by Ambrose Hollingworth
Suppose Nazi Germany had:
Driven on into Dunkirk
Finished off RAF Fighter Command
Continued into Moscow and Leningrad
Eliminated Malta and reinforced Army Group Afrika
Completed the Atlantic Wall and taken Rommel’s advice
The logical extension of any of the above would have been a German victory in Europe. This is not the usual what-if proposal which theorizes that which never happened (what-if our carriers had been at Pearl Harbor, etc.). On the contrary, the above five situations were actually in their finishing-up or final stages when curtailed or canceled. In each case the holdup was by order of Adolf Hitler, Commander-in-Chief. And in each case the decision was of a faltering nature and followed by a half-hearted gesture to reinstate the original plan.
Regardless of the participation of other voices—the General Staff, local commanders, combat officers—the decisions themselves were the Führer’s. The pattern is simple:
Arrived on the verge of decisive strategic victory.
Call a halt to switch targets, re-group or re-confer.
Attempt to resume the same or a similar operation.
Suffer catastrophic defeat in the new operation.
None of the Great Captains ever followed this pattern of command, which is like saying no great football coach ever made a practice of punting on the second down. Possibly if Adolf had served in the cavalry instead of the infantry, his psychology of warfare would have emphasized pursuit rather than consolidation. At any rate, these five strategic blunders make an interesting collection of “lost victories.”
Dunkirk, June 1940
One thousand battle-toughened tanks of Panzer Gruppe Kleist stood at the Gravelines–St. Omer canal line. Most of the bridges were still intact and several crossings were underway. Fighter Gruppe 1/JG 27 was setting up at St. Omer. The best of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) was heavily engaged more than a hundred miles away in Belgium. Sprinkled along the 24-mile ‘line’ was one battalion of the British 48th Infantry Division. The panzers would go through them without even noticing that they were there. And beyond that, nothing for ten flat, soggy miles right into the channel port of Dunkirk.
Already the Germans were 30 miles closer to Dunkirk than the closest British force of any effective strength. The quick sprint across the marshy ground ahead would be the final pounce of the incredible fourteen-day charge from the Ardennes forest to the Channel coast. This final run would bag the entire British Expeditionary Force along with over a hundred thousand French troops; taking both nations right out of the land war. It was 24 May 1940.
Two days later they were still standing there while the Allies jelled a defense perimeter which then held for a solid week. A quarter of a million British soldiers and the remnants of three French armies got away, by the ‘miracle of Dunkirk.’ And England stayed in the war.
This incident has been hashed over pretty well by now and we know the halt order came in a personal directive from a jittery Hitler against the advice of his own staff. Several excuses have been given and reasons brought out. They’re all relevant enough, but they just don’t justify the decision that was made.
The ground was marshy, flanks exposed, communications strung out, air and infantry support was scant, tank treads worn down, etc. But only ten uncontested miles to cross!
At a meeting with Colonel General Kluge on the 25th, Guderian described his own reaction to the order as ‘speechless.’ Richthofen, VIII Air Corps commander, was at the same meeting. Afterward, he told his friend, Jeschonnek, Luftwaffe Chief of Staff: “Unless the panzers can get moving again at once, the English will give us the slip. No one can seriously believe that we alone can stop them from the air.”
At that moment the Luftwaffe was temporarily exhausted. Many of the bomber wings were at half combat strength. None of the pilots were trained in precision bombing. There were no advance airfields to speak of. Albert Kesselring, then commander of Luftflotte 2, appraised the situation thus: “The job is completely beyond the strength of my depleted forces.” Even if it were possible, why assemble a whole new operation when a thousand tanks had but ten uncontested miles more to go?
Because of the weather not even the Luftwaffe attacked Dunkirk until after the 26th, except for small raids. Since water and sand make poor shrapnel, only direct hits on loading or loaded vessels could stop the evacuation. The odds were poor at best. Yet Hitler saved the final blow for the Luftwaffe.
The other strange reason offered was even further removed from military logic. This was Hitler’s quaint belief that the British would come to terms when they saw what a break he was giving them.
The Battle of Britain, August-September 1940
The Luftwaffe was destroying RAF Fighter Command. Air Marshall Dowding said as much to Churchill. Göring also knew it, more or less. The Battle of France had left England with twenty-five fighter squadrons, two hundred medium tanks, less than five hundred field guns and a frightening shortage of combat pilots. No help was on the way from the Empire and not much from the United States.
