Yesterday’s battle is tomorrow’s board game. Too often the present views the past with an air of condescension. This is especially true concerning the treatment of command decisions in the Second World War.
Of course, later observers see the war from a comfortable vantage point, armed with benefits their objects of study did not enjoy: plentiful information, ample time to contemplate options, freedom from danger, and foreknowledge of results. Judging a decision is easier than making one, especially when armies and countries are at risk.
Still, leaders and commanders made a number of bumbling mistakes during the war, decisions from which their enemies benefited greatly. These blunders usually emanated from one of four factors: ego, shortsightedness, wishful thinking, or panic. These are human traits to be sure, but they often resulted in needless loss of life and destruction. Listed here are the worst strategic and tactical failures conducted between 1937 and 1945, ranked by time, resources, morale, and lives wasted. Probably none of them changed the war’s final outcome, but all significantly altered its course and duration.
1. THE ATLANTIC WALL (GERMANY’S COASTAL DEFENSES, 1942–44)
From Denmark to Spain, pressed tight against the meandering Atlantic coastline, stood the wall to Hitler’s Fortress Europe: bunkers, trenches, pillboxes, siege guns, machine-gun nests, barbed wire, thousands of antitank and antiship obstacles, and five million mines. The defensive perimeter ran more than seventeen hundred miles, equivalent to the distance from Boston to Denver. It required three years and half a million workers to erect, and it was the largest construction project ever attempted since the Great Wall of China. It was also almost completely useless.85
Poland attempted to defend its entire thousand-mile western border in 1939, only to have Germany abruptly puncture the line in a matter of hours. History repeated itself eight months later when Germany made a mockery of French border fortifications, easily going around or over supposedly impregnable defenses of the Maginot Line. Strange that the chief advocate of the Atlantic Wall, IRWIN ROMMEL, had personally taken part in these two invasions and never made the connection.
Placed in charge of the Atlantic Wall in late 1943, Rommel accelerated construction and demanded more infantry, artillery, and nearly every available tank in the western theater. His commanding officer, Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, advocated keeping forces farther back, waiting for a landing point to become known, and then smashing the invasion with a concentrated counterattack. Precedent favored von Rundstedt. When defenders employed focused counterattacks, invasions were almost always contained, as demonstrated by the Greeks against the Italians in 1940 and the Germans against the Allies at Anzio in 1943. Hitler ordered a blending of Rommel’s and Rundstedt’s strategies, allowing Rommel’s expansion plan to continue. The bastions rapidly grew, as did their insatiable appetite for resources the Third Reich could not spare.86
Judgment day came with the invasion of NORMANDY. The Allies broke through the wall at its strongest point in less than ten hours, turning the entire immobile, expensive wall into one giant relic.87
Huge coastal guns along the Atlantic Wall—expensive, inadequate, and immobile.
From 1942 to 1944, Nazi engineers used twice as much concrete to fortify the Atlantic Wall as they used to build factories, air bases, submarine pens, and oil-storage facilities combined.
2. STALIN’S STUNNED SILENCE (OPERATION BARBAROSSA, JUNE 1941)
A furious Gen. Ivan Boldin screamed into the telephone, “Cities are burning and people are dying!” The deputy commander of the Western Military District begged Moscow for orders in the first horrific hours of the German invasion. More than three million German soldiers, plus another million from supporting nationalities, were rolling eastward, demolishing airfields, towns, and divisions at will. Stationed far from the chaos, the voice on the other line responded to Boldin with cold detachment: “I am informing you…comrade Stalin has not authorized artillery fire against the Germans.”88
At the time, Stalin refused to authorize much of anything. After a few days in Moscow, hearing report after disastrous report from the front, he retired to one of his country villas outside the capital. Those close to him suspected he had suffered a nervous breakdown, as he somehow believed the largest invasion in world history was just a ruse, concocted by a rogue Nazi general—or more likely, Winston Churchill—to trick the Soviets into attacking Germany.89
A week passed before Stalin returned full-time to the Kremlin, and nearly another week went by before he addressed his people by radio, commanding them to stand firm. In those two weeks, his air force lost half its planes, most while on the ground, and his army lost nearly a million men (killed, wounded, or captured) of its five million total. The invasion had sliced deep into Stalin’s domain, two hundred miles in places, and showed no signs of slowing.
Certainly the Soviet armed forces in 1941 were not well trained or equipped. The Red Army as a whole lacked cohesion and morale and had undergone a devastating purge that killed or jailed nearly every senior officer during the later 1930s. But whatever potential the Soviet defenses had in June 1941 was severely and almost fatally compromised because of one man’s terrible and terrified hesitation. The lost territory would be won back, but not until three years had passed.
While Stalin brooded over conspiracy theories, his Red Army stood virtually helpless against the largest invasion in history.
