World War II Behind Closed Doors (11 page)

The Soviet authorities' nervousness about the German military presence in this remote part of the Soviet Union continued to manifest itself in many ways. The Germans, for example, were not permitted to establish their own radio contact with base. All their messages had to be passed through the Soviet guard boat that was anchored in the bay. This proved an extremely inefficient method of communication as the Soviets were not used to writing in Latin letters and often made mistakes. As the weeks went on at Base North, a stultifying atmosphere developed. No U-boats, or any other German military vessels, arrived to be repaired or supplied. The base had been designed to service two submarines, but one was sunk before the base was up and running and the second never
had cause to visit – which was perhaps just as well for the Germans since, due to the suspicion and intransigence of the Soviet officials, the supply ships themselves began to run out of supplies.

In mid-April 1940 the Germans were asked to move their base further along the coast to the even more remote Jokanga Bay. Molotov told the German naval attaché in Moscow that the move was necessary because of Soviet fears that Allied aircraft, operating in the wake of the Finnish war, might identify the German ships. When the German liaison officer, Auerbach, visited the new Base North for the first time on 20 May he found his compatriots on the supply ships demoralized. Not only had the promised relief of personnel not taken place but ‘the mood grew worse, essentially because Base North had no apparent aim’.
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Nor were the Soviets sympathetic hosts; on the boat taking him back to Murmansk, Auerbach reported, his Soviet counterpart refused to speak to him. It was all too much for the German, who had a nervous breakdown shortly after his visit.

The officials at the German embassy in Moscow believed that it was faults in the Soviet system of governance that were causing the problems, rather than any direct malice from the Kremlin. The German naval attaché wrote that the ‘naval Commissariat or some other Soviet departments are afraid of the head of government… they don't want to take responsibility [themselves]’.
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Life was grim for the German sailors at Base North. In April 1940 Dr Kampf, doctor on the German supply ship
Phoenicia
, complained in his diary about the ‘Russian provisions which were suitable only to a limited extent – extremely salted fish, mouldy stinking reindeer and beef and rancid Russian butter’.
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The combination of terrible food, immense isolation and the apparent pointlessness of the mission affected the health of the German sailors. On average they each lost more than two stone in weight and were possessed with a ‘never-ending tiredness, which let us sleep for sixteen to eighteen hours a day…. In addition there was gum bleeding caused by scurvy… and another strange symptom…. Many had a constant urge to urinate which let them urinate only drop by drop’.
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‘We feel completely abandoned and lonely’, Dr Kampf wrote on 4 May. ‘The surroundings are not very attractive: flat mountains and snow. No tree. No bush…. We have nearly nothing left to drink…. The atmosphere on board is terrible, there are many disputes. Some have written letters of complaint to the commander-in-chief…’.
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And Kampf's view of the leading Soviet official, expressed in his diary entry of 29 May, is equally uncompromising: ‘The Russian liaison officer is an unusually evil subject, mistrusts and harasses us whenever possible. And he always uses as an excuse “I first have to ask my High Command”. As a lieutenant he gives the impression of a mentally malnourished, disingenuous servant. I am furious’.
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The story of Base North is significant, even though it made little contribution to the German war effort (apart from one ship based here which in April left to assist in the successful German invasion of Norway). It is important because its existence shows the schizophrenic attitude of the Soviets towards assisting the Germans. On the one hand, the Soviets undoubtedly provided the Germans with a military supply base; but on the other, ideologically the Nazis remained a possible enemy. So in effect they were allies, and yet they were potential belligerents. In order to please the Germans, the Soviets had to offer them practical help in their war effort and thus make them more powerful still. No wonder the Soviet officials on the ground were confused.

But while Dr Kampf was committing his views to his diary that May, events were taking place 1700 miles southwest of Base North that would result in a radical change in the balance of the relationship between Germany and the Soviet Union, as well as causing consternation amongst the Western Allies.

