All Hell Let Loose: The World at War 1939-1945

Huge tracts of downland and urban public spaces were put down to corn and vegetables. Wiltshire farmer Arthur Street ploughed up his grassland as the government ordered, and sent away his beloved hunter to be trained for harness work. Many riding horses took badly to this humble duty, but Street’s ‘Jorrocks’ ‘trotted home like a gentleman’, in the farmer’s words, ‘and since that day he has hauled the milk, pulled the broadcast during wheat sowing, and done ploughing and all sorts of jobs with no mishap…What he thinks about it I don’t know. He has no notion of what it is that trundles and rattles behind him, and the position of his ears shows that he is somewhat worried about it. But as we have never let him down before, he reckons that we are not doing it now, and so does his war work like the gentleman he is.’ Farmers who had struggled to escape bankruptcy in the 1930s suddenly entered a new era of prosperity.

Seven hundred fascists were interned, though most of the aristocrats who had flirted with Hitler were spared. ‘It certainly is breath-taking how all these lords get away with their pre-war affiliations to the Nazi regime,’ complained British communist Elizabeth Belsey in a letter to her soldier husband. If the British had emulated French policy towards communists, thousands of trades unionists and a substantial part of the intellectual class would also have been incarcerated, but these too were left at liberty. There was still much silliness in the air: the Royal Victoria Hotel at St Leonardson-Sea, advertising its attractions in The Times, asserted that ‘The ballroom and adjacent toilets have been made gas-and splinter-proof.’ Published advertisements for domestic staff made few concessions to conscription: ‘Wanted: second housemaid of three; wages £42 per annum; two ladies in family; nine servants kept.’ The Archbishop of Canterbury declared that Christians were allowed to pray for victory, but the Archbishop of York disagreed. While the war was a righteous one, he said, it was not a holy one: ‘We must avoid praying each other down.’ Some clergymen urged their congregations to ask the Almighty’s help for charity: ‘Save me from bitterness and hatred towards the enemy.’ There was anger among British Christians, however, when in November the Pope sent a message of congratulation to Hitler on escaping an assassination attempt.

Hundreds of thousands of young men trained in England with inadequate equipment and uncertain expectations, though they assumed some of their number would die. Lt. Arthur Kellas of the Border Regiment took for granted his own survival, but speculated about the fates of his fellow officers: ‘I used to wonder which of them were for the killing. Would it be Ogilvy, such a nice little man, so worried about his mother in Dundee? Or Donald, so handsome, confident and pleased with himself? Or Hunt, newly married, prosperous in the City of London? Germain? Dunbar? Perkins, whom we ragged without pity? Or Bell, of whom we were jealous when he was posted off to glory with the first battalion in the line in France, first of us to be promoted to the First Fifteen, leaving behind such a pretty sister in Whitehaven? It had happened to our fathers after all. Presumably our War would be much the same as theirs.’

They were so young. As eighteen-year-old Territorial soldier Doug Arthur paraded with his unit outside a church in Liverpool shortly before embarking for overseas service, he was embarrassed to be picked out by one of an emotional crowd of watching housewives: ‘Look at ’im, girls,’ she said pityingly. ‘’E should be at ’ome wit’ ’is Mam. Never mind, son, yourse’ll be alrigh’. God Bless yer la’. He’ll look after yourtse, yer know, like. That bastard ’itler ’as gorra lot to answer for. I’d like to get me bleedin’ ’ands on ’im for five bleedin’ minutes, the swine.’

US president Franklin Roosevelt wrote to his London ambassador Joseph Kennedy on 30 October 1939: ‘While the [First] World War did not bring forth strong leadership in Great Britain, this war may do so, because I am inclined to think the British public has more humility than before and is slowly but surely getting rid of the “muddle through” attitude of the past.’ FDR’s optimism would ultimately prove justified, but only after many more months of ‘muddle through’.

The next act of the struggle increased the world’s bewilderment and confusion of loyalties, for it was undertaken not by Hitler, but by Stalin. Like all Europe’s tyrants, Russia’s leader assessed the evolving conflict in terms of the opportunities it offered him for aggrandisement. In the autumn of 1939, having secured eastern Poland, he sought further to enhance the Soviet Union’s strategic position by advancing into Finland. The country, a vast, sparsely inhabited wilderness of lakes and forests, was one among many whose frontier, indeed very existence, was of short duration, and thus vulnerable to challenge. Part of Sweden until the Napoleonic Wars, thereafter it was ruled by Russia until 1918, when Finnish anti-Bolsheviks triumphed in a civil war.

