8/8/2019 Halford MacKinder's Necessary War http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/halford-mackinders-necessary-war 1/21 Halford MacKinder's Necessary War By F. William Engdahl "An iron-clad Swedish guarantee" In the north of Sweden, well above the Arctic Circle near Kirunavaara, one of the world's largest reserves of high-grade magnetite ore had been developed, with an extraordinary 68% average iron content, almost three times as rich per ton as the iron ores of Alsace-Lorraine. Kiruna and the nearby mines at Gaellivare, had supplied German steel mills in the Ruhr with the greatest portion of their iron ore, ever since Germany had been largely stripped of her ore resources in Alsace-Lorraine and Silesia, by the 1919 Versailles Treaty. The dependence of the German steel industry on the Swedish iron ore was no small affair. By 1938, shortly before Hitler marched into Austria, German steel production had tripled in tonnage from 1913, on the eve of the First World War. Ruhr steel mills depended on imported iron ore for almost three-quarters of their steel-making needs, and Sweden provided more than 11 million tons of that in 1939 alone. After 1939, Sweden had to replace lost French iron ore as well. The economic inter- dependency between Swedish iron ore and German steel was strategic in every sense. Without sufficient steel, no tanks would roll; the Luftwaffe would be without planes; no guns, no artillery, in short, all materiel required to execute a major war would lack. Because of Kiruna's extreme location, there had been only two routes built to get the Swedish ore to export markets. The one route, by rail to the eastern Swedish port of Luleaa, on the Gulf of Bothnia facing Finland, froze over in winter. The only other export route, the only route in fact for almost half the entire year, was across Norway, to the ice-free port of Narvik on the Atlantic, and from there by ship along Norway's coast to the north German ports. At the beginning of the war in 1939, the two largest importers of the rich Swedish iron ore had been Britain, which took about 10%, and Germany, which took more than 70% of Sweden's ore export. British military intelligence was, therefore, well aware of the logistics of the iron ore deliveries to Germany, and of its vital importance to Germany for any future full-scale war. As well, they had been passed a copy from French intelligence of a confidential report from Fritz Thyssen to Hitler and Goering, in which the German steel industry leader noted that the determination of victory or defeat for Germany lay in the iron ore fields of northern Sweden.
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This peculiarity of political geography and the relation it defined between neutral Sweden and the
Third Reich, set the stage for England's first so-called battle of the war. That battle was at the time
viewed as an utter fiasco, as a failed British attempt to pre-empt control of Narvik from the
Germans, in order to cripple Germany's war-making ability.
In reality, Britain's Norway venture in April 1940 was quite something else. Britain's subsequent
defeat in Norway, paradoxically, served two vital objectives for British grand strategy. It assured
uninterrupted supply of Swedish iron ore to the steel mills of the Ruhr for the duration of the
German war effort. This was essential from the standpoint of the overriding Round Table strategy of
forcing a war of mutual annihilation between Germany and Russia.
A deliberately bungled British invasion of Norway also provided the convenient pretext for theRound Table to dump the no longer useful Neville Chamberlain as Prime Minister, and to bring
Churchill in, to run the conduct of the actual war, and the crucial task of winning America to the
project.
It was not terribly surprising, given these considerations, that the new First Lord of the Admiralty in
Chamberlain's government, the bellicose Winston Churchill, set his sights on neutral Norway in
early 1940.
Churchill had been brought into the government by a reluctant Chamberlain, the day the German
invasion of Poland had begun, principally to coopt his most vocal critic into the cabinet. Despite the
dramatic declaration of war by Britain and France against Germany on September 3 1939, the
Allied countries had done nothing of note, as the German dismemberment of Poland proceeded,
beyond occasional attacks on German ships, or dropping propaganda leaflets over Poland.
After Russia had joined in the dismemberment of Poland on September 17, that, in accord with the
secret protocols arrived at between Ribbentrop and Molotov a month before, Chamberlain's silence
became deafening. Despite urgent pleas by Poland's Marshall Smigly-Rydz, that France honor her
previous treaty with Poland and initiate some, any, diversionary action against Germany's exposed
western borders, to slow the German offensive in Poland, nothing happened from either France or
England's side.
