The Times Great Lives
Battle of Britain
Victory Promised for 1941
On July 19, speaking in the Reichstag, Hitler ‘as a victor’ made his final appeal to ‘common sense’ before proceeding with his campaign against her. He spoke with an unusual sobriety, but there was no mistaking his threats. He had his answer from a united and determined Empire. On September 4 he reiterated his menaces. Then he unleashed the Luftwaffe and the Battle of Britain began in earnest. On October 4 after a month of it he was back at the Brenner to talk things over with Mussolini. In a few days his troops entered Rumania. A little later he went to the Spanish frontier for a discussion with General Franco with a view, it was thought, to tightening the blockade of Great Britain. Before the end of the month he was back with Mussolini in Florence. He seemed about this time to understand that Great Britain could not be conquered from the air and to think increasingly in terms of U-boats. He described himself as the ‘hardest man the German people have had for decades and, perhaps, for centuries’.
In his New Year’s proclamation to the army Hitler promised victory over Great Britain in 1941 and added that every Power which ate of democracy should die of it. He continued, for he always seemed uneasy on this score, to place the blame for unrestricted air warfare on Mr Churchill, and he kept on expressing his confidence in the U-boat. All that spring, indeed, he seemed particularly eager to encourage his followers. In April he invaded Yugoslavia and Greece and went to join his advancing armies. And all the time he kept hammering at Great Britain from the air and striking under water at her supply lines.
On June 3, 1941, there was another meeting of the dictators on the Brenner Pass, and it was suggested that there would be an immediate start in the organization of a Continental peace; but on June 22 he cast aside his mask and struck at Russia. Once again the Soviet Government became the ‘Jewish-Bolshevist clique’, and once again he was free to indulge his inherent hatred of the Slav. There were the usual lengthy and disingenuous explanations; but they were not calculated to deceive close readers of Mein Kampf. For at least five years, indeed, he had contemplated this particular volte face, for in 1934 he had taken Dr Rauschning into his confidence in regard to his intention if necessary to employ a Russian alliance as a trump card. In August he and Mussolini visited the Eastern Front. As a gage of affection he presented his brother-in-arms with a great astronomical observatory. After a long silence he spoke on October 4 at the opening meeting of the Winter Help Campaign and announced a ‘gigantic operation’ which would help to defeat Russia. A few days later he was boasting that he had smashed her.
The Supreme Command
Brauchitsch Dismissed
After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour of December 7 most of the world was in the conflict. In announcing his declaration of war on the United States to the Reichstag Hitler abused President Roosevelt and said that America had planned to attack Germany in 1943. Just before Christmas he dismissed Field Marshal von Brauchitsch, his Commander-in-Chief, and took supreme command himself. A promise which he had made two months before to capture Moscow had not been fulfilled, and his own troops were retiring before the Red Army. He felt, perhaps, that he had to find a culprit for the failure and also to put heart into his own troops. He spent Christmas at his headquarters in Eastern Europe, not as previously, among his front line troops.
Hitler’s New Year message for 1942 was far less confident than that of 1941. ‘Let us all,’ he said, ‘pray to God that the year 1942 will bring a decision.’ There were rumours of disagreement with his generals and of pressure from the radicals within the Nazi ranks. In March he appointed Bormann to keep the party and the State authorities in close cooperation. He was making strenuous efforts to build up the home front, to increase the number of foreign workers in Germany, and to procure the forces for a spring offensive.
In April he received from the obedient Reichstag the title of ‘Supreme War Lord’ and measured the duration of the Reich by the mystical number of a thousand years. The tremendous eastward thrust of the summer of 1942 was delivered, reached the Volga, and went deep into the Caucasus. In September he claimed that Germany had vastly extended the living space of the people of Europe and called on his own to do their duty in the fourth winter of the war. On October 1, at the Sportspalast, he taunted, boasted, and promised the capture of Stalingrad. His effort to make good his word in the end cost Germany a tremendous loss of lives and material. He seemed, however, at this period to be more inclined to talk about the inability of the allies to defeat him than to prophesy a German victory. In November, after the allied landings in North Africa, his troops overran unoccupied France and seized Toulon.
