The Second World War

by Antony Beevor

  The Nazis did not know that Churchill had originally wanted to go much further than just seal off the Baltic. The pugnacious First Lord of the Admiralty had originally wanted to take the war right into the Baltic by sending a surface fleet there, but, fortunately for the Royal Navy, Operation Catherine was thwarted. Churchill also wanted to halt the supply of Swedish ore transported to Germany from the port of Narvik, but Chamberlain and the War Cabinet were firmly against the violation of Norwegian neutrality.

  Churchill then took a calculated risk. On 16 February, HMS Cossack, a British tribal-class destroyer, intercepted the Graf Spee’s supply ship, the Altmark, in Norwegian waters to release some British merchant navy prisoners held on board. The famous cry of the bluejacket boarding party to the prisoners below–‘The Navy’s here!’–thrilled a British public who had been suffering the inconveniences of war with little of its drama. In response, the Kriegsmarine increased its presence at sea. But on 22 February two German destroyers were attacked by Heinkel 111s because the Luftwaffe had not been informed in time that they were in the area. The destroyers were hit and struck mines. Both sank.

  German warships were then called back to harbour, although for another reason. Hitler issued orders on 1 March to prepare for the invasion of Denmark and Norway, an operation which would require all available surface ships. His decision to attack the two countries alarmed both the German army and the Luftwaffe. They believed that they faced a hard enough problem already with the invasion of France. A diversion in Norway just beforehand might prove disastrous. Göring especially was furious, but mainly out of pique. He felt that he had not been properly consulted first.

  On 7 March, Hitler signed the directive. It then seemed to take on a greater urgency, because air reconnaissance reported that the Royal Navy was concentrating its forces at Scapa Flow. This was presumed to be in preparation for a landing on the Norwegian coast. Yet the news a few days later of the Soviet–Finnish accord to end their conflict produced mixed feelings in the German high command. Even Kriegsmarine planners, who had been pressing all along for intervention in Norway, now thought that the pressure was off, since the British and French had no further excuse to land in Scandinavia. But Hitler and others, including Grossadmiral Raeder, felt that preparations were so far advanced that the invasion had to go ahead. A German occupation would also be a very effective way of maintaining pressure on Sweden to maintain its deliveries of iron ore. And Hitler liked the idea of Germany having bases which faced the eastern coastline of Britain and offered access to the northern Atlantic.

  The simultaneous invasion of Norway (Weserübung North), with six divisions, and Denmark (Weserübung South), with two divisions and a motorized rifle brigade, was fixed for 9 April. Transport ships escorted by the Kriegsmarine would land their forces at several points, including Narvik, Trondheim and Bergen. The Luftwaffe’s X Fliegerkorps would fly paratroopers and airlanding units to other places, especially Oslo. Copenhagen and seven other key towns in Denmark would be attacked by land and from the sea. The OKW suspected that they were in a race for Norway against the British, but they were in fact comfortably ahead.

  Chamberlain, unaware of German plans, had stood down the Anglo-French expeditionary force for Norway and Finland after the Soviet– Finnish pact was signed. This was against the advice of the chief of the imperial general staff, General Sir Edmund Ironside. Chamberlain, who dreaded extending the war to neutral Scandinavia, just hoped that Germany and the Soviet Union would now drift apart. But Allied inaction and pious hopes that they could conduct the war according to League of Nations rules were unlikely to impress anyone.

  Daladier, when still French prime minister, advocated a much more forceful strategy, providing it kept any fighting away from France. As well as bombing the Baku and mid-Caucasian oilfields, an idea which horrified Chamberlain, Daladier also wanted to occupy the mining area of Petsamo in northern Finland near the Soviet naval base of Murmansk. In addition, he argued strongly for landings on the Norwegian coast and complete control of the North Sea to prevent Swedish iron ore from reaching Germany. The British, however, suspected that he wanted to divert the war to Scandinavia to reduce the chances of a German attack on France. They believed this partly because Daladier obstinately opposed the British plan to block shipping on the Rhine by dropping mines. In any case, Daladier was forced to resign as prime minister on 20 March. Paul Reynaud took over and in the reshuffle Daladier became minister for war.

