I am determined to lead my life in such a way that I can meet death with equanimity when my time comes. Behind me stands the German people, whose morale can only deteriorate…. If we meet the test of this struggle successfully—and we will meet it—our times will go down in the history of our people. In this struggle I shall stand or fall. I will not survive the defeat of my people. Abroad, no capitulation; at home, no revolution. The crisis among the officers in the fall of 1939 had far-reaching consequences. Insisting as he did on total commitments, Hitler henceforth distrusted not only his generals’ loyalty but also their professional advice. The peremptory way in which he himself now assumed the role of generalissimo had its origins in these events. On the other hand, the renewed evidence of the weakness and compliance of the generals, especially of the OKH (Army High Command), suited his desire to reduce the organs of military leadership to purely instrumental functions. In preparing the strike against Denmark and Norway, which was meant to assure him Swedish iron ore and win an operational base for the struggle against England, he completely excluded the OKH. Instead, he transferred the planning to a special staff within the OKW (High Command of the Armed Forces). Thus he managed to install within the military hierarchy the system of rival authorities so fundamental to his practice of government. He thought his decision brilliantly confirmed when the risky enterprise begun in April, 1940, which ran counter to all the principles of naval warfare and had been regarded by the Allied staffs as almost inconceivable, proved a total success. Thereafter he no longer met with open opposition from the generals. The full weakness of those generals had already been exposed during the autumn crisis when Halder approached State Secretary von Weizsacker and asked whether bringing in a soothsayer might not have some influence on Hitler; he could obtain a million marks for the purpose, he said. Commander in Chief von Brauchitsch, on the other hand, gave a visitor the impression that he was “completely done for, isolated.”
At dawn on May 10, 1940, the long-awaited offensive in the West began at last. The night before, Colonel Oster, through his friend Colonel G. J. Sas, the Dutch military attache in Berlin, had informed the other side. But when the din of artillery and the drone of bombers began in the morning, the skeptical Allied general staffs were taken completely by surprise. They had thought the warning a trap. By committing large British and French forces hastily brought up from northern France, they finally managed to check the German advance through Belgium east of Brussels. They gave no thought to the fact that their counteraction was scarcely opposed by the German air force. For this was the real trap. Walking into it had already cost them the victory.
The original German plan of campaign, a variant of the old Schliffen Plan, called for bypassing the French lines of fortifications by a massed assault through Belgium and a descent upon northwestern France. The German leadership was well aware of what was wrong with this plan: it lacked the element of surprise, so that the offensive was liable to be brought to a standstill and freeze into trench warfare even sooner than in the First World War. Moreover, it required the commitment of large tank formations in terrain cut up by many rivers and canals. All this would seem to imperil the rapid decision upon which Hitler’s whole strategy was based. But there appeared to be no alternative. Another plan presented in October, 1939, by General von Manstein, chief of staff of Army Group A, had been rejected by Brauchitsch and Halder, and ultimately Manstein had been relieved of his command. He had argued for shifting the main weight of the German advance from the right wing to the center, thus regaining the element of surprise, since it was generally held that the Ardennes would not permit extensive tank operations. The French leadership had therefore placed relatively weak forces on this sector of its front, and Manstein’s plan was founded on this fact. Once the German tanks had overcome the problems of the mountainous and wooded terrain, he argued, they could roll almost unhindered across the plains of northern France to the sea, and cut off the Allied armies that had been marched into Belgium.
What had vexed the army High Command was precisely what instantly fascinated Hitler: the bold and unexpected character of this plan. It is said that he had already been occupied with similar notions at the time he learned of Manstein’s proposal. By mid-February, 1940, therefore, after a talk with the general, he ordered a reformulation of the plan of campaign. That decision was to prove crucial.
It was by no means numerical advantage or technological superiority that made the war in the West such a breath-taking victory. The forces that confronted one another on May 10 were nearly equal in strength; in fact the Allied side had a slight edge in numbers. Besides the 137 divisions of the Western powers, there were 34 Dutch and Belgian divisions. These confronted 136 German divisions. The Allied air forces had some 2,800 planes, the German air force barely 1,000 more than that. On the Allied side approximately 3,000 tanks and armored vehicles faced 2,500 on the German side, although most of the latter were organized in special armored divisions. But the decisive factor was the remarkable German plan of operations, which Churchill aptly called the strategy of the “scythe-cut”4 and forced the opponent to a “battle with reversed fronts.”
