Winds of War (93 page)

Hitler was deeply loyal to Mussolini, his one real ally, and for political reasons he felt the Italian had to be shored up. Also, with our invasion of the Soviet Union imminent, the neutralizing of the Balkans on our southern flank was important. The Führer embarked on skillful political moves to keep the conflagration in Greece localized, planning to snuff it out with a few good German divisions. He wisely seized the Rumanian oil fields and forced an accommodation with Hungary. He also dictated friendly pacts with Bulgaria and Yugoslavia, and despite Russian complaints, he moved troops into Bulgaria for the Greek action. All was in readiness for the pacification of the Balkans, when Roosevelt’s emissary came to Belgrade.

The Simovic Cabal

Winston Churchill had a farfetched vision of drawing neutral Yugoslavia and Turkey into the Greek mess, thus creating a major Balkan front against us, where as usual other people would fight and die for England. Donovan had tried in January to interest the Yugoslav government in Churchill’s scheme, but the Prince Regent Paul had shrugged off the American meddler. Donovan had managed, however, to make contact with a conspiracy of Serbian military men, led by an air force general, one Simovic. A patchwork creation of the Versailles settlement, Yugoslavia was torn by antagonism between the Croats, who were friendly to the Reich, and the Serbians, our fierce enemies. These Serbian officers were quite receptive to the harebrained Churchill plan; it was Serbian hotheads, it will be recalled, who touched off the First World War at Sarajevo.

On his visit in March, Donovan found the British scheme in collapse; for, under severe pressure from the Führer, Yugoslavia was joining the Axis. Roosevelt now sent a stiff message to the Yugoslav government, which history records: “The United States is looking not merely to the present but to the future, and any nation which tamely submits on the grounds of being quickly overrun would receive less sympathy from the world than a nation which resists, even if this resistance continues for only a few weeks.”

Here, in effect, was a command to Yugoslavia from the American President almost five thousand miles away, to embroil itself in war with Germany, on pain of being punished at some future peace treaty if it did not! There are few instances of more callous effrontery in the chronicles of mankind. The government returned a noble negative reply to the American ambassador, through Prince Paul: “You big nations are hard. You talk of our honor, but you are far away.”

Now came the turn of the Simovic cabal, provoked and encouraged by American promises. It ramified throughout the Yugoslav armed forces like a cancer, and in an overnight bloodless revolution the conspirators deposed the government, seized control of the state, and repudiated the pact with the Axis. Joyous street demonstrations of Serbians followed, and there was much satisfaction and praise for the “heroic Yugoslavs” in the Western newspapers.

“Operation Punishment”

But all this was short-lived. Adolf Hitler ordered the swift and merciless destruction of Yugoslavia. He could do no less. Successful defiance of the Reich by a Balkan cabal would have led to bloody revolts throughout our tranquil New Order in Europe. A fierce bombardment, “Operation Punishment,” leveled Belgrade on April 6. The Wehrmacht conquered Yugoslavia in eleven days, at the same time commencing operations in Greece. Hitler partitioned Yugoslavia up among Germany, Italy, and the Balkan allies, and the country as such ceased to exist (though a Bolshevik partisan movement in the mountains remained a nuisance). The unfortunate Yugoslav people thus paid with wholesale deaths, a surrendered army, and national destruction, for the scheming of Churchill and Roosevelt.

From a technical viewpoint, the Yugoslavia campaign was admirable. Quick victories always look easy; but the terrain is mountainous, and the Yugoslavs had an army of over a million tough men. The Wehrmacht triumphed through the decisiveness of the Führer and the swiftness of the blow. The campaign had to be worked up in Wehrmacht Supreme Headquarters in a single sleepless night, for, unlike our previous land operations, no planned attack on Yugoslavia lay ready in our files. Still, it was executed to perfection; and incredibly, our casualties were less than six hundred soldiers.

