by Unknown
THIRD REICH
VICTORIOUS
Alternate Decisions of World War II
Edited by Peter G. Tsouras
Copyright © 2012 by Lionel Leventhal Limited
This electronic format is published by Tantor eBooks,
a division of Tantor Media, Incorporated,
and was produced in the year 2012.
Contents
List of Maps
Contributors
Introduction
1. The Little Admiral
Hitler and the German Navy, 1939
Wade G. Dudley
2. Disaster at Dunkirk
The Defeat of Britain, 1940
Stephen Badsey
3. The Battle of Britain
Triumph of the Luftwaffe, 1940
Charles Messenger
4. The Storm and the Whirlwind
Zhukov Strikes First
Gilberto Villahermosa
5. The Hinge
Alamein to Basra, 1942
Paddy Griffith
6. Into the Caucasus
The Turkish Attack on Russia, 1942
John H. Gill
7. Known Enemies and Forced Allies
Sicily and Kursk, 1943
John D. Burtt
8. Luftwaffe Triumphant
Defeat of the Allied Bomber Offensive, 1944-45
David C. Isby
9. Hitler’s Bomb
Target: London and Moscow
Forrest R. Lindsey
10. Rommel versus Zhukov
Decision in the East, 1944-45
Peter G. Tsouras
Images
Maps
“A Date Which Will Live in Infamy”
The German Breakthrough
The German Invasion
Luftwaffe Assault on Group 11
Operation Storm
Operation Whirlwind
El Alamein
North Africa
Turkey’s War
Plans for Kursk
Kutusov and Rumianstev Offensives
Sicily
Operation Suvorov
DR. STEPHEN BADSEY M.A. (Cantab.) FR.Hist.S. is a senior lecturer in the Department of War Studies at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. He is a specialist in military theory and in media presentations of warfare. He has written or contributed to over fifty books and articles about warfare, as well as appearing frequently on television and in other media.
JOHN D. BURTT is the editor of Paper Wars magazine, an independent review journal devoted to war games, as well as a nuclear engineering contractor for the United States Navy. However, his real love is military history. A former Marine sergeant and a veteran of Vietnam, he holds a master’s degree in military history and is pursuing a Ph.D. in the same field. He contributed a chapter in Rising Sun Victorious: The Alternate History of How the Japanese Won the Pacific War and has written for Command, Strategy & Tactics, and The Wargamer, and was the original editor of CounterAttack magazine.
WADE G. DUDLEY holds a master’s degree in maritime history and nautical archaeology from East Carolina University (1997) and a doctorate in history from the University of Alabama (1999). He contributed chapters to Sarpedon’s Great Raids in History and Greenhill’s Rising Sun Victorious. Two of his books—a short biography of Sir Francis Drake, and an examination of the British blockade of the United States in the War of 1812—were published in 2002. He is a visiting assistant professor of history at East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina.
COLONEL JOHN H. GILL, U.S. Army. Jack Gill is the author of With Eagles to Glory: Napoleon and His German Allies in the 1809 Campaign (Greenhill, 1992) and the editor of A Soldier for Napoleon (Greenhill, 1998). In addition to numerous articles and papers on Napoleonic military affairs and a chapter in The Peninsular War (Spellmount, 1998), he has contributed chapters to three speculative history collections: The Hitler Options, The Napoleon Options, and Rising Sun Victorious. He received his B.A. from Middlebury College in 1977 (double major: history and German) and his M.A. from George Washington University in 1987 (international relations). He resides in Virginia with his wife, Lt. Col. Anne Rieman, and their two sons, Grant and Hunter.
PADDY GRIFFITH is a freelance author and publisher. His books include The Viking Art of War, Battle Tactics of the Civil War, Battle Tactics of the Western Front, and The Art of War of Revolutionary France. He is currently writing a book about the desert war, 1941-42.
DAVID C. ISBY is a Washington-based attorney and national security consultant and adjunct professor at American Military University. He has a B.A. in history and a J.D. in international law. A former editor of Strategy & Tactics magazine, he has also served as a congressional staff member. He has designed nineteen conflict simulations and been awarded two Charles Roberts awards for excellence in this field. He has written or edited twenty books, including several dealing with World War II: G.I. Victory, The Luftwaffe Fighter Force: The View from the Cockpit, and Fighting the Invasion: The German Army at D-Day.
LIEUTENANT COLONEL FORREST R. LINDSEY, USMC (ret.) served nearly thirty years in the United States Marine Corps, including combat in Vietnam. His special assignments included nuclear weapons testing with the Defense Nuclear Agency, United Nations Truce Supervisor in Egypt, and arms control treaty Inspection Team Leader in the former Soviet Union. His regular duties included appointments as battalion operations officer, regimental logistics officer, and commanding officer of the 5th Battalion, 11th Marines. Upon retirement from active duty in 1996, he continued working with the Marine Corps as senior engineer for the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory, responsible for weapons experimentation and precision targeting. He has written several articles on professional military issues in the Marine Corps Gazette and contributed a chapter to Rising Sun Victorious.