THE NAZIS ARE WINNING

Stalin's relationship with the Nazis, in the period immediately before and after the signing of the Non-Aggression Pact, was underpinned by one basic assumption – that any attempted German conquest of
France would be a protracted affair. Hitler would thus be far too occupied in the West to be able to turn his attention on the Soviet Union. But Stalin's assumption turned out to be woefully wrong.

On 10 May 1940, in pursuit of Fall Gelb (Plan Yellow), German forces advanced through the forests of the Ardennes in Belgium towards France. In one of the most dramatic military operations in history, and thanks in part to the dashing exploits of tank commanders such as Guderian and Rommel, German units managed to encircle whole Allied armies. By 16 May, with the fall of Sedan, the road to Paris lay open.

In London, following the disastrous British campaign in Norway, Neville Chamberlain had resigned as Prime Minister to be replaced by Winston Churchill. It thus fell to Churchill to lead Great Britain through one of the lowest points – if not the single lowest point – in the nation's history. In the last days of May, with the Germans on the northern coast of France and hundreds of thousands of Allied troops trapped at Dunkirk, it seemed as if little would shortly be left to defend Great Britain – except the English Channel.

Churchill later wrote in his memoirs: ‘Future generations may deem it noteworthy that the supreme question of whether we would fight on alone never found a place on the War Cabinet agenda’.
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But the truth was not so simple. In fact, in May 1940 the Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, suggested in the War Cabinet that an attempt be made to ask Mussolini to approach Hitler to find out what terms might be on offer. Churchill, according to the War Cabinet minutes of 27 May, went so far as to say that ‘If Herr Hitler was prepared to make peace on the terms of the restoration of German colonies and the overlordship of central Europe, that was something he was prepared to accept, but he rightly thought such an offer most unlikely’.
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Churchill was performing a careful balancing act – he didn't want Halifax to resign, but he didn't want to pursue a negotiated peace either. He argued that, if peace was to be sought with Hitler, then ‘the position would be entirely different when Germany had made an unsuccessful attempt to invade this country’. Churchill
said he believed that Hitler would never let Britain carry on rearming once a peace treaty had been signed and that the country would be ‘completely at his mercy. We should get no worse terms if we went on fighting, even if we were beaten, than were open to us now’. And in response to Halifax's view that there was nothing wrong with ‘trying out the possibilities of mediation’, Churchill stated that ‘nations which went down fighting rose again, but those which surrendered tamely were finished’.

Then, on the evening of 28 May, Churchill went to the House of Commons to talk to his larger Cabinet – twenty-five strong. According to Hugh Dalton, Minister of Economic Warfare, Churchill made no secret of the gravity of the position in which Britain found itself. British troops had been forced to the French coast and would have to be rescued – perhaps a hundred thousand could be taken from the beaches. Churchill then said that ‘I have thought carefully in these last days whether it was part of my duty to consider entering into negotiations with That Man [Hitler]. But it was idle to think that, if we tried to make peace now, we should get better terms than if we fought it out. The Germans would demand our fleet – that would be called disarmament – our naval bases, and much else. We should become a slave state, though a British Government which would be Hitler's puppet would be set up – under Mosley [British fascist leader] or some such person. And where should we be at the end of all that? On the other side we have immense reserves and advantages. And I am convinced that every one of you would rise up and tear me down from my place if I were for one moment to contemplate parley or surrender. If this long island story of ours is to end at last, let it end only when each one of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground’.
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After he had spoken these words, wrote Churchill later, ‘Quite a number seemed to jump up from the table and come running to my chair, shouting and patting me on the back. There is no doubt that had I at this juncture faltered at all in the leading of the nation I should have been hurled out of office. I was sure that every Minister was ready to be killed quite soon, and have all his family and possessions destroyed, rather than give in’.
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It was one of the most decisive moments of the war – perhaps the most decisive. If Churchill had wavered and agreed with Halifax that exploratory discussions about a possible peace could be pursued, it is hard to see how Britain would have continued to stand solidly and squarely against the Nazis. And peace with Britain – no doubt along the emasculating lines that Churchill had predicted – was exactly what Hitler wanted. Indeed, the Führer would ask in bewilderment a number of times during the rest of the war why Britain had not acted ‘rationally’, as he thought, and made peace.

