Threshold of War

by Heinrichs, Waldo;

  The February account placed greater emphasis on the east. Because of Italian defeats in Albania and North Africa and the “increasing offensive power” of Britain, plans were now “variable.” The invasion of England remained one of the two objectives, but the report dwelt on the “territorial liquidation of the land war in Europe” which included “the smashing of the Red army” and the military and economic advantages this would provide.

  The two reports indicated a distinct and rising possibility of a German attack on Russia but they failed to reveal that Hitler intended to attack the Soviet Union unconditionally and had set aside the invasion of England. Assistant Secretary of State Adolf A. Berle, Jr., who dealt with intelligence matters, reflected the indecisiveness promoted by the reports. Before the first report he thought a German-Russian deal dividing Turkey the most likely possibility. After its receipt he predicted German operations in the Balkans as a prelude to the “real drive” on Russia. The war would then come to a climax in an “ocean of anarchy and bloodshed.” But it was “not clear whether they will attack Russia anyhow, or whether they propose to do so after they have conquered England, as they expect to do.”12

  The Respondek reports provided a prominent but by no means unique indication of German intentions. They came in on a rising tide of European diplomatic speculation about Hitler’s plans in the east conveyed through American embassies and legations. The Swedes, with excellent contacts in Berlin, were more definitive about a German attack on Russia than Respondek. At the end of February the Swedish minister in Moscow told American Ambassador Laurence Steinhardt that, if the German submarine campaign failed to subdue England by March or April, Germany would turn on Russia. A month later the same minister provided some excellent information: three German army groups were forming up, on Koenigsberg, Warsaw, and Krakow (the last true for the main weight of Army Group South), and the commander of the Central Group was Field Marshal Feodor von Bock. Hitler would not necessarily attack, however. According to Swedish information, he would first offer Stalin full participation in the Axis alliance of Germany, Italy, and Japan with territorial compensation and would resort to arms only if rebuffed.13

  The American legation in Bucharest reached the same conclusion by a circuitous and confusing path. With German troops streaming into Rumania for the southern wing of BARBAROSSA as well as the Balkans campaign, Minister Franklin Mott Gunther, a thirty-year foreign service veteran, was in a choice position to predict German moves. He was impressed with the numbers arriving: 1,500 troop trains reserved for January alone, he heard, and a total force of one million or even 1,200,000. “If all this is just for Greece and even Turkey,” he advised, “then the Germans are driving tacks with sledgehammers.” Yet he was bewildered by contradictory rumors and German deception. At first it seemed an attack on Russia was likely, but whether before or after an invasion of England he could not say. Then the German object seemed to be defense of Rumania against Soviet or British intervention or an attack toward Suez. On March 18 he concluded that war in the east was unlikely because Stalin, “hemmed in” and “overawed,” would make almost any concession to perpetuate his rule.14

  The switching of German forces to, from, and within southeast Europe was highly suggestive of German intentions. On March 27 a military coup overthrew the Yugoslav government, which had just bowed to German pressure and joined the Axis. Furious, Hitler immediately ordered expansion of forthcoming operations against Greece to include Yugoslavia. Two Panzer divisions and the SS Adolf Hitler Division, which had begun moving from blocking positions in Bulgaria toward their starting points for BARBAROSSA in southern Poland, were wheeled around and directed against Yugoslavia. The British detected this shift by the ULTRA process of decrypting German radio messages, and to Churchill it “illuminated the whole Eastern scene like a lightning flash”: Yugoslavia was an unexpected departure from the basic plan, which was an attack on the Soviet Union. The American legation in Bulgaria noted and reported a reverse in the “direction of flow of German troops and guns through Sofia” on March 27, but neither it nor Washington sensed the implications.15

  American military attachés forwarded impressive evidence of the eastward deployment of German forces. The attaché in Switzerland had excellent contacts. He noted the departure of elite units from northern France, the Netherlands, and Belgium and their replacement by older, less experienced troops. In the face of this sort of substitution, Vichy officials were becoming dubious about an invasion of England, according to Ambassador William D. Leahy. From Switzerland also came the report of a “continuous current” of trains heading eastward through Belfort, clearing out German divisions from the departments of occupied France bordering Switzerland. Eighty-five trains crossed the Rhine at Neuf Brisach on March 19–20 alone; 142 passed through Besançon on March 24–25. A Warsaw-to-Berlin passenger counted forty-one trains headed the other way on the night of March 3–4.16

