Although this meant that the condition for a coup d’etat was met, the conspirators did nothing. The mere threat against the “spirit of Zossen” had sufficed to reveal their weakness and indecisiveness. “Everything is too late and gone totally awry,” one of Oster’s confidants, Colonel Groscurth, wrote in his diary. With self-betraying haste Halder burned all incriminating material and called an immediate halt to the preparations for a coup. Three days later in the Bürgerbräukeller in Munich Hitler barely escaped an attempted assassination that was obviously the work of a lone individual. Thereafter, fear of a large-scale probe by the Gestapo smothered the last remaining plans for a coup.
Moreover, chance was kind to the conspirators and saved them from their own resolutions; for on November 7 the date for the offensive had to be postponed because of weather conditions. Hitler, however, granted a postponement of only a few days. How set he was against the long-term postponement the military men demanded is evident from the fact that up to May, 1940, when the attack finally began, the process of on-again-off-again was repeated a total of twenty-nine times. During the second half of November the commanders were called to Berlin for ideological morale building. Göring and Goebbels delivered bracing speeches; then Hitler himself appeared before them on November 23, and in three speeches given within the course of seven hours tried at once to convince and to intimidate the officers.3 Looking back upon the preceding years, he charged them with lack of faith. He professed to be profoundly offended. “I cannot endure anyone’s telling me the troops are not all right.” Threateningly, he added: “A revolution at home is not possible, either with you or without you.” His determination to launch an immediate assault upon the West was irrevocable, he said, and answered the objections of several officers to the violation of Dutch and Belgian neutrality by declaring it inconsequential. (“Nobody will question it when we have won.”) Balefully he told them: “I shall shrink from nothing and destroy everyone who is against me,” and ended his speech with the following ringing words:
I am determined to lead my life in such a way that I can meet death with equanimity when my time comes. Behind me stands the German people, whose morale can only deteriorate…. If we meet the test of this struggle successfully—and we will meet it—our times will go down in the history of our people. In this struggle I shall stand or fall. I will not survive the defeat of my people. Abroad, no capitulation; at home, no revolution. The crisis among the officers in the fall of 1939 had far-reaching consequences. Insisting as he did on total commitments, Hitler henceforth distrusted not only his generals’ loyalty but also their professional advice. The peremptory way in which he himself now assumed the role of generalissimo had its origins in these events. On the other hand, the renewed evidence of the weakness and compliance of the generals, especially of the OKH (Army High Command), suited his desire to reduce the organs of military leadership to purely instrumental functions. In preparing the strike against Denmark and Norway, which was meant to assure him Swedish iron ore and win an operational base for the struggle against England, he completely excluded the OKH. Instead, he transferred the planning to a special staff within the OKW (High Command of the Armed Forces). Thus he managed to install within the military hierarchy the system of rival authorities so fundamental to his practice of government. He thought his decision brilliantly confirmed when the risky enterprise begun in April, 1940, which ran counter to all the principles of naval warfare and had been regarded by the Allied staffs as almost inconceivable, proved a total success. Thereafter he no longer met with open opposition from the generals. The full weakness of those generals had already been exposed during the autumn crisis when Halder approached State Secretary von Weizsäcker and asked whether bringing in a soothsayer might not have some influence on Hitler; he could obtain a million marks for the purpose, he said. Commander in Chief von Brauchitsch, on the other hand, gave a visitor the impression that he was “completely done for, isolated.”
At dawn on May 10, 1940, the long-awaited offensive in the West began at last. The night before, Colonel Oster, through his friend Colonel G. J. Sas, the Dutch military attaché in Berlin, had informed the other side. But when the din of artillery and the drone of bombers began in the morning, the skeptical Allied general staffs were taken completely by surprise. They had thought the warning a trap. By committing large British and French forces hastily brought up from northern France, they finally managed to check the German advance through Belgium east of Brussels. They gave no thought to the fact that their counteraction was scarcely opposed by the German air force. For this was the real trap. Walking into it had already cost them the victory.
The original German plan of campaign, a variant of the old Schliffen Plan, called for bypassing the French lines of fortifications by a massed assault through Belgium and a descent upon northwestern France. The German leadership was well aware of what was wrong with this plan: it lacked the element of surprise, so that the offensive was liable to be brought to a standstill and freeze into trench warfare even sooner than in the First World War. Moreover, it required the commitment of large tank formations in terrain cut up by many rivers and canals. All this would seem to imperil the rapid decision upon which Hitler’s whole strategy was based. But there appeared to be no alternative. Another plan presented in October, 1939, by General von Manstein, chief of staff of Army Group A, had been rejected by Brauchitsch and Halder, and ultimately Manstein had been relieved of his command. He had argued for shifting the main weight of the German advance from the right wing to the center, thus regaining the element of surprise, since it was generally held that the Ardennes would not permit extensive tank operations. The French leadership had therefore placed relatively weak forces on this sector of its front, and Manstein’s plan was founded on this fact. Once the German tanks had overcome the problems of the mountainous and wooded terrain, he argued, they could roll almost unhindered across the plains of northern France to the sea, and cut off the Allied armies that had been marched into Belgium.
What had vexed the army High Command was precisely what instantly fascinated Hitler: the bold and unexpected character of this plan. It is said that he had already been occupied with similar notions at the time he learned of Manstein’s proposal. By mid-February, 1940, therefore, after a talk with the general, he ordered a reformulation of the plan of campaign. That decision was to prove crucial.
It was by no means numerical advantage or technological superiority that made the war in the West such a breath-taking victory. The forces that confronted one another on May 10 were nearly equal in strength; in fact the Allied side had a slight edge in numbers. Besides the 137 divisions of the Western powers, there were 34 Dutch and Belgian divisions. These confronted 136 German divisions. The Allied air forces had some 2,800 planes, the German air force barely 1,000 more than that. On the Allied side approximately 3,000 tanks and armored vehicles faced 2,500 on the German side, although most of the latter were organized in special armored divisions. But the decisive factor was the remarkable German plan of operations, which Churchill aptly called the strategy of the “scythe-cut”4 and forced the opponent to a “battle with reversed fronts.”