by Jim Ring
So in the north came fresh attacks right up to the Little St Bernard. On 19 and 20 June the Assietta Division was making slow progress towards the French lines in Briançon. The French responded by bringing up the mortars of the 154th Position Artillery Regiment. On 21 June these knocked out seven of the eight turrets of Fort Chaberton. On the Col de Larche, a series of advances between 20 and 22 June produced heavy Italian casualties and the retreat of the Acqui Division to whence it came. Then came snow. Not terribly unusual for the time of year but unusually heavy. It had to be cleared to allow firing positions to be used, and the ill-equipped Italians suffered from frostbite.
In the south, the weather was also appalling: thick mist, snow above the snow line, heavy rain below. On 20 June, infantry of the Cosseria Division on the south coast attempted a frontal assault on the Casemate du Pont St Louis outside Menton. This was manned by Sous-Lieutenant Piedfort and eight others, armed with just a 37 mm anti-tank gun and twin machine guns. The Italians were driven back by the tiny garrison of the casemate itself and by covering fire from the main ouvrage at Cap Martin and two adjoining ouvrages at Saint-Agnès and Mont Agel. The following day the Italians called up air support and an armoured train. This damaged one of Cap Martin’s 75 mm guns. On 24 June two more armoured trains were brought in support. The Italian infantry infiltrated above the casemate – failing to take it – and managed to capture the Riviera resort of Menton. Italian units also reached Cap Martin, but were forced to retreat by French artillery.
At the same time, events further north took a decisive turn. In the immediate vicinity of the fighting, Hoepner’s XVI Panzer Corps had now advanced lower down the Rhône valley and was beginning to outflank Olry’s forces, forcing the French general to face two ways at once. On 19 June, Hoepner’s 13th Motorised bridged the Rhône at Lyons and headed east into the mountains towards Annecy, Aix-les-Bains, and Grenoble. Olry’s forces blew up all the bridges across the Isère river which barred the way to Grenoble. Further away in northern France, with Paris in the hands of the Nazis, on 22 June the armistice was signed between the French and the Germans at Compiègne. This in turn prompted the French to come to terms with the Italians. Further resistance was clearly futile.
At 7.35 p.m. on 24 June in Olgiata, near Rome, the second armistice was signed. When it came into effect six hours later, the French tricolour was still flying above Sous-Lieutenant Piedfort and his eight men at the casemate at Pont St Louis and – in the northern section of the Line – Sous-Lieutenant Desserteaux and his forty-seven men in the Redoute Ruinée. The Petit Maginot Line had held. The English painter Neville Lytton was living in a village just north of Lyons. He remembered the return of the French troops. ‘Those who came from the Italian front had their tails right up. They said, “Why were we not allowed to go for these macaronis? We would have made one mouthful of them. If we had been allowed to attack, we should by now have been half-way to Rome.’18
Mussolini had hoped for ‘a few thousand dead’. Here he was disappointed. Only 631 Italians were killed. Still, with another 616 missing, 2,361 wounded and more than 2,000 cases of frostbite, the Italian tally was not so bad after all. On the other hand, General Umberto’s forces had hardly covered themselves in glory. Ciano commented, ‘Mussolini … is quite humiliated because our troops have not made a step forward.’19 Churchill’s verdict was that ‘the French Army on the south-eastern borders saved its honour’.20 Certainly the terms of the armistice granted Mussolini only the French territory his three-quarters of a million troops had managed to capture from 35,000 French, together with a modest demilitarised zone imposed on the French side of the Alpine border. It was not blitzkrieg, barely a victory.
5
France had fallen, and with it the Third Republic; yet Switzerland was still unscathed.
On the night of 14–15 May when the invasion had been expected, General Guisan’s slumbers went undisturbed. So too on subsequent nights. For the massing of the Seventh Army on the Swiss border turned out to be a feint. By day, the troops were marched up to the Swiss border, where they were all too visible. By night, the very same troops were marched straight back again – quite unseen. The following day the exercise was repeated. The impression was of an army moving south to cut through Switzerland to outflank the southern end of the Maginot Line. The Swiss thought they were about to be invaded. The French drew precisely the conclusion intended by OKW, that they should reinforce their southern flank. This they duly did with nineteen divisions sorely needed in the north around the Meuse. Meanwhile, the units of Kleist and Guderian attacked in the north around Sedan, crossed to the west bank of the Meuse and opened the way to the Channel. The northern border with Switzerland was left untouched. So, too, was the southern frontier between Canton Ticino and the Italian province of Lombardy. Mussolini’s energies were focused further south in the Alps.
