Hitler in Hell

by Martin van Creveld

  Amidst all this, my generals kept coming up with objections to any potential offensive we might launch against the West. But step by step, I shepherded them toward D Day and H Hour.

  21. Victory in the West

  On 6 October 1939 I addressed the Reichstag. This was in the midst of a period of several weeks during which the West and we put out peace feelers to each other. Once again, one of the intermediaries was the indefatigable Dahlerus. My speech, by convincing the German people that I wanted peace, served its purpose very well. But I cannot say that the talks were really meant in earnest. They were not, as far as I was able to determine, on the English side; adopting the pompous attitude so typical of them, they treated us as if they had just won a war and we had lost it! And not on mine. It was time to get serious. In other words, let the cannons have their say.

  Preparations for “Operation Yellow,” as we called the coming offensive against the West, proceeded slowly at first. To a large extent, it was Halder’s fault. At the time Halder, a Bavarian by birth, was fifty-five years old. He had an unrivaled capacity for work and a schoolmasterly manner I found irritating. He tended to patronize whoever he met; that was why, at one point, I told him he would never know my innermost thoughts. As Chief of the Army General Staff, he carried a larger share of the responsibility than any other officer did. Yet, paradoxically, among all our top commanders he was the general with the least confidence in the offensive. He kept raising difficulties and asking that it be postponed.

  His nominal superior, Brauchitsch, was even worse. His position between Halder and myself made him feel uncomfortable. So he made himself scarce by repeatedly leaving the headquarters and visiting the troops. To sound them out, he said. At one point he even wrote them an open letter concerning their sexual habits! Not exactly an ideal team to work with, I would say. But this was 1939-40, not 1938. We were in the midst of a major war. I could not change my most senior commanders while at the same time preparing the offensive which would determine the fate of Germany for the next thousand years. Or so I hoped.

  Before we could tackle the West, though, there were two other problems that worried us. One was the Allied intent to mine the Danube and to disrupt our oil shipments from Romania. The other was their attempts to do the same with respect to the Swedish iron ore that was being shipped to us by way of the Norwegian Leads. Nothing much came of the first plan. However, the second issue was vital to our existence and could not be ignored. Our intelligence sources told us, quite correctly as it turned out, that the English and the French were preparing to mine the Leads. Next, they were going to land troops at the ports of Narvik, Bergen, Trondheim, and Stavanger. We decided to forestall them by occupying Norway ourselves.

  As Raeder pointed out, doing so would provide us with another advantage. During the World War our submarines and surface blockade runners had greatly suffered from a lack of proper bases. In large part, it was a question of geography. Each in their time, Spain, the Netherlands, and France had all suffered from the same problem. Their way to the Atlantic, and hence the world’s remaining seas and oceans, was blocked by the British Isles standing in the way like sentries in front of a palace. The fact that the Republic of Ireland gained its independence soon after the First World War and remained neutral during the Second helped, but not by very much. In 1939, given how small and weak our navy was, we could not hope to avoid being blockaded just as we had been in 1914-18. But we could do something to give our submarines much greater freedom of action. And we did.

  Undertaking Operation Weserübung was one of the most risky military maneuvers in history. From Kiel to Narvik—look at the map! First, it had to be carried out in the teeth of the enemy’s crushing superiority at sea. Second, northwestern Scotland and the Orkneys, including the main English naval base at Scapa Flow, were much closer to central and northern Norway than our own bases. They enabled the English to make better use of their fleet and air force than we could. Third, the English had carriers whereas we did not. In such a situation only boldness, careful planning, secrecy, perfect execution, a gift for improvisation, and, above all, a bulldog-like determination to hold on could offer a way out. Overall command was in the hands of Hugo Sperrle, the air force officer who had cut his teeth in Spain. So unprepared were we that, initially at any rate, he had to use Bädeker maps, like a tourist! Truth be told, though, neither he nor any other German general had ever commanded anything like this operation.

