by Herman Wouk
“Dey comink.”
World Empire Lost
by General Armin von Roon
(adapted from his Land, Sea, and Air Operations of World War II)
English Translation by
VICTOR HENRY
Translator’s Foreword
BY VICTOR HENRY
I never expected to translate a German military work. For years, like many flag officers, I planned to write up my own experiences in World War II; and in the end, like most of them, I decided against it. It was said of the late Fleet Admiral Ernest King that, if it had been up to him, he would have issued a single communiqué about the Pacific war: “We won.” My war memoirs boil down more or less to this: “I served.”
Upon retiring from the Navy, I became a consultant to a marine engineering firm. On my last business trip to Germany, in 1965, I noticed in the windows of bookstores, wherever I went, stacks of a small book called World Empire Lost, by General Armin von Roon. I distinctly recalled General von Roon, from my days of service in Berlin as naval attaché to the American embassy. I had met him, and chatted with him; and he came to one of my wife’s frequent dinner parties. He was then on the Armed Forces Operation Staff. He had a distant, forbidding manner, a pudgy figure, and a large beaked nose, almost Semitic, that must have given him some grief. But of course, as his name indicates, he was of simon-pure Prussian descent. He was obviously brilliant, and I always wanted to know him better, but did not get the opportunity. I little thought then how well I would come to know him one day through his book!
Out of curiosity I bought a copy of World Empire Lost, and found it so absorbing that I visited the publisher’s office in Munich, to learn who had printed it in America. I then discovered that the work had not yet been translated into English. On my return to the States, I induced the publishers of this volume to acquire the English-language rights. I was planning to retire from business, and I thought that translating the book might ease the pain of putting myself out to pasture.
World Empire Lost is an abstract from a huge two-volume operational analysis of the war, written by General von Roon in prison. He called it Land, Sea, and Air Campaigns of World War II, and he had plenty of time to write it; for at Nuremberg he got twenty years, for complicity in war crimes on the eastern front. This exhaustive technical work is not available in an English translation, and I doubt that it will be.
Roon prefaced his account of each major campaign with a summary of the strategic and political background. These brief sketches, pulled out and compiled by the publisher after his death, constitute World Empire Lost. (I doubt that the general would have approved of that melodramatic title.) World Empire Lost is, therefore, not solid military history, but rather a sort of publisher’s stunt. It runs together Roon’s sweeping assertions about world politics in one short volume, and omits the meticulous military analysis that backed them. However, I believe the result is readable, interesting, and valuable.
The remarkable thing about the book is its relative honesty. Nearly all the German military literature glosses over the killing of the Jews, the responsibility for the war, and Hitler’s hold on the army and the people. About all these sticky questions, Roon writes with calm frankness. He planned to withhold his work from publication (and did) until he was safely dead and buried; so, unlike most German military writers, he was not trying either to save his neck or placate the victors. The result is a revelation of how the Germans really felt, and may well still feel, about Hitler’s war.
Here then is a German general levelling, insofar as he can do so. Roon was an able writer, much influenced by the best French and British military authors, especially de Gaulle and Churchill. His German is more readable than that of most of his countrymen who write on military matters. I hope I have at least partly conveyed this in translation. My own style, formed in a lifetime of writing U.S. Navy reports, has inevitably crept in here and there, but I trust no substantial distortion has resulted.
This author, to my mind, portrays the Germans under Hitler as they were: a remarkably tough and effective fighting nation, not a horde of stupid sadists or comic bunglers, as popular entertainment now tends to caricature them. For six years these people battled almost the whole world to a standstill, and they also committed unprecedented crimes. The stake they were gambling for was, in Shakespeare’s expressive phrase, nothing less than “the great globe itself.” What was going on in their minds seems to me of importance. That is why I have translated Roon.
His version of events, while professional and well informed, can scarcely be taken at face value. He was a German through and through. On the whole I have let General von Roon describe the war his own way. I could not, however, translate certain passages without challenging them; hence my occasional comments.
