London is Bombed. Chapter One: Hitler's "Allies," Churchill's Defenses Defy Führer.
The Führer's allies acted as though they could think for themselves. That was not permitted, but difficult to contain. London was dug in, as best it could be, for a bomb attack. One was coming.
This Episode: As the summer of 1940 went on and Adolf Hitler worried over what was to be done with England and its truculent Prime Minister, his attention was constantly drawn away from that issue to the way his three great “allies” — Franco, Mussolini, and Stalin — were engaging in truculence of their own. If he were not so distracted, he might have understood that Göting’s destruction of Hugh Dowding’s landing fields, and of Lord Beaverbrook’s airplane factories, had England’s Fighter Command on the verge of collapse. But as it happened, he sent Göring to London with all his bombers and opened an attack of “target terror” that would change everything. Everything.
This Chapter: Hitler’s treaty with Stalin in 1939 enabled the Nazi destruction of Poland that brought on Europe’s second Great War. As the Führer next went west, Stalin played games with the treaty’s secret protocols and nibbled at Hitler’s holdings in the east. Franco in Spain, aloft with himself, countered Hitler’s offer of joint operations against Gibraltar and Portugal by saying he would do it himself in exchange for French Morocco. And Mussolini said he intended to seize the Suez Canal and use it as a launching pad for an attack on Greece. Hitler was sick of all the talking of this “diplomacy.” He wanted to kill a lot of people and he chose the population of London as his next meal. They would turn out to be a very tough chew.
Contents: Here are the five chapters of “London is Bombed” from “Seeking the Hinge” with their dates of publication and their reading times.
Chapter One: Hitler’s “Allies,” Churchill’s Defenses Defy Führer. Monday, April 28
Chapter Two: 1,300 Planes Launched on London. Tuesday, April 29
Chapter Three: In the Words of the Pilots. Wednesday, April 30.
Chapter Four: Revenge! Thursday, May 1.
Chapter Five: Consequences. Friday, May 2.
Chapter One: Hitler's "Allies," Churchill's Defenses Defy Führer.
Reading time: thirteen minutes
When the parades disassembled and the bands stored their instruments, Hitler’s summer became complicated by events that went beyond Churchill’s truculence. As he took his attention away from the glorious defeat of the European countries to the west, and began to examine options that would be his when England surrendered, he met new evidence that his primary allies — Franco, Mussolini, and Stalin — had ambitions of their own. And some of the smaller, unconquered puppets to the east behaved as though they were entitled to think for themselves.
The alliance with Russia the previous year defined “spheres of interest” in the Baltic states of Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania, and in the southeastern Balkans, that portended friction at the margins. The three Baltic nations were in Stalin’s sphere, with the exception of northern Lithuania. Where that nation, the only one of the three that bordered Germany, reached to the sea the land that reached the sea was in Hitler’s sphere. In the Balkans, Hungary and Yugoslavia were in Germany’s sphere, and Rumania was in Russia’s. To forestall conflicts, a “Secret Additional Protocol” stipulated that conversations leading to a “friendly understanding” would be held before either party would take an action in its sphere, the wish as father to the thought.
Stalin ignored that in November. He declared war on Finland, which was his according to the protocols, but the action defied the requirement for advance discussion. He knew the Führer was busy enslaving Poland and was also suddenly confronted with the Baltic Sea blockade of Britain and France that forced his hand in Denmark and Norway, so he thought Why not? Hitler swallowed that bitter pill, which Stalin eased down his throat with oily lies about Finland’s provocations. To keep Hitler off balance, Stalin offered profuse emotional support when Germany invaded Norway and Denmark in April, and more of the same in May when they moved their great army all the way to the English Channel. When the successes came, he congratulated the Führer, but on the occasion of the signing of the Armistice he informed the Reich’s ambassador that “unforeseen circumstances” required him to occupy the three Baltic states and “encourage” them to hold elections that would result, he hoped and expected, in their people asking for inclusion in the union of Soviet states. When that occurred, there would no longer be a need for Germany to maintain legations and consulates in the three capital cities, and he knew the Führer would be pleased to have that diplomatic burden lifted. He was not. And by the way if the people of northern Lithuania who could frolic on the Baltic shores voted to join the USSR that would mean their relationship with Nazi Germany would be “problematic.”
Also, Stalin had felt it necessary to occupy the provinces of Bucovina and Bessarabia on the Black Sea coast of Rumania to “assure” that the oil and other resources of that great state would not fall into the hands of the British. At the same time, Stalin went to great diplomatic lengths to make clear that he was, and would remain, Germany’s “steadfast ally.”
