The Danger Zone (DZ)

The bombing of Guernica in Spain by the German Condor Legion, on 26 April 1937, was one of the first uses of modern aircraft to bomb a town. The bombing of Guernica captured the world’s imagination. The headline of  The New York Times  the next day clumsily covered what had happened. Perhaps there were no words then for what the German Condor Legion had done. Journalist G.L. Steer struggled to do...

26 April 1937 is a fateful day for the Spanish Republicans, the Spanish Nationalists. The Germans and the whole world really.  The German Condor Legion was the away team of the Luftwaffe (Hitler didn’t want to be seen as getting involved in a war in Europe). It led by Hugo Sperrle and his chief of staff was Wolfram von Richthofen. Von Richthofen was the highly controversial cousin of the most famo...

That well known left newspaper, the Guardian, used a word normally forbidden in its pages. The word’s a Christian word. Especially known to be associated with Jesus Christ. That word is miracle. But the story of what happened at Dunkirk forced the hand of the reviewer Mark Kermode, in his review of Christopher Nolan’s 2017 movie  Dunkirk . The reviewer tells us: Intertitles tell us that British an...

Over the previous 22 programmes I’ve covered the amazing campaign launched by Germany against France. It produced Germany’s most spectacular victory of World War II. From my analysis it could have led to Hitler winning World War II, as William Shakespeare put it, as surely as night follows day. Karl-Heinz Freiser, at the end of the previous part, took the view that Germany could never have won Wor...

It had been 786 days from the time of Guderian’s meeting with Erich von Manstein in October 1939 about Manstein’s incredible plan of how to exploit to the full the potential of the panzers, to the Fall of France, with the greatest military power in the world smashed in a matter of days, using the unplanned tactics for fighting the blitzkrieg that Manstein had conceived, which succeeded brilliantly...

On 20th December 1941, at the Wolfschanze, the 5 hour meeting between Hitler and Guderian began. The belief at all times in the Third Reich, when things were going badly, was almost always put down to decisions or actions taken by people surrounding Hitler. If only Hitler knew truth he would put things right. Guderian in his memoirs repeats this view, while taking a dig at the creature comforts en...

Guderian had been headstrong as a victorious panzer commander leading the charge across France from the Ardennes to the English Channel. The next year he had been the same in leading the charge into Russia. But was Guderian, now having failed to bring the Russian blitzkrieg to a successful conclusion, still that same man? The failure to take Moscow in December, partly caused because the Germans we...

Adolf Hitler said to his generals of the invasion of Russia:   We have only to kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down. When I first heard that I thought what a boastful little dick. But now that I’ve looked closely at what happened during the Blitzkrieg invasion of France, maybe he wasn’t. So let’s join Hitler’s top panzer general, one of the geniuses behind the ca...

Assuming that Britain had come to terms with Germany in May or June 1940, after the loss of its Army, failing to escape from Dunkirk, and wondering if America would have continued to provide lend lease aid to the Soviet Union alone, and if it did, could the Soviet Union have survived the German Blitzkrieg unleashed on it on 22 June 1941 or more likely earlier. Let’s have a look at the evidence. Ta...

In my last programme I looked at what Britain would do if the miracle of Dunkirk hadn’t happened. I concluded that Britain would most likely have come to terms with Hitler. Probably some time in June 1940.  In just 12 months time, at the latest on 22 June, 1941, although probably much earlier without England involved in the war any longer, Hitler would turn on Russia. British Historian, Alistair H...

The question for this programme is, if the Panzers had reached and taken Dunkirk before the British had gotten there, would Germany have won World War II in Europe? Tag words: Len Deighton; Blood, Sweat and Toil; Dunkirk; Alistair Horne; To Lose a Battle; Karl-Heinz Frieser; Blitzkrieg Legend; Winston Churchill; Adolf Hitler; Lord Halifax; Paul Reynaud; Mussolini; Neville Chamberlain; Admiral Keye...

It would have been the decisive moment for the Panzer generals to ignore Hitler’s halt orders and to keep on thrusting forward to take Dunkirk. But that didn’t happen. Circumstances were different now to just a few days before. Then they were lost somewhere in the French countryside and fairly free to do what they wanted, but now they were close together and operating in a very combined space at t...

