IN Great Britain they were calling it the Phoney War or the Bore War; and many people thought it would all be over by Christmas. The men of Lord Gort’s British Expeditionary Force, supposedly “equipped in the finest possible manner that could not be excelled,” in the words of the then Secretary of State for War, Leslie Hore-Belisha, had settled down in France to await the arrival of the German military machine. Meanwhile, there was simply nothing to do. The weeks slid by, troops dug their useless slit trenches and sang the old songs of their fathers’ war. They were light-hearted, supremely confident and secure behind the apparently invincible walls of the Maginot Line; fatally unaware that the old days of trench warfare had gone for ever and they would never “hang out the washing on the Siegfried Line”.
The war in the air began in much the same casual, hopeful manner. On 4th September Blenheim and Wellington bombers of the Royal Air Force attacked the German naval bases at Wilhelmshaven and Brunsbuettel, inflicting negligible damage on the pocket battleship Admiral Scheer and the cruiser Emden for the loss of seven aircraft. During the next six months, the R A.F. accordingly restricted its activities to leaflet dropping and long-range reconnaissance flights; while the Luftwaffe seemed no more inclined to undertake risky offensive operations against the Allies. On 16th October a dozen Heinkel He111s of Kampfgeschwader 26 bombed British warships in the Firth of Forth and were immediately intercepted by Spitfires of 602 Squadron, which shot two of the Heinkels down—the first enemy aircraft to be destroyed over Britain since 1918. The following day, another small raid was undertaken, this time against Scapa Flow, and the obsolete training battleship Iron Duke was damaged and later had to be beached in shallow water.
And so the winter passed away, with occasional German reconnaissance raids over Britain and France, the odd Dornier Do 17 or Heinkel He 111 destroyed, and a few inconclusive battles between Messerschmitt Bf 109s and the Hurricanes of the B.E.F. which proved only that the German fighter was, on the whole, faster in the dive and slightly more responsive in action. Goering was anxious to launch heavier mass attacks against British ports and shipping, particularly the naval units based at Scapa Flow, but Hitler at that time had no desire to wage war directly against England and chose to keep the Luftwaffe in reserve for the forthcoming land offensive in the west.
Also, during the winter of 1939 the Fuehrer was taking an increasing interest in yet another new project—the simultaneous invasion of Norway and Denmark. The Commander-in-Chief of the German Navy, Admiral Raeder, had pointed out the advantages of securing naval bases in Norway on a number of occasions, but not until after the British destroyer Cossack had intercepted the German prison ship Altmark in Norwegian waters and rescued her prisoners did Hitler tend to agree and decide to appoint a commander for the operation. Thus was born Fall Weseruebung, or Weser Exercise, which took place on 9th April, 1940, only four days after Neville Chamberlain commented that the Germans had failed to take advantage of their initial superiority, and in the same speech uttered the sadly complacent words: “Hitler has missed the bus.” His statement reflected the British attitude of mind at the time; not until Winston Churchill became Prime Minister would the pipe-dreams of a quiet war be shattered for ever.
The invasion of Norway was almost entirely a naval amphibious operation, and initially the Luftwaffe was used mainly for landing assault units in the Oslo area and pin-pointing targets of opportunity. The Sola airfield near Stavanger was attacked by Messerschmitt Me 110s in the early hours of 9th April, parachute troops were landed soon afterwards, and within a few hours the ubiquitous Junkers Ju 52s were flying in infantry reinforcements. The only Norwegian fighter wing, based at Fornebu, near Oslo, and equipped with nine obsolescent Gloster Gladiator biplanes, managed to shoot down two or three Heinkel He 111s before huge formations of twin-engined bombers attacked the airfield. Four of the Gladiators were destroyed on the ground while refuelling and the remainder were shot down in rapid succession. Meanwhile, Junkers Ju 52s began to land at Fornebu, despite the still intense antiaircraft fire, and soon German infantry had dispersed and surrounded the airfield. In Denmark, the Luftwaffe met no opposition at all and the Aalborg airfield was in use within forty-eight hours of its capture.
