[b]21: VICTORY IN THE WEST[/b]

 

 

SHORTLY AFTER DAWN on the fine spring day of May 10, 1940, the ambassador of Belgium and the minister of the Netherlands in Berlin were summoned to the Wilhelmstrasse and informed by Ribbentrop that German troops were entering their countries to safeguard their neutrality against an imminent attack by the Anglo-French armies -- the same shabby excuse that had been made just a month before with Denmark and Norway. A formal German ultimatum called upon the two governments to see to it that no resistance was offered. If it were, it would be crushed by all means and the responsibility for the bloodshed would "be borne exclusively by the Royal Belgian and the Royal Netherlands Government."

 

In Brussels and The Hague, as previously in Copenhagen and Oslo, the German envoys made their way to the respective foreign offices with similar messages. Ironically enough, the bearer of the ultimatum in The Hague was Count Julius von Zech-Burkersroda, the German minister, who was a son-in-law of Bethmann-Hollweg, the Kaiser's Chancellor, who in 1914 had publicly called Germany's guarantee of Belgian neutrality, which the Hohenzollern Reich had just violated, "a scrap of paper."

 

At the Foreign Ministry in Brussels, while German bombers roared overhead and the explosion of their bombs on nearby airfields rattled the windows, Buelow-Schwante, the German ambassador, started to take a paper from his pocket as he entered the Foreign Minister's office. Paul- Henri Spaak stopped him.

 

"I beg your pardon, Mr. Ambassador. I will speak first."

 

[quote]The German Army [Spaak said, not attempting to hold back his feeling of outrage] has just attacked our country. This is the second time in twenty-five years that Germany has committed a criminal aggression against a neutral and loyal Belgium. What has happened is perhaps even more odious than the aggression of 1914. No ultimatum, no note, no protest of any kind has ever been placed before the Belgian Government. It is through the attack itself that Belgium has learned that Germany has violated the undertakings given by her The German Reich will be held responsible by history. Belgium is resolved to defend herself.[/quote]

 

The unhappy German diplomat then began to read the formal German ultimatum, but Spaak cut him short. "Hand me the document," he said. "I should like to spare you so painful a task." [1]

 

The Third Reich had given the two small Low Countries guarantees of their neutrality almost without number. The independence and neutrality of Belgium had been guaranteed "perpetually" by the five great European powers· in 1839, a pact that was observed for seventy-five years until Germany broke it in 1914. The Weimar Republic had promised never to take up arms against Belgium, and Hitler, after he came to power, continually reaffirmed that policy and gave similar assurances to the Netherlands. On January 30, 1937, after he had repudiated the Locarno Treaty, the Nazi Chancellor publicly proclaimed:

 

[quote]The German Government has further given the assurance to Belgium and Holland that it is prepared to recognize and to guarantee the inviolability and neutrality of these territories.[/quote]

 

Frightened by the remilitarization of the Third Reich and its reoccupation of the Rhineland in the spring of 1936, Belgium, which wisely had abandoned neutrality after 1918, again sought refuge in it. On April 24, 1937, Britain and France released her from the obligations of Locarno and on October 13 of that year Germany officially and solemnly confirmed

 

[quote]its determination that in no circumstances will it impair the inviolability and integrity [of Belgium] and that it will at all times respect Belgian territory ... and [be] prepared to assist Belgium should she be subjected to an attack ...[/quote]

 

From that day on there is a familiar counterpoint in Hitler's solemn public assurances to the Low Countries and his private admonitions to his generals. On August 24, 1938, in regard to one of the papers drawn up for him for Case Green, the plan for the attack on Czechoslovakia, he spoke of the "extraordinary advantage" to Germany if Belgium and Holland were occupied and asked the Army's opinion "as to the conditions under which an occupation of this area could be carried out and how long it would take." On April 28, 1939, in his reply to Roosevelt, Hitler again stressed the "binding declarations" which he had given to the Netherlands and Belgium, among others. Less than a month later, on May 23, the Fuehrer, as has been noted, was telling his generals that "the Dutch and Belgian air bases must be occupied by armed force ... with lightning speed. Declarations of neutrality must be ignored."

 

He had not yet started his war, but his plans were ready. On August 22, a week before he launched the war by attacking Poland, he conferred with his generals about the "possibility" of violating Dutch and Belgian neutrality. "England and France," he said, "will not violate the neutrality of these countries." Four days later, on August 26, he ordered his envoys in Brussels and The Hague to inform the respective governments that in the event of an outbreak of war "Germany will in no circumstances impair the inviolability of Belgium and Holland," an assurance which he repeated publicly on October 6, after the conclusion of the Polish campaign. The very next day, October 7, General von Brauchitsch advised his army group commanders, at Hitler's prompting,

 

[quote]to make all preparations for immediate invasion of Dutch and Belgian territory, if the political situation so demands. [2][/quote]

 

Two days later, on October 9, in Directive No. 6, Hitler ordered:

 

[quote]Preparations are to be made for an attacking operation ... through Luxembourg, Belgium and Holland. This attack must be carried out as soon and as forcefully as possible ... The object of this attack is to acquire as great an area of Holland, Belgium and northern France as possible. [3][/quote]

 

The Belgians and Dutch, of course, were not privy to Hitler's secret orders. Nevertheless they did receive warnings of what was in store for them. A number of them have already been noted: Colonel Oster, one of the anti-Nazi conspirators, warned the Dutch and Belgian military attaches in Berlin on November 5 to expect the German attack on November 12, which was then the target date. At the end of October Goerdeler, another one of the conspirators, had gone to Brussels at the instigation of Weizsaecker, to warn the Belgians of an imminent attack. And shortly after the New Year, on January 10, 1940, Hitler's plans for the offensive in the West had fallen into the hands of the Belgians when an officer carrying them had made a forced landing in Belgium. [i]

 

By that time the Dutch and Belgian general staffs knew from their own border intelligence that the Germans were concentrating some fifty divisions on their frontiers. They also had the benefit of an unusual source of information in the German capital. This "source" was Colonel G. J. Sas, the Netherland's military attache in Berlin. Sas was a close personal friend of Colonel Oster and often dined with him at the latter's home in the secluded suburb of Zehlendorf -- a practice facilitated, once the war broke out, by the blackout, whose cover enabled a number of persons in Berlin at that time, German and foreign, to get about on various subversive missions without much fear of detection. It was Sas whom Oster tipped off early in November about the German onslaught then set for November 12, and he gave the attache a new warning in January. The fact that neither attack came off somewhat lessened the credibility of Sas in The Hague and in Brussels, where the fact that Hitler had actually set dates for his aggression and then postponed them naturally was not known. However the ten days' warning that Sas got through Oster of the invasion of Norway and Denmark and his prediction of the exact date seems to have restored his prestige at home.

 

On May 3, Oster told Sas flatly that the German attack in the West through the Netherlands and Belgium would begin on May 10, and the military attache promptly informed his government. The next day The Hague received confirmation of this from its envoy at the Vatican. The Dutch immediately passed the word along to the Belgians. May 5 was a Sunday and as the week began to unfold it became pretty obvious to all of us in Berlin that the blow in the West would fall within a few days. Tension mounted in the capital. By May 8 I was cabling my New York office to hold one of our correspondents in Amsterdam instead of shipping him off to Norway, where the war had ended anyway, and that evening the military censors allowed me to hint in my broadcast that there would soon be action in the West, including Holland and Belgium.

 

On the evening of May 9 Oster and Sas dined together for what would prove the last time. The German officer confirmed that the final order had been given to launch the attack in the West at dawn the next day. Just to make sure that there were no last-minute changes Oster dropped by OKW headquarters in the Bendlerstrasse after dinner. There had been no changes. "The swine has gone to the Western front," Oster told Sas. The "swine" was Hitler. Sas informed the Belgian military attache and then went to his own legation and put through a call to The Hague. A special code for this moment already had been arranged and Sas spoke some seemingly innocuous words which conveyed the message "Tomorrow, at dawn. Hold tight!" [4]

 

Strangely enough, the two Big Powers in the West, Britain and France, were caught napping. Their general staffs discounted the alarming reports from Brussels and The Hague. London itself was preoccupied with a three-day cabinet crisis which was resolved only on the evening of May 10 by the replacement of Chamberlain by Churchill as Prime Minister. The first the French and British headquarters heard of the German onslaught was when the peace of the spring predawn was broken by the roar of German bombers and the screech of Stuka dive bombers overhead, followed shortly afterward, as daylight broke, by frantic appeals for help from the Dutch and Belgian governments which had held the Allies at arm's length for eight months instead of concerting with them for a common defense.

 

Nevertheless the Allied plan to meet the main German attack in Belgium went ahead for the first couple of days almost without a hitch. A great Anglo-French army rushed northeastward from the Franco-Belgian border to man the main Belgian defense line along the Dyle and Meuse rivers east of Brussels. As it happened, this was just what the German High Command wanted. This massive Allied wheeling movement played directly into its hands. Though they did not know it the Anglo-French armies sped directly into a trap that, when sprung, would soon prove to be utterly disastrous.

 

[b]THE RIVAL PLANS[/b]

 

The original German plan of attack in the West had been drastically changed since it fell into the hands of the Belgians and, as the Germans suspected, of the French and British, in January. Fall Gelb (Case Yellow), as the operation was called, had been hastily concocted in the fall of 1939 by the Army High Command under the pressure of Hitler's order to launch the offensive in the West by mid-November. There is much dispute among military historians and indeed among the German generals themselves whether this first plan was a modified version of the old Schlieffen plan or not; Halder and Guderian have maintained that it was. It called for the main German drive on the right flank through Belgium and northern France, with the object of occupying the Channel ports. It fell short of the famous Schlieffen plan, which had failed by an ace of success in 1914 and which provided not only for the capture of the Channel ports but for a continuation of a great wheeling movement which would bring the German right-wing armies through Belgium and northern France and across the Seine, after which they would turn east below Paris and encircle and destroy the remaining French forces. Its purpose had been to quickly put an end to armed French resistance so that Germany, in 1914, could then turn on Russia with the great bulk of its military might.

 

But in 1939-40 Hitler did not have to worry about a Russian front. Nevertheless his objective was more limited. In the first phase of the campaign, at any rate, he planned not to knock out the French Army but to roll it back and occupy the Channel coast, thus cutting off Britain from its ally and at the same time securing air and naval bases from which he could harass and blockade the British Isles. It is obvious from his various harangues to the generals at this time that he thought that after such a defeat Britain and France would be inclined to make peace and leave him free to turn his attention once more to the East.

 

Even before the original plan for Fall Gelb had fallen into the hands of the enemy it was anticipated by the Allied Supreme Command. On November 17 the Allied Supreme War Council, meeting in Paris, had adopted "Plan D," which, in the event of a German attack through Belgium, called for the French First and Ninth armies and the British Expeditionary Force to dash forward to the principal Belgian defense line on the Dyle and Meuse rivers from Antwerp through Louvain, Namur and Givet to Mezieres. A few days before, the French and British general staffs, in a series of secret meetings with the Belgian High Command, had received the latter's assurance that it would strengthen the defenses on that line and make its main stand there. But the Belgians, still clinging to the illusions of neutrality which fortified their hope that they yet might be spared involvement in war, would not go further. The British chiefs of staff argued that there would not be time to deploy the Allied forces so far forward once the Germans had attacked, but they went along with Plan D at the urging of General Gamelin.

 

At the end of November the Allies added a scheme to rush General Henri Giraud's Seventh Army up the Channel coast to help the Dutch north of Antwerp in case the Netherlands was also attacked. Thus a German attempt to sweep through Belgium -- and perhaps Holland -- to flank the Maginot Line would be met very early in the game by the entire B.E.F., the bulk of the French Army, the twenty-two divisions of the Belgians and the ten divisions of the Dutch -- a force numerically equal, as it turned out, to that of the Germans.

 

It was to avoid such a head-on clash and at the same time to trap the British and French armies that would speed forward so far that General Erich von Manstein (born Lewinski), chief of staff of Rundstedt's Army Group A on the Western front, proposed a radical change in Fall Gelb. Manstein was a gifted and imaginative staff officer of relatively junior rank, but during the winter he succeeded in getting his bold idea put before Hitler over the initial opposition of Brauchitsch, Halder and a number of other generals. Manstein's proposal was that the main German assault should be launched in the center through the Ardennes with a massive armored force which would then cross the Meuse just north of Sedan and break out into the open country and race to the Channel at Abbeville.

 

Hitler, always attracted by daring and even reckless solutions, was interested. Rundstedt pushed the idea relentlessly not only because he believed in it but because it would give his Army Group A the decisive role in the offensive. Although Halder's personal dislike of Manstein and certain professional jealousies among some of the generals who outranked him led to Manstein's transfer from his staff post to the command of an infantry corps at the end of January, he had an opportunity to expound his unorthodox views to Hitler personally at a dinner given for a number of new corps commanders in Berlin on February 17. He argued that an armored strike through the Ardennes would hit the Allies where they least expected it, since their generals probably, like most of the Germans, considered this hilly, wooded country unsuitable for tanks. A feint by the right wing of the German forces would bring the British and French armies rushing pell-mell into Belgium. Then by cracking through the French at Sedan and heading west along the north bank of the Somme for the Channel, the Germans would entrap the major Anglo-French forces as well as the Belgian Army.

