Blitzed

by Norman Ohler

  The first battle began in the morning. The Belgian defenders had entrenched themselves near Martelange, a small border community, in bunkers on a hillside. In front of them lay a slope, several hundred yards of open terrain: impossible to take except by a frontal attack, which was apparent suicide. But that’s exactly what the pepped-up infantrymen of the Wehrmacht did. The Belgians, shocked by this fearless behavior, retreated. Rather than securing their position, as military practice would normally have decreed, the completely uninhibited attackers immediately chased after them and set their enemies unambiguously to flight. This first clash was symptomatic.

  After three days the division commander reported that they had reached the French border. Sedan lay in front of the Germans; many of them had not shut their eyes since the start of the campaign. And they still couldn’t rest: the German artillery fire was scheduled for 4 p.m. on the dot, and the massive wave of dive bombers was rolling in from the sky. Whenever the pilots of the Luftwaffe began their breakneck plunge and hurtled vertically down, they turned on their wailing sirens, the so-called horns of Jericho, which were followed by mighty explosions. Windowpanes rattled with the blasts and the houses of the border city shook. Meth unleashed charge after charge in German brains, neurotransmitters were released, exploded in the synaptic gaps, burst, and dispersed their explosive cargo: neuronal paths twitched, gap junctions flared, everything whirred and roared. Down below the defenders cowered, their bunkers shaking. The siren wail of the plunging planes drilled into their ears and left their nerves bare.66

  In the course of the hours that followed, 60,000 Germans, 22,000 vehicles, and 850 tanks crossed the river: “We felt a kind of high, an exceptional state,” one participant reported. “We were sitting in our vehicles, covered in dust, exhausted and wired.”67 In a rush they had never experienced before, the Germans took the French border city. “The pugnacious desire to defeat the enemy in chivalrous combat will never fade,” says the official Wehrmacht report.68 In fact Pervitin made an enormous contribution to putting the soldiers in a warlike mood.

  French military reinforcements arrived a few crucial hours too late. The Germans had already crossed the Meuse. The dam was broken. Until their capitulation the French were no match for Germany’s chemically enhanced dynamism. They kept acting too slowly, were surprised and overrun, and continually failed to grab the initiative. A Wehrmacht report dryly states: “The French must have been thrown into such confusion by the sudden appearance of our tanks that their defense was carried out very weakly.”69

  The French historian Marc Bloch, who fought for his country in May and June 1940, analyzes the breakdown of French troops as a “mental defeat”: “Our soldiers were baulked, they allowed themselves to be thwarted much too easily, because our thinking was too slow.” The French brains were not dominated by the same euphorically tinted exceptional situation. “We encountered the Germans everywhere, they were crisscrossing the terrain,” Bloch writes, describing the crazed confusion that the attackers were sowing: “They believed in action and unpredictability. We were built on immobility and on the familiar. During the whole campaign the Germans maintained their terrible habit of appearing precisely where they shouldn’t have been: they didn’t stick to the rules of the game. . . . Which means that certain, hardly deniable, weaknesses are chiefly due to the excessively slow rhythm that our brains have been taught.”70

  French losses through bombing were relatively small on this first day in Sedan, with fifty-seven dead. It was more the psychological effects provoked by the attack of the unfettered Germans that were so devastating. This was a campaign that was decided in the psyche. A French investigative report described the quick crossing of the Meuse by the Germans and the failure of the French defense as a “phénomène d’hallucination collective.”71

  Time Is Meth

  Blitzkrieg was guided by methamphetamine. If not to say that Blitzkrieg was founded on methamphetamine.

  —Dr. Peter Steinkamp, medical historian72

  Where an invasion is concerned, the advantages of stimulants are obvious: war is played out in space and time. Speed is crucial. One exception to this was the First World War, where minimal territorial gains were won over four whole years of fighting. But if, for example, Napoleon had been able to lead his troops out into the field two hours earlier at the Battle of Waterloo, things might have turned out very differently.

  In the Wehrmacht report the methamphetamine-soaked advance of Guderian is described like this: “The General drives alone along the southern bank of the Maas [Meuse] in his off-road vehicle and heads off toward Donchery . . . engines firing, without rest or peace, day and night, as far as his fuel allows.”73 The reality is less harmless than these lines suggest. Thousands of people died in this invasion of France, which served as a blueprint for later campaigns, waged as it was in an innovative, unparalleled fashion.74 Guderian—with his grey moustache and his trademark binoculars around his neck—spoke of a miracle, but in fact he was the one who had during those days and nights invented the Blitzkrieg. In less than a hundred hours the Germans gained more territory than they had in over four years in the First World War. In planning the operation, Panzer Group von Kleist, of which Guderian was also part, had been given operational freedom as long as they could move fast enough and drive the front ahead of them. As soon as the tanks faltered, the group would be integrated into the structure as a whole. This instruction was now revealed to be a clever piece of planning: the squad developed the ambition never to falter and therefore be absorbed into the rest. Quite the contrary, they refused to be stopped and kept advancing, like the tip of a lance.

