A World at Arms (49 page)

With these and other German setbacks, Hitler returned to a point he had raised before and on which he would insist the following fall: the British might attempt a landing in Norway to relieve the pressure on the Soviet Union in the war he began against that country on June 22. Therefore, the big surface ships still available should be concentrated there to assist in Norway’s defense, and he also directed that even the large warships at Brest be transferred there. Whatever the uproar in Britain provoked by their successful dash through the English Channel in February 1942-and the uproar in German government circles when the two battleships
Scharnhorst
and
Gneisenau
both ran into British mines-Germany’s Atlantic campaign with surface ships was effectively over.
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The submarines, on the other hand, were sinking more shipping than the British could build, especially in the first half of 1941.
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In the second half of the year, the situation turned temporarily in favor of the British, and not only because Churchill concentrated his attention and pressure on it.
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The German transfer of submarines to Norway and the Mediterranean late in the year contributed substantially to this result, but a very significant factor was the ability of the British admiralty to route convoys around the waiting U-Boats because in those months it could read the relevant German navy codes, sometimes on a daily basis.
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The mortal threat of the submarines to Britain’s survival was always there, but it did not keep the British from continuing those measures they had developed earlier in order to pursue the war against the Third Reich. The bombing offensive has already been mentioned. The blockade of Germany was still important in British eyes, and their control of the sea helped them deny its use to Germany as well as to protect their own shipping. They were naturally very concerned about the leak in the blockade by which goods went across the Soviet Union by land and then into German-controlled Europe.
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They also continued to look to the Special Operations Executive (SOE) to try to undermine German power in Europe by revolts, but after the Soviet Union was attacked came to prefer that resistance forces in East Europe be armed by the latter, an expectation that would produce all sorts of problems in the case of
Poland.
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Furthermore, they hoped to increase the French colonial territory shifting to de Gaulle. There was considerable discussion of projects to help de Gaulle seize the islands of Réunion and Madagascar in the Indian Ocean–a project Churchill strongly favored–and of the same possibility for French Somaliland (Djibouti).
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And, as has already been recounted, in June 1941 British and Free French forces began a successful campaign to take Syria and the Lebanon away from Vichy.

Under these circumstances, it should be easy to understand that the British government was no more interested in suing for peace in 1941 than in 1940. The soundings which the British on occasion believed they were getting were rejected out of hand.
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Churchill directed on January 20, 1941, that any contacts be met with “absolute silence”;
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it should be noted that the German government gave similar directions for the treatment of any soundings from the Churchill government.
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Nothing changed in the British attitude after the German attack on the Soviet Union. In view of the belief of many that either during the fighting in the East or afterwards, if the Germans defeated the Soviet Union, a new “peace offensive ” might be launched from Berlin, Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden in a speech at Leeds on July 5 emphatically stated in public that the British were not about to negotiate with Hitler at any time on any subject.
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When in August 1941 they received a feeler from someone claiming to represent the opposition to Hitler inside Germany who suggested that peace could be made on the basis of Germany getting her pre-World War I colonies back and holding on to Alsace-Lorraine, her 1914 borders in the East, Austria, and the Sudetenland, the officials in the Foreign Office could only shake their heads.
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Churchill terminated this type of foolishness on September 10, 1941, with a reiteration of a policy of “absolute silence.” Both the United States and the Soviet Union would be disturbed by any other policy. “I am absolutely opposed to the slightest contact.”
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By that time, another person who had planned to contact the British had been incarcerated for the first four months of what would be many decades behind bars. Hitler’s deputy head of the Nazi Party Rudolf Hess had arrived in Scotland by parachute on May 10, imagining that he could talk the British into making peace on German terms. After assuring themselves that this unexpected visitor was indeed the Deputy Führer as he claimed, the British locked him up for the rest of the war, making clear their intention of trying him as a war criminal once the war was over. There was, understandably, an uproar in the German government; the public announcement that the second man in the state was mentally unbalanced was not exactly reassuring. Hitler was furious
but hardly in a position to do anything about his old friend’s strange action (except for dismissing some of Hess’s associates). In spite of various speculations and the suspicions of the Russians, nothing was planned and nothing ever came of this startling adventure.
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The real war went on.

THE UNITED STATES AND THE WAR

That real war increasingly involved the United States. The destroyer for bases deal and the increasing delivery of goods to England in the fall of 1940 had shown the direction in which things were moving. The reelection of Roosevelt meant that there would be continuity in this regard, but in fact the Republican candidate, Wendell Willkie, had indicated that he too supported aid to Britain.
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There was considerable difference of opinion in Germany as to how to react to the American support of Britain. The navy always favored drastic action, primarily because of faith in unrestricted submarine warfare, at the risk of war.
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Göring, the head of the air force, took a similar position. As he said when warned about American potential: “What does the USA amount to anyway?”
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The German ambassador to the United States, in Germany since November 1938, on the other hand, tried to explain that it made a great difference whether the United States was at war or not and that those in Germany who took the view that the United States was already doing all it could and that hence it did not matter if it entered the war formally were very badly mistaken.
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Hitler took an entirely different tack from all his advisors on this issue. Since by this time he had already decided to attack the Soviet Union, he assumed and repeatedly assured his associates that this step would free Japan to move south, thereby drawing American power into the Pacific. This aspect of German policy will be reviewed in the context of the analysis of Japan’s policy leading to the Pacific War, but it must always be kept in mind in assessing Hitler’s orders to the German navy in the second half of 1940 and the first half of 1941. Since he planned to attack the Soviet Union and to defeat that country quickly, he would first get America diverted to the Pacific and subsequently be enabled to shift resources to naval construction to deal with the United States directly. In the interim, it made no sense to him to provoke the United States into open hostilities by incidents attendant upon what he believed would be a relatively small increment in U-Boat and surface raider sinkings.
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He learned from a study he ordered the navy to undertake that a surprise attack by submarines on the American fleet in American
harbors was not practically feasible;
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if that sort of blow was not possible, it made more sense to wait. If an under-water “Pearl Harbor attack” could not be mounted, it would be better to postpone hostilities with the United States until either Germany acquired an ally with a large navy or had time to build one of its own.

