructionism.
⁸

After war began, Halder and his like-thinking generals had been associated with various peace feelers extended to Britain, predicated upon the removal of Hitler and the restoration of the ‘other Germany’. But the ‘other Germany’ they contemplated was hardly the easy-going liberal republic of Weimar; it was much more like Kaiser Wilhelm II’s pre-1914 Reich. In their ‘peace terms’, the conspirators were not even prepared to discuss Germany’s disrobing herself of Austria and the Czech Sudetenland, while from Poland they required a return to the 1914 frontiers, which was asking even more than Hitler’s prewar
demands. So, while prepared to renounce Hitler, they were not prepared to renounce his works. As far as British acceptance was concerned, these terms were utterly unrealistic, though perhaps domestically more unrealistic still, when it came to carrying along in a
coup d’état
a German populace elated by Hitler’s cheap triumphs. As it was, in the Army alone, support for the ‘resistance’ was very mixed. Of the Army Group commanders, Leeb (already, unbeknown to himself, under Gestapo observation) would have gone far, but Bock and Rundstedt, though sympathetic, took the conventional line of non-political involvement. At the end of October 1939, Halder had sent out his deputy, Stülpnagel,
⁹
to sound out feelings at the front, but on his return Stülpnagel warned him that the troops and junior officers would not follow any call to overthrow Hitler.

Towards the end of November, Halder, referring to the future offensive in the West, declared (according to Ulrich von Hassell): ‘We ought to give Hitler this last chance to deliver the German people from the slavery of English capitalism…’ This was a revealing remark, as symptomatic of the deep conflict in Halder’s mind as it was of that existing in the German military ‘resistance’ as a whole. For the more Hitler looked like winning, both before and during the war, the less ready the ‘resistance’ was to resist, and conversely. Halder certainly never had any particular desire to save the Allies from humiliation; what motivated him and his fellows, both as patriotic Germans and military men, was that Germany should not suffer the horrors of another long war, ending in defeat. For all the radical brilliance that had gone into the shaping of the new Wehrmacht, with its Panzers and its Stukas, the conventional German military Establishment, of which Halder and Brauchitsch were thoroughly representative, remained fundamentally conservative, its thoughts deeply conditioned by 1914–18. In spite of the Army’s staggering success in Poland, its leaders could not shake off their pessimism at the prospects of war with Britain and France; as Brauchitsch had revealed in his 5 November interview with Hitler, they could never quite suppress
their awe of the once-victorious French Army. Left to themselves, Brauchitsch and Halder would have played their game with the same caution as Gamelin and Georges; they were, after all, educated in the same school. This excessive professional prudence was another factor that conditioned their planning for
Gelb
in the autumn of 1939.

If Hitler had been allowed to attack, as he wished and upon the plan then offered by Halder and the O.K.H., in the autumn of 1939, the chances were exceedingly slim that he would have inflicted a decisive defeat on the French. A stalemate would probably have resulted, and the war might well have limped on – until, as the generals feared, it brought eventual defeat to Germany. Thus although motivated by a desire to topple Hitler, in stalling off an abortive offensive in 1939 the O.K.H. ‘resistance’ was in fact to pave the way for Hitler’s greatest triumph and prolong his survival until Germany lay in ashes, while at the same time assuring their own emasculation. History knows few starker ironies.

The ‘Manstein Plan’

Among the professional soldiers in opposition to the
Gelb
projects of 1939, however, another skein now emerges with a quite different point of departure. The details of the first O.K.H. plan had reached Rundstedt’s newly-created Army Group ‘A’ when his Chief of Staff, Manstein, passed through Zossen on 21 October. Immediately the two generals took exception to it – on purely professional and technical grounds.

