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On 3 September, Hitler postponed the date of the invasion until 21 September. A fortnight later, he delayed the invasion again, and on 12 October it was put off until spring of the following year. Hitler ordered that preparations continue as a bluff and distraction, but it was clear that the operation was off. This was almost certainly the right decision. A high-level war game conducted at the Army Staff College at Sandhurst in 1974, involving former senior figures from both sides and based on the then known British and Germans plans, concluded that any invasion would have been a complete disaster.241 The Führer, one of the greatest risk-takers in history, decided not to roll the dice on ‘Sealion’. It was too chancy even for such an inveterate gambler as Hitler.
The British would have to be coerced another way. Hitler now experimented with two strategies simultaneously. The first was to put pressure on Britain’s position in the Mediterranean, in particular, and to invite other powers to join in the partition of the British Empire more generally. Hitler was also determined to keep the United States out of the area, so as to deny Roosevelt a launchpad against the Reich in any future conflict. In this context, Hitler took a brief interest in Africa and toyed, though not very seriously, with the idea of a German sub-Saharan empire.242 He preferred, however, to co-opt regional powers to do the job for him: Italy, of course, but also Spain, Vichy France and even Portugal. Throughout the autumn and early winter of 1940, he courted all three powers, especially Franco. This fitted with Raeder’s preference for a ‘Mediterranean strategy’, its sights firmly on British bases in Gibraltar, Malta and (ultimately) Egypt and the Suez Canal.243
In October 1940, Hitler redoubled his efforts. The aim of this strategy was, as the Führer put it, ‘to bring France and Spain to agree a common line and in this way to establish a continental coalition against Britain’.244 He hoped that Vichy could be persuaded to surrender some territory to Franco and Mussolini, compensating herself elsewhere in Africa at Britain’s expense. This was a delicate question, and the Führer knew that it had to be handled sensitively in order to avoid outraged French colonial administrations declaring for de Gaulle. On 4 October, he met with Mussolini at the Brenner Pass. Three weeks after, the Führer received Pierre Laval, the acting head of the collaborationist French Vichy government. A day later he met Franco at Hendaye and the day after that he met the Vichy leader, Marshal Pétain. Towards the end of the month there was another encounter with Mussolini in Florence, who was worried that France would steal a march on him.245 Hitler accompanied these moves with some fraternalist mood music about the value of allies. When the Spanish foreign minister Serrano Süner visited, he personally requested that crowds be mobilized to welcome him.246 The Führer also ordered the distribution of German decorations ‘in order to demonstrate the comradeship of the German people and its Wehrmacht with allied nations’ supporting her struggle for freedom.247
The second of Hitler’s anti-British, and ultimately anti-American, strategies was to turn Moscow and Tokyo against London. This was very much the brainchild of his foreign minister, Ribbentrop. In the Far East, Hitler’s concern was to prevent a renewed Russo-Japanese war and to ensure that Tokyo remained focused on the British, and especially the American, threat. On 27 September 1940, he concluded the Tripartite Pact with Italy and Japan.248 Unlike its predecessor, the Anti-Comintern Pact, this treaty was not even nominally directed against the Soviet Union. In fact this possibility was explicitly excluded in the text. Its target was clearly the western powers. On 13 October 1940, the Führer invited the Soviet foreign minister, Molotov, to come to Berlin in November. There he tried to persuade the Soviet Union to join in the partition of the British Empire, which he characterized as a ‘giant bankrupt’s estate’ of 40 million square kilometres.249 Hitler urged the Soviet Union to take advantage of this opportunity and to strike towards ‘ice-free ports’ and the oceans, by which he probably meant the creation of Russian bases in Baluchistan, an old Tsarist fantasy. Hitler’s pitch here was well calculated, because Stalin’s main concern at this time was still the British Empire, which he perceived as a threat in the Balkans and Central Asia.
