DR ROBIN HAVERS is Senior - Higher Intellect · DR ROBIN HAVERS is Senior Lecturer in War Studies at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, ... combined forces of Great Britain, France,

DR ROBIN HAVERS is SeniorLecturer in War Studies atthe Royal Military AcademySandhurst, following degreesfrom Queen Mary College,University of London and LSE.He has published a number ofarticles and his book, The ChangiPrisoner of War Camp: From Myth

to History, will be publishedby Curzon Press in 2002.

PROFESSOR ROBERT O'NEILL,AO D.PHIL. (Oxon), Hon D.Litt.(ANU), FASSA, Fr Hist S,is the Series Editor of the EssentialHistories. His wealth of knowledgeand expertise shapes the seriescontent and provides up-to-the-minute research and theory. Bornin 1936 an Australian citizen, heserved in the Australian army(1955-68) and has held a numberof eminent positions in historycircles, including the ChicheleProfessorship of the History ofWar at All Souls College,University of Oxford, 1987-2001,and the Chairmanship of theBoard of the Imperial WarMuseum and the Council of theInternational Institute forStrategic Studies, London.He is the author of many booksincluding works on the GermanArmy and the Nazi party, andthe Korean and Vietnam wars.Now based in Australia on hisretirement from Oxford he isthe Chairman of the Councilof the Australian StrategicPolicy Institute.

Essential Histories

The Second World War (2)Europe 1939-1943

Essential Histories

The Second World War (2)Europe 1939-1943

Robin Havers OSPREYPUBLISHING

First published in Great Britain in 2002 by Osprey Publishing,

Elms Court, Chapel Way. Botley, Oxford OX2 9LP. UK

Email: [email protected]

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ISBN 184176 447 7

Editor: Rebecca Cullen

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This book is one of six titles on the Second World War in the

Osprey Essential Histories series

Contents

Introduction

Chronology

Background to war

The gathering storm

Warring sides

The road to war

Outbreak

'I have determined on a solution by force'

The fighting

Hitler strikes

Portrait of a soldier

- Donald Edgar

World around war

The home front

Portrait of a civilian

Colin Perry

How this period of the war ended

The end of the beginning

Conclusion and consequences

A world at war

Further reading

Index

7

11

13

22

31

40

71

75

86

89

91

93

94

Introduction

At 11.00 am on 11 November 1918, theFirst World War came to an end. Thecombined forces of Great Britain, France,Italy, and the USA had defeated the armies ofGermany, Austria-Hungary, and Turkey. Thiswar cost the lives of around 7 millioncombatants and a further 7 million civilians,although exact totals are difficult to ascertain.During the four years between 1914 and1918, the 'Great War,' as it was being referredto even during the fighting, redefined theparameters of the experience of war.

The First World War was the firsttrue 'industrial' war, where thenineteenth-century advances in technologyand modes of production were harnessed toan insatiable war machine - with terrifyingresults. The impact of new and moreefficient killing methods, backed by virtuallythe whole social, political, and economicinfrastructure of the warring nations,produced a war of destruction unparalleledin human history. The cost of victory wassuch that in terms of casualty figures alonethere was little to choose between winnerand loser. At all levels of society - politicians,generals, ordinary soldiers, and the civilianpopulation - there was a belief and a hopethat this was the 'war to end all wars' andthat in this fashion the tremendous sacrificewould not have been in vain.

Of course, tragically, the Great War didnot prove to be the end of war. Instead, inmany ways the Great War typified the futureof war and not its past. The manner inwhich the war was fought, with an emphasison the full utilization of all availableresources and the involvement of the wholepopulace, pointed the way forward andoffered a glimpse of how wars might befought in years to come.

To those who witnessed the Armistice in1918, the possibility of another major

European conflict within their lifetime musthave seemed an unimaginable horror, yetthat was precisely what was to happen.Despite the shock of the Great War, of theendless lists of dead and wounded publisheddaily in newspapers across Britain, Germany,and France, despite the widespread revulsionat war itself that the Great War engendered,Europe had barely 20 years of peace to enjoy.In 1939 Europe was plunged again into amajor conflagration, and this time the cost,incredibly, would be even higher than1914-18 in lives, in property, and,significantly, in morality.

As with the First World War, the SecondWorld War began in Europe as a result of theactions of an aggressive Germany. Where theSecond World War differed markedly from itspredecessor, however, was in why the warwas fought. The Second World War was notfought for material aggrandizement or forpower-political advantage, although thesefactors had a considerable bearing on thecourse of the war. Fundamentally, theSecond World War was fought because ofpolitical ideas - ideologies.

Political extremism in post-First WorldWar Germany brought to power Adolf Hitler,a man convinced of his own infallibility andalmost divine calling to lead Germany tovictory in a race war that would establish theGermans in their rightful position ofpreeminence in a new global order. Hitlerintended to lead the German people in a warof conquest in which the inherentsuperiority of the German race would bedemonstrated and Germany's racial andideological competitors would be destroyed,leaving Germany at the helm of a unifiedEurope. This ideological dimensionunderpinned the reasons for the fighting andalso exercised an enormous bearing on howthe fighting was conducted.

8 Essential Histories • The Second World War (2)

Hitler at the presentation of standards parade. (AKG Berlin)

Introduction 9

Up to August 1939, Adolf Hitler's Germanyhad achieved many of her initial, territorial,ambitions through a combination of threatand belligerent diplomacy. In August 1939,Hitler felt sufficiently confident to abandondiplomacy as his principal weapon andinstead to use military force to overwhelmGermany's eastern neighbor, Poland. Hitler'sinvasion of Poland was the event thatprecipitated the Second World War. Britainand France were committed to Poland'sindependence and had pledged to come toher aid in the event of a German attack. TheBritish and French governments issued anultimatum to Germany, demanding herwithdrawal. Hitler dismissed this threat,believing that the French and British wereunlikely to do anything to stop the Germaninvasion. When Germany failed to respond tothe ultimatum, Britain and France werebrought into another war and the SecondWorld War was born.

However, unlike the attritional struggle andstalemate of the First World War, the SecondWorld War was fought to quite a differenttempo, initially at least. In the first ninemonths of the Second World War, Germany'smilitary triumphs were nothing less thanastonishing. She invaded and conqueredPoland in little over a month, aided by anexpedient alliance with the Soviet Union,which enthusiastically helped Germany todismember and divide Poland. During thecourse of this opening campaign, Britain andFrance did nothing to come to Poland's aid.

The German invasion of Poland wasfollowed by an attack on Norway and then,when Hitler's forces were fully prepared, onthe combined British and French forces in thewest. In a brilliant, if fortuitous campaign, theFrench and their Belgian, Dutch, and Britishallies (the British in the form of a large armydispatched to the Continent) were defeated inbarely six weeks. By June 1940 all continentalEurope, from Moscow to Madrid, hadsuccumbed to Germany, was allied to her, orwas neutral. Hitler's Germany had achieved ina little over nine months what ImperialGermany, the Germany of Kaiser Wilhelm,had failed to do over the course of four years.

After the fall of France and the loss ofmuch of the British army's heavy equipmentduring the fighting and the hasty evacuationfrom Dunkirk, Britain faced a desperate battleto maintain her freedom against whatappeared to be an irresistible tide of Germansuccess. During what became known as the'Battle of Britain,' a struggle in effect for airsuperiority, Germany suffered her first majorsetback of the war. Tenacious Royal Air Force(RAF) fighter pilots, mainly British but withmany Australians, Americans, Canadians, NewZealanders, Poles, Czechs, and others amongthem, denied the Germans the freedom of theskies that they needed to launch theirprojected invasion of the British Isles.

Unable to implement Operation Sea Lion,the code name for the invasion of Britain,Hitler instead began planning for what heconsidered to be the main prize: the SovietUnion. Before this, however, Hitler's forcesalso occupied Greece and Yugoslavia andbecame active in North Africa in support ofItalian forces. On 22 June 1941, Hitler'sarmed forces turned eastwards, attacking theSoviet Union in Operation Barbarossa andwidening the war dramatically. On 12 July,Britain and the Soviet Union signed amutual assistance agreement to fight theircommon enemy together. On 11 December1941, following the surprise Japanese attackon the American Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor,Germany also declared war on the USA,widening the war still further and, in doingso, increasing the odds considerably onconclusive German victory (see The SecondWorld War (1) The Pacific War and The SecondWorld War (5) The Eastern Front in this series).

Adolf Hitler's Germany, at the zenith of herpower, now faced a formidable array ofopponents: the largest empire in the world,the British; the state with the largest armedforces, the Soviet Union; and the nation thatpossessed the largest economy and probablythe greatest latent potential of all, the USA.The German offensive in the Soviet Union,after some impressive early success, did notbring about the decisive and swift victorythat was required. Whether Germany had achance to win this war decisively is a matter


of considerable debate. Certainly, her failure toknock the Soviet Union out of the war beforethe USA was able to make her impact felteffectively meant that Germany could onlyrealistically achieve a draw of somedescription. The ferocity with which Germanyhad waged the war, however, especially in theeast, meant that her foes were in no mood forcompromise and, following a conference atCasablanca in early 1943, demanded nothingshort of unconditional surrender.

Once the initiative had passed fromGermany to her opponents and the warbecame attritional, there could be only onelogical outcome, although Germany'sresistance to the bitter end meant that thisconclusion was reached with the loss ofmore, rather than fewer, lives and withgreater damage. From early 1943, after theBattle of Stalingrad, the Soviets graduallypushed back the German forces and in June1944 the western allies invaded occupiedFrance and began to drive the Germans backfrom the west. The hard-pressed Germans,obliged to fight a two-front war and bombedmercilessly from the air, fought on until May1945. On 8 May 1945, the new GermanChancellor, Admiral Dönitz - Hitler'ssuccessor of a mere eight days - surrenderedunconditionally to the Allies: Great Britain,the USA, the Soviet Union, and France.

In the ruins of Hitler's Germany - theReich he had claimed would last 1,000 years

- it was, symbolically, the USA and theSoviet Union who linked up first on theElbe River. These two extra-European powerswould be the new determinants of the worldorder in the postwar years, as Britain andFrance, the two preeminent Europeanpowers, reluctantly redefined theirrespective roles on the world stage,exhausted by the demands of two wars inshort succession.

The first four years of the Second WorldWar - the period covered in this book -witnessed the rise and gradual fall of Germanhegemony in Europe. The book examineshow the Second World War began, first bylooking at the legacy of the First World Warand then by exploring Adolf Hitler's actions,which precipitated the war itself. The bookalso examines the role of Nazi ideology ininfluencing how the war would be fought.The major campaigns of the first four yearsare then chronicled: the German invasion ofPoland; the Norway campaign; the fall ofFrance and the Low Countries; the 'miracle'of Dunkirk and then the subsequent 'Battleof Britain.' The book describes how theBritish tried to hit back at German-occupiedEurope, with the disastrous Dieppe raid andthe development of the controversialstrategic bomber offensive. There are alsoaccounts of life in occupied Germany andof the experiences of war for both a civilianand a soldier.

Chronology

1938 12 March German army marchesinto Austria13 March Austria is incorporatedinto the greater German Reich28 March Adolf Hitler encouragesthe German minority inCzechoslovakia to agitate for thebreak-up of the state11 August Czechs opennegotiations with the Germans afterBritain and France apply pressureon them to do so12 August Germans begin tomobilize4 September Sudeten Germans rejectoffers of autonomy for theSudetenland7 September The French begin tomobilize12 September Hitler demands thatthe Czechs concede to Germanclaims on the Sudetenland15 September British Prime MinisterChamberlain visits Hitler at hismountain retreat at Berchtesgaden,where Hitler affirms hisdetermination to annex theSudetenland completely18 September Britain andFrance agree to try to persuade theCzechs to concede territory in whichthere are more than 50 percentGermans22 September Chamberlain meetsHitler at Godesberg, where Hitlerdemands the immediate Germanoccupation of the Sudetenland29 September After negotiations,Chamberlain, Mussolini, Daladier,and Hitler agree to transfer theSudetenland to Germany whileguaranteeing Czechoslovakia'sexisting borders

30 September Hitler andChamberlain sign the 'peace in ourtime' document1 October Germans begin theiroccupation of the Sudetenland5 October Czech premier, Benes,resigns

1939 15 March German troops occupyPrague28 March Hitler denounces the1934 nonaggression pact withPoland16 April Soviet Union proposes adefensive alliance with France andBritain, but this offer is rejected27 April Britain introducesconscription; Hitler abnegates the1935 Anglo-German naval treaty22 May Hitler and Mussolini signthe 'Pact of Steel'11 August Belated Anglo-Frenchovertures to Soviet Union23 August Soviet Union andGermany unveil a nonaggressiontreaty, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact,which contains a secret clauseconcerning the dismembermentof Poland25 August Britain and Polandsign a mutual assistance pact28 August Poles reject negotiationswith Germans1 September Germans invadePoland2 September Britain and Franceissue Germany with ultimatumsover Poland3 September Britain andFrance declare war onGermany17 September Soviet Unioninvades eastern Poland


30 September Soviet Union andGermany partition Poland; the BEFarrives in France

1940 9 April Germany invades Norway14 April British forces land inNorway2 May British forces evacuated fromNorway10 May Chamberlain resigns;Churchill takes over as PrimeMinister; Germany invades France28 May Belgium surrenders29 May-3 June Operation Dynamo22 June France surrendersJune-September Battle of Britain

1941 22 June Operation Barbarossa beginsDecember Japan bombs PearlHarbor; Germany declares war onUSA

1942 26 May Anglo-Soviet treaty ongreater cooperation in war againstGermany14 August Raid on Dieppe fails

1943 January Churchill and Rooseveltdemand 'unconditional surrender' ofNazi GermanyFebruary Last German forcessurrender at StalingradJuly Allied landings in Sicily.

Background to war

The gathering storm

There are many considerations that madethe outbreak of the Second World Warpossible. What made the war inevitable wasone man: Adolf Hitler. Once Hitler hadachieved power in Germany, war was certainto come. The combination of circumstancesthat allowed a man like Hitler to seize power,maintain it, and then take the opportunitiespresented to him on the international stage,however, were less inevitable and far morecomplicated.

Hitler made skillful use of the politicaland economic turmoil of post-First WorldWar Germany. He also capitalized on theunderlying sentiment in the army andamong more right-wing elements of Germansociety, that Germany's defeat in the FirstWorld War was attributable to a 'stab in theback' by socialists and communists at home,rather than to a conclusive military defeat,which of course is what had actuallyhappened. Hitler was able to focus thesefeelings more strongly courtesy of theprovisions of the Treaty of Versailles, whichended the war. This constant reminder of

Germany's national humiliation was a usefultool for Hitler's broader aims.

Hitler's vehicle to power was the NaziParty, 'Nazi' being an abbreviation ofNationalsozialistische. Hitler brought hispersonal dynamism to this ratherdirectionless party and with it his own ideas.In particular, he brought a 'virulent strain ofextreme ethnic nationalism' and the beliefthat war was the means by which the mostracially pure and dynamic people couldaffirm their position as the rulers of a globalempire. Mere revisions of the map wereinconsequential in Hitler's larger scheme ofthings. His ultimate goals lay in the east,where a war of annihilation was to be wagedagainst the Soviet Union.

The Soviet Union was the incarnation ofmany evils as far as Hitler was concerned.His eventual war in the east was designed todestroy the 'Judeo-Bolshevik' conspiracy that

The signing of the Treaty of Versailles, signed by the Alliedand Associated Powers and Germany, on 28 June 1918.(Ann Ronan Picture Library)


he saw emanating from Moscow, and toremove the Slavic population, considered byNazi ideology as Untermenschen orsubhumans. The territory obtained would beeffectively colonized by people of Germanicstock, enlarging and ensuring the survival ofthe Third Reich. It was this element thatdistinguished 'Hitler's war' from previouswars and Hitler's Germany from theGermany of the Kaisers. Germany, however,was no stranger to conflict.

A united Germany

The nation state of Germany is acomparatively new phenomenon. Only in1871 did a united Germany come intoexistence. In 1866 the German state ofPrussia decisively defeated Austria in theSeven Weeks' War and in doing so assuredPrussian dominance of the collection ofGerman-speaking states in central andeastern Europe. Following Prussia's furthersuccess against France, in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, a united Germany wasproclaimed on 18 January 1871, in the Hallof Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles, justoutside Paris. Prussia was the largest Germanstate and also the most advancedeconomically and militarily. The Prussian

capital, Berlin, became the capital of thisnew European power and the Prussian king,at this point Wilhelm I, became the firstEmperor or Kaiser of a united Germany.

The ambitions of the new state grewconsiderably with the accession to thethrone of Imperial Germany of KaiserWilhelm II in 1888. Wilhelm's foreign policywas an aggressive one. He sacked hisChancellor, Bismarck, the man whosepolitical maneuvering had largely created theunited Germany, and determined onbuilding Germany up into a world, ratherthan just a European power. Wilhelm'sreckless desire to acquire colonial possessionsmet with little success in the years prior to1914, but his determination to build a navyto rival the British one inevitably broughthim into conflict with Britain.

Wilhelm, himself a grandson of QueenVictoria, allowed and encouraged a beliefthat Germany must provide for herself in anincreasingly competitive world. In 1914 theopportunity came for Germany to throwherself against France, her nearestcontinental rival. When Archduke FranzFerdinand, the heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, was assassinated, Germany graspedher chance enthusiastically. The rival power

Bismarck in the Hall of Mirrors,Versailles. (AKG Berlin)

Background to war 15

blocs, complicated alliance systems, andpowder keg diplomatic atmosphere ensuredthat there was no repetition of thecomparatively short wars of the mid- to latenineteenth century. The First World War, theGreat War, had begun.

Military defeat and theWeimar Republic

After four years of appalling slaughter,Germany was defeated decisively in 1918.Kaiser Wilhelm abdicated just days beforethe Armistice was signed and a left-winggovernment took over the country. This newgovernment was obliged to sign what theGermans, at least, perceived to be an unfairdiktat masquerading as a peace settlement.The Treaty of Versailles that formallybrought the war to an end was acontroversial settlement. The treaty laid theblame for starting the war squarely uponGerman, saddled her with enormousreparations payments, and also took awaylarge areas of Germany territory, in manycases creating new states.

All of these considerations would have abearing on the outbreak of the Second WorldWar, although in all probability the failure toimplement the treaty adequately was asserious a factor as its provisions. Ofparticular significance also was the fact thatthe government that signed the humiliatingtreaty found itself being blamed for doing so,when in reality it had little choice. TheSocial Democrats were also blamed for theGerman capitulation - many right-wingersand particularly the army considered thatthe German people had not been defeated,but rather had been 'stabbed in the back'by the government. This myth gainedwidespread credence in Germany duringthe interwar years.

In the early years after the war, Germanysuffered along with most of the continent andpolitical extremism was rife. The new Germanrepublic was established in the small town ofWeimar, later to become famous for itsproximity to the Buchenwald concentration

camp. Hence this period of German history,the first ever of genuine German democracy,is known as the Weimar Republic. Weimarwas chosen in preference to Berlin as the siteof the new government because of Berlin'sassociations with Prussian militarism. Berlinwas also a less than safe place.

The Weimar government was assailedfrom both sides of the political spectrum.Extremists fought in many large Germancities and occasional attempts were made byleft and right to overthrow the government;the insurrection led by Wolfgang Kapp(known as the 'Kapp Putsch') was one of themost serious. The constitutional system thatunderpinned the Weimar government alsocomplicated matters. The system was sorepresentative of political opinion that itproduced only minority governments orfragile coalitions that had little opportunityto achieve anything. Meanwhile,international tensions rose when Germanysuspended her reparations payments, as aresult of which the French, eager to drawevery pfennig from the Germans, occupiedthe Ruhr region in 1923. These internationalconcerns were exacerbated by soaringinflation, with the German mark beingtraded at 10,000 million to the pound.

