World War Two

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Henri Philippe Petain – a brief biography

Few men over the last century can have experienced such a change of fortune as Philippe Pétain. During the First World War, Pétain was hailed as the ‘Saviour of Verdun’, helping the French keep the Germans at bay during the 1916 Battle of Verdun. In May 1917 he was made commander-in-chief of French forces. His first task was to quell the French mutiny, which he did through a mixture of discipline and reform.

Pétain’s popularity improved even further when he limited French offensives to the minimum, claiming he was waiting for ‘the tanks and the Americans’.

Pétain and World War Two

World War Two and on 10 May 1940 Hitler’s troops invaded France. A month later, having swept aside French resistance and dispatched the British forces at Dunkirk, the swastika was flying over the Arc du Triomphe.

France surrenders

On 17 June, the French prime minister, Paul Reynaud, resigned, to be replaced by the 84-year-old Philippe Pétain. Pétain’s first acts were to seek an armistice with the Germans and order Reynaud’s arrest. On 22 June, 50 miles north-east of Paris, the French officially surrendered, the ceremony taking place in the same spot and in the same railway carriage that the Germans had surrendered to the French on 11 November 1918.

Northern France, as dictated by the terms of the surrender, would be occupied by the Germans, whilst southern France, 40 per cent of the country, would remain nominally independent with its own government based in the spa town of Vichy in central France, 200 miles south of Paris. Pétain would be its Head of State. A small corner of south-easternFrance, around Nice, was entrusted to Italian control; Italy having entered the war on the 10 June.

Pétain and Vichy France had the support of much of the nation. The French considered the British evacuation at Dunkirk as nothing less than a betrayal, and many labelled General Charles de Gaulle, who had escaped France to begin his life of exile in London, a traitor. Indeed, he was later sentenced to death – in absentia by the Vichy government.

The end of democracy

On 10 July 1940, the French Chamber of Deputies transferred all its powers to Pétain, dissolving the Third Republic and thus doing away with democracy, the French Parliament and itself. Philippe Pétain, never a fan of democracy, which he regarded as a weak institution, was delighted. Strong, central government was Pétain’s way, and relishing his new role in Vichy’s Hotel du Pac, Pétain immediately set about decreeing swathes of new legislation, much of it anti-Semitic, and becoming the most authoritative French head of state since Napoleon.

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Malta during World War Two – a summary

On 15 April 1942, Malta received Britain’s highest civilian award for gallantry, the George Cross. But why would an island receive a medal?

Lying halfway between Italy and North Africa, the 120-square-mile island of Malta unwittingly played a pivotal role during the North African campaign in World War Two.

Part of the British Empire since 1814, the island was Britain’s only military base in the central Mediterranean.

Italian bombing

On June 10, 1940, Italy entered the war and on the following day began by bombing Malta. The British garrison on the island defended the population, and supplies and extra planes were shipped in. But it was only the start.

British submarines and Hurricane fighter planes retaliated by attacking Italian and German convoys, which were shipping men and equipment to North Africa. In October 1941 Erwin Rommel, the German commander in North Africa, lost over 60% of his supplies to British forces based in Malta.

Now the Germans

The Germans decided that Malta was causing too much damage and Albert  Kesselring, Hitler’s Mediterranean commander, promised to “wipe Malta off the map.” Luftwaffe and U-boats stationed sixty miles north on the island of Sicily launched aerial attacks on Malta and the siege intensified. Supplies to the island virtually ceased and the inhabitants suffered eighteen months of hunger as well as continual bombardment. Civilians, starved and frightened, packed the caves beneath the capital Valletta.

The medal

It was during this time of deprivation that Britain’s King George VI awarded the island, as a collective, the George Cross “to bear witness to the heroism and devotion that will long be famous in history”.

Bleak

In May 1942 the British tried to fly in a contingent of Spitfires but most were destroyed before they could be deployed. With food and supplies nearly exhausted, the future looked bleak. Ammunition was so low that only a few rounds were allowed to be fired per day.

Spitfire to the rescue

A second attempt to bring in Spitfires was successful. Immediately they went on the offensive against the German Luftwaffe and were able to escort supply convoys through to the besieged islanders. A convoy of merchant ships escorted by Spitfires and warships managed to survive intense German attack and arrived in Valletta on August 15, the Maltese feast day of St Mary. Their survival and arrival on this important day of the Maltese calendar were seen as nothing less than heaven-sent. The worst was over.

Renewed attacks from Malta on Rommel’s supplies severely hampered the German campaign in Egypt, and by the end of 1942, British supplies to the island were arriving unmolested. The siege was over and the island had survived.

