The Story of Britain: From the Romans to the Present (99 page)

An army was created for Britain’s defence, a Home Guard called the Local Defence Volunteers, and 146,000 men enlisted that summer. They were mainly Great War veterans, allowing young men to fight abroad. But, for all the noise of air-raid warnings, and the inconvenience of the blackout which put an end to street lighting and doubled road accidents, no enemy planes flew over Britain. The East End had been evacuated of half its children, many of whom were billeted in distant Cornwall to keep them out of harm’s way when the Luftwaffe bombed the London Docks. But it never happened. After a few months the evacuee children went home again. No British or French soldiers fired a shot against the Nazis. In disgust, American newspaper correspondents called this period the ‘Phoney War’ and wondered what the two governments were up to. Would Britain and France in the end betray Poland as they had betrayed Czechoslovakia, and accept a peace offer?

In late 1939 the whiff of Munich continued to hang over the British government as a result of Chamberlain’s delay in declaring war on Germany. While the civilized world watched with fascinated horror the newsreels which recorded the onrush of the German tanks through Poland, for two days the British government did nothing. It seemed an extraordinary hesitation; in fact it was a sensible hesitation reflecting the fact that Britain was in no position to wage war against anyone, let alone miles away in Poland. Nevertheless Britain was bound by her August Treaty to declare war immediately on Hitler, and it looked like cowardice that she had not done so.

Forty-eight hours after the attack on Poland, Prime Minister Chamberlain had announced to the House of Commons that if the German government withdrew its forces as far as the British government was concerned the situation could revert to peace as before! He was hoping that the Poles would offer Hitler Danzig to save England from war. Chamberlain still thought, even then, that he could bargain with Hitler. It took the threatened resignation of half the Cabinet to force Chamberlain to his senses as midnight approached. Earlier that evening, amid angry scenes in the House of Commons, the deputy Labour leader Arthur Greenwood had remonstrated with Chamberlain about ‘imperilling the very foundations of our national honour’. ‘Speak for England, Arthur!’ came the shout from the angry Conservative backbenches when he stood up.

The next morning, 3 September, the ultimatum Chamberlain had been made to give Germany expired. But though Britain and France were bound to come to Poland’s aid, their war on her behalf would take place in a different arena. This was not immediately understood by those who were anxious to make up for the betrayal of Czechoslovakia. But the speed of Germany’s campaign, as her forces unveiled her new method of warfare, the
Blitzkrieg
or lightning strike–with tanks advancing a hundred miles a day, in tandem with screaming dive-bombers–saw her overrun Poland in two weeks. Though the Poles were brave fighters and superb airmen, their equipment–they still deployed a prized cavalry division–was old fashioned and swiftly annihilated.

Many people publicly urged that British bombers should cover a French attack on Germany, but the service chiefs would not risk it. Britain did not have the aircraft to defend herself if she were to attack German troops. The government’s policy of appeasement had left Britain with too few planes, and parity with Germany would not be achieved until the spring of 1940. With only a small professional army in readiness, Britain’s initial response to the war could only take place at sea, and not in Poland. Her powerful navy was far larger than Germany’s and would prevent food and fuel from reaching her. But that was going to be a slow process.

The French army on the other hand was enormous and conspicuously superb. Consisting of ninety infantry divisions, as opposed to Britain’s ten, if it had combined with the Polish army at the beginning of September they would have fielded forty more divisions than the German army. Germany had only left twenty-three divisions to guard her frontier with France and they could have been speedily overcome.

But the French army never had a chance to invade Germany from the rear to take the pressure off the Poles. The French reliance on conscript armies–that is, on soldiers who held ordinary jobs in peacetime–meant that the French mobilization in September 1939 took two weeks. During that time, while Frenchmen left their jobs as lawyers, clerks, hoteliers, and donned their uniforms, Poland was forced to surrender. Russia entered Poland on the 17th of that month to complete her swift dismemberment from the east. Accordingly, the order was given to withdraw the small number of French troops who had already made a few skirmishes over Germany’s western frontier. Instead France settled down to defend the Maginot Line, the defences of trenches, pillboxes and big guns that ran along her frontier with Germany. The rest of Europe remained neutral, and peace–other than in Finland, which Russia invaded on the last day of November to re-establish herself on the Baltic–seemed to reign that winter.

