In the last weeks of 1940, therefore, while the British people supposed themselves the focus of the Nazis’ malignity and headlines around the world described the drama of the blitz, Hitler’s thoughts were far away. His generals began to prepare their armies for a struggle in the east. As early as November, an Estonian double agent told the British SIS representative in Helsinki that he had learned from an Abwehr officer ‘German command preparing June campaign against USSR.’ The SIS man commented dismissively on the implausibility of such an indiscretion, saying, ‘Possibly statement made for propaganda purposes.’ Even had this report been believed in London, the British could have done nothing to shake Stalin’s complacency and promote Soviet preparations to meet the threat.
Save for a small force dispatched to North Africa in June 1941, for a year following France’s surrender, scarcely a single German soldier fired a shot in anger. There was a protracted lull in ground operations, a loss of impetus unapparent at the time but critical to the course of the war. Hitler took no meaningful steps towards converting the largest military conquests in history into a durable hegemony. The German navy was too weak either to support an invasion of Britain or to sever its Atlantic lifeline; the Luftwaffe’s campaign against Britain had failed. It seems flippant to suggest that Hitler determined to invade Russia because he could not think what else to do, but there is something in this, as Ian Kershaw has observed. Many more Nazi battlefield triumphs lay ahead, but some generals privy to their Führer’s intentions already understood the Third Reich’s fundamental difficulty: anything less than hemispheric domination threatened disaster; yet Germany’s military and economic capability to achieve this remained questionable.
Hitler’s Continental triumphs caused the democracies to overrate Germany’s strength, while persuading his own nation rapturously to rejoice in their victories. The German people had entered the war full of misgivings, which by the winter of 1940 were largely dispelled. The Luftwaffe’s failure against Britain troubled few: a young pilot, Heinz Knoke, described the thrill of finding himself among the vast audience in the Berlin Sportpalast addressed by Hitler on 18 December. ‘I do not suppose the world has ever known a more brilliant orator than this man. His magnetic personality is irresistible. One can sense the emanations of tremendous willpower and driving energy. We are 3,000 young idealists. We listen to the spellbinding words and accept them with all our hearts. We have never before experienced such a deep sense of patriotic devotion towards our German fatherland…I shall never forget the expressions of rapture which I saw on the faces around me today.’
Yet such triumphalism was premature. Germany’s 1940 victories created an enormous empire, but while this could be pillaged to considerable effect, it was administered with dire economic incompetence. Germany, contrary to widespread perceptions, was not an advanced industrial state by comparison with the United States, which it lagged by perhaps thirty years. It still had a large peasant agricultural sector such as Britain had shed. Its prestige, and the fear it inspired in the hearts of its enemies, derived from the combat efficiency of the Wehrmacht and the Luftwaffe, the latter being much weaker than the Allies knew. Time would show that these forces were inadequate to fulfil Hitler’s ambitions. If Britain at the end of 1940 remained beleaguered, Germany’s might rested on foundations more precarious than the world supposed.
Winston Churchill in the winter of 1940 persuaded his people that they had achieved something heroic and important when most were bemused to learn they had done anything at all. ‘The Prime Minister has been saying nice things about us fighter boys in the House of Commons,’ wrote Spitfire pilot Sandy Johnstone. ‘He says we have just won a famous victory although, to be honest, I don’t think any of us has been aware that there has been that sort of battle going on!’ Churchill imbued with grandeur Fighter Command’s triumph and the nation’s resilience under German bombardment. He did not, however, say how Britain might advance from defying the Luftwaffe to overcoming the Nazi empire, because he did not know.
Edward R. Murrow, the American broadcaster, told his CBS radio audience on 15 September that there was no great outpouring of public sentiment following news that bombs had fallen on Buckingham Palace; Londoners shrugged that the king and queen were merely experiencing the common plight of millions: ‘This war has no relation with the last one, so far as symbols and civilians are concerned. You must understand that a world is dying, that old values, the old prejudices, and the old bases of power and prestige are going.’ Murrow recognised what some of Britain’s ruling caste still did not: they deluded themselves that the struggle was being waged to sustain their familiar old society. The privileged elite among whom Evelyn Waugh lived saw the war, the novelist wrote, as ‘a malevolent suspension of normality: the massing and movement of millions of men, some of whom were sometimes endangered, most of whom were idle and lonely, the devastation, hunger and waste, crumbling buildings, foundering ships, the torture and murder of prisoners…[which] had been prolonged beyond reason’. Few of Waugh’s friends understood that the ‘suspension of normality’ would become permanent in its impact upon their own way of life.
Churchill’s single-minded commitment to victory served his country wonderfully well in 1940–41, but thereafter it would reveal important limitations. He sought the preservation of British imperial greatness, the existing order. This purpose would not suffice for most of his fellow countrymen, however. They yearned for social change, improvements in their domestic condition of a kind which seemed to the prime minister almost frivolous amidst a struggle for global mastery. Lancashire housewife Nella Last groped movingly towards an expression of her compatriots’ hopes when she wrote that summer of 1940: ‘Sometimes I get caught up in a kind of puzzled wonder at things and think of all the work and effort and unlimited money that is used today to “destroy” and not so long ago there was no money or work and it seems so wrong somehow…[that] money and effort could always be found to pull down and destroy rather than build up.’ Mrs. Last was middle-aged, but her children’s generation was determined that once the war was won, money would be found to create a more egalitarian society.
Churchill never defined credible war aims beyond the defeat of the Axis. When the tide of battle turned, this would become a serious weakness of his leadership and a threat to his domestic popularity. But in 1940–41 his foremost challenge was to convince his people that the war could be won. This became more difficult, rather than less, once the Luftwaffe was vanquished: thoughtful people recognised that the nation remained impotent to challenge German dominance of the Continent.
Hurricane pilot George Barclay described an intense discussion between young fliers and senior officers in his airfield mess on Sunday, 29 September 1940, and recorded their conclusions: ‘The British people are still fast asleep. They haven’t begun to realise the power of our enemies and that they have to give their “all”…That we need dictatorial methods to fight dictators…That we shall eventually win the war, but it will be a hell of a job and more so unless we pull ourselves together.’ The message, an eminently sensible one, was that the British must try harder. Many more frustrations, sorrows and defeats lay ahead, and George Barclay himself would lie dead in a desert funeral pyre before Hitler provoked