In October 1939, Stalin determined to strengthen the security of Leningrad, only thirty miles inside Soviet territory, by pushing back the nearby Finnish frontier across the Karelian isthmus, and occupying Finnish-held islands in the Baltic; he also coveted nickel mines on Finland’s north coast. A Finnish delegation, summoned to receive Moscow’s demands, prompted international amazement by rejecting them. The notion that a nation of 3.6 million people might resist the Red Army seemed fantastic, but the Finns, though poorly armed, were nationalistic to the point of folly. Arvo Tuominen, a prominent Finnish communist, declined Stalin’s invitation to form a shadow puppet government, and went into hiding. Tuominen said: ‘It would be wrong, it would be criminal, it was not a picture of the free rule of the people.’

At 0920 on 30 November, Russian aircraft launched the first of many bomber attacks on Helsinki, causing little damage save to the Soviet Legation and the nerves of the British ambassador, who asked to be relieved of his post. Russian forces advanced across the frontier in several places, and Finns joked: ‘They are so many and our country is so small, where shall we find room to bury them all?’ The nation’s defence was entrusted to seventy-two-year-old Marshal Carl Gustav Mannerheim, hero of many conflicts, most recently Finland’s civil war. As a Tsarist officer posted to Lhasa, Mannerheim had once taught the Dalai Lama pistol-shooting; he spoke seven languages, Finnish least fluently. His hauteur was comparable to that of Charles de Gaulle; his ruthlessness had been manifested in the 1919–20 purges of the defeated Finnish communists.

During the 1930s Mannerheim had constructed a fortified line across the Karelian isthmus, to which his name was given. He suffered no delusions about his country’s strategic weakness, and had urged conciliation of Stalin. But when his countrymen opted to fight, he set about managing the defence with cool professionalism. Before the Russians attacked, the Finns adopted a scorched-earth policy, evacuating from the forward areas 100,000 civilians, some of whom adopted an impressively stoical attitude to their sacrifice: border guards who warned an old woman to quit her home were amazed, on returning to burn it, to find that she had swept and cleaned the interior before leaving. On the table lay matches, kindling wood, and a note: ‘When one gives a gift to Finland, one desires that it should be like new.’ But it was a distressing business to destroy housing and installations around the Petsamo nickel-mining centre, which had been constructed with infinite labour and difficulty inside the Arctic Circle. The frontier zone was heavily booby-trapped: mines triggered by pull-ropes were laid, to smash the ice in front of invaders attacking across frozen lakes.

Stalin committed twelve divisions to assaults in a dozen sectors. Most of his soldiers were told that Finland had attacked the Soviet Union, but some were disbelieving and bewildered. Captain Ismael Akhmedov heard a Ukrainian peasant say, ‘Comrade Commander. Tell me, why do we fight this war? Did not Comrade Voroshilov declare at the Party Congress that we don’t want an inch of other people’s land and we will not surrender an inch of ours? Now we are going to fight? For what?’ An officer sought to explain the perils of acquiescing in a frontier so close to Leningrad, but Moscow’s strategic ambitions roused scant enthusiasm among those ordered to fulfil them, most of whom were hastily mobilised local reservists.

Stalin was untroubled. Confident that his attacking force of 120,000 men, six hundred tanks and a thousand guns could overwhelm the Mannerheim Line, he ignored his generals’ warnings about the restricted approaches to Finland. Tanks and vehicles were obliged to advance on narrow axes between lakes, forests and swamps. Though the Finns had little artillery and few anti-tank weapons, so inept were the Soviet assaults that the defenders wreaked havoc on their columns with rifle and machine-gun fire. The snowy wastelands of eastern Finland were soon deeply stained with blood; some defenders succumbed to nervous exhaustion after mowing down advancing Russians at close range hour after hour. Soviet armour suffered 60 per cent losses, chiefly because tanks advanced without infantry support. Most fell victim to primitive weapons, notably bottles filled with petrol and capped with a flaming wick, which caused them to explode into liquid fire when smashed against a vehicle. Though these had been used earlier in the Spanish Civil War, it was in Finland that the soubriquet ‘Molotov bread-basket’, then ‘Molotov cocktail’, first entered the military lexicon.