 

It was a daring plan, not without its risks, as several generals, including Jodl, emphasized. But by now Hitler, who considered himself a military genius, practically believed that it was his own idea and his enthusiasm for it mounted. Halder, who had at first dismissed it as a crackpot idea, also began to embrace it and indeed, with the help of his General Staff officers, considerably improved it. On February 24, 1940, it was formally adopted in a new OKW directive and the generals were told to redeploy their troops by March 7. Somewhere along the line, incidentally, the plan for the conquest of the Netherlands, which had been dropped from Fall Gelb in a revision on October 29, 1939, was reinstated on November 14 at the urging of the Luftwaffe, which wanted the Dutch airfields for use against Britain and which offered to supply a large batch of airborne troops for this minor but somewhat complicated operation. On such considerations are the fates of little nations sometimes decided. [5]

 

And so as the campaign in Norway approached its victorious conclusion and the first warm days of the beginning of May arrived, the Germans, with the most powerful army the world had ever seen up to that moment, stood poised to strike in the West. In mere numbers the two sides were evenly matched -- 136 German divisions against 135 divisions of the French, British, Belgian and Dutch. The defenders had the advantage of vast defensive fortifications: the impenetrable Maginot Line in the south, the extensive line of Belgian forts in the middle and fortified water lines in Holland in the north. Even in the number of tanks, the Allies matched the Germans. But they had not concentrated them as had the latter. And because of the aberration of the Dutch and Belgians for neutrality there had been no staff consultations by which the defenders could pool their plans and resources to the best advantage. The Germans had a unified command, the initiative of the attacker, no moral scruples against aggression, a contagious confidence in themselves and a daring plan. They had had experience in battle in Poland. There they had tested their new tactics and their new weapons in combat. They knew the value of the dive bomber and the mass use of tanks. And they knew, as Hitler had never ceased to point out, that the French, though they would be defending their own soil, had no heart in what lay ahead.

 

Notwithstanding their confidence and determination, the German High Command, as the secret records make clear, suffered some moments of panic as the zero hour drew near -- or at least Hitler, the Supreme Commander, did. General Jodl jotted them down in his diary. Hitler ordered several last-minute postponements of the jump-off, which on May 1 he had set for May 5. On May 3 he put it off until May 6 on account of the weather but perhaps also in part because the Foreign Office didn't think his proposed justification for violating the neutrality of Belgium and Holland was good enough. The next day he set May 7 as X Day and on the following day postponed it again until Wednesday, May 8. "Fuehrer has finished justification for Case Yellow," Jodl noted. Belgium and the Netherlands were to be accused of having acted most unneutrally.

 

[quote]May 7. Fuehrer railroad train was scheduled to leave Finkenkrug at 16:38 hours [Jodl's diary continued]. But weather remains uncertain and therefore the order [for the attack] is rescinded ... Fuehrer greatly agitated about new postponement as there is danger of treachery. Talk of the Belgian Envoy to the Vatican with Brussels permits the deduction that treason has been committed by a German personality who left Berlin for Rome on April 29 ...

 

May 8. Alarming news from Holland. Canceling of furloughs, evacuations, roadblocks, other mobilization methods ... Fuehrer does not want to wait any longer. Goering wants postponement until the 10th, at least ... Fuehrer is very agitated; then he consents to postponement until May 10, which he says is against his intuition. But not one day longer ...

 

May 9. Fuehrer decides on attack for May 10 for sure. Departure with Fuehrer train at 17:00 hours from Finkenkrug. After report that weather situation will be favorable on the 10th. the code word "Danzig" is given at 21:00 hours.[/quote]

 

Hitler, accompanied by Keitel, Jodl and others of the OKW staff, arrived at headquarters, which he had named Felsennest (Eyrie), near Muenstereifel just as dawn was breaking on May 10. Twenty-five miles to the west German forces were hurtling over the Belgian frontier. Along a front of 175 miles, from the North Sea to the Maginot Line, Nazi troops broke across the borders of three small neutral states, Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg, in brutal violation of the German word, solemnly and repeatedly given.

 

[b]THE SIX WEEKS' WAR: MAY 10-JUNE 25, 1940[/b]

 

For the Dutch it was a five-day war, and indeed in that brief period the fate of Belgium, France and the British Expeditionary Force was sealed. For the Germans everything went according to the book, or even better than the book, in the unfolding both of strategy and of tactics. Their success exceeded the fondest hopes of Hitler. His generals were confounded by the lightning rapidity and the extent of their own victories. As for the Allied leaders, they were quickly paralyzed by developments they had not faintly expected and could not -- in the utter confusion that ensued -- comprehend.

 

Winston Churchill himself, who had taken over as Prime Minister on the first day of battle, was dumfounded. He was awakened at half past seven on the morning of May 15 by a telephone call from Premier Paul Reynaud in Paris, who told him in an excited voice, "We have been defeated! We are beaten!" Churchill refused to believe it. The great French Army vanquished in a week? It was impossible. "I did not comprehend," he wrote later, "the violence of the revolution effected since the last war by the incursion of a mass of fast-moving armor." [6]

 

Tanks -- seven divisions of them concentrated at one point, the weakest position in the Western defenses, for the big breakthrough -- that was what did it. That and the Stuka dive bombers and the parachutists and the airborne troops who landed far behind the Allied lines or on the top of their seemingly impregnable forts and wrought havoc.

 

And yet we who were in Berlin wondered why these German tactics should have come as such a shattering surprise to the Allied leaders. Had not Hitler's troops demonstrated their effectiveness in the campaign against Poland? There the great breakthroughs which had surrounded or destroyed the Polish armies within a week had been achieved by the massing of armor after the Stukas had softened up resistance. Parachutists and airborne troops had not done well in Poland even on the very limited scale with which they were used; they had failed to capture intact the key bridges. But in Norway, a month before the onslaught in the West, they had been prodigious, capturing Oslo and all the airfields, and reinforcing the isolated small groups that had been landed by sea at Stavanger, Bergen, Trondheim and Narvik and thereby enabling them to hold out. Hadn't the Allied commanders studied these campaigns and learned their lessons?

 

[b]THE CONQUEST OF THE NETHERLANDS[/b]

 

Only one division of panzers could be spared by the Germans for the conquest of the Netherlands, which was accomplished in five days largely by parachutists and by troops landed by air transports behind the great flooded water lines which many in Berlin had believed would hold the Germans up for weeks. To the bewildered Dutch was reserved the experience of being subjected to the first large-scale airborne attack in the history of warfare. Considering their unpreparedness for such an ordeal and the complete surprise by which they were taken they did better than was realized at the time.

 

The first objective of the Germans was to land a strong force by air on the flying fields near The Hague, occupy the capital at once and capture the Queen and the government, as they had tried to do just a month before with the Norwegians. But at The Hague, as at Oslo, the plan failed, though due to different circumstances. Recovering from their initial surprise and confusion, Dutch infantry, supported by artillery, was able to drive the Germans -- two regiments strong -- from the three airfields surrounding The Hague by the evening of May 10. This saved the capital and the government momentarily, but it tied down the Dutch reserves, which were desperately needed elsewhere.

 

The key to the German plan was the seizure by airborne troops of the bridges just south of Rotterdam over the Nieuwe Maas and those farther southeast over the two estuaries of the Maas (Meuse) at Dordrecht and Moerdijk. It was over these bridges that General Georg von Kuechler's Eighteenth Army driving from the German border nearly a hundred miles away hoped to force his way into Fortress Holland. In no other way could this entrenched place, lying behind formidable water barriers and comprising The Hague, Amsterdam, Utretcht, Rotterdam and Leyden, be taken easily and quickly.

 

The bridges were seized on the morning of May 10 by airborne units  -- including one company that landed on the river at Rotterdam in antiquated seaplanes -- before the surprised Dutch guards could blow them. Desperate efforts were made by improvised Netherlands units to drive the Germans away and they almost succeeded. But the Germans hung on tenuously until the morning of May 12, when the one armored division assigned to Kuechler arrived, having smashed through the Grebbe-Peel Line, a fortified front to the east strengthened by a number of water barriers, on which the Dutch had hoped to hold out for several days.

 

There was some hope that the Germans might be stopped short of the Moerdijk bridges by General Giraud's French Seventh Army, which had raced up from the Channel and reached Tilburg on the afternoon of May 11. But the French, like the hard-pressed Dutch, lacked air support, armor, and antitank and antiaircraft guns, and were easily pushed back to Breda. This opened the way for the German 9th Panzer Division to cross the bridges at Moerdijk and Dordrecht and, on the afternoon of May 12, arrive at the south bank of the Nieuwe Maas across from Rotterdam, where the German airborne troops still held the bridges.

 

But the tanks could not get across the Rotterdam bridges. The Dutch in the meantime had sealed them off at the northern ends. By the morning of May 14, then, the situation for the Netherlands was desperate but not hopeless. Fortress Holland had not been cracked. The strong German airborne forces around The Hague had been either captured or dispersed into nearby villages. Rotterdam still held. The German High Command, anxious to pull the armored division and supporting troops out of Holland to exploit a new opportunity which had just been opened to the south in France, was not happy. Indeed, on the morning of the fourteenth Hitler issued Directive No. 11 stating: "The power of resistance of the Dutch Army has proved to be stronger than was anticipated. Political as well as military considerations require that this resistance be broken speedily." How? He commanded that detachments of the Air Force be taken from the Sixth Army front in Belgium "to facilitate the rapid conquest of Fortress Holland." [7]

 

Specifically he and Goering ordered a heavy bombing of Rotterdam. The Dutch would be induced to surrender by a dose of Nazi terror -- the kind that had been applied the autumn before at beleaguered Warsaw.

 

On the morning of May 14 a German staff officer from the XXXIXth Corps had crossed the bridge at Rotterdam under a white flag and demanded the surrender of the city. He warned that unless it capitulated it would be bombed. While surrender negotiations were under way -- a Dutch officer had come to German headquarters near the bridge to discuss the details and was returning with the German terms -- bombers appeared and wiped out the heart of the great city. Some eight hundred persons, almost entirely civilians, were massacred, several thousand wounded and 78,000 made homeless. [ii] This bit of treachery, this act of calculated ruthlessness, would long be remembered by the Dutch, though at Nuremberg both Goering and Kesselring of the Luftwaffe defended it on the grounds that Rotterdam was not an open city but stoutly defended by the Dutch. Both denied that they knew that surrender negotiations were going on when they dispatched the bombers, though there is strong evidence from German Army archives that they did. [iii] [9] At any rate, OKW made no excuses at the time. I myself heard over the Berlin radio on the evening of May 14 a special OKW communique:

 

[quote]Under the tremendous impression of the attacks of German dive bombers and the imminent attack of German tanks, the city of Rotterdam has capitulated and thus saved itself from destruction.[/quote]

 

Rotterdam surrendered, and then the Dutch armed forces. Queen Wilhelmina and the government members had fled to London on two British destroyers. At dusk on May 14 General H. G. Winkelmann, the Commander in Chief of the Dutch forces, ordered his troops to lay down their arms and at 11 A.M. on the next day he signed the official capitulation. Within five days it was all over. The fighting, that is. For five years a night of savage German terror would henceforth darken this raped, civilized little land.

 

[b]THE FALL OF BELGIUM AND THE TRAPPING OF THE ANGLO-FRENCH ARMIES[/b]

 

By the time the Dutch had surrendered, the die was cast for Belgium, France and the British Expeditionary Force. May 14, though it was only the fifth day of the attack, was the fatal day. The previous evening German armor had secured four bridgeheads across the steeply banked and heavily wooded Meuse River from Dinant to Sedan, captured the latter city, which had been the scene of Napoleon III's surrender to Moltke in 1870 and the end of the Third Empire, and gravely threatened the center of the Allied lines and the hinge on which the flower of the British and French armies had so quickly wheeled into Belgium.

 

The next day, May 14, the avalanche broke. An army of tanks unprecedented in warfare for size, concentration, mobility and striking power, which when it had started through the Ardennes Forest from the German frontier on May 10 stretched in three columns back for a hundred miles far behind the Rhine, broke through the French Ninth and Second armies and headed swiftly for the Channel, behind the Allied forces in Belgium. This was a formidable and frightening juggernaut. Preceded by waves of Stuka dive bombers, which softened up the French defensive positions, swarming with combat engineers who launched rubber boats and threw up pontoon bridges to get across the rivers and canals, each panzer division possessed of its own self-propelled artillery and of one brigade of motorized infantry, and the armored corps closely followed by divisions of motorized infantry to hold the positions opened up by the tanks, this phalanx of steel and fire could not be stopped by any means in the hands of the bewildered defenders. On both sides of Dinant on the Meuse the French gave way to General Hermann Hoth's XVth Armored Corps, one of whose two tank divisions was commanded by a daring young brigadier general, Erwin Rommel. Farther south along the river, at Montherme, the same pattern was being executed by General Georg- Hans Reinhardt's XLIst Armored Corps of two tank divisions.

 

But it was around Sedan, of disastrous memory to the French, that the greatest blow fell. Here on the morning of May 14 two tank divisions of General Heinz Guderian's XIXth Armored Corps [iv] poured across a hastily constructed pontoon bridge set up during the night over the Meuse and struck toward the west. Though French armor and British bombers tried desperately to destroy the bridge -- forty of seventy-one R.A.F. planes were shot down in one single attack, mostly by flak, and seventy French tanks were destroyed -- they could not damage it. By evening the German bridgehead at Sedan was thirty miles wide and fifteen miles deep and the French forces in the vital center of the Allied line were shattered. Those who were not surrounded and made prisoners were in disorderly retreat. The Franco-British armies to the north, as well as the twenty-two divisions of Belgians, were placed in dire danger of being cut off.

