Berlin Diary (93 page)

It may well be that Hitler expected Churchill to make the first move for peace. Didn’t an Englishman know when he was beaten? Hitler would be patient and wait and let the realization sink into his thick British head.

He waited a month. All through the last lovely week of June and the first three weeks of July he waited. In Berlin we heard rumours that contact had been made between Berlin and London at Stockholm and that peace was being talked, but we never had any confirmation of them and in all probability there was nothing to them.

On July 19 Hitler spoke out in the Reichstag. He publicly offered Britain peace, though concealing his terms. But the very fact that he devoted most of the session to promoting his leading generals to be field-marshals, as though the victorious war were in truth over, indicated that he still felt certain that Churchill would bid for peace.

The Luftwaffe had been established on the North Sea
and the Channel for more than a month, but German planes had refrained from any serious attacks on the land of Britain. Hitler was holding it back.

I think the prompt and sweeping reaction in England
to his “offer of peace” came as a shock to him. He was not prepared for such a quick and unequivocal rejection. I think he hesitated until the end of July—twelve days—before he accepted that rejection as Churchill’s final answer. By then a month and a half of precious time had been largely lost.

There is reason to believe that most of the generals of the High Command, especially General von Brauchitsch, commander-in-chief of the army, and General Halder, chief of the General Staff, maintained grave doubts as to the chances of success of an invasion of Britain by a land army, particularly by the end of July, when the British, they knew, had to some extent recovered from the blows of May and June. The naval problem involved seems to have baffled them, for one thing. And though Göring, it is reliably reported, assured them he could knock out the RAF in a fortnight, as he had destroyed the Polish air force in three days, they seem to have had some doubts on this score too—doubts that in the end proved fully justified.

Throughout July the Germans had been gathering barges and pontoons in the canals, rivers, and harbours along the French, Belgian, and Dutch coasts and assembling shipping at Bremen, Hamburg, Kiel, and various ports in Denmark and Norway. A common sight on the new highways in western Germany was that of Diesel-motored barges taken from as far away as the Danube being hauled on rollers towards the west coast. Workshops and garages all over the Reich were put to work on small armoured, self-propelling pontoons which could carry a tank or a heavy gun or a company of
troops in a calm sea, but not in a rough one, over the Channel. Behind Calais and Boulogne on August 16 I saw a few of them.

On the night of August 5, as noted elsewhere in this journal, Hitler had a long conference in the Chancellery with his chief military advisers. Present were Göring, Admiral von Raeder, Brauchitsch, Keitel, and General Jodl, the last a member of Hitler’s own separate military staff and extremely influential in the army since the beginning of the offensive in the west. It is likely that Hitler at this meeting made his decision to attempt the invasion as soon as possible and went over the final plans with the chiefs of the three armed forces.

What were those plans? Probably we shall never know. But from what little has leaked out, I think we can deduce the grand lines of the strategy decided upon. It was cautious and it was classical. A great air offensive against the British air force would be launched on or about August 13. The RAF would be wiped out by September 1. And then with complete mastery of the air over the Channel so as to prevent the British navy from concentrating, and over England to smash the defending British artillery, the invasion would be launched. The main force would cross the Channel in barges, pontoons, and small boats. Other ships, protected by planes, would set out from Bremen, Hamburg, and the Norwegian ports to make landings in Scotland, but this would be only a secondary move and one that would depend upon the action of the British navy in these waters. Another small expedition of ships from Brest would take Ireland. And of course there would be parachute action on a large scale to demoralize the English and the Irish in the rear.

The army would not move until the Royal Air Force had been annihilated. On this being accomplished depended
the whole setting-in-action of the plans for actual invasion. Göring promised its speedy accomplishment. But like many a German before him, he made a grave miscalculation about British character and therefore British strategy. Göring, I think it is now clear, based his confidence on a very simple calculation. He had four times as many planes as the British. No matter how good English planes and pilots were—and he had a healthy respect for both—he had only to attack in superior numbers, and even if he lost as many planes as the enemy, in the end he would still have a substantial air fleet, and the British would have none. And there was little likelihood of losing as many as your opponent if you always attacked with more planes than he had.

What Göring and all the other Germans were incapable of grasping was that the British were prepared to see their cities bombed and destroyed before they would risk
all
of their planes in a few great air battles to defend them. To the British this was mere common sense and the only tactic that could save them. To the German military mind it was incomprehensible. It is primarily due to this error of judgment, so typically German, I’m convinced, that the plan to invade Britain this year had to be abandoned.

To destroy the British air force Göring had to get it off the ground. But try as he did—and when I was on the Channel in the middle of August he was sending as many as a thousand planes a day across the Channel to lure the British into the air—he never succeeded. The British kept most of their planes in reserve. Their cities, for a while, suffered as a result. But the RAF remained intact. And as long as it did, the German land army massed on the coast would not move.

Why, many Germans here have asked, could not the Luftwaffe destroy the RAF on the ground? The air
forces of Poland, Holland, Belgium, and France had largely been wiped out by the Germans demolishing their planes on the airfields before they had a chance to take off. The Luftwaffe’s own answer is undoubtedly true. German airmen tell me that the British simply scattered their planes on a thousand far-flung fields. No air force in the world, with any opposition at all, could hunt them out in sufficient numbers to destroy any sizable portion of Britain’s available planes.

