A World at Arms (18 page)

A second element of the conflict at sea was the restriction imposed on the Germans by the absence of any effective naval air arm. This is a long and complicated story, the origins of which are even now not entirely clear, but the key fact was that the German navy never had its own air reconnaissance system and had to depend on the very intermittent and eventually non-existent willingness or ability of the German air force to provide such support. In practice, this meant that German submarines had to find the convoys themselves, by no means an easy task and one that would subsequently lead them into great difficulties.

The third factor evident in the first months of naval war was the extraordinary willingness of British naval ships to run whatever risks seemed appropriate to fight it out regardless of losses in specific engagements. They were spared the disaster which would surely have followed
had the pet project of Winston Churchill as First Lord of the Admiralty been implemented in the fall of 1939. As yet unaware of the danger of sending surface warships into seas dominated by enemy air forces, he was urging that British navy units move into the Baltic Sea in the face of German control of the skies there.
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When it came to actions in reality, as opposed to imagination, however, the Royal Navy showed daring and skill. The destruction of the
Graf Spee
by British cruisers she outclassed was only the first spectacular instance. Another would follow soon after, and one closely related to that example.

The
Graf Spee
while busy sinking ships had been supplied by a German naval auxiliary, the
Altmark
(which had been sent out for this purpose as early as August 5, 1939)
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and to which she transferred the crews captured from those ships. The
Altmark
was then to take these as prisoners back to Germany. While illegally taking her prisoners through Norwegian waters, the
Altmark
was boarded by a British destroyer which freed the 300 prisoners on February 16, 1940, while allowing the ship itself to continue.
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The Royal Navy had not lost its spirit, as many subsequent events confirmed.
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If protection of Allied shipping against German submarines and surface ships was the major defensive function of Allied naval power, its offensive role was its participation in the blockade of Germany. The mythology of World War I included belief in the efficacy of the blockade as a decisive weapon in the Allied success against the Central Powers. Scholarship questioning this view did not appear until long after World War II; and in the pre-war years the British government assumed that blockade would again become a major element in the Allied arsenal in any new war against Germany. In the event, the measures initiated in 1939 and strengthened in the following years did have some effect on Germany, but their impact was greatly reduced by the availability of supplies provided by or across the Soviet Union until June 1941, by the German conquest of Western Europe from the spring of 1940 on, by pre-war German stockpiling of critical supplies, and by changes in German industrial procedures which reduced dependence on imported raw materials. First British and later United States purchases of scarce materials in neutral countries, especially Spain, Portugal and Turkey, had their effect, primarily in the last year of World War II, but there is no evidence to suggest that the measures of what was termed “economic warfare” actually played a major role in Allied victory.
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It was in fact as a part of their effort to throttle the German war economy that the British and French governments in the winter of 1939–40 gave serious consideration to the occupation of Sweden and aerial bombardment of the Caucasus oil fields during the Russo-Finnish War.
Some aspects of this will be discussed in connection with the review of that conflict, but it should be noted here that the root of these projects was to be found in the hope of depriving Germany of iron ore from Sweden and oil from the Soviet Union. In the case of the former, the massive shipments of high-grade ores to Germany were believed then and continued to be thought later to be essential to Germany’s armaments industry. Recent research has shown these calculations to have been somewhat exaggerated–Germany had alternatives available to her–but at the time it was widely believed that an Allied occupation of the key mines in northern Sweden, attendant on the sending of assistance to Finland in her defense against Soviet invasion, would have the effect of crippling armaments production in the Third Reich.
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Similarly, bombing Soviet oil fields in the Caucasus, especially those at Baku, was seen as a way of making it impossible for the Soviet Union to provide Germany with the oil supplies so important to her war effort. Pushed very heavily by the French government, this project was delayed and eventually turned down by the British government which saw it as certain to bring a war with Russia but unlikely to end either the war with Germany or the newly initiated one against the Soviet Union. Both this and the Scandinavian project reveal more about the anxiety of the French government to transfer hostilities from Western Europe to practically anywhere else on the globe with little attention to the likely implications and about the greater realism of the British leaders of the time, especially Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax, than about any real prospects of defeating Germany by measures in the economic field.
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THE NEUTRALS

