The Storm of War

Andrew Roberts

• Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780062079473
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World War II
• Index: History

"Gripping....splendid history. A brilliantly clear and accessible account of the war in all its theaters. Roberts's prose is unerringly precise and strikingly vivid. It is hard to imagine a better-told military history of World War II." – New York Times Book Review

Andrew Roberts's acclaimed new history has been hailed as the finest single-volume account of this epic conflict. From the western front to North Africa, from the Baltic to the Far East, he tells the story of the war—the grand strategy and the individual experience, the brutality and the heroism—as never before.

Meticulously researched and masterfully written, The Storm of War illuminates the war's principal actors, revealing how their decisions shaped the course of the conflict. Along the way, Roberts presents tales of the many lesser-known individuals whose experiences form a panoply of the courage and self-sacrifice, as well as the depravity and cruelty, of the Second World War.

PART I

Onslaught

It is recorded of the great Moltke, that when he was being praised for his generalship in the Franco-Prussian War, and was told by an admirer that his reputation would rank with such great captains as Napoleon, Frederick or Turenne, he answered ‘No, for I have never conducted a retreat.’

Frederick von Mellenthin, Panzer Battles (1955), p. 236

Chapter 1
Four Invasions

September 1939–April 1940

If we lose this war, then God have mercy on us.

Hermann Göring to Hitler’s interpreter,
Paul Schmidt, 3 September 1939¹

Although the international situation, and his months of sabre-rattling against Poland, meant that his invasion of that country could not be a surprise attack, Hitler hoped, with good reason, that the Wehrmacht’s new Blitzkrieg (lightning war) tactics would deliver a tactical shock to the Poles. Blitzkrieg tactics, which relied on very close, radio-controlled contact between fast-moving tank columns, motorized artillery, Luftwaffe bombers and fighters and truck-borne infantry, swept all before them. Hitler’s dislike of static, attritional warfare was a natural response to his years in the 16th Bavarian Infantry Regiment between 1914 and 1918. His job as a Meldegänger (battalion runner) in that conflict involved waiting for a gap in artillery salvoes and then springing forward in a semi-crouched stance, sprinting from trench to shell-hole taking messages. He was thus brave and conscientious, probably never killed anyone himself, and always refused promotions that would take him away from his comrades because, as his regimental adjutant Fritz Wiedemann later stated, ‘For Gefreiter [Corporal] Hitler, the Regiment was home.’² He even won two Iron Crosses, Second Class and First Class.

Having survived four years of stalemate and attrition, Hitler had learnt by the age of twenty-nine, when the war ended, that tactical surprise was of inestimable advantage in warfare, and as he was later to write in Mein Kampf: ‘Even a man of thirty will have much to learn in the course of his life, but this will only be a supplement.’ Throughout his political career as a revolutionary, he constantly attempted to employ surprise, usually with great success. The attempted coup of 1923 known as the Beerhall Putsch had surprised even its titular leader, General Ludendorff, and Röhm had had no inkling of the Night of the Long Knives. Yet the Poles were expecting Hitler’s sudden attack, because exactly one week beforehand their country had been invaded by a tiny detachment of Germans who had not been informed of the postponement of the invasion originally planned for dawn on Saturday, 26 August.

Part of Germany’s plan to invade Poland, Fall Weiss (Plan White), involved small groups of Germans dressed in Räuberzivil (robbers’ civvies) crossing the border the night before and seizing key strategic points before dawn on the day of the invasion. The secret Abwehr (German intelligence) battalion detailed to undertake these operations was given the euphemistic title of Construction Training Company 800 for Special Duties. A twenty-four-man group under the command of Leutnant Dr Hans-Albrecht Herzner was instructed to prepare the way for the assault of the 7th Infantry Division by infiltrating the border and capturing a railway station at Mosty in the Jablunka Pass running through the Carpathian mountains, to prevent the destruction of the single-track railway tunnel which was the shortest connection between Warsaw and Vienna.³ Crossing the border into the forests at 00.30 on 26 August, Herzner’s group got lost and was split up in the dark, but Herzner managed to capture the railway station at Mosty with thirteen men at 03.30 and cut the telephone and telegraph lines, only to discover that the Polish detonators had already been removed from the tunnel by the defenders. Polish tunnel guards then attacked his unit, wounding one of his men. Out of contact with the Abwehr, Herzner could not know that, with only a few hours to go, the previous evening Hitler had postponed Plan White until the following week, and that every other commando unit had been informed of this except his. It was not until 09.35 that the Abwehr finally managed to get through and order Herzner, who by then had lost another man wounded and had killed a Pole in the firefight, to release his prisoners and return to base immediately.

