World War Two

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The 20 July Bomb Plot – an outline

The attempt on Hitler’s life on 20 July 1944 was the seventeenth known occasion that someone had tried to kill Hitler. The most infamous occasion being Georg Elser‘s solo attempt in 1939. Unlike other attempts however this, the 20 July Bomb Plot, was the most intricate, and involved plans for a new Germany following the successful accomplishment of the mission.

Count Stauffenberg loses faith

A fervent supporter of Hitler, 36-year-old Count Claus von Stauffenberg had fought bravely during the Second World War for the Fuhrer. Fighting in Tunisia in 1943, Stauffenberg was badly wounded, losing his left eye, his right hand and two fingers of his left. Once recovered, Stauffenberg was transferred to the Eastern Front where he witnessed the atrocities firsthand which made him question his loyalty. As it became increasingly apparent that Germany would not win the war, Stauffenberg lost faith in Hitler and the Nazi cause.

At some point in early 1944, Stauffenberg joined a group of German officers intent on bringing the war to a quick end and negotiating peace with the Allies. Their biggest obstacle was of course Hitler.

But the plotters received a bit of luck when Stauffenberg was appointed to the staff of the Reserve Army, reporting directly to General Friedrich Fromm, another officer who had lost faith in the Nazi cause. When Stauffenberg was invited to a meeting in Hitler’s Wolf’s Lair in Rastenburg, East Prussia, for 20 July, the opportunity seemed perfect.

The conspirators hatched their plan, codenamed Valkyrie, and crucial to its success was Stauffenberg’s proximity to Hitler.

‘I Am Alive, I Am Alive’ Continue reading →

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Vidkun Quisling – a summary

On 24 October 1945, Vidkun Quisling, the Norwegian Nazi, was executed as the ultimate traitor, and a new word entered common usage.

Born 18 July 1887, Vidkun Quisling’s life and early career had started promisingly. As a child, the son of a Lutheran pastor, he was considered somewhat a mathematical child prodigy and, as a young cadet coming out of military school, he gained the highest recorded marks in Norway.

Vidkun Quisling, CBE

After leaving the army, where he had worked his way up to the rank of Major, Quisling worked as a humanitarian, helping with the great famines in Russia during the 1920s. It was in Russia he became an avid anti-Communist and, in doing so, helped British interests in their diplomatic wrangling with the Soviets. In 1929 the British, so grateful to Quisling for his help, awarded him the CBE.

Between 1931 and 1933 Quisling was Norway’s Minister of Defence but then, disillusioned with democracy, resigned and formed his own ‘National Unity’ party, a Norwegian equivalent of the German Nazi Party. But the Norwegians had little time for fascism and in the 1933 national elections, Quisling’s party polled little more than 2% of the vote and gained no seats.

Quisling and Hitler

With no support and no influence, Quisling looked destined to wither away into obscurity. But in Adolf Hitler, whom Quisling visited in December 1939, he had a friend.

In April 1940, Quisling met German agents in Copenhagen and divulged secrets concerning Norway’s defences. Six days later – Germany invaded. On 9 April, Quisling stormed into the studios of Oslo’s radio station and declared himself prime minister. German representatives demanded that Norway’s king, Haakon VII, recognise Quisling. The king refused but, in danger, went into exile to England and there formed a government-in-exile.

With German backing, Quisling ordered all resistance to stop. Once Germany had established control of Norway the Nazis put Quisling in charge of their government of occupation. So trusting were the Germans of their Norwegian puppet that two years later, in 1942, they appointed Quisling Prime Minister and granted him full license to run the country without interference.

But on 9 May 1945, the day after Germany’s unconditional surrender, Quisling was arrested. King Haakon returned to his country, arriving amidst emotional scenes of jubilation.

Norway had abolished capital punishment in 1905, but its government-in-exile reinstated it specifically for Quisling and his highest-ranking colleagues. Hence, charged with high treason, Quisling was executed by firing squad on 24 October 1945. He was 58.

