CHAPTER 1
Countdown
TUESDAY, 4 JULY 1939, and a hot, humid Independence Day in New York City. Far away, across the Atlantic, Europe appeared once more to be cantering towards all-out war for the second time in a generation, but here in America, the land of the free, the growing crisis seemed remote. Most in the United States had quite enough worries of their own after ten long years of bitter depression. True, there were signs of -recovery, but there had been similar signs three years earlier and then there had been another dip. The first concern of Americans was to have a job and put bread on the table, not to get embroiled in what was happening back in the old countries. In any case, while many in the US might only have been first-or second--generation Americans, they had made the trip across the Atlantic for a reason, and for the majority that was to escape to a better life. America promised to be a land of opportunity, and a land of peace, and even with the pain of depression it stood unrivalled as the most modern and forward-thinking country in the world. Europe, with its history of despots and wars, famine and plague, was a world away…
And so now there was another round of bickering on the other side of the Atlantic. Let them fight it out for themselves; there were other things to think about than a madman, with a dodgy moustache, called Adolf Hitler.
Things to think about like baseball, and, on that sticky summer day in New York, one ball player in particular. The game was the country's national sport, an obsession for many millions, and Lou Gehrig was not only one of the greatest hitters ever to have played the game, but a household name across the United States – as famous as any man alive in America. In a career with the New York Yankees that had spanned seventeen seasons, he had hit more than forty home runs six times, had dipped below thirty only once since 1927, was one of the highest run-producers in history and -consistently had one of the highest batting averages. His record of a -staggering 2,130 consecutive games was one that would stand for over fifty years, which was why, when his form had so dramatically collapsed at the start of the 1939 season, it had seemed unfathomable. Clearly, there was something wrong. He'd noticed himself that he had begun feeling tired midway through the previous season, but during spring training he appeared to have lost all his strength, such a feature of the Iron Horse's game. At one point, he had even collapsed on the field. He struggled badly on the opening day, then benched himself. His career was over.
Sent to the famous Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, he was -diagnosed with a rare degenerative disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, on his thirty-sixth birthday, 19 June. This was a terminal wasting disease that would lead to paralysis, difficulty in speaking and, in due course, death. Life expectancy was around three years, if he was lucky.
The Yankees and the baseball world were in shock. Lou Gehrig was not so colourful a character as his former team-mate Babe Ruth, but he was respected for his quiet humility and for his amazing strength and agility. He had always let his batting do the talking, but on this 4 July, 1939, 'Lou Gehrig Appreciation Day', he was to make one of the most famous speeches in sporting history. Nearly 62,000 fans had crammed into the Yankee Stadium to see a double-header against the Washington Senators, and -between the games the great slugger would make his final appearance on the plate in a ceremony attended by Babe Ruth and New York's mayor, Fiorello H. La Guardia.
Among those watching was John E. Skinner, a fourteen-year-old from New Brunswick, across the Hudson in New Jersey. A keen and promising young ball player himself, he was a Yankees fan and had been taken to see Gehrig for the last time by a friend of his father's. What had shocked him most was the change in the great slugger's appearance. Gehrig had been a big man, but he looked shrunken now, his famous Number 4 jersey -hanging off his shoulders and his pants bunched badly at his waist. 'Before the -ceremonies began,' says Skinner, 'you'd picture Gehrig belting a ball out of the park, but then, when you have to see him pull himself up by his hands to get out of the dugout, it was a very sad thing.'
As speeches were made and gifts handed over, Gehrig stood, twisting his cap in his hand and looking awkward. Eventually, it was time for the quiet man to say a few words. The crowd was chanting and applauding as he stepped up to the microphone. As he cleared his throat, he stopped, hands awkwardly planted on his sides and head stooped. 'For the past two weeks,' he said, 'you've been reading about a bad break.' He paused, then added, 'Today, I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth.' The times he'd had, the players he'd played with, the family he had. 'Sure I'm lucky,' he said.
Behind John Skinner, two huge men were bawling like babies. 'They were… really moved,' says Skinner. 'It was a moving experience.' It was a speech of humility and bravery, from a sporting hero who was demon-strating astonishing courage in the face of cruel adversity. Before the coming war was out, John Skinner would need some of that courage himself. So would millions of other Americans, not that they could know it that hot summer afternoon in New York.
A few hundred miles south of New York, just a day later, the President, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was floating down the Patuxent River in Maryland on the presidential yacht, the USS Potomac, a vessel he liked to call the 'floating White House'. He had come to visit his close friend and advisor, Harry Hopkins, who was laid low and convalescing at Delabroke, a beautiful pre-Revolution house on the river loaned to him for the summer. Hopkins had organized, overseen and run many of the key -projects of Roosevelt's New Deal – relief agencies in which the government invested heavily in an attempt to provide jobs and public works projects and help the country crawl out of depression. The biggest of these jobs programmes, the Works Progress Administration, or WPA, had been the centrepiece of the New Deal from 1935 and had been run by Hopkins until the previous summer, when he'd been recovering from a vicious bout of cancer that had seen two-thirds of his stomach removed. Now, eighteen months after his treatment, he could no longer ingest -properly. Like Lou Gehrig, it seemed that Hopkins was dying.
His death would be a huge blow to the President, who had developed a close bond with this thin, sickly man with the rapier wit, dynamic organiz-ational skills and shrewd judgement. More recently, FDR – as the President was widely known – had started using Hopkins in a different role. The imminent war in Europe may not have been foremost on the mind of most Americans but it certainly was now centre stage in the President's thoughts, and had been for some time, the more so because of the events in Munich the previous autumn. Back then, war had threatened to engulf Europe, but both France and Britain had stepped back from the brink; they had allowed Hitler, the German Chancellor, to annex the German-speaking Sudetenland from the rest of Czechoslovakia unopposed. The Czechs had had their country sliced up, and war had been averted, but then in March that year, just six months after the Munich agreement, Hitler's troops had marched into the rest of Czechoslovakia, and in so doing the German leader had flagrantly gone back on his promise. Now he wanted part of Poland too. A pattern was clearly emerging: bully, threaten, watch the rest of the world step aside, and then walk in. Land grabs had never been so easy. The issue, as Britain, France and Roosevelt were all too aware, was that Hitler was unlikely to stop unless made to by military force. And that meant war.
Thus a European conflict seemed to the President to be increasingly likely, but while many in Washington assumed that a future European -conflict had little to do with them, FDR was not so sure. He had also begun to realize that the Atlantic was no longer the barrier it had once been. Air power was growing rapidly, as was naval power. Charles Lindbergh, an American, had famously flown across the Atlantic in a single flight back in 1927; it was only a matter of time before fleets of bombers could do the same. And, in any case, there were now aircraft carriers, floating airstrips that could deliver air power to all corners of the globe. Technology was advancing rapidly. The world was becoming a smaller place.
Be that as it may, it was not a view that was widely shared within the United States. Americans were quite aware of the emergence of Hitler and the Nazis, the suppression of civil rights in Germany, and the rising -persecution of Jews and other minorities, and yet the overwhelming view was that these were problems for Europe to resolve not the United States. Americans had reluctantly become drawn into the last war and had been given, in the eyes of many in the US, precious little thanks for it.
Yet they had entered the war in 1917 on the back of idealism – an idealism that had long since been exposed for its naivety and resentfully cast aside. It had been Woodrow Wilson, the US president at the time, who had been the architect of this American world-view, outlining his vision for a future world peace early in 1918 with his 'Fourteen Points' speech. He had attended the subsequent Paris Peace Conference with lofty ideals for global free trade and a future League of Nations, in which he saw the United States playing a central and progressive role – the New World showing the Old Order how to create a better, fairer globe. The subsequent Treaty of Versailles, however, had fallen some way short of such ideals; the peace terms revealed no utopian future but rather exposed deep-rooted national mistrust and hatred, made worse by four years of slaughter – much of it on French soil and in the heart of Europe.
One of those who had observed the Paris Peace Conference first hand had been Roosevelt, then Assistant Secretary of the Navy, although perhaps his most significant conversation was not at the conference itself, but with Woodrow Wilson on the return crossing afterwards, when the President was still fired with enthusiasm for his proposed League of Nations. 'The United States must go in,' he told FDR, 'or it will break the heart of the world, for she is the only nation that all feel is disinterested and all trust.'
It was not to be, however. When Wilson returned to the United States, he was unable to persuade the Senate to ratify the treaty and with it American membership of the President's proposed League of Nations. The appetite for playing a leading role in world affairs had gone. Few wanted a large military either; after all, what was the point? What's more, it appeared to many that the Old Order had prevailed in Europe after all, with Britain and France the major beneficiaries. The New World had tried to help but had had that offer thrown back in its face. Well, if that was the way they wanted it, then fine.
None the less, this new isolationist stance had short-term consequences. Four million men in uniform had to be demobilized and sent home, while the booming wartime armaments industry was to be equally rapidly reduced. It was inevitable that the economy consequently took a dip.
It was hardly any surprise, then, that at the next elections the Democrats were out and the Republicans came to power with the promise of a return to a more inward-looking future. Far from promoting free trade, they increased import tariffs, reduced taxes and encouraged spending. A more laissez-faire approach ensued, in which central government was reduced. The brief dip turned swiftly to boom. Americans were free to enjoy the time of plenty in this young, vibrant and liberal country. The Roaring Twenties and the Jazz Age had arrived.
But while the US had turned its back on leading the world into a progressive modern age, this did not mean America was keeping out of European affairs altogether. Far from it, and throughout much of the 1920s it was the United States which played the most significant part in getting Germany back on to its feet. When the severity of the reparations led to hyperinflation and wheelbarrows of printed money, it was the Dawes Committee that oversaw a dramatic reduction in the payments. Led by General Charles G. Dawes, a Chicago banker and industrialist, and with another American industrialist, Owen Young, the chairman of General Electric, driving the scheme, they also brought in increased foreign invest-ment, re-established the Reichsmark on gold at its pre-war level against the dollar, and helped stabilize the German economy. The New York bankers J. P. Morgan then backed these changes with a massive loan of $100 million.
A further measure was the establishment of a Reparations Agent – in this case a rising Wall Street financier, Parker Gilbert – who had the power to halt any reparations payments if they looked set to endanger the stability of the German economy. Suddenly, the flow of foreign capital – and -particularly dollars – was enough to not only get the Reichsmark back on its feet, but also for Germany to easily pay its reparations to Britain and France without default. This money was then ploughed back into the US, which was insisting France and Britain honour their wartime debts. Thus, the money was effectively going round and round, but in the process Germany was climbing back out of the abyss and emerging once more as the modern, industrial economy at the centre of Europe that it had been before the war.
This was all very well until suddenly America, and then the rest of the first world, was mired by the Wall Street Crash of October 1929. The loans to Germany dramatically dried up, while in the US the days of boom were for the time being over. By the time FDR became the thirty-second President of the United States and brought the Democrats back to power for the first time in twelve years, America was in the grip of the worst depression in its history, with unemployment soaring to 25 per cent and the economy in a nosedive. Roosevelt had got into power on the back of greater isolationism and on the promise of relief, recovery and reform: relief for the poor and unemployed, recovery of the economy, and reform of many of the US's financial institutions. These pledges were almost entirely domestic and continued America's inward-looking progress. There was now little room for Germany.
Another central tenet shared by both sides of the American political divide had been the need to reduce the military. It had been Roosevelt, for example, who, as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, had overseen much of the demobilization of that part of the services. A strong military, the theory went, did not act as a deterrent but as a provocation. And for America, now pursuing an isolationist stance, there was simply no need to spend billions on large armed forces.
It was a very different world now, however. The democratic Weimar Republic had gone, the German policy of the 1920s had been cast aside, and in its place there ruled an absolute dictator in Adolf Hitler, and a Nazi party that let no opportunity to rattle sabres and display its martial strength slip by.
Roosevelt had not forgotten that conversation with Wilson on the ship back to America after the Paris Peace Conference, however, and no matter how inward-looking he had pledged to be on taking office in 1933, he had become convinced that Hitler was a madman bent on world domin-ation, and that should Germany crush France and Britain, then it would most likely turn on the USA. He still hoped to prevent war, but believed the best way of doing that was to discard the policy of the past two decades and rapidly rearm, and particularly in terms of aircraft. The Germans were known to have more aircraft than Britain and France, and, in the summer of 1939, greater ability to maintain that advantage.
Late in 1938, FDR had sent his friend Hopkins on an undisclosed -mission to the West Coast of America to assess the capacity there to build aircraft and how to increase production urgently. Hopkins had reported back favourably. FDR had hoped to sell aircraft, especially, to France and Britain. Perhaps if Germany knew this, it would think twice about taking on the two biggest powers in Europe; he viewed Britain and France as America's front line, where the critical struggle would take place in the air. American aircraft might make all the difference.
There were two stumbling blocks, however. The first was that this represented a major political volte-face and would require some in-credibly deft public relations to pull off, even though there were signs in the polls that increasing numbers of Americans accepted rearmament as a policy. The second was legal – namely, the Neutrality Act of 1937, which placed an embargo on the sale and shipment of arms to any belligerent, whether aggressive dictatorships or friendly democracies. Britain, for example, could get round this by using existing funds in the USA and shipping arms in its own vessels from Canada, but there was no doubt a repeal of the act would show intent and represent a warning shot to Nazi Germany.
A bill to repeal the Neutrality Act had gone before the House of Representatives the previous month, and a fudged, half-baked, amended version of this had been passed on 30 June, 1939. Now, as Harry Hopkins and his daughter, Diana, and sons, Robert and Stephen, joined the President on his yacht, they were awaiting the verdict of the Senate.
Its answer came a few days later on 11 July. The embargo would remain, but the cash-and-carry provisions were removed. From now on, American ships could trade freely if it came to war. As for full repeal of the Act, well, that was deferred until the next session – in 1940. It was what one commentator called 'a negative compromise between isolationism, collective security, Washington heat, and partisan politics'.
What was certainly true, however, was that the United States, for all its isolationism, had played a major part in the rise of Hitler and the Nazis. There is no question at all that it was the harshness of the Treaty of Versailles that had fired Hitler and his sympathizers. Nevertheless, until 1929, his Nazi party had been largely insignificant. Germany, until then, had been pursuing a democratic course, in which a policy of inter-national co-operation and growing industrial strength was perceived to be the quickest and most effective way of restoring the French-occupied Rhineland and returning the country to the premier stage. Only once Germany began to collapse again following the Great Depression did Hitler and the Nazis start clawing their way into mainstream politics.
In other words, it was Versailles that caused the emergence of the Nazis, but it was the Wall Street Crash that helped get the Nazis into power.
Far across the sea, in Rome, the Italian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Galeazzo Ciano, Count of Cortellazzo and Buccari, was struggling to come to terms with the fact that one of those closest to him was dead. His father, Amiragglio Costanzo Ciano, a highly decorated First World War hero, had died on 26 June, somewhat unexpectedly and at only sixty-three years old. His son was desolate. The news, he wrote in the single longest entry in his diary, shocked him deeply. 'It was a great blow to me, physically and mentally,' he scribbled. 'I felt that something was torn away from my physical being. Only at that moment, after thirty-six years of life, did I come to realize how real and deep and indestructible are the ties of blood.'
Ciano's father had also been at the forefront of the rise of Fascism, which had been more directly attributable to the effects of the last war than had the emergence of Nazism. Italy may have ended up on the -winning side, but it had been a pyrrhic victory. Like Germany, Italy was a new country, and was still, for all its rich history, music and arts, a fragmented nation, underdeveloped and struggling to emerge into the modern age. War had exposed one of its greatest weaknesses: a lack of the kind of natural resources needed to drive development and -modernity. Italy may have been one of the big five – along with Britain, France, the USA and Japan – to have thrashed out the Treaty of Versailles, but its influence had been minimal, its ambitions unfulfilled, and the country had been left broke. In 1920, the lira crashed and inflation rocketed. Weak governments tumbled one after another.
It was into this maelstrom that Benito Mussolini, a journalist with a fiery and bombastic charisma, emerged. Copying much of the liturgy of the right-wing poet-prince, Count Gabriele d'Annunzio, Mussolini -developed a new political movement. Fascism was a belief in the bond of nationhood – the Patria – encapsulated in the spirit and personality of a common leader. Fractious, weak and democratic politics were replaced with strong leadership and plenty of theatre to help unite that sense of a common bond. Thus, in came blackshirts, Roman salutes, banners, -slogans – and militarism.
And Amiragglio Ciano, known as 'Ganascia' – 'the Jaw' – the famous war hero and celebrated in poetry by d'Annunzio, was quick to declare himself for Fascism. The admiral was also there beside Mussolini in October 1922 when the Fascist leader and some 30,000 of his paramilitary squads left their northern strongholds in Milan and the Po Valley and began marching on Rome. Fearing civil war, the King, Vittorio Emanuele III, handed power to Mussolini and his National Fascist Party. Mussolini declared it a -revolution, and the March on Rome became part of the mythologizing of Fascism. At any rate, his dictatorship had begun.
The admiral continued to play a major role in Mussolini's ministry, eventually taking over as President of the Italian Chamber of Deputies in 1934. Being an ennobled war hero in the heart of the new regime brought plenty of riches; the admiral was nothing if not corrupt. At any rate, it was into this world of power and new-found wealth that his son, Galeazzo, emerged. Clever and ambitious, he married Mussolini's daughter, Edda, in 1930 and swiftly rose through the political ranks. After a posting as Consul in Shanghai, he returned to Italy in 1935 to become Minister of Press and Propaganda. This put him at the heart of Mussolini's government, although he left Rome to command a squadron of the Regia Aeronautica – the Royal Air Force – during the Italian invasion of Abyssinia. On his triumphant return he was appointed Foreign Minister. Young, suave, handsome and an aviatore, as well as a known womanizer, he was the very embodiment of Mussolini's new Italy.
A few days after his father's death, however, the new and second Count Ciano was trying to immerse himself in work – as good an antidote as any for grief. His office, the Palazzo Chigi in the heart of Rome, was suitably grand and luxurious, but these were difficult times for the Foreign Minister. Just a couple of months earlier, Mussolini – Il Duce – had concluded a formal alliance with Nazi Germany, known as the 'Pact of Steel'. Together, Italy and Germany were now collectively known as the 'Axis'. The pact had been drawn up almost entirely in Berlin and bound Italy to support Germany in any foreign affairs, including war. During the negotiations, in which Ciano had played a leading part, there had been much discussion about buying time for Italy to properly rearm, but he had been reassured that Germany was planning nothing soon – and certainly not an imminent attack on Poland. Ciano had been reassured and had returned to Berlin on 21 May to sign the following day. He had thought Hitler looked well, although he heard from Frau Goebbels, wife of the Führer's propaganda chief, that she was tiring of their leader's monologues. 'He can be Führer as much as he likes,' Ciano had written in his diary, 'but he always repeats himself and bores his guests.'
At the signing ceremony, senior Nazis had crowded around Ciano and the Italian delegation. Joachim von Ribbentrop, the Foreign Minister, had been given a special Collar of the Annunziata; G?ring, Hitler's deputy and head of the Luftwaffe as well as the leading industrialist in Germany, had looked on enviously. Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, was also there to witness the removal of any threat to Germany's ambition from the south. The following day, Ciano had arrived back in Rome to be greeted by a considerable crowd. 'However, it is clear to me,' he noted later, 'that the pact is more popular in Germany than in Italy.'
Seven weeks on, however, it seemed their German allies were not showing them the kind of respect the Italians had expected. Rather, Germany was flagrantly keeping them in the dark; in fact, the Germans had lied to Italy about their intentions towards Poland. Ciano was greatly disturbed.
Openly, the main bone of contention was the Danzig Corridor, a narrow passageway to around seventy miles of the Baltic coastline and including the port of Danzig. Beyond this to the east lay East Prussia, separated from the rest of Germany. The creation of the Second Republic of Poland had been part of the Versailles Treaty and proposed by President Wilson in one of his Fourteen Points. Poland had been an independent country once before but by the end of the eighteenth century had been partitioned three ways by Prussia, Russia and Austria. In other words, it had been part of these countries and with German and Russian peoples living there for almost as long as the United States had been an independent country.
When these lands had been handed back to the Poles in 1919, there had been further war with the Soviet Union, which they had won, but it was unsurprising that both Russia and Nazi Germany wanted these lands back. The Poles felt they had won a historic new independence, free from the yoke of their neighbours; Russia and Germany felt part of their -respective countries had been unfairly carved up.
In the intervening years, Poland had managed to fuse these territories into a nation state, but, politically, it had become increasingly authori-tarian. A military coup in 1926 was followed by the gradual erosion of parliamentary politics. By 1935, Poland was, to all intents and purposes, a dictatorship. None the less, so long as they toed the political line, most Poles lived freely enough, and while many would have preferred a return to democracy, at least they were independent. The Poles were nothing if not a proud people.
Meanwhile, although non-aggression pacts had been signed with both Germany and the Soviet Union, it was clear Poland was extremely -vulnerable to attack from its antipathetic neighbours. Little, however, was done to build up much by way of defences; defence plans were based on the assumption that its armed forces would not be called upon to fight before 1942. The Army was small and poorly trained. It did have a tank that was superior to both the German Panzer Mk I and II, but had only 140 of these 7TPs and in all just two armoured brigades – that is, around one division. Its Air Force had only about six hundred aircraft of all types and most were inferior to those in the Luftwaffe. It wasn't remotely strong enough to take on Germany; and certainly not the Soviet Union as well.
Germany's claims, while not justified, were certainly understandable; much of Poland had been German in living memory, and there were plenty of Germans still living in Poland who twenty years earlier had been living in territory that had been Prussian, then German, for more than 125 years. Prior to 1919, Poland had not been an independent country since the eighteenth century – in other words, well beyond living memory. Hitler was well aware, however, that the Poles had no intention of handing over any of this new-found independence. Therefore the only alternative was to take it by force.
Neither Britain nor France was particularly bothered about what happened to Poland, but they were concerned that Hitler should not be allowed to keep land-grabbing. After all, where would it stop? All of Europe? The entire world? After they had backed down at Munich the previous October over the Sudetenland, it was clear that the buck now had to stop. They had to stand up to the ambitions of Hitler and his Nazis.
Equally uninterested in the fate of the Poles was Count Ciano. He didn't give a fig about Danzig, but he did care about being drawn into a war for which Italy was clearly not ready. It had not been ready in 1914, and, although it had backed the winning side, the war had been a catastrophe for Italy. Mussolini had since claimed he would create a new Italian empire and one that rivalled Ancient Rome, but the wars of conquest in East Africa had not solved the resources problem. What's more, it was one thing taking on native Africans, as they had done in Abyssinia – and that had been harder than might have been imagined – and another storming into a backward and crumbling Albania, as the Italians had done in April that year; but it was quite a different matter altogether ending up in a full-blown European war against Britain and France. Industrially, economically and materially, Italy could not compete – not unless it had a very huge amount of help from its newest ally.
CHAPTER 2
Diplomacy
PARIS, FRANCE, on the evening of Monday, 31 July 1939. It had been a particularly fine summer in Paris. The street cafés and parks had been as busy as ever, and the usual Bastille Day military parade just a fortnight earlier had been especially splendid. Mounted cavalry, breastplates shining in the sun, troops from Africa, infantry in their finest bright uniforms, and huge new tanks and artillery pieces had all marched down the Champs-élysées in a display of military might and confidence as befitted one of the leading and most powerful nations in the world.
At the austere Chateau de Vincennes in south-east Paris, the head-quarters of the General Staff of the French Armed Forces, instructions for the forthcoming military talks with the Soviet Union had just arrived from their British counterparts. A printed document around an inch thick, it was a dossier that well reflected the unease both Britain and France were feeling about dealing with the Russians and, in particular, their Communist dictator, Joseph Stalin.
Talks with the Soviet Union had begun that April, with both Britain and France expressing their willingness for some kind of pact based on the old entente that had encircled Imperial Germany back in 1914. The trouble was, Russia was very different now. For Western democracies, Communism was as bad as Nazism, while Stalin's purges of the past few years hardly encouraged trust. Foreign observers were stunned to learn, in the summer of 1937, that a large number of senior Red Army officers had been arrested and immediately executed, including Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, a brilliant man who had impressed the British during a visit in 1936. But Tukhachevsky was hardly alone. Three out of five marshals were executed, thirteen out of fifteen Army commanders, fifty out of fifty-seven corps commanders, and 154 out of 186 division commanders. In other words, much of the Red Army leadership had been wiped out, and one of the key figures behind the purge was Vyacheslav Molotov, who, from the beginning of May 1939, was the new Soviet Foreign Minister. While neither the British nor French knew the precise figures of the Red Army purge, they knew enough. These were hardly the kind of people to do business with, and it was one of the reasons why they had chosen to isolate the Soviet Union in recent years.
On the other hand, would Germany be foolish enough to invade Poland if it meant going to war with the Western powers and the Soviet Union? If war could be averted, surely, the British and French persuaded themselves, it would be worth dealing with the Russians?
Yet there had been mutual mistrust from the outset. The Russians were uncertain how honest were Western intentions. Precisely because of the purge, which had left the Red Army greatly weakened, Stalin was concerned about being left alone to face a hostile Nazi Germany on the Soviet borders – the inevitable outcome should Germany invade Poland. On the other hand, Britain and France, democracies both, were politically far removed from Communist Russia. Furthermore, Britain was still a -monarchy. The Russians had executed their own royal family only twenty years earlier. In fact, Stalin seemed to execute rather a lot of people. In France, concerns were not only about the unsavoury nature of Stalin and his henchmen, but also about encouraging the growing support for Communism and fears of Soviet encroachment.
Then there were the Soviet demands. Both Britain and France had agreed to honour Poland's sovereignty, but now Stalin wanted the two Western powers to honour the sovereignty of the Baltic States as well. Another thorny issue as yet unresolved was the Soviet insistence that the Red Army be allowed passage across Poland should the need arise, something the French had repeatedly tried in vain to persuade the Poles to accept.
Back and forth the negotiations went. Britain's heart was not in it – the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, especially, had only been persuaded to enter talks at all by the weight of support to do so from his Cabinet. The French had been more anxious to come to some kind of agreement, but both sides were unable to find the form of terms on which they could agree.
Then suddenly, out of the diplomatic blue on 17 July, Soviet negotiators had demanded military talks, inviting a British and French military -mission to Moscow. Such discussions face to face, the Soviets claimed, were -essential before a political agreement could be agreed. So now, at the beginning of August, it appeared there was still a chance of striking a deal after all.
The British had swiftly drawn up their own proposed set of in-structions for the talks in Moscow, and it was this weighty printed document that had now reached the Chateau de Vincennes. Among those in the French -mission now wading through the British instructions was Capitaine André Beaufre, a thirty-seven-year-old staff officer recently posted to the General Staff from French North Africa. What struck him about the British -dossier was its caution. The British were insisting there should be absolutely no passing on of any secret information, and that the Western allies should bear in mind constantly that German–Soviet collusion was possible. In other words, the Russians were not to be trusted under any circumstances.
In fact, it was all too clear to Beaufre that the prime objective of the British was not signing a treaty with the Soviet Union, but, rather, to spin out negotiations for as long as possible. Nevertheless, he still believed the mission offered a breath of hope; the Russians must, he thought, be serious about coming to some kind of accord. And that was something.
The President of the United States had always loved the sea and had a fascination both with the Navy and with sailing of any kind. Thus it was that he would take himself off on the presidential yacht whenever time allowed, and why, just a month earlier, he had taken his friend Harry Hopkins for a trip down the Patuxent River.
Another man who liked messing about in boats was Feldmarschall Hermann G?ring, and that first weekend of August found him cruising around the Baltic islands in Carin II, his luxury yacht, named after his adored first wife, who had died eight years earlier.
No other leading Nazi enjoyed the opportunities for riches and extravagances as much as he. While Hitler liked things to be big – war-ships, offices, buildings, guns and so on – there was something of the puritan about him; his clothes were drab, he did not smoke or eat meat and nor did he drink. The same could not be said for G?ring, who had had made for him a large array of flamboyant uniforms, had become fat on the excesses of food and fine wine, smoked the best cigars, and not only had a luxury yacht but also a fleet of luxury cars, and houses and estates filled with great works of art, games rooms and even, at Carinhall, his mansion to the north of Berlin, a large model railway over which mechanical aircraft moved on wires. G?ring loved luxury.
Although often portrayed as an overweight figure of ridicule, G?ring was, rather, a highly intelligent and politically astute operator. Charismatic, he was also an arch-Machiavel and had cleverly used a combination of guile, charm and ruthlessness to attain a position of power and authority within the Nazi party that was second only to Hitler himself.
During the First World War, G?ring had transferred from the trenches to the Air Force and had risen to command Jagdgeschwader 1, formerly led by Manfred von Richthofen, the Red Baron. After the war, he had continued flying, barnstorming at air shows and then for a Swedish airline. Making something of a name for himself in Swedish society, he had met the explorer Eric von Rosen, who had in turn introduced G?ring to Carin von Kantzow, who became G?ring's first wife. It was also while staying at von Rosen's country estate that G?ring had spotted the swastika symbol; supposedly it was after seeing this Nordic rune in Sweden that G?ring suggested to Hitler it be adopted as the symbol of the Nazis.
At the time that G?ring met Carin von Kantzow and von Rosen, he had already begun to develop political ambitions, and back in Germany he met Hitler and was instantly captivated by this man and his fledgling political movement. G?ring was by Hitler's side at the Beer Hall Putsch in 1923, when the Nazis attempted to seize power, and was shot in the groin for his trouble. His subsequent long and painful recuperation was aided by copious amounts of morphine, to which he became addicted. It was a habit he had never kicked; among the drug's side-effects are the creation of a sense of euphoria, but it also plays havoc with glands and hormones, prompts outbursts of increased energy and vanity and also delusions, as well as monumental lows. G?ring displayed all these symptoms. It did not stop him, however, from sticking loyally by Hitler's side, or, during his moments of energy, demonstrating a razor-sharp political grasp and vision.
Throughout much of the 1920s and into the 1930s, the Nazis, or the National Socialists as they more formally called themselves, were at best a political irrelevance and at worst a joke. Only after the Crash of 1929 did Hitler and his Nazis start to gain ground, and even then it was slowly. In 1928, the Nazis had gained just 2.5 per cent of the vote; sales of Hitler's memoir-cum-manifesto, Mein Kampf, had fallen so badly his publishers decided to hold back the second volume. In 1931, however, in the wake of the Crash, Britain dropped out of the gold standard, the anchor around which sterling, the world's leading trading currency, had been based. This move turned a bad recession in the international -community into a deep depression. Eleven other countries followed Britain in floating their currencies, but France, Germany and others stayed fixed on gold at their old parity. As sterling and other currencies devalued, so German exporters struggled; and it was on economic growth – industrial exports – that Germany's peaceful and democratic growth and strategy for return to the forefront of world powers had been based.
Germany might well have devalued the Reichsmark, but such a move had its own risks and in any case had too many painful associations with the post-war hyperinflation of 1922–3. The USA also warned against such a move, telling the government it wanted to see Germany not only service its long-term loans but also protect its balance of payments by maintaining existing exchange controls. Thus, Germany found itself stuck to the gold standard but facing the devaluation of many of the currencies in which it gained most of its burgeoning foreign exchange.
The net result was rapidly rising unemployment and a surge in -nationalism. Hitler and his Nazis had been unequivocal: the struggle – the 'Kampf' – was one for food, resources and living space, or Lebensraum. That, Hitler argued, could not be achieved by mutual international -economic interdependence. It could be achieved only by military -conquest. In other words, liberalism did not work.
With the policy of the 1920s now in ruins and the hard times returning, Hitler's vision of nationalism started to gain ground. In the summer -election of 1932, the Nazis won 37.2 per cent of the vote, and although there was no clear majority for any party, General Hindenburg, the German President, resisted the chance to make Hitler Chancellor. The Nazi leader refused any lesser post. This disappointed his supporters, and Hitler's National Socialists actually lost ground in the second election that year, in November, when they got 33 per cent of the vote.
By the start of 1933, there were also just the beginnings of economic recovery, but with politics now fractious and the current Chancellor, General Kurt von Schleicher, holding on to power in a weak coalition, a small group of disaffected right-wing conservatives – including the former Chancellor, Franz von Papen, ousted the previous summer – had then conspired to force Hindenburg to form yet another government, and one that included the Nazis. This meant offering Hitler the Chancellorship, even though the National Socialists' popular vote was down. It was a post Hitler accepted.
In no way, however, was he brought to power by an overwhelming desire by the German people to adopt the Nazis' policies of aggressive re-armament, military conquest, anti-Semitism and anti-Bolshevism. Rather, Hitler's -elevation came about as a result of Germany meeting a series of un-predicted forks in the roads and repeatedly taking the turn that led towards the -emergence and then rise of the Nazis.
And, once Chancellor, Hitler had wasted no time in dismantling -parliamentary democracy. A further election was called in March 1933, and by using strong-arm tactics and bullying the Catholic Centre Party, Hitler got the two-thirds majority he needed, and which then led him to pass the Enabling Law. This allowed his government to rule by decree and so ended parliamentary democracy in Germany. Other parties were banned, and a restriction was placed on the press. Jews and other non-Aryans were excluded first from the arts and then from owning land. The timing had been perfect: in the US, Roosevelt had just taken office and America was suffering a second dip in the depression, while France was equally pre-occupied with its own political turmoil. The rest of the modern world was thus distracted. By the summer of 1934, when Hindenburg died, Hitler became the sole leader of the Third Reich, as Germany had become. He was now not only the Führer of the Nazis but of all Germans.
All through Hitler's early struggles and the Nazi party's long and troubled journey to power, G?ring had never wavered in his loyalty to Hitler and in his dedication to the cause. Furthermore, while Hitler supplied the vision and rhetoric, G?ring had been responsible for much of the apparatus. It was he who created the Schutzstaffel, or SS, initially Hitler's personal bodyguard. G?ring also created the Sicherheitsdienst, the SD, of which the Gestapo, the secret police, was a part. He was also responsible for establish-ing the concentration camps, initially detention centres for political prisoners. He became Speaker of the German Parliament, President of the Reichstag, Prime Minister of Prussia, President of the Prussian State Council, Reich Master of Forestry and Game, and the creator of the new German Air Force, which, under his command in 1935, became the Luftwaffe.
That same year, Hitler had given him control of Germany's synthetic oil and rubber production – a vital role given the Reich's lack of oil – and then, in 1936, he became Special Commissioner for the Four-Year Plan, over and above the Economics Minister, Hjalmar Schacht. His brief was to com-pletely overhaul the German economy, to continue rearmament, oversee the stockpiling of resources, reduce unemployment, improve agricultural production, develop public works and stimulate other areas of production and industry.
This was a gargantuan undertaking and yet by surrounding himself with leading industrialists and bankers and by using his abundant charm, he concluded a number of bilateral deals in Yugoslavia, Sweden, Romania, Turkey, Spain and Finland, enabling Germany to build up resources of vital minerals such as tungsten, oil, nickel and iron ore, all of which were vital for war production. The German economy had been already on the rise before Hitler came to power, but by 1936 it was stable enough to begin a much larger rearmament programme. Early works projects had driven up employment figures, and although Germany remained -dependent on imports, by continuing to drive down consumer spending the Nazis had been able to limit consumer imports, which enabled them to continue to buy in the raw materials needed for rearmament. Hitler had also harnessed German business to his plans for military conquest by banning trade unions and promising a bright future; this meant big companies like Krupp, IG Farben and Siemens were prepared to accept IOUs guaranteed by the Reichsbank, which enabled the process to get started almost as soon as Hitler took power.
G?ring took these measures a stage further with the Four-Year Plan, revolutionizing the German economy even more and running much of the process through his own private cabal of advisors and specialists brought in from his own Prussian Ministry.
There were also plenty of bribes, secret deals and favours granted, but in the process he created a vast industrial empire. Realizing iron and steel production was under-performing, he set up his own iron and steel works, absorbing many smaller companies in the Ruhr Valley, Germany's -industrial heartland, as well as in Austria. His Hermann-G?ring-Werke, or HGW, became one of the biggest conglomerations in Europe; what's more, HGW was never state-or Nazi-owned – rather, it remained G?ring's own private concern. Furthermore, as the master of the Nazi economy, he controlled Germany's entire foreign exchange reserves, while no in-dependent corporation could purchase any imports without his say-so.
G?ring's achievements should not be belittled, even though the Führer's backing made his task unquestionably easier. That Hitler could even contemplate risking war by the summer of 1939 was, to a large extent, thanks to his right-hand man. On the other hand, making a luxury-loving morphine addict and former barnstormer overlord of the Reich's economy was a high-risk strategy to say the very least. But, then again, Hitler was an arch gambler, as the world was about to discover.
G?ring was hardly risk-averse either, although he understood, perhaps better than the Führer, that Germany was still far from ready for all-out war against the world's superpowers. Taking on Poland was one thing; taking on Britain, France and the Soviet Union as well, with the USA -hovering in the background, was quite another. If Poland were to be attacked and the Danzig Corridor forcibly reclaimed, then it had to be done without the risk of drawing those other nations into the conflict.
During that first weekend in August, as he cruised on Carin II, he repeatedly asked his intelligence chief, Beppo Schmid, 'What will the British do?' A few days later, on 7 August, he clandestinely met seven British businessmen at a remote farmhouse on the west coast of Schleswig-Holstein. His friend, Birger Dahlerus, a Swedish businessman who had persuaded G?ring he could mediate with the British on behalf of Germany, had set this up. At the meeting, G?ring warned the British businessmen that Germany might well still negotiate with Russia. Over lunch, he then proposed a toast to peace. The businessmen, sent with the British Foreign Office's backing, returned with an offer for G?ring to meet with Chamberlain. In the days that followed, G?ring and Dahlerus waited for a response. On 12 August, G?ring telephoned his friend to tell him he had ordered Goebbels to go easy on the British in the press.
From the British, however, there remained only stony silence.
In Britain, as July had made way for August, the long, hot summer -continued. Tuesday, 1 August 1939, was a fine, sunny day in southern England, and, in Kent, Edward Spears was visiting his old friend Winston Churchill, at Chartwell, the latter's house near Westerham. Churchill was now a parliamentary colleague on the back benches, but Spears had come to know him during the last war. At the time, in 1915, Spears had been British liaison officer to the French 10e Armée and had accompanied Churchill, the First Lord of the Admiralty, on a tour of inspection; a friendship had been forged. Later in the war, Spears had been promoted and had become a liaison officer between the French Ministry of War and the War Office in London; although his parents were British, he had been born and brought up in Paris and not only spoke faultless French but was unsurprisingly an ardent Francophile – as was Churchill.
After lunch, Churchill took Spears upstairs to the long, bright and sunny room where he worked. From there could be seen sweeping views across the rolling and peaceful Kent countryside. Spears had asked Churchill to read through his new book about the last war, which his friend had done with a few comments, passing on his condolences at Spears having just finished a book on one war when another looked likely to be about to begin.
