The Danger Zone (DZ)

Telling a real life story, like the story of Rommel and his campaigns in Libya and Egypt, is like a painting. What we the readers get to see depends on what the painter saw and how the painter interpreted what he saw – and whether the painter had an agenda. So the court painters of the 18thCentury were required to deliver portraits that their patrons wanted to see - flattering. The painter’s eye is shaped by the life they’ve lead and their political and philosophical views.  One of the remarkable men who painted Rommel in words for us was the British historian David Irving. And his is a remarkable life – with the dramatic climax being a defamation case that he brought in the Supreme Court of England against American historian Deborah Lipstadt, and her publishers, Penguin Books, for Lipstadt’s claim that David Irving was a holocaust denier. Tag words: David Irving; Field Marshall Erwin Rommel; Deborah Lipstadt; Penguin Books; Denial; Holocaust; Professor Richard Evans; Richard Cohen; Making History; Kell Richards; Truth-Telling; Myall Creek massacre; Linda Burney; Mahmoud Ahmadinejad; Grand Mufti; Adolf Hitler; Hitler’s War; Trail of the Fox; The Destruction of Dresden; Winston Churchill; Condor Legion;

Rommel’s nickname, picked up at some time during the desert campaigns he conducted, was the Desert Fox. But his first African offensive, begun in March 1941, he appeared to be more the hound than the fox. Rommel was quite the remarkable man. A good place to get a feel for Rommel is the opening chapter of David Irving’s biography of him - The Trail of the Fox. Tag words: David Irving; The Trail of the Fox; Field Marshall Erwin Rommel; Desert Fox; Infantry Attacks; Bernard Montgomery; Dwight Eisenhower; General Sir Claude Auchinleck; General Enno von Rintelen; General Gerhard von Schwerin; Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt; General Heinz Guderian;

Saving Mussolini from the consequences of the loss of the last remaining Italian colonies in Africa was the purpose of the despatch of Rommel with a single division, the 5th Light Division, in early 1941. The logistical consequences of Rommel launching a major offensive would be to overstretch the capacity of the Italians to be able to supply their forces and the German forces through the main port of Tripoli. Benghazi and Tobruk also had some capacity too. If they were available, they would enable the supply of the Axis armed forces in North Africa to be improved, but both of those ports were vulnerable to air attack by the Royal Air Force – more vulnerable than Tripoli. What follows is what Adolf Hitler and the German High Command at first expected of Rommel – which grew into something bigger than the German High Command liked. Tag words: Benito Mussolini; 5th Light Division; Field Marshall Erwin Rommel; Royal Air Force; Adolf Hitler; Operation Felix; Operation Sealion; Operation Attila; Operation Marita; David Irving; The Trail of the Fox; War Directive 22; Afrika Korps; 15th Panzer Division; Erich von Manstein; X Luftwaffe Korps; Marshal Graziani; General Gariboldi;

Despite the fact that modern armies are maintained by sophisticated logistic support, that should be delivering everything to them that they needed to fight, to advance, if they were the army on the offensive, or to hold their ground or retreat, if they were on the defensive, even modern armies still live off the land to some extent. But not the armies fighting in North Africa (in Cyrenaica and Egypt). The only thing that was found in abundance there was camel dung. A modern mobile army can fight for a short time without food or water, but its virtually useless without fuel and ammunition. Logistics are vital. The distances to be travelled in North Africa made even the distances on the Russian front look small. Tag words: North Africa; Cyrenaica; Lilli Marlen; Rommel; Malta; Via Balbia; General Ritter von Thoma; Ariete armoured division; General Archibald Wavell; Fascists; Adolf Hitler; Führer; BenitoMussolini; Tripoli; Benghazi; Tobruk; General Enno von Rintelen; 5th Light Division; 15th Panzer Division; Deutsches Afrika Korps; Africa Corp; Vichy France; Admiral Darlan; Mers-el-Kébir; War Directive No.22;

