Why the Allies Won

by Richard Overy

  There has been little controversy about the merit of the last example of professional leadership, Roosevelt’s army Chief-of-Staff, General George Marshall. He was the epitome of the modern military manager. Though he ran an army of more than eight million people, he himself had never experienced combat. He ran the American war effort from a desk in the Pentagon. Born in 1880, the son of a Pennsylvania businessman who wasted his fortune on a failed hotel, Marshall never wanted to be anything other than a soldier. His reputation as a serious, excessively industrious, and ascetic personality was formed at cadet school in Virginia. He saw himself as a man of action, but was always fated to miss it. He arrived in the Philippines in 1902 a week after the armed insurrection there was over; he was sent to France in the vanguard of United States forces in 1917, but ended up on staff and training assignments. When he was finally offered command of the invasion of France in 1944, Roosevelt rescinded the commission.

  Marshall’s real virtues were evident from the first. He was an outstanding organiser and manager, avid for responsibility. Before the Great War he collapsed twice from overwork. In an army light on managerial skills Marshall was indispensable. He organised much of the training programme for the American army raised from scratch in 1917–18, but like so many middle-aged American servicemen between the wars he remained stuck at a relatively junior rank with limited staff duties. He was rescued from obscurity by Roosevelt, in 1939, who wanted a Chief-of-Staff with experience of building up an army quickly. Marshall was the obvious man for the job.90

  The new Chief was very different from Roosevelt, and although they came to respect each other deeply they never became close friends: in six years Marshall never once visited the President’s estate at Hyde Park in New York state. His personality was outwardly calm and unassuming. He had a natural air of authority. He was reserved where his President was extrovert, sparse with words where his leader was garrulous, mechanically competent rather than informal and disorganised. Beneath the modest exterior, Marshall was known to be firm; he had a fierce temper which he tried to keep under control. He eschewed both sentiment and anger, once telling his wife: ‘My brain must be kept clear.’91 Colleagues found him aloof and unsociable, a strict taskmaster, a perfectionist who had not a great deal of tolerance for imperfections in others – in fact remarkably akin to Brooke and Antonov. His whole being was subsumed by work. He was famous for the disciplined regularity of his own life. He rose at 6.30 every day, rode half a dozen miles, arrived for work at 7.45, took lunch alone with his wife at home, and worked until five. No one, Marshall believed, had an original idea after five o’clock in the afternoon, and when he left the office, even during the war years, he cut himself off from the outside world until the following morning. After an evening ride, or canoeing on the Potomac river for an hour or so, he retired at nine. This routine was disturbed during the war only by the introduction of a general briefing meeting each morning. Outside office hours he answered the telephone only to the President or the Secretary for War, and invited no one to his home for fear that they would talk shop.92

  His attitude to war reflected his personality. He described it as a managing director might define the operation of a giant company. In a speech to veterans in June 1940 Marshall reminded them that the old ‘flag-waving days of warfare are gone’. The modern army, he continued, ‘is composed of specialists, thoroughly trained in every aspect of military science, and, above all, organised into a perfect team’. In war, he believed, cold factual analysis was preferable to enthusiasm, common sense to sentiment.93 He applied these technocratic views to the job of constructing America’s new army and choosing its strategy. His experience of World War I convinced him that unity of command was essential. The development of an American equivalent to the British Chiefs-of-Staff was his inspiration. He dominated the proceedings of this new Joint Chiefs-of-Staff Committee, which reported directly to the President. During the war he assumed the role of senior adviser to Roosevelt. Unity between Allies he regarded as of paramount importance and he was a driving force in fusing together the British and American war efforts. He streamlined the top of the army, reducing from 61 to six the number of officials with direct access to his office, and he divided the organisation into three major elements, army, air forces and supply. A great deal of his energy was devoted to training and logistics. These were not just the preferences of a desk general. War for Marshall was a unity, from recruitment through to combat. He did not want to repeat his experience in France in 1917 when the United States 1st division arrived short of weapons and uniforms, with men who had not yet fired a gun.94

