Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945

by Max Hastings

The fact that Churchill persuaded the British people to an alternative judgement, to defiance of perceived reality, prompted enduring French envy, resentment and bitterness. THE

After the BEF’s escape, Churchill made the fine moral but reckless military decision to send more troops to France, to stiffen the resolve of its government. In June, two ill-equipped divisions were shipped to join the residual British forces on the Continent. After the armistice, because the Germans were overwhelmingly preoccupied elsewhere, it proved possible to evacuate almost 200,000 men from the northwestern French ports to England, with the loss of only a few thousand. Churchill was fortunate thus to be spared the consequences of a folly.

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.

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.

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.

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 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 and an undefeated RAF. Hitler’s heart was never in it.

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.

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 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.

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.

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-based 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;

were achieved by a handful of each side’s best men: the top 3.5 percent of Fighter Command’s pilots made 30 percent of all claims for aircraft shot down, and the Luftwaffe’s aces accounted for an even higher proportion of kills.

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 “halswah”—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.

British pilots partied relentlessly at night, youth overcoming exhaustion. Pete Brothers said, “We used to booze dreadfully.” One day when his squadron was stood down in bad weather, the airmen adjourned to the bar, only to find themselves scrambled when the sky cleared. “I shall never forget taking off and thinking, ‘That button … turn it that way … switch on gunsights …’ We were all absolutely tanked. Mind you, when we saw black crosses, you were instantly sober.”

The 146 Poles who participated in the Battle of Britain formed the largest foreign element, 5 percent of overall RAF pilot strength.

Three-quarters of downed British fighters fell to Bf‑109s, rather than to bomber gunners or twin-engined Bf-110s. Surprise was all: four out of five victims never saw their attackers; many were hit from behind, while themselves attacking a plane ahead.

between 10 July and 31 October, 463 Hurricanes suffered such damage, sometimes total and fatal. As many as one-third of both Dowding’s and Göring’s overall losses were accidental.

But throughout the winter of 1940–41 the Luftwaffe lacked a credible strategic plan, together with the aiming accuracy and bomb loads necessary to inflict decisive damage on British industry.

boffin,

In that role, one of his more notable feats was to evacuate from Bordeaux, after the French surrender, £3 million in industrial diamonds retrieved from Amsterdam, a group of France’s most brilliant scientists, and the country’s entire stock of Norwegian heavy water, indispensable to making an atomic bomb.

HITLER’S AIR ASSAULT on Britain ranks second only to the invasion of Russia among his great blunders of the war. After June 1940 many of Churchill’s people, especially in high places, recognised their country’s inability to challenge Nazi mastery of the Continent. If they had merely been left to contemplate British impotence, political agitation for a negotiation with Germany might well have been renewed, and gained support from the old appeasers still holding high government office. The unfulfilled threat of air attack, on an annihilatory scale widely anticipated and feared in 1939, could have influenced British policy more strongly than the reality of an inconclusive one.

The Germans failed to achieve this against Britain in 1940–41, a first earnest of one of the great truths of the conflict: while the Wehrmacht often fought its battles brilliantly, the Nazis made war with startling ineptitude. The Luftwaffe, instead of terrorising Churchill’s people into bowing to Hitler’s will, merely roused them to acquiesce in defiance.

Hitler spent much less time than the British supposed contemplating the Luftwaffe’s operations against them. He never visited its airfields on the Channel coast. Instead, for most of the autumn and winter he was wrestling with his fundamental strategic dilemma: whether to consolidate Germany’s western victories and invade Britain in 1941, or instead to follow his strongest inclinations and turn east. On 31 July 1940, long before the Luftwaffe attack on Britain reached its climax, at the Berghof he told his generals of his determination to attack Russia the following May.

From his own perspective, he had no choice. The German economy was much less strong than its enemies supposed—only slightly larger than that of Britain, which enjoyed a higher per capita income. It could not indefinitely be sustained on a war footing, and was stretched to the limits to feed the population and arm the Wehrmacht. Hitler was determined to secure his strategic position in Europe before the United States entered the war, which he anticipated in 1942. The only option unavailable to him was that of making peace, since Churchill refused to negotiate.

Hitler saw three reasons for striking: first, he wished to do so, in fulfilment of his ambition to eradicate bolshevism and create a German empire in the east; second, it seemed prudent to eliminate the Soviet threat before again turning west for a final settlement with Britain and the United States; third, he identified economic arguments. Ironically, Russia’s vast deliveries of raw materials and commodities following the Nazi-Soviet Pact—which in 1940 included most of Germany’s animal-feed imports, 74 percent of its phosphorus, 67 percent of its asbestos, 65 percent of its chrome ore, 55 percent of its manganese, 40 percent of its nickel and 34 percent of its oil—convinced Hitler that such a level of dependence was intolerable.

