The Peace of Amiens

by Nicholas Sumner

  ​Oswald Mosley was given some busy work by Attlee after he was forced out as Prime Minister. Attlee didn’t want him around so he sent him off to do an audit of the Empire. That was an eye opener for our State Department. It was the first time we had looked seriously at what a British Imperial retreat would have meant to us and it wasn’t pretty. That drove a tolerant approach to the British Empire.

  DWH: A tolerant approach?

  HST: Yes, we decided to mind our own business basically.

  DWH: What was your attitude to Russia?

  HST: Well there was a lot of resentment over their spying activities in our country. I mean a lot. As you know the Soviet Union came apart over the winter of 1942 to 43, the place was chaos for a while, and then Kaganovitch took over what was left and started trying to put it back together again. By the time I took office, the British were beginning to supply the Russians with food, medicines, fuel and some weaponry through eastern Iran. From late ‘45 we started to send supplies that way too. We really started pouring food, fuel, raw materials and munitions in there. Reza Shah wouldn’t let us put a lot of troops on the ground in Iran, he wanted to stay neutral so he was hedging his bets, but he was fine with letting us transport supplies through there. Because of that the Russians were able to start planning for real military operations against the Germans rather than the partisan/guerrilla style stuff they had been doing up to that time. We knew we were going to need their help fighting Germany. Most of their industrial infrastructure had survived the Axis-Soviet War, they moved it all away from the front line in ‘41 and ‘42.

  DWH: Going back to the Tizard mission; was it actually very significant in terms of our military build-up?

  HST: Yes it was, Tizard came over here with quite a bag of tricks. The most important were aircraft engines and the work the British had done on developing an atomic bomb, but there was all sorts of other stuff as well.

  DWH: Rolls-Royce were building military aircraft engines in Indiana at this time, weren’t they?

  HST: Yes that’s correct, in Auburn, at the old Auburn – Cord – Duesenberg factory. Michigan too, at the Packard factory in Detroit.

  DWH: How did that come about?

  HST: When the Auburn automobile company closed their doors in 1937, they were bought by Rolls-Royce using a loan from the British government. The British were worried about their manufacturing capacity and they were exploring the possibilities of using American and Canadian factories to build stuff for them. The American aero-engine companies were pretty unhappy about that and got Franklin Roosevelt’s Administration to ensure that none of the engines built at Auburn would come onto the American market, they would all just go straight to the UK.

  DWH: Why didn’t the British just buy American engines?

  HST: They didn’t think they were good enough, not the liquid-cooled in-line engines anyway, they liked our air-cooled radials better. They were telling the Air Force that our fighter aircraft weren’t as good as theirs and we even tested a few of their types and found that they were right. They were really giving our manufacturers a hiding in the international market for military aircraft. Sterling was weak against the dollar, and because of the abrupt end of the War of 1940 they had a surplus of warplanes. The loss of orders for aircraft from Turkey, China, Thailand and Chile really hurt our industry. But none of our manufacturers wanted to build British planes let alone pay the licence fees.

  ​The Argentine-Chilean war – that’s what really bought the message home, the Argentine air force was mostly equipped with German aircraft, Focke-Wulf fighters and so on, while the Chileans used American airplanes. Our bombers were as good as or better than theirs, but our fighters, P38s, P39s and P40s were at a real disadvantage to the best European types, the P39 just wasn’t much good at altitude, the P38 was too hard to fly in combat, and the P40 was just about at the end of its development.

  DWH: The Chileans bought British fighters eventually.

  HST: Yeah, Spitfire fives I think it was. They still weren’t as good as the German fighters, but they were much better than ours, and because they were surplus to British requirements they were much cheaper too. The same thing happened with the Turks and the Chinese. Once the aircraft industry began to appreciate this, it wasn’t long before they decided to try a British engine in one of our fighters.

  DWH: These were built by Packard though.

