Storming the Eagle's Nest

by Jim Ring

  The Prime Minister still needed the Cabinet’s endorsement of his proposals. He also required the support of the French, who, following the reoccupation of the Rhineland on the Franco-German border in March 1936, had every reason to fear Hitler’s expansionist policies. There were the Czechs too. Reporting the matter in the American News Chronicle, the paper’s European correspondent related that the elevator operator in the paper’s New York headquarters had asked, ‘Mr. Waithman, can you tell me why Britain should have any right to give Czechoslovakia to Hitler?’23 The French Prime Minister Édouard Daladier saw no such difficulty, perhaps because France had a pact of mutual support with Czechoslovakia that she was ambivalent about honouring. The Czech leader Edvard Beneš saw little alternative to the Anglo-French proposals, however unpalatable.

  Returning to the Rhineland resort of Bad Godesberg on 21 September 1938, Chamberlain expected to be congratulated by the Führer for achieving the compliance of the French and the Czechs. On the morning of 22 September he was somewhat surprised to hear from the Nazi leader that the proposal was no longer sufficient. Now the Sudetenland was to be handed over on 1 October, to be transferred directly to German troops, without due process, a commission, and the normal paraphernalia of bureaucracy. For the British that was enough.

  Chamberlain flew back to England and the country prepared for war. The fleet was mobilised, the public issued with gas masks, and air-raid trenches dug in Hyde Park. On 27 September, Chamberlain famously told the nation, ‘How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is 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.’ On 28 September, the US ambassador to Britain, Joseph P. Kennedy, reported to the US State Department that ‘failing acceptance of the German ultimatum by 2:00 p.m. today, Germany may attack Czechoslovakia tomorrow’.24 The French army mobilised and 1.5 million Czech soldiers manned the border with Germany. In Switzerland all the roads leading into the country from her neighbours were mined.

  That evening it fell to the Prime Minister to update the House of Commons on the crisis. As Chamberlain was reaching the climax of an hour-long speech chronicling these events, he was handed a note. He read it in silence. He then turned again to the benches of the Commons, both to his own followers and to the Opposition. In response to a proposal from Mussolini, he announced, Hitler had agreed to postpone German mobilisation for twenty-four hours and to meet Chamberlain himself, Mussolini and Daladier in Munich. The Commons broke into uproar. The huge crowds assembled outside in Parliament Square wept with relief. A telegram arrived from the White House in Washington. It was worded simply, ‘Good man! Franklin D. Roosevelt.’ It took only hours to agree the formal dismemberment of Czechoslovakia. Chamberlain, moreover, induced Hitler to sign a flimsy piece of paper declaring that Germany and Britain would never again engage in war. On his return to Heston he pulled this out of his pocket and told the crowds, ‘Here is a paper that bears his name. It is peace for our time.’

  This was Munich, but it would be better named Berchtesgaden. For it was at the Berghof that the Rubicon had been crossed. Here Chamberlain had embraced the belief that the sacrifice of Czechoslovakia could satisfy Hitler’s demands. Thereafter, the dominoes fell. In Berchtesgaden the fate of Europe, and with it the Alps, was sealed. Hitler not unreasonably concluded that France and England would not stand in the way of his ambitions in eastern Europe. As Shirer summarised, ‘From this surrender at Berchtesgaden, all else followed.’25

  6

  Having achieved his ambitions in Czechoslovakia, Hitler turned to the Polish question. An agreement created by Halifax for France and England to support Poland should she be invaded was regarded by Hitler as a dead letter. The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact between the Reich and the Soviet Union signed on 23 August 1939 negated his concern of fighting a war on two fronts: Zweifrontkrieg. At dawn on Friday 1 September 1939 German troops invaded Poland.

  Cicely Williams’s family was on holiday in Zermatt, the Swiss resort catapulted into international fame by the tragedy that followed the first ascent of the Matterhorn by the Englishman Edward Whymper in 1865.

  On Friday morning we wandered down to the station to get a paper – an excited little crowd was gathered round the kiosk. We got a copy of La Suisse and on the front page in thick black type we read a proclamation by the British Consul in Berne ordering all British tourists to leave by the night train – the last to leave Switzerland for the coast. This was a command that could not be ignored.26

  Two days later, Chamberlain was forced to take to the airwaves once more to recant the bargain struck a year earlier in the Berchtesgadener Alps. The Anglo-French ultimatum to Hitler had been ignored. At 11.15 a.m. on 3 September Chamberlain told the nation:

  This morning the British Ambassador in Berlin handed the German Government a final note stating that unless we heard from them by 11.00 a.m. that they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland, a state of war would exist between us. I have to tell you that no such undertaking has been received, and that consequently this country is at war with Germany.

