The Rise of Germany, 1939–1941: The War in the West

The Rise of Germany

1939–1941

Also by James Holland

Non-fiction

FORTRESS MALTA

TOGETHER WE STAND

HEROES

ITALY’S SORROW

THE BATTLE OF BRITAIN

DAM BUSTERS

AN ENGLISHMAN AT WAR

Fiction

THE BURNING BLUE

A PAIR OF SILVER WINGS

THE ODIN MISSION

DARKEST HOUR

BLOOD OF HONOUR

HELLFIRE

DEVIL’S PACT

The Rise of Germany

1939–1941

The War in the West

Volume One

James Holland

Atlantic Monthly Press

New York

Copyright © 2015 by James Holland

Jacket design by mjcdesign

Jacket artwork: WWII Poster: The Flag of Victory

Author photograph by WiLKY Photography

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First Published in Great Britain in 2015 by Bantam Press,

an imprint of Transworld Publishers

Published simultaneously in Canada

Printed in the United States of America

ISBN 978-0-8021-2397-8

eISBN 978-0-8021-9090-1

Atlantic Monthly Press

an imprint of Grove Atlantic

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For Rachel

Contents

List of Maps

List of Principal Characters Featured

Note on the Text

Introduction

Part I: War Begins

1 Countdown

2 Diplomacy

3 Running Out of Time

4 The Point of No Return

5 War Declared

6 All at Sea

7 Offensive Reconnaissance

8 Vehicle Shortages

9 The Modern Army

10 Leading the Nation

11 Attention to Detail

12 Case YELLOW

13 Home Front

14 Iron in the Soul

15 All Alone

Part II: Germany Triumphant

16 Operation WESERÜBUNG

17 The Battle for Norway

18 The Go-for-Broke Gamble

19 Attack in the West

20 Race to the Meuse

21 Smashing the Meuse Front

22 Encirclement

23 Britain’s Darkest Hour

24 Getting Away

25 The End in France

26 Air Power: I

Part III: War in the Air and on the Sea

27 Air Power: II

28 Not Alone

29 Indecision

30 Adler-Angriff

31 Crossing the Water

32 The Approach to Battle

33 Science, Money and Resources

34 The Grey Atlantic

35 The Humiliation of Mussolini

36 Change of Tack

Part IV: The Widening War

37 The Vanquished and the Defiant

38 Saved from the Deep

39 Developments at Sea

40 Sea Battles

41 Mixed Fortunes: I

42 Forwards and Backwards

43 Gains and Losses

44 Mixed Fortunes: II

45 Mercury Falling

46 Midsummer Heat

47 Industrial Potential

48 Trouble at the Top

Preview: Brothers in Arms

Glossary

Appendices

Timeline

Notes

Selected Sources

Acknowledgements

Picture Acknowledgements

Index

List of Maps

Europe, the Atlantic and North & South America, July 1939

German Expansion, 1936–39

Mediterranean and Middle East, 1939

Battle of the Atlantic, 1939–41

Invasion of Denmark and Norway

German Attack in the West

Battle of Britain, July–October 1940

Operation COMPASS, December 1940–February 1941

The War in East Africa, 1941

Invasion of Yugoslavia and Greece, April 1941

Battle for Crete, May 1941

Cyrenaica and the Western Desert, 1941

LIST OF PRINCIPAL

CHARACTERS FEATURED

(Ranks at September 1941)

General Sir Harold Alexander – British

Commander of 1st Division in France, last man to leave Dunkirk, later commander, Southern Division, then British Forces in Burma, before becoming C-in-C Middle East in August 1942. Appointed commander, 18th Army Group, in February 1943.

Sergeant Cyril ‘Bam’ Bamberger – British

An NCO fighter pilot in 610 and 41 Squadrons during the Battle of Britain, he was later commissioned and flew with 261 Squadron on Malta and then 93 Squadron in Tunisia.

Capitaine Daniel Barlone – French

Reserve officer commanding 92/20th Horse Transport Company in 2nd North African Division.

Capitaine André Beaufre – French

Staff officer at General Headquarters.

Jean-Mathieu Boris – French

Officer in the Free French Army.

Pfc Henry ‘Dee’ Bowles – American

Served in 18th Infantry Regiment, 1st Infantry Division, in North Africa.

Pfc Tom Bowles – American

Served in 18th Infantry Regiment, 1st Infantry Division, in North Africa.

Air Commodore Sydney Bufton – British

Commander, 10 and 76 Squadrons, RAF Bomber Command, then became Station Commander at RAF Pocklington before being made Deputy Director of Bomber Operations at the Air Ministry.