After a further series of incidents Herzner’s group recrossed the border at 13.30. The German Government explained to the Poles that the whole affair had been a mistake due to the lack of a defined border line in the forest. As the operation had not been an official military one, therefore, and had taken place in peacetime, Herzner very Teutonically put in for overnight expenses of 55 Reichsmarks and 86 pfennigs.⁴ Equally Teutonically, the authorities did not initially want to award him the Iron Cross (Second Class) for exploits that technically took place in peacetime. (They eventually did, but it did him little good: after breaking his back in a motor accident in 1942 Herzner drowned during his swimming therapy.)

On 28 August Hitler had abrogated the 1934 German—Polish nonaggression treaty — a curious and unusual act of legalism from him — so the Poles could hardly have had a clearer indication that Germany was on the verge of invading their country, but they could have had little intimation of Blitzkrieg tactics, hitherto the preserve of certain German and British theoretical tacticians. They could estimate accurately where and roughly when the attack would come, but crucially not how. The Poles therefore chose to place the bulk of their troops close to the German border. The Munich crisis the previous autumn, and Hitler’s seizure of the rump of Czechoslovakia the following spring, meant that Poland’s border with the Reich had been extended from 1,250 to a full 1,750 miles, much further than the Polish Army could adequately defend. Its commander-in-chief, Marshal Edward Śmigly-Rydz, therefore had to decide whether to keep the majority of his forces back behind the natural defensive line formed by the Vistula, San and Narev rivers, or to try to protect Poland’s industrial heartlands and best agricultural land in the west of the country.

Śmigly-Rydz decided to commit his troops to defending every inch of Polish soil, which left them perilously exposed. He attempted to deploy across the whole front from Lithuania to the Carpathians, and even kept a special assault group for invading East Prussia, retaining one-third of his force in Poznia and the Polish Corridor. As so often in the history of poor, martyred Poland, the dispositions were brave: otherwise Śmigly-Rydz would simply have had to abandon cities as important as Kraków, Poznań , Bydgoszcz and Łódź, which all lay to the west of the three rivers. Nonetheless, it is hard not to agree with Major-General Frederick von Mellenthin, then the intelligence officer of the German III Corps, that Polish ‘plans were lacking a sense of reality’.⁵

At 17.30 hours on Thursday, 31 August 1939, Hitler ordered hostilities to start the next morning, and this time there would be no postponement. So at 04.45 on Friday, 1 September German forces activated Plan White, which had been formulated that June by the German Army High Command, the Oberkommando des Heeres (OKH). The OKH was composed of the commander-in-chief of the Field Army (Feldheer), the Army General Staff, the Army Personnel Office and the commander-in-chief of the Reserve Army (Ersatzheer). Above the OKH in terms of creating grand strategy was the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (Armed Forces High Command, or OKW). Soon after assuming personal command of the German armed forces in February 1938, Hitler had created the OKW to function as his military staff under his direct command, with Keitel as its chief. Whereas Blomberg had been strenuously opposed by the Navy and Army in his efforts to set up a unified high command, Hitler was not to be baulked. In August 1939, when general mobilization went ahead, OKW consisted of the office of the Chief of Staff (Keitel), a central administrative division, the armed forces administration office (under Jodl) which kept Hitler informed of the military situation, an intelligence office under Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, a war production office and various smaller units concerned with military justice and finance.

According to Plan White, on either side of a relatively weak and stationary centre, two powerful wings of the Wehrmacht would envelop Poland, crush its armed forces and capture Warsaw. Army Group North, under Colonel-General Fedor von Bock, would smash through the Polish Corridor, take Danzig (present-day Gdańsk), unite with the German Third Army in East Prussia, and move swiftly to attack the Polish capital from the north. Meanwhile an even stronger Army Group South, under Colonel-General Gerd von Rundstedt, would punch between the larger Polish forces facing it, push east all the way to Lvov, but also assault Warsaw from the west and north. (At the Jablunka Pass, the Poles did at least destroy the railway tunnel, which was not reopened until 1948.)

