LACK OF PLANNIN 13 page

. DEALING WITH THE DEVILAugust 1939 Joseph Stalin made a mistake, one that deeply affected not only the Soviet Union but also the rest of the world. The mistake was that on August 23, 1939, the dictator of the communist empire signed a secret protocol with Adolf Hitler. The document was a clear blueprint for a political alliance between Russia and Germany. It included economic exchanges, cultural exchanges, and even military cooperation. Effectively, this agreement laid the basis for the two nations to divide eastern Europe between them. One provision stated that should Germany invade Poland, Stalin would order the now-infamous “stab in the back.” Russia promised to also invade the already prostrate nation from the east and occupy a large part of it.was a very good argument to be made that it was to Russia’s advantage. Their army had been crippled by purges and the failures of a botched invasion of Finland. But by signing this pact with Germany, Joseph Stalin also guaranteed the start of World War II. One of the Nazis’ greatest fears was a two-front war. This had proved disastrous for Germany only a few decades before in World War I. This pact guaranteed that would not happen again. Ironically, they were right, and when Hitler chose to disregard the agreement two years later, it began a series of events that resulted in the total defeat of the Third Reich. The pact removed the last real check on German aggression. Britain and France maintained a continuing attitude of appeasement. America’s stand was one of adamant neutrality that even a concerned Franklin Roosevelt could not change. With Russia neutralized, there simply was no one else strong enough to stop the Nazis.had many reasons to think this protocol was a good idea. One was that it left his own occupation of Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltic states, and the eastern part of Russia’s old nemesis, Poland, unchallenged. Another appeal was that it played to Stalin’s need to create a buffer zone that reached about 200 kilometers from the actual Russian border. Perhaps most important, Adolf Hitler had been working hard on the Western democracies to join with him in a crusade against the communists. Stalin had a real fear Hitler might succeed. It had been barely twenty years since most of the Western nations and Japan had sent military units into Russia to support the White Russian, anti-Bolshevik armies. Finally, it appears from the now-available records that Stalin actually believed that any war between Germany and Russia could be avoided. This was, in retrospect, wishful thinking, but that belief not only caused him to sign the protocol but also led to orders that crippled the Russian army when the Wehrmacht invaded two years later. So desperately did Stalin hold on to the belief that Hitler would obey the terms of this pact that German troops passed trains of raw materials from Russia still delivering resources as agreed, hours after Operation Barbarossa had begun in 1941. Leopold Unger, a Polish-Belgian author and historian, is unquestionably correct in calling the 1939 protocol the “most cynical operation of the World War II, and the founding document of the post-war Soviet empire in Europe.” This agreement also effectively ended discussions on another pact, the Tripartite Pact between Britain, France, and Russia, which was also designed to ensure peace and hold Hitler at bay. So, effectively, Stalin decided to believe Adolf Hitler and Germany—which had attacked Russia in World War I—instead of trusting his allies from that same war.the lens of history, there are fewer more obvious, world-changing mistakes than Joseph Stalin cutting a deal with the devil. Perhaps the only greater mistake Stalin made was believing that the agreement was anything but Realpolitik: something cynically done by Hitler only for passing expediency. So while the Nazi- Soviet pact of 1939 gave Russia the illusion of security, in reality it gave the Nazis a green light to attack Poland and then France. It was a major factor in the start of World War II. Believing the assurances of peace with Russia, which Hitler betrayed the first chance he got, was more than just a mistake. It sold out not only Poland and western Europe but, in the end, was even more costly to Russia itself. Almost exactly two years after signing the nonaggression and cooperation pact, Hitler attacked Russia. Stalin was so dismayed that he had a virtual breakdown and was ineffective for the crucial first days of the invasion. The result of his mistake was the loss of millions of Russian lives, half the Russian population suffering from Nazi occupation, and the destruction of much of the manufacturing base of the Soviet Union. It was a terrible price for a short-term agreement. Rarely has anyone’s judgment proven so wrong.

