Warlords
The book
As
this extract from the book by Simon Berthon and Joanna Potts opens,
the Lend-Lease Bill has been passed by the US Senate and President Roosevelt
has given a speech in which he forbids any more attempts at appeasement
with Hitler, thus leading Churchill to believe that the US is close
to entering the war. But sources close to the president believe that
Roosevelt is playing with Churchill – boosting his morale while
keeping a certain distance. Meanwhile, Hitler has forced the ageing
regent of Yugoslavia, Prince Paul, to join the Axis …
The heart of conflict 1939-1945
27 March 1941, Berlin. It was a bolt from the blue, an insufferable challenge to his authority. In his office in the Reich Chancellery, Hitler angrily brandished the offending telegram. The nasty surprise he was reading through the spectacles kept firmly hidden from public view threatened his entire strategy in the east.
Humiliating and irritating
At 2am a group of high-ranking Serbian officers in the Yugoslav army, blazing with the patriotic zeal and aggressive nationalism associated with the Führer himself, had launched a lightning coup in Belgrade. Disgusted by Prince Paul's submission to the Nazis and the coerced entry of their country into the Axis, they had arrested the regent and installed in his place his 17-year-old nephew King Peter II.
Their daring operation was both humiliating and infuriating. Hitler had every reason to assume that, with Yugoslavia in the bag, he could exert an easy mastery over the Balkans without having to use force. Now he had an unwelcome diversion, but one that had to be dealt with. He immediately set about planning the destruction of the upstart regime and a ruthless punishment of the Yugoslav nation. 'The Führer does not let himself be messed around in these matters,' Joseph Goebbels observed.
By early afternoon, Hitler had gathered together army and Luftwaffe officers. 'I am determined … to make all preparations to smash Yugoslavia militarily and as a state-form,' he brutally explained. While the coup's leader, General Dusan Simovic, enjoyed his first few hours at the head of the new Yugoslav government, operational orders for the invasion of Yugoslavia – Directive No. 25 – were sent out by General Alfred Jodl.
Spheres of influence
In Moscow Joseph Stalin was issuing proclamations of his own. As dusk settled on the snow-bound Kremlin, street lights flickering feebly on its icy cobbles, the Soviet leader, normally keen to placate Hitler, now decided to use the Yugoslav coup to send him a signal that the Balkans were just as much a Soviet as a German sphere of influence.
The arguments over territory during Vyacheslav Molotov's visit to Berlin back in November still rankled; it was time to remind Germany that the Soviet Union had muscle too. As soon as news of Simovic's coup reached his desk, Stalin announced official Soviet recognition of the new government in Belgrade.
Stalin's impetuous gesture was an extra irritant to Hitler, but also an extra reason to savour the surprise he had lined up for his Soviet collaborator in the early summer. Goebbels, lucid as ever, summed up the Führer's state of mind. 'The problem of Yugoslavia', he noted confidently, 'will not take up too much time ... the big operation then comes later: against R.'
A shot in the arm
In London, as Hitler planned his Balkan bloodbath and Stalin drove one further nail into his own coffin, the Yugoslav coup was a shot in the arm. Churchill was having lunch that day with [US Ambassador] John Winant before giving a speech to the Trades Union Congress. The news of an unexpected pocket of resistance in eastern Europe could only improve the appetite.
'It was breaking all our hearts to see the gallant Serbian and Yugoslav people signing away their souls through weak and cowardly rulers,' he told his fellow diner. 'But I rejoiced when I heard ... that a revolution had taken place.'
Churchill used his speech as a further affirmation of the unequivocal support he now believed Roosevelt was giving him. Winant sat in the audience as guest of honour; nodding in his direction Churchill told the trade unionists that all the president's men 'gave me the definite impression that they would be shot stone dead rather than see this cause let down'.
Rallying cry
That evening, in his second major speech of the day, he told the Conservative Association: 'There is another supreme event more blessed than victories – namely, the rising of the spirit of the great American nation and its ever more intimate association with the common cause.' His words were not only intended to boost British spirits; they were a rallying cry to the president and the supporters of war within his entourage.
The day's events added steel to his words. 'The Yugoslav nation has found its soul,' he informed his evening audience. In Berlin, his speeches were met with anger and derision. 'The old liar,' wrote Goebbels, 'is, of course, on his high horse.' Hitler, already blanching from the Yugoslav affront, allowed himself to be goaded further by Churchill's words. 'The Führer is outraged,' admitted Goebbels.
Uncertain conditions
In the early afternoon, five hours behind London time, President Roosevelt was on the last leg of an Atlantic fishing trip aboard his favourite yacht Potomac, trying to relax despite the buffeting from the choppy Atlantic waters of the Bahamas. A flying boat lumbered into view. On board was the business of Washington DC. As the yacht rolled in the surf, the aeroplane circled closer, taking an age to land in the uncertain conditions.
