That all the world shall, – I will do such things, –
What they are yet I know not; but they shall be
The terrors of the earth.’
From William Shakespeare, King Lear, Act 2, Scene IV
On September 1st 1939, Germany invaded Poland. Britain and France declared war, but could do little else to help the Poles. German armoured forces penetrated rapidly and deeply behind the lines of the brave, but antiquated, Polish army. The Polish air force was annihilated in days. German aircraft ranged over Poland at will, hitting cities and troops with demoralising impunity. On September 17th, the Soviet army, in accordance with the secret terms of the Nazi – Soviet pact the preceding month, re – occupied eastern Poland, which the Poles had wrested from them in the war of 1920. Poland was crushed.
Hurrying behind the German forces came seven ‘Einsatzgruppen’, Reichsfuehrer Heinrich Himmler’s death squads, who sought out the Polish aristocrats, priests and intelligentsia, as well as the hapless Jews, for slaughter. There was no treaty. Poland was simply absorbed by her conquerors, and Polish troops were to continue fighting in western armies until the end of the war, while at home the Polish underground began a long struggle, conducted with unbelievable gallantry. They would play a notable part in the defeat of the ‘V’ weapons.
On April 9th 1940 Germany began her attack on Norway; however despite British and French naval and military assistance, it was conquered by June. Denmark was attacked at the same time, the Danish government ordering a ceasefire less than two hours later. These conquests were a preliminary to the most dramatic military debacle of the twentieth century. Bad weather had caused a German attack on France to be postponed several times. In January 1940 a German officer mistakenly landed in Belgium, where he was interned. He had with him documents detailing German plans for the offensive, and it was not known whether he had managed to destroy them1. The plans were therefore altered. The new plans were more daring.
France, Holland, Belgium and Luxemburg were invaded on May 10th. Parachutists landed on the roof of the great Belgian fortress of Eban Emael, which was neutralised, and captured by advancing forces later. German panzer divisions, composed of tanks, self propelled guns and motorized infantry, using a strategy propounded by Sir Basil Liddell Hart, burst through the French front in the Ardennes mountains, which were thought to be impassable to tanks. They were the steel tip of a wedge of some fifty divisions.2 Penetrating deeply to the rear of the British and French armies, which had, as the Germans had expected, swung into Belgium to meet the German advance there, they rapidly reached the Channel coast, to the consternation of both the allies and the German high command itself, which was fearful of a counterstroke.
Columns of refugees streamed westwards along the French roads, hampering military movement. Both refugees and soldiers were harassed by swarms of dive-bombers, the famous Stukas, which were fitted with sirens, and their bombs with screaming whistles, to add to the terror. All around was confusion. No sooner did the position of the German forces seem to have been established than the information became outdated. Rumour and chaos led to panic, and panic led to demoralisation. It was a game of chess, with the allies blindfolded by German air superiority and their own panic and confusion, in which the Germans, fighting a new, faster, more mechanised war, seemed to have three moves to the allied one.
When the Germans reached the channel coast, their commanders wanted to hurl their forces at the British, who were attempting to establish a defence perimeter around the port of Dunkirk in order to facilitate their withdrawal to their home islands. But General (later field Marshal) Gerd von Rundstedt (1875-1953) was concerned about the wear on his armoured forces, which might have to respond to a French attack from the Aisne. Goering had promised Hitler that the Luftwaffe could finish off the British army, which was strung out on the open beaches; furthermore, the high command, remembering the Great War, were wary of their armoured forces being bogged down in the marshes of Flanders. Hitler accordingly stopped his tanks just short of Dunkirk, in one of the most fateful decisions of the war. Whether this decision owed anything to his admiration for the British, his desire for an alliance with them, and his wish not to humiliate them, is one of history’s deepest mysteries. The British army owed much to the gallantry of the French defence at Lille, which occupied German troops and attention; to the Belgians, whose bravery won the admiration of the Germans; to the Royal Air Force, which fought at odds in the sky over the beaches; and to the Royal Navy, to whose courage and organisation the survivors owed their return home.
The French army was finished off by the now unstoppable German war machine. ‘The great battle of France is over; it lasted 26 years,’ wrote a young German engineer officer,3 linking the bloodshed of 1914–1918, the great collapse, the simmering fury of Freikorps and Nazis, the French occupation of the Ruhr and Hitler’s gigantic rearmament programmes with the fall of France into one great war. This view will no doubt be taken by Historians a thousand years hence. It was certainly taken by Hitler. But the Historian of the far future will make one small alteration; he will discover the end of the great battle of France in the ruined heart of Germany, after a conflict of 31 years.
The French, now under the government of the aged hero of the first World War, Marshal Petain, sought an armistice. It was signed, at Hitler’s insistence, in the very same railway carriage in which the German delegation had signed the 1918 armistice, which was towed to Compiegne just for that purpose, and then blown up. This was vengeance indeed. Alsace – Lorraine, taken from France in 1871 and forcibly returned in 1919, was again to be part of the German Reich. French prisoners of war were not to be returned, and northern and western France were to be occupied, while Germany remained at war with Britain. The French government retired to Vichy. The British, frightened that the great French fleet would fall into German hands, insisted that the French sail it to a French Caribbean or a United States port, or that it join the British, or scuttle, or otherwise demilitarize. Acting quickly, without allowing time for full discussions, the British attacked the French fleet at Mers el Kebir, and seized or demilitarized French ships elsewhere. France, tormented by defeat, had now to suffer humiliation by her allies.
But Hitler’s policy towards France was rooted in the events of 1918, and the French occupation of the Ruhr in 1923. He had considered France to be ‘the inexorable mortal enemy of the German people,’ and thought, ‘on soberest coldest reflection’ that Britain and Italy were Germany’s only possible allies.’4 But the theatrical scene enacted in the railway carriage at Compiegne was not born of the ‘soberest and coldest reflection.’ It was vengeance; delightful, narrow and expensive. He could not exploit the anti-British bitterness of the French caused by the evacuation at Dunkirk and the bloodshed at Mers el Kebir. Hitler might have made a lasting peace with France by leaving her with Alsace Lorraine and her full territory, and returning her prisoners, asking only for a free hand in the east. What could Britain have done, faced in 1940 with an exclusion from a united Europe, as in 1962? What would have been Britain’s justification to the people of the United States for maintaining a war in the face of such determined goodwill? Would she still have been offered lend – lease by the Americans? Could she have blockaded France to prevent her supplying goods from the world market to Germany? Could she afford to continue the war? But Hitler thought that Britain would make peace anyway, now that France was down.
Whatever his policy options, Hitler was master of western Europe. He had achieved this by two main instruments. firstly, the German army, the best in the world, drilled and trained with iron Prussian discipline, brave, enthusiastic, skilful, well led, well armed, victorious and battle hardened. Secondly, the German air force, the Luftwaffe, armed with modern