Hitler, Adolf (1889–1945) southern Italy in September Vast air armadas now darkened German skies more than the Luftwaffe had ever done or hoped By the start of 1943, any grand strategy Hitler ever pursued was done Thereafter, all he could was hang on to power until it was wrested from his dead hands by the greatest violence, systematic destruction, and horror the world has ever seen From 1943 to 1945, his leadership style in field operations thus changed significantly He became extremely cautious about most proposals for offensives, but also ever more inflexible in defense Over the second half of the war he was intent on holding what he had gained during its first half, although inflexibility about how to accomplish that cost him whole armies and then entire countries, time and again The pattern was first made clear in his refusal to withdraw in front of a series of effective Soviet offensives in Ukraine lasting from November 1943 to March 1944 Hitler insisted on trying to hold at all costs the line of the Dnieper bend Those operations—the Second Battle of Ukraine, the Zhitomir-Berdichev operation, and the Proskurov-Cherovitrsy operation—drove Army Group South entirely out of Ukraine, leaving it shattered and isolated in eastern Rumania They also cut off German and Rumanian armies on the Taman peninsula in the Crimea Again revealing his Great War experience of trench warfare, Hitler hated retreat of any kind, even a successful and necessary one He could not brook abandonment of a declared but largely imaginary line of “feste Plätze” in Ukraine Field Marshals Erich von Manstein and Ewald von Kleist were therefore summoned to see Hitler in Bavaria on March 30, 1944, to be dismissed They were neither the first nor the last of the best German field commanders to be forcibly retired by Hitler’s need to blame others for cascading military failures Georg von Küchler had been sacked in February, joining a long list of field marshals and generals fired in the fall of 1941 and winter of 1942 Others followed as the Wehrmacht lost more battles and campaigns on several fronts in 1944–1945 The battlefield skills of such professionals could not have prevented most German losses after mid-1943, and probably not even from the end of 1942 But they would have delayed Nazi Germany’s final defeat From 1943 to 1945, Hitler repeated a pattern of trying to hold territories of limited strategic importance with diminishing military assets: in the Crimea, the Baltic States, Greece and the eastern Mediterranean, then in Sicily, Italy, Hungary, France, Finland, and Norway That left large pockets of German forces isolated and cutoff in the Crimea and Lower Dnieper bend, before Leningrad, then at Falaise, the Ardennes, in the Rhineland, and in Courland Hitler might have learned better from a dead Prussian king he claimed to admire Friedrich II (“der Grosse”) once famously warned: “He who defends everything defends nothing.” In 1944 Hitler proposed to hold in northern Italy, give ground slowly as he must in the east, but concentrate to defend against the expected infantry of France by the Western powers He failed spectacularly in France, not least because he was duped by deception operations about where the blow would fall on D-Day (June 6, 1944) That and other grave operational errors assisted the Wehrmacht lose the Normandy campaign in June–August 1944 Even then, Hitler indulged fantasies of snatching ultimate victory from obvious military catastrophe with spectacular operational blows and Wunderwaffen (“wonder weapons”), such as V-weapons 521