Third Reich Victorious (7 page)

18
. Till, Geoffrey, “Retrenchment, Rethinking, Revival, 1919-1939,” in Hill,
The Oxford Illustrated History of the Royal Navy
, 340, provided the data for British, French, and Italian naval strength in 1939.

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19
. Thanks to Dönitz’s espionage, Germany began the war with effective radar. Unfortunately, the bulky equipment and short supply of sets dictated that only capital ships, carriers, and command/control U-boats could be equipped with them in 1939.

20
. Ship abbreviations are: CV for carrier, CVL for small carrier, BB for battleship, B for pocket battleship, BC for battle cruiser, CA for heavy cruiser, CL for light cruiser, and DD for fleet destroyer.

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21
. In 1939 the armored flight deck of a German light carrier was crowded with 22 planes: six fighters, eight torpedo bombers, and eight dive bombers. In late 1940, two Flettner 282 helicopters (for air/sea rescue), two fighters, and six dive bombers replaced the torpedo bombers. A
Graf Zeppelin
class carrier sported an equal mix of fighters, torpedo bombers, and dive bombers among its 48-plane air group. Though Fl 282s also joined this class in 1940, it retained its torpedo bombers until 1942.

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22
. Hitler formally apologized to the understandably concerned President of the United States, promising to observe a strict neutral zone extending 200 miles from the North American coast. It is the only diplomatic apology ever rendered by Adolf Hitler. Of course, he did present the commander of CG IV with the Knight’s Cross upon his return to Germany.

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23
. From an interview with Johnny “Boy” Griffen, survivor of the carrier engagement of September 12, 1939, by the author (English Ghetto, Marseille, France, 1971).

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24
. Two battalions, some 96 tanks, of the SS Panzer brigade had been equipped with snorkels and special waterproofing, allowing them to be dropped offshore and to advance across the seabed to emerge from the sea alongside the landing craft of the infantry. (In reality, the German Army designed such tanks for the never implemented Operation Sea Lion, and actually used them during the invasion of Russia.)

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25
. Einstein-Raeder, Elise,
Heavy Water, Deadly Fire
(Finkle Press, Madgeburg, 1983), 153-68. Professor Einstein-Raeder also defends the use of the first atomic bombs against Moscow, speculating that had the United States possessed similar weapons of mass destruction in 1945, it would have used them against Japan rather than incur the nearly one million casualties necessitated by the invasion of that country.

Stephen Badsey

At eleven o’clock on the morning of Friday, May 10, 1940, three men met in the Cabinet Room of 10 Downing Street to decide the future fate of their country. The result of their decision was to be the catastrophic surrender of Britain to Nazi Germany just seventy days later. Historians have tended to be kind to these men, especially as two of them died without knowing the consequences of their actions. Particularly in Germany, it has been argued that Britain’s defeat was virtually inevitable in the face of the formidable Third Reich. But given the narrow margin of victory, concealed at the time by Nazi propaganda, a case can be made that things might have happened otherwise.

Of the three men present at that fatal meeting, Neville Chamberlain, Prime Minister and head of the Conservative government since 1937, had taken Britain and its Empire to war in September 1939 against all his own hopes and expectations. Chamberlain had championed the policy of “appeasement,” believing that another world war would give Britain only the choice between military defeat by Germany and economic domination by the United States. Already in February 1940 the Treasury had warned that its gold reserves would be exhausted within two years. When forced into war, Chamberlain still hoped to avoid a repetition of the monstrous casualties of the First World War. As in 1914, Britain sent a small British Expeditionary Force (BEF) to France; but British strategy relied on the French Army, together with the Royal Air Force (RAF) and Royal Navy, to defend against the Germans, while hoping for some kind of negotiated solution. One American journalist complained that “there is something phony about this war,”
¹
and the expression stuck. Now the Phony War was over, and with it, Chamberlain’s tenure of office.

Earlier that morning the long awaited German offensive in the West had begun. Aircraft of the Luftwaffe were attacking targets in France, and also in Belgium and the Netherlands, both of which had abandoned their neutrality and asked for French and British help. The first Allied troops were driving across the Belgian frontier to meet the Germans, the BEF among them, while the RAF’s Advanced Air Striking Force (AASF), based near Rheims, joined in the contest for the skies. But Chamberlain’s fall from power had begun two days earlier, as Parliament debated the disastrous Anglo-French campaign in Norway against the Germans, launched in early April. Ill equipped and ill organized, the Allies had been heavily defeated. In the House of Commons, Chamberlain faced an open revolt from many of his own Conservative party, who made it clear that he must resign.

Under the British system of ministerial responsibility, arguably the man most to blame for the Norway debacle was also present in the chamber. Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, had been dismissed from the same post in 1915 after a similar failed amphibious exploit, the Gallipoli landings. A suspect figure in his own party for many years, the foremost critic of appeasement and opponent of the Nazis, Churchill was also an undeclared leader of the revolt against Chamberlain, and a popular candidate for Prime Minister. From the war’s start, he had viewed Nazi Germany as the enemy of western civilization, an evil thing to be destroyed. The Labor and Liberal opposition leaders were also prepared to enter a coalition government under Churchill.

But Churchill was not Chamberlain’s first choice. Also present was the Foreign Secretary, Edward Third Viscount Halifax, who was also the choice of King George VI and of most of the Conservative party. Lord Halifax was a deeply religious, highly intelligent, fox-hunting member of the British political and social establishment, who had championed appeasement but was finally convinced of the need for war. Churchill called him the “Holy Fox,” and it was an apposite name. Like both Churchill and Chamberlain, Halifax’s policy was to preserve Britain and its Empire. His view of the war was that men of goodwill should negotiate terms, and he had already made repeated secret approaches to Hitler. A colony or province here, a trade agreement there, and an honorable peace could be arranged.

