Ever since Germany had broken the terms of the Versailles treaty, the danger she posed to international peace was all too evident to far-sighted people like Winston Churchill and an increasing number of Labour and Conservative MPs. They believed that Britain should spend more on rearming and should stand up to the dictators who were destroying democracy in Europe by threatening to fight them if necessary. But the national government was still in power in London and its leaders still held to appeasement. They shrank from plunging Britain into another world war when she had scarcely got over the dislocation caused by the first.
In 1937 Lord Halifax was sent to discuss treaty revision in central Europe with Hitler. To the dismay of his critics, Chamberlain a year later made a more dramatic move to separate Mussolini from Hitler: the British government accepted Mussolini’s conquest of Ethiopia by recognizing the King of Italy as its Emperor. But the foreign secretary Anthony Eden who had become convinced that this level of appeasement was a mistake, believed the price was too high and resigned in February 1938.
In March Hitler drastically began to reinvent the German Empire. A German army went into Austria in March 1938 and joined her to the Third Reich, or Third Empire. Welcomed by most Austrians, the ‘Anschluss’ had been expressly forbidden by Versailles, yet not a soul stirred to prevent it. The Nazi government had been confident that nothing would happen, because reports from its ambassador to London Joachim von Ribbentrop had assessed the British upper classes as being pro-German, mainly on the evidence of the appeasers he met at Nancy Astor’s home, the so-called Cliveden Set. One of them, the editor of The Times Geoffrey Dawson, wrote his paper’s pro-German editorials. Sir Oswald Mosley, whose admiration for the Nazis was so great that he would be married to his second wife Diana Mitford at Goebbels’ house in Berlin, continued to be received by much of upper-class London society.
Hitler had only just begun. The German government, whose presses were pouring forth directives describing what the new German Empire demanded from its citizens, started churning out propaganda about the plight of the three million Sudeten Deutsch (or Germans) who lived in former Habsburg territory which the 1919 Treaty of St Germain had given to the new state of Czechoslovakia. It was quite obvious that Czechoslovakia was Hitler’s next target, and in September he duly gave her an ultimatum. America’s failure to guarantee the peace had driven France to make alliances on Germany’s borders to protect herself more thoroughly. By the terms of one of these treaties she was bound to come to Czechoslovakia’s aid. This meant war.
It was a war for which Britain was simply not ready. Moreover, since Europe was devoted to the right of self-determination there did seem to be good reason for the Sudetenland to be joined to Germany. Neville Chamberlain, who had had two earlier meetings with Hitler at Berchtesgaden and Godesberg, and had been persuaded that the Sudeten Germans had a point, flew to Munich to negotiate with the Führer. At the Munich conference attended by the French prime minister Edouard Daladier, Hitler, Mussolini and Chamberlain, it was agreed that Germany would take over the Sudetenland part of Czechoslovakia. Chamberlain returned clutching a piece of paper and saying in what would become a notorious phrase that he had achieved ‘peace in our time’. Duff Cooper, the first lord of the Admiralty, resigned in protest at the betrayal of Czechoslovakia.
Nothing could have been less true than Chamberlain’s belief that he had achieved peace for his time. He had bought a breathing space by throwing Czechoslovakia into the mouth of the wolf. And, as the clearest sign that appeasement did not work, Germany’s military position became still more formidable once her tanks had rolled into the Sudetenland and appropriated forty divisions of the Czech army and most of the country’s natural defences.
Whatever Chamberlain’s feeling that it was ‘horrible, fantastic and incredible…that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas-masks here because of a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing’, it was becoming clear that even Britain could not insulate herself from Hitler’s activities. By March 1939 the Führer had broken his word to Chamberlain and seized the rest of Czechoslovakia, the non-German Czech part–her steel mills, her industries and her population. All Chamberlain had bought was time, a year, for Britain to rearm and create an air force able to take on the Luftwaffe. Even he now saw that his policy of appeasing dictators had failed. Reluctantly Britain began to prepare herself for war. Appeasement formally came to an end on 31 March 1939 when guarantees of her territorial integrity were offered to Poland by France and Britain. Soon afterwards similar guarantees were granted to Romania and Greece.