Gino Cappozzo – Italian

Gunner in 17th Battery, 3rd Alpine Artillery Regiment.

Capitaine René de Chambrun – French

Reserve officer in 162e Régiment d’Infanterie de Forteresse, Reynaud’s personal emissary to the United States.

Count Galeazzo Ciano – Italian

Italian Foreign Secretary and son-in-law of Mussolini.

Lieutenant-Colonel Mark Clark – American

G3 Staff Officer at General Headquarters, US Army.

Jock Colville – British

One of the secretaries to the Prime Minister, first Neville Chamberlain and then Winston Churchill.

Gwladys Cox – British

Civilian living in London.

William Cremonini – Italian

Soldier in the Giovani Fascisti division.

Admiral Sir Andrew Browne Cunningham – British

Commander of the Mediterranean Fleet until 1942, then posted to Washington.

Pilot Officer Roald Dahl – British

Hurricane pilot with 80 Squadron in Greece.

Général Charles de Gaulle – French

Army officer then leader of the Free French.

Admiral Karl Dönitz – German

Commander of the Kriegsmarine’s U-boat fleet.

Margarete Dos – German

Teenage girl living in Berlin at the beginning of the war, and a member of the Bund Deutscher Mädel, the girls’ wing of the Nazi Youth Movement.

Captain Norman Field – British

Officer in the Royal Fusiliers in France and Belgium, then an officer in the Auxiliary Units in the UK, before joining the airborne forces.

Andrée Griotteray – French

French civilian and member of the Resistance.

Ted Hardy – Australian

Sapper in 2/3rd Field Company, 9th Australian Division, serving in North Africa and the Middle East.

Major Hajo Herrmann – German

Flew Heinkel 111s in Poland and Norway with KG4 before becoming a Staffel commander and switching to Ju88s. He later served in the Mediterranean before transferring to Norway to command III/KG30. In July 1942, he joined the Luftwaffe General Staff.

Harry Hopkins – American

President Roosevelt’s closest friend and advisor, and unofficial emissary to Winston Churchill.

Henry Kaiser – American

Construction tycoon and director of Todd California Shipbuilding Corporation.

Feldmarschall Albert Kesselring – German

Commanded Luftflotte I in Poland, then Luftflotte II in France and during the Battle of Britain. Later transferred to the Mediterranean.

Major Siegfried Knappe – German

An artillery officer, he took part in the invasion of France and then served on the Eastern Front.

Heinz Knocke – German

Trainee fighter pilot in the Luftwaffe.

Bill Knudsen – American

Chairman of General Motors and then Chairman of the Office of Production Management, and later, in 1942, Director of Production at the Office of the Under-Secretary of War.

Private Joseph ‘Lofty’ Kynoch – British

Served in 2/5th Leicestershire Regiment in Norway.

Oberst Helmut Lent – German

A Luftwaffe nightfighter ace, who served in Norway then in Holland with NJGI and later NJGII.

Corinne Luchaire – French

French film star and daughter of Vichyist Jean Luchaire, and married to a Frenchman serving with the Luftwaffe.

Hauptmann Hans von Luck – German

Served with Rommel during the invasion of France and then through­out most of the North African campaign. He later commanded a panzer battalion in 21. Panzer­division in Normandy and north-west Europe.

Oliver Lyttelton – British

Appointed Controller of Non-Ferrous Metals at the outbreak of war, became President of the Board of Trade in 1940, was elected MP for Aldershot and later joined the War Cabinet as Minister of State, Middle East. He returned to the UK in 1942 as Minister of Production.

Commander Donald Macintyre – British

Served as a convoy escort ­commander on destroyers, firstly on HMS Hesperus and then on HMS Walker.

Maggiore Publio Magini – Italian

Pilot and staff officer in the Regia Aeronautica.

Hauptmann Helmut Mahlke – German

Stuka pilot serving in France then the Balkans and Mediterranean.

General George C. Marshall – American

Chief of Staff of the United States Army.

Walter Mazzucato – Italian

Sailor in the Regia Marina, serving first on the battleship Vittorio Veneto and then on escort ­destroyers in the Mediterranean.

Flight Lieutenant Jean Offenberg – Belgian

A fighter pilot who flew with 4e Escadrille, 2e Groupe, 2e Régiment Aéronautique I, of the Belgian Air Force, then later joined 145 and 609 Squadrons of the RAF.

Martin Pöppel – German

Served as a Fallschirmjäger – ­paratrooper – over Holland and Norway in 1940, in Crete and Russia the following year, and later in Sicily, Italy, Normandy and the Lower Rhine.

