The Second World War

by John Keegan

  In November 1937 Mussolini did indeed accept a German alliance, the Anti-Comintern Pact against the Soviet Union (originally signed by Germany and Japan a year earlier), thus reinforcing the ‘Rome-Berlin Axis’ agreement of October 1936. By March 1938 Hitler felt free to act against Austria. He first demanded that Austrian Nazis should be installed in key government posts. When Kurt von Schuschnigg, the Austrian Chancellor, refused, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, the Austrian Nazi leader, was instructed to declare himself the head of a provisional government and request German intervention. On 12 March German troops marched in, Anschluss was declared the following day, and on 14 March Hitler made a triumphal entry into Vienna, where he had spent his unhappy and aimless youth. Britain and France protested but did no more. Their inactivity was the confirmation Hitler needed that he could safely proceed to his diplomatic offensive against Czechoslovakia. In April he ordered OKW to prepare plans for a military operation, meanwhile instructing the Nazi groups among the Sudetenland Germans to sustain demands for secession. In August he fixed October as the date for military action and on 12 September, when he delivered a fiery anti-Czech speech at Nuremberg, German troops moved to the frontier.

  This ‘Czech crisis’ seemed to threaten war, even though it was not clear who would fight it. The Czechs were not powerful enough to resist the rearmed Wehrmacht without help, but the Red Army, the only nearby source of assistance, could come to their aid only by crossing Polish territory (or Romanian, but the Romanians were pro-German), a manoeuvre which the Poles, with their deep hostility to and well-founded suspicion of the Russians, were not disposed to permit. The British and the French were also disinclined to see Russia intervening in central Europe and, though France had a treaty with Czechoslovakia, and both Britain and France recognised that honour and prudence demanded that they should not allow Czechoslovakia to be dismembered, they could see no way of protecting her except by military action of their own in the west, from which government and people in both countries shrank. Neither had yet modernised their forces, though they had begun reluctantly to rearm; more to the point, neither had yet developed the will to back protest with force, as was lamentably demonstrated by their succession of failures to implement collective action against aggressors through the League of Nations machinery – against Japan for its aggression in Manchuria in 1931 and in China in 1937, against Italy for its aggression against Ethiopia in 1936. Edouard Daladier and Neville Chamberlain, the French and British Prime Ministers, therefore counselled President Eduard Beneš of Czechoslovakia to acquiesce in Hitler’s demands, even though the cession of the Sudetenland meant the cession also of the country’s frontier fortifications; once surrendered, Czechoslovakia would have no protection whatsoever against further German demands. Nevertheless Benesβ felt obliged to agree, since the Western democracies would not stand by him. The crisis seemed to be settled, but on 22 September Hitler decided to harden his terms. Instead of waiting for an international commission to delimit the revised frontier, he demanded the Sudetenland at once. It was this turning of the screw which provoked the crisis called ‘Munich’, since it was there that Chamberlain and Daladier went to treat with Hitler again on 29-30 September, in a series of craven meetings that conceded him even more than he had initially demanded.

  Munich, it is generally said, marked ‘the end of appeasement’; certainly it sent Daladier and Chamberlain home, superficially relieved, but convinced – Chamberlain more strongly than Daladier – that rearmament must henceforth proceed apace. More accurately, however, Munich marked the moment when Hitler abandoned caution in his campaign of aggressive diplomacy and began to take the risks which would stiffen the will of the Western democracies to meet challenge with firm response and eventually force with force. The turning-point was Hitler’s treatment of browbeaten Czechoslovakia. Having seized the Sudetenland only six months before, on 11 March 1939 he arranged for the pro-German separatist party in the Slovakian half of what remained of the country to announce their secession and request that he become their protector. When the new Czech President, Emil Hacha, arrived in Berlin to protest, he was physically bullied into requesting a German protectorate over the whole of Czechoslovakia. The following day, 15 March, German troops marched into Prague just in time to form a guard of honour and a protective screen for Hitler when he entered the city on their heels.