The Definition of Quisling

The word quisling entered common usage during the war as a term denoting a traitor. Today, in the Oxford English Dictionary, a quisling is defined as, ‘a person cooperating with an occupying enemy force; a collaborator; a traitor.’

In 1940, King George VI revoked Vidkun Quisling’s CBE.

Read more about the war in The Clever Teens Guide to World War Two available as an ebook and 80-page paperback from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Waterstone’s, Apple Books and other stores.

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Vera Inber – Leningrad Siege Diarist

Born 10 July 1890, Vera Inber was a Soviet poet and writer whose greatest legacy, Leningrad Diary, described the daily deprivations suffered by the city during the 900-day siege of 1941 – 1944.

Vera Inber’s father, the owner of a publishing house, was an older cousin to the future Bolshevik revolutionary, Leon Trotsky. As a nine-year-old, Trotsky lived in the Inber’s Odessa household at the time Vera was still a baby.

As a young woman, Inber worked as a journalist and lived in Paris and Switzerland before returning to the Soviet Union, first to Odessa and eventually settling in Moscow.

In 1941, with the outbreak of the Second World War in the Soviet Union, Inber joined the Communist Party. Together with her husband, she lived in Leningrad and recorded what she witnessed in a diary, published in 1946. In it, she wrote of the daily suffering of herself and the people she saw around her. She described the hunger, the cold, and the struggle to survive. Inber, herself, came close to dying from starvation.

Being a party member, Inber never criticised the regime or the city authorities and, as a result, the diary is sometimes regarded as overly propagandist. Nonetheless, it’s a fascinating account of the siege which includes a memorable account of sharing her apartment with a starving mouse, the rodent struggling to find even a crumb. She describes people pulling their deceased loved ones on sledges to the cemetery, of a dead horse stripped within moments of whatever flesh it had left, of the frozen bodies piled on top of each other and left to fester in apartment block cellars. Her greatest fear, she wrote, was ‘not the bombing, not the shells, not the hunger – but a spiritual exhaustion.’

During the siege, she composed an 800-line poem, The Meridian of Pulkovo, and often broadcast her poems on the radio. Her wartime work was much hailed and in 1946, Inber was awarded the Stalin Prize for literature.

In June 1944, five months after the siege was finally lifted, Inber and her husband moved back to Moscow. The final words of Leningrad Diary reads,

‘Farewell Leningrad! Nothing in the world will ever erase you from the memory of those who lived here through this time.’

Vera Inber died aged 82 in Moscow on 11 November 1972.

Rupert Colley.

Read more Soviet / Russian history in The Clever Teens’ Guide to the Russian Revolution (80 pages) available as paperback and ebook from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Waterstone’s, Apple Books and other stores.

 

 

 

 

 

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The Battle of Kursk – an outline

The Battle of Kursk, Germany’s last grand offensive on the Eastern Front and the largest ever tank battle the world’s ever seen, began on 5 July 1943.

The industrial city of Kursk, 320 miles south of Moscow, had been captured by the Germans in November 1941, during the early stages of the Nazi-Soviet war, and retaken by the Soviets in February 1943. Now held by the Soviets, Kursk and the surrounding area comprised a salient, or a ‘bulge’, 150 miles wide and 100 miles deep, into German-held territory.

‘My stomach turns over’

Soviet M3 Lee tanks, Kursk July 1943

German Field-Marshall Erich von Manstein wanted to recapture Kursk as early as March 1943 by ‘pinching the salient’ from the north and south, thereby cutting it off from the rest of the Soviet territory. ‘Operation Citadel’ would also provide, argued Manstein, an immediate morale booster following the German humiliation suffered at Stalingrad, but Hitler wanted to have a new generation of tanks ready before doing so. The normally bellicose Hitler was unusually nervous about the planned offensive, confessing to his general, Heinz Guderian, ‘Whenever I think of this attack, my stomach turns over’. Three times he delayed the date of the attack. The delays were to prove fatal.

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The Day Stalin Almost Had a Breakdown

During his thirty-year rule of the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin succeeded in stifling all opposition. There was never a serious threat to his leadership. But there was one occasion, at the end of June 1941, when Stalin suffered what may have been a mental breakdown. When, after three days, his colleagues came for him, he fully expected to be arrested.

