All Hell Let Loose (15 page)

Britain’s ambassador to France, Sir Ronald Campbell, wrote in valediction after the collapse: ‘I should … describe France as a man who, stunned by an unexpected blow, was unable to rise to his feet before his opponent delivered the “coup de grace”.’ In the decades that followed French defeat, there was intense debate about alleged national decadence, which had caused such an outcome. That summer of 1940, the Bishop of Toulouse thundered: ‘Have we suffered enough? Have we prayed enough? Have we repented for sixty years of national apostasy, sixty years during which the French spirit has suffered all the perversions of modern ideas … during which French morality has declined, during which anarchy has strangely developed.’

Modern staff-college war games of the 1940 campaign sometimes conclude with German defeat. This causes a few historians to argue that Hitler’s triumph on the battlefield, far from being inevitable, might have been averted. It is hard to accept this view. In the years that followed the 1940 débâcle, the German army repeatedly demonstrated its institutional superiority over the Western Allies, who prevailed on battlefields only when they had a substantial superiority of men, tanks and air support. The Wehrmacht displayed a dynamic energy entirely absent from the 1940 Allied armies. Contrary to popular myth, the Germans did not conquer France in accordance with a detailed plan for blitzkrieg – lightning war. Rather, commanders – and especially Guderian – showed inspired opportunism, with results that exceeded their wildest expectations. If the French had moved faster and the Germans more slowly, the outcome of the campaign could have been different, but such an assertion is meaningless.

In 1940 the Germans were not obliged to divert large forces to an eastern front, as they were in 1914 when France was allied with Russia. Despite the indisputable superiority of the invaders’ air arm, Allied defeat was the consequence less of material than of moral inferiority; with rare and isolated exceptions, at every level Allied responses to German initiatives lacked conviction. Winston Churchill was almost alone among Anglo-French directors of the war, as well as among soldiers on the battlefield, in being willing to demand a struggle to the last man. French politicians and generals, by contrast, adopted a rationalist view: they identified limits to the damage acceptable to the population and fabric of their country to avoid bowing to a foreign invader, as often before in history France had been compelled to bow. Relatively few French soldiers felt willing to sacrifice themselves for the cause, because they believed neither in their national leaders nor in their commanders; the country had endured forty-two chronically weak governments between 1920 and 1940. Gamelin wrote as early as 18 May: ‘The French soldier, yesterday’s citizen, did not believe in the war … Disposed to criticise ceaselessly anyone holding the slightest amount of authority … he did not receive the kind of moral and patriotic education which would have prepared him for the drama in which the nation’s destiny will be played out.’

Irène Némirovsky wrote reflectively in 1941, looking back on the collapse: ‘For years, everything done in France within a certain social class has had only one motive: fear … Who will harm them the least (not in the future, not in the abstract, but right now and in the form of kicks in the arse or slaps in the face)? The Germans? The English? The Russians? The Germans won, but the beating has been forgotten and the Germans can protect them. That’s why they’re “for the Germans”.’ Very few Frenchmen in 1940 and afterwards followed the example set by tens of thousands of Poles – fighting on in exile, even after their country had been defeated. Only in 1943–44, when it became plain that the Allies would win the war and German occupation had proved intolerably oppressive, did French people in large numbers offer significant assistance to the Anglo-Americans. In the years of Britain’s lonely defiance, French forces offered determined resistance to Churchill’s armies and fleets wherever in the world they encountered them. Few even among those who did not fight against the British chose instead to fight with them: the French aircraft carrier
Béarn
, for instance, laden with precious American fighter planes, took refuge in the French Caribbean colony of Martinique from June 1940 until November 1942.

