A World at Arms (17 page)

How was a war against Germany to be fought? Having begun their rearmament program long after Germany, the British and French believed themselves behind in armaments, especially in the air and on land. Their basic strategy, therefore, was to remain on the defensive in the first stages of war. If Germany could be held in check, Britain and France could continue to build up their air forces, France could hopefully purchase additional planes in the United States to make up for deficiencies in its own air force, while the British could move forward seriously with the buildup of a substantial army, conscription having been introduced earlier in 1939. As this program went forward, the naval forces of the Allies would destroy German and protect Allied shipping. Furthermore, a reading of World War I which included the belief that the blockade had made a great contribution to victory in 1918 suggested that in spite of major changes–such as the opening of a huge hole in any blockade by the German–Soviet Pact–blockade might once again play such a role.

This misperception, as we now know it to have been, was reinforced by another perception which was even more removed from reality. It was widely believed, and continued to be believed until well into the war, that Germany’s economy was severely strained and operating at full or near–full capacity, so that any substantial interference with that economy was likely to have serious repercussions on her capacity to fight. The building up of Allied forces while Germany was assumed to have already reached a pitch of military and economic efficiency was expected to open up the prospect for Allied offensive operations after an initial period of defensive fighting.

The staff talks of the British and French in the spring of 1939, which examined the contingencies then facing the two powers, had considered a war started by Germany and Italy as the most likely one, with their enemies looking at the time element from the opposite point of view, that is, looking to early victory from successful early offensives mounted at a time of Axis military superiority, in order to avoid the likely shifting
of the military balance over time as the strength of the Allies increased. The conclusions drawn by the British and French from this have been aptly summarized in the British official history as pointing to the following view of war:

first a mainly defensive phase directed towards maintaining as far as possible the integrity of the two empires but during which no opportunity should be lost to achieve, without undue cost, successes against Italy calculated to reduce her will to fight; then a second phase directed towards holding Germany and dealing decisively with Italy; then the final objective, the defeat of Germany.
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How long would such a war take? On September 6 the Secretary of State for War in the War Cabinet in London asserted that it should be assumed that the war would last “at least five years.”
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A problem which this set of assumptions and the conclusions drawn from them did not address directly was the situation to be faced by Poland, the country both Britain and France had pledged themselves to assist if attacked.
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The assumption throughout was that Poland in World War II, like Serbia in World War I, would be overrun during hostilities but restored to independence after an Allied victory. Neither Western Power expected that the Soviet Union, if so inclined, could do much to assist Poland against Germany except by providing some supplies (though able to do a considerable amount to defend
herself
if attacked). There is no evidence that an immediate offensive into Germany if she attacked Poland was ever considered. Theoretically such a move could be seen as dangerous to Germany and highly advantageous for the Allies. German forces would be busy in the East and weakest in the West. But there was no substantial British army available to participate in such an operation, and the French government and military leaders were united in their refusal to contemplate offensive operations on the Western Front by themselves.

Without any willingness of Belgium to participate in such an operation, any offensive would have had to be launched at precisely that portion of the German border best covered by the defenses of the Westwall, as the Germans called what the Allies referred to as the Siegfried line. Though in reality nowhere near as strong as the French believed, or pretended to believe, the Westwall looked to the hesitant French military leadership of the time like an insurmountable obstacle, or one which could be broken into only at the cost of casualty levels that the country could not afford. Even in 1936, long before the construction of fortification in the Rhineland, the French
Commander-in-Chief, General Maurice Gamelin, had believed that the French army could not break through the Rhineland;
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he could hardly be more optimistic now. Any questioning of the efficacy of the Westwall would have implied questioning the strength of France’s own elaborate defensive fortification system, the Maginot Line, and no one was prepared to make the mental effort and face the political and military implication of such dangerous thoughts.
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And with a military doctrine which dispersed the French armored forces as supporting elements among the infantry units, there was perhaps some truth to the view that, if the French army did move after it had completed mobilization, there would in any case not have been time for its slow advance to make itself felt before the bulk of the German army could be returned to the Western Front from its victory in Poland. Even without such thoughts, however speculative, the French military leaders saw the prospect of victory
not
in an early offensive but in a successful defensive, followed only after lengthy preparation by an offensive of their own. That was how they had won in 1918; it was their only recipe for victory in the future.

In spite of this defensive military policy, which in effect wrote off any smaller Eastern allies of France, to be overrun before an offensive was mounted against Germany, the French in negotiations with the Polish Minister of War in May 1939 had promised a major offensive in the West at the latest on the fifteenth day of mobilization, after they had started bombing Germany immediately on the outbreak of war and begun limited local offensives on the third day after announcing mobilization.
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The origins and purposes of this deception remain to be explained, but all available evidence shows that there was never any intention of implementing the central portion of these promises–a major offensive starting on the fifteenth day of mobilization–and the man who would have had to command it, General Alphonse Georges, in fact asserted that he would resign if ordered to carry it out.
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The French military would wait for the buildup of a substantial British army, a process guaranteed to last a year or two, and would hope that the increasing strength of the Western Allies might induce the Belgians to side with them and permit an eventual invasion of Germany across their territory, an even more remote contingency. The meaning of such a policy, whatever explanations for it were offered later, was that only nominal French actions in the West would occur while Poland was overrun. The focus of concern was a successful defense of France against a German offensive, whenever it came.