  From Sedan onward Guderian was practically autonomous, out in front in his armored radio car, flanked by his ordnance officers in motorcycle combinations. His intention was no longer to secure the position and then to set up the bridgehead in an orderly fashion, following the rules. After taking the border city he charged on even though he was given a strict order to stop. In the rush of the campaign he became wholly insubordinate. He no longer needed flank protection; it was a matter of being faster than anyone who could have come at him from the side. He didn’t worry about supplies; he already had everything his unit needed. An ingenious supply system guaranteed that even the furthest forward tanks always had enough fuel, and Pervitin was distributed by the Main Medical Park, the Wehrmacht’s wholesale pharmacist.75

  Four days passed, and the Allies were still being completely taken by surprise. They couldn’t adjust to this unpredictable invader who didn’t act methodically but was simply focused on reaching the Atlantic Coast as quickly as possible, to make the encirclement perfect. The journey there would be achieved through a kind of ad hoc planning in which methamphetamine played a crucial part.

  “We drive as fast as convoy travel permits. The general has his men run the operation as smoothly as possible. We covered huge distances today. Two officers from a French supply column are presented to the General: ‘Oh, the Germans very fast—très, très vite.’ They are flummoxed at suddenly having been caught. They had no idea where and when we were coming from. . . . On we progress to Montcornet. All the vehicles on this stretch are going at full speed. The general has to assign new roads for us to travel along. It’s all so incredibly fast,”76 as the report on Guderian’s advance has it. “In the market square the French are still getting out of their trucks, for a stretch they travel along in our column. No one has had time to take care of the town. The general stops at the church and regulates the traffic with his adjutant. One division off to the right, the other to the left. Everyone is chasing along as if in a race.”77

  The Blitzkrieg had unleashed itself and became autonomous—and in those hectic spring days of May 1940 it embodied the evolving modern age, bursting all its bonds, crossing every boundary. From now on, uppers were indispensable.

  The Crystal Fox

  Erwin Rommel, later the best known of all the German generals, wasn’t an expert on tanks but came from the infantry, the r
ank and file of the army. But it was his ignorance of the steel giants and their possible movements that helped him advance in a completely unconventional way. He led his 7th Panzer Division intuitively, like a shock troop. Instead of waiting until the assault engineers had built pontoons, he put his massively heavy vehicles onto ferries across the rivers of France—and it worked. Winston Churchill, named British prime minister on the day of the German invasion, was rarely wider off the mark than when he tried to reassure his French colleague, Prime Minister Paul Reynaud: “All experience shows that the offensive will come to an end after a while. . . . After five or six days, they have to halt for supplies, and the opportunity for counterattack is presented.”78

  Rommel didn’t halt. Too nimble to offer a target, he drove and drove and drove, taking advantage as Guderian had done of the excellent German logistics and becoming a kind of deadly joker, always playing high and wild, becoming unpredictable, uncontrollable, unstoppable. They admired him at headquarters: “I’d like to go right to the front like General Rommel. He’s the greatest daredevil, always in the first combat vehicle of his division!”79 Even his superior, General Hermann Hoth, couldn’t issue him with orders, because by the time these written documents arrived on the battlefield, Rommel was already miles away and out of radio contact. He had no apparent sense of danger—a typical symptom of excessive methamphetamine consumption. Even in the middle of the night he stormed on and attacked solid positions while still in motion, firing all barrels like a sort of berserker, constantly catching his adversaries on the back foot. The French despaired at the sight of the unleashed monsters coming at full speed toward their artillery. What on earth were they supposed to do? There were no instructions on how to defend yourself in that situation; they’d never practiced it in maneuvers.

  Toward the end of that first week of the attack there was a ghostly scene that casts a sharp light on the German advance: in the early hours of May 17, 1940, Rommel, no longer answerable to any of his superiors, tore along the road from Solre-le-Château, right in the north of France, toward Avesnes. As chance would have it, the 5th Infantry Division, parts of the 18th Infantry Division, and the 1st Infantry Division of the French Army had struck their bivouac on that very spot. Rommel didn’t hesitate for a second. He dashed through them, crushing everyone and everything, fired broadsides, and over the next six miles he pushed hundreds of vehicles and tanks, along with the dead and wounded, into the ditches on either side and rattled on with blood-smeared tracks, standing between two officers from his staff in the armored command post vehicle, his cap pushed to the back of his head, leading the attack.80

