The Second World War

by Antony Beevor

  On 6 October, Hitler announced in the Reichstag his offer of peace to Britain and France, assuming that they would accede to his occupation of both Poland and Czechoslovakia. The very next day, without even waiting to hear their reply, Hitler began discussions with commanders-in-chief and General der Artillerie Halder on an offensive in the west. The army high command, the OKH, was instructed to draw up a plan, Case Yellow, for an attack in five weeks’ time. But the arguments of his senior commanders about the difficulties of redeployment, provisioning and the lateness of the season for such an operation exasperated him. He must also have been put out when, on 10 October, a wild rumour swept Berlin that the British were agreeing to peace terms. The spontaneous celebrations in street market and Gasthaus alike turned to dejection when Hitler’s eagerly awaited speech on the radio showed that this was a wishful fantasy. Goebbels was furious, above all at the lack of enthusiasm for the war which had been revealed.

  On 5 November, Hitler agreed to see Generaloberst von Brauchitsch, the army commander-in-chief. Brauchitsch, who had been urged by other senior officers to stand firm against an early invasion, warned Hitler not to underestimate the French. Because of ammunition and equipment shortages the army needed more time. Hitler interrupted him to express his contempt for the French. Brauchitsch then tried to argue that the German army in the Polish campaign had shown itself to be ill disciplined and badly trained. Hitler exploded, demanding examples. A very rattled Brauchitsch was unable to cite any off the top of his head. Hitler sent his commander-in-chief away shaking and thoroughly humiliated, with the threatening remark that he knew ‘the spirit of Zossen [OKH headquarters] and was determined to crush it’.

  Halder, the army chief of staff, who had toyed with the idea of a military coup to remove Hitler, now feared that this remark of the Führer’s indicated that the Gestapo knew of his plans. He destroyed anything which might be incriminating. Halder, who looked more like a nineteenth-century German professor with his hair en brosse and his pince-nez, would bear the brunt of Hitler’s impatience with the conservatism of the general staff.

  Stalin, during this period, had wasted little time in seizing the gains offered by the Molotov–Ribbentrop agreements. Immediately after the Soviet occupation of eastern Poland had been completed, the Kremlin had imposed its so-called ‘treaties of mutual assistance’ on the Baltic states. And on 5 October, the Finnish government was asked to send envoys to Moscow. A week later Stalin presented them with a list of demands in another draft treaty. These included the leasing to the Soviet Union of the Hanko Peninsula and the transfer to the Soviet Union of several islands in the Gulf of Finland, as well as part of the Rybachy Peninsula near Murmansk and the port of Petsamo. Another demand insisted that the border on the Karelian Isthmus above Leningrad should be moved thirty-five kilometres to the north. In exchange the Finns were offered a largely uninhabited part of Soviet northern Karelia.

  The negotiations in Moscow continued until 13 November without a final agreement. Stalin, convinced that the Finns lacked international support and the will to fight, decided to invade. His unconvincing pretext was a puppet ‘government-in-exile’ composed of a handful of Finnish Communists calling for fraternal aid from the Soviet Union. Soviet forces provoked a frontier incident near Mainila in Karelia. The Finns turned to Germany for help, but the Nazi government refused any support and advised them to concede.

  On 29 November, the Soviet Union broke off diplomatic relations. The next day, troops of the Leningrad military district attacked Finnish positions and Red Army aviation bombers raided Helsinki. The Winter War had begun. Soviet leaders assumed that the campaign would be a walk-over, like their occupation of eastern Poland. Voroshilov, the commissar of defence, wanted it to be finished in time for Stalin’s sixtieth birthday on 21 December. Dmitri Shostakovich was ordered to compose a piece to celebrate the event.

  In Finland, Marshal Carl Gustav Mannerheim, a former officer of the Tsar’s Chevalier Gardes and the hero of the war of independence against the Bolsheviks, was called out of retirement as commander-in-chief. The Finns, with fewer than 150,000 men, many of whom were reservists and teenagers, faced Red Army forces over a million strong. Their defences across the Karelian Isthmus south-west of Lake Ladoga, known as the Mannerheim Line, consisted mainly of trenches, log-lined bunkers and some concrete strongpoints. The Finns were also aided by the forests and small lakes which funnelled any lines of advance towards their carefully laid minefields.