To the Allies, the unexpected German attack on Norway and Denmark fell like a thunderbolt out of an untroubled sky. The Chamberlain government wasted valuable time in the vain hope that Sweden would come to the aid of her neighbours, and the Wehrmacht had therefore secured most of the key positions in both countries before it was decided to hurriedly despatch an expeditionary force to Namos and Aandalsnes in an attempt to capture and hold Trondheim. A week later, in response to urgent requests for air support, a single R.A.F. squadron of Gloster Gladiators was flown in from the aircraft carrier Glorious to operate from the frozen surface of Lake Lesjeskog, thirty-two miles to the south-east of Aandalsnes. Immediately, German bombers arrived on the scene, and within two days the Luftwaffe had efficiently blasted the lake into great pieces of ice and destroyed or disabled all but one of the Gladiators. On 20th April, the Luftwaffe began a series of concentrated attacks on Namsos, and without air support the assault on Trondheim ended in dismal failure. Under continuous air bombardment, the remnants of the British expedition retreated to the coast and were evacuated, bringing the hopeless campaign in central Norway to a close. An Allied assault on Narvik, in northern Norway, met with greater success, particularly after the little airfield at nearby Bardufoss had been made operational as a base for Gladiators and Hurricanes; but the launching of the German offensive in France and the Low Countries radically altered the strategic situation. Before the end of May, Norway was becoming a relatively unimportant theatre of war, and Narvik had no sooner been captured by the Allied forces than it had to be abandoned.
So ended Fall Weseruebung, a truly remarkable example of well-organised planning in combined operations and the tactical use of air power. The vastly superior British naval forces, while able to inflict serious damage on the German Fleet, had been powerless to resist the land-based aircraft of the Luftwaffe, which not only poured reinforcements into the vital landing points and destroyed the defences, but also compelled the Allies to evacuate Namsos and Aandalsnes. Much of the credit for the excellent Luftwaffe organisation during the attack on Norway must go to Erhard Milch, who arrived in Oslo on 16th April to command the new air fleet headquarters, Luftflotte 5, established to control all Luftwaffe operations in Norway. Three weeks later Milch returned to Germany in order to finalise preparations for the western offensive, his successor in Norway being General Stumpf, who remained in command of Luftflotte 5 until 1944. This was, in fact, the only occasion on which Milch left his desk to undertake a command in the field; he was an administrative genius whose abilities were wasted outside the main headquarters, and neither Udet nor Jeschonnek were capable of grasping in quite the same way the vast potentialities of air power.
Once Norway and Denmark were in German hands, Hitler was “beside himself with joy”, according to General Jodl, but before the campaign came to an end he was fully occupied with other, now far more important mattere. During the night of 9th May the Fuehrer’s special train was rumbling across Germany towards the Belgium frontier, and dawn the following morning found Hitler and his staff in his new forward headquarters some twenty miles south-west of Bonn. Behind the bleak concrete walls of the bunker they bent over the maps that covered a front of nearly 400 miles, from the Ems estuary on the North Sea coast to the Swiss border at Basle, aware that seventy-five German divisions were at that very moment surging across the frontiers of Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg. Within the hour, the reports that Hitler nervously awaited were pouring in; the great western offensive—Fall Gelb—had begun, and, for better or worse, nothing could stop it now from thundering on to victory or defeat.
In the grey light of early morning on 10th May, 1940, the people of Rotterdam and The Hague were awakened by the heavy drone of aero engines as the bombers of Albert Kesselring’s Luftflotte 2 passed overhead. German fighters skimmed the roofs and spires of The Hague to rake the streets with machine-gun fire, and, even as the armoured columns of Army Group B under von Bock were moving ponderously forward into Holland, a fleet of 475 three-engined Junkers Ju 52s was embarking the parachute troops and airborne units calculated to break all Dutch resistance within a matter of hours. The initial concentrated bombing of airfields, military barracks and other important objectives lasted for an hour, and was immediately followed by the first waves of transport aircraft. The defenders of the three main airfields at The Hague, dazed by the deluge of bombs, had no time to recover before they found themselves under fire from parachute troops, while a second airborne assault, under General Kurt Student, dropped out of the skies to capture and hold the vital Moerdijk Bridge near Rotterdam. By the afternoon of this first day of the campaign, some twelve hundred airborne troops had been landed on Waalhaven airfield, and reinforcements, including light artillery, were pouring in from successive waves of Junkers Ju 52 troop carriers.
