Blood tears and folly, p.1
Blood, Tears and Folly, page 1
Len Deighton
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BLOOD, TEARS AND FOLLY
An Objective Look at World War II
Contents
Introduction
PART ONE The Battle of the Atlantic 1 Britannia Rules The Waves
2 Days of Wine and Roses
3 Exchanges of Secrets
4 Science Goes to Sea
5 War on the Cathode Tube
PART TWO Hitler Conquers Europe 6 Germany: Unrecognized Power
7 Passchendaele and After
8 France in the Prewar Years
9 An Anti-Hitler Coalition?
10 German Arms Outstretched
11 Retreat
PART THREE The Mediterranean War 12 The War Moves South
13 A Tactician’s Paradise
14 Double Defeat: Greece and Cyrenaica
15 Two Side-Shows
16 Quartermaster’s Nightmare
PART FOUR The War in the Air 17 The Wars Before the War
18 Preparations
19 The Bullets Are Flying
20 Hours of Darkness
21 The Beginning of the End
PART FIVE Barbarossa: The Attack on Russia 22 Fighting in Peacetime
23 The Longest Day of the Year
24 ‘A War of Annihilation’
25 The Last Chance
26 The War for Oil
PART SIX Japan Goes to War 27 Bushido: The Soldier’s Code
28 The Way to War
29 Imperial Forces
30 Attack on Pearl Harbor
31 The Co-Prosperity Sphere
Conclusion: ‘Went The Day Well?’
Acknowledgements
Notes and References
Index
About the Author
Len Deighton was born in 1929 in London. He did his national service in the RAF, went to the Royal College of Art and designed many book jackets, including the original UK edition of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. The enormous success of his first novel, The IPCRESS File (1962), was repeated in a remarkable sequence of books over the following thirty or so years. These varied from historical fiction (Bomber, perhaps his greatest novel) to dystopian alternative fiction (SS-GB) and a number of brilliant non-fiction books on the Second World War (Fighter, Blitzkrieg and Blood, Tears and Folly).
His spy novels chart the twists and turns of Britain and the Cold War in ways which now give them a unique flavour. They preserve a world in which Europe contains many dictatorships, in which the personal can be ruined by the ideological and where the horrors of the Second World War are buried under only a very thin layer of soil. Deighton’s fascination with technology, his sense of humour and his brilliant evocation of time and place make him one of the key British espionage writers, alongside John Buchan, Eric Ambler, Ian Fleming and John Le Carré.
Len Deighton in Penguin Modern Classics
The IPCRESS File
Horse Under Water
Funeral in Berlin
Billion-Dollar Brain
An Expensive Place to Die
Only When I Larf
Bomber
Close-Up
Spy Story
Yesterday’s Spy
Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Spy
SS-GB
XPD
Goodbye, Mickey Mouse
Berlin Game
Mexico Set
London Match
Winter
Spy Hook
Spy Line
Spy Sinker
MAMista
City of Gold
Violent Ward
Faith
Hope
Charity
Short stories
Declarations of War
Non-fiction
Fighter
Blitzkrieg
Blood, Tears and Folly
To your children, and ours
‘Death and sorrow will be the companions of our journey; hardship our garment; constancy and valour our only shield.’
Winston Churchill, addressing the House of Commons, 8 October 1940
Illustrations
FIGURES
1 HMS Dreadnought
2 German U-boat submarine, type VIIC
3 HMS Ajax
4 HMS Exeter
5 German Enigma coding machine
6 British shipping losses in the first year of the war
7 Focke-wulf Fw 200C Condor
8 Short Sunderland flying boat
9 Consolidated Catalina flying boat
10 The German battleship Bismarck
11 The US long-range Liberator, used for convoy escort
12 Comparative ship sizes
13 British Lee-Enfield rifle Mk 111
14 Mercedes and Auto-Union racing cars
15 British Bren light machine-gun
16 British, French and German tanks in use at the start of the war
17 Junkers Ju 52/3m transport aircraft
18 German DFS 230 4.1 glider
19 Heinkel He 111 bomber
20 German Mauser Gewehr 98
21 German MG 34 machine-gun
22 Fairey Swordfish from HMS Illustrious
23 German 8.8mm anti-aircraft/anti-tank gun
24 Heinkel He 280 – the world’s first jet fighter, for which neither Milch nor Udet saw any need
25 British Avro Lancaster bomber
26 Junkers Ju 87 Stuka dive-bomber
27 Supermarine Spitfire and Messerschmitt Bf 109
28 Hawker Hurricane fighter
29 Messerschmitt Bf 110 long-range fighter
30 Dornier Do 17 bomber
31 Junkers Ju 88 bomber
32 The rocket-powered Messerschmitt Me 163 Komet – the fastest aircraft used in the war
33 Germany’s jet-propelled Me 262 – the only jet aircraft to have a significant role in the war
34 Arado 234 ‘Blitz’ bomber (jet)
35 Heinkel 162 ‘Volksjäger’ (jet)
36 Russian Ilyushin 2 Shturmovik
37 Russian T-34 tank
38 Russian machine-pistol PPSh 41
39 Two of the best aircraft of the war the Mitsubishi ‘Claude’ and ‘Zero’ fighters
40 The Japanese aircraft carriers Akagi and Kaga
41 Japanese infantry cyclist
MAPS
