The Second World War (19 page)

Hitler’s investment in his U-boat fleet thus more than justified the cost. It exerted a partial strangulation on the offensive effort of the immediate enemies, the Russians most of all but also the British, delayed the build-up of a large American expeditionary force on his doorstep and hampered the development of a hostile ‘peripheral’ strategy in the Mediterranean; the closing of that sea to regular British convoying in 1940-2, largely through aerial but partly through submarine threat, forced the desert army to depend on supply via the Cape route, 12,000 miles long, at very great cost to its efficiency.

Had Hitler achieved the creation of a 300-boat fleet before 1942, added significantly to its size thereafter, or managed to introduce his advanced schnorkel and revolutionary hydrogen-peroxide types before 1944, partial might have become total strangulation. None the less, Germany considerably maximised the advantage of being able to operate from the centre of its strategic area – the advantage of ‘interior lines’ that continental powers had traditionally exercised against oceanic enemies in the European world. Dönitz proved by far the most useful of all the military subordinates who lent their services to Hitler’s campaign of conquest – far more useful than Goering, the Luftwaffe chief, or even von Braun, the father of his pilotless missiles – and it was entirely appropriate that he should have been nominated to succeed him as Führer in the last days of the Reich. In pitiless and self-immolatory dedication to the creed of total war, Nazism found no equal within the Wehrmacht to the U-boat arm. Its ‘aces’ – Günther Prien, Otto Kretschmer, Manfred Kinzel, Joachim Schepke – whether believing Nazis or not, personified its ethos of the superman and even succeeded, for all the cruelty they inflicted, in winning the respect of their enemies for their warrior prowess. The British officer who interrogated Kinzel, ‘ace of aces’ with a slate of 270,000 tons of shipping sunk, ruefully expressed the hope that ‘there were not too many like him’.

The Atlantic was not the only
via dolorosa
of war supply. The Burma Road and ‘the Hump’, over which supplies were driven or flown (at 14,000 feet) to Chiang Kai-shek’s army in south China, were others. The Takeradi route, from West to East Africa, provided the desert air force with aircraft disembarked from Atlantic convoys and assembled ashore. The Lake Ladoga ‘ice road’ saved Leningrad from total starvation in the winters of 1941-3. And ultimately the Japanese, who had succeeded in turning the archipelagos within their Pacific ‘island perimeter’ into the foundation of a watery ‘continental’ strategy during 1942, achieved extraordinary feats of maritime supply in keeping their far-flung garrisons combatant during 1943-4, when MacArthur’s ‘island-hopping’ plan cracked the carapace of their oceanic fortress. In 1945, at the end of their own ‘Battle of the Pacific’, when they lost almost their whole merchant fleet to America’s submarines, the home islands were on the brink of starvation by midsummer – a whimpering end to Japan’s campaign of conquest which was stopped short by the cosmic bang of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

However, none of these logistic efforts compared in duration, magnitude and importance with the Battle of the Atlantic. It was truly both a battle and a war-winning enterprise. Had it been lost, had those ‘statistics, diagrams and curves’ which blighted Winston Churchill’s days and nights in 1940-2 turned wrong, had each U-boat on its patrol line succeeded in sinking only one more merchant ship in the summer of 1942, when losses already exceeded launchings by 10 per cent, the course, perhaps even the outcome, of the Second World War would have been entirely otherwise. The 30,000 men of the British Merchant Navy (one-fifth of its pre-war strength) who fell victim to the U-boats between 1939 and 1945, the majority drowned or killed by exposure on the cruel North Atlantic sea, were quite as certainly front-line warriors as the guardsmen and fighter pilots to whom they ferried the necessities of combat. Neither they nor their American, Dutch, Norwegian or Greek fellow mariners wore uniform and few have any memorial. They stood nevertheless between the Wehrmacht and the domination of the world.