. HALFWAY RIGHTMaginot Line was built by France in reaction to the slaughter of more than 1 million French soldiers in World War I. Before that war, the French military doctrine had been unchanged from when Napoleon I was emperor. If you wanted to win a battle, you attacked. Courage would overcome any enemy and guarantee victory. Admittedly, the doctrine had not worked so well even for Napoleon at the Battle of Nations or Waterloo, but France stuck with it. Then came World War I and the trenches. Attacking through barbed wire against modern artillery and machine guns proved fatal and useless. But it took the French generals almost two years and a mutiny to understand this.result of the French people’s revulsion to the horrific losses in World War I was to go to the other extreme. The leaders of postwar France decided that if total offense was a disaster, total defense must be the answer. France, since Vauban and Louis XIV, had been the leader in building fortresses, so fortresses it would be. The result was the construction of the Maginot Line at the cost of more than 3 billion francs. That amount today, were it an equivalent portion of the U.S. annual budget, would be more than $3,000,000,000: That’s $3 trillion. But the problem was not cost. The mistake that the French made was that the French built only half of the line.Maginot Line was not a single line of forts. It was rather a continuous series of defensive positions. The line included everything from small machine gun bunkers, some remote-controlled using periscopes, to massive artillery cupolas that would have been impressive on a battleship. In places, the defenses ran more than ten miles in depth. The forts were well stocked with everything from artillery shells to vintage wines and were ready to hold off any German attack for weeks without resupply. The Maginot Line was originally planned to run the entire length of the northern border of France. Half that border was with Germany. The other half ran along the border with Belgium. The first half, the portion that ran along the German border, was completed in the 1930s.construction of the Maginot Line reached the 150-mile border between France and Belgium, the government of Belgium objected. They refused to accept anything on the border because it inferred they would be abandoned by the French in the event of a German attack. But they also refused to allow the French to help them build anything along their border because it might serve as a provocation to the Germans. Belgium threatened that if the French built anything at all, they would ally themselves with Germany.French reaction was to do nothing. Even after Poland was invaded, there was no effort to add even the most rudimentary fortifications to the border that ran from the Ardennes to the Channel. Half of the French border was solidly fortified. The northern half, the route German armies had used almost every time they invaded France in the past thousand years, was left undefended. Eventually, the leaders of France justified stopping halfway by explaining that now they knew where the Germans had to attack since the Maginot Line was impregnable. Unfortunately for them, they were so right and so very wrong.half the border defenseless, the French and British agreed on a new strategy. When the Germans invaded Belgium, and only after they invaded, massive armies, waiting along the French border, would rush north and reinforce the Belgian army. The plan even worked. When the Sitzkrieg ended and the fighting between France and Germany began, the Nazis did attack northern Belgium; and like everyone expected, a day later the British Expeditionary Force and a substantial part of the French army hurried past the undefended French border and into defensive positions along Belgium’s waterways. While they did so, the Germans pressed only a little and mostly waited.the British and French had committed dozens of divisions in Belgium, the Wehrmacht attacked through the virtually undefended Ardennes Forest. Undefended because the Maginot Line stopped short of it, and the French incorrectly assumed the forest was too dense for a major offensive to push through. They were wrong about it being impassable, and within weeks the main German offensive had reached the Channel. Hundreds of thousands of Allied soldiers were now trapped in Belgium. About 300,000 were eventually evacuated from Dunkirk, but more than that were left surrounded in northern Belgium while the panzers poured over the undefended portions of the French border and tore through France. Exactly one month after the Ardennes attack, the Nazis occupied Paris.part of the Maginot Line that was completed worked; what few Nazi assaults were made along it from Germany failed. But once France fell, most of the defenders had to surrender. Their guns faced the wrong way and many of their families were in German hands. The few fortresses that held out were not even attacked. Bulldozers were used to simply cover the turrets, ventilation shafts, and entrances with yards of dirt that turned the underground defenses into tombs.by allowing politics to overcome military sense, the incredibly expensive fortification failed to be more than a trap for the men manning it. Had the national wealth spent on constructing the Maginot Line been spent on tanks, planes, and artillery, the French army would have been immeasurably stronger. But the postwar wealth of France was squandered on a defensive line that by being incomplete accomplished nothing.France ignored the irrational objections of Belgium and completed the Maginot Line, it might well have fulfilled its purpose. If, in 1940, the German panzer spearheads had to fight through a completed Maginot Line, their losses would have been staggering. The Nazis might still have defeated France in a much longer war, or they might not have, as the Blitzkrieg would have had little effect on mutually supporting and highly fortified positions. France might even have survived long enough to learn how to fight a modern war or force yet another stalemate on her German invaders.

