The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (276 page)

The burst pipes, amounting to an epidemic, derived from the coldest European winter in forty-five years, an act of God which did not strengthen confidence in the King’s endorsement of His benevolence. The coal shortage contributed to it, of course, but even without the inconveniences of wartime, Britain and the Continent would have suffered. Trains were buried under thirty-foot drifts; snowplows dug them out, but even so they were over twenty-eight hours late in reaching their destinations. Among civilians communications were often impossible. You couldn’t phone, you couldn’t send a wire; hundreds of miles of telephone and telegraph wires were down. In Derbyshire the drifts towered over cottage roofs. The Thames was solid ice for eight miles—from Teddington to Sunbury. And the Strait of Dover was frozen at Dungeness and Folkestone. Afterward, one editorial surmised: “It is probable that on January 29, when chaotic transport conditions prevailed over a large part of England, due to snow and ice, Berlin had little idea of the extent of our wintry weather.”
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It did not occur to that insular editor that the Continent might be sharing Britain’s misery. Actually, the Continent was just as frigid. Even the Riviera was desolate, and Berlin, like London, was snowbound. The weather, which had not saved Poland, gave the Allies a reprieve. Seldom, if ever, have meteorological conditions so altered the course of a war, though the issue of who benefited most is debatable. Telford Taylor believes that because “the extremity of that bitter winter alone prevented Hitler from launching [an attack] against an ill-equipped and ill-prepared Anglo-French army… the weather saved the British army, which at that time had only half the strength it was to attain by spring.” Certainly they felt blessed at the time. But afterward, when the OKW hierarchy was interrogated at Nuremberg, it became clear that during that arctic hiatus the Führer, in a brilliant stroke, completely changed his western strategy and thereby gained his margin of victory. How the Allies would have fared in the autumn of 1939 is moot. The fact that the French collapsed in the spring of 1940 is not, and the fewer troops the BEF had when France fell, the better, for in the ultimate crisis all of them had to be rescued.
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Hitler’s military genius in the war’s early years—his gift for reviewing the choices presented by
die Herren Oberbefehlshaber
(the commanders in chief) and unerringly selecting the right one—can hardly be exaggerated. Later, after his victories persuaded him that he was invincible, he provided the same generals with evidence to support their contention that his strategy was a succession of blunders. It wasn’t; he achieved his remarkable triumphs despite them, in part because he understood them, and, more important, their soldiers, better than they did. Most of the world outside the Reich assumed that the Wehrmacht would rest after overwhelming Poland while the Führer digested his new conquest. Ironside disagreed. On September 15—twelve days before the surrender of Warsaw—the CIGS told the War Cabinet that the French believed the Wehrmacht “would stage a big attack on the Western Front” within a month, and he himself thought a German offensive possible before the end of October. It seemed improbable. Even Churchill wrote Chamberlain later that same Friday that in his view a German attack on the western front “at this late season” was “most unlikely.” A turn eastward and southward through Hungary and Rumania made more sense to Winston. He doubted that the Führer would turn westward until “he has collected the easy spoils which await him in the East,” thereby giving his people “the spectacle of repeated successes.”
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His vision was clouded there. However, no one outside the War Office and the Conseil Supérieur de la Guerre, and very few in them, matched his analysis of the Polish campaign. In that same letter he wrote that he was “strongly of the opinion that we should make every preparation to defend ourselves in the West.” In particular, French territory on the border “behind Belgium should be fortified night and day by every conceivable resource,” including “obstacles to tank attack, planting railway rails upright, digging deep ditches, erecting concrete dolls, land-mines in some parts and inundations all ready to let out in others, etc.,” which “should be combined in a deep system of defence.” The panzers which were overrunning Poland, he wrote, “can only be stopped by physical obstacles defended by resolute troops and a powerful artillery.” If defenders lacked those, he warned, “the attack of armoured vehicles cannot be resisted.”