In 2012 a movie called Iron Sky was released. It tells the true story, well the complete fiction, of how, in the dying days of World War 2, the Nazis fled to the far side of the moon and established a base there where they could safely stay until the time was ripe to bring the Fourth Reich back to earth - this time succeed where the Third Reich had failed before. The landscape on the moon, funnily enough, was perhaps an easier landscape than what General (Later Field Marshall) Rommel was to find himself fighting over for about 2 years between 1941 and 1943 – the desert of North Africa.  Rommel had proven himself a remarkably bold panzer commander, a natural master of the new style of war known as Blitzkrieg when in France in 1940 he commanded the 7th Panzer Division, named by his French adversaries the Ghost Division because they never knew where or when it would appear. Season 59, Parts 10 to 13 on my Danger Zone podcast tells that story. But the challenges of fighting in the desert of North Africa proved much more akin to fighting on the moon – only worse. Well not worse, but challenging. In fact, in this series of programmes I look at whether it was even going to be possible for Rommel to win his North African campaign with his legendary Deutsche Afrika Korp and his much, and often unfairly maligned Italian allies. Tag words: Martin van Creveld; Supplying War; Dick Taylor; The Second World War Tank Crisis; Iron Sky; General Rommel; Field Marshall Rommel; North Africa; Libya; Cyrenaica; Western Desert; 7thPanzer Division; Deutsche Afrika Korp; Africa Corp; Blitzkrieg; Qattara Depression; Ice Cold in Alex; Mungo Melvin; Hannibal; Cannae; Franz von Halder; Graziani; Sidi Barani;

The lies told by the Republican forces to the media after the bombing of Guernica on 26 April 1938 caused World War II in Europe. Proving the old saying Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive. And now I’ll tell you why that happened. Tag words: Guernica; Malcolm Gladwell; World War II; Antony Beevor; Wolfram von Richthofen; David & Goliath – Underdogs, Misfits and the Art of Battling Giants; HG Wells; The Shape of Things to Come; Things to Come; Basque; James Corum; Condor Legion; Bombing of Hamburg; bombing of Dresden; Munich Crisis; Herman Göring; Adolf Hitler; Pablo Picasso;

In Antony Beevor’s book, The Battle for Spain, he writes of Germany’s, perhaps the world’s, top tactical air force commander, Wolfram von Richthofen in these terms: Richthofen, a cousin of the famous Red Baron air ace, was a hard, arrogant man, disliked by German and Spanish officers alike. He was to become infamous as the destroyer of many towns and cities: Durango and Guernica in Spain, then Rotterdam, Belgrade, Canea and Heraklion in Crete, followed by many cities in the Soviet Union, most notably of all, Stalingrad, where 40,000 civilians were killed. I get the feeling that Antony Beevor almost has a personal hatred of Wolfram von Richthofen – perhaps because he sees him as the man who came up with the concept of terror bombing. Beevor left out of his list one of von Richthofen’s most famous city bombing raids, Warsaw, perhaps the first raid described as a terror bombing in World War II. At the time, the bombing of Warsaw was classified as a terror bombing. Were these attacks terror bombings or were they something else? Tag words: Antony Beevor; The Battle for Spain; Wolfram von Richthofen; Warsaw Uprising; James S. Corum; Junkers Ju 52; Douglas C-47; Douglas DC 3; Communism; Nazism; Stalingrad; Bombing of Dresden; Bombingof Hamburg; Josef Goebbels; Vasily Grossman; A Writer at War;

When von Richthofen ordered, and had carried out, the bombing of Guernica, he knew what he wanted from the bombing. It wasn’t to terrorise his opponents, the Republicans, or the people of Basque, or even just the people of Guernica. What he wanted to do was to block the roads through the town so that when the Nationalist Army attacked, soon after the bombing raid, the 23 Basque battalions, whose only escape route was through Guernica and over its bridge, would be destroyed. Did he get what he wanted? The world wrongly came to believe that his aim was to inflict mind numbing terror on his opponents. Why did the world think that? Tag words: Antony Beevor; Wolfram von Richthofen; Basque; Guernica; Condor Legion; Spanish Civil War; Eric Blair; George Orwell; Animal Farm; Nineteen Eighty Four; Homage to Catalonia; Victor Gollancz; Graham Greene; The Quiet American; José Antonio Aguirre;