. STOPPING SHORT OF VICTORYwas smashing France. The Wehrmacht had sailed through the “impassable” Ardennes Forest and bypassed the Maginot Line. German panzer divisions had spearheaded a push to the Channel that had effectively cut the British forces off from the French army and was pushing them back to the coast. On May 24, 1940, the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) was deeply engaged with the German Second Army. On that same day, the foremost of Heinz Guderian’s panzer units were thirty miles from the port of Dunkirk. This put a substantial amount of Nazi armored and highly mobile units close to Dunkirk, the last continental channel port in Allied hands. The Nazis had more units near the port than almost all of the BEF combined. Worse yet, the BEF was totally engaged and could spare nothing to meet the threat in their rear. They were saved only because on that same day the order was received from Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt to the panzer divisions in Army Group A, which included all of the forces facing the BEF, to halt and re-form on the Lens to Gravelines canals. That move not only stopped Guderian from going for the port but relieved the pressure on the rest of the BEF as well. This order may well have lost Germany its last chance to force a peace on Britain.has since been a lot of speculation as to why the decision to halt the panzers was made. No one after the war was sure why this order was given. It certainly wasn’t because the armored units needed to stop. Diaries from the battle showed that the men and equipment were capable of continuing to attack, and they were frustrated at not being able to do so. Often speculation turns to the theory that Hermann Goering wanted the glory of giving the BEF its coup de grace to go to the Luftwaffe alone. Reichsmarschall Goering was also effectively the number two authority in the Nazi government and had Hitler’s ear, so he could easily have made such a demand.stop order came from the highest level and may have been influenced by Hitler’s desire to seek a quick peace with Britain to leave his entire army free to deal with Russia. Planning for the attack that actually occurred the next summer was already being developed. Allowing the BEF to escape, or at least surrender rather than be destroyed, may have been a ploy used by the Führer to encourage better relations with the British. At this point, he still had hopes of joining with his fellow English Aryans in his planned war against all Slavs and other untermenschen. Or perhaps it was ordered because Hitler had experienced the mud of Flanders first-hand in World War I and was afraid that the armored elite of his army would bog down and be of no use in finishing off France. What is certain is that the decision was not caused by any action taken by the Allies nor was it at all popular with the German general staff. Whatever the reason, this mistake may well have changed the entire course of World War II.Dunkirk had fallen, then there was no place for the BEF and associated Allied units to retreat from. The 338,000 men evacuated would have been lost or become prisoners. The bulk of the British officer corps and noncommissioned officers, who later formed the core of the British army fighting in North Africa and landing in Normandy, would have been lost.of the likely effects of such a loss on Britain would have been the collapse of civilian morale. If that happened, there was a high probability that Britain would have entered into the peace talks Hitler so desired. And in those talks the British empire might well have been represented by the less-determined Clement Attlee and not the then sea lord Winston Churchill. Churchill gained his premiership partially by riding the burst of confidence that came from the successful withdrawal of the BEF. If the bulk of the Royal Army had been lost, the more timid and conciliatory Attlee might well have accepted the premiership instead. In reality, Clement Attlee was offered the leadership of Britain, but he declined in Churchill’s favor. Since Hitler publicly stated that he thought of the British as being fellow Aryans, this might well have encouraged a peace agreement or at least a British openness to a negotiated peace that preserved their empire. Avoiding a two-front war was a tenet of German strategy. That doctrine combined with Hitler’s determination to attack communist Russia suggests that the terms the Führer might have offered Britain would certainly have been very generous.if the loss of the BEF had not forced a peace on Britain, it would have drastically changed how that nation could fight in the next few years. It may well have meant a complete withdrawal from the Mediterranean basin, leaving it to the Axis. Many of the men who fought and eventually stopped Rommel in North Africa were survivors of the Dunkirk evacuation. With the BEF lost, it would have been unlikely that tens of thousands of men could be spared from England to go defend the Suez Canal and Egypt. Lacking enough troops to fend off their assault, Africa might well have fallen to the Italians even without an Afrika Korps being needed.more dramatically affecting the course of the entire war would have been the lack of troops available to assist Greece in 1941. When the Italians attacked Greece, the British rushed several divisions to support the successfully defending Greek army. With that support, the Italians were stopped and pushed back. The Greeks were actually on the offensive in Albania within a month of Italy’s attack. Because of the Anglo-Greek success, the German army had to intervene with significant forces. That intervention delayed the kickoff of Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of Russia. In Russia, later that year, the German army’s successes slowed and then stopped as the weather worsened. Without the British forces sent to Greece, the German intervention may not have been needed, or not needed on a scale that delayed Barbarossa. It was only the early winter weather in 1941 that stopped the shift of several panzer divisions back to the attack on Moscow. With no delay and another month of good weather after the invasion had started, the Russian capital might well have fallen. The capture of Dunkirk and the BEF in 1940 might well have meant that Germany in 1941 would have been able to attack Russia earlier in the summer. They would then have had enough good weather to capture, as the Wehrmacht almost did, the political and transport center of the entire Soviet Union: Moscow. Had they done so, it would have crippled, if not outright defeated, Russia before the onset of the bitter cold. The decision to stop Guderian’s panzers short of Dunkirk may well have been a mistake that lost Germany World War II.

