Second World War, The

by Corrigan, Gordon

  † They were both arraigned on trumped-up charges in 1936 and executed.

  * At Nizhni Novgorod (later renamed Gorky and unrenamed after the collapse of the USSR), the third-largest city in Russia and later the central manufacturing base for MiG aircraft and submarines for the Russian navy – not necessarily all to be blamed on Ford.

  † The US would not sell it to the British either, so the British military attaché had one shipped to London in crates marked ‘pineapples’.

  * Archbishop James Ussher (1581–1656) was a strange mixture of intellectual, political conciliator, theological liberal, educational reformer and complete nut. He calculated that the creation of the world dated from 22 October 4004 bc, that the British Christian Church dated from ad 36 and that the world would end on 25 October 1996.As the Duke of Wellington said in a different context, ‘If you believe that, you will believe anything.’ Charles II bought his library of 10,000 books for £2,000 and gave them to Trinity College Dublin.

  * If only they would…

  † Thirty years later it numbered 250 ships, including two aircraft carriers and forty-nine submarines.

  * Although it was probably the first time that aircraft were used (by the Italians) to bomb ground targets.

  * In today’s Italy something that is a totally incompetent, complete and utter shambles is referred to as Caporetto totale after the Battle of Caporetto in September– October 1917.

  * Since 1870 and the incorporation of Rome as the nation’s capital, the Roman Catholic Church had refused to recognize the legitimacy of the Italian state.

  † In the UK freemasons are a harmless collection of middle-aged men who hop backwards with one leg of their trousers rolled up while giving each other funny handshakes. In Europe they are – or are believed to be – a sinister secret society that influences politicians and the judiciary to advance the cause of its members.

  * Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, ‘National Socialist German Workers’ Party’ – Nazis.

  * Historians differ over the definition of the First Reich. Most agree that it starts with the Carolingian empire around ad 800. It ends either with the first Crusade, ad 1125, or when Napoleon abolished the Holy Roman Empire in 1806, depending upon whom you listen to. The Second Reich ran from 1871, with German unification and the crowning of William of Prussia as Kaiser, until the end of the Hohenzollern dynasty in 1918. The Third Reich was Hitler’s and ran from 1933 until 1945.

  * Whom the French claim as one of theirs but who to the Germans is Karl der Grosse. He was a Frank, so both could claim him.

  * This is generally considered to have been frightfully bad form on Hitler’s part, but in the British Army we are bound by an oath that says that we shall ‘… bear true and faithful allegiance to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II …’ so the Germans were only copying us.

  † Not counting the air force, which at this time was not a separate service but part of the army.

  * In today’s British Army the average age of captains is twenty-six and a bright officer would expect to be a brigadier at forty-three. Details for the American Army of today are similar.

  * The other was the extreme right-wing demagogue Huey Long, Governor of Arkansas, who despite being a Democrat was violently anti-Roosevelt and the New Deal, and had a mass following. He was assassinated in September 1935 and the conspiracy theorists blamed Roosevelt (some still do – and it is almost certainly nonsense).

  † Roosevelt, in his unsuccessful campaign for the vice-presidency in 1920,had campaigned on a platform supporting the League.

  * About as far from a red in tooth and claw socialist as it is possible to be, Attlee was a public school- and Oxford-educated barrister, had a pre-Great War commission in the Territorial Force and ended that war as an infantry major. He was one of only two prime ministers since the first Duke of Wellington to have been wounded in action (the other was Harold Macmillan). There would not be another leader of the Labour Party with a background like his until Tony Blair in the 1990s. Blair did not have the opportunity to fight in a war, but his thoroughly robust views on defence made him popular with the Services.

  * In 1962 this author, as an officer cadet at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, had the misfortune to be briefly in charge of one of Haile Selassie’s many grandsons. That he was unable to tie his own shoelaces or knot a tie (tasks that had always been done by a servant), and that he found using a Western lavatory a trial, was not the problem – we could cope with that – but that he dribbled, never understood that you were supposed to get out of bed in the morning and tended to get lost on his way from his room to the showers did rather militate against modern military training. In the event, even Sandhurst gave up on him and he went back to Abyssinia to become a general and commander of the Imperial Guard. It is hardly surprising that the whole ludicrous edifice was overthrown by a Marxist revolution in 1974.

