Winston Churchill’s most important, most dangerous but ultimately his most constructive characteristic had always been his impatience. He had exhibited impatience throughout his life, both with himself and with the world around him, especially during the imperial and world wars in which he had risen to prominence in British public life. By May 1940 he was sixty-five years old, yet still at the height of his very considerable intellectual and oratorical powers. His long years of largely unheeded warnings about the rise of Nazism had given him an unassailable moral right to the premiership during the parliamentary crisis that month, and he grasped it as soon as it became clear that Chamberlain could not carry on without the support of the Labour and Liberal parties and a small but growing band of Conservative rebels. Churchill was impatient for the premiership, and he took it, bluntly telling his rival for the post, the Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax, that he could not be prime minister from the House of Lords.46 (He later invented a story in which Halifax almost offered him the premiership out of embarrassment after a long period of silence.)
Churchill had a certain idea of heroism – both his own and that of the British people – and in 1940 the two came together in what in retrospect was a sublime way, but which struck many in the British Establishment at the time as dangerously romantic. For over the past forty years there had hardly been a major subject of domestic or international politics in which Churchill had not been intimately involved, very often on the losing side. His judgement had been called into question over such important issues as votes for women, the Gallipoli disaster, sterling rejoining the Gold Standard, the General Strike, Indian self-government, the Abdication crisis and very many more. He had crossed the floor of the House of Commons not once, but twice. Yet now his monumental impatience, especially once he had invented for himself the post of minister of defence immediately after King George VI had appointed him prime minister, was precisely what the nation needed. He demanded, in the wording of the red labels that he was to attach to urgent documents, ‘Action This Day’, and he got it.
Churchill’s preternatural eloquence and world-historical sense, as well as a self-belief that bordered on the messianic, had brought to the fore in Britain a leader who could frame the global struggle in profoundly moving, almost metaphysical terms. In his unpublished essay of 1897 entitled ‘The Scaffolding of Rhetoric’, Churchill had written:
Of all the talents bestowed upon men, none is so precious as the gift of oratory. He who enjoys it wields a power more durable than that of a great king. He is an independent force on the world. Abandoned by his party, betrayed by his friends, stripped of his offices, whoever can command this power is still formidable.47
Almost throughout the 1930s – what he called his Wilderness Years – Churchill’s opposition to Indian self-rule and latterly his warnings about Hitler’s revanchism had left him abandoned by his party, let down by his friends and out of office. Now, however, he was about to wield ‘a power more durable than that of a great king’, but would it be enough? For, on the very same day that Churchill became prime minister, Friday, 10 May 1940, Hitler unleashed Blitzkrieg on the West.
2
Führer Imperator
May–June 1940
I asked you to go without sleep for forty-eight hours. You have gone for seventeen days. I compelled you to take risks… You never faltered.
General Heinz Guderian to XIX Panzer Corps, May 1940
For a quarter of a century it had been the collective assumption that the plan to destroy France in 1914 had failed only because, between the plan’s inception by Count Alfred von Schlieffen in 1905 and its being put into operation nine years later, too many troops had been drawn off its powerful right flanking movement and instead assigned to the weak left flank. So when in October 1939 the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (German General Staff, or OKW) planners were instructed by Hitler to create a new blueprint to destroy France, they produced Fall Gelb (Plan Yellow) which comprised a far stronger right-flank attack, by Army Group B spearheaded by all ten of Germany’s Panzer divisions, and an even weaker left, stationed behind the Siegfried Line. Yet everyone knew that such a mass assault through Belgium and northern France was precisely what the Allies – given their identical experience of the autumn of 1914 – would expect.
