Hitler by Norman Stone

Author:Norman Stone
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 1989-06-28T16:00:00+00:00

8

West, South, and East

Hitler had not planned to be master of the West. In January 1941 he remarked, ‘If anyone had told me two years ago that my armies would be standing from Norway to Spain, I’d have declared him insane.’ But, by the end of June 1940, he was in a quandary. He had not wanted this war with the West. He let the British know, and reinforced this with a public speech, that he would make peace on what were, for him, generous terms. The British then were led, not by the vacillating Chamberlain, but by the stout-hearted Churchill. The British cabinet hesitated for a time – for a longer time, in fact, than was known for many years – but decided in the end to go on with the war.

To Hitler, this was incomprehensible. Why should the British use up the last of their imperial energies in fighting a power that did not really threaten them? At a conference on 13 July he remarked that only the United States and Japan would profit from the end of the British Empire; later, when the Japanese captured Singapore, he was in a black mood. For Hitler, as for many Europeans, English ways set the tone for manners, as French ways had done in the eighteenth century. Besides, for many Europeans, England was a power myth, just as, in reverse, Prussia was for many Englishmen, and particularly, Scotsmen.

It was not as if the British could do any damage to Germany. Their blockade was ineffectual, given Germany’s pact with Russia and her control of the continent. Their bomber force was too small and too far away. On the other hand, Germany could not do great harm to the British. At that time, and to some extent later, Great Britain was represented, by British propaganda, as a kind of David standing up to the German Goliath. But the English Channel was an excellent antitank ditch, the Germans had few ships, and the Luftwaffe – again, despite legends – was really too small to effect very much on its own. Why, then, did the British not come to terms? Why did they persist in fighting Germany, throwing away their vast resources and ending up in partnership with Stalin? There was something to be said for Hitler’s point of view in this matter, and a few Englishmen said it. More have said it since. As perspective lengthens, the British war effort may, perhaps, seem to take on the character of a Hollywood epic, in which theatrical attitudes were struck while Americans put up the money and Russians supplied the extras to be shot at; after all, the bulk of the British war effort went into fighting Italians in North Africa or killing half a million German women and children by aerial bombing. But this is to misunderstand the situation of 1940. The British then saw themselves alone, against an all-powerful, monstrous empire. Narrow-minded political calculation went to the winds; Labour, Liberals and Tories united

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