100 Mistakes That Changed History: Backfires and Blunders That Collapsed Empires, Crashed Economies, and Altered the Course of Our World

by Bill Fawcett

  The plan was to capture Hitler, so as not to make him a martyr and start a civil war. Once they had him in custody they would put him on trial for crimes against the German people. There were several other important Nazi leaders to be imprisoned as well, including Hermann Goering, recently made a field marshal; Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS; and Reinhard Heydrich, who controlled the SD, the security service of the SS. There was a strong expectation that the generals would rally behind their removal. All the conspirators needed was a strong sign of outside support. This would expose the error of Hitler’s opportunism. It would also show the undecided that Germany itself was being placed in an unnecessarily risky position by Hitler and that understanding would provide the impetus to guarantee the revolt’s success. All they needed was a strong stand by Britain and World War II would be averted. In Beck’s words, “If you can bring me positive proof that the British will make war if [Hitler] invades Czechoslovakia, I will put an end to the Nazi regime!”

  Kleist-Schmenzin arrived and was hustled past customs by six MI6 agents. All that was needed was a public statement by the British government that if Hitler went through with his plans to occupy Czechoslovakia, they would declare war; then he could act. The plans for this invasion were complete, troops were being placed, and orders distributed to the German commanders. We now see that this visit was quite literally the last opportunity to stop the plunge of Europe into war. It must not have been that clear then.

  The first meeting Kleist-Schmenzin had was with a Lord Lloyd, an influential member of the ruling party. It is likely this was a sort of initial screening that the Schwarze Kapelle passed. A meeting occurred the next day between Kleist-Schmenzin and Robert Vansittart, an important adviser to the government on foreign affairs. Vansittart was more concerned about what would happen to things like Germany’s borders after the coup, rather than in assisting with the coup itself. But the next day, Kleist-Schmenzin met with the first lord of the navy, Winston Churchill. He again recounted the plans of the conspirators to a silent Churchill. The future wartime prime minister stayed noncommittal until the German was about to leave, and then he said only that he would be interested in working with them only after they brought down Hitler. This was the position that the Chamberlain government chose to take. They would do nothing until the coup was already a success.

  In fact, quite the opposite occurred. A few weeks later, on September 13, Neville Chamberlain sent Hitler a note asking for a meeting. Hitler was enthused that he was being given the recognition from the British and that they had come to him. They met in Munich on September 30, and rather than confront Hitler, Chamberlain made every effort to appease him. They signed an agreement to guarantee “peace for our time,” which most certainly didn’t occur. What it did allow was the occupation of Czechoslovakia by the Nazis, with no resistance from Britain or France. The Schwarze Kapelle was helpless. With Hitler having been triumphant in a bloodless takeover and the Allies showing they had no stomach for challenging the Nazis, the conspiracy was unable to act.

  A few harsh words about the invasion of Czechoslovakia, and there might not have been a World War II and nearly a hundred million lives would have been saved. Rather than supporting the Schwarze Kapelle, the British government chose appeasement. The world was never the same again.

  70

  DEALING WITH THE DEVIL

  Green Light

  1939

  In August 1939 Joseph Stalin made a mistake, one that deeply affected not only the Soviet Union but also the rest of the world. The mistake was that on August 23, 1939, the dictator of the communist empire signed a secret protocol with Adolf Hitler. The document was a clear blueprint for a political alliance between Russia and Germany. It included economic exchanges, cultural exchanges, and even military cooperation. Effectively, this agreement laid the basis for the two nations to divide eastern Europe between them. One provision stated that should Germany invade Poland, Stalin would order the now-infamous “stab in the back.” Russia promised to also invade the already prostrate nation from the east and occupy a large part of it.

  There was a very good argument to be made that it was to Russia’s advantage. Their army had been crippled by purges and the failures of a botched invasion of Finland. But by signing this pact with Germany, Joseph Stalin also guaranteed the start of World War II. One of the Nazis’ greatest fears was a two-front war. This had proved disastrous for Germany only a few decades before in World War I. This pact guaranteed that would not happen again. Ironically, they were right, and when Hitler chose to disregard the agreement two years later, it began a series of events that resulted in the total defeat of the Third Reich. The pact removed the last real check on German aggression. Britain and France maintained a continuing attitude of appeasement. America’s stand was one of adamant neutrality that even a concerned Franklin Roosevelt could not change. With Russia neutralized, there simply was no one else strong enough to stop the Nazis.

