To Lose a Battle

by Alistair Horne

  Once, during the Second World War, Churchill is reputed to have grumbled in aggravation against the Chiefs of Staff system:

  It leads to weak and faltering decisions – or rather indecisions. Why, you may take the most gallant sailor, the most intrepid airman, or the most audacious soldier, put them at a table together – what do you get? The sum of their fears.

  This was indisputably Hitler’s view about his military advisers, and, as the success of each new gamble proved their ‘fears’ to be groundless, so he listened to them less and less. In the long run, the diminished influence of her General Staff was to prove one of the great weaknesses of Germany’s superb military machine in the Second World War. Certainly, the influence of the O.K.H. was never to stand as high again after the Brauchitsch-Hitler interview of 5 November 1939.

  Halder and the ‘Resistance’

  Behind the O.K.H. opposition to Hitler’s plans for a Western offensive in the autumn of 1939, there lay a complexity of motives which, because of its bearing on the evolution of Gelb, needs to be examined. It borders on the whole question of the German ‘resistance’. At the time of the Czech crisis of 1938, the ‘resistance’ movement, such as it was, resided principally among the conservative elements of the Army who had always regarded Hitler as an upstart and a guttersnipe, and who were now thoroughly alarmed as to where his policies would lead the nation. At their head stood the Army Chief of Staff,7 the honourable Colonel-General Beck, who was forced to commit suicide after the bomb plot of 20 July 1944. Had France and Britain stood firm over Czechoslovakia, the ‘resistance’, so we are told, would have taken action against Hitler. But Hitler triumphed, and the ‘resistance’ lost much of its impetus as well as many of its adherents in high places, while another devastating blow was struck at its prestige by Hitler’s coup in pulling off the non-aggression pact with Russia.

  Beck had resigned before Munich, depriving the ‘resistance’ of its mainspring. He was succeeded in office, reluctantly, by General Franz Halder, an artilleryman three years younger than the new Army C.-in-C., Brauchitsch. Coming from an old military family which had provided Bavaria with soldiers for many generations, Halder set a precedent as the first Bavarian Catholic to break the traditional Prussian, Protestant hegemony and to become Chief of Staff. A shrewd, quick-witted and precise-minded intellectual with a passion for mathematics and botany (Shirer says Halder with his mild features and pincenez reminded him more of a university professor), he had had a brilliant career as a staff officer, in which capacity he had passed more of the First War on the static Western front than in the East. In the autumn of 1939, he could definitely be counted a man of the ‘resistance’, but he possessed neither the determination nor the Army following to assume Beck’s mantle. He was not one to take risks, either military or political, nor was he entirely devoid of professional ambition. Whenever he contemplated practical means for ridding Germany of the evil of Hitler, Halder was confronted with the choice of having to resort either to a political putsch, against which his traditionalist sense of honour and obedience as a German officer revolted, or to assassination, which his Christian conscience overruled. Here, in the dilemma of Halder, lay the essential tragedy of what was both best and most ineffective in the German ‘resistance’ as a whole. So instead of sharper weapons, Halder – as far as Gelb was concerned – settled for those of procrastination and obstructionism.8

  After war began, Halder and his like-thinking generals had been associated with various peace feelers extended to Britain, predicated upon the removal of Hitler and the restoration of the ‘other Germany’. But the ‘other Germany’ they contemplated was hardly the easy-going liberal republic of Weimar; it was much more like Kaiser Wilhelm II’s pre-1914 Reich. In their ‘peace terms’, the conspirators were not even prepared to discuss Germany’s disrobing herself of Austria and the Czech Sudetenland, while from Poland they required a return to the 1914 frontiers, which was asking even more than Hitler’s prewar demands. So, while prepared to renounce Hitler, they were not prepared to renounce his works. As far as British acceptance was concerned, these terms were utterly unrealistic, though perhaps domestically more unrealistic still, when it came to carrying along in a coup d’état a German populace elated by Hitler’s cheap triumphs. As it was, in the Army alone, support for the ‘resistance’ was very mixed. Of the Army Group commanders, Leeb (already, unbeknown to himself, under Gestapo observation) would have gone far, but Bock and Rundstedt, though sympathetic, took the conventional line of non-political involvement. At the end of October 1939, Halder had sent out his deputy, Stülpnagel,9 to sound out feelings at the front, but on his return Stülpnagel warned him that the troops and junior officers would not follow any call to overthrow Hitler.

