happened, but they were both at least possible, perhaps probable. By 1942 it was almost
certainly too late for Germany. The window of opportunity had already closed, even as
the Sixth Army slowly moved up to the Volga at Stalingrad. By that time, the Wehrmacht
had suffered too many losses in the Battle of Moscow, and the Red Army was recovering
rapidly from the disasters, and successes, of 1941 and early 1942, and learning how best
to fight the invader.
Germany could not win a long war of attrition against the fully mobilized economies
of the Soviet Union, the United States and Britain. It could win only either if the Grand
Alliance made a fatal operational mistake or two or if it could devise or exploit an
operational opportunity to achieve a rapid, decisive victory. Britain and then the United
States were operationally effectively unreachable until they committed themselves on the
Continent with D-Day in June 1944. So that left the Soviet Union, always Germany’s
most important, as well as most accessible, enemy. To win the war, Hitler had to destroy
the Soviet Union while that outcome was still a practicable goal, assuming that it ever
was, albeit briefly.
Because of Germany’s failure to concentrate its limited, though still massive, combat
power upon potentially strategically decisive objectives – Moscow in 1941; the oilfields
of the Caucasus in 1942 – it forfeited its short-lived chance of victory in the war. But it
is just possible that had Germany won the smashing trial of strength it intended at Kursk
as late as July 1943, the operational victory could have had far-reaching strategic conse-
quences. If the Red Army had been badly beaten, though still in the field, the Western
Allies could not have launched their invasion of France. One can speculate that a timely
concentration of military effort, in the form of the panzer reserve divisions, against the
initially tenuous Allied beachhead in Normandy might have defeated the invasion. Such
a success should have had the strategic consequence, at the very least, of buying time
for Germany. With the Western Front secure for a while, Hitler would have been able to
shift resources to the East, possibly enforce a stalemate there, and secure an armistice.
Alternatively, the Red Army might have been strong enough in mid-1944 to defeat
Germany in the absence of the Allied diversion of German forces in the West.
This third approach to Germany’s defeat favours the systemically contingent view
that Hitler made a series of great mistakes. There is a danger of tautology. Unless one
subscribes to the extreme and implausible belief that Germany could not have won,
irrespective of how its statecraft and war-making were conducted, one is in danger of
simply stating an obvious and logically necessary truth: specifically, an improbably error-
free performance by Hitler as warlord would, or should, have delivered victory for the
Thousand Year Reich-to-be. On close examination, however, it becomes apparent that
most, if not all, of Hitler’s alleged mistakes were in fact nothing of the kind. At least, they
were not errors from his perspective. It makes little sense to measure Hitler’s strategic
prowess, or lack thereof, against some absolute standard of strategic excellence. Hitler,
and hence the German conduct of war, was moved by a cultural dynamic, an ideology,
not by a cool strategic calculation indifferent to political ideas and values.
It is commonplace to believe that the Grand Alliance won World War II on Hitler’s
mistakes. In one sense there is some truth in this: strategic and operational errors in 1941,
and possibly in 1942 and 1943, mighthave cost Germany the war. However, there is a
major problem with the usual lists of ‘Hitler’s mistakes’ (Lewin, 1984; Macksey, 1987,
1994): the alleged mistakes all flowed naturally from Hitler’s ideology and, hence, from
World War II in Europe, II 151