So far as can be determined from the evidence, Hitler made this devastating mistake because of anger, not calculation.
In addition to the sector stations, Göring had been attacking the British air-armaments industry, which meant that industrial cities were suffering substantial damage. Then, on the night of August 24, ten German bombers lost their way and dropped their loads on central London. RAF Bomber Command launched a reprisal raid on Berlin the next night with eighty bombers—the first time the German capital had been hit. Bomber Command followed up this raid with several more in the next few days. Hitler, enraged, announced he would “eradicate” British cities. He called off the strikes against sector stations and ordered terror bombing of British cities.
This abrupt reversal of strategy did not rest entirely on Hitler’s desire for vengeance. The new campaign had a lengthy, highly touted theoretical background. It was the first extensive experiment to test the “strategic-bombing” theory espoused after World War I by an Italian, Giulio Douhet. His argument was that a nation could be forced to its knees by massive bombing attacks against its centers of population, government, and industry. Such attacks would destroy the morale of the people and war production, and achieve victory without the use of ground forces.
The Luftwaffe’s original operation against British airfields, sector stations, and aircraft factories was a variation on the highly successful battles it had won in May and June, which eliminated most of the French air force and shot down or contained the few RAF aircraft on the Continent. This was essentially a tactical campaign to gain supremacy for military forces on the ground.
The second campaign was entirely different. It aimed not at winning a battle but at destroying the morale of the enemy population. If it succeeded, as Douhet had predicted, an invasion of Britain would not even be necessary. The disheartened, defeated people of Britain would raise the white flag merely to stop the bombing.
Hitler was the first to attempt Douhet’s theory, but his bombs failed to break the British people. World War II proved that human beings can endure a great deal more destruction from the skies than Douhet had thought.
On the late afternoon of September 7, 1940, 625 bombers and 648 fighters flew up the Thames River and bombed docks, central London, and the heavily populated East End, killing 300 civilians and injuring 1,300. The fires raging in the East End guided the second wave of bombers that night. Waves of bombers came in repeatedly until 5 A.M. the next day. The assault went on night after night.
On the morning of Sunday, September 15, the Germans sent in a new daylight attack. Although British fighters assailed the air armada all the way from the coast, 148 bombers got through to London. As they turned for home, sixty RAF fighters swept down from East Anglia and destroyed a number of the bombers. The Germans lost sixty aircraft, against twenty-six British fighters. Because the costs were so high, the Luftwaffe soon shifted over entirely to night attacks, concentrating on London, which it struck for fifty-seven straight nights, averaging 160 bombers a night. On September 17, Hitler called off Sea Lion indefinitely.
London took a terrible pounding. Other cities also suffered, Coventry above all. It was a grim fall and winter; 23,000 British civilians had died by the end of the year, but British morale did not collapse, nor did armament production fall. It actually rose, outproducing the Germans by 9,924 aircraft to 8,070 in 1940.
The air war thus degenerated into a vicious campaign aimed at destroying homes and people, and had no significant role in deciding the war. While the world’s eyes were fastened on Britain, conditions on the Continent had worsened. On the day Paris fell Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin sent an ultimatum to the three Baltic republics of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, quickly occupied them, then staged fake elections that called for their absorption into the Soviet Union. Secret police seized thousands of Baltic leaders and intelligentsia and brought them to Russia, where most died.
On June 16, 1940, the Kremlin also demanded from Romania the cession of Bessarabia and northern Bucovina, both adjoining Soviet territory. Romania capitulated at once.
Stalin’s moves against his neighbors disturbed Americans greatly. A few saw them accurately as hedges against potential German aggression. But most, suspicious of Communism, took them as evidence of more brute force being let loose in the world. Stalin’s aggressions, combined with shock over the fall of France and fear about Britain’s survival, caused the American nation as a whole to close in on defense of the Western Hemisphere.
Before the summer was out, Roosevelt had signed a law to create by far the greatest navy on earth (doubling the fleet), began building an air force of 7,800 combat aircraft, called the National Guard into federal service, passed the first peacetime draft in American history, and swapped fifty old U.S. destroyers for long-term leases of bases on eight British colonies from Newfoundland to British Guiana (Guyana).