The Polish Corridor, which had been intended by the framers of the Versailles Treaty of 1919 to cut off East Prussia from the rest of Germany, had long been presented as a casus belli by the Nazis, as had the ethnically German Baltic port of Danzig, but as Hitler had told a conference of generals in May 1939, ‘Danzig is not the real issue; the real point is for us to open up our Lebensraum to the east and ensure our supplies of foodstuffs.’⁶ Yet much more than mere practicalities drove Hitler. This was to be an existential conflict, fulfilling the prophecies he had made fourteen years before in his political testimony Mein Kampf. The German master race would subjugate the Slavs – Untermenschen (subhumans) according to Nazi precepts of racial hierarchy – and use their territory to nurture a new Aryan civilization. This was to be the world’s first wholly politically ideological war, and it is a contention of this book that that was the primary reason why the Nazis eventually lost it.

The strategy of having a weak centre and two powerful flanks was a brilliant one, and was believed to have derived from Field Marshal Count Alfred von Schlieffen’s celebrated pre-Great War study of Hannibal’s tactics at the battle of Cannae. Whatever the provenance it worked well, slipping German armies neatly between Polish ones and enabling them to converge on Warsaw from different angles almost simultaneously. Yet what made it irresistible was not German preponderance in men and arms, but above all the new military doctrine of Blitzkrieg. Poland was a fine testing ground for Blitzkrieg tactics: although it had lakes, forests and bad roads, it was nonetheless flat, with immensely wide fronts and firm, late-summer ground ideal for tanks.

Because the British and French Governments, fearful that Germany was about to invade at any moment, had given their guarantee to Poland on 1 April 1939, with the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain formally promising her ‘all support in the power’ of the Allies should she be attacked, Hitler was forced to leave a large proportion of his hundred-division Army in the west, guarding the Siegfried Line, or ‘West Wall’ – a 3-mile-deep series of still-incomplete fortifications along Germany’s western frontier. The fear of a war on two fronts led the Führer to detail no fewer than forty divisions to protect his back. However, three-quarters of these were only second-rate units and they had been left with only three days’ ammunition.⁷ His best troops, along with all his armoured and mobile divisions and almost all his aircraft, Hitler devoted to the attack on Poland.

Plan White was drawn up by the OKH planners, with Hitler merely putting his imprimatur on the final document. At this early stage of the war there was a good deal of genuine mutual respect between Hitler and his generals, aided by the fact that he had not so far interfered too closely in their troop dispositions and planning; his two Iron Crosses gave him some standing with his generals. Hitler’s own self-confidence in military affairs was singular. This may have come in part from the sense of superiority of many veteran infantrymen that it was they who had borne the brunt of the fighting in the Great War. Both the OKW Chief of Staff Wilhelm Keitel, and his lieutenant the Chief of the Wehrmacht Operations Staff, Alfred Jodl, had been artillerymen and Staff officers in the Great War: their battle had been an indirect one, although Keitel had been wounded. General Walther von Reichenau, Colonel-General Walther von Brauchitsch and General Hans von Kluge were also artillerymen, and General Paul von Kleist and Lieutenant-General Erich Manstein had been in the cavalry (although Manstein too had been wounded). Some generals, such as Heinz Guderian, had been in Signals, and others such as Maximilian von Weichs had spent most of the war on the General Staff. Whatever the reason, Hitler was not as cowed as an ex-corporal would usually have been among generals. Although he had been a mere Meldegänger, he would also have learnt something about tactics. It is possible that had Hitler been a German citizen he would have been commissioned; knowing this himself, he might well have emerged from the war with a sense of being capable of commanding a battalion, which only a technicality had prevented.⁸ Many of the generals of 1939 had spent the 1920s in the paramilitary militia known as the Freikorps and the tiny ‘Treaty’ Army that was permitted under Versailles. Before Hitler came to power, this had involved little more than Staff work, training and studying. That would not have overly impressed Hitler, whatever titular rank those serving in it had achieved. For all that former Lieutenant-Colonel Winston Churchill was to mock ‘Corporal’ Hitler for his lowly Great War rank in the trenches, the Führer seems to have been under no inferiority complex when dealing directly with soldiers who had wildly outranked him in the previous conflict.

