Second World War, The

by Corrigan, Gordon

  On 17 July, Rommel was badly wounded when his staff car was shot up by an RAF fighter. He was evacuated to Germany and command of Army Group B was assumed by Kluge, who combined it with the post of Commander-in-Chief West. On 18 July the Americans captured St Lô and the second phase of Overlord could begin – the breakout. The plan was for the British to draw the German armour on to their front – Operation Goodwood – so as to allow the Americans to strike south – Operation Cobra – and in that Goodwood did draw the German armour over to the east and the Americans did break out it succeeded, but Montgomery’s hopes that he might break out too, with objectives set miles inland, were dashed and the subsequent cover-up, with Montgomery claiming that all had gone to plan when it clearly had not, only served to dent his reputation and increase American exasperation with his manner and dislike and distrust of him. Air Marshal Tedder, Eisenhower’s British deputy, recommend that Montgomery be sacked, and, although this did not happen – indeed, by now his fame as a great British hero was such that he was fireproof – it scuppered any chance he had of continuing as overall Land Forces Commander once the battle for Normandy was over. By August the Allies were advancing across Brittany and south into Normandy, and it became obvious that the German Seventh Army was in danger of being encircled and cut off. The obvious thing to do was to withdraw that army and pull it back to a river line – possibly the Seine – where it could defend properly and impose maximum delay on the Allies, but this was not going to happen.

  On 20 July a group of disgruntled army officers had attempted to assassinate Hitler by exploding a bomb in the conference room of his headquarters in East Prussia. It failed to kill the Führer and only intensified his by now paranoiac suspicion that everybody was against him. Post-war Germany has made much of the resistance to Hitler, painting the German people as victims of Nazism rather than its enthusiastic supporters. All this is, of course, nonsense – in reality there was very little resistance, organized or otherwise, to either Hitler or the NSDAP regime. The attempt to remove Hitler only arose because he had stopped giving Germany victories. Those very few officers who were involved in the bomb plot were far from being liberal democrats – rather they were firm believers in aristocratic rule and in German hegemony – but, now that Hitler no longer seemed able to guarantee that hegemony, they hoped to engineer a peace with the Western Allies that would preserve German polity and allow them to turn their full attention to countering the Russian menace. One of the results of the bomb plot was the inevitable rounding up and execution of anyone remotely suspected of sympathizing with it, including Rommel, who was given the option of suicide and a state funeral and a pension for his widow, or going on trial, and Field Marshal Kluge, who was relieved by Field Marshal Model in both his appointments, summoned back to Berlin and took poison on the way. (The likely truth is that both Rommel and Kluge took the attitude, ‘If it works, count me in; if it doesn’t, then I know nothing about it.’*) Another result was an absolute refusal by Hitler to countenance the withdrawal of even a company, thus preventing the generals from fighting the war of movement that alone might have allowed them to salvage something from the campaign.

  With the failure of Fall Lüttich, an attempt to counter-attack through to Mortain and destroy the American thrust down the west coast of Normandy, and, when it was obvious that the entire Seventh Army was likely to be surrounded in the Falaise pocket in the middle of August, Model was unable to persuade Hitler that only a withdrawal before the pocket closed could save the army from annihilation. Even SS Obergruppenführer Sepp Dietrich, commanding I SS Panzer Corps, an old chum of Hitler’s from the early days and one of the very few of Hitler’s intimates to argue with him (he had protested several times to Hitler about the killing of Jews), remarked when asked to intercede with the Führer that to do so would be the quickest way to get himself shot. When Model finally persuaded Hitler to agree to his withdrawing the army on the premise of concentrating for a counter-attack (one he had no intention of making), it was too late. The gap closed when the British from the north met the Americans from the south at Montormel on 19 August and, although 1 SS Panzer Division Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler managed to hold open a few routes to allow some 30,000 men to escape east, they had to abandon nearly all their tanks, guns and vehicles. Ten thousand German soldiers were dead, 50,000 were taken prisoner and 500 tanks and 700 guns were destroyed or captured. It was the end of the German Seventh Army. The Normandy campaign was over and the road to Paris was open.

  15

  THE SEA AND AIR WAR

  Most of this book concentrates on the land war, but it would be folly in the extreme to think that the war was fought and won solely, or even primarily, by armies. Navies were vital to its prosecution too, and for obvious reasons. Naval forces operate in both offensive and defensive roles. Offensively, they can destroy enemy ships, deliver troops to effect amphibious landings, provide shore bombardment, blockade enemy ports, interfere with enemy trade and supply arrangements and project air power in areas where land-based aircraft cannot operate. Defensively, they can protect trade routes, defend territorial waters, escort convoys, lay and clear minefields and guard aircraft carriers. They can also, and usually by deploying submarines, carry out reconnaissance and sabotage missions, gather intelligence and facilitate clandestine landings.

