Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

Although Britain and France declared war on Germany on September 3rd, it cannot be said that they made war during the next two weeks in which fighting raged in Poland. British airplanes roamed over Germany, dropping leaflets for propaganda purposes, and French patrols ventured into the space between the Maginot Line and the German Westwall, but no support was given to Poland. Although France had three million men under arms and Hitler had left only eight regular divisions on his western border, no attack was made by France. Strict orders were issued to the British Air Force not to bomb any German land forces, and these orders were not modified until April 1940; similar orders by Hitler to the Luftwaffe were maintained for part of this same period. When some British Members of Parliament, led by Amery, put pressure on the government to drop bombs on German munition stores in the Black Forest, the air minister, Sir H. Kingsley Wood, rejected the suggestion with asperity, declaring: “Are you aware it is private property? Why, you will be asking me to bomb Essen next!” Essen was the home of the Krupp munitions factories.

Similar efforts to force the French to take some action against Germany were rejected on the ground that this might irritate the Germans so that they would strike back at the Western Powers. To quiet the English parliamentary group which was demanding action, its leading figure, Winston Churchill, was made first lord of the Admiralty, but the British Navy went into action so slowly that the German “pocket” battleships were able to escape from their ports and from the North Sea out on to the high seas where they could become commerce raiders. Blockade of Germany was established in such a perfunctory fashion that large quantities of French iron ore, as well as other commodities, continued to go to Germany through the neutral Low Countries in return for German coal coming by the same route. These exchanges continued for weeks. On his part Hitler issued orders to his air force not to cross the Western frontier except for reconnaissance, to his navy not to fight the French, and to his submarines not to molest passenger vessels and to treat unarmed merchant ships according to the established rules of international prize law. In open disobedience to these orders, a German submarine sank the liner Athenia , westward bound in the Atlantic, without warning and with a loss of 112 lives, on September 3rd.

As Poland was collapsing without a hand being raised to help it, the Soviet Union was invited by Hitler to invade Poland from the east and occupy the areas which had been granted to it in the Soviet-German agreement of August 23rd. The Russians were eager to move, in order to ensure that the Germans stop as far as possible from the Soviet frontiers, but they were desperately afraid that if they did enter Poland the Western Powers might declare war on Russia in support of their guarantee to Poland and would then wage war against the Soviet Union while not fighting Germany or even while allowing economic and military aid to go to Germany.

Accordingly, the Kremlin held up its invasion of Poland until September 17th. On that day the Polish government petitioned Romania to be allowed to seek refuge in that state. The Soviet Union felt that it could not be accused of aggression against Poland if no Polish government still existed on Polish soil. The Soviet leaders sought to justify their advance into Polish territory with the excuse that they must restore order and provide protection for the Ruthenian and White Russian peoples of eastern Poland. The Soviet and Nazi armies met without incidents. On September 28th a new agreement was made between Molotov and Ribbentrop, dividing Poland. Accordingly, Lithuania was shifted into the Soviet sphere, while in Poland itself the German sphere was extended eastward from the Vistula to the Bug River along the old Curzon Line because Russia wanted to follow the nationality boundary.

The Sitzkrieg, September 1939-May 1940

The period from the end of the Polish campaign to the German attack on Denmark and Norway on April 9, 1940, is frequently called the Sitzkrieg (sitting war) or even the “phony war,” because the Western Powers made no real effort to fight Germany. These Powers were eager to use the slow process of economic blockade as their chief weapon, in order to avoid casualties. So long as he remained in office, Chamberlain was convinced that no military decision could be reached and that Germany could be beaten only by economic measures. Even after the fall of France, the British chiefs of staff declared, “Upon the economic factor depends our only hope of bringing about the downfall of Germany.”

Early in October, Hitler made a tentative offer to negotiate peace with the Western Powers, on the grounds that the cause of the fighting, Poland, no longer existed. This offer was rejected by the Western Powers with the public declaration that they were determined to destroy Hitler’s regime. This meant that the war must continue. The British answer to Hitler’s offer, and possibly the French answer as well, was not based so much on a desire to continue with the war as it was on the belief that Hitler’s rule in Germany was insecure and that the best way to reach peace would be to encourage some anti-Hitler movement within Germany itself. Chamberlain had a passionate personal hatred of Hitler for having destroyed his plans for appeasement. He hoped that a long economic blockade would give rise to such discontent inside Germany that Hitler would be removed and peace made.

GERMAN MOBILIZATION AND THE ALLIED ECONOMIC BLOCKADE

Germany was extremely vulnerable to a blockade, but its effects were indecisive. In spite of some casual threats by Hitler that Germany was prepared for a war of any duration, no plans had been made for a long war, and there was no real effort toward economic mobilization by Germany before 1943. The country’s industrial plant for making armaments was increased only slightly in the five years 1937-1942, so that, contrary to general opinion, Germany was neither armed to the teeth nor fully mobilized in this period.

In each of the four years 1939-1942, Britain’s production of tanks, self-propelled guns, and planes was higher than Germany’s. In the first four months of the war (September-December 1939), for example, England produced 314 tanks, while Germany produced 247. The Germans expected each military campaign to be of such brief duration that no real economic mobilization would be necessary. This policy was successful until Hitler bogged down in Russia in 1941, but, even there, the Führer’s conviction that Russia would collapse after just one more attack delayed economic mobilization for months.

As late as September 1941, Hitler issued an order for a substantial reduction in armaments production, and the counterorder calling for full mobilization of the German economic system was not issued until the last day of that year. Even then the mobilization was never total or anything like it. The captured records of the German War Ministry for the year 1944, the year of the big effort, show that only about 33 percent of Germany’s output in that year went for direct war purposes compared to 40 percent in the United States, and almost 45 percent in Britain. The results of this effort in airplane production can be seen in the fact that Germany produced almost 40,000 aircraft of all kinds in that year 1944, while England produced almost 30,000 and the United States produced over 96,000 military aircraft in the same year.

Germany’s economic mobilization which began in 1942 was to have been carried out by Fritz Todt, the engineer who had been in charge of the construction of the Westwall. Todt, however, was killed in an airplane crash on February 12, 1942. His successor, Albert Speer, was an organizer of great ability, but he had to share his functions with several other offices, including Göring’s Four-Year-Plan organization, and he spent most of his time negotiating agreements to obtain needed resources from these. A Central Planning Board, on which Speer was one of four men, had powers of top allocation of material resources, but no control over labor. On September 2, 1943, Speer’s office was amalgamated with the raw-materials department of the Ministry of Economics to form a Ministry of Armaments and War Production. This new organization obtained control of more and more of the production program without ever obtaining important parts of it. It took eighteen months to get control of naval construction, including submarines and guns (July 1943 to December 1944), while Speer took over production of fighter planes only in March 1944, and of all other planes except “jets” in June 1944. At the same time, more and more war production was getting into the hands of the S.S. because its control of concentration camps gave it the largest available supply of labor. As a result, Speer’s office never had anything like complete control of economic mobilization. It is amazing that Germany could have carried on such a great war effort with such a ramshackle organization of its economic life.