For Churchill, Britons’ fears begat vigilance, which was good. His most pressing problem early in the year was not keeping the Germans out of England—he did not believe they were coming, other than by air. His critical problem was getting food and munitions in. Since October, U-boats in the Western Approaches had sent more than 150 British ships to the bottom, an average of 70,000 tons per week. January’s miserable weather helped moderate the losses, but in early February, with Göring on vacation enjoying his toy trains and pilfered art, Admiral Raeder asked Hitler to augment Admiral Karl Dönitz’s U-boats with several dozen of Göring’s two hundred or so four-engine Focke-Wulf 200 long-range bombers. The pride of Göring’s air fleet, they cruised at 220 miles per hour, could tote a 4,400-pound bombload, and had enough range to take off from Norway, fly around the British Isles, and land in occupied France. The bombers, Raeder argued, could perform reconnaissance duty and hit ships threading their way into ports. Hitler approved the request, and the results were immediate. February saw 320,000 tons of British shipping sunk, including 86,000 tons sent down by German aircraft. So great were British shipping losses and so meager was British air cover over the ports, especially at night, that a suggestion to put cats in the cockpits of fighter planes made the rounds in the RAF. The idea was that RAF pilots (who had been issued extra rations of carrots to augment their night vision) would shoot in the direction in which the cats looked, cats presumably seeing better than humans at night. If anyone had a better idea, now was the time to propose it, for between the losses at sea and the German’s smashing up of the ports, Britain found itself more isolated than ever. “This mortal danger to our lifeline gnaws at my bowels,” wrote Churchill. “The decision for 1941,” he predicted, “lies upon the seas.”63
He did not know that Dönitz had only twenty-two U-boats in the French Atlantic ports or that he could send only a dozen or so to sea at any one time. These months afforded the German navy its best opportunity to squeeze the life out of Britain, but Dönitz lacked the boats to do so. Still, he appeared near enough to ruling the waves that when an Admiralty report of yet another shipping disaster reached Churchill, he fretted to Colville (who had termed the news “distressing”): “Distressing? It is terrifying. If it goes on it will be the end of us.”64
Hyperbolic though Churchill’s outburst might now seem, at the time it was anything but. In the coming months, the battle in the Atlantic would decide Britain’s fate. U-boats hunted British shipping westward to the central Atlantic, far beyond the range of British air patrols. Without enough hulls to carry the food they needed, Churchill faced a terrible choice: food shortages or weapons shortages. Britain could afford neither. Unless Franklin Roosevelt expanded the U.S. patrol zone into the eastern Atlantic, Britain’s losses could only worsen. Roosevelt, to Churchill’s dismay, declined to expose his navy to any new dangers by doing so.
The steel monsters plying the surface matched the terror of the U-boats. Bismarck and Tirpitz, undergoing final fitting-out somewhere in the Baltic, loomed as two of the Führer’s instruments of springtime destruction. Almost 42,000 tons of displacement each, Bismarck and Tirpitz were armed with eight fifteen-inch guns, powered by three Blohm & Voss turbines and a dozen Wagner boilers that generated 138,000 horsepower and speed in excess of 31 knots—over thirty-five miles an hour. Their optical equipment for targeting purposes was far superior to anything the British had, and they could outrun and outshoot any British battleship afloat. Yet Churchill, during the first weeks of 1941, did not even know where Bismarck was. The very uncertainty as to the two ships’ whereabouts was their greatest strength. Churchill later wrote that had Hitler kept “both in full readiness in the Baltic and allow rumors of an impending sortie to leak out from time to time,” the Royal Navy “should thus have been compelled to keep concentrated at Scapa Flow… practically every new ship we had,” with the result that convoys, already insufficiently guarded, would remain so. Allied (British, Dutch, Norwegian, and Canadian) merchant ships sailed with so little escort and were attacked so regularly that crews kept their lifeboats slung out over the sides for the entire voyage, ready for use.65
Such were the generally deplorable conditions upon the seas and in the air during the first two months of 1941. Living conditions on the Continent, from Poland to France, had only worsened since the previous May. Someday, somehow—if Churchill could drag the U.S. into the fight—the final and determining battles would be fought there. Until then, Churchill could only use the occasional broadcast to try to boost the morale of the enslaved Europeans as he had the spirits of Britons in 1940.