Nevertheless when on 10 January 1940 a German courier aircraft flying from Münster to Cologne got lost in fog and was forced to crash-land at Mechelen-sur-Meuse in Belgium, and Major Helmuth Reinberger, a Staff officer of the German 7th Airborne Division, was unable to destroy his copy of Plan Yellow, either behind a hedge before he was captured or by attempting to fling it into a stove afterwards, Hitler was forced to consider entirely altering the OKW plans.1 In fact, because the neutral Belgians passed on only a two-page synopsis to the British and French military attachés the next day, refusing to say how they came by it, leading the Allied High Command initially to suspect a German deception operation, the alteration was probably unnecessary. The Belgians knew the plans to be genuine, however, since they had placed microphones in the room where the German air attaché subsequently met Reinberger, and his first question had been whether he had destroyed the documents. Yet still they and the Dutch did not revoke their neutrality and join the Allies, fearing it might ‘provoke’ the Führer.
‘If the enemy is in possession of all the files,’ Major-General Alfred Jodl, Chief of Operations of OKW, wrote in his diary on 12 January, ‘situation catastrophic!’2 Fearing Plan Yellow to be compromised, Hitler approved an alternative entitled Operation Sichelschnitt (Sickle Cut), the brainchild of Erich von Manstein, chief of staff to Gerd von Rundstedt, who was to command Army Group A in the centre. This comprised taking seven Panzer divisions from the right flank and positioning them in the centre, while keeping the left (Army Group C) as weak as before. After Army Group B in the north had attacked Holland and Belgium, it was hoped that the Allies would move into those countries to meet it, and then at the key moment Army Group A in the centre would burst out of the Ardennes Forest, strike at the Schwerpunkt (point of maximum effort), the fulcrum in the Allied line, pierce it, and race forward to the English Channel, thus cutting off one-third of the Allied armies from the other two-thirds.
Hitler, who from the early hours of 10 May was based at his Felsennest (cliff nest) command post in the Eifel forest 20 miles south-west of Bonn, was later given personal credit for Manstein’s new plan. Keitel described the Führer as ‘the greatest field marshal of all time’, and even six years later he admitted to his Nuremberg psychiatrist: ‘I thought he was a genius. Many times he displayed brilliance… He changed plans – and correctly for the Holland–Belgium campaign. He had a remarkable memory – knew the ships of every fleet in the world.’3 Keitel also regularly told the Führer he was a genius. Dr Goebbels’ propaganda was at that period putting out the message that Hitler was ‘the greatest warlord of all time’, but at least Hitler knew that was state propaganda. To be told by one’s chief of staff the same thing could not but induce hubris.
Hitler’s sheer knowledge of matters military was undoubtedly impressive, and has certainly bowled over modern apologists such as Alan Clark and David Irving, with the former stating that ‘His capacity for mastering detail, his sense of history, his retentive memory, his strategic vision – all these had flaws, but considered in the cold light of objective military history, they were brilliant nonetheless.’4 It was true that Hitler had a phenomenal recall for the technical details of weaponry of all kinds. Of his original 16,300-book library, 1,200 volumes can be found in the Library of Congress in Washington and they include nearly a dozen almanacs on naval vessels, aircraft and armoured vehicles, such as the 1920 edition of The Conquest of the Air: A Handbook of Air Transport and Flying Techniques, a 1935 copy of Hiegl’s Handbook of Tanks, a 1935 edition of The Navies of the World and their Fighting Power, and a well-thumbed 1940 edition of Weyer’s Handbook of War Fleets.5 ‘There are exhaustive works on uniforms, weapons, supply, mobilization, the building-up of armies
in peacetime, morale and ballistics,’ wrote the Berlin correspondent of United Press International who was allowed into the Führer’s libraries in Berlin and Berchtesgaden before the war, ‘and quite obviously Hitler has read many of them from cover to cover.’6 Hitler’s press secretary, Otto Dietrich, was deeply impressed with his boss:
He had an exceptional knowledge of weaponry. For example, he knew all the warships in the world insofar as they were listed in… reference works. He could give in detail from memory their age, their displacement and speed, their armour strength, their towers and weaponry. He was thoroughly informed about the most modern artillery and tank construction from every country.7
Instances when Hitler displayed his technical interest in weaponry during the war are legion. When not asking pointed questions at his Führer-conferences with senior OKW figures and military commanders, he liked nothing better than showing off his detailed knowledge. Subjects upon which he would dilate included the horsepower needed for wheeled tractors to pull heavy field howitzers (85hp); gearshift problems in the Tiger tank; the ricochet hazards associated with the 15cm anti-tank gun; hollow-charge projectile technology for anti-tank weaponry; the night-flying capabilities of the Heinkel He-177; the lowest altitudes at which elite paratroopers can jump; the percentages of ferries in Italy and Germany that were fully operational; altitudes at which Mosquito fighters could fly; the top speed of electric submarines (18 knots); the size of underwater bombs necessary to blow up submarine-base sluice gates (3,000 kilograms); the advantages of flame-throwers over grenades over 30 yards, and so on.8 Yet knowing the calibre of a weapon or the tonnage of a ship is far removed from being a strategic genius, and Keitel confused the two, unforgivably for someone with his role and responsibilities. Because a train-spotter can take down the number of a train in his notebook, it doesn’t mean he can drive one.
