It was seventy years ago today that Italy invaded Greece.

We’ll come back to that.

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Chaos Theory is a mathematical, physical and, occasionally, philosophical theory that says among other things that any action can, theoretically, have a hypothetically infinite set of consequences – even consequences that would never have been predictable.

Such was Italy’s invasion of Greece – from whose language, ironically, the word “Chaos” comes.

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Mussolini, feeling left out of the big conquest-go-round (he’d been stymied by French resistance in the Alps during the Battle of France, had had only captured a few square miles of the country, and his total so far had been the occupation of Albania in early 1939, and the 1935 conquest of Ethiopia – and even that wasn’t going all that well.  Mussolini decided he needed to rack up a trophy.

Months  of diplomatic maneuvering followed, of course.  The Greek Government was actually fundamentally friendly to the Nazis; the Greek dictator, Ioannis Metaxas, was fundamentally a Fascist in the classical sense of the term, and sought friendly relations with Hitler (who, to be fair, seemed to be the winning side at this point in the war).

Metaxas

But Mussolini saw low-hanging fruit.  His few successes in the war so far had come at the expense of the British; he’d swept aside a token British force to occupy British Somaliland.  Since Britain seemed to be on the ropes so far, he sought to build up bases from which to securely pick over what he thought would be the corpse of British power in the Eastern Mediterranean – Egypt, the Suez Canal, Palestine – to add to his new Roman Empire.

Italian troops in East Africa.

So seventy years ago yesterday, Mussolini demanded that Metaxas allow his troops free passage through Greece to occupy strategic locations – naval and air bases that could be used as jumping-off points in the Eastern Med.

It was an absurd request, designed to be rejected – and Metaxas knew it.   When the Italian ambassador presented Mussolini’s ultimatum, Metaxas replied in French (at the time, the lingua franca – hah! – of diplomacy), “”Alors, c’est la guerre” – “Then it’s war”.  This was passed on to the Greek people in a single word – Ochi.  “No”.

It was a setup, of course; the Italians invaded promptly, seventy years ago today, with half a million men and a division of tanks and six times as many planes as the Greeks owned.

Italian CV33 "tankette" - small tank - deploying to Albania before the invasion.

The Greeks were a small country – but they were an exceedingly tough nation.  The people who hewed a living from the rocky peninsula had just won their independence from the Turks within the previous generation, and still held their independence dearly.  And they had had generations of experience fighting in the rocky, inhospitable mountains.

Greek troops moving through the mountains, 1940

While the nation was poor, it had invested heavily in its military – then as now.  Even today, the Greek military is exceedingly large for the nation’s size and strategic position; it’s hereditary hatred of Turkey, whose military is equally exaggerated, keeps things tuned to a fever pitch.

And partly due to that national history, and partly due to Metaxas’ militant nationalism, the Greeks were ready.  They’d built a line of fortifications in the extremely rugged country along the Albanian border.  The Italian offensive smacked into the Elaia-Kalamas line – and bounced off.

By mid-December, the Italian offensive had petered out.  A Greek counteroffensive tossed the Italians out of whatever parts of Greece they’d conquered, and the riposte lopped off a quarter of Albania by April.

Greek soldier sitting on disabled Italian "tankette", or mini-tank.

In March, concerned by the potential threat to vital British territory at Suez and Crete, Churchill diverted British troops from Africa to Greece to help backstop the Greeks.  Faced with the complete implosion of his ally and, potentially, the loss of North Africa, Hitler responded by invading Greece in April of 1941.  Invaded from Albania and Bulgaria – Hitler’s ally – Greece fell in a three-week Blitzkrieg of immense brutality, leading to four years’ occupation (and fierce Greek resistance).

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So let’s go back to chaos theory.

The invasion of Greece set off a chain of events that, directly and indirectly, changed the course of World War II.

• The Neutralization of Italy: Along with the crushing defeats that’d come in North Africa the following year, Italy proved itself a paper tiger.
• The Costliest Rescue: Hitler, to bail out his paper-tiger ally, diverted troops from his planned invasion of the Soviet Union to conquer the Greeks.  He was forced to push back the invasion – Operation Barbarossa – by a couple of months to make up for it.
• The Costliest Counter-Rescue: The British diversion of troops and resources to Greece weakened their position in North Africa, leaving their holdings overextended and ripe for counterattack by German general Erwin Rommel, who would become known as the Desert Fox.
• Pyrrhic Victories: While the British – overextended, at the end of their supply lines – got clobbered in their attempt to rescue Greece, they were largely able to evacuate.  Many evacuated to Crete – where a German airborne assault managed to conquer the Island in June of 1941, but with casualties so horrific that the Germans never attempted another airborne assault.
• The Sandy Backwater: Rommel’s success in the deserts of Libya and Egypt led to the diversion of immense British resources to countering him – which led eventually to the turning-point Battle of El Alamein, in early 1942.
• Supply Lines: The attempt to supply the British forces in Greece passed through and by the key British base at Malta led to one of the epic ongoing naval and air battles in history, as the Germans and Italians pounded the British-held island of Malta.  After Greece fell, Malta became a threat to German/Italian supply lines to North Africa, making the skies above Malta one of the most ferocious air battles of the war, and the seas around Malta a graveyard of British and Italian ships and submarines; the ongoing battle around Malta may have been one of the costliest naval campaigns in history.
• Diversion: The imperative to lift the threat to Malta, clear the Germans and Italians from Africa and open the Mediterranean to ease the threat on the Suez Canal prompted the first great US land campaign in Europe – “Operation Torch”, the invasion of Morocco and Algeria.  Fraught with costly blunders against the experienced Germans, it was a bloody education for US troops.
• A Stitch In Time: The two months delay in the launching of the attack on the USSR meant that Hitler’s troops arrived at the gates of Moscow as winter fell, rather than at the beginning of autumn.  It meant their drive to the Caucasus, and the vital oil fields, bogged down in the frozen rubble of Stalingrad, rather than passing through.  This crippled the Germans’ timetable, and enabled the USSR to rebuild its army, to absord Lend-Lease equipment from the US, and to eventually go on to win the war in the East.
• Echoes: The Greek resistance to the Nazis, esconced in the rugged mountains of that craggy land, was among the largest in occupied Europe.  And like many resistance movements, it was deeply divided between Nationalists loyal to the pre-war government, and Communists whom Metaxas had forced underground and who had been engaged in resistance even before the war. Both sides took their tolls on the Nazis, Italians and Bulgarian occupiers.  Both sides absorbed immense aid from the UK, USSR and, eventually, the US. And after the war, they turned their attention on each other in a bloody civil war that threatened to put Greece in the Soviet bloc for a decade, and into deep-seated political feuding that made the Greek communist party a serious contender for power into the eighties, and has made left-right politics in Greece a bloodsport until this very day, with consequences the Greek nation is feeling even as we speak.

And so a small,  pointless, ego-driven sideshow had side-effects that tipped the outcome of World War II, the Cold War, and our current economic climate.

Opa.

People today often believe that the United States started building up for World War II on December 8, 1941.

The fact is, the upper echelons of the Roosevelt administration saw war as more or less inevitable, going back to the thirties.  FDR started one of the greatest naval shipbuilding programs in history back in the early thirties – partly as a “stimulus”, but largely because the Navy, which had slipped into obsolescence after its huge World War I building surge, was woefully unequipped to deal with the expanding Japanese fleet.

USS Salmon; a make-work project in 1935, it became one of the workhorses of the World War II submarine fleet.

What’s even harder to explain – especially with an entire generation that has no concept of “selective service”, which has been gone for nearly four decades, is the extent to which warfare was an industrial, all-society undertaking.  That was really a very rare thing, historically, having entire nations devote their entire industrial base and manpower to waging war against other nations.  It really started, at least in the West, with Napoleon, who introduced broad conscription throughout France and the occupied territories to keep his armies (which, for all of Napoleon’s genius, suffered grievous casualties) manned.  The US Civil War was the first to bring a developed nation’s entire industrial might to bear against an enemy; the Franco-Prussian War, the first to pit two developed industrial nations in mass war with conscipted masses of troops; World War I, lineups of the same on both sides.

Cartoon lampooning Napoleon's conscription

Big War and Big Government, naturally, go hand in hand; you can’t fight a big war without a big government, directing big industry and raising big manpower.

It was seventy years ago today that Franklin D. Roosevelt, the patron saint of Big Government, signed “peacetime” conscription into law. It was the first peacetime draft in American history.  It ran, through three wars and the Pax Eisenhower, for 33 years.

FDR signs the Selective Service Training Act

It was a huge change in the way the US military, especially the Army, did its business.  A “professional” army – volunteers who sign up to serve of their own free will, and often make careers of the service, and who treat fighting as their job – are usually able (says conventional military wisdom) to do things that draftees can’t.

Imagine this (and the imagination is difficult to impossible for those who’ve not been there, but I’m recycling things I’ve read from other writers who have); you’re advancing through a town; the Captain has told you to take the church, so you can use the steeple as an observation post.  Your squad – eight other guys just like you, and a sergeant who leads you – takes fire from the church.  One of your guys is hit, and goes down to the ground, screaming in pain.  If you and your squad are volunteers, who’ve made a career out of training for this sort of thing, you are more likely to go about your mission, to haul the wounded guy out of harm’s way and put down covering fire on the church to allow one or two guys to get across the street and start chucking grenades in there.  If you and your eight – well, seven – comrades are all draftees who had eight weeks of basic training and would all rather be driving tractors or jerking sodas or building pole barns or finishing high school back in Kansas or Chicago or Montana or California, your sergeant is going to have to work real hard to get you to run out under fire to get the wounded guy, and then aim you at the church to try to finish the job; you will be much more likely to hide out in a cellar and wait for someone else to do the job, if you can.

US Infantry advance through Waldenburg, Germany, 1945

And then, if mortar rounds start raining down, and you hear a tank moving up behind the church, who do you suppose it more likely to grab a bazooka and find a place to lay in wait, and who is more likely to sprint for the rear when the sergeant turns his back?

This has always been the great conundrum of militaries; small,  professional armies of volunteers are more likely to perform reliably, even spectacularly.  Britain’s army in 1914, the “Old Contemptibles”, was about 10% the size of the German and French armies. All volunteers, all trained to the highest standard (especially marksmanship; German units thought they were facing machine guns, not guys with bolt-action Enfields), they shredded the first waves of German attackers along their front.  And the second wave.  And so on.  Until they got killed or wounded in subsequent waves.  And were replaced by newbies and, finally, draftees.  In the meantime, armies of draftees are frequently unreliable in combat, sometimes spectacularly so, especially when fighting on turf not their own.

And each nation dealt with this conundrum differently.

The USSR drafted millions of men (and women), many of them deeply unhappy to be fighting for Josef Stalin.  For some, fighting for the Rodina against the enemy was enough; for the rest, the NKVD  would wait with machine guns, to kill anyone who failed to carry home the attack with gusto and vigor. Stalin also made it clear that being captured, even while incapacitated, was a capital offense likely to lead to nasty consequences for families left behindTo the Russian draftee, victory was the only alternative to death.  And they died in horrendous numbers, at both German and Soviet hands.

Soviet troops. It was pretty much "Win or Die" for Ivan, 2/3 of whom were killed during the war - many of them killed by fellow Russians.

Britain had never been comfortable with the draft.  And so draftees, especially in combat units, joined regiments that had long, storied histories and traditions.   Picture the United State Marine Corps, only a good 100 years longer, in many cases, and most of them drawn from the same area in the UK, fighting often with friends and neighbors.  A British draftee infantryman wasn’t just a number in an anonymous, numbered unit, like an American soldier who might be underwhelmed to be posted to the 2nd Battalion of the 329th Infantry Regiment (which sprang into existence in 1942, and sprang back out in 1945); if he were from, say, Inverary, Scotland, he’d serve in the “Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders“, a unit with a long history of doing great things, led by officers and (especially) NCOs who had spent their careers marinating in that spirit.  Britain being a fairly traditional, caste-based society, it worked in a way that is probably foreign to Americans who’ve never been, say, Marines.

British troops of the 7th Battalion, the Worcestershire Regiment - largely draftees from Worcestershire. The Woosters' history goes back to 1694.

In the US?  A nation without much in the way of shared martial tradition (outside the South, which in fact provided a disproportionate number of soldiers and officers, then as now), but immense industrial power?  We made up for any shortfalls in British-style esprit de corps and Soviet-style brutality with immense firepower.  US troops may have been as reluctant a group of warriors as any mass body of draftees throughout history, but they had firepower beyond the dreams of their opponents and, largely, allies; from the rifle squads with their M1 Garands (the world’s first semi-automatic military rifle in general issue, which gave an individual grunt double the firepower of his British friend or German/Japanese enemy), to artillery and, finally, air support on a lavish scale.  The US Army could blast holes through enemy positions that would have swallowed up regular armies or, given draftee behavior, made them hide out in shell craters and rubble until there was a fair chance of moving forward or backward without getting torn apart.

Sherman tanks and infantry in heavy going

Which is not to say draftees were cowards – far from it.  And it’s not to say they didn’t become good soldiers; after thirty days in combat, they’d be as capable as any Ranger.

If they survived.

But, as befitted an army fielded by a technocratic, “big” administration, the US Army adopted a personnel policy that may have been as lethal an enemy as any Japanese machine-gunner or German mortarman.

