Even that limited scenario, however, horrified his generals. Acutely aware of Germany’s economic difficulties, raw materials shortages, and military deficiencies, they had risked everything in throwing virtually all German military force against Poland. That gamble had succeeded thanks to French inaction, but the French certainly would not remain passive in the face of a direct German assault. Having witnessed first-hand in World War I the tough fighting qualities of the French soldier, virtually all German commanders agreed that Hitler’s ideas were a recipe for disaster. The army would need months of refitting and retraining before it was again ready for action, almost half of its soldiers were over the age of forty, and a desperate shortage of equipment limited its striking power. To take just one example, motor vehicles were in such short supply that Halder suggested a “demotorization program” that entailed a “drastic and ruthless restriction of motor vehicles in existing and newly activated units.” Amazingly, with the spectacular blitzkrieg success looming, the chief of staff of the German army proposed that the horse take the place of the engine. Nor could the shortages be made good quickly since the German armament and economic mobilization plans had been based on the assumption that the war in the west would be a repeat of the attrition struggle of World War I. Only in October 1940 would a significant increase in production be achieved, with maximum levels of output not projected until the autumn of 1941. Nowhere in these economic plans can one detect a clear tactical or strategic blitzkrieg concept.45
From the German perspective, the situation appeared gloomy in the extreme. One leading expert, in fact, has likened the Wehrmacht in the autumn of 1939 to a “lance whose point consisted of hard steel, but [whose] wooden shaft looked… ever more brittle.” Hitler’s generals, aware of their inferiority in both quantity and quality of weapons, numbers of soldiers, and economic preparation, were virtually unanimous in their rejection of an immediate attack in the west, which they considered tantamount to suicide. Colonel-General Walter von Reichenau, widely considered to be a “Nazi general,” called an attack in the autumn of 1939 “just about criminal,” while the head of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW), the otherwise obsequious Wilhelm Keitel, regarded the idea as so crazy that he offered his resignation. An autumn attack on France so distressed Halder that he, not for the first time, sounded out like-minded individuals about the possibility of a coup d’état. Following a stormy meeting on 5 November with Brauchitsch, the head of the OKH (Oberkommando des Heeres, or Army High Command), at which Hitler berated the defeatism of his generals and raged against the sabotage emanating from the army command, Halder panicked and had all incriminating plans destroyed. Still, the situation seemed so desperate that he toyed with the idea of assassinating the Führer. “Amid tears,” a close associate noted later in his diary, “Halder said that he had for weeks had a pistol in his pocket every time he went to Emil [the plotters’ code name for Hitler] in order possibly to gun him down.”46 In the end, however, Halder lost his nerve and could not bring himself to violate his soldier’s oath of personal loyalty.
In the event, a combination of bad weather and Hitler’s own doubts about the original plan of attack led to a postponement of the assault on France until the following spring. During the course of the long winter, the so-called Phony War, or Sitzkrieg, German plans changed substantially. Despite considerable opposition among top commanders, the audacious idea of General Erich von Manstein, chief of staff of Army Group A, to send motorized units in a surprise attack through the Ardennes in order to cut off the enemy’s main body of troops began to gain converts. First General Heinz Guderian, the leading German tank expert, and then Halder himself embraced Manstein’s plan. Since Hitler had been thinking, albeit in vague tactical terms, along similar lines, he also proved an enthusiastic supporter of the conception.
The brilliance with which Operation Sichelschnitt (Sickle Cut) unfolded in May and June 1940 has obscured several key points that accounted for its success. The decisive German victory resulted not from a premeditated strategy of blitzkrieg eagerly embraced by Wehrmacht leaders, but in spite of their doubts, hesitations, and obstructions. Indeed, the plan worked largely as a result of the calculated insubordination of the leading panzer general, Guderian, and the willingness of Halder to take enormous risks. In operational terms, Sickle Cut depended for success on the all-or-nothing gamble of concentrating all available German forces at the key Schwerpunkt (focal point of an attack) for a decisive knockout blow and counting on the enemy cooperating by doing as he should. In strategic terms, it represented the ultimate risk: the German nightmare of being strangled in a slow war of attrition would be resolved with a single throw of the dice. Win, and Germany would break free of the specter of encirclement and blockade; lose, and the result would be catastrophe. Far from being the result of a rational plan of blitzkrieg strategy that would enable Germany to achieve Lebensraum in a series of small wars, Sickle Cut was an act of operational expediency designed to extract Germany from an economically and strategically desperate situation. The country had gone to war in 1939 seriously short of raw materials and unprepared economically to sustain a long war; success in the west had bought needed time.47
Although initially planned or projected not as a blitzkrieg operation but as a conventional conflict similar to the Great War, the unexpected victory over France had significant consequences for German thinking. The new Greater Germany now constituted a formidable economic bloc, but, once the initial elation wore off, German economic planners realized that the area under their control suffered from serious deficiencies and was not the self-sufficient Lebensraum that Hitler desired. Foremost among these deficiencies, and almost perversely designed to rekindle nightmares of blockade and crippling shortages, were shortfalls in foodstuffs and energy. Despite their conquest of an area rich in skilled labor, technology, and sophisticated industrial plant, the Germans found themselves starved of food, coal, and oil. The food requirements of some 25 million people had to be imported, and that was just the peacetime deficit: the British blockade was bound to aggravate the situation, especially since food supplies were already running short in 1940. One bad harvest, the Nazis feared, could again trigger unrest and defeatism on the order of 1917–1918. Far from being blockade proof, Nazi war economists realized, Western Europe lacked a “spare feeding capacity.”48