Mannerheim observed dryly that the attackers came on ‘with a fatalism incomprehensible to a European’. A hysterical Soviet battalion commander told his officers: ‘Comrades, our attack was unsuccessful; the division commander has just given me the order personally – in seven minutes, we attack again.’ The Soviet columns lumbered forward once more – and were slaughtered. Some Finnish units adopted large-scale guerrilla tactics, striking at Soviet units from the forests, then withdrawing. They sought to break up the attackers’ formations then destroy them piecemeal, calling such encounters ‘motti’ – ‘firewood’ battles – chopping up the enemy. Among the heroes of the campaign was Lt. Col. Aaro Pajari, who collapsed with a heart condition in the midst of one action, but somehow kept going. Like most of his fighting countrymen, Pajari was an amateur soldier, but he achieved a notable little victory against much superior forces at Tolvajärvi. During weeks of fighting at Kollaa, the Finns deployed two French 3.5? guns cast in 1871, which fired black powder charges. In the northern sector, the defence was supported by a 1918-vintage armoured train, bustling to and fro between threatened points.

The Red Army was grotesquely ill-equipped for winter war: its 44th Division, for instance, issued men with a manual on ski tactics, but no skis; in the first weeks, Russian tanks were not even painted white. The Finns, by contrast, dispatched ski patrols to cut roads behind the front and attack supply columns, often at night. One Finnish Jaeger regiment was led by Col. Hjalmar Siialsvuo. A peacetime lawyer, short, blond and tough, he galvanised the protracted defence of Suomussalmi village, and eventually found himself commanding a division. The Russians were impressed by the proficiency of Finnish snipers, whom they called ‘cuckoos’. The chief of staff of Gen. Vasily Chuikov’s Ninth Army produced an analysis of Soviet failures which concluded that the offensive had been too road-bound: ‘Our units, saturated by technology (especially artillery and transport vehicles), are incapable of manoeuvre and combat in this theatre.’ Soldiers, he said, are ‘frightened by the forest and cannot ski’.

The Finns deplored everything about the manner in which their enemies made war. One desperate Russian general sought to clear a minefield by driving a herd of horses through it, and the animal-loving defenders were appalled by the resultant carnage. A man gazing on heaped Russian corpses in the northern sector said: ‘The wolves will eat well this year.’ Carl Mydans, a photographer for America’s Life magazine, described the scene on one frozen battlefield: ‘The fighting was almost over as we walked up the snow-banked path that led from the road to the river…The Russian dead spotted the ice crust. They lay lonely and twisted in their heavy trench coats and formless felt boots, their faces yellowed, eyelashes white with a fringe of frost. Across the ice, the forest was strewn with weapons and pictures and letters, with sausage and bread and shoes. Here were the bodies of dead tanks with blown treads, dead carts, dead horses and dead men, blocking the road and defiling the snow under the tall black pines.’

The Finnish Campaign (#ulink_4b4b5726-4386-5229-8afa-54b28fd7a16d)

Around the world, the Soviet assault inspired bewilderment, increased by the fact that the swastika was a Finnish good-luck symbol. Popular sentiment ran strongly in favour of the victims: in fascist Italy, there were pro-Finnish demonstrations. The British and French saw Stalin’s action as further evidence of the Russo-German vulture collaboration manifested in Poland, though in reality Berlin was no party to it. There was a surge of Allied enthusiasm for dispatching military aid to Finland. French general Maxime Weygand wrote to Gamelin urging this course, which in French eyes had the supreme virtue of moving the war away from France: ‘I regard it as essential to break the back of the Soviet Union in Finland…and elsewhere.’ But, while there was intense discussion of possible Anglo-French expeditions to Finland during the months that followed, the practical difficulties seemed overwhelming. If Winston Churchill had then been British prime minister, it is likely that he would have launched operations against the Russians. But the Chamberlain government, in which as First Sea Lord Churchill represented a minority voice for activism, had no stomach for a gratuitous declaration of war on the Soviet Union when the German menace was still unaddressed.

Marshal Mannerheim conducted his campaign to a meticulous personal routine: he was woken at 0700 in his quarters at the Seuranhoe Hotel in Mikkeli, some forty miles behind the front, appeared immaculately dressed for breakfast an hour later, then drove to his headquarters in an abandoned schoolhouse a few hundred yards distant. In the tiny, intimate society of Finland, he insisted upon having casualty lists read aloud to him, name by name. During the first weeks of war, knowing the limitations of his army, he resolutely resisted subordinates’ pleas to advance and exploit their successes, but on 23 December a Finnish counter-attack was indeed launched across the Karelian isthmus. Infantry charged forward crying ‘Hakkaa paale!’ – ‘Cut them down!’; lacking artillery and air support, they were repulsed with heavy losses.

