How it really was

Operation Unthinkable

30th September 2009

Some months ago I wrote about a reference I found in an official intelligence report, written by a British officer in Berlin soon after the end of the Second World War, that another war was likely and this time German soldiers and airmen would fight on the side of the British and Americans against the Russians:

“The war between the Russians and the democracies is approaching and indeed has already begun, and Germany will of course be invited to participate. An International Air Brigade is to be formed for use in the war against Japan. Volunteers are invited and will be trained in England. Several offers have been received.”

(See: More on Goronwy Rees and his six day tour of Germany in July 1945)

I was surprised by this, and since then I’ve looked out for other references to people believing that war between Britain, America and Russia was likely, well before relations between the four victorious Allies broke down, the start of Berlin airlift in 1948 and the division of Germany. 

While researching a different subject – the way ‘communism’ or ‘Bolshevism’ was described as a ‘disease’, rather than as a set of ideas or a political doctrine, by people in Britain between the wars and after and by Winston Churchill in particular – I came across a reference to Operation Unthinkable. Apparently documents released by The National Archives in 1998 showed that in May 1945, immediately after the end of the war in Europe, Churchill instructed his staff to prepare top secret plans for a surprise Anglo-American attack on the Soviet Union, with the assistance of 10 German divisions, under the codename “Operation Unthinkable: Russia: Threat to Western Civilisation.” The aim of the plan was to get “a square deal for Poland” with free and fair elections based on secret ballots and the participation of democratic leaders from all parties, not just the communists, in the government of the country. For planning purposes, the attack was scheduled to be launched on 1st July 1945.

The military planners soon discovered that the idea was hazardous, to say the least, as the Soviet Union had four times as many soldiers and twice as many tanks in Western Europe, as the British and Americans combined, and recommended it was not taken any further. Churchill gave way and modified the terms of reference to defence rather than attack: covering the “hypothetical” case that US troops would go home, and the island of Britain needed to be defended against an attack from Russia.

But the question remains whether “Operation Unthinkable” was just an isolated example of military planning for all contingencies, and how close Britain, the US and the Soviet Union really were to war in 1945. Here are four pieces of evidence I’ve come across in my research which could have some bearing on this:

Firstly, the curious incident of the missing telegram. In 1954 Churchill said, in a speech in his constituency at Woodford in Essex that, even before the war was over, he had “telegraphed to Lord Montgomery directing him to be careful in collecting the German arms, to stack them so they could easily be issued again to the German soldiers whom we should have to work with if the Soviet advance continued.” This caused a furore in the British press, and rather spoilt the celebrations for Churchill’s 80th birthday, as a number of Labour MPs, including Barbara Castle, refused to sign a Birthday Book in his honour because he had been willing to “use Nazi soldiers against our war allies.”

Montgomery, when asked about this, at first said he had received the telegram, but then could not find it in his papers. Churchill withdrew the remark saying he must have confused one telegram with another and the matter died down.

However, as David Reynolds and other historians have found, in Montgomery’s papers at the Imperial War Museum archives there is a handwritten note, dated June 1959, entitled “The Truth about the Telegram”, in which Montgomery confirms he received a verbal, but not written, order from Churchill to ‘stack’ German weapons, in case they might be needed to fight the Russians.

“On 14th May 1945 I flew to London from Germany to see the Prime Minister to tell him that the problems of government in Germany were so terrific that he must at once appoint a C-in-C and Military Governor…. The announcement was made on 22nd May.
 
At our meeting in Downing Street the P.M. got very steamed up about the Russians and about the zones of occupation – which would entail a large scale withdrawal on our part.  He ordered that I was not to destroy the weapons of the 2 million Germans who had surrendered on Luneburg Heath on the 4th May. All must be kept, we might have to fight the Russians with German help.”

A month later no further instructions had been received, so according to Montgomery:

“On 14 June I got fed up with guarding the weapons. We had signed the surrender in Berlin on 5th June and agreed to set up the Control Commission for 4-Power Government of Germany. So I sent the attached telegram to the War Office on 14 June 1945. Things were pretty hectic in Whitehall in those days, the Coalition government was coming to an end; a general election was announced; it was impossible to get a decision, a firm one, on anything. I got no answer.

I waited for one week. I then gave orders for all the personal weapons and equipment to be destroyed!!

Then in November 1954, Winston Churchill in a speech at Woodford referred, unwisely to the order he had given. He said he had sent me a telegram. It could not be found. There was no telegram.”

Secondly, despite official denials by British officials that there were differences between them and their Soviet allies, rumours abounded that things were not as they seemed. For example in his book ‘Berlin Twilight’ (published in 1947) Lt-Colonel Byford-Jones described the lack of cooperation between the Russians and other victorious allies immediately after the end of the war, writing that:

“If a man builds a high wall round his house, locks his gates, refuses to admit his neighbours, he should not be surprised if the building becomes the centre of morbid curiosity….This illustrates the situation in which the Russian zone of Germany found itself in the eight months after the war’s end….Officers of the Allied forces, with whom Russia had been co-operating in the world’s greatest war, were suddenly treated as would be saboteurs or spies, and were refused admittance into the Russian zone, the frontiers of which, adjoining those of the American and British, were closely guarded day and night….Journalists and broadcasters belonging to Allied and neutral countries were forbidden to enter.

It was not surprising in these circumstances that a new Crusade seemed imminent, that officers talked of little else at one time in their British and American messes over strong Schnaps and Steinhaiger [beer] than ‘the coming conflict’. There was something too ‘cloak and dagger’ about these conversations. One did not mention the words Soviets or Russia or even the Red terror; one spoke of ‘they’ and ‘it’ in appropriately lowered tones, and everyone had the key to the code.”

Thirdly, a key element of Nazi propaganda in the closing months of the war was the attempt to persuade the Western allies that they should join with them in forming a “Bulwark against Bolshevism.” For example in a speech on 2nd May 1945, after Hitler had committed suicide, but before the end of the war on May 8th, Count Schwerin von Krosigk, foreign secretary in the interim German government headed by Admiral Dönitz, said:

“But the more German territory in the east, which ought to form a basis for food supplies for the starving people in the west, falls into the hands of the Bolsheviks, the most speedily and terribly will famine sweep over Europe. Nurtured by this distress, Bolshevism flourishes. A Bolshevised Europe constitutes the first phase on the path towards a world revolution which the Soviets have been persistently pursuing for over twenty-five years.”
 
Incidentally, this speech, by Schwerin von Krosigk contains one of the first references I have found to the existence of an “iron curtain” separating East and West: “In the east, the iron curtain is advancing even further, behind which the work of annihilation proceeds hidden from the eyes of the world.” This was well before Churchill used the phrase at his speech at Fulton Missouri, on March 5th 1946, to say: “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.”

Please note I am not claiming that Churchill or other British politicians or soldiers were influenced by Nazi propaganda – if anything this made them take extra care to emphasise the unity of the Allies – but it is still interesting that plans were made to attack Russia, Britain’s wartime ally, despite the enemy they had both defeated saying this was exactly what they should do. (In war you don’t normally do what your enemy says you should!)

Fourthly, how much did Stalin and other Soviet Union leaders know about “Operation Unthinkable? It seems they were, justifiably, very suspicious of British intentions at the end of the war and for several months afterwards. At the Four Power Control Council in Berlin, the Russians claimed, on several occasions, that the British were not meeting their obligations under the Potsdam Agreement to disband the German army. At the meeting on 20th November 1945, Marshal Zhukov, the Russian representative, tabled a formal notice objecting to the “presence of organised units of the former German Army in the British Zone of Occupation.”

Montgomery was incensed by this, writing in a telegram to Arthur Street, the Permanent Secretary of the British “Control Office for Germany and Austria” in London that:

“… it is a mystery to me why it should be thought that we do not want to carry out the POTSDAM agreement in disbanding the German armed forces. We have fought them in two bloody wars and our very existence as a nation has been threatened by them. That we should retain any affection for them or should desire their continued existence is a matter beyond my comprehension.”

Perhaps Montgomery was sincere when he wrote this, or perhaps he was being disingenuous. I don’t know. In any case, by now, in the autumn of 1945, the situation seems to have become very messy. Of the roughly two million German soldiers who had surrendered into British custody at the end of the war, over half a million had been released to work on the land or in the coal mines (under operations codenamed “Barleycorn” and “Coalscuttle”). Others had been sent to the US zone, but around 700,000 were still detained. Whatever British intentions were immediately after the end of the war in May and June 1945, there were now other reasons for not fully disbanding the German army, as Montgomery explained in the “Notes on the Occupation of Germany” held with his papers at the Imperial War Museum:

“There were two main reasons for the presence of the 700,000 ex-Wehrmacht personnel in concentration areas awaiting disbandment … first, we had nowhere to put them if they were disbanded and we could not guard them if they were dispersed in prison camps over our area; second, His Majesty’s Government required 225,000 Germans as reparations labour for the United Kingdom.”

As Montgomery explained in a statement at the subsequent Control Council on 20th November, German soldiers who surrendered at the end of the war were not formally designated as prisoners of war because if they were so described “we should have to accord them certain privileges in conformity with the Geneva Convention. We should be debarred from using them for certain tasks. We should have to feed them on a relatively high scale of rations.”

In addition, the British army in Germany were using some German soldiers, still under the command of their own officers, as so-called ‘Dienstgruppen’ (or service units) to carry out general labouring tasks. As Noel Annan explained in his book ‘Changing Enemies’

“The labour for these schemes was provided by keeping the German army in being and renaming them DienstGruppen, although these had shortly to be dissolved following Russian complaints…”

Somewhat reluctantly, in response to Russian pressure, the remaining captured German soldiers were released, in a process given the intriguing name of “Operation Clobber”, which, according to an army conference held on 4th December was due to start on 10th December 1945 and finish on 20th January 1946 – so you could say this blog post traces British ideas on what to do with the two million German soldiers who surrendered and were interned at the end of the war: from Operation “Unthinkable”, via “Barleycorn” and “Coalscuttle” to “Clobber.”

