The Storm of War - Andrew Roberts [336]
Hitler’s strategic arguments were not unsound – the Crimea would be used to bomb the Romanian oilfields, Turkey might join the Allies if she fell – but this was not a case of Hitler’s optimism versus the generals’ realism.21 Instead it sprang from a completely different Weltanschauung. Hitler felt that every risk must be taken to win the war, because losing it meant certain death for him, whereas a structured withdrawal leading to ultimate defeat signalled only lengthy prison terms for his generals, even those directly connected with war crimes, like Manstein. They were thus playing for drastically different stakes. (In the event, despite the long official sentences they received, Kesselring served only five years, Manstein and List four, Guderian, Blumentritt and Milch three and Zeitzler eighteen months.)
Very often, of course, the policy choices were not clear cut between Hitler on one side and his generals on the other, but were debated between the generals on both sides of the argument with Hitler deciding. Even though Hitler very often came down on the wrong side, he was rarely ever reminded of this. In September 1942, after Jodl had recalled the Führer’s error with regard to the width of front given to List in the Caucasus, he was temporarily snubbed. Hitler avoided Jodl’s company at mealtimes, ‘refused ostentatiously to shake hands’ and gave orders that he be replaced, though this did not happen. ‘A dictator, as a matter of psychological necessity, must never be reminded of his own errors,’ Jodl concluded to Warlimont, ‘in order to keep up his self-confidence, the ultimate source of his dictatorial force.’22 Since Hitler was also the ultimate – indeed sole – source of their prestige and power, it was not in Keitel’s or Jodl’s interests to undermine that self-confidence, and it does not seem to have happened again. As a result the Führer never learnt from his mistakes, and so continued to make much the same ones for two and a half years after Stalingrad. This would have been inconceivable in the Western Alliance, where Generals Brooke and Marshall felt under no obligation to refrain from pointing out earlier errors made by Churchill and Roosevelt, and vice versa.
Between March and July 1943, Hitler delayed the Operation Zitadelle attack on Kursk for a hundred days, partly because of Speer’s promises that the new Panther tanks would be coming on line in large numbers by then. The complete loss of surprise, formerly the Germans’ best weapon in the days of Blitzkrieg, was disastrous. The Russians knew where and roughly when they would attack, and prepared accordingly.
Although Hitler can hardly be blamed for sleeping through the D-Day landings, Rundstedt’s defence of Normandy in June 1944 was badly hampered by him. Indeed he could hardly have helped the Allies better had he been working for them. The compromise he effected between Rundstedt’s desire to deploy inland and Rommel’s to fight on the beaches created the worst of both worlds, by muddying the response and separating the commands disastrously. Even in mid-July Hitler was still convinced that the main Allied attack was to be expected at the Pas de Calais, and refused to allow his powerful forces there to be transferred southwards. He therefore completely fell for both the Norwegian and the Calais parts of the Allied deception plans, Operations Fortitude North and South.
On 17 June 1944, at a meeting with Rommel and Rundstedt, Hitler