The US Army’s personnel policy would be recognizable to a production manager at any factory; if you had a machine on a production line, you could keep that machine running 24/7, provided you kept it stocked with power and materials.  And so the system was designed to keep the machines – the “Divisions” – stocked with supplies; fuel and ammunition and, by the way, guys in olive-drab uniforms.  The ideal was that the units, the divisions and their component regiments and battalions, would stay in the front line more or less nonstop, like a production machine; the Army would just keep feeding men into the units to keep them up to full strength.  But the newbies – “replacements” – would go, usually under cover of darkness, into units of complete strangers, to sink or swim, more or less.  The ones that survived became highly proficient soldiers, because they had to – but the casualty rates among replacement soldiers fed into the line was horrendous.

GIs of the 28th Infantry Division in the Hürtgen Forest, 1944. The battle was one of the bloodiest in US history, and also the most pointless, serving no strategic purpose whatsoever.

It got to the point that the Army figured a replacement could do any job at all, with a little practice in the front line; raw replacements were sent not only to the infantry, but to serve in tank units, which suffered grievous losses as well (more on that when we get to the chapter on the Sherman Tank) but, theoretically, required some training to handle the complex mechanics of running the tank, to say nothing of firing a cannon and driving off-road in a 30-ton vehicle.  The raw replacement crews fared very, very badly; during the Battle of the Bulge, a group of seventeen replacement tanks, with seventeen veteran crewmen as commanders and 68 rank newbies who’d never been in a tank before serving as drivers, loaders and gunners, was infiltrated by a single German tank, which destroyed each of them in turn, killing and maiming dozens as their crews vainly tried to figure out their complex machines, which they were driving for the very first time.

Sherman tank, knocked out in Normandy. Hatches are open; some of the crew may have survived.

But firepower won the day.  The Germans and Japanese had little respect for American infantry (although units that spent enough time in the line with low enough casualties to develop some collective experience earned some grudging praise), and German tankers ridiculed the Americans’ Sherman tanks – but our enemies around the world all feared American air power and, especially, the artillery, which was accurate, quick to get on target, and available in crushing weight.

American 155mm self-propelled gun - mobile and crushingly powerful

And so we won the war with an army of draftees.  And we fought the next one to a standstill with the younger brother of that same army, only on a shoestring.

And then the son of that army went to Vietnam – just in time for war to change.  A military designed to shred tank attacks with artillery, armor and air power was very poorly adapted to fighting peasant guerrillas in a counterinsurgency war.  Draftees with enough firepower could bludgeon an industrial enemy into submission at acceptable cost – but winning a war that involved as much winning of hearts and minds as destroying enemies in close combat was another whole animal.

US troops in Vietnam

And the American draftee adapted, yet again – but again, at immense cost.

Today’s the birthday of our last draft.  Some would bring it back; they’d do it for reasons that would have resonated with Franklin D Roosevelt.

I say good riddance.

Even as I deal with teenage kids.

The Battle of Britain had been going on for three months when, seventy years ago today, the greatest battle of the entire campaign took place in the skies over Britain.

History records this date as the turning point of the Battle of Britain.

In fact, it had happened the day before.

We’ll get back to that.

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In the first three phases of the Battle, the German Luftwaffe had been pursuing a simple mission – take control of the skies over the UK to make way for the invasion.  And so it plinked at convoys, attacked the Royal Air Force’s (RAF) radar bases and aircraft industry.  Due to failures in their intelligence, they constantly believed they were on the brink of extincting the RAF, while the British strength in the air kept increasing (at least in terms of planes and pilots; the level of experience was waning due to casualties, as new pilots struggled to learn the ropes that’d keep them alive long enough to make a difference).

And yet the RAF kept meeting the Luftwaffe’s raids, in greater and greater strength.

And so by the 7th of September, the Luftwaffe was fairly well exhausted.  A change in tactics was called for.

Rather than the (relatively) precise raids against airfields and factories (to say nothing of the extremely difficult job of attacking radar installations) of the previous month or so, the Luftwaffe, with its experience levels falling as fast as its fatigue level was rising, saw a need to change tactics; from many, many smaller raids against airfields, to larger, more compact, easier-to-escort raids against big targets that were easy for less-experienced replacement crews to find.

German Heinkel 111 crew

Like London.

On September 7, the Luftwaffe launched its first, day-and-night-coordinated attacks against the docks on the East End of London.  The Docks – vital for moving commerce and supplies to and from the Thames river – were surrounded by the working class neighborhoods and teeming slums of the East End.

Damage in the East End of London

It was a horrendous massacre, of course.  London was bombed for 57 consecutive days and/or nights.  50,000 Londoners died in The Blitz.

The docks of East London blazing at the height of the Blitz

It wasn’t the first indiscriminate bombing of civilians in history; the Japanese had bombed Shanghai in 1937; the Germans, Warsaw and Narvik and Rotterdam.

It wasn’t the worst bombing of civilians during the war, of course; by war’s end, 50,000 would be the toll for a single night’s firebombing raids on Tokyo and Hamburg, both of which killed as many people as died in two months of the Blitz.

Londoners sheltering from The Blitz in "the Tube", the subway system, which was a highly effective bomb shelter.

But this was the first time the western world had seen itself subjected to constant, calculated bombing of civilans – not a distant, exotic place like Shanghai, or an isolated outpost like Warsaw, but one of Western Civilization’s crown jewels.  Not a tactical exercise in terrorism, like Narvik or Rotterdam, intended to cow a government into a quick, cheap surrender, but an extended campaign to bludgeon a whole people into surrender.

And so for weeks, the Luftwaffe pounded London, day and night.

Firefighters cool down the rubble on the East End

But on September 14, a meeting of Oberkommando West (OKW) in Berlin, with Hitler, his top generals, and Erhard Milch (a World War I fighter ace who was Hermann Göring’s #2 in the Luftwaffe, and was sitting in for his boss while he was at “the front”, in France, inspiring the troops), Hitler decided that the idea of actually taking control of the skies over Britain to make way for a military invasion was hopeless, at least for the rest of 1940.

Rather, Hitler decided to switch to pure terrorism – as he himself said, to seek to “create eight million madmen” from the stress of constant air attack, to the point where the British people would demand Churchill make a separate peace with him.

And so to kick off this effort, seventy years ago today, the Luftwaffe launched the greatest series of raids of the Battle thus far – indeed, the greatest single day of coordinated air attacks in the history of the world to date.  Two immense waves of bombers, escorted by every fighter that could fly, swept over the UK for the entire day.  Every single operational aircraft in Keith Park’s 11 Group flew at least one combat sortie that day – the most intense day of engagement of the entire Battle for the RAF.

Heinkel 111s over southern England

And the losses for the Luftwaffe were catastrophic. 60 planes were lost (to 26 for the RAF), a casualty rate of over 5% for that single day’s raiding.  Piled on top of the three months’ pace of attacks and toll in dead and captured men, it was the last straw for the Luftwaffe; they reached the same decision the RAF had reached earlier in the year, and that the US Army Air Force was very nearly forced to reach three years later; daylight bombing against an organized, determined enemy was too bloody and costly.  The Luftwaffe’s ranks of aircrew, especially bomber crews, had been bled white and worked to exhaustion.  As bad as the situation had been for the RAF,

It was the last day of serious daylight mass bombing.  The Luftwaffe switched to night bombing, and never operated mass waves of bombers in daylight again – which, given the technology of the day, meant that any attempt to systematically attack militarily-significant targets went by the boards.

A German Junkers Ju-88 bomber, crash-landed near Whitstable, Kent

And two days later, on September 17, Hitler quietly ordered all preparations for the invasion of England cancelled.  He formally left the option open to re-consider the following spring – but by that point, his focused had moved east to Russia.

It’d be a mistake to say the Battle was “won” seventy years ago today, although it was the biggest single days’ casualties for the Luftwaffe (the RAF claimed 176 planes shot down, nearly triple the actual score); rather, it’d be safe to say that the threat that European Civilization would be extincted through the destruction of Britain ended.

And they knew it; for while the Battle of Britain was characterized by bad intelligence on both sides, the primacy of British technology, especially at codebreaking, showed its hand.  British cryptologists deciphered a German radio message from a Luftwaffe transport officer telling his airlift units – the ones that’d carry the supplies for the airborne bridge that’d supply Nazi paratroopers – to stop stockpiling supplies for the invasion.  No supplies?  No airborne attack.  No airborne attack?  No invasion.

Bletchley Park, a country manor converted into the headquarters of British code-breaking during the war.

So while Churchill never let on, he knew that the threat was over for the foreseeable future.

London was bombed horribly for the next several months, along with many other British cities.  But from this day on, the outcome was never really in doubt again.

Churchill addressing the House of Commons

It had been three weeks since Churchill had given his “Never was so much owed by so many to so few” speech at the House of Commons, a speech best known for its seminal quote:

The gratitude of every home in our Island, in our Empire, and indeed throughout the world, except in the abodes of the guilty, goes out to the British airmen who, undaunted by odds, unwearied in their constant challenge and mortal danger, are turning the tide of the World War by their prowess and by their devotion. Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few. All our hearts go out to the fighter pilots, whose brilliant actions we see with our own eyes day after day…

Overlooked by many is the real importance of the speech; Churchill’s reference to most signficant foreign-policy development of the month – the growing investment of the United States in the fate of Western Europe:

Some months ago we came to the conclusion that the interests of the United States and of the British Empire both required that the United States should have facilities for the naval and air defence of the Western Hemisphere against the attack of a Nazi power… We had therefore decided spontaneously, and without being asked or offered any inducement, to inform the Government of the United States that we would be glad to place such defence facilities at their disposal by leasing suitable sites in our Transatlantic possessions for their greater security against the unmeasured dangers of the future.… His Majesty’s Government are entirely willing to accord defence facilities to the United States on a 99 years’ leasehold basis…

Two of the 50 World War I-vintage US destroyers lent to the UK. Had Britain not prevailed in the Battle, Lend Lease would have been a dead issue

Undoubtedly this process means that these two great organisations of the English-speaking democracies, the British Empire and the United States, will have to be somewhat mixed up together in some of their affairs for mutual and general advantage. For my own part, looking out upon the future, I do not view the process with any misgivings. I could not stop it if I wished; no one can stop it. Like the Mississippi, it just keeps rolling along. Let it roll. Let it roll on full flood, inexorable, irresistible, benignant, to broader lands and better days.

– a speech that pointed to the next big phase in the war in Western Europe, the growing involvement of the United States, which in the next 15 months would end in Hitler’s declaration of war against America, which was the real tipping point in the West.

And yet it was the events of seventy years ago today that turned those developments into the basis for the great return of 1944, rather than a fallback position for a nation in mortal danger.

It was seventy years ago today that the Battle of Britain entered its decisive phase.

Not its bloodiest phase; that was yet to come.

But it was over the next month that the fate of Britain – and, to an extent, of Western Civilization – was decided.  Because it was in the next thirty days that the outcome of the Battle hung by its thinnest thread.

Historians debate just how thin that thread got – more on that later – but the thirty days starting today were, if not the tipping point, at least the point at which the direction of the tip was decided.

Although neither side really knew it at the time.

The Luftwaffe had spent the previous ten days pummeling Britain’s radar stations.   On the one hand, it was a smart idea, decades ahead of its time.  On the other hand, it’d take a couple of decades to develop the tools and techniques that’d make radar stations a viable target for air attack.  The Germans felt the attacks were achieving little, at immense cost (especially to the Stukas, which were brutalized by British Hurricane fighters seventy years ago yesterday to the point they were largely pulled from the lineup), with little chance of long-term success.  The first conclusion was valid under the circumstances; the second, the losses, were apparent; the third – the long-term prognosis – was very much a matter of conjecture.

Hurricane pilots scrambling to meet a raid.

But no matters.  Seventy years ago today, Hermann Göring ordered the Luftwaffe to begin the next phase of the Battle; the destruction of Fighter Command’s airfields.

For the next two weeks, German bombers launched nearly thirty major raids on Fighter Command airfields, trying to destroy the hangars, control facilities, grounded planes, support crews and “runways”.  The latter was difficult; most Fighter Command “airfields” were just that; flat, mowed fields.  Repairing bomb damage was a matter of shoveling dirt into the bomb crater and steamrolling it into a compact flat surface.

The control facilities, though, were another matter.  Built on the cheap during the rapid buildup before the war, most buildings on the operational bases were above-ground, wood-walled, tile-roofed huts, very susceptible to bomb damage.  As the attacks build up, RAF engineers scrambled to build dirt berms around the squadron command posts, up to eave level, to protect them from blast damage.  It worked, for the most part – only Biggin Hill’s HQ was destroyed, by a freak bomb hit (because most direct bomb hits were freaks of fate, back then).

The biggest damage was up in the air, though; each bomber raid was escorted by a swarm of German fighter aircraft.  A German raid of 30-90 aircraft would have from 40 to 120 ME109 Jagdflieger, fighers, flying close escort around the bombers.  The Brits would be dispatched in squadrons of 12 planes, directly at the raids.  It tended to turn every battle into a “David vs. Goliath” fight – 12 Spitfires or Hurricanes against dozens of German fighters, to say nothing of the bombers.

