Change of Tack
THE BRITISH SHIPBUILDER, Cyril Thompson, and the marine engineer, Harry Hunter, had reached New York on 3 October and had immediately been met by Sir Walter Layton, the Director of Programmes at the Ministry of Supply, who was already Stateside, and Arthur Purvis, a Scottish businessman who had made his fortune in Canada and since the beginning of the war had been head of the British Purchasing Commission. Layton and Purvis briefed them on the two men they had to convince: Rear-Admiral Emory ‘Jerry’ Land, the Head of the US Maritime Commission, and his deputy, Commander Howard Vickery.
Admiral Land, however, was already under fire for not having overseen a rise in shipbuilding big enough to meet American needs and quickly made it clear that, while the US wanted to help, it was a tricky time. In fact, under Bill Knudsen’s direction, the National Defense Advisory Commission had already cleared contracts for a staggering 948 naval vessels, including 292 warships and twelve 35,000-ton aircraft carriers. The British mission would, he told them, be welcome to approach American shipbuilding firms, but would need US Government clearance before a deal was struck. Furthermore, he also made it clear that not only would new shipyards have to be built specifically for the British orders, but Britain would have to also fund their construction. Since Thompson had set sail with the strict brief not to exceed £10 million for the entire order, it was already looking like the mission was facing an uphill struggle.
None the less, armed with Land’s blessing-of-sorts, Thompson and Hunter began a three-week whistle-stop tour of shipyards and marine-engineering works in the United States and Canada, but at every single one the message was much the same: they were working at full capacity already. Furthermore, it was clear that most people they met thought Britain was a busted flush. ‘We got the impression,’ said Thompson, ‘that they thought they were being invited to back a losing cause.’
Finally, however, on 23 October, Thompson and the mission’s fortunes appeared to take a turn for the better. On that day, at Portland, Oregon, Thompson met Henry Kaiser. Fifty-eight years old, bald and round, Kaiser was none the less a firebrand entrepreneur with a nose for money-making opportunities and a can-do attitude to life that had, so far, served him very well. Although he was not a qualified engineer, he had headed a number of construction businesses, and back in 1931 had set up a consortium called Six Companies Incorporated which had built the Boulder Dam in Colorado and followed that by constructing the massive Hoover Dam. Kaiser knew only a little about building roads and dams, but he understood how to harness new technology to make construction cheaper and easier. It had been his idea, for example, to add a plough to the front of a tractor, which he named the Caterpillar, and which soon became a standard piece of construction equipment. He strongly believed that no one should be afraid to do things a new way; innovation was exciting and to be embraced. And he also knew how to build good relations with local, state and federal officials. Bureaucrats and red tape were not barriers: they were something to be oiled, charmed and won over.
Kaiser had got wind of the British Shipbuilding Mission and was excited by the opportunities it might present. He had little experience of shipbuilding, but his Six Companies Incorporated had recently entered a partnership with Todd Shipyards to build and operate a new yard near Seattle. When he met Thompson, Kaiser told him emphatically that if the British gave him the backing, he would build 200 ships during 1942. Both Thompson and Harry Hunter were impressed, and were even more so after visiting the Kaiser–Todd shipyard at Seattle. With Kaiser’s drive and Todd’s know-how, they had already produced two ships and built a yard from scratch in just eleven months. This was the kind of dynamism and speed Thompson had been looking for; what’s more, at last, in Kaiser he had found someone who actually wanted the contract.
There were, however, three big issues to resolve. The first was deciding on the design of the ships that would be built. In the interest of speed of production, it clearly made sense to build just one design, and a provisional agreement was struck that Kaiser’s consortium would build the ships using the plans Thompson had brought with him. Through early November, Thompson and the engineers at Todd worked on those designs, making just a few modifications. It was agreed that the US-built ships would be welded, rather than riveted, partly because it was quicker and partly because there was a lack of trained riveters in America. They would also be powered by British-style coal-fired steam engines, with which British crews were familiar.
