We’re gonna hang out the washing on the Siegfried Line.
Have you any dirty washing, Mother dear?
An American foreign correspondent asked about the Ardennes. Every staff officer was aware that the forest was unfortified; Hitler knew; Manstein, Guderian, Halder, and Rundstedt knew; and Liddell Hart had known of it for over eleven years. But the American public, the British public, and the French public did not know. A majority were under the impression that the Maginot shielded France from every possible German thrust. At Vincennes an officer in a kepi and flawless uniform of sky blue quoted Pétain—“Elle est impénétrable”—with the proviso that “special dispositions” must be made there. The edges on the enemy side would be protected; some block-houses would be installed. The war was nearly four months old, the Maginot Line had been doubled, but the dispositions were not complete. The American asked why. Because at this point the front would not have any depth, he was told, the enemy would not commit himself there. Finally: “Ce secteur n’est pas dangereux.”139
We’re gonna hang out the washing on the Siegfried Line
Walter Lippmann was received as though he were a head of state; a dozen colonels took him on a tour of the Maginot Line, then accompanied him to Vincennes. Lippmann commented that there was only one thing wrong with the line: it was in the wrong place. The généralissime did not understand. What would happen, the American publicist asked, if the enemy attacked in the north, where the line ended at the Belgian frontier? Gamelin was glad he had asked. He was hoping the Germans would try that. “We’ve got to have an open side because we need a champs de bataille,” he explained. “The Maginot Line will narrow the gap through which they can come, and thus enable us to destroy them more easily.”140
’Cause the washing day is here.
Colonel de Gaulle was a peste. He had been repeatedly referred to the army manual Les instructions pour l’emploi des chars—tanks—which clearly stated that “Combat tanks are machines to accompany the infantry…. In battle, tank units constitute an integral part of the infantry…. Tanks are only supplementary means…. The progress of the infantry and its seizing of objectives are alone decisive.” The role of the tank was to accompany infantry “et non pour combattre en formations indépendantes.” Could anything be clearer? He was worse than the aviators, who at least had the decency to remain silent after General Gamelin had told them: “There is no such thing as the aerial battle. There is only the battle on the ground.” Yet here was de Gaulle, turning up in Montry at general headquarters, where most of the General Staff and staff officers could be found, with another of his reports, this one on les leçons to be learned from the blitzkrieg in Poland. He wrote: “The gasoline engine discredits all our military doctrines, just as it will demolish our fortifications. We have excellent material. We must learn to use it as the Germans have.”141
At present, de Gaulle pointed out, French tanks were dispersed for infantry support. It would be wiser, he submitted, to follow the example of the Germans, forming them in armored divisions as the Wehrmacht had done in its Polish campaign, and, indeed, before the Anschluss. His proposals were rejected by two generals—one of whom predicted that even if Nazi tanks penetrated French lines they would face “la destruction presque complète.” To this snub the high command added mortal injury to the France de Gaulle loved. Despite the vindication of Guderian’s prewar book Achtung, Panzer! in Poland, the French high command decided to sell its tanks abroad. The R-35 was a better tank than any German model. Of the last 500 produced before May 10, 1940, nearly half—235—were sold to Turkey, Yugoslavia, and Rumania, with the result that when the Germans struck only 90 were on the French front. Moreover, while Nazi troops, Stukas, and armored divisions were massing in the Rhineland for their great lunge westward, the generals charged with the defense of French soil gathered representatives of countries not regarded as unfriendly to France and auctioned off 500 artillery pieces, complete with ammunition, and 830 antitank guns—at a time when the French army was desperately short of both weapons.142
The French Ministry of War announced that 100,000 pigeons had been mobilized and housed inside the Maginot Line to carry messages through artillery barrages.
We’re gonna hang our washing on the Siegfried Line—
If the Siegfried Line’s still there!
The brief struggle in Finland had drawn the world’s attention to Scandinavia, a development deplored by the Scandinavians, who, like other neutrals, hoped they would be overlooked until the war was over. Norway’s yearning for obscurity—which was inevitably shared by Denmark, as it was situated between the Norwegians and the Reich—was frustrated by the Royal Navy on Friday, February 16, in an action which thrilled all England, widened the war, increased Churchill’s popularity, and, in its sequel, almost led to his ruin.
