How Hitler Could Have Won World War II

1 GERMANY’S OPPORTUNITY FOR VICTORY

EARLY ON THE MORNING OF MAY 10, 1940, THE GREATEST CONCENTRATION OF armor in the history of warfare burst across the eastern frontiers of Belgium and Luxembourg. In four days, 1,800 tanks in seven panzer, or armored, divisions broke through the French main line of resistance on the Meuse River. Seven days later they reached the English Channel 160 miles away and cut off the most powerful and mobile of the French and British forces, who were now in Belgium. Those Allied soldiers who did not surrender were forced to evacuate by sea at Dunkirk.

A month later France capitulated, and the British were thrown onto their islands with few weapons and only twenty-one miles of the Channel to keep them from being conquered as well.

Germany had achieved the most spectacular, rapid, and overwhelming military victory in the twentieth century. It dominated Europe from the North Cape of Norway to the Mediterranean Sea and from Poland to the Atlantic. Victory lay within the grasp of the German dictator, Adolf Hitler.

Yet at this moment of his greatest success—with only feeble barriers remaining before he could create a virtually invincible empire embracing Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East—Hitler turned away and embarked on a course that led to the destruction of the “Thousand-year Reich” in only five years.

A number of high-command German officers saw the opportunities open in 1940 and urged Hitler to seize them. Hitler considered them, but in the end turned them down. After the victory over France, Hitler focused his attention on destruction of the Soviet Union and carrying forward his schemes to destroy the Jews and other peoples he hated.

Hitler came to this decision by an incredibly convoluted and illogical process. Since Britain refused to sign a peace treaty, and since invading Britain would be extremely hazardous given the strength of the Royal Navy and the weakness of the German navy, Hitler concluded that the only way to overcome Britain would be to destroy the Soviet Union. Hitler decided that Russia was Britain’s chief remaining hope for assistance, its “continental dagger,” and once the Soviet Union was destroyed, the British would see reason and give in.

This, of course, was entirely wrong. The British were relying on the United States, not Russia, for their salvation. “I shall drag the United States in,” British Prime Minister Winston Churchill told his son after France fell. And the American president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, was doing everything he could to help. But Roosevelt had to play a cagey game. A majority of the American electorate was deathly afraid of getting into another war in Europe, and wanted to isolate the country behind its two oceans. Only a minority recognized the terrible danger of Adolf Hitler and realized the United States would have to enter the war if Nazi Germany was to be defeated.

Perhaps Hitler was engaging in wishful thinking in turning toward the Soviet Union, concocting a theory of the close connection of Britain to Russia to justify what he wanted to do anyway. He hated Communism, feared the growth of a powerful industrial state that was proceeding apace under Joseph Stalin, and wanted to seize a large segment of Russia and Ukraine. Besides, he could reach the Soviet Union, while he couldn’t reach Britain.

Actually, Hitler did not want to destroy Britain, and this played a role in his decision to turn eastward. He admired the British Empire and wanted to reach an understanding with it. However, Hitler’s conditions were that Britain would keep its empire while Germany would have a free hand on the Continent. Britain could never accept such a settlement, however, because it could not survive as an independent power if Germany controlled the European continent.

Hitler would listen to no criticism. His senior advisers knew the war in the west had been only half-won, and few thought it could be finished on the plains of Russia in the east. The Soviet Union was so vast that a war there could expand into limitless space—placing potentially impossible demands on the German war machine. A war against Russia would be nothing like the war in the west, where distances were limited, populations concentrated, objectives close, and the Atlantic Ocean a finite boundary.

On the advice of General Erich von Manstein, Hitler had changed the Schwerpunkt—or main weight—of the attack from northern Belgium to the Ardennes, when the top German generals had advised otherwise. This decision had given Germany its greatest victory in history. Since the senior military leadership had been wrong, and he (and Manstein) right, Hitler concluded that he could rely on his “intuition.” This intuition told him to downgrade the war against Britain and carry out the two desires that had obsessed him from the early 1920s—destroying the Soviet Union and the Jews of Europe.

Hitler’s belief in Lebensraum was based on his idea that the German people needed more land to produce more food. Classical economics had long since proved that industrial states could buy grains and other foods for their people and did not need additional farmland. But Hitler paid no attention. Besides, the idea of more land resonated with the German people. Their parents and grandparents had sought expansion into central and eastern Europe in the early years of the century; this was one of the underlying causes for World War I, which Germany had lost. In Mein Kampf Hitler wrote that Germany was not a world power in 1914–1918 because it could not feed its people, and would not become a world power until it was able to do so.

Hitler’s compulsion to destroy the Jews and other categories of people rested on no logical basis, only on the most malignant of prejudices. He made the Jews scapegoats for every problem that Germany faced—even the rise of the Soviet Union, whose revolution he falsely claimed had been carried out and sustained by Jews.

Hitler’s political savvy warned him to avoid getting openly involved in this pogrom of hate and murder, however, and he left its operation mostly to underlings, especially Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich of the Schutzstaffel or SS.

