Inferno - Max Hastings [65]
HITLER’S AIR ASSAULT on Britain ranks second only to the invasion of Russia among his great blunders of the war. After June 1940 many of Churchill’s people, especially in high places, recognised their country’s inability to challenge Nazi mastery of the Continent. If they had merely been left to contemplate British impotence, political agitation for a negotiation with Germany might well have been renewed, and gained support from the old appeasers still holding high government office. The unfulfilled threat of air attack, on an annihilatory scale widely anticipated and feared in 1939, could have influenced British policy more strongly than the reality of an inconclusive one.
The prime principle of employing force in pursuit of national objectives is to ensure that it is effective. The Germans failed to achieve this against Britain in 1940–41, a first earnest of one of the great truths of the conflict: while the Wehrmacht often fought its battles brilliantly, the Nazis made war with startling ineptitude. The Luftwaffe, instead of terrorising Churchill’s people into bowing to Hitler’s will, merely roused them to acquiesce in defiance.
Posterity sees the period between July 1940 and the spring of 1941 overwhelmingly in terms of Britain’s air battle against the Luftwaffe, yet that engaged only a small proportion of Germany’s military resources. For the remainder of Hitler’s warriors, and almost the entire army, this became a curious time of idleness comparable with the earlier Phoney War. To be sure, there were conquered nations to be secured, fruits of victory to enjoy—above all those from France. In Berlin, “The first effects of the war were not the traditional ones of decay and scarcity,” wrote the American correspondent Howard Smith, “but a sudden leap upwards in visible prosperity. Berlin charwomen and housemaids, whose legs had never been caressed by silk, began wearing stockings from the Boulevard Haussmann as an everyday thing—‘from my Hans at the front.’ Little street-corner taverns began displaying rows of Armagnac, Martell and Courvoisier.”
German war industry, still performing relatively sluggishly, needed time to produce tanks, planes and ammunition to replace those expended in the continental campaigns. The army spent the winter conducting a vast expansion programme—between May 1940 and June 1941 it grew from 5.7 million to 7.3 million men, from 143 divisions to 180. Beyond brandy and stockings, there was important industrial booty to be garnered from the conquered territories, especially railway wagons. Nazi occupation precipitated a drastic decline in economic activity which persisted across most of Europe until the liberation, though French armaments factories made a useful contribution to the German war effort.
Hitler spent much less time than the British supposed contemplating the Luftwaffe’s operations against them. He never visited its airfields on the Channel coast. Instead, for most of the autumn and winter he was wrestling with his fundamental strategic dilemma: whether to consolidate Germany’s western victories and invade Britain in 1941, or instead to follow his strongest inclinations and turn east. On 31 July 1940, long before the Luftwaffe attack on Britain reached its climax, at the Berghof he told his generals of his determination to attack Russia the following May. Thereafter, however, he indulged more months of vacillation. The German navy pressed for major operations to expel Britain from the Mediterranean, by seizing Gibraltar through Spain and the Suez Canal through Libya. In advocating