Among the shocked spectators of the collapse of France was Stalin. Molotov sent Hitler a dutiful telegram offering congratulations on his capture of Paris, but in Moscow the Nazi triumph provoked horror. All Soviet strategic calculations had been founded upon an expectation that a protracted bloodbath would take place on the Continent, which would drastically weaken Germany as well as the Western Powers. A Russian diplomat in London later remarked indiscreetly that, while most of the world weighed Allied and German casualties against each other, Stalin added the two together to compile an assessment of his own balance of advantage. Nikita Khrushchev described the fury of Russia’s warlord at Pétain’s surrender: ‘Stalin was in a great agitation, very nervous. I had seldom seen him in such a state. As a rule he seldom sat in his chair during meetings, usually he kept walking. On this occasion he was literally running around the room, swearing terribly. He cursed the French, cursed the English, [demanding]: “How come they allowed Hitler to thrash them?”’

Stalin probably expected eventually to fight Germany, but anticipated at least two or three years’ grace before a showdown. The Soviet Union had embarked on a massive rearmament programme that was still far from fulfilment. Stalin believed that Hitler gained too many material advantages from their relationship to breach the Nazi–Soviet Pact, at least until Britain was occupied. The German navy enjoyed access to north Russian ports. Vast quantities of corn, commodities and oil flowed from the Soviet Union to the Reich. Even after the French surrender Stalin remained anxious to avoid provocation of his dangerous neighbour, and constructed no major fortifications on his western frontier. Instead, he exploited the chaos of the moment to increase his own territorial gains. While the eyes of the world were fixed on France, he annexed the Baltic states, where in the year that followed the NKVD conducted savage purges and mass deportations. From Romania, he took Bessarabia, which had been Russian property between 1812 and 1919, and the Bukovina. At least 100,000 Romanians, and perhaps as many as half a million, were deported to Central Asia, to replace Russian industrial workers conscripted into the army. Amid events in the west, few people outside the world’s foreign ministries noticed the human catastrophe created by Stalin in the east; to that extent, Hitler’s lunge across western Europe served Soviet interests. But Russia’s warlord recognised the outcome as a calamity almost as alarming for his own nation as for the vanquished Western Powers.

Italy entered the war alongside Hitler on 10 June, in a shamelessly undignified scramble for a share of the spoils. Benito Mussolini feared Hitler and disliked Germans, as did many of his fellow countrymen, but he was unable to resist the temptation to secure cheap gains in Europe and the Allied African empires. Mussolini’s conduct inspired the derision of most of his contemporaries, friends and foes alike: he coupled himself to Hitler because he sought for his country a splendour he knew Italians could not achieve alone; he wanted the rewards of war, in return for a token expenditure of blood. To his intimates in May and June 1940, he repeatedly expressed hopes that a thousand or two Italians might be killed before a peace settlement with the Allies was signed, to pay for the booty he wanted.

On the eve of commencing hostilities with France, Mussolini asserted privately his intention to declare war, but not to wage it. Unsurprisingly, this minimalist approach precipitated a fiasco: on 17 June, when the French had already asked for an armistice, he abruptly ordered an attack on the Franco–Italian border in the Alps. The Italian army, wrong-footed by the sudden transition from manning fixed positions to launching an offensive, was briskly repulsed. The Duce’s delusions and confusion of purpose persisted thereafter: he expressed hopes that the British would not make peace until Italy had been able to make some show of contributing to their defeat, and that the Germans would suffer a million casualties before Britain was overrun. He wished to see Hitler victorious, but not all-powerful. All his dreams would perish in a fashion that would have rendered Mussolini an object of pity and ridicule, had not his delusions cost so many lives.

On 20 June, Franz Halder wrote complacently: ‘I just cannot comprehend what more the political leadership could want of us, and which of its wishes have remained unfulfilled.’ Hitler’s army adjutant Col. Georg Engel recorded: ‘The C-in-C [Gen. Walther von Brauchitsch] had his hour of triumph with the Führer when he announced the end of operations and preparations for an armistice. He briefed the F[ührer] on the urgent need either to make peace with Britain or to prepare and carry out an invasion as soon as possible. The Führer is sceptical and considers Britain so weak that, after bombing, major land operations will be unnecessary. The army will move in and take up occupation duties. The F[ührer] comments that “One way or another … [the British] will have to accept the situation.”’