Air Chief Marshal Sir Charles Portal – British

Commander-in-Chief of Bomber Command from April 1940, then became Chief of the Air Staff in October the same year.

Ernie Pyle – American

A journalist and war correspondent for Scripps Howard Newspapers.

Paul Reynaud – French

French politician and Finance Minister, then Prime Minister from March to June 1940, and was later imprisoned first by the Vichy Government and then the Germans.

Generalmajor Erwin Rommel – German

Commanded 7. Panzerdivision in France in 1940, then took command of the Deutsche Panzerkorps in North Africa in February 1942, and later became commander of the Italo-German Panzerarmee Afrika. Promoted to Feldmarschall in July 1942.

Leutnant Günther Sack – German

In the RAD – Reichsarbeitsdienst – at the start of the war, Sack became a Fahnenjunker with a heavy flak unit, then switched to light flak in March 1940. After serving in the invasion of France and the Low Countries, he served in the Balkans and Greece, then returned to France. After briefly serving at Leningrad, he returned to the Western Front.

Giuseppe Santaniello – Italian

Soldier in 48th Artillery Regiment, Bari Division.

Generalmajor Adolf von Schell – German

General Plenipotentiary of Motor Vehicles within the War Economics and Armaments Office.

Hans Schlange-Schöningen – German

First World War veteran and former politician, during the war he ­continued his family duties as owner of a large estate in Pomerania.

Eric Sevareid – American

War correspondent and broadcaster for CBS.

Flight Lieutenant Tony Smyth – British

Bomber pilot with RAF Bomber Command then later RAF Middle East.

Gunnar Sonsteby – Norwegian

Fought in the Norwegian Army in 1940, then joined the Resistance Movement. He later joined the British SOE and went to Britain for saboteur training, and became chief of operations in the Resistance.

Lieutenant-General Sir Edward Spears – British

Member of Parliament and Chairman of the Anglo-French Committee, and then Churchill’s Personal Representative to the French Prime Minister. Later became the PM’s Personal Representative to the Free French.

Reichsminister Albert Speer – German

Hitler’s chief architect, and from November 1942 Minister of Armaments and War Production.

Hauptmann Johannes ‘Macky’ Steinhoff – German

Fighter pilot and commander with JG2 and JG52.

Henry L. Stimson – American

US Secretary of State for War.

Arthur ‘A. G.’ Street – British

Wiltshire farmer, writer and ­broadcaster for the Ministry of Information.

Korvettenkapitän Reinhard ‘Teddy’ Suhren – German

First Watch Officer on U-48, then took command of U-564, before leaving the service in October 1942 to become an instructor.

Air Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder – British

Director of Research at the Ministry of Aircraft Production then posted to the Middle East to become Air Officer Commanding. Later, in February 1943, he became C-in-C Mediterranean Air Command.

Generalleutnant Georg Thomas – German

Head of the War Economics and Armaments Office and chief ­economic advisor to the Army from 1939 to 1942.

Robert Cyril Thompson – British

Ship designer at Joseph L. Thompson in Sunderland.

Oberleutnant zur See Erich Topp – German

1WO on U-46 and then commander of U-57 and U-552.

Lieutenant Hedley Verity – British

Officer in 1st Green Howards.

Pilot Officer Adrian Warburton – British

RAF reconnaissance pilot.

General Walter Warlimont – German

Served as Deputy Chief of the Operations Staff to the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW).

Else Wendel – German

Civilian living in Berlin and working at Kraft durch Freude.

Lieutenant-Commander Vere Wight-Boycott – British

First Lieutenant on the destroyer HMS Delight and served in the Norwegian campaign until he took command of his own destroyers, HMS Roxborough and then HMS Ilex, carrying out convoy escort work in the Atlantic and Mediterranean.

Note on the Text

I AM VERY CONSCIOUS t hat the narrative in this book repeatedly switches from one perspective to another: from British to German, and from French to Italian and then to American and even Dutch and Norwegian. In an effort to help distinguish who is who, I have written ranks in the language of the respective nationality. Thus it is Captain Field, but Capitaine Barlone, and Major-General Kennedy, but Generalmajor Rommel. The aim is not to be pretentious but rather just to help with the flow of the narrative.

I have applied this rule somewhat inconsistently to military units too. As a rough rule of thumb, any unit of corps or above in size has been written in the vernacular, but there are also a few other examples, especially German, where I have used the original words. Luftwaffe squadrons are Staffeln because actually, a German Staffel was not quite the same as a British squadron. German paratroopers and mountain troops are written as Fallschirmjäger and Gebirgsjäger. This will certainly help lessen any confusion by the time I reach Volume III and D-Day, for example, where there were German, American, Polish, Canadian and French airborne troops all operating, and in the case of Americans, Poles and Germans, often with similar sounding surnames.