A Chastened Man
In the New Year order of the day for 1943 he prophesied that the year would perhaps be difficult but not harder than the one before. He was certainly a much chastened Führer. The industrial effort of Germany was being seriously disrupted by air attack, and Russia was pressing perilously hard. On the tenth anniversary of his accession to power he did not speak, but entrusted Goebbels with a proclamation to read for him. His silence gave rise to rumours, some to the effect that he was giving up his command of the army, others that he was dead. On February 25, instead of speaking, he issued another proclamation to celebrate the birthday of the party. It added fresh fuel to the rumours.
On March 21 Hitler at last broke silence. The manner of his speech was lifeless and almost perfunctory. The matter, even for one as prone as he to endless reiteration, was all too familiar. His only news was that he had started to rearm not in 1936 but in 1933.
Mussolini’s Fall
The Italian Capitulation
Hitler, in his appeal on the anniversary of the Winter Help scheme on May 20, told the German people that the army had faced a crisis during the winter in Russia – a crisis, he said, which would have broken any other army in the world. Soon another crisis faced the Germans. On July 25 Mussolini fell from power, four days after it had been announced that Hitler and Mussolini had met in northern Italy where it was believed Mussolini had demanded more help from Germany in the defence of Italy. But Italy was not to be kept at Germany’s side, and on September 8 Marshal Badoglio, who had succeeded Mussolini, announced in a broadcast that his Government had requested an armistice from the allies. Hitler reacted in characteristic manner. He told the Germans that the collapse of Italy had been foreseen for a long time, not because Italy had not the necessary means of defending herself effectively, or because the necessary German support was not forthcoming but rather as a result of the failure or the absence of will of those elements in Italy who, to crown their systematic sabotage, had now brought about the capitulation. Though Hitler was able to claim this foreknowledge of events in Italy, it was clear from his speech, which was direct and effective, that he did not underestimate the seriousness of his new problem.
Hitler seemed still to have the collapse of Italy in mind when he emerged from his headquarters on November 8 to spend a few hours with the ‘Old Comrades’ of the National-Socialist Party at Munich. He spoke deliberately and forcefully. He was loudly cheered when he declared that the hour of retaliation would come. He said that everything was possible in the war but that he should lose his nerve, and he assured his audience that however long the war lasted Germany would never capitulate. She would not give in at the eleventh hour; she would go on fighting past 12 o’clock. At the beginning of his twelfth year in power – on January 20 – Hitler spoke of the danger from Russia. ‘There will be only one victor in this war, and that will be either Germany or Soviet Russia.’
In the late afternoon of July 20 it was announced that an attempt had been made on Hitler’s life. The attempt was a deep and well-laid plan by a group of generals and officers to end Hitler’s regime and the military command. General Beck, who was Chief of the General Staff until November, 1938, when he was dismissed, was declared to have been the chief conspirator. It was added that he was ‘no longer among the living’. On August 5 a purge of the Army was announced from Hitler’s headquarters. ‘At the request of the Army,’ the announcement said, Hitler had set up a court of honour to inquire into the antecedents of field marshals and generals and to find out who took part in the attempt on his life. It was disclosed that several officers had already been executed. Further executions were announced on August 8.
In a proclamation issued on November 12 as part of the annual commemoration of the Nazis who fell in the Putsch of 1923, Hitler declared that Germany was fighting for her life. Throughout the proclamation there were references to his own life and to its unimportance compared with the achievement of German aims. ‘If, in these days,’ Hitler said, ‘I have but few and rare words for you, the German people, that is only because I am working unremittingly towards the fulfilment of the tasks imposed upon me, tasks which must be fulfilled if we are to overcome fate.’ In the spring the gravity of Germany’s crisis became clear. The Russians reached the Oder; the British and Americans crossed the Rhine. On April 23 Marshal Stalin confirmed that the Russians had broken through the defences covering Berlin from the east. The battle for Berlin had begun, and Hitler, the man who brought ruin to so many of Europe’s cities, was, according to Hamburg radio, facing the enemy in his own capital, and there he came to his end.