Among the more unlikely spectators of the German victory parade in Paris on 22 June was a bewildered nineteen-year-old English girl, Rosemary Say, who found herself trapped in the French capital:

Before the Germans attacked in the west, the Allies had wanted a long war, believing this would serve their best interests by enabling them to mobilise both American support and their own industrial resources against Hitler. The fall of Norway, Denmark, France, Belgium and Holland seemed to show that instead, the Nazis had achieved a swift and conclusive triumph. Few people anywhere in the world saw that Germany’s armistice with France, signed in the historic railway carriage at Compiègne on 22 June, marked not an end, but a beginning. The scale of Hitler’s ambitions, and the stubbornness of Churchill’s defiance, had yet to reveal themselves.

RAF fighter pilot Paul Richey, wounded in France, was flown home by mail plane in the first days of June: ‘I looked down on the calm and peaceful English countryside, the smoke rising not from bombed villages, but lazily from cottage chimneys, and saw a game of cricket in progress on a village pitch. With my mind still filled with the blast and flame that had shattered France, I was seized with utter disgust at the smug contentedness England enjoyed behind her sea barrier. I thought a few bombs might wake up those cricketers, and that they wouldn’t be long in coming either.’ Richey echoed the resentment many men and women feel, on coming fresh from the horrors of war to encounter those spared from them. He was right that the people of southern England would not long enjoy their cricket undisturbed. But, when summoned from their pitches, almost without comprehension until their national leader enthroned their experience in majestic prose, they inflicted upon Hitler’s Germany one of the decisive repulses of history.

Churchill’s speech to the House of Commons on 18 June 1940 has been so often quoted that it sometimes receives only the nod due to glorious rhetoric. But its closing words repay attention, because they defined for the rest of the war the democracies’ vision of their purpose:

It is striking to contrast the prime minister’s appeal to ‘brace ourselves to our duties’ with the strident demands of Germany’s warlord, in similar circumstances in 1944–45, for ‘fanatical resistance’. Grace, dignity, wit, humanity and resolution characterised the leadership of Britain’s prime minister; only the last of these could be attributed to Hitler. In the summer of 1940, Churchill faced an enormous challenge, to convince his own people and the world that continued resistance was credible. Sergeant L.D. Pexton, thirty-four years old, was a prisoner in Germany when he wrote on 19 July: ‘Heard today that Hitler had broadcast some peace terms and that Churchill had told him what to do with them … Hope they do patch up some sort of terms as everyone here wants it, and to get home.’ Pexton’s view was obviously influenced by experiencing defeat in France, and thereafter finding himself at the mercy of the victorious Nazis. But in Britain, too, there were those – especially among the commercial classes and the ruling caste, best informed about the nation’s weakness – who continued to fear the worst. It was Churchill’s epic personal achievement to rally them in support of the simple purpose of repelling invasion.

The latter months of 1940 were decisive in determining the course of the war. The Nazis, stunned by the scale of their triumphs, allowed themselves to suffer a loss of momentum. By launching an air assault on Britain, Hitler adopted the worst possible strategic compromise: as master of the Continent, he believed a modest further display of force would suffice to precipitate its surrender. Yet if, instead, he had left Churchill’s people to stew on their island, the prime minister would have faced great difficulties in sustaining national morale and a charade of strategic purpose. A small German contingent dispatched to support the Italian attack on Egypt that autumn would probably have sufficed to expel Britain from the Middle East; Malta could easily have been taken. Such humiliations would have dealt heavy blows to the credibility of Churchill’s policy of fighting on.

As it was, however, the Luftwaffe’s clumsy offensive posed the one challenge which Britain was well placed to repel. The British Army and people were not obliged to confront the Wehrmacht on their beaches and in their fields – a clash that would probably have ended ignominiously for the defenders. The prime minister merely required their acquiescence, while the country was defended by a few hundred RAF pilots and – more importantly though less conspicuously – by the formidable might of the Royal Navy’s ships at sea. The prime minister’s exalting leadership secured public support for his defiance of the logic of Hitlerian triumph, even when cities began to burn and civilians to die.

