War Stories III

The Heroes Who Defeated Hitler

Oliver North, Joe Musser, Joe Musser

• Publisher: Regnery History
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780895260147
• eBook ISBN: 9781596983069
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

It was the Greatest Generation's greatest moment: when heroes at home and abroad, united in common purpose as soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines—under the leadership of generals like Patton, Eisenhower, Marshall, and Bradley—rescued Europe from the tyranny and genocide of Adolf Hitler. In War Stories III: The Heroes Who Defeated Hitler, Marine combat veteran Lt. Col. Oliver North gives you a chance to revisit the front lines. Using dramatic first-person testimony, North reveals: The reality of combat: how it felt to live through the Battle of Britain as a citizen and a pilot, on the ground and in the air The stories of Yanks in the RAF: how Americans fought Hitler before Pearl Harbor America's first taste of battle in North Africa against the Germans—and the French. A date with destiny: men and women who joined up together to fight for liberty. The saga of war on the home front: how women faced enormous challenges in America, Russia, and Britain and helped win the war. Featuring extended interviews with veterans that cover the war in Europe from beginning to end, War Stories III: The Heroes Who Defeated Hitler is a testament to the courage and sacrifice of the World War II generation—a remembrance of the bravery and honor of these heroes.

CHAPTER 1

WAR CLOUDS 1938–1941

World War II in Europe was both inevitable and preventable. It was a war started by a military dictator who came to power not by a coup, but by the ballot box. One man—Adolf Hitler—precipitated the carnage, and he was able to do so because the German people and the democracies of the world were unwilling to confront his growing evil until it was too late.

A World War I veteran, unsuccessful artist, and failed businessman, Hitler was a charismatic demagogue, xenophobe and racist. From 1919 to 1923, with Germany reeling in the chaotic political environment after World War I and crippled by reparations imposed by the Treaty of Versailles, he and a half-dozen other political unknowns organized the nucleus of what was to become the National Socialist—or Nazi—Party.

In the autumn of 1923, the French army occupied the Ruhr River valley, Germany’s industrial heartland, in an effort to force Berlin to pay its World War I reparations. The value of the German currency plummeted and Hitler convinced himself—and several thousand followers—that the hyper-inflation and French “invasion” had created conditions conducive to a coup that would bring down the national government.

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The “Beer Hall Putsch,” in Munich on 9 November 1923, failed miserably. Had Hitler and his co-conspirators been sentenced to lengthy jail terms, that might well have ended any threat that he and his Sturmabteilung—the “SA,” brown-shirted “Storm-troopers”—posed to the Weimar Republic and the security of Europe. But as it turned out, he only served nine months, just enough time to dictate his political manifesto, Mein Kampf (My Struggle) to his leading accomplice Rudolf Hess, a fellow World War I veteran.

Once freed, Hitler spent the next eight years building a political machine—and a 400,000-man private army. In the elections of 1932, the Nazi party won more than 37 percent of the vote and a plurality of seats in the Reichstag, the German parliament. Beset by the catastrophic effects of the worldwide “Great Depression,” six million unemployed workers, and the rising specter of Communist-inspired revolution, Paul von Hindenburg, a World War I hero and the figurehead president of the republic, installed Hitler as chancellor on 30 January 1933.

Nazi brownshirts saluting Hitler (1935).

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The following month the Reichstag was destroyed by fire. The Nazis claimed that the fire had been set by Communists and used the incident to pass the infamous “Enabling Bill,” which suspended legislative authority and gave Hitler near absolute power to make new laws. In June of 1934 he had all of his rivals in the SA brutally murdered, and when Hindenburg died in August of that year, Hitler combined the offices of chancellor and president in a new post: Führer. From that moment on, war was practically inevitable.

Hitler immediately set about consolidating his hold on absolute power. By 1935 his public works projects: railroads, motorways (he called them autobahnen), airports, military conscription, and armaments industries, had cut German unemployment to a fraction of that in the rest of the world. Meanwhile, Europe’s leaders did little but debate about what to do about the growing menace in the heart of the continent.

The French, alarmed at Hitler’s withdrawal from the League of Nations and his unilateral abrogation of the Versailles Treaty, did little but double the term of service for their army conscripts and speed up work on their border fortifications—the Maginot Line. The British, in the first of many acts of appeasement, agreed that Germany was no longer bound by naval restrictions imposed by the Versailles Treaty. In Moscow, Josef Stalin was busy purging his military and establishing a totalitarian police state that oppressed, tortured, and killed millions. In Rome, Hitler’s philosophical ally and fellow fascist, Benito Mussolini, was engaged in his own imperial ambitions in Africa. Militarism and expansionism also gained ground in Asia, as the Japanese expanded their territorial ambitions in the heart of China from Manchuria, which it had occupied in 1930.