Hitler's rise to power

Amidst all this social, economic, andpolitical turbulence, one radical amongmany was making a name for himself. AdolfHitler, an Austrian by birth, had served inthe German army throughout the FirstWorld War. In 1923 Hitler, who had becomeleader of the fledgling Nazi Party (then theGerman Workers' Party, Deutsche ArbeiterPartei) by virtue of his personal dynamismand skills of oratory, organized his firstclumsy attempt to seize power. However, theMunich Putsch, on 9 November 1923, was afailure and earned him five years inLandsberg prison.

Despite the sentence, Hitler served onlynine months in rather plush conditions. Theauthorities, many of whom had some


The freikorps (above) were dissolved in 1921 and manymembers later went on to join Hitler's SA.

sympathy for Hitler's position, werepersuaded to release him early, after Hitlertemporarily resigned the leadership of theNazi Party and agreed to refrain fromaddressing public meetings on politicalissues. However, Hitler neatly circumventedthese restrictions by moving his meetingsinto the private homes of his wealthiersupporters.

While Hitler was in jail, dictating hismemoirs and thoughts, later to be publishedas Mein Kampf, the situation in Germanyimproved considerably. A new scheme, theDawes Plan, was accepted to rescheduleGermany's repayments, which now reflectedmore closely Germany's ability to pay. It alsoallowed Germany to borrow substantially,mainly from the USA, and fueled a briefflurry of credit-induced economic prosperity.Germany later ratified a more comprehensiverestructuring of the payments in the YoungPlan, which improved her economicsituation.

Similarly, the efforts of a new Chancellor,Gustav Stresemann, led to Germany enteringthe League of Nations in 1926 and signingthe Treaty of Locarno with Britain and

France, which helped to thaw theinternational situation. This treaty confirmedthe existing borders of the participatingstates of western Europe. The prevailingfeeling of reconciliation appeared to usher ina more constructive period of internationalrelations. Importantly, however, Locarnofailed to guarantee the frontiers of Germanyin the east, suggesting to many in Germanythat the western powers would not be asconcerned if Germany were to attempt toreclaim lost territory there.

However, the improvements in Germany'sposition by 1929 were undone totally by anunforeseen event that would havetremendous ramifications for the world atlarge. On 29 October 1929 came the WallStreet crash. The immediate effect was thatall the American loans that had beenartificially buoying up the world economywere recalled. The effects on the globaleconomy were dramatic enough, butGermany, whose tenuous economic recoveryhad been fueled by extensive borrowingfrom the USA, was among the hardest hit.This new round of economic hardship gaveHitler another opportunity to make politicalcapital, and he seized it with both hands.

Political violence on the streets of Germancities characterized the years between 1929


and 1933 as Nazi fought communist andGermany's economy labored under thepressures of worldwide recession andreparations. It was Hitler and the Nazis whopromised a brighter future for Germany, andon 29 January 1933, the President of theGerman Republic, Paul von Beneckendorffund Hindenburg, appointed Adolf Hitler asChancellor of Germany. In the elections ofthe following March, the Nazi Party received44 percent of all votes cast. Even in theoverly representational system of the WeimarRepublic, this was still sufficient to give theNazis 288 out of the 647 seats in theReichstag. Hitler made ample use of hisposition, passing various 'Enabling Laws' tomake him effectively a legal dictator.

Once Hitler took power, he beganimmediately to destroy the old structures ofsociety and rebuild them in the mode ofNational Socialism. All political parties otherthan the Nazi Party were banned.Progressively, Jews were excluded from

Chaos in the streets during the Wall Street crash. .(Topham Picturepoint)

society and publicly shunned, culminatingin the anti-Jewish pogrom of Kristallnacht in1938 when Jewish property was vandalized.Concentration camps were also opened for'undesirables' where hard work was the orderof the day - the extermination role of thesecamps was as yet in the future. Hitlerattempted to get Germans back to work withan ambitious program of public works, theplanning and construction of the Autobahnenbeing the most famous.

Hitler was not above removing anyonewho stood in his way. On 'the night of thelong knives' he ordered the deaths of his oldcomrade and supporter Ernest Röhm, head ofthe Sturmabteilung (SA), and severalhundred senior SA men. The SA was a largegroup of paramilitaries who had providedsome of Hitler's earlier supporters. Thesemen were a private army for the Nazi Party


Germany and Central Europe after the Treaty of Versailles


and kept order at political meetings as wellas engaging in physical battles withcommunists and other opponents.Increasingly, however, Hitler doubted theloyalty of Röhm, and the activities of theSA alienated the army, whose support Hitlerneeded. In the wake of the SA emerged theSchutzstaffel (SS), under Heinrich Himmler.In removing the army's potential rivals, theSA, Hitler hoped to get the army more firmlyon his side. Hitler also made the army sweara personal oath of allegiance to him as the'Führer of the German Reich and people andCommander-in-Chief of the armed forces.'

At this time, Hitler began to revise theTreaty of Versailles. The treaty affectedGermany in a number of ways. First, she lostin the region of one-eighth of her territoryand one-tenth of her population: theprovinces of Alsace and Lorraine, seized byPrussia as spoils of the 1870 war, werereturned to France; Eupen-Malmedy wasgiven to Belgium, and Schleswig-Holstein toDenmark. The most serious territorial losseswere in the east, where Germany lost a largearea of West Prussia to the recreated state ofPoland. This left East Prussia cut off fromGermany and accessible, by land, only acrossPolish territory - known as the 'PolishCorridor.' The city at the head of thiscorridor, Danzig, was to be a free city underthe auspices of the League of Nations.Germany also lost territory to the new stateof Czechoslovakia, created out of the ruins ofthe Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Importantly, these territorial losses in theeast did not include a transfer of theirGerman-speaking populations, who largely-remained in situ and ripe for use as politicalpawns in the future. At the end of the SecondWorld War, when Germany was once againdismembered, the Allies did not make thesame mistake again and expelled millions ofGermans to ensure that they would notbecome troublesome and vocal minorities inthe future. Under the Treaty of Versailles,Germany was also forbidden to unite withAustria, the Rhineland was to bedemilitarized in perpetuity, and all Germany'scolonies were handed over to the Allies.

Germany's military capabilities weredrastically reduced; she was to have no majornavy or air force and only 100,000 men inthe army. Germany was also required to pay ahuge indemnity, £6,600 million. Perhaps themost controversial provision of the treaty wasArticle 231, the so-called war guilt clause, inwhich Imperial Germany, and Germanyalone, was blamed for starting the war.

Much has been written about how theTreaty of Versailles played a role in theoutbreak of the Second World War. Despitewhat turned out to be Marshal Foch'saccurate prediction, that 'this [the treaty] isnot a peace but an armistice for 20 years,' thetreaty itself did not cause the Second WorldWar. It certainly failed to prevent anotherwar, but then the treaty was never enforcedas it was originally meant to be. Nevertheless,the Treaty of Versailles provided Adolf Hitlerwith a useful vehicle for inciting Germanhatred. The inequities represented by thetreaty, in particular the losses of land that inmany cases had been German for hundredsof years, were a daily reminder that Germanyhad lost the war. Although the provisions ofthe treaty itself did not lead directly to war,the fact of the treaty was enormously usefulfor Hitler's purposes.

Hitler did not take long before he beganto repudiate various elements of the treaty.In March 1935 he reintroduced conscriptioninto Germany, announced that thepeacetime army would be raised to500,000 men, and also brazenly announcedthe existence of an army air arm, theLuftwaffe. All were in direct contraventionof the treaty, yet none drew firm responsesfrom the Allies, Britain and France. Hitleralso signed a naval agreement with Britainallowing the new German navy a proportionof the tonnage of the Royal Navy.

In 1936 Hitler chanced his arm stillfurther by reoccupying the demilitarizedRhineland. France was concerned by thisresurgence of German confidence, but wasunwilling to act without firm support fromBritain. Many historians have interpretedthis failure to act against Hitler at this earlystage as disastrous. Certainly Hitler gained :


German troops reenter the Rhineland on 7 March 1936.(AKG Berlin)

strength from his inital successes, becomingconvinced that the British and French weretoo weak to stop him. Indeed, during thereoccupation of the Rhineland, Germantroops were instructed to retreat if theFrench merely looked as though they wouldoffer some resistance. On 14 October 1933,Germany withdrew from the League ofNations. In 1936 she sent men, aircraft, andnaval vessels to fight in the Spanish CivilWar, providing the new armed forces with areal proving ground for their tactics andequipment.

Responses to Hitler

There are several reasons why little was doneto stop Hitler at this early juncture. First,although Hitler was considered somethingof an extremist, he was not yet themegalomaniac the world now knows him tobe. Although much of what was to followwas mentioned in Mein Kampf, few outsideGermany had bothered to read this long anddull work. Paradoxically, Hitler was alsoconsidered a positive development by many.His dynamic leadership appeared to bringbadly needed order and stability toGermany. David Lloyd-George, the wartimeBritish Prime Minister, spoke of Hitler's


achievements in getting the unemployedback to work and famously visited Hitler inGermany, being greeted by him as 'the manwho won the war.' Lloyd-George was neitherthe first nor the last senior politician to behoodwinked by Hitler.

The new Germany was also considered tobe a valuable bulwark against the threat ofcommunism from the east and Hitler'sauthoritarian regime was seen as a smallprice to pay for such reassurance. This fearof communism was a significant force ininterwar Europe and it prevented anymeaningful development of an alliancebetween the western allies and the SovietUnion until Hitler had shown his handcompletely.

Importantly, there were many on theAllied side who believed the Treaty ofVersailles to be a mistake, neither harshenough to punish nor lenient enough toconciliate. The treaty was greeted with lessenthusiasm than might have been expectedin some quarters. The eminent Britisheconomist John Maynard Keynes resignedfrom his position with the British teamresponsible for negotiating the treaty amiddisagreements over what form it wouldeventually take. Keynes's criticism foundform in his book The Economic Consequencesof the Peace, and this began the subtlechanging of opinion, at the highest levelsat least, in Britain. Such feelings helpexplain why there was widespread antipathytoward enforcing such a treaty.

There were other factors that militatedagainst a more unitary front towards thegrowing threat of Nazi aggression in Europe.There was still memory of the horrendouslegacy of the First World War. Thegeneration of politicians in office in the1930s had served in the trenches and knewfirsthand the cost of such a war. Thesesentiments had a profound echo in thepublic at large with the League of NationsPeace Ballot and the famous Oxford Uniondebate (when undergraduates debated and

Portrait of J. M. Keynes. the famous British economist.(Topham Picturepoint)

passed the motion 'this house will notfight again for King and Country') allcontributing to an air of pacifism. The beliefthat Hitler was at worst an ambiguous figurecombined with an overwhelming reluctanceto fight another war led to a profoundinertia and perhaps an unwillingness torecognize the threat even when it becameovert.

Underscoring the political vacillation andpopular mood was a concrete economicreason for avoiding a costly conflict. TheWall Street crash and the consequent GreatDepression had left most industrializedeconomies significantly weaker. Thefinancial muscle required to prosecuteanother war was simply unavailable throughthe early to mid-1930s. Ironically, eventhough Nazi Germany and Roosevelt'sAmerica introduced programs (such as theNew Deal in the USA) to stimulate theeconomy, it was rearmament that finallygot men back to work.

Warring sides

The road to war

The Second World War was fought betweenBritain, France, the USA, Poland, the SovietUnion and assorted smaller countries on oneside, and Germany, Italy, Romania, andHungary on the other. Matters are slightlycomplicated by the fact that the SovietUnion was allied to Germany from August1939 until June 1941 when Germanyattacked her. We will look here at Germany,France, Britain, and Poland, and makesmaller mention of the other participants.

Germany

The German armed forces at the outbreak ofthe war were perhaps the best prepared forthe ensuing conflict, although Germany didnot possess the largest army in 1939. TheGermans had worked out how best to utilizethe various new technological developmentsin weaponry and harnessed them effectivelyto traditional German tactics as well asoriginating new tactical ideas.

In the aftermath of the First World War,the German military faced a soberingreappraisal of their position. Despite themany variations of the 'stab in the back' idea,that Germany had lost the war not because ofmilitary defeat but instead by the actions ofleft-wing elements at home, the Germanarmed forces had been decisively defeated by1918. Senior German officers were only tooaware of where their shortcomings lay and setabout addressing them.

The German armed forces responded todefeat with a thorough examination of thereasons that underpinned it, and set aboutproviding practical military solutions to theirproblems. However, just as Germany hadsuffered extensive territorial loss as a result ofthe Treaty of Versailles, so too did she sufferconsiderable readjustment of the manning

and equipment levels of her armed forces. InNovember 1918, at the time of the Armistice,the Imperial German army could field in theregion of 4 million men. After the Versaillessettlement she was restricted to a formationthat numbered only 100,000 troops, of whom4,000 were officers. While this numberwas comparatively small, the men of the'100,000' Army would provide the nucleus ofthe enlarged army and their intensive trainingand proficiency would prove to be invaluable.

As well as these limitations on manpower,the German army was prohibited frompossessing or developing tanks and theGerman air force was abolished altogether.The German navy, much of which had beenscuttled at Scapa Flow as it was due to behanded over to the British, was confined to afew larger surface vessels from the pre-Dreadnought era, but was forbidden to haveU-boats at all. These apparent disadvantageswere overcome in a number of ways.

Under the enthusiastic and skillfulleadership of Colonel-General Hans vonSeeckt, many of the arrangements agreedupon at Versailles were sidestepped ornegated. First, the German military spent agreat deal of time thinking about the way inwhich their forces might be employed to facea larger enemy and also about why they hadfailed to win a victory between 1914 and1918. While the Germans were denied accessto new equipment, they considered how theymight employ such equipment in the likelyevent of restrictions on Germany being lifted.

The Germans also went to considerablelengths to circumvent the restrictions onequipment. In 1922 a bilateral agreement wasforged between Germany and BolshevikRussia, the two pariah states of Europe, tocooperate on military matters. The Germansgained training areas away from the pryingeyes of the Allies, while the Soviet Union

Warring sides 23

Hans von Seeckt (right). (AKG Berlin)


received technical aid. The training of pilotswas also carried out clandestinely, with manypilots learning the principles of flight throughthe new glider clubs that grew during the1920s and 1930s. When Hitler came to powerin January 1933, he brought with him aresolve and an ideology to make Germany agreat power once again. His accession broughta new commitment to rearmament and adetermination to reassert Germany'sinternational position.

When the new German army wasunleashed on the Poles in 1939, andespecially against the Anglo-French forces in1940, it exhibited a flexible technique ofcommand and control that proved thedifference between the German soldiers andtheir opponents. This idea had its roots in thepartially successful German spring offensive of1918 and stressed the idea of Auftragstaktic ormission command. This focused on the needfor all officers and NCOs to take decisions toachieve the goal of their mission, andencouraged initiative and freedom of actionon the ground rather than waiting for ordersfrom on high. This flexibility was aided by thedevelopment of wireless communications andthe fact that all German tanks were equippedwith radios.

In 1932 a Germany army captain namedBechtolsheim gave a lecture on Germanprinciples of war to the United States ArtillerySchool. He stressed the following ideas:

The German Army has of course its principlesas to what is to be done in war, but - pleasemark this well - no stereotyped rules as to how itis to be done. We believe that movement is thefirst element of war and only by mobile warfarecan any decisive results be obtained ... to doalways what the enemy does not expect and toconstantly [sic] change both the means and themethods and to do the most improbable thingswhenever the situation permits; it means to befree of all set rules and preconceived ideas. Webelieve that no leader who thinks or acts bystereotyped rules can ever do anything great,because he is bound by such rules. War is notnormal. It cannot therefore be won by ruleswhich apply in peacetime.

These ideas found their most effectiveexpression in the employment of tanks andsupporting arms acting in concert, and theywere aided by the ideas of General HeinzGuderian, often called the 'father of thePanzers' (tanks). The sum total of Germanideas of mission command and newtechnology would prove devastating in theearly years of the Second World War andwould introduce a new word to the militarylexicon, Blitzkrieg.

Great Britain

At the end of the First World War, it was theBritish army that appeared to lead the worldin terms of effective war fighting. The Britishskill in utilizing the all-arms concept (theinteraction of artillery, tanks, infantry, andair power) had been very apparent at the endof 1918. By 1939, however, this effective leadhad been lost. The reasons why this state ofaffairs developed are several.

Britain, like most of the major combatantsin the First World War, was 'war weary.' Inthe late 1920s a rash of books was publisheddetailing the experiences of British troops inthe war. Almost all written by officers, thesebooks played a significant role in defining orredefining the popular British perceptions ofthat conflict. Works such as SiegfriedSassoon's Memoirs of a Fox Hunting Man,Edmund Blunden's Undertones of War, andRobert Graves' Goodbye to All That (to namebut three) meshed well with a general sensethat the war was a tragedy, and rathereclipsed and replaced other modes ofremembrance. Certainly at this time therewere few books that celebrated the war as anunambiguous victory. In tandem with thisliterary response there came a wider, popularrevulsion against war in the more generalsense, underscored by the Peace Ballot. Withthis mood in the country and little moneygenerally, it is hardly surprising that defensebudgets were slashed.

In tandem with widespread anti-warsentiment, Britain also found herself in aprecarious economic position. Having

Warring sides 25

Siegfried Sassoon was one of the many poets andwriters who took part in the First World War andwhose experiences colored their writings. (TophamPicturepoint)

entered the war as the global economy'sprincipal creditor - the one to whom themost money was owed - she finished it asone of the largest debtor states. The cost ofthe war had been enormous, absorbingBritish reserves and also bringing about theloss of many of Britain's overseas marketswhen production of consumer goods wasswitched to war materials. At the end of thewar, British producers found that many oftheir prewar markets had been taken over byother countries, notably the USA. Indeed, itwas the USA that emerged as the economicvictor after 1918. Having capitalized on theabsence of traditional European competitionfor trade and markets between 1914 and1918, she also lent large amounts to theother Allied participants.

British strategy in the event of anotherwar initially focused upon facing theimagined threat of air attack. The idea that'the bomber will always get through'

informed British defense thinking from1934. To this end, priority was given tobuilding up the Royal Air Force (RAF) andestablishing the new 'radar' system to coverthe British coast. The Royal Navy, althoughno longer the unchallenged master of theseas, was still a formidable force. The Britisharmy was the only fully mobile army in 1939and the British Expeditionary Force (BEF)that was dispatched to France in 1939 wasstill a useful formation at 160,000 men. Theinterwar debate about the role of the tank inthe British army had largely been resolved by1939. The resolution had come in favor ofthose who believed that the tank should bethe essential element of any formation, butacting alone, not as a component of acohesive all-arms grouping.

France

In the interwar years, a great deal of security,real or imagined, was derived from the veryexistence of the French army. In March 1933,two months after Adolf Hitler becameChancellor of Germany, Winston Churchillmade one of his customary and oft-quotedexclamations, declaring: 'thank god for theFrench army!' To such as Churchill, still alone voice in the political wilderness in1933, the French army was a significantbulwark against future German aggression.Few in Britain, however, agreed with him.Indeed there were many who saw theposturing of France with regard to Germanyas the real threat to European stabilityand not Germany herself.

In many ways, France's experience of theFirst World War was quite different from thatof her British allies, and it certainly exerciseda far greater influence on her subsequentmilitary organization, doctrine, and tactics.While the British army fought in severaldifferent theaters and pioneered theemployment of tanks and the adoption ofall-arms techniques of fighting toward theend of the war, with great success, the Frenchsuccesses between 1914 and 1918 weregrounded in determinedly holding a defensive


line. This static mentality found both its mosteloquent expression and a source of nationalgrandeur in the heroic fighting at Verdun,where the French army had endured horrificcasualties yet had prevailed. Despite Frenchoffensive success and their own positiveexperiences of all-arms conflict toward theend of the First World War, French losses hadbeen so significant between 1914 and 1918that few Frenchmen would willingly go to warin the future.

