Napoleon's Hemorrhoids

by Phil Mason

  Hitler’s curious decision, early in his invasion of the West in May 1940, to halt the rapid advance of his tanks when they had bottled up the bulk of the British Army against the sea at Dunkirk, may have been the moment when Germany began to lose the war. Had he pressed his advantage and crushed the Allied forces, Britain’s powers of resistance may have been, like France’s, completely neutralised and the war effectively over.

  As it was, on 24 May, just a fortnight after German forces had crossed the border into France and the Low Countries, having made breakneck and virtually unhindered progress to the Channel, and with four Panzer divisions at the Aa canal just 12 miles from Dunkirk, Hitler astonishingly ordered his tank commanders to halt the offensive. The decision has mystified military historians to this day.

  By the time he relented two days later, the perimeter of Dunkirk had been sufficiently reinforced by the Allies to enable them to resist a further advance. It was too late. In the ‘miracle’ of Dunkirk that unfolded over the next 11 days, the Allies managed to evacuate 338,000 men to safety. They would go on to the Western Desert later that year and begin the turnaround in North Africa that would bring the war full circle five years later.

  Witnesses have given mixed reasons for Hitler’s decision, all acute misjudgements. His adjutant said that Hitler believed the British would fight until their ammunition ran out, and then give up, yielding the Nazis a huge prize of prisoners-of-war to be used in peace negotiations.

  To his valet, however, Hitler apparently suggested that, ‘It is always good to let a broken army return home to show the civilian population what a beating they have had.’ To his deputy, Bormann, it was his well-known ambivalence towards England that lay at the heart of his decision. He had purposely let the British escape, but had been disappointed with the reaction, complaining that ‘Churchill was quite unable to appreciate the sporting spirit of which I had given proof by refraining from creating an irreparable breach between the British and ourselves.’

  Whatever Hitler’s true motive, that single calamitous decision, although it would take time to show its full consequence, could well have been the pivotal point of the whole war.

  Despite the setback at Dunkirk, Hitler’s plans for invading Britain possibly came within a day or so of success. Only another strategic blunder by Goering in the management of the Battle of Britain air campaign allowed the RAF enough time to fend off the assault.

  In mid-July 1940, Hitler had ordered Operation Sealion to be launched on 15 September. The air offensive on the RAF bases in southern England was relentlessly maintained for seven weeks through the summer. Losses were running in the range of two fighters for every German plane downed. By 6 September, the RAF was on the point of exhaustion. That day was decisive. Britain had learned, through breaking the German code, that an invasion fleet was massing. Even though the Luftwaffe was receiving crippling damage in the air battles over Kent, a few more days of raiding could have put the remaining air fields out of action and rendered Britain without air cover to defeat the invasion.

  On the night of 6 September, however, Goering inexplicably changed the focus of the German attacks from the airfields and aircraft factories to raids on civilian London. That night, 68 bombers attacked the city instead, and the next night the first mass raid took place with over 550 bombers.

  The raids would continue for another 57 straight nights, wreaking havoc on the capital. They also gave the RAF a vital reprieve. The growing strength of the air opposition forced Hitler to temporarily postpone the invasion on 17 September. Three weeks later, he cancelled it for good.

  How close Britain came to losing its air cover and opening the way for invasion, and all that that might have meant for the collapse of the Allied effort, remains one of the most tantalising ‘if onlys’ of the Second World War

  Two years into the war, and shortly before Pearl Harbor, when Britain fought alone and American isolationism appeared to be as strong as ever, British secret intelligence successfully duped President Roosevelt into committing America to support the war effort against Nazism, using a faked map of the Western Hemisphere that suggested Germany had designs on the United States.

  In October 1941, Roosevelt was given the ostensibly German map by his intelligence chief, who was running the forerunner of the CIA. It showed South America reorganised into four mega-states and German bases in central America lying within bombing range of Texas and Florida.

