The Second World War

by Antony Beevor

  Hitler was, however, disturbed by the Soviet Union’s seizure of Bessarabia and the northern Bukovina from Romania on 28 June. Stalin’s ambitions in the region might threaten the Danube delta and the oilfields of Ploesti, which were vital to German interests. Three days later, the Roman-ian government renounced the Anglo-French guarantee of its frontiers and sent emissaries to Berlin. The Axis was about to gain another ally.

  Churchill, as determined as ever to fight on, had meanwhile come to a harsh decision. He evidently regretted his telegram to Roosevelt of 21 May, in which he had raised the prospect of British defeat and the loss of the Royal Navy. Now he needed a gesture to the United States and the world at large which demonstrated a ruthless intention to resist. And since the risk of the French fleet falling into German hands still preoccupied him greatly, he decided to force the issue. His messages to the new French administration urging it to send its warships to British ports had not been answered. Admiral Darlan’s previous assurances no longer convinced him after he had secretly joined the capitulards. And Hitler’s guarantee in the armistice conditions could easily be discarded like all his previous promises. The French fleet would be of inestimable value to the Germans in an invasion of Britain, especially after the Kriegsmarine’s losses off Norway. And with Italy’s entry into the war, the Royal Navy’s mastery of the Mediterranean could be challenged.

  The neutralizing of the most powerful French naval force was bound to be an almost impossible mission. ‘You are charged with one of the most disagreeable and difficult tasks that a British Admiral has ever been faced with,’ Churchill had signalled to Admiral Sir James Somerville as his Force H left Gibraltar the night before. Somerville, like most Royal Navy officers, was deeply opposed to the use of force against an allied navy with which he had worked closely and amicably. He questioned his orders for Operation Catapult in a signal to the Admiralty, only to receive in return very specific instructions. The French could either join the British to continue the war against Germany and Italy; sail to a British port; sail to a French port in the West Indies, such as Martinique, or to the United States; or scuttle their ships themselves within six hours. If they refused all of these options, then he had ‘the orders of His Majesty’s Government to use whatever force may be necessary to prevent [their] ships falling into German or Italian hands’.

  Shortly before dawn on Wednesday, 3 July, the British made their move. French warships concentrated in southern British ports were taken over by armed boarding parties, with only a few casualties. In Alexandria, a more gentlemanly system, blockading the French squadron in the harbour, was arranged by Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham. The great tragedy was to take place at the French North African port of Mers-el-Kébir near Oran, the old base of the Barbary Coast pirates. The destroyer HMS Foxhound appeared off the harbour at dawn and, once the morning mist had risen, Captain Cedric Holland, Somerville’s emissary, signalled that he wished to confer. Admiral Marcel Gensoul, in his flagship Dunkerque, also commanded the battle-cruisers Strasbourg, Bretagne and Provence, as well as a small flotilla of fast fleet destroyers. Gensoul refused to receive him, so Holland had to carry out a very unsatisfactory attempt at negotiations through the gunnery officer of the Dunkerque whom he knew well.

  Gensoul insisted that the French navy would never allow its ships to be taken by the Germans or the Italians. If the British persisted in their threat, his squadron would meet force with force. Since Gensoul still refused to receive Holland, he passed on the written ultimatum with the different options available. The possibility of sailing to Martinique or the United States, which even Admiral Darlan had considered an option, has seldom been mentioned in French accounts of this incident. Perhaps this is because Gensoul never mentioned it in his signal to Darlan.

  As the day became hotter and hotter, Holland kept trying, but Gen-soul refused to change his original reply. As the deadline of 15.00 hours approached, Somerville ordered Swordfish aircraft from the Ark Royal to drop magnetic mines across the harbour entrance. He hoped that this would convince Gensoul that he was not bluffing. Gensoul finally agreed to meet Holland face to face, and the deadline was extended to 17.30 hours. The French were playing for time, but Somerville, revolted by his task, was prepared to take that risk. As Holland climbed aboard the Dunkerque, no doubt reflecting on the unfortunate coincidence of its name, he noted that the French ships were now at battle stations, with tugs ready to pull the four battleships clear from the jetty.

