Blood tears and folly, p.21
Blood, Tears and Folly, page 21
March 1936, when Hitler occupied the Rhineland in defiance of the Versailles treaty, had been the time to confront the Nazis. Despite the fears expressed by the British government at that time, France’s Prime Minister Sarrault and Foreign Minister Flandin had urged Gamelin to eject the Germans, but he would not do so, explaining that Germany had 22 divisions on a war footing. In fact they had three. Afterwards, it was discovered that the Germans had orders to withdraw if they were opposed, and Eden’s memoirs said that this was the act of appeasement he most regretted.
Gamelin decided what he wanted to do and invented the reasons afterwards. It was his low opinion of the Czechoslovak army that influenced the Allies to give way to Hitler at Munich.24 He told his political masters, and the British too, that the ‘West Wall’ – Germany’s concrete fortifications, which the British Press liked to call the ‘Siegfried Line’ – would possibly halt him and force him to withdraw to his Maginot defences. When asked about the strength of his army he boasted of what it could do, while artfully adding such alarming asides as ‘initially [it] will be a modern version of the battle of the Somme’.25 It was enough to make the politicians sign anything Hitler gave them.
But when the next crisis came Gamelin expressed no such reservations about the Polish army. He thought it was formidable, and this had persuaded him to agree that in the event of war he would attack Germany three days after France’s mobilization. Such a two-front war was calculated to divide Germany’s effort and give the Poles a chance to defend themselves. And on 7 September 1939, eight divisions of the French army – including two motorized divisions and five tank battalions – moved forward into the region between the Maginot Line and the West Wall. The Germans pulled back, leaving unoccupied some 200 square kilometres of ground and about 50 German villages mined and extensively booby-trapped. Newspaper correspondents exulted, telling of great French victories and deep penetrations into Germany. Photographs and newsreel footage appeared to back up the claims.
As September ended the ‘Saar offensive’ could be seen for what it really was: a propaganda exercise. The French withdrew having suffered 27 killed and 22 wounded and the loss of a number of aircraft. By the end of October both sides were back in the positions from which they had started. From what we now know of Gamelin’s spirit and mentality it seems not impossible that the ‘Saar offensive’ was staged to prove that the cautions he’d expressed to his government about going to war in aid of Czechoslovakia were correct.
Just one week into the war the British cabinet were told some harsh facts by the chancellor of the exchequer: Britain’s financial position was desperate; far worse than it had been in 1914. Her ally France was also far weaker in every respect, and three other allies of that previous war – Russia, Italy and Japan – were now potential enemies. Britain’s total resources were about £700 million with little chance of adding to that figure. And, because the government had defaulted on its First World War debts to the United States, purchases there would in future have to be paid for in cash.26 Surely no one in the cabinet room that day could have missed the implication: America’s entry into the war was the Allies’ only chance of salvation. And it would have to come very soon.
For two weeks the world watched the Germans smash their way into Poland. Then there came a grotesque finale as the Red Army occupiers came rolling across Poland’s eastern frontier. It was clear to anyone who looked at a map that if Germany and Russia were friendly enough to mount a combined attack on Poland, they would be friendly enough for the German army to leave only a token force along that Polish frontier when they regrouped and came clubbing their way westwards.
The German campaign in Poland
For the first time, the new German army was seen in action, using techniques and weapons old and new. The Polish campaign was decided by the fact that the German army went to war by railway. The railheads near the border had to be the jumping-off points for the invaders. The armoured and motorized units that spearheaded the assault constituted only about one-sixth of the invading force: the rest of it was the same plodding horse-drawn German army that had fought in the previous war. Of the whole army only about 10 per cent had been equipped with wheels and tracks.27 Even this attempt to mechanize the army had been achieved only after 16,000 German civilian vehicles were commandeered in 1939. Germany’s auto-industry was big but it never came near to supplying the quantity of vehicles needed. Neither was the quality good enough. Few, if any, German trucks were robust enough for military use. But in ‘lightning war’ such failures did not matter. By the time the hardware of war fell apart the enemy had surrendered.
The Germans used bases in Czechoslovakia to attack Poland from north and south, as well as from the west. Poland’s geography, and the historic threat from both west and east, precluded effective defensive works. Like the French, the Poles would not build any defence lines that relinquished large areas of the country to the enemy, and they tried to hold the Germans along the frontier. It was hoped that this would provide time for the country to mobilize its army and mount a counter-offensive, and for France and Britain to attack Germany from the west.
For the first time, the world saw the sort of opening air attacks that nowadays are the way in which most wars begin. German intelligence – both on the ground and by photo-reconnaissance – had prepared the target lists, and hampered as they were by bad weather, the Luftwaffe managed to destroy much of the Polish air force in the first hours of war. Medium-range bombing attacks on Polish towns disrupted mobilization of the army. At the fighting front Stuka dive-bombers served as efficient artillery, for the Stuka training schools produced men able to get at least 50 per cent of their bombs within 25 metres of the target. (Stuka is an abbreviation of Sturzkampfflugzeug, dive-bomber. The name could be applied to any aircraft used in this role, but was often used to refer specifically to the Junkers Ju 87.)
