Meanwhile, the vice around Hitler’s Reich was tightening. Between June and September the Wehrmacht lost on all fronts well over a million men killed, captured, or missing. The losses of tanks, guns, planes, and other armaments were incalculable.151 The war in the air was by now almost wholly one-sided. Fuel shortages left many German fighters unable to take to the air as the British and American bomber armadas wreaked havoc on German towns and cities with impunity by day as well as by night. The war at sea had also by this time been definitively lost by Germany. The U-boat fleet had never recovered from its losses in the second half of 1943, while Allied convoys could now cross the Atlantic almost unmolested. In the second half of 1944, only twelve ships, with a tonnage of 55,290 tons, were sunk in the northern Atlantic (with no losses at all in October). Another sixty-five ships — a tiny fraction of the overall Allied shipping crossing the seas — fell victim to German submarines off the shores of Britain. In all, 138 U-boats were lost over the same period.152 In the meantime, the territories of the Nazi empire were shrinking markedly by the end of the summer following the advances of the Allies on both western and eastern fronts since June.
On the western front, Germany’s military commanders had by then long viewed the continuation of the war as pointless. On replacing Rundstedt in early July, the weak and impressionable Kluge was easily persuaded by Hitler that the western commanders, especially Rommel, had been far too pessimistic in their judgement of the situation. After a two-day visit to the front, however, Kluge had been forced to admit that Rommel was right. In his letter to Hitler of 15 July, Rommel had explicitly stated that, heroically though the troops were fighting, ‘the unequal struggle is heading for its end’. He felt, therefore, compelled to ask Hitler, he wrote, ‘to draw the consequences from this position without delay’.153 He let the leaders of the conspiracy against Hitler know that he would be prepared to join them if the demands for an end to the war were dismissed. Germany’s most renowned field-marshal was never put to the test. Three days before Stauffenberg’s bomb exploded, Rommel was seriously injured when his car skidded from the road after being strafed by an enemy aircraft.154
Five days after the assassination attempt on Hitler, ‘Operation Cobra’, the Allied attack southwards towards Avranches, began with a ferocious ‘carpet-bombing’ assault by over 2,000 aircraft, dropping 47,000 tons of bombs on an already weakened German panzer division in an area of only six or so square miles. It ended on 30 July with the taking of Avranches and the opening not only of the route to the Brittany coastal ports, but also to the exposed German flank towards the east, and to the heart of France.155
The significance of the loss of Avranches was still not fully appreciated when Hitler provided Jodl with his overview of the entire military situation on the evening of 31 July. Hitler was far from unrealistic in his assessment. He was well aware of how threatening the position was on all fronts, and how impossible it was in the current circumstances to combat the overwhelming Allied superiority in men and materials, above all in air-power. His main hope was to buy time. Weapon technology, more planes, and an eventual split in the Alliance would open up new opportunities.156 He had to get some breathing-space in the west, he told his Luftwaffe adjutant, Nicolaus von Below, shortly after his briefing with Jodl. Then, with new panzer divisions and fighter formations, he could launch a major offensive on the western front. In common with many observers, Below had thought it more important to concentrate all forces against the Red Army in the east. Hitler replied that he could attack the Russians at a later point. But this could not be done with the Americans already in the Reich. (He led Below to believe at the same time that he feared the power of the Jews in the USA more than the power of the Bolsheviks.157) His strategy was, therefore, to gain time, inflict a major blow on the western Allies, hope for a split in the Alliance, and turn on the Russians from a new position of strength.
