by Jim Ring
Yet Switzerland was a country with her back rather than front to the Alps. Her southern and eastern frontiers with Italy and Austria were defined by Alpine ranges; so too was her south-western flank with France south of Geneva. To the north-west, though, the Rhine valley and the Jura provided relatively few obstacles to hostile armies. As to the north and north-east, where Switzerland had her frontier with Germany running from Basel to Lake Constance, here were the rolling plateaus that were perfect for the blitzkrieg motorised warfare practised to such effect by the Heer and the Luftwaffe. And here, too, were the principal Swiss cities of Basel itself, Zurich and the capital Berne.
So to a man like Hitler fluent in the language of maps, albeit those of a small scale, the Swiss northern frontier was porous. Should the thrust to the north of the main Maginot Line indeed falter, the Swiss excursion was a perfectly viable option. Bernard Biner was a guide in Zermatt, a friend of the Williams family who had holidayed in the resort for years. To the family he wrote in spring 1940 of the day when he met a boy at the Britannia Hut, a mountain refuge high above Zermatt’s neighbour Saas-Fee. The lad had been sent up from the village with a notice of general mobilisation. ‘Then the guardian of the hut told me that Holland and Belgium were invaded and that things were going badly for the Allies. Already people were beginning to talk of the invasion of Switzerland.’8 Such, it seemed, was the explanation of the Seventh Army activity on the frontier spotted by the Swiss in mid-May 1940, and which caused such alarm.
Back in Berlin, on 14 May William Shirer was notified that the US government had advised Americans living in Switzerland to leave immediately. The League of Nations closed its Geneva offices. British Consul officials in Zurich burned all their files and fled the city. The British legation in Berne swept up its archives and headed west. Three British officials – Ena Molesworth, Richard Arnold-Baker and Marguerite Winsor – cycled all the way to Bordeaux. Tens of thousands of citizens of Basel, Schaffhausen and Zurich piled their cars with household furniture and mattresses – a shield from aerial gunfire – and headed south to the safety of the mountains. Others rushed to the railways. It was less a retreat than a rout, a panic, an exodus and a flight.
Then a yet more disturbing rumour reached Swiss ears. The Swiss had long believed that Mussolini, the leader of their southern neighbour, did not see it in his interests to have the north of his country surrounded by the Reich. Italy, like France, could be relied on to help maintain the Swiss buffer. But now a tale that had first started to circulate in early May 1940 reached a crescendo. Italian mountain troops were massing on the Swiss border just south of Canton Ticino. It seemed that the country faced attack from all sides: the 80 million Germans and 43 million Italians against 4.2 million Swiss. While the Swiss army was dealing with the Wehrmacht in the north, the Italians would sneak in the back door. Switzerland was going to be gobbled up by the Axis.
In those grim mid-May days of 1940, Switzerland held its breath.
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If Italy meant Mussolini and Rome, it also meant a good deal of the Alps. They formed Italy’s border with Switzerland herself, France, Austria and Yugoslavia, a cap over the top of Italy’s leg. They ran in an arc west to east from the Gulf of Genoa in the Ligurian Sea to just north of Trieste on the Adriatic. The western range bowled north from Nice to Mont Blanc, the central from the Brenner Pass into Austria via the Matterhorn and the eastern from the Brenner to Trieste via the strange, sculpted limestone Dolomites.
For centuries these stone frontiers had provided a focus for national rivalries. The 15,761-foot Mont Blanc might have been the highest peak in western Europe but according to the Italians it was not French but Italian. It was Monte Bianco. The Swiss Matterhorn was Monte Cervino from the Italian side, and the 1865 cross-border race to make a first ascent had decidedly chauvinist overtones. Further east, the historical rivalry was between Italy and the Habsburg monarchy. Between May 1915 and November 1918, the ‘white war’ in the Dolomites claimed the lives of nearly three-quarters of a million Italians and around half that number of Austro-Hungarian troops. In 1919 the Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye gave Italy some of the spoils due to the victor by way of Trieste, the Alpine provinces of Friuli and Trentino, and the German-speaking Alpine South Tyrol.