  Britain has been a maritime power since at least the time of Alfred the Great. As an island nation, she could survive without an army; without a navy, however, she would long ago have fallen into the hands of European adventurers. For much of Britain’s history the British Army has been, in the words of Admiral Sir Jackie Fisher, a missile fired by the Royal Navy. Without a navy there could have been no Dynamo and no Ariel, the operations that brought home 400,000 British and Allied troops from Europe in 1940, and without Dynamo and Ariel it is questionable whether Britain could have stayed in the war. It was largely fear of the Royal Navy that convinced Hitler, like Napoleon before him, that an invasion of England in 1940 or 1941 was not a starter. Equally, Britain, as a net importer of food and raw materials, would soon have starved without a navy, and operations in the Mediterranean could never have been mounted and supported without a fleet. The United States, too, was a sea power and the fighting in the Pacific would simply not have been possible without the US Navy and the ability of America’s shipyards to build warships at a rate that would have seemed impossible before the war.

  Although the London Naval Agreement of June 1935 allowed Germany to build up to 35 per cent of the total Royal Naval tonnage, and up to 45 per cent in submarines, when war broke out the Royal Navy was, at least on paper, far superior to the German and Italian navies combined. Only in submarines did the Axis powers outnumber the British. If the French fleet is added to that of the British, the numerical superiority is overwhelming, and, even after the removal of the French from the equation following their surrender in 1940, the total of British warships still compared favourably with the Germans, Italians and Japanese put together. But the figures were deceptive: lack of funding between the wars meant that many of Britain’s warships were obsolescent, even obsolete, and the recognition by most naval experts that the aircraft carrier had replaced the battleship had been opposed vehemently by, among others, Churchill, who as Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1927 cut the Naval Estimates so that the seven carriers that had been planned to be built were reduced to three. The German navy had lost all its capital ships at the end of the First World War, when they had been interned at Scapa Flow while the victorious Allies argued as to their disposal,* and it now really only had to worry about coastal defence (although it did have wider ambitions, supported by the building of pocket battleships and heavy cruisers intended for commerce raiding); the Italians had no interests outside the Mediterranean and the Gulf, and the Japanese had only to look to the Far East. The Royal Navy, however, had worldwide responsibilities even if the Far East had been almost abandoned, and, although sizeable, the fleet in Alexandria could not guarantee the protection of mercha
nt shipping in the Mediterranean in time of war. It was fortunate that the ambitious German naval expansion programme was predicated on war not breaking out before 1944. One of the few advances in British naval preparedness was actually a reversion, when the responsibility for naval aviation was returned to the navy from the RAF, where it had occupied a very low priority for the air marshals, who were more concerned, understandably, with the defence of the United Kingdom than with the projection of power overseas.

  Like the British Army, the Royal Navy suffered from Churchill’s delusion that he was not only a great exponent of land warfare but a great naval strategist as well. Having been First Lord of the Admiralty (the minister responsible for the navy) twice, he knew how the Admiralty worked, and in the early days of the war took with great glee to moving individual ships around the world, usually to the detriment of the war effort. Once he became prime minister as a result of the Norway debacle, for which he was largely responsible, he had less time to interfere with the minutiae of naval operations, but still took to sending stirring and impractical signals to individual naval commanders. In Admiral Sir Dudley Pound, Churchill had a First Sea Lord (the professional head of the navy) who was unable to stand up to him* or to prevent him appointing old chums to important posts – for example, the sixty-seven-year-old retired Admiral of the Fleet the Earl of Cork and Orrery as Flag Officer Narvik; the sixty-eight-year-old and nine years retired Admiral of the Fleet Sir Roger Keyes as Chief of Combined Operations; and the very dubious Captain Lord Louis Mountbatten, with his accelerated promotion to commodore (and eventually to vice-admiral, lieutenant-general and air marshal), to succeed Keyes. Nor could Pound prevent him from insisting on the despatch of the Prince of Wales and the Repulse to Singapore without air cover, with fatal results. Churchill did come up against tougher opposition from individual commanders, and the navy generally closed ranks to block his more lunatic fancies; he could never have got away with a naval equivalent of the Cairo Purge (when the supine acquiescence of the CIGS allowed Churchill to sack three generals). Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham in particular suffered from Churchill’s attempts to manage the war in the Mediterranean from Whitehall, and had no qualms about dealing with him in the manner of General Seydlitz’s words to Frederick the Great at the Battle of Korndorf: ‘After the battle Your Majesty may have my head, but in the meantime kindly allow me to use it’ – so much so that, when Pound died and Cunningham was his obvious replacement, Churchill did his best to appoint a less robust officer. As the admirals’ trade union refused to cooperate, Cunningham was appointed.