Although the US Congress had passed the Lend-Lease Bill two weeks before, neither money nor materials could start flowing until the president signed the authorisation to release the necessary funds. While Churchill was talking up the transatlantic friendship, Roosevelt was handed the papers that would release the billions of dollars necessary to keep Britain afloat. The president signed, and the pilot took to the skies again with his valuable cargo. Within hours, the $7,000,000,000 appropriations Bill would pass into law.
'Final and drastic solution'
On 30 March, Hitler summoned his generals for a 2.5-hour lecture in the Reich Chancellery. Yugoslavia was a fly to be quickly swatted; at the same time, the German army would sort out the mess the Italians were making in Greece. After that, the road ahead was clearer than ever.
The Führer continued to express both surprise and anger at Churchill's obstinacy; it was a 'mistake of the British not to take advantage of chances for peace'. However, when Russia was quickly crushed, the prop upon which Churchill was relying would have disappeared, leaving Germany the dominant nation in the world. 'Only the final and drastic solution of all land problems,' he told his audience, 'will enable us to accomplish within two years our tasks in the air and on the oceans.'
After the tactical analysis, it became clear that the seething hatred of 'Jewish Bolshevism' was now foremost in Hitler's mind. 'This is a war of extermination,' he told his generals. 'We must forget the concept of comradeship between soldiers.' Murder was in the air. General Franz Halder described that day as a 'crushing denunciation of Bolshevism'. 'Barbarossa [the operation to invade the USSR]' was not just about land. It was, wrote Halder after the meeting, about a 'clash of ideologies'. 'Communism is a danger for our future,' Hitler explained, and it needed to be totally destroyed.
Back-sliding
The billions of dollars Roosevelt had signed off for Lend-Lease could only help to thwart Hitler if supplies were shipped safely across the Atlantic. As Nazi U-boats cut an ever-mounting swathe through the merchant shipping upon which British survival rested, Roosevelt's more hawkish colleagues pleaded with him to allow American warships to escort the merchant convoys. It was an immediate test of how far Roosevelt was willing to go in risking confrontation with Hitler. He pulled back.
[US Secretary of the Treasury] Henry Morgenthau noted his words at Cabinet on 2 April: 'The president said that public opinion was not yet ready for the United States to convoy ships. This was his whole attitude anyway, that he seemed to be still waiting and not ready to go ahead on “all out aid for England”.' It was the first sign of back-sliding; and not the attitude of a man who intended to give his people the firm lead Churchill had come to assume.
A clever deduction
That weekend, Churchill, blissfully unaware of Roosevelt's retrenchment, was at Ditchley Park. According to [his private secretary] John Colville, he 'spent much of the weekend pacing – or rather tripping – up and down the Great Hall to the sound of the gramophone ... deep in thought'.
While the corridors rang to the tune of Strauss waltzes and brass band anthems, thoughts were germinating in the prime minister's mind. Many months ago he had sensed that Hitler would turn east; now intelligence reports confirmed it. Despite all the rebuffs from Moscow so far, he decided to write his second letter to Stalin.
He told him that a trusted agent – in fact, a decrypt of Nazi Enigma messages – had informed the British of German troop movements that could only herald an invasion of the Soviet Union. He wrote that, on 20 March, just after Hitler had initiated his pact with the now-deposed Yugoslav government, thus protecting his rear in the Balkans, the Germans had begun:
to move three out of the five Panzer Divisions from Romania to southern Poland. The moment they heard of the Serbian revolution this movement was countermanded. Your Excellency will appreciate the significance of these facts.
Churchill was asking Stalin to believe that only Hitler's need to deal with the crisis in Yugoslavia was delaying the build-up of a massive German army on the Soviet border. He knew that Stalin would suspect him of engineering friction between the Soviet Union and Germany and instructed Stafford Cripps [British ambassador to the USSR] not to imply that 'we ourselves required any assistance from the Soviet government or that they would be acting in any interest but their own.' Churchill explained:
What we want them to realise is that Hitler intends to attack them sooner or later. The fact that he is in conflict with us is not in itself sufficient to prevent him from doing so. It is in the Soviet interests to take every possible step to ensure that he does not settle his Balkan problem in the way that he wants.
It was a clever, and correct, deduction, but was there any chance of Stalin fighting Hitler for the sake of General Simovic and his friends?
Bombs on Belgrade
In the early hours of the morning on 6 April 1941, it might have seemed so. Stalin stood beside a delegation from Simovic's new government in the malachite splendour of Catherine Hall deep in the heart of the Kremlin Palace. He bent down to sign the treaty spread out before him. Placing the pen back on the table, he beamed. Celebratory cheers broke out among the assembled ambassadors and politicians as the Soviet–Yugoslav non-aggression pact was cast in ink.
