Churchill summed up the neutrals’ position in a radio broadcast of 20 January 1940: ‘Each one hopes that if he feeds the crocodile enough, the crocodile will eat him last. All of them hope that the storm will pass before their time comes to be devoured.’ Several neutrals complained about the characterization, but it was essentially accurate. Switzerland, despite having 450,000 men under arms and a virtually impregnable ‘national redoubt’, had declared her neutrality in March 1938. Yet the Swiss also allowed German and Italian military supply trains to pass through their country, baulking only at the passage of actual troops. They charged well for these facilities. Before the war, the Swiss state-subsidized timber company had built the concentration camp of Dachau, with the contract for 13 million Swiss francs being negotiated by the son of the then Swiss Commander-in-Chief, Henri Guisan.
It is impossible to calculate how many innocent lives were lost by the Swiss refusal to accept Jewish refugees escaping from the Vichy militia roundups of 1942–3. Pressure mounted for the Swiss to review their draconian immigration laws, by which only 7,000 immigrants had been allowed into the country since the outbreak of war. Nevertheless Dr Heinrich Rothmund, the chief of the police department of the federal Ministry of Justice and Police, instructed his men to repel Jews attempting to cross the frontier in the wooded area around Pontarlier–Besançon, and those found on Swiss soil were escorted back to France. ‘Incredible scenes developed,’ records the Swiss historian of his country’s neutrality. ‘Some committed suicide in front of the Swiss border guards.’59 The argument the Swiss Government gave for refusing entry to persecuted Jews was that subversive agents might enter the country too, that Swiss people might lose jobs to the immigrants, and that many immigrants would not move on to third countries. A ban was thus imposed upon any refugee or immigrant ‘engaging in any professional activity, paid or unpaid’. By May 1945, there were 115,000 refugees in camps, however, with more staying in hotels, in hostels and with friends or family. During the war a total of 400,000 people moved to or through Switzerland, including, of course, towards its end German and Italian Fascists.60
Swedish accommodation of the Nazis started early. Although they resolutely refused to allow the British and French expeditionary forces to cross their territory to aid Finland in her struggle against Russia in early 1940, the Stockholm Government allowed the Germans to cross it to reinforce their army of occupation in Norway later that same year. Between July 1940 and August 1943, no fewer than 140,000 German troops and countless thousand tons of military equipment and supplies had used the Swedish rail network, thus protecting the Kriegsmarine from the Royal Navy.
Just before the German invasion of Russia, the Swedes allowed an entire German division to traverse the country in order to take part in the assault. The next year, Swedish ships were carrying 53 per cent of Germany’s iron-ore imports – the raw material most needed for her armaments industry – to German ports, thereby saving the German Navy further trouble and danger. It was only after the battle of Stalingrad in February 1943, when she saw which side would probably win, that Sweden gave in to Allied pressure and forced the Germans to carry the ore in their own ships; not until April 1944 did Sweden stop selling Germany ball-bearings, and after the war crucial components for the V-2 rockets were found to have ‘Made in Sweden’ stamped on them. Albert Speer records that Hitler intended his vast new capital at Berlin – named Germania – to be very largely built from Swedish granite, which was being obligingly shipped to him throughout the war along with the iron ore and ball-bearings. Had Hitler won the war, of course, the sovereignty of Switzerland, Sweden, Eire and several other neutrals would have been swatted overnight. In late January 1942, after saying that the Swedes and Swiss were merely ‘playing at soldiers’, the Führer told cronies at the Berghof that ‘the Jews must pack up, disappear from Europe… they’ll have to clear out of Switzerland and Sweden. We cannot allow them to retain bases of withdrawal at our doors.’61
The most notable absentee from civilization’s line of battle, however, was Eire, whose actions cannot be explained, like Sweden’s and Switzerland’s, by a close physical proximity to Germany. Neither was it a case of malingering, for even when in the latter stages of the war there was no chance of a German invasion the Taoiseach, Eamon de Valera, still refrained from publicly denouncing the Nazis or Hitler himself. (When he criticized the invasion of the neutral Low Countries in 1940 he did not even specify who had been responsible.) Of his infamous gesture in visiting the German Legation in Dublin to express his condolences on the death of Hitler in April 1945, de Valera later said: ‘I acted correctly and, I feel certain, wisely.’ Since the concentration camp of Buchenwald had already been liberated by then, and the genocidal nature of the Nazi regime revealed, the British and Americans reacted with rage to this action, but it went largely unreported in Eire’s heavily censored press.
