HITLER’S LACK OF POLICY

Waikato Times, Volume 126, Issue 21041, 17 February 1940, Page 11 (Supplement)

HITLER’S LACK OF POLICY

INDECISION AND VACILLATION :: PLANS IN RUINS

(Scrutator, in Sunday Times)

JF ANYONE IS INCLINED to be discouraged by what he thinks is the slow development of the naval and military issues in the war he may find comfort in seeing it through the eyes of Hitler. This is the 166th day of the war. When the Great War had lasted so long, every German, almost without exception, felt assured of victory. Hindenberg had won the sensational victory of Tannenberg over the Russians; Belgium was over-run; the German army had failed to reach Paris, but was in possession of the industrial north of France, and had narrowly missed occupying Calais. It had lost the Battle of the Marne, but apart from that its record in the war had been one of complete and often astonishing victories. It might well have seemed doubtful whether the British armies could be trained in time to prevent the threatened defeat of the Allies. We were entering on a kind of wor about which we had almost everything to learn. Contrast the situation then and the situation today. Three months ago, Hitler saw his policy in complete ruin. He was at war with Britain and France, which he had wished to avoid or at least to reserve for a later occasion, and in his desperate anxiety to avoid a war on two fronts he had patched up a hasty agreement with Russia, the terms of which were vague and had not been worked out. He must already have recognised Ribbentrop as his evil genius. He had allowed Ribbentrop’s assurances that Great Britain would never fight to persuade him until it was too late for him to draw back and he saw no way of escaping from inevitable defeat except by an agreement with Russia, which lost him the sympathy of Spain, Italy and Japan, and Tore the Heart Out of Everything that Nazism stood for in relation to Communism. He had, in fact, been converted from an Easterner into a Westerner. It is no wonder that after crushing Polish resistance he made an offer of peace which was an attempt to recover his footing on the slippery declivity down which he was falling. But, having failed to induce us to abandon the cause for which we had gone to war. Hitler was now faced with the problem which twenty-one years before had baffled the Kaiser, and which he had been firmly resolved at all costs to avoid. He seems to have been without definite plans for this new war. In making his fraudulent offer of peace he had been influenced by the hope that he would have the sympathy of neutrals whose timidity preferred any peace to any war, but his first idea of waging the war in the west merely proposed to repeat with slight variation the crime of invading Belgium which had damned Germany in the eyes of the world in 1914. There seems little room to doubt the story that Hitler had not only decided on the invasion of Holland, but had actually ordered it to begin, and that it would have taken place if the General Staff had not refused. At one time Hitler had boasted that he could carry the Maginot Lines and would do so even though it cost him a million lives. But it was an idle boast that had no support from the responsible heads of the army. That the attempt to force the Maginot Lines will never be made it‘is too early to say, but certain it is that if it ever is made it will probably be the last blunder that he will have the chance of making in the war. It may well be that a real peace with Germany will have no chance until she has suffered some great defeat; but enormous casualties incurred in an unsuccessful attempt on tne Maginot Lines would be the beginning of a revolution in Germany which might make a good peace possible. There is sufficient lack of sympathy between Hitler and the heads of the army to make them the natural leaders of such a revolution. It was this uncertainty of his relations with the army chiefs as much as any other cause that drove Hitler to make his main efforts for victory on the sea. On the sea Germany had come nearest to victory in the last war and his hope oir repeating those successes was by no means groundless. But in this war as in the last Germany found that it was not only ships flying the British flag that she had to deal with. To set up a blockade such as would affect the result of a war she must also prevent neutrals from trading with us. She increased her offence by sowing magnetic or non-contact mines in the channels that we left through minefields. Non-contact mines are not a new discovery, and the only thing that is new is the places in which they were sown and the use of aeroplanes to sow them. Nothing, indeed, is more remarkable in this war than the Lack of New Ideas in the German Practice. Throughout, it has been merely imitative of what was done in the last war, and though apparently it was of the magnetic mines that Hitler was speaking when he boasted that Germany had a weapon to which we could make no reply, we have already found a reply. The victory at Montevideo was in many respects more remarkable than Sturdee’s victory in the last war In the Battle of the Falkland Islands. That was a victory won by sheer weight of metal, but the battle of Montevideo was a victory of audacity and skilful manoeuvre. It is heartening to contrast the Nelson touch of Commodore Harwood in driving the Graf Spee into the Plate River with the mismanagement which allowed the