  HST: Yes, that’s right. The British had got Packard all tooled up to build engines on the same basis as Auburn, but when the war of 1940 came to an end, Packard were left hanging in the breeze. Anyway, they got it together with the North American aircraft company to swap out the Allison engine from one of their A36 planes for a Rolls-Royce engine and they came up with the P51. Our airplane engine manufacturers were as mad as hell about it, but I backed the Air Force’s decision. We had to get our boys the best weapons we could and if that meant paying royalties on non-American engines then so be it. Their jet engines were well ahead of ours too.

  DWH: What did the British do for the Manhattan Project?

  HST: As you know, Franklin Roosevelt started our atomic bomb programme in 1940. He had received a letter from Albert Einstein warning him that the Germans might be developing atomic weapons so he got the ball rolling. Under Wendell Willkie’s administration things moved forward but not as fast as they might have done. The problem was the whole project was just so darned expensive, Willkie’s administration understood the importance of the thing but they had to surround it with secrecy and one way to keep it as quiet as possible was to limit the amount of money that it got. If items turned up in the budget with huge dollar figures in front of them people tended to ask questions, people in Congress and the Senate. So Wendell had to disguise spending on the bomb as much as possible.

  ​The British were already ahead of us and their government isn’t nearly as open and accessible as ours is. In consequence it was much easier for the British to hide what it was costing. The Tizard mission showed us how far they had got. I got Oppenheimer and Groves to come and look at the documents Tizard had bought with him and they confirmed that the British were well ahead. Now we knew that we would be able to catch them up, but the problem was time. We had no idea how far ahead the Germans were, no idea at all, and frankly a lot of people were very scared about what would happen if they got the bomb first. We were getting warnings through the Danish resistance from a guy named Niels Bohr, a Danish atomic physicist, one of the best in the world. He kept getting German atomic physicists coming and asking him questions, stuff that could only be related to atomic weapons. He did what he could to mislead them but of course there was only so much he could do, and he was really worried about where the Germans were with their bomb development.

  ​Oppenheimer and Groves both agreed with me that any shortcut would help us out. As I say, we were really on the back foot at that time and it was imperative that we get a working atomic bomb as quickly as possible. It was no time to stand on national pride.

  DWH: The British drove a hard bargain though didn’t they?

  HST: Yes but I respected them for it. There were big changes between the way Attlee’s Administration approached us and the way Sinclair’s did. Dealing with Attlee’s people was like dealing with a bunch of beggars, dealing with Sinclair’s was more like doing business. Their chief negotiator was Louis Mountbatten, and a real charming British aristocrat he is too. He really knew how to get around people. But in the end I think we got a good deal. We agreed to bear three quarters of the cost of the programme and the British agreed to give us 50% access to the Canadian uranium ore, we agreed to complete disclosure between the laboratories, ours at Los Alamos and theirs at Chalk River in Ontario, which meant less wasteful duplication of effort.

  DWH: This wasn’t just another example of the British getting us to fight their wars for them, or more specifically, getting us to pay for their wars for them?

  HST: No, no, not at all. We could tell from the way they had cut their naval programme back in July
of ‘43 and the limits they put on expanding their army that they were strapped for cash.

  DWH: How much time in developing the bomb did the deal save us?

  HST: I believe it may have saved us two to three years.

  CHAPTER 23: NO CALM BEFORE THE STORM

  From ‘Germany and the Conquered Territories’ by Heinz Lang, Macallister 1997

  There were seven versions of the Generalplan Ost, the Nazi’s plan for Eastern Europe. The final version was set down in a document of 374 pages dated 28th January 1943. [110] As well as the ‘Germanisation’ of the annexed Polish territories, it recommended the creation of four ‘borderlands’ (Marken), Ostland, Ukraine, Caucasus and Gotengau (Crimea and Kherson province) and one Verteidigungzone (a defensive area under military jurisdiction) – Muskovy. There were no proposals for German settlement in most of the Russian heartland. Certainly there was the intention of long-term German domination, but there does not appear to have been any plan for Russia comparable to the other settlement plans which focused on Ukraine and Belorussia. The timescale over which the plan was to be implemented was twenty-five to thirty years, the greater part of the cost was to be raised by borrowing.