  The rape of Czechoslovakia drove the democracies to act. The French cabinet agreed that when Hitler next moved he must be stopped. On 17 March Chamberlain publicly announced that if there were further attacks on small states Britain would resist ‘to the utmost of its power’, a clear warning that Hitler now risked war. Hitler did not believe or did not fear the threat. Since January he had been menacing Poland, to which belonged the largest slice of territory that had been German before 1918, in particular the ‘corridor’ which divided East Prussia and the German-speaking Free City of Danzig from the Reich heartland. The Poles doggedly resisted his threats and continued to do so even when on 23 March, as an earnest of intentions, he occupied the port of Memel, a former League of Nations territory on Poland’s border which had been German until 1918. They were chiefly sustained by the knowledge that Britain and France were now preparing to extend them a guarantee of protection; and on 31 March, eight days after publicly announcing that they would defend Belgium, Holland or Switzerland against attack, Britain and France issued a joint declaration guaranteeing the independence of Poland. Two weeks later, on 13 April, to demonstrate the general hardening of their attitude, they issued similar guarantees to Romania and Greece after Mussolini, in imitation of Hitler, annexed Albania.

  Poland, however, was the focus of the growing crisis, which France and Britain now hoped best to solve by drawing the Soviet Union into a protective agreement, even though they knew the Poles were reluctant to accept any help from their traditional enemy. The French and British were themselves mistrustful of the Soviets, besides harbouring a deep dislike of their political system, feelings which were exactly reciprocated. Without Polish resistance, however, an agreement might have been reached; but the Poles adamantly refused to contemplate the Red Army operating on their soil, since they rightly suspected that the Russians desired to annex large parts of Polish territory and might hold these under occupation as their reward for intervention. The British and French could offer Stalin no compensatory inducement to act with them in a hypothetical crisis; during the summer of 1939 the negotiations between the Western democracies and Stalin hung fire.

  Hitler, on the other hand, could offer powerfully tempting inducements. He too had been negotiating desultorily with Stalin during the spring and summer, encouraged by hints that Russia had no taste for risking war, even over the future of a country as important to the security of its western border as Poland. The discussions seemed to make no progress, since neither side would reveal its hand. Then in late July Hitler decided to gamble with a thinly veiled offer to let Stalin take a slice of eastern Poland if he agreed not to impede a German invasion of the country from the west. The Russians responded with keen interest and on 22 August the two Foreign Ministers, Molotov and Ribbentrop, signed a nonaggression pact in Moscow. Its secret clauses effectively permitted the Soviet Union, in the event of a German-Polish war, to annex eastern Poland up to the line of the Vistula and the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia.

  Poland was now doomed. On 15 June the German army staff, the Oberkommando des Heeres (OKH), had settled on a plan which provided for two army groups, North and South, to attack simultaneously with their objective as Warsaw. Because northern Poland was dominated by the German province of East Prussia, while southern Poland bordered on Czechoslovakia, now an extension of German territory (as the Protectorate of Bohemia-Moravia and the puppet state of Slovakia), Poland was deeply outflanked across the whole length of its two most vulnerable frontiers. Its fortified zone lay in the west, covering the industrial region of Lower Silesia, and since Germany’s annexation of Czechoslovakia time had not allowed for new for
tifications to be built. The Polish government was naturally concerned to protect the richest and most populous region of the country; it remained ignorant of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, and so of the Russian threat to its army’s rear; and it counted on the French, with British assistance, to attack Germany’s western border in order to draw off German divisions from the east as soon as the Wehrmacht marched.