Churchill can rightly be criticized for many of his later actions, but nothing takes away from the power of this one moment, in the House of Commons on 28 May 1940, when this one man gave defiant voice to righteousness, and in the process saved the independence of Great Britain. But what is also significant about this period of crisis – and often overlooked – is that Churchill believed at the time that an absolute precondition of Britain's ability to prosecute the war was the help of America. ‘If this country was left by the United States to its fate’, he wrote to President Roosevelt on 18 May, ‘no one would have the right to blame those then responsible if they made the best terms they could for the surviving inhabitants’.
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While Churchill was trying to rally support for Britain's cause, both at home and across the Atlantic, Stalin learnt with astonishment of the swift capitulation of the French. After news that the Germans had entered Paris reached Moscow on 17 June, he plaintively remarked: ‘Couldn't they put up any resistance at all?’
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Stalin's policy of standing back while Germany and France fought it out on the Western Front now lay shattered before him. Hitler was the master of continental western Europe. Only the British held out against him. And who was to say how long they would last?

Stalin's response to this worrying new development was to redouble Soviet efforts to assist the Nazis. The flow of raw material from the Soviet Union to Germany increased over the following months as he sought to demonstrate to Hitler that the Nazis could
have all they needed from the Soviet Union without the necessity of war. What Stalin didn't know, of course, was the continuing depth and intensity of Hitler's hatred of Communism in general and the Soviet Union in particular. At a meeting with his military commanders on 31 July 1940 at the Berghof, the Führer's ideological conviction fused with practical necessity as he performed an astonishing volte-face and announced that German armed forces must plan for an attack on the Soviet Union.

Hitler's somewhat twisted reasoning went like this: British hopes of victory rested on the fact that the Red Army might one day offer them military assistance. So the elimination of the Soviet Union would mean that Britain would no longer have any reason to carry on fighting. It was, of course, a flawed piece of logic from the first. Britain relied on American assistance to continue fighting, not the fantasy of some eventual Soviet involvement. But the fundamental military assumption behind Hitler's words – that the Soviet Union could be crushed with relative ease – was not questioned by his military commanders. Not least because they had just defeated 3 million French soldiers – members of, in Nazi racial terms, a ‘civilized’ army. What opposition could the ‘Bolshevik hordes’ possibly provide? Then there was the question of timing. Although the Nazis were now in the ascendancy, there was no guarantee that this situation would last indefinitely. ‘We knew that in two years' time’, says Hubert Menzel,
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then a major in the General Operations Department at German army headquarters, ‘that is by the end of 1942, beginning of 1943, the English would be ready, the Americans would be ready, the Russians would be ready too, and then we would have to deal with all three of them at the same time…. We had to try to remove the greatest threat from the East…. At the time it seemed possible’.

Given the subsequent destruction of much of the German army on the Eastern Front, it is easy to read into Hitler's decision to invade the Soviet Union a sense of hubristic zaniness – almost madness. But Major Menzel reminds us that at the time it wasn't perceived that way by many Germans. Yes, Hitler was influenced by ideological considerations, but in addition he
demonstrated to his army commanders that the timing was right to attack the Soviet Union.

Those officers were also aware that this was not the first occasion in their lifetime when Germany had invaded the East. During the First World War the German army had conquered much of Belarus and the Ukraine. Lenin had subsequently been forced to agree at the 1918 Treaty of Brest-Litovsk to accede to German influence over not just the Ukraine and Belarus but also Poland, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. The fact that the defeat of Germany later that year had led to the dismemberment of this hugely advantageous deal only served to imbue the Brest-Litovsk agreement with the rosy glow of nostalgia for the Nazis. If the Germans had conquered the East once in recent memory – and in the process forced the embryo Soviet state to a humiliating peace – why couldn't they do it again?