Table of Contents

Tragedy and Hope

A History of the World in Our Time

By Carroll Quigley

PART FOURTEEN







Part Fourteen: World War II: the Tide of Aggression: 1939-1941

Chapter 47: Introduction

     The history of the Second World War is a very complex one. Even now, after hundreds of volumes and thousands of documents have been published, many points are not clear, and interpretations of numerous events are hotly disputed. The magnitude of the war itself would contribute to such disputes. It lasted exactly six years, from the German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939 to the Japanese surrender on September 2, 1945. During that period it was fought on every continent and on every sea, in the heights of the atmosphere and beneath the surface of the ocean, and fought with such destruction of property and lives as had never been witnessed before.

     The total nature of the Second lA7orld War can be seen from the fact that deaths of civilians exceeded deaths of combatants and that many of both were killed without any military justification, as victims of sheer sadism and brutality, largely through cold-blooded savagery by Germans, and, to a lesser extent, by Japanese and Russians, although British and American attacks from the air on civilian populations and on nonmilitary targets contributed to the total. The distinctions between civilians and military personnel and between neutrals and combatants, which had been blurred in the First World War, were almost completely lost in the second. This is clear from a few figures. The number of civilians killed reached 17 millions, of which 5,400,000 were Polish; while Poland had less than 100,000 soldiers killed or missing in the Battle of Poland in 1939, Polish civilians to the number of 3,900,000 were executed, or murdered in the ghetto, subsequently.

     The armies which began to move in September 1939 had no new weapons which had not been possessed by the armies of 1918. They still used infiltration tactics, with columns of tanks, strafing airplanes, and infantrymen moving in trucks, but the proportions of these and the ways in which they cooperated with one another had been greatly modified. Weapons for defense were also much as they had been at the end of the previous war, but, as we shall see, they were not prepared in proper amounts nor were they used in proper fashions. These defensive weapons included antitank guns, antiaircraft guns with controlled fire, minefields, mobile artillery on caterpillar tracks, trenches, and defense in depth.

     Germany used the offensive weapons we have mentioned in the new fashion, while Poland in 1939, Norway, the Low Countries, and France in 1940, the Balkan countries and the Soviet Union in 1941 did not use the available defensive tactics properly. As a result, Hitler advanced from one astounding victory to another. In the course of 1942 and 1943, new weapons created by democratic science and new tactics learned in Russia, in North Africa, and on the oceans of the world made it possible to stop the authoritarian advance and to reverse the direction of the tide. In 1944 and 1945 the returning tide of Anglo-American and Soviet power overwhelmed Italy, Germany, and Japan with the superior quality and the superior quantities of their equipment and men. Thus the war divides itself, quite naturally, into three parts: (1) the Axis advance covering 1939, 1940, and 1941; (2) the balance of forces in 1942; and (3) the Axis retreat in 1943, 1944, and 1945.

     The Germans were able to advance in the period 1939-1941 because they had sufficient military resources, and used them in an effective way. The chief reason they had sufficient military resources was not based, as is so often believed, on the fact that Germany was highly mobilized for war, but on other factors. In the first place, Hitler's economic revolution in Germany had reduced financial considerations to a point where they played no role in economic or political decisions. When decisions were made, on other grounds, money was provided, through completely unorthodox methods of finance, to carry them out. In France and England, on the other hand, orthodox financial principles, especially balanced budgets and stable exchange rates, played a major role in all decisions and was one of the chief reasons why these countries did not mobilize in March 1936 or in September 1938 or why, having mobilized in 1939 and 1940, they had totally inadequate numbers of airplanes, tanks, antitank guns, and motorized transportation..

     There was another reason for the military inadequacy of the Western Powers in 1939. This, of even greater significance than the influence of orthodox finance, arose from conflicts of military theories in the period 1919-1939. Several violently conflicting theories held the stage during the twenty years of armistice, and paralyzed the minds of military men to the point where they were unable to provide consistent advice on which politicians could base their decisions. In Germany, on the other hand, decisions (not necessarily correct ones) were made, and action could go on.

     One theoretical dispute raged around the role of tanks in combat. The tank had been invented to protect advancing infantry against machine-gun fire by its ability to put machine guns out of action. Accordingly, tanks were originally scattered among the infantry, to advance with it, both moving at a rate of speed no greater than that of a man on foot, consolidating the ground, yard by yard, as both moved forward. This view of the tactical function of tanks continued to be held in high military circles in France and England until too late in 1940. It was sharply challenged, even a decade earlier, by those who insisted that tanks should be organized in distinct units (armored brigades or divisions) and should be used, without close infantry support, moving as perpendicular columns rather than in parallel lines against the defensive formations, and should seek to penetrate through these formations at high speed and without consolidating the ground covered, in order to fan out on the rear of the defensive formations to disrupt their supplies, communications, and reserves. According to these new ideas, the breakthrough made by such an armored column could be exploited and the ground consolidated by motorized infantry, following the armored division in trucks and dismounting to occupy areas where this would be most useful.

     In France, the new theory of armored warfare was advocated most vigorously by Colonel Charles de Gaulle. It was generally rejected by his superior officers, so that De Gaulle was still a colonel in 1940. This theory was, however, accepted in the German Army, notably by Heinz Guderian in 1934, and was used very effectively against the Poles in and against the Western Front in 1940.

     At full strength a German panzer (armored) division had two regiments of tanks and two regiments of motorized infantry plus various specialized companies. This gave it a total of 14,000 men with 250 tanks and about 3,000 motorized vehicles. In September 1939, Germany had six of these panzer divisions with a total of 1,650 tanks of which one-third were 18-ton models with a 37-mm. gun (Mark III), while two-thirds were 10-ton models (Mark II). By May 1940, when the attack was made in the west, there were lo armored divisions with a total of 2,000 tanks, some of which were the new Mark IV model, a 23-ton conveyance carrying a 75-mm. gun. No major increase occurred in the next year, but the number of armored divisions was doubled by splitting the ten which existed in May 1940. Thus in June 1941, when Germany attacked Russia, it had 20 armored divisions with a total of 3,000 tanks, of which several hundred were l\lark IV but l,000 were still Mark II. In opposition to these, Poland had only a handful of tanks in 1939, France had over 3,000 in May 1940, and the Soviet Union had, in June 1941, about 15,000 scattered tanks, almost all light or obsolescent models.

     A second theory which paralyzed the Western Powers in the years before World War II was concerned with the superiority of defensive over offensive tactics. This defensive theory, of which the Englishman Basil Liddell Hart was the most voluble proponent, assumed that attack would be made in lines, as the Western Powers themselves were trained to attack, and that such an attack would be very unlikely to succeed because of the great increase in firepower of modern weapons. It was argued, on the basis of the experience of World War I, that machine guns could hold up advancing infantry indefinitely and that artillery fire, carefully placed and ranged so that it could cover the field, could prevent tanks from silencing the defensive machine guns to allow infantry to advance.

     The Maginot Line was based on these theories. As such, it was not a defense in depth (which would seek to break up offensive columns by allowing them to penetrate to varying depths, thus separating tanks, infantry, and artillery so that each could be dealt with by proper weapons as impetus was dispersed), but was a rigid line (which sought to stop the offensive lines in front of it, as a whole).

     The theory of defensive superiority left the military forces of the Western states with inadequate offensive training, poor offensive morale, and unable to come to the help of distant allies (like Poland); it put a premium on a passive, indecisive, inactive military outlook (such as shown by P้tain or Gamelin in the years leading up to 1940) and left them unable to handle any real offensive when it came against them. The theory of continuous defensive lines, which must be kept intact or instantly reestablished whenever they are breached, created a psychology which was incapable of dealing with an assault which came at it in columns and inevitably must breach any defensive line at the point of impact. When this occurred in 1940, French military units threw down their arms or tried to make a precipitous retreat to some point where a new continuous line could be established. As a consequence, the Poles in 1939 and, to a greater extent, the French in 1940, were constantly abandoning positions from which they had not been driven, until units were too broken up to allow hope of reestablishing any continuous line, and France proved to be too small to permit continued retreat. The only alternative seemed to be surrender. As we shall see later, another, highly effective, alternative was discovered, mostly in Russia, by 1942.

     In the inter-war period there was a third theory, violently disputed, about the effectiveness of air power. In its most extreme form, this theory held that the chief cities of Europe could be destroyed almost completely in the first twenty-four hours of a war, devastated hy high-explosive bombs and rendered uninhabitable by gas attacks from the air. This theory, frequently associated with the name of the Italian General Giulio Douhet, was much more prevalent in civilian circles than in military ones, and played an important role in persuading the British and French peoples to accept the Munich Agreement. Like most farfetched ideas, it was supported more frequently by slogans than by logic or by facts, in this case by mottoes like, "The bombers will always get through." The chief facts to support the theory were to be found in the Spanish Civil War, notably in the German destruction of Guernica in 1937 and the ruthless Italian bombardment of Barcelona in 1938. No one paid much attention to the fact that, in both of these cases, the targets were totally undefended.

     The military advocates of such air bombardment, most of them considerably more moderate than General Douhet, concentrated their attention on what was called "strategic bombing," that is, on the construction of long-range bombing planes for use against industrial targets and other civilian objectives and on very fast fighter planes for defense against such bombers. They generally belittled the effectiveness of antiaircraft artillery and were generally warm advocates of an air force separately organized and commanded and thus not under the direct control of army or naval commanders. These advocates were very influential in Britain and in the United States.

     The upholders of strategic bombing received little encouragement in Germany, in Russia, or even in France, because of the dominant position held by traditional army officers in all three of these countries. In France, all kinds of air power were generally neglected, while in the other two countries strategic bombing against civilian objectives was completely subordinated in favor of tactical bombing of military objectives immediately on the fighting front. Such tactical bombing demanded planes of a more flexible character, with shorter range than strategic bombers and less speed than defensive fighters, and under the closest control by the local commanders of ground forces so that their bombing efforts could be directed, like a kind of mobile and long-range artillery, at those points of resistance, of supply, or of reserves which would help the ground offensive most effectively. Such "dive-bombers," or Stukas, played a major role in the early German victories of 1939-1941. Here, again, this superiority was based on quality and method of usage and not on numbers. In the three major campaigns of 1939-1941 Germany had a first-line air force of about 2,000 planes, of which half were fighters and half were tactical bombers. On the other side, Poland had 377 military aircraft in 1939: France and Britain had about 3,000 in 1940; while the Soviet Union had at least 8,000 of very varying quality in 1941.

     At the outbreak of war in 1939, ideas about sea power were so generally held and with such firm conviction that they were questioned only occasionally. One of these ideas was that sea power was dominated by big-gun capital ships, all other vessels serving simply as accessories to this backbone of the fleet. A related idea assumed that the area in which a fleet could function effectively was limited by the positions of its major bases, such as Pearl Harbor, Gibraltar, Singapore, Toulon, or Kiel. Another idea, rarely disputed, stated that no landing could be made from the sea on a defended shore. These ideas on the nature and limits of sea power had received only minor challenges in the inter-war period, except from the extreme advocates of air power like General William Mitchell of the United States Army Air Force. Such extremists, who insisted that land-based planes could make all battleships (or even all navies) obsolete, did not succeed in convincing the admirals or politicians. In the United States Mitchell was subjected to a court-martial and forced to resign. Although the experiences of the Second World War did not support the extreme advocates of air power, either in respect to the navy or to strategic bombing, the ideas of land warfare and especially of sea warfare which were prevalent in rg3g had to be drastically modified by 1945.

Chapter 48: The Battle of Poland, September 1939

     The German invasion of Poland began with powerful air attacks at 4:40 A. M. on September 1. These attacks, aimed at airfields, assembly points, and railroads, wiped out the Polish air force of 377 planes, mostly on the ground, and, in combination with the rapidly advancing German armored spearheads of tank divisions, made it impossible for Poland to mobilize completely, crippled Polish reconnaissance, destroyed any centralized system of communications, and reduced Polish resistance to numerous fragments of uncoordinated fighting units. The Poles had 30 infantry divisions, a motorized brigade, 38 companies of tanks, and large masses of cavalry, but could bring only a portion of these into action.

     Germany struck at Poland with 2,000 planes (of which 4oo were dive-bombers) supporting 44 divisions (of which 6 were armored or panzer divisions and 6 were motorized). These forces were organized into 5 armies. The Fourth Army drove down from Pomerania in the northwest while the Eighth and Tenth armies drove upward from Saxony, the three converging in a pincers movement at a point west of Warsaw. At the same time, a much larger pincer converging on the Bug River, a hundred miles east of Warsaw, was formed by the German Third Army, advancing from the Polish Corridor and East Prussia, and the German Fourteenth Army driving northeastward from Galicia and Slovakia. The armored divisions, supported by dive-bombers, raced ahead of their supporting infantry and disrupted all Polish plans, communications, and supplies. The Polisl1 forces, caught in too advanced positions, vainly tried to fight their way eastward to the Vistula and the Bug rivers but were broken up, isolated, and destroyed. Violent but hopeless fighting continued in the pockets, but by September 15th, when Guderian's tanks entered Brest-Litovsk in eastern Poland, the country had been destroyed.

     Although Britain and France declared war on Germany on September 3rd, it cannot be said that they made war during the next two weeks in which fighting raged in Poland. British airplanes roamed over Germany, dropping leaflets for propaganda purposes, and French patrols ventured into the space between the Maginot Line and the German Westwall, but no support was given to Poland. Although France had three million men under arms and Hitler had left only eight regular divisions on his western border, no attack was made by France. Strict orders were issued to the British Air Force not to bomb any German land forces, and these orders were not modified until April rg40; similar orders by Hitler to the Luftwaffe were maintained for part of this same period. When some British Members of Parliament, led by Amery, put pressure on the government to drop bombs on German munition stores in the Black Forest, the air minister, Sir H. Kingsley Wood, rejected the suggestion with asperity, declaring: "Are you aware it is private property? Why, you will be asking me to bomb Essen next!" Essen was the home of the Krupp munitions factories.

     Similar efforts to force the French to take some action against Germany were rejected on the ground that this might irritate the Germans so that they would strike back at the Western Powers. To quiet the English parliamentary group which was demanding action, its leading figure, Winston Churchill, was made first lord of the Admiralty, but the British Navy went into action so slowly that the German "pocket" battleships were able to escape from their ports and from the North Sea out on to the high seas where they could become commerce raiders. Blockade of Germany was established in such a perfunctory fashion that large quantities of French iron ore, as well as other commodities, continued to go to Germany through the neutral Low Countries in return for German coal coming by the same route. These exchanges continued for weeks. On his part Hitler issued orders to his air force not to cross the Western frontier except for reconnaissance, to his navy not to fight the French, and to his submarines nor to molest passenger vessels and to treat unarmed merchant ships according to the established rules of international prize law. In open disobedience to these orders, a German submarine sank the liner Athenia, westward bound in the Atlantic, without warning and with a loss of 112 lives, on September 3rd.

     As Poland was collapsing without a hand being raised to help it, the Soviet Union was invited by Hitler to invade Poland from the east and occupy the areas which had been granted to it in the Soviet-German agreement of August 23rd. The Russians were eager to move, in order to ensure that the Germans stop as far as possible from the Soviet frontiers, but they were desperately afraid that if they did enter Poland the Western Powers might declare war on Russia in support of their guarantee to Poland and would then wage war against the Soviet Union while not fighting Germany or even while allowing economic and military aid to go to Germany.

     Accordingly, the Kremlin held up its invasion of Poland until September 17th. On that day the Polish government petitioned Romania to be allowed to seek refuge in that state. The Soviet Union felt that it could not be accused of aggression against Poland if no Polish government still existed on Polish soil. The Soviet leaders sought to justify their advance into Polish territory with the excuse that they must restore order and provide protection for the Ruthenian and White Russian peoples of eastern Poland. The Soviet and Nazi armies met without incidents. On September 28th a new agreement was made between Molotov and Ribbentrop, dividing Poland. Accordingly, Lithuania was shifted into the Soviet sphere, while in Poland itself the German sphere was extended eastward from the Vistula to the Bug River along the old Curzon Line because Russia wanted to follow the nationality boundary.

Chapter 49: The Sitzkrieg, September 1, 1939-May 1940

     The period from the end of the Polish campaign to the German attack on Denmark and Norway on April 9, 1940, is frequently called the Sitzkrieg (sitting war) or even the "phony war," because the Western Powers made no real effort to fight Germany. These Powers were eager to use the slow process of economic blockade as their chief weapon, in order to avoid casualties. So long as he remained in office, Chamberlain was convinced that no military decision could be reached and that Germany could be beaten only by economic measures. Even after the fall of France, the British chiefs of staff declared, "Upon the economic factor depends our only hope of bringing about the downfall of Germany.''

     Early in October, Hitler made a tentative offer to negotiate peace with the Western Powers, on the grounds that the cause of the fighting, Poland, no longer existed. This offer was rejected by the Western Powers with the public declaration that they were determined to destroy Hitler's regime. This meant that the war must continue. The British answer to Hitler's offer, and possibly the French answer as well, was not based so much on a desire to continue with the war as it was on the belief that Hitler's rule in Germany was insecure and that the best way to reach peace would be to encourage some anti-Hitler movement within Germany itself. Chamberlain had a passionate personal hatred of Hitler for having destroyed his plans for appeasement. He hoped that a long economic blockade would give rise to such discontent inside Germany that Hitler would be removed and peace made.

German Mobilization and the Allied Economical Blockade

     Germany was extremely vulnerable to a blockade, but its effects were indecisive. In spite of some casual threats by Hitler that Germany was prepared for a war of any duration, no plans had been made for a long war, and there was no real effort toward economic mobilization by Germany before 1943. The country's industrial plant for making armaments was increased only slightly in the five years 1937-1942, so that, contrary to general opinion, Germany was neither armed to the teeth nor fully mobilized in this period.

     In each of the four years 1939-1942, Britain's production of tanks, self-propelled guns, and planes was higher than Germany's. In the first four months of the war (September-December 1939), for example, England produced 314 tanks, while Germany produced 247. The Germans expected each military campaign to be of such brief duration that no real economic mobilization would be necessary. This policy was successful until Hitler bogged down in Russia in 1941, but, even there, the Fuhrer's conviction that Russia would collapse after just one more attack delayed economic mobilization for months.

