by John Keegan
France sought literally to wall itself off from a renewal of the trench agony by building a simulation of the trench system in concrete along its frontier with Germany, the Maginot Line, which was as costly in its first phase (3,000,000,000 francs) as that of Britain’s Dreadnought building programme of 1906–13; like an enormous landlocked fleet of battleships, it was intended to prevent an offensive by any future German army — for Germany had effectively been deprived of an army under the terms of the peace — from ever setting foot again on French territory.55 The British reacted from the prospect of another great war with the same revulsion as the French, though without their realism. In 1919, at the prompting of Winston Churchill, a former First Lord of the Admiralty and Secretary of State both for War and Air, it adopted the ruling that, ‘for the purpose of framing the [defence] estimates, [it should be assumed] that at any given date there will be no major war for ten years’ and this ‘ten-year rule’ was renewed year-on-year until 1932; even thereafter, despite the accession to power in Germany of Adolf Hitler in 1933, resolved to reverse the outcome of the First World War, Britain undertook no substantive measures of rearmament until 1937.56 Hitler had meanwhile reintroduced universal conscription and set about recreating once more a warrior culture among a new generation of German youth.
ULTIMATE WEAPONS
For Hitler the First World War had been ‘the greatest of all experiences’.57 Like a minority of veterans in all armies, he had found the excitement and even the dangers of the trenches enlarging, indeed uplifting. His bravery had won him medals and the good opinion of his officers while his admission to a circle of comradeship, after years of life as a down-and-out in the backstreets of Vienna, had reinforced his burning belief in the superiority of the German nation above all others. And he was filled with consuming outrage at its humiliation at the peace of Versailles, the terms of which — including loss of territory, the reduction of its army to a strength of only 100,000, the deprivation of its navy of modern warships and the outright abolition of its air force — the German government had accepted only because the Allied naval blockade, at last achieving the effect it had failed to impose in the war years, gave it no option. Hitler’s anger was matched by that of enough other veterans to supply him; when he took up extreme right-wing politics in 1921, with the nucleus of a paramilitary party.
Paramilitary parties were on the march in the 1920s, in almost every country that had undergone defeat or been cheated of its expectation of victory. Turkey was the exception: there Atatürk, military saviour of the Turkish heartland, after the Allies had stripped it of its Middle Eastern empire, succeeded in turning his warlike people for the first time toward a strategy of moderation. In Russia, a triumphalist Bolshevik party, victorious in civil war, was instituting a regime which, for all its egalitarian rhetoric, would far outdo the French Revolution in subordinating every aspect of public life, and much of private life as well, to command from the top, reinforced by arbitrary disciplines and a pervasive system of internal espionage. In Italy in 1923 Mussolini — voice for all those who felt that the British and French had taken an unfair share of the victor’s spoils, though the Italians had made an equal blood sacrifice — actually usurped government with a party that wore military uniforms, aped military habits, exiled or imprisoned its political opponents and installed its own militia on an equal footing with the constitutional army.