Probably Oslo’s desperate attempts to remain a spectator were doomed. A country’s neutrality cannot always be determined by its own government. If it is violated by one warring power, the country is like the ravished maiden in the Nibelungenlied legend who immediately becomes available to all others, and the Germans had been exploiting Norway’s territorial waters since the outbreak of the war. Swedish iron ore from Gällivare was “vital for the German munitions industry,” as Churchill had told the War Cabinet on September 19, and while in summer German ships could transport this ore across the Gulf of Bothnia, between Finland and Sweden, in winter it had to be moved westward to Narvik, a Norwegian port, and then down the length of the Norwegian coast through the Leads, a deep-water channel running parallel to the shore. Germany wasn’t the only country with U-boats; British submarines could have littered the floor of the North Atlantic with the sunken hulks of enemy freighters.143
It hadn’t done so because their captains had remained within Norway’s three-mile limit, and the government in Oslo, fearful of Nazi reprisals, had decided not to protest. If this use of Norwegian territorial waters could not be stopped “by pressure on the Norwegian government,” said Churchill, it would be his duty to propose “the laying of mines” inside Norway’s “territorial waters.” There was precedent for this. The Admiralty had done it in 1917, and had successfully drawn the German ships out beyond the Leads. After the meeting broke up, he sent Pound a minute advising him that the War Cabinet, including Halifax, “appeared strongly to favor this action.” Therefore, he wrote, he wanted Admiralty staff to study the minelaying operation, adding: “Pray let me be continually informed of the progress of this plan, which is of the highest importance in crippling the enemy’s war industry.” A further decision of the War Cabinet would be made “when all is in readiness.”144
Pound had seen to it that all was soon in readiness, but other members of the cabinet had not really shared Churchill’s sense of urgency, and when the project was mooted in Whitehall, the Foreign Office and the Dominions emitted sounds of alarm. After discussion a majority of the War Cabinet had decided that immediate action was unnecessary, and the matter had been set aside. This seemed to be the fate of every imaginative proposal Winston laid before them, and his sense of frustration is evident in a letter to a colleague. His “disquiet,” he wrote, was mainly due to “the awful difficulty which our machinery of war conduct presents to positive action. I see such immense walls of prevention, all building and building, that I wonder whether any plan will have a chance of climbing over them.”145
The issue had remained on Churchill’s mind, however, and had been one of his motives in drafting Operation Catherine. Now in February a flagrant Nazi trespass inside the three-mile limit called for an instant response by the Admiralty. Before Graf Spee’s last battle, the captured crews of the British merchantmen she had sunk had been transferred to her supply ship, the Altmark. Over three hundred of these English seamen had been locked in Altmark’s hold, and they were still there, because after Graf Spee went down the smaller Altmark had escaped from the battered British warships. For nine weeks she had been hiding in the vastness of the South Atlantic; now, runn
ing out of fuel and provisions, with no safe haven elsewhere, she was bringing the British crews home to the Reich for imprisonment. On the morning of February 16 Winston was told that an RAF pilot had sighted her, hugging the Norwegian coast and heading south. Immediately he decided to rescue the men in her hold. Ordering all British warships in the area to “sweep northwards during the day,” he directed them “to arrest Altmark in territorial waters should she be found. This ship is violating neutrality in carrying British prisoners of war to Germany. Surely another cruiser or two should be sent to rummage the Skagerrak tonight? The Altmark must be regarded as an invaluable trophy.”146
That afternoon H.M.S. Cossack, Captain Philip Vian commanding, sighted the German vessel. She fled into Jösing Fjord. Vian blocked the mouth of the fjord and sent in a destroyer with a boarding party. Two Norwegian gunboats intercepted them, and the captain of one of them, the Kjell, arrived by barge on the Cossack. Vian wrote afterward that he told the Norwegian that he “demanded the right to visit and search, asking him to come with me.” The Norwegian officer replied that the Altmark had been searched three times since her entry into Norwegian waters and that “no prisoners had been found. His instructions were to resist entry by force: as I might see, his ships had their torpedo tubes trained on Cossack. Deadlock.”147