The Polish army, and its air component, proved a dauntless opponent, but it was not equipped to fight a modern war. The Germans used armoured divisions to pierce the front. Following them, conventional armies converged to surround the Poles in two vast encirclements, one inside the other. It was the seventeenth day of the campaign when the second set of pincers met at Brest-Litovsk in the middle of eastern Poland. On the same day, the Red Army moved across Poland’s eastern frontier. The fighting continued but the war was decided.
The Germans, always ready to learn, studied their campaign. The supply of fuel and ammunition to the fast advancing units must be improved. Battalion and regimental commanders were urged to keep closer to the fighting men. Artillery must be pushed forward more quickly. The lighter tanks – the Mark Is and Mark IIs – had suffered 89 per cent and 83 per cent losses, while the heavier ones – Mark Ills and Mark IVs – had suffered only 26 per cent and 19 per cent casualties.28 The factories must shift to the production of heavier tanks. Lighter models could be adapted for reconnaissance and command duties; some were converted into self-propelled artillery and anti-tank guns. Every change was designed for striking harder and faster next time. For soldiers who believed that battle was to be revolutionized by mobile forces, the Polish campaign had been too orthodox. They wanted blitzkrieg.
Lord Gort
The 6th Viscount Gort, the hereditary Irish peer appointed to command the British Expeditionary Force, was not unorthodox. He had spent much of the First World War as a staff officer, but when he went to the front line with the Grenadiers he showed himself to be a fearless leader. He ended the war with an amazing array of awards for bravery: a VC, three DSOs, an MC. In 1937 Gort’s record as a fighting soldier had played a big part in his becoming Chief of the Imperial General Staff, GIGS, Britain’s top soldier. He was the youngest man to get this job and he was jumped a rank to pass many senior officers such as generals Brooke, Dill and Wavell. Gort had been chosen by Leslie Hore-Belisha, the war minister, to revitalize the army. There is little sign that he did this.
In September 1939, Gort relinquished the role of GIGS for the even more coveted job of commanding the BEF. By this time he had made many enemies, including his political chief Hore-Belisha. It was this rift between Hore-Belisha and his most important general that enabled the army’s top brass to campaign against the minister. The fact that Hore-Belisha was Jewish gave a specially unpleasant dimension to this squalid intrigue. The end result was that the generals were divided and Gort – whose subordinates, such as the irrepressible Alan Brooke, were less than loyal to him – made no stronger. After Dunkirk, when Gort needed friends in high places, none were to be found.
‘Fat Boy’ Gort – depicted by the British Press as ‘Tiger Gort’ – was thought to be directly responsible to his king and government for the British force he led. In fact he was no more than the commander of an army; one of many armies. In Paris, General Maurice Gamelin, the supreme commander, regarded the BEF as a minor element of his western defences but Gort did nothing without first checking with London.29 This ambivalence was to play a part in the final tragedy of the BEF.
The British Expeditionary Force
In the first hours of war Britain sent RAF units to France and put together the British Expeditionary Force, consisting of all five regular home-based divisions. They were joined in the early months of 1940 by five divisions of Territorials (part-time volunteers now serving full-time). Their restricted prewar training schedule meant that drilling had been neglected in favour of more practical tactical and weapons training. But General Gort was a Guards officer, and the regular soldiers around him were distressed to attend parades alongside soldiers deficient in drill. The ‘Terriers’ soon found themselves doing quite a lot of marching and parading when they might have been training for combat.30
Britain’s professional army was prepared to remedy other deficiencies it found in the civilian soldiers who joined up to help fight the Germans:
The Colonel, the Adjutant told us, had been concerned and shocked on the previous evening – a guest night – to observe that some of the newly joined officers had been in doubt about the correct implements and glasses to employ for the successive courses. If we would be kind enough to pay attention and take notes, he would give us a practical demonstration. Without batting an eyelid this impeccable young man then sat down at the table and an equally solemn mess waiter served him first with token soup, then with token fish, then with token meat then with token pudding and finally with a token savoury. The wine waiter went through the motions of pouring out sherry burgundy, port and brandy.
‘Somewhere I still possess the valuable notes I made,’ added Ralph Arnold, who shortly after this performance at the Infantry Training Centre became an aide with Lord Ironside, now CIGS.31
Another three divisions crossed the Channel in April but these were so ill-trained and ill-equipped that they were classified as ‘labour’ formations. Since the BEF spent more time digging and constructing defence lines than in any form of battle training the distinction made little difference at this stage. Although there were tank formations in the BEF, Britain’s one and only armoured division was still not ready for action.32
The British force was criticized by the French as being an inadequate contribution. Its size was seen as evidence that the British were relying on the French to fight the war. They had some cause to complain: the British Expeditionary Force was smaller than the Dutch army, and only 40 per cent the size of the Belgian army, while the French fielded 88 divisions from a population smaller than Britain’s.