References

Some of the original “Operation Unthinkable” documents have been digitised and can be viewed on the web:

On Churchill’s use of medical imagery to describe the “disease of Bolshevism”:
Antoine Capet, ‘“The Creeds of the Devil’ Churchill between the Two Totalitarianisms, 1917 – 1945”, Finest Hour Online, 31 August 2009 

 On Churchill writing his memoirs and his interpretation of the history of the War, including references to “Operation Unthinkable” see the chapter on "The Unnecessary Cold War” pp 464-486 in:
David Reynolds, In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War (London: Allen Lane, 2004)

Montgomery’s handwritten note on the “Truth about the Telegram” is held at the Imperial War Museum archives:
BLM 162: “The Woodford Speech of Nov 1954 and the famous Telegram”

For a description of rumours circulating in the feverish atmosphere of post-war Berlin:
W. Byford-Jones, Berlin Twilight (London: Hutchinson, 1947)

The speech by Count Schwerin von Krosigk is reprinted in Ulrike Jordan (ed), Conditions of Surrender, Britons and Germans witness the end of the war (London & New York: I.B. Tauris Publishers, 1997)

The references to Soviet objections to “organised units of the German army in the British Zone”, the Dienstgruppen and the disbandment of the German army are from:
Montgomery’s Notes on the Occupation of Germany, Part 3 (Imperial War Museum, BLM 87) and M.E. Pelly and H.J.Yasamee (eds) assisted by G.Bennett, Documents on British Policy Overseas, Series 1, Volume 5, Germany and Western Europe 11 August – 31 December 1945 (London: Her Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1990)

The Watch on the Rhine: the British occupation of the Rhineland after World War One

14th September 2009

It’s intriguing how memories of the First World War and its aftermath influenced British people in occupied Germany at the end of the Second World War.

At the end of the First World War, French, British, Belgian and US troops occupied the Rhineland. This was agreed as part of the Armistice signed on November 11th 1918. The details, including zones of occupation, were worked out by the French Marshal Foch and the British were allocated the city of Cologne and surrounding area. British troops first crossed the frontier into Germany on 2nd December 1918.

The occupation was originally intended to last for 15 years, with the number of Allied troops reduced in stages after 5 and 10 years, subject to certain conditions being met. The British left Cologne in January 1926, but some troops stayed on in Wiesbaden until 30th June 1930.

Looking back to memories of the First World War and its aftermath helps to explain some of the ambivalence in British policy and attitudes towards the German people after the Second World War. On the one hand a concern not to be deceived again by a duplicitous people, who, so the story went, had courted sympathy from well-meaning Allied soldiers, claiming they were victims of an unjust peace settlement, while at the same time planning their revenge and preparing for war. But on the other hand, a concern that the Allies had also made some mistakes, and the economic depression, hunger and unemployment which followed the First World War should not be repeated, for fear that an even worse disaster may occur in the not so distant future.

As examples of the view that this time, in 1945, they had to “stay the course” and “do the job properly”, here are some extracts from three articles in early editions of the British Zone Review, the official journal of the British Military Government and Control Commission for Germany:

“Experiences of Rhineland Occupation: 1919-1925

You will not, I think, be surprised at my conclusions – that the occupation, intended as a measure for preventing their making war, was used by the Germans as a means of dividing the Allies and of getting their propaganda into the very heart of each of the Allied countries. Moreover we failed to see that Germany was only shamming dead economically and financially and was exploiting the situation to arouse a wholly unjustified sympathy and causing us serious trade difficulties, for which we would blame the peace settlement and our Allies.”
(British Zone review, October 13th 1945)

“Lessons of History

We set out to see whether there was a lesson to be learnt from history. It now stares us in the face. To cut down our occupying forces below an effective minimum or to let considerations of retrenchment weaken our control organisation would be to fly in the face of experience.”
(British Zone Review, November 24th 1945)

“Why Weimar failed

Behind the welter of political strife, the confusion of unversed and inept politicians, the militarists and industrialists waited and planned to avenge themselves of their defeat.”
(British Zone Review, December 22nd 1945)

On the other hand, if we look at contemporary accounts of the British occupation of the Rhineland after the First World War, written in the 1920s rather than in 1945, we find that the troops generally got on well with the local population, and in many cases returned home “definitely pro-German.” Violet Markham, who spent two years in Germany with her husband, who was chief demobilization officer for the British Army of the Rhine, wrote in her book 'A Woman’s Watch on the Rhine' published in 1921, that “Life in Cologne is very pleasant for the occupying army” and “surely no Army of Occupation was ever so well housed or so comfortable as we are.” On first crossing the border into Germany, she remarked that “It is almost with a shock you realise that German civilians are not equipped with hoofs and horns or other attributes of a Satanic character” and she soon came to see people as individuals, rather than as the stereotypes promoted by governments in wartime:

“It is easy to hate the abstraction called Germany, but for individual Germans one feels either like, dislike or indifference the same as for other people.”

Although she had no doubts as to the “noble ideal” for which the British had fought the war, and was irritated at Germany’s “refusal to say she is sorry”, she was also critical of Allied post-war policy; especially the continuation of the economic blockade; and the Treaty of Versailles, which she said had “scrapped the fundamental ideals for which we fought the war.”

In her view, the democratic government which emerged in Germany in 1918 had an impossible task as it was “confronted by hunger, defeat, despair, and the miseries which resulted from the blockade” and the Allies were partly to blame for the rise of the extreme parties and the decline in the vote for the Social Democrats in the elections of 1920:

“The party standing for ordered democratic development had been knocked out. The British public should try to realise it has been killed by the Allied policy.”

She was not optimistic for the future. In a prediction, which may have seemed extravagant at the time, but which turned out to be unpleasantly close to the truth, she wrote that:

“The post-war chaos appears so complete that men turn from it in despair. Moral disillusion and weariness have their counterparts in recklessness and wild extravagance. There is a sense of an approaching Twilight of the Gods; of a collapse of the foundations of society.”

Perhaps surprisingly, it seems that official British policy after the Second World War, at least as implemented by those on the ground in Germany, was influenced as much by this second strand of thought, of the need to avoid hunger, despair and unemployment, as by concerns that German militarists would re-arm and seek their revenge. This can be traced in the papers of General Sir Brian Robertson, arguably the most influential British soldier and administrator in Germany after the end of the war. His father, General, later Field-Marshal, Sir William Robertson had been Chief of the Imperial General Staff during the First World War and for a time, in 1919, Military Governor of the British occupied part of the Rhineland.

In a speech in November 1939, when he was President of the Natal Chamber of Industries in South Africa, well before he had any idea of his future role in post-war Germany, Brian Robertson looked forward to the end of the war, saying:

“This war, so far at least, is very unlike the last. It is equally certain that the peace treaties, which have yet to be made, will be quite unlike those which ended the last war. Those treaties were failures because they were based upon fear and vindictiveness. The next treaties, if they are to give lasting peace, must be founded upon confidence and generosity, and they must strike at the root causes of international unrest. Chief among these causes is that economic nationalism which has grown up like a rank week to stifle the national flow of trade between nations.”

Many years later in 1965, in a speech to the Royal Institute of International Affairs, Brian Robertson referred to his experience as a member of the British delegation at the League of Nations in Geneva in 1932-3 and how this had made him: “a first hand witness of the failure to deal properly with Germany after World  War 1.” He continued by saying:

“My father had been Military Governor for a period then. He often talked to me about the mistakes and problems of those years. ‘The idea that you can hold down a country like Germany with her face in the dust indefinitely is a foolish one’ he used to say.”

If it was not possible to 'hold Germany down' for ever, there had to be an alternative policy to one that was purely negative, based on disarmament, demilitarisation and economic controls. In an article in the British Zone Review in October 1945, Robertson tried to explain his own personal philosophy, which suggested he had learnt a different 'lesson from history' from the other articles I quoted earlier in this posting. The analogy Robertson used was that of education: the German people had to be treated as one would treat a child. Firstly it was necessary to be stern, as the child had “inherited some very bad qualities from its parents”. But secondly it was necessary to be just, as:

“Lack of justice towards the Germans will bring us no profit but will evoke a spirit of embitterment and martyrdom which is as certain to lead to a desire for revenge as it did during the years which followed the First World War. Starvation and disease are not suitable punitive measures.”

In a talk he gave in December 1945 at a conference of British Army Corps Commanders, who at the time also acted as regional governors, responsible for all aspects of Military Government in their areas, Robertson gave his view of the attitudes of the four Allies in Germany, claiming that it was only the British who had a constructive policy. The French were concerned above all with their own security and the Russians with the payment of reparations. The Americans went from one extreme to the other and “their main contribution to Quadripartite government is to produce a series of unpractical laws which have very little bearing on the main problems.” The British were, in his view: “the only power that really cares what happens to Germany. We flatter ourselves that we can regenerate her. Probably we feel instinctively that our interests will not best be served by turning Germany into a helpless desert.”

References:

David G. Williamson, The British in Germany 1918-1930: the Reluctant Occupiers (New York, Oxford: Berg, 1991)

David Williamson, A Most Diplomatic General: The life of General Lord Robertson of Oakridge (London, Washington: Brasseys, 1996)

Violet Markham, A Woman’s Watch on the Rhine (London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1921)

 

List of postings: June 2009 - May 2007

3rd September 2009

For anyone reading this blog for the first time, I am a PhD history student at the Centre for Contemporary British History at the University of London, researching the British in occupied Germany after the end of World War Two. I am now in the third year of a six year part-time course. In my view, history is a process of discovery, and I try to post something new and interesting on this blog once a week, as I work my way through the research. 

Here is a list of all posts since May 2007. For earlier posts, see the previous list

Stephen Spender on Humphrey Jennings, libraries, and his Humber car 6th June 2009

More on Stephen Spender and post-war Germany 1st June 2009

Stephen Spender – European Witness 9th May 2009

Marriage with ‘ex-enemy nationals’ 2nd May 2009

General Sir Brian Horrocks – Corps Commander 24th April 2009

Why did Field-Marshal Montgomery believe that a Germany that 'looked East’ was ‘a menace to the British Empire’? 5th April 2009

What did Field-Marshal Montgomery mean by ‘Winning the Peace’ in 1945? 30th March 2009

Field-Marshal Montgomery and the fraternisation ban 14th March 2009

Field-Marshal Montgomery’s ‘Notes on the occupation of Germany’, part 1 21st February 2009

Stealing coal in Germany after the war 14th February 2009

Field-Marshal Montgomery as Military Governor of the British Zone of Germany 1st February 2009

Eckernförde under British Occupation 25th January 2009

John Bayley – In Another Country 18th January 2009

Patrick Gordon-Walker – the Lid Lifts (part 2) 9th January 2009

Patrick Gordon-Walker – the Lid Lifts 4th January 2009

Amy Buller – Darkness over Germany 15th December 2008

The documentary film 'School in Cologne' made in 1948 6th December 2008

More on Goronwy Rees’ six day tour of Germany, 1945 30th November 2008

Turning Points: when and why did British policy in Germany change after the end of the Second World War? 23rd November 2008

‘GIs and Germans’ by Petra Goedde 15th November 2008

Another Two Kreis Resident Officers 9th November 2008

More about the film: K.R.O. Germany 1947 5th November 2008

Kreis Resident Officer – The film K.R.O. Germany 1947 2nd November 2008

Justum et tenacem propositi virum – the wise man, firm of purpose 26th October 2008

