Science, Money and Resources
ALTHOUGH HITLER had postponed SEALION on 17 September, lessthan a month later, on 12 October, he pushed it back again until the spring. The air fighting continued, but the days were drawing in, the weather was worsening, and the RAF was stronger than it had been when Göring had launched Adlertag back on 13 August. The Luftwaffe had lost the Battle of Britain and, as a result, there would be no invasion of England in 1940.
Shipping was now released, and barges were sent back to the Rhine. The air fighting would continue, but by this time the Luftwaffe was exhausted and a shadow of the confident, brash and all-conquering force it had been long ago back in May. The Me110s had been decimated and the Stukas withdrawn, and there were now only a few hundred Me109s remaining. By that time, bomber pilot Leutnant Hajo Herrmann had flown nearly a hundred combat missions with KG4 and in recent weeks had repeatedly flown over London and other English cities, sometimes for three nights in a row; he had carried out twenty-one attacks on London alone. RAF Bomber Command would never consider sending their crews out on consecutive nights, but then the Luftwaffe had never thought much about aircrew care; after all, in a short lightning war, tours of duty were not really a consideration. On 18 October, he was taking off as Schiphol came under attack by British bombers. One of his tyres was burst by shrapnel, he lost control of the plane and crashed, his bomb load still on board. The Junkers, however, did not explode, although Herrmann was badly injured. He was psychologically damaged too, mentally and physically spent after flying without a break since 10 May.
Herrmann was now given an enforced break, but the same could not be said for the rest of the German bomber force. The Luftwaffe was still coming over in daylight hours when conditions allowed but had realized, after a night attack on Liverpool back in August, that Britain’s fighter defence was designed for daylight operations and that the only real danger facing them at night was British anti-aircraft guns, which, by September, were still not as numerous as they might have been.
Assisting them to their night-time targets was a system of navigation beams, known as Knickebein and X-Gerät. While the Luftwaffe had not made the most of radar technology for defensive purposes, or done much to develop radio communication within aircraft, it had used pulse radio technology to create beams that could converge on a particular target and thus home bombers in on it with some degree of accuracy. British intelligence had cracked Knickebein but not X-Gerät, so as the Luftwaffe began its night campaign, its planes were well placed to both hit their targets and get back home again without excessive risk.
The problem was that it was unable to make the most of this advantage, as it continued to strike rather pointlessly at London every single night, once, on 15 October, with around 400 bombers, but usually with no more than around 160 and often fewer than that. In October, it dropped 6,500 tons of high explosive, which was enough to wreck houses in almost every borough, to cause major interference to London’s rail network and to damage many of the East End docks and other public utilities.
On 2 October, bombs hit Gwladys Cox’s flat in Hampstead. ‘The bottom of our world has dropped out!’ she recorded. ‘Last night, most of our home, together with the whole top floor of Lymington Mansions, was destroyed by incendiary bombs.’ They had been in the air raid shelter below at the time but had actually heard the sound of the falling incendiaries. Her husband, Ralph, had rushed out and grabbed an ARP warden, and initially they could see no sign of damage. Incendiaries, however, were designed, as their name suggests, to create fires and were often delayed-action bombs. Soon smoke was pouring from the roof of No. 11. Gwladys, worried she would end up trapped for ever in the shelter, decided with the others that they would be safer above ground. Grabbing their cat, Bob, she looked up the shaft steps and saw nothing but tongues of flame streaming out of one of their neighbours’ flats. Above ground, she found Ralph. ‘For God’s sake,’ he said, ‘come quickly – the whole of the top storey is on fire!’ The fire brigade had now arrived and were battling to put out the rapidly worsening conflagration. Ralph hurried Gwladys – and Bob – away, stumbling over the numerous hoses, to another shelter at the top of Sumatra Road.
There, Gwladys felt as though she and the other refugees from Lymington Mansions were like ship-wrecked mariners. Cigarettes were lit and they smoked and smoked, still numb with shock. ‘I felt Ralph’s hand,’ she wrote, ‘it was feverishly hot and he coughed painfully.’ ARP wardens came in at regular intervals, taking roll calls and shouting out names of missing people. Firemen also looked in to report on the progress of the blaze.
No matter how shocking and traumatic this was for people like Gwladys and Ralph Cox and their neighbours, no one was panicking, while the ARP wardens and firemen were, for the most part, handling the situation with swift and calm efficiency. Elsewhere, this sustained assault was hardly causing mortal injury to the capital. Even the bombing of the docks was considered ‘serious but not crippling’. Nor was the bombing breaking the morale of the people.
