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Overview
Ernest R. May's Strange Victory presents a dramatic narrative-and reinterpretation-of Germany's six-week campaign that swept the Wehrmacht to Paris in spring 1940.
Before the Nazis killed him for his work in the French Resistance, the great historian Marc Bloch wrote a famous short book, Strange Defeat, about the treatment of his nation at the hands of an enemy the French had believed they could easily dispose of. In Strange Victory, the distinguished American historian Ernest R. May asks the opposite question: How was it that Hitler and his generals managed this swift conquest, considering that France and its allies were superior in every measurable dimension and considering the Germans' own skepticism about their chances?
Strange Victory is a riveting narrative of those six crucial weeks in the spring of 1940, weaving together the decisions made by the high commands with the welter of confused responses from exhausted and ill-informed, or ill-advised, officers in the field. Why did Hitler want to turn against France at just this moment, and why were his poor judgment and inadequate intelligence about the Allies nonetheless correct? Why didn't France take the offensive when it might have led to victory? What explains France's failure to detect and respond to Germany's attack plan? It is May's contention that in the future, nations might suffer strange defeats of their own if they do not learn from their predecessors' mistakes in judgment.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781466894280 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| Publication date: | 07/28/2015 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 384 |
| File size: | 6 MB |
About the Author
Ernest R. May is one of the leading diplomatic historians in the United States. He is the Charles Warren Professor of History at Harvard University, where he has taught for over three decades and served as dean of Harvard College, director of the Institute of Politics at the Kennedy School of Government, and chair of the History Department. In 1988 he won the Gravemeyer Award for Ideas Contributing to World Order. Among his many books, the most recent are Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision Makers and The Making of the Monroe Doctrine. He is also the advisory editor to the Bedford Books in American History series.
Read an Excerpt
Strange Victory
Hitler's Conquest of France
By Ernest R. May
Hill and Wang
Copyright © 2000 Ernest R. MayAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-9428-0
CHAPTER 1
ORDERS
"The Führer already said in my hearing on September 29 [1939], this offensive [against France] could well cost him a million men, but also the enemy, who cannot bear it."
— Diary of Ernst von Weizsäcker, October 17, 1939
"Prolonged conference with the commander in chief [Brauchitsch] on the overall situation: commander in chief: Three possibilities: attack; wait and see; fundamental changes."
— Diary of General Franz Halder, chief of staff of the German army, October 14, 1939
Anyone with a taste for old movies can visualize the scene. It is late afternoon, Wednesday, September 27, 1939. What is already being called the Second World War is entering its fourth week. Berlin is a city no longer at peace but not yet at war. Heavy five- liter Horch and Mercedes limousines with wide running boards roll along the Wilhelmstrasse. On their gull-wing fenders flutter miniature flags with white-circled black swastikas on bright-red backgrounds, the symbol of the Nazi state. At the old Chancellory, they turn into the narrow, dead-end roadway fronting the courtyard of the New Chancellory. The giant white building, just nine months old, looms over the old limestone- block Chancellory next door as, in his imagination, Chancellor and Führer Adolf Hitler looms over predecessors such as Frederick the Great, the eighteenth-century monarch who made Prussia a great power, and Otto von Bismarck, the nineteenth- century chancellor who transformed Prussia into the German Empire, the most powerful state in Europe from 1871 until the end of the Great War in 1918.
The passengers leave their limousines. Army generals are in field gray with glistening black boots; air-force officers wear pale blue, naval officers blue-black. Every chest is spangled with medals. Up marble stairs, through massive Corinthian columns, past huge gilded statues of Aryan athletes, the visitors walk through seventeen-foot-high bronze doors flanked by guards wearing the black uniforms and black boots of the Nazi Schutzstaffel — the SS. The five-hundred-foot-long entry hall has a polished marble floor which Hitler has left uncarpeted because he relishes seeing dignitaries slip and fall. At the far end, doors open on an oversize reception area, beyond which is Hitler's four-thousand-square-foot study, characterized by Life magazine as the "biggest private office in the world."
Beside the study doorway stand other SS troopers. Each has Hitler's name braided on his left sleeve, on his helmet a white death's head, and on both lapels the emblem of the Hitler bodyguard. Inside, above the doors, a mural depicts the Virtues — Wisdom, Prudence, Fortitude, and Justice. Over a fireplace, not quite so out of place, hangs an oil portrait of Bismarck. Hitler's huge desk is ornamented, even more appropriately, with an inlay of a sword emerging from its scabbard.