     As late as September 1941, Hitler issued an order for a substantial reduction in armaments production, and the counter-order calling for full mobilization of the German economic system w-as not issued until the last day of that year. Even then the mobilization was never total or anything like it. The captured records of the German War Ministry for the year 1944, the year of the big effort, show that only about 33 percent of Germany's output in that year went for direct war purposes compared to 40 percent in the United States, and almost 45 percent in Britain. T he results of this effort in airplane production can be seen in the fact that Germany produced almost 40,000 aircraft of all kinds in that year 1944, while England produced almost 30,000 and the United States produced over 96,000 military aircraft in the same year:

     Germany's economic mobilization which began in 1942 was to have been carried out by Fritz Todt, the engineer who had been in charge of the construction of the Westwall. Todt, however, was killed in an airplane crash on February 12, 1942. His successor, Albert Speer, was an organizer of great ability, but he had to share his functions with several other offices, including G๖ring's Four-Year-Plan organization, and he spent most of his time negotiating agreements to obtain needed resources from these. A Central Planning Board, on which Speer was one of four men, had powers of top allocation of material resources, but no control over labor. On September 2, 1943, Speer's office was amalgamated with the raw-materials department of the Ministry of Economics to form a Ministry of Armaments and War Production. This new organization obtained control of more and more of the production program without ever obtaining important parts of it. It took eighteen months to get control of naval construction, including submarines and guns (July 1943 to December 1944), while Speer took over production of fighter planes only in March 1944, and of all other planes except "jets" in June 1944. At the same time, more and more war production was getting into the hands of the S.S. because its control of concentration camps gave it the largest available supply of labor. As a result, Speer's office never had anything like complete control of economic mobilization. It is amazing that Germany could have carried on such a great war effort with such a ramshackle organization of its economic life.

     When Germany began the war in September 1939, less than a third of its oil, rubber, and iron ore were of domestic origin; it had only two months' supply of gasoline at the peacetime rate of consumption and about three months' supply of aviation fuel. Germany expended less than100,000 tons of gasoline and oil in Poland and less than 500,000 tons in the conquest of Denmark, Norway, the Low Countries, and France in the period April-June 1940, but captured in the process about two million tons, mostly in France..

     At first the British economic warfare against Germany was quantitative rather than qualitative, seeking to reduce the supply of all war materiel rather than concentrating attention, as was done later, on interrupting the supply of a few vital commodities such as ball bearings or aviation fuel. The blockade, with little real effort, was able to cut off immediately over half of Germany's supply of petroleum products and almost half of its iron ore, but, in general, the blockade was established slowly. There was very poor Anglo-French coordination for the whole period before the fall of France in June 1940, and there was a general agreement not to use aerial bombardment, preemptive buying, export control of enemy products, or rationing of neutral purchases. These special techniques of economic warfare began to be applied only in the spring of 1940, just before they were disrupted by the fall of France.

     The early British efforts to control contraband and to obtain a quantitative restriction on German imports placed a burden on the navy which it was unable to bear, particularly because of the demand for naval vessels for convoy duty. In this last respect Britain was very fortunate, for here, also, Germany was woefully unprepared for a major war. In the whole period from the launching of the first German submarine in 1935 to the outbreak of war, the German Navy built only 57 submarines. Only 26 of these were equipped for service in the Atlantic. These were subject to such limitations, especially in regard to their cruising range, that less than ten could be kept in the shipping zone at any one time. British minefields in the English Channel, which destroyed three U-boats immediately, made it necessary for these vessels to go out by the route north of Scotland, with the result that they could not operate, by reason of limited cruising range, farther west than 12ฐ 3o' W. (about 80 miles west of Ireland), so that the British Navy did not have to convoy farther west than this line.

     As far as the U-boats were concerned, there was no improvement in this situation until the latter half of 1941. The number of U-boat sinkings reached seven a month, and Germany's replacement capacity for building these weapons reached 15 a month (compared to 2j a month in the First World War). This production margin made it possible to raise the number of German submarines at sea, by steady steps, from 15 in April 1941 to 60 at the end of the year. This improvement, from the German point of view, was counterbalanced by an improvement in the British antisubmarine defense tactics, as we shall see, but the struggle became so severe that it is deservedly known as the Battle of the Atlantic. Our present concern with this subject lies in the fact that the inadequacy of the German submarine attack in 1939-1941 made it considerably easier for the British Navy to cope with the blockade problem.

     In contraband control work, suspicious merchant vessels were forced to put into a control harbor for search of their cargoes. Control points were placed in Canada, in the Mediterranean, in the north of Scotland, and elsewhere, but the United States would not permit one in the Caribbean Sea area. When vessels being detained began to clog up these ports, whole categories of vessels were exempt from control. This applied, for example, to American ships after January 1940. In order to reduce congestion and delay, vessels which certified that they had no contraband and gave detailed reports of their lading were issued commercial passports, called navicerts, by British representatives in their ports of departure and were generally exempt from search or delay. This use of navicerts, voluntary at first, was made compulsory in July 1940. At the same time, the use of British credit, repair facilities, insurance, refueling stations, charts, and all kinds of shipping aids were denied to vessels which did not have a British "ship-warrant." This system, with the unofficial support of the United States, gradually made it possible to control most of the shipping of the world. The United States and other countries also cooperated from 1940 in rerouting passengers and mails through points like Bermuda or Gibraltar where they could be searched by the British. This gave Britain control of information and enemy funds for blockade purposes.

     In order to reduce the enemy's ability to buy abroad, financial connections were cut, his funds abroad were frozen, and his exports were blocked. [Actually the financial and corporate monopolies and cartels in Germany, Britain, France and the United States had established an elaborate secret system to supply Germany with money and war supplies.] The United States cooperated in these efforts as well, freezing the financial assets of various nations as they were conquered by the aggressor Powers and finally the assets of the aggressors themselves in June-July 1941. One of the chief steps in this effort was the interruption of the export of German coal by sea from the Baltic to Italy on March 5, 1940, three months before Italy itself became a belligerent. This disrupted the Italian economy. Efforts to supply only half of Italy's needs from Germany by rail almost disrupted the German transportation system (since it required the use of 15,000 railroad cars). At the same time, curtailment of Italian exports and the need to buy British coal reduced the Italian gold reserve, almost at once, from 2.3 to 1.3 billion fire.

     Because the British Navy lacked ships to enforce any complete control of contraband by stopping vessels for search, various devices were adopted. Beginning in December 1939, agreements were signed with neutrals by which these latter agreed not to re-export their imports to Britain's enemies. Compulsory rationing of neutral imports was established at the end of July 1940. At the same time, preemptive buying of vital commodities at their source to prevent Germany and its allies from obtaining them began. Because of limited British funds, most of this task of preemptive buying was taken over by the United States, almost completely so by February 1941.

     After 1941, the blockade became increasingly effective, especially by the elimination of neutrals (like the Soviet Union, Japan, and the United States) and by the shift from quantitative to qualitative controls. Under this new system the blockade concentrated on a few vital materials and commodities, trying to increase the rate of German usage of these or to reduce their stocks by bombardment or sabotage, and seeking out such materials (like industrial diamonds) at their sources, frequently in remote regions of the earth, then following them by economic-intelligence information to a point where Britain could get them by seizure or by preemptive purchase.

     The blockade was enforced by Britain with little regard for international law or for neutral rights, but there was relatively little protest from the neutrals, because the most influential neutrals were already so deeply committed to one side or to the other that they could hardly be regarded as neutrals and were not prepared to defend such a status. The United States openly favored Britain, while Italy and Japan equally openly favored Germany. The Soviet Union favored neither side but was very fearful of attack from both; until April 1940, it was more fearful of Britain and France, while after the fall of Norway and France it became increasingly fearful of Germany. Both of these fears, through geographic and political circumstances, inclined it to a wholehearted economic support of Germany. This continued to the day of the German attack on the Soviet Union on June 22,1941.

     The Nazi-Soviet Trade Agreement of August 19, 1939, promised that Germany would provide 200 million marks' credit to be used for machinery and industrial installations for Russia in return for Russian raw materials to the value of 180 million marks. On February 11, 1940, a new agreement increased these exchanges to 750 million marks' value and provided that Russian deliveries should be made in 18 months and be paid for by German deliveries covering 27 months, the accounts to be balanced in this z:3 ratio at six-month intervals. At the same time, Russia promised to facilitate transshipment of goods to Germany from Iran, Afghanistan, and the Far East, across Siberia.

     This Trans-Siberian leak in the blockade of Germany could have been of great significance because it allowed Germany to keep contact with allied Japan and provided a route to the tin, rubber, and oil of the Netherlands Indies and southeast Asia. However, transportation difficulties, lack of full cooperation by the Russians and Japanese, as well as payment problems, kept the 1940 total for Trans-Siberian freightage to Germany down to about 166,000 tons, of which 58,000 were soybeans and 45,000 were whale oil. In the five months of 1941, before the outbreak of war in Russia, this transit of goods to Germany reached 212,000 tons with soybeans and whale oil accounting for 142,000 tons of the total. Such essential items as rubber, tin, copper, wool, or lubricating oils amounted to only a small fraction of the total.

     Germany did much better in obtaining goods from the Soviet Union itself, for the total on this score reached 4,541,202 tons over the 22 months from September r, 1939 to June 22, 1941. The largest items in this figure were 1,594,530 tons of grain, 777,691 tons of wood and timber, 641,604 tons of petroleum products, 165,157 tons of manganese ore, and 139,460 tons of cotton, but, once again, there were relatively small amounts of vital defense materials which Germany urgently needed. On the other hand, the items Germany did obtain were very profitable to it because Germany was far behind on its repayments to Russia, a situation which became worse as June 1941 approached. The materials Germany had promised in payment were industrial products of great value to the Soviet defense, and Germany delayed in its shipments as much as possible because of Hitler's plans to attack eastward. The Soviet demands that the Germans should catch up on their arrears of payment became one of the irritants which hastened the Nazi attack on Russia in 1941.

     On the whole, the blockade had no decisive effect on Germany's ability to wage war until 1945. After examining the evidence on this problem, the chiefs of the blockade of the Foreign Economic Administration in Washington wrote, "Germany's war production and military operations were never seriously hampered by a shortage of any essential raw materials or industrial products, with the single exception of petroleum—and even that shortage resulted from the combined effect of the Soviet Army's capture of Romanian oil fields and the concentrated bombing of Germany's synthetic production rather than directly from economic warfare." The same writers point out that Germany's food supply, in calories per capita, was at the prewar level until the very last months of the war.

     The ability of the Germans to cope with the blockade was largely due to their high level of engineering skill and their ruthless exploitation of conquered Europe, especially of the manpower of dominated areas. German engineering ability made it possible to get around material shortages or to repair industrial plants damaged by air raids, but these efforts required more and more manpower, which Germany lacked. An increase in the labor supply was obtained by enslaving the captured peoples of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Russia, and other countries. In the same way, the German food supply was kept up by starving these enslaved peoples.

     In the early part of the war, the blockade was not effective because of the low level of German mobilization, the slow and faulty fashion in which the blockade was (perhaps necessarily) applied, the large number of neutral and nonbelligerent countries, the leaks to Germany across Soviet Russia and Vichy France, the ineffectiveness of quantitative controls under a limited naval patrol, and the succession of German conquests which brought such valuable assets as the Norwegian iron-ore route, the French iron mines and aluminum industry, the Romanian oil wells, or the Yugoslav copper mines under direct German control.

The Soviet Borderlands, September 1939-April 1940

     During the "phony war" from September 1939 to April 1940, there were persons in Britain, France, and Germany who were willing to fight to the bitter end and other persons who were eager to make peace. Such persons engaged in extensive intrigues and cross-intrigues in order to negotiate peace or to prevent it. One of the most publicized of these efforts gave rise to the so-called "Venlo incident" of November 1939. On October 8th Hitler ordered his commanding generals to prepare for an immediate attack on the Low Countries and France. Shortly afterward, two members of British military Intelligence in the Netherlands, who were officially attached to the British diplomatic mission at The Hague, were approached by a man whom they believed to be an agent of discontented generals of the German General Staff. This man, who may have been a "double agent" working for both sides, wished to discuss the possibility of negotiating peace if the German generals removed Hitler and his chief associates by a coup d'้tat. The proposal sounded authentic because the British leaders had been approached with similar offers, which were known to be authentic, since August 1938, and there was, at that very moment, late in 1939, a member of the German General Staff who was passing information (including the date of Hitler's projected attack on Holland) to the Netherlands military attache in Berlin.

     With Lord Halifax's permission, the two British officers, Major Richard Henry Stevens and Captain Sigismund Payne-Best, with an observer from the Netherlands government, Lieutenant Klop, held five meetings on Dutch territory with the German negotiators. At the fifth meeting, at Venlo on November 8th, the negotiators, who were really members of the Security Police of the S.S., shot Lieutenant Klop, and escaped into Germany with his body, the two British agents, a Dutch chauffeur, and the automobile in which they had been traveling. The incident aroused great notoriety at the time and, in some circles, was taken to indicate that Britain was really eager to find some way out of the conflict, in spite of its proclaimed determination to fight to a finish.

     The Venlo incident was but one, and on the whole a rather unimportant one, of a number of unsuccessful efforts to make peace between the Western Powers and Germany in the six months following the defeat of Poland. These efforts combined with the lack of fighting in the "phony war" to convince the leaders of the Soviet Union that the Western Powers had little heart in fighting Germany and would prefer to be fighting Russia. As we shall see, this was probably true of Chamberlain and his close associates and of Daladier and his successor as prime minister of France, Paul Reynaud. To avoid or at least postpone an attack, from either the Western Powers or Germany, became the chief aim of Soviet policy, and every effort was made to strengthen Russia's military, strategic, and political position. It was felt in the Kremlin, in the period from September to May, that the danger of attack was greater from the Western Powers than it was from Germany, since Germany was in such great need of Russian raw materials that it would probably keep the peace if the Soviet Union made serious efforts to fulfill the economic agreements it had signed with Germany. Moreover, the political agreements of August 23rd and September 28th, by giving the Soviet Union a free hand east of a specified line, made it possible for Russia to strengthen its defenses against Germany by advancing its frontiers and military bases up to that line. Furthermore, the Soviet leaders believed that full economic cooperation with Germany might persuade Hitler to bring pressure on Japan to reduce its pressure on the Soviet Far Eastern frontier.

     The Japanese pressure on the Soviet Far East reached its peak in the years 1938 and 1939 with two attacks by the Japanese Army on Soviet territory. The second of these attacks, at Nomonhan on the Manchurian-Mongolian frontier, resulted in a major Japanese defeat in which Nippon suffered 52,000 casualties; it was ended by a truce signed on September 16, 1939, only one day before Russian forces began to move into Poland. From the diplomatic point of view the Soviet Far Eastern policy was a success, for Hitler, in the years 1939-1941, put pressure on Japan to relax its efforts to expand on the northern part of the Asiastic mainland and to replace this with a movement against British Malaya and the Netherlands East Indies. The Japanese defeat at Nomonhan and the fact that the raw materials which Japan needed were to be found in the south rather than in Mongolia, Siberia, or even northern China, persuaded Japan to accept the change of direction. A Soviet ambassador returned to Tokyo in November 1939, for the first time since June 1938.

     During the period 1929 to October 1941, the Soviet Union had excellent information about Japanese affairs from its "master spy" in the Far East, Richard Sorge. Sorge, a member of the Nazi Party from 1933, representative of many German newspapers in Tokyo from the same year, and press attache in the German Embassy in Tokyo in 1939-1941, had an excellent knowledge of the most secret matters in the Far East because of his own intimate relations with the German ambassador and because of his secret agents (including Saionji, adopted son of the "last Genro," and Ozaki, adviser to Prince Konoye) in Japanese governing circles. By reporting to Moscow on the condition of the Japanese military forces and the gradual triumph, within the Japanese government, of the anti-British over the anti-Russian influence, Sorge made it possible for the Soviet Union to weaken its defenses in the Far East in order to strengthen them in Europe.

     In Europe, after the occupation of Poland (which shielded the Russian center), the Soviet leaders were worried about two areas. In the south, including the Balkans, the Dardanelles, or the Caspian oil fields, they were very fearful of an Anglo-French attack, while in the Baltic they were fearful of both the Western Powers and Germany.

     The Soviet fears of the Western Powers in the south appear quite unfounded to us, but seemed very real to them in 1939. The information which has been released since 1945 shows that there was some basis for this fear but that the Anglo-French threat to Russia was much greater in the Baltic than it was in the south. In the latter area the Kremlin was suspicious of the French Army of the Orient in Syria. The Russians believed that General Maxime Weygand had a force of several hundred thousand men which he wished to use across Iran or Turkey in an attack on the Russian oil fields in the Caspian region. In January 1940, Germany obtained reports from Paris that Weygand proposed to attack the Soviet Union from Romania. As a matter of fact, Wevgat1d had only three poorly equipped divisions totaling about 40,000 men, and his plans were largely defensive. He hoped to support the Allied guarantees to Turkey, Greece, and Romania (given in April 1939), and to protect the Romanian oil fields by moving northward from Salonika if Germany, Hungary, or Bulgaria made any warlike move in the Balkans.

     The political situation in the Balkans was of such precarious stability that the Western Powers did not dare to make a move in the area for fear everything would collapse. Turkey, Greece, Romania, and Yugoslavia were joined in a Balkan Entente aimed at preventing any Bulgarian aggression. Since these four states could mobilize over a hundred divisions, although lacking all modern or heavy equipment, they could keep Bulgaria quiet. Unfortunately, the Balkan Entente was not designed for protection against Italy or Germany, where the real danger lay.

     Italy had various projects to attack Greece from the Albanian territory it had seized in April 1939. It also had fully matured plans to disrupt Yugoslavia by subsidizing and supporting a Croat revolt, under Ante Paveliๆ, against the dominant Serb majority in that state. During the "phony war" the Italians hoped that the Western Powers would allow Italy to carry out its project against Yugoslavia in order to block any German movement into that area. Such permission seemed possible from the fact that the democratic states had not guaranteed Yugoslavia as they had the other three states of the Balkan Entente. Italy's project Noms set for early June 1940, but was interrupted by Hitler's attack in the West, which was made, without notifying his Italian partner, on May 10th.

     Another element of instability in southeastern Europe was the position of Hungary, which aspired to detach Transylvania from Romania. Since Hungary could not take this area by its own power, it sought support from Italy rather than from Germany (which the Hungarians feared). With Italian support, Hungary refused to allow German troops to cross its territory to attack Poland in September 1939, and began to negotiate an agreement with Italy by which the Duke of Aosta would be offered the crown of Hungary, as an anti-German solution to Hungary's ambiguous constitutional position. This project, like the one in Croatia, was upset by the growing rivalry of Germany and Russia in the Balkans.

     During the period from September 1939 to June 1940, Hitler had no political ambitions with respect to the Balkans or the Soviet Union. From both he wanted nothing more than the maximum supply of raw materials and a political peace which would permit these goods to flow to Germany. Both areas cooperated fully with Germany in economic matters, but fear of Germany was so great that both areas also sought political changes which might strengthen their ability to resist Germany at a later date. Hungarian efforts to obtain support from Italy were not successful, as we have seen, because Italy wavered between fear of Germany and recognition of the fact that its own ambitions in the Balkans, the Mediterranean, or Africa could be obtained only with German support. The Balkan Entente sought support and military supplies from the Western Powers but could obtain little, since these Powers believed that they did not have the equipment to defend themselves. The only important step they took was a military alliance with Turkey. This was signed with France and England on October 19, 1939 in the form of a mutual-assistance pact, except that Turkey could not be compelled to take up arms against Russia. This last clause was inserted on Turkish insistence but was kept secret and, in consequence, the Soviet Union was not reassured by the agreement.

