Stupid Wars : A Citizen's Guide to Botched Putsches, Failed Coups, Inane Invasions, and Ridiculous Revolutions

by Ed Strosser

  The night, however, was quickly becoming a comic “who’s on first?” scenario, Prussian army style. Nobody wanted to make a move without knowing first what the other guy was going to do. Loyal-but-sympathetic soldiers refused to shoot putschers but also refused to join them. They didn’t have orders! A German soldier couldn’t be expected to join a rev­olution without orders!

  The SA company that had been frustrated at the barracks had marched back to the putsch hall. The men sat down in the hall, waiting for orders, stuffing their faces with free beer and sausage. Some started to bunk down under the tables, sensing it was going to be a long night. Some of them had to get up in the morning to go to their regular jobs.

  The putsch had turned into an uncoordinated circus. Goering was worried about his ailing wife. Instead of occupying the power centers of the city, random attacks on the Nazis’s favorite targets became the order of the day. The hotel where the Allied army officers were lodged was attacked; the French and British arms control officers were accosted in their pajamas; the hotel staff was able to convince the Nazis to let them stay in the hotel. Enemies of the Nazis, including the usual Jews and Commies, were attacked and fifty-eight prisoners dragged back to the putsch hall.

  By midnight, the alarmed President Ebert in Berlin, by now well versed in crushing challenges to his government from both the left and right, turned to his head coup-crusher, General Hans von Seeckt, and told him to handle it. When nervously asked by the ministers where the army stood, the icy von Seeckt replied “Behind me.” Von Seeckt wasn’t about to let Germany’s rebirth be hijacked by a rookie like Hitler. He ordered the army on a midnight march to Munich to bol­ster the tiny army force in the city.

  From the safety of their secret lair in the barracks, Kahr, Lossow, and Seisser issued a message repudiating the putsch and ordered posters to be printed and circulated. But in actu­ality they were badly outgunned. There were only a thousand state police and a handful of loyal army troops who could be relied upon to fight against the thousands of SA troopers roaming the streets. Hitler and Ludendorff still had the upper hand, but it was slipping out of their grasp. Even after waiting in von Lossow’s office in vain Ludendorff had wasted yet more time phoning around the various ministries to find him. Lossow’s aides put off the dupable Ludendorff by either not picking up the phone or telling him that von Lossow was still en route from somewhere to somewhere else.

  When dawn arrived on November 9, the fifth anniver­sary of the Kaiser’s abdication, Hitler and Ludendorff fi­nally realized that the von trio — Kahr, Lossow, and Seisser — had betrayed them. It had taken them almost seven hours to comprehend this fact. Almost all of the key installations were still under the control of the police and army: infantry barracks, telegraph and phone exchanges. Reconvening at the putsch hall they argued bitterly over their next steps while the troopers milled about the smoky, dank beer cellar. Goering’s contribution was to find a band to roust the tired troops out of their morning daze while Hitler frantically planned his next moves. The sleepy band played without their breakfast or pay and under threat of a good kicking.

  To further boost the troops, Hitler sent two SA command­ers, including Ludendorff’s stepson, both of whom happened to be experienced bank clerks, and a couple dozen toughs in beer trucks to rob the presses where government officers were up all night printing money to keep up with inflation. The troopers each received a couple trillion marks for their night’s service, just enough to cover the night’s beer bill.

  Then Hitler, in a crazed, desperate gambit, dispatched a drinking buddy of the deposed crown prince of Bavaria to plead with him to join the coup and order monarchy-adoring Kahr to obey Adolf.

  The good news for Hitler was that SA battalions were making their way back to the putsch hall, and reinforcements from outside the city were arriving. Kahr had finally allowed word to leak out about his government’s resistance to the coup. But Hitler’s finely tuned propaganda machine beat them to the punch. Posters and papers blared headlines that the revolution was on, and Hitler and Ludendorff were leading it.

  Around 11 a.m., a detachment of state police was finally sent to guard the bridge that led from the putsch hall into the heart of the city. Their orders were crafted as if for a column of schoolchildren: if confronted by the putschers, they were not to resist actively but only to politely ask them to please take another route. Everyone was still on the fence.

