Blood, Tears and Folly: An Objective Look at World War II

During the fighting Hitler was selected to be a ‘runner’ taking messages from the front line to the staff. It was a dangerous job usually given to intelligent and educated fit young soldiers. He won the coveted Iron Cross 1st Class in August 1918 when advancing German troops came under ‘friendly fire’ and his officer – Lt Hugo Gutmann – promised the award to anyone who could get a message back to the artillery. Hitler completed this ‘suicide mission’ and Lt Gutmann kept his promise. By that time Hitler had also won the Iron Cross 2nd Class, the Cross of Military Merit 3rd class with swords, and the regimental diploma. Details of Hitler winning his Iron Cross 1st Class – a notable award for a low-ranking soldier – were not widely publicized, leading to suggestions that it was never awarded at all. Probably Hitler felt his virulent anti-Jewish policies did not go well with receiving a medal from a Jewish officer.

Entering politics, Hitler’s coarse regional accent and wartime lowly rank were appealing to thousands of ex-servicemen who heard their thoughts about war-profiteers and self-serving politicians voiced by a man with natural skills as an orator. The Communists kept blaming the soldiers for the war: Hitler’s patriotic respect for the army was more to the taste of the veterans, and the relatives of those who had been killed and injured. The Nazis were fiercely xenophobic: Germany’s troubles were blamed on foreigners. Socialists and Communists owed their true allegiance to Moscow, the Nazis said. Capitalists were equally unpatriotic, for they used cheap overseas labour for their imported goods and sent their profits to foreign banks overseas. Never mind that it wasn’t true; in the harsh postwar climate it was the sort of explanation many Germans wanted to believe.

Hitler’s anti-Jewish tirades were well received in Bavaria, the Nazi party’s home, where both Lutheranism and the Catholic Church provided soil in which deep-rooted prejudice had flourished over hundreds of years. The Communists proposed a workers’ paradise from which all ‘privileged’ Germans should be excluded; while Hitler’s vision of a new Germany was designed to appeal alike to generals and tycoons, schoolteachers and physicians, as well as to workers and beggars.

Hitler and anti-Semitism

Hitler was not the first politician to foment anti-Jewish hatreds for political ends. In 1887 an International Anti-Jewish Congress had been organized in Dresden. More such gatherings had taken place in Kassel and Bochum in 1886 and 1889.

By 1895 anti-Semites were virtually a majority in Germany’s lower house, while in Vienna, Karl Lueger’s anti-Jewish Christian Socialists had 56 seats against 71 Liberals. In France the persecution of Captain Alfred Dreyfus revealed anti-Semitism no less deeply seated.

A motion in the Senate that would have banned Jews from public service in France was defeated 268:208.

A native of Austria, Hitler centred his political activities upon Bavaria in southern Germany. Always deliberately vague about his political aims and intentions, he artfully used many local prejudices to win support. Berlin bureaucrats ruled the new unified Germany. He attacked the remoteness of the heartily detested central government. He blamed the generals – conveniently regarded as Prussian Protestants – for losing the war. In Catholic Bavaria, traditionally resentful of Prussian attitudes, these views found warm support.

Hitler’s vaguely defined anti-Semitism enabled the small farmer to hate the bank to whom he owed money, the small shopkeeper to hate the department store against which he competed. More intelligent Germans were convinced that these rabble-rousing simplifications were temporary measures. They firmly believed that once the Nazis turned their eyes away from Munich, Bavaria, to focus attention on the real seat of power in Berlin, such vicious anti-Semitism would tone down and fade away.

These hopes that Hitler and his Nazis would become moderate and statesmanlike were illusory. Hatred of Jews was Hitler’s whole motivation. His campaign against Jews became more and more murderous and demented right up to the time of his death. He fanned ancient irrational fears of Jewish international conspiracies. This gave him the excuse to put peacetime Germany into a permanent state of emergency. That ‘war footing’ was what gave the Nazi party such tight control of all aspects of the life of every German.

Albert Speer provides a revealing memory of Adolf Hitler:

He jumped from one subject to another, frequently repeating words like ‘fundamental’, ‘absolutely’, ‘unshakeable’. Then too he had a special fondness for phrases and words out of the days of the beer-hall brawls, such as ‘club down’, ‘iron perseverance’, ‘brute force’, or ‘beat up’, as well as scatological words like ‘shithead’, ‘crapper’. In moments of excitement he also tended to phrases like: ‘I’ll finish him off myself’; ‘I’ll personally put a bullet through his head’; or ‘I’ll fix him.’

The Maginot Line

While the French generals still regarded attack as the secret of success in war, plans were approved for a mighty series of fortifications along her frontier with Germany. This was not incompatible with the military policy of attack; it would provide time for the reserve to be mobilized and for a naval blockade to be established. Attack, using the best forces, would follow.

