While full-scale rearmament had not been implemented before Munich, what spare British cash that was available for defence had been spent on the Royal Air Force. It was an article of faith, held not just by the British but by the Germans, Italians and Americans too, that aerial bombardment of civilian populations, which all sides publicly eschewed but privately feared and prepared for, would so cripple industry and destroy the population’s will that the nation subjected to it would have to give up the fight. In hindsight, of course, bombing from the air had almost the opposite effect on morale, both in Europe and in the United Kingdom, and industry simply moved underground or surrounded itself with anti-aircraft defences, but at the time the slogan ‘The bomber will always get through’ was widely believed.* In the event, more or less the only field in which Britain was militarily reasonably well prepared when war did come was in the nation’s air defence. Despite Chamberlain’s ‘peace in our time’ rhetoric, intended for public consumption both in the UK and abroad, it was becoming increasingly apparent that another European war was brewing up nicely. With the German occupation of the rump of Czechoslovakia, it was no longer a question of if, but of when. Britain and France issued a guarantee to Poland – neither country was in any state to actually do anything, but it was hoped that the very existence of the threat of military action might make the Germans stop and think.
In 1939 the Royal Navy was the largest in the world, but many of its ships were old, the planned number of new aircraft carriers had not been built, and the Washington Naval Conference of 1922–23 had forced Britain to lay up or destroy ships to reduce her fleet to the agreed tonnage. The army – volunteer and professional, unlike European conscript armies – was tiny, and spread over the Empire. Not only is a professional army expensive, and therefore small, but it does not have the turnover in manpower that a system of conscription does, and hence there is the difficulty of producing a first-line reserve available to expand the army in time of major war. This had been recognized in the early years of the century and led to the setting up of the Territorial Force by Lord Haldane and Major-General Sir Douglas (later Field Marshal Earl) Haig. This organization, which changed its name to the Territorial Army in 1920, consisted of civilians, or those who had served in the regular army but had no reserve liability, who trained in the evenings and at weekends and was supposed to mirror the regular army in organization and equipment, but in fact was poorly trained and scantily equipped. This was not the fault of its members who, discounting the drinking-club element, were by and large well-motivated patriots who wanted to ‘do their bit’, albeit not as a full-time career, but an inevitable consequence of the shortage of funding for and interest in defence between the wars. What few assets were made available naturally went to the regular army, with precious little left over for the part-timers. Thus, the British government’s announcement in spring 1939 that the TA was to be doubled in size was an empty gesture militarily, but one which might show the world that the British meant business. In February 1939 the government at last accepted a continental commitment and staff talks with the French, an admission that the British would have to provide land forces in Europe in the event of a war, an eventuality for which the armed services had been training for some years but which had been steadfastly denied by politicians who rather hoped that the British contribution would be a naval blockade and bombers over Berlin. In May of the same year the British government introduced conscription.
* * *
In Spain an attempted coup by the army supported by monarchists, industrialists, conservative landowners, the Church and the Falange fascist party against the Popular Front republic, which began in 1936 when the German and Italian air forces helped to ferry the Army of Africa to mainland Spain, had become a civil war. Both sides were incompetent and corrupt and perpetrated atrocities but the wider world saw it in simplistic terms: republic good, nationalists bad. The Republican side attracted support from the USSR in the shape of 1,000 aircraft, 900 tanks, 1,500 artillery pieces and large quantities of small arms ammunition, but no other formal governmental assistance. The British government preferred the Nationalist cause (as it was less likely to interfere with British trade and investment) while the French were broadly sympathetic to the Republicans, but both governments pursued a policy of non-intervention. The Civil War did, however, become a magnet for communists, anarchists, liberals and naive do-gooders from all over Europe and America. Republican forces included the so-called International Brigades (in practice, rather smaller than brigades) mostly raised under the aegis of Soviet or communist surrogates, unbeknownst to many of those joining them. The French government allowed a training camp to be established at Perpignan and permitted movement to Spain via Marseilles, and, while the brigades caught the imagination of the less sceptical, they were often untrained and poorly equipped.