  BARON MICHAEL VON GODIN

  Baron Michael von Godin was one of the sensible, moral, and nameless middle managers in the sea of German radicalism who put his life on the line to try to stop Hitler and the fascists. A senior lieutenant in charge of the company of Bavarian state police that faced down Hitler and Ludendorff in the Odeonplatz, he gave the order to fire upon them, ending the putsch. For this act, the Nazis hounded him until he retired in 1926 and was forced to leave the country. When he returned in May 1933, he was captured and tor­tured by the Nazis for eight months before he was finally allowed to leave again, due to some hiccup in the Nazi horror apparatus. After World War II he became the chief of the Bavarian police.

  Hitler sent his bodyguards to take the police HQ, but when the leader pounded on the door they were politely but firmly turned away. Instead of attacking the HQ, he decided to check in with the putsch hall. Goering told him to come back — there had been a change in plan. The founding mem­bers of the group that was to kill and terrorize millions had packed up their machine guns and meekly marched back to the beer hall, where Hitler had found time in his schedule to fit in an interview. They found him holding his first international press conference with reporters from the New York Times and other American newspapers.

  Back to Goering. After getting the um-pah band together and needing something more to do, he took the city council hostage and made sure the good citizens of Munich were flying the Nazi flag. But the state police were finally posting themselves on the bridges separating eastern Munich from the western part. It was almost noon, and except for Goering’s energetic hostage taking, nothing much was happen­ing. Hitler and Ludendorff realized something had to be done or the putsch would fail. Reports came in that police and army reinforcements had moved out in force to surround Röhm and the flag-clutching Himmler, who were both still holed up at the war ministry where Hitler and Ludendorff had forgotten them.

  Ludendorff knew they must immediately attack or re­treat. Retreat to the hills was rejected. Hitler wanted to wait until they got an answer from the deposed crown prince, but their messenger was still on the train. Ludendorff chose neither and oddly decided to march peacefully from the beer hall to the center of town in a triumphant procession to try to sway the populace to their side, and presumably lead on to Berlin. Hitler didn’t like the idea, most likely because it wasn’t his, but Ludendorff, wearing his revolutionary tweed cap instead of his spiked Pickelhaube, commanded “we march.” Swept up in revolutionary fervor he blithely aban­doned the most basic of infantry tactics, such as attacking your enemy.

  Not even Hitler could hold back the bullheaded general when he finally worked up a full head of steam. The band, still unpaid, packed up its instruments and went home. Ludendorff, the Great War hero, Hitler, the ingénue, and his retinue of thousands of desperate soldiers of fortune would have to march to victory unaccompanied by music. Hitler, Ludendorff, and Goering fronted a column and marched from the putsch hall toward the center of town a few hundred yards away. After presumably declining to take another route when asked by the police, the bridge into downtown Munich was stormed by Hitler’s bodyguards who easily pushed aside the police troopers gamely blocking their way. The march moved on.

  The morning papers and the posters had done their job: the populace was turning out to cheer them on. At every corner they seemed to be gaining strength. It was the glori­ous first morning of the Nazi revolution. The confusion of the night before was vanishing in the festive morning air. In the Marienplatz, about a mile west of the river, they came to another line of state police
but this time veered around them and kept marching. Singing broke out. Hitler, Ludendorff and the others linked arms. It was just how they dreamed it would be.

  Then they turned another corner and confronted a line of police at the entrance to the Odeonplatz, in the heart of Munich. The marchers pushed the police back into the square. The police stiffened. A shot rang out. Hitler’s reliably brutal bodyguards attacked with drawn bayonets. More shots rang out as the crowd scattered.

  The shooting lasted for almost a minute. The volley of police gunfire had devastated the column, scattering the marchers, except for the implacable Ludendorff, gloriously and stubbornly out of touch now with even his own immedi­ate environment. He picked himself up off the street, stepped over the dead and wounded, and marched straight through the police lines into captivity.

