Berlin Diary

by William L. Shirer

  BERN, October 24

  A sad, gloomy trip with Joe [Harsch] up from Geneva this afternoon. I gazed heavy-hearted through the window of the train at the Swiss, Lake Geneva, the mountains, Mont Blanc, the green hills and the marble palace of the League that perished.

  MUNICH, October 25

  Blind-landed in a thick fog and the authorities would not let us continue our flight to Berlin because of the lack of visibility. Am taking the night train. All the restaurants, cafés, and beer-halls here packed tonight with lusty Bavarians. Notice they’ve completely stopped saying: “Heil Hitler.”

  BERLIN, October 27

  Ed Hartrich off in a couple of days for home and I shall leave early in December. Harry Flannery is arriving from St. Louis to take over.

  BERLIN, October 28

  Today we’ve had a classic example of how a Fascist dictatorship suppresses news it feels might too easily shock its people. This morning the Italian army marched into Greece. This morning, too, Hitler popped up in Florence and saw Mussolini about this latest act of Fascist aggression. The Berlin newspapers have great headlines about the meeting in Florence. But they do not carry a single line about the Italian invasion of Greece. My spies report that Goebbels has asked for a couple of days to prepare German public opinion for the news.

  No word from Tess since she left Geneva. With the present chaos in unoccupied France and Spain, anything can happen.

  BERLIN, October 29

  Twenty-four hours after Italy’s wanton aggression against Greece, the German people are still deprived of the news by their rulers. Not a line in the morning papers or the noon papers. But Goebbels is carefully preparing his public for the news. This morning he had the press publish the text of the outrageous Italian ultimatum to the Greek government. It was almost an exact copy of the ultimatums which the Germans sent to Denmark and Norway, and later to Holland and Belgium. But the German public may have wondered what happened after the ultimatum, since it expired yesterday morning.

  LATER.—The news was finally served the German people in the p.m. editions in the form of the text of today’s Italian war communiqué. That was all. But there were nauseating editorials in the local press condemning Greece for not having understood the “new order” and for having plotted with the British against Italy. The moral cesspool in which German editors now splash was fairly well illustrated by their offerings today. After several years of it I still find it exasperating. Also today, the usual Goebbels fakes. For example, one saying that the Greeks disdained even to answer the ultimatum, though the truth is that they did. They rejected it.

  There is certainly no enthusiasm among the people here for the latest gangster step of the Axis. German military people, always contemptuous of the Italians, tell me Greece will be no walk-away for Mussolini’s legions. The mountainous terrain is difficult for motorized units to operate in and moreover, they say, the Greeks have the best mountain artillery in Europe. General Metaxas, the Premier, and quite a few Greek officers have been trained at Potsdam, the Germans tell me.

  BERLIN, October 31

  The story is that Hitler rushed from France, where he had seen Franco and Pétain (the Führer greatly impressed by the French marshal, but not by Franco, say the party boys), to Florence to stop Mussolini from going into Greece. He arrived four hours too late, and by the time he saw Mussolini there was no turning back. The fact is that Hitler thinks he can take the Balkans without a fight. He does not want a war there for two reasons: first, it disrupts the already inadequate transportation facilities which are needed now to bring food and raw materials from the Balkans to Germany; secondly, it forces him to spread still further his forces, which now must hold a line stretching for more than a thousand miles from Narvik to Hendaye in the west, and on the east the long frontier with Russia, where he keeps a minimum of thirty-five divisions and one whole air fleet. Hitler is reported furious at his junior Axis partner for jumping the gun.

  With winter upon us, it is now obvious that there will be no German attempt to invade Britain this fall. Why has the invasion not been attempted? What has happened to the grand lines of Hitler’s strategy? Why no final victory, no triumphant peace, by now? We know that at the beginning of last June he felt certain of them by summer’s end. His certainty inspired the armed forces and the entire German people with the same sure feeling. He and they had no doubts about it. Were not the stands erected and painted, and decorated with shining Swastika eagles and black-and-silver iron crosses for the great Victory Parade through the Brandenburger Tor? Early last August they were ready.

  What, in truth, went wrong?

  We do not yet know the entire answer. Some things we can piece together.

  In the first place, Hitler hesitated and his hesitation may well prove to have been a blunder as colossal as the indecision of the German High Command before Paris in 1914, marking a turning-point in the war that none of us can yet grasp, though it is manifestly too early yet to say so. The French army was liquidated by June 18, when Pétain asked for an armistice. Many who followed the German army into France expected Hitler to turn immediately and strike at Britain while the iron was hot, while the magic spell of invincibility was still woven round him and his magnificent military machine. The British, Hitler knew, were reeling from the titanic blows just struck them. They had lost their ally, France. They were just receiving home the demoralized remnants of their Continental expeditionary force, whose costly, irreplaceable arms and equipment had been abandoned on the beach of Dunkirk. They had no longer a great organized, equipped land army. Their shore defences were pitiful. Their all-powerful navy could not fight in great force in the narrow waters of the English Channel, over which Göring’s bombers and Messerschmitts, operating from bases in sight of the sea, now had control.

