For this reason Britain had embarked on a course which appeared to throw self-interest to the winds. She borrowed heavily from the United States, and the level of her gold and currency reserves was determined by that power, for although America would support democracy, she would not sustain a rival in trade. Britain was prepared to accept American industrial and financial aid on terms which meant the sale of all her remaining American assets, and which would inevitably lead to her post war dependence on the United States, and to American hegemony in the West. The future of her empire would be in the hands of the nation whose birth and whose very soul was anti-imperialistic. The uncertain future was mortgaged for the fight against Hitler.
But with huge American and Canadian subsidies, the progressive imperial decline in finance and industry was temporarily reversed, and Britain’s main weakness disappeared. British factories could produce armaments to their full, and considerable, capacity, and the products of American industry began to flood in. These industries would now begin to supply an army which would ultimately consist of some 47 divisions, 11 of them armoured, and although these were also required in the Far and Middle East, they represented a force which Germany had continually to guard against, for they might raid anywhere from Stavanger to Bordeaux. “He that commands the sea”, wrote Bacon, “is at great liberty, and may take as much or as little warre as he will.”15 For the army in 1940, the ‘warre’ taken was necessarily little. Although the imperial army could recruit from many warlike peoples in India, and would receive valuable additions from the brave ‘Free French’ forces of Charles de Gaulle, from the Poles, the Czechs, the Dutch, the Belgians and others who had escaped to Britain, and above all, from Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa, it simply could not match the German army in numbers, equipment, morale or efficiency.
The navy commanded the sea, but could not end the war on its own. It might deny the seas to Germany for all but the most hazardous and clandestine of trade, but it was itself vulnerable to shore based aircraft and to submarines. Battleships, once the lords of the oceans, were in deadly peril unless they were protected from the torpedo and the bomb, as were all other vessels. Land based aeroplanes made any approach to a coast without air cover hazardous. The navy, like the army, could scarcely operate at all without protection from aerial attack.
But the air force was different. It could directly attack enemy territory. Like the light cavalry of the Huns and the Magyars, it could send out raiding parties to burn and destroy deep within enemy territory. It could not be stopped by city walls, garrisons or armies. It could single out for destruction industries, transport, military installations and ships. It was the only armed force possessed by Britain that could strike directly at Germany. Some thought it might eventually win the war on its own by a massive bombardment that would destroy cities, industries and morale alike. The Royal Air Force itself, jealous of its independence from the other armed services, had readily embraced the strategic bombing theory; it found a ready ear among those who dreaded trench warfare, and among those who perceived that the expense of heavy bombers seemed considerably less than that of capital ships and huge armies.
The bombing of cities had been dreaded before the war, and its destructiveness overrated. Guernica had been destroyed by bombers in the Spanish civil war. But Guernica was small and had been undefended. When bombers were opposed by intense anti-aircraft gunfire, they had to fly high, or be decimated. When opposed without a large fighter escort by enemy fighter planes, they were forced to fly at night (bitter British and American experience was to prove that no defensive armament could reasonably protect unescorted day bombers against the ravages of enemy fighters). At high altitude, and at night, navigation was difficult and accuracy of aim almost impossible. There would be no more Guernicas until the arrival of better navigational aids, bombing accuracy and air superiority – unless the target was so huge that it could not be missed.
Nevertheless, the British persisted in their bombing campaign, because they could do little else. Between July 1940 and the end of May 1941, some 18,000 tons of bombs were dropped, nearly 4000 tons being on industrial towns.16 Although extremely irritating to the German High Command and the Nazi elite, these attacks were costly to Britain in men and materials, and inaccurate. By the end of 1940 the Germans had dropped nearly 35,000 tons on Britain. They had dropped over 22,000 tons during 1941,17 but most of this was in the early part of the year. Hitler was turning his attention eastwards.
For various reasons the Soviet Union had always been at the centre of Nazi plans, and Nazi philosophy. It was, first of all, a great danger militarily; it was heavily armed, and still arming; it was the largest state in the world, and its potential, which was still in the process of being realised, was enormous.
The Soviet Union had also begun advancing westwards, after a twenty-year lull. Since the Nazi – Soviet pact, she had absorbed eastern Poland, occupied the Baltic States – Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania – had seized Northern Bukovina and Bessarabia from Rumania, and after a short, inglorious war, had annexed Finnish territory in order to secure strategic bases and to push the Finnish frontier further from Leningrad (St. Petersburg).18 The Soviet Union had crept too close to vital German interests in Scandinavia and the Ploesti oilfields in Rumania for Germany’s comfort.
But whatever the cold validity of these reasons for attacking the Soviet Union, ambition, prejudice and hatred seem to have always directed Hitler’s glare eastward. Adolf Hitler felt himself to be a genius, guided by fate, an avenger of the two million German soldiers who fell in the Great War. It was from the east that the poison of Bolshevism had spread, and it was in the east that the Jews still sat in triumph. The fall of France would be nothing in revenge compared to the destruction of the November criminals in their own nest, and the supplanting of the inferior Slavs by the Germans. Germany would then be unassailable by America, and Britain would be overwhelmed. If he did not accomplish these things before he grew too old, no one would.19
But first Mussolini, his great ally, was in trouble. Driven helter skelter across north Africa by the British, and thrown ignominiously out of Greece and back into Albania by the Greeks, he had made the Greeks an ally of Britain, who might soon bomb the Ploesti oilfields from Greek bases. During April 1941 arrangements were made for German forces to pass through Yugoslavia, Hungary and Bulgaria and to conquer Greece. The satellites (including Italy) received their instructions. At the last moment Serb officers toppled King Peter of Yugoslavia, who had been a reluctant satellite anyway, and severed the country’s connection with the Axis powers, as Germany, her satellites and Japan termed themselves. Hitler decreed that they should be suppressed with ‘merciless harshness’ for this insult to himself and the Third Reich. Yugoslavia, her Serb, Croat and Slovene population deeply divided, was occupied in 10 days; Greece followed rapidly. The British were bundled out of Greece. An airborne invasion of Crete followed, which was successful, but suffered heavy losses in very severe fighting. Hitler was appalled by the casualties, and drew the lesson that airborne assaults were too expensive. But it was not the method of their arrival on the battlefield that was at fault; due to the ‘Ultra’ codebreakers at Bletchley Park, the paratroopers had been expected by the British; and they had landed on New Zealand troops, always formidable in battle.
Hitler’s plans to tear the Soviet Union apart had been delayed from May to June 1941; they were now set for June 22nd. The Soviet forces were to be prevented from retreating into the vast depths of Russia by encirclement on the borders; they would be seized by the pincers of his armoured divisions, and devoured by the following infantry. The Soviet army, which the German High Command believed had been emasculated by Stalin’s purges of its officers, would be ruined; they had shown, by their initial defeat in Finland in 1940, that they were surely no match for the German war machine, the Wehrmacht. Yet the Finnish operation had merely shown that Stalin had not prepared properly; when, after the initial failure, the assault was renewed, the finns, despite fighting bravely