One can imagine Hitler standing in front of this desk this early-autumn afternoon. Northern light streaming through the high windows silhouettes him. He is of medium height and slender, though with the beginning of a paunch. Previously, his standard costume had been the brown uniform of the Nazi Party's now largely ceremonial Sturmabteilung — SA, or storm troopers. Now he has on a simple field-gray uniform, which he has vowed to continue wearing until the war is over. Except for a swastika armband and the Iron Cross he won as a front-line soldier in the last war, he is without decorations. His brown hair slants down over the left side of his forehead, matching in color the brush mustache which, for foreign cartoonists, has become his emblem. (Hitler grew and kept the mustache to distract from his too-large nose.) One can imagine him nodding to the arrivals, gesturing them to seats, tossing his head, then beginning to speak. It was his custom to speak softly at first, then to let his voice and emotions rise in tandem.
Those in attendance include the commanders in chief of the armed services: General Walther von Brauchitsch for the army; Field Marshal Hermann Göring for the air force; and Admiral Erich Raeder for the navy. Brauchitsch is slight, rigidly erect, with a handsome face that is beginning to sag. Göring, almost comically fat, is stuffed into a white, gold-trimmed uniform of his own design and has a Crusader's sword at his waist. He has natural dimples and a set smile but, above it, small, malicious, pale-blue eyes. Raeder is squarely built but wide-bottomed, like one of his cruisers. The most detailed notes are taken by the army chief of staff, General Franz Halder, who has cropped hair, wears rimless spectacles, and, out of uniform, might be taken for a schoolteacher rather than a soldier.
Less than four weeks earlier, on September 1, German armed forces had invaded Poland, and France and Great Britain, after demanding a ceasefire and German withdrawal, had declared war. All the men gathered in Hitler's study had feared that French armies would march against Germany. At the time, German defense forces on the Western front had been feeble. Their commander, General Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb, had warned Brauchitsch that he could do little to stop French troops from walking in and taking over the Ruhr River Valley. A 1,280- square-mile area less than forty miles from Germany's western border, this valley included cities such as Essen, Dortmund, Duisburg, and Bochum, where a large percentage of German heavy industry was concentrated. Hitler, who had gone to the Polish front on the Amerika, a special twelve-car double-locomotive armored train, had opened every morning's meeting in the train's command coach by asking, "What's new in the West?" Brauchitsch had said to his staff, "Every day of calm in the West is for me a gift from God."
Apart from a noisy show of force on the border with Germany and some leaflet dropping, France and Britain had done nothing. Meanwhile, the Germans had thrown more than a million and a half soldiers and almost two thousand aircraft into a campaign aimed at the quick and complete defeat of Poland. In the first few days, German bombers had decimated the small Polish air force and disrupted life in the Polish capital, Warsaw. From then on, German planes made it difficult for Polish forces to move either by road or by rail.
A German Army Group commanded by General Fedor von Bock attacked from the north. After breaking through Polish lines, its two armies turned south to envelop Warsaw. A corps under General Heinz Guderian, composed primarily of armored divisions and supported by air-force dive-bombers, stormed northern Poland, not stopping until it reached Brest, more than a hundred miles west of Warsaw. A second Army Group, commanded by General Gerd von Rundstedt, meanwhile struck from the west and southwest, closing in on central Poland like the lower jaw of a wire-cutter.
Just a week before the start of the war, Nazi Germany had astonished the world by signing a nonaggression pact with the communist Soviet Union, supposedly its mortal ideological enemy. This pact had ensured the Soviet Union's not joining France and Britain in declaring war. The commitment made by Germany to obtain this result became apparent when, on September 17, four Soviet armies marched into Poland from the east. Germany and the Soviet Union soon afterward agreed on a partition line, and, for the time being, Poland disappeared from the map.
Though the Polish army mounted a briefly successful counteroffensive, it was soon overwhelmed. During the second week of the war, Brauchitsch and Halder had felt able to begin transferring some forces to Leeb in the West. As early as September 12, Brauchitsch said to one of his aides that he could now "nip in the bud any attempt by the enemy to invade German territory." He and Halder began to plan for recruiting, training, and equipping forces with an eye to a possible offensive against France in 1941, if the war was still going on. They drew up orders for partial demobilization so that skilled workers could go back to their factories. On an assumption that any fighting in the West in the next year or two would be defensive, they also planned to "demotorize" some infantry divisions that had fought in Poland, thus conserving both vehicles and fuel.
