5
For the moment the First Consul genuinely wanted peace, while for some years the Führer was officially averse to war. In 1802 the Whig statesman Charles James Fox wrote, ‘I am obstinate in my opinion that Bonaparte’s wish is peace – nay, that he is afraid of war to the last degree.’ Till 1939 Neville Chamberlain was equally optimistic about the Führer. The French and German peoples were desperately anxious to avoid any repetition of the Revolutionary wars, or of 1914-18. We now know that, no less than Napoleon, Hitler hoped to avoid war – if only in the west. The careers of both men had a stage in which each successfully expanded his country’s territory to what was called, with a certain hyperbole, ‘natural frontiers’. Napoleon employed war to secure them, the Führer’s aggressive diplomacy was backed up by the threat of war. In both cases it seemed briefly that they would keep them.
Curiously enough, there were historical precedents. At their most extended France’s ‘natural frontiers’ included the Low Countries, the left bank of the Rhine and north-western Italy. The Low Countries had been under Valois rule as possessions of the Dukes of Burgundy during the late Middle Ages; Louis XIV had nearly secured the Palatinate and Savoy, Milan and Genoa had been under French domination for short periods. One could cite the Carolingian empire. There were therefore arguments, however specious, to justify incorporating Belgium and the left bank of the Rhine into France, and for the puppet states known as the Batavian, Ligurian and Cisalpine Republics (Holland, Genoa and Lombardy). But Bonaparte would always feel threatened unless France could dominate Europe by acquiring further puppet states.
To begin with. Hitler’s Lebensraum was the Grossdeutschland envisaged by the Frankfurt Liberals of 1848. They had drawn up maps of a state including every German-speaking land – Germany, Austria and Bohemia together with Prussian Poland – all of which Hitler almost secured without going to war. Only when this Great Germany had been built did he intend to conquer the Slavs in the east. Germans had done so before him, and very recently; early in 1918, at the treaty of Brest-Litovsk, Germany had gained another chunk of Poland together with a chance to set up puppet states in the rump of Poland, in the Ukraine and on the Baltic – there were even plans for annexing the Crimea. Every German schoolboy knew how in an earlier age Teutonic Knights and Baltic barons had conquered Poles and Lithuanians, how Hindenburg and Ludendorff had annihilated the Russian would-be invaders at Tannenberg in 1914.
By the end of 1800 there were particularly good reasons for the First Consul to consider peace favourably. He had shown beyond dispute that his armies were a match for any in the world, while he had secured France’s ‘natural frontiers’ and fastened her hold more tightly on the puppet states. Austria was exhausted, mourning her losses in men, treasure and territory. Even Britain had grown tired; for a decade she had been vainly spending enormous sums to subsidize coalitions against the French, and her economy was suffering. There was booming prosperity in France. And the French people wanted peace before anything else.
The Austrians signed a treaty at Lunéville in February 1801. Soon only Britain remained at war with France. In 1800, before Marengo was fought, William Pitt had asked the House of Commons with bitter irony if:
the jacobinism of Robespierre, of Barère, the jacobinism of the Triumvirate, the jacobinism of the Five Directors … has all vanished and disappeared, because it has all been centred and condensed into one man who was reared and nursed in its bosom, whose celebrity was gained under its auspices, who was at once the child and the champion of all its atrocities and horrors?
He added grimly, ‘Our security in negotiation is to be this Bonaparte, who is now the sole organ of all that was formerly dangerous and pestiferous in the revolution.’ However, Pitt resigned office in the same month as Lunéville. By November 1801 – if with a marked lack of enthusiasm – he was telling the House:
after the dissolution of the confederacy of the states of Europe … It became merely a question of the terms to be obtained for ourselves, and for those of our allies who still remain faithful to us.
Lord Cornwallis (who had surrendered at Yorktown) and Joseph Bonaparte signed the peace treaty at Amiens in March 1802. Egypt was to be given back to the Turkish Sultan, Malta to its Knights. The Peace of Amiens was welcomed with wild enthusiasm in both France and England. Everyone hastened to visit each other’s capital.
Among the visitors to France in 1802 was Charles James Fox, who was presented to the First Consul at the Opéra in December. Napoleon had small recollection of the meeting, later pretending he remembered how badly Fox spoke French – in reality he spoke it very well. Fox was not altogether favourably impressed by ‘a young man intoxicated with success’. But the First Consul told him, ‘The two great nations of Europe require peace; they ought to understand one another.’ The great Whig wrote ecstatically, ‘I feel morally certain that Bonaparte and all his friends are of the opinion that war with England is the only event that can put his power in peril.’ Earlier in the year he had given it as his opinion that ‘since there is to be no political liberty in the world, I really believe Bonaparte is the fittest person on earth to be master.’ This is not so very far removed from the language of certain ‘appeasers’ in the 1930s.
There was bound to be friction. The noblemen who constituted Britain’s ruling oligarchy had scant respect for their royal family, and were scarcely inclined to admire a pseudo-monarch. Nor was the frozen haughtiness of their formal manners best calculated to soothe a parvenu First Consul. (Even Talleyrand admitted emerging a broken man from an interview with Lord Grenville.) Viscount Whitworth, the British Ambassador, was a prime specimen. Enormously tall, beautifully dressed, a former Grenadier who had married the Dowager Duchess of Dorset, his very appearance irritated Bonaparte.
Many British statesmen were fearful of Bonaparte. In the last months of 1802 George Canning, the future Prime Minister, declared it was the First Consul’s character, not just his policies, which made him dangerous. Asking the Commons for new military establishments, he added, ‘for the purpose of coping with Bonaparte, one great commanding spirit is worth them all’. As yet no British general inspired much confidence. (Canning was to play an important role in discovering Wellington.) ‘The destruction of this country is the first vision that breaks on the First Consul through the gleam of the morning’, warned Sheridan, ‘this is his last prayer at night, to whatever deity he may address it, whether to Jupiter or to Mahomet, to the Goddess of Battles or the Goddess of Reason. Look at the map of Europe, from which France was said to be expunged, and now see nothing but France.’ Windham was even more alarmed. ‘Buonaparte is the Hannibal who has sworn to devote his life to the destruction of England.’