Despite this, it was disconcerting to say the least, even for old hands at being shelled like the newly promoted Major-General John Kennedy. Since returning from France, he had been Chief of Staff to the C-in-C Northern Ireland. Part of the job entailed preparing defence plans for a possible German invasion of the Irish Republic, no matter how unlikely this might be. Churchill had hoped the Irish might join the war on Britain’s side, but the Irish President, Éamon de Valera, had made his position clear: if the Germans invaded, he wanted Britain’s help to drive them out again; if Britain moved in first, however, Ireland would fight them instead.
On 9 October, and with a German invasion of Ireland looking unlikely, Kennedy had received a telegram appointing him Director of Military Operations, a key posting at the War Office and one that would see him playing a crucial role at the heart of Britain’s wartime military strategy. It was also a job that he accepted with a certain degree of misgiving, knowing how difficult and fraught it would prove to be.
On his first evening back in town, he had been dining at his club when a bomb had demolished the neighbouring Carlton Club just a couple of hundred yards away. The blast bellied out the curtains and he was covered in a shower of dust. Later, as he sat drinking coffee, a further bomb fell on nearby Waterloo Place, and this time a shower of bricks and broken glass fell among him and his companions. With the electricity then knocked out, he took a candle and went up to bed, only to be kept awake by the thud and crash of yet more bombs falling and the light of parachute flares. ‘I thought to myself that this was really too much,’ he noted. ‘It was bad enough having to put up with the horrors of life in the War Office without having the horrors of war as well. I had not heard such a din since the Battle of Passchendaele.’
On 27 September, Japan signed a tripartite pact with Germany and Italy, and also forced an agreement with the Vichy government in French Indo-China for facilities there for bases in its ongoing war with China. Although there was no question of its declaring war on anyone else at this moment, the move was a threatening one to British, American and Dutch interests in the Far East. Yet it also offered a cause for hope for Britain. Each member of the pact had pledged to aid one another militarily and economically should one of them be attacked by a power not already involved in the European or Sino-Japanese war. This was clearly directed at the United States, and from the British point of view, anything that further wedded America to the Allied cause was to be welcomed.
For this reason, the news of the American Draft, as it was widely known from the outset, was also a step very much in the right direction, as were other ties developing between the two countries. Britain was still paying with cash, and vast amounts of it too, but such was the scale of its requirements, this could not last for ever; British reserves of gold and dollars were beginning to run short. Fortunately for Britain, however, the Americans recognized not only that supplying Britain was massively helpful for its own rearmament, but also that the longer Britain could keep going on its own, so much the better for the United States.
In the summer and autumn of 1940, however, British cash was still helping to fund the development of the new armaments business, which was great for Roosevelt because to a certain extent he could use British requirements and cash to really aim big without being accused of secretly planning to send American boys to war.
Back in June, the battleship HMS Nelson had arrived with the precious blueprints of the Rolls-Royce Merlin engine. It was an already highly proven aero engine and better than anything being produced by American manufacturers at the time. The idea was that a US company would produce them under licence for both the British and for American aircraft too. It was Bill Knudsen who was given the task of finding a manufacturer. Already he was realizing that mass aircraft production was going to be the hardest task for American industry. The President had demanded that the USA produce 27,000 aircraft by 1 October 1941 and a further 36,000 by 1 April the year after, but, for the US, warplanes were still something new. When he spoke to potential manufacturers about aircraft production, he realized they were mostly talking nonsense. Most of the existing aircraft manufacturers were small companies who could not possibly make the numbers needed. ‘The number of people who talked, without having the faintest idea of the technical problems involved,’ said Knudsen, ‘beggared all description.’ The blueprints of the Merlin were unquestionably an extremely valuable asset, and Knudsen immediately thought of Ford as the obvious company to make them. True, Ford was primarily an automobile manufacturer, but it had some experience of aircraft manufacturing, not least its Trimotor commercial plane. Henry Ford, however, an ardent isolationist, refused point-blank to make any engines for the British. Furious at this rebuttal, Knudsen then turned to the Packard company, a small manufacturer of top-end motor cars. Unlike Ford, it jumped at the chance, even though there were a host of obstacles now confronting it. Every single blueprint, with thousands of parts, had to be converted into US measurements, while the company also had to develop and design a means of production that would allow for mass production from a largely unskilled workforce, a third of whom were women newly recruited by Packard. Again, this would not happen overnight.
Important though the Merlin deal was, it was as nothing compared with the riches brought by the Tizard Mission that September. Sir Henry Tizard was an academic, chemist and scientist, and was chairman of the Aeronautical Research Committee, and in this latter role had been instrumental in the development of British radar. Tizard himself had flown to the United States in August to make preliminary arrangements and was later followed by the rest of the mission, a mixture of officers from all three services as well as scientists.