The German attack once again began with an onslaught against Holland, Belgium, and Luxembourg. No declaration of war was made, and the enemy air forces were destroyed on the ground. “Fortress Holland” fell in five days. Hitler himself had developed the idea of dropping small, highly trained units of parachute troops at strategically important points behind the front; this proved a decisive factor in the rapid victory. Similarly, the center of the Belgian system of defense collapsed when Fort Eben Emael, the key to the system of fortifications guarding Liege, was eliminated by one such unit, which landed inside the fort area in gliders. Meanwhile, the advance through Luxembourg and the Ardennes, again a complete surprise to the enemy, made rapid progress. By May 13 the tank formations were able to cross the Meuse at Dinant and Sedan. On May 16 Laon fell, on May 20 Amiens; and that same night the first formations reached the Channel coast. At times the advance proceeded so rapidly that the main units lost contact with the vanguard, and Hitler, suspicious as always, distrusted his own triumph. “The Fuhrer is frightfully nervous,” Halder noted on May 17. “He is alarmed by his own success, doesn’t want to risk anything, and consequently would prefer to stop us.” And on the following day: “The Fuhrer is unaccountably fearful about the southern flank. He rages and shouts that we are on the point of ruining the whole operation and exposing ourselves to the dangers of defeat.”5
In fact there was no danger. When Britain’s new Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, alarmed by the situation at the front, flew to Paris, General. Gamelin admitted to him that the majority of his mobile forces had already, fallen into the German trap. Gamelin, commander in chief of the Allied armies, tried to conjure up memories of past glories. In an Order of the Day for May 17 he repeated word for word General Joffre’s proclamation before the first Battle of the Marne in September, 1914, calling upon the soldiers not to yield a foot of soil. But the Allied leaders did not succeed in collecting their retreating armies, building new lines, and organizing a counterattack. The Allied defeat would have been complete if General Guderian’s tank spearhead had not received the order, on May 24, to stop in its tracks. It was at this time only a few miles south of Dunkirk and not in contact with the enemy. The German slowdown for forty-eight hours left the Allies a port and thus the chance to escape. Within a week, in one of the most daring improvisations of the war, with the aid of some 900 largely small ships, fishing boats, excursion steamers, and private yachts, nearly 340,000 men—the greater part of the Allied formations— were ferried to England.
The responsibility for the order to halt before Dunkirk has since been the object of extensive investigation. Some have held that Hitler himself deliberately let the majority of the British Expeditionary Corps escape in order to keep open the way for the compromise with England that he continued to hope for. But such a decision would have contradicted the war aim formulated in his memorandum. It would also have contradicted Directive Number 13 of May 24, which began: “Next goal of operations is the annihilation of the French, British and Belgian forces encircled in Artois and in Flanders by the concentric attack of our northern wing…. During this operation the task of the Air Force is to break all enemy resistance in the encircled parts and to prevent the escape of the British forces across the Channel.” Hitler’s order to halt met with vehement opposition within the army High Command, but was approved by General von Rundstedt, the commander of Army Group A. Its underlying intention was rather to give a respite to the tank formations, exhausted by two weeks of fighting, and enable them to recoup their strength for the impending battle for France. Goring’s boasts that his Luftwaffe would transform the port of Dunkirk into a sea of flames and sink every ship that tried to dock there reinforced Hitler in his decision. When the city, which had been undefended and within Guderian’s reach ten days earlier, at last fell into German hands on June 4, Halder noted tersely: “Dunkirk taken, coast reached. Even the French are gone.”
Yet the superior operational plan was not alone responsible for the German successes. When Hitler’s armies turned south, after completing the encirclement maneuver at the Channel coast, they encountered a discouraged, broken enemy whose defeatism had been only magnified by the debacle in the north. The French command was operating with formations that had already been beaten, with divisions that had been dispersed,