  Despite heavy artillery support, the Soviet 7th Army received a nasty shock. Its infantry divisions were at first delayed by screening forces and snipers close to the border. Lacking mine-detectors and under orders to push forward without delay, Soviet commanders simply marched their men forward through the snow-covered minefields in front of the Mannerheim Line. For Red Army soldiers, who had been told that the Finns would welcome them as brothers and liberators from their capitalist oppressors, the reality of the fighting sapped their morale as they struggled through the snowfields towards the birchwoods which concealed parts of the Mannerheim Line. The Finns, masters of winter camouflage, mowed them down with machine guns.

  In the far north of Finland, Soviet troops from Murmansk attacked the mining area and the port of Petsamo, but their attempts further south to slice through the middle of Finland from the east to the Gulf of Bothnia proved the most spectacularly disastrous. Stalin, astonished that the Finns had not immediately given in, ordered Voroshilov to crush them with the Red Army’s numerically superior forces. Red Army commanders, terrified by the purges and hamstrung by the stifling military orthodoxy which ensued, could only send more and more men to their deaths. In temperatures of minus 40 degrees Centigrade, Soviet soldiers, ill equipped and untrained for this sort of winter warfare, stood out in their brown greatcoats as they stumbled through the deep snow. Amid the frozen lakes and forests of central and northern Finland, the Soviet columns could only follow the few roads through the woods. There, they were ambushed in lightning attacks by Finnish ski-troops armed with Suomi sub-machine guns, grenades and hunting knives to finish off their victims.

  The Finns adopted what they called ‘log-cutting’ tactics, slicing enemy columns into sections and cutting off their supply routes so that they starved. Appearing silently out of a freezing fog, their ski-troops would hurl grenades or Molotov cocktails at the Soviet tanks and artillery, then disappear just as swiftly. It was a form of semi-guerrilla warfare for which the Red Army was totally unprepared. Farms, byres and barns were burned down by the Finns to deny the Red Army columns any shelter as they advanced. Roads were mined and booby-traps prepared. Anyone wounded in these attacks froze to death rapidly. Soviet soldiers had started to refer to the camouflaged Finnish ski-troops as belya smert–or ‘white death’. The 163rd Rifle Division was surrounded near Suomussalmi, then the 44th Rifle Division, advancing to its relief, was split up in a series of attacks and also fell victim to the white ghosts flitting between the trees.

  ‘For four miles,’ wrote the American journalist Virginia Cowles when visiting the battlefield later, ‘the road and forests were strewn with the bodies of men and horses; with wrecked tanks, field kitchens, trucks, gun carriages, maps, books and articles of clothing. The corpses were frozen as hard as petrified wood, and the colour of the skin was mahogany. Some of the bodies were piled on top of each other like a heap of rubbish, covered only by a merciful blanket of snow; others were sprawled against the trees in grotesque attitudes. All were frozen in the positions in which they huddled. I saw one with his hands clasped to a wound in his stomach; another struggling to open the collar of his coat.’

  A similar fate had met the 122nd Rifle Division advancing south-westwards from the Kola Peninsula towards Kemijärvi, where they were surprised and massacred by the forces of General K. M. Wallenius. ‘How strange were these bodies on this road,’ wrote the first foreign journalist to see the effectiveness of the Finns’ brave resistance. ‘The cold had frozen them into the positions in which they fell
. It had, too, slightly shrunken their bodies and features, giving them an artificial, waxen appearance. The whole road was like some huge waxwork representation of a battle scene, carefully staged… one man leant against a wagon wheel with a length of wire in his hands; another was fitting a clip of cartridges into his rifle.’

  International condemnation of the invasion led to the Soviet Union’s expulsion from the League of Nations, its final act. Popular feeling in London and Paris was almost more outraged by this incursion than by the attack on Poland. Stalin’s German ally also found itself in a difficult position. While receiving an increased volume of supplies from the Soviet Union, it now feared damaging its relations and trade with Scandinavian countries, especially Sweden. Above all, the Nazi leadership was disturbed by the calls in Britain and France for military aid to be sent to Finland. An Allied presence in Scandinavia risked disrupting Swedish iron-ore deliveries to Germany, whose high quality was vital for its war industries.

