War and Remembrance (163 page)

TRANSLATOR
’
S NOTE
:
Roon treats the Normandy landings and the Soviet attack in June as a combined operation. This is valid only in a very general sense. At Tehran the Grand Alliance did agree to strike at Germany simultaneously from east and west. But the Russians did not know our operational plans, nor we theirs. Once we landed it was touch and go for two weeks whether Stalin would actually keep his word and attack.

This chapter combines passages from Roon’s strategic essay and his concluding memoir about Hitler.
—
V.H.

In June 1944, the iron jaws of the vise forged at Tehran began to close. The German nation, the last bastion of Christian culture and decency in middle Europe, was assailed from west and east by the long-plotted double onslaught of plutocratic imperialism and Slav communism.

In Western writings, the Normandy landings and the Russian assault still pass as a triumph for “humanity.” But serious historians are beginning to penetrate the smokescreen of wartime propaganda. At Tehran, Franklin D. Roosevelt delivered eastern Europe into Red claws. His motive? To destroy Germany, the strongest rival on earth to American monopoly capital. England was already skinned like a rabbit, in Hitler’s colorful phrase, by her overstrained war-making, and by Roosevelt’s wily anticolonialism. Brave Japan was sinking to her knees in the unequal contest with von Nimitz’s ever-swelling fleets. Only Germany still blocked the way to the world hegemony of the dollar.

It is a shallow commonplace that Roosevelt was “outsmarted” at the later conference in Yalta and gave away too much to Stalin. In fact, he had already given everything away at Tehran. Once he pledged the assault on France, he made the Red Asian sweep into the heart of Europe inevitable.
To assure this, he flooded Lend-Lease to the Soviet Union. The figures still beggar the imagination: some four hundred thousand motor vehicles, two thousand locomotives, eleven thousand railway cars, seven thousand tanks, and more than six thousand self-propelled guns and half-tracks, with the two million seven hundred thousand tons of petroleum and other products required to put the primitive Slav horde on wheels; to say nothing of fifteen thousand aircraft, and millions of tons of food, together with raw materials, factories, munitions, and technical equipment beyond calculation.

The picture of Roosevelt as a naïve outwitted humanitarian in his dealings with Stalin was his greatest propaganda swindle. These two icy butchers thoroughly understood each other; they just struck dissimilar poses for domestic consumption and for history. Of the two, Roosevelt always had the upper hand, because Soviet Russia was half-devastated and in desperate straits, while America was rich, strong, and untouched. Stalin had no choice but to sacrifice millions of Russian lives to clear the way for world rule by American monopolists. He did explore the possibility of making peace with us on reasonable terms, in very secret parleys that we at Headquarters knew nothing about at the time; but here Roosevelt’s Lend-Lease “generosity” frustrated us. Naturally Hitler was not prepared to yield all our gains. Given all that matériel, Stalin decided he would do better by fighting on, at the cost of rivers of German and Russian blood.

The quarrelsome and impoverished lands of eastern Europe were Roosevelt’s sop to Stalin for his country’s terrible sacrifices. Roosevelt’s policy was simply to let them fall to the Russians. Of course, the treacherous Balkans were a dubious prey. The Soviets already belch with indigestion from those swallowed but intransigent nationalities. The strategic importance of that turbulent peninsula is not what it was in past centuries, or even to us in 1944 as a conduit for Turkish chrome. But even so, to invite Slav communism to march to the Elbe and the Danube was monstrous. Churchill’s itch to funnel the main Allied thrust into the Balkans at least showed some political sensitivity, and some sense of responsibility for middle Europe and for Christian civilization. His blood was not as cold as Roosevelt’s. Roosevelt cared nothing for the Balkans or for Poland; though in a strange moment of candor he told Stalin at Tehran that he had to make some sort of fuss about Poland’s future, because of the large Polish vote in the election he faced.

Franklin Roosevelt took a great risk with the Normandy landings. This is not well-known. When one weighs the opposing forces, the elements of space and time, and the sea-land transfer problem, one sees that Churchill’s
foot-dragging made sense. The landings were very chancy and might have ended disastrously. A pyramiding of mistakes and bad luck on our side gave Roosevelt success in his one audacious military move.

Eisenhower himself knew the riskiness of Overlord. Even as his five thousand vessels were steaming toward the Normandy coast in the stormy night, he drafted an announcement of the operation’s failure, which by chance has been preserved:
“Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time and place was based upon the best information available. The troops, the air, and the Navy did all that bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone.”