A formation of German Heinkel 111 bombers

It sounds stupid – but there was method to the madness.  British fighters – like their German counterparts – had very, very short “legs”; the Hurricane had a range of about 600 miles, the Spitfire even less, and that was at cruising speed.

Spitfire pilots racing to their aircraft during a "scramble" - a mad dash to get airborne to catch an incoming raid.

In an “intercept” situation – taking off, forming up the squadron and  climbing at 2000+ feet per minute while following the control officers’ directions to intercept raids, with the throttle jammed to the firewall – the British planes could basically take off, find the raid, fight for half an hour, and return to base.  There was rarely time to circle around and wait for more British fighters to show up.

Although that was a major contention in the upper ranks of RAF’s Fighter Command.

Southern Britain was divided up among three Groups; 10 Group, controlling the southwest; 12 Group, commanded by Air Vice Marshall Trafford Leigh-Mallory, covering the Midlands; and, in the southeast, closest to occupied France, 11 Group, commanded by Air Vice Marshall Keith Park.

The four Groups charged with Britain's air defense. 10, 11 and 12 were on the front lines. 13 Group, after giving unescorted German bombers flying from Norway a very bloody nose on "Adlertag", served mainly as a training area and a rest zone for squadrons exhausted by the fight in the south.

The men had similarities; both had joined the Army as privates at the beginning of World War I.  Both had gotten commissioned as officers, then joined the Royal Flying Corps after being wounded in ground combat.  Both distinguished themselves as pilots.  Both rose steadily through the ranks.

But those were the only similarities.  Leigh-Mallory had been a lawyer, son of a prosperous lawyer and bureaucrat who excelled at academics; Park, a New Zealander, the son of a mining company geologist, was an indifferent student, an outdoorsy hunting enthusiast.

And the two men sniped at each other, constantly, throughout the Battle.

Park favored the direct approach; sending squadrons barrelling into the German bomber formations as fast as they could get into action, without regard to forming them up into larger units.

Air Vice Marshal Keith Park

The one real refinement was his attempt to send the faster Spitfires after the German fighters, and letting the slower Hurricanes after the bombers.  It was a formality, mostly; Hurricanes were 2/3 of the British inventory, and closer to 70% of Park’s order of battle.  And so the 11 Group battle was largely one of harrying German bombers, quickly but piecemeal, before they could get to their targets.

Leigh-Mallory – and his top Wing Commander, the legendary Douglas Bader, who lost both legs around the knee in a pre-war flying accident, and returned to active duty in time for the Battle –  favored the “Big Wing”; grouping 3-5 squadrons into a “wing” of 36-60 aircraft, and then throwing the “wing” at the German .

Air Vice Marshal Trafford Leigh-Mallory, commander of 12 Group. A capable commander, a salient intra-service politician.

The problem was, it took a while to get three to five squadrons up, off the ground and into the air and grouped together in the time available before the German raids actually hit their targets.

Squadron Leader Douglas Bader (fourth from right) with pilots from 242 Squadron during the Battle. Shot down over France later in the war, he spent the rest of the war as POW; even though legless, he earned the distinction of being sent to the most "escape-proof" POW camp - because of his many attempts to break out. That's cojones.

The conventional wisdom, built from decades of revisionist history, is that the two men eventually settled on a one-two punch; Park’s squadrons would hit the bombers as they came in to the attack; Leigh-Mallory’s Big Wing would catch them on their way home.  In fact, it very rarely worked that way; Park’s squadrons bore the brunt of the fighting, while the Big Wing, flying in a huge mass around southern England once it formed up, rarely caught the eneny, and often confused the British ground controllers.  Leigh-Mallory had the political clout; after the Battle, he managed to maneuver Park out of his position and get him sent to Training Command (although he went on to lead the air defense of Malta and then the air attack against Italy, and is generally regarded today as one of history’s great air commanders; he’s finally getting the recognition he deserves in the UK)

Statue of Keith Park, on the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square. Like all Fourth Plinth statues, it's temporary. It's a shame.

Still – through a combination of British technological prowess and air-combat chops – and a few lucky breaks – the RAF wore down the Luftwaffe over the course of the next month to the point that it needed to switch to night-time terror bombings of British cities – “the Blitz” – which is the part most Americans know about, and ironically was the part that was of least importance in winning air superiority over Britain.  Because once the Luftwaffe ceded control of the daylight sky over Britain to the RAF, and allowed Fighter Command to regain its strength once and for all, then in fact the bid to invade Britain ended for the rest of 1940 – which meant, in the end, for good.

As with all great events of World War II, there are lots of myths – and a few hidden stories.

Owed To So Few: It’s a constant contention among historians; some say that, between August 24 and September 15, the RAF’s supply of pilots was dwindling from the attrition.  Others note that the supply of pilots actually rose – while the Luftwaffe’s aircrew ranks actually shrank during the Battle (normal, given they were flying over enemy territory’; if they bailed out or crash-landed, they’d be captured).

The answer, of course, is somewhere in between.  While the number of pilots rose, they were often very, very new pilots, freqently with no air combat training.  These pilots suffered grievous losses, until they survived enough missions to learn the trade.

So Many: One of the features about the British military, but especially the RAF, that surprises Americans the most is the huge number of nations represented by the RAF’s pilots.  The RAF included Canadians (as members of RAF squadrons as well as a squadron of the RCAF), Australians, South Africans, Australians, New Zealanders (including Park), even a Jamaican pilot (indeed, Jamaicans – of African descent – flew as officers in the RAF throughout the war, side by side with white officers and with white aircrew).

The pilots in exile – the French and Norwegians who played such role in the RAF later in the war – hadn’t quite gotten up to speed yet.

But as the attrition of July and August began catching up with the RAF, the need for experienced pilots became overwhelming – so Fighter Command leader Air Marshall Hugh Dowding approved allowing a squadron of Poles into action, along with a few other Eastern European pilots who’d had nearly a years’ experience in combat already.

I wrote about the Poles last year – 303 Squadron ran up one of the most impressive scores of the battle – in a seventeen-day tear starting about this time 70 years ago.

Pilots of 303 Squadron

Some of these men were fighting in their third air force in under a year, having fought in Poland, France, and now the RAF.

Topping them all?  Josef Frantisek, a Czech pilot who fled his homeland to Poland when Chamberlain sold it out to the Nazis.  He fought with the Poles, flying an unarmed reconnaissance plane, sometimes attacking German ground troops with hand grenades.

Josef Frantisek

He then fled to France where he fought again, scoring between 7 and 11 kills before finally decamping to the UK, where he served in the RAF alongside the Poles in 303 (there was a Czech squadron forming, but he’d developed a tight relationship with his Polish comrades.  He scored 17 more confirmed kills, becoming the highest-scoring ace of the Battle period, before dying in a crash while landing; he was either exhausted or showing off for his girlfriend; either would have been in character for the colorful Czech.

Spitfire Vs. Hurricane: The Supermarine Spitfire is largely regarded as the hero of the Battle.

The Supermarine Spitfire

The sleek, elliptical-winged Spitfire – one of the most beautiful aircraft ever built, did become one of the most important air superiority fighters of the war.  It stayed in production until 1946, longer than any other World War II fighter.   And it lent not only its Rolls-Royce Merlin engine, but some of its design lessons, to the American P51 Mustang – the greatest piston-engined fighter ever made.

But it didn’t win the Battle.

The Spitfire, at the beginning and throughout the Battle, was about a third of the RAF’s fighter inventory.  The other 2/3 were the humbler, lesser-known Hawker Hurricane:

A vic of Hawker Hurricanes

The Hurricane – Britain’s first single-wing, mostly-metal fighter plane – was about a year older than the Spitfire.  It was a little slower on the straightaway and in the climb, could turn tighter, and would shake and swerve a lot less when its eight Browning .303-caliber machine guns (same as the Spitfire) opened up, making it easier to aim and hold a target in the crosshairs.  It could also take more damage and stay flying; its skin was made of doped muslin fabric aft of the cockpit, which sounds archaic but was nearly as strong as aluminum (close enough for the purposes); repairing a bullet hole was as simple as gluing on a fabric patch.

The Hurricane peaked during the Battle; it was quickly relegated to ground-attack duty, and finally shipped off to secondary fronts like India and Burma, while the Spitfire – which had more development potential – evolved with new engines and bigger guns over the course of the war.

But the Hurricane’s role in history – it was not only 2/3 of the RAF’s fighter inventory, but scored 2/3 of the RAF’s kills – was a matter of historic record, if not necessarily public imagination.  Author Paul Gallico felt the need to set the record straight in his book, The Hurricane Story.  It’s worth a read, if you can find it.

But behind the never-ending battle between Spitfire enthusiasts and Hurricane partisans lay the real important point; the British built more of both than the Germans did of their own aircraft.  But the British didn’t know how few aircraft the Germans could produce, and the Germans had no idea how fast British aircraft factories and repair shops could work.

Which leads us to…

Military Intelligence: As with the second phase of the Battle – when the Germans broke off their attacks on the radar sites – both sides’ intelligence failed them.

The Germans believed the British aircraft industry was on the ropes, even as production of Hurricanes and Spitfires ramped quickly up to a point where even the worst weeks’ worth of losses didn’t make a dent in the number of planes in the air.  (Pilots were, arguably, another story).  The productivity of the British aircraft industry was one of the great triumphs of the war – but the Germans didn’t figure this out until far too late.

The British, on the other hand, heavily overestimated the planes German could produce.  The end result was, while conventional history says the Luftwaffe outnumbered the RAF, the fact is that by September, the RAF outmatched the Germans in sheer numbers of fighters (and would soon beat them at bombers as well.

So throughout the Battle, the Germans consistently were surprised at how many RAF fighters there still were; the British constantly expected a huge onslaught of fresh reserve German aircraft that never materialized.

The Terrorist: Conventional wisdom was correct in that the beginning of the end of the Battle came when Germany stopped bombing the airfields, around September 14, and switched to terror-bombing British cities.

The conventional wisdom misses that there was a three week period in which the biggest opponent of bombing the cities was…Hitler.

Hitler barred the bombing of London and the indiscriminate bombing of cities (although many civilians were killed and many civilian neighborhoods damaged during attacks on nearby ports, factories, airfields and military installations), even after the RAF bombed Berlin for the first time, seventy years ago this evening (August 25).  History records that the decision was made as a result of Luftwaffe chief Hermann Göring’s bruised pride, having promised on German radio that Berlin was totally safe.  In fact, it was a reaction to the exhaustion and casualties the German bomber crews suffered over the following three weeks’ assaults on RAF airfields and factories – a decision RAF Bomber Command made itself before long, and that the US Eighth Air Force was very nearly forced to make, for the same reasons, in 1943.

———-

Churchill said, after the Battle, that never in history had so many people owed so much to so few; and while there were rather more RAF pilots than the conventional wisdom would hold, it was still a tiny number.  There were between 1,000 and 1,400 or so RAF fighter pilots at any given point during The Battle; maybe three times as many Germans (because of the bombers’ four-man crews).  Compare that number with those engaged in the war’s other pivotal battles; the tens of thousands of sailors in the Battle of the Atlantic or Midway; the hundreds of thousands at El-Alamein, D-Day and the Bulge; the millions at Stalingrad and Kursk.

Errors in conventional wisdom don’t change the fact; Churchill was right.

I’ve spent a good part of the last month thinking about this next episode.

On August 12, 1940, World War 2 was three weeks shy of a year old.  In those 49 weeks, Hitler’s Germany had conquered all of Europe from the Polish/Russian border to the English Channel.  Poland, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands and Belgium and fallen.

And finally, Hitler had knocked out the continent’s greatest military power in less than a month, sending its survivors and its British allies reeling across the Channel.

The previous month had been like the fourth round of a major prize fight; after three rounds of furious punching, the fighters probed and regrouped, looking for developing weaknesses and rebuilding their strength for the climactic rounds.  The German Luftwaffe had spent the month plinking at British convoys in the English Channel and probing the Brits’ defenses.

On August 12, the German plan was scheduled to switch into high gear.  The plan – called Adlerangriff (“Eagle Attack”) was…

…put off for a day due to weather.

But seventy years ago today, Adlerangriff started, with the initial assault, Adlertag (“Eagle Day”).

And for all the talk over the past seven decades about the pilots and their planes – the Douglas Baders and Adolf Gallands, the Spitfires and the ME109s – this phase of the Battle, which lasted only ten days, came down to technology and intelligence.

———-

The sky is a big place.  And even small countries by American standards, places like Britain and France and Germany, have a lot of it.  That’s why even back to the earliest days of air to air combat, the hard part wasn’t shooting the enemy down so much as finding him.

Over confined spaces like the Western Front in World War I, it was less difficult; the whole front, with its millions of combatants and hundreds of planes facing off, was only a few hundred miles long, and the actual battles were quite compact.  The odds were that if a World War I ace like a Richtoven or a Rickenbacker or a Guynemer or a Mannock went looking for a fight over an active battlefield, they’d find one.

