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All Hell Let Loose: The World at War 1939-1945
Sir Max Hastings
Maps best viewed on a tablet.A magisterial history of the greatest and most terrible event in history, from one of the finest historians of the Second World War. A book which shows the impact of war upon hundreds of millions of people around the world – soldiers, sailors and airmen; housewives, farm workers and children.‘Unquestionably the best single-volume history of the war ever written’ SUNDAY TIMES.All Hell Let Loose reflects Max Hastings’s thirty-five years of research on World War II, and describes not just the course of events, but an epic tale of human experience, from campaign to campaign, continent to continent.This magisterial book ranges across a vast canvas, from the Russian front, where more than 90% of all German soldiers who perished met their fate, to the agony of Poland amid the September 1939 Nazi invasion, and the 1943 Bengal famine, in which at least a million people died under British rule – and British neglect. Some of Hastings’s insights and judgements will surprise students of the conflict, while there are vivid descriptions of the tragedies and triumphs of a host of ordinary people, in uniform and out of it.This is ‘everyman’s story’, an attempt to answer the question: ‘What was the Second World War like?’, and also an overview of the big picture. Max Hastings employs the technique which has made many of his previous books best-sellers, combining top-down analysis and bottom-up testimony to explore the meaning of this vast conflict both for its participants and for posterity.



Max Hastings
All Hell Let Loose
The World at War 1939–45



Copyright
WilliamCollins
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1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.WilliamCollinsBooks.co.uk (http://www.WilliamCollinsBooks.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by HarperPress in 2011
ALL HELL LET LOOSE. Copyright © Max Hastings 2011. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Max Hastings asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book
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Source ISBN: 9780007338092
Ebook Edition © AUGUST 2011 ISBN: 9780007338122
Version: 2018-07-17

Dedication
TO MICHAEL SISSONS,
for thirty years a princely agent,
counsellor and friend

Contents
Cover (#ulink_cdad4d21-7184-5f0b-816c-8ec2d50319d5)
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
List of Maps
Introduction
1 Poland Betrayed
2 No Peace, Little War
3 Blitzkriegs in the West
1 (#ulink_9287ddcf-bea7-5380-93ec-17eb279c8e18) Norway
2 (#ulink_c8ebdef9-2a93-5b44-9090-437736318393) The Fall of France
4 Britain Alone
5 The Mediterranean
1 Mussolini Gambles
2 A Greek Tragedy
3 Sandstorms
6 Barbarossa
7 Moscow Saved, Leningrad Starved
8 America Embattled
9 Japan’s Season of Triumph
1 ‘I Suppose you’ll Shove the Little Men Off’
2 The ‘White Route’ from Burma
10 Swings of Fortune
1 Bataan
2 The Coral Sea and Midway
3 Guadalcanal and New Guinea
11 The British at Sea
1 The Atlantic
2 Arctic Convoys
3 The Ordeal of Pedestal
12 The Furnace: Russia in 1942
13 Living with War
1 Warriors
2 Home Fronts
3 A Woman’s Place
14 Out of Africa
15 The Bear Turns: Russia in 1943
16 Divided Empires
1 Whose Liberty?
2 The Raj: Unfinest hour
17 Asian Fronts
1 China
2 Jungle-Bashing and Island-Hopping
18 Italy: High Hopes, Sour Fruits
1 Sicily
2 The Road to Rome
3 Yugoslavia
19 War in the Sky
1 Bombers
2 Targets
20 Victims
1 Masters and Slaves
2 Killing Jews
21 Europe Becomes a Battlefield
22 Japan: Defying Fate
23 Germany Besieged
24 The Fall of the Third Reich
1 Budapest: In the Eye of the Storm
2 Eisenhower’s Advance to the Elbe
3 Berlin: The Last Battle
25 Japan Prostrate
26 Victors and Vanquished
Picture Section
Notes and References
Bibliography
Searchable Terms
Acknowledgements
Other Books by Max Hastings
About the Publisher (#u5a67a6d7-1f76-5afd-954a-bca611d9e95b)

Maps
The Polish Campaign (#ulink_18f60f58-7995-57f3-be33-03cf7a8e585b)
The Finnish Campaign (#ulink_653f3e65-88c1-502c-800b-082db6dbd1b7)
The Invasion of Norway (#ulink_c64da8c6-5258-552f-9b40-597b2157197c)
The Last Phase of the 1940 French Campaign (#ulink_9c947140-4855-5072-ace1-4a84b1c485cd)
The Invasion of Greece
The German Winter Offensives 1941
The Pacific Theatre
The Battle of the Coral Sea
The Battle of Midway
The Russians Encircle Hitler’s Sixth Army
The 1942–43 Advance of Eighth Army
The Russians Exploit Victory at Kursk
Russian Advances Across Ukraine
The 1943 Landings in Italy
The 1944 Thrust into Poland
The Allied Breakout from Normandy
The 1944 Allied Advances on Germany
The 1945 Western Drive into Germany
The Russian Drive to the Oder
The Final Russian Assaults

Introduction
This is a book chiefly about human experience. Men and women from scores of nations struggled to find words to describe what happened to them in the Second World War, which transcended anything they had ever known. Many resorted to a cliché: ‘All hell broke loose.’ Because the phrase is commonplace in eyewitness descriptions of battles, air raids, massacres and ship sinkings, later generations are tempted to shrug at its banality. Yet in an important sense the words capture the essence of what the struggle meant to hundreds of millions of people, plucked from peaceful, ordered existences to face ordeals that in many cases lasted for years, and for at least sixty millions were terminated by death. An average of 27,000 people perished each day between September 1939 and August 1945 as a consequence of the global conflict. Some survivors found that the manner in which they had conducted themselves during the struggle defined their standing in their societies for the rest of their lives, for good or ill. Successful warriors retained a lustre which enabled some to prosper in government or commerce. Conversely, at the bar of a London club thirty years after the war, a Guards veteran murmured about a prominent Conservative statesman: ‘Not a bad fellow, Smith. Such a pity he ran away in the war.’ A Dutch girl, growing up in the 1950s, found that her parents categorised each of their neighbours in accordance with how they had behaved during the German occupation of Holland.
British and American infantrymen were appalled by their experiences in the 1944–45 north-west Europe campaign, which lasted eleven months. But Russians and Germans fought each other continuously for almost four years in far worse conditions, and with vastly heavier casualties.
Some nations which played only a marginal military role lost many more people than the Western Allies: China’s ordeal at Japanese hands between 1937 and 1945 cost at least fifteen million lives; Yugoslavia, where civil war was overlaid on Axis occupation, lost more than a million dead. Many people witnessed spectacles comparable with Renaissance painters’ conception of the inferno to which the damned were consigned: human beings torn to fragments of flesh and bone; cities blasted into rubble; ordered communities sundered into dispersed human particles. Almost everything which civilised peoples take for granted in time of peace was swept aside, above all the expectation of being protected from violence.
It is impossible to detail within a single volume the vastness of the war, the largest event in human history. I have already described aspects of it in eight books, most significantly Bomber Command, Overlord, Armageddon, Nemesis and Finest Years. While any work such as this should be self-contained, I have striven to avoid repetition of either anecdotage or analysis of large issues. For instance, having devoted an entire chapter of Nemesis to the 1945 dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it seems fruitless to revisit my own arguments. This book sustains a chronological framework, and seeks to establish and reflect upon the ‘big picture’, the context of events: the reader should gain a broad sense of what happened to the world between 1939 and 1945. But its principal purpose is to illuminate the conflict’s significance for a host of ordinary people of many societies, both active and passive participants – though the distinction is often blurred. Was, for example, a Hamburg woman who ardently supported Hitler, but perished in the July 1943 firestorm generated by Allied bombing, an accomplice to Nazi war guilt, or the innocent victim of an atrocity?
In my pursuit of the human story, wherever possible without losing coherence my narrative omits unit identifications and details of battlefield manoeuvres. I have tried to create a global portrait: the strategic narrative emphasises aspects of the conflict which I have not examined elsewhere, and about which there seems more to be said – for instance, India’s experience – at the expense of others which have been exhaustively explored, such as Pearl Harbor and the battle for Normandy.
The Jewish genocide became the most coherent fulfilment of Nazi ideology. I wrote in Armageddon about the ordeal of concentration-camp prisoners, and have here instead addressed the evolution of the Holocaust from a Nazi perspective. So widespread is a modern Western perception that the war was fought about Jews, that it should be emphasised this was not the case. Though Hitler and his followers chose to blame the Jews for the troubles of Europe and the grievances of the Third Reich, Germany’s struggle with the Allies was about power and hemispheric dominance. The plight of the Jewish people under Nazi occupation loomed relatively small in the wartime perceptions of Churchill and Roosevelt, and less surprisingly in that of Stalin. About one-seventh of all fatal victims of Nazism, and almost one-tenth of all wartime dead, ultimately proved to have been Jews. But at the time their persecution was viewed by the Allies merely as one fragment of the collateral damage caused by Hitler, as indeed Russians still see the Holocaust today. The limited attention paid to the Jewish predicament by the wartime Allies was a source of frustration and anger to informed co-religionists at the time, and has prompted powerful indignation since. But it is important to recognise that between 1939 and 1945 the Allied nations saw the struggle overwhelmingly in terms of the threat posed by the Axis to their own interests, though Churchill defined these in generous and noble terms.
One of the most important truths about the war, as indeed about all human affairs, is that people can interpret what happens to them only in the context of their own circumstances. The fact that, objectively and statistically, the sufferings of some individuals were less terrible than those of others elsewhere in the world was meaningless to those concerned. It would have seemed monstrous to a British or American soldier facing a mortar barrage, with his comrades dying around him, to be told that Russian casualties were many times greater. It would have been insulting to invite a hungry Frenchman, or even an English housewife weary of the monotony of rations, to consider that in besieged Leningrad starving people were eating each other, while in West Bengal they were selling their daughters. Few people who endured the Luftwaffe’s 1940–41 blitz on London would have been comforted by knowledge that the German and Japanese peoples would later face losses from Allied bombing many times greater, together with unparalleled devastation. It is the duty and privilege of historians to deploy relativism in a fashion that cannot be expected of contemporary participants. Almost everyone who participated in the war suffered in some degree: the varied scale and disparate nature of their experiences are themes of this book. But the fact that the plight of other people was worse than one’s own did little to promote personal stoicism.
Some aspects of wartime experience were almost universal: fear and grief; the conscription of young men and women obliged to endure new existences utterly remote from those of their choice, often under arms and at worst as slaves. A boom in prostitution was a tragic global phenomenon which deserves a book of its own. The conflict provoked many mass migrations. Some of these were orderly: half the population of Britain moved home in the course of the war, and many Americans took new jobs in unfamiliar places. Elsewhere, however, millions were wrenched from their communities in dreadful circumstances, and faced ordeals which often killed them. ‘These are strange times,’ wrote an anonymous Berlin woman on 22 April 1945 in one of the great diaries of the war, ‘history experienced first hand, the stuff of tales yet untold and songs unsung. But seen close-up, history is much more troublesome – nothing but burdens and fears. Tomorrow I’ll go and look for nettles and get some coal.’
The nature of battlefield experience varied from nation to nation, service to service. Within armies, riflemen experienced far higher levels of risk and hardship than millions of support troops. The US armed forces suffered an overall death rate of just five per thousand men enlisted; the vast majority of those who served faced perils no greater than those of ordinary civilian life. While 17,000 American combat casualties lost limbs, during the war years 100,000 workers at home became amputees as a result of industrial accidents. Men who found themselves on battlefields when their nations were in retreat suffered more heavily than others who served in times of victories; Allied warriors who saw action only in 1944– 45 had a far better statistical prospect of survival than, say, aircrew or submariners who began operational service earlier, when their cause was faring badly.
My story emphasises bottom-up views and experiences, the voices of little people rather than big ones; I have written extensively elsewhere about the warlords of 1939–45. Contemporary diaries and letters record what people did or what was done to them, but often tell us little about what they thought; the latter is more interesting, but more elusive. The obvious explanation is that most warriors are young and immature: they experience extremes of excitement, terror or hardship, but only a small minority have the emotional energy for reflection, because they are absorbed in their immediate physical surroundings, needs and desires.
It was fundamental that only a tiny number of national leaders and commanders knew much about anything beyond their immediate line of sight. Civilians existed in a fog of propaganda and uncertainty, scarcely less dense in Britain and the US than in Germany or Russia. Front-line combatants assessed the success or failure of their side chiefly through counting casualties and noticing whether they were moving forwards or backwards. These were, however, sometimes inadequate indicators: Pfc Eric Diller’s battalion was cut off from the main American army for seventeen days during the Leyte campaign in the Philippines, but he realised the seriousness of his unit’s predicament only when this was explained to him by his company commander after the war.
Even those with privileged access to secrets were confined to their own fragments of knowledge in a vast jigsaw puzzle. For instance Roy Jenkins, who later became a British statesman, decrypted German signals at Bletchley Park. He and his colleagues knew the importance and urgency of the work they were doing, but, contrary to the impression given in sensational films about Bletchley, they were told nothing about the significance or impact of their contributions. Such constraints were greater, unsurprisingly, on the other side of the hill: in January 1942 Hitler became convinced that too many people in Berlin knew too much. He decreed that even officials of the Abwehr should receive only such information as was necessary for their own work. They were forbidden to monitor enemy broadcasts, a considerable handicap for an intelligence service.
I am fascinated by the complex interplay of loyalties and sympathies around the world. In Britain and America, confidence that our parents and grandparents were fighting ‘the good war’ is so deeply ingrained that we often forget that people in many countries adopted more equivocal attitudes: colonial subjects, and above all India’s four hundred millions, saw little merit in the defeat of the Axis if they continued to endure British suzerainty. Many Frenchmen fought vigorously against the Allies. In Yugoslavia, rival factions were far more strongly committed to waging civil war against each other than to advancing the interests of either the Allies or the Axis. Large numbers of Stalin’s subjects embraced the opportunity offered by German occupation to take up arms against a hated Moscow regime. None of this implies doubt that the Allied cause deserved to triumph, but it should emphasise the fact that Churchill and Roosevelt did not have all the best tunes.
It may be useful to explain how this book was written. I began by rereading Gerhard Weinburg’s A World at Arms and Total War by Peter Calvocoressi, Guy Wint and John Pritchard, probably the two best single-volume histories of the war. I then composed a skeleton narrative, setting the most important events in sequence, and laid upon it the flesh of anecdotage and my own reflections. When I had completed a draft, I revisited some other outstanding recent accounts of the conflict: Richard Overy’s Why the Allies Won, Allan Millett and Williamson Murray’s There’s a War to be Won and Michael Burleigh’s Moral Combat. I thus reviewed my own comments and conclusions in the light of theirs.
Wherever possible, I have favoured relatively obscure anecdotage at the expense of justly celebrated personal recollections – omitting, for instance, the likes of Richard Hillary’s The Last Enemy and George Macdonald Fraser’s Quartered Safe out Here. Dr Lyuba Vinogradova, who has researched my Russian material for the past decade, for this work once again identified and translated personal narratives, diaries and letters. Serena Sissons has translated thousands of words from Italian memoirs and diaries, because Mussolini’s people seem to me inadequately represented in most Anglo-Saxon narratives. I have explored unpublished Polish accounts in the Imperial War Museum archive and London’s Sikorski Institute. I am once again indebted to Dr Tami Biddle of the US Army War College at Carlisle, Pennsylvania, for insights and documents derived from her own researches, which she has generously shared with me. Various friends, notable among them Professor Sir Michael Howard, Dr Williamson Murray and Don Berry, have been kind enough to read my draft manuscript and make invaluable corrections, suggestions and comments. The doyen of British naval historians, Professor Nicholas Rodger of All Souls College, Oxford, read the chapter on the British experience at sea, much to the advantage of my final text. Richard Frank, doyen of US Pacific historians, identified an alarming catalogue of egregious mistakes in my draft, for which I am deeply grateful. None of these, of course, bears any responsibility for my judgements and errors.
Any writer’s highest aspiration, more than sixty-five years after the war’s ending, is to offer a personal view rather than a comprehensive account of this greatest and most terrible of all human experiences, which never fails to inspire humility in its modern students, inspired by gratitude that we have been spared anything comparable. In 1920, when Colonel Charles à Court Repington, military correspondent of the Daily Telegraph, published a best-selling account of the recent conflict, it was considered sinister and tasteless that he chose as his title The First World War, for it presumed another. To call this book The Last World War might tempt providence, but it is at least certain that never again will millions of armed men clash on European battlefields such as those of 1939–45. The conflicts of the future will be quite different, and it may not be rashly optimistic to suggest that they will be less terrible.
MAX HASTINGS
Chilton Foliat, Berkshire, and Kamogi, Kenya, June 2011

