Five Days in London, May 1940
Page 5
There is a fair amount of literature (and speculation) about the sources (rather than about the consequences) of Hitler’s halt order. Hitler’s motives and purposes were not simple. We must attempt to sum them up — or, rather, to sort them out. On one level (if that is the proper phrase) of his mind he was concerned about the wear and tear on the German armored vehicles, in continuous movement and skirmishing for a fortnight now: this concern accorded with those of Rundstedt, who had made an account of such losses the night before. Perhaps this concern was also buttressed by Hitler’s memories of the First World War, when he had served four long years in a land crisscrossed by watercourses and canals and where large armies attempted offensives mired in the mud. More evident, and documentable, are Hitler’s nervous worries at the time. He still feared the possibility of an Allied counteroffensive maiming the snout of the advancing German crocodile. In sum, he did not — yet — believe his luck.
There was another element in his mind. Any historian worth his salt knows how to eschew monocausal explanations of human events — that is, the attribution of a single motive to any given decision.1 And there is another necessary distinction, the one between motives and purposes (the first a push of the past, the second the pull of the future), for rare are also those instances when the purposes of a decision are singular or exclusive. This applies to Adolf Hitler, too, who was secretive and whose mind was not simple. It is at least possible that he wished not to annihilate the entire British Expeditionary Force. “Not to annihilate” is perhaps the phrase that comes closest to the truth, or, rather, to the workings of his mind. There are not a few instances, in war as in politics, when it is to the victor’s advantage to let—or to force — his opponents to make a narrow escape, for otherwise, having burned their bridges, they may fight to the very end, with all kinds of unforeseeable consequences. That almost surely was in Hitler’s mind. But he would soon in retrospect exaggerate his purposes. “Bridge” — indeed, “golden bridge” — are the words some Germans have used to explain Hitler’s decision to halt before Dunkirk. These include Rundstedt, whose reminiscences do, however, have elements of special pleading. After the war Churchill, in his War Memoirs, took good care to ignore speculations about golden bridges; he attributed the halt order to Rundstedt’s hesitations rather than to Hitler’s. Churchill was not altogether incorrect: “golden bridge” was an overstatement, to say the least. But an overstatement, while wanting in precision, is not necessarily altogether devoid of truth. Other people in Hitler’s circle heard him say, “The Führer wants to spare the British a humiliating defeat.”2 After Dunkirk came Hitler’s rationalization: “The army is England’s backbone. … If we destroy it, there goes the British Empire. We would not, or could not, inherit it.… My generals did not understand this.”3 And near the end of the war, in February 1945: “Churchill was quite unable to appreciate the sporting spirit of which I have given proof by refraining from creating an irreparable breach between the British and ourselves. We did, however, refrain from annihilating them at Dunkirk.”4
Hitler’s purposes were mixed. He wanted the British army to leave Europe. But by “not annihilating” the BEF, he did not wish to spare them. Three days before the halt order he let himself be convinced by Hermann Goering that the retreating BEF could be smashed to pieces by the Luftwaffe. On 23 May Major Engel, Hitler’s adjutant, noted in his diary that Hitler and Goering were talking on the telephone again: “The Field Marshal thinks that the great task of the Luftwaffe is beginning: the annihilation of the British in Northern France. The army will only have to occupy. We are angry. The Führer is inspired.”5 Another diary entry of 23 May, this one by the canny Ernst von Weizsaecker, undersecretary of state: “Whether the English give in now or whether we make them peace-loving through bombing…” Well, the bombing did not work. The halt order was crucial: “Dunkirk is to be left to the Luftwaffe. Should the capture of Calais prove difficult, this port too is to be left to the Luftwaffe.”
