| Tons | |
| Germany | 600,000 |
| Denmark | 140,000 |
| France | 210,000 |
| Holland | 240,000 |
| Norway | 60,000 |
| Sweden | 165,000 |
| Italy | 220,000 |
| Japan | 700,000 |
| 2,335,000 | |
| United Kingdom | 2,000,000 |
| Total | 4,335,000 |
After the defeat of Britain, Germany and her allies would possess the capacity to build 4,335,000 tons of ships a year, which is more than four times our 1941 production of around 1,000,000 tons and is even larger than our record performance in 1919 when we turned out 4,075,000 tons of ships. Admiral Land’s prediction that we would eventually build 6,000,000 tons a year remains to be fulfilled. As matters now stand if the Germans were to capture Britain, time would be on their side for the building of ships. Furthermore, of course, the Germans would inherit the vast British industrial machine, and save for the production of steel, would have the power to turn out more airplanes and munitions than we could for many years. All of this is merely to emphasize what the fall of Britain and the end of the British Navy as a fighting force against Hitler would mean to the United States.
Q. But isn’t Churchill often wrong in his military judgment? Hasn’t he made mistakes due to overconfidence?
A. It is true that Mr. Churchill has the vices of his virtues, and since his most prominent virtue is courage, he also possesses what has seemed at times to be recklessness. His sanguine temperament makes him ideally equipped to lead a nation in desperate circumstances, but his critics of whom a few still exist will never cease insisting on the obvious, that he makes mistakes, as though it were not the hoariest of adages that only the man who never does anything commits no errors. They list a roll of his alleged military failures, beginning with his unsuccessful defense of Antwerp and the costly attempt to take the Dardanelles in the last war; and in this war Norway, Greece, and Crete. But if these events are analyzed it will be seen that each of them had its justification.
Many military critics looking back at the last war now agree that Mr. Churchill was right to advocate holding Antwerp as an Allied strong point behind the German lines, and if the Allied High Command had supported him sufficiently Churchill’s defense might have succeeded. The Dardanelles attempt—which used to be the failure his enemies most enjoyed—was in the view of most military men today a brilliant conception which would have ended the war victoriously for the Allies two years earlier, if Churchill’s plan had been carried out as it could have been. We know now not only that the campaign could have succeeded from the outset and at comparatively little cost, if the Churchill timetable had been scrupulously kept, but also that the straits could have been captured even at the very end if one last push had been made. One of Raymond Swing’s best stories is of his experience as a war correspondent with the Turks, whom he saw hoarding their last few rounds of ammunition as, to their astonishment, the British steamed away, losing with a completely un-British lack of persistence. It was jealousy more than anything else that spoiled the Dardanelles campaign, Kitchener’s jealousy of Churchill.
In his old age, Kitchener, the Army chief, obstinately refused to do what the Navy chief advised, and the end was failure. It was perhaps the most keenly felt failure in the life of Churchill when he resigned after the Dardanelles. Anyone who reads the painstaking account he has written of the campaign in his history of the war, The World Crisis, may perceive how heavy the blow was. Even clearer evidence are the pictures of him in his country place at Chartwell. One for which he sat immediately after the Dardanelles campaign shows him looking years older than a picture of him before the campaign began. No, the Dardanelles ought to be remembered to Churchill’s credit, and it will be eventually.
In this war its place has been given by his critics to Norway, Crete, and Greece. Ed Angly, my companion in flight from France, used humorously to wonder if the British were ever going to cease retreating and my reply was that they probably never would until they had retreated to victory. The Norwegian campaign discouraged many, and critics on both sides of the Atlantic demanded to know why the British secret service had not known in advance of the German intention to invade Norway; why the Royal Navy had not prevented invasion; why the British Army landed in the north could not hold on.
The reproach of faulty information can be leveled only by persons not acquainted with the nature of the Gestapo. It must not have escaped general attention that when the German Army marches into a captured territory, for a few days news of a sort continues to trickle out, and we may hope that British or other enemy agents continue to function during this time. But as soon as the Gestapo appears, with Himmler directing its hordes of agents in civilian clothes, and its tens of thousands of black-uniformed SS, it is as though an asbestos curtain had fallen on the frontiers of the country, and from then on the silence of the grave envelops the land. I was not surprised that Hitler could strike with such devastating secrecy; what victim of his has been warned except by the general reputation of the invader? Even the Bolsheviks were plaintively surprised when the “assassin of the working classes” so violently dissolved his friendship with the “scum of the earth.” We may be sure that if Hitler were ever put, by the fall of Britain, in a position to attack the Western Hemisphere, we would also be surprised, not by the action but by the time and method. The Norwegian surprise was no fault of Churchill.
The question why the British could not hold on is one that is put not only about Norway but about Crete and Greece and it may be put again before the last battle is fought. The answer is one which may have to be borne in mind for a long time. It is contained in the simplest facts about the war, which tend to be forgotten in the riot of daily news. The principal fact is that Britain after two years of war has not yet caught up with the numbers and equipment of the German war machine built by a population double that of the British over seven years of peacetime preparation and two of war. The British have fought on nearly every one of their battlefields so far with inferior numbers against superior material and better-trained men. Let those of us in America who imagine we have only to call a few million boys to the colors and train them a year in order to have an army, consider the British experience. The British soldiers are only now after more than two years of war training, becoming a capable modern army, about one-third the size of Britain’s “medium-sized” army.
Finally we heard the criticism that Churchill’s decision to send troops to Greece was a mistake, since he knew they could not hold out against the Germans. “Political” reasons, it was said, ought not to govern military decisions. But what is the war being fought about if not to re-establish honor among nations? Britain was sworn to come to the aid of Greece. Had she failed to do so, forlorn though the hope was of immediate success, she would have lost a good part of that moral reputation which is worth more than many army corps to her today. This “political” decision was made in the sense of the classical definition of politics, “that branch of ethics dealing with the ethical relations and duties of states.”