Between the Alps and a Hard Place (8 page)

Without knowing the Swiss military tradition, one could easily discount Guisan's order to his troops as German forces were breaking through French lines at Sedan. The order attributed “the stunning daily progress of certain troops” (it was politically incorrect to name any potential opponent) to the failure of individuals to do their duty. Hence Guisan ordered Swiss troops to disregard whatever might be going on around them: “Each man, even if isolated, must defend himself where he is. . . . [E]ven if encircled, [units] must fight until the last bullet, and then attack with their blades. . . . So long as any man has a bullet or a blade, he has no right to surrender.”
¹⁰
Every officer and NCO, regardless of circumstance, was responsible for gathering whatever troops happened to be around and leading them against the enemy. Order after order reminded the troops that the country's authorities were irrevocably committed to military defense, and that any radio transmissions the troops might hear to the effect that Switzerland had given up or that they should do anything but fight to the death were to be treated as the work of the enemy. This drumbeat would automatically brand as traitors any government official or senior officer who might want to throw in the towel.

Guisan's orders stated, “The attacker succeeds not so much because he deploys superior firepower, but above all through the destruction of the defender's will to fight to the end.” You are here, Guisan said, to sacrifice your life. To the troops' reasonable question of how they could fight with enemy airplanes all over them, Guisan answered that bombing and strafing from the air could kill you no more dead than artillery. But what about the tanks—they can slice right through our positions! “None of you
must quit his post, even if armored tanks are attacking or have already arrived on the flanks or in the rear. . . . You must be confident that our rear echelons will deal with them. . . . So long as you maintain your positions on both sides of the breach, and you do not permit the arrival of reinforcements, these eruptions amount to nothing.” And the same went for being outflanked by enemy parachutists.
¹¹
While it was nonsense to say that being penetrated and outflanked was militarily meaningless, it made perfect sense as part of a strategy to hold together the army and to harm the enemy.

It is by no means certain that these orders would have been followed had Germany invaded. But the orders did hold the army together. During the middle of May the Germans massed troops near the Swiss border. This turned out to be a feint, to distract the French from Germany's main axis of assault through Belgium. Nevertheless, the Swiss massed their troops to get in the way. There is little doubt they would have fought. Late in the campaign, as German armies approached the Geneva area, the Swiss massed troops there, while interning the fleeing remnants of the French army on whom they had counted for help.

In the war's crucial period—June 1940 to Spring 1944—Switzerland's military strategy rested on the willingness of its border troops to die and of the bulk of the entrenched army to take casualties without hope of relief. Even to plan such operations takes a certain bloody-mindedness. Yet we should not conclude that willingness to die is necessary only in desperate circumstances. Rather, it is a necessary condition for any meaningful military action.

The only place where Swiss and Germans shot at each other during the war was the airspace over the French border. When 180 German planes violated Swiss airspace, the Swiss shot down
nine and lost only two ME 109s in the process. Angered by this, the
Luftwaffe
's commander, Hermann Goering, ordered a commando team to blow up Swiss airplanes. On June 16 Swiss authorities arrested the team. Alas, the Reich soon intimidated the Swiss government into releasing the team, the captured German pilots, and the remains of the airplanes that had come down on Swiss soil. The Swiss government even added an ambiguous apology. In short, the Swiss military had bravery and skill—but little else.

If the fall of France had been unimaginable, Italy's entry into the war on Germany's side was counterintuitive. True, the general European assumption that Mussolini would follow Italy's natural geopolitical interest in limiting the power of Germany had taken a beating in 1938, when
Il Duce
failed to bolster Austria's feeble resistance to the
Anschluss
. But in 1940 even Winston Churchill thought that Mussolini would know his interests well enough not to join Hitler.
¹²
In Switzerland, conventional wisdom had been that Mussolini would do whatever was necessary to avoid having northern Italy surrounded by a stronger power. Therefore Italy, like France, could be counted on to help maintain a Swiss buffer. Swiss leaders in 1940 were heirs of a foreign policy that had adjusted Swiss interests with Mussolini's Italy very well. So in June 1940, when Mussolini added the weight of forty million Italians to that of eighty million Germans, the military predicament of four million Swiss could not have been worse or more unexpected. The country could be attacked from all sides and expect help from none. The greater part of the Ticino canton, including the city of Lugano, became indefensible, just like Geneva, Lausanne, Fribourg,
Bern, Basel, and Zurich. Indeed the question became, could the Swiss army defend anything for any useful purpose?

The events of June 1940 forced the Swiss to confront the question that no military establishment anywhere wants to confront: What would we do if we found ourselves alone, relying strictly on our own resources, against a first-class enemy? Most countries build their military forces to fight the wars they would prefer to fight—not the ones they dread. And yet the foremost military lesson is that armies should prepare first and foremost for fighting alone against the worst of enemies. Switzerland's plans to march a screen of heavy infantry around threatened borders loudly proclaiming neutral self-sufficiency while silently arranging for help from large, modern foreign forces was no sillier than, say, American Cold War plans to fight a ground war in Europe against the Soviet Union. Equally silly was ancient Athens's supposition that it could commit the fleet that made it the world's greatest sea power to supporting a major land war in faraway Sicily. Similarly foolish, American post–Cold War plans essentially assumed the friendship or forbearance of most of the world, and that no nation would use nuclear armed missiles seriously. Again, most nations' military plans assume that allies will play a very large role, and that the enemy will not do his worst. What happened to Switzerland in June 1940 taught lessons that have had to be learned time and again throughout history: The availability of allies is inversely proportional to the need for them, and yes, the enemy can be very efficient.

