World War II, 1939-45
4.1. The Blitzkrieg Era
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Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW), between Beck’s successor and himself, he ensured that the army’s power to in uence policy would be diminished. Still, the Anglo-French declaration of war on September 3, 1939, rattled Hitler and for a time left him speechless and unsure as to what he might do next.
Once it became clear that France and England would not attack in the west but stay on the defensive, Poland’s fate was sealed.
Geographically, Poland was surrounded by Germany on three sides
—west, north, and south—and only a few days after the German o ensive began the USSR attacked from the east, the result of the German-Soviet nonag-gression pact signed just a week before the war began. Beaten in the air—most Polish aircraft were destroyed on the ground, and the rest did not prove a match for the Luftwa e
—and outnumbered and out-quali ed on the ground, Poles saw the end come after a mere seventeen days. The next eight months proved an anticlimax. Having started the war only a few years after the beginning of rearmament, the Germans were not satis ed with their forces’ performance and spent the time reorganizing and retraining.
By contrast, the British and the French did absolutely nothing.
The outbreak of war caught the British army in turmoil as conscription was reintroduced. As in 1914, a small expeditionary force was sent to the channel ports and took up positions on the French left ank. As in 1915, plans were created to carry out wide- ranging strategic sweeps so as to avoid the need to meet the full power of the German army in its forti ed positions. One plan was to attack Romania, from which the Germans derived most of their oil, but since the necessary air bases were unavailable nothing came of it. Another was to assist Finland, which was ghting for its life against the Soviet Union, and cut o the supply of German nickel in the process. In the end, the Allied plan that came closest to realization was an invasion of Norway aimed at the same objective:
cutting o the supply of Finnish nickel that reached Germany by way of Narvik.
German planning in some ways was a mirror image of these schemes, and plans for an invasion of Norway, with the objective of securing the supply of nickel as well as providing the navy with additional submarine bases for operations in the North Atlantic, began to be hatched as early as October 1939. Given the geographic background, as well as the balance of forces, the occupation of Denmark, which began and ended on the same day, April 9, 1940, presented few di culties. Taking Norway was a di erent matter, involving the transport of forces across the sea in the face of the much more powerful British navy. Norway’s capital city, Oslo, was relatively close at hand, so that the ships destined for it could be given air cover. However, the remaining objectives were not only much farther away, but actually nearer the British bases in Scotland and the Orkneys than to German bases in the North Sea. Finally, in order to preserve surprise, all had to be captured at once, which in turn meant that the German naval forces, weak to begin with, would have to be dispersed.
After much argument it was decided to load the troops aboard warships—which did not thereby gain in e ciency—and make landings in approximately regimental strength at Oslo, Kristiansand, Bergen, Trondheim, and Narvik. Smaller forces went ashore at Egersund and Arendal, where they seized the cable cars. Stavanger was to be taken by airborne troops. So unprepared were the Germans for mounting the invasion that the initial planning was based on Norwegian tourist guides.
In the event, the hair-raising plan worked. At the cost of 1,317 dead, 1,604 wounded and 2,275 lost at sea, the Germans achieved all their objectives, although these gures re ected the considerable resistance they met. The Norwegian defenders in the entrance to Oslo harbor launched a torpedo that took down a heavy cruiser, the Bluecher. More German troops were lost near Narvik, where no fewer than ten German destroyers were sunk. So costly was the operation to the Kriegsmarine that by the end of June 1940, Germany only had one heavy cruiser, two light cruisers, and four destroyers t for action. Resistance on land proved much lighter
mainly because the Norwegian chief of sta resigned his post on the day the invasion started. Oslo itself was occupied by a battalion of airborne troops that had landed in the airport and marched into the town while accompanied by a band. The only really serious ghting occurred at Narvik in the far north, where the Allies were able to carry out an amphibious landing, and where the German troops at one point thought they might have to retreat into Sweden and be interned. In the end, the Germans were able to hold out until help arrived from the south.
Despite the losses, Norway was merely a sideshow. Some German commanders even thought the campaign should have been postponed until victory over France had consolidated Germany’s hold on the Continent.2 Even as events were unfolding in the north, 135 German divisions, now freed from their commitment in Poland, were directed toward the west. The corresponding gure on the Allied side (combining Dutch, Belgian, French, and British forces) was 151 divisions. Thus, qualitatively the Allied ground forces were roughly equal to their German counterparts, and in terms of numbers they were certainly a match. Why the Allied forces were not able to counter the German onslaught has become one of the great mysteries of military history, and one about which vast amounts of ink have been spilled.
