All Hell Let Loose (9 page)

There was no doubt of the strength of British popular sentiment in Finland’s favour, but next to nothing was done to translate this into action, save to prepare an expedition to Narvik, neutral Norway’s northern ice-free port. The Allies were attracted by the notion of exploiting the pretext of aiding the Finns to land in Norway and sever Germany’s winter link to Sweden’s iron-ore mines. The cynicism that had characterised Allied policy during the Polish campaign thus reasserted itself. In the early months of 1940 London and Paris urged the Finns to keep fighting, because if they quit there would be no excuse for intervention in Norway. A wild French proposal to land an expeditionary force at Petsamo on the north coast was vetoed by the British, who still declined to clash headlong with the Russians.

In mid-January, a new wave of assaults on Finland began. In one position 4,000 Russians attacked thirty-two Finns; they lost four hundred men, but only four defenders survived. On 1 February, the invaders launched a massive bombardment of the Mannerheim Line, followed by infantry and armoured drives in overwhelming strength. The Finnish artillery, such as it was, had almost exhausted its ammunition, but for two weeks the defenders held their positions. An officer, Wolf Haslsti, wrote on 15 February: ‘In the early afternoon, there appeared in front of our tent a reserve ensign, really nothing more than a child, asking if we could spare some food for himself and his men … he was in charge of a platoon of “men” scarcely old enough to shave. They were cold and scared and hungry and on their way to join the troops at the roadblock in front of Lahde.’ Next day Haslsti added: ‘Same reserve ensign back again, blood on his clothes, asking for more food … he lost both guns and half his men when the Russians broke through.’ Finnish sufferings were matched by those of their foes, especially those trapped for weeks in encircled positions. A Russian soldier wrote on 2 February: ‘It’s particularly cold this morning, nearly minus 35C. I was unable to sleep due to the cold. Our artillery has been firing through the night. After I woke I went for a shit, but at that moment the Finns opened fire, one bullet hitting the ground between my legs. I hadn’t had a shit since January 25th.’

The one-sided struggle could not continue indefinitely. The Finnish government made a last vain plea for Swedish help. The British and French offered token contingents of troops, which embarked on transports but had not yet sailed when on 12 March a Finnish delegation signed an armistice in Moscow. Minutes before this took effect, the Soviets launched a last vengeful bombardment of their vanquished victim’s positions. A Finnish officer wrote to his family: ‘One thing is clear: we have not fled. We were prepared to fight to the last man. We carry our heads high because we have fought with all our might for three and a half months.’

Carl Mydans found himself on a train to Sweden with three Finnish officers, one of whom opened a conversation with the American: ‘At least you will tell them that we fought bravely.’ Mydans muttered that he would. Then the colonel’s temper snapped: ‘Your country was going to help … You promised, and we believed you.’ He seized Mydans and shook him, screaming: ‘A half-dozen goddamned Brewster fighters with no spare parts! And the British sent us guns from the last war that wouldn’t even work!’ The Finn lapsed into sobs.

The peace Stalin imposed bemused the world by its moderation. He enforced his territorial demands, amounting to 10 per cent of Finland’s territory, but refrained from occupying the entire country, as he probably could have done. He appears to have been uneasy about provoking international anger at a moment when much larger issues were at stake. His confidence had been shaken by his losses – at least 127,000, perhaps as many as a quarter of a million, dead, against Finland’s 48,243 killed and 420,000 homeless. Soviet prisoners released by the Finns were dispatched by Stalin to the gulag to contemplate their treachery in having accepted captivity.

The Finnish campaign was irrelevant to the confrontation between Germany and the Allies, but it importantly influenced the strategy of both. They alike concluded that the Soviet Union was a paper tiger; that Stalin’s armies were weak, his commanders bunglers. After the armistice Finland, having failed to gain useful help from Britain and France, turned to Germany for assistance in re-arming its forces, which Hitler was happy to provide. The Russians learned critical lessons from the Finnish war, and set about equipping the Red Army with winter clothing, snow camouflage and lubricants for sub-zero temperatures, all of which would play a vital role in future campaigns. The world, however, saw only that Russian prestige had been debased by one of Europe’s smallest nations.