Hitler’s halt order was sent in clear.6 It was instantly read in London. (It was brought to the command in the War Office by General A. E. Percival, assistant chief of defence of the general staff—the unfortunate man who, less than two years later, would be the feeble defender of Singapore, surrendering it to the Japanese: the most shameful defeat of British arms in an entire century.) Neither the War Office nor Churchill nor Lord Gort, the commander of the BEF, recognized its immediate importance.7 The confusion in the War Office was great and deep. They were preoccupied with the situation at Calais. Boulogne had capitulated to the Germans the night before. At 2 A.M. an order was sent to Calais: “evacuation was decided in principle.” The siege of Calais was about to begin; in the morning the first German artillery shells began to pepper the port. Two large British ships, loaded with British troops, cast off from Calais for Dover. The Germans could see this with their own eyes. The British were leaving the Continent. This may have contributed to Hitler’s halt order. A few minutes before the halt order, Brigadier Claude Nicholson, the British commander at Calais, told the War Office by telephone that evacuation would continue. He expected it to be completed some time the next day. Somewhat later the War Office countermanded the evacuation plan: Calais was to be held as long as possible. Often through that afternoon British and French troops, marching to vessels at the port, were turned around with orders to stay in Calais. The confusion at the War Office was worse than what was happening in Calais. Earlier that day Churchill had learned of the evacuation order. He minuted to General Ismay: “This is surely madness. The only effect of evacuating Calais would be to transfer the forces now blocking it to Dunkirk. Calais must be held for many reasons, but especially to hold the enemy, on its front.”8 By noon Churchill’s impetuosity got the better of him. Again he sent a note to Ismay: “I cannot understand the situation around Calais.… The Germans are blocking all exits.… Yet I expect [the German] forces achieving this are very modest. Why then are they not attacked? Why does not Lord Gort attack them from the rear at the same time that we make a sortie from Calais?” This seemed logical to Churchill: another, smaller version of a two-pronged attack, cutting off the German snout. In reality, it made no sense at all.9 As Airey Neave, who had fought and was wounded and captured at Calais (and who later escaped from a German prison camp), afterward put it, “Churchill’s admonition to Gort to attack the Tenth Panzer Division when the B.E.F. was separated from Calais by at least four Panzer Divisions … [is] evidence of the terrifying ignorance of those conducting this campaign from Whitehall.”10 There was another reason to hold on to Calais. The French pressed the British to stay on, not to evacuate. Indeed it may have seemed to the French that the British were packing up, leaving them in the lurch. Churchill was sufficiently appreciative of this, because of its political—and human — implications. General Weygand had ordered to maintain a large connected bridgehead: the ports “can be held for a long time.” That was an unreasonable exaggeration. Yet Calais did hold out till the afternoon of the twenty-sixth, and that made a difference. Had Calais not been defended, two other German divisions would have joined Guderian pushing northward. He was already on the north side of the Aa Canal before Dunkirk; on the twenty-fourth there were only a small British corps and a few French units between him and Dunkirk. “Had this happened,” Neave later wrote, “there would have been no need for Hitler’s intervention which lost Guderian the historic chance of winning the Second World War almost in a morning.”11 The italics are mine. There may be some imprecision — imprecision, rather than exaggeration — in Neave’s statement: but not much.12
There was now, at least temporarily, a difference between the War Office and Churchill. The command in London wished to save the British units in Calais. They therefore still would have preferred evacuation, while Churchill wanted to fight on in Calais till the end — partly, as we have seen, because of its effects on the French, but also partly because, as he properly recognized, it would slow down the German advance to the last port, Dunkirk. The War
Office was constrained to agree with Churchill, though with some reluctance. This appears from the telegram that the War Office sent to Brigadier Nicholson late (at 11:23 P.M.) on 24 May: “In spite of policy of evacuation given you this morning fact that British forces in your area now under Fagalde [General Fagalde was a courageous French commander in the Calais area] who has ordered no repeat no evacuation means that you comply for the sake of Allied solidarity.” When Churchill read this early next morning, he was furious. He sent a message to General Ironside: “Pray find out who was the officer responsible for sending the order to evacuate Calais yesterday and by whom this very lukewarm telegram I saw this morning was drafted in which mention is made of ‘for the sake of Allied Solidarity.’ This is no way to encourage men to fight to the end. Are you sure there is no streak of defeatist opinion in General Staff?” There was at least a small streak of defeatist opinion in Ironside, to whom this fast minute was directed. Even though there were no signs of defeatism among the officers and soldiers of the British units under Gort (still well to the east of Dunkirk, retreating slowly westward), signs of defeatism were apparent in the Belgian army, where some of the Flemish soldiers were unwilling to fight Germans. In any event, when Churchill read the “lukewarm telegram” early on the morning of the twenty-fifth, the swastika flag was already flying on the Hôtel de Ville in Calais. Around the port and the maritime quays Nicholson and Fagalde held out, for another day and a half.
This is not a military history of May 1940. But it is not reasonable or even possible to separate the unfolding of the military from the political sequence of events. Nor is it at all reasonable to separate Hitler’s military purposes from his political ones. Their essences were the same: to convince the British not to oppose him, certainly not in Europe. Were they to leave the Continent, all to the good; he might have to force them to do that; but they ought not be dead set to fight him at any cost. Now there was Churchill; but he was not “the British.”
This is not the place to attempt a detailed analysis of Hitler’s understanding of the British. He had a certain respect for their Empire and also for their soldierly abilities (especially because of what he had seen during the First World War). He knew something, but not much, about their history. He did not really understand the common people of Britain or elements of their character. But as the war proceeded, his respect for the British faded fast. He began to deprecate their fighting abilities, and toward the end of the war he turned on them with a furious hatred — his rocket firings at London and many of his statements are evidences of that. He blamed the British for having chosen to oppose him and thus, like the Poles, having precipitated the war.
But this was May 1940. What he saw then (and he had agreed with Joseph Goebbels when the latter had said something like this in April) was that this was but a repetition, on a larger scale, of the struggle that he had fought and won in Germany, which had brought him to power. He and his National Socialists were bound to win the struggle, even though they had started out as a minority, because they and their ideas were more determined and stronger than those of their opponents. That during the street fighting in Weimar Germany a National Socialist trooper was worth two or three of his Communist or Socialist opponents was a consequence of that. During the war Hitler believed that, much in the same way, one German soldier was worth two or three Polish or French or perhaps even British soldiers, not only because of superior German discipline and equipment but also because a German soldier of the Third Reich incarnated a national ideology that was better and stronger than those of his enemies. And thus 80 million Germans were more than a match for their nearly 100 million Western European opponents, with all their many empires behind them. There was some truth in this but not enough. In the end 80 million Germans, tough match as they were, were not enough to withstand the hundreds of millions of Russians and Americans and British and others pouring over them. But that was not yet so in May 1940.