  In a national radio address on 27 October, the President disclosed the existence of the map: ‘I have in my possession a secret map made in Germany by the planners of the new world order.… The geographical experts of Berlin,’ he said to the shocked country, ‘have ruthlessly obliterated all the existing boundary lines, bringing the whole continent under their domination.… This map makes clear the Nazi design not only against South America but against the United States as well.’

  Outrage followed. Sentiment rapidly turned in America. A week later the Senate repealed the Neutrality Act and the House of Representatives, till then an even stronger bastion of isolationism, soon followed. It gave Roosevelt a free hand to conduct covert operations against German submarines in the Atlantic on Britain’s side.

  The map had worked. It only emerged in the 1960s that it had been a product of a special group of British secret service operatives based in Station M, a forgery factory near Toronto over the border in Canada.

  The stunning intelligence coup was overshadowed just 40 days later when America was presented with its very own reason for entering the conflict.

  The base at Pearl Harbor missed multiple warnings before the Japanese attack on the morning of 7 December 1941 that could have prevented the full effects of the catastrophe.

  The US intelligence agencies had long broken the Japanese military codes, and on 6 December had intercepted 13 parts of a 14-section top-secret message from Tokyo to the Japanese embassy in Washington. The final part was decoded in Washington by 8am on 7 December (2am in Pearl Harbor). It instructed diplomats to present a note to the State Department that lunchtime, rejecting US demands for Japanese withdrawal from China. As soon as Secretary for War General Marshall saw it, he recognised it to be effectively the declaration of war.

  However, he would not see it for some hours. His subordinates were under strict instructions not to disturb the General during off-duty hours. It was a Sunday. They therefore waited until after the General’s regular morning horse ride and until he had arrived at his command office at mid-morning.

  Seeing the meaning of the message, Marshall ordered warnings to be issued to all the bases on the west coast and the Pacific (it was not clear where an attack might strike). They were sent at a minute past noon Washington time (6.01am in Pearl Harbor – still nearly two hours before the first Japanese planes struck).

  The messages reached all the bases intended – except Pearl Harbor. Poor atmospheric conditions prevented contact being made, so the warning had to be re-encrypted and sent as a telegram by commercial lines, first to San Francisco and then re-sent by overseas radio on to Honolulu. It did not arrive until 11.45, nearly two hours after the attack had finished. The courier who took the message from the telegraph company’s office round to the base apologised to the commander for his own delay, explaining he had taken shelter because of the raid.

  Other actions locally that morning proved to be missed opportunities for detecting the attack. At 3.30am, a minesweeper outside the entrance to the harbour spotted and fired on a periscope. (The Japanese deployed a fleet of five midget submarines as part of the raid. At least two managed to penetrate into the harbour.) They reported the incident, but it was not thought significant. So much so that as the minesweeper returned to port, the anti-submarine nets which were drawn open to allow it in were not returned to their action stations, leaving the mouth of the harbour wide open.

  Two more midget submarines were spotted at 6.45 and 7am in the vicinity of the harbour mouth. Both were depth-charged and thought to have been blown up.


  Lack of coordination of activity reports meant that these suspicious engagements were not seen in conjunction with mysterious radar sightings that were made just after 7am at a tracking station on the tip of Oahu island, 25 miles north of Pearl Harbor. The radar station saw on their screen a vast formation of approaching aircraft about 100 miles north and closing fast. They radioed the sighting to the base, but only two men were on duty there – since breakfast hour had just started – a switchboard operator and one officer. The officer, one Kermit Tyler, a lieutenant in training with the US Army Corps, picked up the phone and told the radar trackers, ‘Don’t worry about it.’ He assumed they were American craft that were due in from the mainland. The radar watchers packed up and went off to breakfast themselves. Nearly an hour’s warning was lost.

  The complete surprise of the raid increased damage and casualties enormously. There were simply no defensive preparations made. All of the battleships of the Pacific Fleet except one were moored in the harbour. They were all lost or severely damaged – 15 major battleships and cruisers, and three support vessels. 2,403 military personnel and civilians died, and over a thousand more were wounded.