  Stalin had many reasons to think this protocol was a good idea. One was that it left his own occupation of Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltic states, and the eastern part of Russia’s old nemesis, Poland, unchallenged. Another appeal was that it played to Stalin’s need to create a buffer zone that reached about 200 kilometers from the actual Russian border. Perhaps most important, Adolf Hitler had been working hard on the Western democracies to join with him in a crusade against the communists. Stalin had a real fear Hitler might succeed. It had been barely twenty years since most of the Western nations and Japan had sent military units into Russia to support the White Russian, anti-Bolshevik armies. Finally, it appears from the now-available records that Stalin actually believed that any war between Germany and Russia could be avoided. This was, in retrospect, wishful thinking, but that belief not only caused him to sign the protocol but also led to orders that crippled the Russian army when the Wehrmacht invaded two years later. So desperately did Stalin hold on to the belief that Hitler would obey the terms of this pact that German troops passed trains of raw materials from Russia still delivering resources as agreed, hours after Operation Barbarossa had begun in 1941. Leopold Unger, a Polish-Belgian author and historian, is unquestionably correct in calling the 1939 protocol the “most cynical operation of the World War II, and the founding document of the post-war Soviet empire in Europe.” This agreement also effectively ended discussions on another pact, the Tripartite Pact between Britain, France, and Russia, which was also designed to ensure peace and hold Hitler at bay. So, effectively, Stalin decided to believe Adolf Hitler and Germany—which had attacked Russia in World War I—instead of trusting his allies from that same war.

  In the lens of history, there are fewer more obvious, world-changing mistakes than Joseph Stalin cutting a deal with the devil. Perhaps the only greater mistake Stalin made was believing that the agreement was anything but Realpolitik: something cynically done by Hitler only for passing expediency. So while the Nazi- Soviet pact of 1939 gave Russia the illusion of security, in reality it gave the Nazis a green light to attack Poland and then France. It was a major factor in the start of World War II. Believing the assurances of peace with Russia, which Hitler betrayed the first chance he got, was more than just a mistake. It sold out not only Poland and western Europe but, in the end, was even more costly to Russia itself. Almost exactly two years after signing the nonaggression and cooperation pact, Hitler attacked Russia. Stalin was so dismayed that he had a virtual breakdown and was ineffective for the crucial first days of the invasion. The result of his mistake was the loss of millions of Russian lives, half the Russian population suffering from Nazi occupation, and the destruction of much of the manufacturing base of the Soviet Union. It was a terrible price for a short-term agreement. Rarely has anyone’s judgment proven so wrong.

  71

  HALFWAY RIGHT

  Totally Wrong

  1939

  The Maginot Line was built by France in reaction to the slaughter of more than 1 million French soldiers in World War I. Before that
war, the French military doctrine had been unchanged from when Napoleon I was emperor. If you wanted to win a battle, you attacked. Courage would overcome any enemy and guarantee victory. Admittedly, the doctrine had not worked so well even for Napoleon at the Battle of Nations or Waterloo, but France stuck with it. Then came World War I and the trenches. Attacking through barbed wire against modern artillery and machine guns proved fatal and useless. But it took the French generals almost two years and a mutiny to understand this.

  The result of the French people’s revulsion to the horrific losses in World War I was to go to the other extreme. The leaders of postwar France decided that if total offense was a disaster, total defense must be the answer. France, since Vauban and Louis XIV, had been the leader in building fortresses, so fortresses it would be. The result was the construction of the Maginot Line at the cost of more than 3 billion francs. That amount today, were it an equivalent portion of the U.S. annual budget, would be more than $3,000,000,000: That’s $3 trillion. But the problem was not cost. The mistake that the French made was that the French built only half of the line.

  The Maginot Line was not a single line of forts. It was rather a continuous series of defensive positions. The line included everything from small machine gun bunkers, some remote-controlled using periscopes, to massive artillery cupolas that would have been impressive on a battleship. In places, the defenses ran more than ten miles in depth. The forts were well stocked with everything from artillery shells to vintage wines and were ready to hold off any German attack for weeks without resupply. The Maginot Line was originally planned to run the entire length of the northern border of France. Half that border was with Germany. The other half ran along the border with Belgium. The first half, the portion that ran along the German border, was completed in the 1930s.

  When construction of the Maginot Line reached the 150-mile border between France and Belgium, the government of Belgium objected. They refused to accept anything on the border because it inferred they would be abandoned by the French in the event of a German attack. But they also refused to allow the French to help them build anything along their border because it might serve as a provocation to the Germans. Belgium threatened that if the French built anything at all, they would ally themselves with Germany.

  The French reaction was to do nothing. Even after Poland was invaded, there was no effort to add even the most rudimentary fortifications to the border that ran from the Ardennes to the Channel. Half of the French border was solidly fortified. The northern half, the route German armies had used almost every time they invaded France in the past thousand years, was left undefended. Eventually, the leaders of France justified stopping halfway by explaining that now they knew where the Germans had to attack since the Maginot Line was impregnable. Unfortunately for them, they were so right and so very wrong.

  With half the border defenseless, the French and British agreed on a new strategy. When the Germans invaded Belgium, and only after they invaded, massive armies, waiting along the French border, would rush north and reinforce the Belgian army. The plan even worked. When the Sitzkrieg ended and the fighting between France and Germany began, the Nazis did attack northern Belgium; and like everyone expected, a day later the British Expeditionary Force and a substantial part of the French army hurried past the undefended French border and into defensive positions along Belgium’s waterways. While they did so, the Germans pressed only a little and mostly waited.