In the butchery that followed, Hitler and his willing German executioners killed 6 million Jews in what is now called the Holocaust, perhaps a million Poles and Gypsies, thousands of persons who had mental or physical disabilities or who objected to his ideas, and 7.7 million Soviet civilians. This does not count the 9.1 million Allied personnel killed in battle (7.5 million Soviets), and 5 million Soviet soldiers who died in prisoner-of-war camps or were murdered by their captors.

Aside from their horror, the killings of civilians and prisoners of war deprived Germany of the labor and mental contributions of potentially valuable workers and took immense amounts of transportation, resources, personnel, and energy badly needed for the war effort.

It is easy enough to assert that Hitler was mad. He most certainly was. His fixation on these two monstrous, irrational goals proves it. But Hitler also was in part a sensible person, possessed of great intelligence and superior political skills. His fantastic success up to mid-1940 demonstrates this.

Many of the men who served Hitler believed they might tap the sane part of Hitler’s mind and deflect the mad part, and in this way lead Germany to a successful outcome of the war. The events in Hitler’s headquarters from mid-1940 onward are a rolling drama of this attempt. While a number of far-sighted officers saw the way to succeed and tried to convince him, toadies catered to Hitler’s prejudices. Sometimes Hitler listened to one, sometimes to the other, and sometimes to no one but himself.

Until the summer of 1940, Hitler had run up a string of victories that were unprecedented in world history. He achieved most of them by the application of his remarkable political skills, and without the use of force.

Over the course of six years, beginning with his assumption of the chancellorship of Germany on January 30, 1933, Hitler got himself elected dictator of Germany less than two months later and put the state wholly under the Nazi party which he led; withdrew Germany from the League of Nations in October 1933; commenced massive secret rebuilding of German military power in 1934; introduced conscription in violation of the Versailles treaty in 1935; reoccupied the Rhineland in 1936, a German border region demilitarized under terms of the Versailles treaty; declared the treaty dead in 1937; seized the sovereign state of Austria and joined it to Germany on March 10, 1938; bullied the leaders of Britain and France into accepting his dismemberment of Czechoslovakia at the Munich conference, September 29–30, 1938, and occupied the remaining rump of the state—the Czech portions of Bohemia and Moravia—on March 15, 1939.

It was this last act of treachery that finally showed Neville Chamberlain, British prime minister, and Edouard Daladier, the French premier, that their policy of “appeasement” of Hitler was utterly misguided and that Hitler was a congenital liar. At Munich, Hitler had solemnly sworn that his final territorial aspiration in Europe was annexation of the Sudetenland, the German-speaking part of Czechoslovakia, and that he would assure the independence of the remainder of the state.

Britain and France now guaranteed the independence of Poland, the next victim on Hitler’s list. It was a hopeless gesture, since neither country could help Poland. That country’s fate was sealed on August 23, 1939, when the Soviet Union signed a nonaggression pact with Germany— inspired not by confidence in the peaceful intentions of Hitler but by desperation. Britain and France, who feared Communism, had refused to work with the Soviet Union to block Hitler during the early years when he could have been stopped with relative ease.

Bolstered by secret provisions of the Berlin-Moscow pact, which divided eastern Europe into German and Soviet spheres of influence, Hitler launched his armies against Poland on September 1, 1939. Poland had no chance whatsoever, being half-surrounded by German or German-held territory. The Polish army was enveloped from the first day. In addition, German General Heinz Guderian had developed a spectacular panzer arm, and German tanks cut through and rolled up Polish defenses with ease and unimagined speed in the first application of Blitzkrieg, or “lightning war.” Within three weeks Poland was defeated—and the Poles found their land partitioned between the Germans in the west and the Soviets in the east.

Britain and France declared war on Germany on September 3, 1939. The British took some action at sea, blockading German ports and pursuing German surface raiders, but were slow to put troops on the Continent, while France did virtually nothing on the Franco-German frontier. The fall and winter of 1939–1940 became known in the British Empire and the United States as the “phony war,” in France as the drôle de guerre, and in Germany as the Sitzkrieg.

Meanwhile, the Soviet Union took advantage of its pact with Germany to demand from Finland large cessions of territory as a buffer around the city of Leningrad (St. Petersburg) and elsewhere. The Finns refused and Soviet troops invaded on November 30, 1939. The Finns performed brilliantly in the “winter war,” but Soviet power was too great. Russians breached the main Finnish defensive line on February 11, 1940, and Finland capitulated on March 12, ceding the land Russia wanted.

The Allies—Britain and France—saw a chance to damage the German war economy by mining the territorial waters of Norway to prevent shipment of iron ore from northern Sweden during the winter through the Norwegian port of Narvik. This ore was vital to the German war effort, but could not be moved by way of the Baltic Sea in winter because the Gulf of Bothnia froze over. At the same time Hitler coveted the deep fjords of Norway as protected places to launch German surface ships, aircraft, and submarines against British supply lines. Both sides began plans early in 1940 to occupy Norway.

