A Patriot's History of the Modern World

by Larry Schweikart

  It was a high-risk operation, and the Norwegian part dangerously exposed the Kriegsmarine to destruction by the much more powerful Royal Navy. Germany’s shipbuilding program, as we have seen, had already been squelched (except for U-boats) and the Kriegsmarine lacked aircraft carriers to provide air cover. Admiral Erich Raeder feared the loss of much of his surface fleet to the British (there was no Norwegian navy of any substance) and specified that German vessels had to return immediately to German ports as soon as all troops and supplies were disembarked. The Germans encountered a brief delay near Oslo when the Blücher was sunk, which provided enough time for the Norwegian government, including the king, parliament, and treasury, to escape to Britain, forming a government-in-exile. Ironically, the Blücher—Germany’s newest heavy cruiser—was sunk by shells from 1905 Krupp guns located in a fort built during the Crimean War, and torpedoes manufactured by an Austrian firm at the turn of the century.21

  Quisling took to the airwaves on April 9 to proclaim himself the new prime minister, and Norway soon surrendered, even though only 10,000 German troops were in the first wave (ultimately reinforced to about 25,000). Oslo was captured so effortlessly that a German military brass band led the Nazis into the city. Upon removal of the German heavy surface forces to safety, the Royal Navy cornered ten German destroyers in Narvik Fjord and sank them all, thereby reducing Germany’s destroyer fleet by half. Two German light cruisers were sunk near Bergen and Kristiansand, and twenty-seven other vessels, including transports and supply ships, were lost through the middle of June. It was a catastrophe for the Kriegsmarine and one from which the surface fleet never recovered. The German Naval High Command commented in its war diary that Weserübung “broke all the rules in the book of naval warfare,” but it was also the first time in history when an army, air force, and navy had operated intimately together with interlinked tasks and objectives (today called “combined arms”).22 Once again the German military had broken new ground, showing the rest of the world how to conduct military operations, but at a high cost. Quite possibly, however, it was all unnecessary. German general Walter Warlimont and others have maintained that even if the Allies had established themselves in Norway, the country could have been taken more easily after the fall of France given the proximity to Germany, the presence of Nazi traitors, and Britain’s lack of long-range bomber power.23 Once the invasion of France started, the point was moot: the Allies decided they needed to concentrate their forces in France, and more than 25,000 British, French, and Norwegian forces, along with King Haakon VII, were evacuated in late May. Including Denmark—which surrendered after two weeks in April 1940 at a loss to the Nazis of 16 soldiers—Hitler had bagged two more countries at a total cost of fewer than 4,000 men and about 100 aircraft and looked more unstoppable than ever.24

  In addition to a steady supply of valuable iron for Germany, Norway also contained a minor prize, the Vemork hydroelectric plant, which could produce heavy water (deuterium oxide) as a by-product of fertilizer production. The deuterium was seen by German scientists as a key component of plutonium production for their nuclear energy program. Prior to the German invasion, the French removed all stocks of heavy water from the facility, but the Allies worried the Germans would produce more. From 1940 to 1944, a number of sabotage operations were mounted that included Norwegian resistance and Allied bombing, one raid finally putting the plant permanently out of commission. Subsequent research has shown that German scientists created far too little heavy water to start a nuclear reactor, but at the time, Allied intelligence had to presume the Nazis could develop such capabilities. (As late as 1944, Allied assassination teams still scoured France for Werner Heisenberg, originator of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and head of the German atomic bomb effort, unaware that Hitler had scrapped all atomic bomb plans a year earlier.)25

  France’s Epic Failure

  Whether in Paris, London, or Washington, military and civilian leadership thought matters on the Western Front would unfold much as they had in 1914. But a great deal had changed in the interim, some of it ironic and even amusing. Tales of horrors in the Great War, for example, drove many men to search for “safer” areas of service in World War II—artillery, or logistics. One British unit still retained the name “Hussars,” which fooled many recruits into thinking it was a horse cavalry regiment instead of the frontline combat force it had become.26 Soldiers’ fear of recreating the trench scene of 1915–18, while understandable, created its own self-fulfilling morale problems under German attacks, most notably the shocking disintegration of French ground forces. In truth, the western democracies proved totally inept and irresolute: the Dutch surrendered in four days after 3,000 battle deaths, the Belgians in seventeen after losing 6,000, the French after 80,000 died in only forty-three days, and British forces were chased from the continent in twenty-three days except for 136,000 troops trapped in northwestern France and evacuated from French harbors as shipping became available. German military superiority was stunning beyond comprehension, proving to many that the West was beyond recovery.