The idea of the defense had a specialpoignancy for the French, as their losses in theFirst World War were taken on French soil andin defense of La République. It was no wonder,then, that future defensive arrangementsshould seek to learn from French successes and

The Maginot Line, constructed at massive cost, was thecornerstone of French defensive strategy. (Ann RonanPicture Library)

also to build on them to such an extent thatthe devastation of 1914-18 would not berepeated. The result was the creation of theenormous and costly Maginot Line, a vastsystem of interconnected fortresses, linkedunderground via railways, comprising barracksand hospitals, ammunition stores, and fueland ventilation systems that would allow theforts to continue to function - and fight -even if surrounded by the enemy. At 7 billionFrench francs, the final cost of the line was farmore than the original estimate.

The cost of construction and also the on-going cost of maintenance inevitably meantthat the funding available for other areas ofthe French armed forces was reduced greatly.Despite these considerations, however, therewere few in France who would dispute thenecessity of such an arrangement. MarshalPétain summed up the French national faithin such defenses, referring to them as 'lavish

Warring sides 27

with steel, sting}' with blood,' and after thehorrors of the trenches, few disagreed.

There was a weakness in the wholearrangement, in that the line did not extendthe length of the Franco-Belgian frontier - theobvious route for an invading army - and infact stretched only from Strasbourg as far asMontmédy. The reasons for this were partlypractical and partly economic as well as areluctance to exclude Belgium from analliance with France. If Belgium were left outof the Maginot Line, in all likelihood shewould once again revert to her previousneutrality - she had been neutral in 1914 -and thereby provide a conduit for Germanaggression. In the event, Belgium opted forneutrality anyway, effectively scupperingFrench plans to move into prepared positionson Belgian soil. Similarly, the Maginot Linedid not cover the area opposite the Ardennes,a densely wooded forest area, as it wasconsidered to be 'impenetrable' to modernarmored columns.

The sum total of these many considerations- a misplaced optimism in the strength of theMaginot Line, worries about the politicalposition of Belgium, financial concerns, andan unwillingness to conceive that offensive,maneuver-type operations might hold theupper hand in a future war - all led to thedevelopment of what would be termed the'Maginot mentality.' This amounted to a beliefin the superiority of the defensivearrangement of the Maginot Line and anunwillingness to believe or acknowledge thatwarfare might have moved on.

The Maginot Line was also tremendouslyimportant for the Germans. Almostunwittingly, it had imposed upon the Frencha strategic straitjacket. There was little chancethat, having shackled herself so firmly (andexpensively) to the defensive, France was likelyto go onto the attack. In 1935 the FrenchMinister of War, in a speech to the FrenchChamber of Deputies, asserted: 'How can westill believe in the offensive when we havespent thousands of millions to establish afortified barrier? Would we be mad enough toadvance beyond this barrier upon goodnessknows what adventure!' - • .

Not only had the French national mentalitybecome inextricably wedded to the defensive -a mindset both created and reinforced by theMaginot Line - but there were also otherpractical considerations. The Maginot Line hadbeen the product of tremendous investment indefense budgets and manpower. With theMaginot Line receiving so much of theavailable moneys for defense, it severelyrestricted other areas of defense spending. Evenhad the French army not been so deficient inthe means to adopt offensive operations, themeans to fund new equipment to that end wasabsent. The knowledge of this would obviouslyaid Adolf Hitler, who was reasonably securethat, whatever action he might take in theeast, it was highly unlikely that France wouldthreaten seriously the western border ofthe Reich.

The French army in the 1930s suffered froma number of problems, many of them reflectedin French life more widely. French troops wereunderpaid and undervalued, and the army wasriven by many of the social and politicaldivisions of the country at large. The Frencharmy continued to rely on telephonecommunication rather than radio. Similarly,the French failed to take on board the newpotential of tanks. The French army of 1918 didnot manage to enact the all-arms battle withany degree of conviction, generally reducingits tanks to the role of infantry support vehiclesthat were the means to the end of an infantrybreakthrough. This was despite developing :some excellent vehicles toward the end of thewar. The French all-arms battle generally gearedthe speed of the other elements down to thatof the slowest component, the infantry, ratherthan seeking to motorize the infantry and allowthem to maintain the speed of the armoredelements. Despite the protestations of a fewFrench officers during the interwar period,notably those of Charles de Gaulle, Frenchdoctrine remained stubbornly behind the times.

Belgium

The small Belgian army had played as active arole as it could during the First World War


and in the aftermath made serious efforts topreserve its security. The Belgians signeddefensive agreements with both Britain andFrance and endeavored to maintain a largestanding army, courtesy of conscription.However, by 1926 this commitment to areasonably strong standing army had largelybeen abandoned and a reliance on theinevitability of British and French support inthe event of war informed Belgium's defenseposture. The advent of Hitler in 1933prompted a renewal of Belgian militaryspending and by the time of the Anglo-French declaration of war, the Belgian armystood at nearly 600,000 men. The Belgianarmy, despite a number of modern andeffective weapons, planned to fight adefensive war in the event of her neutrality,reaffirmed with the Anglo-French declarationof war on Germany being breached.

Poland

The Poles were to have the dubiousdistinction of being Hitler's first militaryvictims. The performance of the Polish armyin the early battles of the Second World Warhas attracted considerable attention, if onlyfor the apparent futility of its desperateefforts to repel the German invaders. The

history of the Polish army is an interestingone. Poland, as an independent politicalentity, had effectively been off the map forthe 123 years before 1918. Successive'partitions' of Poland between Prussia,Imperial Russia, and the Austro-HungarianEmpire came to an end in 1918 when Polandwas restored by the Treaty of Versailles, atthe territorial expense of those same states.

Large numbers of Poles fought in the FirstWorld War, serving, ironically, in the armiesof Germany, Russia, and also Austria-Hungry.It was the formations of Polish Legionsraised by the Austro-Hungarians that were tohave the largest and most disproportionateimpact on the new army of independentPoland. A fledgling Polish army was soonestablished in the new Poland under thecommand of Jozef Pilsudski, the formercommander of the Polish Legions in theAustrian army. Despite the unpromisingorigins of this essentially disparate, 'rag-tag'grouping, the Polish army was to score anotable success. The Poles were bolstered bya number of additional Polish formations,most notably the 'Haller' army, a formationof 25,000 Polish-American volunteers.

In the aftermath of the First World Warand with the large empires of east and

Polish cavalry. (Topham Picturepoint)

Warring sides 29

central Europe collapsing, there followed ageneral free-for-all as many states struggledto seize territory and incorporate ethnic kinwithin the boundaries of the new states. ThePoles, emboldened by a number of localvictories against the new masters of Russia,the Bolsheviks, joined with Ukrainiannationalist forces to invade the Ukraine andfight the Red Army. After the Poles enjoyedinitial successes, the Red Army forced themall the way back to the gates of Warsaw.Then Pilsudski achieved an enormousreversal of Polish fortunes and defeated theRed Army so decisively that the Bolshevikswere obliged to conclude a humiliating peacesettlement, something that rankled throughthe 1920s and 1930s and certainlycontributed to Stalin's willingness todismember the country in 1939.

Polish tankettes. (Steve Zaloga)

Poland's strategic position wasunpromising. Sandwiched between twopowerful enemies, the Soviet Union to theeast and Germany to the west, the nightmarescenario for Poland was, of course, a two-front war. Poland's strategic predicament wasthe source of considerable concern to Polishplanners. In 1921 they managed to secure adefensive alliance with France. This obligedthe French to assist the Poles in the event ofGermany entering into a conflict that wasalready in progress between the Poles andRussia. If this criterion were fulfilled, Francewould attack Germany. This treaty hadobvious benefits for the French, whosediplomatic maneuvering in the interwar yearswas directed toward containing and restricting


Germany. The Poles also secured a treaty withthe Romanians that promised help againstRussia rather than Germany.

The Treaty of Locarno, signed in 1925between Britain, France and WeimarGermany, appeared to be a source of futuretrouble for Poland, guaranteeing as it did thefrontiers of western Europe. The obviousproblem lay in the fact that Germany, withher western borders secure from her mostvehement enemy, France, might take theopportunity to redress some of her manyterritorial grievances in the east. In amasterstroke of diplomatic collusion, Hitleragreed a nonaggression pact betweenGermany and Poland.

Despite the judgement of history on thePolish army in the war with Germany, that itwas fighting a thoroughly modern opponentwith nineteenth-century tactics andequipment, the Polish army was in fact weddedto a doctrine of maneuver. These tacticswere born of the successes and experiencesof the fast-moving Russo-Polish War, butunfortunately while the ideas were modern,the means by which they were to be realizedwere most definitely from a bygone era. Whilethe German ideas of maneuver utilized tanks,armored infantry, and self-propelled artillery,the Poles still placed their faith in cavalry andinfantry marching on foot. The resulting clashcould have only one winner.

Outbreak

'I have determined on asolution by force'

The Second World War began, effectively,with the German invasion of Poland. Thisevent, in itself, might have been acomparatively local incident. What wasrequired to turn it into a wider Europeanwar and a world war was the participationof Britain and France, which had bothpledged to come to Poland's aid in the eventof overt German aggression. The reasonswhy the British and French foundthemselves in this position may be tracedto several years previously.

German territorial ambitions

Hitler intended to restore German power andprestige in Europe. To do so he first believedthat it was necessary to secure the restitutionof the territory and people that Germanyhad been obliged to give up under the termsof the Versailles settlement in 1919. Once allGermans had been incorporated into aGermany that itself encompassed traditionalGerman territory, Hitler then had moreambitious plans. He intended that Germanyshould dominate Europe and conceived ofsuch a situation in distinctly Darwinianterms. The Aryan Germans woulddemonstrate their superiority over races,such as the Slavs of eastern Europe, throughwar in a 'survival of the fittest' contest.

Hitler believed that a people must eitherexpand or die and the area of expansion forthe German superstate was to be in the east.The Slavic inhabitants of eastern Europewere to be reduced to a slave race, livingopenly to serve their German masters. Theland conquered in the east would becolonized by Germans and would providesufficient space for expansion (Lebensraum),something not available in Germany herself.Some peoples, the Jews and the gypsies for

example, were not considered fit enougheven to serve the Germans and were to beeliminated. Writing in Mein Kampf, Hitlermade the following declaration:

The foreign policy of a nation state mustassure the existence on this planet of a race ...by creating a healthy, life-giving and naturalbalance between the present and future numbersof the Volk [people] on the one hand and, on theother, the quantity and quality of its territory.

With the reoccupation of the Rhinelandin 1936, it was obvious that Hitler was intenton addressing Germany's territorialgrievances. Hitler ordered the army into theRhineland against the better judgement ofhis generals, and the German success therepersuaded him of both his own infallibilityin such matters and the weakness andindifference of his likely opponents, Britainand France.

Anschluss

Union with Austria was another importantstep for Hitler. Although forbidden by theTreaty of Versailles, it also ran counter tothe ideas of self-determination enshrined inthe treaty itself, as many Germans living inAustria did not want to be incorporated intoGermany. Hitler, however, was extremelykeen to bring the Germans in Austria withinthe greater Reich, not only for racial reasons,but also because Austria was the land ofhis birth.

In 1934 the Austrian Nazi Party had beenbanned by the then Austrian Chancellor,Dollfuss. Later that year, the Austrian Nazisattempted a coup d'etat, but Hitler waspersuaded not to intervene when Mussolinithreatened to intervene on Dollfuss's behalf.


News of the Anschluss reaches the Reichstag. (Topham

Picturepoint)

Four years later, following an improvementin Italian-German relations, with theannouncement of the Rome-Berlin Axis andthe more formal Anti-Comintern Pact, the

Austrian Nazis began agitating again. At thisjuncture the Austrian Chancellor promised aplebiscite on Austria's future. Hitler was notconfident that Austrians would vote to joinGermany and this possibility forced hishand. Threatened with a German invasion,the government of Austria capitulated. In

Outbreak 33

February 1938 the Austrian Chancellor,Schuschnigg, resigned and was replaced bythe Nazi Seyss-Inquart, who invited inGerman troops. On 13 March he officiallydecreed Austria out of existence andAdolf Hitler became the Chancellor of aGreater Germany.

For many in the outside world, theenforced separation of the ethnically similarAustrians and Germans was artificial andinappropriate. When Germany and Austriawere united in what became known as theAnschluss, many observers dismissed Hitler'saggression on these grounds. But if theybelieved that this success would assuagerather than fuel his ambitions, they werecertainly wrong.

The Sudetenland

Hitler's next concern was the future ofthe large numbers of Germans inCzechoslovakia, almost all of whom,unlike the Austrians, wished to beincorporated into Germany. The whollyartificial Czechoslovakian state had beenconstituted out of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire and German territory, andcontained around 3 million ethnic Germans,living in that area of Czechoslovakia calledthe Sudetenland.

Since 1933, elements of the Germanminority in Czechoslovakia had beenagitating for political autonomy from theirostensible parent nation, Czechoslovakia.They were led by a Nazi sympathizer, KonradHenlein. There was some sympathy for thedemands of the Sudeten Germans: after all,the right of self-determination had beenenshrined in the Treaty of Versailles andwhat this minority wished for was,ostensibly, little different. At the 1938 NaziParty rally in Nuremberg, Hitler made thefollowing announcement, clearlydemonstrating his ambitions over the futureof the Sudeten Germans:

I believe that I shall serve peace best if I leaveno doubt upon this point. I have not put forwardthe demand that Germany may oppress threeand a half million Frenchmen or that, forinstance, three and a half million of the Englishshould be given up to us for oppression; mydemand is that the oppression of three and ahalf million Germans in Czechoslovakia shallcease and that its place shall be taken by the


A poster advertising the plebiscite in the Sudetenland.(AKG Berlin)

free right of self-determination. We should besorry if, through this, our relations to the otherEuropean states should be troubled or sufferdamage. But in that case the fault would not liewith us.

While the British Prime Minister, NevilleChamberlain, appeared genuinely to believein Hitler's sincerity, the truth was that theBritish and French were ill prepared for war.When Hitler moved German troops to theCzech border in early September, thereappeared to be every likelihood thatGermany would invade. However, Hitler wasreasonably sure that he could obtain what hewanted through diplomacy and that theBritish and French were unwilling to fightfor Czechoslovakia.

The British and French faced a number ofproblems with regard to aidingCzechoslovakia. The Czechs alone wereinsufficiently strong to resist the Germans inthe event of war, and their most likelysupporters, the Soviet Union, could only sendaid by crossing Polish and Romanian territory,

Prelude to war: the Sudetenland, the Polish Corridor and Gleiwitz

Outbreak 35

something that the Poles and Romanians wereunlikely to permit. In addition, the British andFrench were also uneasy about the prospect ofRussian interference in Czechoslovakia.Although France and Czechoslovakia had adefensive agreement, there was consequentlylittle will to fight, and even if there had been,Britain and France were too weak militarily todo so. The British and French thereforecounseled the Czech leader Benes to agree toHitler's demands and surrender theSudetenland, even though this would entailthe loss of the strategically most significantportion of Czechoslovakia and all her vitalfrontier fortifications, making any furtherGerman incursion a simple matter.

At a meeting on 15 September betweenChamberlain and Hitler, at Hitler's mountainretreat of Berchtesgaden, Hitler revealed hisintention to annex the Sudetenland underthe principle of self-determination. Afterseveral days of escalating tension, duringwhich time the Royal Navy prepared for warand France also began to mobilize, anagreement was reached to meet at Munich on29 September. On 27 September, Chamberlainmade this well-known comment:

How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is thatwe should be digging trenches ami trying on gasmasks here because of a quarrel in a far-awaycountry between people of whom we knownothing. It seems still more impossible that aquarrel which has already been settled inprinciple should be the subject of war.

The Munich Conference, incredibly, didnot feature a Czech representative, butinstead Britain, France, Italy, and Germanymet to decide the future of Czechoslovakia.Hitler signed an agreement promising thatonce the Sudetenland was transferred toGermany, the remaining Czech frontierswould be respected. After this Chamberlainflew back to England, landing at Croydonairport, and waved his famous piece of paper,signed by Hitler, which Chamberlain saidguaranteed 'peace in our time.' On 15 March1939, German troops entered the Czechcapital, Prague, and occupied the Czechprovinces of Bohemia and Moravia.

The Munich Conference. Left to right: NevilleChamberlain, Daladier, Adolf Hitler Benito Mussolini,Count Gano (Ann Ronan Picture Library)


Chamberlain at Croydon after the Munich conference.

(Topham Picturepoint)

Outbreak 37

The Munich Conference of September1938 has become shorthand for weakness inthe face of obvious aggression andsynonymous with the term 'appeasement.'Appeasement is an oft-heard term, but inthis context it was the means by which theBritish and French in particular sought topacify Hitler by agreeing to as many of hisdemands as possible in the hope of assuaginghis ambition and, fundamentally, avoidingwar. In fact the Munich Conference markedthe end of appeasement and bothChamberlain and the French Prime Minister,Edouard Daladier, knew that rearmamentmust continue at a pace, as Hitler had onlybeen temporarily satiated.

Poland

The final act that escalated local disputesinto a major European and ultimately aworld war was the German invasion ofPoland. Following Hitler's move against therump state of Czechoslovakia, the Britishgovernment offered a military guarantee toPoland, intending to demonstrate to Hitlerthat a repetition of Munich would not becountenanced. This was also a recognition ofthe popular mood in Britain, where ameasure of conscription was also introduced.Britain offered similar guarantees to bothRomania and Greece, thereby reversing thelongstanding pledge of previous Britishgovernments not to tie Britain into anothercontinental commitment.

Hitler wanted Poland as the first majorstep toward obtaining Lebensraum in theeast. The pretext was an obvious one:Germany proper was separated from hereasternmost province, East Prussia, by a stripof Polish territory. It was not difficult toaccuse the Poles of interfering with Germanaccess to East Prussia. Similarly, in the freecity of Danzig, local Nazis went about thefamiliar business of creating trouble anddemanding that the city be incorporatedinto the Reich. Hitler then had ample pretextto begin putting pressure on the Polishgovernment to cede territory to Germany, in

the same fashion as the Czechs had beenobliged to do.

The strategic position changeddramatically in August with the surpriseannouncement of the Molotov-RibbentropPact between Germany and the SovietUnion. This expedient alliance broughttogether the two countries that would bedeadly foes in only a couple of years. Stalinrealized this and sought to delay the Germanassault on his country as long as possible. Healso rationalized that a deeper border withGermany would have benefits for theSoviets, and readily agreed to help Germanyattack Poland on the understanding that theSoviets would gain half of Polish territory.This accommodation gave Hitler theconfidence to risk war, secure in theknowledge that the Soviet Union would notattack even if Britain and France did. Britainmade it very clear to Germany that shewould come to Poland's aid if need be.Hitler, however, was committed.

In defiance of British and Frenchwarnings, Adolf Hitler ordered his forces toinvade. In OKW Directive No. 1, issued byHitler on the last day of August 1939, heasserted the following: 'Having exhaustedall political possibilities of rectifying theintolerable situation on Germany's easternfrontier by peaceful means, I have decidedto solve the problem by force.'

The event needed to turn this action intoa major European conflict occurred at11.15 am on 3 September 1939. At 9.00 am,just over three hours previously, the BritishPrime Minister had issued Germany with anultimatum, demanding that unless Britainheard by 11.00 am that Germany wasprepared to withdraw her troops fromPoland then a state of war would existbetween Great Britain and Germany. At11.15 am Neville Chamberlain made hisimmortal speech informing the Britishpeople that 'no such undertaking has beenreceived and that, consequently, this countryis at war with Germany.' Britain's ally,France, issued a similar ultimatum at noonon 3 September. When the deadline for theGermans' reply to that ultimatum came and


Directive No. 1 for the conduct of war; reproduced from The Fall ofFrance, by G. Fortey and John Duncan (Tunbridge Wells, 1990).