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Hitler shared Churchill’s admiration for tanks, and for that very reason he wanted to invade the neutral Low Countries before such obstacles could be built. He also assumed—illustrating his ignorance of how democracies work—that the Allies would soon occupy Belgium and Holland. Two days after Ironside’s presentation to the War Cabinet and Churchill’s advice to the prime minister, the Führer told the OKW commanders in Zossen that immediately after the Polish surrender he wanted to move the entire Wehrmacht across Germany and strike at the Allied forces. The Generalstab was shocked. They had been counting on several months of positional warfare in the west while they retrained their men and planned the army’s order of battle. He was adamant; a few weeks later, on October 10, he issued his Directive No. 6, ordering immediate preparations for an attack through Luxembourg, Belgium, and Holland “at as early a date as possible” with the objective of defeating the French and establishing “a base for conducting a promising air and sea war against England.” To his staff he said he wanted the invasion under way by November 12.
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Ten days after his directive, the generals submitted their plan for invasion in the west. In Hitler’s view, and in history’s, it was remarkable for its mediocrity and lack of imagination. They proposed a frontal assault driving head-on across the Low Countries to the Channel ports. Six days later the Führer suggested that the main thrust drive across southern Belgium and through the forested Ardennes toward Sedan. Their reply echoes Pétain’s view; the hills and thick woods of the Ardennes were “
unmöglich
” (“impossible”). The Führer made no further comment then. He hadn’t dismissed the idea, but had the fine weather held, the unimaginative attack would have proceeded. Although the Allied armies were not up to strength, that was the plan they expected, and they would have met it with everything they had. They did so seven months later, when they had much more. Unfortunately, the German plan of attack had changed; while they were rushing to bar the front door, the enemy slipped in the back.

The weather, responsible for the long delay, persuaded Hitler to postpone his assault nine times. Each time, he reconsidered lunging through the Ardennes with a panzer corps. His aides were instructed to bring him aerial photographs and detailed topographic maps of the terrain. Studying them, he felt confirmed; much of it was good panzer country, fields and roads; the forested areas which discouraged generals could be used to advantage, camouflaging tanks from aerial surveillance. In fact, although this was unknown to him, in 1939 when the Conseil Supérieur had staged a seven-division German drive in the French Ardennes with armored support, the “enemy” had put the defenders to flight. Field Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch, army commander in chief, was unconvinced, and protocol required the Führer to deal directly with him. However, a handful of his most gifted generals, Manstein, Rundstedt, and Guderian among them, believed that a massive panzer
Sichelschnitt
(scythe-cut) in the south, with a far stronger force than Hitler had proposed, could slice through the Ardennes, drive to the sea, and trap the Allied armies in the north, where the Germans were expected. On February 17, in a traditional ceremony, five generals promoted to corps commanders were invited to dine with the Führer. Manstein was among them. He gave his host a detailed account of the plan he, Rundstedt, and Guderian had developed. Hitler was ecstatic. At noon the next day he issued a new
Führerordnung
, incorporating all Manstein’s points. By February 24, Hitler, Halder, and the OKW in Zossen, working round the clock, had completed the final orders for their Ardennes offensive. The blow would fall in May.

The British military presence in France, so slight before winter closed down Hitler’s plan for a lightning stroke in the west, grew through the bitter winter, until Lord Gort, the BEF commander, had nearly 400,000 men dug in. Unlike their fathers in 1914, they were not eager to fight, but they were ready. Morale was high; the British spit-and-polish traditions were observed; so were training schedules; and officers organized games, the more vigorous the better, to keep the men fit. Gracie Fields’s ration song was unheard here. The music halls had given the BEF a rollicking anthem which enjoyed tremendous popularity until events soured its lyrics.

Soldiers given leave headed for Paris, where the season’s hit shows were
Paris, Reste Paris
, at the Casino de Paris, starring Maurice Chevalier and Josephine Baker; Lucienne Boyer at her
boîte de nuit
in the rue Volney; and revivals of
Cyrano de Bergerac
and
Madame sans Gêne
at the Comédie Française. But on the whole Tommies found the City of Light disappointing. The attitude of the French puzzled them. They seemed surly, hostile, smoldering with grievances. And so they were. Some of their anger was intramural; they held their leaders in contempt. After the Russians had picked up their winnings in Poland and declared themselves at peace, France’s powerful Communist party took the position that the war was a “capitalist-imperialist project” in which workers had no stake. At the other end of the political spectrum, the extreme French right still yearned for an understanding with the Reich; with Poland gone, they argued, the need for an anti-Bolshevik bulwark was all the greater. To them, German National Socialism was preferable to French socialism; their rallying cry was “Better Hitler than Blum.” Lucien Rebattet, a gifted writer for the Fascist weekly
Je Suis Partout
, wrote that the war had been launched “by the most hideous buffoons of the most hideous Jewish and demagogic regime…. We are supposed once more to save the Republic, and a Republic worse than the one in 1914…. No, I do not feel the least anger against Hitler, but much against all the French politicians who have led to his triumph.”
