rise-and-fall-of-the-third-reich-william-shirer-pdf

SITZKRIEG IN THE WEST 571. . . A French attack would have encountered only a German militaryscreen, not a real defense. 747Why then did not the French Army (the first two British divisions were notdeployed until the first week of October), which had overwhelming superiorityover the German forces in the west, attack, as General Gamelin and the Frenchgovernment had promised in writing it would?There were many reasons: the defeatism in the French High Command, thegovernment and the people; the memories of how France had been bled white inthe First World War and a determination not to suffer such slaughter again if itcould be avoided; the realization by mid-September that the Polish armies wereso badly defeated that the Germans would soon be able to move superior forcesto the west and thus probably wipe out any initial French advances; the fear ofGerman superiority in arms and in the air. Indeed, the French government hadinsisted from the start that the British Air Force should not bomb targets inGermany for fear of reprisal on French factories, though an all-out bombing ofthe Ruhr, the industrial heart of the Reich, might well have been disastrous tothe Germans. It was the one great worry of the German generals in September,as many of them later admitted.Fundamentally the answer to the question of why France did not attackGermany in September was probably best stated by Churchill. ”This battle,”he wrote, ”had been lost some years before.” 748 At Munich in 1938; at thetime of the reoccupation of the Rhineland in 1936; the year before when Hitlerproclaimed a conscript army in defiance of Versailles. The price of those sorryAllied failures to act had now to be paid, though it seems to have been thoughtin Paris and London that payment might somehow be evaded by inaction.At sea there was action.The German Navy was not put under such wraps as the Army in the west,and during the first week of hostilities it sank eleven British ships with a totaltonnage of 64,595 tons, which was nearly half the weekly tonnage sunk at thepeak of German submarine warfare in April 1917 when Great Britain had beenbrought to the brink of disaster. British losses tapered off thereafter: 53,561tons the second week, 12,750 the third week and only 4,646 the fourth week –for a total during September of twenty-six ships of 135,552 tons sunk by U-boatsand three ships of 16,488 tons by mines. ∗There was a reason, unknown to the British, for the sharp tapering off. OnSeptember 7, Admiral Raeder had a long conference with Hitler. The Fuehrer,jubilant over his initial victories in Poland and the failure of the French toattack in the west, advised the Navy to go more slowly. France was showing”political and military restraint”; the British were proving ”hesitant.” In viewof this situation it was decided that submarines in the Atlantic would spare∗ Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, disclosed the general figures in the Houseof Commons on September 26. He gives the corrected official figures in his memoirs. He alsotold the House that six or seven U-boats had been sunk, but actually, as he also notes in hisbook, the figure was later learned to be only two.Churchill’s speech was marked by an amusing anecdote in which he told how a U-boatcommander had signaled him personally the position of a British ship he had just sunk andurged that rescue should be sent. ”I was in some doubt to what address I should directa reply,” Churchill said. ”However, he is now in our hands.” But he wasn’t. This writerinterviewed the submarine skipper, Captain Herbert Schultze, in Berlin two days later in abroadcast to America. He produced from his logbook his message to Churchill. (See Churchill,The Gathering Storm, pp. 436-37; Berlin Diary, pp. 225-27.)