  Seeing was not necessarily believing. The Germans explained away the evident growth of forces in Poland: that country provided more room for maneuvers and a better food supply. They planted rumors and false information about preparations for invasion of England, such as the movement of poison-gas shells to northwest France, the manufacture of black silk parachutes at Beauvais, and the concentration of 300,000 paratroops and transport gliders.17 Colonel B. R. Peyton, military attaché in Berlin, noting the rising number of German divisions located opposite Russia, was nevertheless impressed with the “unbelievable pains” the Germans went to in preparing for the invasion of Britain. Furthermore, he had learned that the Red Army had withdrawn from the frontier, making an envelopment like the one achieved by Hannibal in the battle of Cannae more difficult. He concluded, as did the Military Intelligence Division in Washington, that, while an attack on the Soviet Union was possible, it was the last on Hitler’s list of objectives. First still was invasion of England.18

  The difficulty in divining German intentions was not due to lack of experience. The list of American chiefs of mission in and near Europe reads like one from the 1920s: Leland Harrison at Bern, Switzerland, Frederick Sterling at Stockholm, William Phillips at Rome, John Van Antwerp MacMurray at Ankara, Arthur Bliss Lane at Belgrade. Roosevelt, for all his complaints about the flaccidity of the State Department, turned to professional diplomats again and again. Nor was there lack of ability. Assisting the chiefs and providing much of the political reporting were foreign service officers who would go on to become leading lights of American diplomacy after World War II: George Kennan, Jacob Beam, and James Riddleberger in Berlin, Llewelyn Thompson in Moscow, Robert Murphy and H. Freeman Matthews in Vichy, Herschel Johnson in London.19

  Of course good information was exceedingly scarce in the totalitarian, machiavellian, militarized world of continental Europe in 1941, and so misinformation abounded. Diplomats were thrown in upon each other and usually repeated around the circuit of embassies and posts the same scraps of rumor and fact that came their way, thereby amplifying them. The main problem was intellectual, however. Information pointing to a German attack was hard to believe because Hitler, it seemed, could get what he wanted without war, because it was unwise for him to engage a new enemy before finishing off the British, and because war between Russia and Germany was too good to be true. Hitler had made no mistakes so far. Loy Henderson, an officer in the European Division of the Department of State, provides an example of the problem. The “growing coolness” between Moscow and Berlin was naturally a matter of keen interest in Washington, he said in March; “credible evidence” was available of a German plan to attack the Soviet Union “at an appropriate moment.” He warned against wishful thinking, however. He found it difficult to believe the two powers would end their cooperation and go to war.20

  Foreign estimates were no more definitive. Not all Churchill’s colleagues were alive to the possibility of a German attack eastward. British army intelligence, relying on worst case analysis, insisted that invasion of England was first on the German agenda. The For
eign Office was divided, some impressed with the “stream of information” pointing to an attack, others more skeptical. The Swedish information about army groups and commanders seemed proof Germany was “flaunting” an attack to intimidate the Russians into a closer partnership.21 Japanese diplomats, though Axis partners, were no better informed. MAGIC intercepts documented the growing coolness in Nazi-Soviet relations, but without agreement on the consequences. One observer saw Suez as the German objective, another, Suez and Gibraltar, a third, England, and a fourth believed that military preparations in the east were “aimed resolutely” at meeting any hostility from Russia.22

  The problem of German intentions in the spring of 1941 was never so simple as deciding whether or not Hitler would attack a certain country but rather which of several directions German aggression would take and in what order the victims would fall. Thus evidence of preparations against Russia could be seen (and German intelligence cultivated the view) as preparations for a southeastwards advance: Greece would be the springboard to Suez.23 Or word would pass that they were a cover for the invasion of England. But even these three vectors of attack did not comprise the full range of Western fears: signs also pointed to a German thrust southwestwards through the Iberian peninsula to Gibraltar, northwest Africa, and the Atlantic islands, the Azores, Cape Verdes, and Canaries.

