At 8am Guderian’s troops crossed the border and headed east towards Vienna. At every town or village they reached, crowds flooded the streets to welcome them. The Austrian armed forces laid down their arms whenever they were encountered.The German troops occupied every building on their list without bloodshed. Guderian drove through Linz on the Saturday, but it then began to snow and he did not reach Vienna until Sunday morning. He found an Austrian military band waiting to play him into town.
On 14 March Hitler went to Vienna to be greeted by vast cheering crowds. On 9 April a referendum was held in Austria and Germany on whether or not to approve Anschluss. The result showed the Austrians were keener on the idea than the Germans, but not by much. The yes vote in Austria was 99.7%, in Germany it was 99.1%.
If Hitler was pleased with the political and diplomatic triumph, he was extremely unimpressed with the army. Guderian had to admit shamefacedly to his Führer that over two thirds of the panzers had broken down on the road to Vienna, and that was without anybody shooting at them. Moreover, several units had got lost trying to find the more remote Austrian army bases and several had found themselves without food, ammunition and sometimes both. A furious Hitler summoned Brauchitsch and ordered him to begin a thorough overhaul of German staff work. Then he ordered Guderian to make sure the panzers did better next time.
Both men went to work, painfully aware that Hitler would not tolerate failure a second time. Guderian embarked on a minute examination of what had gone wrong and found that the vast majority of panzers had been brought to a halt by relatively minor mechanical problems. The panzer crews were retrained to cope while several Panzer Is were converted into armoured mobile workshops and attached to lead units.
Brauchitsch, meanwhile, found a key problem had been the confusion caused when two units tried to use the same road. Often the unit with the more senior commander went first, even if the other unit was more urgently needed by forward troops. A lack of petrol had been particularly noticeable with petrol tankers driven by privates and corporals being made to give precedence to staff cars carrying colonels. A new system of road marshals was introduced to ensure that necessary supplies were given priority. Nobody, not even a high ranking officer, would be able to disobey the orders of a road marshal.
These were vital lessons which were being learned and would have good effect when the army moved next.
CZECHOSLOVAKIA 1938
Hitler’s next target was Czechoslovakia. Several million Germans lived in the Sudetenland, that area of Czechoslovakia which bordered Germany. Again Hitler went to work on the diplomatic front while ordering the OKH, under Brauchitsch, to draw up invasion plans. This time the army did not expect anything other than a tough war. The Czechs had 35 divisions in their regular army and many more in reserve. Moreover the borders with Germany were mountainous and heavily fortified. The borders through from the newly occupied Austria were more open, but even here the country was not particularly suited to Guderian’s tanks. Anyway, the Czechs had as many heavy guns as the Germans and their own modern tanks, manufactured at the famous Skoda works.
Brauchitsch reported that the defeat of Czechoslovakia would take some weeks and that this would give France, Britain or Russia ample time to intervene if they decided to do so. Hitler set his own staff at OKW, the supreme armed forces staff, to study the findings of OKH. They agreed.
It was therefore fortunate for the German Army that Hitler managed to pull of the coup known as the Munich Agreement. Hitler spent the summer of 1938 playing up the human rights demands of the Germans living in Czechoslovakia and threatening war if they were not solved. On 29 September, Mussolini arranged a meeting in Munich between Hitler, the new British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and French premier Edouard Daladier. The Czechs were not invited, neither were the Russians. After an exhausting series of talks, with Hitler threatening instant war, the British and French agreed not to object to Germany taking over the border areas of Czechoslovakia where Germans were the majority population.
War had been averted, but Czechoslovakia was lost. Without the prospect of military aid from larger countries, the Czechs gave in. With the border areas they surrendered their mighty fortresses and gun emplacements. Hitler told Brauchitsch to draw up plans to occupy the rest of Czechoslovakia from start positions in the Sudetenland. Again, OKH began on the assumption that the Czech army would fight. Again, Hitler proved them wrong.