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However, the chief target of French discontent was Britain. Although the British were allies, they were treated with scorn. Until Tommies began manning sectors of the Maginot Line, a brigade at a time, most poilus were unaware that the British Expeditionary Force even existed. Certainly their newspapers didn’t tell them. The Parisian press, reinforcing the public mood, was resentful not of Nazi aggression, the root cause of the war, but of
l’Albion perfide
. England, in the popular French view, had forced France into unnecessary hostilities, and there was widespread suspicion that the British had no intention of fighting—that when battle appeared imminent they would withdraw to their island, shielded by the Royal Navy, while poilus were slaughtered. Daladier told William Bullitt, the American ambassador, that he was convinced Britain intended to let the French do all the fighting. At the Quai d’Orsay, Alexis Léger spoke as though Britain were uncommitted, telling Bullitt: “
La partie est perdue. La France est seule.
” Holding his first staff meeting as supreme commander of Allied troops, Gamelin revealed his opinion of his ally by neglecting to bring an interpreter and speaking so rapidly that less than half of what he said was understood by the British officers.
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Churchill had been visiting France since childhood, and despite his atrocious accent, he spoke the language fluently. Hitler spoke only German. He had never been abroad. Yet Churchill’s Francophilia was a romantic illusion, while the German führer’s evaluation of the people who had been Germany’s foe for over two thousand years was penetrating. “Hitler,” Churchill later wrote, “was sure that the French political system was rotten to the core, and that it had infected the French Army.” Whatever the reason, the rot was there. And Joseph Goebbels knew how to make it fester. The Luftwaffe, like the RAF, staged truth raids. They were, however, far more clever than England’s. Their contribution to what one French officer called “
une guerre de confettis
” was not leaflets but single slips of paper that fluttered down round the French lines. Resembling colored leaves, they bore on one side the message: “In the autumn the leaves fall. So fall the poilus, fighting for the English.” The obverse read: “In the spring the leaves come again. Not so the poilus.”
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The leaflets were followed by beguiling enticements from French-speaking Germans using bullhorns and large signs taunting poilus at the front, asking why they should die for Danzig, the Poles, or the British (“
Ne mourez pas pour Danzig, pour les Polonais, pour les Britanniques!
”). Nazi propagandistic statements quoted by Molotov, effective among French Communists, assigned to “
la France et la Grande-Bretagne la responsabilité de la poursuite des hostilités
.” On September 26, with Poland vanquished, the Germans opened a new propaganda campaign: “Why do France and Britain want to fight now? Nothing to fight about. Germany wants nothing in the West [
L’Allemagne ne demande rien à l’ouest
].” The most effective line was the assurance that if the French didn’t open fire, German guns would remain silent.
Time
reported a version of this: “We have orders not to fire on you if you don’t fire on us.” Soon poilus and
Soldaten
were bathing in the Rhine together.
Time
readers unfamiliar with the fighting spirit essential in infantry combat—not only for victory but also for the survival of the individual infantryman—might have thought this harmless. But it served the Führer in two ways. In the first week of the war civility between men on both sides would permit his thin screen of troops on the Reich’s western front to hold while the Wehrmacht finished off the Poles. And idle soldiers, especially those doubtful of their cause, deteriorate under such circumstances; their combat efficiency loses whatever edge it had, and when the balloon goes up, they find it almost impossible to kill the likable, fair-haired youths on the far shore, which means the youths on the far shore, no longer under orders to appear likable, are far likelier to kill
them
.
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