Göring's air staff had returned to planning a bomber force that would be large enough by 1942 for a strategic air campaign against Britain. Raeder, who had advised Hitler that a serious effort to blockade the British Isles would require three hundred submarines and that Germany currently had only fifty-seven, wanted raw materials diverted from both the army and the air force so that, in a year or two, the navy could play a decisive role in a war. The military chiefs lined up in front of Hitler were all looking forward to a very long period of, at most, defensive warfare.
Halder's notes show their gradual discovery of the different message that Hitler had in mind, for Hitler described the victory over Poland as giving Germany only a temporary advantage. "All historical successes come to nothing when they are not continued," he said. "Great victories have little enduring luster." He attributed the French and British inaction to weakness, which would not last: "The enemy adjusts. After the first engagement with an enemy, even bad troops get better."
For the present, said Hitler, France held back because England would not yet "bear enough of the cost in blood." That would change when British troops arrived. Learning from the Polish war, the two enemy powers would strengthen their anti-aircraft and antitank defenses, and that would make another quick German victory increasingly difficult. Therefore, Hitler concluded, Germany should take the offensive against France now. "The sooner, the better," Halder recorded his saying. "Do not wait for the enemy to come to us, but rather immediately take the offensive ourselves. ... Ruthless methods. Once time is lost, it cannot be recovered."
After being dismissed by Hitler, the generals and admirals made their way back to the courtyard of the New Chancellory. The staff cars of Brauchitsch and Halder went down the Wilhelmstrasse and around Belle Alliance Platz, with its sixty- foot-high Peace Column, put up just one century earlier to celebrate the twenty-five-year peace following what was remembered by Germans as their war of liberation and by other Europeans as the last of the Napoleonic Wars. The route went out of the city along the Berlinerstrasse, passing first industrial suburbs and then farmland still green with late cabbage rows and beanstalks, where, between stands of linden, maple, and oak, Holstein and Jersey cows grazed in high grass.
The destination of Brauchitsch and Halder, about twenty miles from Berlin, was a huge fenced-in army-training facility neighboring the village of Zossen. The grounds had barracks, stables, vehicle-weighing stations, a large recreation center, and fields for sports, parades, and maneuvers. They also had sugarloaf-shaped structures mounting anti-aircraft guns, near which stood two large A-shaped buildings mistakable, at a distance, for ski chalets.
Built on marshland, these A-shaped buildings had to be approached across wooden planks. They contained offices and living quarters. But their north doors gave admission to elevators that descended sixty feet downward and opened onto long, steel- walled corridors lined with insulated cables and broken at intervals by airtight steel doors. These corridors led to a warren of offices, communication centers, and service and storage areas. Under the code name "Zeppelin," this was the army high command's supposedly bomb-proof, gas-proof quarters for wartime. (It was sufficiently well built so that, throughout the Cold War, the Soviet Union would use it as a command post for its armies in East Germany.) Brauchitsch and Halder had moved there six days before the attack on Poland.
Early in the afternoon on the day following Hitler's order for an early Western offensive, Halder gathered some key officers of the general staff in his office, a Spartan pine-paneled room with barracks furniture. He directed these officers to analyze possibilities for an offensive against France. If his own diary account is trustworthy, he himself made a strong case for such an offensive. He said that Hitler hoped France and Britain would agree to some negotiated settlement, but if not, Germany would face the reality that time worked in favor of the enemy. Even with the Western front being reinforced by troops transferring from Poland, France and Britain could still seize the Ruhr Valley if they made a determined strike. Since the two powers had only recently begun to modernize their military forces, they would grow progressively stronger, and their prospects for success would improve. Hence, said Halder, the general staff needed to develop a contingency plan for a possible German offensive to be launched as early as late October, seeking to take as much territory as possible in the Netherlands and Belgium and conceivably in northern France, with a view to providing defense in depth for the Ruhr and gaining coastal bases for air and naval operations against the British home islands.
