WW2 Anniversary

| 12 August 2010

Remembering Hiroshima

Hiroshima today – with the memorial dome on the left of the photo.

It was the 65th anniversary of the dropping of the world’s first atomic bomb on Hiroshima on 6 August, and I have just returned from a troubling visit to the city.

Here’s why it was troubling. The focus of the commemoration was on the terrible suffering of the people of Hiroshima as a result of the attack – and that, I guess, is as it should be. But the whole atmosphere of the event – not to say the tone and layout of the hugely popular museum in the ‘Peace Park’ close to the epicentre of the explosion – was utterly condemnatory. The dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima is not exactly described as ‘a war crime’ in the official Japanese literature, but a visit to the Hiroshima museum certainly gave me the impression that this was what the Japanese authorities want people to think it was. This sense that the Japanese were ultimately ‘victims’ of the war was something which a Japanese academic explicitly expressed to me some years ago. ‘There were two horrendous crimes of WW2,’ he said. ‘The Holocaust and Hiroshima’.

Really? Is that how we should remember Hiroshima?

(more…)

2 Comments

WW2 Anniversary

| 5 August 2010

Battle of Britain

Did Churchill ‘hype’ the danger of a German invasion in 1940?

We’ve just released onto the site for subscribers our video on the Battle of Britain.

It was a fascinating video to make because of the divide on this subject that I detected between many academic historians and the popular myth. The prevailing view in popular culture is clear: the victory of the RAF in the Battle of Britain saved this country from invasion. But to many experts the history is not quite as simple as that.

Take the views of Professor Adam Tooze, for example, now a Professor at Yale University but for many years an academic at Cambridge University. In answer to my question ‘Was there ever any real prospect of the Germans invading Britain in 1940?’ He answered: ‘No’. And then elaborated: ‘I do think one has to understand the timeframes here. They [ie the Germans] hadn’t started thinking about a war with Britain, let alone an invasion, until May 1938. The naval armaments programme doesn’t get into gear until January 1939. For the preceding five years Britain had been outspending Germany on the navy so the already enormous gap between the German navy and the British navy in 1933 had not been shrinking but growing larger every year. So when they then also go on to lose the vast majority of their modern naval forces in the Norwegian debacle which, from a German naval point of view, is a catastrophe, they essentially do not have a surface navy with which to protect an invasion in the summer of 1940. I believe they had three cruisers and four destroyers. Two of the cruisers are light cruisers, and so the preponderance of the home fleet is absolute, which basically makes any invasion attempt a huge gamble, because if the British decide to launch a suicidal charge through the Channel they can cut the supply lines and isolate the German army and that will be the end of that.’

Professor Tooze goes so far as to agree that it is ‘fair to say’ that Churchill was to some extent ‘hyping’ up the chances of a German invasion during this period.

Or listen to what the historian Andrew Roberts, author of the acclaimed history of WW2 ‘Storm of War’ told me: ‘I don’t think the Germans were going to be able to invade successfully in 1940. I think that the actual plans needed to get an army across the channel, even in the event that the RAF was neutralised for a long enough period, were just not in place. There weren’t enough of those flat bottom boats, they weren’t particularly sea worthy and if the Royal Navy had got amongst them there would have been a massacre.’

All of which begs the question, why is this reality not properly reflected in the massive coverage this summer of the 70^th anniversary of the Battle of Britain? Or do we know the answer already – that myth is more comforting than history?

Comments Off

WW2 Anniversary

| 22 July 2010

The Nazis and the Madagascar Plan

The Nazis had a plan to send the Jews here, to Madagascar.

This month marks the 70th anniversary of one of the most bizarre and potentially murderous Nazi ideas of them all – a plan to forcibly deport European Jews to the island of Madagascar off the coast of Africa. It isn’t an event of 1940 – like the Fall of France, Dunkirk or the Battle of Britain – that you’ll see mentioned in the newspapers or on the TV news, but it’s certainly worth remembering all the same.

On 3 July 1940, Franz Rademacher of the German Foreign Ministry wrote a memo which suggested that ‘France must make the island of Madagascar available for the solution of the Jewish question’. The idea was that the Jews of Europe should be sent to live on Madagascar, supervised by an ‘SS Governor’. And this was clearly not some kind of relatively ‘benign’ way of ‘solving’ the ‘Jewish question’. The presence of the SS Governor clearly shows how the Jews were to be treated, and the alacrity with which Reinhard Heydrich – a crucial figure in the eventual ‘Final Solution’ – subsequently muscled in on Rademacher’s plan further demonstrates the murderous intent behind it. This plan might have involved a different route to genocide than the gas chambers of the Holocaust, but it was still a route to genocide all the same.

The decision of the British not to make peace with the Germans in 1940 consigned the Madagascar plan to the dustbin – how could the mass sea transportation of the Jews be organized whilst the war was still being fought? But the Madagascar plan remains important for at least two reasons. The first is that it shows the limitless sense the Nazis possessed that they could accomplish anything. Yes, others (including the Polish government just before the war) had fantasised that Madagascar could be a place that European Jews could settle, but no one except the Nazis had imagined forcibly pushing the policy through on this scale and with this genocidal intent.

The Madagascar plan thus fitted into a Nazi pattern of thought. For one emotion that characterized many of the former Nazis I’ve met over the years was the immense and liberating sense of excitement they felt about belonging to the Nazi party. ‘It was a time when dreams could become a reality!’ one of them told me.

