Storming the Eagle's Nest (6 page)

This was precisely the issue faced by Federal President Marcel Pilet-Golaz, and exactly the issue he addressed in his speech to the Swiss nation on 25 June 1940.

It was fortunate that General Henri Guisan, though by training a soldier, was by instinct a politician.

No sooner had Guisan heard Pilet-Golaz’s speech than he seized his pen. The following day – it was 26 June 1940 – the Federal Council received the General’s request to confirm that his mission remained as originally drafted on the occasion of his appointment ten months previously: ‘de sauvegarder l’indépendance du Pays et de maintenir l’intégrité du territoire’.
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This adeptly put the equivocators on the defensive. It was a question that they could not judiciously answer no. The consequences would have been Guisan’s resignation, a loss the Council knew that neither country nor Council could afford. Early on the evening of 4 July a courier arrived at Guisan’s Gümligen Castle HQ bearing a letter. It was the Council’s necessary affirmation. The General smiled. He now had the laissez-passer to a radical plan. This he had been incubating since his appointment, and had been brought to fruition as Reynaud’s and Weygand’s France collapsed. It was for the Alpenfestung, the Réduit National for the country’s speakers of French, or for the many Anglophiles the Alpine Redoubt.

There was little that was entirely novel about the idea, but the implications of the Redoubt strategy were explosive, and its ultimate manifestation breathtaking.

When Guisan was appointed Commander-in-Chief of Swiss forces on 30 August 1939 he was astounded to discover that there existed no overall plan for Switzerland’s defence. Not a draft of any nature, nor any contingency plans for the likelihood of a German invasion – let alone one from Italy in the south; conceivably an attack from France to the west. There was no systematic doctrine manifested in a pattern of defence, tank traps, machine-gun nests, pillboxes, earthworks or strongpoints. In terms of armament there was a collection of
nineteenth-century
84 mm and 120 mm museum pieces, together with – in all – eight antiquated and thirty-four modern Oerlikon
anti-aircraft
guns. In the dawning age of motorised warfare, the Swiss army boasted 50,000 horses borrowed from the civilian population, and the facility to requisition civilian motorised transport. Contemporary photographs show small pieces of field artillery towed by taxis. The Swiss professional army amounted to a fraction of the total of around 500,000. Of this militia, the Elite were aged between twenty and thirty-six, the Reserve thirty-six and forty-eight, the Home Guard forty-eight and sixty. They were good marksmen, for tradition maintained that each man kept his arms at home and practised regularly. These were the tools with which Guisan was to fight the blitzkrieg.

The events of May and June 1940, of Fall Gelb and Fall Rot and the spinelessness of Marshal Pétain, showed Guisan all too clearly the fragility of his position. It was natural enough for a country to defend its own borders. Yet despite the Maginot Line, France had discovered that its frontiers were indefensible to the Wehrmacht’s combination of infantry supported by a motorised army and the Luftwaffe. Given that Switzerland’s northern frontier with Germany was at least as porous as that of France, Guisan realised that it was similarly impossible to defend. He noted the aphorism of Frederick the Great: ‘He who defends everything defends nothing.’

So Guisan’s first move as the country’s military leader was to withdraw troops from the 1,200-mile border to any feature of the terrain that could be an ally. A river, canal, lake, wood, hill
– or indeed a mountain. Yet if May 1940 had lowered his hopes, June in some respects raised them. On the Franco-Italian Alpine border he had been given the clearest conceivable demonstration of Switzerland’s salvation. His staff summarised the French performance in the Alps: ‘Un chef décidé, des troupes de qualité, un terrain alpestre extrêmement bien fortifié, une météorologie détestable, sont parvenus à arrêter un ennemi.’
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The Alps were indeed the country’s natural – as opposed to political – frontiers. They constituted a lozenge-shaped block dropping down to the Italian border from a line heading north-east-east from the eastern tip of Lake Geneva to the eastern end of Lake Zurich. This was an area intrinsically defensible – and indeed had been long recognised as such before the heady days of Stukas and Panzers. It was akin to England, a fortress built by Nature for herself.