The question now was where the allies should launch their attack on the Axis powers. From September onwards Britain and France sent their aircraft factories into frenzied production. Britain in particular was remarkably badly prepared for war. Even though the Royal Navy was hunting German submarines deep beneath the icy northern seas, the improved facilities required by the naval base at Scapa Flow, including a better anti-submarine boom, would not be ready until the following year. In October a German U-boat managed to penetrate the base and sink the battleship
Royal Oak
, killing 800 seamen. It would not be until March 1940 that twenty divisions of conscript soldiers would be trained and ready to cross the Channel to join the British Expeditionary Force, Britain’s small professional army, in France.

That was one of the penalties of being a peace-loving, unmilitaristic nation. Britain started the war with one hand tied behind her back. Against the enormous professional armies of fascist Germany, whose torchlit parades throughout the 1930s had been a source of amusement to the irreverent British, was mustered an army of eccentric amateurs. The Germans also had the munitions and armies of Austria and Czechoslovakia to call on. On the other hand Britain had France and the vast resources of the British Empire at her back.

The British armies that fought the Second World War would be even larger than Kitchener’s armies. By the end of the war, six years later, from Britain alone five million men would have been called up. But the shadow of the Great War, which had ended only twenty years before, made Britain and France in 1939 very reluctant to throw their armies into battle against the Germans and Russians. The all too recent memory of the trenches, and of the Somme in particular, had convinced the British forces chiefs that the war would have to be won in the air. But where was the war to be fought?

In the spring of 1940 the allies decided to put an end to the German export, via the Norwegian port of Narvik, of Swedish iron ore that was crucial for the German war effort, especially in the manufacture of shells, submarines and tanks. The plan involved laying mines in Norwegian waters. Meanwhile in vivid broadcasts on the BBC Winston Churchill, first lord of the Admiralty since 3 September, was advising the neutral states of Norway, Holland, Denmark, Belgium and Switzerland to join Britain and France against Nazism or they would be swallowed up too. ‘Each one hopes that if he feeds the crocodile enough, the crocodile will eat him last,’ he said. There was of course a second crocodile at work: the Finns’ tiny but gallant army on skis–‘white death’ it was called–consisting of only twenty-five divisions held down one hundred Russian divisions until 20 March 1940, when it was forced to surrender.

By this time the allied plan to mine Norwegian waters had become known in Berlin. Thus, in a surprise invasion, German forces landed in Norway on 9 April, shortly before the British were due to arrive. Backed by the Luftwaffe, they captured the capital Oslo and all Norway’s main ports and airfields in only a few hours. On the very same day German tank regiments moved north across the German border to capture Copenhagen and overrun Denmark. British forces were soon landed in Norway, but her main ports remained securely in German hands. After moving out of Oslo to rally the country with radio messages broadcast from a secret mountain village, the King of Norway reluctantly agreed to evacuate. He left his country at the beginning of June 1940, on a ship bound for Britain with the last of the British soldiers.

His departure had been precipitated by news from the south which ruined all hope of saving Norway as allied territory. On 10 May, as guerrilla fighting continued in the icy fjords, German armies invaded neutral Holland and Belgium. At dawn, as in Norway, parachutists attacked Holland’s two principal cities, Rotterdam and the Hague, capturing all their bridges before the Dutch could blow them up. By the 15th the Dutch had surrendered. A few hundred miles south-west Belgium was also fighting for her life, assisted by the British Expeditionary Force which had rushed to her aid from France. In another deadly surprise, only seventy-eight German parachute engineers were needed to capture the fort guarding the Albert Canal. Further airborne invaders prevented other crucial bridges being destroyed. Belgium too was soon overwhelmed. But this was just the prelude to Hitler’s main objective, the capture of Belgium’s vast neighbour France. For his ultimate game plane was to control France’s Atlantic ports, and, after he had captured European Russia, to be prepared for the war between America and the future German empire, which he was convinced would one day take place.

