Hitler Versus His Generals In The West

In the years since World War II some German generals have declared that Germany lost the war because Hitler insanely meddled in military affairs of which he knew nothing. If only, they sighed, Hitler had not interfered with the conduct of military operations. . . .

This thesis not only exonerates the German generals of blame; not only does it establish Hitler as the scapegoat for the military disaster; it also restores the prestige of the German army. The hypothesis is convenient for the nations that today are counting on the strength of a re-armed Germany.

Certainly, Americans find it rather natural to accept this point of view. Hitler had personified the enemy, and a mad dog seemed more detestable than an evil one. The professional officers of the German army, in contrast, had the reputation of being well trained and efficient soldiers. It was inconceivable that in the campaign of Western Europe during 1944 and 1945 they could have made the blunders that had led so irresistibly to defeat. The explanation must be that they had had to carry out orders from Hitler who had stupidly intervened.

There is no disputing the fact that Hitler took an active part in military matters. The master of Germany, he exercised military command. He directed the formulation of military plans, both strategic and tactical, and he supervised their execution. His system of personal dictatorship, the pyramid of command that culminated in him, his claim to legendary omniscience for public consumption, his diminishing confidence in his subordinates’ abilities, all made his close control of the military perhaps inevitable.

Hitler’s commander in the western theater, Field Marshal von Rundstedt, was one of the most respected officers in the army. But Rundstedt did not have the virtual carte blanche for the conduct of operations that his opponent, General Eisenhower, enjoyed. Rundstedt functioned under the close inspection of Hitler. He had no authority over air force and naval units. He controlled no theater reserves. He did not have a unified command. He shared responsibility with one of his subordinates, Rommel.

Field Marshal Rommel, who commanded an army group and controlled the tactical forces that were to oppose an Allied invasion, was also an eminently respected officer. He took orders from Rundstedt, but he had the direct access to Hitler that was a privilege of all field marshals. Although responsibility for defense against an Allied landing might logically have belonged to Rundstedt as theater commander, Hitler had charged Rommel specifically with repelling the expected invasion.

The lack of cohesion in the German command structure in the west duplicated an absence of coherence in defensive planning. Despite this condition, the three commanders in the west acted in unison when the Allies assaulted the Normandy beaches. Rommel gave battle on the coast, Rundstedt began to prepare a counterattack, and Hitler commenced to think of moving reserve divisions toward the battlefield. As they directed the war in tactical terms, concerned with parrying the Allied efforts to establish a beachhead on the continent, the German commanders searched for a decisive action that would destroy the Allies in a single blow of strategic importance.

The traditional thought and training of the German military establishment stressed the ideal of defeating the enemy by a decisive act of annihilation. Such a philosophy of war rejected the idea of a gradual and cumulative strategy of attrition. Thus oriented, the German military leaders, although fighting essentially a defensive war, were thinking offensively. Their reaction against the Allied landing was ultimately to be a counterattack that would obliterate Allied hopes forever.

The accord that had unified the commanders in the west did not last for long. Five days after the Allied invasion, Hitler and his generals were in disagreement. Their point of departure was Cherbourg. The differences of opinion among them revealed a divergence of thought and of concept that was to characterize the entire German campaign in Western Europe.

The port of Cherbourg had a significant place in Allied intentions. A basic feature of the Allied invasion plan overlord was the postulated needs for securing major ports in France. Without ports, the Allies would not be able to remain on the continent; they would not be able to receive quickly enough the troops and material in the quantities required to defeat Germany. The first mission assigned to American troops, therefore, was to take Cherbourg.

The city and its marvelous harbor lie at the northern tip of a peninsula. American soldiers had landed on the east coast of the peninsula near the base. As a preliminary action to capturing Cherbourg, the Americans planned to thrust across the base of the peninsula to the west coast. The result would isolate Cherbourg from landward reinforcement. Holding a line across the peninsula near the base, the Americans would then drive north and capture the port.