  Our first troopships sailed on 7 April. On 9 April, the day on which hostilities proper began, we dealt with the tiny Danish air force, which was based around Copenhagen. Thereupon, the Danes, fearing we would bomb their capital as we had Warsaw, capitulated. Norway, a much larger and topographically very difficult, country, proved a tougher nut to crack. First, we sent naval forces into the Oslofjord in an attempt to reach the capital. However, the Norwegian coastal batteries were ready and opened fire. They sank the heavy cruiser Blücher and damaged the cruiser Lützow, forcing her to withdraw from the fight and to sail home for repairs. In the end we had to complete the job by flying in troops to occupy the local airfield. From there they marched into the city and took it over.

  Proceeding from south to north, our landings at Kristiansand, Bergen, and Trondheim went well. We met the strongest resistance at Kristiansand, where the cruiser Karlsruhe was hit and almost went to the bottom. However, in all three places we ended by attaining our objectives. Having captured the ports, our forces set out to occupy southeastern and central Norway as well. The narrow mountain passes, melting snow, and occasionally fierce Norwegian resistance obstructed their advance and slowed it down. Time and again the troops had to call on the Luftwaffe to deal with the defenders. It took longer than we had expected, but by the second week of May they had more or less accomplished their missions.

  The situation at Narvik, far to the north, was entirely different. Our commander on the spot was General Eduard Dietl, a Bavarian. I had known him since 1923, when he and his company had sided with us during the Putsch. Escorted by ten destroyers, he and his men took Narvik on 9-10 April. On their way out, though, the destroyers ran into a greatly superior English naval force that sank all ten of them.

  Next, the English sent their troops ashore. The vast distance between our bases and Narvik prevented the Luftwaffe from softening up the Norwegian units in this area as it had done further south. Joining the English, they captured the town, forcing Dietl to retreat into the surrounding mountains. There, greatly outnumbered, he continued the fight. At one point, so desperate was the situation that I considered ordering him to withdraw across the border to Sweden, where he and his forces would be interned. In the end, our victories in Benelux and France and his own strong nerves prevailed. The English withdrew, but not before fighting a naval battle in which they lost an aircraft carrier and we had one of our pocket battleships, the Scharnhorst, badly damaged. In June I awarded Dietl the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross. He was the first of my generals to receive that distinction; no one deserved it more.

  Our troops had performed magnificently. We suffered 5,296 casualties. Of those 2,375 were sunk at sea, 1,317 were killed on land, and 1,604 were wounded. Six of our submarines went to the bottom. So did one out of two heavy cruisers, two out of six light cruisers, and ten out of twenty destroyers. Several other warships suffered heavy damage. So badly was the surface fleet hit that it never quite recovered. We also lost about ten percent of our merchant fleet. The Luftwaffe’s losses totaled 90 aircraft. But the objective of Weserübung was achieved. Denmark and Norway were now in our hands.

  In Denmark we allowed the existing government to stay, under our control of course. In Norway things were different. The Norwegian government, with King Haakon VII at its head, had escaped to England. Hence we formed a new government under a former Minister of Defense, Vidkun Quisling, who agreed to take the job. Over his head I appointed my veteran Gauleiter, Josef Terboven, Reichskommissar for the occupied Norwegian Territories. During the rest of the war bot
h occupied countries remained almost perfectly calm. Norway met our expectations by providing our submarines with first-class bases, whereas Denmark delivered a considerable amount of our food.

  Compared to the tremendous drama now unfolding in the West, though, Scandinavia was a sideshow. Throughout the autumn and winter of 1939-40 the troops trained, and the problems that had plagued us in Poland were gradually solved. Meanwhile, my staff and I wrangled over the exact shape of the offensive to come. The French, remember, had built the Maginot Line to cover their frontier with us. That fact persuaded the Army High Command, with Halder at its head, to plan for a repetition of the Schlieffen Plan of 1914. The only essential difference was that, this time around, the Netherlands would not be spared.