Once military planners accept that they must rely strictly on their own resources, they no longer ask, “What kind of war would we like to fight?” but rather: “What kind of war do our resources allow us to fight? What are our real possibilities? Are we strongest on land or on the sea? Where does our strength
lie?” In the case of the Swiss, there really was only one answer: Much as we would like to defend our country against all comers, we must recognize that if we play all our cards right we can hold out for a time—and that only in the Alps.

Consider the topography of Switzerland
(
fig. 2
)
. The northern part of the country consists of the broad end of the Rhine valley. The west is the broad end of the Rhône valley. The northwest is the broad Aare valley feeding into the Rhine. The southern tip consists of the Ticino valley. In the lower middle is a mountainous mass resting mostly on the Italian border. In the middle of this mass is the St. Gotthard Massif, from which roughly the Rhône heads west, the Rhine east, and the Ticino south. This is the roof of Europe, where Italian, French, and German ethnicities meet. This is the home of the 1 percent of Swiss who speak the ancient Romansch language and live in picture postcard settings. At their beginning, these valleys are high, narrow, and steep. The natural use of this topography for defense consists in blocking the three valleys at the points where they broaden, while also blocking the passes that lead to them laterally from the north and south.

Controlling the main entrance from the south involves blocking the St. Gotthard pass—easy enough in the summer, and no job at all during the eight snowy months. The Swiss had built a fortress guarding the pass. The other passes into Switzerland from the south, guarded by mountains like the Matterhorn and Monte Rosa, are militarily impracticable. At the northeast entrance of the Rhine valley is the fortress of Sargans, while the St. Maurice fortress guards the Rhône entrance to the south-west. The northern lateral gateways into the region are short, steep, Alpine valleys through places like the Bernese Oberland, difficult enough to travel without military opposition. The only partial exception is the valley leading up and south from Lake Lucerne.

 

Here then was an area into which any army could fruitfully concentrate its defensive resources, however limited. The great shortcoming of this natural bastion is that it contains little to defend: its great metropolises have names like Chur, Brig, St. Moritz, and Andermatt, better known for skiing than for economic productiveness. While it did not take genius to notice this natural redoubt, it took a peculiar combination of single-mindedness and desperation to use it as the Swiss ended up doing.

Here we must return to the central point of the German army's assessment of what it would take to defeat the Swiss in 1940: only about as much as it had taken to beat the Belgian army—
unless
a substantial portion of the Swiss army should manage to fall back into the Alps. Indeed, the first draft of the German contingency plan for the invasion of Switzerland, dated June 25, 1940, says that “a well-ordered retreat into mountainous regions” would “retard the military decision.” Twice more that summer, on August 6 and 12, German staffs produced versions of the plan. The differences between them lay in the number of divisions assigned, their precise objectives, and the line of demarcation between German and Italian forces. The final version, which bears the signature of General Franz Halder, chief of the
Oberkommando Des Heeres
, cut the number of divisions to be employed from twenty-one to eleven, while raising the number of armored divisions to four. But the primary military objective remained the same: to get behind the Swiss army fast enough to “prevent the retreat of the Swiss divisions massed on the northern frontier in the high mountains.”
¹³
By January 1944, after the Swiss army had in fact fortified its Alpine region,
the German military attaché in Bern wrote that conquering it would be a difficult task. But by then Germany's big worries elsewhere had become even bigger. Indeed, in 1944–1945 the same German officers who made these judgments about the Swiss mountain redoubt believed that their own best chances against prevailing foes was for themselves to retire into the Alps.

One of the oldest truths of military science is that an outnumbered army that withdraws in good order into narrow places
ipso facto
reduces its exposure to just the entrances, where it forces its superior pursuer to fight on even terms numerically and at a tactical disadvantage. Thus the Spartans delayed the Persians at Thermopylae, and Demosthenes' Athenians stood off the Spartans on Pylos's rocky beach.
¹⁴
At the least, defeating a Swiss army ensconced in its mountains would cost time, resources, and embarrassment. Such an army would surely interrupt traffic through the St. Gotthard and Simplon tunnels, and would likely blow them up. In the worst case it could launch counterattacks for years, making it difficult to profit from occupying the rest of the country. It would also provide a focus for resistance in the heart of Europe while Germany was still facing deadly foes.
This worst case would be most likely if the Alps were to be occupied not by whatever remnants of the Swiss army had managed to escape the German armored pincers, but rather by an undefeated Swiss army that had established itself in the redoubt, amassed supplies, and built fortifications.
This became obvious to Swiss and Germans alike. Yet for the Swiss army to avail itself of advantages so natural, so rational, required some unnatural, even irrational decisions.

After June 1940 there was no question in any Swiss military mind that if the Germans attacked, the Swiss army sooner or later would be broken and its remnants forced to take refuge in
the Alps. No one questioned the need to prepare supplies and fortifications to receive this remnant—the greater the preparations, the more credible Switzerland's pretense to independence. The objections were about all the unpalatable conclusions to which this logic led: Most of the population would be abandoned to the Nazis' tender mercies, much of the country's productive capacity would have to be blown up, and, perhaps worst of all, the very preparation of such a drastic course would provoke Germany to be harsher toward Switzerland than otherwise.