I should also explain how some military units were written. A corps is numbered in Roman numerals and a military operation in upper case. Luftwaffe gruppen were written in Roman numerals, but staffeln in Arabic numbering. There were three staffeln per gruppe, so 5/JG2, for example, would be in II/JG2, but 7/JG2 would be in III/JG2.

Introduction

THE S ECOND W ORLD W AR witnessed the deaths of more than sixty million people from over sixty different countries. Entire cities were laid waste, national borders were redrawn and many millions more people found themselves displaced. Over the past couple of decades, many of those living in the Middle East or parts of Africa, the Balkans, Afghanistan and even the United States may feel, justifiably, that these troubled times have already proved the most traumatic in their recent past. Yet, globally, the Second World War was, and remains, the single biggest catastrophe of modern history. In terms of human drama, it is unrivalled; no other war has affected so many lives in such a large number of countries.

Yet much of what we think we know about the Second World War is steeped in perceptions and myth rather than fact. For the past sixty-odd years, we have looked at this cataclysmic conflict in much the same way, particularly when it comes to examining the War in the West – that is, the conflict between the Axis, led by Nazi Germany, and the Western Allies.

Seventy years on, the generation that fought through the war is ­slipping away fast. At the time of writing, the vast majority still living are into their nineties; there has been an urgency about the way in which veterans have been interviewed before it is too late, and there is no doubt that it is the human experience of war that has been the focus of much of the recent mainstream books on the subject.

The human drama of the war is what first drew me to the subject. It still seems incredible that just a short time ago we in Europe were embroiled in such a bitter and destructive conflict. I have often wondered what I would have done had I been a young man back then; would I have joined the Air Force, the Navy or the Army? How would I have coped with the loss of friends and family? How would I have dealt with the fear, or with the often brutal conditions? Or with being away from home for up to years on end?

The questions are still fascinating, and the immensity of the drama is still compelling, but as my knowledge and understanding have grown, so have I realized how many questions still remain and how vast a subject the war really is.

It is, however, easier to unearth new material and learn fresh per­spectives than it once was. The comparative cheapness of travel, the opening up of many archives, and, especially, the advent of digital ­photography have all played important parts; I should know, for in the past decade I have ­travelled to Germany, Austria, Norway, France, Italy, America, Canada, New Zealand, India, Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, South Africa and Australia, visiting archives, interviewing veterans, and walking the ground. When I began, a visit to the archives meant taking hugely time-consuming notes in pencil; now, what once took a week can be achieved in a fraction of that time. When I was at the Citadel, the Military College of the South in Charleston, South Carolina, I photographed most of General Mark Clark’s entire papers in a day. Back home, these papers can then be examined more thoroughly, and at leisure; it means greater detail can be absorbed and analysed.

Despite the continued appetite for the subject, and despite a steady stream of books, documentaries, magazines and even movies about the war, it is amazing how often they still conform to the traditional, and in many regards mythical, view of the conflict. That general perception goes something like this: that at the start of the war Nazi Germany had the best-trained army in the world with the best equipment and weapons. In 1940, Britain, now stranded and alone, managed to hold out and keep going until the United States entered the war. Thereafter, American ­economic might overwhelmed German military prowess, which in any case was fatally weakened by the much more significant, and large-scale, war on the Eastern Front. These basic presumptions have dominated thinking for the best part of sixty years.

There has, however, been something of a quiet revolution going on in academic circles, and, just occasionally, this work has managed to burst out into the mainstream, which is all to the good. My own views began to change dramatically when I started writing a series of wartime novels. Although fiction, they needed to be rooted in detailed research, but while ­writing them I suddenly realized I needed to know a great deal more about the minutiae of war – that is, the uniforms and weapons that were used, and, more importantly, how they were used, and why particular tactics were developed.

This level of study was revelatory, because suddenly a very different ­picture was emerging. The narrative focus has been very land-centric – as it was, incidentally, in Hitler’s own mind – and we have often been rather too seduced by the action at the front. Yes, tactical flair is important, but it’s not going to win a war unless other facets are carried out with equal ability.

In the early narrative, the focus was on the high level of war – the ­decisions by generals, for example. Personal memoirs followed: first the generals and decorated war heroes, then the ‘ordinary’ men – and women. Over the past thirty years, much work has also been done on the human experience of the war, but what has been conspicuously lacking is the ­context to go with these personal accounts. After all, it is all very well having the testimony of an American soldier, cowering in his fox-hole as he came under mortar fire, but why was he there and why were the mortars being fired? Just how did armies, air forces and navies operate? And what were the differences in their approaches? All too often, accounts of men in the war revert to old myths and stereotypes: British troops were slow and spent too much time ‘brewing up’ tea; Americans were scruffy and lacked discipline; German machine guns were manifestly the best on either side; the Tiger tank was similarly the best tank of the war, and so on.

