The Second World War Read online

  The British, however, still expected at any moment the ringing of church bells to announce the invasion. Bomber Command continued to attack the barges assembled in Channel ports. Nobody knew Hitler’s own doubts. If the RAF were not destroyed by mid-September, then Operation Sealion would be postponed. Göring, well aware that he would be blamed for the failure to crush the RAF, as he had boasted he would do, ordered another major assault on Sunday, 15 September.

  That day, Churchill had decided to visit the headquarters of 11 Group at Uxbridge, where he stood in the control room alongside Park. He watched avidly as the information from the radar stations and the Observer Corps was converted into German raiders on the plotting board below. By midday, Park, following his instinct that this was an all-out effort, had scrambled twenty-three squadrons of fighters. This time, the Spitfire and Hurricane squadrons had received plenty of warning to gain altitude. And once the escorting Me 109s had to turn back when short of fuel, the bombers found themselves overwhelmed by the fighters of an air force they had been told was finished.

  The pattern repeated itself during the afternoon, with Park calling in more reinforcements from 10 Group and 12 Group in the west of England. By the end of the day, the RAF had destroyed fifty-six aircraft for the loss of twenty-nine fighters and twelve pilots killed. There were more attacks a few days later, but nothing on the same scale. And yet, on 16 September, Göring was convinced by his ever optimistic chief intelligence officer that Fighter Command was down to 177 aircraft.

  A fear of invasion remained, but Hitler decided on 19 September to postpone Sealion until further notice. The Kriegsmarine and the OKH were even less keen to invade now that the Luftwaffe’s failure to crush Fighter Command had become clear. With the war in the west approaching a stalemate, indications of it turning into a global conflict began to appear. The Japanese had recently been taken aback by Communist forces in northern China launching a series of attacks. The Sino-Japanese War was flaring up again in another round of brutal fighting. On 27 September, the Japanese signed a tripartite pact in Berlin. This was clearly aimed at the United States. President Roosevelt promptly summoned his military advisers to discuss the implications, and two days later Britain reopened the Burma Road for the transport of war materials to the Chinese Nationalists.

  The Battle of Britain was deemed to have ended at the end of October, when the Luftwaffe concentrated on the night bombing of London and of industrial targets in the Midlands. If one takes the figures for August and September, the core of the battle, the RAF lost 723 aircraft, while the Luftwaffe lost over 2,000. A strikingly high proportion came not from ‘enemy action’ but from ‘special circumstances’, which mainly meant accidents. In October the RAF shot down 206 German fighters and bombers, yet the total Luftwaffe loss for that month was 375.

  The so-called Blitz on London and other cities continued throughout the winter. On 13 November, RAF Bomber Command hit back at Berlin on Churchill’s orders. This was because the Soviet foreign minister, Molotov, had arrived the day before for talks. Stalin was uneasy about the presence of German troops in Finland and about Nazi influence in the Balkans. He also wanted a German guarantee of Soviet shipping rights from the Black Sea through the Dardanelles to the Mediterranean. Many found it strange to hear a Wehrmacht band playing the ‘Internationale’ on Molotov’s arrival at the Anhalter Bahnhof, which was festooned with red Soviet banners.

  The meetings were not a success, producing only mutual irritation. Molotov demanded answers to specific questions. He asked whether the Nazi– Soviet pact of the year before was still valid. When Hitler replied that of course it was, Molotov pointed out that the Germans were establishing close relations with their enemies, the Finns. Ribbentrop urged the Soviets to attack south towards India and the Persian Gulf, and share in the spoils of the British Empire. The suggestion that the Soviet Union should join the Tripartite Pact with Italy and Japan for this purpose was not one that Molotov took seriously. Nor was he inclined to agree when Hitler, in a characteristic monologue, lectured him on how the British were as good as beaten, as did Ribbentrop. So when the air-raid sirens sounded, and Molotov was led downstairs into the Wilhelmstrasse bunker, he could not resist remarking to the Nazi foreign minister: ‘You say that England is defeated. So why are we sitting here now in this air-raid shelter?’