  The man marching next to Hitler was shot dead while Hitler’s bodyguard, a beefy ex-wrestler named Ulrich Graf, yanked Hitler to the ground and took eight bullets in order to shield the future murderer of millions from death. Hitler suffered a badly strained shoulder before fleeing in a waiting car. Goering, hit badly in the groin, crawled into a nearby house where he was patched up by the wife of a Jewish busi­nessman and her sister, and then smuggled into Austria. (Goering later helped the sisters escape Germany on the eve of World War II.)

  Enough of the putschers managed to return fire to kill four state policemen. The rest of them fled like rats, leaving four­teen of their putschmates dead in the street.

  The putsch was over, ending ignominiously less than a day after it started.

  WHAT HAPPENED AFTER

  Hitler fled to a farmhouse outside the city, where he was rounded up a couple days later like a common criminal. Goering’s wound at the Odeonplatz led him to a morphine addic­tion that would plague him to the end of his life. Himmler and his pet flag, along with most of the putschists’ troops, were al­lowed to march out the back door of the War Ministry by sympathetic troops when Röhm surrendered. Röhm was ca­shiered from the army, sent to prison, and then sailed to Bo­livia as a military consultant to its fascist-leaning government.

  Ulrich Graf, the bodyguard who saved Hitler’s life, was dropped from Hitler’s inner circle after he got out of prison.

  The whole affair was soft-pedaled by the courts, and Hitler and his coterie were given ten months easy time in Landesberg prison, a cushy castle, where the putative dicta­tor used the time to finally jot down his thoughts about taking over the world in a book titled Mein Kampf.

  Hitler and his gang finally gained widespread success by using their vile messages to seduce the one power in Ger­many that could free them to do their evil bidding: the German army high command.

  EIGHT.

  THE CHACO WAR: 1932

  Some countries have never won a war. You might say they inhabit the losers’ bracket of history. To them the way out of that bracket is to beat somebody. Anybody. But what they don’t understand is beating another loser won’t put them in the winners’ bracket; it’ll just elevate them in the losers’ bracket.

  Two members of the losers’ bracket are Paraguay and Bo­livia. Paraguay had fought the disastrous War of the Triple Alliance, while Bolivia suffered a huge defeat during the War of the Pacific, leaving both countries poor and landlocked. Gradually it occurred to them that the only path to the win­ner’s circle of history lay in beating the other. For decades they circled each other and prepared, which in their military traditions meant barely prepared. In 1932 neither was even close to battle-ready, but it seemed as if history itself had doomed them to fight. It became the bloodiest fight of the century in North and South America.

  In the end nothing was gained or lost, except for a lot of lives and treasure.

  THE PLAYERS

  Marshal José Félix Estigarribia — smart and calm, Estigarribia quickly rose through the officer ranks to lead the Paraguayan troops. As preparation to commanding Paraguay’s army he spent three years in France and graduated from the French army’s Staff College the year after Charles de Gaulle.

  Skinny — As a young man he was recognized as an outstanding officer and sent to Chile for additional training with its professional army.

  Props — His victories gained more worthless territory for Paraguay than any other military leader in its history.

  Pros — Despite years of French military training, he managed to win a few battles for his country.

  Cons — Crowned himself dictator after the war.

  General Hans Kundt — Bolivia’s secret weapon, known by the clever nickname of “el Aleman” — the German — because he was from Ger­many. Kundt, a German staff officer, first went to Bolivia in 1911 to help build the army and returned there after World War I to moon­light as army commander. In 1930, however, he fled Bolivia after a coup knocked him and his presidential ally from office. Then, with his adopted land of the perpetual dictator in trouble against Para­guay, he became “Das Ringer” who returned from exile and in 1933 brought Bolivia to the brink of victory.

  Skinny — He fought under the Kaiser in World War I, rising to the rank of brigadier general.

  Props — He came from Germany where they know how to fight wars.

  Pros — Willingly returned to Bolivia. Reason for Bolivians to cheer.

  Cons — Often confused Bolivia with Bavaria and vice versa.

  THE GENERAL SITUATION

  War has been a mixed blessing for both Bolivia and Paraguay. On one hand, both fought bitter and calamitous wars that left them devastated. On the other, the wars are the main reason outsiders read about the two countries.

