How Hitler Was Defeated

“BEHOLD,” cried Job long ago, “my desire is that mine adversary had written a book!” Modern psychoanalysts agree with Job. Be his subject never so impersonal, a man cannot write a book without revealing a great deal about himself. And when he has written a book in which he consciously tries to set forth his outlook on life, he has put into the hands of his adversary an invaluable weapon—if only the adversary knows how to use it. It is an extraordinary coincidence that, at almost the same time, two men neither of whom could foresee that within a decade and a half he would be at death grips with the other, should have sat down to expound a scheme of grand strategy for the conduct of diplomacy and the waging of war. Never before has it happened that each of two great leaders has given his foeman a like opportunity to fathom the deepest recesses of his mind. We may be sure that the book that Winston Churchill studies most assiduously is Hitler’s Mein Kampf. And we may be equally sure that the book that Hitler pores over most feverishly is Churchill’s The World Crisis. If there is one thing in his life that Hitler must bitterly regret, it is that he ever unlocked the secrets of his soul for a Churchill to scrutinize them: Mein Kampf is the deadliest weapon in Churchill’s armory. And if there is one thing that Churchill must bitterly regret, it is that he ever laid bare the secrets of his strategy for a Hitler to profit by them: The World Crisis is the most formidable weapon in Hitler’s armory.

Every general knows that the worst thing that can happen to him is to be taken by surprise. An astute commander’s chief preoccupation is to find out in advance what the enemy is planning to do. Every conceivable device is resorted to to obtain the desired information—reconnaissance, espionage, the interrogation of prisoners, the bribing of traitors. If external information in one form or another is lacking, he tries to put himself in his adversary’s place. He seeks to anticipate what the opposing general—given his level of intelligence and his psychological make-up—will do in a given set of circumstances. Stated thus baldly, the art of putting oneself in another’s place seems a very easy one to practice. Actually it is one of the most difficult arts in the world. Very few generals ever master it. When an ordinary grade C general—let us call him General C—tries to apply this method to solving the intentions of his opposite number, General Q, he invariably falls victim to his own wishful thinking. He has hopes, and his hopes lead him to impute to General Q just those moves, or those failures to move, which will most redound to General C’s advantage. In practice, unless General Q happens to be a fool, General C is perpetually baffled by General Q’s stubborn refusal to conform to his wishful thinking.

A general of a somewhat higher order of intelligence—let us call him General B—will banish wishful thinking from his calculations. But there will still be a flaw in his analysis. He will see the situation clearly, but the course of action he will impute to General Q will be unconsciously based on the assumption that General Q is a man of the same mold as himself, and that he will decide just as General B would decide. If General Q is cleverer than General B—or even if he is stupider—he may make some unexpected move that throws General B off his balance and puts him to rout.

The leader of genius—whom we shall call General A—is not content with merely putting himself in General Q’s place: he projects himself into his mind, disjoins himself from his own brain and temporarily powers his faculties with Q’s brain. This gift of seeing a situation as one’s enemy sees it is extremely rare: it calls for deep psychological insight, imaginative fecundity of a high order, and a strong dose of that intangible something we call intuition.

Both Churchill and Hitler, however they may differ in temperament and in the moral climate they inhabit, possess that high order of intelligence which we have imputed to General A. From the moment Hitler came into power in 1933, he marched from one diplomatic victory to another, from one military victory to another, through his seemingly uncanny faculty of reading the minds of the mediocre politicians and generals who faced him. Not until he ran up against Churchill did he confront a foeman worthy of his steel. Churchill again and again has predicted Hitler’s next move, and again and again the prediction has been verified by the event. At the beginning Churchill’s predictions were scoffed at by those who had not read Mein Kampf, or read it with no more understanding than General C would have brought to it. Years before the outbreak of war, Churchill charged that Hitler was secretly engaged in building up a gigantic army and air force. Mr. Baldwin, the then British Prime Minister, pooh-poohed the notion: he pleaded that he had no information that would bear out such a portentous allegation. Churchill’s imaginative ability to project himself into Hitler’s mind, and to deduce what a man of Hitler’s intelligence, temperament and ambitions would do with the tremendous power at his disposal, led him to conclusions far more accurate than those arrived at by a pedestrian politician with all the resources of the British Intelligence Service at his fingertips.

An excerpt from, “Revealed: How archaeologists are shedding new light on how Hitler was defeated” By David Keys, The Independent, March 31, 2023:

A British archaeological investigation is revealing the true story of one of the Second World War’s most important battles.

Known as Operation Cobra, the crucial yet little-researched series of engagements took place in late July 1944 (just 51 days after the Normandy landings) – and was arguably the most successful allied western European military land operation of the entire war.

. . .However, the crucial development that really ensured that the Germans were routed actually took place at a Nazi HQ a thousand miles to the east – namely the failure of a German military plan to kill Hitler, install a new government and try to negotiate a ceasefire (with the Western allies) and an orderly withdrawal from France.

Instead, the failure of that German anti-Nazi military coup (which had been scheduled for 20 July 1944) made it virtually impossible for the top German commander in France (who had been cognisant of and sympathetic to the coup plan) to disobey Hitler’s order not to even stage a tactical retreat.

