A World at Arms (24 page)

The British government, on the other hand, was most skeptical.
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This appears in part to have been due to a slightly more realistic assessment of the risks.
^j
As for the British Communist Party, it, of course, was also parrotting the line about the desirability of an immediate peace with Hitler, but its numerical insignificance eliminated it as a serious concern. The British government, both because of general principles and out of concern for American public opinion, was also much more reluctant than the French to violate the neutrality of Norway and Sweden, a step that increasingly appeared to be an unavoidable concomitant of any effective assistance to Finland.

Whatever the abstract sympathies Norwegian and Swedish governments might have for fellow Scandinavians in their hour of peril, they were not about to do anything which exposed them to the risks of hostilities with either Germany or the Soviet Union. The Swedes, as will be evident later, would go very far to accommodate Germany: they would allow hundreds of thousands of German troops to move across their territory to and from different parts of Norway and they would permit tens of thousands to move across to attack the Soviet Union. This was from their point of view at a time and under circumstances without any
major risk of retaliation from either Britain or Russia. If they allowed British and French troops across to Finland in 1940, however, certainly Germany and possibly Russia would take military action against them. The Western Powers, therefore, could move only if they were willing to fight Norway and Sweden, and this they were not prepared to do. Even before these issues were sorted out, new Soviet policies had altered the whole situation.

When the second as well as the initial set of Soviet offensives failed, Stalin made a number of changes in policy and approach. Massive reinforcements from all over the Soviet Union were moved to the Finnish front, particularly the Karelian Isthmus, to make a major offensive feasible. That offensive was designed to crush Finnish resistance, penetrate the Mannerheim line, and force the Finns to give up the fighting. As soon as the preparations for the great offensive were well under way, Stalin in effect dropped the Kuusinen regime and agreed to negotiate once again with what had, to his great surprise, turned out to be the real government of Finland.
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As the Red Army clawed its way through the Finnish defenses, the Finns decided that further resistance was hopeless and, with Sweden acting as intermediary, negotiated for peace.

The Soviet demands now went considerably beyond what they had asked earlier and, it would appear, became slightly greater during the very process of negotiations, perhaps because the military situation continued to shift in Russia’s favor.
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Stalin insisted on a substantially enlarged transfer of territory in the south, a major cession in central Finland, and on an area larger than that specified the preceding October to be leased at Hangö for a Soviet base. While in the north the Soviets did not extend their territorial demands beyond the western portion of the Rybachi peninsula already specified earlier, and agreed to evacuate the Petsamo area and to its return to Finland, there was now to be no territorial compensation for the Finns. The Finnish government saw no alternative to accepting what it considered a very harsh peace. They had fought hard and lost; they had no real prospects of effective aid; and though they had retained their independence, their position for defending it in the future was geographically weaker than before. There may, however, be other elements in the picture which relate to the shift in Soviet policy of January 1940.

There is no way of knowing for certain why and in what direction Stalin revised his approach early in 1940, but the following is suggested as the most likely explanation in view of the known facts and subsequent Soviet policy. With Soviet prestige clearly engaged, Stalin was determined to win the war and to commit whatever resources were needed for that purpose. But in line with the cautious approach he had earlier
followed toward Japan in the Nomonhan incident, victory in battle should pave the way for a prompt settlement the other side could accept
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rather than extended further fighting. That fighting limited the ability of the Soviet Union to push forward in the Balkans and had all sorts of attendant risks–in this case, possible war with Britain and France and even complications with the United States, which repeatedly protested against the Soviet invasion.
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Aquick settlement could be reached only by abandoning Kuusinen’s crew and dealing with the government in control in Helsinki. While such a settlement gave the Soviet Union substantially more than had been asked before the fighting began, it would leave the Finns their independence, at least for the time being.
^k

It seems to me that it is in this context that one must see the return of the occupied territory around Petsamo to Finland. That area not only contained valuable nickel deposits and provided Finland with its only outlet to the Arctic Ocean but it also constituted a territorial buffer between the Soviet Union and Norway.
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All the evidence available to Moscow pointed to a possible conflict between the Germans and the Western Powers in Scandinavia; here was the simplest way to isolate the Soviet Union from any such conflict: she would have no border with either Sweden or Norway. The just defeated Finns could serve to keep any new complications in Scandinavia away from the Soviet Union. As for Finland’s ultimate fate, that could be decided later.