How three British army offices reacted to the transition from war to peace in Germany, 1945 28th June 2008

More on Major General Sir Alec Bishop 19th May 2008

Major General Sir Alec Bishop 12th May 2008

Goronwy Rees on Weimar Germany 3rd May 2008

Goronwy Rees on Field Marshal Montgomery 27th April 2008

Goronwy Rees and Sir William Strang’s six day tour of Germany in 1945 18th April 2008

Goronwy Rees and his preface to Der Fragebogen by Ernst von Salomon 12th April 2008

Konrad Adenauer and his dismissal as Mayor of Cologne by the British in 1945 30th March 2008

Sholto Douglas – and the German Luftwaffe 3rd March 2008

More on Sholto Douglas – and his opposition to the death penalty 23rd February 2008

Sholto Douglas: the second Military Governor of the British Zone of Germany 18th February 2008

Mass Observation at the Movies 8th February 2008

‘You have to see it to believe it’: British first impressions of Germany after the war 2nd February 2008

E F (Fritz) Schumacher 26th January 2008

Follow the People (continued) 20th January 2008

Follow the People 13th January 2008

Happy New Year 8th January 2008

Drew Middleton: The Struggle for Germany 8th December 2007

British and US first impressions of Germany in 1945 1st December 2007

Potsdam 1945 to Western Germany 1965: A Miracle 24th November 2007

Sir Brian Robertson 18th November 2007

Englishness and Empire and ‘Winning the Peace’ 11th November 2007

Finest Hour – films by Humphrey Jennings 3rd November 2007

Winning the Peace – the British in occupied Germany 1945-51 29th October 2007

The Battle of the Winter 23rd July 2007

Germany in 1945 and Britain in 1967 as 'super-Sweden' 14th July 2007

‘Germany under Control’ exhibition 2nd July 2007

Alec Cairncross – 'The Price of War' and 'A Country to Play With' 24th June 2007

Ratchford and Ross – Berlin Reparations Assignment 18th June 2007

George Clare – Berlin Days 9th June 2007

Ivone Kirkpatrick – The Inner Circle 2nd June 2007

The Bonfire of Berlin - a lost childhood in wartime Germany 29th May 2007

Germany Year Zero 20th May 2007

Stephen Spender on Humphrey Jennings, libraries, and his Humber car

6th June 2009

Sometimes the asides and diversions in a book can be as, if not more, revealing than the main story. In this third and final post on Stephen Spender’s book European Witness, an account of two visits he made to Germany immediately after the Second World, I want to write about the unacknowledged hero, or villain, of the piece, his Humber car.

One of the ironies of the book, is that despite his grand and noble conclusion that only a “conscious, deliberate and wholly responsible determination to make our society walk in the paths of light” could save the world from “a threat of a still greater darkness, a total and everlasting one ... rising up from the ashes of fascism", he himself appeared powerless and unable to do anything.
 
The original reason for his visit to Germany was to inspect and re-open libraries in the Ruhr and Rhineland, including vetting and removing Nazi books. But he came to think that this was a pointless task:

“…my conversation with Dr Reuter, [the librarian at Düsseldorf] made me realize that there was little point in our policy. Anyone who wished to obtain Nazi books in Germany could easily do so, and to withdraw the Nazi books seemed only a piece of window-dressing which would give us a reputation for treating literature in the same way as the Nazis themselves had done.”

For example, a librarian at Aachen told him there was no difficulty at all carrying out his orders; they had previously done much the same for the Nazis:

“We understand exactly what you want, and there is no difficulty whatever about carrying out your instructions. You see, throughout the Nazi regime, we kept all the books by Jewish and socialist writers in a special cellar, under lock and key, as having only historical and scientific interest. All we have to do now is to take out these books and put them on our open shelves, while at the same time we lock up all the Nazi books, because now they only have historical and scientific interest.”

And in any case, many local German librarians had already done what was necessary on their own initiative:
 
“In practice, I found that the libraries of the Ruhr and the Rhineland were capable of opening themselves without my intervention … In every case, the Germans had automatically set about purging their libraries on the day of their towns being occupied by the Allies, if not before that.”

Throughout this time, Spender was often unable to travel round the British Zone and do his job, because his (British) Humber car had broken down, often for days, despite attempts to fix it:

“During these days of my car being broken down, I was often left with little to do but observe conditions and listen to rumours.”

“The car remained in a very bad state. However, one day we managed to get it to Aachen and almost all the way back before we got stuck a few miles outside Bonn, from where we had to be towed.”

I don’t think he intended the book to be read this way, but it seems to me that the car had become a symbol of the British occupation; of how despite the best of intentions, they were not able to achieve anything constructive, and were in fact no different from, and no better than, the people whose country they were occupying:

“On 20th September the Humber had a slight attack of recovery. I made an attempt to get it to Düsseldorf. After going very fast for four miles, it stopped in a rain-storm on the autobahn between Bonn and Cologne. My driver decided that the pump was wrong and he got out to repair it. After he had taken it to pieces and put it back, no petrol came through the pipe leading to it from the tank at the back of the car. He undid the cap of the petrol tank and blew down the hole. There was some pressure of air in the tank and petrol squirted back at him into his eyes, mouth and nose. He was practically blinded for five or ten minutes. Three little German boys who were present at this scene were in ecstasies of hysterical joy. They rolled over on the ground roaring with laughter, and, for the next hour, while we waited dismally in the car, they imitated to each other the expression on his face when he fell back into the road. This was one of those moments when our occupation suddenly appeared like all occupations: one could imagine similar scenes in which little French boys were squirming on the ground with laughter at solemn German officers whose Mercedes had broken down, during their Occupation.”

Spender could be extraordinarily insensitive to the needs and feelings of those around him, as well as very perceptive. For example, he described meeting, by chance, a former inmate of a concentration camp, and arranged to see him later at his hotel. Because he was classified as a German civilian, Spender was not permitted to share his tea with him:

“The next day he arrived at four-thirty while I was having a large tea in the lounge. I could not offer him, a German civilian, tea, so I sent him up to my room while I finished off my excellent repast with far more butter and ham than one gets in England. I was aware of the contrast between my own standard of living and that of this concentration camp inmate; but although this worried me, on the whole it had the effect of making me eat perhaps a slightly larger tea than I would have done otherwise, because this worry was a form of anxiety and anxiety tends to make me greedy.”

I don’t think there was any irony in this account, or even self-criticism.

During his second visit, in September and October 1945, Spender met the documentary film director Humphrey Jennings, who was in Germany making his film ‘A Defeated People’ (see previous posts on this blog).

In the book Spender refers to Jennings as ‘Boyman’, presumably from his tendency to say “Oh boy, oh boy”.

“Boyman talks an Anglo-American-Continental Film World slang in which he mixes up phrases such as ‘Oh boy, oh boy,’ with cockney such as ‘Bob’s-your-uncle.’”

Jennings’ self confidence irritated him. At the end of an evening in the British officers’ mess, Spender wrote that:

“[Boyman] talked a great deal more and said that the damned fool of a British public ‘had no realization of these conditions.’ His attitude that everyone except his Film Unit is a bloody fool, annoys me. Besides which, why should the British public be sensitive to conditions in Germany? I often wonder whether sensibility is such a virtue as I myself am inclined to suppose it to be, since my own experience is that being sensitive, aware and imaginative does not prevent one from being selfish. In fact, it makes one ego-centric. All the same, Boyman is a live wire, and part of my irritation with him is undoubtedly due to jealousy and competitiveness. After the evening with Boyman I went to bed doubly depressed: by the squalid destruction of Düsseldorf and by the assertive cocksureness of Boyman.”

One of the ironies of history is that while Spender’s reputation has declined over time, that of Jennings has grown, and he is now considered by many to be Britain’s greatest wartime documentary film maker. For example, Angus Calder in his classic work, ‘The Myth of the Blitz’, referred to him as “Britain’s most remarkable maker of official films.”

But what struck me most were not the differences, but the similarities in outlook between Spender’s book, European Witness, and Jennings’ film A Defeated People. Words and images in the book reappear in the film. For example these words from European Witness could be describing a shot in the film: “The girders of the Rhine bridges plunged diagonally into the black waters of the Rhine frothing into swirling white around them”; as could descriptions and portraits of a demoralised and apathetic people; ‘Zero Hour’ represented by the clock whose hands have stopped working; and an overriding concern, in the words of the commentary of the film, that “our powers of destruction today are terrible”. But also apparent both from reading the book and watching the film, were the high and noble ideals of many of those responsible for the British occupation; their belief in the urgent need to do whatever was necessary to prevent another war; combined and contrasted on occasions, with a sense of hopelessness in the face of extreme adversity; and running in parallel with all of this, a grudging sympathy with the current condition of the former enemy.

Despite overwhelming odds, and personal limitations, both the book and the film tried to convey to the British people back home, the sense that things could not be left as they were; in the words of the film, the German people could not be “left to stew in their own juice”; and despite everything that had happened in the past, what was needed now was a constructive effort, on both sides, to repair the physical, moral and, for some people, the spiritual damage caused by the war. In Spender’s words: “a conscious, deliberate and wholly responsible determination to make our society walk in the paths of light.”

More on Stephen Spender and post-war Germany

1st June 2009

In my last post, I wrote about Stephen Spender’s book 'European Witness', and his reactions to the destruction he found in the cities of Germany after the war; of how this made him all too aware of the fragility of European civilisation, and his fear that the ruins of Cologne and Berlin could all too easily be followed by the ruins of London, Paris or Brussels.

The conclusion he drew from this was, that if things were to get better instead of worse, a conscious effort was required:

“… today we are confronted with the choice between making a heaven or a hell of the world in which we live, and the whole of civilization will be bound by whichever fate we choose.”

The Nazis had shown, in his view, that it was possible for individuals to have a dramatic effect on the future of the world, for the worse. Previous outlooks on life, prevalent before the war, were no longer sustainable. Both Marxist historical determinism and liberal laissez-faire attitudes had assumed that the actions of individuals were insignificant compared to the greater impersonal forces of history. But if the end result of trusting to a benign and inevitable social progress was the rise of fascism and the destruction of civilisation, as he knew it, what was the alternative?

“We realize today that what goes on in men’s minds may have a terrifying effect on their environment. The nihilistic nightmares of Fascism have proved that, and the weapons which destroyed fascism have proved it to a degree which makes even Fascism seem a childish dream.”

“One might compare the countries of the world to-day to clocks. Each country registers a different time, but outside their time there is one time for the whole world, registered to one clock, with a time-bomb attached to it.”