  Towards the end of November, Halder, referring to the future offensive in the West, declared (according to Ulrich von Hassell): ‘We ought to give Hitler this last chance to deliver the German people from the slavery of English capitalism…’ This was a revealing remark, as symptomatic of the deep conflict in Halder’s mind as it was of that existing in the German military ‘resistance’ as a whole. For the more Hitler looked like winning, both before and during the war, the less ready the ‘resistance’ was to resist, and conversely. Halder certainly never had any particular desire to save the Allies from humiliation; what motivated him and his fellows, both as patriotic Germans and military men, was that Germany should not suffer the horrors of another long war, ending in defeat. For all the radical brilliance that had gone into the shaping of the new Wehrmacht, with its Panzers and its Stukas, the conventional German military Establishment, of which Halder and Brauchitsch were thoroughly representative, remained fundamentally conservative, its thoughts deeply conditioned by 1914–18. In spite of the Army’s staggering success in Poland, its leaders could not shake off their pessimism at the prospects of war with Britain and France; as Brauchitsch had revealed in his 5 November interview with Hitler, they could never quite suppress their awe of the once-victorious French Army. Left to themselves, Brauchitsch and Halder would have played their game with the same caution as Gamelin and Georges; they were, after all, educated in the same school. This excessive professional prudence was another factor that conditioned their planning for Gelb in the autumn of 1939.

  If Hitler had been allowed to attack, as he wished and upon the plan then offered by Halder and the O.K.H., in the autumn of 1939, the chances were exceedingly slim that he would have inflicted a decisive defeat on the French. A stalemate would probably have resulted, and the war might well have limped on – until, as the generals feared, it brought eventual defeat to Germany. Thus although motivated by a desire to topple Hitler, in stalling off an abortive offensive in 1939 the O.K.H. ‘resistance’ was in fact to pave the way for Hitler’s greatest triumph and prolong his survival until Germany lay in ashes, while at the same time assuring their own emasculation. History knows few starker ironies.

  The ‘Manstein Plan’

  Among the professional soldiers in opposition to the Gelb projects of 1939, however, another skein now emerges with a quite different point of departure. The details of the first O.K.H. plan had reached Rundstedt’s newly-created Army Group ‘A’ when his Chief of Staff, Manstein, passed through Zossen on 21 October. Immediately the two generals took exception to it – on purely professional and technical grounds.

  Together, Rundstedt and Manstein represented the most imposing combination in the German Army; under their leadership Army Group South had formed the right, and stronger, arm of the pincer which had smashed the Polish forces in little more than a week. In his background at least, Rundstedt was a typical Prussian officer of the old school. There were few wars involving Prussia in which a von Rundstedt had not taken part; as early as 1745, there is a record of one serving with the Hessians in Scotland. In 1914, Gerd von Rundstedt had been a captain on the staff of the 22nd Reserve Division, which during the enactment of the Schlieffen Plan came the closest to Paris that September. The memory of the bitter disa
ppointment which followed after his division had actually glimpsed the Eiffel Tower in the distance, only to be thrown back by the French counter-offensive on the Marne, was to wield considerable influence upon Rundstedt all through the campaign of 1940. From 1915 onwards, Rundstedt spent the rest of the war fighting in the mobile campaigns of the Russian front. Between 1919 and 1933, he held almost every staff post in Seeckt’s Reichswehr. On the advent of Hitler, he was commanding the key First Army Group in Berlin, which high post he held for six years. At the end of 1938 (having already applied to retire several times) he left the Army as a colonel-general to live in a rented apartment in Cassel. In 1939, like Hindenburg and Pétain before him, he was recalled to service. He was then rising sixty-four.

  As a special tribute, Rundstedt on his retirement had been made honorary colonel of the 18th Infantry Regiment, which he had once commanded, and during the war he always preferred to wear the simple jacket of a regimental commander rather than a Field-Marshal’s regalia. Frequently young officers mistook him for a colonel. With his hair parted down the centre and a heavy jowl even as a young man, Rundstedt’s face reveals no outstanding intelligence. But in the Army he had a deserved reputation for being the most gifted of all the senior commanders. Despite his age, he was resourceful and flexible-minded. He knew how to profit from the advice of talented subordinates, and he confined his genius to tactical problems, while his Chief of Staff, Manstein, possessed a much wider vision on the overall conduct of war. Rundstedt also enjoyed deep respect throughout the officer corps, and would have made an ideal leader of the ‘resistance’; his moral principles on the waging of war were of the highest, and he was one of the few senior Wehrmacht commanders against whom there was never to be any taint of war crimes. But, like a true Prussian officer, however much he may have despised Hitler he eschewed political involvement just as much as he regarded higher strategy to be no concern of his.