  In the first war, the Royal Navy had been able to deploy one of its primary weapons – the blockade – to considerable effect, and by 1917 the civilian population of Germany was not far above starvation level and the German army was starved of vital raw materials such as rubber. In this war a blockade would have far less effect. Up to June 1941 Germany was able to import what she wanted from Russia, and even after that the length of coastline controlled by or sympathetic to Germany and the extent of German conquered territories largely negated the effects of any blockade, always assuming, of course, the Royal Navy had possessed the assets to mount one. Of the many naval campaigns of this war, the most critical, after the removal of the army from Europe to fight elsewhere, was the protection and preservation of the sea routes to and from Britain, particularly that from North America. Known as the Battle of the Atlantic, the fight to keep the trade routes open went on for virtually the whole of the war. If it had been lost, Britain could not have stayed in the war and, if Britain had left the war, she would not have been available as the springboard for eventual re-entry into Europe, and the United States may well have written Britain and Europe off as a lost cause and concentrated on Japan. Hitler’s Germany knew, as had the Kaiser’s Germany in 1914–18, that the only way in which Britain could be defeated was by starving her population of food, her industry of raw materials and her armed forces of armaments.

  The Battle of the Atlantic was the single longest campaign of the war and was fought between German submarines and a few surface ships on the one hand and British and ultimately American surface ships and aircraft on the other. Initially, the British were more concerned about surface raiders than about submarines. The Germans deployed warships disguised as merchantmen and warships proper, which by June 1941 had sunk 900,000 tons of British and Allied shipping. The British had forced the pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spee to scuttle herself off Montevideo, Uruguay, in December 1939, but the first major naval engagement of the war came in May 1941 when the battleship Bismarck and the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen* on a raiding mission sank the battlecruiser HMS Hood – there were only three survivors – and damaged the brand-new battleship HMS Prince of Wales. Although there were all sorts of excuses, and although the Bismarck was sunk by the Royal Navy a few days later, it was a severe jolt to British morale.

  The real threat, however, was to come from submarines, and the first sinking by a submarine came only hours after the declaration of war on 3 September 1939 when, 400 miles north-west of Ireland, the U-30 sank a passenger liner, the Athenia, outbound from Glasgow for Halifax, Canada, causing the deaths of 118 passengers, of whom twenty-two were American citizens. The German navy was under strict orders to obey the Hague Convention, which forbade the attacking of passenger ships without first surfacing and allowing the crew and passengers to take to the lifeboats, and, to be fair to the captain of the U-boat, he genuinely thought he was attacking an armed merchant cruiser. As it was, the Germans denied all knowledge, saying it was a British plot to stir up anti-German feeling, while to the British it was a gift, winning them sympathy and increased support in the United States. The British now instituted anti-submarine measures, including the convoy system, but even so to begin with the Germans seemed to be winning. From the outbreak of war until May 1940 German submarines sank 562 British, Allied and neutral (but bound for Britain) ships, totalling 1.75 million tons; from then until February 1941, with the whole of the French and Norwegian coasts at their disposal as bases, the German submarine fleet sank 1,377 ships and over 5 million tons, including twenty-one out of thirty and twelve out of forty-nine of the ships in two east-bound convoys following behind each other in October 1940. Over the next four months, from March to June 1941, it accounted for 582 ships and over 2 million tons. Losses were now exceeding new builds and between September 1940 and June 1941 the British merchant fleet was reduced from 18 million tons to 15 million, and, although some of this could be made up from chartered or seized foreign shipping, total imports into the UK dropped sharply. Before the war, the British had calculated that their normal peacetime imports were between 50 million and 60 million tons, and that in time of war they needed 47 million. In fact, imports fell from 44 million tons in the first year of the war to 31.5 million in the second year and to 23 million in 1942. Food rationing, the ploughing up of golf courses and the disappearance of luxury goods from the shops made this bearable, but it could not go on.

  One of the problems was that Royal Navy escorts could only take the convoys across the Atlantic as far as 300 miles west of Ireland before they had to either turn back for the next convoy or take over one coming the other way, and with the deployment by the Germans of the Fw 200C Condor, a long-range reconnaissance bomber, the convoys were vulnerable beyond that range. Countermeasures besides the building of more escort vessels included the arming of merchant vessels, the conversion of some into aircraft carriers by the fitting of a flight deck and others given a catapult to launch a single Hurricane or Hurricat fighter which, having theoretically dealt with the Condor, would either land at the nearest friendly air base or ditch in the sea with the pilot being plucked to safety. (Those pilots who crash-landed in the (neutral) Irish Free State were interned in a camp near the border with (British) Ulster and the gate left ajar.) Fortunately, the Germans were slow to give priority to the building of submarines over and above other types of ship, only doing so in July 1940,but the measure had a significant
effect: whereas the number of U-boats that could be at sea at any one time (although not all ever were) in January 1941 was twenty-two, in July of that year it was over sixty.