The Third Reich at War Page 15
The leading generals were appalled by this fresh outburst of what they considered Hitler’s irresponsible aggressiveness. Time was needed, they pleaded, to train more recruits, and to repair and replenish the equipment damaged or lost in the Polish campaign. The Chief of the Army General Staff, Franz von Halder, was so alarmed that he took up again the conspiratorial plans he had been hatching with fellow officers, discontented spirits in army counter-intelligence and conservative civil servants and politicians, during a similar confrontation over the proposed invasion of Czechoslovakia in the summer of 1938. For a time he even went around with a loaded revolver concealed on his person, in the hope of shooting Hitler when the occasion presented itself. Only Halder’s ingrained sense of obedience to his oath of loyalty to the Nazi Leader, and the knowledge that he would have little support from the public or indeed his junior officers, prevented him from using it. During November 1939 the conspirators began again to prepare to arrest Hitler and his principal aides, with the idea of putting G̈ring in power, since he was known to have serious doubts about a war with Britain and France. On 23 November 1939, however, Hitler addressed his senior generals. ‘The Leader,’ noted one of them, ‘takes a stand in the strongest manner against defeatism of any kind.’ His speech betrayed ‘a certain mood of ill-humour towards the leaders of the army’. ‘ “Victory,” he said, “cannot be won by waiting!” ’10 Halder panicked, believing Hitler had got wind of the plot, and pulled out of it altogether. It fell apart. Ultimately, the lack of communication and co-ordination between the plotters, and the absence of any concrete plans for the period after Hitler’s arrest, had doomed the conspiracy to failure from the outset.11
In the end, in any case, the confrontation proved unnecessary, for Hitler was forced to postpone the offensive time and again through the winter of 1939- 40 because of poor weather conditions. Constant heavy rain turned the ground to mud across large tracts of Western Europe, making it impossible for German tanks and heavy armour to move with the rapidity that had played such a key part in the Polish campaign. The months of delay proved beneficial to German war preparations as Hitler brought about major changes in the armaments programme. In the later 1930s he had been demanding the building of an air force on an enormous scale. But Germany lacked sufficient supplies of aircraft fuel. And by the summer of 1939 shortages of steel and other raw materials, as well as of qualified construction engineers, were leading to a drastic scaling-back of the construction programme. Aircraft production also had to compete for priority with tanks and battleships. In August 1939 Hitler was persuaded by intensive lobbying on behalf of the Air Ministry to put the production of Junkers 88 bombers back on the top of the agenda. A cutback in the naval building programme also allowed Hitler to demand a massive increase in the manufacture of ammunition, especially artillery shells. From this point on, airplanes and ammunition always took up two-thirds or more of arms production resources. But these changes were slow to work their way through the planning and production systems, as fresh blueprints had to be drawn, machines retooled, equipment built, existing factories redeployed and new ones opened. Labour shortages were compounded by the call-up of workers to the armed forces, while under-investment in the German railway system meant that there was not enough rolling-stock to carry armaments, components and raw materials around the country, and coal supplies for industry began to be seriously held up. All these factors took time to overcome.12
It was not until February 1940 that ammunition output began to increase significantly. By July 1940 German production of armaments had doubled.13 By this time, however, Hitler had already lost patience with the armaments procurement system run by the armed forces under the leadership of Major-General Georg Thomas. On 17 March 1940 he set up a new Reich Ministry for Munitions. The man he put in charge of it was Fritz Todt, his favourite engineer, who had masterminded one of Hitler’s pet projects in the 1930s, the construction of the new motorway system.14 So dismayed was the head of the army’s procurement office, General Karl Becker, at this development, and the accompanying whispering campaign against the alleged inefficiency of his organization, orchestrated in part by representatives of arms companies like Krupps, who saw an opportunity in the new arrangement, that he shot himself. Todt immediately set up a system of committees for different aspects of arms production, with industrialists playing the leading role. The surge in arms production that took place over the following months was largely the achievement of the previous procurement regime in unblocking supply bottlenecks of vital raw materials such as copper and steel. But the credit went entirely to Todt.15
III
The Nazi- Soviet Pact and further negotiations surrounding the invasion of Poland had resulted in a German assignment to the Russian sphere of influence not only of Eastern Poland and the Baltic states but also of Finland. In October 1939, Stalin demanded that the Finns cede to Russia the area immediately north of Leningrad, and the western part of the Rybachi peninsula, in return for a large area of eastern Karelia. But negotiations broke down on 9 November 1939. On 30 November the Red Army invaded, installed a puppet Communist government in a Finnish border town, and got it to sign an agreement ceding the territory that Stalin had been demanding. At this point, however, things began to go seriously wrong for the Soviet leader. Many of the senior Soviet generals had been eliminated in the purges of the 1930s, and the Soviet troops were unprepared and poorly led. Winter had already set in, and white-clad Finnish troops, moving swiftly about on skis, outmanoeuvred raw Soviet conscripts who had not been trained for fighting in deep snow. Indeed, some Soviet officers regarded such camouflage as a badge of cowardice and refused to employ it even when it was available. Trained only to attack, whole Red Army units went to their deaths as they ran straight at machine-gun nests built into the defensive bunkers of the Mannerheim Line, a lengthy series of concrete trenches named after the Finnish Commander-in-Chief. 16