  * It was also attractive to those who did not want to spend money on battleships and tanks or to have to maintain manpower-intensive armies.

  * In the sense of destroyed by enemy action, rather than mislaid.

  † The highly successful T-34 did not come into service until 1940 and even then there were very few of them.

  * Translated as ‘colonel-general’, it is the equivalent of general in the British and US Armies. The German army had no rank of brigadier (British) or brigadier-general (US) so a German Generalmajor (major-general) equated roughly to a brigadier, a Generalleutnant (lieutenant-general) to a major-general and a General der… (insert arm of service) to a lieutenant-general. A Generalfeldmarschall was a field marshal (British) or general of the army (US).

  * Freiherr is the German equivalent of a baronetcy, i.e. an hereditary knighthood.

  * With their ability to make a virtue out of necessity, the British, with very few tanks, allowed squadron-sized (or company-sized) and even troop-sized (or platoon-sized) attacks. Today we would say that in most circumstances tanks should not be employed in less than squadron size.

  † In training one is not allowed to fire live ammunition – the only certain way of finding out which side wins – so all military exercises are observed by umpires whose duty it is to ensure that timings are realistic and that what units and individuals do conforms as closely as possible to real combat. Everyone has driven through minefields when the umpires were not looking.

  ‡ As the Germans were not ready to admit that they were developing real tanks, they could only exercise with dummies. Lest the reader should snigger, it should be pointed out that in the 1970s, when the defence budget was under even more strain than usual, we in the British infantry were issued with football rattles for exercises to compensate for there being no blank ammunition for machine-guns.

  * ‘Case White’. The British title their plans ‘Operation…’, the Germans use ‘Case…’.

  * Angrifftag or ‘Attack Day’, the equivalent of the British D-Day or the French J-Jour, the day on which a particular operation is to start and from which all timings start (i.e. D – 1 the day before the operation begins, D + 1 the day after and so on).

  † Including three Slovak divisions. The Germans also fielded a number of Frontier regiments and two Waffen SS Standarten (brigades).

  * In that he was right: French and British production of aircraft and tanks in late 1939 and early 1940 far outstripped that of Germany.

  * For a full account of the sorry debacle of the Norwegian caper, see my Blood, Sweat and Arrogance.

  * Field Marshal Sir John French, the Commander-in-Chief of the British Expeditionary Force, had promised Churchill the command of a brigade, but by 1916 French had been superseded by the much harder-headed General Sir Douglas Haig, and in any case, while the government was prepared, just, to stomach an acting Lieutenant-Colonel Churchill, it drew the line at his being a brigadier-general.

  * As the foul winter of 1939–40 had made some of the French roads impassable to motor vehicles, some Indian Army pack transport companies, with mule
s, had been brought in.

  † The British had a handful of A9 and A10 cruiser tanks with a two-pounder gun, and 7 Royal Tank Regiment (7 RTR) were armed with the A12 (Matilda Mk II), which had a two-pounder gun, 3.7 inches of frontal armour and a top speed of 15 mph. Because of its thickness of armour, the Matilda was very difficult to knock out and, had there been several hundred of them and had they been handled properly, the outcome of the Battle of France might have been different. But then, if there had been several hundred of them, the Germans might well not have attacked in the first place.

  * Or, at least, nearly everyone. Churchill continued to send increasingly hysterical and completely unrealistic instructions on how to fight the battle. Fortunately for the BEF, its commander ignored them.

  † I have avoided making reference to ‘changing horses in mid-stream’, one of the more ridiculous metaphors in our vocabulary. Why on earth would anyone want to get off one horse and on to another in the middle of a river?

  * But the French high command had only given permission to their men to embark on 30 May.