“The countries of the world are isolated in their separate experience. Yet the pressure of awareness is so great that the world to-day has a kind of transparency. We look through our own experiences to those of other countries. They might be us and we might be them. What has happened to us might happen to them. Through the streets of London and Paris we see the streets of Hamburg and Warsaw. Yet, it is easier in Paris to imagine the whole city being destroyed, than in Berlin to imagine Berlin being rebuilt.”

Liberal ideas of individual freedom, of each individual striving for his own personal self-interest, resulting in social progress and greater happiness for all, were no longer acceptable as a guide to personal conduct. The only answer to the nightmare of present destruction and the threat of worse to come was a conscious and deliberate effort, by all those who recognised the danger, to do whatever they could to avoid it.

“If we are truthful with ourselves, we have to admit, surely, that political freedom has been tolerable and welcome to us, because we did not think that it confronted us with the direct responsibility of a choice between good and evil. We were free because we believed in ‘laissez-faire’, in the old-fashioned conception of evolution, in the sense of having confidence that an interplay of free forces and conflicting interests would inevitably product the best results. And no one was responsible for these results, no one was responsible for progress. If one was a reformer or even a radical revolutionary, one was still only a force within a total of conflicting forces which were producing the general movement of social advancement, so that in a sense it was true that the people who were opposed to reform, the conservatives, were contributing as much to the general progress (in that they themselves represented one of the forces of society) as the progressives.”

The Nazi and fascist leaders showed that individuals could make a difference, even if it was for evil, rather than for good:

“They made social and political activity significant moral, or rather immoral, activity, and they renounced the irresponsible amoral automatism of the progressive industrial era. As human beings, they were at the centre of their own social actions and in a universe which, if it does not include the idea of heaven, at least includes the idea of hell, they damned and destroyed themselves and a great part of the world with them.”

I’ve written before on this blog (in my post on Amy Buller’s book ‘Darkness over Germany’) about how some British commentators described the war and its aftermath in religious and spiritual terms. Perhaps surprisingly, even an enlightened, liberal and rational commentator such as Stephen Spender ended his book by writing in religious and spiritual terms about the importance of morality, and of the “realization that society has got to choose not just to be free but to be good.”

“Thus can I explain to myself why it is that these terrible men preoccupied (I can witness only for myself) not only my waking thoughts but also my dreams, during many years. And in my dreams, I did not simply hate them and put them from me. I argued with them, I wrestled with their spirits, and the scene in which I knew them was one in which my own blood and tears flowed. The cities and soil of Germany where they were sacrificed were not just places of material destruction. They were alters on which a solemn sacrifice had been performed according to a ritual in which inevitably all the nations took part. The whole world had seemed to be darkened with their darkness, and when they left the world, the threat of a still greater darkness, a total and everlasting one, rose up from their ashes. And at the same time, there could not be the least doubt that the only answer to this past and this present is a conscious, deliberate and wholly responsible determination to make our society walk in the paths of light.”

Stephen Spender – European Witness

9th May 2009

Stephen Spender was one of a group of highly influential left-wing writers and artists who came to prominence in Britain in the 1930s, including W H Auden and Christopher Isherwood. After the war he was a notable public intellectual, editor of the magazine Encounter, and received numerous honours and awards, including Poet Laureate of the United States in 1965, and a knighthood in Britain in 1983.

In more recent years his reputation as a poet has declined. See for example this review, in the electronic magazine Slate, of a recent biography of Spender:

“Fairly or unfairly, Spender's reputation as a toady has steadily consolidated, while his reputation as a poet has steadily declined.”

I am no expert on Spender and can’t comment on whether this view of his poetry and personality is justified or not, but I’ve recently read his book European Witness, an account of two visits he made to Germany immediately after the Second World War, in July and August, and September and October 1945.

In some ways, European Witness tells a similar story to other British and American accounts of Germany after the war, such as Patrick Gordon-Walker’s The Lid Lifts, and Humphrey Jennings’ documentary film ‘A Defeated People’, but Spender seemed to have had a knack of making explicit, what other observers alluded to but rarely, if ever, said directly.

I’ve written on this blog before, about the shock many British observers felt at the scale of destruction in Germany - far worse than anything at home. It wasn’t just the physical destruction of the cities they found shocking, but the apparent collapse and demoralization of the people. Humphrey Jennings expressed this in stark terms in a letter he wrote to his wife Cicely, when filming in Germany in September 1945:

“… the problem of the German character and nation … seeing, watching, working with the Germans en masse – terrified, rabbit-eyed, over-willing, too friendly, without an inch of what we call character among a thousand … a nation of near zombies with all the parts of human beings but really no soul – no oneness of personality to hold the parts together and shine out of the eyes. The eyes indeed are the worst the most telltale part – no shine, often no focus – the mouth drawn down with overwork and over-determination …” 
 
Jennings was unusual in expressing this so directly and visually. Spender, writing in European Witness, a book for publication, was more literary, but some of the language he used - parasites sucking at a dead corpse - was just as vivid:

“Now it requires a real effort of the imagination to think back to that Cologne which I knew well ten years ago. Everything has gone. In this the destruction of Germany is quite different from even the worst that has happened in England (though not different from Poland and from parts of Russia). In England there are holes, gaps and wounds, but the surrounding life of the people themselves has filled them up, creating a scar which will heal. In towns such as Cologne and those of the Ruhr, something quite different has happened. The external destruction is so great that it cannot be healed and the surrounding life of the rest of the country cannot flow into and resuscitate the city which is not only battered but also dismembered and cut off from the rest of Germany and from Europe. The ruin of the city is reflected in the internal ruin of its inhabitants who, instead of being lives that can form a scar over the city’s wounds, are parasites sucking at a dead carcase, digging among the ruins for hidden food, doing business at their black market near the Cathedral -  the commerce of destruction instead of production.

The people who live there seem quite dissociated from Cologne. They resemble rather a tribe of wanderers who have discovered a ruined city in a desert and who are camping there, living in the cellars and hunting amongst the ruins for the booty, relics of a dead civilization.

The great city looks like a corpse and stinks like one also, with all the garbage which has not been cleared away, all the bodies still buried under heaps of stones and iron.”

It’s easy now, looking back with hindsight, to think that reconstruction and economic recovery – the economic miracle - followed almost inevitably from the ruins of war. For contemporary British observers in 1945, it was very far from obvious. Their expectation was the opposite - that what had been destroyed was lost for ever and could never be rebuilt. According to Spender this sense of hopelessness, and despair at the future, affected the occupiers, as well as the occupied:

“The effect of these corpse-towns is a grave discouragement which influences everyone living and working in Germany, the occupying forces as much as the German. The destruction is serious in more senses than one. It is a climax of deliberate effort, an achievement of our civilization, the most striking result of co-operation between nations in the twentieth century. It is the shape created by our century as the Gothic cathedral is the shape created by the Middle Ages…. The city is dead and the inhabitants only haunt the cellars and basements. Without the city they are rats in the cellars, or bats wheeling around the towers of the cathedral…. The destruction of the city itself, with all its past as well as its present, is like a reproach to the people who go on living there.”

It made him feel sick, as he described in a chapter in the book, entitled Nausea:

“A few days later, I experienced a sensation which is as difficult to describe as a strong taste or a disagreeable smell or a violent action, because, although it was a mental condition, its effects were so physical. It is worth endeavouring to describe however, because although I may have felt this rather more acutely than others, I believe that the condition is a mental one which is partly the result of the occupation, and from which many people in the occupying Armies suffer. Other people would probably explain the horror – the longing to get away at all costs – which affects the majority of the members of the Forces occupying Germany as a result of the ruined surroundings, the lack of entertainment and the generally depressing atmosphere. But I think that subtler and deeper than this is a sense of hopelessness which is bred of the relationship of Occupiers and Occupied.

The first symptoms of the illness were violent homesickness accompanied by a sensation of panic that I would never get out of Germany…. Such sensations are acuter than most physical pain and, although they do not last, whilst they go on it is of little use telling oneself, what is most certainly true, that one will be better to-morrow, because they have the force of a vision…”

In some ways therefore, although the war had ended and Nazi Germany had been defeated, things were no better than they had been before. The ambitions of modern nation states, the destructive power of war, and the possible consequences of this in the future for everyone, for the victors as well as for the defeated, were starkly obvious in the ruins of the German cities and a demoralised and hopeless people. The Cologne and Berlin of today could all too easily be the London, Paris or Brussels of tomorrow. According to Spender, there was no German problem now, only the problem of the disunity of the Allies.

“Germany, instead of being a place where the ‘German problem’ is being solved has become a scene where the disunity of the Allies is projected and one more demonstration of the fact that modern states were incapable, during what is called peace, of sacrificing national sovereignty in order to avert foreseen disasters.”

The foreboding he had felt in 1931, before the rise of the Nazis, had not been dispelled by victory in war, as the potential for further and even worse destruction was all too obvious and the ruins of Germany could become the ruins of the whole of Europe. Just as there had been, in his words, “enormous power for good or for evil” in Weimar Germany, the future in 1945 was not inevitable, but required a conscious choice. In summary, as he wrote at the end of the chapter, his “sense of nausea on certain days in Bonn”, was due to:

“… a real potentiality in my environment, as vivid as the potentialities of Nazism in 1931. This was the potentiality of the ruin of Germany to become the ruins of the whole of Europe: of the people of Brussels and Paris, London and New York, to become the herds wandering in their thousands across a continent, reduced to eating scraps and grass. It was the sense as I walked along the streets of Bonn with a wind blowing putrescent dust of ruins as stinging as pepper into my nostrils, that the whole of our civilization was protected by such eggshell walls which could be blown down in a day. It was a sense of two futures within modern humanity, like the two worlds within Faust’s breast, one a future of confidence between people in a world of such happiness as can reasonably be organized within the conditions of human existence, the other a world given over to destruction and hatred. Both these potentialities were real: but the constructive one required resolution, unity, will, acceptance of guilt, and a conscious choice to determine our future, the destructive one was to be got by going on as we have done now ever since 1918.”

References:

Stephen Spender
European Witness
(London: Hamish Hamilton, 1946)

For other views of Stephen Spender see:

John Xiros Cooper
“The Crow on the Crematorium Chimney”: Germany, Summer, 1945
https://ejournals.library.ualberta.ca/index.php/ESC/article/view/341/317 (PDF)

David Aberbach
'Stephen Spender's Jewish roots'
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article5800826.ece

Stephen Metcalf
Stephen Spender, Toady: Was there any substance to his politics and art?
http://www.slate.com/id/2113164/

Marriage with ‘ex-enemy nationals’

2nd May 2009

I’m trying to work out who was the first British soldier or civilian member of the Control Commission to marry a German, after the end of the Second World War, and when the first wedding took place.