1
Poland Betrayed
While Adolf Hitler was determined to wage war, it was no more inevitable that his 1939 invasion of Poland precipitated global conflict than that the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria did so in 1914. Britain and France lacked both the will and the means to take effective action towards fulfilment of security guarantees they had given earlier to the Poles. Their declarations of war on Germany were gestures which even some staunch anti-Nazis thought foolish, because futile. For every eventual belligerent save the Poles themselves, the struggle began slowly: only in its third year did global death and destruction attain the vastness sustained thereafter until 1945. Even Hitler’s Reich was at first ill-equipped to generate the intensity of violence demanded by a death grapple between the most powerful nations on earth.
During the summer of 1939 Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell’s novel of the old American South, enjoyed a surge of popularity in Poland. ‘Somehow, I considered it prophetic,’ wrote one of its Polish readers, Rula Langer. Few of her compatriots doubted that a conflict with Germany was imminent, because Hitler had made plain his commitment to conquest. Poland’s fiercely nationalistic people responded to the Nazi threat with the same spirit as the doomed young men of the Confederacy in 1861. ‘Like most of us, I believed in happy endings,’ a young fighter pilot recalled. ‘We wanted to fight, it excited us, and we wanted it to happen fast. We didn’t believe that something bad could really happen.’ When artillery lieutenant Jan Karski received his mobilisation order on 24 August, his sister warned him against burdening himself with too many clothes. ‘You aren’t going to Siberia,’ she said. ‘We’ll have you on our hands again within a month.’
The Poles paraded their propensity for fantasy. There was an exuberance in the café and bar chatter of Warsaw, a city whose baroque beauties and twenty-five theatres caused citizens to proclaim it ‘the Paris of eastern Europe’. A New York Times reporter wrote from the Polish capital: ‘To hear people talk, one might think that Poland, not Germany, was the great industrial colossus.’ Mussolini’s foreign minister, his son-in-law Count Galeazzo Ciano, warned the Polish ambassador in Rome that if his country resisted Hitler’s territorial demands, it would find itself fighting alone, and ‘would quickly be turned into a heap of ruins’. The ambassador did not dissent, but asserted vaguely that ‘some eventual success…might give Poland greater strength’. In Britain, Lord Beaverbrook’s newspapers denounced as provocative Warsaw’s defiance in the face of Hitler’s threats.
The Polish nation of thirty million, including almost one million ethnic Germans, five million Ukrainians and three million Jews, had held borders established by the Treaty of Versailles for only twenty years. Between 1919 and 1921, Poland fought the Bolsheviks to assert its independence from longstanding Russian hegemony. By 1939 the country was ruled by a military junta, though the historian Norman Davies has argued, ‘If there was hardship and injustice in Poland, there was no mass starvation or mass killing as in Russia, no resort to the bestial methods of Fascism or Stalinism.’ The ugliest manifestation of Polish nationalism was anti-Semitism, exemplified by quotas for Jewish university entry.
In the eyes of both Berlin and Moscow, the Polish state owed its existence only to Allied force majeure in 1919, and had no legitimacy. In a secret protocol of the Nazi–Soviet Pact signed on 23 August 1939, Hitler and Stalin agreed Poland’s partition and dissolution. Though the Poles viewed Russia as their historic enemy, they were oblivious of immediate Soviet designs on them, and were bent instead upon frustrating those of Germany. They knew the ill-equipped Polish army could not defeat the Wehrmacht; all their hopes were pinned upon an Anglo-French offensive in the west, which would divide Germany’s forces. ‘In view of Poland’s hopeless military situation,’ wrote its London ambassador Count Edward Raczy
ski, ‘my main anxiety has been to ensure that we should not become involved in war with Germany without receiving immediate help from our allies.’
In March 1939, the British and French governments gave guarantees, formalised in subsequent treaties, that in the event of German aggression against Poland, they would fight. If the worst happened, France promised the military leadership in Warsaw that its army would attack Hitler’s Siegfried Line within thirteen days of mobilisation. Britain pledged an immediate bomber offensive against Germany. Both powers’ assurances reflected cynicism, for neither had the smallest intention of fulfilling them: the guarantees were designed to deter Hitler, rather than to provide credible military assistance to Poland. They were gestures without substance, yet the Poles chose to believe them.
If Stalin was not Hitler’s co-belligerent, Moscow’s deal with Berlin made him the co-beneficiary of Nazi aggression. From 23 August onwards, the world saw Germany and the Soviet Union acting in concert, twin faces of totalitarianism. Because of the manner in which the global struggle ended in 1945, with Russia in the Allied camp, some historians have accepted the post-war Soviet Union’s classification of itself as a neutral power until 1941. This is mistaken. Though Stalin feared Hitler and expected eventually to have to fight him, in 1939 he made a historic decision to acquiesce in German aggression, in return for Nazi support for Moscow’s own programme of territorial aggrandisement. Whatever excuses the Soviet leader later offered, and although his armies never fought in partnership with the Wehrmacht, the Nazi–Soviet Pact established a collaboration which persisted until Hitler revealed his true purposes in Operation Barbarossa.
The Moscow non-aggression agreement, together with the subsequent 28 September Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Demarcation, committed the world’s two principal tyrants to endorse each other’s ambitions and forswear mutual hostilities in favour of aggrandisement elsewhere. Stalin indulged Hitler’s expansionist policies in the west, and gave Germany important material aid – oil, corn and mineral products. The Nazis, however insincerely, conceded a free hand in the east to the Soviets, whose objectives included eastern Finland and the Baltic states in addition to a large share of Poland’s carcass.
Hitler intended the Second World War to start on 26 August, only three days after the Nazi–Soviet Pact was signed. On the 25th, however, while ordering mobilisation to continue, he postponed the invasion of Poland: he was shocked to discover both that Mussolini was unwilling immediately to fight beside him, and that diplomatic communications suggested Britain and France were serious about honouring their guarantees to Warsaw. Three million men, 400,000 horses and 200,000 vehicles, and 5,000 trains advanced towards the Polish frontier while a last flurry of futile exchanges took place between Berlin, London and Paris. At last, on 30 August, Hitler gave the attack order. At 2000 next evening, the curtain rose on the first, appropriately sordid, act of the conflict. Sturmbannführer Alfred Naujocks of the German Sicherheitsdienst (security service) led a party dressed in Polish uniforms, and including a dozen convicted criminals dismissively codenamed ‘Konserwen’ – ‘tin cans’ – in a mock assault on the German radio station at Gleiwitz in Upper Silesia. Shots were fired; Polish patriotic slogans were broadcast across the airwaves; then the ‘attackers’ withdrew. SS machine-gunners killed the ‘tin cans’, whose bloodstained corpses were arranged for display to foreign correspondents as evidence of Polish aggression.
At 0200 on 1 September, the Wehrmacht’s 1st Mounted Regiment was among scores roused in its bivouacs by a bugle call – some German units as well as many Polish ones rode horses to battle. The squadrons saddled, mounted, and began to move towards their start line alongside clattering columns of armour, trucks and guns. The order was given: ‘Muzzle caps off! Load! Safety catches on!’ At 0440, the big guns of the old German battleship Schleswig-Holstein, anchored in Danzig harbour for a ‘goodwill visit’, opened fire on the Polish fort at Westerplatte. An hour later, German soldiers tore down crossing poles on the western frontier, opening the way for leading elements of the invasion force to pour forward into Poland. One of its commanders, Gen. Heinz Guderian, soon found himself passing his family’s ancestral estate at Chelmno, where he had been born when it formed part of pre-Versailles Germany. Among his soldiers, twenty-three-year-old Lt. Wilhelm Pruller expressed the euphoria that suffused the army: ‘It’s a wonderful feeling now, to be a German…We’ve crossed the border. Deutschland, Deutschland über alles! The German Wehrmacht is marching! If we look back, or in front of us, or left or right, everywhere the motorised Wehrmacht!’
The Western Allies, heartened by knowledge that Poland boasted the fourth largest army in Europe, anticipated a struggle lasting some months. The defenders deployed 1.3 million men against 1.5 million Germans, with thirty-seven divisions on each side. But the Wehrmacht was far better equipped, having 3,600 armoured vehicles against 750 Polish, 1,929 modern planes against nine hundred obsolete ones. The Polish army had been progressively deploying since March, but had held back from full mobilisation in response to Anglo-French pleas to avoid provoking Hitler. Thus, on 1 September, the defenders were surprised. A Polish diplomat wrote of his people’s attitude: ‘They were united in the will to resist, but without any clear idea about the kind of resistance to be offered, apart from a lot of loose talk about volunteering as “human torpedoes”.’
Ephrahim Bleichman, a sixteen-year-old Jew living in Kamionka, was among thousands of local inhabitants summoned into the town square to be addressed by the mayor: ‘We sang a Polish hymn declaring that Poland was not yet lost, and another promising that no German would spit in our faces.’ Piotr Tarczy
ski, a twenty-six-year-old factory clerk, had been ill for some weeks before he was mobilised. But when he informed the commanding officer of his artillery battery that he was ailing, the colonel responded with a brisk patriotic speech, ‘and told me he was sure that once I found myself in the saddle I would feel much better’. Equipment was so short that the regiment could not issue Tarczy
ski with a personal weapon; he did, however, receive a regulation charger, a big horse named ‘Wojak’ – ‘Warrior’.
An air force instructor, Witold Urbanowitz, was conducting a mock dogfight with a pupil in the sky over D
blin when he was bewildered to see holes appearing in his plane’s wings. Landing hastily, he was met by a fellow officer who ran across the field towards him, exclaiming, ‘You’re alive, Witold? You’re not hit?’ Urbanowitz demanded, ‘What the hell’s going on?’ His comrade said, ‘You should go to church and light a candle. You were just attacked by a Messerschmitt!’ The nakedness of Poland’s defences was everywhere apparent. Fighter pilot Franciszek Kornicki was scrambled twice on 1 and 2 September. On the first occasion he pursued a German plane which easily outpaced him. On the second, when his guns jammed he tried to clear them, roll and renew his attack. As the plane banked steeply, the harness buckles holding him in his open cockpit came undone; he fell into the sky, and found himself making an embarrassed parachute descent.
At 1700 near the village of Krojanty, Polish Uhlan cavalrymen received an order to counterattack, to cover the retreat of neighbouring infantry. As they formed line and drew sabres, the adjutant Captain Godlewski suggested that they should advance on foot. ‘Young man,’ the regimental commander, Colonel Mastalerz, responded testily, ‘I’m quite aware what it is like to carry out an impossible order.’ Bent low over the necks of their horses, 250 men charged across an open field. German infantrymen fled from their path, but beyond them stood armoured cars, whose machine-guns ravaged the Uhlans. Scores of horses crashed to the earth, while others raced away riderless. Within minutes half the attackers were dead, including Colonel Mastalerz. The survivors fell back in confusion, flotsam of an earlier age.
France’s high command had urged the Poles to concentrate their forces behind the three big rivers in the centre of their country, but the Warsaw government deemed it essential instead to defend its entire nine-hundred-mile frontier with Germany, not least because most Polish industry lay in the west; some divisions thus became responsible for fronts of eighteen miles, when their strengths – around 15,000 men – scarcely sufficed for three or four. The three-pronged German assault, from north, south and west, drove deep into the country in the face of ineffectual resistance, leaving pockets of defenders isolated. Luftwaffe aircraft gave close support to the panzers, and also launched devastating air raids on Warsaw, Łód
, D
blin and Sandomierz.
Polish troops and civilians were strafed and bombed with ruthless impartiality, though some victims took time to recognise the gravity of the threat. After the first wave of attacks Virgilia, American-born wife of Polish nobleman Prince Paul Sapieha, told her household reassuringly: ‘You see: these bombs aren’t so bad. Their bark is worse than their bite.’ When two bombs fell in the park of the Smorczewski family’s stately home at Tarnogóra on the night of 1 September, the young sons of the house, Ralph and Mark, were hastily dragged from their beds by their mother and rushed outside to hide in a wood with other young refugees. ‘After recovering from the initial shock,’ Ralph wrote later, ‘we looked at each other and fell into a fit of unrestrained giggles. What a strange sight we were: a motley collection of youths, some in pyjamas, others with coats thrown over their underwear, standing aimlessly under the trees, playing with gas masks. We decided to go home.’
Soon, however, there was no more giggling: the people of Poland were obliged to recognise the devastating power of the Luftwaffe. ‘I was awakened by the wail of sirens and sound of explosions,’ wrote diplomat Adam Kruczkiewicz in Warsaw. ‘Outside I saw German planes flying at incredibly low level and throwing bombs at their ease. There was some desultory machine-gun fire from the tops of a few buildings, but no Polish fliers…The city was stunned by the almost complete lack of air defence. They felt bitterly disappointed.’ The town of Łuck belied its name: early one morning a dozen German bombs fell on it, killing scores of people, most of them children walking to school. Impotent victims called the cloudless skies of those September days ‘the curse of Poland’. Pilot B.J. Solak wrote: ‘The stench of burning and a brown veil of smoke filled all the air around our town.’ After hiding his unarmed plane beneath some trees, Solak was driving home when he met a peasant on the road, ‘leading a horse whose hip was a blanket of congealed blood. Its head was touching the dust with its nostrils, each step causing it to shudder with pain.’ The young airman asked the peasant where he was taking the stricken animal, victim of a Stuka dive-bomber. ‘To the veterinary clinic in town.’ ‘But that’s four miles more!’ A shrug: ‘I have only one horse.’
A thousand larger tragedies unfolded. As Lt. Piotr Tarczy
ski’s artillery battery clattered forward towards the battlefield, Stukas fell on it; every man sprang from his saddle and threw himself to the earth. A few bombs dropped, some men and horses fell. Then the planes were gone, the battery remounted and resumed its march. ‘We saw two women, one middle-aged and one only a girl, carrying a short ladder. On it was stretched a wounded man, still alive and clutching his abdomen. As they passed us, I could see his intestines trailing on the ground.’ Władysław Anders had fought with the Russians in World War I, under the exotically named Tsarist general the Khan of Nakhitchevan. Now, commanding a Polish cavalry brigade, Anders saw a teacher leading a group of her pupils to the shelter of woods. ‘Suddenly, there was the roar of an aeroplane. The pilot circled, descending to a height of fifty metres. As he dropped his bombs and fired his machine-guns, the children scattered like sparrows. The aeroplane disappeared as quickly as it had come, but on the field some crumpled and lifeless bundles of bright clothing remained. The nature of the new war was already clear.’
Thirteen-year-old George
l
zak was on a train with a party of children travelling home to Łód
from summer camp. Suddenly there were explosions, screams, and the train lurched to a stop. The group leader shouted at the boys to get out fast and run for a nearby forest. Shocked and terrified, they lay prostrate for half an hour until the bombing stopped. On emerging, a few hundred yards up the track they saw a blazing troop train which had been the Germans’ target. Some boys burst into tears at the sight of bleeding men; their first attempt to reboard their own train was frustrated by the return of the Luftwaffe, machine-gunning. At last, they resumed their journey in coaches riddled with bullet holes. George reached home to find his mother sobbing by the family radio set: it had reported Germans approaching.
Pilot Franciszek Kornicki went to visit a wounded comrade in a Łód
hospital: ‘It was a terrible place, full of wounded and dying men lying everywhere on beds and on the floor, in rooms and corridors, some moaning in agony, others lying silent with their eyes closed or wide open, waiting and hoping.’ Gen. Adrian Carton de Wiart, head of the British military mission in Poland, wrote bitterly: ‘I saw the very face of war change – its glory shorn, no longer the soldier setting forth into battle, but the women and children being buried under it.’

