Leading the Nation
IN THE WEEKS that had followed the outbreak of war, the American journalist Eric Sevareid had been providing broadcasts almost every day, responding to a seemingly insatiable appetite for war news from the other side of the Atlantic. And during that time he had managed to get out of Paris and have a look at what was going on along the front lines. He’d seen the arrival of British troops at Cherbourg, and then he and several others, including the New Zealander Geoffrey Cox, who was writing for the British Daily Express, had even managed to get to the Maginot Line. There was an understanding that no journalists were to go there, but no written prohibition, so, leaving early in the morning, they drove out of the city and on reaching one checkpoint after another sweet-talked their way through, until they reached the city of Metz and drove on right up to the front-line forts.
It was damp and cold, and twilight had settled on the land as they reached a village near the border. Increasingly as they had approached the front, they had seen long lines of Parisian buses, painted in camouflage and teeming with troops, and plodding horses pulling soup kitchens. The men wore the same oval helmets they had in the last war, and even their uniforms looked much the same too: they wore overcoats, or capote, with the skirts buttoned back off the front of the legs, just as they had in 1914 – this was a purely nineteenth-century design and, if anything, harked back even to Napoleon’s day. Around their legs, they still wore puttees that wrapped all the way to the knee. Much of the uniform was now, at long last, khaki, rather than blue, although some troops still wore blue trousers. A new golf-style baggy set of plus-fours had been introduced but these were not widespread yet; in any case, they made the French soldiers look even more like they were in the nineteenth century. Webbing was a combination of canvas and leather, but it was curious that the poilus should look so old-fashioned when in a few other areas great advances had been made; while the standard uniform was bulky, heavy and utterly ill-suited to modern fighting, mountain troops, for example, a small elite within the French Army, had superb kit: modern cotton and serge short jackets, woollen pullovers, excellent boots and practical short gaiters. If only the entire French Army had been equipped in such a way, because the cost was certainly not the issue; a long, bulky, standard-issue greatcoat used much more material than the shorter, more comfortable cotton and serge jacket, for example. Uniforms were very, very important, and not only from a pragmatic point of view. Put on a modern, comfortable, radical design of uniform and the wearer will feel he is part of something equally forward-thinking. Conversely, wear a uniform that looks at least forty years out of date, and the opposite is likely to be the case. This certainly struck Eric Sevareid. ‘It was all the same,’ he noted. ‘The projector had stopped in 1918 and now was turning again.’ After seeing a large number of Moroccan troops and hearing just one lone gun fire a single shell, he and his colleagues turned back to Paris.
Not long after, Sevareid and his increasingly good friend, Geoffrey Cox, had driven north to Belgium, Holland and tiny Luxembourg, conscious that, as yet, no broadcasts had been sent from this trio of neutral countries. Britain and France had hoped they could set up a defensive line along the Belgian border with Germany, but as in 1914 Belgium had refused; not until such time that Germany abused its neutrality would Belgium allow Allied troops to cross its borders. Effectively, these countries were now no-man’s-land, caught in the middle and clearly hoping that somehow they could avoid becoming embroiled in a conflict in which they wanted no involvement whatsoever. The reality, which was abundantly clear to any outside observer – and not least Eric Sevareid and Geoffrey Cox – was that this was wishful thinking of the highest order. It did not take a master strategist to realize the Germans were unlikely to attempt an assault across the Maginot Line or that Hitler was going to sit back and wait for the Allies to attack. It was therefore a reasonable bet that Belgium – at the very least – would be fought over. Had these countries allowed Allied troops in earlier, then it would have been possible to create a much stronger and unified line while there was still time. This was not to be, however. Both King Leopold of Belgium and his Government and Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands and her Government stolidly stuck to their neutral stance, accepting Hitler’s assurances that their neutrality would be respected. Why they should have thought these promises were more likely to be kept than others that had flagrantly been broken is not clear. Maybe it was wishful thinking. Or maybe they hoped that by remaining neutral they would be dealt with more leniently should the war reach them.