The Tizard Mission offered a wealth of new technology, including power-driven turrets, gyroscopic gunsights, details of jet engine technology then beginning to be developed in Britain, engine superchargers, plastic explosives and, perhaps most significantly, the Frisch–Peierls memorandum on the feasibility of an atomic bomb, radar and specifically the newly developed cavity magnetron. The Americans had developed their own radar, but nearly all this other technology was new to them; Americans knew how to build large numbers of cars, fridges, vacuum cleaners and other exciting new domestic products but were lagging behind in terms of military technology. This was hardly surprising considering the intensely isolationist approach since the end of the last war. Now, however, they needed to catch up not just in terms of tanks and aircraft and men in uniform, but in terms of science too.
The cavity magnetron was hugely important to the future development of radar, because it allowed for shorter-wavelength radars, which in turn meant detection of smaller objects from smaller antennas. This was part of the process of drastically reducing the size of radar sets, so that British scientists were now developing sets that could be put into aircraft and anti-submarine escort ships. While the Americans had nothing like the cavity magnetron, they were, however, further ahead in terms of receiver technology – it was one development the Americans were able to share in return. The Bell Telephone Company began making cavity magnetrons almost immediately, while as a direct result of the Tizard Mission the National Defense Research Committee set up the Radiation Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with the brief to research and develop better radar and radio navigation systems.
These secrets handed over by the British would have had huge commercial value in peacetime, and they still did now, although perhaps in a different way. Handing over such secrets had risks, but in doing so the British were killing two birds with one stone: they were finding someone else to supplement their own production and research, and at the same time forging ever closer ties and unity of purpose. And when Britain’s cash did finally run out, as it surely would now that exports had been sacrificed for war production, these would be of critical importance.
It wasn’t only Britain that was tapping into new sources of supply. So too was Nazi Germany, now undisputed masters of Europe. A vast Greater Reich now lay in Hitler’s grasp, almost as big as the United States in terms of size and much bigger in terms of population – some 290 million people now looked up to see the swastika fluttering over them. It was almost as many as those living under the Union Flag and within a stone’s throw too, rather than scattered around the globe. Also now in German hands was an enormous booty of cash, raw materials and war materiel. From France alone, the Nazis plundered 314,878 rifles, 5,017 artillery pieces, nearly 4 million shells and 2,170 tanks – all of which would be put to considerable use in the future; the Germans were never, ever shy of using second-hand goods.
Adolf von Schell and his comrades in the Reichsbahn also received a bonanza of extra vehicles, steam locomotives and rolling stock. Hundreds of thousands of captured and requisitioned military and civilian vehicles passed into German hands, bolstering the inventories in no small way. Over 4,000 locomotives and a staggering 140,000 railway wagons considerably helped Germany’s freight shortcomings. As for raw materials, from France came 13 billion francs’ worth, including 81,000 tons of all-important copper. Germany was also significantly better off in terms of zinc and nickel. The rapidly diminishing oil and fuel stocks had also been given a much-needed surge. The oil deal with Romania at the end of May was one huge headache solved, but Germany was now able to add to this goldmine with substantial supplies from the newly conquered European territories.
A further problem apparently alleviated was the shortage of foreign exchange. For too long it had been largely one-way traffic in Germany with only armaments leaving the country in any significant numbers, which, of course, meant they could not be used by the Wehrmacht. Not only did Germany plunder foreign banks – justified as ‘reparations’ and then renamed ‘occupation costs’ – but it also established a centralized clearing system. What this meant, in very simple terms, was that a company in France might still export to Germany and be paid for it, except that payment would be made by the French central bank, not that of Germany. The French would then in turn bill the Germans, but that would be squirrelled away in a folder marked ‘never to be settled’ and forgotten about. This way, the foreign suppliers still received their money, Germany got its goods and the only ones to lose out were the vassal governments of the newly occupied territories, as the governments in Vichy France, Belgium, Holland and elsewhere were discovering. That was the more than fair price of defeat as far as Nazi Germany’s economists were concerned. This clearing system took on another level when it became clear that France could not keep up the 20 million Reichsmarks a day ‘occupation costs’ demanded by Germany. To help them out, Germany offered to take payment in shares of French companies; Vichy France managed to largely resist this kind offer but did sell – at much reduced rates – French interests in eastern and south-eastern Europe, where France had invested heavily in Poland, Yugoslavia and Romania, including a large stake in the Romanian oil and Yugoslavian copper industries. New oil ‘multinationals’ such as Kontinentale Öl AG and the copper mining operation Mines de Bor, superficially private concerns, fell under the increasingly large web spread by Reichsmarschall Göring, whose business interests were now gargantuan and made him the largest single industrialist in Europe, if not the world.
