Читать книгу Fighter: The True Story of the Battle of Britain - Len Deighton - Страница 15

Although by tradition subordinate to the army as a fighting force, the German navy was independent of it in a way that the Luftwaffe was not. In the spring of 1940 the German navy fought a brilliant and daring campaign in Norwegian waters. This had to some extent been made possible by the navy’s B-Dienst cryptanalytic department which, by the time war began, was able to read even the most secret of the British Admiralty’s messages, having broken the codes and ciphers.

In the spring of 1940 the German navy’s prestige was high. Its strategists demanded more steel for submarines and were preparing a surface fleet that, with Italian help, might control the Mediterranean by 1942.

But the navy needed time to recover from the grave, but worthwhile, losses that the conquest of Norway had caused it. So the Admirals had little enthusiasm for hasty and dangerous invasion plans that would their hazard few remaining ships in the Straits of Dover.

In Norway it had lost ten destroyers and three cruisers. The Scharnhorst and Gneisenau had been put out of action by torpedo hits. Of the three ‘pocket battleships’ with which Germany had entered the war, the Lützow had been damaged by torpedoes, the Admiral Scheer had engine trouble, and the Graf Spee had been scuttled after the naval action off Montevideo, Uruguay. The new battleships, Bismarck, Tirpitz, and the cruiser Prinz Eugen, would need until the following year to train their crews and work up to combat readiness.

To cover the Sea-lion invasion, face the Royal Navy’s Home Fleet, motor torpedo boats, coastal batteries, submarines, minefields, and the combined air units of the Fleet Air Arm and the RAF, the Germans had only one heavy cruiser, Hipper, two light cruisers, half-a-dozen destroyers and some U-boats.

No wonder that the German navy had sent motorised naval commandos with the panzer armies that invaded France, as part of an attempt to seize French warships. But the French sailed away. Even the incomplete battleship Jean Bart had escaped just before the Germans got to St Nazaire.

Churchill, afraid the Germans would still be able to barter armistice terms for the warships they badly needed, ordered the Royal Navy to persuade the French crews to sail beyond German reach or scuttle. In July at Oran in French North Africa units of the French navy came under the gunfire and bombs of the Royal Navy. The blood of 1,300 French sailors spattered all over the British, for two or three generations.

Sea power still decided the fate of nations. In the USA nothing worried Roosevelt and his advisers more than the threat to their eastern seaboard that would come if Germany controlled the Royal Navy’s ships. All American decisions were based on this fear, and Churchill tried unsuccessfully to play on it.