 

The first couple of days had gone fairly well for the Allies, or so they thought. To Churchill, plunging with new zest into his fresh responsibilities as Prime Minister, "up until the night of the twelfth," as he later wrote, "there was no reason to suppose that the operations were not going well." [10] Gamelin, the generalissimo of the Allied forces, was highly pleased with the situation. The evening before, the best and largest part of the French forces, the First, Seventh and Ninth armies, along with the B.E.F., nine divisions strong under Lord Gort, had joined the Belgians, as planned, on a strong defensive line running along the Dyle River from Antwerp through Louvain to Wavre and thence across the Gembloux gap to Namur and south along the Meuse to Sedan. Between the formidable Belgian fortress of Namur and Antwerp, on a front of only sixty miles, the Allies actually outnumbered the oncoming Germans, having some thirty-six divisions against the twenty in Reichenau's Sixth Army.

 

The Belgians, though they had fought well along the reaches of their northeast frontier, had not held out there as long as had been expected, certainly not as long as in 1914. They, like the Dutch to the north of them, had simply not been able to cope with the revolutionary new tactics of the Wehrmacht. Here, as in Holland, the Germans seized the vital bridges by the daring use of a handful of specially trained troops landed silently at dawn in gliders. They overpowered the guards at two of the three bridges over the Albert Canal behind Maastricht before the defenders could throw the switches that were supposed to blow them.

 

They had even greater success in capturing Fort Eben Emael, which commanded the junction of the Meuse River and the Albert Canal. This modern, strategically located fortress was regarded by both the Allies and the Germans as the most impregnable fortification in Europe, stronger than anything the French had built in the Maginot Line or the Germans in the West Wall. Constructed in a series of steel-and-concrete galleries deep underground, its gun turrets protected by heavy armor and manned by 1,200 men, it was expected to hold out indefinitely against the pounding of the heaviest bombs and artillery shells. It fell in thirty hours to eighty German soldiers who under the command of a sergeant had landed in nine gliders on its roof and whose total casualties amounted to six killed and nineteen wounded. In Berlin, I remember, OKW made the enterprise look very mysterious, announcing in a special communique on the evening of May 11 that Fort Eben Emael had been taken by a "new method of attack," an announcement that caused rumors to spread -- and Dr. Goebbels was delighted to fan them -- that the Germans had a deadly new "secret weapon," perhaps a nerve gas that temporarily paralyzed the defenders.

 

The truth was much more prosaic. With their usual flair for minute preparation, the Germans during the winter of 1939-40 had erected at Hildesheim a replica of the fort and of the bridges across the Albert Canal and had trained some four hundred glider troops on how to take them. Three groups were to capture the three bridges, the fourth Eben Emael. This last unit of eighty men landed on the top of the fortress and placed a specially prepared "hollow" explosive in the armored gun turrets which not only put them out of action but spread flames and gas in the chambers below. Portable flame throwers were also used at the gun portals and observation openings. Within an hour the Germans were able to penetrate the upper galleries, render the light and heavy guns of the great fort useless and blind its observation posts. Belgian infantry behind the fortification tried vainly to dislodge the tiny band of attackers but they were driven off by Stuka attacks and by reinforcements of parachutists. By the morning of May 11 advance panzer units, which had raced over the two intact bridges to the north, arrived at the fort and surrounded it, and, after further Stuka bombings and hand-to-hand fighting in the underground tunnels, a white flag was hoisted at noon and the 1,200 dazed Belgian defenders filed out and surrendered. [11]

 

This feat, along with the capture of the bridges and the violence of the attack mounted by General van Reichenau's Sixth Army, which was sustained by General Hoepner's XVIth Armored Corps of two tank divisions and one mechanized infantry division, convinced the Allied High Command that now, as in 1914, the brunt of the German offensive was being carried out by the enemy's right wing and that they had taken the proper means to stop it. In fact, as late as the evening of May 15 the Belgian, British and French forces were holding firm on the Dyle line from Antwerp to Namur.

 

This was just what the German High Command wanted. It had now become possible for it to spring the Manstein plan and deliver the haymaker in the center. General Halder, the Chief of the Army General Staff, saw the situation -- and his opportunities -- very clearly on the evening of May 13.

 

[quote]North of Namur [he wrote in his diary] we can count on a completed concentration of some 24 British and French and about 15 Belgian divisions. Against this our Sixth Army has 15 divisions on the front and six in reserve ... We are strong enough there to fend off any enemy attack. No need to bring up any more forces. South of Namur we face a weaker enemy. About half our strength. Outcome of Meuse attack wil1 decide if, when and where we wil1 be able to exploit this superiority. The enemy has no force worth mentioning behind this front.[/quote]

 

No force worth mentioning behind this front, which, the next day, was broken?

 

On May 16 Prime Minister Churchill flew to Paris to find out. By the afternoon, when he drove to the Quai d'Orsay to see Premier Reynaud and General Gamelin, German spearheads were sixty miles west of Sedan, rolling along the undefended open country. Nothing very much stood between them and Paris, or between them and the Channel, but Churchill did not know this. "Where is the strategic reserve?" he asked Gamelin and, breaking into French, "Ou est la masse de manoeuvre?" The Commander in Chief of the Allied armies turned to him with a shake of the head and a shrug and answered, "Aucune -- there is none." [v]

 

"I was dumfounded," Churchill later related. It was unheard of that a great army, when attacked, held no troops in reserve. "I admit," says Churchill, "that this was one of the greatest surprises I have had in my life." [12]

 

It was scarcely less a surprise to the German High Command, or at least to Hitler and the generals at OKW if not to Halder. Twice during this campaign in the West, which the Fuehrer himself directed, he hesitated. The first occasion was on May 17 when a crisis of nerves overcame him. That morning Guderian, who was a third of the way to the Channel with his panzer corps, received an order to halt in his tracks. Intelligence had been received from the Luftwaffe that the French were mounting a great counterattack to cut off the thin armored German wedges which extended westward from Sedan. Hitler conferred hastily with his Army Commander in Chief, Brauchitsch, and with Halder. He was certain that a serious French threat was developing from the south. Rundstedt, commander of Army Group A, the main force which had launched the breakthrough over the Meuse, backed him up when they conferred later in the day. He expected, he said, "a great surprise counteroffensive by strong French forces from the Verdun and Chalons-sur-Marne areas." The specter of a second Marne rose in Hitler's feverish mind. "I am keeping an eye on this," he wrote Mussolini the next day. "The miracle of the Marne of 1914 will not be repeated!" [13]

 

[quote]A very unpleasant day [Halder noted in his diary the evening of May 17]. The Fuehrer is terribly nervous. He is worried over his own success, will risk nothing and insists on restraining us. Puts forward the excuse that it is all because of his concern with the left flank ... [He] has brought only bewilderment and doubts.[/quote]

 

The Nazi warlord showed no improvement during the next day despite the avalanche of news about the French collapse. Halder recorded the crisis in his diary of the eighteenth:

 

[quote]The Fuehrer has an unaccountable worry about the south flank. He rages and screams that we are on the way to ruining the whole operation and that we are courting the danger of a defeat. He won't have any part in continuing the drive westward, let alone southwest, and clings always to the idea of a thrust to the northwest. This is the subject of a most unpleasant dispute between the Fuehrer on the one side and Brauchitsch and me on the other.[/quote]

 

General Jodl of OKW, for whom the Fuehrer was nearly always right, also noted the discord at the top.

 

[quote]Day of great tension [he wrote on the eighteenth]. The Commander in Chief of the Army [Brauchitsch] has not carried out the intention of building up as quickly as possible a new flanking position to the south ... Brauchitsch and Halder are called immediately and ordered peremptorily to adopt the necessary measures immediately.[/quote]

 

But Halder had been right; the French had no forces with which to stage a counterattack from the south. And though the panzer divisions, chafing at the bit as they were, received orders to do no more than proceed with "a reconnaissance in force" this was all they needed to press toward the Channel. By the morning of May 19 a mighty wedge of seven armored divisions, driving relentlessly westward north of the Somme River past the storied scenes of battle of the First World War, was only some fifty miles from the Channel. On the evening of May 20, to the surprise of Hitler's headquarters, the 2nd Panzer Division reached Abbeville at the mouth of the Somme. The Belgians, the B.E.F. and three French armies were trapped.

 

[quote]Fuehrer is beside himself with joy [Jodl scribbled in his diary that night]. Talks in words of highest appreciation of the German Army and its leadership. Is working on the peace treaty, which shall express the tenor: return of territory robbed over the last 400 years from the German people, and of other values ...

 

A special memorandum is in the files containing the emotion-choked words of the Fuehrer when receiving the telephone report from the Commander in Chief of the Army about the capture of Abbeville.[/quote]

 

The only hope of the Allies to extricate themselves from this disastrous encirclement was for the armies in Belgium to immediately turn southwest, disengage themselves from the German Sixth Army attacking them there, fight their way across the German armored wedge that stretched across northern France to the sea and join up with fresh French forces pushing northward from the Somme. This was in fact what General Gamelin ordered on the morning of May 19, but he was replaced that evening by General Maxime Weygand, who immediately canceled the order. Weygand, who had a formidable military reputation gained in the First World War, wanted to confer first with the Allied commanders in Belgium before deciding what to do. As a result, three days were lost before Weygand came up with precisely the same plan as his predecessor. The delay proved costly. There were still forty French, British and Belgian battle-tested divisions in the north, and had they struck south across the thin armored German line on May 19 as Gamelin ordered, they might have succeeded in breaking through. By the time they moved, communications between the various national commands had become chaotic and the several Allied armies, hard pressed as they were, began to act at cross-purposes. At any rate, the Weygand plan existed only in the General's mind; no French troops ever moved up from the Somme.

 

In the meantime the German High Command had thrown in all the infantry troops that could be rushed up to strengthen the armored gap and enlarge it. By May 24 Guderian's tanks, driving up the Channel from Abbeville, had captured Boulogne and surrounded Calais, the two main ports, and reached Gravelines, some twenty miles down the coast from Dunkirk. The front in Belgium had moved southwestward as the Allies attempted to detach themselves there. By the 24th, then, the British, French and Belgian armies in the north were compressed into a relatively small triangle with its base along the Channel from Gravelines to Temeuzen and its apex at Valenciennes, some seventy miles inland. There was now no hope of breaking out of the trap. The only hope, and it seemed a slim one, was possible evacuation by sea from Dunkirk.

 

It was at this juncture, on May 24, that the German armor, now within sight of Dunkirk and poised along the Aa Canal between Gravelines and St.-Omer for the final kill, received a strange -- and to the soldiers in the field inexplicable -- order to halt their advance. It was the first of the German High Command's major mistakes in World War II and became a subject of violent controversy, not only between the German generals themselves but among the military historians, as to who was responsible and why. We shall return to that question in a moment in the light of a mass of material now available. Whatever the reasons for this stop order, it provided a miraculous reprieve to the Allies, and especially to the British, leading as it did to the miracle of Dunkirk. But it did not save the Belgians.

 

[b]THE CAPITULATION OF KING LEOPOLD[/b]

 

King Leopold III of the Belgians surrendered early on the morning of May 28. The headstrong young ruler, who had taken his country out of its alliance with France and Britain into a foolish neutrality, who had refused to restore the alliance even during the months when he knew the Germans were preparing a massive assault across his border, who at the last moment, after Hitler had struck, called on the French and British for military succor and received it, now deserted them in a desperate hour, opening the dyke for German divisions to pour through on the flank of the sorely pressed Anglo-French troops. Moreover, he did it, as Churchill told the Commons on June 4, "without prior consultation, with the least possible notice, without the advice of his ministers and upon his own personal act."

 

Actually he did it against the unanimous advice of his government, which he was constitutionally sworn to follow. At 5 A.M. on May 25 there was a showdown meeting at the King's headquarters between the monarch and three members of the cabinet, including the Prime Minister and the Foreign Minister. They urged him for the last time not to surrender personally and become a prisoner of the Germans, for if he did he "would be degraded to the role of Hacha" in Prague. They also reminded him that he was head of state as well as Commander in Chief, and that if matters came to the worst he could exercise his first office in exile, as the Queen of Holland and the King of Norway had decided to do, until eventual Allied victory came.

 

"I have decided to stay," Leopold answered. "The cause of the Allies is lost." [14]

 

At 5 P.M. on May 27 he dispatched General Derousseaux, Deputy Chief of the Belgian General Staff, to the Germans to ask for a truce. At 10 o'clock the General brought back the German terms: "The Fuehrer demands that arms be laid down unconditionally." The King accepted unconditional surrender at 11 P.M. and proposed that fighting cease at 4 A.M., which it did.

 

Leopold's capitulation was angrily denounced by Premier Reynaud of France in a violent broadcast, and Belgian Premier Pierlot, also broadcasting from Paris but in a more dignified tone, informed the Belgian people that the King had acted against the unanimous advice of the government, broken his links with the people and was no longer in a position to govern, and that the Belgian government in exile would continue the struggle. Churchill when he spoke in the House on May 28 reserved judgment on Leopold's action but on June 4 joined in the general criticism.

 

The controversy raged long after the war was over. Leopold's defenders, and there were many in and outside Belgium, believed that he had done he right and honorable thing in sharing the fate of his soldiers and of the Belgian people. And they made much of the claim that the King acted not as chief of state but as Commander in Chief of the Belgian Army in surrendering.