CHARLES MESSENGER was a regular officer in the British Royal Tank Regiment for twenty years before beginning a second career as a professional military historian and defense analyst. He is the author of numerous books, including The Art of Blitzkrieg, “Bomber” Harris and the Strategic Bombing Offensive against Germany, 1939-1945, The Commandos 1940-1946, The Century of Warfare, and biographies of SS General Sepp Dietrich and Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt. He is also the editor of The Reader’s Guide to Military History. He has carried out numerous historical studies for the British Ministry of Defense and written and helped to direct a number of TV documentary series.
LIEUTENANT COLONEL PETER G. TSOURAS, U.S. Army Reserve (ret.) is a senior analyst for the Battelle Corporation in Crystal City, Virginia. He was formerly a senior intelligence analyst at the U.S. Army National Ground Intelligence Center’s Washington office. He served in the army as a tank officer in the 1st Bn/64th Armor Regiment, 3rd Infantry Division, in Germany, and subsequently in intelligence and Adjutant Generals’ Corps assignments from 1970 to 1981. He retired from the Army Reserve as a lieutenant colonel in 1994 after serving as a Civil Affairs officer. His assignments have taken him to Somalia, Russia, Ukraine, and Japan. He is the author or editor of twenty-one books on international military themes, military history, and alternate military history, including Rising Sun Victorious, Disaster at D-Day, Gettysburg: An Alternate History, The Great Patriotic War, The Anvil of War, Fighting in Hell, The Greenhill Dictionary of Military Quotations, Civil War Quotations, Changing Orders: Evolution of the World’s Armies, and Warlords of the Ancient Americas. He has also written numerous chapters in other books and many journal articles, and has been interviewed frequently on television and radio.
COLONEL GILBERTO VILLAHERMOSA is a historian with the U.S. Army’s Center of Military History at Fort McNair, Washington, D.C. A twenty-two-year veteran, he is a West Point graduate, Armor officer and Master Parachutist.
Colonel Villahermosa was a senior graduate fellow at the Soviet Ministry of Defense Center for Military History in Moscow under Col. Gen. Dmitrii Volkogonov in 1990, when he first worked with the actual document upon which his chapter is based. He has served with the Armored Cavalry in Germany and the 82nd Airborne Division’s light armor battalion at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. He was also a Soviet analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency, U.S. military representative to Georgia and Tajikistan, and adviser on Russia and Eurasia to the NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe. Colonel Villahermosa holds master’s degrees in international affairs and philosophy of political science from Columbia University, as well as a certificate in advanced Soviet studies from the university’s Harriman Institute. He has published articles on the Napoleonic Wars, the Soviet Army, and the U.S. Army in Armor, Army, and Napoleon magazines. He has also authored a series of entries on the U.S. military for Dictionary of American History (Scribner’s).
The Germans win World War II. It is an unsettling, even horrifying proposition for a book. It is also thought-provoking. All too often history, and especially military history, is seen as running down an already approved and well-worn groove. We won World War II because we were meant to win it. It is a gratifying but dangerous road to travel. If we have learned anything about history it is that we hold it in our hands like a lump of wet clay.
The actions of not only great men and women, the warlords, heroes, and geniuses, constantly shape our history, but also the actions of countless nameless people. The guard who is so bone weary but also so resolved to do his duty that he must rest his chin on his bayonet to stay awake, in his own way, is a mighty shaper of history. An army consisting of such men will do great things. A soldier who carelessly falls asleep on guard, and the leadership that lets him, will also make a mark in history. Decision, reason, and character are mighty ingredients in the makeup of history.
These are the rational elements of human history-making, but there are others, ephemeral qualities not subject to human construction—chance and opportunity. That they occur is powerful enough. History then is also essentially about the interplay between them. I have explored this concept in the companion volume to this book, Rising Sun Victorious: The Alternate History of How the Japanese Won the Pacific War (Greenhill, 2001). It is worth restating:
The interplay between chance and opportunity is the heartbeat of war. Clausewitz touched on it when he said, “War is the realm of chance. No other human activity gives it greater scope: no other has such incessant and varied dealings with this intruder. Chance makes everything more uncertain and interferes with the whole course of events.”1 And Napoleon put his finger on the relationship, “War is composed of nothing but accidents, and … a general should never lose sight of everything to enable him to profit from these accidents; that is the mark of genius.”2 This book examines the ways not taken, the stillborn possibilities that might have grown to mighty events.