  Gensoul warned Holland that it would be ‘tantamount to a declaration of war’ if the British opened fire. He would scuttle his ships only if the Germans tried to take them over. But Somerville had come under pressure from the Admiralty to settle matters quickly, because wireless intercepts indicated that a French cruiser squadron was on its way from Algiers. He sent a signal to Gensoul insisting that if he did not agree to one of the options immediately, he would have to open fire at 17.30 hours as stipulated. Holland had to leave rapidly. Somerville waited nearly another half an hour beyond even the delayed deadline in the hope of a change of heart.

  At 17.54 hours, the battle-cruiser HMS Hood and the battleships Valiant and Resolution opened fire with their 15-inch main armament. They soon found their range. The Dunkerque and the Provence were badly damaged while the Bretagne blew up and capsized. Other ships remained miraculously untouched, but Somerville ceased fire to give Gensoul another chance. He did not see that the Strasbourg and two of the three fleet destroyers, hidden by the thick smoke, had managed to reach the open sea. When a spotter plane warned the flagship of their escape, Somerville did not believe it because he had assumed that the mines would have prevented it. Eventually, the Hood gave chase and Swordfish and Skuas were launched from the Ark Royal, but their attacks failed when intercepted by French fighters scrambled from Oran airfield. By then, night was falling swiftly over the North African coast.

  The carnage aboard the stricken ships in Mers-el-Kébir was appalling, especially for those trapped below in engine rooms. Many suffocated from the smoke. Altogether 1,297 French sailors were killed and another 350 wounded. Most of the dead were from the Bretagne. The Royal Navy quite rightly regarded Operation Catapult as the most shameful task it had ever been called upon to perform. And yet this one-sided battle had an extraordinary effect around the world in its demonstration that Britain was prepared to fight on as ruthlessly as it needed. Roosevelt in particular was convinced that the British would not now surrender. And in the House of Commons, Churchill was cheered for similar reasons, and not because of any hatred of the French for seeking an armistice.

  The rampant anglophobia of Pétain’s administration, which had shaken American diplomats, turned to a visceral loathing after Mers-el-Kébir. But even Pétain and Weygand realized that a declaration of war would achieve no benefit. They simply broke off diplomatic relations. For Charles de Gaulle, it was naturally a terrible period. Very few French sailors and soldiers in Britain were prepared to join his nascent forces, which at first numbered just a few hundred men. The homesick majority asked for repatriation instead.

  Hitler too was forced to reflect on these events as his great triumphal entry into Berlin was prepared. He had been about to make a ‘peace offer’ to Britain just after his return, but now he felt less certain.

  Most Germans, having feared another bloodbath in Flanders and Champagne, were overjoyed by the astonishing victory. This time, they were certain that the war would come to an end. Like the French capitulards, they were convinced that Britain could never hold out alone. Churchill would be deposed by a peace party. On Saturday, 6 July, girls in the uniform of the Bund Deutscher Mädel, the female equivalent of the Hitler Youth, strewed flowers along the road from the Anhalter Bahnhof, the station where the Führer’s train would arrive, all the way to the Reichschancellery. Vast crowds had begun to gather six hours before his appearance. The fever of excitement was extraordinary, especially after the strikingly muted reaction in Berlin to the news of German forces occupying Paris. It far sur
passed the fervour following the Anschluss, the annexation of Austria. Even opponents of the regime were caught up in the frenzied rejoicing of victory. This time it was galvanized by a hatred of Britain, the only remaining obstacle to a Pax Germanica across Europe.

  Hitler’s Roman triumph lacked only the captives in chains and the slave murmuring in his ear that he was still a mortal. The afternoon was sunny for his arrival, which again seemed to confirm the miracle of ‘Führer weather’ for the great occasions of the Third Reich. The route was packed with ‘cheering thousands who shouted and wept themselves into a frantic hysteria’. After Hitler’s convoy of six-wheeled Mercedes reached the Reichschancellery, the ear-piercing cries of adulation from the girls of the BDM mixed with the roar of the crowds as they called for their Führer to appear on the balcony.

