“Blitz Bum’s Rush” (April 28, 1939)
by Paul Albert Plaschke (1880 – 1954)
24 x 36 in., ink and charcoal on paper
Coppola Collection

History records Hitler as an inept military leader.

During WWI, Hitler led a failed effort referred to as The Spring Offensive, which came to represent his uninformed hubris as a strategist.

During the first part of WWII, Hitler continued to be as brazen as he was naïve. He did not sit back and allow his generals to run the war. He overrode them, instead, and was proved right, or lucky, perhaps too often.

The generals argued against the occupation of the Rhineland in 1936, and were convinced it would lead to war. But Hitler was confident that that France and Britain would sit by. And he was right to read these countries as sheepish after WWI about restarting any conflicts, so he ended up with appeasement.

The generals also disagreed with the annexation of Austria in 1938. Hitler overrode them and this, too, went without a hitch. Same with Sudetenland (1938), and the European sell-out of Czechoslovakia, both of which the generals thought he would not get away with.

Although there does not seem to be a triggering incident for this cartoon, it might simply be a general commentary on the public criticism that Hitler would make about his timid military in the light of his victories.

This bold lucky streak built Hitler’s confidence, and eventually led to recklessness. The decision to stand firm and fight it out in front of Moscow (June-December, 1941) turned out to be the last time that Hitler was right to override his generals on something major.

The second Moscow offensive, during the bitter winter of 1941-42, ended with the successful defense of the Soviet capital, just as the United States was being brought into the war following the bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941.

From then on, Hitler’s decision making was generally disastrous for the rest of the war. But Germany would not have gotten to that 1941 peak, just a few miles shy of Moscow and within a whisker of defeating the Soviets for good, if Hitler had not refused to listen to his generals and overrode their recommendations on prior occasions.