The Blitzkrieg Myth: How Hitler and the Allies Misread the Strategic Realities of World War II

646 Pages·2003·1.91 MB·English

by  John Mosier

The Blitzkrieg Myth
How Hitler and the Allies
Misread the Strategic Realities
of World War II
JOHN MOSIER
Men prefer one great lie to a mass of small truths.
—ALEXANDER PUSHKIN
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Epigraph

Introduction: New Theories of Warfare
Chapter 1 - War as Pseudoscience: 1920–1939
Chapter 2 - The Maginot Line and Hitler’s Response
Chapter 3 - The Tank Production Myths
Chapter 4 - Lessons Mislearned: Poland and the Winter Wars
Chapter 5 - The Germans and the Allies Prepare for War
Chapter 6 - The German Assault and the Fall of France: May–June
1940
Chapter 7 - The Uses and Misuses of Armor: North Africa, Italy,
the Eastern Front
Chapter 8 - The Failure of Strategic Airpower: 1940–1944
Chapter 9 - Normandy and the Breakout at Saint-Lô: Summer
1944
Chapter 10 - The Breakthrough Failures: Arnhem, Metz, Bastogne
Chapter 11 - Conclusion: The Persistence of Failed Ideas
Appendix: Researching the War
Index
Acknowledgments

About the Author
Also by John Mosier
Copyright
About the Publisher
Introduction: New Theories of Warfare
Their ideas are prefabricated. Experience teaches them nothing.
— 1
ALBERT SCHWEITZER
T
his book, the result of a quarter century of research and reflection,
demonstrates that traditional accounts of the Second World War are seriously
flawed. The fundamental error is this: in the 1920s two new theories of warfare
were postulated, most notably by the English armored officer J. F. C. Fuller and
the Italian aviator Giulio Douhet. Over the course of the next decades these
theories—or their key portions—were adopted almost universally by military
and political leaders and by historians and military analysts. The resulting ideas,
identified as Blitzkrieg and airpower, are now universally accepted, not merely
as important concepts in modern warfare—which they certainly are—but as
assumptions defining how the war was fought and why one side was successful
and the other not. Douhet and Fuller—and their apostles—reworked the
evidence to support their arguments. As this book explains, their ideas were
mostly incorrect, but all accounts of the Second World War accept their
assumptions.
Although both Douhet and Fuller pretended to be rigorous and scientific
theorists, their ideas, far from being borne out by what happened in the First
World War, are almost completely contradicted by it. It follows, therefore, that
those historians who have accepted their ideas as holy writ give a highly
misleading picture of the war.
Not as to the actual outcomes: in this regard the Second World War is
entirely different from the First, whose results were at bottom paradoxical and
inconclusive. In an earlier book I argued that the military lessons of the Great
War were mislearned. The Allies were largely ineffective militarily, the
Germans largely victorious, even though they ultimately lost the war. In this
book my critical focus is on the reasons given for the various defeats and
victories, since the end results are clear: During 1939 and 1940, seven nations
officially admitted their defeat by Germany; in May 1945 Germany officially
admitted its own defeat and surrendered. Its cities were in ruins, its national
territory occupied. There is no ambiguity there at all. The problem arises when
we begin to consider how these defeats came about. My argument is that
evidence demonstrates that these defeats were not primarily the result of new
ideas about warfare but the result of traditional factors: politics and strategy.
The implications of this argument are fundamental for military history. It is
almost universally accepted, for example, that the construction of the Maginot
Line was an exercise in near futility that revealed the defeatist, retrograde
thinking of the French. However, the facts reveal this to be a misperception of
the realities of the 1920s and the 1930s. During the 1930s German military
engineers presided over the construction of elaborate and extensive defensive
positions, both east and west, almost exactly comparable to what the French had
planned the decade before. Surprisingly little is known about the nature and
extent of these fortifications, whose details (for the eastern frontier) did not
begin to emerge until after the collapse of Communist Poland.
The assumption that the Maginot Line was uniquely French, and that it tells
us something about France, is simply not true. The evidence shows that the
Germans went through the same discussions the French did, that Hitler himself
took a keen interest in what was being built, and that one of the key officers
involved, a young major on the newly reformed general staff, was none other
than Erich von Manstein, generally—and correctly—regarded as one of the
Wehrmacht’s most successful commanders and the alleged architect of some of