On Sunday, 3 September, Britain and France declared war on Germany, in fulfilment of their guarantees to Poland. Stalin’s alliance with Hitler caused many European communists, compliant with Moscow, to distance themselves from their nations’ stand against the Nazis. Trades unionists’ denunciations of what they branded an ‘imperialist war’ influenced attitudes in many French and British factories, shipyards and coalmines. Street graffiti appeared: ‘Stop the War: The Worker Pays’, ‘No to Capitalist War’. Independent Labour MP Aneurin Bevan, a standard-bearer of the left, hedged his bets by calling for a struggle on two fronts: against Hitler and also against British capitalism.
The secret protocols of the Nazi–Soviet Pact, delineating the parties’ territorial ambitions, were unknown in Western capitals until German archives were captured in 1945. But in September 1939, many citizens of the democracies perceived Russia and Germany alike as their foes. The novelist Evelyn Waugh’s fictional alter ego, Guy Crouchback, adopted a view shared by many European conservatives: Stalin’s deal with Hitler, ‘news that shook the politicians and young poets of a dozen capital cities, brought deep peace to one English heart…The enemy at last was plain in view, huge and hateful, all disguise cast off. It was the Modern Age in arms.’ A few politicians aspired to separate Russia and Germany, to seek the support of Stalin to defeat the greater evil of Hitler. Until June 1941, however, such a prospect seemed remote: the two dictatorships were viewed as common enemies of the democracies.
Hitler did not anticipate the British and French declarations of war. Their acquiescence in his 1938 seizure of Czechoslovakia, together with the impossibility of direct Anglo-French military succour for Poland, argued a lack of both will and means to challenge him. The Führer himself quickly recovered from his initial shock, but some of his acolytes were troubled. Goering, C-in-C of the Luftwaffe, his nerve badly shaken, raged down the telephone to Germany’s foreign minister, Ribbentrop: ‘Now you’ve got your fucking war! You alone are to blame!’ Hitler had striven to forge a German warrior society committed to martial glory, with notable success among the young. But older people displayed far less enthusiasm in 1939 than they had done in 1914, recalling the horrors of the previous conflict, and their own defeat. ‘This war has a ghostly unreality,’ wrote Count Helmuth von Moltke, an Abwehr intelligence officer but an implacable opponent of Hitler. ‘The people don’t support it…[They] are apathetic. It’s like a danse macabre performed on the stage by persons unknown.’
American CBS correspondent William Shirer reported from Hitler’s capital on 3 September: ‘There is no excitement here…no hurrahs, no wild cheering, no throwing of flowers…It is a far grimmer German people that we see here tonight than we saw last night or the day before.’ As Alexander Stahlberg passed through Stettin with his army unit en route to the Polish border, he echoed Shirer’s view: ‘None of the brave mood of August 1914, no cheers, no flowers.’ The Austrian writer Stefan Zweig readily explained this: ‘They did not feel the same because the world in 1939 was not as childishly naïve and gullible as in 1914…This almost religious faith in the honesty or at least the ability of your own government had disappeared throughout the whole of Europe.’
But many Germans echoed the sentiments of Fritz Muehlebach, a Nazi Party official: ‘I regarded England’s and France’s interference…as nothing but a formality…As soon as they realised the utter hopelessness of Polish resistance and the vast superiority of German arms they would begin to see that we had always been in the right and it was quite senseless to meddle…It was only as a result of something that wasn’t their business that the war had ever started. If Poland had been alone she would certainly have given in quietly.’
The Allied nations hoped that the mere gesture of declaring war would ‘call Hitler’s bluff’, precipitating his overthrow by his own people and a peace settlement without a catastrophic clash of arms in western Europe. Selfishness dominated the response of Britain and France to the unfolding Polish tragedy. France’s C-in-C, Gen. Maurice Gamelin, had told his British counterpart back in July: ‘We have every interest in the conflict beginning in the East and only generalising little by little. That way we shall enjoy the time we need to mobilise the totality of the Franco-British forces.’ Tory MP Cuthbert Headlam wrote petulantly in his diary on 2 September that the Poles ‘have only themselves to blame for what is coming to them now’.
In Britain on 3 September, the air-raid alarm which sounded within minutes of prime minister Neville Chamberlain’s broadcast announcement of war aroused mixed emotions. ‘Mother was very flustered,’ wrote nineteen-year-old London student J.R. Frier. ‘Several women in the neighbourhood fainted, and many ran into the road immediately. Some remarks – “Don’t go into the shelter till you hear the guns fire” – “The balloons aren’t even up yet” – “The swine, he must have sent his planes over before the time limit was up.”’ After the all-clear, ‘within minutes everyone was at their doors, talking quickly to each other in nervous voices. More talk about Hitler and revolutions in Germany…Most peculiar thing experienced today was desire for something to happen – to see aeroplanes coming over, and defences in action. I don’t really want to see bombs dropping and people killed, but somehow, as we are at war, I want it to buck up and start. At this rate, it will carry on for God knows how long.’ Impatience about the likely duration of the struggle proved an abiding popular sentiment.
In remote African colonies, some young men fled into the bush on hearing that a war had started: they feared that their British rulers would repeat First World War practice by conscripting them for compulsory labour service – as indeed later happened. A Kenyan named Josiah Mariuki recorded ‘an ominous rumour that Hitler was coming to kill us all, and many people went fearfully down to the rivers and dug holes in the bank to hide from the troops’. The leaders of Britain’s armed forces recognised their unpreparedness for battle, but some young professional soldiers were sufficiently naïve merely to welcome the prospect of action and promotion. ‘The effect was one of exhilaration and excitement,’ wrote John Lewis of the Cameronians. ‘Hitler was a ludicrous figure, and Pathé newsreels of goose-stepping German soldiers were a cause of hilarious merriment…They were pretty good at dive-bombing defenceless Spanish villages, but that was about all. Most of their tanks were dummies made of cardboard. We had beaten a much more powerful Germany twenty years before. We were the greatest empire in the world.’
Few people were as clear-thinking as Lt. David Fraser of the Grenadier Guards, who observed harshly: ‘The mental approach of the British to hostilities was distinguished by their prime faults – slackness of mind and wishful thinking…The people of democracies need to believe that good is opposed to evil – hence the spirit of crusade. All this, with its attempted arousal of vigorous moral and ideological passions, tends to work against that cool concept of war as [an] extension of policy defined by Clausewitz, an exercise with finite, attainable objectives.’
Many British airmen anticipated their own likely fate. Pilot Officer Donald Davis wrote: ‘It was a marvellous autumn day as I drove up past the Wittenham Clumps and Chiltern Hills I knew so well, and I remember thinking that I should be dead in three weeks. I stopped to view the scene and ponder for a few minutes. [I decided that] were I to be faced by the same decisions I should still have decided to fly and join the RAF if I could.’ To Davis’s generation around the world, the privilege of being granted access to the sky fulfilled a supreme romantic vision, for which many young men were content to make payment by risking their lives.
At Westminster, with monumental condescension a government minister told the Polish ambassador, ‘How lucky you are! Who would have thought, six months ago, that you would have Britain on your side as an ally?’ In Poland, news of the British and French declarations of war prompted a surge of hope, boosted by the new allies’ extravagant rhetoric. Varsovians embraced in the street, danced, cried, hooted car horns. A crowd gathered outside the British Embassy on Aleje Ujadowskie, cheering, singing, stumbling through a version of ‘God Save the King’. The ambassador, Sir Howard Kennard, shouted from the balcony: ‘Long live Poland! We shall fight side by side against aggression and injustice!’
These tumultuous scenes were repeated at the French Embassy, where a crowd sang the Marseillaise. In Warsaw that night, a government bulletin announced triumphantly: ‘Polish cavalry units have thrust through the armoured German lines and are now in East Prussia.’ Across Europe, some enemies of Nazism embraced brief delusions. Mihail Sebastian was a thirty-one-year-old Romanian writer, and a Jew. On 4 September, after hearing news of the British and French declarations of war, he was naïvely astonished that they did not immediately attack in the west. ‘Are they still waiting for something? Is it possible (as some say) that Hitler will immediately fall and be replaced by a military government, which will then settle for peace? Could there be radical changes in Italy? What will Russia do? What’s happening to the Axis, about which there is suddenly silence in both Rome and Berlin? A thousand questions that leave you gasping for breath.’ Amid his own mental turmoil, Sebastian sought relief first in reading Dostoevsky, then Thomas de Quincey in English.
On 7 September, ten French divisions moved cautiously into the German Saarland. After advancing five miles, they halted: this represented the sum of France’s armed demonstration in support of Poland. Gamelin was satisfied that the Poles could hold off Hitler’s Wehrmacht until the French rearmament programme was further advanced. Slowly, the Polish people began to understand that they were alone in their agony. Stefan Starzy
ski, a former soldier in Piłsudski’s Legion, had been Warsaw’s inspirational mayor since 1934, famous for making his city a riot of summer flowers. Now, Starzy
ski broadcast daily to his people, denouncing Nazi barbarism with passionate emotion. He recruited rescue squads, summoned thousands of volunteers to dig trenches, comforted victims of German bombs who were soon numbered in thousands. Many Varsovians fled east, the rich bartering cars for which they had no fuel to procure carts and bicycles. Sixteen-year-old Jew Ephrahim Bleichman watched long columns of refugees of his own race trudging wretchedly along the road from Warsaw. In his innocence, he did not grasp the special peril they faced: despite Poland’s notorious anti-Semitism, ‘I had never experienced anything more severe than name-calling.’
Exhaustion among men and horses soon posed the main threat to the headlong German advance. Cavalryman Lance-Corporal Hornes found his mount Herzog repeatedly stumbling: ‘I called out to the section commander – “Herzog’s had as much as he can take!” I had scarcely got the words out when the poor beast fell to his knees. We’d gone 70km on the first day, then 60 on the second. And on top of that, we’d had the trek over the mountains with the advance patrol galloping…That meant we’d gone nearly 200km in three days without any proper rest! Night had long fallen, and we were still riding.’
The horrors of blitzkrieg mounted: while Warsaw Radio played Chopin’s Military Polonaise, German bombing of the capital was now accompanied by the fire of a thousand guns, delivering 30,000 shells a day, which pounded its magnificent buildings into rubble. ‘The lovely Polish autumn [is] coming,’ fighter pilot Mirosław Feri
wrote in his diary, recoiling from the irony. ‘Damn and blast its loveliness.’ A pall of grey smoke and dust settled over the capital. The royal castle, opera house, national theatre, cathedral and scores of public buildings, together with thousands of homes, were reduced to ruins. Unburied bodies and makeshift graves lay everywhere on the boulevards and in the parks; food supplies, water and electricity were cut off; with almost every window shattered, glass fragments carpeted pavements. By 7 September the city and its 120,000 defenders were surrounded, as the Polish army reeled back eastwards. Its chief of staff, Marshal Edward Rydz-
migły, had fled Warsaw with the rest of the government on the second day of war. The army’s supply system and communications collapsed. Cracow fell almost without resistance on 6 September; Gdynia followed on the 13th, though its naval base held out for a further week.
A counter-attack on 10 September by eight Polish divisions, across the Bzura river west of Warsaw, briefly disrupted the German offensive and took 1,500 prisoners. Kurt Meyer of the SS Liebstandarte acknowledged with mingled admiration and condescension: ‘The Poles attack with enormous tenacity, proving over and over again that they really know how to die.’ Contrary to legend, on only two occasions did Polish horsemen engage German tanks. One such episode took place on the night of 11 September, when a squadron hurled itself full gallop at the village of Kałuszyn, strongly held by the Germans. Out of eighty-five horsemen who attacked, only thirty-three afterwards rallied. The invaders used their own cavalry to provide reconnaissance and mobility, rather than for assaults. Lance-Corporal Hornes’s unit advanced in column, while two men rode ahead: ‘They would hurry at a gallop from one hill to the next, then wave the troop on. As another precaution, lone horsemen were sent out alongside us on the ridges of the hills. Suddenly, we saw new unfamiliar contours emerging from the thick dust-cloud: small, agile horses with bobbing heads, ridden by Polish Uhlans in their khaki uniforms, long lances held with one end in the stirrup leather and the other slung from the shoulder. Their shining tips bobbed up and down in time with the horses’ hooves. At the same moment, our machine-guns opened fire.’
The Wehrmacht was vastly better armed and armoured than its enemies. Poland was a poor country, with only a few thousand military and civilian trucks; its national budget was smaller than that of the city of Berlin. Given the poor quality and small number of Polish planes compared with those of the Luftwaffe, it is remarkable that the campaign cost Germany 560 aircraft. Lt. Piotr Tarczy
ski’s artillery battery came under intense shellfire a mile from the river Warta. Himself a forward observer, he found his telephones dead; linesmen sent to investigate never returned. Without having summoned a single salvo, he was surrounded by German infantrymen who took him prisoner. Like many men in his predicament, he sought to ingratiate himself with his captors: ‘I can only compare my situation with that of someone finding himself unexpectedly faced by influential strangers upon whom he is completely dependent. I know I ought to have been ashamed of myself.’ As he was marched away to captivity, he passed several dead Polish soldiers; instinctively, he raised his hand to salute each one.
Amid popular rage against the invaders of their homeland, there were scenes of mob violence which conferred no honour upon Poland’s cause. Mass arrests of ethnic Germans – supposed or potential fifth columnists – took place throughout early September. At Bydgoszcz on ‘Bloody Sunday’, 3 September, a thousand German civilians were massacred after allegations that they had fired on Polish troops. Some modern German historians claim that up to 13,000 ethnic Germans were killed during the campaign, most of them innocents. The true figure is almost certainly much lower, but such deaths provided a pretext for appalling and systemic Nazi atrocities towards Poles, and especially Polish Jews, which began within days of the invasion. Hitler told his generals at Obersalzberg: ‘Genghis Khan had millions of women and men killed by his own will and with a light heart. History sees him only as a great state-builder…I have sent my Death’s Head units to the east with the order to kill without mercy men, women and children of the Polish race or language. Only in such a way shall we win the Lebensraum that we need.’
When the Wehrmacht entered Łód
, thirteen-year-old George
l
zak was bewildered by seeing women throw flowers at the soldiers, and offer them sweets and cigarettes. Children shouted ‘Heil Hitler!’
l
zak wrote wonderingly: ‘Boys I was at school with waved swastika flags.’ Though these welcoming civilians were Polish citizens, they were of German ancestry and now flaunted their heritage. Goebbels launched a strident propaganda campaign to convince his people of the justice of their cause. On 2 September the Nazi newspaper Völkischer Beobachter announced the invasion in a double-deck headline: ‘The Führer proclaims the fight for Germany’s rights and security’. On 6 September Lokal-Anzeiger asserted: ‘Terrible bestiality of the Poles – German fliers shot – Red Cross columns mowed down – nurses murdered’. A few days later, Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung carried the startling heading ‘Poles Bombard Warsaw’. The story stated: ‘Polish artillery of every calibre opened fire from the eastern part of Warsaw against our troops in the western part of the city.’ The German news agency denounced Polish resistance as ‘senseless and insane’.
Most young Germans, graduates of the Nazi educational system, unhesitatingly accepted the version of events offered by their leaders. ‘The advance of the armies has become an irresistible march to victory,’ wrote a twenty-year-old Luftwaffe flight trainee. ‘Scenes of deep emotion occur with the liberations of the terrorised German residents of the Polish Corridor. Dreadful atrocities, crimes against all the laws of humanity, are brought to light by our armies. Near Bromberg and Thorn they discover mass graves containing the bodies of thousands of Germans who have been massacred by the Polish Communists.’