  This was the ultimate result of Chamberlain’s trip to the Alps. The speech was the epitaph of appeasement and the epitaph of Plan Z. Europe was at war, and with Europe the Alps.

  The Alps of Germany, Austria and Italy were already in thrall to fascism. Those to the east in Yugoslavia and to the west in France now fell under the shadow of the Reich. As to Switzerland, the Alpinist Arnold Lunn – the son of Henry Lunn, who had done so much to create Swiss tourism – commented on the prospect with perhaps understandable partiality: ‘Second only to the supreme horror of Hitler’s evil face gloating over conquered London from the balcony of Buckingham Palace was the possibility that the swastika might fly from the roofs of Berne.’27 For Lunn and many other lovers of the Alps, possibility was becoming probability. Certainty loomed. Cicely Williams recalled, ‘On Sunday morning, September 3rd 1939, shortly after eleven o’clock, the general mobilisation call sounded in Zermatt.’

  Notes

  1. David Paroissien (ed.), Selected Letters of Charles Dickens (London: Macmillan, 1985).

  2. John Ruskin, Modern Painters (New York: Wiley, 1888).

  3. Mark Twain, A Tramp Abroad (London: Chatto & Windus, 1880).

  4. Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War, Volume I: The Gathering Storm (London: Cassell, 1948).

  5. Graham Macklin, Chamberlain (London: Haus, 2006).

  6. Robert Rhodes James (ed.), Chips: The Diaries of Sir Henry Channon (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1967).

  7. Macklin.

  8. Norman Cameron and R. H. Stevens, Hitler’s Table Talk, 1941–1944: His Private Conversations (London: Phoenix, 2000 [1953]).

  9. Cameron and Stevens.

  10. Cameron and Stevens.

  11. Andrew Roberts, The Holy Fox: A Biography of Lord Halifax (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1991).

  12. Roberts.

  13. Churchill, Second World War, Volume I.

  14. William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (London: Book Club Associates, 1969).

  15. Macklin.

  16. Churchill, Second World War, Volume I.

  17. Roberts.

  18. Nerin E. Gun, Hitler’s Mistress (Coronet, 1976).

  19. Keith Feiling, The Life of Neville Chamberlain (London: Macmillan, 1946).

  20. Nevile Henderson, Failure of a Mission: Berlin 1937–1939 (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1940).

  21. Cameron and Stevens.

  22. Macklin.

  23. Ralph F. De Bedts, Ambassador Joseph Kennedy 1938–1940: An Anatomy of Appeasement (New York: Peter Lang, 1985).

  24. De Bedts.

  25. Shirer, Rise and Fall.

  26. Cicely Williams, Zermatt Saga (London: Allen & Unwin, 1964).

  27. Arnold Lunn, The Story of Ski-ing (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1952).

  TWO

  ‘I need a few thousand dead’

&
nbsp; I need a few thousand dead so as to be able to attend the peace conference as a belligerent.

  BENITO MUSSOLINI

  1

  ‘When will it be Switzerland’s turn?’1 So asked William Shirer nine months later on 13 May 1940. With his wife Tess living in Geneva with the couple’s daughter, the fall of the Alpine republic to Hitler’s forces was a matter of paramount personal interest – not just high-octane copy for Ed Murrow. On 14 May both the Swiss government itself and the Allied high command at Vincennes in Paris assumed that the time had now come. The invasion of the Alpine republic was imminent. That night, General Henri Guisan, the sixty-five-year-old commander of the Swiss army, issued orders telling his troops to expect the German attack in the early hours of 15 May. Blitzkrieg, the mechanised lightning war that the Wehrmacht* had practised so spectacularly in Poland, was coming to the Alps.

  Four days earlier, on 10 May 1940, forces under the commands of Generalobersts Gerd von Rundstedt, Fedor von Bock and Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb had finally executed Fall Gelb – Case Yellow. Neutral Luxembourg and Belgium had been invaded to outflank from the north the fixed defences on the border between France and Germany. This was the eighty-seven-mile Maginot Line of fortresses that ran from Luxembourg to Switzerland, and by which the French set such store. Now, though, after the it helter-skelter of the first seventy-two hours, it seemed to General Maurice Gamelin in Vincennes that the Wehrmacht advance was faltering. At Hannut in Belgium on 12 and 13 May the French had inflicted a tactical victory on Generaloberst Erich Hoepner’s XVI Panzer Corps. The following day this was repeated when Hoepner defied orders and again tried to break the French line. In the light of this reverse, Gamelin speculated that the next move of the German armed forces high command, the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW), would be an attack on Switzerland.