Hitler deeply admired Mussolini, whom he constantly compared to Julius Caesar and whose use of legionary symbolism, including that of legionary banners and the ‘Roman’ salute, he adopted for his own revolutionary group. The German state, weakened though it was by defeat, proved a tougher nut, however, than the Italian. Hitler’s attempt at a coup d’état in 1923 was easily quashed by the Bavarian police, backed by an army which was not prepared to see its national role challenged by a rabble parading in a parody of field-grey. During sixteen months in prison, Hitler reflected on his mistakes and determined never to confront the army directly again. Instead, while courting the military leadership and proceeding with the creation of a mass uniformed militia of ‘storm-troopers’ (which achieved a strength of 100,000 — as large as the army — in 1931), he decided to use the electoral process to bring him to power.58 In January 1933 he scraped a plurality, was installed as Chancellor and embarked at once on measures designed to restore Germany to its former place as a great military power; on 8 February, he secretly informed his Cabinet that ‘the next five years have to be devoted to rendering the German people again capable of bearing arms’.59 The following year, on the death of President Hindenburg, the wartime commander-in-chief, he arranged for all servicemen to swear personal allegiance to himself as the new head of state (Führer, or ‘leader’). In 1935 he renounced the clauses of the Versailles treaty which limited the size of the army to 100,000, reintroduced universal conscription, and decreed the creation of an independent air force; in 1936, the same year as he negotiated with Britain a new Anglo-German naval treaty that allowed him to build U-boats, he unilaterally reoccupied the demilitarised Rhineland with German troops. He was already building tanks — in January 1934, he had been shown some illegal prototypes at Kummersdorf by Guderian, father of the panzer arm, and had trumpeted, ‘That’s what I need! That’s what I want to have’ — and by 1935 three panzer divisions were under formation.60 By 1937, the German army had thirty-six infantry and three panzer divisions (in 1933 there had been only seven infantry divisions) which, with reserves, yielded a war strength of 3,000,000 men, a thirtyfold increase in armed strength in four years’ time. By 1938 the new Luftwaffe had 3350 combat aircraft (none in 1933), and was training parachute troops to be the airborne arm of the army, while the navy was laying down the first of a series of super-battleships and planning to build an aircraft-carrier.
Rearmament proved enormously popular, not simply because it provided a means of absorbing the youthful unemployed and of integrating into the territory of a greater Germany both the Rhineland and, in 1938, the rump of Austria and the German-speaking regions of Czechoslovakia, but also because it restored German national pride. Among the victor nations the cost of winning the First World War had left the populations determined never to bear it again; in Germany the cost of losing the war seemed to be justified only if the result could be reversed. Hitler, whose whole being was suffused with that conviction, had had the perception to detect this popular rancour, buried though it was beneath a veneer of internationalism that was the official philosophy of the post-imperial state, and had worked to excite it throughout fifteen years of political agitation. His accusations of treason against those who had signed the Versailles treaty and his relentless demands for revenge fell on ready ears.
While the French strengthened the Maginot Line and the British steadfastly refused to rearm, young Germans enthusiastically donned the field-grey uniform of the trenches, basked in the admiration of civilians as their fathers and grandfathers had done in the decades before 1914 when the conscript army had been the principal symbol of German nationhood, and thrilled to the modernity that tanks, fighter aircraft and dive-bombers represented. Mussolini’s vision of what Italy might do had been inspired by the art of ‘futurism’; in Hitler’s Germany futurity was not merely an aspiration, as it remained in underfunded Fascist Italy, but a heady reality. By 1939 German society was not only remilitarised but suffused with the belief that it possessed the means to overcome its decadent neighbours, states which paid no more than lip service to the philosophy of ‘every man a soldier’, and win the victory of which it had been cheated twenty-one years earlier.
Announcing his decision to go to war against Poland, and therefore also France and Britain, on 1 September 1939, Hitler explicitly evoked the trench experience. ‘I am asking’, he said, ‘no German man more than I myself was ready to perform during the few years of the [First World] War … I am from now on no more than the first soldier of the Reich. I have once more put on the coat that was most sacred and dear to me. I will not take it off again
until victory is assured, or I will not survive the outcome.’61 These were eerily prophetic words from a political leader who was to take his own life five and a half years later as enemy shells rained down on the bunker where he sheltered in the ruins of Berlin. At the outset, however, any prospect of defeat seemed chimerical. Hitler’s generals had warned, as military professionals commonly do when asked to translate plans into action, that victory over Poland might not be swift. In the event Poland’s forty divisions, none armoured, found themselves surrounded from the outset by sixty-two German divisions, including ten panzer, and were overwhelmed in five weeks of fighting; the Polish air force of 935 aircraft, almost all obsolete, was wiped out in the first day. Nearly 1,000,000 Poles were taken prisoner, 200,000 by the Russians who, in a secret agreement with Hitler which lifted the danger from Germany of having to fight a two-front war as in 1914, had arranged to invade and annex the east of the country once operations were under way.