On 17 September, the date on which Poles expected the French to begin their promised offensive on the Western Front, instead the Soviet Union launched its own vicious thrust, designed to secure Stalin’s share of Hitler’s booty. Stefan Kurylak was a thirteen-year-old Ukrainian Pole, living in a quiet village near the Russian border. Retreating Polish troops began to trickle down its dusty main street on foot and on horseback, some crying out urgently, ‘Run – run for your lives, good people! Hide anywhere you can, for they are showing no mercy. Hurry. The Russians are coming!’ Soon afterwards, the teenager watched a Soviet tank column clatter through the village: a child who lingered in its path, frightened and confused, was casually shot down. Kurylak took refuge in his family’s potato pit.
Vyacheslav Molotov, Stalin’s foreign minister, told the Polish ambassador in Moscow that, since the Polish republic no longer existed, the Red Army was intervening to ‘protect Russian citizens in western Belorussia and western Ukraine’. Although Hitler had agreed Stalin’s annexation of eastern Poland, the Germans were taken by surprise when the Soviet intervention came. So, too, were the Poles. Once the Red Army struck in their rear, wrote Marshal Rydz-
migły bitterly, resistance could become only ‘an armed demonstration against a new partition of Poland’. The Wehrmacht high command, anxious to avoid accidental clashes with the Russians, declared a boundary on the San, Vistula and Narew rivers; wherever its forces had advanced beyond that line, they now withdrew.
Hitler hoped that Stalin’s intervention would provoke the Allies to declare war on the Russians, and in London there was indeed a brief flurry of debate about whether Britain’s commitment to Poland demanded engagement of a new enemy. In the War Cabinet, only Churchill and war minister Leslie Hore-Belisha urged preparations for such an eventuality. Britain’s Moscow ambassador Sir William Seeds cabled: ‘I do not see what advantage war with the Soviet Union would be to us although it would please me personally to declare it on Molotov.’ Much to the relief of prime minister Neville Chamberlain, the Foreign Office advised that the government’s guarantee to Poland covered only German aggression. Bitter British rhetoric was unleashed against Stalin, but no further consideration was given to fighting him; the French likewise confined themselves to expressions of disgust. Within days, at a cost of only 4,000 casualties, the Russians overran 77,000 square miles of territory including the cities of Lwów and Wilno. Stalin gained suzerainty over five million Poles, 4.5 million ethnic Ukrainians, one million Belorussians and one million Jews.
In Warsaw, starving people still clung to hopes of aid from the west. An air-raid warden confided to an acquaintance: ‘You know the British. They are slow in making up their minds, but now they are definitely coming.’ Millions of Poles were at first bewildered, then increasingly outraged, by the passivity of these supposed friends. A cavalry officer wrote: ‘What was happening in the west, we wondered, and when would the French and British start their offensive? We could not understand why our allies were so slow in coming to our assistance.’ On 20 September, Poland’s London ambassador broadcast to his people at home: ‘Fellow countrymen! Know that your sacrifice is not in vain, and that its meaning and eloquence are felt to the utmost here…Already the hosts of our allies are assembling…The day will come when the victorious standards…shall return from foreign lands to Poland.’ Yet even as he spoke, Count Raczy
ski was conscious, as he wrote later, that his words were ‘little more than a poetic fiction. Where were the Allied hosts?’
In Paris, Polish ambassador Juliusz Łukasiewicz exchanged bitter words with French foreign minister Georges Bonnet. ‘It isn’t right! You know it isn’t right!’ he said. ‘A treaty is a treaty and must be respected! Do you realise that every hour you delay the attack on Germany means…death to thousands of Polish men, women and children?’ Bonnet shrugged: ‘Do you then want the women and children of Paris to be massacred?’ American correspondent Janet Flanner wrote from Paris: ‘It would seem, indeed, as if efforts are still being made to hold the war up, prevent its starting in earnest – efforts made, perhaps self-consciously, by government leaders reluctant to go down in history as having ordered the first inflaming shots, or efforts made as a general reflection of the various populations’ courageous but confused states of mind. Certainly this must be the first war that millions of people on both sides continued to think could be avoided even after it had officially been declared.’


