In Europe (52 page)

It was only in the 1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, that the secret protocols of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact finally emerged. (As late as 1990, Mikhail Gorbachev was still denying its existence.) In those protocols, both superpowers’ European spheres of influence were carefully delineated. The Soviet Union was to have its way in part of Poland, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Bessarabia. Germany could go ahead in the rest of Poland, and in Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, France, Yugoslavia and Greece. Strictly speaking, it was a non-aggression pact. In actual fact, it was a pact of pure aggression, a thoroughly worked-out scenario for the upcoming wars of conquest.

Within weeks of the invasion on 1 September, 1939, Poland had been conquered, divided, plundered and terrorised by the Germans and the Soviets. The west of the country was absorbed into the Great German Empire, the areas around Warsaw, Krakow, Radom and Lublin were transformed into SS country. This ‘General Government of Poland’ was to be the area to which, soon enough, all Poles, Jews and other ‘non-German elements’ would be deported, and which would be ‘governed’ by the SS.

Western Europe was still in a state of partial slumber. Belgium, the Netherlands and the Scandinavian countries cherished their neutrality. To describe winter 1939, the British later coined the term ‘the phony war’, a hazy state somewhere between peace and battle, the silence before what was coming. The French would have liked nothing more than to have that calm last forever. They indignantly rejected a proposal from Churchill to block supplies into the Ruhr by filling the Rhine with mines: to do that would only lead to war. At some spots along the front their soldiers had even put up signs:
‘DON'T SHOOT PLEASE, WE WON'T SHOOT EITHER!’
The British and the French did, however, assemble a joint force of 100,000 troops in March 1940 to help the Finns against the Soviet Union. This
decision, in the analysis of the distinguished British war historian A.J.P. Taylor, defied all rational explanation. The very idea of starting a war with the Soviet Union while the Allies had already declared war on Germany, he noted, was complete and utter madness, unless, of course, there was something very different behind it: a conscious attempt, for example, to channel this nascent war in an anti-Bolshevik direction, and to forget and end as quickly as possible the conflict with Germany. Whatever the background, the campaign came too late and led to nothing. The Finns capitulated in the month the Franco-British force was raised.

In the end it was Hitler who broke the silence. On 9 April, 1940, he invaded Denmark and Norway. For the British, this came as a hideous surprise. All winter, they themselves had been working on a similar plan of attack. Neutral Norway was of vital importance to the German war industry; in winter, all major ore shipments from Sweden left from Norwegian ports. As soon as Churchill became secretary of the navy in September 1939, he proposed the idea of a surprise conquest of the Norwegian ports and the blocking of German shipping routes with mines. The British intended to carry out their plans in early April. Admiral Erich Raeder, Churchill's German counterpart, had come up with the same idea in October: an attack on Norway to secure its ports. The Germans won, only because they were faster and better organised. The British landed in wintry Norway without skis and equipped only with tourist maps of the country. ‘Missed the bus!’ was what enraged Members of Parliament shouted at Chamberlain. The fiasco cost him his position as prime minister, and cleared the way for Churchill.

The strategy of Hitler's great offensive was highly reminiscent of the old Schlieffen Plan. Just as they had in 1914, the German armies swung like a scythe through north-western Europe, but this time the swathe was much wider and cut straight through the Low Countries. Hitler could easily have followed the ‘platonic way’ of the French, eternally prolonging the phony war of the British and ultimately ridding himself of the entire Polish question by means of negotiation. But that was not his way. His ultimate goal lay to the east: the creation of German
Lebensraum
in Poland and the Soviet Union. But to make sure that Germany would not again become caught in a war on two fronts, he first had to make short work of France and the Low Countries.

At 3.15 a.m. on 10 May, the first shots rang out: at the Dutch border station of Nieuweschans the guards were eliminated, to allow a German armoured train to roll unobstructed towards Groningen. Paratroopers landed behind the lines to seize vital positions in the Hague and Rotterdam. The Dutch government had dismissed as ‘alarmist’ the emphatic warnings of a resistance group within the
Abwehr
, the German intelligence service. Here and there the Germans met with stout resistance, but the Dutch – who had not experienced a war on their own territory for more than 150 years – were generally in a state of shock. They had always thought of their country as a kind of Switzerland, neutral and inviolable. By flooding strategic strips of land in the case of an emergency, they thought, this corner of the continent could be converted into an island like Britain. On that day, however, the Dutch realised that their special position in Europe – half inside, half outside – was gone for good.