its greatest offensive victories. To understand what happened in this war, one
must begin with an explanation that embraces the facts as they are known to
exist, not as several generations of analysts have wished them to be.
The other point made by this book is no less fundamental: That is the
argument that the airpower theories of men like Douhet, and the Blitzkrieg
theories of men like Fuller, are at bottom the same thing, the difference being
only in the mechanism used (tanks as opposed to planes). Both proposed to
strike directly into the heart of the enemy, to win the war in one swift and
decisive stroke. For want of a better term, I have employed the word
breakthrough to describe this idea, which came to dominate both the direction
of the war and what has been written about it since.
The point of this book is that accounts of this war, as of the one preceding it,
are based on a slowly collapsing paradigm that is riddled with anomalies and
contradictions—too dependent on the suppression of evidence—to be accepted
as a satisfactory explanation of the phenomenon itself. British historians of the
First World War produced a gripping and absorbing account of how the war was
won. The only thing wrong with it was that little of it was actually true. Through
repetition they came to think that it was true, and to explain away any evidence
to the contrary by mystifying the facts and hiding primary causes in a forest of
secondary ones. In the Second World War partisans of national interest have
largely (although in the United States not entirely) been replaced by adherents of
the two theories, but the end result is the same sort of tale with all the same
problems: It makes for a gripping story, but most of it isn’t true.
The basic ideas of my narrative are simple, although its implications are not.
The structure is divided into three parts: The first explains what these new
theories of warfare were, and shows why they were largely, although not
entirely, incorrect. The second explains how the two chief European powers,
France and Germany, prepared for a future war. Not by devoting their defense
budgets to tanks and planes but by building fortifications. The third, by far the
longest section, reexamines the campaigns of the war in Western Europe in the
light of what the first two sections establish as the historical truth.
In researching my earlier book on the Great War, I noticed two significant
facts: first, that German losses in combat were substantially lower than those of
their adversaries, generally in the neighborhood of two and even three to one;
and second, that most of the casualties in the war were caused not by rifle bullets
(as had been the case in all previous modern wars), but by shellfire from guns.
These two facts led me to an investigation of German artillery, since it appeared
that here was one important reason for the casualty imbalance.
By their very nature the instruments of modern warfare are complex technical
devices. Yet without understanding the why and how of their basic functions,
one can hardly judge the theories of their use that dominated military thinking in
the decades before 1940. The old cliché that those who do not understand history
are doomed to repeat it is nowhere more applicable than in the study of warfare
in this century. That alone justifies the necessity of combining the technical and
the general, the practical and the theoretical, so that this account of combat in the
Second World War goes beyond a simple recitation of the conventional wisdom
on the subject—for, as we shall see, at every turn the conventional wisdom is
hardly sustained by what actually happened on the battlefield.
After 1942 the Germans, having enjoyed absolute air superiority in their earlier
campaigns, failed signally to appreciate the realities of armored warfare without
it. Their technical expertise in one area blinded them to the underlying reasons
for their own success, a theme that this book expounds on at length. None of the
specialists who planned for this war, or the military leaders who directed it once
it began, seems to have had any real sense of the events that had gone before.
Thus we find Patton, far and away the most literate and historically astute of all
the major commanders, completely bogged down in precisely the same theater of
operations—Lorraine—in which he had fought in the First World War. Of all the
senior allied commanders, he should by rights have been the most aware of the
difficulties involved in dislodging German infantry from fortifications.
The explanation for these failures, I believe, lies not so much in the personal
or professional inadequacies of the commanders but in their conversion to
theories of armored warfare that were in themselves mostly erroneous.
Significantly Montgomery, generally the most cautious and conventional of all
the senior commanders, alone seems to have grasped the realities of the modern
battlefield. But even there, with Operation Market-Garden, the attempt to