Two years ago I conducted an oral history interview (now held as part of the Imperial War Museum sound archive) with an elderly gentleman who married his wife in Germany on 28th June 1947. He believed he was the first serving British soldier to have been given permission to marry a German woman, but I am not sure that is correct, as in her autobiography, Lucky Girl Goodbye, Renate Greenshields describes how she, and fourteen other German women, travelled to Britain on the ship the Empire Halladale on 18th December 1946, to marry British men they had met in Germany. Her wedding took place on 6th January 1947. But she was married in Britain, so perhaps the rules were different for couples marrying in Germany.

The ban on fraternisation was relaxed on 25th September 1945, permitting British soldiers and members of the Control Commission to mix socially with German men and women, but intermarriage with German women was still forbidden, at least until August 1946.

The first official reference I have found on the subject is a file at The National Archives entitled Marriage with ex-enemy nationals. It starts with a copy of Hansard (the official record of proceedings in the British Parliament), for 31st July 1946, in which Lord Nathan, the Parliamentary Undersecretary of State for War, said in the House of Lords, in answer to a question by Lord Faringdon, that the matter had been considered by the government and he was now:

 “… able to state that it has been decided that local military Commanders should be authorised to relax the present ban on marriage between British servicemen and alien women, other than Japanese, in cases where the reasons for marriage are good and there is no security objection.”

In reply, Lord Faringdon said that:

“I should like to thank the noble Lord very much indeed for his reply, which I believe will give great satisfaction, both in this country and to members of the Forces abroad.”

Although the government had decided in principle that the ban could be relaxed, in the British Zone of occupied Germany, specific approval in each case was still required from “Commanding officers with the rank of Commander, Lieutenant Colonel or Wing Commander” or above, and marriage was only permitted under certain conditions.

A note from the armed forces Chiefs of Staff Committee to the Military Governor of the British Zone, Sir Sholto Douglas, entitled “The conditions under which British Service men may marry German women in the British Zone of Germany,” stated that:

“This approval only to be given if the marriage is in the interest of the man concerned, subject to security examination and to specific conditions:

• No marriage until after 6 months from date of application, during which time the man is to go to the UK on his normal leave
• Married accommodation available on the same conditions as apply to British families, and the applicant is entitled to it (to prevent members of the occupying forces living with Germans)
• Medical certificate by a British medical officer to be submitted for the prospective wife
• A certificate of good character to be signed by the Oberbürgermeister or other relevant official
• Pregnancy not to influence above conditions
• Conditions to apply even if a form of marriage has already taken place”

The Military Governor, Sholto Douglas, suggested a minor amendment, (which was agreed a few days later on the 29th August), in a reply which also revealed something of his own attitude to the matter:

“I consider that the words ‘in the interest of the man concerned’ should be deleted from the conditions. A Commanding Officer might hold the view – which indeed I am inclined to share – that in no case is it in the interest of a British officer or man to marry a German girl, and so might prevent any of his men from so doing. This would not be in accordance with the spirit of the Government instruction. The sentence would now read ‘This approval only to be given if the marriage is subject to security examination etc etc’”

As one of the conditions was that marriage could not take place earlier than 6 months after the date of application, it seems unlikely that any marriages were permitted in Germany before 1st March 1947 at the earliest. However, Renate Greenshields described how she and her husband-to-be, had originally applied to be married in May 1946, so maybe there was some flexibility in how the date of application was interpreted.

Mr Jan Thexton, the gentleman I interviewed, had great difficulty securing approval to marry his wife, not only from the British, but also from the German authorities. He remembered the announcement being made in the House of Commons, rather than the House of Lords, and told me about the reaction of his local commander:

“When I first got engaged to my wife we weren’t allowed to get married. And then it was announced in the House of Commons that people could get married to Germans … And when I applied I was told I couldn’t get married. They didn’t accept the parliamentary … what had gone through parliament they didn’t accept …

I had to apply to, well fundamentally at that time the local commander, who was a brigadier I think from memory; this was in the Control Commission of course. And he said I couldn’t get married, and in fact … I knew him quite well ... he said ‘Look I’d much sooner you married a wog, rather than marry a German. They’re quite terrible people.’ I said ‘I don’t agree.’ Anyway I got fed up with this. I knew the thing had gone through Parliament and I had a neighbour who was an MP … my parents had a neighbour who was an MP, so I went home and told him the story …

Anyway he said he’d take it up, and when I got back to Germany there was a big notice on my desk: ‘Here is your authority to get married. God help you.’ So I started to sort things out, and then I was told that the Germans were still operating under the laws of the Third Reich, so the Third Reich forbade German citizens to marry foreigners. So I had to take a car and a driver and go all over the place in Germany to sort out the legal situation. I finished up at what amounts to … what would be the equivalent over here … a sort of district legal office … and I sat down with the German civil service lawyers and we thrashed out a method of doing this….

When we’d sorted it out I went back and applied and got married in a German registry office. I set up a sort of … established notice of how to do it and this was circulated. I was told three thousand other couples married in that year … based upon what I’d negotiated with the Germans.”

References:

Imperial War Museum sound archive
Interview with Mr J M G Thexton, 7th November 2007

The National Archives
FO 1030/174
Marriages with ex-enemy nationals

Renate Greenshields
Lucky Girl Goodbye
First published 1988

General Sir Brian Horrocks – Corps Commander

24th April 2009

The purpose of my research is to understand what British people aimed to achieve in occupied Germany after the Second World War. For the past year or so I’ve been looking at some of the senior army officers, notably Field Marshal Montgomery, who was Military Governor of the British Zone for the first year of the occupation, from May 1945 to the end of April 1946.

As I progress further with the research I’ll be looking at other groups of people: politicians, diplomats and administrators, the education advisers, young men, who were only 18 or 19 years old at the outbreak or war and who had no adult experience of anything else, and German speaking exiles, who returned to the country they had grown up in, as members of the occupying forces or as administrators in the Control Commission.

One theme which interests me is how army officers adjusted to their changed role after the fighting was over and the task of ‘winning the peace’ had begun. I’ve recently read the autobiography of General Sir Brian Horrocks, ‘A Full Life’, (first published in 1960 by William Collins; new edition published 1974 by Leo Cooper), which provides some insight into this, although he stayed in Germany for only a few months after the end of the war.

Horrocks was one of three Corps Commanders in the British 21st Army Group, who reported directly to Montgomery as Commander-in-Chief. With the rank of Lieutenant General (which is higher than Major General) the Corps Commanders were, in the early days of the occupation, the most important people in the Zone, equal if not senior in rank to the Deputy Military Governor, Sir Brian Robertson, with complete authority in their own areas of command.

According to his Wikipedia entry, Horrocks was one of Montgomery’s most successful generals, respected by both his British and American colleagues. He fought under Montgomery at the Battle of Alamein and in North Africa, and then again, as commander of 30 Corps, from the Battle of Normandy to the final defeat of the German armies and unconditional surrender in May 1945.

I’ve quoted some extracts from his autobiography below, which are interesting for a number of reasons: his background and experience as a POW in the First World War and in Russia and Germany afterwards, which must have influenced his outlook on life later, his descriptions of Montgomery, his reactions to the liberation of a concentration camp, and how he set about his task in Germany after the Second World War was over.

Brian Horrocks was born in India in 1895, but grew up and was educated in England. His father was a doctor in the Royal Army Medical Corps and he remembered holidays in Gibraltar as a young boy:

“I used to travel out by P. & O. every holidays from my preparatory school in Durham and the Gibraltar of those days was a small boy’s paradise, much more so than today, as we had free access to Spain. Life consisted of bathing, hunting with the Calpe hounds, cricket matches, race meetings and children’s parties – all great fun.”

In 1912 he went to Sandhurst to train as an officer in the army. At the outbreak of war in August 1914 he was sent to France, but was wounded and captured at the Battle of Ypres in October. He was just 19 years old at the time. He spent the rest of the war as a POW, despite numerous unsuccessful attempts to escape, one of which ended only yards from the Dutch border. As a POW he shared a room with 50 Russian officers and learnt Russian. As a result of this, he was sent to Russia in 1919 as part of the (unsuccessful) British efforts to help the White Russian armies defeat the Bolsheviks.

On returning from Russia he rejoined his regiment, now stationed in Germany, as part of the British occupation of the Rhineland after the First World War. He described his experiences as follows:

“When I returned to my regiment as a captain I was lucky, for the 1st Battalion The Middlesex Regiment then formed part of the British Army of the Rhine. For us in the occupation forces life in Cologne was very pleasant, because, owing to the chronic inflation of the German mark, we always had plenty of money, a most unusual experience for me.

It was all too easy. I opened an account for £10 sterling in a German bank and as each day the pound become worth more in German currency, all I had to do was to call and draw out the extra marks. Towards the end of this period we used to get the weekly pay for our companies in sacks. But the Germans suffered terribly. The more expensive bars were filled with fat profiteers and their hard-faced, brassy mistresses who drove round in huge cars and seemed to batten on the wretched, starving, professional classes. …

I don’t think anyone who has not witnessed at first hand the real horrors of inflation can understand what it means. I came away convinced that any sacrifice was worth while in order to avoid this economic cancer.”

In April 1921 he returned to the UK “for duty in connection with the coal strike.” He was then posted to Ireland during ‘the troubles’ “where our life consisted of searching for hidden arms, patrols, keeping a lookout for road-blocks and dealing with ambushes organised by the Sinn Feiners – a most unpleasant sort of warfare.” This was followed by a trip to Silesia in 1923 “to maintain law and order during a plebiscite” to determine whether the area should be remain part of Germany or be transferred to Poland.

He also took part in the 1924 Olympic Games in Paris, competing in the Modern Pentathlon. In those days the modern pentathlon had a strong military association, as it was, according to Horrocks, “based on the conception of a courier carrying dispatches though a hostile country” who needs to ride a horse, run on foot, swim, fence and shoot with a pistol.

At the start of the Second World War in 1939, Horrocks joined the British Expeditionary Force in France as a major, commanding a machine-gun battalion. He described his first meeting with the divisional commander, General Montgomery:

“I hadn’t been there two hours when I was told that the divisional commander, General Montgomery, was in his car on the road and wanted to see me. Monty had obviously come up at once to cast an eye over his new divisional machine-gun commander. This was my first meeting with him, apart from once in Egypt. I saw a small, alert figure with piercing eyes sitting in the back of his car - the man under whom I was to fight all my battles during the war, and who was to have more influence on my life than anyone before or since.

I knew him well by reputation. He was probably the most discussed general in the British Army before the war, and – except with those who had served under him – not a popular figure…. He was known to be ruthlessly efficient, but somewhat of a showman. I had been told sympathetically that I wouldn’t last long under his command, and to be honest, I would rather have served under any other divisional commander.”