  Once the British and French had committed dozens of divisions in Belgium, the Wehrmacht attacked through the virtually undefended Ardennes Forest. Undefended because the Maginot Line stopped short of it, and the French incorrectly assumed the forest was too dense for a major offensive to push through. They were wrong about it being impassable, and within weeks the main German offensive had reached the Channel. Hundreds of thousands of Allied soldiers were now trapped in Belgium. About 300,000 were eventually evacuated from Dunkirk, but more than that were left surrounded in northern Belgium while the panzers poured over the undefended portions of the French border and tore through France. Exactly one month after the Ardennes attack, the Nazis occupied Paris.

  The part of the Maginot Line that was completed worked; what few Nazi assaults were made along it from Germany failed. But once France fell, most of the defenders had to surrender. Their guns faced the wrong way and many of their families were in German hands. The few fortresses that held out were not even attacked. Bulldozers were used to simply cover the turrets, ventilation shafts, and entrances with yards of dirt that turned the underground defenses into tombs.

  But by allowing politics to overcome military sense, the incredibly expensive fortification failed to be more than a trap for the men manning it. Had the national wealth spent on constructing the Maginot Line been spent on tanks, planes, and artillery, the French army would have been immeasurably stronger. But the postwar wealth of France was squandered on a defensive line that by being incomplete accomplished nothing.

  Had France ignored the irrational objections of Belgium and completed the Maginot Line, it might well have fulfilled its purpose. If, in 1940, the German panzer spearheads had to fight through a completed Maginot Line, their losses would have been staggering. The Nazis might still have defeated France in a much longer war, or they might not have, as the Blitzkrieg would have had little effect on mutually supporting and highly fortified positions. France might even have survived long enough to learn how to fight a modern war or force yet another stalemate on her German invaders.

  72

  STOPPING SHORT OF VICTORY

  Miracle by Mistake

  1940

  Blitzkrieg was smashing France. The Wehrmacht had sailed through the “impassable” Ardennes Forest and bypassed the Maginot Line. German panzer divisions had spearheaded a push to the Channel that had effectively cut the British forces off from the French army and was pushing them back to the coast. On May 24, 1940, the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) was deeply engaged with the German Second Army. On that same day, the foremost of Heinz Guderian’s panzer units were thirty miles from the port of Dunkirk. This put a substantial amount of Nazi armored and highly mobile units close to Dunkirk, the last continental channel port in Allied hands. The Nazis had more units near the port than almost all of the BEF combined. Worse yet, the BEF was totally engaged and could spare nothing to meet the threat in their rear. They were saved only because on that same day the order was received from Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt to the panzer divisions in Army Group A, which included all of the forces facing the BEF, to halt and re-form on the Lens to Gravelines canals. That move not only stopped Guderian from going for the port but relieved the pressure on the rest of the BEF as well. This order may well have lost Germany its last chance to force a peace on Britain.

  The Dunkirk evacuation

  There has since been a lot of speculation as to why the decision to halt the panzers was made. No one after the war was sure why this order was given. It certainly wasn’t because the armored units needed to stop. Diaries from the battle showed that the men and equipment were capable of continuing to attack, and they were frustrated at not being able to do so. Often speculation turns to the theory that Hermann Goering wanted the glory of giving the BEF its coup de grace to go to the Luftwaffe alone. Reichsmarschall Goering was also effectively the number two authority in the Nazi government and had Hitler’s ear, so he could easily have made such a demand.

  This stop order came from the highest level and may have been influenced by Hitler’s desire to seek a quick peace with Britain to leave his entire army free to deal with Russia. Planning for the attack that actually occurred the next summer was already being developed. Allowing the BEF to escape, or at least surrender rather than be destroyed, may have been a ploy used by the Führer to encourage better relations with the British. At this point, he still had hopes of joining with his fellow English Aryans in his planned war against all Slavs and other untermenschen. Or perhaps it was ordered because Hitler had experien
ced the mud of Flanders first-hand in World War I and was afraid that the armored elite of his army would bog down and be of no use in finishing off France. What is certain is that the decision was not caused by any action taken by the Allies nor was it at all popular with the German general staff. Whatever the reason, this mistake may well have changed the entire course of World War II.

  If Dunkirk had fallen, then there was no place for the BEF and associated Allied units to retreat from. The 338,000 men evacuated would have been lost or become prisoners. The bulk of the British officer corps and noncommissioned officers, who later formed the core of the British army fighting in North Africa and landing in Normandy, would have been lost.

  One of the likely effects of such a loss on Britain would have been the collapse of civilian morale. If that happened, there was a high probability that Britain would have entered into the peace talks Hitler so desired. And in those talks the British empire might well have been represented by the less-determined Clement Attlee and not the then sea lord Winston Churchill. Churchill gained his premiership partially by riding the burst of confidence that came from the successful withdrawal of the BEF. If the bulk of the Royal Army had been lost, the more timid and conciliatory Attlee might well have accepted the premiership instead. In reality, Clement Attlee was offered the leadership of Britain, but he declined in Churchill’s favor. Since Hitler publicly stated that he thought of the British as being fellow Aryans, this might well have encouraged a peace agreement or at least a British openness to a negotiated peace that preserved their empire. Avoiding a two-front war was a tenet of German strategy. That doctrine combined with Hitler’s determination to attack communist Russia suggests that the terms the Führer might have offered Britain would certainly have been very generous.