Outbreak 39

went, at 5.00 pm that day, France too wasonce again at war with Germany.

The American journalist William Shirer,who wrote regular dispatches from Germanyduring the early years of the Second WorldWar, had this to say about the reaction ofthe German people to the announcementthat Germany would now face a war againstthe British and the French:

In 1914,1 believe, the excitement in Berlin onthe first day of the world war was tremendous.Today, no excitement, no hurrahs, no cheering,no throwing of flowers, no war fever, no war

hysteria. There is not even any hate for theBritish and French - despite Hitler's variousproclamations to the people, the Party, the EastArmy, the West Army, accusing the 'Englishwarmongers and capitalistic Jews' of starting thiswar. When I passed the French and Britishembassies this afternoon, the sidewalk in front ofeach of them was deserted. A lone schupo [shortfor Schutzspolizei or policeman] paced up anddown before each.

Whatever the average German mighthave felt about the war, there was now noway back.

The fighting

Hitler strikes

The invasion of Poland

The invasion of Poland was the first strike ina total war. Hitler's new army was now to betested on the field of combat against thelarge and well-trained armed forces of thePolish state - the same nation that hadfamously stopped the Red Army beforeWarsaw in 1920. As it turned out, however,the poignant and tragic imagery of Polishcavalry fighting against, and hopelesslyoutclassed by, German armor would prove tobe one of the most significant and definingimages of the war. The years of training andexercises that the German army had engagedin since 1919 were now to be put intopractice with devastating effect.

German troops cross the border into Poland. (AnnRonan Picture Library)

Despite Hitler's ambition and confidence,the Germans went through an elaboratecharade in order to convince the world thatGermany was provoked. Men from theSicherheitsdienst or SD department of the SS,under the overall direction of ReinhardHeydrich, planned an operation toprecipitate the war that Hitler wanted. Thisoperation, code-named Hindenburg,involved three simultaneous raids: the firstwas on the radio station at Gleiwitz, thesecond on the small customs post atHochlinden, and the third on an isolatedgamekeeper's hut at Pitschen. The raids wereto be conducted by men dressed in Polishuniforms, and at Gleiwitz the plan was thatthe attack would be heard live on radio -with the attackers' voices, speaking in Polishand declaiming Germany, being broadcastlive over the air to maximize their impact.

The fighting 41

Reinhard Heydrich, 1904-42 was chief of the SS and theoriginator of the Final Solution plan. (Topham Picturepoint)


After a number of false starts and poororganization bordering on the farcical, theattacks took place. Four condemned menfrom the Sauchsenhausen concentrationcamp and a single German (a local Polishsympathizer) were murdered to provideevidence for the Polish incursions - thecorpses, dressed in Polish uniforms, werephotographed to complete the provocation.Despite the planning, the radio attack failedto be broadcast because of the poor strengthof the transmitter. Hitler was neverthelessable to announce to the Reichstag on1 September that 'Polish troops of the regulararmy have been firing on our territoryduring the night [of 31 August/1 September].

Since 05.45 we have been returning thatfire.' The Second World War was up andrunning.

The German attack on Poland began on1 September. The position was greatly aidedby Hitler's successful 'annexation' ofCzechoslovakia, as Poland was now situateduncomfortably between the twin prongs ofGerman-held territory. To the east, Stalin'sRed Army bided its time before, on17 September, acting in accordance with thesecret clauses of the Molotov-RibbentropPact and also invading Poland. The Poles,caught between the forces of Nazi Germanyand the Soviet Union, did not manage tomaintain resistance for long.

The Poland campaign, September-October 1939

The fighting 43

The German plan for the invasion ofPoland was termed Fall Weiss or 'Case White'and essentially aimed to defeat the Polisharmy by encircling and destroying Polish armyformations. The Germans planned to do thisat the tactical level, but also at the strategiclevel, with German sights focused uponWarsaw, the Polish capital. The Poles wereoutnumbered both in terms of modern tanksand also in terms of tactics. The Germansmobilized 50 divisions for the Polishcampaign, including six Panzer divisions, fourmotorized divisions, and three mountaindivisions. These sizable forces represented thebulk of the available German army, leavingonly 11 divisions in the west, where theFrench army was 10 times that number.

The Germans deployed their armoredformations in such a manner as to maximizethe attributes of their Panzer troops, rapidlyoutflanking the slower-moving Poles andcreating the conditions for theKesselschlachten, or 'cauldron battles,' thatthe Germans were so keen to fight. Theseinvolved the rapid penetration of theenemy's defenses via the weakest spot,followed by the encirclement of the enemy.The enemy was therefore compelled either tostand and fight, suffering artillery and airbombardment, or to attempt a breakout, inwhich case it would be forced to relinquishthe advantage conveyed by its prepareddefensive positions.

The Germans made good progress acrossground baked hard by the long, hot summerof 1939 and were aided also by their

overwhelming air superiority, establishedwithin the opening three days by the vastlymore impressive Luftwaffe. In a pattern thatwould be dreadfully familiar over theensuing years, German aircraft struck at thePolish air force on the ground, effectivelyremoving it from the equation. Germanaircraft flew hundreds of sorties in support oftroops on the ground, operating essentiallyas an aerial dimension to the German army.While the Poles were acutely aware of thelikelihood of the German military action andhad reasonably good intelligence as to thegrowing concentrations of German forces,they were still taken by surprise when theattack actually happened. The Germans wereable to seize the initiative and held it for theduration of what proved to be a depressinglyshort campaign.

Army Group North, comprising the4th Army under Kluge and the 3rd Armyunder Kuchler, struck the first blow in thecampaign. The two-army formation in EastPrussia and Pomerania quickly overran thePolish Corridor and the free city of Danzig.Further to the south, Army Group Southunder the command of von Rundstedt hadthree army-sized formations, 8th Army(Blaskowitz), 10th Army (Reichenau), and14th Army (List), which drove westwards intothe heart of Poland. The Poles rallied brieflyaround the city of Poznan and succeeded indriving the Germans back, but this offered

German cavalry column in twos, possibly members ofthe 1st Cavalry Division. (IWM RML225)


only a brief respite and these Polish troopswere eventually overrun. The Germans,courtesy of two encirclements (the secondbeing required when the Poles withdrewfaster than anticipated) were in a position by16 September to have surrounded the bulk ofPolish forces in western Poland. They wereable to snap shut the pincers of theirencircling operation at will.

By 16 September the German forces hadthe Polish capital, Warsaw, surrounded, andthey proceeded to bombard the city fromthe air and the ground. Warsaw eventuallysurrendered on 27 September with around40,000 civilian casualties. The Russianinvasion of Poland on 17 September was thedeathblow for Poland. Predictably, it metlittle or no resistance as the Poles were bothtaken completely by surprise and totallyimmersed in the fighting against Germanforces in the east of their country. The PolishGeneral Staff had no plans for fighting a waron two fronts, east and west, simultaneously.In fact, the Poles had considered that it wasimpossible to wage a two-front war.

The timing of the Soviet assault was also ofconsiderable surprise to Germany. Hitler hadbeen attempting to persuade Stalin to enter thewar against Poland for some time, reasoningthat the western powers then might refrainfrom intervening at all (i.e. not declare war onGermany) or, if not, might declare war on theSoviet Union as well. Stalin, predictably, hadhis own agenda with regard to the haplessPolish state. Soviet forces refrained fromentering the fighting in Poland while the RedArmy organized and re-equipped.

When the Red Army finally crossed theborder, it did so under the weak pretencethat it was responding to alleged borderviolations and that the intervention wasaimed purely at 'the protection of theUkrainians and Belorussians, with fullpreservation of neutrality in the presentconflict.' Stalin also asserted that, with noeffective Polish government now in existence,the 'Soviet government is no longer boundby the provisions and demands of theSoviet-Polish non-aggression treaty,' and wastherefore at liberty to enter the war against

its former ally. While the Soviets receivedlittle in the way of significant resistancefrom the Poles, they did engage in minorskirmishes with German troops whom theymet on their advance. It took some timebefore the position was established and theGerman and Soviet formations respected theboundary line, which followed the course ofthe River Bug, along which the two unlikelyallies had agreed to divide Poland.

On 19 September the Polish governmentleft Warsaw and eventually established agovernment in exile. This government,under Wladyslaw Sikorski, finally settled inLondon after the fall of France. Besides thePolish leaders, many Polish servicemen alsoescaped, with some 90,000 making their wayto France and Britain.

What were the key reasons for the rapidcollapse of Poland? There are several. First,Poland's strategic situation was poor: withthe conclusion of the Molotov-RibbentropPact on 23 August 1939, Poland waseffectively surrounded. The addition of theSoviet Union to the side of Germanycompounded the territorial adjustments thathad been wrought with Germany's successful,dismemberment of Czechoslovakia. Thesurprise that characterized the Germanassault also prevented the Poles from doing abetter defensive job. This, in combinationwith the new weaponry employed with suchdevastating effect by the Wehrmacht, left thePoles struggling to match the Germans, andwith the invasion from the east by the SovietUnion, any hope of continuing the fight waseffectively removed. Nevertheless, the Poles,for all the ultimate futility of their efforts,did manage to inflict significant casualtieson the Germans. They destroyed in theregion of 200 German tanks, about10 percent of the total number deployed,and also killed 13,000 German soldiers,wounding a further 30,000.

The 'phoney war'

While Poland was fighting for her survival inthe east, in the west her two allies, Britain

The fighting 45

and France, did nothing. Given that Franceand Britain had declared war on Germanybecause of the attack on Poland, and Franceand Britain were committed guarantors ofPolish independence, this inaction seemsstrangely at odds. The British hadsuccessfully dispatched the BritishExpeditionary Force (BEF), numbering140,000 men, to France by 30 September1940, but even then no offensive action wascontemplated.

Prior to this, on 7 September, elements ofthe French Fourth and Seventh Armies hadadvanced into Germany in the vicinity ofSaarbrucken. This initial incursion reachedno more than about 5 miles (8km) along a16-mile (26km| front. German militaryformations in the area withdrew behind theSeigfried Line. At this point, the bulk of theGerman army was still in Poland and theDaily Mail in Britain ran a headline thatclaimed 'French Army pouring over theGerman border.' However, the Frenchadvance went no further, and following thePolish surrender, the French forces withdrew.

'It was only a token invasion. We did notwish to fight on their territory and we didnot ask for this war,' a senior French officerwas alleged to have said. Certainly, it was afortuitous development for the Germans,who were surprised that the western alliesdid not make more of the strategicopportunity before them. After the war, theGerman Field Marshal, Keitel, commentedthat 'we were astonished to find only minorskirmishes undertaken between the Siegfriedand the Maginot Lines. We did notunderstand why France did not seize thisunique opportunity and this confirmed us inthe idea that the Western Powers did notdesire war against us.'

This period between the Anglo-Frenchdeclaration of war and the fall of France isknown as the 'phoney war' because of thevery inaction of both sides. The Germanswere honing their plans for the assault onthe Allies in the west, and the Allies too werebusying themselves with organizing theircounter-effort. The BEF dug what was knownas the 'Gort' Line (after General The

Viscount Gort, the commanding officer ofthe BEF) and civilians back in Britain alsodug air-raid trenches and prepared for the airwar that most thought would come.

The Russo-Finnish War

Elsewhere in Europe, more bitter fightingbegan with the outbreak of theRusso-Finnish War. This conflict has rarelyreceived the coverage it perhaps deserves,peripheral as it was to the larger picture.Nonetheless, some important lessons werelearnt from it. The war is known morecommonly as the 'Winter War' and ran from30 November until 13 March 1940, duringwhich time Stalin's ill-advised thrust into hisnear neighbor's territory resulted in a bloodynose for the Red Army.

The Red Army, in November 1939, was afar cry from the powerful and well-organizedforce that would eventually defeat Hitler'sGermany. In fact, in the Winter War againstFinland, the Soviets proved remarkablyinept. Their difficulties against the Finns, incombination with the purges of the 1930s,probably persuaded Hitler that the Red Armywas not likely to prove a formidableopponent in the future. Certainly theGermans were to underestimate the courageand tenacity of the ordinary Soviet soldierwhen they eventually invaded the SovietUnion in June 1941.

In October 1939, flush from the success ofthe limited campaign in Poland, Stalin issuedan ultimatum to the Finnish governmentdemanding a redrawing of the Russo-Finnishborder north of Leningrad, in the Karelianpeninsula. The Finns, who had only wonindependence from Russian dominance in1917, declined and a short, bitter warensued. The Finns outfought theirnumerically superior opponents, using hit-and-run tactics and making the best use ofthe terrain and climate to thwart Sovietintentions. By January 1940, however, theSoviet attack had been stabilized and the RedArmy began to employ its strengths in amore effective fashion.

46 Essential Histories • The Second World War (2

A scene from the Russo-Finnish War. (TophamPicturepoint)

The Finns eventually sued for peace inMarch 1940 and were obliged to concede theterritorial demands originally required ofthem in October 1939. The Finns sufferedroughly 25,000 casualties, but the Red Armycame off far worse. Around 200,000 Red Armysoldiers were lost in Finland, many throughexposure. The Red Army, however, had learntsome valuable lessons for the future.

Hostilities resumed between the Finns andthe Soviet Union during what becameknown as the 'Continuation War' of 1941-44when the Finns formally allied themselves toGermany. The Finnish leader, Mannerheim,skillfully detached himself from the Germanswhen their defeat became evident. Althoughhis terms for peace with the Soviet Unionmeant a permanent acknowledgment of

the border situation of spring 1940,Mannerheim's actions did at least ensurethat his country did not fall under the swayof the Soviet Union, as did so many otherstates at the war's end.

The Norway campaign

While the western allies were content to bidetheir time in France, in Norway they at lasttook the offensive. The Allied campaign inNorway was to prove a fascinating mix ofstrategic ineptitude coupled withextraordinary individual heroism. TheGerman economy was reliant on over10 million tons of iron ore each year beingimported from Sweden. The route of this vitalcomponent was overland from Sweden toNorway and thence from the Norwegian portof Narvik to Germany. If the Allies could

The fighting 47

prevent the regular flow of ore, they wouldinflict a crucial blow against Germany's wareffort. There was also some discussion ofproviding aid to the Finns in their struggleagainst the Soviets, and the easiest route todo this would be across Norway.

The Germans too were concerned at thisvulnerability and resolved to take Norway,which would also provide bases for Germansurface vessels and submarines. First,however, German forces struck at Denmark.The Danes were ill prepared for a war against

The Norway campaign, April-May 1940


German troops at the Polar circle in Norway. (AKG Berlin).

their powerful neighbor and the Danishgovernment ordered that no resistanceshould be put up against the invadingGermans. Denmark formally surrenderedon the same day as the German invasion,9 April 1940.

The Norwegians, however, weredetermined to put up a fight. Joining themwere 12,000 British and French troops,originally earmarked to join the Finns intheir battle against the Soviets. The Finnishcapitulation meant that these Allied forcescould endeavor to engage the Germans inNorway. Prompt action by the Germansmeant that their invasion force landed first,at Oslo, Bergen, Stavanger, and Kristiansand.Fierce Norwegian resistance gave the Alliestime and an Allied force landed in thevicinity of Trondheim, from where itengaged German forces heading north fromOslo. Despite success by the Royal Navy

against the German Navy, bad planning andconfusion blighted the whole operation.After six weeks of fighting, the Allied troopswere outfought and eventually evacuated on8 June. The Norwegian government escapedto Britain and the Germans installed apuppet government under the NorwegianVidkun Quisling.

France and the Low Countries

Having dealt with the Poles and securedGermany's eastern borders from the threat ofattack by the Soviet Union, courtesy of theMolotov-Ribbentrop Pact, Hitler was finallyable to deal with France. What was tohappen now would astonish the world andturn traditional ideas of strategy and tacticson their head. To gain some idea of what theGerman armed forces managed to achieve intheir invasion of France and the LowCountries, it is useful to draw a parallel with

The fighting 49

the First World War. Between 1914 and 1918the armed forces of Imperial Germany hadstriven to defeat the combined forces ofBritain and France. In four years they failedto achieve this aim and in doing so alsosuffered over 2 million dead as well asexperiencing a revolution that swept awaythe Kaiser and all remnants of the overseasempire that he had tried so hard to establish.Now, in the spring of 1940, Adolf Hitler'snew Germany would deal the western allies acrippling blow and achieve in five weeks,and for the loss of only 13,000 killed, whatthe armies of the Kaiser had not achieved infour years.

The eventual German plan of attack wasarrived at only by much discussion and theintervention of fate as well as by judgement.The initial German plan was an uninspiredrepetition of the German advance of August1914 and was based upon an invasion ofBelgium. This operation, essentially a rerunof the Schlieffen Plan, was known as CaseYellow or Fall Gelb. The plan was a cautiousone and reflected in part the concerns thatmany senior German officers had over thelatent potential of the French army. CaseYellow would see German forces making afrontal assault on the Allied positions inBelgium and the Low Countries and asmaller, diversionary thrust of German forcesthrough the densely wooded and seeminglyimpenetrable Ardennes region. The Alliedresponse to this probable thrust was the DylePlan, which had the best French units andthe BEF advancing into Belgium andHolland, thereby avoiding fighting innorthern France as well as meeting theGerman advance.

This plan was not to last for long as theprincipal means of German advance. Hitlerwas not keen on the plan, believing that thepotential for the German forces to stall andthen become bogged down was too great.Hitler's vacillation over the plan washastened by the crash landing, on 9 January,of a Luftwaffe aircraft with a Germanparatroops officer on board near Mechelen,in Belgium. In his possession was a copy ofCase Yellow, the officer in question having

been on his way to a conference in Colognefrom his base in Münster. Although effortswere made to destroy the plans, enoughremained of the documents to make it alltoo obvious that the Germans intended tostrike at France, once again, throughBelgium.

Once aware of the German intentions, theAllies changed the original Dyle Plan using amodification, known as the Breda variant,which called for the Allies to advance to theline of the Dyle River and also commit thebulk of their reserves. However, the captureof the German plans did nothing more thanreinforce in the minds of the Allied generals,and the French Commander-in-ChiefGeneral Maurice Gamelin in particular, thattheir original assumptions about the likelyGerman approach were correct.

The German response to the capture ofthe details of Case Yellow was alsointeresting. Hitler, as we have seen, was lessthan enthusiastic about the original idea andhad some notions of his own about how toproceed. Simultaneously, and independently,General Erich von Manstein had beenworking on how to improve Case Yellow.The new plan, sometimes called theManstein Plan, called for an audaciousswitch of effort, with the original,diversionary, thrust through the Ardennesnow to be the main point of attack.

While the Ardennes was considered bymost, the western allies included, to be'impassable,' this was not the case. TheArdennes region did not have wide roadsand was heavily wooded, with many streamsand rivers. Despite this, it was passable,albeit slowly and with some difficulty.However, moving a formation the size thatthe Manstein plan envisaged through thenarrow roads would be a tremendous gambleand would require a sophisticated deceptionplan and coordinated air support to ensurethat the passage was neither discovered norinterdicted.

The Manstein Plan required Army GroupA to effect a passage through the Ardennes,cross the River Meuse, and break out into theideal tank country beyond. The formation


that was to have shouldered the originalburden of the main thrust, Army Group B,was now to attack the Low Countries. ArmyGroup B was to defeat the Dutch and Belgianforces while ensuring that the large numbersof quality British and French troops were'fixed' to prevent them from acting againstthe main German effort. German aircraftwere also tasked with ensuring that the Allieswere kept well away from the Ardennes. Therole of Army Group B in the north wascrucial and likened to that of 'the matador'scloak,' a target tempting enough to persuadethe Allied bull to engage it. Army Group C,further south, was to carry out a deceptionplan opposite the Maginot Line so as toconfuse matters still further.

