Second World War, The

by Corrigan, Gordon

  And then Montgomery did something that was totally out of character: normally cautious, meticulous, painstaking, ponderous, he proposed a lightning thrust to bypass the West Wall, the German frontier defences and make it unnecessary to clear the Germans out of the Scheldt. He planned to drop airborne troops on 17 September to seize a series of bridges over rivers all the way from the Dutch border to the town of Arnhem on the lower Rhine – Operation Market – and then drive an armoured corps along a sixty-mile corridor through German-held territory to link up those bridges – Operation Garden. Having thus outflanked the West Wall, the British would then turn right and penetrate into the heart of the Ruhr, Germany’s industrial heartland. Eisenhower approved the plan and gave Montgomery logistical priority for it. It didn’t work: the American 82 and 101 Airborne captured their objectives but the British 1 Airborne landed too far away from the bridge at Arnhem and only one battalion got there; their second lift was too late; XXX Corps with its armour took far longer than was planned to get through the corridor and Allied intelligence had failed to pick up, or had ignored, the fact that two SS panzer divisions were refitting in the area. When it all ended in failure with the evacuation of the remnants of the British Airborne division on 25 September, 2,500 dead were left behind and 4,500 went into captivity.

  Montgomery made sure that no stain attached to him, blaming Lieutenant-General Sir Richard O’Connor,* who was in command of one of the flanking corps, and continued to protect his longtime toady Lieutenant-General Brian Horrocks, commanding XXX Corps, to whom, after Montgomery himself, the blame should really have been attached. Montgomery then had O’Connor sacked in November, allegedly for not being sufficiently tough with the commanders of American units under his command. With Market Garden a failure – and it is difficult to see what it could have achieved even if it had succeeded – the Allies were still without Antwerp, and its clearance had been put back by several weeks.

  On the German side, Rundstedt thought that, if he could only delay the Allies until the onset of bad weather, then there would be a chance to go on to the offensive again, while Hitler and many of the officers at OKW were convinced that the Anglo-American alliance with the Soviets could not last. Rundstedt was facing forty-eight Allied divisions plus the Free French over afrontof 300 miles from the River Scheldt to the Swiss border, with his own panzer divisions able to muster only five or ten tanks each and with only eleven infantry and four motorized divisions up to strength and capable of offensive action. The West Wall had never been the obstacle that the Allies feared it would be, but now the Todt Organization, Hitler Youth and other party organizations were working on it under the supervision of the Gauleiters and local military headquarters. Additionally, towns that lay in the path of the Allied advance were declared fortresses, as were the Channel ports, to be held to the last, rear areas were being combed out for men who could be sent to the front, and stragglers were being rounded up and fed in as reinforcements.

  Eventually, on 28 November 1944, the Allies were at last able to get a naval convoy into Antwerp, and, with the supply situation now eased somewhat, Eisenhower’s next priority was to get a bridgehead across the Rhine. But the Germans still had a powerful shot in their locker.

  17

  THE HOME WAR

  After the war, it was in the interests of all those who had lived under German or Italian occupation to present themselves as having actively resisted, or at least not to have collaborated. The tongue-in-cheek comment that until 1944 in France there were 40 million collaborators and after 1944 there were 40 million resistance fighters is an exaggeration, but it makes the point that in most occupied countries the bulk of the population were concerned with surviving, with their own lives and with those of their families, and, whatever they may have thought of the occupiers, they tended to keep their heads down and stay out of trouble.