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 the impossible, to describe to his readers something that no one had ever seen before and perhaps their imaginations would run riot. His headline, in many ways tells it all. Historic Basque Town Wiped Out; Rebel Fliers Machine-Gun Civilians Waves of German-Type Planes Fling Thousands of Bombs and Incendiary Projectiles on Guernica, BehindLines, as Priests Bless Peasants Filling Town on Market Day G.L. Steer saw, arriving the day after the air raid, had the events described to him by the survivors, and clearly people from the Republican propaganda ministry, judging from the whoppers that were contained in his news report. Luckily, or probably not, I live in a world where those sites are common place. Let me tell you what happened leading up to that day, and on that day. Tag words: Antony Beevor; James S Corum; Pablo Picasso; Condor Legion; Guernica; Spanish Civil War; Wolfram von Richthofen; Nationalists; Republicans; Hague Convention Respecting the Laws and Customs of War on Land; Geneva Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War;Heinkel 111; Francisco Franco; Savoia Marchetti SM-79 bombers;

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 famous World War I ace, Baron Manfred von Richthofen – the Red Baron.  On 26 April 1937, von Richthofen was in command of launching the controversial bombing attack on the Spanish town of Guernica in the Basque region in the North of Spain. At that time, the Basque region was controlled by the elected socialist/Communist Republican government. The Nationalists rebels, commanded by General Francisco Franco, were in the process of prosecuting a campaign against the Republican forces to conquer that area. The Nationalists were supported by the Nazi government of Adolf Hitler and very substantially, only in terms of numbers, by military personnel of the Fascist government of Benito Mussolini. Their performance was mostly abysmal, which was something that wouldn’t change in the coming World War. The air-raid on Guernica was reported on by the journalist on the spot (well he arrived there the day after the attack) George Steer. His article about the attack was published in both the Times of London, and the New York Times. Steer’s newspaper report read, in part: The object of the bombardment seemingly was demoralisation of the civil population and destruction of the cradle of the Basque race. That is, George Steer was calling this air raid a terror raid against a civilian population. Pablo Picasso, the world famous ex-pat Spanish painter, was living in Paris at the time of that air raid. He was immediately commissioned by the Republican government to produce a painting about the bombing of Guernica. Picasso completed his painting just a few months after the attack, in June 1937. Picasso never returned to Spain to live. Picasso’s finished painting was displayed at the International Exhibition of Arts in Paris in 1937. It’s the world’s most famous painting of war. Painted in blue, black and white, measuring 3.5 metres high by 7.8 metres wide, it is a powerful, and physically imposing, condemnation of the German terror raid on Guernica. The only problem with that description is that, well maybe it wan’t a terror raid. If it wasn’t, the left who were behind promoting it as that, rendered an enormous service to Adolf Hitler which I would say guaranteed the second world war in Europe. This series of programmes will reveal all. Tag words: Antony Beevor; Pablo Picasso; James C CorumGuernica; Spanish Civil War; Wolfram von Richthofen; Hugo Sperrle; Baron Manfred von Richthofen; Red Barron; Francisco Franco; Adolf Hitler; Benito Mussolini; Condor Legion; General Wilhelm Wimmer; Herman Göring; Hans Udet; General Helmuth Wilberg; Nazi Germany; Carl von Clausewitz; On War; Hans Jeschonnek; Curtis Le May;