If these were the initial moves of the major belligerents, how did the new war look to other powers? Italy had allied herself formally with Germany in May of 1939 by treaty.
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Her understanding had, however, been that several more years of peace would precede the joint war against France and Britain for which the “Pact of Steel” was designed. Moving forward at his own speed rather than Rome’s, Hitler had disregarded the warnings from Italy and had plunged into war. The Italians had not only stood aside but had tipped off the Western Powers of their intention to do so. They had been angry with the Germans for disregarding what they perceived as Italy’s need for additional preparation, and had been alarmed at the possibility that if they joined in they would be exposed to defeats from French and British attacks launched against them while Germany concentrated her forces on Poland. They saw themselves
exposed in 1939 to the fate which had befallen Austria–Hungary in 1914 when Russian armies destroyed the cream of the Dual Monarchy’s forces in Galicia while Germany concentrated on what was supposed to be a quick victory over France. Italy’s Foreign Minister, Count Galeazzo Ciano, was especially annoyed with the Germans and reinforced as much as he could the inclination of Mussolini to refrain from entering the war on Germany’s side. The Italian fear of an Allied attack on them was by no means unwarranted. The vulnerability of Italy was as obvious to London and Paris as it was to Rome-all three overestimating Italian strength about equally–but the Western Powers were not about to take advantage of their superiority by attacking a neutral Italy.
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For a short time in late September the Italians thought that perhaps the Germans could be persuaded to give up a large portion of the Polish territory they had occupied, make peace with a Polish government, and thus restore something akin to the situation preceding the outbreak of war. That, in turn, might have provided the Italian government the year of peace they wanted to prepare themselves for war with the Western Powers. Count Ciano learned very quickly, however, during his visit to Germany on October 1st that the Germans were under no circumstances going to give up anything. Hitler became as hysterical over suggestions of restoring an independent Poland when urged in that direction by Ciano as he rejected all ideas of a revived Czechoslovakia. Hitler explained that he did not expect peace with the West-a subject to which we will return–but was prepared to fight to victory. Rejoicing in his victory and his fine relations with the Soviet Union, he was not about to draw back.
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Mussolini also toyed briefly with the idea of organizing a Balkan bloc to mediate peace, but quickly drew back as it became clear that this might separate him permanently from Germany. His basic policy was and remained an alignment with Hitler and entrance into the war as soon as possible. He could see no alternative way for Italy to attain the imperial ambitions he craved for her. If the Allies won–as he sometimes feared and as Ciano expected–they would hem in Italy’s position permanently. If Germany won without Italian help, Italy would not only get nothing for herself but could in fact end up under German domination, something Mussolini feared. Whatever the hopes and fears of Ciano or the Italian military, the Vatican or the royal family, to say nothing of the Italian population, Mussolini would steer a course toward war. Only the details of timing and intervening issues of the day-to-day conduct of government remained to be settled.
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The Italian government during the period of “non-belligerence,” as they called it in preference to the pacific sounding term “neutrality,”
cooperated minimally with the Germans in the economic sphere. Here the Italians were in a quandary. The very preparation they wanted to make for war with the West entailed imports which might be made subject to blockade. Simultaneously, the Germans alone would and could supply the coal Italy needed, a hold on Italy reinforced by Germany’s conquest of Poland’s coal mines which had been supplying Italy since the British General Strike of 1926 had interrupted coal shipments from Britain. Whatever the details and the arguments over shipments, purchases, and blockade measures, the basic position of Mussolini never changed.
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The same thing was true of the continuing troubles over the long-promised evacuation of Germans from the South Tyrol. The Italians repeatedly and pointedly contrasted the rapidity and apparent smoothness with which German people were evacuated from the Baltic States and other areas coming under Soviet control with the interminable delay in moving Germans out of the South Tyrol.
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But while they complained and fretted, they could never see themselves breaking over this issue with the Germans, who shrewdly pointed out to them that it was in part to provide settlement space for these very people that she could not abandon her schemes for massive population shifts in Poland. And the Italians themselves, or at least the authorities on the spot, were by no means certain that any massive emigration of the sort the German government was planning, as a part of its population transfer program, would be such a wonderful thing for them: who would cultivate the alpine farms abandoned by those who left for Germany?