The Polish Campaign (#ulink_7d229f3a-ea40-5e5f-8fee-a9e9af0be229)
The French were wholly unwilling to launch a major offensive against the Siegfried Line, as Winston Churchill urged, far less to invite German retaliation by bombing Germany. The British government similarly declined to order the RAF to attack German land targets. Tory MP Leo Amery wrote contemptuously of prime minister Neville Chamberlain: ‘Loathing war passionately, he was determined to wage as little of it as possible.’ The Times editorialised in a fashion which seemed to Polish readers to mock their plight: ‘In the agony of their martyred land, the Poles will perhaps in some degree be consoled by the knowledge that they have the sympathy, and indeed the reverence, not only of their allies in western Europe but of all civilized people throughout the globe.’
It is sometimes argued that in mid-September 1939, with the bulk of the German army committed in Poland, the Allies had an ideal opportunity to launch an offensive on the Western Front. But France was even less prepared psychologically than militarily for such an initiative; and Britain’s small expeditionary force, still in transit to the Continent, could contribute little. The Germans could probably have repelled any assault without much disrupting their operations in the east, and the inertia of the French and British governments reflected the will of their peoples. A Glasgow secretary named Pam Ashford wrote in her diary on 7 September: ‘Practically everyone thinks the war will be over in three months…Many hold that when Poland is smashed up there won’t be much point in continuing.’
The Poles should have anticipated the passivity of their allies, but its cynicism was breathtaking. A modern historian, Andrzej Suchcitz, has written: ‘The Polish government and military authorities had been double-crossed and betrayed by their western allies. There was no intention of giving Poland any effective military support.’ As Warsaw faced its doom, Stefan Starzy
ski declared in a broadcast: ‘Destiny has committed to us the duty of defending Poland’s honour.’ A Polish poet later celebrated the mayor’s defiance in characteristically emotional terms:
And he, when the city was just a raw, red mass
Said: ‘I do not surrender.’ Let the houses burn!
Let my proud achievements be bombed into dust.
So what, if a graveyard grows from my dreams?
For you, who may come here, some day recall
That some things are dearer than the finest city wall.
By the end of the campaign’s third week, Polish resistance was broken. The capital remained unoccupied only because the Germans wished to destroy it before claiming the ruins; hour after hour and day after day, merciless bombardment continued. A nurse, Jadwiga Sosnkowska, described scenes at her hospital outside Warsaw on 25 September:
The procession of wounded from the city was an unending march of death. The lights went out, and all of us, doctors and nurses, had to move about with candles in our hands. As both the operating theatres and the dressing stations were destroyed the work was done in the lecture rooms on ordinary deal tables, and owing to the lack of water the instruments could not be sterilised, but had to be cleansed with alcohol…As human wreckage was laid on the table the surgeon vainly attempted to save the lives that were slipping through his hands…Tragedy followed tragedy. At one time the victim was a girl of sixteen. She had a glorious mop of golden hair, her face was delicate as a flower, and her lovely sapphire-blue eyes were full of tears. Both her legs, up to the knees, were a mass of bleeding pulp, in which it was impossible to distinguish bone from flesh; both had to be amputated above the knee. Before the surgeon began I bent over this innocent child to kiss her pallid brow, to lay my helpless hand on her golden head. She died quietly in the course of the morning, like a flower plucked by a merciless hand.
Professional soldiers can seldom afford to indulge in emotionalism about the horrors of war, but posterity must recoil from the complacency of Germany’s generals about both the character of their national leader, and the murderous adventure in which they had become his accomplices. Gen. Erich von Manstein is widely regarded as the finest German general of the war; afterwards, he took pride in pretensions to have done his part as an officer and gentleman. However, his writings during the Polish campaign, as well as later, reveal the insensitivity characteristic of his caste. He was delighted by the invasion: ‘It’s a grand decision of the Führer in view of the attitude of the Western Powers up till now. His offer to solve the Polish question was so obliging that England and France – if they really wanted peace – should have pushed Poland into accepting.’ Soon after the campaign began, Manstein visited a formation which he himself had recently commanded: ‘It was touching to see the staff so pleased when I suddenly appeared…Cranz [his successor] told me it was a pleasure to command such a well-trained division in war.’
In a letter to his wife, Manstein described his personal routine during the campaign, in which he served as von Rundstedt’s chief of staff at Army Group South: ‘I get up at 6.30, plunge into the water [for a swim], into the office by 7.00. Morning reports, coffee, then work or trips with R[undstedt]. Midday, field kitchens here. Then half an hour break. In the evening after supper, which we eat together with the general staff officers as at lunch, the evening reports come in. And so it goes on to 11.30.’ The contrast is stark, between the serenity of army headquarters and the vast human tragedy its operations had precipitated. Manstein signed an order for the German forces encircling Warsaw to fire upon any refugees who attempted to leave: it was deemed easier to force a swift outcome of the campaign, and to avoid a battle in the streets, if the inhabitants were unable to escape the capital’s bombardment. Yet he was a man of such personal fastidiousness that he sometimes quit rooms in which von Rundstedt was speaking, because he recoiled from his chief’s obscene language. On 25 September, he basked in a congratulatory visit from Hitler, writing to his wife: ‘It was nice to see how the soldiers rejoiced everywhere as the Führer drove past.’ In 1939, the officer corps of the Wehrmacht already displayed the moral bankruptcy that would characterise its conduct until 1945.
A Polish cavalry officer, Klemens Rudnicki, described the plight of his regiment and its beloved mounts in Warsaw on 27 September, the last night before the city fell: ‘Red, glittering flames illuminated our horses, standing quiet and motionless along the walls of the Łazienki Park, resembling saddled skeletons. A few were dead; some were bleeding, exposing huge, gaping wounds. Kowalski’s horse Cenzor was still alive, but lay with his bowels ripped out. Not long ago he had won the Army’s Challenge Cup at Tarnopol. He had been our pride. A shot in the ear ended his sufferings. Next day, probably, somebody needing to assuage his hunger would cut a joint from his loins.’
Warsaw capitulated on 28 September. Little Captain Krysk of Rudnicki’s 3rd squadron declared emotionally that he rejected the order: ‘Tomorrow morning we shall charge the Germans to preserve the regimental tradition that the 9th Lancers never surrender.’ Rudnicki dissuaded him; together, the regiment’s officers secreted their colours in the church of St Anthony on Senatorska Street, the only building still intact amid acres of rubble. Rudnicki reflected ruefully that the Polish army should have deployed in depth for a protracted defensive action, instead of manning a weak forward line that was certain to be broken. This, however, would have been ‘at variance with our natural aspiration – and with our military traditions and hopes of becoming a great Power’.
On 29 September the Modlin army north of Warsaw surrendered to the Germans, who took 30,000 prisoners. Organised resistance petered out, the Hel peninsula falling on 1 October; the last recorded engagement took place at Kock, north of Lublin, on the 5th. Hundreds of thousands of men fell into German hands, while many more struggled to flee. Young flier B.J. Solak was moved to encounter an air force colonel sitting beneath a tree, tears pouring down his face. Feliks Lachman was one of many Poles whose thoughts reverted to their recent reading of Gone with the Wind. Fleeing his home, he mused: ‘Desolate as was the Tara estate, Scarlett O’Hara was going through fire and water to the place where she knew she belonged. We had left, once and forever, men and things that formed the social, intellectual and emotional environment of our life. We were moving in a vacuum, aimlessly.’ After an air raid on the city of Krzemieniec, Adam Kruczkiewicz saw in the street a hysterical old Jew, ‘standing over the corpse of his wife…uttering a string of curses and blasphemies, shouting “There is no God! Hitler and the bombs are the only gods! There is no grace and pity in the world!”’
A few Polish cavalry units made good their escape into Hungary, where they surrendered their arms. At the barracks of the 3rd Hungarian Hussar Regiment, exhausted fugitives were moved to find themselves greeted by the unit’s officers, led by the elderly Colonel von Pongratsch, drawn up in full ceremonial uniform. A few days later, when the Poles left to face internment, the bewhiskered veteran embraced each one before bidding them farewell. Such old-world courtesies were welcome, because they had been banished from the pitiless universe of which most Poles now found themselves inhabitants.
Gen. Władysław Anders led his exhausted and depleted unit eastwards to escape the Germans. The men sang as they urged on their emaciated horses amid a throng of refugees and military stragglers. Then they met the Red Army, and Anders sent a liaison officer to the local Soviet headquarters to beg safe passage to the Hungarian border. The Pole was stripped of all he had, and threatened with execution. Russian guns began to shell the Polish positions. Anders ordered his men to split into small groups and find their own way into Hungary. He himself, badly wounded, was captured along with many others. A Russian officer told him complacently: ‘We are now good friends of the Germans. Together we will fight international capitalism. Poland was the tool of England, and she had to perish for that.’
Regina Lempicka was one of hundreds of thousands of Poles arbitrarily arrested by the Russians during the months that followed, then shipped to Kazakhstan. Her grandmother and baby niece died of starvation during their exile, while her soldier brother was shot. The family experience in Russian hands, she wrote later, became ‘a ghastly dream’. As one group of Polish soldiers was marched over a border bridge by Red Army guards, a prisoner said bleakly: ‘We enter Russia. We shall never return.’ Tadeusz
ukowski wrote: ‘From this instant the whole world seemed to change: different sky, soil and people. A weird feeling, as if something cracked inside you had burst open, as if life left you and you suddenly dropped into a dark cave, a pitch-dark underground passage.’ A woman said contemptuously to a Polish prisoner on his way to the gulag, ‘You Polish, fascist lords! Here in Russia you will learn how to work. Here you will be strong enough to work but too weak to oppress the poor!’
Around 1.5 million Poles, mostly civilians evicted from their homes in the forfeited east of their country during the months that followed, began an ordeal of captivity and starvation in Soviet hands, which cost the lives of some 350,000. Many such families were without menfolk, because these had been summarily dispatched. On 5 March 1940, the Soviet Union’s security chief Lavrenti Beria sent a four-page memorandum to Stalin, proposing the elimination of Polish senior officers and others defined as leaders of their society. Those held in Soviet camps, urged Beria, should be subjected to ‘the use of the highest means of punishment – death by shooting’. Stalin and other members of the Politburo formally approved the recommendation to decapitate Poland. During the weeks that followed, at least 25,000 Poles were murdered by NKVD executioners at various Soviet prisons, each receiving a single bullet in the back of the head. The bodies were then buried in mass graves in the forests around Katyn west of Smolensk, at Minsk and other sites, the largest of which was discovered by the gleeful Nazis in 1943.
Later allegations that the post-1945 Allied war crimes trials represented ‘victors’ justice’ were powerfully reinforced by the fact that no Russian was ever indicted for Katyn. In October 1939 a Pole under interrogation by NKVD officers demanded bitterly: ‘How is it possible for the USSR, a progressive and democratic state, to be on friendly terms with a reactionary Nazi Germany?’ His inquisitor replied coldly: ‘You are wrong. Our policy is at present to be neutral during the struggle between England and Germany. Let them bleed – our power will increase. When they are utterly exhausted, we shall come out as the strong and fresh party, decisive during the last stage of the war.’ This seems a just representation of Stalin’s aspirations.
Hitler, visiting Warsaw on 5 October, gestured to the ruins and addressed accompanying foreign correspondents: ‘Gentlemen, you have seen for yourselves what criminal folly it was to try to defend this city…I only wish that certain statesmen in other countries who seem to want to turn all of Europe into a second Warsaw could have the opportunity to see, as you have, the real meaning of war.’ Warsaw’s Mayor Starzy
ski was removed to Dachau, where he was murdered four years later. The Polish army had lost 70,000 men killed and 140,000 wounded, together with uncounted thousands of civilian dead. The German army’s casualties amounted to 16,000 killed and 30,000 wounded. Some 700,000 Polish soldiers became Hitler’s prisoners. An unelected Polish exile government was established in London.
Britain’s Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Gen. Sir Edmund Ironside, met Adrian Carlton de Wiart on that officer’s return from Warsaw and snapped dismissively, ‘Well, your Poles haven’t done much.’ This assertion reflected the frustration of British and French hopes that the Polish army would inflict sufficient injury upon the Wehrmacht to alleviate the Western Allies’ need to do so. Carlton de Wiart replied, ‘Let us see what others will do, sir.’ A remarkable number of Poles made the decision to accept exile, separation from everything they knew and loved, in order to continue the fight against Hitler. Some 150,000 made their way westwards, often after memorable odysseys. This was by far the largest voluntary exodus from any of the nations eventually overrun by Germany, and reflected the Poles’ passion to sustain their struggle. Exiles fleeing west were astonished by the warm reception they received in fascist Italy, where a host of people called to them, ‘Bravo Polonia!’
Before quitting his home airfield, fighter instructor Witold Urbanowicz gave a radio and his silk shirts to the woman cleaner of his quarters, his formal evening dress to the porter, then set off by bus with his cadets, down the road to Romania; almost a year later, at the controls of a Hurricane, he became one of the RAF’s foremost aces. Some 30,000 Poles, one-third of them air force pilots and ground crew, reached Britain in 1940, and more came later. One man clutched a wooden propeller, a symbol to which he had clung doggedly through a journey of 3,000 miles. Many others joined the British Army in the Middle East, after their belated release from Stalinist captivity. These men would make a far more notable contribution to the Allied war effort than had Britain to their own.
Poland became the only nation occupied by Hitler in which there was no collaboration between the conquerors and the conquered. The Nazis henceforth classified Poles as slaves, and received in return implacable hatred. As Princess Paul Sapieha crossed the frontier to precarious safety amid a throng of refugees, her small daughter asked, ‘Will there be bombs in Romania?’ The princess answered, ‘No more bombs now. There’s no war here. We’re going where it will be sunny and where children can play wherever they please.’ The child persisted: ‘But when are we going home to Papa?’ Her mother could not answer. Soon, there would be scarcely a corner of Europe that offered safe haven to either children or adults.
Hitler had committed himself to conquer Poland, but as so often, he had no clear plan for what should follow. Only when it became plain that Stalin welcomed the country’s extinction did Germany’s ruler decide to annex western Poland. Before the war, Nazis liked to dismiss Poland as a ‘Saisonstaat’ – a temporary state. Now, it would cease to be any state at all: Hitler became master of lands containing fifteen million Poles, two million Jews, one million ethnic Germans and two million other minorities. Among his foremost characteristics was a reflexive hatred of all those who opposed his will. This soon manifested itself against the Poles – and especially, of course, against their Jews. One day in Łód
soon after the occupation began, Szmulek Goldberg was returning from work when ‘I encountered chaos in the streets. People were running wildly in every direction. Somebody stopped and grabbed my sleeve. “Hide! Hide!” he shrieked. “The Germans are capturing Jews at gunpoint and taking them away on trucks.”’ He watched trucks drive past, loaded with captives, a first earnest of Hitler’s designs upon his race. Within weeks of Poland’s conquest, the first few thousand of its Jewish citizens had been murdered.
In Britain, a mother named Tilly Rice who had been evacuated with her children from London to a fishing port in north Cornwall, wrote on 7 October after the end of the Polish campaign: ‘In the household in which I live the whole thing has been received in bewildered silence…War is still going on, but as something distant with just occasional repercussions on the general lives of the community…My own reactions to the whole situation are growing more and more indifferent every day.’ Britain and France had declared war on Germany to save Poland. Poland was now gone, and Polish representatives were expelled from the Allied Supreme War Council, where they were deemed redundant. Many British and French politicians and citizens demanded: to what end was the war being sustained? How could it be effectively waged? US ambassador in London Joseph Kennedy shrugged to his Polish counterpart: ‘Where on earth can the Allies fight the Germans and beat them?’ Though Kennedy was a shameless anglophobe, appeaser and defeatist, his question was valid, and the Allied governments had no good answer to it. After the fall of Poland, the world waited in bewilderment to discover what might follow. Since France and Britain lacked stomach to seize the initiative, the further course of the war waited upon the pleasure of Adolf Hitler.