  Upon reflection, France’s total collapse was entirely predictable, and not merely because the Maginot Line was a monument to military stupidity. As ineffective as they sometimes were, tanks in World War I had proven the obsolescence of fixed defenses, yet the Maginot Line—an unbroken string of defenses stretching from Switzerland to Luxembourg, replete with barbed wire, concrete pillboxes, long-range artillery, and underground tunnels to rapidly move troops to threatened positions—was merely an updated version of the trench. French strategy assumed that it could thwart any direct assault, and therefore would force the invaders to enter Belgium as they had in 1914. France and Britain would then move three French armies and the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) to the Dyle River and other defensive positions, hoping to halt the expected German attack before it penetrated French territory. But just as the Belgians refused German passage in 1914, now the Belgian government refused France entry into its country to take up positions until after hostilities commenced. By putting the Allies in a reactive mode from the outset, Belgian policy gave the Germans a decided advantage. In addition, France originally planned to build a Maginot-type static defense line one hundred miles long in Belgium (which never materialized), but rapid movement to that line would have to be attempted under wartime conditions with relatively little transport available. This was not a plan for victory; it was an exercise in attrition like World War I. Even then the disposition of troops, irrespective of the strategic plan, was badly flawed. Holland had to defend itself with its eight divisions; north of Dinant, the Allies would field Belgium’s twelve fully equipped divisions of 204,000 men (plus ten divisions with minimal equipment), the BEF’s nine divisions (237,000 men), and twenty-six French divisions for one hundred miles. Meanwhile, France retained sixty divisions (approximately 1.6 million men) at the Maginot Line. Unfortunately, this setup left a gap of ninety-five miles in the Ardennes Forest, supposedly impenetrable for a modern army, with only sixteen reserve divisions stationed there to defend the area.

  It must be noted that the mobilized French Army in 1940 numbered 2,776,000 men, and her Army of the Interior, 2,224,000.27 Although British, French, Dutch, and Belgian forces enjoyed a substantial numerical superiority in ground troops over the Germans on the eve of battle, they were dispersed, uncoordinated, and lacked joint training. The Germans placed fewer than 2.5 million men on the Western Front, while the Allied total was more than 3.5 million. The French even had more and better tanks than the Germans, including 405 medium Char-Bs, the best tank on the battlefield, but rendered relatively harmless through poor tactics.

  While the Allies enjoyed superior forces in the field, the Germans possessed forward-looking military strategists and tacticians. Lieutenant General Erich von Manstein, chief of staff to General Gerd von Rundstedt, commander of Army Group A, which would bear the brunt of the fighting, had introduced a plan that departed radically from the old Schlieffen wheel, still the basic pla
n of the German High Command. Where Schlieffen pivoted south to pin French forces against German units on the border with his “swinging door,” von Manstein, with support from panzer general Heinz Guderian, commander of the elite armored 19th Army Corps, devised a rapid stab through the Ardennes toward the English Channel to isolate the Allied northern armies. When two German officers fell into Belgian hands on January 10 carrying the First Air Fleet’s Operation Order of Fall Gelb (“case yellow”), which contained details of an army-strength attack into Belgium west of Maastricht and airborne assaults between the Meuse and Sambre rivers on January 14, the Belgians opened their borders to French troops, and the French battle plan was exposed. Von Manstein himself was removed from his position, probably due to his opposition to the current version of Fall Gelb, and made commander of an infantry corps then forming in Silesia (thereby sent into obscurity). Politicking through Hitler’s adjutant, Rudolf Schmundt, von Manstein obtained an audience with Hitler on February 17 where he was able to present his plan. Hitler was immediately persuaded, and, after following the plan, the Germans were able to cut off the British and French as they rushed pell-mell northeast into Belgium to meet the originally planned German attack. France was doomed.28

  Major operations began on May 10, 1940, through the Netherlands, where a botched attempt to parachute forces into the Hague cost the Luftwaffe Transportgruppen almost 50 percent of their strength and half of the paratroopers involved in the operation. The bombing of Rotterdam occurred four days later, a tragedy of errors wherein attempts to cancel the German bombing of a Dutch force already negotiating its surrender resulted in bombing the city through an obscuring cloud of smoke and haze. More than eight hundred Dutch citizens died, the legend that no city was safe from German terror bombing was born, and the Dutch were finished.