The latter became a bone of contention between Hitler and the man on whom the German leader modelled himself: Il Duce, Benito Mussolini. It was Mussolini’s march on Rome in October 1922 that had established the thirty-nine-year-old in power and inspired Hitler’s failed Munich putsch of thirteen months later. Mussolini’s Fascism also gave Hitler ideas like militaristic uniforms, the use of paramilitaries to perpetrate violence against political opponents, orchestrated rallies for propaganda purposes, pageantry, and the straight-armed Roman salute. The very word Duce meant leader or, in German, Führer. Both dictators also found the Russian Revolution a ready source of pleasingly illiberal ideas. When Galeazzo Ciano visited the Berghof in Berchtesgaden on 24 October 1936, Hitler tactfully declared, ‘Mussolini is the leading statesman in the world to whom none may even remotely compare himself.’9 This did not wash with the foreign minister, who was rabidly anti-German. Ciano’s father-in-law, the bullet-headed Mussolini, was himself ambivalent about the newly muscular Germany. Germans generally he regarded as bullies and pederasts. Hitler’s long-cherished and widely publicised ambition to reunite Austria and Germany would put the Reich on his doorstep. The recently acquired South Tyrol might follow into the maw.
When the pair of dictators first met in Venice in June 1934, Mussolini whispered to an aide: ‘I don’t like the look of him.’10 Neither did he like the sound. Hitler subjected Mussolini to a tirade, talking without pause for an hour. The Führer left little opportunity for his Italian counterpart to vent his own well-rehearsed opinions. Mussolini complained to his Chief of General Staff, Pietro Badoglio, that ‘Hitler was simply a gramophone with seven records, and that when he had played them all he began again at the beginning’.11 His self-importance was outrageous. When Hitler’s propaganda campaign for the reunification with Austria reached a peak in 1934, the Austrian chancellor, Engelbert Dollfuss, turned to Mussolini for help. On 25 July 1934, Austrian Nazis murdered Dollfuss, seized the Vienna Chancellery and attempted to proclaim a government under the Nazi Anton Rintelen. Mussolini massed his troops on the Brenner Pass that divided the North Tyrol from the contended South Tyrol and formed the Austro-Italian border. His point was made. Hitler was obliged to repudiate his Austrian followers and the Catholic nationalist Kurt Schuschnigg became Austrian chancellor. Back down marched Il Duce’s troops.
But when Britain poured cold water on Italy’s colonial ambitions over Abyssinia in 1936, Mussolini was forced into Hitler’s arms. The Rome–Berlin Axis was established on 25 October 1936. On the occasion of Anschluss in March 1938, Mussolini thought better of ordering his troops once again up to the top of the Brenner. It was this forbearance that elicited from Hitler the famous exclamation ‘Tell Mussolini I shall never forget him for this, never, never, come what may.’12 On 22 May 1939, Italy and Germany signed their military alliance, the Pact of Steel. In the general dismemberment of Europe Il Duce anticipated, he was greedy for the former Italian possession of Nice, France’s second city of Lyons, the Italian-speaking Swiss canton of Ticino bordering on Italy, perhaps his north-eastern neighbour, Yugoslavia. Still, despite the Pact, Italy remained neutral when Hitler invaded Poland in September 1939 and Germany found herself at war with France and Britain. By the following spring it was apparent at least to Mussolini which way the wind was blowing.
On 13 May 1940, when Switzerland was believed to be on the point of an attack from the north by the Seventh Army, the rumour circulated the southern cantons of Switzerland like an avalanche. Mussolini’s Alpine soldiers were coming up from Lombardy to invade the canton of Ticino and the city of Locarno on the verdant shores of Lake Maggiore. At two o’clock in the morning of 14 May 1940, the Swiss army contingent at Zermatt was turned out and ordered to patrol the passe
s from the Weisshorn to the Dent d’Hérens, the great peaks that marked the frontier, beyond which lay Italy.
