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One reason for the delay was that Huntziger insisted that Weygand give him not an authorization to sign but an order—no one in France wanted to take the responsibility.
France was now destined to become a German vassal, as Pétain, Weygand and Laval apparently believed—and accepted.
France, which had held out unbeaten for four years the last time, was out of the war after six weeks.
All that stood between him and the establishment of German hegemony in Europe under his dictatorship was one indomitable Englishman, Winston Churchill, and the determined people Churchill led, who did not recognize defeat when it stared them in the face and who now stood alone, virtually unarmed, their island home besieged by the mightiest military machine the world had ever seen.
So certain was he that the British would agree to this that even after the fall of France he made no plans for continuing the war against Britain, and the vaunted General Staff, which supposedly planned with Prussian thoroughness for every contingency far in advance, did not bother to furnish him any.
Especially when it could get a peace that would leave it, unlike France, Poland and all the other defeated lands, unscathed, intact and free?
Not even when on June 4, after the evacuation from Dunkirk, the Prime Minister had made his resounding speech about fighting on in the hills and on the beaches; not even when on June 18, after Pétain had asked for an armistice, Churchill reiterated in the Commons Britain’s “inflexible resolve to continue the war” and in another one of his eloquent and memorable perorations concluded: Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will say: “This was their finest hour.” These could be merely
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In the United States the German Embassy, under the direction of Hans Thomsen, the chargé d’affaires, was spending every dollar it could lay its hands on to support the isolationists in keeping America out of the war and thus discourage Britain from continuing it.
The party conventions were being held that summer and Thomsen was bending every effort to influence their foreign-policy planks, especially that of the Republicans.
The next day Thomsen was wiring Berlin about a new project he said he was negotiating through an American literary agent to have five well-known American writers write books “from which I await great results.”
I was able furthermore through a confidential agent to induce the isolationist Representative Thorkelson [Republican of Montana] to have the Fuehrer interview inserted in the Congressional Record of June 22. This assures the interview once more the widest distribution.
Churchill himself, as he related later in his memoirs, was somewhat troubled by the peace feelers emanating through Sweden, the United States and the Vatican and, convinced that Hitler was trying to make the most of them, took stern measures to counter them.
To the King of Sweden, who had urged Great Britain to accept a peace settlement, the grim Prime Minister drafted a strong reply. …Before any such requests or proposals could even be considered, it would be necessary that effective guarantees by deeds, not words, should be forthcoming from Germany which would ensure the restoration of the free and independent life of Czechoslovakia, Poland, Norway, Denmark, Holland, Belgium and above all, France…*37 That was the nub of Churchill’s case and apparently no one in London dreamt of compromising it by concluding a peace that would preserve Britain
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I have made to Britain so many offers of agreement, even of co-operation, and have been treated so shabbily [he wrote] that I am now convinced that any new appeal to reason would meet with a similar rejection.
The Hitler we saw in the Reichstag tonight was the conqueror and conscious of it, and yet so wonderful an actor, so magnificent a handler of the German mind, that he mixed superbly the full confidence of the conqueror with the humbleness which always goes down so well with the masses when they know a man is on top.
To be sure, his long speech was swollen with falsifications of history and liberally sprinkled with personal insults of Churchill.
He made no concrete suggestions for peace terms, no mention of what was to happen to the hundred million people now under the Nazi yoke in the conquered countries.
On July 1 he had told the ambassador: …It was always a good tactic to make the enemy responsible in the eyes of public opinion in Germany and abroad for the future course of events. This strengthened one’s own morale and weakened that of the enemy.
The speech of July 19 worked with the German people, but not with the British.
Now in the midsummer of 1940 they did not know what to do with their glittering success; they had no plans and scarcely any will for exploiting the greatest military victories in the history of their soldiering nation.
The Germans, despite their vaunted military talents, lacked any grand strategic concept. Their horizons were limited—they had always been limited—to land warfare against the neighboring nations on the European Continent.
They might bring Britain down by striking across the Mediterranean with their Italian ally, taking Gibraltar at its western opening and in the east driving on from Italy’s bases in North Africa through Egypt and over the canal to Iran, severing one of the Empire’s main life lines.
This fateful neglect would prove to be one of the great turning points of the war and indeed of the short life of the Third Reich and of the meteoric career of Adolf Hitler.
Taylor, who spent four years as an American prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials, is an authority on the German documents.
good many of the exhausted Tommies on the beaches, who underwent severe bombings, were not aware of this, since the air clashes were often above the clouds or some distance away. They knew only that they had been bombed and strafed all the way back from eastern Belgium to Dunkirk, and they felt their Air Force had let them down.
