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  How Hitler Could Have Won World War II

  Bevin Alexander

  Most of us rally around the glory of the Allies’ victory over the Nazis in World War II. The story is often told of how the good fight was won by an astonishing array of manpower and stunning tactics. However, what is often overlooked is how the intersection between Adolf Hitler’s influential personality and his military strategy was critical in causing Germany to lose the war.

  With an acute eye for detail and his use of clear prose, acclaimed military historian Bevin Alexander goes beyond counterfactual “What if?” history and explores for the first time just how close the Allies were to losing the war. Using beautifully detailed, newly designed maps, How Hitler Could Have Won World War II exquisitely illustrates the important battles and how certain key movements and mistakes by Germany were crucial in determining the war’s outcome. Alexander’s harrowing study shows how only minor tactical changes in Hitler’s military approach could have changed the world we live in today.

  How Hitler Could Have Won World War II untangles some of the war’s most confounding strategic questions, such as:

  Why didn’t the Nazis concentrate their enormous military power on the only three beaches upon which the Allies could launch their attack into Europe?

  Why did the terrifying German panzers, on the brink of driving the British army into the sea in May 1940, halt their advance and allow the British to regroup and evacuate at Dunkirk?

  With the chance to cut off the Soviet lifeline of oil, and therefore any hope of Allied victory from the east, why did Hitler insist on dividing and weakening his army, which ultimately led to the horrible battle of Stalingrad?

  Ultimately, Alexander probes deeply into the crucial intersection between Hitler’s psyche and military strategy and how his paranoia fatally overwhelmed his acute political shrewdness to answer the most terrifying question: Just how close were the Nazis to victory?

  Why did Hitler insist on terror bombing London in the late summer of 1940, when the German air force was on the verge of destroying all of the RAF sector stations, England’s last defense?

  With the opportunity to drive the British out of Egypt and the Suez Canal and occupy all of the Middle East, therefore opening a Nazi door to the vast oil resources of the region, why did Hitler fail to move in just a few panzer divisions to handle such an easy but crucial maneuver?

  On the verge of a last monumental effort and concentration of German power to seize Moscow and end Stalin’s grip over the Eastern front, why did the Nazis divert their strength to bring about the far less important surrender of Kiev, thereby destroying any chance of ever conquering the Soviets?

  Bevin Alexander

  HOW HITLER COULD HAVE WON WORLD WAR II

  The Fatal Errors That Led to Nazi Defeat

  Introduction

  AROUND 400 B.C. THE GREAT CHINESE STRATEGIST SUN TZU BRUSHED IN THE characters for the most profound sentence ever written about warfare: “The way to avoid what is strong is to strike what is weak.”

  Adolf Hitler knew nothing of Sun Tzu. But for the first seven years of his dictatorship of Germany, from 1933 to 1940, he avoided strength, struck at weakness, and achieved such stunning success that he was on the threshold of complete victory.

  After 1940, however, Hitler abandoned a course of action that would have completed his victory. He attacked frontally into the strength of the Soviet Union, allowed Britain and the United States time to build immense military power, and was unable to prevent them from striking into Germany’s weakness. The collision of the Allies and Germans brought on the most titanic clash in history. But the outcome had already been foreshadowed by Hitler’s fatal mistakes in 1940 and thereafter. By 1945 Germany was shattered and Adolf Hitler dead.

  Hitler was one of the most evil monsters the world has ever known. But he was also a skilled politician. His political mastery boosted him into power and allowed him to hide his wickedness behind great economic, territorial, and military advances that he gained for Germany. Hitler did not seek rational goals, however. His aims were those of a maniac. He believed he could elevate the German people into a “master race” through restriction of marriages and sexual relations only among “Aryans,” refusing to recognize that Europeans had been interbreeding for a millennium and there could be no such thing as a pure “race” of Aryans or anything else. He wanted to gain Lebensraum, or living space, for the German people in Russia and Ukraine, and intended to kill or starve millions of Slavs living in those lands. Beyond this Hitler wanted to kill whole categories of people—Jews, Gypsies, persons with mental and physical disabilities, and anyone who objected to his desires.

  Hitler possessed great skill in spotting and exploiting the vulnerabilities of opponents. Using these gifts, Hitler gained an unparalleled string of victories that commenced with his installation as German chancellor in January 1933 and ended in the summer of 1940, when his victory over France convinced him he was an infallible military genius. He did not see that the victory came not from his own vision, but from that of two generals, Erich von Manstein and Heinz Guderian.

  Believing Britain would no longer be a major problem, Hitler turned his attention to killing Jews and other peoples he despised, and to the destruction of the Soviet Union.

  From this point on, these twin drives—war against Soviet Russia and perpetration of the Final Solution—consumed most of Hitler’s attention and the vast bulk of the resources and manpower of the German Reich.

  This course led straight to his destruction. It did not have to be. Hitler’s strategy through mid-1940 was almost flawless. He isolated and absorbed state after state in Europe, gained the Soviet Union as a willing ally, destroyed France’s military power, threw the British off the Continent, and was left with only weak and vulnerable obstacles to an empire covering most of Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. This empire not only would have been unassailable from the outside, but would have put him into the position, in time, to conquer the world.

