How Hitler Could Have Won World War II

by Bevin Alexander

  The offensive opened at 11 P.M., May 11, with a massive artillery barrage. For the first three days the attack made little progress. The Polish Corps suffered heavily, and the American 2nd Corps on the coast and the British 13th Corps likewise had little to show for their efforts. However, General Juin’s French corps, lying between the two, found only one division opposing its four, and made some progress in mountains where the Germans had not expected a serious thrust. On May 14 the French broke into the valley of the small Ausente River, and the German 71st Division fell back fast before them. This relieved pressure on 2nd Corps, and it began to move along the coast road after the German 94th Division. The two German forces were now separated by the roadless Aurunci Mountains. General Juin, sensing the opportunity, sent a division-sized force of Moroccan Goums, natives of the Atlas Mountains, across these mountains to break into the German rear.

  The Moroccans pierced the Germans’ second defensive line. The flank along the sea now collapsed, breaking the Gustav line, and the German paratroops at Cassino withdrew on May 17—leaving 4,000 Polish dead in the town and on the slopes of Cassino.

  Alexander had ordered forces driving out of the Anzio beachhead to rush past the Alban Hills and block Route 6 at Valmontone, thus cutting off most of the German 10th Army. But Mark Clark wanted the Americans to be first into Rome. When, on May 25, the U.S. 1st Armored and 3rd Infantry Divisions from Anzio linked up with 2nd Corps at Cori, beyond Route 7 but ten miles short of Valmontone, Clark turned three American divisions north along Route 7 toward Rome, sending only one toward Valmontone. Three German divisions held up this division three miles short of Route 6.

  Clark found he could not rush into Rome after all, for he was slowed by German resistance on the “Caesar line” of defenses just south of Rome. And 8th Army’s armored divisions were unable to pin the retreating German divisions against the Apennines. They slipped away on roads through the mountains. It looked for a while that General Senger would be able to stop the Allies along the Caesar line, but the U.S. 36th Division pierced it at Velletri on Route 7 on May 30. Clark at once ordered a general offensive—2nd Corps took Valmontone and thrust up Route 6, while 6th Corps rushed along Route 7.

  The Germans gave way, and the Americans entered Rome on June 4. Kesselring had declared it an open city in order to prevent destruction.

  Alexander’s offensive had gained Rome but little else. The Americans lost 18,000 men in the operation, the British 14,000, and the French 10,000. The Germans sustained about 10,000 killed and wounded, but about 20,000 became prisoners of war. The Italian campaign had not proved a good investment for the Allies. They had committed two soldiers to every German. No Germans had been drawn away from northern France, though without Italy, German strength could have been increased there.

  Churchill and Alan Brooke pushed for a campaign to drive into northern Italy, and press through the Ljubljana Gap into Austria, but General Marshall and President Roosevelt ruled instead for Operation Anvil (renamed Dragoon) on August 15—the invasion of southern France, to aid the Normandy operation.

  The Italian campaign vanished from the front pages. The fighting was not over. The Allies slowly slogged their way northward. But the killing and the maiming that continued apace no longer played a decisive factor in the war.

  21 NORMANDY

  IRONICALLY, THE TWO GREATEST ARMORED COMMANDERS IN HISTORY—HEINZ Guderian and Erwin Rommel—clashed on the proper way to meet the Allied invasion of France. Adolf Hitler’s response to that collision largely determined the outcome of the war.

  Guderian came to his position from his experiences in the east with the Red Army, Rommel from his experiences in Africa with the western Allies. They proposed diametrically opposite solutions.

  In February 1944 Guderian went to St.-Germain-en-Laye, just outside Paris, to visit Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, commander in chief west, and General Leo Geyr von Schweppenberg, in charge of panzer training in the west. Together they came to agreement on handling armor.

  Panzer and panzergrenadier divisions, Guderian wrote, “must be stationed far enough inland from the so-called Atlantic Wall so that they could be switched easily to the main invasion front once it had been recognized.”