  A few days later, Hitler came to a decision. Having mulled over possible strategies against Britain and discussed an invasion with his commanders-in-chief, he issued ‘Directive No. 16 for Preparations of a Landing Operation against England’. The first contingency plans for an invasion of Britain, ‘Studie Nordwest’, had been finalized the previous December. Yet even before the Kriegsmarine’s losses during the Norwegian campaign, Grossadmiral Raeder had insisted that an invasion could be attempted only after the Luftwaffe had achieved air superiority. Halder, for the army, urged that an invasion should be a last resort.

  The Kriegsmarine faced the almost impossible task of assembling enough ships and craft to transport the first wave of 100,000 men with tanks, motor transport and equipment across the Channel. It also had to consider its decided inferiority in warships against the Royal Navy. The OKH initially allocated the Sixth, Ninth and Sixteenth Armies, positioned along the Channel coast between the Cherbourg Peninsula and Ostend, to the invasion force. Later, this was reduced to just the Ninth and Sixteenth Armies landing between Worthing and Folkestone with a total of about 150,000 men.

  Wrangling between the armed forces over the insuperable problems made any operation look increasingly unlikely before the unsettled weather of the autumn. The only part of the Nazi administration which seemed to take the invasion of Britain seriously was Himmler’s RSHA (Reichssicherheitshauptamt, the Reich Security Head Administration) which included the Gestapo and the SD (Sicherheitsdienst). Its counter-espionage department, led by Walter Schellenberg, produced an extraordinarily detailed (and at times amusingly inaccurate) briefing on Great Britain, with a ‘Special Search List’ of 2,820 people whom the Gestapo intended to arrest after the invasion.

  Hitler was cautious on other grounds. He was concerned that the disintegration of the British Empire might lead to the United States, Japan and the Soviet Union grabbing its colonies. He decided that Operation Sealion should go ahead only if Göring, now promoted to the new rank of Reichsmarschall, could bring Britain to its knees with his Luftwaffe. As a result the invasion of Britain was never treated with urgency at the highest levels.

  The Luftwaffe was not ready. Göring had assumed that the British were bound to sue for peace after the defeat of France and his air force formations needed time re-equip their squadrons. German losses in the Low Countries and France had been far higher than expected. Altogether 1,284 of its aircraft had been destroyed, while the RAF had lost 931. Also redeploying fighter and bomber units to airfields in northern France took longer than expected. During the first part of July, the Luftwaffe simply concentrated on shipping in the Channel, the Thames estuary and the North Sea. This they called the Kanalkampf. Attacks mainly by Stuka dive-bombers and by fast S-Boote (motor torpedo boats which the British called E-boats) virtually closed the Channel to British convoys.

  On 19 July, Hitler made a lengthy speech to members of the Reichstag and his generals assembled with great pomp in the Kroll Opera House. After hailing his commanders and exulting in Germany’s military achievements, he turned to England, attacking Churchill as a warmonger and making an ‘appeal to reason’, which was immediately rejected by the British government. He had completely failed to understand that Churchill’s position had now become unassailable as the epitome of dogged determination.

  Hitler’s frustration was all the greater after his triumph in the railway carriage in the Forêt de Compiègne and the huge increase in German power. The Wehrmacht’s occupation of northern and western France provided overland access to the raw materials of Spain and naval bases along the Atlantic coast. Alsace, Lorraine, the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg and Eupen-Malmedy in eastern Belgium were all incorporated in the Reich. The Italians controlled part of south-eastern France while the rest of south-central France, the unoccupied zone, was left to Marshal Pétain’s ‘French State’ based in the spa-town of Vichy.

  On 10 July, a week after Mers-el-Kébir, the Assemblée Nationale gathered in Vichy’s Grand Casino. They voted full powers to Marshal Pétain, with only eighty members out of 649 opposing. The Third Republic had ceased to exist. The État Français, supposedly incarnating the traditional values of Travail, Famille, Patrie, created a moral and political asphyxi ation which was xenophobic and repressive. It never acknowledged that it was assisting Nazi Germany by policing unoccupied France in the German interest.