The ‘Maginot Line’, as it came to be known, was born out of the mighty battles that had raged round the French forts at Verdun. These forts had been a part of the defences built after the 1870 defeat. For ten months in 1916 the French and German armies stood toe-to-toe there and countless men died. Almost every French soldier served at Verdun at some time or other. Every family in France had cause to curse its name. After the war it became a shrine and a place of pilgrimage. Still today the echoing footsteps, and whispered words of school parties, can be heard in its monolithic blockhouses which even 42-cm Krupp shells failed to raze.

Liddell Hart’s History of the World War suggests that it was luck that saved Verdun.

All the German 17-inch howitzers were destroyed by French long-range guns and 450,000 ready-fused artillery shells in a German artillery park near Spincourt blew up. Others say Verdun was saved when Haig’s attack on the Somme diverted German resources. In France General Henri Philippe Pétain was given the credit for stopping the German advance at Verdun in 1916. He was hailed as the saviour of Western civilization. Doubly so when in 1917 he used his reputation and personal pleas to quell the mutinies that threatened the continued existence of the French army.

Until 1914 Pétain had been an undistinguished lecturer in infantry tactics at the Ecole de Guerre. Then General J. J. C. Joffre, who had been appointed commander-in-chief despite entirely lacking staff experience, remembered Pétain, his old teacher, and thought he might prove useful if employed on his staff. So when, after the war, the government wanted a soldier’s opinion about permanent defences, Pétain, now inspector-general of the French army (and designated C-in-C in the event of hostilities), was an obvious choice. He had a theory about ‘battlefields prepared in peacetime’, a line of defences along the western bank of the Rhine, and to Thionville on the Moselle. The line would not be strongly fortified, neither would it continue along the Franco-Belgian border. Pétain believed that that part of the frontier could only be defended from inside Belgium.

From this time onwards it became a fundamental part of French strategy that Belgium remain an ally of France, and that the line of fortifications inside Belgium was a de facto part of French defences.

Some believe that the Maginot defences were deliberately positioned so as to ensure that any German attack would have to go through Belgium and bring Britain and the Dominions into the war as it had done in 1914. To the south, the main defences of the Maginot Line were built to include the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine.

These provinces had been a part of Germany until 1918. The people there had grown up under German rule but the Maginot fortifications told them unequivocally that France would not allow this region to become German again. Thus the siting and building of the Maginot Line took political as well as military ideas into account.

The northern provinces provided special problems. The low lands flooded every winter, as had been discovered by the wretched front-line troops who served in waterlogged trenches there in the First World War. An urban-industrial region straddled the Franco-Belgian frontier and was growing as Europe recovered from the war. It would be difficult to build fortresses amid factories and houses. Any construction along the French side of this border would be a declaration that France would abandon Belgium in the event of war.

For all these reasons, and many more, the Maginot Line was not a continuous series of fortifications. It stopped and started; and in any case it was designed only as a barrier which would enable France to spread second-rate troops thinly behind the forts, and concentrate its best units elsewhere. Many people, including Winston Churchill, agreed that the small population of France, compared with that of Germany, made the construction of the Maginot Line a sensible precaution.

That the Maginot Line ‘was an astounding feat of twentieth century engineering’

can be seen still today. It was designed however before the use of armoured mobile columns changed the textbooks. When the Maginot Line was being planned, whole armies of tracked and wheeled vehicles were no more than theoreticians’ dreams that few soldiers took seriously.

In the long run the Maginot Line had more effect upon the French than it had upon the Germans. It lulled them into a false sense of security. When war began, at a time when the German army was fully occupied in Poland, the French had a wonderful chance to use their fortifications as a base from which to strike against the Rhineland. They did not do it. The ‘Maginot mentality’ – added to its political confusions and Hitler’s fearsome propaganda – had hypnotized France and made it into a victim waiting for an end that many considered inevitable.

Neither did the magic of Maginot totally fade in 1945. At war’s end, the French army immediately occupied and reconditioned the Maginot Line. It kept it maintained until 1964. Now its mouldering turrets and weedy entrances are to be found by curious holiday-makers who wander off the highways.

8 (#ulink_c8ca40f2-92be-5850-97c9-e23376bdf2b7)

FRANCE IN THE PREWAR YEARS (#ulink_c8ca40f2-92be-5850-97c9-e23376bdf2b7)

Peace is better than war, because in peace the

sons bury their fathers, but in war the

fathers bury their sons.

Croesus to Cambyses (son of his enemy Cyrus the Great)

It was not only the ‘Maginot mentality’ that rendered France so vulnerable in 1940. Although the generals failed to equip France’s army for modern war, the nation itself during those interwar years became ever more demoralized and divided. Political extremists of both left and right had a powerful influence upon French society, as did the widespread corruption that so often procured fat government contracts. The French aircraft industry provided an example of the crippling effect of political theorists. In 1936 all the well established French aircraft manufacturers were nationalized by the Communist air minister Pierre Cot. The effect upon production was devastating, and the resulting chaos was still being sorted out when the Germans attacked in 1940. France’s relationships with the rest of the world suffered as a result of its own dissensions. Although the French had remained Britain’s close allies since before the First World War, the ties between the two countries had grown more and more uncertain. Even in November 1938 – after the Munich agreement – the British prime minister thought it necessary to ask the French whether they would support Britain if it became the victim of German aggression. In the same cabinet meeting, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain said he had been assured that France was not proposing to sign a non-aggression pact with Germany that would rule out help to Britain.

