Introduction
You often wonder if the outcome of World War II was inevitable given the massive industrial power of the Allies. Bevin Alexander argues that the war was not decided by material superiority alone, but by a series of catastrophic strategic errors committed by Adolf Hitler.
Germany pioneered revolutionary blitzkrieg tactics that stunned the world, yet threw away historic opportunities through rigid ideology and poor military choices. You will see how the German armed forces repeatedly defeated superior opponents only to have their victories squandered by their supreme commander.
This book examines military decisions from 1940 to 1945 to uncover how Germany could have won the conflict. You will explore the alternative paths available to the Axis powers.
- How did Germany conquer France so rapidly using new armor doctrines?
- Why did Hitler halt his panzers at Dunkirk and abandon the Mediterranean?
- What made the invasion of the Soviet Union a fatal miscalculation?
1. Military Innovation and the Western Campaign
Germany revolutionized warfare by concentrating armor and air support into fast-moving panzer divisions, enabling the stunning defeat of France through Erich von Manstein's sickle-cut plan. You will see how traditional armies collapsed because they clung to outdated doctrines.
German doctrine revolutionized warfare by treating tanks and airplanes as fast-moving vehicles rather than mere infantry support.
Heinz Guderian built the panzer arm on the teachings of English experts J.F.C. Fuller and Basil H. Liddell Hart. Instead of scattering tanks among infantry divisions, the German army concentrated all armor into panzer divisions accompanied by motorized infantry, artillery, and engineers. These fast runner tanks reached speeds of 25 miles an hour for quick penetration.
Erwin Rommel formulated the operational concept known as blitzkrieg warfare, which caught traditional armies completely off guard.
- Concentrate strength at one point
- Force a breakthrough
- Roll up and secure the flanks on either side
- Penetrate like lightning deep into the enemy rear before they react
Although slow and technologically dated by 1940, the Junkers 87B Stuka functioned as highly accurate aerial artillery. German pilots fitted Stukas with whistles that emitted a screaming sound during dives to demoralize Allied defenders. The Stuka dive-bomber had a 240 mph top speed and an 1,100-pound bombload capacity.
Allied military doctrine relied on rigid, slow methodical battles and dispersed armor, leading directly to their collapse. French and British leaders adhered to the concept of a continuous front and methodical battles requiring slow infantry advances behind massive artillery barrages.
A French training exercise in 1938 required eight days of preparation for an attack designed to last just two days. The opposing forces included 3,370,000 men in 143 Allied divisions against 3 million men in 141 German divisions, alongside 3,400 Allied tanks compared to 2,700 German tanks.
Erich von Manstein's bold shift of the main attack through the Ardennes forest enabled the rapid defeat of France.
The original German and French plans expected a head-on collision in northern Belgium. Manstein proposed the sickle-cut plan, or Sichelschnitt, shifting the primary weight of the attack through the difficult terrain of the Ardennes to Sedan. Manstein convinced Hitler during a private luncheon on February 18, 1940, leading OKH to issue directives reflecting his strategy under the codename Fall Gelb.
Seven panzer divisions containing 1,800 tanks broke through the French line on the Meuse in four days. They raced a distance of 160 miles from the Meuse to the English Channel in seven days, cutting off the entire northern wing of Allied armies using the Schwerpunkt principle.
2. Hitler's First Great Strategic Errors
Hitler issued a fatal halt order at Dunkirk allowing the British army to escape and subsequently abandoned the Battle of Britain air campaign to pursue strategic terror bombing.
Hitler issued a controversial halt order that allowed the British Expeditionary Force to escape from Dunkirk. He ordered the panzers to stop eight miles from Dunkirk, influenced by nervousness, fears of Flanders marshes, and Göring's promises that the Luftwaffe could prevent evacuation.
Between May 26 and June 4, 860 vessels evacuated 338,000 troops to England from Dunkirk. This total included 120,000 French troops. The May 24 halt order preserved the core of Britain's military personnel.