The Polish campaign unveiled the new tactics for which Germany’s land and air forces were equipped and trained. Called Blitzkrieg, ‘lightning war’, a journalist’s term but a descriptive one, it concentrated the tanks of the panzer divisions into an offensive phalanx, supported by squadrons of dive-bombers as ‘flying artillery’, which, when driven against a defended line at a weak spot — any spot was, by definition, weak when struck by such a preponderant force — cracked it and then swept on to spread confusion in its wake. The technique was the same as that introduced by Epaminondas at Leuctra, used by Alexander against Xerxes at Gaugamela and employed by Napoleon at Marengo, Austerlitz and Wagram. Blitzkrieg, however, achieved results denied earlier commanders, whose ability to exploit success at the point of assault had been limited by the speed and endurance of the horse, whether as an instrument of force or a means to carry messages and reports. The tank not only easily outstripped infantry, but could keep up a pace of advance of thirty, even fifty miles in twenty-four hours as long as supplied with fuel or spare parts, while its radio set enabled headquarters both to receive intelligence and transmit orders at the same speed as operations invoked, a development which came to be known during the war as ‘real time’.
There had been experimentation with radio during the First World War, but the early sets, needing bulky power sources, had worked well only at sea. Miniaturisation had reduced the power demand, allowing reliable sets to be installed in tanks or command vehicles, while the Germans had also achieved remarkable success in mechanising encipherment of messages. Here was the basis for an offensive revolution. Its nature was encapsulated in remarks made by the German air-force general, Erhard Milch, at a pre-war conference on Blitzkrieg tactics: ‘The dive bombers will form a flying artillery, directed to work with ground forces through good radio communications … tanks and planes will be [at the commander’s disposition]. The real secret is speed — speed of attack through speed of communication.’62
These ingredients of an offensive revolution persuaded Hitler and the more forward-looking German generals not only that the Wehrmacht could defeat the still conventionally organised armies of its enemies in the west at little loss, but that they would also spare Germany the crippling economic costs of putting German industry on a full-scale war footing. The German military establishment attributed the Allied victory in 1918 to its better ability to fight the Materialschlacht, ‘battle of materials’; thus it preserved the illusion that the German soldier had not really been defeated at all. Blitzkrieg, the weapons of which were comparatively cheap, would thus allow the German people to enjoy the fruits of victory without making the financial sacrifices always previously entailed in waging all-out war.
The results of the campaign of May-June 1940 in France and the Low Countries appeared to bear this expectation out. Concentrated by stealth in the Ardennes forests north of the Maginot Line, the German panzer divisions cracked the French field defences in three days of fighting and drove forward to reach the Channel coast at Abbeville on 19 May. This advance cut the Allied armies into two, leaving the best of the French and the British Expeditionary Force isolated in the north, while to the south the French hinterland was defended only by immobile and second-rate formations. The northern pocket was eliminated by 4 June — most of the British army was evacuated by sea from Dunkirk — while the southern front was penetrated and overrun immediately after. On 17 June the French government sued for an armistice which came into effect (also with Italy, a latecomer to Germany’s side) on 25 June. ‘The great battle of France is over,’ wrote a young German officer. ‘It lasted twenty-six years.’ His sentiment neatly reflected that of Hitler. On 19 July he held a victory celebration in Berlin to elevate twelve of his generals to the rank of marshal; he had already made the decision to demobilise thirty-five of the army’s hundred divisions, so that industry would regain the manpower necessary to sustain output of consumer goods at peacetime levels.
It seemed in the summer of 1940, therefore, as if Germany was to enjoy the best of all worlds: victory, economic plenty and the return of the warriors to their firesides. As a precaution against the resumption of conflict, Hitler gave orders to persist in the output of the new weapons; the number of tank divisions was to be doubled, U-boat launchings increased and advanced aircraft prototypes taken to production stage. No threat of conflict, however, appeared to loom. The Soviet Union was inert, content to incorporate into its territory the eastern lands assigned to it by Hitler’s pre-war agreement with Stain, and to fulfil the deliveries of raw materials that were a condition of it. Britain, expelled from the continent where it had abandoned almost all its heavy military equipment, was bereft of means to wage offensive war; at best it would hope to defend its sea lanes or air space. By any rational calculation it ought to sue for peace. So Hitler calculated, and he waited throughout June to July to receive Churchill’s overtures.