During February and March of 1939, Hitler courted the secessionists in Slovakia who wanted to be independent of Prague and those Czechs who were fascists. Riots and disorder spread rapidly and on 13 March, Hitler met with President Hacha of Czechoslovakia, ostensibly to discuss various matters arising out of the earlier occupation of Czech territory. When Hacha arrived in Berlin it was almost midnight. He was treated to a guard of armed SS men, then subjected to an angry tirade of abuse, accusations and allegations from Hitler. If the Czechs did not surrender at once to Slovak independence and Nazi government, Hitler said, the German armed forces would invade at dawn. Prague would be bombed to rubble by the Luftwaffe at 6am. Hacha fainted. When he came to, Hitler offered to call off his armed forces if Hacha signed a surrender document.
At 3.55am Hacha signed.
At 6am the German army invaded. The Luftwaffe did not, as planned, fly in to secure the Czech air force bases because the entire country was covered by fog. The threat to bomb Prague had been a bluff.
This time the move went exactly as Brauchitsch and Guderian had planned. Mechanical breakdowns were kept to a minimum, road traffic ran in the correct order and virtually nobody got lost. There was one crucial difference to what had happened in Austria and the Sudetenland occupations. The detailed orders which were followed by the various units had been drawn up by OKW, not OKH. Hitler did not trust the older reactionary officers of Brauchitsch’s staff, but instead preferred the staff work of his Nazi loyalists under Keitel. The reason Hitler had given to the military for this change was that close co-operation between the army and the Luftwaffe would be necessary. In the event, fog stopped that from happening.
POLAND 1939
The occupation of Czechoslovakia had one other military result of prime importance. The diplomatic reactions convinced Hitler that Britain was more likely to declare war if he invaded another country than was France. And Hitler was intending to invade another country with a German minority population: Poland.
In May 1939, Hitler announced to Keitel, Brauchitsch, Raeder and 11 other senior military men that Poland would be invaded. ‘We cannot expect a repetition of the Czech affair,’ Hitler warned them. ‘This time there will be a war.’ The invasion was to be codenamed Operation White. This time all three services were to be involved. Keitel at OKW, the supreme staff, issued instructions detaling the strategic objectives for each of the three services and called for detailed proposals on how these were to be achieved.
Throughout May and June the various branches of the armed services drew up plans, revised plans, replacement plans and alternative plans. At each stage, Hitler was consulted. He was taking a much closer interest in the arrangements for the attack on Poland than he had in any previous operation of the Wehrmacht. In July Hitler sat down with the plans that then existed and spent days going through them in great detail. He examined the role of each division, brigade and regiment, quizzing the generals as to what was suggested and why. If he did not like what he heard, Hitler altered the plans with firm marks of a black pencil.
In the case of the proposals for taking some crucial objectives, Hitler even discussed the roles of individual companies and called in the battalion commanders to discuss plans with them. A typical example was the operation to capture the half mile long bridge across the Vistula at Dirschau and hold it until the panzers could arrive to drive over it and on into northern Poland. The capture and defence of the bridge was organised by the navy. Staff at OKH thought it would take three days for the panzers to get there. Hitler said two days and changed OKH plans accordingly. In
the event it took just a day and a half for the army to reach Dirschau.
It was late in July before Hitler was happy with the plans for Operation White. In their final form, the German invasion plans saw 53 divisions deployed for battle, of which 40 were conventional infantry and 13 new panzer divisions. These ground troops were backed up by the full might of the Luftwaffe which was to bomb Polish communications centres and have Stukas on standby to give close support to the army. The navy, the Kriegsmarine, meanwhile was given the task of taking and holding coastal cities, including the disputed city of Danzig, now Gdansk, which had been in German territory until 1919 and was still populated mainly by Germans.