General Gamelin's French Army, with its 28 divisions, waited in their barracks, oiling their guns
and polishing their boots. German Field Marshall Keitel testified after the war that, had a French
attack been launched against Germany's Ruhr industry heartland at that point, it would have
"encountered only feeble resistance."
Britain's "phoney war" had begun. The intent of that phoney war as it came to be known, was meant
to be a period of British manipulation and maneuver, in order to set the stage for a break of the
Russo-German pact, to play Germany and Russia against each other, and at the same time, to
maneuver the United States into the war on England's side.
Four days into the Nazi invasion of Poland, the German High Command got highly accurate
intelligence on the status of British troop readiness to aid of France against Germany in response to
Germany's invasion of Poland. Hitler had been told that England, on the day she declared war
against Germany, had no more than 3 divisions in combat readiness, and that she would not deployto aid France until fully 7 divisions had been made ready, something which could not be done
before at least summer 1940.
Further, Hitler learned that France, for her part, would not initiate any military action against
Germany, without a full British troop support backing her. Instead of having to redeploy several
divisions from the Polish campaign to cover Germany's western flank, Hitler could proceed
systematically to carve up Poland, with no fear of attack from Britain or France.
Poland was to serve the same broad aim of British geopolitical strategy as Munich had some
months before, if less obviously so. As far back as July 1936, Chamberlain's predecessor as Prime
Minister, Stanley Baldwin, had laid out to a group from the House of Lords, the policy for the
coming European war. Baldwin, a director of Lothian's Rhodes Trust, and a member of the inner
circle of the Round Table, had told the Lords, "If there is any fighting in Europe to be done, I should
like to see the Bolsheviks and the Nazis doing it."
The effort of Churchill and the highest levels of the British establishment between September 1939
and the America's war declaration in December 1941, was anything but phoney, even if it did not
produce the war which most, especially the hapless Poles, had expected. Of course, the actual
reasons for the strange war conduct could never be admitted publicly, without endangering the
entire enterprise.
While she had immediately acted to declare war against Germany for Germany's violation of Polish
territorial sovereignty in September, Britain had made only feeble protest against the Soviet's for
dismembering Poland. This too was deliberate, part of a grand strategy of the larger war intended by
the Round Table. In early October, Churchill had told an astonished Joseph Kennedy, U.S.
Ambassador to Britain, that the Russians were justified in taking eastern Poland, arguing that it was,
"really Russian territory."
Smelling the power vacuum and the opportunity to act, Stalin ordered the Soviet Red Army to
prepare an invasion of Finland at the end of November, two months after he had "liberated" eastern
Poland.
By October 10, the Soviet Union had forced the three Baltic states, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, to
sign military assistance pacts with Russia, giving Moscow naval and air bases in Estonia and
Latvia, something Hitler accepted reluctantly, in return for guarantees of Soviet oil. The Russiancity of Leningrad was a vital industrial center of the Soviet Union, which joined the Baltic Sea by
the Gulf of Finland. An opponent, coming from Finland, could launch a devastating strike on Russia
through the Karelian Isthmus, in heavy artillery range of entire Leningrad. Under the secret
protocols of the August 1939 Hitler-Stalin pact, Stalin had insisted that Finland also become a
Soviet sphere of influence, to extend Russia's defensive perimeter.
On November 30 1939, after failing to get the territorial demands from the Finns by negotiation,
Stalin renounced the 1932 Finnish-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact, and invaded tiny and relatively
defenseless Finland, with a force of 30 Red Army divisions, 1,200 tanks, hundreds of aircraft and
28 warships.
England had privately encouraged the Finns to stand firm, and not give in to Russian territorial
demands, while at the same time encouraging Stalin by quietly backing a League of Nations
resolution to expel Finland from the League, for allegedly firing on Russian soldiers across the
border. As the Finns tried to show the League, without success, Stalin had given secret orders for a
contingent of Soviet troops to fire on their own Russian men, killing four and wounding ten, giving
Stalin the ostensible pretext for invading Finland, in response to "Finnish aggression against the
Soviet Union."
