War Stories III (2 page)

 

Molotov and Ribbentrop sign non-aggression treaty in Moscow.

While London and Paris scrambled to accelerate military production and conscription, Hitler engaged in a diplomatic offensive with his sworn enemy to the east—the Soviet Union. On 22 August 1939 foreign ministers Vyacheslav Molotov and Joachim von Ribbentrop signed a secret non-aggression pact in Moscow, effectively dividing Poland in two—giving Hitler free reign east to the Vistula—and a German promise not to intervene if the Soviets annexed the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.

When the sixty-two divisions and 1,300 aircraft of the Nazi war machine invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, it took three full days for Britain, France, Australia, and New Zealand to declare war on Germany. Poland's ill-equipped army fought the
blitzkrieg
—“lightning war,” a term coined by British newspapers—as best they were able, hoping for a rapid Allied response. But the unprepared Poles were no match for the modernized German army, and when Warsaw fell on 27 September, no allied forces were yet fully mobilized. Rather than surrender to Hitler's legions, several hundred thousand Polish troops fled east—only to be captured by the Soviets, who promptly murdered every officer who fell into their hands.

The Führer spent the remainder of the autumn and the winter of 1939–1940 preparing for an expected Franco-British intervention in the west that never came—and arguing with his generals as to how best to capture France. Stalin, believing himself secured from Hitler's voracious territorial appetite by the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, sent his own army into Finland on 30 November 1939, earning nothing more than expulsion from the League of Nations.

Hitler watched the “Winter War” in Finland with great interest. The poor performance of more than a million Soviet troops—fighting fewer than 200,000 Finns—convinced the Führer that Stalin's Red Army was no match for his Wehrmacht. By the time Moscow and Helsinki inked an armistice on 12 March 1940, members of the General Staff in Berlin—instigated by Grand Admiral Erich Raeder—had convinced Hitler that the
Third Reich had to have Norway in order to ensure access from the Baltic into the North Atlantic.

On 9 April 1940 German troops occupied a totally undefended and neutral Denmark—and simultaneously invaded Norway. Though the Wehrmacht quickly captured Oslo, secured their objectives in the south, and forced the royal family to flee, the British Navy fought back tenaciously and succeeded in doing serious damage to the German invasion fleet at Narvik. Only Hitler's long-planned invasion of Holland, Belgium, and France saved the German invaders from the 25,000 or so Norwegian, British, and French troops fighting their way south down the rough Scandinavian coastline.

Hitler called his plan for seizing France—and the rest of northwestern Europe—
Sichelschnitt
: “Sickle Stroke.” It involved three German army groups—120 infantry divisions, ten Panzer divisions with 2,400 tanks, two paratroop divisions, thousands of tracked and wheeled vehicles, more than 2,500 aircraft—and the most important requirement of all, the element of surprise. At 0430 on the morning of 10 May 1940, the “Phony War” ended as the largest mechanized army yet assembled on earth began a slashing assault across the neutral Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg—and into the heart of France. That evening the government of Neville Chamberlain collapsed and Winston Churchill was named prime minister.

Within fourteen days the outnumbered and outgunned British Expeditionary Force and the remnants of the once-proud French First Army Group had been pushed into a pocket along the French Coast—the English Channel to their backs. From 24 May to 6 June, a flotilla of nearly a thousand small boats in “Operation Dynamo” evacuated more than 338,000 Allied troops from the beaches of Dunkirk, carrying them across the cold, choppy waters of the channel to the eastern thumb of Kent, England. On 4 June 1940, as “Dynamo” was coming to a close, a defiant Churchill promised, “We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills—we shall
never
surrender.”

On 10 June, Italy declared war on France and Mussolini dispatched twenty-eight of his divisions across the Alps to invade France from the
south—only to be held in check by four under-strength French divisions. But in the north it was a different story. By 14 June, most French units were simply out of ammunition and Paris, declared an “open city” to spare its destruction, was occupied by German troops. On 16 June, the aged Marshal Philippe Petain—a World War I hero—was appointed prime minister of France. Five days later the old man authorized an armistice—dividing France into an “Occupied Zone” and moving the “sovereign” French government first to Bordeaux and then to Vichy.

The terms of the cease-fire were onerous. Some 90,000 Frenchmen were dead, almost half a million wounded, and nearly two million others became prisoners of the Reich. Across the English Channel, a defiant Winston Churchill, leader of the only democracy left in Europe but Switzerland, told his countrymen to prepare for an invasion—while at the same time trying to persuade America into war.

Americans had done their best to avoid getting drawn into another war in Europe. Following World War I many American politicians and ordinary citizens proudly described themselves as “isolationists.” By the 1930s, most U.S. citizens were overwhelmed with their own concerns. The Great Depression had robbed a great many of them of their farms, homes, businesses, and way of life. Heartbreaking as Nazi and Japanese atrocities sounded, most Americans had to face their own anxieties. Their families and jobs were more important than what was happening on the other side of the Atlantic or Pacific oceans during one of the darkest and bleakest periods of American history.

As Hitler's rise to power threatened stability in Europe, prominent American business and political leaders counseled that whatever happened “over there”—it was not our fight. Robert Wood, the chairman of Sears Roebuck Company, emphasized the consequences and the terrible economic losses that war left in its wake. Most newspapers echoed those sentiments and urged that we remain neutral as war clouds enveloped Europe and Asia.