Then came a setback. ‘Cable from London,’ noted Thompson in his diary on 16 November, ‘changing size of all ships. Oh Hell.’ Despite the work already put in with Todd, the Admiralty now wanted the new ships to follow a further design of Thompson’s, a slightly larger version, which the shipyard back at North Sands was planning to start building early the following year. The plans of these, however, were back in England. None the less, enough had been agreed for the time being. More important in the immediate term was the securing of US government approval from Rear-Admiral Jerry Land. Wedded to this was the building of new shipyards and deciding just where they might be. Kaiser had made it clear that they could not be built in Seattle; he would build the new shipyards, but these would need to be near a major conurbation with a large potential workforce and good inland transport connections, and also near deep-water channels. The USA had a big coastline, but finding two, if not three, such locations was easier said than done.
Kaiser, however, soon came up with three options. The first was at Richmond, California, on the eastern side of San Francisco Bay, and he took Thompson and his party to see the site. There was nothing there but a mass of dismal mud flats. ‘It’s true you see nothing now,’ Kaiser told them, ‘but within months this vast space will have a shipyard on it with thousands of workers building the ships for you.’ This yard would be constructed and run by the newly formed Todd California Shipbuilding Corporation. The second would be constructed at Portland in Maine, on the east coast, by the Todd Corporation in association with Bath-Iron. In this case, Thompson had much greater involvement in the choice of site. Here it was decided to create a series of shallow dry docks blasted out of the rock. The third was planned for Mobile, Alabama, in the Gulf of Mexico.
On 1 December, Admiral Land informed the British Shipbuilding Commission that the US Government had given its blessing to the building of the two new yards at Richmond and Portland, but not Mobile, and the construction of thirty vessels at each, but there was still a third issue to be overcome, and that was the cost. The deal Thompson had provisionally agreed would cost £24 million, more than double the authorized expenditure. While the Admiralty and British Government had been kept in the loop throughout Thompson’s mission, getting this vastly inflated sum approved was another matter. It was time, Thompson believed, to head back to Britain and argue the case in person. So, armed with the draft contract and a number of other documents in a safely locked briefcase, he boarded the cargo liner Western Prince at New York on 6 December and set sail for home.
Meanwhile, back across the Atlantic, the Battle of Britain had been won. The Luftwaffe had not destroyed the RAF, it had not won air superiority over Britain, and there had been no chance of Germany launching an invasion across the Channel. However, whenever the weather permitted, daily clashes in the air still occurred, although at nothing like the intensity of the summer and early autumn. Jochen Marseille had been posted away from LG2 to JG52 – largely for disciplinary reasons – and there came under the command of Macky Steinhoff. He had arrived a day late after spending the night with a French girl, but sauntered in to see his new CO as though he had done nothing wrong at all.
‘What the hell is this?’ Steinhoff asked him, holding up his personnel record. ‘It’s almost as thick as a telephone directory!’ Despite Steinhoff’s warnings, Marseille seemed unwilling to change his ways. In combat, he invariably shot off on his own without warning. Steinhoff had him grounded for a week, but it never occurred to him to restrict his errant pilot to barracks. ‘He stole my car,’ said Steinhoff, ‘went into town and came back drunk, with two girls in varying degrees of undress, also drunk, and one was driving the car. I was beyond angry.’ Steinhoff now restricted him to base for a month. It says much about the autonomy which these Luftwaffe Gruppen were allowed to exercise that in such a disciplined and militaristic totalitarian state as Nazi Germany someone so wayward as Marseille could survive.
While Steinhoff was struggling to contain Marseille, the Luftwaffe’s bombers continued to pound Britain, although mostly now by night. In fact, they had been bombing Britain every night since the first attack on London back on Saturday, 7 September. The aim was no longer to destroy the RAF but to cause as much damage as possible and to break the morale of the British people. The British had dubbed this bomber assault by the Luftwaffe ‘the Blitz’.
Unsurprisingly, civilian casualties were mounting. For all the swift efficiency that Gwladys Cox had witnessed when her flat was destroyed, Britain was not as prepared for aerial bombing as it might have been. There were spaces in public shelters for only around half the nearly twenty-eight million people living in the major cities, and most of these were not, in 1940, deep reinforced concrete bunkers but, rather, tended to be basements in the public buildings, such as church halls. Many people never bothered going to these in any case. The Government had also tried to persuade people to build their own shelters. This could mean reinforcing the cellar or basement, placing a cage or box under the kitchen table, or building an Anderson shelter in the garden. These shelters, named after the engineer David Anderson, involved digging a trench into the ground, covering it with curved but solidly thick corrugated-iron strips, then layering it with the already excavated soil. None of these shelters would protect from a direct hit, but the Anderson shelter, especially, protected its inhabitants from almost anything other than that. These unquestionably saved many lives, but casualties were still quite high: 6,968 deaths and 9,488 serious casualties in September, 6,313 and 7,949 in October, 5,004 and 6,247 in November. The British people had never suffered a violation like this, and not since the plague of 1665 had the public been in such personal danger.