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 and French troops are “hoping for deliverance… for a miracle”, while the Bergman-esque spectre of death haunts the beach. Entitled “The Mole” (after the jutting stone and wood structure from which marine evacuation beckons), The actual unspoken words that appear on the screen are: The enemy have driven the British and the French Armies to the Sea. Trapped at Dunkirk, they await their fate. Hoping for Deliverance. For a Miracle. As I told you at the beginning of the last programme, the Cambridge Dictionary defines a miracle in these terms: An unusual and mysterious event that is thought to have been caused by a god because it does not followthe usual laws of nature. Was the escape of the British Army and a significant part of the French Army trapped at Dunkirk, a miracle from God? I’ll tell you the facts and you decide for yourself. Tag words: Christopher Nolan; Dunkirk; Blitzkrieg; Operation Dynamo; British Expeditionary Force;Jesus Christ; General Sir Edmund Ironsides; Chief of the Imperial General Staff; CIGS; King George VI; Exodus; Parting of the Red Sea; Quran; Koran; Captain William Tennant; Vice-Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay; Stuka; Ju 87; Captain E.F. Wharton; the Little Boats; Walter Lord; The Miracle of Dunkirk; Douglas Bader; Karl Heinz-Frieser; The Blitzkrieg Legend; Hermann Göring; Albert Kesslring; Wolfram von Richthofen; General Harold Alexander; Admiral Sir Dudley Pound; Winston Churchill; General von Bock;

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 World War II because, in this industrial age, there was no way that Hitler could have beaten the combined industrial might of the United States, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, Canada, and all of the other Allies. But I disagree. The brilliance of Manstein’s 1940 Operation Sichelschnitt (Sickle Cut) did make that a possible outcome – if it had been exploited to the full. The only thing that robbed Hitler of victory in World War II, in my opinion, was the escape of the British, and many many French and other Allied troops, at Dunkirk. The escape of so many British and allied soldiers at Dunkirk is most commonly described as a miracle. The Cambridge Dictionary defines a miracle in these terms: An unusual and mysterious event that is thought to have been caused by a god because it does not followthe usual laws of nature. So was what happened at Dunkirk a miracle according to this definition? Let’s look closely at what happened. You make up your own mind on this – just make sure that you keep your mind open. Tag words: James S Corum; Karl-Heinz Freiser; Adolf Hitler; Miracle of Dunkirk; Luftwaffe; Hermann Göring; Spanish Civil War; Condor Legion; Wolfram von Richthofen; Me 109; He 111; Do 17; Ju 87 Stuka dive bomber; He 59 seaplane; Royal Navy; Battle of Britain;

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 to the invasion of Russia and the failure of the blitzkrieg before the gates of Moscow and finally the sacking of Guderian on Christmas Day 1941, when the first planned blitzkrieg had catastrophically failed, dooming the Third Reich. It's now time to see what happened leading up to Guderian’s dismissal and the shape that Germany was then in on the Eastern Front to resume the offensive in 1942. Tag words: Tag words: Karl-Heinz Frieser; Blitzkrieg Legend; David Stahel; Retreat from Moscow;Erich von Manstein; Heinz Guderian; Eastern Front; Adolf Hitler; Von Kluge; Franz Halder; Second Panzer Army; Albert Speer;

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 enjoyed at Hitler’s headquarters, compared to life at the front of Army Group Centre. Guderian wrote:  At that time, however, I still believed that our Supreme Command would listen to sensible propositions when they were laid before it by a general who knew the front. This belief I retained while making the long flight from the ice-bound battle area north of Orel to the well-appointed and well-heated Supreme Headquarters far away in East Prussia. If only Hitler knew. Tag words: David Stahel; Retreat from Moscow; Wolfschanze; Adolf Hitler; Heinz Guderian; Third Reich; Army Group Centre; Field Marhsall von Brauchitsch; Friederich Nietzsche; Nazi ideology; Thus Sprake Zarathustra; Übermensch; The Will to Power; Mein Kampf; 'Lords of the Earth; Erich von Manstein; Lost Victories; General von Kluge; National Socialist; Ostheer;