  ​In addition to their plans for the east, there were also detailed plans for regions closer to the 1939 borders of Germany. The plan defined a Volksraum (People’s Room) with seven settlement areas: Belgium, Luxemburg, Elass-Lothringen (Alsace-Lorraine), Upper Carinthia, Lower Styria, Bohemia-Moravia and the Incorporated Eastern Territories annexed from Poland. All of these were subsumed by decree into Germany proper between 1942 and 1944. Switzerland was annexed in 1943 following the German conquest when it was re-named ‘Schweizmark’. It does not seem to have figured in the ‘Volksraum’ plans, perhaps because most of the population were already ethnic Germans.

  ​The plan proposed a future population of 30 million people in the settlement areas of the Volksraum, consisting of an existing ethnic German population of 5.6 million, a residual Germanised native population of 7.4 million, and 17 million German immigrants. As the existing population was 36.3 million, of which 5.6 million were already German (German citizens, ethnic Germans etc) and 5.4 million were defined as ‘Germanisable’ natives; the plan implied, but did not explicitly mention, the expulsion of around 25 million people.

  ​For the Ostland area, out of a population of 7.2 million, of which few were considered German, 2.1 million were considered Germanisable while the remaining 5.1 million would be required to disappear. 3.1 million German settlers would have been needed to bring the population back up to 5.2 million.

  ​In total, the disappearance of around 30 million non-Germans out of the settlement areas of the Volksraum, the Marken and the Verteidigungzone was implied in the plan, but this mass movement of peoples across Europe was hardly even begun by 1945. Generalplan Ost was wholly divorced from socio-economic realities and completely unworkable. More than one German observer dismissed it as “Realitätsferne Hirngespinste” (pipedreams divorced from reality) and the entire process of planning for Germany’s eastern conquests, has an air of delusion, unreality and disorganisation.

  ​Hitler set only vague policy guidelines, which were based on Nazi ideology, itself a fundamentally confused system of ideas. His underlings devised models that were based on their own interpretation of this mish-mash of half-baked thinking and then attempted to obtain Hitler’s endorsement. In many cases there were direct conflicts between the conceptions advanced by different subordinates and Hitler would not give clear approval of one idea over a competing one, leading to uncertainty and confusion in the administration of the conquered territories.

  ​A number of cities in the east were renamed by the Nazis. Moscow became Liststadt after Guido von List, while Leningrad was officially renamed Landsberg, though Lanzberg and Petersberg were also commonly used. Hitler’s fixation with Ulrich von Hutten manifested itself in the renaming of Minsk as Huttenberg and Kiev became Amalia, after the quasi-fictional capital of the Goths on the Dnieper. Sevastopol became Goetheberg for Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Tbilisi was renamed Schönerer for Georg von Schönerer.

  Europe 1943.

  Generalplan Ost was a failure. The fundamental problem was that millions of Germans did not suddenly volunteer to become settlers since the post-war economic boom in Germany absorbed all available German manpower and even drew in foreign labour. Furthermore, the inhabitants of a prosperous developed country such as Germany could not be induced to leave for a hazardous, uncomfortable life in the undeveloped East.

  ​Ostland, Ukraine, Gottengau and Caucasus continued as military occupation zones tying down large numbers of German troops. There was sporadic partisan activity and the Germans committed many atrocities in response. Economic activity was greatly subdued and the Germans even found difficulty in inducing the people of the region to plant grain.

  ​Finally, there was the question of the territories of Holland, Denmark, the Danish colonies and Norway. The people of these countries were regarded by the Nazis as Aryans and they were therefore eligible to be Germanised. Norway, largely because of Norse mythology which had been adopted by the Nazis, was an obvious choice. Denmark followed on as a kind of stepping stone to Norway and though annexation had been planned for 1950 this was bought forward and both were officially annexed in January 1945. Holland presented a slightly different case but was also annexed in the spring of 1945.