It was a hopeless task. Hitler had buried the hopes of all those he had conquered. Hitler held the western half of Europe, Stalin the eastern half. With the release of winter’s grip, the dictators planned to tighten theirs. They were partners. Stalin had been a faithful and dependable vendor to the Reich since Hitler struck westward to vanquish the imperialist democracies. He pledged to pour millions more tons of Russian grain and oil into Germany in the coming year. In return, Hitler promised to boost shipments of steel and capital goods to Russia. The target date for the first influx of German steel was mid-1941.
Hitler was most conciliatory regarding Russia in his New Year’s greeting to Mussolini: “I do not envision any Russian initiative against us so long as Stalin is alive, and we ourselves are not victims of any serious setbacks…. I should like to add to these general considerations that our present relations with the U.S.S.R. are very good.” Those words were a work of pathological obfuscation. German intelligence could detect no hint of any Soviet “initiative” against Germany because none was in any way contemplated. The Soviets sought only increased trade with Germany and increased influence in Eastern Europe, although Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov manifested a stubborn greed during his November talks with Ribbentrop. Molotov demanded more leverage in the Balkans. He demanded that German troops leave Finland and that Germany acknowledge Bulgaria to be within the Soviet sphere of influence. As well, he demanded that Hitler divulge any plans he might have pertaining to the Balkans and Greece.66
Such impudent requests infuriated Hitler, for he needed free rein in the region, especially in Bulgaria, in order to protect his southern flank from anticipated British adventures in Greece, and for another compelling reason, which he of course did not disclose to Stalin. The previous July he had told his commanders that he intended to attack Russia in the spring. This was why Bulgaria assumed new strategic importance; it not only protected the German southern flank from the British should they land in Greece but also anchored the southern flank of Hitler’s line opposite Stalin. In order to deflect Stalin’s gaze from central Europe, Hitler dangled the tantalizing prospects of a Russian share in the spoils of the dismembered British Empire were the Soviets to make the Tripartite Pact a four-way deal. So much plunder would there be, and so rich the rewards for the Soviets—in the Far East, the Near East, and in attaining their ancient goal of ready access to the Mediterranean. The idea appealed to Stalin. Yet England fought on, and Hitler could not yet deliver the corpse of the British Empire.
To Stalin, a greater role in the Balkans and Bulgaria appeared the more modest and surer bet and would result in Moscow’s geographical buffer edging farther west. In essence, it would result in Germany and Russia sharing hegemony in east-central Europe. Churchill believed Hitler never intended to share power, and he had tried to warn Stalin of that the previous June. Hitler had made clear in Mein Kampf that Germany’s destiny lay in the east. He had written that modern Germany would pick up where the Teutonic knights had left off six hundred years earlier, in east Prussia. He described the “regents of present-day Russia” as “common bloodstained animals” who belonged to “a nation which combines a rare mixture of bestial horror with an inconceivable gift for lying.” Hitler had always believed Lebensraum (“living space”) lay in the east, that is, in Russia. That was why in mid-1940 he ordered OKW to begin planning for the invasion of Russia, and why, in Decem
ber, he approved OKW’s plan (Barbarossa), which called for the attack to begin in mid-May, with victory expected in five months, before winter.67
The logic of a betrayal of Stalin was lost on everybody except Hitler and some—but by no means all—of his inner circle. Churchill, as he had the previous summer, tried to open up a line of communication with Stalin of the sort he had with Roosevelt. He failed. Stalin believed any warnings sent his way by London were ruses, ploys to precipitate trouble between Russia and its good friend Germany. In any case, Churchill had no hard intelligence to confirm his suspicions. Nor, early in the year, did the Americans. The American diplomat George Kennan later wrote that the American legation in Berlin, where Kennan then served, was “slow to recognize that in Hitler’s logic the inability to invade Britain would inevitably spell the necessity of invading Russia.” William L. Shirer’s sources in Berlin hinted at that outcome, but Shirer assumed along with the rest of the world that England must first be conquered. In late 1940, Shirer pondered in his diary the prospects of Hitler going to war with either America or Russia: “I am firmly convinced he does contemplate it and if he wins in Europe and Africa he will in the end launch it unless [because of isolationist appeasement] we are prepared to give up our way of life.” Once victorious in Europe, Shirer wrote, Hitler “will attack Russia, probably before he tackles the Americas.” Yet, “Hitler’s Germany can never dominate the continent of Europe as long as Britain holds out.”68
