rise-and-fall-of-the-third-reich-william-shirer-pdf

VICTORY IN THE WEST 679planning would be very bloody . . . Therefore one must convincepublic opinion that everything had first been done to avoid thishorror . . .In his speech of October 6 [when he had offered peace to the Westat the conclusion of the Polish campaign – W.L.S.] he had likewisebeen guided by the thought of making the opposing side responsiblefor all subsequent developments. He had thereby won the war, asit were, before it had really started. Now again he intended forpsychological reasons to buttress morale, so to speak, for the actionabout to be taken. 890A week later, on July 8, Hitler confided to Ciano thathe would stage another demonstration so that in case the war shouldcontinue – which he thought was the only real possibility that cameinto question – he might achieve a psychological effect among theEnglish people . . . Perhaps it would be possible by a skillful appealto the English people to isolate the English Government still furtherin England. 891It did not prove possible. The speech of July 19 worked with the Germanpeople, but not with the British. On July 22 Lord Halifax in a broadcastmade the rejection of Hitler’s peace offer official. Though it had been expected,it somehow jolted the Wilhelmstrasse, where I found many angry faces thatafternoon. ”Lord Halifax,” the official government spokesman told us, ”hasrefused to accept the peace offer of the Fuehrer. Gentlemen, there will be war!”It was easier said than done. In truth neither Hitler, the High Command northe general staffs of the Army, Navy and Air Force had ever seriously consideredhow a war with Great Britain could be fought and won. Now in the midsummerof 1940 they did not know what to do with their glittering success; they hadno plans and scarcely any will for exploiting the greatest military victories inthe history of their soldiering nation. This is one of the great paradoxes of theThird Reich. At the very moment when Hitler stood at the zenith of his militarypower, with most of the European Continent at his feet, his victorious armiesstretched from the Pyrenees to the Arctic Circle, from the Atlantic to beyondthe Vistula, rested now and ready for further action, he had no idea how to goon and bring the war to a victorious conclusion. Nor had his generals, twelve ofwhom now bandied field marshals’ batons.There is, of course, a reason for this, although it was not clear to us at thetime. The Germans, despite their vaunted military talents, lacked any grandstrategic concept. Their horizons were limited – they had always been limited– to land warfare against the neighboring nations on the European Continent.Hitler himself had a horror of the sea ∗ and his great captains almost a totalignorance of it. They were land-minded, not sea-minded. And though theirarmies could have crushed in a week the feeble land forces of Britain if theyhad only been able to come to grips with them, even the narrow waters of theDover Straits which separated the two – so narrow that you can see across to∗ ”On land I am a hero, but on water I am a coward,” he told Rundstedt once. (Shulman,Defeat in the West, p. 50.)