In London, people had taken to using Underground stations as shelters which were, for the most part, bombproof. Initially, this was prohibited, although the ban was quickly lifted. Other cities, though, did not have this unexpectedly effective facility, and, as October had given way to November, so the Luftwaffe began to widen its net.
On the night of 14 November, Coventry, an industrial cathedral city in the Midlands, was hit by an unusually large number of bombers – some 450, led by KG100 equipped with X-Gerät. Attacking in two waves in perfect bombing conditions and with a mixture of high explosives and incendiaries, the gap in the waves was timed to perfection, with the second fanning the flames of the first. The target had been the city’s motor factories, but the centre was devastated. The cathedral and the medieval heart of the city were destroyed. The attack was the worst so far in the Blitz and was a psychological and physical blow that shocked both the wider public and Britain’s war leaders. Coventry would not be forgotten – neither the method of the attack nor its effects.
RAF Bomber Command wasted no time in striking back, however. The following night, over a hundred bombers attacked Hamburg and Dutch airfields used by the Luftwaffe. The Hamburg raid caused a number of fires and heavy damage to the Blohm & Voss shipyard and was unquestionably the most successful RAF raid so far; the same conditions that had helped the Luftwaffe over Coventry had worked for Bomber Command too.
Striking back was all very well, but there was a growing feeling that not enough was being done to combat the Luftwaffe’s night raids. The incredibly successful fighter defence of Britain had been based entirely on daylight operations. Air Chief Marshal Dowding was frantically working on a system of night interception, in which fighters would rely entirely on their instruments to fly and be guided to targets by onboard radar. Yet although the cavity magnetron had revolutionized the potential of radar and made much smaller sets possible, it was not something that could be perfected overnight.
Fighter Command also needed night fighters. It was clear that most who were told to convert from day to night operations both loathed it and found it very difficult to acclimatize to the change. The obvious answer was to draw new night-fighter pilots from Bomber Command, whose pilots were used to operating in the dark, and when Air Marshal Sholto Douglas, Deputy Chief of the Air Staff, asked Air Vice-Marshal Arthur Harris, C-in-C of 5 Group, Bomber Command, for some recommendations, he had no hesitation in putting forward Flight Lieutenant Guy Gibson, whom he considered one of the most dogged, determined pilots to have served in his command.
In fact, Gibson had already been packed off to 14 OTU as an instructor at the end of September, having flown thirty-seven operations, during which time he had lost no fewer than sixty-two of his colleagues. Gibson had taken the chance of some leave to get engaged to his girlfriend, Eve Moore, a dancer seven years his senior, with whom he was quite infatuated.
He had barely started at 14 OTU, however, when Harris contacted him and told him he was being posted to 29 Night Fighter Squadron. In return, Harris promised that after doing this stint he would bring him back and give him the best squadron in Bomber Command he could. Gibson was only too happy to chuck in the instructing but was less than enamoured of RAF Digby, a soulless and bleak airfield in the Lincolnshire fens.
The atmosphere in the squadron was as bleak as the setting. They had shot down just one enemy in five months, but one of their own planes had been mistakenly blasted out of the sky by a Hurricane. To make matters worse, they were regularly dispersed in penny-packets of three to different airfields, had been flying totally unsuitable Blenheims and were fed up that the day fighter boys were getting all the accolades. The only solace was the arrival of new Beaufighters in recent weeks – a twin-engine aircraft based on the Blenheim, but which could fly at well over 300 mph and was armed with both 20mm cannons and machine guns. None the less, when Gibson turned up from Bomber Command to take over A Flight, he was given a surly reception.