Roon starts on his first page, for instance, exactly as Adolf Hitler started all his speeches: by denouncing the Versailles Treaty as an injustice imposed on an honorable and trusting Germany by the cruel Allies. He does not mention the historical catch to that. German writers seldom do. In 1917 Lenin overthrew the Kerensky government and sued for a separate peace on the eastern front. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, dictated by the Germans over a year before the Treaty of Versailles, deprived Russia of a territory much larger than France and England combined, of almost sixty million inhabitants, and of almost all her heavy industry. It was far harsher than the Versailles Treaty.
I used to bring up this little fact during my Berlin service, whenever Versailles was mentioned. My German friends were invariably puzzled by the comparison. They thought it made no sense at all. The Treaty of Versailles had happened to them; Brest-Litovsk had happened to the other fellow. In this reaction they were sincere. I cannot explain this national quirk of the Germans, but it should never be forgotten in reading World Empire Lost.
Oakton, Virginia Victor Henry
27 May, 1966
Case White
The Responsibility for Hitler
In writing this book, I have only one aim: to defend the honor of the German soldier.
To trace the rise of Adolf Hitler, our leader in World War II, is not necessary here. No story of the twentieth century is better known. When the victorious Allies in 1919 created the crazy Treaty of Versailles, they also created Hitler. Germany in 1918, relying on the Fourteen Points of the American President Wilson, honorably laid down arms. The Allies treated the Fourteen Points as a scrap of paper, and wrote a treaty that partitioned Germany and made an economic and political madhouse of Europe.
In thus outwitting the naïve American President and butchering up the map, the British and French politicians probably imagined they would paralyze the German nation forever. The cynical policy boomeranged. Winston Churchill himself has called the Versailles settlement a “sad and complicated idiocy.” The oppression of Versailles built up in the vigorous German people a volcanic resentment; it burst forth, and Adolf Hitler rode to power on the crest of the eruption. The Nazi Party, a strange alliance of radicals and conservatives, of wealthy men and down-and-outers, was united only on the ideal of a resurgent Germany, and unfortunately on the old middle-European political slogan of discontent—anti-Semitism. A riffraff of vulgar agitators, philosophic idealists, fanatics, opportunists, bullies, and adventurers, some of them extremely able and energetic, swept into power with Hitler. We of the General Staff for the most part watched these turbid political events with distaste and foreboding. Our loyalty was to the state, however it was governed, but we feared a wave of weakening social change.
It is fair to say that Hitler surprised us. Swiftly, without bloodshed, this brilliant and inspiring politican repaired one injustice of Versailles after another. His methods were direct and strong. The Weimar regime had tried other methods, and had met only with contempt from Britain and France. Hitler’s methods worked. Inside Germany, he was equally strict and harsh when needed. Here too the methods worked, and if historians now call his regime a terror, one must concede that it was then a popular terror. Hitler
brought prosperity and he rearmed us. He was a man with a mission. His burning belief in himself and in his mission swayed the German masses. Though he usurped much power, the masses would probably have granted it all to him freely anyway.
Case Red
Naturally, the swift renascence of Germany under Hitler created anger and dismay among the Allies. France, war-weary, luxury-loving, and rotted by socialism, was reluctant to take effective action. England was another matter. England still ruled the world with her global navy, her international money system, her alliances, and her empire on five continents. In ascending to mastery of Europe, and upsetting the balance of power, Germany was once more challenging her for world rule. This was the confrontation of the Great War again. Nothing could avert this showdown, for Germany early in the twentieth century had passed England in both population and industrial plant. In this sense Churchill correctly calls the Second World War a continuation of the first one, and both conflicts together “another Thirty Years’ War.”