Later in the book he described another meeting with Montgomery, in 1947 after the war was over and he was based in Chester:

“The highlight was a visit from Monty. I had not realised how popular he was with all and sundry. It was almost like a Royal tour, with people lining the route – and he loved every minute of it. Just before his departure for Liverpool, where he was to catch his train back to London, the mayor of Birkenhead rang me up to say that over 1,000 people were waiting for him on the near side of the Mersey tunnel. A small platform had been erected and he hoped that the field-marshal would be prepared to say a few words to the crowd. This was quite unexpected so, as we drove along, I did my best to brief him on the role which Birkenhead had played during the war. I spoke most of the time to his back as he was continuously leaning out of the window and waving to the crowds while he murmured ‘Yes, yes Jorrocks – three battleships constructed – I have got that. Yes go on.’ We arrived, and he then made a sparkling speech which delighted everybody without mentioning a single word of what I had told him during the journey.”

After defeat in France and evacuation at Dunkirk in 1940, Horrocks returned to England. In 1942 he went with Montgomery to Egypt and played an important role in the series of victories which led to the German army being driven out of Africa. His army career was interrupted in 1943, when he was seriously wounded in Tunisia in an attack by an aeroplane. He was out of action until July 1944, when he re-joined the army as commander of 30 Corps in the Battle of Normandy.

Towards the end of the war, he played a large part in the fighting which forced the German army back across the Rhine. I’ve written before on this blog about the horror many soldiers felt at the destruction caused by war; to themselves, their enemies and to innocent civilians. Horrocks described ordering the destruction of the town of Kleve, during the Battle of the Reichswald:

“One thing, during this preparatory stage, caused me almost more worry than anything else; the handling of the immense air resources which were to support us. General Crerar told me that in addition to the whole of the 2nd Tactical Air Force the heavies from Bomber Command were also available. And he put this question to me: ‘Do you want the town of Cleve taken out?’ By ‘taking out’ he meant, of course, totally destroyed.

This is the sort of problem with which a general in war is constantly faced, and from which there is no escape. Cleve was a lovely, historical Rhineland town. Anne of Cleves, Henry VIII’s fifth wife came from there. No doubt a lot of civilians, particularly women and children, were still living there. I hated the thought of its being ‘taken out’. All the same, if we were to break out of this bottle-neck and sweep down into the German plain beyond it was going to be a race between the 15th Scottish Division and the German reserves for the hinge, and all the German reserves would have to pass through Cleve. If I could delay them by bombing, it might make all the different to the battle. And after all the lives of my own troops must come first. So I said ‘Yes’.

But I can assure you that I did not enjoy the sight of those bombers flying over my head on the night before we attacked. Generals, of course, should not have imagination. I reckon I had a bit too much.”

This “horrible battle” lasted a month. “We took 16,800 German prisoners and it was estimated that the total enemy casualties was about 75,000 as against 15,634 suffered by us. Our losses seemed very high at the time, but this was unquestionably the grimmest battle in which I took part during the last war and I kept reminding myself that during the battle of the Somme in the 1914-18 war there were 50,000 casualties during the first morning.”

After crossing the Rhine, he led the force which captured the city of Bremen:

“It was in Bremen that I realised for the first time just what the Germans must have suffered as the result of our bombing. It was a shambles; there didn’t seem to be a single house intact in this huge seaport.”

Earlier in the book, while describing his experience as a POW in the First World War, he had spoken of the ‘great respect’ front line soldiers had for those on the other side:

“I have always regarded the forward area of the battlefield as the most exclusive club in the world, inhabited by the cream of the nation’s manhood – the men who actually do the fighting. Comparatively few in number, they have little feeling of hatred for the enemy – rather the reverse.”

This was reinforced by his experience in North Africa:

“There was an odd atmosphere about this desert war: never has there been less hate between the opposing sides: that is between the Germans and ourselves. Owing to the constant ‘to-ing and fro-ing’ both armies lived alternately on each other’s rations and used quite a quantity of each other’s captured equipment.”

But at the end of the war, he was present at the liberation of Sandbostel concentration camp, and this made him change his opinion:

“Up to now I had been fighting this war without any particular hatred for the enemy but just short of Bremen we uncovered one of those horror camps which are now common knowledge, but which at that time came as a great shock. I saw a ghastly picture when I entered with General Allan Adair, the commander of the Guards Armoured Division. The floor of the first large hut was strewn with emaciated figures clad in most horrible striped pyjamas. Many of them were too weak to walk but they managed to heave themselves up and gave us a pathetic cheer. Most of them had some form of chronic dysentery and the stench was so frightful that I disgraced myself by being sick in a corner. It was difficult to believe that most of these hardly human creatures had once been educated civilised people.

I was so angry that I ordered the burgomasters of all the surrounding towns and villages each to supply a quota of German women to clean up the camp and look after these unfortunate prisoners, who were dying daily at an alarming rate. When the women arrived we expected some indication of horror or remorse when they saw what their fellow-countrymen had been doing. Not a bit of it. I never saw a tear or heard one expression of pity from any of them. I also brought one of our own hospitals into the camp and when I found some of our sisters looking very distressed I apologised for having given them such an unpleasant task. ‘Goodness me,’ they said, ‘it’s not that. We are only worried because we can do so little for the poor things – many of them have gone too far.’ A somewhat different approach to the problem by the woman of two countries.”

He received the surrender of German forces in his area:

“I had often wondered how the war would end. When it came it could hardly have been more of an anti-climax. I happened to be sitting in the military equivalent of the smallest room when I heard a voice on the wireless saying ‘All hostilities will cease at 0800 hours tomorrow morning 5th May.’

It was a wonderful moment – the sense of relief was extraordinary; for the first time for five years I would no longer be responsible for other men’s lives. The surrender on our front took place at 1430 hours on 5th May when the German general commanding the Corps Ems and his chief of staff arrived at our headquarters. Elaborate arrangement had been made for their reception. Our military police, looking very smart escorted them to a table in the centre of the room; all round the outside was a ring of interested staff officers and other ranks of 30 Corps.

When all was ready I came in and seated myself all alone opposite the two Germans. After issuing my orders for the surrender I finished with these words, ‘These orders must be obeyed scrupulously. I warn you we shall have no mercy if they are not. Having seen one of your horror camps my whole attitude towards Germany has changed.’

The chief of staff jumped up and said, ‘The army had nothing to do with these camps.’ ‘Sit down,’ I replied, ‘there were German soldiers on sentry duty outside and you cannot escape responsibility. The world will never forgive Germany for those camps.’”

But once the war was over, another “considerable mental switch” was required:

“During those first few days after the German capitulation we all felt as though an immense weight had been lifted from our shoulders; but this wonderful carefree atmosphere did not last for long. We were faced by the many intricate problems involved in the resuscitation of a stricken Germany. Having spent the last six years doing our best to destroy the German Reich, almost overnight we had to go into reverse gear and start building her up again. This required a considerable mental switch.”

“There is something terribly depressing about a country defeated in war, even though that country has been your enemy, and the utter destruction of Germany was almost awesome. It didn’t seem possible that towns like Hanover and Bremen could ever rise again from the shambles in which the bulk of the hollow-eyed and shabby population eked out a troglodyte existence underneath the ruins of their houses.

Things were better in the country districts, but what struck me most was the complete absence of able-bodied men or even or youths – there were just a few old men, some cripples, and that was all. The farms were all run by women. How appalling were the casualties suffered by the Germans was brought home to me forcibly when I first attended morning service in the small village church of Eystrop where I lived. The Germans commemorate their war dead by means of evergreen wreaths – dozens and dozens of them. In a similar church in the United Kingdom I would not expect to see more than eight to ten names on the local war memorial. The Germans certainly started the last war, but only those who saw the conditions during the first few months immediately after the war ended can know how much they suffered.”
 
“Monty laid down the priorities as 1) food and (2) housing; he then, as always, gave us a free hand to look after our own districts until such time as proper military government could take over from us. It was a fascinating task. I found myself to all intents and purposes the benevolent (I hope) dictator of an area about the size of Wales. At my morning conference, instead of considering fire plans and laying down military objectives, we discussed such problems as food, coal, communications, press and so on. I soon discovered the merits of a dictatorship. I could really get things done quickly. One day in the late autumn a staff officer reported than the output of coal was dropping every week in our corps district. That was very serious with winter approaching. The reason, I was informed, was that the miners lacked clothes. I immediately ordered a levy to be carried our in certain nearby towns to provide adequate clothing for the miners, and sure enough a few weeks later the graph showing coal production began to rise. I smiled when I thought of what would happen in dear old democratic Britain if the Cabinet ordered clothes to be removed compulsorily from Cardiff, shall we say, to clothe the miners in the Welsh valleys.”

“To start with a great deal of this work had to be carried out by British troops and quite naturally this caused resentment. I remember being asked by an intelligent sapper corporal, ‘Why should I now have to work hard and repair bridges for the so-and-so Germans who have caused so much misery to the world.’ As he was obviously voicing the doubts of many others, I collected the company together and explained to the best of my ability that the war was now over, so Germany must take her place again as a European state. Many of the people were on the verge of starvation and if food couldn’t be moved freely into the towns they would die that winter. And this would cause great bitterness. Furthermore it was essential for our own British economy to start trading again with Germany and we would never be able to do this until communications had been repaired. Whether I convinced them or not I have no idea, but they went back to work at once without any further questions.”

“The British soldier has often been described as our best ambassador and this is particularly so if he forms part of an army of occupation because one of the most difficult things in the world is to occupy a foreign country and yet remain friendly with its people. If left to himself the British soldier will soon be on the best of terms with the local population.  Unfortunately this time he was not left to himself and all sorts of regulations about non-fraternisation with the German population were issued. No doubt there were good reasons for this policy but it caused endless trouble at our level. What happened was that our troops were prevented from getting to know the ordinary, decent families in an open and normal way, and were driven to consorting on the sly with the lowest types of German women.”

“In spite of the non-fraternisation rule I was determined somehow or other to make our occupation as palatable as possible for the local inhabitants. This may sound sloppy, but I had experienced the difficulties of occupying Germany after the First World War. I knew very well that nobody will ever keep the Germans down for long because they belong to a very rare species which actually likes work. I also understood the menace of Communism better than most – thanks to my time in Russia. So, without claiming any particularly brilliant foresight, it seemed to me that the Germans were the sort of people whom it would be better to have on our side than against us. I therefore ordered all units in my corps to do everything they could to help the German children. Nobody could blame them for the last war, and they had obviously had a bad time. Some of the children had never even seen chocolates in their lives. Units were told to open special youth clubs, and camps in the summer, and organise sports, etc.”

