LECTURE 14

BLITZKRIEG 1.

HITLER UNLEASHED

In January 1933 Hitler was installed as Chancellor; a year later, with President Hindenburg dead, he arranged for all military personnel to swear personal allegiance to himself as the new head of state (Fuhrer, leader). Backed by an Enabling Act that heralded the destruction of parliamentary government in Germany, he was able to carry out his program of Gleichschaltung: systematic "coordination" from above, banning political parties, seizing the assets of the trade unions, taking over every organization from the courts and police and security services to youth groups and choral societies. His policy of public works expenditures (on highways, for example) and accelerated rearmament brought Germany close to full employment by the end of 1936Üa remarkable turnaround in this depression era. The regime controlled wages and prices to suppress inflation, and managed the economy with high levels of state intervention and regulation. By the late 1930s Hitler had consolidated a personal dictatorship, along with an array of bureaucratic fiefdoms run by his henchmen, all of them competing for the Fuhrer's favor.

The real goal, as we have seen, was the recreation of a new German nation, cleansed of the cultural and racial imperfection that had resulted from modernization, and above all from the termite-like activities of the Jews. Further, the industrialization and urbanization of Germany which had done so much to rot good, healthy German stock was to be balanced and counteracted by the preservation and extension of the German peasantry, rooted in good, healthy German soil. But since there was not enough suitable territory within the existing frontiers of the Reich to provide adequate living space for such an extension, Germany must acquire more land: much as the British, another over-industrialized people, had acquired colonies of settlement all over the world. As a superior Volk the Germans had the right, the duty, to subordinate, even to eliminate, inferior peoples. Moreover, Hitler believed that Germany suffered from certain chronic economic problems that imperialism alone could solve: lack of sufficient food, fuel, and mineral ores. After the German state had brought the Germans of Austria and Czechoslovakia within its borders, it would proceed to conquer Eastern Europe, turn it into a German economic hinterland, and settle the Ukraine with agricultural colonists. While some Eastern European peoples, like the Balts, might be Germanized, others must be enslaved, expelled, or exterminated.

But all of this required reversing the verdict of the First World War. In 1935 Hitler renounced the clauses of the Treaty of Versailles that limited the size of the army to 100,000, reintroduced universal conscription, and created a Luftwaffe, an airforce; in 1936, he renegotiated a naval treaty with Britain that allowed him to build submarines, and unilaterally reoccupied the demilitarized Rhineland. He was already, from 1934, secretly building tanks and panzer divisions. By 1937 he had an army of 3 millionÜa thirtyfold increase in four years. By 1938 his Luftwaffe has 3350 combat aircraft, whereas there had been none in 1933. And this rearmament effort was enormously popular, because it threw off the hated shackles of the Treaty of Versailles, restored national pride and territory, and absorbed the unemployed. "Among the victor nations," John Keegan has written, "the cost of winning the First World War had left the populations determined never to bear it again; in Germany the cost of losing the war seemed to justified only if the result could be reversed." And this Hitler promised to do. Until 1938, he had done it without firing a shot.

2. FRANCE IN THE DOLDRUMS

The Depression had struck Germany and Britain like a blizzard; in France it was more like a nagging drizzle. But this meant a longer recovery, delayed until the end of the 1930s. As late as 1931, the direct and indirect costs of the First World War, including pensions and debt service, consumed more than half of the French budget. Between 1929 and 1936 unemployment quadrupled, tourism plummeted, agricultural prices fell by half, and exports too declined by 50%. Many firms that had risen in the later 1920s on shaky financial arrangements and political deals cracked under the impact of the Depression, causing serial bankruptcies and demoralizing scandals. A sluggish economy, timorous capitalists, disenchanted investors, shrinking producers, desperately thrifty consumersÜthis pattern sent capital into hiding at home and abroad, just when it was needed most. Rent controls and high interest rates discouraged the building of new homes, which was the British road to recovery. In 1935 Pierre Laval cut all government expenditures by 10%Üexactly the opposite of Hitler's pump priming strategy of government spending. France was maintaining the value of the franc at the cost of its trade. In 1936 the electorate punished the government by voting for the Socialists. But as we've seen, inflation and capital flight soon undid the Popular Front government of Leon Blum.

Meanwhile, French foreign policy suffered from hopeless contradictions. The First World War had seemed to French military planners to prove the dominance of the defense. France embodied this conclusion in the construction of the Maginot Line, an enormously expensive chain of fortresses designed to protect the vulnerable industrial heartland of northeastern France. The defensive thrust of French military doctrine rendered the army capable of fighting only west of the Rhine, while diplomatically France had allied itself with the small states of Eastern Europe. France could prevent German "revisionism" in the East only with a credible option of invading Germany. But the Maginot line signaled the opposite, a completely defensive posture. After Hitler's destruction of Czechoslovakia, the French and the British offered guarantees to Poland, but Poland was even less defensible than Czechoslovakia. An alliance with the USSR would have given Hitler something to worry about, but the British and the French were unwilling to deal with Stalin on his terms. The Nazi-Soviet Pact, which cleared the way for Hitler's invasion of Poland, was Stalin's contribution to appeasement: it included large immediate deliveries of food and raw materials in exchange for future deliveries of industrial goods, as well as secret understanding for the carve-up of Poland.

3. LIGHTNING WAR

Hitler defeated Poland in a month, Denmark and Norway in two months, France in six weeks, Belgium in seventeen days, Holland in five, Yugoslavia in eleven, Greece in three weeks. How did he do it?