1 The pursuit and sinking of the Bismarck
2 North Atlantic convoy escort zones
3 The Maginot Line
4 The invasion of Norway 1940
5 The Westward German armoured offensive
6 German Blitzkrieg and the evacuation of Dunkirk
7 Italy enters the war, June 1940
8 Advance of the Allied XIII Corps along the North African coast, January/February 1941
9 The Mediterranean Theatre 1939-40
10 Battle of Britain – the air battlefield
11 Russian/Japanese battles of 1938-40
12 The expansion of the USSR, 1939-40
13 The ‘buffer states’ between Germany and Russia eliminated by invasions and treaties
14 Russian rail communications
15 Barbarossa: the German Army on the eve of the invasion of the USSR
16 Barbarossa: the first impact
17 German advance towards Moscow, June to December 1941
18 The economic resources of the USSR
19 The German assault on Moscow
20 Petroleum supplies to Britain and Germany 1939
21 World Oil Supplies 1939-45
22 The Japanese assault on Pearl Harbor
23 Japanese invasion routes, and the sinking of Force Z
TABLES
1 Allied shipping losses May–December 1941
2 Relative strengths of the Great Powers in 1939
3 German and Allied casualties, 1940
4 Airmen killed in the First World War
5 Aircraft production 1939–44
6 Average monthly Farenheit temperatures in four Soviet cities
7 Sources of German oil supplies in 1940
8 Japan’s Pearl Harbor carrier attack force
DOCUMENT Guidelines issued for the behaviour of German troops in England as part of the invasion play of 1940 p. 451
The maps and drawings are by Denis Bishop. Permission to reproduce the photographs is acknowledged with thanks to the following sources: Bibliothek fur Zeitgeschichte, Stuttgart (20); Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin (13); E.C.P. Armées, France (5); Getty Images (1, 14, 15); Imperial War Museum, London (8, 9, 10, 11, 16, 17, 19); Robert Hunt Library/Mary Evans (18); SZ Photo/ Mary Evans (2, 3, 6); Ullsteinbild/TopFoto (4, 7, 12).
Introduction
I was lucky to be so early in my studies of the Second World War. Finding participants was not difficult: the eyewitnesses and the men who had done the fighting were mostly still young. The men who had commanded the battles and made the decisions that influenced them were no longer young. My great good fortune was in being able to talk to such senior figures as General Adolf Galland, the Luftwaffe fighter chief, to Major-General Sir Francis de Guingand, the chief of staff to Field Marshal Montgomery, and to General Walther Nehring, who was chief of staff to General Rommel. (General Nehring was kind enough to write an Introduction for my book Blitzkrieg.) I also met with Albert Speer, Hitler’s Minister of Armaments, a remarkable, and usefully frank, source of information about top-level decisions.
When the first edition of this book was ready to go to the printers I sat down with Tony Colwell and Steve Cox, editors who had supported and advised me through th
It is a national characteristic beloved of the British to see themselves as a small cultured island race of peaceful intentions, only roused when faced with bullies, and with a God-given mission to disarm cheats. Rather than subjugating and exploiting poorer people overseas, they prefer the image of emancipating them. English school history books invite us to rally with Henry V to defeat the overwhelming French army at Agincourt, or to join Drake in a leisurely game of bowls before he boards his ship to rout the mighty Armada and thwart its malevolent Roman Catholic king. The British also cherish their heroes when they are losers. The charge of the Light Brigade is seen as an honourable sacrifice rather than a crushing defeat for brave soldiers at the hands of their incompetent commanders. Disdaining technology, Captain Scott arrived second at the South Pole and perished miserably. Such legendary exploits were ingrained in the collective British mind when in 1939, indigent and unprepared, the country went to war and soon was hailing the chaotic Dunkirk evacuation as a triumph.
Delusions are usually rooted in history and all the harder to get rid of when they are institutionalized and seldom subjected to review. But delusions from the past do not beset the British mind alone. The Germans, the Russians, the Japanese and the Americans all have their myths and try to live up to them, often with tragic consequences. Yet Japan and Germany, with educational systems superior to most others in the world, and a generally high regard for science and engineering design, lost the war. Defeat always brings a cold shock of reality, and here was defeat with cold and hunger and a well-clothed and well-fed occupying army as a daily reminder that you must do better. The conquerors sat down and wrote their memoirs and bathed in the warm and rosy glow that only self-satisfaction provides.