Even as Finland was struggling for survival, through the winter of 1939–40 the Allied armies shivered in snowbound trenches and bunkers on the frontier of Germany. Churchill, the First Sea Lord, strove to extract every ounce of excitement and propaganda from the Royal Navy’s skirmishes at sea with German U-boats and surface raiders. There was a sensational episode on 13 December, when three British cruisers met the far more powerfully armed German pocket-battleship
Graf Spee
off the coast of Uruguay. In the ensuing battle the British squadron was badly mauled, but
Graf Spee
suffered damage which caused her to take refuge in Montevideo. She was scuttled on the 17th rather than risk another battle, and her captain committed suicide, an outcome promoted as a handy Allied victory. The British strove to make friends across the Atlantic, or at least to moderate their war-making to avoid antagonising US opinion. When Churchill heard that Americans were angered by the Royal Navy’s contraband searches of their ships, on 29 January 1940 he gave orders that no further US vessels should be bear-led into the British war zone, although this concession was kept secret to avoid upsetting other neutral nations whose vessels remained subject to inspection.

Meanwhile the Allied leaders and commanders wrangled: French thinking remained dominated by determination to reject a direct military challenge to Hitler; they declined even to shell the heavily industrialised Saarland, within easy range. The Daladier government, favouring an initiative as far as possible from France, was attracted by the notion of tightening the blockade of Germany through interdiction of its Swedish iron-ore supplies. To achieve this, it would be necessary to violate Norwegian neutrality, either by mining the inshore navigation route to force German ships out into the open sea, or by establishing troops and aircraft ashore, or both. Britain’s prime minister and foreign secretary, Neville Chamberlain and Lord Halifax, were unwilling to adopt such a course, despite the urgings of Churchill. Many days were devoted to planning and preparing a Norwegian expedition, but action was repeatedly postponed.

Gen. Sir Edmund Ironside, head of the British Army, wrote: ‘The French … put forward the most extravagant ideas. They are absolutely unscrupulous in everything.’ Gamelin said afterwards: ‘Public opinion did not know what it wanted done, but it wanted something else, and above all it wanted action.’ A French naval officer and later historian, Jacques Mordal, wrote contemptuously: ‘The idea was to do something, even something stupid.’ A British scheme for mining the Rhine became a new focus of friction: Paris feared that it would provoke German retaliation.

Almost nothing about these debates was known to the Allied peoples, who saw only their armies inert in the frontier snow, digging trenches and contemplating the Germans opposite. A sense of vacuity afflicted alike young and old, national leaders and humble citizens: ‘Everyone is getting married and engaged, or else having babies,’ wrote twenty-three-year-old Liverpool typist Doris Melling on 7 April. ‘Makes me feel rather stale and out of things.’ She was unimpressed, however, by columnist Lord Castlerosse’s flippant assertion in that day’s
Sunday Express
that any girl who had not found a husband by the end of the war was not really trying. ‘Most of my friends have made such messes of their married life – no proper homes, keeping in their jobs, and such.’

Maggie Joy Blunt, a thirty-year-old architectural writer of strong left-wing convictions, lived in Slough, west of London. She observed on 16 December 1939 that what seemed to her most remarkable about the war thus far was how little it changed most people’s lives:

