The Storm of War - Andrew Roberts [345]
misfortune that none of our great writers took his subject from German Imperial history. Our Schiller found nothing better to do than to glorify a Swiss crossbowman! The English, for their part, had a Shakespeare, but the history of his country has supplied Shakespeare, as far as heroes are concerned, only with imbeciles and madmen.36
Analyses of Hitler’s defeat have tended to portray him as a strategic imbecile – ‘Corporal Hitler’ – or otherwise as a madman, but these explanations are clearly not enough. The real reason why Hitler lost the Second World War was exactly the same one that caused him to unleash it in the first place: he was a Nazi.
List of Illustrations
1. General Werner von Blomberg, the German Defence Minister, in discussion with the newly elected Chancellor Adolf Hitler at Ulm in September 1933. The Pact made between these two men aboard the battleship Deutschland the following April cemented Hitler’s power in the Reich and set Germany on the path to war.
2. The Nazi–Soviet Pact was signed in the Kremlin at 2 a.m. on Thursday, 24 August 1939, by the two men on either side of Joseph Stalin, the German Foreign Minister Joachim Ribbentrop (left) and his Russian counterpart V. M. Molotov (right). Friedrich Gaus (extreme left), head of the legal department of the Reich Foreign Ministry, drafted the agreement. It gave Hitler the diplomatic initiative and was Stalin’s greatest blunder.
3. The Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, Hitler, Major-General Alfred Jodl and Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel confer at Hitler’s headquarters in East Prussia, the Wolfsschanze, on 25 August 1941, three days after Hitler had diverted troops southwards from the attack on Moscow towards Kiev.
4. Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, Keitel and SS-Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler confer with Hitler on 10 April 1942.
5. The outspoken Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt was appointed and sacked by Hitler four times in his career. On 18 April 1944 he was inspecting the Atlantic Wall as commander-in-chief west.
6. Field Marshal Erich von Manstein, the man responsible for the ‘Sickle Cut’ manoeuvre that led to the fall of France and the capture of the Crimea and Kharkov, was the greatest German strategist of the war, but even he could not relieve Stalingrad.
7. General Heinz Guderian, Germany’s most talented tank commander, in December 1940.
8. Field Marshal Walter Model overseeing a German and Hungarian counter-attack on the southern Russian front. He was sent to rescue difficult situations so often that he was nicknamed Hitler’s Fireman.
9. A French tank about to receive the full force of Blitzkrieg, as a Junkers Ju-87 Stuka dives to bomb it in northern France in 1940.
10. Refugees flee Paris in June 1940.
11. Operation Dynamo: Allied troops queuing along the evacuation beaches of Dunkirk in late May 1940, hoping for what Churchill was to call ‘a miracle of deliverance’.
12. Huge quantities of Allied vehicles, arms, stores and ammunition had to be disabled and left behind in France. This was the scene on 27 May 1940.
13. A terrible beauty: vapour trails from RAF and Luftwaffe planes battling over Kent on 3 September 1940. ‘Both life and death had lost their importance,’ wrote one British fighter ace. ‘Desire sharpened to a single, savage purpose – to grab the enemy and claw him down from the sky’.
14. ‘Scramble!’ Pilots of 87 Squadron rush to their Hurricanes.
15. Hitler and Goebbels confer privately by a roaring fire in his Alpine retreat, the Berghof, in 1940.
16. Operation Barbarossa: the Wehrmacht in the Ukraine in the summer of 1941. Note the commandeered bus bringing up supplies.
17. Operation Typhoon, the German assault on Moscow, gets stuck in atrocious mud in October 1941. This assault gun is about to be abandoned.
18. Exhausted, freezing and demoralized, German soldiers start to surrender to winter-clad Russians as 1941 comes to a close.
19. US Navy Douglas Dauntless dive-bombers during the attack that crippled the Japanese fleet at the battle of