On his second day with the squadron, he was taken to the Operations Room to see the techniques of ground control. By chance, the enemy raid he followed from the dais was that on Coventry. As the plots developed and were moved across the map table, Gibson watched and listened as night fighters were ordered into the sky, but during the entire two waves of raids only one fighter even so much as spotted an enemy bomber. Earlier in the summer, Macky Steinhoff had discovered exactly the same difficulties were facing the Luftwaffe: without an effective means of homing aircraft in on a target, night-fighting was never going to work.
Dowding and the Air Ministry Research Establishment were making progress, though, and had recognized that night-fighting was now the prime task in the air defence of Great Britain. The Beaufighter was gradually coming into service and was a good machine: rugged, packing a punch, faster than any bomber and big enough to carry the kind of equipment and weapons needed. A new onboard radar was also coming into service, Air Interceptor (AI) Mk IV, which had a greater range than earlier versions, although of still only a few miles.
The biggest headache facing Dowding and his scientists had been how to track enemy bombers once they flew past the static screen of radar stations along the coast. This, too, had now been solved by the development of a Ground Control of Interception (GCI) radar. Fully rotational, it was tested successfully the same November that Gibson joined 29 Squadron. Such was the speed of technological advancement in this war.
In Bill Knudsen’s office in the marble Federal Reserve building in Washington DC, he had fixed up a static radial engine for him to look at and to help him keep his focus. A man in a hurry, he had insisted – as Lord Beaverbrook had insisted at the Ministry of Aircraft Production in Britain – that the normal methodical means of doing business were thrown out the window. All contracts, he demanded, had to be boiled down to a single typewritten sheet, while his own stamp was a single ‘K’ written in blue ink. This was jumped on in a feature in Time magazine in early October when ‘Motormaker’ Knudsen was the cover story under the question, ‘How are we doing?’ ‘The answer last week,’ concluded Time, ‘was about as well as a democracy in peacetime could be expected to do. No one pretended that a peacetime democracy could hope to take on a totalitarian war machine – yet.’
Despite the hint of cynicism in the piece, Knudsen would agree with the magazine that time was most definitely the biggest challenge. He was making progress, though, and not least with the automobile business. Packard was in the process of making Merlin engines, Pontiac was making Oerlikon cannons, and Chrysler was making the new M3 tank for both the US and the British, but by October Knudsen was realizing that all US car firms should be working on war production. After all, collectively, they were America’s biggest employer, with more than a thousand factories and manufacturing facilities worth $3 billion. While other areas of American industry had become run down, the motor car industry was the one area above all others still in rude health. With his biggest problem still how to mass-produce aircraft, and with a dangerous bottleneck developing, he hoped the automobile moguls would provide the answers.
On 29 October, he had gathered all the US automobile executives in New York and introduced them to a panel of Air Corps officers and aviation people, who then explained to them the process of making aircraft, how they were used, the different types, and the level to which they needed to be produced in double-quick time.
To a man, the motor execs agreed to help and out of that conference formed the Automotive Committee for Air Defense. Annual model changes were suspended, which would give them time for retooling to make aircraft parts. The key, Knudsen knew, was to let the aircraft manufacturers continue to make aircraft, but to get the motor manufacturers to mass-produce parts. So Chrysler and the Hudson Motor Car Company agreed to make airframes for the B-26 Marauder medium bomber, while GM, among others, would make parts for the B-17 Flying Fortress heavy four-engine bomber. GM would also help with the B-25 medium bomber and Ford was one of those who agreed to make parts for the B-24 Liberator heavy bomber.
Yet it was also two steps forward, one step back. Knudsen was utterly apolitical, and he viewed the process purely from the perspective of the businessman and practical economics. The deal with the automobile manufacturers had outraged union leaders, and he had been widely criticized for giving the biggest contracts to the biggest firms. Once again, they railed, Big Business was winning at the expense of the little guy. Knudsen, however, had stuck to his guns, pointing out that it was the biggest companies who had the capacity as well as the best engineering staffs. There was, he argued, plenty for small business too, but as subcontractors.
The criticism of Knudsen and the NDAC was still rumbling on when on Tuesday, 3 December, Henry Stimson had invited Knudsen, Ed Stettinius and Donald Nelson, the ex-president of Sears and Roebuck and now Stettinius’s deputy, to an emergency lunch. (Nelson’s Time magazine photo caption had been: ‘From safety pins to 16-inch guns.’)