Had she and her compatriots known it, in the winter of 1939 the Nazis were troubled by many problems of their own. Germany had entered the war on the verge of bankruptcy, in consequence of Hitler’s armaments expenditure. There was so little money for civilian purposes that the railway system was crumbling, and desperately short of rolling stock: two bad train smashes killed 230 people, provoking fierce public anger. Far from the Nazis having made the trains run on time, industry suffered from disrupted coal deliveries, and the Gestapo reported widespread grumbling about the faltering passenger service. The Allied blockade had caused the collapse of Germany’s export markets and a serious shortage of raw materials. Hitler wished to launch a great offensive in the west on 12 November, and was furious when the Wehrmacht insisted on postponement until spring. The generals considered the weather wholly unfavourable to a major offensive, and recognised the deficiencies of their army’s performance in Poland: it was short of vehicles and weapons of all kinds. As the army expanded, the 24.5 million industrial workforce of May 1939 fell by four million. Industrial policy was characterised by wild vacillation and arbitrary production cuts, made necessary by steel shortages.

A decision was made that would influence German armaments production for years ahead: to focus immediate effort on manufacturing ammunition and Ju88 light bombers. The Luftwaffe convinced itself that the Ju88 was a war-winning weapon, and the plane indeed did notable service. Later, however, lack of new-generation aircraft became a severe handicap. The German navy remained weak – in Admiral Raeder’s gloomy words, ‘not at all adequately armed for the great struggle … it can only demonstrate that it knows how to go down with dignity’. Germany’s paper military strength in the winter of 1939 was only marginally greater than that of the Allies. Given all these difficulties, it is remarkable that Hitler retained his psychological dominance of the conflict. His great advantage was that the Allies had made a principled commitment to confront and defeat Nazism, while lacking any appetite for the bloody initiatives and human sacrifice required to achieve this. Thus, Hitler was left to make his own weather.

In the last weeks before Germany attacked in the west, relations between the two allies became sulphurous: each blamed the other for failure to wage war effectively. French public opinion turned decisively against prime minister Daladier, who sought a parliamentary vote of confidence on 20 March: only one deputy voted against him, 239 in his support – but three hundred abstained. Daladier resigned, though remaining in the government as defence minister, to be succeeded by Paul Reynaud. France’s new leader was a sixty-two-year-old conservative, notable for high intelligence and physical insignificance – he stood less than 5 feet 3 inches high. Eager to take the initiative, he now proposed a landing in Norway and bombing of Soviet oilfields at Baku. Gamelin said sourly: ‘After Daladier who couldn’t make a decision at all, here we are with Reynaud who makes one every five minutes.’ France’s prime minister initially supported Churchill’s cherished scheme to mine the Rhine, only to be repudiated by his own ministers, still fearing retaliation. The British said that if France would not support the mining operation, they in turn would decline to join a landing at Narvik.

In the first days of April, as snow vanished from the Continent the armies emerged as if from hibernation, looking about to discern what the new campaigning season might bring. At last, Churchill persuaded his government colleagues to support the mining of Norwegian waters. Four destroyers put to sea to execute this operation, while a small land force embarked at British ports, ready to sail to Norway if the Germans responded to the Royal Navy’s initiative. London was oblivious of the fact that a German fleet was already at sea. For months, Hitler had been fearful of British intervention in Norway, because of its implications for his iron-ore supplies. His agitation acquired urgency on 14 February 1940, when the Royal Navy’s destroyers pursued the
Graf Spee
’s supply ship
Altmark
into a Norwegian fjord to free 299 captive British merchant seamen. Determined to pre-empt a British initiative to seize a foothold in Norway, on 2 April he gave the final order for the invasion fleet to sail.

British ships and planes observed Germany’s intense flurry of naval activity, but naval commanders were so preoccupied with their own impending mining operation that they failed to realise that these movements presaged German action rather than reaction. The Admiralty decided that Admiral Raeder’s warships intended a breakout into the Atlantic to attack British sea lanes; this caused them to deploy much of the Home Fleet many hours’ steaming from Norway. Before dawn on 8 April, the Royal Navy indeed laid a minefield in Norwegian coastal waters. A few hours later, however, the Germans commenced air and naval landings to occupy the entire country. The Phoney War was over.