  The Blitzkrieg by the Germans, who no longer had to sleep, had breached all boundaries. The seed was sown for future orgies of violence. There was an impression that these soldiers could be stopped by nothing and no one, and they gradually appeared to believe their own propaganda, which claimed they were truly superior. Methamphetamine, which encourages arrogance, supported this false assessment of the situation. The first rumors of the “unconquerable Wehrmacht” started making the rounds. The French war minister, Édouard Daladier, in the Élysée Palace, wouldn’t have it and yelled his disbelief down the receiver when his commander in chief, Maurice Gamelin, told him of the defeat on May 15 at 8:30 p.m. “No! What you’re telling me is impossible! You must be mistaken! It’s impossible!” The boches were already eighty miles from Paris—and there were no French reserves to protect the capital. Everything had gone so fast. “Is that supposed to mean that the French army is beaten?” Daladier’s expression was one of utter dejection.81 “I was dumbfounded,” Churchill recorded in his memoirs. “I admit that this was one of the greatest surprises in my life.”82

  The Germans had won the war in Europe after only a few days. Well, almost.

  Hitler Doesn’t Understand the Blitzkrieg

  At the moment it looks like the greatest military disaster in history.

  —General Edmund Ironside, chief of the Imperial General Staff, about the situation of the Allies on May 17, 194083

  A most ungratifying day. The Führer is extremely nervous. He is afraid of his own success, doesn’t want to risk anything and would ideally like to stop us.

  —Franz Halder, head of the Army General Staff, also on May 17, 194084

  He rages and roars, he’s on the way to spoiling the whole operation and exposing himself to defeat.

  —Halder, a day later85

  The rapid progress of events surprised everyone in the General Staff. The military departments worked day and night, collected telephone messages about the various sections, and constantly corrected the position of the front. At midday and in the evening Major General Jodl delivered the situation report in the Felsennest headquarters. But the restless and impatient sleepwalker Hitler got up from his couch in the middle of the night, left his bunker, which was protected with reinforced concrete walls a yard and a half thick, and found his bearings from the luminous phosphorus strips, tapping his way through the dark oak grove to the map house, where Jodl’s adjutant had already drawn a new battle line, farther to the West. The dictator sat down in the wicker chair until dawn, and only the constant motion of his jaws revealed his inner agitation and paradoxically bad mood.

  The Führer wasn’t leading this campaign. Instead he was panting along behind his headstrong, independent tank generals. Even though they were successful, the dictator could not cope with the fact that he had effectively handed over control. Was this still “his” war? Had the senior officers, who had been opposed to the attack for so long, now seized the initiative, and were they charging along faster than the planning in the map house allowed? Hitler’s fear of the highly specialized military officers, all better educated than him, a simple lance corporal, rushed to the forefront. He sensed problems where none existed and accused the generals of being drunk on victory, of not covering their flanks, making themselves vulnerable to attack: what if the Allies coming from Belgium and the south carried out a pincer attack on the extended front? In fact, because of the unholy confusion on the opposing side this had never been a possibility. But Hitler didn’t recognize reality. He was guided instead by his own anxieties, fueled by a latently smoldering inferiority complex.

  So in the spring of 1940, in the forest in the Eifel, the hopelessly overtaxed supreme commander made a crucial mistake when he decided to halt the full-throttle, whipped-up brain of the Wehrmacht. He had made his secret decision: he would disempower the army leadership as the locus of the war, whatever the cost. He just didn’t know how to do it yet. Everyone was going to see who was in control. He was firmly convinced that the physical resilience of a genius like himself was enough on its own to give him victory over his adversaries. When all the others lost their nerve he, and he alone, would be the one still standing. Physically he felt as strong as an ox and thought he could take on the whole world. So why not his own army command?

  Hitler’s personal physician also paradoxically experienced these days of heady success as a personal setback and defeat. He was constantly at the ready, but his services were barely used. He wrote to his wife: “Asked the Führer a few days ago if he had any complaints. He said no. He is really fit as a fiddle. He is fresh and cheerful. Medically there’s hardly anything for me to do here.”86 As a useless civilian Morell remained a hopeless outsider in the military command post, with its round-the-clock staff rotations. He was in everyone’s way, and many people felt repelled by both his presence and his role. It didn’t do him any good that he had himself made a fantasy uniform based on his own designs, with gold rods of Asclepius on its light grey and green collar, so that he didn’t have to go walking around in plain clothes anymore. His ridiculous outfit only earned him mockery from the generals. When he added an SS buckle to his black belt, objections were raised immediately because he wasn’t a member of the SS, and he had to get rid of it. He then, rather helplessly, chose a gold buckle that looked like something out of an operetta. He was envious of his rival, Hitler’s surgeon, who
had a proper Wehrmacht rank: “From today Dr. [Karl] Brandt wears the epaulettes of a lieutenant colonel (army).”87 In response, Morell tried to acquire his own regular rank as a military doctor, but his attempts fell on deaf ears. Even Hitler didn’t support him in his project. That was precisely the appeal of his personal physician: it was only if he remained an outsider, without a position in the Party, the Wehrmacht, or any other mass organization, that he couldn’t be manipulated or abused—and he belonged to him, the Führer, alone.