Part 4 What If . . .?

By OTTO FRIEDRICH Research by Peggy T. Berman and Katherine L. Mihok/New York

Defenseless under the night

Our world in stupor lies;

Yet, dotted everywhere,

Ironic points of light

Flash out . . .

-- SEPTEMBER 1, 1939, by W.H. AUDEN

We know, of course, how this great story finally ended. That is told in a series of place names that have become part of the language: Bataan, Midway, Guadalcanal, Stalingrad, El Alamein, Anzio, Omaha Beach, Bastogne, Iwo Jima, Okinawa, Hiroshima. In retrospect, it all seems to have a kind of inevitability, and yet there lingers over each battlefield a faint question. What if rains in Poland had mired the German tanks in mud? What if the French army had then attacked? What if . . .?

The most obvious speculations about Hitler focus on what would have happened if he had met more resistance, from the beginning. While Hitler's will to power seemed almost demoniac in its ferocity, that was partly because he encountered such feeble opposition. Starting in Germany, if the democratic forces had united against him, he would never have come to power. If even just the conservatives had opposed him, he could not have become Chancellor. And if the French had resisted his reoccupation of the Rhineland, his regime would have collapsed.

Chief of Staff Halder testified after the war that the German generals were ready to overthrow the dictator if the Czechoslovak crisis of 1938 led to actual fighting. But when the British and French caved in at Munich, so did the German generals. Assassins, too, narrowly failed on several occasions. In November 1939, for instance, Hitler made a speech in Munich, then left ahead of schedule -- just 13 minutes before a time bomb went off and killed several bystanders.

After the war started, even Hitler was surprised at the suddenness of his success. Yet many of his seemingly invincible tanks were very lightly armored and carried no offensive weapons heavier than machine guns. More important, the German war machine depended heavily on imported supplies: Swedish steel, Rumanian oil, South African chromium. The blitzkrieg was in part a response to the fact that a Germany blockaded by Britain did not then have the resources to wage war for more than six months. In addition to his natural gall and guile, though, Hitler had one attribute indispensable to a commander: luck.

At least as important and interesting as the question of what might have stopped Hitler early on is the question of whether he might have emerged victorious. First, by not going to war at all. If, instead of invading Poland, he had limited himself to threats and bullying, he might have achieved his main demands, control of Danzig and freedom of movement through the Polish Corridor. It is possible, of course, that the whole dynamic of Nazism required war, but if Hitler had been able to stop short of that, he would probably have been widely regarded as the man who undid the defeat of 1918, rebuilt and restored the nation.

Once he had started the war and quickly conquered Poland, most of Scandinavia, the Low Countries and France, Hitler confronted his next great choice: whether to invade England, his last belligerent enemy. It is now known that he seriously planned an invasion in the summer of 1940. And in outlining the future, the German army issued orders that all able-bodied British males between the ages of 17 and 45 were to be interned and shipped to the Continent. The list of people to be arrested by the Gestapo ranged from Bertrand Russell to Chaim Weizmann to Virginia Woolf.

But could the Germans really have conquered Britain? "The massacre would have been on both sides grim and great," Churchill later said. "They would have used terror, and we were prepared to go to all lengths." There is some evidence that Churchill would have even resorted to using poison gas. A number of military historians nonetheless believe that an invasion would have succeeded. "There is an excellent chance that the Germans would have prevailed," says Russell Weigley, Distinguished University Professor at Temple and author of Eisenhower's Lieutenants. "If Hitler had invaded, there is no doubt he would have wiped the floor with us," says Sir Michael Howard, Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford and author of The Causes of Wars. "He would have overrun the country."

The major dissenters were the German commanders who feared British naval and aerial supremacy, and that was why Hitler called off the invasion. But the Germans thought Britain was virtually defeated whether Hitler invaded or not, and a number of historians agree. "Even if he didn't invade us, he could have put resources into the war at sea . . . and starved us out," says Howard. "There's very little chance that we would have been able to survive." The strategist B.H. Liddell Hart, in History of the Second World War, applied the term "slow suicide" to Churchill's policy of fighting on. "By refusing to consider any peace offer," he wrote, "the British government had committed the country to a course that . . . was bound, logically, to lead through growing exhaustion to eventual collapse -- even if Hitler abstained from attempting its quick conquest by invasion."