The Germans had long recognized Cherbourg as an obvious Allied objective, and they had prepared to defend the port with three divisions fighting from fortifications around the city. But five days after the Allied landing on the Normandy coast, it appeared to Rundstedt and to Rommel that Cherbourg had little importance. Two facts were more significant.

First, the Allies had gained a firm foothold in France. Experience in Sicily and Italy demonstrated that once Allied landing troops succeeded in digging in on shore, it was impossible to dislodge them. Thus, the German anti-invasion plans of meeting and repelling the Allied assault on the beaches had failed.

Second, the headquarters that Rundstedt had activated to prepare the German counterattack was bombed out of existence by a lucky Allied air strike.

The effect of these events, realization of the successful Allied landing and the shock of having the counterattack headquarters destroyed, seemed to paralyze the field marshals. Suddenly bereft of hope, they appeared to be destitute of ideas. They sought only to consolidate the front. As for Cherbourg, they agreed to leave light forces in the city and thereby sacrifice only a few troops. The units saved from what they considered a useless defense of the port would establish a strong defensive line south of the American drive across the base of the peninsula.

Hitler, however, was still thinking of an attack to destroy the invasion forces. To further this plan, he ordered a crack SS Panzer Corps from his eastern front to Normandy. But while these troops were in transit, he wanted to deny the Allies Cherbourg. He was not interested in conserving several thousand soldiers in the Cherbourg peninsula when he could, by expending them, keep the Allies from gaining a major port. He was not willing to yield cheaply an important link, in the projected chain of Allied logistics. While his commanders prepared the master counterstroke, for which they needed about a month’s time, Hitler wanted them to hold on to Cherbourg. When he learned that they had decided to abandon the port, he interfered with the conduct of operations.

At a meeting with Rundstedt and Rommel eleven days after the invasion, Hitler pressed his commanders for a counterattack. Prodded by Hitler, Rundstedt suggested the British portion of the front near Caen as the critical sector. He recommended an attack there, an action that might eventually split the Allied forces on the beaches and that in any case would deny the Allies easy access to the Seine River and Paris, objectives that must be of prime importance to the Allies. Although Hitler seemed little concerned about Paris at the moment, he accepted Rundstedt’s choice. But he warned that Cherbourg must be defended in accordance with the original plans.

While Hitler was speaking, news came that the Americans had cut the base of. the Cherbourg peninsula and were about to turn toward the city. Hitler immediately authorized the withdrawal of German troops into the fortifications. He added several important qualifications: at least three divisions must fall back on Cherbourg; they must make Americans fight for every inch of ground; and they must hold the port for no less than a month.

A simple error balked Hitler’s wishes. Before he added his qualifying remarks, a subordinate left the conference room to telephone instructions to the troops in the field. These instructions authorized a withdrawal into the port. Consequently, only one division and confused elements of two others managed to reach Cherbourg, a force so small that it was inadequate either to fight strong delaying action or to man fully the defenses of the city. Later, but too late, frantic efforts were made to reinforce the garrison by air and by sea. But no airborne troops were prepared to execute such a mission, and demolition of the Cherbourg harbor had already progressed too far to permit troops arriving by water to debark.

Cherbourg thus slipped through the fingers of the field marshals. Disheartened by German troop confusion, by inadequate provisioning of the port fortifications, and by the vigor of the American attack, the commanders virtually abandoned Cherbourg and concentrated their efforts to mount against the British the decisive counterattack that might throw the Allies back into the sea. They reckoned without Hitler. A week after the conference Hitler intervened again to order the proposed attack shifted west and against the Americans in order to relieve pressure on the Cherbourg garrison.

By then, Allied action had developed the situation beyond German control. On the following day the British commenced a large-scale attack toward Caen; a day later Cherbourg fell to the Americans. With Cherbourg gone and the British threatening Caen, the Germans had no alternative but to commit reserves to hold the persistent British attack. The only reserves available were the troops preparing to launch the German counterattack. These had to be committed defensively. Forced by Allied initiative, the Germans reluctantly abandoned their offensive concept for one of defense.