On 19 July 1940 Hitler convened the Reichstag in the Kroll Opera House in Berlin to witness his mass creation of the new German marshalate. It was a consciously Napoleonic gesture and, like Napoleon’s elevation of eighteen of his generals to be Marshals of the Empire on 9 May 1804, was designed to glorify the head of state rather than honour his military servants. His three army group commanders, Bock, Leeb and Rundstedt, his personal chief of staff, Keitel, the army commander-in-chief, Brauchitsch, four of the most successful field commanders, Kluge, Witzleben, Reichenau and List, and three Luftwaffe chiefs, Milch, Sperrle and Kesselring, were on the roll; Goering was appointed to the novel rank of Reichsmarschall, a distinction he decided entitled him to yet another splendid uniform, and was decorated with the Great Cross of the Iron Cross, the fifth – and last – award of an honour previously conferred by the Prussian kings on Blücher, Moltke and Hindenburg.

Although the creation of the marshalate was the sensational event of that day, the actual point of the occasion was to review for the puppet deputies the course of the Second World War thus far and to state the terms on which it might be concluded. Hitler’s speech was intended as an appeal, via world opinion, to Britain, exposing the hopelessness of her position and inviting her government to make peace. William Shirer, the American journalist, who witnessed it and was a connoisseur of Hitler’s speeches, thought it his finest performance: ‘The Hitler we saw in the Reichstag tonight was the Conqueror, and conscious of it, and yet so wonderful an actor, so magnificent a handler of the German mind, that he mixed superbly the full confidence of the conqueror with the humbleness which always goes down so well with the masses when they know a man is on top.’ His appeal came at the very end of his long oration: ‘In this hour, I feel it to be my duty before my own conscience to appeal once more to reason and common sense in Great Britain as much as elsewhere. I consider myself in a position to make this appeal since I am not the vanquished begging favours, but the victor speaking in the name of reason. I see no reason why this war must go on.’

He did not, however, disclose, or even apparently harbour, any view of how it might be ended. Since the arrangement of the armistice with France, intellectually and emotionally Hitler had given himself a vacation from responsibility from which he was loath to return. In the company of two old comrades of the trenches he had toured the First World War battlefields of the Western Front where he had fought with great bravery as a common soldier. He had visited the sights of Paris, to muse at Napoleon’s tomb and view the Opéra, the supreme expression of his taste in architecture. He had wandered through his favourite South German landscapes, breathing the mountain air and the adulation of simple people. He had waited for a week in one of his many purpose-built headquarters, at Freudenstadt in the Black Forest, for word that Churchill was recognising the reality of defeat. It was with reluctance that he had returned to the burdens of leadership, made all the heavier by the need to decide the future. Britain or Russia? That was the choice of enemy he confronted at the crossroads to which his decision for war ten months earlier had now brought him.

Either choice was disagreeable and dangerous. He could not be defeated by Britain but he could be humiliated in the attempt to invade her; moreover, he clung to his dream of winning Britain’s co-operation rather than beating her into subjection. On the other hand, he had long and ardently desired the defeat and subjection of Russia; but he recognised the dangers of the attempt. Russia was strong, her centres of power remote; only the fear that time would make her stronger and the urge to incorporate her fertile and productive western territories – those Germany had briefly possessed in 1918 – drove him to seek for ways through the risk of an eastern offensive.

During the days after his Reichstag speech, Hitler addressed himself to debating these dilemmas with his commanders. Erich Raeder, his Grand Admiral, warned that, ‘if the preparations for Sealion’ (by which he meant the defeat of the RAF) ‘cannot definitely be completed by the beginning of September, it will be necessary to consider other plans.’ In fact Hitler, even during his ‘vacation’ after the French armistice, had told Schmundt, his chief Wehrmacht adjutant, that he was considering an attack on Russia – which was not what Raeder meant by ‘other plans’ – and had set Colonel Bernhard von Lossberg, one of OKW’s operations officers, to draft a study (which Lossberg codenamed ‘Fritz’, after his son). He now set OKH to the same task.