     In the meantime the Soviet Union took steps to defend itself against any attack from the Baltic. In the period September 29-October 10, 1939, three of the Baltic states, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, were forced to sign military-assistance pacts with Russia. Estonia and Latvia provided naval and air bases for Russian forces, while the City of Vilna was given to Lithuania by Russia. About 25,000 Russian troops were stationed in each of the three countries. Appeals from these countries to Germany for support against Russia were summarily rejected, and they were advised to yield to the Soviet demands. As part of the reorganization of this area, Hitler on September 27th ordered that the so-called "Balts" (German-speaking residents of the Baltic states) should be moved to Germany as quickly as possible. This was done within a month.

     From the Soviet point of view Finland provided a much more important problem than any of the Baltic states. The city of Leningrad, one of Russia's greatest industrial centers with a population of 3,191,000 persons, was joined to the Baltic Sea by the Gulf of Finland. This gulf, about 150 miles long and so miles wide, ran west to east, with its northern and eastern shores occupied by Finland and its southern shore largely Estonian. Leningrad, at the extreme southeastern corner of the gulf, was at the southern end of the Karelian Isthmus, a neck of land running north and south between the gulf and Lake Ladoga, some 20 miles farther east. The Finnish frontier crossed this isthmus from the gulf to Lake Ladoga only 20 miles north of Leningrad.

     On October 14th the Soviet Union demanded that the Finnish frontier north of Leningrad be pushed back along the shore of the gulf so that the frontier would run westward from Lake Ladoga instead of southward as formerly. This would put the Finnish frontier about 50 miles from Leningrad, leaving Finland about half of the Karelian Isthmus. In addition, the Bolsheviks demanded a 30-year lease on the Finnish naval base at Hang๖ at the entrance to the Gulf of Finland, a strip about 100 miles long and 10 miles wide in central Finland (where the Finnish frontier came closest to the railroad line between Leningrad and Russia's ice-free port of Murmansk on the Arctic Sea), and a small area of about 25 square miles where the Finnish frontier reached the Arctic Ocean west of Murmansk. In return for these concessions Moscow offered a nonaggression pact, about 2,100 square miles of wooded area in central Finland, and permission to Finland to fortify the Aaland Islands between Finland and Sweden, something which had been forbidden since 1921.

     It is not yet clear why Finland rejected the Russian demands of October 1939. The Germans and Russians believed that it was done under British influence, but the evidence is not available. At any rate, the Finn asked for German support and were rebuffed as early as October 6-7 1939 (before the Russian demands were received); they ordered mobilization of their armed forces against the Soviet Union on October 8th, and were reported by the German minister to be "completely mobilized" ten days later. In the negotiations Stalin abandoned the Soviet demand for Hang๖ if he could get the Island of Russar๖ nearby and the island of Suursaari farther up the gulf, but insisted on most of the Karelian demand; the Finns offered about a third of the Karelian demand but refused to grant any naval bases in the gulf. On November 8th the discussions broke down; four days later the Finnish negotiators went home. For some unexplained reason, the Finns seem to have felt that the Russians would not attack their country, but the Soviets attacked at several points on November 28th.

     If the Finns had misinterpreted the Soviet determination to attack, the Soviets misinterpreted the Finnish determination to resist. Although attacked at five major points by large forces with heavy equipment, the Finns made very skillful use of the terrain and the winter weather. In the first two months (December-January) a half-dozen or more Soviet divisions were torn to pieces. Only in February 1940 did the Soviet offensive begin to move, and by the end of the month Finland's forces were so exhausted by superior numbers that they accepted the Soviet terms. Peace was signed on March 12, 1940.

     As soon as Finland realized that Russia seriously intended to attack, it set up a new Cabinet under Risto Ryti to wage the war and simultaneously seek peace by negotiation. This latter proved to be difficult because on December 2nd, Moscow set up a puppet Finnish government under a minor and discredited Finnish Communist in exile, V. Kuusinen; a mutual-aid pact was signed with this puppet state at once. The existence of this regime discouraged Germany from offering any mediation seeking peace, in spite of its eagerness to see the end of the fighting in Finland, but on March 12th, when peace was made with the authentic Finnish government, Kuusinen was simply left in the lurch by Moscow.

     The Soviet attack on Finland provided the leaders in the Entente countries with a heaven-sent opportunity to change the declared but un-fought war with Germany, which they did not want, into an undeclared but fighting war against the Soviet Union. The fact that a Russian war would be hundreds of miles away, while the war with Germany was on their doorstep, was an added advantage, especially in Paris, which had been steadily resisting British suggestions for any unfriendly action against Germany along the Rhine. Accordingly, Britain and France resurrected the moribund League of Nations, violated the Covenant to put Finland, Egypt, and South Africa on the Council, and illegally (according to the American Journal of International Law) expelled Russia from the League as an aggressor.

     That Russia was an unprovoked aggressor is beyond question, but there was at least a surface inconsistency between the violence of the Anglo-French reaction against Russian aggression in 1939 and the complacency with which they had viewed other aggressions in 1931-1939. This last act of the League of Nations was its most efficient. Although the League's consideration of the Japanese aggression in China had required fifteen months and resulted in no punishment, Russia was condemned in eleven days in December 1939. The German aggressions of 1936-1939 had not even been submitted to the League of Nations, and the Italian seizure of Albania had been recognized by Britain with unseemly haste earlier in 1939, but the Anglo-French leaders now prepared to attack the Soviet Union both from Finland and from Syria.

     In the north, every effort was made by France and Britain to turn the Soviet attack on Finland into a general war against Russia. On December 19, 1939, the Supreme War Council decided to provide Finland with "all indirect assistance in their power" and to use diplomatic pressure on Norway and Sweden to aid Finland against Russia. The Scandinavian countries w-ere informed of this on December 27th. On February 5, 1940, the Supreme War Council decided to send to Finland an expeditionary force of 100,000 heavily armed troops to fight the Soviet hordes. Germany at once warned Norway and Sweden that it would take action against them if the two Scandinavian countries permitted passage of this force.

     Germany and Russia were both eager to end the Finnish fighting before any Anglo-French intervention could begin, the former because it feared that Anglo-French forces in Scandinavia would be able to stop shipments of Swedish iron ore across Norway to Germany through the seaport of Narvik, the Russians because they were convinced of an Anglo-French desire to attack them. The evidence supports both of these fears.

     Because of its very high quality, Swedish iron ore was essential to the ,German steel industry. In 1938 Germany imported almost 22 million tons of ore, of which almost nine million tons came from Sweden and over five million came from France. A German-Swedish trade agreement of December 22, 1939, promised that Sweden would ship ten million tons of ore in 1940, of which two or three million would go by way of Narvik. As early as September 1939, the British were discussing a project to interrupt the Narvik shipments either by an invasion of Norway or by mining Norwegian territorial waters. When Germany heard of the Anglo-French expeditionary force being prepared to cross Norway to Finland, it assumed that this was merely an excuse to cut off the ore shipments. Accordingly, Germany began to prepare its own plans to seize Norway first.

     As a matter of fact, the Anglo-French expeditionary force was really intended to attack Russia, but it was unable to arrive on time, although Britain and France did all they could to force Finland to continue to fight until they could arrive on the scene. In February word was sent that if Finland made peace the two Western Powers would not be bound to support Finnish independence after the great war ended. On January 3rd the British ambassador was withdrawn from Moscow. On February 26th Lord Halifax rejected a Soviet request that Britain convey its peace terms to Finland; they had to be sent through Sweden instead. On March 4th Daladier and Lord Ironsides formally promised Finland an expeditionary force of 57,000 men. The Scandinavian countries put pressure on Finland not to ask for troops, and informed Britain that they would tear up their railroad tracks if the expeditionary force tried to cross.

     When the request from the Finns did not arrive, Daladier, on March 8th, sent them a threatening message which said: "I assure you once more, we are ready to give our help immediately. The airplanes are ready to take off. The operational force is ready. If Finland does not now make her appeal to the Western Powers, it is obvious that at the end of the war the Western Powers cannot assume the slightest responsibility for the final settlement regarding Finnish territory."

     According to the Finnish foreign minister, V. Tanner, Daladier at this time told the Finnish military attache in Paris that if Finland stopped fighting Russia, the Western Powers would make peace with Germany. According to the same authority, Anglo-French agents did all they could, up to the final moment, to prevent or to disrupt the Soviet-Finnish peace negotiations, and had made plans to cross Scandinavia, even without permission, and to use any Finnish appeal for an expeditionary force as a weapon to arouse the Scandinavian people to overthrow their own governments. The Swedish prime minister, in return, threatened to fight on the side of Russia against any Entente effort to force a transit. When the Finnish request did not come, Britain, on March 12th, informed Norway and Sweden that it had arrived, and made a formal request for transit across the two countries. This was refused, and Finland made peace the same day.

     The Soviet-Finnish Peace Treaty of March 12, 1940 was made at the insistence of the Finnish commander in chief, Baron Mannerheim, although it was much more severe than the Russian demands of October. In addition to the areas in the north and the naval base at Hang๖, the Soviet aggressors took many of the islands of the Gulf of Finland and the whole of the Karelian Isthmus, including all the shores of Lake Ladoga. These gains made it possible for Russia to bring both official and unofficial pressure on Finland to influence its foreign and domestic policy. To resist this steady pressure, Finland began, in August 1940, secret military conversations with Germany.

     The failure of the Anglo-French expeditionary force to reach Finland does not mean that no aid reached the Finns. Germany refused all aid, and intercepted most of Italy's aid, releasing it again once peace had been made. The Western Powers, however, encouraged volunteers to go and sent much valuable equipment. Early in March, Chamberlain wrote to his sister about Finnish aid as follows: "They began by asking for fighter planes, and we sent all the surplus we could lay hands on. They asked for AA guns, and again we stripped our own imperfectly-armed home defenses to help them. They asked for small arms ammunition, and we gave them priority over our own army. They asked for later types of planes, and we sent them 12 Hurricanes; against the will and advice of our Air Staff. They said that men were no good now, but that they would want 30,000 in the spring."

     The Soviet-Finnish treaty of March 12th did not put an end to the Anglo-French projects to attack Russia or to cross Scandinavia. Anger against both the Soviet Union and the Scandinavian countries remained high in Paris and London. The Finnish expeditionary force was kept together in England, where its existence gave a powerful incentive to the German project to invade Norway before Britain did so. On April 5th, only four days before the German attack on Norway, Lord Halifax sent a note to Norway and Sweden threatening these countries with dire, if unstated, consequences at the hands of Britain if they refused to cooperate with the Western Powers in sending aid to Finland "in whatever manner they may see fit" in any future Soviet attack on Finland.

     Six days later, two days after Germany's aggression against Denmark and Norway, General Weygand was ordered to attack the Soviet Union from Syria. This project had been initiated on January 19, 1940, when Daladier ordered General Gamelin and Admiral Jean Darlan to draw up plans to bomb Russia's Caucasian oil fields from Syria. These plans were submitted on February z2nd but were held up in favor of the Finnish project; on April 11th, a month after the Soviet-Finnish peace, the new French premier, Reynaud, ordered General Weygand to carry out the raid on the Soviet oil wells of the Caucasus as soon as possible. Weygand was unable to do this before the end of June. By that time France had been defeated by Germany, and Britain was in no position to attack any new enemies.

The German Attack on Denmark and Norway, April 1940

     Hitler's orders to attack France through the Netherlands and Belgium were issued on October 9, 1939, and the date of the attack was set for November 8th. This was postponed on November 7th; between that date and May loth, the order to attack was given and revoked a half-dozen times because of adverse weather conditions and lack of munitions. Each of these order was reported to the West through the Dutch military attache in Berlin, but, as no attack eventuated, it is probable that faith in this informant declined.

     Information also came from other sources. One order to attack was reported to the West by Count Ciano, the Italian foreign minister, but the Italians were dependent on their own spies, since they could get no information from Hitler, and did not know of the date which was finally used on May 10th. In January a German plane with operational orders for the attack made an emergency landing in Belgium; the orders were captured before they could be destroyed completely. This caused great alarm in the West, but no one could be sure if the captured documents were authentic or part of a Nazi false alarm.

     In the meantime, from December 1939, onward, plans to invade Norway were prepared at the insistence of the German admirals. These plans were made in cooperation with Major Vidkun Quisling, a former Norwegian minister of war and leader of the insignificant Nazi Party in Norway. Formal orders were issued by Hitler on March 1, 1940 to occupy both Denmark and Norway. Violations of Norwegian neutrality by both sides in the early months of 1940 influenced these plans very little. In February the British Navy intercepted the German prison ship Altmark in Norwegian waters and released about three hundred British sailors who had been captured by the German commerce raider Graf Spee; on April 7th the British placed a minefield in Norwegian waters to interrupt the flow of Swedish iron ore down the western coast of Norway from Narvik to Germany. But by that time the German operations had begun.

     Denmark yielded to a German ultimatum on April 8th as German divisions overran the country; and seaborne forces landed in Copenhagen harbor. The same morning secret German agents inside Norway and troops smuggled into Norwegian harbors in merchant vessels seized Norwegian airfields, radio stations, and docks. They were supported at once by airborne infantry in Oslo and Stavanger and by seaborne forces at Oslo, Trondheim, Bergen, and Narvik. Although German naval losses were large, including three cruisers and eleven destroyers, the operation was a complete success. Oslo was captured in its sleep the first day, and the Luftwaffe had air supremacy over most of Norway by the end of that day.

     The Allied expeditionary force which had been prepared for Finland, with some additional forces from France, was committed to Norway in a scattered and piecemeal fashion, chiefly around Trondheim and Narvik. The Trondheim expedition was badly bungled and had to be evacuated to sea on May 1st; the Narvik expedition captured that city on May 27th but began to evacuate, taking the Norwegian royal family with it, a week later. In the operation, British naval losses were heavy, and included the aircraft carrier Glorious.

     The Norwegian fiasco brought Britain's increasingly restive public opinion to the boiling point. In the parliamentary debate of May 7-lo, Chamberlain feebly defended his policies, but was subjected to a devastating attack from all sides. The high point was reached when Leopold Amery, repeating Cromwell's words to the Long Parliament, cried at Chamberlain: "You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say—let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!" In the following vote of confidence Chamberlain w-as victorious, 281-200, but his nominal majority of 200 had fallen to t31, equivalent to a defeat. The next day, May 9, 1940, the Speaker was very busy preventing the Honorable Members from continuing their attack on Chamberlain. On May loth, at dawn, the German armies struck westward against the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, and France. Chamberlain resigned, and was replaced by a national government under Winston Churchill.

     After forty years of parliamentary life, during much of which he had been the best-hated man in the House of Commons, Churchill's arrival to the highest political office was received by Englishmen with a sigh of relief. Right or wrong, fairly or unfairly, Churchill had always been a fighter and, in May 1940, as the German armies swept westward, what the forces of decency and democracy needed was a fighter, to provide a nucleus about which those who wished to resist tyranny and horror could rally. In his first speech, the new prime minister provided such a nucleus: all he had to offer was "blood, toil, tears and sweat.... Our only aim is victory," he said, "for without victory there is no survival."

Chapter 50: The Fall of France, (May-June 1940)and the Vichy Regime

     In the next six months neither victory nor survival seemed very likely for the West. The German forces which attacked on May 10th were inferior in manpower to the forces which faced them but were much more unified, used their equipment in an effective fashion, and had a single plan which they proceeded to carry out. Amounting to about 136 divisions, they were opposed by 156 divisions, but the defenders were divided into four different national armies, were arranged improperly, were given tasks too difficult for their size and equipment and, in general, were so managed that their weakest points coincided completely with the most powerful German attacks.

     The French plan of campaign was dominated by two factors: the Maginot Line and Plan D. The Maginot Line, an elaborate and expensive system of permanent fortifications, ran from Switzerland to Montm้dy. Behind this line, where they could not be used in the great battle drawing near, were stationed 62 of 102 French divisions on this frontier. From Montm้dy to the sea, France had 40 divisions, plus the British Expeditionary Force of lo divisions. According to Plan D, the anticipated German attack on the Low Countries was to he met by the Allied forces north of Montm้dy advancing as rapidly as possible to meet the enemy. If the Belgian Army of 20 divisions were successful in holding up the German advance, it was hoped that a new Belgian-British-French line could be formed along the Dyle River or even forty miles farther north along the Albert Canal; if the Belgian defense were less successful, the new line was to be formed along the Scheldt River, fifty miles behind the Dyle. To carry out this rapid movement as soon as the German attack was announced, the French placed their best and fastest divisions on the extreme left (in Henri Giraud's Seventh Army) and their poorest divisions close to the end of the Maginot Line (in Andr้ Corap's Ninth Army), where they were expected to make a relatively short advance to take a position between Sedan and Namur along the Meuse River. Once this Plan D advance into the Low Countries had been achieved' it was expected that the new line, from the sea to Longwy (deep in the Maginot Line), would stand as follows:

          Netherlands forces—10 divisions

          Giraud's Seventh Army—7 divisions

          Belgian forces—20 divisions

          Lord Gort's British Expeditionary Force—10 divisions

          Jean Blanchard's First Army—6 divisions

          Corap's Ninth Army—9 divisions

          Charles Huntziger's Second Army—7 divisions

     Originally the German plans were, as the French anticipated, a modified version of the Schliefen Plan of 1905, involving a wide sweep through the Low Countries. The false alarms of a German attack in the winter of 1939-1940 revealed to the Germans, however, that the Allies would meet this attack by a rapid advance into Belgium. Accordingly, at the suggestion of General Erich von Manstein, the Germans modified their plans to encourage the Allied advance into Belgium while the Germans planned to strike with their greatest strength at Sedan, the pivot of the Allied turning movement. Such an assault at Sedan made it necessary for the German forces to pass over the narrow, winding roads of the Ardennes Forest, then to cross the deep and swift Meuse River, and to break between Corap's and Huntziger's forces, but, if this could be done and Sedan taken, excellent roads and a railroad ran from Sedan westward across France to the sea.

     Under the "Manstein Plan" the German attack from the North Sea to Sedan was organized in four armies. In the north, the Netherlands was attacked by the German Eighteenth Army (one panzer and four infantry divisions); in the middle, Belgium was attacked by the German Sixth Army (two panzer and 15 infantry divisions) and the German Fourth Army (two panzer and 12 infantry divisions); farther south, in the Ardennes area, France was attacked by the German Twelfth Army (five panzer and four other divisions); from Sedan to Switzerland, although Germany had about 30 divisions, all were infantry formations and no major offensive was made.

     The "Manstein Plan" was a total surprise to the French. They were so convinced that the Ardennes were impassable for large forces, especially for tanks, that everything was done to make the German task easier: Corap and Huntziger placed their poorest forces (six Series B divisions, undermanned, with little training) on either side of Sedan and their best forces on their fronts most remote from the Ardennes (that is, from Sedan). In Huntziger's case these better divisions were behind the Maginot Line itself. Because of the Ardennes, Corap gave his four poor divisions near Sedan no antitank guns, no antiaircraft guns, and no air support (reserving these for his high-quality divisions forty miles farther north), and expected them to defend a front of ten miles per division (while the French Third Army, deep behind the Maginot Line, had a front of 1.8 miles per division). Moreover, Corap's poor divisions were not stationed on the Meuse, but two days' march to the west of it, and were required, once the German attack began, to race the Germans to the intervening river.

