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Napoleon and Hitler both fought a war on two fronts, sometimes on more. As has been seen, the former’s ‘Spanish Ulcer’ (together with the continuing threat from Britain) contributed to his decision to strike at Russia in 1812 – in order to avoid just such a dual conflict. Similarly, the Führer hoped that a successful invasion of Russia would enable him to eliminate Britain. Each failed, ensuring his own destruction. A refusal to make peace on at least one front, however brilliant the use of declining resources, proved suicidal. Moreover, each man had further commitments on lesser fronts.
Looking back from St Helena, the Emperor himself admitted that:
The unfortunate war in Spain ruined me. All my reverses originated there. The Spanish war destroyed my reputation throughout Europe, increased my difficulties and provided the best possible training ground for English troops. I trained the English army myself, in the Peninsula.
For the situation required Napoleon’s presence, yet he could not spare the time. Clausewitz considers that he might have overcome Spain in 1808 despite the British intervention, but he dared not ignore Austria. The same observer thinks it remarkable that the French were able to stay in the Peninsula in the circumstances, and could do so only because they had ‘great superiority both physically and morally over the Austrians’.
The true venom in Napoleon’s ‘gnawing cancer’ in Spain was not Wellington but the Spanish guerrillas. Clausewitz pinpointed the terrifying potential of guerrilla warfare, which he had seen for himself in Russia: ‘the Spaniards by their stubborn resistance have shown what the general arming of a nation and insurgent measures on a great scale can effect’. Hitler seems to have thought that Marxist socialism had destroyed Russian nationalism. It was his most costly mistake. Just as the Emperor had spurned the Poles, so did the Führer reject any thought of enlisting support from Ukrainian or anti-Communist Russians.
The Emperor’s brother Joseph – ‘Don José Primero’– was not up to the role of King of Spain, while his Marshals were no match for Wellington, who was a superb commander, as brilliant a strategist as he was a tactician. The situation deteriorated steadily. In Clausewitz’s words, ‘In Spain, the war itself became an affair of the people.’ (He comments that in 1812 the example of the Spaniards was an inspiration to the Russians.) Napoleon agreed – ‘The Spaniards acted in the mass like a single man of honour.’ He recognized the extent of the problem at an early stage, even if he did not extricate himself. ‘Vast means are needed to pacify Spain’, he lamented, ‘and not a single Spaniard supports my cause.’ During the Austrian campaign of 1809 the entire Iberian peninsula burst into bloody uproar, with a gun behind every bush. There were countless small campaigns and battles, tying down nearly 300,000 French troops.
The Spanish regulars who opposed the French were led by out-of-date generals. In consequence they were beaten time and again. Yet such successes proved Pyrrhic victories for the French, since the defeated troops joined the countless guerrilla bands led by unconventional though far more formidable commanders. French deaths in spain averaged about a hundred a day between 1809 and 1814, well over 180,000 fatalities in all. Wellington managed to inflict only 45,000 casualties on the French, including prisoners, during this period.
The most important role of the British Expeditionary Force was to support and encourage the guerrillas. Usually Wellington faced French forces of over 100,000 men with scarcely more than 20,000, and to begin with he fought very few battles, content to make the country a desert and demoralize the enemy by starving them. Unluckily for Napoleon, his commanders were incapable of co-ordinating offensives, seeing each other as rivals and competing for the lion’s share of money, provisions and troops. As time went by they became too interested in loot and living like satraps. (Pieter Geyl comments that Spain was ‘a training ground in disobedience for the marshals’.) It was impossible for him to control them from a thousand miles away. He could not appreciate that his normal method of feeding his troops – living off the country – did not work. Unlike the British, who had proper supply trains carried on the backs of six thousand mules, and were systematically revictualled from the sea, the French had only what they could find to put in their knapsacks. Wellington’s policy of cheering on the the guerrillas and scorching the earth proved lethal. He could go where he pleased with his small force while the French had to cope with an enormous area and to guard over-extended communications.
Eventually Wellington began to give battle to the French. In July 1809 he defeated Marshal Victor at Talavera, though he then had to retreat to Portugal, pursued by superior French forces. After defeating Austria the Emperor was able to devote much more time to the Spanish problem – until 1812 – though he did not take command himself. He sent Masséna to drive the British out of their Portuguese base. After a delaying action at Busaco, Wellington withdrew to the lines of Torres Vedras in front of Lisbon. Masséna was baffled by the lines, and after a month had to limp home, his troops decimated by hunger.