Only late in the war did the Allies grasp the severity of their enemy’s fuel problems: petrol was so short that novice Wehrmacht drivers could be given only meagre tuition, resulting in a heavy military-vehicle accident rate. Even in 1942, the worst year of the Battle of the Atlantic, Britain imported 10.2 million tons of oil; meanwhile, German imports and synthetic production never exceeded 8.9 million tons. Thus it was that Hitler made seizure of the Caucasian oil wells a key objective of Operation Barbarossa, heedless of the handicap this imposed on operations to destroy the Red Army, by dividing Germany’s forces.

It was a striking characteristic of Axis behaviour until 1945 that while there was some limited consultation between Germany, Italy and Japan, there was no attempt to join in creating a coherent common strategy for defeating the Allies.

Save for a small force dispatched to North Africa in April 1941, for a year following France’s surrender scarcely a single German soldier fired a shot in anger. There was a protracted lull in ground operations, a loss of impetus unapparent at the time but critical to the course of the war. Hitler took no meaningful steps towards converting the largest military conquests in history into a durable hegemony.

Many more Nazi battlefield triumphs lay ahead, but some generals privy to their Führer’s intentions already understood the Third Reich’s fundamental difficulty: anything less than hemispheric domination threatened disaster; yet Germany’s military and economic capability to achieve this remained questionable. Hitler’s continental triumphs caused the democracies to overrate Germany’s strength, while persuading his own nation rapturously to rejoice in their victories.

Yet such triumphalism was wildly premature. Germany’s 1940 victories created an enormous empire, but while this could be pillaged to considerable effect, it was administered with dire economic incompetence. Germany, contrary to widespread perceptions, was not an advanced industrial state by comparison with the United States, which it lagged by perhaps thirty years; it still had a large peasant agricultural sector such as Britain had shed.

Churchill’s single-minded commitment to victory served his country wonderfully well in 1940–41, but thereafter it would reveal important limitations. He sought the preservation of British imperial greatness, the existing order, and this purpose would not suffice for most of his fellow countrymen. They yearned for social change, improvements in their domestic condition of a kind which seemed to the prime minister almost frivolous amid a struggle for global mastery.

Churchill never defined credible war aims beyond the defeat of the Axis; when the tide of battle turned, this would become a serious weakness of his leadership and a threat to his domestic popularity. But in 1940–41 his foremost challenge was to convince his people that the war could be won. This became more difficult, rather than less, once the Luftwaffe was vanquished: thoughtful people recognised that the nation remained impotent to challenge German dominance of the Continent.

AT THE OUTBREAK of the conflict in 1939, Hitler had no intention of waging war in the Mediterranean, and asserted his determination not to commit German resources there. It was his fellow dictator Benito Mussolini who yearned to create an Italian lake, and on his own initiative launched the offensives which brought conflict to the region.

Italy was relatively poor, with a GDP less than half the size of Britain’s, and barely one-third per capita; it produced only one-sixth as much steel. The nation mobilised its economy less effectively for the Second World War than it had for the First. Even in the sunshine days of Mussolini’s relationship with Hitler, such was the Nazis’ contempt for their ally that 350,000 Italian workers in Germany were treated little better than slaves;

In 1936, when a foolish woman at a party asked Field Marshal Werner von Blomberg who would win the next war, he is alleged to have answered, “Madam, I cannot tell you that. Only one thing I can say: whoever has Italy on his side is bound to lose.” There was a contemptuous joke in Nazi Party circles of Hitler’s lackey Wilhelm Keitel reporting, “My Führer, Italy has entered the war!” Hitler answers, “Send two divisions. That should be enough to finish them.” Keitel says, “No, my Führer, not against us, but with us.” Hitler says, “That’s different. Send ten divisions.”

The clashes between desert armies were little more significant in determining the outcome of the global conflict than the tournaments between bands of French and English knights which provided entr’actes during the Hundred Years’ War. But the North African contest caught the imagination of the Western world, and achieved immense symbolic significance in the minds of the British people.

It is foolish to romanticise any aspect of the war, given the universal reality that almost every participant would have preferred to be in his own home; that to die trapped in a blazing tank was no less terrible at Sollum or Benghazi than at Stalingrad. But the emptiness of desert battlefields, where there was neither much slaughter of innocents nor destruction of civilian property, alleviated some of the horrors imposed by collateral damage in populated regions. While campaigning in the desert was never comfortable, in the protracted intervals between battles it was preferable to winter Russia or monsoon Asia.