However, if the Nazis had been initially giddy as schoolboys with all this new-found plunder, it was, in reality, little more than a short-term fix, especially since the war was clearly far from over. In any case, the victor’s booty was still as nothing compared to the resources Britain could call upon, while hovering in the background, ever-more ominously, was the United States. The combined might of Britain and America had the kind of global reach, purchasing power and access to every conceivable raw material that was the stuff of Nazi dreams.
Germany’s incredible victories had persuaded Hitler that he really was a military genius. He was, of course, nothing of the sort. Selective reading of military history and four years in the trenches were not the qualifications for being a supreme military commander. As Warlimont and his staff had long ago realized, Hitler had neither an understanding of nor interest in staff work. What he was interested in were men with dash and verve, who could rapidly implement his will and fulfil the true destiny of the Third Reich. Curiously, though, he was also then prone to sudden bouts of doubt and prevarication. Plans would be embraced and ordered with absolute certainty – his directives for both Norway and the attack on the West were testimony to this – but then he would fret, interfere and be overcome with anxiety once those attacks began. A true psychopath would have had no such anxieties.
Rather, Hitler was more a fantasist and schizophrenic than a psychopath. The Third Reich was little more than a projection of his warped fantasies: one in which he was the leader, in charge of a world that harked back to a magical, mystical time. He was obsessed with the stories of Arminius’s defeat of Varus’s legions. The myths of Arminius as a freedom fighter who had liberated the pure Aryan German peoples from the tyrannical yoke of Rome became a source for Nazi ideology. Blurring into this was his love of Wagner, whose operas similarly harked back to a mystical time of old. Hitler had mixed these passions to create a German heritage that had virtually no basis in reality but which, because of his will, became truth. Most of the leading Nazis bought into this, not least Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, who had even created a special cult headquarters at the Schloss Wewelsburg, near Paderborn, in which there was even a stone round table. In this mish-mash of ancient myths, there was, it seemed, even a place for the British – and mythological – King Arthur.
It was almost as though Hitler existed in a kind of parallel world: one of Aryan purity, in which there were enemies that needed to be eradicated for the good of the world. He was the master, and because of him and his iron will Germany was rising again, greater than ever. Vast buildings were being erected, enemies were being slain, while marching to his tune were millions of uniformed men. There was ceremony, there was the cult of his own being, and there were endless banners of blood-red, black and white. The people saluted him, cheered him, idolized his brilliance. He was their Führer – their guide. Their inspiration. Their key to greatness.
Hitler’s fantasy world was becoming a reality, but his world-view, so warped, was also very narrow, which was all too evident in his strategy for global domination, this was a major problem. Hitler was a continentalist, and his strategic outlook reflected that. He was born nowhere near the sea and rarely visited the coast; after all, there were no seafaring stories among the myths of the Teutonic Knights. In fact, he had barely travelled outside Germany since becoming Chancellor – the odd trip to Italy and Austria, a brief spot of sightseeing in Paris, but that was about it. Even his forward headquarters tended to be surrounded by trees, so even when not ensconced in his Führerbunker he could hardly see much. His boyhood nickname had been Wolfi; wolves were important symbolic creatures to him, which might explain the penchant for forests and for being underground.
He also judged others by his own standards and shallow perspectives. The British were has-been imperialists, the Americans degenerates and in the grasp of the Jewish conspiracy. His outlook was not just warped and deranged but infantile – like a schoolchild calling another names because they have big ears. Had he ever bothered to understand his would-be enemies better, his strategic judgements might have been more carefully considered, but that was not in Hitler’s capacity.
The air assault on Britain had been an unmitigated disaster. True, it had not seemed that way to those in Britain who had been watching the sky blacken with German aircraft, or who had suffered the blitzes on London and other cities, but it was now abundantly clear that the Luftwaffe had never had nearly enough aircraft to achieve what was needed: total control of British air space. The Luftwaffe had been mighty enough when operating against an enemy air force that was, to all intents and purposes, operating blind, and when flying in support of the ground forces, but it was in no way near large enough to destroy the RAF over its home turf. The number of times more than a hundred bombers had flown together over England on a single raid could be counted on one hand. Usually, twenty or thirty bombers was more like it. The Italian Generale Douhet, the prophet of Armageddon, had been wrong, while Guernica, Warsaw and Rotterdam had given a false sense of strength and what might be achieved with a few hundred twin-engine bombers. The RAF, on the other hand, had demonstrated quite clearly that the bomber would not always get through if you had a half-decent fighter force backed up by an equally half-decent co-ordinated air defence system, something that had not existed when the Condor Legion had flown in Spain, or when the Luftwaffe had been operating over Poland and France. And Britain’s air defence system had proved not just half decent, but very decent indeed.