Churchill was worried about Britain's weakness in the air. Britain had put air power at the centre of its rearmament drive and yet, Churchill thought, the RAF was not strong enough. As it happened, Britain and Germany were virtually neck and neck in terms of aircraft production, at around 8,000 per annum, but Germany had been producing those kinds of figures for longer. At any rate, the Luftwaffe had some 2,000 front-line aircraft ready for action; the RAF had half that. Nor, he added, was the Air Force of the French strong enough – not compared with the German Luftwaffe. Materially, this was not the case; together, Britain and France could muster more planes than the Luftwaffe; operationally and tactically, however, Churchill was nearer the mark.
But both men had great faith in the French Army. Spears, -especially, having spent so much time with the French in the last war, was 'very fond' of their army and shared in the martial pride of the officers he had known and worked alongside. He felt sure the current crop of young officers and men were worthy of their fathers. In a couple of weeks' time, the two men were due to meet again, but this time in Paris as guests of Général Alphonse Georges, Deputy Commander-in-Chief of the French General Staff. Georges had promised them a tour of the Maginot Line and of French defences, something Churchill had been very keen to see for himself.
The conversation moved on to the forthcoming Anglo-French military mission to Russia, about which neither felt confident. Churchill, especially, had no doubt that the Russians would willingly turn the tables on Britain and France should they consider it to their advantage to do so.
In the meantime, they could only hope that a miracle might happen in Moscow. If so, then perhaps, even now, war might be averted.
One person who did not share Churchill's and Spears's unequivocal faith in the French Army was Capitaine André Beaufre. This bright and -perceptive staff officer had been too young to take part in the last war, but had seen action in Morocco in the Rif campaign, where he had been badly wounded and almost died. Recovering, he been sent to the école de Guerre, and then had taken staff jobs at General Staff headquarters as well as posts back in French North Africa. Beaufre was a dynamic young officer and deep thinker – about all military and political matters – and it bothered him greatly that the French armed services, and the Army -especially, seemed to be so instinctively defensive, so bereft of ideas.
Beaufre was among those in the French mission heading for talks in Moscow. The plan was to go to London first, meet the British team, then together sail to Leningrad. None of this suggested a huge amount of urgency. It was diplomacy, and it was all part of their efforts to avert war, but no one in either party appeared to have his heart in the process.
While Feldmarschall G?ring had been cruising in his yacht, Beaufre and the French team under Général Aimé Doumenc (a senior, but not very senior, commander of the French 1st Military Region) arrived in London on the boat train on 4 August. The following day, they travelled to Tilbury Docks on the River Thames and boarded the City of Exeter, an ageing Ellerman Lines ship used for the South Africa run but chartered by the Royal Navy especially for the trip to Leningrad. Crewed entirely by turbaned Indians, the ship was, thought Beaufre, 'a silent witness to the Empire'. With comforts Beaufre thought a little 'passé', the ship had a whiff of faded grandeur that could equally be applied to the joint mission.
Doumenc was the youngest general in the French Army but still sixty. Heading the British team was the fabulously named Admiral The Hon. Sir Reginald Aylmer Ranfurly Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax, aged nearly sixty. Like Doumenc, he was a senior officer but by no means top-drawer. The senior British airman was the ruddy-faced, bushy-eyebrowed Air Vice-Marshal Sir Charles Burnett, who regaled Beaufre with tales from the Boer War. Capable and experienced though the mission undoubtedly was, it was hardly the line-up to dazzle the Russians.
As they steamed up towards the Baltic, there was the chance for the two missions to meet twice daily in what had been the children's playroom and talk shop, and work out an agreed combined text that might be put to the Russians. The rest of the time they continued their leisurely cruise east, and bonded over copious meals of curry and deck tennis tournaments.
Eventually, on 9 August, they reached Leningrad. It was eleven o'clock at night, but the sky was still light with a milky brightness. On the quay, a few scruffy bystanders and some soldiers wearing green caps looked up to the bridge of the City of Exeter to see twenty-six officers in full Mess kit while the Indian crew, equally spick and span, brought the ship in. 'It would be difficult,' noted Beaufre, 'to find a neater picture to sum up the difference between the two worlds which were now to confront one another.'
By the second week of August, the Italians were becoming increasingly worried, and none more so than Count Ciano. With mounting frustration and anger, he had realized they were being duped by their Axis partner over Poland. A few days earlier, Ciano had suggested to Mussolini that he meet mano a mano with von Ribbentrop and try to discover just what on earth was going on. He planned also to pursue Mussolini's latest idea of holding a world peace conference. The last thing Ciano wanted was for Italy to become embroiled in a war at this time. Gold reserves were already reduced to nothing after catastrophically expensive campaigns in Abyssinia, misadventures in the Spanish Civil War, and limited rearmament. Stocks of metals were low, and the military was far from ready. 'If the crisis comes,' noted Ciano, 'we shall fight if only to save our "honour". But we must avoid war.'
And so the Italian Foreign Minister had flown to Salzburg in Austria the previous evening, and from there driven up to the Obersalzberg over-looking Berchtesgaden, where Hitler and so many of the Nazi elite had mountain villas.
The talks proved deeply unsatisfactory. With the Alps looming all around them, Ciano found his German counterpart evasive and the conversation tense. It was clear, though, that Hitler and Germany were set on war. They were, thought Ciano, 'implacable'; von Ribbentrop rejected all Ciano's suggestions for compromise. 'I am certain,' he scribbled later, 'that even if the Germans were given more than they ask for they would attack just the same, because they are possessed by the demon of destruction.' He was becoming horribly aware of how little their German allies valued Italian opinions.
The following day, after a dinner at which an icy chill of distrust had descended, Ciano met Hitler, whom he found every bit as determined to wage war as von Ribbentrop. 'France and England will certainly make extremely theatrical anti-German gestures,' Hitler told him, 'but will not go to war.' The Führer spoke highly of Il Duce but then glazed over and stopped listening the moment Ciano started telling him about the disastrous effect war would have on the Italian people.
Incensed, Ciano flew back to Rome, where he immediately reported to Mussolini at the Palazzo Venezia, recounting what had happened and admitting his disgust with Germany, its leaders and its way of doing things. 'They have betrayed and lied to us,' he said. 'Now they are dragging us into an adventure which we have not wanted and which might compromise the regime and the country as a whole. The Italian people will shudder in horror.' He urged Mussolini to declare that Italy would not fight against Poland and to simply step away from that obligation of the Pact of Steel. At first Mussolini agreed, then changed his mind and said that honour compelled Italy to march with Germany. Ciano left him, aware that he would have to work hard over the ensuing days to turn Il Duce's mind and 'arouse in him every possible anti-German reaction in any way I can'. War alongside Germany, Ciano was convinced, would spell doom for Italy. Somehow, some way, it had to be averted.
CHAPTER 3
Running Out of Time
MONDAY, 14 AUGUST 1939. In a shady corner of a restaurant in the Bois de Boulogne on the edge of Paris, Edward Spears and Winston Churchill were having lunch with the French Deputy Commander-in-Chief, Général Alphonse Georges, and his Aide-de-Camp. It being August, with much of the beau monde having deserted the capital for the holidays, the place was almost empty. It would be Georges's birthday the following day – his sixty-fourth – but despite his advancing years and now almost white and thinning hair, he seemed, Spears thought, as full of energy as ever.
Spears had been in France a week, having driven over with his wife before meeting up with Churchill, conscious this might well be his last chance for a holiday for some time. They had stayed with old friends but Spears had been disturbed by their resentment towards Britain. The shadow of war hung heavy, just as it did in England, but it was clear they felt the British were not pulling their weight and were using France as a shield in the inevitable forthcoming conflict with Germany.
It was a relief, then, to find Général Georges on such good form, -apparently ready to shoulder the burden of responsibility that would in-evitably fall upon him should there be war. As they ate wood straw-berries soaked in white wine, Churchill grilled the general about the French defences and, in particular, the Maginot Line, the series of fortifications that ran along the eastern edge of France, where there was a shared border with Germany. What concerned him was the shoulder of the line, facing the forests and valleys of the Ardennes. Churchill pursed his mouth and gazed at the fruit on the table with a distant expression in his eye, before warning Georges it would be unwise to think the Ardennes was impassable to a modern army. 'Remember,' he said, 'that we are faced with a new weapon, armour in strength, on which the Germans are no doubt con-centrating, and that forests will be particularly tempting to such forces since they will offer concealment from the air.'
Capitaine André Beaufre had reached the Polish capital on the evening of 19 August, and now, the following morning, he was hurrying to the head-quarters of the Polish General Staff and was struck by the apparent lack of concern of the Poles he saw out and about. No sandbags, no trenches being dug – rather, people just ambling about enjoying the August sunshine.
That he was there at all was because talks in Moscow had not gone well. In fact, they could hardly have got off to a worse start when they had met for first discussions on 12 August. The Russian delegation was led by Marshal Kliment Voroshilov, the Commissar for Defence and a more senior commander than either Doumenc or Drax; that he was meeting British and French delegates junior in rank and status felt like a snub.
As they had sat at a round table in the banquet room of the Spiridonovka Palace, Voroshilov had asked whether the French and British missions had written authority to negotiate on all military matters. Doumenc announced that he did, but Drax, shifting awkwardly and breaking out into un-controllable coughing, was forced to admit that he did not; whether it was embarrassment or the thick cigarette smoke that caused the -spluttering was not clear. At any rate, Voroshilov was far from amused. Matters plunged further downhill when Drax confessed the British only had a mere four infantry divisions – around 60,000 men – to contribute to any future -military alliance. For the Soviets, who were well aware that the Germans had nigh on a hundred -divisions, this was a risibly small contribution.
A further and bigger stumbling block, however, had been over the passage of Soviet troops through Poland. On 14 August, Voroshilov had asked point-blank whether they had secured permission from the Poles on this matter before beginning these talks; Doumenc and Drax had been forced to admit they had not. It was for this reason that Beaufre had been put on a train and urgently sent to Warsaw, reaching the Polish capital on the -evening of the 18th. His mission was to find out whether there were any circumstances in which Russian forces would be allowed to pass through Poland.
Reaching the Polish General Staff headquarters, he was ushered in to see General Stachiewicz. 'I understand your point of view perfectly,' the Polish general told him. 'But I ask you also to understand ours. We know the Russians better than you do; they are a dishonest people whose word is not to be relied upon by us or anyone else, and it is quite useless to ask us to even contemplate a proposition of this nature.' Beaufre hung around -another day, but, despite the best efforts of the French embassy staff, the answer remained steadfastly the same: 'With the Germans we risk the loss of our liberty, but with the Russians we lose our soul.'
The next day, Monday, 21 August, Beaufre took a train to Riga, from where he planned to catch a flight to Moscow. It was another beautiful sunny day. On the train were families heading on holiday. From the window he watched bathers splashing in the rivers. All looked so happy, so carefree; Beaufre could feel nothing but deep sadness.
He reached Moscow later that evening, just as a telegram from édouard Daladier, the Prime Minister, reached the French mission instructing them to lie about the Poles' resolute stance. But, by then, it was too late in any case, because that night the British and French mission received a bomb-shell. The Russians, it was reported in Pravda, the Soviet newspaper, were about to sign an altogether different agreement – a non--aggression pact with Nazi Germany.
That very same evening, Monday, 21 August, the German Führer, Adolf Hitler, was holding court at the Berghof, his mountain retreat on the Obersalzberg, in the Bavarian Alps. During supper, the 34-year-old Albert Speer watched as the Führer was handed a note. Reading it swiftly, Hitler stared momentarily into space, flushed, then banged a fist on the table so hard that the glasses shook. Then, with a voice tremulous with excitement, said, 'I have them! I have them!' A few moments later, having regained his control, he continued eating. No one else dared say a word, least of all Speer. A trusted member of Hitler's inner circle, Speer was the Führer's chief architect, responsible for the enormous parade grounds at Nuremberg and also the vast new 146-metre-long Reich Chancellery in the heart of Berlin. He had also drawn up plans to rebuild Berlin which included a three-mile-long grand boulevard and a huge 'Great Hall' over 200 metres high and capable of holding 180,000. Speer, like Hitler, -preferred to think big.
This was one of the Führer's chief attractions as far as Speer was concerned. He assumed that the Führer's ultimate goal was world domination, and Speer could think of nothing better; it was the whole point of his buildings, which, to his mind, would have looked grotesque if Hitler were not to spread the wings of Nazi Germany. 'All I wanted,' he said, 'was for this great man to dominate the globe.'
The next stage in Hitler's planned expansion of territory was finally revealed after supper, when the Führer called his guests together and announced the non-aggression pact with Russia was about to be concluded. Speer was stunned. 'To see the names of Hitler and Stalin linked in friendship,' he noted, 'was the most staggering, the most exciting, turn of events I could have imagined.'
Having left Churchill and Général Georges, Edward Spears and his wife continued their holiday, staying with friends in a chateau in south-west France. Once again, he had found the atmosphere in France heavy with apprehension. His friends felt the world had gone mad. What on earth was that lunatic house-painter Hitler thinking of? And why, if Britain and France were intending to challenge him over Poland, had they not rearmed in line with Germany? That Britain and France together had more tanks, men and artillery pieces, many more ships and only fractionally fewer aircraft would have stunned most of Spears's French friends. These well-educated and intelligent amis were also incredulous that both France and Britain should risk war over Poland. After all, they pointed out, it had been bad enough trying to defend France last time around, so why do so for Poland? That seemed crazy!
Spears's own special prayer was that nothing would happen to spoil his holiday, which he had been looking forward to all year. His prayers, however, were in vain. That morning, 22 August, news of the impending Soviet–German pact was announced around the world. 'This is very bad news, isn't it?' Spears's host had asked. He could only agree that it was. Later that day, word reached him that Parliament had been recalled for a special session two days later. The Spearses would have to abandon their holiday and head back to England just as fast as they could.
Edward Spears and his wife were not the only two people forced to interrupt their holiday. That same day, men throughout Britain and France found themselves being mobilized into service. Bill Cheall, three days shy of his twenty-second birthday and on a camping holiday near Crediton in Devon, heard the news in an announcement on the wireless. All those in the Territorial Army were to report to their headquarters without delay. He had joined the 6th Battalion, The Green Howards, its Territorial battalion, back in April when it had been announced there would be a doubling of the TA force. At the time, Cheall had been -working in the family grocery business in Middlesbrough, but realizing war was most likely just around the corner and that he would be called up at some point, he decided to join up right away, telling himself it was better to enlist on his own terms rather than waiting to be ordered to do so.
Life in the Territorials meant weekly sessions in the drill hall at Lytton Street in Middlesbrough and annual camp near Morecambe Bay earlier in August. Drill, route marches, rifle practice – that made up the bulk of his training. The rest of the time, he continued as before, working in the family business.
The holiday to Devon, however, had been a big adventure. Bill had never been so far south, and he and his mates had driven the long journey down in his cherished Morris Ten. That morning, the sun had shone, larks had sung vibrantly above them and, having been out for a quick dip in the river at the bottom of the field, Bill had called in at the farm to -collect eggs and milk. He'd been lying back on the grass, thinking all was well in the world, when the call to arms had been announced.
Immediately, they set to, taking down the tent, loading the car, and, soon after, speeding on their way back north to Yorkshire.
In Paris, that Tuesday, René de Chambrun had gone to work as normal, to the law office he had set up four years earlier. It being August, the city seemed empty, and that evening, on his way home, he had looked up at the cloudless sky and had felt somehow that the entire city belonged to him.
At his apartment on the Place du Palais Bourbon his wife was waiting for him. His birthday was the following day, and he immediately went into a family council to decide what they should all do to celebrate it. After a short discussion, they agreed he would take the day off and they would all motor to Deauville and have a day by the sea.
Unaware of news of the proposed Soviet–German pact, he had gone to bed happily looking forward to his birthday. Early the following morning, however, there was a knocking at the door. Chambrun hurried down to find two policemen waiting for him.
'Monsieur René de Chambrun?' asked the first, and on receiving a nod in reply drew out a summons from his leather bag informing him that, as a reserve officer, he was to report to his unit immediately.
'This time it means business,' said the second policeman.
A couple of hours later, having dusted down his uniform, packed his bag and bade farewell to his wife and all whom he loved, he was heading for the Gare de l'Est. His birthday trip would have to wait.
Tuesday, 22 August 1939. Hitler invited all his senior generals to a 'tea party' at the Berghof. They were to come in civilian clothes. While every-one wore sombre suits, G?ring took the opportunity to don grey stockings, knickerbockers, white blouse and green leather jerkin, with a heavy gold dagger hanging from his side; he looked as though he'd come to a fancy dress party as Robin Hood. This comical appearance rather belied the fact that G?ring had been at the heart of the diplomatic manoeuvres. With continued silence from Britain to his overtures – -despite repeated and thinly veiled hints of German collusion with the Soviet Union – it had been he who had encouraged von Ribbentrop to contact Stalin; it was a move Hitler had been considering since the spring. G?ring had greeted the news of the subsequent pact as triumphantly as the Führer. He was convinced, like Hitler, that Britain and France would not now interfere.
With his generals before him, Hitler outlined his plans for war with Poland. It was, he told them, better to test German arms now. The situ-ation with the Danzig Corridor had become intolerable; German prestige was at stake, and it was almost certain that the West would not uphold its pledge of war. Of course there was a risk, but it was one he was prepared to take, and with iron resolve. 'We are faced,' he told them, with his usual black or white world-view, 'with the harsh alternatives of striking or of certain -annihilation sooner or later.' The only choice remaining was to invade and to crush Poland. 'Act brutally,' he told them. 'The wholesale -destruction of Poland is the military objective.'
Hitler was never one to use one word when ten would do, and this speech lasted more than two hours. As one of the senior officers summoned to the Berghof, Oberst Walter Warlimont was among those listening with a sinking heart. Warlimont was Acting Chief of Operations at the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, or OKW, the Combined Staff of the Army, Navy and Air Force, and since the spring had been trying to counter Hitler's plans, which he was convinced would plunge Germany into a war that ultimately they could not win. The 44-year-old Warlimont was bright, well-educated and with an incisive intellect, and, unlike most of the German senior staff, had not only studied English in Britain, but had also been to the United States before the Crash to study American methods of -industrial mobilization, an experience that had impressed him deeply. Then, in 1936, he had been sent to Spain as military attaché to General Franco. Combined with his experience as a gunner in the First World War, he was in a unique position at the OKW in having both active military experience and a -realistic world-view.
Needless to say, his attempts, and those of the Operations Staff, to -dissuade Hitler from the course on which he was set had failed dismally. His immediate boss was General Wilhelm Keitel, who was rarely prepared to stand up to Hitler, which was precisely why he'd been appointed. Back in January 1938, Keitel had been described to the Führer as little more than an office manager. 'That's exactly the man I'm looking for,' Hitler had replied. A month later, Hitler had scrapped the War Office, made himself Commander-in-Chief of the Wehrmacht and created the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht instead. This new establishment was the world's first ever combined services operations organization and, on the face of it, a good idea. But Hitler liked to rule by creating rival and parallel organizations; the OKW had never been given any executive power and where it stood in relation to the Army's Oberkommando des Heeres (OKH), for example, was not clear.
Warlimont, as Acting Chief of Operations, had early in the summer drawn up plans demonstrating that Germany could not hope to keep pace with the armaments potential of the Western democracies – which he had witnessed first hand – but Keitel had flatly refused to put this to Hitler. Next, Warlimont and his staff had suggested a series of summer war games in preparation for possible conflict not only with Poland, but also Britain and France. Again, Keitel had demurred. As the summer months had passed, with no word reaching the OKW on just how, when and if an attack on Poland might be launched, Warlimont and his staff found themselves -existing in Berlin in a rather uneasy vacuum. Only as July gave way to August had it become clear that a possible advance into Poland was -imminent and plans stepped up accordingly.
Now, at last, the waiting game appeared to be over. It was clear to Warlimont that the main purpose of Hitler's speech was to convince his generals of the rightness of his decision, and assure them Britain and France would keep out. The Führer's confidence was based on a number of factors, not least his experiences back in March when German troops had marched into Czechoslovakia unopposed. He had been braced then for a more -dramatic response from the Western democracies, and yet he had got away with it. He had been getting away with it for years; not a shot fired as his troops had reclaimed one chunk of territory after another: first the Rhineland, then Austria, then the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia and then the remainder of the country. The rest of the world had stood by and watched; it stood to reason an attack on Poland would be treated in the same way despite the threats, and even more so now a pact had been signed with Stalin.
Because of his staggering lack of geo-political understanding, because he had a rampant ego, and because such was the adulation in which most Germans held him, and the sycophancy of his inner circle, Hitler had begun to believe his 'will' alone made him invincible. And, like most megalo-maniacs, he could rarely, if ever, see any point of view other than his own. To his mind, it made no sense that France and Britain would risk war over Poland. Therefore they would not.
Also listening had been the 33-year-old Hauptmann Gerhard Engel, who was Hitler's Army Adjutant. Engel thought the Führer had seemed calm and objective, but it was clear to him that the generals had not been convinced. 'Grave' was what Engel thought them. 'Not just over Poland,' he scrawled in his diary, 'but what will follow. They are expecting definite consequences with France and Britain.'
The next day, Hitler told his commanders the invasion of Poland would begin on 26 August, in just three days' time. For Warlimont, and all the other service staffs, this was ridiculous – three days! It was no time at all and flew in the face of all accepted military practice. It was one of the many problems thrown up by having a Commander-in-Chief who had promoted himself to the top job from the rank of corporal, and with no military experience or staff training in between.
Later that evening, Wednesday, 23 August 1939, Albert Speer joined the Führer out on the terrace that led from the main drawing room at the Berghof. From the veranda, the view out across the Untersberg was stunning. Curiously, that night the aurora borealis, the Northern Lights, was showing over the Alps. The sky was alive with a dazzling array of -shimmering lights while a shroud of deep red was now cast across the Untersberg and the valley between. Hitler marvelled at the sight, but Speer noticed the same red light bathed their hands and faces, and, as if all minds were now filled with the same thought, the small gathering suddenly became pensive.
Hitler turned to one of his military adjutants. 'Looks like a great deal of blood. This time we won't bring it off without violence.'
He could not have been more right. For all his talk of Britain and France bluffing, the one who was really doing so was Hitler. The carefully orchestrated parades, the even more carefully managed showreels of German troops and tanks and skies thick with aircraft, were, to a very large extent, a projection of military might rather than representative of the reality. Germany was by no means ready for all-out war. It did not have enough tanks, vehicles or trained soldiers, and certainly not enough natural resources, to carry out anything more than a short, sharp campaign against a massively inferior enemy: Germany possessed little iron ore, no oil, no copper, tungsten, bauxite or rubber, and, crucially, did not have enough land, sufficiently farmed, to fulfil the food requirements of both the population and a massive military. Few, if any, nations had access to all the resources needed for war-making, but, unlike Britain and France, Germany's merchant fleet was small and access to global resources was limited.
Meanwhile, for all the concerns of men like Churchill or Général Georges, the disparity in air power was not as great as they feared. In Britain, aircraft production was almost on a par with that of Germany; monthly British output was 662 aircraft, compared with 691 in Germany. France was one of the leading powers in the world and had a sizeable standing army, with the administration and infrastructure in place to mobilize more than a hundred divisions in a matter of days should it come to war.
It was true Britain's army was small by comparison, but it was growing rapidly. Within the Royal Navy and Air Force, rearmament had been going on since 1935, and Britain now had the world's first fully co-ordinated air defence system. It also had the world's largest Navy by some margin and stood at the centre of the biggest global trading network the world had ever seen. It was rich – the richest country in Europe, even after the depression – had the kind of access to resources Germany could only dream of, and it was, and had been for some time, the world's largest armaments exporter. With its Empire and Dominions, it also had access to an unprecedented amount of manpower. In almost every way, Britain was better equipped for a major conflict than Germany.
The gloomy mood in Britain and France that last summer before war was because most knew they were not bluffing Hitler. If Germany invaded Poland, that would mean war; there was to be no more acquiescing to a megalomaniacal despot, who had repeatedly shown he could not be trusted in any way. That was profoundly and deeply depressing. No wonder the mood had been sombre, yet although they would go to war reluctantly, Britain, especially, could do so with a fair degree of confidence.
As Hitler stood on his balcony that night of 23 August, his hands bathed in red, his mind was more determined than ever. Poland would be invaded.
It was to be one of the most catastrophic decisions ever made.
CHAPTER 4
The Point of No Return
'THE DAY IS charged with electricity and full of threats,' noted Count Ciano on 23 August. Since his return from Salzburg, the Duce had been vacillating badly. One minute he was bellicose and all for entering the fray alongside Hitler, the next he appeared persuaded that war would be disastrous for Italy. In truth, much depended on whom the dictator spoke to. If it was Generale Alberto Pariani, the Under-Secretary for War, he was all for fighting; if it was Ciano, or Maresciallo – Marshal – Pietro Badoglio, the Chief of the General Staff, he became more cautious.
That evening, as Hitler had stood on the balcony at the Berghof, Mussolini had had one of his talks with Pariani. The upshot was predictable.
'This evening the Duce is favourable to war,' wrote Ciano. 'He talks of armies and attacks. He received Pariani who gave him good news of the condition of the army. Pariani is a traitor and a liar.'
It was a curious feature of Mussolini's dictatorship that he was never quite as powerful as he would have liked, and certainly with none of the absolute power of his Axis colleague, Hitler. Despite seventeen years of Fascism, Italy was still a monarchy, and ultimate authority belonged to the King, Vittorio Emanuele III, and to the senior generals of the Regio Esercito, the Royal Army. Collectively, these men were quite powerful enough to have thrown out both Mussolini and Fascism at any time should they have chosen to do so.
So it was fortunate for Ciano that the following day, 24 August, he had the opportunity to speak with the King, who, he knew, was both hostile to the Germans and vehemently opposed to war. The King was staying at Sant'Anna di Valdieri, an Alpine resort in Piedmont on the French border, so yet again Ciano left Rome and headed north for this latest audience.
The diminutive King Vittorio Emanuele, who had acceded to his throne in 1900 and presided over Italy's disastrous involvement in the last war, could not have been more withering about the state of the armed forces, and the Army in particular. The officers, he told Ciano, were not fit for purpose, their weapons old and obsolete, and during his thirty-two recent inspections of various units and border defences he was appalled by the sad state of preparedness. If the French chose to march into Italy, he was convinced they could at any time. What's more, the Italian 'peasants' all curse the 'damn Germans'. 'We must, therefore, in his opinion,' noted Ciano, 'await events and do nothing.'
Meanwhile Neville Henderson, the British Ambassador, had visited Hitler at the Berghof and handed him a letter from Neville Chamberlain. 'No greater mistake could be made,' Chamberlain warned, if Germany believed the German–Soviet pact made any difference to Britain's obligation to Poland. But he also stated that in his mind, 'war between our two peoples would be the greatest calamity that could occur'. It was not too late, he wrote, to resolve the issues between Germany and Poland by negotiation, not force.
But of course it was too late. Hitler had made up his mind. The die had been cast, his Rubicon crossed.
The Führer was in a highly charged mood – a dangerous blend of high excitement, nerves and resolve. He was, he had told his generals, now fifty. An assassin might claim him at any time. Only he had the strength of will to lead Germany to victory. The attack on Poland had to be now, while he was fit and alive and well. He was convincing himself of the rightness of his course as much as the generals.
No letter from Chamberlain was going to make him change his mind, but Britain's continued pressure and insistence on honouring its pledge to Poland was making him seethe. He berated Henderson, partly because of his own heightened mood and partly because giving verbal tongue-lashings had always been a tried-and-tested means of getting what he wanted. His aim was to browbeat Henderson and the British into backing down. Britain's aggressive stance, he told the Ambassador, was making negotiation impossible. Germany had continually offered friendship and that offer had been thrown back in Germany's face – forcing it to seek an alliance with Russia. The British Government, he told him, preferred anything to co-operation with Germany; if war came, it would be a life-and-death struggle, and Britain would have more to lose.
What Hitler simply could not understand was that both Britain and France found him and his regime utterly repellent. The vast majority of British people viewed totalitarianism as repugnant, and while the British Union of Fascists had gained a certain amount of ground during the 1930s, it had remained a minority movement. Certainly, the instruments of the Nazis – the SS, the secret police, the sinister storm troopers and swastikas – chilled most British people to the core. Then there was Nazi anti-Semitism. Many in Britain and even more in France had a wariness of Judaism, but persecuting a particular religious group was not considered the action of civilized people. Furthermore, the violence towards and ostracization of Jews in the Third Reich had truly shocked many British citizens. 'Kristallnacht', as the pogrom of the night of 9–10 November 1938 had come to be known, had appalled people throughout the free world. 'No foreign propagandist bent upon blackening Germany before the world,' noted The Times of London on 11 November 1938, 'could outdo the tale of burnings and beatings, of blackguardly assaults on defenceless and innocent people, which disgraced that country yesterday.'
All these factors combined to make it very hard for Britain – and France – to cosy up to Germany in any way. Nevertheless, however, Britain was not standing up to Hitler now to defend the Jews; rather, it was doing so because it feared that Hitler had designs not just on the German-speaking corners of Europe, but the entire world. Where would his ambitions end if not checked now? Defending Poland was about maintaining the balance of power.
By the 24th, Hitler and his entourage were back in Berlin, at the Reich Chancellery built by Speer the previous year. Also there, returned from Moscow, was von Ribbentrop, who now revealed that a secret part of the pact had been that the Red Army invade Poland from the east a short time after Germany's attack from the west. Poland was to be divided. This news stunned G?ring. He was beginning to feel increasingly on edge. It was essential, he firmly believed, to keep Britain categorically out of the war and he had finally by now made direct contact with the British Secret Service; it seemed a meeting with Chamberlain might happen after all. At this point, however, Hitler refused to let him go. Later that day, he saw his Swedish friend, Birger Dahlerus, who was now talking about arranging a four-power conference between Britain, France, Germany and Italy. G?ring asked Dahlerus to let Chamberlain know about this latest revelation concerning the German–Soviet pact.
On the 25th, Hitler made an offer to Britain, repeated by G?ring through Dahlerus. If Britain kept out of Germany's squabble with Poland, then the Reich would be prepared to enter an agreement in which it would safeguard the British Empire and even guarantee German assistance should it be required. This Hitler told Henderson in person at the Reich Chancellery at 1.30 p.m. At 3.02 p.m., he ordered Case WHITE, the invasion of Poland, to begin at dawn the following morning.
The 'offer' was clearly no more than a simple bribe, a carrot dangled to encourage Britain to take a step back. Hitler remained convinced, outwardly at any rate, that Britain was still bluffing. This was where his lack of geo-political understanding, his myopic world-view, skewed his judgement. The point had been reached where neither Britain nor France could possibly stand by if Germany invaded Poland; to do so would be to abandon all political and moral authority, not just in Europe but in the world. They could not allow such a loss of influence and prestige.
That same day, Friday, 25 August, almost as soon as the order for Case WHITE had been issued, G?ring received intelligence that suggested the attempt to cow the British had failed. As well as his many state offices, command of the Luftwaffe and control of the HG Works, G?ring also had his own private intelligence service, the Forschungsamt. This was an extensive and highly efficient monitoring service of radio, wireless and telephone communications, involving deciphering as well as phone-tapping. Among those regularly being deciphered and tapped were Dahlerus, Neville Henderson, Monsieur Coulondre, the French Ambassador, and Attolico, the Italian Ambassador. Traffic from Ciano's Palazzo Chigi was also regularly being intercepted.
Incredibly, Hitler both was aware of its existence and did nothing to make G?ring hand over control to the SS or the Abwehr, the Wehrmacht's secret intelligence service, or any other Nazi apparatus. As a consequence, G?ring was not only able to keep one step ahead of many of his rivals within the party, but also to control vital intelligence that he could then pass on to the Führer. Thus it was that his Forschungsamt heard Neville Henderson telephone London saying the German offer was nothing more than an attempt to drive a wedge between Britain and Poland, when earlier, to Hitler, he had told the Führer he thought it would be worth him flying personally to London to present the proposal to the British government. In other words, to Hitler, Henderson had hinted there might be some ground for manoeuvre, whereas on the telephone he had made it clear he thought the opposite.
Then, at 5 p.m., the Forschungsamt detected Count Ciano dictating a formal note warning that Italy would not fight. Half an hour later, the French Ambassador delivered a message to Hitler insisting on France's determination to fight for Poland. Half an hour after that, at 6 p.m., the British announced they had ratified their alliance with Poland.
At this, even Hitler briefly lost his nerve. The invasion was still due to begin the following morning, but the Führer now telephoned Keitel and ordered him to stop everything.
'Is this just temporary?' G?ring asked Hitler.
'Yes,' he replied. 'Just for four or five days until we can eliminate British intervention.'
'Do you think four or five days will make any difference?' G?ring responded.
Friday, 25 August, had been a fraught day for Ciano. In the morning, he had been warned that Il Duce was still in a furiously warlike mood and indeed this was how he found him on his arrival at the Palazzo Venezia. With the King's opinions to help him, Ciano gradually talked Mussolini out of his latest belligerent stance and suggested he send Hitler a communiqué announc-ing Italian non-intervention until Italy was better prepared for war.
With this agreed, Ciano left happy that he had at last got his way. However, no sooner had he reached his office at the Palazzo Chigi, some six hundred metres away down the Via Corso, than Mussolini called him back, having yet again changed his mind. 'He fears the bitter judgement of the Germans,' Ciano scrawled wearily, 'and wants to intervene at once. It is useless to struggle.'
At 2 p.m., a message for Mussolini from Hitler arrived, hinting at imminent action against Poland and asking for Italian 'understanding'. Ciano then used this latter phrase as a pretext to persuade Mussolini to reply stating categorically that Italy was not ready for war. It was this that was picked up as it had been written by the Forschungsamt.
This news and the subsequent formal communiqué from Mussolini had taken some of the puff out of Hitler's sails, and Hauptmann Engel thought the Führer seemed suddenly totally downcast and at a loss as to what to do, even though this did nothing to divert him from the course on which he was set. He did not blame Mussolini, but rather what he believed to be the Anglophile Italian aristocracy, and not least upper-crust playboys like Ciano. The implication was clear, though, and Mussolini would have wept with shame to hear it: a proper dictator would have thrown out the King and silenced any dissenting voices.
Hitler's response was to ask Italy for a shopping list of what they needed in order to come into the war. This reached Rome by 9.30 p.m.
The Germans were given this list the following day, and it included more than 18,000 tons of coal, steel, oil, nickel, tungsten and other raw materials, all of which were vital ingredients of modern war and none of which Italy could produce itself. As Ciano admitted with thinly disguised glee, this gargantuan figure would require no fewer than 17,000 train -carriages to ship them.
The ploy worked exactly as Ciano had hoped. The Germans, in reply, offered a fraction of the material asked. They understood the Italian -position and released them from their obligation to fight by their side. For the time being, at any rate, Italy could keep out of the war that was about to erupt. It was a blow for Mussolini's damaged pride, but as far as Ciano was concerned, Italy had been saved from tragedy.
In some ways it is odd that Hitler should have been so alarmed by Italy's stance. Italy was clearly not ready for war and unquestionably would have been more of a hindrance than a help. Perhaps, though, he liked the idea of standing shoulder to shoulder rather than Germany going it alone; perhaps, too, the sheer scale of the Italian demands both shocked and alarmed him. The German High Command had known Italy was militarily weak, but perhaps not quite as weak as was the reality. On the other hand, the Germans had hardly behaved like allies in recent months; rather, they had played a game of smoke and mirrors, flagrantly lying and pulling the wool over Italy's eyes, and showing scant regard or respect for their Axis partner. It hardly augured well for the future.
Oberst Warlimont had been hugely relieved to learn that Case WHITE had been called off, although on being summoned by Keitel to the Reich Chancellery the following day, 26 August, he was told not to start celebrating; the invasion had not been cancelled, just delayed. Although this meant there would still be war, at least it gave the Wehrmacht a bit more time to mobilize.
Two days later, Henderson returned to Berlin with Britain's formal -response to Hitler's offer, which he handed to the Führer at 10.30 p.m. that night, Monday, 28 August. The letter expressed the desire to 'make friendship' and a 'lasting understanding' with Germany, although it insisted a settlement be reached with Poland first. The Poles, wrote the British, had expressed a willingness to open negotiations. In turn, on the 29th, Hitler accepted the suggestion and proposed that a Polish negotiator be sent the next day, 30 August.
No Polish emissary arrived that day, however. Instead, German proposals for these possible talks grew increasingly demanding, while von Ribbentrop in his conversations with Henderson became more heated. The Poles, meanwhile, promised a reply by noon on the 31st.
By this time, it was too late; in fact, Hitler had never intended anything other than a delay. He had always been a gambler and had made his mind up days before. His course had been set; there could be no deviation. Invading Poland was a gamble he was going to take, whether Britain and France declared war or not.
At 12.40 p.m. on Thursday, 31 August, Hitler issued his 'Directive No. 1 for the Conduct of War'. Case WHITE, the German plan for the -invasion of Poland, was to begin at dawn the following day, Friday, 1 September 1939.
Propaganda had been a key component of Nazi politics from the outset, and while there were some who had not been persuaded, it had unquestionably been hugely effective, not just within the Reich but around the world too. To a large degree, this was due to Dr Josef Goebbels, the Reich Minister for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda, and Gauleiter – administrative leader, an old Frankish term that had been resurrected by the Nazis – of Berlin. A former failed journalist and one of the first Nazis, he was utterly devoted to Hitler, so much so he had even given up an affair with a Czech film star with whom he was deeply in love because the Führer asked him to. The son of a shop assistant, Goebbels was highly intelligent and despite those humble beginnings had attended several universities and gained a doctorate. Marriage to Magda Quant, a society divorcee, gave him the kind of money and status he needed to help him climb up the Nazi ladder. He had become Propaganda Minister in 1933, the year Hitler became Chancellor, and had immediately announced that his prime goal was to achieve the 'mobilisation of mind and spirit' of the German people. 'We did not lose the war because our artillery gave out,' he said of defeat in 1918, 'but because the weapons of our minds did not fire.'
In many ways, Goebbels was as responsible for Hitler's position as Hitler was himself. It was Goebbels who had largely shaped the Nazis' public image. It was he who had insisted on draping swastikas – the bigger the better – from as many places as possible; it was he who taught Hitler how to whip a crowd into a frenzy; it was also Goebbels who had elevated Hitler into a demigod in the eyes of many. He knew all about manipu-lation theories and orchestrated heavy-handed mob violence, and in the 1933 election created the 'Hitler over Germany' campaign; it was the first time aircraft had been used to take a candidate around a country in an effort to reach more people. It worked spectacularly well.
With the Nazis in power, Goebbels had also done much to whip up the virulent anti-Semitism that lay at the heart of Nazi ideology and had helped turn Nazism into a form of surrogate religion, in which harking back to a 'purer' Aryan past worked to bind the people both together and behind the party and, more importantly, the leader. Goebbels's influence – his genius – should never be underestimated.