Hitler struck first, seizing Denmark in a swift coup de main and occupying key ports of Norway on April 9, 1940. The Allies contested the occupation of Norway and scored some successes, especially at sea. But German efforts were more ordered and decisive, and Allied forces soon withdrew, especially as the focal point of the war shifted to the Low Countries of Belgium, Holland, and Luxembourg and to France where Hitler launched his campaign in the west on May 10, 1940.

The Polish campaign should have tipped off the Allies to new uses for two elements in the German arsenal. But it did not, and they hit the Allied forces in the west like a thunderbolt. The elements were the airplane and the tank.

German generals had discovered something that the leaders of other armies had not figured out—that airplanes and tanks were not weapons but kinds of vehicles. Vehicles could carry armor, guns, or people, making possible an entirely new military system built around them. Armies could consist of troops carried by airplanes or dropped from them, or of self-propelled forces containing tanks, motorized artillery, and motorized infantry. Air forces could include tactical aircraft, such as dive-bombers, that functioned as aerial field artillery, or strategic aircraft with long-range and heavy bomb-carrying capacity that could bomb the enemy homeland.

Heinz Guderian had built the panzer arm on the teachings of two English experts, J. F. C. Fuller and Basil H. Liddell Hart, whose ideas of concentrating armor into large units had been largely ignored in their own country. The German high command was as hidebound as the British leadership on this point, and fought Guderian’s ideas. It was the enthusiasm of Hitler for tanks that gave Guderian the opening to establish the army doctrine of putting all armor into panzer divisions, instead of dividing it into small detachments parceled out to infantry divisions, as remained the practice in the French and British armies.

In addition, Guderian won acceptance of the doctrine that panzer divisions had to be made up not only of tanks but of motorized infantry, artillery, and engineers, who could move at the speed of tanks and operate alongside armor to carry out offensive operations wherever the tanks could reach.

Erwin Rommel, who would become famous for his campaigns in North Africa, produced the best one-sentence description of blitzkrieg warfare: “The art of concentrating strength at one point, forcing a breakthrough, rolling up and securing the flanks on either side, and then penetrating like lightning deep into his rear, before the enemy has had time to react.”

This was a revolutionary idea to the armies of the world. Most military leaders thought tanks should be used as they had been employed in World War I—to assist infantry in carrying out assaults on foot against enemy objectives. For this reason, the best Allied tanks, like the British Matilda, were heavily armored monsters that could deflect most enemy fire but could move scarcely faster than an infantryman could walk. German tanks, on the other hand, were “fast runners” with less armor, but able to travel at around 25 miles an hour and designed for quick penetration of an enemy line and fast exploitation of the breakthrough thereafter into the enemy rear.

It is astonishing that Allied (and most German) generals did not see the disarming logic of Guderian’s argument. He pointed out, for example, that if one side had 2,100 tanks and dispersed them evenly across a 300-mile front to support its infantry divisions, the tank density would be seven per mile, not enough to be decisive except in local engagements. If the other side had the same number of tanks and concentrated them at a single Schwerpunkt, or main center of attack, the density would be as many tanks as could physically be fitted on the roads and fields in the sector. Such a concentration would be bound to break through. Defending tanks and antitank guns would be too few to destroy all the attacking armor, leaving the remainder to rush into the rear, with other motorized forces following to exploit the victory. This would inevitably destroy the equilibrium of the main line of resistance and force the entire front to disintegrate.

Nevertheless, British and French armies persisted in spreading most of their tanks among their infantry divisions. Both remained under the delusion that battles would be fought all along a continuous line, and they could move tanks and guns to block any point where a few enemy tanks achieved a breakthrough. They did not understand the effect of massing large numbers of tanks for a decisive penetration at a single point.

The radical aircraft the Germans developed was not much to look at. It was the Junker 87B Stuka, a dive-bomber with nonretractable landing gear, an 1,100-pound bombload, and a top speed of only 240 mph. It was already obsolete in 1940, but the Stuka (short for Sturzkampfflugzeug, or “dive battle aircraft”) was designed to make pinpoint attacks on enemy battlefield positions, tanks, and troops. And, since the German Luftwaffe (air force) gained air superiority quickly with its excellent fighter the Messerschmitt 109, the Stuka had the sky over the battlefield largely to itself. The Stuka functioned as aerial artillery and was highly effective. It also was terrifying to Allied soldiers because of its accuracy and because German pilots fitted the Stuka with an ordinary whistle that emitted a high-pitched scream as it dived. The Allied air forces had not seen a need for such a plane and concentrated primarily on area bombing, which was much less effective on the battlefield.

When German panzers broke through enemy lines, they could employ both their own organic artillery and Stukas to shatter enemy positions or assist motorized infantry in attacks. It was a new way to win tactical engagements, and the Allies had nothing to match it.