Leaders and Intelligence

Michael I. Handel

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780714633305
• eBook ISBN: 9781136287169
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

From a systematic point of view, all intelligence work can be studied on three levels: Acquisition, analysis, and acceptance. The author focuses on the third of these levels, studying the attitudes and behavioural patterns developed by leaders during their political careers, their willingness to consider information and ideas contrary to their own, their ability to admit mistakes and change course in the implementation of a failing policy and their capacity to cooperate.

The Paradox of Duality: Adolf Hitler and the Concept of Military Surprise

DAVID JABLONSKY

The First World War was a major event in Adolf Hitler’s life. ‘To me’, he wrote in a famous passage six years after the conflict, ‘those hours seem like a release from the painful feelings of my youth. Even today I am not ashamed to say that, overpowered by stormy enthusiasm, I fell down on my knees and thanked Heaven from an overflowing heart for granting me the good fortune of being permitted to live at this time’.¹ Hitler may have been influenced by the romantic nihilism of Friedrich Nietzsche, whose Also sprach Zarathustra was sold to thousands of German soldiers off to war in 1914.² What is certain is that for Hitler at the end of that conflict the ‘romance of battle had been replaced by horror...and the exuberant joy was stifled by mortal fear’.³

Hitler was a Meldegänger, a runner, in the 16th Bavarian Infantry ‘List’ Regiment for the entire war.⁴ It was a particularly dangerous and thankless job in the attritive, mass technology warfare of the stalemated Western Front. Runners would hunch forward in trenches and shell-holes and then spring up, as one officer in the List Regiment recalled, ‘like rabbits’ between artillery salvoes and run in semi-crouched positions to other shell-holes, which if they had calculated correctly they would reach before the next torrent of steel descended.⁵ By most accounts, Hitler was a brave and dependable soldier who refused promotion and remained in his dangerous job in order to stay with his regiment.⁶ He seldom took leave, only rarely received mail and increasingly withdrew into the narrow world of his unit. ‘For Corporal Hitler’, the regimental adjutant later recalled, ‘the list Regiment was homeland’.⁷

By the end of the war, Hitler had been wounded and gassed as well as awarded the Iron Cross First Class, the former common enough occurrences for the average German infantryman, the latter an extremely rare honor for Untersoldaten⁸ Equally important, Hitler had begun to form opinions on warfare that were to remain with him for the rest of his life. ‘Even a man of thirty’, he wrote at that age while serving a prison term, ‘will have much to learn in the course of his life, but this will only be a supplement’.⁹ This is particularly true of the two different approaches to war that crystalized in Hitler’s mind as a result of his First World War experiences. One focused on the decisive head-on battles of annihilation; the other on what Liddell Hart would later refer to as ‘the indirect approach’.¹⁰ The purpose of this study is to demonstrate why Hitler was drawn to these two approaches and how his experiences and personality led him to the concept of military surprise as a means to bridge the gap between these warfighting dichotomies. It was not always an easy bridge to build, despite Hitler’s well publicized surprise attacks in the early years of the Second World War. And in fact, as this study also demonstrates, the early experiences and personality traits that drew him to the concept of military surprise also resulted in a leadership style and an organization for war that ultimately destroyed the bridge, leaving the Nazi leader vulnerable to surprise at every level of war.

II

THE DIRECT APPROACH

The stalemated Western Front of the First World War was anathema to Hitler’s nature. To begin with, there was his inner compulsion to change entire situations suddenly, not gradually. As a boy in Linz, for instance, he was furious that improvements to the town’s concert hall did not begin with demolitions. ‘It seems’, he told his boyhood friend, August Kubizek, ‘they intend to patch up once more the old junk-heap’.¹¹ A few years later in Vienna, the young Hitler developed a grandiose project for completely rebuilding the entire city district by district.¹² Not surprisingly, Hitler considered Georges Haussmann the ‘greatest city planner in history’. Haussmann had torn down most of central Paris at the behest of Napoleon III between 1853 and 1870 and had subsequently built elegant façades along gleaming, extraordinarily wide boulevards.¹³

Equally important, there was the all-or-nothing aspect of Hitler’s character that could only chafe in the trenches of northern France and Belgium. ‘Another symptom of decay’, he wrote after the war, ‘is a half--heartedness in all things’.¹⁴ Added to this was a nervous, aggressive temperament that was only comfortable with quick decisive actions. ‘Patience’, even the normally docile Kubizek noted, ‘did not seem to be one of Adolf s outstanding characteristics’.¹⁵ It is in this context that Hitler could look back nostalgically after the war on the Ludendorff offensive of March 1918, ‘when out of the cool nights the allied soldiers already seemed to hear the dull rumble of the advancing storm units’.¹⁶ That offensive, Hitler noted almost lyrically, created:

the most tremendous impressions of my life; tremendous because now for the last time, as in 1914, the fight lost the character of defense and assumed that of attack. A sigh of relief passed through the trenches and the dugouts of the German Army when at length, after more than three years’ endurance in the enemy hell, the day of retribution came. Once again the victorious battalions cheered and hung the last wreaths of immortal laurel on their banners rent by the storm of victory. Once again the songs of the fatherhood roared to the heavens along the endless marching columns.¹⁷

