The Defeated

THE GERMAN GENERALS TALK (308 pp.) --B. H. Liddell Hart--Morrow ($4).

At the end of World War II, Captain Basil Henry Liddell Hart came into contact with many of the captured generals of the German High Command. His own reputation as a military authority--he was the foremost British advocate of defensive warfare--had been somewhat flattened out by the success of the German Panzers, but talking with the generals Captain Liddell Hart was in his element. For one thing, most of them had read his books. Once they opened up they talked well--and with the wisdom of hindsight.

There was Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, a victor in Poland, France and the Ukraine, and 68 at the time of the Allied landings in Normandy. In retrospect, his tragedy was that Hitler always insisted on holding the most advanced point his troops reached, would not permit even slight strategic withdrawals until too late. After the Allies landed in Normandy, Hitler's headquarters had asked, "What shall we do?" Said Rundstedt: "End the war! What else can you do?"

Numbers v. Reality. Liddell Hart gives fragments of his discussions with Field Marshal von Kleist (who conducted the retreat from Russia) and a dozen others. They all had bitter recollections--Hitler's disregard of their advice; their success in carrying out impossible orders, only to be supplanted afterwards; the constant surveillance of the Gestapo. General von Manteuffel, an army commander at 47, told how Hitler would intoxicate himself with figures and quantities:

"When one was discussing a problem with him, he would repeatedly pick up the telephone, ask to be put through to some departmental chief, and ask him--'How many so and so have we got?' Then he would turn to the man who was arguing with him, quote the number, and say: 'There you are . . .' without asking if the numbers stated were available in reality."

The German General Staff seems never to have been confident of ultimate victory. The successes that appeared so staggering to the rest of the world did not encourage them, for they knew what difficulties they still faced.

Double Nightmare. The generals got very little information from agents in Britain. (Hitler may have gotten more and kept it from them.) Hitler himself made only one trip to the Channel coast. He went to Cap Gris Nez one day in 1940, looked over the Channel toward Britain, and went home. The "Atlantic Wall" was never a system of continuous fortifications; Rundstedt called its defenses "absurdly overrated." There was no real cooperation between the Luftwaffe and the ground forces, the generals told Liddell Hart. And the Battle of the Bulge, which seemed so powerful an assault to the Allies, was a nightmare to the Germans too --confused, desperate, suicidal.

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