TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/090489/09048900.010

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PART 4--What If . . .?

Some sharp but unanswerable questions about the outcome

     By  OTTO FRIEDRICH

    Defenseless under the night
    Our world in stupor lies;
    Yet, dotted everywhere,
    Ironic points of light
    Flash out . . .

    SEPTEMBER 1, 1939, by W.H. AUDEN

    We know, of course, how this great story finally ended. That
is told in a series of place names that have become part of the
language: Bataan, Midway, Guadalcanal, Stalingrad, El Alamein,
Anzio, Omaha Beach, Bastogne, Iwo Jima, Okinawa, Hiroshima. In
retrospect, it all seems to have a kind of inevitability, and yet
there lingers over each battlefield a faint question. What if rains
in Poland had mired the German tanks in mud? What if the French
army had then attacked? What if . . .?

    The most obvious speculations about Hitler focus on what would
have happened if he had met more resistance, from the beginning.
While Hitler's will to power seemed almost demoniac in its
ferocity, that was partly because he encountered such feeble
opposition. Starting in Germany, if the democratic forces had
united against him, he would never have come to power. If even just
the conservatives had opposed him, he could not have become
Chancellor. And if the French had resisted his reoccupation of the
Rhineland, his regime would have collapsed.

    Chief of Staff Halder testified after the war that the German
generals were ready to overthrow the dictator if the Czechoslovak
crisis of 1938 led to actual fighting. But when the British and
French caved in at Munich, so did the German generals. Assassins,
too, narrowly failed on several occasions. In November 1939, for
instance, Hitler made a speech in Munich, then left ahead of
schedule -- just 13 minutes before a time bomb went off and killed
several bystanders.

    After the war started, even Hitler was surprised at the
suddenness of his success. Yet many of his seemingly invincible
tanks were very lightly armored and carried no offensive weapons
heavier than machine guns. More important, the German war machine
depended heavily on imported supplies: Swedish steel, Rumanian oil,
South African chromium. The blitzkrieg was in part a response to
the fact that a Germany blockaded by Britain did not then have the
resources to wage war for more than six months. In addition to his
natural gall and guile, though, Hitler had one attribute
indispensable to a commander: luck.

    At least as important and interesting as the question of what
might have stopped Hitler early on is the question of whether he
might have emerged victorious. First, by not going to war at all.
If, instead of invading Poland, he had limited himself to threats
and bullying, he might have achieved his main demands, control of
Danzig and freedom of movement through the Polish Corridor. It is
possible, of course, that the whole dynamic of Nazism required war,
but if Hitler had been able to stop short of that, he would
probably have been widely regarded as the man who undid the defeat
of 1918, rebuilt and restored the nation.

    Once he had started the war and quickly conquered Poland, most
of Scandinavia, the Low Countries and France, Hitler confronted his
next great choice: whether to invade England, his last belligerent
enemy. It is now known that he seriously planned an invasion in the
summer of 1940. And in outlining the future, the German army issued
orders that all able-bodied British males between the ages of 17
and 45 were to be interned and shipped to the Continent. The list
of people to be arrested by the Gestapo ranged from Bertrand
Russell to Chaim Weizmann to Virginia Woolf.

    But could the Germans really have conquered Britain? "The
massacre would have been on both sides grim and great," Churchill
later said. "They would have used terror, and we were prepared to
go to all lengths." There is some evidence that Churchill would
have even resorted to using poison gas. A number of military
historians nonetheless believe that an invasion would have
succeeded. "There is an excellent chance that the Germans would
have prevailed," says Russell Weigley, Distinguished University
Professor at Temple and author of Eisenhower's Lieutenants. "If
Hitler had invaded, there is no doubt he would have wiped the floor
with us," says Sir Michael Howard, Regius Professor of Modern
History at Oxford and author of The Causes of Wars. "He would have
overrun the country."

    The major dissenters were the German commanders who feared
British naval and aerial supremacy, and that was why Hitler called
off the invasion. But the Germans thought Britain was virtually
defeated whether Hitler invaded or not, and a number of historians
agree. "Even if he didn't invade us, he could have put resources
into the war at sea . . . and starved us out," says Howard.
"There's very little chance that we would have been able to
survive." The strategist B.H. Liddell Hart, in History of the
Second World War, applied the term "slow suicide" to Churchill's
policy of fighting on. "By refusing to consider any peace offer,"
he wrote, "the British government had committed the country to a
course that . . . was bound, logically, to lead through growing
exhaustion to eventual collapse -- even if Hitler abstained from
attempting its quick conquest by invasion."