Meanwhile the guerrillas became more and more threatening, tying down corps who should have been chasing Wellington – 90,000 alone being needed to protect the road to France. Soult’s entire army was required in Andalusia, unable to help Marmont, who had replaced Masséna. By 1811 there were 370,000 French troops in Spain. Yet during the following year Wellington was able to capture Ciudad Rodrigo and then Badajoz, going on to defeat Marmont at Salamanca in July, and then to a brief occupation of Madrid. The French concentrated their forces for once and chased him out, but in doing so they relaxed their hold on too much territory, strengthening the guerrillas enormously. They were further weakened when Napoleon withdrew troops from the Peninsula after the retreat from Moscow. The end in Spain came in the summer of 1813, Marshal Jourdan being totally defeated at Vittoria.
Even Joseph Bonaparte complained about ‘the horrible treatment’ inflicted on his unwilling ‘subjects’ by French military governors. The only properly administered regions were the four provinces north of the Ebro which had been annexed to France. Both sides inflicted inhuman atrocities on each other. Even the Emperor gave way to despair; when one of Marmont’s officers came to see him early 1812 and described the situation he exclaimed, ‘But how will all this end?’ He explored the possibility of an armistice with the British in Spain, though he broke off negotiations when London insisted on restoring the Bourbons.
There were lesser ulcers. People forget that Napoleon was threatened on another southern European front. The exiled Bourbons of Naples had taken refuge at Palermo, protected not only by the Royal Navy but by British troops. The latter might always invade, as they did in the summer of 1806, when an expeditionary force landed to defeat a far larger French force at Maida in Calabria. The situation improved when Murat became King of Naples, recovering Capri from the British. Even so, guerrilla warfare continued, monopolizing 50,000 French troops.
Because Britannia ruled the waves, she could land men when and where she liked. One such landing took place in 1809 during the renewed war between France and Austria. General Lord Chatham – the late William Pitt’s cousin – led 40,000 men to seize the island of Walcheren off the Dutch coast, at the mouth of the Scheldt, and then occupied Flushing on the mainland. However, an epidemic broke out, killing thousands, Chatham having to disembark his men. Although the Walcheren expedition was a failure, it demonstrated the vulnerability of Blocus Continental.
It goes without saying that the Russian front was the greatest of the Führer’s military ‘ulcers’. Throughout the war not less than a million Germans were serving on the Eastern front at any one time, absorbing the bulk of his troops. In 1942 there were 72 per cent of the Wehrmacht and two-fifths of the Luftwaffe stationed in Russia.
After the failure to destroy the Red Army in 1941 many commanders advised withdrawal. Rundstedt told Hitler to be content with Poland but, like Napoleon before him, the Führer was convinced that he needed new and spectacular victories to retain his rule over Europe, while he was still determined to build a German colonial empire in the East. He had recruited fresh troops and German factories were turning out more arms; in 1942 the Wehrmacht would rise to three million, while war production would double. On 5 April Führer Directive 41, containing ‘Operation Case Blue’, was issued. Its overall plan was that while the armies in the centre would stand fast and those in the north take Leningrad, those in the south, heavily reinforced, would cross the Don to secure the Caucasian oil-fields and the passes through the Caucasus mountains – cutting Russia off from her main source of oil. This almost unbelievably ambitious project, Hitler’s brain-child, came closer to success than is generally appreciated. During the early summer the Red Army’s offensives ended in disaster along the entire front; it had lost seven million men in 1941, and now suffered further huge casualties. Case Blue began at the end of June. By the end of July the Germans were over the Don, one part of their forces swinging southward into the Caucasus, the other advancing on Stalingrad.
Like Napoleon’s Spanish campaign, Hitler’s operations had to be directed from hundreds of miles away. However, unlike the Emperor, he did not do so from a palace but was installed in a bleak frontier headquarters at Vinitsa on the Ukraine. He was more optimistic than the Emperor. Nevertheless, there were some resemblances – notably in the ferocious and costly activities of the partisans and in the terrible toll of veteran troops.
The Führer recognized that ‘banditry’ was almost as dangerous as the Red Army. In Führer Directive No. 46 of 18 August 1942 he ordered that the confidence of the local population should be won by handling them ‘strictly but justly’, and seeing that they had the bare necessities – otherwise more might join the partisans. However, he also warned against ‘misplaced confidence in the native population’.