2
No Peace, Little War
In November 1939, the Norwegian Nobel Committee announced that, with much of Europe at war, it had decided to award no Peace Prize that year. Yet in the eyes of many British and French people, the collapse of Poland condemned to futility the struggle to which their governments had committed them. The French army, with a small British contingent in its traditional place on the left flank, confronted German forces on France’s eastern frontier. But the Allies had no appetite for offensive operations, certainly not until they were better armed. The Polish campaign had demonstrated the effectiveness of the Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe, though not yet their full power. Gen. Lord Gort, commanding the British Expeditionary Force, was appalled by the condition of some Territorial units which arrived in October to join his own five poorly equipped divisions. He said he had not believed it possible to see such a sight in the British Army: ‘The men had no knives and forks and mugs.’
Allied deployments were critically hampered by Belgian neutrality. It was assumed that if Hitler attacked in the west, he would reprise Germany’s 1914 strategy, advancing through Belgium, but King Leopold declined to offer Germany a pretext for invasion by admitting Anglo-French troops meanwhile. In consequence, the armies on the Allied left wing spent much of the icy winter of 1939 building defences on the French border which they intended to abandon, in favour of an advance into Belgium the moment the Germans attacked. The British, having only belatedly introduced conscription, possessed no large reserves of trained manpower for mobilisation, to match those of almost every Continental nation. Britain’s anti-militarist tradition was a source of pride to its people, but in consequence the nation declared war on the strongest power in Europe while capable of contributing only limited ground and air reinforcements to the French armies deployed against Germany. Any land initiative was dependent on the will of the Paris government. France had begun to rearm before Britain, but still awaited delivery of large orders of tanks and aircraft. The Allies were too weak either to precipitate a showdown with the Wehrmacht or to mount an effective air assault on Germany, even if they had the will for one. During the winter of 1939 the RAF staged only desultory daylight bomber attacks on German warships at sea, with heavy losses and no useful results.
Common sense should have told the Allied governments that Hitler was unlikely to delay a clash of arms in the west until they were adequately equipped to challenge him. Instead, perversely, they persuaded themselves that time was on their side. They sought to exploit their naval strength to enforce a blockade of the Reich. Gamelin spoke of launching a big land offensive in 1941 or 1942. The two governments clung to hopes that the German army and people would meanwhile ‘come to their senses’ and acknowledge that they could not sustain a protracted struggle. In Poland, so the Allies’ Panglossian thinking went, Hitler’s reckless territorial aggrandisement had achieved its last triumph: the Nazis would be overthrown by sensible Germans, then an accommodation could be sought with a successor regime.
The Allies formalised their joint decision-making through a Supreme War Council, of the kind that was established only in the final year of the previous European conflict. It was agreed that the British and French would share the cost of the war effort sixty-forty, proportions reflecting the relative size of their economies. France’s politics and policies were profoundly influenced by fear of the left, prospective tools of Stalin. In October 1939, thirty-five communist parliamentary deputies were detained in the interests of national security. The following March, twenty-seven of these were tried and most convicted, receiving prison sentences of up to five years. In addition, some 3,400 communist activists were arrested, and more than 3,000 foreign communist refugees interned.
Among the Allies’ mistakes in forging their strategy, insofar as they had one, was to focus upon strengthening their armed forces while conceding little attention to morale; ministers ignored the corrosive influence of inactivity on public sentiment. In the minds of many French and British people, the war effort seemed purposeless: their nations were committed to fight, yet were not fighting. The French were acutely sensitive to the economic strain imposed by sustaining 2.7 million men under arms. They urged on the British the virtues of action almost anywhere save on the Western Front. Mindful of France’s 1.3 million World War I dead, they recoiled from provoking another bloodbath on their own territory. But their proposals for marginal operations – for instance a Balkan front in Salonika, to pre-empt German aggression there – found no favour in London. The British feared such a step would merely provoke the Italians to make common cause with Germany. Ministers would not even speak publicly of creating an ‘anti-fascist front’, for fear of upsetting Benito Mussolini.
Unable to define credible military objectives, many British and French politicians craved a patched-up peace with Hitler, granted only that he should accept some face-saving moderation of his territorial ambitions; their peoples recognised this, coining the phrases ‘Phoney War’ and ‘Bore War’. The social-research organisation Mass Observation reported ‘a strong feeling in the country that the wretched war is not worth going on with…We can suspect that Hitler has won News-Round 1 in this war. He’s been able to give his own people a tremendous success story – Poland.’
It is hard to overstate the impact of months of passivity upon the spirit of France’s forces. In November 1939 British corps commander Alan Brooke described his sensations on witnessing a parade of the French Ninth Army: ‘Seldom have I seen anything more slovenly…men unshaven, horses ungroomed, complete lack of pride in themselves or their units. What shook me most, however, was the look in the men’s faces, disgruntled and insubordinate looks…I could not help wondering whether the French are still a firm enough nation to again take their part in seeing this war through.’ Exiled Poles, of whom some thousands were now attached to the French forces, noted with dismay the equivocal attitudes displayed by their allies: pilot Franciszek Kornicki wrote that ‘both the French communists and fascists worked against us, and Lyons was full of the former. One day somebody made a friendly gesture, but another day someone else would swear at you.’
A French soldier, the writer Jean-Paul Sartre, wrote in his diary on 26 November: ‘All the men…were raring to go at the outset, but now they are dying of boredom.’ Another soldier, Georges Sadoul, wrote on 13 December: ‘The days pass, interminable and empty, without the slightest occupation…The officers, mainly reservists, think no differently from the men…One feels they are weary of the war, they say and repeat that they would like to go home.’ On 20 February 1940, Sartre observed: ‘The war machine is running in neutral…Only yesterday a sergeant was telling me, with a gleam of insane hope in his eyes: “What I think is, it’ll all be arranged, England will climb down.”’
The British were equally baffled. Jack Classon, a young shopworker in Everton, Lancashire, wrote to a friend in the army: ‘The war doesn’t seem to make much headway, does it? We read one thing in the paper in the morning, the denial the following day, & it’s killing business. You can blame my gloom on the black curtains that drape the shop & the blued windows that stare at you when you go upstairs…The Curzon cinema has had for the last week or so Henry Croudson the organist as guest…some people are enjoying that more than the picture, his most popular number at the moment being “We’ll Hang Out The Washing On The Siegfried Line”. The audience raises the roof when he plays that.’
One and a half million British women and children, evacuated from the cities amid the threat of German bombing, suffered agonies of homesickness in an unfamiliar rural environment. One of them, Derek Lambert, a nine-year-old from London’s Muswell Hill, later recalled: ‘We went to strange beds and lay with fists clenched. Our toes found tepid hot water bottles and our fingers silk bags of old lavender inside the pillows. An owl hooted, wings brushed the window. I remembered the London sounds of distant trains and motor cycles, the breaking limbs of the mountain ash, next door’s dog, the droning radio, the fifth stair groaning and the ten-thirty throat-clearing; I remembered the familiar wallpaper where you could paddle a canoe through green rapids or drive a train along sweeping cuttings…We sobbed in awful desolation.’
Most evacuees were drawn from the underclass, and shocked rustic hosts by their rags and anarchic habits: urban children, victims of the thirties Depression, were unaccustomed to meals at fixed hours, some even to knives and forks. They were used to subsisting on ‘pieces’ – bread and margarine, fish and chips – eaten on the move, together with tinned food and sweets. They recoiled from soup, puddings and all vegetables save potatoes. Many paraded their alienation by resorting to petty delinquency. The habits of their mothers dismayed staid rural communities: ‘The village people objected to the evacuees chiefly because of the dirtiness of their habits and clothes,’ recorded Muriel Green, a garage assistant in Snettisham, Norfolk. ‘Also because of their reputed drinking and bad language. It’s exceptional to hear women swear in this village or for them to enter a public house. The villagers used to watch them come out of the pubs with horror. The holiday camp proprietor said: “You should see them mop down the drink.”’ By Christmas, with Britain still unbombed, most of the evacuees had returned to their city homes, to the mutual relief of themselves and their rural hosts.
If there was little substance to Britain’s war effort, there were many symbols: sandbagged public buildings, barrage balloons floating above London, a rigorous blackout in the hours of darkness. Before peace came, accidents in the blackout killed more people than did the Luftwaffe: in the last four months of 1939 there were 4,133 deaths on the roads, 2,657 of these pedestrians, a figure almost double that for the same period in 1938. Many more people died as a consequence of non-highway mishaps: some 18 per cent of those interviewed by Princeton pollsters in December 1940 said they had injured themselves groping in the dark; three-quarters of respondents thought air-raid precautions should be eased. Defence regulations were so stringently enforced that two soldiers leaving the dock at the Old Bailey after being condemned to death for murder were rebuked for failing to pick up their gas masks. Two and a half million people were enrolled in civil defence.
Huge tracts of downland and urban public spaces were put down to corn and vegetables. Wiltshire farmer Arthur Street ploughed up his grassland as the government ordered, and sent away his beloved hunter to be trained for harness work. Many riding horses took badly to this humble duty, but Street’s ‘Jorrocks’ ‘trotted home like a gentleman’, in the farmer’s words, ‘and since that day he has hauled the milk, pulled the broadcast during wheat sowing, and done ploughing and all sorts of jobs with no mishap…What he thinks about it I don’t know. He has no notion of what it is that trundles and rattles behind him, and the position of his ears shows that he is somewhat worried about it. But as we have never let him down before, he reckons that we are not doing it now, and so does his war work like the gentleman he is.’ Farmers who had struggled to escape bankruptcy in the 1930s suddenly entered a new era of prosperity.
Seven hundred fascists were interned, though most of the aristocrats who had flirted with Hitler were spared. ‘It certainly is breath-taking how all these lords get away with their pre-war affiliations to the Nazi regime,’ complained British communist Elizabeth Belsey in a letter to her soldier husband. If the British had emulated French policy towards communists, thousands of trades unionists and a substantial part of the intellectual class would also have been incarcerated, but these too were left at liberty. There was still much silliness in the air: the Royal Victoria Hotel at St Leonardson-Sea, advertising its attractions in The Times, asserted that ‘The ballroom and adjacent toilets have been made gas-and splinter-proof.’ Published advertisements for domestic staff made few concessions to conscription: ‘Wanted: second housemaid of three; wages £42 per annum; two ladies in family; nine servants kept.’ The Archbishop of Canterbury declared that Christians were allowed to pray for victory, but the Archbishop of York disagreed. While the war was a righteous one, he said, it was not a holy one: ‘We must avoid praying each other down.’ Some clergymen urged their congregations to ask the Almighty’s help for charity: ‘Save me from bitterness and hatred towards the enemy.’ There was anger among British Christians, however, when in November the Pope sent a message of congratulation to Hitler on escaping an assassination attempt.
Hundreds of thousands of young men trained in England with inadequate equipment and uncertain expectations, though they assumed some of their number would die. Lt. Arthur Kellas of the Border Regiment took for granted his own survival, but speculated about the fates of his fellow officers: ‘I used to wonder which of them were for the killing. Would it be Ogilvy, such a nice little man, so worried about his mother in Dundee? Or Donald, so handsome, confident and pleased with himself? Or Hunt, newly married, prosperous in the City of London? Germain? Dunbar? Perkins, whom we ragged without pity? Or Bell, of whom we were jealous when he was posted off to glory with the first battalion in the line in France, first of us to be promoted to the First Fifteen, leaving behind such a pretty sister in Whitehaven? It had happened to our fathers after all. Presumably our War would be much the same as theirs.’
They were so young. As eighteen-year-old Territorial soldier Doug Arthur paraded with his unit outside a church in Liverpool shortly before embarking for overseas service, he was embarrassed to be picked out by one of an emotional crowd of watching housewives: ‘Look at ’im, girls,’ she said pityingly. ‘’E should be at ’ome wit’ ’is Mam. Never mind, son, yourse’ll be alrigh’. God Bless yer la’. He’ll look after yourtse, yer know, like. That bastard ’itler ’as gorra lot to answer for. I’d like to get me bleedin’ ’ands on ’im for five bleedin’ minutes, the swine.’
US president Franklin Roosevelt wrote to his London ambassador Joseph Kennedy on 30 October 1939: ‘While the [First] World War did not bring forth strong leadership in Great Britain, this war may do so, because I am inclined to think the British public has more humility than before and is slowly but surely getting rid of the “muddle through” attitude of the past.’ FDR’s optimism would ultimately prove justified, but only after many more months of ‘muddle through’.