There was another element in Hitler’s vision about this war being but a larger repetition of his struggle in Germany a decade or so before. There he could not have come to power without the support of the German Conservatives. In 1923 he had attempted a radical nationalist uprising in Munich, challenging the established authorities if need be. It failed, and thereafter he changed his mind or, rather, his tactics. He would come to power with the support of the Conservative parties, of their politicians, of their press, and of the masses of respectable conservative German voters. They would support him not only because they would be impressed with his mass following. They would be inclined to sympathize, at least to some extent, with his nationalism, with his anti-Semitism, and especially with his anti-Communism. Thus he would disarm their opposition; he would gain a certain amount of respectability and their support when needed. They would think that he was dependent on them, that he was their partner; but, once in power, they would be entirely dependent on him, and soon. This was, of course, what happened in Germany in 1933. He had little respect for these people; indeed, he regarded most of them (and on occasion said so) with contempt. A prototypical example of such German Conservatives was Alfred Hugenberg, the Nationalist party leader and press magnate, with whom Hitler made an alliance in 1930 and whom Hitler discarded easily a few months after his assumption of power, having no trouble with the erstwhile Hugenbergers, most of them his followers now.
And then, beginning at the latest in 1935, when his relationship with Britain became very important to him, he met people among the British governing classes, members of the British aristocracy, and the British Conservative Party; he met Halifax, and then Chamberlain, and many others, too, including the old Lloyd George — and again, Hitler saw, or thought he saw, through them, as indeed he had seen through so many opponents and followers during his extraordinary career. He thought that he understood their strengths and their weaknesses, just as he had understood his potential German conservative opponents before 1933. And just as these German Conservatives were unwilling to take a firm stand against Hitler (certainly unwilling to station themselves on the side of liberals, socialists, or other leftists), it was evident that these Britishers were unwilling to consider a war with him, certainly not on the side of the French or of other Europeans. Just as these German Conservatives feared Communism and took comfort in Hitler’s evidently uncompromising anti-Communism and anti-Marxism, so did some of these British Conservatives. Indeed, just as some of these German Conservatives had done, they seemed to be willing to give him the benefit of the doubt and to see his New Order as at least an alternative both to Communism and to the decaying and corrupting climate of an antiquated parliamentary liberalism. Hitler did not sufficiently understand that Britons were not Germans — that the patriotism of British Conservatives and the nationalism of German Conservatives were not quite the same things. But when he occasionally called the British appeasers “meine Hugenberger,” my Hugenbergers, he was not entirely wrong.
We have seen that many — probably the majority—of the Conservative members in the House of Commons did not particularly like Churchill and that their reluctance to applaud him was largely due to their uneasiness with his personal and public reputation, with his past. There was, however, more to it than that. These members of Parliament — a huge Conservative majority — were elected in 1935, and in 1935 the policies of the government, the inclinations of their party and what seems to have been those of the majority of the British people, were not what they were in 1940. In 1935 and for some years thereafter, they were willing—more precisely, they were not unwilling — to give the new Germany a measure of credit. Since then at least a dozen books have been written about appeasement. This is not the place to compose another précis of its history. Besides, “appeasement,” as such, was a dead issue in 1940, when Britain and Germany were at war. But the uncertain acceptance —indeed, the lack of enthusiasm for Churchill in May 1940—had much to do with his anti-appeasement record and rhetoric, including his many attacks on Chamberlain’s policy that stopped only in
September 1939 —which is why we cannot avoid a short description of the inclinations of Churchill’s former (and in May 1940 still latent) opponents.
The British tendency to appease Germany (the term “appeasement” did not become widely current until later, in 1938) had many sources. They included the gradual recognition of the British people that Germany had been treated unfairly by the Treaty of Versailles and thereafter. There was the almost universal wish of government and people (shared by Labour and pacifists) to avoid a British involvement in another war, especially another war in Europe, at almost any cost. To these wide and popular inclinations was added the willingness of many Conservatives and at least a portion of the upper classes to give some credit to the then-new types of authoritarian governments in Europe, largely owing to their seemingly determined anti-Communism. As Andrew Roberts wrote in his biography of Halifax: “Although today it is considered shameful and craven, the policy of appeasement once occupied almost the whole moral high ground. The word was originally synonymous with idealism, magnanimity of the victor and the willingness to right wrongs.”13 Pragmatism rather than idealism, we might say, and an unwillingness to risk involvement rather than magnanimity, but Roberts is not altogether wrong. He is certainly right in citing Sir Samuel Hoare that in March 1936 there was “a strong pro-German feeling in this country” and that the then prime minister Stanley Baldwin feared war, since that “would probably only result in Germany going Bolshevik.”14 (Churchill and others — both before and well after the war—declared that the last chance to deter Hitler was to move against him when he reoccupied the Rhineland in March 1936, as if that would have been an easy thing. They were wrong.)