The blitzkrieg that exploded across Germany’s border with Poland on 1st September 1939 was a new kind of warfare, more destructive, more terrifying, more shocking in its speed and power than any brand of fighting previously known. Overnight, other armies were made to look antiquated now that the forces of Nazi Germany had demonstrated for the first time what armour, tanks and aircraft could do when they acted in concert. The meaning of blitzkrieg - lightning war - was fully justified. As the hapless Poles soon discovered, blitzkrieg struck hard, it struck fast and it struck decisively.
The attack on Poland was the point at which the appeasement policy previously followed by Britain and France finally broke down. They had allowed the forces of Nazi Germany to march into the Rhineland in 1936. They had protested, but did nothing, in 1938 when Adolf Hitler announced the Anschluss: this union of Austria and Germany had been forbidden under the Treaty of Versailles at the end of the First World War. They had given in when Hitler demanded the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia, ostensibly to protect the rights of the German minority there. They failed to react when, contrary to his word, Hitler absorbed the rest of Czechoslovakia into the German Reich in March 1939. At that juncture, Poland was the next obvious target on Hitler’s list of territorial demands and Britain and France promised the Poles their support if they were attacked.
Two days after Hitler’s forces invaded Poland and refused all demands to withdraw, Britain and France, together with Australia and New Zealand, declared war. By then, the Germans were well on their way to an easy victory and despite the promises, the Poles were left to fight on their own. The British, the French and the world could only watch as the German armoured columns sliced through Poland, backed by the Luftwaffe which plastered Polish airfields and destroyed runways, hangars and fuel stores. Railways and communication lines were systematically disrupted.
With no armoured divisions, few antitank or anti-aircraft weapons and a largely obsolete air force, the Polish army had scant chance. Enveloped by a double-double encirclement, Polish power to fight back was virtually eliminated and the last major Polish defence, at the battle of the Bzura River, ended with the surrender of 100,000 Poles. Although Warsaw managed to hold out until 27 September and the last organised resistance did not cease until 5 October, the Germans had prevailed in less than three weeks, by 19 September. Soviet Russia, then an ally of Nazi Germany, had invaded two days earlier and ultimately, Poland was dismembered and most of it was shared out between them.
Hajo Hermann, holder of the Knight’s Cross with Swords, who later became a famous bomber ace, scoring nine victories, flew over the border with Poland on the first day of the invasion. The German forces, always the focus of Josef Goebbels’ inventive propaganda department, had been told that they were making a defensive move: the Poles were going to invade Germany and so deserved to be attacked. Hajo Hermann, who was to become a famous night-fighter pilot, had his own ideas about that. He believed that the Poles had invited retribution through their ingratitude towards Germany after the First World War.
‘We liberated Poland in the First World War. At the time, it was a province of Russia. We made it independent and said: ‘You can have your kingdom again!’ But were the Poles grateful? Not a bit of it! After the War, the Poles acted against us and took western Prussia away from us, and Upper Silesia. That was a very great injustice. When you think of 1 September 1939, you have to bear this in mind. When you flew against the Polish enemy remembering how they betrayed us, you feel very patriotic, there’s no mistaking it. If nowadays, someone says: “How could you have done that? That’s how the War began!’ That’s nonsense, nothing began on 1 September. The War started only when Britain and France declared war on us two days later.’
Hans Lehmann, who was with the invasion troops on the first day, had a less virulent view of the Poles.
‘No. I didn’t hate them. As far as I was concerned they were human beings, not that I loved them, you understand. It’s simply that they were a foreign people, that’s all, but I didn’t feel that I had to exterminate them, or whatever, I can’t say that. That was true of only a very few people. It’s also true, though, that men become brutal when they are at war for too long, it gets easier and easier to shoot a person the longer you are out there’’.
Strictly speaking, the German campaign in Poland was not true blitzkrieg. It was basically a conventional land war with certain blitzkrieg elements. Those elements were decisive, though. The most important was the element of surprise, which was why there was no formal declaration of war by Germany. As intended, the Poles were caught completely off guard. Hans Lehmann remembers how unprepared they were.
‘The Poles hadn’t expected to be invaded and we really did take them by surprise. We were able to just walk in at first. Then, the first troops arrived and by that time, the Poles knew what was happening. They started firing, but it wasn’t very effective. In comparison to ours, the Polish weapons were so out of date that they couldn’t do anything. We fired back, of course, and some of the Poles were shot. The others either ran away or surrendered. Afterwards, the whole Polish army realised they were helpless and capitulated’
Blitzkrieg theory had no place, either, for the preliminary artillery bombardment which had been regular practice before major battles in the First World War. Instead, the Germans delivered swift-striking attacks from the air. One of the Luftwaffe’s major players was the Ju-87 ‘Stuka’ dive bomber which had already shown its paces during the Spanish Civil War of 1936 to 1939, when it was used by the German Condor Legion to bring new and previously unimagined brand of terror to warfare. The Ju-87, capable of a top speed of 255 mph and armed with two 7.9mm MG81 and two 7.9mm MG17 machine guns, carried a bomb load of around 2,000 pounds, but it created panic and confusion on the ground even before any of these weapons came into play.
Ugly and angular, the Ju-87’s gull-wings gave it a thoroughly sinister appearance. The dive-bombers swooped down like birds of prey, giving off a chilling screaming sound. This sound was produced by the sirens the Germans fitted to the wheel-covers. Colloquially, they were called the ‘Trombones of Jericho’, with all the promise of utter destruction that Biblical reference implied. Hans Lehmann remembers the effect as the Ju-87s dived on their victims below.
‘The Stukas - they dived onto the enemy lines and the moral state of the adversary was so depressed because of the terrible sound it made. They had already begun to run the moment they heard it. They weren’t going to wait for the bombs to fall!’
In Poland, tanks as well as aircraft, appeared in a new guise. Like the military aircraft, the tank had been a newcomer to war in 1914-1918, but the requirements of blitzkrieg had helped to transform it from the ‘lozenge’ designed to lumber across the muddy First World War terrain to the heavier, much more aggressive and speedy prime mover of the Second.
The tank and the Germans’ use of it in Poland and afterwards, in western Europe, epitomised a long-held tenet of the Prussian military system: the value of mobility. The fighting in the First World War had been the antithesis of mobility and restoring it to its proper place in warfare played an important part in searching analysis undertaken after 1918 by Germany’s keenest military minds. They were determined to avoid a repetition of the essentially phyrric nature of the first War, with its futile battles of attrition and costly effort for the sake of little gain. Never again, they resolved, would Germany be brought to her knees by a long-drawn out war or starved into submission by blockade. It was unthinkable, too, that the horrors of trench warfare should ever be repeated. Future wars were going to be aggressive, swift and decisive.
One of the most acute and perceptive of German military minds was Heinz Guderian, who became the legendary German tank commander of the Second World War. Guderian’s aim was create large tank units that could range over the battlefield at will, causing maximum damage, doing it fast, and operating independently of infantry and other forces.