  This fresh tactic would outflank not the northern but the southern end of the Maginot Line, and so reach France by the back door. The way to the Channel ports would then be open. Freiburg in Baden-Württemberg, just thirty miles north of the Swiss border at Basel, was the HQ of the German 7. Armeeoberkommando (Seventh Army). Swiss intelligence reports indicated a massive concentration of thirty German divisions of the Seventh on the northern banks of the Rhine where it forms the Swiss–German border. Landing craft were spotted further east along the border on the shores of Lake Constance. It was going to be Switzerland’s Anschluss, the annexation to which her Alpine neighbour Austria had been subjected more than two years before.

  Guisan had already mobilised 700,000 men, nearly one in five of the Swiss population. On 14 May many of his units were positioned on this northern frontier. Urs Schwarz was the commanding officer of an anti-aircraft battery at Olten in Canton Solothurn, just twenty miles south from the German–Swiss border at Basel:

  As far as I could see when observing the officers and soldiers under my command, beneath their calm exterior was an excited expectation, coupled with a kind of incredulity. This was easy to understand in an army that had trained and trained, yet had never seen a war. Some of the men seemed to look forward to a real fight, some seemed to think that such a thing simply could not happen to us, but nobody looked scared.2

  General Guisan was similarly phlegmatic. A nipped, jockey-like figure who often graced a horse, he came from Switzerland’s French-speaking community in Canton Vaud. Originally a farmer, he had distinguished himself as a militia artilleryman, turning professional soldier in 1926. Thirteen years later in August 1939 he had been elected by the Swiss Federal Assembly to a position filled in Switzerland only in times of war. This was to obviate the regrettable tendency of the military to usurp civilian political power. His HQ was at Gümligen Castle close to the capital of Berne. Swiss intelligence had picked up a story that the castle was to be raided by German saboteurs. Removing himself to a nearby chateau, he had a final meeting with his Chief of Staff and the head of the intelligence service, Colonel Roger Masson. The prospect of the Wehrmacht attack was confirmed. The invasion was on. ‘See you tomorrow,’ Guisan remarked at this conclusion. ‘Good night.’3

  The following morning, 15 May 1940, the British Prime Minister was woken at 7.30 to take an early morning phone call by his bedside in 10 Downing Street. This was now Winston Churchill, who had replaced Neville Chamberlain as the country’s leader just five days earlier. It was not General Guisan asking for help. It was a call entirely unexpected. It was Churchill’s opposite number in France, Prime Minister Paul Reynaud. Churchill recorded, ‘He spoke in English, and evidently under stress: “We have been defeated. We are beaten; we have lost the battle.”’4 Churchill was dumbfounded.

  2

  For Hitler, brooding over his maps in Berchtesgaden as his troops did battle in the Low Countries, Guisan’s Switzerland was almost as tempting a plum as Reynaud’s embattled France.

  At a glance, this tiny Alpine country of 4.2 million people and 16,000 square miles – just half the size of Scotland – was beneath his notice. It was neither a potential source of Lebensraum for the 80-million-strong Reich nor, as in the case of France, a plentiful source of labour, raw materials and daily bread. Switzerland depended on her neighbours Italy and France for around three-quarters of her food and on Germany herself for energy. Without the Reich, Swiss lights would dim, her stoves grow cold, her factories close. Yet standing at the crossroads of Europe, sharing borders with France, Germany, Austria and Italy, the Alpine republic was a kingpin, a hub around which all Europe revolved. Critically, she cut off the northern European countries from the Mediterranean. She divided France from Austria and the Danube basin, and Germany from her Axis partner Italy. In the days when Autobahns were in their infancy, Switzerland’s transalpine railway tunnels – principally the twelve-mile Simplon and the nine-mile St Gotthard – were the arteries of central Europe. Where the Alps divided, they united, forming the lifelines between the central European states. On 21 March 1938, in the aftermath of Anschluss, the Swiss Federal Council declared by way of a warning to Hitler that it was ‘Switzerland’s secular mission in Europe to guard the passage of the Alps in the interests of all’.5

