How Hitler Could Have Won World War II

States entered the war. The talks (known as ABC-1 for American-British conversations) concluded on March 29, 1941, with the recommendation that the defeat of Germany, which was far more powerful than Japan, should have the highest priority. Roosevelt did not formally endorse ABC-1, but followed it.

The British and Americans couldn’t agree on a policy against Japan. The British urged moving the American Pacific fleet to the Philippines and Singapore, but the Americans decided to keep it at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii and continue to negotiate with Japanese diplomats in hopes of a peaceful solution.

5 THE FATAL TURN TO THE EAST

HITLER HAD ALREADY SWITCHED HIS PRINCIPAL INTEREST AWAY FROM BRITAIN before the air war commenced. This came formally on July 31, 1940, in a conference with his senior military chiefs, when Hitler announced his “resolve to bring about the destruction of the vitality of Russia in the spring of 1941.”

This statement worried a number of German senior officers. They feared leaving Britain and its potential ally the United States as threats in the west, while Germany focused its energy, thoughts, and power on destruction of the Soviet Union.

The top army generals, along with their staffs, amassed arguments to convince Hitler to neutralize Britain before turning on Russia. Perhaps they realized dimly what Winston Churchill had grasped: that Britain’s best chance lay in holding out until Hitler made an irreparable slip, as Napoleon had done when he invaded Russia in 1812.

Only Erich Raeder, the German navy commander, saw the danger clearly enough to press repeatedly and with great conviction for another way to gain Germany’s goals. He demonstrated to Hitler that the victory over France had opened a way to victory—and Hitler would not have to attack the Soviet Union to achieve it.

Major General Alfred Jodl, chief of operations for the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW), or armed forces supreme command, felt the same way, though less openly and less forcefully. In a June 30, 1940, memorandum Jodl wrote that if the strike across the Channel did not come off, the Mediterranean offered the best arena to defeat Britain. His recommendation was to seize Egypt and the Suez Canal. Maybe the Italians could do it alone. If not, the Germans could help.

At the time the British had only 36,000 men in Egypt, including a single incomplete armored division under the command of General Sir Archibald Wavell. Moreover, Italy’s entry into the war had closed off Britain’s supply line through the Mediterranean except by means of heavily guarded convoys. The main British route now had to go 12,000 miles around the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa, and up through the Red Sea.

Even if Britain devoted all its strength to building a strong army in Egypt, it would take months, perhaps a year, to do so. And Britain was not going to undertake such a task because it had to concentrate most of its efforts on defense of the homeland.

Italy, aided by Germany, could get superior forces to Italy’s colony of Libya far more quickly. At this stage, it would be relatively easy to use Luftwaffe bombers to neutralize Malta, a British possession only sixty miles south of Sicily, where aircraft, ships, and submarines constituted a major danger to Italian supply ships and reinforcements moving between Italy and Tripoli in Libya.

Hitler in his July 31 meeting did not wholly exclude a “peripheral strategy” in the Mediterranean, and Generals Walther von Brauchitsch, commander in chief of the army, and Franz Halder, chief of staff in the army high command, Oberkommando des Heeres (OKH), proposed sending panzer forces (an “expeditionary corps”) and aircraft to Libya to help the Italians, who were planning an offensive into Egypt.

But Hitler hadn’t responded to Jodl’s memorandum and wouldn’t commit himself to a panzer corps and combat planes in Africa. The only thing in the Mediterranean that excited Hitler was the possibility of capturing the British base of Gibraltar, and thereby closing the western end of the Mediterranean to the Royal Navy. Britain had won this strategic rock from Spain in 1704 and had held it resolutely ever since.

Hitler could think of no way to grab Gibraltar except by direct assault. This meant German forces would have to approach through Spain. The Spanish dictator, Francisco Franco, would have to cooperate. Seeing that Hitler was deeply taken with the idea, the senior generals sent Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, chief of the Abwehr—the military counterintelligence service—to Madrid July 20–23 to get Franco’s reaction. Cagily, Franco didn’t reject Spanish help out of hand, but refused to commit.

The Gibraltar plan—the only idea ever considered was a headlong attack on the heavily fortified rock—now became a leitmotiv that ran through most of the discussions that followed. It was an absurd idea, and shows how unrealistic Hitler was.

The plan required Spanish entry into the war, an extremely dangerous move that would benefit Spain little, yet cause dire and immediate consequences. The British would cut off food imports from Argentina and other American countries Spain depended on, and would seize the Spanish Canary Islands off the northwestern coast of Africa. Franco wanted nothing to do with the plan, yet with the Wehrmacht on his border, he didn’t dare say so.

Aside from Gibraltar, Hitler also came up with other nonsensical ideas that demonstrated a profound lack of appreciation of the strategic possibilities that had opened to him. He waxed hugely enthusiastic about seizing two groups of Portuguese islands, the Azores, in the Atlantic 1,200 miles west of Lisbon, and the Cape Verde Islands, in the south Atlantic 150 miles west of Dakar off the coast of Africa. He also studied capture of the Canaries prior to a Gibraltar attack—with the idea of beating the British to the punch.

In theory, all three island groups would be useful as air and sea bases to break up British convoys that moved regularly through the Atlantic. Hitler’s excitement about the Azores, however, rested mainly on hopes of building long-range bombers that could reach the United States. If he could get these aircraft built and stationed on the Azores, he said, the threat would force the United States to concentrate on its own defense, and help Britain less.

The Atlantic islands idea was more absurd than the Gibraltar plan. Only Admiral Raeder dared to tell Hitler so, and even he couched his objections in discreet terms. The German navy could actually seize the islands in surprise moves, Raeder assured Hitler, but it could not protect the sea lanes to them thereafter. The Royal Navy would erect an iron blockade in days. German garrisons would be cut off from supplies, except driblets that might be flown in. Few attacks on British convoys— much less air attacks on the United States—could be mounted, because the Germans could get little fuel to the islands.

Raeder’s logic was overwhelming and should have ended the matter right there. But it didn’t. Hitler continued to agitate for capture of the Atlantic islands on into the fall and beyond.

Since the army generals had been unable to sway the Fuehrer to carry out a Mediterranean strategy, Admiral Raeder weighed in on September 6 and September 26, 1940. At the second conference Raeder cornered Hitler alone and showed him step by step how Germany could defeat Britain elsewhere than over the English Channel. Doing so would put Germany in a commanding position against the Soviet Union.

Raeder, bowing to Hitler’s passions, said the Germans should take Gibraltar and secure the Canary Islands. But his main concern in that part of the world was the great northwestern bulge of Africa, largely controlled by France.

An imponderable regarding Hitler’s thinking is why, when he was negotiating France’s surrender, he did not demand admission of German troops into French North Africa—Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco. If the French refused, he could have threatened to occupy all of France and deny the French a government at Vichy. Besides, the French had so few troops in North Africa they couldn’t have prevented a German occupation.

The importance of the region was forced upon him only three days before the September 26 conference: a joint operation of British and Free French forces under Charles de Gaulle had tried to seize Dakar, but had been beaten off by Vichy French guns. This reinforced Raeder’s conviction that the British, supported by the United States, would try to get a foothold in northwest Africa in order to move against the Axis. He urged Germany to team up with Vichy France to secure the region.

But Raeder’s main argument was that the Axis should capture the Suez Canal. After Suez, German panzers