Lost Victories: The War Memoirs of Hitler's Most Brilliant General [Illustrated Edition]

Erich Von Manstein

• Publisher: Verdun Press
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781786257758
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

Illustrated with 24 plates of maps and diagrams and 13 photographs"Originally published in Germany in 1955, and in England and the United States in 1958, this classic memoir of WWII by a man who was an acknowledged military genius and probably Germany's top WWII general, is now made available again. Field Marshal Erich von Manstein described his book as a personal narrative of a soldier, discussing only those matters that had direct bearing on events in the military field. The essential thing, as he wrote, is to "know how the main personalities thought and reacted to events." This is what he tells us in this book. His account is detailed, yet dispassionate and objective. "Nothing is certain in war, when all is said and done, " But in Manstein's record, at least, we can see clearly what forces were in action. In retrospect, perhaps his book takes on an even greater significance."-Print Ed.

PART I — THE CAMPAIGN IN POLAND

1 — BEFORE THE STORM

I WATCHED POLITICAL developments after the Austrian anschluss from a point far from the centre of military affairs. At the beginning of February 1938, after I had risen to the second most senior post on the German Army Staff that of Oberquartiermeister I— the deputy to the Chief-of-Staff, my career as a General Staff officer had abruptly ended. When Colonel-General Baron v. Fritsch was eliminated as Commander-in-Chief of the Army through a diabolical party intrigue, a number of his closest collaborators, myself included, had been removed from the Army High Command (O.K.H.) along with him. Since then, as commander of 18 Division, I had naturally ceased to be informed of matters falling within the High Command’s jurisdiction.

Indeed, since the beginning of April 1938 I had been able to devote myself entirely to my job as a divisional commander. It was a particularly satisfying task even more satisfying in those years than at any other time but it also called for every ounce of one’s energy, since the expansion of the army was still far from complete. The continual formation of new units entailed a constant reorganization of those already in existence, while the speed of rearmament, and especially the attendant growth of both the officer and non-commissioned officer corps, meant that the most exacting demands were made on commanders at all levels if we were to fulfil our aim of creating intrinsically stable and highly trained troops who would guarantee the security of the Reich. To succeed in this work was more gratifying still, especially in my own case, now that, after several years in Berlin, I once again had the pleasure of being in direct touch with combat units. It is with immense gratitude, therefore, that I remember that last year and a half of peace, and, in particular, the Silesians of whom 18 Division was largely composed. Silesia had produced good soldiers from time immemorial, so the military education and training of the new units was a rewarding task.

It is true that the brief interlude of the ‘floral war’ the occupation of the Sudetenland had found me in the post of Chief-of-Staff of the army commanded by Colonel-General Ritter v. Leeb. As such I had learnt of the conflict that had broken out between the Chief-of-Staff of the Army, General Beck, and Hitler over the Czech question and which, to my intense regret, had ended with the resignation of the Chief-of-Staff I so revered. This resignation, however, snapped the thread which had kept me in touch with O.K.H.

And so it was not until summer 1939 that I learnt of Operation ‘Order White’, the first offensive deployment against Poland to be prepared on Hitler’s orders. No such thing had existed before the spring of 1939. On the contrary, all military preparations on our eastern frontier had been based on defence.

In the above operation order I was earmarked as Chief-of-Staff of Southern Army Group, the Commander-in-Chief of which was to be Colonel-General v. Rundstedt, then already living in retirement. It was planned that this Army Group should deploy in Silesia, eastern Moravia, and partly in Slovakia, in accordance with the detailed arrangements which we were now to work out.

As the Army Group Headquarters did not exist in peacetime and would be set up only in the event of general mobilization, a small working party was formed to deal with the new operation order. It assembled on 12th August 1939 in the Silesian training area of Neuhammer. It was to work under the direction of Colonel Blumentritt, a General Staff officer who was destined to become the Army Group’s chief of operations (Ia) on mobilization. This was an unusual stroke of luck as far as I was concerned, for my relationship with that exceptionally able man was one of the closest confidence. The bond had been forged while we were both serving at the headquarters of v. Leeb’s army during the Sudeten crisis, and I considered it extremely valuable to have a colleague on whom I could rely in times like these. As often as not, the things that attract us to another person are quite trivial, and what always delighted me about Blumentritt was his fanatical attachment to the telephone. The speed at which he worked was in any case incredibly high, but whenever he had a receiver in his hand he could deal with whole avalanches of queries, always with the same imperturbable good humour.