The next act of the struggle increased the world’s bewilderment and confusion of loyalties, for it was undertaken not by Hitler, but by Stalin. Like all Europe’s tyrants, Russia’s leader assessed the evolving conflict in terms of the opportunities it offered him for aggrandisement. In the autumn of 1939, having secured eastern Poland, he sought further to enhance the Soviet Union’s strategic position by advancing into Finland. The country, a vast, sparsely inhabited wilderness of lakes and forests, was one among many whose frontier, indeed very existence, was of short duration, and thus vulnerable to challenge. Part of Sweden until the Napoleonic Wars, thereafter it was ruled by Russia until 1918, when Finnish anti-Bolsheviks triumphed in a civil war.
In October 1939, Stalin determined to strengthen the security of Leningrad, only thirty miles inside Soviet territory, by pushing back the nearby Finnish frontier across the Karelian isthmus, and occupying Finnish-held islands in the Baltic; he also coveted nickel mines on Finland’s north coast. A Finnish delegation, summoned to receive Moscow’s demands, prompted international amazement by rejecting them. The notion that a nation of 3.6 million people might resist the Red Army seemed fantastic, but the Finns, though poorly armed, were nationalistic to the point of folly. Arvo Tuominen, a prominent Finnish communist, declined Stalin’s invitation to form a shadow puppet government, and went into hiding. Tuominen said: ‘It would be wrong, it would be criminal, it was not a picture of the free rule of the people.’
At 0920 on 30 November, Russian aircraft launched the first of many bomber attacks on Helsinki, causing little damage save to the Soviet Legation and the nerves of the British ambassador, who asked to be relieved of his post. Russian forces advanced across the frontier in several places, and Finns joked: ‘They are so many and our country is so small, where shall we find room to bury them all?’ The nation’s defence was entrusted to seventy-two-year-old Marshal Carl Gustav Mannerheim, hero of many conflicts, most recently Finland’s civil war. As a Tsarist officer posted to Lhasa, Mannerheim had once taught the Dalai Lama pistol-shooting; he spoke seven languages, Finnish least fluently. His hauteur was comparable to that of Charles de Gaulle; his ruthlessness had been manifested in the 1919–20 purges of the defeated Finnish communists.
During the 1930s Mannerheim had constructed a fortified line across the Karelian isthmus, to which his name was given. He suffered no delusions about his country’s strategic weakness, and had urged conciliation of Stalin. But when his countrymen opted to fight, he set about managing the defence with cool professionalism. Before the Russians attacked, the Finns adopted a scorched-earth policy, evacuating from the forward areas 100,000 civilians, some of whom adopted an impressively stoical attitude to their sacrifice: border guards who warned an old woman to quit her home were amazed, on returning to burn it, to find that she had swept and cleaned the interior before leaving. On the table lay matches, kindling wood, and a note: ‘When one gives a gift to Finland, one desires that it should be like new.’ But it was a distressing business to destroy housing and installations around the Petsamo nickel-mining centre, which had been constructed with infinite labour and difficulty inside the Arctic Circle. The frontier zone was heavily booby-trapped: mines triggered by pull-ropes were laid, to smash the ice in front of invaders attacking across frozen lakes.
Stalin committed twelve divisions to assaults in a dozen sectors. Most of his soldiers were told that Finland had attacked the Soviet Union, but some were disbelieving and bewildered. Captain Ismael Akhmedov heard a Ukrainian peasant say, ‘Comrade Commander. Tell me, why do we fight this war? Did not Comrade Voroshilov declare at the Party Congress that we don’t want an inch of other people’s land and we will not surrender an inch of ours? Now we are going to fight? For what?’ An officer sought to explain the perils of acquiescing in a frontier so close to Leningrad, but Moscow’s strategic ambitions roused scant enthusiasm among those ordered to fulfil them, most of whom were hastily mobilised local reservists.
Stalin was untroubled. Confident that his attacking force of 120,000 men, six hundred tanks and a thousand guns could overwhelm the Mannerheim Line, he ignored his generals’ warnings about the restricted approaches to Finland. Tanks and vehicles were obliged to advance on narrow axes between lakes, forests and swamps. Though the Finns had little artillery and few anti-tank weapons, so inept were the Soviet assaults that the defenders wreaked havoc on their columns with rifle and machine-gun fire. The snowy wastelands of eastern Finland were soon deeply stained with blood; some defenders succumbed to nervous exhaustion after mowing down advancing Russians at close range hour after hour. Soviet armour suffered 60 per cent losses, chiefly because tanks advanced without infantry support. Most fell victim to primitive weapons, notably bottles filled with petrol and capped with a flaming wick, which caused them to explode into liquid fire when smashed against a vehicle. Though these had been used earlier in the Spanish Civil War, it was in Finland that the soubriquet ‘Molotov bread-basket’, then ‘Molotov cocktail’, first entered the military lexicon.
Mannerheim observed dryly that the attackers came on ‘with a fatalism incomprehensible to a European’. A hysterical Soviet battalion commander told his officers: ‘Comrades, our attack was unsuccessful; the division commander has just given me the order personally – in seven minutes, we attack again.’ The Soviet columns lumbered forward once more – and were slaughtered. Some Finnish units adopted large-scale guerrilla tactics, striking at Soviet units from the forests, then withdrawing. They sought to break up the attackers’ formations then destroy them piecemeal, calling such encounters ‘motti’ – ‘firewood’ battles – chopping up the enemy. Among the heroes of the campaign was Lt. Col. Aaro Pajari, who collapsed with a heart condition in the midst of one action, but somehow kept going. Like most of his fighting countrymen, Pajari was an amateur soldier, but he achieved a notable little victory against much superior forces at Tolvajärvi. During weeks of fighting at Kollaa, the Finns deployed two French 3.5? guns cast in 1871, which fired black powder charges. In the northern sector, the defence was supported by a 1918-vintage armoured train, bustling to and fro between threatened points.
The Red Army was grotesquely ill-equipped for winter war: its 44th Division, for instance, issued men with a manual on ski tactics, but no skis; in the first weeks, Russian tanks were not even painted white. The Finns, by contrast, dispatched ski patrols to cut roads behind the front and attack supply columns, often at night. One Finnish Jaeger regiment was led by Col. Hjalmar Siialsvuo. A peacetime lawyer, short, blond and tough, he galvanised the protracted defence of Suomussalmi village, and eventually found himself commanding a division. The Russians were impressed by the proficiency of Finnish snipers, whom they called ‘cuckoos’. The chief of staff of Gen. Vasily Chuikov’s Ninth Army produced an analysis of Soviet failures which concluded that the offensive had been too road-bound: ‘Our units, saturated by technology (especially artillery and transport vehicles), are incapable of manoeuvre and combat in this theatre.’ Soldiers, he said, are ‘frightened by the forest and cannot ski’.
The Finns deplored everything about the manner in which their enemies made war. One desperate Russian general sought to clear a minefield by driving a herd of horses through it, and the animal-loving defenders were appalled by the resultant carnage. A man gazing on heaped Russian corpses in the northern sector said: ‘The wolves will eat well this year.’ Carl Mydans, a photographer for America’s Life magazine, described the scene on one frozen battlefield: ‘The fighting was almost over as we walked up the snow-banked path that led from the road to the river…The Russian dead spotted the ice crust. They lay lonely and twisted in their heavy trench coats and formless felt boots, their faces yellowed, eyelashes white with a fringe of frost. Across the ice, the forest was strewn with weapons and pictures and letters, with sausage and bread and shoes. Here were the bodies of dead tanks with blown treads, dead carts, dead horses and dead men, blocking the road and defiling the snow under the tall black pines.’


The Finnish Campaign (#ulink_4b4b5726-4386-5229-8afa-54b28fd7a16d)
Around the world, the Soviet assault inspired bewilderment, increased by the fact that the swastika was a Finnish good-luck symbol. Popular sentiment ran strongly in favour of the victims: in fascist Italy, there were pro-Finnish demonstrations. The British and French saw Stalin’s action as further evidence of the Russo-German vulture collaboration manifested in Poland, though in reality Berlin was no party to it. There was a surge of Allied enthusiasm for dispatching military aid to Finland. French general Maxime Weygand wrote to Gamelin urging this course, which in French eyes had the supreme virtue of moving the war away from France: ‘I regard it as essential to break the back of the Soviet Union in Finland…and elsewhere.’ But, while there was intense discussion of possible Anglo-French expeditions to Finland during the months that followed, the practical difficulties seemed overwhelming. If Winston Churchill had then been British prime minister, it is likely that he would have launched operations against the Russians. But the Chamberlain government, in which as First Sea Lord Churchill represented a minority voice for activism, had no stomach for a gratuitous declaration of war on the Soviet Union when the German menace was still unaddressed.
Marshal Mannerheim conducted his campaign to a meticulous personal routine: he was woken at 0700 in his quarters at the Seuranhoe Hotel in Mikkeli, some forty miles behind the front, appeared immaculately dressed for breakfast an hour later, then drove to his headquarters in an abandoned schoolhouse a few hundred yards distant. In the tiny, intimate society of Finland, he insisted upon having casualty lists read aloud to him, name by name. During the first weeks of war, knowing the limitations of his army, he resolutely resisted subordinates’ pleas to advance and exploit their successes, but on 23 December a Finnish counter-attack was indeed launched across the Karelian isthmus. Infantry charged forward crying ‘Hakkaa paale!’ – ‘Cut them down!’; lacking artillery and air support, they were repulsed with heavy losses.
The Finnish government never deluded itself that the nation could inflict absolute defeat on the Russians: it aspired only to make the price of fulfilling Stalin’s ambitions unacceptably high. This strategy was doomed, however, against an enemy indifferent to human sacrifice. Stalin’s response to the setbacks, indeed humiliations, of the December offensive was to replace failed senior officers – one divisional commander was shot and another spent the rest of the war in the gulag – and to commit massive reinforcements. Ice roads capable of bearing tanks were built by laying logs on trampled snow, then spraying them with water which was allowed to freeze. The Finns had started the war with three weeks’ supply of artillery ammunition, and fuel and small-arms ammunition for sixty days; by January, these stocks were almost exhausted.
The world greeted Finland’s initial successes with awe: Mannerheim became a popular hero in western Europe, and French prime minister Edouard Daladier promised the Finns reinforcements of a hundred aircraft and 50,000 men before the end of February, but never lifted a finger to make good on his pledge. The writer Arthur Koestler, in Paris, wrote contemptuously that French excitement about Finnish victories recalled ‘a voyeur who gets his thrills and satisfaction out of watching other people’s virile exploits, which he is unable to imitate’. In Britain the left, represented by its weekly organ Tribune, at first offered reflexive support to Moscow’s cause, then abruptly switched allegiance to back the Finns.
Churchill regarded Soviet action as direct kin to Nazi aggression. Britain’s First Sea Lord exulted in Stalin’s failure, declaring in a broadcast on 20 January: ‘Finland, superb – nay sublime – in the jaws of peril, Finland shows what free men can do. The service rendered by Finland to mankind is magnificent. They have exposed, for all the world to see, the military incapacity of the Red Army and of the Red Air Force. Many illusions about Soviet Russia have been dispelled in these few fierce weeks of fighting in the Arctic Circle. Everyone can see how communism rots the soul of a Nation; how it makes it abject and hungry in peace, and proves it base and abominable in war.’
The Finns were heartened by such rhetoric. British Tory MP Harold Macmillan, who visited Finland, reported a Helsinki woman ticket-collector saying to him: ‘The women of Finland will fight on, because they believe that you are coming to help them.’ Eight thousand Swedes, eight hundred Norwegians and Danes, together with a few American and British civilians, volunteered to take up arms; some reached the war zone, but none served to any effect. Britain had few enough weapons for its own armed forces, and had nothing significant to spare for a nation which might be struggling gallantly, but was not fighting the power against which it was itself making war. Thirty Gloster Gladiator biplane fighters were dispatched, of which eighteen were lost in action within ten days; the Finns were obliged to pay cash for the aircraft, a foretaste of neutral American policy towards Britain.
There was no doubt of the strength of British popular sentiment in Finland’s favour, but next to nothing was done to translate this into action, save to prepare an expedition to Narvik, neutral Norway’s northern ice-free port. The Allies were attracted by the notion of exploiting the pretext of aiding the Finns to land in Norway and sever Germany’s winter link to Sweden’s iron-ore mines. The cynicism that had characterised Allied policy during the Polish campaign thus reasserted itself. In the early months of 1940 London and Paris urged the Finns to keep fighting, because if they quit there would be no excuse for intervention in Norway. A wild French proposal to land an expeditionary force at Petsamo on the north coast was vetoed by the British, who still declined to clash headlong with the Russians.