     The German attack began at 5:35 on May loth. Two days later the panzer division with the German Eighteenth Army broke through the Dutch defenses and began to join up with parachute and airborne forces which had been dropped behind these; the Netherlands collapsed. The Dutch field forces surrendered on May 14th, after much of the center of Rotterdam had been destroyed in a twenty-minute air attack. The Netherlands royal family and the government moved to England to continue the war.

     The great mass of the German attack fell on Belgium, and was greatly aided by the failure of many ordinary defensive precautions. Vital bridges over the Meuse and the Albert Canal were destroyed only partly or not at all. The defenders on the Albert Canal were attacked from the rear by parachutists and glider forces which had been landed behind them. The powerful fort of Eben Emael, covering the canal bridges, was captured by airborne volunteers who landed on its roof and destroyed its gun apertures with explosives. Belgium's forces fell backward toward the Dyle as the French and British units, according to Plan D, wheeled northeastward, on Sedan as a pivot, to meet them. As the Belgian forces withdrew northwest, while the German attack swung southwest, the main burden of the German assault now fell on the French First Army, to pin it down and thus prevent it from reinforcing Corap farther south. In this the Germans were successful; on May I:th, as news of the breakthrough at Sedan became known, Gamelin ordered all forces in Belgium to fall backward from the Dyle Line toward the Scheldt.

     The attack through the Ardennes on Corap's Ninth Army was made by a special German force of five panzer and three motorized divisions under General Paul von Kleist. These passed through the forest and crossed the Meuse to fling themselves on the right side of Corap's inexperienced divisions. By the evening of May 15th, Corap's army had been "volatilized," and the German spearhead was racing forward thirty-five miles west of Sedan. The misplaced French Sixth Army, in reserve 300 miles south near Lyon, began to move toward the breach, while General Giraud, with three divisions from the Seventh Army, was ordered from the extreme northwest, and seven other divisions were taken from the forces behind the Maginot Line. All these arrived too late, because von Kleist's advance units crossed France and reached the sea at Abbeville on May 20th, having covered 220 miles in eleven days. No coordinated attack was ever made on this thin extended line, although orders were issued for it to be attacked both from the north and the south.

     The Allied forces retreating southward from Belgium were greatly hampered by masses of refugees clogging the roads, were constantly harassed by Stukas, and had lost communication between units. There was almost no contact or cooperation between the French, British, and Belgians in the north, or between these and the French forces south of Kleist's breakthrough. Panic swept Paris. On May 16th sixteen French generals, including Gamelin, were dismissed, and the command given to Weygand, who did not arrive from Syria until May 20th. During this period, evacuation of the government to Tours was ordered, and the secret archives of the Foreign Ministry were burned in bonfires on the lawns of the Quai d'Orsay.

     On May 17th Reynaud replaced Daladier as minister of national defense and generally shook up the government, replacing many weak men by defeatists, appeasers, and Fascist sympathizers. The chief new face was that of Marshal P้tain, eighty-three years old, the man chiefly responsible for the inadequacy of French military planning in the inter-war period. P้tain was recalled from the ambassadorship in Madrid to be vice-premier in the new Cabinet. Certain French politicians, including Pierre Laval, hoped that P้tain might play a role in French domestic politics such as Hindenburg had played in Germany: to protect the organized vested interests of industry and business from changes by the Left in a period of defeat.

     Weygand spent five days (May 20th-25th) in an unsuccessful effort to get a coordinated attack on Kleist's salient. On May 25th-26th, Kleist, moving up the coast from the Somme, on the rear of the northern Allied forces, captured Boulogne and Calais, leaving Dunkerque as the only major port on the Allied rear. Withdrawal to this port was threatened by a German break through the Belgian Army toward Ypres. On May 27th, King Leopold of Belgium made an unconditional surrender of his armies to the Germans, over the objections of the Belgian civil government and without making certain that the Allied Command had been informed. The British Expeditionary Force at once began to evacuate the Continent through Dunkerque.

     In seven days, using 887 water craft of all types and sizes, 337,131 men were taken off the beaches at Dunkerque under relentless air bombardment (May 28th-June 4th). By Hitler's direct order, no intensive ground attack was made on the Allied forces within the Dunkerque perimeter, as Hitler was convinced that Britain would make peace as soon as France was defeated, and wished to save his dwindling armored forces and munitions for the attack on the rest of France. In the interval before this new attack, Weygand tried to form a new line along the Somme and Aisne rivers from the sea to the Maginot Line and to eliminate three bridgeheads the Germans already held south of the Somme.

     The Battle of France began on June 5th with German attacks on the western and eastern ends of the "Weygand Line." By June 8th the western end had been broken, and German forces began to move to the rear of the Somme defenses. As the line collapsed and the military forces fell back, they disintegrated among packed masses of civilian refugees, hurried onward by German dive-bombers. Paris and later all cities of France were declared open cities, not to be defended. Just as in Kleist's original breakthrough, no effort was made to hold up the Germans by road obstacles, civilian resistance, house-to-house fighting, destruction of supplies, or (above all) destruction of abandoned gasoline. The German armored units roamed at will on captured fuel.

     On June 12th Weygand requested the French government to seek an armistice; Reynaud refused to permit any civilian surrender, since this was forbidden by an Anglo-French agreement of March 12, 1940. Instead, he gave permission for a military capitulation, if the civil government continued the war from French North Africa or from overseas bases, as Norway, the Netherlands, and Belgium were doing. P้tain, Weygand, and their supporters refused to leave France. They also flatly rejected any military capitulation, for they wanted to end the fighting with an armistice which would allow France to maintain a French Army as a guarantee against any economic or social changes in France.

     There was also considerable pressure behind the scenes from anti-democratic French industrialists in monopolistic lines such as chemicals, light metals, synthetic fibers, and electrical utilities. These industrialists, together with politicians like Laval and private or commercial banks, like the Banque Worms, or the Banque de l'Indochine, had been negotiating cartel and other agreements with Germany for ten years, and felt an armistice would offer a splendid opportunity to complete and enforce these agreements.

     As the military collapse continued, piteous appeals for help were sent to London and to Washington. Reynaud sent eighteen messages to Churchill asking for more air support, but could obtain none, as the British War Cabinet wished to save all the planes it still had for the defense of Britain after the French collapse. Appeals to Roosevelt were no more successful; 150 planes and 2,000 75-mm. cannons were sent, but they sailed from Halifax only on June 17th and were at sea when the fighting ceased.

     The chief concern in London and Washington was over the fate of the French fleet and of French North and West Africa, especially Dakar. If Hitler obtained the French fleet or any considerable portion of it, British and American security would be in acute jeopardy. The French fleet was of high quality and included two new battleships (Richelieu and Jean Bart) which had just been built but were not yet in service. Such a navy, in combination with the German and Italian navies, might destroy Britain's sea defenses and force a British surrender. This would place America in great danger, as American security in the Atlantic had been preserved by the British fleet since 1818 and, by 1940, the whole American battle fleet had to be kept in the Pacific to face Japan.

     Only less immediate than these dangers was the threat to both British and American security from a German occupation of French North and West Africa. This would close the British route through the Mediterranean immediately and allow the Italian forces in Libya to invade Egypt with relative impunity. The possession of Dakar by German forces would provide a base from which submarines could attack the British route to the East by way of South Africa and might permit an attack on Brazil, only 1,700 miles west of Dakar.

     With these considerations in mind, Washington and London did all they could to dissuade Mussolini from attacking France and to persuade the French to avoid any armistice which might yield either French Africa or the French fleet to Hitler. Eventually Britain gave permission to France to seek an armistice if the fleet sailed to British ports. This was rejected by the French military and naval authorities. As a final effort, Churchill, on June 16th, offered France a political union with Britain, involving joint Anglo-French citizenship and a joint Cabinet. This was never considered by the French.

     As the military debacle continued to grow and Reynaud would not make a separate peace and could not get a Cabinet agreement to withdraw overseas, he resigned (June 16th) and was replaced by a new government headed by Marshal P้tain. The old man, surrounded by defeatists and appeasers who had been intriguing for deals with the Nazis for years, at once asked for an armistice, and issued an ambiguous public statement which led some French units to cease fighting immediately. On June loth Italy had declared war, but was unable to make any important military advances against French resistance. On June 14th the Germans entered Paris, the French government having moved to Tours on June 14th and continuing to Bordeaux on June 15th.

     The armistice negotiations were conducted in the same railway carriage at Compi่gne in the forest of Rethondes where Germany had surrendered in 1918; they took three days, and went into effect on June 25th. Hitler was so convinced that Britain would also make peace that he gave surprisingly lenient terms to France. In spite of Mussolini's demands, France did not have to give up any overseas territory or any ports on the Mediterranean, no naval vessels or any airplanes or armaments to be used against England. Northern France and all the western coast to the Pyrenees came under occupation, but the rest was left unoccupied, ruled by a government free from direct German control and policed by French armed forces. The chief burden of the surrender came from three provisions: ( 1) the division of the country into two zones, with about two-thirds of French productive capacity in the occupied zone; (1) all French prisoners of war, amounting to almost two million men, were to remain in German hands until the final peace treaty, while German prisoners were to be released at once; and (3) all the expenses of the German occupation were to be paid by unoccupied France. The two zones were sealed off so completely that even postal communication was reduced to a minimum; this crippled the economy of the unoccupied part. The expenses of the army of occupation were set at the outrageous sum of 400 million francs a day. Moreover, by fixing the exchange rate at one reichsmark for 20 francs, in place of the prewar rate of one for eleven francs, it became possible for the occupying forces to buy goods very cheaply in France, thus draining wealth to Germany.

     The governmental system of Vichy France was a kind of bureaucratic tyranny. Pierre Laval pushed through a series of constitutional laws which ended the Third Republic and the parliamentary system, combining in the hands of Marshal P้tain the joint functions of head of the state (formerly held by the president) and head of the government (formerly held by the prime minister), with the right to legislate by decree. Laval was designated as P้tain's successor in holding these powers, and the parliamentary chambers were dismissed.

     In spite of this appearance of centralized authority, the government as a whole operated on the basis of whim and intrigue, the various ministers following mutually inconsistent policies and seeking to extend these by increasing their influence over P้tain. The procrastinations, suspicions, ambiguities, and secrecies of the marshal himself make it difficult to determine what his own policy was, or even if he had one. It seems likely that he followed various policies simultaneously, allowing his legal powers to be exercised by quite dissimilar subordinates in an effort to achieve a few clearly defined aims. These aims seem to have been four in number, in decreasing importance: (1) to maintain, at all costs, the independence of unoccupied France; (2) to secure the release, as rapidly as possible, of the prisoners of war; (3) to reduce the financial charges of the occupation forces; and (4) to reduce, bit by bit, the barriers between the occupied and unoccupied zones.

     The ideology of Vichy was a typical Fascist melange of nationalism, social-solidarity, anti-Semitism, anti-democracy, anti-Communism, opposition to class conflicts, to liberalism, or to secularism, with resounding blasts on the virtues of discipline, self-sacrifice, authority, and repentance; but all these things meant very little either to the rulers or the ruled of the new regime. In general, corruption and intrigue, idealism and self-sacrifice were about as prevalent under Vichy as they had been under the Third Republic, but secrecy was more successful, civil liberties were absent, the distance between propaganda and behavior was, if anything, wider, and hypocrisy replaced cynicism as the chief vice of politicians. The two strongest characteristics of the regime, which made it sufficiently solid to continue to function, were negative ones: hatred of the Third Republic and hatred of England. But these ideas were too negative and too remote from the problems of day-to-day existence to provide very satisfactory guides to Vichy policy. As a result, there was complete confusion of policy.

     Some leaders, and these the less influential, like Weygand, were resolutely anti-German, and were patiently awaiting the day when Vichy could turn against the German conquerors. Others, and these the more influential, like Laval or Admiral Darlan, had faith in a final German victory over Britain, and felt that France must accept the inevitable hegemony of Germany but try to secure for itself a privileged position as "favorite satellite." While P้tain's personal views were probably closer to those of Weygand, his pessimistic and defeatist personality led him to embrace the other point of view as a necessary evil. Accordingly, under German pressure he removed Weygand from all participation in public life (November 1941) and accepted Laval and later Darlan as his chief advisers and designated successors. In this situation Darland had an advantage over Laval, in view of P้tain's personal inclinations, for Laval was a wholehearted and frank advocate of collaboration with Hitler, while Darlan was a much more devious and ambiguous personality, and thus closer to P้tain's own character and policy. Accordingly, Laval was named foreign minister and successor in July 1940, but was removed from office, as unduly pro-German, on December 13, 1940. Darlan, who had been minister of the navy, became foreign minister, vice-premier, minister of the interior, successor-designate and chief adviser to P้tain in February 1941 and held these positions until April 1942; at that date Hitler forced P้tain to make Laval head of the government with full powers in both internal and external affairs.

     The policy of Vichy France can hardly be called a success under P้tain, Darlan, or Laval. Some of the basic assumptions on which the regime had been founded proved to be false. Britain did not surrender. Efforts to collaborate with Hitler did not succeed in releasing the prisoners of war, in reducing the costs of occupation, or in lowering the barriers between the two zones of France. More than a million prisoners were still in German hands in January 1944. In addition, large numbers of French civilians were forced to go to labor in Germany. In spite of all kinds of resistance, the number of these reached 650,000 by late 1943. The occupation payments were reduced from 400 million to 300 million francs a day in May 1942, but were increased again, to 500 million in November 1942, and finally to 700 million a day in July 1944. In forty-five months (to April 1944) France paid 536,000 million francs of these charges. Such payments resulted in a completely unbalanced budget and extreme inflation. Futile efforts to control this inflation by price-fixing, wage-fixing, and rationing gave rise to enormous black-market transactions and widespread corruption, to the great profit of both German and Vichy officials. The latter did not even retain the satisfaction of believing that the armistice had preserved the integrity of France and of its empire, for Alsace-Lorraine was, in fact if not in law, annexed to Germany, and most of the overseas empire fell out of Vichy control in 1942. Lorraine was Germanized, and those inhabitants who remained loyal to France or to French culture were persecuted and exiled, hundreds of thousands coming as refugees to unoccupied France.

     The continued resistance of Britain, the treatment of Alsace-Lorraine, the growing economic strain, and, above all, Hitler's attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941 led to the growth of an anti-German underground resistance in France. Russia's involvement in the war shifted the Communists throughout the world, as if by magic, from a pro-German, antiwar policy to an anti-German, pro-war policy. Their discipline and fanaticism gradually made them the dominant influence in the resistance, in France, and elsewhere in Europe.

     British and American policies toward Vichy France, as toward Franco Spain or neutral Russia, were parallel but Tar from identical. London, which broke off diplomatic relations with the new French regime in June 1940, followed a severe policy but at the same time sought to win France back into some kind of anti-Nazi resistance. Vichy weakness made this a hopeless task. At the same time, London tried to build up General de Gaulle, as leader of the "Free French," into a diluted French government-in-exile, although De Gaulle's uncooperative personality and arrogant pride made this a difficult and unpalatable task. De Gaulle obtained little support in the French Empire and almost none in France itself, but continued to enjoy a certain measure of British support.

     In Washington, on the other hand, De Gaulle obtained almost no support. The United States continued to recognize the Vichy regime, with Roosevelt sending Admiral Leahy as his personal representative to P้tain and Robert Murphy as his special agent in North Africa. In general the United States encouraged France, offered certain economic concessions, especially in North Africa, and sought little more than steadfast adherence to the armistice terms and continued withholding of the fleet and empire from Nazi hands. Both the United States and Britain made numerous secret and special agreements with various representatives of the Vichy government but achieved very little. An agreement of February 26, 1941, between Robert Murphy and General Weygand did allow the United States, in return for certain commercial promises, to maintain consular "observers" in North Africa. These observers obtained large amounts of valuable military and economic information for the United States and Britain during the months preceding the Allied invasion of North Africa on November 8, 1942.

Chapter 51: The Battle of Britain, July-October 1940

     The collapse of France was one of the most astonishing events in European history. For weeks, or even months, millions of persons in all parts of the world were stunned, walking about in a painful fog. Equally important, although not recognized at the time, was the determination of Britain to go on fighting. Hitler, who had won a victory surpassing his expectations, could not end the war, and was left without plans for continuing it. He began to improvise such plans without adequate information to make them good and without adequate preparation for carrying them out. If Germany had concentrated on building submarines, the newly acquired U-boat bases in Norway, in the Low Countries, and in France might have made it possible to blockade Britain into surrender, but Hitler rejected this plan. Instead he ordered an invasion of Britain (Operation Sealion), a project in which no German, not even Hitler himself, had much confidence.

     At the same time, Britain's refusal to make peace revealed to the full the inadequacies of the French armistice. Hitler sought to remedy these by a project to capture Gibraltar (Operation Felix). Sealion and Felix required Hitler's active attention from July to November 1940. In the first half of December, Hitler put Sealion and Felix aside and replaced them with two new projects. The new projects sought to conquer all the Balkans (Operation Marita) and to attack the Soviet Union (Operation Barbarossa). These went into operation in April-June 1941.

     Hitler's change of plans in December 1940 was a consequence of four influences: (1) it was, by that time, clear that Sealion could not be carried out; (2) Franco's refusal to cooperate had made Felix impractical; ( 3 ) Mussolini's foolish attempts to conquer Egypt and Greece had opened a hornets' nest in the eastern Mediterranean; and (4 there was growing tension, much of it in Hitler's own mind, between Germany and the Soviet Union.

     Operation Sealion was beyond Germany's strength, but no one saw this at the time. It required, as a first necessity, air supremacy for the Luftwaffe over southern England. Following this, the invasion would require a large flotilla of invasion craft to carry men and supplies across a lengthy stretch of water and to assemble these forces in combat formation in England. The German Navy was in no position to defend such a flotilla against the British Navy with minefields and to preserve both the invasion flotilla and the minefields by German air superiority.

     Britain had adequate manpower, including the men evacuated from France and thousands of anti-Nazi refugees from overrun countries, but had little heavy equipment and certainly had only a fraction of the thirty-nine divisions the Germans estimated to he the size of the defensive forces. These forces were hurriedly prepared; barbed wire and mines were placed on all the landing beaches; watchers were stationed everywhere; all road signs which might guide the invaders were removed; and all able-bodied men, many armed only with fowling guns, were drilled for defense against parachutists. Fortunately, none of these defensive measures ever had to be tested, because Germany was unable to win air superiority over England.

     Although air superiority had not yet been achieved by Germany, orders for the invasion were issued at the middle of July, the date was finally fixed at September 21st, but it was postponed, temporarily on September 17th and indefinitely on October 12th. The attacks of the Luftwaffe were directed successively, from July 10th to the end of October, at coastal defenses, at R.A.F. installations, and at London itself. very heavy damage was inflicted on England, but the losses to the German Air Force were more significant, reaching 1,733 planes witl1 their pilots in three and a half months. In the same period, the British dead reached 375 pilots and over 14,000 civilians. The greatest loss for the Germans in one day was 76 planes on August Isth, but the turning point of the battle came on September 15th when 56 invading planes were shot down.

