Germany's Military Success

I

THE total success of Germany’s total war against the Netherlands, Belgium, France, and England (on the Continent) leaves every onlooker stunned and gasping with horror that so much loss of life and such immeasurable misery could be inflicted upon innocent peoples in so brief a time, with such vast military results. The greatest experts, who but a short time ago were declaring that the French army was ‘the finest in Europe’ and certain to defeat the Nazis, are hard put to it to explain how they could have been so misled. Allowing for some treachery and much incompetence on the Allied side, the truth is that the Germans crashed through their opponents not merely because they had piled up enormous quantities of the new weapons of war, but because they had drilled a huge army in original methods of warfare which swept the enemy off their feet. For their aviation, their armored cars and tank corps, they invented remarkable tactics quite contrary to existing military conventions, and — most important of all — applied those tactics with an amazing timing and coördination and coöperation of the various branches of the service. Since the net result is so staggering, so alarming, it is of the utmost importance to understand at once how such results were achieved when Hitler had only five years in which to arm openly.

In the first place, it must not be forgotten that the conscienceless dictators who misrule Germany deem themselves radical revolutionists called upon to warp the world to their ideas, and this has had a profound influence upon their military planning. When they attacked the Netherlands they frankly announced that this was the final move in ‘the greatest world revolution ever seen,’ and that it would end in the complete smashing of ‘democratic plutocracy.’ Now there have been many revolutions before, but most of them have been inefficiently led by zealots often lacking in executive ability and leadership and so visionary as to ensure failure. This is probably the first great one which has been engineered and directed by men of extraordinary organizing and administrative ability, who are great soldiers and are able to plan on a gigantic scale down to the smallest detail, since they have been able to rule exactly as they please, without public criticism, without let or hindrance. They have known their objectives, and pursued them with a merciless, bloody brutality and murderous ruthlessness to which the whole life of the country has been subordinated.

This has rendered all the easier their creating their own precedents, notably in military affairs; they have made farreaching changes in systems and procedures without having to ask anyone’s permission. Even that does not tell the whole story. The Nazis have had the foresight to break with a large part of Germany’s military past, and here the Allies helped enormously, for the original post-Versailles Reichswehr, 100,000 strong, was built on totally new lines. According to an Associated Press dispatch of June 3 last, the chief of the press department of the German army on the western front, Lieutenant Colonel Hesse, declared correctly that ‘the Versailles Treaty gave Germany a tremendous advantage. For many years we were unable to build militarily, so now we have designed equipment, even an infantry rifle, so superior to the enemy’s that the effects turned out to be surprising from the time of the first battle.’ He added that the Allied armies were ‘surprisingly easy to defeat.’ When the Nazis took over the Reichswehr they were in a position to expand a new, absolutely up-to-date organization wholly free from the castes and conventions of the Kaiser’s army. They did not revive century-old traditions. They did not create another snobbish aristocratic military machine in which the officers were everything, with a most dangerous code of honor and frequently intense antagonism to the civilian public, and the men were slave-like automatons. Today it is intended that all the men in the army, whether rich or poor, educated or otherwise, shall be on a complete equality.

Thus the Nazis aimed at a more democratic army and encouraged their officers to eat and sleep with their men when in the field or in manœuvres, to know and to work with them. The officers were urged to overcome the chief fault of the German soldier in the first World War — his lack of individual initiative, his sheeplike character, more of a robot than a man, and as such automatically obeying orders. This was made the easier because of the change in the machinery of war itself. When you ride a motorcycle, or help to fly a plane, or drive or service one of a half-million trucks, camions, tractors and tanks, you are bound to develop some initiative and independence, some readiness to be a ‘ thinking bayonet,’ and to make decisions for yourself. Moreover, where there were comparatively few varieties of troops in 1914, — heavy and light artillery, cavalry and infantry, some cyclists, telegraph, railroad and engineer troops, and so forth, — the number of different branches of the service has enormously increased with the advent of the new weapons and the new techniques, such as searchlight forces, anti-aircraft batteries in enormous numbers, parachutists, and endless kinds of troops in armored vehicles. It is certainly a far cry from the days of Kaiser Wilhelm I, when the sole objectives were, first, perfect drill on the parade ground, and second, good work in field manœuvres.

