More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
This gave a great fillip to British morale in general and to that of the hard-pressed fighter pilots in particular.
Already on June 14, the day German troops entered Paris, the Soviet government had sent a nine-hour ultimatum to Lithuania demanding the resignation of its government, the arrest of some of its key officials and the right to send in as many Red Army troops as it pleased. Though the Lithuanian government accepted the ultimatum, Moscow deemed its acceptance “unsatisfactory,” and the next day, June 15, Soviet troops occupied the country, the only one of the Baltic States to border on Germany.
The press having been suppressed, the political leaders arrested and all parties but the Communist declared illegal, “elections” were staged by the Russians in all three countries on July 14, and after the respective parliaments thus “elected” had voted for the incorporation of their lands into the Soviet Union, the Supreme Soviet (Parliament) of Russia “admitted” them into the motherland: Lithuania on August 3, Latvia on August 5, Estonia on August 6.
The letters from the envoys of the three Baltic States in Berlin protesting Russian aggression were returned to them by order of Ribbentrop.
Bessarabia had been taken by Rumania from Russia at the end of the First World War, but Bucovina had never belonged to it, having been under Austria until Rumania grabbed it in 1919.
The Soviet dictator did not bother to answer; probably, like almost everyone else, he thought Britain was finished.
Sir Stafford Cripps, a left-wing Labor Party leader, whom the Prime Minister had rushed to Moscow as the new British ambassador in the hope of striking a more responsive chord among the Bolsheviks—a forlorn hope, as he later ruefully admitted—was received by Stalin early in July in an interview that Churchill described as “formal and frigid.”
Such staggering smugness, such abysmal ignorance leave one breathless. The Russian tyrant did not know, of course, the secrets of Hitler’s turgid mind, but the Fuehrer’s past behavior, his known ambitions and the unexpectedly rapid Nazi conquests ought to have been enough to warn him of the dire danger the Soviet Union was now in.
At that time the two-front war, the nightmare of German generals for a century, was very much on Hitler’s mind, and he spoke of it at length on this occasion. He would not repeat the mistake of former German rulers; he would continue to see to it that the Army had one front at a time.
Brauchitsch told the Leader that the campaign “would last four to six weeks” and that the aim would be “to defeat the Russian Army or at least to occupy enough Russian territory so that Soviet bombers could not reach Berlin or the Silesian industrial area while, on the other hand, the Luftwaffe bombers could reach all important objectives in the Soviet Union.”
The more he thought of it the more convinced he was, Hitler said, that Britain’s stubborn determination to continue the war was due to its counting on the Soviet Union.
Though he would later claim to have opposed the whole idea of an attack on Russia as insane, his diary entry for this day discloses him full of enthusiasm as he applied himself to the challenging new task.
Planning now went ahead with typical German thoroughness on three levels: that of the Army General Staff, of Warlimont’s Operations Staff at OKW, of General Thomas’ Economic and Armaments Branch of OKW.
When Mihai Manoilescu, the Rumanian Foreign Minister, saw the map stipulating that about one half of Transylvania should go to Hungary, he fainted, falling across the table at which the signing of the agreement was taking place, and regaining consciousness only after physicians had worked over him with camphor.
The thieves, as is almost inevitable in such cases, had begun to quarrel over the spoils.
The memorandum was couched in strong language and the Russians replied to it on September 21 with equally stern words—by this time both sides were putting their cases in writing.
The chilly Soviet Foreign Commissar, whose suspicions of the Germans were now growing like flowers in June, was highly skeptical when Werner von Tippelskirch, the chargé, brought him this news on the evening of September 26. He said immediately, with that pedantic attention to detail which so annoyed all with whom he negotiated, friend or foe, that according to Article IV of the Moscow Pact the Soviet government was entitled to see the text of this tripartite military alliance before it was signed, including, he added, the text of “any secret protocols.” Molotov also wanted to know more about
...more
It is, as might be expected, a fatuous and at the same time arrogant epistle, abounding in nonsense and lies and subterfuge. England is blamed for the war and all its aftermaths thus far, but one thing is sure: “The war as such has been won by us. It is only a question of how long it will be before England… admits to collapse.”
Ribbentrop gave a sly hint what those views were: nothing less than dividing up the world among the four totalitarian powers.
There was some delay in the German Embassy in Moscow in getting this letter to its destination, which made Ribbentrop livid with rage and inspired an angry telegram from him to Schulenburg demanding to know why his letter had not been delivered until the seventeenth and why, “in keeping with the importance of its contents,” it was not delivered to Stalin personally—Schulenburg had handed it to Molotov.
But to have survived in the cutthroat competition of the Kremlin he must have something. The Germans talk glibly of letting Moscow have that old Russian dream, the Bosporus and the Dardanelles, while they will take the rest of the Balkans: Rumania, Yugoslavia and Bulgaria…
The Fuehrer, he said, had concluded that all four countries would naturally expand “in a southerly direction.”
This was an awkward but crucial question, as the Germans would learn during the next thirty-six hours of ceaseless conversations with this stubborn, prosaic, precise Bolshevik.
