Why the west likes neither Molotov, nor Ribbentrop 14 страница
Why did this British general break his oath, when it came to the crunch? But he did not! He received the command to advance from his French chief and the command to retreat from his chief in London. Thus, General Gort did not abandon a place to the enemy of his own free will; he just complied with the order of his English commander. “Gort’s giving up the fight was
Churchill, W. The Second World War. P. 74.
Ibid. P. 63.
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approved by Churchill. But later the English premier1 made believe that he supported Weygand’s plan that envisaged the participation of the English expeditionary force in the counter-attack. To save the face leaving an ally to his fate was the policy of the English Cabinet”2.
Winston Churchill ordered to leave France to its own fate
It is possible to compare the dates in order to resolve doubts: on May 22, 1940 the English premier Churchill came to France; on the 24th the British expeditionary force began to retreat toward Dunkirk. Could anyone believe that General Gort had not contacted the head of the gov-ernment to inform him that he had decided to sign the death-warrant to France?
The treacherous decision of the English Cabinet cannot be justified by discussion of the strategic context. Oddly enough, the French generals, apart from their English colleague, considered Weygand’s plan quite feasible. But because one part of the Allied Armies began to retreat, the whole plan went down the drain, and so did the last hope to stabilize the front. Yet, why did the British ally of France behave so reproachfully.
Churchill became the prime-minister on the 10th of May, soon after the German offensive that started the same day.
Proektor, D. M. The blitzkrieg in Europe: The war in the West. M., 2004. P. 253.
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How England left France to sink or swim
This is one mystery of that war that needs puzzling out. To do this it is necessary to keep in mind where the British divisions were retreating. They were retreating to Dunkirk! Why? Churchill himself gives an exhaustive answer to this question, and a mass of historians repeat him: for “a sea evacu-ation under the bombs of the enemy air force”. It was reasonable, as Dunkirk was the only port from which the British troops were able to get home1.
The surprising thing was that the British troops would not have been able to evacuate, but for the help from… the Germans, or, to be moreprecise, from one German whose name was Adolf Hitler. The military the situation was as follows: at the time when the British expeditionary force was pulling out toward Dunkirk, there were already German tanks at the approaches to the city. They had approached Dunkirk two days before the British troops and were only 16 kilometers from the city, while the expe-ditionary force was 60 kilometers away2. It was not worth a whistle for the Germans to enter into the helpless city and occupy the last harbor that could ensure evacuation of the retreating British troops. But Hitler gave his famous “stop-order” that stalled the German advance. “We were robbed of the power of speech”, General Guderian recalled later. No wonder! At the time, when they were only faced with the task of occupying a city that was not too big and thus set the fate of the enemy force group, the head of Germany clearly forbade them to do it. Things came to such a pitch that General Halder began to challenge the German fuehrer’s decision, trying to explain, why it was vital to occupy the last free port on the coast. But Hitler was inexorable: “The excited discussion finished with a definite order by Hitler, to which he added that he would ensure execution of his order by sending personal liaison officers to the front”3.
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Historians find different reasons for Hitler’s strange decision:
‰ Hitler was worried about his tanks, as he wanted to save the armor divi-sions for “the battle for France”4;
‰ Hitler apprehended a catch from the enemy5;
Volkov, F. D. Nothing is secret that shall not be made manifest. P. 43–44.
Ibid. P. 44.
Churchill, W. The Second World War. V. II. P. 68.
Proektor, D. M. The blitzkrieg in Europe: The war in the West. M., 2004. P. 279.
Taylor, A. The Second World War: Two approaches. P. 417.
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‰ Hitler failed to understand the intention of the British army to evacuatefrom Dunkirk1.
These fabulous reasons invented by historians are both funny and dis-tressing. It was not hard to puzzle out the intention of the British army to evacuate by sea: the British have always and everywhere left their allies to their fate and always evacuated their forces under threat of defeat. It happened at Walcheren in 1809, at Gallipoli in 1915, in Norway in 1940. One does not have to be a clairvoyant to predict the action of the British in 1940. Their intention to take to their heels from Dunkirk was self-evident, because there were no variants! Hitler gave his “stop-order” early on the morning of May 24, and, according to Churchill, on the same day the British started to retreat. But they managed to approach Dunkirk only on the evening of the 25th, and the Germans had to wait for them nearly 48 hours. Without focusing on these dates, the reader would hardly, if ever, comprehend the causes of all those mysterious events, being comfortably confident that the proud English nation never entered into secret collusions with Hitler, but always fought against this “devil incarnate” to the last ditch.