If the Führer’s most immediate concern was Britain, his continental bloc was also very much directed against the United States. American hostility only increased throughout the summer and autumn of 1940 as the population instinctively identified with ‘the few’ battling it out in the skies, and the many sheltering in the basements and tube stations during the ‘Blitz’. Journalists extolled the defence of democracy, American volunteer pilots served in the RAF, and American war material poured across the Atlantic. The administration, too, ratcheted up the pressure. On 19 July, the same day that Hitler gave his ‘peace speech’, Roosevelt signed the ‘two-ocean navy’ bill into law. On 2 September 1940 he exchanged fifty old destroyers for leases on British bases, a move more important for its symbolism than for its military implications. German diplomats in the United States differed in their assessment of US capabilities, and on the timing of its likely belligerency, but they were all agreed on its hostile intent and collusion with, or manipulation by, the forces of international Jewry.250
Hitler watched all this closely. He worried not only about US supplies to Britain, but also America’s potential help to the Soviet Union.251 Hitler was uncertain how to respond. On the one hand, Goebbels was pressing him to prepare the German people for the inevitable showdown with the United States. On the other hand he did not want to alarm them, and his allies, prematurely. Hitler hesitated. ‘The decision of the Führer on how to handle the British-American agreement,’ he let it be known in early September 1940, ‘is still awaited.’252 Hitler also resisted the temptation to interfere in American domestic politics, which Roosevelt would have exploited, and forbade the press from intervening in the election campaign.253 The Führer was also anxious not to repeat the mistake of the First World War, which was accidentally to provoke the United States into declaring war, or to provide it with a pretext for doing so, through the prosecution of unrestricted submarine warfare. Hitler limited himself to pre-emptive measures, in particular securing his western flank. On 26 September 1940, he decreed that ‘England-USA must be thrown out of North-West Africa’ and that the ‘Canaries, possibly also Azores and Cape Verdes, must be secured previously through the air force’.254
In his meeting with Molotov in mid November 1940, Hitler openly confessed not just that he feared that the United States would help itself to the ‘bankrupt’ British Empire, but also that he wanted greater Russian involvement in Europe to keep out the Americans. This was Hitler restating his belief in a Monroe Doctrine for Germany, which sought to banish the United States to the western hemisphere. He was calling on his old Bolshevik foe to redress the imbalance created by the New World. His aim was to create a global coalition against Anglo-America spanning Eurasia from Spain to Vladivostok and Yokohama. ‘Germany wants to create a world coalition of interested parties,’ he told Molotov, stretching from ‘North Africa as far as East Asia’, and consisting of ‘Spain, France, Italy, Germany the Soviet Union, and Japan’, which would divide up the ‘bankrupt’ British Empire.255 Hitler was also anxious to reassure the German population that they were part of a global coalition against an increasingly isolated British Empire. ‘Germany and its allies are certainly strong enough,’ he told the party faithful in his annual oration on 8 November 1940, ‘to counter any combination in this world.’ The period September to November 1940 thus marks the high point of Hitler’s diplomacy. It was a time of frenetic activity, when all options were still on the table and the future–what he called ‘worldwide perspectives’256–appeared open.
Nazi moves to create a ‘continental bloc’ were flanked with another dose of anti-Anglo-American, anti-capitalist, anti-Semitic and anti-imperialist rhetoric. If the British Empire and the United States were the ‘haves’ of the world order, Hitler argued, the German Reich was the leader of the ‘have-nots’. It is not clear whether Hitler lifted this resonant phrase from Ernest Hemingwa
y’s eponymous novel, which was published in 1937, but he certainly used it repeatedly long before the appearance of the famous film version with Humphrey Bogart in 1944. ‘I have been a have-not all my life,’ he claimed, ‘I consider myself a have-not and have always fought for them.’ For this reason, Hitler announced, he ‘acted in the world as a representative of the “have-nots”’.257 The Führer, in short, was claiming to express not just a German but a global resentment at the unjust distribution of the earth’s resources.
In Hitler’s reading, inequality was manifested at both the national and the class level, and the two were connected. Germany as a whole was subject to an international ruling class, which had divided Germans from each other. In late 1940, Hitler reprised his old critique of the Westphalian treaties which had led to the fragmentation of the Reich. This meant that Germany had been left behind in the global distribution of territory, being left with less space per head of population than any other major European state. Here the Führer once again rehearsed the facts of Lebensraum with the usual statistics.258 The Reich’s main rival, as ever, was Britain, which had walked off with the lion’s share. Given that Hitler made no suggestion that the lands occupied in Scandinavia and western Europe were destined for settlement or that gains in central Europe and Poland represented a solution to the perennial German problem of space, the implication was clear. Germany might ‘own’ large tracts of Europe, but in global terms she was still poor. She did not yet ‘have’ enough.