‘They are swatting us like flies,’ a Soviet infantryman on the Finnish front complained in December 1939. By the time the conflict was over, more than 126,000 Soviet troops had been killed and another 300,000 evacuated from the front because of injury, disease or frostbite. Finnish losses were also severe, indeed proportionately even more so, at 50,000 killed and 43,000 wounded. Nevertheless, there was no doubt that the Finns had given the Soviets a bloody nose. Their troops showed not only courage and determination, fuelled by strong nationalist commitment, but also ingenuity. Borrowing from the example of Franco’s forces in the Spanish Civil War, the Finns took empty bottles of spirits, filled them with kerosene and other chemicals, stuck a wick in each of them, then lit them and threw them at incoming Soviet tanks, covering them with flames. ‘I never knew a tank could burn for quite that long,’ said a Finnish veteran. They devised a new name for the projectile, too: in honour of the Soviet Foreign Minister they called them ‘Molotov cocktails’. 17 In the end, however, numbers told. After a second offensive thrust had failed, Stalin called in huge reinforcements, at the same time dropping his puppet Finnish government and offering negotiations to the legitimate Finnish regime in Helsinki. On the night of 12- 13 March 1940, recognizing the inevitable, the Finns agreed a peace deal which allotted to the Soviet Union a substantially larger amount of territory in the south than it had originally demanded. Despite their eventual defeat, however, and the opening of a Soviet military base on their territory, the Finns had retained their independence. Their tough and effective resistance had exposed the weakness of the Red Army and convinced Hitler that he had nothing to fear from it. For Stalin, Finland would now serve as a subservient buffer-state to insulate Russia against any conflict between Germany and the Allies that might be fought out in Scandinavia. The many setbacks and disasters of the war persuaded Stalin to recall purged and disgraced former officers to active service in senior positions. They also prodded his generals into embarking on sweeping military reforms that they hoped would ensure that the Red Army would put on a better performance the next time it went into action.18
5. Soviet Territorial Gains, 1939-40
In the meantime, however, the conflict in Finland, and the Anglo-French failure to intervene, turned Hitler’s attention to Norway. The country’s coastal ports could be sites for vital bases for German submarine operations against Britain. They could also provide an essential channel for the export of much-needed iron ore from neutral Sweden to Germany, especially during winter, when Narvik remained ice-free. The lack of any immediate prospect of invading France and the evident possibility of a pre-emptive invasion by the British made a strike against Norway all the more urgent in Hitler’s eyes. The head of the German navy, Grand Admiral Raeder, mindful of the consequences of Germany’s failure to control the north-west European coast in the First World War, was already pressing such a course upon Hitler in October 1939. To prepare the ground, Raeder made contact with the leader of the Norwegian Fascist Party, Vidkun Quisling. Born in 1887, Quisling, son of a pastor, had passed out from the military academy with the highest marks ever achieved, and joined the army General Staff at the age of twenty-four. In 1931-3 he served as Minister of Defence in a government led by the Agrarian Party, a nationalist group formed not long before to represent small farming communities in this country of 3 million people. Rapid industrialization had led to the rise of a radical, pro-Communist labour movement in the cities, which created great alarm among the peasantry. By this time, Quisling was openly proclaiming the superiority of the Nordic race and warning against the threat of Communism. He presented himself as an advocate of peasant interests. In March 1933, when the government fell, he founded his own National Unity movement, adorning it with ideas such as the leadership principle, borrowed from the newly installed Nazi regime in Germany.19
Quisling’s movement failed to make any headway in the 1930s. It was undermined by the turn of the Norwegian Social Democrats to a centrist position, based on reconciling the interests of workers and peasants. This brought the Social Democrats a parliamentary majority from 1936 onwards. Quisling took up contacts with the Nazis, visiting Hitler early in 1940 to try to persuade him to back a fascist coup led by himself. The Germans were sceptical, in view of the evidently complete lack of support for Quisling among the Norwegian population. However, Quisling did convince Hitler that an Allied invasion of Norway was likely, and two days after their meeting, Hitler ordered planning for a pre-emptive German strike to begin. Quisling travelled to Copenhagen on 4 April 1940 and met a German staff officer to whom he provided details of Norway’s defensive preparations and indicated the best places to invade. Disastrous though it was Quisling’s treachery was to prove useful to Allied propaganda in one respect: perhaps because his name was easy to pronounce, it quickly became a handy term for traitors of every kind, replacing the more cumbersome ‘fifth columnist’, first used in the Spanish Civil War, which British propagandists thought most people had probably already forgotten.20