It was the now familiar Blitzkrieg technique all over again, but not always a victory without losses. Large numbers of airborne troops attempting to capture the airfields of Ypenburg and Valkenburg encountered strong resistance, being driven back with heavy casualties; the lumbering Ju 52s continued to land in the face of point-blank anti-aircraft fire and the runways soon became a shambles of wrecked and burning aircraft. Meanwhile, the few Dutch fighters that had managed to get into the air wrought fearful havoc among the crowded and almost unarmed transports before hordes of Bf 109s hurtled down like avenging eagles to even out the score. As in Poland, it soon became an unequal struggle, but Student’s Fallschirmjaeger and airborne infantry suffered such heavy losses that not until a year later were they fully up to strength again.
On 10th May the Netherlands Army Air Service had available, and also mobilised for action, some 132 serviceable aircraft, including forty obsolescent Fokker C.V. and C.X and Koolhoven F.K.51 reconnaissance machines. The most modem Dutch fighters available were the twin-boomed Fokker G1A “bomber destroyer” and the little single-seater Fokker D.XX1; both were excellent aircraft, but only twenty-three G.1As were in service at the time of the German attack and the D.XX1 was handicapped by a maximum speed of only 286 m.p.h. and an inadequate armament. The few Dutch fighters that survived the initial bombardment were always hard pressed and outnumbered, but they fought valiantly to the end against the far superior Bf 109s, until the Army Air Service fighter regiments no longer possessed a single airworthy machine and most of the pilots and other aircrew had been killed or wounded.
The bomber regiments of the Netherlands Army Air Service possessed only two modem types on 10th May, 1940, the Fokker T.V, medium bomber, of which only eight were available, and the Douglas DB-8A-3N two-seater attack bomber, eighteen of which had recently been acquired from the U.S.A. All the T.V. bombers were lost during the first four days of the campaign in vain attempts to halt the advancing columns of the Wehrmacht, and the majority of the Douglas DB-8A-3N aircraft were destroyed on the ground at Ypenburg in the first German onslaught; the remainder were engaged by the cannon-armed Bf 109ES and Me 110Cs of the Luftwaffe and shot out of the skies in a matter of hours.
By 13th May the war in Holland was almost over. However, the Dutch forces were still holding Rotterdam, and von Bock had been ordered to “liquidate Holland speedily” before moving his divisions into France in support of von Runstedt: this in turn led to a decision by Goering to launch the dive-bombers of Fliegerkorps IV, temporarily attached to Kesselring’s Luftflotte 2, against the strongpoints surrounding the Rotterdam bridgehead. That evening. Queen Wilhelmina and the government left The Hague aboard two British destroyers bound for London, and the following morning a German staff officer entered Rotterdam under a white flag with a typewritten demand that the city be surrendered.
The wires continued to hum at Luftwaffe headquarters. Goering changed his mind about the Stukas, hesitated, and finally instructed Kesselring to launch a saturation raid, with the result that in the early afternoon Kampfgeschwader 54, equipped with Heinkel He 111 medium bombers, was ordered into the air. The target was the heart of Rotterdam; the purpose, to hasten the Dutch capitulation; the outcome, one of the most controversial incidents of the Second World War.
Shortly after noon, a Dutch officer named Captain Bakker arrived at the Corps headquarters of General Rudolf Schmidt to negotiate the surrender of Rotterdam, and an hour later he returned to the city bearing the detailed German terms. General Schmidt, acutely aware of the impending aerial bombardment, immediately ordered the firing of red flares in an attempt to warn off the approaching bombers; he was, perhaps, five minutes too late. As the flares struggled vainly to pierce the smoke of battle that drifted over Rotterdam, the He 111s of Kampfgeschwader 54 appeared overhead, and simultaneously the bombs came raining down.
At Nuremberg, both Goering and Kesselring denied any knowledge of the surrender negotiations, but in retrospect there seems little doubt that the bombing of Rotterdam was yet another deliberate “act of force” inspired by Goering; it was intended to hasten the Dutch capitulation, and in this it succeeded. The heart of the city was totally destroyed, some eight hundred civilians were killed, several thousand wounded and 78,000 rendered homeless, while intense fires aggravated by burning oil from a bombed margarine factory raged for many hours and overwhelmed the fire services. That evening the Dutch commander-in-chief, General Winkelmann, issued a proclamation of military capitulation, and soon afterwards German airborne troops and armoured units were entering Rotterdam. The campaign in Holland—the amazing five-day war—was at an end.