The 150,000 British soldiers put at the disposal of the French were deployed along the frontier of neutral Belgium, where there was not even an enemy to face. It was logical to put the British along this northern part of France’s western frontier, for it shortened their lines of supply, which came through Arras from England. There was also the fact that any German attack on France was likely to come this way.
The southern part of the front was defended by the mighty Maginot Line. The sector along the hilly Ardennes forest was almost universally regarded as impassable to armour. Therefore, said the experts, the Germans would have to strike at France by going through Belgium. When this happened, said Gamelin, who made the master plan, the Allied northern armies would swing forward to meet the enemy in Belgium and halt him there. The northern part of this ‘door’ would have furthest to swing, so the all-mechanized BEF was best equipped to do it.
The British were justifiably proud to field the world’s first fully mechanized army. Unlike their contemporaries, the British had relegated the horse to ceremonial duties, while Tommies went to war on wheels and tracks. And yet a closer look reveals that it wasn’t all that the War Office Press releases claimed. One division commander, Bernard Montgomery, later wrote:
the British Army was totally unfit to fight a first-class war on the continent of Europe … In the years preceding the outbreak of war no large-scale exercises with troops had been held in England for some time. Indeed, the Regular Army was unfit to take part in a realistic exercise. The Field Army had an inadequate signals system, no administrative backing and no organization for high-command; all these had to be improvised on mobilization. The transport was inadequate and was completed on mobilization by vehicles requisitioned from civilian firms. Much of the transport of my division consisted of civilian vans and lorries from the towns of England; they were in bad repair and when my division moved from the ports up to its concentration area near the French frontier, the countryside of France was strewn with broken-down vehicles.33
Gort, during his time as CIGS, had done very little to build the modern army that Britain needed to fight the Germans. The armoured division was not ready for war and tank experts had been given no chance to contribute their opinions to the top planners. And Gort had shown little concern about air support for his army. Army Cooperation RAF squadrons were neglected, and the army was permitted no say in the use of the ‘Advanced Air Striking Force’, the tactical bombing RAF squadrons sent to France to support the land forces.
But France and Britain had a breathing space. While concentrating their efforts on Poland, the Germans remained inactive, apart from a few air reconnaissance sorties, on their Western Front. The Allied politicians, and the soldiers too, breathed a sigh of relief and made sure their German enemies were not provoked. France asked Britain not to bomb Germany lest that brought retaliatory bombing attacks on French factories. Instead the RAF dropped propaganda pamphlets which Churchill sarcastically hoped might rouse the Germans to a higher morality. Only at sea was the phoney war real. Time is on our side, the optimists said.
War production
Had such optimists seen the German production figures they might have been even more complacent. In quantity, if not in quality, the Allies were outstripping the Germans. In the first six months of 1940, Anglo-French factories produced 1,412 tanks compared with German production of 558. The chaos of French aircraft production was being improved and brought Anglo-French aircraft production to 6,794, double that of Germany.34
The change of pace resulting from the Munich crisis began to show benefits in the opening months of the war. The organization of Britain’s air defences – notably the radar chain – improved every day. The worry was that so many vital items, including Swiss fuses and Dutch and American radio valves used in the radar stations, had to be imported. So did many aircraft components, and as much as 25 per cent of Britain’s wartime steel came from overseas.
Britain’s steel-making was poor in both quality and quantity. Although German domestic steel production was not large, conquests provided a total of 212 million tons a year by the end of 1940. At this time Britain’s annual output was a mere 18 million tons.35
Hitler was the most popular leader Germany had ever known.36 Believing that the naval mutinies had brought Germany’s downfall in 1918, and remembering the revolutions that followed, he was determined to avoid discontent at home. He would fight his wars while Germany continued to enjoy many of the luxuries of a peace-time-style economy.
During the prewar years Hitler had built a well equipped army while keeping German living standards as high as any in Europe. To further increase production he would have to do as the British were doing – increase working hours and draft women into the war factories. Hitler was reluctant to do either of these things. (In fact the proportion of women workers was about the same in both countries, but many German women were engaged in such inessential jobs as domestic service. Furthermore the generous allowances paid to the wives of German soldiers gave no immediate incentive for them to do war work.)
As the war continued, the Germans expanded their workforce by using foreign labourers, including those brought by compulsion or coercion, prisoners of war and slaves. Even these drastic measures did little to increase German war production. At no time did the Germans, together with the Austrian and Czech output, reach the level of production they had achieved in the First World War. During the first year of the German assault on Russia, they did not even reach a quarter of their 1918 production. Albert Speer, who became minister of war production in February 1942, had no doubts that bureaucracy – aggravated by the Nazi authoritarian system – was at the heart of the failure. As an example, he pointed out that the Ordnance Office employed ten times as many staff during the Second World War as they had in the First World War.37
No accurate estimates of German production were available to the Allied governments because the British intelligence services could not provide regular reliable and informative reports from even one agent in Germany. The Secret Intelligence Service had to depend upon refugees, escapers and what could be gleaned from foreign newspapers.