. RENAISSANCE MANis a “what if ”: If you were the leader of a nation at war, whom would you trust as your second-in-command? A man who:

. May have stopped the panzers short just so that his aircraft could get credit for destroying the trapped British in Belgium and then instead allowed more than 300,000 enemy soldiers to be evacuated from Dunkirk?

. Had failed you in the Battle of Britain even though his Luftwaffe far outnumbered the Royal Air Force? Then he blamed his pilots and called them cowards.

. Bragged publicly and continually that his Luftwaffe would never allow a single British aircraft over Berlin? In a radio interview, he said that if one bomb fell, you “could call him Meier,” which was contemporary slang for “I would be a fool,” and a week later, seventy-five British bombers attacked the German capital with few losses.

. Guaranteed that if the surrounded Sixth Army stayed in Stalingrad, his aircraft could deliver 750 tons of supplies a day? This promise was made even though his own officers informed him that they had barely enough planes to deliver a third of that amount. The army was ordered to hold the city and not to break out when it could. Eventually starved for ammunition and just plain starved, more than half a million German and allied Axis soldiers were lost at Stalingrad.

. Forbade the head of his fighters, Adolf Galland, to report to anyone that the new American fighters were now accompanying the bombers deep into Germany?

. Even as the Allies bombed Germany’s cities, continued to extend the Goering Works manufacturing empire until it employed 700,000 workers, many of them prisoner labor? Most of what the Goering Works made were items under contract to the Nazi government or the Luftwaffe. You can bet those were no-bid contracts. During the war, his company made him one of the richest men in Germany.

. Regularly used morphine and had been effectively addicted to the drug since 1923? Because of this addiction the Reichsmarschall gained more than 100 pounds by 1943.

. Was notorious as the greatest art thief in history, assigning entire military units to loot thousands of art treasures from all of Europe for his personal collection?would trust and rely on such a man? Hitler did. The man, of course, was Hermann Goering. He became Hitler’s war minister, commander of the Luftwaffe and, as Reichsmarschall, the number two head of the Nazi government. He was even Hitler’s designated successor almost to the very end of the war. No matter how often Hermann Goering failed, Hitler made the mistake of continuing to trust “Fat Hermann,” the self-proclaimed Renaissance man. Perhaps we should be very grateful for this mistake. How frightening might the world be today if the Führer had instead found a competent right-hand man?

