transferred all the cannon to the English Channel for use against the British; took all the stored food and equipment in the labyrinth; and left a few light bulbs to illuminate the empty concrete passageways. So the Maginot Lines remains to this day.
The French passed from the stage of historical greatness. Germany’s implacable enemy of the centuries had at last come to grief. Strategically, they had guessed wrong on the use of industrial power in war, and had wasted their national energy and treasure on an enormous tragic joke in steel and concrete: half a wall. Tactically, when General Gamelin said, “
Shadows on the Victory
In the headquarters of the Supreme Command, the victory over France, while welcome and exhilarating, had its worrisome aspects. Some of us who were present at the signing of the armistice watched with heavy hearts as the Fuhrer danced his little jig of triumph in the sunshine of Compiegne. We were torn between pride in this feat of German arms, this virile reversal of the 1918 defeat, and our inside knowledge of tragic errors the capering Dictator had made or tried to make. There were completely covered up for the world at large by the rosy glow of success. Germany in that hour was like a virgin at a military ball, all radiant with the blushed aroused in her by the admiring eyes of handsome officers, and all unaware of a fatal cancer budding inside her.
The cancer already afflicting Germany at that hour, unfelt by all but handful in the innermost circle of command, was amateur military leadership. We had watched the symptoms crop up in the minor Norway operation. Our hope was that our inexperienced warlord, having been blooded in that victory, would steady down for the great assault in the west.
But, six days after the breakthrough, when Rundstedt was rolling to the sea, with Guderian’s panzers in the van and all enemy forces in flight, Hitler had a bad fit of nerves, fearing a French counterattack from the south — no more likely at that moment than a Hottentot counterattack — and halted Rundstedt’s army group for two precious days. Fortunately Guderian wangled permission for a “reconnaissance in force” westward. Thereupon he simply ignored the Fuhrer and blitzed ahead to the coast.
Then followed an incredible tactical blunder. With the British expeditionary force helplessly retreating toward the sea, but far behind in the race and about to be cut off by Guderian’s massed tanks, the Fuhrer halted Guderian on the River Aa, nine miles from Dunkirk, and forbade the tank divisions to advance for three days! To this day nobody has factually ascertained why he did this. Theories are almost as abundant as military historians, but they add little to the facts. During these three days the British rescued their armies from the Dunkirk beaches. That is the long and short of the “miracle of Dunkirk.”
Had Hitler not halted Guderian, the panzers would have beaten the foe to Dunkirk and cut him off. The British would have lost over three hundred thousand men and officers, the bulk of their trained land force, in the Flanders cauldron. I discuss in detail, under my section “Fantastic Halt at the River Aa,” the preposterousness of the excuse that the terrain around Dunkirk was too marshy, and too crisscrossed by hedges and canals, for tank operations. The fact is that finally Guderian did advance, after seventy-two mortal hours in which the first golden chance for quick victory in World War II slipped from our grasp. Hermann Goring’s Luftwaffe was supposed to take over from the halted armored divisions and finish off the British. Perhaps Hitler relished this notion of letting a Nazi air marshal in at the kill, instead of the distrusted Army General Staff. History records what Goring accomplished.
But if final victory was denied us, at least we had vanquished France; that much seemed indisputable. Yet on June 6 even this was momentarily cast in doubt when Hitler had another brainstorm. Paris, he suddenly declared, was not the objective; what our armies should do next was cut southeast in force and capture the Lorraine basin, so as to deny France its coal and armaments industries! Fortunately the momentum of operations was beyond even the Fuhrer’s power to meddle. We took Paris even while a number of divisions went wheeling needlessly into Lorraine.
His Worst Mistake
But worse than all these mistakes — so bad that history will forever stand amazed at the fact — the Wehrmacht arrived at the English Channel without any plan of what to do next! There we were at the sea, millions strong, armed to the teeth, flushed with victory, facing a beaten, disarmed, impotent enemy across a ditch forty miles wide; but our infallible Leader, who had all staff activities so firmly in his grip that nobody could make a move without his nod, had somehow overlooked the slight detail of how one got to England.
Here nevertheless was a moment for greatness, such as comes once in a thousand years. Alexander, Caesar, and Napoleon in their time had made mistakes as major as any of Hitler’s. What they possessed to balance and outweigh these was generalship: the ability to divine and seize a favoring moment with the utmost speed and audacity. Yes, we had no plan for invading England, but had the British had a plan for crossing the Channel from Dunkirk in a scraped-together flotilla of cockleshells? Under the spur of necessity, despite the total disorganization of defeat, despite fierce Luftwaffe bombardment, they had moved three hundred thousand men across the water. Why then could not we, the strongest armed force on earth in the full tide of victory, do a “Dunkirk in reverse,” and throw a force of armored divisions across the Channel to an undefended, helpless shore? There was nothing on the ground in England to oppose our march to London. The rescued expeditionary force was a disarmed rabble; all its equipment lay abandoned in Flanders. The Home Guard was a pathetic raggle-taggle of old men and boys.
Opposing our invasion would have been the Royal Air Force and the British fleet, two formidable fighting organizations. But had Hitler seized the first moment in June, using every available vessel afloat in western and northern Europe — there were thousands — to hurl an invasion body across the Channel, the fleet would have been caught by surprise, as it had been in the Norway operation. We would have been across before it could mass to counterattack. The aerial Battle of Britain would have been fought out in the skies over the Channel, under conditions vastly more favorable to the Luftwaffe.
Assuredly we would have taken heavy losses. The attack phase and the supply problem would have cost dearly. Again we would have been staking all on one throw. But in the hindsight of history, what else was there to do? I have several times requested in writing, from American and German archivists, a copy of a draft memorandum I wrote in June 1940, outlining for headquarters discussion a plan for exactly such an immediate cross-Channel assault. My requests have gone unanswered. The memorandum is only a curiosity, and I have no way of knowing whether it has actually survived. At the time Jodl returned it to me without a single word, and that was the end of it.
The Aborted Invasion
Seelowe (Sea Lion), the invasion scheme scrambled together in the ensuing months, proved an exercise in leisurely futility. Forcing the Channel, once the British had caught their breath and fortified their coast, needed a complex buildup. Hitler never really pushed it. Against England he had lacked the greatness to dare all; and we gradually saw that he lacked the stomach to dare much. He merely allowed Goring to waste his Luftwaffe over the British aerodromes far inland, while the army and the navy frittered away weeks that stretched through the summer, disputing over the operation plan, and passing the buck back and forth. In the end, “Sea lion” was abandoned. Germany certainly had the industrial plant and the military strength to mount the invasion, but not the leadership. When an ounce more of boldness in battle might have won a world, Hitler faltered; and the professional generals were all in impotent subjection to this amateur.
That was the real “triumph” of the Fuhrerprinzip in the summer of 1040. In retrospect, the wrong leader danced the jig.
