The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (465 page)

Most significant, if Hitler took the strategically correct course and pulled in his northern and southern flanks, as well as the Minsk salient, he could establish a defensive line strong enough to prolong the war indefinitely in both the east and west. If Hitler folded Army Group North three hundred miles back to Königsberg and ran his line due south through Brest-Litovsk to Kovel and the Carpathians, he would cut the length of his front in half and effectively double his strength. He could then contemplate shifting some his 166 divisions in the east to the west, a prospect that troubled Washington and London, and especially Montgomery, who for three weeks after the D-day landings expected a counterattack but did not know when
or in what strength. The possible consequences of a German counterattack to the Red Army and the Anglo-American forces were vastly different. Punching holes in the Red Army lines was like digging on a beach; the next wave erases the effort. If Hitler wiped out thirty Soviet divisions, Stalin would replace them. But if he wiped out half of the twenty-five Allied divisions that were in France by late June, he would fling the Allies from the Continent. Sound strategy called for Hitler to do just that, to tighten his eastern line and concentrate his western armies against the invader.

But, like Napoleon, Hitler could not bear to exchange conquered territory for security. To not do so was a faulty strategy, and, as Brooke put it, the Germans “were bound to pay the penalty” for it. The Russian high command had concluded in May that the key to opening the entire Eastern Front was to destroy Army Group Center, which still occupied the most critical sector of historic White Russia and blocked the roads to Warsaw and Berlin. The Russian operation was code-named Bagration, after Pyotr Bagration, a hero of Russia’s 1812 repulse of Napoleon. Stalin personally chose the day of attack: June 22, the third anniversary of Hitler’s plunge into Russia. To put the Germans off the scent, the Soviets conducted a disinformation campaign consisting of false radio signals that indicated a massive buildup of Soviet artillery and armored units south of the Pripet Marshes, which led the Wehrmacht to conclude that the main attack would come in the southern Ukraine. Then, to further muddle German thinking, on June 11 the Red Army struck out from the Leningrad sector into Finland. This assault was conducted with two objectives in mind: to serve notice to the Finns that their doom was nigh, and to keep Hitler wondering if the Soviets and British might be on the verge of launching dual operations through Finland and Norway for the purposes of cutting off Germany’s supply of Swedish iron ore. The Führer now kept seven divisions in Finland and twelve in Norway against that possibility. From the Allied perspective, the more Hitler scattered his forces, the better the chances for success in Normandy and on the Eastern Front.
²⁰

As the date for Bagration neared, Montgomery found himself in virtually the same place he had been since D-day. He had planned to take Caen on D-day and then drive his armies east, with the Channel on his left and the Americans on his right, destination, the Seine. Failing to do so, he was forced to change his strategy. Rather than strike Caen, he allowed the Germans to punch themselves out at his front. Still, sooner or later (and Churchill was wary of anything that smacked of “later”), Caen would be the hinge upon which the entire plan turned. The American role was to break out from their beaches, take Cherbourg to the west, and swing around south and east to cover Montgomery’s right flank. But Rommel and the weather disrupted the plans. On June 19, the worst Channel storm
in four decades blew for four days, destroying the Omaha Beach Mulberry harbor and bringing the war in Normandy to a halt. Eisenhower later called the action during June and July “The Battle of the Beachhead.” Had the master plan gone as planned, the battle would have been over by the time Churchill made his visit on June 12.

The Channel storm was still raging on June 22, when on the Eastern Front a far more murderous storm broke at dawn as Operation Bagration kicked off. So effective was the Soviet misinformation campaign that only 37 weakly supported German divisions along the five-hundred-mile Minsk salient found themselves facing 166 Red Army divisions supported by 2,700 battle tanks and 1,300 field guns. The results were immediate, and staggering; the Red Army pushed one hundred miles west within days. Three weeks later, on July 11, another entire Soviet army hooked south under the Pripet Marshes on a general heading for Cracow. The Western press proclaimed Germany to be finished but for the formalities. A
Kansas City Star
headline brayed R
ED
S
PEED
S
TUNS
N
AZIS
, Y
ANKS
S
TRIKE IN
F
RANCE.
In fact, the Germans had conceded the Cotentin Peninsula to the Americans. The Yanks took Cherbourg on June 25 after the German commander—ordered by Hitler to fight to the last man—asked his American counterpart to fire one artillery round at the main gate in order to preserve German honor. The Americans fired, and honor preserved, the Germans surrendered. Along the rest of the Normandy front the Allies had not advanced much beyond the beaches. Monty finally took Caen on July 9—D + 33—after bombing it almost to powder on July 8. That week George Patton and the first units of his Third Army—whose whereabouts vexed the Germans—landed in Normandy. That night was the last one of favorable moon and tides for an invasion at Calais; given that no Allied army appeared there, the Germans should have concluded that Patton was headed elsewhere, probably to Normandy. They did not.
²¹

By then von Rundstedt no longer commanded the armies to Montgomery’s front. In late June, with the Cotentin taken, von Rundstedt told his superiors that any counterattack on the British sector was bound to fail. “What should we do?” asked OKW’s Keitel. Replied von Rundstedt: “Make peace, you fools, what else can you do?” On July 1, von Rundstedt was forced into an early retirement. His replacement, Field Marshal Hans Günther von Kluge, a hero of the Russian battles and a born fighter, arrived on the scene full of fire in his belly. He castigated Rommel for his lack of initiative, and announced his intention to attack. But after his first visit to the front, he realized how desperate the situation really was. Von Kluge also carried a secret. For almost two years, a group of anti-Hitler conspirators had sought his support in a plot to kill the Führer. It was their understanding that von Kluge had agreed to join the plot, but only after
Hitler was dead. Rommel, too, was aware of the plot. Not reporting that information to authorities was no less treasonous than joining the plot.
²²