While the Nationalists too had some volunteers from overseas, notably an Irish contingent led by ‘General’ Eoin O’Duffy, an old IRA warrior who attempted to form an Irish equivalent of the NSDAP – its members made the raised arm salute and uttered the cry of ‘Hail O’Duffy’ – and took around 700 Irish Catholics to Spain in the belief that they were fighting to preserve the mother church from the godless Republicans, they had considerable material support from Italy and Germany. In the three years of the war nearly 78,000 Italian troops served in Spain and Italy provided 759 aircraft, 157 tanks, 1,800 artillery pieces of various calibres and 320 million rounds of small arms ammunition. The Germans sent the Condor Legion, mainly an air force but also with a tank unit and some support services. Altogether, Germany provided 600 aircraft and 200 light tanks.20 While there was no direct German or Italian interest in Spain, a victory for the Nationalist cause would act as a counterweight to France and, in the event of war, might, by closing the Strait of Gibraltar, make things difficult for the British in the Mediterranean. Of more immediate use, perhaps, was the opportunity to practise tactics and operational procedures, particularly the use of dive-bombers, which would reap dividends in any coming war. The Spanish Civil War ended with a Nationalist victory in March 1939 and the new Caudillo (‘leader’), General Francisco Franco, joined Germany, Japan and Italy in the Anti-Comintern Pact.
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Thus far, the German armed forces’ only experience of actual combat since 1918 had been that of the Condor Legion. Italy, on the other hand, had been fighting in Libya until 1932, had committed eighteen divisions to Abyssinia in 1935 and suffered 10,600 casualties. Leaving two divisions and 200,000 colonial troops to maintain order, she had then supported the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War – thereby incurring another 14,000 casualties – and finally in April 1939 had invaded and annexed Albania, which Italians believed should have been theirs after 1918. The Italian Army and air force had either lost* or given to the Spanish Republicans huge amounts of military hardware and ammunition and had consequently run out of both. Originally inclined to be suspicious of Germany, Mussolini’s regime had been angered by the British sponsoring of (ineffectual) sanctions by the League of Nations against its Abyssinian adventure and the failure of the Hoare–Laval Pact. Italy had signed the Anti-Comintern Pact in 1937 yet in 1939 made it clear that she could not possibly go to war at Germany’s side without massive re-equipment of her armed forces – list supplied. It was a list that Germany could not possibly meet.
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In Soviet Russia of the mid-1930s Stalin’s position, seemingly impregnable after the death of Lenin, seemed, at least to him, to be under threat. The rapid pace of forced industrialization and the collectivization of farms with the movement of labour from the countryside into the towns produced great hardship at the lower levels of a society where there were supposed to be no levels, and there were outbreaks of unrest and criticism of Stalin’s policies, which even extended to delegates to the Seventeenth Party Congress in 1934 and members of the Central Committee. For Stalin the solution was straightforward: anti-Soviet elements, foreign spies, counter-revolutionaries, Trotskyites
, saboteurs and anyone who might even think of opposing Stalin must be eliminated, and the Great Terror began. It started in 1937 with the Red Army, then a force of nearly 1 million men in ninety infantry and sixteen horsed cavalry divisions, with around 5,000 ageing aircraft and 3,000 obsolete tanks.† Of the Supreme Military Soviet’s eighty members, just five survived; of the nineteen army commanders, thirteen went; and of 135 divisional commanders, 110 were purged. No one knows the exact figures for more junior officers but it has been estimated that up to 30 per cent were imprisoned or executed. What was left lacked staff experience and was of low morale. No officer had any confidence that he would still be in post the following week. Prior to the purge, there had been disagreement between the generals, who wanted to concentrate on technology, upgrading weapon systems and modernizing training, and the Central Committee, which insisted that all future wars would be class wars and that it was political ideology which mattered: the Red Army should go on the offensive because there would be pro-Soviet risings by the workers and peasants in the attacked countries. Of course, this was nonsense, but after the purge it was ideology that won and it would take a series of defeats at the hands of the Germans before military common sense was allowed to return, at least in part.