     The counterattack of the R.A.F. on German bases was also very successful; hundreds of invasion craft, in some cases loaded with German soldiers under training, were destroyed. As the Battle of Britain drew to its close in October 1940, the Germans shifted to night bombing of British cities. This practice continued, night after night, with fearful destruction and great loss of life, until Hitler's attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941. During that time, millions of city dwellers, deprived of their sleep, night after night, or crowded into ill-ventilated underground shelters, emerged each morning into scenes of conflagration and ruin to resume their daily work at the war effort.

     The calm courage and methodical devotion to duty of the average Englishman ended Hitler's sequence of diplomatic and military victories. and inflicted on Nazi Germany its first and decisive defeat. The successful defense of Britain, forcing Hitler to give up the project for invading England, was the turning point of the European war. Coming as the first year of war was ending, a year in which Hitler had achieved unprecedented conquests, it ended any possibility of a short war, and forced the Germans into a long struggle for which they had neither plans nor resources.

     The defenders were victorious in the Battle of Britain for six chief reasons: (1) the indomitable spirit of the English people put surrender out of the question; (2) British planes were equal in numbers and superior in quality to the German planes; ( 3) British pilots were of better quality and with better fighting spirit; (4) the British operational organization was far superior; (5) fighting over their own land, British pilots could usually be saved by parachuting; and (6) British scientific inventions were far ahead of those of Germany. This sixth point is of vital significance.

     Radar was used in scientific experiments in Britain as early as 1924. Adapted for defense against air attack in 1935, a chain of radar station, had been laid out in 1937 and began continuous operation in April 1939. Before war began in September, these stations could detect most aircraft at distances up to 100 miles. Eventually a very elaborate centralized system could report on all enemy planes over or near Britain. After the fa'.l of France, special night-fighter planes with their own individual radar detectors with a three-mile range were being provided. When they began to shoot down German bombers in total darkness in December 1940, the Luftwaffe did not know what was happening. By March 1940, effective radar-aiming devices were being attached to antiaircraft guns on the ground. These increased the effectiveness of such guns in shooting down enemy bombers by fivefold. These new devices were so helpful that over 100 bombers were shot down by night fighters in the winter of 1940 1941, and an equal number by radar antiaircraft guns.

     Science was also applied to the British night bombing raids on Germany, but at a much later date. In 1940 and 1941 almost 45,000 tons of bombs were dropped on German targets, but 90 percent fell harmlessly in fields. In 1941 new navigational techniques, using intersecting radio beams from three stations in England, were used to provide greater accuracy in navigation for more planes. Using this method, Britain launched a thousand-bomber raid on Cologne in May 1942. By the end of that year an entirely new method was introduced; this had an accuracy of about one yard per mile of distance from base, and could place over half of the bombs dropped from 30,000 feet within 150 yards of the target at 250 miles' distance. About the same time (early 1943) radar was adapted to allow bombers to see the target through night or clouds. As we have already indicated, bomb damage, however great, had no decisive effects on Germany's ability to wage war, but the growing effectiveness of British and American bombing made it necessary for Germany to devote increasing amounts of its resources and manpower to air defense and to production of fighter planes, and, by drawing German planes back to western Europe from Russia, aided the Russian defense very considerably.

Chapter 52: The Mediterranean and Eastern Europe, 1940) June 1940-June 1941

     The collapse of France had a shattering effect along the Soviet-German borderlands, from the Baltic to the Aegean Sea. In the week following June 15, 1940, the Soviet Union sent peremptory notes to Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, demanding that their governments be reorganized to include persons more acceptable to the Kremlin. Since Soviet armed forces were already within these states, and no hand of assistance was raised anywhere, least of all in Berlin, the Baltic countries yielded to the Soviet demands. In the first week of August, the three new governments held elections, in typical Soviet fashion, with only a single list of candidates; the newly elected parliaments at once sought, and obtained, union with Soviet Russia as Socialist Soviet Republics.

     Farther south, Romania's hopes that the Anglo-French guarantee of April 1939 might bring support from Weygand's forces in Syria were dashed by Weygand's defeat in France. On May 29, 1940, at a Romanian Crown Council, King Carol insisted that protection must be sought elsewhere and that only an alignment with Germany would permit Romania to resist any possible Soviet pressure. It was felt that Germany's need for Romanian oil would make it very unwilling to allow the war to spread to that area. Accordingly, Romania abandoned its policy of neutrality and aligned itself with Germany, the foreign minister, Grigore Gafencu, resigning in protest at the new policy.

     Romania did not obtain the benefits it had hoped from its change in policy. On June 26, 1940, having previously notified Germany, the Soviet Union demanded Bessarabia and northern Bukovina from Romania within twenty-four hours. Germany protested against the demand for Bukovina, since this had not been granted to Russia in the Nazi-Soviet Agreement of August 1939. Otherwise Germany made no objection, although Hitler was personally disturbed and had to he reassured hy Ribbentrop that he had actually agreed to give Bessarabia to the Soviet Union.

     The loss of Bessarabia was a severe blow to the more moderate leaders in Romania. But worse was yet to come. On August 26th Hitler summoned Romanian leaders to Vienna and, in the presence of Count Ciano and representatives of Hungary, forced Romania to give two-thirds of Transylvania to Hungary. In return, Germany gave Romania a guarantee of its new, reduced frontiers.

     The "Vienna Award" destroyed the forces of moderation within Romania. Riots and assassinations became the regular method of domestic political activity. These were instigated very largely by the "Iron Guard," a reactionary anti-Semitic political group which had been in a quasi-civil war with the Romanian government since 1933, but had been suppressed by the strong-arm tactics of King Carol. On September 5, 1940, an Iron Guard government under Ion Antonescu took office in Bucharest. Its first act was to depose the king and chase him into exile, replacing him on the throne by his son Michael. Two days later, under indirect German pressure, southern Dobruja was yielded to Bulgaria. Thus, in the space of a week, the territorial gains Romania had made at the expense of three of her neighbors in 1919 were largely canceled.

     Moscow protested against the Vienna Award on the grounds that it had not been consulted and that no guarantee of Romania by Germany was necessary. These protests were rejected on the basis that Berlin had been informed of various Soviet activities with equally small notice and that the guarantee was necessary to forestall any possible British attack on the Romanian oil fields. Shortly thereafter German military units began to move into Romania, while Soviet units began to seize the uninhabited islands in the mouths of the Danube. At the same time a German military occupation of Finland began under the pretext that the forces in question were en route to Norway (September 19th).

     The confusion following the defeat of France spread quickly to the Mediterranean area. This was dominated by two factors: (1) Mussolini's jealous determination to obtain some glorious conquest in the Mediterranean to match Hitler's impressive victories in the north, and (2) the complete inadequacy, from Germany's point of view, of the terms of the French armistice. By these terms neither Germany nor Italy obtained any units of the French fleet, any naval bases in the Mediterranean, or any parts of the French overseas territories. On June 24th, when the armistice was made, Hitler had been so convinced that Britain would make peace that he had neglected these items and had rebuffed Mussolini's efforts to include them. Within a month, Hitler recognized his error and demanded from France extensive military and naval bases and transport facilities in North Africa (July 15, 1940). These demands were rejected by P้tain at once..

     Hitler had little real interest in the Mediterranean area at any time and simply hoped that it would remain quiet. His personal belief, as soon as the invasion of Britain became remote, was that Britain wished to hold out until the Soviet Union became strong enougl1 to attack Germany from the east. There is no evidence that the Soviet Union had any plans to do so, or that it was in communication with Britain in any such project, however remote, or that Hitler was afraid of Russia. On the contrary, the Soviet Union became, if anything, increasingly cooperative toward Germany, especially in the economic sphere, and by May 1941, was almost obsequious; all efforts for improved Anglo-Soviet understanding were rejected until after June 22, 1941; and Hitler, far from being fearful of the Soviet Union, despised it completely, and was convinced that he could conquer it in a few weeks. His decision to attack Russia, first stated on July 29, 1940, and issued as a formal directive (Operation Barbarossa) on December 18th, was based on two considerations: (1) only by destroying Russia and all Britain's hopes based on Russia could Britain be forced to ask for peace, and (2) Soviet cooperation with Germany was Stalin's personal policy and depended on his life, a factor regarded as too undependable to allow Germany to place any long-range expectations on it.

     In spite of Hitler's desires, the Mediterranean area could not be kept quiet. The inadequacy of the French armistice, Mussolini's demands for a more active Mediterranean policy, British naval successes against the Italian Navy, Admiral Raeder's warning that some defensive measures must be taken to avert any American intervention in French Africa— all these kept calling the Mediterranean to Hitler's attention at a time when he wanted to concentrate on the problem of how to attack the Soviet Union.

     In order to deter the United States from any intervention in West Africa, and in the belief that it would aid the anti-Roosevelt isolationists in the presidential election of 1940, Germany, Italy, and Japan signed a military alliance on September 27, 1940. This Tripartite Pact, announced with great propagandist fanfare, provided that the signers would aid one another in every way if one of them was attacked by a Power not already involved in the European war or in the Sino-Japanese conflict. To aim this agreement more specifically at the United States, and to allay the natural anxieties of the Soviet Union, one clause provided that the new pact would not change the existing relationships of the signers with Russia. As we shall see in a moment, Ribbentrop's efforts, in November 1940, to obtain Soviet adherence to the Tripartite Pact led to a turning point in the Nazi-Soviet collaboration.

     As France was falling in June 1940, Spain assured Hitler that it would enter the war on Germany's side as soon as it had accumulated sufficient supplies, especially grain, to be able to resist the British blockade. This assurance was repeated by Ramon Serrano Su๑er, the Spanish foreign minister, brother-in-law of Se๑ora Franco, in Berlin on September 17th. About the same time, Admiral Raeder spoke to Hitler about the need to exclude Britain from the Mediterranean hy capturing Gibraltar and Suez. To these possible objectives Hitler added the idea of seizing some of the Canary or Cape Verde islands, or even one of the Azores, to be used as defensive points against any American attempt to land in French West Africa.

     About the same time, in September 1940, under pressure from pro-German collaborators led by Laval, Marshal P้tain removed Weygand from his post as minister of national defense and sent him to Africa as coordinator and commander in chief of the French colonial possessions there. Fearful that Weygand might cooperate with an American landing, Hitler at the middle of October began serious efforts to settle the western Mediterranean situation, once for all, in cooperation with Vichy France and Franco Spain.

     In anticipation of such an attempt, Britain in July 1940 had attacked and largely destroyed the major vessels of the French fleet at anchor at Mers-el-Kebir (near Oran, Algeria) and at Dakar (West Africa). With somewhat greater skill the French units at Alexandria, Egypt, were demobilized by agreement. These British attacks on French vessels and subsequent De Gaullist attacks with British support on Dakar (September 23rd) and elsewhere were probably unnecessary and served to drive the Vichy regime into the arms of the Germans. On June 24, 1940, the French Navy had been ordered to scuttle its vessels if there was any chance of their falling into control of foreigners (be they German, Italian, or British). The fact that Britain killed 1,400 French seamen by bombardment of anchored vessels greatly increased the normally anti-British bias of the Vichy regime and made it possible for the most anti-British members, such as Laval or Admiral Darlan, to eliminate the more moderate ones like General Weygand.

     Hitler's efforts to coordinate Fascist Italy, Franco Spain, and Vichy France in a single policy in the western Mediterranean was not an easy one, as Italy and Spain expected to satisfy their shameless ambitions at French expense, while Hitler trusted neither France nor Spain. On October 22, 1940, Hitler traveled by train to the Spanish frontier to confer with Franco and obtain a commitment to attack Gibraltar. Franco's demands were not modest. He wanted French Morocco, parts of Algeria and French West Africa, about half a million tons of grain, and the motor fuel and armaments necessary for the capture of Gibraltar. For this, as Hitler bitterly told Mussolini, Franco offered Germany his "friendship." Hitler also obtained Franco's promise to enter the war on Germany's side at some indefinite date in the future and to join the Tripartite Pact at once, if this could be kept secret.

     Disappointed in the south, Hitler's train returned northward across France. The following day, October 24, 1940, Hitler and Ribbentrop met P้tain and Laval at Montoire-sur-le-Loire and drew up a rather ambiguous agreement. This document proclaimed the signers’ joint interest in the speedy defeat of Britain and promised that France, in return for a favorable attitude toward the territorial ambitions of Italy and Spain, would be allowed to share in the booty of the disrupted British Empire at the end of the war so that the total overseas possessions of France would not be reduced in that area. Four days later, Laval was made foreign minister of the Vichy regime.

     At this point Hitler's disappointments began to flow over. Having just concluded unsatisfactory agreements with Spain and France, he received at Montoire a delayed message from Mussolini, forwarded from Berlin, announcing that Italy was about to attack Greece. Since Hitler and Ribbentrop had vetoed any attack on either Greece or Yugoslavia as early as July 7th, and had repeated this warning several times since, Hitler at once ordered his train from France to Florence to dissuade Mussolini from his projected attack on Greece. When the two leaders met in Florence, October 28, 1940, the Italian attack on Greece had already begun, so they restricted their discussion to other topics, such as the ingratitude of General Franco.

     During the summer of 1940, Mussolini's irascible disposition had not been improved by the failure of Italian ground forces against France, the meager results of the French-Italian armistice, the failure of the Italian Navy to disrupt British convoys to Malta and Alexandria, the complete collapse of the Italian Air Force, and a series of German vetoes against any Italian movement against Yugoslavia or Greece. The Duce’s efforts to attack Egypt overland from Libya were resisted by his generals for months. When Rodolfo Graziani finally attacked on September 13th, he advanced, without difficulty, a distance of seventy miles in five days, to Sidi Barrโni in Egypt. T here he stopped, and refused to go on.

     Thirsty for some success to console his wounded ego, the Duce of Fascism decided to attack Greece. The German military occupation of Romania was the final straw which broke his imperious patience. "Hitler always faces me with a fait accompli," he told Count Ciano. "This time I am going to pay him back in his own coin. He will find out from the newspapers that I have occupied Greece. In this way the equilibrium will be reestablished." The Italian generals were unanimously against the project, and had to be driven to it. In an outburst to Ciano, Mussolini threatened to go personally to Greece "to see the incredible shame of Italians who are afraid of Greeks."

     Unfortunately for Mussolini, his generals had better judgment than he had. The attack, which began from Albania on October 28th, was stopped completely within three weeks; the subsequent Greek counterattack carried deep into Albania, and Greek pressure continued throughout the winter.

     As promised in the guarantee of April 1939, Britain joined Greece against Italy at once, but its own weakness did not allow any substantial increase in its forces in the area. On November 11, 1940, twenty-one British planes made a torpedo attack on the chief units of the Italian fleet in Taranto harbor and sank three out of six battleships at a cost of two planes and one pilot killed. A month later, on December 7, 1940, Graziani's forces of 80,000 men in Egypt were suddenly attacked by General Archibald Wavell with 31,000 men and 225 tanks. In two months, at a cost of only 500 killed, Wavell captured 130,000 Italians with 400 tanks and 1,300 cannon, and advanced westward 600 miles to El Agheila. Shortly thereafter, in an equally brief period (February 1 l-April 6, 1941), Italian East Africa and Ethiopia were conquered and 100,000 Italian troops destroyed by a British imperial force which suffered only 135 killed.

     The Italian failures in Greece and Africa, along with Franco's refusal to attack Gibraltar, forced a considerable rearrangement of Hitler's plans. In the space of two weeks (December 7-21, 1940), Franco flatly refused to execute Operation Felix (December 7th), and, accordingly, this project was canceled (December 11th); Italy decided to ask for German and Bulgarian aid against Greece; the Nazi-Soviet rivalry in Bulgaria and Finland came to a head; and three new war directives were ordered by Hitler, operations Attila, Marita, and Barbarossa. Operation Attila (December 10th) sought partial compensation for the abandonment of Operation Felix by ordering an immediate occupation of all Vichy France, with a special effort to capture elements of the French fleet in Toulon, if French North Africa rebelled against the Vichy government. This plan was carried out when the Western Powers invaded North Africa in November 1942.

     The Italian appeal to Germany for aid against Greece (December 7th) led to a transformation of the relationship between the two Powers: Italy's status changed from that of an ally to that of a satellite. On December 1 8th Hitler promised to attack Greece from Bulgaria, but not before March 1941, at the earliest. He rejected a detailed Italian request for raw materials, on the ground that he had no way of knowing how these would be used; instead he suggested that large numbers of Italian laborers should be sent to Germany and there work up the raw materials into finished products which could then be sent to Italy to be used according to the advice of German "experts" stationed in Italy. For the immediate relief of Italy's military problems, Hitler refused to send any forces to Albania to fight Greece, but instead offered an armored force, under General Rommel, to fight in Libya, and a German air fleet (of about 500 planes) to be stationed in Sicily to protect Fascist convoys to Libya and to disrupt British convoys through the Mediterranean.

     The German intervention in the central Mediterranean in the early months of 1941 was a great success on the ground and in the air, but was not able to prevent the British from strengthening their position on the water. The first Malta convoy of 1941 was badly battered by the first intervention of the Luftwaffe; Britain's sole aircraft carrier in the eastern Mediterranean, Illustrious, was damaged so badly that it had to limp to the United States (by way of Suez and around Africa) for repairs; no other British convoy got through the Mediterranean for four months. On the other hand, Rommel's force was transported to Libya without loss.

     These two blows to Britain were somewhat balanced by a British naval victory over the Italians off Cape Matapan on March 28-29, 1941. With the loss of one man in one plane, Britain sank three cruisers and two destroyers and damaged a battleship. This battle is notable for the first use of radar-controlled gunnery at sea. With this innovation, at night, the opening salvo of six 15-inch guns by Warspite scored five hits; earlier in the engagement, in the daylight, the Italian battleship Vittorio Veneto fired more than ninety 15-inch shells without a hit. As a consequence of this battle, Mussolini ordered the Italian fleet not to operate beyond the range of Italian land-based fighter planes until an aircraft carrier could be built. Accordingly, the Italian Navy played no role in the subsequent struggle for Libya, Greece, and Crete.

     Rommel's arrival in Libya reversed the situation in North Africa. He had tanks and good air support against British forces which had been largely depleted by sending an armored division to Greece (landed at Piraeus on March 7th). This division and three infantry divisions were sent to Greece over the objections of the very able Greek commander in chief, General Alexander Papagos, who "thought that withdrawal of troops from success in Africa to certain failure in Europe was a strategic error." Striking at El Agheila with a German armored division supported by two Italian divisions on March 31, 1941, Rommel reached the Egyptian frontier on April 11th.