But Britain suffered terribly from bombing attack during the First World War – Zeppelins and crude two-engined bombers launched from bases in Belgium that’d lob bombs over London and other cities,  sowing more terror than damage, with rough impunity; the Brits had no idea how to find and track aircraft in the dark; they were dependent on ground observers seeing shapes in the moonlight, estimating course and speed, phoning the report in to…someone (because there was no coordinated air-defense command, much less air-defense command center); then, phone a report based on the estimated course and speed to an airbase in the area that may or may not have had fighters ready to take off, to fly in the dark without IFR instruments of any kind to even navigate, much less detect a target, not to mention trying to get their anemic, crude aircraft to climb to the altitude the attackers were at (which could alone take half an hour). And then find a target in the dark based on a crude course-distance calculation made based on eyeball observations from the ground.  And that was even if the famously fickle British weather made flying possible (although the German bombers and especially Zeppelins were fairly immune to the weather; they just had to lob bombs over the general area of the world’s most sprawling city).

It was with these raids in mind that Britain paid very close attention to research in the late 1920’s to the idea of measuring the time it took for a radio signal to bounce off an object and return to a receiver.  In 1936, British researchers were able to bounce a signal from a ground station off a passing Handley-Page Herford bomber that was completely unaware of its place in history.

The British Air Ministry’s research section, led by Sir Robert Watson-Watt, took a course that, seventy-five years later, should endear him to a generation of IT customers who want perfection for no money down; he rushed the production of the radar sets and stations into production long before the system had been perfected or polished; he said “third-best is acceptable when second-best won’t be available in time and best will never be built at all”.  So the first production British radar system, code-named “Chain Home”, was crude even by appearance:

British "Chain Home" radar station

A series of 300 foot tall towers along the British coast, Chain Home was bone simple by comparison to later sets.  Its “user interface” was a scope with a single cathode-ray line, like an old CRT TV that had gone on the blink; a “blip”, or uptick, in the glowing line would tell an operator the bearing and distance to the target.  Usually.  Not all the bugs had been worked out.

But by the time the war started, Chain Home was up and operational, providing Britain with all-round coverage, 24/7, in all weather.

And, most importantly, the stations – around seventy of them, each with a detection range of a little over 100 miles – were connected by phone with RAF Fighter Command’s control room, from which Air Marshal Hugh Dowding, chief of Fighter Command, would run the battle.

Mockup of RAF Operations Room, Stanhope

Operators – mostly women – would take phone calls from the radar stations with the course, height and speed of incoming raids; as signals from more than one station came in, the raid’s location could be precisely fixed, even before it left French airspace.  The location, direction, speed and strength of each raid were laid out with wooden “counters” on the huge map table, moved about with croupier’s paddles by the female airmen, overlooked by the operations staff on the balcony above, who would “scramble” fighters from airbases in the raids’ paths to intercept them, and maneuver squadrons from bases just off the path to pester the raids as they tried to return home.

It was a huge leap forward from 1918.  And the Germans, in the midst of building their own radar chain (in typical German fashion, building the much more sophisticated Freya system, which was coming in late and over budget, with only eight stations ready for action by the time the Battle started), knew this.

And so the target of Adlerangriff was these radar stations, and the airfields near the coast from which the first wave of RAF fighters would scramble.

It sounded simple in concept.

———-

So that was the first phase of the Battle of Britain – the German attempt to bomb the Chain Home stations.

And looking at the picture of the huge latticework antennae above, you’d think that’d be an easy job.  But from 15,000 feet up, the antennae weren’t all that big; the radar operators huts were flimsy, above-ground wooden structures, built in great haste to get the system on the air, but they were also tiny, almost invisible from high up.  And the fact is that the classic World War 2 bomber, whether a B29 or a German Heinkel 111, was not a precision bomber.

In fact, nothing back then really was.

German Heinkel 111 bombers - the workhorse of the Luftwaffe during the Battle

And it’s here we get into another technological area – in this case, a lag rather than an advance.  In our age of precision-guided cruise missiles and Predator drones shooting missiles through windows of buildings, it’s hard to recall that in 1940, attacking people from the air was incredibly imprecise.

High-altitude daylight level bombing, even as practiced by the Americans later in the war (with much-advanced technology) usually did well to get fifty percent of the bombs to drop within 1000 yards of the target from 20,000 feet.  German technology at the beginning of the war was incredibly crude even by that standard.

“Precision bombing” in World War 2 was the art and science of getting a bomb to land on something the size of, say, a moving ship, to say nothing of a tank or individual building.  It was the province of two different kinds of planes and sets of tactics; the “Dive Bomber”, and the low-level fighter-bomber.  And they had to do it using the most primitive instruments; simple geometric and reflector sights, and the pilot’s  own intuition and experience.

Junkers 87 "Stuka" dive bomber.

Later in the war, of course, both were elevated to high crafts;  American Thunderbolt and British Typhoon fighter-bombers would plink at troop units, trains and indivdual tanks with bombs and rockets; German Stukas armed with rockets and automatic cannon shredded through Soviet tank formations; US Navy dive bombers sank Japanese battleships and carriers; British Mosquito light bombers developed the craft to its apogee, dropping bombs on Gestapo jails precisely enough to free prisoners without killing them, mostly by constant refinement of math and experience.

Hitting radar sites was particularly difficult; even a huge antenna like a Chain Home station is a small target from the air; as the war progressed, they got much smaller (within a year, night fighters were carrying air-interception radar into the air to hunt night bombers); even twenty years later over Vietnam, attacking radar stations was such a hit-and-miss proposition that the US invested millions in building missiles and bombs that could home in on radar signals.

Messerschmitt 110 "heavy fighter". A failure as a fighter, it served mostly as a light bomber in the Battle. Fitted with radar later, it became a scourge of British night bombers in 1943-44

In 1940, none of that existed yet.

———-

So seventy years ago today, the Luftwaffe embarked on a three-point plan of attack:

1. Their high-altitude bombers plastered RAF airfields – first along the coast, and then moving inland.  The intention was ot make it impossible for the RAF to base its planes close to the Channel – important, since the British Spitfires and Hurricanes had very short ranges.
2. Their fighters roamed about southern England (to the extent that their also-limited range allowed), looking for targets to attack.  Called Frei Jagd (“Free Hunting”), it’s the kind of stuff fighter pilots love even today.
3. The German “precision bomber” force – the Stukas and a special fighter-bomber group, ‘Research Group 210″, at that time perhaps the most highly-trained group of low-altitude precision attack pilots in the world – went after the radar stations.

The attacks on the airfields had little effect – but well get back to that.

The fighters?  They occasionally “bounced” flights of Spitfires and Hurricanes, on their way to attack bomber and Stuka formations, causing casualties (and losing plenty in the process), breaking up some interceptions.  However, the British – using radar and the simple math, vectored the RAF interceptors away from the small  “blips” that were moving at 250-300mph – obviously fighters – and toward the big plodding, 180mpg bomber blips.

The initial attacks put four radar stations out of commission for a m atter of hours – less than a day or so in all cases.   The crude simplicity of the British equipment made repairs fairly easy.

But the Stukas, flying with little to no fighter escort, were shredded by the British defenders.  By August 23, the planes that had so terrorized the Poles, and had blasted the decisive holes in the French lines three months earlier, were withdrawn from combat.  They were never used in significant numbers against significant enemy aerial opposition again in the war.

Luftwaffe chief Hermann Göring saw the casualties among the Stukas and the Me110 crews – which cut him deeply, as the 110 had been his pet project before the war – and decided after ten days to change tactics.  We’ll get to that in about ten days.

And it’s there we get to the failure in intelligence.  The Germans saw the casualties, and saw that for all the effort only four radar stations had gone offline…

…and missed the opportunity that made the Brits genuinely nervous; to keep hitting the sites until spares ran out; to hit the generator stations that provided the crude, power-hungry sites their electricity; to hit the civilian telephone exchanges that, incredibly, Chain Home used to call its reports back to Stanhope.

And so after ten days, Göring switched the attack, never knowing how close he came to giving the RAF a handicap that they might never have been able to surmount.

It wouldn’t be the last, of course.

But we’ll talk about that in about ten days.

It was seventy years ago today that the Battle of Britain officially began.

It’s hard to remember, but seventy years ago today – within the lifetime of a huge number of Americans -Western Civilization itself was on the ropes, and the Nazis commenced what they hoped would be the endgame.

It was that bad.

———-

It’s hard to imagine to us, today, engaged as we are in a counterinsurgency war that is very nearly a decade old, how different war was in 1940 than today.  It was very, very fast, in the same way that we conquered Hussein’s Iraq very, very quickly, with huge armored columns sweeping across the plains and clouds of aircraft pummeling opposition far behind the increasingly-meaningless “front line”.  And remember – it had been ten scant months since Hitler had conquered Poland, three months since the lightning campaigns in Denmark and Norway (where the Allies had finally pulled out seventy years and one month ago today on June 10, 1940); not quite two months since Hitler had conquered the Netherlands and Belgium; less than a month since France had capitulated.

In four months – less time than it takes to get through the Stanley Cup playoffs – all of Western Europe, save Switzerland (which watched the Germans warily from their mountain fortresses, mobilized for war on the one hand and needing to accomodate a power that completely surrounded them on the other), Sweden (also ready for war, also surrounded by German or German-allied territory), Spain (where Francisco Franco remained friendly to his benefactor Hitler, while studiously avoiding entering a war he realized would gain him nothing) and Germany’s ally Italy, had fallen.

It was also incredibly bloody by our standards today.  The six weeks between the invasion of the Low Countries and the surrender of France led to 65,000 French killed and missing;
Britain lost nearly 20,000 dead and captured and twice as many wounded; the Dutch lost nearly 10,000 dead and wounded in two weeks, the Belgians twice as many in about a month.  The Germans lost 27,000 dead conquering France, with at least as many wounded.  And the victory, crushing as it was, cost about a third of the strength of the German air force, the Luftwaffe.  That’s over 100,000 dead, not counting civilians, in less time than it takes for your tax refund to arrive if you file by mail.

A section of Boulton-Paul Defiant fighters in formation.

So when German troops lined up along the English Channel, the big question was “what now?”  The obvious answer was “invade Britain”.

But this hadn’t been done successfully since 1066; in the nine hundred years since, Britain had built the world’s most powerful Navy, which if left to operate with impunity would shred any invasion attempt…

…unless it was impossible to operate because of crushing German air superiority.

German Messerschmidt 109 fighter

This was a novel, radical change in warfare even since World War I, 22 years earlier; the idea that there was a third front, the sky, that could control movement on the land and sea and make it impossible to successfully resist.  It was complete German control of the air that hamstrung Poland’s resistance, that gave Germany’s shoestring invasion of Norway the advantage it needed, that drove the Dutch to surrender, that finally doomed France.  Because Germany controlled the skies, Stukas broke up French counterattacks and troop concentrations as German fighters mowed French bombing counterattacks down like sheep.

And the Germans knew they’d have to control the sky over Great Britain to have a chance of holding the Royal Navy at bay long enough to get ashore in Britain to face what might have been an anticlimactic battle against a British army that had left most of its equipment in France while evacuating from Dunkirk.

Hitler knew he needed to capitalize on his momentum.  He also needed to give the exhausted Luftwaffe time to recover, bring in new pilots and planes to replace casualties, and start over again, and give his Navy time to muster enough ships and barges to carry an army cross the Channel, especially after the grievous casualties they’d suffered in Norway over the previous three months.

So the Luftwaffe‘s first mission, which would occupy the first month of the Battle of Britain, scarecely touched British soil at all. 

———-

So as fraught as the date and the events were, the Battle of Britain started with a bit of a whimper.   The Luftwaffe was exhausted from the Battle of France – and so, to slow down the tempo and allow for training replacement crews, the first month of the Battle was spent sparring over the English Channel.

German Heinkel 111 bomber - theretofore most famous for bombing Guernica, during the Spanish Civil War - over the Channel.

Stukas, with powerful fighter escorts, descended on British convoys through the Channel.  The British being on defense, they had to try to cover all the convoys equally; being at the limits of the ranges of the Spitfires and Hurricanes that stood the patrols, the British advantage in radar (of which more in a month or so) was of little value.

German Stukas. While history records that the Stukas were badly bloodied in the Battle, they went on to be among the most efficient ship and tank-killing planes of the entire war.

And so the two air forces spent the month like a couple of boxers in the first round, poking at each other, feeling out each others’ games.

Artists impression of a 92 Squadron Spitfire approaching the white cliffs of Dover during the opening stages of the Battle.

For the merchant ships and the Royal Navy in the Channel below, of course, it was another matter; casualties in this first month became so heavy that the Admiralty stopped all convoy shipping in the Channel.

British ship gets a close call from a German bomb

And so the first phase of the final battle for the future of western civilization went to the Germans by a close nod.

But things would pick up in August.

It was seventy years ago today that Germany’s “Operation Red” – the invation of France proper – began.

It took fifteen days for Germany to bring France – which a month before had been continental Europe’s greatest military power – to the armistice table.  The speed and completeness of the defeat – to say nothing of the potency of the metaphors surrounding the debacle – have combined to make “french defense” a bit of a punchline in America.

German troops entering Paris, 1940

Let me be the first to say that in many ways, France got a very, very bad rap.

We’ll get back to that.  First, the history.

———-

There isn’t much of it.  After the French sent their best troops – including most of their armored divisions – charging into Belgium to the rescue of the Belgians and Dutch, the Germans sent the elite of their military charging through the Ardennes Forest, exactly as they had in 1871 and 1914, and exactly as they would in the winter of 1944 at the Battle of the Bulge.