Germany attacked the Soviet Union with 170 divisions. Soviet postwar history books later inflated this to 208 divisions.
3. CHIANG DROWNS HIS OWN PEOPLE (YELLOW RIVER, CHINA, JUNE 1938)
The three-thousand-mile-long Hwang Ho, or Yellow River, was also known as “China’s Sorrow.” Over the centuries, the mainland artery had burst time and time again, flooding the vast east central plains, killing thousands and occasionally millions of people. In an ongoing effort to cure the problem, the Chinese constructed stalwart dikes hundreds of miles long to nurse the staggering, murky Yellow River eastward into its namesake sea.90
In 1938, China was undergoing an altogether new sorrow. Driving south from Manchuria, armed with tanks, bombers, and artillery, Japanese Imperial forces appeared as if they could drive through to Indochina and cut China in half. To stop them, Generalissimo CHAING KAI-SHEK ordered the severing of the Yellow River dikes. None of the residents in the doomed flood plains were warned ahead of time.91
Witnesses described a storm of mud and water heading south and east. Crops, buildings, homes, roads, and wells were soon buried under a great swath of liquid earth. An estimated six million became homeless. The number of drowning victims was never determined.92
Flooding did slow the Japanese, but only temporarily. Far greater was the lasting damage rendered upon the Chinese. Along with eleven major cities and four thousand villages, precious farmland was destroyed and remained unusable for years. Widespread famine ensued, killing exponentially more than the actual flooding and earning Chiang millions of lifelong enemies.93
As a result of the flood, the Yellow River changed its course by 250 miles, the equivalent of having the Mississippi River sweep over to the Alabama-Georgia border and out through the panhandle of Florida.
4. HITLER’S SIXTH ARMY SACRIFICE (BATTLE OF STALINGRAD, NOVEMBER 1942–FEBRUARY 1943)
Soon after hearing of Rommel’s crippling defeat at SECOND EL ALAMEIN, Hitler received intelligence of an even greater crisis. Soviet forces, during a frigid and whirling blizzard in late November 1942, launched major counterattacks north and south of STALINGRAD, threatening to encircle Gen. Friedrich von Paulus and 250,000 soldiers of the Sixth Army.
Sentenced to die at Stalingrad, the German Sixth Army paid the ultimate price for its leader’s hubris.
Fixated on holding the city, Hitler adamantly refused withdrawal. Three days later the two claws of the Red Army closed forty miles west of Paulus and began to curl inward. As Soviet artillery rained down on the German, Romanian, Italian, and Hungarian troops, pockets of Russians still within the city chewed away at Hitler’s men like a cancer. Adding to the misery, temperatures fell below freezing. Immediately Paulus started to run low on ammunition, medical supplies, and food. HERMANN GÖRING assured Hitler his Luftwaffe could supply Paulus from the air. Instead, a lack of planes and landing sites, the relentless weather, and Göring’s ineptitude assured failure. The army did not receive a tenth of the supplies it needed.
Twice the Soviets offered surrender terms. Twice Hitler ordered Paulus to refuse, demanding he fight to the last man for “the salvation of the Western world.” Hitler even promoted Paulus to field marshal, knowing that never in history had a German of that rank ever been taken alive. Nonetheless, after months of cruel fighting, Paulus capitulated, and Hitler lost all of an army that could have been saved.94
The German Sixth Army started the Soviet campaign with 285,000 men. After Stalingrad, it numbered 91,000. After years of imprisonment, only 5,000 members survived to return to Germany.
5. THE UNTOUCHED OIL TANKS (PEARL HARBOR, DECEMBER 7, 1941)
In the attack on PEARL HARBOR, the Japanese lost just twenty-nine planes and five midget submarines. They destroyed seven battleships, three cruisers, three destroyers, and more than three hundred aircraft. But they missed one huge, vital target.
Opposite Battleship Row, adjacent to the submarine pens and main naval station, sat two sprawling fields of oil tanks, the sole cache of lifeblood for every Corsair and carrier in the U.S. Pacific Fleet. Every drop had to be transported from California, more than two thousand miles away. And every three-story storage tank was vulnerable to .50-caliber bullets.
Big, full, and overlooked oil tanks skirt the water’s edge at Pearl Harbor.
Technically, the oversight was not the fault of the Japanese dive bombers and fighters. Responsibility rested with the usually meticulous Adm. Yamamoto Isoroku, architect of the assault. He had simply failed to include the hillside of oil tanks in his list of primary targets.95
To what precise extent the damaged reservoirs and lost fuel might have hindered the U.S. war effort cannot be determined, but an authority on naval operations suggested the effect would have been considerable. By his estimation, Adm. CHESTER NIMITZcalculated that the loss of the PEARL HARBOR oil field “would have prolonged the war another two years.”96
Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in retaliation for something that happened on August 1, 1941. To curb Imperial aggression, President Franklin Roosevelt imposed a total oil embargo on the empire.
