A World at Arms (27 page)

^a
It is at times asserted that the German abandonment of the idea of a rump-Poland was caused by the refusal of the Allies to arrange peace with Germany after the German victory in Poland. This interpretation cannot be fitted into the chronology. Hitler’s September 19 speech in Danzig already forshadowed the positive German response to the Soviet suggestion of that date that there be no Polish state at all. The German views of September 19 and 20 can hardly be interpreted as a response to Chamberlain’s speech of October 12 (which is discussed subsequently).

^b
Some of the opponents of war with Germany sympathized with National Socialism, and the leaders of this faction would take over the government in Pretoria in 1948, dominating the government of what was to become the Republic of South Africa thereafter. On the role of the new Prime Minister who took South Africa into war in the September 1939 crisis, see Kenneth Ingham,
Jan Christian Smuts: The Conscience of a South African
(New York: St. Martin’s, 1986), pp. 205–7.

^c
The British did make sure that Poland’s gold would be safe from German seizure; something they had failed to do in the case of Czechoslovakia.

^d
The record of the extended discussion of this subject in the British Cabinet meeting of October 14, 1939, is highly instructive. There were still to be restraints on bombing because of concern over civilian casualties. The Germans were to be left the dubious honor of starting with the bombing of cities (in the face of evidence that they had already done so in Poland), but the British would do the same if the Germans began general bombing or invaded neutral Belgium. War Cabinet 47(39), PRO, CAB 65/3, ff. 123–27.

^e
Admiral Raeder thought that England had gone to war in 1939 for fear of a deteriorating naval situation later when the German navy had completed its construction program. (“Gedanken des Oberbefehlshabers der Kriegsmarine zum Kriegsausbruch 3.9. 1939,” 3 September 1939, BA/MA, RM 6/71.) Like most German, but unlike most Japanese, naval officers, Raeder considered only Germany’s construction plans and their implementation while ignoring the naval construction programs of other powers. This curious form of blind-ness-there is no reference to the fact that Great Britain and the United States had begun substantial naval building programs in the 1930S and that the ships being built would some day be completed–awaits investigation.

^f
The Japanese government formally adopted a policy line calling for a settlement of outstanding issues with the Soviet Union and possibly a non-aggression pact on December 28, 1939;see Hosoya in James W. Morley (ed.),
Fateful Choice
(New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1980),pp. 27–8, 36–7.

^g
Many historians have attributed to Hitler a supposed interest in agreement with England; they never contrast his care to accommodate the interests of Italy, Japan, Turkey, the Soviet Union, and others when he wanted agreement with those countries with his refusal ever to consider interests expressed by the London government. See also Gerhard L. Weinberg, “Hitler and England, 1933–1945: Pretense and Reality,”
German Studies Review,
8 (1988), 299–309

^h
It is true that
before
the war, Lithuania did not have a common border with the Soviet Union either, but this changed as soon as Russian troops occupied eastern Poland.

ⁱ
The Kuusinen government also began to set up its own military force. The whole project looks in retrospect like a rehearsal for what was later done by the Soviet Union in regard to Poland: a new regime established in Lublin with its own military force under General Berling. The big differences are two: the Red Army did not occupy Finland but did occupy Poland; and the Kuusinen government was to get its compensation for yielding territory from the Soviet Union itself, while Poland was to get its compensation from Germany.

^j
Chamberlain was most cautious at his meeting with Daladier on December 19. He wanted no expeditionary force planned and was primarily worried about the possibility that all of Scandinavia might come under German-Soviet control with vast implications for the situation in the Atlantic.

^k
it should be noted that the Soviets allowed the Finns living in the transferred territory to leave –as practically all promptly did–according to rules similar to those agreed to for the Germans in the Baltic States, and they also arranged for a full exchange of prisoners of war.

^l
As Hitler told Goebbels on December 11, 1939: “I want to beat England whatever it costs.” Goebbels,
Tagebiicher,
12 Dec. 1939, Vol. 3: 663.

^m
As late as February 19, 1940, one of the higher officers in the German naval command, Heinz Assmann, wrote a memorandum arguing that as long as Germany kept the United States neutral and refrained from an attack through Holland and Belgium she could not lose, but any attack into the Low Countries would probably lead to war with the United States. Recognizing-as few Germans did–that the Treaty of Versailles had left Germany a united and relatively strong country, he warned that if Germany lost this time, she could not expect a second Versailles Treaty. “Entwurf: Beurteilung der Kriegslage (19. Februar 1940)” BA/MA, III M
502/4.

The key figure in planning for a coup in the high command of the army, Helmuth Groscurth, was relieved of his post by General Halder on February 1, 1940 (Helmut Krausnick and Harold C. Deutsch (eds.),
Helmuth Groscurth: Tagebücher eines Abwehroffiziers 1938–1940
[Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1970], pp. 84, 246–48, 323).

ⁿ
Just one example was the assertion of the British commander at Namsos that the route to the north was impassable; the Germans would move across almost 90 miles of it in four days (Earl F. Ziemke,
The Northern Theater of Operations,
1940-
1945 (Washington: GPO, 1960) pp. 90, 96–97)). The British loss of an aircraft carrier, the
Glorious,
to a surprise surface the Royal Navy was also capable of some extraordinary ineptitude (the most recent account in David Kahn,
Seizing the Enigma: The Race to Break the German U-Boat Codes,
1931)-1943
[Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1991], pp. 122–23).