 

That the battered Belgian troops were in desperate straits by May 27 there is no dispute. Valiantly they had agreed to extend their front in order to free the British and French to fight their way south. And that extended front was fast collapsing though the Belgians fought doggedly. Also Leopold was not told that on May 26 Lord Gort had received orders from London to withdraw to Dunkirk and save what he could of the B.E.F. That is one side of the argument, but there is another. The Belgian Army was under the over-all Allied Command and Leopold made a separate peace without consulting it. In his defense it has been pointed out that on May 27 at 12:30 P.M. he telegraphed Gort that he soon would "be forced to capitulate to avoid a collapse." But the British commander, who was extremely busy and constantly on the move, did not receive it. He later testified that he first heard of the surrender only shortly after 11 P.M. on May 27 and found himself "suddenly faced with an open gap of twenty miles between Ypres and the sea through which enemy armored forces might reach the beaches." [15] To General Weygand, who was the King's superior military commander, the news arrived by telegram from French liaison at Belgian headquarters a little after 6 P.M. and it hit him, he later said, "like a bolt out of the blue. There had been no warning ... " [16]

 

Finally, even as Commander in Chief of the armed forces, Leopold in this constitutional, democratic monarchy was bound to accept the advice of his government. Neither in that role nor certainly as chief of state did he have the authority to surrender on his own. In the end the Belgian people, as was proper, passed judgment on their sovereign. He was not recalled to the throne from Switzerland, where he took refuge at the war's end, until five years after it was over. When the call came, on July 20, 1950, after 57 per cent of those voting in a referendum had approved it, his return provoked such a violent reaction among the populace that civil war threatened to break out. He soon abdicated in favor of his son.

 

Whatever may be said of Leopold's behavior, there should be no dispute -- though there has been [vi]  -- about the magnificent way his Army fought. For a few days in May I followed Reichenau's Sixth Army through Belgium and saw for myself the tenacity with which the Belgians struggled against insuperable odds. Not once did they break under the unmerciful and unopposed bombing of the Luftwaffe or when the German armor tried to cut through them. This could not be said of certain other Allied troops in that campaign. The Belgians held out for eighteen days and would have held out much longer had not they, like the B.E.F. and the French northern armies, been caught in a trap which was not of their making.

 

[b]MIRACLE AT DUNKIRK[/b]

 

Ever since May 20, when Guderian's tanks broke through to Abbeville on the sea, the British Admiralty, on the personal orders of Churchill, had been rounding up shipping for a possible evacuation of the B.E.F. and other Allied forces from the Channel ports. Noncombatant personnel and other "useless mouths" began to be ferried across the narrow sea to England at once. By May 24, as we have seen, the Belgian front to the north was near collapse, and to the south the German armor, striking up the coast from Abbeville, after taking Boulogne and enveloping Calais, had reached the Aa Canal only twenty miles from Dunkirk. In between were caught the Belgian Army, the nine divisions of the B.E.F. and ten divisions of the French First Army. Though the terrain on the southern end of the pocket was bad tank country, being crisscrossed with canals, ditches and flooded areas, Guderian's and Reinhardt's panzer corps already had five bridgeheads across the main barrier, the Aa Canal, between Gravelines on the sea and St.-Omer, and were poised for the knockout blow which would hammer the Allied armies against the anvil of the advancing German Sixth and Eighteenth armies pushing down from the northeast and utterly destroy them.

 

Suddenly on the evening of May 24 came the peremptory order from the High Command, issued at the insistence of Hitler with the prompting of Rundstedt and Goering but over the violent objections of Brauchitsch and Halder, that the tank forces should halt on the canal line and attempt no further advance. This furnished Lord Gort an unexpected and vital reprieve which he and the British Navy and Air Force made the most of and which, as Rundstedt later perceived and said, led "to one of the great turning points of the war."

 

How did this inexplicable stop order on the threshold of what seemed certain to be the greatest German victory of the campaign come about? What were the reasons for it? And who was responsible? The questions have provoked one of the greatest arguments of the war, among the German generals involved and among the historians. The generals, led by Rundstedt and Halder, have put the blame exclusively on Hitler. Churchill added further fuel to the controversy in the second volume of his war memoirs by contending that the initiative for the order came from Rundstedt and not Hitler and citing as evidence the war diaries of Rundstedt's own headquarters. In the maze of conflicting and contradictory testimony it has been difficult to ascertain the facts. In the course of preparing this chapter the author wrote General Halder himself for further elucidation and promptly received a courteous and detailed reply. On the basis of Ihis and much other evidence now in, certain conclusions may be drawn and the controversy settled, if not conclusively, at least fairly convincingly.

 

As for responsibility for the famous order, Rundstedt, despite his later assertions to the contrary, must share it with Hitler. The Fuehrer visited the General's Army Group A headquarters at Charleville on the morning of May 24. Rundstedt proposed that the panzer divisions on the canal line before Dunkirk be halted until more infantry could be brought up. * Hitler agreed, observing that the armor should be conserved for later operations against the French south of the Somme. Moreover, he declared that if the pocket in which the Allies were entrapped became too small it would hamper the activities of the Luftwaffe. Probably Rundstedt, with the approval of the Fuehrer, issued the stop order at once, for Churchill notes that the B.E.F. intercepted a German radio message giving orders to that effect at 11:42 that morning. [17] Hitler and Rundstedt were at that moment in conference.

 

At any rate, that evening Hitler issued the formal order from OKW, both Jodl and Halder noting it in their diaries. The General Staff Chief was most unhappy.

 

[quote]Our left wing, consisting of armor and motorized forces [he wrote in his diary], will thus be stopped dead in its tracks on the direct orders of the Fuehrer! Finishing off the encircled enemy army is to be left to the Air Force![/quote]

 

This exclamation mark of contempt indicates that Goering had intervened with Hitler, and it is now known that he did. He offered to liquidate the entrapped enemy troops with his Air Force alone! The reasons for his ambitious and vain proposal were given the writer in the letter from Halder on July 19, 1957.

 

[quote]During the following days [i.e., after May 24] it became known that Hitler's decision was mainly influenced by Goering. To the dictator the rapid movement of the Army, whose risks and prospects of success he did not understand because of his lack of military schooling, became almost sinister. He was constantly oppressed by a feeling of anxiety that a reversal loomed ...

 

Goering, who knew his Fuehrer well, took advantage of this anxiety. He offered to fight the rest of the great battle of encirclement alone with his Luftwaffe, thus eliminating the risk of having to use the valuable panzer formations. He made this proposal ... for a reason which was characteristic of the unscrupulously ambitious Goering. He wanted to secure for his Air Force, after the surprisingly smooth operations of the Army up to then, the decisive final act in the great battle and thus gain the glory of success before the whole world.[/quote]

 

General Halder then tells in his letter of an account given him by Brauchitsch after a talk which the latter had with the Luftwaffe Generals Milch and Kesselring in Nuremberg jail in January 1946, in which the Air Force officers declared

 

[quote]that Goering at that time [May 1940] emphasized to Hitler that if the great victory in battle then developing could be claimed exclusively by the Army generals, the prestige of the Fuehrer in the German homeland would be damaged beyond repair. That could be prevented only if the Luftwaffe and not the Army carried out the decisive battle.[/quote]

 

It is fairly clear, then, that Hitler's idea, prompted by Goering and Rundstedt but strenuously opposed by Brauchitsch and Halder, was to let the Air Force and Bock's Army Group B, which, without any armor to speak of, was slowly driving back the Belgians and British southwest to the Channel, mop up the enemy troops in the pocket. Rundstedt's Army Group A, with some seven tank divisions, halted on the water lines west and south of Dunkirk, would merely stand pat and keep the enemy hemmed in. But neither the Luftwaffe nor Bock's army group proved able to achieve their objectives. On the morning of May 26, Halder was fuming in his diary that "these orders from the top just make no sense ... The tanks are stopped as if they were paralyzed."

 

Finally, on the evening of May 26, Hitler rescinded the stop order and agreed that, in view of Bock's slow advance in Belgium and the movement of transports off the coast, the armored forces could resume their advance on Dunkirk. By then it was late; the cornered enemy had had time to strengthen his defenses and behind them was beginning to slip away to sea.

 

We now know that there were political reasons too for Hitler's fatal order. Halder had noted in his diary on May 25, a day, he says, that started "off with one of those painful wrangles between Brauchitsch and the Fuehrer on the next moves in the battle of encirclement," that

 

[quote]now political command has formed the fixed idea that the battle of decision must not be fought on Flemish soil, but rather in northern France.[/quote]

 

This entry puzzled me and when I wrote to the former General Staff Chief I asked him if he could recall Hitler's political reasons for wanting to finish this battle in northern France rather than in Belgium. Halder recalled them very well. "According to my still quite lively memory," he replied, "Hitler, in our talks at the time, supported his reasons for the stop order with two main lines of thought. The first were military reasons: the unsuitable nature of the terrain for tanks, the resulting high losses which would weaken the impending attack on the rest of France, and so on." Then, writes Halder, the Fuehrer cited

 

[quote]a second reason which he knew that we, as soldiers, could not argue against since it was political and not military.

 

This second reason was that for political reasons he did not want the decisive final battle, which inevitably would cause great damage to the population, to take place in territory inhabited by the Flemish people. He had the intention, he said, of making an independent National Socialist region out of the territory inhabited by the German-descended Flemish, thereby binding them close to Germany. His supporters on Flemish soil had been active in this direction for a long time; he had promised them to keep their land free from the damage of war. If he did not keep this promise now, their confidence in him would be severely damaged. That would be a political disadvantage for Germany which he, as the politically responsible leader, must avoid.[/quote]

 

Absurd? If this seems to be another of Hitler's sudden aberrations (Halder writes that he and Brauchitsch were "not convinced by this reasoning"), other political consideration which he confided to other generals were more sane -- and important. Describing after the war Hitler's meeting with Rundstedt on May 24, General Guenther Blumentritt, the latter's chief of operations, told Liddell Hart, the British military writer:

 

[quote]Hitler was in very good humor ... and gave us his opinion that the war would be finished in six weeks. After that he wished to conclude a reasonable peace with France and then the way would be free for an agreement with Britain ...

 

He then astonished us by speaking with admiration of the British Empire, of the necessity for its existence, and of the civilization that Britain had brought into the world ... He said that all he wanted from Britain was that she should acknowledge Germany's position on the continent. The return of Germany's colonies would be desirable but not essential ... He concluded by saying that his aim was to make peace with Britain on a basis that she would regard as compatible with her honor to accept. [18][/quote]

 

Such thoughts Hitler was to express often during the next few weeks to his generals, to Ciano and Mussolini and finally in public. Ciano was astonished a month later to find the Nazi dicta:or, then at the zenith of his success, harping about the importance of maintaining the British Empire as "a factor in world equilibrium," [19] and on July 13 Halder, in his diary, described the Fuehrer as sorely puzzled over Britain's failure to accept peace. To bring England to her knees by force, he told his generals that day, "would not benefit Germany ... only Japan, the United States and others."

 

It may be, then, though some doubt it, that Hitler restrained his armored forces before Dunkirk in order to spare Britain a bitter humiliation and thereby facilitate a peace settlement. It would have to be, as he said, a peace in which the British left Germany free to turn once more eastward, this time against Russia. London would have to recognize, as he also said, the Third Reich's domination of the Continent. For the next couple of months Hitler would be confident that such a peace was within his grasp. No more now than in all the years before did he comprehend the character of the British nation or the kind of world its leaders and its people were determined to fight for -- to the end.

 

Nor did he and his generals, ignorant of the sea as they were -- and remained -- dream that the sea-minded British could evacuate a third of a million men from a small battered port and from the exposed beaches right under their noses.

 

At three minutes before seven on the evening of May 26, shortly after Hitler's stop order had been canceled, the British Admiralty signaled the beginning of "Operation Dynamo," as the Dunkirk evacuation was called. That night the German armor resumed its attack on the port from the west and south, but now the panzers found it hard going. Lord Gort had had time to deploy against them three infantry divisions with heavy artillery support. The tanks made little progress. In the meantime the evacuation began. An armada of 850 vessels of all sizes, shapes and methods of propulsion, from cruisers and destroyers to small sailboats and Dutch skoots, many of them manned by civilian volunteers from the English coastal towns, converged on Dunkirk. The first day, May 27, they took off 7,669 troops; the next day, 17,804; the following day, 47,310; and on May 30, 53,823, for a total of 126,606 during the first four days. This was far more than the Admiralty had hoped to get out. When the operation began it counted on evacuating only about 45,000 men in the two days' time it then thought it would have.

 

It was not until this fourth day of Operation Dynamo, on May 30, that the German High Command woke up to what was happening. For four days the communiques of OKW had been reiterating that the encircled enemy armies were doomed. A communique of May 29, which I noted in my diary, stated flatly: "The fate of the French army in Artois is sealed ... The British army, which has been compressed into the territory ... around Dunkirk, is also going to its destruction before our concentric attack."

 

But it wasn't; it was going to sea. Without its heavy arms and equipment, to be sure, but with the certainty that the men would live to fight another day.

 

As late as the morning of May 30, Halder confided confidentially in his diary that "the disintegration of the enemy which we have encircled continues." Some of the British, he conceded, were "fighting with tooth and nail:" the others were "fleeing to the coast and trying to get across the Channel on anything that floats. Le Debacle," he concluded, alluding to Zola's famous novel of the French collapse in the Franco-Prussian War.

