Rise & Fall of the Wehrmacht

World War II (European division) is already more distinct than it was while it was going on. It fell into three stages, each distinguished by the sensations in men's viscera.

Three Stages of Emotion. For the democratic world, Stage I was characterized first by the numb, sinking feeling of shock when a new Nazi invasion began; then by a few days of false hope that the campaign would go well, then by the despairing finality of another decisive defeat, finally by the return to a fool's paradise (e.g., the Phony War) until another Nazi invasion began.

Such was the sequence of sensations which followed--

P: When, in the darkness before dawn on Sept. 1, 1939, the German divisions entered Poland (four weeks later Warsaw fell).

P: Again on April 9, 1940, when the invasion of Denmark and Norway began (three weeks later the British were driven from Namsos).

P: Again on May 10, 1940, when the Germans burst into the Low Countries (people strewed flowers before the British troops advancing into Belgium; three weeks later came Dunkirk; six weeks later, the fall of France; four months later, the blitz of London).

P: Again on April 6, 1941, when the Panzer divisions pushed into Yugoslavia (Wavell's men, fresh from beating the Italians at El Agheila, made a gallant but hopeless attempt at rescue; three weeks later they were fleeing from the beaches of Greece, seven weeks later half the survivors were exterminated in the island of Crete).

In Stage II, the visceral feeling was quite different. With its emotions benumbed, the democratic world no longer expected anything but the worst. On June 22, 1941, when Hitler invaded Russia, most of the world took it for granted that Russia would crumble within a short time. But the worst never quite happened. The Russians were beaten and beaten and beaten--for 15 months. But the Germans could not crush them.

Stage III, which began with the defense of Stalingrad, was almost Stage I in reverse. The Allied world tingled periodically to the announcement of new campaigns and invasions, even as the Germans had once tingled.

For German was reserved the hollow feeling of shock, when the Allies landed in North Africa, in Sicily, in Italy, in Normandy, in southern France, on the east bank of the Rhine. This time the Germans felt the false hopes of abortive offensives, Atlantic Walls and secret weapons--and still hollower feelings after the fall of Tunis, Sicily, Naples, Rome; Kharkov, Kiev, Odessa, Bucharest; Paris, Marseilles, Antwerp; Riga, Sofia, Warsaw, Budapest; Aachen and Cracow; Frankfurt and Danzig; Essen and Vienna; Magdeburg and Nuerenberg; Bremen, Milan, Munich, Berlin--

War Is Not Sporting. These three emotional stages were connected very directly with three stages in the military development of the war.

In Stage I the Wehrmacht was victorious because in every campaign it outclassed its opponent both in quantity and in quality, in manpower and in weapons.

In the cases of Denmark, Norway, Yugoslavia and Greece, the German margin of superiority was immense. The one exception to the Germans' superiority in weapons was the fighter planes of the R.A.F. Although few in number, they kept Hitler from two decisive triumphs. They maintained local control of the skies over Dunkirk for three saving days. And they stopped the Luftwaffe in its tracks.

Otherwise, for 21 months Hitler kept his two overpowering advantages. During that period Germany crushed and occupied nine nations, beginning with Poland and ending with Greece. The Germans won every battle.

New Odds. Stage II began when Hitler voluntarily gave up one of his advantages. At the onset of the Russian campaign, the Wehrmacht mustered about 150 German and Rumanian divisions to the Russians' 110. In armor and planes the Wehrmacht had even greater superiority. But a month later, in spite of having lost hundreds of thousands of men, Stalin had as many men in the field as Hitler. Hitler never again outclassed his opponents in manpower.

His advantage in weapons remained. By the passage of the Lend-Lease Act in March 1941, the economic weight of the U.S. had been thrown into the scales, thereby giving potential weapon superiority to Hitler's enemies. But the actual weapon advantage was still his. The Wehrmacht rode that advantage for 15 months, but the ride was no longer easy. The Wehrmacht now had to skimp. The results showed clearly in the Mediterranean: the Afrika Korps recovered Italian Cyrenaica but lacked enough power to crush beseiged Tobruk; then lost Cyrenaica again to Auchinleck; finally, reinforced, overran the British army to push across Egypt to El Alamein. At that point only a decimated British army which had lost most of its equipment stood between Rommel and Cairo.

Meanwhile in Russia the Wehrmacht fought almost, but no quite, to Moscow; lost some ground in a winter campaign but pushed on again to Stalingrad. In September 1942 the attack on Stalingrad began. The Russians had already lost over half their steel capacity, 40% of their machine-tool industry, the whole fertile Ukraine--and 6,000,000 casualties. The Allies had traded men and miles for time, and they were closed to the ragged edge. That September of 1942 the Germans stood at the Nile and the Volga. The British were digging tank traps in the Khyber Pass, to keep the Germans out of India.

But Hitler had pushed his last advantage as far as it would go--and farther. In 15 months of hard fighting the Wehrmacht had not conquered a single other nation nor won a decisive battle.

On Oct. 23, 1942, Montgomery began the assault which broke Rommel's line at El Alamein. On Nov.8, Eisenhower landed in Morocco and Algeria. On Jan. 31 1943, the Sixth German Army surrendered at Stalingrad, Stage II had ended.