That this document did not become the official Allied communiqué was due to several factors, chiefly:

a. Our abominable intelligence;

b. Our confused and sluggish response to the attack in the first decisive hours;

c. Unbelievable botching by Adolf Hitler;

d. Failure of the Luftwaffe to cope with Allied air superiority.

The mounting of the invasion armada was certainly a fine technological achievement; as was the production of the huge air fleets, with crews to man them. General Marshall’s raising, equipping, and training of the land armies that poured into Normandy showed him to be an American Scharnhorst. The U.S. infantryman, while requiring far too luxurious logistical support, put up a nice fight in France; he was fresh, well fed, and unscarred by battle. The British Tommy under Montgomery, though slow-moving as usual, showed bulldog courage. But essentially what happened in Normandy was that Franklin Roosevelt beat Adolf Hitler, as surely as Wellington beat Napoleon at Waterloo. In Normandy the two men at last clashed in head-on armed shock. Hitler’s mistakes gave Roosevelt the victory; just as at Waterloo it was less Wellington who won than Napoleon who lost.

The core of Franklin Roosevelt’s malignant military genius lay in these simple rules: to pick generals and admirals with care; to leave strategy and tactics to them, and attend only to the politics of the war; never to interfere in operations; never to relieve leaders who encountered honorable reverses; and to allow all the glory to those who won victories. When Roosevelt died, his supreme command in the field was virtually the original team. This steadiness paid dividends. Shake-ups in military command can cost much momentum, élan, and fighting effectiveness. The shuffling of generals by Hitler was our plague.

For the Führer had arrogated supreme operational command to himself,
and we were suffering bad reverses. He could never admit that he was responsible for any setback. Hence, heads had to keep rolling. Ambitious rising commanders abounded, eager to plunge in where their elders had been sacked for Hitler’s failures. I watched these temporary Führer favorites come and go, taking over with zest, only to be worn down by Hitler’s meddling and at last fired for his bad moves; likely as not to kill themselves or die of heart failure. It was a sad business, and absurd war-making.

Three questions governed the invasion problem, on which the fate of our nation hung:

1. Where will they land?
   
2. When will they land?
   
3. Where do we fight them?
   

By all military logic, the place for the Anglo-Americans to land was the Pas de Calais, opposite Dover. It offered the shortest route to the Ruhr, our nation’s industrial heart. The Channel is there at its narrowest. Waterborne troops are all but helpless, and common sense demands getting them ashore the quickest way. The turnaround time for ships and for air support would have been shortest on the Dover-Calais axis. The Normandy coast, where the enemy struck, was a much longer pull by sea and air.

By preparing so well for invasion at the Pas de Calais, we set our minds in one groove, and gave the foe the chance to spring a surprise. Hitler somehow guessed that Normandy might be the place. At one staff meeting he literally put his finger on the map and said, “They will be landing here,” with what we used to call his undeniable
coup d’oeil.
But he made many such guesses during the war, as often as not extremely wild. Of course he remembered only the ones that turned out right, and made a great noise about them. Rommel, charged with repelling the invasion, also became concerned about Normandy. So, very late, we hardened up those beaches, and augmented the armed forces poised there; and we could have crushed the landings despite the surprise, except for the unspeakable manner in which the first day was bungled.

The chief British planner of the landings, General Morgan, has written: “One hopes and plans for battle as far inland from the beach as may be,
for if the invasion battle takes place on the beach, one is already defeated.”
I confess that we of the OKW staff erred on this. We agreed with Rundstedt that the mobile reserve should lie in wait far enough inland to avoid the naval and close air bombardment; and that once Eisenhower was ashore and moving inland in force, we should attack and wipe out the whole enterprise, as we had repeatedly bagged Russian armies. It was an “eastern
front” mentality. Rommel knew better. In North Africa he had tried to fight a war of maneuver against an enemy controlling the air. We were between the devil and the deep, and the only time to stop the Normandy invasion was when the enemy was floundering ashore under our guns. Rommel fortified the so-called Atlantic Wall and made all his plans on that principle. Had we fought D-day as he planned it, we might have won and turned the war around.

TRANSLATOR
’
S NOTE
:
Roon gives no credit to the superb deception tactics, mainly British, that encouraged the Germans in their wishful “logic” about where we would land. An enormous effort was laid on: air attacks and naval bombardment of the Pas de Calais exceeding those in Normandy, aerial bombing of the railroads and highways leading to it, vast arrays of dummy landing craft and fake army hutments near Dover, and a variety of still-secret intelligence tricks. The Germans were not very imaginative. They swallowed all hints confirming their clever judgment that we were coming to the Pas de Calais.
—
V.H.