German antiaircraft gun firing at French tanks

They crossed the only real obstacle – the Meuse River – at Sedan, bringing the full weight of the blitzkrieg, Stukas and massed tanks, to bear against a French division that broke and ran – eventually, after giving two German Panzer divisions a bloody nose trying to cross the river – not so much out of “cowardice” as being grossly unprepared for what they faced.  Indeed, the French division beat back half of the German attempts to cross the river; it was the other half, and the relentless bombing, and the disruption in communication it caused, that sent them eventually running to the rear.  More on this below.

German troops crossing a pontoon bridge of the Meuse at Sedan.

After Sedan, it took mere days to drive to the Channel.  This cut off the French First Army and the British Expeditionary Force, whose evacuation from Dunkirk finished seventy years ago yesterday.

That left it to the Germans to charge into the French interior and finish the game.   After their ghastly losses in the North – including all of their five armored divisions and much of the best of the French Air force – the French had 63 remaining divisions (plus one British division that’d stayed in the south) to hold a front that needed sixty of them.   The Germans destroyed the French Air Force in short order; the demoralized French gave way across the entire front;  by June 14 – in eight days – Paris fell.

German General Erwin Rommel, whose Seventh Panzer Division broke the French front at Sedan. Rommel would go on to fame as the "Desert Fox".

Prime Minister Reynaud resigned rather than surrender; the French brought back eightysomething Field Marshal Petain, the great hero of the French resistance at Verdun in 1916, with the intention of signing an armistice.

Marshal Petain with Hitler at the armistice signing.

And on June 22, at Compiegne, in the very railroad car and on the very spot where Germany had signed the armistice ending World War II, the French surrendered.

Hitler at the Eiffel Tower.

It was one of history’s great anticlimaxes.  Such an anticlimax that it’s been a punchline for seventy years now.  The French are forever tarred as “cheese-eating surrender monkeys”.

It’s a bum rap in many ways.

———-

Myth 1:  The French were Cowards:  How many of you remember the 1970’s?

Our president had just resigned in disgrace.

Our economy was in the tank.

Worst of all, we’d lost the Vietnam War.  56,000 Americans had died for…what?  What had we gained, the question went, after that wrenching ordeal?

Between those three causes, America fell into a deep, self-questioning malaise.  Some wondered if our greatest days weren’t behind us.  Some looked at the “second world” we faced – communism – and wondered if they might not have a good point, and noted that they were at the very least here to stay.

Now, imagine what would have happened if the Soviets had (somehow – I mean, we have to suspend a bit of disbelief here) invaded Canada in about 1978.  And our Pentagon plan for an invasion of Canada called for the US to send its best troops – the Airborne, the Marines, the Second Armored, the Eleventh Cavalry, all of ’em – charging north of the border to rescue the Canadians.

Say, then, that the Soviets had landed a huge invasion force at Seattle by complete surprise, and put their tanks on I94 and drove across the demoralized USA, sacking Chicago and driving along the south shore of the Great Lakes and down the Saint Lawrence all the way to theAtlantic, completely cutting off all those troops in Canada from food and fuel and ammunition and leaving America defended by the post-Vietnam National Guard?

It might have gone badly for us.

Now, picture a situation – a national demoralization, a malaise – 100 times worse than that.

Americans have a hard time comprehending being slaughtered en masse.  In recent memory, World War II is as close as we got – and the history that we’re told doesn’t record a lot of cases of Americans dying in droves like cannon-fodder.  The Civil War, of course.  Maybe a few debacles since then – the Volturno and Rapido rivers, the Huertgen Forest, the daylight bombing campaign of 1942 and 1943, places where Americans were killed in huge numbers for no real appreciable gain.  Our casualties were light-ish, compared to the Soviet Union (which lost over 10 million soldiers, and at least twice as many civilians, perhaps as many as half of them at Soviet hands); our nearly 400,000 dead of all causes (from combat to ruptured appendixes amounted to 6-8% of those who served.

So if you remember the national garment-rending that accompanied the 56,000 dead in Vietnam – about one in 40 of the soldiers that served there – then wrap your head around this:   in World War I, France lost 1.3 million dead and over 4 million wounded – out of a total of 8 million soldiers serving.  Nearly two out of three French soldiers were killed, wounded, captured or went missing in four years of war.

French troops at Verdun, 1916

This crushed the generation of French that came of age before and during the war years.  And it was this generation that went on to become the nation’s middle-management, its field-grade officers, and its low-level politicians by 1940, as well as its family people.

Town of Verdun, with German artillery damage.

Although not so much of that family thing.  While Americans after World War II came home victorious and spawned a baby boom, French soldiers – those that lived – came home and wondered what it was all about.  There was a huge baby bust in France in the twenties.  French society got commensurately older.  And between the destruction of much of the generation that came to middle age by the time of the war and the ravages of the Great Depression, France was beset by a malaise that made the US in the 1970’s look like an evening at Mardi Gras, as well as a relative shortage of military-age males.

French North African troops

As a result, France developed on the one hand a strong desire never to have it happen again.   Although there were nearly twice as many Germans as French, France mobilized fully a third of all males between ages 18 and 45, and managed to outnumber the German Wehrmacht.  They invested heavily in technology to help make that force more effective – albeit the wrong technology, in hindsight.  More below.

But  the nation was also a bit like a dog that’d been kicked too hard as a puppy.  It was deeply unwilling to go through another national bloodletting.  Politics in France was intensely divisive in the twenties and thirties, with parties of the far right and far left battling it out in a way that makes America’s current debate look downright dignifed.

Myth 2: “The Maginot Line Mentality”:   The Maginot line was a line of fortresses guarding France’s border with Germany, from the Swiss to the Belgian borders.  It’s often bandied about as an example of short-sightedness and strategic hide-boundness; the American left is fond of comparing weapons development projects as having “Maginot Line Mentality” – being expensive and yet uselessly behind the times, or havnig sapped money away from the weapons that, in hindsight, could have turned the Germans back.

All of which makes sense –  if you ignore contemporary French history.

The slaughter of World War I made a deep impression on the French psyche – and the casualties made a huge impression on the manpower available to the French military.   During the Great War, the French had suffered ghastly casualties in part due to their doctrine of “toujours l’attacque“, “always attack”.  Two years of reckless charges into the face of German artillery and machine guns forced a change in plan; the French became much more methodical, relying on heavy reinforced strongholds on defense, and tightly-coordinated attacks with artillery and tanks and infantry moving very deliberately under cover.

This philosophy carried forward as France armed itself for the next round of wars, in the ’20s and ’30s.   France created in effect two armies;  one intended to be fast, mechanized and armored, manned by the traditional Army – professional soldiers and lots of enlistees in their teens and twenties, intended to fight a combined-arms mobile war; the other with hundreds of thousands of middle-aged reservists in their thirties and forties intented to hold long stretches of the line with as little cost as possible.

And it was for that second army that the Maginot Line was built.  A long, complex chain of concrete forts and gun turrets and millions and millions of antitank obstacles and thousands of bunkers and pillboxes connected by tunnels, underground phone lines and even narrow-gauge railways, the Maginot Line was intended to make it easy for a relatively small number of middle-aged weekend warriors to hold off the German army while the first Army worked on the war-winning attack.

Artists' rendering of a Maginot line fortress

And it worked.  The Germans had to batter their way through Belgium and the Netherlands to outflank the Line; the younger troops and tanks, the elite of the Army, got cut off and surrendered in Belgium, and only that allowed Germany to move unmolested into the heart of France without having to punch its bloody way through the Maginot Line.

Myth 3: The French weren’t ready for modern war: With their fortresses and their harkening back to the tactics of World War I’s trenches, it looks to someone looking back seventy years that France was anachronistic.

At the time, it was not true.  Indeed, in some respects France’s eagerness to modernize was its undoing.

If you work in Information Technology, you know this scenario:  when adopting new technology, companies have a choice:  Adopt the technology early, and by committing immense financial resources to the change risk having it go obsolete before too terribly long (all of you with companies still running NT4.0 servers, show of hands?), or adopt late and have a buggy, unreliable system.

France took the former route; they standardized their Army and Air Force on technology from the late twenties and early thirties, and built it in huge numbers.  And it showed; many of France’s tanks have a distinctly twenties look to them;

many of their fighter planes, built in the mid-thirties in the middle of a period of dizzyingly rapid aircraft development, were sixty miles per hour slower than their British and German counterparts (and the Brits, for their part, almost standardized too late; the Spitfire fighters that carried them through the war almost didn’t make it into service in time to fight).

French MS406 fighter

But they had more tanks, and with the Brits more planes, than the Germans – and the late attempt to rectify the technology was starting to pay off; the French “Somua” tank was possibly the best in the world; the Dewoitine 520 fighter was among the best, although just coming into production.

At any rate – conventional wisdom, when it comes to history, fares about as well as it does anywhere else.

On this Memorial Day, in this dismal low-point in what may well be remembered as one of the worst periods in recent American history, it’s good to remember a time when things were much, much more tangibly horrible.

Seventy years ago today, the evacuation at Dunkirk was reaching its peak – after  a fitful start that had some wondering if Britain mightn’t be better off making a deal with Hitler.  And with it, the future of Western Civilization was…

…well, not “saved”; wars, as Churchill said, are not won by evacuations.  But the events seventy years ago this week sent World War II into a second act.

It had been three weeks since Germany had launched its invasion of Belgium and the Netherlands.   The feint into Holland with Germany’s second line troops accomplished its mission – drawing the best of the French Army, and the ten divisions of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF), into northern Belgium.

The Germans’ next step – pouring their best Panzer divisions thorugh the Ardennes Forest and driving straight for the English Channel – cut off the BEF and most of the best French troops – the regulars, the North Africans, the twentysomething soldiers – in Belgium.

The troops, cut off from supplies and communications, had to make their way to the Channel, under intense German pressure and constant bombardment from the German Luftwaffe.   By the end of May, the British, along thousands of French troops, were trapped in a pocket by the French port city of Dunkirk, right at the Belgian border.

It’s hard to describe how desperate, and fraught, this situation was.  The BEF was over 200,000 soldiers and airmen, including the bulk of Britain’s combat power at the time.   Losing them would cripple Britain’s war effort.  And it seemed very likely that they would lose the BEF.  King George VI ordered an unprecedented national week of prayer.

And it was then, starting on May 27, that Churchill – acting through Admiral Bertram Ramsay – ordered one of the most desperate gambles of all time.

He ordered Admiral Ramsay to attempt to evacuate the BEF, under fire, from Dunkirk.  To facilitate this, Ramsay put out another call – for Britains’ small boat owners, private and commercial, to volunteer their small craft and, if possible, themselves.

The outlook seemed grim.  Ramsey’s initial orders were to take two days to try to evacuate 45,000 men.  And on the first day, May 27, that looked improbable, with 7,000 men being picked up from the harbor the first day, and maybe 10,000 more the next.

But by May 30, Ramsey’s plan began to fall into place – aided by the Germans’ acceptance of Hermann Goering’s promise that the Luftwaffe could subdue the Brits alone, freeing up the German tanks to drive south.  He used larger ships – especially Britain’s fleet of destroyers, very fast ships that could carry hundreds of men back to safety at nearly 40 miles per hour, but needed the 15-20 feet of underwater room- to go into Dunkirk’s harbor and pick men up off the docks and especially “the Mole”, the harbor’s long breakwater.

In the meantime his call for “little ships” brought hundreds of smaller boats of all kinds, mostly shallow-draft boats capable of getting to or close to the beaches to pick up the thousands of men waiting there.

There were all manner of these boats – lifeboats from ocean liners, pleasure boats, trawlers and fishing smacks, dozens of Dutch canal boats that had fled the Netherlands (and carried thousands to safety), much of the UK’s rescue boat fleet, even a Thames river dredge.

Some of the soldiers on the beach in turn built makeshift docks out of the hundreds of army trucks that were going to be abandoned anyway, allowing men to clamber their way out into deeper water to be picked up more easily by the boats.

Between the two – small boats picking men off the beaches, larger ships carrying bulk lots from the harbor- it was seventy years ago today that the evacuation had its biggest day, with 22,000 picked up from the beaches and 45,000 more from the harbor.

The Germans tried to choke off the evacuation; air raids at one point forced the Royal Navy’s destroyers to restrict their entry into the harbor to night-time sorties.

Two days later – days after the supposed deadline, as Hitler finally overruled Goering and sent ground troops in to finish Dunkirk off – the last organized units of the BEF left the continent.  The Navy and the little ships were battered by losses – six of the vital destroyers and hundreds of the little ships had been sunk, with many more damaged.

The French government was putting immense political pressure on Churchill to evacuate French soldiers and send them, along with as many evacuated French troops as possible, back to France to help defend against the inevitable German offensive into France.  So Churchill and Ramsey ordered the evacuation to continue for another day, and then another, taking off mostly French troops as the French rear guard held off the Germans.  On June 4, it finally ended with 26,000 final rescues, the last boats leaving as the Germans entered the city, capturing the last of the French defenders.

In total, 338,000 men were rescued from the continent – 88% of the men who’d been trapped in the Dunkirk pocket nine days earlier.

