Broadcasting over the BBC on 11 September 1940, Churchill said, ‘It ranks with the days when the Spanish Armada was approaching the Channel, and Drake was finishing his game of bowls; or when Nelson stood between us and Napoleon’s Grand Army at Boulogne.’ Later he was to point out that the great air battles of 15 September took place, like Waterloo, on a Sunday.
The Battle won, men forgot their ideas about a compromise peace with Hitler. Wartime propaganda, much of it primarily intended for American newspaper and radio correspondents, provided material from which a David and Goliath myth was engineered. It suited all concerned, except the Germans, who still today insist that there was no such event as the Battle of Britain.
The Battle of Britain, although small in scale compared with the later fighting, was nevertheless one of the decisive battles of the Second World War. It converted American opinion to a belief that the British, given help, might win. This belief fed anti-German feeling. Until now dislike of Nazism had been repressed, because Americans felt that they couldn’t do much about it. In 1940 they began to believe they could do something about it, and Britain provided a focal point for many disparate anti-Nazi elements, from émigrés to labour unions.
In military terms, the Battle proved that Britain was a secure base, from which the USA could fight Germany. More importantly, but less accurately, it convinced America that air-power was the decisive weapon with which to do it.
In June 1940 the French signed an armistice with the Germans. The British had been killed, captured, or had departed. The refugees turned round and began the walk home. Hitler took two old comrades on a tour of the 1914–1918 battlefields, where he had served as a corporal.
Hitler now ruled a vast proportion of Europe: from the Arctic Ocean to the Bay of Biscay. Stalin, his new friend, was supplying oil, cattle, grain and coal. Rumania, Hungary and the Balkans were all anxious to do business with their rich and powerful neighbour, as teams of German technicians investigated the resources of the conquered lands.
The German victories had been a direct result of brilliant generalship and highly skilled, well-equipped armies with good morale. Yet by the spring of 1940 – in spite of months of war with Britain – the Wehrmacht had made no preparations whatsoever for any direct assault upon a hostile shoreline.
FIGURE 2. June 1940 – Hitler Rules Europe
By the summer of 1940 Hitler had created a centralised Europe ruled from Berlin. The USSR had invaded Poland and split it down the middle with Germany. That part of France not occupied by the German forces was little more than a satellite. The German mark was pegged artificially high in respect to other currencies so that wealth moved back into Germany without the victims realising what was happening. Anxious to be in at the kill, Italy declared war in the final hours of France’s agony and nibbled pieces of territory. The Balkan countries, given the choice of co-operating fully or being taken over, co-operated.
Unlike the Anglo-American armies later in the war, the Germans had no landing craft – for tanks, trucks, or men – no artificial breakwaters, no trained beach-masters, or any system of sea-route marking. In fact, the only army with any experience, or adequate equipment, was the Japanese army, which operated its own sea transport. It had made amphibious landings on the banks of the Yangtse river in 1938. At the time there had been a flutter of interest from military commentators but, apart from some experiments by the United States Marine Corps, no high commands envisaged a need for such techniques.
It was not until 12 July 1940 that the OKW – the High Command of the Wehrmacht – prepared a memorandum about invading England. Even then General Alfred Jodl, its author, described it as being ‘in the form of a river crossing on a broad front’. He called it operation Löwe (Lion). Hitler took this memo and used it as a basis for his Directive No. 16, ‘on preparations for a landing operation against England’. He changed the name to Seelöwe (Sea-lion).
Hitler’s Directive No. 16, a top-secret document of which only seven copies were made, asked the army and navy chiefs for more proposals. But the Luftwaffe had a specific task: it must reduce the RAF morally and physically to a state where it could not deliver any significant attack upon the invasion units. To Göring that seemed possible.
In the heady days of that summer anything seemed possible. In Berlin representatives from the Welsh Nationalist movement were already talking of their coming role. So was a senior official of the IRA, which had been exploding bombs in England for several months before the war. The Welshmen made no progress with the Germans; the Irishman was sent home in a U-boat in August 1940, but died en route and was buried at sea, his body shrouded in a German naval ensign.
In France the German army was devoting some of its finest units to preparations for a great victory parade through Paris. Generaloberst Heinz Guderian, architect of the blitzkrieg, was in the capital, along with many other senior members of the army and air force. Feldmarschall Hugo Sperrle, commander of Air Fleet 3, had made it his headquarters.
Units rehearsed for the victory procession included massed motorcycles and tanks. German flags were prepared for all the façades in the Place de la Concorde, and blue hortensias for the Étoile. Press reports of the event were prepared but not yet dated. The only cloud on the horizon was a growing fear that the widespread publicity would invite a decidedly unfriendly flypast by the RAF. On 20 July caution prevailed; the whole scheme was abandoned and the men went back to their units.
By that time, Berlin had enjoyed a victory parade. It was a modest affair. Local conscripts of the 218th Infantry Division marched through the Brandenburg Gate. Joseph Goebbels, Minister for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, took the salute. Hitler was not present. He was saving himself for the following evening, when the whole Reichstag and an astounding array of Generals had been summoned to hear his speech. Appropriately this glittering event took place in the Kroll Opera House. Hitler’s speech was a long one and he used it to claim personal credit for the victories of 1940. ‘I advised the German forces of the possibility of such a development and gave them the necessary detailed orders,’ said the ex-Corporal to one of the most dazzling arrays of military brains ever gathered under one roof. ‘I planned to aim for the Seine and Loire rivers, and also get a position on the Somme and the Aisne from which the third attack could be made.’
One eye-witness was William Shirer, who later described Hitler as an actor who this day mixed the confidence of the conqueror with a humility that always goes down well when a man is on top. Almost in passing, Hitler offered Churchill a chance to make peace. It was ‘an appeal to reason’, said Hitler. Whether he hoped that his appeal would bring peace is still argued. Some say it was no more than a way of ‘proving’ to the German public that it was the British – and more specifically Churchill – who wanted the war. We shall never know. It was in Hitler’s nature to seek opportunities and pursue those that seemed most promising. ‘So oder so,’ he would repeatedly tell the men around him: achieve it either this way or that way.
When the applause of that multitude of generals, politicians and foreign dignitaries died away, Hitler began to distribute the honours. He created no less than twenty-seven new generals. Mostly they were men who had commanded armies or panzer groups to win for him the great victories in Poland, Norway and the west. But artfully Hitler arranged that yes-men such as Alfred Jodl and Wilhelm Keitel – who had told Hitler, ‘my Führer, you are the greatest military commander of history’ – got double promotions and seniority. While Gustav von Wietersheim – whose motorised infantry corps had consolidated the panzer thrust by which Guderian skewered France – was passed over because he had argued with the Führer in 1938. The lesson was learned by some.
So many new promotions were announced that there was not time for the Generals to receive Hitler’s personal congratulations. As each name was called, a General stood up and gave the Nazi salute. There was then a brief pause while other officers leaned across to shake hands and, according again to Shirer, slap