From 24 August to 6 September, 269 new and repaired fighters were turned out; 295 were destroyed and another 171 were badly damaged. According to Dowding, by the beginning of September, fresh squadrons were being worn out before there was anything with which to replace them. The British War Office was considering possible (military) withdrawal to Canada or the various islands of the Empire.
Then, surprise! Right at the peak of the fighting, the Luftwaffe target was switched to residential and dockside London, Fighter Command got away and again Britain stayed in the war.
Germany had no strategic air arm, no four-engine bombers and no long-range fighters. Only because of the geographical location of London was an air campaign at all viable. The strategy was to attack the fighter bases around the capital and simply destroy all the British fighter planes both on the ground and in the air. After that, at their leisure and unmolested, the Luftwaffe could annihilate all industry, shipping, communications, transport and fortifications in southeast England, the area covered by Fighter Group 11.
At the end of August, few of the original squadrons of Group 11 were still in action. Pilot strength on 24 August was one thousand. Losing 120 and replacing sixty per week meant a weekly loss rate of sixty. This would have trimmed them down to 640 in six weeks. That meant no better than 320 available at any given time to cover the around-the-clock alert that summer. In the end, the front line squadrons in Group 11 were given nearly all the trained pilots in the country. Even the Navy and the Bomber and Coastal Commands gave up pilots to the hard-pressed fighter arm. Also, the new pilots were coming in less and less trained due to the emergency time factor. Germany did not have this problem. Records indicate that, in spite of heavy losses in May and June, the German flying schools were turning out more pilots than could be absorbed into front-line squadrons. Germany, also, could have accepted her higher casualty rate as the price of decisive victory.
At a conference on 3 September, Kesselring said: “We have no chance of destroying the English fighters on the ground. We must force their last reserves into combat in the air.” He said this at the very time when reports from the German pilots indicated that for the first time the violence of the British fighter defense was slackening. A German fighter gruppe commander reported that there was not much going on over Eastchurch anymore. Eastchurch is on the Thames estuary, en route to London!
Once again Hitler broke off the attack, this time partially on pretext of reprisal. After that, the English civilian became the shield for the sword of the RAF and drew the fire until the following year when the Luftwaffe departed for the engulfing skies over Russia.
Moscow, July-September 1941
At mid-summer, the Soviet armies in European Russia were in a shambles. They had been initially surprised, then blitzed and encircled and wiped out again and again. In spite of early delays and distractions, a late spring and a wet July, over twenty per cent horse-drawn transport, primitive roads and a vast underestimate of Soviet manpower, the spearheads of Army Group Center were within 200 miles of Moscow. Up north Leeb was preparing to take Leningrad, while to the south the Crimea and Ukraine were threatened, covered only by relatively immobile Russian horde armies and great blotches of T-34 tanks. Stalin told U.S. diplomat Harry Hopkins: “If Moscow falls, the Red Army will have to give up the whole of Russia west of the Volga.”
Four and one-half months later the Wehrmacht had pulled back from Moscow and Leningrad, Army Group South had overrun but not really captured the Ukraine and Crimea.
Army Groups North and Center never got any further; in the south the Kursk and Stalingrad debacles were yet to come. What the hell happened?
The original plan was to take Leningrad and Moscow first, and only then to deal with the Ukraine and the Caucasian oil fields. In other words, first win the war and then gather the spoils. Hitler’s Directive 21 (Operation Barbarossa) states in part 3, section (A): “Once the battles south or north of the Pripyet Marshes have been fought, the pursuit is to be undertaken with the following objectives: In the south the rapid occupation of the economically important Donetz Basin; in the north the speedy capture of Moscow. The capture of this city would be a decisive victory both from the political and from the economic point of view.”
The 96th Infantry Division was about six miles from downtown Leningrad by 15 September. Two days later the 1st Panzer Division took Aleksandrovka on Lake Ladoga and the encirclement was in effect.
With Moscow virtually in the hand and therefore a Soviet capitulation probable, Hitler switched all the armor to the Ukraine and Leningrad. The southern campaign went off well, tactically, but accomplished little strategically. In the north, the Leningrad assault was no sooner underway when the commander-in-chief snatched back the armor and all bomber units and called off the operation. As Carell phrased it: “At the very moment when Leningrad’s last line of defense had been broken, when the Duderhof Hills had been stormed … and the city, quaking with fright, lay in front of the German formations; came the red light from the Führer’s headquarters.” The panzers were shuttled back to Moscow where the last abortive effort was held up in the snowy forests outside the suburbs. On the night of 5-6 December 1941, the Wehrmacht went over to the defensive.
