A Patriot's History of the Modern World (56 page)

All these problems could have been solved with time, but Hitler did not
give his military that precious commodity. It didn't help that Germans tended to be engineering perfectionists. For example, many parts for a Tiger I tank developed in 1942 could not be used on a Tiger II produced two years later. As a result of excellent engineering, the German Panther and Tiger tanks were the best in the world for their time, far superior to the American Shermans and in armor and firepower the equivalent or superior of the Russian T-34. The problem was, the Americans built 60,000 Shermans, the Soviets 40,000 T-34s (and later, fielded the new IS-2, specifically designed to defeat German Tigers and Panthers), while the Germans produced only 6,132 Panthers and 1,840 Tigers.

Two viselike realities ensnared Hitler as he prepared for war, both of his own making. Each new burst of armaments further solidified western opposition against him, thereby further confirming in his mind that Germany needed to rearm. German freedom—German
survival
—demanded that he arm his military to the hilt, yet it was increasingly clear that the Reich could not outproduce even Britain and France, let alone the United States. Just prior to the Battle of Britain, in June 1940, the United States agreed to deliver 10,800 aircraft over the next year and a half, complementing Britain's existing fleet of 15,000, in contrast to total 1940 German production of 7,829 aircraft.
¹¹
Between 1940 and the end of 1941, America shipped more than 7,000 aircraft to Britain while ramping up to an astounding production total of almost 85,000 airplanes by 1943. Indeed, the United States had mobilized its air industry immediately after the fall of France, not after Pearl Harbor, providing the foundations for the Allies' winged victory.

The American Shadow

Temporarily forgotten in the conquest of Europe was Hitler's long-range concern about a war with the United States. The notion that the United States would have avoided the war in Europe if not for some nefarious scheme by FDR to manipulate Japan into attacking and drawing America in via the “back door to war” completely ignores the entire dynamic of why Hitler engaged in the moves he did. Since 1928, his writing was quietly obsessive about American power. In his “Second Book,” Hitler warned that the reason “the American Union is able to rise to such a threatening height is not based on [its millions of people] but on the fact that [it possessed millions of] square kilometers of the most fertile and richest soil…inhabited by [millions of] people of the highest racial quality.”
¹²
Despite his misreading
of the racial component of the United States, he swerved into a telling truth, that the “individual quality of these people [gives them] a cohesive, inclusive commitment to fight the struggle for survival.”
¹³
Indeed, the “significance of the
menacing American hegemonic position
appears to be determined primarily by the quality of the American people,” he observed (emphasis ours).
¹⁴
He fumed that “whatever the Germans in North America achieve specifically, it will not be credited to the German people, but is forfeited to the body of culture of the American union.” Germans abroad, he claimed, were “only the cultural fertilizer for other peoples.”
¹⁵

Hitler's early views of the United States were in large part shaped by German writer Karl May's stories of the American frontier and Indians; his limited reading on American immigration history; the conspicuous numbers of American-made autos in the Weimar Republic; and finally, the 1940 American movie
The
Grapes of Wrath
.
¹⁶
He watched the film many times and “assumed that it represented the whole United States for all time.”
¹⁷
Hitler himself never visited the United States, and rarely talked to anyone who had. In any event, he remained torn between the notion that the United States had risen to its position of international power due to Nordic influences on the one hand, and on the other that its “mongrelization” through immigration and black slavery had made it corrupt and weak. The latter view was apparent in his comments about the American Civil War. He observed, “the Southern States were conquered against all historical logic,” and when “the principle of slavery and inequality were destroyed in the war, [it also destroyed] the embryo of a future truly great America.”
¹⁸

It was this image of a weakened United States that finally won out in Hitler's mind. After Pearl Harbor, he said, “I'll never believe that an American can fight like a hero,” and added, “I don't see much future for the Americans.” America “is a decayed country.”
¹⁹
Once lashed to this mast, Hitler had to reverse his views of American industrial potential, which he had previously admired. Once war was declared, he thereupon considered U.S. economic power a figment of Franklin Roosevelt's imagination. His assessments were reinforced when Rommel easily defeated the American 2nd Corps at Kasserine Pass, Tunisia. Only later in the war, after he was delivered many stinging lessons by American forces, did Hitler occasionally return to his 1928 views of American productive might.

Taken in this light, Germany's entanglement in Russia was entirely predicated on the premise that Germany was already confronting an Anglo-American alliance, and that Hitler was de facto at war with the United
States before Pearl Harbor. The sheer disparity in industry and resources alone meant that for Germany to succeed, Hitler had to capture the Russian oil fields as well as Romania's.