The original German plan was essentially a repetition of the 1914 Schlie en Plan, although this time around the Netherlands would be included in the invasion so as to reach the North Sea and acquire bases from which the Luftwa e could ght Britain. The original Allied plan was to advance into Belgium from the southwest, meeting the Germans head-on, thus denying the Wehrmacht the opportunity of out anking them as it had tried to do in 1914.
However, in the winter of 1939–40, after a complicated series of debates among the most important German commanders, including Hitler himself, the decision was made to move the Schwerpunkt, center of gravity, from the right ank of the front to its center.
Rushing into Belgium, the Allies would be taken in the ank and rear by German forces coming from the Ardennes, long considered
impassable for large motorized formations. As Schlie en himself had once written, for a great victory (what he called a “Cannae”) to take place, it was necessary for the commanders on both sides to cooperate, each in his own way. In the event, that was just what happened.
The sector of the front that the Germans attacked on May 10, 1940, was weakly held by second-rate troops whose nerves shattered under the impact of screaming German dive-bombers. The French high command, saddled by a completely inadequate communications network, was unable to react to the German movements in time. So bad were things in this respect that, later in the campaign, the freshly appointed commander in chief, General Maxime Weygand (the same who had praised French generalship to a British audience a year earlier), had only a single telephone apparatus to transmit his orders, and the female secretary responsible for it insisted on going out for lunch every day between 1200 and 1400.3
Worst of all was the performance of the French air force, which not only deployed its aircraft well to the rear, but got o only a quarter as many sorties per day as its German opponent. Nothing is more characteristic of its operations than the fact that, when the campaign ended, the Armee de l’Air actually had more serviceable aircraft than at the beginning of hostilities.
As brilliantly as all this was progressing, and despite his boast—in a letter to Mussolini describing the Norwegian campaign4—that fortune always favors the bold, Hitler rebuked his generals for their reckless daring and insisted that the armored divisions stay in place for days on end until the infantry could catch up and secure their communications. Therefore, whatever setbacks the Germans su ered were self-in icted. Indeed, Hitler’s “halt” order made the evacuation of the British expeditionary force from Dunkirk possible, which people spoke of as a “miracle.”
The German victory over France set the stage for invading the USSR, Hitler’s ultimate goal. At one point, the Fuehrer considered
launching the operation in the autumn of the same year as the invasion of France, but saner counsels prevailed. Meanwhile, since Britain still refused to come to terms, the Germans were forced to prepare for a sea and air campaign in the hope of defeating it by these means.
It wasn’t until February 1941 that German ground forces went into action again. Two divisions under the leadership of Erwin Rommel were sent to help the Italians shore up their defenses against the British in Libya. A month after his arrival, Rommel de ed his orders, rushing forward across Cyrenaica and into Egypt.
It was only when his supply columns could no longer keep up that he was forced to halt. He was still there in November 1941, when the British counterattacked and forced him to retreat.
While these events were taking place, the Germans were also preparing to invade Greece, which the Italians had tried to do in October 1940. When that campaign began going wrong, which it did within a few days, Hitler was forced to intervene lest the British, who were already assisting Greece, gain air bases in the country to be used to bomb the Romanian oil elds on which Germany depended.
Throughout the winter and early spring of 1941, German forces moved across Hungary into Romania and from there into Bulgaria.
They were just about ready to start operations when, on March 27, a coup took over in Belgrade, bringing to power a government that was unfriendly to Germany and threatening Germany’s Balkan right ank. Only a masterpiece of improvisation enabled the Germans to react rapidly, redeploying their forces and bringing up eleven divisions in addition to the eighteen already in the theater of operations. In just three weeks, German troops had occupied Yugoslavia and the swastika ag was raised at the southern tip of the Peloponnesus. This, in turn, was soon followed by the successful, if costly, airborne assault against Crete. No wonder that Hitler, speaking to the Reichstag on May 4, 1941 and looking back on a year of unprecedented victories, told his listeners that to the German soldier, nothing was impossible.5
The greatest challenge of all, though, was still to come. Until November 1940, Hitler, and even more so his foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, had hesitated as to whether Germany should attack the USSR or try to form an alliance. After talks with Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov failed, the decision to launch the o ensive was made in December. Preparations, such as preparing bases and bringing up forces, went on throughout the following winter and spring; the number of trains used, seventeen thousand in all, speaks for itself. The German o ensive would safely be the largest ever. No less than 144 divisions (out of a total of 200 or so) divided among three separate army groups—one for Leningrad, one for Moscow, and one for the Ukraine—stood ready.