The future tank force, as Guderian saw it, would be concentrated in armoured divisions, not dispersed in small numbers. They would be spearheads of a single, large military formation which also included aircraft, artillery and mechanised infantry. Tank commanders would not remain in positions far in the rear, but would operate near the front, responding instantly to changing situations and issuing orders by radio directly to his units.
Making the most efficient use possible of available technology was only part of Guderian’s plans. He also had a clear understanding of the value of proper training, and the fact that it was vital to encourage drive and initiative even in the lowest ranks. The German Army as a whole was an army of incomparable standards, but the men of the tank arm were to be trained to an even higher pitch of excellence.
Heinz Guderian was regarded as something of a maverick among the German ‘top brass’ and, as he stated in his memoirs, his concept of warfare was too revolutionary for the ultra-conservative General Staff. As a result, Guderian claimed, they blocked his ideas for many years. All the same, in the late 1930s, Guderian’s theories appealed where it mattered most in Nazi Germany: the Führer himself approved.
Adolf Hitler had his own, political, use for swift, decisive war as envisaged by Guderian and others of like mind. During the late 1930s, Hitler appeared to be just a cynical risk-taker, dangling British and French politicians like puppets and relying on their fear of another war to force territorial gains out of them. This did not mean he was unaware of realities. If he were to make his strike in his long-planned strike in eastern Europe, then he would have to do it quickly. If he waited, Britain and France could become too strong for him and there might never be another opportunity.
The chance Germany would be taking in another war was already known even outside Germany, as Georg Lehrmann discovered when he heard a chilling prediction from a Czech prisoner. The prediction was remarkably accurate, and the Czech’s conclusion was that Germany would lose.
‘In Czechoslovakia, we were based in a small town ten kilometres from the German border. We had a Czech prisoner who spoke perfect German, so that we were able to converse very easily. He told us ‘Listen, you can start a war with us, but don’t start on the others because then you have had it’. I said ‘How is that possible?’ and he replied, ‘I know it. First of all, you’ll probably march on France and then on Russia and then you’ll get it in the neck.’ That is what the Czech said before the war had even begun.’
Engine torn from its supports by airscrew out of balance owing to a hit, and hanging only from the drag wires. The airplane flew home with the other two engines.
The Czech prisoner was, of course, right about Russia. What he could not take into account was the extent to which blitzkrieg was going to move the goal posts of warfare. For a start, the Luftwaffe first purpose was to seize control of the air. To do that, they would destroy the Polish air force on the ground. Although some Polish planes escaped - they had been moved to new locations - the Luftwaffe succeeded in virtually annihilating the rest after only two days, by 3rd September. This was the first demonstration in the Second World War of a truism: the fact that superiority in the air was the ultimate superiority. From then on, what little hope the Poles might have had vanished completely.
Once the German air force had taken care of the preliminaries, the tanks and other armoured units moved in and sliced a swathe of destruction across Poland, the like of which had never been seen in war before. Hitler himself was astonished by the havoc when he visited the tank corps soon after the invasion.
A communiqué issued by the Germans at this time was naturally triumphalist in tone, but at the same time, largely accurate:
‘in a series of battles of extermination, of which the greatest and most decisive was in the Vistula curve, the Polish army numbering one million men has been defeated, taken prisoner or scattered. Not a single Polish active or reserve division, not a single independent brigade, has escaped this fate. Only fractions of single bands escaped immediate annihilation by fleeing into the marshy territory in eastern Poland. There, they were defeated by Soviet troops. Only in Warsaw, Modlin and on the peninsula of Hela in the extreme north of Poland are there still small sections of the Polish army fighting on and these are in hopeless positions.’
However futile the Germans considered their position to be, the manner in which some Poles fought back was savage. Hans Lehmann was an eyewitness.
‘There was hand to hand fighting in Poland, man against man. The were fanatics on both sides. It’s either you or it’s me and to the death, they were saying. Forget about being taken prisoner. You feel hatred perhaps for a moment if someone has been shot beside you, you feel great hatred of the opponent…’
Individual reprisals were not unusual. Hans Lehmann became involved in one such incident after a young Pole was arrested.
‘A company commander said to me ‘He had a knife on him, you must shoot him!’A Polish man, a young Polish man, he could have been only about twenty-one years old. Because I had known the commander for some time, I said ‘You’re off your head. I won’t do it’. Fortunately, I got away with it because I knew him. If it had been an officer I didn’t know, then he would have shot me straight away. Experiences like this made me very, very sad. But then, for us it was to a greater or lesser extent depressing anyway. Some men, young men mostly, took it all quite lightly, but others took it very badly. Some of our comrades, when it began in Poland, actually messed their pants’.
Eventually, after some three weeks, the battle for Poland resolved itself into a last desperate struggle for the capital, Warsaw. For a long time, the defenders refused all demands to surrender and were subjected to day after day of bombing and shelling. By 26th September, it was reported that the city’s business centre was in flames. Over a thousand civilians were reported killed, and four churches and three hospitals filled with wounded were destroyed. According to the German communiqué, there were no longer any buildings in Warsaw remaining intact, and not a house in which there had not been a victim of bombs or shells. Within the previous twenty-four hours some hundred fires had broken out following the launching of a hail of incendiary bombs.
On 21 September, six days before the surrender of Warsaw, the city’s Lord Mayor, M. Starzynski, issued his own statement. It was a bitter comment on what the Nazis had labelled ‘a humanitarian war’.
‘I want the whole civilised world to know what the Nazi Government means by humanitarian war. Yesterday, in the early hours of the morning, seven of our hospitals were bombed, among many other buildings, with terrible results. Soldiers wounded on the battlefield were killed in their beds. Many civilians, among them women and children, were killed outright or buried under the ruins. But the most barbaric crime was committed against the Red Cross Hospital, which had the Red Cross flags flying from the windows. Several hundred wounded Polish soldiers were there.’
Despite brave words and the defiance of Warsaw, many Poles yielded to the logic of the situation without too much of a struggle. Hans Lehmann belonged to a platoon that was put in charge of four hundred Polish prisoners.
‘They were glad the war was over for them. It all happened so fast that they were completely overrun before they knew it. You see, if a man realises there’s no prospect of changing a situation, then he surrenders, he wants to protect his life.’
Similarly, on the march into Poland, Lehmann passed through whole villages where there was no appreciable resistance.
‘If a village didn’t have any soldiers, then the men didn’t bother to take up arms. There was one village now and again where we were fired at but on the whole, the civilian population remained very calm, in order to protect their property and possessions. They knew that at the moment when foreign soldiers arrive, it could cost them their lives if they rebelled against them’.
Polish resistance nevertheless cost the Germans dear, both in men and materiél. They lost more men in Poland than in their later campaigns in the Norway, the Low Countries, France and the Balkans. put together. According to Hans Lehmann, the casualties had begun at the border on the first day.