The annexation of Piedmont had first surprised and alarmed Britain. Worse had followed. Portuguese Guiana was ceded to France, while Spain returned Louisiana to France (see p. 166), General Victor being appointed its Captain-General. Haiti was conquered briefly – by a French expeditionary force, its Negro leader Toussaint l’Ouverture dying mysteriously in captivity after surrendering on a promise that his life would be spared. Spain agreed that France might have Parma when its reigning duke died. Civil war broke out in Switzerland; Napoleon sent in Ney with 40,000 men, taking control as ‘Grand Mediator of the Swiss Confederation’ – Aloys Reding of Berne and his hopelessly outnumbered little army being defeated and imprisoned. Turkey was bullied into giving French merchants unprecedented privileges in the Levant. The last straw was the publication of Colonel Sébastiani’s article in the Moniteur, the Consular régime’s official gazette; he stated that most Egyptians wanted the French back, that only 6,000 troops were needed to recapture the country, that the British had tried to assassinate him when he was in Egypt and that the Ionian Islands wished for French rule. When Britain complained France retorted that she had far more grounds for complaint because of the publication of a book insulting the Consul and his army. (Sir Robert Wilson’s History of the British Expedition to Egypt). On both sides of the Channel the Press grew more hostile. Communications between the two governments sank into what Fox termed ‘reciprocal Billingsgate’, a mere exchange of abuse.
Bonaparte insisted that as none of his actions broke the Treaty of Amiens, Britain had no reason to object to what was happening, especially in Europe; the Treaty of Lunéville (by which he had guaranteed the independence of the new Swiss, Dutch and Italianrepublics) was with Austria and had nothing to do with the British. Similarly, Hitler convinced himself that after the Munich agreement Europe was no concern of Britain or France. Almost certainly the Consul wanted peace but on his terms, just as according to Anthony Eden the Nazis ‘would have liked to be friends with us if they could have got their own way’.
Moreover, the British did not like the sound of life under Bonaparte. Tom Paine’s opinion of the France of 1802 was ‘Republic! do you call this a republic? Why, they are worse off than the slaves of Constantinople!’ A Colonel Littlehales noticed how the Legislature and law-courts were ringed by soldiers. The Dean of Christchurch wrote that Parisian society was made wretched from insecurity because of Bonaparte’s methods of spreading suspicion everywhere, ‘considering it his best hold’.
Even so, the majority of the British had been desperately anxious for peace with the First Consul in 1802, just as they would be in 1938. The former Bourbon minister Calonne reported that British enthusiasm for Bonaparte was well-nigh incredible, that the Court, the city of London, the capital, the provinces, and people of all classes down to the humblest artisan were all singing his praises. When war broke out again, however, everyone believed that he had long been planning it, that he alone was responsible. Admiral Nelson complained, ‘It is really shocking that one animal should disturb the peace of Europe’, while Fox foresaw ‘dreadful things if Bonaparte takes, as is natural with him, violent measures’. There was a genuine dread of war.
If with hindsight one can say war was unavoidable one can also say that those who started it had no intention of an all-embracing conflict. The First Consul was determined to assert the dominance of France, but envisaged a series of small wars, never dreaming of a ‘war of nations’. He tried to frighten the British government, aware that Pitt’s successor as Prime Minister, Addington, was weak and inept. He warned (in a despatch supposedly written by Talleyrand) that, were she driven to declare war, France would conquer the entire European continent:
The First Consul is a mere 33 years old; up to now he has only destroyed lesser powers. No one knows how quickly he might change the face of Europe, and restore the Western Empire if he is forced.
He also attempted to intimidate the British by bullying their Ambassador, an unrewarding task.
In February Lord Whitworth was summoned to the Tuileries where Bonaparte raged at him for two hours before allowing him to speak. ‘Every gale blowing from England carries enmity,’ he shouted, claiming that the British government harboured assassins who were plotting to kill him, that the British Press slandered him. As for suspicions that he had designs on Egypt, ‘Egypt must one day belong to France’ but he had no wish to fight for it. ‘What would I gain from a war? Invasion would be my sole means of doing you harm – and invasion is what you’re going to have if you force me!’ In a gender tone he added, ‘Together we could rule the world. Why can’t we reach an understanding?’ Whitworth, that ‘calm and high spirited nobleman’, replied coolly ‘His Britannic Majesty merely wishes to protect his rights and has no wish to join in plunder and oppression.’
There was a further outburst during a reception for the diplomatic corps in March. As soon as he entered the room Bonaparte glared at Whitworth and said at the top of his voice, ‘So you want war!’ The Ambassador tried to reply, but the Consul shouted him down. ‘We’ve been fighting for fifteen years and you’re determined to have fifteen years more of it – you’re forcing me on!’ He continued, ‘Why are you arming? If you arm, I’ll arm too. If you fight, I’ll fight too. You may be able to destroy France but you can’t intimidate her!’ Bonaparte then roared, ‘Respect treaties – Woe on those who fail to respect them, they shall answer for what happens!’ before storming out.
Across the Channel Addington and his government were terrified by any suggestion of war – very like Chamberlain’s 135 years later. The anti-French party grew increasingly angry, demanding Pitt’s return.
By the spring of 1803 war between Britain and France was inevitable. The British Press had grown vituperative, the Morning Post having described the First Consul in February as ‘an unclassifiable being, half African, half European, a Mediterranean mulatto’ while émigré newspapers alleged that he slept with his stepdaughter Hortense. George III, who hated the very idea of peace with a nation which had killed its king, was urging his ministers to go to war. The British had had their breathing-space. They were infuriated that France did not even try to negotiate a trade agreement as promised at Amiens, while French hegemony meant that the markets not only of France and her puppet states but of much of Germany were closed to British goods. They demanded the evacuation of French troops from Holland and Switzerland, and insisted on retaining Malta for ten years – to stop any more French expeditions to Egypt. Bonaparte proposed that it be occupied temporarily by the Russians, but the British refused. On 16 May they seized all French ships in their harbours and the First Consul ordered the internment of some ten thousand British residents and tourists in France. War was declared two days later.
