Hitler. 1936-1945: Nemesis полностью

In the Atlantic, meanwhile, the battle was in reality lost, even if it took some months for this to become fully apparent. The resignation on 30 January 1943 as Commander-in-Chief of the Navy of Grand-Admiral Raeder, exponent of what Hitler had come to recognize as an outmoded naval strategy based upon a big surface battle fleet, and his replacement by Karl Dönitz, protagonist of the U-boat, had signalled an important shift in priorities.¹²⁸ Hitler told his Gauleiter on 7 May that the U-boat was the weapon to cut through the arteries of the enemy. This weapon was, in his view, at the very beginning of its development. He expected great things of it.¹²⁹ At the end of the month, he told Dönitz: ‘There can be no question of easing up on the U-boat war. The Atlantic is my western approach (Vorfeld), and if I have to wage a defensive there, it’s better than only being able to defend on the coast of Europe.’ He immediately agreed to Dönitz’s request to increase the construction rate of U-boats from thirty to forty a month.¹³⁰ But, in fact, that very month forty-one U-boats carrying 1,336 men had been lost in the Atlantic — the highest losses in any single month during the war — and the number of vessels in operation at any one time had already passed its peak. In the light of the losses, Dönitz ordered the U-boats away from the Atlantic convoy routes and moved them to south-west of the Azores.¹³¹ The deciphering of German codes by British intelligence, using the ‘Ultra’ decryption methods, was allowing U-boat signals to be read. It was possible to know with some precision where the U-boats were operating. The use of long-range Liberators, equipped with radar, and able to cover ‘the Atlantic Gap’ — the 600-mile stretch of the ocean from Greenland to the Azores, previously out of range of aircraft flying from both British and American shores — was a second strand of the mounting Allied success against the U-boat menace.¹³² The crucial supplies between North America and Britain, gravely imperilled over the previous two years, could flow with increasing security. Nothing could hinder the Reich’s increasing disadvantage against the material might of the western Allies.

Hitler’s greatest worry, once Tunis had fallen, was the condition of his longest-standing ally. Immediately after the fall of Tunis, the Wehrmacht High Command’s Operations Staff had outlined — probably at Hitler’s request — a scenario ‘should Italy withdraw from the war’. It posited the likelihood of the Allies forcing their way on to the European continent through the unstable and weakly defended Balkans. Hitler, in part it seems misled by a false lead given by British intelligence, which had deliberately planted disinformation on a corpse left floating off the Spanish coast,¹³³ disagreed with his own staff and with Mussolini in thinking an Allied landing would be attempted not in Sicily, but in Sardinia. Contingency plans were made to move forces from both the western and eastern fronts to the Mediterranean, and to put Rommel — now largely restored to health — in command in Italy should an Italian collapse take place.¹³⁴

By the time he heard a report on the situation in Italy in mid-May from Konstantin Alexander Freiherr von Neurath, son of the former Foreign Minister, and one-time Foreign Office liaison to Rommel’s Afrika Korps, Hitler was deeply gloomy. He thought the monarchists and aristocracy had sabotaged the war-effort in Italy from the beginning. He blamed them for preventing an Italian declaration of solidarity with Germany in 1939. If such a declaration had been forthcoming, he asserted, the British would not have hastened to sign the Guarantee for Poland, the French would not have gone along in their wake, and the war would not have broken out.¹³⁵ He thought there was no longer the will in Italy to transport troops to Sicily to defend against an Allied landing. Whatever the Duce’s personal strength of will — and Hitler continued to detach him from his savage criticism of the Italians — it was being sabotaged.¹³⁶

There was a big question mark, he thought, over Mussolini’s health — he had suffered from a stomach ulcer since September of the previous year — and his age, now approaching sixty, told against him. Hitler was sure that the reactionary forces associated with the King, Victor Emmanuel III — whose nominal powers as head of state had nevertheless still left him as the focus of a potential alternative source of loyalty — would triumph over the revolutionary forces of Fascism. A collapse had to be reckoned with.¹³⁷ Plans must be made to defend the Mediterranean without Italy.¹³⁸ How this was to be done with an offensive imminent in the east and no troops to spare, he did not say.