Russian military response is, at best, extremely difficult to predict. The loss of Moscow and Leningrad may have driven their armies out of reach beyond the Urals or drawn them north in a great massive flanking attack. Marshal Budenny did have five thousand tanks. Or his army group of eighty divisions might have recoiled down around and past the Black Sea. Whatever the reaction, Russia would certainly have been decisively disrupted as a nation at war. Both Hitler and Brauchitsch were aware of this. Where was the renowned German efficiency?
Once more the reasons given by Hitler and his OKW toadies were relevant, but third-rate as military logic. A Hitler directive dated 21 August 1941 stated: “Of primary importance before the outbreak of winter, is not the capture of Moscow, but rather the occupation of the Crimea, of the industrial and coal mining area of the Donetz basin, the cutting of the Russian supply routes from the Caucasian oil fields.” Apparently he would rather have seen the Slavic people unhappy than defeated.
Egypt, June-July 1942
On the last day of June, twelve battered German tanks pulled up, in a swirl of dust, to the Alamein Line. They were short on everything and the crews were in an advanced state of fatigue. Strung out for many miles were three or four dozen more tanks, the Italian Littorio Division and the 21st Panzer Division. To the south, the remnants of the British armor lay out on the desert before scrambling on into the shelter of fortified boxes which were the Alamein ‘line.’ Ahead were two fresh infantry brigades and a recuperating division, hoping to bar the way to Alexandria, less than 65 miles further on along the coast road. Tobruk, captured a week before, had given up over 300,000 gallons of gasoline.
Malta had proven itself the strategical key to supply in North Africa. Only when the tiny island (useless, expensive Crete is twenty-six times larger) was nearly obliterated by the Luftwaffe did Army Group Afrika receive its minimum of supply. This was in the spring of 1942, when all the British bombers, destroyers and submarines had to be evacuated.
Riding one of the panzers was a 49-year-old field marshal. He was unaware of the vulnerable British armor to his right or the disposition and strength of the infantry to his front. He was, however, vigorously aware of Alexandria, gateway to all the Middle East, just 60-odd miles ahead. As Churchill stated, “The condition and morale of his [Rommel’s] forces and the weakness of the British position prompted pursuit ‘into the heart of Egypt’.” In Alexandria and in Cairo, files were being destroyed, records and orders burned and the families of diplomats and officers were being evacuated. Mussolini shipped a white stallion over for his triumphal entry. The way was momentarily clear for what would lead to a sweep to the Suez and on into the Arabian oil fields. After that, Malta could be dealt with easily. To lose the Mediterranean, the Suez and the Middle East along with the accompanying loss of men and equipment would have eliminated Great Britain as a serious factor in the European war. The stage was set.
Three days later, Rommel and most of his staff knew that it was all over for Germany in North Africa. “We had just failed.”
The Mediterranean issue is not nearly so simple as the previous three, but if the whole rambling thing can be seen intact, the same syndrome we have been pointing out is again recognizable.
North Africa was the strategical key to the Middle East. It took no expert to see this. North Africa includes the invaluable Suez Canal. Syria was a reliable enough ally in the event of German military presence. And the only really effective British force was that engaged in Egypt.
The Middle East was the key to breaking the British, outflanking Russia and permanently solving the oil problem. Even the overly talked about link-up with the Japanese was to be at least taken into consideration.
When Tobruk fell, on 21 June, Mussolini reminded Hitler of their agreement to take Malta before going into Egypt. Back in April, Rommel himself had offered to lead the invasion of the island. The XI Air Corps was trained and ready, along with a crack Italian parachute division, an airborne division and six amphibious assault divisions. The intelligence preparation was complete. General Kurt Student, commander of the XI Air Corps, later stated that: “We knew much more about the enemy’s dispositions [than with Crete]. Excellent aerial photographs had revealed every detail of his fortifications, coastal and flak batteries, and field positions. We even knew the caliber of the coastal guns and how many degrees they could be turned inland.”
Hitler was preoccupied with killing Slavs and brushed the whole matter aside sarcastically and dramatically with accusations of essential cowardice in the Italian Navy and a flowery letter to the Duce about the divine opportunity in Egypt.
At that point, Hitler dumped the entire Mediterranean theater, with empty orders to Kesselring to supply and support Rommel in his march to the Nile.