That still left 30,000-odd who were captured – two divisions of the French rear guard, troops that fought until all hope was gone against insurmountable odds, and then only surrendered when ordered – and many British stragglers.

Still, compared to a week earlier, when it looked as if barely a third of the 45,000 man initial estimate might be saved, it was a miracle.

The French demanded that the rescued British and French troops be sent back to the south of France – but it was a ludicrous request. The troops had left all their artillery, trucks, tanks, and everything heavier than rifles lying in the sand.  They were exhausted – as was the Royal Navy.  As the last evacuation ships tied up in the UK, the next German offensive – “Plan Red” – that would lead to the capitulation of France, was about to start.  More on that on Saturday.

But the evacuation was vital to the war.  Britain’s 300,000 best troops went on to fight another day, and serve as the nucleus for the British war effort in North Africa, Italy and, finally, the return to France four years later.

Many of the French soldiers returned to France, mostly to become prisoners of war in a few short weeks.  But those that remained – the survivors of the best of the French military, the ones that had been sent into Belgium three weeks earlier – formed the nucleus of the Free French Army under Charles DeGaulle.  More on them later this week as well.

Re-equipping all those British troops accelerated Churchill’s negotiations with the US for “Lend-Lease” equipment – which, in turn, drew the US closer to war with Germany (although in 18 months Pearl Harbor would make that a moot point).

All in all, the evacuation allowed Churchill, on June 4, to make his “Dunkirk Speech” in the House of Commons a rousing, defiant one.  Not that Churchill was going to give a defeatist speech in any case – although the British war cabinet did in fact take a vote on seeking terms with Hitler; the evacuation helped make the vote a landside “no”.   More on that on Friday, as well.

And so while Memorial Day is an American holiday commemorating American troops, it’s worth paying some mind today for the many other people who’ve fought for freedom alongside American troops over the years; the Australians, Danes and Poles who joined us in Iraq; the Lithuanians and New Zealanders who are with us in Afghanistan; the Koreans who have not only defended their own homeland against their psychotic neighbor but joined us in Vietnam 45 years ago (suffering thousands of casualties but beating the Viet Cong on their own turf)…

…and, seventy years ago today, thousands of British soldiers and sailors and  weekend fishermen and boat hobbyists who kept Western Civilization alive until help could arrive.

(Worth a read)

It was seventy years ago today that Germany executed Fall Gelb– “Case Yellow” – the codename for the invasion of Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourge.  About three weeks later, the operation continued with Fall Rot – “Case Red”, the invasion of France.  We’ll come back to that one in a bit.  Both nations – low-lying, largely few natural defenses other than the Rhein and Maas rivers, and saddled with the same sort of preventive neutrality that Norway tried to practice, fell quickly.

Rotterdam bombed by the Germans

The Germans’ goals weren’t just taking the three small countries – although Germany craved ports on the North Sea and, eventually, the Atlantic.  The primary goal was to sucker the French Army to send their best troops charging into Belgium (along with their British allies) to the rescue – and to get cut off in Belgium and Northern France, while the Germans outflanked the Maginot line and charged into the heart of France.

The entire campaign was, in other words, a hip fake.

German Pzkw II tank in Holland in 1940. Outclassed by many French and British tanks, it nonetheless was often found where thos tanks weren't.

But it was a very risky hip fake.  The Germans were trying to capture both countries with a minimum of force, to conserve troops for the real battle, taking out France and destroying or capturing the British Army on the continent.  Many of the German troops were older reservists, from units that had been only half-trained.  The Germans’ best troops – their most experienced Panzer divisions, their first-line infantry – were being saved for the push into France.

The Germans employed the first of what we’d today call “commando raids” to take a key obstacle, the Belgian fort at Eben Emael, manned by over a thousand Belgian troops with artillery and machine guns, which covered the key crossings of the Albert Canal and the Meuse/Maas river.

Armored observation cupola at Eben Emael, with a view of the terrain the Germans would have to cross. From this cupola, an observer would call down artillery fire on attackers.

A force of 78 German paratroops landed in gliders on the fairly undefended roof of the fort, and planted armor-piercing explosives on the gun turrets, silencing the fort’s main defense until the rest of the German army could cross the bridges below.

The German paratroopers that captured Eben Emael

Paratroops were the solution to a more difficult problem in the Netherlands.  The Dutch had, since the 1600s, planned to defend the economic and industrial heartland of their flat, almost indefensible country by flooding the low-lying farmland east of Utrecht.  The “Waterlinie“, or Water Line, created a putative “Fortress Holland”, effectively turning the nation’s heartland into a peninsula, nearly an island,with its east covered by the Water Line and a chain of forts, and the south by the Rhein River.

A Dutch fort/gun position astride one of the dijks at the edge of the Water Line. The dijk would be the only safe, dry road through the waterlogged, trench-ridden landscape. Dutch soldiers, so the plan went, would make sure invaders got an even drier welcome.

The Dutch flooded the water line well before the German invasion.  But German paratroops captured the bridges over the Rhein, and poured troops across under complete air superiority, outflanking the Water Line for the first time since the 1600s, dooming the nation’s resistance.

The Netherlands fell, effectively, in a matter of days.  Belgium held on longer – but it was, in fact, irrelevant in the greater scheme of things.

But as we’ve observed in the previous parts of this series, on the invasions of Poland, Norway and Denmark – American education has been sorely lacking at this part of history, unless the goal is to teach people media myths, not merely American but in fact German.

Over the decades, plenty of wives’ tales have come to be accepted as common currency.

“The Low Countries were weak and pathetic“.  Well, yes and no.

Belgium and the Netherlands both realized, as did Norway and Denmark before them, that they had no chance fighting against any of the major powers, Britain or France or especially Germany.  And like Norway and Denmark before them, they had spent most of the years since World War I embracing strict neutrality; not taking either side in any war.  Of course, watching the world order fraying after about 1936 had caused alarm in both nations (and watching the Japanese grow ever more militaristic also spurred the Dutch, who at the time owned Indonesia as a colony) into belated action.  Both nations started rebuilding their long-neglected defenses; both were too late, of course, but it wasn’t without effect.

The Dutch submarine O19. When it was built, it was perhaps the best submarine in the world. It served with distinction through the war, being lost when it ran on an uncharted reef in 1945; its crew was rescued by an Ameircan submarine.

Along with the successful raids on Eben Email and the bridges to bypass the Water Line, the Germans tried again to cut the head off the Dutch Government and capture Queen Wilhelmina, landing paratroops at three airfields around the Dutch summer capitol at Den Haag.   The paratroops suffered terrible casualties at each of the airfields; worse, the paratroops were unable to secure the area around the airports, so Dutch anti-aircraft fire destroyed many planed bringing reinforcements.

German Junkers 52 transport, destroyed on the ground at a Den Haag airfield by Dutch infantry.

Finally, Dutch counterattacks led each of the raids to retreat, with heavy casualties; over a thousand paratroopers were captured, and between Dutch antiaircraft fire and planes being caught on the ground by the Dutch infantry, the Luftwaffe lost half of its entire air transport fleet – losses that it keenly felt later in the war.  The German paratroopers themselves were bled white by the resistance, and between the terrible losses in Holland and even worse losses the following year on Crete, the disaster led to the German airborne arm being grounded the rest of the war.  Queen Wilhelmina, like Norwegian King Haakon before her, fled to the UK to lead a government in exile, lending the Dutch puppet government no legitimacy.

As the German panzers approached Rotterdam, the German paratroops that had taken the bridges tried to force their way across; a company of Dutch Marines in their striking black uniforms stood in the way.  For the better part of four days. the Marines kept the two German forces apart, denying them one of their key routes into Fortress Holland.  This resistance was a key part of the Germans’ decision, on May 14, to terror-bomb Rotterdam – the first of many terror-bombings in the West – and the threat of many more such attacks.  The threat – and the carnage in Rotterdam, with 800 civilians dead – led to the Dutch government’s surrender.

And it was only then that the Marines gave up.  The German commander was shocked; he expected a battalion of 800 Marijniers; as he saw the survivors of the company – 100 men and change – emerge from the rubble, he ordered his own troops to salute them.

According to Walter Lord in Miracle at Dunkirk, the Germans ranked their opponents in descending order of ferocity, tenacity and courage at the end of the 1940 campaign, according to the observations of German units in the field.

In order, they were the Dutch, Belgians, British, and finally the French.

The French Were Cowards:  We’ll talk more about this in a few weeks, when we get to the actual invasion of France.  But suffice to say it’s a lot more complicated than that.

While the histories of the era relate the supremacy of the German “Panzers” – tanks – in fact the French had more, and largely better, tanks than the Germans.  It’s a truism among military geeks that the French employed their tanks badly, spreading them all over the front while the Germans concentrated theirs in a tight mass of steel that was sent slicing through the lines into the enemy’s rear.

But the French met the Germans in the biggest tank battle in history (until the huge battles in North Africa and Russia later in the war), the Battle of Hannut, in which French tank and infantry, fighting with the kind of skill that the legends of French cowardice have found too inconvenient to remember, held the Germans to a tactical draw and an operational defeat. halting a German armored advance.

French tanks, destroyed in action at Hannut.

The French victory turned out to be more or less irrelevant – the real attack came a few days later, through the Ardennes Forest, the same place where Germans had attacked to rout the French and Belgians in 1871 and 1914, and where they’d surprise the Americans in the winter of 1944.   This attack caught the French, Belgians and British by surprise, crossing the Meuse river (in one of the cases where French troops – thirty-something reservists, mostly – actually did break and run under heavy attack from German Stukas.  The attack drove straight to the English channel in a matter of four days, cutting off the troops that had prevailed at Hannut and many other places along the northern front.

And it was there, really, that the Battle of France was decided.  France’s best troops – their elite, their best-equipped, their tanks, their best of everything – had raced north to rescue the Belgians.   Although three weeks and change would pass before the actual invasion of France, the initial plan – to draw the French and British into Belgium and cut them off – succeeded brilliantly.  The entire British Expeditionary Force, and a third of the entire French Army, was trapped in Belgium and  northern France.  They would engage in an epic retreat to Dunkirk, and be snatched from the jaws of disaster by an epic national response…

…but we’ll get to that in a few weeks.

It was seventy years ago today that World War II came to Norway and Denmark.

As with the previous episode in this series, the Invasion of Poland, history has spawned all kinds of myths about this campaign.

Norway and Denmark, like many other smaller European nations, had actively embraced the idea of neutrality as their best defense against huge potential enemies like Germany, the USSR and, believe it or not, France and the UK.  Indeed, that was what “neutrality” meant, in the full legal sense of the term, for countries that embraced it; they could not distinguish between liberal democracies like Britain and fascist dictatorships like Germany; they had to treat all nations as the same, and all belligerents in a war as equally culpable.

This, believed the Danes and Norwegians, was their best shot at avoiding war; taking absolutely no side in the conflict.

And it’s one of histories great accidents that in Norway’s case it didn’t turn out to be true, at least legally.  Winston Churchill noted that much of the steel that ran Germany’s war machine came from iron ore mined in northern Sweden, and exported via train to Narvik, Norway, and thence shipped to Germany.  Churchill hatched a plan; to send a brigade of British soldiers to occupy Narvik first, and work out the diplomatic details with the Norwegians later.    And so in the days leading up to April 9, 1940, the British embarked a brigade of infantry onto a couple of cruisers and got ready to send them to Norway.

The Germans got there first.

They had engineered a pretty elaborate surprise attack; they put most of their troops on warships, fast cruisers and destroyers, rather than on regular transports and landing ships.  They also staged the world’s first major airborne assault, sending the paratroopers (Fallschirmjäger) to capture Norway’s major airport and, they hoped, King Haakon and his cabinet.

King Haakon VII

The German surprise attack wasn’t a complete surprise; British intelligence got some word out in advance.  A Polish submarine, the Orzel, which had itself escaped the conquest of Poland only eight months before, sank a transport off Lillesand, and a British sub damanged a cruiser full of troops.   And one group of German ships encountered the Norwegian patrol boat Pol the night before the invasion, as the ships were staging to launch their assaults in the morning.  They sank the Pol, whos captain became the first fatality of many the next day.

But it was a home-field game for the Germans; Denmark was on their own border, and Norway was much closer to Germany than to the UK or France.

Despite the three naval actions the day before, the word was slow in getting to the governments in London and Oslo; the Norwegian government, realizing they had no hope of preserving peace, ordered an alert – which, being far too late, did little good – and started packing up the nation’s gold reserves (which did succeed).

And so on the morning of April 9, a coordinated six-point assault with elements of six infantry and mountain divisions simultaneously invaded the six most important cities in Norway.  Two German battlescruisers carried elements of a Mountain Division to Narvik, well above the Arctic circle, destroying two of Norway’s ancient “battleships”, the Eidsvold and the Norge, leaving a few dozen survivors out of crews totalling 300 men.  Other ships landed troops at Trondhjem, Bergen, Kristiansand and Egersund; the biggest detachment sailed up Oslofjord to try to capture Oslo, link up with the paratroopers, and try to decapitate whatever command and control Norway had.

German tanks land in Oslo

And so the Germans essentially drove into Denmark, and debouched from ships and planes into Norway.  The Danes, having a tiny military, indefensible terrain, and no real chance at defense, worked out an armistice quickly that enabled them to keep at least some small degree of autonomy under German rule – which would hold for the next couple of years.