On 23/24 May 1940 a final stop order was imposed on the panzers – the last one for the Operation Sickle Cut campaign before it was concluded. Time would reveal that the consequences of the various stop orders were disastrous for Adolf Hitler. But there’s always a silver lining in every cloud as they say and that was that the miracle at Dunkirk that these allowed were a blessing for Germany and the...

The British attack at Arras on 21 May, which had been completely seen off that same night, was then all done and dusted in the minds of the panzer commanders, including Rommel. But the view from the front, looked very different to the view at the headquarters. The consequences of this hopelessly executed British attack, that ended in failure, and was easily brushed aside by Rommel, was to win the...

The Germans had crossed the Meuse River on 13 May. On 14th May Guderian had ordered the Panzers to wheel westward to the Channel. The only thing slowing their dash were was Army Group commander Runstedt and the Corp commanders. Then, of course, there was the great panic by the Führer on 16 May – waiting for the counter-attack by the French Army into the flank of the Panzers – the 1940 version of t...

The French began calling Rommel’s 7th Panzer Division  la division fantôme  (the ghost division), because it moved with such incredible speed that the French never knew where it would turn up. The German high command probably agreed with the name because Rommel never hesitated to go off the grid, mainly so that they couldn’t rein him in. Like Julius Caesar’s exciting diary of his conquests in Gaul...

Rommel is one of the most exciting and inspiring military leaders of all times. His exploits from World War I, recorded in his 1936 book  Infantry Attacks , telling about his actions as a junior officer in World War I. His actions in the Battle of Caporetto in 1917 gives the first insights into Rommel’s unique gifts as a commander, and especially how he was going to wage war in France in 1940 and...

The wargames that had been conducted by Manstein on 7 February 1940, at the headquarters of Army Group A, and then subsequently other wargames by other people, were all about getting through the Ardennes and then over the Meuse River. I can’t imagine that Manstein would have left his plans up in the air after that point, but Halder had gotten rid of him to command a new Corp that didn’t yet exist...

Although Guderian didn’t know it, once he began disobeying orders from above in the race to the English Channel there was a first and a second prize awaiting. The second prize was trapping the Allied armies that had advanced into Belgium against the coast. That would be the bulk of the Allied armies and would effectively end the Battle of France. The glittering first prize, though, was to take Dun...

What the German Panzer Divisions did in May 1940 was not in their training and operational manuals. What they did had never been practised. It was all made up as they went. Improvised. Karl-Heinz Frieser in his book  Blitzkrieg Legend  says: As earlier emphasized, the operations plan of the army high command was only a half-hearted and inconsistent implementation of Manstein's bold Sickle Cut...

From the moment of the first German attack in the north, the air forces of both sides had been deployed in the skies over the northern sector where the main German attack was expected. At noon on the 13th May, the Luftwaffe suddenly vanished from the skies in the North. Soon the Allies would learn why. Tag words: Sir Basil Liddell Hart; Colonel Bourguignon; General Gamelin; General André Prételat;...

On 15 March 1940, less than two months before the launching of the German offensive in the West, Hitler summoned a meeting of General von Runstedt, the commander of Army Group A, the commanders of the individual armies under his command, and the commanders of the panzer forces, Heinrich von Kleist and Heinz Guderian. The purpose of the meeting was for each of the generals to present their plan for...

The deception measures that the Germans put in place for their surprise attack out of the Ardennes forests, and then heading to Sedan, were remarkable and they never get much attention. The German high command, and many officers, were worried that Manstein’s plans was a repeat of the massive gamble of the Schlieffen Plan that had been badly executed in World War I and had lost Germany the war. In...

I probably shouldn’t be mentioning George Washington and Adolf Hitler in the same sentence, but I’m going to. George Washington said: Success has many fathers. Failure is an orphan. So the brilliant Operation Sichelschnitt (Sickle Cut) was claimed by Erich von Manstein, Adolf Hitler and Franz Halder as its father. If it had failed I think Manstein would have been given the credit by Hitler and Hal...

Manstein had seen the army high command’s hopeless, unimaginative plan, for the attack on France. He’d come up with a better idea – an attack through the impenetrable Ardennes Forest in Belgium in the centre using the new, and really untested, panzer divisions. As fate would have it, the father of Germany’s panzer forces, Heinz Guderian was in the town of Koblenz where Manstein was also based as t...