Certainly, their own defences were as nothing compared with what they might have been had the French, in particular, been allowed in. A united Europe that stood up to Nazi ideas of territorial expansion would have added up to more than the sum of its individual parts. This was already horribly clear after the rolling over of Czechoslovakia. Most of the Czechs’ considerable defences had been in the Sudetenland, which had then been ceded without a fight after Munich. Had they remained intact, and had France and Britain persuaded the Low Countries, and the states of Scandinavia, that together, through mutual aid and alliances, they could build an impregnable ring around Nazi Germany, there is every chance the war would never have started. Had that been the case, there is also every reason to suppose the Pact of Steel may never have been signed. Even Hitler understood the importance of not fighting on more than one front at any time; it was widely accepted that this was what had led to defeat in the last war, as the Germans had battled to fight Russia in the east and the Allies in the west, and it was this fundamental weakness of geography that made Germany both so vulnerable and an unlikely military superpower; avoiding fighting on multiple fronts was deeply ingrained into every one of his senior commanders.
But this ring of iron around Germany had not been achieved, and already Hitler had been able to start rendering its constituent parts harmless, first the Sudetenland, then the rest of Czechoslovakia and now Poland; this was the failure of appeasement, not the mythical late entry into rearming. The threat from the East had been neutralized. The worry for the West was that Germany would be able to undermine it further by strikes north and west into the Low Countries.
As Sevareid and Cox drove around, they were depressed by what they saw. It was true the Ardennes, that area of densely wooded hills and narrow valleys, was widely considered a natural barrier impassable by modern mechanized armies, but, even so, the few log barriers they saw were going to stop nothing, let alone the full weight of the Nazi war machine. At one point, as they drove deep into the Ardennes, they came across a Belgian patrol, who stopped them and asked them whether they had any liquor, then asked for a joyride in their car. As Sevareid and Cox made to drive on, one of the Belgian soldiers said in a slurring voice, ‘Post’s jush down nex’ turn. Don’t tell the captain we’re already drunk.’ A Belgian colonel they met and spoke to told them at least 50 per cent of his regiment were absent without leave in Antwerp.
When they reached Holland and Sevareid explained to the American consul that he wanted to make a broadcast about the military situation in the country, he was met with incredulity; the consul had assumed Sevareid would want to tell his listeners about canals, tulips and winter skating. Everywhere they went, they saw normal life continuing – the mobilization André Beaufre had seen as he had travelled back through Amsterdam had, as far as Sevareid was concerned, melted away.
Across the Atlantic, Americans continued to be fascinated by the war, and not least Harry Hopkins, who was still weak and confined to bed but had miraculously survived what had looked like an early end to his life just a couple of months earlier. ‘The only interest here,’ wrote Harry Hopkins in a letter to his brother, ‘is the war,’ although he hoped and believed America could still keep out of it. ‘Fortunately there is no great sentiment in this country for getting into it, although I think almost everyone wants to see England and France win.’
This, in a neat nutshell, was the terrible dilemma facing the President, Franklin D. Roosevelt, who most definitely wanted France and Britain to win but knew that his fellow countrymen had no appetite to help them achieve that victory. The first wartime poll in the United States in September showed that only 2.5 per cent of the population believed America should enter the war on the side of the Allies. The largest proportion – 37.5 per cent – believed the US should take no sides and stay out of the war entirely, but offer goods to anyone on a cash-and-carry basis. A further 29.9 per cent felt America should have nothing to do with the war whatsoever.
Roosevelt’s motives were based on both morality and self-interest. As far as he was concerned, it was imperative a free and democratic Western world prevailed, and that meant the defeat of Nazism. Nor did he believe the United States was immune from the current European war. ‘We in the Americas,’ he had said in a speech in Canada the year before, ‘are no longer a far-away continent to which the eddies of controversies beyond the seas could bring no interest or no harm . . . The vast amount of our resources, the vigor of our commerce and the strength of our men have made us vital factors in world peace whether we choose it or not.’ His worst-case scenario went something like this: Britain and France would be defeated, and then Nazi Germany would turn west, probably first towards Latin America, then to the USA. Meanwhile, an emboldened Japan would strike in the Pacific.