  France had to pay not only for the costs of its own occupation, but also a fifth of the costs of Germany’s war so far. The inflated calculations and the exchange rate for the Reichsmark fixed by Berlin could not be questioned. This was an enormous bonus for the army of occupation. ‘Now there’s a lot to be bought for our money,’ wrote one soldier, ‘and many a pfennig is being spent. We are stationed in a large village and the shops are almost empty now.’ Those in Paris were stripped bare, especially by officers on leave. In addition, the Nazi government was able to seize what raw-material stocks it needed for its own war industries. And the military booty taken, in weapons, vehicles and horses, would furnish a considerable part of the Wehrmacht’s needs for the invasion of the Soviet Union a year later.

  French industry, meanwhile, reorganized itself to serve the needs of the conqueror, and French agriculture helped the Germans live better than they had since before the First World War. The French daily ration of meat, fats and sugar had to be reduced to around half that of the German. Germans regarded this as a just revenge for the hunger years they had endured after the First World War. The French, on the other hand, were encouraged to console themselves with the idea that as soon as Britain came to terms a general peace settlement would improve conditions for everyone.

  After Dunkirk and the French capitulation, the British were in a state of shock similar to a wounded soldier who feels no pain. They knew that the situation was desperate, if not catastrophic, with almost all the army’s weapons and vehicles abandoned on the other side of the Channel. And yet, helped by Churchill’s words, they almost welcomed the stark clarity of their fate. A self-comforting belief developed that, although the British always did badly at the beginning of a war, they would ‘win the last battle’, even if nobody had the remotest idea how. Many, including the King, professed a relief that the French were no longer their allies. Air Chief Marshal Dowding later claimed that, on hearing of the French surrender, he had gone down on his knees and thanked God that no more fighters needed to be risked across the Channel.

  The British expected the Germans to follow up their conquest of France with a rapid invasion. General Sir Alan Brooke, now responsible for the defence of the south coast, was most concerned about the lack of weapons, armoured vehicles and trained units. The chiefs of staff were still deeply worried by the threat to aircraft factories, on which the RAF would depend for replacements for the aircraft lost in France. But the time the Luftwaffe took to get ready for its onslaught on Britain provided a vital period of preparation.

  The British may have had only 700 fighters at the time, but the Germans failed to appreciate that their enemy was capable of producing 470 a month, double the rate of their own armaments industry. The Luftwaffe was also confident that its pilots and aircraft were manifestly superior. The RAF had lost 136 pilo
ts, killed or captured in France. Even when reinforced by other nationalities, they were still short. Flight training schools were pushing through as many as they could, but freshly qualified pilots were almost always the first to be shot down.

  The Poles formed the largest foreign contingent, with over 8,000 air force personnel. They were the only ones with combat experience, but their integration into the RAF was slow. Negotiations with General Sikorski, who wanted an independent Polish air force, had been complicated. But, once the first groups of pilots were brought into the RAF Volunteer Reserve, they rapidly proved their skill. British pilots often referred to the ‘crazy Poles’ because of their bravery and disdain for authority. Their new comrades soon showed their exasperation with the bureaucracy of the RAF, and yet they acknowledged that it was far better run than the French air force.

  Discipline was often a problem, partly because the Polish pilots were still angry with their own commanders for the state of their air force at the time of the German invasion the previous September. They had faced the prospect of fighting the Luftwaffe with fierce joy, convinced that although their P-11 machines were slow and badly armed they would win by skill and courage. Instead, they had been overwhelmed by the numerical and technical superiority of the German air fleets. That bitter experience, to say nothing of the dreadful treatment of their country by Hitler and Stalin, had created a burning desire for revenge now that they had modern fighters. Senior RAF officers could not have been more wrong when they arrogantly assumed that the Poles had been ‘demoralized’ by their defeat, and wanted to train them for bomber squadrons.