History of the Second World War (5 page)

Besides her small but high quality Regular Army, Britain was just in the process of forming and equipping a Territorial field army of twenty-six divisions, and on the outbreak of war the Government had made plans for expanding the total to fifty-five divisions. But the first contingent of this new force would not be ready to enter the field until 1940. Meantime, Britain’s main contribution could only be in the traditional form of naval power exercising a sea blockade — a form of pressure that was inherently slow to take effect.

Britain had a bomber force of just over 600 — double that of France, though considerably less than half that of Germany — but in view of the limited size and range of the machines then in service, it could exert no serious effect by direct attack on Germany.

Germany mobilised ninety-eight divisions, of which fifty-two were active divisions (including six Austrian). Of the remaining forty-six divisions, however, only ten were fit for action on mobilisation and even in these the bulk of the men were recruits who had only been serving about a month. The other thirty-six divisions consisted mainly of veterans of World War I, forty-year-olds who had little acquaintance with modern weapons and tactics. They were very short of artillery and other weapons. It took a long time to get these divisions organised and trained collectively to operate as such — longer even than had been reckoned by the German Command, which was much alarmed at the slowness of the process.

The German Army was not ready for war in 1939 — a war which its chiefs did not expect, relying on Hitler’s assurance. They had consented unwillingly to Hitler’s desire to expand the army quickly, as they preferred a gradual process of building up thoroughly trained cadres, but Hitler had repeatedly told them that there would be plenty of time for such training, as he had no intention of risking a major war before 1944 at the earliest. Equipment, too, was still very short compared with the scale of the army.

Yet after the event it came to be assumed generally that Germany’s sweeping victories in the early stages of the war were due to an overwhelming superiority of weapons, as well as of numbers.

The second illusion was slow to fade. Even in his war memoirs, Churchill said that the Germans had at least a thousand ‘heavy tanks’ in 1940. The fact is that they had then no heavy tanks at all. At the start of the war they had only a handful of medium tanks, weighing barely 20 tons. Most of the tanks they used in Poland were of very light weight and thin armour.*

* Liddell Hart:
The Tanks,
vol. II, Appendix V.

Casting up the balance sheet, it can be seen that the Poles and French together had the equivalent of 130 divisions against a German total of ninety-eight divisions, of which thirty-six were virtually untrained, and unorganised. In numbers of ‘trained soldiers’ the balance against the Germans was much larger still. What could be weighed against this adverse numerical balance was that the weightier combination was widely separated — divided into two parts by Germany’s central position. The Germans were able to attack the weaker of the two partners, while the French had to attack the Germans’ prepared defence if they were to bring relief to their ally.

Even so, on a quantitative reckoning, the Poles had large enough forces to
hold up
the striking force launched against them — which consisted of forty-eight active divisions. These were followed up by some half dozen of the reserve divisions that were mobilised, but the campaign ended before they came into action.

On the surface, it would appear that the French had ample superiority to crush the German forces in the West, and break through to the Rhine. The German generals were astonished, and relieved, that they did not do so. For most of them still tended to think in 1918 terms, while overrating the French Army as much as the British did.

But whether Poland could have held out, and France been more effective in helping her, looks very different when examined more closely — with clearer understanding of the inherent handicaps and of the new technique of warfare that was first put into practice in 1939. From this modern viewpoint it seemed impossible, even before the event, that the course of events could be altered.

Describing the collapse of Poland in his war memoirs, Churchill said:

Neither in France nor in Britain had there been any effective comprehension of the consequences of the new fact that armoured vehicles could be made capable of withstanding artillery fire, and could advance a hundred miles a day.*

* Churchill;
The Second World War,
vol. I, p. 425.

That statement is only too true, in so far as it applies to the bulk of the senior soldiers and statesmen of both countries. But it was in Britain, first of all, that these new potentialities had been visualised and explained, publicly and unceasingly, by a small band of progressive military thinkers.

In his second volume, dealing with the collapse of France in 1940, Churchill made the notable, if qualified, admission:

Not having had access to official information for so many years, I did not comprehend the violence of the revolution effected since the last war by the incursion of a mass of fast-moving heavy armour. I knew about it, but it had not altered my inward convictions as it should have done.†

†
ibid,
p. 39.

It was a remarkable statement, coming from the man who had played so great a part in sponsoring the tank m World War I. The admission was honourable in its frankness. But he had been Chancellor of the Exchequer up to 1929, while the Experimental Armoured Force, the first in the world, had been formed on Salisbury Plain in 1927 to try out the new theories which the exponents of high speed tank warfare had been preaching for several years. He was fully acquainted with their ideas, and had visited the Experimental Force at work, while he continued to meet them in subsequent years.

The incomprehension of the new idea of warfare, and official resistance to it, was even greater in France than in England. And greater in Poland than in France. That incomprehension was the root of the failure of both armies in 1939, and of the French again, more disastrously, in 1940.

The Poles were antiquated in their ruling military ideas, and also to a large extent in the pattern of their forces. They had no armoured or motorised divisions, and their old-type formations were very short of anti-tank and anti-aircraft guns. Moreover, Poland’s leaders still pinned their trust to the value of a large mass of horsed cavalry, and cherished a pathetic belief in the possibility of carrying out cavalry charges.‡ In that respect, it might truly be said that their ideas were eighty years out of date, since the futility of cavalry charges had been shown as far back as the American Civil War — although horse-minded soldiers continued to shut their eyes to the lesson. The maintenance of great masses of horsed cavalry by all armies during World War I, in the hope of the opening that never came, had been the supreme farce of that static war.