Within hours, the vodka-fuelled congratulations in Moscow were dashed. At 5.15am, with the city still sleeping, the first Nazi bombs fell on Belgrade. The Soviet warlord was defiant. 'Let them come,' he said, 'we've got strong nerves.' It was all froth. Stalin had no intention of fighting.
Last of the Blitzkrieg
Three days later, Berlin was subjected to the Royal Air Force's heaviest bombardment of the war so far. The opera house was flattened and Hitler forced to leave the city. Field headquarters were established aboard his special train Amerika at the mouth of a railway tunnel on the line to Vienna.
But on 13 April, his equilibrium was restored as Wehrmacht soldiers marched into the smoking ruins of Belgrade. The rejoicing became louder with the news that General Erwin Rommel, the Third Reich's most charismatic commander, had encircled Tobruk in the north African desert. In Greece, the British, already routed in Africa and the Balkans, were executing a humiliating lightning retreat from Mount Olympus. Sitting aboard his train at the foot of the Alps Hitler, though he did not know it, was enjoying his final unmitigated triumph, the last of the Blitzkrieg.
'A fine thing'
At the same time, at the Yaroslavsky station in central Moscow, Joseph Stalin was bidding farewell to a new friend. The platform was deserted save the heavy faceless guards and their precious charge, the Japanese foreign minister Yosuke Matsuoka. Stalin had just signed a non-aggression pact with Japan. He was thrilled with his coup and got happily tipsy; a newsreel of the signing shows him beaming with pleasure as he links arms with Matsuoka.
His rear was now protected and he could prepare for the inevitable but, as he saw it, still distant confrontation with Nazism. For Hitler, it was another nuisance; he had harboured every hope that Japan, his ally in the Tripartite Pact, would pose a continuing threat to Russia, tying down Soviet troops in Siberia.
For Stalin the overriding aim still remained to prolong the peace with Hitler by continuing his double game of combining occasional displays of firmness with friendly gestures and scrupulous observance of the Nazi–Soviet pact. As Matsuoka's train pulled out, Stalin walked over to the German military representative in Moscow, Colonel Hans Krebs. Swinging his arm over Krebs' shoulder, Stalin told him: 'We must remain friends and you must now do everything to that end. We will stay friends with you whatever happens.'
Stalin's words were reported back to Berlin. Hitler was delighted: 'This is marvellous and for the moment extremely useful.' Goebbels noted after conversations with his leader: 'It is a fine thing to have power. It seems that Stalin has no desire to make the acquaintance of our German Panzers.'
'Funny party'
Despite the risk of enemy bombing, Churchill was spending this weekend at Chequers in the rolling Buckinghamshire countryside, hosting a dinner for the two Americans, Winant and Averell Harriman [Roosevelt's personal envoy]. 'They must have thought it a funny party,' [Foreign Secretary] Anthony Eden recalled, 'Winston in his rompers [custom-made red velvet pyjamas] in which he had apparently travelled from south Wales.'
The evening had started on a gloomy note with talk of the setbacks in Libya. It ended, wrote John Colville, 'in glad momentous news from the USA'. While Roosevelt had baulked at armed convoys, he now cabled his intention to extend the limits over which American flying boats and warships could patrol the Atlantic. The pace appeared to be quickening in the long-distance roller-coaster ride with the president.
The next morning, while the party prepared to motor back to London, Colville had a quiet word with Harriman. 'Do you not think last night's news from the US might mean war with Germany?' Colville asked expectantly. 'That's what I hope,' Harriman replied.
But Roosevelt's move gave only small extra protection to the shipping lanes between Britain and the United States and was little use against a Hitler who now controlled most of Europe and was threatening the whole of the Middle East, and India beyond.
Entering the dark
On 17 April, the last remnants of formal Yugoslav resistance vanished before Hitler's brutal onslaught. The Nazi dictator celebrated in style with an outdoor concert at his improvised headquarters in the foothills of the Alps. Next to the sidings of his special train, the evening air was filled with the music of triumph and power.
Not one to rest on his laurels, the Führer sent orders for the most devastating attack yet on the heart of Churchill's Britain. Yugoslavia had been punished for her impudence. It was now time for the British people to pay for the bombing raids on Berlin. London woke up on the morning of 21 April to the smoking aftermath of thousands of German incendiaries unleashed by a fleet of 700 Luftwaffe bombers. Safely ensconced at Ditchley Park deep in the Oxfordshire countryside, Churchill mourned yet another battering to British morale. He was entering his darkest period of the war.
Simon Berthon is a distinguished writer and producer of television history. A founding partner of 3BM Television, he has presided over a stream of high-quality historical documentaries including A World in Arms, The Age of Terror and Ten Days to D-Day. His previous book was Allies at War on the relationship between Churchill, Roosevelt and de Gaulle.
Historian Joanna Potts was series researcher on the Channel 4 series Empire.