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 were then vastly overstretched, with supply lines that weren’t coping, with the final nail in the coffin of their attempt to take Moscow being the surprise launching by the thoroughly defeated Russian Army, as the Germans saw it, of the Russian Winter Offensive. How good that offensive was has been grossly exaggerated in most minds. It was a pitiful affair that damaged the Russians more than it did the Germans. Then came Hitler’s halt order, his haltbefehl, of 18 December 1941. Was that going to save the German Army or destroy it? Generals from the new Army Group Centre commander, von Kluge down, handled it with subtelty. But subtelty wasn’t schneller Heinz (Swift Heinz) way of doing things. Ultimately what would be left of the Ostheer – the German Army in the east - for the next fateful year, 1942 and would the German Army in that year be able to win the war on the eastern front, or was Germany then doomed to a slow agonizing death by a thousand cuts? Tag words: David Stahel; Retreat from Moscow; halt order; haltbefehl; Heinz Guderian; schneller Heinz;Panzer Leader; Adolf Hitler; Army Group Centre; Ostheer; Nicholas von Below; At Hitler’s Side; von Kluge; Wolfram von Richthofen; Bock; Winter Offensive; Rastenburg; Wolf’s Lair;

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 cataclysmic Fall of France, Heinz Guderian, as he’s circling in behind Moscow to bring about the fall of the Soviet Union and victory in World War II for Germany. Pushing his men forward like only a German panzer general of World War II could do. Tag words: David Stahel; Retreat from Moscow; Adolf Hitler; Heinz Guderian; Panzer Leader; Wolfram von Richthofen; James S. Corum; VIIIth Air Corps; Franz Halder; Mungo Melvin; Manstein; Dr Abraham Twerski; Winter Offensive;

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. Tag words: Dunkirk; Blitzkrieg; Soviet Union; Luftwaffe; Red Army; Molotov; Joseph Stalin; US Ambassador Steinhardt; AY Vishinsky; Winston Churchill; Theodore Roosevelt; Viktor Naidenko; Lend Lease; David Stahel; Retreat from Moscow; Communists; Georgi Zhukov; Pearl Harbour; Anastas Mikoyan; Edward Stettinius; Colonel Henry Aurand; Henry Morgenthau; Harry Dexter White; Andrei Gromyko; Litvinov; Adolf Hitler; Harry Hopkins; Volkischer Beobachter; rasputitsa;

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 Horne, in his book To Lose a Battle wrote: Had the BEF had been wiped out in northern France, it is difficult to see how Britain could have continued to fight; and with Britain out of the battle, it is even more difficult to see what combination of circumstances could have aligned America and Stalin's Russia to challenge Hitler. In this programme I’m going to look at what might have happened to Russia when as Churchill had said of the looming Battle of Britain: The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Now that meant the Soviet Union. Would Stalin have survived then? With the Panzers starting their engines lined up along the borders with Stalin’s Russia, and Guderian and the Panzer forces knowing how to fight a lightning war this time, base on their experience in France. Tag words: Blitzkrieg; Lend Lease; Harry Hopkins; Alistair Horne; To Lose a Battle; Winston Churchill; Joseph Stalin; Heinz Guderian; Norman Gelb; Dunkirk: The Complete Story of the First Step in the Defeat of Hitler; Adolf Hitler; Theodore Roosevelt; fireside chat; Cordell Hull; Operation Barbarossa; Harry Truman; president Herbert Hoover; Colonel Yeaton; Ambassador Steinhardt; Maxim Litvinov;

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 Keyes; Lord Gort; King George VI; Marshall Pétain; Lloyd George; as Edward VIII; The Duke of Windsor; Mrs Wallis Simpson

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 the Channel, with Hitler and Runstedt nearby. The real kicker was why Hitler halted the Panzers – only a leader like Hitler could be motivated to do what he did, and why he did. Let’s cover a bit more background first as to how the halt order, when first made, went down, before getting to Hitler’s unique motivation for ordering the halt. Tag words: Dunkirk; Blitzkrieg; Gerd von Runstedt; Adolf Hitler; von Bock; von Brauchitsch; Franz Halder; von Kluge; von Kleist; Heinz Guderian; Gravelines; Sepp Dietrich; Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler; Erich von Manstein; Sickle Cut Plan; Alfred Jodl; Wilhelm Keitel; Karl-Heinz Frieser; Blitzkrieg Legend; Göring; David Stahel; Retreat from Moscow;