Bonaparte was convinced that if he could cross the Channel he could easily defeat any troops who opposed him, that the island would be conquered in a matter of weeks. He was probably right. Moreover, he might have been able to cross the Channel – with luck. In 1798 he had contemplated Hoche’s scheme of invading Ireland (and making the octogenarian Cardinal of York, Prince Charles Edward’s brother, its king) but the pro-French United Irishmen had been put down with merciless severity and the British were firmly in control again. Instead he revived Lazare Carnot’s old scheme of invasion, of a landing in Sussex (though not in Yorkshire as well). On St Helena he recalled:
London lies only a few days march from Calais, and the English army scattered in order to protect the coast could not have re-grouped in time to save the capital once a landing had been effected … I intended to mass 40 or 50 men-of-war in the harbour at Martinique where they would have sailed from Cadiz, Brest and Ferrol. When assembled they were to make for Boulogne with all speed. I needed to be master of the Channel for 14 days. I had 150,000 troops and 10,000 horses in readiness at the coast, with some 3-4,000 flat bottomed boats. As soon as I received news of my fleet’s arrival I meant to land in England and make myself master of London.
During 1803 camps were established all along the coast at Boulogne, Dunkirk and Ostend while large fleets were being fitted at Brest, Rochefort and Toulon. Every coastal dockyard, every riverside wharf in north-western France – including Paris – was busy building over 1,200 flat-bottomed gunboats and transports, while 150,000 men were widening the harbours. To prevent British bombardment or landing-parties, 500 heavy guns were placed in cliff-top batteries; there were also ‘submarine batteries’, submerged at high tide, emerging to fire at low tide if necessary. The north-western coast of France became known in consequence as ‘The Iron Coast’. These preparations went on for over two years. Bonaparte’s spies brought him reports that no less numerous camps were being set up in Kent and Sussex, in particular at Dover and Deal.
The British response to the threat of the Grande Armée and the ‘Boulogne Flotilla’ was to bring back William Pitt as Prime Minister in March 1804, in place of Addington, and recruit volunteers and militia. Despite much boasting – ‘One Englishman could thrash three Frenchmen’ – there was considerable apprehension. The caricatures by Gillray and others grew more savage and grotesque than ever, reflecting – together with such pamphlets as Atrocities of the Corsican Demon – an increasingly nervous popular hatred. Many believed openly that the French invasion would succeed; some feared that the poorer classes might rise in support of the First Consul as ‘Robespierre on horseback’, others that he would land in Ireland and be joined by its peasantry. In general people – though not all – were in agreement with Southey’s view (written a few years later) that Bonaparte’s ultimate aim was to ‘ensnare, degrade and brutalize mankind’. What frightened the more reflective was the knowledge that the French had beaten almost every army in Europe. Meanwhile, in Napoleon’s words, ‘The rival armies watched each other silently, divided only by the Channel, which swarmed with British ships.’
The First Consul was prepared to wait for his chance, his strategy being that the British could not be sure of co-ordinating their naval resources with the weather and the tides to stop him taking control of the Channel for ten hours. He was gambling on long but not impossible odds. He needed 3,000 transports to bring over 200,000 troops under Davout, Ney, Soult, Victor and of course himself, though he never succeeded in assembling more than 2,000. Nevertheless, Spain’s entry into the war on France’s side in 1803 gave him the use of many more valuable men-o’-war with which to threaten the West Indies and lure British warships away from the Channel.
In 1805 the French fleet seemed, momentarily, to have a chance of wresting control of the Channel from the British. Napoleon – now Emperor – produced a plan which was certainly worth trying. On his instructions Admiral Villeneuve sailed from Toulon to Cadiz to join Admiral Gravina. The combined Franco-Spanish fleets then made for the Caribbean, pursued – as intended – by Nelson as far as the Gulf of Mexico. Suddenly they put about, returning under full sail in the hope of seizing command of the Channel. However, after an engagement with Sir Robert Calder’s comparatively small flotilla off Cape Finisterre, Villeneuve lost his nerve, putting in to refit at Cadiz. Nelson soon arrived to blockade him.
British diplomacy (and subsidies) built an alliance against Napoleon in the summer of 1805 – Austria, Russia, Sweden and Naples. An Austrian army was to advance on the Emperor in Lombardy, an Austro-Russian army down the Danube valley, a Swedish-Russian army through Hanover and a British-Russian-Neapolitan army from southern Italy. The Emperor concentrated on the threats in Lombardy and from the Danube valley. He sent an army to hold Archduke Charles on the Adige while he himself dealt with the Danube sector. The Austrian General Mack led 60,000 troops into Bavaria, occupying the Upper Danube in order to stop any French attempt to advance through the Black Forest. Napoleon pretended to attack through it but instead went round – placing himself between Mack and Vienna. Mack surrendered Ulm on 19 October, although it could have held out for months. An army of 60,000 men had been eliminated in three weeks.
Two days later all French hope of invading Britain vanished at Trafalgar. Goaded by his master’s taunts, and references to ‘infamous Villeneuve’, the French Admiral had sailed out of Cadiz, to be intercepted off Cape Trafalgar by Nelson, who blocked his escape back into Cadiz. The French ships and sailors were excellent, but not their officers; the noblemen who had sometimes proved more than a match for the British during the American War of Independence had all been murdered or chased into exile in the Revolution. Villeneuve and his captains were outmanoeuvred and then annihilated. Nelson was killed, but a French fleet would never again challenge the British Navy.
Although so much effort and planning had been wasted, there was some reason for the Emperor Napoleon’s dismissal of Trafalgar – ‘storms have deprived us a few vessels following a battle in which they were imprudently engaged’. On 13 November he rode into Vienna, the Holy Roman Emperor’s capital which had never before been entered by a conqueror. He was about to win the greatest of his battles, Austerlitz.