Conscription, which even at the height of the First World War had appeared such an ethical problem and a threat to Britain’s civil liberties, was introduced without prior discussion or much protest on 29 April, its first appearance in peacetime. The menace of Hitler, who had grabbed one country after another, made most Britons accept the need to begin military training. Once again Britain, which had been on distant terms with her First World War ally for too long, co-ordinated military secrets with the French.
Hitler had no fear of their preparations. Since 1936, if not before, many ordinary German factories had been turned over to manufacturing a huge arsenal for the drive to the east to recapture all the cities wrongfully given to Poland in 1919. That summer, more strenuously than ever, the German press pounded out demands to get Danzig and the Polish Corridor back where they ‘rightfully’ belonged. The only country which might prevent this was Soviet Russia. France and Britain now found themselves in a race with Germany to obtain an alliance with her new ruler Stalin.
But the dictator Stalin had not been impressed by the western powers’ sacrifice of Czechoslovakia to save their skins, and Poland–with painful memories of her old ruler’s savagery–refused to allow any of Russia’s troops on to her soil.
On 23 August 1939, to the despair of the liberal western powers the German–Soviet Non-Aggression Pact was announced. It contained a secret agreement that Germany and Russia would divide Poland between them. Chamberlain warned Hitler that Britain would support Poland if she were attacked, and that pledge finally became an official Anglo-Polish Treaty on 25 August. But Hitler had obtained the go-ahead he needed. On the first day of September Nazi tanks supported by dive-bombers invaded Poland, spreading terror wherever they went. Two days later Britain and France declared war on Nazi Germany. The Second World War had begun.
The Second World War (1939-1945)
For the inhabitants of Britain, the Second World War began in a strangely hesitant way. A couple of thousand miles away, in the middle of the continental landmass, palls of smoke hung over the bombed-out cities of Poland. By the end of September 1939, more than 80,000 Polish soldiers had abandoned their homeland to avoid joining the 700,000 prisoners taken by the Germans and their allies, the Russians, who invaded Poland from the east that same month. But in Britain, Poland’s ally, all was as quiet and peaceful as if she were not at war.
An army was created for Britain’s defence, a Home Guard called the Local Defence Volunteers, and 146,000 men enlisted that summer. They were mainly Great War veterans, allowing young men to fight abroad. But, for all the noise of air-raid warnings, and the inconvenience of the blackout which put an end to street lighting and doubled road accidents, no enemy planes flew over Britain. The East End had been evacuated of half its children, many of whom were billeted in distant Cornwall to keep them out of harm’s way when the Luftwaffe bombed the London Docks. But it never happened. After a few months the evacuee children went home again. No British or French soldiers fired a shot against the Nazis. In disgust, American newspaper correspondents called this period the ‘Phoney War’ and wondered what the two governments were up to. Would Britain and France in the end betray Poland as they had betrayed Czechoslovakia, and accept a peace offer?
In late 1939 the whiff of Munich continued to hang over the British government as a result of Chamberlain’s delay in declaring war on Germany. While the civilized world
watched with fascinated horror the newsreels which recorded the onrush of the German tanks through Poland, for two days the British government did nothing. It seemed an extraordinary hesitation; in fact it was a sensible hesitation reflecting the fact that Britain was in no position to wage war against anyone, let alone miles away in Poland. Nevertheless Britain was bound by her August Treaty to declare war immediately on Hitler, and it looked like cowardice that she had not done so.