On this day, June 17, 1940, the exiled Kaiser sent from Doorn, in occupied Holland, a telegram of congratulations to Hitler, whom he had for so long scorned as a vulgar upstart.
In all German hearts there echoes the Leuthen chorale sung by the victors of Leuthen, the soldiers of the Great King: “Now thank we all our God!”
His death, Hassell noted in his diary (p. 200), “went almost unnoticed” in Germany. Hitler and Goebbels saw to that.
The defeatist French High Command forbade any offensive action against Italy.
When the R.A.F. tried to send bombers from the airfield at Marseilles to attack Milan and Turin the French drove trucks onto the field and prevented the planes from taking off.
Such receipts or memoranda would fall into the hands of the American Secret Service if the Embassy were suddenly to be seized by American authorities, and despite all camouflage, by the fact of their existence alone, they would mean political ruin and have other grave consequences for our political friends, who are probably known to our enemies…
One is struck by me tendency of the German diplomats to tell the Nazi dictator pretty much what he wanted to hear—a practice common among representatives of totalitarian lands. Two officers of OKW told me in Berlin that the High Command, or at least the General Staff, was highly suspicious of the objectivity of the reports from the Washington embassy and that they had established their own military intelligence in the United States.
Boetticher also overestimated the influence of the isolationists in American politics, especially of Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh, who emerges in his dispatches as his great hero.
Lindbergh gave it as his opinion that England would soon collapse before German air attacks. The General Staff officers, however, held that Germany’s air strength was not sufficient to force a decision.
This promiscuous award of field-marshalships—the Kaiser had named only five field marshals from the officer corps during all of World War I and not even Ludendorff had been made one—undoubtedly helped to stifle any latent opposition to Hitler among the generals such as had threatened to remove him on at least three occasions in the past.
None of the gifted planners in any of the three German armed services knew how Britain was to be invaded, though it was the Navy, not unnaturally, which had first given the matter some thought.
Following his appearance at Compiègne on June 21, Hitler went off with some old cronies to do the sights of Paris briefly* and then to visit the battlefields, not of this war but of the first war, where he had served as a dispatch runner.
Though Jodl was second only to Keitel at OKW in his fanatical belief in the Fuehrer’s genius, he was, when left alone, usually a prudent strategist.
But one reporter can see very little of a war and we know now that the Germans did not begin to assemble the invasion fleet until September 1. As for the generals, anyone who read their interrogations or listened to them on cross-examination at the Nuremberg trials learned to take their postwar testimony with more than a grain of salt.
Also they had many axes to grind, one of the foremost being to discredit Hitler’s military leadership. Indeed, their principal theme, expounded at dreary length in their memoirs and in their interrogations and trial testimony, was that if they had been left to make the decisions Hitler never would have led the Third Reich to defeat.
Even if it were possible to assemble such a vast amount of shipping, Raeder told Hitler on July 25, it would wreck the German economy, since taking away so many barges and tugs would destroy the whole inland-waterway transportation system, on which the economic life of the country largely depended.
If a broad front with the large number of troops to man it was attempted, the whole German expedition might be sunk at sea by the British Navy. If a short front, with correspondingly fewer troops, was adopted, the invaders might be hurled back into the sea by the British Army.
Actually, as Raeder’s long recording of the talk shows, the Fuehrer discoursed at length about almost everything except Sea Lion: about Norway, Gibraltar, Suez, “the problem of the U.S.A.,” the treatment of the French colonies and his fantastic views about the establishment of a “North Germanic Union.”23 If Churchill and his military chiefs had only got wind of this remarkable conference the code word “Cromwell” might not have been sent out in England on the evening of the next day, September 7, signifying “Invasion imminent” and causing no end of confusion, the endless ringing of church bells
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As will shortly be seen, this savage bombing of London on September 7, though setting off a premature warning and causing much damage, marked a decisive turning point in the Battle of Britain, the first great decisive struggle in the air the earth had ever experienced, which was now rapidly approaching its climax.
America’s rearmament would not be fully effective until 1945.
Adolf Hitler, after so many years of dazzling successes, had at last met failure.
The Fuehrer has decided that from now on until the spring, preparations for “Sea Lion” shall be continued solely for the purpose of maintaining political and military pressure on England.
What had happened to make Adolf Hitler finally give in? Two things: the fatal course of the Battle of Britain in the air, and the turning of his thoughts once more eastward, to Russia.
In fact, the bemedaled German Air Force chief thought that the Luftwaffe alone could bring Britain to her knees and that an invasion by land forces probably would not be necessary.
The R.A.F. Command shrewdly declined to commit more than a fraction of its fighters, and as a result considerable damage was done to shipping and to some of the ports.