General G. S. Patton
Brilliant American war leader
21 December 1945
General George S. Patton Junior, commander of the United States Fifteenth Army, whose death is announced on another page, was one of the most brilliant and successful leaders whom the war produced. It was he who led the American attack on Casablanca, forged his way through to effect a juncture with the Eighth Army near Gafsa, commanded the Seventh Army in Sicily, and then swept at the head of the Third from Brittany to Metz and onwards.
George Smith Patton, a cavalryman by training and instinct, became a tank expert. Brave, thrustful, and determined in action, he was a remarkable personality, who taught his men both to fear and to admire him. At the same time he was a serious and thoughtful soldier. He was an early advocate of the employment of armour in swiftly moving masses to exploit the break-through, and was finally able, with the help of American methods of mass-production, to realize his theories in practice. A great athlete in his earlier days, he had also a taste for philosophy, literature, and poetry. He was the son of a California pioneer, and was born at San Gabriel, in that State, on November 11, 1885. Soldiering was in his blood for he was the great-grandson of General Hugh Mercer, who served under Washington, and his grandfather died in the Civil War. It was natural, therefore, that he should find his way to the United States Military Academy at West Point, where he graduated in 1909. After great achievements on the track at West Point he was to be placed fifth in the cross-country run of the Modern Pentathlon (in the main a military event) at the Olympic Games of 1912. He was also to be known as a fine horseman and show rider and a crack pistol shot. He developed a flamboyant and emotional character for which his men found expression in the sobriquet ‘Old Blood-and-Guts’, but he was a born military leader.
Commissioned in the cavalry, Patton served first at Fort Sheridan, Illinois. A little later he went to France to study the sabre there and after his return served as Master of the Sword at the Mounted Service School at Fort Riley, Kansas. In 1916 he was aide-de-camp to General Pershing on the punitive expedition into Mexico. Then, when America entered the 1914–18 war he, by that time a captain, went on Pershing’s staff to France, where, in November, 1917, he was detailed to the Tank Corps and attended a course at the French Tank School and he was present when the British tanks were launched at Cambrai. After this he organized the American Tank Centre at Langres and later the 304th Brigade of the Tank Corps, which he commanded with much distinction in the St Mihiel offensive of September, 1918. Having been transferred with his brigade to the Meuse-Argonne sector he was wounded on the first day of the offensive; for his services he was awarded the dsc and dsm and at the time of the Armistice was a temporary colonel.
Returning to the United States in early 1919, Patton in 1920 was given command as a permanent captain of a squadron of the 3rd Cavalry at Fort Myer. Then he was detailed to the general staff corps and served for four years at the headquarters of the First Corps area at Boston and in the Hawaiian Islands. After four more years at Washington he was ordered to Fort Myer, where, as a permanent lieutenant-colonel, he remained on duty with the 3rd Cavalry until 1935.
Patton received command of the 2nd Armoured Division in October, 1940, with the temporary rank of brigadier-general, becoming in the next year commanding general of the First Armoured Corps. While he was thus employed Patton learned that they might be required in North Africa. He therefore set up a large training centre in California, where he built up a coordinated striking force. At last his opportunity came and as commander of the Western Task Force he and his men succeeded in their swift descent in occupying Casablanca. He himself had a narrow escape, for the landing craft which was to take him ashore was shattered. Later, when the American Second Corps were in difficulties at Kasserine Pass, Patton was sent to retrieve the situation and, with timely British aid, not only did so but carried it on to Gafsa, near which it made contact with the Eighth Army. Thus it was that he was chosen to command the Seventh Army in the invasion of Sicily. It was while he was visiting a field hospital in that island that, suspecting a soldier of being a malingerer, he struck him. The incident was reported and General Eisenhower made it clear that such conduct could not be tolerated; but Patton, who made generous apology, was far too valuable a man to lose when hard fighting lay ahead, and a little later he was nominated to the permanent rank of major-general.