The Balance Tips. Stage III began with several months in which the Allies had an edge in manpower but were only on about equal terms in weapons.

By the end of 1942 Russia had received from the Allies 2,600 first-line planes, 3,200 tanks, 81,000 other vehicles; and during the winter she reconquered part of the lands she had lost the previous fall. But during those same months the Germans were still exploiting their advantage in weapons underseas. That winter U-boats sank abut 1,000,000 tons of Allied shipping a month--and with it many of the weapons which might have tipped the balance more rapidly.

Yet those months saw the balance tip.

Once started, the balance tipped more & more rapidly.

Before 1943 ended the Germans lost Sicily, southern Italy, the Donetz basin. With 1944 the Germans lost White Russia, the remainder of the Ukraine, half of Poland, most of the Balkans. Their aircraft plants and oil refineries were progressively reduced by the vast new weapon of the Allies: air power. Last week, captive Field Marshall Gerd von Rundstedt named Allied air superiority as the biggest single reason for Germany's final defeat.

By Dday, June 6, the Germans had no air defense in Normandy. Although they had now mustered 300 divisions, they could spare only 50, including six or seven Panzer divisions, for the defense of France; the rest were tied up elsewhere.

After the landing in Normandy, the pendulum swung more rapidly. In losing Africa, the Axis had lost a million men. In losing France they lost another million--beside their losses on the Russian front and in Italy.

From superiority in quantity and quality, Hitler grew progressively inferior in both. With V1, V-2 and jet-propelled planes he made a desperate effort to recover the advantage of weapons. But it was too late.

The Wehrmacht still showed skill. It held the Russians at the Vistula. It held the Allies' secondary attack in Italy. It launched a vigorous offensive in the Ardennes. But, once its two initial advantages in manpower and weapons had been definitely lost, it did not conduct a single successful campaign. Like the Allies in Stage I, the Germans in Stage III lost every major battle.

On Feb. 23, 1945, when Eisenhower began his big assault on Germany's western frontier, he had about 100 first-rank U.S., British, Canadian and French combat divisions, against some 55 understrength German divisions. In armor he had at least a 3-to-1 numerical superiority. In the air his superiority approached infinity. On the German frontier in February 1945, as in May 1940, one side completely outclassed the other. And the military results were inevitably just as conclusive.

The Big Mistake. In spite of their ultimate superiority in manpower and weapons, bad generalship on either the east front or the west front might have lost the war for the Allies at any time up to the final campaign.

Until history opens its book a little farther, the world will not know exactly what share of credit belongs to those Big Three--Winston Churchill, Joseph Stalin and Franklin Roosevelt--who very definitely commanded as well as took advice from their soldiers.

The credit for the successful field conduct of Russia's part in the war presumably rests chiefly on Voroshilov and Zhukov. In the west the credit belongs chiefly to the Combined Chiefs of Staff and to their field commanders Eisenhower, Montgomery, et al.

The Allied command, in uniform and out, might have wasted Allied superiority in attacks that were costly and futile, delivered too soon or too late, at ineffective places or without proper preparation. They might also have lost the war by failing to cope with critical enemy attacks, such as the U-boat campaign.

Although Allied generalship did not create the vast advantages in manpower and in potential weapon power which won the war, it did exploit those advantages decisively, converting potential victory into actual victory.

But if it was not inevitable that the Allies would win the war, there is a strong presumption that neither was it inevitable that the Germans should lose it. Here again history must open its book before the authorship of the German failure can be assigned.

Many Allied military men believe that the Germans made one colossal blunder: their decision to invade Russia rather than Britain. Not only in the popular British view, but in the view of Allied military men, immediately after Dunkirk Britain lacked the physical means of repelling a determined invasion. The Germans would have found it costly but they would probably have succeeded.

There is every likelihood that in such a case, Churchill was prepared to retire to other parts of the Empire to carry on the war. But if Britain had been lost, there would have been small chance that the U.S. could ever have launched a successful invasion of Festung Europa. For that enterprise, a huge unsinkable aircraft carrier--was almost essential. The none too practical route through Africa would have been far less practical had the Germans not had to divide their defense between the English Channel and Mediterranean Sea.

Why did the Germans not invade Britain? Possibly the German General Staff, which had planned so thoroughly for Europe's conquest, had overlooked the little matter of the actual invasion of Britain. Last week Rundstedt, comparing the German landing barges to those used by the Allies in Normandy, referred to the German craft as "apple barges." He added that as far as he knew, the German High Command's reason for abandoning the invasion of Britain was fear of the British fleet.

At any rate, the alternative which the Germans chose completed their undoing. For they, not the Allies, set the military pendulum swinging against themselves. In attacking Russia they relinquished their quantitative advantage in military power. Making that mistake clearly lost them the war,.

But in the German mind another thought was probably stirring--the thought that if Russia, then rapidly preparing against attack, were not beaten in 1941, Germany would never be strong enough to beat her. Then Germany might have won World War II only to lose World War III to Russia -- two years or five years or 20 years afterward.

No one can ever tell whether that calculation was correct. But if it was, then the Germans made the greatest military mistake of all. They should never have started the war in the first place.

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