Three and a half million troops, thirty- ve hundred tanks, and six hundred thousand vehicles (most of which were horse-drawn) would ride or march into the history books.
On June 22, 1941, Operation Barbarossa opened with a devastating attack against Soviet air elds, destroying some eight thousand aircraft. In a matter of hours, the Germans had command of the air. Faithful to its now well-developed Blitzkrieg doctrine, the Luftwa e pressed on, interdicting Red Army communications and providing close support for the Wehrmacht’s ground troops.
“Strategic” attacks were made on armaments factories in Moscow and warships in Kronstadt and Leningrad. Russian frontier defenses, having been breached by infantry and artillery, were now open to the armored divisions.
Initially, progress was even more rapid than it had been against France, what with Army Group North reaching the outskirts of Leningrad by July 10. Its neighbor to the right, Army Group Center, entered Smolensk, four hundred miles away from the starting line on the River Bug, only three weeks after the beginning of the campaign, setting a record that not even the Americans advancing to Baghdad in 2003 could match. As in France, a deadly combination of surprise, mediocre organization and training, and technical backwardness contributed to Russia’s dire situation.
And yet, again compared with France in the previous year, there were also important di erences. Although the size of the Soviet Union dictated heavy reliance on the railways, those that were captured were broad-gauged and had to be converted in order to be compatible with German rolling stock. Also, since there were hardly any paved roads, progress was often slowed or stopped by the weather, and consumption of fuel and spare parts far exceeded expectations. It is true that the skill of Soviet commanders could not match their German counterparts at this stage. Still, their men fought stubbornly, especially on the defense and especially when provided with suitable terrain such as swamps and forests which favored the defenders. All translated into very heavy German casualties, which by the end of 1941 had amounted to eight hundred thousand, far more than in all previous German campaigns combined.
By the middle of August 1941, the Germans, nding their forces dispersed in an ever-expanding Russian countryside, were unsure what to do next. Hitler’s decision to besiege Leningrad rather than try to capture it did not, apparently, lead to much argument. Things were di erent at the center of the front. There, Hitler had his eye on the Ukraine, where he hoped to obtain wheat, coal, and, at a later stage, oil—without which, he said, he could not continue the war.
By contrast, the army general sta would have preferred a direct advance on Russia’s capital, Moscow. The city was an important manufacturing and transportation center; besides, it was the only objective the Soviets could not abandon and where they could therefore be brought to battle and defeated.6 However, Army Group Center was su ering from severe supply di culties,7 and, adopting such a plan would have meant missing a magni cent opportunity to trap the Soviet forces in the Ukraine. Hitler’s will having prevailed, the German advance into the Ukraine proved a huge success, and no fewer than 650,000 Red Army troops were captured.
Twenty German armored and motorized divisions, plus about forty infantry divisions with their horse-drawn equipment, now converged on Moscow from the north, west, and south, although
many of the units had been attrited to the point that they were divisions in name only. Lines of communication were lengthening, and the autumn rains were turning the roads into seas of mud, leaving small parties of men— their vehicles stuck miles behind—
desperately trying to make their way on foot.
The onset of winter and frost witnessed a sti ening of Soviet resistance, whereas bad weather prevented the Luftwa e from making its impact felt. At Bryansk and Vyazma, the Germans were still able to register a nal triumph, ghting twin encirclement battles, capturing almost as many prisoners as in the Ukraine, and coming almost within sight of the Kremlin. There they were met by the victor of Khalkin Gol, Zhukov, who was now in charge of the Western Front. Armed with intelligence that Japan had no plans for attacking, Zhukov was able to amass fresh forces from Siberia and counterattack. On December 8, Hitler declared the o ensive suspended.
With the setback in front of Moscow, the Blitzkrieg era ended. For two years, the “Lightning War” was the foundation of a series of brilliant campaigns, leading to numerous spectacular victories and leaving an almost legendary reputation. Still, most of its achievements were due as much to the weakness and incompetence of Germany’s enemies as to the Wehrmacht’s own prowess. Given their quantitative and qualitative superiority, the fact that German troops were able to overrun Poland, Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg is not surprising—although, had the British been more enterprising, the occupation of Norway at any rate might have been prevented. In Greece and Yugoslavia, both very weak militarily, the same was also true; in both cases the terrain did as much to obstruct the German advance as the defenders. France was the real surprise, and given the balance of forces, its collapse can only be seen as astonishing.