Through detailed fieldwork, the archaeologists, investigating the German collapse in Normandy, are discovering evidence of previously unknown allied ambushes and other key military engagements – and, by mapping individual finds, the investigators hope to reconstruct how this crucial battle unfolded.

. . .“These new excavations will for the very first time allow historians to more fully understand the details of how the German collapse in Normandy unfolded,” said a leading expert on Cobra, James Holland, author of the most recent study on the subject, Normandy ’44: D-Day and the Battle for France.

An excerpt from, “Richard G. McKee: A Forgotten U.S. Army Officer of World War II” (PDF) By Stephen A. Bourque:

One disheartening aspect of World War II’s historiography is how little we know about most of the U.S. Army’s senior commanders and staff officers. Other than the famed general officers that captured the attention of journalists and historians, such as Omar N. Bradley and George S. Patton, most commanders of corps, divisions, regiments, and battalions merit little more than a sentence or two in most of the period’s military histories. Unless they went on later in their careers to positions of prominence—Creighton Abrams and Maxwell Taylor immediately come to mind—they are all but unknown to most of the American public.

The absence of recognition for senior staff officers, those who implemented the commanders’ plans, is even more pronounced. With the singular exception of Walter Bedell Smith, General Dwight D. Eisenhower’s chief of staff, most are unknown to the average military historian. For many reasons, these talented, brave colonels and lieutenant colonels, who led soldiers into battle as commanders and wrestled with issues of ammunition, fuel, intelligence, and troop morale as staff officers, have disappeared into the depths of historical memory.

Richard G. McKee is one officer who fits this pattern. Always supporting his famous commanders, including Courtney Hodges, J. Lawton Collins, and Raymond O. Barton, McKee typifies most U.S. Army colonels who served throughout the war in essential positions as trainers, staff officers, and regimental commanders. 

McKee was always in the background of major events but seldom made it into the history books. The likeliest reason for this was the result of personal friction between Collins and him while McKee served as the VII Corps chief of staff under Collins. After the war, Collins mentioned his chief only once in his autobiography, Lightning Joe. In his 1972 interview with officers from the Army War College, Collins indicated that his chief of staff, who he had inherited from the previous commander (which he did not), and does not mention his name, was “not quite good enough.” This is an interesting statement about someone who had successfully overseen some of the most intense corps-level operations the Army had ever conducted. Neither of the official histories of the assault on Utah Beach, the capture of Cherbourg, and the breakout at St. Lô mentions him. None of the standard accounts of the D-Day invasion name him either, including Joseph Balkoski’s one-volume study of Utah Beach. How was it possible that history had hidden Collins’s principal staff officer who, frankly, made the VII Corps commander look good in the late spring and summer of 1944? Surprisingly, the standard official repositories of Army records, the U.S. Army Center for Military History and U.S. Army Heritage and Education Center, have little material. 

Wikipedia – Operation Cobra:

On 18 July, the British VIII and I Corps—to the east of Caen—launched Operation Goodwood. The offensive began with the largest air bombardment in support of ground forces yet, with more than 1,000 aircraft dropping 6,000 short tons (5,400 t) of high explosive and fragmentation bombs from low altitude. German positions to the east of Caen were shelled by 400 artillery pieces and many villages were reduced to rubble but German artillery further to the south, on the Bourguébus Ridge, was outside the range of the British artillery and the defenders of Cagny and Émiéville were largely unscathed by the bombardment. This contributed to the losses suffered by Second Army, which sustained over 4,800 casualties. Principally an armored offensive, between 250 and 400 British tanks were put out of action, although recent examination suggests that only 140 were completely destroyed with an additional 174 damaged. The operation remains the largest tank battle ever fought by the British Army and resulted in the expansion of the Orne bridgehead and the capture of Caen on the south bank of the Orne.

Simultaneously, the II Canadian Corps on the western flank of Goodwood began Operation Atlantic to strengthen the Allied foothold along the banks of the Orne river and take Verrières Ridge to the south of Caen. Atlantic made initial gains but ran out of steam as casualties mounted. Having cost the Canadians 1,349 men and with the heavily defended ridge firmly in German hands, Atlantic was closed down on 20 July. At Montgomery’s urging, “strongly underlined in the Supreme Commander’s communications to Montgomery”, the II Canadian Corps commander, Lieutenant-General Guy Simonds, began a second offensive a few days later, codenamed Operation Spring. This had the limited but important aim of tying down German units to prevent them from being transferred to the U.S. sector, although Simonds took the opportunity to make another bid for Verrières Ridge. Again the fighting for Verrières Ridge proved extremely bloody for the Canadians, with 25 July marking the costliest day for a Canadian battalion—The Black Watch (Royal Highland Regiment) of Canada—since the Dieppe Raid of 1942. A counterstroke by two German divisions pushed the Canadians back past their start lines and Simonds had to commit reinforcements to stabilize the front. With Goodwood, the Canadian operations caused the Germans to commit most of their armor and reinforcements to the eastern sector. Operation Spring—despite its cost—had drawn the 9th SS Panzer Division away from the U.S. sector on the eve of Operation Cobra. Only two Panzer divisions with 190 tanks now faced the First Army. Seven Panzer divisions with 750 tanks were around Caen, far away from Operation Cobra as were all the heavy Tiger tank battalions and the three Nebelwerfer brigades in Normandy.