That this change was absolutely essential appears from what has been called ‘ the indescribable melee of the Blitzkrieg ‘ in Belgium and France, in which, Mr. Churchill said, Allied troops were behind German troops and German tanks and shock troops far behind the Allied lines. Day after day, it was reported, troops on both sides fought individual actions all by themselves, even in small groups, and certainly it is not possible that there were officers with all the cyclists, tank and armored-car drivers, and parachutists who mushroomed out as soon as they were behind the Allied forces. The most striking part of the new Nazi tactics is this rushing of men far behind the enemy lines in order to cut communications, blow up bridges, terrorize the enemy’s troops and the civilian population, bringing about complete panic and disorder. The dispatches report that sometimes only a handful of armored cars or tanks or cyclists broke through, but that they went ahead with lightning speed, not to ‘get thar fust with the mostest men,’ but to get as far to the rear as possible, with utter disregard of previous military conventions and with no thought of what might happen to themselves, or of having supports or bases to fall back on. They were apparently expected to be ‘battalions of death,’ if need be. All this required not only dash, nerve, utter recklessness as to themselves, but most unusual daring, decision, and, above all, initiative. Officers and men both have to think for themselves.

II

As Herbert Rosinski has just pointed out in his new book, The German Army, the powers assumed by the General Staff officers on duty with brigades, divisions, corps and armies, led to endless intrigues, to their grasping after more and more power, to blunders, to inefficiency in steadily increasing degree through the years 1914-1918. The Nazis took good care that their new General Staff officers were subordinated and in proper relationship to their generals. Indeed, the most amazing thing about the new German army appears to have been its open-mindedness and its eagerness to accept new ideas. Two remarks by Sir Edmund Ironside, who has been transferred from the headship of the British General Staff to command of the home defenses, seemed to me to convict him of unfitness for his earlier task. The first was his echoing Neville Chamberlain’s incredible remark that Hitler had ‘missed the bus’ because he did not attack the English and French on the outbreak of the war when they were not ready for him, whereas in May they were. The second was his assuring his countrymen that the British army was superior to the German because the latter had no generals who served as such in 1914-1918, and the British had.

The first was astounding to me, who had been in Germany in October and November and, just as a lay observer, knew that Hitler had to have that breathing spell to mobilize millions, drill his raw recruits, reorganize his army after the Polish campaign, move it across Germany, and build up his enormous tank, armored-car, airplane, and ammunition reserves for the great May offensive. That this had been decided on then, military men freely told me and others, and I recorded and reported it at the time. Why did not Ironside and Chamberlain know these things? The second remark seemed to reveal an even more dangerous mentality, or at least lack of understanding by Sir Edmund of the new German army and the tactics it was planning to use. I recall hearing the Czechoslovak army praised by military observers several years ago on the ground, among others, that it had not a single general of the vintage of 19141918, because all its generals had been captains or majors in those years. It does not seem to have occurred to Sir Edmund that this policy of not retaining any men of general’s rank in the old army might have been deliberate, a part of the plan to have a new kind of war conducted by men who were not consciously or unconsciously affected by their experiences as commanders in 1914-1918. New fighting, new fighters! How calculated and far-reaching this policy was still remains to be exactly revealed — but that the German army was a new army, with wholly inexperienced company and battalion officers, is true. That its leaders were young and fresh would appear at this distance to have been its strength and not its weakness, as Sir Edmund thought. Certainly the collapse and dismissal of so many French officers, headed by the seventyyear-old generalissimo, Gamelin, would seem to point another moral and adorn a very sad tale.

The English and the French commanders should have realized not only that the Nazis were going to strike out on new lines precisely as they did in Poland, where the campaign gave full notice of the technique applied to Norway and in the West, but that they were determined to profit by the lessons of the last war. One of the most egregious of these was the failure to make a rush for the Channel ports the minute the Battle of the Marne was lost and trench warfare established, for then the Germans might have taken those harbors with a few thousand men. That was freely admitted to me by a group of ex-officers when I reached Berlin in February 1919, three months after the Armistice. Since the British have from the beginning of this war been honored by being the especial target of all the Nazi venom and hatred, it was a foregone conclusion that the Channel ports as well as the Dutch harbors would be the chief Nazi objectives if an offensive against the Low Countries and France were undertaken. Moreover, the German army — or the Prussian — was always trained for Blitzkrieg, as it demonstrated in 1866 against Austria and in 1870 against France. When it was stopped in its tracks in 1914, the whole staff machine collapsed. Everybody should have foreseen that the Nazis would return to the historic German policy of planning a war of recordbreaking speed, and that they would count on their new weapons to ensure success.

Hence it was certain that the Nazi generals would strike like lightning against the French if they undertook an offensive in the West, as they had in Poland, where they began with the destruction of every Polish air field on the first day. According to Polish statements, Nazi planes appeared immediately over 400 Polish cities, towns, and villages. There was the same machinegunning from the air of troops and civilians, even a limited use of parachute troops dropped behind the Polish lines, with masses of tanks and armored cars sweeping over the countryside and opening the way for the motorized infantry. If there were any new tactics or weapons used in the plunge into Holland, Luxembourg, Belgium, and France in May, I cannot seem to trace them, except that some of the tanks used were 70-ton vehicles that had not been displayed in Poland. Was not the attack on France merely a repetition of the strategy and tactics used in Poland, only on a vastly larger scale with far greater numbers of tanks and other machines? Yet the Allies were apparently entirely taken by surprise.