In mid-August the future commander of Southern Army Group, Colonel-General v. Rundstedt, arrived at Neuhammer. Every one of us knew him. As an exponent of grand tactics he was brilliant—a talented soldier who grasped the essentials of any problem in an instant. Indeed, he would concern himself with nothing else, being supremely indifferent to minor detail. He was a gentleman of the old school—a type, I fear, which is now dying out, but which once added a delightful variant to life. The General had a charm about him to which even Hitler succumbed. The latter seemed to have taken a genuine liking to him, and, surprisingly enough, there was even a glimmer of this left after he had twice dismissed him. What probably attracted Hitler was the indefinable impression the general gave of a man from a past which he did not understand and to the atmosphere of which he never had access.

As a matter of interest, when our working party assembled at Neuhammer, my own 18 Division was also in the training area for the annual regimental and divisional exercises.

That everyone among us, disquieted by the number of emergencies through which the Fatherland had passed since 1933, wondered where all this would lead, I need hardly say. Our thoughts and private conversations at this time were centred on the signs of the gathering storm on the horizon around us. We realized that Hitler was fanatically resolved to dispose of the very last of the territorial problems Germany had inherited through the Treaty of Versailles. We knew that he had begun negotiations with Poland as far back as autumn 1938 to clear up the whole Polish-German frontier question, though what progress, if any, these negotiations had made we were not told. At the same time we were aware of the British guarantee to Poland. And I can safely say that not one of us in the army was so arrogant, thoughtless or shortsighted as not to recognize the deadly seriousness of the warning that guarantee implied. This factor alone though it was not the only one convinced our party in Neuhammer that there would in the end be no war. Even if the deployment plan on which we were now engaged went into operation, that still need not, in our opinion, mean war. We had watched Germany’s precarious course along the razor’s edge to date with close attention and were increasingly amazed at Hitler’s incredible luck in attaining hitherto without recourse to arms all his overt and covert political aims. The man seemed to have an almost infallible instinct. Success had followed success in a never-ending progression if one may initially refer to the glittering train of events that ultimately led to our downfall as successes. All those things had been achieved without war. Why, we asked ourselves, should it be different this time? Look at Czechoslovakia. Though Hitler had drawn up a menacing array of troops against her in 1938, there had still been no war. Yet the old adage about taking the pitcher to the well once too often still echoed in our ears, for the position was now a much trickier one and the game Hitler seemed intent on playing had a more dangerous look about it. There was the British guarantee to contend with this time. But then we recalled Hitler’s assertion that he would never be so mad as to unleash a war on two fronts, as the German leaders of 1914 had done. That at least implied that he was a man of reason, even if he had no human feelings left. Raising that coarse voice of his, he had explicitly assured his military advisers that he was not idiot enough to bungle his way into a world war for the sake of Danzig or the Polish Corridor.

THE GENERAL STAFF AND THE POLISH QUESTION

Poland was bound to be a source of great bitterness to us after she had used the dictated peace of Versailles to annex German territories to which neither historical justice nor the right of self-determination gave her any claim. For us soldiers she had been a constant cause of distress in the years of Germany’s weakness. Every time we looked at the map we were reminded of our precarious situation. That irrational demarcation of the frontier! That mutilation of our Fatherland! That corridor whose severance of East Prussia from the Reich gave us every reason to fear for that lovely province! For all that, however, the army had never dreamt of fighting an aggressive war against Poland to end this state of affairs by force. Apart from anything else, such forbearance had a perfectly simple military reason: any attack on Poland would have plunged the Reich into a war on two or more fronts, and with this it could never have coped. In the period of weakness imposed on us at Versailles we had always had the cauchemar des coalitions a nightmare that disturbed us all the more whenever we thought of the aspirations for German territory still harboured with such ill-concealed longing by wide circles of the Polish people. Yet although we had no wish to fight an aggressive war, we could hardly hope, even taking the most unprejudiced view of the Polish mentality, to sit down peacefully at the same table as the Poles to revise those senseless frontiers. Neither did it seem beyond the bounds of possibility that Poland might herself take the initiative one day and set out to solve the frontier question by force. We had gained some experience in this respect since 1918, and in Germany’s years of weakness it had been just as well to be prepared for such a thing. Once Marshal Pilsudski’s voice was silent and certain nationalist circles had gained a decisive influence in Poland, an incursion into East Prussia or Upper Silesia was just as feasible as the Polish raid on Vilna before it. For that contingency, though, our military deliberations had found a political answer. If Poland were proved to be the aggressor and we succeeded in warding off the attack, the Reich might well have an opportunity to get the unhappy frontier question revised on the political rebound.