Surprisingly determined national resistance by the Finns, under command of the 72-year old
General Mannerheim, managed to hold off the Red Army forces, inflicting staggering losses of
more than 200 ,000 dead on the Soviet side. Stalin had fully expected the Finns to negotiate a swift
surrender, and had not even prepared his troops with winter clothing, causing as many or more
opponent of appeasing Germany, through, among others, London ambassador Ivan Maisky. Maisky
apparently never quite realized how he and Moscow were merely being maneuvered by the sly
Churchill, to lead the Soviet Union into a bloodbath with Germany, in pursuit of British geopolitical
strategy. Chamberlain had merely represented another way to accomplish the same bloody goal, a
German-Soviet war, by playing to the German side against the Soviet Union.
Churchill, whose own mother was American, had also started secret and highly unusual
correspondence, that, as a mere First Lord of the Admiralty in Chamberlain's government, with an
old acquaintence from the period of the First World War, when both men had occupied leading posts
in their respective navies. The Churchill correspondence with U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt,
done secretly in sealed diplomatic pouch to avoid Foreign Office or State Department mediation,
was calculated in every way by the cunning Churchill, who signed his cables, "Former NavalPerson," to play on the earlier common bond with Roosevelt, who had been U.S. Navy Assistant
Secretary during the Great War, when Churchill was British First Lord.2
"Stopped short"
Hitler's blitz occupation of Denmark and Norway had necessitated his interrupting planning for an
invasion of the Low Countries and France. In November 1939, just after the Polish invasion, Hitler
had begun arguing with his generals over the necessity to protect Germany's Rhine and Ruhr
industrial centers from danger of a combined French and British attack through the Low Countries.
"Time is working for our adversary," Hitler told the generals. "We have an Achilles' Heel--the Ruhr.
If Britain and France push through Belgium and Holland into the Ruhr, we shall be in the greatest
danger."
The moment success for the Norwegian occupation was clear, Hitler turned his full energies again
to the Low Countries and France. At dawn on May 10, he gave the order to launch "Case Yellow,"
the simultaneous invasion of Holland, Belgium and France.
Germany committed 136 divisions to the operation, with Goering's Luftwaffe deploying more than
3,600 fighters and bombers to support the invasion. They faced combined Allied forces totalling
135 divisions. But those numbers belied the lack of combat readiness of especially the French
soldiers. There were 94 French, 10 British, 22 Belgian and 9 Dutch divisions.
France at that time had mobilized one in eight of its adult male population, Britain only one in
forty-eight. The French troops however were mostly poorly trailed unwilling conscripts, with little
or no combat experience. France's Air Force was wholly unprepared for war, with fewer trained
pilots even than planes, which numbered only some 350. Prime Minister Edouard Daladier's Air
Minister, Guy la Chambre, had just been exposed before the National Assembly in a closed-door
session, for concealing the grim reality.
On May 11, in an ingenious operation, German glider-borne paratroops captured the most powerful
defensive fortification at the junction of the Albert Canal and the Meuse River on the Belgian
border with Holland, near Maastricht, the fortress at Eben-Emael. Eighty men captured the 1,200
man garrison, previously thought impregnable, by a surprise landing on the roof, and silenced themightiest guns on the Meuse. The defeat was a devastating blow to morale of the Belgians and the
Dutch. The Dutch Army formally surrendered on May 15. By May 17 German forces had entered
Brussels, and Belgian King Leopold surrendered on May 28.
British propaganda attributed tremendous black fires in the port of Rotterdam to a revenge bombing
of Hitler against Dutch resistance. In actual fact, the fires had been the work of a British sabotage
commando unit sent by Churchill to blow up the large oil refineries of Royal Dutch Shell and
Standard Oil, in order to deny the huge oil stores to Hitler's Wehrmacht. The sabotage oil fires were
largely contained and the saboteurs taken prisoner.
At that point one of the most brilliant military campaigns of the war was launched, ironically, over
the vehement objections of the German General Staff. General Erich von Manstein, in consultation
with the equally iconoclastic General Heinz Guderian, author of a widely-studied textbook on the
new potentials of tank warfare, had formulated an alternative to the German General Staff battle
plan for the invasion of France.