Yet despite his position, and despite the job title, Goebbels did not have complete control over propaganda. Hitler's divide-and-rule style of leadership was to encourage jealousy and back-stabbing among his acolytes, so von Ribbentrop's office was given foreign propaganda and the OKW any military reporting. Further muddying the waters was Otto Dietrich, the Reich Press Chief, and although on paper subordinate to Goebbels, he was still part of Hitler's inner circle.
Even so, Goebbels was the top dog despite these checks on his power and had masterminded a cunning way of getting the prescribed message across. Key to this was repetition and radio. There were many inno-vations of the 1930s in which Germany lagged behind other leading countries in the world, but the embracing of radio sets was not one of them. Goebbels had realized that radio was the ideal way to get his message across and so was instrumental in making sure radio sets were both cheap and accessible. First up into the mass market was the Volksempf?nger – the 'People's Receiver'. Using the word 'Volk' was another Nazi trick, which suggested togetherness rather than exclusivity. This was later followed by the DKE, or Deutsche Kleinempf?nger, the 'German Little Receiver', which, as its name implied, was both pioneeringly small and also affordable. The net result was that by 1939 almost 70 per cent of the population owned radios. For those remaining 30 per cent still without one, however, there were -communal listening points: in cafés, bars, restaurants, the stairwells of blocks of flats, the corners of town squares with accompanying loud speakers. Radio coverage in Germany was more dense than anywhere else in the world. Finally, to really ram home the message, there were radio wardens to coax people into listening to key speeches and programmes, all of which were mixed in between unceasing light music, martial marches, Wagner and popular entertainment. 'Radio must reach all,' claimed Hans Fritzsche, the Nazis' chief radio commentator, 'or it will reach none.'
Alongside radio, there were news films shown at every cinema and movies that equally promoted Nazi ideology: Jews were played as villainous, duplicitous and money-grabbing, the heroes were tall, broad, blond and fulfilling the Aryan ideal. There were documentaries too, like Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will, about the 1934 Nazi rally at Nuremberg. Cinema goers had grown massively through the 1930s, from 250,000 in 1933 to three times that number by 1939.
Finally, there were state-controlled newspapers. Every city had one and there were national ones too, not least the principal party mouthpiece, the V?lkischer Beobachter, the 'People's Observer'. One of Goebbels's key instructions to journalists was to make the writing more readable, more conversational and less dry. Again, it was a policy that worked a treat: the V?lkischer Beobachter had climbed from a circulation of 116,000 in 1932, to almost a million by 1939. In little more than a year's time it would become the first newspaper in Germany to pass a daily circulation of over a million.
The result was that very few in Nazi Germany could avoid hearing the oft-repeated propaganda put about by Goebbels and his carefully orchestrated team at the Propaganda Ministry.
In the run-up to the launch of Case WHITE, this was broadly very effective. Most people believed what was being put across both on radio and in the state-controlled press, namely that the Poles were committing all kinds of atrocities on former Prussians living in Poland, that they were war-mongering and using threatening language, and that not only was the Danzig Corridor rightfully part of Germany, but it was the duty of the Reich to defend those subjects living there.
Heinz Knocke, eighteen years old, was from Hameln in central Germany and typical of many of his age. He had absolute faith in the Führer and the rightness of the German cause. Wanting to join the Luftwaffe as a pilot, he had had his preliminary examinations and was eager that with war imminent his call-up would be accelerated. 'The Polish atrocities against the German minority make horrible reading today,' he scribbled in his diary on 31 August. 'Thousands are being massacred daily in territory which had once been part of Germany.' It was absolute nonsense.
Oberleutnant Hajo Herrmann, a 24-year-old pilot with the bomber group III/KG4, also thought the Poles had brought war upon themselves. As far as he was concerned, the Danzig issue was one of principle. It had been German before 1919, was still inhabited mostly by Germans, and since the Poles had rejected any peaceful solution, what did they expect? 'The anger that I felt inside at their unreasonableness,' he noted, 'matched my sacred conviction: that of German rightness.' Others, like another eighteen-year-old, Martin P?ppel, a young Gefreiter in 1. Fallschirmj?gerregiment, were simply hugely excited at the sudden turn of events. A paratrooper in the Luftwaffe, he was less worried about the rights of Germans in Danzig and more concerned about seeing some action before it was all over.
Such was the callowness of youth, but there were many who did not share this bravado. 'September 1, 1939, was no day of jubilation for us,' said Oberleutnant zur See Erich Topp, then a 26-year-old First Watch Officer (1WO) on the U-boat U-46. 'We were aware of our weaknesses from the beginning, notably in the Navy. Everyone knew it would be a long war.'
For Oberleutnant Hans von Luck, an officer in 7. Armoured Reconnaissance Regiment, the escalating situation had brought a sudden recall from leave just a few days earlier. He had found everyone at the garrison in Bad Kissingen near Schweinfurt in high spirits. Neither he nor his friends believed a word of Goebbels's propaganda about the Poles, but they did believe Danzig and the corridor should be part of Germany once more. 'We were not hungry for war,' von Luck noted, 'but we did not believe the British and French would come to Poland's defence.' How wrong he was.
CHAPTER 5
War Declared
IN ENGLAND, it had been a gloriously hot last week of August, and the first day of September had been every bit as lovely. At Hove, on the south coast, it was the Friday of the Brighton and Hove cricket week, and the Sussex team were playing host to Yorkshire, already crowned county -champions for a record-breaking seventh time that decade.
The match was also a benefit game for Jim Parks, a stalwart of the Sussex side and an England player too, and while other games around the country had already been cancelled because of the imminent outbreak of war, the fact that it was a cricket festival week and a benefit match en-couraged both sides to keep playing and finish off the three-day game. The tension in the air that day was palpable. Some felt they shouldn't really be playing sport at a time like this, and yet alongside that was a very keen sense that this could be the last match for a very long time. Sussex reached 387 in their first innings, and Yorkshire 393, when, after lunch on that Friday, the hosts began batting again. There had been a thunderstorm on the Wednesday night, but now the sun was blazing hot, baking the wicket in what were ideal conditions for spin bowling.
Hedley Verity had proved the finest spin bowler of the past decade, -playing for both Yorkshire and England and taking vast numbers of -wickets. He'd twice achieved the feat of claiming all ten wickets in an innings and had taken nine seven times – an unequalled record. Still only thirty-four, he could have had a long career yet ahead of him. For the time being, however, it seemed as though it would most likely be put on hold. Not, though, before he had bowled out Sussex in their second innings.
That afternoon, as German soldiers pushed into Poland and the Luftwaffe screamed overhead, amidst the genteel calm of the Sussex county ground at Hove, Verity took seven wickets for nine runs as the hosts were bowled out for just thirty-three. Not long after, Yorkshire cantered home to an emphatic victory. If it was to be Verity's last match for a while, those were exceptional bowling figures on which to end.
Straight after the match, the Yorkshire players headed back north in the team coach, no one much mentioning the cricket, even though it had been a fine match. Outside London, they saw streams of vehicles filled with people and possessions evacuating the capital. A blackout was now in force, and so they halted for the night at Leicester. If it was war – and with the news of the invasion of Poland, it would be any moment – most of the country's cricketers would be expected to play their part; sporting heroes would not be exempt. Verity knew this but had decided to enlist anyway; he'd been thinking about it for almost a year ever since the Munich crisis and had not only spoken to Lieutenant-Colonel Arnold Shaw of The Green Howards, a local Yorkshire infantry regiment, but had also spent con-siderable time reading military textbooks. For Verity, it was simple. Hitler and Nazism were evil, Britain was under threat, and it was his duty to play his part.
In France that same day, mobilization continued. By law, every Frenchman, or naturalized Frenchman, was obliged to serve in the Army, Navy or Air Force unless he was unfit to do so, and that included those living in French colonies. Originally after the last war, Frenchmen were required to do their 'Colour Service' for just one year. This was the annual con-script class, normally called up in October, for all 21-year-olds. Back in 1935, as the effects on childbirth of the First World War started to take effect, this was raised to eighteen months. The following year, 1936, it had been raised to two years, and still numbers were down.
Once a conscript had seen out his Colour Service, he was then con-sidered en disponibilité for a further three years. The idea was that in peacetime, all units, regiments and divisions would operate at around a third of their strength. If hostilities broke out the numbers en disponibilité would then be immediately called up and would bring the active armed services up to war strength. After this period of service, a Frenchman would be in the 1st Reserve for a further sixteen years. Finally, there would be a final period of seven years when they would be on the 2nd Reserve. In theory, most people would only expect to do their service in the Colours. Provided peace held, those en disponibilité or in the 1st and 2nd Reserves would not expect to have to put on their uniforms again, and even in a time of crisis it might well be the case that only those reserves who had most recently served would be called up.
These were not ordinary times, however, and now all reserve officers and those en disponibilité had been called up, which was why men like René de Chambrun had been hastily brought back into active service with immediate effect and not even the chance to enjoy a birthday outing. By 1 September, Chambrun was a captain once more and a company commander in 162e Régiment d'Infanterie based at Amanvillers, near the border city of Metz in Lorraine and right on the Maginot Line. When he had reached the village, large groups of men had been arriving, mostly in civilian clothes, some on bicycles, others on foot. On arrival, each had been issued with a uniform and no fewer than 142 items, from ammu-nition pouches to steel helmets. Chambrun had seen one man, newly equipped and dressed, leaning sadly on a farmhouse door. In a voice choking with grief, he had explained that his wife of five years had been killed the day before in a threshing machine accident and that, now called up, he'd had to leave his three-year-old daughter with friends in his -village – which was worryingly close to the German border. The French General Mobilization, however, made no exceptions; this man would have to do his duty, grief-stricken or not.
At Amanvillers the following day, René de Chambrun had attended Mass in a field next to the small village church. The priest, now wearing the uniform of a corporal, told the assembled officers and men, 'Remember – many things are more painful to bear than war. Slavery is one of them, and, with the help of God, let us fight so this soil will remain French forever.' Chambrun had followed his eyes to the horizon, where the menacing turrets of the Maginot Line thrust upwards out of the ground.
Barely had German troops crossed into Poland than embassies in Warsaw and Berlin began furiously transmitting communiqués to their respective governments. In Britain, the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, called his cabinet together at 11.30 a.m. The previous day, the Italians had made one more final attempt to resolve the situation by calling for a world peace conference, but it was too late, and the British rejected the overture.
So, what had been threatened all summer had finally occurred; attempts to deter Hitler had failed. 'The events against which we had fought so long and so earnestly have come upon us,' Chamberlain told his colleagues, 'but our consciences are clear and there should be no possible question now where our duty lies.' Had Chamberlain looked deep into his heart, perhaps his conscience about British abandonment of the Czechs might have been a little less clear. However, be that as it may, he was right on one point: Britain had to declare war on Germany. It was agreed a final warning would be issued to Germany to withdraw immediately, and they would also have to work out procedural details with the French, but Chamberlain's mind was clear.
The House of Commons met at 6 p.m. that evening. The moral agony of the Prime Minister was all too evident; there was no doubting he had, for the past year, acted in the hope of avoiding war, regardless of whether his judgement had been correct. But he insisted there could be no peace in Europe while Hitler and the Nazis remained in power, and in this he was unquestionably correct.
There was still no announcement, however, about just when Britain would declare war. Since the warning to Germany to withdraw immediately was sent that evening, it would presumably be the following day on the assumption that Germany would ignore the threat. It became clear that evening, however, that France was wobbling. The French had not rejected the Italians' offer of a peace conference outright, and Georges Bonnet, the French Foreign Minister, now called Lord Halifax, his British counterpart, to say that constitutionally they could not declare war until Parliament had met and that would not be until the evening of Saturday the 2nd, although general mobilization had been ordered. It was Général Maurice Gamelin, Chief of the General Staff, who was most nervous; he worried that German bombing might hamper mobilization and that France needed a little longer to get ready.
While the French were playing for time rather than dodging their commitments, Chamberlain and Halifax faced revolt from both the Cabinet and the House of Commons when it met late the following day, Saturday, 2 September. The Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary had been delaying only to keep a united front with the French and to give Germany a chance to withdraw – any chance of peace, however slim, was, to their mind, worth pursuing. But their colleagues did not see it that way. Edward Spears was far from alone in feeling increasingly incensed by the delay.
'Speak for England!' shouted the Conservative Leo Amery. And the Labour MP Arthur Greenwood did so, urging the Prime Minister to be decisive, to save Britain's honour. 'The moment we look like weakening,' he said, 'the dictators would know we were beaten.' Chamberlain, horrified by the hostility he had met, feared the Government might fall. The Cabinet met again at 11.30 p.m. that night. Outside, a violent thunderstorm raged. A shaken Prime Minister now accepted that, as Greenwood had urged, decisive action was needed, regardless of the French stance. It was agreed that an ultimatum would be presented to Berlin at 9 a.m. the following morning, which would expire two hours later.
Later that evening, Gwladys Cox, her husband, Ralph, and their cat, Bobby, arrived back at their flat on the top floor of Lymington Mansions in West Hampstead. For a couple of days, they had gone to Guildford to stay with Gwladys's sister, Ruth. Like many others in London, they had decided to evacuate, fearing gas attacks and other horrors. It was the threat of gas attacks that particularly troubled Gwladys – Ralph suffered badly from asthma and during the numerous Air Raid Precaution trials in August, he had been unable to cope with wearing their newly issued gas masks.
After two days in Guildford, however, they decided to return; they had been wracked by indecision ever since they had left – or, rather, abandoned – their home. They had only moved into their flat a year before and had been delighted with it. On the top floor, it had come equipped with electric plugs, a shower in the bathroom and an Ascot heater in the kitchen, so that hot water was both constant and plentiful. It had a south-facing view that caught the sun and had lovely views of London, so that they could easily see St Paul's Cathedral, Big Ben and other landmarks. In Guildford they were miserable; no matter what lay ahead, it was better to face the future from their own home with their own things.
Almost 1.5 million were leaving Britain's cities – a massed evacuation that had begun on 1 September. Although most taxis and cars were being used, the Coxes managed to find a car and driver, and reached West Hampstead at sunset. 'I shall never forget my first sight of the barrage balloons,' scribbled Gwladys in her diary. 'Hundreds of them dotted the sky and glittered silvery pink in the setting sun.'
That night, as darkness fell and once more back in Lymington Mansions, they put up the blackout curtains for real for the first time; then, before going to bed, she switched off the light and looked over London. 'The sky was heavy with dark clouds,' she noted, 'and countless searchlights combed the heavens.' As though anticipating what was to come, the weather had then dramatically turned. Gwladys was woken in the morning to the sound of thunder. Sheet lightning flashed across the sky. She noticed all the barrage balloons, suspended high above London to prevent low-flying enemy aircraft, had gone.
Sunday, 3 September, dawned, warm and sunny. At 9 a.m., the ultimatum was issued. Two hours later there had been no response from Berlin, and Chamberlain wearily announced to the nation, after a quarter of an hour, that Britain was at war with Germany. Those at church were told by priests at the conclusion of the morning service. Later that afternoon, the French finally followed suit. Around the world, the governments of Canada, Australia and New Zealand, all British Dominions, also declared war. Two days later, so too would South Africa.
It had come to pass.
That morning, Edward Spears had joined a meeting of the Eden Group, an informal gathering of Conservative anti-appeasers led by the former Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden. They met at a house in Queen Anne's Gate, near St James's Park. Sunlight poured in through the drawing room -windows. Spears looked out at the blue sky and the trees of St James's Park, wishing not to miss a moment of sunshine or colour.
The assembled group had not only been discussing the inevitable outbreak of war, but also the news that Churchill was to be brought back into the Cabinet. Spears was relieved, as they all were; Churchill would be resolute in his determination to stand up to Germany, and it was essential he was in the Cabinet. Spears, for one, believed he might well become Prime Minister. If he were to lead the country through this war, he needed to be at the centre of the Government now.
Not far away, Churchill and his wife, Clementine, had listened to Chamberlain's broadcast then heard the wail of an air raid siren droning out over London. Hurrying up to the flat roof of the house, they looked out to see what was going on. Slowly rising above the roofs and spires of London were as many as forty silvery barrage balloons. There was no sign of the enemy, but aware of the prescribed air raid drill, the Churchills grabbed a bottle of brandy then hurried to the nearest shelter.
In an empty lecture hall of the London School of Economics, the 24-year-old Jock Colville heard the news with a sense of numbness, from which he was only awakened when he heard the same air raid drone. Colville was a young member of the Foreign Office who, that morning, had discovered he had been reassigned to the brand-new Ministry of Economic Warfare, which was being established in empty rooms at the LSE. A Cambridge graduate, he had travelled widely through Russia, Asia, Turkey and Europe after leaving university, learning German and French in the process. After attempting a career in the City, he decided it wasn't for him and so had sat exams for the Foreign Office. To his surprise and delight, he got in. He had not looked back.
Now, though, with the siren blaring, it seemed likely that aerial apocalypse was about to arrive, so he hurried to the nearest shelter with several of his colleagues and played bridge until the all-clear sounded. They were back at their desks by lunchtime, but with nothing to do and with no bombs falling after all, he decided to head home, reflecting that Britain seemed hardly ready for Armageddon.
Churchill, meanwhile, had hurried to the House of Commons, where MPs were due to meet at noon. Listening to Chamberlain's statement on the declaration of war, Churchill suddenly felt a serenity of mind descend over him, then a sense of uplifted excitement that Britain was at last standing firm. Afterwards, the Prime Minister asked to see him. Not only did he want to offer him a place in the War Cabinet, but also the post of First Lord of the Admiralty. It was the position Churchill had held twenty-five years earlier when Britain had last gone to war.
In Britain, uncertainty filled the air. Mobilization was in full swing, over 1.5 million children were still being evacuated from Britain's cities, and yet, despite the air raid siren sounding only twenty minutes after the declaration of war, the aerial onslaught that many had predicted and feared had not yet materialized; on the face of it, peacetime and wartime Britain did not seem so very different. Reaching home, Jock Colville met his brother, Philip, who was awaiting his call-up to the Grenadier Guards, and together they drove up to Trent Park in north London, owned by a friend. 'It had an excellent private twelve-hole golf course,' noted Colville, 'on which my brother and I peacefully spent the first afternoon of war.'
In France the mood was more palpably tense. Britain was – had its population stopped to think about it – still a long way from German airfields and so unlikely to be receiving massed bomber formations that first day of war. In any case, the Luftwaffe was busy destroying the Polish Air Force; fears of its size and strength had been greatly exaggerated. Moreover, France and Germany shared a border, and the French had experienced, first hand, just a generation before, the agony of being invaded and the country carved up.
In Paris, many were devastated, including Andrée Griotteray, nineteen years old, who worked in the passport and ID department at the police headquarters. 'That's it,' she wrote starkly in her diary. 'War has been declared.' She had enjoyed a happy and carefree childhood with her French father, Edmond, and her Belgian mother, Yvonne, and three -siblings – an older sister and brother and one younger brother, Alain. In 1930, they had left Paris for Cannes and then Nice, where her father had opened an antiques and interior-decorating business. They had returned to Paris six years later, and Andrée had been sent to England for a year, where she had made friends, become an Anglophile, and learned English. Life for her had been good – as a family, they had not wanted for much – but now suddenly it seemed as though her world had come to an end. Bright, vivacious and pretty, Andrée instinctively knew the advent of war would change all their lives. A few days after the declaration, she noted, 'We are now at war and we will have to live with it. Hitler has to be stopped. We must believe in France's victory and shout from the rooftops of Paris, "Vive la France."' The doubt, however, was unmistakable; it was as though she wanted to believe in French victory but feared the worst. Her brother, Alain, she scribbled, kept repeating, 'what bastards they all are.' 'As for me,' she added, 'I am totally heartbroken.'
Now back in Paris along with the rest of the French mission to Moscow was André Beaufre, although it had been no easy task getting home and had involved a long, circuitous journey through Finland, Sweden and Holland; during the flight from Sweden to Amsterdam, their aircraft had even been buzzed by a German fighter plane. In Holland, the Dutch Army was also mobilizing, so the airfield at Schiphol was teeming with troops. Finally back in Paris on 29 August, the situation was equally frenetic as mobilization got underway.
Beaufre had discovered a city full of grim resignation. At Army HQ in the Boulevard Saint-Germain, he found most of his friends already gone to set up General Headquarters, so he took an empty office and settled back into staff work. Around him, Parisians carried gas masks over their shoulders, blackout curtains went up over windows, and after dark the city's lights remained switched off, cloaking Paris in darkness. But, as yet, there was no sign of any bombers coming to terrorize them.
Along the front, however, Order X had been enacted. This called for the complete evacuation within three hours of all the villages in front of or next to the Maginot Line. Lieutenant René de Chambrun had been given the agonizing task of clearing the hamlet of Gomelange, home to some 318 inhabitants. A piercing bugle call had signalled the start of the task shortly after midnight on that Sunday, 3 September. Men, women and children were woken and told they had an hour to clear out; they could take only what they could carry. Vehicles, animals, carts – all had to stay behind. A bridge over the river was blown, as was a dam so that the fields might be flooded – an extra line of defence. Chambrun saw a small child of about five point towards one of the soldiers in the half-dark. 'C'est Papa!' he cried out then ran to the soldier's arms. 'Well, as long as the fields are flooded,' a farmer said philosophically, 'what else can we do but go away?' Chambrun was deeply moved by the stoic fortitude of the people of Gomelange.
André Beaufre might have escaped Moscow in time, but others were -finding themselves trapped on the wrong side of the fence now that war had been declared. Among them was Eric Brown, a twenty-year-old Scot who was something of a Germanophile – an attitude that was not uncommon in Britain. After all, many British considered themselves Anglo-Saxons; the Royal Family was of German origin; and until the turn of the century Germany had been a firm ally, albeit never a formal one. The vast majority of British people instinctively disliked the Nazis and all they stood for, but not all – famously, two of the Mitford sisters, noted society beauties, had courted Hitler and his entourage, while the British Union of Fascists had also formed links.
Eric Brown had first visited Germany during the 1936 Olympics – his father, a former balloon observer and pilot in the Royal Flying Corps, had been invited along with other ex-pilots to the opening ceremonies by G?ring and other former First World War pilots. While there, he had met Ernst Udet, a fighter ace and stunt pilot but by then in charge of the Luftwaffe's technical department, the T-Amt. Udet had been delighted one of his old adversaries had brought his son and, learning of young Eric's interest in aircraft, had offered to take him for a flight from Halle in his Bücker Jungmann biplane.
Udet, who was probably the finest aerobatic pilot in the world, put the plane – and Eric – through their paces. After twirling and pirouetting around the sky, Udet finally took the plane in to land, Brown still clutching his stomach and relieved he had not disgraced himself. Suddenly, Udet flipped the plane over. Brown watched upside down as they continued to approach the airfield. 'In fact,' says Brown, 'we were coming in so low I thought the silly old fool's had a heart attack!' Thinking it was the end, Brown braced himself, but then, when there was only just enough space, Udet rolled the plane back again and made a perfect landing, looked at his ashen passenger and burst out laughing. 'He was young at heart, really, Udet,' says Brown.
As they walked clear of the plane, Udet had slapped him on the back and told him he would make a good fighter pilot but had to do two things – learn to fly and learn to speak German.
Brown took Udet at his word and did both, studying modern languages at Edinburgh University and joining the University Air Squadron. In the summer of 1938, he returned to Germany, renewing his acquaintance with Udet, and was back again the following summer. This time, however, it was courtesy of the Foreign Office, which had been recruiting at Edinburgh and had suggested Brown spend the next year in Europe before returning to Edinburgh to complete his degree.
On 3 September, he had only recently reached Salem on Lake Constance and was staying in a small Gasthaus when he was rudely awoken by three members of the SS. 'I'm afraid you'll have to come with us,' he was told, 'because our countries are now at war.'
Gathering together all his belongings, and also taking his MG Magnette, they took him to Munich and put him in a cell. It was the first day of the war, and, as far as Brown was concerned, it seemed likely he would be a prisoner of the Germans for the duration.
Other people were trying to leave not just Germany, but Europe. On board the SS Athenia was the eighteen-year-old James Goodson, heading back home to Toronto. Goodson had been born in the USA to British parents but had been brought up in Canada and had recently been in France -studying at the Sorbonne; with all the talk of war, it had seemed it was time to head home.
Chamberlain's announcement had been broadcast by radio throughout the ship, and Goodson, along with a number of other passengers, had listened to it in the Third Class lounge.
For a moment after the Prime Minister had finished speaking there was silence, then Goodson said, 'This is the way the world ends: not with a bang but a whimper!', quoting T. S. Eliot.
'Well, we're well out of it,' said another. Most seemed to agree. The ship was heading for Montreal and crammed with over 1,100 passengers, including more than three hundred Americans, a large number of Canadians, a few English, Scottish and Irish, and a number of European refugees. There were also over three hundred crew.
By evening, they were off the Hebrides. There was a cold, strong westerly wind, and the ship was pitching and rolling. Goodson had just climbed the staircase and was making for the dining room when he felt the ship lurch violently and heard a huge explosion followed by a loud crack. A moment later, the lights went out and people began to scream. Slewing to a halt, the Athenia began to list. Around Goodson, people were running in all directions, shouting, calling out to one another. Suddenly the emergency lights went on and Goodson hurried back to the companionway from which he'd come. Looking down, he saw a large gaping hole filled with surging water and broken bits of wooden stairway, flooring and furniture. A number of people were clinging to this flotsam, so Goodson clambered down and tried to pull as many women as he could to safety. Some were screaming that they couldn't swim. Throwing off his jacket and kicking off his shoes, he plunged into the water and helped those unable to swim out onto the broken companionway, carrying children and others one by one out of harm's way. When Goodson asked the crew for some help, they all shook their heads sadly and confessed they could not swim.
Despite working alone, Goodson finally managed to clear the corridor and join some of the crew, who asked him to help search the upper corridors. By now the ship was listing much further and Goodson found himself wading and then swimming once more. He found no one, just the dead body of a young man who earlier had sung Scottish ballads in the lounge.
Clambering back up, cold and soaking wet, Goodson was helped up onto the deck and then he and some surviving crew headed towards one of the lifeboats. It was packed and suddenly one of the ropes on the davits slipped, the front of the boat dropped and the passengers were tipped, screaming, into the water. There was nothing Goodson could do, so he hurried to the other side of the ship and saw the very last lifeboat about to be lowered.
There was no room for him, but from the deck he saw a lifeboat out at sea just a hundred yards away. Using one of the davit ropes, he began climbing down then dropped into the water and, after eventually coming back to the surface, swam as hard as he could towards the lifeboat he had seen, although it now looked horribly far away.
Eventually, he reached it, although several of the passengers tried to push him away, banging his knuckles as he gripped the side of the boat. A seaman yelled at them and then a young woman came to his rescue, pushing his assailants aside and helping to pull him up. As he collapsed, exhausted, into the boat, a blanket was wrapped around him. Looking up, he saw the girl who had rescued him. She was about his age, pretty and dressed only in bra and underclothes. It seemed she had been dressing for dinner when the boat was struck. The girl was American and had been touring Europe that summer with several of her friends. They began telling jokes and singing songs, then, when they had rowed far enough from the ship not to be pulled down with it when it finally sank, they stopped, huddling together to keep warm and praying they would be rescued.
It was well after midnight when the Athenia went down. Slowly, the stern disappeared and then the bow began to rise, water surging off her as she rose vertically, towering above them. For a moment, she seemed to pause there before plunging downwards until, with a final surge of water erupting into the air, she disappeared from view.
Little did Goodson or his fellow passengers on the lifeboat know it at the time, but the SS Athenia had been hit by a torpedo fired from U-30, one of Germany's U-boats already patrolling the Atlantic.
On the first day of hostilities, it was at sea, and against civilians, that Germany had first struck at Britain.
CHAPTER 6
All at Sea
JAMES GOODSON WAS RESCUED along with all those in his lifeboat at around 4.30 a.m. on the morning of 4 September by an empty Norwegian tanker called the Knute Nelson. Recovering soon after below deck, rough blanket around him, Goodson fell into a deep sleep. By the time he awoke, they were slipping into Galway Bay in the neutral Republic of Ireland. Huge crowds were there to greet them, and as Goodson stepped on to dry land once more, other survivors, picked up by British destroyers, rushed towards him and the others from the tanker asking about missing friends and relations. A brother and sister, both about twelve, asked him whether he had seen their parents.
At this, Goodson felt an overwhelming fury sweep over him. No one, he thought, had the right to cause such suffering to innocent people. There and then, Goodson decided he would do something about it; he knew what he had to do. He would get back to the United States, then head to Canada and join the Royal Canadian Air Force.
Winston Churchill had chaired his first meeting of the Admiralty Board on the evening of Sunday, 3 September, just a few hours before the Athenia had been struck. These rooms at the Admiralty were rich in history. It was here that the naval campaign to defeat Napoleon had been plotted; it was here that Wellington and Nelson had met one another for the only time, albeit briefly. And it was here that Churchill and Lord Fisher had quarrelled back in 1915 over the Dardanelles campaign; it had ended badly for both men.
Now he was back, sitting at the same desk and with the same familiar high-backed dark leather and mahogany chair. Watching him was a portrait of Nelson, Britain's great naval hero. The last time he had been in that room, Churchill reflected, Britain had been fighting Germany. A quarter of a century later, they were doing so again. 'Once again we must fight for life and honour,' he noted. 'Once again. So be it!'
On his first night back, Churchill worked late, brimming with energy and excitement at the prospect of being at the heart of Britain's war strategy. The First Sea Lord, the most senior naval officer in the land, was Admiral Sir Dudley Pound, a straightforward and uncomplicated fellow who lacked imagination and flair but who was a good foil to Churchill and happy to play second fiddle.
The Royal Navy was known as Britain's Senior Service for a reason. It was comfortably the world's largest, with 15 battleships, 7 aircraft carriers, 15 heavy cruisers, 49 light cruisers, 192 destroyers, 73 escort vessels, 9 patrol vessels, 52 minesweepers, 2 gun monitors and 62 submarines. Only the USA, which was not in the war, had anything like this number of vessels. And there was a lot more shipping on the way; in shipyards from Belfast to Glasgow to Tyneside, more ships were already being built as Britain entered the war: 19 more cruisers, 52 destroyers, 6 battleships, 6 aircraft carriers and 11 more submarines, to list just some of this building programme. There has been considerable criticism thrown at the Royal Navy of 1939, not least by those who argue it was ageing and stuck in the past. It is true that its two newest battleships, the Nelson and Rodney, were completed back in 1927, but battleships were meant to last. They took four years to build from scratch and were unbelievably complex pieces of engineering, and fantastically expensive. Even so, each of Britain's fifteen battleships had either undergone a major refit or been largely reconstructed, especially with regard to firepower and fire control gear. During the inter-war years, Britain had out-built all the other navies of the world in almost all classes except for submarines.
It also made sense to build up this large fleet of capital ships – battle-ships, aircraft carriers and cruisers – during peacetime. Such vessels took years to build and were not something that could be brought to being in a hurry. The Navy was well aware of the battleships and cruisers entering the service of the Kriegsmarine, the German Navy; the response was to have an even greater force to check any thoughts of German naval dom-inance. Once war came, it was much easier and quicker to build destroyers, armed merchant vessels and smaller escorts like corvettes and sloops.
There were, however, other reasons why Britain had maintained such a large navy. It was an island nation with the largest empire the world had ever known. This kind of vast global reach meant, even in this emerging age of aviation, linking the sea lanes around the world. The Navy was needed to protect not only its foreign territories but also the country's trade. Nor was Britain's reach around the world purely linked to its empire – rather, most of its trade was extra-imperial: with Europe, and especially Scandinavia, and with countries in both North and South America, where British companies had huge interests. Entire railways in Argentina, for example, had been built with British money and were run by British companies, even though the country was not within the Empire.
Britain was also a major exporter: the leading supplier of armaments in the 1930s and also of coal, to name but two trades. And for all this she needed a sizeable number of merchant vessels; so as well as having the world's largest Navy, she also had the world's largest merchant fleet, amounting to some 33 per cent of global merchant shipping. On top of that, Britain had access to around another 50 per cent of the rest of the world's merchant navies, such as those of Norway, Greece, Holland and other major players in world maritime shipping.
Strategically, then, Churchill had inherited a fairly comfortable position. In terms of threats to Britain, it was only really Germany in that September of 1939. Imperial Japan had been increasingly threatening over the past decade and with Britain's large interests in the Far East, this was a worry. However, at present, Japan was more than busy in China and with fighting the Soviet Union, so it posed no immediate threat. Italy, too, had shown that it was not ready to fight just yet if at all. Italy's Navy was perhaps the most up to date of its armed services, but while it had the most submarines in the world (106), it had no aircraft carriers and only four battleships. Britain and France together would have made short work of it.
What this meant was that Britain could keep the Mediterranean Fleet firmly in the Mediterranean, maintain a significant presence on the China Station, and have the Home Fleet at Scapa Flow in the Orkneys north of Scotland, as well as deploying further forces all around the United Kingdom. It also meant that they could immediately implement an economic blockade of Germany. Britain's naval power should not be underestimated.
The news of the sinking of the Athenia, however, had still been a terrific shock, not least because it was a civilian liner and thus supposed to be exempt from attack under the Prize Rules conditions of the Hague Convention, to which Germany had signed up. These not only forbade the sinking of passenger ships but decreed that merchant vessels could only be sunk once their crews had been safely rescued. Churchill had barely finished meeting his new team when the news reached them. The very next day, he sent his first minute on his return as First Lord, to the Director of Naval Intelligence, demanding a statement on the German U-boat force, both 'actual and prospective'. The answer was sixty now and ninety-nine expected by early 1940. This wasn't far off the mark. In fact, the Kriegsmarine had fifty-seven submarines available, although for those in the U-boat service this didn't seem like very much.
Commanding Germany's U-boat force was Admiral Karl D?nitz, a post he had held since 1935. The previous four years had been frustrating for him, because he strongly believed that the U-boats had come very close to winning the last war and felt certain they held the key to this renewed conflict, and particularly in the war against Britain. Submarines had come a long way since 1918. They were more rugged, could dive quicker, were faster and larger, with more numerous and more powerful torpedoes, which were battery-powered and wakeless (making them harder to detect), and had greater range. Radio and radar equipment had also advanced considerably, so that now U-boats could communicate not only with their base, but also with each other. In fact, U-boats, traditionally lone hunters, could now operate in packs. Conversely, anti-submarine weapons had also improved, but not, D?nitz believed, enough to pose a significant threat.
Britain was utterly dependent on seaborne trade, so clearly it was the task of the Kriegsmarine to sever those sea lanes. Frustratingly for D?nitz, however, it seemed that no one else in Germany believed as he did that U-boats were the weapon to deliver that victory. Rather, Admiral Raeder, who as Commander-in-Chief at the Oberkommando der Marine (OKM), or Naval High Command, was commander of the Kriegsmarine, preferred to build a predominantly surface fleet. After Munich, G?ring had begun a renewed rearmament programme in Germany that was to dwarf the earlier, yet still considerable, military growth. The Luftwaffe, for example, was to increase fivefold to some 21,750 aircraft, while the Kriegsmarine was to begin a major fleet-building programme, called the 'Z Plan', which had been prepared over the summer of 1938, principally by Commander Heye of the operations department of the Naval War Staff under Raeder's instructions. Heye made the entirely valid assumption that should Germany go to war with Britain, the latter would not be able to overcome an economic blockade for any significant length of time, so disrupting British overseas trade had to be the prime -objective. Heye believed that primarily this should be achieved by a cruiser war – that is, long-range, powerfully armed cruisers and 'pocket' battleships; submarines had an important part to play but not the lead role. This appealed to Hitler, who had already enthusiastically backed an earlier battleship programme, not because of any particular military logic, but because battleships were enormous and gave a fabulous physical impression of power.
The flaw in Heye's plan was how to support this cruiser force in far-off seas without a series of strategically based foreign ports and bases, as were available to the British, and also to the French for that matter; Germany's access to the world's oceans via the narrow Baltic Sea wasn't really going to cut it. Realistically, German ships could not safely pass through the English Channel because of mines, proximity to Britain and its defences, which meant going around the north of Scotland to reach the wide oceans – and this could be easily hampered by the Royal Navy's blockade. Admiral Carls, the Commander-in-Chief of the Fleet, made this exact point, arguing that the only way to get these overseas colonies and secure sea routes was by conquest. 'A war against Britain,' he commented, 'means a war against the Empire, against France, probably also against Russia and a number of countries overseas, in other words against one half or two-thirds of the whole world.' He was absolutely spot on, although far from baulking at this apocalyptic vision, Carls instead called for large-scale land conquests and the rapid development of a huge fleet that would be able to achieve his dream of global naval domination. Coming from a senior military commander, it betrayed a level of self-delusion that was astonishing.
How much Carls's views were taken into account is not clear, but the Z Plan, announced in mid-October 1938, called for 10 battleships, 15 pocket battleships, 5 heavy, 24 light and 36 small cruisers, 8 aircraft carriers and 249 U-boats. It was nothing more than pure fantasy; realizable perhaps on some far-off day once the rest of the world had been taken over, but not in the medium to short term. Germany did not have the industrial capacity or the raw materials required, nor the cash. And even if a fraction of this force had been built, the country would not have had the fuel to power it.
A far more sensible approach would have been to have done precisely what D?nitz was urging and concentrate largely on submarines. These were quite expensive enough, but would have been easier and cheaper to build than large numbers of surface vessels – and they used less fuel. During the summer, he had again pressed his point, more convinced than ever that war with Britain was looming now rather than to be expected in 1942, when the planned 249 U-boats in the Z Plan were due to be completed. In July, he had urged Raeder to tell Hitler his continuing concerns about the paltry size of the U-boat fleet – at the time he had just twenty-seven ocean-going submarines, of which only nineteen were ready for war. In his memo to Hitler he made it clear that to make a substantial contribution against Allied Atlantic shipping, at least one hundred boats always needed to be operational. This was based on the 'third' principle: a third on active duty, a third heading to or returning from active duty, and a third undergoing repair, re-equipping and refitting. Soon after, Raeder conveyed the Führer's reply. 'He would ensure that in no circumstances would war with Britain come about,' noted D?nitz. 'For that would mean finis Germaniae.'
Well, now they were at war, and Hitler immediately tore up the Z Plan and promised to make U-boat building the priority for the Kriegsmarine – and so much so that it took precedence over even key projects such as the new Junkers 88 long-range bomber. It was, D?nitz believed, too little too late. 'Seldom indeed,' he noted, 'has any branch of the armed forces of any country gone to war so poorly equipped.'
For the time being, the U-boat arm would have to do what it could with the few submarines it did have. Most seaworthy U-boats had actually been sent out to the Atlantic at the end of August, which was why U-30 had been able to intercept the Athenia on the first day of war against Britain. The commander, Oberleutnant Lemp, had spotted her zig--zagging and off the normal shipping course and so had assumed it was a troopship and therefore fair game. It was a mistake, and the Germans tried to hush it up, but it still prompted huge outrage on both sides of the Atlantic – the sinking brought back memories of the torpedoed Lusitania in 1915.
