A World at Arms (25 page)

The army Chief of Staff, General Franz Halder, at times pondered taking action against Hitler but never did; of the three Army Group commanders one, Ritter von Leeb, was willing to move at that time, but, however skeptical, neither of the others, von Bock or von Rundstedt, would act. Eventually each would be cowed and bribed into line.

The Commander-in-Chief of the German navy was at this point, as always, in full agreement on major issues with Hitler. Since, like Hitler, he saw England rather than France as Germany’s main enemy, he welcomed the proposed acquisition of bases for the navy, especially in northern France, and would only, as will be discussed below, press on Hitler in early October an extension of German offensive operations into Norway in order to obtain naval bases on that side of England as well. Göring, the air force Commander-in-Chief, had some doubts about the offensive in the West, but neither then nor at any other time would even think of defying his beloved Führer.

The fact that there was considerable doubt among the military about the planned offensive was known to Hitler, and he devoted considerable time and effort to counteracting it. In a memorandum dated October 9 (though written earlier) and in a talk to some 200 German high-ranking officers on November 23 he explained his own reasoning at great length.
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He set forth the basic assumptions underlying his policy. He had always intended to go to war, and it was therefore critical to select the proper moment. This was it. If Germany were to conquer the living space she needed and avoid destruction at the hands of her enemies, which he asserted was their goal, she must move now. Time was not an ally because Britain and France would build up their forces, the Soviet Union might not always be friendly, Italy might not always be helpful, and the United States might not always be neutral. A defensive posture would be far too dangerous. Now that Germany could take the initiative and do so on one front, she should move as quickly as possible, allowing no opportunity for a compromise but striking into the Low Countries to provide a base for the continuing struggle with Germany’s main enemy
in the West: Britain.
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Germany, he was confident, would win–otherwise all would be lost.

Hitler had reinforced his own certainty by these arguments, even if he had not persuaded all in his audience. First plans and orders were issued with a target date in early November; it was in connection with the necessary reviewing of these orders that Hitler left the annual celebration of the failed coup attempt of 1923 early on the evening of November 9 and thus narrowly escaped the assassination scheme of Elser. The weather, however, repeatedly forced postponement; the Germans needed clear weather to take full advantage of their air force.

The successive postponements eventually pushed the offensive back six months from the original date in November 1939 to May 1940, but those postponements themselves had a whole series of repercussions. In the first place, they obviously provided the Germans with added time to assimilate the lessons of the Polish campaign in regard to troop training as well as to make up for equipment losses and repairs. As will be shown in the following chapter, their enemies did not put this half-year interval to equally good use. Secondly, the German intention to attack repeatedly leaked out, at times because of Allied intelligence; at least once through an Italian warning to the Dutch and Belgians;
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once by the accidental landing of a German plane carrying relevant operational orders which were not all completely destroyed; and repeatedly by the deliberate warnings given out by a key opponent of the National Socialist regime in German central military intelligence, Colonel Hans Oster.
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The very repetition of warnings and alerts followed by new warnings and alerts, however, eventually had the effect of obscuring the significance of the final warnings in May of 1940; it was hard to credit the fact that the warnings had been accurate when each–until the last one–had been followed by postponement.

A third aspect of the postponements was a twofold reorientation in the German military planning for the offensive in the West. One of these, more in detail than in broad concept, affected the role of Holland in the invasion plans. A shift from inclination toward a partial to a complete occupation of that country was accompanied by increasing emphasis on the use of airborne troops, the latter also being given an enhanced role in the seizure of key spots controlling river crossings in Belgium.
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More significant was a shift in the general operational concept of the offensive. Increasingly the main thrust was changed from the northern to the southern Army Group participating in the offensive into
the Low Countries (while the third held the front along the old German–French border).

This shift involved more than a reassignment of specific divisions from one point or higher command to another. Rather it meant a slow but basic change in both the goal of the offensive and the means to attain it. Instead of a thrust into the Low Countries and northern France to provide a basis for future operations against Britain and France, the new plan was designed to destroy so large a proportion of the French and British forces on the continent as to end the war in the West at one blow. The attack by the Army Group on the northern section was now intended to draw out and engage whatever French and British forces joined the Dutch and Belgians in defense of their countries, while a carefully planned and hopefully in the initial stages concealed armored thrust further south, through the Ardennes, drove to the coast like a scythe, cutting off the French and British forces that had moved northward to meet the German invasion. The destruction of these, however, would both open all of France to German conquest and provide bases on the Atlantic as well as the Channel coast for naval and air warfare against England if she remained in the war.

This reorientation in goals and operational plans was the result of combining the thinking of Hitler and one of his generals, Erich von Manstein, with the ambitions of the Commander-in-Chief of the Army Group now to have the key role (von Rundstedt) and the armored commanders who would spearhead the attack. The very fact that both the Low Countries and the Western Allies had learned some details of the
earlier
German plan now served to make them even more vulnerable to the
later
one, because it suggested that a massive Allied advance might halt the main German push when in fact it would draw them more deeply into a trap.

Simultaneously, it should be noted, the increasing prospect of the new plan’s real possibility of success reduced whatever inclination to oppose Hitler and his offensive project had existed among the German military leaders. The few who still had their reservations either withdrew into silence or were transferred to unimportant assignments.
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THE GERMAN CONQUEST OF NORWAY AND DENMARK

Closely related to the intended offensive in the West, and given a major impetus by the original German plan for an operation limited to the seizure of the Low Countries and portions of northern France, was the German project for seizing Norway and, as a subsidiary portion of that seizure, also occupying Denmark. Both because there was some discussion among the Western Allies about an operation in Scandinavia and because the central figure in the German plan, Admiral Raeder, was tried for his role in the invasion of Norway after the war at Nürnberg, especially eloquent lies were told about this project by him and those who wanted to defend him.
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In order to understand the origins and purpose of the German attack northwards, however, it is necessary to disregard the fairy tales put forward afterwards and to examine the operation in the terms in which it was seen at the time.