Forty-eight hours after the attack on Poland, Prime Minister Chamberlain had announced to the House of Commons that if the German government withdrew its forces as far as the British government was concerned the situation could revert to peace as before! He was hoping that the Poles would offer Hitler Danzig to save England from war. Chamberlain still thought, even then, that he could bargain with Hitler. It took the threatened resignation of half the Cabinet to force Chamberlain to his senses as midnight approached. Earlier that evening, amid angry scenes in the House of Commons, the deputy Labour leader Arthur Greenwood had remonstrated with Chamberlain about ‘imperilling the very foundations of our national honour’. ‘Speak for England, Arthur!’ came the shout from the angry Conservative backbenches when he stood up.
The next morning, 3 September, the ultimatum Chamberlain had been made to give Germany expired. But though Britain and France were bound to come to Poland’s aid, their war on her behalf would take place in a different arena. This was not immediately understood by those who were anxious to make up for the betrayal of Czechoslovakia. But the speed of Germany’s campaign, as her forces unveiled her new method of warfare, the Blitzkrieg or lightning strike–with tanks advancing a hundred miles a day, in tandem with screaming dive-bombers–saw her overrun Poland in two weeks. Though the Poles were brave fighters and superb airmen, their equipment–they still deployed a prized cavalry division–was old fashioned and swiftly annihilated.
Many people publicly urged that British bombers should cover a French attack on Germany, but the service chiefs would not risk it. Britain did not have the aircraft to defend herself if she were to attack German troops. The government’s policy of appeasement had left Britain with too few planes, and parity with Germany would not be achieved until the spring of 1940. With only a small professional army in readiness, Britain’s initial response to the war could only take place at sea, and not in Poland. Her powerful navy was far larger than Germany’s and would prevent food and fuel from reaching her. But that was going to be a slow process.
The French army on the other hand was enormous and conspicuously superb. Consisting of ninety infantry divisions, as opposed to Britain’s ten, if it had combined with the Polish army at the beginning of September they would have fielded forty more divisions than the German army. Germany had only left twenty-three divisions to guard her frontier with France and they could have been speedily overcome.
But the French army never had a chance to invade Germany from the rear to take the pressure off the Poles. The French reliance on conscript armies–that is, on soldiers who held ordinary jobs in peacetime–meant that the French mobilization in September 1939 took two weeks. During that time, while Frenchmen left their jobs as lawyers, clerks, hoteliers, and donned their uniforms, Poland was forced to surrender. Russia entered Poland on the 17th of that month to complete her swift dismemberment from the east. Accordingly, the order was given to withdraw the small number of French troops who had already made a few skirmishes over Germany’s western frontier. Instead France settled down to defend the Maginot Line, the defences of trenches, pillboxes and big guns that ran along her frontier with Germany. The rest of Europe remained neutral, and peace–other than in Finland, which Russia invaded on the last day of November to re-establish herself on the Baltic–seemed to reign that winter.
The question now was where the allies should launch their attack on the Axis powers. From September onwards Britain and France sent their aircraft factories into frenzied production. Britain in particular was remarkably badly prepared for war. Even though the Royal Navy was hunting German submarines deep beneath the icy northern seas, the improved facilities required by the naval base at Scapa Flow, including a better anti-submarine boom, would not be ready until the following year. In October a German U-boat managed to penetrate the base and sink the battleship Royal Oak, killing 800 seamen. It would not be until March 1940 that twenty divisions of conscript soldiers would be trained and ready to cross the Channel to join the British Expeditionary Force, Britain’s small professional army, in France.
That was one of the penalties of being a peace-loving, unmilitaristic nation. Britain started the war with one hand tied behind her back. Against the enormous professional armies of fascist Germany, whose torchlit parades throughout the 1930s had been a source of amusement to the irreverent British, was mustered an army of eccentric amateurs. The Germans also had the munitions and armies of Austria and Czechoslovakia to call on. On the other hand Britain had France and the vast resources of the British Empire at her back.