Eire’s neutrality aroused great resentment in the rest of the British Isles, and it was not just Churchill who considered the country to be ‘legally at war, but skulking’. In 1938, the Chamberlain Government had turned over to Irish sovereignty the three strategically valuable Atlantic ports that Britain had retained under the terms of the 1922 Anglo-Irish Treaty, and Dublin’s denial of their use to the Royal Navy on the outbreak of war the next year exposed this as having been a disastrous error by the British. As Churchill put it to the War Cabinet: ‘Eire was strangling England quite pleasantly.’62 For him the Irish joke of the day – ‘So who are we neutral against?’ – was not funny. The only explanation for Eire’s neutrality was a lingering hostility to Britain after centuries of mutual antagonism, which blinded the de Valera Government to the greater issues that were at stake by 1939.
The loss through diplomacy of the Atlantic naval bases in southern and western Ireland meant that escorts could not sail as far out into the Atlantic as in the Great War; destroyers and corvettes took longer to be refuelled; tugs could not be sent out to ships in distress, but instead escorts had to go ‘the long way round’ from Scottish ports. ‘To compute how many men and how many ships this denial was costing, month after month’, wrote Nicholas Monsarrat, the novelist who commanded a frigate during the battle of the Atlantic, ‘was hardly possible; but the total was substantial and tragic.’ Although Monsarrat’s classic tale The Cruel Sea was of course fictional, its hero, who also commanded a frigate on the transatlantic convoys during the battle, states:
it was difficult to withhold one’s contempt for a country such as Ireland, whose battle this was and whose chances of freedom and independence in the event of a German victory were nil. The fact that Ireland was standing aside from the conflict… posed, from the naval angle, special problems which affected, sometimes mortally, all sailors engaged in the Atlantic, and earned their particular loathing… In the list of people you were prepared to like when the war was over, the man who stood by and watched while you were getting your throat cut could not figure very high.63
If the neutrals could not be prevailed upon to help, it was necessary to stir up those former Continental allies that had been subdued by the Germans, and on 19 July 1940 Churchill set up the Special Operations Executive (SOE), ‘to co-ordinate all action by way of subversion and sabotage against the enemy overseas’.64 This was to be the romantic world of moonlit parachutists, arms caches, cyanide pills, forged papers, weapons-drops, gold sovereigns and guerrilla units that occupied so much literature and film, a concentration of attention out of all proportion to SOE’s actual operational importance.