  * Fifty years old in 1940 and a major-general since 1939, Jodl came from a distinguished military family and headed the operations planning staff in OKW until the end of the war. More intelligent than his immediate superior, Field Marshal Keitel, he was well able to spot the flaws in some of Hitler’s strategic and tactical ideas and, while not challenging the Führer openly, he often did persuade him to change his mind. In what this author considers a disgraceful travesty of justice, Jodl was tried as a war criminal by the Allies after the war and executed.

  * In contrast, Operation Overlord, the Allied invasion of Normandy in June 1944,had an initial landing of five divisions along fifty miles.

  * The Italian General Giulio Douhet pioneered the bombing of ground targets during Italy’s conquests of Libya and was an air ace in the First World War. His 1921 book Command of the Air, which argued that sufficient aircraft would always get through and that wars could be won from the air, was enormously influential between the wars.

  * Apart from the War of the Spanish Succession, it was a cause of some resentment in Spain that, in what the British call the Peninsular War (1808–14) and the Spanish the War of Independence (1807–14), Spain could only expel the French by accepting British money, equipment and troops. As Spain was old, Catholic, agrarian, on the way down and broke, and England was brash, Protestant, industrialized, on the way up and the richest country in the world, and had long been either an enemy or a competitor of Spain, one can understand the Spanish attitude. Today’s Spain would still like it back, although anyone who travels in Spain can see exactly why Britain has no intention of giving it back and why over 90 per cent of Gibraltarians regularly vote to remain British.

  * In 1940 the Germans had taken out the seemingly impregnable Belgian frontier fortress of Eban Emael by landing glider-borne troops on top of it.

  * Paavo Nurmi (1897–1973), the ‘Flying Finn’, was probably the greatest track athlete of all time. Between 1921 and 1931 he set twenty-nine world records for distances between 1,500 and 20,000 metres and won nine Olympic gold medals. In one of many post-war examples of pots hanging kettles, Kuebler was tried by the Yugoslavs in 1947 and executed.

  * Some years ago this author hired a Spanish postgraduate student as an interpreter. The student professed total antagonism to Franco. When it was suggested that Franco had at least kept Spain out of the Second World War, the student expostulated: ‘But that’s the whole point – if we had gone in we would have been beaten and we would have got loads of money in Marshall Aid!’

  * The French and the British are, of course, traditional enemies, having fought together for around six years and against each other for more than 200. Every year on the anniversary of Trafalgar, 21 October, the French marines drink a toast to the man who shot and killed Nelson from the rigging of the Redoubtable.Cheekybuggers.

  * When the French, forgetting that it is solely due to the USA and the UK that they are not now Germans, refused to support the Coalition in its invasion of Iraq in 2003, there was a move in the USA to rename French fries ‘Freedom fries’. Students of linguistics should note that what to the British are chips are fries to the Americans, and what are chips to the Americans are potato crisps to the British.

  * An American isolationist who did not like the British very much anyway, Kennedy became increasingly disenchanted with Roosevelt and ‘resigned’ as ambassador in 1940.

  * Essentially, Wavell was a thinking soldier and a gentleman, whereas Churchill was neither. As Wavell rightly commented, Churchill’s tactical understanding stopped somewhere around the middle of the Boer War.

  † Another example of the British ability to make a hero out of a wrong ’un, Wingate was probably mad and certainly unbalanced. Lucky to not be court-martialled for getting too close to Jewish terrorists in Palestine, and doubly lucky to not be booted out as a failed suicide in May 1941, he will reappear in Burma.

  * Strictly speaking, Egypt was not British but an independent country. Britain did, however, retain certain rights, including the defence of the Suez Canal and, under a treaty of 1936, the use of all Egyptian facilities, ports and airfields and means of communication in time of war. This meant that the British in effect occupied Egypt with the king and government doing pretty well what they were told.

