The World at War (12 page)

RAB BUTLER

Halifax had led the country away from the appeasement policy during the summer at the beginning of the war, and he had proven himself, and indeed was in India as a Viceroy, a very able Minister. But being in the House of Lords he wasn't really very well known. I never thought that the National Government with Labour idea would work with Halifax and the Labour leaders came to realise in their own ways that Churchill would be better. I had a frank talk with Halifax and I came to the conclusion that he simply didn't want to do it, and under the circumstances, with crisis looming and virtually being in the war alone, it's no good to have a man as
Prime Minister who doesn't want to do it. And if you've got somebody straining at the leash, you'll probably get a better deal from him. So I really agreed with Halifax's decision.
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JOHN COLVILLE

Churchill was viewed with grave misgivings by the Establishment. Everybody at 10 Downing Street and Whitehall, the Cabinet Officers, among soldiers, sailors and airmen and in very large sectors of the Conservative Party and to some extent the Labour Party were frightened of Churchill, they thought he was an adventurer. They did not want to see the fortunes of the country at a most critical moment in its whole history handed over to somebody who might do the most extraordinary things and undertake the most astonishing adventures. They all realised that Norway, this fiasco from which we had just been saved in the nick of time, was largely the inspiration of Churchill. It was a very fine idea but it didn't work. Halifax was safe, he was clever, a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, a man of indisputable charm and absolute integrity, and it was hoped that he would perhaps be sent for by the King. Churchill would be a gamble and when you're in it, at a very serious moment of your lives, a gamble is not the thing to undertake.

ROBERT BOOTHBY

The Germans attacked the West on the 10th May 1940 as many of us had foreseen they would. I had spent a year and a half before in a little town in Switzerland watching their preparations across the Swiss frontier while we were doing nothing at all. I had received private warnings from friends in Belgium and Holland where I had been invited by Churchill to go and try and get some arms. I had no doubt that a German attack on a great scale was impending. And then Chamberlain thought in these circumstances, although he had made up his mind to resign, he ought to carry on. Political henchmen in the House of Commons told him that this was such an emergent' that only a National Government could met the occasion and he said he must resign. He sent for Churchill and Halifax who were the only possible alternatives. The Labour Party made it quite clear through Party leader Clement Attlee and [Deputy Leader] Arthur Greenwood that they would never serve in any government under Neville Chamberlain, but they would under Halifax or Churchill. Halifax refused on the ground that he was in the House of Lords and couldn't conduct a war as Prime Minister unless he was a member of the House of Commons – which he couldn't be in those days. And therefore the mantle fell upon Churchill. Despite the Norwegian fiasco and the debate in which he defended the government, he became Prime Minister and formed the National Government which steered us to victory.

RAB BUTLER

The decision was largely taken by Halifax who told me he had a pain in his stomach an hour or two before the meeting and did not really want to be Prime Minister; whereas the man who really did want to be Prime Minister was quite determined on it. Chamberlain was rather hesitant because he favoured Halifax: after the India controversy of the years before, Churchill was regarded as being unsound and a rogue element. It was only when he took over with his marvellous broadcasts and all that he gradually began to get control of the nation. The people saw what an absolutely perfect Prime Minister he was for these occasions.

JOHN COLVILLE

I remember Churchill telling us that the critical moment came when Chamberlain asked Halifax and the three of them were there. Chamberlain suddenly turned to Churchill and said, 'Tell me, Winston, do you see any reason why in the twentieth century a Prime Minister should not be in the House of Lords?' and Churchill thought that this was a trap because if he said no, he thought Chamberlain would turn up to Halifax and say, 'If the King were to ask my advice I could perhaps suggest you.' On the other hand it was very difficult for him to say yes because there could be no alternative but himself, and so he turned round and stood staring over Horse Guards Parade and did not reply to the question.

