Stalin’s unvarying policy after signing the Ribbentrop pact was to seize whatever territory he could, while we were at war with the democracies, to strengthen his position for an eventual showdown with us. Hitler had already given him huge concessions in the Baltic states and in Poland, to buy a free hand against the West. But like all Russian rulers, Czarist or Bolshevik, Stalin had a big appetite. This was his chance to take over the Karelian Isthmus and dominate the Gulf of Finland. When his emissaries failed to get these concessions from the proud Finns by threats, Stalin set out to take them by force. The rights of Finland were, as a matter of course, to be trampled upon.
But to the world’s surprise, the Russian dictator got in trouble, for the attack went badly. The vaunted Red Army covered itself with disgrace, revealing itself in Finland as an ill-equipped, ill-trained, miserably led rabble, unable to crush a small well-drilled foe. Whether this was due to Stalin’s purges of his officer force in the late thirties, or to the traditional Russian inefficiency added to the depressant effect of Bolshevism, or to the use of inferior troops, remained unclear. But from November 1939 to March 1940, Finland did bravely fight off the Slav horde. Nor did the Russians ever really defeat them militarily. In the classic manner of Russian combat, the handful of Finnish defenders was finally drowned in a rain of artillery shells and a bath of Slav blood. Thus Stalin’s goal was achieved, at ruthless cost, of shaping up the Leningrad front by pushing back our Finnish friends on the Karelian Isthmus. This move, it must be confessed, probably saved Leningrad in 1941.
After the Finnish victory during Christmas — the classic battle of Suomussalmi in which nearly thirty thousand Russians were killed or frozen to death, at a cost of about nine hundred Finnish dead — it was impossible to regard the Soviet army as a competent modern adversary. Much later, Hermann Goring was to call the Finnish campaign “the greatest camouflage action in history,” implying that the Russians in Finland had pretended to be weak in order to mask their potential. This was just an absurd excuse for the failures of his Luftwaffe in the east. In point of fact, Stalin’s Russia in 1939 was militarily feeble. What happened between that time and our final debacle on the eastern front at Russian hands is the subject of a later section, but their performance in Finland certainly misled us in our planning.
Sitzkrieg Ends: Norway
Much vociferous propaganda went on in the Western democracies about the attack on Finland, and about sending the Finns military aid. In the end they did nothing. However, the opening of the Finnish front did force Hitler to face up to a genuine threat in the north: the British plot to seize Norway. Of this we had hard intelligence. Unlike many of the “plots” and “conspiracies” of which our German armed forces were accused at the Nuremberg trials, this British plot certainly existed. Winston Churchill openly describes it in his memoirs. He acknowledges that the British invasion was laid on for a date ahead of ours, and then put off, so that we beat the British into Norway by the merest luck, by a matter of days.
The Russo-Finnish war made the problem of Norway acute, because England and France could use “aid to Finland” as a perfect pretext for landing in Norway and driving across Scandinavia. This would have been disastrous for us. The North Sea, bracketed by British bases on both sides, would have been closed to our U-boats, choking off our main thrust at sea. Even more important, the winter route for ships bringing us Swedish iron ore lay along the Norwegian coast. Deprived of that iron ore, we could not have gone on fighting for long. When the High Command convinced Hitler of these risks, he issued the order for “Weser Exercise,” the occupation of Norway, and postponed Case Yellow once again.
It is a sad commentary that Admiral Raeder, at the Nuremberg trials, was convicted of “a plot to occupy neutral Norway,” when the British who sat in judgment had plotted the same thing themselves. Such paradoxes have enabled me to bear with honor my own experience at Nuremberg, and to regard it as not a disgrace at all, but rather a political consequence of defeat. Had the war gong the other way, and had we hanged Churchill for plotting to occupy Norway, what would the world have said? Yet what is sauce for the goose should be sauce for the gander.
Our occupation of Norway, a surprise overwater move virtually under the guns of a highly superior British fleet, was a great success; not, however, because of Hitler’s leadership, but in spite of it. We took heavy losses at sea, especially of destroyers that we sorely missed when the invasion of England was later planned. But the price was small compared to the gain. We forestalled the British, opened up a much wider coastline to counter the blockade, and secured the Swedish iron ore supply for the rest of the war.
Mistakes in Norway
Hitler’s amateurishness showed up badly in Norway. It cropped up again and again in every campaign, tending only to get grosser as time went on.
The mark of the amateur in any field is to lose one’s head when the going gets hard. What marks the professional in his competence in an emergency, and almost the whole art of the soldier is to make sound judgments in the fog of war. Hitler’s propensity to lose his head took two forms: calling a panicky halt to operations when they were gathering momentum, and changing the objective in mid-campaign. Both these failings appeared in Weser Exercise. I give details in my Norway operational analysis, of his hysterical insistence day after day that we abandon Narvik, the real key to the position; his wild sudden scheme to capture the port of Trondheim with the luxury liner
This interference from above, incidentally, was to haunt operations to the end. Adolf Hitler had used all his political shrewdness over many years to gain control of the armed forces, not stopping at strong-arm methods. There is no question that this man’s lust for power was insatiable, and it is certainly regrettable that the German people did not understand his true nature until it was too late. The background of this usurpation will be sketched here, as it significantly affected the whole course of the six-year war.
How Hitler Usurped Control of the Army
In 1938, he and his Nazi minions did not scruple to frame grave charges of sexual misconduct against revered generals of the top command. Also, they took advantage of a few actual unfortunate lapses of this nature; the details need not be raked over in this account. Suffice it that the Nazis managed to topple the professional leadership in a bold underhanded coup based on such accusation. Hitler with sudden stunning arrogance then assumed supreme command himself! And he exacted an oath of loyalty to himself throughout the Wehrmacht, from foot soldier to general. In this act he showed his knowledge of the German character, which is the soul of honor, and takes such an oath as binding to the death.
Our staff, muted and disorganized by the disgusting revelations, and pseudo-revelations about our honored leaders, offered no coherent resistance to this usurpation. So the strict independence of the German army from German politics, which for generations had kept the Wehrmacht a strong stabilizing force in the Fatherland, had come to an end; and the drive wheel of the world’s strongest military machine was grasped by an Austrian street agitator.
In itself this was not a catastrophic turn. Hitler was far from a military ignoramus. He had had four years in the field as a foot soldier, and there are worse ways to learn war. He was a voracious reader of history and of military writings. His memory for technical facts was unusual. Above all, he did have the ability to get to the root of a large problem. He had almost a woman’s intuition for the nub of a matter. This is a fine leadership trait in war, always providing that the politician listens to the soldiers for the execution of his ideas. The combination of a bold political adventurer, a Charles XII personality risen from the streets to weld Germany into a solid driving force, and our General Staff, the world’s best military leadership, might well have brought us ultimate success.