  Erich von Manstein, promoted Lieutenant-General shortly before the war, was just twelve years younger than Rundstedt. His father was an Army officer of Polish–German origin, named Lewinski, but Erich had been adopted as a child by a family friend and brother officer, whose name of Manstein he subsequently assumed. Commissioned into a Prussian regiment of Foot Guards in 1906, Manstein had served as a staff captain on General von Gallwitz’s group attacking on the left bank of the Meuse throughout much of the worst fighting at Verdun. The conclusions Manstein had formed from this appallingly futile struggle lay directly opposed to those of his French contemporaries defending Verdun: attrition resulting from the old style, direct, frontal attack was no way to win a war. In 1935, then a colonel, Manstein became Army Chief of Operations, under General Beck. But extremely outspoken and with one of those minds which any army finds uncomfortably brilliant, during the military ‘purge’ of 1938 Manstein, although he was not one of those hostile to Hitler,10 was dispatched to command a division. It was only with considerable difficulty that Rundstedt could bring him back on to the General Staff. In appearance, the beaky nose which dominated his features, the heavily arched eyebrows and penetrating eyes, gave Manstein something of the look of an eagle or a hawk. A harsh disciplinarian,11 icy and unbending, he was a leader who commanded respect rather than love. Like Guderian, Manstein’s interests were purely professional, and this formed the basis of his loyalty to Hitler. Guderian, seldom lavish with praise for others, regarded Manstein as ‘our finest operational brain’, and as the war was to bring him one higher post after another, Manstein indeed proved himself Germany’s ablest commander of large bodies of troops, as well as being her outstanding strategic thinker. In fact, history is almost certain to rate him one of the great generals of the twentieth century.

  On examining the O.K.H.’s ‘Deployment Directive Yellow’ of 19 October, Manstein’s instant reaction was that, at best, it could only lead to a partial success. Unlike General von Leeb, he was not deeply concerned by the fate of Belgium, but he did believe that if Germany were to breach her neutrality for a second time in a generation, this was worth doing only if it aimed at a totally decisive victory. Accordingly, he sat down to draft the first of six memoranda to the O.K.H. In it he expressed the view that success of the whole operation would lie in ‘defeating and annihilating the whole of the enemy forces fighting in Belgium, or north of the Somme, and not only throwing them back frontally’. With this aim, the Schwerpunkt of the offensive must be shifted farther to the south, with its axis running from Namur through a line Arras–Boulogne, so that the Allied wing in Belgium would not simply be rolled back to the Somme, ‘but cut off on the Somme’. At the same time, the left flank of the German thrust must be strong enough to ward off any powerful French counter-thrust coming up at it from the south-west.12 Manstein concluded that he did not expect the Allies to ‘make the mistake of throwing too strong forces into Belgium on their northern flank’ (which in fact, as has already been seen, was precisely the direction in which Gamelin’s plans were heading); but if they did, the prospects for Germany of a ‘great success’ would be just that much better.

  In its initial shape, the ‘Manstein Plan’ still allocated the Schwerpunkt to Bock’s rival Army Group ‘B’ in the north. It gave no specific details as to the employment of the Panzers; it offered no comment on the timing of the offensive; nor did it mention the magic names of Sedan or the Ardennes, as did Hitler’s ‘new idea’ of 30 October. On the other hand, Manstein was putting forward a much more precise formula. And, in his proposition to ‘cut off’ the northern wing of the Allied armies on the Somme, here was a scheme far more ambitious than anything that had yet emerged from the mind of Hitler himself.