But suppose Hitler, who often expressed admiration for the English, had not tried to conquer Britain? What if he had simply kept offering some kind of peace terms that would have preserved the independence of Britain and its empire while leaving Germany in control of Europe? It is hard to see how Britain could have gone on waging war indefinitely without any allies. And though Churchill had vowed to fight on the beaches, there were always others who might have been more "reasonable." One such figure was the self-exiled Duke of Windsor, who had taken refuge in Spain after the fall of France. He made it clear that he opposed the war, and the Germans tried through intermediaries to recruit him as a mediator in peace talks, even suggesting that he might thus be restored to his throne. Both he and the British government later declared that these discussions were without significance.

Hitler's greatest mistake of all, historians generally agree, was his decision to turn away from Britain and invade Soviet Russia. That ultimately disastrous error was based on a gross underestimation of the Soviet Union's strength and its people's willingness to fight stubbornly for their homeland. But here too Hitler came very close to winning. Once he had decided to invade, he made two major blunders. The first was to delay the attack by one crucial summer month for the unnecessary foray into Yugoslavia and Greece. The second was to postpone and weaken the drive on Moscow for the sake of capturing the mines and industries of the Ukraine. General Guderian, who was leading the tank spearhead toward Moscow, pleaded for an all-out offensive, but Hitler jeered, "My generals know nothing about the economic aspects of war."

Yet even then, when the Soviets stopped the Wehrmacht just outside Moscow, Hitler still controlled vast territories in the western U.S.S.R. What if he had negotiated a settlement that let him keep his gains? He had predicted such a possibility in the fall: "The recognition that neither force is capable of annihilating the other will lead to a compromise peace." Stalin actually began sending out peace feelers as early as October 1941, and, according to Liddell Hart, Foreign Ministers Molotov and Ribbentrop finally met secretly in 1943 to seek a settlement. But the Germans wanted a new boundary on the Dnieper River, which would have given them more than 130,000 sq. mi. of Mother Russia, while the Soviets, having withstood the Nazis' deepest penetration and inflicted some 300,000 casualties at Stalingrad, insisted on the prewar frontiers.

The key question in any such speculation about a partial or complete Hitler victory is whether peace would have brought any kind of stability. Could Hitler have established a continental network of satellite states under German domination, like that in Vichy France? And could such a network of satellites have lasted as long as the one created by Stalin after the war? It was partly wartime hysteria that led to the savagery of Nazi rule in the occupied lands, not only against the Jews but also against the Slavs, some of whom had originally welcomed the Wehrmacht for liberating them from Stalin. Once some kind of peace was re-established, in other words, could the Nazis have moderated their rule enough to make it tolerable, or did Hitler's psychotic drives constantly impel him toward new battles, toward the Holocaust, toward his death in the ruins of his nation?

That suicidal impulse may have been what inspired his last major political error, declaring war on the U.S. after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. There was no treaty with the Japanese that required him to do so, and Hitler never saw a treaty he couldn't break. It is quite likely that the U.S. would have eventually joined the European war anyway, but it is also possible that if Hitler had professed neutrality, the U.S. war effort would have been turned against Japan. And if Hitler had succeeded in establishing some kind of peace with Britain and the Soviets, that peace might have survived Pearl Harbor.

One other great lapse in judgment occurred in the field of technology. The man who had mesmerized Europe with his panzers and dive bombers talked increasingly, in the later days of the war, about the secret weapons that would save his lost cause. Those weapons turned out to be the missiles that subjected London to a second blitz. But he passed up the chance to develop the jet plane, which German aircraft makers had already test-flown in 1939. And while U.S. scientists feverishly began work on the atom bomb out of fear that their German counterparts were doing the same, Hitler apparently ignored that possibility as well.

Armaments Minister Albert Speer had explored creating a nuclear weapon with the eminent physicist Werner Heisenberg. Speer later told American correspondent James P. O'Donnell that he had asked Heisenberg in 1942, "If I make available to you the entire resources of the Reich, how long would it take to build an atom bomb?" Heisenberg said it could not be done before 1946. Figuring that "if we don't win the war by 1943, forget it," as Speer told O'Donnell, he gave Hitler a bleak assessment, and that was that. But what if some German scientist had alerted Hitler -- as the refugee Albert Einstein alerted an equally indifferent President Roosevelt in 1939 -- to the destructive powers inside the atom? As with so many other possibilities that never happened, this is one about which the world can count its blessings.