Armageddon - Max Hastings [128]
It is much harder to comprehend the behaviour of the generals such as Guderian and von Rundstedt, with their intelligence, high military competence and pretensions to honour, than that of the senior Nazis. Most of Germany’s senior commanders had been dismissed for suffering defeats on the battlefield, only to be reinstated when their successors proved incapable of doing better. The generals complained constantly about the humiliations to which they were exposed, professed to despise Hitler, privately acknowledged that the war was lost. Yet, month after month, they attended the Führer’s military conferences, endured his ravings about “wonder weapons,” Wallenstein and Frederick the Great, then returned to their headquarters to continue the direction of his doomed war.
It is interesting to compare the German command structure with that of the Allies. The Russian system worked remarkably well from 1942 onwards, once Stalin showed himself willing to delegate to able commanders. Stalin shared Hitler’s monomania and paranoia, but acquired vastly better strategic judgement. The U.S. Chiefs of Staff directed their forces with great managerial skill, though their effectiveness was weakened by inter-service rivalries. Roosevelt displayed no inclination to play the warlord as Churchill did, nor to impose his authority upon the military decision-makers except on the largest issues. Churchill’s generals often complained about their master’s military fantasies, eccentricities and egotism. In small matters, Britain’s prime minister could behave high-handedly and pettishly. But on great decisions, however loud his protests, he accepted the advice of the military professionals. He possessed an extraordinary instinct for war. The partnership of Brooke and Churchill created the most efficient machine for the direction of the war possessed by any combatant nation, even if its judgements were sometimes flawed and its ability to enforce its wishes increasingly constrained.
By contrast, for all the tactical genius displayed by German soldiers fighting on the battlefield, they could never escape the consequences of serving under the direction of a man who rejected rationality. Hitler believed that his own military skills and judgement were superior to those of any of his professional advisers. He immersed the leadership in a morass of detail, wasting countless hours of his commanders’ time, about armament design and the movements of trifling numbers of men and tanks. He allowed Göring, his old political crony, to remain leader of the Luftwaffe even when it was plain that it was collapsing as a fighting force through huge errors of policy and management. He gave Himmler a battlefield command which caused that master of mass murder to suffer a nervous collapse. His insistence upon sustaining to the end of the war heavily garrisoned German “fortresses” in the Channel Islands, Scandinavia and the Aegean for reasons of prestige deprived Germany of prodigious numbers of men and quantities of precious arms and matériel, which might significantly have influenced the battles of 1945 if they had been withdrawn to Germany while there was still time.
One of Hitler’s greatest follies in the last years of the war was the devotion of enormous scientific and industrial effort to the so-called Vergeltungswaffen—“retaliation weapons.” The V1 was a small pilotless aircraft powered by a pulse-jet engine, catapulted from launch ramps located at hundreds of sites in Holland after the loss of those in France and Belgium. The first was fired at England on 13 June 1944, and in the weeks that followed 2,451 others followed. About two-thirds crashed prematurely, were toppled by British fighters (which perfected a clever manoeuvre of flying alongside the bomb, then flicking a wingtip under its fins) or were shot down by anti-aircraft fire. Many of the remainder fell on and around greater