The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred

by Niall Ferguson

  Under the circumstances, it is not surprising that Hitler expected Chamberlain to keep appeasing him, selling Danzig and perhaps even the Polish Corridor the way he had sold the Sudetenland, in return for yet another reprieve. True, he now regarded war with Britain as all but inevitable. Addressing his army commanders in May 1939, Hitler expressed his ‘doubts whether a peaceful settlement with England is possible. It is necessary to prepare for a showdown. England sees in our development the establishment of a hegemony which would weaken England. Therefore England is our enemy and the showdown with England is a matter of life and death.’ Yet it was probably not his intention to precipitate that showdown as early as September 1939. He simply did not believe that Chamberlain, a man armed only with his habitual rolled umbrella, had the guts to fight. Thus he did almost nothing in the course of 1939 to encourage Chamberlain’s lingering hopes that Europe might soon be out of the danger zone. On March 23, three days after Ribbentrop had threatened the Lithuanian government with war, Hitler sailed into Memel harbour aboard a German warship, even as Chamberlain was trying to cobble together a four-power declaration against such acts of aggression.

  Nor was Hitler the sole troublemaker in Europe. Italy invaded Albania in April, in what was supposed to be the prelude to an Italian takeover of the Balkans; the following month Mussolini impulsively concluded a ‘Pact of Steel’ with Hitler. Undaunted, Chamberlain continued to regard the Italian dictator as a possible partner in his effort to restrain Hitler. To be sure, the Italians proved to be most unreliable allies to the Germans, declining to join in the war until the fall of France was imminent. On the other hand, precisely this unreliability minimized Mussolini’s influence in Berlin. Chamberlain persisted in believing that Hitler would not ‘start a world war for Danzig’. He failed to see that Hitler did not anticipate a world war; he anticipated another Munich.

  If Hitler was confident before the conclusion of the Nazi-Soviet Pact that Chamberlain would not fight over Poland – as German military deployments on the Polish border would seem to indicate – he was all but certain of it thereafter. ‘Now Europe is mine!’ was his comment when the news from Moscow was relayed to him at Berchtesgaden in the early hours of August 24. That was not strictly true, in that he had to allow Stalin half of Poland, Finland and all three of the Baltic states. Moreover, by doing a deal with Stalin, Hitler made it less likely that either Italy or Japan would immediately join his side. But Hitler’s remark illustrates how completely he assumed he had outmanoeuvred the Western powers. He can hardly have been impressed by the reappearance of the spineless Henderson to restate the British guarantee to Poland. ‘Our enemies are little worms,’ he remarked, two days before the treaty with Russia was signed; ‘I saw them at Munich.’ And, indeed, Chamberlain probably would have given him another Munich had it not been for his Cabinet colleagues, who insisted that the guarantee to Poland be honoured, and the Poles, who were suicidally determined to fight. Still he clung to the idea of another conference – which once again the Italians proposed – venturing to mention the idea in the Commons even after Poland had been invaded. Though war was now forced upon Chamberlain, he still sought to avoid (as Samuel Hoare put it) ‘going all out’.

  In one respect, British policy did have credibility, despite Chamberlain’s worst efforts. Most members of the Nazi ruling elite continued to regard a war against the Western powers as both likely and dangerous. Göring was far from keen to risk such a war; he knew the true strength of the Luftwaffe. Goebbels, too, remained fearful of British intervention even after he heard the news of Ribbentrop’s coup in Moscow. The news that the Italians were not ready to fight and that the British were resolved to stand by Poland convinced Goebbels that, as over Czechoslovakia, a temporary diplomatic ‘minimal’ agreement would have to be worked out with Britain, giving Germany back Danzig and at least part of the Polish Corridor. The extent to which Hitler himself, suddenly ‘cautious’, was prepared to contemplate this course is striking. Almost at the last minute, he postponed the invasion of Poland, which was originally scheduled for dawn on August 26, in order to see Henderson again and offer a crude deal: arms limitation and minimal colonial demands in return for a ‘free hand’ in Poland. Three days later, when that had been turned down, he tried another gambit, requesting that a Polish plenipotentiary be sent forthwith to Berlin. However, this was not sincerely meant and Ribbentrop did his best to make it impossible for the Poles to comply, which they did not in any case wish to do. By August 30, with all preparations complete, Hitler had reverted to his earlier confidence (‘The English believe Germany is weak. They will see they are deceiving themselves’). The next day he overruled Gö ring and Goebbels, despite their ‘scepticism’ about English non-intervention: ‘The Führer does not believe England will intervene.’ Apart from Hitler, Ribbentrop alone was keen for war, encouraging Hitler to believe that Munich had been ‘a first-class stupidity’ and assuring him the British would not act. By the morning of September 3, when the British ultimatum was delivered, they had both been proven wrong.