These were chilly words about Britain’s closest neighbours immediately prior to a life-and-death struggle with a well armed and determined enemy.

Hitler’s New Order

In the eyes of many people, Adolf Hitler’s regime was a success. Everything seemed to have improved since the waves of economic depression that rolled over Europe in the 1920s. Germans were thankful for the way Hitler’s coming to power stopped the vicious and extensive street battles which were a regular ending to all Communist and Nazi political rallies. But the Nazi way of restoring law and order was to execute or imprison without trial all opponents. Equally drastic was the way Hitler reduced unemployment by means of massive public works projects and rearmament. In 1935 conscription was introduced. All German youth was called to serve twelve months in the armed forces following a term of manual work in the RAD, the State Labour Service. In September 1936 Hitler was able to announce to a party congress that the jobless had fallen from 6 million to 1 million. A strictly controlled economy caused living standards to rise sharply, so that Germans soon enjoyed the highest living standards in Europe.

The Nazi propaganda machine brought the arts, theatre, cinema, newspapers and radio under the direct control of the artful Joseph Goebbels. Parades with flaming torches, vast uniformed rallies on monumental stages and stadiums, massed flags and columns of searchlights had made Germany into a political theatre watched by the rest of the world.

As part of the rapid expansion of the German army, during training and exercises it employed motor cars fitted with flimsy wooden superstructures to represent tanks, with other mock-ups for artillery and so on. Such improvised vehicles gave rise to colourful rumours that were repeated everywhere abroad and even got into foreign newspapers. They said the German army was no more than a sham force built for parades, and designed solely to intimidate other nations. A more accurate picture of the expanding war machine was available to motor-racing enthusiasts.

During the Thirties the victories of the German motor-racing team shocked and dismayed its competitors. Many, if not most, British racing drivers were competing simply for fun; using the same cars to journey to the circuits, race there and then travel home. The Nazis were quick to see the propaganda benefits of international racing victories. German cars – Mercedes and Auto-Union – were highly specialized designs with engineering that was years ahead of their rivals. The drivers – some of them non-Germans – and fitters were highly trained and dedicated. The team organization was managed with a professional resolution quite unlike anything from other European countries. It could be said that the Germans invented the racing team as we now know it. In every respect those victorious German racing teams of the Thirties provided a glimpse of blitzkrieg to come.

It wasn’t only racing cars that Germany was manufacturing: in the period 1930–38 German car production went from 189,000 to 530,000 vehicles. Industrial production soared and unemployment plunged from its 1932 peak.

FIGURE 14 (#ulink_db977a40-eb36-5fc5-8afe-1b4e73066260)

Mercedes and Auto-Union racing cars (#ulink_db977a40-eb36-5fc5-8afe-1b4e73066260)

Hitler’s defiant stance, and his violent speeches against the injustices of the peace treaty, gave Germans a new sort of pride. It was the ‘stick and carrot’ technique. Most Germans turned a blind eye to the persecution of the Jews, and all the other legalized crimes of the Nazis, when the stick might be a spell in a labour camp. Those who objected were arrested; many were never seen again. Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution legalized protective custody and enabled all the fundamental rights of a citizen to be withheld. Using this the Nazis sent thousands of opponents to concentration camps without due process of law. The lawyers found legal reasons to classify such prisoners as citizens assisting in upholding the law.

Here and there a brave German spoke up against the regime. The view that Nazi Germany – whatever its faults – had to be supported because of the ‘protection’ it provided against the spread of Russian Communism was echoed by the rich and powerful everywhere. It was certainly a view aired in the British cabinet. In Rome the Pope did nothing to stop the anti-Semitic excesses of the ‘anti-Bolshevik’ state Hitler had created as a bulwark against the Reds.

The German trade unions had been silenced by arrests and threats. The Nazi labour organizations which replaced them gave workers cheap vacations and luxury cruises but deprived them of the right to strike, demonstrate or make any kind of objection to the regime. It succeeded. Working-class Germans – like middle-class ones – offered no serious opposition to the Nazis.

It is difficult to give a balanced picture of the respective strengths of the great powers in that period immediately before the war. But in an attempt to provide some sort of estimate, Table 2 looks at three aspects of each nation. Manpower is a guide to the size of the army that could be put into the field. Annual steel-making capacity estimates the ability to build ships, submarines, tanks and artillery. Annual aircraft production is a guide to the potential production of such items as trucks, cars and infantry weapons, as well as aircraft.

Table 2 (#ulink_57e54acb-69fd-5bb9-b791-b8b369ee1b0f)

Relative strengths of the Great Powers in 1939 (#ulink_57e54acb-69fd-5bb9-b791-b8b369ee1b0f)

British population figures do not take account of men in the Dominions. For steel, the figures given are the best for the 1930s, with German figures including Austrian production. Aircraft numbers take no account of size (tending to underrate UK and USA, which were building more large aircraft than the other nations).