Perhaps Göring – and indeed Hitler – could be forgiven for not appreciating the scale of air assault that would be needed, since no air force had ever attempted such a large-scale operation before or come up against such concerted defence, but the tactical and especially the intelligence failings had demonstrated a much bigger chink in the armoury.
The Luftwaffe had shown a complacency born from easy aerial successes against much weaker enemies that had outweighed the greater experience it had gained than that of the RAF; the lack of proper ground control, the failure to harness technology such as radio and radar, and the shocking over-confidence had worked seriously to undermine its chances of success. Meanwhile, men like Beppo Schmid continued to pedal baloney to his boss, telling the Reichsmarschall what he wanted to hear rather than the truth. To enter a major aerial battle with Britain and still not know that the RAF was divided into three home commands, or not understand the importance of radar, or insist that two-engine fighters were better than single-engine models in air-to-air combat was breathtakingly foolhardy. How could Göring really have thought that? How could Milch, Kesselring, Jeschonnek et al. let him think that? Did they never bother to ask those kinds of questions? And how was it that poor old Ernst Udet was still convinced that dive-bombing was the way forward? Until the Battle of Britain, the Luftwaffe had shone a beacon for Nazi might. Its pilots were among the pick of Germany’s finest young men: bright, dashing and brave, and the leading aces were the Reich’s biggest pin-ups; but over southern England they had suffered a rude awakening. Publicly, the Luftwaffe was as dashing and exciting and modern as ever; but in Hitler’s eyes, Göring’s men had suffered a dent to their reputation they would never make good.
Already, Britain on its own was out-producing Germany in numbers of aircraft, a decisive factor in the air battle that had raged in the summer. Some 15,049 aircraft were built in British factories in 1940, and a further 1,069 had arrived from America, a number which was due to increase significantly in 1941. If Roosevelt was to be believed, Germany faced the spectre of 50,000 new American aircraft a year being added into the mix. Germany, in contrast, produced only 10,826 aircraft, almost a third less than Britain alone.
Even worse, America’s shipyards were also now busy building large fleets of destroyers, cruisers and, most ominous of all, aircraft carriers. The proposed expansion of the German Navy, the Z Plan, had called for aircraft carriers; but this was no longer possible. It was, however, not only possible for the US Navy, but was already becoming a reality. For that matter, it was a reality for the Royal Navy too, even if it was not quite on the scale of those planned for the United States. British shipyards were none the less busy building more ships too. In all, 1 battleship, 2 aircraft carriers, 7 cruisers, 27 destroyers, 15 submarines, and over 50 corvettes were completed in 1940, as well as 810 merchant vessels, along with nearly 2,000 vessels converted for war service. In contrast, the Kriegsmarine added just 22 new U-boats to the BdU in 1940. At no time in the 1920s and 1930s had the British armaments industry ever gone to sleep, but now, with the war a year old, it was positively humming.
Which was more than could be said for the captured shipyards and aircraft factories in the newly conquered territories. The number of aircraft built in French factories was tiny, because unlike those in America they were drastically short of coal and oil, and its workers of food. Plundering booty and demanding crippling occupation costs had, unsurprisingly, had an adverse effect on the French economy. Its oil had been taken and its vehicles requisitioned, and without fuel and vehicles there was little way of moving food and supplies around the country. By the end of 1940, France’s level of automobile ownership, previously the highest in Europe, had dropped by 92 per cent – and all those vehicles had been swept up by Germany.
Moreover, all these occupied territories needed governing and defending. Admittedly, half of France had been left to the new Vichy Government, but Poland, Holland, Belgium, Denmark, Norway and the other half of France all had to be occupied and run on a day-to-day basis, with military commanders and security forces. This dispersed manpower, weapons and resources, and after the initial flow of bounty was beginning to cost Germany more than it was gaining.
To cap it all, the rain that had prevented Göring from having the four clear days of good weather over southern England he needed had also affected the harvest. After stripping France and the other conquests of their riches and reserves, Germany was discovering that these countries were now drawing on resources rather than providing them.
When Hitler had triumphantly returned to Berlin at the beginning of July, it must have seemed as though the war was won and all his dreams and ambitions in the West had been fulfilled. By October, the long, attritional war that all Germans had so dreaded appeared now to be a reality.
And with the poisoned chalice of Italy for an ally, Hitler’s headaches were about to get a whole lot worse.