Curiously, the famous record-setting aviator Charles Lindbergh also promoted isolationism, but at the same time seemed to be courting
Germany and Hitler. Lindbergh's heritage was German, and he held views that some said were anti-Semitic and pro-Nazi. During 1935–39, in his visits to Germany, where he praised German aviation, Lindbergh was presented with a medal from the Nazis. A member of an isolationist movement calling itself “America First,” Lindbergh was also a featured speaker during a neo-Nazi rally of the “German-American
Bund
” when they met at Madison Square Garden in 1941.

Though President Franklin Delano Roosevelt viewed developments in Europe and Asia with growing concern, he was unable to convince Congress not to pass a series of five “Neutrality Acts” between 1935 and 1939.

These laws effectively prohibited the United States government or its citizens from becoming a party to either side in the overseas conflicts by banning the shipment of war materiel and restricting travel abroad by U.S. citizens “except at their own risk.” FDR—who favored opposing German, Japanese, and Italian aggression—walked a tight line. He wanted to soften the country's isolationist position, but at the same time didn't want to alienate Congress by vetoing any of the neutrality bills. He was unwilling to jeopardize legislation that he wanted passed which he believed would help ameliorate the effects of the Depression.

But just weeks after FDR signed the first Neutrality Act in 1935, Hitler's National Socialist Party passed the Nurenburg laws—revoking the citizenship of German Jews. The Nazis then forbade marriage between Jews and “pure-blooded” Germans. Seeing the handwriting on the wall, many Jews living in Germany decided to leave the country. But America, like most other countries, turned them away.

The U.S. had tightened immigration policies some ten years earlier, and lawmakers were unwilling to ease those restrictions—after all, America was still deep within the Depression and many unemployed Americans were afraid that a flood of refugees would make it even harder to find a job. Polls showed that three-fourths of the country opposed raising refugee quotas.

The international response to the Jewish refugee situation was no better. The matter was debated in European capitals, but none volunteered to open the doors to the Jewish refugees. That only encouraged further Nazi
oppression of the Jews in Germany. In 1938 Hitler arrested 17,000 Jews of Polish citizenship—many of whom had been living in Germany—and relocated them in “work camps” on the Polish border after Poland refused to take them back.

In November 1938, violence organized by the Nazis erupted in what became known as
Kristallnacht
—the “night of broken glass”—and over 7,000 Jewish shops and a hundred synagogues and homes were ransacked, robbed, and burned. In the aftermath, more than 25,000 Jews were sent to concentration camps.

In 1939, several hundred Jewish refugees sailed on the liner
St. Louis
from Hamburg for Havana, Cuba. On board were 937 Jews fleeing Nazi persecution after the horror of
Kristallnacht
the previous November. Each passenger of the
St. Louis
carried a valid visa providing for temporary entry into Cuba.

However, as the ship neared Havana, the Cuban government announced that the visas were no longer valid and denied entry to the nearly one thousand passengers. The
St. Louis
then sailed for the United States but the American government—adhering to its strict immigration policy—also denied them entry and even refused to let the ship dock. After weeks of futility and pleas for asylum, the
St. Louis
returned to Europe, docking at Antwerp, where the king and prime minister permitted 200 passengers to enter Belgium. The British, French, and Dutch governments finally agreed to grant temporary asylum for the refugees, but by then the passengers had disembarked at Amsterdam. When the Nazis invaded the Netherlands on 10 May 1940, many of the Jews from the
St
.
Louis
were still there—and found themselves once again in Hitler's clutches. For most, their hapless and hopeless story finally ended in a Nazi death camp as part of Hitler's “Final Solution.”

In 1939, President Roosevelt called Congress into special session to amend the earlier neutrality acts. FDR presented them with a plan he called “cash-and-carry,” which permitted Americans to sell arms and munitions to “democratic countries” able to pay for them in cash and carry them away from American docks in their own ships. Some isolationists in Congress protested
the plan, but the Neutrality Act of 1939 finally allowed Britain and France to buy American weapons and war materiel. It was not until March 1941 that Congress passed the Lend-Lease Act—permitting the president to “sell, transfer title to, exchange, lease, lend, or otherwise dispose of,” war materiel to other governments deemed “vital to the defense of the United States.” FDR was authorized to provide up to $1 billion to England in such aid.

But all of this military aid would come too late for the Dutch, Belgian, British, and French armies that had to face the German onslaught in May 1940. Within days of the Dunkirk evacuation, the president asked for Congress to authorize more funds for America's own national defense—and for the Selective Training and Service Act—the first U.S. peacetime military draft. This bill, considered by isolationist opponents to be “jingoistic,” and too “provocative for a neutral nation,” would eventually make it possible to recruit more than sixteen million Americans—but it had to be reauthorized the following year. Accordingly, the number of infantrymen who were assigned to specific organized U.S. Army units actually
decreased
between mid-1939 and the start of 1940 to a total of just under 50,000 men. It wasn't until 12 August 1941 that the law was amended, authorizing U.S. military conscripts to be sent overseas. It passed the U.S. House of Representatives by a single vote.