The Royal Air Force's primary defensive advantage during the Battle of Britain was its sophisticated radar and sector station network. Radar stations detected incoming German raids early, enabling Fighter Command to vector squadrons precisely, conserve precious fuel, and maximize efficiency against outnumbered aircraft.
Britain relied on a double line of high towers and short-range radar receivers, combined with ground spotters, to track enemy formations. Combat forces faced difficult odds against 800 Messerschmitt 109s, 875 two-engined bombers, 316 Stukas, and 250 Messerschmitt 110 fighters opposing 675 combat-ready British fighter planes.
Hitler committed a fatal strategic error by abandoning attacks on British sector stations to begin terror-bombing London in retaliation. He shifted the Luftwaffe from a tactical campaign against airfields to strategic terror bombing, relieving pressure on the collapsing British air defense after stray bombs hit London and subsequent RAF raids hit Berlin.
Following RAF reprisal raids on Berlin in late August 1940, Hitler ordered the destruction of British cities, testing Giulio Douhet's strategic-bombing theory. Stray bombs fell on London on August 24, 1940, and the first Berlin reprisal raid used 80 bombers. Later, the September 7 docklands raid killed 300 civilians, contributing to 23,000 British civilians dead by the end of 1940.
President Roosevelt established Lend-Lease to transform the United States into the arsenal of democracy and sustain Britain's war effort.
President Roosevelt recognized that Britain could no longer pay for vital supplies. He proposed lending military equipment and materials, effectively bypassing financial hurdles and gearing American industry for total war production.
Following his November 5, 1940 election to a third term, Roosevelt delivered a national radio fireside chat on December 29, 1940, calling the United States the arsenal of democracy. This rhetoric promoted the four freedoms and led to the enactment of the Lend-Lease bill on March 11, 1941, alongside staff agreements known as ABC-1.
3. The Rejected Mediterranean Strategy
Germany missed a war-winning opportunity to seize Egypt, the Suez Canal, and Middle Eastern oil fields, choosing instead to invade the Soviet Union and attack Crete.
The victory over France opened a major strategic alternative to defeat Britain via the Mediterranean without attacking the Soviet Union. Major General Alfred Jodl and Admiral Erich Raeder argued that seizing Egypt and the Suez Canal would cut off Britain's supply routes, paralyze the Royal Navy, and open the Middle East. Hitler, however, failed to grasp this perspective and remained fixated on attacking the Soviet Union and capturing Gibraltar and Atlantic islands.
On July 31, 1940, Hitler announced his resolve to destroy the vitality of Russia in the spring of 1941, ignoring Raeder's step-by-step demonstrations that an advance through Suez would put Germany in a commanding position.
Capturing the Middle East would provide Germany with vital oil resources, put Turkey in an impossible position, block supply routes to the Soviet Union through Iran, and threaten British control of India. Stalin would have been immobilized and forced to provide Germany with grain and raw materials without a single German soldier being lost.
In a message to President Roosevelt, Winston Churchill asserted that losing Egypt and the Middle East would make continuation of the war a hard, long, and bleak proposition.
The British were vulnerable because there were 36,000 men in Egypt available to the British in June 1940. Their main supply route stretched 12,000 miles around the Cape of Good Hope. The British possession of Malta lay only 60 miles south of Sicily.
While Admiral Raeder and navy commanders argued that neutralizing Malta was an essential precondition for a war in the Mediterranean, Hitler chose to use his elite parachute and glider troops to seize Crete. The operation resulted in catastrophic losses for German airborne units, while Malta continued to be the main base for interdicting Axis shipping to Libya.
General Kurt Student's 11th Air Corps lost 6,000 men on Crete, two-thirds dead, leading Hitler to remark that the day of parachute troops was over.
The island of Crete spanned 3,200 square miles, whereas Malta measured only 122 square miles. Operation Mercury for Crete cost the 6,000 men lost by the 11th Air Corps.
General Erwin Rommel recognized that desert warfare depended entirely on mobility and range, mirroring warfare at sea. Nonmotorized troops were useless against a motorized enemy because mobile units could easily surround them. Rommel understood that whoever had the greatest mobility and the longest range could compel opponents to act according to their wishes.
