by Herman Wouk
Hitler and England
Of all things, Hitler wanted no war with England. To this, I can personally testify. I do not need to, for it is written plainly in his turgid and propagandistic self-revelation, Mein Kampf. I saw his face at a staff conference on the day that England gave its strategically insane guarantee to Poland. I saw it again by chance in a corridor of the chancellery, on September 3, when contrary to Ribbentrop’s assurances, England marched. That time, it was the face of a shattered man. It is impossible to understand what happened in 1940 without having this fact about Adolf Hitler firmly in mind, for from the start of the war to the end, German strategy, German tactics, and German foreign policy were never anything but this man’s personal will.
No world-historical figure, when entering the scene, ever made his aims and his program clearer. By comparison, Alexander, Charles XII, and Napoleon were improvisers, moving where chance took them. In Mein Kampf, Hitler wrote in bombastic street-agitator language what he intended to do upon attaining power; and in the twelve years of his reign he did it. He wrote that the heart of German policy was to seize territory from Russia. That effort was the fulcrum of the Second World War, the sole goal of German arms. He also wrote that before this could be attempted, our traditional enemy France would have to be knocked out.
In discussing England, Hitler in Mein Kampf praises the valor of the race, its historical acumen, and its excellent imperial administration. Germany’s grand aim, he says, must be a Nordic racial alliance in which England maintains its sea empire, while Germany as its equal partner takes first place on the continent and acquires new soil in the east.
From this conception Hitler never departed. When Churchill spurned his many peace offers, he felt a frustrated fury, which he vented on the Jews of Europe, since he felt that British Jewry was influencing Churchill’s irrational policy. Almost to the hour of his suicide, Hitler hoped that England would see the light and would come to the only sensible arrangement of the world that was possible, short of abandoning one half to Bolshevism, and the other half to the dollar-obsessed Americans—the outcome the world must now live with.
In these considerations lies the secret of the failure of Adlerangriff; of our arrival at the coast, facing panicky England, without an operational plan for ending the war; and of the persistently unreal air about the Sea Lion plan, which, after elaborate and costly preparations, never came off. In the last analysis, the set-piece invasion did not sail because Hitler had no heart for beating England, and somehow our armed forces sensed this.
The Air Battle
The battle went in several stages. The Luftwaffe first attempted to make the British fight over the Channel, by attacking shipping. When the RAF would not come out and fight for the ships, Göring bombed the fighter bases. This forced the British fighter planes into the air. After knocking them about pretty badly, Göring—pushed by Hitler because of unconscionable British bombing of our civilians—sent in his bombers in the great Valhalla waves against London and other major cities, hoping to cause the people to depose Churchill and make peace. Hitler’s July 19 speech, though perhaps a little blustery in language, had set forth very generous terms. But all was in vain, and the October rains and fogs closed gray curtains on the weary stalemate in the air. So ended the “Battle of Britain,” with honors even, and England badly battered but gallantly hanging on.
Most military writers still blame Göring for our “defeat” over England. But this falls into the trap of the Churchillian legend that the Luftwaffe was beaten. That Germany’s sparkling air force could do no better than fight a draw, I do, however, lay to Göring’s charge. Despotic political control of an armed force, here as in Case Yellow, again meant amateurism in the saddle.
Hermann Göring was a complicated mixture of good and bad qualities. He was clever and decisive, and before he sank into stuporous luxury, he had the brutality to enforce the hardest decisions. All this was to the good. But his vanity shut his mind to reason, and his obstinacy and greed crippled aircraft design and production. Until Speer came into the picture, the Luftwaffe was worse hit by bad management and supply on the ground than by any enemy in the air, including the Royal Air Force in 1940. Göring vetoed excellent designs for heavy bombers, and built a short-range air force as a ground support tool. Then in 1940 he threw the lightly built Luftwaffe into a strategic bombing mission beyond its capabilities, which nevertheless almost succeeded. As a ground support force, the Luftwaffe shone in Poland and France and in the opening attack on the Soviet Union. It fell off as our armies got further and further away from the air bases; but for quick knockout war on land, its achievements have yet to be surpassed.