But on what basis have those judgements been made? And are they fair? Very often not. Talk to a GI or Tommy who had to confront a German Tiger tank, to pick one example, and he’ll most likely tell you it was a ­terrifying beast and vastly superior to anything in the Allied arsenal. It was huge. It had a big gun. It had lots of armour. The Allied soldier’s view is entirely valid. But the Tiger was also incredibly complicated, mechan­ically un­reliable, very difficult to sustain in combat, unusable for anything other than short distances, and could only be moved any distance by rail, for which it needed a change of tracks because otherwise it would not fit on the continental railway loading gauge; it was ludicrously thirsty in terms of fuel – of which the Germans had precious little by 1942 when the Tiger first appeared – and was too heavy to use most of the bridging facilities available at that time of the war, so would have been useless for any force operating on the offensive. The GI confronting such a terrifying weapon is not concerned about any of these issues – it’s big and scary and he’s literally staring down the barrel of death. But the historian does need to consider such things. Believing a particular weapon was more deadly than others just on the word of someone who confronted it in battle isn’t good enough. There’s a more nuanced picture to consider, and in analysing these things and questioning some of these long-held views, quite different pictures emerge.

In warfare, there are understood to be three important levels: the ­strategic, the operational and the tactical. Strategy refers to the big ­picture – the overall aims; the tactical level is the fighting on the front line and how that is conducted; and the operational refers to the means of making both the strategic and the tactical happen – in other words, the nuts and bolts: the kit, the ammunition, logistics, resources – the economics of war – getting men and machines from A to B. Sustaining the battle.

Talk to a British veteran of the Battle of Britain, for example, and he might describe how he could be shot down one day but be flying again the following morning. So where did he get his new plane and in such quick order? I once put this to Tom Neil, who flew Hurricanes with 249 Squadron in the summer of 1940. ‘Where they came from and how they got there, I have no idea,’ he said. ‘But every morning, as if by a miracle, we had a full complement of aircraft again.’

And talk to an Allied tank man who fought in Normandy in 1944 and he will almost certainly say much the same thing: his Sherman was knocked out one afternoon, but the following morning he was in a new one and back in action. Where did it come from? ‘We just went back to Echelon and picked up another,’ one British squadron commander in the Sherwood Rangers told me. When I pushed him, he confessed that he lost three tanks between landing in Normandy and the end of the war the following May, but he never went a single day without a tank.

It is this operational level that has been most neglected in the histori­ography of the Second World War. But don’t be put off – it’s also one of the most interesting, because when one starts to understand this more complex level, all kinds of new perspectives appear, which cast our understanding of the war in a different light. And that is very exciting.

I have been researching these three volumes for years, but as I began writing, it occurred to me that I should, from the outset, set down my aim and the parameters I have given myself. Above all, this is meant to be a compelling narrative history – one that can be easily read and digested, and hopefully enjoyed, yet which brings together not only my own research but also much of the recent academic thinking on the ­subject. The aim is not to write only a military history, but a social, ­political and economic history too. One of the things I have come to learn is that when studying the Second World War, none of these themes should be sep­arated. Or, rather, a much clearer picture of what was going on emerges when these different facets are interwoven.

This is not intended to be a detailed account of the fates and fortunes of every single country that took part in the War in the West. Rather, I am focusing on the principal participants: Germany and Italy on the Axis side, Britain and the United States on the Allied (although in fact they were in a coalition, not a formal alliance). In between them is France – one of the Allies to begin with, then on the Axis side (albeit with elements fighting for the Allies), and then back with the Allies towards the end. Other countries – such as Norway, Holland, Greece and Belgium – will also be examined, but not in as much detail. Nor will the wider war be ignored. What was happening in the Soviet Union and the Far East had an enormous impact on events in the West; it is impossible to entirely separate east from west.

The spine that I hope will hold the narrative together will be provided by a cast of individuals – from politicians, generals and industrialists to ­captains, privates and civilians. Their stories will be illustrative of the ­experience of war and the conduits to explaining the bigger picture. The narrative of the Second World War in the West is a wide and sweeping one: in the air, on the land and out at sea; from the mountains and fjords of Norway to the heat of the African desert, and from the sparkling Mediterranean to the briny grey of the Atlantic. It’s an epic story and still, after all this time, one about which there is much to learn.