To compensate for a lack of real tanks when establishing his initial front, Rommel had workshops near Tripoli produce large numbers of dummy tanks mounted on Volkswagens to deceive RAF reconnaissance pilots.
British troops were stopped 180 miles farther east at El Agheila, facing the Deutsches Afrika Korps equipped with 120 tanks in the 5th Panzer Regiment along the Via Balbia.
4. Operation Barbarossa and the Fatal Turn to the East
Successful military strategy requires diminishing enemy resistance by striking at weaknesses and supply lines rather than launching direct, frontal assaults. A direct attack against a strong opponent guarantees maximum resistance and lengthens the attacker's supply lines while shortening the defender's. The correct approach is to separate the enemy from reserves and supplies through flank attacks or by targeting vulnerabilities.
By invading the Soviet Union without a unified objective, treating populations as enemies rather than liberators, and diverting forces to Kiev, Germany doomed its eastern campaign.
On June 22, 1941, the direct invasion of the Soviet Union ignored eternal rules of warfare by attacking enemy strength rather than seeking a weak point. Hitler's greatest strategic and political error was entering the Soviet Union as a brutal conqueror instead of a liberator of oppressed populations. Decades of Communist autocracy, collective farming, secret police purges, and subjugated nationalities created fertile ground for an anti-Stalin rebellion. Instead of promising freedom, Hitler instituted extermination detachments and starvation policies, turning genuine initial local welcomes into bitter guerrilla warfare.
Alfred Rosenberg stated two days before the invasion that feeding the German people stood at the top of claims, with no obligation to feed Russians.
Hitler refused to concentrate on a single goal, ordering Army Group North to Leningrad, Army Group Center to Moscow, and Army Group South to Ukraine and the Caucasus. Because resources were split over a space-to-men ratio twenty times greater than in the western campaign, the German army lacked the strength to succeed anywhere. Leningrad was 940 airline miles away from Odessa on the Black Sea, making coordinated three-way campaigns impossible. Hitler hoped to seize 1 million square miles in 1941, compared with the area of the campaign in the west of 50,000 square miles, comparable to North Carolina or New York State.
Tempted by the rich resources of Ukraine and the chance to trap Soviet armies around Kiev, Hitler diverted his panzer groups south. Although the Germans captured massive numbers of troops at Kiev, the delay consumed vital dry summer weather and pushed the final advance on Moscow into the autumn mud and winter. The Germans captured 665,000 men in the Kiev caldron, marking the largest single military success and prisoner haul in history, 250 miles away from Dnepropetrovsk.
Operation Typhoon brought German forces to the outskirts of Moscow, but the autumn mud and the onset of severe winter halted the offensive. Despite massive initial encirclement victories near Vyazma and Bryansk that netted hundreds of thousands of prisoners, German forces were severely depleted and lacked winter equipment. The autumn rains turned roads into bottomless mud canals, slowing transport to a crawl before the arrival of sub-zero temperatures. The Germans counted 650,000 prisoners in the Vyazma and Bryansk pockets, leaving an 800,000-man total remaining Soviet army in European Russia.
Georgy Zhukov mobilized a quarter of a million people, three-quarters of them women, to build antitank ditches by hand along the Mozhaisk line.
An eighteen-mile closest approach of a German division to Moscow occurred at Krasnaya Polyana before the offensive ground to a halt. The arrival of fresh Siberian reserves enabled a massive Soviet counteroffensive, while Hitler's declaration of war on the United States completed Germany's strategic isolation. Secret intelligence from Richard Sorge allowed Stalin to safely redeploy divisions from the Far East to defend Moscow. Zhukov launched a winter counteroffensive that forced German troops back, supported by 12 divisions of reinforcements with 1,700 tanks and 1,500 aircraft transferred from eastern Siberia.
On December 7, 1941, Japan attacked the American Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, prompting Hitler to declare war on the United States four days later. Total German losses reached 775,000 in dead, wounded, and missing, amounting to one-fourth of field strength. Troops suffered through 228,000 cases of frostbite as temperatures dropped initially to minus 20 degrees Celsius during the winter halt.