  Then along came General Erich von Manstein. Haughty in manner, addicted to bridge, he was widely regarded as the army’s most outstanding strategic mind. At the time he was serving as Chief of Staff to Army Group A. The group was deployed opposite Northern France and Belgium between Army Group B on its right and Army Group C on its left. Working informally with Guderian, Manstein proposed moving the Schwerpunkt, or center of gravity, from our north to our center. The decisive point was to be Sedan, the little town where Moltke had encircled Emperor Louis Napoleon III and his army back in 1870. The problem was Halder. Halder was a conventional officer with a conventional officer’s mind. Considering the Ardennes passes too narrow for motorized formations to drive through, he did not like the plan at all. To get rid of Manstein, he sent him to command a corps at Stettin! I, however, got wind of the scheme during a luncheon I held for some corps commanders.

  In January one of our courier aircraft, violating my explicit orders, was forced to land in Belgium. The papers it was carrying fell into Allied hands. The incident strengthened my conviction that the original plan should be scrapped and a new one put into its place. Willy-nilly, Halder went along. Over the next few months we systematically took forces away from Army Groups B and C and moved them to Army Group A and its commander, General Gerd von Rundstedt. So vast was the concentration of troops and vehicles that its tail, stretching over 150 kilometers, reached back across the Rhine! Above all, we gave Rundstedt practically all the armored and motorized divisions we had.

  The balance of forces between us and the Allies, Belgium and the Netherlands included, was as follows. We had 3,350,000 troops; they had 3,300,000. We had 5,638 aircraft; they had 2,935. We had 141 divisions; they had 144. We had 7,378 artillery barrels; they had 13,974. We had 2,445 tanks; they had 3,383. Here it is worth noting that many of their tanks, the French Char B in particular, were heavier and better armored than ours. They were so much better armored, in fact, that the light cannon most of our tanks carried were unable to penetrate them. As I said earlier, though, we had the better organization, the better ancillary equipment, and the better—much better—doctrine for using them. By this time we also had the more experienced commanders. But our most important advantage was the offensive spirit of our troops and their willingness to dare, risk, and fight. For that, I suppose, I can take much of the credit.

  On the evening of 9 May I left Berlin in a Ju-52 flown by my faithful pilot, Captain Baur. First, to deceive any onlookers, we headed east. Next, we turned and flew to Bad Münstereifel, not far from Euskirchen, where the army engineers had prepared a field headquarters for me. I called it Felsennest, the Nest among the Rocks. There had been some last-minute worries. In particular, the weather which could have interfered with our air operations upon which so much depended. My chief meteorologist sweated blood, as they say. But things turned out as he had predicted: it was a cool, bright day of the kind people liked to call Hitlerwetter. Much later, I learned that some traitors high up in the Abwehr, the military intelligence and counter-intelligence organization, had contacted the enemy and betrayed the date of our attack. But we did not know it at the time, and in any case it did not matter.

  Distances in the theater were much smaller than in Norway. But the risk we took was almost equally as great. For several years the Luftwaffe had been preparing equipment and troops for air-to-ground assaults. Now Göring sent gliders to capture the fortress of Eben Emäl in Belgium and paratroopers to take Dutch airfields at The Hague as well as the bridges over the Maas at Rotterdam. Both operations were the first ever of their kind. The one against Eben Emäl went perfectly and opened our way into northeastern Belgium. However, the paratroopers in the Netherlands got stuck and came under a fierce counterattack by the Dutch Army.

  Meanwhile, to the east, our forces succeeded in penetrating the so-called Grebbe Line and entering “Fortress Holland.” This was the 14th of the month, and negotiations aimed at making the Dutch surrender were already under way. Meanwhile, we sent bombers to relieve our hard-pressed paratroopers in Rotterdam. Just before they arrived, an agreement was reached. Our commanders on the ground launched red flares to warn the bombers away. But for some reason only a third of them received the order and acted accordingly. The remaining fifty-something struck at their targets. They were Dutch military positions and therefore perfectly legitimate according to the laws of war. Unfortunately, some of them missed and hit a margarine factory instead. The outcome was a huge conflagration that could be seen from dozens of kilometers away. The material damage was vast; yet the number of dead was only about 900.