‘When we marched into Poland, there were corpses all around. Many of them were Germans. They lay around and no one bothered about them. I was so upset that couldn’t eat for three days. Later on, almost the whole company was destroyed, and our armoured cars, too. If they’d been put out of action, we had to leave them. If the caterpillar tracks were hit, then you were unable to move even if the whole vehicle hadn’t been destroyed. Some of the caterpillar tracks were blown clean off, so you couldn’t drive any more. On one occasion, there were ten or eleven of us together with a second driver. They were all injured - and very badly - except for me.’
The German triumph in Poland was so speedy that, ironically, it made trouble for Lehmann. His platoon was ordered to take their four hundred Polish prisoners to Danzig and then rejoin their unit. It did not work out that way.
‘We couldn’t get back, so instead, we returned to our headquarters in Harburg. The next thing we knew, we were being threatened with a Court Martial as deserters! It was all sorted out in the end, but the reason we hadn’t been able to follow orders and rejoin our unit was that the campaign in Poland was over so quickly. Before we could catch up with them, our unit had moved out and returned to Germany!’
After Poland, hostilities on land settled down what contemporary journalists termed the Phony War or, among the Germans, the Sitzkrieg or Twilight War. Sitzkrieg did not mean inactivity, but there two important factors governed this outwardly quiet time that was so much of a contrast to the shock and drama of the Polish campaign.
The first was the defensive attitude of the French. The German High Command feared the military strength of France and had objected, for example, to Hitler’s reoccupation of the Rhineland in 1936 in case this prompted the French to use this strength against them. When France, with Britain had declared war on Germany, they had been appalled at the idea of confronting this mighty power they fancied lay across their western frontier. What they did not take sufficiently into account was that the French military concept of the time was predominantly defensive. During the Phony War period, they confined their operations to occasional patrols, a few probing missions and intelligence forays, but basically, they sat behind their much-vaunted Maginot Line awaiting events.
The Germans, for their part, held back from attacking the French at this juncture because they had only 23 divisions on their western frontier to France’s one hundred. The rest of the German Army had been used in Poland and time was needed to deploy and refit their forces for future action. However, future action, when it came, did not occur in the direction the troops had come to believe. Reinhold Runde of the Luftwaffe air signal corps was one of many who believed that the next target of attack would be Britain.
‘We all had the feeling after the Polish campaign that we would be going to England. All of us in the Luftwaffe though we’d be off to England one way or another. no one dreamed that it would Denmark and Norway’.
At that time, Norway and Denmark were neutral, but their geographical position posed a danger to the vital supplies of iron ore that came to German north coast ports from Sweden. The route for these supplies ran from Narvik, the ice-free port on Ofotfjord, through the Norwegian Leads and on to Germany. The Royal Air Force, flying from Britain, could easily disrupt this supply line, so that securing the two Scandinavian countries under German control became imperative.
Norway had particular attractions, with its long coastline indented by a mass of fjords. In German hands, that coastline could help prevent the chance of a British blockade, deny Britain control of the trade routes and put a stop to any threat they could pose by occupying bases there.
The Danes were the first victims of this next German campaign. Denmark was invaded, though not yet formally occupied, on 9 April 1940. It was all over within a day. The Wehrmacht met nominal resistance from the Danish Royal Guard before the Germans took charge and Luftwaffe aircraft circling overhead obliged a very reluctant King Christian X to co operate. King Haakon VII of Norway was made of sterner stuff. He refused the German demand to accept a government led by the collaborator Vidkun Quisling and with his ministers, resolved to resist.
By then, the German land, sea and air invasion was already under way.
On 7th April, the same day the British decided, after much hesitation, to mine the Norwegian Leads, Reinhold Runde was on board ship as vehicles from the air intelligence battalion and flak guns were being loaded into the holds.
‘Another ship anchored in front of us was loaded with dismantled plane sections, flak and artillery, also with flak and artillery. The next night, we were instructed that we had to leave the deck, and go below because we were about to sail through sovereign Danish waters between the Danish islands in order to get to the Skagerrak.’
These precautions were necessary because Denmark was still neutral and uninvaded at that juncture, though not of course, for long, and the German ships had to avoid detection by the Danes. They were lucky.
‘Though they prowled around, the Danes didn’t notice that the ships were loaded with war material. Merchant ships often sailed this route and I suppose they assumed that ours were the same. It was only when we had left sovereign Danish waters in the direction of Skagerrak that we were able to stop and get together with the rest of the invasion fleet: thirteen heavy transport ships, torpedo boats and minesweepers. We had to be careful of mines, so one ship sailed behind the other with the mine sweepers and torpedo boats between them.
‘In the early morning hours on 9th April, we saw in front of us, approaching from the west, the heavy cruiser Blücher, which was supposed to be unsinkable, and the small cruiser Emden. We were in the second ship behind the Blücher and we were able to see that there were nurses and heavy flak on the deck. At around 0500 hours, the convoy slowly got under way. Just before we entered Oslo Fjord, all the ships were stopped, and torpedo boats drew up alongside each one and handed the ship’s officers a document roll.’
Runde and his comrades were about to be informed that they were going to occupy Norway as friends, not enemies. The author of this fiction was Adolf Hitler.
‘We were all ordered out on deck. The Führer’s orders were read to us, saying that we had to occupy Norway as a protection for the Norwegians - and ourselves - against Britain and France. In case the Norwegians didn’t under stand this, and tried to resist, they had to be crushed without consideration. And so we sailed on into the Oslo Fjord. The entrance to the fjord was very wide, with Sweden on one side Norway on the other.
‘Then suddenly, the Blücher started firing shells towards the shore, but we couldn’t see exactly where they were aimed. At that moment, some tactical Luftwaffe aircraft roared over our heads in the dawn light, heading towards Norway. All of a sudden, there was an explosion on the Blücher and we saw clouds of smoke.’
What this meant was Britain was coming to the aid of the Norwegians and the Royal Air Force had arrived. The fourth ship behind Runde’s was hit, with devastating consequences for the Germans on board.
‘Before we sailed into Oslo Fjord, three British torpedo planes had come over and bombed a German tanker, the fourth ship behind us. The tanker was hit by torpedoes and sank, leaking its oil over the water. The sea caught fire - we saw it burning - and we heard men screaming and screaming, such horrible screams! It wasn’t possible to save them, that was evident. No-one from the German fleet, neither the navy command nor anyone else, took any notice of the men swimming in the oil or attempted to rescue them. The order was straight ahead, straight ahead, straight ahead.
‘We continued sailing, and we could still hear the heard the Blücher’s guns firing. But clouds of smoke were belching out Blücher was going down. The ship was listing to port and soldiers were jumping off the decks into the sea. Before long, we saw Blücher sinking at the bows and gradually take everything and everyone left on board down into the depths. Soldiers were swimming on the surface, the temperature of the water was below freezing point at the time’.
Blücher had been hit by 11.2 inch and 6-inch guns fired from the shore and although her captain, Heinrich Woldag managed to get her anchored onshore in hopes of repairing her turbines, successive explosions defeated the effort. Blücher had to be abandoned at 0700 hours and at 0723, she capsized and sank. Reinhold Runde watched.
