On May 10, 1940, Britain’s struggle took a turn for the worse as Germany unleashed its military might on the Low Countries and France. By May 26, the BEF and isolated portions of the French Army stood with their backs to the Channel near the port of Dunkirk, praying for a miracle that never came. Pushed by Hitler to drive the hated British from the continent forever, the Wehrmacht, ably supported by the Luftwaffe, slammed ever forward, closing the last Channel port on May 29. General Erwin Rommel of the 7th Panzer Division accepted the official surrender of the BEF the following day. The Royal Navy, aided by many gallant civilian vessels, had managed to evacuate fewer than 30,000 British soldiers, most without even rifles, while suffering heavy losses from German land-based aircraft.
France surrendered on June 22, Hitler dancing a jig as French representatives signed the terms of surrender in the same rail car in which Germany had been shamed in 1918. The terms were harsh: occupation by German troops for an indeterminate period, loss of the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, disbandment of France’s army and air force, surrender of its navy to Italian forces (Italy had at last joined the war—after Germany had beaten France), reparations (the amount to be determined “at a later date”), and forced participation in the Danzig Pact.
By mid-July the Luftwaffe had relocated its forward air bases to France. On July 28, Hitler unleashed Operation Eagle, designed to drive the Royal Navy from the Channel coast and the Royal Air Force from the Channel skies. Supported by three carrier groups from the North Sea, the German Air Force smashed shipping and repair facilities as well as major airfields throughout eastern England. On August 23, Prime Minister Winston Churchill quietly ordered the remnants of the Home Fleet to Canada, then broke the news to Parliament with those famous words, “Sometimes blood, sweat, and tears are of little avail …”
In the early morning hours of September 18, 1940, English residents near the coasts of Sussex woke to the sound of numerous planes flying inland. Many rushed to their cellars, waiting for the inevitable bombs. But this time the German payloads fell softly from the sky. Parachutists of the Wehrmacht’s veteran 7th Flieger Division seized critical road junctions and towns, isolating a long stretch of England’s coastline, while their comrades of the SS Parachute Brigade dropped directly (and with heavy casualties) onto four British airfields, allowing the rapid deployment of reinforcements from the Wehrmacht’s 22nd Air Landing Division. At dawn, units of the British Home Guard, supported by the pitifully few remnants of the regular army gutted at Dunkirk, watched with horror as German tanks swam from the sea alongside the flat-bottomed landing craft of the SS Liebstandarte and Das Reich Divisions.
24
The British troops fought bravely, but short of experience and equipment, and isolated by the German parachutists to their rear, the issue was never in doubt. By the end of the day, SS troopers from the beaches had linked with their comrades from the skies, securing a perimeter that included the port facilities at Brighton and Worthing.
Over the next two weeks, the SS slowly expanded the perimeter against determined resistance and piecemeal counterattacks. From captured air bases, the Luftwaffe dominated the skies. During that time, German armored units and heavy artillery rapidly off-loaded at the captured ports, while infantry battalions poured across the beaches. On October 2, the XXX Panzer Corps (two armored and a motorized infantry division) burst from the bridgehead to capture Portsmouth, then drove on to Bristol, isolating British forces in Devon, Cornwall, Somerset, and Dorset. The two divisions of the SS, strengthened by an armored and a motorized division, struck north to surround and isolate metropolitan London. Three days later the SS “Wiking” Division staged a successful amphibious assault on the mouth of the Thames estuary, isolating London from the sea. Taking advantage of the confusion attending Wiking’s landings, German forces of the SS corps completed the encirclement of the city on October 8.
By the third week of October the British government was still refusing to surrender, despite the occupation of most of England by German forces. Hitler therefore ordered his army to reduce London. For a week, the city witnessed heavy fighting. Only when Churchill, the stub of a cigar clutched in his lips, died defending a barricade near Buckingham Palace, did British resistance finally cease.
A puppet government, formed by Hitler, signed the formal surrender on November 11, 1940, on the deck of the cruiser
Wiesbaden
in Scapa Flow. Reduced to a third-rate power under permanent German garrison, Britain was not even allowed to join the Danzig Pact. Though scattered fighting continued in former British protectorates around the Mediterranean basin for several months (and a resistance movement would plague Germany for many years), the opening episodes of World War II in Europe had ended.
The Kriegsmarine continued to grow through 1945, earning additional glory while supporting the seizure of the Azores and the occupation of South Africa in 1941. Germany remained neutral after the Japanese surprise attack on the United States in December of that year, its relations with the United States souring only after Germany seized British Honduras in early 1942. In June 1943, amid growing concern at the threat of militant communism, Hitler invaded a prepared Russia. Though the navy’s carriers and U-boats contributed little to the campaign (other than escorting the troop ships of the SS, which fought bravely wherever committed, but notably at Murmansk, Leningrad, and Sevastopol), its Research and Development Section effectively ended World War II.
In December 1939 a German scientist, Albert Einstein, had penned a note to Grand Admiral Raeder (Einstein’s niece was engaged to Raeder’s grandson) asking if the navy would be interested in a new explosive device based on “heavy water” research. Fascinated by the potential, Raeder spoke with Hitler, who immediately saw the possibility of combining the new explosive device with rockets then under development.
25
In August 1945, as Americans struggled ashore on the Japanese home islands, Hitler obliterated Moscow (along with Josef Stalin and most of the members of his government) with two nuclear weapons mounted on V-3 guided missiles. Russian resistance collapsed as quickly as what little remained of its national government. World communism died overnight, an unsuccessful experiment never to be resurrected. The small states formed from the carcass of the USSR joined the Danzig Pact nations now firmly under Germany’s hegemony.