Of course Churchill also took a close interest in the minutiae of war-making, especially in tactics, but not so much in the technical side of weaponry unless there were problems associated with it. Whereas Hitler paid little or no heed to his troops’ material comforts, Churchill was constantly interesting himself in such matters. Would there be brass bands playing when they returned home? Were they getting their post on time? On 17 July 1944, he referred the Secretary of State for War, P. J. Grigg, to a Daily Mail article about the way the troops were ‘tired of compo [rations]’ and lacked bread. Grigg answered that six out of the Army’s twelve bakery units were in France. ‘Should not put up with it,’ replied Churchill. ‘Ought to get decent cooked bread and meat.’ He instructed the War Office to accelerate the movement of mobile bakeries to France.9 Such an exchange would have been unthinkable at a Führer-conference, not least because the German equivalent of the Daily Mail would not have dared to criticize the Wehrmacht over its rations.
Manstein correctly identified the Schwerpunkt as the 50-mile-wide sector of the Meuse river between Danant and Sedan. Once that was crossed, the Channel reached and forty Allied divisions in the north surrounded and captured, the rest of France to the south could be attacked from across the Somme and Aisne in a separate operation, entitled Fall Rot (Plan Red). Speed was vital, and this would be gained by close co-operation between the Luftwaffe and advanced Panzer units, as had worked so well in Poland. The Panzer divisions would be grouped closely together to hit the Schwerpunkt simultaneously, taking advantage of the fact that despite the lessons of the Polish campaign the Allies had spread out their armour widely across the whole front. Though the Germans were actually outnumbered by the Allies in terms of men and tanks, and used not significantly better equipment, their superior training, generalship, surprise and especially Manstein’s strategy would deliver the defeat of France. That strategy had come about as the result of a chance crash-landing of a nondescript courier plane caught in fog.
Manstein’s plan, which Hitler approved in early February, contained significant risks. The Ardennes is a heavily wooded, mountainous region of narrow roads which was considered virtually impassable to heavily armoured vehicles; the left flank of Army Group A would be wide open to Allied counter-attack from the south as it raced across northern France towards Abbeville on the Somme river and then northwards to Boulogne, Calais and eventually Dunkirk; there was a limited number of bridges over the River Meuse, which had to be captured quickly; the weak left flank guarded by the unarmoured twenty divisions of Army Group C on the Siegfried Line would be vulnerable to the forty French divisions facing it behind the Maginot Line. Over the last issue the Germans need not have worried unduly. The Maginot Line was as much a state of mind as a line of fortifications, and there was no likelihood of the French surging forward from it to engage Army Group C. Named after a French defence minister of the 1930s, André Maginot, the Line had been built between 1929 and 1934. Stretching from Pontarlier on the Swiss frontier all the way along the Franco-German frontier to Luxembourg, it was 280 miles long, comprised 55,000 tons of steel and 1.5 million cubic metres of concrete, and was connected by an underground railway, which still works today.