Operation White envisaged two main lines of attack. In the north the Fourth Army under General Hans von Kluge was to advance from Pomerania across the Polish Corridor towards the German enclave of East Prussia, taking Danzig and Dirschau as it went. Meanwhile the Third Army under Kuchler was to drive south from East Prussia to capture Brest-Litovsk and the Polish capital of Warsaw. The main attack was to come in the south. General Karl von Rundstedt was given three different armies to command, the Eighth, Tenth and Fourteenth. The Eighth Army was to take Lodz and the Fourteenth Cracow and Lvov. Between the two was placed the Tenth Army with the bulk of the panzers and close Stuka support. The Tenth was to drive fast and deep into Poland, surrounding Polish forces and breaking through to Warsaw.
The detailed plans called for the type of mobile, armoured warfare that Guderian had been planning for years and Hitler had ordered the Wehrmacht to work towards since 1933. While the panzers punched through the defences and then motored on at high speed to the enemy rear, the infantry and artillery were to move through the gaps created to outflank and crush the remaining front line defences. The Luftwaffe was to penetrate deep behind enemy lines to bomb bridges, rail yards and roads to hamper the ability of the enemy to bring up reserves. The Stuka dive bombers of the Luftwaffe were to operate in close action with the panzers, bombing to rubble any strong point which threatened to hold up the panzers. Everything depended on movement, speed and bringing overwhelming fire power to bear at specific points of tactical or strategic importance. All units were linked to their commanders, and to each other, by radio to ensure swift communications to bring up reserves, direct the Stukas or call for changes of direction.
While the military staff planned the campaign, Hitler again went to work on the diplomatic front and soon had Russia as an ally (see Chapter Three). Russia and Germany would carve up Poland between them, though Hitler would choose the time and the excuse for an attack. Hungary was already an ally. That left Britain and France. Hitler resigned himself to the fact that both nations would declare war on Germany as soon as he invaded Poland. But he calculated it would take at least three weeks for the Allies to be ready to invade Germany in the West, and he thought that by then Poland would be on its last legs. Hitler hoped France would make peace rather than go to war for an already defeated Poland. He was less sure what Britain would do, but he discounted the risk by arguing that Britain had no land border with Germany and would probably follow the French lead.
By late August everything was ready. Only an excuse was needed.
The excuse was provided by Reinhard Heydrich, head of the party security service (Sicherheitsdienst – the SD) and Himmler’s deputy at the SS. He dressed several squads of SS men in Polish uniforms, together with some political criminals dragged from the concentration camps. A little after midnight on 1 September, the men attacked a number of German customs offices and border posts. The guards fled, and the occupying SS men, still masquerading as Poles, used the radios to broadcast anti-German slogans in Polish. The prisoners from the concentration camps were then shot dead to provide some ‘Polish’ bodies. Hitler declared this proof positive of Polish aggression. The invasion began.
Two days earlier, on 31 August, Hitler had issued his War Directive No.1 which set the time for the attack as 4.45am on 1 September and instructed all units to proceed exactly as laid out in Plan White.
The Poles, of course, had long known that a German invasion was a possibility.They had 40 divisions of infantry, 16 brigades of cavalry, 500 tanks 400 aircraft. More than enough, it was thought, to give Hitler the bloody nose he deserved.
There were two schools of thought in the Polish army as to the form the German aggression would take. Some thought Hitler was after the disputed parts of Poland that had been German until 1919. They envisaged Hitler launching massive strikes to invade, conquer and occupy areas within two or three days and so present the world with an accomplished blow. It would be best, these people argued, to defend these areas in depth to slow the Germans and give Poland’s allies time to intervene. Another group of Poles believed Hitler aimed instead to destroy the Polish Army and then dictate surrender terms from a position of strength. If this were the case it would be better to lure the Germans into the forest and swamps of central Poland where they could be ambushed and defeated.
In the event, the Polish Commander in Chief, Field Marshal Edward Smigly-Rydz chose neither plan. He put a third of his forces in the Polish Corridor and around Danzig, then spread the remainder of his men out along the long border with Germany. He kept only a small reserve under his own command near Warsaw. His plan was to bog down any attack around Danzig while holding the borders and using his reserve to counterattack any German breakthrough.