  The Luftwaffe attacked Coventry the next night, but this had been planned in advance and was not a reprisal. The heavy raid hit twelve armaments factories and destroyed the ancient cathedral, as well as killing 380 civilians. But the night-bombing campaign failed to break the will of the British people, even though 23,000 civilians were killed and 32,000 seriously injured by the end of the year. Many complained of the sirens, whose ‘prolonged banshee howlings’, as Churchill called them, were soon reduced to give people a chance to sleep. ‘The sirens go off at approximately the same time every evening and in the poorer districts queues of people carrying blankets, thermos flasks, and babies begin to form quite early outside the air-raid shelters.’ Boarded-up shop windows smashed by bomb blast carried stickers announcing ‘Business as usual’ and the inhabitants of houses destroyed in the east end of London placed paper Union Jacks on the piles of rubble which had been their homes.

  ‘Worse than the tedium of our days’, wrote Peter Quennell working in the ministry of information, ‘was the squalor of our restless nights. Very often we were required to work in shifts–so many hours in a stifling subterranean dormitory under hairy much-used blankets; so many above ground crouched at our usual desks or, during a lull, asleep upon the floor, ready to be woken up by an elderly office messenger, who brought some hideous piece of news–say, a direct hit on a crowded bomb-shelter–from which we had to draw the sting. Yet it is odd how quickly a habit forms, how easily we adapt ourselves to an unfamiliar way of life, and how often supposed necessities are revealed as superfluities.’

  Although Londoners faced up far better than expected to the hardships, displaying the ‘spirit of the Blitz’ in Underground stations, a fear of German paratroopers continued, especially among women outside London. Rumours of an invasion spread from week to week. Yet on 2 October Operation Sealion had been effectively postponed until the next spring. Sealion had played a double role. The menace of a German invasion had helped Churchill unify the country and steel it for a long war. But Hitler was canny in the way he maintained the psychological threat for long after he had discarded the idea. This persuaded the British to maintain far larger defence forces in the United Kingdom than were necessary.

  In Berlin, Nazi leaders were resigned to the fact that even the bombing campaign was unlikely to bring Britain to its knees. ‘The view now prevails’, wrote Ernst von Weizsäcker, the state secretary of the German foreign office, in his diary on 17 November, ‘that starvation caused by a blockade is the most important weapon against Britain, and not smoking the British out.’ The very word ‘blockade’ carried an emotional note of revenge in Germany, obsessed with memories of the First World War and the Royal Navy’s blockade. This strategy would now be turned against the British Isles by submarine warfare.

  9

  Reverberations

  JUNE 1940–FEBRUARY 1941

  The Fall of France in the summer of 1940 created reverberations, both direct and indirect, all around the world. Stalin was deeply disturbed. His hopes that Hitler’s power would be greatly weakened in a war of attrition against France and Britain had proved utterly wrong. Germany was now far more powerful with a large part of the French army’s vehicles and weaponry captured intact.

  Further east, it represented a doubly serious blow to Chiang Kai-shek and the Chinese Nationalists. After the loss of Nanking, they had relocated their industrial base to the south-western provinces of Yunnan and Kwangsi, close to the frontier of French Indochina, believing that to be their most secure area with access to the outside world. But the new Vichy regime of Marshal Pétain began to bow to Japanese demands in July, and agreed to accept a Japanese military mission in
Hanoi. The Nationalist supply route through Indochina was cut.

  The advance of the Japanese 11th Army in that summer of 1940 up the Yangtze valley split the Nationalist armies and caused huge losses. On 12 June, the fall of the major river port of Ichang represented a terrible blow. It also isolated the Nationalist capital of Chungking and allowed Japanese naval aircraft to attack it with continual raids. There were no river mists at that time of year to impede visibility. As well as bombing towns and villages along the river, Japanese aircraft attacked steamers and junks overcrowded with wounded and refugees as they escaped upriver through the great Yangtze gorges.

  Agnes Smedley asked a Red Cross doctor about the situation. He admitted that of the 150 military hospitals on the central front, only five had survived. ‘What about the wounded?’ Smedley asked. ‘He said nothing, and I knew the answer.’ Death was all around. ‘Each day,’ she added, ‘we saw the bloated corpses of human beings slowly floating down the river, drifting against junks, and being shoved away by boatmen with long, spiked poles.’