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Only a few researchers venture to advance the non-conventional idea that Hitler purposefully built “the golden bridge” for the enemy to retreat with the view of having an opportunity to enter into negotiations with England later2. But there is no one to connect the sudden and treacherous retreat of the British army with their subsequent miraculous evacuation granted by Adolf Hitler!
No one explains the content of the “stop -order”. Everybody just says: Hitler stopped the tanks. So the reader may have the impression that the strange fuehrer wanted to save the lives of his soldiers and for that reason forbade them to storm the English positions at Dunkirk. But the city was as good as vacant! The Germans stood at Dunkirk for a couple of days waiting for their fuehrer’s order to advance. In his turn, Hitler waited for
Bullock, A. Hitler and Stalin. P. 730.
The best known proponents of the idea of “the golden bridge” were… the German generals: Rundstedt, Blumentritt and Jodl. After the war they wrote memoirs and bore evidence to the victorious allies. In the Soviet epoch many a historian wrote, that Hitler deliberately let the British Army go home. But these statements, usually not grounded on the analysis of important dates were mainly non-substantial and tenuous and focused on “the aggressive nature of imperialism”.
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How England left France to sink or swim
the retreating British troops to occupy the port. Only on the 26th of may he let the army go ahead, but by that time the British had dug in and re-pelled all the German attacks. When did the British army officially start their evacuation? According to my conjecture, it was before Hitler’s order to advance. Indeed, a day before, on the 25th Churchill ordered to start the evacuation…1
None other but Adolf Hitler ensured the evacuation
of the British troops from Dunkirk
Britain took advantage of the granted opportunity on Hitler’s part and, on the 27th of May executed Operation “Dynamo”, evacuating 338 thousand soldiers. There were 215 thousand British soldiers, the rest being the French, the Belgians and the soldiers of the other allied countries. Why were the French so few? They were few, because the British soldiers were embarked first of all and only then the allied troops were allowed to embark2. So there was no cross-national camaraderie and mutual readiness to help…
Here is a good example of behind-the-scenes politics. Realizing that the French campaign was lost, the British got in touch with Hitler via one of the channels still available to communicate with him. Britain’s condition was simple enough: that the allied troops should be able to evacuate from the continent. Why was Hitler supposed to accept it? For one thing, he was
Volkov, F. D. Nothing is secret that shall not be made manifest. P. 44.
Ibid. P. 57–58.
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a real Anglophil, for another thing, he never wanted to crush England, and, last, but not least, they explained to him that London would never forgive him annihilating the British army. What was, probably, more important, Washington would neither forgive Hitler for that. Such an unheard-of de-feat of Britain was tantamount to a direct call on the USA for entering the war against Germany, until it was too late. And then a real mighty struggle against Germany would be inevitable, and it would be a war of extermina-tion. But there is another variant, with the British Army going home, with saving human lives. This will be appreciated. Yes, the French campaign is lost, but Great Britain has saved the face, and the road to peace nego-tiations is not closed1. There are some vague allegations that the situation presented to Hitler was something like that may be found in the books of some Western historians. For example: “The significance of the Dunkirk evacuation became clear later when Hitler realized that the British were going to continue the war”2.
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Thus, Hitler resolved to let the British Army go home. But why did he decide that they would not continue the war? Who promised him that? What person had such influence with Hitler that he acted against common sense, not annihilating his enemy that had so far persistently refused to come to the negotiating table? Wasn’t it more reasonable to crush the whole Brit-ish Army in Dunkirk and deprive Britain of the possibility to carry on the war? It gas to be repeated again and again: if some actions of a politician seem to lack logic, it means that the information the politician had, taking his decision, is now missing. Politics is not a straight line; it is a sine curve with abrupt ups and downs…
One of the conditions of successful evacuation of the British Army was giving Hitler a free hand for crushing France. Hitler could take the liberty to do whatever he chose to, as the French generals were not supposed to get assistance from their British allies. England cynically wrote France off, the way they had written off Czechoslovakia and Poland a year before. At the critical hour of the German offensive, when all the might of the Allies should have been thrown into the scale of the common cause, the British thought only about themselves, not about the common victory. This has been Britain’s
Falin, V. The second front. The anti-Hitler coalition: conflict of interests. P. 183.
Bullock, A. Hitler and Stalin. P. 730.