Churchill had believed that for a year, too. But he realized that were Hitler to crush the Russians, he could build more sinister heavy bombers at leisure, and perhaps even rocket weapons. He could build ships, U-boats, and modern landing craft. The Führer could then turn his armies westward, toward Britain. Churchill prepared Britons for that eventuality, and prepared his home armies, as well. The next move was Hitler’s. If he came to England in the spring, Churchill, his armies growing by the week, would be ready. If Hitler did not come to England, the day would come—perhaps two years hence—when Churchill would go to Europe. That was the plan. But Churchill faced a plethora of unknowns. He sensed the course Hitler would take in the east, but he lacked the counterintuitive instincts and the hard intelligence necessary to parse Hitler’s contorted logic. He could only wait.
Other than by air, Churchill could not take the battle directly to Hitler, but he could take it to him indirectly. The previous summer he had approved a proposal to finance and arm those brave enough among the conquered peoples to rise up against their Nazi jailers, to resist by any means and with any weapon. He encouraged those who were too fearful to strike at the enemy; many listened, and in time many fought. During the Battle of Britain he had ordered Ismay to create a force of “specially trained troops of the hunter class” to bring a “reign of terror” to Nazi positions along the European coasts, at first with a strategy of “butcher and bolt,” to be followed in time with the storming and reducing of “Hun garrisons” while “leaving a trail of German corpses behind.” It was to be a dirty but necessary business.69
At the time, Hugh Dalton, minister for economic warfare, which included covert “black” propaganda (lies and misinformation), argued the need “to organize movements in enemy-occupied territory comparable to the Sinn Fein movement in Ireland, to the Chinese Guerillas now operating against Japan… or—one might as well admit it—to the organizations which the Nazis themselves have developed so remarkably in almost every country in the world.” A socialist, Dalton called his proposed organization the “democratic international.” It would employ tactics such as “industrial and military sabotage, labour agitation and strikes, continuous propaganda, terrorist acts against traitors and German leaders, boycotts and riots.” It was clear to Dalton that such an organization must operate “entirely independent” of ordinary departmental or cabinet rules and supervision, including the War Office. In essence, he proposed to Halifax an organizational structure of the sort Americans decades later termed “stand alone and off the shelf.” Not only would this special unit function without oversight, but in Dalton’s estimation, the success of its future operations depended on “a certain fanatical enthusiasm.”70
Churchill heartily embraced the scheme. If fanaticism proved necessary in the battle against Hitlerism, then let the mayhem commence. If it did not prove effective, Dalton and his socialist friends could take the blame. In July 1940 Churchill summoned Dalton to join him and the “usual nocturnal visitors”—the Prof and Bracken—to work things up. Over dinner and drinks Churchill asked Dalton to head “a new instrument of war,” the Special Operations Executive (SOE). It was exactly the organization Dalton had proposed to Halifax, and it would engage in exactly the sort of murderous raids Churchill had proposed to Ismay. Churchill termed it the “Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare.” The meeting over, Churchill sent Dalton off with a final command: “And now, set Europe ablaze.”71