  Haggling between the Allies over their rival operations wasted precious time. Daladier forced Reynaud to continue to oppose the mining of the Rhine. The British agreed to the French plan to mine the waters off Narvik, which was carried out on 8 April. Churchill wanted to have a landing force ready, as he was certain that the Germans would react, but Chamberlain remained too cautious.

  Unknown to the British, a large German naval force with infantry on board had already set sail from Wilhelmshaven on 7 April for Trondheim and Narvik in northern Norway. The battle-cruisers Gneisenau and Scharnhorst were accompanied by the heavy cruiser Admiral Hipper and fourteen destroyers. Another four groups headed for ports in southern Norway.

  A British aircraft sighted the main task force under Vice Admiral Günther Lütjens. RAF bombers launched an attack, but failed to score a single hit. The British Home Fleet under Admiral of the Fleet Sir Charles Forbes put to sea from Scapa Flow, but it was well behind. The only naval force in a position to intercept was the battle-cruiser HMS Renown and its escorting destroyers acting in support of the mining operation off Narvik. One of these destroyers, HMS Glowworm, sighted a German destroyer and gave chase, but Lütjens sent in the Hipper, which sank the Glowworm as she attempted to ram her.

  The Royal Navy, determined to concentrate its forces for a major naval battle, ordered the disembarkation of troops on other warships ready to sail to Narvik and Trondheim. Yet the Home Fleet was having little success in intercepting the main German task force. This gave Lütjens time to send his destroyers into Narvik, but his battle squadron then sighted the Renown at dawn on 9 April. The Renown, with impressively accurate fire in the heavy seas, battered the Gneisenau and damaged the Scharnhorst, forcing Lütjens to withdraw while his ships carried out emergency repairs.

  The German destroyers, having sunk two small Norwegian warships, landed their troops and seized Narvik. Also on 9 April, the Hipper and her destroyers landed troops in Trondheim, and another force entered Bergen. Stavanger was also taken by paratroops and two airlanded infantry battalions. Oslo proved a much harder task, even though the Kriegsmarine had sent the new heavy cruiser Blücher and the pocket battleship Lützow (the former Deutschland). Norwegian shore batteries and torpedoes sank the Blücher; the Lützow had to withdraw after also suffering damage.

  At Narvik the following morning, five British destroyers managed to enter the fjords unseen. A heavy snowfall had hidden them from the offshore screen of U-boats. As a result they surprised five German destroyers in the process of refuelling. They sank two of them, but were then attacked by other German destroyers from side-fjords. Two Royal Navy destroyers were sunk and a third badly damaged. Unable to break out, the surviving ships had to wait until 13 April, when the battleship HMS Warspite and nine destroyers came to their rescue and finished off every German warship remaining.

  In other actions down the coast, two German cruisers, the Königsberg and the Karlsruhe, were sunk, the former by bombs from carrier-launched Skuas and the latter torpedoed by a submarine. The Lützow was so badly damaged that it had to be towed back to Kiel. But the Royal Navy’s partial successes did nothing to stop the transport of over 100,000 German troops to Norway in the course of the month.

  The occupation of Denmark proved even easier for the Germans. They managed to land troops in Copenhagen before the shore batteries could be alerted. Denmark’s government felt obliged to accept the terms dictated by Berlin. The Norwegians, however, rejected any notion of a ‘peaceful occupation’. The King, withdrawing with the government from
Oslo on 9 April, ordered mobilization. Although German forces seized many bases in their coups de main, they found themselves isolated until reinforcements arrived in strength.

  Because of the Royal Navy’s decision to disembark troops on 9 April, the first Allied troops did not put to sea until two days later. The situation was not helped by an impatient Churchill changing his mind and interfering constantly in operational decisions, to the exasperation of General Ironside and the Royal Navy. Norwegian troops meanwhile attacked the German 3rd Mountain Division with great bravery. But with German forces already established in Narvik and Trondheim, the Anglo-French landings had to be made on their flanks. A direct assault on the harbours was considered too dangerous. Only on 28 April did British troops and two battalions of the French Foreign Legion begin to land, reinforced by a Polish brigade. They captured Narvik and were able to destroy the port, but the Luftwaffe’s air supremacy ensured that the Allied operation was doomed. In the course of the next month the German onslaught on the Low Countries and France would force an evacuation of Allied troops from the northern flank and thus the surrender of Norwegian troops.