  Hitler, however, was serenely confident at this time. He had been confirmed in his belief that providence was on his side, preserving him for the accomplishment of his great task. On 8 November, he had made his annual speech in the Bürgerbräukeller in Munich from where the Nazis’ failed 1923 Putsch had been launched. Georg Elser, a cabinet-maker, had secretly filled a pillar with explosives close to the platform. But for once Hitler had cut his visit short to return to Berlin, and twelve minutes after his departure a huge explosion had wrecked the place, killing a number of his Nazi ‘Old Fighters’. According to one commentator, the reaction in London to the news was ‘summed up in a calm British “Bad luck”, as though someone had missed a pheasant’. With misplaced optimism, the British comforted themselves with the idea that it was simply a matter of time before the Germans would get rid of their own ghastly regime.

  Elser was arrested that evening trying to cross into Switzerland. Even though he had clearly worked entirely alone, Nazi propaganda immediately blamed the British Secret Intelligence Service for the attempt on the Führer’s life. Himmler had the perfect opportunity to exploit this fictitious link. Walter Schellenberg, an SS intelligence expert, was already in contact with two British SIS officers, having convinced them that he was part of an anti-Hitler conspiracy in the Wehrmacht. The next day, he persuaded them to meet him again at Venlo on the Dutch frontier. He promised to bring an anti-Nazi German general with him. But the two British officers instead found them themselves surrounded and seized by an SS snatch party. It was led by Sturmbannführer Alfred Naujocks, who had commanded the fake attack on the Gleiwitz transmitter at the end of August. It would not be the only British secret operation to go horribly wrong in the Netherlands.

  This debacle was concealed from the British public, who at least had their pride restored in the Royal Navy later that month. On 23 November, the armed merchant cruiser HMS Rawalpindi fought back against the German battle-cruisers Gneisenau and Scharnhorst. In a hopeless engagement of great bravery, which was inevitably compared to Sir Richard Grenville in the Revenge taking on vast Spanish galleons, guncrews fought on until they were killed. The Rawalpindi, blazing from bow to stern, went down with her battle ensign still flying.

  Then, on 13 December off the coast of Uruguay, Commodore Henry Harwood’s squadron, with the cruisers HMS Ajax, Achilles and Exeter, sighted the pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spee, which had already sunk nine ships. Kapitan Hans Langsdorff, her commander, was highly respected because of his good treatment of the crews of his victims. But Langsdorff mistakenly thought that the British ships were only destroyers and so did not avoid battle as he should have done, even though he outgunned his adversaries with his 11-inch main armament. The Exeter, drawing the Graf Spee’s fire, suffered heavy damage, while the Ajax and the New Zealand-crewed Achilles attempted to close within range to fire torpedoes. Although the British squadron was badly battered, the Graf Spee, which had also been hit, broke off the action under a smokescreen and headed for Montevideo harbour.

  Over the following days, the British bluffed Langsdorff into believing that their squadron had been heavily reinforced. And on 17 December, having first disembarked his prisoners and most of the crew, Langsdorff took the Graf Spee out into the estuary of the River Plate and scuttled her. He committed suicide soon afterwards. The British celebrated this victory at a time when morale needed a boost. Hitler, afraid that the Deutschland might suffer the same fate, ordered that her name should be changed to Lützow. He did not want headlines round the world proclaiming that a ship called ‘Germany’ had been sunk. Symbols were of paramount importance to him, as would become even more evident when the war turned against him.

  Having been told by Goebbels’s propaganda ministry that the Battle of the River Plate had been a victory, Germans were then shaken to hear that the Graf Spee had been scuttled. The Nazi authorities tried to make sure that the news did not spoil their ‘war Christmas’. Rationing was eased for the festivities and the population was encouraged to contemplate the devastating victory over Poland. Most convinced themselves that peace would soon come since both the Soviet Union and Germany had called on the Allies to accept the reality of Poland’s destruction.

