Fateful Choices: Ten Decisions That Changed the World, 1940-1941

by Ian Kershaw

  Choice presupposes options. What strategic possibilities lay open to the German leadership in the summer of 1940? That an alternative–militarily far more promising–strategy was available, but was squandered through Hitler’s insistence on attacking the Soviet Union, was not infrequently claimed in the postwar years.49 It offered an exculpatory device for some military leaders, all too keen to look no farther than Hitler himself as the cause of ‘the German catastrophe’.50 Later historical research has usually been far more sceptical, invariably concentrating upon Hitler’s ideological imperative for the war in the east.51

  Hitler decided strategy. On that there is no doubt. Moreover, his sensitivity to the prestige invested in his position as supreme Leader demanded that decisions be taken imperiously, without detailed soundings of advice, let alone prolonged debate and discussion. Critical assessment of policy options partly depends in no small measure upon the effectiveness of mechanisms within a governmental system to shape and present them to the leadership. Given the nature of government in the Third Reich, the potential for presenting Hitler with judiciously framed alternatives was not high. Whereas the British War Cabinet reached a collective decision, after three days of intensive debate, to stay in the war, Hitler simply announced to his generals on 31 July (without prior consultation other than with his immediate military advisers, who had had the first contingency plans drawn up) the decision to prepare for war with the Soviet Union the following spring. No one in the Reich’s civil administration was informed of the decision.

  As we have noted, the fragmentation of government below Hitler was greater even than in any other dictatorship at the time. Once the Reich Cabinet had met for the last time, at the beginning of 1938, even the remnants of collective government no longer existed. At that same point, in early 1938, Hitler had concentrated the leadership of the armed forces in his own hands. But the High Command of the Wehrmacht, set up as the vehicle of Hitler’s own control, did not function as a collective advisory body on military strategy in the way that the meetings of the chiefs of staff did for the British War Cabinet. Consequently, there was little or no coherent planning devised collectively by the three branches of the armed forces–army, air force and navy. These largely operated alongside each other, their commanders-in-chief dealing in the main bilaterally with Hitler.

  Quite different strategic priorities emerged, therefore. Among them were the German navy’s own strategic preferences, which differed markedly from those of Hitler. Did they offer a workable option, ignored by Hitler, which offered a more promising prosecution of the war and could have avoided the debacle in the east?

  III

  Strategic thinking among the leaders of the German navy–competing in what was usually an uphill struggle with the army and air force for status, influence and resources–had from the outset run along different lines to that of Hitler, though it was no less aggressive and no less global in its ambitions for territorial expansion and eventual world domination. Where Hitler had wanted to harness British friendship to destroy the Soviet Union, looking to build a huge land empire in eastern Europe and impregnable strength from which at some distant future date Germany could engage in a showdown with the United States, the navy saw the destruction of British world power as the central war aim. It demanded a big and powerful fleet, capable of taking on and defeating the Royal Navy in a classic naval war. Accompanied by the construction of an enormous German colonial empire, this would provide the basis to challenge and defeat the United States in the contest for world domination. Attacking Bolshevik Russia did not figure prominently in this thinking. Bolshevism was, of course, accepted as an evil to be confronted and destroyed at some point. But it was taken for granted that it could be contained, then smashed at a later date, once German pre-eminence had been established.

  Naval thinking in the Third Reich was, in essence, an updated and amended variant of that of Tirpitz’s time.52 It drew on one of the two main strands of German imperialism, that of the overseas colonial empire. Hitler’s ideas (and those of the Nazi Party) arose from the alternative strand of imperialism, also with deep roots in the Wilhelmine period, that looked to expansion and conquest in eastern Europe.53 For the army, though not the navy, this latter version, with its inbuilt demands for a large land force to ensure Continental mastery, had evident attractions. But the maritime and Continental alternatives could easily stand alongside each other in the prewar years. Though army, navy and air force competed for resources, there was no need to choose between the alternatives. With the decision in 1939 to construct a large surface fleet, envisaged in the Z-Plan, it even appeared for a time as if the navy was getting its way.54