  When Smedley reached Chungking on its cliffs high above the confluence of the Yangtze and Chialing rivers, she was startled by explosions, but these were not bombs. Chinese engineers were blasting tunnels in the cliffs to make air-raid shelters. She found that during her absence much had changed, both good and bad. A provincial city of 200,000 inhabitants was swelling towards a population of a million. The growth of industrial cooperatives was very encouraging, but increasingly powerful right-wing elements in the Kuomintang saw them as crypto-Communist. Improvements had been made in the army medical services, with free clinics set up in Nationalist areas, but again Kuomintang bosses wanted to control the health services, most likely for their own enrichment.

  Most sinister of all was the rise in power of the security chief General Tai Li, who was said now to have a force of 300,000 men, both uniformed and plain clothes. His power was so great that some even suspected that he controlled Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek himself. General Tai was stamping down not just on dissent but on free speech in any form. Chinese intellectuals began to flee to Hong Kong. Even the most innocuous organizations, such as the Young Women’s Christian Association, were closed down in the atmosphere of crisis.

  Foreigners in Chungking, according to Smedley, regarded the Chinese armies with contempt. ‘China, they said, couldn’t fight; its generals were rotten; its soldiers illiterate coolies or mere boys; its people ignorant; the care of the wounded an abomination. Some charges were true, some untrue, but almost all were based on a lack of appreciation of the fearful burdens under which China staggered.’ Europeans and Americans failed completely to understand what was at stake and did little to help. The only substantial aid for medical services came from expatriate Chinese, whether in Malaya, Java, the United States or elsewhere. Their generosity was considerable, and in 1941 the Japanese conquerors would make them suffer for it.

  Chiang Kai-shek had continued with meaningless peace negotiations in the hope of putting pressure on Stalin to bring his military support back to earlier levels. But in July 1940 a change of government in Tokyo brought General Tj Hideki into the Cabinet as minister of war. These shadow negotiations were broken off. Tj wanted to starve the Nationalists of supplies by making a stronger agreement with the Soviet Union and cutting off their other supply routes. In Tokyo, military leaders were turning their gaze south to the Pacific and south-west to the British, French and Dutch possessions around the South China Sea. This would give them rice and deprive the Nationalist Chinese of imports, but above all Japan wanted the oilfields of the Dutch East Indies. Any idea of compromise with the United States which involved a retreat from China was unthinkable to the regime in Tokyo after the deaths so far of 62,000 Japanese soldiers in the ‘China Incident’.

  In the second half of 1940 the Chinese Communist Party, under instructions from Moscow, launched its Hundred Regiments campaign in the north with almost 400,000 men. The intention was to undermine Chiang Kai-shek’s negotiations with the Japanese: they did not know that these had been broken off and had never been serious in the first place. The Communists managed to push back the Japanese in many places, cut the Peking–Hankow railway, destroy coal mines and even carry out attacks into Manchuria. This major effort, using their forces in more conventional tactics, cost them 22,000 casualties which they could ill afford.

  In Europe, Hitler demonstrated an astonishing degree of loyalty to Mussolini, often to the despair of his generals. But the Duce, his former mentor, tried every trick to avoid becoming his subordinate. The Fascist leader wanted to conduct a ‘parallel war’ separate from that of Nazi Germany. He failed to tell Hitler in advance of his plan to occupy Albania in April 1939, and pretended it was a companion piece to the German takeover of Czechoslovakia. Nazi leaders, on the other hand, were reluctant to share secrets with the Italians. Yet the Germans had still wanted to sign the Pact of Steel just over a month later.

  Like imprudent lovers hoping to profit from a relationship, both men misled each other, and both felt misled. Hitler had never warned Mussolini of his intention to crush Poland, but still expected his backing against France and Britain, while the Italian leader believed that there would be no general conflict in Europe for at least another two years. Mussolini’s subsequent refusal to enter the war in September 1939 at Germany’s side disappointed Hitler greatly. The Duce knew that his country was simply not ready, and his excessive demands for military equipment as a condition for support constituted his only excuse.