The Maltese flag

The George Cross to Malta was the first time it had been awarded to a collective. (The second and, so far, last occasion was in 1999 when it was awarded to the Royal Ulster Constabulary.) To this day the image of the George Cross appears in the top left corner of the Maltese flag.

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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Into the Jaws of Death: The True Story of the Legendary Raid on Saint-Nazaire – book review

‘It was one of those enterprises which could be attempted only because in the eyes of the enemy it was absolutely impossible.’ Lord Louis Mountbatten, Chief of Combined Operations, describing the Second World War raid on Saint-Nazaire.

On 28 March 1942, 621 men of the Royal Navy and British Commandos attacked the port of Saint-Nazaire in occupied France. The mission has been dubbed ‘the greatest raid of all time.’ It was certainly daring, audacious in the extreme, and terribly dangerous – less than half the men returned alive. Five Victoria Crosses were awarded, two of them posthumously. As the title of this new book on the raid states, the men went Into the Jaws of Death.

Historian, Robert Lyman, has written much about specific aspects of the Second World War, with books about the Cockleshell Heroes, the Siege of Tobruk, Kohima, the Middle East during the war, and a biography on General Bill Slim. Now, Lyman has turned his attention to the Saint-Nazaire raid. Into the Jaws of Death: The True Story of the Legendary Raid on Saint-Nazaire is a detailed book on the raid: the reasons that lay behind it, the preparation, the training, the raid itself and its aftermath.

A Bleak Time

Early 1942, as Lyman reminds us, was a bleak time for the Western Allies during the Second World War – British forces had just surrendered their garrison at Singapore; Britain was losing the Battle of the Atlantic, and wartime austerity was beginning to bite. In Europe, following the fall of France eighteen months earlier, Nazi occupation had been firmly established; and the first deportations of Jews residing in France had just begun.

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Bernard Montgomery – a brief biography

The son of a bishop, Bernard Montgomery, or ‘Monty’, was born in London but spent his early years in Tasmania. He fought during much of the First World War and was twice badly wounded. An obstinate individual, he fell out with his mother to such an extent that when she died in 1949, he refused to attend her funeral. Training to be an army officer at Sandhurst he was demoted for having set a fellow student on fire and during First World War he allegedly caught a German by kneeing him in the testicles.

The early death of his wife in 1937 from septicemia, caused by an insect bite, devastated Monty and from then on, he devoted himself entirely to his career.

El Alamein

Self-confident in the extreme, and prone to odd headwear, Montgomery was adored by his men, especially during the Second World War desert campaigns in North Africa during which he made his name by defeating Erwin Rommel at El Alamein. But he frequently clashed with his American counterparts and, because of his immense self-pride, took offence easily. Having planned the successful invasion of Sicily, he believed himself worthy of being in overall command of the Italian campaign and took great umbrage at having to work under Dwight Eisenhower.

In December 1943, Montgomery was appointed land commander, again under Eisenhower, for Operation Overlord, the planned invasion of France. His D-Day objectives included the capture of Caen within the first 24 hours. In the event, it took several weeks and proved costly, for which he was heavily criticised. During the chaotic days of mid-June, his American counterparts felt that Montgomery’s strategy was too cautious and hoped to have him replaced, a view endorsed by Churchill. But Montgomery held onto his post and his tactics did draw much enemy attention to the east of the Allies’ bridgehead, allowing the Americans to successfully breakout from the west.

Towards Berlin

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Adolf Eichmann – a brief biography

On 31 May 1962, a man who seemed from the outside quite an ordinary person, even banal, was hanged in Ramla prison in Israel. It was, and still is, the only time the Israel state has executed a person. Tall, slim, bespectacled and with a receding hairline, his external persona was indeed very mundane but this was no ordinary person. The man in question was 56-year-old Adolf Eichmann, responsible for the logistical management of the mass deportations of Jews to the Nazi death camps.

Born 19 March 1906 in the town of Solingen in western Germany, Eichmann was brought up in a middle-class Lutheran environment. (Eichmann kept his faith right up to the late 1930s, long after it was fashionable for Nazis to denounce religion).

Following his mother’s death in 1914, Adolf Eichmann’s father, an accountant, took his two sons to live in Linz, Austria, the town that Adolf Hitler always considered his home. Eichmann’s early life was certainly ordinary, dropping out of his studies to become a mechanical engineer and drifting from one job to another before finding more permanent employment as a travelling salesman for an Austrian oil company.

The Jewish Expert

Eichmann joined the Austrian Nazi Party in April 1932 having been approached by a friend of his father’s, an SS man, who said to the younger Eichmann, ‘You belong to us’. Within seven months he had become attached to the SS itself, Hitler’s paramilitary corps, headed by Heinrich Himmler. In 1934, as an SS corporal, he worked at the newly-opened Dachau concentration camp.