On 1 March 1940, Hitler issued a formal order for the invasion (dubbed ‘Weser Exercise’), which for obvious geographical reasons was to encompass not only Norway but also Denmark as well. Brushing aside the objection that the Norwegians and Danes were neutral and likely to remain so, he noted that only a relatively small force would be necessary in view of the weakness of the enemy defences. On 9 April 1940, German forces crossed the land border into Denmark from the south at 5.25 in the morning, while an airborne landing at Ålborg secured the principal base of the Danish air force, and a seaborne invasion took place at five different points, including Copenhagen, the defenders of which were taken completely by surprise. The only problem occurred when the battleship Schleswig-Holstein ran aground. At 7.20 a.m., recognizing the inevitable, the Danish government ordered resistance to cease. The invasion had been successfully completed in less than two hours.21 In Norway, however, the invading forces encountered more serious resistance. German transport ships on their way to Trondheim and Narvik managed to evade the waiting British, but bad weather scattered the accompanying fleet of fourteen destroyers, two battleships (the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau) and a heavy cruiser, the Admiral Hipper. The British battle cruiser Renown encountered the two German battleships and damaged them severely enough to cause them to withdraw, but crucially, the British ships were too far away from the Norwegian coast to stop the main German force from entering the Norwegian fjords. Some damage was caused by coastal batteries, and a newly launched battle cruiser, the Blücher, was sunk, but this was not enough to stop German troops taking over all the major Norwegian towns, including the capital. Even so, it was not all plain sailing, and two attacks by the British fleet sank ten German destroyers anchored in and around Narvik on 10 and 13 April 1940. The Germans also lost fifteen transport vessels, forcing them to use a fleet of 270 merchant ships to carry the back-up force of 108,000 troops and their supplies across from Denmark while a further 30,000 were airlifted in. Dependence on airlifting and lack of troop ships meant that the initial invasion was unable to use the overwhelming force it really needed. Coupled with the difficulties of Norway’s mostly mountainous terrain, this gave the Norwegians the chance to put up a fight against the invading German forces.22
The difficulties of the invasion were compounded by the decision to proclaim Quisling head of a new pro-German government as soon as Oslo was occupied on 9 April. Several of the erstwhile supporters he named as his ministers refused publicly to join him, and the legitimate government roundly condemned his action. The King called for resistance to continue, and left Oslo with the cabinet. He was supported by the army and the great mass of the Norwegian people, outraged by the installation of an obvious German puppet who lacked any kind of significant electoral support. Quisling’s proclamation of a ‘national revolution’ on May Day 1940, when he branded the King and the government as traitors who had sold out to the Jews who ran Britain, and dedicated Norway’s future to what he called the ‘Germanic Community of Fate’, met with nothing but derision.23 Norwegian troops played a significant part in the fighting around Narvik and the other western ports in the wake of the German invasion. Things were clearly not going as planned for the Germans. But they were even more disastrous for the British. On 14 and 17 April, British forces landed at two points midway along the coast, supported by troops from the French Foreign Legion and a number of Polish units. But there was confusion about where they should go. Many of the soldiers were poorly equipped for winter fighting, and had no snowshoes: others were so overburdened by their winter equipment that they could hardly move. Crucially, they had no effective air support. German airplanes bombarded them mercilessly. After many delays, the Allies occupied Narvik on 29 May 1940, but German reinforcements now finally began to arrive, and a surprise attack that sank the British aircraft-carrier Glorious on 4 June along with all the aircraft on board underlined the difficulties of the British position. The Allied forces to the south of Narvik had already withdrawn, and after destroying the harbour, the force occupying Narvik itself sailed for home as well, on 8 June 1940. The day before, the King of Norway and his government had gone into exile on the cruiser Devonshire, leaving orders for a ceasefire behind, but making it clear that a state of war would continue between their country and the Third Reich until further notice.24
Despite the difficulties they had encountered, the Germans had triumphed through an unprecedented, co-ordinated attack by air, sea and land. They now held a large part of the north-western coast of the Continent, where they established a series of major naval bases, especially for the submarines that were so vital to the disruption of British supplies from America. Not only were Swedish ore deliveries to Germany now assured, but Sweden itself, still nominally neutral, had effectively been reduced to the position of a German client state. Even during the Norwegian campaign the Swedish authorities had allowed German supplies to be transported across Swedish territory; subsequently they permitted the transit of hundreds of thousands of German troops as well. Swedish shipyards built warships for the German navy, and the Swedish economy became the source of supply f
or practically anything the Germans chose to demand so long as they had it. By contrast, the entire Allied operation had been, as William L. Shirer noted in his diary, a ‘debacle’. British plans to lay mines outside the key Norwegian harbours had been repeatedly postponed until it was too late. Co-ordination between the British army and the Royal Navy had been poor. Military planning had been confused and inconsistent. The British forces had been forced to undertake a humiliating withdrawal shortly after landing. In Narvik they had dithered fatally before advancing, thus surrendering the element of surprise and allowing the Germans to bring in reinforcements. None of this seemed to bode well for the future of the British war effort.25 Indeed, as early as 21 March 1940, the army officer Hans Meier-Welcker noted in his diary a general optimism amongst ordinary Germans that the war would be over by the summer.26