He gave a tea party for 150 German children, but “unfortunately the party was also attended by some reporters from the British Press … inexperienced, callow, young men who were concerned mainly with getting an angle to their stories … It soon become obvious they were hostile” and the next day headlines appeared in the press “British General Gives Tea Party for German Children”. He received “an enormous number of letters in which the kindest comment was “that I had obviously gone mad.’”

“These were of little consequence, but unfortunately owing to all the adverse criticism I was ordered to cease my activities with the German children at once. Orders had to be obeyed but I still feel that this was a serious mistake. Instead of mixing with the civilian population on a friendly basis we were driven back into ourselves and when I returned to Germany some three years later to take over the appointment of commander-in-chief, I found that the B.A.O.R. was an army of occupation in the true sense of the word, living quite apart from the German people.”

He was appointed commander-in-chief of the British Army of the Rhine in 1948, but before taking up the post, had another operation on his stomach, his seventh after being wounded in North Africa:

“Very unwisely I went out to Germany before I had completely recovered and then followed the most unhappy period of my life. I arrived to command B.A.O.R. just when things were getting more and more difficult with the Russians.”

He had to resign from the army, but continued to live an active and varied life. In 1949 he was appointed gentleman usher of the Black Rod in parliament and fourteen years later became a director of Bovis, the construction company. He also presented a series of TV programmes ‘Men in Battle’ which at its peak, had eight and a half million viewers. Brian Horrocks died in 1985.

Why did Field-Marshal Montgomery believe that a Germany that 'looked East’ was ‘a menace to the British Empire’?

5th April 2009

For the last few weeks I’ve been writing about different aspects of Field-Marshal Montgomery’s year as Military Governor of the British Zone of Germany, based mostly on his unpublished ‘Notes on the Occupation of Germany’ held as part of his papers at the archives of the Imperial War Museum.

It seems to have been an extraordinarily active time for him. As I wrote last week, he repeatedly made the point that “our hardest task remains to be tackled”. After the destruction caused by war, the task of “rebuilding European civilisation” required the same, or even greater, levels of dedication, hard work and personal sacrifice, as winning the war had done.

It’s almost as if, in some ways, he didn’t want the war to end. The Battles of Normandy and of the Rhine, which culminated in the unconditional surrender of all German forces in North-West Europe on Luneburg Heath on May 4th 1945, were soon followed by the “Battle of the Winter” whose objectives, this time, were not to defeat the enemy, or capture territory, but “food, work and homes” for people in Germany.

He made a conscious decision that, in the absence of any functioning civil administration, he would use the army to tackle the chaos and confusion he found in Germany after the war, and operations ‘Overlord’, ‘Market Garden’ and ‘Plunder’ were followed by Operations ‘Barleycorn’ (the release of captured German POWs to work on the land and help bring in the harvest), ‘Coalscuttle’ (a further release of POWs to work in the coalmines of the Ruhr) and ‘Stork’ (the evacuation of young children from the British Zone in Berlin).

He issued four ‘personal messages’ to the population of the British Zone, addressing a civilian population of 20 million people in much the same way as he addressed his own troops before going into battle. As the number of soldiers under his command in Normandy, when he was supreme Allied Commander in July 1944, was around 2 million, perhaps the difference was not that great? In message no.3, for example, issued on 8th August 1945, exactly 3 months after the end of the war in Europe, he told the German people he was:

“… now going to proceed with the second stage of the Allied policy. In this stage it is my intention that you shall have freedom to get down to your own way of life, subject only to the provisions of military security and necessity. I will help you eradicate idleness, boredom, and fear of the future. Instead I want to give you an objective, and hope for the future.”

In his three ‘Notes on the Present Situation’ issued a little earlier, on 25th June, 6th and 14th July, and sent to his Corps Commanders and the Heads of Division of the British Control Commission, he had already outlined what he meant by the “second stage of Allied policy,” in some detail. For example in the second of these notes, he explained to his colleagues that:

“Two months have now passed since Germany surrendered and the country passed to the control of the Allied Nations.

During these two months the full extent of the debacle has become apparent; we now know the magnitude of the problem that confronts us in the rebuilding of Germany.

The coming winter will be a critical time. In the British Zone there will be a shortage of food, a very definite shortage of coal, inadequate services of transportation and distribution, and insufficient accommodation. Northwest Europe is very cold in the winter; the average temperature is freezing and heavy falls of snow are frequent; under such conditions people want food and warmth, and they are likely to lack both.

…

The great mass of 20 million people in the British Zone are in for a hard time this winter; they are apprehensive about food, about housing, and about the general unsettled conditions.

The best way to counteract this feat is to give them ‘hope’

It is clear that we must tackle the ‘battle of the winter’ energetically, and we must win it; for if we lost it, we would compromise the future.

We require a good short term plan to take us through the winter; this must be closely linked to the long term plan for the complete restoration of the economic life of Germany.”

Although this was not explicitly stated in these notes, it appears that, in his mind, the task of rebuilding civilisation in Europe was now closely associated with the urgent need for reconstruction in Germany. Existing policy, agreed by the Allies before the end of the war and implemented by SHAEF, the joint British and US Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force, was, in his view no longer relevant. As he explained in the Notes:

“I think some of our troubles are due to a tendency to adhere rigidly to SHAEF instructions issued previously; many of these instructions are now out of date.”

A week, later, in the third Note, he was able to say that he had been given authority, by the Government, to act on his own initiative in the British Zone, without waiting for joint agreement by all the Allies:

“In my ‘Notes of the Present Situation’ dated 6 July, I outlined the problem that is likely to confront us during the coming months and I gave my views on the methods we should adopt to deal with the situation.

It has now been agreed that the Directive issued to me as C-in-C [Commander-in-Chief] of the British Forces of occupation in Germany, and U.K. member of the Control Council, gives me full powers to begin work on the policy we want to adopt: without waiting for the Control Council to become fully operative…

Our present attitude towards the German people is negative, it must be replaced by one that is positive and holds out hope for the future.”

By the end of the year, the ‘Battle of the Winter’ seemed to have been won, but perhaps surprisingly, Montgomery’s outlook for the future had deteriorated rather than improved.

On 8th October 1945, he returned to England for a conference of the Chiefs of the Imperial General Staff, the most senior military body in the country, and didn’t return to Germany until the 27th.

In the ‘Notes on the Occupation of Germany’ he says he was first told he would be appointed CIGS or Chief of the Imperial General Staff on 26th January the following year, 1946, but he may have been given an indication of this during the conference, as for the remainder of the year, he appeared increasingly preoccupied with the problems faced by the British Army, (rather than those of the British Zone of Germany), arguing strongly that the army should not be reduced in size too much, too quickly. (The war against Japan had ended two months earlier with the surrender of Japan on VJ Day, August 15th 1945, following the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 6th and 9th August).

In a paper Montgomery gave at the conference in October, he said he expected the occupation of Germany to last a long time, 20 years or more, and this represented an ideal opportunity to get training facilities for the British army, at no cost:

“An Army of occupation would be required in Germany for at least ten, and possibly twenty years … The Field Army should normally be kept and trained in Germany, where the cost would be borne by the Germans and where training facilities were magnificent.”

On 31st October he started a tour of the Army Corps in Germany in a special train ‘Lion’ meeting his troops and canvassing their views. His diary shows he made three separate tours, over the next two months, each lasting just under a week.

He continued to press the case that the number of troops should not  fall below what he considered minimum requirements, arguing in December that although: “‘The Battle of the Winter’ is proceeding and it is my opinion that we shall win that battle… this is no time for complacency.”

“…the British Zone has remained quiet. So far scarcely a spark has occurred. I do not think we shall have any trouble with the Germans this winter;  they are fully occupied with their own immediate troubles; our main problems this winter are more likely to be with the hard facts of economics; how to sustain the Zone with the minimum of starvation and disease.

Our conflicts with the Germans lie ahead; but they will come. Next year, 1946, is going to be a difficult time; the Germans will have got through the winter and will be feeling better; they will see their factories and coal being removed; they will realise that they themselves are not to be allowed to benefit from the recovery of their country.

We have removed from positions of responsibility a large number of Nazi Germans, all immensely capable people and first-class organisers; these people are now idle.
 
Our industrial and economic policy is such that there is bound to be widespread unemployment in Germany as time goes on.

We have demobilised in the Zone about two million fighting men and are now in process of adding about another half million to the figure.

It will be clear from this brief outline that there is much fertile ground in which to sow the seeds of discontent and trouble.

Therefore I am convinced that our conflicts with the Germans lie ahead, and may well begin next year.

It is essential that we should not let the strength of our armed forces in Germany run down too quickly…”

After returning home for the Christmas holidays, he saw the Prime Minister, Clement Atlee, on Christmas Eve and on January 3rd he addressed a full meeting of the Cabinet, at which, according to his ‘Notes’, he made the same points, but this time also stressing the need to import food, to prevent starvation the following year:

“… the 23 million Germans in the British Zone were peaceable now but might not be so in the future; and he emphasised that the outcome of the Battle of the Winter depended on the Imports of Wheat, without which the Germans would starve.”

In summary, it appears that, although this is not stated in the Notes, Montgomery was losing the argument with the government in London in at least three areas he considered crucial:

- the size of the army in Germany was being reduced too far
- imports of wheat might not be sufficient to prevent starvation, with resulting discontent and unrest, which could be difficult to control
- the level of industry proposed for the future German economy was not sufficient to prevent unemployment, promote economic reconstruction and give German people ‘hope for the future’

(For the context and background for the second two points, see earlier posts in this blog on Bread Rationing in Britain, and the Level of Industry Talks). 

With hindsight, we know that after Montgomery left Germany in May 1946, British policy changed yet again in all three areas. Decisions were taken to maintain the British Army of the Rhine in Germany indefinitely (it is still there today), significant imports of wheat from the US were sent to Germany from 1946 onwards, and the very restrictive terms agreed by all the Allies at the Level of Industry Talks in Berlin in January 1946 were soon relaxed allowing German industry to expand from 1947 and 1948 onwards.

However, in early 1946 things looked very different. The conclusion Montgomery drew was that the consequences of the current restrictive British policy (as determined in London) was that the German people would look to Russia for support, rather than to the US or Britain, and that a hostile Germany combined with a communist Russia could be a serious threat to the security of Britain and the British Empire.

Before he left Germany, Montgomery expressed these concerns in two memos. The first, on the Problem in Germany, was dated 1 Feb 1946. In this he said that: ‘The Battle of the Winter’ had been won:

“No epidemics had broken out and the general health of the German people had been maintained. But the outlook for the future was now worse than ever before…. The future level of German economy would cause distress and unemployment; the influx of refugees was just beginning; all stocks of consumer goods had now been used up. The next battle would be more serious than the ‘Battle of the Winter.’”