One U-boat playing more closely by the rules was U-48, under the command of Kapit?nleutnant 'Vati' Schultze. The U-48 had left Kiel and slowly made its way around the north of Scotland, just as the crew had done on numerous practice patrols over the past year. First Watch Officer was the 23-year-old Reinhard 'Teddy' Suhren, who despite joining the Navy back in 1935 had moved to the U-boat arm just the previous year.
Suhren had always loved the sea and as a boy had become hooked on sailing, first with the Hanseatic Yachting School and then on school trips to the Frisian Islands. His time under training had seen him repeatedly in trouble; even his nickname, 'Teddy', had come about when one of his comrades had suggested he marched so badly he looked like a teddy bear. The name stuck.
After time as a midshipman on destroyers, and believing he would never make Leutnant, Suhren thought of resigning from the Kriegsmarine altogether. It was his brother, Gerd, already a Leutnant himself, who talked him into staying put and simply changing his attitude. From then on, Teddy was determined to try harder, play by the rules, and keep his sheet clean. It very quickly paid off. Within a few months, in April 1938, he was promoted to Leutnant and soon after transferred to submarines, and to U-48. So far, Suhren had had no cause to regret the transfer. He particularly liked the camaraderie and the understanding and even warmth of his fellow crew. They were a band of brothers, and no longer did Suhren feel like the junior, constantly pushed around. 'Now I came back to life,' he noted, 'and felt myself more at home in the Navy by the day.'
On 4 September, they spotted a lone Swedish freighter and, surfacing, flashed the signal for the merchantman to stop at once and not use its radio. The Swedish ship ignored them, so, to show they meant business, Schultze ordered men on to the 88mm gun on the foredeck. Climbing up on to the bridge was Suhren, but to his horror he saw there was no one manning the gun – the men had been swept overboard in the swell. Fortunately, they had remembered to clip on the safety harnesses and so were hauled back on board, and before they had need to open fire, the freighter hove to.
They let the Swedish captain continue on his way, but the following day they spotted another freighter on the horizon. Diving swiftly they then emerged just in front of what they now saw was a British 5,000-ton merchantman, Royal Sceptre. 'Stop at once and show papers!' they signalled. Schultze gave the British crew ten minutes to get into the safety of their lifeboats. 'We couldn't hang around for long in this area,' noted Suhren, 'without getting ants in our pants.' They were still nerve--wrackingly close to Scotland.
They watched the men clambering into the boats, then from 600 metres fired a pair of torpedoes that hit square amidships. When they heard radio signals being sent off, they fired a few shots with the gun and watched the Royal Sceptre sink beneath the waves.
'Pity about the nice ship,' said Suhren.
'Well, this war is none of my choosing,' Schultze replied.
The Royal Sceptre had barely slipped out of sight when a further freighter was spotted. Once again, they intercepted the vessel; it too was British, the Browning, and this time the ship sent boats to meet them. Suhren, once more up on the bridge, was astonished to see the boats full of black women and children. As they drew alongside the German U-boat with tears running down their faces, they held up their screaming babies and pleaded with their captors to save them. Suhren saw Schultze look at him helplessly. 'Good God,' he said, 'what do we do now?'
'No way am I prepared to torpedo it,' declared Suhren.
'No more am I,' his captain replied.
There was a pause while Schultze thought for a moment, then he said, 'We'll send them back to their ship. They can pick up the survivors from the Royal Sceptre and carry on with their voyage.'
Communicating this, however, was no easy matter. The women were in a state of shock and needed some convincing that they would be safe if they returned to the Browning. Eventually, though, having warned them not to use their radio, Schultze ordered U-48 to draw away from the boats. Seeing them leave, the women and crew hurried back to the ship as instructed. 'It all went according to plan,' noted Suhren. 'They didn't radio, continued on their course, and made it into port three weeks later in South America.'
On 8 September, they sank another British freighter, the Winkleigh, then a further ship, the Firby, both after following the Prize Rules and sparing the crews. The captain of the Firby had been distraught and close to tears. It appeared he had taken his son with him on the trip and now pleaded with Schultze to take the boy. That, however, was not possible, so instead Schultze ordered a plain text signal to be sent: 'To Mr Churchill – We just sank the British steamer Firby. Please save the crew! Posit 59°40'N 13°50'W.' Schultze's action meant that the Firby's captain and all thirty-three crew were soon rescued by a British destroyer. The U-boat was then ordered home, its first wartime patrol drawing to an end. With three ships to their name and some 15,000 tons of Allied shipping now at the bottom of the ocean, it had been a good start.
U-48 had been ordered home along with nine others of the eighteen U-boats that had been in the Atlantic during the opening week of the war. D?nitz wanted a good number of ocean-going U-boats back for rest and refitting ready for a renewed hunt in October – and a hunt in which his flotillas would not be operating singly, but together. This was a new idea D?nitz was keen to test. This new group of U-boats, he had decided, would be called a wolfpack.
Despite Churchill's urgent demand to know the true strength of the U-boat force, the Admiralty was certainly not particularly worried by the threat as hostilities began. Perhaps some of the Royal Navy's ships were a little old and creaking, but their giant fleet was certainly well served by a first-class infrastructure. During the last war, the British had created a global organization called Naval Control of Shipping (NCS) and intricate naval intelligence systems. Since the end of the war, it had been repeatedly improved and upgraded, and had been further enhanced by the setting up of an Operational Intelligence Centre (OIC) at the Admiralty just two years before in 1937.
Naval intelligence was not only served by the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park, where civilian mathematicians and -scientists had been recruited in an attempt to break enemy signal codes, but also by a network of Radio Intercept Stations and reports from ports around the world sent via secure underwater telegraph cables – an intelligence exchange known as the VESCA system – and, of course, aerial reconnaissance carried out by both RAF Coastal Command and the Navy's own Fleet Air Arm. All merchant shipping was brought under the control of NCS, which tracked the movements, cargoes and destin-ations of almost all Allied shipping. This meant that, in theory at any rate, it was possible to know exactly where any ship was at any moment of any given day. The key objective was, as far as was possible, to keep Allied shipping away from danger.
Another means of securing the safe passage of ships was by putting them into convoy, and no sooner had the Athenia been sunk than the Admiralty ordered NCS to reintroduce the convoy system. This was nothing new and had operated well in the final year of the last war, working on the principle that a tight formation escorted by armed vessels was considerably less vulnerable than a lone and unescorted freighter. A mass of ships with the protection of destroyers, corvettes and other escorts was no easy proposition for a lone U-boat.
In any case, although U-boats like the U-48 had picked off several lone freighters in the opening days of the war, the Royal Navy was pretty well placed to deal with the threat the Kriegsmarine posed. The Home Fleet alone was considerably larger than anything the Germans could put to sea, while the U-boat force was simply not large enough to do more than inconvenience Allied shipping. Of course, it was to be expected that Germany would build more submarines, but there was every sign that British shipyards were building more escorts than German shipyards were building U-boats. There was, then, quiet reason for confidence as far as the war at sea was concerned. And since war was as much about logistics and supply of materials as anything, it seemed that Britain and its ally France were, for the time being at any rate, well placed.
Before the year was out, there would, however, be some shocks in store.
CHAPTER 7
Offensive Reconnaissance
ON THE FIRST DAY of the war, the RAF's Bomber Command had carried out its first operation, when twenty-seven bombers had been sent to search for the German Fleet.
Among those heading out over the North Sea had been six Handley Page Hampdens of 83 Squadron, based at Scampton, just to the north of Lincoln. Among the pilots was Guy Gibson, a 21-year-old flying officer fresh back from leave on the last day of August. The squadron's Hampdens were twin-engine bombers like those of the Luftwaffe. The Hampden was nimble, could carry a decent bomb-load and was faster than most bombers of the day, with a cruising speed of over 250 mph. Gibson, however, was not a great fan of the model and thought his own personal mount, C-Charlie, was 'lousy'. 'On take-off, she swung like hell to the right,' he noted, 'and flew in the air with her left wing low. Sometimes an engine died out, but that was nothing.'
Gibson had been told he would be flying soon after Chamberlain's announcement, with take-off scheduled for 3.30 p.m. that same afternoon. He had been quite terrified at the prospect; just a few days earlier he had been sunbathing, carefree and having the time of his life. Now he was flying off to war, and, he was convinced, never to return. He had been so nervous, he had had to run to the toilet four times, and as he'd been about to take off had discovered his hands shaking like a leaf. One of the ground crew said to him, 'Good luck, sir, give those bastards a real hiding.' Gibson had given him a sickly smile.
He found, though, that once the engines were running and he was at last rumbling down the grass runway he became calmer, even though this was the first time he had ever flown C-Charlie with live bombs strapped underneath. As he got airborne and flew over Lincolnshire, he struggled to believe he could possibly be flying towards Germany in an act of war. He desperately wished he could turn back. Passing over Skegness in the sunshine he thought how just a couple of months ago he had gone there with some of the boys. It seemed surreal. And then he was out over the North Sea.
As they approached the north German coast, he remembered what he had read about the aces of the last war and began to constantly swivel his head, scanning the skies. He spotted a German Dornier seaplane but flew on until, as they were within forty miles or so of Wilhelmshaven, the cloud dramatically descended. Suddenly, they were flying through driving rain, and the sea below looked wild. They ploughed on until around ten miles from target they saw the faint flash of enemy guns. Far from being alarmed, Gibson now realized the anti-aircraft guns were providing a wonderful target marker, but, to his surprise, the formation leader banked away. Duly following, Gibson slowly realized they were, in fact, turning back. All would make it safely home again, but Bomber Command's first operation had been something of a damp squib.
The following day, Bomber Command returned to Germany, and although most once again struggled to find the German Fleet, a handful of Blenheims did manage to hit the pocket battleship Admiral Scheer and the cruiser Emden; unfortunately for the attackers, however, the bombs failed to explode on the Scheer and caused only some damage, although more was caused by one of the Blenheim bombers crashing on to it. Four other Blenheims were shot down.
That was Bomber Command's last aggressive operation for a while; for the next few months it carried out leaflet dropping only. How that was going to help the Poles was anyone's guess.
When President Roosevelt had appealed to all belligerents on 1 September to refrain from unrestricted warfare, both France and Britain had agreed. Attacking the German Fleet was all right because warships were a purely military target; the same could not be said for land targets, where there were civilians and non-military buildings and infrastructure. From France's perspective, there was considerable anxiety over possible retaliation on French cities, and, as far as Britain was concerned, there was good sense in conserving its bomber force and building strength for when it was really needed. Leaflet dropping, on the other hand, was still dangerous and potentially costly in terms of aircraft and lives, but achieved absolutely nothing. It is hard to think of a greater waste of resources than sending bombers to drop paper on one's enemy.
Perhaps the air forces would have had a bit more gumption if there had been more determination on the ground. The onus for such a move was clearly on France, since the British Army was still very small and only just starting to arrive on the Continent. Back in May, Général Gamelin had assured the Poles that on the outbreak of hostilities with Germany, France would take the offensive, and that after fifteen days of mobilization at the latest would throw its full weight behind a campaign. This was another reason why the Poles had been prepared to dig their heels in with Germany.
Now that push came to shove, however, Gamelin was making comments about not wanting to begin the war with another Battle of Verdun and, far from putting the full weight of the Army into a decisive invasion of western Germany, ordered just nine divisions to make an 'offensive reconnaissance' along a sixteen-mile front into the Saar region.
Among those taking part was Capitaine Daniel Barlone, another reserve officer recently called up and sent to take command of the 92nd/20th Horse Transport Company of the headquarters of 2nd North African Division. Having been in a civilian job in Paris just the week before, he was armed with a hefty copy of Journal de Mobilisation, which outlined what he was expected to do and what stores he should draw. After a long journey east, they had been based at the tiny village of Pillon, north-west of Metz and not far from Verdun. 2nd North African Division was a mobile division, but Barlone was surprised to find it so short of weapons, munitions and vehicles, and yet the situation was much improved since the previous year, when he'd last been on exercise. 'How should we come off if we had to start the fray now?' he wondered in his diary. 'We should manage somehow, I suppose.'
A few days later, they were on the march, after dark for fear of German planes. It took a long time: a long column of horses and wagons, plodding forward in the dark and what seemed like incessant rain. After several days they were south of Luxembourg and south of the Saar, and then reached the Maginot Line. 'We skirt some huge earthworks,' wrote Barlone, 'but I am amazed to see that nothing, absolutely nothing, has been prepared in depth.' The Maginot Line, he discovered, was a single thread 100–150 yards wide with webs of wire. He wondered what would happen if any part of it were breached. How would the men behind the line be able to stem the flood which would pour through and outflank the forts? He was later assured that a more elastic system of defence did exist. 'Not in this sector at any rate!' he noted.
Eventually, the division headquarters reached the village of Holling, which, like all other border villages, had been evacuated. For several days they remained where they were; Barlone had established his company headquarters in a now-empty café. The German border was just two and a half miles away, and each night Barlone could hear unending streams of artillery, equipment and supplies heading up to the border. Everyone was keenly aware that an attack was about to be launched; news from the front filtered back that the Germans had abandoned their border villages too but had left them riddled with booby traps – a combination of artillery and engineers was now clearing them. 'The attack is on the point of being launched,' Barlone scribbled, 'that is as clear as day. The Polish front will be eased.'
In fact, it was a bit late in the day for easing the Polish front. The Poles had already lost their freedom of action after just a few days, and by 11 September, German forces were sweeping in a wide swathe across a third of the country. Warsaw looked set to fall within a matter of days. As it stood, the result was no longer in doubt, although if the French attacked as wholeheartedly as Gamelin had promised back in May, there was a golden opportunity to drive straight on to Berlin without much to stop them. And that would have been a major game-changer.
Barlone and his men certainly felt ready and prepared. 'We are all burning with desire,' he noted, 'and jumping for joy at the idea of entering the fray.' He was especially confident in French firepower; having served in the last war, he knew their artillery had been something to be reckoned with back then and was even more so now.
But a further week passed and still the attack had not been ordered. Then, on 18 September, Barlone heard whispers from division HQ that it would be launched the following morning. By this time, Barlone was wondering whether it was now going to be too late – news had arrived that Warsaw was surrounded. Still, his men remained confident and raring to go, but then, the following day arrived and still there was no order to attack. Instead, news reached them that the Russians had invaded Poland from the east. Barlone was dumbstruck by this devastating piece of news, as were most people in the West. 'Poland is done for,' he admitted in his diary. 'Since yesterday activity has slowed down, no more artillery, no fresh troops. The Staff give me to understand that the offensive will not take place. What a pity that nearly a fortnight has been wasted before being able to attack.'
In fact, there had been an offensive – albeit a very limited one. The French had pushed just five miles, reached the outposts of the extremely thinly held Siegfried Line, and then gone no further. Casualties had been extremely light and were mostly caused by mines. As one regiment diary noted, 'X Platoon tried to continue its advance; it was halted by the fire of an automatic weapon.' A generation earlier, French poilus had advanced over ground torn up by shellfire into withering storms of machine-gun and rifle fire; now entire advances were being held up by a single weapon.
Along the Maginot Line, René de Chambrun and his regiment had disappeared into the depths of the Fort of Rotherberg, from where no enemy could be seen at all. As if to show solidarity in the effort, the Hochwald Bastion further along the line fired the odd shell, although its 75mm gun, the only artillery piece that could actually reach Germany, fired only a few shots and then jammed.
At Army headquarters in Paris, André Beaufre was bristling with shame. 'The Germans did not react,' he noted. 'Gamelin decided to pull back. So much for our help to Poland.' Before the war, Gamelin had calculated that Poland would be able to hold out until the spring. In fact, the Poles, despite showing unquestioned bravery and determination to fight, had been overwhelmed by a two-pronged assault from west and east and capitulated after just twenty days. It was slightly worrying for the Allies that Gamelin and his generals seemed to be operating on a much slower timescale than the Germans in this war.
All French troops were back behind the Maginot Line by 4 October, and Gamelin, for one, was only too relieved that the pledge of honour to the Poles had been, to his mind, satisfied. Now, the Allies could do what they had always planned to do: sit and wait and build up strength, and hope that Germany would not attack them before they were ready to meet the challenge.
Unquestionably, fear of military inferiority played a large part in French thinking. On one level, this was misplaced, because the French were pretty well equipped for war with Germany. There were already the best part of a million men before mobilization, and that figure grew rapidly: over six million men were mobilized in September. The Army was also equipped with the most heavily armed and heavily armoured tanks in the world and had good numbers too. The Somuas were well protected and had 47mm guns, while the Char Bs mounted both 75mm and 47mm guns. The only German tank – or panzer as they were known – to mount a 75mm gun was the Panzer Mk IV, the tank model of fewest numbers. The French were very well equipped with artillery pieces, and their small arms – such as rifles and machine guns – were perfectly good. The Chatellerault light machine gun, to give just one example, was solid and reliable, had a rate of fire of some 500–600 rounds per minute, and its muzzle velocity was more powerful than any other model in the world.
In the air, the French had some 1,735 front-line aircraft and a further 1,600 reserves, and when these were combined with the RAF's, the Allied total actually exceeded the number of aircraft available to the Luftwaffe. The Farman 222, while not the fastest, could carry more bombs than any aircraft flying at that time – more than four tons. Its fighter aircraft, though not as fast as the Messerschmitt 109, were not far off the pace; the Dewoitine D520, for example, was also well-armed, with machine guns and a 20mm cannon, and had exceptional range for a fighter. And then there was the French Navy, which was the second largest in Europe, behind Britain's.
There were also signs of a resurgent economy, which helped the huge rearmament drive. France in the 1930s had been riven by political factions, failing governments and even civil unrest. édouard Daladier had been Prime Minister twice earlier in the decade – and once for only a few days – but, after the failure of Léon Blum's Popular Front, had taken the premiership again the previous year, in April 1938, and eighteen months on was still there. He had brought a grim authoritarianism, running the country almost entirely without Parliament and hurriedly increasing rearmament. The speed of French mobilization was im-pressive and backing it up were factories that were outproducing Germany in terms of tanks, guns and aircraft.
After long years of depression and political fractiousness in France, the message now was one of unity – of the nation pulling together in this hour of need as, once again, they faced a resurgent enemy. In a speech on national radio on 10 September, the Minister of Finance, Paul Reynaud, had made a rallying call to arms. Housewives, even the elderly, were called upon to do their bit. Anyone capable of helping the production effort but evading this duty deserved, he said, to be called deserters. France was also better off, he told them, than it had been in 1914. 'We shall prevail,' he said, as he finished, 'because we are stronger.'
A former lawyer from Verdun, Reynaud was a month shy of sixty-one, and small and dark, with narrow eyes and a trim moustache. Known as something of a maverick, he had none the less proved a hugely successful Finance Minister, going against the wishes of many of his political colleagues and implementing a tough austerity programme combined with large amounts of deregulation – such as scrapping the forty-hour working week. It was these reforms as much as anything that were responsible for the economic recovery in France, which saw a rise in the nation's coffers from 37 billion francs at the time of Munich to 48 billion by the outbreak of war. It was this that was funding France's massive rearmament programme.
Despite all this, there remained, however, a curious degree of both complacency and military insecurity at the heart of France's military leadership, most of whom had not only served in the last war, but had worn the burden of higher command. Général Gamelin, for example, had been a divisional commander, while Général Georges had served on the General Staff at Army headquarters. And the previous war pervaded the thinking of this crop of senior French commanders, who believed any fighting against Nazi Germany would follow a similar pattern to that of the last war: it would be long-drawn-out, attritional and, above all, largely static. Speed of manoeuvre did not really come into it.
Compounding French thinking was a systematic belief that no matter how many guns or tanks or forts were built, the Germans had more, and German propaganda about their incredible military might was swallowed hook, line and sinker. A classic piece of German cunning had been to invite Général Vuillemin, the head of the Armée de l'Air, to some Luftwaffe manoeuvres. The Germans switched aircraft from one base to another, changing registration numbers as they did so and thus giving the impression they had many more aircraft than was the reality. When Vuillemin returned to France, he told Daladier that when it came to war, the French Air Force would be annihilated in a matter of days.
And yet when, in October, Edward Spears as the new Chairman of the Anglo-French Committee brought a delegation of British politicians over to France, he was once again reassured by the good spirits of those he saw. At a meeting with Daladier, Spears was told about a visit to the front. After talking to some troops, a soldier had said to the Prime Minister, 'We are glad to observe that the morale of Monsieur le Président du Conseil is good.' Daladier had laughed as he recounted this to Spears. 'There was I investigating the morale of the troops and it was they who were looking into mine!'
En route to the Suez Canal and the Mediterranean was the British destroyer HMS Delight, making its long way back from the China Station. For the ship's First Lieutenant, Vere Wight-Boycott, it was all rather frustrating as they were not sure whether they were to be joining the Mediterranean Fleet or heading on back to Britain. The news had been patchy to say the least, and what they heard had been learned via the captain's private wireless set, and that had been decidedly intermittent. 'We have heard of the sinking of the Donaldson ship with Americans,' he wrote to his mother on 19 September, 'the Kiel air raid, the dropping of leaflets, and the fact that British troops are in France, but that is as far as we have got.'
Wight-Boycott was more up to date than he had imagined, not least in that more and more troops of the British Expeditionary Force were being -shipped to France. One of those escorting the soldiers was Lieutenant-Commander Donald Macintyre, skipper of the ageing destroyer HMS Venomous. Now thirty-five and a career officer in the Royal Navy, Macintyre was a ruddy, round-faced man with a twinkle in his eye and a phlegmatic determination that had served him well. Having joined as a midshipman back in 1922, he had been commissioned three years later and served in the Mediterranean before transferring to the Fleet Air Arm and learning to fly. He served on the aircraft carriers Hermes on the China Station and Courageous with the Home Fleet and loved every minute, although frustrated by the Navy's perceived reluctance to see the real potential of air power. As Macintyre saw it, the time and money spent on improving and building further battleships would have been better spent on larger aircraft carriers. He may well have had a point…
His flying came to an end when he became seriously ill in 1935 and, although he recovered, was declared unfit for further flying. He was not unfit, however, for service back on sea, and his disappointment at ending his flying career was largely made up for by his delight at being promoted and given command of his first ship. This was a new kind of anti--submarine vessel, the Kingfisher, and it was during this time that he began to take an overriding interest in submarine hunting, not least because his ship became the experimental vessel at the Anti-Submarine School in Portland and so was trialling every new gadget and piece of equipment that was devised.
After a further stint commanding a destroyer back out in the Far East, he returned home in the spring of 1939 and, when the Reserve Fleet began to be mobilized in the summer, was given command of Venomous. Laid down back in May 1918, it was one of a number of old vessels that had been given a quick once-over and brought back into service. His new crew was largely drawn from the various reserves now hastily being called up. First among them were the Royal Fleet Reserves – men who had served their time but were being brought out of retirement. Then there were the Royal Naval Reserves – officers and seamen drawn from the merchant navy and fishing fleet and with a fair amount of seafaring behind them. Finally, there were the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserves – or RNVR – who were mostly weekend amateurs: keen sailors but with little military training or experience. They were eager, but still had a lot to learn.
Macintyre had been disappointed to have been given Venomous, and regarded her as something of a dubious proposition. Her 4-inch guns were obsolete and she had none of the latest anti-shipping equipment he had so enjoyed testing down at Portland; he had imagined that no sooner had war been declared than he would have been off on the hunt for U-boats, but for the time being at any rate it was not to be. There were other forces to deal with the paltry U-boat presence; Macintyre's job was to escort the ships carrying the renamed British Expeditionary Force across the Channel to France.
Almost nightly, at around midnight, and along with two or three other escorts, Venomous would rendezvous at the mouth of Portsmouth Harbour and then lead the cross-Channel packets requisitioned for the task across to Cherbourg or Le Havre. They would have an hour or two in the French port while the packets unloaded, and then would steam back again. Sometimes they could get ashore and buy French scent for their wives and girlfriends and also wine. 'The former,' noted Macintyre, 'made us very popular ashore on our return and the latter soon gave Venomous a remarkably fine cellar for a modest price.'
Among those British troops being ferried over to France was Lieutenant Norman Field of the Royal Fusiliers, aged twenty-two and hastily married on the outbreak of war. It was quite irregular for anyone in the regiment to be wed so young; the rules were that officers had to be at least twenty-six before taking the plunge, but he and another friend in the battalion, Harley Archer, had both married on the same day. If he was honest, it hadn't really occurred to Field to get married quite so swiftly, but, as he was discovering, unexpected things happen in a time of war.
It had come about because the battalion had been posted to Grand Shaft Barracks in Dover. His then girlfriend was great friends with Harley Archer's girlfriend, but they now lived a long way away in Gloucestershire, so together he and Archer had arranged for the two girls to move down to Kent to be near them. Just after the news that Germany had invaded Poland, their company had been on a route march when the girls had pulled up in a car and told them they had been to the Archbishop's office in Canterbury and got special marriage licences; soon their boyfriends would be off to war and the girls wanted to be married right away. That meant that very afternoon.
But how to get permission from the new commanding officer? It was noon by the time they were back at the barracks and, knowing the colonel was partial to some port, Field and Archer stayed behind after lunch, pushed a bottle in his direction and then asked him whether he might possibly agree to them getting married later that day.
Much to their surprise, the CO said, 'Of course. What can I do about it?'
And so they were married at five o'clock that same afternoon, Friday, 1 September. 'Someone found a crate of champagne,' says Field, 'and we were allowed out of barracks that night, but we were back on duty the following morning.'
A week later they left, their new brides waving them off. Field couldn't tell his wife where they were headed – he had no idea in any case – but the train took them to Southampton, where they boarded a boat to Cherbourg and from there went on to a village just outside Le Mans. Field was sorry to say goodbye to his new wife, but, at the same time, heading overseas to France seemed like something of an adventure.
Norman Field was a Regular soldier, having joined after leaving school four years earlier. Sent straight to the Royal Military College Sandhurst for officer training, he only joined the 2nd Battalion, Royal Fusiliers, after he was commissioned. The Regular British Army had been small then, at just 192,325 in 1936, a figure that actually fell slightly the following year. In addition, there were 141,000 members of the Territorial Army, for whom there was occasional weekend training and an annual two-week camp, and a further 57,500 British troops in the Indian Army. All of these men were, like Norman Field, volunteers.
By 1936, when Field joined the Army, there had been much discussion in Britain about rearmament and strategic military policy, but this did not mean there was not already a considerable armaments industry in Britain – because there most certainly was. It was true that the Army had been much reduced since the end of the First World War, but in terms of building warships, aeroplanes, guns and even tanks, Britain was leading the way. Firms like Vickers Armstrong and its subsidiary, Vickers Aviation, Hawker Siddeley, Rolls-Royce and de Havilland employed thousands and invested huge sums in research and development.
Neville Chamberlain, Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1935, had been a leading advocate of rearmament and particularly of further development of the Air Force. It was in no small part thanks to him that the RAF now had two modern fighter planes in the Hawker Hurricane and Supermarine Spitfire. As Prime Minister, he had continued to oversee Britain's further investment in the arms industry; just because he had favoured appeasement at Munich the previous year, it should not be assumed he was in any way slow to build up Britain's military strength. The scale of aircraft construction, of the Royal Navy's latest warship-building programme, and of the construction of new ordnance factories was immense, and most areas of military production were, by the outbreak of war, greater than those of Germany.
History, however, has all too often suggested otherwise, not least because of the size of the Army. It has to be remembered, though, that Britain was in a very different position to either France or Germany or even Italy. Britain was an island at the heart of a huge global trading empire. Its military strategy was not an aggressive land-grabbing one – it was, in the first instance, to defend the nation's sovereignty, regardless of its commitment to Poland. To do this, a powerful navy and a strong Air Force were more important than troops on the ground, something that Chamberlain never failed to argue throughout the rearmament dis-cussions right up to the outbreak of war.
Moreover, there were important logistical considerations militating against a large army. If Germany or France needed to move their armies, they simply walked or put them on to trains or into vehicles. If Britain wanted to do the same, the Army had to get into a vast armada of ships. Gradually transporting the ten divisions of the BEF to France was one thing; moving a force of millions in quick order was quite another. What's more, once overseas, a large army needed ever-larger amounts of material support. Maintaining such a force in peacetime was clearly nonsensical, and should it come to war and a larger army be required, then it could be built up rather as it had been in the last war. The hope, however, was that such a force would not be necessary – not with France as an ally and with greater emphasis on sea and air power.
Furthermore, history had repeatedly shown that nations with strong navies tended to come out on top, and this was a theory that had certainly worked for Britain. A series of successful wars and the world's largest empire, with an invincible navy at its core, were testimony to that. While books such as the American Captain Alfred Mahan's The Influence of Sea Power Upon History had become standard reading across the board, air power was a less well-known quantity. An Italian general, Giulio Douhet, had written about it and been widely read, but in truth no one was quite sure how air power would manifest itself in the next war, despite its use in recent conflicts such as the civil war in Spain; air power and aeroplane technology were changing fast, and twenty years on from the last great war machines were very different. However, it was a safe bet that air power would prove very important; clearly, whoever controlled air space would have a crucial advantage.
With this in mind, no matter how hard the Army chiefs argued the point, the Prime Minister was determined that Britain should forget about a million-man army and stick with just five Regular home divisions, while focusing on air power and naval dominance instead.
There was, however, another reason for this stance. Britain may have been a warfare state in the late 1930s, but it was not a militaristic state like Germany. It was also a democracy, and it was inconceivable that British society would have accepted conscription – and that would have been the only way to raise an army of the size that could compete with the likes of France, Germany and Italy. In any case, the kind of colonial police work that dominated much of Britain's military operations on the ground – such as in Palestine and along the Northwest Frontier – was far better suited to Regular troops than conscripts. Should war become increasingly likely, then Britain could think again, but, until that point, it made more sense to Chamberlain and others to build up Britain's strength through mechanization and technology rather than manpower. And there was unquestionably a sound logic to this, because in these areas Britain was second only to the USA. This is not to say that Britain and France had been necessarily right to adopt a policy of appeasement the previous autumn, no matter how compelling the reasons seemed at the time; but appeasement did not mean in any way that Britain was delaying rearming. It was not.
Chamberlain's stance on the size of the Army changed following the German march into Czechoslovakia that March, although the Chiefs of Staff, Britain's senior service chiefs, had received intelligence of a supposed German invasion of Holland in January, which had focused their minds on possible war. There had been no joint staff talks with the French since 1936 and none at all during the Munich Crisis the previous autumn, so finally an approach for such discussions had been made, to which the French agreed. These took place at the end of March. First, though, the Chiefs of Staff drew up their own 'European Appreciation, 1939–40', which, although in some ways it became outdated almost immediately, set Britain on the strategic course that it would take in the forthcoming war with Germany.
Among the assumptions were that Britain would have the support of its Dominions – Australia, New Zealand, Canada and South Africa – but also the Republic of Ireland. The USA would be friendly, but unlikely to intervene. Portugal would remain neutral, and Egypt would fulfil its treaty obligations of allowing British troops to maintain a sizeable presence.
A lack of resources was considered the major Achilles heel of both Germany and Italy. For Germany, most of its industrial capacity was concentrated in the Ruhr, while for Italy – as far as it went – it was in the north, around Turin, Milan and Genoa. The other threat was from Imperial Japan, but Britain and France together had greater economic resources than their three potential enemies combined.
While Britain and France's naval forces were greatly superior, it was recognized that these would be considerably stretched should it come to war. Initially, the combined armies of both countries would be smaller than Germany's, but not for long. The Luftwaffe was known to be superior, and while British aircraft production was increasing greatly, France's was not doing so at the same pace.
With these factors in mind, the policy was to play for time as long as possible and then initially to go on to the defensive. The Axis economic limitations suggested they would opt for a rapid and decisive victory within a matter of months. British staff conclusions were that Britain and France must withstand this initial Axis strike, then continue the build-up of military strength and then, when this had been achieved, strike back. No timescale was put on this, but it was considered that when Britain had achieved the full fighting strength of the Empire it could confront the war from a position of some strength and, thanks to its naval power, strike at a place of its choosing.
In the subsequent talks, France had broadly agreed with this appreci-ation, although if Italy entered the war, there was agreement that it was both militarily and economically weak and should be dealt with decisively. Should it come to war with Germany, the RAF would be expected to make a major commitment, as would the Royal Navy, but the French also demanded more effort from Britain in terms of men on the ground; even Chamberlain was finally having to give way on this. In January, he had already called for more volunteers to join the armed services and finally, in April, with the Cabinet confident public opinion had sufficiently shifted, limited conscription was announced. And, as the government had hoped, the announcement had been accepted by the British public.
The result of British conscription, French mobilization and continued and increased rearmament in all areas was that by the autumn of 1939 Britain and France together had more men in uniform than Germany, considerably greater naval power, and air forces that were only fractionally weaker in numbers.
Man-for-man, Britain and France looked stronger, not weaker, than Germany. Furthermore, they would be initially on the defensive, and, as the Germans were well aware, accepted military thinking was that any attacker needed at least a 3:1 advantage in manpower to achieve a decisive breakthrough. On paper, at least, the Allies could face the German threat with confidence.
CHAPTER 8
Vehicle Shortages
WHEN THE YOUNG Scotsman Eric Brown had been picked up by the Gestapo in Bavaria, he had assumed that for him the war was over before it had even started. But, to his intense relief, after three days he was freed and told he would be taken to the Swiss border. Bundled into a large Mercedes, he was driven out of Munich. Following behind was another SS officer driving his MG.
Once at the border, he was told he could have his car back. Brown was perplexed.
'You've taken my books, my money, my clothes. Why are you giving me my car?' he asked.
'Because we have no spares,' came the reply. It was a curiously prophetic comment.
Brown's troubles were not over, however. The Swiss border guard then detained him until his presence was cleared with the Swiss government at Bern. Eventually, he was escorted to the British Embassy, where he was interviewed by the Ambassador. 'You've got to go back home,' he told Brown, 'because I've got your call-up papers here.' The Ambassador then gave him enough petrol coupons to get him to England and sent him on his way.
This small episode said much about Britain's and Germany's separate situations regarding resources, and particularly with regard to motor vehicles. Brown was solidly middle class but not especially well-off, yet he already had a car of his own; it was a luxury very few Germans of his age enjoyed. In 1935, there was one vehicle for every 65 people in Germany, and four years later, despite building autobahns, that figure was still only one vehicle for every 47 people. In Britain in 1935, the figure had been one vehicle for every 23 people and had risen to one for every 14 by the outbreak of war. In France, the leading user of motor vehicles in Europe, the figure had been one vehicle for every 19 people in 1935. In the United States, it had been one vehicle for every 5 people back in 1935 and had risen to almost one for every 3 by 1939. In contrast, in Italy in 1936, there had been just one car for every 104 people. Italy and Germany may have had already well-known – and Grand Prix-winning – names such as Mercedes, Audi and Alfa Romeo, but this only underlined just what an elite sport it was; it was no reflection on the wider German or Italian society.
For a nation like Germany that had entered into war against two of the leading and richest nations in the world, this was a major problem, because the lack of motor vehicles in the country had all kind of knock-on effects that went beyond a simple shortage of vehicles on the front line. The fewer vehicles there were meant there were also fewer factories than in say, France or Britain, making them. The fewer factories there were, the fewer people there were with the know-how to make vehicles, and the fewer mechanics there were to repair them; it meant there were also fewer people who knew how to drive them, and fewer petrol pumps to fill them. This shortfall in expertise could not be magicked out of thin air. It took time to build up.
Nazi propaganda had worked hard to give the impression that the Wehrmacht of 1939 was the most modern, most mechanized in the world. Nothing could have been further from the truth, as those trying to manage the Polish campaign and its aftermath had been struggling to come to terms with. Rather, just fifteen divisions out of the fifty-four used had been mechanized in any way; the rest had been dependent on vast numbers of horses and the men marching on their own two feet – just as Prussian and then German armies had moved for hundreds of years. Nor was there any 'Blitzkrieg' strategy – certainly it was not a phrase anyone would have been familiar with in Germany; rather, it was coined later, by Time magazine in the US on 25 September. Furthermore, because Hitler had ordered Case WHITE very suddenly, the planned war games in which air forces and ground troops would put theories to the test had to be cancelled. The time to test their Army and Air Force became the invasion itself, and although the campaign was effectively over in just eighteen days, the Poles were hardly much of a yardstick by which to judge the efficacy of their war machine. The planning had been good, but plenty of difficulties had arisen, not least with the limited amount of motor transport employed.
One of the men trying to deal with this really rather massive problem within the Wehrmacht was Oberst Adolf von Schell, who was General Plenipotentiary for Motor Vehicles under General Georg Thomas, head of the War Economics and Armaments Office (WiRüAmt) at the OKW. Now forty-six years old, von Schell had been a career soldier who had fought throughout the First World War from its opening manoeuvres in Belgium, through some of the major battles on the Western Front and across to the Eastern Front and the Carpathians. He had been wounded four times and awarded the Iron Cross First Class twice, and, having emerged still in one piece at the end, had remained in the Reichswehr, the much-reduced German Army.
By 1930, he was a captain, had served both in infantry regiments and as a staff officer at the RWM, the Reich Ministry for Economic Affairs, and had then been sent to Fort Benning in the United States as an instructor at the Infantry School. The Americans had been impressed by this hugely experienced infantry officer, and the US Army had even published a book based on his lectures there, called Battle Leadership. For his part, the genial and inquisitive von Schell had made the most of the opportunity of being in the United States to study the American motor industry, including spending time at the Ford motor plants in Detroit. When he returned to Germany the following year, he did so with his mind full of ideas about just how the Army could become more mechanized and what was needed from the German motor industry.
As he discovered, staff appointments at the Ministry of War as well as a stint as tactics instructor at the Institute of War gave him the oppor-tunity to speak out about his views and what he had learned in the USA, the most automotive society in the world. By 1937, he was Chief of Staff of the Inspectorate of Mechanized Troops; a year later, he had been appointed Under-Secretary in the Ministry of Transport and had begun to be noticed by both Hitler and G?ring. First came an appointment as the Automotive Engineering Delegate for the Four-Year Plan. Finally, in November 1938, as G?ring had announced his plans to massively increase the rate of rearmament, he was given the key role of General Plenipotentiary of Motor Vehicles. This meant he was the man who was to co-ordinate and oversee the mechanization of the Wehrmacht. For so long he had striven to influence the Wehrmacht and help make the Army, especially, more mechanized. Now, at last, he had that position of influence. Little did he realize at the time, however, just what a poisoned chalice this would be.