  Hitler’s calculations were different. He believed, correctly as it turned out, that the French would not move against him in the west, which he left defended by only forty-four divisions – to oppose the nominal hundred of the French army – and that the British could do little to hurt Germany during the brief span of time he intended the Polish campaign to fill. He had the advantage of being mobilised, whereas the British and French were not. He had the even more important advantage of deploying superior numbers and immeasurably superior equipment against the Poles. The German Army Group North and South together numbered some sixty-two divisions, of which six were armoured and ten mechanised, supported by 1300 modern combat aircraft. Although the Poles had begun to mobilise in July as war became imminent, they had not fully deployed all their men by 1 September. Together they formed forty divisions, of which none was armoured; the few Polish tanks were old, light models, sufficient to equip only a single brigade; and half the 935 aircraft of the air force were obsolete.

  The campaign in Poland

  Hitler nevertheless still needed a pretext to attack. He was briefly deterred on 25 August by the news that Britain had entered into a formal alliance with Poland which guaranteed protection against aggression by a third party, and a few days of inconclusive diplomatic sparring followed. On 28 August, however, he formally abrogated the 1934 non-aggression pact with Poland, signed at a time when her army far outnumbered the Wehrmacht, and on the evening of 31 August received news of Polish aggression near the Silesian border town of Gleiwitz; the incident had in fact been carefully staged by his own SS. Next morning, at 4.45 am, his tanks began to cross the frontier. Since it was Hitler’s pretence that Germany had been attacked by Poland, he issued no declaration of war.

  By the end of 1 September the Polish air force had largely ceased to exist, many of its aircraft having been caught on the ground and destroyed by the Luftwaffe, which also bombed Polish headquarters, communications and cities. All the Wehrmacht ground forces made rapid progress. On 3 September the French and British governments delivered separate ultimatums demanding the withdrawal of German troops from Poland; both ultimatums expired that day and a state of war therefore existed between them and Germany. By that date, however, the Fourth Army advancing from Pomerania had made contact with the Third advancing from East Prussia and had cut off the ‘Polish Corridor’ to Danzig and Gdynia, Poland’s outlet to the sea. By 7 September, after a Polish attempt to stand on the line of the river Warta, west of Warsaw, had failed, the Tenth Army had advanced from the south to within thirty-six miles of the capital, while the Third Army, driving down from the north, was on the river Narew, twenty-five miles away. There was now a German change of plan. It had been expected that most of the Polish army would be entrapped west of the Vistula, on which Warsaw stands. By rapid disengagement, however, large numbers of troops got across the river and marched to concentrate on the capital to fight a defensive battle there. The German commanders therefore ordered a second and deeper envelopment, aimed at the line of the river Bug, a hundred miles east of Warsaw. While it was in progress, the one and only crisis for the Germans occurred. The Polish Poznan Army, one of those entrapped west of the Vistula, turned and attacked the German Eighth and Tenth Armies from the rear, inflicting heavy casualties on the surprised 30th Division in the first impact. A bitter encirclement battle ensued, ending with the capture of 100,000 Polish troops on 19 September.

  Warsaw had been encircled by 17 September; in an effort to reduce its garrison’s resistance by terror, it was heavily bombed until 27 September, when the defenders finally capitulated. All hopes of escaping eastward into the remote and difficult country bordering the Pripet Marshes were ended when the Red Army, after appeals for assistance from the Germans on 3 and 10 September, finally moved its White Russian and Ukrainian Fronts across the frontier on 17 September. Some 217,000 of the 910,000 Poles taken prisoner in the campaign fell into Russian hands. By 6 October all Polish resistance had ended. Some 100,000 Poles escaped into Lithuania, Hungary and Romania, whence many would make their way to France and later Britain, to form the Polish armed forces in exile and continue the struggle – as infantrymen in the Battle of France, as pilots in the Battle of Britain, and later on other fronts – until the last day of the war.

  At the conclusion of the campaign the Wehrmacht, which had suffered 13,981 fatal casualties in Poland, immediately began to turn its victorious divisions westward to man the Siegfried Line or West Wall and prepare for a campaign against the British and French, who had made no attempt at all to divert German forces, except for a small flurry of activity between 8 September and 1 October known as the ‘Saar Offensive’. The only immediate military outcome of the Polish campaign lay not in the west but in the east. There Russia at once capitalised on the terms of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact to demand basing rights for its troops in Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, a manoeuvre which eventually led to the annexation of all three countries to the Soviet Union in June 1940.