‘Regular soldiers are not the men to stir up revolution,’ wrote the Labour politician Hugh Dalton of his new role in control of the newly founded SOE, ‘to create social chaos, or to use all those ungentlemanly means of winning the war which come so easily to the Nazis.’ Churchill had always been interested in irregular warfare, and SOE was his brainchild; on 16 July 1940 he appointed Dalton to the post with the inspiring invocation: ‘And now set Europe ablaze.’65 The intention was later to use resistance m
ovements to hold down a large number of German divisions far away from the Eastern, and later the Italian and Western Fronts, but there was an horrific price to pay when this was put into operation. Targeted (and often untargeted) assassinations and the blowing up of communication lines behind enemy lines were sometimes strategically helpful before D-Day, but they tended to alienate the local populations upon whom the German wrath fell once the SOE operatives had got away. The Germans did not jib at mass shootings of hostages in reprisal against attacks on them in Occupied Europe, with entire villages occasionally paying the price for SOE operations that were strategically not worth the butcher’s bill. Where SOE did succeed was in the intangible sense of helping to return a sense of self-esteem to European peoples after crushing defeats that had been measured in mere weeks. This was especially true of France, which had always seen herself as – indeed had always been – la grande nation.66
SOE also played an important part in holding back Stalin’s ambitions. It was partly the arms provided by SOE that allowed the Yugoslav partisan leader Marshal Josip Broz Tito to stand up to the Russians in 1945–6 and the anti-Communists to triumph in Greece; the French Communists might have tried to stage a coup in the autumn of 1944 had not SOE distributed half a million small arms to résistants across France. SOE helped Queen Wilhelmina back on to the throne in Holland in March 1945; in Burma it persuaded U Aung San’s militia to turn their coats and join the Allied side in the spring of 1945. It also carried out important operations against German ‘heavy water’ nuclear research facilities at Telemark and Vermork, the success of which may have retarded the German capacity for developing an atomic bomb. Furthermore, operations undertaken on the ground could sometimes achieve accuracy denied to precision bombing. For example, the Peugeot factory at Sochaux near Montbéliard, which manufactured tank turrets, had its key installation wrecked by a satchel-bomb delivered by SOE on 5 November 1943, four months after an RAF attack had missed the target and resulted in heavy civilian casualties near by.67
A severe problem for SOE was that European resistance movements were often torn by internal animosities. In Greece and Yugoslavia monarchists hated Communists, whereas the French résistants covered the whole political spectrum between right-wing Gaullists and Communist francs-tireurs. Then there were the central internal contradictions of all operations: how to create secret armies while not attracting attention but simultaneously carrying out high-profile sabotage, and how not to lose the support of the local populace while your actions inevitably bring down the murderous wrath of the Germans. Furthermore, SOE repeatedly clashed with the RAF over plane allocations, with the Foreign Office over neutrals’ sovereignty, with local commanders-in-chief over strategy, and with the War Office (where SOE was nicknamed ‘the Racket’) over resources, and none of this was helped by the fact that Dalton was a naturally very combative politician.68
If Britons were willing to bring down the wrath of the Germans on innocent civilians, they were also prepared to do the same to themselves. The auxiliary units that were set up by Colonel (later Major Colin Gubbins in 1940 in order to continue the resistance after a German invasion of Britain took great care not to allow their (sometimes quite elaborate) hide-outs to be noticed by the local population, in case they were betrayed as a result of the threat of reprisals. As for the Regular Army, ‘We prepared road-blocks and cleared fields of fire; not that we had anything to fire except a few shot-guns,’ recalled Michael Howard of his service in the Coldstream Guards in the summer of 1940.
I scoured the neighbourhood for hollow lanes across which we could stretch wires and decapitate German motor-cyclists. The thought that if we did anything of the kind the Germans would probably shoot the entire population of the village did not enter our heads, or at least my head. Nor did the realization that if we lost the war I would be deported, along with all fit young men over the age of seventeen, as slave-labour to Germany, and that for my mother, 100 per cent Jewish, an even worse fate might lie in store.69
The death of Hitler’s Sealion meant that none of that happened in Britain as it did on the Continent. The British were thus saved from having to make the terrible choices and compromises which the populations of Occupied Europe were forced to make. The spirit of 1940 – the undoubted annus mirabilis of British history – was often to be called upon by Churchill in the remaining years of the war, and by many other politicians since.
For British strategists a vast void had opened up. Where were they to strike the Axis next, now that Europe was completely closed off? More out of a lack of any viable alternative than anything else, as well as to protect British interests further afield, the war was transferred to the North African littoral and the Mediterranean. Soon the victory of the battle of Britain was to seem like an all too isolated incident in a dangerously unpredictable struggle.
4
Contesting the Littoral
September 1939–June 1942
You seem to be the only enemy I can be sure of defeating these days.