Vian signaled the Admiralty for instructions. Churchill had left word that any message concerning Altmark should be sent directly to him. The incident offers an excellent illustration of what General Sir Ian Jacob has called “the fury of his concentration.” On such occasions, Jacob writes: “When his mind was occupied with a particular problem, however detailed, it focused upon it relentlessly. Nobody could turn him aside.” Marder adds: “With a display of energy and his imagination, Churchill sometimes carried his offensive ideas too far…. The Baltic, and increasingly the Norwegian facet, became almost an obsession with him.” There were those in the Foreign Office who thought his reply to Vian was too aggressive; they were the same people who, after his broadcast criticizing neutral countries, had issued a gratuitous statement declaring that the first lord had not represented HMG policy.148
In fact his instructions to Vian were almost flawless—“almost,” because he should have sent them through Admiral Sir Charles Forbes, Vian’s superior. He did phone Halifax and told him what he proposed to do. The foreign secretary hurried over to the Admiralty, where Winston and Pound lectured him on the “Law of Hot Pursuit” at sea. Halifax suggested giving the Norwegian captain an option—taking Altmark to Bergen under joint escort, for an inquiry according to international law. His suggestion was adopted, and then the order was radioed to Cossack. If the Norwegians refused to convoy Altmark to Bergen, Vian was told, he was to “board Altmark, liberate the prisoners, and take possession of the ship.” If a Norwegian vessel interfered she should be warned off, but “if she fires upon you, you should not reply unless the attack is serious, in which case you should defend yourself using no more force than is necessary, and ceasing fire when she desists.”149
That night, as the first lord and the first sea lord sat up in the war room—“in some anxiety,” as Churchill wrote—Vian boarded Kjell and proposed the Halifax option. The Norwegian captain declined; he repeated that the German ship had been searched, that she was unarmed, and that she carried no British prisoners. These were all lies, but as Churchill pointed out, “Every allowance must be made” for the Norwegians, who were “quivering under the German terror and exploiting our forbearance.” Already the Nazis “had sunk 218,000 tons of Scandinavian ships with a loss of 555 Scandinavian lives.” Vian said he was going to board Altmark. He invited the Norwegian officer to join him. The invitation was declined; henceforth he and his sister ship were passive spectators.150
So the Cossack entered the fjord alone, searchlights blazing, knifing through the ice floes until Vian realized that Altmark was under way and attempting to ram him. Luckily the German at the helm was a poor seaman. He ran his vessel aground. Vian forced his way alongside; his crew grappled the two ships together, and the British boarding party sprang across. The Nazi vessel was armed, with two pom-poms and four machine guns. The tars seized those and turned on Altmark’s crew; in a hand-to-hand fight four Germans were killed and five wounded; the others fled ashore or surrendered. No Norwegians had searched the ship. In battened-down storerooms and in empty oil tanks, 299 Britons awaited rescue. The boarding party was flinging open hatches; one of them called, “Are there any English down there?” There was a shouted chorus of “Yes!” and a boarder shouted back, “Well, the navy’s here!” By midnight Vian was clear of the fjord, racing home to England.151
The news reached Admiralty House at 3:00 A.M., and Churchill and Pound were jubilant. Randolph’s wife, Pamela, saw Cossack land the rescued prisoners at Leith, on the Firth of Forth, where doctors, ambulances, press, and photographers awaited them. She wrote her father-in-law: “You must have had a very thrilling & anxious night on Friday. It’s comforting to know we can be ferocious.” In his Downing Street diary, Jock Colville’s Saturday entry began: “There was great excitement at No. 10 over the Altmark affair, news of which reached us early in the morning. It is a perfect conclusion to the victory over the Graf von Spee.” The King sent a congratulatory note to his Admiralty’s first lord, who replied at once: “It is a vy gt encouragement & gratification to me to receive Your Majesty’s most gracious & kindly message…. By none is Your Majesty’s compliment more treasured than by the vy old servant of Your Royal House and of your father & yr grandfather who now subscribes himself / Your Majesty’s faithful & devoted subject / Winston S. Churchill.”152