During the autumn of 1805 Britain could scarcely credit that Napoleon was going to triumph yet again. On hearing rumours of his victory at Ulm, William Pitt snapped, ‘Don’t believe a word of it! It is all fiction.’ Disappointment grew steadily as still grimmer news seemed likely. Nevertheless, with the security won by Trafalgar, the British were no more inclined to make peace. Apart from the illusory reconciliation of 1802-3, save for such wilful optimists as Charles James Fox they had always hated both the Jacobin and the dictator in the Emperor. A Whig, not a Tory, wrote of him in 1805 that while cowing the French – ‘Corrupt, divide and terrify are the three great pillars of his throne’ – his ultimate aim was the conquest of all Europe; the writer adds that ‘General Bonaparte’s principal characteristics are ‘duplicity and violence’. The descendants of such men would see very much the same evil menace in Hitler, and in much the same way.
Sir Basil Liddell Hart has argued persuasively that misconceived interpretations of the teachings of Clausewitz influenced both the causes and the character of the First and Second World Wars.19 Yet before hostilities broke out Hitler could be most un-Clausewitzian; in the early 1930s he explained to Hermann Rauschning what he then regarded as the best method of aggrandisement:
How to achieve the moral breakdown of the enemy before the war has started – that is the problem that interests me. Whoever has experienced war at the front will want to refrain from all avoidable bloodshed.
But when war came the Führer would be an extreme Clausewitzian in the most simplistic sense, echoing the master’s view that ‘only great and general battles can produce great results’.
Clausewitz is best known for his hackneyed dictum that war is a continuation of politics by other means. What is less familiar, although implicit in such a belief, is his contempt for international law: ‘Violence arms itself with the inventions of Art and Science in order to contend against violence. Self-imposed restrictions, almost imperceptible and hardly worth mentioning, termed usages of International Law, accompany it without essentially impairing its power.’ Like the Emperor, Hitler applied this approach to peace as well as to war.
While the Führer hoped to avoid a war in the West, he certainly anticipated one in the East. His stealthy preparations were an almost text-book application of Clausewitzian principles, as any reader of Vom Kriege will recognize immediately. In Clausewitz’s words:
In order to ascertain the real scale of the means which we must put forth for War, we must think over the political object both on our own side and on the enemy’s side; we must consider the power and position of the enemy’s State as well as of our own, the character of his Government and of his people, and the capacities of both, and all that again on our own side, and the political connections with other States, and the effect which the War will produce on those States … it is the true flash of genius which discovers in a moment what is right.
From the very beginning the Führer made it perfectly clear that he intended to rearm Germany. Yet he was genuinely astonished by Churchill’s warning that Hitler would become a threat to all Europe. He had no quarrel with the British, whom to some extent he even admired, nor with anyone else in the West – not excepting the French whom he despised and hated, like Bismarck before him – so long as they let him build his Grossdeutschland and gave him a free hand in Eastern Europe. Moreover, on taking power he felt himself dangerously weak, with an army of only 100,000 men, no planes, no tanks and almost no navy. The armed might of Facist Italy could inspire him with real fear in 1934.
Indeed, his first diplomatic moves were concerned with securing peace and parity. If Germany withdrew from the League of Nations and the Disarmament Conference in October 1933 it was on the grounds that she was not being treated as an equal. The Führer was surprisingly well disposed towards the British. In Mein Kampf he had written that they were Germany’s only possible ally in the East. They had been hostile to Russia for most of the nineteenth century, and besides detesting the new Soviet régime – they had helped its enemies in 1918-20 – they feared it might revive Tsarist imperialism and threaten India. He had a very friendly meeting with the British minister Anthony Eden in February 1934, impressing him by his ‘sincerity’. (Eden reported to Baldwin, ‘He is a surprise. In conversation quiet, almost shy, with a pleasant smile. Without doubt the man has charm.’) When Britain fell out with Italy during the same year over the latter’s designs on Abyssinia – seen by the Führer as bare-faced cynicism on Britain’s part – he took the opportunity to negotiate an agreement which allowed him to increase his navy to one-third the size of the British but no more. He responded to the Franco-Soviet pact of 1935 by a speech to the Reichstag in which he denounced war, offering a non-aggression pact to every country in Europe.
Privately he was noticeably receptive to new ideas in military technology, welcoming General Guderian’s book Achtung Panzer. This advocated the use of armour and mechanized infantry in overwhelming strength on a narrow front so as to punch a hole in the enemy’s defences and achieve a decisive breakthrough. He also gave a sympathetic hearing to Luftwaffe officers who had taken up the theories of Giulio Douhet, in particular the breaking of civilian morale by air-raids on cities. The combination of Guderian’s ideas with those of Douhet would produce what was to be known as blitzkrieg – lightning war. (This method boded well for the Clausewitzian Hauptschlacht – the decisive battle which Napoleon had always sought, with which he had won so many campaigns in a matter of weeks.)
Hitler’s first aggressive move was in 1936. Versailles had stipulated that German troops should never be stationed in the Rhineland, as a strategic guarantee to France. In 1936 France had a weak government together with a notably defeatist chief-of-staff in General Gamelin. In March Hitler ordered the reoccupation of the Rhineland, sending in two divisions. His generals were appalled, since the Wehrmacht was still too weak to think of confronting the French army. But Gamelin’s imagination magnified 22,000 German troops into 265,000, terrifying his government, who were easily persuaded by Britain to fall back on negotiation – which needless to say proved futile. For years after the Führer described the crisis as the most nerve-racking of his life. ‘If the French had marched into the Rhineland we would have had to withdraw with our tails between our legs’, he admitted frankly.
His triumph alarmed all Europe, demonstrating that the French would only consider fighting a defensive war. In consequence every French ally was at risk, even if France remained ostensibly the greatest military power in the world. The system which had kept the peace since 1918 was no longer in working order.
