Bill Fawcett - 100 Mistakes That Changed History

Even if the loss of the BEF had not forced a peace on Britain, it would have drastically changed how that nation could fight in the next few years. It may well have meant a complete withdrawal from the Mediterranean basin, leaving it to the Axis. Many of the men who fought and eventually stopped Rommel in North Africa were survivors of the Dunkirk evacuation. With the BEF lost, it would have been unlikely that tens of thousands of men could be spared from England to go defend the Suez Canal and Egypt. Lacking enough troops to fend off their assault, Africa might well have fallen to the Italians even without an Afrika Korps being needed.

Even more dramatically affecting the course of the entire war would have been the lack of troops available to assist Greece in 1941. When the Italians attacked Greece, the British rushed several divisions to support the successfully defending Greek army. With that support, the Italians were stopped and pushed back. The Greeks were actually on the offensive in Albania within a month of Italy’s attack. Because of the Anglo-Greek success, the German army had to intervene with significant forces. That intervention delayed the kickoff of Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of Russia. In Russia, later that year, the German army’s successes slowed and then stopped as the weather worsened. Without the British forces sent to Greece, the German intervention may not have been needed, or not needed on a scale that delayed Barbarossa. It was only the early winter weather in 1941 that stopped the shift of several panzer divisions back to the attack on Moscow. With no delay and another month of good weather after the invasion had started, the Russian capital might well have fallen. The capture of Dunkirk and the BEF in 1940 might well have meant that Germany in 1941 would have been able to attack Russia earlier in the summer. They would then have had enough good weather to capture, as the Wehrmacht almost did, the political and transport center of the entire Soviet Union: Moscow. Had they done so, it would have crippled, if not outright defeated, Russia before the onset of the bitter cold. The decision to stop Guderian’s panzers short of Dunkirk may well have been a mistake that lost Germany World War II.

Here is a “what if ”: If you were the leader of a nation at war, whom would you trust as your second-in-command? A man who:

1. May have stopped the panzers short just so that his aircraft could get credit for destroying the trapped British in Belgium and then instead allowed more than 300,000 enemy soldiers to be evacuated from Dunkirk?

2. Had failed you in the Battle of Britain even though his Luftwaffe far outnumbered the Royal Air Force? Then he blamed his pilots and called them cowards.

3. Bragged publicly and continually that his Luftwaffe would never allow a single British aircraft over Berlin? In a radio interview, he said that if one bomb fell, you “could call him Meier,” which was contemporary slang for “I would be a fool,” and a week later, seventy-five British bombers attacked the German capital with few losses.

4. Guaranteed that if the surrounded Sixth Army stayed in Stalingrad, his aircraft could deliver 750 tons of supplies a day? This promise was made even though his own officers informed him that they had barely enough planes to deliver a third of that amount. The army was ordered to hold the city and not to break out when it could. Eventually starved for ammunition and just plain starved, more than half a million German and allied Axis soldiers were lost at Stalingrad.

5. Forbade the head of his fighters, Adolf Galland, to report to anyone that the new American fighters were now accompanying the bombers deep into Germany?

6. Even as the Allies bombed Germany’s cities, continued to extend the Goering Works manufacturing empire until it employed 700,000 workers, many of them prisoner labor? Most of what the Goering Works made were items under contract to the Nazi government or the Luftwaffe. You can bet those were no-bid contracts. During the war, his company made him one of the richest men in Germany.

7. Regularly used morphine and had been effectively addicted to the drug since 1923? Because of this addiction the Reichsmarschall gained more than 100 pounds by 1943.

8. Was notorious as the greatest art thief in history, assigning entire military units to loot thousands of art treasures from all of Europe for his personal collection?

Who would trust and rely on such a man? Hitler did. The man, of course, was Hermann Goering. He became Hitler’s war minister, commander of the Luftwaffe and, as Reichsmarschall, the number two head of the Nazi government. He was even Hitler’s designated successor almost to the very end of the war. No matter how often Hermann Goering failed, Hitler made the mistake of continuing to trust “Fat Hermann,” the self-proclaimed Renaissance man. Perhaps we should be very grateful for this mistake. How frightening might the world be today if the Führer had instead found a competent right-hand man?

Two mistakes in August 1940 may have changed the entire war that followed. One was made by the lead aircraft in a small flight of Heinkel bombers on August 24. It was night, and accurate bombing at night was difficult. In 1940, there was no GPS or any other way for a pilot to know where he was. The only available method was simply to follow landmarks. This was a dicey proposition on a dark night. Even in daylight, following any flight plan over enemy territory while being fired on from the ground and threatened by fighters was difficult. In the dark, it became incredibly easy to be dozens of miles off course. So it was not unusual for a flight of Heinkels, over blacked-out England, to go astray. The only real difference between the situation that night was that they had strayed over central London.

That was during the peak of the Battle of Britain. If Germany could gain air dominance, it could control the Channel and invade England. Their army had been shattered on the Continent and those who had escaped had left their artillery, tanks, and even weapons behind. The only thing protecting Britain from invasion was the Royal Air Force (RAF) and the Royal Navy. But without control of the air over the English Channel, the ships of the Royal Navy would be easily sunk in the narrow waters. If that occurred, there was virtually no chance the battered Royal Army could hold the island against a determined German landing. Since August 13, the Luftwaffe had been constantly challenging the RAF. Their targets had been the RAF itself. German bombers had struck at the English airfields, aircraft production plants, and occasionally the strange radar towers along the coast. This forced the Hurricanes and Spitfires of the RAF to meet every attack or be destroyed on the ground.

The German’s normal technique was to send over bombers protected by fighters during the day and unprotected bombers at night. The strategy was working. When the British fighters rose to attack the daytime bombers, the Nazi fighters could attack them. Since the RAF was outnumbered more than two to one in fighters, this created a steady attrition that favored the Germans.

In a message to the secretary of state for air on June 3, Winston Churchill stated that

the Cabinet were distressed to hear from you that you were now running short of pilots for fighters, and that they had now become the limiting factor… Lord Beaverbrook has made a surprising improvement in the supply and repair of aeroplanes, and in clearing up the muddle and scandal of the aircraft production branch. I greatly hope that you will be able to do as much on the personnel side, for it will indeed be lamentable if we have machines standing idle for want of pilots to fly them.