Hitler’s interest in Cherbourg had been strategic, not tactical. His basic strategic desire had been to hold the Allies and hamper their buildup until the Germans could launch the countermeasure that would change the course of the war.

Hitler’s commanders, on the other hand, had been thinking tactically. They had not grasped Hitler’s willingness to give ground to the British in order to strike indirectly at Cherbourg. They had not seemed to understand Hitler’s desire to prevent the Americans, and thus eventually the Allies, from improving their logistical situation. Even the German Air Force command in the west, forced to choose between supporting ground troops in the Cherbourg or the Caen regions, had on its own initiative selected the latter.

From the Allied point of view, Hitler was correct. Cherbourg was the important immediate Allied objective, not Paris. The French capital was far from Allied minds in June, 1944; in fact, Allied plans for the far distant future called for troops to bypass Paris.

With the German counteroffensive forces dissipated in defense against the British, Rundstedt came to the conclusion that the Germans could neither drive the Allies from their beachhead nor hold the Allies in Normandy. For him there were two alternatives, capitulation or withdrawal across France to the German border. Either course of action reflected a defeatist point of view, an attitude that Rommel had demonstrated as early as several days after the invasion.

Hitler in contrast had not abandoned the idea of launching a decisive offensive action some time in the future. With the army temporarily on the defensive, he ordered the air force and the navy to perform two functions. They were to disrupt Allied logistics and also permit the German army to regain a freedom of movement that would allow Hitler to launch his decisive act. Whether Hitler believed that the feeble forces of Goering and Doenitz could bring about the conditions he desired, he proceeded on the assumption that they might. In the meantime, while the principal effort occurred on the sea and in the air, the ground troops had to stand fast to prevent the expansion of the Allied beachhead.

Hitler’s insistence on holding a defensive line in France stemmed from two facts. Withdrawing troops always lost not only morale but also personnel through stragglers and equipment through abandonment; Germany could afford neither. On the eastern front the vastness of space made limited withdrawals or a Russian breakthrough matters of little importance, but on the western front such an event could well be disastrous. Believing it more dangerous for the German Army to attempt to withdraw across France and through its hostile population, a withdrawal that was sure to be harassed by Allied air, Hitler attempted to hold.

Convinced that the situation had disintegrated beyond repair, Rundstedt requested relief at the end of June. At about the same time a report from a subordinate headquarters, transmitted through the chain of command and endorsed at every echelon, seemed to imply criticism of Hitler’s direction of the war. Profoundly disturbed, Hitler relieved Rundstedt; he sent a cryptic message to Rommel telling him to learn to take orders.

Hitler needed about a week to realize that Goering and Doenitz were unable to fulfill his requirements for a decisive offensive act on the ground. He fell back on his Minister of Production, Speer. .Hope for victory, Hitler decided, lay in the speedy manufacture of jet aircraft, more tanks, munitions, and fuel. Until such weapons could be employed against the Allies, the German ground troops, still performing a secondary mission, had to continue to hold the line and delay the Allies.

By this time many German generals, both on the eastern and western fronts, had become convinced that defeat was inevitable. The Russians had instituted a gigantic offensive that menaced the German position in Scandinavia. Danger of defection in the Balkans was arising. In the west, the Allies had become capable of breaking through the shallow German defensive line in France and of driving immediately into Germany. A conspiracy reached its climax on July 20th with an unsuccessful attempt on Hitler’s life. Smashed immediately, the putsch had no direct effect on military operations in the west. Yet Hitler began to have tormenting thoughts that he was surrounded by traitors.

Three days after the putsch Hitler agreed that a German withdrawal from France had become necessary. But the Allies moved too fast. Two days later the Americans launched the attack that developed into the breakout. The success of the Americans was accelerated by inefficiency on the part of the German army commander opposing them, Hausser. By the time that Field Marshal Kluge, Rundstedt’s replacement who had also assumed Rommel’s duties, could gather together in his hands the reins of tactical control, American troops were at Avranches.

As American units streamed south of Avranches and turned simultaneously westward into Brittany and eastward toward the Seine, Hitler acted strategically again, rather than tactically.