     In the meantime, Ribbentrop was engaged in involved diplomatic maneuvers. The Tripartite Pact of September 1940, in spite of Russia's suspicions, was really intended to frighten the United States to abstain from interference in the tumults of Eurasia. To strengthen this threat, Ribbentrop sought to obtain Russia's adherence to the Tripartite Pact and a Soviet-Japanese nonaggression pact which would free Japan in Asia to allow it to strike southward against Singapore. These maneuvers were a disaster for Germany. Futile efforts to obtain Soviet adherence to the Tripartite Pact merely succeeded in revealing the bitter German-Soviet rivalry in Bulgaria and Finland, while the successful Soviet-Japanese Nonaggression Pact of April 1 3, 1 94 1 made it possible to withdraw Soviet troops from the Far East in sufficient numbers to save Moscow from Hitler's attack on that city in November.

     During Molotov's visit to Berlin on November 12-15, 1940, Germany offered the Soviet Union a worldwide division of spheres of influence among the aggressor states: Italy would take North and East Africa; Germany would take western Europe, western and central Africa; Japan could have Malaya and Indonesia; while the Soviet Union could have Iran and India; Germany, Italy, and the Soviet Union would pursue a cooperative policy in the Near East to free Turkey from its British connections and obtain for Russia freer access to the Mediterranean through the Dardanelles. Hitler offered Molotov a picture of a brilliant, if remote, future:

     "After the conquest of England the British Empire would be apportioned as a gigantic world-wide estate in bankruptcy of 40 million square kilometers. In this bankrupt estate there would be for Russia access to the ice-free and really open ocean. Thus far, a minority of 45 million Englishmen had ruled 600 million inhabitants of the British Empire. He [Hitler] was about to crush this minority. Even the United States was actually doing nothing but picking out of this bankrupt estate a few items particularly suitable to the United States.... He wanted to create a world coalition of interested powers which would consist of Spain, France, Italy, Germany, Soviet Russia, and Japan and, would to a certain degree represent a coalition—extending from North Africa to Eastern Asia—of all those who wanted to be satisfied out of the British bankrupt estate."

     Molotov was only mildly interested in these grandiose schemes about spheres of interest, and seemed to have no ambitions in respect to the British Empire. Instead he wanted detailed answers to specific questions: Why were German troops stationed in Finland? Could not an accurate demarcation between Soviet and Nazi interests be drawn in Finland? Why could not the Nazi guarantee of Romania be balanced by a Soviet guarantee of Bulgaria, or, failing in this, the Romanian guarantee be canceled? What were the exact limits of Germany's New Order in Europe and of Japan's East Asian Sphere?

     After hours of discussion, during which the Germans evaded Molotov's questions about Finland and Bulgaria, Ribbentrop offered Russia a protocol covering five points: (1) the Soviet Union would join the Tripartite Pact; (2) the four Powers would "respect each other's natural spheres of influence"; (3) they would "undertake to join no combination of Powers and to support no combination of Powers which is directed against one of the Four Powers"; (4) the four respective spheres of influence would follow the vague German suggestions; and (5) the three European Powers would seek to detach Turkey from British influence and to open the Dardanelles to the free passage of Soviet warships.

     Molotov immediately presented Germany with additional proposals drawn up in a formal draft protocol. These added to the German suggestions five other points: (I) that German troops be withdrawn from Finland immediately, ( 2 ) that Bulgaria sign a mutual-assistance pact with the Soviet Union and hand over to it a base from which Russian naval and air forces could defend the Dardanelles, ( 3 ) that the area from Batum and Baku to the Persian Gulf be recognized as "a center of Soviet aspirations," (4) that Japan yield to the Soviet Union its oil and coal concessions in northern Sakhalin, and (5) that the prospective agreement with Turkey be expanded to include a Soviet military and naval base "on the Bosporus and Dardanelles" and a guarantee of Turkish independence and territorial integrity by all three Powers.

     Molotov's conditions for joining the Tripartite Pact enraged Hitler. Four weeks later he issued orders for Operation Barbarossa, a joint Finnish-German-Romanian attack on the Soviet Union. Before this could be carried out, however, the ambiguous situation on the German right flank, in the Balkans, had to be cleared up by Operation Marital The chief aims of this operation were to drive from the area British forces which had entered Greece in consequence of the Italian attack, and to prevent them from bombing the Romanian oil fields while Germany was occupied with Russia. The original plan called for a pincers movement into Greece from Bulgaria and Yugoslavia after these two countries had been brought into the Axis system by diplomatic activity.

     German forces moved steadily into Romania beginning in October 1940; four months later, Moscow was informed by Hitler that these occupying forces had reached “almost 700,000" men. On March 1st Bulgaria joined the Tripartite Pact, and these German forces began to occupy that country the same day.

     Yugoslavia did not succumb so easily. For almost six weeks, because of strong opposition in the country and in the Cabinet, Regent Prince Paul resisted the German demands. When Yugoslavia accepted and signed the Tripartite Pact at Vienna on March 25th, it was able to obtain promises of substantial concessions in return: freedom from any German military occupation, release from any promise of military support to Germany under the pact, and a promise of German support for Yugoslavia's desire for an outlet on the Aegean at Salonika.

     Soviet opposition to these German advances was somewhat indirect. There were vigorous protests against the movement of German troops into Romania and Bulgaria. Turkey was informed that Russia would abide fully by the Soviet-Turkish Nonaggression Pact of 1925, if Turkey became involved in hostilities with a third Power (meaning Germany). Most significant of all, a military coup d'้tat in Yugoslavia overthrew the Yugoslav regency and government on the night of March 26th-27th, replacing the regent, Prince Paul, as head of the state by the young King Peter and installing a less pliant Cabinet under General Dusan Simoviๆ. This new government signed a treaty of friendship and nonaggression with the Soviet Union on the night of April 5th-6th. Less than six hours later, Belgrade was subjected to a violent bombardment from the Luftwaffe, and thirty-three German divisions began to invade Yugoslavia and Greece. Both countries vv ere overrun within three weeks and were divided up among the jackal collaborators of Nazi Germany.

     From Bulgaria and Hungary, Yugoslavia was invaded by three German columns. The two satellite states followed along behind to occupy the areas allotted to them. Greek forces, overextended, into Albania in the west and outflanked by the German capture of Salonika in the east, fell hack southward, but were soon cut off from 68,000 British troops in Thessaly. On April 20th the Greek government advised the British to evacuate because the situation was hopeless, but the almost total destruction of the Piraeus from the air and the sudden capture of the Corinth Canal by German paratroopers made this operation very difficult. Without air protection, the British Navy evacuated 44,000 British troops from various beaches, landing 27,000 of them on the island of Crete.

     After a week of bitter mountain fighting, much of it hand-to-hand, with the German Air Force supreme in the sky, the British began to evacuate Crete. When the operation had reached "almost 700,000" men. On March 1st Britain had lost 55,000 men in Greece and Crete and had one battleship, seven cruisers, and thirteen destroyers sunk or damaged; it had lost all North Africa except Egypt itself, and had seen two more countries overrun by Germany. T he only possible consolation was to be found in the fact that Yugoslav and Greek resistance had delayed Hitler's attack on the Soviet Union by three weeks, and the heavy German losses in Crete (over 30 percent casualties) persuaded Hitler to renounce all airborne operations in the future. A somewhat more remote benefit rested in the fact that German brutality and Balkan stubbornness gave rise to extensive guerrilla operations which drained Axis strength in the mountains of Yugoslavia, Crete, and Greece.

     The loss of Crete gravely threatened the British position in the Near East. In Iraq, on April 3rd, a group of army officers led by Rashid Ali el-Gailani overthrew the government and seized power; a month later this new regime made an attack on British treaty installations in Mesopotamia. Admiral Darlan provided bases in Syria for German and Italian planes going to aid the rebels, and on May 28th signed "Paris Protocols" which almost took France into the war on the side of Germany. These agreements promised to the Iraqi rebels most French military supplies in Syria, and to provide Germany with air bases in Syria and at Dakar, to hand over transport facilities, including ports and railroads in Syria, the port of Bizerte in Tunisia, the railroad from Bizerte to Gab่s, French munitions for Germany, French ships for transporting supplies across the Mediterranean, French naval vessels for protecting such shipments, and a submarine base at Dakar. The violent objections of Weygand and other officers against these agreements and the vigorous protests of the United States persuaded Marshal P้tain to overrule Darlan and to cancel the agreements (June 6th).

     The rebellion in Iraq was overthrown in May, and a joint force of British and Free French supporters of De Gaulle conquered Syria and Lebanon in June. About the same time, by a tenacious defense of Malta and relentless attacks on Axis convoys to Libya, the British Navy sought to restore its control of the surface of the Mediterranean Sea. This made it necessary for the Axis, in spite of the growing demands of the Battle of the Atlantic and the Battle of Russia, to increase its air and underseas forces in the Mediterranean. In November 1941, 70 percent of Axis supplies for Libya were sunk. In September, Hitler sent the first German submarines (only six of them) to the Mediterranean, and in December he sent the Second Air Fleet of 500 planes under Marshal Albert Kesselring to Sicily. In November the British lost an aircraft carrier and a battleship to U-boats; the following month, in a daring personal exploit, the Italians sent three two-man human torpedoes into Alexandria harbor and sank the two British battleships left in the eastern Mediterranean.

     By June 1941, the attrition of British sea-power was becoming almost unbearable. With only a handful of operational U-boats, plus some support from surface raiders and land-based planes, the Axis sank, in the period from September 1939 to June 1941, a total of 1,738 merchant ships of a total tonnage of 7,118,112; in addition almost 3,000,000 tons were left damaged in ports. In buying supplies, chiefly from the United States, Britain had used up, by June 1941, almost two-thirds of its dollar assets, gold stocks, and marketable United States securities.

Chapter 53: American Neutrality and Aid to Britain

     When the European war began in September 1939, American public opinion was united in its determination to stay out. The isolationist reaction following American intervention in the First World War and the Paris Peace Conference in 1917-1919 had, if anything, become stronger in the 1930's. Historians and publicists were writing extensively to show that Germany had not been solely guilty of beginning the war in 1914 and that the Entente Powers had made more than their share of secret treaties seeking selfish territorial aims, both before the war and during the fighting.

     In 1934 a committee of the United States Senate investigated the role played by foreign loans and munition sales to belligerents in getting the United States involved in World War I. Through the carelessness of th Roosevelt Administration, this committee fell under the control of isolationists led by the chairman, Republican Senator Gerald P. Nye of North Dakota. As a result, the evidence before the committee was mobilized to show that American intervention in World War I had been pushed by bankers and munitions manufacturers ("merchants of death") to protect their profits and their interests [Foreign loans] in an Entente victory in the early years of the war. Under these influences American public opinion in the late 1930's had an uncomfortable feeling that American youths had been sent to die in 1917-1918 for selfish purposes concealed behind propaganda slogans about "the rights of small nations," "freedom of the seas," or "making the world safe for democracy." These feelings were reinforced in the late 1930's by growing disillusionment with the cynicism of authoritarian aggression and the weakness of British appeasement. All this helped to create a widespread determination to keep out of Europe's constant quarrels in the future and, above all, to avoid any repetition of what was regarded as the "error of 1917."

     The isolationist point of view had been enacted into American statute law, not only in the 1920's by restrictions on contact with the League of Nations and other international organizations but also later, in the Roosevelt administrations, in the so-called Neutrality Acts. These misnamed laws sought to avoid any repetition of the events of 1914-1917 by curtailing loans and munition sales to belligerent countries. Originally enacted in 1935, and revised in the next two years, these laws provided that export of arms and munitions to belligerents would cease whenever the President proclaimed a state to be a participant in a war outside the Americas. Any materials, including munitions, named by the President had to be sold on a "cash-and-carry" basis, with full payment and transfer of title before leaving the United States, and had to be transported on foreign ships. The "cash" but not the "carry" provision also applied to all other trade with belligerents. In addition, loans to belligerents were forbidden, and American citizens could be warned not to travel on belligerents' ships.

     An early statute, the Johnson Act of 1934, prevented loans to most European Powers by forbidding such loans to countries whose payments were in arrears on their war debts of World War I. Moreover, by a so-called "moral embargo" the Roosevelt Administration sought to restrict export of war materials on ethical or humanitarian grounds where no legal basis existed for doing so. Under this provision, for example, airplane manufacturers were asked not to sel1 planes to countries which had bombed civilians, as Italy had done in Ethiopia, Japan had done in China, or the Soviet Union had done in Finland.

     In the years 1935-1939 the neutrality laws proved to be quite un-neutral in practice, and a considerable encouragement to aggressors. The Italian attack on Ethiopia showed that an aggressor could arm at his leisure and then, by making an attack, prevent his victim from purchasing from the United States the means to defend himself. These laws gave a great advantage to a state like Italy, which had ships to carry supplies from the United States or which had cash to buy them here, in contrast with a country like Ethiopia which had no ships and little cash. By special legislation the Neutrality Acts had been extended to civil wars to cover the Spanish uprising of 1936 and had cut the recognized government of Spain off from purchasing munitions while the rebel regime continued to obtain such munitions from the Axis Powers.

     The obvious unfairness of these laws in the Sino-Japanese crisis of 1937 persuaded President Roosevelt to refrain from proclaiming a state of war in East Asia, although in fact it was clear to everyone that a war was going on there. Above all, by 1939, it was obvious that the Neutrality Acts were encouraging Nazi aggression, since Germany, by making war on Britain and France, could cut them off from American armaments. For this reason, the Roosevelt Administration tried to get the Congress to repeal the embargo provision of the Neutrality Acts but was unable to overcome isolationist opposition led by Senator William E. Borah of Idaho (July 1939)

     As soon as the war began in Europe, Roosevelt called a special session of Congress to revise the neutrality laws so that the Entente Powers could obtain supplies in the United States. Under the resulting revision of these acts, in November 1939, the embargo on munitions was repealed and all purchases by belligerents were placed on a "cash-and-carry" basis; loans to belligerent Powers were forbidden, Americans were excluded from travel on belligerent ships, and American ships were not to be armed, to carry munitions, or to go to any areas the President had proclaimed as combat areas. Under this last provision, all European ports on the Baltic or the Atlantic from Bergen south to the Pyrenees were closed to American ships. As the war spread, these areas were extended by proclamation.

     The collapse of France in June 1940, combined with the arrogant Japanese demands on the Netherlands East Indies and French Indochina (August-September 1940) and the signing of the Tripartite Pact, gave rise to a severe crisis in American foreign affairs. We have already indicated the danger to American security which could arise from the French fleet or Dakar falling into German hands or from a successful Nazi invasion of Britain. This danger raised the controversy over American foreign policy to a feverish pitch and widened the extremes of public opinion. These extremes ranged from the advocates of immediate intervention into the war on the side of Britain on the one hand to the defenders of extreme isolationism on the other. The extreme interventionists insisted that Britain could be saved only by an immediate American declaration of war on Germany, not because of America's ability to fight at once, which was recognized to be small, but because British morale needed such a declaration to provide it with the strength to go on fighting. The isolationists, on the other hand, argued that it was no concern of the United States whether Britain collapsed or survived, since Hitler had no desire to attack America, and, even if he did, the Western Hemisphere could withdraw into itself and survive with security and prosperity. Most American opinion, in the summer of 1940, was undecided or confused but tended to incline to a point of view somewhere between the two extremes.

     In order to unify America's political front, Roosevelt took two outstanding leaders of the Republican Party (both interventionists) into his Cabinet as secretaries of war and of the navy. Henry L. Stimson had been secretary of war in the Taft administration and secretary of state in the Hoover Administration, and Frank Knox had been the Republican candidate for Vice-President in 1936; both were promptly repudiated by the Republican leaders, but played a major role in the Roosevelt Administration thereafter. In combination with the secretary of the treasury (Henry Morgenthau), the secretary of state (Cordell Hull), and the secretary of the interior (Harold Ickes), this gave Roosevelt a preponderantly interventionist Cabinet. Roosevelt himself was sympathetic to this point of view, but his strong sense of political realism made him aware of the powerful currents of isolationism in American public opinion, especially in the Midwest. As a consequence, Roosevelt, who seemed to the outside public to be an advanced interventionist, was definitely a restraining influence inside the Administration. In his own mind his role clearly was to act as a brake on his Cabinet colleagues while he used the prestige and publicity of his office to educate American public opinion in the belief that America could not stand alone, isolated, in the world and could not allow Britain to be defeated if any acts of ours could prevent it.

     Outside the Administration, American public opinion was being bombarded by paid and volunteer agitators of all shades of opinion from inside the country and from abroad. Many of these were organized into lobbying and pressure groups of which the most notable were, on the interventionist side, the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies and, on the isolations" side, the America First movement. The controversy reached its peak during the presidential campaign of 1940 and subsequently, as Congress enacted into la\v the vital defensive measures desired by the third Roosevelt Administration..

     The international crisis ... [gave] Roosevelt [the opportunity] to violate the constitutional precedent against a third term. In spite of the fact that the Republican candidate, Wendell Willkie, was in general agreement with Roosevelt's position on foreign affairs, his desire to win the election had led him to indulge in what he subsequently called "campaign oratory" and to make violent accusations against his opponent. Among others, he assured the American people that Roosevelt's reelection meant that "we will be at war." To counteract these charges and to win back antiwar voters who might have been attracted by the generally isolationist outlook of the Republican Party, especially of its senior congressional leaders, Roosevelt replied with some campaign oratory of his own. Some of his assurances were thrown back in his face later: in New York he said, "We will not send our army, navy or air forces to fight in foreign lands outside of the Americas, except in case of attack"; and in Boston he said most emphatically, "I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again: Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars."

     This "campaign oratory" on both sides was based on the general recognition that the overwhelming majority of Americans were determined to stay out of war, but the confusion in the minds of this majority was revealed on numerous occasions, as on October 5, 1940, when a Gallup Poll of public opinion showed that 70 percent of Americans felt it was more important to defeat Hitler than to keep out of war. This poll was close enough to Roosevelt's own sentiments for him to feel justified in taking any actions which would increase the chances of a Hitler defeat and improve the ability of America to defend itself.

     The fall of France raised the problem of American defense in an acute form. The American army and air force were pathetically weak, while the navy was adequate to its tasks only in the Pacific. To remedy these deficiencies it was agreed, in July 1940, to seek an army of 1,400,000 men and an air force of 18,000 planes by April 1942, and a "two-ocean" navy increased by 1,3 2 5,000 tons of ships as soon as possible. These objectives could not be achieved, in view of the slowness of American mobilization, both economic and military, and were made even more unattainable by the constant demands of Britain, China, Greece, and others for military equipment as soon as it came off the production line. Two months after these goals had been set, an official memorandum estimated that the United States had no more than 55,000 men in its army and 189 planes in its air force ready for immediate action (September 25, 1940).