CHRISTABEL BIELENBERG

Englishwoman married to an anti-Nazi German lawyer

The German opposition always felt that they would have to have the bulk of the German people with them if they didn't want to turn Hitler into a martyr, but that would change if he proved himself to have led the Germans to destruction. And they certainly pinned their hopes on the fact that if he did declare war on the West – this was after the Polish war – if he did make an active war, if what was called in Germany the Phoney War ever became no longer phoney, then he would have to attack the Maginot line, and it was the opinion of the generality in Germany that it would cost the German Army five hundred thousand men at least, and the opposition felt that would be the moment to strike. Well, as one knows very well, the Maginot line was circumvented and that did not happen.

CHAPTER 4
BATTLE OF THE ATLANTIC 1939–40

The Battle of the Atlantic, so fundamental to eventual Allied success, rolled on continuously from 1939 to 1945 but, for convenience, is divided here into three periods. The first, during the Phoney War, was characterised by failed strategies and mishaps on both sides. The Allies counted on a naval blockade to exercise the suffocating effect it had in 1914–18, although with the Soviet Union now supplying Nazi Germany with everything it needed, blockade could not be effective. The Germans calculated that the surface raiders that had put to sea before the outbreak of war would cause disproportionate disruption to British trade, but they were rapidly eliminated. U-boats scored early successes but the swift introduction of convoys limited the damage and the bulk of German anti-shipping activity was devoted to mine-laying off British ports by surface ships, submarines and aircraft. A counter to the magnetic mine (degaussing) was soon developed and Allied shipping also suffered less than it might because of a design flaw in the magnetic pistols on German torpedoes. Losses during the first four months were still significant: 323 ships, nearly a million tons. The Admiralty under Winston Churchill, meanwhile, used submarine hunting groups formed around aircraft carriers to search for U-boat needles in the immense haystack of the Atlantic instead of providing close escort for the convoys. The folly of such tactics was promptly underlined by the loss on 17 September of the aircraft carrier HMS
Courageous
to
U-29.
On 14 October, Günther Prien in
U-46
penetrated the Royal Navy's principal base at Scapa Plow and sank the battleship HMS
Royal Oak.
Following a lull during the extremely cold winter of 1940–41,
when many U-boats were frozen into their Baltic bases, the entire Kriegsmarine was committed to the invasion of Norway and suffered devastating losses. However, the capture of the French Atlantic ports a month later freed the U-boat arm from the shackles imposed by Britain's geographical position across its lines of access to the Atlantic, and more than doubled its effective fighting power.

ADMIRAL KARL DÖNITZ

Commander U-boats 1939–43

In October 1918 I was captain of a submarine and in the Mediterranean, near Malta, in a dark night I met a British convoy with schooners and destroyers and I attacked and sank a ship. But after this I had to dive and then by a fault in the construction my boat was sinking and the depth of the water, the water was three or four thousand metres deep. I made it possible to come to the surface again, but then I had to go out of the boat with the whole crew. A British destroyer stopped and we came on board. I had the impression that there was a difference in our treatment because I thought that the captain of the destroyer had the feeling 'They are warriors and they had their orders like we too'. When I came home it was clear to me that it was only by chance in that light to find this British convoy, but the chance would have been very much greater if they would not have been only one submarine but a lot of submarines – and there were a lot of ships. And that is why I developed the idea to
wolf-pack, to put the submarines together in all the years from 1918 until in 1935 we had the first submarines again.

COMMANDER PETER GRETTON

Royal Navy, Escort Group Commander 1942–43

The British Army is always accused of fighting a new war with the lessons of the past. Well, no one can accuse the Royal Navy of doing this. In 1919 we promptly forgot all the lessons of the last war, particularly the most unpleasant ones, and as a result the crisis of the spring of 1917, when the German U-boat attack was sinking hundreds and thousands of tons of Allied shipping every month, was completely forgotten. As a result very few preparations were made for protection of shipping in a new war. Some were made: the sonar-projection set Asdic was making considerable progress, but unfortunately far too optimistic claims were made for it and as a result we did not build nearly enough
escort ships, and the Air Force didn't get enough anti-submarine aircraft for the job needed.