  German occupation varied widely depending on the country: in general terms, it was fair but firm in the West and ranged from mildly brutal to utterly bestial in the East. The inhabitants of Western European countries were seen as either racially akin (Scandinavia, Holland, Flemish Belgium) or not so far removed as to fall into the racially inferior category (France, Wallonia). In Poland and the Soviet Union, however, the Slav populations were generally Untermenschen – ‘subhumans’ – to be exploited without regard to legal niceties, or indeed common decency, while active partisan activity in the Balkans meant that there too control measures were harsh. In large parts of the Soviet Union the Germans were initially seen as liberators from the hated Russian or communist yoke and as we have seen it was one of the major errors of the German government and Wehrmacht that they did not tap into this. They did employ large numbers of Crimean Tatars, Ukrainians and Latvians as military auxiliaries, although the Latvians and other citizens of the Baltic States who came into German employ were mainly of German ethnic origin. In Poland, ethnic Germans, now German citizens, were conscripted into the army like any other German, but large numbers of ethnic Poles were also employed, ex-soldiers to whom a uniform, pay and three square meals was vastly more attractive than languishing in a prisoner-of-war camp.

  While the image of the Italians, at least in British minds, is one of harmless accordion-playing and Chianti-drinking military incompetents, their occupations were in fact remarkably harsh. In areas of Libya that had been overrun by the British and then reoccupied by the Axis, the Italian authorities shot large numbers of Jews (mainly Italian Jews but some French as well) and Arabs whom they suspected (often correctly) of driving Italian colonists off their land in British-controlled areas. Italian attitudes to Jews varied: in Libya they happily exterminated them, yet in the sliver of France occupied by Italy the Italians refused to hand over the Jews living there to either the Milice Française* or to the Germans for deportation to extermination camps in the East. In Italy itself Mussolini did agree to deport his Jews but the machinery for doing so worked so slowly that very few actually went.

  It is, though, the French Resistance that has attracted the most post-war coverage on the page and screen, but it has to be said that much of this is fiction. The fall of France in 1940 came as a mind-numbing shock to most French men and women, who thought that the British had left them in the lurch, had never heard of the obscure brigadier-general who broadcast to them from London and in the main pinned their faith on Marshal Pétain, the hero of Verdun who had been brought back from his post as ambassador to Spain to be deputy prime minister and then head of state and who negotiated the surrender. To many, perhaps most, Frenchmen, Pétain had maintained France as a nation, still with her empire, still with her fleet and still allowed an army of 100,000. It was true that the north-western départements, Nord and Pas de Calais, were governed directly by the German military administration in Belgium; that three fifths of the country, including the area around Paris and the coastal strip, was occupied by German troops; that the portion of Lorraine and all of Alsace that were German between 1871 and 1918 were annexed to the Reich with its men (generally not unhappily) conscripted into the German army, and that France was required to pay US$10mperday towards the occupation costs; but nevertheless nearly half the country was not occupied, the Church was not unhappy to see the demise of the anti-clerical Third Republic and Papa Pétain would surely ensure that all would be well in the end.

  Indeed, Pétain’s government, based in Vichy, was not established by a coup nor forced on France by the Germans but was a perfectly legal government recognized by most of the world including the United States and most of the British Dominions and by the UK until Vichy broke off diplomatic relations after the British attack on the French fleet in Mers el Kebir in July 1940. Even then, unofficial contact was maintained and the British assured the Vichy regime that they would permit the French to retain their empire after the war, would not appropriate French colonies and would allow France to import food from her North African colonies through the British blockade. In return, Vichy promised not to attempt to recover the colonies that h
ad gone over to de Gaulle and not to allow the rest of the French fleet to pass into German hands. The fiction that Vichy ruled not only unoccupied France but the occupied portion as well was maintained, and outwardly that was true in so far as the civil administration was concerned, but behind the scenes in occupied France gendarmes and civil servants who did not act as the Germans wished were swiftly removed.

