How Hitler Could Have Won World War II

4 HITLER’S FIRST GREAT ERROR

THE SWIFT GERMAN VICTORY OVER FRANCE AND THE EJECTION OF THE BRITISH Expeditionary Force from the Continent without its weapons raised the immediate question of whether Britain could survive.

The obvious answer was what the world expected: German forces would sweep over the narrow seas and conquer the British isles as quickly as they had shattered France. There was only one impediment: Germany had to achieve at least temporary air and sea supremacy over and on the English Channel. Otherwise, ferries, barges, and transports carrying troops could be easily sunk by Royal Navy ships before they could land on English beaches and docks.

The crucial requirement was in the air. German navy leaders believed they could shield landing craft and ships for the short passage, but only if British warships could not run in at will among the convoys. This could be assured only if the Luftwaffe ruled the skies above the invasion fleet, and could bomb and strafe any enemy ship that showed itself.

Hitler was reluctant to invade Britain, thinking the British would come to their senses, recognize their “militarily hopeless situation,” and sue for peace.

He persisted in this view in spite of a speech by Winston Churchill in the House of Commons on June 18, 1940, four days before France gave up. “The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us,” Churchill said. “Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands…. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will say, ‘This was their finest hour.’”

Shortly thereafter, Hitler got a swift lesson in British determination to continue the war.

The Germans had occupied three-fifths of France, including the whole Atlantic coast, leaving the remainder unoccupied with a government under Marshal Pétain centered in the resort town of Vichy. The big question was what would become of the French fleet. Most of it moved into the French Mediterranean harbor of Toulon, but powerful elements remained in North Africa.

Churchill’s government feared a change in the balance of power if even a part of the French fleet got into German hands. The British wanted to take possession of it or eliminate it.

In surprise moves on July 3, 1940, British troops seized French ships that had taken refuge in British harbors, and a powerful British naval group including three battleships and an aircraft carrier under Admiral Sir James Somerville arrived at Oran and Mers-el-Kebir in Algeria, where the largest French flotilla outside Toulon lay at anchor.

Somerville tried to get the French to surrender, but failed, and the British opened fire on their former allies. The battleship Bretagne blew up, the Dunquerque ran aground, the battleship Provence beached, and the torpedo cruiser Magador exploded. The battleship Strasbourg and three heavy destroyers were able to run out to sea, break through the British ring of fire, and reach Toulon, as did seven cruisers berthed at Algiers. Almost 1,300 Frenchmen died in the Mers-el-Kebir battle. Five days later torpedo bombers from the British aircraft carrier Hermes seriously damaged the French battleship Richelieu at Dakar in Senegal.

The British attacks enraged France, but brought before the eyes of people everywhere the striking power of the Royal Navy. It helped to convince President Roosevelt and the American people that backing Britain was a good bet.

Hitler still waited until July 16 before ordering an invasion, named Operation Sea Lion. He said, however, that the undertaking had to be ready by mid-August.

Hermann Göring assured Hitler that his Luftwaffe could drive the Royal Air Force out of the skies in short order. The invasion depended upon Göring’s word.

Britain had only 675 fighter planes (60 percent Hurricanes, 40 percent Spitfires) combat-ready when the battle started. Germany had 800 Messerschmitt 109s to protect its 875 two-engined bombers and 316 Stukas. It also had 250 two-engined Messerschmitt 110 fighters, but these were 60 miles per hour slower than Spitfires, and turned out to be a great disappointment.

The Messerschmitt (or Bf) 109 had a top speed of 350 miles per hour. It was armed with three 20-millimeter cannons and two machine guns. Approximately equal was the British Supermarine Spitfire with a maximum speed of 360 mph and armed with eight machine guns. Somewhat inferior was the British Hawker Hurricane with a top speed of 310 mph, a slower rate of climb, eight machine guns, but more robust and easier to maintain. The 1940 model Hurricane could reach 330 mph and carried four 20-millimeter cannons. The Me-109 and the Spitfire both had a maximum range of about 400 miles, the Hurricane 525 miles.

Aircraft numbers were closely guarded secrets, but leaders everywhere had good estimates of the comparative strengths of the two sides, and few were betting on the British.

Göring concentrated his fighters and bombers for an all-out assault on airfields and fighters in southern England. He and other Luftwaffe leaders didn’t realize that the RAF’s greatest strength was not its fighter aircraft, vital as they were, but the new British-developed radar, which sent out radio signals that struck incoming aircraft and reflected them back to receiving stations. By 1940 Britain had a double line of radar stations facing the Continent. One line consisted of receivers on high towers that could detect high-flying enemy aircraft 120 miles away. The other had a shorter range but could pick up low-flying aircraft.

The radar net, combined with Observer Corps spotters on the ground who tracked aircraft once past the coast, gave the RAF advance warning of approaching bombers. The skill of RAF Fighter Command was based on shrewd use of radar. From the moment they took off from bases in western Europe, German aircraft were spotted on screens, their courses plotted. Fighter Command knew exactly where and when they could be attacked.

RAF fighters could mass against each German wave, and also climb into the air just before they had to engage, thus preserving fuel. By comparison, Messerschmitts could remain protecting bombers over England only for minutes because they had to fly from the Continent and back.

In the days leading up to the start of the main campaign, Eagle Day on August 13, Stukas struck repeatedly at airfields and radar stations, and on August 12 knocked out one radar station. But the Germans didn’t know how vital radar was and didn’t concentrate attacks on it. The strikes showed that the Stukas were too slow and vulnerable for the long-range mission against Britain, and had to be withdrawn.

On August 13 and 14, three waves of German bombers, a total of 1,500 sorties, damaged several RAF airfields, but destroyed none. The strongest effort came on August 15 when the Germans launched 800 bombing and 1,150 fighter sorties. A hundred bombers escorted by Me-110s from Air Fleet 5 in Scandinavia, expecting to find the northeastern coast of Britain defenseless, instead were pounced on by Hurricanes and Spitfires as they approached Tyneside. Thirty aircraft went down, mostly bombers, without a British loss. Air Fleet 5 never returned to the Battle of Britain.

In southern England the Luftwaffe was more successful. In four attacks, one of which nearly penetrated to London, bombers hit four aircraft factories at Croydon, and damaged five fighter fields. But the Germans lost 75 planes, the RAF 34.

On August 15, Göring made his first major error. He called off attacks on the radar stations. But by August 24 he had learned about the second key to the RAF defense, the sector stations. These nerve centers guided fighters into battle using latest intelligence from radar, ground observers, and pilots in the air. He switched to destruction of these stations. Seven around London were crucial to protection of southern England.

From that day to September 6, the Luftwaffe sent over an average of a thousand planes a day. Numbers began to tell. They damaged five fields in southern England badly, and hit six of the seven key sector stations so severely that the communications system was on the verge of being knocked out.

The RAF began to stagger. Between August 23 and September 6, 466 fighters were destroyed or badly damaged (against 352 German losses). Although British factories produced more than 450 Spitfires and Hurricanes in both August and September, getting them into squadrons took time. And the real problem was not machines but men. During the period 103 RAF pilots were killed and 128 seriously wounded, one-fourth of those available. A few more weeks of such losses and Britain would no longer have an organized air defense.

At this moment, Adolf Hitler changed the direction of the battle—and the war. If he had allowed the Luftwaffe to continue its blows to the sector stations, Sea Lion could have been carried out and Hitler could have ended the war with a swift and total victory. Instead, he made the first great blunder in his career, a blunder so fundamental that it changed the course of the entire conflict—and set in motion a series of other blunders that followed in its wake.

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.