In March 1940, Hitler approved this plan,with additional embellishments fromGeneral Franz Haider. The role of ArmyGroup B, the deception formation, hastraditionally been given scant attentionamidst the dynamic and audacious activitiesof the other German formations. However,the Germans themselves set a great deal ofstore by the deception plans in the north,designed not necessarily to change opinionsof where the main effort of German activitywould fall, but rather to confirm in theminds of senior Allied officers what theythemselves had erroneously concluded.

The French wished, essentially, to recreatethe Great War's set-piece battles of attrition,but they also wished to reverse the roles. In

The original German plan for the invasion of France and therevised version

The fighting 51

the French mind, it was the Germans whowould be launching futile and costly attackson well-defended French positions. TheFrench had put considerable faith in theimpressive fortifications of the Maginot Line,named after its instigator, the DefenseMinister Andre Maginot. This interconnectedline of fortifications stretched the length ofthe Franco-German border and was well nighimpregnable. The French did not believe thatthe Germans were likely to attempt to battertheir way through. Instead the value of theMaginot Line was that it obliged anyGerman invasion to come through Belgium,most probably in a repeat of the 1914 StiltonPlan, and thus defensive arrangements couldbe planned to deal with the threat along thispredictable axis of advance.

The Allied strategy was essentially along-term one: to draw the Germans into the

Panzerkampfwagen III Ausf. F, shown here in Yugoslaviain 1941. (US National Archives)

type of fighting that had worked so wellbetween 1914 and 1918, that of fixedpositions with an emphasis on attrition,hopefully wearing down the Germans in afashion similar to the First World War. TheGermans were aware of this and weredetermined that such a situation should notarise. Hitler knew the trenches of the FirstWorld War only too well and wasdetermined to avoid a repetition. He soughtto conduct a rapid campaign that would endthe war quickly before its demands couldoverburden the German economy - itself notconfigured for a prolonged war. However, theGerman method of war fighting, too, wasnot without its weaknesses.

On 10 May 1940, German forces attackedthe Low Countries Belgium, Holland, andLuxembourg. That same day the BritishPrime Minister, Chamberlain, resigned andWinston Churchill took over. Churchill'saccession to power, however, could notstop the subsequent events. As well as


achieving their strategic aims in short order- the destruction of France and the isolationof Britain - the Germans did so byemploying the experience they had gainedin the Polish campaign to even moredevastating effect.

It was after the France campaign thatGermany's devastatingly effective tacticsbecame firmly associated with Blitzkrieg, theterm subsequently being misappropriated bydozens of historians and generals as abyword for fast, effective armored warfare. Infact, the term Blitzkrieg is one that wouldhave thoroughly mystified German soldiers -officers and men alike - prior to 1940. It isnot to be found in any German fieldmanuals or army correspondence dealingwith the conduct of operations. Rather, theterm was mentioned first by an Italianjournalist who used it to describe the type

The British Vickers Mark VI used in light cavalry units wasunder-armored and under-gunned when compared to itsGerman counterparts. (The Tank Museum, Bovington)

of fighting that he had seen in France andthe Low Countries.

Crucially, then, Blitzkrieg is descriptiverather than prescriptive and was coined todescribe what the German tactics did ratherthan the more elusive notion of how they didit. There was a good reason for this. TheGermans themselves were not entirely sure thatwhat they were doing was new at all. In fact,to a great extent the practices of fast thrust,encirclement, and then annihilation of theencircled troops were not new at all but hadbeen practiced by German (and Prussian) armiesfor years before, and by other armies as well.

What was really new in 1940 was the waythe Germans were achieving their fastthrusts to encircle their opponents. Whereasin 1870, against the French, the Prussianswould have used cavalry, now theWehrmacht deployed tanks. Of course, theGermans were not the only state to possesstanks. Unlike in the Polish campaign, withits heroic but tragic mismatches of Polishcavalry against German armor, the British

The fighting 53

The French Char B1 tank was an impressive vehicle butits effectiveness was hampered by the penny-packetfashion with which it was employed.

and French were well provided with tanks.Also, contrary to popular perceptions aboutthis phase of the war, if anything the tanksof the British and the French were of betterquality than the German vehicles andcertainly were not inferior.

However, while Britain had taken the leadin the conception and development of tanksin the First World War, and indeed hademployed them in the most innovative andsuccessful fashion of all the majorcombatants in the Great War, this lead hadlargely evaporated in the interwar years.Germany, despite the limitations imposed onher by the Versailles settlement, hadconducted exercises with mock-tanks, sure inthe knowledge that the tank would prove tobe a major element on the battlefield.

Numerically, the French army on its ownhad more tanks than the Germans were ableto field, which meant that when Frenchtanks were combined with those deployed aspart of the BEF, the western allies had amarked numerical superiority: 3,383 tanksdeployed compared to Germany's 2,445.Numbers alone, however, are rarely thedeciding factor in combat; obviously thequality of the equipment is also of vitalsignificance. Here too the Anglo-Frenchforces were not embarrassed. The Frenchwere equipped with a variety of tanks, thebest of which were the Somua S35 and theChar B. These were more than a match forthe German Panzer IIs and IIIs with whichthe majority of the German Panzerformations were armed. The Panzer divisionswere equipped with 1,400 Marks I and II;349 Mark IIIs, with a 37mm (1.5-inch) gun;and only 278 of the larger, 24-ton Mark IVs,armed with a far more substantial


75mm (3-inch) gun. The Germans also had anumber of excellent Czech-built tanks, aresult of Germany's earlier takeover of thatcountry.

In other areas, the French superiority wasmarked. The French army possessed far moreartillery than the Germans, for example,fielding in the region of 11,000 piecescompared to the Germans' 8,000. But theGermans, although numerically weaker, didhave mobile artillery: self-propelled piecesthat equipped units deployed with Panzerdivisions. These enabled them to be used ina far more dynamic and effective fashionthan the static role favored by the French.

The Germans went to considerable lengthsto convince the Allies that the main blowwould come in the north. Airborne forcesattacked bridges spanning the Mass, Waal,and Lek rivers, and cut the Netherlands intwo. Parachute engineers also attacked theimpressive Belgian fortress of Eben Emael, thelinchpin of Belgium's defenses. In a move of

brilliant audacity, the German Paras negatedall of Eben Emael's strengths. The fort wasvirtually impregnable from attack on theground, such was the thickness of its walls.The Germans negated these strengths bylanding on the roof of the fortress, usinggliders that made no sound, and thus deniedthe defenders the opportunity to react earlier.The German troops blasted their way into thefortress and held it until relieved.

While Army Group B continued with itsoperations, further south, Army Group Apenetrated the Ardennes. The Luftwaffe flewinnumerable sorties on the first few days toprotect the long and slow Panzer columns,terribly vulnerable in the narrow confines ofthe Ardennes roads. This was the Allies' mainchance: if the advance of Army Group A hadbeen spotted in time and sufficient forcebrought to bear, the outcome of thecampaign would have been totally different.Instead, only light Allied air attacksthreatened the German advance. The

The Battle of France: opening moves

The fighting 55

German troops crossing the River Meuse in rubberboats (Ian Baxter)

Germans encountered only moderateresistance on the ground, mainly fromreserve formations, and this provedinsufficient to prevent the advance of thePanzers - seven divisions all told. By theevening of 12 May, these units had reachedthe east bank of the River Meuse. TheGerman forces now demonstrated that theypossessed a host of attributes.

On 13 May the Germans successfullycrossed the Meuse at Dinant, courtesy of aweir left intact by the French. Further south,at the town of Sedan, German infantry andcombat engineers crossed the river atastonishing speed under cover of aconcentrated air and artillery barrage.German infantry established a foothold onthe western bank and within hours pontoonbridges were constructed across the river andPanzers began to cross. The all-arms

combination functioned perfectly, with allthe participating units knowing the aim oftheir mission and all working in concert toachieve it.

By the morning of 16 May, over2,000 German tanks and in excess of150,000 German troops had crossed theRiver Meuse along a 50-mile (80km) stretch.This breach of the Allied defensive lineeffectively sealed the fate of the Allied armiesin northwest France and the Low Countries,and paved the way for the decisive, strategicsuccess of the German assault. The Germanformations, now in open country, begantheir drive for the Channel in anorthwesterly arc, deep into the rear areas ofthe British and French formations deployedin Belgium.

The opportunity for the Allies to defeatthe apparently inevitable German advance,however, was considerable. The Germanlines of communication were by necessityvery extended, stretching back to the Meuse


Blown bridge over the River Meuse. (Ann Ronan Picture Library)

The fighting 57

and beyond. These extended lines ofcommunication were as much a feature ofthe German Blitzkrieg as anything and were areal vulnerability in the German methods ofwar fighting. Here was an opportunity forthe Anglo-French to drive across the 'Panzercorridor' and regain some of the initiative.

If, as seems to be the case, there was not amassive gulf between the quality of theGerman armored formation and theirAnglo-French opponents, nor was there adiscrepancy in numbers between the Germansand the western allies. Indeed, the Anglo-French forces were able to field more armoredvehicles than the Germans. How, then, can weexplain the apparently overwhelming successof the Germans? Fundamentally it came downto the way in which armor was employed bythe respective sides. The Allies used their tanksin small formations - what was known as'penny-packets' - and as, in effect, little morethan infantry support weapons rather than asweapons with an intrinsic, dynamic potentialof their own. The BEF was almost completelymobile - the only participating army thatcould make such a claim. Yet, the British failedto make the most of this capability.

Other considerations did mark out GermanPanzers from their Allied counterparts. Whilearmor and gun and speed might have beenequal amongst the respective sides, theGermans had one crucial advantage. Most ofthe individual Panzers were equipped withradios. On the Allied side, only 20 percent oftanks were similarly equipped. It has been saidelsewhere that the key technical developmentin the evolution of Blitzkrieg involved neitherthe tank nor the aircraft - both of whichacquired in the 1930s the reliability, range,and speed needed for deep penetrationoperations - but the miniaturization of theradio. General Guderian had received hisinitial experience of combat as an officer in asignals unit, and his appreciation of the needfor effective communication was vital. Theminiature radio enabled the tanks to be usedto maximum effect and facilitated theinteraction between the armored formationsand other branches or arms of the Germanarmed forces.

The Germans also practiced their ideas ofAuftragstaktic to a far greater extent in Franceand this was well served by the abundance ofradios. The British and especially the Frenchwere nowhere near as up to date and wereoften suspicious of radio communicationsbecause of their susceptibility tointerception. Von Kluge, Commander of theGerman 4th Army, summed up theimportance of mission command in theGerman war-fighting method:

The most important facet of German tacticsremained the mission directive, allowingsubordinates the maximum freedom toaccomplish their assigned task. That freedom ofaction provided tactical superiority over the moreschematic and textbook approach employed bythe French and English.

The following quotation from a 3 PanzerDivision Report (1940) also stresses thetype of officer that the German Panzertroops were seeking to recruit. It makes aninteresting comparison with the earlierlecture of Captain Bechtolsheim:

One thing is sure - he who seeks formulaefor commanding the mobile units, the pedantictype, should take off the black battledress [ofthe Panzer forces]. He has no idea of its spirit.

Apart from the numbers of tanks availableto each side, the opposing sides (the British,French, Dutch, and Belgians on one hand, andthe Germans on the other) were fairly evenlymatched in terms of manpower totals andeven equipment levels. It became fashionableto dismiss the Allies as outnumbered by theGermans - after all, the German population in1940 was double that of France. But in fact,the western allies fielded 144 divisions withthe Germans managing 141. Similarly, thewestern powers fielded 13,974 artillery piecesas against the Germans' 7,378.

In the air, the Allies again had greaternumbers of aircraft, but the Germans hadthe advantage in terms of numbers ofmodern combat aircraft. They possessed theexcellent Messerschimdt 109 fighter, which


outclassed most Allied fighters. The Britishcontribution to the air war did not includesending Spitfire aircraft to France, but onlyHurricanes in limited numbers. The FrenchDewoitime was another good Allied aircraft,but the French air force had only around100 machines. The Germans had used theirStuka dive-bomber to devastating effectagainst the Poles and the Luftwaffe possessedseveral hundred of these aircraft, using themin the close air-support role.

Once the lead German formations hadcrossed the Meuse and largely outrun theirsupporting infantry and logistical supplies,the western allies were presented with anopportunity to regain some of the initiative.The Germans lacked a coherent operationallevel plan; once they had crossed the Meuse,

they were in two minds as to where to go,either towards Paris or to take the MaginotLine from behind. Eventually the Germansdecided to head for the coast and the Alliesat last took their chance. The counterattackby the BEF at Arras, from the north, and theFrench from the south was indicative of thewhole campaign. The Anglo-French forcesdid not operate in tandem and despite someinitial success the Germans beat them off.This incident, however, did persuade Hitlerto halt his leading Panzer elements and indoing so allowed the British and French vitaltime to organize the evacuation of theirforces from Dunkirk.

Hitler, along with many senior Germanofficers, could not quite believe how muchtheir forces had achieved so quickly and still

The Battle of France: the race to the sea

The fighting 59

considered that the Allies were likely tostrike back. They were wrong; Alliedresistance had collapsed. After 5 June theGermans enacted Fall Red, the final phase oftheir plan to take France, occupying the restof the country. Ironically, some elements ofthe Maginot Line were not defeated, butinstead were ordered to give up in thegeneral surrender of 22 June.

Operation Dynamo

Operation Dynamo began, officially, on26 May 1940. By 4 June, 366,162 Alliedtroops had been successfully evacuated fromthe beaches around Dunkirk; of these,53,000 were French. The price of theDunkirk evacuations was not a light one.The RAF lost 177 aircraft over Dunkirk -losses it could ill afford - and the Royal Navyalso had 10 escorts sunk. Even after the

operations around Dunkirk were over, theevacuation of Allied personnel continuedfrom elsewhere in France, including France'sMediterranean coast, and up to the finalcessation of operations on 14 August afurther 191,870 were successfully rescued.In total 558,032 Allied personnel wereevacuated from France between 20 May and14 August.

Operation Dynamo has traditionallybeen represented, certainly in Britishhistoriography, as something of a triumph.In many respects it was so; the figures citedabove are ample testimony to what was afantastic achievement in rescuing so manyAllied troops from captivity or death. A littleover a month after the Dunkirk evacuation,however, three British journalists, PeterHoward of the Sunday Express, Frank Owen ofthe Evening Standard, and Michael Foot alsoof the Standard, wrote a devastating critiqueof the Dunkirk fiasco and the events that led

The Battle of France: the Panzer breakthrough

60 Essential Histories • The Second World War (21

Queues wait for the navy at Dunkirk during OperationDynamo, 29 May-2 June 1940. (Ann Ronan Picture Library)

up to it. This work, entitled Guilty Men andpublished with the authors' names concealedby the pseudonym 'Cato,' had a considerableimpact on the general public.

Cato charged the disaster to have beencaused by the prewar appeasers, men such asRamsay MacDonald, Stanley Baldwin, and,most specifically, Neville Chamberlainhimself. This notion became firmlyembedded in the postwar psyche, certainlyof the British. The fact that it accorded withwhat Winston Churchill was also to write,postwar, certainly helped this simplistic ideaof appeasement to become the standard wayof remembering the prewar years.

The collapse of France was to have a tragicand controversial postscript. The FrenchNavy was large and formidable, and itsinclusion in either of the warring sideswould have proved significant. The BritishMediterranean fleet was on a par with theItalian Navy, but the addition of the Frenchwould have tipped the delicate balancedecisively. In the aftermath of the fall ofFrench, the French fleet, under AdmiralDarlan, ignored the provisions of the

The Ulster Rifles at Bray Dunes. 29-May-3 June 1940.(Topham Picturepoint)

Franco-German armistice, by which theFrench fleet was to have been disarmedunder Axis supervision. Instead, a largeportion of the fleet sailed to the Algerianports of Oran and Mers el-kebir, where ithad assembled by 29 June.

The British were understandablyconcerned about the future of the Frenchvessels and considered a variety of options.They wished the French fleet either to join

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Swastika over Paris. (Ann Ronan Picture Library)

with their Free French compatriots and fightalongside the British, to sail to neutral ports,or to scuttle their ships and thus preventthem being utilized by the Axis powers. Afinal option, described by Winston Churchillas 'appalling,' was that the Royal Navywould 'use whatever force was necessary' toprevent the ships being used against Britain.There were concerns, too, over what theGerman role might be - whether or not theGermans would apply pressure to forceAdmiral Darlan to comply.

Despite last-minute talks between theBritish and the French commander on the

spot, no accommodation could be reached.The British, fearing the arrival of otherFrench vessels, opened fire on 3 July, killingin the region of 1,200 French sailors. TheBritish officer responsible for the failednegotiations wrote to his wife: 'It was anabsolute bloody business to shoot up thoseFrenchmen ... we all feel thoroughly dirtyand ashamed.'

The Battle of Britain

In the aftermath of the rapid defeat of Franceand the Low Countries, and the evacuationof the British Expeditionary Force from


Dunkirk, few believed that Great Britaincould resist Hitler for long. Indeed, theAmerican Ambassador to the Court ofSt James, Joseph Kennedy - father of thefuture president, John F. - believed thatBritain was doomed and reported the sameto Washington.

In the face of the British refusal to makepeace, Hitler planned an ambitious amphibiousoperation, codenamed Operation Sea Lion, toinvade the British Isles. With the fall of Franceand the scrambled evacuation of Anglo-Frenchforces from the beaches of Dunkirk, Britainstood effectively alone against Nazi Germany.On 18 June Winston Churchill told theassembled House of Commons that 'The Battleof France is over, I expect that the Battle ofBritain is about to begin.'

The next logical step for Adolf Hitler wasthe removal of Great Britain from the strategicequation, leaving him free, in due course, toturn eastwards and accomplish his principalaim: the destruction and subjugation of theSoviet Union and the establishment ofGerman colonies in this new Lebensraum.How this was to be achieved was a dilemmafor Hitler, initially at least. Hitler was not animplacable opponent of the British, partly forreasons of race, and professed to admire theBritish Empire. What, then, of the chancesfor peace between Britain and Germany?

Despite some apparent British warmth forthe idea of a negotiated settlement, thesesentiments were fundamentally insubstantial,based as they were on the false beliefs, first,that an acceptable peace could be arrived atand, second, that suggestions of impendingBritish acquiescence might spur both the USAfrom her neutrality and the Soviet Unionfrom her collaboration with Hitler. Hitler'senunciation of his willingness to negotiatewith the British was made clear in a speech on19 July. When there was no positive responsefrom the British, the way was clear for theplanning of Operation Sea Lion - the proposedinvasion of Britain by German amphibiousforces.

However, any successful landing in Britainwould require effective German air superiority.To achieve that, the Royal Air Force had to be

destroyed and this was to prove problematic.While the British Expeditionary Force that hadbeen sent to France was representative ofBritain's generally small army, it was the RAFand to a lesser extent the Royal Navy that hadreceived the lion's share of defense spending inthe run-up to the outbreak of war. To a largeextent this money had been well spent, withnew fighter aircraft such as the Hurricane beingparticularly effective and the even newer Spitfiresetting new standards of performance for afighter plane. The RAF had not deployed any ofits Spitfire strength to France, instead holdingthem back for the likely air battle to follow.

The German ability to attain air superioritywas hampered, in part, by the role for whichthe Luftwaffe had originally been conceived,that of tactical air support for troops on theground. This focus on supporting armyoperations meant that in 1940 Germanylacked both a long-range bomber and a fighterwith which to conduct a strategic bombingcampaign. Indeed, over the course of the warGermany never rectified this position,although she did develop larger aircraft,notably the four-engine Condor, which wasused for reconnaissance purposes.

The Battle of Britain has earned a significantplace in British cultural as well as militaryhistory. Emboldened and honored in severaltrademark speeches, the 'few' of the RAF(together with a sizable Commonwealth andexile contingent of Czechs and Poles)successfully thwarted the aims of theLuftwaffe, obliging the date for Sea Lion to beprogressively put off until it was finallycancelled. The Battle of Britain canconveniently be split into two distinct phases:the first from 10 July 1940 until13 August, and the second from 13 August to17 September, when Operation Sea Lion waspostponed indefinitely. The invasion wasfinally cancelled on 12 October 1940.