  This was the situation when Hitler strode into the little clearing of Compiègne Forest on June 21 to dictate a harsh armistice to France. I recall now—though the fact did not make any impression on me at the time—that at Compiègne there seemed to be no hurry on the part of the German military to finish with Britain. Piecing together today—long after the event—stray bits of conversation picked up here and there in Compiègne and Paris, I think the word had come down from Hitler that an invasion of Britain, though it must be quickly and thoroughly prepared, would never be necessary. Churchill would accept the kind of peace which the little Austrian was mulling over in his mind. It would be a Nazi peace, it would bar Great Britain from the continent of Europe at long last; it might be merely an armistice, a breathing-spell during which Germany could consolidate such overwhelming strength on the mainland that Britain in the end would have to bow to the Nazi conqueror without a fight—but it would be a face-saving peace for Churchill. And he would accept it. I believe Hitler really thought he would. And his certainty delayed and slackened the work which was necessary to prepare a devastating invasion force—the construction and concentration of barges, pontoons, shipping, and a thousand kinds of equipment.

  [LATER. 1941.—The breathing-spell might also be used to settle accounts with Russia. Some observers in Berlin were convinced at the end of June that Hitler was sincerely anxious to conclude peace with Britain (on his own terms, of course) so that he could turn on the Soviet Union—always his long-term objective. Hitler, they believed, felt sure the British would understand this. Had not Chamberlain’s policy been to encourage the German military machine to turn east against Russia? The fact that during the last days of June and throughout the first three weeks of July one German division after another was recalled from France and hurriedly transported to what the Germans usually referred to as the “Russian front” would seem to bear this out. But it is by no means certain. Russia, Hitler believed, was weak. Russia could wait. What was important was getting Great Britain out of the way. Yet his mind seemed full of puzzling contradictions. He realized very clearly that German hegemony on the Continent, not to mention a foothold in Africa, could never be safely maintained as long as Britain held com
mand of the seas and possessed a growing air force. But Hitler must have known that Britain, battered and groggy though she was by what had happened in France and the Low Countries, would never accept a peace which would rob her of her sea power or curtail her increasing strength in the air. Yet this was the only kind of peace he could afford to offer her. The evidence seems conclusive, however, that he was confident that Churchill preferred this manner of peace to facing a German invasion.]

  It may well be that Hitler expected Churchill to make the first move for peace. Didn’t an Englishman know when he was beaten? Hitler would be patient and wait and let the realization sink into his thick British head.

  He waited a month. All through the last lovely week of June and the first three weeks of July he waited. In Berlin we heard rumours that contact had been made between Berlin and London at Stockholm and that peace was being talked, but we never had any confirmation of them and in all probability there was nothing to them.

  On July 19 Hitler spoke out in the Reichstag. He publicly offered Britain peace, though concealing his terms. But the very fact that he devoted most of the session to promoting his leading generals to be field-marshals, as though the victorious war were in truth over, indicated that he still felt certain that Churchill would bid for peace.

  The Luftwaffe had been established on the North Sea and the Channel for more than a month, but German planes had refrained from any serious attacks on the land of Britain. Hitler was holding it back.

  I think the prompt and sweeping reaction in England to his “offer of peace” came as a shock to him. He was not prepared for such a quick and unequivocal rejection. I think he hesitated until the end of July—twelve days—before he accepted that rejection as Churchill’s final answer. By then a month and a half of precious time had been largely lost.

  There is reason to believe that most of the generals of the High Command, especially General von Brauchitsch, commander-in-chief of the army, and General Halder, chief of the General Staff, maintained grave doubts as to the chances of success of an invasion of Britain by a land army, particularly by the end of July, when the British, they knew, had to some extent recovered from the blows of May and June. The naval problem involved seems to have baffled them, for one thing. And though Göring, it is reliably reported, assured them he could knock out the RAF in a fortnight, as he had destroyed the Polish air force in three days, they seem to have had some doubts on this score too—doubts that in the end proved fully justified.

  Throughout July the Germans had been gathering barges and pontoons in the canals, rivers, and harbours along the French, Belgian, and Dutch coasts and assembling shipping at Bremen, Hamburg, Kiel, and various ports in Denmark and Norway. A common sight on the new highways in western Germany was that of Diesel-motored barges taken from as far away as the Danube being hauled on rollers towards the west coast. Workshops and garages all over the Reich were put to work on small armoured, self-propelling pontoons which could carry a tank or a heavy gun or a company of troops in a calm sea, but not in a rough one, over the Channel. Behind Calais and Boulogne on August 16 I saw a few of them.

  On the night of August 5, as noted elsewhere in this journal, Hitler had a long conference in the Chancellery with his chief military advisers. Present were Göring, Admiral von Raeder, Brauchitsch, Keitel, and General Jodl, the last a member of Hitler’s own separate military staff and extremely influential in the army since the beginning of the offensive in the west. It is likely that Hitler at this meeting made his decision to attempt the invasion as soon as possible and went over the final plans with the chiefs of the three armed forces.