Thinking in terms of strategic logistics, Hitler continued in Brittany his policy of denying the Allies major ports. He had transformed these ports into fortress cities. He had placed ruthless and determined men in command of them, and he had ordered them to defend “to the last man, to the last cartridge.” Cherbourg had taught Hitler a lesson. He had been disappointed there because his field commanders had failed to grasp his strategic conception. But he had also been embittered by the tactical defense of Cherbourg. Instead of conducting the final resistance in the city as he had wished, the last defenders had fought a vain action on the extreme point of the peninsula where the Americans had ultimately taken some 8,000 prisoners who might, according to Hitler, better have fought within the city and thereby delayed the Allied capture of the port. He had then resolved that the Brittany ports would not be lost so easily as Cherbourg, and he had taken measures to implement his resolution.

Satisfied that the Americans would not gain Brittany and its ports quickly, Hitler acted against the breakout forces streaming through Avranches by ordering a counterattack that was essentially strategic in nature. The counterattack, to be launched westward through Mortain to Avranches, a distance of twenty miles, was to cut the American supply lines. Success would separate American forces north and south of Avranches, sever the American troops in Brittany from their supplies coming from the invasion beaches and from Cherbourg, and place the Americans in a state of confusion.

Admittedly, such action was a gamble. But on the basis that the Allies were capable of more mobility on the ground than the Germans and could therefore beat them in a war of movement, and on the basis that Allied air and the French movement would continually harass a German withdrawal, Hitler decided that the gamble was worth the risk.

Kluge and most of the field commanders, despite misgiving, carried through the Mortain counterattack. But the attack was halfhearted, imperfectly prepared, and incorrectly timed; it also miscalculated by a scant thousand yards a point on the American front so weak that the attack if made there would quite certainly have carried the Germans to Avranches. Furthermore, refusal of a division commander, Schwerin, to attack, an instance of flagrant disobedience, seriously impaired whatever chance the Germans had had of success. The tenacity of the American defense at Mortain, the speed of American reaction to the attack, and the efficacy of Allied air and artillery sealed the doom of the German effort. Although a failure primarily because of the tactical incompetence of his commanders, Hitler’s counterattack had caused the Allies extreme concern and had threatened to nullify at least temporarily the Allied advance.

Failure at Mortain was followed by the familiar events of the Argentan-Falaise pocket. The dire prophecies that German generals had muttered came true. The defeated German army streamed in retreat across France, smashed en route in Normandy and at the Seine, unable to turn and fight until it reached the Siegfried Line at the German border.

Meanwhile, although his generals had frantically recommended that all the troops be recalled to Germany, Hitler insisted that the Brittany fortress ports be held. From a tactical point of view, defense of these coastal cities was an inexcusable waste of resources. Strategically, their temporary retention by German garrisons caused the Allies to divert a sizable force into Brittany and indirectly resulted in partially preventing, on logistical grounds, the Allies from surging forward in strength against the Siegfried Line.

The tenacious German defense of St. Malo delayed the liberation of Brittany for two weeks. At the successful completion of the American siege of St. Malo, three hundred German soldiers still held a tiny island several thousand yards offshore, and they continued to do so for two more weeks against combined air, sea, and land bombardment.

The defenders of Brest engaged more than three American divisions and kept them occupied more than a month. Each American soldier in Brittany and each round of ammunition expended there comprised so much less available to be used against the German homeland.

Similarly but more significantly because of its vital importance, Hitler denied the Allies the port of Antwerp on the Channel coast. Despite the pleas of Field Marshal Model, who had replaced Kluge, Hitler refused to withdraw his troops along the Scheldt estuary, which connects Antwerp to the sea. In contrast to Cherbourg, which functioned as an Allied port from the middle of July, the port of Antwerp was of no use to the Allies until the end of November, three long months after the German retreat from France. .

Without the major ports on which they had based their invasion plans, the Allies outran their logistics as they swept across France. Having lost the momentum of their drive at the German border, they prepared for winter battle. By then, Hitler had scraped together a force to defend Germany.