In popular history—which is only Churchill’s wartime rhetoric, frozen into historical error—Hitler the raging tiger sprang first on Poland, then insensately turned and tore France to death, then reached his blood-dripping claws toward England and recoiled snarling from a terrible blow between the eyes from the RAF. Maddened, blinded, balked at the water’s edge, he turned from west to east and hurled himself against Russia to his doom.
In fact, from start to finish Hitler soberly and coolly—though with self-defeating amateurish mistakes in combat situations—followed out the political goals laid down in Mein Kampf, step by step. He yearned to come to terms with England. No victorious conqueror ever tried harder to make peace. The failure to achieve this peace through the Eagle attack was of course a disappointment. It meant that our rear remained open to nuisance attack from England while we launched the main war in the east. It meant we had to divert precious limited resources to U-boats. Above all it meant the increasing intervention of America under Roosevelt.
The Final Tragedy
These nagging results of British obduracy festered in Adolf Hitler’s spirit. He had in any case an unreasonable attitude toward the Jewish people. But the regrettable excesses which he at last permitted trace directly to this frustration in the west. A Germany allied with England—even with a benevolently neutral England—would never have drifted into those excesses. But our nation was beleaguered, cut off from civilization, and we became locked in a mortal combat with a primitive, giant Bolshevist country. Humane considerations went by the board. Behind the line, in conquered Poland and Russia, the neurotic extremists of the Nazi Party were free to give rein to their criminal tendencies. Hitler, enraged by the Churchillian opposition, was in no mood to stop them, as he could have with one word. When crossed, he was a formidable personality.
This was the most important result of the “Battle of Britain.”
__________
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE:Roon’s discussion of the Battle of Britain is unacceptable. It is not a Teutonic trait to admit defeat gracefully. I have read most of the important German military books on the war, and few of them manage to digest this bitter pill. But Roon’s far-fetched thesis that Winston Churchill’s stubbornness caused the murder of the European Jews may be the low point in all this literature of self-extenuation.
His figures on the airplanes involved in the battle are unreliable. To be sure, few statistics of the war are harder to pin down. Depending on the date one takes as the start, the original balance of forces differs. Thereafter the figures change week by week due to combat losses and replacements. The fog of war at the time was dense, and both commands remained with tangled records. Still, no official source I have read calls it an equal match, as Roon calmly does.
His assertion that the attack was a “peacemaking gesture” is as ridiculous as his claim that the outcome was a draw. If there is ever another major war, I devoutly hope the United States armed forces will not fight such a “draw.”
“Popular history” has it right. Göring tried to get daylight mastery of the air, the two fighter commands slugged it out, and he failed; then he tried to bomb the civilian population into quitting, first by day and then by night, and failed. The British fighter pilots turned the much larger Luftwaffe back, and saved the world from the Germans. The sea invasion never came off bec
ause Hitler’s admirals and generals convinced him that the British would drown too many Germans on the way across, and in Churchill’s words, “knock on the head the rest who crawled ashore.” A navy remains a handy thing to have around when the going gets rough. I hope my countrymen will remember this.
There was no clear-cut moment of victory for the British. They really won when Sea Lion was called off, but this Hitler backdown was a secret. The Luftwaffe kept up heavy night raids on the cities, and this with the U-boat sinkings made the outlook for England darker and darker until Hitler attacked the Soviet Union. But the Luftwaffe never recovered from the Battle of Britain. This was one reason why the Germans failed to take Moscow in 1941. The blitzkrieg ran out of blitz in Russia because it had dropped too much of it on the fields of Kent and Surrey, and in the streets of London.—V.H.
31
SILVERY fat barrage balloons, shining in the cloudless sky ahead of the plane before land came in view, gave the approach to the British Isles a carnival touch. The land looked very peaceful in the fine August weather. Automobiles and lorries crawled on narrow roads, through rolling yellow-and-green patchwork fields marked off by dark hedgerows. Tiny sheep were grazing; farmers like little animated dolls were reaping corn. The plane passed over towns and cities clustered around gray spired cathedrals, and again over streams, woods, moors, and intensely green hedge-bounded fields, the pleasant England of the picture books, the paintings, and the poems.