  * Probably the only British item of army equipment that was superior to anything deployed by German or Italian, the 25-pounder fired a high-explosive (HE) shell weighing 25lb out to a range of 13,400 yards, whereas the Italian 75mm fired a 14lb shell to 11,000 yards.

  † This author has been unable to find any firm evidence for this, and regretfully concludes that, like the report that each Italian platoon was issued with a machine for making cappuccino coffee, it is an old soldiers’ tale (the equivalent of an old wives’ tale but with rather more alcohol involved).

  * For any reader who does not hunt – and there may be some – killing the fox in the open, as opposed to sending him to ground and having to drive him out with terriers, is a great compliment to one’s pack of hounds. American readers should note that in England hunting means fox hunting; what Americans call hunting is shooting or stalking in England.

  * It should have been three cruisers but the Royal Navy had managed to persuade one of them to turn back to Toulon.

  † It may have been, depending on how long the ships stayed in Greek waters.

  * The Croats had no particular love for Germany but objected to being dragged into war. The other group in the country were the Serbs, who disliked just about everybody but remembered that they had been in the Allied camp in the first war.

  * An ad hoc formation of two infantry battalions, a reconnaissance battalion, two anti-tank battalions, two machine-gun battalions, one field artillery battalion, one anti-aircraft battalion and an armoured regiment of two battalions of Mk III and Mk IV tanks.

  * In March 1941 O’Connor was appointed Commander British Troops Egypt and replaced as Commander XIII Corps by Lieutenant-General Phillip Neame VC, who thanks to the Greek nonsense had precious little with which to defend. When Rommel’s attack began, O’Connor went forward to advise Neame, but their staff car got lost and both were captured.

  * Somewhat of a misnomer – while many of the original Bolsheviks had been Jewish (Trotsky being the best known), by the 1930s the USSR was almost as anti-Semitic as Germany, reverting to a long Russian tradition of persecution of her Jews.

  * In fact, it did exactly the opposite, reinforcing Roosevelt’s view that the USA should support Britain.

  * During the formation of the Red Army, officer ranks were abolished, being replaced by functional titles (company commander, battalion commander etc), then in the 1930s junior and field ranks (second lieutenant to colonel) were reintroduced, but functional titles were still used for what had been generals’ ranks. Hence, Army Commander First Rate was a Front (Army Group in British, American and German terms) commander, or five-star general, Army Comm
ander Second Rate was an army commander, or four-star general, and so on down.

  † There was a period in the 1960s and 1970s when fervour for Scottish country dancing swept through the British Army like dysentery at the siege of Harfleur. Some commanding officers in perfectly respectable regiments with no Scottish connections made these evenings mandatory. This author found that the only way to survive was either to employ ridicule and sabotage (the eightsome reel is particularly susceptible) or to consume very large quantities of alcohol.

  * For a proof of this, and lots of other explanations as to why the senior officer you thought behaved oddly did so, see Norman F. Dixon, On the Psychology of Military Incompetence, Jonathan Cape, London, 1976.

  * Hess was an old friend of Hitler’s, serving in the same regiment in the first war (albeit commissioned whereas Hitler was a JNCO) before becoming a fighter pilot. He shared a cell with Hitler after the failed Munich putsch and became deputy leader of the NSDAP (not, as is so often claimed, deputy leader of the state). Quite what was behind his flight to Britain is still not clear: not all the files have been released by TNA, but most of the conspiracy theories have been disproved. The British government refused to negotiate (or said they did) and Hess ended up in Spandau jail as the last prisoner of the Nuremberg trials, and he died there in 1987, probably by his own hand. This author once commanded the guard on Hess, and discovered that a source of amusement for the old boy was to beg cigarettes from the soldiers and then, having smoked them, report the donors for breaking the rule of no contact with the prisoner.

  * Frederick I (1122–90) was king of Germany and Holy Roman Emperor from 1152. Called Barbarossa because of his red beard, he did much to unify Germany and was drowned while on crusade. German legend says that he sleeps in a mountain cave ready to return and restore Germany to her ancient greatness. This is probably untrue.