The breaking-down of class barriers within Germany, divisions the Führer believed to have been carefully cultivated by the external enemy, was part and parcel of national liberation. Hitler wanted to transcend, as he said in early September 1940, the ‘legacies of the past, of origin, of estate, and of profession’. For obvious reasons, the Führer argued, this grand social project was a threat to the established order, especially the British, who would stop at nothing to frustrate it. This, Hitler told an audience of German armament workers in mid November 1940, was why ‘plutocratic-capitalist Britain’ had gone to war against the German ‘welfare state’.259 The British, Hitler repeated right at the end of the year, ‘hate us for our social convictions and our plans and actions [in the social field] seem dangerous to them’.260
This was why Hitler was determined to maintain as much as possible of his transformative socio-economic programme and to promise the German people a better life, at least after the war. In early 1940, even before the western campaign, he gave Robert Ley the task of looking into the idea of ‘a comprehensive and generous old-age provision for the German people’. Later in the year, after much deliberation, he issued his ‘Decree for the Preparation of German Residential Construction after the War’. Victory, he explained, would confront the Reich with tasks ‘which it could only fulfil through an increase in population’. The purpose of the decree, therefore, was to promote the ‘healthy life of child-rich families’ and thereby bring about a larger birth rate.261
In Hitler’s rhetoric, the Reich was the vanguard of a global war of liberation to free Germany, the European continent and ultimately the entire world from the clutches of international capitalist plutocracy.262 This message was directed not only at Germans, Europeans and Americans but also to the colonized peoples. The Nazi Arab language broadcasting service, for example, announced that Hitler’s speeches heralded ‘the day upon which the world will be freed of Churchill, Eden, [and] the Jews’.263 Towards the end of the year, Hitler even looked forward privately to a black ‘awakening’ as part of his anti-imperialist turn.264 To be sure, this trend in Hitler’s thinking was part opportunism and part rationalization of the final breach with Britain, but it also reflected his sense of wider historical processes sweeping the world. Anti-Semitism was integral to this vision, as reflected not only in Hitler’s reflexive coupling of capitalism with the Jews, but also in the regime’s broader narrative. For example, the iconic anti-Semitic propaganda film Der ewige Jude, which was screened in German cinemas from late 1940, made great play of the Rothschilds.265 Anti-communism, by contrast, played little role, at least for now. Significantly, the Propaganda Ministry ordered the press to identify each and every ‘Jew’ they mentioned except in the case of those working for Hitler’s ally the Soviet Union.266
The Führer never managed to weld together a coherent ‘continental bloc’. In the Mediterranean, there were just too many moving parts. Coordination with Italy was poor, on both the political and the military fronts.267 The two powers effectively conducted separate wars, not only failing to assist each other, but actually cutting across one another. What began as an advance on parallel lines soon became diverging axes.268 Mussolini not only made a complete hash of the campaign against Britain in western Egypt, but also launched a catastrophic invasion of Greece in October 1940, giving the Führer virtually no warning. This antagonized Athens, with whom Hitler had no quarrel. In fact he rather admired the Greeks, and expected them to resist successfully. Italian bungling also gave Churchill a pretext to do what Hitler feared most, which was to intervene in the Balkans and set up air bases there.269 In early November the first British troops duly appeared in Salonica to cover the deployment of the RAF there. The Führer was livid, probably unsettled by memories of the First World War, when the British and French armies in Salonica had suddenly surged forwards in 1918 and rolled up the entire south-eastern flank of the Central Powers. Hitler had not driven the British out of Scandinavia just in order for them to reappear on his southern flank. This was to become a major worry for him over the next nine months or so.
Hitler had no more luck in the western Mediterranean. There was no lack of appetite to despoil Britain, but the pre-emptive destruction of the Vichy French squadron at Oran, the Luftwaffe’s failure over England, Italy’s fiasco in the Cyrenaica, and the Fleet Air Arm’s destruction of much of the Italian fleet at Taranto in mid November 1940 showed that the lion still had the capacity to maul any scavengers. If various jackals had popped their heads over the parapet from Lisbon to Kabul after the fall of France in June 1940, they were beginning to scurry back behind cover in the autumn.270 Another problem was that the demands of Spain, France and Italy in North Africa were mutually contradictory, and Hitler was simply not strong enough to force his view on them in the way he had adjudicated the claims of Hungary and Romania. What really did for the Führer’s strategy, however, was Franco’s territorial greed in demanding large swathes of (Vichy) French north-west Africa, where Hitler wanted bases to deter the United States.271 The meeting between the two at Hendaye was so fraught that Hitler later said that he would rather have all his teeth pulled than consent to another encounter with the Spaniard.272 If Hitler was going to deprive Britain of Gibraltar, Malta and the Suez Canal, he would have to do so himself.
