@RDRDRD1,
This is quite a fascinating discussion. It's nice to be able to blog on the subject, it's better than holding a verbal discussion in some ways because it allows one the luxury of considering and evaluating his responses before submitting them, and better than writing an essay because it allows the thrust and parry, to-and-fro of a moving debate, between many people across many countries representing many different attitudes of the War. Are there any Americans in this forum? I'm British myself, but I imagine the Americans have a very different attitude towards the European War - my understanding is that America's 'personal' crusade in WWII was first and foremost against the Japanese, because of their treachery at Pearl Harbour, even though the bulk of their war effort was directed against Germany. Ironically many Americans did not harbour real 'enmity' towards the Germans, because they had not been directly attacked by them (there were very few US civilian casualties in the War, and most of those were caused by the Japanese), in much the same way that the British in the First World War felt more hatred towards the French, their traditional enemies, than their Teutonic cousins.
This subject was the basis of my final year Dissertation (Sheffield Hallam University, BA Modern History), and I'm quite proud of my understanding of the subject, having read books my many authors - currently I am reading Churchill's four volume account of the Second World War, and Max Hastings' "Armageddon" is a favourite too - however I do not claim to possess a bullet-proof, absolute knowledge of the many aspects of the War. I expect challenge and criticism, in my opinion there is no such thing as a 'flawless' argument and there will always be commentators and detractors, that is the point of historical debate. There are so many aspects to the War and so many areas to consider that no single, individual argument could remain uncontested for long and the best thing we can hope for is to entertain as many viewpoints as possible. And the subject warrants a good deal more discussion, elaboration, knowledge and information than I have at my disposal. So please, feel free to point out my deficiencies wherever possible!
First of all - yes, Hitler did make mistakes. He made many mistakes, and much of the time he didn't seem to learn from them. So did Churchill, for that matter. Ever heard of the Dardanelles fiasco in WWI? That should have sunk his career and his reputation faster than the fleet which he sent to its doom. Churchill is remembered, however, primarily for his successes, his achievements, his inspiration, NOT for the mistakes he made. At least Churchill was humble and intelligent enough to learn from them. Hitler was certainly intelligent - even if his intelligence was dimmed by obsession and frustration in the later years - but humility was not one of his qualities, it seems. Had he been willing and able to learn and improve from his mistakes, rather than drawing the German Army on its relentless path to destruction, he might well have won the War, though the whole world might stand against him. I stand by my argument (the central point of my thesis) that if the Soviet Union had collapsed in 1941 or 42, German victory would have been all but certain. (The reasons are too many and too complicated to bring up here; if you want to however I will pursue them in another thread.) Britain would eventually have capitulated, having being forced to fight on alone and now facing the full strength of German firepower; and the US, distanced as it was from Western Europe, and deprived of a base from which to launch its operations, would have been unable to do anything but stand by and watch as Germany consolidated its power on the continent. The German failure to capture Moscow in 1941, and the later disaster of Stalingrad, were the two points of no return: before this, Hitler *might* have had a chance of succeeding. One catastrophe, as always, leads into another.
(I stress *might* - there are so many variables, so many possibilities and unknowns that it is impossible to know for sure. I will, however, maintain that the fall of Moscow would have made the Soviets' war effort unsustainable: Stalin and his forces could have retreated and regrouped their forces behind the Urals, as they did indeed do, but it is hard to imagine the Red Army recovering from such a blow. The encirclement of Moscow was the biggest operation in military history, dwarfing Stalingrad, the Battle of Normandy, even Operation Bagration three years later. Stalin himself was determined not to relinquish the capital, at whatever cost; it was the seat of the Soviet government and its loss would have been a massive blow to morale.)