  At the same time, Germany established bridgeheads into Belgium behind unprecedented tactical bombing by the Luftwaffe and then, farther south, punched through the Ardennes against little resistance. The famed Blitzkrieg (“lightning war”) did not come about by design. Quite the opposite, it was forced on the Germans as an “inspired, high-risk improvisation, a ‘quick military fix’ to the strategic dilemmas, which Hitler and the German military leadership had failed to resolve up to February 1940.”29 Germany could win only wars of fire and maneuver, not wars of attrition. In fact, throughout the assault on Belgium and France, panzer columns including 1,200 tanks and nearly 550 other armored vehicles stretched one hundred miles long and would have been astonishingly vulnerable to Allied air attacks had any been launched. Physical demands on the tankers and drivers were so great that thousands of doses of “tank chocolate,” a variant of amphetamines, were handed out. Nor had weapons planning provided the Nazis with superior tanks. Quite the contrary, German panzers were lightly armed and the French had far more powerful tanks. Germany was, in fact, still relying heavily on Americans for her armor: as late as 1939, Adam Opel’s company—taken over by General Motors in 1929—and Ford were Germany’s largest producers of tanks, and, of course, German armor benefited greatly from the acquisition of several hundred Czech tanks.30

  Two of the French army’s weakest divisions were posted in the critical Sedan hinge, in the Ardennes where the Maginot Line was replaced by the Belgian border. The 71st Infantry had only two regular army officers, and while regular divisions fought bravely in spots, reservists were hopelessly outclassed by the Germans, especially once panzers smashed holes in the French lines. Methodical trench-warfare tactics were of little use in a moving battle of improvisation and chaos for which the French were entirely unprepared. Armored units bypassed numerous pillboxes, panicking French units who heard rumors that Germans were already behind them. However, the popular image of Germans always advancing behind armored spearheads is incorrect. Breaching the Meuse at Sedan, for example, required German infantry to cross the river in rubber rafts, taking the high ground beyond so pioneers (engineers) could build bridges for armor. In those cases, superior German leadership and cohesiveness at the small-unit level carried the day.

  French officers were no better than their men in adapting to the fast-moving fog of war. General Erwin Rommel’s 7th Panzer Division, which breached the defenses of the French 9th Army at Dinant in twenty-four hours, captured 10,000 French in two days and was struck by how quickly they capitulated. In one case, hundreds of French officers marched to detention for miles without a guard. A German reporter asked how it was possible that “these French soldiers, with their officers, so completely downcast, so completely demoralized, would allow themselves to go more or less voluntarily into imprisonment.”31 Even some of the colonial troops, particularly the Moroccans, held out longer than veteran French units.

  Guderian, meanwhile, had turned his panzer divisions northwest in an advance toward the English Channel at Abbeville on the Somme. With their tanks possessing superior radio communication, the Germans—with their smaller guns and lighter armor—were faster and more nimble. At one point Rommel charged through the French 5th Motorized Division, which had lined its tanks up in an overnight bivouac right in his path. Only three of the French tanks escaped. All this should have added up to an astounding victory, and it did, but the rapidity of the movements was unnerving to the Fuehrer. As was evident in Poland, Norway, and now in France, Hitler tended to lose his nerve in a crisis, this time raging that the advance was too fast, and, as General Franz Halder noted, he “keeps worrying about the south flank…and screams that we are on the way to ruin.”32 Hitler should have been more trusting (a trait invariably absent in dictators), for at the time Hitler’s generals were still willing to use their own initiative under the long-established German command principle of subordinate independence, and they ignored his attempts to retard their advance.33