The Finnish government never deluded itself that the nation could inflict absolute defeat on the Russians: it aspired only to make the price of fulfilling Stalin’s ambitions unacceptably high. This strategy was doomed, however, against an enemy indifferent to human sacrifice. Stalin’s response to the setbacks, indeed humiliations, of the December offensive was to replace failed senior officers – one divisional commander was shot and another spent the rest of the war in the gulag – and to commit massive reinforcements. Ice roads capable of bearing tanks were built by laying logs on trampled snow, then spraying them with water which was allowed to freeze. The Finns had started the war with three weeks’ supply of artillery ammunition, and fuel and small-arms ammunition for sixty days; by January, these stocks were almost exhausted.

The world greeted Finland’s initial successes with awe: Mannerheim became a popular hero in western Europe, and French prime minister Edouard Daladier promised the Finns reinforcements of a hundred aircraft and 50,000 men before the end of February, but never lifted a finger to make good on his pledge. The writer Arthur Koestler, in Paris, wrote contemptuously that French excitement about Finnish victories recalled ‘a voyeur who gets his thrills and satisfaction out of watching other people’s virile exploits, which he is unable to imitate’. In Britain the left, represented by its weekly organ Tribune, at first offered reflexive support to Moscow’s cause, then abruptly switched allegiance to back the Finns.

Churchill regarded Soviet action as direct kin to Nazi aggression. Britain’s First Sea Lord exulted in Stalin’s failure, declaring in a broadcast on 20 January: ‘Finland, superb – nay sublime – in the jaws of peril, Finland shows what free men can do. The service rendered by Finland to mankind is magnificent. They have exposed, for all the world to see, the military incapacity of the Red Army and of the Red Air Force. Many illusions about Soviet Russia have been dispelled in these few fierce weeks of fighting in the Arctic Circle. Everyone can see how communism rots the soul of a Nation; how it makes it abject and hungry in peace, and proves it base and abominable in war.’

The Finns were heartened by such rhetoric. British Tory MP Harold Macmillan, who visited Finland, reported a Helsinki woman ticket-collector saying to him: ‘The women of Finland will fight on, because they believe that you are coming to help them.’ Eight thousand Swedes, eight hundred Norwegians and Danes, together with a few American and British civilians, volunteered to take up arms; some reached the war zone, but none served to any effect. Britain had few enough weapons for its own armed forces, and had nothing significant to spare for a nation which might be struggling gallantly, but was not fighting the power against which it was itself making war. Thirty Gloster Gladiator biplane fighters were dispatched, of which eighteen were lost in action within ten days; the Finns were obliged to pay cash for the aircraft, a foretaste of neutral American policy towards Britain.

There was no doubt of the strength of British popular sentiment in Finland’s favour, but next to nothing was done to translate this into action, save to prepare an expedition to Narvik, neutral Norway’s northern ice-free port. The Allies were attracted by the notion of exploiting the pretext of aiding the Finns to land in Norway and sever Germany’s winter link to Sweden’s iron-ore mines. The cynicism that had characterised Allied policy during the Polish campaign thus reasserted itself. In the early months of 1940 London and Paris urged the Finns to keep fighting, because if they quit there would be no excuse for intervention in Norway. A wild French proposal to land an expeditionary force at Petsamo on the north coast was vetoed by the British, who still declined to clash headlong with the Russians.

In mid-January, a new wave of assaults on Finland began. In one position 4,000 Russians attacked thirty-two Finns; they lost four hundred men, but only four defenders survived. On 1 February, the invaders launched a massive bombardment of the Mannerheim Line, followed by infantry and armoured drives in overwhelming strength. The Finnish artillery, such as it was, had almost exhausted its ammunition, but for two weeks the defenders held their positions. An officer, Wolf Haslsti, wrote on 15 February: ‘In the early afternoon, there appeared in front of our tent a reserve ensign, really nothing more than a child, asking if we could spare some food for himself and his men…he was in charge of a platoon of “men” scarcely old enough to shave. They were cold and scared and hungry and on their way to join the troops at the roadblock in front of Lahde.’ Next day Haslsti added: ‘Same reserve ensign back again, blood on his clothes, asking for more food…he lost both guns and half his men when the Russians broke through.’ Finnish sufferings were matched by those of their foes, especially those trapped for weeks in encircled positions. A Russian soldier wrote on 2 February: ‘It’s particularly cold this morning, nearly minus 35C. I was unable to sleep due to the cold. Our artillery has been firing through the night. After I woke I went for a shit, but at that moment the Finns opened fire, one bullet hitting the ground between my legs. I hadn’t had a shit since January 25th.’