5. Desert Warfare and Lost Alternatives
Erwin Rommel perfected mobile desert warfare using hidden antitank gun lines, but Hitler repeatedly rejected Admiral Raeder and Rommel's appeals to prioritize North Africa and the Mediterranean.
Rommel discovered that desert warfare required attrition and destruction of enemy organization rather than traditional encirclement. Motorized forces could easily break out of traps in open desert environments, nullifying methods that worked in Poland or Western Europe. You watched Rommel shift tactical aims to wearing down the enemy and shattering their organic cohesion.
During Operation Battleaxe, Rommel used his five-point method and antitank guns to smash British armor while keeping his own tanks back for decisive strikes.
You can trace specific rules for desert operations:
- Concentrate forces while trying to split enemy forces and destroy them at different times.
- Protect supply lines while cutting the enemy's.
- Attack enemy armor with antitank guns, reserving own tanks for the final blow.
- Operate near the front to make immediate decisions when tactical conditions change.
- Achieve surprise, maintain great speed of movement, and overrun disorganized enemy formations without delay.
The German 88-millimeter antiaircraft gun became the most formidable antitank weapon of the war, devastating British armor while the British failed to use their own comparable heavy guns against tanks. The 88 could blast through 83 millimeters of armor at 2,000 yards. Rommel deployed them horizontally with little visible above ground, often combining them with 50-millimeter antitank guns in ambush traps.
At Hellfire Pass during Operation Battleaxe, a trap of four 88s destroyed all but one of thirteen British Matilda tanks.
Admiral Raeder and General Rommel proposed shifting Germany's primary focus to seizing North Africa, the Middle East, and cutting Atlantic supply lines, which could have saved the war for Germany.
Raeder urged driving through Egypt to the Middle East, seizing Caucasus oil, closing the Iranian supply route, and building an all-out U-boat fleet, while going on the defensive in Russia. Rommel flew to Hitler's headquarters at Rastenburg on February 15, 1942, pressing for three more divisions to smash the British, capture Egypt, and press to the oil fields of Iraq and Iran.
Adolf Hitler rejected the strategic pivot to the Mediterranean and Atlantic, maintaining his fixation on destroying the Soviet Union and giving the Allies a crucial reprieve. Hitler prioritized the Ostheer and German rearmament for the Russian front over U-boat construction and North African reinforcements, ignoring the potential to alter the war's outcome.
10 Key Ideas
- Germany revolutionized warfare by concentrating armor and air support into fast-moving panzer divisions, enabling the stunning defeat of France through Erich von Manstein's sickle-cut plan.
- Hitler issued a fatal halt order at Dunkirk allowing the British army to escape and subsequently abandoned the Battle of Britain air campaign to pursue strategic terror bombing.
- President Roosevelt established Lend-Lease to transform the United States into the arsenal of democracy and sustain Britain's war effort.
- Germany missed a war-winning opportunity to seize Egypt, the Suez Canal, and Middle Eastern oil fields, choosing instead to invade the Soviet Union and attack Crete.
- By invading the Soviet Union without a unified objective, treating populations as enemies rather than liberators, and diverting forces to Kiev, Germany doomed its eastern campaign.
- Georgy Zhukov successfully mobilized labor for defensive lines and leveraged fresh Siberian reserves alongside winter weather to halt the German advance outside Moscow.
- Erwin Rommel perfected mobile desert warfare using hidden antitank gun lines to smash British armor and exhaust enemy organization.
- Admiral Raeder and General Rommel proposed shifting Germany's primary focus to seizing North Africa, the Middle East, and cutting Atlantic supply lines, which could have saved the war for Germany.
- Hitler repeatedly rejected strategic appeals to prioritize North Africa and the Mediterranean, maintaining his fixation on destroying the Soviet Union.
- Adolf Hitler's ideological fixations and catastrophic military errors threw away historic opportunities, ultimately leading to Germany's strategic isolation and defeat.