  On the major issues it was Marshall rather than Roosevelt who perceived the necessity for a ‘Europe first’ priority, and battled with Fleet Admiral King and the navy to sustain it. It was Marshall who without reservation backed the cross-Channel attack when his President wavered. His approach was rooted in strategic rationality and good sense. He did not decide things lightly, but once plans were formulated he stuck to them. The decisions to fight in Europe and to attack the German main force in the west can both be regarded as central to Allied success. Marshall displayed great force of character in carrying the plans through to fulfilment in the face of considerable opposition. For Roosevelt he became ‘the indispensable man’. By 1944 he drafted many of the President’s military papers, even replies to Churchill. But he remained a self-effacing hero, the model of the citizen-soldier, the manager in uniform. Churchill regarded him as ‘a magnificent organiser’, but he was not a Churchillian soldier. There was nothing flamboyant, daring, or even very courageous about Marshall. He was the personification of a managerial culture absorbed by the business of war.95

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  Superficially Hitler’s wartime leadership bore some resemblance to that of his enemies. He too was Supreme Commander of the armed forces, a post to which he appointed himself in February 1938. He concentrated civilian and military power in his own hands. He interfered ceaselessly in the conduct and planning of operations, as Stalin and Churchill did. He was not happy with routine administration, and preferred the private interview to the large committee, like Roosevelt. But between Hitler and the three Allied leaders there was one very great difference. Hitler took his position as Supreme Commander literally. He alone devised strategy; he decided on all major operational questions. The delegation of responsibility in any meaningful sense of the term was quite foreign to him. He had no sense of his own limitations. Indeed as the war went on he became ever more convinced that he, the humble veteran, knew more about the conduct of war than the generals.

  Assessing Hitler’s achievement as a military leader has never been easy. German generals after the war clamoured to demonstrate that German defeat was the product of their commander’s ineptitude. Their testimony has never been regarded as entirely reliable. To set against the later failures, there is the awkward evidence of German successes up to the autumn of 1942, all of which were achieved under Hitler’s command as well. The temptation exists to argue that he outdid the military leaders at their own game, that he possessed a naive but intuitive grasp of military strategy. There were certainly serious-minded soldiers in 1940 who suspended their disbelief and hailed the Führer’s genius. But it is a temptation that should be resisted. Hitler’s credentials both as a strategist and as a commander were negligible. He had had no professional military education or staff training. Though Hitler regarded his experiences in the trenches as a harsh preparation for life, they hardly qualified him for supreme command. He had only a rudimentary familiarity with military affairs before 1938, and had a buff’s eye view of military technology. His staff found him profoundly ignorant of the basic principles of command and of the art of war. In the view of General Walter Warlimont, deputy for operations at Supreme Headquarters, Hitler lacked any appreciation of ‘the relative strengths of two sides, the factors of time and space’.96 He was at best a half-hearted administrator. He brought to high command two principles of his own: pursue the offensive whatev
er the circumstances, and fight to the death rather than abandon ground. This was more Custer than Clausewitz.

  On one thing Hitler’s military critics agree: he exercised high command with exceptional willpower, the same quality he had shown in his earlier political struggle. Von Manstein, who struggled more than most with Hitler’s incompetence, thought strength of will ‘the decisive factor’ in Hitler’s military make-up.97 Hitler certainly thought so. ‘Genius’, he told a general in December 1944, ‘is a will-o’-the-wisp if it lacks a solid foundation of perseverance and fanatical tenacity. This is the most important thing in all human life …’ On another occasion he observed: ‘My task has been never to lose my nerve under any circumstances.’ Hitler’s was ‘a will of iron’.98 No doubt his fanatical self-belief, his refusal to compromise or take advice, his blinkered obsession with conquest, the heroic stances – ‘never yield, never capitulate’ – played some part in overcoming the hesitancy of his generals and in firing the war effort. Hitler took risks the generals would never have taken. In 1939 and 1940 the risks paid off. Against weak or disorganised enemies the fighting skills of German forces allowed them to prevail with relative ease. This demonstration of military competence had little to do with Hitler, though he took the credit. He did not attribute these successes to military professionalism but to his strength of will.