The war began as planned by the Germans, and it was the Kriegsmarine which was given the honour of firing the opening shot. The cruiser Schleswig-Holstein steamed into Danzig harbour and opened fire on the Polish military depot there. Just minutes later the panzers lurched forwards, followed by the infantry and cavalry, while overhead the Luftwaffe began their bombing raids.
Later that day Hitler went to the Reichstag to announce that the invasion had begun following Polish attacks on border posts the night before. This was the first day of war and Hitler had dressed for the occasion. Gone were the civilian clothes and familiar brown shirt for Hitler had dressed himself in a field grey uniform. It was not an army uniform, for Hitler had no army rank, but a Nazi Party uniform made out of army material. Hitler waited in Berlin long enough to receive the responses of Britain and France to the invasion.
Once he was certain that war was declared, Hitler boarded his newly constructed command train and set off for the battlefront. The train was armour plated and equipped with a conference room, sleeping quarters, living room, toilets and guard rooms as well as a host of radio equipment and maps to keep Hitler up to date with the campaign. The train headed for Pomerania, near the Polish border west of Danzig, where the heaviest fighting was expected.
In fact the invasion was going better than even the optimistic Hitler had expected. On the day Hitler arrived at the front, Danzig fell and East Prussia was reconnected to the rest of Germany by the columns of Kluge’s Fourth Army. The next day two Polish armies in western Poland were cut off by the panzers and motorised troops. The Poles, on foot or horseback, simply could not move fast enough to get out of the way of the encircling panzer columns. The Poles continued fighting, however, forcing the Germans to keep their own foot and cavalry in the region to contain the Poles.
On 8 September the first German scouting vehicles came within sight of the suburbs of Warsaw. Hitler was jubilant. He left his train in an open-topped Mercedes and drove off to visit the army units in the area. He drove around standing up in full view of the troops, just as he had done during parades in peace time. His staff tried to persuade him this was too dangerous, but to no avail. The task of protecting Hitler on these drives to the front, which became increasingly common as the campaign progressed, fell to the head of his HQ staff guard, a previously obscure middle-aged officer named Erwin Rommel.
On the same day, a serious disagreement blew up between von Rundstedt, the commander in the field, and Brauchitsch at OKH. Working from the reports of Luftwaffe scout aircraft, the OKH thought the bulk of the Polish army had retreated across the Vistula and issued orders
to Rundstedt to pursue them eastwards. However, Rundstedt’s forward panzer commanders were reporting that the Poles were retreating north towards Warsaw. He wanted to follow them. A series of increasingly blunt telegrams and radio messages flashed back and forth. Finally Rundstedt won his case and continued the drive north.
By the morning of 9 September the Poles had managed to mobilise their reserves east of Warsaw and linked them to the retreating Pomorze Army. Together the two forces launched a counterattack against the Germans advancing on Warsaw from the north. The Battle of Bzura which developed threw the German columns back in confusion, then spread to the south where the Poles stopped Rundstedt’s armies at Lowicz.
Hitler was furious at the delay. He moved his train to Silesia and sent out a stream of messages demanding to know the current situation and what was being done. He still did not issue any direct orders to his military commanders. Having prepared the plans in great detail, Hitler was content to leave battlefield decisions to his generals, though he continually pestered them for action.
On 15 September the Polish forces involved in the Battle of Bzura began to run out of ammunition. The disruption in the rear caused by Luftwaffe raids and deep penetration by the panzers meant that Polish supply lines had been cut. General Tadeusz Kutrzeba ordered his southernmost units to try to break out towards the southeast to join Marshal Smigly-Rydz, then fell back with the rest of his men for a last ditch defence of Warsaw. German attacks began almost at once, with the Luftwaffe pounding Polish defences from the air.
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