The General Staff's plan called for a more or less predictable repeat of the von Schlieffen Plan of
1914, fighting the new war with the ideas of the last, by sweeping from Belgium south, into a head-
on clash with combined British and French forces, and risking a repeat of the prolonged trench
warfare debacle of the First World War. Ironically, the French General Staff held equally tenaciously
to the same view as their German counterpart, convinced a repeat of 1914 through Belgium was the
only practical German option. This rigidity, over the fierce protests of a young French tank
commander, Charles de Gaulle, was to have fatal consequences for France.
General Guderian had advanced an astonishing 250 miles across enemy terrain in only 11 days.
Then, with his Panzer forces at Gravelines, only ten miles from Dunkirk, orders came down on May
24, that his tanks were to halt.
Guderian's forces had been within hours of capturing more than 300,000 of the best-trained
professional soldiers of the British Expeditionary Force, along with some 100,000 of France's best
-trained and equipped men. Guderian at first read the order with disbelief. His commander, General
von Kleist, stated that, on receiving the order, "I decided to ignore it, and to push on across thecanal. But then came a more emphatic order that I was to withdraw behind the canal. My tanks were
kept halted there for three days."
The order had come directly from Hitler. The three days pause was intended, though Hitler did not
tell his generals at the time, to allow Britain's best fighting force escape by ship across the Channel
to England. He intended it as a clear gesture of good will towards his British adversary.
That was the "miracle of Dunkirk," which Churchill's strictly censored wartime press propaganda in
England portrayed as divine providence smiling down on the chosen British people. The British
population would have been no doubt quite surprised, had they been allowed to learn the truth, that
the one who had smiled on their army at Dunkirk had in fact been Hitler.
A week later, referring to this "miracle of Dunkirk," Churchill told the House of Commons and the
entire nation over the BBC radio, "We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be; we shall
fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the
streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender..."
It wasn't exactly the response Hitler had in mind.
What Churchill left out of his rousing speech, was the fact that his commander in France, Lord
Gort, had ordered his British forces to proceed to Dunkirk, as rescue boats were being readied
across the Channel, while Churchill had promised Prime Minister Reynaud and General Weygand,
after a visit to Paris some days before, that Gort's forces, together with British Royal Air Force air
cover, would join a reinforced French counter-offensive against the over-extended and highly
exposed German lines.
Churchill's promised air support never appeared. Instead, he deployed a contingent of the RAF in a
highly ineffective mission to bomb sites in the Ruhr, a move with another intent altogether. Lacking
sufficient support from both ground and air, the French offensive collapsed in disarray and
demoralization.
As hundreds of British ships, large and small, shuttled back and forth from Dover to Dunkirk over
the three days of pause, they were filled first and foremost with British soldiesrs, despite
agreements from Churchill to Reynaud that French and British would be treated equally in the
evacuation operation. Field-Marshall Gort at one point personally refused a boat pass to a Frenchgeneral, arguing, "Two French going means two less British," leading France's Admiral Darlan later
to question the wisdom of entrusting the defense of Dunkirk to the British who, he said, had only
one thought, namely, "To the boats." Only 36,000 Frenchmen managed to escape by boat at Dunkirk
with the more than 338,000 British troops.
Dunkirk was to be only one of several unusual military decisions by the German Fuehrer in those
critical days. His message each time was intended as a clear signal to his opponents. He was
determined to give England convincing proof of his ultimate good will towards the British Empire,
by allowing the elite of Britain's fighting forces to escape to England. Ribbentrop's adviser on
France, Otto Abenz, remarked caustically of the Dunkirk decision, "If Hitler had not been consumed
by a diseased Anglophilia, everything would be different and easier." It was perhaps more a
perverse love-hate attitude toward British power. The effect on the vital decisions of the war was
nonetheless to be catastrophic for the Germans.
Hitler ordered von Kleist and Guderian to turn their Panzers south, after the evacuation of British
Expeditionary Forces at Dunkirk. Guderian's Panzers rolled on towards the exposed rear of Maginot
Line. On June 14, the Germans entered an abandoned Paris, which the French had just declared an
"open city." There was no significant resistance, no street fighting, not even destruction of vital
gasoline stores by the French, a major gift, giving the German Panzer's extraordinary mobility. Of
some five million Parisians, fewer than 700,000 remained. The rest had fled in panic. Reynaud's
government had itself fled some days before to Tours.