‘We noticed a low throbbing noise in the ship, several throbbing noises. We knew something was wrong and we were all up on the deck. Suddenly, Blücher was firing again. We saw muzzle flashes from her starboard side. She was firing towards the Oslo Fjord, but she had started to list to port. We saw soldiers and also nurses sliding down the deck into the Oslo Fjord, the list was so pronounced that they could no longer hold on and it didn’t take long before we saw that the stern of the Blücher rising up into the air. The bow was pressed downwards.
‘At that moment, German tactical planes roared over our heads and bombed fortifications to our left which turned out to be the Oskarsborg fortifications. We didn’t know it then, but the fortress was armed with torpedo emplacements. The exterior of Oskarsborg was quite badly damaged, we could see that. Several waves of planes flew in but during this raid by German planes the Blücher was sinking more and more, and then disappeared, bow first into Oslo Fjord. It happened quite quickly. It was certainly all observed from both the Swedish and Norwegian shores because shortly afterwards, fishing boats came out and tried to save the men swimming around in the water.
‘More and more of them arrived. Our ships were now stationary, beside the sinking Blücher, waiting for the rescue to begin. No one from our ship took part in the rescue operation, it was all done by civilians, Norwegians and Swedes. The Swedish Navy also came out with ships and searched for survivors. There were rocks sticking out of the water, and some of the people from Blücher tried to cling to them. But they were so slippery that they couldn’t get a hand-hold and slid into the water and drowned. Some were saved in the last minute by the Norwegians and Swedes.’
There was nothing to do now but sail on towards Oslo. But the Blücher was given one last salute by the German ships.
‘After this terrible disaster, all soldiers were assembled on deck, standing to attention as we sailed over the sunken Blücher towards Oslo. It all went smoothly. The Norwegians didn’t attack and we reached Oslo without trouble.’
Meanwhile, the Wehrmacht’s artillery units had gone ashore and fought their way into the Norwegian capital as far as the city’s airport. The Norwegian planes parked there had been destroyed from the air and Luftwaffe bombers had landed on the runway. One of the German pilots was Hajo Hermann, whose war almost ended then and there.
Rapidly flying, the Stuka has rushed downward; the bomb has just been released and will hit the mark in a few seconds.
‘We had been sent to Norway because the British had landed a corps in Bergen and it was our job to attack their landing areas and support ships. When we arrived, we found the airfield was stuffed full with German planes. Then, I spotted one runway that was relatively clear. I flew in - I had a lot of bombs on board - and touched down but then the plane rolled and rolled and rolled. Either the runway was too short or I did it wrong. Anyway, our plane smashed into this narrow path at the end of the strip. My crew leaped out in a tremendous fright, but I stayed sitting in the plane and they screamed, ‘You’re going to explode! You’re going to explode! Get out of there!’ However, my mood was that of a ship’s captain who wanted to go down with his ship. Fortunately, there was no explosion, but it was a very nasty moment for me.’
After Reinhold Runde’s ship had berthed at Oslo, the vehicles were unloaded. The reception the Germans received as they drove through the capital was muted.
‘The people of Oslo stood on both sides of the street and followed the passing convoys with their eyes. No shots were fired, we were able to march safely through. Some of the Norwegians even waved to us. They didn’t seem all that angry and there was no resistance, but their faces were serious. We supposed that the radio stations had been taken over by Quisling who ordered the Norwegians to remain calm.’
From Oslo, the convoy drove to Hamar. Several of the vehicles had crews of ten, all armed with rifles and machine guns. The country was mountainous and the German vehicles proved to be too wide and too high for the narrow roads, so progress was slow. The convoy passed through wooded country and the Germans were fired on by Norwegian soldiers hidden in the trees. No one was hit, Runde remembers, but the Germans prepared to fight back.
‘We got out of our vehicles now and again and set up firing positions. But we hardly saw an adversary, there was snow and ice everywhere, everything was covered, the passes and the roads too. Sometimes we had get out and shovel snow before we could drive on’.
The task assigned to Runde’s unit was to repair telephone lines to airports and command posts. When they reached Trondheim, where the lines had been damaged by the Norwegians, the two German battle cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau were in harbour after participating in the German landings at Narvik. During the War, the British made several attempts to destroy the battle cruisers to stop them preying on Allied convoys in the Atlantic. Gneisenau survived the War, but Scharnhorst was destroyed by naval action in 1943. Three years earlier Rienhold Runde, witnessed an early British attempt to sink the commerce raiders which were such a danger to them.
‘Two days after we arrived in Trondheim, there was a British air raid on the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau. Scharnhorst was slightly damaged by bombs exploding on deck, a gun-barrel was smashed and the decking suffered damage. Three days later, we sailed from Trondheim and visited the two ships. Our job in the signal corps was to inspect the air raid damage and make an official report.’
Runde and the rest of the signal corps moved on to Steinkier, and along the way, witnessed the Luftwaffe and the Royal Air Force in action.
‘Now and again during our journey from Trondheim to Steinkier, British planes flew over Trondheim Fjord and were fought off by German fighters, Some were shot down, and British soldiers who had landed north of the Trondheim fjord were captured down, and were captured by the Germans. They were taken to the fortifications at Trondheim where they were treated as German POW’s according to the provisions of the Geneva Convention.’
Runde remembers ruefully how well these British prisoners were treated compared to their German counterparts.
‘They were sent packets from England. They were allowed to buy food. They had regular postal contact and cards from the International Red Cross. These prisoners even received civilian visitors and had visits from other captured British units. That was all possible for them, but it was denied to us Germans in other countries during the War.’
When the Norwegians finally surrendered, on 9th June 1940, Runde’s unit was in Namsos, which had been evacuated by British forces several weeks earlier, on 3rd May. The Norwegian army was allowed to hand in their weapons, remove their uniforms if they wished to and then went home, or rather they were supposed to go home. Having lost the regular war, many later resorted to irregular warfare and became partisans. Reinhold Runde encountered them.
‘There were Norwegian soldiers up in the mountains. They fired at us and we only saw them as they ran off across the snow and ice amongst the trees. We had to get out of our cars, use them as cover and then fire our rifles. I myself carried the P38 submachine gun. Our cars were quite heavily armoured, a rifle bullet wouldn’t have penetrated them and the Norwegians were firing rifles, rather old-fashioned rifles as we later discovered. They had long barrels and looked like weapons we had seen in museums. I think they came from the First World War. The Norwegians didn’t have modern weapons, like the latest machine-guns. They used water-cooled MGs and they were ineffective.’
By the time the Norwegians surrendered, another fighting front had been opened up by blitzkrieg, this time in western Europe when the Germans invaded Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and France on 10th May 1940. This was the blitzkrieg which obliged the British to finally withdraw their troops from Norway and return home to defend their own country. King Haakon and the Norwegian royal family went with them and spent the rest of the War as exiles in Britain. From there, Haakon, an exemplary monarch provided the inspiration for the Norwegian resistance to the Germans.