After Belgium short-sightedly re-established her neutrality after the Great War, the Line should have been continued all the way along the Belgian border to the Channel coast, and some extra fortification did take place; however, there were several difficulties. The technical ones a higher water table in the east, and the heavily industrialized areas of Lille and Valenciennes through which the Line needed to pass might have been dealt with, but the huge financial cost threatened to break the French military budget.10 Moreover the Belgians somewhat hypocritically complained that an extension of the Line to the coast would effectively sacrifice them to Germany, a factor that the French might understandably have taken in their stride considering Brussels’ repudiation of the defensive treaty on the basis of which the Line had been built in the first place.
As it turned out, although the majority of the Wehrmacht skirted round to the west of the Line, the German First Army breached it south of Saarbrücken on 14 June despite its lack of tanks, finding its shallowness meant that it was relatively easy to attack with grenades and flame-throwers.11 What had been originally intended merely to slow the Germans down and deny them the element of surprise had instead engendered a defensive mentality in the French that had – along with their 1870 defeat and the terrible bloodletting of 1914–18 – robbed them of offensive spirit. An all-out attack on the Siegfried Line in September 1939 was the French High Command’s best hope, as officers such as General André Beaufre readily admitted, after it was too late.12 At the outset of war, neither France nor Britain was politically prepared for such action.
What the Allied plans, drawn up during the Phoney War, did propose was a swift movement into Holland and Belgium as soon as Germany invaded those countries, just as Manstein had predicted. Under Plan D, three French armies under Generals Giraud (Seventh Army), Blanchard (First Army) and Corap (Ninth Army), as well as most of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) under Lord Gort, would move from their entrenched positions along the Franco-Belgian border up to a line between Breda and the Dyle river, in order to cover Antwerp and Rotterdam. To allow these vital Channel ports – invaluable for U-boats to threaten shipping – to fall into German hands was unthinkable. Yet, as the Panzer strategist and historian Major-General Frederick von Mellenthin acutely observed, ‘The more they committed themselves to this sector, the more certain would be their ruin.’13
The Wehrmacht comprised 154 divisions in May 1940 and the western attack employed no fewer than 136 of them.14 The Allies, once Belgium’s twenty-two and Holland’s ten divisions were belatedly added to the total, numbered 144 divisions in the theatre. Both sides had around 4,000 armoured vehicles, with the German forces heavily concentrated in ten Panzer divisions of 2,700 tanks, supported by mechanized infantry. The 3,000 French tanks were hopelessly disseminated in a linear manner, as they had been in attack during the Great War, while the British had only around 200 tanks in all. ‘By dispersing their armour along the whole front,�
� argued Mellenthin, ‘the French High Command played into our hands, and have only themselves to blame for the catastrophe that was to follow.’ It was true: the Allies had ignored the lessons of Poland.
In the all-important sphere of air superiority, whereas the Allies had 1,100 fighters and 400 bombers in the region, the Luftwaffe had 1,100 fighters, 1,100 horizontal bombers and also 325 dive-bombers, of which the Allies had no equivalent.15 Allied planes were committed to aerial reconnaissance and defence, but not to close support of troops on the ground, a tactic which the Germans had perfected in pre-war manoeuvres and in the Polish and Norwegian campaigns, and which was greatly aided by the sophistication of ground-to-air communications. Much French heavy, field and anti-tank artillery was actually better than the Germans’ – except for the Wehrmacht’s superb 88mm anti-aircraft gun, which could double as an anti-tank weapon – and the British Matilda tank’s 2-pounder gun was also a match for the German Mark III Panzer’s 37mm gun. Yet this campaign was to prove once again how much more important psychology, morale, surprise, leadership, movement, concentration of effort and retention of the initiative are in warfare than mere numbers of men and machines and quality of equipment. The German concept of Auftragstaktik (mission-orientated leadership), developed over the previous decade, was to deliver victory just as surely as any piece of weaponry they deployed.
The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War Page 7