  Rundstedt entirely supported the thinking of his Chief of Staff, and on 31 October (by sheer coincidence, only a day after Hitler had voiced his ‘new idea’ to Jodl) the memorandum was dispatched to the O.K.H. bearing his signature. Four days later, a visit to Rundstedt’s H.Q. by Brauchitsch gave Manstein the opportunity to discuss his plan in person. Brauchitsch refused to countenance any alteration to the existing directive; finally, however, he did let himself be coaxed into promising to Army Group ‘A’ in the south the 2nd Panzer Division and two motorized regiments. Here began the progressive escalation of Army Group ‘A’ at the expense of ‘B’ (Bock).13 But Brauchitsch was not to be impressed by Manstein’s fears of a French threat to his left flank. ‘Every Army Group’, commented Halder trenchantly, ‘expects the maximum of enemy counter-measures on its own front’, and doubtless Manstein’s proposals struck the O.K.H. at first as simply a subordinate formation advancing its own parochial interest. In any case, they were sat upon at Zossen and not passed on to the O.K.W. or Hitler, nor were the new orientations in Hitler’s thoughts relayed to Army Group ‘A’.

  Meanwhile, the Führer was still pursuing his ‘new idea’ of 30 October. On 11 November, after the second postponement of the offensive, the O.K.H. notified Army Groups ‘A’ and ‘B’ that Hitler had ordered a third group of fast-moving troops to be formed on ‘A’s’ southern flank, heading for Sedan. This would be composed of Guderian’s XIX Corps, consisting of two Panzer and one motorized divisions. Bock at once expressed dissatisfaction at this further erosion of Army Group ‘B’, but still the function of the Sedan thrust was regarded as purely secondary, designed to ‘ease’ the task of Army Group ‘A’ (which in itself remained subordinate to that of ‘B’). Guderian, the Panzer expert, who now enters the act for the first time, was asked for his opinion and declared that the forces for an advance on Sedan via Arlon were quite inadequate. On the 13th, and again on the 16th, bad weather, combined with the continued reluctance of the O.K.H. (which was undoubtedly having its effect even on Hitler), once more postponed the offensive, on the latter occasion to 26 November. On 21 November another visit to Koblenz by Brauchitsch (accompanied by Halder) permitted Manstein to deliver a second memorandum. Again, however, the O.K.H. leaders granted it no serious discussion. At this time they had still cherished hopes that Hitler would abandon all ideas of an offensive in th
e West, and the injection of Manstein’s views into the existing plan could only lend grist to Hitler’s mill. But at the same time, there was also undoubtedly an element of professional jealousy involved in Brauchitsch’s and Halder’s refusal to allow their subordinate generals direct access to the Führer. Relations between Brauchitsch and Rundstedt were never noticeably good, while the cautious Halder clearly evinced resentment towards the daring genius of Manstein.

  Hitler Berates His Generals

  Two days later, an extraordinary gathering took place in the Chancellery. By now thoroughly exasperated at the O.K.H.’s opposition to his designs, Hitler summoned together all his top Wehrmacht leaders down to corps commanders and their equivalent ranks in the Luftwaffe and Navy – totalling over 180 – and, treating them like so many small boys, delivered a scarifying lecture. He began with the reminder that without the Nazi Party, the rebuilding of the Wehrmacht (through which, he did not need to point out, those present enjoyed their present distinction) could never have taken place. Although he had always been surrounded by more ‘doubters’ than ‘believers’, his policy of annexations had paid off; now, for the first time in sixty-seven years, while the successors of Bismarck may have missed their cues, he, Hitler, had ensured that Germany would not have to fight on more than one front. He was determined to launch a crushing offensive on this one front, and ‘anyone who thinks otherwise is irresponsible’. Now, the moment was favourable; in six months’ time it might not be. Waving aside the question of Belgian and Dutch neutrality, he declared that ‘nobody would question this if Germany were victorious’. As for Britain, she would be brought to her knees by U-boat and mine warfare (details unspecified).

  Turning the heat on the Army leaders, Hitler all but accused them of cowardice; he had not created the Wehrmacht in order not to fight. He condemned obsolete notions of chivalry, and warned that anyone who opposed his will would be ‘annihilated’. With a reference to Brauchitsch’s luckless intervention of 5 November, he declared that he was ‘infuriated’ by any suggestion that ‘his’ troops had been ‘inadequate’ in Poland. ‘Everything depends on the military leaders. With the German soldier I can do anything, provided he is well led.’ Hitler ended his homily with a call for total determination: ‘If we emerge from this struggle as victors – and we shall be victors! – then our epoch will enter into the history of our people. As for me’, he added prophetically, ‘I shall stand or fall in this struggle. I shall not survive the defeat of my people. No surrender abroad! No revolution at home!’