The converse of this policy of restraints imposed on the existing German navy was a double one. In the diplomatic field, it meant, as we shall see, urging Japan forward in the Pacific, if necessary with the promise to go to war against the United States alongside Japan if that was what the Japanese believed they needed to do. In the military field, it meant returning from emphasis on the army to emphasis on naval construction and on the air force just as soon as the war in the East seemed to be going as well as Hitler confidently anticipated. It is in this context that one must understand why the moment he (quite incorrectly) believed that the campaign in Russia was going well, Hitler ordered the big program of battleship, aircraft carrier, and cruiser construction resumed.
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That program had to be set aside in the fall of 1941, as had been necessary in the fall of 1940, when the fighting went very differently from the way Hitler had expected. The failure of the German navy to cancel one of the contracts led to the delivery in
June
1944 of four completed battleship engines.
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Promptly scrapped, these relics of earlier dreams show how seriously the Germans had held at one time to their plans for fighting the American navy.

The American President hoped to avoid open warfare with Germany altogether. He urged his people to aid Great Britain, and he .devised and proposed, as we shall see, a whole variety of ways to do just that and to make sure that the aid actually reached its destination; but he hoped until literally the last minute that the United States could stay out of the war. There has been almost as much argument about Roosevelt’s foreign policy in 1940–41 among historians as there was among contemporaries. Several types of recently available sources confirm dramatically the reliability of a number of long-known statements made by Roosevelt at the time but not always taken as accurate indications of his views.

On August 22, 1940, when trying to get the support of the chairman of the Senate Naval Affairs Committee for the destroyers for bases deal, Roosevelt engaged the argument that such a step might lead to war with Germany because of retaliatory acts by the latter. He argued that if the Germans wanted to go to war with the United States, they would always find an excuse to do so, but that the United States would not fight unless attacked.
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At the end of the year, when explaining his
policy in detail to the American high commissioner in the Philippines, he stressed the global aspects of the aid to Britain policy but again asserted that the country could and should stay out of the war in both Europe and the Far East unless herself attacked.
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When recordings of press conferences made in the White House in the fall of 1940 became available recently, and it turned out that a machine had been inadvertently left turned on, extraordinarily similar remarks by Roosevelt in private conversation came to light. On October 4 and on October 8, he explained to political and administrative associates that the United States would not enter the war unless the Germans or Japanese actually attacked; even their considering themselves at war with the United States would not suffice.
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We know that in practice he would follow that approach in December 1941 towards Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria, trying unsuccessfully for half a year to persuade those countries that they might find it wiser to withdraw their declarations of war on the United States.
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The picture of Roosevelt trying and hoping to avoid war has been reinforced by what we now know about the breaking of German codes. Although the Americans told the British of their successes in breaking the major Japanese diplomatic code already in September 1940,
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and provided them with a machine for reading such messages themselves in January 1941,
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the British did not reciprocate with information on their breaking of German enigma machine codes until April 1941.
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Thereafter cooperation became more and more extensive. For the rest of 1941, the knowledge of German naval dispositions gained from the reading of naval messages was regularly and carefully utilized to
avoid
incidents, when it could very easily have been used to
provoke
them.
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The famous Presidential order to shoot at German submarines on sight, thus, was more to frighten them off than to provoke them. Aware of German orders to submarines to avoid incidents, the President could push forward with his program of aid to Britain knowing that at worst there might be isolated incidents in the Atlantic.
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The general assumption of many that countries are either at war or at peace with each other was not shared by Roosevelt, who knew that the American navy had originated in the quasi-war with France at the turn of the eighteenth to the nineteenth century and that more recently Japan and the Soviet Union had engaged in bloody encounters at specific points in East Asia while continuing to have diplomatic relations and without entering into general hostilities with each other. Some of Roosevelt’s advisors did think the United States should or would have to enter the war to assure the defeat of Hitler, but there is no evidence that the
President himself abandoned his hope that the United States could stay out. He had been proved right in his belief that Britain could hold on in 1940-against the view of many;
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he would be proved right in his expectation that the Soviet Union could hold on in 1941 -again against the view of many. In a way he would be proved right on the question of formal American entrance into the war. We now have his comments on October 8, 1940; “the time may be coming when the Germans and the Japs [sic] will do some fool thing that would put us in. That’s the only real danger of our getting in...”
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