Second World War, The

by Corrigan, Gordon

  In all, around 43,000 British civilians were killed in the Blitz and about three times that number injured, but by the time the campaign tapered off in the spring of 1941, when German eyes and assets were increasingly being directed eastwards, it had failed. It did not break civilian morale, it did not destroy, or even seriously reduce, industrial output, and nor did it provoke the population into demanding an end to the war, as the pre-war theories of Douhet* and his adherents predicted. A great deal of housing was destroyed, but much of this was in slum areas that would have had to be replaced anyway, and reconstruction provided employment. Frightful though living through constant air raids must have been, particularly for the inhabitants of London, which not unnaturally was the target of more German raids than any other city, the Luftwaffe was simply not equipped to do the job properly. Its principal bombers, the Heinkel 111 and Dornier 17, were medium bombers, and even the Junkers Ju 88, by far the most effective German bomber, could not match the load-carrying capabilities of the RAF’s heavy bombers such as the Short Stirling, the Handley-Page Halifax and, later, the Avro Lancaster. The He 177, the one German bomber that, depending on variant, could carry a decent load of up to 12,000 pounds, entered service far too late to be effective, was plagued by structural and engine problems, and was regarded as positively dangerous in a dive. Excellent though the Luftwaffe was as a ground-support arm, it had been configured (and equipped) as a tactical rather than a strategic air force, and to expect it to reduce major cities to rubble was just asking too much.

  If the Germans could neither invade England nor force a peace from the air, then there might be merit in going for weak points somewhere else. The Mediterranean had long been regarded as a British lake, at least by the British, and their bases in Malta and Gibraltar did allow the Royal Navy to dominate the sea lanes there. The possession of Gibraltar allowed the British to close the straits and prevent shipping from passing into or out of the Mediterranean. Force H, the Royal Navy task force based on Gibraltar, supported the search of all neutral shipping passing through the straits, and the prevention of ‘contraband’ (what the British considered to be war materials) passing to Italy or to Germany via Vichy French ports. If the Germans could take Gibraltar, or deny its use to the British, then that would have considerable strategic and propaganda value. Gibraltar had been held by the British since 1704. It was ceded to Britain in perpetuity by Spain on 13 July 1713 as part of the Treaty of Utrecht, which brought to a close the War of the Spanish Succession, in which the British, with their allies the Dutch and the Savoyards, were successful in preventing the French from bagging the Spanish throne and thus becoming a superpower. In the years since, the Spanish, rapidly forgetting that it was England that had twice saved them from becoming a lackey of France, rather regretted giving Gibraltar away and wanted it back.*

  Franco and the Falange party were in power because Germany and Italy had put them there. They might, just, have won their civil war without Hitler and Mussolini, depending upon what the USSR and Britain and France might or might not have done, but it would have taken them a lot longer and Spain would have been reduced to even more of a basket case than it already was. Franco had signed the Anti-Comintern Pact and was a fellow fascist. It was not unreasonable, therefore, for the Germans to assume that some gratitude might be forthcoming now that payback time had arrived. Accordingly, OKW was instructed to plan for the capture of Gibraltar, something that Grand Admiral Raeder, commander of the German navy, had been constantly urging.