  What were those plans? Probably we shall never know. But from what little has leaked out, I think we can deduce the grand lines of the strategy decided upon. It was cautious and it was classical. A great air offensive against the British air force would be launched on or about August 13. The RAF would be wiped out by September 1. And then with complete mastery of the air over the Channel so as to prevent the British navy from concentrating, and over England to smash the defending British artillery, the invasion would be launched. The main force would cross the Channel in barges, pontoons, and small boats. Other ships, protected by planes, would set out from Bremen, Hamburg, and the Norwegian ports to make landings in Scotland, but this would be only a secondary move and one that would depend upon the action of the British navy in these waters. Another small expedition of ships from Brest would take Ireland. And of course there would be parachute action on a large scale to demoralize the English and the Irish in the rear.

  The army would not move until the Royal Air Force had been annihilated. On this being accomplished depended the whole setting-in-action of the plans for actual invasion. Göring promised its speedy accomplishment. But like many a German before him, he made a grave miscalculation about British character and therefore British strategy. Göring, I think it is now clear, based his confidence on a very simple calculation. He had four times as many planes as the British. No matter how good English planes and pilots were—and he had a healthy respect for both—he had only to attack in superior numbers, and even if he lost as many planes as the enemy, in the end he would still have a substantial air fleet, and the British would have none. And there was little likelihood of losing as many as your opponent if you always attacked with more planes than he had.

  What Göring and all the other Germans were incapable of grasping was that the British were prepared to see their cities bombed and destroyed before they would risk all of their planes in a few great air battles to defend them. To the British this was mere common sense and the only tactic that could save them. To the German military mind it was incomprehensible. It is primarily due to this error of judgment, so typically German, I’m convinced, that the plan to invade Britain this year had to be abandoned.

  To destroy the British air force Göring had to get it off the ground. But try as he did—and when I was on the Channel in the middle of August he was sending as many as a thousand planes a day across the Channel to lure the British into the air—he never succeeded. The British kept most of their planes in reserve. Their cities, for a while, suffered as a result. But the RAF remained intact. And as long as it did, the German land army massed on the coast would not move.

  Why, many Germans here have asked, could not the Luftwaffe destroy the RAF on the ground? The air forces of Poland, Holland, Belgium, and France had largely been wiped out by the Germans demolishing their planes on the airfields before they had a chance to take off. The Luftwaffe’s own answer is undoubtedly true. German airmen tell me that the British simply scattered their planes on a thousand far-flung fields. No air force in the world, with any opposition at all, could hunt them out in sufficient numbers to destroy any sizable portion of Britain’s available planes.

  There is another aspect of Göring’s failure which is not so clear to us here in Berlin. He tried for a month—from the middle of August to the middle of September—to destroy the air arm of Britain’s defence. This attempt was made in daylight attacks, for you cannot destroy a nation’s air force at night. But by the third week of September the great daylight raids had ceased. I note that in my broadcast of the night of September 23 I wrote: “It now seems clear from a perusal of the German reports that Germany’s big air attacks on Britain—unlike a month ago—now take place at night, not during the day. The High Command today calls the day flights ‘armed reconnaissance’; the night raids ‘reprisal attacks.’ “The military censor did not like the paragraph and only allowed me to use it after I had softened it down by writing that the large-scale attacks of the Luftwaffe “are recently more at night,” which was bad English but did not prevent the idea from being put across.

  At first thought there seems to be some contradiction between our belief here that the British preferred to see their cities bombed rather than risk too many of their planes in the air at any one time to drive off the Germans—between that and the fact that in the short space of a month the RAF obviously took such
a toll of German planes that Göring had to abandon his grandiose daylight attacks. And this contradiction has bothered most of the neutral air attaches here, who, like the rest of us, have access to only the German side of the picture.

  Probably it is no contradiction at all. From what German airmen themselves have told me, I think the truth is that while the British never risked more than a small portion of their available fighters on any one day, they did send up enough to destroy more German bombers per day than Göring could afford to lose. For he was using them in large mass formations, more as a snare to get the British fighters off the ground so that his Messerschmitts could wipe out Britain’s fighter defence than for mere bombing. And here British air tactics played an important role. The Germans tell me that the British fighter squadrons had strict orders to avoid combat with German fighters whenever possible. Instead they were instructed to dart in on the bombers, knock off as many of the cumbersome machines as they could, and then steal away before the German fighters could engage them. These tactics led many a German Messerschmitt pilot to complain that the British Spitfire and Hurricane pilots were cowards, that they fled whenever they saw a German fighter. I suspect now the German pilots understand that the British were not being cowardly but merely smart. Knowing they were outnumbered, that the German aim was to destroy their entire fighter force and that Britain was lost when her last fighters were destroyed, the British adopted the only strategy which would save them. They went after the German bombers, which are set-ups for a pursuit ship, and avoided the Messerschmitts. After all, the Messerschmitts carried no bombs which could destroy England. On at least three separate days, during the latter part of August and the first days of September, British fighters shot down some 175 to 200 German planes, mostly bombers, and crippled probably half as many more. These were blows which made the Luftwaffe momentarily groggy and which it could not indefinitely sustain despite its numerical superiority, because the British were losing only a third or a fourth as many planes, though, to be sure, they were mostly fighters.