A different sort of embarrassment was caused by another UXB man, Bob Davies, a pre-war drifter from Cornwall. He had acquired some technical experience during travels around the world, which he parleyed into an emergency commission in the Royal Engineers. Early one morning in September 1940, Davies commanded a squad sent to address a thousand-kilogram bomb which had buried itself deep in the road in front of St Paul’s Cathedral during a raid in the night. The engineers quickly found themselves in difficulties when overcome by gas from a fractured main, which caused them to be briefly hospitalised. Resuming work, they dug all night, until a spark ignited gas from another main, burning three men.
The press got hold of the story – and the threat to the cathedral. The Daily Mail used the opportunity to applaud the courage of the UXB squads: ‘These most gallant – and most matter of fact – men of the RE are many a time running a race with death.’ Deeper and deeper Davies’s men dug, until almost eighty hours after it fell, they reached the bomb, twenty-eight feet into the London clay. A heavy cable was attached, with which a lorry sought to extract the huge menace. This snapped. Only when two lorries took the strain on a second cable did the bomb slowly rise to the surface. It was lashed to a cradle and driven through the streets of London to Hackney Marshes, where it was detonated. The explosion blew a crater a hundred feet wide.
A flood of publicity followed about Davies and his team, who became famous. A headline asserted: ‘A Story that Must Win a Man a VC’. Davies and the sapper who found the bomb and saved St Paul’s were indeed awarded the newly created George Cross, for civil acts of heroism. Only in May 1942 did an unhappy sequel take place: Davies was court-martialled on almost thirty charges involving large-scale and systematic theft throughout his time in charge of his BD squad; he had also exploited his role to extract cash payments from some of those whose premises he saved from bombs, as well as passing dud cheques. More embarrassments followed: it emerged that the St Paul’s bomb did not, as claimed by the media, contain a delay fuse, so it was much less dangerous than had been alleged; and Davies did not himself drive it out to Hackney. The officer served two years’ imprisonment, being released in 1944. The perils of UXB work were indisputable, and the Cornishman undoubtedly did brave and useful work. But a lesson of his story was that scoundrels as well as heroes played their parts in the blitz, and some people were a tangle of both.
Hitler’s air assault on Britain ranks second only to the invasion of Russia among his great blunders of the war. After June 1940 many of Churchill’s people, especially in high places, recognised their country’s inability to challenge Nazi mastery of the Continent. If they had merely been left to contemplate British impotence, political agitation for a negotiation with Germany might well have been renewed, and gained support from the old appeasers still holding high government office. The unfulfilled threat of air attack, on an annihilatory scale widely anticipated and feared in 1939, could have influenced British policy more strongly than the reality of an inconclusive one.
The prime principle of employing force in pursuit of national objectives is to ensure that it is effective. The Germans failed to achieve this against Britain in 1940–41, a first earnest of one of the great truths of the conflict: while the Wehrmacht often fought its battles brilliantly, the Nazis made war with startling ineptitude. The Luftwaffe, instead of terrorising Churchill’s people into bowing to Hitler’s will, merely roused them to acquiesce in defiance.
Posterity sees the period between July 1940 and the spring of 1941 overwhelmingly in terms of Britain’s air battle against the Luftwaffe, yet that engaged only a small proportion of Germany’s military resources. For the remainder of Hitler’s warriors, and almost the entire army, this became a curious time of idleness comparable with the earlier Phoney War. To be sure, there were conquered nations to be secured, fruits of victory to enjoy – above all those from France. In Berlin, ‘The first effects of the war were not the traditional ones of decay and scarcity,’ wrote American correspondent Howard Smith, ‘but a sudden leap upwards in visible prosperity. Berlin charwomen and housemaids, whose legs had never been caressed by silk, began wearing stockings from the boulevard Haussmann as an everyday thing – “from my Hans at the front”. Little street-corner taverns began displaying rows of Armagnac, Martell and Courvoisier.’
German war industry, still performing relatively sluggishly, needed time to produce tanks, planes and ammunition to replace those expended in the Continental campaigns. The army spent the winter conducting a vast expansion programme – between May 1940 and June 1941 it grew from 5.7 million to 7.3 million men, from 143 divisions to 180. Beyond brandy and stockings, there was important industrial booty to be garnered from the conquered territories, especially railway wagons. Nazi occupation precipitated a drastic decline in economic activity which persisted across most of Europe until the liberation, though French armaments factories made a useful contribution to the German war effort.
Hitler spent much less time than the British supposed contemplating the Luftwaffe’s operations against them. He never visited the airfields on the Channel coast. Instead, for most of the autumn and winter he was wrestling with his fundamental strategic dilemma: whether to consolidate Germany’s western victories and invade Britain in 1941, or instead to follow his strongest inclinations and turn east. On 31 July 1940, long before the Luftwaffe attack on Britain reached its climax, at the Berghof he told his generals of his determination to attack Russia the following May. Thereafter, however, he indulged in more months of vacillation. The German navy pressed for major operations to expel Britain from the Mediterranean, by seizing Gibraltar through Spain and the Suez Canal through Libya. In advocating this course, naval C-in-C Admiral Erich Raeder was supported by General Walter Warlimont, head of the Wehrmacht’s strategic planning section. Following an important commanders’ conference in the Reich Chancellery on 4 November, Hitler’s army adjutant Gerhard Engel wrote that the Führer seemed ‘visibly depressed…at the moment he does not know what to do next’.
The western option had still not been finally and formally rejected in November when Molotov, Stalin’s foreign minister, visited Berlin. The Russian displayed an appetite for further Soviet expansionism which roused German ire, expressing Moscow’s interest in the future of Romania, Bulgaria, Poland and even Greece. He enquired whether Sweden’s continuing neutrality suited the common purposes of Germany and the Soviet Union, and was sharply told that it did. His remarks emphasised that if Hitler still had unfulfilled territorial ambitions, so too did Stalin. By the time Molotov boarded a plane home, Hitler was confirmed in his earlier conviction: Germany should attack Russia the following year.
From his own perspective, he had no choice. The German economy was much less strong than its enemies supposed – only slightly larger than that of Britain, which enjoyed a higher per capita income. It could not indefinitely be sustained on a war footing, and was stretched to the limits to feed the population and arm the Wehrmacht. Hitler was determined to secure his strategic position in Europe before the United States entered the war, which he anticipated in 1942. The only option unavailable to him was that of making peace, since Churchill refused to negotiate. Hitler persuaded himself that British obstinacy was fortified by a belief that Churchill might forge an alliance with Stalin, which could make victory over Germany seem plausible. Thus, the Soviet Union’s defeat would make Britain’s capitulation inevitable. If Germany was destined to engage in a death struggle with Russia, it would be foolish to delay this while Stalin re-armed. On 18 December, Hitler issued a formal directive for an invasion, to be launched at the end of May 1941.
Hitler saw three reasons for striking: first, he wished to do so, in fulfilment of his ambition to eradicate bolshevism and create a German empire in the east; second, it seemed prudent to eliminate the Soviet threat before again turning west for a final settlement with Britain and the United States; third, he identified economic arguments. Ironically, Russia’s vast deliveries of raw materials and commodities following the Nazi–Soviet Pact – which in 1940 included most of Germany’s animal-feed imports, 74 per cent of its phosphorus, 67 per cent of its asbestos, 65 per