By that date, 14th May, the fate of Belgium had also been sealed. The main frontier defences of that country were apparently formidable, consisting of extremely powerful fixed fortifications, including one of the most modem fortresses in the world at Eben Emael, north of Liège. At dawn on 10th May troop-carrying gliders towed by Junkers Ju 52s appeared over Aix-la-Chapelle, the gliders were efficiently uncoupled, and within minutes a silent army was descending rapidly on the unsuspecting Belgium defences. The early morning stillness was abruptly shaken by the crash of gunfire as the gliders landed to disgorge men near the three bridges carrying the main highways from Maastricht into Belgium—and also directly on the top of Fort Eben Emael. Assault troops with powerful explosive charges blew great holes in the fort’s armoured turrets, and flamethrowers directed into loopholes and other openings quickly silenced the defenders; within ten minutes the great fortress had been blinded and virtually put out of action. Nevertheless, the garrison put up a desperate resistance, despite more explosive charges dropped down shafts into the depths of the casemates, causing tremendous detonations in the confined space. Twenty-four hours later, German infantry and von Richthofen’s dive-bombers arrived to support the airborne assault groups, and after severe hand-to-hand fighting had taken place in the underground chambers Fort Eben Emael surrendered. Over a thousand prisoners were taken, against German losses of six killed and nineteen wounded.
Meanwhile, two of the three vital bridges over the Albert Canal behind Maastricht had been captured by the glider-borne troops before the defenders could light the fuses to blow them. The attack on the third bridge had, by contrast, proved a total failure; heavy defensive fire wiped the German assault group out and the bridge was blown up. By noon on 11th May, at about the same time Fort Eben Emael surrendered, General Erich Hoepner’s XVIth Armoured Corps was thundering across the two intact bridges, with waves of Stukas ranging ahead to blast all before them out of existence.
After seven Belgian aircraft out of a force of nine had been shot down in a vain attempt to destroy the bridges, the Advanced Air Striking Force of the Royal Air Force undertook the almost impossible task. On the morning of 12th May five Fairey Battle two-seater bombers, protected by an escort of six Hawker Hurricanes, dive-bombed the now heavily defended bridges through a veritable wall of anti-aircraft fire. The Hurricanes were immediately engaged by dozens of Bf 109s, and fought valiantly until all but one of the British fighters had been destroyed, while four of the Battles were shot down over the targets and the fifth was so crippled that it crashed on the return flight. On the credit side, one Battle, manned by Flying Officer D. E. Garland and Sergeant T. Gray, both to be posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross, had temporarily knocked out the Veldwezelt bridge before plunging headlong to earth out of control. The German advance was slightly checked, but soon reinforcements and supplies were again pouring through the Maastricht gap, driving the Belgium forces back to the Dyle defensive line.
Meanwhile, much had been happening in France. At first light on 10th May the German forces had opened their assault with simultaneous air attacks on the Armée de L’Air’s main bases at Dijon, Lyon, Metz, Nancy and Romilly; below the bomber formations, von Kleist’s armoured columns were driving almost unopposed through the Ardennes. By 12th May, the 7th Panzer Division, commanded by Generalmajor Erwin Rommel, had reached the Meuse, preceded by the inevitable Stukas, and was poised for the breakthrough that would take von Runstedt’s Army Group A to the Channel coast within a fortnight.
Never before had there been such perfect co-operation between ground and air forces. The Luftwaffe had available some 3,500 aircraft to cover this tremendous assault, the units being divided between Albert Kesselring’s Luftflotte 2 and Hugo von Sperrle’s Luftflotte 3, these being sub-divided into five Fliegerkorps of about 750 aircraft each; Richthofen’s Fliegerkorps VII, Keller’s Fliegerkorps IV, Grauert’s Flieger korps I, von Greim’s Fliegerkorps V, and Bruno Loerzer’s Fliegerkorps II. Against this formidable force the French Armée de L’Air could muster some twenty-four single-seater fighter Groupes and six Escadrilles of twin-engined Potez 631 fighters, a total of some 800 machines. These were supported by two squadrons of Gloster Gladiators and four squadrons (increased to ten squadrons on 10th May) of Hawker Hurricanes of the R.A.F. component of the British Expeditionary Force. The French and British bomber arms could almost at once be discounted, as vain attempts to stem the grey flood of German armour had decimated them in the first two days; the Advanced Air Striking Force of the R.A.F. numbered 135 serviceable Battles and Blenheims on 10th May and only seventy-two at midnight on 12th May, while by 14th May forty of these had also been lost.
