The Scapegoat
' UTURE events were to show that I was' right: F The sentence is taken from a soldierly account by General Hasso von Manteuffel of Hitler's bold and temporarily successful counter-stroke against the Allied armies in the Ardennes in the winter of 1944. Von Manteuffel com- manded the Fifth Panzer Army, which was one of the three German armies involved. He criticised, at an early stage of the hurried and ultra-secret planning, the practicability of the operation; and events (as he says) showed that his criticisms were sound.
He is one of seven former German generals who contribute their own first-hand stories of turning-points in the last war to a book called The Fatal Decisions, published by Michael Joseph at 25s. and illustrated—not, to my mind, under any compelling necessity—by camera studies of the contributors taken fifteen years ago. The turning-points are the Battle of Britain (1940); Moscow (Christmas, 1941); El Alamein (summer, 1942); the invasion of Normandy (summer, 1944); and the Ardennes (winter, 1944). These pregnant episodes are linked, very ably, by a sort of now-read-on commentary by General Westphal, who started his active service in the cavalry and finished it as Chief of Staff to the Commander-in-Chief West at the time of the Normandy invasion.
So many former. German generals are now on attachment, if not under contract, to the official American historians of the last war that this book has almost the air of an indiscretion. Of the six 'fatal decisions' it deals with, the first two were taken, and had their consequences, while America was still neutral; to the German defeats attributable to the second two no American forces contributed; the fifth case (Normandy) involved an Anglo-American partnership on roughly equal terms; and in the sixth (the Ardennes) an American army was surprised and outfought before it gallantly regained its balance and threw back intruders who had reached the end of their tether. But the fact that there are not as many niches as usual for Mr. Errol Flynn in this arbitrarily designed Valhalla is really neither here nor there; a similar anthology compiled by former Japanese commanders would include far fewer references to their British adversaries.
Except for von Manteuffel, who had a command at the time, all the contributors witnessed the events they describe from the standpoint of senior staff officers. They were, so to speak, backstage, and knew more than the audience or even the actors could about the underlying reasons for the failure or miscarriage of some ambitious mise en scene. They all blame everything on Hitler.
They have a perfect right to do this, and their narratives nowhere suggest that they have found it necessary to cook the abundant evidence of his incapacity as a Supreme Com- mander. But these detailed, first-hand, round-by-round revela- tions of what many honourable men knew—in most cases at an early stage of the war—about his lunatic methods of com- mand make it all the more remarkable that they went on putting up with him not merely until he had brought Germany to the brink of destruction, but until he had pushed her over it.
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It was, after all, in the winter of 1942 that Zeitzler, who had succeeded Haider as chief of staff of the Army High Command, wrestled for weeks with Hitler in vain attempts to save a quarter of a million men in Stalingrad from the inevitable consequences of a demented strategy. In the previous summer Bayerlein, who was Rommel's chief of staff, saw with almost equal vividness the disastrous results of Hitler' remote control at Alamein; and in the year before the German commanders in Russia had, according to Blumentritt, plenty of evidence that the conduct of the war was at the mercy of the Filhrer's fantasies.
After-knowledge always distorts the perspective. But if, as this book suggests, so many responsible generals were aware, so early in the war, that Hitler was for practical purposes barking mad and that his immediate military advisers were corrupt and incompetent lackeys, it becomes less easy to synt• pathise with their central theme, which is that Hitler (abetted at times by Goring) was in the last analysis to blame lot everything.
Probably the truth is that they did not, in hard fact, see things as clearly then as they now think they did. The Hitlet of the last act dominates their memories : a glaucous, puffy troglodyte, sharing a catacomb with thugs and quacks and Eva Braun; a figure out of the News of the World. They have forgotten the dazzling victories of the first ten months, the shower of promotion and Knights' Crosses which so gratified them at the time; but they had not wholly forgotten them in those days. They must still have. had some faith in Ms wizardry, some relish for his favours. If they had not7---4 Hitler really appeared to them in the colours they now paint him in—I do not think it is quite fair thatthe should bear the whole of the blame.
In 1940 I published what was possibly the only non-serious book ever written about Hitler. In it the Fiihrer landed by parachute in England after the aircraft in which he was inspect' ing his intended victim had blown up, and in due course he was taken into custody. His capture, though it seemed at first a most auspicious event, put the British Government in an embarrass' ing quandary, for in Germany one of his doubles was imnle: diately installed in his place; there was grave danger that, it London announced that they had the Fiihrer under lock and key, Berlin would reply that they had been duped by a clever German trick and the British would find themselves committed to supporting the legitimism of a tyrant whose overthrow Was their principal war aim. In the end the situation Was saved by a minor Cabinet Minister who plucked up courage to suggest that Hitler should be put back where he came from. 'As I see it,' said this humble fellow, 'lie's not going to do the Germans much good in the long run: So in the end Hitler was returned, by parachute' to the Third Reich. France had just fallen when this mild feu d'esprit appeared' and there was among the critics a tendency to reproach the author for his frivolity in so palpably underestimating th Arch-Enemy; phrases like 'In this grave hour, surely no useful purpose is served' were freely employed, and ItlYt American publishers expressed in a cable the somewba, timorous opinion that 'in view of recent military developments to proceed with publication would be neither in my interests nor in theirs. But having read The Fatal Decisions and a number of similar works by German generals, I do not think that I can . be accused of immodesty if I make, in respect of my estimate of Hitler's long-term utility to the German cause, a cia!,1111 i which is repeatedly advanced in their pages, and say. vil` von Manteuffel: 'Future events were to show that I was right_.,'
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