At all events, there was no exaggerated wishful thinking on the subject on the part of any army leaders. Although General v. Rabenau, in the book Seeckt, Aus Meinem Leben, quotes the Colonel-General as saying that ‘Poland’s existence is intolerable and incompatible with Germany’s essential needs: she must disappear through her own internal weakness and through Russia...with help from ourselves’, this was in fact an attitude already overtaken by developments in the political and military fields. We had a pretty fair idea of the growing military power of the Soviet Union; and France, the land under whose spell one so easily fell, still faced us with the same hostility as ever. She would always seek allies in Germany’s rear. But if the Polish State were to disappear, the mighty Soviet Union could become a far more dangerous ally of France than a buffer State like Poland was at present. Any elimination of the buffer formed by Poland (and Lithuania) between Germany and the Soviet Union could lead only too easily to differences between the two big Powers. While it might be a matter of mutual interest to carry out frontier revisions vis-à-vis Poland, the complete removal of that State would hardly be to Germany’s advantage in view of the entirely changed situation that now prevailed.

So whether we liked her or not, it was preferable to keep Poland between us and the Soviet Union. Aggrieved though we were as soldiers by the senseless and explosive frontier demarcation in the east, Poland was still less dangerous as a neighbour than the Soviet Union, Like all other Germans, of course, we hoped a revision of the frontier would come about sometime and return the predominantly German-populated areas to the Reich in accordance with the natural right of their inhabitants. At the same time it was most undesirable from the military point of view that the size of our Polish population should increase. As for the German demand for a union of East Prussia with the Reich, it could well have been harmonized with Poland’s desire for a seaport of her own. This, and none other, was the trend of thought on the Polish problem favoured by the majority of German soldiers in the days of the Reichswehr let us say from the end of the nineteen-twenties onwards whenever the question of armed conflict cropped up.

Then the wheel of fate turned once again. Adolf Hitler appeared on the stage. Everything changed, including the basis of our relationship with Poland. The Reich concluded a non-aggression pact and treaty of friendship with our eastern neighbour. We were freed from the nightmare of a possible Polish attack. At the same time relations between Germany and the Soviet Union cooled off, our new ruler having only too clearly voiced his hatred of the Bolshevik system in public speeches. Poland was bound to feel less constrained politically in consequence of this new situation, but that was no longer a danger as far as we were concerned. German rearmament and Hitler’s series of successes in the field of foreign policy made it improbable that she would use her new freedom of action against the Reich. And when she proved only too ready to take a hand in the partitioning of Czechoslovakia it seemed not unlikely that we could talk business about the frontier question.

Until spring 1939, then, the High Command of the German Army never had any plan for offensive deployment against Poland on its files. Before that all our military measures in the east had been purely defensive in character.

WAR OR BLUFF?

Was it to be the real thing this time-in autumn 1939? Did Hitler really want war, or would he, as with Czechoslovakia in 1938, bring the very limit of pressure to bear militarily and otherwise to settle the Danzig and Corridor questions?

War or bluff? That was the question exercising the mind of everyone without any real insight into political developments, primarily into Hitler’s own intentions. And who, for that matter, was vouchsafed any insight whatever into those intentions?

At all events, it was entirely conceivable that the military measures taken in August 1939 despite Operation ‘Order White’—were directed towards increasing political pressure on Poland. Since the summer, on orders from Hitler, work had been proceeding at feverish speed on an Ostwall—an eastern equivalent of the Siegfried Line. Whole divisions, the 18th among them, were moved to the Polish frontier in constant rotation to work on this fortification for several weeks at a stretch. What was the point of all this effort if Hitler were going to attack Poland? Even if, contrary to all his assurances, he were contemplating a war on two fronts, the Ostwall would still have been quite out of place, since the only proper action for Germany in such circumstances would be to attack and overwhelm Poland first while remaining on the defensive in the west. The reverse solution offensive action in the west and defensive measures in the east was quite out of the question with the present ratio of forces, especially as neither plans nor preparations for an offensive in the west had been made. So if the construction of an Ostwall were to have any rhyme or reason in the present situation, it could surely only be to exert pressure on Poland by placing large troop concentrations on her frontier. Even the deployment of infantry divisions on the east bank of the Oder in the last ten days of August and the movement of the armoured and motorized divisions into assembly areas initially west of the river need not really have been preparations for an attack: they could just as well have been a form of political pressure.

Be that as it may, the peacetime training programme went on just as usual for the time being. On 13th and 14th August I had my last divisional exercise at...

Table of contents

• Title page
• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• DEDICATION
• ILLUSTRATIONS
• FOREWORD by Captain B. H. Liddel Hart
• AUTHOR’S PREFACE
• TRANSLATOR’S NOTE
• PART I - THE CAMPAIGN IN POLAND
• PART II - THE CAMPAIGN IN THE WEST
• PART III - WAR IN THE EAST
• APPENDIX I
• APPENDIX II
• APPENDIX III
• APPENDIX IV
• MILITARY CAREER
• GLOSSARY OF MILITARY TERMS
• ILLUSTRATIONS