  German reconnaissance parties were duly despatched in civilian clothes and with false passports to Spain, where they received full cooperation from the authorities. Wearing Spanish uniforms, the officers, at various times consisting of mountain infantry, artillery, engineer, secret intelligence service and parachute representatives, were able to get close to the border, observe the Brtish colony from Spanish houses and obtain an aerial view by travelling in Spanish civilian aircraft whose flight plans strayed slightly into British airspace. It soon became clear that what had appeared from Berlin to be a relatively simple operation would actually pose all sorts of problems. To begin with, the Royal Navy’s presence in and around the Rock precluded any form of seaborne landing. From the land the only line of approach was the 1,500 metres of open ground along the narrow isthmus linking Gibraltar with the mainland, and this had been mined by the British and was covered by a large number of artillery pieces. The British had evacuated most of the civilian population, and the garrison, estimated by Admiral Canaris’s intelligence service at around 10,000, including five infantry battalions making use of the forty or so miles of tunnels carved into the limestone rock, had supplies for eighteen months, making a siege impractical. Secondly, there was the problem of transporting the assault troops from Germany to Spain. The French and Spanish rail gauges were different, so troops and stores would have to be cross-loaded at the border; all rail lines went through Madrid, the capital, making it impossible to disguise troop movement on such a scale, and there was only one, rather bad, road from the mainland to Gibraltar. Finally, the lack of landing sites on the precipitous slopes and unpredictable winds around the rock ruled out the use of parachute troops or an Eban Emael-style glider assault.*

  OKW’s first stab at a plan for the capture of Gibraltar – Case Felix – predicated a force of one infantry regiment, one mountain regiment, two combat engineer battalions, one engineer construction battalion, the perhaps astonishing total of twelve artillery regiments of various types and large numbers of 88mm anti-aircraft guns capable of engaging point targets to take out the British guns emplaced in embrasures cut in the rock. As time went on more and more assets were considered necessary, until the final bill for Felix amounted to 65,400 men and 11,000 horses, the original assault force having been augmented by three observation battalions, a third combat engineer battalion, another fourteen medium and heavy artillery regiments and two smoke battalions. In addition there would be two motorized divisions and nine regiments of medium artillery in support, with a Waffen SS division as flank protection and communication and logistic units as required. Once the troops were assembled in their concentration area near La Linea, there would be a massive artillery bombardment of the rock and the harbour, followed by an attack by Luftwaffe bombers and dive-bombers on whatever British shipping was still afloat. Once that was over, the artillery would start again, aiming to keep the defenders in their tunnels, while the 88mm guns would neutralize the British coastal artillery, allowing the infantry and engineers to advance through the minefields under the cover of smoke.

  The units nominated for Felix were assembled for training in the French Jura region, where the limestone rock was similar to that of Gibraltar and where there were mountains that resembled it. To command the operation, General of Mountain Troops Ludwig Kuebler with Headquarters XLIX Corps was selected. A superb soldier, albeit a hard taskmaster, Kuebler had been severely disfigured by wounds sustained in the First World War, and was known to his men as the ‘Limping Nurmi’.* If anyone could take Gibraltar, Kuebler was that man and by late September 1940 training in rope work, fighting in built-up areas and tunnels, mine clearance and general physical fitness began in earnest. The logistic problems inherent in Felix would be horrific. The Spanish rail system was primitive and could only move one division every twelve days, so most of the troops would have to march, and it is between 1,000 and 1,400 miles from France to Gibraltar, depending upon where one crosses the Pyrenees. Virtually nothing could be obtained in country and the force would need over 13,000 tons of ammunition, 140 tons of food per day and 9,000 tons of petrol, oil and lubricants. Depots would have to be set up in advance and vehicle-repair workshops pre-positioned. Six to eight weeks’ notice would be needed to mount the operation and it would be almost impossible to hide what was going on from the British.

  All this, of course, assumed full Spanish agreement, and at first it looked as if this would be forthcoming. General Juan Vigón, the Spanish Minister of War, and his staff agreed
to improve airfields in southern Spain for use by the Luftwaffe, to improve the roads around Gibraltar and to cooperate fully in intelligence-gathering. While all assured the Germans that Spain would enter the war on the German side, no one was prepared to say when that might be. It was pointed out that Spain was impoverished from the Civil War and would need large quantities of arms, fuel and foodstuffs from Germany before she could commit herself to what might be a long war. A request by the Germans for Spain to cede one of the Canary Islands to them for use as an airbase was batted into the long grass, and, when the Spanish pointed out that they had territorial claims in North Africa and would like not only Gibraltar but French Morocco as well, discussions stalled.