Goeben at the opening of the last war to escape to Constantinople—surely the worst blundering ever made by a British admiral. It brought Turkey into the war against us. The general impression left on the mind by the German conduct of the war is one of indecision and vacillation. Only in the air has German policy so far been consistent, for she has kept to her promise to bomb none but military objectives. What happened in Poland forbids us to find the reason in motives of pure humanity; for that matter motives are usually mixed. But it is satisfactory to have this evidence that as between air forces reasonably matched the bombing of open towns is regarded as worse than a crime. It is a mistake, because the military results are small Out of AH Proportion to the Risks that are taken and to the expenditure of war material. But there is no guarantee that Germany will continue to honour this promise. Perhaps it ought to be accounted as the greatest victory for the British Navy that it was mainly responsible for the agreement between Russia and Germany. The fear of the prospective British blockade, not of the armies of Russia, had inflicted on Germany before the war began the equivalent of crushing defeat. It was a panic-stricken agreement. Had Germany reflected on the conditions of transport in Russia she could hardly have given away so much and received so little. She may have promised not to oppose Russia’s essays in the technique of aggression which she herself taught her, but she can hardly have realised the uses to which Russia would put her license. Still less can she have calculated on the consequences if Russia failed in her aggression. That Finland can prevail against the enormous odds against her is indeed a forlorn hope, but forlorn hopes are not always unsuccessful. In any case, the universal condemnation of Russia’s assault on Finnish liberties is a blow for Germany as well as for Russia. If, as some believe, the war develops a hard and fast alliance between Germany and Russia the problem of Finland will diminish the value of any assistance that Russia can give. Meantime, while nothing should divert us from our main task in the war, which is the defeat of the instructor, not the copyist, it is good to think that Finland is assured of material assistance in her heroic struggle. That assistance can be given without breach of neutrality, as the United States are assisting us and still remain neutral. Can we form any general conclusions from the wav the war has gone so far ? Prophecy about war has been called a gratuitous form of error, but we can at least form some idea what developments may come in the course of events. The dominant impression that one gets from the war so far as it has yet gone is that Hitler is

Destitute Of Any Consistent Policy for winning. He has a tangential mind, taking up plans impulsively and presently dropping them in favour of other plans which negative them. Thus the man, one of whose motives for proposing peace on terms that allowed him to stop the war at the point at which he could keep his gains was to conciliate neutrals who preferred any peace to any war. is presently found carrying on the war in a way that loses him any chance of the sympathy of any neutral. The truth probably is that Hitler sees no wav of winning the war. and does not expect to do so. He is engaged in just the kind of war which it is consistently argued Germany should never wage. A man of a temperament like Hitler’s may react in such circumstances in two opposite ways. Because he knows he is unwise, but cannot bring himself to admit it, he may persist still more obstinately in what he knows to be folly. Or. on the other hand, he is capable of reverting violently back to his original ideas and making a dramatic gesture of resignation in the hope of saving his country, and incidentally himself. The course of the war so far encourages us to keep both these possibilities in mind. There are as yet no signs of decided change in the political character of the German people such as would make them revolt against Hitler’s policy. Nor is such change to be expected unless some dramatic happening in the war convinces the German people that they cannot possibly win. It is important not only that we should win some striking victory that would have that effect on their minds, but that we should win it as soon as possible; and Therein Lies a Serious Danger. Victory at sea, humanly speaking, seems assured, but on land that impatience might lead to defeat by encouraging us to incur ruinous casualties by attacks on the Siegfried Line, which would be likely to end in failure. Modern conditions of warfare give an enormous advantage to the defence, even in the air, as we are now beginning to suspect. So far from deploring the absence of decisive happening on the French front we ought rather to rejoice over it. The key to victory in this war may be in some joint operation of Army and Navy which will conceivably give us the entrance into the Baltic, or it may lie in combining judicious peace aims with energetic prosecution of the war, or, finally, on the enemy's economic front, where he is weakest.