  The Norwegian royal family and the government sailed to England to continue the war. Raeder’s obsession with Norway, with which he had infected Hitler, was however to prove a very mixed blessing for Nazi Germany. The army continued to complain throughout the war that the occupation of Norway tied down far too many troops, who would be of much greater use on other fronts. From an Allied point of view, the Norway campaign was far more disastrous. Although the Royal Navy managed to sink half the Kriegsmarine’s destroyers, the combined operation was the worst example of inter-service cooperation. Many senior officers also suspected that Churchill’s misdirected enthusiasm had been influenced by a secret desire to blot out the memory of his ill-fated Dardanelles expedition in the First World War. Responsibility for the Norway debacle, as Churchill privately acknowledged later, rested much more with him than with Neville Chamberlain. Yet, with the cruel irony of politics, the reverse would bring him to replace Chamberlain as prime minister.

  Along the French frontier, the Phoney War, or drôle de guerre, or Sitzkrieg as the Germans called it, lasted far longer than Hitler had planned. He despised the French army and he was certain that Dutch resistance would collapse immediately. All he needed was the right plan to replace the one passed to the Allies by the Belgians.

  The most senior army officers did not like General von Manstein’s daring project and tried to suppress it. But Manstein, when finally given access to Hitler, argued that a German invasion of Holland and Belgium would draw the British and French forces forward from the Franco-Belgian frontier. They could then be cut off by a thrust through the Ardennes and across the River Meuse towards the Somme estuary and Boulogne. Hitler grabbed at the plan, because he needed a knock-out blow. Characteristically, he later claimed that it had been his idea all along.

  The British Expeditionary Force with four divisions had taken up positions along the Belgian frontier the previous October. By May 1940, it had been increased to one armoured and ten infantry divisions under General Lord Gort. Gort, despite the considerable size of his command, had to take orders from the French commander in the north-east, General Alphonse Georges, and the strangely diffident French commander-in-chief, General Maurice Gamelin. There was no joint Allied command as in the First World War.

  The greatest problem both Gort and Georges faced was the obstinate refusal of the Brussels government to compromise Belgium’s neutrality, even though it knew that the Germans planned to attack. Gort and his neighbouring French formations would thus have to wait for the German invasion before they could move forward. The Dutch, who had managed to stay neutral in the First World War, were even more determined not to provoke the Germans by making joint plans with the French or the Belgians. Yet they still hoped that Allied forces would come to support their small and under-equipped army when the fighting started. The Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, although sympathetic to the Allies, knew that it could do no more than close its border and point out to the German invaders that they were violating its neutrality.

  There was another fatal flaw in French planning. The Maginot Line stretched only from the Swiss border to the southernmost point of the Belgian frontier opposite the Ardennes. Neither the French nor British staffs imagined the Germans attempting a thrust through this heavily wooded region. The Belgians warned the French that this was a danger, but the supercilious Gamelin dismissed the possibility. Reynaud, who called Gamelin ‘the nerveless philosopher’, wanted to sack him, but Daladier, as minister of war, insisted on keeping him. The paralysis of decision extended right to the top.

  The lack of support in France for the war was barely concealed. German claims that Britain had forced the French into the war, and then would leave them to face the bulk of the fighting, were effectively corrosive. Even the French general staff led by General Gamelin showed little enthusiasm. The utterly inadequate gesture of a limited advance near Saarbrücken in September had represented almost an insult to the Poles.

  France’s defensive mentality affected its military organization. The majority of its tank units, although not technically inferior to the German panzers, were insufficiently trained. Apart from three mechanized divisions–a fourth was hurriedly put together under the command of Colonel Charles de Gaulle–French tanks were split up among its infantry formations. Both French and British forces were short of effective anti-tank guns–the British two-pounder was generally referred to as a ‘pea-shooter’–and their radio communications were primitive to say the least. In a war of movement, field telephones and landlines would prove to be of little use.