At the end of July he reconvened discussions with his commanders at the Berghof, his Bavarian retreat. On 31 July he told Brauchitsch and Halder that he was reversing his decision, taken in mid-June, to demobilise thirty-five divisions to provide manpower for the economic war against Britain, would in fact increase the strength of the army to 180 divisions (he had already ordered a doubling of the number of Panzer divisions from ten to twenty) and would accelerate the transfer, already begun, of forces to the east, so that by the spring of 1941 he would have 120 divisions close to Russia’s border.

This decision could be interpreted as a precautionary move. He had been alarmed by Russia’s occupation of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia in mid-June and by its annexation of Bessarabia and North Bukovina from Romania on 28 June – an annexation in which he was bound to acquiesce, since Russia’s claim to those provinces had been agreed in the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of 22 August 1939. These acquisitions of territory could be seen as threatening. They consolidated a move westward of Russia’s strategic boundary, which since September of the previous year had engulfed 286,000 square miles inhabited by 20 million people. Hitler did not, however, believe that Russia intended to attack. It was rather that the boundary changes enlarged Russia’s opportunities for further strategic expansion while narrowing Germany’s. The occupation of the Baltic states threatened Finland, effectively a German protectorate, and extended Russia’s area of control in Baltic waters (where Germany, among other things, trained its U-boat crews). The annexation of Romania’s Danubian provinces threatened Bulgaria, a German client state, and improved Russia’s opportunity of seizing the Mediterranean entrance to the Black Sea.

It was the evidence these ‘forward’ moves gave of Russia’s determination to pursue its own advantage in the teeth of Germany’s proven military power that persuaded Hitler he could not defer a test of strength with her for ever – and, if so, it must be sooner rather than later. Foreign Armies East, the OKH intelligence branch which monitored Soviet capabilities and intentions, had reported in May, from the military attaché in Moscow, that the Red Army, though capable of raising 200 infantry divisions for war, remained so disorganised by the great military purge of 1938 that it would take twenty years ‘until it reached its former heights’. Its information on Russian arms production, particularly of tanks, which would have warned otherwise, was defective: the size of the Russian tank fleet was reckoned at 10,000 (against Germany’s 3500), when in fact it was 24,000. Hitler was prepared to pit his tank fleet against the Russian, even at odds of three to one; and he had no doubt that 120 German divisions could defeat 200 Russian, if Stalin succeeded in mobilising such a number.

When the twelve new marshals came to collect their batons at the Chancellery on 14 August, therefore, Hitler’s talk was of the emerging need to fight the Soviet Union. Field Marshal von Leeb’s record of Hitler’s remarks reveals the trend of his calculations:

Probably two reasons why Britain won’t make peace. Firstly, she hopes for US aid; but the US can’t start major arms deliveries until 1941. Secondly she hopes to play off Russia against Germany. But Germany is militarily far superior to Russia. . . . There are two danger areas which could set off a clash with Russia: number one, Russia pockets Finland; this would cost Germany her dominance of the Baltic and impede a German attack on Russia. Number two, further encroachments by Russia on Romania. We cannot permit this, because of Romania’s gasoline supplies to Germany. Therefore Germany must be kept fully armed. By the spring there will be 180 divisions. . . . Germany is not striving to smash Britain because the beneficiaries will not be Germany but Japan in the east, Russia in India, Italy in the Mediterranean and America in world trade. That is why peace is possible with Britain.

On 27 August Hitler sent Schmundt and Dr Fritz Todt, his chief of war construction, to East Prussia to search for a suitable site for another new headquarters from which an eastern campaign might be conducted. On 6 September he approved the transfer of Bock’s Army Group B from west to east, where thirty-five divisions, including six Panzer, were now deployed. And on 14 September, when his commanders again convened at the Chancellery for a war conference, he reviewed further reasons for postponing Operation Sealion against Britain; three days later he announced that it was postponed again.