  With newsreel film showing children round Christmas trees, the propaganda ministry produced a sickly feast of German sentimentality. But many families were haunted by a terrible disquiet. Although officially informed that a disabled child or elderly relative had died from ‘pneumonia’ in some institution, suspicions had started to grow that they were in fact being gassed in a programme run by the SS and members of the medical profession. Hitler’s order on euthanasia had been signed in October, but was backdated to the outbreak of war on 1 September to cover the first SS massacres of around 2,000 Polish asylum inmates, some of them shot in their straitjackets. The Nazis’ covert assault on ‘degenerates’, ‘useless mouths’ and ‘lives unworthy of life’ represented their first step in the deliberate annihilation of those they categorized as ‘sub-human’. Hitler had waited for the start of the war to cover this extreme programme of eugenics. More than 100,000 mentally and physically disabled Germans would be killed in this way by August 1941. In Poland, the killings continued, mainly by shooting in the back of the head, but sometimes in sealed trucks with the exhaust fumes piped in, and also, for the first time, in an improvised gas chamber in Posen: a process which Himmler himself came to observe. As well as the disabled, a number of prostitutes and Gypsies were also murdered.

  Hitler, who had forsworn his passion for the cinema for the duration of the war, also gave up Christmas. Over the holiday period, he paid a number of highly publicized surprise visits to Wehrmacht and SS units, including the Grossdeutschland Regiment, Luftwaffe airfields and flak batteries, and also the SS Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler, now relaxing after its murderous campaign in Poland. On New Year’s Eve he addressed the nation over the radio. Proclaiming a ‘New Order in Europe’, he said: ‘We shall only talk of peace when we have won the war. The Jewish capitalistic world will not survive the twentieth century.’ He made no reference to ‘Jewish Bolshevism’, having so recently sent sixtieth-birthday greetings to Stalin, a message which also offered best wishes ‘for the prosperous future of the peoples of the friendly Soviet Union’. Stalin replied that ‘The friendship of the peoples of Germany and the Soviet Union, cemented by blood, has every reason to be lasting and firm.’ Even under the hypocritical requirements of their unnatural relationship, the phrase ‘cemented by blood’ in reference to their dual attack on Poland constituted a pinnacle of shamelessness as well as an ill omen for the future.

  Stalin can hardly have been in a good mood as the year came to an end. Finnish forces had now advanced on to Soviet territory. He was forced to accept that the disastrous performance of the Red Army in the Winter War had been partly the fault of his incompetent crony Marshal Voroshilov. The humiliation of the Red Army in the eyes of the world had to be stopped, especially since he had been alarmed by the devastating effectiveness of German Blitzkrieg tactics in the Polish ca
mpaign.

  He therefore decided to bring in Army Commander S. K. Timoshenko to head up a North-Western Front. Like Voroshilov, Timoshenko was another veteran of the 1st Cavalry Army in which Stalin had served as commissar in the Russian Civil War, but he was at least slightly more imaginative. New weapons and equipment were issued, including the latest rifles, motorized sledges and heavy KV tanks. Instead of massed infantry attacks, the Soviet forces would rely on smashing Finnish defences with artillery.

  A new Soviet offensive began against the Mannerheim Line on 1 February 1940. The Finnish forces buckled under the onslaught. Four days later, their foreign minister made an initial contact with Mme Aleksandra Kollontay, the Soviet ambassador in Stockholm. The British and especially the French hoped to maintain Finland’s resistance. They accordingly made approaches to the Norwegian and Swedish governments to obtain transit rights for an expeditionary force to help the Finns. The Germans were alarmed and began to study the possibility of sending troops to Scandinavia to pre-empt an Allied landing.

  Both the British and French governments also considered the possibility of occupying Narvik in Norway and the mining areas of northern Sweden to cut off iron-ore supplies to Germany. But the Swedish and Norwegian governments were afraid of being drawn into the war. They refused the British and French requests to cross their territory to aid the Finns.

  On 29 February the Finns, with no hope of foreign help, decided to seek terms on the basis of the Soviet Union’s original demands, and on 13 March a treaty was signed in Moscow. The terms were harsh, but they could have been far worse. The Finns had shown how resolutely they were prepared to defend their independence, but most importantly Stalin did not want to continue a war which might yet drag in the western Allies. He was also forced to accept that Comintern propaganda had been ludicrously self-deluding, so he dropped his puppet government of Finnish Communists. The Red Army had suffered 84,994 killed and missing, with 248,090 wounded and sick. The Finns had lost 25,000 killed.