The blitzkrieg in the west was a shock, despite the first demonstration in Poland. The shock had an extra edge because the Germans did what many military experts had considered impossible. The Maginot Line had stood as an impregnable barrier on the Franco-German border ever since it was completed in 1935 after five years’ construction. The gap where in ended in the north, at the Belgian frontier, was covered by the Ardennes forest, a plateau up to 500 metres above sea level and so thick with trees that it was considered impassable. For that reason, the Ardennes region was weakly defended. On 10th May, the impregnable barrier was outflanked and the impassable forest was penetrated as the German armour crashed through.
The French, had neglected this region, mainly because they were relying on the massive fortifications of the Maginot Line. The Germans had to contend with little more than a bemused Belgian cavalryman, who peered uncomprehendingly through the trees. Once clear of the Ardennes, the German blitzkrieg surged through the Netherlands and Belgium and within four days, the Dutch had surrendered, followed a fortnight later, on 28th May, by Belgium.
The Germans had devised this strategy, not only as a means of entering western Europe in force and by surprise, but as a feint, designed to draw the British and French northwards, away from their entrenched defensive positions in France. Meanwhile, the Luftwaffe was in action, unleashing devastating bombing raids on key targets in Holland and German paratroopers landed both north and south of the Hague.
An English newspaper reporter was in The Hague when the attack began.
‘Just as dawn was breaking, hundreds of aircraft came over the city and bombs were falling everywhere. The sky seemed to be filled with planes and parachute troops were being dropped in large numbers on several parts of the city. Meanwhile, the bombers concentrated their efforts on the important buildings, including the barracks.
‘When the smoke and dust had subsided, I saw that several buildings, including the prison, had been destroyed. Bombers accompanied by fighters came over in waves of two hundred at a time, some as low as 250 metres above the ground. While I watched, Dutch anti-aircraft guns bagged six large machines. One, a forty-seater troop carrier, burst into flames, struck another and both came down. They destroyed three houses and I saw forty or fifty bodies in the street.
‘At the same time, seaplanes with detachable rubber pontoons, each containing forty men, sailed on the shallow water near the shore. Five hundred men were landed on the beach in this way, wading ashore from the pontoons.
‘Each parachute party numbered about forty, in charge of a sergeant. These men took the town hall, museum and library near the square. A civilian defence corps, armed only with butchers’ knives was formed immediately to counteract the parachutists.’
George Lehrmann’s unit virtually walked in when they were sent across the Dutch-Belgian border.
‘We just marched over Belgium, the Albert canal, to the English Channel. It was no problem. The Albert Canal had been taken by parachute units. They jumped out backwards from gliders. They couldn’t do that carrying rifles, so they had small 25-round machine-guns strapped to their stomachs’.
Driving on into France, the Germans encountered their first considerable obstacle in the River Meuse. The river was reached on the morning of 13th May and the plan was to cross it at three points. To ensure that the crossing was not interrupted, nearby Sedan, sited on the river near the Belgian frontier, was subjected to an intensive bombardment lasting six hours. After this murderous onslaught, Guderian’s engineers crossed the Meuse swiftly, followed by the first of the German infantry.
That same evening, the Germans smashed their way over the river and were on the opposite bank in strength. The French defenders, shattered by the onslaught, were unable to stop them. Both the other crossing were successfully forced, and the defence was in tatters.
The Low Countries and northern France offered ideal tank country, stretching out flat and even for miles on end. The defenders, mainly ill-equipped and elderly reservists, were no match for the surge of blitzkrieg power that overwhelmed them. The Luftwaffe’s dive-bombers were already at work, wreaking wholesale destruction and inspiring widespread terror. But there was more to come. Behind the spearheads extending back from the River Meuse there were twenty-five divisions of supporting infantry.
By 16th May, the southern French defences were gaping wide and it was evident that a potential catastrophe was in the making. The Luftwaffe had command of the air, easily repulsing attempts to bomb German targets. The bombing of Abbeville was typical of the blanket destruction wrought by blitzkrieg from the air. Alan Stuart Roger of the Red Cross organisation saw what happened.
One of the dive bombers came too close to the water when pulling out during an attack on coastal fortifications, whereby it lost the whole undercarriage and the airscrew was slightly bent. In that condition the machine returned in formation to the base airdrome more than 120 km off and landed smoothly on the underside of the fuselage.
‘Abbeville became one vast desolation of smouldering ruins, fires raging and the shattered streets strewn with dead and dying women and children. The Germans bombed it relentlessly, without any thought of military objectives. They dropped high explosive and incendiary bombs, as well as incendiary darts, which shoot about like jumping crackers.
‘I saw a house where a delayed-action bomb, ricocheting from the ground, flew clean through the bedroom in which a man and his wife were asleep. By a thousand one chance, the missile landed harmlessly outside. But wherever there was a jam on the road, the Luftwaffe swooped down, bombing and machine-gunning the processions of fugitives.’
On 21st May, German forces broke through to the Channel coast, capturing Arras, Amiens as well as Abbeville. The French managed to retrieve Arras next day, but their air force was nowhere to be seen. The French had hundreds of aircraft, but they had been removed to safe locations and were unavailable for action. The shattered French armies, literally knocked backwards by the Germans’ blitzkrieg power, attempted to make a hasty retreat from the lowlands but found the roads clogged with panic-stricken refugees. Meanwhile, the twin German spearheads were thrusting on, driving deeper and deeper into France.
Many Germans involved in this helter-skelter advance were exhilarated by it, but not all. War and its ugly sights were still new to many of the younger soldiers and they were emotionally affected by it. Herbert Boehm saw what happened when a French tank was destroyed.
‘A French tank was shot into flames, and the tank commander got out of the burning machine. As he came into view out of the turret, he was shot, killed by one of the bullets flying all around him. No one actually aimed at him, but he was hit just the same. He toppled to the ground, dead. It shocked me, I can tell you. He thought he was going to save himself, but he was killed instead!’
Guderian’s tanks raced from the River Meuse to the sea in an astounding sweep that exemplified blitzkrieg in its purest and most lethally efficient form. Guderian was impatient and the exhilaration of this swift drive to the sea brought out all his impetuosity. At Guderian’s urging, the Panzers frequently covered more than 80 kms. a day, far outstripping the infantry and causing acute alarm among his superiors. Quite often, the mere sight of the thundering tanks eating up the distance was enough to make the opposition move out of the way, and fast. For the Germans, it was like a joy-ride.
Guderian and his tanks were the stuff of which legends were made and legends were rapidly made in France in the summer of 1940. All over the country, even in places far away from the northern battlefield, wild rumours circulated about Fifth Columnists and saboteurs who had betrayed the forces - and the honour - of France and delivered them up into the power of the merciless invaders. Gossips whispered about German paratroops, strangely disguised, and further terrible disasters soon to occur.
These rumours both sprang from and further encouraged the rather defeatist French cast of mind. This attitude had already been evident in the First World War. Twenty years later, the gloom that settled over them as their land was gobbled up by the Germans brought it to the surface. It did not seem to matter now that the French had more troops than the invaders, and even more tanks, or that the best of them, such as the heavily armed Chars and Soumas were formidable weapons of war in their own right. None of this counted where the will to use this military strength was lacking, as it was in France in 1940. To make matters even worse, if that were possible, the French and British Allies were indulging in petty squabbles and inter-service rivalries, weakening even further their will to resist. Rarely, if ever, in war had defenders found themselves in such a dire state of helplessness and disarray.
