Bevin Alexander - How Hitler Could Have Won World War II

Nevertheless, the arrival of both panzer divisions stopped the rapid advance of the Allies out of Normandy. But these and other divisions were eaten up as they were committed piecemeal, and the moment passed when the German army could have thrown the Allies into the sea. Meanwhile Hitler held some of his strongest divisions at the Pas de Calais, still believing the Normandy invasion was a feint. From sites around the Pas, he also launched attacks on London, beginning June 12–13, with the V-1 jet-propelled cruise missile, and, in September, fired the first V-2 rocket-propelled ballistic missiles.

On June 10, Rommel proposed to Hitler that all armored forces in the line be replaced with infantry formations, and that armor be shifted westward to cut off and destroy the Americans in the lower Cotentin peninsula (7th Corps that had landed at Utah and the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions). But Hitler vetoed the plan, and the Germans were forced into a wholly defensive operation.

This led to a murderous battle, but the outcome was never in doubt. Overwhelming Allied power was building day by day. Before long the Allies would burst out of Normandy and roll over the German army.

ALL THE DISASTERS PREDICTED BY ERWIN ROMMEL FOR FAILURE TO MOVE UP forces in advance now came to pass. Practically every unit ordered to the battlefront suffered heavy damage. Reinforcements had to be thrown in as soon as they arrived, and their strength eroded rapidly. Battle losses ran 2,500 to 3,000 a day. Tank losses were immense, replacements few.

Allied aircraft destroyed the railway system serving Normandy and smashed anything moving on the roads in daytime. The supply system was so damaged that only the barest essentials reached the front.

As Hitler repeated his familiar order to hold every square yard, Rundstedt and Rommel went to Berchtesgaden on June 29 to talk with the Fuehrer.

Hitler’s ideas for stopping the western Allies were utterly unrealistic. The navy was to attack the Allied battleships, but Admiral Dönitz pointed out only a few small torpedo and other light boats were available, and they could accomplish little. A thousand of the new Me-262 twin-engine, jet-propelled fighters were to wrest control of the air over Normandy. However, Anglo-American air attacks in the winter and spring of 1944 had virtually wiped out the pool of skilled German pilots. The Luftwaffe could produce only 500 crews, most of them ill-trained. Consequently, very few Me-262s, with a speed (540 mph) and armament (four 30-millimeter cannons) exceeding any Allied fighter, ever flew against the Allies.

Rundstedt and Rommel told Hitler the situation was impossible. How, Rommel asked, did Hitler imagine the war could still be won? A chaotic argument followed, and Rundstedt and Rommel expected to be ousted from their jobs.

Back at Paris on July 1, Rundstedt got Hitler’s order that “present positions are to be held.” He called Hitler’s headquarters and told a staff officer he couldn’t fulfill this demand. What shall we do? the officer asked. Rundstedt replied: “Make peace, you fools.”

The next day an emissary from Hitler presented Rundstedt with an Oak Leaf to the Knight’s Cross and a handwritten note relieving him of his post because of “age and poor health.” Hitler replaced Rundstedt with Günther von Kluge, who at first thought the situation was better than it was. He changed his mind the moment he visited the front.

Rommel, to his surprise, remained at his post. About this time Rommel and his chief of staff, Hans Speidel, concluded that the Germans should commence independent peace negotiations with the western Allies. Their idea was to open the west to an unopposed “march in” by the British and American armies, with the aim of keeping the Russians out of Germany. Everything had been prepared and Kluge and others won over, when fate intervened on July 17: Rommel was severely wounded by a low-flying Allied aircraft near Livarot.

Three days later, on July 20, 1944, Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, a leader of the secret opposition to Hitler, placed a bomb under a table where Hitler was meeting in his headquarters at Rastenburg, East Prussia. The bomb exploded, but Hitler survived. Immediately afterward, he replaced the army chief of staff, Kurt Zeitzler, with Heinz Guderian, who reported to Hitler at noon on July 21.

“He seemed to be in rather poor shape,” Guderian wrote. “One ear was bleeding; his right arm, which had been badly bruised and was almost unusable, hung in a sling. But his manner was one of astonishing calm.”

Hitler quickly recovered from the physical effects of the bomb. An existing malady, which caused his left hand and left leg to tremble, had no connection with the explosion. The attempt on his life had a profound effect on his behavior, however. Guderian wrote that “the deep distrust he already felt for mankind in general … now became profound hatred…. What had been hardness became cruelty, while a tendency to bluff became plain dishonesty. He often lied without hesitation…. He believed no one any more. It had already been difficult enough dealing with him; it now became torture that grew steadily worse from month to month. He frequently lost all self-control and his language grew increasingly violent.”

Hitler commenced a wave of terror against anyone suspected of a role in the bombing plot. This led to numerous executions. On October 14, 1944, Rommel, recovering from his wounds at his home in Ulm, received the option of a People’s Court trial, which would have meant execution, or taking poison and getting a state funeral—and no persecution of his wife and son. Rommel chose poison.

By June 27, the Americans had pushed the Germans out of the Cotentin peninsula and seized Cherbourg (though the Germans damaged the port and it took weeks to get it operating). Meanwhile, Montgomery’s British forces on the east had been unable to budge the Germans from Caen. Danger arose that the Allies would be boxed into Normandy, especially as a Channel storm June 19–23 severely damaged the Mulberries on the Norman coast and drove 800 vessels up on the beaches.

Omar Bradley, commanding the U.S. 1st Army, began moving his forces south to carry out the original plan of Overlord: breaking out to Avranches at the base of the Cotentin peninsula, thereby opening the door to capture of Brittany and the ports there by George Patton’s 3rd Army, to be committed at this time. These advances in addition would give the Allies space for a massive turning movement that could sweep across France to the German frontier.

Bradley lined up twelve divisions in four corps to crack through in a massive frontal assault. Troy H. Middleton’s 8th Corps and J. Lawton Collins’s 7th Corps on the west were to drive full speed down the west coast of the peninsula to Avranches. Meanwhile Charles H. Corlett’s 19th Corps would seize St. Lô in the center, and Leonard T. Gerow’s 5th Corps at Caumont would “hold the hub of the wheel,” in Bradley’s words, protecting the right flank of the British 2nd Army.

Middleton’s corps, on the extreme west, opened the attack on July 3. But it failed completely. Collins’s 7th Corps had no better luck the next day, while 19th Corps made only meager gains around St. Lô.

To Bradley and his corps commanders the fault lay with the leadership within the American divisions, which in numerous cases was inadequate. Bradley replaced several commanders, but the great problem the Americans faced was the bocage— the hedgerow country of Normandy— which caught the Americans by complete surprise. Planners, solving problems of the landings, had paid little or no attention to the terrain just behind the beaches. No troops were taught how to deal with it.