The World by a Thread

After the fall of Poland, Britain and France did little to attack Germany, although they made plans to support Finland in its defense against the Soviet Union. By doing so, Britain and France could kill two birds with one stone—repel the Soviet invasion of Finland that started on November 30, 1939, and shut off the supply of raw materials from Sweden to Germany. Working leisurely, by late January of 1940 Britain had put together a plan for three simultaneous operations, one in northern Norway, another in southern Norway, and a third in southern Sweden. Britain would command a joint force of 100,000 British and 50,000 French and Polish troops, backed by the Royal Navy. The departure date was set for March 13,
²⁰
but at the last moment, the Finns capitulated to the Soviets, and the plan was scrapped.

Meanwhile, Norway had come to Hitler's attention. There had been absolutely no German plans to invade Norway at the outbreak of war, but with obvious British activity to aid the Finns, Hitler convened a staff on February 5, 1940, to plan a way to secure the iron ore route that ran through the Norwegian port of Narvik. The operation was given the code name
Weserübung
(Weser [a river in northern Germany] practice). Then came the incident on February 14 involving the German tanker
Altmark
, which was carrying 300 British seamen who had been taken prisoner by the German pocket battleship
Graf Spee
in December 1939. The
Altmark
entered Norwegian waters, and the Norwegian government permitted it to proceed to Germany. In spite of Norwegian protests and protection of the
Altmark
by Norwegian torpedo boats, Royal Navy warships entered the fiord where the
Altmark
lay at anchor, sent a party aboard, and secured the British prisoners. Norway's unwillingness or inability to defend its sovereignty and neutrality against British intruders incensed Hitler. He demanded the Wehrmacht's planning for the invasion of Norway be accelerated.

Chief of Staff Alfred Jodl recommended General Nikolaus von Falkenhorst to command the effort. Hitler interviewed von Falkenhorst, telling him to take a couple of hours and come back with ideas on how to take Norway. Von Falkenhorst immediately went to a bookstore, purchased a Baedeker's travel book on the country (he had never been there), made some sketches, wrote down ideas, and returned to present them. Hitler approved
von Falkenhorst's plans and ordered him to build a staff and make preparations immediately. Von Falkenhorst's scheme soon expanded to include both Norway and Denmark, both operations to occur simultaneously. Help and intelligence were obtained from Vidkun Quisling, a pro-Nazi Norwegian defense minister, and the invasion took place on April 9.

It was a high-risk operation, and the Norwegian part dangerously exposed the Kriegsmarine to destruction by the much more powerful Royal Navy. Germany's shipbuilding program, as we have seen, had already been squelched (except for U-boats) and the Kriegsmarine lacked aircraft carriers to provide air cover. Admiral Erich Raeder feared the loss of much of his surface fleet to the British (there was no Norwegian navy of any substance) and specified that German vessels had to return immediately to German ports as soon as all troops and supplies were disembarked. The Germans encountered a brief delay near Oslo when the
Blücher
was sunk, which provided enough time for the Norwegian government, including the king, parliament, and treasury, to escape to Britain, forming a government-in-exile. Ironically, the
Blücher
—Germany's newest heavy cruiser—was sunk by shells from 1905 Krupp guns located in a fort built during the Crimean War, and torpedoes manufactured by an Austrian firm at the turn of the century.
²¹

Quisling took to the airwaves on April 9 to proclaim himself the new prime minister, and Norway soon surrendered, even though only 10,000 German troops were in the first wave (ultimately reinforced to about 25,000). Oslo was captured so effortlessly that a German military brass band led the Nazis into the city. Upon removal of the German heavy surface forces to safety, the Royal Navy cornered ten German destroyers in Narvik Fjord and sank them all, thereby reducing Germany's destroyer fleet by half. Two German light cruisers were sunk near Bergen and Kristiansand, and twenty-seven other vessels, including transports and supply ships, were lost through the middle of June. It was a catastrophe for the Kriegsmarine and one from which the surface fleet never recovered. The German Naval High Command commented in its war diary that
Weserübung
“broke all the rules in the book of naval warfare,” but it was also the first time in history when an army, air force, and navy had operated intimately together with interlinked tasks and objectives (today called “combined arms”).
²²
Once again the German military had broken new ground, showing the rest of the world how to conduct military operations, but at a high cost. Quite possibly, however, it was all unnecessary. German
general Walter Warlimont and others have maintained that even if the Allies had established themselves in Norway, the country could have been taken more easily after the fall of France given the proximity to Germany, the presence of Nazi traitors, and Britain's lack of long-range bomber power.
²³
Once the invasion of France started, the point was moot: the Allies decided they needed to concentrate their forces in France, and more than 25,000 British, French, and Norwegian forces, along with King Haakon VII, were evacuated in late May. Including Denmark—which surrendered after two weeks in April 1940 at a loss to the Nazis of 16 soldiers—Hitler had bagged two more countries at a total cost of fewer than 4,000 men and about 100 aircraft and looked more unstoppable than ever.
²⁴

