The Second World War (15 page)
Chiang Kai-shek feared that the Soviet Union and Japan might come to a secret agreement to carve up China, like the Nazi–Soviet partition of Poland in September. Mao, on the other hand, welcomed the possibility as it would greatly increase his power at the expense of the Nationalists. Chiang was also alarmed when Stalin reduced the amount of military aid he supplied to the Nationalists. And the start of the war in Europe in September meant that there was even less chance of assistance from the British and French.
For the Nationalists, the lack of outside help became increasingly grave, especially as they had lost their major industrial bases and tax revenues. The Japanese invasion had not just created a military threat. Harvests and food supplies had been destroyed. Banditry became even more widespread, with deserters and stragglers roaming as gangs. Tens of millions of refugees were trying to escape westwards, if only to save wives and daughters from the cruelty of Japanese troops. Unsanitary overcrowding in cities led to outbreaks of cholera. Malaria had spread to new regions with the mass movement of population. And typhus, the lice-borne curse of fleeing
troops and refugees, became endemic. Although great efforts were made to improve Chinese medical services, both military and civilian, the few doctors could do little to help refugees, who suffered from ringworm, scabies, trachoma and all the other burdens of poverty exacerbated by severe malnutrition.
Yet, greatly encouraged by their success at Changsha, the Nationalists launched a series of counter-attacks in a ‘winter offensive’ right down the length of central China. They intended to cut the supply lines of exposed Japanese garrisons by impeding river traffic on the Yangtze and severing railways communications. But as soon as the Nationalist attacks began in November, the Japanese invaded the south-western province of Kwangsi with an amphibious landing. On 24 November, they took the city of Nanning and threatened the railway line to French Indochina. The few Nationalist troops in the area were taken by surprise and retreated quickly. Chiang Kai-shek rushed in reinforcements, and the fighting which lasted for two months was savage. The Japanese claimed to have killed 25,000 Chinese in one battle alone. Other Japanese offensives further north seized regions important to the Nationalists for grain supplies and recruitment. They also built up their bomber force in China to raid deep into the Nationalists’ rear areas and batter their new capital of Chungking. The Communists, meanwhile, secretly negotiated a deal with the Japanese in central China under which they would not attack the railways providing the Japanese would leave alone their New Fourth Army in the countryside.
The world situation was very unfavourable to the Nationalists, since Stalin was in an alliance with Germany and warned Chiang Kai-shek off any dealings with Britain and France. The Soviet leader feared that the British as well as the Chinese wanted to manoeuvre him into a war with Japan. In December 1939, during the Winter War against Finland, the Nationalists faced a terrible dilemma when the Soviet Union was faced with expulsion from the League of Nations for its invasion. They did not want to provoke Stalin, yet could not use their veto to save him as that would anger the western powers. In the end, their representative abstained. This angered Moscow without satisfying the British and French. Soviet deliveries of military material dropped significantly and were not restored to their previous level for a year. To put pressure on Stalin to relent, Chiang Kai-shek made noises about pursuing peace talks with the Japanese.
Even so, the Nationalists’ main hope for the future now lay increasingly with the United States, which had started to condemn Japanese aggression and to reinforce its own bases in the Pacific. But Chiang Kai-shek also faced two internal challenges. The Chinese Communist Party under Mao was becoming much more assertive, increasing its hold on territory behind Japanese lines, and claiming that it would defeat the Kuomintang
at the end of the Sino-Japanese War. And on 30 March 1940, the Japanese established Wang Ching-wei’s ‘National Government’ of what was called the Reformed Kuomintang in Nanking. The real Nationalists referred to him simply as ‘
the criminal traitor
’. They were concerned that his regime might be recognized not only by Germany and Italy, Japan’s only European allies, but by other foreign powers as well.