But they hadn’t come to arrest him, they’d come to plead with him, begging him to return and take control. Stalin had survived and was to remain in power until his death twelve years later. But what had brought about Stalin’s temporary collapse, and why did his Politburo colleagues fail to bring to an end his murderous rule?

We doubt the veracity of your information

On 23 August 1939, the Nazis and Soviets had signed a non-aggression pact. But both sides knew it was never meant to be more than a postponement of hostilities.

In September 1940, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Hitler’s Foreign Minister, invited the Soviet Union to join the Tripartite Pact, an alliance of initially three Axis powers (Germany, Italy and Japan) that was drawing more nations to its mast, including Romania, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia. In response, Stalin sent his foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, to Berlin for talks. The talks failed dismally (Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s Minister for Propaganda, described Molotov and his companions as ‘Bolshevik subhumans’). Molotov returned empty-handed to Moscow whilst Hitler announced plans for the invasion of the Soviet Union.

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Code Name Pauline – book review

Born in Paris to English parents, Pearl Witherington Cornioley was an extraordinary SOE agent who, at one point during World War Two, had over 3,000 fighters under her command. In 1995, her memoirs were published in France. Now, eighteen years later, as Code Name Pauline: Memoirs of a World War II Special Agent, they are finally available in English, edited by American author Kathryn Atwood, and published by Chicago Review Press. Atwood first introduced us to Pearl in 2011 in her excellent Women Heroes of World War II: 26 Stories of Espionage, Sabotage, Resistance, and Rescue. And here we get Pearl’s story from the woman herself. And it’s quite a story.

Pearl’s father was a drifter and an alcoholic, rarely at home. Although she states she was “never unhappy at home with Mummy”, it was, nonetheless, a difficult childhood, having to bear her parents’ arguing, often rummaging for food and fighting off her father’s debt collectors. As the eldest of four girls and with an English mother who found it hard to cope with life in Paris, Pearl was imbued from an early age with a sense of responsibility; a responsibility that deprived her of a proper childhood. As soon as she was old enough, and following her father’s death, Pearl went out to work to earn money, not for herself, but her mother and her sisters.

The Fall of France

Pearl met her future husband, Henri Cornioley, the son of prosperous parents, in 1933. But with war, six years later, came separation. Drafted into the army, Henri was not to see his sweetheart for over three years. Following the fall of France in June 1940, Pearl and her family, as British citizens, were still technically enemies of Nazi Germany and therefore had to flee. Following a circuitous journey lasting some seven months, they finally arrived in London in July 1941.

Vehemently opposed to the occupation of France, Pearl felt impelled to help the Allied cause and being a fluent French-speaker was able to join the newly-formed SOE (Special Operations Executive). Established specifically to cause disruption and sabotage within Nazi-occupied territories, Winston Churchill hoped that the SOE would “set Europe ablaze”.

Like many SOE agents, Pearl was given an honorary rank of second lieutenant in the “vain hope that, if captured, the enemy would treat these ‘officers’ as POWs according to the Geneva Convention”. Pearl’s SOE trainers were much impressed with her. Her weapons instructor referred to her as “probably the best shot (male or female) we have yet had”.

After months of training and preparation, Pearl was parachuted into France in September 1943 disguised as a cosmetics saleswoman. What follows is an account of her work in France, which includes, at one point, being shot at by the Germans. The tone is continually matter-of-fact and the descriptions of her adventures understated. But we know that here is a woman of immense courage, working under the most difficult of situations, fearful of arrest at every turn.

Nothing remotely civil

Following France’s liberation, Charles de Gaulle, “anxious to not credit the British for their help during the Resistance”, ordered Britain’s SOE agents to leave France within 48 hours. As French residents, Pearl and Henri did not fall into this bracket but nonetheless an even greater slight awaited them… Pearl was offered an MBE – the civilian version. Indignant, she refused it, stating that she hadn’t done “anything remotely ‘civil’ for England during the war”. Her obstinacy paid off and in 1946, Pearl was duly awarded the military MBE.