  Paraguay, led by its feckless dictator, Francisco Solano López, and his beautiful but venomous mistress, the Irish-born and Parisian-trained lovelady, Eliza Lynch, started a war against Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay in 1865. The war came to an end in 1870 when the Brazilians shot López on a river-bank and forced Lynch to bury him in a shallow grave. A few years later Bolivia joined Paraguay in the loser’s bracket. Bo­livia started an ill-advised war over birdshit profits with Chile and resulted in a crushing, smelly defeat outdone in stupidity only by their Peruvian allies, who continued on long after the war was lost. The war left Bolivia landlocked and burning with a deep desire to extract revenge on somebody, anybody, most likely a neighbor it had not yet fought a war against.

  By the 1920s, it became clear to both countries’ dictators du jour that their only chance to drink from the sweet cup of military victory was beating up the other. Each country si­multaneously arrived at the same conclusion: We can take them. To top it off, both countries had found the perfect reason to fight a meaningless war: the same perfectly mean­ingless piece of land.

  This is called the Chaco. Few have heard of it. Fewer have been there. And even fewer stayed. No one has ever reported enjoying it. Located in the center of South America, the Chaco consists of hot, steamy swampland in the summer and dry desert in the winter — and somehow manages to incorpo­rate the worst of both. It’s a vast, flat homeland for an army of ants, piranhas, jaguars, snakes, spiders, and horrible-smelling air. Those who’ve been there nostalgically describe it as a green hell. Its few inhabitants are Indians apparently unaware that other members of the human race spend their days without being surrounded by terrorizing clouds of over­sized flies and belligerent mosquitoes. Adding to the other charms of the Chaco is its lack of water. Plenty exists to support vast mosquito swarms, but not enough for humans. Water holes are miles apart and are often not sufficient to sustain large numbers of people. To fight in the Chaco, armies needed to first think about water.

  Bolivia had a reason to control sections of the Chaco. The landlocked country had no hope of gaining access to the ocean through its archenemy Chile, so it looked east. By taking the Chaco they would obtain access to the Atlantic through a series of rivers. For their part, equally landlocked Paraguay wanted the Chaco to expand its harvest of the que­bracho tree, whose bark yielded valuable tannins, one of the country’s few exports.

  On a deepe
r level, however, were the feelings held by both countries’ leaders that this was a chance they could not afford to lose. Bolivians were tired of being pushed around by their more powerful neighbors and to accept anything less than total control of the Chaco was too much even for them. Getting manhandled by Chile was not fun but understand­able. Getting pushed around by Paraguay would be too hu­miliating to consider. Paraguay held similar but more desperate feelings. After suffering its devastating defeat in the war of the triple beating, the country was on trigger alert for any neighborly aggression. Showing weakness would leave the country vulnerable to attack and dismemberment, ending its extended experiment in isolated poverty. Like a small, wounded animal, Paraguay needed to be tough and vigilant at all times.

  The tension between Paraguay and Bolivia escalated over the decades, and by the 1920s the drumbeat of failure in both countries ratcheted up the pressure. Clearly something big was going to happen. Skirmishing broke out. Army raids back and forth kept everyone on edge. Diplomatic relations broke off, only to be reestablished months later. Each held back from attacking only because they lacked any semblance of a functioning military.

  On paper, Bolivia held a huge advantage in the coming fight. Its population was about three times Paraguay’s and its potential army equally bigger. Plus, Bolivia had a thriving tin exporting business, producing a strong income stream for the country. Paraguay exported only tea and unskilled workers.

  To prepare for the coming conflict, the combatants went on buying sprees. In 1926, Bolivia contracted with a British firm for a large shipment of warplanes, artillery, small arms, and mounds of ammunition. But they never got the full ship­ment of weapons (possibly because they never paid in full), and what they did receive often didn’t work. These minor details failed to discourage the wound-up Bolivians. They didn’t fully appreciate that unpaid-for weapons sitting in warehouses in Great Britain can’t help win wars.