The Russians declined to abandon Stalingrad, whose loss would cut their country’s supply lines in two. The Germans began their attack on 1 September, despite having advanced so far forward on such a narrow front that they risked encirclement. The Russiansdefended the city with amazing determination, continuing to fight under their factory fortresses after the buildings above them had been reduced to flaming rubble; combats of indescribable savagery took place in cellars, tunnels, lift-shafts and sewers.
Meanwhile the Red Army had amassed nearly a thousand tanks and a million men, outnumbering German forces within reach of Stalingrad by two to one. On 19-20 November 1942 they launched a classic pincer attack from both sides of the city, trapping 250,000 troops. The Führer believed the situation could be saved, just as it had been the previous winter, by ordering the Commander, General Paulus, to stay put and supplying him by air until he was relieved. The task was beyond the Luftwaffe’s capability, while although Manstein’s counter-attack got within forty miles of the city, it had failed by Christmas. Despite promotion to Field Marshal (in the hope that this would inspire him to commit suicide rather than give in), Paulus surrendered on 30 January 1943, together with twenty-four generals. In the meantime the Germans extricated themselves from the Caucasus, not without difficulty.
The more thoughtful and better-informed German officers now realized that it was impossible to win the war. Yet although it was defending a front of some 1,200 miles, the Wehrmacht remained formidable and superbly led. Even if Goering was correct in telling Goebbels in March 1943 ‘the Führer has aged fifteen years during three and a half years of war’, he remained as determined as ever to continue the struggle. A major Russian salient penetrated the German front in the area around Kursk, and in July 1943 sixty-four divisions attacked in ‘Operation Citadel’. However, the cannon-fire from the Red Army’s tanks, dug hull deep into the ground, smashed into the Panthers, Tigers and Ferdinands as they advanced, and made the Germans break off the crucial offensive after a week in which they lost 2,500 tanks. The failure of Citadel meant that Hitler’s Russian front was untenable. By the end of 1943 it had been driven back nearly 250 miles, the Russians recapturing such keypoints as Smolensk, Bryansk, Kiev and Kharkov, isolating German and Romanian troops in the Crimea. During the winter of 1943-4 the Red Army at last relieved Leningrad, besides regaining Odessa and the Crimea.
Like the Emperor, the Führer had other fronts, minor no doubt but none the less costly. The most important of these was the Battle of the Atlantic (for which there is no Napoleonic equivalent), a sustained and very nearly successful attempt by German submarines to starve Britain into submission by preventing supplies from reaching her. While the Führer had no control over the actual fighting, he was able to dictate strategy, emphasizing in Führer Directive No. 23 of February 1941 that sinking merchantmen was more important than attacking enemy warships, and the continuous use of minefields just as effective as torpedoing – ‘By reducing the available enemy tonnage not only will the blockade, which is decisive to the war, be intensified, but enemy operations in Europe or Africa will be impeded.’ The British were unable to master the U-boat menace until the spring of 1943 and then only with American help.
On land the Italians presented Hitler with two more fronts, first by involving him in North Africa and then Italy himself – changing sides when the Allies invaded their country. A Führer Directive of January 1941 decreed that Germany must go to the aid of the Italians ‘for reasons strategic, political and psychological’, Lieutenant-General Erwin Rommel arriving in Libya the following month with a detachment of what was later to be known as the ‘Afrika Korps’. He went into action the day he landed. Although outnumbered and always with far fewer tanks (sometimes camouflaged Volkswagens took their place), his combined German and Italian force routed the British time and again, driving them out of Libya. In June 1942 he captured the stronghold of Tobruk, whose importance was as much psychological as strategic, and Hitler promoted him to Field Marshal. He prepared to invade Egypt, his ultimate objective being the Suez Canal. The Abwehr (or German counter-intelligence) was full of ingenious schemes, such as enlisting the Touareg tribes of the Sahara to fight against the British.
However, the Führer was not prepared – or could not afford – to let North Africa become a major front. He promised to send large reinforcements, but these never arrived. Had they come, in Rommel’s opinion, ‘We would have been strong enough to destroy the British in Egypt in the spring of 1942, and could have advanced into Iraq and cut the Russians off from Basra.’ Nor would the Führer, despite Jodl’s warnings, go to the expense of capturing Malta, so that British submarines stationed there were able to ensure the Afrika Korps was starved of supplies. Any hope of taking Egypt and the Suez Canal ended at El Alamein in the autumn of 1942 when Montgomery employed his enormous superiority in men, armour and aircraft to block, decimate and then pursue the Germans.