Another instance of the Nazis’ profiting by the mistakes of 1914-1918 is their superior use of propaganda. In the Kaiser’s war the English were far ahead of the Germans in this respect, especially in the United States, where they carried everything before them. Despite the measureless lying and conscienceless falsification of the Nazis’ propaganda since last November, they have achieved marked success. The English press has admitted that some of the German broadcasts affected their troops adversely, and that innumerable Britons have been listening to the renegade Englishman ‘Lord Haw-Haw,’ although it is said that his daily talks are not as effective now as at first. In a recent trip to California and return, it seemed to me that I could trace the effect of the German propaganda by the constant questions asked me as to whether there was, morally, any difference between the Allies and the Germans.

Berlin has often given better and quicker news to the foreign correspondents, and it lived up to the promise made to me when I reached the Foreign Office there, that I was free to cable and mail what I chose provided only it was truthful as to facts and did not vilify the German leaders. For once the Germans have shown some understanding of the psychology of other peoples, while deliberately misinforming and deceiving their own. The Nazis struck out along new lines in this field also.

III

Mr. Rosinski is one of many who thought that the Nazi generals had gone too far in their creation of a ‘purely mechanical and centralized control.’ He quotes ‘a leading person’ as saying to him in 1936: ‘Among our elder staff officers the idea of being prepared for every emergency has developed such fantastic notions of the supplies needed that, if those gentlemen had their way, within three years the whole of Germany would be nothing but a gigantic munitions dump, with a single private left to guard it!’ It must be admitted, however, that this policy of enormous preparation, especially in piling up new weapons, has largely produced the German victories in Flanders. The all-important point remains that the Nazi army leaders were sufficiently free from red tape, bureaucratic conservatism, and hidebound tradition to enable them to build their campaign plans around their new techniques and new weapons while holding fast to the best methods and policies of the past. Thus, in 1914 the Schlieffen plan was modified — and ruined, and the war lost. In 1940 it was modified to correspond with the new conditions and the new coastal objectives in France, but its underlying strategy was preserved, and an unparalleled success was obtained.

It remains only to add that the Nazi leaders and their generals have succeeded in instilling into their officers and soldiers the most complete certainty of success. The officers and informed civilians (even when anti-Nazi) I talked with were so sure of victory that they would not argue with me about it. They outlined the program against England which has been followed, stressing particularly their superiority in the air, though they were careful not to suggest the violation of any neutral’s territory. The military men were certain that since they had the will to conquer, since, under Hitler, their country had had a new birth and was animated by a new spirit of vigor and a vital new force, they could not be defeated.

Is there one person who is responsible for the German success? General Göring, with sickening sycophancy, has lauded Hitler to the skies as a commander greater than Napoleon and has assured us that every move, political and military, has been planned by Hitler himself. He has represented the Führer as giving every moment to poring over maps and plans until all hours of the night, and then, he says, the ex-corporal of 1914-1918 brings forth the wonderful solutions which have ensured the German victories. Possibly this is true. Possibly Hitler has contributed largely to the streamlining of his army for the new-type war of 1940. Personally, it is easy for me to believe that it has not been the work of one man, but that of many minds in agreement, more or less influenced by the psychology and the program of the Nazi Party. If, however, Hitler is to be credited with all the things attributed to his ‘genius,’ according to Göring, then the ex-corporal must also be charged with another responsibility — that of being the leader who ordered his army to wage this war with unparalleled ferocity, with a sadistic wickedness in ruthlessly destroying men, women, and children on a scale never before equaled in supposedly civilized warfare.

Hitler doubtless will not shrink from accepting this responsibility, for he has boasted from the start that if war came it would be conducted with a violence and ferocity never before witnessed, and also with new and irresistible weapons. For this he will answer at the bar of history, whether he wins or loses. In this respect he has also broken with the German military past. Whatever misconduct may have been proved against the Kaiser’s troops in 1914-1918, no honest man can doubt that in satanic determination to lay waste the lands of the Poles, Norwegians, Dutch, and Belgians, who never injured Germany or threatened her in any way, — to say nothing of France and England, — the Nazi leaders have established a record. It is a criminality which must make the dead leaders of the Germans in 1870 and 1914, if they can behold the desolated Europe of today, wince with shame at the never-to-be-forgiven brutalizing and degrading of the German army and the German people. It is certainly a complete break with the old Germany, which did not seek world dominion.