They drove up to Woodley, Stimson’s grand house at Rock Creek Park, where they found not only Stimson, but Frank Knox, the Navy Secretary, and Cordell Hull, the Secretary of State. Hull was not optimistic. Britain was being bombed to blazes, too many ships were being lost, British cash was running out. If they weren’t careful, Britain could be out of the war before they knew it. Somehow, Stimson told them, they needed to stir up the business people of America, who, as far as he was concerned, were still asleep.
Afterwards, Stimson drove with Knudsen and Knox to the Treasury to see Henry Morgenthau. On a large blackboard, Morgenthau had chalked up Britain’s remaining gold and reserve assets, which showed the UK would owe $3 billion by 1 June 1941 but most likely be around a billion short.
‘I’m rather shocked at the depth we’re getting into,’ said Stimson.
Knox said, ‘We are going to pay for the war from now, aren’t we?’
‘Well, what are we going to do?’ said Morgenthau. ‘Are we going to let them place more orders, or not?’
‘Got to,’ replied Hull. ‘No choice about it.’
‘We can make it,’ said Knudsen, ‘if it can be financed.’
As it happened, Roosevelt had already been thinking about this conundrum and had on 9 December received a letter from Churchill expressing his concerns that before long British cash would run out, yet pointing out the urgent need to keep shipping orders, especially, coming their way.
At the time, Roosevelt was on board the heavy cruiser Tuscaloosa, along with his inner circle, for a restorative trip around the Caribbean. Naturally enough, Harry Hopkins was with him and noticed FDR read and re-read Churchill’s lengthy letter. Then, on the night of the 11th, he explained to Hopkins his idea. America would simply ‘lend’ Britain all the materiel it needed. ‘He suddenly came out with it,’ said Hopkins. ‘The whole programme.’ Obviously, the US would in effect be giving Britain this materiel, as realistically the US was unlikely to want it back after the war. But that wasn’t the point. Rather, it was about ensuring Britain kept fighting so that America didn’t have to for as long as possible, and making certain that this was tied to a legal framework, however spurious.
It was the genesis of what would be called Lend-Lease.
In the Western Desert, an Australian war correspondent, Alan Moorehead, had listened to a briefing from General Wavell early on 9 December and then had hurried up into the ‘blue’, as the desert was known, and later that day reached the carnage. The first Italian strongpoint he and his colleagues reached was Nibiewa and they were stunned by the scene of chaos and devastation. Walking from one tent to another, and through trenches and subterranean tunnels, Moorehead marvelled at the work and effort that had gone into the position only for the British to go through it as easily as a knife through butter. They found Generale Maletti, beribboned, bearded and bloodied, sprawled on his bed. ‘Extraordinary things met us wherever we turned,’ wrote Moorehead. ‘Officers’ beds laid out with clean sheets, chests of drawers filled with linen and an abundance of fine clothing of every kind. Uniforms heavy with gold lace and decked with the medals and colours of the parade ground.’ They walked into at least thirty dugouts and everywhere Moorehead was overcome by the quality of the leatherwork, the intricacy of their kit. He had never seen an army so well supplied with personal comforts. Nor had he ever seen so many letters. He picked up a number, scanning them briefly. All talked of home, of lovers or family. ‘God watch and keep our beloved Federico and Maria,’ he discovered in one, ‘and may the blessed Virgin preserve them from all harm until the short time, my dearest, passes when I shall press thee into my arms again. I cry. I weep for thee here in the desert at night and lament our cruel separation.’
He also discovered others that showed a surprising understanding of their situation. ‘We are trying to fight this war as though it is a colonial war in Africa,’ one officer had written. ‘But it is a European war in Africa fought with European weapons against a European enemy. We take too little account of this in building our stone forts and equipping ourselves with such luxury. We are not fighting the Abyssinians now.’
They had hardly covered themselves in glory in that conflict in any case. The endless bits of paper, the broken equipment, the scattered supplies and other detritus at Nibiewa demonstrated a terrible truth, plain to almost all but Mussolini and his acolytes, that neither was Italy ready for modern war and nor did the Italian troops have the stomach for it. The vast majority of them wanted to be back at home cuddling Maria and Federico.
