A World at Arms (32 page)

It was precisely this point, however, which was understood by Eamon de Valera, the leader of the Irish Free State, who wanted his country to stay out of the war but preferred for England rather than Germany to win. Facing a very difficult internal situation, where a radical opposition wanted to work with the Germans to overthrow his government as well as the British administration in Ulster, and where that radical support had contacts reaching into his own government–including the general commanding one of the two Irish divisions–de Valera resisted all approaches from London.
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In June of 1940 those approaches included an offer to negotiate an end to partition. Since the end of partition would mean, in effect, that all of Ireland would be in the war on Britain’s side, de Valera refused. He asserted that Ireland would fight whomever invaded first, Germany or Britain, and ask the other for assistance; but he authorized preliminary arrangements for such assistance only with the British.
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He passed up an opportunity for Irish unity in the summer of 1940 and again in December 1941; formal neutrality looked to him like the most practical policy for his people. The defeat of the Germans and the restraint of the Allies left Ireland both neutrality and partition.
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The German bombing of Belfast in April of 1941 and of Dublin the following month greatly affected public opinion in the Irish Free State and probably made it easier for de Valera to make some practical concession first to the British and later also the Americans in the conduct of the war; but from his perspective, it would always remain their war.
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At home, the British, having decided to continue fighting before Hitler recognized that this was indeed their policy, proceeded to prepare to meet a German invasion which they anticipated he would launch even before Hitler himself recognized its necessity. The critical issue was no longer military manpower but equipment. By mid-June, there were rifles for all the one and half million regulars but not yet for the newly organized local Defense Volunteers, subsequently called the Home Guard. These were about to be loaded in the United States.
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Heavy weapons and armored vehicles were the great need–the British Expeditionary Force had left most of its modern equipment in France. But some was coming out of the factories and some was about to arrive from the United States, at least in a trickle. The Prime Minister, who also held the new position of Minister of Defense, watched the process carefully and urged progress with zeal.
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All would attempt to fight; Churchill’s assertion,
“you can always take one with you,” characterized the attitude of many.
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If worse came to worse, gas would be used on established beachheads; and while the army fought as best it could, a guerilla organization readied in secret was to operate in any portions of the United Kingdom which the Germans might overrun.
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Beaches were mined, bridges prepared for demolition, and a variety of devices, some more and some less outlandish, was tried out. Thousands of people thought possibly dangerous were hurriedly interned.
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Whatever the efficacy of these preparations, in retrospect they illuminate the grim determination of large numbers; at the time they took people’s minds off recent disasters.

If the country could not be defended successfully, there was the possibility of doing what the Polish, Norwegian, Belgian, and Dutch governments had done and which the British had so strongly urged on the French: evacuation overseas to continue the war from Canada. This was not much discussed at the time and has left few traces in the available documentation, hardly a surprising situation given the negative impact on morale any such discussion would surely have had. In any case, the financial preparations for that contingency were secretly under way. It is understandable that continuation of the war even if the British Isles were occupied by the Germans was mentioned as a possibility to Spain, the country which was correctly thought most unlikely to join England’s enemies if the war were prolonged for years.
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Whatever preparations could be made to meet any invasion attempt, the critical question was increasingly seen to be the ability of Britain to defend herself against the German air force. As Hitler had long seen, and as anyone looking at a map of Europe could tell, bases for the German air force in the Low Countries and northern France made it far easier to attack Great Britain, simultaneously interposing additional obstacles to any British air attack on the cities of Germany which were in any case far from British air bases.
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Could Germany utilize her numerical advantage in the air and the proximity of her airfields to much of England to destroy the British air force and either cow or bomb or invade the country out of the war? Could the British, using their fighters and their radar screen, blunt the German assault sufficiently so that the Germans either would not risk invasion or do so under circumstances in which the odds no longer favored them?

The air battles over Dunkirk had provided a foretaste of what was to come, and though the Royal Air Force had checked the Luftwaffe, it
too had suffered heavy losses there as well as in the preceding and subsequent battles over the continent. Now there was considerable preliminary skirmishing as the German government faced the implications of at least some continuation of hostilities, reorganized and reorientated the Luftwaffe toward operations primarily against England rather than France, and began to test the British defenses.
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The Commander-in-Chief of the German air force, Hermann Göring, was confident that his planes could crush the Royal Air Force in about five weeks; most of the German air force high command shared these optimistic expectations. The formations, ground support system, and the aircraft industry of Britain would all be attacked.
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In the event, British defenses were sorely tried but successful. In preliminary skirmishes during June, July, and the first weeks of August, both sides suffered heavy losses. When the Germans stepped up the pace in mid-August, losses on both sides increased; but the British were more successful in replacing their losses, in part because British fighter production was by this time higher than Germany’s. It was, in any case, becoming evident that the British were indeed holding on and that the attacks were not even close to their aim. The concentration of Luftwaffe attacks on the airport and radar control facilities inflicted great damage and strained the resources of Fighter Command, but in the battle of attrition that was developing, the British were at the very least holding their own.