Hitler and the British leaders of the 1930s had no more in common than Napoleon and the Whigs. Chamberlain and Halifax and the luminaries of the Third Reich found each other incomprehensible. When Goering arrived late for dinner at the British Embassy, explaining, ‘I have been shooting’, the Ambassador, Sir Eric Phipps, inquired ‘Animals, I hope?’ Quivering with inferiority, Goebbels thought the aristocratic Eden ‘a horrible fop’. Such Englishmen had no hope whatever of understanding the Führer, staying convinced to the end that he preferred peace to war. Confident of his ability to outmanoeuvre them diplomatically, Hitler simply could not grasp that in the last resort they would fight. In this he was abetted by Ribbentrop, whose arrogance when Ambassador in London made him a laughing-stock. Relations with Britain might have been very different had Goering with his bonhomie and cunning led a mission there.
During the closing years of the 1930s British statesmen and diplomatists feared Hitler’s paranoia and aggressive, unpredictable nature far more than his unimaginable policies – Churchill had done so since the moment Hitler became Reichskanzler in 1933. Even though he was mistaken in his estimate of the real strength and capability of the Wehrmacht and the Luftwaffe, Churchill’s wild exaggerations alerted the British to the fact that danger lay ahead.
Hitler was convinced that North America would never again take part in a European war. Undoubtedly ‘Isolationism’ contributed to this delusion. His reaction to Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal was bizarre to say the least, if one may believe Hermann Rauschning – ‘the last disgusting death rattle of a corrupt and outworn system’. (Rauschning, an East Prussian magnate and Nazi who later left the party and fled to Switzerland and then America from Germany, recorded a number of conversations which he had with the Führer between 1932 and 1934; they are even more revealing than Mein Kampf about his real objectives and plans.) ‘Since the Civil War, in which the Southern States were conquered against all historical logic and sound sense, the Americans have been in a condition of political and popular decay’, the Führer believed. ‘The beginnings of a great new social order based on the principle of slavery and inequality were destroyed by that war, and with them also the embryo of a future truly great America that would not have been ruled by a corrupt caste of tradesmen, but by a real Herren-class that would have swept away all the falsities of liberty and equality.’
Nevertheless, he did not despair of the United States. The country was on the brink of a revolution from which he alone could save her, and he intended to do so; soon there would be an American SA. Moreover, he told Rauschning, ‘I am firmly convinced that in a certain section of the American middle class and the farmers, the sound fighting spirit of colonial days has not been extinguished.’ He was encouraged by a ‘wholesome aversion for the negroes and the coloured races in general, including the Jews’. Such traits were ‘an assurance that the sound elements of the United States will one day awaken as they have awakened in Germany’. He added, ‘I guarantee, gentlemen, that at the right moment a new America will exist as our strongest supporter.’ However, he did not have a high opinion of American troops. One day all these misconceptions would contribute decisively to his total ruin.
Roosevelt never made the mistake of underestimating ‘this wild man’. He suspected ‘Brother Hitler’ from the beginning, although trying without much hope to discourage Germany from rearming. By 1935 he was convinced that war would come in Europe, and by the end of the year was only too willing to sign the Neutrality Act – designed to prevent United States involvement. But by 1937 he had realized that America could not hope to escape it.
In 1936 the diplomatic situation changed radically. Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy grew increasingly close, to be joined by Falangist Spain when the Spanish Civil War broke out in July. By the end of the year an ‘Axis’ – Mussolini’s term – had come into being. During 1937 France and Britain began to grow fearful of Germany’s increasing might – even those who had hitherto derided Churchill. Yet Hitler may well have been sincere when in 1937 he told Lord Lothian ‘another Anglo-German quarrel would mean the departure of both countries from the stage of history’.
Curiously enough, in Hitler’s case there were probably less real grounds for mistrust on both sides than there had been in Napoleon’s day. In June 1935, when the Anglo-German naval agreement was signed, he had said, ‘Politically I see the future only in alliance with the British.’ There is no reason to disbelieve him. But when, after he had started to rearm, France and Britain did so too he began to race them, though not very much faster. Churchill exaggerated consistently, having been supplied with incorrect statistics; in 1936 he claimed that Germany was spending 12,000 million marks a year on rearmament – we now know that the figure was under 5,000 million. To some extent Hitler was to blame. In March 1935 he told Eden that his new Luftwaffe already had as many planes as the RAF, a lie which caused panic in Britain.
Churchill for one never doubted that war with Hitler would come. In March 1933 he told the House of Commons: ‘We watch with surprise and distress the tumultuous insurgence of ferocity and war spirit [in Germany]:’ in 1934 ‘That mighty Power is now equipping itself once again, 70,000,000 of people, with the technical apparatus of modern war, and at the same time is instilling into the hearts of its youth and manhood the most extreme patriotic, nationalist and militaristic conceptions … Beware, Germany is a country fertile in military surprises’; and in April 1937 ‘we seem to be moving, drifting, steadily, against our will, against the will of every race and every people and every class towards some hideous catastrophe.’
Yet we now know that the Führer did not want war in the West, if he could avoid it.
Even Winston Churchill was not immune to the man’s spell. ‘One may dislike Hitler’s system and yet admire his patriotic achievement’, he pronounced in 1937. ‘If our country were defeated, I hope we should find a champion as indomitable to restore our courage and lead us back to our place among the nations.’ In those days he saw the Führer as one of those ‘whose lives have enriched the story of mankind’.
Foreign observers overestimated Hitler’s strength. In October 1935 Churchill warned the Commons:
The incredible figure of more than £800,000,000 sterling is being spent in the currency of the present year on direct and indirect military preparations by Germany. The whole of Germany is an armed camp … the industries of Germany are mobilised for war to an extent to which ours were not mobilised even in the year after the Great War had begun. The whole population is being trained from childhood up to war. A mighty army is coming into being. Many submarines are already exercising in the Baltic. Great cannon, tanks, machine guns and poison gas are fast accumulating.
And in 1936:
Do not forget that all the time those remorseless hammers of which General Goering spoke are descending night and day in Germany, and that the most warlike and, in many ways, the most efficient people in Europe, are becoming welded into a tremendous fighting machine, equipped with the fearful agencies of modern science.
In reality even in 1939 Germany had fewer planes and tanks than France and Britain. It was all a brilliant piece of bluff on the Führer’s part.
