[Hitler] did not even build up his Navy to the limited scale visualized in the Anglo-German Naval Treaty of 1935. He constantly assured his admirals they could discount any risk of war with Britain. After Munich, he told them that they need not anticipate a conflict with Britain in the next six years at least. Even in the summer of 1939, and as late as August 22, he repeated such assurances—if with waning conviction.26
A.J.P. Taylor concurs with Hinsley and Liddell Hart. Though a German attack at sea presented a graver threat to Britain’s survival than the Luftwaffe, Taylor—with only slightly different statistics—writes:
Here, too, the Germans were badly prepared. At the outset of war they had only twenty-two ocean-going U-boats and few trained crews. Hitler did not authorize new construction until July 1940 and cut it down again in December when the army prepared to attack Soviet Russia.27
Churchill, who had returned as First Lord of the Admiralty, confirms Germany’s dearth of sea power to combat the Royal Navy. When war broke out in September 1939, Churchill writes,
the German navy had only begun their rebuilding and had no power even to form a line of battle. Their two great battleships, Bismarck and Tirpitz, were at least a year from completion…. Thus there was no challenge in surface craft to our command of the seas…. Enemy shipping, as in 1914, virtually vanished almost at once from the high seas. The German ships mostly took refuge in neutral ports, or, when intercepted, scuttled themselves.28
Hitler’s navy was that of a Germany whose ambitions lay on land. Had he ever planned to invade England, he would have built troopships, landing barges, and transports to ferry tanks and artillery across the Channel—and warships to escort his landing craft, provide fire support for the invasion, and keep the Royal Navy out of the Channel while his invasion force was crossing. He did none of this.
LOOKING EASTWARD
THERE IS OTHER EVIDENCE that Hitler never intended to invade Western Europe. Before World War I, the German General Staff had adopted the Schlieffen Plan, which entailed a massive German offensive through Belgium. Because German war strategy was to take the offensive from day one, the Kaiser built no new defensive fortifications to match the great French forts of Toul and Verdun. Hitler, however, for three and a half years after his army entered the Rhineland, invested huge sums and tens of millions of man-hours of labor constructing his West Wall. On September 1, 1939, his engineers were frantically completing it. Asks Taylor: If Hitler was all along planning an invasion of France, why did he, at monstrous cost, build purely defensive fortifications up and down the Rhineland? The Kaiser never built a Siegfried Line, because Moltke’s army of 1914 planned to attack on the first day of war.
Even after Britain and France had declared war on Germany, Hitler confided to his inner circle, “[I]f we on our side avoid all acts of war, the whole business will evaporate. As soon as we sink a ship and they have sizable casualties, the war party over there will gain strength.”29 After Poland had surrendered, Hitler, on October 6, 1939, made a “peace offer” to Britain and France; it “was turned down without hesitation.”30
“Even when German U-boats lay in a favourable position near the battleship Dunkerque, he [Hitler] refused to order an attack,” wrote Albert Speer.31 Other strategic decisions make sense only if Hitler’s true ambitions lay in the east. After overrunning France, Hitler stopped at the Pyrenees. He asked Franco for passage through Spain to attack Gibraltar. Denied, he abandoned the idea. He did not demand that France turn over its battle fleet, the fourth largest in the world, as Germany had been forced to do in 1918. He did not demand France’s North African colonies. He did not demand access to French bases in the Middle East to threaten Suez. He visited Paris, saw the Eiffel Tower, went home, and began to plan the invasion of Russia, preliminary orders for which went out in July 1940—before the Battle of Britain had even begun.
Hitler also issued the “stop order” to his Panzers, letting the British army escape at Dunkirk. His occupation of Britain’s Channel Islands was benign compared to the horrors in the east. While Hitler reannexed Alsace and Lorraine after June 1940, the peace terms he imposed on France were more generous than those the Allies had imposed on Germany in 1919. None of this represented magnanimity. In the New Order in Europe, Hitler wanted Marshal Petain as an ally, as he had wanted Colonel Beck as an ally.