Hitler’s preference for the offensive was strengthened over the years by his admiration for Clausewitz and Frederick the Great. It is now generally concluded that the Nazi leader did not study Clausewitz in either a systematic or critical manner; but instead, in the way of semi-educated people, used the Prussian philospher as a source for quotations.¹⁸ Nevertheless, there is abundant evidence that Hitler also used Clausewitz as much as any other purported spiritual predecessors as a source and justification of his thoughts, particularly those dealing with military affairs.¹⁹ This was certainly true in his view of Clausewitz as the primary exponent of the offensive, a misperception he shared with the majority of the German military.²⁰ In a similar manner, Hitler’s works and conferences were replete with references to Frederick the Great, whose major departure from the other military leaders of the baroque age was, as Gerhard Ritter pointed out, ‘the unflagging offensive spirit, pressing for rapid decisions’.²¹

Hitler remained remarkably true to this spirit, even after losing the strategic offensive in the Second World War. In August 1943, he stated that ‘defensive operations alone are not enough. We must resume the offensive’.²² And at a conference just before the 1944 German counterthrust in the Ardennes, he pointed out to his division commanders that ‘in the long run the principle that defence is stronger than attack does not hold’.²³ At the end of that conference, Hitler stressed the need for offensive operations if decisive results were to be obtained. Once again his personal battlefield experiences dominated his thinking. ‘From the outset of the war therefore’, he concluded, ‘I have striven to act offensively whenever possible, to conduct a war of movement and not to allow myself to be maneuvered into a position comparable to that of the First World War’.²⁴

Clearly linked to this spirit of the offensive in Hitler’s mind was the decisive battle of annihilation, the so-called Vernichtungsschlacht of Clausewitz. And although a scholastic conflict had been waged for years as to whether Frederick the Great belonged to this school of warfare, Hitler obviously had no doubt. Had not Thomas Carlyle, the Nazi leader’s favorite chronicler of the Prussian King’s life, quoted Frederick’s call for ‘a great battle to decide our fate’?²⁵ Such battles could come about by great mass movement and envelopment. The key was to avoid stalemate. ‘Interlocked frontal struggles lasting for years on petrified fronts’, Hitler stated in 1932, ‘will not return. I guarantee that. They were a degenerate form of war’.²⁶

Not only degenerate but for Hitler an aberration. As a boy he had devoured popular histories of the battles in the wars of German unification. ‘It was not long’, he wrote concerning one such history of the Franco-Prussian War, ‘before the great heroic struggle had become my greatest inner experience’.²⁷ It was the battles of annihilation that were decisive. Without Koniggratz and Sedan, there was always the specter of a two-front war.²⁸ Without these decisive battles Germany’s ‘union policy would no more have led to anything than did the chattering of the men of 48 in the Cathedral of Frankfurt’.²⁹ There had been no such battles of annihilation on the Western Front in the First World War. For Hitler, the infantryman with the ‘worm’s eye view’ of that struggle, this void still rankled decades later as his troops engaged in such battles throughout Russia. ‘Apart from the great victories...of Tannenberg and the... Masurian Marshes’, Hitler reminisced in the fall of 1941, ‘the Imperial High Command proved itself inadequate’.³⁰

III

THE INDIRECT APPROACH

The carnage of the First World War made an enormous impression on Hitler. As early as 1915 he referred to ‘the sacrifices and agonies which now so many hundreds of thousands of us endure every day’ and to ‘the river of blood which flows here daily’.³¹ The feelings of loss and pain were genuine enough for a man who felt for the first time a sense of mission and belonging in the comradeship of his regiment.³² Years after the war, Hitler returned again and again in his memoirs to ‘how those boys of seventeen sank into the earth of Flanders’.³³ By then, his own brand of Social Darwinism had evolved into the conviction that the shedding of precious German blood was a biological crime. In this context, the war ‘drained the extreme of the best humanity almost entirely of its blood. For the amount of irreplaceable German heroes’ blood that was shed in those four years was really enormous’.³⁴ This theme dominated Hitler’s so-called ‘Secret Book’ of 1928, which in myriad blood-filled images hammered home the point that the ‘most unprecedented blood sheddings in history’ were ‘sacrileges committed against a nation, a sin against a people’s future’.³⁵ By the early 1930s, all this had taken on the characteristics of dogma for Hitler in addition to its obvious propaganda use. ‘Whoever has experienced war at the front’, he confided to Hermann Rauschning, ‘will want to refrain from all avoidable bloodshed. Anything that helps preserve precious German blood is good’.³⁶

Seen in this context, any type of warfare that avoided direct assaults against weapons of mass technology would appeal to Hitler. In 1924, the heavy human toll of that technology still weighed heavily on him as he reminisced about the Battle of the Somme, which his unit had entered in September 1916. ‘For us it was the first of the tremendous battles of material which now followed, and...it was more like hell than war’.³⁷ Battles of attrition had replaced those of annihilation. Offensive action was no longer decisive. As late as 1941, the subject was an emotional one for Hitler.

The offensive at Verdun...was an act of lunacy. From beginning to end, all the commanders responsible for that operation should have been put in straitjackets. We’ve not yet completely got over those mistaken notions.³⁸

The answer to these ‘mistaken notions’ was an indirect approach based on cunning, mobility and maneuver, much of which was designed to dislocate the enemy’s moral, mental and material balance even before the actual decisive engagement.³⁹ There was a natural appeal for Hitler in such a concept. A...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Leaders and Intelligence
• Napoleon’s Use of Intelligence: The Jena Campaign of 1806
• The Paradox of Duality: Adolf Hitler and the Concept of Military Surprise
• Westmoreland vs. CBS: Was Intelligence Corrupted by Policy Demands?
• Churchill and Intelligence
• Commanding Generals and the Uses of Intelligence
• Intelligence Estimates and the Decision-maker
• Intelligence and Command
• Notes on Contributors