  Even as Hitler stormed about the “ruin” that his generals might cause, French prime minister Paul Reynaud, a bantam little man with unceasing energy, telephoned the new British prime minister Winston Churchill, who had replaced Neville Chamberlain when the first German tanks rolled into Belgium. Reynaud somberly informed Churchill, “We have been defeated. We are beaten; we have lost the battle.”34 Cut off from the French interior and driven against the coast at Dunkirk, more than 338,000 men were evacuated on 861 ships to England from May 27 to June 4; the bulk of them British but also nearly 140,000 French, plus Poles, Belgians, and a few Dutch troops. One fourth of the vessels were sunk in the “miracle at Dunkirk,” the largest and most successful military evacuation by sea in history. Churchill, however, glumly noted, “Wars are not won by great evacuations.”

  Top French officers soon issued searing indictments of their nation’s troops, including General Maurice Gamelin, who complained, “The French soldier, yesterday’s citizen, did not believe in the war…. Too many failures to do their duty in battle have occurred…. The rupture of our [force] dispositions has too often been the result of an every-man-for-himself attitude at key points.”35 Intended for the eyes of Édouard Daladier, France’s minister for national defense, Gamelin’s assessment arrived after Daladier had already been relieved of that position by Paul Reynaud. Gamelin himself was soon given the hook, only nine days after the German attack commenced. The embodiment of a senior officer corps desperate to dodge blame for the fiasco, Gamelin was sixty-seven years old, small and heavy-set, and famous for his bland imperturbability. His replacement, General Maxime Weygand, had never held a field command and was even older (seventy-three). After the surrender in June, France’s generals blamed one another for the rout. Despite their failures as military leaders, however, the “defeated generals and untried admirals were…among the biggest political winners in 1940; they became members of France’s new ruling class.”36

  Churchill flew to Paris on May 16, while the French government was already frantically burning its archives and preparing to evacuate. He met with Reynaud, Daladier, and Gamelin, all standing around a table as if it were a coffin, shrouded in utter dejection. They stared grimly at a map showing the German
s pouring through at Sedan. An optimistic Churchill asked, “Where is the strategic reserve?” and, again in French, “Où est la masse de manoeuvre?” General Gamelin turned, shrugged and said, “Aucune” (“There is none”).37 Undeterred, Churchill asked where and when Gamelin proposed to counterattack the bulge, only to have Gamelin soberly state, “Inferiority of numbers, inferiority of equipment, inferiority of method.”38 He was correct only on the last count, and might have added, “inferiority of leadership, inferiority of will.”

  When Churchill again visited France on June 11–12, his fourth visit since Hitler’s invasion of Poland, he met first with Weygand, Reynaud, and others at the French General Headquarters. Weygand, reputed to be the illegitimate son of Empress Carlota of Mexico (the daughter of Belgian King Leopold) and General Alfred van der Smissen, was a monarchical Catholic possessed of an intense dislike of parliamentary governments. He asked Churchill to send all available air power from Britain, but the prime minister refused: he needed the Royal Air Force for the defense of England, he announced. Furthermore, Churchill told all present that Britain planned to fight on—alone, if necessary. The French simply didn’t believe him.39 World War I Marshal Henri Philippe Pétain, who would soon surrender and head what would become the Vichy government, “was mockingly incredulous” at Churchill’s intention to go it alone. Paris would not even attempt to mount a resistance.40 The best Churchill could do was secure a promise from Admiral Jean François Darlan that the Germans would never get the French Navy.

  Churchill returned the following day to meet with French officials at Tours, where the government was then located. Reynaud asked that France be released from her obligation to fight on so French honor could be upheld. Churchill would not agree and stated, “At all events England would fight on. She had not and would not alter her resolve: no terms, no surrender…death or victory.”41 Reynaud, unmoved, said, “We cannot count on American help. There is no light at the end of the tunnel…. We have no choice.”42 Three days later, he resigned and went into hiding with his mistress; soon thereafter he plowed his car into a tree, killing his mistress and injuring himself. While recuperating before being arrested, Reynaud confided to the American ambassador, “I have lost my country, my honor and my love.”