  But the navy’s conception of preparing for a major struggle by the mid-1940s was completely upturned when the Polish crisis led to war between Germany and Great Britain in September 1939. In a remarkable memorandum of 3 September 1939, the very date that Britain and France declared war on Germany, the Commander-in-Chief of the navy, Grand Admiral Erich Raeder, coming close to criticizing Hitler for taking Germany into war prematurely, admitted that the navy, which according to the Z-Plan was arming for a war ‘on the ocean’ at the turn of the year 1944–5, was still in autumn 1939 nowhere near sufficiently armed for the ‘great struggle with England’.55

  By the spring and early summer of 1940, however, this initial gloom had given way to unbounded optimism. In the wake of the part played by the navy in the Scandinavian conquests in April, then especially the stirring events during the western campaign in May and June, culminating in the dramatic victory over France, naval leaders had worked out their utopian vision of the future world power of Germany resting on the strength of the navy to protect its overseas possessions.56 Huge territorial annexation was envisaged. According to a memorandum of 3 June, composed by Rear Admiral Kurt Fricke, Denmark, Norway and northern France were to remain as German possessions, safeguarding the Reich’s north-western seaboard. A contiguous swathe of territories, mainly to be taken from France and Belgium, added to some returned former German colonies, and others exchanged with Britain and Portugal, would establish a large colonial empire in central Africa. Islands off the African east coast, most notably Madagascar, would offer protective bases.57

  Admiral Rolf Carls, head of naval command in the Baltic and for long seen as Raeder’s likely successor, went even further. Parts of Belgium and France (including Normandy and Brittany) would become German protectorates, based on the Czech model. The French colonial empire would be broken up in favour of Germany, Italy and to some extent Spain. South Africa and Southern Rhodesia would be removed from the British Empire and become an independent state, while Northern Rhodesia would come into German possession as a bridge to link its east-and west-African territories. All British rights in the Persian Gulf, most notably the oilfields, would pass to Germany. Britain and France were to be excluded from any control over the Suez Canal. British mandates in the Middle East would be taken away. Germany would take over the Shetlands and the Channel Islands. Strategic bases were to be established on the Canary Islands (probably in an exchange of territory with Spain), in Dakar on the African west coast (at the expense of France) and on Madagascar, Mauritius and the Seychelles in the Indian Ocean. Carls admitted the vision might seem ‘fantastic’, though he advocated its realization in order to ‘secure Germany’s claims of its part of the globe once and for all’.58

  Yet another memorandum, dated 11 July, imagined the great battle-fleet necessary to defend a large colonial empire and wage war against the United States when Britain had been totally defeated and its once-mighty Empire had broken up. Coastal defences would be massively extended. Bases on the Azores, the Canaries and the Cape Verde Islands would offer security against attack from across the Atlantic. Taking possession of New Guinea as well as Madagascar would offer protection against attack in the Indian Ocean. Links between Germany and its colonies could be upheld without difficulty by dominance in the Indian Ocean, Red Sea and Mediterranean.59 It was a breathtak
ingly grandiose vision, and further testimony to a hubris in the German elite that was far from confined to Hitler.

  However, such memoranda fell well short of anything resembling coherent strategic thinking. They remained no more than megalomaniac pipe dreams composed in the intoxication of seemingly imminent final victory. In fact, without the defeat of Britain, which was their underlying premiss, even the first steps towards their realization were out of the question. And they did nothing to prepare the navy for the strategic choice which, by the summer of 1940, Hitler had effectively made: the invasion of the Soviet Union by spring the following year. The dictator’s interest remained, as it had done throughout, focused on the prospects of empire in the east of Europe, not in central Africa. For him, in contrast to the navy, building a colonial empire in Africa would only come after, not before, the defeat of Bolshevism and formed part of the inevitable future confrontation with the American continent.60

  For its own part, the naval leadership, when it descended from utopian dreams to practical planning, was preoccupied with the immediate task which had been thrust upon it only weeks earlier: preparing the operational plans for the invasion of Britain by the autumn, aimed at removing British involvement in the war and freeing Germany’s rear for the attack on the Soviet Union.