^o
In order to understand the preference of many at the time for Lord Halifax over Churchill, one must recall that Churchill was then not on good terms with either Conservatives or Labourites. He had broken with the former on one of the few issues on which the latter shared the view Churchill rejected: more self–government for India. This situation was personified in 1940 by the other key figures. Clement Attlee, the leader of the Labour Party, has served on the Statutory Commission which has prepared the original draft of the Government of India Act that Churchill opposed; Lord Halifax had been the Viceroy of India whose conciliatory attitude toward Gandhi had infuriated Churchill.

3

Early in the morning of May 10, 1940, Germany invaded Holland and Belgium, having infiltrated troops into Luxembourg the night before. These neutrals would be rewarded for their prior shielding of Germany in the West by the swift destruction of their independence. But that destruction was incidental to a broader aim. The purpose of the German invasion was to crush the French and British forces on the continent so that Germany would have quiet in the West while conquering living space from the Soviet Union in the East. The three neutrals in the West were to provide the avenue for victory over France and a coastal base for defeating England, while the great neutral in the East, the Soviet Union, both enabled Germany to concentrate her forces on one major front and helped supply these forces with the materials Germany needed in taking this preliminary step for the subsequent campaign in the East.

As already described, the German plan had changed from an initial one for a limited offensive in the north to a subsequent one for an attack toward the Channel coast through Luxembourg, Belgium and northern France.
¹
Disagreements over strategy and weather problems had led to twenty–nine postponements. These postponements, however, had some major advantages for the Germans. They utilized the seven months’ lull in the fighting to make good the losses and take into account the lessons of the Polish campaign. Because some details of the original German campaign plans came to the attention of the Western Allies when a German plane, carrying an officer with relevant documents he could not destroy quickly enough, made a forced landing in Belgium, the Allies were misled into disregarding the signs of a reorientation of the direction of the main German thrust. They were, therefore, inclined to fall all the more completely into the trap created by the second and actually implemented campaign plan. Finally, the repeated leaks of Germany’s intention to invade, several of them deliberately arranged by Hans Oster,
a key figure in the internal opposition to Hitler, left the immediate victims of attack doubtful about crediting the last warning in the series.
²

The Allies had observed the smashing blows which broke Poland’s armies so quickly, but they had learned little from these events. Chamberlain recognized the impact of the new warfare, but the British army had been provided the necessary resources to begin rebuilding so recently that there was little chance to profit from the disaster in the East.
³
The French also had some idea of how the quick blows and rapid exploitation of the German armored divisions supported by the German air force might interfere with their own process of deliberate and methodical campaigning, but similarly did little or nothing to alter the scattering of armor and the dependence on stale tactics.
⁴

Recognizing that the Germans would again strike in the West through neutral territory in order to by-pass the French fortifications on the Franco-German border, the famed Maginot Line, the French and British had to choose between disregarding the neutrality of Belgium and Holland by advancing into them before Germany struck, abandoning those countries to their fate when invaded while trying to hold the Germans on a longer and more dangerous front on the Franco-Belgian border, or pushing their own forces into the Low Countries to assist the latter once the Germans had launched their attack. For political reasons, the Allies rejected the first of these possibilities. They would not try to move before the Axis, a policy the British subsequently abandoned in dealing with the French fleet and the important island of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean. The second approach–abandoning the Low Countries to their fate–appeared to be doubly disadvantageous. Such a strategy would write off what armed forces Belgium and Holland might muster, particularly the Belgian army which was correctly thought to be a substantial force and was in fact larger than the army Britain had been able to send to the continent in the first part of the war. Furthermore, holding the Belgian-French border would mean both fighting closer to key centers of French population and industry and defending a line longer than one that might be attained if French and British forces pushed forward at least into Belgium.

Under these circumstances, the Allies settled on a plan to advance into the Low Countries once these were attacked, in the hope of halting the Germans on a front that covered much of Belgium and perhaps a small part of Holland.
⁵
This project was thus designed to assist the neutrals victimized by German aggression and simultaneously to include their defensive capabilities into the general military power of the Allies. It suffered from two major defects, one obvious from the start, the other apparent only once the fighting began. The
shortcoming evident at the time, never adequately remedied, and contributing greatly to the Allied defeat, was the refusal of Holland and Belgium to coordinate their defensive plans fully with France and Britain. Fearful of arousing the ire of the Germans, the two neutrals allowed some secret contacts and exchange of information with the Western Powers, but never agreed to the development of fully coordinated plans with appropriate preparation to implement them when Germany struck. On the contrary, in both countries the highest officers in the army were replaced by men less inclined to cooperate with France and Britain. The Dutch thereupon decided on a withdrawal pian guaranteed to isolate them from any assistance by land, and the Belgians–whose military forces were far more substantial–also refused to work out a coherent defensive strategy with their only conceivable protectors. Whether, in the face of such attitudes, it made sense for France and Britain to plan a commitment of their best equipped forces to a move forward into countries unwilling to coordinate their own efforts with those whom they planned to ask for help, raises a question of great complexity which had arisen in Norway; it reflects the redoubling of an advantage unscrupulous attackers have over cautious countries which hope to avoid war by avoiding measures thought likely to provoke the attacker–the same advantage Germany had enjoyed and exploited in the face of the delayed Polish mobilization.