This was the end of a tedious week-long journey for Pug via Zurich, Madrid, Lisbon, and Dublin. It had begun with the arrival in Berlin of a wax-sealed envelope in the pouch from Washington, hand-addressed in red ink: Top Secret—Captain Victor Henry only. Inside he had found a sealed letter from the White House.
Dear Pug:
Vice CNO says you are a longtime booster of “radar.” The British are secretly reporting to us a big success in their air battle with something called “RDF.” How about going there now for a look, as we discussed? You’ll get dispatch orders, and our friends will be expecting you. London should be interesting now, if a bit warm. Let me know if you think it’s too warm for us to give them fifty destroyers.
FDR
Pug had had mixed feelings about these chattily phrased instructions. Any excuse to leave Berlin was welcome. The red-ink blare and boasts in the meager newspapers were becoming intolerable; so were the happy triumphant Germans in government offices, chortling about the pleasant postwar life that would start in a month or so; so were the women strolling the tree-lined boulevards, looking slyly complacent in French silks and cosmetics. Pug even felt guilty eating the plunder in the improved restaurant menus: Polish hams, Danish butter, and French veal and wine. The gleeful voices of the radio announcers, claiming staggering destruction of British airplanes and almost no Luftwaffe losses, rasped his nerves as he sat alone in the evenings in the Grunewald mansion looted from a vanished Jew. An order to leave all this behind was a boon. But the letter dismayed him, too. He had not walked the deck of a ship now in the line of duty for more than four years, and this shore-bound status appeared to be hardening.
Walking home that afternoon he passed the rusting olive-painted Flakturm, and like nothing else it made him realize how glad he would be to get out of Berlin. People no longer gawked at the high tower bristling at the top with guns, as they had when the girder frame and the thick armor plates had been going up. Guesses and rumors about it had run fast and wild for weeks. Now the story was out. It was an A.A. platform for shooting at low-flying bombers. No high building could get in the lines of fire, for it rose far above the tallest rooftops in Berlin, a crude eyesore. So far the few English raiders had hugged maximum altitude, but the Germans seemed to think of everything. This gigantic drab iron growth, towering over the playing children and elderly strollers in the pretty Tiergarten, seemed to Victor Henry to epitomize the Nazi regime.
The lonely cavernous house got on his nerves that evening, as his quiet-stepping Gestapo butler served him pork chops from Denmark at one end of the long bare dining table. Pug decided that if he had to come back he would take a room at the Adlon. He packed suits and uniforms, the great weariness of an attaché’s existence: morning coat, dress blues, dress whites, evening uniform, khakis, civilian street clothes, civilian dinner jacket. He wrote letters to Rhoda, Warren, and Byron, and went to sleep thinking of his wife, and thinking, too, that in London he would probably see Pamela Tudsbury.
Next day Pug’s assistant attaché, a handsome commander who spoke perfect German, said he would be glad to take over his duties and appointments. He happened to be a relative of Wendell Willkie. Since the Republican convention, he had become popular with the Germans. “I guess I’ll have to hang around this weekend, eh?” he said. “Too bad. I was going out to Abendruh with the Wolf Stöllers. They’ve been awfully kind to me lately. They said Göring might be there.”
“Go by all means,” said Pug. “You might pick up some dope about how the Luftwaffe’s really doing. Tell your wife to take along a pair of heavy bloomers.” He enjoyed leaving the attaché staring at him, mystified and vaguely offended.
And so he had departed from Berlin.
“How the devil do you keep looking so fit?” he said to Blinker Vance, the naval attaché who met him at the London airport. After a quarter of a century, Vance still batted his eyes as he talked, just as he had at Annapolis, putting the plebe Victor Henry on report for a smudged white shoe. Vance wore a fawn-colored sports jacket of London cut, and gray trousers. His face was dried and lined, but he still had the flat waist of a second classman.