leapfrog into Germany by dropping airborne troops all along the key route
through the Netherlands, we see the same failure: on the one hand the belief that
armored units could cut swiftly through opposition, and on the other an obvious
ignorance of just how costly the invasion of the Netherlands had been for
German airborne units in May 1940.
These simple comparisons suggest the principle that underlies this history:
Cross-comparisons spread over the course of the war—and over the course of
the century—allow us a much more profitable understanding of what actually
happened than do the specialized studies of one isolated offensive, weapon, or
idea.
Chapter 1 - War as Pseudoscience: 1920–1939
Nothing is more dangerous in war than theoreticians.
— 1
MARSHAL PéTAIN
T
he Second World War was the complete opposite of the First. In the latter,
Allied propagandists had been free to weave their fables, unchecked and
unquestioned. The result was a highly consistent series of myths that foundered
not because of any real internal inconsistencies but because they were based on a
series of palpable untruths, facts about relative losses of men and territory that
could ultimately be verified or proved false.
This was not possible in the Second World War, in which, from the very
first, many of the claims of the combatants were subject to verification.
Americans listening to William Shirer’s censored broadcasts from Berlin in
1939–40 received a surprisingly coherent and in many respects truthful account
of what was happening—even under the worst censorship it far exceeded what
had been available in 1914–15. Moreover there were men in Great Britain who
had bitter memories of how their government had managed the truth. When, in
1940, the government attempted to lay all the blame for the collapse on the
hapless Belgians, Adm. Sir Roger Keyes stood up in the House and exposed the
government’s efforts for what they were—an attempt to find a scapegoat to
cover up its own ineptitude. Like all slanders, bits and pieces of this one stuck,
but the myth of how Belgium betrayed the Allied cause and brought it to ruin
was quickly shattered.
It was precisely the lack of any central coherent myth to recast the narrative
of World War II that made all the various accounts so full of internal
contradictions and anomalies. It was easy to see that, but the very incoherence of
the narrative of the war made it difficult to piece together what had actually
happened.
The explanation is that military theory between the wars was dominated by
the work of airpower enthusiasts and apostles of armored warfare. In both cases
and in every country, the theoreticians resorted to rewriting the history of the
Great War to vindicate their theories about how wars should be fought. When
the Second World War actually broke out on September 1, 1939, both the
military theorists and the propagandists of the combatants produced converging
explanations of what had happened.
The invasion of Poland provides a perfect example. Hitler’s propagandists
were eager to portray the Polish offensive as a terrifying German military
triumph that glorified not only the achievements of the Luftwaffe, which from
the first had been regarded as the most National Socialist of the services, but
would glorify those achievements in such a way as to cower everyone else into
submission.
The airpower enthusiasts and armored apostles were only too delighted to
shape the Polish campaign so that it justified their emphasis on armor and
airplanes. To the followers of Giulio Douhet (and to the airmen in the United
States and Great Britain who hit on these same ideas independently) the Polish
campaign was proof positive that the side that lost command of the air would be
quickly destroyed—from the air. The misleading and simplistic belief that
Warsaw was destroyed by the Luftwaffe was thus turned into a great symbol
with all sorts of layers: on one level it represented the barbarism of Hitler’s
ideas, on another it served as a sort of dissuasive bogeyman for timid Frenchmen
and Englishmen. And on still another level it supported the arguments that more
money needed to be spent on airplanes instead of other areas of national defense.
Since Poland had even fewer tanks than it had planes, much the same process
occurred. The German successes, insofar as they were not exclusively caused by
airplanes, were attributed to the fact (in reality not particularly true) that they
deployed tanks en masse, organized as armored divisions. An army with no
armored divisions was helpless in the face of this onslaught.
However, the primary reasons for Poland’s defeat were strategic, not tactical.
When Erich von Manstein dissected the causes of Poland’s defeat, his
concluding sentence was that “Poland’s defeat was the inevitable outcome of the
Warsaw government’s illusions about the actions its allies would take, as well as
of its over-estimation of the Polish Army’s ability to offer lengthy resistance.”2