Together, Rundstedt and Manstein represented the most imposing combination in the German Army; under their leadership Army Group South had formed the right, and stronger, arm of the pincer which had smashed the Polish forces in little more than a week. In his background at least, Rundstedt was a typical Prussian officer of the old school. There were few wars involving Prussia in which a von Rundstedt had not taken part; as early as 1745, there is a record of one serving with the Hessians in Scotland. In 1914, Gerd von Rundstedt had been a captain on the staff of the 22nd Reserve Division, which during the enactment of the Schlieffen Plan
came the closest to Paris that September. The memory of the bitter disappointment which followed after his division had actually glimpsed the Eiffel Tower in the distance, only to be thrown back by the French counter-offensive on the Marne, was to wield considerable influence upon Rundstedt all through the campaign of 1940. From 1915 onwards, Rundstedt spent the rest of the war fighting in the mobile campaigns of the Russian front. Between 1919 and 1933, he held almost every staff post in Seeckt’s Reichswehr. On the advent of Hitler, he was commanding the key First Army Group in Berlin, which high post he held for six years. At the end of 1938 (having already applied to retire several times) he left the Army as a colonel-general to live in a rented apartment in Cassel. In 1939, like Hindenburg and Pétain before him, he was recalled to service. He was then rising sixty-four.

As a special tribute, Rundstedt on his retirement had been made honorary colonel of the 18th Infantry Regiment, which he had once commanded, and during the war he always preferred to wear the simple jacket of a regimental commander rather than a Field-Marshal’s regalia. Frequently young officers mistook him for a colonel. With his hair parted down the centre and a heavy jowl even as a young man, Rundstedt’s face reveals no outstanding intelligence. But in the Army he had a deserved reputation for being the most gifted of all the senior commanders. Despite his age, he was resourceful and flexible-minded. He knew how to profit from the advice of talented subordinates, and he confined his genius to tactical problems, while his Chief of Staff, Manstein, possessed a much wider vision on the overall conduct of war. Rundstedt also enjoyed deep respect throughout the officer corps, and would have made an ideal leader of the ‘resistance’; his moral principles on the waging of war were of the highest, and he was one of the few senior Wehrmacht commanders against whom there was never to be any taint of war crimes. But, like a true Prussian officer, however much he may have despised Hitler he eschewed political involvement just as much as he regarded higher strategy to be no concern of his.

Erich von Manstein, promoted Lieutenant-General shortly
before the war, was just twelve years younger than Rundstedt. His father was an Army officer of Polish–German origin, named Lewinski, but Erich had been adopted as a child by a family friend and brother officer, whose name of Manstein he subsequently assumed. Commissioned into a Prussian regiment of Foot Guards in 1906, Manstein had served as a staff captain on General von Gallwitz’s group attacking on the left bank of the Meuse throughout much of the worst fighting at Verdun. The conclusions Manstein had formed from this appallingly futile struggle lay directly opposed to those of his French contemporaries defending Verdun: attrition resulting from the old style, direct, frontal attack was no way to win a war. In 1935, then a colonel, Manstein became Army Chief of Operations, under General Beck. But extremely outspoken and with one of those minds which any army finds uncomfortably brilliant, during the military ‘purge’ of 1938 Manstein, although he was not one of those hostile to Hitler,
¹⁰
was dispatched to command a division. It was only with considerable difficulty that Rundstedt could bring him back on to the General Staff. In appearance, the beaky nose which dominated his features, the heavily arched eyebrows and penetrating eyes, gave Manstein something of the look of an eagle or a hawk. A harsh disciplinarian,
¹¹
icy and unbending, he was a leader who commanded respect rather than love. Like Guderian, Manstein’s interests were purely professional, and this formed the basis of his loyalty to Hitler. Guderian, seldom lavish with praise for others, regarded Manstein as ‘our finest operational brain’, and as the war was to bring him one higher post after another, Manstein indeed proved himself Germany’s ablest commander of large bodies of troops, as well as being her outstanding strategic
thinker. In fact, history is almost certain to rate him one of the great generals of the twentieth century.