None came. Instead the war took a different course. Hitler had already turned to consideration of how safe it was to leave Russia undisturbed on his open eastern frontier. Its lack of natural frontiers and the ‘tankable’ expanses of its western steppe laid it open to Blitzkrieg on an extended scale; a successful lightning war would provide Germany with the material and industrial resources to make it Europe’s unassailably dominant power in perpetuity. No such Blitzkrieg would be launched if Britain would agree to an armistice, since that would avert the danger that the United States might eventually intervene in Europe, as it had done in 1917, to reverse the balance of power. However, Britain proved recalcitrant, even under the weight of a full-scale air offensive launched against it in August. While Hitler watched to see how long British air defences could sustain resistance, therefore, he decided to halt the demobilisation of divisions that had taken part in the Battle of France and to begin a precautionary deployment of his panzer formations to the east.
Hitler must be seen in retrospect as the most dangerous war leader ever to have afflicted civilisation, since he combined in his outlook three savagely complementary beliefs, often found separately but never before combined in a single mind. He was obsessed with the technology of warmaking, preening himself on his mastery of its details and holding unfailingly to the view that superior weapons could supply the key to victory; in this he stood in outright opposition to the traditions of the German army, which reposed its trust in the fighting-power of the German soldier and the professional skills of the general staff to bring victory.63 He nevertheless also believed in the primacy of the warrior class, which in his political messages to the German people he invested with a ruthless racial content. Finally, he was a convinced Clausewitzian: he really did see war as a continuation of politics, did not distinguish, indeed, between war and politics as separate activities. Like Marx, though he contemptuously rejected his collectivism, since it was invented to liberate all races indifferently from economic slavery, he conceived of life as struggle, and warfare therefore as the natural means by which racial politics was to achieve its ends. ‘Not one of you’, he threw at a Munich audience in 1934,
‘has read Clausewitz, or if you have read him, you haven’t learnt how to relate him to the present’; in his last days of life in Berlin in April 1945, when he sat down in the bunker to compose his political testament to the German people, the only name he cited was that of ‘the great Clausewitz’ in justification of what he had tried to achieve.64
Revolutionary weapons, the warrior ethos and the Clausewitzian philosophy of integrating military with political ends were to ensure that, under Hitler’s hand, warmaking in Europe between 1939 and 1945 achieved a level of totality of which no previous leader — not Alexander, not Muhammad, not Genghis, not Napoleon — had ever dreamed. At the outset he acquiesced in the declaration issued by the British and French governments that they would not direct aerial attack against civilian targets. Once the prohibition was breached — by, as it happened, a German attack mistakenly delivered against the German city of Freiburg on 10 May 1940, which expediency required should be blamed upon the French — inhibitions were cast aside.65 An Italian military theorist, Douhet, had already advanced the proposition that wars might be won by airpower alone (the Italians, coincidentally or not, had been the first to use aircraft for military purposes, against the Turks in Libya in the war of 1911–12) and, though the bombing of each other’s cities by aircraft and airships in the First World War had caused few casualties and trifling damage, Hitler was persuaded that his new Luftwaffe, with its thousand bombers, could break both the Royal Air Force and British civilian morale with a concentrated blow.66 On what is still called in London ‘the first day of the bombing’, 7 September 1940, the Luftwaffe burnt out the London docks and wide swathes of the city on each side of the Thames; on 31 December, it destroyed much of the City of London; and on 10 May 1941, the first anniversary of the panzer attack in the west, it devastated Whitehall and Westminster, including the chamber of the House of Commons. Despite causing the deaths of 13,596 Londoners in 1940 alone, the Luftwaffe eventually found its own losses — of 600 bombers in August and September — the deciding factor, and abandoned the effort to give Douhet’s doctrine of ‘victory through air power’ force.67 During 1941–3 it confined itself to launching sporadic raids only at night against British targets.