  Guderian and Geyr proposed that the ten fast divisions Hitler had allocated to defend the west be concentrated in two groups, one north and the other south of Paris. Both officers recognized the immense superiority of Allied air power, and that it gravely affected German ability to shift armor. But they believed the problem could be overcome by moving at night.

  When Guderian got back to supreme headquarters, he discovered that Rommel, who had taken over defense of the Atlantic Wall in November 1943 as commander of Army Group B, was stationing panzer divisions very near the coast.

  To Guderian this was a fundamental error. “They could not be withdrawn and committed elsewhere with sufficient rapidity should the enemy land at any other point.” When he complained to Hitler, the Fuehrer told him to discuss the matter with Rommel. Guderian hit a stone wall when he met Rommel at his headquarters at La Roche Guyon, a magnificent château west of Paris. Because of Allied air supremacy, Rommel said, there could be no question of moving large formations, even at night.

  To Rommel the day of mobile warfare for Germany had passed, not only because of Anglo-American air power but because Germany had not kept up with the western Allies in production of tanks and armored vehicles—a result due more to the shortage of oil than to Allied bombing.

  Implicit in Rommel’s theory was that the Germans must guess right where the Allies were going to land. If German forces could not move, they had to be in place close to the invasion site. Rommel decided that the Allies would land at the Pas de Calais opposite Dover.

  Rommel ruled out other landing places, especially because the Allies could provide greater air cover there than anywhere else. Rommel wrote Hitler on December 31, 1943, listing the Pas de Calais as the probable landing site. “The enemy’s main concern,” he wrote, “will be to get the quickest possible possession of a port or ports capable of handling large ships.”

  Guderian did not conjecture precisely where the Allies might invade. He thought they should be allowed to land and make a penetration, so that their forces could be destroyed and thrown back into the sea by a counteroffensive on a grand scale. This was in keeping with successful German movements in Russia. Although Rundstedt and Geyr accepted the idea, neither they nor Guderian had any idea how Anglo-American command of the air could restrict panzer movement.

  Rommel did, and to him Guderian’s proposal was nonsense. “If the enemy once gets his foot in, he’ll put every antitank gun and tank he can into the bridgehead and let us beat our heads against it,” he told General Fritz Bayerlein, commander of the Panzer Lehr Division.

  The only way to prevent this, Rommel wrote, was to fight the battle in the coastal strip. This required operational reserves close behind the beaches that could intervene quickly. Bringing reserves up from inland would force them to run a gauntlet of Allied air power, and take so much time the Allies could organize a solid defense or drive farther inland.

  Rommel set about building a fortified mined zone extending five or six miles inland. He also built underwater obstacles along the shore—including stakes (“Rommel’s asparagus”) carrying antitank mines, concrete structures equipped with steel blades or antitank mines, and other snares. But his efforts came too late to be fully effective, and they were concentrated in the Pas de Calais, though some work extended to Normandy.

  Rommel and Guderian were both wrong, of course. The Allies were not bound to take the shortest route to seize the closest port. Rommel did not understand the vastness of Allied maritime resources, and he was not aware of British ingenuity in building two artificial harbors (Mulberries) which could serve as temporary ports. The Mulberries veiled the biggest secret of all: the Allies did not have to capture a port to invade the Continent. This made possible a landing at the least likely place still under t
he Allied air umbrella: the beaches of Normandy.

  Guderian was wrong in his belief that the Germans could duplicate anything like the vast sweeping panzer movements they practiced in Russia. There the Luftwaffe generally had parity with the Red air force, and could achieve temporary local superiority to carry out a specific mission. In the west, Allied air power was overwhelming and permanent. In the winter of 1944, the Luftwaffe was virtually swept from the skies, primarily because of the American P-51 Mustang fighter. The Mustang surpassed all German fighters, yet the Luftwaffe was forced to challenge it since the P-51 was now escorting B-17 bombers in daylight raids over Germany. The Germans lost large numbers of fighters, and by March were reluctant to come up and engage the Mustangs.

  Another reason Allied air power was decisive in France was that forests, rivers, and cities forced traffic along predictable arteries, which could be bombed and strafed, and bridges broken, unlike in Russia where panzers could often strike out across open plains.