Even by the spring of 1939, some of the problems that would plague Germany's drive for a more mechanized Wehrmacht were becoming all too apparent to von Schell. He recognized that only a motorized economy could produce motorized armed forces; it was not enough to simply demand greater mechanization – as both Hitler and G?ring did – and expect it to happen out of thin air. Eventually, in the long term, maybe; but in 1939 there was a huge discrepancy between what was being demanded and what was actually achievable in the short term. The building of fortifications, for example, such as those along the Westwall, or Siegfried Line, required more trucks than had been anticipated; so too did the new divisions that were being raised. There was, however, no mass production as there was in the United States, and no co-ordination of effort, rather just a lot of innovative models being produced in low numbers. There was also a conflict between commercial and military requirements. The disparate and largely small-scale German motor industry was made up from individual companies that continued to produce their own, different types of trucks, cars and other vehicles. When von Schell had taken over as General Plenipotentiary of Motor Vehicles, there had been no fewer than 131 different types of truck and 1,367 different types of trailer, all of which required different parts, different repair knowledge and, all too often, different tools too.
The second big problem was that of raw materials. On the one hand, the Nazis were demanding more mechanization for the Wehrmacht, but on the other had reduced the iron ore quota, for example, as priority was switched elsewhere. Because of this, von Schell warned G?ring in a long memo back in March, only 50 per cent of truck orders could realistically be delivered by the beginning of 1940. For the already inefficient factories, this was a disaster, because it meant there would be a lag of time when there was not enough work, and owners would have no choice but to lay people off. 'Once this has happened,' von Schell told him, 'then an increase in production is unimaginable for several years. This would damage the motorization of the Wehrmacht, the Reich and commerce, from which it would hardly be able to recover.'
Amidst these conflicting demands and the deeply entrenched -privatized motor industry, von Schell had spent the best part of a year valiantly trying to make improvements with a series of measures that became known as the 'Schell Plan'. He knew that the still-privatized motor industry needed greater state interference, but the Nazis were curiously reluctant to do this, not least because it went against Hitler's – and G?ring's – -penchant for divide and rule.
None the less, von Schell would have to impose himself on the motor industry if he was to have any chance at all of making it more efficient, and top of his list of measures was to reduce the number of vehicle types – in the case of trucks, from 131 to twenty-three. The aim was for the old types to be discontinued through 1939. Because of the shortage of fuel, he also planned to increase the number of vehicles operating not with petrol but with gas generators of solid fuels, aiming for nearly 160,000 such trucks by 1941. Also encouraged was the production of the militarized version of Hitler's planned car for the masses, the Volkswagen. Both the civilian and military version, which became known as the Kübelwagen, or 'bucket car', were designed by Ferdinand Porsche. However, even though Porsche's first designs for the Kübelwagen were drawn up in 1938, it was still not in production by the invasion of Poland; instead, a handful only were field tested in the campaign. Full production was still a few months off, as the design was repeatedly refined and tweaked. Meanwhile, time was ticking away.
Another of von Schell's plans was to improve maintenance, so he came up with the Home Motor Pool Organization, in which repair shops and garages would remain independent and in private hands but would be under the Wehrmacht's control. This meant the military would take priority over civilian requirements, and there would at least be some form of pooling of maintenance resources. Finally, there was compulsory requisitioning. Some 50 per cent of all civilian trucks were taken for military use, on the basis that half could be taken without crippling the economy too severely.
Since his appointment as controller of all motor vehicles, von Schell had been aiming to fulfil all his plans by 1942, and by the beginning of September 1939 there was an awful lot of work yet to be done. Getting the various companies to toe the line had been no easy task and still there were too many variations and production was too low.
Film crews were careful to focus on the units that did have trucks and panzers, and stopped the cameras rolling whenever things started to go wrong. However, even before troops crossed over into Poland, it was clear there were nowhere near enough maintenance facilities. This was because that part of Prussia was an area of especially few motor vehicles, which had meant there were fewer civilian repair shops to incorporate into the Home Motor Pool Organization. And once they were in Poland, the roads had proved particularly bad, putting a greater strain on the vehicles themselves, all too many of which were originally civilian and never designed for robust military use. Inexperienced drivers were also too rough with them. The grinding of gears, numerous potholes, pressure of battle and a host of other factors all conspired to make mechanical breakdown a major issue. Once kaput, the problem was further exacerbated by the still large range of vehicles. Getting the right spares to the right broken-down vehicle, deep inside Poland, was no easy task. Von Schell was relieved it had been all over bar the shouting within a couple weeks. A much longer campaign, and the mechanized arm of the Wehrmacht would have ground to a halt.
It wasn't only the outside world that had thought of the emerging Wehrmacht as a giant, modern, mechanized force. Most Germans believed it too, including Siegfried Knappe, who, as a nineteen-year-old back in October 1936, had joined the artillery with visions of becoming part of an elite force of modern motorized guns. His father had been a naval gunnery officer in the last war and during Siegfried's childhood had told him many thrilling tales of his wartime exploits. During his final years at the Gymnasium, his secondary school, and his six months' conscription in the Reich Labour Service, Knappe had read much in the newspapers and magazines about the new self-propelled artillery weapons that were coming into service so, on joining the Army, signing up for the artillery had been an easy choice.
As he had arrived at the barracks in Jena, however, Knappe had been in for a shock. Far from being kitted out with shiny modern equipment, there were instead vast rows of stable blocks.
'You mean they still pull the artillery with horses?' he asked hiscompanion, desperately hoping it was not true.
'Yes, I am afraid so,' came the reply.
The following morning, before dawn and in the cold darkness, the new recruits were taken straight to the stables and each man was given a horse stall to clean. A deflated Knappe began what would now become a daily routine – mucking out. 'I still could not believe,' he noted, 'I was actually in the horse-drawn artillery. It all seemed so backward in this modern age.'
Almost three years later, Knappe, now a lieutenant and battery commander, had come to terms with his earlier disappointment. He had become a keen horseman and was proud of his battery, his regiment and their high standard of training. They knew their task so well that operating and firing had become instinctive; they had trained with the infantry too, and while their guns were still horse-drawn, they were high-quality pieces all the same: 24. Artillerieregiment began the war with justifiable confidence.
Not all the regiment had headed into Poland, however. Twenty per cent had been left behind to form a new regiment. This was because only a comparatively small part of the German Army was fully trained. Fully trained Regular troops had amounted to around 684,000, while there were a further 410,000 fully trained reservists. Some 709,000 reservists had received only very rudimentary training, and on top of that there were nearly 1.7 million older reservists and First World War veterans. The Field Army was 2.5 million strong, while the Replacement Army numbered 1.2 million.
The Field Army was made up from a mixture of fully trained Regular troops and reservists, while a fifth of the personnel of Regular Army divisions were pulled out of the Field Army and put into the Replacement Army. Siegfried Knappe was among the 20 per cent taken from 24. Artillery Battalion and sent to form the cadre of a new formation. Generally speaking, replacement divisions were spread around the country and drew on locally mobilized men, largely because they then had less distance to travel – and with the chronic shortage of vehicles and an already over-burdened railway network, this made good sense.
In 1939, the unit by which the scale of a fighting force was judged tended to be the division. Numbers varied, but as a rule of thumb, most were between 14,000 and 17,000 men strong, and this was the case for British and French – and even American and Italian – divisions too. Two or more divisions made up a corps, while two or more corps made up an army and two or more armies made an army group. Divisions were described by the make-up of their core regiments, either panzer (armoured), panzer grenadier (motorized) or infantry. In an infantry division, for example, there would be three regiments consisting of three battalions each, as well as pioneers (engineers), artillery and support troops. Each regiment would be 3,250 strong with a number of ancillary companies and battalions of around 800 troops. The British had regiments, but while these were divided into battalions, the equivalent formation to a German regiment was known as a brigade, i.e. made up of three battalions, but usually from different regiments.
At any rate, the German Army of September 1939 was made up of 106 divisions, which included the Field and Replacement Armies. Only half of those divisions, however, were what were called 'First Wave' troops, i.e. those sent into Poland.
Knappe and the 24. Artillery Battalion had been based at Plauen, in south-east Germany, near the Czech border. With much of the regiment gone, the remainder stayed behind at the barracks waiting for new replacements to arrive. For Knappe, it meant a lot of new faces, including a new battery commander, who was over forty and a reservist, as well as 150 others and the same number of horses. At least, however, he was able to keep his own horse, his beloved Schwabenprinz.
Within a few days, this newly formed artillery regiment moved out and headed west, taking up positions near the Luxembourg border. There they immediately began a vigorous training programme in order to accustom the horses and men to working together and to get them ready as soon as possible to face a potential attack by the Allies. Still no attack came, so that by the end of September, and with confidence rising, Knappe heard the troops starting to make jokes about it. A few days later, they pulled back a short distance out of their bunkers to more comfortable surroundings. It seemed that the French were not going to attack after all. 'Even though we were technically at war with England and France,' noted Knappe, 'everyone assumed that the war was really over with the defeat of Poland.'
Siegfried Knappe wasn't the only German soldier thinking such thoughts. Hans von Luck, who had fought in Poland and survived unscathed along with most of his colleagues, had also heard much talk that the war was now over, both from soldiers and from German civilians as they returned to Bad Kissingen. But von Luck wasn't so sure; he'd noticed the propaganda machine was once again cranking up against Britain and France. Hitler, he knew, held a deep-rooted loathing of France ever since the last war. The names 'Alsace' and 'Lorraine', taken in the Franco-Prussian War in 1871 but handed back to France in 1919, were also cropping up repeatedly.
Von Luck was quite right not to be seduced by premature thoughts of peace, although many of those at the very top of the Wehrmacht, horrified by the declaration of war by Britain and France, had hoped the war could be brought to an end by political means now that the campaign in Poland was over. Even the more pessimistic, like General Walter Warlimont at the OKW, hoped that by adopting a firm defensive approach and building up military strength further, they might eventually draw the Allies to the negotiating table.
They were, however, about to be stunned by a bombshell. Warlimont had been visiting Hitler's forward headquarters, temporarily set up in the Casino Hotel in Zoppot, in Poland, on 20 September, when he saw an ashen General Keitel. The Chief of the OKW then told him that Hitler intended to launch an offensive on the West almost immediately. It was, he told Warlimont, top secret and he was not to breathe a word; Keitel confessed he had only heard through one of Hitler's aides.
Warlimont was dumbstruck. At no point had Hitler ever discussed the matter with any of his senior generals – not Keitel, not General Walther von Brauchitsch, the head of the Army, not even G?ring. The Polish campaign was all but over by then, but, even so, it had shown up some worrying deficiencies, not least shortages of just about everything, from vehicles and vehicle spare parts to ammunition. The fighting in Poland was also demonstrating the lack of training in many of the divisions. Taking on Poland was one thing, but going on the offensive against the two powerhouses of Europe was quite another. Hitler had decided to strike quickly before Britain and France could build up a sufficient advantage in terms of men, machines and equipment. What he singularly failed to realize was the Wehrmacht needed time to build up strength too, because Germany was simply not ready for all-out war in the autumn of 1939. Furthermore, winter was coming, which massively affected the efficiency and operational capability of forces on the ground and in the air; using the Luftwaffe in tandem with the Army on the ground was a key part of Germany's war plan, but in the shortening days and worsening weather this was much harder to put into action. Yet again, Hitler's lack of understanding of the -operational art of war was becoming all too apparent; he was envisioning attacking the West within a matter of weeks. That would lead to a plan that was in-sufficiently prepared and inadequately thought through. It was madness.
Warlimont was so horrified he decided to try to take things into his own hands. Recognizing that neither Keitel nor General Alfred Jodl, the Chief of Staff of the OKW, would act, he decided to ignore Keitel's warning of secrecy and let the Army General Staff know what the Führer was planning. Despite this tip-off, the Army did nothing.
A week later, on 27 September, Hitler assembled his Commanders-in-Chief at the Reich Chancellery in Berlin, along with Keitel and Warlimont, and announced they would be attacking in the West as soon as possible. Warlimont noticed he had been holding a small piece of paper with some notes on it; having said his piece, he tossed the paper into the fire. No one said a word in protest.
CHAPTER 9
The Modern Army
OBERST ADOLF VON SCHELL was in no doubt whatsoever that a fully mechanized army was the way forward. It was true that horses did not require petrol, but they did require fuel and lots of it. Fodder had to be transported, and in any case its production used ground that could otherwise be utilized for the production of food for both the armed forces and the general population. In fact, von Schell had calculated that a fully mechanized army would be 80 per cent more efficient in terms of the supply of men and materiel.
It was with these sorts of calculations in mind that Britain had decided its entire field force should be fully mechanized. Back in March the Territorial Army had been doubled from thirteen divisions to twenty-six and since then mobilized – Bill Cheall, the young Yorkshireman from The Green Howards whose Devon holiday had been interrupted at the end of August, was part of this call to arms. On the outbreak of war, the National Service (Armed Forces) Act had been immediately passed, introducing full conscription. On 8 September, it was agreed that the aim should be to equip fifty-five divisions by the end of the second year of war, i.e. 1941, which would include fourteen from the Dominions of Canada, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand, and a further four from India. At least twenty divisions were to be equipped within the first twelve months. Priority was to go to the Field Force being sent to France, soon named the British Expeditionary Force in a nod to the army sent overseas back in 1914.
By the end of September, almost 160,000 Army personnel and 22,000 vehicles, along with nearly 10,000 men of the RAF, some 36,000 tons of ammunition and 25,000 tons of fuel had safely been shipped to France, and it was planned that this fighting force would grow significantly over the ensuing months. Because of this rapid growth in the Army, especially, there were now worrying shortages of equipment, particularly guns and tanks, but output was growing on a weekly basis.
Despite these shortages, the British Army was still the best equipped and most modern in the world, not least because its Field Force was entirely mechanized. There were no horse-drawn artillery units, and all infantry were ferried from A to B in trucks. The 15 cwt and 30 cwt lorries equipping much of the BEF were rugged and robust – the motor firms Bedford and Morris producing most of them. British artillery was also of good quality, and most guns were now equipped with pneumatic tyres, which meant they could easily be towed by trucks and gun tractors, unlike most of the German equivalents, which were largely towed by horse. There was also a tracked troop carrier simply called the Universal Carrier. Infantry had never been so well served by machines.
In fact, the British Army was going through something of a revolution. Hand in hand with rearmament had come the recognition that attitudes had to change, that a modern war required modern equipment, and that Britain needed to use its global reach to full effect. Ironically, the im-pression from German propaganda of a Reich that was creating a modern, mechanized military Moloch had done much to kick-start this new outlook.
Much had changed in the past three years, right down to the uniforms. With the scent of war in the air, Britain had, in 1938, designed the Battledress, a highly innovative concept and the most modern and practical combat uniform adopted by any European power. Made of hard-wearing khaki wool serge, it consisted of a short jacket that came down to its wearer's midriff. This was very sensible given the high-waisted trousers of the day; the battle blouse, as the jacket was called, therefore only covered the waistband of the trousers, and in so doing saved a significant amount of fabric on earlier designs and on those worn by almost every other army the world over. It was generously cut under the arms, allowing easy movement, and considerable thought had been given to the pockets – two large ones on the inside of the jacket, two large breast pockets, side pockets on the trousers and a further generous pocket on the thigh, big enough for a map or documents. The old knee-high puttees had also gone, relics of a former era, replaced by durable canvas ankle gaiters. This new soldier's uniform had no frills, wasted no material, and was exceptionally cheap and easy to mass-produce, while at the same time allowing its wearer easy manoeuvrability and warmth.
Also recently introduced was the new Bren light machine gun, capable of firing at a theoretical rate of 500 rounds per minute, which, as had been shown by the phenomenally effective German Maxim gun of the previous war, was around the optimum rate of fire; much faster firing rates created problems of overheating and, obviously, used more ammunition, and in any case there was an argument for having a weapon that could kill twenty enemies with one bullet each rather than one soldier with twenty. Fed by thirty-round magazines, the Bren was rarely allowed to overheat and, in any case, had a thick barrel and wooden grip that made barrel-changing very straightforward. It was also what was considered a light machine gun, and could be operated by just one man. Designed in Brno, Czechoslovakia, and adapted and modified by Enfield in England – hence Br–en – it was versatile, robust and accurate, and had a barrel designed to fire 220,000 rounds. It was a fine piece of kit.
Now out in France with the Royal Fusiliers, Lieutenant Norman Field's platoon of thirty-six men had three sections of ten men plus a six-man platoon headquarters, and each section was now equipped with one Bren and nine Short Magazine Lee Enfield rifles, the latter capable of firing two five-round clips without a change of magazine. No other rifle at the time could fire as many, and, because the firing bolt came back only a short way, whoever was firing it could pull the bolt back without altering his aim. As this capacity was not something shared by other bolt-action rifles at the time, a reasonably trained rifleman in the British Army could expect to fire around thirty rounds per minute, while the French and German infantry-men could manage only half that.
British webbing – the soldier's pouches, packs and belts – had also changed with the advent of the Bren and the Battledress. Back in 1914, the British Army had realized that leather, which had been used for centuries to make ammunition pouches, was not so effective in sustained and -continuous combat. It was also expensive – very expensive – and if it got wet could become brittle when it dried out again. Far more effective was canvas, which was both cheap and durable. Ever since then, British -webbing had been made of this cotton-based material, and the new 1937 pattern included two pouches large enough to carry three Bren magazines each.
Certainly, there were no complaints from Norman Field and his men about the new uniforms. 'It was a vast improvement,' he says. 'In the old service dress, one always felt rather stiff and buttoned up. It was much easier to slither around on the ground in Battledress.'
The British infantry, at any rate, were now well-equipped for war. They had plenty of firepower, trucks and tracked Carriers to move them around rapidly, and new, modern-design uniforms.
None the less, it was, of course, easier to equip a smaller army than a large one. Rearmament since 1935 had focused so heavily on the Navy and RAF, and these decisions by men like Neville Chamberlain, first as Chancellor of the Exchequer and then as Prime Minister, not only largely dictated Britain's actions in the build up to war, but the approach it would also take as the conflict unfolded. The First World War had underlined to Britain's war leaders the futility of labour-intensive campaigns, in which huge numbers of men were thrown at increasingly powerful weapons, and which had produced long years of attritional stalemate. The British intention was to invest in -machinery and technology to help create a strategy that was less wasteful of men's lives and, hopefully, would bring about victory sooner. Quite intentionally, the number of men at the coal face of fighting was to be kept as low as possible. In this new war, manpower would be used not just as soldiers on the ground and on ships, but in many more aircraft and, most of all, in factories and shipyards. And considering Britain's global reach and already heavy investment in research and technology, it was an entirely sensible approach.
With this in mind, Britain was preparing for a massive increase in the size of its Army, but still had no intention of going beyond fifty-five divisions, even though Germany had over a hundred by the outbreak of war, and France, after rapid mobilization, now also had close to a hundred. The men behind these decisions were not only the Prime Minister, peacetime Cabinet and now War Cabinet, but also the Chiefs of Staff, which consisted of the three service chiefs and the man at the top of the pile, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS). This had been General Lord Gort, who had won a Victoria Cross, Britain's highest award for valour, in the last war. He had now taken command of the BEF, so General 'Tiny' Ironside had become CIGS in his place. Assisting them were the Vice-Chiefs of Staff, the Joint Planning Staff and the Joint Intelligence Committee, or JIC, both of the latter, as their names implied, representing all three services working both separately and together.
Collectively, the planning teams, Vice-Chiefs and Chiefs of Staff and Government had had the vision and wherewithal to create a modern and well-equipped army, but while training now taught soldiers how to operate with all this mechanization and with radio sets and Bren light machine guns, much of the Regular Army had spent the years since 1918 carrying out its more traditional role: policing the Empire. And containing angry Arabs or troublesome Pashtuns on the Northwest Frontier was no real preparation for coming into combat against the combined forces of Nazi Germany.
Intellectually, the British Army was also stymied by a somewhat insouciant and deeply entrenched regimental system, which laid great emphasis on both loyalty to the cap badge and tradition, and which encouraged a culture that frowned on too much talking shop. In the Mess, one discussed cricket, polo or pig-sticking, not how to effectively co--ordinate tanks and infantry. In any case, the cavalry had largely remained cavalry throughout much of the 1920s and 1930s, even though Britain had invented the tank, and its regiments were among the most influential within the British Army. Tanks were the preserve of the Royal Tank Corps and rather looked down upon by the cavalry as a bunch of low-grade Johnny-come-latelys. When the cavalry regiments did finally begin to mechanize, most of their number were appalled. Certain members of The Royal Scots Greys, for example, were so disgusted at the idea of mechanization that in 1938 they lobbied Parliament against such a move and wrote angry letters to The Times.
Yet, by the summer of 1939, most had succumbed to the inevitable and modernized. As Britain began this new war, the thinking was that tanks would perform a variety of roles, which required different types of tank. Cavalry regiments tended to be equipped with light, fast tanks, for use in a forward screening and reconnaissance capacity, such as they had performed in the last war and beyond, while the newly formed Royal Armoured Corps, which contained the new regiments of the Royal Tank Corps, used slower, more heavily armoured tanks in direct support of the infantry.
British tanks were, for the most part, on a par with, if not better than, German versions. The Matilda had the thickest armour of any tank in the world and was virtually immune to most of the guns in the German arsenal, while the Mk II variant had a high-velocity 2-pounder gun that was more than a match for all German panzers apart from the Panzer IV. Early British cruiser tanks were not so good, with complicated suspension systems, and they suffered from being jacks of all trades and masters of none. None the less, the A10 had armour as thick as a Panzer IV's and was also equipped with a 2-pounder, while the next version, the A13, was fast, was soon upgraded to 30mm of armour and was similarly equipped with the 2-pounder. When this anti-tank gun had first appeared in 1938, it was probably the best of its kind in the world and could fire a 37mm shell at some 2,700 feet per second; by the outbreak of war, this was still a velocity that ranked favourably with most German guns, and could penetrate 50 millimetres of armour at a thousand yards, that is two-thirds of a mile. The thickest armour on any panzer was 30 milli-metres. Early British tanks have taken a large amount of criticism over the years, but by the standards of the first year of war they were really not bad at all. What's more, production was rising rapidly.
By August 1939, the only units where horses and vast amounts of leather were still used were those in the Yeomanry regiments. The Yeomanry had first been raised during the Napoleonic Wars, volunteer units whose members had to own or have access to a horse. By the summer of 1939, this recruitment policy still held, which was why most of its members were landowners, countrymen, mad-keen huntsmen and steeplechasers.
One of those regiments still equipped with its chargers was the Nottingham Sherwood Rangers Yeomanry. One of the TA units to have been mobilized on the outbreak of war, it had had a fine record in the last war, where it had served in the Middle East, but since then had been confined to weekend training and the obligatory summer camp each August. Its last camp had been at Welbeck, the estate of the Duke of Portland, and was, in many ways, rather like a grown-up Scout camp on horseback.
Already, though, its ranks were being swelled by an influx of new -officers and other ranks, drawn from a much wider pool. One of those was Stanley Christopherson, who was twenty-seven and had already seen something of the world, having been brought up partly in South Africa and having worked there in the gold-mining business after leaving Winchester College. He had since returned and gone into stockbroking in the City, living the life of a highly sociable and extremely charming young bachelor about town. A few years back, he had also joined the Inns of Court, a TA cavalry regiment for barristers, solicitors, stockbrokers and former public schoolboys like himself.
The Inns of Court had not been mobilized at the outbreak of war, but all its members had. Christopherson and two of his old Inns of Court pals had been sent to join the Sherwood Rangers. Having been to see the regimental tailor and boot-maker in London, a week or so later they boarded the train to Malton in Yorkshire, where the Rangers were based, proudly wearing their one pip of a second-lieutenant and sporting riding breeches, boots, spurs and tunics. 'We were slightly apprehensive,' Christopherson noted in his diary, 'as we had heard the Regiment boasted three Masters of Fox Hounds and the pre-war officers were extremely wealthy and very insular.' To his delight, however, he not only found old City chums like Micky Gold and Mike Parrish were already in the Sherwood Rangers, but so too were Peter and Michael Laycock, with whom he had been at prep school.
At Malton, the Rangers would carry out intense training and complete the business of switching from peacetime TA unit to full-time soldiers. For the time being they would be keeping their chargers; the Sherwood Rangers would not be heading to France, however, but to Palestine. There was no immediate sign of war breaking out in the Middle East, but the problems of the Empire did not stop now that Britain was at war with Germany; on the contrary, in many cases they were exacerbated. The area had been stable enough in the 1920s, but by the late 1930s threatened to break out in violence at any moment. Arab nationalism was an easy way for the Axis to make life difficult for the British, and while Italy had kept out of the war, Italian agents were still agitating in the region. British strategy was therefore not only to make sure there was no uprising but also to ensure there were enough troops out there should Italy enter the war and make a move against British possessions there.
There was, it was true, something about the Sherwood Rangers Yeomanry that harked back to an earlier age, but they were by no means representative of the rest of the rapidly enlarging British Army. In any case, these few outmoded Yeomanry and Regular cavalry units affected only one level of warfare – and, in Britain's case, only one of its three armed services. War, it was widely understood, was to be fought on three levels: the strategic, the operational and the tactical. Tactically, in the Army at any rate, Britain had some growing up to do, but operationally and strategically, she was on much firmer footing. The biggest issue during this first winter of war, was size. Britain was mobilizing fast, but the Army's growth to fifty-five divisions would take several years, not months. There was no panic yet, however, because France's Army was huge.
And so with the Nazi swastika now fluttering over Warsaw, the plan as agreed between Britain and France back in the spring still held true: so long as they could hold any German offensive at bay, all would be well. They would sit tight, build up strength and then strike back. There had never been much question of storming into Germany within moments of war being declared; the deal with Poland was to enter the war on its behalf. No one mentioned actually trying to save the beleaguered Poles. Not right away, at any rate.
Certainly, thanks to its existing Air Force, Navy and access to vast resources of merchant shipping, Britain's own sovereignty was in no way under threat. New, modern factories were already making arms with increased vigour. Sixteen new ordnance factories had been authorized in March, and a further twenty-nine were given the green light in December. Planned spending on arms for 1939/40 was ￡580 million, half of all government expenditure. More guns, more aircraft, more ships – more war materiel – and with no sign of there being any let-up until Germany was beaten. And this was the point: Britain's – and France's – war aims were not for the war to fizzle out in some negotiated peace with Germany. Rather, it was to take on the Third Reich and rid the world of Hitler and Nazism, and beat Germany once and for all. This, however, would take time, so as far as Britain's war leaders were concerned, the longer Germany delayed the better.
Britain's appreciation of the situation was precisely what Hitler feared and was why he was demanding his generals prepare for an immediate assault on the West. Hitler's geo-political understanding was often very suspect indeed. But on the need to crush Britain and France swiftly and decisively, he was absolutely right.
CHAPTER 10
Leading the Nation
IN THE WEEKS that had followed the outbreak of war, the American journalist Eric Sevareid had been providing broadcasts almost every day, responding to a seemingly insatiable appetite for war news from the other side of the Atlantic. And during that time he had managed to get out of Paris and have a look at what was going on along the front lines. He'd seen the arrival of British troops at Cherbourg, and then he and several others, including the New Zealander Geoffrey Cox, who was writing for the British Daily Express, had even managed to get to the Maginot Line. There was an understanding that no journalists were to go there, but no written pro-hibition, so, leaving early in the morning, they drove out of the city and on reaching one checkpoint after another sweet-talked their way through, until they reached the city of Metz and drove on right up to the front-line forts.
It was damp and cold, and twilight had settled on the land as they reached a village near the border. Increasingly as they had approached the front, they had seen long lines of Parisian buses, painted in camouflage and teeming with troops, and plodding horses pulling soup kitchens. The men wore the same oval helmets they had in the last war, and even their -uniforms looked much the same too: they wore overcoats, or capote, with the skirts buttoned back off the front of the legs, just as they had in 1914 – this was a purely nineteenth-century design and, if anything, harked back even to Napoleon's day. Around their legs, they still wore puttees that wrapped all the way to the knee. Much of the uniform was now, at long last, khaki, rather than blue, although some troops still wore blue trousers. A new golf-style baggy set of plus-fours had been introduced but these were not widespread yet; in any case, they made the French soldiers look even more like they were in the nineteenth century. Webbing was a combination of canvas and leather, but it was curious that the poilus should look so old-fashioned when in a few other areas great advances had been made; while the standard uniform was bulky, heavy and utterly ill-suited to modern fighting, mountain troops, for example, a small elite within the French Army, had superb kit: modern cotton and serge short jackets, woollen pullovers, excellent boots and practical short gaiters. If only the entire French Army had been equipped in such a way, because the cost was certainly not the issue; a long, bulky, standard-issue greatcoat used much more material than the shorter, more comfortable cotton and serge jacket, for example. Uniforms were very, very important, and not only from a pragmatic point of view. Put on a modern, comfortable, radical design of uniform and the wearer will feel he is part of something equally forward-thinking. Conversely, wear a uniform that looks at least forty years out of date, and the opposite is likely to be the case. This certainly struck Eric Sevareid. 'It was all the same,' he noted. 'The projector had stopped in 1918 and now was turning again.' After seeing a large number of Moroccan troops and hearing just one lone gun fire a single shell, he and his colleagues turned back to Paris.
Not long after, Sevareid and his increasingly good friend, Geoffrey Cox, had driven north to Belgium, Holland and tiny Luxembourg, conscious that, as yet, no broadcasts had been sent from this trio of neutral countries. Britain and France had hoped they could set up a defensive line along the Belgian border with Germany, but as in 1914 Belgium had refused; not until such time that Germany abused its neutrality would Belgium allow Allied troops to cross its borders. Effectively, these countries were now no-man's-land, caught in the middle and clearly hoping that somehow they could avoid becoming embroiled in a conflict in which they wanted no involvement whatsoever. The reality, which was abundantly clear to any outside observer – and not least Eric Sevareid and Geoffrey Cox – was that this was wishful thinking of the highest order. It did not take a master strategist to realize the Germans were unlikely to attempt an assault across the Maginot Line or that Hitler was going to sit back and wait for the Allies to attack. It was therefore a reasonable bet that Belgium – at the very least – would be fought over. Had these countries allowed Allied troops in earlier, then it would have been possible to create a much stronger and unified line while there was still time. This was not to be, however. Both King Leopold of Belgium and his Government and Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands and her Government stolidly stuck to their neutral stance, accepting Hitler's assurances that their neutrality would be respected. Why they should have thought these promises were more likely to be kept than others that had flagrantly been broken is not clear. Maybe it was wishful thinking. Or maybe they hoped that by remaining neutral they would be dealt with more leniently should the war reach them.
Certainly, their own defences were as nothing compared with what they might have been had the French, in particular, been allowed in. A united Europe that stood up to Nazi ideas of territorial expansion would have added up to more than the sum of its individual parts. This was already horribly clear after the rolling over of Czechoslovakia. Most of the Czechs' considerable defences had been in the Sudetenland, which had then been ceded without a fight after Munich. Had they remained intact, and had France and Britain persuaded the Low Countries, and the states of Scandinavia, that together, through mutual aid and alliances, they could build an impregnable ring around Nazi Germany, there is every chance the war would never have started. Had that been the case, there is also every reason to suppose the Pact of Steel may never have been signed. Even Hitler understood the importance of not fighting on more than one front at any time; it was widely accepted that this was what had led to defeat in the last war, as the Germans had battled to fight Russia in the east and the Allies in the west, and it was this fundamental weakness of geography that made Germany both so vulnerable and an unlikely military superpower; -avoiding fighting on multiple fronts was deeply ingrained into every one of his senior commanders.
But this ring of iron around Germany had not been achieved, and already Hitler had been able to start rendering its constituent parts harmless, first the Sudetenland, then the rest of Czechoslovakia and now Poland; this was the failure of appeasement, not the mythical late entry into rearming. The threat from the East had been neutralized. The worry for the West was that Germany would be able to undermine it further by strikes north and west into the Low Countries.
As Sevareid and Cox drove around, they were depressed by what they saw. It was true the Ardennes, that area of densely wooded hills and narrow valleys, was widely considered a natural barrier impassable by modern mechanized armies, but, even so, the few log barriers they saw were going to stop nothing, let alone the full weight of the Nazi war machine. At one point, as they drove deep into the Ardennes, they came across a Belgian patrol, who stopped them and asked them whether they had any liquor, then asked for a joyride in their car. As Sevareid and Cox made to drive on, one of the Belgian soldiers said in a slurring voice, 'Post's jush down nex' turn. Don't tell the captain we're already drunk.' A Belgian colonel they met and spoke to told them at least 50 per cent of his regiment were absent without leave in Antwerp.
When they reached Holland and Sevareid explained to the American consul that he wanted to make a broadcast about the military situation in the country, he was met with incredulity; the consul had assumed Sevareid would want to tell his listeners about canals, tulips and winter skating. Everywhere they went, they saw normal life continuing – the mobiliza-tion André Beaufre had seen as he had travelled back through Amsterdam had, as far as Sevareid was concerned, melted away.
Across the Atlantic, Americans continued to be fascinated by the war, and not least Harry Hopkins, who was still weak and confined to bed but had miraculously survived what had looked like an early end to his life just a couple of months earlier. 'The only interest here,' wrote Harry Hopkins in a letter to his brother, 'is the war,' although he hoped and believed America could still keep out of it. 'Fortunately there is no great sentiment in this country for getting into it, although I think almost everyone wants to see England and France win.'
This, in a neat nutshell, was the terrible dilemma facing the President, Franklin D. Roosevelt, who most definitely wanted France and Britain to win but knew that his fellow countrymen had no appetite to help them achieve that victory. The first wartime poll in the United States in September showed that only 2.5 per cent of the population believed America should enter the war on the side of the Allies. The largest proportion – 37.5 per cent – believed the US should take no sides and stay out of the war entirely, but offer goods to anyone on a cash-and-carry basis. A further 29.9 per cent felt America should have nothing to do with the war whatsoever.
Roosevelt's motives were based on both morality and self-interest. As far as he was concerned, it was imperative a free and democratic Western world prevailed, and that meant the defeat of Nazism. Nor did he believe the United States was immune from the current European war. 'We in the Americas,' he had said in a speech in Canada the year before, 'are no longer a far-away continent to which the eddies of controversies beyond the seas could bring no interest or no harm… The vast amount of our resources, the vigor of our commerce and the strength of our men have made us vital factors in world peace whether we choose it or not.' His worst-case scenario went something like this: Britain and France would be defeated, and then Nazi Germany would turn west, probably first towards Latin America, then to the USA. Meanwhile, an emboldened Japan would strike in the Pacific.
The dilemma facing Roosevelt was that while he deeply believed America could not stand idle, he would face political suicide if he pushed against the tide of public opinion too heavily. Furthermore, the following autumn, in November 1940, there would be a presidential election. To stand for a third term would be unprecedented, yet to allow an isolationist into the White House could, to his mind, spell disaster. If he were to stand again, he would have to tread even more carefully. He was walking on glass, as he well understood.
Roosevelt had not given up on amending the Neutrality law, however, and with the outbreak of war had made immediate and renewed moves to get it changed. In a speech to Congress on 21 September, he told them it was not a question of being interventionist or isolationists – they were all united in wishing to avoid war. Neutrality revision, he argued, was essential to ensure peace at home. Personally, he favoured a complete repeal but instead proposed a sales of arms and goods on a cash-and-carry basis. In other words, any country would be able to buy arms, so long as it was for cash and they collected and shipped them themselves. This would almost exclusively benefit France and Britain, because Germany had neither the cash nor the shipping to do so. Roosevelt would then further be able to help the Allies by assisting Anglo-French purchasing teams as far as -possible and co-operating with the British blockade of Germany, which had been put into effect immediately war broke out. Because Germany's access to the world's oceans was through the North Sea, the Royal Navy was able to block that access fairly easily. Immediately on that opening day of war, British submarine patrols began on the approaches to Wilhelmshaven and the Kiel Canal that linked the Baltic to the mouth of the River Elbe. Air patrols were stepped up, the Humber force of two cruisers and eight destroyers began cruising off the Norwegian coast, and the main body of the Home Fleet was put to sea some 400 miles west of the Hebrides in north-west Scotland. This screen was substantial enough to ensure there was little chance that any German vessel would be able to get through.
Throughout the debates in both the Senate and the House of Representatives, the President was careful not to mention either Britain or France by name and to stress the importance of the reforms for America's chances of continued peace. 'Our acts must be guided by one single hard-headed thought,' he told Congress, 'keeping America out of this war.'
His cause was helped by the vivid images of the destruction of Poland and by careful lobbying, so that by the beginning of November both houses had voted comfortably to repeal the arms embargo. For FDR, it was an important stepping stone – a move in the right direction at the very least.
America was still only slowly emerging from the Depression, but it had size, manpower and natural resources in abundance – the three components needed, above all, to create a large and successful armaments industry. That Britain and France could now, albeit in a limited fashion, draw on that resource was very much to their advantage and to the detriment of Nazi Germany.
It was also one of the principal reasons why Hitler was so anxious to strike west and knock Britain and France swiftly out of his way, and it made sense that it should be the OKW that would draw up plans for such an attack. After all, they were the combined operations staff and so were, on the face of it, best placed to plan and co-ordinate not only future oper-ations that involved the Army, Luftwaffe and Navy, but also to draw up appreciations of possible future scenarios and to put in place plans should those ever be realized. Among their staff there were the men perfectly capable of doing this – men such as Oberst Warlimont, for example. In fact, as Deputy Chief of the Operations Staff, this was precisely what the job title suggested, but instead he and his department in Section L, as the Operations Staff were known, acted more as Hitler's personal military office. Their task was to distribute the Führer's directives and orders, and try and ensure the Wehrmacht was as efficiently equipped as possible – which was why, for example, Oberst von Schell's military vehicle office was within the OKW. In other words, the OKW were facilitators of Hitler's military will, not architects of military strategy and operations.
Warlimont and the operations staff could therefore offer little more than opinions, and the OKW as a whole was generally despised by the staffs of the other services, who considered them little more than Hitler's puppets. Keitel, for example, was known as 'Lakeitel' – lackey – a pun on his name. For Warlimont it was not only frustrating, but made no -military sense whatsoever. 'Such lack of foresight,' he noted, 'seems almost in-comprehensible.' The already fraught relationship between the OKW and the Army was made worse by the strong public support given to Hitler's decision to strike west without delay by those at the top of the OKW – Keitel, its chief, and Jodl, as Chief of Staff. As it happened, Keitel had suggested to Hitler that it was, perhaps, not such a great idea and even offered his resignation; this, however, had been waved aside. Instead, Keitel's public support for what was palpably military suicide merely lost him – and the OKW – even more respect among the Army command. And in the absence of any planning by the OKW, it was the Army, and, specifically, General Franz Halder, the Army Chief of Staff, that was given the task of preparing the attack in the West. The idea of launching an offensive within a matter of weeks and with winter approaching appalled Halder every bit as much as it did Warlimont.
Halder, who was fifty-five, crop-haired and bespectacled, came from a long line of military duty. He had spent most of his career in staff posts and, although he had served during the last war, had never seen front-line action or commanded men in battle. But he did have a fastidious eye for detail and was known as an expert on training, and since joining the OKH as von Brauchitsch's Chief of Staff had done well, helping to gel a highly competent team. No great admirer of either Hitler or the National Socialists, he had none the less produced an exemplary plan of attack for Poland and now had to produce another for the West.