On August 10, 1939, three weeks before the attack of Poland, Hitler summoned the League of Nations High Commissioner for Danzig, Dr. Carl Burckhardt, to the Eagle’s Nest the next day. Writes Kershaw, this “was a calculated attempt to keep the West out of the coming conflict.”32 Hitler gave Burckhardt this message, intended for British ears:
Everything that I undertake is directed against Russia; if the West is too stupid and too blind to understand this, then I will be forced to reach an understanding with the Russians, smash the West, and then turn all my concentrated strength against the Soviet Union. I need the Ukraine so that no one can starve us out again as in the last war.33
Historian John Lukacs suggests Burckhardt’s quotation is suspect. Indeed, it seems incredible that Hitler would reveal his intention to smash the Soviet Union and seize Ukraine to a Swiss diplomat, who would be relating what he had been told as soon as he got down from the Eagle’s Nest.34
Henry Kissinger, however, cites Burckhardt and writes that this is
certainly an accurate statement of Hitler’s priorities: from Great Britain he wanted non-interference in continental affairs, and from the Soviet Union he wanted Lebensraum, or living space. It was a measure of Stalin’s achievement that he was [able] to reverse Hitler’s priorities, however temporarily.35
Kissinger might have added, “and a measure of Britain’s failure.” American historian W. H. Chamberlin is even more damning of British diplomacy:
From every standpoint, military, political and psychological, it would have been far more advantageous if Hitler’s first blows had fallen on Stalin’s totalitarian empire, not on Britain, France and the small democracies of the West….[O]n the basis of available evidence, the failure of Britain and France to canalize Hitler’s expansion in an eastward direction may reasonably be considered one of the greatest diplomatic failures in history.36
Though Bismarck had maintained good relations with Russia, the Drang nach Osten, or drive to the east, was embedded deep in German history. While infinitely more savage in the means he employed, Hitler’s Ostpolitik did not differ in its ultimate goals from that of Hindenburg and Ludendorff. The lands Hitler coveted were not terra incognita. They had been occupied by the German army as of Armistice Day 1918.
Nor had Britain been greatly alarmed in 1918 at German gains in the east at the expense of Russia. Some Allied statesmen were willing to let the Kaiser keep his eastern conquests if he would restore the status quo ante in Belgium and France. In November 1917, after the Germans and Austrians had broken the Italian lines at Caporetto and Bolsheviks had seized power in Petrograd and sued for peace, some British statesmen wanted to end the war. They suggested offering the Germans an eastern empire, including Ukraine, if the Kaiser would agree to give up his lost African and Pacific colonies and retire from Belgium and France. Jan Smuts, fearing the war could last until 1920, signed on. In short, British statesmen in 1917 and 1918 were prepared to offer the Kaiser’s Germany the same dominance in Eastern Europe they went to war to deny to Hitler’s Germany in 1939.37
Here, then, is the unwritten bargain Hitler had on offer to Britain in 1939. France and Belgium could keep the lands given to them at Versailles—Malmédy, Eupen, Alsace, and Lorraine. But Germany would take back the German lands and peoples given to the Czechs and Poles in violation of Wilson’s principle of self-determination. Germany would concede the democracies’ dominance west of the Rhine if they would cease interfering in the east. Why Britain would reject this, Hitler could never understand. He believed a Germany prepared to confront and block Bolshevism should cause rejoicing in the capitalist West.
Thus, when the Allies refused to
give Hitler his free hand in the east and threatened war if he moved on Poland, Hitler decided to offer a deal to Stalin. Stalin greedily accepted. Thus the Allies got war, while Stalin got Finland, the Baltic republics, half of Poland, and two years to prepare for the inevitable Nazi attack. Stalin used those two years to build the tanks, planes, and guns, and conscript the troops that stopped Hitler at Leningrad, Moscow, and Stalingrad. Thus did British diplomatic folly succeed only in getting Western Europe overrun and making Eastern Europe safe for Stalinism.
DID HITLER WANT THE WORLD?