  This did not happen. Hitler’s paranoias overwhelmed his political sense. He abandoned the successful indirect strategy of attacking weakness, which he had followed up to the summer of 1940, and tried to grab Lebensraum directly and by main strength. He was unable to see that he could achieve these goals far more easily and with absolute certainty by in-direction—by striking not what was strong but what was weak.

  Even after Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, he might have gained a partial victory if he had not possessed two more lethal defects— insistence on offensive solutions to military problems when his strength was inadequate, and attempting to keep all the territory he had seized when retreat would have preserved his forces. These failings led to disastrous offensives—Stalingrad, Tunisia, Kursk, the Bulge—and “no retreat” orders that destroyed huge portions of his army.

  The way to victory was not through a frontal attack on the Soviet Union but an indirect approach through North Africa. This route was so obvious that all the British leaders saw it, as did a number of the German leaders, including Alfred Jodl, chief of operations of the armed forces; Erich Raeder, commander of the German Navy, and Erwin Rommel, destined to gain fame in North Africa as the Desert Fox.

  After the destruction of France’s military power in 1940, Britain was left with only a single armored division to protect Egypt and the Suez Canal. Germany had twenty armored divisions, none being used. If the Axis— Germany and its ally Italy—had used only four of these divisions to seize the Suez Canal, the British Royal Navy would have been compelled to abandon the Mediterranean Sea, turning it into an Axis lake. French North Africa—Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia—could have b
een occupied, and German forces could have seized Dakar in Senegal on the west coast of Africa, from which submarines and aircraft could have dominated the main South Atlantic sea routes.

  With no hope of aid, Yugoslavia and Greece would have been forced to come to terms. Since Hitler gained the support of Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria, Germany would have achieved control of all southeastern Europe without committing a single German soldier.

  Once the Suez Canal was taken, the way would have been open to German armored columns to overrun Palestine, Transjordan, the Arabian peninsula, Syria, Iraq, and Iran. This would have given Germany unlimited supplies of the single commodity it needed most: oil.

  As important as oil was for the conduct of modern war, the greatest advantages of German occupation of the Arab lands and Iran would have been to isolate Turkey, threaten British control of India, and place German tanks and guns within striking distance of Soviet oil fields in the Caucasus and along the shores of the Caspian Sea. Turkey would have been forced to become an ally or grant transit rights to German forces, Britain would have had to exert all its strength to protect India, and the Soviet Union would have gone to any lengths to preserve peace with Germany because of its perilous position.

  Germany need not have launched a U-boat or air war against British shipping and cities, because British participation in the war would have become increasingly irrelevant. Britain could never have built enough military power to invade the Continent alone.

  Unless the strength of the Soviet Union were added, the United States could not have projected sufficient military force across the Atlantic Ocean, even over a period of years, to reconquer Europe by amphibious invasion in the face of an untouched German war machine. Since the United States was increasingly preoccupied with the threat of Japan, it almost certainly would not have challenged Germany.

  Thus, Germany would have been left with a virtually invincible empire and the leisure to develop defenses and resources that, in time, would permit it to match the strength of the United States. Though Britain might have refused to make peace, a de facto cease-fire would have ensued. The United States would have concentrated on defense of the Western Hemisphere and the Pacific. Even if the United States had proceeded with development of the atomic bomb, it would have hesitated to unleash it against Germany.

  This book is about the opportunities Hitler possessed that might have led to victory. But such was not to be, because of his inability to see the indirect way to victory, and his fixation on frontal assault of the Soviet Union.

  1 GERMANY’S OPPORTUNITY FOR VICTORY

  EARLY ON THE MORNING OF MAY 10, 1940, THE GREATEST CONCENTRATION OF armor in the history of warfare burst across the eastern frontiers of Belgium and Luxembourg. In four days, 1,800 tanks in seven panzer, or armored, divisions broke through the French main line of resistance on the Meuse River. Seven days later they reached the English Channel 160 miles away and cut off the most powerful and mobile of the French and British forces, who were now in Belgium. Those Allied soldiers who did not surrender were forced to evacuate by sea at Dunkirk.

  A month later France capitulated, and the British were thrown onto their islands with few weapons and only twenty-one miles of the Channel to keep them from being conquered as well.

  Germany had achieved the most spectacular, rapid, and overwhelming military victory in the twentieth century. It dominated Europe from the North Cape of Norway to the Mediterranean Sea and from Poland to the Atlantic. Victory lay within the grasp of the German dictator, Adolf Hitler.

  Yet at this moment of his greatest success—with only feeble barriers remaining before he could create a virtually invincible empire embracing Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East—Hitler turned away and embarked on a course that led to the destruction of the “Thousand-year Reich” in only five years.