His final ‘Notes on the German Situation’ are dated 1st May 1946, the day before he left Germany. Montgomery claims in his Memoirs he took it back to England and "handed a copy personally to the Prime Minister" (though not to his successor as Military Governor in Germany, Sholto Douglas, who complained later that he had never been given these and only learnt of their existence many years later). In these final Notes Montgomery wrote that:

“The general picture was sombre if not black. The food crisis overshadowed all else, but there were other serious factors. The whole German economy was sick. Coal was short, industries lay idle, and there were few goods in the shops. The level of industry agreement was bound to cause distress and might produce unemployment. The result of this situation was the beginning of inflation.”

He went on to say there was a need for “a concrete plan designed to bring about a change of heart in the German people”. The foundation for the plan was “the economic line of attack” and Germans must have “a reasonable standard of living; they must be given some hope for the future…”

“I gave it as my opinion that if we did not do this, we would fail in Germany.

We have not done it and I would say that at the moment there is a definite danger that we may fail. By that I mean there is a danger that if things do not improve the Germans in the British Zone will begin to look EAST. When that happens we shall have failed, and there will exist a definite menace to the British Empire. In this connection, much communist propaganda is coming westwards over the ‘green frontier.’

The people living inside that Germany must be given a reasonable standard of living, and hope for a worth-while future.”
 …

“We must decide whether we are going to feed the Germans, or let them starve. Basically we must not let them starve; if we do, then everything else we do is of no avail.

It does not look at present as if we can increase the ration beyond the present rate of 1042 calories; this means we are going to let them starve: gradually.

In spite of the difficulties of the world food situation, we must get back to a reasonable ration standard in the British Zone as quickly as possible. The discrepancies which exist between the standard of feeding in our Zone and that in other Zones must be removed by agreement on a common standard.

… above all, we must tell the German people what is going to happen to them and to their country. If we do not do these things, we shall drift towards possible failure. That ‘drift’ will take the form of an increasingly hostile population, which will eventually begin to look EAST.

Such a Germany would be a menace to the security of the British Empire.

On the other hand, a contented Germany with a sound political framework could be a great asset to the security of the empire and the peace of the world.”

What did Field-Marshal Montgomery mean by ‘Winning the Peace’ in 1945?

30th March 2009

When I first read Field-Marshal Montgomery’s four part 'Notes on the Occupation of Germany' I ignored the speeches, reprinted in the appendices, which he gave on receiving numerous honours in Britain and in Europe, such the Freedom of the Cities of Manchester, Newport, Brussels, Antwerp, Londonderry and Canterbury, of the London Boroughs of Chiswick and Lambeth and an honorary degree from Queen’s University, Belfast.

At first I thought this showed his vanity and that success had gone to his head, as he wrote, for example, of being greeted by cheering crowds in the streets of Brussels and elsewhere. The speeches all seemed to say much the same thing, fine words and platitudes about soldiers and civilians depending on each other and the importance of the British Empire.

But on a second reading, it seemed to me that these speeches may be as close as we can get to what Montgomery’s own views really were and what he aimed to achieve after the war was over. Why else would he include all these speeches in the Notes, word for word, if he didn’t mean what he said?

On other occasions, for example when he spoke to the press and journalists, he was eminently practical, detailing the problems faced by British Military Government and the steps they had taken in response to these. He talked about issues such as the shortage of food, the problems of refugees, displaced persons, lack of accommodation, the threat of disease, shortage of coal and absenteeism in the mines, the problems of denazification, the formation of political parties, trades unions, and the need for cooperation between the allies. Some of these addresses read as if they were written for him.

The speeches he gave on receiving honours were quite different in tone. Perhaps they were an opportunity for him to say what he really thought and believed?

In these speeches the same themes re-occur again and again, expressed in different ways: the need to rebuild civilisation after the chaos and destruction of war, which can only be done through hard work, sweat and blood (if not tears); the need for personal sacrifice to achieve this, and a firm “spiritual basis” on which to build; how older men, such as himself, were tired after the stress and strain of years of war, and younger men were needed to take over the task from them; the importance of a strong and united British Empire as one of the main pillars of the post-war world.

Here are some extracts:

From his speech in reply to receiving the freedom of the city of Antwerp, on 7th June 1945

“Our first task in now ended. Together we have won the war, and have destroyed the Nazi tyranny of Europe. Our hardest task remains to be tackled. Out of the chaos and confusion which the war has inflicted on Europe we have to rebuild our European civilisation. In destroying the Nazi power, we have destroyed one great evil; much that was good and beautiful has also been destroyed, and the economic organisation of Europe lies in ruins. We can rebuild what has been destroyed only by toil and sweat, and there is no short cut back to prosperity.”

On receiving the freedom of Chiswick, 28th July 1945

“The war in Europe is now over, and the war in the Pacific will be relentlessly pressed to its certain conclusion. But even then much will remain to be done. We must now start to face the problems of rebuilding our civilisation in Europe, and in the world. As a result of this war much of Europe has been destroyed. We have lost much that was good and much that was beautiful, and the whole economic framework of Europe lies in ruins. We have got to rebuild that framework in England, in Europe, in the World, and this can only be done by toil, and sweat, and much hard work; there is no short cut to prosperity.”

On receiving the Freedom of Lambeth on 15th August 1945

“We are all tired as a result of the strain and stress through which we have passed; we all want a rest and some relaxation. I do myself. But we cannot any of us rest for long. We have a job to do which will call for all our energy and purpose. We have got to rebuild a new England and a new Europe out of the ruins of the old. Much of Europe will look to us to give them a lead and we cannot afford to neglect this great responsibility. If we do neglect it, we may well allow the seeds of yet another war to be sown.”

….

“I firmly believe that every enterprise which man undertakes, if it is to achieve any lasting success, must have a strong spiritual basis; if we attempt any great thing for soles material reasons, the results cannot be good. Today our task is greater and more complex that ever before. We have won the war; we now have to rebuild a new civilisation: a new world in which all nations may live in peace and prosperity.

We cannot achieve success in this great task unless we have a firm spiritual basis on which to build.”

….

“But we do not only want peace. We want prosperity; and there are many who think that this will be provided for us by the State: but this is a great mistake. The State can merely provide the opportunity and ensure that it is fair for all; we have got to win prosperity for ourselves, or else go without it; and we will win it for ourselves only by much hard work and by personal sacrifices on the part of us all.”

On receiving the Freedom of the City of Brussels on 12th September 1945:

“In spite of this war, and in spite of all that has been lost or destroyed by it, Europe still has the heritage of all the culture handed down to us through the ages, and this is immeasurably more valuable that our material possessions which have been destroyed. We must build our future on all that was good in the past, and must this time make sure that what we build cannot again be destroyed.”

Of especial interest were three speeches he gave in Northern Ireland, where his family originated from, and still owned land:

On receiving an honorary degree from Queen’s University, Belfast, on 14th September 1945, he started by saying: “It is a great pleasure for me who am an Irishman to come here today to receive an Honorary Degree of your famous University.”

“The future is in your hands. Many of us older men are tired with the stress and strain through which we have passed during the war. In due course we shall want a rest. But the task ahead calls for great energy and drive and the white-hot enthusiasm of youth. We older men may give the lead for a while, but it is for the younger men to take up the running and shoulder this task. I believe there are now immense opportunities for reshaping our world for the better.”

And on receiving the Honorary Burgess of the City of Belfast, later the same day he spoke of the British Empire:

“This Empire of ours does not stand still. It is a great living and developing organism, and is today, I believe, one of the great forces for good in the advancement of the world towards peace and prosperity. During this war, every part of our Empire has learnt to carry greater responsibilities, and our brotherhood in arms has brought us closer together and more conscious of each other’s problems than ever before. Let us see to it that we do not forget the lessons we have learnt. Now, as never before, we must be prepared jointly to shoulder our Imperial responsibilities, and together to help to build a new world based on our love of freedom and justice for all.”

On receiving the Freedom of the City of Londonderry the following day, 15th September 1945, he continued the same theme, invoking the history of the city “which I almost feel is my home town”:

“Before the war, the Empire was everywhere weak … A weak Empire is a danger to ourselves and to the whole world. But a strong and united Empire, united in a common belief in freedom and justice, is one of the greatest forces for good in the world today.”

“This ancient city of ours can well understand these things, since it has itself been through difficult times and suffered great tribulations: the ancient city of Derry being finally reduced to ashes early in the seventeenth century. But the people of London assisted in the work of reconstruction, and a new city arose on the ruins of the old: and was called Londonderry, on account of its connection with the capital of the Empire.

“We of Londonderry thus have a link with the Empire that can never be broken: a link that binds us strongly to the very heart of the Empire.”

On receiving the Freedom of the City of Newport, on 25th September 1945, he spoke of what he believed needed to be done in Germany:

“For how long we shall occupy Germany we cannot say now. But we will do so until we can satisfy ourselves that she can conduct her affairs decently and will not again become a canker in the heart of Europe. Therefore we must start to reorganise her country for peace, a country which has been completely destroyed. We must re-educate her, and teach her people to want to live a free and decent life, and to accept the ideals of freedom and justice. We must eradicate the poison which has been injected into her for so many years and replace it by decent ideas. This is what we are now trying to do in Germany today. It is part of our task of restoring the shattered fabric of civilisation. It will take a long time, but I think it can be done. We shall not ensure peace unless we succeed in this task.” 
 
On receiving the freedom of the City of Canterbury on 20th October 1945

“Today we stand at the beginning of a new era. Peace has been won; we must now win prosperity. We have got to rebuild our civilisation, much of which lies in ruins. This will call for much hard work, as prosperity is not automatically one of the fruits of victory.”

On receiving the Freedom of the Borough of Maidenhead on 22nd October 1945

“Furthermore, the destruction in this war has been on a far greater scale than anything known before. Our complex modern civilisation lies heavily battered, and in some parts of Europe it has almost ceased to exist.”

And finally, the conclusion to a lecture he gave at St Andrews on 15th November 1945 on 'The Spiritual basis of leadership'

“Finally I do not believe that today a commander can inspire great armies, or single units, or even individual men, and lead them to achieve great victories, unless he has a proper sense of religious truth; and he must be prepared to acknowledge it, and to lead his troops in the light of that truth. He must always keep his finger on the spiritual pulse of his armies, and he must be very sure that the spiritual purpose which inspires them is right and true, and is clearly expounded to one and all. Unless he does this he can expect no lasting success.

For all leadership, I believe, is based on the spiritual quality, the power to inspire others to follow; and this spiritual quality may be for good or may be for evil. In many cases this quality has been devoted towards personal ends and was partly or wholly evil; and, whenever this was so, in the end it failed. For leadership which is evil, while it may temporarily succeed, always carries within it the seeds of its own destruction.”