     As the military forces of the country slowly grew, a series of strategic plans were drawn up to fix the way in which these forces would be used. All these plans decided that Germany was the major danger, witl1 Japan of secondary importance, and, accordingly, that every effort, including actual warfare, should be used to defeat Germany and that, until this goal was achieved, every effort must be made to postpone any showdown of strength with Japan. The priority of a German defeat over a Japanese defeat was so firmly entrenched in American strategic thinking that, as early as November, 1940, it was seriously considered that it might be necessary, if Japan attacked the United States, for the United States to make war on Germany in order to retain this order of priority. As events turned out, Germany's declaration of war on the United States four days after the Japanese attack saved the United States from the need to attempt something which American public opinion would never have condoned—an attack on Germany after we had been attacked by Japan.

     Although $17.7 billion had been appropriated by the American government for re-armaments by October 1940, the actual production of armaments remained insignificant until 1942. There were several reasons for this slow progress. In the first place, the governmental side of the rearmament effort was not centralized.... Instead, similar and conflicting powers were scattered about among various administrators or were granted to unwieldy committees made up of conflicting personalities, while the really vital powers of duress over labor, industry, or material priorities were largely nonexistent. In the second place, industry was very reluctant, in view of the recent economic depression with its great volume of unused capital equipment, to build new plant or new equipment for defense manufacture, unless the government gave them such concessions in regard to prices, taxes, or plant depreciation that the new equipment would cost the corporation little or nothing. Even then the more monopolistic corporations (which formed the overwhelming majority of the corporations with defense contracts) were reluctant to expand production facilities, since this would jeopardize price and market relationships in the postwar period.

     Accordingly, most industrialists, especially the largest ones, who were in closest contact with the government, rejected the Administration's plans for defense production as grandiose and impossible. This was most emphatic following Roosevelt's statement in May 1940 that America's goal was to produce 50,000 planes a year. Although the industry was almost unanimous in calling this a "fantastic" figure, issued only as a "New Deal propagandist trick," America's plane production in the next five years was about six times this figure, and reached 96,000 in 1944. These results were achieved because the government paid for nine-tenths of the new factories and compelled modern mass-production methods to be adopted by what was still, even in 1941, a handicraft industry.

     In addition to the reluctance to expand capacity, both industry and labor w ere reluctant to convert existing equipment from peacetime production to war production at a time when government spending was creating a level of peacetime demand and peacetime profits such as had not been known in many years. Businessmen accepted war contracts but continued to allocate capacity, materials, and labor forces to civilian products because these were more profitable, satisfied old customers who were expected to remain customers in the postwar period, and required no conversion of capacity or disruption of distribution facilities.

     This was particularly true of the automobile industry, which refused to convert or even to give up the unnecessary luxury of annual model changeovers until, in January 1942, the government ended pleasure-car manufacture for the duration of the war. But as a result of reluctance to do this earlier, about two years of wartime production by the automobile industry was lost and more pleasure cars were manufactured in 1941 than in almost any year in history. In December 1940, Walter P. Reuther, head of the United Automobile Workers, suggested that the unused capacity of the automobile industry (which he estimated at 50 percent) be used to produce airplanes; this was rejected by both airplane and automobile manufacturers. The latter insisted that only 10 or 15 percent of their machine tools could be used in the manufacture of munitions. After the forced conversion of 1942, 66 percent of these machine tools were used in this way, and the automobile industry eventually built two-thirds of all the combat airplane engines produced in the United States between July 1940 and August 1945.

     In most industries the government had little or no authority to compel defense contracts to be carried out before civilian contracts, with the result that the latter were generally given preference until 1942. Even in such a vital product as machine tools, no effective system of compulsory priorities for defense was set up until May 1942. This was so typical of the war mobilization that it can be said with assurance that no real mobilization was established until after June 1942. A year later, by July 1943, there had been an astonishing increase. We produced only 16 light tanks in March 1941, and these were too light for service in Europe; our first medium tank (the General Grant) was finished in April 1941, but thirty months later, late in 1943, we were turning out 3,000 tanks a month. In July 1940, the United States produced 350 combat planes, and in March 1941, could do no better than 506 such planes, but by December 1942, we produced 5,400 planes a month, and in August 1943, reached 7,500. A similar situation existed in shipbuilding. In all of 1939 the United States built only 28 ships totaling 342,000 tons, and in 1940 could raise this to no more than 53 ships of 641,ooo tons. In September 194 l, when the German U-boats were aiming to sink 700,000 tons a month, the United States completed only 7 ships of 64,450 tons. But among those seven ships of September 1941 was the first "Liberty ship," a mass-production model largely based on a British design. Two years later, in September 1943, the United States launched 155 ships, aggregating 1,700,000 tons, and was in a position to continue at this rate of five ships a day, or 19 million tons a year, indefinitely.

     It must always be remembered that these impressive figures were reached almost two years after the attack on Pearl Harbor at the end of 1941, and that for two years after the fall of France the United States faced a critical diplomatic crisis with almost no military resources to fall back on or to meet the piteous appeals for aid which came from Britain, China, Greece, Turkey, Sweden and dozens of other countries. Except for Britain, most of these appeals received little satisfaction. China, for example, received only 48 planes in the first eight months of 1940 and only 59 million worth of all kinds of arms and munitions in the whole year 1940. Of the 2,251 combat planes produced in the United States from July 7, 1940, to February 1, 1941, 1,512 went to Britain and 607 went to our own army and navy.

     Boxed in between the steady advance of authoritarian aggression, the inadequacy of American war production, the appeals of the aggressors' potential victims, and the outraged howls of American isolationists, the Roosevelt Administration improvised a policy which consisted, in almost equal measure, of propagandist public statements, tactical subterfuges, and hesitant half-steps. In September 1940, in spite of the adverse effect it might have on Roosevelt’s chances in the November election, the Administration persuaded the Congress to enact a Selective Service Act to build up the manpower of the armed forces through compulsion. It provided for one year of training for 900,000 men, and stipulated that they must not be used outside the Western Hemisphere.

     In the same month, September 1940, Roosevelt proclaimed a limited National Emergency and, by executive fiat, gave fifty old destroyers of World War I to Britain in return for ninety-nine-year leases of naval and air bases in British possessions in this hemisphere from Newfoundland to Trinidad.

     The opening of a new session of Congress in January 1941 gave Roosevelt an opportunity to state the aims of America's foreign policy. He did so in the famous "Four Freedoms" speech: America was looking forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms: freedom of speech and expression, freedom of every person to worship God in his own way, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. In casting about for some way in which America could contribute to these ends while still remaining out of the war, and without enraging the isolationists completely, the Roosevelt Administration, in the early months of 1941, came up with a number of procedures which they summed up in the phrases "America as the Arsenal of Democracy" and "Lend-Lease."

     The Arsenal of Democracy idea meant that America would do all it could to supply armaments and essential supplies to countries resisting aggressors, especially to Britain. The British side of this idea was reflected in a public statement of Winston Churchill’s: "Give us the tools and we'll finish the job." These statements are of historical significance because, even as they were being made, the military experts in both America and Britain were trying to persuade the political leaders that material contributions from the United States to Britain, no matter how large, would not be sufficient: American fighting men would also be needed.

     The Arsenal of Democracy project, even if not adequate to defeat Hitler by itself, faced the tremendous obstacles of Britain’s inability to pay and Britain's inability to ensure that war materials from the United States could be delivered in England. These two problems occupied much of Roosevelt's attention in 1941, the one in the months January to March and the other in the months March to December.

     At the outbreak of war in September 1939, Britain had about $4,500,000,000 in assets which could be converted readily into dollars to buy supplies in the United States (gold, dollar exchange, or American securities). In the first sixteen months of the war, Britain earned another $2,000,000,000 of dollars from sales of gold or of those goods, like Scotch whiskey or English woolens, which America was willing to buy. But in that sixteen months, Britain paid out nearly $4,500,000,000 for American goods and placed orders for about $2,500,000,000 more, so that the year 1941 opened with Britain's uncommitted dollar reserves down to about $500,000,000. In the first few months of that year 1941, Britain was selling United States securities (which had been taken over from British subjects) at a rate of $10,000,000 a week. It was clear that Britain's ability to pay in dollars for urgently needed supplies was reaching the end. This end could not be postponed by means of loans, since they were forbidden by the Neutrality Acts and the Johnson Act. Moreover, the experience of the First World War had shown that loans left a most unhappy postwar legacy.

     To Roosevelt's ... mind it seemed foolish to allow monetary considerations to stand as an obstacle in the way of self-defense (as he regarded the survival of Britain). Rather, he felt that the resources of war should be pooled between the United States and Britain so that each could use what it needed from a common store. He emphasized that Englishmen were already dying in our defense and that the British had already given us hundreds of millions of dollars to build factories and machines to manufacture planes, engines, ships, or tanks; they were also giving us, without cost, vital secrets in radar and submarine detection, our first successful liquid-cooled airplane engine (the Rolls-Royce "Merlin," built by Packard in a factory constructed with British money and used in our best escort fighter plane, the P-51 Mustang), many secret features incorporated in the engines of our B-24 (Liberator) bombers, and the Whittle jet engine (which was later adapted to produce the General Electric Company's jet engine used in the P-80 Shooting Star).

     As early as December 17, 1940, Roosevelt expressed his point of view to the American people in the following characteristic statement: "Suppose my neighbor's house catches fire, and I have a length of garden hose four or five hundred feet away. If he can take my garden hose and connect it up with his hydrant, I may help him put out the fire. Now what do I do? I don't say to him before that operation, 'Neighbor, my garden hose cost me $15; you have to pay me $15 for it.' What is the transaction that goes on? I don't want $15—I want my garden hose back after the fire is over...." A bill embodying these ideas was introduced in the Congress on January 10, 1941 as H.R. 1776, and became law two months later as the Lend-Lease Act.

     During these two months, debate raged both on Capitol Hill and throughout the nation, with the isolationists using every possible argument against it. Senator Burton K. Wheeler, who had been vice-presidential nominee on a third-party ticket in 1924 and had become increasingly isolationist and reactionary with the passing years, said that the bill would "plow under every fourth American boy." Other opponents argued that Britain had tens of billions in concealed dollar assets and that Lend-Lease was merely a clever trick for foisting the costs of Britain’s war on the backs of American taxpayers. Still others insisted that Lend-Lease was an un-neutral act which would arouse German rage and eventually involve the American people in a war they had no need to get in. The bill finally passed by a largely party-line vote; in the House of Representatives this vote was 260 - 161, with only 25 Democrats voting against it and only 24 Republicans voting for it. It provided that the President could "sell, transfer title to, exchange, lease, lend, or otherwise dispose of . . . any defense article" to any nation whose defense he found vital to the defense of the United States; the payment could be made to the United States by any "payment or repayment in kind or property or any other direct or indirect benefit which the President deems satisfactory." By November 1941, $14.3 billion had been provided for carrying out these provisions.

     The Lend-Lease Act was to expire in two years. The change in American public opinion can be judged from the fact that it was renewed in March 1943 by a vote of 476-6 in the House and 82-0 in the Senate.

     In spite of the large appropriations for Lend-Lease provided in 1941, it moved little additional supplies to any fighting nation before 1942. The American productive system was almost completely clogged up with unfilled orders which had been placed previously by either the British or the American governments. When the Soviet Union came into the war in consequence of Germany's attack in June 1941, no additional outlet was provided for Lend-Lease goods by this event, because American public opinion was too strongly anti-Communist to allow the Soviet Union to partake of Lend-Lease benefits. Only at the end of the year was Russia admitted to these benefits.

     Shortly afterward the productive log jam in war industries was broken by the so-called Victory Program of August 1941. This program ended the attempt to build a war-productive system out of the surplus capacity of the peacetime civilian industrial system, and courageously faced the issue that adequate economic mobilization for war could be achieved only if it were based on three fundamental principles: (1) civilian production must he curtailed to provide labor, materials, and capital for war industry; (2) any adequate war industry requires a great increase in investment in new industrial capacity; and (3) economic mobilization is impossible unless there is some degree of centralized control by the government and some degree of duress on business, labor, and consumers.

     As part of this effort, Roosevelt at the end of August 1941 set up a new agency of the government, the Supply Priorities and Allocations Board, which, while it had all the weaknesses of a committee organization in contrast with a single executive organization, began, for the first time, to face the fact that there could be no real economic mobilization without a single over-all plan of priorities and allocations among the many different groups demanding access to economic resources. Behind this whole effort toward economic mobilization w as a secret decision of Roosevelt's military advisers, made in the summer of 1941, that the war could not be won unless the United States planned eventually to raise the number of men in its armed forces to 8,000,000.

     An 8,000,000-man army looked very remote in the summer of 1941 as the 900,000 draftees provided by the Selective Service Act of 1940 approached the end of their year of training and eagerly began to prepare to disperse to their civilian activities again. To have permitted this would undoubtedly have inflicted a dangerous blow to the preparedness program. Accordingly, the Roosevelt Administration asked the Congress to extend the terms of service of these men. At once the isolationists were in full cry, and this time they found a greater response in American public opinion. It seemed to many to be very unfair to keep in service for several years men who, when they reported for service, had been assured that they need serve for only one year. The supporters of the extension argued that America's preparedness and security must take precedence over any such mistaken assurances. An Act extending the period of selective-service training by an additional eighteen months passed the Congress on August 12, 1941, by the narrow margin of one vote, 203-202. Once again, the Republicans were solidly opposed to the Act, only 21 voting for it, while 133 voted against it.

     As the voting on the extension of selective service was being counted, the historic Atlantic Conference of Roosevelt and Churchill was being held on the battleship Prince of Wales in a small harbor in Newfoundland. After four days of conferences (August 9-12, 1941), the chiefs of government of the United States and Britain issued the so-called Atlantic Charter as their first formal enunciation of war aims. According to this document they renounced all ambitions toward territorial aggrandizement for themselves and, for others, hoped to obtain territorial settlements and forms of government in accord with the freely expressed wishes of the peoples concerned. They also aspired to see equal access to trade and raw materials for all states, international economic collaboration, freedom of the seas, and postwar disarmament..

     Certain differences of outlook which emerged from the discussions between the British and Americans were either omitted or compromised in the public announcement. The British were still in favor of imperial preference and a certain measure of bilateralism, commercial discrimination, and economic autarchy in international trade, while Secretary Hull's influence set the American delegation solidly in opposition to these and in favor of multilateral, nondiscriminatory trade relations on most-favored-nations principles. A second difference, which was soon pushed into the background, rested in the contrast between Churchill's desire for some statement of preference for a long-range postwar plan for an international organization to replace the League of Nations, and Roosevelt's preference for an immediate postwar system based on police action by the few Great Powers, or even by a simple Anglo-American partnership. At any rate, Roosevelt was too reluctant to rouse the unsleeping dogs of isolationism to allow the Atlantic Conference to issue any public statement on international organization.

     The Atlantic Charter was issued to the world as soon as the conference ended; at least equal in importance were the simultaneous military and strategic conversations which were kept secret. Once again, these decided that the defeat of Germany must have priority over the defeat of Japan, but there was a wide difference of opinion on how Germany could be defeated. The British had no plans or expectations for making any large-scale invasion of Europe with ground forces. Instead, they hoped that Germany could be worn down to defeat, after a very long war, by blockade, aerial bombardment, subversive activity, and propaganda. They wanted large numbers of heavy bombers, and hoped for American intervention in the war, as soon as possible, largely for its propaganda value against German morale. Apparently, no one pointed out that a German defeat by British methods would leave the Soviet armies supreme in all Europe, with no Axis, Anglo-American, or local forces to oppose them.

     On military grounds alone, the Americans at the Atlantic Conference rejected the British theories. They rejected any immediate American intervention into the war on the grounds that the United States was not sufficiently armed to be effective. The only immediate contribution which the United States could add by intervention, they felt, would be in escorting convoys of British supply vessels to Europe. The American military experts rejected the idea that Germany could be defeated by blockade, propaganda, air attacks, or by anything less than a large-scale invasion by ground forces. For this purpose the War Department in Washington was planning an army of 8,000,000 men.

     An additional difference of opinion between the British and Americans emerged from the discussions regarding Japanese aggression. The British wanted a joint or parallel message to Japan, accompanied, if possible, by threatening naval movements, to demand a cessation of aggressive Japanese actions. The Americans were reluctant, fearing to take any steps which might speed up Japanese aggression and thus distract attention from the German problem; Roosevelt even said that continued peace with Japan was so essential that "he would turn a deaf ear if Japan went into Thailand, but not if they went into the Dutch East Indies." In the latter case he envisaged nothing more than economic warfare for a considerable period.

     Immediately following the Atlantic Conference, Roosevelt was concerned with two major European problems, leaving the rising tension with Japan in Hull's hands. The two problems were naval escort of convoys to Britain and military supplies for the Soviet Union.

     During the spring, summer, and autumn of 1941, Roosevelt was under constant pressure from many of his Cabinet to grab the bull by the horns and establish American naval escort of supply ships to Britain. At first he yielded to this pressure, but by July he became convinced that American public opinion would not accept convoy escort all the way to Britain, and substituted for this escort to the meridian of Iceland, with the argument that this was still within the Western Hemisphere. Orders to organize convoy escorts all the way to Britain had been issued on February 26th. To protect these, an Atlantic Fleet, under Admiral King, had been created on February 1st. This was reinforced by three battleships, an aircraft carrier, four cruisers, and numerous destroyers, transferred from the Pacific in May. In March, Roosevelt ordered two destroyer bases and two seaplane bases to be constructed witl1 Lend-Lease funds in northern Ireland and Scotland. At the same time, he gave Britain ten Coast Guard cutters to be based in Iceland, and seized possession of sixty-five Axis and Danish ships anchored in American harbors. A month later, Greenland was declared to be in the Western Hemisphere, and the United States took over its protection and began to construct bases.

     The Red Sea was declared not to be a combat area, thus reopening it to American merchant ships carrying supplies to Egypt (April 10, 1941). The financial assets of the Axis Powers and of all occupied and belligerent countries in Europe were frozen, and Axis consulates in the United States were closed (June 14-16, 1941). American flying schools were made available to train British aviators. Four thousand marines who had been ordered to occupy the Azores in anticipation of a Nazi move toward Gibraltar or the Atlantic islands were released from this assignment when Hitler moved eastward in June. Accordingly, they were reassigned to occupy Iceland, which they did, in agreement with the Icelandic government, in July.

     In the meantime, hy presidential proclamation, the American Neutrality Zone which had been defined in September 1939 as west of 60ฐ W. longitude was extended to 26ฐ W. longitude, the meridian of Iceland. The United States Navy was ordered to follow all Axis raiders or submarines west of this meridian, broadcasting their positions to the British. On July 19, 1941, American naval convoys were ordered as far eastward as this meridian. The first such convoy left on September 16, 1941. In practice, American escort vessels covered about 1,200 miles of distance in the mid-Atlantic between 52ฐ W. and 26ฐ W., picking up from Canadian escorts south of Newfoundland and delivering their charges to British escorts south of Iceland. This gave the Canadians and British routes of about 650 miles to cover on either end. By this time, Axis submarines had moved from the waters off the British Isles to the mid-Atlantic, where they were operating by a "wolf-pack" technique. Under this method, as soon as a convoy was discovered, a dozen or more submarines would assemble in its path and attack on the surface at night. This proved to be a very effective method, especially against inexperienced American escorts, which maintained too rigid stations too close to their convoys. But this method had the great weakness that it required extensive radio communication with Germany for orders; this revealed the locations of the U-boats, and eventually became a fatal weakness.