 

By afternoon, after a session with Brauchitsch, the General Staff Chief had awakened to the significance of the swarms of miserable little boats on which the British were fleeing.

 

[quote]Brauchitsch is angry ... The pocket would have been closed at the coast if only our armor had not been held back. The bad weather has grounded the Luftwaffe and we must now stand by and watch countless thousands of the enemy get away to England right under our noses.[/quote]

 

That was, in fact, what they watched. Despite increased pressure which was immediately applied by the Germans on all sides of the pocket, the British lines held and more troops were evacuated. The next day, May 31, was the biggest day of all. Some 68,000 men were embarked for England, a third of them from the beaches, the rest from the Dunkirk harbor. A total of 194,620 men had now been taken out, more than four times the number originally hoped for.

 

Where was the famed Luftwaffe? Part of the time, as Halder noted, it was grounded by bad weather. The rest of the time it encountered unexpected opposition from the Royal Air Force, which from bases just across the Channel successfully challenged it for the first time. [vii] Though outnumbered, the new British Spitfires proved more than a match for the Messerschmitts and they mowed down the cumbersome German bombers. On a few occasions Goering's planes arrived over Dunkirk between British sorties and did such extensive damage to the port that for a time it was unusable and the troops had to be lifted exclusively from the beaches. The Luftwaffe also pressed several strong attacks on the shipping and accounted for most of the 243 -- out of 861 -- vessels sunk. But it failed to achieve what Goering had promised Hitler: the annihilation of the B.E.F. On June 1, when it carried out its heaviest attack (and suffered its heaviest losses -- each side lost thirty planes), sinking three British destroyers and a number of small transports, the second-highest day's total was evacuated  -- 64,429 men. By dawn of the next day, only 4,000 British troops remained in the perimeter, protected by 100,000 French who now manned the defenses.

 

Medium German artillery had in the meantime come within range and daytime evacuation operations had to be abandoned. The Luftwaffe at that time did not operate after dark and during the nights of June 2 and 3 the remainder of the B.E.F. and 60,000 French troops were successfully brought out. Dunkirk, still defended stubbornly by 40,000 French soldiers, held out until the morning of June 4. By that day 338,226 British and French soldiers had escaped the German clutches. They were no longer an army; most of them, understandably, were for the moment in a pitiful shape. But they were battle-tried; they knew that if properly armed and adequately covered from the air they could stand up to the Germans. Most of them, when the balance in armament was achieved, would prove it -- and on beaches not far down the Channel coast from where they had been rescued.

 

A deliverance Dunkirk was to the British. But Churchill reminded them in the House on June 4 that "wars are not won by evacuations." The predicament of Great Britain was indeed grim, more dangerous than it had been since the Norman landings nearly a millennium before. It had no army to defend the islands. The Air Force had been greatly weakened in France. Only the Navy remained, and the Norwegian campaign had shown how vulnerable the big fighting ships were to land-based aircraft. Now the Luftwaffe bombers were based but five or ten minutes away across the narrow Channel. France, to be sure, still held out below the Somme and the Aisne. But its best troops and armament had been lost in Belgium and in northern France, its small and obsolescent Air Force had been largely destroyed, and its two most illustrious generals, Marshal Petain and General Weygand, who now began to dominate the shaky government, had no more stomach for battle against such a superior foe.

 

These dismal facts were very much on the mind of Winston Churchill when he rose in the House of Commons on June 4, 1940, while the last transports from Dunkirk were being unloaded, determined, as he wrote later, to show not only his own people but the world -- and especially the U.S.A. -- "that out resolve to fight on was based on serious grounds." It was on this occasion that he uttered his famous peroration, which will be long remembered and will surely rank with the greatest ever made down the ages:

 

[quote]Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous States have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule, we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight in the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God's good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the Old.[/quote]

 

[b]THE COLLAPSE OF FRANCE[/b]

 

The determination of the British to fight on does not seem to have troubled Hitler's thoughts. He was sure they would see the light after he had finished off France, which he now proceeded to do. The morning after Dunkirk fell, on June 5, the Germans launched a massive assau1t on the Somme and soon they were attacking in overwhelming strength all along a 400-mile front that stretched across France from Abbeville to the Upper Rhine. The French were doomed. Against 143 German divisions, including ten armored, they could deploy only 65 divisions, most of them second-rate, for the best units and most of the armor had been expended in Belgium. Little was left of the weak French Air Force. The British could contribute but one infantry division, which had been in the Saar, and parts of an armored division. The R.A.F. could spare few planes for this battle unless it were to leave the British Isles themselves defenseless. Finally, the French High Command, now dominated by Petain and Weygand, had become sodden with defeatism. Nevertheless some French units fought with great bravery and tenacity, temporarily stopping even the German armor here and there, and standing up resolutely to the incessant pounding of the Luftwaffe.

 

But it was an unequal struggle. In "victorious confusion," as Telford Taylor has aptly put it, the German troops surged across France like a tidal wave, the confusion coming because there were so many of them and they were moving so fast and often getting in each other's way. [20] On June 10 the French government hastily departed Paris and on June 14 the great city, the glory of France, which was undefended, was occupied by General von Kuechler's Eighteenth Army. The swastika was immediately hoisted on the Eiffel Tower. On June 16, Premier Reynaud, whose government had fled to Bordeaux, resigned and was replaced by Petain, who the next day asked the Germans, through the Spanish ambassador, for an armistice. [viii] Hitler replied the same day that he would first have to consult his ally, Mussolini. For this strutting warrior, after making sure that the French armies were hopelessly beaten, had, like a jackal, hopped into the war on June 10, to try to get in on the spoils.

 

[b]THE DUCE PLUNGES HIS SMALL DAGGER INTO FRANCE'S BACK[/b]

 

Despite his preoccupation with the unfolding of the Battle of the West, Hitler had found time to write Mussolini at surprisingly frequent intervals, keeping him informed of the mounting German victories.

 

After the first letter on May 7, apprising the Duce that he was attacking Belgium and Holland "to ensure their neutrality" and saying he would keep his friend informed of his progress so that the Duce could make his own decisions in time, there were further ones on May 13, 18 and 25, each more detailed and enthusiastic than the other. [22] Though the generals, as Halder's diary confirms, couldn't have cared less what Italy did -- whether it came into the war or not -- the Fuehrer for some reason attached importance to Italian intervention. As soon as the Netherlands and Belgium had surrendered and the Anglo-French northern armies had been smashed and the surviving British troops began taking to the boats at Dunkirk, Mussolini decided to slither into the war. He informed Hitler by letter on May 30 that the date would be June 5. Hitler replied immediately that he was "most profoundly moved."

 

[quote]If there could still be anything which could strengthen my unshakable belief in the victorious outcome of this war [Hitler wrote on May 31] it was your statement ... The mere fact of your entering the war is an element calculated to deal the front of our enemies a staggering blow.[/quote]

 

The Fuehrer asked his ally, however, to postpone his date for three days -- he wanted to knock out the rest of the French Air Force first, he said -- and Mussolini obliged by setting it back five days, to June 10. Hostilities, the Duce said, would begin the following day.

 

They did not amount to much. By June 18, when Hitler summoned his junior partner to Munich to discuss an armistice with France, some thirty-two Italian divisions, after a week of "fighting," had been unable to budge a scanty French force of six divisions on the Alpine front and farther south along the Riviera, though the defenders were now threatened by assault in the rear from the Germans sweeping down the Rhone Valley. [ix] On June 21 Ciano noted in his diary:

 

[quote]Mussolini is quite humiliated because our troops have not moved a step forward. Even today they have not succeeded in advancing and have halted in front of the first French fortification which put up some resistance. [23][/quote]

 

The hollowness of Mussolini's boasted military might was exposed at the very beginning and this put the deflated Italian dictator in a dour mood as he and Ciano set out by train on the evening of June 17 to confer with Hitler about the armistice with France.

 

[quote]Mussolini dissatisfied [Ciano wrote in his diary]. This sudden peace disquiets him. During the trip we speak at length in order to clarify conditions under which the armistice is to be granted to the French. The Duce ... would like to go so far as the total occupation of French territory and demands the surrender of the French fleet. But he is aware that his opinion has only a consultative value. The war has been won by Hitler without any active military participation on the part of Italy, and it is Hitler who will have the last word. This naturally disturbs and saddens Mussolini.[/quote]

 

The mildness of the Fuehrer's "last word" came as a distinct shock to the Italians when they conferred with the Nazi warlord at the Fuehrerhaus at Munich where Chamberlain and Daladier had been so accommodating to the two dictators regarding Czechoslovakia less than two years before. The secret German memorandum of the meeting [24] makes clear that Hitler was determined above all not to allow the French fleet to fall into the hands of the British. He was also concerned lest the French government flee to North Africa or to London and continue the war. For that reason the armistice terms -- the final terms of peace might be something else -- would have to be moderate, designed to keep "a French government functioning on French soil" and "the French fleet neutralized." He abruptly dismissed Mussolini's demands for the Italian occupation of the Rhone Valley, including Toulon (the great French Mediterranean naval base, where most of the fleet was concentrated) and Marseilles, and the disarmament of Corsica, Tunisia and Djibouti. The last town, the gateway to Italian-held Ethiopia, was thrown in by Ciano, the German notes say, "in an undertone."

 

Even the bellicose Ribbentrop, Ciano found, was "exceptionally moderate and calm, and in favor of peace." The warrior Mussolini was "very much embarrassed," his son-in-law noted.

 

[quote]He feels that his role is secondary ... In truth, the Duce fears that the hour of peace is growing near and sees fading once again that unattainable dream of his life: glory on the field of battle. [25][/quote]

 

Mussolini was unable even to get Hitler to agree to joint armistice negotiations with the French. The Fuehrer was not going to share his triumph at a very historic spot (he declined to name it to his friend) with this Johnny-come-lately. But he promised the Duce that his armistice with France would not come into effect until the French had also signed one with Italy.

 

Mussolini left Munich bitter and frustrated, but Ciano had been very favorably impressed by a side of Hitler which his diaries make clear he had not previously seen or suspected.

 

[quote]From all that he [Hitler] says [he wrote in his diary as they returned to Rome] it is clear that he wants to act quickly to end it all. Hitler is now the gambler, who has made a big scoop and would like to get up from the table, risking nothing more. Today he speaks with a reserve and a perspicacity which, after such a victory, are really astonishing. I cannot be accused of excessive tenderness toward him, but today I truly admire him. [26][/quote]

 

[b]THE SECOND ARMISTICE AT COMPIEGNE[/b]

 

I followed the German Army into Paris that June, always the loveliest of months in the majestic capital, which was now stricken, and on June 19 got wind of where Hitler was going to lay down his terms for the armistice which Petain had requested two days before. It was to be on the same spot where the German Empire had capitulated to France and her allies on November 11, 1918: in the little clearing in the woods at Compiegne. There the Nazi warlord would get his revenge, and the place itself would add to the sweetness of it for him. On May 20, a bare ten days after the great offensive in the West had started and on the day the German tanks reached Abbeville, the idea had come to him. Jodi noted it in his diary that day: "Fuehrer is working on the peace treaty ... First negotiations in the Forest of Compiegne." Late on the afternoon of June 19 I drove out there and found German Army engineers demolishing the wall of the museum where the old wagon-lit of Marshal Foch, in which the 1918 armistice was signed, had been preserved. By the time I left, the engineers, working with pneumatic drills, had tom the wall down and were pulling the car out to the tracks in the center of the clearing on the exact spot, they said, where it had stood at 5 A.M. on November 11, 1918, when at the dictation of Foch the German emissaries put their signatures to the armistice.

 

And so it was that on the afternoon of June 21 I stood by the edge of the forest at Compiegne to observe the latest and greatest of Hitler's triumphs, of which, in the course of my work, I had seen so many over the last turbulent years. It was one of the loveliest summer days I ever remember in France. A warm June sun beat down on the stately trees -- elms, oaks, cypresses and pines -- casting pleasant shadows on the wooded avenues leading to the little circular clearing. At 3:15 P.M. precisely, Hitler arrived in his big Mercedes, accompanied by Goering, Brauchitsch, Keitel, Raeder, Ribbentrop and Hess, all in their various uniforms, and Goering, the lone Field Marshal of the Reich, fiddling with his field marshal's baton. They alighted from their automobiles some two hundred yards away, in front of the Alsace-Lorraine statue, which was draped with German war flags so that the Fuehrer could not see (though I remembered from previous visits in happier days) the large sword, the sword of the victorious Allies of 1918, sticking through a limp eagle representing the German Empire of the Hohenzollerns. Hitler glanced at the monument and strode on.

 

[quote]I observed his face [I wrote in my diary]. It was grave, solemn, yet brimming with revenge. There was also in it, as in his springy step, a note of the triumphant conqueror, the defier of the world. There was something else ... a sort of scornful, inner joy at being present at this great reversal of fate -- a reversal he himself had wrought.[/quote]

 

When he reached the little opening in the forest and his personal standard had been run up in the center of it, his attention was attracted by a great granite block which stood some three feet above the ground.

 

[quote]Hitler, followed by the others, walks slowly over to it [I am quoting my diary], steps up, and reads the inscription engraved (in French) in great high letters:

 

"HERE ON THE ELEVENTH OF NOVEMBER 1918 SUCCUMBED THE CRIMINAL PRIDE OF THE GERMAN EMPIRE -- VANQUISHED BY THE FREE PEOPLES WHICH IT TRIED TO ENSLAVE."