  Another small twist of fate, however, worked in America’s favour that day. Fortunately for her later prospects in the Pacific theatre, all three of the navy’s aircraft carriers were out on manoeuvres. Had they been caught up in the destruction, the future might have turned out very differently. Over the next four years, the aircraft carrier was to emerge as the key to eventual success. Their absence in port that day was the single stroke of good fortune to emerge from the day’s appalling run of bad luck.

  The fall in February 1942 of Singapore, Britain’s pivotal maritime base in southeast Asia, has been described by historians as the most costly and humiliating defeat in Britain’s imperial history. It occurred through a series of fiascos in military planning, attitude and organisation, mostly avoidable. The collapse of the ‘Gibraltar of the Far East’, thought to be impregnable, with such little resistance, spurred the Japanese on, and signalled the historic decline of British power in the region. It was an important step on the path to an independent India, and marked the rise of Japan as a military and economic power.

  Astonishingly, at no time did the Japanese enjoy the superiority of numbers. Nor did they have much motor transport – they arrived on cheap bicycles. The attitude of the British authorities did not help either. They doubted Japanese prowess, largely due to a racist attitude against the ‘little yellow’ nation. According to the British military attaché, ‘Our chaps place the Jap somewhere between the Italians and the Afghans.’

  When the Japanese arrived from Malaya to the north, Singapore was undefended – all the guns pointed seawards; no one had anticipated an invasion from the other direction. According to author Philip Knightley’s account, the secretary of the golf club had refused to allow guns to be placed on his greens until his committee had been consulted, and last-minute defences were delayed for over a week in a dispute over local coolies’ wages. As bombs dropped on the city, street lights stayed on because no one could find the key to the master switch to turn them out. The Post Office even cut off phone calls to the front once the wartime regulation three minutes were up.

  The Japanese overran the ‘fortress’ island in just six days, capturing 85,000 Allied troops as prisoners of war. In his diary, the Japanese commander Tomoyuki Yamashita wrote, ‘My attack on Singapore was a bluff. I had 30,000 men and was outnumbered more than three to one.…I was extremely frightened that the British would discover our numerical weakness and lack of supplies and force me into disastrous street fighting. But they never did. My bluff worked.’

  One of the earliest signs that Hitler suspected he was losing the war came a year after his invasion of Russia – by a trick using cigar smoke. He paid a surprise visit to the Finnish leader, Marshal Carl Mannerheim, who was also engaged against the Soviet army, in June 1942.

  The visit was ostensibly to mark the Marshal’s 75th birthday. They met in a cramped railway carriage on the Finnish-Soviet front. It was intended to be symbolic of the mutual strength of the Allies, but Mannerheim discovered a deeper truth when he lit up a cigar in the Führer’s presence. Hitler was renowned for his abhorrence of smoking. Mannerheim is said to have deliberately blown the smoke into Hitler’s face. While adjutants froze expecting a reaction, Hitler meekly showed none.

  Mannerheim deduced that the war was going badly for Germany. Had Hitler shown any reaction, it would have been a sign of strength. By not batting an eyelid, Hitler gave away his weakness. He needed the Finns to keep their efforts up. He could not afford to antagonise their leader.

  At the end of the meeting, Mannerheim was certain of the outcome of the Nazi-Soviet conflict.

  The entire secret plan for the D-Day invasion of Normandy was lost by a British Intelligence officer only two months before the operation was set to go. It contained every detail of the radio wavelengths and codes to be used by the forces involved. It also revealed the layout and strengths of the assault formations and clues to the date.

  The officer, a deputy to Brigadier Lionel Harris, chief of the telecommunications branch of the Supreme Allied Headquarters, had somehow lost the bulky document while travelling home through London’s Waterloo station in April 1944. Harris suspected him of after-hours drinking. Unless planners were going to take a huge gamble, the breach of security would mean the abandonment of the operation that had been in preparation for nearly two years.