  Hitler the gambler had in fact been doubly wrong: wrong to think that Chamberlain had been earnest about war in September 1938 and wrong to think that he was bluffing in August 1939. Yet Hitler’s miscalculations were lucky ones. For if Chamberlain had acted as he expected in 1938 – had actually called Hitler’s bluff rather than folding – Germany’s position would have been far more exposed than it was in 1939, when Hitler guessed that Chamberlain would fold again. By going to war later rather than sooner, Chamberlain unwittingly saved the Third Reich, vastly improving Hitler’s chances of winning the war he had always intended to fight. Hitler presented Britain with a choice. Unfortunately, Britain’s Prime Minister chose the wrong year. In that sense, Churchill was half right. The war of 1939 was indeed an ‘unnecessary war’. But what was necessary to stop it was a war in 1938.

  THE END OF APPEASEMENT

  The policy of appeasement was not quite dead after the war began. The option of reaching some kind of negotiated peace with Germany was not closed off until Churchill replaced Chamberlain as Prime Minister in May 1940. It was in these last months of his premiership, more than a year and a half too late, that Chamberlain finally began to take seriously the idea of some kind of regime change in Germany. On January 17, 1940, Harold Nicolson heard that there was ‘still a group in the war Cabinet working for appeasement and at present in negotiation via the former Chancellor Brü ning to make peace with the German General Staff on condition that they eliminate Hitler’. But the chance that the German ‘opposition’ might play the deus ex machina was long gone. Roosevelt was even less realistic. He continued to act as if a compromise peace might still be concocted on the basis of Munich-style concessions to the dictators; hence the 1940 trips to Europe by the Under-Secretary of State, Sumner Welles, and the Vice-President of General Motors, James Mooney, the former touting concessions to Germany that even Chamberlain and Halifax thought laughable. Only with the fall of France was appeasement finally buried. Paradoxically, it was at its moment of supreme weakness that the British Empire rediscovered the virtue of defiance. True, a few faint hearts still wondered if somehow the Empire might be salvaged by conceding all Europe to Hitler and Mussolini. But this was not appeasement; it was defeatism. Churchill gave them their answer at the War Cabinet meeting of May 28, 1940: ‘The Germans would demand our Fleet… our naval bases, and much else. We should become a slave state.’

  This was surely right. As Hitler had told Keitel and the chiefs of his army, navy and air force on October 9, 1939, his aim was ‘to effect the destruction of the strength of the Western Powers and their capability of resisting still further the political consolidation and continued expansion of the German people in Europe.’ Even his later decision to attack Russia had an anti-British objective; as he put it on July 31, 1940, twelve days after once again offering to make peace with Britain: ‘Russia is the factor on which Britain is relying the most… With Russia shattered, Britain’s last hope would be s
hattered.’ The idea that a peace could have been struck with ‘That Man’, as Churchill called him, was always an illusion. The proof that the policy of appeasement had been a disastrous failure lay precisely in the strength of Hitler’s position by the summer of 1940 – victorious from the Channel to the River Bug, protected to the East by a non-aggression pact, able to bomb Britain from French airfields, in a position to make disingenuous offers of peace. Though Great Britain herself could not yet be described as being at Hitler’s mercy, her few allies were vanquished and large swathes of her Empire would be vulnerable to invasion in the event of a Japanese attack. Henceforth – and with good reason – the term ‘appeasement’ would be used exclusively as a term of abuse.

  PART III

  Killing Space

  11

  Blitzkrieg

  A new order of ethnographic relationships, that is to say a resettlement of the nationalities so that, at the end of the process, there are better dividing lines than is the case today.

  Hitler, October 6, 1939

  We are paying very heavily now for failing to face the insurance premiums essential for security of an Empire! This has usually been the main cause for the loss of Empires in the past.