However, Franklin D. Roosevelt was seeking any way possible to support Britain’s war against Hitler. His hand was strengthened greatly on November 5, 1940, when he became the first (and only) American president elected to a third term.
On December 17, FDR announced to reporters that he was determined to maintain Britain as the nation’s first line of defense. And, since Britain could not pay for all the goods it needed, he proposed that the United States “lend” the British arms, aircraft, food, vehicles, and any other materials they required. The public responded favorably to the idea and to Roosevelt’s call in a December 29 national radio “fireside chat” that the United States become “the arsenal of democracy.” In his inaugural address on January 6, 1941, FDR advocated a postwar world based on the “four freedoms”—freedom of speech and worship, and freedom from want and fear.
On January 10, 1941, the “lend-lease” bill was introduced into Congress, and on March 11, 1941, it became law. Lend-lease set American factories to producing war goods at full capacity. Exploiting American economic strength was essential to success against Germany, thus lend-lease was a major step toward American entry into the war.
The likelihood became even stronger during the winter of 1940–1941 when high-level British and American military officers met in secret sessions in Washington to discuss a broad joint strategy in the event the United States entered the war. The talks (known as ABC-1 for American-British conversations) concluded on March 29, 1941, with the recommendation that the defeat of Germany, which was far more powerful than Japan, should have the highest priority. Roosevelt did not formally endorse ABC-1, but followed it.
The British and Americans couldn’t agree on a policy against Japan. The British urged moving the American Pacific fleet to the Philippines and Singapore, but the Americans decided to keep it at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii and continue to negotiate with Japanese diplomats in hopes of a peaceful solution.
5 THE FATAL TURN TO THE EAST
HITLER HAD ALREADY SWITCHED HIS PRINCIPAL INTEREST AWAY FROM BRITAIN before the air war commenced. This came formally on July 31, 1940, in a conference with his senior military chiefs, when Hitler announced his “resolve to bring about the destruction of the vitality of Russia in the spring of 1941.”
This statement worried a number of German senior officers. They feared leaving Britain and its potential ally the United States as threats in the west, while Germany focused its energy, thoughts, and power on destruction of the Soviet Union.
The top army generals, along with their staffs, amassed arguments to convince Hitler to neutralize Britain before turning on Russia. Perhaps they realized dimly what Winston Churchill had grasped: that Britain’s best chance lay in holding out until Hitler made an irreparable slip, as Napoleon had done when he invaded Russia in 1812.
Only Erich Raeder, the German navy commander, saw the danger clearly enough to press repeatedly and with great conviction for another way to gain Germany’s goals. He demonstrated to Hitler that the victory over France had opened a way to victory—and Hitler would not have to attack the Soviet Union to achieve it.
Majo
r General Alfred Jodl, chief of operations for the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW), or armed forces supreme command, felt the same way, though less openly and less forcefully. In a June 30, 1940, memorandum Jodl wrote that if the strike across the Channel did not come off, the Mediterranean offered the best arena to defeat Britain. His recommendation was to seize Egypt and the Suez Canal. Maybe the Italians could do it alone. If not, the Germans could help.
At the time the British had only 36,000 men in Egypt, including a single incomplete armored division under the command of General Sir Archibald Wavell. Moreover, Italy’s entry into the war had closed off Britain’s supply line through the Mediterranean except by means of heavily guarded convoys. The main British route now had to go 12,000 miles around the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa, and up through the Red Sea.
Even if Britain devoted all its strength to building a strong army in Egypt, it would take months, perhaps a year, to do so. And Britain was not going to undertake such a task because it had to concentrate most of its efforts on defense of the homeland.
Italy, aided by Germany, could get superior forces to Italy’s colony of Libya far more quickly. At this stage, it would be relatively easy to use Luftwaffe bombers to neutralize Malta, a British possession only sixty miles south of Sicily, where aircraft, ships, and submarines constituted a major danger to Italian supply ships and reinforcements moving between Italy and Tripoli in Libya.