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Reinhard Heydrich – a brief biography

On 4 June 1942, the Nazi wartime leader of occupied Czechoslovakia, Reinhard Heydrich, died. He had been the victim of an assassination attempt a week earlier. Aged 38, the ‘Butcher of Prague’ was dead.

Six months earlier, on 28 December 1941, two Free Czech agents, Jan Kubis and Jozef Gabčík, trained by Britain’s Special Operations Executive (the SOE), had parachuted into Czechoslovakia. Their objective, almost certain to end in their deaths, was to assassinate the ‘Deputy Reich Protector of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia’, to give Reinhard Heydrich his full title.

Assassination attempt

On 27 May 1942, the agents, on learning of Heydrich’s movements that day, went into action. As the car taking Heydrich to a meeting slowed to navigate a hairpin bend, the two men attacked. Heydrich, as was his routine, was without an armed escort. Gabčík tried to shoot Heydrich but his submachine gun jammed at the fatal moment. Instead of ordering his chauffeur to drive off, Heydrich chose to fight. He attempted to fire back but a small bomb, thrown by Kubis, exploded, injuring him. Heydrich and his driver gave chase on foot, but the two agents escaped before Heydrich, bleeding profusely, collapsed from his injuries. He was rushed to hospital. Surgeons operated and initially it seemed the stricken Nazi was recovering.

On 2 June, a week after the attack, he received a visit from his superior and mentor, Heinrich Himmler. Following Himmler’s visit, Heydrich slipped into a coma and died on 4 June. He was given a sumptuous funeral in Prague followed by a second ceremony in Berlin.

Meanwhile, Heydrich’s assassins, Kubis and Gabčík, hid in the crypt of a Prague church. Three weeks later they were betrayed and the church was surrounded by 800 members of the SS. The men held out for as long as possible before turning their guns on themselves.

Young Heydrich

Reinhard Heydrich was born in the eastern German town of Halle on 7 March 1904. His mother was an actress and his father, Richard, a music teacher and occasional opera composer inducing in his sons (Reinhard and his younger brother, Heinz) a love of the operas of Richard Wagner. Reinhard became an accomplished violinist. Heydrich’s father, a fervent German nationalist, was sometimes known as Heydrich-Süss.  Süss, having a Jewish ring to it, fuelled rumours that the family had Jewish blood. Later, Reinhard Heydrich was so haunted by the thought, that he ordered an SS investigation into his family ancestry. The report concluded, unsurprisingly, that Reinhard Heydrich’s family contained no trace of Jewish descent. Continue reading →

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The Fall of Singapore – a summary

With the fall of Singapore on 15 February 1942, Britain suffered the worst humiliation in its military history. 

The photograph sums it up: General Arthur Percival (far right), the British commander in Malaya, and his fellow officers, walking forlornly towards the Japanese commanders to sign the dismal surrender. With their baggy shorts, knee-length socks and tin helmets, one carries the Union Jack while another holds the white flag of surrender. Escorting them, a number of Japanese soldiers, or ‘little men’ as the British military elite referred to them.

The ‘Gibraltar of the East’

British Malaya had been considered a strategic stronghold within the eastern Empire, and the island of Singapore, 273 square miles, on the southern tip of Malaya, was known as the ‘Gibraltar of the East’. Acquired by Stamford Raffles for Britain’s East India Company in 1819, Singapore became a full British possession five years later, in 1824. Colonial life in early twentieth-century Singapore was one of tea, tennis and dancing. Rumours of a Japanese attack were dismissed as nonsense; these ‘Japs’ with their feeble eyes could hardly shoot straight, let alone pose a threat to the might of the Malayan-based British troops and their Commonwealth comrades.

An impressive naval defence system consisting of huge guns had been built at great cost during the 1920s facing south out to sea. To the north of the island, on the mainland, lay hundreds of miles of dense Malayan jungle and rubber plantations considered by the British to be impenetrable. Stationed on the island, almost 100,000 British, Canadian, Australian, Indian and a few local Malay troops.

‘I never received a more direct shock’

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Juan Pujol Garcia – brief biography

Juan Pujol Garcia was unique among Second World War agents – he was the only one to offer his services as a double agent as opposed to all others who had been captured and ‘turned’. Bespectacled, balding and timid, Pujol was not the image usually associated with a double agent, let alone Britain’s most effective one.