The French, nevertheless, resisted desperately, even though they were outclassed. George Lehrmann fought against them in the front line:
‘The French fought partly from trenches, but it wasn’t the trench fighting of twenty years before. In 1940, when soldiers moved forward, they went in waves, not lines. The First War was a war of man against man. There was some of that in the Second, but it was much more a war of machines. We were motorised, we had armoured cars. Well, they weren’t really armoured cars, they had just 3 mm of metal. On top we had a 2 cm cannon and machine guns, and men fired from those moving vehicles, too. Of course, the attack took place over quite a wide distance but it wasn’t disproportionately wide, the front line, not like in the First World War. Mostly, we were the ones who attacked. The French fired back of course, but German superiority was too great. The French apparently, hadn’t expected it. We also had larger amounts of weaponry than the French.
‘We had relatively few casualties, and of course, we had marvellous support from the Luftwaffe. Our JU-87 Stukas terrified the French just as they had terrified the Poles in 1939. I suppose that when you’re already tense and anxious, and thinking you’re going to be killed any moment, the screaming of the Stukas is enough to put you over the edge. Many soldiers simply ran away as if banshees were after them.
‘I’ve got to admit, though, that I was frightened, too. Not by the Stukas, of course. They were on our side. It was the whole business of fighting and killing and dying that frightened me. I never trembled so much in my entire life as when we went into the fighting. I sometimes felt I was frozen with fear.
‘We saw terrible things, really terrible. I remember once that we were involved in fighting and were camouflaged under some brushwood when we saw a French plane shot down. The plane spiralled downwards and then suddenly it twisted around and dropped down right onto one of our vehicles. The noise, the flames, the smoke….. in a flash, the vehicle and its crew were gone. It was very hard to see that kind of thing, but there’s always that selfish gratitude you feel that it didn’t happen to you. It might have done, you know. The vehicle that was destroyed was only about 100 metres away.
Original caption: Observer and pilot over Norway
‘We couldn’t do anything. It was too late for help. In a few moments, it was all burned out, just a mass of twisted metal. And the fighting was still going on around us. When that happens, all you can do is keep your head down. First rule in war - when there’s a bang, get down fast, lightning fast; the one who got down fastest had the greatest chance of survival.’
By 20th May, after only ten days, Guderian’s tanks had reached Amiens and the last link between the defenders in the north and the south was severed. The same day, the Germans captured Abbeville, and by 23rd May, all the ports on the English Channel were in their hands. Three days after that, in London, planning for Operation Dynamo, the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force from France, was set in train.
The task could not have been more monumental. What had to be done was to lift 45,000 men from the beaches, jetties and piers of Dunkirk and sail them home to Britain. In the event, the figure, which included French and Belgian soldiers, rose more than eight times over, to 338,000. At this juncture, an extraordinary and still controversial situation had intervened to give the British some hope that they could pull off this extraordinary feat. On 24th May, Adolf Hitler issued the order for Guderian’s tanks to halt at the Dunkirk pocket and allow the Luftwaffe to finish off the British. The SS Liebstandarte Adolf Hitler, of the Waffen-SS, commanded by Sepp Dietrich, were in position on the Aa Canal southeast of Dunkirk. Dietrich ordered his men to ignore Hitler’s order. They captured the Watten Heights on the opposite side at Dunkirk and were told to go into the attack. However, even this élite was unable to interfere with the effect of the ‘Halt’ order. The pause gave the British two days to complete their escape. Even though some of the heat was off, the Germans did not make it easy for them. George Lehrmann, who was there, recalls that Dunkirk was still a place where many soldiers lost their lives and never went home.
‘We arrived at Dunkirk where the English were trying to escape. They took everything that was able to float - big naval ships, small yachts, small boats - and took off. We were able to pick up all the chocolate and cigarettes they had left behind. We stayed in Dunkirk for about thirty-six hours. Our guns were trained on the fleeing soldiers, who couldn’t defend themselves any more, and we fired on them like crazy. I’ve often wondered why we did so. They wanted to get away, so what was it all about? When we’d finished, the Stukas arrived and thundered into the crowds of men on the beaches.’
One of the private shipowners who went to Dunkirk to help in the rescue described the German bombardments:
‘On the afternoon of 30th May, when we got there, the German planes were coming over all the time. German troops couldn’t have been very far away because they opened fire every now and then, and the shells would fall amongst our men. The aircraft came over from a northerly direction, eight or nine in a line, and so low that we could distinguish their markings quite plainly. They were using tracer bullets. Our men took cover and fired back with their rifles.
‘On Saturday 1st June, the Germans started bombing attacks on the ships. At first, we were fairly lucky. Then another wave of bombers came over one after the other in a line, and they hit us. We soon had a very bad list, so we had to abandon ship and take to the boats. We kept the AA gun going all the time and as the ship was going down, our fellows were firing the pom-poms.
‘Unfortunately, most of our boats had been wrecked in the attack and most of us had to take to the water. I swam away and managed to get onto a raft, where several others joined me. The Germans hadn’t done with us yet, for they came back while a tug was taking men off the forecastle. They bombed the tug and all the men had to swim for it and get picked up again. Some climbed onto a wreck, but the Germans saw them and came back and bombed them there, too. There must have been hundreds of planes which kept returning again and again and when they had sunk the ships, they still weren’t satisfied, but would bomb us again after we had been rescued.’
Vice-Admiral Bertram Ramsey, commander of the naval forces from Dover that went to the relief of Dunkirk, was just as graphic.
‘The Germans sent over hordes of bombers, literally hundreds. They made Dunkirk docks a shambles. The whole place was son fire, and the heat was great that no troops could come down to the docks.
‘We had to make alternative arrangements, or else we could not get any men away. The only part of Dunkirk harbour where a ship could go alongside was a narrow pier or breakwater of wooden piles. Eventually, there came something like 250,000 men off this pier, a place never intended in wildest imagination for a ship to go alongside and perform such a task.’
The task was certainly monumental. There were no gangways, and narrow mess tables were put across the planks from the pier to the ships. The soldiers ‘walked the plank’ to safety, mainly in the dark and most of them were so tired that they hardly drag their legs. In one day, 66,000 men were taken off the pier.
The Germans did everything they could to stop the evacuation. First, they mounted heavy batteries commanding the direct route to England passing near Calais. The British diverted to a new route, even though it meant that a 76-mile journey became a voyage of 175 miles. The Germans promptly brought up artillery batteries commanding this second route, and a third had to be found which had never been used before. Not surprisingly, either. The third route was obstructed by sandbanks which had to be swept and marked by buoys before it could be used.
Original caption: He-111 takes on fuel.
