and favoured postponing it until the following May. Hitler wanted to keep his options open. Things would become difficult with the passing of time. Air attacks should begin straight away. They would determine Germany’s relative strength. ‘If results of air warfare are unsatisfactory, invasion preparations will be stopped. If we have the impression that the English are crushed and that effects will soon begin to tell, we shall proceed to the attack,’ he stated. He remained sceptical about an invasion. The risks were high; so, however, was the prize, he added. But he was already thinking of the next step. What if no invasion took place? He returned to the hopes Britain placed in the USA and in Russia. If Russia were to be eliminated, then America, too, would be lost for Britain because of the increase in Japan’s power in the Far East. Russia was ‘the factor on which England is relying the most’. The British had been ‘completely down’. Now they had revived. Russia had been shaken by events in the West. The British were now clutching on, hoping for a change in the situation during the next few months.
He moved to his momentous conclusion: remove Russia from the equation. Halder’s notes retained Hitler’s emphasis. ‘
Unlike the anxious reactions on the occasions in 1938 and 1939 when the generals had feared war with Britain, there is no indication that they were horror-struck at what they heard. (As we have noted, Halder, gleaning what was in the air, had anticipated Hitler in broaching, at the beginning of the month, the possibility of military intervention to force the Russians to recognize German dominance.)162 The fateful underestimation of the Russian military potential was something Hitler shared with his commanders. Intelligence on the Soviet army was poor. But the underestimation was not solely the result of poor intelligence. Airs of disdain for Slavs mingled easily with contempt for what Bolshevism had managed to achieve. Contact with Soviet generals in the partition of Poland had not impressed the Germans. The dismal showing of the Red Army in Finland (where the inadequately equipped Finns had inflicted unexpected and heavy losses on the Soviets in the early stages of the ‘Winter War’ of 1939–40) had done nothing to improve its image in their eyes. Not least, there was the apparent madness which had prompted Stalin to destroy his own officer corps. Whereas an attack on the British Isles remained a perilous undertaking, an assault on the Soviet Union raised no great alarm. A true ‘lightning war’ could be expected here.163
The day after the meeting on the Berghof, Hitler signed Directive No. 17, intensifying the air-war and sea- war against Britain as the basis for her ‘final subjugation’. He explicitly — underscoring the sentence in the Directive — reserved for himself a decision on the use of terror bombing.164 The offensive was set to begin four days later, but was postponed until the 8th. It was again postponed on account of the weather conditions until the 13th.165 From then on, the German fighters sought to sweep the Royal Air Force from the skies. Wave after wave of attacks on the airfields of southern England was launched. Spitfires, Hurricanes and Messerschmitts wheeled, arched, dived, and strafed each other in the dramatic and heroic dogfights on which Britain’s survival at this point depended. The early optimistic results announced in Berlin soon proved highly misleading.166 The task was beyond the Luftwaffe. At first by the skin of their teeth the young British pilots held out, then gradually won the ascendancy. Despite Hitler’s orders that he alone was to decide on terror- bombing, 100 planes of the Luftwaffe acting, it seems, under a loosely worded directive from Goring issued on 2 August, had attacked London’s East End on the night of 24 August. As retaliation, the RAF carried out the first British bombing raids on Berlin the following night.167 Ineffective though they were, they came as a shock to the people of Berlin. Goring had once joked that should British planes ever reach Germany, his name was not Hermann Goring, but Hermann Meier. From now on, caustic Berlin tongues dubbed him ‘Herr Meier’.168
Hitler regarded the bombing of Berlin as a disgrace.169 As usual, his reaction was to threaten massive retaliation. ‘We’ll wipe out their cities! We’ll put an end to the work of these night pirates,’170 he fumed at a speech in the Sportpalast on 4 September. He spoke with Goring about undertaking the revenge. From 7 September the nightly bombing of London began.171 It was the turn of the citizens of Britain’s capital to experience night after night the terror from the skies. The shift to terror- bombing marked a move away from the idea of the landing which Hitler had never whole-heartedly favoured. Persuaded by Goring, he now thought for a while that Britain could be bombed to the conference-table without German troops having to undertake the perilous landing.172 But, dreadful though the ‘Blitz’ was, the Luftwaffe was simply not powerful enough to bomb Britain to submission. The chief of the Luftwaffe’s Operational Staff (Luftwaffenfuhrungstab), General Otto Hoffmann von Waldau, stated almost a month after the high-point of the ‘Battle of Britain’ that an air-fleet four times the size would have been needed to force Britain to its knees.173
Between 10 and 13 September there were signs that Hitler had gone utterly cold on the idea of a landing.174 On 14 September he then told his commanders that the conditions for ‘Operation Sealion’ — the operational plan to attack Great Britain — had not been attained. The military chiefs themselves did not believe that a landing in England at that stage could be successfully carried out.175 ‘I had the impression at this discussion,’ wrote Nicolaus von Below many years later, ‘that Hitler had given up hope of a successful invasion of England the following spring. In autumn 1940 the great unknown, the fairly improvised crossing over the sea, frightened him. He was unsure.’176
Meanwhile, the dogfights over southern England and the Channel coast intensified during the first fortnight in September, reaching a climacteric on Sunday, the 15th. The Wehrmacht admitted 182 planes lost in that fortnight, forty-three on the 15th alone.177 The horrors of the ‘Blitz’ would continue for months to be inflicted upon British cities — among the worst devastation the bombing of Coventry on the night of 14 November, as the German onslaught switched to the industrial belt of the Midlands to strike at more manageable targets than London.178 But the ‘Battle of Britain’ was over. Hitler had never been convinced that the German air-offensive would successfully lay the basis for the invasion of which he was in any case so sceptical. On 17 September he ordered the indefinite postponement — though, for psychological reasons, not the cancellation — of ‘Operation Sealion’.179
The peace-overtures had failed. The battle for the skies had failed. Meanwhile, on 3 September the grant of fifty destroyers to Britain by the USA — a deal which Roosevelt had eventually pushed through, initially against much opposition from the isolationists — was, despite the limited use of the elderly warships, the plainest indication to date that Britain might in the foreseeable future be able to reckon with the still dormant military might of the USA.180 It was increasingly urgent to get Britain out of the war. Hitler’s options were, in autumn 1940, still not closed off. There was the possibility of forcing Britain to come to terms through a strategy of attacks on her Mediterranean and Near Eastern strongholds. But once that option also faded Hitler was left with only one possibility: the one that was in his view not only strategically indispensable but embodied one of his most long- standing ideological obsessions. This point would not finally be reached until December 1940. By then it would be time to prepare for the crusade against Bolshevism.
III
Hitler did not have the power to bring the war to the conclusion he wanted. And, within Germany, he was powerless to prevent the governance of the Reich from slipping increasingly out of control. The tendencies already plainly evident before the war — unresolved Party-State dualism, unclear or overlapping spheres of competence, proliferation of