Hitler, perhaps for the first time in his life, was too taken aback to answer. He proposed that they adjourn “in view of a possible air-raid alarm,” promising to go into a detailed discussion the next day.
He had been expressing himself bluntly all day, to the growing annoyance of his hosts, and now he pressed on.
Hitler, apparently exhausted and still irritated by the afternoon’s ordeal, did not put in an appearance.
Some of us, I confess, had waited hopefully for the planes, but they had not come.
The proposed treaty was obviously an attempt to divert Russia from its historic pressure westward, down the Baltic, into the Balkans and through the Straits to the Mediterranean, where inevitably it would clash with the greedy designs of Germany and Italy.
The untiring, poker-faced Soviet Foreign Commissar left nothing out and Ribbentrop, who felt himself being buried under the avalanche of questions—for at this point Molotov said he would “appreciate it” if his guest made answer to them—protested that he was being “interrogated too closely.”
This sarcasm may have gone over the head of Ribbentrop, a man of monumental denseness, but Molotov took no chances. To the German’s constant reiteration that Britain was finished, the Commissar finally replied, “If that is so, why are we in this shelter, and whose are these bombs which fall?”
He had tried to keep Russia out of Europe, but now Stalin was demanding Finland, Bulgaria, control of the Straits and, in effect, the Arabian and Persian oil fields, which normally supplied Europe with most of its oil.
The great cold-blooded Nazi blackmailer had met his match, and the realization infuriated him.
Such was Hitler’s grandiose plan, completed just before the Christmas holidays of 1940, and so well prepared that no essential changes would be made in it.
Later Halder would write derisively of “Hitler’s Russian adventure” and claim the Army leaders were against it from the beginning.37 But there is not a word in his voluminous diary entries for December 1940 which supports him in this.
At any rate, for Hitler the die was cast, and, though he did not know it, his ultimate fate sealed, by this decision of December 18,1940.
Out of his mind too—as far as possible—must have been any thoughts of Charles XII of Sweden and of Napoleon Bonaparte, who after so many glorious conquests not unlike his own, had met disaster in the vast depths of the Russian steppes.
Adolf Hitler, balked by a shifty Franco, by the ineptitude of Mussolini and even by the senility of Marshal Pétain, had really missed the bus in the Mediterranean.
They had come about not only because of the weaknesses of Germany’s friends and allies, but, in part, because of the Nazi warlord’s incapacity to grasp the larger, intercontinental strategy that was called for and that Raeder and even Goering had urged upon him.
The Canary Islands must be secured by the Air Force.
According to Raeder, Hitler agreed with his “general trend of thought” but added that he would have to talk matters over first with Mussolini, Franco and Pétain.
Franco, who owed his triumph in the Spanish Civil War to the massive military aid of Italy and Germany, had, like all his fellow dictators, an inordinate appetite for spoils, especially if they could be gained cheaply. In June, at the moment of France’s fall, he had hastily informed Hitler that Spain would enter the war in return for being given most of the vast French African empire, including Morocco and western Algeria, and provided that Germany supplied Spain liberally with arms, gasoline and foodstuffs.
The crafty Spaniard was not impressed by the Fuehrer’s boast that “England already is decisively beaten,” nor was he satisfied with Hitler’s promise to give Spain territorial compensation in French North Africa “to the extent to which it would be possible to cover France’s losses from British colonies.” Franco wanted the French African empire, with no strings attached.
Franco replied, with typical Spanish pride, that Gibraltar would have to be taken by Spaniards “alone.”
“That ungrateful coward!” Ribbentrop cursed to Schmidt about Franco the next morning. “He owes us everything and now won’t join us!”
But this was because the aging, defeatist Marshal, the hero of Verdun in the First World War and the perpetrator of the French surrender in the Second, agreed to France’s collaboration with her conqueror in one last effort to bring Britain, the late ally, to her knees.
According to all accounts, Mussolini greatly enjoyed this revenge on his friend for all the previous occasions when the Nazi dictator had marched into a country without previously confiding to his Italian ally.
The British will be prevented from gaining a foothold at another point of the Iberian peninsula or the Atlantic islands. “Felix” was to be the code name for the taking of Gibraltar and the Spanish Canary Islands and the Portuguese Cape Verde Islands. The Navy was also to study the possibility of occupying Portugal’s Madeira and the Azores. Portugal itself might have to be occupied. “Operation Isabella” would be the cover name for that, and three German divisions would be assembled on the Spanish–Portuguese frontier to carry it out.
He assured them on November 4, Halder noted, that he had just received Franco’s renewed promise to join Germany in the war, but this, as we have seen, was not quite true.
The Italian disaster in Greece—Mussolini’s troops had now been hurled back into Albania and were still retreating—had not only greatly improved Britain’s strategic position in the Mediterranean, the sailors pointed out, but enhanced British prestige throughout the world.
He had never been able to envisage the war in the Mediterranean and North Africa as anything but secondary to his main objective.