Aircraft carrying German paratroopers flying over Copenhagen.

For the most part, the strikes on Norway went off with surgical assurance and with little overt resistance; Norway had nearly disbanded her military, and had only very recently realized that pacifism needed some form of defense; they’d begun building a few new destroyers (to replace vessels commissioned in the 1890s), and bought fighter and anti-submarine planes from Britain and the US – although by April 9, only 12 British-built Gloster Gladiator biplanes were combat-ready.

Norwegian Gladiator (pilot; Dag Krohn). Painting by Lars Lindgren.

All 12 were destroyed by the end of the first day – although not before shooting down several German planes full of paratroopers first.

But for the key part of the German plan – the capture of King Haakon, his cabinet, the Storting (Parliament), the gold reserves and the legitimate government of Norway ?  The wheels came off, unpredictably, bright and early.

The biggest of the German invasion forces stormed into Oslofjord on the morning of April 9.   Lead by the heavy cruiser Blücher, the force included two other heavy cruisers, three destroyers, and eight other ships crammed with German infantry.   Norway had very few formal defenses – but the Oscarsborg fortress, sitting in at a narrowpoint in the fjord, was one of them.  The commander of the fortress, Colonel Birger Eriksen, sensing trouble, had put his troops on alert on his own initiative, disobeying an order to stand down.

Oscarsborg Fortress, in Oslo Fjord

And at 5:15AM, his searchlights illuminated Blücher; his fortress’ main battery, two 11-inch cannon that’d been installed in 1892, engaged the cruiser.

One of the two Oscarsborg 11 inch guns.

Two hits blew a turret off of the cruiser, and forced it to stop – leaving it a sitting duck for an 1890-vintage torpedo, fired from a glorified log flume on shore, which caused Blücher to tip over on its right side and sink, ablaze, killing 1,000 sailors and soldiers, including many specialists and administrators who were to take over the running of the Norwegian government.

Blucher, ablaze, capsizes in the Drobak narrows

This blocked the fjord, preventing the force from getting to Oslo long enough for the King, Cabinet, Parliament, and the gold supply to evacuate.

The Germans needed Haakon and his Cabinet; if they could be captured and induced to capitulate, it would mean that Germany controlled Norway’s legitimate government.  And so they sent an elite force of paratroopers in a convoy of commandeered civilian trucks to try to intercept Haakon’s convoy as it fled into the interior.

They nearly succeeded.  But at the village of Midtskogen Gard, they ran into a group of Royal Guards and “reservists” – hunting club members, really – who blocked them and, in a short, sharp battle, turned them back.

And so Haakon and his government managed to escape into the interior, where they led Norway’s tiny, hardscrabble Army in resistance for nearly two months, before evacuating from Tromsö aboard a British cruiser on June 7.

German soldiers marching in front of the Storting (Parliament) in Oslo - the day after Haakon and the Government escaped.

Norway thus became the only country conquered by Hitler to never surrender to the Nazis.  Haakon, leading Norway’s legitimate government (no country ever recognized, even by the dubious standards of world diplomacy, Vidkun Quisling’s puppet regime) at the head of over 20,000 troops in exile, 50,000 troops in the underground, and the 22,000 men and hundreds of ships of Norway’s merchant marine.

It was five years to the day later that Haakaon returned to Norway at the head of his military (escorted by the US 99th Infantry Battalion, made up of Norwegian-speaking GIs from Minnesota, the Dakotas and Michigan) in 1945.

———-

As I’ve done throughout this series, I’m here to debunk myths.

There are several in re the war in Scandinavia.

No Pushover:  While the popular history has it that Norway rolled over quickly for the German attack, the fact is that not only did Norway never surrender (as noted above), but the campaign became a bit of a quagmire, at least initially, for Germany.  The initial invasion used six divisions and parts of a seventh, and still couldn’t conquer the whole country.

German troops and light tank, under fire from Norwegian troops in rural Norway.

To make matters worse for the Germans, the British expeditionary force originally slated to invade Norway ended up arriving in Narvik after the Germans – to be seen as liberators and rescuers.  The British navy task force delivering them, led by the battleships HMS Warspite, wiped out the German naval force at Narvik, including ten destroyers – a blow from which the German destroyer force never recovered throughout the war.

German destroyers, wrecked at Narvikfjord

The Allied ground force – including British, French, Norwegian and Polish-Army-In-Exile forces – drove the Germans out of the city, and held until evacuated in June.  The Norwegians operating outside Narvik, under General Fleischer, delivered the first tactical defeat suffered by the German Army in World War II.

Polish "Podhalanska" mountain troops with German POWs at Narvik

Farther down-country, the Norwegians – again, mostly gun-club “reservists”, with French and British troops in support- delayed, and then halted, the German advance up-country during the campaign around Namsos, which was finally overcome only through the lack of Allied air support and, finally, the fall of France.

As the quagmire dragged on, the Germans got desperate, carrying out terror-bombing attacks on Nybergsund, Andalsnes, Molde, Elverum, Kristiansund, Namsos and Narvik.

Narvik blazes after German terror bombing

The last Norwegian army unit fighting in Norway didn’t cease organized resistance until June 10; Norway resisted longer than than of any of Hitler’s other conquests.

June 7, 1945: Crown Prince Olaf returns to Oslo. His bodyguard is noted Norwegian commando Max Manus - about whom more soon.

Resistance:  Tens of thousands of Norwegians escaped Norway; fifty thousand more fought in some capicity or another in the Resistance.  The Milorg achieved some spectacular successes, including the destruction of the German “Heavy Water” supply during the Vemork raid.  Germany stationed a total of eighteen divisions in Norway on occupation duty during the war – partly testament to the importance of Germany’s bases, which supported U-boat and air raids on convoys crossing the Atlantic and especially those supplying Lend-Lease supplies to the USSR – and also to the effectiveness of Norway’s resistance.  It was the highest ratio of occupation troops to civilians anywhere in Europe.

Denmark resisted as well; indeed, given the more difficult terrain, the Danish resistance was especially crafty, adaptible and ferocious.  And both nations pulled off the incredible; during a three-week stretch in 1943, the Danish resistance managed to smuggle 86% of Denmark’s Jews to safety in Sweden, after word got out that Hitler was about to abrogate the terms of Denmark’s armistice and round the Jews up for extermination.

Danish fishing boat en route to Sweden with a hidden cargo of Jewish refugees

Norway similarly got 75% of its Jewish population smuggled to Sweden, albeit in less dramatic fashion.  Both nations’ resistance groups are listed collectively among the “Righteous Among Nations” at Yad Vashem.

Exile: Among the Norwegians and Danes who escaped to fight onward, many distinguished themselves.  The Canadian government, using airplanes Norway had bought from the US but were not delivered, set up a training base for Norwegian pilots, “Little Norway”, near Toronto.  The Norwegian pilots served with distinction; 331 and 332 Squadrons, flying Spitfires, became among the highest-scoring squadrons in the Royal Air Force late in the war, flying air cover over the Normandy invasion, the liberation of Holland, and the crossing of the Rhein River.

Three 331 Squadron Spitfires at North Weald airfield. The squadron's letter code "FN" was random - but happened to coincide with the squadron motto, "For Norge" - For Norway.

At sea, Norway’s huge merchant fleet was a huge part of the Allied effort to first keep Britain from starving, and then to support the invasion and liberation of Europe.  Beyond that?  Norwegian crews on British-built torpedo boats and gunboats, and two British-built submarines – the Uredd, lost in a minefield, and the Ula, which sank more enemy tonnage than any other Allied submarine in the Atlantic during World War II – vexed the occupiers up and down Norway’s long coastline.

HNoMS Ula, highest-scoring Allied submarine in the Atlantic in WWII.

Lessons Learned: Norway has always had a reputation for big-L “liberalism”, which it passed on to its descendants in Minnesota.

But it learned its lesson, too.  During the Cold War, when faced with an enemy historically even worse than Hitler (remember – Norway and Turkey were the only NATO nations to share borders with the USSR), they backed up their innate pacifism with a big stick.

NNoMS Kobben, which spent the Cold War watching Soviet ships and prowling the fjords.

Although the nation has about the same population as Minnesota, it built up a sizeable navy to defend its long, craggy coastline from invasion – and turned virtually its entire male population into an army.  Norwegians served in a system similar in many ways to that of Switzerland and Israel, keeping their weapons at home, ready for the worst.  The nation’s military was trained for guerilla warfare; a hypersecret branch of Norway’s special forces spent the Cold War years building the infrastructure to make another occupation of Norway a horrible and bloody thing for the next round of enemies.

Norwegian Leopoard tanks on exercises in the Telemark, 1982.

For it’s part, the Danish military after World War II developed a reputation for fierceness; Danish troops serving in Bosnia/Herzegovina were reportedly among the most aggressive in smacking down Serb aggression.  It’s worth noting that Danish special forces – the Jaegerkorpset, among the most admired special opertions forces in NATO – accompanied the US in its initial invasion of Iraq, along with those of Poland, another nation that had learned the hard way that freedom needed fierce defense.

As we confront our nation’s own tribulations, we’d do well to remember the examples of the people of Norway and Denmark.

It was seventy years ago this morning that Germany invaded Poland, launching World War II in Europe – beginning what was, in a sense,the end of a war that’d begun 25 years earlier, taken a 21 year break, and then re-ignited, killing tens of millions of people directly on the battlefield and, in ways never before seen in human history, off of it.
In another sense, it began the final act of the Old World – the world of European dominance, of its kingdoms and alignments and customs defining “civilization” for the rest of the world – and was the beginning of the world we have today, a world who’s denouement is at this moment very much in play.

But that’s a story we’ll recap in seventy more years, God willing.

———-

In reading the story of the German Blitzkrieg into Poland most of my cognitive life, I became fascinated with the history of Poland – or, really, of all of the smaller European states that Hitler swallowed up.  A lot of legends sprang up around each of these nations and their record during the awful year that followed the invasion of Poland.

I would like to address some of them.

———-

Poland started the war with a couple of strikes against it.

For starters, its terrain is just not defendable.

All of its major cities sit on a broad, flat plain, cut by few rivers (whose banks are, largely, not major obstacles to much of anything).  The road from the German or Russian border to the capitol in Warsaw, or its industrial heartland around Katowice/Sosnowiec, or its intellectual and cultural heart in Krakow has no more physical speed bumps than a drive from Fargo to Grand Forks.

And while Poland knew very well that it was surrounded by a couple of rapacious dictatorships who, as they had through all of history, meant it nothing but ill, and they did their best to prepare for eventualities, they did something that’s all too familiar to modern IT executives; at a time in history when military technology was evolving at a pace that the world had never before seen (and in many respects hasn’t seen since), the Poles, like the French, laid their cards on the table early, standardizing and mass-producing equipment that turned out to be obsolete a mere 5-10 years after it rolled off the assembly line.  The Polish Air Force was mass-producing the Pzl fighter plane and the Karas fighter-bomber at a time when the Germans had just started developing the planes with which they’d launch the war, the Bf109 fighter, the Ju87 Stuka dive bomber, the He111/Do17/Ju88 bombers.

(The French military, like the British navy, likewise bet long on mid-thirties technology that served it less effectively than later designs). Likewise, they built thousands of tiny, two-man machine-gun armed “tankettes”, state of the art in 1933 but useless as anything but mobile machine guns in 1939 against the German tanks that were just going up on the drawing boards.

By 1939, Poland was just starting to produce the excellent “7TP” tanks – as good as any German Panzer…

…but it was too little and too late.

To help make up for that, the Poles had a few advantages; the Air Force’s pilots were spectacularly well-trained; indeed, the Polish pilots who escaped after the Blitz to the UK, and got to fly first-rate modern fighters like the Hurricane and the Spitfire in 1940 turned out to be among the RAF’s highest scorers in the Battle of Britain.

In the days before radar, they were supported by a large, comprehensive ground observer network that did a surprisingly good job of detecting German air raids and vectoring Polish fighters onto the target.  The Polish Navy, in contrast (and as an ironic result of its relatively lower standing at budget time) standardized rather later, and went to war with some of the finest equipment in all of Europe; the Blyskawica-class destroyers and Orzel-class submarines (both built in Holland) were among the best anywhere, certainly outclassing anything in the German or British navies.  And, since they were standardized late and in dire  economic times, there were exactly two of each in service.

The Poles had one other thing; centuries of vassaldom to the Germans and Russians.  Other than the brief Republic of Krakow in the mid-1700’s, and the 21 years of independence (marked by a war for survival against the Soviets), Poland had been under one boot or another since the end of the Jagiellonian era. The Poles wanted their freedom.  And even though the government in 1939 was at least partly a dictatorship – a response to a paralyzing indecision in the face of both the Great Depression and the gathering threat from east and west – Poland was an outpost of small-“l” liberal sentiment.  It also built an intellgience service that, like that of many counteries surrounded by enemies (see Israel), disproportionally excellent; indeed, Polish Intelligence helped with one of the great coups of the war; it was the Poles that made the first inroads into breaking Germany’s “Enigma” encryption system.  The Polish mathematicians fled to the UK, and joined with the British thinkers at Bletchley Park to complete the job.  The fact that the Allies could read Germany’s “secret” transmissions in near-real-time (by cryptology standards) was one of the key factors in winning the war; without that, the U-Boat offensive in 1941-43 would have likely succeeded in starving Britain to the negotiating table with Hitler.