To aid him, the Führer had issued some rather woolly thoughts in a memorandum on 9 October, forwarded dutifully as 'Directive No. 6' by the OKW. The aim, Hitler announced, was to defeat the French Army and any forces fighting on their side, and at the same time to win as much territory as possible in Holland, Belgium and northern France, 'to serve as a base for the successful prosecution of the air and sea war against England'. Just what form this air and sea war was going to take was not mentioned.
Halder's approach was to make the plan so self-evidently bad that even Hitler would be forced to demur. His first effort was much the same as the German plan of 1914, with a thrust through Belgium to the coast. Hitler, however, saw through this and ordered him to think again. At the same time, Halder became embroiled in a plan to assassinate the Führer, hatched at Zossen, the headquarters of the OKH to the south-east of Berlin, and which also involved General Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb, commander of Armeegruppe C, one of three army groups likely to be used in any future offensive in the West, General Carl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel, Halder's deputy at the OKH, and Generaloberst Ludwig Beck, Halder's predecessor, who had resigned in opposition to Hitler in August the previous year. This was a deeply fraught time for Halder because he believed the only way to save Germany from catastrophe was to get rid of Hitler, but to do so the plotters needed support; however, securing that support was risky, to put it mildly. He took to carrying a loaded pistol in his pocket in case he had the chance to pull the trigger on the Führer himself.
With increasingly frayed nerves he continued drawing up plans for action in the West. His second plan, produced at the end of October, was much the same as the first but included a second and simultaneous thrust further south. This brought a furious response from Hitler when von Brauchitsch, with the support of all his senior commanders now on the Western Front, presented it on 5 November. His field armies, von Brauchitsch tried to explain, were simply not ready for a major offensive. The torrent of invective from Hitler left the Army C-in-C quite stupefied; he later confessed to Halder that he had been unable to stand up to Hitler's iron and maniacal will. Like Keitel, von Brauchitsch immediately offered his resignation, although it was similarly refused. Hitler wanted men like his Army chief in charge – men he could boss about and reduce to a quivering wreck. The Führer despised the traditional Prussian military elite; they were necessary to him, but he took every opportunity possible to growl and make them feel intimidated. Von Brauchitsch was head of the OKH for the same reason Keitel was the top man at the OKW: because Hitler knew they would not stand up to him.
It was after von Brauchitsch's ordeal in front of Hitler that Halder cut his ties with the resistance. Von Brauchitsch had also told him how Hitler had raged against the 'spirit of Zossen', and with mounting panic Halder had assumed the Führer had somehow learned of the plot. This was not the case, but Halder realized he was not the assassinating revolutionary kind, so, having ensured all incriminating documents were destroyed, decided instead to embrace the coming offensive. If he could not prevent it – and clearly he could not – then the best chance was to try and produce a plan that might just, somehow, some way, work – or at least might avoid total defeat once more for Germany. Just what this new plan might be, however, was not, in the last weeks of 1939, at all apparent to him or any of his planning team at Zossen.
CHAPTER 11
Attention to Detail
IT IS TEMPTING still to assume Nazi Germany in those first months of war had the finest Army the world has ever seen, in terms of both -training and equipment, and especially when compared with other armies at that time. Propaganda certainly shielded both most Germans and the wider world from the truth of its levels of mechanization. As regards its tanks, again the reality was rather different from the perceived wisdom. The vast majority were Mk I and Mk IIs and Czech T35s and T38s, all of which were small, under-gunned and under-armoured. The Panzer Mk I, for example, stood about six feet off the ground and carried nothing more than a brace of machine guns. This accounted for around a third of all German tanks.
The artillery – both field howitzers and higher-velocity anti-aircraft and anti-tank guns – were good, but the majority were designed to be coupled with horsepower, as Siegfried Knappe had discovered to his horror. The German soldier was well equipped with personal weapons. The rifle, the K98, was accurate and reliable, even if it could only fire a maximum of five bullets before reloading. Also starting to come into wider use was the MP38 Machinenpistole, or sub-machine gun. This was ideal for close combat and house-clearing, with its ability to lay down considerable fire in a short, sharp burst. Its practical range was little more than 30–40 yards, but it was beautifully balanced and engineered, and no other side had anything like it.
The basic infantry light machine gun was the MG34, which had been developed in the early 1930s by the firm Rheinmetall and was designed to be used in a number of different roles, including as an infantry weapon, as an anti-aircraft gun, and also on vehicles. It was originally even designed to go in aircraft. As it happened, it was rejected by the Luftwaffe as an aircraft-mounted weapon, but thanks to a series of different mountings could be used in either a mobile or a 'light' role with just a bipod, or in a static or 'heavy' role with a more elaborate and sturdy mount. It had been quite deliberately designed to have these different functions, which had first been suggested in the previous war, and which, on one level, certainly made sense.
To be any use as an anti-aircraft gun, for example, it needed a high rate of fire. Military advisors also wanted their machine gun to pack a big punch in any initial engagement, and so, unlike the Maxim, the MG34 fairly ripped out the bullets, with a rate of fire of around 900 per minute. Like the MP38, it was beautifully made with rolled steel and a number of attractive touches, such as wooden, metal or Bakelite grip, a detachable stock and with an assortment of accoutrements, such as detachable sights, the bipod, whose two legs could be clipped together and tidied away entirely, and an array of impressive maintenance equipment, all delivered in leather-lined wooden boxes and with no small detail overlooked. There was a heavy mount, an additional optical sight and a lightweight tripod too. In fact, the MG34 was the most elaborate machine gun ever built, with more than a hundred individual parts on the main weapon itself. Unquestionably, its incredible finish was designed to impress any onlooker, and no doubt it did.
It was a fine weapon and its rate of fire had a debilitating and demoralizing effect on the enemy – at least, certainly at first, as the Poles found out. The MG34 was one of the weapons that seemed to demonstrate Germany's highly advanced weapons technology and superiority on the battlefield.
There were, however, drawbacks to the MG34, regardless of its sophisti-cated lethality. To start with, it was expensive, which was understandable with the level of fine engineering devoted to each and every one. For example, nearly 50 kilograms of iron was needed to make the weapon, which weighed just 11 kilograms when it was finished; this was a pretty wasteful use of precious metal. The end product was also on the heavy side for a 'light' machine gun. It cost 312 Reichsmarks, which amounted to around $1,300 in 1938 prices. This was no small sum, but perhaps is not so surprising considering the amount of iron, the number of parts and the fact that it took around 150 man-hours to make. The Bren, by contrast, took just fifty. In other words, Britain could, in theory, produce three times as many Brens as MG34s in the same time, or could use the saving in time to make something else, such as more aircraft or ships.
The other problem was that while there was an unquestioned advantage in being able to lay down an incredible amount of bullets in any initial exchange, there was a pay-off for being able to spit out lead at such a rate. The MG34 was air-cooled, but with some fifteen bullets per second detonating their charge in the breech and down the barrel, it soon got very, very hot. In fact, it quickly became so hot that the barrel began to melt. The way round this was twofold. First, its users had to maintain a very resolute fire discipline and employ it in short, sharp bursts of a few seconds' length, and second, they had to frequently change the barrel. Each MG34 had to be accompanied by no fewer than six spare barrels, all of which had to be carried with the weapon itself, which on its own weighed around 20 pounds. Unlike the Bren, there was no wooden handle attached to the perforated sheath of the barrel, but experienced handlers none the less quickly got the hang of the rapid barrel change – a clip was flicked open, the breech unlocked and the over-hot barrel tipped out, usually extremely close to the user's face. Crews were given a giant padded mitt to help, but in practice these were rarely used.
Training manuals were quite firm about not getting carried away when firing. 'Shooting more than 250 shots in one continuous burst from one barrel,' noted one instruction manual, 'is forbidden.' That meant absolutely the longest continuous burst of fire was around sixteen seconds. In practice, however, the barrel would have started to lose accuracy well before that, while the amount of smoke from so many bullets being fired at that rate caused further problems. A well-trained machine-gunner would expect to fire around only 120 rounds per minute, which, co-incidentally, was about the same as for a Bren, even though the Bren's theoretical rate of fire was only a little over half that of the MG34.
The final problem was that if users were not sparing with the trigger, they tended to get through an awful lot of ammunition very quickly. The MG34 could use twin 34-round drums, but more commonly was belt-fed and these were usually 250 rounds in length and weighed no small amount. The Bren was absolutely a light machine gun and could easily be operated by just one man; the MG34 was a hybrid, and really needed two men to operate it – one to fire and one to feed the belt, and to get the best from it the weapon needed a highly trained crew. In practice, the entire ten-man Gruppe – the German equivalent of the British section – tended to be used to service this one weapon. This wasn't necessarily a bad thing, as the heavy rate of fire did, certainly, have advantages. But like almost every weapon in war, for all the plus points, there were invariably minuses too.
There were, in some ways, a number of curious paradoxes to the German Army. It may have had innovative sub-machine guns and other finely engineered weaponry, for example, but despite the impression of vast military might, there was also something rather old school about the German Army in other areas. Certain forward-thinking officers, such as General Heinz Guderian, may have spent time writing treatises on the future of armoured warfare, but for the most part the Army was still dominated by a traditional Prussian military aristocracy that cited an inheritance which stretched back to Frederick the Great and the Seven Years' War in the middle of the eighteenth century. Men like von Clausewitz, von Moltke, von Schlieffen, von Hindenburg, von Ludendorff were all household names in Germany – and now the Army was commanded by von Brauchitsch. Even in Nazi Germany, it was hard to climb to the top of the pole without a 'von' before your name.
It still had a rather nineteenth-century look to it too. The Pickelhaube, the old pointed helmet, had gone, but the large amounts of leather, the high jackboots, the baggy-thigh breeches and the traditional high--collared tunics all harked back to an earlier era when looking the part – looking militaristic – was very much the brief. They looked smart, they looked efficient. They looked like they meant business, which was -precisely the effect they were supposed to achieve.
This more traditional military look was eagerly adopted by the Nazis, not least because a powerful military tradition was what set the German character apart; Germany had been forged in 1871 with the Prussian states at its heart, and they, during the 1860s, had drawn upon militarism as being at the very core of their existence. There is no question that the German nation which emerged from the collection of kingdoms, duchies and principalities less than seventy years earlier was a militaristic society, but the idea that the Prussian – and later German – military was manifestly superior to any other in the world was a dubious claim. Prussia – the largest German kingdom prior to unification – had fought only a handful of small wars in the century that separated the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the conflict in 1914. When it had gone to war alongside Austria against Denmark in 1864, it had barely fought since Waterloo fifty years earlier and most certainly did not out-perform Austria militarily. Two years later, Prussia was at war with its former ally, but Austrian mistakes were every bit as important to Prussia's subsequent victory as any military genius. Four years after that Prussia was at war again, this time against the mighty France, and it was on this stunning success that much of its military swagger, which would be sustained and would grow further within the newly formed Germany, was based. Interestingly, however, all three wars, and indeed German unification in 1871, were orchestrated not by a military leader but by a political one, namely Otto von Bismarck.
Following unification, the military was elevated in society, with -veterans venerated and uniforms and military bearing considered the aspiration of every self-respecting young German male. No one was more fond of standing ramrod straight and wearing military garb than the Kaiser, Wilhelm II, who was always to be seen in a variety of uniforms, shiny breastplates and Pickelhaube, but had never actually seen any combat himself or, frankly, been much of a soldier.
Also woven into the military heritage was von Clausewitz's widely read and acclaimed work On War, but this was based on analysis of Napoleon, who was French, and was, in any case, interpreted to suit Nazi ideology. The other iconic figure was the Prussian king, Frederick the Great, who belonged to the eighteenth century, and who, despite continued vener-ation by a stream of Germans from Admiral Tirpitz through to Hitler, had won just eight of his sixteen battles and even one of those, the Battle of Zorndorf in 1758, might more accurately be considered a stalemate. None the less, von Clausewitz's military theories and Frederick's victories certainly added to the belief in Germany's military inheritance. Somehow, the Prussians, and then Germany, had created not only a militaristic society in which soldiers were greatly venerated, but also a reputation for military brilliance, which was based on not a huge amount if they were really honest. At the turn of the twentieth century, when Britain had threatened Imperial Germany with economic blockade and the destruction of its Navy if it became involved in the Boer War, the Kaiser backed down and kept out of it. This humiliation – and his obsession with ships – contributed to the vast building programme of capital vessels, and resulted in a giant fleet that ventured out once, at Jutland in 1916, then retreated, and was scuttled at the end of the war.
Germany's great military tradition was thus based on a somewhatspurious reputation and had, in any case, taken a massive blow with the catastrophic defeat of 1918. The Nazis were emerging at a time when morale within Germany was low, but they cleverly appealed to this suspect military tradition and to German pride in that sense of -martial inheritance. By strutting around with straight backs and chests out, wearing snappy brown or black uniforms, and with starkly striking insignia that harked back to ancient Aryan runes, the Nazis were inviting people to come and join an exciting new club. The message was simple: be a National Socialist, and wear a smart-looking uniform and be reinvigorated with a renewed sense of national pride, identity and purpose. It was hardly an original ruse, but the cut and design of the uniforms were very deliberately intended to look both smart and debonair while also nodding to the military past. Nazi uniforms were as beautifully tailored as an MG34 was engineered, and when it came to dressing the rapidly growing Army, these principles were rigorously maintained.
The field tunics of the ordinary German soldier were not quite so -sartorially elegant as the SS outfits, but they were smart enough and -certainly supremely well made. A private was not paid much, but he was given very decent kit. The jacket, the Feldbluse, was lined in soft cotton or rayon, was thigh length with two generously large and pleated pockets on the chest and two on the waist; it was also pleated at the back, while the cuffs had buttons that could be undone and the waist four lots of eyelets through which metal belt clips could be threaded. The buttons were all aluminium, rounded at the edges for easy use and with a dotted pattern, and quite deliberately designed as opposed to simply mass-stamped. The collar of the Feldbluse was well stitched and around the inside was another row of buttons on to which a smart and comfortable collar liner could be attached. It was warm, comfortable and produced with the kind of -attention to detail that would make a bespoke tailor smile with pleasure. In 1939, each soldier was given no fewer than seven uniforms: field, service, watch, parade, report, walking out and sport. The numbers of cloth suppliers and tailors involved with making all these uniforms was immense, but like most German war production there was no adherence to the principles of mass production. There were, for example, no fewer than 323 different companies producing just one -particular type of military linen. This was a trend repeated across the board.
Most of the soldier's webbing was made of black leather: the ammunition pouches, holsters, belts, straps and even the case that held the stout short-handle entrenching tool. Boots came up almost to the knee rather than the ankle. Field packs, although made of canvas, came with leather straps and a fur-covered outer flap. One particularly well-engineered piece of personal kit was the gas mask case, a steel cylinder with grooves down the side to give it added strength. It was quite large and even bulky, but the attention to detail on it was impressive, with a spring metal catch and inside, within the lid, a further little compartment in which spare lenses for the mask were stored and held in place by a delicate spring-loaded catch. The intricacy with which these millions of tins were manufactured – each some 25 centimetres tall – was impressive; and they even came with a leather carrying strap. It became an instantly iconic piece of the soldier's equipment.
Young officers, such as Hans von Luck and Siegfried Knappe, for example, had even more elaborate uniforms. Their field dress was made of the same wool as those of their men, but their service dress was gabardine with silk or rayon lining and with a cuff that doubled back almost halfway to their elbows, which was almost eighteenth century in its design. Officers were given wool greatcoats or full-length leather versions. There were different uniforms for mountain troops, different uniforms for paratroopers, yet more uniforms for the panzer arm, and even more for the Luftwaffe. Pilots like Hajo Herrmann could choose from a staggering array of breeches, woollen trousers, leather trousers, cotton, wool and leather jackets of -differing shades of brown and black, some fur lined, others not.
This attention to detail and to producing a sartorially unbeatable armed services was all well and good and had certainly, in the early years of the Nazis at any rate, served a valid purpose. Unlike Britain, however, Germany had few sheep farms and no Dominions on the far side of the world from where it could easily purchase what it lacked at home. In fact, Germany had very few natural resources of its own at all – no oil, very little iron ore, no tungsten, no bauxite, no copper; a coal industry was about all it did have and even that was as nothing compared with Britain's, for example. And because so much of the economy was now devoted to war production, Germany had little to export in return. Yet rather than watching the pfennigs in areas where costs could easily have been kept down, there was, in 1939, no army that was more expensively turned out. The cost of German uniforms, however, was, from the Nazi perspective, a small price to pay to make soldiers believe they were part of a modern and techno-logically advanced militaristic society.
The standard of training was, by and large pretty good, particularly among the Regular Army divisions, and helped by a rigid adherence to discipline. Good training could paste over many deficiencies elsewhere. Young soldiers began the process of militarization and indoctrination to the values of National Socialism with the Hitler Youth, which boys would join at fourteen, and then followed this with a stint in the Reichsarbeitsdienst, or RAD, in which young men fresh from school were further indoctrinated, given a harsh daily routine of early rises, extensive drill and then back-breaking manual labour, such as building roads or defences. By the time they were recruited into the military proper, at eighteen, they were already halfway to being soldiers, having been taught rigid discipline and imbued with powerful national ideals. Divisions tended to have a strong regional base, with recruits largely drawn locally. They would then be taught as part of a training battalion within the division. This helped morale but also saved on transport. It did mean, however, that the quality of the division tended to depend on the quality of the command.
However, now, after Poland, over half the Army's divisions had the added advantage of having tasted combat, the greatest trainer of all. Throughout the 1930s, as the Army expanded and also searched for answers to the failure of 1918, much thought was given to the form that future warfare would take. Unlike in the British Army, where it was considered infra dig to discuss military matters out of hours, within the German Army it was positively encouraged. Hans von Luck eagerly absorbed all the latest military thinking. He had been particularly impressed by General Heinz Guderian, who was emerging as something of a pioneer of mobile tactics, as opposed to the largely static warfare that had been experienced during the previous war. Guderian, who had written articles and a book on his theories, had visited every single company in von Luck's 8. Panzer Reconnaissance Battalion, and discussed his ideas with all officers and NCOs, which had gone down very well; junior officers and NCOs were not usually spoken to by generals, and von Luck, for one, found it inspiring. He also thought his training right up to the outbreak of war was consistently intensive, and was con-centrated primarily on two aspects. 'On the one hand we were made familiar with the technology and armaments,' he noted, 'on the other, we practised mobile engagements in the field.'
Martin P?ppel was also training every bit as intensively. The Fallschirmj?ger had been on standby for an airborne drop, but in the event had been surplus to requirements. P?ppel and his comrades had been deeply frustrated not to see action in Poland, but, with hostilities over, training continued as hard as ever: more drops and, crucially, more radio exercises at both regimental and divisional level.
Along the Western Front, Siegfried Knappe was now training alongside the infantry, and as a junior officer was incredibly well drilled in all facets of artillery tactics and deployment. At the very least, this gave him and his men a huge amount of confidence. Knappe may have been startled to discover horses rather than a tracked self-propelled gun when he had first joined the Army, but any doubts had long been swept aside. And self-belief and discipline were crucial elements of any fighting power. It was true that the Wehrmacht was not nearly so well equipped as the propaganda suggested, but at the ground level, at any rate, the men believed they were ready for war with the West. Time would tell soon enough whether their confidence was well placed.
CHAPTER 12
Case YELLOW
IN THE WAR at sea, the Royal Navy had scored some valuable points but had received a number of bloody noses too; it was nothing that Britain couldn't take on the chin, but two attacks in particular had been more than just a little humiliating for the country that prided itself on and set great store by its naval supremacy. The first had occurred in September when the aircraft carrier Courageous had been sunk by a U-boat off Ireland. At the time, Courageous had been U-boat hunting with only a small screen of destroyers. The sinking of such a valuable asset showed that U-boat hunting was not the right role for such large and important capital ships – it was a lesson learned the hard way.
The second setback had been a carefully planned attack on the British Home Fleet at Scapa Flow, their base on the Orkney Islands north of Scotland. The Fleet had already been out on several aggressive sweeps across the North Sea, hunting German surface vessels, but it was German submarines that once again were to prove the thorn in their side. Scapa Flow, while providing a good anchorage, had been neglected in terms of defences, and Admiral Forbes, commander of the Home Fleet, had been ordered to move to a safer base at Loch Ewe on the west coast of Scotland. However, in early October, the German battle cruiser Gneisenau, and several other Kriegsmarine surface ships, had been reported as venturing into the North Sea, so Forbes's main force was sent to intercept them north-east of the Shetlands. The German ships beat a hasty retreat, but on the night of 13–14 October, several capital ships from the Home Fleet were still back at Scapa, and with the Northern Lights flickering across the sky, a single U-boat, U-47, captained by the imperturbable Günther Prien, managed to slip into the narrow passage and successfully sink the battleship Royal Oak, with the loss of 833 men. It was a severe shock not just to the Navy, but to Britain as a whole.
It was also a PR coup Germany milked for all it was worth. Prien became an overnight pin-up in Germany; if there was one area in which Germans felt a palpable inferiority complex it was over their Navy. That Prien had shown such daring, cunning and skill by successfully slipping into the lion's den and slaying one of the beasts showed what could be done. No one was more pleased than Admiral D?nitz, for while there was no immediate increase in U-boat production as a result, the sinking of the Royal Oak showed Hitler that a single, relatively inexpensive, vessel manned by fewer than fifty men could destroy a huge battleship crewed by 1,200. It demonstrated what might be achieved with a U-boat fleet of the kind of numbers D?nitz had been suggesting.
The British were, naturally enough, defiant and no one more so than the First Lord, Winston Churchill. On 8 November, he gave a speech to the House of Commons on the loss of the Royal Oak. Listening from the gallery was Jock Colville, who, since the outbreak of war, had left the Foreign Office after being asked if he would like to join No. 10 as one of the Prime Minister's secretaries. He'd been assured of very long hours and plenty of tedium too, but the chance to be close to the centre of things was an opportunity he was unwilling to let slip. Now, at the House of Commons, he thought Churchill was acquitting himself well, particularly when it came to rubbishing German bragging. 'When I recall the absurd claims which they are accustomed to shout around the world,' Churchill told the House, 'I cannot resist saying we should be quite content to engage the entire German Navy, using only the vessels which at one time or another they have declared they have destroyed.' That, Colville thought, was his best point. 'The latest German claim,' Colville noted later, 'is to have sunk HMS Kestrel, which turns out to be a naval sea-plane base some miles inland.'
Bragging aside, the Kriegsmarine had not had it all its own way in any case. Three U-boats from the tiny total force were sunk in October, and in December the pocket battleship Graf Spee had been chased to the River Plate in Argentina. Before this, the Graf Spee had been cruising British trade routes on the hunt for merchant shipping. It had sunk three merchantmen before being tracked down by a British hunting group of two heavy and two light cruisers. Having been blockaded in the mouth of the River Plate, the ship's captain had been ordered by Berlin to scuttle her rather than let her fall into British hands. Just as the Germans had milked the sinking of the Courageous and the Royal Oak especially, so the British made much of the so-called Battle of the River Plate. A month later, in January, the Graf Spee's supply ship, the Altmark, was caught near Trondheim in Norway on its return from the South Atlantic. The ship was boarded by sailors from the destroyer HMS Cossack, and found to be armed and holding 299 prisoners, who were released.
This was, in fact, an infringement of Norwegian waters and neutrality. 'The wireless has just given the first news of the boarding of the Altmark,' wrote Vere Wight-Boycott, whose ship had recently returned to Britain and was now part of the Home Fleet. 'Cossack seems to have done some fine work.' He did wonder, though, what the American reaction might be to this violation of neutrality. As it happened, not a lot; the US was already showing double standards on such matters. At any rate, already Admiral Carls's emphasis on attacking Allied shipping with a fast cruiser force was beginning to look a little misjudged. It is impossible to know what would have happened had the U-boat force been some 200 or even 300 strong in the opening months of the war, but there is no question that with that number, with well-trained crews, and before the Royal Navy had really organized its measures for anti-submarine warfare (ASW), Germany's chances of bringing Britain swiftly to heel would have been far higher. The sea lanes were Britain's lifeline. Without them, it would have been paralysed. And since much of Britain's overseas shipping passed through the Atlantic, whether it was coming from the Americas or the Far East, the Atlantic battleground should have been Germany's top priority in the war against Britain. Hitler, and the Wehrmacht command, however, were continentalists. The entreaties of enlightened men like Admiral D?nitz were given scant regard.
As it was, nine of the small number of U-boats had been lost by the end of 1939. U-48, however, was not one of them. Rather, under Kapit?nleutnant Schultze, the submarine had continued to sink Allied ships, so that by the New Year the crew had no fewer than twelve to their name, and the 1WO, Teddy Suhren, had been promoted to Oberleutnant zur See. But as January gave way to February, Suhren and his comrades noticed the war was becoming harder; the Allies had started arming -merchant vessels, and shot at anything that looked like a sub. The convoy system, too, was harder to penetrate, and the escorts more numerous. The weather was a factor as well. That first winter of war was terrible, and Suhren wondered whether, somehow, war and catastrophe could influence weather patterns. The Kiel Canal froze over, while out at sea their oilskins would become caked in ice while they were on the bridge. Drops of water froze and remained hanging from eyelids and beards, while inside the U-48, everything remained continually damp, with condensation glistening on the bulkheads, breath hanging in the air like fog, and food moulding.
As if the weather weren't enough, the U-boat crews had to contend with the enormous risks of their wartime profession. For merchant vessels, the word U-boat conjured up images of a dark, sleek and stealthy killer – and as a ship destroyer it was certainly highly effective. Yet for the crews, bottled up in a damp, stinking, foetid tin can, it was an unbelievably tough and threatening existence, in which hunter could become hunted at any moment. If hit, the crew faced drowning or suffocation, which was a long, lingering and awful death. They knew the chances were they would never be found, that wives, lovers and family would be left wondering what had happened to them. Such matters did not bear thinking about, and yet sometimes it was hard not to. Oberleutnant Suhren had lost a good friend when U-41 was sunk on 5 February by a British destroyer off the coast of Ireland. The two U-boats had been alongside one another at Heligoland before that patrol, and Suhren had seen his old friend Jürgen, an officer on U-41. Jürgen had seemed downcast – his brother, a pilot in the Luftwaffe, had been killed, and now he was convinced he was for the chop too. 'He was absolutely right,' noted Suhren. 'There were no survivors…'
Suhren was lucky not to end up permanently at the bottom of the sea himself. For a submariner, there can have been few things more un-settling than being repeatedly depth-charged. These were explosive devices that were set to sink to a certain level and then explode. For those under attack, there was the constant fear of knowing that at any moment an explosion might come that could seal the fate of the sub and all within it.
On 14 February, they were positioned off the south-west coast of Ireland, over towards St George's and the Bristol Channel. It was early morning, with a heavy fog, when suddenly out of the mist loomed the outlines of ships. A large convoy was heading straight for them.
'Kapit?n, on the bridge! Alarm! Crew to action stations,' came the cry, and with Schultze hurrying back down the conning tower, they hastily dived with a roar and sank to periscope depth. Everyone on board now had a specific role to play. Zurn, the LI, or Chief Engineering Officer, set the trim of the U-boat, i.e. tried to keep it steady on an even keel and depth. Schultze himself was still in the conning tower at his station on the -periscope, which he lowered, then lifted up again, put the right pedal down and swung it a full 360 degrees. Directly below, in the control room, Suhren waited, listening, ready to pass on Schultze's orders. In an attack, it was the captain who made every decision about when to fire, when to dive, what depth, what speed. At the bow of the U-boat, the caps of the torpedo tubes were opened. At the TDC, the torpedo-attack computer, the No. 1 sat and waited, listening carefully to what Schultze told him. This device fed information into the torpedo tubes – it worked through adjustors that were air-drive gyros; as the torpedo was fired, the gyros started up and steered the missile in the right direction.
Quiet descended through the boat. All that could be heard was the low hum of the electric motors as the submarine travelled slow-ahead.
'OK, Chief?' asked Suhren, sticking his head up through the open hatch.
Schultze nodded. 'We're standing well off to port. In five minutes I'll be ready to shoot.'
'Much in the way of escorts?'
Schultze nodded again. 'Enough.'
Five minutes passed, with everyone on board concentrating on their -station. No one spoke. Then Schultze raised the periscope once more and looked around. Instructions were passed down, trim and course adjusted, then he called out, 'Tubes one to four, stand by!' followed by, 'Tube one – fire! Tube two – fire! Three – fire! Four – fire!'
After that, what felt like a long wait. The target was 1,800 metres away, and the torpedoes travelled at thirty knots. That meant around 120 seconds – two whole minutes. The stopwatch ticked. The LI was struggling to keep the U-boat at periscope depth and asked for more speed.
'Eighty seconds,' called out the Obersteuermann. Then 90, 100, 110.
Schultze ordered the boat be turned to starboard, then a dull thud – a hit! They had just struck the SS Sultan Star, a large 11,300-ton British freighter filled with meat from the Argentine.
'Quick, go deep!' ordered the captain.
'What's up?' asked Suhren.
'An escort's spotted us. She's coming straight for us!'
Everything now happened at once. Two more explosions – their -torpedoes had hit the ship twice more – but, even then, the submarine was rapidly diving, creaking and groaning as it did so as the pressure around it increased. At 120 metres down, a fusilade of eight depth charges erupted, and in frightening proximity. U-48 lurched and rolled. Above them, they could clearly hear the enemy ASDIC, the ship's onboard sonar, ping-ping-ping, and the low whirr of the propellers. The submarine was now effectively pinned down, and there was damage already.
'Exhaust valves making water!' came a report from the engine room.
'Zurn,' said Schultze, 'make sure the valves are closed down as far as they'll go.'
Zurn did so, but they were still taking on a small amount of water.
Above, the convoy continued on its way – Suhren, who had taken the hydrophones from the radio operator, could hear the engines, but then the sound of the escorts' propellers drowned it out – it sounded like a nail being scraped across a plate. It was 0700. More depth charges, bubbling down towards them. He handed back the headphones and braced himself. An explosion, the boat rocked, then five more in quick succession. But they were still in one piece. Calmly, Schultze ordered a change of course west.
That was not the end of the attacks, however. The U-boat dropped to 120 metres. The explosions seemed to be getting closer. They dived further, the hull creaking and grinding until, with a bump, they stopped at 135 metres – the charts put them at the Cockburn Bank. It was as deep as they could go. Above them, a destroyer was raking over them once more, the ping of the ASDIC still quite audible. The whirr of the propeller, followed by gurgling bubbles as the depth charges fell, then peng-wham! Peng-wham! Peng-wham! Once more U-48 rolled and shook and was tossed off the seabed and thumped back down again. 'We can scarcely stay on our feet,' noted Suhren. 'We look for a handhold and hang on wherever we can.'
Inside, no one dared speak; they barely dared breathe. A bit of metal fell on the deckplate, prompting angry glares towards the man responsible. Another hour passed, then another, each marked by a further attack. By noon, they had been pummelled with depth charges no fewer than eleven times. Suhren had made some calculations – the hydrophones had picked up the smack of the depth charges as they hit the water; they sank at 4 metres per second and the explosions occurred after twenty-eight seconds – that meant they were detonating at between 110 and 120 metres; just 15 metres above them.
'What do you think?' Schultze asked Suhren. 'Should we leak out a bit of oil? Then they'd be sure to think they'd hit us.'
'No,' replied Suhren, shaking his head. 'No movement at all. Just play dead. Once it gets dark, they'll knock it off.'
They all looked tense, strained and drawn. Only Schultze appeared to be as calm and imperturbable as ever; imperturbability was one of the key attributes for any submarine captain.
Down in the U-boat, it was neither daylight nor night, but up above, on the ocean's surface, darkness had fallen. But every half-hour, more depth charges burst around them; there was no let-up. The hissing sound of the ventilator began to grate on the crew's nerves, but there was nothing they could do about it. 'We wonder,' noted Suhren, 'whether we would have had so much patience, or whether we'd already have reported "enemy destroyed". Gradually my doubts return. How long can an execution take?'
Hours passed, slowly, painfully, the tension never lessening for those inside the U-boat. Then at 2200, a flurry of eight depth charges, not five. Was that significant? Maybe – yes.
'Listening Room, what can you hear?' asked Suhren.
'Herr Oberleutnant, I can hear the two destroyers getting further away!'
But Schultze was not moving just yet. Another half-hour – just to be safe.
The half-hour passed – and still no sound from above, so Schultze ordered the pumps to start, which they did with high-pitched humming Suhren found hard to bear as they battled against 13.5 atmospheres of pressure. Slowly, slowly, the vessel lost weight and gradually, gingerly, lifted off the seabed. They were now going forward, climbing gently until finally, at long last, they broke the surface. Suhren followed Schultze up on to the bridge. As they opened the hatch and clambered out, Suhren could feel his eardrums throb with the equalizing of pressure. To their horror, they saw bright lights all around them – they were encircled by about twenty fishing boats at anchor on the Cockburn Bank. But it was night and nothing was stirring, so half submerging and relying on their electric motors, they quietly slipped away, undetected.
They were barely clear of the fishing boats when new shadows loomed up ahead as they closed in on more merchant shipping. Once more, Schultze ordered them to attack, aiming for a large freighter. Torpedoes were fired and after a hundred seconds came an explosion – another ship gone, added to U-48's mounting tally.
'There you are, Suhren,' said Schultze. 'Attacking again and getting a hit are the best medicine.'
That February, there were never more than ten operational U-boats at sea, but fifty-six Allied merchant ships were sunk, along with three U-boats. There could be no doubting that the war at sea was now well underway. In contrast, nothing much was stirring on the ground – nor in the air for that matter. The appalling weather put paid to that.
This did not mean there was a lack of activity, however. Rather, factories from England to German-occupied Poland and Czechoslovakia continued to build more tanks, aircraft, munitions and other instruments of war. At parade grounds and training camps, men drilled and learned the rudiments of soldiering, while along the Western Front the opposing sides readied themselves, prepared defences, drilled for the clash that suddenly seemed as though it might never happen at all.
At Zossen, the OKH continued to do their level best to prevent any imminent assault in the West while at the same time putting together a plan of attack that might have some chance of success, however slim. But in the ten weeks between von Brauchitsch's dressing-down by Hitler at the beginning of November and the first couple of weeks of the New Year, General Halder was not making a huge amount of progress.
There were, however, a couple of senior commanders within the Army who thought they might have found a way. One was General Erich von Manstein, who was Chief of Staff of Armeegruppe A, one of three groups of armies already assembled, and who, during that time, had produced and sent to Halder no fewer than seven drafts of a daring plan in which the main thrust was a surprise attack through the Ardennes. The idea was that a sizeable thrust would be made in the north, through Holland and into Belgium. The Allies would assume this was the main attack and would then move their troops forward, through Belgium, to meet this thrust. At the same time, however, the real main attack would go through the thick forest and rolling hills of the Ardennes in south-west Belgium. The invading force would emerge and cross the River Meuse, the main French line of defence, and then drive straight towards the Channel coast. The vast bulk of the French, Belgian and British armies would then be caught in a massive encirclement. That was the plan: a two-pronged attack, one a feint in the north, where the Allies most expected it, and the other the main attack, or Schwerpunkt, where it was least expected.
The Ardennes was an area of thick forest, rolling hills and steep river valleys that ran across the south-west part of Belgium, which, as in 1914, was firmly neutral. In truth, each draft was much the same and was based on the premise that if the Germans could reach the mighty River Meuse and cross it in a surprise operation, a rapid thrust using what mechanized troops they did have could blaze through France before the slow, more methodical enemy army had a chance to react.
Halder, however, had dismissed von Manstein's suggestions, for while his basic idea was certainly bold and daring, it was, to his mind, dependent on far too many variables for comfort: that the extremely complicated logistic operation through the Ardennes – an area widely considered impassable to large-scale mechanized troop movements – would go to plan; that Allied air forces would not detect it; that the French would be surprised; that the French would not be able to recover sufficiently; that untested panzer units could cut such a swathe across France. After all, by the spring – the most obvious time in which to launch an offensive – there would be just ten panzer divisions and six mechanized divisions in the entire Army. Could those few really be expected to sweep through France in the way that von Manstein was envisioning? Halder wasn't convinced by any stretch of the imagination, but he was also keenly aware that it was precisely the kind of daring and outrageous plan that Hitler would immediately latch on to. Furthermore, Hitler had even suggested a thrust across the Meuse at Sedan on the edge of the Ardennes himself, not through any genius of military thinking, but rather because it was there that the Prussians had successfully crossed in 1870. With this in mind, Halder therefore put von Manstein's memos to one side.
In the New Year, however, two events happened that made Halder think again and dramatically reconsider the possible merits of von Manstein's plan. The first took place on 10 January, when a German aircraft made a forced landing near Mechelen in Belgium. On board was a Luftwaffe operations officer with copies of the latest German offensive plans, which still held that a thrust through the Low Countries was to be the main point of attack. Realizing how important the documents were, the German officers hastily tried to burn them. They were captured, however, before the plans had been destroyed. What had been a terrible security leak had suddenly become a stunning opportunity for deception, despite Hitler's ire, because the incident prompted a rapid response from the Allies, who began extensive troop movements, going on to the alert all along the front and moving reserves forward, all of which was watched and noted by Luftwaffe reconnaissance planes. It showed that the Allies had been expecting a German attack exactly as outlined in Halder's current plans.
The second event happened a few weeks later. At the end of January, von Manstein had been sidelined and given command of a corps that existed in name only. Frustrated by this, Generals Günther Blumentritt and Henning von Tresckow, two admirers of von Manstein, took it upon themselves to give von Manstein's plans to General Schmundt, Hitler's military aide. They were then shown to Hitler, who, of course, embraced them immediately.
The situation by mid-February, however, was very different to the one back in October. It was true the Allies were by then out-producing Germany in terms of aircraft and tanks, but the months of uneasy calm along the Western Front had been of considerable help to the Wehrmacht too. In that time, ammunition stocks, which had fallen so drastically low during the Polish campaign, had been replenished and increased, and, more importantly, valuable lessons had been learned and incorporated into training. Poland had been a crucial test-run. While France and Britain had been holding the line and building defences, the German Army had been preparing for offensive operations, now with experience to throw into the mix. Numbers of new aircraft were certainly well below what G?ring and the Luftwaffe wanted, and only a few new U-boats were entering the war on shipping, but the Army was in immeasurably better shape than it had been just a few months earlier.
Another factor that helped change Halder's stance had been the slow French response to recent German regrouping movements along the front: intelligence suggested they had taken as much as two weeks to realize there had been a change in German troop dispositions. Thus if it should prove possible to move enough forces through the Ardennes forest of Luxembourg and Belgium and reach the main French defences in less time than that, it would, theoretically, be possible to catch them out. 'Surprise may now be regarded as assured,' he noted with confidence in his diary after a February Führer conference. What's more, any thrust through the Ardennes would have a far better chance of success if it was done in good weather and when the days were long, with plenty of sunlight. Fortunately for Halder, bad weather had meant continual postponements of Hitler's proposed assault. This too was playing into Halder's plans to ensure the Army was sufficiently ready for an operation of this magnitude before being committed.