Stalin subsequently turned his attention to the civil service and local party officials, then to the management of industry and the higher levels of the party. Suspects were rounded up by the secret police, the NKVD (the OGPU with a new name), hastily tried and, after a grovelling confession had been extracted, either executed or sentenced to long, or even indefinite, terms in concentration camps. Of the 1,966 delegates to the Seventeenth Congress, which had changed the title of Stalin’s post from general secretary to secretary, ninety-eight were executed or imprisoned, and, of the seventy-one members of the Central Committee, fifty-five disappeared. By 1939 the terror had accounted for perhaps 20 million killed and 8 million jailed.21
Despite the havoc wreaked upon it by Stalin, the Red Army performed creditably against Japanese border incursions in 1937 and again in a nasty little campaign around Lake Khasan, south-west of Vladivostok, in July and August of 1938. From May to September 1939 there was a major operation involving 40,000 men, tanks and aircraft on the border of Inner Mongolia (Russian) and Manchuria (Japanese) that brought the Japanese to a halt. But this was a campaign of relatively low technology, when the Red Army was defending its own land. The USSR was in no state to engage in military adventures outside the USSR, nor to defend its territory against a first-class enemy – like the Germans. Given the problems with the Japanese in the East and the general condition of the Red Army, the August 1939 pact signed by Joachim von Ribbentrop for Germany and Vyacheslav Molotov for the USSR made enormous sense, whatever Hitler might have said about the Bolshevik menace in the past.
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The French general election of 1936 was won by the Popular Front, a loose coalition of left-wing parties including the communists and backed by the trade unions, headed by Léon Blum, who became prime minister. Blum announced an ambitious programme of nationalization and the extension of workers’ rights. A forty-hour week, increased pay scales, holidays with pay and compulsory arbitration of labour disputes were to be implemented, and the Bank of France and some major industries were taken into full or partial public ownership. All this cost money, which alienated the middle classes and business, whose taxes would have to be raised to pay for it, and also investors, who increasingly began to move capital out of the country. When the communists, under orders from Moscow, refused to cooperate with Blum, his programme became unsustainable, the Popular Front collapsed and Blum was replaced by the radical socialist Édouard Daladier. Increasingly, many Frenchmen thought that only some form of totalitarianism could restore France to her former glory, and by 1939 French society was fatally riven between those who clung to the old republican values, and those who thought it was time for a new beginning.
Much of the prestige of the French Army did not long survive the victory parades of 1919. The generals were thought by many to have fought the war in the wrong way and with little regard for the lives of their men. The interwar military establishment was in no doubt that it would have to fight another war against Germany eventually and home defence was the overriding priority of all military planning, with the defence of the empire and the sea lanes coming a poor second. The French Army, the largest of the three services, relied on a regular cadre of officers and NCOs of around 106,000, and an annual conscription of private soldiers, some of whom might become junior NCOs. In 1918 conscription had been for a period of three years (or until the end of hostilities, whichever came later), reduced to two years in 1921, to eighteen months in 1923 and to one year in 1928. At this stage, the annual intake of conscripts was 240,000, which produced a standing army of almost 350,000 and a reserve which was topped up by the annual discharge of the previous year’s 240,000. As long as Germany was held to the 100,000-man army laid down by Versailles, this was more than enough to defend the homeland and police the empire. When, however, it became obvious that Germany had embarked on rearmament, and this realization was coupled with a calculation which showed that because of the huge losses of men of breeding age in the first war, whose sons would have been eligible for military service, the annual intake of conscripts from 1936 onwards would drop to 120,000, the term of conscription was raised to two years in 1935, which maintained the army at its 350,000 strength.