There is another aspect of Göring’s failure which is not so clear to us here in Berlin. He tried for a month—from the middle of August to the middle of September—to destroy the air arm of Britain’s defence. This attempt was made in daylight attacks, for you cannot destroy a nation’s air force at night. But by the third week of September the great daylight raids had ceased. I note that in my broadcast of the night of September 23 I wrote: “It now seems clear from a perusal of the German reports that Germany’s big air attacks on Britain—unlike a month ago—now take place at night, not during the day. The High Command today calls the day flights ‘armed reconnaissance’; the night raids ‘reprisal attacks.’ “The military censor did not like the paragraph and only allowed me to use it after I had softened it down by writing that the large-scale attacks of the Luftwaffe “are recently more at night,” which was bad English but did not prevent the idea from being put across.

At first thought there seems to be some contradiction between our belief here that the British preferred to see their cities bombed rather than risk too many of their planes in the air at any one time to drive off the Germans—between that and the fact that in the short space of a month the RAF obviously took such a toll of German planes that Göring had to abandon his
grandiose daylight attacks. And this contradiction has bothered most of the neutral air attaches here, who, like the rest of us, have access to only the German side of the picture.

Probably it is no contradiction at all. From what German airmen themselves have told me, I think the truth is that while the British never risked more than a small portion of their available fighters on any one day, they did send up enough to destroy more German bombers per day than Göring could afford to lose. For he was using them in large mass formations, more as a snare to get the British fighters off the ground so that his Messerschmitts could wipe out Britain’s fighter defence than for mere bombing. And here British air tactics played an important role. The Germans tell me that the British fighter squadrons had strict orders to avoid combat with German fighters whenever possible. Instead they were instructed to dart in on the bombers, knock off as many of the cumbersome machines as they could, and then steal away before the German fighters could engage them. These tactics led many a German Messerschmitt pilot to complain that the British Spitfire and Hurricane pilots were cowards, that they fled whenever they saw a German fighter. I suspect now the German pilots understand that the British were not being cowardly but merely smart. Knowing they were outnumbered, that the German aim was to destroy their entire fighter force and that Britain was lost when her last fighters were destroyed, the British adopted the only strategy which would save them. They went after the German bombers, which are set-ups for a pursuit ship, and avoided the Messerschmitts. After all, the Messerschmitts carried no bombs which could destroy England. On at least three separate days, during the latter part of August and the first days of September,
British fighters shot down some 175 to 200 German planes, mostly bombers, and crippled probably half as many more. These were blows which made the Luftwaffe momentarily groggy and which it could not indefinitely sustain despite its numerical superiority, because the British were losing only a third or a fourth as many planes, though, to be sure, they were mostly fighters.

There was another factor. As most of the air battles took place over England, the British were saving at least half of the pilots whose machines were shot down. They were able to bail out and come down safely by parachute. But every time a German plane was shot down, its occupants, though they might save their lives with parachutes, were lost to the Luftwaffe for the duration of the war. In the case of bombers, this meant a loss of four highly trained men with each plane brought down.

And so the first fortnight in September came and went, and still the Germans could not destroy the British air force and, as a consequence, wrest complete superiority in the air over England. And the great Nazi land army waited, cooling its heels behind the cliffs at Boulogne and Calais and along the canals behind the sea. It was not left entirely unmolested. At night, as I have described from personal experience earlier in this journal, the British bombers came over, blasting away at the ports and the canals and the beaches where the barges were being assembled and loaded. The German High Command has maintained absolute silence about this little chapter in the war. What losses in men and materials were sustained by these insistent British air attacks is not known. I can get no authoritative information on the subject. But from what I saw of these bombings myself and from what I’ve been told by German
airmen, I think it is highly improbable that the German army was ever able to assemble in the ports of Boulogne, Calais, Dunkirk, and Ostend, or on the beaches, enough barges or ships to launch an invasion in the force that would have been necessary. Whether it ever seriously attempted to do so is also doubtful.

The stories emanating from France that an actual full-fledged invasion of Britain was attempted on or around the middle of September and repulsed by the British also seem to be without foundation on the basis of what we know here. In the first place, the British, whose morale probably was none too high at this time, would certainly have let the news out if they had actually repulsed an all-out German attempt to invade England. Publication of the news not only would have had an electrifying effect on British public opinion and that of the rest of Europe but would have been of immeasurable value in rallying help from America. Washington in August, I’m told, had almost given Britain up as lost and was in a state of jitters for fear the British navy would fall into Hitler’s hands and thus place the American eastern seaboard in great danger. Also, the British would have had little trouble through short-wave broadcasts in German and the dropping of pamphlets in letting the German people know that Hitler’s great bid for the conquest of Britain had failed. The psychological effect in Germany would have been crushing.

What probably happened, so far as we can learn here, is that the Germans early in September attempted a fairly extensive invasion rehearsal. They put barges and ships to sea, the weather turned against them, light British naval forces and planes caught them, set a number of barges on fire, and caused a considerable number of casualties. The unusual number of hospital trains full of men suffering from burns would bear out this
version, though we have no other concrete information to go on.

Perhaps the British have already put out information that makes this account of why the invasion attempt never came off superfluous. I note it down as the sum of our information here in Berlin, which is little enough. The only time the Germans give out information is when they are winning, or have won. They have not mentioned their submarine losses, for instance, for nearly a year.