On 19 July 1940, Hitler made a curiousspeech in the Reichstag. It was witnessed byAmerican journalist William Shirer, who notedthat Hitler said:

In this hour I feel it is my duty before my ownconscience to appeal once more to reason and

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common sense. I can see no reason why this warmust go on ... I am grieved to think of thesacrifices which it will claim. I should like toavert them, also, for my own people.

Shirer admitted to wondering what theBritish reply to this clumsy overture for apeaceful accommodation might be. It did

not take long for British feelings to bemade known. Shirer heard the BBC Germanprogram announcer reply, unofficially,'Herr Führer and Reichskanzler we hurl itright back at you, right in your evil-smellingteeth.' The official feeling was lessgraphically expressed but did not differmarkedly.

The principal RAF and Luftwaffe bases


The first phase of the German air assaultwas designed to secure German airsuperiority over the Channel - the so-calledKanalkampf - with the harbors of England'ssouth coast and their associate shippingbeing the target. The second phase wasknown as the Adlerangriff (Eagle Attack) andbegan, on 13 August, with Adlertag (Eagle

Day), which finally swept the RAF from theskies. The German bombers nowconcentrated on the RAF airfieldsthemselves, destroying aircraft and pilotsfaster than the British could replace them,

Civilians try to sleep in a tube station during the Blitz.(Topham Picturepoint)

The fighting 65

and threatening to overwhelm FighterCommand's ability to resist.

However, despite the odds mountinggradually in Germany's favor, a freakincident helped change the course of thebattle and with it the strategic direction ofthe war. The accidental bombing of Londonby German aircraft led to a reciprocal Britishstrike on Berlin. This prompted Hitler to hisfamous pronouncement, 'since they bombour cities, we shall raze theirs to the ground,'and to the wholesale switch of German aireffort toward the destruction of British citiesrather than the RAF bases that defendedthem. On 7 September 1940, ReichsmarschalHermann Goring told his senior Luftwaffeofficers:

I now want to take this opportunity ofspeaking to you, to say this moment is anhistoric one. As a result of the provocative Britishattacks on Berlin on recent nights, the Führerhas decided to order a mighty blow to be struckin revenge against the capital of the BritishEmpire. I personally hare assumed the leadershipof this attack and today I have heard above methe roaring of the victorious German squadronswhich now, for the first time, are driving towardsthe heart of the enemy in full daylight,accompanied by countless fighter squadrons ...this is an historic hour, in which for the firsttime the German Luftwaffe has struck at theheart of the enemy.

This switch in tactics was a godsend forthe RAF, since the breathing space allowed itto regroup and rejoin the battle. Now thebattle focused on preventing German aircraftfrom reaching their targets over London or ascore of other British targets.

While the target of German interest hadchanged, the ferocity of the air battles hadnot. Nor were losses in the air declining.During the first week of September, the RAFlost 185 aircraft and the Luftwaffe lost inexcess of 200. The climax of the battle cameon 15 September. Successive waves ofGerman bombers, escorted by fighters, flewtoward London and the RAF was stretched tothe limit to try to contain them. The end

result was a success for Fighter Command -but only just - and a realization on the partof the Luftwaffe and Adolf Hitler that airsuperiority was unlikely to be achieved anytime soon. 15 September, subsequentlycelebrated as Battle of Britain day, markedthe end of German attempts to provide theright circumstances for an invasion.

The success of Fighter Command instaving off the imminent threat of Germaninvasion did not, however, end the Germanbombing campaign against British cities. Infact the Blitz, as it came to be known, hadonly just begun. The Germans hit theMidlands city of Coventry on 14 Novemberand followed this up with raids onBirmingham, Bristol, Manchester, andLiverpool. London, too, was obviously amassive target for the Luftwaffe as a symbolof British defiance as well as the heart of thegovernmental system. German bombingcontinued into 1941, with the last raids ofthe Blitz coming in May that year. Germanattacks on Britain resumed in the latterstages of the war as they launched initiallythe V1 rockets, later the V2, against London.These weapons did little real damage, butwere sufficient to cause concern amongst thecivilian populace.

Dieppe

Having successfully warded off the threatof imminent German invasion in 1940,the British gave considerable thought tohitting back at the Germans. One means,in the air, was the strategic bombingcampaign, examined in more detail below.While the British had achieved somemorale-building successes, such as thesinking of the German pocket battleshipBismarck, in 1942, there was widespreadfeeling that more should be done to strikeat Hitler's 'fortress Europe.'

After the fall of France, Churchill hadsanctioned the training and employment of'commando' units to strike at targets inoccupied Europe. He also created the SpecialOperations Executive (SOE) to 'set Europe


ablaze.' The commando raids were successfulin raising Allied morale and proving anuisance to the Germans, but after successesat St Nazaire and Bruneval, the Alliesdetermined on a more substantial forayinto occupied Europe.

The aim of the Dieppe raid of August1942 was limited in terms of what was tobe achieved practically, but significant interms of what the Allies hoped to learnabout the problems involved in landing inenemy-held territory. The Allied plan,Operation Jubilee, aimed to land troopsand armored vehicles on the beach and takeand hold the port for 12 hours. The Alliedforces, having secured the town, were topush inland and capture a Germanheadquarters, gaining prisoners forinterrogation and documents, and then toretreat back across the Channel. The Alliesalso hoped to cause enough damage, andto worry the Germans sufficiently, that theGerman High Command would withdrawforces from the Eastern Front and therebytake some pressure off the Red Army. Thissecond aim was rather ambitious.

In the event, Dieppe was a disaster. TheAllied force lost the vital ingredient ofsurprise when they ran into Germanshipping mid-Channel, and failed tosecure the two headlands on either side ofthe main beach at Dieppe. Despite thissetback, the main force landed on thebeach and met considerable fire fromGerman troops, well dug-in in blockhouseson the seafront and from the headlands.Still more Allied forces landed:27 Churchill tanks reached the beachsafely and 15 made it to the esplanadebut no further.

Eventually, when it was apparent thatno progress was being made, the mixtureof British, Canadian, and American troopswere withdrawn. This first composite Alliedforce, a foretaste of the Normandy landingstwo years hence, suffered 1,027 dead anda further 2,340 captured. However, theexperience gained by the assault itselfproved invaluable and prompted AdmiralLord Mountbatten to comment that 'for

every soldier who died at Dieppe, ten weresaved on D-Day.' While Mountbatten'scomments may have proved, ultimately,to be true, he was also the man in chargeof the operation.

The Battle of the Atlantic .

The Battle of the Atlantic was one of themost important battles waged during theSecond World War (see The Second World War(3) The war at sea in this series). Britain'ssurvival, and with her the survival of thestruggle against Nazi Germany, depended onfeeding her population and her warmachine. British industry relied on rawmaterials from overseas to keep functioning.These goods had to be carried to Britainacross, for the most part, the Atlantic Ocean.Without the outside lifeline, Britain's abilityto sustain meaningful resistance against theAxis powers would have been seriouslyeroded, and eventually Britain would havebeen starved into submission.

The means of ensuring this constantlifeline were convoys - large numbers ofships marshaled together with naval supportto beat off attacks from German submarines,or U-boats. As the tactics adopted by theGerman submariners became ever moresophisticated, such as hunting in large WolfPacks, and as their submarines became everlarger and more seaworthy, so too did theweapons and tactics devised by the Alliesin response. These included underwaterecho-finding sonar, known as asdic, depthcharges, and merchant ships converted tocarry aircraft launched from a catapult. Thedevelopment of surface radar was also vitalin enabling surface warships to detect theirsubmarine prey on the surface, when theywere at their most vulnerable. This advanceallowed the surfaced U-boats to be located indarkness and helped reduce the threat fromthe U-boat fleet, many of whosecommanders preferred to attack at night andvia the surface.

Alongside the vital convoys bringing rawmaterials to Britain between 1939 and 1943,

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the British also mounted an enormous effortto send supplies to the Soviet Union in orderto prop her up against the German attack,after June 1941. While the Soviet authoritiesconsistently downplayed the amount ofBritish (and American) aid received, it wassubstantial. The convoy routes from Britainto the Soviet Union, usually the northernport of Murmansk, were fraught with dangerfrom the German U-boats and from theperilous conditions of sub-zero temperaturesand mountainous seas.

The war in the Atlantic cost the lives ofthousands of sailors on both sides, but bythe summer of 1943 it was the Allies whowere decisively in charge. The U-boatsof German Admiral Dönitz's navy sank

2,600 Allied merchant vessels and over175 naval ships; 30,000 Allied sailorsalso died. On the German side, out of1,162 U-boats built, 784 were lost. Of theGerman crews, a staggering 26,000 sailorsout of a total number of 40,000 were killed,with 5,000 men taken prisoner. The Germansubmarine arm had come close to stranglingthe Allied war effort, but the cost, as aproportion of the size of the service, wasunmatched.

The strategic bomber offensive

One of the most controversial elements ofthe Second World War was the Allied

The strategic bombing campaign


strategic bombing offensive against German-occupied Europe. The bombing of enemycities was obviously not a new phenomenon;indeed, the Germans had carried out alimited campaign against Britain in the FirstWorld War using Zeppelin airships and Gothaaircraft. However, bombing had previouslybeen essentially confined to a tactical role, ifonly because of the limitations of the fragiletechnology available.

Between the wars, much thought wasgiven over to the idea of air power now being

potentially a decisive weapon in war. Theimprovements in aeronautical engineeringturned the fragile aircraft of 1914-18, withtheir limited range and payload capacity, intofar more useful weapons. Air power theoristssuch as the Italian Guilo Douhet, theAmerican William Mitchell, and the BritonSir Hugh Dowding all prophesied that thebomber might shape the course of future

ArthurTravers Harris received the nickname 'Bomber'Harris. (Ann Ronan Picture Library)

The fighting 69

wars. In Britain especially, the idea that the'bomber will always get through' hauntedinterwar defense planners, conscious thatBritain's traditional reliance on her navalstrength would be inadequate. In the eventthis proved true, and the days of thebattleship were numbered when HMS Repulseand HMS Prince of Wales were sunk byJapanese aircraft off Malaya in December1941. However, the role of the bomber alsoproved to be far less decisive than theadvocates of air power imagined.

On 3 September 1940, a year to the dayafter Britain had declared war on Germany,Winston Churchill declared that 'our supremeeffort must be to gain overwhelming masteryin the air. The fighters are our salvation, butthe bombers alone can provide the means tovictory.' Churchill's personal commitment tothe idea that the bomber could win the warwas significant and had its origins in hisposition as the First Lord of the Admiraltywhen he ordered bombing raids on GermanZeppelin bases. In 1917, however, Churchill'sposition was rather different; indeed, heconsidered then that 'nothing we have learnedjustifies us in assuming that they [Germancivilians] could be cowed into submission bysuch methods [large-scale bombing].'

On 22 February 1942, Arthur Travers Harriswas appointed to the post of Chief of RoyalAir Force (RAF) Bomber Command. Hebelieved that area bombing or strategic

The Avro Lancaster bomber entered service in 1942and became the mainstay of the British strategic

bombing campaign. (Topham Picturepoint)

bombing could win the war, and that bypounding Germany's industrial capability anddestroying German cities, the will of theGermans, in tandem with the buildingsaround them, would collapse. This bomberoffensive was no simple payback for theGerman raids on British cities. RAF BomberCommand pounded Germany for three years,culminating in the destruction of Dresden.The British bombers were joined in thesummer of 1942 by the United States Army AirForce, whose more heavily armed B-17 'FlyingFortresses' bombed by day, and then the Alliesstruck around the clock in a campaign that theGermans called 'terror bombing.' Harris soonearner himself the nickname of 'Bomber'Harris amongst the general public, and 'Butch'or 'Butcher' Harris amongst his own men.

The tactics of the bombing offensivechanged dramatically as the war progressed.Initial sorties were conducted bycomparatively small, twin-engine aircraftsuch as the Vickers Wellington. The amountof ordnance that these aircraft could carrywas small compared to the new, four-enginebombers that were coming into service bythe time Harris took over. The introductionof the Short Stirling and later the AvroLancaster revolutionized the distance thatthe bomber raids could fly, and thus therange of targets that could be hit, as wellas increasing exponentially the bombtonnage that could be carried.

A confidential report, prepared in 1941,highlighted some of the worrying problemsassociated with the bombing campaign andundermined the claims by the bomber


advocates that they were capable of winningthe war on their own. The report, gleanedfrom aerial photographs of bomb targets,concluded that only one aircraft in three wasable to get within 5 miles (8km) of itsallocated target and that their accuracy wasoften even less impressive. The overallpercentage of aircraft that managed to arrivewithin 75 square miles (194km2) of the targetwas as low as 20 percent.

The net result of these inaccuracies was thecreation and adoption of a new tactic, that of'area bombing.' This eschewed the attemptedprecision raids of the past in favor of thedestruction not only of factories but also oftheir hinterland: the surrounding towns,complete with the workers who lived there.This policy, unfairly attributed to Harrishimself, was the product of a decision not toadopt terror tactics, but rather to amelioratethe shortcomings inherent in bombing soinaccurately. It was also hoped that the neteffect of this type of destruction, to civilians,would result in the gradual erosion of moraleamongst the civilian population. Potentially, itmight either bring about the collapse of thewill to resist or, more ambitiously, and moreunlikely, induce a war-weary population tooverthrow Adolf Hitler's administration.

The German response to the Alliedbombing offensive was an impressive defensivearrangement that also grew in sophistication,in tandem with the bomber formations that itwas conceived to thwart, as technologicaladvances combined with tactical reappraisals.Luftwaffe General Josef Kammhuber wasappointed to lead the air defense provision forthe Reich and initially achieved some startlingsuccesses. He devised a grid system, with eachsquare in the grid being 20 square miles(52km2), and located a fighter in each square -held there by air traffic control and guided byradar to its target whenever a bomber orbomber formation entered its airspace.

British bomber tactics had initially focusedon sending aircraft into occupied Europesingly, at intervals, and Kammhuber's approachwas ideally suited to dealing with them. Later,however, with larger numbers of aircraftavailable, the British simply swamped the

German defensive arrangements. In fact, muchof the strategic value of the bombing campaignlay in the extent to which it diverted valuableresources of men and equipment away from vitalfront-line areas. The intensity of the bombingobliged the Germans to relocate artillery piecesas flak guns in Germany, rather than deployingthem against the Soviets on the Eastern Front.

While concentrations of bombers, bringingall their firepower together, had improved theirsurvivability in the skies over Germany, asecond Allied initiative would help turn thecourse of the bomber offensive in a decisivefashion. This development was the introductionof fighter escorts for the whole duration of thebombing mission. It was made possible by theadoption of long-range fuel tanks, a practice thatwas very common when deploying fighters overlong distances, but which had failed to beconsidered practical for combat purposes. Theintroduction of the Anglo-American P51Mustang brought immediate results.

The strategic bombing campaign has beenthe cause of much controversy since the end ofthe Second World War. Elements of it, inparticular Operation Gomorra (the firestormraids on Hamburg) and the destruction of thebaroque city of Dresden, are cited as evidence ofhow far democracies, too, are forced to go in a'total war.' Alongside the many charges ofwanton slaughter of civilians leveled at BomberCommand and its chief, Arthur Harris, are alsoless inflammatory ones. These allegations aremore practical and center on the claim that,particularly in the early years of the war, thestrategic bomber offensive was a criminal wasteof men and materials that would have beenbetter employed elsewhere. It has been arguedthat the overall impact on Germany's war-fighting ability was far less than it should havebeen, given the resources expended. However,as Richard Overy comments:

i There has always seemed somethingfundamentally implausible about the contention ofbombing's critics that dropping almost 2.5 milliontons of bombs on tautly-stretched industrial systemsand war-weary urban populations would notseriously weaken them. Germany ... had no specialimmunity.

Portrait of a soldier

Donald Edgar

In 1940 Donald Edgar joined the reserveelement of the British army, the TerritorialArmy. As a barely trained private soldier inthe East Surrey Regiment, he was sent toFrance along with rest of the BritishExpeditionary Force in much the samefashion as the original BEF had gone in 1914.Unlike the BEF of 20 or so years previously,however, the BEF of 1940 was not to halt theGerman advance. Edgar himself was capturedby the Germans and spent the next five yearsas a prisoner of war of the Germans.

Donald Edgar, along with manythousands of young men, responded to agovernment appeal in March 1939 to jointhe Territorial Army. Adolf Hitler hadoccupied Czechoslovakia and it was apparentto many that the war was highly likely, ifnot inevitable. Edgar was in many ways an

atypical private soldier, having attendedDulwich School, where he served with theOfficer Training Corps, and OxfordUniversity, from where he went to work as astockbroker in the City of London. Edgarwrote of his enlistment that 'I was patrioticand there was a general feeling around in theCity ... that it was time for us young men"to do something."' Edgar was also keen tovolunteer, rather than await what heconsidered to be the inevitable conscription,declaring that 'No one in my family had everbeen conscripted. They had always beenvolunteers.'

Edgar's unit was part of the British12th Division, one of three 'second-line'

British troops pose in a well-constructed position in thewinter of 1939-40 in France. (IWM)


formations that Edgar considered to havebeen 'denied equipment and arms' and leftto perform 'humdrum, menial tasks that leftno time for training.' Edgar believed that theWar Office thought these units were littlemore than a 'bloody nuisance.' This was anespecial injustice for Donald Edgar and onethat he felt all the more keenly because, ashe put it, 'the ranks of these battalionscontained a large proportion of the men whohad patriotically responded to theGovernment's call in the spring. They werethe real volunteers of the war.'

Edgar was called up in August 1939 andreported to his unit at the Richmond DrillHall. He was fortunate to be made a numberof financial guarantees by his employers inthe City and he noted also that they gavehim a 'handsome gift' to help him on hisway, following a 'glass or two of champagne'at his farewell luncheon. This rather pleasantfarewell was followed by a rude introductionto the realities of army life.

Edgar's unit moved to a camp nearChatham, a naval dockyard on the southcoast of England, where they were eachissued with five rounds of live ammunitionand told, 'This is real guard duty, see?'Edgar's experiences of the regular Britisharmy were not positive: the conditions oftheir initial camp and the reception grantedhim by two regular warrant officers weredescribed as 'lazy inefficiency' and 'only thefirst example we were to experience of theRegular Army's appalling state of slackness.'

At 11.15 am on 3 September, Edgar andhis comrades listened to Prime MinisterNeville Chamberlain's speech announcingBritain's declaration of war on Germany. Onthis momentous occasion, according toEdgar, Chamberlain gave his speech 'asthough he were giving one of his budgettalks on the radio when he were Chancellor.'

After a month or so at Chatham, Edgar'sunit moved back to Richmond, where theywere employed guarding 'vulnerable points'- the railway bridge over the Thames beingEdgar's own duty. He recalled the mood thatseemed to pervade the country during the'phony war,' a mood that seemed to suggest

that Britain was doing all it could to honorher promise to Poland - even though thatcountry had already been dismembered byGermany and the Soviet Union. Edgarthought the British had 'convinced ourselvesthat by mobilising the fleet and sending afew divisions to France we had done justabout all that was necessary for the waragainst Germany.'

Despite Edgar's many complaints aboutthe wider conduct of Britain's war effort, hehimself was successively promoted throughlance-corporal, corporal, and lance-sergeant,working in the unit's Intelligence Section.Edgar's unit spent a long and cold winter inEngland, relocating to Richmond Park andundergoing occasional training forays in thewide expanse of parkland on offer.