Hitler in his July 31 meeting did not wholly exclude a “peripheral strategy” in the Mediterranean, and Generals Walther von Brauchitsch, commander in chief of the army, and Franz Halder, chief of staff in the army high command, Oberkommando des Heeres (OKH), proposed sending panzer forces (an “expeditionary corps”) and aircraft to Libya to help the Italians, who were planning an offensive into Egypt.
But Hitler hadn’t responded to Jodl’s memorandum and wouldn’t commit himself to a panzer corps and combat planes in Africa. The only thing in the Mediterranean that excited Hitler was the possibility of capturing the British base of Gibraltar, and thereby closing the western end of the Mediterranean to the Royal Navy. Britain had won this strategic rock from Spain in 1704 and had held it resolutely ever since.
Hitler could think of no way to grab Gibraltar except by direct assault. This meant German forces would have to approach through Spain. The Spanish dictator, Francisco Franco, would have to cooperate. Seeing that Hitler was deeply taken with the idea, the senior generals sent Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, chief of the Abwehr—the military counterintelligence service—to Madrid July 20–23 to get Franco’s reaction. Cagily, Franco didn’t reject Spanish help out of hand, but refused to commit.
The Gibraltar plan—the only idea ever considered was a headlong attack on the heavily fortified rock—now became a leitmotiv that ran through most of the discussions that followed. It was an absurd idea, and shows how unrealistic Hitler was.
The plan required Spanish entry into the war, an extremely dangerous move that would benefit Spain little, yet cause dire and immediate consequences. The British would cut off food imports from Argentina and other American countries Spain depended on, and would seize the Spanish Canary Islands off the northwestern coast of Africa. Franco wanted nothing to do with the plan, yet with the Wehrmacht on his border, he didn’t dare say so.
Aside from Gibraltar, Hitler also came up with other nonsensical ideas that demonstrated a profound lack of appreciation of the strategic possibilities that had opened to him. He waxed hugely enthusiastic about seizing two groups of Portuguese islands, the Azores, in the Atlantic 1,200 miles west of Lisbon, and the Cape Verde Islands, in the south Atlantic 150 miles west of Dakar off the coast of Africa. He also studied capture of the Canaries prior to a Gibraltar attack—with the idea of beating the British to the punch.
In theory, all three island groups would be useful as air and sea bases to break up British convoys that moved regularly through the Atlantic. Hitler’s excitement about the Azores, however, rested mainly on hopes of building long-range bombers that could reach the United States. If he could get these aircraft built and stationed on the Azores, he said, the threat would force the United States to concentrate on its own defense, and help Britain less.
The Atlantic islands idea was more absurd than the Gibraltar plan. Only Admiral Raeder dared to tell Hitler so, and even he couched his objections in discreet terms. The German navy could actually seize the islands in surprise moves, Raeder assured Hitler, but it could not protect the sea lanes to them thereafter. The Royal Navy would erect an iron blockade in days. German garrisons would be cut off from supplies, except driblets that might be flown in. Few attacks on British convoys— much less air attacks on the United States—could be mounted, because the Germans could get little fuel to the islands.
Raeder’s logic was overwhelming and should have ended the matter right there. But it didn’t. Hitler continued to agitate for capture of the Atlantic islands on into the fall and beyond.
Since the army generals had been unable to sway the Fuehrer to carry out a Mediterranean strategy, Admiral Raeder weighed in on September 6 and September 26, 1940. At the second conference Raeder cornered Hitler alone and showed him step by step how Germany could defeat Britain elsewhere than over the English Channel. Doing so would put Germany in a commanding position against the Soviet Union.
Raeder, bowing to Hitler’s passions, said the Germans should take Gibraltar and secure the Canary Islands. But his main concern in that part of the world was the great northwestern bulge of Africa, largely controlled by France.