Britain’s presence was anomalous to the verge of absurdity: Egypt was an independent sovereign state ruled by King Farouk, where the British supposedly exercised rights only to defend the Suez Canal. The Cairo government did not formally enter hostilities until February 1945. The sympathies of most Egyptians lay with the Axis, which they believed would liberate them from more than seventy years of British domination. Indeed, such views were widespread among Arab nationalists throughout the Middle East, and were stimulated by Hitler’s 1940 successes. That August, the secretary of the grand mufti of Jerusalem visited Berlin to discuss fomenting a revolt in Iraq. In addition, he suggested, prospective rebels in Palestine and Transjordan might be armed with weapons provided by the Vichy French in Syria. The aspiring insurgents’ principal demand was that the Nazis should commit themselves to the future independence of the Arab states.

Mussolini dismissed Hitler’s offer of two armoured divisions for North Africa, which might have been decisive in securing a swift Axis victory: he was determined to keep the Germans out of his own jealously defined sphere of influence. A quarter of Italy’s combat aircraft were dispatched to join the Luftwaffe’s attack on Britain, leaving Italian troops in Libya almost without air support, while a large army in Albania—occupied by Mussolini in 1939—was held in readiness to attack either Yugoslavia or Greece, as the Duce deemed expedient. The Italians made policy and strategy in the belief that they were participating in the residual military operations of a short war soon to conclude in Axis victory. Mussolini, indeed, was fearful that the British might make terms with Hitler before he had achieved his own conquests. Instead, Italy would become the only nation whose strategic fortunes were decisively affected by events in Africa, where it lost progressively twenty-six divisions, half its air force and its entire tank inventory, together with any vestige of military credibility.

but the Abyssinian campaign was crowned with British success, after some hard fighting on short commons. Though combat losses were few, 74,550 men succumbed to sickness or accidents and 744 of them died, as did 15,000 camels supporting the British advance. More than 300,000 Italians became prisoners.

Lt. Tom Bird employed a cricketing metaphor: “One can’t help feeling that it is a great bit of luck to have been able to have a practice over or two, so to speak, with the Italians. What more delightful people to fight could there be?”

Nothing went right for the Italian war effort. Mussolini’s propaganda department in Rome made a film designed to demonstrate the superiority of fascist manhood. To this end, a fight was staged between former world heavyweight champion Primo Carnera and Kay Masaki, a black South African taken prisoner in the desert. Masaki had never entered a boxing ring in his life, and was knocked down when the cameras began to roll. He picked himself up, however, and struck Carnera a blow that rendered him unconscious.

DURING THE THREE MONTHS before the British offensive in Libya petered out in February 1941, it achieved an important marginal impact, unrecognised at the time: Operation Compass contributed to keeping Spain out of the war. Franco faced the same dilemmas as Mussolini, but reached different conclusions. He was ideologically enthusiastic towards the Axis and wished to share the spoils of Allied defeat. But he was cautious about exposing his country, ravaged by recent civil war, to the hazards of a new struggle until the British had been reduced to impotence. From 1939 onwards Spain was no neutral, but a belligerent-in-waiting:

Franco’s military planners busied themselves preparing a possible takeover of Portugal as well as Gibraltar. Thereafter, however, relations with Germany soured. The Spanish dictator was galled when Hitler refused to concede to him French colonies in Africa, partly because Germany still hoped to enlist Vichy France as an active ally. Mussolini strongly opposed Spanish belligerence, partly because he was a competitor with Franco for the same French colonies, and also because he sought unreserved personal hegemony over the Mediterranean littoral.

The most intractable sticking point in negotiations was that the Spanish leader, like Mussolini, was unwilling to allow large numbers of German troops into his country. He admired Hitler vastly, and cherished absurd illusions that the Führer would create a new European polity in which Spain, for so long an abused underdog, would be conceded its rightful place in the sun. But he had no intention of allowing his country to become a Nazi fiefdom.

If Franco had joined the war, the inevitable fall of Gibraltar would have doomed Malta. It would have been much harder—perhaps impossible—for the British to hold the Middle East. The damage to their prestige and confidence would have been immense, and Churchill might not have survived as prime minister through 1941. Franco deserved no gratitude from the Allies, because cautious Spanish diplomacy was driven by self-interest; he held back only because he overvalued his own worth to the Axis. But the outcome was much to the advantage of both Britain and Spain.