HITLER HAD TO BE stopped, it is argued, because he wanted the world. After defeating Russia, he would have turned west, overrun France, and starved Britain. Then would have come the turn of the United States—and America would have had to face Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan alone. British statesmen believed this. After Czechoslovakia fell to pieces in mid-March 1939 and Hitler motored into Prague to make it a protectorate of the Reich, Chamberlain asked aloud: “Is this in fact a step in the direction of an attempt to dominate the world by force?”38
Halifax wrote that “the lust of continental or world mastery seemed to stand out in stark relief.”39 Henderson agreed: “The principles of nationalism and self-determination…had been cynically thrown overboard at Prague and world dominion had supplanted them.”40
But was Hitler’s imposition of a German protectorate over a Czech rump state that had belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire for the first thirty years of his life really part of a grand strategy for “world mastery,” “world dominion,” or “domination of the world by force”?
Among British elites of the twentieth century, there was always a streak of Germanophobia, an inordinate fear that Germany was secretly plotting the ruin of the British Empire and the conquest of the world. We see it here in Chamberlain, Halifax, and Henderson, as we saw it in the run-up to World War I in ex–minister for war Haldane: “I thought from my study of the German General Staff that once the German war party had got into the saddle…it would be war not merely for the overthrow of France or Russia but for the domination of the world.”41
On the eve of the war of 1914–1918, Churchill described the Kaiser, who was then casting about desperately for some way to avoid a war, as a “continental tyrant” whose goal was “the dominion of the world.”42
When Haldane and Churchill claimed the Kaiser was a “continental tyrant” out for “dominion of the world,” Wilhelm II was in late middle age, had been in power twenty-five years, and had yet to fight his first war.
In his 1937 Great Contemporaries, Churchill exonerates the Kaiser of the charge of which he had accused him before the war of 1914: “[H]istory should incline to the more charitable view and acquit William II of having planned and plotted the World War.”43
In the same book, Churchill wrote of Hitler, “Whatever else may be thought about these exploits, they are among the most remarkable in the whole history of the world.”44 Churchill was referring not only to Hitler’s political achievements, but his economic achievements. Before the end of his fourth year in power, Hitler had ended the Depression, cut unemployment from six million to one million, grown Germany’s GNP by 37 percent, and increased auto production from 45,000 vehicles a year to 250,000.45 City and provincial deficits had disappeared. This success goaded Churchill, before Hitler had ever moved on Austria or Czechoslovakia, to confide to American Gen. Robert Wood, at his flat in London in November 1936, “Germany is getting too strong and we must smash her.”46
If Hitler was out to conquer the world, the proof cannot be found in the armed forces with which he began the war. As U.S. Maj. Gen. C. F. Robinson wrote in a 1947 report he produced for the U.S. War Department,
Germany was not prepared in 1939—contrary to democratic assumption—for a long war or for total war; her economic and industrial effort was by no means fully harnessed: her factories were not producing war matériel at anything like full capacity.47
WAS AMERICA IN MORTAL PERIL?
IN A REPUBLIC, NOT AN EMPIRE, this writer argued that once Göring’s Luftwaffe had lost the Battle of Britain, Germany presented no mortal threat to the United States:
If there had been a point of maximum peril for America in the war in Europe it was in the summer of 1940, after France had been overrun and England seemed about to be invaded, with the possible scuttling or loss of the British fleet. But after the Royal Air Force won the Battle of Britain, the invasion threat was history. If Göring’s Luftwaffe could not achieve air supremacy over the Channel, how was it going to achieve it over the Atlantic? If Hitler could not put a soldier into England in the fall of 1940, the notion that he could invade the Western Hemisphere—with no surface ships to engage the United States and British fleets, and U.S. air power dominant in the Western Atlantic—was preposterous.48
In refutation, The New Republic enlisted history professor Jeffrey Herf, who wrote that, even with the victory of the Royal Air Force, America was still in mortal peril. Herf cited as his authority Gerhard Weinberg, the “great historian of Hitler’s foreign policy.”
In his important essay “Hitler’s Image of the United States,” Weinberg shows how, after overrunning France in 1940, Hitler’s inner circle began planning a Third World War—against the United States. In 1943, Hitler launched a huge battleship-construction program, the “Z Plan,” to confront the American Navy. At the same time he set up naval bases on the coasts of France and Africa. In Tomorrow the World: Hitler, Northwest Africa and the Path Toward America, Norman Goda further documents Germany’s plans to build a massive surface fleet, develop a trans-atlantic bomber, and procure naval bases in French Africa, the Canary Islands, the Azores, and the Cape Verde Islands.49
This is comic-book history.