The concept of the German navy’s needing bases in Norway for a war with England in order to break out of the confines of the North Sea goes back decades before World War II.
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The German naval leadership of World War II was entirely familiar with this idea and began discussing its application under the current circumstances right after the war started.
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In early October 1939, there was extensive discussion and correspondence in naval circles about the need for bases for the naval war against England. Bases near Murmansk, on the Norwegian coast with Trondheim as a favorite–and on the French Atlantic coast all figured in the discussion. The doubts of the army Chief of Staff, General Halder, that the German army could reach the French Atlantic coast, and the developing original plan for an offensive westwards which did
not
look toward a prompt occupation of Brittany and the coast south of that peninsula, combined in early October, 1939, to concentrate naval attention on Norway.
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It was under these circumstances that Raeder raised the question of obtaining bases in Norway with Hitler on October 10, 1939.

Raeder argued that the more brutally Germany waged the war at sea, the sooner the whole war would be over. The possibility of conflict with the United States should not be allowed to hinder the war at sea–if the war lasted a long time, the United States would join in anyway. The Soviet offer of a base near Murmansk would be investigated, but a base in Norway, preferably at Trondheim, was especially desirable.
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While
the protection of Germany’s steel imports from Sweden would later be brought in as an added argument for the occupation of Norway–in the winter, when the Gulf of Bothnia was frozen, the ore was routed by train to the Norwegian port of Narvik and then by boat down the coast the original concept was an offensive one aimed at England. Once Hitler’s attention had been focused on Norway and orders extracted from him to prepare an invasion of that country, the leaders of the German navy could afterwards pretend to have been acting only in accordance with orders from above.
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As the project for an occupation of Norway developed in the following months, several aspects of it acquired ever greater significance. Once inaugurated, these preparations looked not to a temporary military action as a wartime expedient but to the permanent incorporation of Norway into a greater German empire: the country was never to regain its independence.
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In making their preparations, the Germans took advantage of internal Norwegian support, led and symbolized by the man who would give his name to the concept of selling your own country to the tender mercies of another, Vidkun Quisling. This leader of Norwegian sympathizers with National Socialism had long been in touch with and in part financed by the foreign policy office of the Nazi Party under Alfred Rosenberg. He was now put in touch with Admiral Raeder, the key advocate of a German occupation of his country. Quisling urged the Germans to move quickly and, as former War Minister of Norway, did what he could to provide them with tactical military information that might assist them in seizing Norway as easily as possible. A man who combined enormous vanity, cupidity, and stupidity, he would earn his keep and his reputation.
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Quisling’s role as a traitor to his country turned out to be a mixed blessing for his German paymasters. He was so unpopular in Norway that German sponsorship of him undoubtedly hardened the resolve of most Norwegians against the invader, but at one place he could be of help: at Narvik. This was a key point in the whole German operation; it was furthest from Germany, most exposed, and most difficult for the navy to reach. The commander of the garrison there happened to be a Quisling supporter, and in the event he would promptly surrender to the German invaders.
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These were to be brought primarily on ten fast destroyers, which could not venture that distance without assurance of maintenance and refueling. These would be provided, in turn, by Germany’s other supporter in the daring strike into Arctic waters: the Soviet Union. A special maintenance and supply ship, the tanker
Jan Wellem
had previously been dispatched to “Basis Nord,” the German naval base at Zapadnaya Litsa Bay near Murmansk; and as soon as the invasion of
Norway was scheduled for April 9, the ship was ordered from there to Narvik where she met and refuelled the German destroyers. After the Royal Navy had destroyed the German warships at Narvik, the
Jan Wellem
was scuttled, but she had by then played her part in facilitating the conquest of Norway.
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The dramatic events at Narvik, of which only a few have just been mentioned, show how the German plan called for a combined operation in which the whole navy was committed to the support of the army in a campaign which had been developed in response to that navy’s pressure. Given the location of Norway in relation to German military power, the planning staff in Berlin came to the conclusion that Denmark had to be seized at the same time, and all planning took this into account. The promises to respect Denmark’s neutrality were to be violated, along with those to the Norwegians; it was hoped that the Danes might be overawed so quickly that no serious fighting would be required. At the appropriate moment, Berlin would publish “proofs” that the invasion of the two countries was everybody’s fault but Germany’s.
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Those who had prepared an analogous volume to show that the outbreak of war in 1939 was the fault of Poland and Britain had time for this project before getting out the next set of pretexts for the invasions of Holland, Belgium, and Luxembourg. They would get lots more practice, even if few outside Germany believed them.

As the approaching end of the Russo-Finnish War suggested that there was no likelihood of any Allied intervention in Scandinavia, some German officers began to have their doubts about the planned operation against Norway and Denmark. Even in the navy there seem to have been last-minute reservations, perhaps reinforced by the knowledge that the changes made in the meantime in the German plans for an offensive in the West now promised access to the better bases on the French coast they had hoped for but had not been promised in the fall. These doubts were reinforced by the German Minister to Norway, who was confident that Norway would maintain her neutrality and that the Allies would not violate it. Raeder still believed in the operation, as he told Hitler on March 26. Hitler had made up his mind and would not draw back. As he explained to the commanders of the forthcoming operation at a final conference on April 1, the very daring quality of the invasion would assure success. The war with England was the essential key to Germany’s future access to the oceans, and the opportunity of fighting on one front must be seized. France was weak; the German air force superior to the British and French air forces combined; Italy was getting ready to join Germany’s side; and relations with the Soviet Union as good as Germany could possibly want. Now was the time to move.
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