Alongside that was the non-militaristic character of the Netherlands. The concept of an ‘enemy’ was completely new for many. The writer Anton Coolen described the great trouble to which his neighbours in North Brabant province went to give direction to a couple of German soldiers. ‘They crowded hurriedly and willingly around the car, craning their necks to understand the question in German … A few women came out of the house carrying trays with steaming cups of coffee, they brought them to the Germans, who folded up their maps and laughed.’

I found a letter that my own grandfather sent to his daughter, my mother, shortly after the German invasion. ‘The garden looks lovely at the moment, the violets are already blooming,’ he wrote. ‘Now I sit in my office like a king. And I'm going to practise resigning myself to the new situation. Practise being content with all that overcomes you.’

On Tuesday, 14 May, Rotterdam was bombed, the third great Luftwaffe bombardment after Guernica and Warsaw. Most of the inner city was reduced to rubble. About 900 inhabitants were killed. That afternoon – the Germans had threatened to do the same to Utrecht – General Henri Winkelman capitulated. His army had been at war for precisely five days.

King Leopold III of Belgium capitulated two weeks later. By that time at least 1.5 million Belgians were fleeing to France. The king's decision
created a breach in France's northern defences, and the French 1st Army's positions around Lille were suddenly no longer tenable.

At the same time, a grave conflict arose between the king and his ministers that would continue until after the war. For the Belgian government, the country's neutrality had always been a political given, a matter of sensible opportunism imposed by the configuration of power within Europe. But now they were ready to fight to the death. For Leopold, however, neutrality was a sacred principle, a line of behaviour that corresponded to his most basic sensibilities. He was obsessed with one thing only: preventing a repetition of 1914. Every ruined street, every dead soldier was, in his view, one too many. Unlike the assertive Dutch queen, Wilhelmina (who had retreated to England) he saw no sense in continuing the European war. ‘France will go down fighting, perhaps within only a few days. Britain will continue the fight in its colonies and at sea. I choose the more difficult path.’ After 28 May, the Belgian king considered himself Hitler's prisoner of war.

In the afternoon of that same historic day of 10 May, 1940, Winston Churchill was appointed prime minister of the United Kingdom. Five days later, at 7.30 on Wednesday morning, he was roused from his sleep by a telephone call from the French premier, Paul Reynaud. Disaster was pending. At least seven German armoured divisions had unexpectedly broken through the Ardennes and were now rolling through the countryside close to the town of Sedan. Behind them were trucks full of infantry. It was, Reynaud feared, the beginning of the end. And that, indeed, is how France was overwhelmed by more than 1,800 tanks of General Rundstedt's
Heeresgruppe A
, backed by some 300 Stuka dive bombers, that came storming into the country through the ‘impassable’ Ardennes.

The next day, when Churchill – who had quickly flown to Paris after Reynaud's call – looked out the window at the French ministry of foreign affairs, he saw a remarkable sight:‘Outside in the garden of the Quai d'Orsay clouds of smoke arose from large bonfires, and I saw from the window venerable officials pushing wheelbarrows of archives onto them.’ He sent the French an additional ten fighter squadrons, but reluctantly, knowing that soon he would be needing every one of them in order to survive.

IN THE MIDDLE OF THE ROLLING FORESTS OF THE ARDENNES, CLOSE
to the village of Brûly-de-Pesche, is a tall block of concrete amid the trees, weathered and overgrown, with two thick iron doors and a little peep-hatch. Around here people call the structure
l'abri de Hitler
, and during the first week of June 1940 this was indeed the Führer's makeshift headquarters.

The photographs in the little museum make it look like a holiday in the woods of Brûly: a relaxed Hitler consulting with his generals in front of the barracks; the group in front of the village church where they all watched newsreels every day; the same group, laughing, at the edge of the field where Göring is about to start up his plane; the entire HQ staff listening to the radio on 17 June as Pétain announces the French surrender. (Hitler afterwards slapped his thighs in pleasure, his usual way of expressing glee, but regrettably there are no pictures of that.)