Aedes, you commented before that audacity does not equate with 'greatness'. That I will challenge. Take Churchill for example, widely regarded as a military 'genius' and great leader. His greatest, indeed most memorable quality was his audacity - his stubborn willingness and belief that Britain COULD fight on alone, against the odds; that even surrounded and beaten down there was still a hope for that tiny island, a hope of final victory, though many victories and many changes must surely come before it. Hitler too was audacious, if not in the same manner. His audacity encouraged him to take gambles, which as I pointed out before led to his some of his greatest downfalls, but also some of his greatest triumphs. (The ill-fated decision to take as wide a sweep into in Russia as possible, for instance, rather than concentrating his forces in a knock-out blow on Moscow.) Also I refute your argument that France was militarily 'backward' and therefore presented no difficult foe for Germany. *Strategically* backward, perhaps - France felt safe and secure behind its protective Maginot Line, and believed that no foe could penetrate its eastern wall in force. It also thought (wrongly, as it turned out) that a war with Germany would form of a defensive struggle, drawn-out like the battles of Passchendaele and the Somme in the First World War. It did not anticipate Hitler's Blitzkreig movement into France and a crushing six week campaign. THAT, surely, was an audacious move - France at the actually possessed the largest army in Europe, albeit not the most motivated (Hitler in 1939 and 1940 was still building up his strength, Britain and the US were notably lagging); and many spectators thought that it would take him much longer to overrun France. Both Britain and Russia were taken aback by the success of these lightning campaigns, so much so that this might even explain Britain's unpreparedness for 'Operation Sea-Lion' in 1940, and Stalin's refusal to square up with facts in 1941 - both had expected to have much more time to prepare before Hitler made his move. In these early days of the War, audacity was Hitler's greatest strength, and also up to a point his greatest hope, as Germany did *not* at this time possess an army strong enough to overwhelm its opponents; the impression of its strength was far greater than the reality. Now a more conservative, thoughtful leader than Hitler might have opted for a different path, and it seems reasonable that he would therefore have longer to realize his goals. Perhaps this would have been for the better, for Germany anyway; equally, however, it could have been detrimental. An extra year or so would have given Stalin time in which to prepare for the inevitable assault on Russia, and in the event this could have been decisive. (By the way Stalin *knew* that it was coming; in one conversation with his foreign minister, just after the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, he declared that he and Hitler were playing 'a great game', a dangerous game, and it remained only to be seen who would make the first move; he was biding his time and preparing for the difficult struggle that lay ahead. The argument used by some that Stalin was completely unprepared for Hitler's betrayal is poorly founded; he failed however abysmally in anticipating the timing.)
Even Hitler, in fact, was surprised by the extraordinary good fortune of his early successes - hence the 'Phoney War' that followed the defeat of France, in which not much happened. Hitler had not properly planned his next move. He was not looking forward to war with Britain; rather he hoped the British Government was stand aside. These things point to Hitler being as much an opportunist as a planner; if one thing can be said of his leadership it is that he was very good at seeing opportunities and taking advantage of them. Again, these were gambles - sometimes they led to significant victories, and sometimes to frustrating defeats. Hitler's drive towards the Southern Caucasus is a perfect example and encapsulates both - his seizure of Kiev, one of the main-food producing regions of the Ukraine, signaled a heroic triumph for Germany ('the beginning of the end' for Russia, as he believed), but also cost him significantly in time, men and resources which might have been better deployed elsewhere. In the long term, this was not a gamble that paid off. In the short term, however, it severely hampered the Soviet Union's war effort: many Soviet soldiers and citizens were already freezing; the loss of a major agricultural region was a serious blow.
Interestingly, this audacity, this opportunism were qualities Stalin appears to have lacked in the early stages of the War. He failed to respond adequately to the German invasion in the summer and autumn, even after recognizing that the Wehrmacht *was* in fact making a concerted defeat to defeat him, and even after the successful winter counter-offensives (which prevented the Germans from securing their toe-hold near Moscow and taking the capital, a crucial victory), it took him a long time still to properly seize the initiative. Even afterwards there were set-backs, any one of which might have proved fatal - if not to Stalin or to the Soviet Army itself, perhaps to their fighting morale. Stalingrad was, of course, the decisive 'turning-point' of the Eastern Front after this - a Pyrrhic victory for its namesake, but an unmitigated disaster for Hitler - however victory for Russia was still by no means certain after this; the Allies might have already won 'the War', but there were many battles to be fought after this, and a serious misstep at any point on the way might have changed Stalin's fortunes.