  Most Frenchmen assumed that Britain could not long outlast their own surrender: after all, if the Germans could beat the finest army in Europe – that of the French – how could the puny British Army possibly resist? The Royal Navy would be destroyed by the Luftwaffe and Britain would have to make what accommodation she could, and in fact around 20,000 Frenchmen volunteered for the SS, in either the Charlemagne Division or the French Storm Brigade. It was the French who first used the term collaboration, but, far from having the pejorative connotation attached to the word now, then it simply meant cooperation. In occupied France there were those – not all of them fascists – who welcomed a German victory, whose future depended on it and who worked enthusiastically to ensure it, as allowing a regeneration of France from the old corrupt and incompetent democratic regime, and who saw a future French nation as having a major part to play in a German-dominated Europe. In Vichy, while the fact of French defeat in war was accepted, collaboration only went as far as to ensure the survival of a French state, although as the war went on the little independence given to Pétain was constantly whittled away. Vichy France very quickly introduced anti-Jewish laws – and its ministers were at pains to point out that these owed nothing to the Germans – which were actually stricter than the Nuremberg Laws. The latter defined a Jew as someone who had at least three Jewish grandparents and who practised the Jewish religion, whereas Vichy’s rule required only two grandparents and converts were not exempt. While Vichy did not run its own extermination programme, it cooperated wholeheartedly by rounding up Jews in the unoccupied zone and returning those who fled from the German-controlled areas.

  Active, as opposed to passive, resistance to the Germans came only slowly, and, when it did, it was divided and expended more time in squabbles between the various groups than it did in opposing the occupiers. Up to June 1941 the French Communist Party, which was persecuted by Pétain’s government but sizeable none the less, supported Germany in accordance with the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact; thereafter, when it did start to organize anti-German resistance, its members were hunted down by the Germans and by Vichy. To begin with, the methods were simple: the writing of graffiti on walls, then the publication of clandestine newspapers and eventually the assassination of Germans waiting for a train or shopping, actions which inevitably attracted reprisals in the shooting of hostages, these latter drawn from the many communists already detained by the French government on the outbreak of war. In due course the communist groups coalesced into the Front National, but they were not the only organization. There were Combat, based in Marseilles and run by an ex-army officer; Libération, based in Lyons and headed by an ex-navy officer; Franc-Tireur, based in Avignon and made up of leftist Catholics; Sabotage-Fer, whose speciality was derailing German troop trains; and the Maquis, originally young men hiding from compulsory forced labour in Germany but whose numbers were swelled by officers of the Vichy army, disbanded when Germany occupied all of France after the Torch landings.

  These were the main groupings but there were many others, some locally based, some centred on political parties or determined by religious or class affiliation. All were jealous of their own areas of expertise and of the territory in which they worked, lacked cohesion, were suspicious of each other and, initially at least, lacked structure and organization. Most were particularly contemptuous of any attempt from London to direct their activities, whether by British or American agents or by de Gaulle’s Free French, and, despite the setting up of the Conseil National de la Résistance in London in 1943, it took another six months before the main resistance groups in France agreed to be part of it – and, crucially, to accept that it would be de Gaulle and his Free French who would form a French government once the Germans had been driven out. Despite the publicity given to acts of resistance at the time and since, it is probable that their military contribution was slight, although their attacks on roads and railways prior to and just after Overlord did hamper German movement up to a point. After the war, General of Artillery Walter Warlimont, who had been Deputy Chief of the Armed Forces Operations Staff at OKW, was asked what effect the Resistance had had on German military operations. ‘What resistance?’ was his reply. The achievement and legacy of French resistance, therefore, was in ensuring an agreed government of liberated France, rather than the civil war that many feared.

  * * *

  In the case of Denmark, the German invasion of the country in April 1940 did not involve a declaration of war by either side. A German ultimatum was presented, the Danish parliament spent four hours debating it and then accepted it. As there was no war, there was no surrender, and the fiction that German troops were in Denmark to guarantee that country’s neutrality was accepted, at least on the surface. For the first three and a half years, it was a mild occupation: the king remained as head of state and rode around the streets of his capital without an escort conversing with his people; the Social Democrat (socialist in British terms) government continued to function almost as normal; the courts and the judicial system carried on; and, although the army was reduced from 7,000 to 2,000, the police remained Danish and were actually increased and given more weapons. Political parties were tolerated, including the communists, free elections were held (in March 1943 the Danish Nazis got 2 per cent of the vote), Danish Jews were protected or hidden and strict orders were given to German troops in regard to their behaviour towards Danes, whose honour they were not to impugn and whose women they were to respect. In return, Denmark, with a population of 4 million, exported enough food to feed 9 million Germans.