Halder asked General Kurt von Tippelskirch, head of the general staff's intelligence directorate, and Lieutenant Colonel Ulrich Liss, chief of Tippelskirch's Foreign Armies West branch, for a quick, rough estimate of enemy numbers and materiel and of fortifications in the Netherlands and Belgium. He asked General Karl Heinrich von Stülpnagel, head of the general staff's plans-and-operations directorate (and effectively his own number two), to outline a plan based on Tippelskirch's estimates of likely enemy forces and of German forces that could be shifted quickly from the Polish front to the West. He allowed less than two days for this work. Suspecting a negative reaction to the very idea of an offensive, he closed the meeting by emphasizing: "Extreme urgency to obtain basic data for a thorough discussion with the Führer about what is possible. No reservations or hesitations."
When the group assembled again on the morning of Saturday, September 30, the reports all discouraged even thinking of an offensive in the West any time soon. General Eduard Wagner, the army's chief supply officer, confirmed the conclusions of General Georg Thomas, who headed the economic section in Hitler's own armed-forces staff, that the Polish campaign had sapped Germany's reserves of fuel and ammunition and that Germany lacked the industrial base, particularly in chemicals and steel, to produce adequate quantities of gunpowder or artillery shells before 1941. Noting that about half of Germany's tanks had broken down or been disabled in Poland, General Adolf von Schell, who was in charge of motor transport, predicted that most of these tanks would still be out of action at the end of October. In any case, only the newer-model tanks — Panzer IIIs and Panzer IVs — had a hope of standing up against French and British tanks and antitank guns, and they could not come on line in any numbers until much later in the year, if then.
Tippelskirch, the intelligence chief, and Liss, his expert on Western armies, ticked off obstacles to a successful offensive against the Low Countries and France. For one, Belgium had a respectable army and some of the strongest fortifications in Europe. For another, France and Britain had sixty divisions on the French-Belgian border, eighteen of which were mechanized or motorized and could quickly come to Belgium's rescue. Stülpnagel and his operations staff, having already analyzed on their own the possibilities for a German offensive in the West, reported that there was no way in which it could be conducted with any prospect of success before 1942 at the earliest.
Anticipating negative reports from the general staff, Halder and Brauchitsch had already put their heads together to outline arguments that might persuade Hitler to change his mind. They agreed to point out to him the extreme vulnerability of the Ruhr Basin. They would explain that, though fast-moving German tank formations with air support had had success in Poland, they could not be equally effective in the West, where the terrain was different and the opposing forces would be much better equipped, trained, and led. Tanks moving into Belgium or France would encounter concrete fortifications, deep trenches, and steel barricades, none of which had existed in Poland. German tanks would become sitting targets for French and British bombers and for the thousands of artillery pieces arrayed along the French and Belgian frontiers. Moreover, the days were getting shorter. The weather was becoming more unpredictable. These factors would hamper ground operations and make air operations more and more chancy. Still, if the offensive were postponed even to 1940, Brauchitsch and Halder proposed to point out, the German army would not only have time to build up supplies and to train recruits but would also have significant numbers of Panzer IIIs and IVs and, among other things, new mortars capable of firing poison-gas shells. With their brief thus assembled, Brauchitsch and Halder arranged to see Hitler.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Strange Victory by Ernest R. May. Copyright © 2000 Ernest R. May. Excerpted by permission of Hill and Wang.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Introduction,PART ONE: HITLER'S GERMANY,
1. Orders,
2. Honeymoon,
3. Rifts,
4. Conflict,
5. Clashes,
6. War!,
7. Hitler,
PART TWO: THE WESTERN ALLIES,
8. Daladier,
9. Gamelin,
10. Cross-Currents,
11. To Munich,
12. Chamberlain,
13. Enough!,
14. Accepting War,
PART THREE: PLAN YELLOW,
15. Now France?,
16. Not Defeat?,
17. Intelligence,
18. Gamble,
PART FOUR: THE DEMOCRACIES' PREPARATIONS FOR VICTORY,
19. War but Not War,
20. "The Bore War",
21. The Dyle-Breda Plan,
22. Distractions,
23. Stumbles,
24. Intelligence Failure,
25. The Reasons Why,
26. The Dam Breaks,
PART FIVE: THE WAR-A PARARLE?,
27. Battle!,
28. "Hitch" at Sedan,
29. Plan Yellow Plays Out,
30. France Falls,
Conclusion: Why? And What Can Be Learned?,
Appendix: Tables and Charts,
Notes,
Bibliography,
Acknowledgments,
Index,