PART I

WAR BEGINS

CHAPTER 1

Countdown

TUESDAY , 4 J ULY 1939, and a hot, humid Independence Day in New York City. Far away, across the Atlantic, Europe appeared once more to be cantering towards all-out war for the second time in a generation, but here in America, the land of the free, the growing crisis seemed remote. Most in the United States had quite enough worries of their own after ten long years of bitter depression. True, there were signs of ­recovery, but there had been similar signs three years earlier and then there had been another dip. The first concern of Americans was to have a job and put bread on the table, not to get embroiled in what was happening back in the old countries. In any case, while many in the US might only have been first- or second-­generation Americans, they had made the trip across the Atlantic for a reason, and for the majority that was to escape to a better life. America promised to be a land of opportunity, and a land of peace, and even with the pain of depression it stood unrivalled as the most modern and forward-thinking country in the world. Europe, with its history of despots and wars, famine and plague, was a world away . . .

And so now there was another round of bickering on the other side of the Atlantic. Let them fight it out for themselves; there were other things to think about than a madman, with a dodgy moustache, called Adolf Hitler.

Things to think about like baseball, and, on that sticky summer day in New York, one ball player in particular. The game was the country’s national sport, an obsession for many millions, and Lou Gehrig was not only one of the greatest hitters ever to have played the game, but a household name across the United States – as famous as any man alive in America. In a career with the New York Yankees that had spanned seventeen seasons, he had hit more than forty home runs six times, had dipped below thirty only once since 1927, was one of the highest run-producers in history and ­consistently had one of the highest batting averages. His record of a ­staggering 2,130 consecutive games was one that would stand for over fifty years, which was why, when his form had so dramatically collapsed at the start of the 1939 season, it had seemed unfathomable. Clearly, there was something wrong. He’d noticed himself that he had begun feeling tired midway through the previous season, but during spring training he appeared to have lost all his strength, such a feature of the Iron Horse’s game. At one point, he had even collapsed on the field. He struggled badly on the opening day, then benched himself. His career was over.

Sent to the famous Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, he was ­diagnosed with a rare degenerative disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, on his thirty-sixth birthday, 19 June. This was a terminal wasting disease that would lead to paralysis, difficulty in speaking and, in due course, death. Life expectancy was around three years, if he was lucky.

The Yankees and the baseball world were in shock. Lou Gehrig was not so colourful a character as his former team-mate Babe Ruth, but he was respected for his quiet humility and for his amazing strength and agility. He had always let his batting do the talking, but on this 4 July, 1939, ‘Lou Gehrig Appreciation Day’, he was to make one of the most famous speeches in sporting history. Nearly 62,000 fans had crammed into the Yankee Stadium to see a double-header against the Washington Senators, and ­between the games the great slugger would make his final appearance on the plate in a ceremony attended by Babe Ruth and New York’s mayor, Fiorello H. La Guardia.

Among those watching was John E. Skinner, a fourteen-year-old from New Brunswick, across the Hudson in New Jersey. A keen and promising young ball player himself, he was a Yankees fan and had been taken to see Gehrig for the last time by a friend of his father’s. What had shocked him most was the change in the great slugger’s appearance. Gehrig had been a big man, but he looked shrunken now, his famous Number 4 jersey ­hanging off his shoulders and his pants bunched badly at his waist. ‘Before the ­ceremonies began,’ says Skinner, ‘you’d picture Gehrig belting a ball out of the park, but then, when you have to see him pull himself up by his hands to get out of the dugout, it was a very sad thing.’

As speeches were made and gifts handed over, Gehrig stood, twisting his cap in his hand and looking awkward. Eventually, it was time for the quiet man to say a few words. The crowd was chanting and applauding as he stepped up to the microphone. As he cleared his throat, he stopped, hands awkwardly planted on his sides and head stooped. ‘For the past two weeks,’ he said, ‘you’ve been reading about a bad break.’ He paused, then added, ‘Today, I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth.’ The times he’d had, the players he’d played with, the family he had. ‘Sure I’m lucky,’ he said.

Behind John Skinner, two huge men were bawling like babies. ‘They were . . . really moved,’ says Skinner. ‘It was a moving experience.’ It was a speech of humility and bravery, from a sporting hero who was demon­strating astonishing courage in the face of cruel adversity. Before the coming war was out, John Skinner would need some of that courage himself. So would millions of other Americans, not that they could know it that hot summer afternoon in New York.