  Mussolini was, however, determined to come into the war at some point to gain more colonies and make Italy appear a great power. As a result he did not want to miss the opportunity when the two great colonial powers, Britain and France, suffered a major defeat in the early summer of 1940. The astonishing rapidity of Germany’s campaign against France and the widespread belief that Britain would have to come to terms sent him into a fever of uncertainty. Germany would dictate the shape of Europe, almost certainly becoming the dominant power in the Balkans, while Italy risked being sidelined. For that reason alone, Mussolini was desperate to obtain the right to involvement in peace negotiations. He calculated that a few thousand Italian casualties would buy him that seat at the table.

  The Nazi regime certainly did not oppose Italy’s entry into the war, even beyond the eleventh hour. Yet Hitler greatly overestimated Italy’s fighting strength. Mussolini had famously boasted of ‘eight million bayonets’ when he had fewer than 1.7 million soldiers, and many of them lacked the rifles on which to place a bayonet. The country was desperately short of money, raw materials and motor transport. To increase the number of divisions, Mussolini reduced them from three regiments to two. Out of seventy-three divisions, only nineteen were fully equipped. In fact Italy’s forces were smaller and less well armed than they had been on entering the First World War in 1915.

  Hitler unwisely took Mussolini’s estimates of Italian strength at face value. In his very limited military vision, conditioned by marked-up maps at Führer headquarters, a division of troops was a division, however under-strength, ill equipped or badly trained. Mussolini’s fatal miscalculation was to believe, in the summer of 1940, that the war was as good as over when it had hardly started. He did not appreciate that Hitler’s former rhetoric of Lebensraum in the east would become a concrete plan. On 10 June, the Duce had declared war on Britain and France. In his bombastic speech from the balcony of the Palazzo Venezia in Rome he puffed out his chest and claimed that the ‘young and fertile nations’ would crush the tired democracies. This was hailed by the crowd of loyal Blackshirts, but most Italians were far from happy.

  The Germans were unimpressed by Mussolini’s attempt to bask in the Wehrmacht’s reflected glory. The state secretary at the Wilhelmstrasse saw their Axis partner ‘as a circus clown rolling up the carpet after the acrobat’s performance and claiming the applause for himself’. Many more compared the Fascist leader’s declaration of war on a defeated France as the action of a ‘jackal’ t
rying to snatch part of the prey killed by a lion. The opportunism was indeed shameless, but it hid something worse. Mussolini had made his country the captive and the victim of his own ambitions. He realized that he could not avoid an alliance with the dominant Hitler, yet he persisted in his wishful thinking that Italy could pursue a separate policy of colonial expansion while the rest of Europe was involved in a far more deadly conflict. Italy’s weakness was to prove an utter disaster for itself and a grave vulnerability for Germany.

  On 27 September 1940, Germany signed the Tripartite Pact with Italy and Japan. Part of the idea was to deter the United States from intervening in the war, which was in a state of limbo after the failure to bring Britain to its knees. When Hitler met Mussolini at the Brenner Pass on 4 October, he reassured him that neither Moscow nor Washington had reacted dangerously to the announcement of the pact. What he wanted was a continental alliance against Britain.

  Hitler had intended to leave the Mediterranean region as an Italian sphere of interest, but he soon found after the fall of France that the issues were far more complicated. He had to try to balance the conflicting expectations of Italy, Vichy France and Franco’s Spain. Franco wanted Gibraltar, yet he also sought French Morocco and other African territories. But Hitler did not want to provoke Pétain’s French State and its loyal forces in the country’s colonial possessions. It was far better from his point of view for Vichy France to police itself and the North African colonies in Germany’s interest as long as the war lasted. Once it was won, then he could give away France’s colonies either to Italy or to Spain. But Hitler, despite his apparently limitless power after the defeat of France in 1940, proved incapable that October of persuading his debtor Franco, his vassal Pétain or his ally Mussolini to support his strategy of a continental bloc against Britain.