There were plenty of occasions for friction since Italians and Germans heartily disliked one another, and this gave rise to any number of incidents, including a German-deciphered warning by the Italians to Holland and Belgium that they were about to be invaded.
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All the same, Mussolini would not break with Hitler, Hitler would not break with Mussolini, and no person or group in either country could force a major shift in policy.
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Mussolini was especially concerned about the possibility that the Soviet Union might displace Italy as Germany’s most important ally and did what he could to deflect what he perceived to be a real danger to Italy’s position in a Europe in which Germany would, in his judgement, always be the most powerful country. This was the underlying reason for his willingness to tolerate and even share in Ciano’s use of the opportunity provided by the Russo-Finnish war to endanger Italian-Soviet relations which had generally been excellent since the early 1920s.
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The Germans did their best to patch up the quarrel between their old and their new–found friend,
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but Mussolini need not have worried; Hitler had no intention of letting his satisfaction over Soviet support in the current war against the Western Powers interfere with
his long-term aims for expansion in the East. On the very day that the Soviet-Finnish war was ending, Mussolini would commit himself to entering the war against Britain and France on Germany’s side.

The other European power closely aligned with Germany, Spain, had made no secret of its interest in remaining outside the war, at least for the time being. The civil war there had ended with the triumph of Francisco Franco’s Nationalists only a few months earlier, and the country was in no condition to undertake any great adventures. Not only was a period of reconstruction after three years of warfare necessary, but Spain was dependent upon imports of food and petroleum products, with both subject to interruption by Allied blockade. The economic needs of Spain, in fact, led to important trade agreements with France in January and with England in March of 1940. The Germans were not only obviously unable to provide Spain with any goods the latter needed; but their insistence in the months between the end of the civil war and the beginning of World War II on repayment by Spain for the aid provided during the fighting soured opinion in government circles in Madrid.
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And certainly the Spanish dictator, who had just been urged most insistently by Berlin to join the Anti-Comintern Pact,
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was not enthused by Germany’s signing up with the Soviet Union.
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Nevertheless the Spanish government thought of itself as favoring Germany and was, as will be shown, willing to assist the German war effort. In the long run, there was always the hope that a German victory might bring the return of Gibraltar to Spanish control.
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The German government was not surprised by Spain’s neutrality in 1939. They had been angered by Franco’s early announcement of neutrality in 1938, but they expected nothing else this time. Already in January 1939 Hitler had explained to Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels that Spain could do no more than remain neutral.
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The Germans had, however, long been planning to use neutral Spanish and other territory for their naval war against the Western Powers. The German navy had taken preliminary steps in this direction already in 1938; in January 1939 they drew lessons for the future.
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A study of this subject remains to be written; understandably the Germans–and presumably the Spaniards–did not leave massive records of these clandestine activities, but enough has already come to light to provide some sense of what was going on.
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From the beginning of the war into its last days, the Germans maintained a massive intelligence operation inside Spain, often with Spain’s assistance. In addition to using this, especially to observe traffic through the Straits of Gibraltar, the Germans relied on Spanish harbors to repair and refuel their submarines. This had been a key part of their pre-war plans for “using” Spain’s neutrality, and it would long be an important
feature of the German conduct of submarine warfare. If usually not as publicly conspicuous as presented in the movie, “Das Boot,” it was still a highly effective way for the Spanish government to show where its real sympathies lay.
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