Nor did the defeat at Sidi Barrani mark the end of the British charge. Flushed with success, they pushed on. Sollum and Fort Capuzzo were captured on the 17th, and three days later the Italians were swept from Egypt. By now, 6th Australian Division had entered the fray and taken the lead, and had swiftly surrounded Bardia in Libya. Mussolini had not just taken on Britain, but the British Empire and the Dominion countries as well.
In his report to Mussolini of his meeting with Hitler at the Berghof in the middle of November, Count Ciano put a fairly good gloss on things, although he was more honest with himself. ‘Hitler is pessimistic,’ he noted, ‘and considers the situation much compromised by what has happened in the Balkans. His criticism is open, focused and final.’ Ciano couldn’t get a word in edgeways.
Hitler was pessimistic because he now had a lot of problems on his hands, all stemming from Britain’s very infuriating insistence on continuing to fight. If only Britain had seen sense and sued for terms back in the summer! Now, British factories were churning out ever-more war materiel, and so too was the United States, and the two Western democracies were beginning to cosy up to each other to a worrying degree. How to beat Britain and curb the threat of the USA had been exercising his mind since June and although he had been perfectly willing to go ahead with an invasion of England, he was not going to let his troops be slaughtered in mid-Channel before they had fired a shot.
Conscious that a war across a sea was not a strategy he felt comfortable with, Hitler had very quickly reverted to the German default plan for engaging in war: a lightning strike that would bring about a swift and crushing victory, and on land, which was what the Wehrmacht was primarily designed for. This meant an attack not against Britain, but against the Soviet Union.
General Walter Warlimont first heard of Hitler’s plan at the end of July, when he and others in Section L were called together by General Jodl, by then recently promoted three ranks from major-general to full general. It was his reward for being the unfaltering mouthpiece of the Führer’s will. And now he told his senior staff that, once and for all, Hitler was going to rid the world of Bolshevism. They would invade no later than May the following year.
To a man, they were horrified and immediately offered a whole host of objections, not least the opening up of the situation most feared above all: a war on two fronts. Jodl countered them all: a collision with Soviet Russia was going to happen at some point, so it was better, he argued, to do it now, while the Red Army was still weakened by Stalin’s purges and Germany was at the peak of its military powers. There was, in fact, something in this; Stalin had no more intention of keeping the pact in place than Hitler did, and there was no doubt that the much weakened Red Army had been rather embarrassed by Finland. And while it was true that the Soviet Union was much larger than France and therefore would bring about certain logistical headaches, no one could claim the Reds were a better military machine than the French, who had been despatched in a mere six weeks. So how hard could it be? Hitler had gambled in Norway and won, gambled in France and victory had followed. He would crush the Soviet Union in a war of annihilation too.
Warlimont’s consternation was entirely understandable, but the truth was, Hitler’s worst decision had been invading Poland in the first place and then not having a properly thought through Plan B if Britain didn’t sue for peace. What were the alternatives to a swift pre-emptive strike on the Soviet Union? Attack in a few years’ time, by which point Britain and America would be overwhelmingly strong and the Soviet Union stronger too? Or sit back and wait? That wasn’t the German way of war at all; when cornered, the Prussian–German way, as it always had been, was to take advantage of superior training and the Bewegungskrieg, and attack.
Because of the huge scale of an invasion and because, as Napoleon had discovered back in 1812, winters in the Soviet Union were appalling, this operation really did need Germany’s unwavering focus, which was why Hitler was far from pleased to find the Balkans now under threat. He could not afford to have a war on a third front to Germany’s south, nor to have Italy knocked out of the war, nor to have the Romanian oilfields threatened. It was clear the Italian Fleet no longer had any chance of defeating the Royal Navy and now, to make things worse, it looked as though Italy might be kicked out of North Africa altogether. Britain had guaranteed the independence of Greece back in April 1939, and Ioannis Metaxas, the Greek Prime Minister-cum-dictator, had wasted no time in asking the British to honour that promise. And Britain had done so, sending naval and air support and troops and naval forces to Crete. Troops, Churchill had pledged, would follow.