Unlike France – misconceptions about whom we’ll address on their own 70th anniversary, in about eight months – this gave Poland a deep will to fight.

It wasn’t enough, of course – but it came a lot closer to evening things up than contemporary propaganda credits them.
———-

Two myths grew up around the German invasion of Poland; that the Polish Air Force was destroyed on the ground in the opening minutes of the campaign, and that the Polish Army’s cavalry was such a medieval throwback, it resorted to charging at tanks with lances.

Both are propaganda myths spread by the Germans and parrotted, in a story all too familiar to modern consumers of news, by an incurious, uninformed Western news media.

———-

The Polish Air Force was not caught on the ground.  Far from it; they dispersed away from their major airfields, according to pre-war plans that recognized not only the Luftwaffe’s superiority in numbers and equipment – by this point, German bombers could outrun Polish fighter planes – but Poland’s few aces in the hole.

And when the German bomber streams started appearing over Poland, the observers saw and heard them, and phoned in the information to HQ, who vectored Poland’s old fighters into position to do the only thing they realistically could against planes that were faster than their own; wait in ambush over the targets, take the most direct approach they could to their targets, and fight like hell.

And they did.  The Polish Air Force shot down over 230 German planes during September of 1939, about 250 more were damaged, many of them beyond repair.  The Lotnictwo Wojskowe lost about 100 shot down or otherwise destroyed by enemy action, with about as many being lost as the pace of the German advance, and later the Russian invasion, made repairs impossible and swallowed up the warning network and, finally, teh airfields themselves.

Following the goverment’s instructions, as the fight in central Poland became impossible, they retreated to the mountains in the south, and after the surrender made their way, by air or car or foot, first to Romania, then through Africa or Iran or the Mediterranean, then to France (where many fought with the French air force) and finally Britain or the USSR.

———-

The other legend – the horse-cavalry charges with bugles blowing and lances waving – is more pernicious.  It’s a propaganda legend, of course, one started as a German reponse to a Polish tactical victory.

In the opening days of the war, Poland had plenty of horse cavalry; they were in the process of trying to retired horses in favor of tanks and armored cars, but the Depression had slowed the process (as it did, by the way, in the US, whose cavalry was still largely horse-mounted in 1939 as well).  They didn’t fight in the classic sense of the term; think of them as infantry on horses, using the greater mobility of being mounted to help cover more ground, but dismounting to fight on foot when the action started.  And while they had lances, they were for ceremonial occasions only; they weren’t carried in the field.  There was never an intention to fight the way cavalry had always fought – the saber charges, the bugles, the mounted dashes.

Usually.

In the opening days of the war, a squadron of Pomeranian cavalry under Colonel Julian Filipowicz, patrolling in the corridor below Gdansk (Danzig, at the time), encountered a German infantry battalion which, tired from advancing and from a brisk fight with a Polish infantry unit across some nearby railroad tracks, was resting in an open field.

Col. Filipowicz’ unit – about 300 cavalrymen – while scouting the area, found the Germans.  As is so often the deciding factor in modern war, they saw the Germans first, and were able to act accordingly.  They deployed some modern weapons – Browning M2 machine guns, first built in 1918 and still found on every US Army tank today – to back up a charge led by some very old weapons, the cavalry saber.  Filipowicz, seeing an unprepared foe, ordered a charge.

And it cut the German battalion to pieces, killing dozens, wounding hundreds, and leaving the battalion combat-ineffective for quite some time.

As the Poles completed several passes, a unit of German armored cars happened on the scene, and turned their cannon and machine guns on the Poles, causing heavy losses and sending them back into the woods, to fight another day.

German photographers, travelling with a group of tanks that responded to the debacle, photographed a number of the dead Polish troopers alongside the Panzers.  The German propagandists spread the report –  the Poles were stuck in the medieval era! – as a morale booster.  And the tall tale, rather than the story of the boundless courage of Filipowicz’ men, stuck.

———-

It wasn’t the last bloody nose the Poles gave the Germans.  When the Germans pushed the Poles back to Warsaw, they tried to storm the city using the same tanks that had led them across the North Polish Plain.  The Sixth Panzer Division was ordered to attack the city.

The tanks moved into the warren of streets that made up Warsaw’s western suburbs…

…and got swallowed in a morass of antitank guns, molotov cocktails (which wouldn’t earn their name until the following winter, from the Finns, about whom more in a couple of months) and booby traps.

The Sixth Panzers lost sixty tanks – about a third of its armored strength – in the first day of its assault, a catastrophic hit.

Warsaw would have to fall the old-fashioned way – through infantrymen advancing from house to house.

———-

Or through treachery.

Stalin, as part of his temporary alliance with Hitler, invaded Poland about this time, destroying whatever hope for resistance that the Poles might have had.  It was all she wrote.

Oh, they fought on anyway; tens of thousands of Poles went to the UK or the USSR to carry on the war; hundreds of thousands more fought with the various guerrilla groups, the Armia Krajowa (Home Army) which hampered German movements throughout the war and in 1944, as the Soviets approached, seized control of much of Warsaw (and were beaten down as the Soviets stopped in the city’s eastern suburbs and refused to cross the Vistula River).  The Poles, realizing their excellent but tiny navy had no chance, ordered their most modern ships – their destroyers and submarines to feel to the UK in the opening hours of the war; Orzel, brand new out of the shipyard, ran to Sweden, and was interned (placed under arrest, essentially).  The crew escaped, and stole the sub from the docks; the Swedes had seized all the boat’s charts and navigational gear, so it sailed across the Baltic, and through the treacherous Skagerrak, and across the North Sea by guess and by gosh.

The Poles had scant hope holding against Hitler from the west; against both of their hereditary enemies, they had none.  The clock ran out fast on the Poles.  The nation’s story was one of the great tragedies of the past 100 years; winning their freedom, having it seized, held hostage by one dictator and then another for two generations.

It’s also one of the great inspirations; after all that, they took their freedom back…

….and with it catalyzed a shot at freedom for the rest of the Second World.

As we approach the seventieth anniversary of World War II, I’ve found myself more and more fascinated by the stories of the people who left their conquered homelands to carry on the fight.

I’ve tried to imagine what that must be like; to see your homeland being brutalized, and to pack up and not only leave your home, family and life…

…but to do so not as a refugee, but as a soldier or sailor, to carry on a fight in perpetuity against absolutely no guarantee that it’d ever be rewarded, to eternally face the soldier’s risks of dying in some foxhole or ship compartment far from home, all the while knowing that everything and everyone you know is back “home”, under the thumb of a hideous  tyrant, waiting and praying for you to return with a few thousand friends to kick occupier ass.

People from all of the conquered nations fled their homes to fight on; hundreds of thousands of French repudiated the reputation for “cowardice” that history has slapped on their nation (more on that next June) and fled to England or Canada or North Africa to carry on the fight; Norwegians and Danes and Dutch and Belgians, Czechs and Hungarians and, later on, Italians and even a few Germans risked all to not only fight on, to risk all the usual horrors that stalk soldiers and the additional risk of being murdered as a “traitor” if captured.

And the most poignant of all the stories was that of the Poles.  A nation that craved independence from Germany, Austro-Hungary and Russia for centuries, Poland was a nation for 21 years when the Germans and the Russians again swallowed it up with head-spinning brutality. Tens of thousands of Poles fled – via Romania to France,or via Russia through Iran through Africa to England.  They fought on for the next six years.

Among those refugees were the survivors of Poland’s small but highly-accomplished Air Force.  Poland from 1918 through 1939 was a bit like Israel from 1948-1968; surrounded by sworn enemies, it took fighting seriously, and it showed; Poland clobbered the Bolsheviks in 1920 – largely with the help of Poland’s fledgeling air force.  And so like the Israelis, the Polish Air Force was an elite; more highly-trained than any other pilots in Europe, the Poles gave the Luftwaffe worse than they got, even though they flew obsolete planes that should have been laughed from the skies (more next month, as we address the 70th anniversary of the invasion).  After Poland’s surrender, they fled to France – and then fled again as that nation collapsed, this time to the UK.

A Polish Air Force PZL fighter; the best in the world in 1932, a museum piece in 1939.

And, 69 years ago today, at the height of the Battle Of Britain, as Western civilization was pummeled against the ropes and hung on by the skin of its British teeth, the first dozen or so of these Polish refugee pilots were formed into 303 (Polish) Squadron of the Royal Air Force.

Pilots of 303 Sqn. and one of their Hurricanes during the Battle of Britain

These pilots – stone-cold killers who’d survived two debacles already – went into action at a time when the RAF was catastrophically short of pilots.  The Battle of France and the summer’s air battles over southern England had bled Fighter Command dry.  Replacement pilots were being thrown into combat straight out of flight school with less than a dozen hours of experience in their Spitfires and Hurricanes, and being mowed down in turn in droves; flying a fighter plane in combat is not a game for newcomers who get less training in their planes than kid gets on a shake machine at McDonald’s today.

A Polish pilot, a sergeant, climbs of of a Spitfire, later in the war.

So the Polish pilots, seasoned airmen and combat veterans that they were, were not only welcome, they were desperately needed.  And they delivered. They were credited during the Battle as the highest-scoring unit in the RAF, claiming 120 German aircraft destroyed in a 17 day rampage in September of 1940, the height of the Battle;

Battle-of-Britain-era endzone happy dance

The claims were lowered to 50-60 after the war, but that made them the fourth-highest-scoring squadron, and the best squadron flying the older Hawker Hurricane – and all in less than three weeks of furious fighting.  Used to flying obsolete Polish aircraft and, in some cases, underpowered and obsolescent French planes, they made the most of the modern, front-line Hurricanes they flew, pressing home attacks with a furious-but-professionally-precise ruthlessness that astounded their British comrades (as related by Squadron Leader Peter “Not The Guitar Player” Townsend in his classic personal history Duel of Eagles)

King George VI with pilots of 303 Sqn. immediately after the Battle.

And then they fought on throughout the war (ceding the title of “highest scoring squadron in the UK” to another exile unit, Norway’s 331 Squadron).

Shot of 303 Sqn. Spitfire with squadron mascot, “Misia”

But while the French, Norwegians, Dutch, Belgian, Danish and other western exiles got to go back to their homelands after the war, the Poles faced a communist dictatorship in their homeland. Some went back; many stayed in the UK (including the Polish Air Force exile who became the father of this guy) or moved to the US, Australia and Canada, where they waited 45 years for events (and, let’s be honest, Ronald Reagan, who is widely revered in Poland for his role in ending the Cold War and liberating Poland to an extent that’d amaze Americans  who’ve been duped by a generation of media disinformation on the subject) to finish the job they’d started in their youth.

…that the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising began.

The story is well-known to people who know their history – which means most Americans know nothing about it.

Before there were concentration and extermination camps, the Nazis used the traditional Jewish “Ghettos” of Eastern Europe as natural “camps” in which to confine the Jews, Gypsies and the rest of their targets. They systematically deported Jews from all over Poland, Ukraine and Russia – and then all over Europe – to these small enclaves in Polish, Baltic and Ukrainian cities, using them as holding tanks until the camps – the last link in the Final Solution – were ready.

And in early 1942, they were ready.  The Germans started shipping Jews off to Treblinka, the first of the Vernichtungslagern, or Extermination camps.

And in the overcrowded, starving, disease-ridden Warsaw Ghetto – the realization that the end was near provoked a response from some of the inmates; it’d be better to die fighting.

And so a resistance movement,armed with a few stolen handguns and rifles, had formed.  In the previous months, it had managed to disrupt some of the roundups to the camps, throwing the Germans’ plans – as precise as any industrial supply chain management system – into disarray. And on April 19, the Germans’ military response was met with armed resistance.

The story is long, and gruesome; it’s been told better elsewhere.

The Jews – hopelessly outnumbered and virtually unarmed by military standards – somehow dished out a military setback to the Germans, holding the Germans out of the Ghetto for nearly a month.

It couldn’t last, of course.  The Germans advanced building-to-building, killing nearly everyone as they went, burning the entire Ghetto to the ground.

The Germans trashed the Ghetto as thoroughly as Ground Zero; they shipped the very few they didn’t kill or burn or bury out of hand off to Treblinka (itself to end in another doomed uprising in the near future).

There are still some survivors; Marek Edelman, at 87, the last surviving leader, and a handful of others continue to tell their stories.  But like our own World War Two generation, the Holocaust’s few survivors – and the fewer still who survived the Ghetto – are dying off.
And as they do, we should worry – justifiably – that society is going to forget about what happened; that society might forget the consequences of racism (the real kind), hatred, dminishing the humanity of ones’ enemies (or scapegoats) to try to justify all manner of inhumanities and horrors upon them. And of course, worry that some will take away the wrong lesson, as another loathsome person did fourteen years ago today.

I read the story of the Ghetto and the Uprising when I was in junior high; I probably absorbed it much later.  And lessons were these; never let this happen here.  Call out the prejudice that leads to this sort of eliminationist hatred when you see it, and do it without stint or mercy.  Never let society be left at the mercy of the thugs and the autocrats; it’s why we have a Second Amendment.

Above all, uphold humanity.

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