Plan White devoted sixty divisions to the conquest of Poland, including five Panzer divisions of 300 tanks each, four light divisions (of fewer tanks and some horses) and four fully motorized divisions (with lorry-borne infantry), as well as 3,600 operational aircraft and much of the powerful Kriegsmarine (German Navy). Poland meanwhile had only thirty infantry divisions, eleven cavalry brigades, two mechanized brigades, 300 medium and light tanks, 1,154 field guns and 400 aircraft ready for combat (of which only Łoś aircraft were not obsolete), as well as a fleet of only four modern destroyers and five submarines. Although these forces comprised fewer than one million men, Poland tried to mobilize her reservists, but that was far from complete when the devastating blow fell from 630,000 German troops under Bock and 886,000 under Rundstedt.

As dawn broke on 1 September, Heinkel He-111 bombers, with top speeds of 350kph carrying 2,000-kilogram loads, as well as Dorniers and Junkers Ju-87 (Stuka) dive-bombers, began pounding Polish roads, airfields, railway junctions, munition dumps, mobilization centres and cities, including Warsaw. Meanwhile, the training ship Schleswig Holstein in Danzig harbour started shelling the Polish garrison at Westerplatte. The Stukas had special sirens attached whose screams hugely intensified the terror of those below. Much of the Polish Air Force was destroyed on the ground, and air superiority – which was to be a vital factor in this six-year conflict – was quickly won by the Luftwaffe. The Messerschmitt Me-109 had a top speed of 470kph, and the far slower Polish planes stood little chance, however brave their pilots. Furthermore, Polish anti-aircraft defences – where there were any – were inadequate.

In charge of the two armoured divisions and two light divisions of Army Group North was General Heinz Guderian, a long-time exponent of – indeed passionate proselytizer for – the tactics of Blitzkrieg. Wielding his force as an homogeneous entity, by contrast with Army Group South where tanks were split up among different units, Guderian scored amazing successes as he raced ahead of the main body of the infantry. Polish retaliation was further hampered by vast numbers of refugees taking to the roads. Once they were bombed and machine-gunned from the air in further pursuance of Blitzkrieg tactics, chaos ensued.

Hitler needed the Polish campaign to be over quickly in case of an attack in the west, but it was not until 11 a.m. on Sunday, 3 September that Neville Chamberlain’s Government finally declared war on Germany, with the French Government reluctantly following six hours later. It soon became clear to everyone – except the ever hopeful Poles – that the Western Allies were not about to assault the Siegfried Line, even though the French had eighty-five divisions there facing forty German. A fear of massive German air attacks devastating London and Paris partly explained Allied inaction, but even if Britain and France had attacked in the west Poland could probably not have been saved in time. As it was, although the RAF Advanced Air Striking Force reached France by 9 September, the main British Expeditionary Force (BEF) under Lord Gort vc did not start to arrive on the Continent until the next day.

What was not appreciated by the Allies at the time was the ever present fear that Hitler had of an attack from the west while he was dealing with matters in the east. In a letter to the Deputy Prison Governor at Nuremberg in 1946, Wilhelm Keitel averred that ‘What the Führer most feared and repeatedly brought up’ was firstly the possibility of a ‘Secret agreement between the French and Belgian general staffs for a surprise thrust by the French high-speed (motorized) forces through Belgium, and over the German frontier, so as to burst into the German industrial zone in the Ruhr’, and secondly the possibility of a ‘Secret agreement between the British Admiralty and the Dutch general staff for a surprise landing of British troops in Holland, for an attack on the German north flank’.⁹ In the event, Hitler needn’t have worried about either development, as neither France nor Britain, let alone neutral Belgium and Holland, was so much as contemplating anything so imaginative and vigorous. It was true that Chamberlain brought the long-term anti-Nazi prophet Winston Churchill into his government as first lord of the Admiralty, with political re...