This meant Germany had to intervene. This had become more practicable since Hungary, Romania and Slovakia had joined the Axis in the third week of November, and Yugoslavia looked as though it might well sign up as well; all feared the encroaching spread of Soviet Communism more than Nazism, and it was clear that cosying up to Germany, whose armies appeared so unstoppable, seemed like a shrewd move. For Hitler, these new Axis partners helped him shore up a crucial southern bloc. Greece, however, could not be allowed to defeat Italy, nor be a portal for Britain to re-enter Europe. As a result, Hitler accepted that he had to intervene with his own troops. The Greeks would have to be defeated.
He also recognized that he needed to do something to curb the strength of the Royal Navy in the Mediterranean. Warlimont’s Section L had been preparing a plan to capture Gibraltar, but Franco had refused to countenance such a move. The alternative was to send some Luftwaffe units to Sicily, from where they might attack the British fleet; Mussolini had rejected such offers of support before but no longer, and Luftflotte X was duly posted to the Mediterranean in the middle of December.
On 14 December, Hitler issued a directive for the invasion of Greece, and four days later a further directive for Operation BARBAROSSA, the invasion of the Soviet Union. Immediately, von Brauchitsch spoke to Hitler’s Army Adjutant, Major Engel, asking whether he thought Hitler really meant to invade the Soviet Union or whether he was bluffing. ‘I am convinced that the Führer still does not know what will happen,’ wrote Engel. ‘Distrustful of his own military leaders, uncertainty about Russian strength, disappointment over British stubbornness continue to preoccupy him.’ It was hardly an encouraging assessment. Despite this, a recent detailed report had suggested Russian forces were as weak as Hitler had hoped. ‘Hopes English will relent,’ added Engel, ‘does not believe USA will enter war. Big concerns about Africa and the Italians. Astonishing faith in the capabilities of the Luftwaffe.’ The long and short of it was this: Hitler was facing an appalling conundrum made very much worse by the ineptitude of his number one ally. One thing was certain, however: time was not standing still and Germany could not expect to hold on to its military dominance for ever. And just as Britain was running out of cash, so Germany would soon enough be running out of resources. Britain was turning to the USA; Germany would have to snatch the resources it needed from Russia. For all Hitler’s ongoing prevarication, he really did have no alternative.
One young Luftwaffe pilot who had every intention of repaying Hitler’s faith was Heinz Knocke, who had at long last completed his flying training and on 18 December, the very day Hitler had issued his BARBAROSSA directive, was to see the Führer in person at the Sportpalast in Berlin. Knocke was one of 3,000 future officers from all three services and the SS who had been assembled. In just a few months, he would be a fully fledged officer and sent to the front. Knocke couldn’t wait.
The ceremony began with Göring appearing on the vast stage. The errant young pilot Hans-Joachim Marseille, had none the less made a name for himself during the air fighting over Britain, and was now presented to the Reichsmarschall, after which a few minutes passed and then the crowd was brought to attention. Arms were outstretched in salute and then there he was, Hitler himself, flanked by Raeder and Keitel. Absolute silence reigned, then the Führer began to speak.
Knocke could not imagine the world had ever known a more brilliant orator. ‘His magnetic personality is irresistible,’ he enthused. ‘One can sense the emanations of tremendous will-power and driving energy. We are 3,000 young idealists. We listen to the spell-binding words and accept them with all our hearts. We have never before experienced such a deep sense of patriotic devotion towards our German fatherland.’ Whipped up to a frenzy, Knocke and his fellows happily pledged their lives to the battles ahead. At the end, Knocke was left feeling profoundly moved. ‘I shall never,’ he added, ‘forget the expressions of rapture which I saw on the faces around me today.’
The following day, Knocke received his posting: to JG52 – one of the most successful fighter wings in the Luftwaffe.
While young, impressionable men like Heinz Knocke, who had been indoctrinated since their early teens, were keen as mustard to head off and fight for Führer and Fatherland, many older Germans were increasingly tiring of both the war and the iron grip of the party.
Else Wendel was a young housewife in Berlin who was losing her enthusiasm for both Hitler and the Nazis. Rations were getting smaller and smaller. Berlin, she thought, looked forlorn and abandoned – there were no lights and no Christmas trees showing through the blackout curtains; no getting away from the war.