Unquestionably there was something of the Napoleonic marshal about Erwin Rommel, a resemblance which was not confined to his gifts as a soldier. The Führer’s impact on him was very similar to that of the Emperor on many of his own commanders – especially those of humble origin like the Desert Fox. In all too many newsreels he can be seen fawning on Hitler, an impression confirmed by the diaries of Britain’s ‘favourite German soldier of World War II’. (Americans do not seem to have one.) Thanks to Dr Goebbels, who considered him ‘an exemplary character’, after taking Tobruk Rommel became a household name throughout Germany. The Führer approved highly of this hero-worship of a Nazi paladin. Napoleon would never have allowed such a thing, since he was invariably jealous of his commanders.
Rommel’s success persuaded Hitler that North Africa could be held, an illusion strengthened by the rout of the Americans at the Kasserine Pass in February 1943, after the Anglo-American invasion of Tunisia. Rommel left Africa in March on sick leave but could not have averted the defeat and surrender of the Afrika Korps in May. The Führer had lost 240,000 veterans who might have been of the utmost value to him elsewhere.
The invasion of Italy by the British and Americans during the second half of 1943 resulted in the removal of Mussolini by King Victor Emmanuel and the Fascist Grand Council. The coup shows the shrewdness of both Napoleon and Hitler in refusing to bring back monarchies which might dismiss them. Although the Italians had gone over to the other side, the skill of Field Marshal Kesselring – a far greater commander than Rommel, in some ways a twentieth-century German Wellington – in exploiting the Italian terrain, barred by mountain ridges and rivers, building the lines of Torres Vedras over and over again, long deprived the Allies of Italy.
The importance of the Balkans to the Führer is much too easily forgotten. He was always fearful that the Allies might launch an attack there, to take the pressure off the Russians, once they had overcome the Afrika Korps. Indeed, Winston Churchill had wanted the invasion of the ‘soft underbelly of Europe’ to take place in Yugoslavia rather than in Italy. Yugoslav partisans had been fighting the Germans since 1941, holding down numerous divisions. Admittedly, the occupation had the support of the Croats and the Ustaša fascists, together with that of many officers of the old Austro-Hungarian army who were only too ready to avenge themselves on the Serbs for the humiliations of 1918 – it could also rely on the Royal Bulgarian Air Force and the Albanian SS Skanderbeg Division. But the wild mountains and dense forests were ideal for guerrilla warfare, even crack Alpine troops finding it impossible to dislodge the partisans. Hitler dared not withdraw from territory so near Italy and the Romanian oilfields. As in Russia, he recognized that partisans could be as dangerous as regular troops.
Hungary was another potential Achilles heel. The Magyar nobles who ruled it had little natural sympathy for Herr Hitler, even if they were still more antipathetic to Bolshevism. The Führer disliked and distrusted them instinctively, resenting the courtly, old-fashioned German in which the Regent Admiral Horthy wrote to him. He cannot have forgotten how in 1941 Horthy’s prime minister, Count Teleki, had shot himself in protest when his country was forced to join in the invasion of Yugoslavia. Hitler, moreover, was almost as uneasy about the Carpathian mountains, absolute control of which was essential for any successful defence of the Balkans. In the spring of 1944 he occupied the entire country.
In the later stages of their careers Napoleon and the Führer over-extended their troops on a truly massive scale, at a time when they were about to need every man they could muster. Perhaps inevitably, each man had entered upon an irrational and impossible grand strategy. Otherwise they might well have succeeded. Years of conflict had bled them white, sapping their armies’ spirit, while each had grown too overweeningly arrogant, too far removed from reality, to function properly. They were now without flexibility, political or diplomatic.
Hitler became so stretched between Africa and Russia that these two original points of aim turned into the horns of a dilemma, and the strain precipitated his collapse in a way very similar to Napoleon’s.
Sir Basil Liddell Hart, Strategy
Clausewitz would have approved the efforts of Hitler in the early years to use his armed forces as instruments of policy, but would have noted how the unlimited nature of his objectives made the war a total one far beyond his capacity to wage.
Sir Michael Howard, ‘The Influence of Clausewitz’