We of the German General Staff knew that at some point in Hitler’s spectacular normalizing of Europe, England would intervene. The only questions were, when, and under what circumstances? Already in 1937 we had prepared a plan for a two-front war against England and Poland: Fall Rot (“Case Red”). We kept updating it as Adolf Hitler scored one bloodless victory after another, and our strategic situation and armed strength improved by leaps while Britain and France contented themselves with feeble scolding protests. We began to hope that the forceful Führer might actually bring his new order to Europe without bloodshed, by default of the perpetrators of Versailles. Had this occurred, he could have launched his grand crusade against the Soviet Union for living space in the east—the aim of his life—as a one-front war. History would have followed a different course.
But on March 31, 1939, a day that the world should not forget, all this changed. The British Prime Minister Chamberlain suddenly gave Poland an unconditional guarantee of military assistance! His pretext was anger at Hitler for breaking his promise not to occupy the weak fragment of Czechoslovakia, left after the Munich partition—the deal which Chamberlain himself had engineered. Hitler’s promises, like those of all politicians, were merely contingent and tactical, of course. It was asinine of Chamberlain to think otherwise, if he did.
Whatever the motive for the Polish guarantee, it was a piece of suicidal stupidity. It stiffened the corrupt Polish army oligarchy to stand fast on the just German grievances involving Danzig and the Polish Corridor. It placed in the hands of these backward militarists the lever to start another world war. Otherwise it had no meaning, because in the event, England was unable to give Poland actual military help. With Russian participation the guarantee might have made sense; in fact it might have stopped Hitler in his tracks, because he feared above all things, as the General Staff also did, a two-front war. But the British gentlemen-politicians disdained the Bolsheviks, and Poland in any case utterly refused to consider admitting Russian protective troops. So foolishness and weakness joined hands to trigger the catastrophe.
For Chamberlain’s defiant move, like the weak pawing of a cornered rabbit, only spurred the Führer to greater boldness. Like lightning, down came the word to our staff to prepare an operation order for an attack on Poland in the fall. Working day and night, with Case Red as a basis, we prepared the plan. On April 5 it went to the Führer under a new code name: Fall Weiss—“Case White.”
Historic Ironies
Case White, the plan for smashing Poland, shaped itself on a few major and classic geographical facts.
Poland is a plain: a larger Belgium with few natural obstacles and no real boundaries. The Carpathian Mountains to the south are breached by the Jablunka pass, affording ready access from Czechoslovakia to Cracow and the Vistula. The rivers Vistula, Narew, and San present problems, but in the summer and early autumn the water levels are low and the rivers are in many places fordable by motor vehicles and horses.
Poland is itself a political freak, reflecting its formless geography. It has no permanent shape, no continuity of regime or national purpose. It has several times disappeared from the map of Europe, divided up as provinces of stronger and abler powers. Today it is again little more than a Russian province. At Yalta the Allied leaders moved the entire crude geographical parallelogram called “Poland” about two hundred kilometers to the west, to the Oder-Neisse Line. This was done at the expense of Germany, of course, giving to Poland cities, territories, and populations which had been German from time immemorial, and causing the tragic uprooting and resettling of millions of people. Such is war: to the victor, the spoils; to the defeated, the costs. The Second World War began over the question of Polish territorial integrity, but Poland has not recovered, and will never recover, its 1939 borders. It has lost that part of its territory which, through the deal between Hitler and Stalin, was absorbed into the Soviet Union. England went to war with us over the question of these borders, dragging in France and eventually the United States. At Yalta, England and the United States endorsed forever Hitler’s gift of Polish territory to the Soviets. Such are the ironies of history.
The Polish strategic situation in 1939 was poor. The entire land could be regarded as a weak salient into Germany and German-occupied territory, flanked by East Prussia to the north and Czechoslovakia to the south, and wholly flat and open to a thrust from Germany to the west. To the rear, in the east, the Soviet Union stood poised, newly linked to Germany through the nonaggression pact engineered by Ribbentrop.
