Inferno - Max Hastings [29]
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 17 December 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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 the 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