In mid-January, a new wave of assaults on Finland began. In one position 4,000 Russians attacked thirty-two Finns; they lost four hundred men, but only four defenders survived. On 1 February, the invaders launched a massive bombardment of the Mannerheim Line, followed by infantry and armoured drives in overwhelming strength. The Finnish artillery, such as it was, had almost exhausted its ammunition, but for two weeks the defenders held their positions. An officer, Wolf Haslsti, wrote on 15 February: ‘In the early afternoon, there appeared in front of our tent a reserve ensign, really nothing more than a child, asking if we could spare some food for himself and his men…he was in charge of a platoon of “men” scarcely old enough to shave. They were cold and scared and hungry and on their way to join the troops at the roadblock in front of Lahde.’ Next day Haslsti added: ‘Same reserve ensign back again, blood on his clothes, asking for more food…he lost both guns and half his men when the Russians broke through.’ Finnish sufferings were matched by those of their foes, especially those trapped for weeks in encircled positions. A Russian soldier wrote on 2 February: ‘It’s particularly cold this morning, nearly minus 35C. I was unable to sleep due to the cold. Our artillery has been firing through the night. After I woke I went for a shit, but at that moment the Finns opened fire, one bullet hitting the ground between my legs. I hadn’t had a shit since January 25th.’
The one-sided struggle could not continue indefinitely. The Finnish government made a last vain plea for Swedish help. The British and French offered token contingents of troops, which embarked on transports but had not yet sailed when on 12 March a Finnish delegation signed an armistice in Moscow. Minutes before this took effect, the Soviets launched a last vengeful bombardment of their vanquished victim’s positions. A Finnish officer wrote to his family: ‘One thing is clear: we have not fled. We were prepared to fight to the last man. We carry our heads high because we have fought with all our might for three and a half months.’
Carl Mydans found himself on a train to Sweden with three Finnish officers, one of whom opened a conversation with the American: ‘At least you will tell them that we fought bravely.’ Mydans muttered that he would. Then the colonel’s temper snapped: ‘Your country was going to help…You promised, and we believed you.’ He seized Mydans and shook him, screaming: ‘A half-dozen goddamned Brewster fighters with no spare parts! And the British sent us guns from the last war that wouldn’t even work!’ The Finn lapsed into sobs.
The peace Stalin imposed bemused the world by its moderation. He enforced his territorial demands, amounting to 10 per cent of Finland’s territory, but refrained from occupying the entire country, as he probably could have done. He appears to have been uneasy about provoking international anger at a moment when much larger issues were at stake. His confidence had been shaken by his losses – at least 127,000, perhaps as many as a quarter of a million, dead, against Finland’s 48,243 killed and 420,000 homeless. Soviet prisoners released by the Finns were dispatched by Stalin to the gulag to contemplate their treachery in having accepted captivity.
The Finnish campaign was irrelevant to the confrontation between Germany and the Allies, but it importantly influenced the strategy of both. They alike concluded that the Soviet Union was a paper tiger; that Stalin’s armies were weak, his commanders bunglers. After the armistice Finland, having failed to gain useful help from Britain and France, turned to Germany for assistance in re-arming its forces, which Hitler was happy to provide. The Russians learned critical lessons from the Finnish war, and set about equipping the Red Army with winter clothing, snow camouflage and lubricants for sub-zero temperatures, all of which would play a vital role in future campaigns. The world, however, saw only that Russian prestige had been debased by one of Europe’s smallest nations.

Even as Finland was struggling for survival, through the winter of 1939–40 the Allied armies shivered in snowbound trenches and bunkers on the frontier of Germany. Churchill, the First Sea Lord, strove to extract every ounce of excitement and propaganda from the Royal Navy’s skirmishes at sea with German U-boats and surface raiders. There was a sensational episode on 13 December, when three British cruisers met the far more powerfully armed German pocket-battleship Graf Spee off the coast of Uruguay. In the ensuing battle the British squadron was badly mauled, but Graf Spee suffered damage which caused her to take refuge in Montevideo. She was scuttled on the 17th rather than risk another battle, and her captain committed suicide, an outcome promoted as a handy Allied victory. The British strove to make friends across the Atlantic, or at least to moderate their war-making to avoid antagonising US opinion. When Churchill heard that Americans were angered by the Royal Navy’s contraband searches of their ships, on 29 January 1940 he gave orders that no further US vessels should be bear-led into the British war zone, although this concession was kept secret to avoid upsetting other neutral nations whose vessels remained subject to inspection.
Meanwhile the Allied leaders and commanders wrangled: French thinking remained dominated by determination to reject a direct military challenge to Hitler; they declined even to shell the heavily industrialised Saarland, within easy range. The Daladier government, favouring an initiative as far as possible from France, was attracted by the notion of tightening the blockade of Germany through interdiction of its Swedish iron-ore supplies. To achieve this, it would be necessary to violate Norwegian neutrality, either by mining the inshore navigation route to force German ships out into the open sea, or by establishing troops and aircraft ashore, or both. Britain’s prime minister and foreign secretary, Neville Chamberlain and Lord Halifax, were unwilling to adopt such a course, despite the urgings of Churchill. Many days were devoted to planning and preparing a Norwegian expedition, but action was repeatedly postponed.
Gen. Sir Edmund Ironside, head of the British Army, wrote: ‘The French…put forward the most extravagant ideas. They are absolutely unscrupulous in everything.’ Gamelin said afterwards: ‘Public opinion did not know what it wanted done, but it wanted something else, and above all it wanted action.’ A French naval officer and later historian, Jacques Mordal, wrote contemptuously: ‘The idea was to do something, even something stupid.’ A British scheme for mining the Rhine became a new focus of friction: Paris feared that it would provoke German retaliation.
Almost nothing about these debates was known to the Allied peoples, who saw only their armies inert in the frontier snow, digging trenches and contemplating the Germans opposite. A sense of vacuity afflicted alike young and old, national leaders and humble citizens: ‘Everyone is getting married and engaged, or else having babies,’ wrote twenty-three-year-old Liverpool typist Doris Melling on 7 April. ‘Makes me feel rather stale and out of things.’ She was unimpressed, however, by columnist Lord Castlerosse’s flippant assertion in that day’s Sunday Express that any girl who had not found a husband by the end of the war was not really trying. ‘Most of my friends have made such messes of their married life – no proper homes, keeping in their jobs, and such.’
Maggie Joy Blunt, a thirty-year-old architectural writer of strong left-wing convictions, lived in Slough, west of London. She observed on 16 December 1939 that what seemed to her most remarkable about the war thus far was how little it changed most people’s lives:
We have had to suffer certain inconveniences – the blackout, petrol rations, altered bus and train services, a lack of theatrical entertainment, rising cost of food, scarcity of certain commodities such as electric light batteries, sugar, butter. A number of adults are doing jobs that they have never done before and never expected to do. But there has been no essential change in our way of living, in our systems of employment or education, in our ideas or ambitions…It is as though we were trying to play one more set of tennis before an approaching storm descends…A local MP…remarked that he was not in favour of this ‘half-asleep’ war. Scattering pamphlets [on Germany] is no more use than scattering confetti. I am sorry to have to say it, but we shall have to make the Germans suffer before we can make peace possible.
Had she and her compatriots known it, in the winter of 1939 the Nazis were troubled by many problems of their own. Germany had entered the war on the verge of bankruptcy, in consequence of Hitler’s armaments expenditure. There was so little money for civilian purposes that the railway system was crumbling, and desperately short of rolling stock: two bad train smashes killed 230 people, provoking fierce public anger. Far from the Nazis having made the trains run on time, industry suffered from disrupted coal deliveries, and the Gestapo reported widespread grumbling about the faltering passenger service. The Allied blockade had caused the collapse of Germany’s export markets and a serious shortage of raw materials. Hitler wished to launch a great offensive in the west on 12 November, and was furious when the Wehrmacht insisted on postponement until spring. The generals considered the weather wholly unfavourable to a major offensive, and recognised the deficiencies of their army’s performance in Poland: it was short of vehicles and weapons of all kinds. As the army expanded, the 24.5 million industrial workforce of May 1939 fell by four million. Industrial policy was characterised by wild vacillation and arbitrary production cuts, made necessary by steel shortages.
A decision was made that would influence German armaments production for years ahead: to focus immediate effort on manufacturing ammunition and Ju88 light bombers. The Luftwaffe convinced itself that the Ju88 was a war-winning weapon, and the plane indeed did notable service. Later, however, lack of new-generation aircraft became a severe handicap. The German navy remained weak – in Admiral Raeder’s gloomy words, ‘not at all adequately armed for the great struggle…it can only demonstrate that it knows how to go down with dignity’. Germany’s paper military strength in the winter of 1939 was only marginally greater than that of the Allies. Given all these difficulties, it is remarkable that Hitler retained his psychological dominance of the conflict. His great advantage was that the Allies had made a principled commitment to confront and defeat Nazism, while lacking any appetite for the bloody initiatives and human sacrifice required to achieve this. Thus, Hitler was left to make his own weather.
In the last weeks before Germany attacked in the west, relations between the two allies became sulphurous: each blamed the other for failure to wage war effectively. French public opinion turned decisively against prime minister Daladier, who sought a parliamentary vote of confidence on 20 March: only one deputy voted against him, 239 in his support – but three hundred abstained. Daladier resigned, though remaining in the government as defence minister, to be succeeded by Paul Reynaud. France’s new leader was a sixty-two-year-old conservative, notable for high intelligence and physical insignificance – he stood less than 5 feet 3 inches high. Eager to take the initiative, he now proposed a landing in Norway and bombing of Soviet oilfields at Baku. Gamelin said sourly: ‘After Daladier who couldn’t make a decision at all, here we are with Reynaud who makes one every five minutes.’ France’s prime minister initially supported Churchill’s cherished scheme to mine the Rhine, only to be repudiated by his own ministers, still fearing retaliation. The British said that if France would not support the mining operation, they in turn would decline to join a landing at Narvik.
In the first days of April, as snow vanished from the Continent the armies emerged as if from hibernation, looking about to discern what the new campaigning season might bring. At last, Churchill persuaded his government colleagues to support the mining of Norwegian waters. Four destroyers put to sea to execute this operation, while a small land force embarked at British ports, ready to sail to Norway if the Germans responded to the Royal Navy’s initiative. London was oblivious of the fact that a German fleet was already at sea. For months, Hitler had been fearful of British intervention in Norway, because of its implications for his iron-ore supplies. His agitation acquired urgency on 14 February 1940, when the Royal Navy’s destroyers pursued the Graf Spee’s supply ship Altmark into a Norwegian fjord to free 299 captive British merchant seamen. Determined to pre-empt a British initiative to seize a foothold in Norway, on 2 April he gave the final order for the invasion fleet to sail.
British ships and planes observed Germany’s intense flurry of naval activity, but naval commanders were so preoccupied with their own impending mining operation that they failed to realise that these movements presaged German action rather than reaction. The Admiralty decided that Admiral Raeder’s warships intended a breakout into the Atlantic to attack British sea lanes; this caused them to deploy much of the Home Fleet many hours’ steaming from Norway. Before dawn on 8 April, the Royal Navy indeed laid a minefield in Norwegian coastal waters. A few hours later, however, the Germans commenced air and naval landings to occupy the entire country. The Phoney War was over.

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