Rarely has a military campaign run as smoothly as the German invasion of May 1940. Contrary to what is often assumed, the Allied forces were at least as strong as the Germans, if not stronger. Hitler was fighting with fewer than ninety divisions. The French alone had more divisions than that stationed along the eastern border, to say nothing of over forty British, Polish, Belgian and Dutch divisions. The Allies had combined access to twice as much heavy artillery and one and a half times as many tanks. To be sure, the Germans had an impressive air force with at least 4,000 planes, while the Allies had no more than 1,200. That typifies the decisive difference: the Allies thought in terms of the last war, the Germans in terms of the next.

With their Maginot Line the French had prepared themselves for an old-fashioned sitzkrieg, while the Germans came with a concept that revolved around mobility and speed: the blitzkrieg. Their army no longer
advanced at the speed at which a man or a horse could walk, but at the speed of a car, thirty or forty kilometres an hour. Their airborne landings and paratrooper campaigns – in the western Netherlands, for example – were unlike anything seen before. Their ultramodern Stukas sowed panic everywhere. In the wake of the advance hung the penetrating smell of dead bodies referred to by the German officers as ‘the perfume of battle’. At 7 a.m. on 20 May, 1940, two tank divisions from General Guderian's 19th Army Corps rolled out of Péronne in a westerly direction. By 10.00 they had reached the town of Albert. A little group of British soldiers tried to stop them there, with a barricade of cardboard boxes. At 11.00 the Germans reached Hédauville, where they were confronted by a British artillery battery armed only with dummy shells. At noon the first division took Amiens, where Guderian briefly paused to view the famous cathedral. The second division thundered on. By 4 p.m. they had reached Beauquesne, where they seized the entire map archive of the British expeditionary forces. At 9.00 that evening they reached Abbeville at last, and saw the sea by the dying light of day.

On that one day in May, in a single movement, they had cut through all the Allied positions. The British, the Belgians and the French 7th Army – more than a million men in all – were caught helplessly with their backs to the North Sea. The civilians fled en masse: in June 1940, a quarter of the French population was on the run.

In Picardy I look up Lucienne Gaillard, president of the Association Nationale des Anciens Combattants de la Résistance. ‘Come right away,’ she said on the phone. ‘We're just having a board meeting.’

At her house beside the little grey church of Saint-Blimont, three older men are sitting around the table. She introduces them to me one by one: ‘He was in the Maquis, he was in the Resistance, and he's here because his father was executed.’

‘And you?’

‘At a certain point this whole house was full of British and American pilots. You must realise, I was only fifteen at the time, but I looked quite grown up for my age.’

The table is covered with sheets of paper, neatly typed minutes, careful calculations from the bookkeeper.

‘Ah, the funding. In the 1950s we had 1,000 members,’ she tells me, ‘now barely 130. Every year there are fewer.’

For the men of Saint-Blimont the war began when the mobilisation notices were posted, on 2 September, 1939. ‘My father worked in the sugar factory, he didn't have to go. Otherwise we didn't notice much of anything, not until 26 May, 1940, that is. I still remember it clearly, it was on a Sunday, the day of my First Communion. We were coming out of the church when we heard the cannons at Abbeville. We left a few days later, like everyone else. Everyone was fleeing south, by car, on horseback, in carts and pushing prams. The panic was truly amazing, all the fear from 1914–18 came back to the surface. My father had a car. We slept along the road in rubbish dumps, in the hay. My mother was heavily pregnant. She finally gave birth in Limoges.’

Saint-Blimont emptied out almost completely. Of the 20,000 inhabitants of Évreux, barely 200 remained at home. In Lille, nine out of every ten houses were empty. There were only 800 people left in Chartres. On Monday, 10 June, there were at least 20,000 people waiting at the Gare d'Austerlitz in Paris for one of the infrequent trains going south. The afternoon papers bore huge headlines: Italy had entered the war, Italian troops had invaded the south of France. Two days later, the Swiss journalist Edmond Dubois stumbled upon an abandoned herd of cattle in the middle of Paris, their lowing echoing in the deserted streets. By the end of that week, when the Germans rolled into Paris, almost three quarters of the three million Parisians had fled. When Albert Speer visited Reims on 26 June he found a ghost town, its shutters clattering in the wind. ‘As though the lives of the townspeople had, for one mad moment, stood still; on the tables one still saw glasses, plates and cutlery, untouched meals.’