Churchill's Wizards (30 page)

‘The beginnings of any war by the British', wrote General Archibald Wavell, ‘are always marked by improvidence, improvisations, and too often, alas, impossibilities being asked of the troops.' The Phoney War turned real and bloody in Norway. While no one could doubt British courage and phlegm in what Churchill called ‘the first main clinch of the war', the Germans managed to deceive their intelligence, wrong-foot their diplomacy and outmanoeuvre and outgun their armed services. The Norwegian campaign would end in retreat and evacuation.

All Scandinavia was neutral at the start of WW2. In January 1940, Britain began secret planning to violate that neutrality by stopping German ships, mining the waters and seizing the port of Narvik in Norway to prevent the winter export of Swedish iron ore for Germany's military industries. Britain also planned to send an Anglo-French expeditionary force to help the Finns in their fight against the Russians. But on 9 April 1940, Germany jumped the gun by suddenly invading Denmark and Norway. The Germans seized Narvik by a Trojan-horse deception: German iron-ore ships apparently waiting peacefully in the harbour suddenly disgorged hidden troops. (The British later did the same at Namsos in Norway, disembarking troops at night, hiding all traces from reconnaissance aircraft by day.) In the silky words of Joseph Goebbels, both Denmark and Norway were ‘taken under the protection of the Reich to forestall Allied occupation'. The German Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop added, ‘Germany has preserved Scandinavia from destruction and will be responsible for true neutrality in the North until the end of the war.'

In mid-April 1940, after a successful, violent naval action off Narvik, Churchill was urging the British general on the ground, Pat Mackesy, to attack the Germans in Narvik directly. Given his available
forces and the local conditions, Mackesy thought he could not mount a direct assault from the sea but would have to take the surrounding fjords first. Under Churchill's goading he finally snapped and wrote an irate message that included the line ‘Are snows of Narvik to run red as sands of Gallipoli?' This would have got him sacked had it been sent. But an alert young staff officer read it and held up its transmission by pretending that wireless communications were ‘out' to Catterick, until tempers had cooled and the message could be moderated. Churchill did sack Mackesy the next month, but at least it was not for this cable. That junior staff officer was Captain J. T. Rankin of the Hallamshire battalion of the York and Lancaster regiment, my father.

In Norway, the Germans were deploying a new kind of mobile infantry –
Fallschirmtruppen
– dropped by parachute, and the Luftwaffe commanded the air. They used tactics developed in Spain, close air support of attacking infantry, and incendiary bombs, to devastating effect. Yet the two-month Norway campaign turned out to be a long way from the complete fiasco it seemed. The Germans had lost over 5,000 men and 242 aircraft, and the
Kriegsmarine
proportionately suffered more than the Royal Navy. Meanwhile, King Haakon VII and the Norwegian government, no longer neutral, moved to London, to be joined the Dutch royal family and government. Three million tons of Norwegian merchant shipping (the fourth largest fleet in the world) came over to the Allied side, as did remnants of the Norwegian navy and air forces. Because Major Vidkun Quisling of Norway was believed to have helped the Germans invade, his surname entered the English dictionary as a new and loathsome synonym for ‘traitor'. In 1943, the British-trained Norwegian resistance succeeded in preventing Nazi scientists from getting deuterium oxide or ‘heavy water' for atomic bomb research from the Norsk Hydroelectric Plant at Vemork in the Telemark region. And the mountainous, fjord-riven kingdom of Norway managed in time to tie the hands and feet of some twelve divisions of German soldiers, nearly half a million men.