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Although such invasion plans certainly existed, Mussolini’s thoughts were actually elsewhere. He had followed events in northern Europe from his headquarters in the Palazzo Venezia in Rome with a mixture of admiration for the blistering triumphs of the Wehrmacht and a daily increasing concern that his place at the victor’s banquet might not be laid. On 13 May 1940, Chief of General Staff Badoglio and Marshal Italo Balbo were called into Mussolini’s office for a special audience. Badoglio recalled:
He did not speak at once and silently transfixed us with his penetrating stare. Finally he decided to speak and with an air of inspiration, he announced, ‘I wish to tell you that yesterday I sent a messenger to Hitler with my written declaration that I do not intend to stand idly by with my hands in my pockets, and that after 5 June I am ready to declare war on England.’
When I was able to speak, I said, ‘Your Excellency, you know perfectly well that we are absolutely unprepared. We have about twenty divisions with 70% of the necessary equipment and training; and about another twenty divisions with 50%. We have no tanks. The air force … is grounded. This is to say nothing of stores – we have not even sufficient shirts for the army. In such a state of affairs how is it possible to declare war? It is suicide.’ Mussolini did not answer for a few minutes and then said quite calmly, ‘I assume that the war will be over in September and that I need a few thousand dead so as to be able to attend the peace conference as a belligerent.’13
Badoglio then tottered across to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to discuss the matter with Ciano, the foreign minister who cared so little for Germans, Hitler or a war. According to Badoglio, Ciano ‘commented several times, “Mussolini is absolutely mad”’.14 Nevertheless, four weeks later, Italy duly declared war on England and her ally France. President Roosevelt commented from Washington, ‘On this tenth day of June 1940, the hand that held the dagger has struck it into the back of his neighbor.’15
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England was a distant target for the Regia Aeronautica – the Italian Royal Air Force – which had been hastily declared airworthy. France was a different matter, for Italy shared with the Third Republic the Alpine border that ran north from the Riviera to Mont Blanc. Beyond the frontier in the south lay the prizes of Lyons and Nice. Here in the southern Alps were stationed two Italian armies under Prince General Umberto di Savoia. They supposedly numbered 700,000 in thirty-two divisions. These forces were ranged against just 35,000 French at the disposal of General René Olry. These were the remnants of the Armée des Alpes, much depleted by reinforcements sent to northern France and Norway. The result was surely a foregone conclusion.
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Contrary to the supposition of both the Allied high command in Vincennes and the Swiss, by this time the thrust of Hitler’s blitzkrieg forces in the Low Countries and France had entirely regained its momentum. It was just as Reynaud had told Churchill so early in the morning of 15 May. France was defeated.
After the spearhead of the 2nd Panzer Division had reached the Channel coast at Abbeville on 20 May, it turned north. There followed the deliverance of the British Expeditionary Force at Dunkirk, the collapse of the Weygand Line, the flight of the French government to Bordeaux, and the push into France by the Wehrmacht dubbed Fall Rot – Case Red. Paris fell on 14 June 1940, and the Maginot Line on the German border was gradually outflanked. On 16 June Generalleutnant Heinz Guderian’s Panzers reached the Swiss border near Pontarlier, driving before them the French XLV Army Corps. On 19 June, the French requested permission to cross the Swiss border. Observing the Hague Convention, the Swiss complied. Forty-two thousand French and Polish soldiers – together with 5,000 horses – crossed the frontier into Canton Neuchâtel. There they were disarmed and interned. The sight of this bedraggled, bleeding and broken army did little for Swiss morale.
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In the light of this devastating news from northern France, there seemed – at first glance – little prospect of General Olry’s Armée des Alpes holding firm.
In the north, the fixed defences of the Maginot Line on the Franco-German border had simply been outflanked by the Wehrmacht. In the Alps, there was another line of fixed defences known as the Ligne Alpine or the Petit Ligne Maginot. This comprised a series of small forts or ouvrages – concrete strongpoints linked by tunnels. The largest of these, the gros ouvrages, were manned by between two and three hundred specialist fortress infantry: the Brigade Alpin de Forteresse. Unlike the more concentrated line of the Maginot further north, the forts were placed only where it was strictly necessary to defend: at the few passes in the Alpine wall that could be breached by an army. From the north downwards: Bourg-Saint-Maurice in the Tarentaise valley stood sentinel at the Little St Bernard Pass, Modane in the Maurienne defended the Mont Cenis, Briançon guarded the Col de Montgenèvre and the road up from Turin, and Barcelonnette the Col de Larche and the high road to Lyons. Close to Nice, where the Alpes-Maritimes dropped down towards the sea, the terrain was easier and the forts were more closely grouped: both to the north in the mountains and along the coastal road – and railway line – east to Italy.