Furthermore, Hitler was now beginning to think of striking at Denmark and Norway first, before an assault on France and the Low Countries. The winter's armaments drive had shown just how much iron ore was needed by Germany. The trouble was, most of it came from Sweden via Norway, so securing its safe passage away from the British Navy was essential. Invasion and occupation were the only way to guarantee this. Moreover, Norway would provide important bases for future attacks on British shipping. All in all, such an attack offered a number of benefits, and especially before any strike in the West.
So now, in February 1940, Halder was faced with better conditions for an offensive, the chance to make the most of an unintentional deception plan, and the opportunity to secure a northern flank and crucial iron ore first. Finally, war games at the beginning of February had also shown this daring plan of attack might just – just – work after all. What Halder had gradually realized through the first two months of 1940 was that they faced a stark choice: a more cautious plan that would avoid any quick defeat, or a go-for-broke gamble that risked everything but which also offered the only realistic chance of decisive victory.
Thus by the end of February, when Halder submitted his latest plans, he had completed his dramatic volte-face: Armeegruppe B would noisily thrust into Holland and northern Belgium with the support of the majority of the Luftwaffe, while the panzers of Armeegruppe A would hurry through the Ardennes and attack the French across the Meuse. With luck, the Allies would be coaxed into a trap, rushing forward to meet the northern thrust, while the main German attack burst through the back door around Sedan, ensnaring the bulk of the Allies' northern front in a huge encirclement before they had time to effectively respond. The operation was to be codenamed Fall Gelb – Case YELLOW: a codename, like Case WHITE, that was neutral and deliberately bland.
The trouble was, though, that while Halder and even von Brauchitsch were now convinced their plan was the right one, it was all too clear that most of the senior commanders in the Wehrmacht did not agree. And even for Halder there was no doubt that Case YELLOW was a massive, massive gamble. There was still much that could go wrong.
CHAPTER 13
Home Front
IN GERMANY, the war had descended on the Third Reich like a shroud. The campaign in Poland had been brought to a swift and decisive conclusion but by Christmas any hopes that the West could be brought to the peace table seemed to have evaporated. For the fifteen-year-old Margarete Dos, war had already changed her life irrevocably. A keen athlete, she had dreamed of representing Germany in the 1940 Olympiad, but that would never happen; there could be no Olympic Games now that war had broken out.
Margarete lived in Charlottenburg in Berlin with her mother, younger brother, Dieter, and her stepfather, Karl Spaeth, a veteran of the last war and now a staff officer at Kriegsmarine headquarters. Despite his -position, one of the first direct effects of the war was the requisitioning of their family car – Oberst Adolf von Schell needed it for the war effort. Some men from the SS came to collect it, and while they offered compensation, the men pointed out that since the family would no longer be able to purchase fuel, there was no point in keeping it in any case.
A blackout had been imposed immediately and everywhere were posters saying 'THE ENEMY SEES YOU. PUT OUT YOUR LIGHT.' In their home, Margarete and her family put up blackout curtains and blinds across all the windows. Even along Unter den Linden, the most famous thoroughfare in Berlin, camouflage netting was now spread from one side of the street to the other, so that they seemed to be walking the length of a huge tent.
Margarete did not mind so much about the car – she had her bicycle and there were the U-Bahn and S-Bahn in any case – and nor was she so bothered about the blackout. She did mind, however, about the rationing, which was severe and had begun in August. They were allowed margarine but not butter, meat was rationed and so too was bread, that most basic staple. All cereals, fats, cheese, milk, sugar and eggs were rationed. Thin tasteless broth became a staple. Ration cards with tear-off coupons called Essensmarken were not just for meat and bread, but also for soap and clothing. They were colour-coded – such as red for bread – and valid for twenty-eight days, which meant the authorities could alter the rations from month to month. Rationing of clothes, with further different-coloured cards, was also quite stringent – Germany produced no cotton, while wool was scarce and there were still incredibly elaborate military uniforms to make. For a beautiful young girl like Margarete, just emerging into young womanhood, clothes rationing was depressing. 'Our clothes were always too small or too large, or very ragged,' she noted, 'and our shoes never fit… my toes grew crooked, my feet always hurt.' And almost everything was brown – her pullovers, her skirts, her shoes.
Margarete found it all unsettling, not just because food and other items were rationed, but rather because it was often inconsistent. Sometimes there was almost nothing even with the ration coupons, then there would suddenly be plenty of a particular type of fruit. Bread changed too – other ingredients were added. Sometimes there would be no bread either. Coffee also vanished and was replaced by Ersatzkaffee, made from chicory and burnt wheat grains. 'Muckefuck' was the name it was given. Margarete hated it.
In fact, the Nazis had tried to prepare for the twin problems of fighting a war and still feeding the nation adequately. State agriculture was run by the Department of Food and Agriculture – the Reichsn?hrstand, or RNS – and led by Walther Darré, an early Nazi and friend of Hitler's. In many ways, the origins of the Nazi fantasy of a 'master race' came from Darré, who was obsessed not only with agriculture but also with selective breeding. Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, was particularly taken with Darré's philosophy of 'blood and soil' and looking after the German farmer, whom he viewed as being the essence of the Nordic race; Himmler himself had dabbled at being a chicken farmer after taking a degree in agriculture.
The Nazis had realized they needed to deal with agriculture and the potential problems of feeding both the nation and armed services from the outset, although this was just another of the economic headaches facing them. The big problem was that balance of payments continually plagued them. To rearm, they had to import raw materials because they lacked their own. However, because those arms were for their own use they could not then be exported, which would have provided them with much-needed foreign cash. In other words, lots of German money was going out, but not much was coming in. One way of keeping the amount of overseas spending down was to import less food and depend more heavily on home production. Consequently, to the Nazis, the German farmer had a critical role to play in aiding rearmament.
The Germans liked to give many of their state projects martial overtones. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there had been the 'war on nature' in which Germany had battled to straighten untidy rivers like the Rhine or improve the flow of water to growing industrial conurbations with huge dam projects. In November 1934, Herbert Backe, a Nazi agrarian technocrat, launched the 'Battle of Production' (Erzeugungsschlacht). While there was never any question of becoming entirely self-sufficient, the Battle of Production was designed to maximize domestic output and certainly greatly improve what was being achieved at the time.
The big areas for improvement were not in cereals, in which Germany was already self-sufficient, but in animal feedstuffs and fats, as well as some raw materials, which led to an increase in fibre-bearing plants. The Battle of Production was launched with a massive PR campaign – German farmers were to be persuaded not compelled; Darré was convinced that appealing to German honour and national pride was the way to go. Unfortunately for Darré and Backe, however, the Battle of Production could hardly have got off to a worse start. Two bad harvests in a row meant an increase not a decrease in food imports, while other measures mis-managed by the RNS compounded the problems. One was asking farmers to surrender 70 per cent of their rye harvest, which would normally be used for animal feed, in return for imported barley. Most farmers understandably thought it was a whole load of unnecessary hassle to give up one crop in return for another that was meant for the same purpose. The net result was a bad shortage of domestic fodder. The Battle of Production had not gained very much ground.
Supervision of farmers became tighter again with the start of the Four-Year Plan in 1936. From then on, every farmer with a farm of 12.5 acres or more had to have a record card. Recording and issuing these was an -exhausting process because there were more than two million farm holdings that fell into this category, accounting for 90 per cent of all farmland in Germany. In other words, there were way too many farms to ever make German agriculture truly efficient. The size of these small farms made the introduction of mechanization quite difficult – although another problem was the decidedly small motor industry in Germany. By 1939, Germany had just one tractor for every 1,000 acres; in Britain, that figure was just over 300 acres. In truth, there wasn't much the Nazis could do without investing heavily in farm machinery – which was out of the question – or without radically altering the nature of German farming from lots of small-scale holdings to much larger enterprises. This would have gone against Nazi ideology, and in any case would have taken too long to implement, so it was equally a non-starter. So food production was going to continue to be a problem, with no obvious major solution in sight other than creating Lebensraum – living space. Another term for it was colonization, or territorial expansion.
In fact, rather than gaining extra farmland, rural Germany lost some one million acres due to the construction of the Siegfried Line along the country's western border, and further land was lost to the autobahn project that involved the construction of dual-lane roadways linking the major cities; by 1939, there were 3,500 kilometres of autobahns, most of which passed through agricultural land. Since the Germans had very few cars and most military traffic travelled by rail, they were rather pointless, although they had been designed originally with the idea of transporting some 300,000 troops from east to west Germany in forty-eight hours. Nor were they particularly an answer to unemployment since re-armament had taken care of that already. They were opened, however, with another major PR drive and certainly made Germany appear very modern and forward-thinking.
Yet more farmland was taken away by state requisition for both military training areas and for the growth of industry. This loss of land, of course, had an effect on production. It was one of the ironies of Nazi Germany that the Battle of Production on the land was, above all, designed to help rearmament, and yet rearmament was now hindering the farmers' ability to provide that help.
The only real way, then, to improve production within Germany itself was to use more fertilizers. This the RNS managed to implement fairly successfully, largely by making prices cheaper; between 1933 and 1939, fertilizer use rose by a third and home production did rise, albeit not substantially. As it happened, Germany was already 81 per cent self-sufficient by 1936, and this rose to 83 per cent by 1939. However, imports had also grown in that time, by about a quarter, which meant that overall, since the Nazis had come to power in 1933, self-sufficiency had risen by only 3 per cent, which was clearly not a huge amount. The other big problem that had not been addressed was fodder for animals. Germany ate proportionally more pork than any other country, but the problem with pigs was that they competed with humans for foodstuffs, in contrast to sheep, which ate grass.
The solution was to reduce the number of pigs, but that then meant less fat was available, which in turn meant people ate more sugar beet and potatoes; this in turn led to less fodder for what pigs there were. British people, on the other hand, ate a higher proportion of mutton, which was a more practical meat source because sheep only required grass and their wool could be made into uniforms. In fact, the figures for pigs and sheep were almost mirror opposites of those in Britain: Germany had 4 million sheep in 1937; Britain had 4 million pigs; Germany had 23 million pigs, Britain 24.5 million sheep. But national eating characteristics cannot be easily changed.
With the outbreak of war and the immediate imposition of a blockade by Britain and France, maximizing the home production of food was now even more essential. Even so, there were some reasonable grain reserves, ration cards had already been printed back in 1937, yields were on the up, and the country was virtually self-sufficient in grain, potatoes and sugar. Margarete Dos may have found the onset of rationing discomforting, and may have spent days at a time feeling hungry, but no one in Germany was starving yet, despite these hardships.
However, even though the current food situation was reasonably satisfactory, it didn't take much to realize that ahead lay trouble, as Walter Darré was all too aware. Wartime conscription and rearmament were taking men from the land, while fuel would be in shorter supply, as would the chemicals to make fertilizers – chemicals that were also used in military production. Back in February, Darré told a group of troop commanders that food was the most urgent problem facing Germany. He had a point.
Food, then – that essential component of war – was just one more of the many factors informing Hitler's war plans, and, as with everything else, it pointed to one thing: the need for a short, sharp and decisive battle with the Western powers. There really was no alternative with Hitler and the Nazis in power. The West would never trust them and nor would the USSR, mutually beneficial pacts notwithstanding. Yet nor could Nazi Germany solve those shortages of resources – those barriers to rising German strength – without military conquest. Clearly, wars of plunder could, in theory, kill two birds with one stone: by taking land by force, the Reich could grab the resources it needed while at the same time neutralizing the threat from its neighbours. It was, of course, a high-risk strategy, but one that slotted in neatly with Hitler's mindset as the arch-gambler. If it worked, and the German nation rose to the challenge, then there would be a Thousand-Year Reich. If it failed, then Germany did not deserve to rise again.
Just when Hitler realized a European war was inevitable is not clear, although he had certainly begun to shape his plans several years earlier. Back in November 1937, at a meeting called to discuss Raeder's complaints that the Kriegsmarine was not getting a large enough share of steel and other raw-material allocations, the Führer had decided instead to outline his expansionist policies to Raeder, G?ring, General Werner von Fritsch and Baron Konstantin von Neurath, the last two being chief of the Army and the Foreign Minister at the time. He pointed out that Germany had neither enough food nor a strong enough economy as things stood, and that therefore they would have to plunder what they lacked by force – and sooner rather than later before France and Britain became too strong militarily. 'German policy,' noted Oberst Friedrich Hossbach, writing the minutes of the meeting, 'had to reckon with two hate-inspired antagonists, Britain and France, to whom a German colossus in the centre of Europe was a thorn in the flesh.'
It was with this in mind that Hitler had marched into Austria and then Czechoslovakia, overrunning potential enemies and absorbing both territory and resources into the Greater Reich. Poland had been part of the same plan. Britain and France had declared war, but that was fine by Hitler: soon would come the moment of truth. He would turn his armies on both and defeat them both, and then his hand would be free to build up Germany's strength further, enriched as the Reich would be by European space and plunder. And then, with the West subdued and Germany's neighbours vanquished, he could turn East.
That was all very well, but in the meantime Berliners like Margarete Dos and her family were hoping – and believing – the war would be over soon. Christmas had lacked its normal magic as dancing halls had been shut down, bars and restaurants were no longer allowed to stay open late, and while shop windows were still twinkling with an array of tantalizing goods, most of it was just for show rather than for sale.
Coal, too, was rationed – needed for industrial processes and for running the trains rather than people's homes, and it was a particularly cold winter – the coldest in decades right across Europe. Margarete had heard that a man had been found frozen to death in the street. On New Year's Eve, her mother had sent her to see Herr Strichler, who owned a restaurant with a Biergarten across the street. Wrapping up as warmly as she could, she headed out into the snow. She liked Herr Strichler, who always seemed cheery and liked to talk. He pointed out one of the many placards that had been put up around the city: 'NO ONE SHALL BE HUNGRY. NO ONE SHALL FREEZE.' 'Now we're not even allowed to be hungry any more!' he told her.
In France, despite the cold, they were not going hungry, even though farming was as troubled in France as elsewhere in Europe. The tradition of the French peasant farmer was, as in Germany, deeply rooted, but agriculture and its farming community had taken a battering during the 1930s. Thanks to Napoleonic inheritance laws, the majority of farms were small family affairs that had embraced neither investment nor modern technology. France as a whole may have been highly automotive, but farmers tended not to be. There were exceptions, however. Around the Paris basin and the wide, open arable land of the north, large, modern and vibrant farms produced large amounts of wheat. The battlefields of the last war, for example, had received massive reinvestment and had become more productive than ever. The problem was that throughout the 1930s wheat prices tumbled, partly because of the wider global depression and partly because as other foods became more accessible, so the French were eating less bread. The harvests of 1932 and 1933 were the best ever, yet rather than being good news for farmers, this was a disaster, even with a protected home market. France simply had too much grain. It was drowning in it. Farm spokesmen – and farmers were always volubly represented – reckoned that wheat should be sold at no less than 300 francs per quintal (100 kilograms). By 1930, they were getting just 147 francs, and by 1935 it had plummeted to 70 francs.
Most other farm products suffered similarly. Wine sales dropped drastically. It was both economically and emotionally a key product, yet American prohibition, cheap Algerian wine and an earlier Phylloxera epidemic had hit the industry very hard indeed, so that wine producers could not even benefit from one of the most perfect ever grape harvests in 1933. The meat market also suffered thanks to cheaper refrigerated imports and an outbreak of bovine TB, which prompted the lucrative British market to stop all French imports. Milk prices also collapsed. Seventy-eight per cent of French milk came from small producers, but consumption by the mid-thirties was 75 per cent lower than it had been before the last war.
Many farmers believed their way of life was dying out. Successive governments – and there were a staggering thirteen between 1930 and 1934 alone – tried to help ameliorate this agrarian collapse but if anything made the situation worse. Another factor in the malaise was that proportionally more young French farmers had been killed in the last war than any other part of the population.
Thus by the outbreak of war French farming appeared to be in terminal decline. War, however, promised to change that. Food imports were reduced and both the nation as a whole and its armed services needed feeding. In times of war, an abundance of grain and milk – which also provided fats – was just what was needed. Henri Queuille, the Minister for Agriculture, made considerable play of not introducing rationing – unlike both Britain and Germany. In this, Queuille had Daladier's backing, but there were plenty in the government who disagreed with the policy, and not least the Finance Minister, Paul Reynaud, who thought it a highly dangerous policy. In a long war, he argued, stocks needed to be preserved, not frittered on peacetime levels of con-sumption; he had a point.
None the less, few of the population were complaining. In the freezing cold of winter, most were grateful there was at least food on the table.
On the Normandy coast at Deauville, the beautiful French film star Corinne Luchaire had been sitting out the autumn and onset of winter. Still only eighteen, she was one of the most famous women in France, but after making two films earlier in the year she had been invited by her father to join him in the fashionable Normandy resort. Throughout much of August, she had partied hard, making friendships with English peers, having an affair with the Aga Khan's son, Ali Khan, and living the gay, carefree life of the rich. Even with the declaration of war, it seemed initially as though not much would change. 'War was just an accident,' she wrote. 'Everybody thought it was going to be very short.' Restaurants, dancing clubs and the casinos all stayed open. The biggest change was the requisitioning of her hotel, the Normandy, to become a hospital. Corinne and her father moved into an empty villa with some friends and spent the next few weeks smoking, drinking and playing cards. There was no mobilization for them.
Corinne had been born to artistic, socially well-connected parents. Her mother was a painter, while her father, Jean Luchaire, was a successful political journalist and editor of a weekly newspaper, Notre Temps, and her grandfather was an acclaimed playwright. But although her first years were spent in bohemian Parisian society, she had also spent time in Germany as a young girl when her mother began an affair with a German politician, Gustav Stresemann. There were also visits to Florence, where her grandfather had a house, and throughout her childhood she constantly met a large number of artists, politicians and writers – men like Kurt Freiherr von Schr?der, the German financier, and Otto Abetz, the German Ambassador to France and later secretary to von Ribbentrop. She was also well acquainted with Paul Reynaud and the right-wing Pierre Laval. Otto Abetz had married her father's secretary, but to Corinne they were just friends of her parents – friends that gave her dolls or puppets. She was particularly close to her father (who had only been seventeen himself when she had been born), and he liked to take her with him whenever he could. Once he had taken her along to a conference with President Poincaré. When the President arrived earlier than expected, Corinne's father hid her under the conference table. All had been well until Corinne had become bored and grasped the President's leg, thinking it was her father's. Poincaré had not been amused.
Beautiful and precocious, and given excessive freedom by her parents, she had left school at fourteen and enrolled in Raymond Rouleau's School of Dramatic Art, and although she was not much good as an actress to begin with, she persevered and after doing well in a stage performance of one of her grandfather's plays, she was cast in her first film at just fifteen. It was the movie Prison sans barreaux, filmed a year later, that made her a star, however. 'At that time,' she noted, 'I didn't question the easy life I had thanks to money and fame. I was fully confident in my future. Nothing could happen to me but happiness.'
A couple of years later, a string of failed affairs behind her and with war grinding the French movie industry to a temporary halt, life wasn't quite so blissful as it had been. By Christmas, she was finally back in Paris, doing her bit for the war by holding parties for British and French pilots and taking them out to nightclubs; in the French capital, there may have been a blackout, but the champagne still flowed, cars still ran, and there was no sign yet of any rationing.
In Britain, food production was an equally pressing problem, not least because British agriculture was in apparently terminal decline and because more than 70 per cent of all food was imported, whether it be for human or animal consumption. In effect, an industrial nation that had neglected its countryside had to be saved from possible famine. Britain was not preparing for a short, sharp war but, rather, a long battle of attrition and in that scenario shipping was going to be at a premium and needed for transporting crucial war materiel rather than food. Somehow, some way, British farmers needed to pull their collective fingers out and create a very dramatic farming revolution – one which meant that much food for consumption became home-reared rather than imported from overseas. A figure of between 80 and 90 per cent home-produced food – like Germany – was needed and in swift order. It was a massive challenge.
'So once again in a time of national danger,' scribbled Arthur 'A. G.' Street, on 8 September 1940, 'our industry of farming is to be transformed from Cinderella, not into a fairy queen, but into Britain's fourth line of defence.' He was aware that the BBC had started referring to the Air Raid Precautions, or ARP, as Britain's fourth line of defence after the Army, Navy and Air Force, but A. G. was insistent that it was farming which deserved that moniker. 'After all,' he added, 'what is the good of starving to death in an air raid shelter? Better to die outside with a full belly.'
British farming had been in the doldrums since the 1870s as Britain's global reach extended further with the advent of free trade; the policy had been to export high-end goods in return for cheap food and raw materials. Suddenly, wheat was flooding into Britain, grown more cheaply in the wide expanses of North America, while refrigeration meant meat could be sailed from the Argentine and even New Zealand on the far side of the world. Since the 1890s, the worst of the decline was past, but there had been only a temporary recovery during the last war when, as food imports had fallen, so agricultural prices at home had risen. A poor harvest in 1916 and the German policy of unrestricted submarine warfare meant the new Lloyd George government had needed to act swiftly. County Agricultural Executive Committees had been established to oversee the ploughing up of grassland and take possession of poorly run farms. Guaranteed prices had been set for cereals and potatoes.
It did not last, however, and by 1921 guaranteed fixed prices were dropped and farmers were once again left to fend for themselves. With livestock sold, cereal prices falling, losses in the workforce and the break-up of many country estates, farming declined once more. By the late 1930s, British farming had reached its nadir. Hedgerows had grown wild, large parts of the landscape lay fallow and had reverted to scrub, decrepit barns dotted farmsteads, and yards were filled with abandoned carts and agricultural equipment. Large numbers of estates had been sold during the twenties and thirties, tenant farmers were disappearing, and owner-occupiers were going bust on an almost weekly basis. Those that remained were feeling besieged, unwanted and increasingly bitter. By 1939, the amount of land under the plough had been reduced to two-thirds of what it had been in 1801 and there were 25 per cent fewer farm workers.
Most farms were less than a hundred acres and were livestock rather than arable. Nor was there much sign of modernization. Despite the advent of tractors and other modern machinery, fewer than one in six farms had a single tractor by 1939. While this was a far higher figure than that of Germany, it was none the less considerably below Britain's potential levels of agricultural mechanization. Crop yields were much the same as they had been fifty years earlier. This meant that by 1939 just 12 per cent of wheat and flour was home-grown, while just 16 per cent of sugar, oils and fats, and 9 per cent of butter came from British farms. Admittedly, 50 per cent of meat was home-reared, but 8.75 million tons of feedstuffs were imported to feed British livestock. In all, around a third of all imports were food. And that was way too high a figure now that Britain was at war.
Of course, it wasn't doom and gloom for all British farmers, and some regions had done better than others. The biggest single agricultural product consumed at home was milk – some 94 per cent was home--produced – so the dairy farmers of the south-west were doing better than most. A. G. Street, who had a farm at Wilton in south-west Wiltshire, was a pro-gressive farmer always on the look-out for new schemes and farming methods, and had adopted the Hosier milking system. This was a mobile milking unit that enabled seventy cows to be milked at once out in the open air. It was a great success, but rather depended on the better southern climate. Even so, A. G. supplemented his income not only by writing books, but also by -running his own milk-round in Salisbury throughout much of the 1930s. Like most farmers, he worked nearly all day, every day of the week.
And Street was a success, the more so after his first book, Farmer's Glory, published in 1932, had become an overnight hit. More tomes had followed, and with them came demands to lecture and speak and even advise on rural -matters. Despite all this, the Streets were never more than comfortable; his daughter, Pamela, went to a local private school, but it was a struggle to pay the fees. Ditchampton Farm was a lovely spot, but the farmhouse was hardly a mansion and there were few luxuries. Farming was tough, even when you were doing well.
Admiral D?nitz was fully aware of how dependent Britain was on imported food, and had assessed that his U-boats needed to sink around half a million tonnes of shipping per month. If they were successful, within a year, he reckoned, Britain would be brought to the point of starvation. 'No weapon ever invented,' wrote the author and poet Laurie Lee, 'is more deadly than hunger.' It was all very well Britain rearming and having access to resources from all around the globe, but if the British people could not be fed, it was all for naught, as farmers like A. G. Street were all too aware.
But so too was the government, and despite the rural decline, con-siderable thought had been given to this potential problem should war erupt once more. In 1935, the then Minister of Agriculture, Walter Elliott, had set up a committee to investigate how farming might be organized in the event of war. Among its recommendations were the reconstitution of the County Agricultural Committees. These had worked well in the last war, and were based on the principle that local farmers were best placed to implement state directives in their regions as they not only knew the soils and best local farming practices, but invariably knew the other farmers in the region too. The following year, a provisional list of chairmen, executive officers and secretaries was agreed should the War Executive Agricultural Committees – as they were to be called – need to be enacted.
Further steps were taken. A new Agricultural Act was passed in 1937, offering grants to farmers to buy crucial fertilizers such as lime and basic slag and to invest in land drainage; it was part of an effort to increase the badly neglected fertility of the land. By the spring of 1939, the new Minister for Agriculture, Sir Reginald Dorman-Smith, was buying large stockpiles of phosphates, oil seeds, cereal feeds and even tractors. Stocks of other foodstuffs were also built up, and Dorman-Smith instigated a renewed -ploughing-up campaign with an incentive of ￡2 for every acre of permanent pasture turned over to arable, a sum in 1939 that was not to be sniffed at. There were also financial incentives for growing barley and oats to replace imported animal feed. Manpower was also protected as farming was considered a reserve occupation.
In addition to these measures, at the end of August 1939, the Minister of Agriculture was given full powers to control and direct food pro-duction, including, most controversially, the authority to requisition any farm or terminate any tenancy where land was being neglected or farming practices were unnecessarily poor. The Ministry was also attempting to dramatically increase mechanization on farms, not least with a big rise in the number of tractors. The American company Ford had opened a 66-acre site in Dagenham in Essex back in 1932. Six years later, Ford offered to increase production to eighty tractors a day within three months with the help of government financing. This was initially turned down, but as other measures were being put in place a deal was struck, with Ford agreeing to increase production and to keep 3,000 in reserve should war break out. The Fordson Model N was not the best tractor around, but it was the only one being mass-produced, and in the government's new drive to increase food production that was what mattered.
The War Agricultural Executive Committees were also enabled and could begin their work immediately, as those on each of the county committees had already been appointed and begun work in readiness. Wiltshire's War Ag – as they immediately became known – was made up of highly respectable farmers, squires and yeomen. A. G. Street broadly approved of the choice and certainly the principle – he thought it made perfect sense that those who knew the local conditions and capabilities of the land were best placed to prepare Wiltshire for the 1940 harvest. 'In this instance,' he noted, 'decentralisation has already scored a notable triumph.'
With the outbreak of war, Britain did at least, then, have measures in place to attempt the dramatic increase in home food production that was urgently needed. Now that war had come, farmers were asked to plough up a further million acres of grassland. It had to be this way. During peacetime, people wanted fresh meat, fresh milk, fresh eggs, fresh vegetables and fresh fruit. Now, however, what was needed above all was grain and -potatoes – after all, it was possible to feed a great deal more on bread than on the eggs produced by feeding that same grain to hens.
Britain was fortunate to have so much grassland that could be -ploughed up. None the less, A. G. Street was conscious that this was asking a lot of many farmers, who would now have to alter farming systems and reduce livestock, which would add a significant layer of work and worry. Many still did not have the mechanical equipment, horses or labour to tackle this sudden demand for more acreage. Street himself had lost his foreman, Charlie Noble, who, as a territorial, had answered the call to arms, while at the same time his family was suddenly inundated with evacuees. All across Britain, between the end of June and the first week of September, some 3.5 million had left the cities for the countryside, most of whom were children and young mothers; the Streets were now looking after three girls from Portsmouth, which required quite some adjusting, not least because none of them had ever seen plumbing and running water before let alone had any experience of country life. Soon after, the mother of one of the girls also arrived, carrying a baby. Most hosts had little choice in taking on evacuees, although who was sent where tended to be a little less haphazard; billeting officers were always local figures who knew the potential bedroom space their neighbours had. Needless to say, this enormous evacuation put a huge strain on many families, schools and local facilities.
A. G. was, however, philosophical. A passionate champion of British farming but also a patriot, he believed that whatever hardships stood at his door or lay before him in the future would prove a small sacrifice. It was essential, he believed, that the countryside, collectively, show the towns and cities that without their farms they could not hope to survive the war. But more than that, it was a matter of conscience. 'Whenever I see an aeroplane performing its dangerous evolutions above my farm,' he noted late one evening at his desk, 'I realise that youth is taking the dangerous share, and that middle-aged countryfolk should be only too glad to toil in safety on the fields below.'
Despite the seriousness of the potential food production crisis in Britain, there was, however, no panic yet as the country entered the first winter of war. For sailors like Vere Wight-Boycott, out on the North Sea, the weather was an enemy more savage than any German. In London, Jock Colville was getting fed up with walking through endless snow and slush, while in her flat in West Hampstead, Gwladys Cox was finding the cold quite debilitating. 'Colder than ever!' she noted on 20 January. '24 degrees of frost on Hampstead Heath. Pipes in bathroom frozen, milk solid in larder.' When the milk boy came he looked so numb with cold she sat him down by the kitchen fire and plied him with hot coffee.
But for farmers like A. G. Street, who always liked to look on the bright side, there were benefits; cold it may have been, but it was at least dry, and that meant he could get on with threshing the previous summer's harvest. He had also made silage for the first time the previous autumn – high-moisture, fermented and stored hay – so was feeding his dairy cows with that rather than hay, as he had done all his previous farming years. He had become an immediate convert: silage could be fed to his cows out of doors even if it was raining and didn't blow about in the wind either.
He had also converted his tractor to pneumatic tyres, which made beetling about the farm in the snow much easier and had enabled him to lay up his farm van for the time being. Also put away in one of the sheds was his big car, leaving just an old Austin Seven for him and his wife. In the big scheme of things, however, Street, like many farmers, was finding it easier to get around than most in Europe at this time. Petrol rationing had been introduced from the outset of war, with non-essential users limited to 1,800 miles per year and essential users given an annual allowance of 9,000 miles. Farmers with mechanical machinery were also given concessions against the petrol ration.
Food rationing, however, had been repeatedly postponed. The Government had been worried about public opinion and so, although it had been preparing for it, did not actually bring it in until the New Year. Gwladys Cox in north London had been issued her ration books in November and had promptly left them with 'the butcher, Atkinson, grocer Dimmer, and milkman, Limited Dairies'. On 8 January, she jotted in her diary, 'Today, butter, sugar and bacon rationing starts. ? lb butter, ? lb sugar per head.' In March all meat was rationed. Gwladys Cox was not grumbling and, although there were plenty who were, it was not especially severe – not to begin with at any rate – and in addition people were encouraged to produce their own food, whether it be growing vegetables or rearing rabbits. Early in the New Year, this scheme had been given a catchy name, coined by one of the national newspapers: 'Dig for Victory'. Flower beds gave way to vegetable patches, while public parks, railway embankments, school playing fields and recreation grounds were dug up for new allotments. The Prime Minister let it be known he was growing potatoes, and King George VI that potatoes, cabbages and other vegetables were replacing the flower beds around the Queen Victoria Memorial opposite Buckingham Palace. The Dig for Victory campaign successfully killed two birds with one stone: it would provide a not insignificant amount of extra food and also gave Britons a useful sense of unity of purpose.
But while British people of all ages and classes were now united in growing vegetables, that same unity of purpose was not shared by the War Cabinet, the Chiefs of Staff or even their French allies. At the end of November, the Soviet Union had invaded Finland. This followed on from their invasion of east Poland in September, as agreed in the German–Soviet Pact, and then by the absorption of the Baltic States through a series of 'mutual-assistance pacts'. It then tried to secure the Gulf of Finland, -demanding the Finns hand over a number of ports, including those to the north touching the Barents Sea. When the Finns refused, the Red Army attacked.
This prompted a crisis of future strategy in London and Paris. The long, hard winter may have provided Allied factories with an essential chance to increase armaments, but the inactivity on the ground had caused problems. At a crucial moment, prevarication was replacing decisiveness…
CHAPTER 14
Iron in the Soul
IN FEBRUARY 1940, President Roosevelt sent a special envoy to Europe on a personal fact-finding mission. Sumner Welles was a refined and high-born Under-Secretary of State and FDR's main diplomatic advisor. Reserved, impeccably groomed, fastidious and imperturbable, Welles was a man of high intellect and little humour. On his trip to Europe, he would visit Rome, Berlin, Paris and London; his task: merely to talk with leaders of all four countries, gauge the temperature and report back. It was a mission that reflected Roosevelt's very personal approach to diplomacy. It certainly went against the grain to send such envoys – after all, the United States had ambassadors and embassies in all these places; but FDR mistrusted the State Department – the foreign ministry – disliked a number of his ambassadors, and, because his own poor health limited his movement, had always relied on a few, close and, most importantly, trusted friends and aides to be his extra eyes and ears.
Welles reached Naples by ship on 25 February and then took a special train ride straight to Rome. The following day, after a brief meeting with the King, he visited Count Ciano at the Palazzo Chigi. Welles found Ciano frank and intelligent and more sympathetic to the Allies than he had perhaps expected. Next up was a visit to see Mussolini himself in the Duce's huge office in the Palazzo Venezia, known as the Sala del Mappamondo. He thought Mussolini looked older than his fifty-six years and was surprised by how laboured his movement was. However, the Duce was cordial and assured Welles he still thought a real and lasting peace was possible between Germany and the Allies.
All in all, Welles left for Berlin the following day feeling the trip had been a success and that the Italians were less hostile and more desirous of peace than he had supposed. Whatever optimism he may have had leaving Italy, however, was dashed in Berlin, where during a series of meetings with leading Nazis, including von Ribbentrop, G?ring and even Hitler, the message was crystal clear: there was no chance of any peace until Britain and France had been crushed into submission. Of any compromise there was not even a whiff. Unlike Rome, which had seemed bright and light and opulent, Welles found Berlin rather sinister with its swastikas, SS guards and endless uniforms. Later, after driving back to Berlin from Carinhall, G?ring's house, he noticed long lines of Berliners queuing for food and, whether it was his imagination or not, recorded that he did not see one smiling face. He was glad to leave Germany behind.
And so on to France and to Paris, a city he had been to before and which struck him as much changed. Key monuments were now sand-bagged and there was, he thought, a feeling of sullen apathy. The Prime Minister, Daladier, confided to Welles that he would not rule out a deal with the Nazis, but it was his meeting with Léon Blum, the Jewish, socialist leader of the Popular Front and former Prime Minister, that left a more lasting impression. There was a profound sadness in Blum's remarks. Welles had the impression Blum thought that for France 'the hours were numbered'.
Finally, Welles went to London, where he met most of the leading British politicians, usually accompanied by the US Ambassador, Joe Kennedy, a man who was deeply anti-Communist and who had more than a passing admiration for the Germans. His most important meetings were two separate interviews with Neville Chamberlain and the Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax. Although it was not part of his remit, Welles did try to outline a compromise that might lead to peace, including disarmament of all the major belligerents. Both the PM and Halifax made it clear there could be no negotiations with Hitler unless the Führer agreed to give up 'most of what Nazidom stands for'. It was an honourable effort by the urbane American, but he was clutching at straws. Chamberlain, particularly, rather took to Welles. 'I felt that I had established a personal relation with him that may be useful,' the Prime Minister wrote in a letter to his sister, 'and it was evident that he attached much importance to what I said to him.'
Before he sailed home, Welles returned to Rome for one more round of talks with Ciano and Mussolini, and in a final effort to bridge the gap between Allies and Axis suggested there was far more room for manoeuvre on the part of Britain and France than was the case. It all came to naught. This time, a reinvigorated Mussolini warned Welles that the German offensive in the West was very, very close. 'The minute hand,' he told Welles with sinister gravity, 'is pointing to one minute before midnight.' Later, Welles did telephone the White House, asking whether he had permission to begin a vague attempt at a negotiated peace through Mussolini. Roosevelt refused him this. In fact, the very same day, the President gave a speech making his own stance as crystal clear as Hitler had made his, ruling out peace while there was oppression and cruelty and while small nations lived in fear of powerful neighbours. 'It cannot be a moral peace,' he said, 'if freedom from invasion is sold for tribute.'
Mussolini had not been at all impressed with Welles, although Ciano, for his part, had liked him. 'I have had too many dealings with the pack of conceited vulgarians that make up the German leadership,' he noted, 'not to appreciate the fact that Sumner Welles is a gentleman.' In his views of Welles, Ciano was neatly reflecting the increasing divergence in opinion between himself and his father-in-law, Il Duce.
Not much had changed between Italy and Germany: they were still allies, still part of the Axis, but Germany was at war with Britain and France, and Italy was not. None the less, Mussolini had been hurt and angered by Germany's deal with Russia, although by January he was thawing. At the time, there had been no chance of a meeting with the Führer and so instead he had written a long letter to Hitler, warning him about any further close ties with the Soviets. 'I feel that you cannot simply abandon the antisemitic and anti-Bolshevist banner which you have flown in the wind for twenty years and for which so many of your comrades have died,' he wrote. 'You cannot foreswear your gospel, in which the German people have blindly believed.' Russia was Germany's Lebensraum; Italy, he assured him, was accelerating military prepar-ations and should be seen as Germany's reserve. The letter was intended to reinforce Italy's position as Germany's number one ally.
Mussolini was now more determined than ever to enter the war, although he was keenly aware how badly unprepared for conflict Italy was. For all the grandstanding, military parades, uniforms and chest-puffing, any impression of military strength was an utter charade. Italy was simply not wealthy enough nor blessed with enough raw materials to even remotely compete with the major belligerents. That was a big enough disadvantage, but was compounded by the inexorable bureaucracy and, frankly, low calibre of the senior leadership. In August and September, hundreds of thousands of reservists had been called up and had duly turned up to barracks and depots throughout the country only to find severe shortages of just about everything and infrastructure that was on the point of collapse.
That was just mustering the Army, before anyone began training or even fighting. Generale Pariani, the Under-Secretary for War, oversaw a Regio Esercito – Royal Army – that was deficient in artillery, tanks, vehicles, rifles, most equipment and even uniforms.
The Regia Aeronautica – Royal Air Force – was hardly any better, and its commander, Generale Valle, was every bit as incompetent as Pariani. Valle continually told Mussolini the Air Force had around 2,200 aircraft when, in fact, only a third of that number were what could be considered relatively modern, and of those some 240 were grounded for repair. Both men were subsequently sacked, but even bringing in new blood did not alter the funda-mental problems facing Italy now that Germany, Britain and France were at war.
