Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (73 page)

Yet it was an illusion. The summer of 1940 brought the end of old Europe, sweeping off the stage of history the notion of a world managed by a concert of civilized European powers, within a frame of agreed international conventions and some system of moral absolutes. Britain survived but in a defensive posture, a prisoner of its relative impotence. In July, August and September 1940, Britain’s fighter-squadrons and radar chains decisively defeated an attempt by Goering’s
Luftwaffe
to destroy the
RAF’
s
airfields in south-east England, a necessary preliminary to any attempt to invade Britain. Thus Hitler forfeited his option of a conclusive campaign in the West. But Churchill, for his part, could carry out effective offensive operations only against Hitler’s weak and embarrassing ally, Mussolini. On 11 November the Italian fleet was crippled at Taranto by a naval air-strike, and thereafter the British never lost their general sea-control of the Mediterranean. Early in 1941 Britain began offensive operations against the Italians in Libya and proceeded to dismantle the whole of Mussolini’s precarious empire in North-East Africa. But Britain’s main engagement with the Nazis, the naval-air struggle to keep open the sea-lanes, was defensive. The one way of striking at Germany itself was through the air. Since fighter escorts for daylight bombing could not be provided, and since night-bombers could not guarantee to deliver their loads within a ten-mile radius of their targets, Churchill’s only aggressive option was the virtually indiscriminate bombing of cities. On 8 July he wrote a
sombre letter to his Minister of Aircraft Production, the newspaper proprietor Lord Beaverbrook:

When I look round to see how we can win the war I see that there is only one sure path. We have no Continental army which can defeat the German military power. The blockade is broken and Hitler has Asia and probably Africa to draw from. Should he be repulsed here or not try invasion, he will recoil ea stward, and we have nothing to stop him. But there is one thing that will bring him back and bring him down, and that is an absolutely devastating, exterminating attack by very heavy bombers from this country upon the Nazi homeland.
¹⁰⁵

This letter is of great historical significance (it should be compared to Churchill’s remarks on the corrupting effect of war on p. 13), marking the point at which the moral relativism of the totalitarian societies invaded the decision-making process of a major legitimate power. It is a matter of argument whether the British or the Germans first began the systematic bombing of civilian targets.
¹⁰⁶
Hitler (like Lenin and Stalin) had from the very first practised and defended the use of terror to obtain any or all of his objectives. What is clear is that, long before the end of 1940, albeit under the verbal pretext of attacking ‘strategic objectives’, British bombers were being used on a great and increasing scale to kill and frighten the German civilian population in their homes. As the cabinet minuted on 30 October, ‘the civilian population around the target areas must be made to feel the weight of the war’. The policy, initiated by Churchill, approved in cabinet, endorsed by parliament and, so far as can be judged, enthusiastically backed by the bulk of the British people – thus fulfilling all the conditions of the process of consent in a democracy under law – marked a critical stage in the moral declension of humanity in our times.

The adoption of terror-bombing was also a measure of Britain’s desperation. The Treasury had warned the cabinet on 5 July 1939 that, without decisive American support, ‘the prospects for a long war are becoming exceedingly grim’. Britain could not pursue Germany’s economic policy of autarchy. As exports declined with the switch to war-production (taking 1938 as 100, British exports had fallen to 29 per cent by 1943, imports only to 77 per cent), gold and dollar reserves disappeared. The Roosevelt administration was verbally sympathetic to the Allies but in practice unhelpful. Pitiful French calls for help in early June 1940 were coldly dismissed by Cordell Hull as ‘a series of extraordinary, almost hysterical appeals’. For some time Britain fared no better. Ambassador Joseph Kennedy, another Roosevelt campaign contributor, did not even provide verbal support: ‘From the start I told them they could expect zero
help. We had none to offer and I know we could not give it and, in the way of any material, we could not spare it.’
¹⁰⁷
By the end of 1940 Britain had run out of convertible currency: she had only $12 million in her reserves, the lowest ever, and was obliged to suspend dollar purchases.
¹⁰⁸