Wendel had been brought up in Charlottenburg, an affluent suburb of Berlin, but, although educated and intelligent, had remained largely apolitical. She had married and had two sons, and then her husband had run off with another woman; because Nazi ideology denigrated the Church and religion, it had become much easier for men to divorce without any obligations to their families. Severing all ties with his wife and sons, he had completely abandoned them. Else had been left with no choice but to look for work and foster out her two boys, a decision she had understandably found heartbreaking. She did, however, have a good job – working for the Department of Art in Kraft durch Freude (KdF), part of the German Labour Front. She and her boss, Herr Wolter, had to organize art exhibitions in factories, all part of the Nazi cultural plan.
Despite her personal difficulties, Wendel enjoyed her work and like most people had been swept along by the astonishing victories earlier in the year; and like many, back in the summer, she had assumed the war would soon be over. Even so, she was keenly aware of the ever-watching eyes of the party. She would not, for example, dare tell derogatory jokes about the regime, and at her middle sister’s recent engagement party had been shocked to hear her future brother-in-law telling gags about ‘Wotan’s Mickey Mouse’; he had meant Goebbels. She had been further shocked to hear the plight of her younger sister, Erna, and the demands made upon her as a youth welfare worker in Königsberg, where the party dominated all they did. ‘All you have to do today,’ Erna had told her, ‘is kneel down and worship Hitler – you don’t want any other qualifications for your job of work at all.’ Rules, ludicrous demands and endless threats were making it almost impossible for Erna to do her job efficiently.
Others were more virulently against the regime – and not just those who were victims of persecution like Jews or other minorities. Hans Schlange-Schöningen was a landowner and farmer in Prussia who had fought throughout the last war and dabbled in right-wing politics before the Nazis came to power. Now farming once more, he had, since the war began, been writing down his growing disgust as ‘a documentary record for a people who so easily forget,’ but added, ‘I am writing this today under constant threat from the Gestapo . . . I am writing in the name of innumerable old war comrades who proved their love of country for four long years and shed their blood. I am writing in the name of millions of people who cannot raise their voices, but who can say with full justice that they do not want, and never have wanted, what is happening now.’
As far as he was concerned, at Christmas 1940, Germany was a beleaguered fortress, now responsible for feeding the greater part of Europe and saddled with a pathetic ally attached to Germany like a convict’s ball and chain. At home, food shortages were increasing. As a farmer, he was suffering from the shortage of fodder supplies. ‘Exchange in kind is flourishing illegally,’ he wrote. ‘Cold and hungry people get up tired from disturbed nights in the air-raid shelters to queue up in front of food shops in the early morning.’ No matter how fervent an admirer of Hitler one might be, no one could claim that life was easier now that the war was entering the New Year.
Ardent admirers, the apathetic and the antis – they were all there in Nazi Germany. Only the ardent admirers, however, would dare to openly profess their feelings.
In Britain, the improvements in night-fighter technology had come too late to save Air Chief Marshal Dowding, who was forced to relinquish command on 24 November. It was Lord Beaverbrook, the Minister for Aircraft Production, who effectively wielded the axe, despite his enormous respect for the Fighter Command chief. Dowding’s dismissal has caused a lot of grumbling ever since, but it had been a very long summer, he had already carried on past his due retirement day twice and he was unquestionably exhausted, and getting some fresh blood in to tackle what was a quite different challenge to that of daylight defence was probably, on balance, a sensible move.
It marked a month of changes, however. When Dowding left Fighter Command, so too did Keith Park, who had handled the Battle of Britain with such skill and ingenuity. In their place came Sholto Douglas and Air Vice-Marshal Trafford Leigh-Mallory, two very different animals; they had big boots to fill. But November 1940 was also the month that a giant of British politics passed away. On the 9th, Neville Chamberlain died of cancer. He’d been ill for some time, probably – and unknowingly – even during the crisis of April and May 1940. He was not a martial man, yet when he had been Chancellor of the Exchequer, he had backed rearmament and the build-up of the Air Force and the Navy. After Munich, he had shown he would not be duped by Hitler again, and at the end of May he had sided with Churchill, not Halifax, in what probably turned out to be the most important decision of his life.
The attack on Coventry, the sacking of Dowding and the passing of Chamberlain: at home in Britain, a turning point had been reached as the New Year approached. The Battle of Britain was over; the country’s sovereignty appeared safe. Victory over its enemies, was, however, a quite different proposition. No one was doubting that ahead lay long years of war.