Emboldened by the impotence of his neighbors, in March 1936, Hitler sent troops into the “demilitarized” Rhineland, in violation of the Treaty of Versailles. In October that same year, Hitler and Mussolini signed the Rome-Berlin Axis Agreement—expanded a year later to include a military agreement under the so-called Anti-Comintern Pact—pledging military support to one another in the event of war with the Soviet Union.

In late 1937 the Führer also reorganized the German military and established a new strategic command structure—the Obercommando der Wermacht (OKW)—and put himself at its head. In November of that year, Hitler convened a secret conference in the Reich Chancellery, where he outlined for his cabinet and senior military commanders his plan to gain Lebensraum—“living space”—for the “Aryan” race, a term for the German people that he’d first articulated in Mein Kampf.

The broad strokes of Hitler’s plan called for expanding German territory to the east, seizing resources, “purifying” German-held territory of “non-Aryan” peoples and “confronting Communism.” In his grand plan for creating a “Third Reich,” he envisioned massive propaganda campaigns, the use of disinformation to spread fear, the use of espionage operations in an enemy’s heartland, and “lightning stroke” military maneuvers to overwhelm adversaries without the static attrition that had characterized combat in World War I. He correctly surmised that the French would have to be beaten militarily but wrongly assumed that both the Soviet Union and Great Britain could be cowed into submission.

The Führer’s strategic premise—that the Western democracies would be powerless to stop the German juggernaut—was supported by assessments of his military intelligence service, the Abwehr. By the time he finished laying out his plan for European domination, no one in the Nazi party had any doubt that Hitler was ready for war.

On 12 March 1938 Germany annexed Austria in what the Führer called an Anschluss—or “re-unifying annexation.” The European democracies filed a diplomatic protest. When Hitler arrayed his army on the border of Czechoslovakia that September, Neville Chamberlain and Édouard Daladier—the British and French prime ministers—flew to Munich in an effort to appease the German dictator. On his return to London, Chamberlain, quoting an old hymn, promised that they had secured “peace for our time.” Less than six months later, on 15 March 1939, the grey-clad, jack-booted Wehrmacht marched into Prague, Czechoslovakia, without resistance. Only then did the British and French start serious preparations for war.

Molotov and Ribbentrop sign non-aggression treaty in Moscow.

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While London and Paris scrambled to accelerate military production and conscription, Hitler engaged in a diplomatic offensive with his sworn enemy to the east—the Soviet Union. On 22 August 1939 foreign ministers Vyacheslav Molotov and Joachim von Ribbentrop signed a secret non-aggression pact in Moscow, effectively dividing Poland in two—giving Hitler free reign east to the Vistula—and a German promise not to intervene if the Soviets annexed the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.

When the sixty-two divisions and 1,300 aircraft of the Nazi war machine invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, it took three full days for Britain, France, Australia, and New Zealand to declare war on Germany. Poland’s ill-equipped army fought the blitzkrieg—“lightning war,” a term coined by British newspapers—as best they were able, hoping for a rapid Allied response. But the unprepared Poles were no match for the modernized German army, and when Warsaw fell on 27 September, no allied forces were yet fully mobilized. Rather than surrender to Hitler’s legions, several hundred thousand Polish troops fled east—only to be captured by the Soviets, who promptly murdered every officer who fell into their hands.

The Führer spent the remainder of the autumn and the winter of 1939–1940 preparing for an expected Franco-British intervention in the west that never came—and arguing with his generals as to how best to capture France. Stalin, believing himself secured from Hitler’s voracious territorial appetite by the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, sent his own army into Finland on 30 November 1939, earning nothing more than expulsion from the League of Nations.

Hitler watched the “Winter War” in Finland with great interest. The poor performance of more than a million Soviet troops—fighting fewer than 200,000 Finns—convinced the Führer that Stalin’s Red Army was no match for his Wehrmacht. By the time Moscow and Helsinki inked an armistice on 12 March 1940, members of the General Staff in Berlin—instigated by Grand Admiral Erich Raeder—had convinced Hitler that the Third Reich had to have Norway in order to ensure access from the Baltic into the North Atlantic.

On 9 April 1940 German troops occupied a totally undefended and neutral Denmark—and simultaneously invaded Norway. Though the Wehrmacht quickly captured Oslo, secured their objectives in the south, and forced the royal family to flee, the British Navy fought back tenaciously and succeeded in doing serious damage to the German invasion fleet at Narvik. Only Hitler’s long-planned invasion of Holland, Belgium, and France saved the German invaders from the 25,000 or so Norwegian, British, and French troops fighting their way south down the rough Scandinavian coastline.