Code Name Pauline is an illuminating read. Atwood introduces each chapter with a summary or explanation written in such a way that, as the reader, you feel you are being gently guided. But at no point does Atwood’s commentary detract from the main narrative.

In accidental tandem with Code Name Pauline, is a biography of Pearl called She Landed By Moonlight: The Story of Secret Agent Pearl Witherington: the real Charlotte Gray by Carole Seymour-Jones. (Pearl has often been stated as the source of Sebastian Faulks’s eponymous heroine although Faulks denied the connection). Both titles, Atwood’s and Seymour-Jones’s, were published within a month of each other. She Landed By Moonlight has generally received favourable reviews and no doubt was intended to honour Pearl and her work during the war. But, rather strangely for a biography, it reads as a novel, using imaginary dialogue and imagined thoughts. For a woman who was so down-to-earth and fervently opposed to the romanticism of her story, one wonders what Pearl would have made of it.

Pearl Witherington Cornioley died, aged 93, on 24 February 2008. Kathryn Atwood’s finely edited book honours her memory in a manner I imagine Pearl would have thoroughly approved of.

Rupert Colley.

Code Name Pauline: Memoirs of a World War II Special Agent edited by Kathryn Atwood is now available for purchase.

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Operation Barbarossa: Germany’s invasion of Russia – a summary

On 22 June 1941, Adolf Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa, Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union. What followed was a war of annihilation, a horrific clash of totalitarianism, and the most destructive war in history.

Hitler’s intention was always to invade the Soviet Union. It was, along with the destruction of the Jews, fundamental to his core objectives – living space in the east and the subjugation of the Slavic race. He stated his intentions clearly enough in his semi-autobiographical Mein Kampf, published in 1925. This was meant to be a war of obliteration – and despite the vastness of Russian territory and manpower, Hitler anticipated a quick victory (his generals were predicting ten weeks). So confident the Nazi hierarchy, that they provided their troops with summer uniforms but made no provision for the fierce Russian winter that lay further ahead.

Unprecedented, unmerciful, unrelenting

“You have only to kick in the door,” said Hitler confidently, “and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down.” Two tons of Iron Crosses were waiting in Germany for those involved with the capture of Moscow. This was always going to be the most brutal war, one which could not be “conducted with chivalry,” as Hitler told his generals, but “conducted with unprecedented, unmerciful, unrelenting harshness.”

Two years earlier, on 23 August 1939, the Nazis and Soviets had signed a non-aggression pact. But both sides knew it was never more than a postponement of hostilities. For the Soviets, it gave them time to build up their defences (in the event little was achieved); and for Hitler, the pact gave him time to concentrate on the West (the defeat of France, Britain and elsewhere) before turning his attention eastwards.

May God Bless Our Weapons

Now, in June 1941, with his Western objectives achieved (with the exception of Britain), the time had come.

On the eve of attack, Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s Minister for Propaganda, wrote in his diary, “One can hear the breath of history… May God bless our weapons!”

Stalin’s spies had forewarned him time and again of the expected attack but he refused to believe it, dismissing it all as ‘Hitler’s bluff’. When warned of the imminent German invasion by a high-ranking Luftwaffe spy, Stalin responded, ‘Tell your “source” to go fuck his mother.’ He ordered another shot for spreading ‘misinformation’.

Stalin strenuously forbade anything that might appear provocative to the Germans, even insisting on the continuation of Russian food and metal exports to the Germans, as agreed in the Pact. He prohibited the evacuation of people living near the German border and forbade the setting up of defences.

So when, at 4 a.m. on 22 June 1941, Operation Barbarossa was launched, progress was rapid. (Barbarossa was the nickname given to Frederick I, 1122-1190, king of Germany and Holy Roman Emperor). At first, more frightened of Stalin’s prohibition of ‘provocative’ acts than the German armies, Soviet soldiers didn’t dare fire back. When one desperate Soviet border guard signalled, ‘We’re being fired on. What do we do?’, the response came back, ‘You must be mad; and why isn’t your signal in code?’