While the French army and the whole of the British Expeditionary Force were rushing north-east to defend Belgium, to the south, unbeknown to them, German armies were invading France. German tanks were plunging through the thick woods of the Ardennes into France just above Luxembourg where the defensive Maginot Line came to an end. This weakness in the French border defences had been noted before the war by British strategists with some dismay. But the French military always reassured them that they considered the hilly, forested terrain of the Ardennes quite impassable by tanks. The Ardennes were therefore in no need of any great defence forces since they were a natural barrier in themselves.

The leader of the Panzer division which ploughed through the Ardennes was a man named Heinz Guderian who before the war had become fascinated by tank warfare. The British army had been leaders in the field and their experiments had been closely followed by Guderian. Not only was he convinced that tanks could be used like battering rams in wooded terrain, he had also become a master of strategy. His theory was that victory could be achieved by what the military historian Sir Basil Liddell Hart called ‘deep strategic penetration by independent armoured forces’ involving ‘a long-range tank drive to cut the main arteries of the opposing army far behind its front’. Guderian would do just that to the allied armies.

The crucial point of the operation was to get the tanks across the River Meuse before the French realized what was happening. On 13 May at a point just west of the scene of another major French defeat, Sedan, German infantry crossed the river in rubber boats, attended once more by screaming bombers. As the French troops on the other side of the river were rounded up, pontoon bridges were constructed, over which soon trundled a stream of German tanks. While French attention was still focused on sending help to Belgium, the Panzer division began sweeping west to cut off the British and French armies in Belgium. They took Abbeville on the Somme, and then, having reached the coast, occupied Boulogne and Calais. They were now within fifteen miles of Dunkirk, just by the French border with Belgium–the only port from which the trapped British army could escape. But amazingly the German tanks went no further, because Hitler gave the order to halt. Although this is sometimes called Hitler’s first mistake (his second was to invade Russia), he was following the advice of one of his senior commanders in France, General Gerd von Rundstedt, who wanted to preserve his tanks for the south, and that of Göring, who believed that the Luftwaffe would be sufficient to wipe out the British. Had the German army not stopped, the entire British Expeditionary Force would have been killed or captured. As it was it had to leave all its heavy artillery and tanks behind in France to be seized by the Germans.

The order to evacuate the British army from Dunkirk was given against the protests of the French. But it was evident that the British had to get out or be captured. On 26 May the mass evacuation began. In what became known as ‘the miracle of Dunkirk’, between 850 and 950 ordinary boats responded to the government’s SOS and, organized by the Admiralty, rushed to France to help evacuate the army. They included cross-Channel boats, holiday steamers, hopper barges from the London County Councils, and nine tugs which towed barges behind them, as well as yachts, lifeboats and other private small craft. As the Luftwaffe bombed and strafed them, the exhausted soldiers waded through water up to their waists to get out to the hundreds of boats bobbing in the Channel. Some 224,000 British troops were retrieved from France and 95,000 French. Despite the murderous attacks by the Luftwaffe, thanks to the Royal Air Force and the weather, only 2,000 men died during the brilliantly executed evacuation.

On 9 June, as the Germans swept through France, her army crumbled and her government fled Paris for Tours. Meanwhile Mussolini, scenting spoils and a way to expand the Italian Empire, announced on the 10th that Italy (which had remained neutral until then) had entered the war on Hitler’s side. On the 14th German troops goosestepped through the French capital, and two days later the French government asked for an armistice. It was granted on the 20th in the same place, Compiègne, and in the same railway carriage where the armistice of just over twenty years before had ended the First World War. The German revenge for Versailles seemed complete. When Churchill, who had just become prime minister in a turnabout for both his and Britain’s fortunes, heard the news of France’s defeat by the Nazis, he wept.