Although it was large in numbers of men, much of the French Army’s equipment was outdated and in need of modernization. Despite its pacifist tendencies, the Popular Front government accepted that rearmament was essential and voted the funds for a massive increase in the production of tanks and anti-tank guns. As it happened, industry could not cope and by the time war came nothing like the planned quantities were available. The French defence lobby envisaged the next war as being long and defensive: France would hold her frontiers until blockade, allies and industrial production could combine to weaken Germany to such an extent that one final offensive would end the war. A huge proportion of the defence budget went into the Maginot Line, a series of fortified zones along the Rhine and running from the Belgian frontier in the north to the Swiss border and into southern France. The Line was highly sophisticated with underground barracks, hospitals, gun emplacements, and stores and ammunition depots. It was an attempt to substitute steel and concrete for men’s lives and is often derided as a white elephant. In fact it did exactly what it was supposed to do: the Italians in 1940 failed to break through it and the Germans only mastered it by outflanking it. Had it extended around the Belgian frontier – impossible politically – then the story of the Battle of France might well have been different.
While the military establishment thought in terms of a lengthy defensive war, the foreign policy of successive French governments was to counter the threat of German aggression by a network of alliances, with Poland,Yugoslavia, Romania and Czechoslovakia. A military agreement with Italy in 1935 was regarded as a great coup by the French – now they could divert divisions from the Italian to the German border. This understanding was short-lived, however, and fell apart because of British insistence on sanctions being applied to Italy in the latter’s Abyssinian campaign. The difficulty with building alliances and mutual assistance pacts was that, should Poland, Yugoslavia et al be attacked by Germany, the only assistance France could give would be by an invasion of Germany from the west, and the French Army was organized, trained and equipped for a defensive war. Thus, French foreign and defence policies were at loggerheads, a dichotomy that was never resolved until war and defeat resolved it for them.
And that war came soon enough, for in the early hours of 1 September 1939 1.5 million German soldiers in sixty-seven divisions, supported by air and naval forces, invaded Poland.
3
GO!
The army permitted to Germany by the Versailles settlement was limited to 100,000 men, all to be professionals so that no sizeable reserve cou
ld be built up. The limit for the navy was 15,000. There were strict limitations on the numbers and types of weapons, and the amount of ammunition that could be held for them; there were to be no tanks, no aircraft and no gas, nor the means of delivering it, and there was to be no general staff. That in a mere twenty years this tiny military rump, barely sufficient to keep order internally, was transformed into a force of 4.5 million, which could send 1.5 million men, including six armoured divisions fielding 3,600 of the forbidden armoured vehicles, into Poland had a certain amount to do with Hitler and the NSDAP but a great deal more to do with the German army itself. The army of the Weimar Republic, the Reichswehr, was a very carefully selected body. Only the best of the officers and NCOs of the old Hohenzollern military machine were retained, and all ranks were trained to think two ranks up; thus sergeants were expected to be able to command companies, company commanders brigades (regiments in German parlance) and battalion commanders divisions. Versailles had built in safeguards to prevent the Germans from creating a cadre for future expansion (by, for example, having more officers and senior NCOs than needed, who would manage expansion when it came), but Generaloberst* Hans von Seekt, Commander-in-Chief from 1920 to 1926, found numerous loopholes and ensured that the army slipped through them. A Prussian of the old school and still a monarchist at heart, he had no sympathy with Weimar democracy and was determined to keep the army out of politics, regain respect for it within society and prepare it for the war that would surely come to restore Germany to her rightful place in the world. It was von Seekt who arranged for the German army to experiment with tanks and aircraft deep inside Russia, who re-created the Great General Staff under inoffensive titles (the ‘Head of the Troops Office’ was actually the Chief of the General Staff) and who encouraged preparations for mechanization.
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