6. OPERATION MARKET-GARDEN (HOLLAND, SEPTEMBER 17–25, 1944)
The Allies had stalled along Germany’s western border, but Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery convinced Gen. DWIGHT EISENHOWER to try a radical solution: push north into occupied Holland, then east into the industrial heart of Germany, then on to Berlin. The plan would secure the Belgian port of Antwerp and shorten Allied supply lines by hundreds of miles, avoid Nazi fortifications in the Siegfried Line (a.k.a. the West Wall), and, if all fared well, end the war by Christmas.97
Though the premise was tempting, the specifics left much to be desired. Crossing Holland meant traversing a myriad of canals, streams, and rivers, the last being the deep and expansive Rhine. No fewer than nine bridges had to be secured behind enemy lines. To do this, Monty proposed airdropping the U.S. 101st and 82nd, the Polish 1st, and the British 1st Airborne Divisions to secure the bridges while the British Armored Thirty Corps attacked northward and covered seventy miles to link them all up.
Adding to the challenge, the Allies did not have enough planes to carry all the paratroopers at once, radio equipment was inadequate and faulty, and Thirty Corps had but one narrow road that could handle the weight of its twenty thousand vehicles. In addition, intelligence reports gave conclusive evidence of German heavy armor units deployed where the Allied attack was most vulnerable—along the Rhine.98
Soon after it started, the operation unraveled. Thirty Corps planned to make thirty-six miles on the first day. Caught in a series of firefights, it advanced only six. Radios failed. Fog rolled in and delayed supporting airdrops for days, leaving paratroopers without supplies and reinforcements. German resistance was tougher than expected around every bridgehead, especially at ARNHEM, where the 1st Polish and 1st British Airborne were nearly wiped out in less than a week. The Allies had achieved little more than moving sideways along the border of the Reich at a cost of more than ten thousand casualties. Stopped cold in Holland, the Allies would not cross the Rhine until March of the following year.99
Bird’s-eye view of Arnhem bridge. Reconnaissance photos and reports also showed the presence of German armor, but Allied planners went ahead with the attack.
The Allies lost more soldiers in Operation Market-Garden than they lost in the first week of the Normandy invasion.
7. BLITZKRIEG STRIKES TWICE (BATTLE OF THE BULGE, DECEMBER 16, 1944)
During April 1940, from Switzerland to the North Sea, French and Belgian defenses deployed to withstand a German offensive. Fortresses, batteries, men, and armor were at the ready—everywhere except directly in the middle, west of the ARDENNES. Topographically, the minimalist treatment seemed logical. Densely forested, the ARDENNES was also the only area in all the Low Countries dominated by steep hills and deep basins through which only a few narrow roads passed. To practically every observer, it seemed to be a natural barrier.100
A GI guards German prisoners near Bastogne. He was a lucky survivor in a battle that cost sixty thousand American casualties.
Adjacent to this region, France placed nine divisions, or about a tenth of its army. Through this area, in May 1940, Germany thrust forty-five divisions, taking France and much of the Western world by surprise.
By November 1944, the Allies had returned to the German border with three massive army groups. But in the middle, in the “impassible” ARDENNES, the United States had just six divisions. On December 16, 1944, twenty-five German divisions came barreling through.
The Allies responded rather brilliantly once the attack began. Eisenhower treated the battle as an opportunity, and Patton rapidly counterattacked from the south. The tenacious fight offered by frontline and reserve troops all prevented a grave mistake from turning into disaster. The price for initial indiscretion was, however, exceedingly high, especially for the Americans. Hitler’s 1944 Ardennes offensive killed more U.S. soldiers than any other battle in the war.101
The U.S. lost more men in the Battle of the Bulge than at Pearl Harbor, Midway, D-day, and Iwo Jima combined.
8. THE INVASION TEST (DIEPPE, FRANCE, AUGUST 19, 1942)
Barely hanging on against the bulk of the German army, Soviet leaders became incensed by London’s vacillation on opening a second front in Europe. American military and public opinion also clamored for action. To satisfy their allies, Churchill and company presented an offering. In the summer of 1942, ten thousand troops would land in northern France and establish a beachhead for future operations. This was later scaled down to six thousand troops to perform a brief “reconnaissance in force” at the port city of Dieppe.