Stalin had miscalculated and some 200,000 Soviet soldiers–along with 25,000 Finns–had paid with their lives, but he had drawn new conclusions from the experience. On the other hand, by driving the Finns into implacable hostility, Stalin had left Leningrad, Murmansk, the Soviet Union’s ice-free port, as well as the Murmansk railway, in even greater danger than before; but this was a miscalculation he did not understand at the time.

The peace treaty between the Soviet Union and Finland was agreed to in the night of March 12–13,1940, and accepted by a stunned Finnish parliament on the 15th. In the following days the Red Army occupied the areas allotted to the Soviet Union and drew back to the new border in the north. Although here again clarity will not be attained for years, another major decision of fateful importance was made by Stalin in those days and should, in my judgement, be seen in connection with his concern over isolating the Soviet Union even more tightly from the continuing war between Germany and the Western Powers.

The systematic shooting of almost all Polish officers, reserve officers
and other specialists captured by the Red Army in 1939 has generally been referred to as the Katyn forest massacre from the location near Smolensk where a substantial proportion of their bodies was found, and is discussed in the literature in connection with that grisly discovery in the spring of 1943. While the repercussions of the discovery will be examined in the context of other developments of 1943, the point that must be remembered is that the camps in which the victims had been held were dissolved in March and the men killed early in April of 1940 (obviously with no anticipation that the corpses would be found).
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The decision to dissolve these camps and murder the inmates simultaneously at different geographical locations in the Soviet Union was made by Stalin and confirmed by the Politburo on March 5, 1940.
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It has been suggested that the motive for this terrible step was to reassure the Germans as to the reality of Soviet anti-Polish policy. This explanation is completely unconvincing in view of the care with which the Soviet regime kept the massacre secret from the very German government it was supposed to impress. Besides, nothing the Soviet Union was doing in east Poland would or could lead the Germans to believe that Stalin had suddenly become a great friend of Poland.

A more likely explanation is that, like the rapid and in Soviet (though not Finnish) eyes moderate settlement with Finland, this step should be seen as looking to a future in which there might possibly again be a Poland on the Soviet Union’s western border. Since he intended to keep the eastern portion of the country in any case, Stalin could be certain that any revived Poland would be unfriendly. Under those circumstances, depriving it of a large proportion of its military and technical elite would also make it weaker. Before the spring campaign weather arrived in Western and Central Europe, the Soviet Union would isolate and protect itself even further from whatever might happen in what it called the Second Imperialist War. As the Secretary of the Soviet embassy in Rome explained in early March, the Soviet-Finnish peace would make clear to the Italians that for them as well as Germany and the Soviet Union the real enemy was Great Britain. “One must ardently hope that the world war will begin in earnest as soon as possible.”
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GERMAN PLANS FOR THE WEST

The Germans had hoped to launch the war “in earnest” long before. Hitler had been anticipating a war against the Western Powers for years. As he began to think of that war as an imminent possibility rather than a prospect for the distant future, he had formed some very specific ideas of how it would be waged. Two inter-related aspects appeared in his
formulations relatively early. One was that Germany would invade the Low Countries, both Holland and Belgium and not only Belgium as in World War I. The other one, clearly related to this concept, was that the key enemy in the West was not France–as most of his military advisors believed–but England, and that the control of the Low Countries was particularly important for Germany so that she could strike at England from bases there as well as in northern France. He explained these views to his military leaders on May 28, 1938,
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and again on May 23, 1939.
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The army would seize the area, which the German air force could then utilize for what Hitler called the “death blow” at England. The instrument with which this death blow was to be struck was the JU-88, the two-engined “wonder bomber.”
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On August 31, 1939, Hitler ordered a dramatic increase in JU-88 production, and again on September 6, before leaving Berlin for the front in Poland, ordered special priority for the JU-88 program.
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Simultaneously he ordered a speed-up in preparation for gas warfare.
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Both the JU-88 and the gas-warfare programs ran into many difficulties; they are mentioned here as signs that the German allocation of resources and priorities was geared to a perception of concentrating on blows against England from bases in Holland and Belgium (as well as northern France), which would be seized by a violation of the neutrality of the Low Countries, a plan held to consistently from pre-war times into the early days of the invasion of Poland. The new bases in the Low Countries and France would, of course, also be available for the German navy’s war against British shipping.