The one-sided struggle could not continue indefinitely. The Finnish government made a last vain plea for Swedish help. The British and French offered token contingents of troops, which embarked on transports but had not yet sailed when on 12 March a Finnish delegation signed an armistice in Moscow. Minutes before this took effect, the Soviets launched a last vengeful bombardment of their vanquished victim’s positions. A Finnish officer wrote to his family: ‘One thing is clear: we have not fled. We were prepared to fight to the last man. We carry our heads high because we have fought with all our might for three and a half months.’

Carl Mydans found himself on a train to Sweden with three Finnish officers, one of whom opened a conversation with the American: ‘At least you will tell them that we fought bravely.’ Mydans muttered that he would. Then the colonel’s temper snapped: ‘Your country was going to help…You promised, and we believed you.’ He seized Mydans and shook him, screaming: ‘A half-dozen goddamned Brewster fighters with no spare parts! And the British sent us guns from the last war that wouldn’t even work!’ The Finn lapsed into sobs.

The peace Stalin imposed bemused the world by its moderation. He enforced his territorial demands, amounting to 10 per cent of Finland’s territory, but refrained from occupying the entire country, as he probably could have done. He appears to have been uneasy about provoking international anger at a moment when much larger issues were at stake. His confidence had been shaken by his losses – at least 127,000, perhaps as many as a quarter of a million, dead, against Finland’s 48,243 killed and 420,000 homeless. Soviet prisoners released by the Finns were dispatched by Stalin to the gulag to contemplate their treachery in having accepted captivity.

The Finnish campaign was irrelevant to the confrontation between Germany and the Allies, but it importantly influenced the strategy of both. They alike concluded that the Soviet Union was a paper tiger; that Stalin’s armies were weak, his commanders bunglers. After the armistice Finland, having failed to gain useful help from Britain and France, turned to Germany for assistance in re-arming its forces, which Hitler was happy to provide. The Russians learned critical lessons from the Finnish war, and set about equipping the Red Army with winter clothing, snow camouflage and lubricants for sub-zero temperatures, all of which would play a vital role in future campaigns. The world, however, saw only that Russian prestige had been debased by one of Europe’s smallest nations.

Even as Finland was struggling for survival, through the winter of 1939–40 the Allied armies shivered in snowbound trenches and bunkers on the frontier of Germany. Churchill, the First Sea Lord, strove to extract every ounce of excitement and propaganda from the Royal Navy’s skirmishes at sea with German U-boats and surface raiders. There was a sensational episode on 13 December, when three British cruisers met the far more powerfully armed German pocket-battleship Graf Spee off the coast of Uruguay. In the ensuing battle the British squadron was badly mauled, but Graf Spee suffered damage which caused her to take refuge in Montevideo. She was scuttled on the 17th rather than risk another battle, and her captain committed suicide, an outcome promoted as a handy Allied victory. The British strove to make friends across the Atlantic, or at least to moderate their war-making to avoid antagonising US opinion. When Churchill heard that Americans were angered by the Royal Navy’s contraband searches of their ships, on 29 January 1940 he gave orders that no further US vessels should be bear-led into the British war zone, although this concession was kept secret to avoid upsetting other neutral nations whose vessels remained subject to inspection.

Meanwhile the Allied leaders and commanders wrangled: French thinking remained dominated by determination to reject a direct military challenge to Hitler; they declined even to shell the heavily industrialised Saarland, within easy range. The Daladier government, favouring an initiative as far as possible from France, was attracted by the notion of tightening the blockade of Germany through interdiction of its Swedish iron-ore supplies. To achieve this, it would be necessary to violate Norwegian neutrality, either by mining the inshore navigation route to force German ships out into the open sea, or by establishing troops and aircraft ashore, or both. Britain’s prime minister and foreign secretary, Neville Chamberlain and Lord Halifax, were unwilling to adopt such a course, despite the urgings of Churchill. Many days were devoted to planning and preparing a Norwegian expedition, but action was repeatedly postponed.