In July 1934 Austrian Nazis seized the Chancellery in Vienna, murdering the Chancellor, Engelbert Dollfuss. The coup was easily put down. Everyone saw Hitler’s hand in the affair, for once unjustly. Dollfuss had been Mussolini’s protégé, and the Duce massed several divisions at the Brenner Pass. In ‘a state of tremendous agitation’ the Führer told Papen hysterically, ‘We are facing a second Sarajevo’, sending him to Vienna to placate the Austrians and Italians. (At this date Mussolini considered Hitler a ranting buffoon, and referred to him as ‘that horrible sexual degenerate’ while in lighter moments the latter would give a spirited impersonation of the Duce delivering a speech.)
Despite his army’s inferiority, the Führer did not introduce conscription until March 1935. His demands for a renegotiation of the Versailles settlement seemed not unreasonable. Most foreign observers conceded that the division of Europe into the winners and losers of 1918 could not go on for ever.
On 10 November 1937 Colonel Friedrich Hossbach noted down what he remembered of a meeting which Hitler had summoned five days earlier at the Chancery in Berlin. Those present included the Führer, Goering (chief of the Luftwaffe), Field Marshal von Blomberg (Defence Minister), Colonel-General von Fritsch (Wehrmacht commander-in-chief), Admiral Raeder (Naval chief) and Konstantin von Neurath (Foreign Minister). They were asked to consider three possible scenarios. First, a war situation in 1943-5. Second, if civil war broke out in France in 1938-40 (far from impossible), in which case Germany should invade Czechoslovakia. Third, if war broke out between France and Italy, there would be an opportunity for overrunning not merely Czechoslovakia but Austria as well. Hitler argued that Germany could have what she wanted without a ‘great war’. Nevertheless, there was no programme of aggression. The meeting’s real aim seems to have been to bully Schacht into providing more money for rearmament. Far from being a blueprint for war, the ‘Hossbach Memorandum’ shows that the Führer expected to get what he wanted without a European war, let alone a world war.
German and Italian collaboration in the Spanish Civil War drew Hitler and Mussolini closer together. The latter urged the new Austrian Chancellor, Kurt von Schuschnigg, to co-operate with Germany, which he did by an agreement signed in July 1936. In February 1938 Schuschnigg set off a fatal crisis by visiting Berchtesgaden; he asked for economic assistance and help in dealing with Austria’s violent Nazis. The Führer bludgeoned him into an agreement by which the NSDAP was to be legalized in Austria and a Nationalist, Seyss-Inquart (an old school friend of Schuschnigg, but a secret Nazi), to become Minister of the Interior. When Schuschnigg returned to Vienna he tried to evade the agreement by a plebiscite – ‘Do you want a Free, Christian, German Austria?’ But by rigging the voting he enabled Austrian Nazis to appeal to Hitler for ‘constitutional justice’. German tanks crossed the frontier on 11 March, swiftly occupying Vienna. Schuschnigg resigned, Seyss-Inquart taking his place as Chancellor. The following day a message came to the Führer from the Duce, stating that he ‘had no interest in Austria’. An emotional Hitler cried, ‘Tell Mussolini I will never forget this …If he should ever need any help or be in any danger, he can be convinced that I shall stick to him, whatever may happen, even if the whole world be against him.’ It was one of the promises which that extraordinary man kept. (Yet Count Ciano – Mussolini’s son-in-law and Foreign Minister – had written in his diary three weeks earlier that Italian intervention would have been impossible. ‘At the first shot we fired every Austrian, without exception, would fall in behind the Germans against us.’) Until now the Führer had always declared that he envisaged an independent Austrian Nazi state allied with Germany. However, on 13 March, at Linz – the big city of his boyhood – he announced most unexpectedly that Austria would become part of the Reich. His decision was ratified by a plebiscite of 99 per cent in favour on 10 April.
Churchill pointed out the strategic implications:
A long stretch of the Danube is now in German hands. This mastery of Vienna gives to Nazi Germany military and economic control of the whole of the communications of south-eastern Europe, by road, by river and by rail.
Yet although disturbed, and although still much more powerful militarily, the French and British government took no action. They could not believe that the Führer wanted to start a war with them. Nor did he.
Because of its geographical position between Austria and what is now East Germany, Czechoslovakia was a very real threat to the Reich – ‘a revolver stuck in Germany’s ribs’. Hitler called it ‘a French aircraft carrier’. The most industrialized of the countries carved out of the Habsburg Empire, it was also the most heavily armed. Yet Czechoslovakia was a multinational state while supposedly founded on national identity; Czech rule was resented not merely by Germans but by Slovaks, Ruthenes, Poles and Hungarians, all hoping for independence or else incorporation into Poland or Hungary.
Czechoslovakia’s greatest weakness was its German minority in the Sudetenland. Well over 3 million, it was situated on the German border. Many Sudetendeutsche had joined an extremely active local NSDAP under a leader, Konrad Henlein, who was subsidized from Berlin – and whom Hitler had impertinently appointed as his ‘Viceroy’ at the end of March 1938. They disliked being ruled by Czechs in Prague instead of from Vienna, as they had been before 1918. The Anschluss made them eager to follow the Austrians into the Führer’s fold.
There were other weaknesses. The Czechs’ neighbours all coveted large chunks of their territory, while their only ally was France. Yet they had some strengths as well. Their army numbered 34 divisions, compared with the Wehrmacht’s 28 during the spring of 1938, and the mighty Skoda steel works ensured an adequate supply of munitions. In President Beneš Hitler faced one of his most skilful diplomatic opponents, a tough negotiator who welcomed rather than feared a crisis. Even so, the Führer knew that his own army would expand to 55 divisions by October. His original aims were probably limited to annexing the Sudetenland and neutralizing Czechoslovakia’s military potential.