The war against the Germans could have been lost a number of times. Each of the ten chapters in this book explores a different door leading to that dark end. Each is a self-contained examination of one particular battle, campaign, or event in the context of its own alternate reality. These are ten authors’ separate approaches. Since each chapter sets in motion new events, each generates new ground from the historian’s perspective. Each is to be read as if it were actual history. This approach best conveys the sense of events. If the Germans win the Battle of Britain, for example, different historical works would appear in time. These different works appear in the endnotes along with those reflecting actual events. They are woven together to present a seamless alternate history.
The use of “alternate reality” notes, of course, poses a risk to the unwary reader who may make strenuous efforts to acquire a new and fascinating source. To avoid an epidemic of frustrating and futile searches, the “alternate” notes are either noted as such or indicated with an asterisk (*) before the number. All works appearing in the bibliographies included separately in each chapter, however, are genuine.
The chapters are presented in chronological order. So it is appropriate that the peril of Britain dominates the first chapters. For truly the sceptered isle was the only bar to a quick and easy victory for Hitler. In Chapter 1, “The Little Admiral,” Wade Dudley takes a unique approach, reaching back deep into the century to explore the astounding consequences of a young Hitler whose military service is with the German Navy in World War I. Britain had triumphed at sea for over three hundred years, defeating would-be conquerors of Europe who mercifully did not understand sea power. How would it have fared against an evil genius who fixed upon the Royal Navy as Britain’s center of gravity?
The next two chapters concentrate on other perils facing Britain in the early part of the war. In Chapter 2, “Disaster at Dunkirk,” Stephen Badsey draws a picture of the destruction of the British Expeditionary Force on the continent, a fate it missed by a hairsbreadth, and the subsequent advancement of the invasion of Britain itself. Charles Messenger writes in Chapter 3 of a Battle of Britain in which a few changes in reasoning and luck would have spelled the end of the Fighter Command’s ability to defend the English skies.
As Hitler turned his back on a still defiant Britain and plotted against the Soviet Union, history briefly waved a great opportunity before him and then withdrew it before he knew it. Stalin contemplated attacking first in 1941. Gil Villahermosa draws a thought-provoking description in Chapter 4, “The Storm and the Whirlwind,” of massed Soviet armies commanded by Zhukov attacking into the teeth of the German forces themselves assembling for Operation Barbarossa, Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union.
In the middle period of the war, fate then hands Britain back the key to defeat as Paddy Griffith describes in Chapter 5, “The Hinge,” how close Rommel came to snapping the hinge of three continents in 1942 at El Alamein. Also in 1942, in Chapter 6, “Into the Caucasus,” Jack Gill examines the fascinating possibilities inherent in Turkey’s entry into the war on the side of Germany. Turkey was the largest neutral state outside of the Americas. Its entry into the war on the side of Germany in 1942 would have stretched Soviet resources at their weakest moment. John Burtt rounds out the middle period of the war in Chapter 7, “Known Enemies and Forced Allies,” with the twin battles in time—Kursk and Sicily, each a close thing and surprisingly interrelated.
The discussion of the final period of the war, 1944-45, addresses the possibilities of air power and technology in two chapters. In Chapter 8, “Luftwaffe Triumphant,” David Isby describes the possibility for defeat of the Combined Bomber Offensive, which in reality was so vital to the steady destruction of the German ability to manage and supply war. Forrest Lindsey then addresses the horrendous consequences of Germany developing the atomic bomb first. No other weapon so embodied Hitler’s compulsion to destruction. It is inconceivable that, if such a weapon had been available to him, he would not have immediately and gleefully used it.
Finally, in Chapter 10, “Rommel Versus Zhukov,” I draw a scenario in which Germany could have escaped destruction as late as August 1944. The Soviet steamroller seemed invincible by then and its victory inevitable. Yet, even after the destruction of Army Group Center, Germany theoretically had the resources to achieve at least a stalemate on the Eastern Front. It is an optimum scenario but one that shows that, absent Hitler, rational German leadership had a chance for victory—not the victory of conquest, but of survival.
Peter G. Tsouras
Alexandria, Virginia
2002
Notes
1. Clausewitz., Carl von, On War, edited and translated by Howard, Michael, and Paret, Peter (Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1976) 101.
2. Napoleon, The Military Maxims of Napoleon, tr. Burnod (1827), in Phillips, T.R., ed., Roots of Strategy (Stackpole Books, Harrisburg, PA, 1985) 436.
CHAPTER 1
The Little Admiral
Hitler and the German Navy, 1939
Wade G. Dudley
Introduction
We are the sum of our experiences. Change any of those experiences, and you change the person. Change the person, and you may just change the world. Make that person a young Adolf Hitler, and things do get interesting …
An Undying Enmity, 1914-19