‡ It is grimly ironical to recall that when, in my book
The Defence of Britain,
published shortly before the war, I expressed anxiety about the way that the Polish military chiefs continued to put faith in cavalry charges against modern arms (pp. 95-7), the Polish Foreign Office was spurred by them to make an official protest against such a reflection on their judgement.

The French, on the other hand, had many of the ingredients of an up-to-date army, but they had not organised them into such — because their military ideas at the top were twenty years out of date. Contrary to the legends that arose after their defeat, they had more tanks than the Germans had built by the time the war came — many of them bigger and more thickly armoured than any of the German tanks, though rather slower.* But the French High Command still regarded tanks through 1918 eyes — as servants of the infantry, or else as reconnaissance troops to supplement cavalry. Under the spell of this old-fashioned way of thought they had delayed organising their tanks in armoured divisions — unlike the Germans — and were still inclined to employ them in penny packets.

* Liddell Hart:
The Tanks,
vol. II, pp. 5-6.

The weakness of the French, and still more of the Poles, in new-style ground forces was made all the worse by their lack of airpower to cover and support their armies. With the Poles that was due partly to lack of manufacturing resources, but the French had no such excuse. In both cases the needs of airpower had been subordinated to the building up of large armies — because the voice of the generals was dominant in the distribution of the military budget, and the generals naturally tended to favour the kind of force with which they were familiar. They were far from realising the extent to which the effectiveness of ground forces was now dependent on adequate air cover.

The downfall of both armies may be traced to a fatal degree of self-satisfaction at the top. In the case of the French it had been fostered by the victory of World War I and the way that their partners had always deferred to their assumption of superior military knowledge. In the case of the Poles it had been nourished by their defeat of the Russians in 1920. The military leaders in both cases had long shown themselves arrogantly complacent about their armies and military technique. It is only fair to say that some of the younger French soldiers, such as Colonel de Gaulle, showed a keen interest in the new ideas of tank warfare that were being preached in England. But the higher French generals paid little attention to these British-born ‘theories’ — in marked contrast to the way the new school of German generals studied them.*

Even so, the German Army was still far from being a really efficient and modernly designed force. Not only was it unready for war as a whole, but the bulk of the active divisions were out of date in pattern, while the conceptions of the higher command still tended to ran in old grooves. But it had created a small number of new-type formations by the time war broke out — six armoured and four ‘light’ (mechanised) divisions, as well as four motorised infantry divisions to back them up. It was a small proportion of the total, but it counted for more than all the rest of the German Army.

At the same time the German High Command had, rather hesitatingly, recognised the new theory of high-speed warfare, and was willing to give it a trial. That was due, above all, to the enthusiastic advocacy of General Heinz Guderian and a few others, and the way that their arguments appealed to Hitler — who favoured any idea that promised a quick solution. In sum, the German Army achieved its amazing run of victories, not because it was overwhelming in strength or thoroughly modern in form, but because it was a few vital degrees more advanced than its opponents.

The European situation in 1939 gave fresh emphasis, and a new turn, to that much quoted remark of Clemenceau’s in the last great conflict of nations: ‘War is too serious a business to be left to soldiers.’ For it could not now be left to soldiers even if there had been the most complete trust in their judgement. The power to maintain war, if not to launch it, had passed out of the military sphere of the soldier into that of economics. As machine-power gained a growing domination over manpower on the battlefield, so, in a realistic view, did industry and economic resources push the armies at the front into the background of grand strategy. Unless the supplies from the factories and oilfields could he maintained without interruption they would be no more than inert masses. Impressive as the marching columns might look to the awed civilian spectator, in the eyes of the modern war scientist they were but marionettes on a conveyor-belt. And in that aspect was presented the potential factor that could save civilisation.

If existing armies and armaments alone counted, the picture would have been much more gloomy. The Munich settlement had changed the strategic balance of Europe, and for a time at least made it heavily adverse to France and Britain. No acceleration of their armament programmes could be expected to offset for a long time the removal from the scales of Czecho-Slovakia’s thirty-five well-armed divisions, and the accompanying release of the German divisions which they could have held in balance.

Such increase of their armaments as France and Britain had achieved by March was then more than counterbalanced by what Germany gained through her swoop into helpless Czecho-Slovakia, whose munitions factories as well as military equipment she took over. In heavy artillery alone, Germany doubled her resources at a stroke. To make the prospect worse, German and Italian help had enabled Franco to complete the overthrow of Republican Spain, thereby raising the spectre of an additional menace to the frontiers of France, and to the sea-communications of both France and Britain.

Strategically, nothing save the assurance of Russia’s support could promise to redress the balance within a measurable time. Strategically, too, no time was likely to be so favourable for joining issue with the Western Powers. But the strategic scales rested on an economic base, and it was doubtful whether under the pressure of war this would long support the weight of Germany’s forces.

There were some twenty basic products essential for war. Coal for general production. Petroleum for motive power. Cotton for explosives. Wool. Iron. Rubber for transport. Copper for general armament and all electrical equipment. Nickel for steel-making and ammunition. Lead for ammunition. Glycerine for dynamite. Cellulose for smokeless powders. Mercury for detonators. Aluminium for aircraft. Platinum for chemical apparatus. Antimony, manganese, etc., for steel-making and metallurgy in general. Asbestos for munitions and machinery. Mica as an insulator. Nitric acid and sulphur for explosives.