(22 June was not the most auspicious date on which to launch an attack on the Soviet Union. It was on 22 June, exactly 129 years before, that Napoleon started his ill-fated invasion of Russia.)

For the good of humanity

Operation Barbarossa Operation Barbarossa was the largest attack ever staged – three and a half million Axis troops, including Romanian and Hungarian, along a 900-mile front from Finland in the north to the Black Sea in the south. The Germans employed their Blitzkrieg, or lightning attacks, that had proved so successful against Poland and France. Their tanks were advancing 50 miles a day and, within the first day, one-quarter of the Soviet Union’s air strength had been destroyed – the Russians had left rows of uncamouflaged planes sitting on their airfields, providing easy targets for the Luftwaffe.

German soldiers were excited by the prospect of defeating Stalin’s mighty Bolshevik empire. One 18-year-old German tank driver wrote, ‘It’s a German’s duty for the good of humanity to impose our way of life on lower races and nations.’ They, like Hitler, expected an easy victory. An SS sergeant wrote, “My conviction is that Russia’s destruction will take no longer than France’s; I assume I’ll still get my leave in August.”

By the end of October, Moscow was only 65 miles away; over 500,000 square miles of Soviet territory had been captured and, as well as huge numbers of Soviet troops and civilians killed, 3 million Red Army soldiers had been taken prisoner of war, where, unlike in the West, the rules of captivity held no meaning for the Germans. (Of the five million Soviet PoWs taken during the course of the war, 3½ million were to die of malnutrition, disease and brutality. Those who survived returned home to the Soviet Union to be immediately branded as traitors and, in many instances, sent to the gulag.).

Stalin, once his generals had persuaded him that his country was under attack, controlled the Soviet response. His first acts were to order the execution of those who retreated and to send Vyacheslav Molotov, his foreign minister, to formally announce the war to his people. Molotov’s radio broadcast, relayed across cities by loudspeaker, announced this “act of treachery unprecedented in the history of civilised nations.”

The Great Patriotic War

Stalin attempted to control every aspect of operations but only for the first week before suddenly giving up. “Lenin founded our state,” he declared, exhausted, “and we’ve fucked it up.” This “bag of bones in a grey tunic”, as Nikita Khrushchev later described him, disappeared to his dacha where, many believe, he suffered a mental breakdown. Nothing could be done without him, nothing issued in the way of direction.

When, after three days, his Politburo came for him, Stalin feared he was about to be arrested. Instead, they came to ask him what to do. Once stirred, Stalin re-emerged. On 3 July, in his first public address since the invasion, perhaps the most important speech of his life, Stalin spoke of “The Great Patriotic War”.

By the end of June, Finland, Hungary and Albania had all declared war on the USSR. For Finland, it was a ‘holy war’, an opportunity to avenge their defeat the previous year during the Finnish-Soviet ‘Winter War’.

The sides had been drawn, the invasion launched. What followed was the most ferocious war ever known which was to last three years and claim the lives of over five million Axis troops, nine million Soviet troops, and up to 20 million civilian deaths.

Rupert Colley.

Read more about the war in The Clever Teens Guide to World War Two available as an ebook and 80-page paperback from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Waterstone’s, Apple Books and other stores.

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The Fall of France – an outline

On 11 November 1918, the French and British allies accepted Germany’s surrender and, between them, signed the armistice that ended the First World War. The signing took place in a railway carriage in the middle of the picturesque woods of Compiègne, fifty miles north-east of Paris. The humiliation of that event ran deep into the psyche of Germany, and none more so than in Adolf Hitler, at the time a corporal in the Imperial German Army.

On 22 June 1940, Hitler, now the German Führer, got his revenge – it was the turn of the French to surrender, and Hitler made sure that it was done in the most demeaning circumstances possible – in exactly the same carriage and in the same spot as the signing twenty-two years earlier.