The prospect of an imminent invasion was less plausible than Britain’s chiefs of staff supposed and Churchill publicly asserted, because the Germans lacked amphibious shipping and escorts to convoy an army across the Channel in the face of an immensely powerful British fleet. Hitler’s heart was never in it. But intelligence about his means and intentions was fragmentary: decryption of enemy cipher traffic at Bletchley Park
^*
lacked anything like the comprehensive coverage achieved later in the war. Much German activity, or absence of it, on the Continent was shrouded from London’s knowledge. British service chiefs, traumatised by the disaster in France, attributed almost mystical powers to the Wehrmacht.

Privately, Churchill was always sceptical about the invasion threat, but he emphasised it in his rhetoric and strategy-making throughout 1940–41, as a means of promoting purposeful activity among both his people and the armed forces. He judged, surely rightly, that inertia and an understanding of their own impotence would be fatal to the spirit necessary to sustain morale, and to his hopes of inducing the United States to enter the conflict. There must be no return to phoney war: since defence against prospective invasion was the utmost the home army could encompass, he projected this as its principal task for many months after it became plain that the danger had passed.

Following the fall of France, the prime minister’s ruthlessness was first displayed against his recent allies. One morning in July 1940, armed Royal Navy parties boarded French warships in British harbours to demand their surrender. At Devonport, officers of the submarine
Surcouf
resisted, starting a gun battle in the control room during which one French and three British sailors were killed. Three-quarters of French servicemen in Britain, including most of those rescued from Dunkirk, insisted on repatriation, a choice in which the British indulged them. French alienation increased after a British ultimatum to their battle squadron at Mers-el-Kébir was rejected on 3 July. Churchill was determined that Pétain’s fleet should not support a German invasion of Britain. Admiral Marcel-Bruno Gensoul refused either to renew the war alongside the Royal Navy, or to accept neutrality under British guard. Admiral Somerville thereupon sank or shelled into wreckage three of Gensoul’s ships, killing 1,300 sailors. Churchill feared the assault might cause the Pétain regime actively to ally itself with the Nazis, though this did not dissuade him from giving the fire order. Vichy did not become a formal belligerent, and a few remote African colonies ‘rallied’ to Brigadier-General Charles de Gaulle’s ‘Free France’ in London. But French forces vigorously resisted every British encroachment on their territories until the end of 1942.

It seems mistaken to suppose that the policies of Pétain, and the widespread support they commanded, represented mere fallout from French defeat. The Vichy government welcomed the opportunity to impose what Michael Burleigh has called ‘a regressive moral, political and social agenda in which authority and duty would trump liberty and rights’. Pathological hatred and fear of the left – and of Jews – caused almost all of aristocratic, commercial and bourgeois France to back Pétain until German oppression became intolerable and Allied victory plainly inevitable.

The Luftwaffe air assault on Britain which began in July 1940 offered Churchill’s people their best opportunity to engage the Germans on favourable terms. The only class of ground or aerial weapons system in which the British had near parity with their enemies in quality and quantity was the single-seat interceptor fighter. The RAF’s Hurricanes and Spitfires were handicapped by clumsy tactical doctrine and .303 machine-gun armament with inadequate destructive power, but squadrons were controlled by the most sophisticated radar, ground-observer and voice-radio network in the world, created by an inspired group of civil servants, scientists and airmen. If the equipment and performance of Britain’s army remained unsatisfactory throughout the war, Churchill’s nation far surpassed Germany in the application of science and technology: mobilisation of the best civilian brains, and their integration into the war effort at the highest levels, was an outstanding British success story. The RAF had developed a remarkable system of defence, while their opponents had no credible system of attack.