JANUARY–MAY 1940
H
itler had originally wanted his attack on the Low Countries and France to begin in November 1939, as soon as German divisions could be transferred from Poland. Above all he wanted to seize Channel ports and airfields to strike against Britain, which he regarded as his most dangerous enemy. He was in a desperate hurry to achieve a decisive victory in the west before the United States was in a position to intervene.
German generals were uneasy. They believed that the size of the French army might lead to another stalemate as in the First World War. Germany possessed neither the fuel nor the raw materials for an extended campaign. Some were also reluctant to attack neutral Holland and Belgium, but such moralistic qualms–like the few protests over the killing of Polish civilians by the SS–were furiously dismissed by Hitler. He was even angrier when told that the Wehrmacht was dangerously short of
munitions
, especially bombs, and of tanks. Even the brief Polish campaign had exhausted their stocks and emphasized the inadequacy of the Mark I and Mark II tanks.
Hitler blamed the army’s procurement system for the failure and soon brought in Dr Fritz Todt, his construction chief, to run it. And in a characteristic decision, Hitler decided to use up all raw-material reserves ‘
without regard to the future
and at the expense of later war years’. They could be replenished, he argued, as soon as the Wehrmacht captured the coal and steel areas of the Netherlands, Belgium, France and Luxembourg.
Mists and fogs in the late autumn of 1939 had in any case forced Hitler to accept that the Luftwaffe could not provide the vital support needed for his November target date. (It is tantalizing to speculate how differently things might have turned out if Hitler had launched his attack then rather than six months later.) Hitler then ordered plans to be drawn up for an assault on neutral Holland in mid-January 1940. Astonishingly, both the Dutch and Belgians received warnings of this from the ministry of foreign affairs in Rome. This was because many Italians, especially Mussolini’s foreign minister Count Ciano, had been made both nervous and angry by Germany’s rush to war in September. They feared that they would be attacked first in the Mediterranean by the British. In addition, Oberst Hans Oster, an anti-Nazi in the Abwehr (German military intelligence), tipped off the Dutch military attaché in Berlin. Then, on 10 January 1940, a
German liaison plane, which had become lost in thick cloud, crash-landed on Belgian territory. The Luftwaffe staff officer on board, who had a copy of the plans to attack Holland, tried to burn the papers, but Belgian soldiers arrived before they were all destroyed.
Paradoxically, this turn of events would prove to be most unfortunate for the Allies. Assuming that a German invasion was imminent, their formations in north-eastern France destined to defend Belgium were immediately moved to the frontier, thus giving away their own plan. Hitler and the OKW felt obliged to rethink their strategy. The replacement plan would be Generalleutnant Erich von Manstein’s brilliant project of attacking with panzer divisions through the Ardennes, then striking for the Channel behind the backs of the British and French armies due to advance into Belgium. All the postponements lulled the Allied forces languishing on the French frontiers into a false sense of security. Many soldiers, and even planners in the War Office, began to believe that Hitler would never summon up the courage to invade France.
Grossadmiral Raeder, unlike the senior army commanders, was in complete agreement with Hitler’s aggressive strategy. He went even further and urged the Führer to include the invasion of Norway in his plans to give the German navy a flank from which to operate against British shipping. He also used the argument that the northern Norwegian port of Narvik should be seized to secure the supply of Swedish iron ore, so vital for Germany’s war industries. He had brought Vidkun Quisling, the pro-Nazi leader in Norway, to meet Hitler, and Quisling helped persuade the Führer that a German occupation of Norway was essential. The threat of British and French intervention in Norway, as part of a plan to support the Finns, had disturbed him. And if the British established a naval presence in southern Norway, they might cut off the Baltic. Himmler also had his eye on Scandinavia, but as a recruiting ground for his Waffen-SS military formations. Yet Nazi attempts to infiltrate the Scandinavian countries had not been as successful as they had hoped.