Like the Alps on the Franco-Italian border, the Swiss massif needed additional fortification only at the doors into the higher ground: the passes. For such purposes, fortresses had been constructed in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. They guarded the St Gotthard railway, the Oberalp, and the Furka and Grimsel passes in the central Alps. Guisan’s plan – developed in a series of meetings with his general staff as France was falling – was to lightly defend the border and more heavily defend what he called the army line. This ran from west to east in the middle of the country, following natural features of the terrain. These positions were merely to delay the invading force sufficiently to allow the main body of the army to retreat to the Alps. It was a strategy that attracted the name Verzögerungskrieg or delaying war. Beyond would be established an impregnable zone in the high Alps. There – as both the Swiss and the Germans recognised – the defending force would be a much tougher nut to crack. The army would also control the country’s key strategic assets of the St Gotthard and Simplon transalpine railway tunnels. In their absence – should they be mined – the incentive to invade evaporated.

However, the Redoubt strategy had profound implications. On the day on which the German–French armistice came
into effect, Guisan met with members of his general staff to finalise the strategy. Later he wrote, ‘I had to be clear now … to what extreme degrees we must be prepared for all possible consequences of the reduit policy’.
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The most obvious of these was logistical. The framework or infrastructure of the Redoubt was already – albeit very lightly – in place. It took the form of three great fortresses at the perimeter of the massif: at Sargans in Canton St Gallen in the east in the Rhine valley; at St Gotthard in the south on the main route between Zurich and Milan; and at St Maurice in the far west, guarding the entrance to the upper Rhône valley. St Gotthard – Fort Airolo – dated from 1887; St Maurice – the subterranean Fort Dailly – was started in 1892; Sargans was begun in the immediate aftermath of Anschluss in the late spring of 1938. Each was designed for a garrison of about 1,000 soldiers, and had to be duly stockpiled with victuals and ammunition.

These, though, were merely the foundations of a ring of citadels that would need to be built on the fringes of the Redoubt. At this stage Guisan’s staff could not detail what would be required. They had an agreed outline and the three key fortresses. Until a survey had been completed, it was impossible to say precisely what strongpoints would be required where. In the end, the
réduit
would comprise no fewer than seventy medium-sized fortresses and around 10,000 smaller bunkers, command posts, observation positions and pillboxes. One of the medium emplacements – the Vitznau Artillery – was quarried into the side of 5,896-foot Mount Rigi, overlooking Lake Lucerne and the Rütli meadow. As the
New York Times
reported in 1999 when – for the first time – this swarm of secret emplacements was thrown open to the public, ‘It has a kitchen, with spotlessly clean oversized pots and pans to feed large numbers, an infirmary, toilets modern by 1940 standards and separate sleeping quarters for officers. It also has a radio room, war room, huge water tank, disinfection area in case of a
chemical attack, generator, ammunition storage areas and two 105-millimeter cannons.’
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As the French discovered when building the Maginot Line, a chain on a comparable scale to the Swiss redoubt, emplacements like these were immensely greedy of resources. The Maginot Line cost 2–3 billion French francs, and took nine years to construct. If it was to be of any value to the Swiss, their own Redoubt needed to be completed in months not years. It also needed to be constructed in secret so that the precise location of the
emplacements
was hidden. Arthur Joller was a boy at the time of the construction of the Vitznau Artillery. ‘When I was young we would hear dynamite, and we’d see the earth move down from the mountains. The work was always guarded, and we never dared come. It was absolutely forbidden.’ When construction was completed, the fortresses still needed to be concealed. Festung Gütsch on the Oberalp Pass had its turrets camouflaged as boulders. At Magletsch in Canton St Gallen the fort dug into the mountainside had its 105 mm gun turrets disguised as Alpine chalets. There was also a story – unverified – about an airstrip built into a mountain face with an opening in the rock large enough for planes to fly in and fly out. Time, materials, skill, men, money were needed just to build the redoubt, let alone provide it with a stockpile of war materiel and food for the fortress guard corps – the Festungswachtkorps. According to some estimates the cost in today’s terms was $13 billion. All this in a country of 4.2 million souls. It was as though Switzerland had planned to put a man on the moon.

