Bevin Alexander - Inside the Nazi War Machine: How Three Generals Unleashed Hitler’s Blitzkrieg Upon the World

Inside the Nazi War Machine: How Three Generals Unleashed Hitler’s Blitzkrieg Upon the World — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "Inside the Nazi War Machine: How Three Generals Unleashed Hitler’s Blitzkrieg Upon the World" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

↓

↑

Georgia Tahoma Arial Verdana

Reset

Interval:

↓

↑

Bookmark:

Make

1234567...61

Table of Contents

OTHER BOOKS BY BEVIN ALEXANDER

How the South Could Have Won the Civil War:
The Fatal Errors That Led to
Confederate Defeat

How America Got It Right: The U.S. March to
Military and Political Supremacy

How Wars Are Won: The 13 Rules of War
from Ancient Greece to the War on Terror

How Hitler Could Have Won World War II:
The Fatal Errors That Led to Nazi Defeat

Robert E. Lees Civil War

Korea: The First War We Lost

Lost Victories: The Military Genius of
Stonewall Jackson

How Great Generals Win

The Future of Warfare

Adolf Hitler, accompanied by two Luftwaffe enlisted men, in front of the Eiffel Tower, June 1940.

INTRODUCTION

This is the story of how three low-ranking German generalsErich von Manstein, Heinz Guderian, and Erwin Rommelshattered the armies of France, Belgium, Holland, and Great Britain, forced the abject surrender of France, and evicted Britain from the Continent, all within the space of six weeks in 1940. The effects were world-shaking.

These three generals handed the German dictator, Adolf Hitler, the keys to the domination of Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East; the neutralization of the British Empire; and the reduction of the Soviet Union to subservience.

The campaign in the West in 1940 was the most complete military triumph in modern times. But it could have been an even vaster victory that could have abruptly transformed the political structure of the world. That this did not happen is because Hitler reacted in panic and disbelief to the stunning success that was unfolding. Instead of recognizing the gift that the generals had presented him, he frantically put the brakes on the advance. At precisely the moment when German forces were about to seize the port of Dunkirk, Hitler ordered the tanks to stop and allowed the entire British Expeditionary Force (BEF) to escape.

This was the single most devastating military mistake in modern times. If the BEF had been forced to surrender, virtually the entire British professional army with nearly all of its top commanders would have become captives. General Alan Brooke, later chief of the Imperial General Staff, who himself escaped from Dunkirk, said that, if the BEF had not returned to England, it is hard to see how the army could have recovered from the blow. The British, with virtually no land forces, would have been almost as vulnerable to aerial invasion as the Dutch had been when German airborne troops seized the heart of Holland and forced its surrender in just five days. Avoiding invasion and liberating their troops would have almost surely been decisive factors in forcing the British to end the war.

If Britain had been forced to make peace in June 1940, the choking blockade of the Royal Navy would have been lifted, the worlds raw materials would have flowed freely into Europe, and Germany would have become supreme on the Continent. It would have had the choice of attacking the Soviet Union without fear of its rear, or of so intimidating the Soviets that Joseph Stalin would have acquiesced to nearly all German demands. In other words, Germany would have instantly become the heart of a great European empire that could have dictated world events.

Yet even after the gross mistake of allowing the British to escape from Dunkirk, Hitler still could have achieved a virtually invincible empire. Only a single understrength British armored division in Egypt barred him from occupying North Africa, Suez, and the Middle East. Seizing these regions would have forced the Royal Navy to abandon the Mediterranean, given Hitler unlimited oil, and placed German armies within striking distance of the Soviet oilfields in the Caucasus and along the shores of the Caspian Sea. With Soviet oil in peril, Stalin would have gone to any lengths to placate Hitler. Britain would have been forced to use all its limited power to protect its crown jewel, India. Germany would have faced no military danger and, with all of continental Europes industry in its hands, could have become as powerful as the United States.