  This was hardly sufficient to discourage the Führer’s ambition to unite all German-speaking peoples within the Grossdeutsches Reich. ‘Common blood must belong to a common Reich,’ he had declared on the first page of Mein Kampf. This had dictated Anschluss with Austria and the destruction of Czechoslovakia and Poland. In 1940 about two-thirds of Swiss spoke German, so the inference was obvious. Politically, too, Switzerland was distasteful. Whereas the Swiss and the English had much in common, for the Führer the Helvetic touchstones of democracy, freedom of expression, independence and co-operation between language groups were anathema. Switzerland also had a near world monopoly on the tiny jewel bearings used in the manufacture of watches and all sorts of precision instruments used by the military, particularly for aircraft navigation; she was the home of the state-of-the-art anti-aircraft gun manufacturer Oerlikon. These wares were prized both by the Reich and by the Allies. It was Hitler, though, who – naturally enough – was most concerned about Switzerland as a source of military intelligence placed at the disposal of the French and the British, principally concerning the Reich. All in all, Switzerland’s very existence was an affront. To Mussolini and the Italian foreign minister Galeazzo Ciano, Hitler dismissed the Swiss as ‘the most despicable and wretched people and national entity … mortal enemies of the new Germany’.6

  A German plan for the invasion of Switzerland was circulated in the Swiss press as early as September 1933. The Swiss viewed Hitler’s remilitarisation of the Rhineland in March 1936 with foreboding; Anschluss two years later in March 1938 with alarm. The cantons of St Gallen and Graubünden formed the Swiss frontier with western Austria. After Anschluss, the Reich was one step nearer. She was now on both Switzerland’s northern and eastern doorsteps. On the day Hitler entered Vienna in March 1938, a statement endorsed by Hitler’s Reich minister of propaganda Joseph Goebbels appeared in the Frankfurter Zeitung, ‘No bra
nch of the German race has the right or possibility of withdrawing from the common destiny of all Germans.’7 Then the stout and strutting Luftwaffe chief Hermann Göring published a map of the Reich with Switzerland comfortably within her borders. Switzerland was just a province of the Reich, a Gau, to be ruled by a regional leader, a Gauleiter.

  This was enough for the Swiss. They had begun rearming in 1933 when Germany withdrew from the League of Nations. After Anschluss military service was extended. The frontiers both with Italy and Austria were reinforced with new emplacements and pillbox fortifications. Munitions were brought up to various putative front lines. The Swiss gold reserves were removed from Zurich to vaults secreted in the high Alps in southern Switzerland near the St Gotthard Pass. Plans to mine the Simplon and St Gotthard tunnels as a means of deterring the German army’s adventures were hatched: without the tunnels, Switzerland was not a conduit but a full stop. After Anschluss, these plans were repeatedly advertised to the Reich.

  *

  In the early days of Fall Gelb, with his forces thrusting through the supposedly impenetrable Ardennes into Belgium, Hitler thought Switzerland could wait. If the campaign were to falter, things might take quite a different turn. On the map of Europe so often used at the Berghof, Hitler could see easily enough that from Baden-Württemberg in the south-west of Germany, Swiss territory could be used as a short cut to Paris and the Channel ports. The Maginot Line barred the most direct route, and the forcing of the Ardennes was the northern way. The alternative route, through Switzerland, posed surprisingly few problems.

  ‘And we are here as on a darkling plain … Where ignorant armies clash by night.’ So sang Matthew Arnold, and plains are indeed fine for armies. Troops prefer a level playing field and their commanders favour terrain where they can observe and control their troops. Mountains are different, for they swing the balance dramatically in favour of the defender – or at least to those who hold the higher ground against an advance. Such forces can observe their attackers’ movements with far greater ease and – perched on ridge or crest – they enjoy a far better field of fire. This in turn greatly diminishes the impact of any superiority of numbers. A small force can defeat a much larger one. The Swiss themselves instanced the Battle of Morgarten Pass in 1315, where 1,400 Swiss peasants ambushed 20,000 Habsburg knights in a narrow defile, decimating the knights at the cost of twelve Swiss. Mountain warfare also favours those with knowledge of all the ridges, passes, gullies, spurs, screes and buttresses that constitute a mountain system – the local understanding normally in the possession of the defenders alone. Up hill and down dale also set at naught the fast-moving mechanised warfare developed in the 1930s, partly by the Germans, partly the French. In mountains, to have was to hold.