At the end of the day, perhaps Hitler was simply 'lucky' to begin with and rather less fortunate as the years went by. Perhaps he was not well-equipped, physically, mentally and emotionally, to deal with the demands of total war and the various set-backs which plagued his later campaigns. Perhaps he did not have the 'mettle' to cope with defeat after defeat. How many commanders DO rise from the ashes of their defeats and come out greater than before? All these are valid points; but there can be no denying that Hitler WAS successful in his early campaigns, extraordinarily so, and his subsequent ill-decisions and ill-fortunes do not change the fact.
Yes - Hitler did indeed (to quote Alan McDougall) 'stratify' his rule, and his subordinates, from Donitz to Rommel to Guderian, were the ones who fought and won the battles. They deserve as much of the credit, if not more. Perhaps I confused 'tactician' with 'strategist' before. It is an easy mistake to make; I shall remember that in the future. Hitler was, however, the Fuehrer, the overall director of Germany's grand strategy, and seldom in any of his decisions was he unopposed - even the ones that turned out victories for Germany! He knew what he wanted, and most of the time he followed his own counsel, even against the suggestions of his advisors and sometimes counter to standard military doctrine. In my mind, this is as much the mark of a great leader as of a flawed leader. Sometimes the majority do not always know best; standard doctrine is not always the best answer or the best solution. Nearly all the Allied leaders, in some measure and at some time, are guilty of the same thing - Churchill, Stalin, Roosevelt, Patton, Montgomery; the list goes on: all of them refused logic and advice and made their own decisions. As with Hitler, sometimes this resulted in Allied disasters (Operation Market Garden), sometimes in victories - Montgomery in the Battle for El Alamein was regarded as something of a maverick, Patton's 'leadership' was often called into question; both of them were instrumental in the victories in France and Normandy. My point is, going AGAINST the advice of your counsellors can be as much a blessing as a curse - unless your counsellors are uniformly more gifted, knowledge and informed than you are! (In 1944 and 45, this WAS the problem with Hitler; he had lost the grasp of the War and believed in imaginary armies coming to save him which did not, in fact, exist. But beforehand, his gambles did occasionally pay off.) When we describe the victors, we often use terms such as 'decisive', 'single-minded', 'unwavering' - by their context these are implied to be virtues, and not weaknesses. Applied to the losers, however, they have negative connotations: the same words, but different meanings!
It has been said before, and has become something of a cliche, that if Hitler HAD succeeded in realizing his goal of world domination, he would most certainly have gone down in history as a great leader and mover of men, and the blemishes of his conquest would have been eclipsed by the magnitude of his achievement. The same argument can be applied to Napoleon, Alexander the Great, just about any other 'great' leader who has ever lived. Initially successfully, dramatically so, at some point they all fell afoul of their vision, and were in the end defeated; and the people who had spoken of them with admiration beforehand would ever afterwards speak of them in terms of shame and ignominy. To borrow an old axiom, the higher one climbs, the farther one falls. Although Hitler even in 1940 had his share of critics, even among his closest disciples, the world was obviously awed by his achievements and a great many people and nations entertained an almost inflated idea of his abilities. Too often his 'god-like' status among the German people is put down simply to Nazi propaganda, but this does not explain it: one cannot become so revered without evidence to back it up. Likewise Stalin would quickly have lost his reputation as the 'Hero' and 'Glorious Leader' of the Soviet people if he had failed to reverse the German victory at Stalingrad. Among his contemporaries, Hitler was initially regarded as prescient, intuitive and brilliant, and even in his twilight years as an inspirational leader. In hindsight we perceive him as bumbling, dogged, stubborn, foolish, inexperienced and incompetent. In truth, he was a much more complex person - he was ALL of these things, and more!