Yet for the Swiss, the situation was still dire. The Fall of France left the country a democratic oasis in a fascist desert. On 4 July 1940 Shirer was visiting his family in Geneva and took the opportunity to gauge Swiss opinion:
They see their situation as pretty hopeless, surrounded as they are by the victorious totalitarians, from whom henceforth they must beg facilities for bringing in their food and other supplies. None have any illusions of the kind of treatment they will get from the dictators … now that France has completely collapsed and Germany and Italy surround Switzerland, a military struggle in self-defence is hopeless.
Mont Blanc from the quay today was magnificent, its snow pink in the afternoon sun.21
This pessimism was understandable. The Wehrmacht, revelling in victory, was at the height of its powers. In six weeks it had accomplished what the Kaiser had failed to achieve in four years. On 18 June 1940 there was a thanksgiving service held in Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. The following day a victory parade was staged on the Brandenburger Tor in Berlin. It was the first such parade since 1871 when the Second French Empire had been defeated and the Second German Reich founded. On 24 June, the day the armistice between the French and Italians was signed, Swiss intelligence reported that Hitler had once again discussed the invasion of Switzerland with Göring, Keitel, Ribbentrop, Hess (Hitler’s deputy) and Goebbels. The following day a new plan for the invasion of Switzerland was drafted by the OKW staffer Captain Otto Wilhelm von Menges. Operation Tannenbaum – Christmas Tree – envisaged a pincer movement between the Germans in the north and the Italians in the south. It was just as the Swiss had feared in May.
This was also the momentous day on which the Swiss federal president, Marcel Pilet-Golaz, addressed the Swiss nation. The fifty-year-old was a bureaucrat who had made his name putting the Swiss railways in order. Affairs of state were less his métier. He sported a toothbrush moustache, reminiscent of Hitler’s, and his tone, if not his precise message, was clear. ‘The time for inner renewal has come. We must look forward, determined to use our modest but useful strength in the reconstruction of the world in the state of upheaval.’22 The Swiss took this to mean they should accept the New Order in Europe. Henceforth, the country would be a satellite of the Third Reich. The President told the government that Switzerland should seek a pretext for breaking off diplomatic relations with Great Britain so as to facilitate an accommodation with the Reich.
Europe’s New Order had arrived in the Alps.
Notes
1. William L. Shirer, Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent, 1934–1941 (Baltimore, MD, and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002).
2. Urs Schwarz, The Eye of the Hurricane: Switzerland in World War Two (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1980).
3. Jon Kimche, Spying for Peace: General Guisan and Swiss Neutrality (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1962).
4. Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War, Volume II: Their Finest Hour (London: Cassell, 1949).
5. Stephen P. Halbrook, Target Switzerland: Swiss Armed Neutrality in World War II (New York: Sarpedon, 1998).
6. Halbrook, Target Switzerland
.
7. Halbrook, Target Switzerland.
8. Cicely Williams, Zermatt Saga.
9. Shirer, Rise and Fall.
10. Richard Lamb, Mussolini and the British (London: John Murray, 1997).
11. Lamb, Mussolini and the British.
12. Richard Collier, Duce! The Rise and Fall of Benito Mussolini (London: Collins, 1971).
13. Pietro Badoglio, Italy in the Second World War (L’Italia nella seconda guerra mondiale), tr. Muriel Currey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1948).
14. Badoglio.
15. Conrad Black, Franklin Delano Roosevelt (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2003).
16. Claire Eliane Engel, Mountaineering in the Alps: An Historical Survey (London: Allen and Unwin, 1971).
17. Galeazzo Ciano, The Ciano Diaries 1939–1943, ed. Hugh Gibson (New York: Fertig, 1973).
18. Neville Stephen Lytton, Life in Unoccupied France (London: Macmillan, 1942).
19. Ciano.
20. Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War, Volume V: Closing the Ring (London: Cassell, 1952).