A few hundred miles south of New York, just a day later, the President, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was floating down the Patuxent River in Maryland on the presidential yacht, the USS Potomac, a vessel he liked to call the ‘floating White House’. He had come to visit his close friend and advisor, Harry Hopkins, who was laid low and convalescing at Delabroke, a beautiful pre-Revolution house on the river loaned to him for the summer. Hopkins had organized, overseen and run many of the key ­projects of Roosevelt’s New Deal – relief agencies in which the government invested heavily in an attempt to provide jobs and public works projects and help the country crawl out of depression. The biggest of these jobs programmes, the Works Progress Administration, or WPA, had been the centrepiece of the New Deal from 1935 and had been run by Hopkins until the previous summer, when he’d been recovering from a vicious bout of cancer that had seen two-thirds of his stomach removed. Now, eighteen months after his treatment, he could no longer ingest ­properly. Like Lou Gehrig, it seemed that Hopkins was dying.

His death would be a huge blow to the President, who had developed a close bond with this thin, sickly man with the rapier wit, dynamic organiz­ational skills and shrewd judgement. More recently, FDR – as the President was widely known – had started using Hopkins in a different role. The imminent war in Europe may not have been foremost on the mind of most Americans but it certainly was now centre stage in the President’s thoughts, and had been for some time, the more so because of the events in Munich the previous autumn. Back then, war had threatened to engulf Europe, but both France and Britain had stepped back from the brink; they had allowed Hitler, the German Chancellor, to annex the German-speaking Sudetenland from the rest of Czechoslovakia unopposed. The Czechs had had their country sliced up, and war had been averted, but then in March that year, just six months after the Munich agreement, Hitler’s troops had marched into the rest of Czechoslovakia, and in so doing the German leader had flagrantly gone back on his promise. Now he wanted part of Poland too. A pattern was clearly emerging: bully, threaten, watch the rest of the world step aside, and then walk in. Land grabs had never been so easy. The issue, as Britain, France and Roosevelt were all too aware, was that Hitler was unlikely to stop unless made to by military force. And that meant war.

Thus a European conflict seemed to the President to be increasingly likely, but while many in Washington assumed that a future European ­conflict had little to do with them, FDR was not so sure. He had also begun to realize that the Atlantic was no longer the barrier it had once been. Air power was growing rapidly, as was naval power. Charles Lindbergh, an American, had famously flown across the Atlantic in a single flight back in 1927; it was only a matter of time before fleets of bombers could do the same. And, in any case, there were now aircraft carriers, floating airstrips that could deliver air power to all corners of the globe. Technology was advancing rapidly. The world was becoming a smaller place.

Be that as it may, it was not a view that was widely shared within the United States. Americans were quite aware of the emergence of Hitler and the Nazis, the suppression of civil rights in Germany, and the rising ­persecution of Jews and other minorities, and yet the overwhelming view was that these were problems for Europe to resolve not the United States. Americans had reluctantly become drawn into the last war and had been given, in the eyes of many in the US, precious little thanks for it.

Yet they had entered the war in 1917 on the back of idealism – an idealism that had long since been exposed for its naivety and resentfully cast aside. It had been Woodrow Wilson, the US president at the time, who had been the architect of this American world-view, outlining his vision for a future world peace early in 1918 with his ‘Fourteen Points’ speech. He had attended the subsequent Paris Peace Conference with lofty ideals for global free trade and a future League of Nations, in which he saw the United States playing a central and progressive role – the New World showing the Old Order how to create a better, fairer globe. The subsequent Treaty of Versailles, however, had fallen some way short of such ideals; the peace terms revealed no utopian future but rather exposed deep-rooted national mistrust and hatred, made worse by four years of slaughter – much of it on French soil and in the heart of Europe.

One of those who had observed the Paris Peace Conference first hand had been Roosevelt, then Assistant Secretary of the Navy, although perhaps his most significant conversation was not at the conference itself, but with Woodrow Wilson on the return crossing afterwards, when the President was still fired with enthusiasm for his proposed League of Nations. ‘The United States must go in,’ he told FDR, ‘or it will break the heart of the world, for she is the only nation that all feel is disinterested and all trust.’

It was not to be, however. When Wilson returned to the United States, he was unable to persuade the Senate to ratify the treaty and with it American membership of the President’s proposed League of Nations. The appetite for playing a leading role in world affairs had gone. Few wanted a large military either; after all, what was the point? What’s more, it appeared to many that the Old Order had prevailed in Europe after all, with Britain and France the major beneficiaries. The New World had tried to help but had had that offer thrown back in its face. Well, if that was the way they wanted it, then fine.

None the less, this new isolationist stance had short-term consequences. Four million men in uniform had to be demobilized and sent home, while the booming wartime armaments industry was to be equally rapidly reduced. It was inevitable that the economy consequently took a dip.