 

Hitler reads it and Goering reads it. They all read it, standing there in the June sun and the silence. I look for the expression in Hitler's face. I am but fifty yards from him and see him through my glasses as though he were directly in front of me. I have seen that face many times at the great moments of his life. But today! It is afire with scorn, anger, hate, revenge, triumph.

 

He steps off the monument and contrives to make even this gesture a masterpiece of contempt. He glances back at it, contemptuous, angry -- angry, you almost feel, because he cannot wipe out the awful, provoking lettering with one sweep of his high Prussian boot. [x] He glances slowly around the clearing, and now, as his eyes meet ours, you grasp the depth of his hatred. But there is triumph there too -- revengeful, triumphant hate. Suddenly, as though his face were not giving quite complete expression to his feelings, he throws his whole body into harmony with his mood. He swiftly snaps his hands on his hips, arches his shoulders, plants his feet wide apart. It is a magnificent gesture of defiance, of burning contempt for this place now and all that it has stood for in the twenty-two years since it witnessed the humbling of the German Empire.[/quote]

 

Hitler and his party then entered the armistice railway car, the Fuehrer seating himself in the chair occupied by Foch in 1918. Five minutes later the French delegation arrived, headed by General Charles Huntziger, commander of the Second Army at Sedan, and made up of an admiral, an Air Force general and one civilian, Leon Noel, the former ambassador to Poland, who was now witnessing his second debacle wrought by German arms. They looked shattered, but retained a tragic dignity. They had not been told that they would be led to this proud French shrine to undergo such a humiliation, and the shock was no doubt just what Hitler had calculated. As Halder wrote in his diary that evening after being given an eyewitness account by Brauchitsch:

 

[quote]The French had no warning that they would be handed the terms at the very site of the negotiations in 1918. They were apparently shaken by this arrangement and at first inclined to be sullen.[/quote]

 

Perhaps it was natural, even for a German so cultivated as Halder, or Brauchitsch, to mistake solemn dignity for sullenness. The French, one saw at once, were certainly dazed. Yet, contrary to the reports at the time, they tried, as we now know from the official German minutes of the meetings found among the captured Nazi secret papers, [27] to soften the harsher portions of the Fuehrer's terms and to eliminate those which they thought were dishonorable. But they tried in vain.

 

Hitler and his entourage left the wagon-lit as soon as General Keitel had read the preamble of the armistice terms to the French, leaving the negotiations in the hands of his OKW Chief, but allowing him no leeway in departing from the conditions which he himself had laid down.

 

Huntziger told the Germans at once, as soon as he had read them, that they were "hard and merciless," much worse than those which France had handed Germany here in 1918. Moreover, if "another country beyond the Alps, which had not defeated France (Huntziger was too contemptuous of Italy even to name her), advanced similar demands France would in no circumstances submit. She would fight to the bitter end ... It was therefore impossible for him to put his signature to the German armistice agreement ..."

 

General Jodl, the Number Two officer at OKW, who presided temporarily at this moment, had not expected such defiant words from a hopelessly beaten foe and replied that though he could not help express his "understanding" for what Huntziger had said about the Italians nevertheless he had no power to change the Fuehrer's terms. All he could do, he said, was "to give explanations and clear up obscure points." The French would have to take the armistice document or leave it, as it was.

 

The Germans had been annoyed that the French delegation had arrived without authority to conclude an armistice except with the express agreement of the government at Bordeaux. By a miracle of engineering and perhaps with some luck they succeeded in setting up a telephone connection from the old sleeping car right through the battle lines, where the fighting still continued, to Bordeaux. The French delegates were authorized to use it to transmit the text of the armistice terms and to discuss it with their government. Dr. Schmidt, who served as interpreter, was directed to listen in on the tapped conversations from an Army communications van a few yards away behind a clump of trees. The next day I myself contrived to hear the German recording of part of the conversation between Huntziger and General Weygand.

 

To the credit of the latter, who bears a grave responsibility for French defeatism and the final surrender and the break with Britain, it must be recorded that he at least strenuously objected to many of the German demands. One of the most odious of them obligated the French to turn over to the Reich all anti-Nazi German refugees in France and in her territories. Weygand called this dishonorable in view of the French tradition of the right of asylum, but when it was discussed the next day the arrogant Keitel would not listen to its being deleted. "The German emigres," he shouted, were "the greatest warmongers." They had "betrayed their own people." They must be handed over "at all costs." The French made no protest against a clause which stated that all their nationals caught fighting with another country against Germany would be treated as "francs-tireurs" -- that is, immediately shot. This was aimed against De Gaulle, who was already trying to organize a Free French force in Britain, and both Weygand and Keitel knew it was a crude violation of the primitive rules of war. Nor did the French question a paragraph which provided for all prisoners of war to remain in captivity until the conclusion of peace. Weygand was sure the British would be conquered within three weeks and the French POWs thereafter released. Thus he condemned a million and a half Frenchmen to war prison camps for five years.

 

The crux of the armistice treaty was the disposal of the French Navy. Churchill, as France tottered, had offered to release her from her pledge not to make a separate peace if the French Navy were directed to sail for British ports. Hitler was determined that this should not take place; he fully realized, as he told Mussolini on June 18, that it would immeasurably strengthen Britain. With so much at stake he had to make a concession, or at least a promise, to the beaten foe. The armistice agreement stipulated that the French fleet would be demobilized and disarmed and the ships laid up in their home ports. In return for this

 

[quote]the German Government solemnly declares to the French Government that it does not intend to use for its own purposes in the war the French fleet which is in ports under German supervision. Furthermore, they solemnly and expressly declare that they have no intention of raising any claim to the French war fleet at the time of the conclusion of peace.[/quote]

 

Like almost all of Hitler's promises, this one too would be broken.

 

Finally, Hitler left the French government an unoccupied zone in the south and southeast in which it ostensibly was free to govern. This was an astute move. It would not only divide France itself geographically and administratively; it would make difficult if not impossible the formation of a French government-in-exile and quash any plans of the politicians in Bordeaux to move the seat of government to French North Africa -- a design which almost succeeded, being defeated in the end not by the Germans but by the French defeatists: Petain, Weygand, Laval and their supporters. Moreover, Hitler knew that the men who had now seized control of the French government at Bordeaux were enemies of French democracy and might be expected to be co-operative in helping him set up the Nazi New Order in Europe.

 

Yet on the second day of the armistice negotiations at Compiegne the French delegates continued to bicker and delay. One reason for the delay was that Huntziger insisted that Weygand give him not an authorization to sign but an order -- no one in France wanted to take the responsibility. Finally, at 6:30 P.M. Keitel issued an ultimatum. The French must accept or reject the German armistice terms within an hour. Within the hour the French government capitulated. At 6:50 P. M. on June 22, 1940, Huntziger and Keitel signed the armistice treaty. [xi]

 

I listened to the last scene as it was picked up by the hidden microphones in the wagon-lit. Just before he signed, the French General, his voice quivering, said he wished to make a personal statement. I took it down in French, as he spoke.

 

[quote]I declare that the French Government has ordered me to sign these terms of armistice ... Forced by the fate of arms to cease the struggle in which we were engaged on the side of the Allies, France sees imposed on her very hard conditions. France has the right to expect in the future negotiations that Germany show a spirit which will permit the two great neighboring countries to live and work in peace.[/quote]

 

Those negotiations -- for a peace treaty -- would never take place, but the spirit which the Nazi Third Reich would have shown, if they had, soon became evident as the occupation became harsher and the pressure on the servile Petain regime increased. France was now destined to become a German vassal, as Petain, Weygand and Laval apparently believed -- and accepted.

 

A light rain began to fall as the delegates left the armistice car and drove away. Down the road through the woods you could see an unbroken line of refugees making their way home on weary feet, on bicycles, on carts, a few fortunate ones on old trucks. I walked out to the clearing. A gang of German Army engineers, shouting lustily, had already started to move the old wagon-lit.

 

"Where to?" I asked.

 

"To Berlin," they said. [xii]

 

The Franco-Italian armistice was signed in Rome two days later. Mussolini was able to occupy only what his troops had conquered, which meant a few hundred yards of French territory, and to impose a fifty-mile demilitarized zone opposite him in France and Tunisia. The armistice was signed at 7:35 P.M. on June 24. Six hours later the guns in France lapsed into silence.

 

France, which had held out unbeaten for four years the last time, was out of the war after six weeks. German troops stood guard over most of Europe, from the North Cape above the Arctic Circle to Bordeaux, from the English Channel to the River Bug in eastern Poland. Adolf Hitler had reached the pinnacle. The former Austrian waif, who had been the first to unite the Germans in a truly national State, this corporal of the First World War, had now become the greatest of German conquerors. All that stood between him and the establishment of German hegemony in Europe under his dictatorship was one indomitable Englishman, Winston Churchill, and the determined people Churchill led, who did not recognize defeat when it stared them in the face and who now stood alone, virtually unarmed, their island home besieged by the mightiest military machine the world had ever seen.

 

[b]HITLER PLAYS FOR PEACE[/b]

 

Ten days after the German onslaught on the West began, on the evening German tanks reached Abbeville, General Jodi, after describing in his diary how the Fuehrer was "beside himself with joy," added: " ... is working on the peace treaty ... Britain can get a separate peace any time after restitution of the colonies." That was May 20. For several weeks thereafter Hitler seems to have had no doubts that, with France knocked out, Britain would be anxious to make peace. His terms, from the German point of view, seemed most generous, considering the beating the British had taken in Norway and in France. He had expounded them to General von Rundstedt on May 24, expressing his admiration of the British Empire and stressing the "necessity" for its existence. All he wanted from London) he said, was a free hand on the Continent.

 

So certain was he that the British would agree to this that even after the fall of France he made no plans for continuing the war against Britain, and the vaunted General Staff, which supposedly planned with Prussian thoroughness for every contingency far in advance, did not bother to furnish him any. Halder, the Chief of the General Staff, made no mention of the subject at this time in his voluminous diary entries. He was more disturbed about Russian threats in the Balkans and the Baltic than about the British.

 

Indeed, why should Great Britain fight on alone against helpless odds? Especially when it could get a peace that would leave it, unlike France, Poland and all the other defeated lands, unscathed, intact and free? This was a question asked everywhere except in Downing Street, where, as Churchill later revealed, it was never even discussed, because the answer was taken for granted. [28] But the German dictator did not know this, and when Churchill began to state it publicly -- that Britain was not quitting -- Hitler apparently did not believe it. Not even when on June 4, after the evacuation from Dunkirk, the Prime Minister had made his resounding speech about fighting on in the hills and on the beaches; not even when on June 18, after Petain had asked for an armistice, Churchill reiterated in the Commons Britain's "inflexible resolve to continue the war" and in another one of his eloquent and memorable perorations concluded:

 

[quote]Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will say: "This was their finest hour."[/quote]

 

These could be merely soaring words from a gifted orator, and so Hitler, a dazzling orator himself, must have thought. He must have been encouraged too by soundings in neutral capitals and by the appeals for ending the war that now emanated from them. On June 28 a confidential message arrived for Hitler from the Pope -- analogous communications were addressed to Mussolini and Churchill -- offering his mediation for "a just and honorable peace" and declaring that before initiating this step he wished to ascertain confidentially how it would be received. [29] The King of Sweden was also active in proposing peace to both London and Berlin.

 

In the United States the German Embassy, under the direction of Hans Thomsen, the charge d'affaires, was spending every dollar it could lay its hands on to support the isolationists in keeping America out of the war and thus discourage Britain from continuing it. The captured German Foreign Office documents are full of messages from Thomsen reporting on the embassy's efforts to sway American public opinion in Hitler's favor. The party conventions were being held that summer and Thomsen was bending every effort to influence their foreign-policy planks, especially that of the Republicans.

 

On June 12, for example, he cabled Berlin in code "most urgent, top secret" that a "well-known Republican Congressman," who was working "closely" with the German Embassy, had offered, for $3,000, to invite fifty isolationist Republican Congressmen to the Republican convention "so that they may work on the delegates in favor of an isolationist foreign policy." The same individual, Thomsen reported, wanted $30,000 to help pay for full-page advertisements in the American newspapers, to be headed "Keep America Out of the War!" [xiii] [30]

 

The next day Thomsen was wiring Berlin about a new project he said he was negotiating through an American literary agent to have five well-known American writers write books "from which I await great results." For this project he needed $20,000, a sum Ribbentrop okayed a few days later. [xiv] [31]

 

One of Hitler's first public utterances about his hopes for peace with Britain had been given Karl von Wiegand, a Hearst correspondent, and published in the New York Journal-American on June 14. A fortnight later Thomsen informed the German Foreign Office that he had printed 100,000 extra copies of the interview and that

 

[quote]I was able furthermore through a confidential agent to induce the isolationist Representative Thorkelson [Republican of Montana] to have the Fuehrer interview inserted in the Congressional Record of June 22. This assures the interview once more the widest distribution. [33][/quote]

 

The Nazi Embassy in Washington grasped at every straw. At one point during the summer its press attache was forwarding what he said was a suggestion of Fulton Lewis, Jr., the radio commentator, whom he described as an admirer of "Germany and the Fuehrer and a highly respected American journalist."