  On 23 October 1940 Hitler and his entourage travelled by train through France to Hendaye, on the Spanish border, for discussions with General Franco. The Caudillo expressed his warm friendship for Germany and complete support for her war aims. He would certainly join the war but there were problems. Spain depended on imports for all her oil and also for much of her food, the latter coming mainly from Canada. A blockade by the Royal Navy would easily cut this lifeline and put Franco’s regime in serious danger. Certainly Spain regarded Gibraltar as hers, and she had other territorial claims too, but while she very much wished to enter the war she simply could not do so until Britian was defeated – which Franco assured Hitler could only be a matter of weeks, or months at most. Hitler was displeased at such ingratitude, but Felix without Franco could not be mounted. Things might change, however, and the plan, and training for it, continued. Franco’s only child, his daughter Carmen Franco Polo, in a book published in Spain in 2008 claims that her father feared that he might be kidnapped by the Germans at the Hendaye conference in order to force him to take Spain into the war, in a rerun of Napoleon’s snaffling of the Spanish royal family at the Bayonne conference in 1808. As Carmen was only fourteen at the time of Hendaye, it seems improbable that her father would have confided such matters to her, so this is more likely a reverie in hindsight. In any case, it seems very unlikely that the Germans, unscrupulous though they could be in matters of diplomacy, would risk imprisoning the head of state of a neutral power.

  By early 1941 the Germans had virtually given up hope of persuading Franco to join the war – the wily Caudillo kept professing his intention to do so but the intransigence of the British allowed him to fall back on the vulnerability of Spain to counter-actions on their part and to insist on the defeat of Britain as a precondition to a Spanish declaration.* In German eyes, there remained the possibility that the British might launch a pre-emptive invasion of Spain, and thus a further operational plan – Case Isabella – envisaged ten German divisions moving into Spain to counter a British landing. As the focus of German planning turned increasingly towards the East, so interest in Felix and Isabella waned. No doubt German staff officers were well aware of the quarter of a million French troops tied down in Spain in 1812 while Napoleon marched on Moscow, and, although Felix stayed on the books, the troops training for it were withdrawn for other duties, and eventually Isabella was watered down to a paper-only contingency plan to hold a defensive line along the Pyrenees with one armoured and two infantry divisions.28

  If the capture of Gibraltar would seriously discommode the British, then the capture of the Suez Canal as well would make the Mediterranean an Axis preserve. There would no longer be any risk of British intervention in the Balkans; the shortest British route to India would be severed; Italian troops would be available for operations outside their own immediate area; there would be no risk of the French colonies and the French fleet declaring for de Gaulle; and the Axis could obtain the raw materials of North Africa and be within striking distance of the Middle East oil fields. Some of the OKW planners considered that one German armoured division to support the Italians would be enough for Mussolini’s troops in Italian Libya to take the canal; others were sceptical as to the value of armour in the desert, but in any event Mussolini, against the advice of his generals based in Africa, was convinced that Italy could take Egypt without assistance, and hence all the glory would be his.

  In the meantime, the British, despite having no army left at home, did manage to show Hitler that they had no intention of giving in by themselves hitting at soft targets. In July 1940 they sequestered French warships in British ports in the United Kingdom and Egypt with little resistance, but when the fleet based in French North Africa declined either to join the Free French Navy, sail for neutral ports or render their ships incapable of action, the Royal Navy opened fire at Mers el Kebir, sinking one battleship, severely damaging two and killing a large number of French sailors. What the British did was entirely illegal, but needs must and, had Vichy France handed her fleet over to the Germans, re-entered the war on the German side, or had her fleet seized by the Germans, the balance of naval power would have shifted dramatically. The British action was entirely understandable in the circumstances, even if the French navy have still not forgiven Britain for it* and de Gaulle accused the British of glorying in it (which, apart from most British admirals, who thought the action unnecessary, they probably did). In September 1940 an attempt to take the port of Dakar, in Vichy French Senegal, by an amphibious operation in conjunction with the Free French was an inglorious failure (see below), largely because of over-optimism by de Gaulle, bad Allied security and the determination of the Vichy garrison, but in November carrier-borne aircraft of the Royal Navy sank three Italian battleships and damaged a large number of other ships at virtually no loss to themsleves in a raid on Taranto naval base, and, when the remnants of the fleet attempted to sail for safer ports, British ships inflicted yet more damage. Increasingly Hitler was forced to recognize that the British were not going to do the sensible thing and agree a peace: all that Germany could do for the moment was to nibble at the vulnerable points, although on several occasions Hitler stated that Britain’s only hope lay with Russia, and, once that problem was dealt with, Britain would have no further reason for fighting on.