. BLINDED BY REVENGEmistakes in August 1940 may have changed the entire war that followed. One was made by the lead aircraft in a small flight of Heinkel bombers on August 24. It was night, and accurate bombing at night was difficult. In 1940, there was no GPS or any other way for a pilot to know where he was. The only available method was simply to follow landmarks. This was a dicey proposition on a dark night. Even in daylight, following any flight plan over enemy territory while being fired on from the ground and threatened by fighters was difficult. In the dark, it became incredibly easy to be dozens of miles off course. So it was not unusual for a flight of Heinkels, over blacked-out England, to go astray. The only real difference between the situation that night was that they had strayed over central London.was during the peak of the Battle of Britain. If Germany could gain air dominance, it could control the Channel and invade England. Their army had been shattered on the Continent and those who had escaped had left their artillery, tanks, and even weapons behind. The only thing protecting Britain from invasion was the Royal Air Force (RAF) and the Royal Navy. But without control of the air over the English Channel, the ships of the Royal Navy would be easily sunk in the narrow waters. If that occurred, there was virtually no chance the battered Royal Army could hold the island against a determined German landing. Since August 13, the Luftwaffe had been constantly challenging the RAF. Their targets had been the RAF itself. German bombers had struck at the English airfields, aircraft production plants, and occasionally the strange radar towers along the coast. This forced the Hurricanes and Spitfires of the RAF to meet every attack or be destroyed on the ground.German’s normal technique was to send over bombers protected by fighters during the day and unprotected bombers at night. The strategy was working. When the British fighters rose to attack the daytime bombers, the Nazi fighters could attack them. Since the RAF was outnumbered more than two to one in fighters, this created a steady attrition that favored the Germans.a message to the secretary of state for air on June 3, Winston Churchill stated thatCabinet were distressed to hear from you that you were now running short of pilots for fighters, and that they had now become the limiting factor… Lord Beaverbrook has made a surprising improvement in the supply and repair of aeroplanes, and in clearing up the muddle and scandal of the aircraft production branch. I greatly hope that you will be able to do as much on the personnel side, for it will indeed be lamentable if we have machines standing idle for want of pilots to fly them.August 19, a concerned Vice Air Marshal Keith Park commented during a heated debate as to whether the British fighters should go in as they arrived or form large formations and attack the German aircraft en masse, that the loss of planes and pilots had become so great it no longer was a pertinent question. He observed that a larger formation was still better, “but we are at moment in no position to implement it anyway.” There weren’t enough pilots left flying to use in any large formations. To the British, it was becoming clear that the Luftwaffe was winning what was later known as the Battle of Britain. And the Germans knew they were winning. Just the day before those Heinkel bombers wandered over London, Air Marshal Hermann Goering had ordered that the Luftwaffe wascontinue the fight against the enemy air force until further notice, with the aim of weakening the British fighter forces. The enemy is to be forced to use his fighters by means of ceaseless attacks. In addition the aircraft industry and the ground organization of the air force are to be attacked by means of individual aircraft by night and day, if weather conditions do not permit the use of complete formations.as things stood, with the RAF at the edge of exhaustion and running low on pilots, Operation Seelowe, the invasion of England, seemed inevitable. Then those few Heinkel bombers went off course. Not seeing their designated targets and deciding it was time to turn back toward their airfields in France, they did what they were supposed to do. They simply dropped their bombs without aiming at anything in particular. Without bombs it was easier for the aircraft to dodge enemy fighters. This clearing out of bombs was the common practice by both sides throughout the war. It just happened, unknown to the Heinkel pilots, that they were over London. The bombs themselves did little damage to the city, but the reaction was great.the German bombing of Rotterdam on May 15,1940, the official policy of the RAF became to bomb all military targets even when the target was located somewhere that guaranteed civilian casualties. But such bombings had been rare. Both sides had avoided bombing the other’s cities. But with the Germans seemingly beginning to attack London, this changed. The British reacted by sending up ninety-five RAF bombers who flew to the edge of their range. Their mission was to bomb Tempelhof air base. This base is located near the center of Berlin. Eighty-one of those bombers reached Berlin, but as was common throughout the war, their bombing accuracy was terrible, and that night, their bombs fell all over the German capital., who had been bragging about how well the air war over England was going, was more than embarrassed. He had publicly and personally promised the citizens of Berlin that they would never even see a British aircraft over the city. Himmler had featured him making this promise on the radio several times in the weeks before the British reprisal raid. Adolf Hitler too was infuriated. In what seemed to have been an emotional reaction, they ordered the emphasis of the attacks on Britain to change from concentrating on the RAF to the bombing of London and the other British manufacturing and population centers.this time, most of the RAF coastal air bases had been rendered unusable. The RAF had plenty of aircraft, but was desperately short of trained pilots. The pilots they did have had been flying constantly for weeks and were exhausted. Some German bombing raids were beginning to get through without any aircraft intercepting them at all. Churchill’s valiant “few” were on the ropes and the count had begun. Britain was days away from losing control of the air over the Channel and England.the German decision, in reaction to the Berlin raid, changed everything. London began to suffer, but the pressure was off the RAF. While the German bombers wreaked havoc on London in the first days of what became known as the Blitz, the Royal Air Force’s pilots got needed rest, aircraft were serviced correctly, and new pilots were brought in. Air bases could be repaired and all of the radar stations put back on line. While the Battle of Britain continued for several more weeks, never again was the RAF so close to total defeat. By September, Hitler was forced to accept that an invasion of England was impossible.those Heinkel bombers had not mistakenly dropped bombs on London on August 24, it is possible that the Third Reich might have won World War II. The United States was not yet involved and would not be for more than a year. With England forced to surrender or be occupied, even if the United States had entered the conflict, there was no easy base near occupied Europe to stage an invasion from. More important, if the RAF, who had been days from collapse as an effective force, had been defeated and England forced to sue for peace, then the half million soldiers guarding western Europe would have been free to participate in the invasion of Russia a year later. With that many more men and tanks, the ability of Russia to survive those first months was questionable. Without them, German units penetrated to within fourteen miles of Moscow.Heinkel bomber pilots made an ordinary mistake following the standard procedure, by jettisoning their bombs without realizing London was below them. But the reaction of Hitler and Goering to the reprisal raid that bombing generated lost Germany the Battle of Britain and a chance to knock Britain out of the war. The prideful, emotional decision to change tactics to bombing London in August 1940 may well have cost the Nazis victory in World War II.