Gen. Sir Edmund Ironside, head of the British Army, wrote: ‘The French…put forward the most extravagant ideas. They are absolutely unscrupulous in everything.’ Gamelin said afterwards: ‘Public opinion did not know what it wanted done, but it wanted something else, and above all it wanted action.’ A French naval officer and later historian, Jacques Mordal, wrote contemptuously: ‘The idea was to do something, even something stupid.’ A British scheme for mining the Rhine became a new focus of friction: Paris feared that it would provoke German retaliation.

Almost nothing about these debates was known to the Allied peoples, who saw only their armies inert in the frontier snow, digging trenches and contemplating the Germans opposite. A sense of vacuity afflicted alike young and old, national leaders and humble citizens: ‘Everyone is getting married and engaged, or else having babies,’ wrote twenty-three-year-old Liverpool typist Doris Melling on 7 April. ‘Makes me feel rather stale and out of things.’ She was unimpressed, however, by columnist Lord Castlerosse’s flippant assertion in that day’s Sunday Express that any girl who had not found a husband by the end of the war was not really trying. ‘Most of my friends have made such messes of their married life – no proper homes, keeping in their jobs, and such.’

Maggie Joy Blunt, a thirty-year-old architectural writer of strong left-wing convictions, lived in Slough, west of London. She observed on 16 December 1939 that what seemed to her most remarkable about the war thus far was how little it changed most people’s lives:

We have had to suffer certain inconveniences – the blackout, petrol rations, altered bus and train services, a lack of theatrical entertainment, rising cost of food, scarcity of certain commodities such as electric light batteries, sugar, butter. A number of adults are doing jobs that they have never done before and never expected to do. But there has been no essential change in our way of living, in our systems of employment or education, in our ideas or ambitions…It is as though we were trying to play one more set of tennis before an approaching storm descends…A local MP…remarked that he was not in favour of this ‘half-asleep’ war. Scattering pamphlets [on Germany] is no more use than scattering confetti. I am sorry to have to say it, but we shall have to make the Germans suffer before we can make peace possible.

Had she and her compatriots known it, in the winter of 1939 the Nazis were troubled by many problems of their own. Germany had entered the war on the verge of bankruptcy, in consequence of Hitler’s armaments expenditure. There was so little money for civilian purposes that the railway system was crumbling, and desperately short of rolling stock: two bad train smashes killed 230 people, provoking fierce public anger. Far from the Nazis having made the trains run on time, industry suffered from disrupted coal deliveries, and the Gestapo reported widespread grumbling about the faltering passenger service. The Allied blockade had caused the collapse of Germany’s export markets and a serious shortage of raw materials. Hitler wished to launch a great offensive in the west on 12 November, and was furious when the Wehrmacht insisted on postponement until spring. The generals considered the weather wholly unfavourable to a major offensive, and recognised the deficiencies of their army’s performance in Poland: it was short of vehicles and weapons of all kinds. As the army expanded, the 24.5 million industrial workforce of May 1939 fell by four million. Industrial policy was characterised by wild vacillation and arbitrary production cuts, made necessary by steel shortages.

A decision was made that would influence German armaments production for years ahead: to focus immediate effort on manufacturing ammunition and Ju88 light bombers. The Luftwaffe convinced itself that the Ju88 was a war-winning weapon, and the plane indeed did notable service. Later, however, lack of new-generation aircraft became a severe handicap. The German navy remained weak – in Admiral Raeder’s gloomy words, ‘not at all adequately armed for the great struggle…it can only demonstrate that it knows how to go down with dignity’. Germany’s paper military strength in the winter of 1939 was only marginally greater than that of the Allies. Given all these difficulties, it is remarkable that Hitler retained his psychological dominance of the conflict. His great advantage was that the Allies had made a principled commitment to confront and defeat Nazism, while lacking any appetite for the bloody initiatives and human sacrifice required to achieve this. Thus, Hitler was left to make his own weather.

In the last weeks before Germany attacked in the west, relations between the two allies became sulphurous: each blamed the other for failure to wage war effectively. French public opinion turned decisively against prime minister Daladier, who sought a parliamentary vote of confidence on 20 March: only one deputy voted against him, 239 in his support – but three hundred abstained. Daladier resigned, though remaining in the government as defence minister, to be succeeded by Paul Reynaud. France’s new leader was a sixty-two-year-old conservative, notable for high intelligence and physical insignificance – he stood less than 5 feet 3 inches high. Eager to take the initiative, he now proposed a landing in Norway and bombing of Soviet oilfields at Baku. Gamelin said sourly: ‘After Daladier who couldn’t make a decision at all, here we are with Reynaud who makes one every five minutes.’ France’s prime minister initially supported Churchill’s cherished scheme to mine the Rhine, only to be repudiated by his own ministers, still fearing retaliation. The British said that if France would not support the mining operation, they in turn would decline to join a landing at Narvik.

