On 21 July 1940, Hitler and his high command, waited to receive the French Peace Delegation, in the forest of Compiegne. The negotiations took place and were sealed in the same fox-red, railway salon-wagon as had been used on 8 November 1918 for the Surrender Treaty of the German Empire. However, it was certainly no repeat performance of humiliation as had happened on that autumn day. Then, the German envoys were treated with abuse, and already as prisoners of war, by the French Marshal, Ferdinand Foch. However, in July 1940, Germany’s ‘brave opponents’ were treated with military honour, the negotiations were handled correctly, and with a view to the future.
Incidentally, it was the same Marshal Foch who had, after the signing of the Versailles Pact declared, “This is no peace, but a laying down of arms for twenty years”. He was right. War had begun again 1939, but now, the roles were reversed.
In a campaign which had taken no less than seven weeks, three countries had been defeated by the German Armed Forces. Europe’s coastline from the North Cape to the Pyrenees were now in German hands. However, that did not mean they had held the upper hand with a 3:1 superiority of strength in the west, which military experts had assessed to be the ultimate requirement. Germany had fought with 136 divisions against 144 of the Allies, and with 2,245 tanks against 3,063. Only in the air was Germany supreme, with approximately 4,000 planes in comparison to 3,400 enemy machines.
War was at an end in the west and the German people now hoped for peace. The fighting forces were rewarded with holidays and it was suggested that no less than 35 divisions be demobilised. The return of Hitler’s forces from the western battle-zone was celebrated with a triumphal parade through Berlin. Every bell in the city was rung and an indescribable cheering from the population accompanied the column of cars driving over a carpet of flowers, from the Anhalter Station to the new Chancellery. The German people were overjoyed. In the few weeks of the war, very few had fallen, in comparison with the awful years of First World War which had cost the lives of millions.
On 19 July 1940, Hitler tried once more for conciliatory negotiations with his British opponents, in order to avoid unnecessary suffering and misfortune. But Churchill remained resolute. The war moved into the next round, Churchill being determined to fight for a ‘knock-out’.
German submarines were having one success after another at sea. The Royal Navy suffered considerable damage and losses. In the first year it was at a rate of 10 to 1 to the Germans. Instead of concentrating their efforts at sea, Britain became active in the air.
The first bombing mission by the Royal Air Force took place on 4 September 1939, 24 hours after Britain’s declaration of war. From aerodromes in East Anglia, the target of 29 bombers was Wilhelmshaven and German warships, which they wanted to destroy. Weather conditions were far from ideal and ten of the planes returned to their base, not having found their target, because of rain and heavy clouds. Three other planes wanted, mistakenly, to attack British warships but recognised their signals and turned around. One plane jettisoned its load on the Danish town of Esbjerg, being 180 kilometres off target through a navigation failure. In the actual bombardment of Wilhelmshaven from the other fifteen machines, five Blenheims and two Wellingtons were destroyed, from a heavy anti-aircraft barrage. All in all, they had only produced the minimum of damage. In broad daylight, those bombing crews were faced with flying a distance of 430 kilometres, from the British coast, in order to find their targets, which half the bomber force had not managed to find. It was a very disappointing beginning, luckily without heavy loss of life, but Britain learned very quickly from those mistakes.
When Churchill came to power, the air-warfare escalated. Liddell Hart’s comment was, “the world has not seen such an uncivilised form of warfare from the War Office, since the devastation by the Mongols”.
The ‘Blitz’, i.e. the air raids on London, began only after Britain had continuously bombarded German cities for three months. The first German bombs fell on the Island Kingdom from the German Air Force in June 1940.
Pointless restraint was at an end. At the opening of the Organised Winter Relief on 4 September 1940, Hitler declared, “they come in the night, indiscriminately dropping their bombs on residential areas, and I have, after three months, not retaliated. I believed that such madness would be stopped. We are now answering night for night. If the British Air Force drops two, three or four tons of bombs, then we will in one night drop 150, 250 or 300 tons. If they declare that they will increase their attacks on our cities, then we will raze their cities to the ground”. He then secretly lifted the embargo on London.
In the aerial battle of Britain, the ‘Battle of Britain’, it very quickly became clear that the young German Air Force was not equipped for aerial warfare, particularly for bombing raids on a large scale. They just did not possess any large bomber-type aircraft similar to those of the British, or those that the Americans used later against Germany. The bomber squadrons were very quick to recognise that they had a problem. They and their accompanying fighters could only cope with a tenth of the range needed to reach Britain’s island territory, in which, almost undisturbed the production of planes continued, as well as the training of their pilots. The war, as far as the German Air Force was concerned, was ill-timed, its conception not having been completed. They really did not have a very good chance to fulfil all that was expected of them.
Despite this, the air raids in the late summer and autumn of 1940, caused fear and anxiety for the 7 million inhabitants on and around the Thames. London, as the nerve-centre of the War Office, the Royal Woolwich Arsenal and munitions factories, with the Battersea power station, commercial docks, warehouses and trade centres, was of a very high strategic importance. In the first attack, 306 Londoners were killed.
We boys often cycled to the neighbouring aerodrome in Soesterberg, from where the German squadrons flew their missions over the Channel. We wanted to take a look at those gigantic birds. We were just fascinated by both flying perfection and technique. There were no security measures as such and we were able to walk over the grass to the crews sitting in the shade playing ‘skat’, to while away the time, the sun shining on the glass cockpits of the He—111s. Somewhat amused, but always friendly, the crews talked to us, giving information for which we had a real thirst. Enthusiastic and just as relaxed as those heroes of the air, we listened intently, as they told their stories of the battles with the ‘Sons of Albion’.
With the extension of air warfare, the Royal Air Force began to attack the small aerodromes in the Netherlands, including that of Soesterberg. Gigantic searchlights, shooting fingers of light in the night sky, encircled heavy 8.8cm calibre anti-aircraft guns standing in the middle of our village, for our defence.
The ‘ack-ack’ went into action at the approach of the British planes, flashes of fire spitting from the muzzles over the darkened houses. We heard shrapnel hitting roofs and tarmac quite clearly and night was turned into day for minutes on end, from parachute flares, silently floating down from the enemy planes. We saw flashes of lightning in the distance from exploding high explosive bombs and when the nightmare ended, we boys returned quite happily to our beds. It did not however quite end there. The ‘God of War’ gave encores, with a devilish plan, in every sense of the word, for the next day. He had another iron in the fire with a delayed reaction. Phosphorous strips, dropped by the British, ignited in the rays of the hot sun, which set harvest and hay stacks alight and which was a positive danger for us living in our thatched roof houses.