That left the possibility of using the British and French air forces to bomb Germany; but here too there were doubts in both governments,
doubts which reinforced each other. As Nicholas Bethell has put it, “Both sides were relieved by the other’s reluctance to act.”
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In spite of the obvious and public evidence of German bombing of civilian targets in Poland, the British and French both still insisted on restraining their air forces by strict limitation in target selection to the purely military.
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Furthermore, there was great concern that an air offensive might simply lead to extensive German retaliatory raids, which neither the British nor the French believed themselves prepared to meet.
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The British plans for bombing German industrial targets in the Ruhr area were met not only by concern over civilian casualties which would inevitably result, but by French fears for their own industry, still without adequate defense. As for the French air force, it was neither prepared for nor inclined to offensive operations of any kind; it would merely support the ground operations of French forces–and of these, as we have seen, none were under \vay.
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Aside from unsuccessful attempts to attack German warships from the air
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–
the
purely military target for bombers by its very nature–the air effort over Germany in the first months of war illuminated the political perceptions rather than the military intentions of the Allies. British planes dropped millions of leaflets over Germany explaining the causes of the war and calling on the German people to end it. Unwilling or unable to believe that a population assumed to be cultured and civilized could support its government in the terrible course Germany had undertaken, the Allies still hoped that an internal upheaval might end the conflict. This assumption confused Germany’s enemies for a long time, and only the endlessly dedicated support Hitler received from the country eventually dispelled illusions which did credit to the sentiments if not to the insight of those who held them.
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Other than in Poland itself, the war began in earnest in September 1939 only at sea. Two German pocket–battleships and sixteen submarines had been sent into the Atlantic before the German initiation of hostilities so that they might begin to attack Allied shipping immediately. When war started, the German naval construction program had to be curtailed for the time being; the big battleships
Bismarck
and
Tirpitz
as well as the heavy cruiser
Prinz Eugen
were to be completed, and work was also continued on one of the two aircraft carriers; but work on the super-battleships which were designed to provide Germany with a major
surface fleet had to be postponed for the time being.
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Available resources, insofar as they were allocated to the navy at all, were concentrated on submarines, destroyers, and smaller warships.

After a brief initial period of restraint to see whether the Western Powers, and especially France, were seriously going to become involved in military activities against Germany, the German navy began its attack on Allied shipping.
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Even in the cautious first days, the liner
Athenia
was sunk with large loss of life; but the German government, which preferred to postpone war with the United States, pretended that this sinking was a British provocation; and Admiral Raeder, the Commander-in-Chief of the navy, was careful to maintain this fiction after talking to the captain of the German submarine which had fired the torpedo.
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With mines laid off the British coast, submarines in the waters around Great Britain, the pocket-battleships in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, and a little later auxiliary cruisers disguised as merchant ships, the Germans did what they could to interrupt Allied shipping. They also tried to support these efforts by using their only two then available battleships for diversionary operations closer to home. The penetration of the great British naval base at Scapa Flow and the sinking of the battleship
Royal Oak
by a German submarine (U-47) on October 14, 1939, was a serious blow for the British but certainly could not balance the uneven strength in capital ships.

The German efforts did indeed have a substantial impact with the sinking of several hundred thousand tons of Allied shipping, but on balance it must be noted that the greater strength of the Allies at sea gave them an advantage the Germans could not yet overcome. The convoy system for protecting Allied shipping was initiated on the most threatened routes almost immediately–instead of after great delay as in World War I–and reduced losses. One of the pocket-battleships was forced into naval action off the coast of Argentina and Uruguay and subsequently scuttled by the Germans themselves. Although a substantial portion of the crew of the
Graf Spee
eventually returned to Germany with the assistance of the Soviet Union,
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the morale effect in both Britain and Germany of the spectacular developments surrounding what was called the “Battle of the River Plate” was clearly in favor of the
Allies.
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Not as obvious to the public, but perhaps more significant in the long run, was the way in which confusion over strategy and organization in the German navy produced the sacking of first one fleet commander and subsequently his successor by Raeder.
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Three critical aspects of the war at sea which would remain characteristic features of the whole struggle were already becoming evident in the first months of the war. The first was the fact that the British navy had greatly underestimated the extent to which German submarines could operate successfully against Allied shipping, in spite of techniques of anti-submarine warfare developed during World War I, so that the small number of German submarines at sea in the first year of the war could have a major impact. In this, the Germans were aided by the fact that they had developed a submarine type which operated effectively in the Atlantic in spite of its relatively slow speed, its need to spend as much time as possible on the surface, and the use of a torpedo model which well into the war was as likely to malfunction as to explode as it was supposed to.
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Far into the war, in fact until mid-1943, the German navy was also assisted in its attacks on Allied shipping by information derived from broken British codes, at first less important ones, but in 1940–43 the Royal Navy Code 3 used for the convoys.
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On the other hand, unknown to the Germans, the British, using the basic information supplied by Polish cryptologists, were beginning to work on the German naval codes as well as on improving their radio direction finders. The Commander-in-Chief of the German navy, Admiral Raeder, on January 23, 1940, warned Admiral Dönitz, the commander of German submarines, about restricting the use of radios by submarines to reduce the danger from radio locators, but the latter could see no great danger–on this issue he would remain stubbornly ignorant until after Germany’s defeat.
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