In the first days of April, as snow vanished from the Continent the armies emerged as if from hibernation, looking about to discern what the new campaigning season might bring. At last, Churchill persuaded his government colleagues to support the mining of Norwegian waters. Four destroyers put to sea to execute this operation, while a small land force embarked at British ports, ready to sail to Norway if the Germans responded to the Royal Navy’s initiative. London was oblivious of the fact that a German fleet was already at sea. For months, Hitler had been fearful of British intervention in Norway, because of its implications for his iron-ore supplies. His agitation acquired urgency on 14 February 1940, when the Royal Navy’s destroyers pursued the Graf Spee’s supply ship Altmark into a Norwegian fjord to free 299 captive British merchant seamen. Determined to pre-empt a British initiative to seize a foothold in Norway, on 2 April he gave the final order for the invasion fleet to sail.

British ships and planes observed Germany’s intense flurry of naval activity, but naval commanders were so preoccupied with their own impending mining operation that they failed to realise that these movements presaged German action rather than reaction. The Admiralty decided that Admiral Raeder’s warships intended a breakout into the Atlantic to attack British sea lanes; this caused them to deploy much of the Home Fleet many hours’ steaming from Norway. Before dawn on 8 April, the Royal Navy indeed laid a minefield in Norwegian coastal waters. A few hours later, however, the Germans commenced air and naval landings to occupy the entire country. The Phoney War was over.

3

Blitzkriegs in the West

1 NORWAY

The smaller nations of Europe strove to escape involvement in the war. Most resisted association with Germany, which required acceptance of Hitler’s hegemony, but even those that favoured the objectives of the democracies were wary of joining them in belligerence. Historic experience argued that they would thus expose themselves to the horrors of war for small advantage: the fate of Poland and Finland highlighted the Allies’ inability to protect the dictators’ chosen victims. Holland and the Scandinavian countries had contrived to remain neutral in World War I. Why should they not do so again? In the winter of 1939–40, all took pains to avoid provoking Hitler. The Norwegians were more apprehensive about British designs on their coastline than German ones. At 0130 on 9 April, an aide awoke King Haakon of Norway to report: ‘Majesty, we are at war!’ The monarch promptly demanded: ‘Against whom?’

Despite repeated warnings that a German invasion was imminent, the country’s tiny army had not been mobilised. The capital was quickly blacked out, but old General Kristian Laake, Norway’s commander-in-chief, responded feebly to news that German warships were approaching up Oslo Fjord: he ordered reservists to be mustered by mail – which would assemble them under arms only on 11 April. His staff officers remonstrated, but Laake was in flight from reality: ‘A little exercise should do these units no harm!’ he declared indulgently. German warships entered ports and began to disembark troops. The Norwegians, French and British had alike deluded themselves that Hitler would never dare to invade Norway in the face of the Royal Navy. Yet poor intelligence and misjudged deployments caused the Admiralty to forfeit its best opportunities to wreak havoc, as the Germans landed on 9 April. Thereafter, although the invaders suffered severe attrition at sea, so too did the Royal Navy at the hands of the Luftwaffe and Kriegsmarine. Norway’s nearest coastline lay four hundred miles from Britain, beyond range of land-based air cover. The vulnerability of ships to bomber attack was soon brutally exposed.

The most dramatic development that first morning of the campaign took place in Oslo Fjord shortly after 0400, as the new cruiser Blücher, carrying thousands of German troops, approached Oscarsborg. The ancient fortress’s two nineteenth-century cannon, named ‘Moses’ and ‘Aaron’, were laboriously loaded. Local commander Colonel Birger Eriksen, knowing the gunners’ limitations, held his fire until the last moment. The cruiser was only five hundred yards offshore when the antique weapons belched flame. One shell hit the cruiser’s anti-aircraft control centre, while the other smashed into an aviation fuel store, causing a pillar of flame to leap skywards. After suffering two further hits from shore-launched torpedoes, within minutes Blücher was engulfed in fire and listing heavily, her ammunition exploding. The ship sank with the loss of a thousand German lives.