The Luftwaffe’s commanders suffered from a confusion of objectives which persisted throughout the summer. Gen. Albert Kesselring opposed the assault on Britain, preferring instead to seize Gibraltar and gain dominance of the Mediterranean; Hitler initially vetoed bombing of British cities, while Goering rejected attacks on southern ports, which would be needed for the Wehrmacht’s landings. The Luftwaffe sought to gain dominance of the air space over south-east England by destroying Fighter Command, and embarked on an incoherent campaign to achieve this by sending bombers to attack airfields and installations, escorted by fighters which were expected to shoot down RAF planes as easily as they had done in France. Intelligence, a chronic weakness of the Third Reich, was woeful: the Germans had no understanding of Fighter Command’s detection and control network. They themselves had developed radar –
Dezimator-Telegraphie
, as they called it, or
DeTe
for short – before the British, and their sets were technically more advanced. But they failed to link them to an effective ground–air direction system, and never imagined that Fighter Command might have done so. Throughout the war, institutionalised hubris dogged the Nazi leadership, which was repeatedly wrong-footed by Allied technological initiatives; if Germans had not built a given weapon or device, they were reluctant to credit their enemies with the wit to do so.

Colonel ‘Beppo’ Schmid, head of Luftwaffe intelligence, was a charlatan who told his chiefs what they wished to hear. Goering had neither a strategic reserve of aircraft, nor manufacturing resources to create one. The Germans conducted the Battle of Britain with stunning incompetence, founded upon arrogance and ignorance. If the RAF made its share of mistakes, Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding and his most important subordinate, Air Vice-Marshal Keith Park, the New Zealander commanding 11 Group, displayed a steadiness of judgement amounting to brilliance, entirely absent across the Channel. The Germans began their campaign with two assets: a modest superiority of aircraft numbers and a corps of experienced combat veterans. They failed to concentrate these, however, against the vital targets – radar receivers, fighter stations and supporting installations.

The Battle of Britain opened with July skirmishes over the Channel, as the Germans attacked coastal convoys and the RAF responded. Hitting a precision target from the air was difficult. A dive-bomber pilot attacking a 750-foot ship from astern, for instance, had only a 1.5-second margin of error in pressing his bomb release, which from abeam fell to a quarter of a second; it was a tribute to the skills of German Stuka pilots that they inflicted severe losses on British convoys. But the Ju87s flew even more slowly than the RAF’s Battle bombers, which had been destroyed wholesale in France, and it was now the turn of the British to exploit enemy vulnerability: Stukas suffered slaughter wherever Fighter Command encountered them, and eventually had to be withdrawn from the battle.

Spitfire pilot Geoff Wellum described the racing sensations of air combat:

In mêlées in the sky, it was often remarkable how few aircraft either side destroyed. Over a Channel convoy on 25 July, for instance, scores of British and German planes exchanged fire, but only two Spitfires were shot down, and one Messerschmitt Bf109. RAF pilots had received scarcely any training in air fighting, an art the Germans mastered over Spain and Poland, and the defenders were now obliged to learn by experience. Early in the battle, it became apparent that the overwhelming majority of ‘kills’ were achieved by a handful of each side’s best men: the top 3.5 per cent of Fighter Command’s pilots made 30 per cent of all claims for aircraft shot down, and the Luftwaffe’s aces accounted for an even higher proportion of ‘kills’. Exceptional eyesight, marksmanship and nerve to get close were the decisive factors.

The RAF strongly discouraged the cult of the ‘ace’, and of personal scores, but the Luftwaffe energetically promoted it. Such stars as Adolf Galland, Helmut Wick and Werner Molders were said by resentful comrades to suffer from ‘
Halsweh
’ – the ‘sore throat’ on which they were eager to hang the coveted ribbon of a Knight’s Cross – as all three did when their score of ‘kills’ mounted. Galland, a supremely effective air fighter but also a selfish and brutal one, had no patience with weaklings in his command. One day on the radio net a frightened German voice wailed, ‘Spitfire on my tail!’ and then again a few moments later, ‘Spitfire still behind me! What should I do?’ Galland snarled, ‘
Aussteigen, Sie Bettnasser!
’ – ‘Bail out, you bed-wetter!’