It was the Czechs, not Hitler, who started the confrontation. When he returned from a State visit to Italy in May it was to find that Benes had accused him, without justification, of mobilizing and had moved troops up to the border to warn the western powers that a crisis was brewing. The Führer was forced to withdraw his own troops from the Czech frontier. At the end of the month he told General von Brauchitsch, ‘It is my unalterable decision to smash Czechoslovakia by military action in the near future’, ordering an invasion to be planned for 1 October. (Some Wehrmacht officers were so horrified that they began to plan a coup.) Yet at this stage he almost certainly hoped to avoid a war. He encouraged Henlein’s men to beat up Czechs, provoking retaliation so that he could claim Sudeten Germans were being persecuted. In September he shouted over the microphone at the Nuremberg Rally, ‘Germans in Czechoslovakia are neither defenceless nor deserted … One can never reconcile so uncompromising an enemy as the Czech.’ The rising by the Sudeten NSDAP which ensued was a fiasco. But he had succeeded in frightening everyone into believing he wanted war.
On 15 September the British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, flew to Munich – his first flight – proposing that he should try to persuade the French to make the Czechs cede the Sudetenland. ‘I’m determined to settle it’, Hitler yelled at the 69-year-old premier, ‘I don’t care if there’s a world war or not!’ Chamberlain returned a week later, announcing that Czechoslovakia was ready to cede the Sudetenland – to be told that ‘regrettably’ it was not enough, that Germany was going to march in straight away without formalities. In response the Czechs and French mobilized, while the British Home Fleet was put on the alert. Hitler backed down. ‘Despite this unheard-of provocation I shall of course keep my promise not to proceed against Czechoslovakia while negotiations are taking place.’ He kept up the pressure by raging at British and French envoys. ‘Germans are being treated like niggers – no one dares to treat even Turkey like this’, he bellowed at Sir Horace Wilson. I’ll have Czechoslovakia where I want her on 1 October.’ Then Mussolini proposed a four-Power conference at Munich, which he chaired. Britain and France gave way. On his return from Munich, Chamberlain was applauded rapturously when he told a crowd in Downing Street, ‘I believe it is peace for our time.’ Every British newspaper save Reynolds’ News welcomed the agreement with frantic enthusiasm.
On 1 October German troops occupied the Sudetenland, keeping to the Führer’s deadline. Shortly afterwards the Poles annexed the Teschen and the Hungarians took southern Slovakia. During the crisis Hitler declared more than once ‘We want no Czechs!’ Yet he had always regarded Bohemia and Moravia as part of ‘Greater Germany’ (they had been part of the Germanic Confederation from 1815 to 1866). After Munich Czechoslovakia could not hope to survive – if Germany did not take more territory. Hungary certainly would. Early in 1939 Slovaks began to complain loudly about ‘Czech repression’. On 13 March their leader, Monsignor Josef Tiso, read out at Bratislava a declaration of Slovakia’s independence under German protectorship. The declaration had been drafted in Berlin.
On 13 March Emil Hácha, the new President of what was now ‘Czechia’ (Bohemia and Moravia), insisted on going to the German capital to beg Hitler to let the Czechs remain independent. Hitler and Goering bullied the man till he had a minor heart-attack; on recovering he signed a document by which ‘Czechia’ became the German Protectorate of Bohemia. As soon as Hácha had left the Führer ran into his secretaries’ room and told the girls to kiss him – ‘I shall be known as the greatest German in history!’ The next day he entered Prague, proclaiming ‘Czechoslovakia has ceased to exist!’ He thought it would be possible to Germanize the Czechs since, judging from their faces, he believed that they were not Slavs but descendants of Mongol colonists.
A week later German troops landed in Memel, a German-speaking port in Lithuania, on the border of East Prussia. Although Hitler claimed it, he had no plans for its annexation. However, the Lithuanians were so terrified that they handed it over without further delay.
These additions to the Fuhrer’s ‘empire’ precipitated a dramatic shift in British public opinion. He had moved too fast, instead of waiting for the rump of Czechoslovakia to fall into his hands. The appeasers were discredited, while Winston Churchill’s prophecies of war were heard with new interest. On 24 March he begged the House of Commons to consider stopping the ‘German Dictator’ by forming a European coalition:
Do not let anyone suppose that this is a mere question of hardening one’s heart and keeping a stiff upper lip, and standing by to see Czechoslovakia poleaxed and tortured as Austria has been … Is it not possible that decided action by France and Great Britain would rally the whole of these five states [of the Danube Basin] as well as Czechoslovakia, all of whom have powerful armies?’
Yet the Führer had convinced himself that the British would never go to war. ‘The day of Britain’s might at sea is past’, he had told Rauschning in 1934. ‘Aircraft and the U-boat have turned surface fleets into the obsolete playthings of the wealthy democracies. They are no longer a serious weapon in decisive warfare.’ He was encouraged in this delusion by both Right and Left – by Mosleyites and Anglo-German friendship societies on the one hand and by pacifists on the other. His impressions were extraordinary. ‘The English are incomparably insolent, but I admire them none the less. We still have a lot to learn from them.’ Because of their colonial empire they had become ‘a nation of rulers’. However, his qualified admiration was restricted to the British aristocracy, believing that their ancestors had come from Lower Saxony. He seems to have thought the ‘masses’ were racially inferior, ‘unaware of the state of servitude in which they live’ and that a socialist Britain must founder in poverty. Chamberlain did not possess the virtues he admired, the prime minister being dismissed as ‘a crawling little worm’.20
By early 1939 the Führer had secured all Greater Germany save for Danzig and that part of Prussia lost in 1919. The ‘Free City of Danzig’ had had an exclusively German-speaking population since its foundation in the Middle Ages, and in 1919 had protested so vigorously against incorporation into Poland that the Allies had given it special status. What Hitler now demanded was the reincorporation of Danzig into the Reich, together with a small strip of territory linking East and West Prussia, the ‘Polish Corridor’; he did not ask for all former German territory. In February 1939 he even offered the Poles a military alliance with a ‘common policy’ in the Ukraine; far from wanting to fight them, he hoped that they would help him in his conquest of the East.
In the spring of 1939 Britain and France guaranteed Poland’s territorial integrity. This merely angered Hitler, who ordered plans to be prepared to invade Poland in the autumn. In April Chamberlain considered and dismissed the possibility of an alliance with the Soviet Union, the one step which might have saved the Poles.