And the second reason that the Madagascar plan is important is that it demonstrates that the Nazis would have carried on trying to eliminate the Jews even if they had won the war and the world was subsequently at peace. In that respect I certainly agree with those historians who no longer see September 1939 as some sudden moment of violent radicalization in Nazi anti-Semitic policy, but instead point to the pogrom against the Jews in November 1938 – the so-called Kristallnacht – as showing that the Nazis were some way along a murderous road before the invasion of Poland. And the mere ending of the war would not have assuaged their blood lust.

2 Comments

WW2 Anniversary

| 23 June 2010

The curse of hindsight

The Kremlin – where Stalin trembled in 1940.

Seventy years ago this month, in his office in the Kremlin in Moscow, Joseph Stalin listened to a radio report of the German occupation of Paris. As he learnt of the Wehrmacht’s triumph, he turned almost in despair to his comrades and complained about the performance of the French army, saying: ‘Couldn’t they have have put up any resistance at all?’

The German success in France was a disaster for Stalin. The core foundation of his foreign policy – the belief that the Germans would become embroiled in a war of attrition in the fields of Flanders, just as they had in the First World War – was now shattered. Stalin had thought, back in August 1939, that he was being extremely clever in negotiating the Nazi/Soviet pact which kept the Soviets out of the fighting, and yet now he had to rethink his policy completely – and from a position of weakness.

In the wake of the German conquest of France, Stalin practiced his own version of obsequious appeasement. Deliveries of raw materials to the Nazis increased, and Stalin went out of his way over the following months to try and assure Hitler that he was a loyal chum of the Fascists. It was the behaviour of a terrified man – and reached a low point on 13 April 1941 when Stalin hugged Colonel Hans Krebs of the German embassy at Moscow railway station. ‘We will be your friends!’ said Stalin emotionally. ‘Whatever will come!’ Krebs was clearly not impressed by this display of weakness from the Soviet leader. ‘It can’t be ruled out,’ Krebs subsequently wrote to a friend, his letter dripping with contempt, ‘that Stalin was under the influence of alcohol.’

(more…)

1 Comment

WW2 Anniversary

| 16 June 2010

Germans in Paris

Seventy years ago today, German soldiers celebrated in Paris. They had achieved what many had thought impossible – they had captured the French capital. And it was only to be a matter of days before total victory in France was theirs.

But what recent research has conclusively demonstrated is just how much of a risk this campaign was for Adolf Hitler. The popular perception is that Hitler’s ‘craziest’ gamble was his decision to invade the Soviet Union. But in a number of respects he took more risks with the invasion of France. Certainly, many of his Generals thought he was almost insane for deciding to move on the West, whilst subsequently supporting his decision to attack the Soviets.

The fact that the Germans won so swiftly seventy years ago has blinded many people to the enormity of the chance they took. It’s a myth, for example, that German soldiers gained victory because they possessed a greater number of armoured vehicles than the Allies. In fact, the French and British had more tanks than they did. Nor did the Germans use revolutionary ‘Blitzkreig’ tactics – their attack on France, as military historian Professor Robert Citino reveals in his interview for this site, was much more reminiscent of the ‘armoured raids’ practiced by the Prussians in the previous century.

No, the Germans won because their troops were better led than the Allies they faced, and because Hitler had authorized one of the most immense gambles in the whole of military history. He had decided that the main German attack would not come through Belgium and the Low countries, as the Allies had anticipated, but through the forest of Ardennes to the east. The plan was that Army Group A would cross through this less than ideal terrain and then make a swift dash to the coast in order to trap the bulk of French and British forces north of them. But this was, as Professor Adam Tooze told me, a gamble so huge that ‘the Germans fully understand that if this plan fails they’ve lost the war’.

All of which makes me think more and more about the personality of Adolf Hitler. What kind of man gambles the entire future of his nation on one single moment? On a plan that could so easily have gone wrong. Because if the Allies had detected the Germans as they crossed through the Ardennes, then they could have easily destroyed them from the air. German tanks simply had no room to maneouvre in the forest.

One explanation as to why Hitler made this decision is, of course, that he was immensely excited by risk. As he told Goering as the war started, ‘I’ve always gone for broke’. In which case, was the defeat of Germany inevitable, even as German soldiers sipped congnac in the street cafes of the Champs Elysees, seventy years ago today? Because a compulsive gambler like Hitler would never have been satsified with one big win, but would always have taken a gamble too far….

Comments Off

WW2 Anniversary

| 25 May 2010

Churchill’s lucky break

In May 1940 Churchill’s government got lucky.

Seventy years ago today, something quite extraordinary happened. Or rather, to be more precise, something quite extraordinary didn’t happen.

German tanks, which were in position to advance on the British Expeditionary Force which had retreated to the channel port of Dunkirk, did not move forward to crush the soldiers on the beaches. They weren’t ordered to attack until three days later, on 28 May 1940. As a result, Churchill and the rest of the British leadership were able to organise the evacuation of over 300,000 allied troops. It was, said Churchill, a ‘miracle of deliverance’. But if it was a ‘miracle’ then the person who should be thanked is Adolf Hitler.

At a meeting on 24 May 1940 attended by both Hitler and General Gerd von Rundstedt, the commander of Army Group A, the decision had been taken to stop the German advance. But why? What were the reasons behind this seemingly idiotic decision? Over the years many different theories have been proposed. Was Hitler trying to send a secret message to the British by allowing them to save their troops – one which emphasised his desire to seek peace with them? Were there technical problems with the Panzers? Was Hitler simply not thinking straight, drunk on the euphoria of Germany’s swift victory in France?

(more…)

2 Comments