Lord Wavell, playing backgammon with the Countess of Ranfurly, 3 May 19411
‘Before Alamein, we never had a victory,’ Churchill wrote in his war memoirs. ‘After Alamein we never had a defeat.’ Like so many generalizations, the remark had a kernel of truth, even if one ignores the huge exception of the battle of Britain. But Churchill should have qualified his words with ‘over the Germans’, because Britain won spectacular victories over the Italians in Africa. Indeed these were so significant that they encouraged Hitler to contest the Mediterranean with resources that would have been far better employed in Russia. Faced with the defeat of Fascism in Africa, Hitler decided to try to save his ideological soulmate, Benito Mussolini, in Africa (and later in Greece), even though his strategy dictated that neither place would be the key to the victory he sought, which was always going to be in Russia.
The first of several British commanders in the long Western Desert campaign was Archibald Wavell, a fine example of the British Army officer of the old school. Wavell’s family came to Britain with William the Conqueror, both his father and grandfather had been generals, he had had a brilliant school career and was personally brave in action. A natural sportsman (especially golf and polo), captain of the regimental hockey team, a fine shot, an excellent linguist (Urdu, Pashtu and Russian), he served in the Boer War and on the North-West Frontier and entered Camberley Staff College in 1909 with an 85 per cent exam pass. He married a colonel’s daughter called Queenie, of whom he wrote admiringly to a friend: ‘She rides well to hounds.’ Much to his chagrin, Wavell was stuck at the War Office when the rest of the Army decamped to France and Flanders in August 1914, but although he did later see action it was as a liaison officer with the Grand Duke Nicholas’ army in Turkey, and later serving under General Allenby in Palestine, that Wavell spent most of the Great War. He not only distinguished himself, but got to know the Middle East and was sent out to command in Palestine in 1937–8. He was also the most literary and reflective of Britain’s Second World War generals.
Yet there were always severe personality differences between Wavell and Churchill, amounting at times to mutual detestation. Even though Wavell had supported the creation of Ralph Bagnold’s Long Range Desert Group in North Africa and later encouraged Orde Wingate in his unorthodox fighting practices in the Burmese jungle, Churchill thought him too cautious and conventional a commander, and longed to replace him. When in August 1940 Wavell returned to London to brief the War Cabinet’s Middle East Committee, Anthony Eden thought his account of operations ‘masterly’, but Churchill’s curt cross-questioning left him feeling bruised and insulted.2 Nonetheless, great risks were run in Africa that month, virtually denuding Britain of tanks while the country was still under threat of invasion, in one of the toughest decisions of the war.
In mid-September Mussolini, fancying himself a second Caesar, sent Marshal Rodolfo Graziani’s Tenth Army to invade Egypt with five divisions along the coast, taking Sidi Barrani. He stopped 75 miles short of
the British, in Mersa Matruh, while both sides were reinforced. It was a nerve-wracking time for the British in Egypt. ‘We actually made dummy tanks, dummy guns, and from the air when reconnaissance planes came across it looked as though we had a really good, strong army,’ recalled Private Bob Mash, an engineer with the Nile Army. ‘We’ve blown up rubber tanks, put them in position, taken them down in the evening, taken them three or four miles further away, blown them up again and laid them there, and from the air it looks as if we had plenty of tanks. Just the same as on the Canal Zone… every other anti-aircraft gun was a wooden one.’3
On 8 December 1940, Wavell’s friend, Lieutenant-General Richard O’Connor, commander of the Western Desert Force (numbering only 31,000 men, 120 guns and 275 tanks), counter-attacked fiercely against a force four times his size, concentrating on each fortified area in turn.4 Operation Compass had close support from the Navy and RAF, and, aided by a collapse in Italian morale, by mid-December O’Connor had cleared Egypt of Italians and 38,000 prisoners were taken. Bardia fell on 5 January and on the 22nd the 7th Armoured Division (the ‘Desert Rats’) captured the key port of Tobruk, which was to loom large in the fortunes of both sides over the next two years. As so often, air superiority was vital, especially as there was less possibility of concealment in the desert than in other terrains. The RAF quickly established dominance over the Italian Air Force, the Regia Aeronautica.5 British naval control of the North African littoral also helped O’Connor, because much of the coastal road was within the range of the large-calibre guns of the Royal Navy.
The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War Page 15