President Roosevelt’s letter of 14 April 1939, urging disarmament, gave the Führer an opportunity to tell the world just how much he had achieved for Germany. He claimed that, because the Germans had gone unarmed to the Versailles peace talks in 1919, they had been subjected to ‘the vilest oppression which peoples and human beings have ever had to bear’, that they had suffered ‘even greater degradation than can ever have been inflicted on the chieftains of the Sioux tribes’. (No doubt he was partly inspired by Karl May’s home-grown German ‘Westerns’.) Ironically, he emphasized his triumph in restoring full employment in his country, belittling the New Deal by implication – ‘You, Mr Roosevelt, have a much easier task in comparison.’ The President’s letter also helped to delude him into thinking that Isolationism would always prevent the Americans from fighting.
Roosevelt had not shared the general European optimism about the Munich agreement. In September 1938 he had written (to the American Ambassador in Rome): ‘Chamberlain’s visit to Hitler today may bring things to a head or may result in a temporary postponement of what looks to me like an inevitable conflict within the next five years.’ By January 1939, even before the seizure of the Czech rump, he had begun to fear Hitler’s designs on Central and South America, and ‘the gradual encirclement of the United States by the removal of first lines of defence’. He warned the Military Affairs Committee of the Senate:
Now, do not say it is chimerical, do not say it is just a pipe dream. Would any of you have said six years ago, when this man Hitler came into control of the German Government, Germany busted, Germany a complete and utter failure, a nation that owes everybody, disorganised, not worth considering as a force in this world, would any of you have said that in six years Germany would dominate Europe, completely and absolutely?
No European leader apart from Churchill saw the situation with such clarity.21
On 23 August Ribbentrop signed a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union, including a secret clause to divide Poland. A week later, on 1 September. Deutscherrundfunk announced that its radio station at Gleiwitz on the border had been attacked by Polish troops, several of whom had been killed. (The latter were Germans under sentence of death, who had been drugged, dressed in Polish uniforms and shot.) To ‘defend the Fatherland’ German troops hurtled into Poland. Guessing that France and Britain would react only slowly, Hitler deployed all his strength, confident in his superiority in planes and tanks. He was not mistaken. Unlike Czechoslovakia, Poland had not modernized her army, her lancers facing motorized columns, dive bombers and flame-throwers. The Poles knew they could not win; their plan was to hold the Germans for a fortnight so that the western powers would have time to come to their rescue by striking across the Rhine. As the Führer had foreseen, the French and British did little beyond declaring war. After two weeks, by arrangement with their Nazi allies, the Russians invaded eastern Poland. After four weeks the Führer reviewed a victory parade in a Warsaw bombed into surrender.
Mussolini had shaken the Führer badly by informing him on 25 August that ‘Italy is not ready for war.’ Hitler had no real desire to fight Britain as well as France. He proclaimed on 6 October that the Western Powers should accept Poland’s defeat and work out with him a lasting European peace, that he would guarantee the British Empire’s survival if Britain would co-operate. We know from his interpreter Paul Schmidt that when the British declaration of war reached him on 3 September he sat silent and unmoving for a time, then glared savagely at his dumbstruck Foreign Minister Ribbentrop, inquiring, ‘What now?’ Goering muttered, ‘If we lose this war, then may God have mercy on us!’
‘We are here faced with phenomena that show an unmistakable relationship.’ Pieter Geyl pointed out in 1944. While believing that the principles of the French and the ‘Brown’ revolutions were radically different, and in some ways diametrically opposed, Geyl argues that they were dangerous for the same reasons. Each was bringing a new order into being, and rejected the standards of the existing order, regarding all opposition as criminal. Napoleon, in Geyl’s words, was ‘a conqueror with whom it was impossible to live; who could not help turning an ally into a vassal, or at least interpreting the relationship to his own exclusive advantage’. These were the colours in which Hitler showed himself unmistakably in 1939-40.
Nevertheless, in October 1939 the Führer appealed to the Allies to negotiate, stating, ‘I believe even today that there can only be real peace in Europe and throughout the world if Germany and England come to an understanding.’ Although he later told his generals that this was only a ruse, and that his ‘unalterable aim’ was to defeat his enemies, there is little doubt he would have preferred peace with Britain and France on condition they let him have a free hand in the East. Throughout the ‘Phoney War’ of 1939-40 curious rumours circulated among the Allied forces that soon Britain and France would be fighting by Germany’s side against the Soviet Union. However, the British, while they did not share the ingrained French hatred of the Boche, saw Hitler in much the same light as they had once seen Bonaparte. Moreover, Churchill, that latter-day Pitt, had by now joined the Cabinet.
Napoleon may genuinely have wanted peace but he had small hope of getting it, principally because the British distrusted him. They were fearful that one day he would build a fleet larger than the British Navy, and were deeply alarmed by his revival of pre-1789 French colonial policy – his acquisition of Louisiana, his sending expeditions to India and the Caribbean. In any case they suspected, rightly or wrongly, that he intended to conquer all Europe. ‘The favourite plan of Bonaparte’, Lord Minto wrote in February 1802, ‘is for our total exclusion from the Continent.’ They saw the Peace of Amiens as a mere lull in hostilities; Whitworth suggested cynically, ‘By peace we can wage a more dangerous and, I trust, more decisive warfare against his Government.’ Only a few weeks after it had been signed, Lord Folkestone denounced it as ‘a treaty built on Jacobin principles and confirming Jacobin power’.
In contrast, Hitler had a very real chance of securing peace. For all his bullying bluster, he never anticipated a world-wide conflict; Speer was convinced that he was thunderstruck by Britain and France declaring war in 1939, and had expected to acquire Poland without any real opposition from them. As A. J. P. Taylor puts it, ‘He wanted the fruits of total victory without total war; and thanks to the stupidity of others he nearly got them.’22
All methods formerly usual were upset by Bonaparte’s luck and boldness, and first rate powers almost wiped out at a blow.
Clausewitz, Vom Kriege
Before the war, and still more during the conquest of the West, Hitler came to appear a gigantic figure, combining the strategy of a Napoleon with the cunning of a Machiavelli and the fanatical fervour of a Mahomet.
Sir Basil Liddell Hart, The Other Side of the Hill