Are you head of the Churchill cult? Has Churchill been elevated to the level of Confucius? Churchill say...
The major problem with Churchill's view, like always, is that it is illogical. He is like a Christian. A Christian will pray for you when you are seriously ill. If you get better, the religious will believe that it was God's will and he healed you. If you die, the same people will say that it was God's will and he took you home. They cannot lose.
For Churchill, the German production of tanks was part of an offensive plan. He believed the same of the West Wall and German coastal fortifications. He, like the airpower radicals he supported, even believed that rising German coal and steel output was evidence of militant behaviour.
(1) "Appreciation of the Situation in the Events of War Against Germany in 1939", Approved by Committee of Imperial Defence and the Cabinet in May 1937:
The document argued that Germany would invade Belgium, France and Britain in 1939 and that Germany was actually a war economy in 1937. Here is a quote:
"In the past, it has been after the outbreak of war that a nation's industry had been adapted and expanded to war requirements, her man-power organized for war and the morale of her people artificially sustained. In Germany, as in other totalitarian States, these processes are now being perfected in time of peace. The dragooning of the populace and their submission to economic hardship to a degree previously only associated with wartime, or acceptable under war conditions, is being enforced during the peace period preceeding the actual campaign...The German people can be made to submit to this system under the stern discipline of their totalitarian regime, but in no way does democracy lend itself to the experiment". [Saward, Bomber Harris]
(2) Steel & Cars & Men: The air pundits pointed out, for example, that German steel production jumped from 5,771,000 in 1932 to 19,208,000 tons in 1937. This certainly looks strange. (They actually didn't because such annual statistics were not published in Germany. They simply argued for a large jump in production).
The problem is that this steel output merely represented a return to pre-depression output. German steel output in 1937 and 1925 was roughly the same. Moreover, the report fails to mention the massive movement forward in German consumer goods like telephones, radios, household appliances and cars. German automobile production, as an example, jumped from from 92,000 in 1933 to 269,000 in 1937. That was a lot of steel. You can actually see a coorelation between cars and steel:
They also don't tell us that the German military was around 700,000 strong in 1937, whereas the Soviets had 1,324,000, the French had 825,000, the even the British had 645,000.
The report listed above was a total fabrication build on nothing more than a series of crude lies. Most of these lies were heartily supported by Churchill. In fact, as I have pointed out elsewhere, the British air pundits fed Churchill exactly the information that he wanted to hear. And all they wanted was more funding in return.
(3) Churchill & the West Wall: No army, and especially the German Army, would build a wall for offensive combat. And here we see propaganda at work. For Churchill & co., the Maginot Line was defensive. The West Wall was not. In fact, they even believed that the German production of telephones represented evidence of a future war of conquest.
A Problem: I am having a hard time finding secondary sources covering the West Wall.
Sources:
stats from Udo Sautter, Deutsche Geschichte seit 1815: Daten, Fakten, Dokumente (volume one) (2004).
doc from Saward, Bomber Harris (1984).