The Nazis did not know that Churchill had originally wanted to go much further than just seal off the Baltic. The pugnacious First Lord of the Admiralty had originally wanted to take the war right into the Baltic by sending a surface fleet there, but, fortunately for the Royal Navy, Operation Catherine was thwarted. Churchill also wanted to halt the supply of Swedish ore transported to Germany from the port of Narvik, but Chamberlain and the War Cabinet were firmly against the violation of Norwegian neutrality.
Churchill then took a calculated risk. On 16 February, HMS
Cossack
, a British tribal-class destroyer, intercepted the
Graf Spee
’s supply ship, the
Altmark
, in Norwegian waters to release some British merchant navy
prisoners held on board. The famous cry of the bluejacket boarding party to the prisoners below–‘The Navy’s here!’–thrilled a British public who had been suffering the inconveniences of war with little of its drama. In response, the Kriegsmarine increased its presence at sea. But on 22 February
two German destroyers
were attacked by Heinkel 111s because the Luftwaffe had not been informed in time that they were in the area. The destroyers were hit and struck mines. Both sank.
German warships were then called back to harbour, although for another reason. Hitler issued orders on 1 March to prepare for the invasion of Denmark and Norway, an operation which would require all available surface ships. His decision to attack the two countries alarmed both the German army and the Luftwaffe. They believed that they faced a hard enough problem already with the invasion of France. A diversion in Norway just beforehand might prove disastrous. Göring especially was furious, but mainly out of pique. He felt that he had not been properly consulted first.
On 7 March, Hitler signed the directive. It then seemed to take on a greater urgency, because air reconnaissance reported that the Royal Navy was concentrating its forces at Scapa Flow. This was presumed to be in preparation for a landing on the Norwegian coast. Yet the news a few days later of the Soviet–Finnish accord to end their conflict produced mixed feelings in the German high command. Even Kriegsmarine planners, who had been pressing all along for intervention in Norway, now thought that the pressure was off, since the British and French had no further excuse to land in Scandinavia. But Hitler and others, including Grossadmiral Raeder, felt that preparations were so far advanced that the invasion had to go ahead. A German occupation would also be a very effective way of maintaining pressure on Sweden to maintain its deliveries of iron ore. And Hitler liked the idea of Germany having bases which faced the eastern coastline of Britain and offered access to the northern Atlantic.
The simultaneous invasion of Norway (Weserübung North), with six divisions, and Denmark (Weserübung South), with two divisions and a motorized rifle brigade, was fixed for 9 April. Transport ships escorted by the Kriegsmarine would land their forces at several points, including Narvik, Trondheim and Bergen. The Luftwaffe’s X Fliegerkorps would fly paratroopers and airlanding units to other places, especially Oslo. Copenhagen and seven other key towns in Denmark would be attacked by land and from the sea. The OKW suspected that they were in a race for Norway against the British, but they were in fact comfortably ahead.
Chamberlain, unaware of German plans, had stood down the Anglo-French expeditionary force for Norway and Finland after the Soviet– Finnish pact was signed. This was against the advice of the chief of the
imperial general staff, General Sir Edmund Ironside. Chamberlain, who dreaded extending the war to neutral Scandinavia, just hoped that Germany and the Soviet Union would now drift apart. But Allied inaction and pious hopes that they could conduct the war according to League of Nations rules were unlikely to impress anyone.
Daladier, when still French prime minister, advocated a much more forceful strategy, providing it kept any fighting away from France. As well as bombing the Baku and mid-Caucasian oilfields, an idea which horrified Chamberlain, Daladier also wanted to occupy the mining area of Petsamo in northern Finland near the Soviet naval base of Murmansk. In addition, he argued strongly for landings on the Norwegian coast and complete control of the North Sea to prevent Swedish iron ore from reaching Germany. The British, however, suspected that he wanted to divert the war to Scandinavia to reduce the chances of a German attack on France. They believed this partly because Daladier obstinately opposed the British plan to block shipping on the Rhine by dropping mines. In any case, Daladier was forced to resign as prime minister on 20 March. Paul Reynaud took over and in the reshuffle Daladier became minister for war.