FM Erich von Manstein

Manstein, FM Erich von (1887-1973). Manstein was commissioned into 3rd Foot Guards, Hindenburg's old regiment, in 1906, and during WW1 he fought at Verdun and the Somme. In 1937 he became DCGS, but was sent off to command a division after the replacement of Fritsch as C-in-C. He served as COS of Rundstedt's army group during the Polish campaign, and went on to be COS of Army Group A in the West. He objected to the unimaginative plan for the invasion of France and the Low Countries, and drew up a more ambitious version, designed, as he put it, to force ‘a decisive issue by land’, which threw the weight of the attack through the Ardennes. Although he was posted to command a corps in the east—his reward for being ‘an importunate nuisance’—he met Hitler and helped persuade him to adopt the plan (see France, fall of).

He was an outstanding success on the eastern front, commanding Eleventh Army which captured the Crimea, and was promoted field-marshal in 1942. In November he was sent to command Army Group Don (later South) to the west and south of Stalingrad, where the German Sixth Army had just been encircled by the Russians. Arguing that Sixth Army should break out of the Soviet encirclement as soon as possible, he feared that the moment had already passed, and emphasized that it could only hope to hold out if guaranteed adequate air supply. He mounted Operation WINTER STORM in an effort to reach the Stalingrad pocket, and might have succeeded had Paulus been allowed to break out to meet him.

After the fall of Stalingrad he carried out a brilliant counter-attack at Kharkov in February-March 1943, carried out ‘on the backhand’ against an attacker who had swept beyond his northern flank, and briefly regained the initiative. It was lost for ever at Kursk, in an attack he initially supported, but believed had been delayed too long by Hitler. ‘The whole idea’, he wrote, ‘had been to attack before the enemy had replenished his forces and got over the reverses of winter.’ He was relieved of command in March 1944 because his concept of fluid defence offended Hitler.

In 1950 he was sentenced to eighteen years' imprisonment for war crimes, but served only three. The title of his dignified book Lost Victories (dedicated to his son and all who, like him, had died for Germany) sums up the frustration of so many Germans in fighting so well but yet being beaten. He is widely regarded as one of the ablest practitioners of armoured warfare, and Liddell Hart, in his foreword to Manstein's book, declared that ‘he had a superb sense of operational possibilities and an equal mastery in the conduct of operations … In sum, he had military genius.’

Bibliography

• Manstein, Erich von, Lost Victories (London, 1958)

— Richard Holmes