Hitler did order up plans to seize the Canaries, Cape Verdes, and Azores, but these were to secure a German hold on Gibraltar, which Hitler never took, as General Franco never gave his army permission to cross Spain.
If Hitler’s “inner circle” was planning to “confront the American Navy,” why did Hitler not demand that the French turn over their fleet to Admiral Raeder at France’s surrender in June 1940? The Germans had been forced to turn over the High Seas Fleet after the armistice of 1918. Yet when Churchill ordered “Catapult,” to secure or sink the French fleet lest it fall into Nazi hands, the French warships were at anchor at Toulon, Alexandria, Dakar—and Mers el-Kebir, where they were sunk by the Royal Navy. Throughout the war, the U.S. Navy did not encounter a single German surface warship. Yet Herf claims the Nazis came close to having “open season…on the harbors and cities of the East Coast.”50
And if Hitler was contemplating building battleships in 1943, he was contemplating a fleet for Jutland, not World War II. As of 1943, Germany had sent two battleships to sea, Bismarck, sunk on her maiden voyage, and Tirpitz, then hiding in Norwegian fjords. By 1943, the battleship era was over and the carrier era had begun. At Midway, in June 1942, in one of the decisive sea battles of history, the U.S. Navy sank Hiryu, Soryu, Akagi, and Kaga, the four carriers that were the heart of the Imperial Japanese Fleet’s strike force, without seeing them, except from the cockpits of U.S. torpedo-and dive-bombers. By war’s end, the United States had scores of aircraft carriers with combat experience at Leyte Gulf and the Battle of the Philippine Sea. Of Hitler’s Z Plan, Roger Chesneau writes in his authoritative Aircraft Carriers:
The celebrated “Z-Plan” envisaged a fleet of four carriers in service by the late 1940s, but a lack of enthusiasm by the Luftwaffe (who would operate the aircraft) and, as time passed, the decision to divert production and resources to more immediate needs meant that none was commissioned.51
Denman dates the launching of the Z Plan to the end of 1938 and its scrapping, due to the demands of the other services, to September 1939, when the war began.52
The Germans did attempt to construct two aircraft carriers, the Graf Zeppelin and the Peter Strasser. However, the German “pilots had no experience of shipboard operating procedur
e and, of course, there were no specialized carrier aircraft.”53
Work on both carriers was suspended in mid-1940 because of the demands of the submarine programme; the second ship, apparently to have been named Peter Strasser, was still on the slip at the Germaniawerft yard at Kiel and was immediately scrapped, but Graf Zeppelin was resumed in 1942…. [B]yearly 1943 she was languishing again. She was scuttled at Stettin by the Germans a few months before the end of the war and although taken over and raised by the Russians, she was lost under tow to Leningrad in August or September 1947.54
Thus concludes Chesneau’s two-page history of the Hitler carrier force that was to threaten the American homeland. Had Hitler pursued the plan, by the mid-1940s four carriers manned by inexperienced German sailors would have been child’s play for a U.S. Navy of more than a thousand warships.
In 1942, the year Herf says Germany “set up naval bases” in Africa, U.S. troops invaded North Africa and, by spring 1943, occupied it from Morocco to Tunisia. And as the Azores and Cape Verde Islands belonged to Portugal and the Canary Islands to Spain, whose dictator Franco had denied Hitler passage to Gibraltar in 1940, how was Germany to seize these islands, build these bases, and construct those huge ships under the gunsights of the U.S. Navy and the British battle fleets that had dominated the Atlantic since Trafalgar?
THE NEW YORK BOMBER
WHAT OF HISTORIAN GODA’S transatlantic bomber, also mentioned by Washington Post columnist Michael Kelly, who wrote, “[I]n 1939 and 1940 [Hitler] ordered up…the Messerschmitt 264 the Nazis called the ‘Amerika-bomber’—intended for that war”?55 This super-bomber also appears in Weinberg:
Churchill, Hitler, and The Unnecessary War Page 33