Most important of all, the two-day debate in the House of Commons on the conduct of the war in Norway on 7 and 8 May 1940 sealed the fate of Neville Chamberlain as British Prime Minister. Leo Amery and Lloyd George openly urged Chamberlain to go, and in the division the PM's Conservative majority shrank from over 200 to 81.
Seventy-one-year-old Chamberlain realised that he himself was the main stumbling block to the establishment of a vigorous, all-party coalition, and he resigned two days later. On 10 May 1940, Winston Churchill, the 65-year-old who had started and impelled the whole Norway campaign but miraculously escaped its avalanche of consequences, now acquired ‘the chief power in the State'. He would be Prime Minister for the next five years and three months of world war. Churchill the historian later smoothed his luck into Fate:

It was a dramatic day in European history. At 3 a.m., Germany launched
Fall Gelb
(Operation yellow), its offensive in the West, a simultaneous land and air attack on the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg. Neutrality and obsequious diplomacy were no defence against Nazi contempt for protocol; water and wire offered no protection against blitzkrieg. Neutral Switzerland mobilised fully, and Eire began to panic: ‘The fact that we want to keep out of war', said Eamon de Valera to a Fianna Fail convention, ‘will not, or may not, be sufficient to save us.'

The onslaught was underway; standing up to it a tremendous task. When Churchill told the House of Commons on 13 May, ‘I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat,' he was almost quoting the opening chapter to volume 5 of
The World Crisis
, thinking back to what he had described as ‘incomparably the greatest war in history', the Eastern Front of the First World War, which destroyed three empires and involved ‘the toils, perils, sufferings and passions of millions of men. Their sweat, their tears, their blood bedewed the endless plain…'

The alarming idea of soldiers dropping from the skies jolted civilian Britain into action. The day after Anthony Eden, the Secretary of State for War, appealed for Local Defence Volunteers – what we think of now as ‘Dad's Army' – to guard against enemy parachute landings, a quarter of a million men joined. Eden was still speaking on the BBC after the nine o'clock news on 14 May 1940 (‘You will not be paid, but you will receive uniforms and will be armed…') when listeners started phoning their local police stations in order to sign up in ‘the parashooters'.

As the United Kingdom pulled itself together in 1940, the working classes were quicker than some of the upper classes – many of whom loathed and distrusted Churchill – at putting their shoulders to the wheel. On 13 May, the Labour Party conference had backed the new national government, which had Labour ministers in the War Cabinet. The cartoon by the New Zealander David Low in the
Evening
Standard
the next day, ‘All behind you Winston', showed an army of politicians and people striding in step with Churchill, all rolling up their sleeves. Suddenly, the country was organising for Socialism; the mood was swinging leftwards.

The Minister of Labour and National Service was the formidable Transport and General Workers Union leader and ex-docker Ernest Bevin, who soon had the Trades Union Congress and the British Employer's Confederation working together. When Herbert Morrison, the Minister of Supply, asked all contractors to ‘work at war speed', in shifts covering twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, providing ‘more shells, more tanks, more guns', the TUC sent a message: ‘Men of the fighting forces, we salute your courage and determination. We are unitedly resolved that all our resources shall be used to the full to provide the arms and munitions you need.' ‘Go to it!' exhorted the Ministry posters.

In his ‘Grand Coalition' cabinet, Churchill made himself Minister of Defence. The Air Ministry was separated from a newly created Ministry of Aircraft Production, which was put under the newspaper magnate Lord Beaverbrook. The appointment was contentious. King George VI sent a worried message to Churchill, because on his 1939 Canadian tour he had heard from John Buchan, the governor general, how many Canadians distrusted Beaverbrook. But malevolent or not, Max was energetic. Within a week the Nuffield Aircraft Factory and
Vickers Supermarine were under the control of one management and working round the clock. And as a newspaperman, Beaverbrook understood the power of symbolic gestures. When he appealed to the housewives of Britain in July to donate their aluminium cookware to help build aircraft frames, the total amount collected might have only equalled one day's supply, but every woman who gave a pot or a pan could imagine a bit of her kitchen in that Hurricane or Spitfire zipping through the burning blue.