  * * *

  In fact, Britain’s hope lay not with Russia but with the United States, as had been made clear by the Chiefs of Staff in their assessment of May 1940. Franklin Delano Roosevelt may well go down in history as the cleverest politician of his age. He did not want Britain to be defeated, not because he necessarily had any particular love for the British, although he preferred their system of government to that of Germany, but simply because he realized that it was not in the American interest for Europe and the British Isles to become a National Socialist fiefdom. As long as Britain could be kept in the war, then, however ineffectively the British might wage that war, Germany could never turn her attention exclusively elsewhere. Once convinced that Britain not only would but could continue the war alone, Roosevelt set about creating the conditions for American support. He had been in regular communication with Churchill since September 1939, when the president sent a letter of congratulation on Churchill’s appointment, or reappointment, as First Lord of the Admiralty, telling the recipient to ‘keep in touch personally, with anything you want to know about’. For the head of state of one nation to communicate directly with a minister in the government of another was an extraordinary breach of protocol, but it was well for the future of both countries that it continued. While Churchill’s influence on American foreign and military policy was less than Churchill thought it was, and while it lessened as the war went on and the United States moved from being a junior member of the alliance to its undisputed leader, there can be no doubt that the personal relationship between the two men was vital to British survival. Whatever Churchill’s faults as a war leader – and they were many – his achievement in obtaining American support, which from the earliest days he knew would be essential, cannot be gainsaid.

  Although no one in the United States of America would have openly cheered the coming of the Second World War, it was what got America out of the Depression. To begin with, however, the vast majority of the American people wanted nothing to do w
ith the war and the president had to move cautiously. In 1938, in the aftermath of Munich, he rather hoped and expected that the Senate Foreign Relations Committee would vote to repeal the Neutrality Acts, banning American war-making material from being supplied to any belligerent in a war in which the US was not engaged: they declined by twelve votes to eleven. A poll by Gallup in early 1939 showed that in the event of a European war 65 per cent of Americans thought Germany should be boycotted and 57 per cent were in favour of repeal of the Neutrality Acts, but, while 58 per cent of respondents thought that the United States would be drawn in, and 90 per cent would fight if America was invaded, only 10 ten cent would fight if America was not invaded. It appeared that, while public opinion was, just, sympathetic to Britain and France (or at least not well disposed to Germany), there was no mandate for American participation. FDR did his best to modernize the navy, and in 1936 he had forced through an increased naval budget against strong pacifist and non-interventionist opposition, but he had neglected the army, which in 1939 was 227,000 strong but with equipment for only 75,000. Rifles and machine-guns were first-war vintage, none of America’s aircraft was a match for those of the British and the French, never mind the Germans, and the field artillery was armed mostly with French 75mm guns brought home in 1918. However, the president selected the fifty-nine-year-old Brigadier-General George C. Marshall as Chief of Staff of the army, promoting him over the head of a number of his seniors, and this was an inspired appointment. Marshall was a master of logistics and organization, and in a war that would depend upon industrial output and would ultimately be won by materiel, his input as professional head of the US Army and later as a member of the Anglo-American Combined Chiefs of Staff Committee was crucial.