  Just as Harris was about to pass on the news to his senior, he received a phone call from the Lost Property Office of Scotland Yard, the capital’s police headquarters, reporting that a briefcase had been found with some papers that appeared to be concerned with wireless. According to one account, there was also a bottle of beer in the case as well. The police officer wanted to know whether the documents were important, and if so, could someone come round to collect them as he was short-staffed and could not spare anyone to deliver them.

  Harris himself dashed round to retrieve the plans. He found out that they had been handed in by a taxi driver, who had discovered the briefcase in the back of his cab after dropping off a somewhat worse-for-wear passenger at Waterloo station.

  British authorities were able to keep well informed of German troop movements across the Channel through one of the most outlandishly simple ruses. They had French intelligence operatives set themselves up as laundrymen. Having established a reputation for low prices and good service, they had secured business from most of the German divisions in the Channel coast region.

  Bizarrely, when the German units moved on, they showed a religious zeal for collecting their laundry, even leaving a forwarding address for the items that were not ready. As one account puts it, the German army ‘might be going to Valhalla, but they were not prepared to go without their linen.’

  This surveillance revealed that shortly before D-Day, the SS’s panzer divisions based elsewhere in France and between Antwerp and Brussels had not moved, indicating that they were still being misled by the Allied deception plan which was misdirecting the Germans to expect the invasion further east near Calais.

  The choice of date for launching D-Day rested heavily on the accuracy of three two-man weather forecasting teams, from the British Meteorological Office, the Royal Navy and the US military.

  The original date, 5 June 1944, was postponed at just two days’ notice because the two British teams forecast poor weather. The Americans disagreed, and even tried to force the British forecasters to change their prediction. The Brits stuck firm, wisely as it turned out – the 5th saw Force 6 winds and high seas.

  The planners were on a knife-edge. If they could not go on the following day, 6 June, the invasion would have to be put back until 19 June, the next time the tides would be right. Fortunately, on 4 June a break in the weather convinced the forecasters that the conditions for 6 June would be favourable. They gave the go-ahead. D-Day dawned with perfect weather and little swell.

/>   Few realised at the time how close the call actually was. Lawrence Hogben, one of only two of the forecasters left alive, recalled in 2004, that if they had been less confident and elected to delay until the 19th, the outcome of the invasion would have been an ‘utter catastrophe’.

  ‘As it happened, on the 17th, all six of us produced a forecast for the 19th for almost perfect conditions, so they would definitely have gone ahead.’ In fact, the 19th saw the biggest storm of the century come up the Channel. ‘If they’d landed that day, I doubt many landing craft would have even made it to the beaches. It doesn’t bear thinking about.’

  The British and Canadian landing beaches for D-Day were all originally to be named after fish – Gold, Sword and Jelly. The last name, however, ran foul of a 1943 edict from Churchill which had laid down for the first time general rules for naming military operations. It specified that those in which large numbers of men were expected to lose their lives should not be named with ‘a boastful or over-confident sentiment’ or be ‘of a frivolous character.’

  It was quickly realised that ‘Jelly’ would not suffice, and it became Juno, which, according to one account, was the name of the wife of one of the Canadian planners.

  The collapsing the German war effort after D-Day should have ended in the complete destruction of Paris as Nazi forces evacuated eastwards. The city was saved because the signals clerk on duty the night the order arrived from Berlin to blow up the city was an enthusiastic Francophile art lover. He sat on the instruction until it was too late to implement it.

  On the evening of 22 August, with the Allies still two days away from Paris, Hitler sent a telegram to the commander in the city instructing that ‘Paris must only fall into the hands of the enemy as a field of rubble.’ Explosives experts had been feverishly working for days to put in place explosive charges to destroy all 45 of the city’s bridges, the Eiffel Tower, the Elysee Palace and several industrial targets. As well as destroying the buildings, the explosions were designed to create a firestorm that would destroy the historic heart of Paris.