The firebombing of Rotterdam from the air frightened other Dutch cities and Holland capitulated. Curiously, a Luftwaffe officer charged with improving the camouflage of his airfield had accidentally exposed the earlier German secret plans to invade Holland and Belgium. When Erich Hoenmanns, lost in fog on his way to Köln, crash-landed on 10 January 1940 near Mechelen-sur-Meuse in Belgium, he was carrying a passenger, Major Helmuth Reinberger, with all the invasion plans in a dispatch case that he failed to destroy. The Allies thought it was only a ‘haversack ruse'; Guy Liddell of MI5 reckoned it ‘part of the scheme for the war of nerves', and John Colville, a secretary at No. 10 Downing Street, recorded in his diary on 15 January that ‘the landing itself, the ostentatiously ineffective efforts of the pilot to burn the papers, and subsequently to commit suicide, are suspiciously like a “put-up job”.' In fact, they were all wrong, for the case held the real plans at that time.

When German Army Group B (two armies of five infantry corps) invaded Holland and Belgium on 10 May, it seemed like the Schlieffen Plan of 1914 again, and the British and French armies moved forward seventy-five miles to block the right hand. This was exactly what the Germans wanted them to do – charge the matador's cloak – because their main weapon was in the other hand. The French army had believed the fortified Maginot line stretching from Switzerland to Longuyon, ‘a battleship built on land', was impregnable; the forested terrain of the Ardennes was surely impassable to tanks. Yet it was through here that von Rundstedt's German Army Group A – four armies, including four armoured corps in twelve divisions – delivered a body blow to France, the
Sichelschnitt
or sweep of the scythe round behind them.

France was unready. Their ageing, corpulent generals had become
complacently defence-minded; the dash of Maréchal Ferdinand Foch had gone. General Gamelin's nickname was ‘Gagamelin', and morale was low among the sullen, bored troops. Goebbels's people, meanwhile, dropped leaflets on the French lines suggesting that Britain was ready to fight to the last Frenchman, and that
les Tommies
, all looters and lechers, were already busy in their homes with their wives and sweethearts. From the radio, the traitor Ferdonnet oozed contempt for the French ruling class. France's confident front was an elaborate
pâtisserie
, concealing a stew of
je m'en foutisme
, defeatism, confused communism, and demoralisation. Churchill felt the French were ‘rotted from within before they were smitten from without'.

The
Schwerpunkt
or concentration point of the German attack was at Sedan, 120 miles north-east of Paris. An RAF reconnaissance Spitfire saw the columns of enemy vehicles stretching back for miles. The German armoured divisions punched through, crossed the Meuse and the Oise, and drove a ‘Panzer corridor' towards the French coast, along the Somme, through the British rear. Marc Bloch, the medieval historian who later died a hero of the French resistance, tortured and shot by the Gestapo in June 1944, believed that the ‘strange defeat' of France in 1940 was in part intellectual. The French high command simply could not conceive of a new kind of war, waged by Germans with ‘methodical opportunism' and an utterly different rhythm and faster tempo. ‘It was much more terrifying to find ourselves suddenly at grips with a section of tanks in open country. The Germans took no account of roads. They were everywhere.' Bloch noted how the Germans ‘relied on action and on improvisation. We, on the other hand, believed in doing nothing and in behaving as we had always behaved.'

Apart from aircraft, the Germans did not have superiority in numbers of men or vehicles, but violence and speed in their use won the day. Because the shocked and dazed French did not counter-attack, the BEF became cut off from its reserves, and had to bend its line backwards as it was squeezed and pushed towards the coast of northern France. Fighting a rearguard action towards the Channel ports, making use of successive rivers and canals, now became the BEF's only option. The stubborn retreat towards the ‘defensive perimeter' of Dunkirk began.

Meanwhile, Dudley Clarke was having a busy war. He had already accomplished a four-month-long trip to Africa, reconnoitring the entire 3,000-mile overland route from Kenya to Egypt as the supply line to reinforce the Middle East should Italy enter the war and choke off sea lanes. He was just back from two missions to wintry Norway in three weeks, when he was suddenly given a new job at the War Office in May 1940. Three days before, German Panzers had reached Abbeville at the mouth of the Somme, and the tip of the
Sichelschnitt
scythe was now moving up the coast towards Boulogne and Calais, preparing to cut the BEF to pieces. Boulogne was hastily defended by the 20th Guards Brigade and then mostly evacuated by the Royal Navy.