It was hardly any surprise, then, that at the next elections the Democrats were out and the Republicans came to power with the promise of a return to a more inward-looking future. Far from promoting free trade, they increased import tariffs, reduced taxes and encouraged spending. A more laissez-faire approach ensued, in which central government was reduced. The brief dip turned swiftly to boom. Americans were free to enjoy the time of plenty in this young, vibrant and liberal country. The Roaring Twenties and the Jazz Age had arrived.

But while the US had turned its back on leading the world into a progressive modern age, this did not mean America was keeping out of European affairs altogether. Far from it, and throughout much of the 1920s it was the United States which played the most significant part in getting Germany back on to its feet. When the severity of the reparations led to hyperinflation and wheelbarrows of printed money, it was the Dawes Committee that oversaw a dramatic reduction in the payments. Led by General Charles G. Dawes, a Chicago banker and industrialist, and with another American industrialist, Owen Young, the chairman of General Electric, driving the scheme, they also brought in increased foreign invest­ment, re-established the Reichsmark on gold at its pre-war level against the dollar, and helped stabilize the German economy. The New York bankers J. P. Morgan then backed these changes with a massive loan of $100 million.

A further measure was the establishment of a Reparations Agent – in this case a rising Wall Street financier, Parker Gilbert – who had the power to halt any reparations payments if they looked set to endanger the stability of the German economy. Suddenly, the flow of foreign capital – and ­particularly dollars – was enough to not only get the Reichsmark back on its feet, but also for Germany to easily pay its reparations to Britain and France without default. This money was then ploughed back into the US, which was insisting France and Britain honour their wartime debts. Thus, the money was effectively going round and round, but in the process Germany was climbing back out of the abyss and emerging once more as the modern, industrial economy at the centre of Europe that it had been before the war.

This was all very well until suddenly America, and then the rest of the first world, was mired by the Wall Street Crash of October 1929. The loans to Germany dramatically dried up, while in the US the days of boom were for the time being over. By the time FDR became the thirty-second President of the United States and brought the Democrats back to power for the first time in twelve years, America was in the grip of the worst depression in its history, with unemployment soaring to 25 per cent and the economy in a nosedive. Roosevelt had got into power on the back of greater isolationism and on the promise of relief, recovery and reform: relief for the poor and unemployed, recovery of the economy, and reform of many of the US’s financial institutions. These pledges were almost entirely domestic and continued America’s inward-looking progress. There was now little room for Germany.

Another central tenet shared by both sides of the American political divide had been the need to reduce the military. It had been Roosevelt, for example, who, as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, had overseen much of the demobilization of that part of the services. A strong military, the theory went, did not act as a deterrent but as a provocation. And for America, now pursuing an isolationist stance, there was simply no need to spend billions on large armed forces.

It was a very different world now, however. The democratic Weimar Republic had gone, the German policy of the 1920s had been cast aside, and in its place there ruled an absolute dictator in Adolf Hitler, and a Nazi party that let no opportunity to rattle sabres and display its martial strength slip by.

Roosevelt had not forgotten that conversation with Wilson on the ship back to America after the Paris Peace Conference, however, and no matter how inward-looking he had pledged to be on taking office in 1933, he had become convinced that Hitler was a madman bent on world domin­ation, and that should Germany crush France and Britain, then it would most likely turn on the USA. He still hoped to prevent war, but believed the best way of doing that was to discard the policy of the past two decades and rapidly rearm, and particularly in terms of aircraft. The Germans were known to have more aircraft than Britain and France, and, in the summer of 1939, greater ability to maintain that advantage.

Late in 1938, FDR had sent his friend Hopkins on an undisclosed ­mission to the West Coast of America to assess the capacity there to build aircraft and how to increase production urgently. Hopkins had reported back favourably. FDR had hoped to sell aircraft, especially, to France and Britain. Perhaps if Germany knew this, it would think twice about taking on the two biggest powers in Europe; he viewed Britain and France as America’s front line, where the critical struggle would take place in the air. American aircraft might make all the difference.

There were two stumbling blocks, however. The first was that this represented a major political volte-face and would require some in­credibly deft public relations to pull off, even though there were signs in the polls that increasing numbers of Americans accepted rearmament as a policy. The second was legal – namely, the Neutrality Act of 1937, which placed an embargo on the sale and shipment of arms to any belligerent, whether aggressive dictatorships or friendly democracies. Britain, for example, could get round this by using existing funds in the USA and shipping arms in its own vessels from Canada, but there was no doubt a repeal of the act would show intent and represent a warning shot to Nazi Germany.