  Hitler’s concept of willpower needs to be treated with caution. His messianic self-belief is not in doubt, but what he took for willpower might be regarded more properly as wilfulness. He was impervious to advice. He listened to but did not absorb the opinions of others. If critics persisted, wrote his operations chief after the war, ‘he would break into short-tempered fits of enraged agitation.’99 He brushed aside uncongenial facts so habitually that his staff began to filter out intelligence of the worst complexion. He displayed in all this not a shred of self-criticism. When things went wrong he blamed others. Sulky, vindictive, intolerant, irascible, Hitler’s ‘will’ was the expression of poor powers of leadership, which he masked with a self-constructed myth of infallibility.

  The weaknesses in Hitler’s military capability were magnified many times over by the command structure he set up. When Hitler assumed the supreme command in 1938 he deliberately avoided the establishment of a command staff to run military affairs. He wanted to do this himself. He appointed a small group of officers to serve as ‘administrative assistants’, translating his decisions into orders, providing him with information, but neither formulating nor recommending strategy. Hitler had scant respect for the professional staff officer. He dominated the headquarters discussions and discouraged independent thought. Those around him were treated, according to Field Marshal von Richthofen, like ‘highly-paid non-commissioned officers’ – sweet revenge for the ex-corporal. Major strategic issues were discussed, if at all, with a close circle of party cronies. The military were left in ignorance of what to expect from their commander. As a consequence any kind of overall or long-term planning was out of the question. Hitler deliberately kept his plans to himself, as he felt befitted the guardian of the nation’s destiny: ‘My true intentions you will never know,’ he told the army Chief-of-Staff, Franz Halder. ‘Even those in my closest circle who feel quite sure they know my intentions will not know about them.’100

  By avoiding any body equivalent to the British Chiefs-of-Staff, to ensure that he alone would determine strategy, Hitler also avoided establishing any unity of command for the three services. None of the other major areas of the war effort – production, logistics, manpower, intelligence – was coordinated by a single committee, or discussed by any kind of war cabinet. There was simply no forum in which the war effort could be viewed as a whole. Instead the three services and the civilian ministries competed with each other for Hitler’s attention. The rivalry between them was never controlled. They cooperated loosely or not at all, a situation that helps to explain the poor economic effort and the failure to decide on priorities in the technological war. Hitler was, as he intended, the sole common denominator, the spider at the centre of the web. This suited his secretive nature, his intense dislike of committee work – the civilian cabinet ceased meeting in 1938 – and his distrust of military expertise. He was the first man ‘since Charlemagne’ to hold ‘unlimited power’, he told his commanders, and he ‘would know how to use it in a struggle for Germany’.101

  The Polish invasion was the only campaign in which the armed forces had any degree of independence in planning operations, though they had no influence whatsoever on the broader strategic issues as they did in 1914. After that Hitler dominated operational preparations as well. Senior officers risked a great deal in arguing with Hitler as the long list of demotions and sackings attests. They had to adapt themselves to the thinking and habits of a Supreme Commander whose outlook was ill-equipped for the demands of such an office. Hitler took his role seriously none the less. ‘The Fuehrer always made the important decisions himself,’ Wilhelm Keitel, Hitler’s chef de cabinet, told interrogators in 1945. He would discuss issues, Keitel continued, only when he wanted to, but then often sleep on the decision for twenty-four hours. ‘Then he would appear and say: “I have come to this decision and no more discussion will follow.”’102 The major activity of the day was the situation conference held around noon and lasting up to four hours. A second report would be made to Hitler later in the evening, sometimes as late as 1 a.m. Hitler often sat at the map table, but all the other officers stood. No stenographic notes or record of the discussions was taken, until a point in 1942 when Hitler, frustrated at what he saw as the deliberate flouting of his orders, commanded a regular record taken down for his personal use at every conference. These records were deliberately kept from the military leaders who continued to rely on their recollection of what Hitler had ordered.103 Army leaders were usually in attendance but the air force and navy were often represented by junior liaison officers. Hitler’s primary interest throughout remained the field army. Neither the navy nor the air force was fully integrated with the higher direction of the war. Much of the discussion at the conferences turned on small technical or operational issues, seldom on wider issues of strategy or operations. Senior officers found themselves compelled to discuss matters of relative triviality; Hitler’s legendary memory allowed him to trump his officers time and again when they forgot technical details. Little of this activity was properly the purview of a supreme commander. Following the situation conferences came more meetings, and then long evenings after dinner, when Hitler took the chance to unwind with close party friends or invited guests. Here he indulged in long monologues in which issues of war featured surprisingly little.