Worse still, Hitler made no headway with the Soviet Union. There was little meeting of minds with Molotov during his two-day visit.273 The Soviet delegation listened politely to the Führer’s monologue on the world situation, and his claim that Britain was already defeated and on the verge of annihilation from the air. Instead of engaging with his invitation to partition the British Empire, however, they asked some pointed questions about German intentions in the Balkans and the Baltic. What, they wanted to know, were the German military missions doing in Romania and Finland, and why had the Soviet Union not been consulted about them as required by the treaty? These questions struck Hitler like a ‘cold shower’, and he appeared to shrink into himself.274 The Soviet visitors showed no interest in the Führer’s attempts to restart discussion of the division of the British Empire. Hitler did not appear at the subsequent reception, perhaps because he was unhappy with how the talks had gone. No sooner had the first toasts been made than the air-raid sirens announced the approach of RAF bombers. The global reach of the British Empire could not have been more graphically illustrated.
One way or the other, Hitler’s attempt to set off another feeding frenzy among the powers of the south and east failed. They were greedy enough, to b
e sure, but an obstinate sense of fear restrained them. 1940 was not 1938 or 1939. The British Empire was not the Czechoslovak Republic, which was occupied without firing a shot, or Poland, whose territory could be partitioned over toasts in the Kremlin. Whoever wanted a share would have to fight for it.
It is therefore unsurprising that Hitler remained more obsessed with British power than ever. His most immediate anxiety was the threat from the air. The first RAF raid on Berlin took place on 25 August 1940, followed by another seven alarms over the next fortnight. These raids–which the regime dubbed ‘terror-bombing’–did little material damage in the big scheme of things but their psychological impact was substantial.275 Hitler was profoundly concerned about their effects. He took a personal interest in precautionary measures in the capital, such as the construction of shelters and air-raid warnings. He gave strict instructions that the population must go to the shelters when the sirens sounded.276 In Berlin, Speer was given the necessary building materials and workers, including slave labour, as well as the authority to confiscate all public and private property as necessary.277 That said, Hitler believed that the best defence lay in deterrence and retaliation. If the British threatened to drop two, three or four thousand kilogrammes of bombs on Germany in one night, he announced in early September 1940, then he would drop hundreds of thousands, perhaps even a million kilogrammes of bombs. He vowed to ‘rub out’ Britain’s cities and to stop the activities of their ‘night-pirates’.278
As the year drew to a close, the skies were darkening for Hitler. His attempts to rally Europe against Anglo-America had failed. Relations with Russia were deteriorating; he left a letter from Stalin unanswered. The British were getting stronger by the day. On 5 November 1940, Roosevelt won re-election to a third term as president. Time seemed to contract again. Hitler therefore redoubled his efforts against Britain. He committed German forces to the Balkans and the Mediterranean to bail out Mussolini.279 On 12 November 1940, he issued Directive no. 18, the planned attack on Gibraltar and the Suez Canal.280 If his immediate target in the western Mediterranean was Britain, its ultimate purpose was to prepare for the confrontation with the United States.281 Relations between Washington and Vichy were good, and Hitler did not trust Pétain to hold the line against the Americans in northern or western Africa. The military plans for Gibraltar saw the rock not as the final destination, but a stepping stone across the Straits.282 Nothing came of the plan because when Serrano Süner arrived in Berchtesgaden to discuss it in mid November, he brought with him unacceptably extensive Spanish demands for French colonies, in particular Morocco. Hitler refused, fearing that this would precipitate a defection to de Gaulle. On 7 December 1940, Franco rejected any idea that he would join the war. Operation Felix was put on hold. For now, the Führer’s plan to pre-empt the United States in the western Mediterranean and North Africa had failed.