In April, 1944, he arrived in the European theatre of operations, and he took command of the Third Army, which went into action in France on August 1. With it he cut off the Brittany peninsula, played his part in the trapping of the Germans and drove on to Paris. In October he had another of his narrow escapes when a heavy shell landed near him but failed to explode. Driving on relentlessly towards the German frontier, it fell to Patton to reconquer Metz, and in recognition of this victory he received the Bronze Star. His next outstanding performance was in late December when the Third Army drove in to relieve the First and helped to hold Bastogne. He was famous for the speed of his operations, but surpassing himself on this occasion, he surprised the Germans, and slowed down and eventually checked the advance of Rundstedt’s southern column. One of his most striking feats was when in the advance to the Rhine, he moved towards that river with his right flank on the Moselle. The Germans were apparently expecting him to force a crossing of the Rhine, but instead he suddenly crossed the Moselle near the confluence, taking the enemy ‘on the wrong foot’ and completely smashing up his array. In Germany his armoured divisions made the deepest advances of all, penetrating in the end into Czechoslovakia. A German staff officer, captured in the final stages, reported that his general had asked him each morning as a first question what was the latest news about Patton.
In April this year President Truman nominated Patton to be a full general. The Third Army occupied Bavaria last July, and in September Patton was ordered to appear before General Eisenhower to report on his stewardship of Bavaria. The summons was a result of Patton’s statements to a Press conference that Nazi politics are just like a Republican and Democratic election in the United States, and that he saw no need for the de-Nazification programme in the occupation of Germany. In October General Eisenhower announced that General Patton had been removed from the command of the Third Army and had been transferred to the command of the Fifteenth Army, a skeleton force.
Patton, in spite of many idiosyncrasies, which included the free use of a cavalryman’s tongue – ‘You have never lived until you have been bawled out by General Patton’ his men used to say – was a fundamentally serious soldier, offensively minded and bent on the single object of defeating his enemy. He affected a smart and sometimes striking turnout, and was insistent that those under him should also maintain a smart and soldierly appearance.
John Maynard Keynes
A great economist
21 April 1946
Lord Keynes, the great economist, died at Tilton, Firle, Sussex, yesterday from a heart attack.
By his death the country has lost a very great Englishman. He was a man of genius, who as a political economist had a worldwide influence on the thinking both of specialists and of the general public, and he was also master of a variety of other subjects which he pursued through life. He was a man of action, as well as of thought, who intervened on occasion with critical effect in the great affairs of state, and carried on efficiently a number of practical business activities which would have filled the life of an ordinary man. And he was not merely a prodigy of intellect; he had civic virtues – courage, steadfastness, and a humane outlook; he had private virtues –he was a good son, a devoted member of his college, a loyal and affectionate friend, and a lavish and unwearying helper of young men of promise.
The Right Hon. John Maynard Keynes, cb, Baron Keynes, of Tilton, Sussex, in the Peerage of the United Kingdom, was born on June 5, 1883, son of Dr John Neville Keynes, for many years Registrary of Cambridge University. His mother was Mayor of Cambridge as lately as 1932. He was brought up in the most intellectual society of Cambridge. He was in college at Eton, which he dearly loved, and he was proud of being nominated by the masters to be their representative governor later in life. He won a scholarship to King’s College, Cambridge, in mathematics and classics, writing his essay on Héloïse and Abelard. He was President of the Cambridge Union, won the Members’ English Essay Prize for an essay on the political opinions of Burke, and was twelfth wrangler in the mathematical tripos. Although he did not take another tripos, he studied deeply in philosophy and economics and was influenced by such men as Sidgwick, Whitehead, W. E. Johnson, G. E. Moore, and, of course, Alfred Marshall.