Arthur Marder speaks for RN professionals when he writes of the Altmark incident: “It was a minor operation of no significance save for its considerable moral effects.” The episode had repercussions, as we shall see, but the casual reference to its impact on the British public reflects the attitude of military professionals. In wartime they are condescending toward civilians, although public opinion, as France was already demonstrating, can determine what kind of war will be fought, and, to a considerable extent, whether it will be won or lost. Blackouts without bombers were merely exasperating; it was after the Altmark that people began to hate. Not all the people—the well-bred still recoiled from the chauvinism without which great victories are impossible. As late as April 26, 1940, Jock Colville saw “a group of bespectacled intellectuals” in Leicester Square’s Bierkeller “remain firmly seated while God Save the King was played. Everybody looked but nobody did anything, which shows that the war has not yet made us lose our sense of proportion or become noisily jingoistic.” The lower classes were less tolerant, and the newspapers fed their wrath. Churchill had found the rescued men “in good health” and “hearty condition,” but Fleet Street rechristened Altmark “The Hell-Ship”; those rescued were encouraged to exaggerate their ordeal, and their stories gained in the retelling. Public opinion was developing genuine hostility toward Nazi Germany. People wanted to believe in atrocities. Even after four of the men saved had appeared on a platform in the East End, looking well-fed and ruddy, a woman in the audience was quoted as saying: “If I saw a German drownding, I wouldn’t save him. Not after that, I couldn’t.”153
Churchill, no hater, used the brief clash in the fjord to build patriotism and confidence in men like Vian and his crew. The House of Commons liked that. On Tuesday, February 20, Harold Nicolson noted: “Winston, when he comes in, is loudly cheered.” Admiral Keyes had been in the war room that night, Nicolson’s diary entry continued, and had told him how “Winston rang up Halifax and said, ‘I propose to violate Norwegian neutrality.’ The message was sent and they waited anxiously in the Admiralty for the result. What a result! A fine show. Winston, when he walks out of the House, catches my eye. He gives one portentous wink.”154
Churchill wanted to squeeze every last drop out of it. The war hadn’t been much of a war thus far. The Germans, he knew, were refitting for an offensive somewhere, and the Allies—who sh
ould have been giving them no rest—remained passive. He had no authority over the other services, but he could make the navy fight. The battle off Montevideo had given England its first real news to cheer about, and on February 15, just one day before the Altmark triumph, he had greeted Exeter as she arrived at Plymouth. Now, on February 23, he gathered the heroes of the River Plate in the great hall of the Guildhall, the focal point for the government of London for over a thousand years. There, beneath the Gothic facade, beneath the four fantastic pinnacles, the exuberant coat-of-arms, and the monuments to Chatham, Nelson, and Wellington, he reminded those present—and the nation beyond—that the brunt of the war thus far had been borne by sailors, nearly three thousand of whom had already been lost in the “hard, unrelenting struggle which goes on night and day.” He said:
The spirit of all our forces serving on salt water has never been more strong and high than now. The warrior heroes of the past may look down, as Nelson’s monument looks down upon us now, without any feeling that the island race has lost its daring or that the examples they set in bygone centuries have faded as the generations have succeeded one another. It was not for nothing that Admiral Harwood, as he instantly at full speed attacked an enemy which might have sunk any one of his ships by a single salvo from its far heavier guns, flew Nelson’s immortal signal.155
He was gathering himself for the final flourish, shoulders hunched, brow lowered, swaying slightly, holding them all in his stern gaze. It wasn’t a Bore War when Churchill spoke of it; it wasn’t squalid or demeaning; it wasn’t, in fact, like modern war at all. Destroying the Nazis and their führer became a noble mission, and by investing it with the aura of heroes like Nelson, men Englishmen had honored since childhood, he made the Union Jack ripple and St. George’s sword gleam. To the action off the Plate, he said, there had recently been added an epilogue, the feat of “the Cossack and her flotilla,” a gallant rescue, “under the nose of the enemy and amid the tangles of one-sided neutrality, of the British captives taken from the sunken German raider…. And to Nelson’s signal of 135 years ago, ‘England expects that every man will do his duty,’ there may now be added last week’s no less proud reply: ‘The Navy is here!’ ”156