  The Winter War

  Stalin also moved against Finland, though with altogether less convenient results. Finland had been Russian territory between 1809 and 1917; when it won its independence after fighting against Russian and local Bolsheviks during the Russian Civil War, it had obtained a frontier demarcation which Stalin decided ran too close for strategic comfort to Leningrad and the Soviet Baltic ports. On 12 October 1939, a week after Latvia had signed its dictated treaty, the Soviet Union confronted the Finnish government with demands for naval basing rights and the cession of a large strip of Finnish territory in the Karelian isthmus leading to Leningrad. The Finns stonewalled until 26 November, when the Soviet Union staged a border incident. On 30 November the Russians attacked with four armies, deploying thirty divisions; for this blatant act of aggression they were expelled from the League of Nations on 14 December. The Soviet Union was eventually to commit a million men to the campaign. The Finns, though their total mobilised strength never exceeded 175,000, fought back with skill and success. Perhaps the most warlike of all European peoples, and certainly the hardiest, the Finns made circles around their Russian attackers in the snowbound wastes of their native forests, employing so-called motti or ‘logging’ tactics to cut off and encircle their enemies, who were regularly disorientated and demoralised by a style of warfare for which their training had not prepared them. While the main strength of the Finnish army defended the Karelian isthmus on the Mannerheim Line, named after the country’s commander-in-chief, who had won the war of independence in 1918, independent units attacked, encircled and destroyed Soviet divisions on the long eastern flank between Lake Ladoga and the White Sea.

  In December the Finns actually counter-attacked from the Karelian isthmus, after a series of operations by the Soviets described by Mannerheim as ‘similar to a performance by a badly directed orchestra’. By January, however, the Russians had taken the measure of their opponents, recognised their own underestimation of the Finns’ military prowess, and brought up sufficient forces to overwhelm them. During February they broke their way through the Mannerheim Line by main force, inflicting casualties which the Finnish government recognised its tiny population could not bear. On 6 March it treated for peace and on 12 March signed a treaty which conceded the demands Russia had made in October; they had lost 25,000 dead since the war had begun. The Red Army, however, had lost 200,000, of whom perhaps the majority had died of exposure while surrounded or out of touch with base. The experience of the ‘Winter War’, which would be renewed as the ‘Continuation War’ after June 1941, conditioned the Soviet Union’s carefully modulated policy towards Finland when the issue o
f peace came round again.

  Finland had briefly been an inspiration to all enemies of the Axis powers, with which, following the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the Soviet Union was identified during 1940. Britain and France had even considered affording her military assistance, and winter-warfare units from both countries were earmarked to join the Finnish army; fortunately for the future of Soviet-Western relations, the Finns had sued for peace before they were sent.

  The Scandinavian campaign

  The end of the Winter War did not, however, terminate Anglo-French military involvement in northern Europe. According to the German navy, which kept a close watch on Scandinavian affairs, Western military assistance for Finland would most probably have passed through Norway, and in doing so would not only have violated Norwegian neutrality but menaced German access to the Kiruna-Gällivare iron ore fields in Sweden which supplied Germany’s war economy with a vital commodity. Hitler’s Grand Admiral, Erich Raeder, was in any case anxious to acquire north Norwegian bases from which to operate against the Royal Navy, and therefore urged Hitler throughout the autumn and winter of 1939 to pre-empt the Allies by authorising an intervention in Norway. Preoccupied by his plans for the forthcoming attack in the west, Hitler would not allow his interest to be aroused, though in December, after Raeder had arranged for the Norwegian Nazi leader, Vidkun Quisling, to be brought to Berlin, he did authorise OKW to investigate whether Norway would be worth occupying. In mid-February his indifference was dissipated by a blow to his pride.