That may sound paradoxical, I know, but consider again the earlier example of Churchill: the Dardanelles fiasco in WWI was a crushing blow to British pride (to none less than Churchill himself, it signaled the end of British naval supremacy, in thought if not in fact), but in after years it appearance to magnify, rather than obscure, the image and the legend of the man: the fact that Winston could redeem himself, learn from his mistakes and rise to greater glories, made him seem even more admirable and heroic. A true hero is a man who falls and pulls himself up, and is greater the second time; the one who never experiences a fall can never be called heroic. (Sounds like something Confucius would say, doesn't it? :-)) Had Hitler somehow, miraculously, reversed Germany's fortunes after 1941, had he won the cataclysmic Battle of Stalingrad and driven German forces to victory, history would have cast him in the same vein as Churchill - triumph over adversity, victory in the face of impossible odds, a great man leading his soldiers and his people through their darkest hour and to the light at the end. From now on, as it turned out, his career was on a slippery downhill slope; Stalingrad was a winner-take-all game and he never really recovered: from this point on he became more and more unpredictable and erratic. To use another cliche, history is always written by the winners: it runs contrary to our modern sensibilities, to imagine that Hitler could be remembered as anything other than a monster and a fiend, but in fact a similar thing did happen - with Stalin! Stalin was as fearsome a monster as Hitler, if not more so, but because he was indispensable to the Allied war effort Churchill and Roosevelt were determined to make him a sympathetic figure ('Uncle Joe'), so as to justify and excuse their relationship with a man who was as much an enemy to freedom and democracy as the one they were fighting. It was not until AFTER the War, when the extent and nature of Soviet crimes and the danger of the Soviet Union itself were presented to the West, that Stalin was cast in a more honest, realistic light - as a liar, deceiver and mass-murderer.
What is my conclusion here? I am drawing on so many comments it is impossible to make a coherent whole out of all this rambling. I could say much more, but I don't have the time. Well, all I can say is, you should never trust everything you read in history books. History has NEVER been entirely objective. The notion that history is written 'by the winners' is rather tired, but unfortunate it is true. History has, indeed, remembered Hitler as a bungler, as a stubborn, foolish and megalomaniacal man, and all these things are all true, and they are not the worst that can be said about him - but they are not the full picture. Believe it or not, there are still people in the world today who believe that Hitler and Stalin were both great men, and they are not all necessarily Nazis, fascists, communists, Marxists, or victims of mind-control or propaganda. Like all leaders and like all men Hitler had his faults, and he committed a great many errors, but these do not diminish the scale of his achievements, which were unprecedented - and if they were brought to naught in the end, those were still tremendous achievements. Not all of them can or should be honoured: the Holocaust, the slaughter and enslavement of 30 million individuals, a six year reign of terror and violence; these things deserve only contempt. But great things he did achieve: he reversed the terms of the crippling Versailles Treaty, and so restored pride to a Germany long been deprived of it; he made his nation into a great military and economic Power; he subjugated Poland, France, stood face to face with the British Empire, even then the greatest empire in the world, the United States, the latent economic superpower, and Russia, the world's greatest military power; he conquered a vast swathe of the Soviet Union, and came perilously close to defeating it altogether; and at its peak the German Empire encompassed one quarter of the globe, the mightiest in the world, and seemingly impervious and beyond challenge to all its foes. Adolf Hitler, that scourge of the world, tyrant of tyrants, the blackest name ever to go down in history, was the greatest military genius who ever lived, but also one of the greatest bunglers - he climbed to heights unsurpassed by any leader before or since, but fell further than any man has ever fallen, into shame and ignominy. That, I think, is the most appropriate summing-up of the man's achievements.