This view of Germany as just another participant in the game of international politics could hardly have been further from how the British people saw the Nazi threat. But Britain in 1940 was not a particularly democratic country. Only in 1928 had all adults been given the vote, while many richer people had more than one vote each. Also, little in recent European history suggested that democracy had much future. The aristocratic, church, and establishment figure of Halifax counted for much among the power brokers of London. Government from the House of Lords was unusual—the last occasion had been Lord Salisbury in 1902—but it was not unconstitutional. A wartime coalition government also had little appeal for Chamberlain; the coalition of 1915 had broken the Liberal party, which had not held independent power since and had declined into obscurity. Churchill himself was the grandson of a duke and had moved twice between political parties, and therefore was hardly a democratic figure. He could not easily be dismissed for his role in the failure over Norway, nor could he be ignored, but he was not in a position to demand power.

All three men left contradictory and self-serving accounts of that critical Downing Street meeting. It is a matter of record, however, that Halifax emerged as the new Prime Minister of a continuing Conservative administration. There would be no coalition government. Churchill’s price was a high one: while remaining at the Admiralty, he became government spokesman in the House of Commons. Anthony Eden, an old political ally of Churchill’s, took over the War Office. Halifax remained Foreign Secretary as well as becoming Prime Minister. Chamberlain was appointed Lord President of the Council, retaining membership of the War Cabinet as well as leadership of the Conservative party. The opposition was left feeling sour and frustrated.

As these decisions were taken, the BEF was rolling forward from its base at Arras into Belgium as part of French 1st Army Group. But its commander, General Lord Gort, and his senior officers made little secret of their pessimism regarding the French “Plan D,” which intended for 1st Army Group to meet the German onslaught head-on. In a telegram to the War Cabinet shortly before his death in battle on June 2, 1939, Gort described how the collapse of the Belgians and the speed of the German advance “coincided almost exactly with the estimate of the GHQ Intelligence staff.”
²
This British pessimism, together with their military weakness, in turn produced even greater pessimism and lack of trust from the French and Belgians.

Even after the Battle of France began, BEF Headquarters and the political and military leadership in London never lost their belief that the real target of any major German attack would not be France at all. The British argued that the Germans had found the experience of the Western Front too terrible to consider repeating, and understood that Britain, with its control of ocean trade routes, was a much greater threat to Germany than France. The British therefore expected any German attack to be aimed chiefly at the Netherlands and Belgium, to capture naval and air bases on the North Sea coast. From there, submarine and air attacks could be mounted against Britain, perhaps followed by an amphibious invasion of East Anglia.

This fear prompted invasion scares in October 1939 and again in April 1940 that disrupted British training and defensive planning. As German agents arrived to provide information for a possible landing, British counterintelligence picked them all off without difficulty. But try as they could, the British intelligence services could find out no details of the German invasion plans, for the simple reason that none existed. Instead, they were picking up whispers of three developments. One of these was Führer Directive 6, of October 9, 1939, Hitler’s order for the invasion of the Netherlands and Belgium, given the rather dull codename of “Case Yellow” by Armed Forces High Command or OKW (in the German staff system all plans were either “cases” or “solutions” to problems). The second development was that Hermann Göring, a keen reader of British and American thrillers, had obtained a translation of Erskine Childers’s novel
Riddle of the Sands.
Written in 1903, it described a German plan for a surprise invasion of East Anglia by barges across the North Sea, under cover of fog. The story caught Göring’s imagination, and it was soon the talk of official Berlin. The third development was the early planning by Naval Headquarters (OKM) under Grand Adm. Erich Raeder for the invasion of Norway. As an afterthought to this, the Kriegsmarine drew up an outline for an invasion of Britain, which was passed to Army Headquarters (OKH) for comment.

German plans for an invasion of Britain might have ended there had it not been for two events in January 1940. The first was that the original Case Yellow plan was compromised by the “Mechelen Incident.” A flight by two Luftwaffe staff officers carrying the plans for Case Yellow developed engine trouble and landed near Mechelen in neutral Belgium on January 10. The officers destroyed some of the plans, but the Belgians did pass a summary on to the French. Next, a feeling among senior German officers that Case Yellow was inadequate found its voice in the form of Infantry Gen. Erich von Manstein, chief of staff of Army Group A, who, on meeting Hitler to receive a decoration for the Polish campaign, explained his own misgivings. Hitler ordered a revision of Case Yellow that produced a much more ambitious plan. Led by seven of Germany’s ten Panzer (armored) divisions, the main thrust would be made through the Ardennes forest in Luxembourg and southern Belgium by Army Group A, with the objective of defeating the French outright. The attack into the Netherlands and Belgium expected by the Allies would be a secondary move by Army Group B, while the remaining Army Group C watched the Maginot Line.

OKW’s response to Manstein’s intervention was acknowledgment that he had done the right thing, along with a reluctance to tolerate bypassing the chain of command. Although many of his ideas went into the revision of Case Yellow, Manstein himself was removed from Army Group A on a technicality, and slated to command XXXVIII Army Corps. Since this was refitting in central Germany, someone in OKW decided on a humorous twist, placing Manstein in charge of an army conference on the possible invasion of Britain, together with a joint army-navy working party on amphibious craft. Without a talented senior officer such as Manstein to lead it, this working party might well have come to nothing.

Manstein started from the premise that the new Case Yellow would succeed, that Germany would control the Dutch and Belgian coast, and that much of the French Army would be neutralized. There were three approaching date-windows during which tides and other factors were optimal for a landing in southern England: early June, mid-July, and mid-September. It seemed impossible that France could be defeated by June, while the September date was too late to be sure of the weather. Only the July option was credible, and this would surely mean invading Britain while simultaneously fighting the French.