T
he Red Army, in the six weeks between June 22 and the last week of July, smashed more than two hundred miles west—in the center to the east bank of the Vistula and the outskirts of Warsaw, in the north to the borders of East Prussia, and in the south to northern Bukovina and the Hungarian frontier. Operation Bagration occupies little space in the collective memory of the West, where Normandy, the Ardennes Bulge, and Dunkirk have assumed sacred status, yet Bagration, more than any other action that year, served to put Germany down on one knee. Churchill did not even name the battle in the final volume of his war history, where he wrote with stupendous understatement, “The Russian summer offensive brought their armies in late July to the river Vistula.” Yet, Churchill was one with many in the West in his inability or unwillingness to grant Bagration its due. During those late June and July weeks when the Red Army swept through an area about the size of Great Britain (north to south and east to west), the Anglo-Americans were still fighting the Battle of the Beachhead on a front only a few miles deep and eighty miles wide, in a swath of Normandy about the size of Cape Cod.
²³

On July 20, Churchill visited Cherbourg and Utah Beach before moving on to visit Montgomery’s positions over the next two days. He had notified Montgomery that he’d be coming, which led Monty to ask Eisenhower to keep visitors away at all costs. Montgomery’s planned breakout, code-named Cobra—a sweep to the Brittany ports and an envelopment of the Germans at Bradley’s front—was set to start within days.

Churchill’s reaction to Montgomery’s query to Ike was to summon Brooke and fly into “an unholy rage” over Monty’s insubordination. “And who is Your Monty that he thinks he can dictate to me? Who does he think he is, trying to stop the Prime Minister from visiting?” It was now D + 44, and the Allied armies were not that much farther away from the beaches than they had been on his first visit of June 12. Churchill, fed up, told Eisenhower that he would support him in any decision having to do with relieving British generals who did not live up to Ike’s expectations. Although Eisenhower, too, was losing patience with Monty, he had no intention of relieving Britain’s revered hero of Alamein. Still, on July 20, Eisenhower’s naval aide, Commander Butcher, told his diary that Ike was “blue as indigo over Monty’s slowdown.” The problem, as Eisenhower saw it, was that Montgomery’s stated strategy of letting Rommel punch himself
out against the British and Canadians depended upon Rommel’s following the script. He wasn’t doing that. “Rommel knew that play by heart,” Butcher wrote. He simply kept his panzers out of range of Montgomery’s artillery. Butcher did not know that Rommel was no longer in Normandy; he had been injured when an Allied fighter strafed his car on July17, and he was on his way to a hospital in Germany. In any event, another week of foul weather delayed Montgomery’s Operation Cobra. Still, though Eisenhower was not about to relieve Monty, he was so fed up with the general that he asked Churchill “to persuade Monty to get on his bicycle and start moving.”
²⁴

As Churchill toured the American lines on July 20, at Hitler’s East Prussian
Wolfsschanze,
Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, who had lost his left eye, right hand, and two fingers on his left hand during an RAF attack in North Africa, was readying himself to report to the Führer on the state of Germany’s homeland defenses. Von Stauffenberg was at the center of a small but dedicated ring of conspirators who believed Germany’s only hope of avoiding obliteration lay in the killing of Hitler. Rommel and von Kluge, who had taken over the injured Rommel’s command, had agreed to back the mutineers if their plot succeeded.

Von Stauffenberg carried a briefcase, which contained two bombs, into Hitler’s East Prussian headquarters. Each had to be armed. When Stauffenberg stepped into a restroom to do so, his damaged hands confounded him. He had armed only one by the time he was called into the conference room. Shortly thereafter he excused himself and left the building. When the subsequent explosion tore through the hut, Stauffenberg, convinced that no one in the room could survive, ordered his driver to take him to a nearby airfield, where he boarded a small plane for Berlin. His assessment of the damage was wrong. Although four people were killed and almost all the survivors were injured, Hitler, shielded from the blast by the heavy, solid-oak conference table, emerged only slightly wounded, his composure and clothes in tatters. Upon his return to Berlin, Stauffenberg urged his co-conspirators to begin the second phase of the coup, the takeover of Nazi offices and radio stations. But after Hitler personally spoke on the state radio, the conspirators realized the coup had failed. They were tracked to their Bendlerstrasse offices and arrested after a brief shoot-out. Stauffenberg was taken outside and shot. Churchill later told the Commons, “When Herr Hitler escaped his bomb on July 20th he described his survival as providential; I think that from a purely military point of view we can all agree with him, for certainly it would be most unfortunate if the Allies were to be deprived, in the closing phases of the struggle, of that
form of warlike genius by which Corporal Schicklgruber has so notably contributed to our victory.”
²⁵

Hitler believed Rommel and von Kluge were both involved in the plot, and rather than face the hideous torture Hitler was unleashing on suspects, Kluge bit down on a cyanide capsule on August 18. Rommel, told by Berlin that he could chose between a trial for high treason or suicide, did likewise on October 14.
²⁶