An imponderable regarding Hitler’s thinking is why, when he was negotiating France’s surrender, he did not demand admission of German troops into French North Africa—Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco. If the French refused, he could have threatened to occupy all of France and deny the French a government at Vichy. Besides, the French had so few troops in North Africa they couldn’t have prevented a German occupation.
The importance of the region was forced upon him only three days before the September 26 conference: a joint operation of British and Free French forces under Charles de Gaulle had tried to seize Dakar, but had been beaten off by Vichy French guns. This reinforced Raeder’s conviction that the British, supported by the United States, would try to get a foothold in northwest Africa in order to move against the Axis. He urged Germany to team up with Vichy France to secure the region.
But Raeder’s main argument was that the Axis should capture the Suez Canal. After Suez, German panzers could advance quickly through Palestine and Syria as far as Turkey.
“If we reach that point, Turkey will be in our power,” Raeder emphasized. “The Russian problem will then appear in a different light. It is doubtful whether an advance against Russia from the north [that is, Poland and Romania] will be necessary.”
No one realized this truth better than Winston Churchill. In a message to President Roosevelt a few months later, he asserted that if Egypt and the Middle East were lost, continuation of the war “would be a hard, long, and bleak proposition,” even if the United States entered.
But Adolf Hitler had a much more difficult time seeing what was clear to Churchill. According to Raeder, Hitler agreed with his “general trend of thought” but had to talk things over with Mussolini, Franco, and Pétain. This shows Hitler was seeking limited tactical gains in the Mediterranean. Although a drive through Suez would call for an agreement with Mussolini, it would not require concurrence of Franco or Pétain. This indicates Hitler did not grasp that the victory over France had transformed the entire strategic outlook for Germany.
Raeder felt the senior army generals had a “purely continental outlook,” did not understand the war-winning opportunities that had opened up on the south shore of the Mediterranean, and would never counsel Hitler correctly. Although the OKH, the army high command, and the OKW, the armed forces high command, did advise Hitler to send troops to North Africa, their proposals lacked Raeder’s urgency. Never did Brauchitsch, Halder, Jodl, or Field Marshal Wil
helm Keitel, chief of staff of the OKW, express the conviction that the war could be won in the Mediterranean, although Keitel told Benito Mussolini that capture of Cairo was more important than capture of London. Part of their hesitancy lay in the knowledge that Hitler had been fixed for a long time on destroying the Soviet Union and gaining Lebensraum in the east. Their careers depended upon not rocking that boat. However, they never stressed to Hitler, as did Raeder, that victory in the Mediterranean would make it easier to achieve victory over the Soviet Union.
Once Axis forces overran Egypt and the Suez Canal, they would close the eastern Mediterranean to the Royal Navy. The British fleet would immediately retreat into the Red Sea, because it could not be adequately supplied by convoys through the western Mediterranean. Whether or not the Germans seized Gibraltar, Britain would be strategically paralyzed.
The Axis would be able to move at will into the Middle East, for the British had no substantial forces there. This region produced much of the world’s oil, and its capture would provide ample amounts of Germany’s single most-needed strategic material.
An advance on the southern frontier of Turkey would put the Turks in an impossible position. Hitler was already gaining Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria as allies. Therefore, Turkey could be approached both by way of Bulgaria at Istanbul and from northern Iraq and Syria. Turkey would be forced to join the Axis or grant passage for Axis forces and supplies. A defiant stance would result in the swift defeat of the Turkish army and disaster.
Passage through Turkey would reduce the importance of Malta and Gibraltar. This way, both could be eliminated without the active support of Franco and without direct assault.
German forces could occupy French North Africa with or without Vichy France’s cooperation. From French Morocco, they could approach from the south the small strip of Morocco along the Strait of Gibraltar ruled by Spain. Spain would be forced to grant transit rights, or stand aside if German forces occupied the strip without permission. Spain could not resist for fear of a German attack into the heart of Spain from France. Consequently, German airfields and batteries could be set up along the south shore of the strait. This would close it to Britain—without an expensive military assault on the rock of Gibraltar.
How Hitler Could Have Won World War II Page 6