  The two generals should have sought a compromise. There was one: dividing the armor and placing one segment behind each of the invasion sites the Allies might choose, and making each segment available on call to Rommel or the commander of the invasion site directly ahead. Such a compromise would have answered most of Rommel’s concerns, and it would have provided a partial answer to the mobile armored reserve Guderian wanted—in the form of the armor behind the sites not attacked by the Allies.

  The actual number of potential invasion sites was three, and they could have been figured out by logic. The Allies would insist on heavy fighter coverage over the landing sites. The Allies were certain to land within the maximum range of their principal ground-support aircraft, Spitfires, P-38 Lightnings, and P-47 Thunderbolts, or about 200 miles from the main fighter bases in southeastern England. A strike into Holland would encounter hard-to-cross rivers and canals, and land below sea level that could be flooded. On the Brittany peninsula an invasion might be sealed off, and the French coast south of the Loire River was much too far. Both were beyond 200 miles of the English fighter bases.

  This left just the Pas de Calais, the Cotentin peninsula of Normandy, and the beaches of Normandy as the only possible invasion places.

  If Rommel, Guderian, Rundstedt, and Geyr had agreed that the invasion could strike one of these places, and none other, then allocation of armor equally to each of the three would have been sensible. Since Hitler had assigned only ten fast divisions to the defense of western Europe, it was imperative to decide where the landings might occur and locate armor at these places.

  But this did not happen. Rommel persisted in believing, until a month or two before the landing, that the Pas de Calais was the only possible site. And since Guderian, Rundstedt, and Geyr believed otherwise, the final decision on where to locate the fast divisions fell to Adolf Hitler. He, in his characteristic indecisive and uncertain fashion, spread the ten panzer and panzergrenadier divisions from northern Belgium to the south of France.

  Hitler refused to settle on even a region that the Allies might invade, let alone specific sites. In a meeting with senior commanders on March 20, 1944, he listed potential invasion places from Norway to southern France. In the final allocation, he stationed six fast divisions north of the Loire River, and four south of the river, three of them near the Spanish frontier or close to Marseilles along the Mediterranean coast.

  Erich von Manstein had won the campaign in the west in 1940 by convincing Hitler to concentrate his armor. Now, at the moment of Germany’s greatest military peril, Hitler was dispersing his armor—all across the map. Furthermore, he kept a firm rein on most of these divisions, intending to direct the battle from Berchtesgaden.

  If, instead, three or four fast divisions had been stationed directly behind the beaches at each of the potential sites, they very likely could have crushed any invasion on the first day.

  From March 1944 onward Hitler had a “hunch” the invasion would come at Normandy, though he thought it would be only a diversion to the main assault on the Pas de Calais. He arrived at this hunch because Americans were concentrated in southwest England, thus were closer to Normandy, and because an exercise took place in Devon on a beach similar to Norman beaches. Rommel came around to the same belief, but, despite frantic efforts, it was too late to build adequate defenses along the Norman coast.

  Whether the landing on Normandy (Operation Overlord) was actually going to take place was the call of the three Allied leaders, not the generals. They did so at the Teheran conference in late November 1943.

  Roosevelt was not as set on Overlord as Marshall, but if Stalin wanted it, he would demand it. Stalin still had the power to sign a cease-fire with Hitler. This was increasingly unlikely with the German retreat after Operation Citadel, but Roosevelt sought to avoid a separate peace at all costs. Beyond that, he was seeking a “constructive relationship” with Stalin after the war—a Soviet Union as a responsible member of the world community, not an agent of further disorder and war.

  Consequently, at Teheran, when Stalin contested diversions in the Mediterranean that Churchill was seeking, Roosevelt announced he opposed any delay in the cross-Channel invasion. With that, the die was cast for Overlord.

  Because American forces would predominate in an invasion of France, Roosevelt insisted that the commander be an American. Churchill had to accept, dashing the hopes of Alan Brooke to get the job. In partial compensation, Churchill arranged for British General Sir Henry Maitland Wilson to become supreme commander of the Mediterranean theater.