At the end of August, the Germans changed their air strategy. It had originally been their intention to wait with a massive terror bombing of London until the invasion was to be launched. What slight evidence we have suggests that Hitler originally thought of a “Rotterdam”-type operation which would cause the people of London to flee the city and block the roads just as German troops were about to land.
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When a large number of German airplanes bombed London on August 24, the British replied with attacks on Berlin.
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Though on a small scale, the British air raid, and the ones which followed when the weather allowed, led Hitler to order mass bombing of London to begin forthwith. Always sensitive to attitudes on the home front–given his belief in the stab-in-the-back as reality, not legend–he announced that London would be destroyed.
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Early in September, the Luftwaffe shifted from attacking the sector stations of the Royal Air Force to a massive series of attacks on London.
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The attacks on the British capital and other cities, though causing great damage and numerous casualties, exposed the Luftwaffe to great losses while allowing the RAF to rebuild its support system. When, in response to the heavy losses in daylight raids the Germans shifted to
night bombing, their losses dropped, but so did their effectiveness.
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The British fighter defenses had held in daytime and though they were at that time essentially ineffective at night, this made no difference to the prospect of invasion which would have had to come in daylight. Only if the British public broke could such air raids accomplish their main objective. The panic Berlin expected did not occur. In the face of a resolute British public–buoyed up by then by the obvious inability of the Germans to launch an invasion–the Blitz, as it was called, failed.
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Rallied by a united government, the people suffered but held firm. A few in the government, but certainly not the public, knew that British air power was being assisted by the first important decripts of German air force machine code messages, decodes which also helped them understand and begin to counter the new German beacon system designed to help the bombers find target cities.
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The British government had begun to work out its offensive projects for winning the war long before it became obvious in the fall of 1940 that their defense against the German onslaught would be successful. As previously described, it would combine a massive bombing of a blockaded German-occupied Europe with efforts to stir up revolts against Nazi rule until the whole system came crashing down. There was here an analysis based on a British version of the German stab-in-the-back legend; Germany had been throttled, not defeated in World War I, and the resistance forces might now play the part originally to have been played by the French army: to hold and wear down the Germans until bombing, blockade and revolts brought them down without the massive armies the British did not have. Whether or not such a strategy would in fact have been effective will never be known, but the decisions made in London to implement it had their impact on the course and nature of the War.

Recognition of the fact that Britain by herself could never field the size of army needed to defeat the German army was behind the development of the British strategy and the allocation of resources to its implementation. The Special Operations Executive, the SOE, was organized in the summer of 1940 in order, as Churchill put it, “to set Europe ablaze.” In the following years, it sent agents into occupied Europe, attempted to arrange arms deliveries to resistance forces, and in every other way tried to make life difficult for the German occupiers.
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Local revolts were expected to increase over time; and eventually the disruption created by bombing, revolts, and the impact of blockade would make it possible for small British units to assist the conquered people of Europe
in regaining their independence. British faith in the possibilities of European resistance organizations seems preposterously exaggerated in retrospect, but few then realized how solid a hold the Germans would acquire.

Even the Germans themselves might be expected to share in the process of revolt. The British government had by the summer of 1940 given up on those internal opponents of Hitler who had so often expressed their opposition before the war and in the winter of 1939–40. All they had done, it seemed, was whisper conspiracy and then carry out Hitler’s policies of invading neutrals with enthusiasm and efficiency. Churchill, it must be remembered, had been in the government which received the messages that if Great Britain would promise to allow Germany to keep Hitler’s loot–or at least most of it–the military would topple him. He would hark back to that experience when approaches from German opponents of Hitler reached London in later years. It was in this context that the British turned for a while to the rather unlikely idea of getting the dissident Nazi Otto Strasser to raise a revolt within Germany against both Hitler and the old elites cooperating with him; nothing came of it all, but it reflects the thinking of a government that hoped someday to find successor regimes in all of Nationalist Socialist controlled Europe.
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While the imposition of Nazi rule was believed likely to create conditions for anti-German revolts in the occupied areas, those conditions would be further exacerbated not only by the sabotage SOE would hopefully organize, but also by the impact of the blockade and bombing. Enforcement of economic warfare measures was believed likely to strain the German war economy and the situation in German-occupied Europe to a vastly greater extent than turned out to be the case, in part because of the basic misassessment of the German economy previously referred to. There was, furthermore, an even more hopelessly inaccurate perception of what could be accomplished by bombing. Not until 1942 was some degree of realism injected into the assessment of the possible effectiveness of bomber operations against Germany; but what must be recognized, if the subsequent course of the war in Europe is to be understood, is that in the summer of 1940 and for considerable time thereafter the bombing offensive looked like and in fact was the only practical way for Britain to strike at the Germans. The German invasion preparations could be and were interfered with by attacks on the port facilities from which any invasion might be launched as well as on the ships being gathered there for the purpose. But beyond that essentially defensive project lay the offensive one of attacking German and German-controlled industries and cities. And that meant a major commitment of material and human resources to the building up of Bomber
Command, the British strategic air force. The impetus given to this program by Churchill in the summer of 1940 helped define the British effort until the end of the war.

In the midst of these preparations to defend themselves against invasion and destroy German control of Europe by blockade, bombing, subversion, and the eventual return of small contingents of troops, the British government was not interested in checking out some vague peace soundings coming out of Germany. Churchill was willing to use the theoretical possibility of any successor government handing the British fleet over to Germany as a means of pressuring the United States into providing more aid to stave off a German victory,
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and some in the British diplomatic service suggested a some what similar scare tactic of warning of a possible Anglo-German peace to awaken the Soviet Union to the dangers facing them in their continued support of Germany.
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The record shows, however, that the government was not interested in exploring any possibilities of a negotiated peace, the assumption being that no terms offered by Germany would be acceptable–and that any acceptable terms could not be trusted.
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