    But suppose Hitler, who often expressed admiration for the
English, had not tried to conquer Britain? What if he had simply
kept offering some kind of peace terms that would have preserved
the independence of Britain and its empire while leaving Germany
in control of Europe? It is hard to see how Britain could have gone
on waging war indefinitely without any allies. And though Churchill
had vowed to fight on the beaches, there were always others who
might have been more "reasonable." One such figure was the
self-exiled Duke of Windsor, who had taken refuge in Spain after
the fall of France. He made it clear that he opposed the war, and
the Germans tried through intermediaries to recruit him as a
mediator in peace talks, even suggesting that he might thus be
restored to his throne. Both he and the British government later
declared that these discussions were without significance.

    Hitler's greatest mistake of all, historians generally agree,
was his decision to turn away from Britain and invade Soviet
Russia. That ultimately disastrous error was based on a gross
underestimation of the Soviet Union's strength and its people's
willingness to fight stubbornly for their homeland. But here too
Hitler came very close to winning. Once he had decided to invade,
he made two major blunders. The first was to delay the attack by
one crucial summer month for the unnecessary foray into Yugoslavia
and Greece. The second was to postpone and weaken the drive on
Moscow for the sake of capturing the mines and industries of the
Ukraine. General Guderian, who was leading the tank spearhead
toward Moscow, pleaded for an all-out offensive, but Hitler jeered,
"My generals know nothing about the economic aspects of war."

    Yet even then, when the Soviets stopped the Wehrmacht just
outside Moscow, Hitler still controlled vast territories in the
western U.S.S.R. What if he had negotiated a settlement that let
him keep his gains? He had predicted such a possibility in the
fall: "The recognition that neither force is capable of
annihilating the other will lead to a compromise peace." Stalin
actually began sending out peace feelers as early as October 1941,
and, according to Liddell Hart, Foreign Ministers Molotov and
Ribbentrop finally met secretly in 1943 to seek a settlement. But
the Germans wanted a new boundary on the Dnieper River, which would
have given them more than 130,000 sq. mi. of Mother Russia, while
the Soviets, having withstood the Nazis' deepest penetration and
inflicted some 300,000 casualties at Stalingrad, insisted on the
prewar frontiers.

    The key question in any such speculation about a partial or
complete Hitler victory is whether peace would have brought any
kind of stability. Could Hitler have established a continental
network of satellite states under German domination, like that in
Vichy France? And could such a network of satellites have lasted
as long as the one created by Stalin after the war? It was partly
wartime hysteria that led to the savagery of Nazi rule in the
occupied lands, not only against the Jews but also against the
Slavs, some of whom had originally welcomed the Wehrmacht for
liberating them from Stalin. Once some kind of peace was
re-established, in other words, could the Nazis have moderated
their rule enough to make it tolerable, or did Hitler's psychotic
drives constantly impel him toward new battles, toward the
Holocaust, toward his death in the ruins of his nation?

    That suicidal impulse may have been what inspired his last
major political error, declaring war on the U.S. after the Japanese
attack on Pearl Harbor. There was no treaty with the Japanese that
required him to do so, and Hitler never saw a treaty he couldn't
break. It is quite likely that the U.S. would have eventually
joined the European war anyway, but it is also possible that if
Hitler had professed neutrality, the U.S. war effort would have
been turned against Japan. And if Hitler had succeeded in
establishing some kind of peace with Britain and the Soviets, that
peace might have survived Pearl Harbor.

    One other great lapse in judgment occurred in the field of
technology. The man who had mesmerized Europe with his panzers and
dive bombers talked increasingly, in the later days of the war,
about the secret weapons that would save his lost cause. Those
weapons turned out to be the missiles that subjected London to a
second blitz. But he passed up the chance to develop the jet plane,
which German aircraft makers had already test-flown in 1939. And
while U.S. scientists feverishly began work on the atom bomb out
of fear that their German counterparts were doing the same, Hitler
apparently ignored that possibility as well.

    Armaments Minister Albert Speer had explored creating a nuclear
weapon with the eminent physicist Werner Heisenberg. Speer later
told American correspondent James P. O'Donnell that he had asked
Heisenberg in 1942, "If I make available to you the entire
resources of the Reich, how long would it take to build an atom
bomb?" Heisenberg said it could not be done before 1946. Figuring
that "if we don't win the war by 1943, forget it," as Speer told
O'Donnell, he gave Hitler a bleak assessment, and that was that.
But what if some German scientist had alerted Hitler -- as the
refugee Albert Einstein alerted an equally indifferent President
Roosevelt in 1939 -- to the destructive powers inside the atom? As
with so many other possibilities that never happened, this is one
about which the world can count its blessings.