     American naval escort of British convoys could not fail to lead to a "shooting war" with Germany. The Roosevelt Administration did not shrink from this probability. The growing tension with Japan combined with the American strategic decision that Germany must be defeated before Japan to compel an increasingly active policy in the Atlantic in order to avoid a situation where we would be at war in the Pacific while still at peace with Germany. Fortunately for the Administration's plans, Hitler played into its hands by declaring war on the United States on December 11, 1941. By that date "incidents"' were becoming more frequent.

     On October 17th the United States destroyer Kearney suffered casualties when it was torpedoed; two weeks later the destroyer Reuben James was blown to pieces, with great loss of life, by a chain of explosives from a German torpedo, its own forward magazine, and its own depth charges. On November 10th an American escort of eleven vessels, including the carrier Ranger, picked up a convoy of six vessels, including America's three largest ocean liners, the America, the Washington, and the Manhattan, with 20,000 British troops, and guarded them from off Halifax to India and Singapore. Pearl Harbor was attacked as this convoy was passing South Africa, and the Washington eventually reached home by crossing the Pacific to California.

     Many of the activities of the American Navy in the summer of 1941 were known not at all or w ere known only very imperfectly to the American public, but it would seem that public opinion generally supported the Administration's actions. In September, Roosevelt sought congressional action to repeal the section of the Neutrality Acts forbidding the arming of merchant vessels. This was done on October 17th, the vote in the House going 259-138, with only 21 Democrats opposing the change and only 39 Republicans supporting it. On that same day the Kearney was torpedoed. Two weeks later all the essential portions of the Neutrality Acts were repealed (November 13th). The vote in the House, 212-194, once again showed the partisan nature of the Administration's foreign policy, for only 22 of 159 Republican votes were for repeal. By this vote the United States "resumed its traditional right to send its ships wherever it pleased and to arm and protect them in every way possible." This meant that open naval warfare with Germany was in the immediate future.

     During this period, from June to December 1941, Roosevelt was also kept occupied by the problem of military aid for the Soviet Union. The Nazi forces which flung themselves on Russia, on June 22, 1941, were at the peak of their powers, and the Soviet Union was soon in grave need of any aid it could get. Churchill ... was willing to accept anyone, "even the devil," as he put it himself, as an ally against the Nazi menace, and to extend whatever aid was available to such an ally. Roosevelt shared these ideas to a considerable extent, but the American people were suspicious of Bolshevism, and American military experts were generally agreed that the Soviet Union could not hold out against Hitler long enough for any aid to be effective. Accordingly, it was several months before Roosevelt was in a position to make Lend-Lease supplies available to the Kremlin.

Chapter 54: The Nazi Attack on Soviet Russia, 1941-1942

     In planning his attack on Soviet Russia, Hitler used the customary German strategic concepts; these gave priority to the destruction of enemy armies over the seizure and occupation of enemy territory and resources. This destruction was to be achieved (and quickly achieved, according to Hitler), in a series of gigantic pincers movements of the double-arm type which had worked so well against Poland in 1939. In these operations a huge outer pincers of armored-division spearheads and a simultaneous but smaller inner pincers of infantry-division columns would enclose a mass of enemy troops, the armored pincers cutting a large segment of these off from their supplies and communications while the infantry columns would slice up the enclosed mass of enemy forces into smaller masses willing to surrender. This method was used, again and again, with extraordinary success against the Soviet armies, after June 1941, enclosing, and frequently capturing, hundreds of thousands of Russians at a time, but the very size of the operations used up Nazi men, materials, and (above all) time without inflicting any fatal blow on the Soviet capacity to resist.

     Because of these German strategic ideas, no geographical objectives were given primary priority in the German plans. Secondary priority Noms given, at Hitler's insistence, to the capture of Leningrad in the north and to the capture of Kiev and the Caucasus to the south. These geographical objectives were set in order to link up with the Finns and cut the Murmansk railway in the north, and to capture, or at least cut off from Russian armies, the Soviet oil centers in the south. The capture of Moscow was, by Hitler's direct orders, given only tertiary priority in the German strategic plans.

     The German generals disagreed with Hitler's geographic conceptions, and insisted that Moscow be made the chief geographic goal of the German advance because it was the vital railroad center of European Russia; it was also an important industrial center, and contained the heart and brain of the whole Soviet autocracy. Its capture would, according to the generals, cripple Russia's ability to shift troops and supplies north and south and would thus make it possible to isolate, for easier conquest, the Leningrad or the Kiev fronts. Moreover, its capture would paralyze the over-centralized system of Soviet tyranny, and strike such a blow to Bolshevik prestige that it would probably be unable to survive.

     In the first three months of the campaign of 1941 and for all of the campaign of 1942, Hitler resisted the pressure from his generals and insisted that the maximum German effort should be devoted to the two areas originally set in the north and the south. Only in September 1941, when it was too late for a successful assault on Moscow, did Hitler recognize that his own geographic objectives could not be achieved, with the result that he fell back on his generals' advice for an attack on Moscow. This dispersal and shifting of geographic objectives, combined with German inability to destroy the Soviet armies completely, brought Germany to the point which Hitler had always insisted must be avoided above all else: a two-front war of attrition by a Germany which was nowhere near total economic mobilization.

     German authorities estimated that Russia had over 200 divisions (of which 30 to 35 were in the Far East), with 8,000 aircraft of diverse quality, and 115,000 tanks, mostly light or obsolescent. On the European front they expected to encounter 125 infantry, 25 cavalry, 25 motorized, and at least 5 armored divisions. Against these Russian forces, Hitler planned to hurl 141 German and 33 satellite (Finnish, Romanian, Italian, Hungarian, Slovak, and Croat) divisions. The German forces included 19 (half-size) armored divisions with 3,2oo tanks, 14 motorized divisions, and 3 air fleets with 2,000 planes. These forces were organized into three army groups (northern, central, and southern) aiming in the general direction of Leningrad (500 miles away), Moscow (750 miles), and the lower Volga (Stalingrad, 800 miles away). Each army group consisted of infantry and panzer armies placed alternately across the front, in order to operate the double-clawed pincer movements we have mentioned. The whole German front, from north to south, had seven infantry armies and four panzer armies organized in this alternating fashion, with two infantry armies forming each end of the line, and the satellite forces on the extreme flanks (Finns to the north, the others to the south).

     The Soviet Union was warned of the impending Nazi attack from Washington and London, as well as by its own spies, and had the exact date of the assault almost as soon as it was set in Berlin. An anti-Nazi German in Berlin gave a copy of Hitler's secret directive for Operation Barbarossa to the American commercial attache within three weeks of its formulation; this was sent to the Kremlin by Secretary of State Hull early in March 1941. All these helpful moves were received with ill grace by the Soviet leaders, and those who offered them were treated as troublemakers. Moscow made no effort to escape the Nazi pincers by withdrawing its forces from their exposed frontier positions, but continued to hope that its abject economic collaboration with Hitler would lead him to cancel the attack orders, in recognition of the fact that he could obtain more, in an economic sense, from collaborating in peace than from conquest in war. This hope was futile, because Hitler had such a gigantic disrespect for Russia's fighting powers that he expected a complete German victory in about six weeks. So convinced was Hitler on this point that he flatly rejected, in June, again in July, and once again in August, suggestions from the chief of the Great General Staff that any preparations be made for fighting in winter. For this refusal Germany was to suffer bitterly.

     Hitler's estimates about the weakness of the Soviet armies and the brevity of the approaching campaign were generally shared by military men throughout the world. In the United States, Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall believed that Germany would be victorious in six weeks.

     The Nazi armies sprang forward at dawn on Sunday, June 22, 1941. At the end of five days two envelopments had been closed and on the following day a third was completed. In these pockets there were such large Russian forces that the perimeters could not be closed completely, and broken Russian units escaped through the German lines. Nevertheless, from these pockets were taken 289,874 prisoners, 2,585 tanks, and 1,149 cannon. By July 2sth several more encirclements had been completed on the central front (yielding 185,487 more prisoners with 2,030 tanks and 1,918 guns).

     At this point a crisis arose in the German High Command. All the great successes we have mentioned were on the central front, while the northern and southern fronts, which Hitler wanted emphasized, were advancing much more slowly. This resulted from the fact that Hitler's generals did not share the Fhrer's strategic ideas, and had disposed the German forces so that, in effect, they overruled his directives and gave preponderance to their own goal, the capture of Moscow. For this reason they had given two of their four panzer armies to Field Marshal Fedor von Bock's Army Group Center, and one to each of the other army groups. Since the Russians had massed their strength in the south, German Army Group South, under Gerd von Rundstedt, had only 800 tanks, while his Soviet opponent, Marshal S. M. Bud๋nny had 2,000.

     The brilliant success of the German Army Group Center led the German General Staff and Hitler to change their minds, but in opposite directions. The weakness of the Soviet defense persuaded Bock to adopt a plan, advanced by Guderian, that Army Group Center abandon further efforts at pincers encirclements and send its armored units on a straight all-out drive to Moscow, one hundred miles away. About the same time, Hitler decided to strengthen the advance of Army Groups North and South, by directing the efforts of the two panzer armies of Army Group Center away from their own front and onto the fronts of the two flanking army groups. This would have left Army Group Center with infantry forces only, thus slowing its advance and restricting its operations to tactical mopping-up activities, but it would have increased the ability of the flanking army groups to close pincer envelopments by giving each of them the use of two panzer armies. By Directive No. 33, on July 19th, Hitler issued orders for this change. Although the generals resisted and stalled in carrying out these instructions, the advance on Moscow was broken.

     General Franz Halder wrote in his diary on July 26th: "The Fhrer's analysis, which at many points is unjustly critical of the Field Command, indicates a complete break with the strategy of large operational conceptions. You cannot beat the Russians with operational successes, he argues, because they simply do not know when they are defeated. On that account it will be necessary to destroy them bit by bit, in small encircling actions of a purely tactical character." Against these ideas of Hitler's his generals argued for weeks, in vain. On August 21st, Hitler issued Directive No. 34. It began: "The proposals of the Army High Command for the continuance of the operations in the east, dated August 18, do not conform to my intentions.... The principal object is not the capture of Moscow." In place of this, it set the following objectives: to seize the Crimea and the Dombas coal mines, to cut off the Caucasian oil supplies, to isolate Leningrad, and to make direct contact with the Finns.

     As a consequence of the shift of emphasis to the south, German Army Group South completed a colossal envelopment east of Kiev (August 24-September 21). In a great bag 200 miles wide, the Germans captured 665,000 prisoners with 3,718 cannon and 884 tanks. Hitler called this "the greatest battle in the history of the world"; his chief of staff called it "the greatest strategic blunder of the Eastern Campaign."

     At this point in the campaign a curious phenomenon appeared: large numbers of anti-Stalinist Russians began to surrender to the Nazis. Most of these were Ukrainians, and the majority were eager to fight with the Nazis against the Stalinist regime of the Soviet Union. If the Nazis had been willing to cooperate with this movement, and to treat these deserters in a decent fashion, it is extremely likely that the flood of Russian deserters would have become an overwhelming torrent and the Moscow regime would have collapsed. Instead, the Nazis, led by Hitler, resolutely refused to adopt the role of "Liberator of the Slavs," and instead insisted on playing the role of "Annihilator of the Slavs." The arrogance, sadism, and racism of the Nazi system soon presented itself in a form as hateful to the average Slav as Stalinism itself.

     As soon as the conquering German armies seized Soviet territory, various Nazi and satellite organizations of exploitation, of enslavement, and of extermination moved in, led by the SS. Prisoners of war and civilians were rounded up by the millions and deported to German slave-labor camps where they were starved, frozen, and beaten into subhuman derelicts at the very time that they were expected to work, fifteen or more hours a day, on Nazi war production. Those inhabitants of conquered areas who escaped deportation or imprisonment generally were deprived of most of their possessions, especially of their food stores and livestock. All industrial equipment which had not been removed by the retreating Soviet armies was stolen or destroyed by the Nazis. The deserters who wished to fight with the Nazis against Stalin would have been welcomed by many German Army officers, but their use in this fashion was generally discouraged and frequently forbidden by the Nazi political leaders such as Hitler or Himmler. In spite of this, some Russian units in the Nazi armies were formed, although generally they were used only for guard or garrison duties. The size of this movement of anti-Stalinist deserters can be judged from the fact that, in spite of the obstacles we have mentioned, the number of such deserters serving in the Nazi armed forces reached 900,000 in June 1944. These were nominally under the leadership of a renegade Soviet general, A. A. Vlasov, who had served as Soviet military adviser to Chiang Kai-shek in China in 1938, with the rank of major general, and had been captured by the Nazis when serving as deputy commander of the Volkhov front, in June 1942. Nothing effective could be done with "Vlasov formations" because of the opposition of Hitler and Himmler. When Germany was clearly on the road to defeat in November 1944, Himmler withdrew his opposition, and allowed Vlasov to issue a call for an anti-Stalinist liberation army of Russians. In six weeks this organization received a million applications for membership, but could obtain almost no equipment and could organize combat units of no more than 50,000 men. At the end of the war, hundreds of thousands of Vlasov's supporters fled westward to the American and British armies for refuge from Stalin's vengeance, but were handed over to the Soviet Union to be murdered out of hand or sent to slave-labor camps in Siberia. The dimensions of human suffering involved in this whole situation is beyond the human imagination. The number of Soviet prisoners captured by the Nazis, according to the records of the German Army, reached over 2,000,000 by November 1, 1941, and reached 3,060,000 by March 1, 1942. Over 500,000 of these died of starvation, typhus, or froze to death in prison camps in the winter of 1941-1942. In the whole Eastern campaign up to January 1944 the Nazis captured 5,553,000 prisoners.

     On September 6, 1941, in Directive No. 35, Hitler suddenly accepted the suggestions of his generals, and ordered an attack on Moscow. After two weeks of reorganization of forces, this attack began. About the same time, Leningrad was encircled, thus commencing an unsuccessful siege which continued until the city was relieved twenty-eight months later.

     By October 8, 1941, two great encirclements west of Moscow closed on 663,000 Soviet prisoners with 5,412 cannon and 1,242 tanks. Mopping up took two weeks. By that time the weather had broken, and the Germans were advancing through pouring rain, sleet, and mud. They suffered their first cases of frostbite on November 7th, but, with Moscow only thirty-eight miles away, the attack continued. A week later, Siberian divisions, moved from the Far East, in consequence of the Japanese-Soviet Nonaggression Pact and Richard Sorge’s information that the Japanese had decided to attack Singapore rather than Siberia, appeared before Moscow. The first Soviet counter-offensive came on November 28th, just as the 2nd German Armored Division caught sight of the towers of the Kremlin from a distance of fourteen miles. The next night the temperature fell to 22ฐ below zero Fahrenheit. The Germans, without any preparation for a winter campaign, began to suffer horribly. Yet when Field Marshal von Rundstedt, commander of Army Group South, allowed some of his units to withdraw, he was removed by Hitler.

     On December 19th the commander in chief, Field Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch was relieved and his post taken by Hitler himself. The Fhrer issued an order which said: "The army is not to withdraw a single step. Every man must fight where he stands." A few days later, Guderian was removed for violation of this order. In spite of Hitler's attitude, Russian pressure throughout the winter made necessary one German withdrawal after another. By the spring of 1942, many units had fallen back a hundred or more miles. During this period the Luftwaffe generally could not operate for lack of winter lubricants, and when its planes did take to the air they had to be used to carry supplies to ground forces which were cut off by Russians. Tanks could he used only after their engines had been warmed up for twelve hours. Frostbite casualties in the German Army ran about a thousand a day, and by February 28, 1942, the total German casualties in the Russian offensive reached over a million (31 percent).

     We have mentioned that military assistance to the Soviet Union from the United States was held up by the slowness of American economic mobilization, the anti-Bolshevism of American public opinion, and the general lack of confidence in Soviet ability to withstand the Nazi attack. These obstacles were not decisive with Churchil1 or Roosevelt. On July 12, 1941, Britain signed an alliance with Russia. Four weeks later Harry Hopkins returned from a hurried visit to Moscow to report to the Atlantic Conference his conviction that the Soviet Union would be able to hold out against the Nazi attack. He also brought a completely unreasonable demand from Stalin for an immediate British invasion of western Europe to relieve the German pressure on Russia. Unable to grant any hopes of such an invasion in 1941 or even in 1942, Roosevelt and Churchill decided to send a full-scale economic mission to Moscow to determine Russia's material needs. This mission, headed by Averell Harriman and Lord Beaverbrook, was in Moscow for three days at the end of September 1941, and signed an agreement for Soviet aid to June 30, 1942

     In the postwar period it was frequently stated that the Roosevelt Administration should have taken advantage of Stalin's urgent need for supplies in September 1941, by forcing him to sign agreements to recognize the independence and territorial integrity of various countries in eastern Europe. Strangely enough, during the discussions in Moscow at the time, Stalin was eager to obtain a formal statement on war aims and on specific territorial boundaries, but the United States was reluctant: it objected to any "secret accords" which might hamper freedom of action later, and was unwilling either to abandon the peoples of eastern Europe to Russia or to insist on their rights vigorously enough to drive the Soviet Union to make a separate peace with Hitler....

     The agreement of September 30, 1941, provided that, in the next nine months, the Anglo-Americans would send to the Soviet Union l,050,000 tons of supplies, including 300 fighting planes, 100 bombers, and 500 tanks a month. Up to that moment Russia had purchased about $100,000,00 of supplies in the United States with its own money, had obtained $29,000,000 in supplies from United States loans to be repaid in future deliveries of gold bullion, and had obtained from Britain considerable supplies, including 450 planes, 3,000,000 pairs of boots, and 22,000 tons of rubber. But financing the new Moscow agreement was quite a different task, and could be done only under Lend-Lease. By the end of November, Roosevelt was able to get American public opinion, and especially American Catholic opinion, to reduce its objections to such a step sufficiently to allow him to establish it.

     As with Lend-Lease aid to Britain, such aid to Soviet Russia raised the problem of how supplies could be delivered. In the first two years of Lend-Lease, 46 percent of the total shipped went across the Pacific to Siberia in Soviet ships; 23 percent took the 76-day route to the Persian Gulf to go north over the completely inadequate trans-Iranian route; 41 percent took the 12-day sea route to Murmansk or Archangel. The dangers of this last route can be seen from the fact that 21 percent of the cargoes on it were lost by German attack, partly by submarines and surface raiders, but chiefly by air attacks from Finnish and Norwegian bases. The horrors of this northern route to Russia are almost beyond description. In the summer, twenty-four hours of light each day allowed attacks to be continuous; in the winter water temperature was so low that torpedoed seamen could survive no more than a few minutes in it. And in both seasons there was no relief at the end of the voyage, for the Russian ports were within easy bombing range of German air bases under conditions of visibility (notably surrounding hills and poor Soviet cooperation) which allowed only a few seconds' warning before any attack.

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