  The fate of Denmark could be favourably compared to the rumours that were creeping back about what was going on in Poland, and 10,000 Danes joined the German army or the Waffen SS, including the government-sanctioned Freikorps Danmark that served on the Eastern Front with heavy casualties. Initially, all went well. Then, as the war went on, German requirements became more stringent, including the transfer of workers to German armaments factories, the suppression of the Danish communists and demands for the handover of Danish Jews. Minor acts of sabotage began, workers went on strike, and people began to boycott German goods. All this was stirred up and encouraged by SOE agents inserted by the British and in August 1943, after the Danish government refused to allow German troops to search for Danish saboteurs, the Germans imposed direct rule and took over the entire administration of the country themselves. This, not unnaturally, led to a reversal in public perception, hitherto still prepared to cooperate with the Germans in return for minimal interference, and now strikes became general and sabotage increased with the blowing up of bridges, the blocking of railway lines and the circulation of over 200 newssheets urging non-cooperation and resistance. When the Germans sent an SS Police battalion into Denmark in October 1943 to arrest and deport the Jews for extermination, the Danes slipped 7,000 across to neutral Sweden* and hid the rest. The Germans found fewer than 500. When the Germans began a round-up of those whom they suspected of organized resistance, in March 1945 the RAF mounted one of the most extraordinary raids of the war: using Mosquitos, it precision-bombed the Gestapo headquarters in Copenhagen, destroying its records section and allowing thirty-two of the thirty-eight prisoners held there to escape.

  While German occupation of Denmark was benign for most of its tenure, that was not the case in Norway, where the German invasion had been resisted and the tiny, militia-based Norwegian Army had fought bitterly. At first, though, the Germans attempted a policy of peaceful cooperation – after all, the Norwegians, like the Danes, were Aryans and could surely understand that what mattered was the eradication of communism. The German concern was to co
ntrol the long Norwegian coastline and there was a constant – and totally unfounded – fear of invasion that caused them to increase the occupation army from 100,000 to 250,000 in mid-1942. With a government-in-exile in London encouraging resistance, acts of sabotage increased, as did the killing of German soldiers and officials, leading to the inevitable reprisals and equally inevitable increase in acts of resistance. In January 1942 the formation under German auspices of a Norwegian government headed by Vidkun Quisling, a Norwegian National Socialist in whom very few of his countrymen had any confidence, and the elimination of the population of the village of Televaag in a reprisal for sabotage attacks finally killed any chance the Germans might have had in retaining at least a quiescent Norway. About 6,000 Norwegians joined the SS, serving mainly in the Viking division, but most were unenthusiastic, particularly when America, where many Norwegians had relatives, entered the war.

  The Dutch, a peaceful and deeply moral people with a strong strain of Calvinism who had stayed out of the First World War, were deeply offended by the German invasion of their country. They had given sanctuary to the Kaiser in 1918 and were linguistically and racially German – how dare this vulgarian Adolf Hitler behave as he had done? To begin with, the Germans trod carefully; they hoped that the Dutch could be persuaded to become allies, they released Dutch prisoners of war and they did not interfere with the machinery of government run by state secretaries who had been appointed before the Queen and her government had departed for London. Dutch factories worked happily for the German war effort and exports of food and raw materials to the Reich went on as normal. There was a Dutch National Socialist Party, led by Anton Mussert, but he had little support in Holland and was held in little regard by the Germans. When the Germans attempted a round-up of Dutch Jews in February 1941, there was a strike and a refusal by university staff to continue in office once Jewish lecturers had been dismissed. Then, after Stalingrad, everything changed. Germany was gearing up for total war and this meant the exploitation of all the occupied countries.