The dilemma facing Roosevelt was that while he deeply believed America could not stand idle, he would face political suicide if he pushed against the tide of public opinion too heavily. Furthermore, the following autumn, in November 1940, there would be a presidential election. To stand for a third term would be unprecedented, yet to allow an isolationist into the White House could, to his mind, spell disaster. If he were to stand again, he would have to tread even more carefully. He was walking on glass, as he well understood.
Roosevelt had not given up on amending the Neutrality law, however, and with the outbreak of war had made immediate and renewed moves to get it changed. In a speech to Congress on 21 September, he told them it was not a question of being interventionist or isolationists – they were all united in wishing to avoid war. Neutrality revision, he argued, was essential to ensure peace at home. Personally, he favoured a complete repeal but instead proposed a sales of arms and goods on a cash-and-carry basis. In other words, any country would be able to buy arms, so long as it was for cash and they collected and shipped them themselves. This would almost exclusively benefit France and Britain, because Germany had neither the cash nor the shipping to do so. Roosevelt would then further be able to help the Allies by assisting Anglo-French purchasing teams as far as possible and co-operating with the British blockade of Germany, which had been put into effect immediately war broke out. Because Germany’s access to the world’s oceans was through the North Sea, the Royal Navy was able to block that access fairly easily. Immediately on that opening day of war, British submarine patrols began on the approaches to Wilhelmshaven and the Kiel Canal that linked the Baltic to the mouth of the River Elbe. Air patrols were stepped up, the Humber force of two cruisers and eight destroyers began cruising off the Norwegian coast, and the main body of the Home Fleet was put to sea some 400 miles west of the Hebrides in north-west Scotland. This screen was substantial enough to ensure there was little chance that any German vessel would be able to get through.
Throughout the debates in both the Senate and the House of Representatives, the President was careful not to mention either Britain or France by name and to stress the importance of the reforms for America’s chances of continued peace. ‘Our acts must be guided by one single hard-headed thought,’ he told Congress, ‘keeping America out of this war.’
His cause was helped by the vivid images of the destruction of Poland and by careful lobbying, so that by the beginning of November both houses had voted comfortably to repeal the arms embargo. For FDR, it was an important stepping stone – a move in the right direction at the very least.
America was still only slowly emerging from the Depression, but it had size, manpower and natural resources in abundance – the three components needed, above all, to create a large and successful armaments industry. That Britain and France could now, albeit in a limited fashion, draw on that resource was very much to their advantage and to the detriment of Nazi Germany.
It was also one of the principal reasons why Hitler was so anxious to strike west and knock Britain and France swiftly out of his way, and it made sense that it should be the OKW that would draw up plans for such an attack. After all, they were the combined operations staff and so were, on the face of it, best placed to plan and co-ordinate not only future operations that involved the Army, Luftwaffe and Navy, but also to draw up appreciations of possible future scenarios and to put in place plans should those ever be realized. Among their staff there were the men perfectly capable of doing this – men such as Oberst Warlimont, for example. In fact, as Deputy Chief of the Operations Staff, this was precisely what the job title suggested, but instead he and his department in Section L, as the Operations Staff were known, acted more as Hitler’s personal military office. Their task was to distribute the Führer’s directives and orders, and try and ensure the Wehrmacht was as efficiently equipped as possible – which was why, for example, Oberst von Schell’s military vehicle office was within the OKW. In other words, the OKW were facilitators of Hitler’s military will, not architects of military strategy and operations.