The governments of Hungary and Bulgaria responded to that, on their own, by deciding they would secure Rumania from the Russian bear. Hungary suggested to Germany they might be rewarded for this with the Rumanian province of Transylvania, which had been taken from them after the first war. Hitler sent Ribbentrop to tell them they owed their very existence to him and they would do nothing of the kind. Ribbentrop presented the Foreign Ministers of the two countries, along with their counterpart from Rumania, with a map of what they would get, and what they would lose, when Hitler took his own action. The Rumanian Foreign Minister fainted dead away at the table when he saw the map. When he awoke, he complained that he was losing part of Transylvania in the north, which Hungary would protect until Hitler thought otherwise, and Dobrudja in the south to Bulgaria, and yet had done nothing to deserve all this but surrender Bucovina and Bessarabia in the east to Russia’s seizure. When Stalin heard of this, and of the news that Hitler was planning to send troops through Finland to reinforce his army in Norway, he was furious and asked why the agreement for consultation had been ignored. And so it went in the east.
Hitler met with Franco, who was now calling himself the Caudillo, meaning Chieftain, to discuss a joint operation with Spain against Gibraltar. Franco said he would do it on his own if Hitler would provide the necessary armaments. He would also claim it for his own and, by the way, he wanted the rights to French Morocco. Hitler raised the possibility of placing troops on Spain’s border with Portugal to force their capitulation, or to seize the nation if it wouldn’t. The Caudillo said he could do that without Hitler’s help, and just might. The Führer met with Mussolini on the way home and told the Duce he would rather have teeth pulled than spend another hour with the Caudillo. Mussolini was sympathetic, but said he was moving his forces from Abyssinia through Somaliland where they would proceed north through Egypt to meet up with another 100,000 he had landed in Libya in order to seize the Suez Canal. And, by the way, he was planning to invade Greece by way of conquered Albania. He told Ciano, his son-in-law and Foreign Minister, that this was his way of repaying Hitler for always presenting him with faits accompli. Two could play that game.
Hitler had his eye on an invasion of Russia and was slow coming to an appreciation of the value of controlling the Suez. His naval commander, Admiral Raeder, made the case that seizure of the canal, along with Gibraltar, would turn the Mediterranean into a lake under Axis control. Those steps, Raeder argued, would make the ground invasion of Russia unnecessary, but Hitler’s thesis for the establishment of the Thousand Year Reich required the conquest of Russia and not its isolation. And, he told his High Command, he wanted to have it happen in his lifetime and he was not getting any younger.
All the diplomatic contentiousness was getting on Adolf Hitler’s nerves. He wanted to unleash his forces to kill a lot of people.
*
Churchill wasn’t confused about either Gibraltar or the Suez. He trusted Lord Gort to hold the Gibraltar rock, but when the Italian forces advanced through the desert with ease, he was annoyed. He got word to his desert commander Archibald Wavell that “the losses sustained are not compatible with resolute resistance.” Wavell responded with “Butchery is not the mark of a good tactician.” Churchill took offense and lost confidence in Wavell for the same kind of obduracy that he found charming in Gort. Wavell had a plan for dealing with the Italian forces and he shared it with Eden, his superior officer. Eden told the Prime Minister the plan was conditional upon the Italian desert forces behaving as they usually did, pausing at great length and comfort for nourishment and wine after an insignificant advance. Wavell would seize them in well-fed sleep. Churchill liked the conception and told Eden as soon as the threat of invasion was diminished he wanted to dispatch 70,000 troops and half his tanks to the Egyptian desert to join the 40,000 British forces already in the theater. They would have to be sent by way of the Cape of Good Hope since a force of that size would not be safe crossing the Mediterranean. It would take close to two months, but “better late than never,” he told Eden. “It’s going to be a long war.”
Beaverbrook had managed to manufacture and scavenge more planes that summer than the Reich. But Göring’s relentless assaults on his factories were taking a toll. In the last week of August the RAF lost 214 fighters and 138 bombers, more than the Beaver could produce. It was not in his nature to suffer in silence, so in a memo to Churchill of September 2 he wrote, “No one knows the trouble I’ve seen.” Winston wrote, “I do,” in the margin and sent it back to him.
Fighter Command lost 230 pilots in those weeks, half dead and half hospitalized. Five landing fields in the southeast were so badly damaged they were shut down, and seven sector stations were so shattered that the entire communications network was hanging by a thread. One or two more body blows and they would be unable to respond in the air. If that were to happen, the island might not survive an invasion.