He sent none of the readily available 70,000-man Malta task force, however. Even more, including the all-important armor, could have come from Germany, France, Russia or Scandinavia without any noticeable drain anywhere. Once again the German war machine fell between two stools at the last minute. Army Group Afrika was allowed to atrophy and to drop off in Tunisia, when the Führer finally got back to it and poured in the reinforcements just in time to swell the Allied prisoner bag to a quarter of a million Axis troops. Hitler had done it again.
Normandy, June 1944
The Danish coastline took a brief ten days, the North Sea bight was not on his list, and then it was on down to Fontainebleau for a study of the coast of France. This was in December 1943, seven months before the Allied invasion. By personal assignment Hitler had sent the field marshal to inspect the Atlantic Wall and report recommendations for its improvement. Invasion was inevitable and both Hitler and Rommel were certain it would fall on the Normandy coast.
Assisting Rommel was his naval advisor and personal friend, Vice-Admiral Ruge, an expert in mines and minesweeping.
Invasion was not only inevitable, it was strategically most desirable, for it would place most of the Allied eggs in one small basket just long enough for them to be smashed. Even America’s industrial might could not equip another such operation for a few years, during which time Germany would fight Russia to a standstill, bring terms to Britain and consolidate Festung Europa. All of which amounts to winning the war in Europe.
So it was actually desirable to draw the Allies (especially the United States) into a full-scale invasion attempt. It was, in fact, Germany’s last chance for survival.
Army Group West carried a combat roster of forty-odd second-class and ten first-class infantry divisions along with ten armored divisions. At least one of the armored units (Panzer Lehr) was a special quadruple-strength, anti-invasion unit. Along the Channel coast were U-boat bases (fifty U-boats were available for action on invasion day) and launching sites for V-1 and V-2 rockets. Over three hundred fighters and four hundred bombers were stationed in France and the Low Countries. The Germans had been there for nearly four leisurely years. They knew their way around by then.
The North African experience had convinced many German military men, including Erwin Rommel, that Allied air power would prevent mechanized units from moving very far very fast. This meant that the invasion would have to be stopped at the beaches or not at all. A neat problem, with only ten armored divisions to cover a 3,000-mile possibility. At least three panzer divisions would have to be in action at the invasion site within a few hours at the latest. And something resembling air support would be necessary for those first critical hours.
A closer look shows those 3,000 miles to be misleading. Only certain stretches are even suitable for a landing and a lesser few would be tactically viable. For a general staff that had already accomplished the impossible, many times over, along every inch of the 1,800-mile Eastern Front, the Channel defense was indeed problematic but not prohibitive. If met in the water, at high tide or low, the invasion could be beaten off with the limited resources at hand in France. As an example: the 21st Panzer, 12th SS Panzer and Panzer Lehr Divisions. Used as a mass, rather than piecemeal, these represented a powerful force to counterstrike any invasion attempt. The 21st Panzer Division alone held Caen (one of Montgomery’s first-day objectives) for an entire month.
The Allies came on the sixth day of June, exactly where Rommel and his commander in chief said they would; with eight thousand ships carrying fourteen infantry divisions and their support. At the only section of the landing beach adequately defended (Omaha) they nearly were thrown back into the Channel by a single crack infantry division.
Four days later, Rommel and von Rundstedt agreed that Germany had just lost the war.
It was the same dull story. Hitler began by sending the right man to the right place, a man who made the right recommendations. Germany still had the resources to meet most of them, thereby probably winning the war in Europe, finally. Then Hitler proceeded to pull out all his air defense, relocate the mobile reserve too deep to counterattack and too close for an in-depth defense, curtail naval defense preparations, refuse the tactical use of the big rockets and place the key panzer divisions under his own personal command. And, of course, when the great counterattack finally was permitted it was far too late and was delivered piecemeal.
Conclusion
Certainly, Hitler made other mistakes which contributed to his defeat, such as keeping his generals uninformed, attacking while understrength, perhaps even of taking command at all. But with all of that, the Wehrmacht could have pulled it off at any one of these five points. I find the story, at the High Command level, to be frustrating and exasperating, from a military viewpoint. In my opinion, Germany lost World War II directly through these strikingly similar five blunders by Adolf Hitler, Commander-in-Chief.
Possibly one of the clearest clues as to the course of that war comes from an exchange of words at the appointment of Ernst Udet as Chief of the Luftwaffe Technical Office. Udet was resisting the appointment and he said to Göring, “I understand nothing about it!” To which Göring replied, “Do you think I understand the things I’ve got to deal with.
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