Though that phrase has long been cited as an example of Churchill’s determination to smite Hitler, Dalton’s biographer, Ben Pimlott, points out the sad irony of the utterance, given the obvious military weakness of Britain at the time. Many within Churchill’s circle did not share Dalton’s enthusiasm. The Foreign Office was keener on avoiding trouble in Europe than on stirring it up; deceiving friends and neutrals would someday lead to repercussions. And, later in the year, soon after taking over the Ministry of Information, Brendan Bracken, long a political enemy of Dalton, unleashed his own campaign of ungentlemanly rumors directed at the SOE and Dalton. Bracken sought to discredit the SOE in order to merge the “black” propaganda conducted by the SOE into the Ministry of Information, which produced “white” (largely truthful) propaganda. It was a turf war plain and simple. Rumors flourished. Within certain circles the SOE was said to be “infested with crackpots, communists, and homosexuals.” T. E. Lawrence, it was whispered around Whitehall, would have given his approval to this “cult of intimate friendship with peasant partisans.”72
General Auchinleck and Air Marshal Portal had complained to Churchill that the section of SOE that dealt in agitation and subterfuge (versus intelligence) was “a bogus, irresponsible, corrupt show.” However unseemly it might appear to refined gentlemen such as Auchinleck and Portal, if assassins could bloody the Nazis, Churchill was all for them. Dalton set up his secret shop in Baker Street.73
Whenever they were captured by the Nazis, Dalton’s saboteurs and resistance fighters and their families paid a terrible price. Reports of Nazi reprisals against those who defied them arrived daily in Whitehall. When Polish patriots murdered an ethnic German, the Gestapo seized 160 hostages and shot seventeen. Death was the penalty for singing the Polish national anthem. Death was the penalty for two Norwegian trade unionists who had the temerity to speak publicly of fair labor practices. Eighteen Dutch resistance fighters sang their national anthem on the way to their execution. To remind the Dutch that they were not forgotten, British bombers dropped thousands of pounds of tea in two-ounce tea bags with a message: “Greetings from the Free Netherlands Indies. Keep a good heart. Holland will rise again.” With the creation of SOE, Churchill came up with something far more lethal than a barrage of tea leaves to help the Dutch—all Europeans—to rise again. To that end, the SOE during the next four years inserted almost five hundred agents, including sixty women (thirteen of whom would be tortured and killed by the Gestapo), behind enemy lines throughout the Continent. If women could spy and if need be kill, Churchill wanted them out there spying and killing. Churchill’s SOE agents became—in modern special-forces terminology—force multipliers, sent with his blessing to train the locals, to organize mass mayhem, to spy, and to kill those who needed killing.74
HMG could not of course disclose any of this to Britons. Churchill’s relationship with Britons was based on the trust he asked them to place in him, and the symbolism he gave in return. During 1941 he had not much else to give but inspiring words, somber poses, and his most inspired gesture of all, the “V” for victory. The “V campaign” began in January
when Victor de Laveleye, a Belgian refugee and head of the BBC Belgian section, made shortwave radio broadcasts from London in which he urged Belgians—who had been scrawling “RAF” on sidewalks and walls—to show their defiance of the Germans by marking the letter “V” in public places. The symbol caught on. In French it stood for Victorie (victory); in Flemish (the second major language in Belgium), Vrijheid (freedom); in Dutch it stood for Vryheid (freedom); in Serbian, Vitestvo (heroism); in Czech, Vite zstoi (victory). However, with predictable arrogance and astounding stupidity, the Nazis also adopted the symbol. Berlin radio claimed credit for the campaign, noting that the “V”—for victoria, the Latin word for “victory”—showed up wherever Germans went in Europe. Indeed it did, but by trying to appropriate the “V” as their own, the Nazis backed themselves into a corner: German soldiers could do nothing but smile and return the salute whenever a Belgian, Dutchman, or Frenchman proffered it. In July, a “Colonel Britton” (the broadcaster Douglas Ritchie) broadcast on the BBC a message from Churchill to occupied Europeans: “It is dark now. Darkness is your chance. Put up your ‘V’ as a member of this vast army. Do it in the daytime too.” They did. In short order, whenever Churchill flashed the “V,” flashbulbs popped. The symbol merged with his bulldog snarl into a single defiant entity. For the remainder of his life, he raised it on any occasion of national duress or personal ordeal.75
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