Possibly the most banal cliché about the Second World War is that Hitler lost it by giving vent to personal rage against Yugoslavia, thus delaying the attack against the Soviet Union for three to five precious weeks, in order to wreak vengeance on a small harmless neighbor. In point of fact, Hitler’s decision was absolutely forced. In planning an attack on Russia, a hostile front in the Balkans on the southern flank, so close to the Rumanian oil fields, could not be tolerated. As for his anger, it was the Führer’s way of making his generals exert themselves. Though it was uncomfortable to be a target of such displays, the technique worked. The argument about lost time is nugatory, since weather and ground conditions governed our timetable against Russia.

Germany would have been better off, it must be conceded, had Italy never entered the war. There are advantages in keeping one’s flanks secured by belts of neutral countries. All Mussolini did was add the two huge Italian and Balkan peninsulas to our negative front. In the end, the decision was fought out on the classical battleground of Europe, the great northern plain between the Volga and the English Channel, where we fatally missed all the vast strength we dissipated southward.

The Mediterranean Strategy

Still, since the flame of war had despite us jumped south, some of our highest leaders, including Hermann Göring and Admiral Raeder, urged the Führer early in 1941 to strike at England in the Mediterranean by seizing Gibraltar, North Africa, and the Suez Canal. The British were helpless to stop such an attack in force; they were stretched too thin. In this way we could have sealed the southern flank with the impenetrable Sahara Desert. The British sea lines to Africa and Asia would have been cut. The shock to the British morale and supply system might well have brought on the fall of Churchill, and the peace that both we and the British needed.

Hitler was tempted. But when the Spanish dictator Franco treacherously refused to join us in attacking the British – after Germany had won his civil war for him – the Führer lost interest. His heart lay in the invasion of Russia. He acted, however, with energy and dispatch as events confronted him in North Africa, Yugoslavia, and Greece, while the crucial assault on the Soviet Union was being marshalled. Our armed forces triumphed in short order wherever they went, and the history of the time records nothing but glorious German victories, one after the other.

Churchill’s Disastrous Folly

Winston Churchill helped our cause with a display of strategic ineptness equal to Mussolini’s. When we entered Greece, the British in Africa were sweeping through Libya, Eritrea, and Abyssinia, with the Italians everywhere fleeing or giving up. Here was England’s chance to wrap up North Africa and secure her Mediterranean lifeline before we could mount an attack. Churchill, however, writes that, though he knew that the British lacked the strength to oppose Germany for long on the Greek peninsula, he felt “honor bound” to help the Greeks. He pulled vital troops out of his triumphant African forces, killing the momentum of their drive, and threw them into Crete and Greece, whence he soon had to withdraw them, crushed and bloodied, in a “little Dunkirk,” for here they were not fighting Italians. The survivors who got back to Africa found themselves once more confronting Germans, since meantime Rommel had consolidated a landing in Tripoli with his famous Afrika Korps. That spelled the end of the merry British romping in Africa. The Americans had to bail them out there, as everywhere else.

“Honor” had nothing to do with Churchill’s maladroit move. He had an obsession about the Balkans, deriving from his fiasco at Gallipoli in World War I. Later in the war this obsession was to estrange him from Roosevelt and reduce him to a pathetic hanger-on at the war conferences, fussing vainly at the Russians and Americans about the Balkans, while they coldly went ahead with plans to finish the war on sound strategic lines in the plains of the north.

Had Churchill left the Balkans alone and allowed his generals to finish off their African campaign early in 1941, the destruction of Yugoslavia, and the subsequent Allied landings in Morocco, Sicily, and Italy, might all have been unnecessary. The war might have been shortened by two years, sparing both sides much horror and bloodshed. But it was not to be.

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TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: Roon puts an unlikely construction on Colonel Donovan’s visits to Yugoslavia. The Simovic revolution was a popular one. Most Yugoslavs were willing to risk Hitler’s anger, they paid the price, and they earned the respect of the United States and all the world. Communist Yugoslavia’s unique friendly relationship with America today stems from that gallant stand in 1941. But even if Roon’s assertions about Donovan were factual, it seems unusually obtuse to blame the destruction of Yugoslavia on Roosevelt and Churchill, while overlooking the little fact that it was the Germans who fire-bombed Belgrade to ashes, invaded the land, and killed the people.