Born in Barcelona on 14 February 1912, Pujol was working on a chicken farm when, in 1936, the Spanish Civil War broke out. He managed to fight for both the Republican side and the Nationalists. He was committed to neither and hated the extreme views they each represented. By the end of the war, he was able to claim that he had served in both armies without firing a single bullet for either.

For the good of humanity

He emerged from the experience with an intense dislike for extreme ideologies and, for the ‘good of humanity’, sought to help achieve a more moderate system. With the outbreak of war in 1939, three times he approached British services in Lisbon and Madrid, offering to spy for them, only to be turned away without an interview. Undeterred, Pujol decided to become a double agent. He offered his services to the German Abwehr service based also in Lisbon, offering to spy on the English, claiming that as a diplomat working in London, he knew England well.

His audacity was certainly impressive – he had never visited England, nor could he speak the language, and he had forged a British passport without ever having seen a real one. Incredibly, the Germans fell for the story, put him through an intensive training course, and supplied him with the tools of the trade: invisible ink, cash, and a code name – Arabel, and sent him on assignment to England with instructions to build a network of spies.

Agent Arabel Continue reading →

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The Bombing of Dresden – a summary

From about 10 pm on the night of 13 February 1945 until noon the following day, the East German city of Dresden was the subject of one the most intense bombing raids of the Second World War. Several German cities were targeted but it is the bombing of Dresden, and its utter destruction, that came to symbolise the work of the RAF’s Bomber Command and its commander, Sir Arthur Harris.

Florence of the Elbe

DresdenGermany’s seventh largest city, 100 miles southeast of Berlin, Dresden was known as the ‘Florence of the Elbe’, such was its architectural splendour, its large collections of art and quaint timbered buildings. In February 1945, the city’s population had temporarily been inflated by a huge influx of German refugees, perhaps up to 350,000, fleeing the Soviet advance sixty miles away to the east.

With only minimal anti-aircraft guns, few German troops, and limited war-related industry, Dresden was still deemed a legitimate target – for Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris’s intention was not so much military but ‘moral bombing’, to demoralise the civilian population and thereby shorten the war (despite evidence during the Blitz that instead of demoralising civilians, bombing only hardened resolve). The strategic objective of bombing Dresden and other cities in eastern Germany was, as agreed at the Anglo-American Yalta Conference, to help alleviate the pressures on Soviet forces advancing into Germany on the Eastern Front.

The Allied commanders studied aerial photographs of German cities and specifically targeted areas of heavy residential populations. His aim, said Harris, was to make the ‘rubble bounce’ not just in Dresden but in every German city.

Thus, on Tuesday, 13 February 1945, two waves of RAF Lancaster bombers, numbering 796 in total, attacked Dresden. The following morning, 529 bombers of the USAAF (US air force) attacked with the objective of hitting the fire fighters tackling the inferno caused by the RAF the previous evening and causing even greater chaos. Of all these aircraft, only eight were shot down.

Devastation Continue reading →

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Karl Eliasberg – a brief biography

In August 1942, Karl Eliasberg conducted a symphony, Shostakovich’s Seventh, in what must rate as the most gruelling concert ever given – for it took place in the city of Leningrad, a city surrounded by Germans and in the midst of a devastating siege which was to last almost 900 days.

Throughout his life, Karl Eliasberg had to be content with second place. From 1937 to 1950 he was the musical director and conductor for the Leningrad Radio Orchestra (LRO), the city’s second orchestra behind the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra and its conductor, Yevgeny Mravinsky, one of the top conductors of the Soviet era. Mravinsky, considered by Dmitry Shostakovich as his favourite conductor, staged the première of the composer’s fifth symphony. At the start of the Leningrad Siege, Mravinsky and the LPO were evacuated to Siberia where they were to play over 500 concerts and 200 radio broadcasts. Eliasberg and the LRO however were left in the city playing only the occasional concert until the performances ceased altogether.

The Leningrad Symphony

When, in the spring of 1942, Andrey Zhdanov, Stalin’s man in Leningrad, decided to organise a performance of Shostakovich’s new seventh symphony, the Leningrad, the composer reputedly asked that Mravinsky conduct it. But with Mravinsky and the LPO ill-deposed in Siberia, the baton fell to Eliasberg and his LRO.

Eliasberg gathered together his orchestra only to find that out of its one hundred members, only fifteen were still alive. Using musicians from the Red Army, rehearsals began in March 1942, and the Leningrad première was performed to a full house at the Philharmonic Hall on 9 August. Writing later, Eliasberg said, ‘People stood and cried. They knew this was not a passing episode but the beginning of something’.

After the concert, Eliasberg married the orchestra’s pianist, Nina Bronnikova.

Post-war Continue reading →