The standard first-line fighters of the Armée de L’Air were the Morane-Saulnier MS.406, the American built Curtiss Hawk 75A and the new Dewoitine D.520. For various reasons these three types proved to be generally outclassed by the Messerschmitt Bf 109 Es they opposed, and hitherto unknown German fighter pilots rocketed to fame and glory during the brief campaign in France. Wilhelm Balthasar of the Richthofen Jagdgeschwader amazingly shot down an enemy aircraft every day for twenty-one days; between 10th May and 21st June he gained twenty-two victories, including nine in one day. Adolf Galland, whose Geschwader was attached to Wolfram von Richthofen’s Fliegerkorps VIII in support of the advance at Maastricht, shot down three Hurricanes in one day on 12th May and ended the campaign with seventeen victories. Other aces in embryo at that time were von Bulow, then commander of the Richthofen Jagdgeschwader; Helmuth Wick, who once said, “I want to fight and die fighting”; and the man acknowledged by Galland to be “an excellent officer and splendid pilot”—the unequalled Werner Molders.
One of Germany’s leading fighter pilots at the height of the Second World War, and already in this spring of 1940 a contemporary of Adolf Galland, young Werner Molders had entered the Luftwaffe in 1935 with little opportunity to demonstrate his enthusiasm and skill until he was posted to Spain in April, 1938, to take over command of the third Staffel of Jagdgruppe J/88 from Galland, whose tour of duty was completed. In the few months that remained before the Legion Kondor was disbanded, Molders gained fourteen victories, thus becoming the most outstanding German fighter pilot in Spain; he was also an exponent of the “finger-four” fighting formation adopted by the Luftwaffe and later used by the Royal Air Force in the Battle of Britain. During the campaign in France, Molders was in command of Gruppe III of Jagdgeschwader 53, and destroyed a further twenty-five enemy aircraft before the conquest was achieved, although he had a narrow escape from death on 5th June when a French fighter surprised him over the Forest of Chantilly and he had to bale out of his burning Bf 109. A calm and disciplined leader: this was Werner Molders, popular with his men not only for his undoubted skill and courage in action, but also because, like Galland, he seldom failed to voice his opinion of Goering, and frequently dared to criticise the whole administrative structure of the Luftwaffe.
The vapour trails wove strange patterns high over the flat green fields of France, and beneath the twisting wings the fighter and bomber units of the Armée de L’Air were falling back in complete confusion. The speed and efficiency of the German advance was almost unbelievable; innumerable French fighters had to be abandoned simply because their pilots, on returning to base, found that German tanks were approaching the airfield and the ground crews had been evacuated. Despite grievous losses during what proved to be the worst six weeks in the history of French military aviation, the Armée de L’Air fought tenaciously to stem the German onslaught, destroying or badly damaging some two thousand enemy aircraft before the campaign came to an end. The Luftwaffe casualties made little difference to the outcome on the ground; by 24th May Guderian’s tanks had captured Boulogne, and were within twenty miles of Dunkirk.
In London, Neville Chamberlain had resigned and Winston Churchill had been commissioned by his king to form a coalition government. On 16th May, he confronted the French Premier Reynaud and General Gamelin in Paris. “Where is the strategic reserve?” he asked Gamelin, and, in his own words, “was dumbfounded” when the Commander-in-Chief of the Allied armies merely shrugged his shoulders and answered, “aucune—there is none.” Three days later, General Maxime Weygand replaced Gamelin, but his plan for the British and French forces to meet by cutting through the wedge of German armour thrusting at the Channel ports failed because its implementation was no longer possible. The Belgian Army surrendered on 28th May, leaving only the “Dunkirk pocket” in possession of the Allies, a corridor less than fifty miles long and fifteen miles wide containing the nine divisions of the B.E.F. and ten divisions of the French First Army. General von Runstedt’s Army Group from the south and Bock’s from the north should on that day have been rapidly converging to destroy them; but in fact Hitler had surprisingly lost his nerve and intervened.