But Hitler did not see this opportunity any more than he saw the opportunity at Dunkirk. He paid little attention to North Africa and attacked the Soviet Union headlong in June 1941. These two colossal and almost inconceivable blunders brought about Hitlers own demise and the death of the Third Reich in 1945. But this did not have to be.

Part of this remarkable story is the incapacity of all of the senior generals and politicianson both the German and the Allied sidesto recognize the transformative impact of two weapons, the tank and the dive-bomber. Because of this, Manstein and Guderian had to overcome immense opposition within the reactionary senior reaches of the German army before and even during the time they, along with Rommel, demonstrated to the equally reactionary senior leaders of the Allies that World War Is method of warfare had been fatally outmoded. The story of the campaign in the West in 1940, therefore, is a double narrative of how a small group of revolutionaries, carrying out a totally new kind of war, overcame not only their unseeing superiors in the German army but also shattered their equally blind opponents in the Allied armies.

There are two kinds of conventional war, static and maneuver. The First World War was the preeminent example of static war, which seeks to achieve victory by firepower, by methodical, measured advances supported by cannons, and by maintaining a solid, continuous, linear front. The victors, France and Britain, believed they possessed the keys to permanent military supremacy by continuing to follow the principles of static war that they had perfected in four years of conflict.

But on May 10, 1940, static warfare was replaced by a modern war of maneuver. Maneuver warfare is the exact opposite of static war. It is a system of such rapid movement that the enemy does not have time to establish a continuous front, and is defeated either by being overridden by fast-moving forces rushing into his rear or by being surrounded in cauldrons and forced to surrender. The two forms of warfare are completely incompatible. The side that conducts static war is not organized to switch over to maneuver war.

The French, therefore, were incapable of reacting when the Germans broke a vast hole in the continuous French front and opened the entire rear to raging torrents of fast-moving German mechanized forces. Shortly after the disaster had struck, General Maxime Weygand, newly appointed supreme commander, told French prime minister Paul Reynaud: We have gone to war with a 1918 army against a German army of 1939. It is sheer madness. French and British leaders had simply slept through a revolution in warfare.

The campaign in the West in 1940, in addition to being one of the most decisive in history, marked the greatest disparity of force between victor and vanquished that has ever been recorded, including the hitherto unsurpassed victories of Alexander the Greats small Macedonian army over the vast hosts of the ancient Persian Empire. In 1940, four corps, consisting of 164,000 men, less than 8 percent of the German armyand fewer than 60,000 of these men were at the critical point where the actual victory was wonbrought about the complete rout of the better-equipped and much more heavily armed Allied armies totaling 3,300,000 men.

Next page

1234567...61

Light

Font size:

↓

↑

Georgia Tahoma Arial Verdana

Reset

Interval:

↓

↑

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «Inside the Nazi War Machine: How Three Generals Unleashed Hitler’s Blitzkrieg Upon the World»

Look at similar books to Inside the Nazi War Machine: How Three Generals Unleashed Hitler’s Blitzkrieg Upon the World. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.

David Wragg

Sink the French!: At War with Our Ally—1940

Benoît Lemay

Erich Von Manstein: Hitlers Master Strategist

Greg Baughen

RAF On the Offensive: The Rebirth of Tactical Air Power 1940-1941

Marthe Cohn

Behind Enemy Lines: the True Story of a French Jewish Spy in Nazi Germany

Clark

Blitzkrieg: Myth, Reality, and Hitlers Lightning War: France 1940

Frieser

The Blitzkrieg Legend: the 1940 Campaign in the West

Germany. Heer

Panzer general: Heinz Guderian and the Blitzkrieg victories of WWII

James Holland

Blitzkrieg

Karl-Heinz Frieser

The Blitzkrieg Legend : the 1940 Campaign in the West

Melvin

Manstein Hitlers Greatest General

Bevin Alexander

How Hitler Could Have Won World War II: The Fatal Errors That Led to Nazi Defeat

John Mosier

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

Discussion, reviews of the book Inside the Nazi War Machine: How Three Generals Unleashed Hitler’s Blitzkrieg Upon the World and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.