On 4th June, Prime Minister Winston Churchill reported to the House of Commons:
‘The Germans attacked on all sides with great strength and fierceness, and their main power, the power of their far more numerous air force, was thrown in to the battle, or else concentrated upon Dunkirk and the beaches.
‘For four or five days, an intense struggle reigned. All their armoured divisions, together with great masses of German infantry and artillery, hurled themselves in vain upon the ever-narrowing, ever-contracting appendix within which the British and French armies fought.
‘Meanwhile, the Royal Navy, with the help of countless merchant seamen, strained every nerve to embark the British and Allied troops. Two hundred and eighty light warships and 650 other vessels were engaged. They had to operate upon the difficult coast, often in adverse weather, under an almost ceaseless hail of bombs, and an increasing concentration of artillery fire.
‘Meanwhile, the Royal Air Force engaged the main strength of the German Luftwaffe and inflicted upon them losses of at least four to one.’
Despite the Luftwaffe, the German E-boats and U-boats out in the Channel, the magnetic mines, and the gunfire from the shore-based batteries which had Dunkirk harbour in range, the evacuation was completed in nine days, by 4th June. The exploit was greeted as if it were a triumph, even though Churchill warned: ‘We must be very careful not to assign to this deliverance the attributes of a victory. Wars are not won by evacuation.’
The French, left to face the Germans alone, fought on for another two weeks but they were unable to contain the might of the blitzkrieg. German forces entered Paris, marching past gaunt, shocked Parisians, some of whom wept openly, on 14th June. Six days later, the French surrendered. Two days after that, the French signed a truce with Nazi Germany, but in the most humiliating circumstances. The signing took place in the same railway carriage in which the French had received the German surrender in 1918. Twenty-two years later, victors and vanquished even used the same table and the same chairs. Now, it was the turn of Britain, the last combat still free to do so, to stand alone against the might of Nazi Germany.
Once the battle of France, the ‘six-week war’ was over, Germans garrisoned in France began to enjoy some of the more hedonistic privileges of a soldier’s life. Hans Lehmann remembers it as ‘a lovely time’.
Original caption: The faithful board mechanic helps his pilot to adjust his parachute. In a few seconds the machine will taxi to the take-off.
‘It was high summer by the time the fighting France ended. Afterwards, we were stationed in different parts of France. We lived in private houses, When we were stationed by the River Loire, there was another river called the Deloire. Nearby was a very peaceful village. It was beautiful, very beautiful, directly beside the water..’
Georg Lehrmann was stationed at Le Mans though, like Lehmann, he had only a limited time to enjoy himself.
‘I was billetted in a beautiful chateau. It was really lovely, the area around Le Mans. There were lots of pretty girls, lots of wine, lots of fun. The sort of life soldiers dream about. It happened so quickly, too. The war in France had lasted only six weeks and then it was finished. Our troops had been good, damned good! But that fool Hitler soon spoiled it all. He wanted too much, didn’t he?’
What Hitler wanted was what he had always wanted. He had said so as long before as 1923, in his Mein Kampf, the book he had written while he was in prison for subversive activities. Mein Kampf was much more than a book. It was a statement of intent and a major theme was lebensraum in the east, living space for the overcrowded German people. Like Kaiser Wilhelm II before him, Hitler coveted the huge resources of Russia and his hatred of communism added extra fuel to his ambitions.
The process of moving east had already started in Poland where the Poles were ‘relocated’ and their lands handed over to new German settlers. More often than not, ‘relocation’ was a euphemism for the concentration camp. Beyond Poland lay the vast expanses of Russia and by August 1940, German divisions were being transferred to Poland in preparation for the opening of a new, eastern, front. The German forces were frequently re-grouped to conceal their numbers and Georg Lehrmann and Hans Lehman were among the many thousands of soldiers who were obliged to leave behind the delights of France and march east.
First, though, Hitler had to secure the southern flank of his invasion forces. To this end, he made treaties with Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania. That was the easy part. All three had right-wing governments that were in tune with Hitler’s own. They were only too pleased to join the Axis, the group of powers first formed with the ‘Pact of Steel’ concluded by Germany and Italy in 1936.
Japan joined the Axis in 1940 and the three Balkan countries, followed by Slovakia and Croatia subsequently enlarged the grouping.
Yugoslavia was all set to belong, too, and on 25th March 1941, the Yugoslav prime ministers and foreign minister signed an agreement with Germany in Vienna on behalf of the pro-German regent, Prince Paul. Riots followed, and two days later, the 17-year old King of Yugoslavia, Peter II, supported a military coup d’état which removed the Prince from power. The agreement with Germany was immediately rescinded. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill commented: ‘The Yugoslav nation has found its soul.’ They also invited their fate.
Hitler, infuriated, decreed that Yugoslavia was to be smashed ‘with merciless brutality, in a lightning operation’. It was another opportunity for blitzkrieg. The Yugoslav capital, Belgrade, was heavily bombed on 6th April 1941 and the German forces swept through the Vardar region in the south. The Royal Yugoslav army was caught in a barely mobilised state, poorly dispersed to contain the onslaught. The result, as gleefully broadcast on German state radio, was inevitable.
‘Some 50,000 men and eight Yugoslav generals have been captured by a single German division. The roads present a picture of a complete military rout. They are strewn with abandoned and broken-down tanks as well as rifles and machine-guns.’
Yugoslav resistance had been vigorous, but there was no doubt about the outcome. Within twelve days, Zagreb, Sarajevo and Skopje had fallen. On 13th April, Belgrade fell and three days later, the Yugoslavs surrendered. the Germans claimed to have captured twenty thousand prisoners and a large number of guns and other war matériel. King Peter, a close relative of the British Royal Family, fled with his government to London.
The rapid defeat and occupation of Yugoslavia left another country still implacably opposed to the Germans and their demands: Greece. Germany’s Italian Allies were supposed to have taken care of the Greeks after their invasion of 28th October 1940, but fanatical Greek resistance impelled them into a humiliating retreat. As his forces floundered, the Italian Duce, Benito Mussolini, appealed to the Germans for help.
The Greeks knew very well that the forces of Nazi Germany, and their appetite for vengeance, made them a very different prospect from the Italians. They, too, called in aid, from Britain. Piraeas, the port of Athens, became a supply centre for the British forces and Hajo Hermann was ordered to lay mines at the entrance to the port to prevent them using it. Hermann’s flight did not go accordingly to plan.
‘We were stationed in Sicily and apart from the mines, I had loaded two bombs onto my plane. This I was actually not allowed to do. I was told to unload them, but I only pretended to do so and flew off with my squadron with the bombs still on board.
‘We flew in low over the bay of Patras over Corinth. First, I dropped mines into the entrance, the rest of the squadron sprinkled their mines down too, and then I spiralled upwards and made a clean run in, to aim at this large ‘tub’ moored at the quayside. We didn’t dive down but flew on a horizontal line, at about 1,000 metres, not very high. The spotlights wove all around us and the flak was shooting quite wildly, but my navigator paid no attention. He looked through his glass and I made corrections according to his instructions until he had released both the ‘forbidden’ bombs.
Original caption: Luftwaffe crewman dons his winter fight suit.