The Fall of France

Following the 1914-1918 war, the French had built a defensive 280-mile long fortification, the Maginot Line, all along the Franco-German border as protection against a future German attack. The Battle of France began on 10 May 1940. The Germans rendered the Maginot Line obsolete within a morning by merely skirting around the north of it, through the Ardennes forest. Because of its rugged terrain, the French considered the forest impassable. Reaching the town of Sedan on the French side of the Ardennes on 14 May and brushing aside French resistance, the Germans pushed forward, not towards Paris as expected, but north, towards the English Channel, forcing the French and their British allies further and further back. In 1916, the Germans had failed to take Verdun despite ten months of trench warfare; in May 1940, it took them but a day.

Elsewhere, Hitler’s armies were enjoying victory after victory – the Netherlands capitulated on 15 May, followed two weeks later by the surrender of Belgium. Allied forces, with their backs to the sea in the French coastal town of Dunkirk, were trapped. But the Germans, poised to annihilate the whole British Expeditionary Force, were inexplicably ordered by Hitler to halt outside the town. Between 26 May and 2 June, over 1,000 military and civilian vessels were rescued and brought back to Britain 338,226 Allied soldiers. But not without scenes of panic, broken discipline and soldiers shot by their officers for losing self-control. Meanwhile, Hitler’s generals watched, puzzled and rueing an opportunity missed.

Winston Churchill may have viewed Dunkirk as a ‘deliverance’ but the French considered the British cowards for what they saw as a betrayal at Dunkirk. Hitler too thought little of the British soldier: ‘They can certainly beat their colonial subjects with a whip but on the battlefield, they are miserable cowards’. Continue reading →

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Charles de Gaulle’s Appeal of 18 June 1940: a summary

Charles de Gaulle’s L’Appel du 18 Juin, the ‘Appeal of 18 June’, is of huge symbolic importance for the French. Former French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, once said “We (the French) are all children of the 18 June”.

Here, below, is a brief resume of the fall of France and the first of Charles de Gaulle’s many broadcasts from the BBC in London.

On 14 June 1940, Hitler’s forces entered Paris, a city largely deserted with over two million Parisians having fled south to escape the Nazi invasion. Soon the swastika flag was flying from the Arc de Triomphe.

Charles de Gaulle

On 15 June, the French general, Charles de Gaulle, was whisked out of France on an aeroplane sent by British prime minister, Winston Churchill, to begin his life of exile in London. At the age of 49, De Gaulle was the youngest and most junior general in the French Army and had only been a government minister for two weeks. Although he had fought at Dunkirk and had met Winston Churchill he was generally unknown. French people certainly hadn’t heard of him and had no idea what he looked like.

In London de Gaulle sought permission to broadcast to France from the studios of the BBC. The British cabinet refused, not wanting to upset the new regime freshly installed in France. Churchill, however, stepped in and granted the Frenchman his wish.

“I speak for France”

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Anne Frank – a brief biography

“I hope I shall be able to confide in you completely, as I have never been able to do in anyone before, and I hope that you will be a great support and comfort to me.”

The last known photograph of Anne taken in May 1942, taken for a passport photo.

Her voice has come to symbolise the Holocaust, one victim among the six million who spoke for them all, a testament to all who perished with her.

Anne Frank died aged 15 in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in early March 1945, possibly the 7th.

Born on 12 June 1929, Anne and her elder sister, Margot, lived their early years in Frankfurt. But in 1933, following Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor, the Franks, as a Jewish family, became concerned for their safety as the Nazis introduced increasingly fanatical anti-Semitic legislation.

The Franks Move to Amsterdam

In late 1933 Anne’s father, Otto, was offered and accepted a business opportunity in Amsterdam. In February 1934 his wife and daughters joined him in the Netherlands. Of the half-million Jews living in Germany in 1933, about 320,000 had emigrated by 1939.

In May 1940 Hitler launched his attack against France and the Low Countries. Rotterdam was heavily bombed and, on 15 May, the Dutch, fearing further losses, surrendered.

Occupied Netherlands

Life for the Jewish population in Nazi-occupied Netherlands became increasingly intolerable and dangerous. In July 1942 Otto Frank received an order to report his eldest daughter for a work camp. The Franks, fearing for their lives, decided they had no option but to go into hiding. Continue reading →