  Early in December on his return from Teheran, FDR met Dwight Eisenhower at Tunis. The president was scarcely seated in the automobile when he said: “Well, Ike, you are going to command Overlord.”

  General Marshall had expected to receive this choicest of all commands, and Roosevelt had planned to give it to him. But he finally decided that Marshall could not be spared, telling him: “I could not sleep at ease if you were out of Washington.”

  Eisenhower, fifty-four years old, was probably the best possible choice. He was not a combat commander, but he was able to build consensus and cooperation among two quite different sorts of armies and officers. He quelled disputes and animosities by reason and with what Max Hastings called an “extraordinary generosity of spirit to his difficult subordinates.”

  Eisenhower secured British Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder as his deputy. He had hoped to get General Alexander, whom the Americans liked despite his critical views of American soldiers, as British ground commander. But Alan Brooke favored Montgomery, and Churchill, deciding he needed Alexander in the Mediterranean, gave Montgomery the job. For American ground commander, Eisenhower selected Omar Bradley, a stable, discreet, but colorless fifty-year-old West Pointer. Because the slapping incidents in Sicily had revealed a serious character flaw in George Patton, Eisenhower refused to consider him for any post higher than commanding an army.

  An enormous buildup commenced in southern England, and by the spring of 1944 much of the country had become a vast military encampment. Tank and vehicle parks covered thousands of acres. Most obvious were the troops who made up one French, one Polish, three Canadian, fourteen British, and twenty American divisions.

  To permit rehearsal of landings with live ammunition, the British evacuated the entire population of a 25-square-mile region along the Devonshire coast between Appledore and Woolacombe. Great tented cantonments arose in the assembly areas. The initial American landing force comprised 130,000 men, with 1.2 million more to follow in ninety days. With them would go 137,000 wheeled vehicles, 4,200 fully tracked vehicles, and 3,500 cannons. Also assembled were prodigious amounts of supplies. Each American soldier in Normandy got six and one-quarter pounds of rations a day, each German three and one-third. On the other hand, a German rifle company’s small-arms ammunition scale was 56,000 rounds, an American company’s 21,000.

  British Lieutenant General Frederick Morgan, charged with drawing up an invasion plan, had put his finger on Normandy by t
he spring of 1943. The Pas de Calais defenses were too powerful, and the Germans might bottle up an invasion of Cherbourg and the Cotentin peninsula. This left only the beaches of Normandy within range of fighter cover. But the final decision came only when a British idea for two artificial harbors (Mulberries) turned out to be feasible, and work began apace.

  If the Germans knew the Norman beaches were the site, they could build up overwhelming force there and smash the landing. It was imperative to deceive them into believing the main attack would come at the Pas de Calais, and that Normandy was only a feint or diversion.

  Out of this arose the most brilliant Allied deception of the war (Operation Fortitude). The Germans had fingered Patton as the most aggressive, inventive, and determined general among the western Allies, and did not think the little matter of his slapping around a couple of enlisted men would make much difference. Patton, they were sure, would lead the assault forces into France. Therefore, when Eisenhower called him to Britain on January 22, 1944, and named him to command 3rd Army, counterintelligence spread the word that he was actually commanding the “1st U.S. Army Group” that would land in the Pas de Calais. The counterspies set up radio nets of this fictitious army group with lots of fake traffic and created the impression that a real army group was busily preparing for action. The Germans kept their strongest army, the 15th, to guard the Pas de Calais.

  The Allies had decided to land at Normandy, but this was only the first step. Shortly after arriving in England on January 14, 1944, Eisenhower established the strategy to defeat Germany. He directed that after breaking out of Normandy the Allies were to advance on Germany on a broad front with two army groups—the British on the left, the Americans on the right. The British were to receive preference in order to capture the ports of Belgium, especially Antwerp, which were vital to build up supplies necessary to break into Germany, and to seize the Ruhr, the main center of German industry, which lay east of southern Holland along the Rhine around Düsseldorf, Duisburg, and Essen.