21. Shirer, Berlin Diary.
22. Kimche.
* Wehrmacht is commonly used as the term for the German Army, but actually means ‘defence force’ or ‘armed forces’. When used in this latter sense it covers all three armed services – Heer, Kriegsmarine and Luftwaffe – but excludes the Waffen-SS.
THREE
Triumph of the Will
‘These are not dark days; these are great days – the greatest days our country has ever lived’
WINSTON CHURCHILL
1
On 13 July 1940 Hitler was once again entertaining at the Berghof. In addition to the generals whose exploits since the spring had so dazzled the world, he was attended by the head of the Kriegsmarine, Grossadmiral Erich Raeder. It was high summer in Berchtesgadener Land, and the Alps were perhaps at their most enchanting. Though the May flowers were over, the scent of mown hay wafted up from the meadows below the Berghof, there were drinks on the terrace overlooking Berchtesgaden under shady parasols and – beyond – the glories of the Untersberg tomb where Barbarossa dozed, vying for attention with Eva Braun in her summer dirndls. The skylarks sang. For Hitler, too, the world might have seemed at his feet. Poland, Norway, Denmark – now Belgium, Luxembourg, Holland and France – had fallen to his forces. Russia, Italy, Spain, Bulgaria and Hungary had come to terms that were largely his own. Of England, Churchill would say of this July tsunami in European history, ‘We were done, almost disarmed, with triumphant Germany and Italy at our throats, with the whole of Europe open to Hitler’s powers.’1 For William Shirer, too, in Berlin, there was a sense of finality: ‘As I recall those summer days, everyone, especially in the Wilhelmstrasse and the Bendlerstrasse, was confident that the war was as good as over.’2 Soon the generals were taking wagers with him on when the swastika would be flying over Trafalgar Square.
Paradoxically, the warlords in their summer uniforms – the heavyweight Göring in pearl grey – at the Berghof found Hitler bemused and frustrated. Contrary to the forces of destiny shaping the new European order, two leaders with a combined age of 132 were defying his wrath and steel by attempting to rally their peoples to resist the onward march of the Reich: Winston Churchill in England and Henri Guisan in Switzerland.
The Führer had assumed that once France fell, England would have no appetite to continue the struggle. On 1 July 1940 he had remarked to the Italian ambassador in Berlin that he ‘could not conceive of anyone in England still seriously believing in victory’.3 Five weeks earlier on 20 May when Guderian’s Panzer spearheads had reached Abbeville on the Channel coast, Hitler had begun drafting a peace treaty with England. It was a labour of love, for the Führer was a great admirer of the British Empire. Daily in the last two weeks of June and in the early days of July he had expected a dove from Whitehall. Instead, all he got was an eagle. Nothing had changed since 4 June, when Churchill had spoken at length to the House of Commons – later to the nation – of the country’s desperate plight. He had summed up by saying,
we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.4
Hitler, second only to Churchill as an orator, doubtless appreciated the technical merits of the speech, the Prime Minister’s flair, chutzpah and showmanship, irrespective of its unpalatable contents. By 11 July, when Grossadmiral Raeder arrived in Berchtesgaden, it was nevertheless beginning to dawn on the Führer that the British Prime Minister meant what he said. The Admiral had been summoned to Obersalzberg to counsel on ferrying the land forces to England’s beaches to do battle. His colleague, Army Chief of Staff Generaloberst Franz Halder, arrived with his senior staff a couple of days later to advise – amongst other things – on the implications of the more equivocal policies of Switzerland. The Swiss people had been much stirred by Churchill’s speech. It had been reported in the republic and was echoed by Guisan himself in various speeches and orders, much to the annoyance of Hitler. Then, on 25 June, had come Federal President Marcel Pilet-Golaz’s speech which preached accommodation, indeed hinted of collaboration. Just what were the Swiss up to?