‘I took the plane down to make sure we’d been on target, and then a detonation wave rose up, so enormous that I just hung in the air completely unable to steer. I thought my plane was doomed. You can’t imagine a more violent detonation. Later, I learned that the Royal Navy Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham reported that the harbour was totally destroyed. ‘It was an explosion of atomic dimensions,’ he said.
‘The British couldn’t get into or out of the harbour because this one hit of ours sank 41,000 tonnes of shipping at one blow. How did that happen? It’s very difficult to sink so much tonnage even in a whole year, but what we’d done was hit a transport ship full of ammunition.
‘Everyone in the harbour seemed to be stunned. The flak stopped, the searchlights stopped turning, and I just floated calmly above it all and watched. There were explosions all along the quayside, because bombs that had already been unloaded detonated and flew across the harbour’.
‘But there was one British soldier - I’d really like to find out his name - he was the only one who took up his gun, a 4 cm, and fired at me. He hit one of my engines. I realised that I was never going to get my aircraft back to Sicily, so decided instead to fly to the island of Rhodes on our remaining engine. We had loaded quite a lot of fuel for the return journey, so the plane was heavy and sank lower and lower until we were flying only 50 metres above the sea. All of a sudden, I saw these cliffs sticking up out of the water. I managed to cheat my way past them, and we decided to offload some of the fuel so that we could fly at a more reasonable height.
‘Unfortunately, there was a fault in the system and we couldn’t stop the fuel flowing out. By the time we reached the southern tip of Rhodes, our tanks were on their last drop. There was a layer of high-lying fog and I couldn’t see anywhere to land. We were managing to fly at about 800 metres by this time. I wanted to make radio contact with the airport, but the Italians who were manning it had decamped because the English had bombarded it. We were able to see one of the wrecked Italian planes, a Savoia, still smouldering.
‘The Italians had switched off the electricity supply, but luckily there was a German radio operator who had an emergency unit. He wound it up and gave me bearings. I came down through the clouds, not flying, but gliding, and managed to land. The needle was at zero. We didn’t have a drop of fuel left.’
The German invasion of Greece took place on the same day, 6th April 1941 as the invasion of Yugoslavia. It also proceeded in the same way. Two German corps stormed into northern Greece from Bulgaria, followed on 8th April by the Second Panzer division. This new blitzkrieg soon proved to be unstoppable. The Germans drove speedily towards the south, driving the British forces before them.
The Greeks, meanwhile, had been overwhelmed. The last of their forces, in the west, capitulated on 21st April, leaving the British to confront the Germans alone. There was a last stand at Thermopylae, but the German assaults proved too strong. Australian and New Zealand troops managed to hold the perimeter while the British organised an evacuation to the island of Crete.
Within a day, the Germans had come after them. On 20th May, the skies over Crete suddenly filled with German aircraft and a relentless bombing raid followed. Eyewitnesses reported that the Luftwaffe came from every direction in successive waves. Often, there were more than sixty planes at a time, and they were flying in such close formation that the sky went dark.
The Germans had the sky to themselves. There was no air cover by the Royal Air Force.
The Luftwaffe was carrying men as well as bombs. The Seventh German Fleigerdivision parachuted down, together with an entire field hospital, doctors, orderlies, bed and Red Cross flags. It was the first major airbourne assault in military history. The local Cretan population were waiting for the Germans, and killed every parachutist they could found. The slaughter was such that the Fleigerdivision lost around half its strength. Several of the Germans were dead before they reached the ground.
German control of the air greatly hampered the soldiers on the ground, but had no effect on their will to resist. A Maori sergeant with the New Zealand contingent on Crete later told what it was like.
‘We were unable to move owing to the unremitting bombing and machine gunning from the German dive-bombers, but when the Sun went down, we were able to fight back. We fixed our bayonets and immediately it was dark, we charged, yelling the Haka, our war-cry. Our first obstacle was a solid line of German machine guns, but we quickly overran then and after a great fight lasting until dawn, we killed practically every German who was there. But then, when daylight returned, waves of German airbourne reinforcements began to arrive. Within a few hours, around one hundred and thirty Nazi troop-carriers, escorted by clouds of fighters, had landed and throughout the day, we were attacked by more than two hundred dive-bombers. We sheathed our bayonets and lay hidden in the rocks or in the drains. With the welcome cloak of darkness, we fixed our bayonets and charged and again cut the enemy to pieces. This went on for four days and four nights.’
The parachutists were also coming down in the mountains, and so many of them were killed by Greek soldiers that ‘in the battle area, it was impossible to walk more than three yards without stepping over dead Germans.’
Original caption: Ground mechanic with ammunition belt.
The balance of the struggle for Crete nevertheless inexorably set against the British and they had to be evacuated from the island. About 45,000 had left by the time the campaign came to an end on 27th May. Some 9,000 became prisoners, according to German estimates, and 6,000 were reported either killed or missing. Hitler could now be satisfied at last that he cleared the ground for his projected invasion of Russia. He looked forward to another blitzkrieg victory, but in this he was severely mistaken.
The triumph of blitzkrieg, in Poland, western Europe and the Balkans, had been influenced by the confines of the battlegrounds and the brevity of the campaigns. No battlefront so far assaulted by the German lightning war had been wider than 300 miles and no campaign had lasted more than around two months. The great maw of Russia, where the front was to be six times as wide and space to manoeuvrer or make strategic withdrawals was virtually infinite, was quite another matter.
Heinz Guderian was appalled at the prospect. Guderian was acutely aware that the main guiding principle of blitzkrieg, the concentration of maximum force against a single objective, was going to be undermined, if not completely dissipated. As the German forces advanced into Russia, they would diverge further and further away from one another instead of drawing closer and becoming more concentrated. This would dissipate the power of their attacks and made the quick disorientating punch of blitzkrieg redundant. The nature of the ground in Russia removed the vital asset of mobility and the apparently endless reserves at the disposal of the Red Army meant that they could recoup losses rapidly. None of these adverse conditions had obtained during the halcyon days of blitzkrieg success in 1940 and early 1941.
Almost the only blitzkrieg element left for the Russian campaign was surprise, as Ernst Preuss observed on invasion day.
‘We advanced at the beginning, on the first day of the war, on the 22nd June 1941, when we marched into Russia. It was the longest day of my life. It started at 0500 hours. We had been told that the Russians had attacked us. so off we marched to teach them a lesson. We had no enemy contact, we just advanced and advanced, with the tanks, and that continued into the night with hardly a pause and it wasn’t until the next day that we met the first light resistance.’
Hans Lehmann encountered Russians rather sooner than Preuss but he had no doubt that the invasion was unexpected.
‘We were stationed on the border, everywhere in the woods and so on. And then it began abruptly, into Russia we went. The Russians were stationed close to the border on the other side, and they were caught totally by surprise.’
Luftwaffe paratrooper armed with machine pistol and hand grenade.
Fw-200 Condor bomber and crew shortly before take-off.
A squadron of Fw-200 Condor bombers shortly before take-off.