This natural barrier, fortified by man, should have given Mussolini pause for thought. These ouvrages might be invested by highly trained mountain troops like the Wehrmacht’s Gebirgsjäger, not by a regular army. Moreover, despite their huge numerical advantage over the French, the Italian armoured units were equipped with light tanks entirely ill-suited to the terrain. Finally, although the Italians did have shirts, most had just thin summer uniforms. Some had cardboard shoes. Only the Alpini mountain specialists were actually equipped for fighting in the Alps. It was high summer, but in the Alps even in high summer it can snow and it can also rain.
It was in the Italians’ favour that because of the local idiosyncrasies of the terrain there were a number of places where their positions overlooked those of the French. Towards the northern end of the Ligne Alpine the medieval walled town of Briançon on the road to Grenoble in the Dauphiné was threatened by Fort Chaberton, built on the very peak of Mont Chaberton’s 10,272-foot summit. Its battery of eight turreted guns was often wreathed in clouds. It was here that on 17 June the Italian fort, manned by units of the Fourth Army, opened fire on the defending ouvrage of Fort de l’Olive, garrisoned by the French XVI Corps. On the same day, General Bertin’s II Army Corps ventured a series of probing patrols across the Col de Larche. They were met with heavy fire from the French Roche la Croix ouvrage. Right at the north of the line, the Little St Bernard Pass was defended by the deceptively named Redoute Ruinée. It was manned by just forty-seven men under the command of the bespectacled Sous-Lieutenant Henri Desserteaux. The Italians here had some success before Desserteaux’s men found their range.
A young French mountain soldier gave a sense of the strangeness of the conflict in the high Alpine world:
I remember one night in June 1940, standing on watch at an altitude of 7,500 feet with the thermometer at 16 degrees Fahrenheit; the wind was blowing wildly through the pass and there was an infinite void on both sides of the ridge. Below me, four square yards of snow and rocks; in front of me, beyond my Tommy gun, a desert of ice, where, in the deceptive light of the moon, each crevasse looked like a man advancing towards me. With ice-cold hands, a flask of brandy inside my anorak and my feet tight with cold inside boots that were too wide for me, I was longing for dawn while peering into the night. The slightest touch of my finger on the trigger would have started a roar of gun-fire in every direction.16
To the south of the Line in the foothills of the Alpes-Maritimes, the campaign was no more fruitful. Here, where the Italian First Army was facing the French XV Corps, the Italian Cosseria Division began advancing along the Riviera coastal road from just beyond the border at Ventimiglia. The Italians came under fire from the ouvrage Cap Martin, garrisoned by the 96th Brigade Alpin de Forteresse. In the next few days the 96th Briga
de repelled without much difficulty the probing patrols of the Italian First Army. Indeed, so slow was progress that General Umberto was obliged to turn to the Germans for help. Generaloberst Erich Hoepner’s XVI Panzer Corps – survivors of the Battle of Hannut – was advancing south down the Rhône valley towards Lyons. They were ordered by OKW to advance with all speed to engage General Olry’s forces from the rear.
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For Mussolini, who less than a month before had appointed himself Italy’s Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces, this was not the blitzkrieg he had envisaged. Neither was it a report he relished making to Hitler when the pair met on 18 June 1940, in Munich. The performance of his forces was belittled by the Wehrmacht in the north of France. Hitler refused his request to jointly discuss the terms of the forthcoming armistice with the French, or the idea that the Italians should be entitled to the Rhône valley as their share of the spoils. Ciano recorded in his diary that Mussolini left the meeting ‘very much embarrassed’.17 To relieve his feelings the Duce tersely ordered General Umberto to redouble the efforts in the Alps.