“Well, Pug, it’s pretty good tennis weather. I’ve been getting in a couple of hours every day.”
“Really? Great war you’ve got here.”
“Oh, the war. It’s going on up there somewhere, mostly to the south.” Vance vaguely waved a hand up at the pellucid heavens. “We do get some air raid warnings, but so far the Germans haven’t dropped anything on London. You see contrails once in a while, then you know the fighters are mixing it up close by. Otherwise you just listen to the BBC for the knockdown reports. Damn strange war, a sort of airplane numbers game.”
Having just toured bombed areas in France and the Low Countries, Henry was struck by the serene, wholly undamaged look of London, the density of the auto traffic, and the cheery briskness of the well-dressed sidewalk crowds. The endless shop windows crammed with good things surprised him. Berlin, even with its infusion of loot, was by comparison a bleak military compound.
Vance drove Victor Henry to a London apartment off Grosvenor Square, kept by the Navy for visiting senior officers: a dark flat on an areaway, with a kitchen full of empty beer and whiskey bottles, a dining room, a small sitting room, and three bedrooms along a hall. “I guess you’ll be a bit crowded here,” Vance said, glancing around at the luggage and scattered clothes of two other occupants in the apartment.
“Be glad of the company.”
Blinker grimaced, winked his eyes, and said tentatively, “Pug, I didn’t know you’d become one of these boffins.”
“Boffins?”
“Scientific red-hots. That’s what they call ’em here. The word is you came for a look-see at their newest stuff, with a green light from way high up.”
Victor Henry said, unstrapping his bags, “Really?”
The attaché grinned at his taciturnity. “You’ll hear from the Limeys next. This is the end of the line for me—until I can be of service to you, one way or another.”
The loud coarse ring of a London telephone, quite different in rhythm and sound from the Berlin double buzz, startled Pug out of a nap. A slit of sunlight gleamed through drawn brown curtains.
“Captain Henry? Major-General Tillet here, Office of Military History.” The voice was high, crisp, and very British. “I’m just driving down to Portsmouth tomorrow. Possibly drop in on a Chain Home station. You wouldn’t care to come along?”
Pug had never heard the expression Chain Home. “That’ll be fine, General. Than
k you.”
“Oh, really? Jolly good!” Tillet sounded delighted, as though he had suggested something boring and Pug had been unexpectedly gracious. “Suppose I pick you up at five, and we avoid the morning traffic? You might take along a shaving kit and a shirt.”
Pug heard whiskeyish laughter in the next bedroom, the boom of a man and the tinkling of a young woman. It was six o’clock. He turned on the radio and dressed. A mild Schubert trio ended, one he had often heard on the Berlin station, and news came on. In a calm, almost desultory voice, the broadcaster told of a massive air battle that had been raging all afternoon. The RAF had shot down more than a hundred German planes, and had lost twenty-five. Half the British pilots had safely parachuted. The fight was continuing, the announcer said. If there were any truth in this almost ludicrously understated bulletin, Pug thought, an astonishing victory was shaping up, high and invisible in the sky, while the Londoners went about their business.
He found Pamela Tudsbury’s number in the telephone book and called her. A different girl answered, with a charming voice that became more charming when Victor Henry identified himself. Pamela was a WAAF now, she told him, working at a headquarters outside London. She gave him another number to call. He tried it, and there Pamela was.
“Captain Henry! You’re here! Oh, wonderful! Well, you picked the right day to arrive, didn’t you?”
“Is it really going well, Pam?”
“Haven’t you heard the evening news?”
“I’m not used to believing the radio.”
She gave an exhilarated laugh. “Oh, to be sure. The Berlin Radio. My God, it’s nice to talk to you. Well, it’s all quite true. We’ve mauled them today. But they’re still coming. I have to go back on duty in an hour. I’m just snatching a bite to eat. I heard one officer say it was the turning point of the war. By the way, if inspection tours are in order for you, you might bear in mind that I’m working at Group Operations, Number Eleven Fighter Group.”