The Fatal Pact
Insufficient attention is paid to the plain fact that this treaty, hailed at the time as a masterstroke, all but lost Germany the Second World War before a shot was fired. The alliance with Bolshevism (however temporary and tactical) was certainly a repudiation of the Dictator’s ideals, running counter to the German national spirit; but this might have been allowable had the tactical advantage proved real. In politics, as in war, only success matters. But the contrary was the case.
This pact handed Stalin the Baltic states and about half of Poland, allowing the Slav horde to march two hundred kilometers nearer Germany. Two years later we paid the price. In December 1941, the gigantic drive of our Army Group Center toward Moscow—the greatest armed march in world history—was halted forty kilometers from its goal, with advance patrols penetrating within sight of the Kremlin towers. Had the German forces jumped off from a line two hundred kilometers nearer Moscow, they would have engulfed the Russian capital, deposed Stalin, and won the campaign before the first flake of snow fell on the Smolensk road. England certainly would have made peace then, and we would have won the war.
Regarded as a triumph of daring diplomacy even by our enemies, this treaty contained between its lines the two words, finis Germaniae. Seldom in history has there been such a political coup de théâtre. Seldom has one so disastrously backfired. Yet we of the Staff who ventured to express doubts at the time, or merely to convey with our eyes our mutual dismay at the news, were very much in the minority.
No member of the armed forces, including Hitler’s own chief of staff, Keitel, and the chief of operations, Jodl, knew of the secret protocol yielding half of Poland to the Bolsheviks. It was only when Stalin angrily telephoned Ribbentrop in the third week of the campaign, bitterly complaining about the advance of our Fourteenth Army into the southeast oil area, that the Wehrmacht received its specific chop lines, and retreated before the Russians, who airily rolled in without shedding a drop of their own, or of Polish, blood.
It was I who received at Supreme Headquarters the staggering telephone call from our military attaché in Moscow around midnight of September 16, informing me that the Russians were marching into Poland in accordance with a secret agreement Hitler had made in August. I immediately telephoned General Jodl with the news that the Russians were on the move. His response, in a tremulous voice most uncharacteristic of Alfred Jodl, was “Against whom?” So completely was the army in the dark.
In the last few
days of August, as Case White preparations speeded up, Hitler tried to cash in on Ribbentrop’s big political surprise with a comedy of peace negotiations. In the spring, in a calmer mood, he had stated with his usual prescience that the Western powers would not again permit a bloodless victory, that this time there would be battle. We had prepared Case White with feelings varying from misgivings to a sense of doom, because our combat readiness was much below par for a major conflict. We were so low on tanks, to cite just one key item, that even for Case White we had to deploy large numbers of Czech tanks of limited value; and the navy had only about fifty submarines ready for action. Worst of all, the Führer was far from ordering full wartime production, even then, for he knew it would be an unpopular move. All in all we were going out on very thin ice.
The staff placed no hope in the peace talks. Hitler, however, while going through his planned histrionics with Henderson, apparently got carried away by his own playacting and the constant assurances of Ribbentrop; he began to believe that England might be bluffed once more and might present us with another Munich. At Supreme Headquarters, in the first days of September, nobody could fail to notice that when the Western declarations of war came through, the Führer was surprised and shaken. But there was nothing to do at that point but execute Case White.
Strategy
The plan called for simultaneous flank attacks from the north and the south, aimed to cut off the Corridor and proceed to Warsaw. The Poles elected to stand all along their indefensible border, thus inviting quick fragmenting, encirclement, and reduction. They should have prepared their main defenses along the lines Vistula-Narew-Bug. This would have prolonged hostilities, and encouraged the British and French to attack our weak holding force in the west. This could have been devastating. Adventurous authoritarian leadership had exposed the German people to a bad risk. However, the gods smiled on us at the time, the Poles proved as inept in their strategic dispositions as they were brave in the field, and the French sat in their camps and fortresses, scarcely firing a shot.