  The French air force was still in a lamentable state. General Vuillemin had written to Daladier during the Czechoslovak crisis in 1938 to warn him that the Luftwaffe would rapidly destroy their squadrons. Only marginal improvements had been made since then. The French therefore expected the RAF to take on most of the burden, but Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding, the head of Fighter Command, was deeply opposed to deploying aircraft to France. Fighter Command’s primary role was the defence of the United Kingdom, and in any case French airfields lacked effective anti-aircraft protection. In addition, neither the RAF nor the French air force had trained to act in close support for their own ground forces. The Allies had failed to learn this lesson of the Polish campaign, as well as others, such as the Luftwaffe’s skill at ruthless pre-emptive strikes against airfields, and the German army’s ability with sudden armoured thrusts to disorientate the defenders.

  After several more postponements, partly due to the Norwegian campaign and partly, in the last few days, to unfavourable weather forecasts, the German invasion in the west was finally set. Friday, 10 May was to be ‘X-Day’. Hitler, with his customary lack of modesty, predicted the ‘greatest victory in world history’.

  6

  Onslaught in the West

  MAY 1940

  Thursday, 9 May 1940 was a beautiful spring day in most of northern Europe. A war correspondent observed Belgian soldiers planting pansies round their barracks. There had been rumours of a German attack, with reports of pontoon bridges being assembled close to the border, but these were discounted in Brussels. Many seemed to think that Hitler was about to attack south into the Balkans, not westwards. In any case, few imagined that he would invade four countries–Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg and France–all in one go.

  In Paris, life continued as usual. The capital had seldom looked so beautiful. Chestnut trees had burst into leaf. Cafés were full. Without any apparent irony, ‘J’attendrai’ continued as the hit song. Race meetings went on at Auteuil, and smart women thronged the Ritz. Most striking of all were the many officers and soldiers in the streets. General Gamelin had just reinstated permission to go on leave. By a curious coincidence, Paul Reynaud, the prime minister, had offered his resignation that morning to President Albert Lebrun, because Daladier had again refused to sack the commander-in-chief.

  In Br
itain, the BBC news announced that the night before, thirty-three Conservatives had voted against Chamberlain’s government in the House of Commons following a debate on the Norway fiasco. Leo Amery’s speech attacking Chamberlain would prove fatal for the prime minister. He ended it with Cromwell’s dismissal of the Long Parliament in 1653: ‘Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!’ Amid tumultuous scenes, with chants of ‘Go! go! go!’, a shaken Chamberlain left the chamber, trying to conceal his emotions.

  Throughout that sunny day, politicians in Westminster and the clubs of St James’s discussed the next step in either hushed or heated tones. Who would succeed Chamberlain: Churchill or Lord Halifax, the foreign secretary? For most Conservatives, Edward Halifax was the natural choice. Many still distrusted Churchill as a dangerous, even unscrupulous maverick. Yet Chamberlain still tried to hold on. He approached the Labour Party, suggesting a coalition, but was told brusquely that they were not prepared to serve under him as leader. That evening he was forced to face the fact that he had to resign. Thus Britain found itself in a political limbo on the very eve of the great German offensive in the west.

  In Berlin, Hitler dictated his proclamation for the morrow to the armies of the western front. ‘The battle beginning today will decide the fate of the German nation for the next thousand years,’ it concluded. As the moment approached, the Führer was increasingly optimistic, especially after the success of the Norwegian campaign. He predicted that France would surrender within six weeks. The audacious glider assault on the principal Belgian fortress of Eben-Emael near the Dutch border excited him the most. His special armoured train, the Amerika, steamed off that afternoon to take him to a new Führer headquarters, designated the Felsennest (or Cliff Nest), in the forested hills of the Eifel close to the Ardennes. At 21.00 hours, the codeword Danzig was sent to all army groups. Meteorological reports had confirmed that the next day would provide perfect visibility for the Luftwaffe. Secrecy had been maintained so carefully that, after all the postponements of the attack date, some officers had been away from their regiments when the order to move out came through.