The lesson of all this for those who are now so frantically arming the United States in the belief that if Hitler wins we shall have to take over and defend by force the Allied and Dutch possessions in the Caribbean, and prevent German domination of Greenland and Iceland, is that the best possible defense will be to have younger and more open-minded men in charge of the administration of the War and Navy Departments, and a resolute insistence not only that these departments shall be modernized and rendered efficient, but that they shall be manned by men who are capable of dealing with American military problems in an American way and are not merely copiers of what goes on abroad. Years ago General William Mitchell, head of our air force in France, was court-martialed and driven from the army because he insisted that the day of the battleship was over and the future of warfare lay with the airplane. He has been dead for some years. Whether in the next two months we shall have it proved to us that English sea power is at an end is on the lap of the gods. But enough has happened in Europe to make it plain that Mitchell was right and those who criticized him wrong. Had his lead been followed, it is certain that the air force of the United States would not now be where it is, and we should not be continuing to build large battleships, at a cost of $100,000,000 apiece, when the British battleships have been far more of a liability than an aid and may at this moment be doomed to defeat. Today the attacks upon Colonel Lindbergh, whose sizing up of the excellence of the German air corps has been completely upheld, to a certain degree seem to prove that the same refusal to face facts as to the airplane’s domination of land, and perhaps of sea, still holds in certain quarters.

Major General Johnson Hagood, a West Point graduate, who has commanded three out of four of our armies and was chief of staff of the line of communications during our war in France, has written of the War Department: ‘It is so involved that no Secretary of War has ever been able to understand it, and no Chief of Staff, however well qualified, has ever been able to keep it under control or to know just what was going on among his subordinates.’ Speaking of the officers of the army, he declared: ‘They are efficient, unselfish and patriotic — but they are human, and no human being, no archangel of Heaven, could operate a machine that is as badly constructed and as complicated as the War Department under existing law. It is too big. It is topheavy.’ He has solemnly warned Congress that ‘if we do not have allies to keep things going while we get ready, the War Department would collapse as it did before.’ One may build 50,000 planes a year, — or 365,000, as Mr. Ford says he can, — but unless they and the campaigns in which they may be used are directed by competent and efficient War and Navy Departments they may be of little avail. Incidentally, General Mitchell declared that the efficiency of an air corps should not be measured by quantity, but by quality, and that an up-to-the-minute corps would be far more effective than a huge mass of planes some of which were out of date.

In addition to the necessity for adequate planning and for modernization of the fundamental army and navy organizations, an important reason for not moving as precipitously as Mr. Roosevelt has done is that unless all signs fail we shall see, perhaps before this article appears in type, a further demonstration of the up-to-date war in the coming attacks upon England. Last November I was assured in Berlin that England would be defeated by July 15 by means of an unprecedentedly large fleet of submarines, fast motorboats, and surface vessels, plus concentrated bombing from the air by thousands of airplanes — to which will now be added the shelling of England from the French ports. The military men I talked with were certain that they could make untenable and uninhabitable every English port, and especially every naval base. They believed that it would be possible to isolate England to such an extent that ships could not dock to put ashore their cargoes of food and other necessities. Now the talk is of the creation of a forty-mile no man’s land by bombing and shelling, under cover of which barrages troops and motorized units are to be landed in England. If that is the case, then the hope of the British must be to keep their forces as mobile as possible, so as to be able to throw them in any direction the minute a bridgehead is established.

We in the United States will be able to profit by a most agonizing demonstration of this form of the modern Blitzkrieg, whether it is successful or unsuccessful. We shall also have the opportunity to learn whether what German military men say is true or false — that the day of the battleship and heavy cruiser, indeed of all sea power, is over, and that the only thing worth considering now is the air force, plus, when land operations are possible, huge masses of tanks and mechanized equipment. Certain it is that we must keep our defense forces mobile behind excellent coast forts; fortunately the 3000-mile moat of the Atlantic Ocean puts us in a position that has enabled more than one officer — such as Admiral Yarnell, who only recently commanded our Asiatic fleet with such honor and distinction — to declare that we cannot possibly be invaded.

But whatever the situation now, or five years from now, if there are not in Washington a streamlined War Department and an up-to-date Navy Department with highly mobile forces, intelligent production of war materials, and commanders with open minds for new devices, new methods, and new tactics, there will be only waste, confusion, and inefficiency. Unless there are fundamental reorganizations, the vast sums already voted will not lead to greater efficiency or safety, but to the contrary. Even more fundamental is the decision whether we shall prepare to defend only our own coasts or undertake to defend all of South America (regardless of the wishes of the twenty-one republics to the south of us in the matter), or whether we shall prepare for another overseas expeditionary effort to conquer the Germans. Unless we tell our military and naval men what they are to defend and how they are to defend it, we certainly cannot blame them if they fail to plan and arm properly.