From Do You Want Total War?, Part One, after a discussion of the luck factor in poker:
I’m not saying I prefer games with no luck – if I did, I’d play chess and not Totaler Krieg. And certainly, games that attempt to simulate history should incorporate randomness. Real generals can’t feed perfect variables into a computer and know how their strategies will unfold on the battlefield; when I attack Tripoli at 2:1 odds and roll a ‘6’, I’m able to imagine any number of reasons why my attack might have failed. Bless the English department at Muhlendorf for making me read this passage from Stephen Vincent Benet’s John Brown’s Body:
If you take a flat map
And move wooden blocks upon it strategically
The thing looks well, the blocks behave as they should.
The science of war is moving live men like blocks.
And getting the blocks into place at a fixed moment.
But it takes time to mold your men into blocks,
And flat maps turn into country, where creeks and gullies
Hamper your wooden squares. They stick in the brush,
They are tired and rest, they straggle after ripe blackberries.
And you cannot lift them up in your hands and move them.
– A string of blocks curling smoothly around the left
Of another string of blocks and crunching it up –
It is all so clear on the maps, so clear in the mind,
But the orders are slow, the men in the blocks are slow
To move, when they start they take too long on the way –
The General loses his stars and the block-men die,
In unstrategic defiance of martial law.
I know this poem isn’t about wargaming – quite the opposite. But this is what randomness in war looks like. In Totaler Krieg, this randomness looks like luck because it arrives in a die-shaped vessel. However, beneath each pip lies a hundred small engagements fought by thousands of men marching across muddy roads and fording creeks and gullies, none of which appear on maps in which each hexagon represents 3,000 square miles. The dice speak of regimental orders misread or poorly implemented by my captains and majors, of gaps in the enemy’s line my colonels and generals have failed to spot, of deserters and spies and codebreakers who fed my opponent vital intelligence.
The story of World War II features moments of pure luck, although not as many as one might think. For example, Britain’s evacuation of more than 300,000 troops from Dunkirk in 1940 was hugely “lucky” in the sense of being an unexpected triumph in what may have seemed a hopeless situation. However, the Germans really only had themselves to blame: Hitler ordered his panzers to halt, not wanting to risk them in the Flanders mud while their flanks weren’t secure, while Goering – not for the last time – promised more than the Luftwaffe could deliver. Luck didn’t save the British: German decision-making did.
So where does pure luck enter the World War II narrative? Here’s my list of the Top Ten Luck-Driven Moments in World War II:
10) The fate of the crew of the USS Indianapolis, 30 July 1945 and afterwards: Sunk by a Japanese submarine while sailing alone, each of the ship’s three SOS signals were disregarded (one of them was received by a drunken watch commander, while another was thought to be a Japanese prank), causing hundreds of men to die needlessly of exposure. Would rank higher on this list if a decisive turning point of the war were involved.
9) Capturing the Rhine bridge at Remagen, 7 March 1945: How had a bridge over the Rhine survived every German order to blow them up? Not as vital to ending the war as first thought, particularly given how few US troops crossed the bridge before it collapsed, but still a monument to how men don’t always behave like blocks and the best-intentioned orders aren’t always executed.
8) Nagumo’s task force remains undiscovered both before and after the Pearl Harbor attack, December 1941: More a combination of good Japanese planning and horrendous misreading of the available intelligence by the Americans than pure luck, of course, but in a raid so daring, when so many things can go wrong but don’t, luck is on your side. (Honorable mention: this could also be said of the German invasion of Norway.)
7) German leadership at the Second Battle of El Alamein, October 1942: Rommel was away on sick leave when the battle started, and his understudy, General Georg Stumme, died of a heart attack during the initial fighting. These absences didn’t determine the battle’s outcome, but with the possible exception of D-Day – with Rommel away in Germany for his wife’s birthday and many of his subordinates on their way to Rennes for a wargame – I can’t think of another time when battlefield leadership was so badly compromised by non-battle-related causes.
6) The weather on D-Day, 6 June 1944: What if Allied meteorologists had been wrong in guessing – and really, it was only an educated guess – that the weather on D-Day would be good enough to support the Normandy invasion? In a worst-case scenario, bad weather could have ruined everything; how would the war have evolved thereafter? (Plus, if the invasion had been postponed, the next suitable dates were marred by what proved to be the worst Channel storms for decades.)
5) Japan’s destroyer at Midway, 4 June 1942: American dive-bombers desperately searching for the Japanese carriers near Midway stumbled upon the destroyer Arashi, headed for Nagumo’s task force at flank speed after diverting to depth-charge a US submarine, and correctly changed course to follow it. Not long thereafter, Akagi, Kaga and Soryu were on fire, and the naval war in the Pacific had been radically altered.
4) The Mechelen Incident, 10 January 1940: One week before the planned German invasion of Belgium and Holland, an obsolescent Messerschmitt accidentally strayed outside of German airspace, suffered mechanical failure and crash-landed in a Belgian field. The two German aviators aboard failed to destroy the top-secret invasion plans in their possession before they could be confiscated by Belgian officials and analyzed by Allied intelligence experts; Hitler reluctantly postponed the attack indefinitely, at least partly because strategic surprise had been lost (although subsequent bad weather may have forced the postponement anyway), and ordered a review of the invasion plan itself, about which he had become increasingly uncertain. Eventually the Wehrmacht discarded its unimaginative reprise of Schlieffen’s 1914 plan and adopted von Manstein’s daring attack through the Ardennes, a revision which underpinned the spectacular victories of May and June 1940. For want of a good pilot, the battle was…won?
3) Assassination attempt, 20 July 1944: Von Stauffenberg’s bomb gets pushed under a table leg, Hitler survives, the war descends into madness for eight-and-a-half additional months.
2) Assassination attempt, 13 March 1943: Von Schlabrendorff’s bomb fails to trigger on the flight back from Vinnitsa, Hitler never realizes how close he came to destruction, the war carries on for two more years.
1) Assassination attempt, 8 November 1939: Hitler leaves the Bürgerbräukeller early because of the fog in Munich, Elser’s bomb explodes 13 minutes too late, and the war isn’t nipped in the bud as it might have been.
Elser’s attempt ranks at the top because it carries the most counterfactual weight: in theory, the gap between life or death for tens of millions of people, and untold disruption to the lives of hundreds of millions of others, was 13 minutes or the clearing of fog at a single airport. “Luck” hardly seems the right word for it.