  Though preliminary naval contingency planning for a possible invasion of Britain had been undertaken as early as November 1939,61 serious operational consideration did not begin until June 1940. On the very day that the French sued for peace, 17 June, Major-General Walter Warlimont, who as head of the National Defence Department of the Wehrmacht Operations Staff was close to the very centre of military thinking, told Raeder that Hitler had expressed no intention of attempting a landing in England ‘since he fully saw the extraordinary difficulties of such an undertaking’. Accordingly, the High Command of the Wehrmacht had made no preparations for such a move. Warlimont also indicated the evident divergence in Hitler’s thinking from the underlying strategic preferences of the naval leadership. He confirmed that Hitler did not want totally to destroy Britain’s world Empire, since this would only be ‘to the disadvantage of the white race’. He preferred to reach peace with Britain, following the defeat of France, ‘on the condition of return of colonies and renunciation of English influence in Europe’.62

  Nevertheless, within a fortnight General Jodl, as head of the Wehrmacht Operations Staff Warlimont’s immediate superior and Hitler’s closest military adviser, had devised a strategy for forcing Britain to capitulate, if she could not be persuaded to agree to terms. This involved the prospect of a landing, but also ‘war on the periphery’, aimed at limited military support for those countries–Italy, Spain, Russia and Japan–which had an interest in benefiting from the undermining of the British Empire. An Italian attack on the Suez Canal and the capture of Gibraltar were specifically mentioned.63 The ‘peripheral strategy’ remained under consideration throughout the summer and autumn, and aspects of it coincided with the thinking of the navy leadership.

  The idea of an invasion of Britain, on the other hand, had only a brief lifespan. Hitler evidently saw this as a last resort and was highly sceptical from the outset about its practicality.64 He had emphasized German mastery of the skies as the most important prerequisite for a landing. Raeder fully agreed. But the navy leadership was not only dubious that this could be attained, but also by mid-July expressing its extreme anxiety about transport difficulties and, not least, the worry that, even if German troops could be landed on British soil, the intervention of the Royal Navy could prevent further landings and cut them off, leading to the ‘extraordinary endangering of the entire deployed army’.65 Moreover, the intended completion of preparations for the landing by mid-August rapidly proved illusory.66 The necessary rescheduling of completion to the middle of the following month67 meant that only the briefest of opportunities was left until the vagaries of the weather in the English Channel ruled out an attempt before the following spring. By the end of August it was plain to the navy leadership that preparations for transport could not be completed by the new date set, 15 September.68 Even before the end of July, the Naval Warfare Executive (Seekriegsleitung) had, in fact, been advising against trying to carry out the operation in 1940, and putting it off until May the following year at the earliest. On 31 July Raeder conveyed the arguments to Hitler, who acknowledged the difficulties, but deferred a final decision until the Luftwaffe had been given the opportunity to bomb England for eight consecutive days.69 The order for the indefinite postponement of ‘Operation Sealion’ was not actually given until 17 September.70 But in reality, Hitler had always had cold feet about the prospect of a landing in Britain, and possibly accepted as early as 29–31 July, long before the decisive phase of the ‘Battle of Britain’ was reached, that it would not be possible to go through with the invasion.71 The decision to attack Russia had swiftly taken the place of the decision to attack Britain. It was seen as less risky.