In 1906 he passed second into the Civil Service, getting his worst mark in economics – ‘the examiners presumably knew less than I did’ – and chose the India Office, partly out of regard for John Morley and partly because in those days of a smooth working gold standard, the Indian currency was the livest monetary issue and had been the subject of Royal Commissions and classic controversies. During his two years there he was working on his fellowship dissertation on ‘Probability’ which gained him a prize fellowship at King’s. This did not oblige him to resign from the Civil Service, but Marshall was anxious to get him to Cambridge, and, as token, paid him £100 a year out of his private pocket to supplement the exiguous fellowship dividend – those were before the days of his bursarship of the college. Anyhow, his real heart lay in Cambridge. He lectured on money. He was a member of the Royal Commission on Indian Currency and Finance (1913–14). He served in the Treasury (1915–19), went with the first Lord Reading’s mission to the United States, and was principal representative of the Treasury at the Paris Peace Conference and deputy for the Chancellor of the Exchequer on the Supreme Economic Council. After his resignation he returned to teaching and to his bursar’s duties at King’s, but he always spent part of his time in London. He was a member of the Macmillan Committee on Finance and Industry, and parts of its classic report bear the stamp of his mind.
In 1940 he was made a member of the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s Consultative Council and played an important part in Treasury business. He was appointed a director of the Bank of England. In 1942 he was created Lord Keynes, of Tilton, and made some valuable contributions to debate in the Upper House. He became High Steward of Cambridge (Borough) in 1943. His continued interest in the arts was marked by his trusteeship of the National Gallery and chairmanship of the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (cema). In 1925 he married Lydia Lopokova, renowned star of the Russian Imperial Ballet – ‘the best thing Maynard ever did’, according to the aged Mrs Alfred Marshall. She made a delightful home for him, and in the years after his serious heart attack in 1937 was a tireless nurse and vigilant guardian against the pressures of the outside world.
Lord Keynes’s genius was expressed in his important contributions to the fundamentals of economic science; in his power of winning public interest in the practical application of economics on critical occasions; in his English prose style – his description of the protagonists at the Versailles Conference, first fully published in his Essays in Biography (1933), is likely long to remain a classic – and, perhaps it should be added, in the brilliant wit, the wisdom, and the range of his private conversation, which would have made him a valued member of any intellectual salon or coterie in the great ages of polished discussion.
In practical affairs his activities in addition to his important public services were legion. As bursar of King’s he administered the college finances with unflagging attention to detail. By segregating a fund which could be invested outside trustee securities he greatly enlarged the resources of the college, and, unlike most college bursars, he was continually urging the college to spend more money on current needs. From 1912 he was editor of the Economic Journal, which grew and flourished under his guidance, and from 1921 to 1938 he was chairman of the National Mutual Life Assurance Society. He ran an investment company. He organised the Camargo Ballet. He built and opened the Arts Theatre at Cambridge and, having himself supervised and financed it during its period of teething troubles, he handed it over, when it was established as a paying concern, as a gift to ex-officio trustees drawn from the university and city. He became chairman of cema in 1942 and of the Arts Council in 1945. He was chairman of the Nation, and later, when the merger took place, of the New Statesman; but he had too scrupulous a regard for editorial freedom for that paper to be in any sense a reflection of his own opinions. He also did duty as a teacher of undergraduates at King’s College and played an important and inspiring part in the development of the Economics faculty at Cambridge. The better students saw him at his most brilliant in his Political Economy Club. He was interested in university business and his evidence before the Royal Commission (1919–22) was an important influence in causing it to recommend that the financial powers of the university should give it greater influence over the colleges.
To find an economist of comparable influence one would have to go back to Adam Smith. His early interest was primarily in money and foreign exchange, and there is an austere school of thought which regards his Indian Currency and Finance (1912) as his best book. After the 1914–18 war his interest in the relation between monetary deflation and trade depression led him on to reconsider the traditional theory about the broad economic forces which govern the total level of employment and activity in a society. He concluded that, to make a free system work at optimum capacity – and so provide ‘full employment’ – it would be necessary to have deliberate central control of the rate of interest and also, in certain cases, to stimulate capital development. These conclusions rest on a very subtle and intricate analysis of the working of the whole system, which is still being debated wherever economics is seriously studied.