In March 1940, Edgar's unit was told thatthey were to proceed to France where theywould at last 'train hard and receive all ourequipment from supplies already there.'They embarked for France and landed at LeHavre, before moving to a large chateau inthe Normandy countryside. Edgar's bilingualcapability led to his being appointed as atranslator and he participated in a number ofmeetings between his battalion commanderand the local French military authorities.These meetings Edgar termed 'predictablyuncomfortable,' but 'no more so than thoseheld at the highest level between French andBritish generals.' Given the lack of adequatecoordination between the French and Britishforces in France, it is interesting to see theseconsiderations replicated at the battalionlevel.

Because of his evident languagecapabilities, Edgar was tasked withtranslating a number of documents that theFrench had passed on to their Britishcounterparts. These documents concernedthe French arrangements to defend theimportant dock areas of Le Havre, but theyhad wider implications for the forthcomingfighting - implications and conclusions thathad Edgar concerned: 'When I came totranslate the French documents I was shakenout of my complacency. The analysisenvisaged a war of movement as a distinct

Portrait of a soldier 73

possibility with the breakthrough of Germanarmoured columns deep into the rear areas.'These conclusions, as we have seen, were toprove extremely accurate. As Edgar alsonoted, however, the officers now leading hisand many other battalions of the British andFrench armies had seen service on theWestern Front during 1914-18 and this wasnot the type of war they were accustomed to.

Donald Edgar obviously had manycriticisms of the British army. Many of thesemay be dismissed as the typical grumbling ofany soldier; some are more valid, however.Edgar informs us that many units were shortof machine guns and antitank weapons,what they did possess being far less than theofficial complement. What Edgar consideredto be the worst omission was one of theareas in which the Germans had both amarked superiority and, perhaps even morecrucially, a greater understanding of itsimportance: communications. While Edgarconceded that the regular BEF units wereprovided with wireless and telephonecommunications, the men of the three'labour' battalions had neither and 'wentforward blind.' This was an unsatisfactorystate of affairs at any time, but given themanner in which the Germans utilized newtechnology in combination with rather lessoriginal tactics, these shortcomings wereparticularly damaging to the effectiveconduct of the war on the Allied side.

Despite all the problems identified byDonald Edgar, writing on the eve of battle,he was not totally pessimistic about thefuture. Edgar believed that 'the spirit of themen was still high - in spite of everything.'Although Edgar's reminiscences at this pointperhaps border on the sentimental, hecomments that 'it is with a bitter smile thatthose English Territorial battalions [went] tobattle in May 1940 with a raucous laugh,singing a silly song: "Roll out the barrel."'

Edgar's experiences of the fighting areinteresting. He noted that his:

Intelligence section travelled in three handy15 cwt trucks and were just about self contained.We had ample ammunition for our rifles and

brens and reserve supplies of petrol ...I madesure ... that we had plenty of cigarettes andbottles of whisky and brandy.

Edgar thought that these preparationswere:

to prove vital in the following days. It gave usa certain confidence, and an army marches -even in trucks - on its stomach. A swig or twoof spirits and a cigarette also help to keep upmorale. Other units in the area were reduced tobegging for food and water.

While Edgar's unit waited for furtherorders he noticed a 'tall figure in khakistanding on some rising ground ... wearingone of those beautifully-tailored near ankle-length great-coats favoured by senior officers.I looked again and saw the red tabs andrealized he was probably a Brigadier orGeneral.' Edgar was shocked to see that theofficer was 'unshaven and bore marks ofdishevelment,' which Edgar consideredunforgivable, observing: 'I am shaved. So aremy men. That's discipline ... Generals shouldnever appear unshaven or unkempt. Theymust always be immaculately turned-out. Itis part of an army's morale!'

In all probability, however, it would havetaken more than morale alone to save theBritish (and indeed French) position inFrance in May 1940. While awaiting furtherinstructions, Edgar ran into a column ofrefugees who included in their number aformer British soldier of the 1914-18 war.This man, now in his forties, had met aFrench girl during that war and returnedafter leaving the army to marry her and setup a business renting holiday cottages. Theman quizzed Edgar about the developmentof the fighting and after Edgar informed himthat he expected the French tocounterattack, the former British soldier,Edgar observed, 'sniffed disbelievingly.'

The evident disbelief was to provereasonably well founded, as thecounterattacks that were planned, notably theinitially successful BEF attack at Arras, soonran out of steam. Edgar found himself and his


men surrounded by the fast-moving Germanforces. After retreating toward the smallFrench port of Veules, Edgar was giveninstructions to take a message to his battalioncommanding officer at St Valery. When hemade the obvious point that 'it won't be easy,Sir, the French tell me that the Germans havecut just about all the roads,' Edgar was toldthat 'this message must get through.' Edgarand two other men set off, and while theywere gone, the officer who had ordered Edgarto St Valery evacuated the rest of the unit.

Edgar managed to rejoin his unit andwith men from other units began the

march towards the sea. Reaching St Valery,they were told that 'evacuation wasnow impossible' due to the deterioratingsituation, and tentative plans were madeto attempt to break through the Germanlines in small groups. These plans, too,came to nothing with the announcementon 12 June of a cease-fire. Edgar andsome 8,000 BEF soldiers went intocaptivity. Edgar himself survived fiveyears in a German prisoner-of-war camp,but had not fired a single shot in angerduring the whole duration of the battlefor France.

The world around war

The home front

While the war was felt most keenly by thoseengaged in its prosecution - the military atthe sharp end of the conflict - the warimpacted on the wider world in a host ofother ways. Indeed, as the war progressed,virtually the whole society of the respectiveparticipants became involved and thedistinction between combatant and non-combatant become less clear: the munitionsworker was arguably as central to thesuccessful conduct of the war as the soldierwho used their product. Many of thechanges wrought by the war years would notdissipate with the end of the fighting, butwould remain part of the permanent fabricof society. In this respect, as well as in thepolitical/military sphere, the war's impactwas enormous.

Great Britain

On the home front, in Britain at least, thewar changed every facet of daily life. TheBritish government had begun the transitionto a war economy - an economy that wasplanned and directed with the specific aimof furthering the prosecution of the war -only with the outbreak of hostilities inSeptember 1939. Thereafter, the extent ofmobilization, economic, military, social, andpolitical, of all of Britain's national resourceswas astonishing. By 1945 Britain hadmobilized and utilized all her latentpotential to a far greater extent than anyother of the major belligerents.

This degree of government control andthe success achieved by state directiontranslated directly into the massive electorallandslide achieved by Clement Attlee'sLabour Party in the 1945 general election.Millions of Britons had become convincedbetween 1939 and 1945 that the government

could direct the economy and do sosuccessfully. The apparent demonstration ofgovernment effectiveness in fighting andwinning a war was seen as a recipe for thepostwar government doing similarly fornational prosperity, to provide the 'land fitfor heroes' that had proved so elusivepost-1918.

In 1942 William Beveridge published hisreport on the shape of postwar Britain. Itaimed to defeat the 'Five Giants on the Roadto Recovery': these were Want, Disease,Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness. To achievethis, Beveridge planned a comprehensivewelfare system, which was to become, ineffect, the welfare state. Much effort wasmade to publicize the report and its findings,and within a month of its publication over100,000 copies had been sold - anastonishing feat for a government paper. By1943, the Gallup polling organizationreported that 19 out of 20 people had heardof the report. The people of Britain, then,knew exactly what they were fighting for interms of a new Britain.

The means to implement Beveridge was,of course, far greater government control ofall aspects of life, as demonstrated by thesuccessful utilization of national resourcesduring wartime. What then, did this statecontrol amount to? A large proportion of thedevolved responsibility for economicproduction fell on women, due to the serviceof the men in the armed services. Some80,000 women served in the Land Army,working as agricultural laborers and ensuringthat every available acre of Britain's farmlandwas under cultivation. Similarly, those withprivate gardens or allotments were urged to'dig for victory' to increase the level of foodproduction.

The British population contributed inother ways to the war effort. Every available


piece of metal was hoarded and used - notonly scrap, but decorative iron railings wereripped up to aid the construction of shipsand tanks. The effects of these levels ofmobilization on production levels weresignificant: for example, tank productionrose from 969 in 1939 to 8,611 in 1942.Drives to secure spare aluminum pots andpans to be used in the construction ofaircraft were accompanied by such catchyphrases as 'Stop 'em frying, keep 'emflying.' This kind of advertising, buoyed,of course, by the widespread realization ofwhat such sacrifices meant, was remarkablysuccessful. The spirit of selflessness andself-sacrifice appeared to be a national one:for instance, crime in Britain fell from787,000 convictions for all crimes in 1939to 467,000 in 1945.

One of the most traumatic elements ofthe conflict, for the civilians of the UK, wasnot the bombing or even the knowledge ofthe dangers being faced by loved ones

RAF recruiting station. (Topham Picturepoint)

involved in the fighting, but simply thepolicy of evacuation. The evacuation of largenumbers of children away from urban areaswas controversial and produced manyunhappy parents, children, and hostfamilies, as children were sent far away fromtheir homes and established routines, toremote parts of the British Isles. For many, itwas the Empire that was their destination,with some being evacuated as far away asCanada and Australia, and many failing toreturn at the cessation of hostilities in 1945.

The USA

While Britain mobilized to the greatestextent in relative terms, it was, predictably,the United States that mobilized the most inabsolute terms. Approximately 16 millionAmericans served in the armed forces andaround 10 million American women steppedinto the jobs that they had vacated. Thewholesale switch of the vast potential of theAmerican economy from peacetime, civil

The world around war 77

American women working in industry.(AKG Berlin)

production to war materials is perhaps bestillustrated by a few bald statistics. In 1941the American automobile industry, and thethree main manufacturers, Ford, GeneralMotors, and Chrysler, together produced inexcess of 3 ½ million vehicles - a record forthe auto-industry. The next year, the firstcomplete one of American participation in

the war, saw this level of car production fallto just 139 vehicles. The whole productivecapacity had been refocused on warproduction. It was this vast economic powerthat the Axis powers now had to face.

The influx of large numbers of Americanservice personnel into Britain also had a bigimpact. The American forces, althoughobviously contributing in a profound fashionto the Allied war effort, were not alwaysaccepted so readily on a local level. The


Propoganda poster showing Churchill. (TophamPicturepoint)

epithet 'over-paid, over-sexed, and over here'was thought by many Britons to be whollyappropriate. The exodus of in excess of50,000 GI brides at the end of the warsuggests, perhaps, that they were at leastpartly right.

Germany

The war changed everyday life in Germanyjust as it did in the rest of Europe. But it didnot come home to the German people asforcibly and as quickly as it did to the rest ofthe major combatants. One reason is that,while the British and Americans mademaximum use of female labor, in jobs and


By 3 September 1,500,000 had been evacuated fromurban areas. Later many left for Canada and Australia,some never to return. (Topham Picturepoint)

industries traditionally monopolized by men,Germany was comparatively late in doing so.Nazi ideology stressed the role of the womanas a mother and homemaker. The need forwomen to occupy jobs in the workplace wasnot easily reconciled with this traditionalperspective of women's role in society.

Such considerations contributed to thetardiness with which the German economyadapted to the demands of a total war.Hitler's initial successes in Europe werepredicated above all on short campaigns andtherefore did not require a more galvanizedeconomy to support the military effort. Notuntil 1943 did the German economy beginto respond in a more concerted fashion tothe demands of total war. On 18 Februarythe first official decrees about what wasneeded were announced by the Nazipropaganda minister, Josef Goebbels. Allmen between the ages of 16 and 65 wereto be registered and available to work forthe state. Also at this time an estimated

Women of Britain poster (Topham Picturepoint

100,000 women were called up to staffanti-aircraft batteries and handlesearchlights. While these initiatives andfigures may seem impressive, they were laterand far lower than, in particular, the British.

While the Germans may have beencomparatively slow in adapting the economyto the demands of a total war, theyresponded to the outbreak of war in muchthe same fashion as the other combatants.Blackouts in urban areas, petrol rationing,and food rationing had all been introducedby the end of September 1939. The weeklymeat ration for German civilians was fixed atllb (450g) per person. Clothes rationing wasalso introduced with points being allocatedper person per year: 150 points representedthe average allowance; a pair of women'sstockings would account for 4 points, while60 points would purchase a man's suit.

These restrictions were not particularlypleasant, but equally they were notunbearable. Indeed, as many testified, the


generations of Germans that had livedthrough the lean years of the 1920s and1930s did not find such shortagesparticularly onerous. However, of course,worse was to come - much worse. The warbegan to bite deeply in the winter of

1941-42 when the lack of farmers to harvestcrops, especially the unrationed potatoes,

Propoganda posters were used by both sides during thiswar. This image shows the line up of nations unitedagainst Hitler (Topham Picturepoint)


This British propaganda poster shows an idyllic countryview. (Topham Picturepoint)

really began to be felt. In June 1941 thebread and meat rations were reduced; nearlya year later the fats allowances were alsoreduced and the ubiquitous potatoes werefinally included on the ration scale.

German civilians endured the effects ofever-decreasing rations and, in the latterstages of the war, almost round-the-clockbombing from the RAF by night and theUSAAF by day. Underpinning it all was aconstant nagging doubt, reinforced by thegrowing numbers of refugees and woundedservicemen, that the war could not really bewon. These feelings obviously grewconsiderably after the fall of Stalingrad inJanuary 1943. From then on, many Germancivilians began to doubt the inevitabilityof the final victory, although the persistentattention of the state security apparatus,and the swift and brutal response to

dissent, ensured that few were eitherbrave or foolish enough to voice theirsuspicions.

There hung a darker shadow overGermany during this time - the Holocaust.

The treatment of German Jews had worsenedprogressively. The early days of Nazi rule sawuncoordinated and localized abuse ofGermany's Jewish population. Theenactment of the 'Nuremberg Laws,' whicheffectively stripped Jews of any rights in NaziGermany, was merely the beginning ofsomething much worse. As the German warmachine moved eastwards, overrunningterritory and population, it also encounteredmillions of Polish and Russian Jews. Somewere shot in mass killings and many otherswere corralled into walled areas of majorcities, known as ghettos. The Jewish'problem' was, for the Nazis, becomingintractable.

In early 1942 a selection of key officialsunder Heydrich, including men such as AdolfEichmann and 'Gestapo' Muller, met at a villain Wannsee, south of Berlin. Here theydecided on the 'final solution' to the 'Jewishproblem': the large-scale gassing of the Jews inplaces such as Auschwitz, Treblinka, Dachau,Belsen, and Buchenwald. Although the finalnumber of Jews and other 'undesirables,' suchas homosexuals, gypsies, and disabled people,killed by the Nazis is unknown, it is probablyin the region of six million.


Poland

For the inhabitants of occupied Europe, thewar itself was over and they faced life underGerman occupation. For many, this wouldprove even worse than the fighting. It wasthe Poles who suffered most, under theGermans in the western portion of theircountry and the Soviets in the east. As aresult of the invasion by the Germans andthe Soviets, Poland ceased to exist as anindependent nation-state. The country wassplit into a number of separate pieces. TheGerman portion was split into two, as thatarea of territory lost by Germany at Versailleswas restored to the borders of the Reich,while the remaining area became termed the'General Government.'

The Polish campaign had been blightedby numerous acts of cruelty by Germanformations - SS and police units mainly -and these incidents had been the subject offrequent, largely ineffectual protests byofficers in the German army proper. Now,with Poland defeated, those isolated acts ofcruelty were approved in the highest quartersof Nazi Germany and were formalized into aprogram of terror. In the quasi-scientificracial hierarchy that underpinned Naziideology, the Poles were consideredsub-humans, Untermenschen. They sufferedaccordingly. During the years of the Germanoccupation, six million Polish citizens died.Poland, alone of the occupied countries ofEurope, had no collaboration with theGerman authorities to speak of.

France

France was rather a different propositionfrom Poland. Although the French were notconsidered the racial equals of the AryanGermans, nor were they considered akin tothe Slavs. Initially at least, France did notfare too badly after the surrender toGermany. During the interwar years therehad been many elements of French societywho approved of Hitler and applauded thetype of right-wing authoritarianism that he

had introduced, apparently so successfully,in Germany. The roots of this apparentlyillogical support lay not in a particular loveof Germany but rather in the fear that manyfelt for the power of the left, of communismand all it stood for. Just as Anglo-Frenchconcern to balance the Soviet Union with astrong Germany had inadvertently aided therise of Hitler and his consolidation of power,so too did it provide an element ofindifference toward what was to come.

There were other considerations, too,that underlay the French response to thesurrender. It is hard to escape the conclusionthat the substance of French resistance tothe German attack of May 1940 was verydifferent from that of 1914 and mostcertainly from that of 1916, when theGermans had tried, in vain, to 'bleed theFrench army white' at Verdun. In 1940 thewill to resist was not as strong as in theGreat War, and the Great War was the reasonfor it. The French people had seen theircountry devastated and her populationslaughtered between 1914 and 1918. May1940 was the third German invasion in70 years. This goes some way towardexplaining the way in which many, if by nomeans all, Frenchmen responded to defeat.

France was divided physically andspiritually. On one side of this division werethose who wished to carry on fighting theGermans. These Frenchmen had as theirfigurehead General Charles de Gaulle,appointed Under-Secretary for Defense on10 June. He left France for London,determined to carry on the fight until Francewas free. His views were echoed by many leftbehind in France, who resolved to formresistance groups and to harry the Germansin any way possible.

Others in France did not feel the sameway. This element was exemplified byMarshal Pétain, the hero of the French armyand nation, and the defender of Verdun inthe First World War. Pétain, the DeputyPrime Minister, who had increasinglyencouraged Paul Reynaud, the PrimeMinister, to seek an armistice with theGermans, was asked (by President Lebrun)


on 16 June to form a ministry and toarrange a cessation of hostilities. On 22 June1940, French delegates signed the armisticethat brought an end to the Germancampaign in France. The treaty was stagemanaged by Hitler personally, with thearmistice signed in the same railway carriageat Compiegne that had been used for thearmistice in November 1918. Hitler hadexacted the revenge on France that he hadlong desired.

Just as Germany had been dismemberedand humiliated in 1918, so too was France in1940. While Pétain and his government wereto remain nominally in power, their countrywas divided in two. The northern part ofFrance, the Atlantic coast, and the borderareas with Belgium and Switzerland were tobe occupied by the Germans. In the south,Pétain and his government would retaincontrol, holding their capital at theprovincial town of Vichy.

Pétain changed the national motto ofFrance from liberté, egalité, fraternité(freedom, equality and brotherhood) to themore national socialist sounding travail,famille, patrie (work, family, country). Withthe initial emphasis on work, it hasuncomfortable echoes of Arbeit macht frei(work will liberate you) that was inscribed onthe main gates of the Auschwitzconcentration camp. While Vichy France wasto retain control over France's colonialterritories, all French servicemen captured bythe Germans were to remain as prisoners ofwar, and this included the large garrison ofthe defunct Maginot Line, even though thesemen had never surrendered.

Vichy France was unique amongst all theconquered territories of the Third Reich inbeing the only legitimate and legallyconstituted government that collaboratedopenly with the German invaders. Thewhole existence of the Vichy regime, and thewidespread popular support that itcommanded, has been a source oftremendous embarrassment for France,post-1945. As well as acquiescing in theGerman takeover, the Vichy government wasalso anti-Semitic in outlook and responsible

for the identification and subsequentdeportation of many French Jews.

In November 1942 the Germans movedto end the bizarre division of France andoccupied the southern portion of thecountry. The simultaneous invasion ofFrench North Africa, Operation Torch, bycombined Anglo-American forces allowedmany Frenchmen to make another choiceover their allegiances in the war. While theAnglo-French occupation of North Africawas resisted by the French Imperial troopsstationed there initially, French forceseventually came around and joined theAllied cause, helped by the obvious changein circumstances of Pétain's government inFrance, now effectively a prisoner of theGermans. Despite the limited support that deGaulle's Free French forces had enjoyed since1940, the formation of the Committee ofNational Liberation in June 1943 gave Francea government-in-exile, free from foreigndirection.

