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.
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