Hitler called his plan for seizing France—and the rest of northwestern Europe—Sichelschnitt: “Sickle Stroke.” It involved three German army groups—120 infantry divisions, ten Panzer divisions with 2,400 tanks, two paratroop divisions, thousands of tracked and wheeled vehicles, more than 2,500 aircraft—and the most important requirement of all, the element of surprise. At 0430 on the morning of 10 May 1940, the “Phony War” ended as the largest mechanized army yet assembled on earth began a slashing assault across the neutral Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg—and into the heart of France. That evening the government of Neville Chamberlain collapsed and Winston Churchill was named prime minister.

Within fourteen days the outnumbered and outgunned British Expeditionary Force and the remnants of the once-proud French First Army Group had been pushed into a pocket along the French Coast—the English Channel to their backs. From 24 May to 6 June, a flotilla of nearly a thousand small boats in “Operation Dynamo” evacuated more than 338,000 Allied troops from the beaches of Dunkirk, carrying them across the cold, choppy waters of the channel to the eastern thumb of Kent, England. On 4 June 1940, as “Dynamo” was coming to a close, a defiant Churchill promised, “We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills—we shall never surrender.”

On 10 June, Italy declared war on France and Mussolini dispatched twenty-eight of his divisions across the Alps to invade France from the south—only to be held in check by four under-strength French divisions. But in the north it was a different story. By 14 June, most French units were simply out of ammunition and Paris, declared an “open city” to spare its destruction, was occupied by German troops. On 16 June, the aged Marshal Philippe Petain—a World War I hero—was appointed prime minister of France. Five days later the old man authorized an armistice—dividing France into an “Occupied Zone” and moving the “sovereign” French government first to Bordeaux and then to Vichy.

The terms of the cease-fire were onerous. Some 90,000 Frenchmen were dead, almost half a million wounded, and nearly two million others became prisoners of the Reich. Across the English Channel, a defiant Winston Churchill, leader of the only democracy left in Europe but Switzerland, told his countrymen to prepare for an invasion—while at the same time trying to persuade America into war.

Americans had done their best to avoid getting drawn into another war in Europe. Following World War I many American politicians and ordinary citizens proudly described themselves as “isolationists.” By the 1930s, most U.S. citizens were overwhelmed with their own concerns. The Great Depression had robbed a great many of them of their farms, homes, businesses, and way of life. Heartbreaking as Nazi and Japanese atrocities sounded, most Americans had to face their own anxieties. Their families and jobs were more important than what was happening on the other side of the Atlantic or Pacific oceans during one of the darkest and bleakest periods of American history.

As Hitler’s rise to power threatened stability in Europe, prominent American business and political leaders counseled that whatever happened “over there”—it was not our fight. Robert Wood, the chairman of Sears Roebuck Company, emphasized the consequences and the terrible economic losses that war left in its wake. Most newspapers echoed those sentiments and urged that we remain neutral as war clouds enveloped Europe and Asia.

Curiously, the famous record-setting aviator Charles Lindbergh also promoted isolationism, but at the same time seemed to be courting Germany and Hitler. Lindbergh’s heritage was German, and he held views that some said were anti-Semitic and pro-Nazi. During 1935–39, in his visits to Germany, where he praised German aviation, Lindbergh was presented with a medal from the Nazis. A member of an isolationist movement calling itself “America First,” Lindbergh was also a featured speaker during a neo-Nazi rally of the “German-American Bund” when they met at Madison Square Garden in 1941.

Though President Franklin Delano Roosevelt viewed developments in Europe and Asia with growing concern, he was unable to convince Congress not to pass a series of five “Neutrality Acts” between 1935 and 1939.

These laws effectively prohibited the United States government or its citizens from becoming a party to either side in the...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Dedication
• Introduction
• CHAPTER 1 - WAR CLOUDS 1938–1941
• CHAPTER 2 - THE BATTLE OF BRITAIN AND THE LONDON BLITZ JULY–OCTOBER 1940
• CHAPTER 3 - THE EASTERN FRONT 1939–1941
• CHAPTER 4 - PLUNGED INTO WAR 1941
• CHAPTER 5 - AMERICA GOES ON THE OFFENSIVE 1942
• CHAPTER 6 - SICILIAN HELL 1943
• CHAPTER 7 - BATTLE FOR THE BOOT 1943–1945
• CHAPTER 8 - WAR IN THE SKIES 1941–1945
• CHAPTER 9 - WAR AT SEA 1941–1945
• CHAPTER 10 - WAR ON THE HOME FRONT 1941–1945
• CHAPTER 11 - OPERATION OVERLORD: NORMANDY 1941
• CHAPTER 12 - FREEING FRANCE FROM HITLER 1944
• CHAPTER 13 - THE BATTLE OF THE BULGE 1944
• CHAPTER 14 - THE LAST DAYS OF HITLER AND THE THIRD REICH 1945
• EPILOGUE
• GLOSSARY
• Acknowledgments
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX
• Copyright Page