  Grand Admiral Raeder had already left the gathering of military leaders at the Berghof on 31 July 1940, when Hitler announced his decision to prepare for war against the Soviet Union the following spring.72 But nothing in the announcement could have been unexpected. Raeder had been present ten days earlier when Hitler had first spoken of a possible attack on the Soviet Union.73 And three days before the announcement, plainly aware of what was in the air, the chief of staff of the Naval Warfare Executive, Rear Admiral Fricke, composed a memorandum outlining his views on conflict with Russia, which Raeder read the following day, 29 July. Fricke accepted that Bolshevism was ‘a chronic danger’ which had to be ‘eliminated one way or the other’, and posed no objection to the envisaged German attack, other than acknowledging the sectional disadvantage that naval interests would take a back seat to those of the army and Luftwaffe.74 At the time of the crucial decision by Hitler on 31 July to prepare for the war against Russia, therefore, the navy raised no objection and had no clearly devised strategic alternative on offer.

  Over the following months, however, this was to change. The emergence of a Mediterranean strategy fitted in with the notion of ‘war on the periphery’ which Jodl had indicated in his memorandum of 30 June. Gradually, a military alternative emerged, though one which demanded a more active diplomacy targeted at Spain, Italy and Vichy France. Meanwhile, however, the operational planning for an attack on Russia was taking shape. This was the sword of Damocles hanging over the timing of any proposed alternative.

  During the late summer and the autumn months, the navy’s ideas on strategy, as they developed, had much in common with the thinking in Hitler’s headquarters. The rapidly fading prospects of an invasion of Britain prompted consideration of other ways to break British resistance. For Jodl, in charge of overall Wehrmacht operational planning, the ‘peripheral strategy’ he had devised was a crucial concern.75 But it did not stand in contradiction to an attack on Russia. Rather, it was aimed ideally at forcing Britain to agree to terms and freeing Germany’s back for the war on Russia, or, failing that, tying Britain down until victory in the Soviet Union compelled her to yield. For the naval leadership, on the other hand, the ‘peripheral’ (or Mediterranean) strategy was no temporary solution to facilitate the war in the east. It offered an alternative to that war.

  By mid-August, Hitler had agreed on plans (which he thought would meet with Franco’s approval) for an operation to take Gibraltar by early 1941 and to support an Italian thrust to the Suez Canal around the same time.76 Shortly afterwards, the first serious consideration by the navy of a strategy focused on the Mediterranean was signalled by an analysis by Admiral Gerhard Wagner on 29 August of how war against Britain could best be waged, assuming that ‘Operation Sealion’ was not to take place.77 Bombing raids and the war in the Atlantic to cut off supplies would not, he took for granted, force a decision over the next months. And by the following spring, British defensive capacity would have improved, perhaps with American support. The best way to attack Britain, he concluded, would be to weaken it
s Empire through war in the Mediterranean, in tandem with the Italians.

  Taking up the thinking in the Wehrmacht High Command, Admiral Wagner pointed out that it would be possible to capture Gibraltar, with Spanish support, and to block the Suez Canal by an offensive thrusting from Libya through Egypt. The result would be to force Britain out of the Mediterranean, which would then be entirely in the hands of the Axis powers. In turn, this would safeguard shipping in the whole of the Mediterranean, ensuring unthreatened imports from north Africa. The position of the Axis powers in the Balkan region would in the process also be greatly strengthened. Turkey would no longer be able to remain neutral, and would fall within their orbit. The raw materials of the Arab countries, Egypt and the Sudan would be available to the Axis. There would be a good platform to weaken British positions in the Indian Ocean through attacks on colonies in east Africa and posing an obvious threat to India itself. The loss of Gibraltar would deprive Britain of one of her most important bases for the war in the Atlantic. Even were Britain to acquire a foothold in the Azores, Madeira or the Canaries, it would scarcely provide compensation. German mastery in the western Mediterranean would enable pressure to be exerted on French north-African colonies and prevent them going over to the Gaullists, and hence to the British side. At the same time, British bases on the west coast of Africa would be endangered.

  The Italian navy would, as an additional advantage, be freed to support the German war effort outside the Mediterranean, in the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic, while the Italian army and air force could make further advances against the British, above all in east Africa. A final benefit would be the entry of Spain into the war (seen as implicit in the taking of Gibraltar), thereby widening significantly the basis for German naval warfare in the Atlantic. The memorandum concluded