 

[quote]The Fuehrer should address telegrams to Roosevelt ... reading approximately as follows: "You, Mr. Roosevelt, have repeatedly appealed to me and always expressed the wish that a sanguinary war be avoided. I did not declare war on England; on the contrary I always stressed that I did not wish to destroy the British Empire. My repeated requests to Churchill to be reasonable and to arrive at an honorable peace treaty were stubbornly rejected by Churchill. I am aware that England will suffer severely when I order total war to be launched against the British Isles. I ask you therefore to approach Churchill on your part and prevail upon him to abandon his senseless obstinacy." Lewis added that Roosevelt would, of course, make a rude and spiteful reply; that would make no difference. Such an appeal would surely make a profound impression on the North American people and especially in South America ... [34][/quote]

 

Adolf Hitler did not take Mr. Lewis' purported advice, but the Foreign Office in Berlin cabled to ask how important the radio commentator was in America. Thomsen replied that Lewis had "enjoyed a particular success of late ... [but that] on the other hand, in contrast to some leading American commentators, no political importance is to be attached to L." [xv] [35]

 

Churchill himself, as he related later in his memoirs, was somewhat troubled by the peace feelers emanating through Sweden, the United States and the Vatican and, convinced that Hitler was trying to make the most of them, took stern measures to counter them. Informed that the German charge in Washington, Thomsen, had been attempting to talk with the British ambassador there, he cabled that "Lord Lothian should be told on no account to make any reply to the German Charge d'Affaires' message."  [36]

 

To the King of Sweden, who had urged Great Britain to accept a peace settlement, the grim Prime Minister drafted a strong reply.

 

[quote]... Before any such requests or proposals could even be considered, it would be necessary that effective guarantees by deeds, not words, should be forthcoming from Germany which would ensure the restoration of the free and independent life of Czechoslovakia, Poland, Norway, Denmark, Holland, Belgium and above all, France ...[xvi] [37][/quote]

 

That was the nub of Churchill's case and apparently no one in London dreamt of compromising it by concluding a peace that would preserve Britain but permanently enslave the countries Hitler had conquered. But this was not comprehended in Berlin, where, as I recall those summer days, everyone, especially in the Wilhelmstrasse and the Bendlerstrasse, was confident that the war was as good as over.

 

All through the last fortnight of June and the first days of July, Hitler waited for word from London that the British government was ready to throw in the sponge and conclude peace. On July 1 he told the new Italian ambassador, Dino Alfieri, [xvii] that he "could not conceive of anyone in England still seriously believing in victory." [38] Nothing had been done in the High Command about continuing the war against Britain.

 

But the next day, July 2, the first directive on that subject was finally issued by OKW. It was a hesitant order.

 

[quote]The Fuehrer and Supreme Commander has decided:

 

That a landing in England is possible, providing that air superiority can be attained and certain other necessary conditions fulfilled. The date of commencement is still undecided. All preparations to be begun immediately.[/quote]

 

Hitler's lukewarm feeling about the operation and his belief that it would not be necessary is reflected in the concluding paragraph of the directive.

 

[quote]All preparations must be undertaken on the basis that the invasion is still only a plan, and has not yet been decided upon. [39][/quote]

 

When Ciano saw the Fuehrer in Berlin on July 7, he got the impression, as he noted in his diary, that the Nazi warlord was having trouble making up his mind.

 

[quote]He is rather inclined to continue the struggle and to unleash a storm of wrath and of steel upon the English. But the final decision has not been reached, and it is for this reason that he is delaying his speech. of which, as he himself puts it, he wants to weigh every word. [40][/quote]

 

On July 11 Hitler began assembling his military chiefs on the Obersalzberg to see how they felt about the matter. Admiral Raeder, whose Navy would have to ferry an invading army across the Channel, had a long talk with the Fuehrer on that date. Neither of them was eager to come to grips with the problem -- in fact, they spent most of their time together discussing the matter of developing the naval bases at Trondheim and Narvik in Norway.

 

The Supreme Commander. judging by Raeder's confidential report of the meeting, [41] was in a subdued mood. He asked the Admiral whether he thought his planned speech to the Reichstag "would be effective." Raeder replied that it would be, especially if it were preceded by a "concentrated" bombing attack on Britain. The Admiral, who reminded his chief that the R.A.F. was carrying out "damaging attacks" on the principal German naval bases at Wilhelmshaven, Hamburg and Kiel, thought the Luftwaffe ought to get busy immediately on Britain. But on the question of invasion, the Navy Commander in Chief was distinctly cool. He urgently advised that it be attempted "only as a last resort to force Britain to sue for peace."

 

[quote]He [Raeder] is convinced that Britain can be made to ask for peace simply by cutting off her import trade by means of submarine warfare, air attacks on convoys and heavy air attacks on her main centers... .

 

The C. in C., Navy [Raeder], cannot for his part therefore advocate an invasion of Britain as he did in the case of Norway ...[/quote]

 

Whereupon the Admiral launched into a long and detailed explanation of all the difficulties involved in such an invasion, which must have been most discouraging to Hitler. Discouraging but perhaps also convincing. For Raeder reports that "the Fuehrer also views invasion as a last resort."

 

Two days later, on July 13, the generals arrived at the Berghof above Berchtesgaden to confer with the Supreme Commander. They found him still baffled by the British. "The Fuehrer," Halder jotted in his diary that evening, "is obsessed with the question why England does not yet want to take the road to peace." But now, for the first time, one of the reasons had begun to dawn on him. Halder noted it

 

[quote]He sees, just as we do, the solution of this question in the fact that England is still setting her hope in Russia. Thus he too expects that England will have to be compelled by force to make peace. He does not like to do such a thing. however. Reasons: If we smash England militarily. the British Empire will disintegrate. Germany, however, would not profit from this. With German blood we would achieve something from which only Japan, America and others will derive profit.[/quote]

 

On the same day, July 13, Hitler wrote Mussolini, declining with thanks the Duce's offer to furnish Italian troops and aircraft for the invasion of Britain. It is clear from this letter that the Fuehrer was at last beginning to make up his mind. The strange British simply wouldn't listen to reason.

 

[quote]I have made to Britain so many offers of agreement, even of co-operation. and have been treated so shabbily [he wrote] that I am now convinced that any new appeal to reason would meet with a similar rejection. For in that country at present it is not reason that rules ... [42][/quote]

 

Three days later, on July 16, the warlord finally reached a decision. He issued "Directive No. 16 on the Preparation of a Landing Operation against England." [43]

 

[quote]TOP SECRET

 

Fuehrer's Headquarters

 

July 16, 1940

 

Since England, despite her militarily hopeless situation, still shows no sign of willingness to come to terms, I have decided to prepare a landing operation against England, and if necessary to carry it out.

 

The aim of this operation is to eliminate the English homeland as a base for the carrying on of the war against Germany, and, if it should become necessary, to occupy it completely.[/quote]

 

The code name for the assault was to be "Sea Lion." Preparations for it were to be completed by mid-August.

 

"If necessary to carry it out." Despite his growing instinct that it would be necessary, he was not quite sure, as the directive shows. The "if" was still a big one as Adolf Hitler rose in the Reichstag on the evening of July 19 to make his final peace offer to Britain. It was the last of his great Reichstag speeches and the last of so many in this place down the years that this writer would hear. It was also one of his best. I put down my impressions of it that same evening.

 

[quote]The Hitler we saw in the Reichstag tonight was the conqueror and conscious of it, and yet so wonderful an actor, so magnificent a handler of the German mind, that he mixed superbly the full confidence of the conqueror with the humbleness which always goes down so well with the masses when they know a man is on top. His voice was lower tonight; he rarely shouted as he usually does; and he did not once cry out hysterically as I've seen him do so often from this rostrum.[/quote]

 

To be sure, his long speech was swollen with falsifications of history and liberally sprinkled with personal insults of Churchill. But it was moderate in tone, considering the glittering circumstances, and shrewdly conceived to win the support not only of his own people but of the neutrals and to give the masses in England something to think about.

 

[quote]From Britain [he said] I now hear only a single cry -- not of the people but of the politicians -- that the war must go on! I do not know whether these politicians already have a correct idea of what the continuation of this struggle will be like. They do, it is true, declare that they will carry on with the war and that, even if Great Britain should perish, they would carry on from Canada. I can hardly believe that they mean by this that the people of Britain are to go to Canada. Presumably only those gentlemen interested in the continuation of their war will go there. The people, I am afraid, will have to remain in Britain and ... will certainly regard the war with other eyes than their so-called leaders in Canada.

 

Believe me, gentlemen, I feel a deep disgust for this type of unscrupulous politician who wrecks whole nations. It almost causes me pain to think that I should have been selected by fate to deal the final blow to the structure which these men have already set tottering ... Mr. Churchill ... no doubt will already be in Canada, where the money and children of those principally interested in the war have already been sent. For millions of other people, however, great suffering will begin. Mr. Churchill ought perhaps, for once, to believe me when I prophesy that a great Empire will be destroyed -- an Empire which it was never my intention to destroy or even to harm ...[/quote]

 

Having thus tilted at the dogged Prime Minister and attempted to detach the British people from him, Hitler came to the point of his lengthy speech.

 

[quote]In this hour I feel it to be my duty before my own conscience to appeal once more to reason and common sense in Great Britain as much as elsewhere. I consider myself in a position to make this appeal since I am not the vanquished begging favors, but the victor speaking in the name of reason.

 

I can see no reason why this war must go on. [xviii]

 

He was not more specific than that. He made no concrete suggestions for peace terms, no mention of what was to happen to the hundred million people now under the Nazi yoke in the conquered countries. But there were few if any in the Reichstag that evening who believed that it was necessary at this stage to go into the details. I mingled with a good many officials and officers at the close of the session and not one of them had the slightest doubt, as they said, that the British would accept what they really believed was a very generous and even magnanimous offer from the Fuehrer. They were not for long to be deceived.

 

I drove directly to the Rundfunk to make a broadcast report of the speech to the United States. I had hardly arrived at Broadcasting House when I picked up a BBC broadcast in German from London. It was giving the British answer to Hitler already -- within the hour. It was a determined No! [xix]

 

Junior officers from the High Command and officials from various ministries were sitting around the room listening with rapt attention. Their faces fell. They could not believe their ears. "Can you make it out?" one of them shouted to me. He seemed dazed. "Can you understand those British fools?" he continued to bellow. "To turn down peace now? They're crazy!"

 

The same evening Ciano [xx]  heard the reaction to the crazy English on a much higher level in Berlin than mine. "Late in the evening," he noted in his diary, "when the first cold English reactions to the speech arrive, a sense of ill-concealed disappointment spreads among the Germans." The effect on Mussolini, according to Ciano, was just the opposite.

 

[quote]He ... defines it "a much too cunning speech." He fears that the English may find in it a pretext to begin negotiations. That would be sad for Mussolini, because now more than ever he wants war. [44][/quote]

 

The Duce, as Churchill later remarked, "need not have fretted himself. He was not to be denied all the war he wanted." [45]

 

"As a manuever calculated to rally the German people for the fight against Britain," I wrote in my diary that night, "Hitler's speech was a masterpiece. For the German people will now say: 'Hitler offers England peace, and no strings attached. He says he sees no reason why this war should go on. If it does, it's England's fault.'"

 

And was that not the principal reason for giving it, three days after he had issued Directive No. 16 to prepare the invasion of Britain? He admitted as much -- beforehand -- to two Italian confidants, Alfieri and Ciano. On July 1 he had told the ambassador:

 

[quote] ... It was always a good tactic to make the enemy responsible in the eyes of public opinion in Germany and abroad for the future course of events. This strengthened one's own morale and weakened that of the enemy. An operation such as the one Germany was planning would be very bloody ... Therefore one must convince public opinion that everything had first been done to avoid this horror ...

 

In his speech of October 6 [when he had offered peace to the West at the conclusion of the Polish campaign -- W.L.S.] he had likewise been guided by the thought of making the opposing side responsible for all subsequent developments. He had thereby won the war, as it were, before it had really started. Now again he intended for psychological reasons to buttress morale, so to speak, for the action about to be taken. [46][/quote]

 

A week later, on July 8, Hitler confided to Ciano that

 

[quote]he would stage another demonstration so that in case the war should continue -- which he thought was the only real possibility that came into question -- he might achieve a psychological effect among the English people ... Perhaps it would be possible by a skillful appeal to the English people to isolate the English Government still further in England. [47][/quote]

 

It did not prove possible. The speech of July 19 worked with the German people, but not with the British. On July 22 Lord Halifax in a broadcast made the rejection of Hitler's peace offer official. Though it had been expected, it somehow jolted the Wilhelmstrasse, where I found many angry faces that afternoon. "Lord Halifax," the official government spokesman told us, "has refused to accept the peace offer of the Fuehrer. Gentlemen, there will be war!"

 

It was easier said than done. In truth neither Hitler, the High Command nor the general staffs of the Army, Navy and Air Force had ever seriously considered how a war with Great Britain could be fought and won. Now in the midsummer of 1940 they did not know what to do with their glittering success; they had no plans and scarcely any will for exploiting the greatest military victories in the history of their soldiering nation. This is one of the great paradoxes of the Third Reich. At the very moment when Hitler stood at the zenith of his military power, with most of the European Continent at his feet, his victorious armies stretched from the Pyrenees to the Arctic Circle, from the Atlantic to beyond the Vistula, rested now and ready for further action, he had no idea how to go on and bring the war to a victorious conclusion. Nor had his generals, twelve of whom now bandied field marshals' batons.