In the planning phase, information on enemy strength was sketchy. Adequate landing vehicles were not available. Sheer cliffs one hundred feet high dominated the landing zones. The area would not be bombed beforehand. Dismayed, Gen. Bernard Montgomery recommended canceling the operation indefinitely. But a youthful, glory-hunting vice admiral, Louis Mountbatten, personally adopted the project. Impressing Churchill with his vigor, Mountbatten was allowed to proceed with the raid.102
Approaching the French coastline at 3:00 a.m. on August 19, 1942, the armada of eight destroyers and scores of landing vessels, shepherded by hundreds of fighter planes, lost the vital element of surprise when a German patrol convoy spotted their advance. Rushing to hit the shoreline, landing craft arrived in the wrong places at the wrong times. Previously undetected German batteries slaughtered advancing columns while Luftwaffe and infantry poured into the area. It took only six hours for the British operation to fail completely.
From an invasion force of 6,000, the losses were 3,369 killed, wounded, or captured, most of them Canadian. The Royal Navy lost an additional 550 men plus one destroyer and more than thirty smaller ships. More than one hundred RAF fighters fell from the sky. The defenders lost less than half their planes and a sixth of their men and began to redouble their defenses for the larger invasion to come.103
If anything, the tragedy of Dieppe provided an opportunity for heroics. Chaplain Maj. John Foote carried thirty wounded men to rescue ships, then swam back to be with his regiment as it entered captivity.
9. GERMANY’S GIANTS (NAZI LARGE WEAPONS PROGRAM, 1937–44)
Along with some of the most effective designs in trucks and artillery, Hitler’s arsenal also included a cast of the big and bizarre, none of which worked well, unless their purpose was to devour materials, money, and manpower.
From his experience in World War I, Hitler respected the destructive effect of artillery. Figuring bigger was better, he endorsed production of a colossal rail howitzer christened the “Gustav Gun,” or as its crews dubbed it, “Big Dora.” Weighing nearly fifteen hundred tons and measuring fifty yards in length, it could only be moved in pieces and on two parallel railroad tracks. Assembly required two more adjacent tracks for cranes. Big Dora took five hundred men to load and fire, plus nearly a division to maintain. The entire contraption, used sparingly in the capture of Sevastopol and against Warsaw, was comically inaccurate and profoundly ineffective.104
Another überhowitzer was the V-3, a cannon 170 yards long, designed to shell London from Continental Europe. Hitler ordered fifty, each to be buried within the French coastal limestone, their exposed muzzles aiming directly at the British capital. Testing was a failure. Shells fell short, the goliath barrels cracked and exploded during firing, and the complex subterranean bunkers were never fully completed. But twenty-five thousand shells were made, and thousands of technicians and artillerists worked on the project for a year before Allied bombers and demolition experts entombed the guns and bunkers under a blanket of rubble.105
Good props for shooting photos but not for much else, the Third Reich’s mammoth railroad guns never justified their consumption of resources.
Not to be outdone, the Luftwaffe failed to develop an adequate four-engine bomber program but did create a six-engine lumbering behemoth made to span the Atlantic and bomb New York, which it never did. German engineers also produced a tank that weighed 180 tons (the workhorse Sherman tank weighed a fifth as much). Slow and costly, with a fickle transmission and engines to match, the tank was too wide and heavy for nearly every road in Europe, and it served as solid proof that the leaders of the thousand-year Reich were not adept at thinking ahead.106
Among the designers working on Germany’s supertanks was a Mercedes engineer who also helped develop the Volkswagen: Ferdinand Porsche.
10. MUSSOLINI’S BALKAN EXCURSION (ITALY INVADES GREECE, OCTOBER 28, 1940)
Benito Mussolini became envious of (and definitely overshadowed by) Hitler’s lightning successes in Poland, Scandinavia, Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg, France, and Romania. In comparison, il Duce’s Continental empire began and ended with Albania. Aspiring to greater conquests, he targeted Greece, a politically fragmented country, albeit a good source of olive oil and only one-fifth the size of Italy.
Expecting an easy victory, he ordered a demobilization of nearly half his army just two weeks before the invasion. Claiming to have planned out every detail, he had obviously missed a few. Most of the troops assembled for the invasion were barely trained and very inexperienced. His estimate of Greek army strength was low—by a factor of ten. Greece’s mountainous terrain apparently was not taken into account, nor was its impending winter weather. Yet there was little opposition to the plan, mostly because Mussolini neglected to inform Hitler, his own air force, and his own navy of the operation until a few days before it was set to begin.107
Not only did the attack fail, but the Greek army also pursued Mussolini’s paltry force of seventy thousand back into Albania. Mussolini later added four hundred thousand troops to the effort with no positive effect. In the face of such blatant ineptitude, an Italian public began to turn against the dictator. The following year, an angered but sympathetic Hitler invaded Greece for Mussolini and, in doing so, may have fatally delayed the invasion of the Soviet Union.
Hours before he killed himself, Hitler reflected on the great catastrophes that plagued his reign. Among the failures he listed was Mussolini’s “useless campaign against Greece.”108