The second problem was also logistical in one sense, but human and political too. There was every logic in Guisan and the army defending only what could be defended. Yet it meant leaving to the good offices and tender mercies of the Nazis all the country’s major cities – Zurich, Geneva, Basel, Berne, Lausanne, Winterthur, St Gallen, Lucerne and Lugano. That is, the vast majority of the country’s industrial assets, and just about four-fifths of her population. It was as if the British army had proposed, in the face of Operation Sea Lion, withdrawing
to the Scottish Highlands and so leaving London, Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, Sheffield and Bristol to fend for themselves. In a sense, this was a counsel of despair that might reasonably have been expected to have fallen on stony ground with the country’s politicians and the public.

Guisan judiciously described the Redoubt to his political masters less as a practical strategy than as a deterrent. Rather like the Western nuclear deterrent in the Cold War, if the strategy had been executed it would already have failed. As Guisan put it to the Federal Council on 12 July, just as Hitler, Raeder and Halder were meeting at the sunny Berghof:

The Federal Council was duly persuaded of this argument. On 17 July 1940, it gave its stamp of approval.

Here again Guisan was adroit. The plan was presented not as his own but as the brainchild of the head of the Military Department, Rudolf Minger. The equivalent of Britain’s secretary of state for defence was well regarded by the six other members of the Federal Council. They were reluctant to gainsay a senior colleague. They might well have contradicted a mere soldier. Whether even the Council was aware of the full implications of the plan is still not clear, even today.

The public of course could not be kept ignorant of the strategy, for its essence was that it was a deterrent of which the Germans were made entirely aware and of which they were constantly reminded. Guisan was far from insensitive to this issue and to the point that the army itself needed persuading. What exactly would his men be fighting for in the Redoubt if their wives and daughters in Zurich, Basel and Schaffhausen were already in the
hands of the Nazis? As Jon Kimche puts it in
Spying for Peace: General Guisan and Swiss Neutrality
, ‘it had become clear to Guisan that the reduit would be little more than a hollow shell if it were not filled with the spirit of a people united, determined and prepared to resist’.

When Guisan talked of the consequences of the Redoubt strategy, this was the most important that he had in mind. Had his troops the will to resist the Reich?

Here, Guisan again had to hand an object lesson from recent events all too close to home. France fell for many reasons, not least the courage, skill and tactics of the Wehrmacht. Yet it also collapsed because of the absence among a good deal of the French army of the will to resist. In the course of the ‘Sitzkrieg’ there was a good deal of contact between General Gort’s British Expeditionary Force and the French, then still led by General Gamelin. The British high command – at the time headed by the chief of the Imperial General Staff, General Edmund Ironside – was perturbed by what it discovered. Some French units were excellent, others less so. Lieutenant General Alan Brooke, later to become Churchill’s Chief of Staff, recalled a march past of a French unit in November 1939: ‘Men unshaven, horses ungroomed, vehicles dirty and complete lack of pride in themselves or their units. What shook me most, however, was the look in the men’s faces, disgruntled and insubordinate looks … although ordered to give the “eyes left”, hardly a man bothered to do so.’ In the eyes of some of the British commanders, this was less than surprising, given the quality of the leadership of the French. Air Marshal Arthur Barratt, the commander of the RAF in France, thought Gamelin a ‘button-eyed, button-booted, pot-bellied little grocer’.
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Vividly aware of the threat to morale, when the Germans crossed the Meuse on 15 May 1940, Guisan issued an order in which he observed that if the French had resolved to stop the Wehrmacht, they would have done precisely that. Guisan told his troops that they themselves were
never
to surrender.