Today, the Kriegsmarine lives on, though Hitler died in 1947, victim of diehard British assassin Ian Fleming. Karl Dönitz, as Hitler had specified, took his place as dictator of the Reich. Though Americans will remember his time as Führer in connection with the Cold War, the Honduras Missile Crisis, and the guerrilla war in Afghanistan, no German will ever forget that Dönitz’s first official act was to lead his nation in a month of mourning for the Little Admiral who had lifted the German people from the misery of Versailles to the glory of the Atomic Age.
Hitler lost World War II in part because he never understood naval power. Thus, he allowed the Royal Navy to survive and the Kriegsmarine to wither. The lessons of history are as clear today as they were in 1939: as long as Great Britain and its naval power survive, no mainland nation will ever be able to establish hegemony over western Europe. Sea power must never be underestimated—and the same goes double for British spirit.
To change Hitler, I introduced the one thing that he clearly lacked—a strong male role model, Stabsoberbootsman Günther Luck (and I am sure that readers with naval service will agree that no one can change a young man as quickly or as effectively as a senior petty officer). Luck, as with any effective leader, showed Hitler how to maximize his natural talents and taught him to love something greater than himself—the Imperial Navy. He instilled discipline in the young man (a quality that Hitler lacked in reality). Perhaps most important, Luck’s death at the hands of the Royal Navy gave new direction to Hitler’s anger—a direction that spared Germany the self-destructive anti-Semitic impulse forever tied to the real Hitler, and forever a leading cause of Germany’s failure to win World War II.
Great Naval Battles: North Atlantic, 1939-43
(Strategic Simulations, Sunnyvale, CA, 1992).
Hill, J. R., ed.,
The Oxford Illustrated History of the Royal Navy
(Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1995).
Mulligan, Timothy P.,
Neither Sharks nor Wolves: The Men of Nazi Germany’s U-boat Arm, 1939-1945
(Naval Institute Press, Annapolis, 1999).
Vause, Jordan,
Wolf U-boat Commanders in World War II
(Naval Institute Press, Annapolis, 1997).
Von der Porten, Edward P.,
The German Navy in World War II
(Ballantine Books, NY, 1969).
Wegener, Vice Admiral Wolfgang,
The Naval Strategy of the World War
, trans. by Holger H. Herwig (Naval Institute Press, Annapolis, 1989).
*
1
. Quoted in Siegfried Junge,
Young Man Hitler
(Green Ville Press, New York, 1993), 14-15.
*
2
.
Ibid.
, 18.
3
. In August 1914 the German Navy featured seventeen modern battleships (dreadnoughts) and five modern battlecruisers; the Royal Navy floated twenty-two dreadnoughts and nine battle cruisers. The British also maintained superiority in pre-dreadnoughts (which could not stand against modern battle cruisers, much less battleships) and lighter fleet units.
*
4
. Raeder, Erich,
We Were Sailors Once and Young
(Institut der Kriegsmarine, Berlin, 1958), 142-45.
*
5
. This is the earliest known mention of Hitler’s future fascination with innovative military technology or “wonder weapons.”
*
6
. In fact, Hitler served his first tour with the duties of a
fähnrich-zur-see
(midshipman), regardless of his rank. Those duties were simple: watch, learn, and do as little harm as possible!
*
7
. Dönitz, Karl,
In the Little Admiral’s Footsteps
, five volumes (Institut der Kriegsmarine, Berlin, 1973), vol. 1, 98.
*
8
. Junge,
Hitler
, 28.
*
9
. Hitler formed the Blueshirts as an activist political cadre from former naval enlisted men and officers. Sometimes characterized as “thugs” and “monsters,” they provided visible intimidation when Hitler’s charisma failed. Purged of “undesirables” (notably, those officers who threatened Hitler’s own power) on the “Night of the Long Knives” in 1934, the remaining Blueshirts later became the founding members of the Reich’s elite SS corps (roughly comparable to the American or British Marines, though they often spearheaded land campaigns as well as conducting amphibious operations).
*
10
. Letter to “Mein Bobo,” November 18, 1921; Family Papers, Stuttgart.
*
11
. The original edition of
Mein Kampf
rang with Hitler’s hatred of Great Britain. Later impressions and translations approved for sale abroad were fifty pages shorter than the original. Raeder had strongly suggested that the inflammatory rhetoric be eliminated so as to reduce potential British alarm at Hitler’s government and thus avoid a naval armaments race.
*
12
. The inscription on the Raeder Memorial in Berlin translates thus, “Those who serve in silence often deserve the loudest acclaim.”
*
13
. The SS constantly expanded through 1945. By that year it included four light amphibious divisions, two armored divisions, two airborne divisions, three corps and an army headquarters, and its own air groups, as well as standard supporting elements.
*
14
. Kriegsmarine Files (Top Secret), Raeder, Directive 318, May 1, 1934.
*
15
. His relief of Hermann Göring, commander of the Luftwaffe in 1937, for interfering in naval air operations is typical of Hitler’s reactions to such squabbling. Subsequently, the Nazis tried and convicted Göring for “crimes against nature and the state” and sentenced him to service in a penal battalion (waste not, want not). Göring “redeemed” himself during mine-clearing operations in Poland, and was buried in Stuttgart Military Cemetery with full honors.
*
16
. Dönitz,
Footsteps
, vol. 2, 280.
*
17
. Guderian, Field Marshal (ret.) Heinz,
Hitler and His Panzer Leaders
(German Military Press, New York, 1958), 75-78.