The British armies that fought the Second World War would be even larger than Kitchener’s armies. By the end of the war, six years later, from Britain alone five million men would have been called up. But the shadow of the Great War, which had ended only twenty years before, made Britain and France in 1939 very reluctant to throw their armies into battle against the Germans and Russians. The all too recent memory of the trenches, and of the Somme in particular, had convinced the British forces chiefs that the war would have to be won in the air. But where was the war to be fought?
In the spring of 1940 the allies decided to put an end to the German export, via the Norwegian port of Narvik, of Swedish iron ore that was crucial for the German war effort, especially in the manufacture of shells, submarines and tanks. The plan involved laying mines in Norwegian waters. Meanwhile in vivid broadcasts on the BBC Winston Churchill, first lord of the Admiralty since 3 September, was advising the neutral states of Norway, Holland, Denmark, Belgium and Switzerland to join Britain and France against Nazism or they would be swallowed up too. ‘Each one hopes that if he feeds the crocodile enough, the crocodile will eat him last,’ he said. There was of course a second crocodile at work: the Finns’ tiny but gallant army on skis–‘white death’ it was called–consisting of only twenty-five divisions held down one hundred Russian divisions until 20 March 1940, when it was forced to surrender.
By this time the allied plan to mine Norwegian waters had become known in Berlin. Thus, in a surprise invasion, German forces landed in Norway on 9 April, shortly before the British were due to arrive. Backed by the Luftwaffe, they captured the capital Oslo and all Norway’s main ports and airfields in only a few hours. On the very same day German tank regiments moved north across the German border to capture Copenhagen and overrun Denmark. British forces were soon landed in Norway, but her main ports remained securely in German hands. After moving out of Oslo to rally the country with radio messages broadcast from a secret mountain village, the King of Norway reluctantly agreed to evacuate. He left his country at the beginning of June 1940, on a ship bound for Britain with the last of the British soldiers.
His departure had been precipitated by news from the south which ruined all hope of saving Norway as allied territory. On 10 May, as guerrilla fighting continued in the icy fjords, German armies invaded neutral Holland and Belgium. At dawn, as in Norway, parachutists attacked Holland’s two principal cities, Rotterdam and the Hague, capturing all their bridges before the Dutch could blow them up. By the 15th the Dutch had surrendered. A few hundred miles south-west Belgium was also fighting for her life, assisted by the British Expeditionary Force which had rushed to her aid from France. In another deadly surprise, only seventy-eight German parachute engineers were needed to capture the fort guarding the Albert Canal. Further airborne invaders prevented other crucial bridges being destroyed. Belgium too was soon overwhelmed. But this was just the prelude to Hitler’s main objective, the capture of Belgium’s vast neighbour France. For his ultimate game plane wa
s to control France’s Atlantic ports, and, after he had captured European Russia, to be prepared for the war between America and the future German empire, which he was convinced would one day take place.
While the French army and the whole of the British Expeditionary Force were rushing north-east to defend Belgium, to the south, unbeknown to them, German armies were invading France. German tanks were plunging through the thick woods of the Ardennes into France just above Luxembourg where the defensive Maginot Line came to an end. This weakness in the French border defences had been noted before the war by British strategists with some dismay. But the French military always reassured them that they considered the hilly, forested terrain of the Ardennes quite impassable by tanks. The Ardennes were therefore in no need of any great defence forces since they were a natural barrier in themselves.
The leader of the Panzer division which ploughed through the Ardennes was a man named Heinz Guderian who before the war had become fascinated by tank warfare. The British army had been leaders in the field and their experiments had been closely followed by Guderian. Not only was he convinced that tanks could be used like battering rams in wooded terrain, he had also become a master of strategy. His theory was that victory could be achieved by what the military historian Sir Basil Liddell Hart called ‘deep strategic penetration by independent armoured forces’ involving ‘a long-range tank drive to cut the main arteries of the opposing army far behind its front’. Guderian would do just that to the allied armies.
The Story of Britain Page 88