One of the most prominent general of WW2 was Erich von Manstein. His comments on Hitler are very valuable when we want to analyse him as a war leader. Manstein in his book 'Lost Victories' writes a whole chapter on Hitler titled 'Hitler as a supreme commander'. I am posting extracts from there.
Part I
When considering Hitler in the role of a military leader, one should certainly not dismiss him with such clichés as 'the lance-corporal of World War I'. He undoubtedly had a certain eye for operational openings, as had been shown by the way he opted for Army Group A's plan in the west. Indeed, this is often to be found in military amateurs - otherwise history would not have recorded so many dukes and princes as successful commanders.
In addition, though, Hitler possessed an astoundingly retentive memory and an imagination that made him quick to grasp all technical matters and problems of armaments. He was amazingly familiar with the effect of the very latest enemy weapons and could reel off whole columns of figures on both our own and the enemy's war production. Indeed, this was his favourite way of side-tracking any topic that was not to his liking. There can be no question that his insight and unusual energy were responsible for many achievements in the sphere of armaments.
Yet his belief in his own superiority in this respect ultimately had disastrous consequences. His interference prevented the smooth and timely development of the Luftwaffe, and it was undoubtedly he who hampered the development of rocket propulsion and atomic weapons.
Moreover, Hitler's interest in everything technical led him to overestimate the importance of his technical resources. As a result, he would count on a mere handful of assault-gun detachments or the new Tiger tanks to restore situations where only large bodies of troops could have any prospect of success.
What he lacked, broadly speaking, was simply military ability based on experience — something for which his 'intuition' was no substitute.
While Hitler may have had an eye for tactical opportunity and could quickly seize a chance when it was offered to him, he still lacked the ability to assess the prerequisites and practicability of a plan of operations. He failed to understand that the objectives and ultimate scope of an operation must be in direct proportion to the time and forces needed to carry it out — to say nothing of the possibilities of supply. He did not - or would not - realize that any long-range offensive operation calls for a steady build-up of troops over and above those committed in the original assault. All this was brought out with striking clarity in the planning and execution of the 1942 summer offensive. Another example was the fantastic idea he disclosed to me in autumn 1942 of driving through the Caucasus to the Near East and India with a motorized army group.
As in the political sphere (at all events after his successes of 1938), so in the military did Hitler lack all sense of judgement regarding what could be achieved and what could not. In autumn 1939, despite his contempt for France's powers of resistance, he had not originally recognized the possibility of attaining decisive success by a correctly planned German offensive. Yet when this success actually became his, he lost his eye for opportunity where conditions were different. What he lacked in each case was a real training in strategy and grand tactics.
And so this active mind seized on almost any aim that caught his fancy, causing him to fritter away Germany's strength by taking on several objectives simultaneously, often in the most dispersed theatres of war. The rule that one can never be too strong at the crucial spot, that one may even have to dispense with less vital fronts or accept the risk of radically weakening
them in order to achieve a decisive aim, was something he never really grasped. As a result, in the offensives of 1942 and 1943 he could not bring himself to stake everything on success. Neither was he able or willing to see what action would be necessary to compensate for the unfavourable turn which events then took.
While strategy must unquestionably be an instrument in the hands of the political leadership, the latter must not disregard - as did Hitler to a great extent when fixing operational objectives - the fact that the strategic aim of any war is to smash the military defensive power of the enemy. Only when victory has been secured is the way open to the realization of political and economic aims.
This brings me to the factor which probably did more than anything else to determine the character of Hitler's leadership - his over-estimation of the power of the will. This will, as he saw it, had only to be translated into faith down to the youngest private soldier for the correctness of his decisions to be confirmed and the success of his orders ensured.
Obviously a strong will in a supreme commander is one of the essential prerequisites of victory. Many a battle has been lost and many a success thrown away because the supreme leader's will failed at the critical moment.
The will for victory which gives a commander the strength to see a grave crisis through is something very different from Hitler's will, which in the last analysis stemmed from a belief in his own 'mission'. Such a belief inevitably makes a man impervious to reason and leads him to think that his own will can operate even beyond the limits of hard reality - whether these consist in the presence of far superior enemy forces, in the conditions of space and time, or merely in the fact that the enemy also happens to have a will of his own.
Generally speaking, Hitler had little inclination to relate his own calculations to the probable intentions of the enemy, since he was convinced that his will would always triumph in the end. He was equally disinclined to accept any reports, however reliable, of enemy superiority, even though the latter might be many times stronger than he. Hitler either rejected such reports out of hand or minimized them with assertions about the enemy's deficiencies and took refuge in endless recitations of German production figures. In the face of his will, the essential elements of the 'appreciation' of a situation on which every
military commander's decision must be based were virtually eliminated. And with that Hitler turned his back on reality.
The only remarkable feature was that this over-estimation of his own will-power, this disregard for the enemy's resources and possible intentions, was not matched by a corresponding boldness of decision. The same man who, after his successes in politics up to 1938, had become a political gambler, actually recoiled from risks in the military field. The only bold military decision that may be booked to Hitler's credit was probably the one he took to occupy Norway, and even then the original suggestion had come from Grand-Admiral Raeder. Even here, as soon as a crisis cropped up at Narvik, Hitler was on the point of ordering the evacuation of the city and thereby of sacrificing the fundamental aim of the entire operation, which was to keep the iron-ore routes open. During the execution of the western campaign, too, as we have seen earlier, Hitler showed a certain aversion to taking military risks. The decision to attack the Soviet Union was, in the last analysis, the inevitable outcome of cancelling the invasion of Britain, which Hitler had likewise found too risky.
During the Russian campaign Hitler's fear of risk manifested itself in two ways. One - as will be shown later - was his refusal to accept that elasticity of operations which, in the conditions obtaining from 1943 onwards, could be achieved only by a voluntary, if temporary surrender of conquered territory. The second was his fear to denude secondary fronts or subsidiary
theatres in favour of the spot where the main decision had to fall, even when a failure to do so was palpably dangerous.
There are three possible reasons why Hitler evaded these risks in the military field. First, he may secretly have felt that he lacked the military ability to cope with them. This being so, he was even less likely to credit his generals with having it. The second reason was the fear, common to all dictators, that his prestige would be shaken by any set-backs. In practice this
attitude is bound to lead to the commission of military mistakes which damage the man's prestige more than ever. Thirdly, there was Hitler's intense dislike, rooted in his lust for power, of giving up anything on which he had once laid hands.