  At the end of 1941 Hitler added to his responsibilities direct command of the field army. Until then the army leaders had been able to use their own initiative within the operational guidelines laid down by the Supreme Command. With Hitler’s assumption of control over the army, all surviving freedom of action was lost. From that moment Hitler neglected the wider issues of supreme command in order to concentrate on the front-line duel with Stalin, while the Supreme Headquarters staff were left to run the other theatres of war. Any pretence at central direction of the war disappeared. Hitler took his new duties as seriously as his old; deeply distrustful of the army leadership, and confident that he had mastered the military art, he rode roughshod over the army General Staff. Relations between the army leaders and Hitler, strained already in 1941, reached a new low. He regarded them as conservative, cautious and obstructive. General Franz Halder, the army Chief-of-Staff, despised his new commander: ‘this so called “leadership” is nothing but a pathological reaction to the impressions of the moment …’104 When Halder suggested in July 1942 that the German line withdraw at a point in the north to create a sounder defensive position, Hitler angrily denounced him as a coward. The tension between the two men poisoned effective staff work during the summer campaign in 1942. In September Halder was sacked. His replacement, Colonel Kurt Zeitzler, was chosen because he was su
fficiently junior, and sufficiently pliant, to do what Hitler told him. In a speech to army staff Zeitzler said he expected one thing from them: absolute belief in the Führer and in his method of command.105

  From that point onward Hitler denied his forces any initiative. It is no accident that German forces now experienced the long series of disasters that turned the tide of war. Hitler interfered with the smallest details of battle; regiments and air squadrons could be moved on the instructions of the Supreme Commander. The consequences were predictable. Instead of an overall strategy Hitler substituted a jumble of ‘individual decisions and orders’. There was, Zeitzler later complained, ‘no delegation of powers or coordinated action’, no ‘decisions on policy’.106 Even allowing for professional jealousy, the generals’ recollections of Hitler’s leadership paint a uniform picture of a man quite out of his depth. During the course of the war, according to an admirer, General von Manteuffel, he developed ‘a good grasp of how a single division moved and fought’ but never understood the operation of an army.107 As the army leaders struggled to ameliorate the misjudgements of their commander, conflicts became more common; Hitler sacked those who crossed him, or who refused to fight for every inch of ground. He trusted no one to take decisions for him. His concern with details was Napoleonic. He was a victim not just of his own military incompetence, but also of the overwhelming nature of his responsibilities. No one on the Allied side attempted to undertake a fraction of what Hitler took upon himself. The remarkable thing is that German forces continued to fight with so much determination that the war hung more in the balance than Hitler’s flawed command merited.

  Few leaders can have needed a military manager more than Hitler. Yet the nature of Hitler’s personal command ruled out the emergence of any figure to compare with Marshall or Brooke. The chief of the Supreme Headquarters staff, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, was appointed in 1938 for his weaknesses rather than his strengths. He was at best an office manager, channelling information to his chief, disseminating his orders. Keitel did not see it as his responsibility to recommend strategy, or to contradict his commander. He was known, without affection, by his nickname ‘Lakeitel’, a pun on the German word for lackey. The Operations Chief at Hitler’s Supreme Headquarters, Colonel Alfred Jodl, was generally judged to have had the aptitude to guide Hitler’s operational choices, but he grasped early on that Hitler was not open to advice, and he gave it, when he did, without conviction. Everything Jodl said to Hitler, observed one General Staff officer, ‘simply bounced off him with no visible effect’. Though Jodl understood Hitler’s military deficiencies, he was loyal to Hitler the statesman. In his cell at Nuremberg after the war, awaiting execution as a war criminal, Jodl described Hitler as a true German hero, who bravely chose death and destruction rather than face humiliating surrender.108