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

According to the Finnish foreign minister, V. Tanner, Daladier at this time told the Finnish military attaché in Paris that if Finland stopped fighting Russia, the Western Powers would make peace with Germany. According to the same authority, Anglo-French agents did all they could, up to the final moment, to prevent or to disrupt the Soviet-Finnish peace negotiations, and had made plans to cross Scandinavia, even without permission, and to use any Finnish appeal for an expeditionary force as a weapon to arouse the Scandinavian people to overthrow their own governments. The Swedish prime minister, in return, threatened to fight on the side of Russia against any Entente effort to force a transit. When the Finnish request did not come, Britain, on March 12th, informed Norway and Sweden that it had arrived, and made a formal request for transit across the two countries. This was refused, and Finland made peace the same day.

The Soviet-Finnish Peach Treaty of March 12, 1940 was made at the insistence of the Finnish commander in chief, Baron Mannerheim, although it was much more severe than the Russian demands of October. In addition to the areas in the north and the naval base at hangö, the Soviet aggressors took many of the islands of the Gulf of Finland and the whole of the Karelian Isthmus, including all the shores of Lake Ladoga. These gains made it possible for Russia to bring both official and unofficial pressure on Finland to influence its foreign and domestic policy. To resist this steady pressure, Finland began, in August 1940, secret military conversations with Germany.

The failure of the Anglo-French expeditionary force to reach Finland does not mean that no aid reached the Finns. Germany refused all aid, and intercepted most of Italy’s aid, releasing it again once peace had been made. The Western Powers, however, encouraged volunteers to go and sent much valuable equipment. Early in March, Chamberlain wrote to his sister about Finnish aid as follows: “They began by asking for fighter planes, and we sent all the surplus we could lay hands on. They asked for AA guns, and again we stripped our own imperfectly-armed home defences to help them. They asked for small arms ammunition, and we gave them priority over our own army. They asked for later types of planes, and we sent them 12 Hurricanes, against the will and advice of our Air Staff. They said that men were no good now, but that they would want 30,000 in the spring.”

The Soviet-Finnish treaty of March 12th did not put an end to the Anglo-French projects to attack Russia or to cross Scandinavia. Anger against both the Soviet Union and the Scandinavian countries remained high in Paris and London. The Finnish expeditionary force was kept together in England, where its existence gave a powerful incentive to the German project to invade Norway before Britain did so. On April 5th, only four days before the German attack on Norway, Lord Halifax sent a note to Norway and Sweden threatening these countries with dire, if unstated, consequences at the hands of Britain if they refused to cooperate with the Western Powers in sending aid to Finland “in whatever manner they may see fit” in any future Soviet attack on Finland.

Six days later, two days after Germany’s aggression against Denmark and Norway, General Weygand was ordered to attack the Soviet Union from Syria. This project had been initiated on January 19, 1940, when Daladier ordered General Gamelin and Admiral Jean Darlan to draw up plans to bomb Russia’s Caucasian oil fields from Syria. These plans were submitted on February 22nd but were held up in favor of the Finnish project; on April 11th, a month after the Soviet-Finnish peace, the new French premier, Reynaud, ordered General Weygand to carry out the raid on the Soviet oil wells of the Caucasus as soon as possible. Weygand was unable to do this before the end of June. By that time France had been defeated by Germany, and Britain was in no position to attack any new enemies.

THE GERMAN ATTACK ON DENMARK AND NORWAY, APRIL 1940

Hitler’s orders to attack France through the Netherlands and Belgium were issued on October 9, 1939, and the date of the attack was set for November 8th. This was postponed on November 7th; between that date and May 10th, the order to attack was given and revoked a half-dozen times because of adverse weather conditions and lack of munitions. Each of these order was reported to the West through the Dutch military attaché in Berlin, but, as no attack eventuated, it is probable that faith in this informant declined.

Information also came from other sources. One order to attack was reported to the West by Count Ciano, the Italian foreign minister, but the Italians were dependent on their own spies, since they could get no information from Hitler, and did not know of the date which was finally used on May 10th. In January a German plane with operational orders for the attack made an emergency landing in Belgium; the orders were captured before they could be destroyed completely. This caused great alarm in the West, but no one could be sure if the captured documents were authentic or part of a Nazi false alarm.

In the meantime, from December 1939, onward, plans to invade Norway were prepared at the insistence of the German admirals. These plans were made in cooperation with Major Vidkun Quisling, a former Norwegian minister of war and leader of the insignificant Nazi Party in Norway. Formal orders were issued by Hitler on March 1, 1940 to occupy both Denmark and Norway. Violations of Norwegian neutrality by both sides in the early months of 1940 influenced these plans very little. In February the British Navy intercepted the German prison ship Altmark in Norwegian waters and released about three hundred British sailors who had been captured by the German commerce raider Graf Spee ; on April 7th the British placed a minefield in Norwegian waters to interrupt the flow of Swedish iron ore down the western coast of Norway from Narvik to Germany. But by that time the German operations had begun.

Denmark yielded to a German ultimatum on April 9th as German divisions overran the country; and seaborne forces landed in Copenhagen harbor. The same morning secret German agents inside Norway and troops smuggled into Norwegian harbors in merchant vessels seized Norwegian airfields, radio stations, and docks. They were supported at once by airborne infantry in Oslo and Stavanger and by seaborne forces at Oslo, Trondheim, Bergen, and Narvik. Although German naval losses were large, including three cruisers and eleven destroyers, the operation was a complete success. Oslo was captured in its sleep the first day, and the Luftwaffe had air supremacy over most of Norway by the end of that day.

The Allied expeditionary force which had been prepared for Finland, with some additional forces from France, was committed to Norway in a scattered and piecemeal fashion, chiefly around Trondheim and Narvik. The Trondheim expedition was badly bungled and had to be evacuated to sea on May 1st; the Narvik expedition captured that city on May 27th but began to evacuate, taking the Norwegian royal family with it, a week later. In the operation, British naval losses were heavy, and included the aircraft carrier Glorious .

The Norwegian fiasco brought Britain’s increasingly restive public opinion to the boiling point. In the parliamentary debate of May 7-10, Chamberlain feebly defended his policies, but was subjected to a devastating attack from all sides. The high point was reached when Leopold Amery, repeating Cromwell’s words to the Long Parliament, cried at Chamberlain: “You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say—let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!” In the following vote of confidence Chamberlain was victorious, 281-200, but his nominal majority of 200 had fallen to 81, equivalent to a defeat. The next day, May 9, 1940, the Speaker was very busy preventing the Honorable Members from continuing their attack on Chamberlain. On May 10th, at dawn, the German armies struck westward against the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, and France. Chamberlain resigned, and was replaced by a national government under Winston Churchill.