On 11 March 1941 Congress enacted the Lend-Lease Act which permitted the President to ‘sell, transfer title to, exchange, lease, lend or otherwise dispose of material to any country whose defence was deemed by him vital to the defence of America. In theory this enabled Roosevelt to send Britain unlimited war-supplies without charge. But in practice Britain continued to pay for most of her arms, and in return for the agreement she virtually surrendered the remains of her export trade to the United States and (under the subsequent Master agreement of 23 February 1942) undertook to abandon Imperial Preference after the war, which for Cordell Hull had been throughout a more important foreign policy aim than the containment of totalitarian power.
¹⁰⁹
Roosevelt’s arms-supply arrangements with the Soviet Union were far more benevolent. Lend-Lease was important to Churchill simply because he believed it might tempt Hitler into conflict with the United States. Indeed, by the beginning of 1941, he recognized that the old European system of legitimacy had disappeared and that the only hope of restoring some system of law lay in Hitler’s own miscalculations. Churchill was not to be disappointed.

ELEVEN
The Watershed Year

Just before dawn on 22 June 1941, German military radio intercepted an exchange between a Soviet forward unit and its army
HQ.
‘We are being fired on. What shall we do?’ ‘You must be insane. Why is your message not in code?’
¹
Half an hour later, at 3.40 am, the Soviet Chief of Staff, G.K. Zhukov, who had received reports of German air attacks, telephoned Stalin at his villa at Kuntsevo, seven miles out of Moscow, where the dictator lived, worked and ate in a single room, sleeping on a sofa. When Zhukov announced that Russia was being invaded, there was nothing at the end of the line but a long silence and heavy breathing. Stalin finally told the general to go to the Kremlin and get his secretary to summon the Politburo. They met at 4.30, Stalin sitting pale and silent, an unlit pipe in his hands. At the Foreign Ministry, Molotov received the declaration of war from the Nazi ambassador and asked piteously, ‘Have we really deserved this?’ By noon, 1,200 Soviet aircraft had been destroyed on the ground. According to Nikita Khrushchev’s account, Stalin gave way to hysteria and despair. Not until 3 July, eleven days later, could he bring himself to address the nation. Then he used a tone that was new to him: ‘Brothers and sisters … my friends’.
²

Everyone had warned Stalin of an impending Nazi attack. Churchill had sent him specific information, which had later been confirmed by the American embassy. On 15 May the Soviet spy in Tokyo, Richard Sorge, had produced details of the German invasion-plan and its correct date. Stalin also got circumstantial warnings from his own people, such as General Kirponos, commander in the Kiev district. Stalin refused to listen. He became furious if such advice was pressed. Admiral Kuznetsov later said it was dangerous to take the view invasion was likely even in private conversation with subordinates. Anyone who said so to Stalin himself, Khrushchev recalled, did so ‘in fear and trepidation’.
³

Stalin, who trusted nobody else, appears to have been the last
human being on earth to trust Hitler’s word. It was a case of wishful thinking. The Nazi—Soviet pact was of enormous benefit to Stalin. Though he later defended it solely as a temporary, tactical arrangement (’We secured our country peace for a year and a half and the opportunity of preparing our forces’) he clearly hoped at the time that it would last indefinitely, or alternatively until the Germans and the West had mutually exhausted themselves in a prolonged war when, in accordance with his 1925 declaration, Russia could move in for the pickings. In the meantime the pact was of immense benefit to him. By mid-1940 he had recovered much of the territory Russia had lost in 1918–19. He had destroyed the structure of eastern Poland. In spring 1940, he had 15,000 Polish officers murdered, a third at Katyn near Smolensk, the rest in or near the Soviet concentration camps of Starobelsk and Ostachkov. It is possible that these mass killings were carried out at the suggestion of the Gestapo.
⁴
Nazi-Soviet security forces worked together very closely up to 22 June 1941. The
NKVD
handed over several hundred German nationals, chiefly Communists and Jews, to the Gestapo at this time.
⁵
The Nazis, in turn, helped Stalin to hunt down his own enemies. On 20 August 1940, after several attempts, he finally had Trotsky ice-axed to death in Mexico: as the latter had justly remarked, ‘Stalin seeks to strike, not the ideas of his opponent, but at his skull.’
⁶
It was an approach he shared with Hitler.