On 24th May the Fuehrer paid an unexpected visit to von Runstedt’s secluded Charlesville headquarters and staggered his generals by personally ordering Guderian’s armour to be halted and for the time being attempt no further advance. His decision was prompted to some extent by von Runstedt, who felt that the armoured columns had outrun themselves and were about to break down under the strain, and Goering had also already telephoned Hitler to point out that the Luftwaffe could, unaided, turn Dunkirk into another Warsaw and Rotterdam. The more humanitarian Brauchitsch and Halder, on the other hand, raised violent objections, and the argument raged at command level for three days, while the Wehrmacht waited for the storm to subside and six transport ships packed with British troops departed without any difficulty from Dunkirk.
At last, Hitler again ordered his armour to advance—but only to within thirteen miles of Dunkirk. It was up to Goering now to finish the job; but his enthusiasm and buoyant confidence met with little response from Albert Kesselring, whose battleworn Luftflotte 2 had to undertake the spadework. The dawn-to-dusk air war in France had already reduced many of his units by fifty per cent, and the speed of the advance had left the Luftwaffe lines of supply and communication stretched to the limit, while the Stuka squadrons so vitally necessary in an operation of this kind were, men and machines, either weakened or exhausted. Nevertheless, Goering was insistent. “I will leave no stone on another in Dunkirk,” he stated, and added boastfully, “I will not only take Dunkirk, but Calais too, if necessary!” With Hitler in full agreement, Kesselring’s arguments fell on deaf ears, and reluctantly he ordered Luftflotte 2 into action.
Meanwhile, the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force from Dunkirk—code named Operation Dynamo—had begun. An armada of some 850 vessels of all shapes and sizes, many of them manned by civilian volunteers, converged on the port, which was by now under a continuous deluge of heavy artillery fire. On the first day of the evacuation, 27th May, these little ships from England took off over 7,000 troops, and the next day 17,800 men were evacuated, despite the increasing numbers of German bombers overhead, which were gradually turning the whole dock area and harbour of Dunkirk into a sea of flames. The town itself was in ruins, the streets littered with debris or blocked with the rubble of fallen houses, dead men and horses everywhere, but somehow the weary British troops struggled through the chaos to the beaches beyond, and soon long, unbroken lines of men stretched out into the sea. Unchecked by the most appalling conditions, the evacuation went on; 47,300 on 29th May; 53,800 on 30th May; and, amazingly, over 68,000 on the last day of the month.
Kesselring had entrusted three Fliegerkorps with the destruction of the Allied forces in the Dunkirk area. These were Fliegerkorps I, commanded by General Grauert; Fliegerkorps IV, commanded by General Keller; and Fliegerkorps VIII, commanded by General von Richthofen. Junkers Ju 87s and Ju 88s, escorted by Messerschmitt Bf 109s, were the aircraft largely used, and all three units, with Jeschonnek’s approval, were ruthlessly committed in a task that hampered the evacuation but never stopped it, and served mainly to highlight the Luftwaffe’s limitations as a decisive weapon of war. The bombed and burning oil tanks of the Dunkirk refineries, belching greasy smoke to a height of 15,000 ft., frequently obscured the targets; the sea was dotted with hundreds of tiny ships and boats that were nevertheless not easy to sink from the air; and the sandy beaches blanketed even the heaviest bomb explosions and saved many lives. Goering had promised his Fuehrer the impossible—but over 250 German aircraft were to be lost over Dunkirk in proving it.
These last days of the B.E.F. in France brought the Royal Air Force Fighter Command up in strength to cover the Dunkirk area, and many of the German attacks were broken up with heavy losses, although the Spitfires and Hurricanes were always outnumbered. The first day of June brought a fiery climax to the air battles, when the British fighters were literally fought to a standstill and the Luftwaffe succeeded in sinking ten ships, including three destroyers. Some thirty aircraft were shot down on either side.
This was Kesselring’s most powerful attempt to prevent the evacuation, but despite all his efforts it ended in failure; by midnight on 1st June over 64,00 men had been taken from the shell-torn beaches. The following day, five Fighter Command Squadrons wrought such appalling havoc in the attacking Luftwaffe formations that only scattered bombs were dropped and the evacuation continued without interruption. Beaten and discouraged, the Luftwaffe never tried seriously to interfere with Operation Dynamo again.