In a nutshell, they were twofold. The first was that Italy had almost no raw materials of its own, and not much to speak of from its limited overseas possessions. The second problem was that most materials were transported around the globe by sea, but Italy had no access to the oceans – or rather, it did, but both those access points – the Straits of Gibraltar and the Suez Canal – were controlled by the British. In fact, between them, the Allies controlled 80 per cent of Italy's raw materials and food imports transported by sea. This meant Britain had control of all oil, rubber, copper and tin, materials without which war would be im-possible. In addition to this was the direct supply of 15 per cent of Italy's coal. As much as 70 per cent of its coal came from Germany, but two-thirds of this was shipped to Italy from Bremen, and, with the outbreak of war, from Rotterdam in -neutral Holland. Only a fraction came by train through the Brenner Pass in the Alps. The situation was made worse when, on 21 November, Britain announced it was including all German exports as well as imports in the blockade, which closed the Rotterdam supply route as well. This meant that Italy's coal shipments from Germany were now cut off, although Ciano did then manage to negotiate an exemption for Italy's precious coal via Rotterdam. This, however, was clearly merely a short-term reprieve; the moment Italy began making bellicose overtures, Britain would turn off the tap.
In an effort to placate any Italian war-talk, however, Britain then offered to supply Italy with 70 per cent of its coal requirement for all of 1940 in return for arms and other goods, but, despite Ciano's careful diplomacy, Mussolini baulked at the idea and put a stop to it. 'I have the pleasure,' Mussolini told Ricardo Ricci, the Minister of Corporations, 'and let me emphasize, the pleasure, to inform you that English coal can no longer come into Italy.' As far as the Duce was concerned, it was a good lash of the whip for Italians to learn to depend on their now reduced resources. The shortfall in coal would be made up from Italian lignite, or low-grade 'brown coal' as it was known. This, however, was no real solution as not only was lignite less efficient, but the Italians did not have the machinery to extract it in any case. Mussolini was operating in a world in which he believed his will was enough; in this, he was tragically mistaken.
For Ciano, this was calamitous. Since the outbreak of war, he had been working to keep Italy out of the fighting, gathering around him key -supporters of this policy and chipping away at Mussolini's resolve -whenever he had the chance. Ciano ensured he kept a dialogue going with both Sir Percy Loraine and André Fran?ois-Poncet, the British and French -ambassadors, and made ill-concealed digs at his German allies whenever he had the chance. In December he made a widely reported speech to the Chamber criticizing the Russian invasion of Finland and by inference, and nothing else, Germany. Italian public opinion was also for the Finns and outraged at German perfidy; at the time, Mussolini had been full of outrage too. With glee, Ciano had scribbled in his diary how the Italians would never now march with the Germans. 'Everybody,' he wrote, 'knows and understands that Germany has betrayed us twice.'
In this, however, he was wrong. It seemed all too obvious to him and many others, leading industrialists included, that Italy would be ruined if it went to war; after all, where would all the raw materials needed for the fight come from? And how on earth could they fight with such an ill--prepared and obsolescent army? 'The Duce must be aware,' Percy Loraine told Ciano, 'that the Britain of today is no longer the Britain of a year ago.' 'It is hard for me to argue with him,' Ciano noted, 'because I share his -opinion and he knows it.'
But Mussolini thought otherwise. While Ciano was convinced the Allies would win in the long term, the Duce believed Germany would crush the feeble-minded Allies. In any case, it was a question of honour. It was -humiliating and degrading to have to dance to the tune of the British over their blockade, and he hated a situation in which he believed Italy stood between a rock and a hard place: needing to keep the Allies sweet but not compromising the alliance with Germany.
On 1 March, Britain announced its temporary reprieve on Italy's coal shipments from Rotterdam was now over, and four days later thirteen coal ships bound for Italy were seized by the Royal Navy. Mussolini was incandescent. 'It is not possible that of all people I should become the laughing stock of Europe,' he ranted to Ciano. 'I have to stand for one humiliation after another. As soon as I am ready I shall make the English regret this. My intervention in the war will bring about their defeat!'
Just how Italy was going to do this was not clear; it was as though verbal outrage would be enough to send Britain packing. At any rate, whatever slim chance Ciano thought he had of turning Mussolini away from the charge towards war, it was ruined by the announcement that his number one least favourite German, von Ribbentrop, was coming to Rome. 'A coup de théatre,' jotted Ciano, 'dear to the low-class tastes of the Germans.' He dreaded Mussolini having any contact with von Ribbentrop. 'Under the circumstances,' he added, 'Ribbentrop will need no great oratorical power to urge the Duce on a course which he, the Duce, desires with all his soul.'
Just as Ciano had feared, von Ribbentrop whipped up Mussolini even further, assuring him the Allies would be crushed, and then proposed a meeting with Hitler. This took place at the Brenner Pass on 18 March, the day after Ciano's and Mussolini's second meeting with Sumner Welles. He had, however, already told von Ribbentrop a week earlier that his mind was made up: at the appropriate moment, Italy would enter the war on the side of its ally. The die, it seemed, had been cast.
The British, with their global fleets and world trade, had always been wedded to the idea that war was really a battle of supplies. All manner of raw materials were needed to fight a war, and not one country in the world had an abundance of all, not even America and the USSR, despite their vast size and geographical range.
Among those raw materials were metals, and in Britain few people understood the myriad and truly international world of metals better than Oliver Lyttelton. Having survived four years of the last war fighting with the Grenadier Guards and winning a Distinguished Service Order and Military Cross in the process, he had made it home and gone on to forge a highly successful business career. By 1939, he was chairman of the British Metal Corporation, who were, in essence, metal merchants and under his leadership had become the biggest metal company in the UK. They had further consolidated their position by striking a number of affiliations with Continental partners, which had enabled Lyttelton to become a director of the German metals firms Metallgesellschaft and Norddeutsche Raffinerie. This had given him an invaluable picture of the German metal trade and the importance of non-ferrous metals in any future war. He had learned, for example, that back in 1914, just a few months into the war, the directors of Metallgesellschaft had been approached by the German General Staff because they were already running out of copper and needed help in finding more. Copper, tin, lead and zinc were all needed – copper and zinc especially – in times of war.
It was with this in mind that in the spring of 1939 Lyttelton had begun a plan to buy up as much of these all-important metals as possible. As he was well aware, many of the leading mining companies around the world would be worrying about the uncertainty war might bring – would they still be able to ship their metals? Would existing buyers continue to purchase them? He had already been approached by the Ministry of Supply to become the Controller of Non-Ferrous Metals should it come to war, and so back in March, with the Germans walking into Czechoslovakia, he had approached Noranda in Canada, Broken Hill in Australia and others, and begun negotiating. What he was proposing was assured purchases, no matter whether they had the shipping or not, in return for guaranteed quantities at a low price.
Much to his immense frustration, he was unable to galvanize the Ministry of Supply into buying these metals right away, even though he knew Germany had been stockpiling copper, so although Lyttelton had personally secured small stocks of nickel, it was not until the outbreak of war that he was finally made Controller of Non-Ferrous Metals and given carte blanche to start purchasing. He hoped it would not already be too late. Lyttelton, like most others in Britain, was expecting a German offensive almost immediately, but was hoping the enemy would delay any action for as long as possible.
In the autumn of 1939, Lyttelton was forty-six and the epitome of the debonair and cultivated Englishman, with his lean features, slicked-back hair and trim moustache. From an aristocratic background, he had been educated at Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge, and had an exemplary war record. Indeed, the war had taught him much: the extremes under which the human body and mind can be placed, the awfulness of the slaughter, the importance of never, ever, giving in. He had been temporarily blinded by gas, had been nearly broken, but somehow had kept going so that when peace finally came he was among an elite of his generation who had fought for almost the entire war and was still standing.
During the war, he had also got to know and befriended a number of key people, from Winston Churchill and Anthony Eden to soldiers now generals in the Army. In the intervening years, he had travelled widely, learned everything he could about both modern business and the world of metals, and developed an outstanding and international web of contacts, as well as finding time to get married and raise a family. Intelligent, worldly and imbued with a razor-sharp business acumen, he was one of the key civilians from the business world from which Britain would greatly benefit now that war had come.
And with war declared, and Lyttelton now Controller of Non-Ferrous Metals, the British Metal Corporation was taken over by the Government and sent to new offices out of London in Rugby in the Midlands. With his own home inundated by young evacuees, he was almost relieved to get away. 'I had little dreamt,' he noted, 'that English children could be so completely ignorant of the simplest rules of hygiene, and that they would regard the floors and carpets as suitable places upon which to relieve themselves.' Already, the war was forcing differing classes in Britain, trad-itionally so separated, to confront one another.
Once installed at Rugby, Lyttelton and his hundred or so staff worked at 'white heat' and six weeks later, despite frustrating and unnecessary amounts of red tape from the Treasury, they had secured Britain's projected requirements. This had been done in precisely the manner Lyttelton had envisaged. The total sum was a staggering ￡250 million but had come at a fraction of the price per ton for which these metals had been purchased in the previous war.
But while non-ferrous metals were essential and urgently needed for the acceleration of armaments production, there was no question that, above all, the two raw materials needed for the successful prosecution of modern war were oil and iron ore. Not one of Britain, France or Germany had enough of either, although in the case of Britain and France this was not too much of an issue due to a combination of overseas trade and the resources of their respective empires. France, for example, gained most of its iron ore from its possessions in North Africa. With their large navies and merchant navies and with the U-boats sinking less than 1 per cent of all Allied merchant shipping, securing supplies of metals, ferrous or non-ferrous, was not – as Oliver Lyttelton had discovered – proving too problematic.
The same could not be said for Germany, whose geographical isolation from the rest of the wider world was one of its major Achilles heels. Because the Kriegsmarine was still so comparatively small, Germany had no means of breaking the Allied naval blockade that had been imposed the moment Britain had declared war, and so, by December, British intelligence deduced that of the 22 million tons of iron ore imported in 1938, the equivalent of 9.5 million tons of that supply had come from sources now closed to it. Details of current stocks were unclear, but they were believed to be low. In order to maintain its war effort and avoid industrial meltdown, it was reckoned that Germany needed to import 750,000 tons of iron ore per month from its one major supplier still available: Sweden. In fact, if anything, these figures were on the conservative side, as the Swedes had assured Germany of some 10 million tons of ore in 1940 and a further supply of lower-quality ore of between 1 million and 2 million tons. Certainly, back in April the previous year, the OKW had accepted that maintaining Swedish ore deliveries was a 'basic demand of the Wehrmacht'.
The biggest Swedish iron field was in the far north of the country in the Kiruna–G?llivare district. From here, ore was shipped either through the Norwegian port of Narvik, just a short rail link away, or through the Swedish port of Lule? in the Gulf of Bothnia, the narrow stretch of sea between Sweden and Finland. This second route, however, was frozen and impassable during winter months. The problem for the Allies was that although the Narvik route was the prime means of transporting the greater proportion of Germany's essential iron ore requirements, Norway was neutral and any infringement of its neutrality would be illegal. In effect, it would be an act of war. Running roughshod over the rights of neutrals wasn't really what freedom-loving democracies were supposed to do.
Be that as it may, it was the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, who first suggested back in September that if diplomacy could not persuade the Norwegians to help the Allied cause, then brazenly violating its neutrality and mining its coastal waters was vital. This way, German ships faced either the risk of hitting a mine or venturing out to sea, where they could be picked off by the Navy. The concern for Churchill, however, was not so much the violation of neutrality, but rather the possibility of retaliation, for Britain, too, received a fair amount of Swedish iron ore through Narvik.
Churchill had considerable sympathy for the Finns, as did most in Britain and France; but while he was all for taking the initiative in the war, mining the Norwegian Leads – the waters around Narvik – rather than sending half-cocked aid to the Finns, seemed to him a simple and bloodless operation that could achieve much. It would, he suggested in a widely circulated memo, be a blow struck at Germany's war-making capacity 'equal to a first-class victory in the field'. Yes, it would mean violating Norwegian neutrality, but the Allies were fighting to protect small countries like Norway. This was true to a point, but there was no doubt Norway would take a very dim view, to put it mildly, should Britain and France make such a move. Did that matter? Well, yes, because while militarily Norway was weak, it did have a sizeable merchant fleet that Britain had been negotiating to charter. Furthermore, it could cut off the supply of Swedish ore to Britain. Even more pertinent was the reaction of Sweden, which would understandably take it equally badly should an important trade be forcibly severed.
So, on the one hand, cutting off Germany's major iron ore supply during this crucial first winter of war would undoubtedly hurt the Nazis, but on the other, there would be a price to pay in terms of shipping, Britain's own supply of ore, and also the loss of the moral high ground, which was not to be underestimated.
While there were arguments for both mining and leaving well alone, one thing was not in doubt: taking the risk of mining the Leads would only be worth it if the British did so right away, during the winter months when passage through Narvik was the only practical supply route for Germany. Come the spring, the Gulf of Bothnia would be open to shipping once more.
Despite Churchill's convincing rhetoric, the Cabinet and Chiefs of Staff did a great deal of teeth-sucking about the matter, squirming with indecision. Churchill, as a member of the War Cabinet but nothing more than that, could not influence them into decisive action. When they decided to test the water, the response from the Norwegian and Swedish governments was unsurprisingly severe. Thus for the time being, it was decided, they would drop the plan of mining the Leads, but continue to apply diplomatic pressure to get both Sweden and Norway to go along with the proposed plan. By that time, of course, it would be too late. The whole point, as Churchill, with mounting frustration kept stressing, was acting decisively, now!
But while Churchill's mining plans had been firmly parked, the Cabinet did continue, albeit with no real enthusiasm, to support French plans to help the Finns – even though that would mean passing the aid through the Norwegian port of Narvik and Sweden, against those countries' wishes, and thus would also be a violation of their neutrality.
Championing this idea in Britain was the most senior military man in the country, General 'Tiny' Ironside, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, who proposed using the cover of helping the Finns to invade both the north of Norway and Sweden and secure the principal Swedish iron mines. To Churchill, this seemed ludicrous. If mining the Leads – a far safer and more effective option – had already been rejected, why was this second plan even being considered? It was not an unreasonable question.
It was with the Scandinavian conundrum still rumbling away that Jock Colville had trudged through the snow and slush to No. 10 on the morning of Monday, 29 January. The day before had been his twenty-fifth birthday, and he'd spent the day with a friend who had evacuated with her children near the Epsom Downs. The return trip to London should have been a breezy forty-minute train ride but because of the chaos caused by the snow took three and a half hours.
'The French are becoming excited about Finland and Scandinavia,' he jotted in his diary. 'They claim to have alarming evidence of energetic Russo-German collusion to force the issue in Finland.' It was to much of the rest of the world's surprise that the Finns were still battling on against the Red Army; a quick Russian walkover had been expected. As far as the Allies were concerned, there were some obvious likely consequences of the war in Finland. It seemed to the French, especially, that should Russia take control of Finland, the path would be open for a German strike into Sweden and Norway, which certainly made strategic sense – not only would the Germans then secure control of all Swedish iron ore for themselves but in doing so would also deny it to Britain. Anticipating such a move, the French were therefore proposing to send a naval force to Petsamo in the extreme north of Finland and mountain troops to take the iron ore fields.
In the days that followed, the prospect of war with Russia appeared increasingly likely. However, with German forces breathing down the necks of the Allies along the Western Front, getting embroiled in a war with Russia seemed a high-risk strategy to say the least. None the less, from the French perspective, anything that might draw German troops and resources away from France and into an entirely different sphere of conflict was to be encouraged in a big way. Fear of a return to the horror of fighting on French soil was ever-present in the minds of the French war chiefs. Thus Britain and France were both considering involvement in Scandinavia, but for different reasons. These differences were undermining the Western Allies' ability to act decisively.
Despite Ironside's initial enthusiasm, Chamberlain and the War Cabinet continued to prevaricate, seemingly crippled into indecisiveness by conflicting military and diplomatic arguments they were unable to square. Discussions rumbled on through February – about the scale of the operation, the risk to Scandinavian neutrality, where to find the men and shipping. The Cabinet was presented with a joint report from the Chiefs of Staff and the Foreign Office on 18 February. This was a day after Captain Philip Vian on the destroyer Cossack had boarded the German ship Altmark and in so doing had indeed violated Norwegian neutrality. The Norwegians protested, and the British replied that Norway should never have allowed such a vessel to use its waters. The Norwegians left it at that.
The French and British then agreed in principle a plan that involved sending a brigade of French chasseurs alpins and one British brigade, which would include three companies of skiers, who were promptly packed off to the Alps for training. The operation would involve the seizure of the main Swedish iron mines as well as military support for the Finns. Three divisions and a large part of a further division were to be withdrawn from France and sent to occupy southern Norwegian ports; their role was to support the Swedes if Germany invaded. Just the British part in the operation would involve some 100,000 troops and 11,000 vehicles; this represented a considerable amount of men and effort, but was still likely to be insufficient to do what was required. How these men were supposed to move about and fight in snow and ice was also not really given too much thought. At any rate, a handful of skis was certainly not going to cut it.
It was towards the end of February that Brigadier John Kennedy was invited to become Chief of Staff to Major-General Pierse Macksey, who had been appointed to command the British part of the proposed Scandinavian operation. Kennedy, a career soldier and veteran of the last war, had been recovering from being knocked down and nearly killed by a car outside the Cabinet Offices in the blackout and had just been given the all-clear to return to duty. Keen to get back to work once more, and equally pleased not to return to the War Office, where he had been Deputy Director, Military Plans, the 46-year-old Kennedy accepted.
Even so, after being fully put in the picture, Kennedy thought the plan seemed both rather ambitious and fraught with potential problems. The intention, Kennedy was told, was to land at Narvik on 16 March. 'I could hardly believe that the scheme was going to come off,' he noted, 'but we had to work on the assumption that it would.' So Kennedy set to it, and put in a fortnight's work trying to implement a plan that would successfully get enough men to Norway in the very short time left. On 11 March, with the operation just a few days away, he attended a Chiefs of Staff meeting where it became clear as it broke up that, despite Ironside's enthusiasm, not everyone agreed it was worth doing. Cyril Newall, the Chief of the Air Staff, turned to Kennedy and said, 'I think the whole thing is hare-brained.' General Ismay agreed. So did Kennedy, for that matter.
The following day, Kennedy was summoned to Downing Street for a further meeting with the War Cabinet, Chiefs of Staff and with Major-General Macksey. It became abundantly clear that there was no real enthusiasm at all from the PM and his War Cabinet unless the operation could be achieved without any major opposition from the Norwegians or Swedes. This, of course, could not be guaranteed. Even so, no final decision was made on whether it would go ahead or not.
On the 13th, Kennedy had to put the final touches to the troops' orders, right down to the minutest detail; they were due to sail in two days' time, but were already in Scotland ready and ships were being loaded. Then news arrived of the impending armistice between Finland and Russia, and orders reached Kennedy that further troop movements were to be stopped. Then they were reduced to forty-eight hours' notice; finally, the operation was cancelled altogether. On the morning of the 15th, rather than slipping down the River Clyde, Kennedy was instead having breakfast with Ironside at the Carlton Club. 'You know it wasn't my fault we took so long to make up our minds,' Ironside told him. 'We need more drive at the top.'
Later that day, Kennedy went home and spent the afternoon digging his garden. The whole episode had been interesting, he realized, because it had taught him some valuable lessons. 'I learned how futile the waging of war becomes when the higher command refuses to grasp the nettle and delegate command to chosen subordinates,' he wrote. 'I learned afresh the dangers of hesitation when embarking on a course whose only hope of success is to be bold.'
Kennedy was quite right. Churchill had been urging swift action since the autumn. Time and again he had underlined the importance of -decisiveness. The whole point had been to deny Germany its iron ore during the crucial winter months when other routes were closed. The Finns suing for peace had saved the Allies from what would have almost certainly been a complete fiasco. As a sign of British and French intent, the whole Scandinavian scheme had hardly augured well.
CHAPTER 15
All Alone
HITLER AND VON RIBBENTROP may have done a good job convincing Mussolini they would sweep Britain and France from the board, but that kind of gung-ho rhetoric wasn't persuading many within the Wehrmacht, who felt nothing but a sense of impending doom – and, frankly, with good reason. If any country stood alone in 1940 then it was Germany in the spring of that year. There was the pact with the Soviet Union, but neither Hitler nor anyone else in Germany were kidding themselves that it had any long-term future. Economically, Germany was isolated. Part of the deal with Russia had been a trade agreement and although the raw materials now coming in from the east were much needed, they did not make up for the sudden and dramatic loss of overseas trade as a result of the Allied blockade. Because of Germany's geographical position, the blockade was relatively easy to enforce – even with half of Poland now morphed into the Reich, there was still only a comparatively short coastline facing the North Sea and a further stretch tucked away in the Baltic. The opportunities for reaching the world's oceans were limited, to say the least. This had been a problem for the Kaiser's imperial plans back at the turn of the century and had crippled the German effort in the last war. It was every bit as much of a problem for Hitler now. Great powers of the modern age needed either plentiful natural resources or easy access to the global sea lanes, or, even better, both. Germany had neither.
The truth of the matter was that, despite the Four-Year Plan, Germany had begun the war still heavily dependent on overseas imports – imports that were now largely cut off by the blockade. Even without British mining of the Leads, little iron ore was getting through that first winter of war, and oil and copper imports fell to almost nothing. So critical was the shortage of copper that Germany had been forced to ask Italy for crucial supplies, exchanging coal for this much-needed metal. Since Italy did not have the 3,500 tons demanded, Mussolini extorted it from the people – effectively stealing housewives' copper pans and chalices from the Church. Ciano warned him the Church would take a poor view of such an action, but the Duce ignored him.
By March, Germany had suffered an 80 per cent reduction in its pre-war imports; this meant it was bringing into the Reich less than a third of the raw materials it had consumed in 1932, the nadir of the Depression and a time when more than half its industrial capacity had ceased to function. It was almost as though the Hindenburg Programme of 1916–17 were happening all over again; back then, increasing indust-rial output had been achieved only by taking from agricultural production. The result had been food shortages and increased prices, leading to a nation, by 1918, that was on the verge of starvation. It was knowing all this that had so horrified many of the leading figures within the Wehrmacht when Britain and France had declared war. The Führer had told them the Western Powers had been bluffing and he had been wrong; it had shaken their faith in his judgement. Those who remembered the blockade of the last war, the terrible deprivations, and the bitter defeat and consequences after being economically crushed, feared history would repeat itself.
For men like General Georg Thomas, head of the military-economic staff at the OKW, and Walther Funk, the Minister for Economic Affairs, the only small sliver of hope lay in hardening the economy and trying to sustain a long, drawn-out war in which eventually all sides concluded a negotiated peace. It would mean absolutely no offensive action what-soever. Thomas reckoned Germany could spin out resources in this way for about three years at the most.
This was so far from Hitler's view that it is no wonder he felt both contempt for and deep frustration with men like Thomas. For Hitler, it was always all or nothing. There was no grey area in any aspect of his thinking. The Third Reich would last a thousand years or it would crumble into dust. He had gambled on Britain and France not declaring war and had lost; this time, he would gamble again in a go-for-broke, all-or-nothing strike for a decisive victory. Even Hitler, with his tenuous grasp on reality, correctly recognized that he had but one choice: to hurl everything on one throw of the dice. There would be no stockpiling of resources; there would be no succour for the civilian population – the Volk of the Reich would have to stomach rationing, coal shortages, commandeered cars and other privations in the interest of bringing all German resources to bear on a rapid and crushing victory over the West.
Drastic measures were ordered. The Z Plan for the Kriegsmarine was scrapped – there would be no more battleships, cruisers or, most import-antly, aircraft carriers, even though they were already emerging as the pre-eminent modern warship. Smaller, cheaper U-boat building increased. Instead of the scrapped Z Plan came the Führerforderung – the 'Führer Challenge' – to raise the production of ammunition by three and a half times in 1940 and by five times by 1941, and to dramatically increase Luftwaffe production, particularly of the Ju88 bomber. At the same time, armaments were also to be increased – more small arms, more mortars, more guns. Hitler's first demands for such an increase came at the end of the Polish campaign. Of course, results took time to kick in – which was too late for Funk, who was summarily axed in December – and were not helped by a crisis on the Reichsbahn, the state railway. Thanks to the massive amount of troop movements and a lack of investment in rolling stock or motor vehicles, bottlenecks occurred with immense railway traffic jams the consequence. In February, G?ring had warned that transport issues were Germany's biggest problem affecting the war economy. In the short term, however, the Reichsbahn traffic problems were eased in the nick of time as the front settled once more.
In March, Fritz Todt, a 48-year-old construction engineer, was made Minister for Ammunition. Todt had worked his way up the Nazi pole, catching the eye of Hitler with his work on the autobahns and then the Siegfried Line, or Westwall as it was known. To do this he had drawn together government organizations like the Reichsarbeitsdienst – the Reich Labour Service – with private enterprise and created a manual labour force, the Organisation Todt. Within a week of taking charge of ammunition pro-duction, he had instigated a number of measures, including a loosening of price controls, decentralization and the cutting of debilitating red tape.
Ammunition figures rose rapidly after his appointment, even though the groundwork had been laid in the autumn of the previous year. At any rate, with Thomas now toeing the line and with the Russian raw materials finally making their way through the system, ammunition levels were starting to soar, and the Ju88 – slower, heavier than had been conceived, but with dive-bombing capabilities – was finally in full production. War against the West the previous autumn would have been suicide, but while it was true British and French rearmament had been stepped up in the same period, at least now Germany had the shells and bombs with which to launch an offensive.
Hitler's demands had, by April, largely been met. The price had been severe hardship at home and the neglect of other areas of the Nazi war machine. But if Hitler could smash the Western Allies in his do-or-die all-out strike, then these sacrifices would have been worth it.
In France, Capitaine Barlone and his Horse Transport Company were now stationed near Valenciennes, along with the rest of 2nd North African Division, on the North-East Front near the Belgian border. Barlone was billeted at a large, warm and comfortable house, which also doubled up as the Mess, but for most of the men the freezing tempera-tures were appalling. At the end of January, the temperature dropped to well below freezing, with the snow turning to ice. By day the men were now detailed to help the engineers build block houses along an anti-tank ditch that ran along the border. Barlone was not impressed – the anti-tank ditch was retained by light wattle and he rather suspected that after a brief bombardment the earth would crumble and the ditch would become easily passable once more.
In between digging and pouring concrete, Barlone and his fellow -officers did what they could to keep up the spirits of the troops. Films were shown once a week and plenty of football was organized. 'Fine,' he noted, 'but the best thing would be to carry on with training and work the men hard instead of letting them rust.' These, however, were the orders from GHQ, so had to be obeyed.
Along the Maginot Line in Lorraine, Lieutenant René de Chambrun was equally concerned about the lack of activity. Life on the front had become more and more monotonous as the weeks and months had gone by. The debilitating freeze had given way to the thaw of spring, but he and his men in 162e Régiment d'Infanterie were still doing little more than the odd patrol. He had felt that in September 1939 his men – most of whom were farmers and peasants – had been ready to fight. 'He was not so ready,' he noted, 'to remain inactive in trenches or billets for eight long months with the feeling that his fields were abandoned and neglected.'
Chambrun also felt the division should have been working harder; it was all just a bit slack. Across the Rhine, he had the impression there were large numbers of highly motivated and incentivized German troops, ferociously building defences and readying for the fight. Chambrun, who was, by instinct, to the right of the political spectrum, worried that the rise of the Socialists and Communists in France in recent years had done much to discourage the concept of hard work. Both the Government and the Army had been so worried about these left-wing influences they had not stood up to them. 'During four years,' he noted, 'the word "travail" had been banned in the public utterance of politicians. There was also a stigma attached to the word.'
At Army headquarters in Paris, André Beaufre was also feeling increasingly frustrated. He understood the corrosive effect of inaction and had a pragmatic solution. While France's war chiefs stuttered over unworkable plans to help the Finns and seize iron mines, and talked of bombing the USSR's chief oil hub at Baku, or considered raising a Caucasian Legion, Beaufre believed the solution lay on their doorsteps. Italy was palpably weak both militarily and in resources, but threatened French possessions in Tunisia and British control of Egypt and the Suez Canal. Striking hard against Italy – and before Germany struck against the Allies – could well have upset the Axis balance of power decisively. After all, Germany was hardly going to sit back and accept a hostile southern flank. For Beaufre, knocking Italy out immediately killed more than one bird with a single stone. It secured the Mediterranean and the Middle East, freed up Allied naval power and resources, gave the French Army some fighting to do, and showed Germany the Allies were not afraid to take the initiative. He reckoned at least thirty divisions could have been drawn from the Maginot Line, which already had a 3:1 manpower advantage over the enemy along that stretch of the front, and there were a further ten French and three British divisions in the Middle East that could have been called upon.
There was something in Beaufre's logic, and a strike against Italy did not lack supporters. 'But nothing was done,' noted Beaufre, 'because such a decision required a firmness which was quite foreign to the nature of our leaders.' Gamelin preferred to wait, as did the British, and Général Georges had concerns about crossing the Alps and weakening his North-East Front. Instead, France continued to make diplomatic overtures to Italy, responding to Ciano's encouragement. By the time Mussolini had resolved to go to war, it was too late.
Like Beaufre, Edward Spears was of the opinion that the French leader-ship was flawed. His friend and colleague Winston Churchill had asked him to head back to France in February. The First Lord had had an idea to mine the River Rhine and disrupt German river freight – which was considerable – opposite the Maginot Line. It was to be a Royal Navy operation but required authority and co-operation from the French.
Spears's trip included meetings with both Georges and Gamelin as well as Daladier and Reynaud. Georges he knew of old, but the general had, he thought, lost much of his lustre since being severely wounded a few years before in Marseilles, when King Alexander I of Yugoslavia had been assassinated. Another problem was that Georges was commander of the North-East Armies and the senior French battlefield commander, yet was strongly disliked by Général Gamelin, the head of the Army, not least because Georges was heir-designate as Commander-in-Chief. It did not make for a smooth chain of command. Gamelin had further put distance between himself and Georges by reorganizing General Headquarters, which had been run by a major-general at Gamelin's HQ at Vincennes. As of January, however, 'General Headquarters' was moved halfway between Vincennes and Georges's HQ under the command of Général Aimé Doumenc, and would control all fronts, including Georges's North-East. It was a cumbersome and unnecessary extra level of staff. Georges also warned Spears that Daladier and the Government would be unlikely to support the mining of the Rhine. The Government was doing everything it could to divert the war away from its own frontiers. This had remained the principle reason for its interest in Finland, but it was also actively pursuing opportunities in the Balkans, as well as considering Beaufre's plan for a pre-emptive strike on Italy. The British operation on the Rhine risked German retaliation on the French.
'But the Germans are blowing up our ships all round our coast,' Spears pointed out. 'The mines are our answer.'
'The politicians and maybe the public won't see it that way,' Georges replied. 'They will connect your attack on enemy rivers with the probable German retort against ours. I am all for Churchill's plan and will give him every facility. But I am telling you.' Spears answered curtly that those who shunned striking blows for fear of being hit back were better off not engaging in war in the first place.
A trip to the front hardly assuaged Spears's increasingly nagging doubts about his beloved France. The much-vaunted tank-trap looked, much as it had to Capitaine Barlone, rather feeble, while the pillboxes were mostly incomplete. Spears heard there had been both a shortage of concrete and arguments about design.
In Paris, he met Gamelin and had dinner with Paul Reynaud. Time and again, Reynaud returned to the same theme: the lack of drive in the prosecution of the war, and the absence of any will to take the offensive from either the French or the British Government. 'Neither,' Reynaud told him, 'have begun to realise what it is all about.' He also told Spears about an inspiring and dynamic cavalry officer – a certain Colonel de Gaulle – for whom he had much esteem. De Gaulle had both studied armoured tactics and written a book about them. Despite getting some attention, however, his tactics of using armour as a highly mobile spearhead rather than purely as infantry support, which was the current French thinking, had not gained wide approval. Another concern was the state of the aircraft industry, which had been nationalized. Rather than streamlining production, however, the effect had been dire. Indiscipline and, again, a lack of drive, Reynaud told him, were stifling efficiency. 'It sounded ominous,' noted Spears.
A few weeks later, on 21 March, the Government fell. The lack of action in Finland and the subsequent surrender of the Finns on 12 March prompted a public outcry. Regardless of the inherent risks of military involvement in Scandinavia, the public had demanded action; in a democracy, and one so politically diverse as France, public opinion counted for a great deal, whether that opinion was right or wrong. There was also palpable disenchantment at the front and in the cities, and an increasing perception that the Daladier Government was weak and in-decisive. In Parliament, a vote of confidence was called and while the Daladier administration got 239 votes, 300 deputies abstained. The Government no longer had the confidence of the House, and Daladier had no choice but to resign.
In his place came Paul Reynaud, chosen by a majority of just one vote. One of the difficulties for Daladier had been the divergence of politics in France. At the outbreak of war, the Prime Minister had created a Union Sacrée – an all-party coalition as had been established back in 1914. The trouble was, the extremes of political views made it hard for the coalition to gel in any shape or form, despite the wartime need for political co-operation. Paul Reynaud and Georges Mandel were determined to galvanize the country, streamline production, and instil patriotic fervour and chutzpah into the French war effort, but on the other side of the spectrum were 'softs' like Georges Bonnet, Anatole de Monzie and Camille Chautemps, whose view was far less hawkish and whose main aim was to restore peace as soon and as bloodlessly as possible.
So while Reynaud had the kind of steely resolve and dynamism to drive the French war effort, he was horribly stymied by the need to continue the Union Sacrée and a lack of emphatic support. He would have liked to have included in his Cabinet the highly capable and more hawkish former Prime Minister Léon Blum, but such was the anti-Semitism mani-fested towards him in political circles that it would never have been accepted. Other 'hards' – or hawks – suggested by Reynaud were also blocked. The result was another Cabinet destined to achieve little, containing six Socialists, five Radical Socialists, six members of the Democratic Right, three of the Union of Socialists and Republicans, five of the Democratic Alliance, five Independents, two of the Democratic Union and one deputy who was unattached to any political group. In other words, a potent mixture of the far right and far left, Communists, conservatives worried about revolution, defeatists and pro-Fascists. The chances of these men ever agreeing on anything seemed rather unlikely.
'The stake in total warfare is the whole stake,' Reynaud told the Chamber on 23 March. 'To conquer is to save everything. To succumb is to lose everything.' Despite this rallying cry, the session descended into a slanging match between the various parties, all of whom felt the com-position of the Cabinet was unfair. All Reynaud wanted to do was find enough commonality to stem the tide and breathe new life and vigour into France. He was facing an uphill battle.
On 4 March, just as Admiral D?nitz was preparing to send his U-boats in wolfpacks out into the Atlantic, his headquarters received orders to stop any further sailings. Instead, they were to be redirected to Norwegian waters as a prelude to invasion and to help ensure the Allies did not try a similar move first. D?nitz was against the move, and he was not alone. Most of the U-boat crews thought it a mad idea, and not least Oberleutnant Erich Topp. 'A submarine is designed to be a commerce raider,' he wrote, 'and requires vast areas of sea space to be effective… Deploying U-boats in Norway's narrow fjords, however, went against all experience and common sense.'
Topp was twenty-five and taller than many submariners, with pale-blue eyes and a resolute chin. He often wore a somewhat wistful -expression but, like most in the German Navy, greatly enjoyed the camaraderie and somewhat special, exclusive, status of the U-boat force. He had first volunteered for the sea back in 1934, even though there was no naval tradition in his family; rather, he had been brought up inland in Hanover, where his father was an engineer, but after starting medical studies he decided to join the Navy instead, following the lure of the sea and the promise of adventure. And his training and first years in the service, not least aboard the cruiser Karlsruhe, did allow him to see something of the world: there was a voyage, for example, that took them to South America, around Cape Horn, and then up to California, under the command of Admiral Günther Lütjens. A couple of years later, in 1937, Topp joined the U-boat arm along with Engelbert Endrass, who had joined the Navy at the same time and was on the same officers' course. They both passed out at the beginning of June 1938, Endrass to join U-47 under Günther Prien, Topp to take over as 1WO, the commander's No. 1, aboard U-46.
He had been in that post ever since, although since the outbreak of war he and the crew of U-46 had proved one of the least successful in oper-ation with just two sinkings to their name. They were not going to add to that score skulking in the Norwegian fjords. At the beginning of April, they were still at their station, watching, waiting, but otherwise doing little. Topp found it exhausting. 'You have to have been with us to know what a seemingly endless waiting period can do to you,' he wrote in his journal. 'While on earlier patrols one surprise followed another in close succession, now we are practically devoured by the monotony of our daily routine.'
This, clearly, was a waste of a very valuable asset, one that needed to be made the most of if Germany was to have any chance of effectively severing Britain's supply lines. D?nitz was the one senior commander who properly understood the potential of the U-boat arm and yet already those above his head, but with less understanding of naval power, were interfering with his handling of this vital weapon.
Everyone, it seemed, was getting drawn into Scandinavia.
At the beginning of April, it was remarkable how disunited most of the major countries were. In Italy, much of the leadership was fervently against war but was nevertheless unable – or unwilling – to challenge the will of the Duce. Similarly in Germany, while Hitler was set on gambling not only Nazism but Germany itself with one of the most audacious and unlikely campaigns ever launched, the vast majority of commanders in the Wehrmacht were harbouring massive doubts and reservations, while the civilian population was praying war would be over with all speed. Even the Berlin teenager Margarete Dos was beginning to wonder whether Hitler was pulling the wool over their eyes; she and her friends had started listening to the BBC's German broadcasts and were horrified by the different picture being painted; that it was every bit as much propaganda as that which Goebbels was peddling was neither here nor there – Margarete was doubting both Hitler and the point of the war, and she was far from alone. In France, political in-fighting and a pronounced disenchantment with war also threatened to undermine fighting morale and confidence.
Only in Britain was there anything like a unity of purpose. It was, of course, different for Britain; the last war had not been fought on its soil, and the Germans were far away, not just the other side of a river. It had the security of wealth, of global reach, even of past victories. Its politics, too, reflected that and were more stable, with just three main parties covering a far narrower political spectrum. Morale surveys showed the vast majority of people not only accepted the necessity of the war, but also believed it was Britain's right and moral duty, as the world's leading global power and democracy, to rid the world of Nazism. Back in January, Gwladys Cox had listened to two speeches on the radio, one by the Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, and the other by Winston Churchill. 'Lord Halifax does indeed seem to be imbued with a profound sense of the rightness of our cause,' she jotted afterwards. 'He declared he would a hundred times sooner be dead than live in a world under Nazi domin-ation.' Churchill's speech on the other hand was 'vigorous, pugnacious, and confident'. It was precisely this belief in the rightness of cause that had prompted the England cricketer Hedley Verity to join up; the Empire may have been on the wain, but the belief that Britain had to take the moral lead in the world was accepted by the majority of British people.
And there was confidence too. Jock Colville, a young man at the heart of Britain's war machine, recognized the war might 'wreck our economy and ruin our prosperity in the process' but never doubted they would win in the end. The 'assurance of victory' was an oft-repeated line in news-papers and on the radio, and most in Britain believed that victory was indeed assured. The path to that victory might well be rocky, and it might well be long, but the defeat of Germany would be the outcome.
Events, however, were about to take place that would shake that confidence.