  American officials were especially sensitive about the possibility of a southwestward thrust toward Africa because Dakar was within aircraft range of Brazil. Hitler wanted Gibraltar and had moved sufficient strength to the Pyrenees to secure it, but General Francisco Franco proved difficult. Imparting sentiments of the deepest loyalty and devotion to the cause of fascism, the ruler of Spain resisted all blandishments to join the Axis and open the road to Gibraltar. He was not convinced Britain would lose; the capture of the western gate to the Mediterranean, he slyly suggested, would not be decisive unless Suez was in the bag as well.24

  Creating another roadblock for the Axis, Spain coveted France’s northwest African colonies, and for Germany to help Franco satisfy these ambitions would certainly have thrown General Maxime Weygand and the Vichy forces he commanded in North Africa into the arms of the British. Most importantly, Spain could obtain food and resources it desperately needed only from Britain and possibly the United States. The vital interests of Spain mandated a subsidized neutrality, and in this policy Franco stubbornly and cleverly persisted. In February the German divisions at the Pyrenees began moving east for BARBAROSSA.

  Though Washington learned of the transfer, its anxiety continued. Armed passage through Spain might not be necessary. Germany might leap the strait and neutralize the “Rock” by securing bases from Vichy France in French Morocco. German forces gathering at Tripoli, an army estimate warned, placed Hitler in a position to dictate a North African division of spoils and exact concessions from the French. According to a March 10 report, Luftwaffe ground crews had arrived in Morocco at Tetuan opposite Gibraltar; rumor was that Germany had secured three air bases south of Tangier along the Atlantic coast and that Tangier, Cadiz, the Canary Islands, and Casablanca would become German submarine bases. During March the number of Germans in Casablanca rose to 250, according to one report. “They really are establishing their wings on the Atlantic line in Norway and Dakar,” Berle concluded. Past experience with German fifth-column penetration roused fears, inflated facts, and made rumor credible.25

  In the spring of 1941 the German army possessed almost mythic qualities. Stimson spoke of its “superb efficiency.”26 Given the contradictory and ambivalent intelligence picture, the warming sun brought a host of dangerous possibilities. Lacking precise, authentic sources, ways of theorizing about German intentions, and a central evaluation process, American officials, most likely including the president, wavered in their estimates, bobbing with each ripple of reports from Europe. Confused and uncertain, they were the more inclined to wait and see.

  Even more ominous and urgent was the successful German war on British shipping and communications. This campaign, under way since the beginning of the war, widened after the Nazi conquest of Norway, the Low Countries, and France. In the late winter and early spring of 1941 it intensified, pressed by surface vessels and air armadas as well as U-boats, and not just on the high seas but also in the coastal waters and firths of Great Britain, and onto its docks, depots, and railroads. The main object was to cut off the people and factories of Britain from their crucial overseas sources of food and raw materials, to “strangle” them, to starve them into submission.27

  A new aerial blitz began at the end of February with successive attacks on the coal city of Swansea in Wales. Then the “tour of the ports” began with heavy night incendiary raids on Cardiff, the Bristol area, Plymouth, Portsmouth, Southampton and, of course, London, all “targets the destruction of which will assist or supplement the war at sea,” as the Fuehrer’s directive put it. Singled out for special attention at London were the Albert and Victoria and King George V docks and the shipping concentrated at Tilbury. Then on the moonlit nights of March 12, 13, and 14, the Luftwaffe carried out “furious” full-force attacks on Liverpool and Glasgow, especially on the Merseyside and Clydeside docks, warehouses, and shipbuilding yards.28

  Altogether the Germans delivered twelve major blows in mid-March and continued attacking in a rising crescendo during April to a climax in the greatest raid of the “night blitz”—May 10 on London—after which “charred paper danced in the woods thirty miles from the city.” Of sixty-one raids between February 19 and May 12, thirty-nine were against the western ports. A German victory in the Balkans would be bad enough, wrote Joseph Alsop and Robert Kintner in the Washington Post, but if they “succeed in closing Glasgow, Liverpool, Bristol, Cardiff, and Swansea, it will be disastrous.”29

  In retrospect the threat posed by the “night blitz” to Britain’s war production and physical sustenance seems manageable and transient. The raids averaged only 100 tons of bombs compared with 1,600 during the allied bombing offensive against Germany in 1944–45. Electronic countermeasures and decoy fires deflected bombers from vital targets. In time better management of docks and rail cars speeded deliveries. Food stocks in the year as a whole actually increased.