VERNON MINER

Merchant seaman

We'd come through a long period of depression and the ships were old; they hadn't been replaced even though there were tramp-ship subsidies in the Thirties. The wages of the seamen had depreciated since the end of the First World War and the conditions would take a long time to alter, to raise up any standard at all. The men that were sailing were basically seamen and this was their career from which they'd started out, and having come through this period of depression where they were so long unemployed that they never dared leave their ship. They were only too glad of the permanency of employment, the fact that all ships of whatever type were going to be running.

COMMANDER GRETTON

Despite the fact that the lessons had shown that
air cover had a magical effect on convoy protection, and stopped attacks altogether, Coastal Command started the war with far too few aircraft and its main role was looking for surface ships instead of the anti-submarine role. What's more, cooperation between the Navy and Air Force was then very bad indeed, mainly due to stupid quarrels among senior officers in Whitehall.

VERNON MINER

If anybody decided they wouldn't sail then they were subject to the Merchant Shipping Act, which has now been changed – in 1971 – and could have been sentenced to a term of imprisonment not exceeding three months. I never thought we were paid commensurate with the risks we ran. The normal comparison that seamen made during the war of their wage for the hours they worked was with the ammunition workers who, we heard at the time, were making a fabulous amount of money for no more risk than a housewife left at home.

SEAMAN EDWARD BUTLER

Escort-ship crewman

We used to read in the papers about bombing Germany and coming back and often the lads would say, 'Well, I wouldn't mind just going over there for a couple of hours and coming back for a good night's kip.' When you're tossing your guts out on the deck for nearly three weeks at a time, there and back three weeks, a total of six weeks, it's a pretty tough life.

ADMIRAL DÖNITZ

Britain's sea trade across the Atlantic was of vital importance to her: British sea power must be able to control the trading routes and most of her food and raw materials and her armaments comes across the Atlantic. The most important strategic object of an enemy of England is to attack these routes, that is why in a war Germany had to send her warships into the Atlantic, and they had to be able to stay for a large enough time in the Atlantic in order to fight against the ships on the British sea routes.

VERNON MINER

One ship I sailed on broke down and we went to Cardiff for repairs, and leaving Cardiff she broke down and was repaired at Milford Haven. Eventually left in convoy, broke down off Anglesey and went to Birkenhead for repairs, left Birkenhead, anchored in the Mersey, broke down there – couldn't raise the anchor. Left with a convoy, too slow to maintain a convoy speed of seven knots. The steering gear bust in a gale, the chain steering gear, the spring buffers parted, it was a common occurrence with that kind of steering gear. I think everything that could have gone wrong with that ship went wrong, until a couple of U-boats sunk it for us.

ADMIRAL DÖNITZ

If from the point of view of the geographical situation of Germany is considered, then it is easy to see how unfavourable it was for the German
surface warships to perform this task – they had to go on the surface from the distant German base, the long way through the North Sea until they could go north of [the] Shetland Islands, westward into the Atlantic Ocean.

CAPTAIN GILBERT ROBERTS

Director, Tactical Unit, Western Approaches, Liverpool

History books will tell you that at the end of the first war aircraft did operate alongside of, or with, the convoys and that from that moment on there was a very significant drop in the sinking of merchant ships. But this wasn't done in the first part of the second war and aircraft seemed to be going out into the Atlantic with their own plans and told to work by themselves.

EDWARD BUTLER

We always seemed to get the
'Rear End Charlie' of a convoy, the rear position, and we were always turning round to go and investigate why a ship was falling behind and this again entailed turning around in heavy seas, and the amount of crockery that was broken and the gear that swirled around, tables overturning if they weren't secured properly. There was always something that went wrong if you turned around. They tried to warn you, probably said, 'We're turning 180 degrees in five minutes' time', then the turn, and you'd get a full wave and everything would go over – pots, pans and all your cutlery would be smashed – and next morning you'd be fighting for a cup to have a cup of tea.