Half-finished wartime projects, such as the United Nations, fluid and unsatisfactory frontiers and enforced allegiances suddenly froze as the war ended with the explosion of two atomic bombs. The ever-present threat of widespread nuclear destruction sent the great powers into a sort of hibernation that we called the Cold War. The division of the world into two camps was decided more by the building of walls, secret police and prison camps than by ideology. Expensively educated men and women betrayed their countrymen and, in the name of freedom, gave Stalin an atomic bomb and any other secrets they could lay their hands on. Only after the ice cracked half a century later could the world resume its difficult history.
But not everyone was in hibernation. With the former leaders of Germany, Italy and Japan disposed of as criminals, more criminal leaders came to power in countries far and wide. The Cold War that seemed to hold Europe’s violence in suspense actually exported it to places out of Western sight. The existence of Stalin’s prison camps was denied by those who needed Lenin and Marx as heroes. The massacre of Communists in Indonesia raised fewer headlines than Pol Pot’s year zero in Cambodia, but they were out on the periphery. Newspapers and television did little to counteract the artful management of news at which crooks and tyrants have become adept. Orthodontics and the hair-dryer have become vital to the achievement of political power.
The postwar world saw real threats to the democratic Western ideals for which so many had died. Is the European Community – so rigorously opposed to letting newsmen or the public see its working and decision-making – about to become that faceless bureaucratic machine that Hitler started to build? Is the Pacific already Japan’s co-prosperity sphere? Hasn’t the Muslim world already taken control of a major part of the world’s oil resources, and with the untold and unceasing wealth it brings created something we haven’t seen since the Middle Ages – a confident union of State and Religion?
Britain’s long tradition of greatly overestimating its own strength and skills leads it to underestimate foreign powers. Our Victorian heyday still dominates our national imagination and our island geography has often enabled us to avoid the consequences of grave miscalculations by our leaders. Such good fortune cannot continue indefinitely, and perhaps a more realistic look at recent history can point a way to the future that is not just ‘muddling through’.
In Germany in 1923 runaway inflation produced the chaos in which the Nazis flourished. Today the United States is very close to the position where even the total revenue from income tax will not pay the interest on its National Debt.1 While the Japanese enjoy one of the world’s highest saving rates, Americans are notoriously reluctant to put money into the bank. Furthermore Japan, with a population less than half that of the USA, employs 70,000 more scientists and engineers, uses seven times more industrial robots, and spends over 50 per cent more per capita on non-military research and development.2
Hans Schmitt, who grew up in Nazi Germany, returned to his homeland as an officer of the American army and become professor of history at the University of Virgina, wrote in his memoirs: ‘Germany had taught me that an uncritical view of the national past generated an equally subservient acceptance of the present.’3 It is difficult to understand what happened in the Second World War without taking into account the assumptions and ambitions of its protagonists, and the background from which they emerge. So in each part of this book I shall take the narrative far enough back in time to deal with some of the misconceptions that cloud both our preferred version of the war, and our present-day view of a world that always seems to misunderstand us.
One good reason for looking again at the Second World War is to remind ourselves how badly the world’s leaders performed and how bravely they were supported by their suffering populations. Half a century has passed, and the time has come to sweep away the myths and reveal the no less inspiring gleam of that complex and frightening time in which evil was in the ascendant, goodness diffident, and the British – impetuous, foolish and brave beyond measure – the world’s only hope.
Part One
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THE BATTLE OF THE ATLANTIC
1
Britannia Rules the Waves
For the bread that you eat and the biscuits you nibble,
The sweets that you suck and the joints that you carve,
They are brought to you daily by all us Big Steamers
And if any one hinders our coming you’ll starve!
Rudyard Kipling, ‘Big Steamers’
It is not in human nature to enshrine a poor view of our own performance, to court unnecessary trouble or to wish for poverty. Myths are therefore created to bolster our confidence and wellbeing in a hostile world. They also conceal impending danger. Having temporized in the face of the aggressions of the European dictators, Britain went to war in 1939 without recognizing its declining status and pretending that, with the Empire still intact, the price of freedom would not be bankruptcy.
In 1939 the British saw themselves as a seafaring nation and a great maritime power, but the two do not always go hand in hand. In order to understand the Royal Navy’s difficult role in the Atlantic in the Second World War, it is necessary to return to the past and separate reality from a tangled skein of myth. Later in the book similar brief excursions will give historical perspective on the performance of the army and the air force, both in Britain and in the other main wartime powers.
After the Renaissance it was Portuguese and Spanish sailors who led the great explorations over the far horizons, while the English concentrated upon defending the coastline that had insulated them from the rest of Europe for centuries. By the middle of the sixteenth century Spain and Portugal had established outposts in America, Asia and Africa, and their ships carried warriors, administrators and freight around the globe in 2,000-ton ships made in India from teak and in Cuba from Brazilian hardwoods. But when England’s shores were threatened, small and less mighty vessels made from English oak and imported timber, sailed by skilful, intrepid and often lawless Englishmen, came out to fight. Using fireships, and helped by storms and by the hunger and sickness on the Spanish vessels, Francis Drake and his men decimated the mighty Armada.