 

There is, of course, a reason for this, although it was not clear to us at the time. The Germans, despite their vaunted military talents, lacked any grand strategic concept. Their horizons were limited -- they had always been limited -- to land warfare against the neighboring nations on the European Continent. Hitler himself had a horror of the sea [xxi] and his great captains almost a total ignorance of it. They were land-minded, not sea-minded. And though their armies could have crushed in a week the feeble land forces of Britain if they had only been able to come to grips with them, even the narrow waters of the Dover Straits which separated the two -- so narrow that you can see across to the opposite shore -- loomed in their minds, as the splendid summer began to wane, as an obstacle they knew not how to overcome.

 

There was of course another alternative open to the Germans. They might bring Britain down by striking across the Mediterranean with their Italian ally, taking Gibraltar at its western opening and in the east driving on from Italy's bases in North Africa through Egypt and over the canal to Iran, severing one of the Empire's main life lines. But this necessitated vast operations overseas at distances far from home bases, and in 1940 it seemed beyond the scope of the German imagination.

 

Thus at the height of dizzy success Hitler and his captains hesitated. They had not thought out the next step and how it was to be carried through. This fateful neglect would prove to be one of the great turning points of the war and indeed of the short life of the Third Reich and of the meteoric career of Adolf Hitler. Failure, after so many stupendous victories, was now to set in. But this, to be sure, could not be foreseen as beleaguered Britain, now holding out alone, girded herself with what small means she had for the German onslaught at the summer's end.

 

_______________

 

[b]Notes:[/b]

 

i. See above, pp. 651, 652, 671-72, respectively.

 

ii. It was first reported and long believed that from 25,000 to 30,000 Dutch were  killed, and this is the figure given in the 1953 edition of the Encyclopaedia  Britannica. However, at Nuremberg the Dutch government gave the figure as  814 killed. [8]

iii. There were no criminal convictions at Nuremberg for the bombing of Rotterdam.

 

iv. The two armored corps of Reinhardt and Guderian made up General Ewald  von Kleist's panzer group, which consisted of five tank divisions and three motorized  infantry divisions.

 

v. After the war Gamelin stated that his reply was not "There is none," but "There  is no longer any." (L'Aurore, Paris, November 21, 1949.)

 

vi. From, among others, General Sir Alan Brooke, who commanded the British IInd  Corps and later became Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke, Chief of the Imperial  General Staff. See Sir Arthur Bryant, The Turn of the Tide, based on Alanbrooke's  diaries.

 

vii. This fact, established from the records of Rundstedt's own headquarters, did not prevent the General from making several statements after the war which put the blame entirely on Hitler. "If I had had my way," he told Major Milton Shulman, a Canadian intelligence officer, "the English would not have got off so lightly at Dunkirk. But my hands were tied by direct orders from Hitler himself. While the English were clambering into the ships off the beaches, I was kept uselessly outside the port unable to move ... I sat outside the town, watching the English escape, while my tanks and infantry were prohibited from moving. This incredible blunder was due to Hitler's personal idea of generalship." (Shulman, Defeat in the West, pp. 42-43.)

 

To a commission of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg on June 20, 1946 (mimeographed transcript, p. 1490), Rundstedt added: "That was a very big mistake of the Commander ... How angry we leaders were at that time is indescribable." Rundstedt made similar declarations to Liddell Hart (The German Generals Talk, pp. 112-13) and to the Nuremberg Military Tribunal in the trial of United States v. Leeb (pp. 3350-53, 3931-32, of the mimeographed transcript).

 

Telford Taylor in The March of Conquest and Major L. F. Ellis in The War in France and Flanders, 1939-40 have analyzed the German Army records of the incident and drawn conclusions that somewhat differ. Ellis' book is the official British account of the campaign and contains both British and German documents. Taylor, who spent four years as an American prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials, is an authority on the German documents.

 

viii. A good many of the exhausted Tommies on the beaches, who underwent severe  bombings, were not aware of this, since the air clashes were often above the clouds  or some distance away. They knew only that they had been bombed and strafed all  the way back from eastern Belgium to Dunkirk, and they felt their Air Force had let  them down. When they reached the home ports some of them insulted men in the  blue R.A.F. uniforms. Churchill was much aggrieved at this and went out of his  way to put them right when he spoke in the House on June 4. The deliverance at  Dunkirk, he said, "was gained by the Air Force."

 

ix. On this day, June 17, 1940, the exiled Kaiser sent from Doorn, in occupied Holland, a telegram of congratulations to Hitler, whom he had for so long scorned as a vulgar upstart. It was found among the captured Nazi papers.

 

[quote]Under the deeply moving impression of the capitulation of France I con gratulate you and the whole German Wehrmacht on the mighty victory granted by God, in the words of the Emperor Wilhelm the Great in 1870: "What a turn of events brought about by divine dispensation."

 

In all German hearts there echoes the Leuthen chorale sung by the victors of Leuthen, the soldiers of the Great King: "Now thank we all our God!"[/quote]

 

Hitler, who believed that the mighty victory was due more to himself than to God, drafted a restrained reply, but whether it was ever sent is not indicated in the documents. [21]

 

The Fuehrer had been furious a little earlier when he learned that a German unit which overran Doorn had posted a guard of honor around the exiled Emperor's residence. Hitler ordered the guard removed and Doorn posted as out of bounds to all German soldiers. Wilhelm II died at Doorn on June 4, 1941, and was buried there. His death, Hassell noted in his diary (p. 200), "went almost unnoticed" in Germany. Hitler and Goebbels saw to that.

 

x. The defeatist French High Command forbade any offensive action against Italy.  On June 14 a French naval squadron bombarded factories, oil tanks and refineries  near Genoa, but Admiral Darlan prohibited any further action of this kind. When  the R.A.F. tried to send bombers from the airfield at Marseilles to attack Milan and  Turin the French drove trucks onto the field and prevented the planes from taking off.

 

xi. It was blown up three days later, at Hitler's command.

 

 

xii. It was stipulated that it would go into effect as soon as the Franco-Italian armistice was signed, and that hostilities would cease six hours after that event.

 

xiii. It arrived there July 8. Ironically, it was destroyed in an Allied bombing of Berlin  later in the war.

 

xiv. Such an advertisement appeared in the New York Times June 25, 1940.

 

xv. By July 5, 1940, Thomsen had become so apprehensive about his payments that he cabled Berlin for permission to destroy all receipts and accounts:

 

[quote]The payments ... are made to the recipients through trusted go-betweens, but in the circumstances it is obvious that no receipts can be expected ... Such receipts or memoranda would fall into the hands of the American Secret Service if the Embassy were suddenly to be seized by American authorities, and despite all camouflage, by the fact of their existence alone, they would mean political ruin and have other grave consequences for our political friends, who are probably known to our enemies ...

 

I therefore request that the Embassy be authorized to destroy these receipts and statements and henceforth dispense with making them, as also with keeping accounts of such payments.

 

This telegraphic report has been destroyed. [52][/quote]

 

 

 

xvi. The doings of the German Embassy in Washington at this period, as disclosed in its own dispatches which are published in Documents on German Foreign Policy, would furnish the material for a revealing book. One is struck by the tendency of the German diplomats to tell the Nazi dictator pretty much what he wanted to hear  -- a practice common among representatives of totalitarian lands. Two officers of OKW told me in Berlin that the High Command, or at least the General Staff, was highly suspicious of the objectivity of the reports from the Washington embassy and that they had established their own military intelligence in the United States.

 

They were not served very well by General Friedrich von Boetticher, the German military attache in Washington, if one can judge by his dispatches included in the DGFP volumes. He never tired of warning OKW and the general staffs of the Army and Air Force to whom his messages were addressed, that America was controlled by the Jews and the Freemasons, which was exactly what Hitler thought. Boetticher also overestimated the influence of the isolationists in American politics, especially of Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh, who emerges in his dispatches as his great hero. An extract or two indicates the tenor of his reports.

 

[quote] July 20, 1940: ... As the exponent of the Jews, who especially through Freemasonry control the broad masses of the American people, Roosevelt wants England to continue fighting and the war to be prolonged ... The circle about Lindbergh has become aware of this development and now tries at least to impede the fatal control of American policy by the Jews ... I have repeatedly reported on the mean and vicious campaign against Lindbergh, whom the Jews fear as their most potent adversary ... [DGFP, X, pp. 254-55.]

 

August 6, 1940: ... The background of Lindbergh's re-emergence in public and the campaign against him.

 

The Jewish element now controls key positions in the American armed forces, after having in the last weeks filled the posts of Secretary of War, Assistant Secretary of War, and Secretary of the Navy with subservient individuals and attached a leading and very influential Jew, "Colonel" Julius Ochs-Adler, as secretary to the Secretary of War.

 

The forces opposing the Jewish element and the present policy of the United States have been mentioned in my reports, taking account also of the importance of the General Staff. The greatly gifted Lindbergh, whose connections reach very far, is much the most important of them all. The Jewish element and Roosevelt fear the spiritual and, particularly, the moral superiority and purity of this man.

 

On Sunday [August 4] Lindbergh delivered a blow that will hurt the Jews. He ... stressed that America should strive for sincere collaboration with Germany with a view to peace and the preservation of Western culture. Several hours later, the aged General Pershing, who has long been a puppet in the hands of Roosevelt, which means of the Jews, read over the radio a declaration, foisted upon him by the wire-pullers, to the effect that America would be imperiled by England's defeat ...

 

The chorus of the Jewish element casting suspicion on Lindbergh in the press, and his denunciation by a Senator ... Lucas, who spoke against Lindbergh over the radio Monday night at Roosevelt's behest ... as a "fifth columnist," that is, a traitor, merely serve to underline the fear of the spiritual power of this man, about whose progress I have reported since the beginning of the war and in whose great importance for future German-American relations I believe. [DGFP, X, pp. 413-15.][/quote]

 

On September 18, Thomsen, in a further report, gave an account of a confidential conversation he said had taken place between Lindbergh and several American General Staff officers. Lindbergh gave it as his opinion that England would soon collapse before German air attacks. The General Staff officers, however, held that Germany's air strength was not sufficient to force a decision. (DGFP, X, pp. 413- 15.)

 

On October 19, 1938, three weeks after Munich, Lindbergh had been awarded -- and had accepted -- the "Service Cross of the German Eagle with Star." This was, I believe, the second highest German decoration, usually conferred on distinguished foreigners who, in the official words of the citations, "deserved well of the Reich."

 

xvii. There are in the DGFP volumes several dispatches to the German Foreign Office about alleged contacts with various British diplomats and personages, sometimes direct, sometimes through neutrals such as the Franco Spaniards. Prince Max von Hohenlohe, the Sudeten-German Anglophile, reported to Berlin on his conversations with the British minister in Switzerland, Sir David Kelly, and with the Aga Khan. He claimed the latter had asked him to relay the following message to the Fuehrer:

 

[quote]The Khedive of Egypt, who is also here, had agreed with him that on the day when the Fuehrer puts up for the night in Windsor, they would drink a bottle of champagne together ... If Germany or Italy were thinking of taking over India, he would place himself at our disposal ... The struggle against England was not a struggle against the English people but against the Jews. Churchill had been for years in their pay and the King was too weak and limited. . If he were to go with these ideas to England, Churchill would lock him up .... [DGFP, X, pp. 294-95.] [/quote]

 

It must be kept in mind that these are German reports and may not be true at all, but they are what Hitler had to go on. The Nazi plan to enlist the Duke of Windsor, indeed the plot to kidnap him and then try to use him, as disclosed in the Foreign Office secret papers, is noted later.

 

xviii. Attolico had been replaced by Alfieri at the instigation of Ribbentrop in May.

 

xix. There was a colorful scene and one unprecedented in German history when Hitler  suddenly broke off his speech in the middle to award field marshals' batons to twelve  generals and a special king-size one to Goering, who was given the newly created  rank of Reich Marshal of the Greater German Reich, which put him above all the  others. He was also awarded the Grand Cross of the Iron Cross, the only one given  during the entire war. Halder was passed over in this avalanche of field marshal  awards, being merely promoted one grade, from lieutenant general to general. This  promiscuous award of field-marshalships -- the Kaiser had named only five field  marshals from the officer corps during all of World War I and not even Ludendorff  had been made one -- undoubtedly helped to stifle any latent opposition to Hitler  among the generals such as had threatened to remove him on at least three occasions in the past. In achieving this and in debasing the value of the highest military rank by raising so many to it, Hitler acted shrewdly to tighten his hold over the generals. Nine Army generals were promoted to field marshal: Brauchitsch, Keitel, Rundstedt, Bock, Leeb, List, Kluge, Witzleben and Reichenau; and three Luftwaffe officers: Milch, Kesselring and Sperrle.

 

xx. Churchill later declared that this immediate and brusque rejection of Hitler's peace offer was made "by the BBC without any prompting from H. M. Government as soon as Hitler's speech was heard over the radio." (Churchill, Their Finest Hour, p. 260.)

 

xxi. The Italian Foreign Minister had behaved like a clown during the Reichstag session, bobbing up and down like a jack-in-the-box to give the Fascist salute every time Hitler paused for breath. I also noticed Quisling, a pig-eyed little man, crouching in a corner seat in the first balcony. He had come to Berlin to beg the Fuehrer to reinstate him in power in Oslo.

 

xxii. "On land I am a hero, but on water I am a coward," he told Rundstedt once.  (Shulman, Defeat in the West, p. 50.)

 

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