. NOT PREPAREDhistory of warfare has shown many times that overconfidence can kill, and this case of misjudgment killed hundreds of thousands. If anyone had a reason to be confident in 1941, it was the Nazis and Adolf Hitler. In 1939, Germany had overrun Poland in a matter of a few weeks. In 1940, France fell in just over a month. Not only did the Blitzkrieg ensure victory, but it seemed to guarantee a quick one as well. Then came Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of Russia. Attacking Russia, they bet everything. The consequences of failure, even failing to win a quick victory, are shown by history. But in 1941, Hitler considered himself a military genius and, so far, appeared to have lived up to the claim. All of Europe, from Poland to the Pyrenees, was occupied by Germany or was her ally. On June 22, 3 million German and allied soldiers attacked Russia. Somehow, mostly because Stalin refused to believe it was going to happen and executed those who disagreed, the Wehrmacht achieved surprise.the first months of the invasion, hundreds of thousands of Russian soldiers were captured. In one case alone nearly 700,000 men surrendered or were killed when a large part of Ukraine was surrounded. Then it began to get cold, and a mistake that is very uncharacteristic of the meticulous planning normally attributed to the German general staff became apparent. The mistake was that Hitler and others were so confident of a fast victory, such as had occurred in Poland and France, that there had been no provision for equipping the army to continue fighting in the cold Russian winter., this means much more than a lack of overcoats and long underwear. Trucks and tanks were not winterized. The radiators would freeze up and even the diesel fuel took on a wax-like consistency in the subzero temperatures. Weapons froze solid in the middle of a battle and water-cooled machine guns became useless. On a personal side, there were no sleeping bags or insulated tents, so thousands of German soldiers literally froze to death in their sleep.quoted earlier, there is an old axiom that no battle plan survives contact with the enemy, but winter can be predicted. Through overconfidence or mistaking the open reaches of Russia for being similar to densely populated western Europe, no provision was made to keep the Wehrmacht fighting in cold weather. There were other factors that led to defeats, such as changing objectives and Hitler shifting panzer divisions around, creating delay. But the real mistake was not expecting another quick victory, but rather preparing for the invasion only under the assumption that all of Russia could be conquered in the few months before the notoriously fierce Russian winter arrived. That overconfident oversight meant that the German army could not fight at anywhere near its best level in the cold weather. It also cost the Wehrmacht tens of thousands of unnecessary casualties from frostbite or worse. Making the mistake of preparing only for the best of outcomes pretty much guaranteed the worst. If the German army had been properly equipped and prepared to continue fighting during the cold weather, they might well have captured Moscow and forced Russia to seek peace on Hitler’s terms.

Date: 2015-02-16; view: 880