How Hitler Could Have Won World War II

largely determined the outcome of the war.

Guderian came to his position from his experiences in the east with the Red Army, Rommel from his experiences in Africa with the western Allies. They proposed diametrically opposite solutions.

In February 1944 Guderian went to St.-Germain-en-Laye, just outside Paris, to visit Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, commander in chief west, and General Leo Geyr von Schweppenberg, in charge of panzer training in the west. Together they came to agreement on handling armor.

Panzer and panzergrenadier divisions, Guderian wrote, “must be stationed far enough inland from the so- called Atlantic Wall so that they could be switched easily to the main invasion front once it had been recognized.”

Guderian and Geyr proposed that the ten fast divisions Hitler had allocated to defend the west be concentrated in two groups, one north and the other south of Paris. Both officers recognized the immense superiority of Allied air power, and that it gravely affected German ability to shift armor. But they believed the problem could be overcome by moving at night.

When Guderian got back to supreme headquarters, he discovered that Rommel, who had taken over defense of the Atlantic Wall in November 1943 as commander of Army Group B, was stationing panzer divisions very near the coast.

To Guderian this was a fundamental error. “They could not be withdrawn and committed elsewhere with sufficient rapidity should the enemy land at any other point.” When he complained to Hitler, the Fuehrer told him to discuss the matter with Rommel. Guderian hit a stone wall when he met Rommel at his headquarters at La Roche Guyon, a magnificent chateau west of Paris. Because of Allied air supremacy, Rommel said, there could be no question of moving large formations, even at night.

To Rommel the day of mobile warfare for Germany had passed, not only because of Anglo-American air power but because Germany had not kept up with the western Allies in production of tanks and armored vehicles —a result due more to the shortage of oil than to Allied bombing.

Implicit in Rommel’s theory was that the Germans must guess right where the Allies were going to land. If German forces could not move, they had to be in place close to the invasion site. Rommel decided that the Allies would land at the Pas de Calais opposite Dover.

Rommel ruled out other landing places, especially because the Allies could provide greater air cover there than anywhere else. Rommel wrote Hitler on December 31, 1943, listing the Pas de Calais as the probable landing site. “The enemy’s main concern,” he wrote, “will be to get the quickest possible possession of a port or ports capable of handling large ships.”

Guderian did not conjecture precisely where the Allies might invade. He thought they should be allowed to land and make a penetration, so that their forces could be destroyed and thrown back into the sea by a counteroffensive on a grand scale. This was in keeping with successful German movements in Russia. Although Rundstedt and Geyr accepted the idea, neither they nor Guderian had any idea how Anglo-American command of the air could restrict panzer movement.

Rommel did, and to him Guderian’s proposal was nonsense. “If the enemy once gets his foot in, he’ll put every antitank gun and tank he can into the bridgehead and let us beat our heads against it,” he told General Fritz Bayerlein, commander of the Panzer Lehr Division.

The only way to prevent this, Rommel wrote, was to fight the battle in the coastal strip. This required operational reserves close behind the beaches that could intervene quickly. Bringing reserves up from inland would force them to run a gauntlet of Allied air power, and take so much time the Allies could organize a solid defense or drive farther inland.

Rommel set about building a fortified mined zone extending five or six miles inland. He also built underwater obstacles along the shore—including stakes (“Rommel’s asparagus”) carrying antitank mines, concrete structures equipped with steel blades or antitank mines, and other snares. But his efforts came too late to be fully effective, and they were concentrated in the Pas de Calais, though some work extended to Normandy.

Rommel and Guderian were both wrong, of course. The Allies were not bound to take the shortest route to seize the closest port. Rommel did not understand the vastness of Allied maritime resources, and he was not aware of British ingenuity in building two artificial harbors (Mulberries) which could serve as temporary ports. The Mulberries veiled the biggest secret of all: the Allies did not have to capture a port to invade the Continent. This made possible a landing at the least likely place still under the Allied air umbrella: the beaches of Normandy.

Guderian was wrong in his belief that the Germans could duplicate anything like the vast sweeping panzer movements they practiced in Russia. There the Luftwaffe generally had parity with the Red air force, and could achieve temporary local superiority to carry out a specific mission. In the west, Allied air power was overwhelming and permanent. In the winter of 1944, the Luftwaffe was virtually swept from the skies, primarily because of the American P-51 Mustang fighter. The Mustang surpassed all German fighters, yet the Luftwaffe was forced to challenge it since the P-51 was now escorting B-17 bombers in daylight raids over Germany. The Germans lost large numbers of fighters, and by March were reluctant to come up and engage the Mustangs.

Another reason Allied air power was decisive in France was that forests, rivers, and cities forced traffic along predictable arteries, which could be bombed and strafed, and bridges broken, unlike in Russia where panzers could often strike out across open plains.

The two generals should have sought a compromise. There was one: dividing the armor and placing one segment behind each of the invasion sites the Allies might choose, and making each segment available on call to Rommel or the commander of the invasion site directly ahead. Such a compromise would have answered most of Rommel’s concerns, and it would have provided a partial answer to the mobile armored reserve Guderian wanted—in the form of the armor behind the sites not attacked by the Allies.

The actual number of potential invasion sites was three, and they could have been figured out by logic. The Allies would insist on heavy fighter coverage over the landing sites. The Allies were certain to land within the maximum range of their principal ground-support aircraft, Spitfires, P-38 Lightnings, and P-47 Thunderbolts, or about 200 miles from the main fighter bases in southeastern England. A strike into Holland would encounter hard- to-cross rivers and canals, and land below sea level that could be flooded. On the Brittany peninsula an invasion might be sealed off, and the French coast south of the Loire River was much too far. Both were beyond 200 miles of the English fighter bases.

This left just the Pas de Calais, the Cotentin peninsula of Normandy, and the beaches of Normandy as the only possible invasion places.

If Rommel, Guderian, Rundstedt, and Geyr had agreed that the invasion could strike one of these places, and none other, then allocation of armor equally to each of the three would have been sensible. Since Hitler had assigned only ten fast divisions to the defense of western Europe, it was imperative to decide where the landings might occur and locate armor at these places.

But this did not happen. Rommel persisted in believing, until a month or two before the landing, that the Pas de Calais was the only possible site. And since Guderian, Rundstedt, and Geyr believed otherwise, the final decision on where to locate the fast divisions fell to Adolf Hitler. He, in his characteristic indecisive and uncertain fashion, spread the ten panzer and panzergrenadier divisions from northern Belgium to the south of France.

Hitler refused to settle on even a region that the Allies might invade, let alone specific sites. In a meeting with senior commanders on March 20, 1944, he listed potential invasion places from Norway to southern France. In the final allocation, he stationed six fast divisions north of the Loire River, and four south of the river, three of them near the Spanish frontier or close to Marseilles along the Mediterranean coast.

Erich von Manstein had won the campaign in the west in 1940 by convincing Hitler to concentrate his armor. Now, at the moment of Germany’s greatest military peril, Hitler was dispersing his armor—all across the map. Furthermore, he kept a firm rein on most of these divisions, intending to direct the battle from Berchtesgaden.

If, instead, three or four fast divisions had been stationed directly behind the beaches at each of the potential sites, they very likely could have crushed any invasion on the first day.

From March 1944 onward Hitler had a “hunch” the invasion would come at Normandy, though he thought it would be only a diversion to the main assault on the Pas de Calais. He arrived at this hunch because Americans