At the tiny airport at Parcay near Tours, an unscheduled flight had landed the morning of June 13
with no advance notice. Out of two small British planes stepped British Prime Minister Churchill,
his new Minister for Aircraft Production Lord Beaverbrook, Foreign Minister Lord Halifax, and
Chief of General Staff Sir William Ironside. They had come to get a first-hand report on the
situation in France directly from Prime Minister Reynaud, General Weygand, and Marshal Petain.
What they heard didn't inspire optimism. Weygand outlined in detail the grim state of their
combined forces, then told his British guests, "The only thing which can save France is English aid.
We immediately need British infantry divisions, artillery, and above all fighter planes, and again,
fighter planes."
Churchill reportedly replied, "We can immediately send you three divisions." Weygand was furious.
"Is that all?" Churchill then tried a different tack. "General, think about the last war. What enormous problems we fought through together, how it then turned to victory."
With barely controlled emotion, Weygand replied, "You perhaps mean Mr. Prime Minister, the time
in Spring 1918 when the Germans had broken through the English Front. I permit myself to recall
that we sent you immediately 25 divisions to help, and after that, another 15 divisions, and we held
ten more in reserve. Today I have in total as reserve one regiment, and that will be deployed in the
next hours. This afternoon our last tanks will be sent into the battle, fresh from the factory, not even
painted."
The French Commander-in-chief, who unlike his predecessor Gamelin, was anything but defeatist
by disposition, then told Churchill that, lacking decisive support from England, France might well
have no alternative but to sue for a separate peace with Germany. Petain concurred, to Reynaud's
distress.
Some minutes later Churchill and his entourage slipped out of Tours and flew back to London,
without giving the French any commitment, leaving not only Reynaud and Weygand, but all France
in the lurch.
On June 16, Prime Minister Paul Reynaud resigned, refusing to agree to an armistice and facing a
militarily hopeless situation. The 84-year old hero of Verdun, Marshal Petain, formed a new
government, now relocated to Vichy, near Lyon in south-central France.
Pierre Laval, the string-puller behind Petain, was a former French foreign minister, with friendly
soldiers from India, placing her naval fleet and her economy in a devastating disadvantage at a time
when many in top British political circles, even some in Churchill's Cabinet such as Beaverbrook,
were resigned to the inevitability of a peace deal with Hitler.
At a meeting June 17 in Munich, the day France's armistice offer was received, Hitler told
Mussolini that he would not impose oppressive conditions on France. When Mussolini suggested
the demand that France turn over its naval fleet, Hitler rejected that idea outright as well.
This concession too, allowing the Petain government to hold on to the French fleet, was no small
thing. At the time, the French naval fleet, unlike other parts of its defense arsenal, was of high
quality. Two new battleships, 'Richelieu' and 'Jean Bart' had just been built. Were the French fleet to
be added to the combined Naval capacities of Italy and Germany, it could quite well have destroyedBritish sea defenses and likely have forced a British surrender within months. The entire American
fleet, even had they wanted to come to England's aid, was unavailable. It had been shifted early in
1940 to Hawaii and the Pacific, far away from Europe, in order to defend against a growing
Japanese threat.
What could be of such over-riding importance in Hitler's thinking as to justify so extraordinary
concessions as the colonies, the fleet and almost half of French territory?
Hitler, after refusing Mussolini's demand for the French fleet, turned to the real subject on his mind
-- England. In a discussion witnessed by Hitler's official interpreter, Paul Schmidt, Hitler told
Mussolini, he was convinced it would not serve any useful purpose to destroy the British Empire.
"It is, after all, a force for order in the world," insisted Hitler.
Hitler's thoughts seemed to be returning to the early lessons in geopolitics he had learned from Karl
Haushofer and Rudolf Hess almost two decades before, in 1924, in his jail cell at Landsberg near
Munich. Hitler had written then in "Main Kampf," about Germany's future and the need for
Lebensraum. "If one wanted land and soil in Europe, then by and large this could only have been
done at Russia's expense, and then the new Reich would again have to start marching along the road
of the Knights of the Order of former times.
"For such a policy, however," wrote Hitler, "there was only one single ally in Europe--England.
With England alone, one's back being covered, could one begin the new Germanic invasion...To
gain England's favor, no sacrifice should have been too great. Then one would have had to renounce