Confusion and black comedy then overtook Norway’s capital. The designated assault commander, Gen. Erich Engelbrecht, was a passenger on the stricken Blücher. He was rescued from the fjord by Norwegians who took him prisoner, leaving the invaders temporarily leaderless. Gen. Laake fled the city in the wake of his staff, first taking a tramcar, then attempting unsuccessfully to hitchhike, at last catching a train. The Norwegian government offered its resignation, which was rejected by the king. The national parliament, the Storting, entered emergency session, with fierce arguments about the merits of surrender. Ministers suggested demolishing key bridges to impede the invaders, but several deputies dissented as ‘this would mean destroying valuable architectural works’. The British ambassador delivered a message from London promising aid, but was vague about when this might materialise. German paratroopers secured Oslo airport, and most of Norway’s south-western ports were soon in enemy hands. The first elements of six divisions disembarked and deployed, while the government fled northwards.

Among stunned spectators of the invaders’ arrival was a nineteen-year-old Austrian Jewish refugee named Ruth Maier. On 10 April, in the Oslo suburb of Lillestrøm, she described in her diary a scene that was becoming a tragic commonplace of Europe: ‘I think of the Germans more as a natural disaster than as a people…We watch as people stream out of basements and crowd together in the streets with perambulators, woollen blankets and babies. They sit on lorries, horse carts, taxis and private cars. It’s like a film I saw: Finnish, Polish, Albanian, Chinese refugees…It is so simple and so sad: people are “evacuated” with woollen blankets, silver cutlery and babies in their arms. They are fleeing from bombs.’

The Norwegians displayed implacable hostility to their invaders. Even when compelled to acknowledge subjection, they were unimpressed by explanations. Ruth Maier heard three German soldiers tell a cluster of Oslo residents that 60,000 German civilians had been murdered by the Poles before the Wehrmacht intervened to save their ethnic brethren. Ruth laughed:

[The man] turns to me and says: ‘Are you laughing, Fräulein?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘And our Führer!’, he goes all misty-eyed. ‘Obviously he’s a human being like the rest of us, but he’s the best, the best we have in Europe.’ The [soldier] with the sky-blue eyes – also misty now – nods: ‘The best…the best …!’ More people come over to listen. The Norwegian says: ‘Are we really to believe that you’ve come over here to protect us?…That’s what it says here!’ He points to [a] newspaper…‘Protect you? No, we’re not doing that.’ But the blond interrupts him. ‘Yes, of course that’s what we’re doing.’ The brown-haired one thinks for a moment and then says, ‘Yes, actually, if we’re honest about it…we’re protecting you from the English.’ The Norwegian: ‘And you believe that?’

The faith of most Germans in the virtue as well as the expediency of their mission was fortified by its swift success. The invaders closed their grip on southern Norway, having secured communications with the homeland by occupying the intervening Danish peninsula almost without resistance. The Norwegian Storting met again in the little town of Elverum, forty miles north of Oslo, where its deliberations were sharpened by news that the Germans had nominated a traitor to lead a puppet regime in Oslo. ‘We now have a Kuusinen government,’ declared the prime minister contemptuously: he alluded to Finnish communist Otto Kuusinen, who collaborated with Stalin’s invasion of Finland. But Norway’s counterpart, Vidkun Quisling, would become much more notorious, his name passing into the English language.

Four busloads of German paratroopers on their way to Elverum came under fire from a roadblock manned by members of a local rifle club; the Norwegians drove the attackers back in disarray, mortally wounding the German air attaché Captain Eberhard Spiller, who had been tasked to arrest the nation’s leadership. The royal family and ministers decamped to the little village of Nybergsund. King Haakon VII was a tall, gaunt, sixty-seven-year-old Dane, elected monarch when the Norwegians gained independence from Sweden in 1905. In 1940, he displayed dignity and courage. At a government council held amid the deep snow of Nybergsund on the evening of 10 April, he told ministers in a high, quavering voice: ‘I am profoundly moved at the idea of having to assume personal responsibility for the woes that will befall our country and our people if German demands are rejected…The government is free to decide, but I shall make my own position clear: I cannot accept…This would conflict with everything I have considered to be my duty as a king.’ Rather than bow to Berlin’s insistence that he should endorse Quisling, he would abdicate. The old king lapsed into silence for several long moments, then burst into tears. At last, he continued: ‘The government must now take its decision. It is not bound by my position…Yet I felt it was my duty to make it known.’