  General Alan Brooke, 1942

  LIGHTNING WAR

  At 4.45 a.m. on September 1, 1939, the tranquillity of daybreak in Western Poland was shattered by a deafening military thunderclap. Five German armies comprising more than 1.8 million men swept across the Polish borders, launched from ideally situated bridgeheads in Western Pomerania, East Prussia, Upper Silesia and German-controlled Slovakia. Almost as loud as the barrages of the German artillery were the roars of engines; the German advance was spearheaded by more than three thousand tanks and hundreds of armoured cars and personnel carriers. From the sky, Ju-87 dive-bombers shrieked down on the hastily mobilizing Poles, their precision bombs destroying bridges, roads and supply convoys, their terrifying sirens sowing panic among the defending forces. The aim was to avoid the protracted attrition of the last war by achieving rapid penetration of territory and swift, annihilating encirclements of enemy forces. With its devastating combination of artillery, infantry, armour and air power, this was precisely what the blitzkrieg made possible.

  Blitzkrieg is, of course, a German word meaning ‘lightning war’. The ironic thing is that it was in many ways a British invention, derived from the lessons of the Western Front in the First World War. Captain Basil Liddell Hart had drawn his own conclusions from the excessively high casualties suffered by both sides. As an infantry subaltern, he himself had been gassed, the long-term effects of which forced him to retire from the army in 1927, after which he turned to journalism, working as defence correspondent for the Daily Telegraph and then The Times and publishing numerous works of military history. In Liddell Hart’s view, the fatal mistake of most offensives on the Western Front had been their ponderous and predictable directness. A more ‘indirect approach’, he argued, would aim at surprising the enemy, throwing his commanders off balance, and then exploiting the ensuing confusion. The essence was to concentrate armour and air power in a lethal lightning strike. Liddell Hart defined the secret as lying

  partly in the tactical combination of tanks and aircraft, partly in the unexpectedness of the stroke in direction and time, but above all in the ‘follow-through’ – the way that a break-through is exploited by a deep strategic penetration; carried out by armoured forces racing on ahead of the main army, and operating independently.

  The good news for Liddell Hart was that his work was hugely influential. The bad news was that it was hugely influential not in Britain but in Germany. With the notable exception of Major-General J. F. C. Fuller,* senior British commanders like Field Marshal Earl Haig simply refused to accept that ‘the aeroplane, the tank [and] the motor car [would] supersede the horse in future wars’, dismissing motorized weapons as mere ‘accessories to the man and horse’. Haig’s brother concurred: the cavalry would ‘never be scrapped to make room for the tanks’. By contrast, younger German officers immediately grasped the significance of Liddell Hart’s work. Among his most avid fans was Heinz Guderian, commander of the 19th German Army Corps in the invasion of Poland. As Guderian recalled, it was from Liddell Hart and other British pioneers of ‘a new type of warfare on the largest scale’ that he learned the importance of ‘the concentration of armour’. Moreover,

  it was Liddell Hart who emphasized the use of armoured forces for long-range strokes, operations against the opposing army’s communications, and [who] also proposed a type of armoured division combining panzer and panzer-infantry units. Deeply impressed by these ideas, I tried to develop them in a sense practicable for our own army… I owe many suggestions of our further development to Captain Liddell Hart.

  Guderian – who was happy to describe himself as Liddell Hart’s disciple and pupil and even translated his works into German – had learned his lessons well. In September 1939 his panzers were unstoppable. The Poles did not, as legend has it, attempt cavalry charges against them, though mounted troops were deployed against German infantry, but they lacked adequate motor transport and their tanks were fewer and technically inferior to the Germans’. Moreover, like the Czechs before them, the Poles found Anglo-French guarantees to be militarily worthless. At the Battle of Bzura they mounted a desperate counteroffensive to hold up the German assault on Warsaw, but by September 16 their resistance was crumbling. By the 17th the Germans had reached the fortress at Bresc (Brest) on the River Bug. On September 28 Warsaw itself fell. Eight days later the last Polish troops laid down their arms. The entire campaign had lasted barely five weeks.

