Hitler soon found that “the American danger was the one against which he could do nothing directly in advance.” The Germans lacked the sea power and bases to project their ample military strength to the approaches to the New World. For their part, the Americans lacked the Army and Air Force necessary to intervene in Europe, and their youth were “little inclined to war service.” Both sides needed time: the Americans to repair their weak defenses and refurbish their spirit; the Germans to deter American intervention by defeating the Allies. Thus, the Fuehrer’s policy was prudent and sensible. But it possessed two great drawbacks: first, German military successes, far from intimidating the Americans, only spurred them to a more combative position; second, Hitler’s reticence left the initiative in the Atlantic to the American President.5
Adolf Hitler once said that he was a hero on land, but a coward at sea. A continentalist, he eschewed colonies and large ships as hostages to his enemies’ fleets. He believed that modern improvements in military transportation and communications made it possible at last for land powers to hold their own in warfare against the traditionally more mobile sea powers.
Germany’s geographical position between France and Russia has bred in her statesmen an obsession with national security and a desire to gain strategic depth by encroaching on the domains of weaker neighbors. To this traditional thrust of policy, the Fuehrer added the intense nationalism of an Austrian outlander and the fever of an ideology half-revolutionary, half-atavistic. The new states of central and eastern Europe were weak, allowing Nazi expansionism to march along the path of least resistance. This course had the additional advantage of leading to Hitler’s ultimate foe, Russia, which, because of shared origins and characteristics, both repelled and fascinated Hitler’s Germany in, as H.R. Trevor-Roper has said, the same way a snake repels and fascinates a bird. But another impulse moved the Germans east. Although the Fuehrer often ridiculed large warships, he never quite evaded the nagging ghost of Mahan. Thus, he found the teachings of the geopoliticians attractive. In the vast Eurasian heartland, immune to the assaults of the sea powers, he saw the ultimate haven of his Reich. Psychology was perfectly wedded to strategy, for years of constant strife gave the Fuehrer the harried weariness of the inveterate outlaw; in the Urals heartland, he might rest at last, finally secure from foes both real and imagined. The escapism inherent in high places and dark forests appealed to him; it was more than the good infantryman’s respect for tenable ground that impelled him to seek recreation or conduct business in mountain or forest regions. He sought an impregnable redoubt and built one in his mind.
A creative soldier, he complained often—as did his great adversaries, Roosevelt and Churchill—that his military advisers were too conservative. “The technicians,” he asserted, “know only one word: No.” A shrewd tactician, he saw better than his generals that tanks, trucks, aircraft, and mobile artillery had restored mobility to modern warfare and that the positional tactics and trench-fortress cast of thought from World War I were passé. But restless and impulsive, he lacked the patience and method to plan an effective long-range strategy for Germany. He built a powerful modern Army, the best in the world, and a largely tactical Air Force to support the tanks and infantry. But his continental outlook and impulsiveness, German industry’s sluggishness in making a thorough transition to wartime production requirements, and Germany’s insufficiency of vital natural resources, including metal ores and oil, all limited the growth of the Navy, which had a small submarine fleet and no aircraft at all.a Without a formidable Navy and a strategic Air Force, the Germans lacked the best weaponry to defeat Great Britain in time to deter the intervention of the rearmed United States, and lacked the realistic strategic planning efficiently to wage a protracted war once American intervention occurred.6
Frustration had long been the companion of the German Navy, which had played an insignificant part in the nineteenth century wars of unification; unlike the U.S. Navy, its traditions were not inextricably linked with the birth of the nation. The service fared better in the era of rapid industrialization and colonial expansion, and by World War I disposed a formidable array of modern vessels, outnumbered by but qualitatively superior to those of the Royal Navy. But geography and inexperience at sea doomed the Germans. They expected the British to mount a close blockade of the German coast, dispersing their forces in order to keep the German High Seas Fleet penned up in its ports. The Germans planned to whittle down the British blockading units spread out by weather, need to refuel, and tactical imperatives with quick, hit-and-run attacks by superior forces. Eventually, with British strength sapped by these tactics, the High Seas Fleet might be able at last to steam boldly into the North Sea and challenge the Grand Fleet in equal and decisive battle for command of the seas and victory.
But geography, the speed of radio communications, and the mine, submarine, and airplane impelled the British to forego the traditional close blockade; they found that they could intercept the High Seas Fleet from home waters. The British Isles served as a cork wedged deep into the neck of the North Sea bottle; and in home ports, the Grand Fleet might remain concentrated instead of dispersed.
The Germans, their prewar strategy foiled, sent their ships to conduct minor nuisance raids against the British coast and spent two years trying to maneuver the High Seas Fleet so as to force a battle against only a part of the stronger Grand Fleet. One such attempt resulted in the Battle of Jutland, in which the Germans fought well but were outnumbered and perhaps spared a crippling defeat only by the great caution of the British leadership. But, thereafter, the German heavy ships remained in port, their sailors disheartened by the contrast between hopes and achievement, while the Army bled copiously into the gray mud of the Western Front. There were rumors that cowardice, not strategic adversity, was responsible for the Navy’s failure to fight harder. But morale amongst the submariners, who sustained increasingly high losses as the United States entered the war and the convoy system was introduced, remained sound. It was on the big ships, amongst men who had fought too little, not too much, that the soul of the Imperial Navy decayed. Then in 1919 came the Navy’s ultimate humiliation; the surrendered High Seas Fleet was scuttled in Scapa Flow to keep it out of Allied hands.7
In the twenties, a small cadre of professionals kept a torpedo-boat Navy alive and clandestinely planned for future growth. In 1928, Erich Raeder became Commander-in-Chief of the Navy. Raeder, then fifty-two, came from a middle-class background. A dedicated, somewhat rigid and austere man, he deplored the glamour and hedonism of the times and strove to instill in the service his own reserve and commitment to cool professionalism. He was respected for his integrity, knowledge, and decisiveness; his staff had few strong wills or independent minds, as he preferred men who did not embarrass his shyness with unseemly controversy. Raeder detested the Nazis as ruffians, but hoped Hitler’s nationalism might mean a larger Navy. He intended to keep faith with the dead by providing Germany with another battle fleet. A fine scholar and administrator, as well as an experienced sailor, yet never having commanded a ship in battle, Raeder sought for both his Navy and himself the glory both had missed in the past. However, Hitler did not intend to repeat the Kaiser’s error of provoking the British with a significant naval building program; he also remembered that the Navy had played a major part in the nation’s spiritual collapse in 1918. So, in the thirties, the service replaced superannuated ships, but did not grow appreciably. Besides, the geographic problem still seemed insoluble: a large surface fleet would be useless because the British once again would block its access to the Atlantic.
However, in the late thirties, the German naval staff became convinced that conquest of Norway or certainly of the French Channel ports would give the fleet safe access to the Atlantic and so restore the Navy’s long-dormant offensive capability. At the same time, the Fuehrer was coming to see that the British would not indefinitely underwrite his advance toward the heartland. Prior to Munich, his foreign policy successes had resulted from the alleged superiority of the Luftwaffe; realizing this, Britain was improving her Air Force, and the Fuehrer felt the need of an additional weapon of intimidation. Thus, interest in a new High Seas Fleet was reawakened in Germany.8
In 1938, the Navy prepared two plans envisaging eventual war with Great Britain. The first supposed that time was the crucial factor, that the Navy would unexpectedly find itself at war