Dunkirk held out until 4th June, when the German tanks and infantry finally moved in to capture the town and harbour. By that day 338,226 British and French soldiers had been evacuated to fight another day, weary men who no longer by any stretch of the imagination resembled soldiers, but had nevertheless miraculously escaped what Churchill feared would be “the greatest military disaster of our long history”. The long, agonising nine days was at an end, but even the Germans would find it hard to believe that the British Army had been defeated; the little ships snatching men out of the smoke and flame of Dunkirk brought not only deliverance but a legend that was destined to remain for ever.
Dunkirk was undoubtedly a bitter blow to Hermann Goering, but it came as no surprise to the more cautious Kesselring, who had foreseen the failure of the Luftwaffe if used as a decisive strategic weapon against shipping and harbour installations. Operating under difficult conditions, and already seriously weakened by the intensive fighting, it had been confronted for the first time over Dunkirk by a determined and skilful enemy air force—and found wanting. The Supermarine Spitfire had proved itself to be a match for the Messerschmitt Bf 109; the Boulton and Paul Defiant, a new British two-seater turret fighter, had shown itself to be an excellent destroyer of bombers; and, given certain advantages of height, the sturdy Hawker Hurricane had outflown everything the Luftwaffe put into the air. Since 10th May the Royal Air Force had lost a thousand aircraft, but twice that number of German aircraft had been shot down. The rough and ready tactics of the Luftwaffe general staff served to increase the casualties; too many men like the unsparing Richthofen had mercilessly wielded the sledgehammer during the Battle of France. Adolf Galland, always in the thick of the fighting, has since commented: “Dunkirk should have been an emphatic warning to the leaders of the Luftwaffe.” Unfortunately for Goering, the writing on the wall could only be read by the keenest eyes in the spring of 1940.
After the B.E.F. had returned to England, the fall of France became only a matter of time. On 3rd and 4th June the Armée de L’Air was finally knocked out by a Luftwaffe offensive code-named Operation Paula—a series of heavy bombing attacks on the airfields and aircraft factories around Paris. More than a hundred French aircraft were shot down and many others destroyed on the ground, for the loss of twenty-five to thirty German machines. The following day the Wehrmacht launched a tremendous offensive with all 143 divisions along the whole front from Abbeville to the Upper Rhine, and the French forces disintegrated in confusion before the overwhelming onslaught. On 10th June the French government left Paris; for three days a great silence hung over the undefended city, then the Champs Elysées resounded to the tramp of German jackboots and the swastika flag fluttered from the Eiffel Tower. “A great day in the history of the German Army!” wrote General Halder in his diary. “German troops have been marching into Paris since nine o’clock this morning.”
On the afternoon of 21st June a procession of gleaming staff cars moved through the lovely Forest of Compiegne and halted in a clearing surrounded by stately trees and pleasantly shadowed by the warm summer sunshine. From the big cars alighted Hitler, Goering, Brauchitsch, Keitel, Raeder, Ribbontrop and Hess, their immaculate uniforms glittering with decorations; they walked forward proudly, triumphantly, because this ground beneath their feet was the very same on which Marshal Foch and the German emissaries had negotiated the armistice on nth November, 1918. Before their eyes was the symbol of Germany’s former humiliation and Hitler’s revenge; the old railway restaurant car in which the 1918 negotiations had taken place had been brought from its Paris museum and now awaited a second armistice. The wheel had turned full circle; the unknown corporal of the 16th Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment had carried the sword of vengeance into France.
Shortly after Hitler and his party had entered the railway car the French delegation arrived. Keitel commenced reading the German terms of surrender, but once the preamble was over Hitler and most of his entourage departed, leaving the negotiations in Keitel’s hands. The Fuehrer strode back to his waiting Mercedes, the German band played Deutschland über Alles, the bright sunshine filtered through the tall elms and pines—and France had been defeated. The Austrian tax-collector’s son had come a long way since those shivering, hungry days when he had roamed the streets of Vienna as an unwanted vagabond, but he would never surpass this, the greatest triumph of his career; his life had been dedicated to obliterating for ever the humiliation of 1918 and here in the Forest of Compiegne his purpose had at last been fulfilled.
