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801  33  One Desperate Blow Anton Graff’s famous portrait of Frederick the Great dominated the Hitler bunker. The Prussian king occupied a prominent position in Hitler ’s mythical universe, and as the noose of the coalition’s armies tightened around the Reich, Hitler drew on Frederick for inspiration. Those who dismissed Hitler as an intellectual poseur were not wrong—except where German history, military thought, and opera were involved. The parallel between Germany’s plight in 1944 and Prussia’s in the Seven Years’ War was obvious enough. Confronted by a constellation of continental great powers—France, Austria and much of the Holy Roman Empire, Russia, and Sweden—and fettered to a perfidious ally, Prussia’s position appeared hopeless. But Frederick emerged victorious owing to two products of the imponderables of war: the two “miracles of the House of Brandenburg,” and the soldier-king’s iron refusal to accept defeat. Frederick’s military genius produced the first miracle. Breaking all the rules of eighteenth-century warfare, Frederick exploited interior lines and surprise in conducting an ancien régime version of blitzkrieg in a winter campaign that saw him defeat the western threat, the Franco-Imperial armies, at Rossbach in November; he then moved east and defeated an Austrian army more than twice the size of his at Leuthen in December. Leuthen witnessed the climactic Prussian attack that appeared out of nowhere across fog-shrouded, snow-clad fields. Then two years later, in 1759, Fortuna appeared to turn against Frederick; the coalition forces pressed his exhausted army—a shell of its former self— on all fronts, and Frederick suffered a crippling defeat at the hands of the Russians and Austrians at Kunersdorf. His prospects seemed as tattered as his bullet-perforated coat, and Frederick contemplated suicide. But another imponderable intervened—luck. His implacable foe the empress of Russia suddenly and fortuitously died and was replaced by a 802  BEETLE moron devotee of the king. With Russia’s withdrawal, the coalition flew apart, and Prussia emerged from the ensuing tangled diplomacy intact and still a great power. The lesson for Hitler was clear: military victory, coupled with the will to resist succumbing to one’s fears, might yet deliver Germany from defeat. A stunning victory in the west would at least buy time for Germany to mass its forces and smash the Russians in the east; a big enough victory might sever the Anglo-American alliance as the necessary preliminary to successful diplomatic negotiations. Hitler did not leave off with Frederick; he probably drew guidance from Clausewitz’s analysis of the great king’s “inner light.” The concurrence between the words of the military theorist and Hitler’s thinking appear too close to be accidental. “When the disproportion of power is so great,” Clausewitz wrote, describing Frederick’s 1759 plight, “that no limitation of our own object can ensure us safety from a catastrophe . . . then the tension of forces will, or should, be concentrated in one desperate blow.” A leader facing destruction, “expecting little help from things which promise none, will place his whole and last trust in the moral superiority which despair always gives the brave.” In such a situation, “the greatest daring” translated into “the greatest wisdom.”1 Backed by the parable of the great Frederick and the wisdom of Clausewitz, and roused by his own sense of intuition that fueled his greatest success in the very locale he meant to attack—the Ardennes—Hitler brooked no opposition from his pedantic generals. Hitler might well have drawn inspiration from his third muse, Wagner. He knew failure would lead not to Clausewitz’s “honorable downfall [and] the right to rise again” but to Götterdämmerung, the funeral pyre of Germany. The code word Leuthen broadcast in the clear, announcing the German offensive in the Ardennes, should have proclaimed Hitler’s intentions to his adversaries, but its meaning, as well as other more prosaic forms of intelligence, only confounded his benighted foe. Turning His Great Gamble into His Worst Defeat Not everybody in the Allied camp proved somnolent. Eisenhower worried that his lines were getting awfully thin in Alsace, and especially in the Ardennes. Earlier he had warned about “a nasty little Kasserine .” But his style of command precluded any intervention. Bradley and his army commanders busied themselves with preparations for the renewal of the offensive against the Roer and into the Saar, gambling that the Germans would not attack in the Ardennes. SHAEF [3.135.205.164] Project MUSE...

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