  In any case, the forces moving into the Netherlands and Belgium were intended mainly as decoys. Their real function was to draw the English and the French north into Belgium. Arriving on the river Dyle, they took up positions as if to defend against a second edition of the Schlieffen Plan. As they did so, Rundstedt’s spearheads were making their way through the Ardennes, far to the south.

  Luck was on their side. The French, their minds still caught in 1914-18, expected a long war. Believing that victory would go to the side with the last battalion in reserve, they deployed their aircraft well in the rear. So reluctant were they to use them that they ended the campaign with more operational ones than they had when it started! Our columns, moving bumper to bumper along the narrow roads and sometimes getting stuck in gigantic traffic jams, went almost unopposed. The fact that the French telephone network was hopelessly antiquated helped. By one account their Commander in Chief, General Maurice Gamelin, depended on a single line. And that one was inoperative for two hours every day because his secretary went for lunch.

  On 15 May our advance guard reached the Meuse at Dinant. They called in the Stukas which silenced the French defenders, less so with their bombs, perhaps, than with the infernal scream they emitted as they dived, almost vertically, upon their targets. Driving west, our troops found themselves across the communications of the Allied forces on the Dyle. So fast was the pace of the advance that it worried me on occasion. That was particularly true on the 17th, when a French division, commanded by the aforementioned de Gaulle, counterattacked at Montcornet. Again, it was the Luftwaffe, acting in perfect cooperation with the army, which saved the day. Later, this General de Gaulle was to form a “Free French” government in London. Seeking recognition, for over four years he drove Roosevelt and Churchill so nuts that the former at one point wanted to arrest him! He also raised some troops, but their military contribution to the Allies’ eventual victory was negligible.

  The curious thing was that, at my headquarters, the roles had been reversed. Throughout the months before the operation, Halder had consistently suggested caution. Now, suddenly, it was he who declared we should press forward as fast as possible whereas I, to the contrary, wanted to rein in the Panzers until the infantry, necessarily marching at a considerably slower pace, could catch up and secure the corridor through which their supplies had to pass. We clashed over this question several times. After the war, working for the U.S. Army’s historical service, he wrote a little book about me. In it he accused me—me, who had assumed all the risk both in Norway and in the West—of having bad nerves! Look who is talking.

  In any case the French counterattack only held us up for one day, if tha
t. On the 20th of May our spearheads, commanded by Guderian, had reached the sea at Abbeville. With that all communications between the French homeland and the Allied forces further to the north had been cut. Guderian, Schnelle Heinz (fast Heinz), as he was known, was understandably flush with victory. He asked for the right to be allowed to proceed north along the coast to Calais so as to close the circle on our enemies. And Halder, with Brauchitsch in tow, supported him.

  I for my part was not so sure. The Panzers had covered some 300 kilometers from Sedan to Abbeville and were exhausted. Both men and machines badly needed rest and replenishment. And I was still worried about our rear. In this I had the support of all my senior commanders, including Generals Rundstedt, Hans Kluge (the excellent commander of 4th Army, which had been put under Rundstedt’s command), and Ewald von Kleist, commander of the Panzergruppe named after him and Guderian’s direct superior. Finally, I knew that the countryside around Dunkirk, though open, was waterlogged and unsuited for armored operations. So, having been stationed there during the Great War, did generals Keitel and Jodl. This was especially true of the latter, whose advice I came to value more and more.

  Here, I want to put to rest two tales historians have come up with. First, it was not a question of allowing the Luftwaffe and Göring to get all the glory. In my view, if not in his own, he already had more than enough glory to spare. Second, I did not stop the tanks in order to enable the English to get away and thus to facilitate peace with London. What really happened was that our intelligence did not discover the Allied evacuation in time. It took us 72 hours to understand what the English were doing: running from the Continent and taking along as many French as they could. As we resumed operations, though, we found ourselves confronted with a perimeter they had erected in haste. Progress was slower than expected. Meanwhile, the Luftwaffe encountered the fresh English fighter squadrons which, up to this point, had been held back. Now, taking off from bases very close to the Pas de Calais, it inflicted quite a few losses on us. Still, the outcome of the struggle was never in doubt. On the morning of 27 May all of Dunkirk was in our hands.