It is true that President Roosevelt made occasional use of informal emissaries, but their importance is overrated in melodramatic films and books, as well as in some military history. These men usually performed minor donkeywork, which for reasons of speed or security could not be done as well through regular channels. To class Harry Hopkins or even Colonel Donovan with these anonymous small-bore persons is inaccurate. – V.H.

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Chapter 42

Lend-Lease passed the Senate by sixty votes to thirty-one. Few Americans followed the debate more keenly than Pug Henry. In the visitor’s gallery of the Senate, hand cupped to his ear because of the bad acoustics, he absorbed a new knowledge of how his own government worked. More and more he admired Franklin Roosevelt’s ability to drive this balky team. After weeks of wild controversy, the vote itself went smooth as oil. The last excitement lay in the crushing of trick amendments. Two to one, the Senate voted in Lend-Lease, while the country and the press barely paid attention. The debate had bored them into indifference.

Yet this vote struck Pug Henry as the key world event since Hitler’s smash into Poland. Here in the yeas of sixty elderly voices the tide might be starting to turn. The President at last had the means to put the United States on a war footing, long before the people were ready to fight. The new factories that must now rise to make Lend-Lease planes and guns, would in time arm the American forces that so far existed only on paper.

That same day he was ordered to fly down to the Norfolk Navy Yard and report to Admiral Ernest King, a dragon he had not met before. King had his flag in the
Texas.

Texas
was the first battleship to which Pug had ever reported, shortly after the World War, on just such a raw and blowy March day as this, in this same Navy Yard, and possibly at this same pier. With one stack gone, and tripod instead of basket mast,
Texas
looked much different than in the old coal-burning days. Pug noted in the paint and brightwork topside an arid sepulchral cleanliness. The gangway watch, and the sailors working around the old gun turrets, were starched and scrubbed as surgeons. Outside the four-starred door to flag quarters a glittery-eyed marine presented arms like a clock striking.

King sat behind a desk, showing blue sleeves stiff to the elbow with gold. The bare office was warmed only by a framed picture of Admiral Mayo on the bulkhead. King had a long, thin, deeply scored red face with high cheekbones, a narrow shiny pate, and a sharp nose. Behind him hung a chart of the Atlantic, with bold black letters in one corner, COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF, ATLANTIC FLEET. He motioned Victor Henry to a seat, tilted back his chin, and eyed him.

“I received a telephone call from the Chief of Naval Operations yesterday,” he commenced in a sandy voice, “that one Captain Victor Henry of War Plans would report to me directly from the President of the United States.”

Henry bobbed his head as though he were an ensign.

Silence, and the hum of ventilators. “Well? State your business.”

The captain told Admiral King what Franklin Roosevelt desired. The admiral calmly smoked a cigarette in a holder, eyes boring at Henry. Then Pug described his plan for executing the President’s desires. He talked for six or seven minutes. King’s long, weathered face remained immobile and faintly incredulous.

“So! You’re prepared to get the United States of America into this war all by yourself, are you, Captain?” said Ernest King at last, with frigid sarcasm. “Well, that’s one way for an obscure person to go down in history.”

“Admiral, it’s the President’s judgment that this exercise will go off without incident.”

“So you said. Well, suppose his judgment’s wrong? Suppose a U-boat fires a fish at you? What then?”

“If we’re fired on, sir, why, I propose to fire back. That won’t start a war unless Hitler wants war.”

Ernest King nodded peevishly. “Hell, we’re in this war anyway. It doesn’t matter too much when or how the whistle blows. The Japanese are going to kick off against us when it suits them and the Germans. Probably when it least suits us. I agree with Mr. Roosevelt that it very likely won’t happen now. But how about the battle cruisers? Hey? Thought about them? The
Scharnhorst
and the
Gneisenau?
They’ve picked off more than a hundred thousand tons in the past month.”

“Yes, sir. I hope the Catalinas will warn us if they’re around, so we can evade.”

Admiral King said, “That’s a big ocean out there. The air patrol can easily miss them.”