  ​After the occupation of Denmark, the Nazis made no move to annex Iceland and Greenland. Although theoretically independent since 1874, Iceland’s foreign affairs were handled by Denmark and consequently the Parliament of Iceland, the Althing, decided to take control of external dealings and elected a provisional governor. The Althing also resolved to strictly enforce a position of neutrality and sought the assistance of the United States which warned the German government that any attempt to occupy or coerce Iceland or Greenland would be dimly viewed in Washington. Involved as they were with their plans for Europe the status of Iceland and Greenland were not matters the Germans desired to pursue at that time.

  ​Following a referendum, Iceland formally became an independent republic on 17th June, 1944, while Denmark was still under German occupation. Despite this, Christian X, the deposed and exiled Danish King, sent a message of congratulations to the Icelandic people. Greenland, though still theoretically a Danish colony came under the administration of Reykjavik though some assistance with practicalities was rendered by Canada and the United States.

  From ‘British Politics after the War of 1940’ by Brian Garret, Gloucester University Press, 2001

  With their disappointing showing in the election of 1941, the Conservative Party quickly realised that the choice of Lord Halifax was a mistake and he stepped down before the final results were tallied. The new leadership race saw the selection of Anthony Eden who had previously been the Shadow Foreign Secretary instead. The choice of Eden as party leader was not without controversy, there was concern about his youth and comparative inexperience. Appointed at the age of 42, the party saw in him a figure that would modernise and revitalise it, in essence he was the Conservative’s answer to Oswald Mosley though as one of the Conservative ‘Grandees’ put it “Unlike Mosley, the man is not an utter blaggard.” [111]

  ​As part of the Liberal-Conservative Coalition government, Eden was given the deputy Prime Ministership but held the portfolio of Foreign Secretary. His good looks, obvious intelligence and relaxed style had great appeal both in the House and for the voters, especially when contrasted with what had gone before. The alliance had first to resolve the issue of free trade which was traditionally one of the chief points of difference between the two parties, but with a world rapidly dividing into trading blocs, the point was rendered moot. While hoping for a return to free trade, the Liberals in the Coalition were forced to confirm the status quo of Imperial Preference for the time being and thus support the Sterling Bloc against the rapidly developing dollar and Reichmark blocs. This was one of the issues which per
mitted the National Liberals to return to the Liberal fold and the decade-long schism in the Liberal Party was healed.

  ​In the wake of the 1941 election, the uproar in the Labour Party showed no signs of ceasing. Hugh Dalton resigned and the new leader, Stafford Cripps, could barely contain a fractious and demoralised group of MPs. Labour had been disconcerted by the Alvarez Affair, thrown into disarray by the armistice of 1940 and the subsequent Treaty of Leamouth, and had lost massively in the election. Yet the divisions caused by Oswald Mosley’s intemperate appetites, Britain’s exit from the war and political defeat, were as nothing in comparison with the split caused by the news in June 1941 of the start of Operation Barbarossa. In some ways this was surprising as the German invasion of the Balkans in April had not excited nearly as much controversy on the left of British politics as it did on the right. [112]

  ​A group on the left of the party, led by Aneurin Bevan, wanted a commitment from the government for direct support of the Soviet Union while the centrists united behind Cripps who preferred a more indirect approach. The pro-Conservative press was able to present Labour as not only split on policy, but both appeasers of Nazism and supporters of Communism!

  ​Bevan’s rages became worse as the unlikelihood of either intervening in Russia abroad, or persuading the country that Labour’s wildly ambitious social programmes at home could be financed, became apparent. It was politically impossible for the government of the day to raise taxes which had not yet returned to their pre-war levels. Furthermore, the Alliance’s own proposals for expanded social spending and the National Health Service were demonstrably less costly than those the Labour Party was demanding. Crucially, they could be funded through greater utilisation of the resources of the Empire. It rubbed salt into the wound that the Alliance used the Mosley report to back their claims. Bevan on the other hand, wanted Labour to commit to giving the territories of the Empire independence as soon as was practicable and advocated borrowing money on the world markets to finance Labour’s plans. However, as these were somewhat depressed due to the recession, and British finances were at a low ebb after the war, this was unlikely to meet with success.