In addition to a steady supply of valuable iron for Germany, Norway also contained a minor prize, the Vemork hydroelectric plant, which could produce heavy water (deuterium oxide) as a by-product of fertilizer production. The deuterium was seen by German scientists as a key component of plutonium production for their nuclear energy program. Prior to the German invasion, the French removed all stocks of heavy water from the facility, but the Allies worried the Germans would produce more. From 1940 to 1944, a number of sabotage operations were mounted that included Norwegian resistance and Allied bombing, one raid finally putting the plant permanently out of commission. Subsequent research has shown that German scientists created far too little heavy water to start a nuclear reactor, but at the time, Allied intelligence had to presume the Nazis could develop such capabilities. (As late as 1944, Allied assassination teams still scoured France for Werner Heisenberg, originator of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and head of the German atomic bomb effort, unaware that Hitler had scrapped all atomic bomb plans a year earlier.)
²⁵

France's Epic Failure

Whether in Paris, London, or Washington, military and civilian leadership thought matters on the Western Front would unfold much as they had in 1914. But a great deal had changed in the interim, some of it ironic and even amusing. Tales of horrors in the Great War, for example, drove many men to search for “safer” areas of service in World War II—artillery, or logistics. One British unit still retained the name “Hussars,” which fooled many recruits into thinking it was a horse cavalry regiment instead of the frontline combat force it had become.
²⁶
Soldiers' fear of recreating the trench scene of 1915–18, while understandable, created its own self-fulfilling morale
problems under German attacks, most notably the shocking disintegration of French ground forces. In truth, the western democracies proved totally inept and irresolute: the Dutch surrendered in four days after 3,000 battle deaths, the Belgians in seventeen after losing 6,000, the French after 80,000 died in only forty-three days, and British forces were chased from the continent in twenty-three days except for 136,000 troops trapped in northwestern France and evacuated from French harbors as shipping became available. German military superiority was stunning beyond comprehension, proving to many that the West was beyond recovery.

Upon reflection, France's total collapse was entirely predictable, and not merely because the Maginot Line was a monument to military stupidity. As ineffective as they sometimes were, tanks in World War I had proven the obsolescence of fixed defenses, yet the Maginot Line—an unbroken string of defenses stretching from Switzerland to Luxembourg, replete with barbed wire, concrete pillboxes, long-range artillery, and underground tunnels to rapidly move troops to threatened positions—was merely an updated version of the trench. French strategy assumed that it could thwart any direct assault, and therefore would force the invaders to enter Belgium as they had in 1914. France and Britain would then move three French armies and the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) to the Dyle River and other defensive positions, hoping to halt the expected German attack before it penetrated French territory. But just as the Belgians refused German passage in 1914, now the Belgian government refused France entry into its country to take up positions until after hostilities commenced. By putting the Allies in a reactive mode from the outset, Belgian policy gave the Germans a decided advantage. In addition, France originally planned to build a Maginot-type static defense line one hundred miles long in Belgium (which never materialized), but rapid movement to that line would have to be attempted under wartime conditions with relatively little transport available. This was not a plan for victory; it was an exercise in attrition like World War I. Even then the disposition of troops, irrespective of the strategic plan, was badly flawed. Holland had to defend itself with its eight divisions; north of Dinant, the Allies would field Belgium's twelve fully equipped divisions of 204,000 men (plus ten divisions with minimal equipment), the BEF's nine divisions (237,000 men), and twenty-six French divisions for one hundred miles. Meanwhile, France retained sixty divisions (approximately 1.6 million men) at the Maginot Line. Unfortunately, this setup left a gap of ninety-five miles in the Ardennes Forest, supposedly impenetrable for a
modern army, with only sixteen reserve divisions stationed there to defend the area.