  A number of high-command German officers saw the opportunities open in 1940 and urged Hitler to seize them. Hitler considered them, but in the end turned them down. After the victory over France, Hitler focused his attention on destruction of the Soviet Union and carrying forward his schemes to destroy the Jews and other peoples he hated.

  Hitler came to this decision by an incredibly convoluted and illogical process. Since Britain refused to sign a peace treaty, and since invading Britain would be extremely hazardous given the strength of the Royal Navy and the weakness of the German navy, Hitler concluded that the only way to overcome Britain would be to destroy the Soviet Union. Hitler decided that Russia was Britain’s chief remaining hope for assistance, its “continental dagger,” and once the Soviet Union was destroyed, the British would see reason and give in.

  This, of course, was entirely wrong. The British were relying on the United States, not Russia, for their salvation. “I shall drag the United States in,” British Prime Minister Winston Churchill told his son after France fell. And the American president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, was doing everything he could to help. But Roosevelt had to play a cagey game. A majority of the American electorate was deathly afraid of getting into another war in Europe, and wanted to isolate the country behind its two oceans. Only a minority recognized the terrible danger of Adolf Hitler and realized the United States would have to enter the war if Nazi Germany was to be defeated.

  Perhaps Hitler was engaging in wishful thinking in turning toward the Soviet Union, concocting a theory of the close connection of Britain to Russia to justify what he wanted to do anyway. He hated Communism, feared the growth of a powerful industrial state that was proceeding apace under Joseph Stalin, and wanted to seize a large segment of Russia and Ukraine. Besides, he could reach the Soviet Union, while he couldn’t reach Britain.

  Actually, Hitler did not want to destroy Britain, and this played a role in his decision to turn eastward. He admired the British Empire and wanted to reach an understanding with it. However, Hitler’s conditions were that Britain would keep its empire while Germany would have a free hand on the Continent. Britain could never accept such a settlement, however, because it could not survive as an independent power if Germany controlled the European continent.

  Hitler would listen to no criticism. His senior advisers knew the war in the west had been only half-won, and few thought it could be finished on the plains of Russia in the east. The Soviet Union was so vast that a war there could expand into limitless space—placing potentially impossible demands on the German war machine. A war against Russia would be nothing like the war in the west, where distances were limited, populations concentrated, objectives close, and the Atlantic Ocean a finite boundary.

  On the advice of General Erich von Manstein, Hitler had changed the Schwerpunkt—or main weight—of the attack from northern Belgium to the Ardennes, when the top German generals had advised otherwise. This decision had given Germany its greatest victory in history. Since the senior military leadership had been wrong, and he (and Manstein) right, Hitler concluded that he could rely on his “intuition.” This intuition told him to downgrade the war against Britain and carry out the two desires that had obsessed him from the early 1920s—destroying the Soviet Union and the Jews of Europe.

  Hitler’s belief in Lebensraum was based on his idea that the German people needed more land to produce more food. Classical economics had long since proved that industrial states could buy grains and other foods for their people and did not need additional farmland. But Hitler paid no attention. Besides, the idea of more land resonated with the German people. Their parents and grandparents had sought expansion into central and eastern Europe in the early years of the century; this was one of the underlying causes for World War I, which Germany had lost. In Mein Kampf Hitler wrote that Germany was not a world power in 1914–1918 because it could not feed its people, and would not become a world power until it was able to do so.

  Hitler’s compulsion to destroy the Jews and other categories of people rested on no logical basis, only on the most malignant of prejudices. He made the Jews scapegoats for every problem that Germany faced—even th
e rise of the Soviet Union, whose revolution he falsely claimed had been carried out and sustained by Jews.

  Hitler’s political savvy warned him to avoid getting openly involved in this pogrom of hate and murder, however, and he left its operation mostly to underlings, especially Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich of the Schutzstaffel or SS.

  In the butchery that followed, Hitler and his willing German executioners killed 6 million Jews in what is now called the Holocaust, perhaps a million Poles and Gypsies, thousands of persons who had mental or physical disabilities or who objected to his ideas, and 7.7 million Soviet civilians. This does not count the 9.1 million Allied personnel killed in battle (7.5 million Soviets), and 5 million Soviet soldiers who died in prisoner-of-war camps or were murdered by their captors.

  Aside from their horror, the killings of civilians and prisoners of war deprived Germany of the labor and mental contributions of potentially valuable workers and took immense amounts of transportation, resources, personnel, and energy badly needed for the war effort.

  It is easy enough to assert that Hitler was mad. He most certainly was. His fixation on these two monstrous, irrational goals proves it. But Hitler also was in part a sensible person, possessed of great intelligence and superior political skills. His fantastic success up to mid-1940 demonstrates this.

  Many of the men who served Hitler believed they might tap the sane part of Hitler’s mind and deflect the mad part, and in this way lead Germany to a successful outcome of the war. The events in Hitler’s headquarters from mid-1940 onward are a rolling drama of this attempt. While a number of far-sighted officers saw the way to succeed and tried to convince him, toadies catered to Hitler’s prejudices. Sometimes Hitler listened to one, sometimes to the other, and sometimes to no one but himself.