But Hitler was incapable of listening to anybody. This undid him and ruined Germany. Grand strategy and incredibly petty detail were equally his preoccupations. The overruling axiom of our war effort was that Hitler gave the orders. In a brutal speech to our staff in November 1939, prompted by our efforts to discourage a premature attack on France, he warned us that he would ruthlessly crush any of us who opposed his will. Like so many of his other threats, he made this one good. By the end of the war most of our staff had been dismissed in disgrace. Many had been shot. All of us would have been shot sooner or later, had he not lost his nerve and shot himself first.
Thus it happened that the strength of the great German people, and the valor of the peerless German soldier, became passive tools in Hitler’s amateur hands.
Hitler and Churchill: A Comparison
Winston Churchill, in a revealing passage of his memoirs on the functioning of his chiefs of staff, expresses his envy of Hitler, who could get his decisions acted upon without submitting them to the discouragement and pulling apart of hide-bound professional soldiers. In fact, this was what saved England and won the war.
Churchill was exactly the kind of brilliant amateur meddler in military affairs that Hitler was. Both rose to power from the depths of political rejection. Both relied chiefly on oratory to sway the multitude. Both somehow expressed the spirit of their peoples, and so won loyalty that outlasted any number of mistakes, defeats, and disasters. Both thought in grandiose terms, knew little about economic and logistical realities, and cared less. Both were iron men in defeat. Above all, both men had overwhelming personalities that could silence rational opposition while they talked. Of this strange phenomenon, I had ample and bitter experience with Hitler. The crucial difference was that in the end Churchill had to listen to the professionals, whereas the German people had committed itself to the fatal
Had Churchill possessed the power Adolf Hitler managed to arrogate to himself, the Allied armies would have bled to death in 1944, invading the “soft underbelly of the Axis,” as Churchill called the fearful mountains and water obstacles of the Balkan peninsula. There we would have slaughtered them. The Italian campaign proved that. Only on the flat plains of Normandy did the Ford-production style of American warfare, using immense masses of inferior, cheaply made machinery, have a chance of working. The Balkans would have been a colossal Thermopylae, won by the defenders. It would have been a Churchill defeat compared to which Gallipoli would have been a schoolboy picnic.
With a Fuhrer’s authority, Churchill would also have frittered away the Allied landing craft, always a critical supply problem, in witless attempts to recapture the Greek islands and to storm Rhodes. In 1944 he nagged Eisenhower and Roosevelt to commit these wild follies until they both stopped talking to him.
Churchill was a Hitler restrained by democracy. If the German nation ever rises again, let it remember the different ends of these two men. I am not arguing for the goose gabble of parliamentarians. By conviction I have always been a conservative monarchist. But whatever the civilian structure, let our people hereafter entrust military affairs to its trained generals, and insist that politicians keep hands off the war machine.
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: This very jarring and distorted comparison of Hitler and Churchill omits the crucial difference, of course. By the common verdict of historians, even most German ones, Hitler was a ruthless adventurer bent on conquest and plunder, while Churchill was a great defender of human liberty, dignity, and law. It is true that Churchill tended to interfere in military matters. Politicians find that temptation hard to resist.
Roon’s assertion about the British plan to land in Norway is correct. His conclusions, again, are a different matter, showing how slippery the issues at Nuremberg were. England was the sole protector and hope of small neutral countries like Norway and Denmark. The purpose of a British landing would have been to defend Norway, not to occupy and dominate it. In a war, both sides may well try to take the same neutral objective for strategic reasons, which does not prove that both sides are equally guilty of aggression. That is the fallacy in Roon’s argument. I would not recommend trying to persuade a German staff officer of this. — V.H.
Chapter 18
Warren Henry and his fiancee Janice were set straight about Russia’s invasion of Finland by an unexpected person: Madeline’s new boyfriend, a trombone player and student of public affairs named Sewell Bozeman. Early in December the engaged couple came to New York and visited Madeline in her new apartment. Finding the boyfriend there was a surprise.
The news of her move to her own apartment had enraged Pug Henry, but had he known her reason, he would have been pleased. Madeline had come to despise the two girls with whom she had shared a flat. Both were having affairs — one with a joke writer, the other with an actor working as a bellhop. Madeline had found herself being asked to skulk around; stay out late, or remain in her room while one or another pair copulated. The walls in the shabby apartment were thin. She had no way of even pretending unawareness.
She was disgusted. Both girls had good jobs, both dressed with taste, both were college graduates. Yet they behaved like sluts, as Madeline understood the word. She was a Henry, with her father’s outlook. Give or take a few details of Methodist doctrine, Madeline believed in what she had learned at home and at church. Unmarried girls of good character didn’t sleep with men; to her, that was almost a law of nature. Men had more leeway; she knew, for instance, that Warren had been something of a hellion before his engagement. She liked Byron better because he seemed, in this respect, more like her upright father. To Madeline sex was a delightful matter of playing with fire, but enjoying the blaze from a safe distance, until she could leap into the hallowed white conflagration of a bridal night. She was a middle-class good girl, and not in the least ashamed of it. She thought her roommates were gross fools. As soon as Hugh Cleveland gave her a raise, she got out.
“I don’t know,” she said, stirring a pot over a tiny stove behind a screen, “maybe this dinner was a mistake. We all could have gone to a restaurant.”
She was addressing the boyfriend, Sewell Bozeman, called Bozey by the world. They had met at a party in September. Bozey was a thin, long, pale, tractable fellow with thick straight brown hair and thoughtful brown eyes that bulged behind rimless glasses. He always dressed in brown, in brown shoes, brown ties, and even brown shirts; he was always reading enormous brown books on economics and politics and had a generally brown outlook on life, believing that America was a doomed society, rapidly going under. Madeline found him a piquant and intriguing novelty. At the moment, he was setting her small dining table, wearing over his brown array the pink apron he had put on to peel onions for the stew.
“Well it’s not too late,” he said. “You can save the stew for another night, and we can take your brother and his girl to Julio’s.”
“No, I told Warren I was cooking the dinner. That girl’s rolling in money — she wouldn’t like an Italian dive. And they have to rush off to the theatre.” Madeline came out, patting her hot face with a handkerchief, and looked at the table. “That’s fine. Thanks, Bozey. I’m going to change.” She opened a closet door crusted with yellowing white paint and took out a dress and slip, glancing around the small room. With a three-sided bay window looking out to backyards and drying laundry, it was the whole apartment, except for the kitchenette and a tiny bath.
Large pieces of blue cloth lay on the threadbare divan under yellow paper patterns. “Darn it! That divan is such a rat’s nest. Maybe I’ll have time to finish cutting that dress, if I hurry.”
“I can finish cutting it,” Bozey said.
“Nonsense, Bozey, you can’t cut a dress. Don’t try.” A doorbell wheezily rang. “Well, the wine’s here already. That’s good.” She went to open the door. Warren and Janice walked in and surprised the tall popeyed man in his pink apron, holding shears in one hand and a sleeve pattern in the other. What with the smell of the hot stew, and Madeline in a housecoat with a dress and a lacy slip on her arm, it was a strikingly domestic scene.
“Oh, hi. You’re early. My gosh, Warren, you’re tan!” Madeline was so sure of her own rectitude that it didn’t occur to her to be embarrassed. “This is Sewell Bozeman, a friend of mine.”
Bozey waved the shears feebly at them; he was embarrassed, and in his fluster he started to cut a ragged