  The outlook from within the escalating blitz, however, was fearsome, especially to foreign observers. Plymouth’s city center suffered “almost total destruction”; Southampton was “badly crippled”; Cardiff, the Germans boasted, looked like the “Ypres of 1917”; Portsmouth at night was like a “tomb.” Damaged or destroyed besides port facilities were telephone exchanges and rail junctions. Cargoes piled up on the docks as the British rail system tried to adjust to arrival of goods mainly at western rather than eastern ports. A million to a million and a half tons of shipping lay over in British yards awaiting repair. British aircraft production was down one-third. One-fourth fewer imports were arriving than anticipated. Oil stocks were dangerously depleted. Stimson was alarmed at the “low level” of British food consumption.30

  Morale was sorely tried. The March raids destroyed or damaged all but seven of Clydebank’s 12,000 houses. The May 1 attack on Liverpool left 76,000 homeless. In the great raids of that spring the dwellers of Plymouth and Merseyside fled their cities by the tens of thousands, rending the fabric of urban life and community. Even small raids were exhausting. In six days of March Southampton had twenty-four air-raid alarms lasting a total of forty-eight hours, breaking the pattern of work and sleep. The blitz of 1941 was impossible to escape: “Even on the Welsh hills, one saw the searchlights groping over the midlands and heard the throb of the bombers looking for Liverpool ….”31

  The Luftwaffe also attacked individual ships and convoys as they bunched up near port and laid mines in the Thames, Humber, and Mersey estuaries. Long-range Focke-Wulf “Kondor” bombers shuttled between Bordeaux and Stavanger, Norway, in an arc west of the British Isles, spotting convoys for U-boats and conducting low-level attacks.32

  More and more U-boats were prowling the North At
lantic. From a dozen or so in October 1940, the number of operational boats rose to thirty in April 1941. U-boat commander Karl Doenitz expected fifty-two by August. British countermeasures in home waters forced the U-boats westward in March 1941 to the vicinity of Iceland and Greenland, where Hitler extended the war zone on March 25. Taking advantage of lengthening daylight for better observation and using new tactics of wolfpack deployment and night attacks on the surface to avoid detection by underwater listening devices, U-boats took a mounting toll.

  Early in April, SC 26, a slow convoy from Sydney, Nova Scotia, ran into a wolfpack southwest of Iceland and was badly mauled. The loss of ten ships in this attack was decisive: the British Admiralty hurried construction of Iceland bases, dispatched aircraft and escort groups there and extended convoy protection to the mid-Atlantic. But the longer the coverage the thinner. U-boat sinkings rose from twenty-one in January to forty-one in March.33

  British escort forces were strained to the utmost by the needs of these and other convoy routes, distant imperial lines of communication, guarding against invasion, and the war in the Mediterranean. The Royal Navy now had fifty former American destroyers of World War I vintage, exchanged for bases in the agreement of September 1940, but their short cruising radius, lack of maneuverability, and material defects due to age limited their usefulness. The blitz delayed repairs. In March over half the escort vessels in the Western Approaches to the British Isles were immobilized for lack of dockyard facilities and labor.34

  This was also the most active period of the entire war for the big ships of the German navy. In contrast to World War I, Germany had access to the high seas through Norwegian coastal waters and preferred to attack British shipping abroad than to challenge the Royal Navy nearby. Though modest in size, the German navy was modern and well suited to commerce destruction. Its two remaining pocket battleships, the Lützow and Admiral Scheer, could cruise a great distance, outgun any cruiser, and outrun any but the most modern battleship. Heavier and faster still were the twin battle cruisers Scharn-horst and Gneisenau. Most powerful of all was the newly completed Bismarck, the equal of any battleship afloat, soon to be joined by its sister ship, Tirpitz. German admirals sought to pass these heavy ships out into the Atlantic past the Faroes or Iceland for raiding cruises, but simply by riding at anchor in Kiel they tied down much heavier forces of the Royal Navy.