Stalin rejoiced at the
Wehrmacht’s
triumph over France and promptly reorganized his own 13,000 tanks on the German pattern.
⁷
He took the view that the downfall of the democracies strengthened his claim for additional compensation in Eastern and Northern Europe, in return for giving Hitler a completely free hand in the West and Africa, and possibly in parts of the Middle East too. Hence when Molotov went to Berlin, 12–13 November 1940, to bring the Nazi-Soviet pact up to date, Stalin instructed him to demand, as primary requirements, Finland, Romania and Bulgaria, plus the Black Sea straits, to be allocated to the Soviet sphere of influence with, as ultimate demands, Hungary, Yugoslavia, western Poland, Sweden and a share in the Baltic Sea outlets.
⁸
Added up, they are not so very different to what Stalin demanded, and in most cases got, as his share of victory at the end of the Second World War. The Molotov ‘package’ testifies to the continuity of Soviet aims.

This list of Soviet interests was put forward on the assumption that Hitler was pursuing his acquisitive appetites chiefly in Western Europe, Africa and Asia, with the Middle East as his next strategic objective. That was a reasonable assumption at the time. Churchill’s most ardent wish was that the Germans should hurl themselves upon the Soviet Union. His greatest fear was that Hitler would make the
Middle East his target. In the early months of 1941 that seemed the most likely outcome. Germany had been drawn into the Mediterranean war by Mussolini’s greed and incompetence. He had invaded Greece on 28 October 1940 but the Greeks, with assistance from Britain, had humiliated and repulsed the invaders. On 9 December the British had opened an offensive in Libya, taking Benghazi on 6 February 1941.

Three days later, with furious reluctance, Hitler went to the assistance of his stricken ally, sending the Afrika Korps to Libya under General Rommel. Once committed to the theatre, the Germans moved with terrifying speed. On 28 February the Nazis, who already had Hungary and Romania as their puppets, moved into Bulgaria. Three weeks later they forced Yugoslavia to come to terms, and when a
coup d
‘état
in Belgrade removed the pro-Nazi government, issued ultimatums to both Yugoslavia and Greece. Rommel’s first victory in North Africa took only eleven days, sending the British reeling back into Egypt. Yugoslavia collapsed after a week’s fight on 17 April, Greece surrendering six days later. In eight days’ desperate fighting in May, the British, already driven out of Greece, were shamed in Crete by German paratroopers. By the end of May, Cairo and the Suez Canal, the oilfields of northern Iraq, Persia and the Gulf, the world’s largest refinery at Abadan and, not least, the sea and land routes to India, were all beginning to look vulnerable.

Hitler’s southern venture had committed only a tiny fraction of his forces. His startling successes had been achieved at insignificant cost. Admiral Raeder and the naval high command begged him to launch a major thrust at the Middle East, which at that time was well within German capabilities. British naval, air and military power was thinly stretched over a vast area and vulnerable everywhere. Hitler’s ally Japan was already contemplating an assault in the Far East. From what we now know, it seems almost certain that the Germans could have driven through the Suez barrier and on into the Indian Ocean, ready to link hands with the Japanese when they surged down into South-East Asia and up into the Bay of Bengal. Raeder’s view was that such a
coup
would strike the British Empire ‘a deadlier blow than the taking of London’. Hitler had 150 divisions, plus most of the
Luftwaffe
, arrayed in eastern Europe. Barely a quarter of these forces would have been enough to drive through to India.
⁹