  The Poles had fought courageously, but they were outnumbered and outgunned. The most striking thing about the war in the West the following year was that the opposite wastrue. It was perhaps predictable that the Dutch and Belgians would succumb to superior German forces, but the fall of France within a matter of just six weeks was, as the historian Marc Bloch said, a ‘strange defeat’. Even without the support of the British Expeditionary Force, the French forces were superior on paper, an advantage that ought to have been magnified by their fighting a defensive campaign. They had twice the number of wheeled vehicles and 4,638 tanks to the German 4,060. Moreover, French tanks had thicker armour and bigger guns. Yet when the German offensive was launched on May 10, 1940, many units put up only token resistance. On May 15 General Erwin Rommel’s 7th Panzer Division was able to take 450 prisoners in the course of two small skirmishes; later they captured 10,000 in the space of two days. Rommel* himself was struck by the readiness of the French officers to give themselves up, and by their insouciant ‘requests, including, among other things, permission to keep their batmen and to have their kit picked up from Philippeville, where it had been left’. Another German officer saw ‘several hundred French officers who had marched 35 kilometres without any guard from a prisoner of war dispatch point to a prisoner of war transit station… with apparently none having made their escape’. Karl von Stackelberg, a reporter in one of the new ‘propaganda companies’, was baffled: ‘20,000 men… were heading backwards as prisoners… It was inexplicable… How was it possible, these French soldiers with their officers, so completely downcast, so completely demoralized, would allow themselves to go more or less voluntarily into imprisonment?’ British soldiers captured in 1940 could not help noticing that ‘the French had been prepared for capture and so were laden down with kit, while we were all practically empty-handed.’ In all, around 1.8 million French troops were taken prisoner in 1940, of whom nearly a million were kept in Germany as forced labourers until 1945. It is true that perhaps as many as half of those who surrendered did so in the period between June 17, when the new Prime Minister, Marshal Pétain, announced that he was seeking an armistice, and its implementation five days later. But it is still remarkable that more than a third of the French army had already been taken prisoner before Pétain’s statement. Indicative of the poor state of morale is the fact that colonial troop
s from French Africa fought with more determination than their supposed masters; their units certainly took heavier casualties.

  What lay behind the French collapse? To Liddell Hart – who was so appalled by the outbreak of war that he suffered a nervous breakdown – it was essentially a failure of military doctrine:

  The panzer forces’ thrust could have been stopped long before reaching the Channel by a concentrated counterstroke with similar forces. But the French, though having more and better tanks than the enemy, had strung them out in small packets… The one British armoured division available was not despatched to France until after the German offensive was launched, and this arrived too late for the first, and decisive, phase… This Blitzkrieg pace was only possible because the Allied leaders had not grasped the new technique, and so did not know how to counter it… Never was a great disaster more easily preventable.

  Marc Bloch agreed that the débâcle was due at least in part to the abysmal quality of French generalship. A decisive factor was the German decision to switch the direction of their main attack from Luxembourg and the Low Countries, as Hitler had originally planned, to the line running between Liège and Namur, through the supposedly impenetrable forests of the Ardennes. The French would have fared better against the original strategy; they were wholly taken by surprise when five panzer divisions thrust their way through the Ardennes and captured the bridges over the River Meuse. Thereafter, their reactions were culpably slow or inept. Yet what happened in 1940 was more than just a military failure. At root, as Bloch argued, it was a collapse of morale.

  Even during the ‘Phoney War’ of late 1939 and early 1940, Lieutenant-General Alan Brooke, who commanded the British Expeditionary Force’s 2nd Corps, had been deeply troubled by the mood of the French army, which he was inclined to attribute to the defensive character of French strategy. The heavily fortified Maginot Line’s ‘most dangerous aspect’ as it ran down the border with Germany, Brooke noted in his diary, was ‘the psychological one; a sense of false security is engendered, a feeling of sitting behind an impregnable iron fence; and should the fence perchance be broken then French fighting spirit [might well] be brought crumbling with it!’ There was more to French defeatism than this, however. To many Frenchmen, the Third Republic simply did not seem worth dying for, when so many of their fathers, brothers and friends had died for it already between 1914 and 1918. This was the mood – the refusal to pursue another Pyrrhic victory – that had been foreshadowed in Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932), with its stomach-churning evocation of the slaughter of the last war’s opening phase. The same mood inspired the Nobel laureate Roger Martin Du Gard’s letter to a friend in September 1936: ‘Anything rather than war! Anything… even Fascism in Spain… Even Fascism in France: Nothing, no trial, no servitude can be compared to war: Anything, Hitler rather than war!’ In the words of one German officer: ‘French spirit and morale had been… broken… before the battle even began. It was not so much the lack of machinery… that had defeated the French, but that they did not know what they were fighting for… The Nazi revolution had already won the Battle of France before our first armoured divisions went to work.’