During this interval, despite his disastrous defeat in France, Hitler continued to search for the mightly blow that would crush the Allies in one decisive act. In September he found it. In December he launched it—the Ardennes counter-offensive called the Battle of the Bulge. Little more than two weeks after the Allies began to employ the port of Antwerp, Hitler threatened to take it back.

Perhaps the Ardennes counteroffensive was a mistake. Certainly the attack dissipated German resources, and its failure clearly revealed German bankruptcy. But Hitler had no alternative. A cautious policy would have served only to prolong a conflict already lost, lost unless a daring act changed the entire course of the war.

Possessing an active and bold imagination, an astute grasp of geopolitics, a highly developed ability to estimate and appraise, Hitler could coordinate his military goals and his political objectives far better than anyone else. Fighting a defensive war with limited resources, he could afford no error. Everything was important, and in view of Allied superiority in men and materiel, everything was more or less a gamble. Since he alone had access to all the information available from all the fronts, he alone was capable of correct decisions. Feeling that he needed to give his personal attention to all matters, he assumed areas of responsibility usually relegated to subordinates.

By 1944 he had delegated to his henchmen by default much of his governmental activity. He did not dare do so on the critical field of battle. But the burden of his commitments prevented him from being everywhere at once. Hitler was not a superman.

As long as Germany was victorious most German generals were content to regard Hitler as a genius. When German fortunes declined, Hitler’s interference seemed nefarious, and professional officers began to resent the spectacle of a political figure, a former corporal, meddling in military affairs.

For the most part from a social class historically more European than national, the officer corps began to question a war which by 1944 had begun to appear inconclusive if not hopeless. When they discovered that Hitler sometimes oversimplified or disguised situations to inject courage into subordinates, they lost faith in him. Interpreting his close supervision correctly as lack of confidence in their abilities, they became indifferent or mutinous. “You demand our trust,” Rommel once told him, “but you do not trust us.”

In an organization permeated by distrust and suspicion, deceit and falsehood replaced candor. As the split between Hitler and his military commanders spread, concealed facts and incomplete reports became commonplace. Information on military operations, on armament production, on personnel figures departed increasingly from reality.

Worse, the pyramid of command was no longer a hierarchy of commanders filling positions in accordance with military efficiency. It had become a collection of personalities in which personal ambitions and suspicions ran counter to precepts of command. To a lesser extent, Hitler’s subordinates reflected him, and each commander became his own strategic planner, each convinced that he alone was right.

Hitler’s strength lay in the fact that he had no alternative but resistance. His weakness was the fear that all dictators suffer, the possible disloyalty of disillusioned hero worshippers.

Disillusioned by the prospect of defeat, many German generals lost the blind faith that holds together a dictatorship. In that moment and for that reason they failed to comprehend Hitler’s conduct of the war. Lamely, and later, they protested his orders to continue to fight. His strategic concept was beyond them. Their fear of failure had perhaps unnerved them. Perhaps, too, they had suddenly become aware of the dishonor that awaited them for having helped Hitler ascend to the place of fuehrer.

Despite overwhelming Allied power, despite an entourage of defeatists on the one hand and a handful of unrealistic flatterers on the other, Hitler waged effective war in the west. That he was able to do so with Germany in such weakened condition indicates that he had a firm grasp of strategic reality, a capability beyond the capacity of his tactical commanders. It would appear that the military ability of the German generals suffers in comparison, that their efficiency was overrated, and that their military reputation was perhaps more publicized than real.

This is not altogether true. The ingredient that might have prevented the split between Hitler and his generals was the cementing oil of faith. Subordinate commanders seldom know all the reasons for decisions at higher headquarters. If they trust their superior officers, subordinates will follow instructions even though those orders may appear to be irrational. If they lose confidence, they will interpret apparent irrationality as madness. While “Sieg Heill” had meaning, the military machine ran beautifully. But when the generals became frightened by the prospect of defeat, they balked, and thus they accelerated the Allied victory.