*
By September, London was an inviting target for bombs dropped from above, but from no other way. The city’s inland geography made it difficult for ground assault. The people couldn’t flee if they wanted to, and they didn’t want to. They were spoiling for a fight. With the full conversion of the nation’s industrial resources to armament production, the army had returned to formidable strength. The island’s watery surround, the onset of the sea’s seasonal churn, and the great British Navy made it dangerous for the flat-bottomed barges that would be required for the transport of an armored infantry attack. But to airplanes coming from the Channel bases of France and Belgium and encountering a weakened RAF, London was a ripened plum.
A short cross-Channel flight would easily find the wide estuary of the Thames, where the great river led thirty miles west to London sprawling over 750 square miles. It would be harder to miss than to hit. The river’s banks from the Channel to the city were lined left and right with industrial and military installations, but Hitler’s goal beginning that Saturday afternoon, September 7, 1940, was to bring England to its begging knees by crushing the resistant will of the people. The mission sought human meat in its densest clusters.
The first target of preference for arriving bombers would come at the misnamed Isle of Dogs, which was in fact a peninsula penetrating the Thames from the north, marking the serious opening of the wharves, docks, and warehouses of the mercantile trade. The great island nation sustained itself with imports — food most critically, but not only — and the heavy work of the wharves was handled by hard Cockneys whose harder homes and families were nearby in London’s East End. It was a vast slum, inviting for bombers on the way in to the city, and for their undropped bombs on the way out.
Just ahead, on the right, the northern shore, Hitler’s planes would pass over the financial center, London City, and the Bank of England, guided by the great navigational lure of St. Paul’s Cathedral with its dome and tall spire. The publishing center of Fleet Street came next. Bombs dropped there would reveal the unexpected combustibility of great piles of paper and vats of bindery glue. To the left, having dealt with God, mammon, and printed pages, the flight crews would see the Thames’s sharp bend to the south. On the river’s western bank at the bend was the government center — Parliament, Downing Street, the Horse Guards Parade, and the War Offices — and then Westminster, the Abbey, St. James Park, and Buckingham Palace, closely surrounded by the telephone and postal exchanges, six railroad stations, Piccadilly Circus, hotels, embassies, museums, and other treasures. To the west was residential affluence, to the north and south neighborhoods of the middle classes. While the buildings of London were mostly faced with brick and stone, their wooden skeletons and roofs were kindling.
The city had burned once before. In 1666, a fire that started in a bakery raged throughout the city for five days. From that experience, the city’s fire defenses had risen to excellence by any standards other than those they would now encounter. The London Fire Brigade had 1,500 professionals with 150 fire engines and ladder trucks, supported by 25,000 volunteers, including 5,000 women, of the Auxiliary Fire Service. The task of the Auxiliary was to use a fleet of 3,000 four-wheeled devices towed by civilian vehicles that would draw water from the Thames and pump it through 87 miles of hose that reached 31,439 hydrants.
His Majesty’s Government had deployed its anti-aircraft guns — “AA” guns to the military, “cannons” to Churchill — to protect factories and RAF landing fields, leaving fewer than one hundred to protect the city, and their range was limited to 12,000 feet. They were augmented with huge barrage balloons that floated from 5,000 to 10,000 feet, tethered at ground level and laced with connecting nets. They impeded the descent of bombers, but there were so many targets that pinpoint accuracy mattered little. They would simply fly above the balloons, out of the range of searchlights and the AA cannons, and bomb away, knowing they would hit something desirable.
The previous September, an air assault from Hitler was expected as a response to Chamberlain’s declaration of war, and some thought had been given to civilian protection, but more thought than action. Hundreds of thousands of devices called an Anderson Shelter, after the Home Secretary who liked the idea, were distributed. It was three sheets of curved galvanized steel with holes and bolts provided for shaping it into a dome-like roof supported by side panels forming an enclosure for six inhabitants. It was suitable for protection from falling shrapnel, but not much else. It required stakes buried in the ground at its edges to secure it. There was little soft ground in the East End, so “Anderson Shelter” became a three-word Cockney epithet. There, the contraptions became places of frolic at all hours. There was also shelter in the basements and cellars of private and public buildings, under bridges, and in the “tubes” of the London Underground transportation system. Hospitals developed plans for accommodating as many as 150,000 casualties, and open space was allotted that bulldozers could quickly convert to pits for mass graves. A half-million papier-mâché coffins and a million burial forms were produced and stored in grisly anticipation.
To this extent, London was prepared.