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How England left France to sink or swim
typical policy over centuries. Great Britain has always been ready to fight “to the last soldier”, as long as it was not her own soldier. When the logic of a struggle requires severe losses, England is never prepared for sacrifice. Like an insurance company, England likes its allies only while they pay their subscription by the lives of their soldiers. When Britain’s ally is in a crunch and badly needs help, the office of “the English insurance company” closes down and it vanishes into the fog over the English Channel, leaving its partners to their problems…
The most characteristic example of such a typical British conduct is the situation in May-June 1940. Britain left France to its fate: the ground force fled and was not going to return. Meanwhile, the French High Command, oddly enough, pinned its hopes on their British allies. The French expected help, they counted on it. “…Our situation is almost hopeless, — said the Commander of the French Army General Weygand to de Gaulle. — We only have some chance, if the current situation does not change too fast, if I man-age to return to the ranks the French that have broken away from Dunkirk, if I manage to arm them, if the newly fitted out British troops reenter into the war, if, finally, the British consent to bring into action considerable units of their Air Force to fight on the continent”1.
During the first hours of attacking France the German Air Force struck at the French airdromes, liquidating the major part of the planes. Since then they had had air superiority in the French sky. Britain ought to have dispatched their air squadrons to the front to improve the situation, as the crashed planes would not be able to threaten England.
But there is no changing the British mentality. So should not be surprised to read the following words by Sir Winston: “It was vital that our metro-politan fighter air force should not be drawn out of Britain on any account. Our existence turned on this”2.
Further on the British began to deceive their French allies in the most impudent manner. And Winston Churchill personally participated in this deceit: “I immediately took Ysmay off with me to M. Reynaud’s flat and <…> told him the favorable news. Ten fighter squadrons!”3
Gaulle, Ch. de. The War Memoirs. The Call-up of 1940–1942. P. 70.
Churchill, W. The Second World War. P. 45.
Ibid. P. 46.
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Adolf Hitler in the prostrate Paris
But these squadrons never came to France, because the British did not give them 1 . Charles de Gaulle writes about it with bitterness in his heart:“After the evacuation from Dunkirk the British Air Force took part in the fighting only occasionally… Their squadrons based in the territory of Great Britain were too far to render efficient assistance to our troops… Churchill declined straight-out my urgent plea that at least some part of the British aviation be relocated to the airdromes south of the Loire”2.
…Any citizen of Russia can easily remember the date of the fall of France: June 22. France signed its capitulation on June 22, 1940. Almost the whole French Army (1,547 men out of 2.5 million of the metropolitan army) was imprisoned. France’s casualties totaled only 84 thousand dead, which suggests that the army had offered only weak resistance to the en-emy. The German Wehrmacht suffered much lighter losses: 28 thousand. It may be compared with the Kaiser’s army casualties during World War
Taylor, A. The Second World War: Two approaches. P. 415.
Gaulle, Ch. de. The War Memoirs. The Call-up of 1940–1942. P. 78.
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I that amounted to 1.8 million servicemen, though that army never man-aged to rout the French…1
Under the terms of capitulation part of France with Paris included was occupied by the Germans. The rest of the formally independent territory was governed by French authorities2. The French government, headed by Marshal Pйtain, a hero of the First World War well advanced in years, came into office on June 16, 1940. The government moved to Vichy3, a resort town in the south of France. In historiography, this legal government of France is usually referred to as the Vichy government, and the state itself is termed the Vichy France.
Under the influence of the incredibly rapid overthrow of the French Army Marshal Pйtain’s regime decided not to be involved in the war. But the irrepressible and unpredictable de Gaulle opted for the variant of fighting to the end. It was his name that would become the symbol of resistance to Nazi Germany. Having left for London, de Gaulle headed all the forces of French resistance and thus saved the honor of France…
De Gaulle had remained unpredictable all his life, even in the capacity of president. One of his best known deeds as president of France was secession from the NATO block in 1966. Why is the HQ of this organization located in Brussels? Because, France no longer a NATO-member, de Gaulle asked his former colleagues “to clear” the French capital from leading NATO organizations based in Paris. So they had to move to a new place and chose the neighboring country, Belgium. De Gaulle was punished for his act. In less than two years Paris saw barricades with posters: “It’s time to go, Charles!” The student disorders in the French capital, indeed, marked the end of de Gaulle’s political career — on April 28, 1969 he resigned the post of the French president. One only has to remember what country’s intelligence service can ensure an uprising practically in any state of the world on condition of a considerably small sum of money allocated to this effect…
Bullock, A. Hitler and Stalin. V. 2. P. 296.
The occupied zone included North and West France extending over 300 thou-sand square kilometers out of the total French territory of 550 thousand square kilometers (source: Gaulle, Ch. de. The War Memoirs. The Call-up of 1940–1942. P. 10).
Marshal Pйtain was elected the head of the French state by members of the democratically elected French parliament with a majority vote of 569 in favor, 80 against, and 17 abstentions (source: Churchill, W. The Second World War. P. 407).
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