Panzer divisions and Luftwaffe squadrons made the differenceÜdeep armored thrusts made effective retreat impossible, while the combination of tanks and dive bombers acted like mobile artillery, demoralizing the enemy infantry and spreading confusion in their wake. John Keegan, the dean of military historians, describes the technique: "The tank not only easily outstripped infantry, but could keep up a pace of advance of thirty, even fifty miles in twenty-four hours as long as supplied with fuel or spare parts, while its radio set enabled headquarters both to receive intelligence and transmit orders at the same speed as operations invoked, a development which came to be known as 'real time.'

"There had been experimentation with radio during the First World War, but the early sets, needing bulky power sources, had worked well only at sea. Miniaturization had reduced the power demand, allowing reliable sets to be installed in tanks or command vehicles, while the Germans had also achieved remarkable success in mechanizing encipherment of messages. Here was the basis for an offensive revolution. Its nature was encapsulated in remarks made by the German air-force general, Erhard Milch, at a pre-war conference on Blitzkrieg tactics: 'The dive bombers will form a flying artillery, directed to work with ground forces through good radio communications... tanks and planes will be [at the commander's disposition]. The real secret is speedÜspeed of attack through speed of communication.'

"These ingredients of an offensive revolution persuaded Hitler and the more forward-looking German generals not only that the Wehrmacht could defeat the still conventionally organized armies of its enemies in the west at little loss, but that they would also spare Germany the crippling economic costs of putting German industry on a full-scale war footing. The German military establishment attributed the Allied victory in 1918 to its better ability to fight the Materialschlacht, 'battle of materials'; thus it preserved the illusion that the German soldier had not really been defeated at all. Blitzkrieg, the weapons of which were comparatively cheap, would thus allow the German people to enjoy the fruits of victory without making the financial sacrifices always previously entailed in waging all-out war.

"The results of the campaign of May-June 1940 in France and the Low Countries appeared to bear this expectation out. Concentrated by stealth in the Ardennes forests north of the Maginot Line, the German panzer divisions cracked the French field defenses in three days of fighting and drove forward to reach the Channel coast on 19 May. This advance cut the Allied armies into tow, leaving the best of the French and the British Expeditionary Force isolated in the north, while to the south the French hinterland was defended only by immobile and second-rate formations. The northern pocket was eliminated by 4 JuneÜmost of the British army was evacuated by sea from DunkirkÜwhile the southern front was penetrated and overrun immediately after. On 17 June the French government sued for armistice which came into effect (also with Italy, a latecomer to Germany's side) on 25 June."

Hitler was both fanatic and opportunist, irrational and calculating. His foreign policy combined consistency of aim with complete opportunism in method and tactics. The Blitzkrieg pattern of warfare was well adapted to Germany's economic position and the advantages of secrecy and surprise enjoyed by a dictatorship. What mattered most were not stocks of raw materials and productive capacity, but armaments ready for use, plus the will to use them. And Hitler used each victory as a basis for raising the stakes in a still bolder gamble next time. But Blitzkrieg would fail against Britain and Russia, for reasons we will examine in some detail. And once Blitzkrieg failed, Hitler was involved in a war of attrition in which stocks of raw materials and productive capacity would mean a great dealÜexactly the kind of war he had intended to avoid.

4. FIVE DAYS THAT SAVED THE WORLD

"If Hitler invaded Hell," Churchill once remarked, "I would make at least a favorable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons." Churchill became Prime Minister on 10 May 1940, the very day when Hitler began his invasion of Western Europe. It was a providential coincidence.

Churchill was experienced in naval strategy, but Hitler understood something that Churchill would grasp only after the fall of France: that the horrible slogging matches of mass armies in the trenches of the First World War were an aberration, that the rapid advances of motorized armored transport had made them obsolete. After five centuries the primacy of land power was replacing that of sea powerÜas it had now at last become easier and faster to move troops by land than by sea. But Churchill understood Hitler's character, whereas Hitler did not understood Churchill at all. Hitler thought Churchill must be mad, or in the pay of the Jews, or both, because he refused to admit defeat.

From 24 May to 28 May the members of the British War Cabinet debated whether to negotiate or to continue the war against Hitler. They did so against the background of the fall of France and the predicament of nearly 400,000 British soldiers bottled up in Dunkirk. Miraculously, Hitler gave his advancing forces a halt order, offering the bulk of the British army the opportunity to escape across the channel. Was it a rare gesture of magnanimity on Hitler's part, a signal to the British that they could deal with him? More likely, he let himself be convinced by Hermann Goering that the Luftwaffe could destroy the British forces by itself.

In any case, Churchill managed to convince his colleagues to remain in the war. To negotiate with Hitler was to start on the "slippery slope" to enslavement. Better to go down fighting. To be sure, he knew the odds were long. The prospect of a war against Germany on the Continent, against Italy in the Mediterranean, and against Japan in East Asia, without allies, was a nightmare. But he had hopes that, if Britain could survive the summer, a combination of naval blockade and strategic bombing could damage the German economy sufficiently to produce a collapse like that of 1918. And perhaps he could seduce Roosevelt and the Americans, though he knew the American ambassador, Joseph Kennedy (father of JFK), hated him and thought the British were finished. In any case, Churchill's study of history, his experience of the First World War, and his own temperament told him that wars could not be fought or won half-heartedly. The lesson of the French defeat, for him, was clear: the power of politicians and generals evaporated if there was no will to fight. His rhetoric was designed to summon the British will to resist.

Perhaps at no time did Hitler come so close to winning his war as he did in these crucial days in May 1940. Had Halifax or Chamberlain been Prime Minister, it is likely that the British would have chosen to negotiate with Hitler, to save what they could in a hopeless situation. Churchill stood firm against such negotiations. Better, as he said repeatedly both privately and publicly, to die in defense of civilization than to try to make a deal with a man who personified barbarism. Churchill's refusal to negotiate changed the course of the war and therefore of modern history.