In the first days of the war, as German forces invaded Poland, the army necessarily confined itself to a defensive posture in the West, but this was only to protect German territory against any French offensive. The intention always was to move forces from the East to the West as quickly as possible, and by September 8 Hitler was already discussing a forthcoming German offensive in the West.
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He explained his ideas to the Commanders-in-Chief of the army, navy and air force on September 27 and ordered planning for the offensive to go forward.
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He was thinking of an attack in late October or early November; in other words, just as soon as forces could possibly be moved West and prepared for a new operation and in any case before winter weather made an attack that was expected to be heavily dependent on air strikes impossible.

Two aspects of these plans as Hitler saw them, and as his military advisors developed them, deserve attention. As for the specifics of these early plans, they aimed precisely at the goals Hitler had been talking about at least since May of 1938. The offensive was to concentrate on striking into the Low Countries and into northern France to defeat the
enemy forces there and seize the basis for further operations, primarily against England. Though sometimes referred to as repetition of the pre-World War I Schlieffen plan, it was in reality nothing of the sort, sharing only its insistence on violating the neutrality of the Low Countries. The new plan was not the vast encircling movement into
France
that a mentally unbalanced Chief of the German General Staff had once envisioned as the best way to protect Austria–Hungary against a Russian attack, regardless of whether it also brought England into the war. Instead this was a thrust westward with a primary emphasis on defeating
England
by seizing bases in the Low Countries and northern France for air and naval use against Great Britain. The defeat of the French forces likely to be met during this operation would be an essential by-product of the campaign but not its main objective.
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The initial German planning for the attack in the West has to be understood from this perspective.

The other important aspect to be noted is the opposition Hitler’s planned attack evoked among some German military leaders. A few were opposed to having Germany once again attack a neutral country, to say nothing of several neutrals. Many believed that it made more sense to await a French offensive –if it ever came. Others hoped that the existing stalemate in the West without serious fighting might lead to peace talks. Most were much less confident than Hitler about the ability of German forces to defeat the French and instead anticipated a costly stalemate, as had happened in World War I.
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Finally there was a small number who thought that rather than going along with this descent into the abyss of total war it would be preferable to overthrow the National Socialist regime.
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We have already seen how this combination of views affected some attempts to contact the Western Allies, in the hope of obtaining assurances that might encourage more of the wavering generals to join the tiny number of resolute individuals willing to risk a coup attempt. Nothing came of any of this, primarily because the key figures in the German military hierarchy were unwilling to act. The central question was always whether the Commander-in-Chief of the army, then General, later Field Marshal, Walther von Brauchitsch, could be moved to action against Hitler. A man entirely lacking in moral courage, he had been bought by Hitler quite literally in 1938,
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and there was no way to provide him with a backbone implant. When officers horrified by the atrocities being committed by Germans in Poland mobilized the senior living German soldier, the aged Field Marshal August von Mackensen of World War I fame, to appeal to von Brauchitsch to put a halt to the horrors, the latter responded
that he would talk things over with Himmler!
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That was also his recipe for dealing with the crisis of confidence created within the German army by Himmler’s published summons to the men of the SS to beget lots of children, inside and outside marriage.
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It should not surprise anyone that his minimal protest to Hitler on November 5, 1939, about the intended offensive in the West was quickly overborne by an angry and self-confident Führer.
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If there was any atrocity or violation of a neutral in World War II that von Brauchitsch stopped or even tried to stop prior to his dismissal in December 1941, no record of it has been found.