Warlimont and the operations staff could therefore offer little more than opinions, and the OKW as a whole was generally despised by the staffs of the other services, who considered them little more than Hitler’s puppets. Keitel, for example, was known as ‘Lakeitel’ – lackey – a pun on his name. For Warlimont it was not only frustrating, but made no military sense whatsoever. ‘Such lack of foresight,’ he noted, ‘seems almost incomprehensible.’ The already fraught relationship between the OKW and the Army was made worse by the strong public support given to Hitler’s decision to strike west without delay by those at the top of the OKW – Keitel, its chief, and Jodl, as Chief of Staff. As it happened, Keitel had suggested to Hitler that it was, perhaps, not such a great idea and even offered his resignation; this, however, had been waved aside. Instead, Keitel’s public support for what was palpably military suicide merely lost him – and the OKW – even more respect among the Army command. And in the absence of any planning by the OKW, it was the Army, and, specifically, General Franz Halder, the Army Chief of Staff, that was given the task of preparing the attack in the West. The idea of launching an offensive within a matter of weeks and with winter approaching appalled Halder every bit as much as it did Warlimont.
Halder, who was fifty-five, crop-haired and bespectacled, came from a long line of military duty. He had spent most of his career in staff posts and, although he had served during the last war, had never seen front-line action or commanded men in battle. But he did have a fastidious eye for detail and was known as an expert on training, and since joining the OKH as von Brauchitsch’s Chief of Staff had done well, helping to gel a highly competent team. No great admirer of either Hitler or the National Socialists, he had none the less produced an exemplary plan of attack for Poland and now had to produce another for the West.
To aid him, the Führer had issued some rather woolly thoughts in a memorandum on 9 October, forwarded dutifully as ‘Directive No. 6’ by the OKW. The aim, Hitler announced, was to defeat the French Army and any forces fighting on their side, and at the same time to win as much territory as possible in Holland, Belgium and northern France, ‘to serve as a base for the successful prosecution of the air and sea war against England’. Just what form this air and sea war was going to take was not mentioned.
Halder’s approach was to make the plan so self-evidently bad that even Hitler would be forced to demur. His first effort was much the same as the German plan of 1914, with a thrust through Belgium to the coast. Hitler, however, saw through this and ordered him to think again. At the same time, Halder became embroiled in a plan to assassinate the Führer, hatched at Zossen, the headquarters of the OKH to the south-east of Berlin, and which also involved General Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb, commander of Armeegruppe C, one of three army groups likely to be used in any future offensive in the West, General Carl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel, Halder’s deputy at the OKH, and Generaloberst Ludwig Beck, Halder’s predecessor, who had resigned in opposition to Hitler in August the previous year. This was a deeply fraught time for Halder because he believed the only way to save Germany from catastrophe was to get rid of Hitler, but to do so the plotters needed support; however, securing that support was risky, to put it mildly. He took to carrying a loaded pistol in his pocket in case he had the chance to pull the trigger on the Führer himself.
With increasingly frayed nerves he continued drawing up plans for action in the West. His second plan, produced at the end of October, was much the same as the first but included a second and simultaneous thrust further south. This brought a furious response from Hitler when von Brauchitsch, with the support of all his senior commanders now on the Western Front, presented it on 5 November. His field armies, von Brauchitsch tried to explain, were simply not ready for a major offensive. The torrent of invective from Hitler left the Army C-in-C quite stupefied; he later confessed to Halder that he had been unable to stand up to Hitler’s iron and maniacal will. Like Keitel, von Brauchitsch immediately offered his resignation, although it was similarly refused. Hitler wanted men like his Army chief in charge – men he could boss about and reduce to a quivering wreck. The Führer despised the traditional Prussian military elite; they were necessary to him, but he took every opportunity possible to growl and make them feel intimidated. Von Brauchitsch was head of the OKH for the same reason Keitel was the top man at the OKW: because Hitler knew they would not stand up to him.
It was after von Brauchitsch’s ordeal in front of Hitler that Halder cut his ties with the resistance. Von Brauchitsch had also told him how Hitler had raged against the ‘spirit of Zossen’, and with mounting panic Halder had assumed the Führer had somehow learned of the plot. This was not the case, but Halder realized he was not the assassinating revolutionary kind, so, having ensured all incriminating documents were destroyed, decided instead to embrace the coming offensive. If he could not prevent it – and clearly he could not – then the best chance was to try and produce a plan that might just, somehow, some way, work – or at least might avoid total defeat once more for Germany. Just what this new plan might be, however, was not, in the last weeks of 1939, at all apparent to him or any of his planning team at Zossen.