Too many historians completely dismiss the first months of World War II as a period which saw the Allied powers sit on their hands, doing little while passively awaiting Germany to make the first move. Nothing could be further from the truth.
On April 8, 1940, the 1600-ton British destroyer Glowworm engaged, and eventually rammed, the 16,000-ton German heavy cruiser Admiral Hipper, which was leading a convoy on the way to invade Norway. It was a valiant effort, but you can probably guess which one went to the bottom. This was really the opening shot, the turning of what many people have described as the “Phoney War” into a very hot war indeed. In the next few months, world politics was changed fundamentally.
The problem is that term “Phoney War”. We have a very peculiar idea of the Phoney War. Too many historians completely dismiss it as the period where the Allied powers sat on their hands waiting for Germany to strike. Nothing could be further from the truth. This period is a fascinating study of the very traditional British pursuit of a “balance of power” solution.
The only conceivable reasons for most historians writing off the entire period as not worthy of consideration, are either: that it is too complex to explain, or, more likely, that it would completely undermine their neat explanations of the Second World War. The Phoney War is little understood, and is usually not considered in its real context. As the Israeli-born Cambridge scholar Gabriel Gorodetsky noted:
The clues to understanding the course of the war … and the seeds of the subsequent conflict are all to be found in the crucial period of 1939–1941 … In fact we can confidently assert that 1939–1941 was the most traumatic and dynamic period of the war.[1]
The German view of the Phony War
Why was the Admiral Hipper on its way to invade Norway in April 1940? Why did Germany need to invade countries that had quietly sat out the previous war?
The usual reason, given in most modern books, is that the Royal Navy had been getting a bit frisky in response to German abuse of Norwegian territorial waters, and was planning to mine the “Narrows” to cut off German iron ore supplies from Sweden. But that is not the real reason that Hitler expedited Operation Fall-Weserubung from a mere planning exercise to a matter of urgency.
In fact the Germans believed that they had been forced into pre-empting an Allied occupation of Norway, and potentially Sweden, that had in fact been ordered, and then delayed, twice over the last two months. From the German perspective, the invasion of Norway was forced on them by Allied plans. The Fuhrer’s War Directive for “Case Weser Exercise” issued on March 1, 1940, began:
The development of the situation in Scandinavia makes it necessary to prepare for the occupation of Denmark and Norway … this would anticipate English action against Scandinavia and the Baltic, would secure our supplies of ore from Sweden …[2]
For the first time Nazi Germany was reacting, rather than initiating. That alone should give us pause for thought about populist over-simplifications about the Phoney War period.
The Allied plan for an ‘intervention’ in Scandinavia in March 1940
As part of the division of Eastern Europe in the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939, the Soviets occupied Eastern Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, large parts of Rumania, and Finland. Finland was the only one to fight back—quite successfully, for several months. Their David-versus-Goliath struggle captivated the world, and the fact that Finland’s 150,000-man volunteer army—with only thirty-two tanks and 114 aircraft available—had victory after victory against well over a million Soviet troops—with over 6000 tanks and 3800 aircraft—gave the conflict the aura of one of the epic sagas of history. One poem, by Alfred Noyes, written shortly after Finland’s surrender, captured the mood:
Far off between the mountain and the sea,
In Ancient days this word was sped:
“Tell them at home we held Thermopylae,
According to their will, and lie here, dead.”
Now from the north there comes a mightier cry:
“We fought and failed against titanic powers.
But ask mankind—whose is the victory
When every unchained heart on earth is ours?”[3]
The League of Nations, moribund and useless for most of the 1930s, finally stirred itself into action for “superb, sublime Finland” as Churchill called it. They expelled the Soviet Union from the League in 1939, not over Poland or the Baltic States or Bessarabia, but over Finland. (One of the first post-war acts of the new United Nations was to bow to Soviet pressure to prosecute Finland for “crimes against peace”!)
The League also, in 1939, requested every member state to assist Finland in any way possible, and eventually dozens of nations sent money and weapons. Some of these included Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Belgium and the Netherlands—all of whom were justly wondering who might be next on the Nazi-Soviet hit list. Others were Britain, France, Spain, Italy and the United States.
