Winston's War_ Churchill, 1940-1945 - Max Hastings [237]
Violent demonstrations flew in the face of national consensuses. It was not that people liked the Germans, but that acquiescence in their hegemony appeared to represent the only rational course. Such prominent figures as the French writer André Gide, who utterly rejected collaboration with the occupiers, nonetheless dismissed the notion of violent opposition. Until the Soviet Union and United States entered the war, Hitler’s grasp upon his empire was beyond military challenge. Britain’s prime minister uttered stirring words, echoed by broadcasters speaking from London in many languages to oppressed peoples, but no British army was capable of reentering the Continent. This made most people in Hitler’s new dominions unwilling to threaten the welfare of their own communities by actions which promised retribution.
Even for those who wanted to fight, Churchill severely underestimated the difficulties of conducting guerrilla operations against an efficient and ruthless occupier in heavily urbanised regions of Europe. In Denmark, Holland, Belgium and large parts of France, there were few hiding places for armed bands. The Germans adopted policies designed to promote passivity. Any action against their forces brought down punishment upon entire communities. On May 27, 1941, Churchill sent872 a note to Lord Selborne, Dalton’s successor at the Ministry of Economic Warfare, suggesting providing oppressed people with simple weapons and sticks of dynamite. Yet the use of “simple weapons” by such “oppressed people” provoked determinedly disproportionate German responses. On October 20 that year, an Alsatian Communist shot dead the German military commandant of Nantes, and made good his escape. Historian Robert Gildea has written: “Far from welcoming873 this assassination as the first step towards their liberation, the population of Nantes was horrified,” not least because the dead German seemed to local bourgeois an unusually sympathetic personality though a ruthless anti-Semite. Ninety-eight civilian hostages were executed. This caused Maurice Schumann to broadcast from London on the BBC French Service, urging that such terrorist action should not be repeated. De Gaulle delivered the same message on October 23: “In war there are tactics. The war of the French must be carried out by those in charge, that is, by myself and the National Committee.”
Churchill, however, dissented. He believed that it was essential to impose maximum pain and inconvenience upon the enemy. He deemed the deaths of hostages a necessary sacrifice for enabling the French people to show that they would not bow to tyranny, as most had indeed bowed since June 1940. He once told a meeting of the Cabinet Defence Committee that while acts of resistance prompted bloody reprisals, “the blood of the Martyrs was the seed of the church.” The behaviour of Hitler’s minions in occupied Europe had made the Germans hated as no other race had been hated, he said, and this sentiment must be exploited. He deplored any attempt to stifle resistance in the interests of innocent bystanders. “Nothing must be done874 which would result in the falling off of this most valuable means of harassing the enemy.” This was an extension of the view he adopted when Britain was threatened with invasion. In 1940, Generals Paget and Auchinleck urged that the civil population should be told to stay at home, rather than risk their lives offering ineffectual resistance to the Germans with scythes and brickbats. The prime minister strongly disagreed. In war, he said, quarter is given not on grounds of compassion, but to deter the enemy from fighting to the end: “Here, we want every citizen to fight875 desperately and they will do so the more if they know that the alternative is massacre.” What he expected from British civilians in 1940 he sought thereafter from those of occupied Europe.
Here was Churchill at his most ruthless. He was constantly fearful that, left to itself,