On these two matters and many others – not least Operation Barbarossa in the east – Hitler’s advisers advised. Raeder believed the invasion of England was neither desirable nor practicable. He thought the British could be made to come to heel by a U-boat blockade of their merchant shipping and by letting loose the Luftwaffe both on their Atlantic convoys and on their industrial heartland. Hitler wavered. It was lamentable that the matter had not been properly considered by OKW beforehand. As to the Swiss, they were a pimple on the face of Europe. Hitler pondered. When the meeting broke up on 13 July 1940 he wrote testily to Mussolini declining the Duce’s considerate proposal of Italian help for the invasion of England. ‘I have made to Britain so many offers of agreement, even of co-operation, and have been treated so shabbily that I am now convinced that any new appeal to reason would meet with a similar rejection. For in that country at present it is not reason that rules.’5 By 16 July the Führer’s mind was made up. On that day he issued Directive No. 16, ‘on the Preparation of a Landing Operation Against England’. He had finally registered Britain’s will to resist and acknowledged Churchill’s 18 June Commons statement of the country’s ‘inflexible resolve to continue the war’. Unternehmen Seelöwe (Operation Sea Lion), the invasion of England, was put in hand, and with it the requirement for the Luftwaffe to clear the skies of the RAF. The Battle of Britain – for Hermann Göring Operation Eagle (Adlerangriffe) – was at hand. In the time he could spare from building up a collection of the artistic treasures of Europe that he hoped would rival that of the Louvre, the fat man of the German air force would direct the destruction of its British counterpart, the RAF.
On the other matter of the invasion of Switzerland, Hitler remained ambivalent. Would the adherents of Pilet-Golaz or those of General Guisan hold sway? Switzerland was clearly divided. Invasions were a troublesome and uncertain business, greedy of blood and treasure. If the Swiss President triumphed, it might save the Wehrmacht a good deal. He had already rescinded the ban on Nazi newspapers and released interned Luftwaffe aircrew. In the case of both countries, Hitler was mindful that invasion was a seasonal sport. Snow in the Alps and storms in the Channel made winter the closed season.
With that thought, the warlords departed the sunny Berghof and made their way back to Berlin.
2
So to Davos, where lay the seeds of President Pilet-Golaz’s speech of two weeks earlier.
Davos was 230 miles south-west of the Berghof. It was a 5,120-foot resort in the Canton Graubünden in the south-east of Switzerland – right on the Italian and
Austrian borders. It had established itself in the 1870s for the ‘Alpine cure’. The resort’s high valley set crosswise against the prevailing winds created a remarkably dry microclimate that proved a prophylactic against, sometimes even a cure for, tuberculosis. Drawn by this reputation, it had been patronised by scores of prominent writers including A. J. A. Symons, Robert Louis Stevenson, Erich Maria Remarque, Thomas Mann, Erich Kästner and Arthur Conan Doyle. It was Doyle who introduced skis to Davos in 1895, the author prophetically remarking that ‘I am convinced the time will come when hundreds of Englishmen will come to Switzerland for the skiing season between March and April.’6 By the twenties his dreams had come true, and Davos had added to the tuberculosis sanatoria in which it abounded the facilities of an international skiing resort. In the early thirties Davos was one of the first resorts to pioneer cable railways – Seilbahnen – for hauling skiers up the slopes of the Jakobshorn, Weissfluhjoch and the Parsenn. Hitherto they had climbed. Less creditably, at much the same time the resort had become the centre of the Nazi Party in Switzerland.
It would have been strange if the Swiss had been entirely deaf to the call of National Socialism. The economic crisis epitomised by the Wall Street Crash of October 1929, in Europe by the collapse of the Weimar Republic, reduced Swiss exports over the next five years by two-thirds. In 1936, in England the year of the Jarrow March, in the United States of the second New Deal, there was in Switzerland similarly drastic unemployment – 13.2 per cent. The Schweizerische Nationalbank (SNB) devalued the franc by 30 per cent and wages plummeted. All this caused unrest. Switzerland, traditionally liberal though she was, could not entirely rise above the tide of belief that parliamentary government had been foisted on central Europe as a result of defeat in the Great War; that the political and social order so clearly absent in – say – Weimar Germany and in the young Austrian republic could only be restored by the single-minded and autocratic state. Post-war Switzerland was very different – much more stable – from her immediate neighbours, fractious places that teetered on the brink of revolution; yet she was not an island. As the largest language group in Switzerland was German, the Swiss could also hardly avoid the story of the rise of Hitler and its implications.