It remained only for the conqueror to acknowledge that his generals had served him well. Hitler enjoyed a minor triumph over his subordinates here, for he cunningly chose to award them so lavishly with promotions that not until afterwards did they realise that he had cheapened their high military ranks and reduced their stature. In a colourful ceremony at the Kroll Opera House on 19th July no less than twelve generals were promoted to the rank of field-marshal, or Generalfeldmarschall, nineteen promotions to Generaloberst were awarded, together with seven to General and one new Generaladmiral. The highest Luftwaffe promotions were very satisfactory; three new Generalfeldmarschaelle, Milch, Kesselring and Sperrle; five new Generaloberst, Grauert, Stumpff, Keller, Weise and Udet, and five new General der Flieger, Jeschonnek, Geissler, Loerzer, Greim and Richthofen. Glittering with decorations, the long line of field marshals posed with Hitler for the photographers before the ceremony came to an end, “cheaper by the dozen”—as many junior officers commented—and rendered indistinguishable as leaders by their very profusion.
Only Hermann Goering remained secure and aloof on his lofty pinnacle of glory, for Hitler had thoughtfully created for him an entirely new rank, that of Reichsmarschall des Grossdeutschen Reiches, or Marshal of the Greater German Reich. Hailed in the official citation as “the creator of the Luftwaffe”, he was also awarded the Grand Cross of the Iron Cross, the only one of its kind to be given during the entire war, and a brand-new uniform had been devised for him to mark the occasion. This unique masterpiece could be tailored either in grey-blue or white, and had crossed gold-embroidered batons backed by silver brocade on one collar tab and a golden Reich eagle, also on a silver brocade base, on the other. The brilliant uniform, together with Goering’s new gigantic Marshal’s baton, soon gave rise to great hilarity in Germany, but he would have requested no other reward; personal power and gleaming, useless baubles were as the breath of life to him.
In fact, the newly created Reichsmarschall was about to undertake the most responsible and unenviable task of his career. On 16th July Hitler had issued his Operational Directive No. 16, which stated: “Since England, despite her militarily hopeless situation, still shows no sign of willingness to come to terms, I have decided to prepare a landing operation against England, and if necessary to carry it out. The aim of this operation is to eliminate the English homeland as a base for the carrying on of the war against Germany, and, if it should become necessary, to occupy it completely.”
The words “to prepare a landing operation against England” were of the utmost importance to Goering. In those preparations the Luftwaffe would be decisive; without overwhelming air superiority a seaborne invasion would be utterly impossible. Even General Jodl, who was convinced that Britain was already beaten to her knees, admitted that a landing could “… only be contemplated after Germany has gained control of the air…” and yet Kesselring doubted that the Luftwaffe was in good enough shape to knock the Royal Air Force out of the skies so soon after the Battle of France.
If Goering had any qualms about the forthcoming air offensive he refused to let them dismay him. “The enemy is already morally defeated…” he stated at a conference of high Luftwaffe commanders in The Hague. “… Our first objective will be the destruction of his fighter forces, partly in the air and partly on the ground, together with the destruction of his airfields. This objective will be attained within two or three days, and that will be decisive.”
More than one of the men listening to Goering’s boastful speech must have reflected that now, for the first time, the Luftwaffe urgently needed a strategic long-range bombing force to strike at the heart of England again and again. But the heavy four-engined bombers so often demanded by General Wever in the past had never been built, and the Luftwaffe’s medium bombers, protected by a small and sadly neglected fighter force, would somehow or other have to tackle the problem. Doubt and uncertainty hung like a cloud over the conference table; only Goering seemed confident and convinced that all would be well.
The Reichsmarschall, resplendent in his new white uniform, dismissed all arguments by insisting that German air strength was far superior to that of Great Britain, and commenting that the Messerschmitt Bf 109 was a better fighter than the Supermarine Spitfire. When the conference came to an end he was in high spirits, having managed to reassure himself, if not his leaders, that the Battle of Britain was already as good as won, and the Luftwaffe could, in his own words, “not only destroy the Royal Air Force, but put the Royal Navy out of action as well.”
Perhaps it was just as well for Goering that summer that he could not look into the future and see the outcome of his latest venture. The Battle of Britain proved to be the turning point in his career; after it had ended, he would never again have any faith in his Luftwaffe, and his commanders would henceforward remember him as the man who had condemned their air weapon to complete disaster.