Free To Lose a Battle by Alistair Horne Page A

speed.

Chapter 3
    Fortune Changes Sides
    Before the year was out it seemed as if Fortune, recognising her masters, was changing sides.
    WINSTON S. CHURCHILL , A History of the English-Speaking Peoples , Vol. iii (on the coming of Pitt)
    There are only two powers in the world… the sword and the spirit. In the long run, the sword is always defeated by the spirit.
    NAPOLEON
    Sunday, 17 March 1935 was Heroes’ Remembrance Day in Germany. At a ceremony in Berlin’s State Opera House, Hitler presided, flanked on the right by the veteran August von Mackensen, Germany’s last surviving Field-Marshal, and on the left by Crown Prince Wilhelm, the heir to the deposed Kaiser and one-time commander of the army attacking Verdun. The whole of the stalls was a sea of military uniforms; to William Shirer, it was ‘a scene which Germany had not seen since 1914’. Far from being one of sober commemoration of the Great War dead, the atmosphere was charged with jubilation and thanksgiving. Amid powerful acclaim, Blomberg declared: ‘The world has been made to realize that Germany did not die of its defeat…’ It was a fact; for the previous day Hitler, in full defiance of Versailles, had announced to the world his intention to rearm, and to do so by introducing conscription.
    Hitler Rearms
    The sequence of events which led to the nightmarish rise of the Third Reich lies still too close to us for anything new to be added here – even if it belonged to this story. But, having sketched in the decline of the French Army up to the Rhineland crisis of 1936, one needs to examine briefly the aweinspiring process by which Hitler, within the following fouryears, was to create a force not only crushingly superior to the combined might of France and Britain, but indeed the most dazzling instrument of war the world had yet seen. By the end of his first year in power Hitler had already secretly ordered the Army to treble its statutory strength of 100,000 men, imposed by Versailles, before October 1934. During that year the defence budget was drastically raised from 172 million Reichsmarks to 654 million. Then, on 10 March 1935, Hitler deliberately leaked to the British Press, as a ballon d’essai , the news that he already possessed an air force in the shape of the infant Luftwaffe.
    His pretext was that France had just ‘expanded’ her own Army by retaining a class of conscripts (which had been done, in fact, simply to mitigate the consequences of the ‘hollow classes’). No more than a blast of protest was registered by either France or Britain, so, on 16 March, Hitler went ahead and published his brief decree announcing the creation of a new German Army, based on compulsory military service. In peace-time alone, the number of its divisions would comprise the imposing total of thirty-six. This was many more than was wanted by even the grateful generals congregated in the State Opera the next day; they realized the mountainous difficulties that digesting this huge expansion would present to the small regular cadres. In fact, as has already been seen, by the time of the reoccupation of the Rhineland the new Wehrmacht was still a relatively feeble, small and lightly armed force; as yet no more than 5 per cent of Germany’s national product was being spent on rearmament. But then, as later, what Hitler lacked in actual hardware he made up for by the loudness and terrorizing effect of his boasting. After 1936, there followed the ‘quiet’ two years of semi-respectability, the years of no territorial adventures, during which the expanding Wehrmacht assumed its definitive shape. By the beginning of 1937, its Army divisions numbered thirty-nine; by 1939, fifty-one. 1 By 1939 it had also added to its potential the manpower of both Austria and the Sudeten Germans.
    Seeckt’s Bequest
    When Hitler began the task of rearming Germany, daunting though it was, he was presented with a number of advantages denied to the French. First, as the vanquished