Resistance

While the Vichy regime commandedconsiderable support, for a variety ofreasons, not all Frenchmen were happywith the situation, especially those in thenorth, under German occupation after thesurrender. Indeed, resistance movementssprang up all over occupied France and allover occupied Europe in general. Resistancefighters came from all walks of life:sometimes they were ex-soldiers, manywere civilians, and many were women.

The Allies attempted to support theburgeoning resistance movement inoccupied Europe. Organizations such as theBritish Special Operations Executive (SOE)and later the American Office of StrategicServices (OSS) were established to providematerial support, such as weapons andexplosives, which were parachuted in. Theyalso supplied agents who could helpcoordinate resistance activities and provideskilled wireless operators to maintaincontacts with London.


The French surrender at Compiegne , 21 June 1940.They are agreeing terms in the same railway carriage inwhich the Germans had signed the 1918 Armistice.(AKG Berlin)

The life of resistance fighters was fraughtwith danger, especially in the early years,with many being betrayed to the Germansand either imprisoned or shot out of hand.Although the true number of those killedwill probably never be known for certain,it is estimated that in the region of150,000 Frenchmen and women were killedduring the German occupation and manymore in other countries.

One of the most successful and audaciousacts of resistance involved the assassination ofthe Governor of the Czech portion ofCzechoslovakia, Reinhard Heydrich. This actwould demonstrate the full potential ofresistance as well as all the dangers. Heydrich,then serving as the Deputy Protector ofBohemia-Moravia, and also Himmler's deputyas leader of the Gestapo security apparatus,was killed by British-trained and equippedCzech patriots, parachuted into theirhomeland with the specific aim of killinghim. However, the operation did not goaccording to plan. The SOE men initially triedto shoot Heydrich, but the Sten gun jammed

at the vital moment and another man insteadthrew a hand-grenade. This grenade failed tokill Heydrich on the spot, but he latersuccumbed to blood poisoning - the result ofthe horsehair stuffing of his car seats enteringhis system after the bomb thrown by thewould-be assassin exploded.

The German response to the attack wasswift and brutal. The two principal assassins,Jan Kubis and Josef Bagcik, were hunted downand eventually trapped in a church in Prague,where, surrounded by German troops andpolice, they killed themselves rather thansurrender. Their fate, at least, was quick. TheGerman reprisals were less so. In response, anSS police unit surrounded and destroyed theCzech village of Liddice. The village was burntto the ground; all the male inhabitants wereshot with the women and children being sentto Ravensbruck concentration camp. Ninechildren were spared as they were consideredto be racially suitable for adoption.

This massacre was followed by a generalclampdown on resistance activity. In totalprobably 5,000 people were killed as directretribution for the assassination of Heydrich -a terrible figure and one that would causesubsequent missions to be reconsideredin light of the probable response of theGerman occupiers.


German instructions for Guernsey. Jersey and Guernseywere liberated on 9 May 1945. Alderney not until 16 May.

Portrait of a civilian

Colin Perry

Colin Perry was just 18 years old when warbroke out in September 1939. He lived in theLondon suburb of Tooting and worked as aclerk in the City of London. He kept ajournal of his thoughts and experiences fromJune 1940, just after the fall of France, untilNovember 1940. These few months werecrucial for Britain, and therefore for thewhole remaining effort to thwart NaziGermany's goals. Britain stood alone duringthis period and endured the constant threatof invasion and aerial bombardment. ColinPerry's account of life during these darkmonths is fascinating, as it reflects the hopesand fears of a young man who cannot helpseeing the war as much as an adventure assomething to be feared.

Once the news of France's capitulationwas known, young Colin Perry's account wasfull of contradictory ideas and thoughts. Hesaid 'condemn him to hell who isresponsible for bringing Britain to the vergeof existence - Britain whom we love andwhom our ancestors placed into theleadership of the world.' Colin considered,from a viewpoint of considerable personaldisappointment, that 'Red tape is our course.Maybe I'm embittered at having passed theMedical A1, just because I do not possess aschool certificate I cannot get into the flyingpart of the RAF.' He was also a young manwith considerable imagination. While listingall the young women to whom he had beenattracted in the past, he noted that one, aGerman girl with whom he had spent 'a dayand a half in London in 1938, was'charming and extraordinarily attractive butI suspect her of 5th column work'!

On 17 July, Colin reported the followingdramatic developments:

Tonight in our proud Island prepare ourselvesfor the word that the invader has commenced his

attack. The air raid wardens have passedinformation round that the Military at Tolworthwill tonight throw up a smoke-screen, which willspread and envelop the whole metropolis, blotout vital objectives and generally throw invadinghordes into confusion.

His dramatic smokescreen did notmaterialize and instead he paid a visit to thecinema, where he saw the propaganda film,Britain at Bay. The impact of this on Colinwas dramatic. He claimed it 'made me wantto join the army tomorrow' - doubtless theintention of the production.

Colin, for all his focus on the war and thepreparations for the imminent invasion,betrays the preoccupations of teenagers theworld over in his writing. Interspersed withhis comments about joining up are manyabout girls, particularly one whom he saw ona regular basis, but whom he had not as yetsummoned up the courage to ask out. Colin,who could imagine himself fighting theenemy, could not similarly conceive of thisgirl taking him seriously.

On 19 July the RAF, hard pressed at thispoint in the Battle of Britain, contactedColin to inform him, in a 'circular,' that theywould be postponing any application of hisfor aircrew for at least a month. Colin'sresponse to this was that 'I do want to get inthe Services before the winter, as I shall thensave myself the price of a new overcoat, hatetc' While visiting a friend's flat nearChancery Lane, Colin thought that themany barrage balloons rising above the citylooked very much like so many 'soft, flabby,silvery floating elephants.'

On 30 July, Colin experienced his firstraid when a solitary German aircraft droppedbombs on Esher, killing and wounding fivepeople. The searchlights in the vicinity ofColin's house were used only briefly, in the

Portrait of a civilian 87

hope of persuading the pilot that he was infact over a rural area rather than the fringesof London itself.

As July became August, Colin becameincreasingly convinced that thelong-predicted German invasion waslikely to come sooner rather than later. On9 August he was writing that 'the invasiondid not come yesterday. Now people thinkHitler will try today or tomorrow, both datesof which are favourable to his star. 1maintain he will strike on 22nd of thismonth.' Interestingly, Colin at timesconsidered the unthinkable: what life mightbe like under a German occupation. He wasparticularly concerned with the fate ofNeville Chamberlain and speculated that 'inthe event of British defeat - God forbid - hewould be produced like Laval and old Pétain.I cannot understand just why Churchill doesnot kick him out.'

While Churchill and many Britons weredoing their utmost to convince PresidentRoosevelt of the necessity of joiningwith Britain to resist German aggression,18-year-old Colin had his own thoughtsabout the USA. He believed that thedevelopments in the war to date had nowobliged the USA to 'realise how dependentthey were upon us':

America would not help us at all by enteringinto this war. They are in greater danger fromthe Nazis than ourselves if only they but realisedit. Riddled with fifth column, a bastard race,with a conflict of opinion they must maintain atwo-ocean nary, which they can't.

Colin's thoughts and feelings reflect themindset of a comparatively immature youth,but the war predictably impinged on his lifein a way that he had not thought possible.On 21 August, a friend of his family, MrsBlock, called to say that her neighbor hadbeen killed in an air raid: 'a bomb felldirectly on her Anderson shelter. Her roadhad been machine-gunned.' Needless to say,this reawakened Colin's wishes to fight againand he drifted off into thoughts of joiningthe RAF:

There is nothing I would like better in thisworld than to be a fully-fledged fighter pilotawaiting a gigantic air offensive, lounging on therough grass talking with Pete and Steve ...by theside of our aircraft as we awaited the signal toscramble.

While Colin's youthful bravado kept hisand his friends' spirits up through this episodeand many other minor raids, involving sparseformations of German aircraft, as the dayspassed through the summer the bombingintensified and Colin's mood darkenedslightly. On 28 August he wrote: 'I cannot sayhow tired I am. I have never known howmuch sleep means. Since the early hours ofFriday morning the Nazi bombers have beenover continuously, in consequence we havehad warning after warning.'

Colin's description of this event isparticularly interesting, as it sheds light onthe opinions of ordinary people on theground towards the bombing. Colin thoughtthat 'nuisance bombers,' as their titlesuggests, were more of a problem than thelarge-scale raids. The 'nuisance' aircraft cameover singly or in pairs and their aim wassimply to prompt air-raid sirens andprecautions on the ground. Colin said, 'It isobvious that these raiders are sent only toshake our morale. It is these that areresponsible for keeping all Londoners awakeand in their shelters for hours every night.'The net result was that many people,responding directly to this German tactic,chose to demonstrate their defiance andtheir need for sleep, by 'taking the risk ofstaying in bed when they [the bombers]come over.'

Colin, true to his ideas, 'mostly stay[ed] inbed ... it was impossible during the earlyhours of Tuesday to do so, however, as everyten minutes or so for 6 hours the Germanraiders passed right over our flat.' Colin'sthoughts on all of this were simple: 'I maybe tired and somewhat depressed, but byGod all this only makes us the moredetermined to smash blasted Hitler once andfor all. The whole of Britain is now moredetermined than ever.'


This determination, which many havesubsequently termed the spirit of the Blitz,was to be severely tested in the comingweeks as the German raids intensified. OnMonday 9 September, Colin's tone changedconsiderably. Gone was the jaunty defianceand cockiness, and in its place was a genuinesense of shock:

London, my London, is wounded, bloody.The sirens sounded last night at 7.59 andstraightway [sic] 'planes were diving andbooming overhead. I saw a whole ring of anti-aircraft fire mark out Clapham Common high inthe sky ... Becton gasworks has been hit ...westayed in the shelter for a while, but I keptrushing around with my binoculars. At oneperiod the firing was so intense I dare not riskthe 18 yards' run to the shelter and stoodagainst a concrete wall, flat. The 'all-clear'sounded at 5.30 am.

But worse was to come. Colin, of course,had to make his way to work that day,exhausted and strained from the excitementand lack of sleep of the previous night. Aftertaking the underground as far as Bank, heventured out as far as Princes Street and wasgreeted by a scene of utter devastation along'a Princess Street hitherto unknown to me.'

Cars packed the road, people rushed here andthere, calm and collected, fire services,ambulances. Refugees from the East End, cars andbikes, luggage and babies all poured from [the]Aldate direction ...a high explosive bomb had

fallen clean in the middle of Threadneedle Street,just missing the Bank's main entrance andsomehow missing the old Royal Exchange. Here inthe heart of the City ... next door to my office,always considered by me as untouchable, haddescended the cold and bloody stab of Hitler. Inthe office the windows were cracked and smashed... dust and earth covered my chair and then Ibeheld the 3rd floor. No windows, debris, dirt. Iwas staggered as I beheld the spectacle. I tookmyself to the roof with my binoculars and saw themost appalling sights. All over the heart of theCity fires were burning, hoses playing ...I cannotdescribe my feelings, they were all toodumbfounded and I was incredulous.

Colin's diary takes an abrupt turn at thisjuncture. He writes:

I knew then that my diary is not 'exciting'reading of happening to be envied, it does notreally show the spirit of glamour which I takefrom these raids, but it simply shows thecallousness, the futility of war. It depicts bloodypeople, smashed bodies, tragedy, the breaking upof homes and families. But above all, high abovethis appalling crime the Nazis perpetrate, there issomething shining, radiating warmth above allthese dead and useless bodies, it is the spirit, thewill to endure, which prevails.

Colin Perry joined the merchant navy inthe autumn of 1940 and on 17 Novemberjoined HMT Strathallan as the ship's writer.He survived the war and published his diaryin 1971.

How the period ended

The end of the beginning

At the end of 1943, the position of AdolfHitler's Germany looked remarkably differentfrom that of the end of 1941. In December1941, Hitler's empire had stretched from theAtlantic seaboard of France as far east, nearly,as Moscow. By the end of 1943 the westernborder remained, but in the east the limit ofGerman expansion was moving slowly, butremorselessly, westwards.

Much had happened between 1939 and1943. Germany's star, so long in theascendant, was at last beginning to wane.The reasons for this are several. First, theentrance of the United States into the war inDecember 1941 changed the whole strategiccomplexion of the conflict. Hitler'spresumptive decision, taken on 11 December1941, to declare war on the USA is still acurious one. Was it a foolish and ultimatelyfatal decision or rather a natural response towhat was something of an inevitability?

President Roosevelt's support of theBritish war effort to date had beenconsiderable, and American sympathy wasclearly on the side of the British and againstNazi Germany. The USA's actions, before theGerman declaration of war, were hardly theactions of a state intent on maintaining herneutrality. The Lend-Lease Act, wherebyBritain's productive shortfall in war materialswas redressed on a pay-later arrangement,dramatically altered Britain's militaryfortunes when she was at a particularly lowebb. However, Roosevelt still had manydissenters at home, who opposed Americanparticipation in the war in Europe. Hitler'sdecision removed any reason for hesitancy,as did the Japanese strike at the US PacificFleet at Pearl Harbor, which provided ampledemonstration, if one were needed, that theUSA could no longer sit on the sidelines.

Through the early months of 1943, thewestern allies were preparing their plans and

harboring the resources necessary to launchOperation Overlord, the invasion ofoccupied France. At the end of 1943, Hitler'sEuropean empire was still a mighty edifice.Already, however, its borders were beingrolled back in the east and in the south. TheRed Army success at Stalingrad in early 1943,and in August 1943 in the enormous tankbattle of Kursk, would prove significant (seeThe Second World War (5) The Eastern Front inthis series).

The German attack on the Kursk salientwas the last major offensive that Germanymounted in the east. The offensive,originally planned for early May 1943 - thefirst time that the ground was sufficientlyhard to bear large-scale movement of heavyequipment after the spring thaw - wasdelayed considerably. Only in early July didHitler give the order to commence theattack. Hitler's reluctance to commit hisforces sooner was based on a belief that thelonger he delayed, the stronger his armoredformations would be. Also greater numbersof the new Panther tank could be deployed.Large quantities of new weapons wereproduced by Germany's now almost fullymobilized economy, but the delay also gavethe Soviets additional breathing space toreorganize, reequip, and prepare theirdefenses in depth.

The net result may be seen as sweepingaway many of the assumptions on which theSecond World War was grounded. TheGerman Wehrmacht, the instigator of fast,maneuver-style Blitzkrieg, was committed byits Commander-in-Chief to an attritionalassault on prepared enemy positions, and indoing so played to their strengths not thoseof the Germans. Hitler, increasinglyassuming more and more direct control overhis armies in the field, was now, apparently,turning his back on the audacious thinking


that had characterized much of his successbetween 1939 and 1943. After Kursk theGerman army fought a long, slow retreatthat would climax in the battle for Berlinitself, the capital of the Reich that was tohave lasted 1,000 years.

In July 1943 the first major Alliedincursions into occupied Europe occurredwhen the Allies invaded Sicily. Two monthslater, in September, they landed on theItalian mainland and began their drivenorth. The German forces made the most ofthe difficult terrain and the narrow Italianpeninsula to ensure that the Allied advancewould be slow, and that German troopswould not be driven out of Italy until thegeneral surrender in 1945. However, thephysical presence of Allied troops onEuropean soil was significant and indicativeof the turn of the tide.

In June 1944 came two events ofenormous significance for Hitler's Reich. Thefirst, on 6 June 1944, was the Allied assaulton Normandy: Operation Overlord or D-Dayas it has entered the popular lexicon. Thiswas the opening of the second front thatStalin had long demanded to take thepressure off the Red Army. Although it hadtaken far longer than Stalin had hoped, andcaused considerable tension with the 'GrandAlliance' as a result, the Normandy landingsnow obliged Hitler and his increasinglyhard-pressed forces to face their strategicnightmare - a war on two fronts.

While the fighting in Italy did tie downlarge numbers of valuable German troopsand resources, Italy was always unlikely to bea decisive theater of operations. As if todemonstrate the problems and conflictingpriorities of such a war, the Soviets launchedtheir largest offensive to date on 22 June, thethird anniversary of the start of OperationBarbarossa. This new offensive, OperationBagration, succeeded in destroying Army-Group Center and was a massive blow forthe Wehrmacht.

Hitler's empire shrank progressively fromJune 1944, as the Soviets advanced

relentlessly from the east and theBritish-American-Canadian-Free Frenchforces from the west. All was effectively lostfor Germany, but her resistance did notslacken. In the fighting in the east, theGermans fought bitterly for every inch ofground. The knowledge of what the Sovietswould exact in revenge for German behaviorin the east and, for many, a fundamentalideological struggle between communismand national socialism underpinned theferocious struggle. In the west, too, theGerman resistance was stiff and the Alliesgained ground only slowly. British GeneralBernard Montgomery's plan to end the warquickly, by seizing the vital bridges over theRhine in Operation Market Garden, was afailure and compelled the Allies to edgeforward inch by inch.

In December 1944, Hitler showed again,briefly, that there still existed an offensivecapability in the German war machine,launching an attack toward the Belgian portof Antwerp, from where the Allied advancewas being provisioned. This campaign in theArdennes became known as the 'Battle of theBulge' and demonstrated once again thetactical capability of the German army.However, Germany was fast losing the abilityto sustain an offensive and the fighting inthe Ardennes soon petered out with noGerman success.

Although the German forces kept fightinguntil May 1945, it was a futile battle againstthe odds. The Soviets gave no quarter intheir struggle to defeat Nazi Germany:having experienced firsthand thecommitment and brutality of Nazi racialideology, they paid the Germans out in kind.Perhaps appropriately, the Allies decided atthe Yalta Conference of early 1945 that itwould be the Red Army that captured Berlin,despite the astounding progress being madeby the Allies in the west. The Germans madethe Soviets fight for the capital, inflicting inexcess of 100,000 casualties, but the Red Flagwas raised on the Reichstag, a dominantimage of the Second World War.

Conclusions and consequences

The world at war

At the end of 1943 the world was poised onthe brink of the final act of the SecondWorld War. In 1944 the Second World Warwas effectively decided beyond any doubt.The three Allied powers, Britain, the USA,and the Soviet Union, would now combineeffectively for the first time, bringing theirresources to bear against Nazi Germany. Thefinal victory, as well as being a triumph forthe alliance against Germany, also marked,dramatically, the end of European globalhegemony. It was the USA and the SovietUnion that would be the dominant forces inthe world hereafter.

Between 1939 and 1943 the Second WorldWar had grown from a comparativelylocalized conflagration centered, as so manywars had previously been, on westernEurope, to encompass virtually the wholeglobe. Only the continent of the Americasescaped the ravages of war, although thelocalized effects of the 'Battle of the RiverPlate' and Japanese 'fire-balloons' on thewest coast of the USA served to remindAmericans of what the wider world wasexperiencing.

The war that had begun in Europe hadspread to the Far East (see The Second WorldWar (1) The Pacific War in this series). Japaneseaggression swiftly deposed the colonialregimes of the British (in Malaya, Singapore,and Burma), the French (Indo-China), and theDutch (Dutch East Indies). However, Japaneseaggression had also brought the USA into thewar, and the entrance of the United Statestipped the balance of the war decisively infavor of the Allies. The vast economicpotential of the USA, once harnessedeffectively, out-produced the Axis decisively,although numbers of weapons alone are notthe most significant determinant.

By early 1943 the war economy of theUSA was beginning to influence the fortunes

of all the Allied forces. In January, BritishPrime Minister Winston Churchill andUS President Franklin Roosevelt met for amajor summit at Casablanca, North Africa.Following their deliberations they issued ajoint ultimatum to Germany, demandingthat she surrender 'unconditionally.' Thiswas a major development; it effectively ruledout a negotiated peace in the future. AdolfHitler and many leading Nazis continued tobelieve that some form of rapprochement wasstill possible with the two western alliesbecause of the inherent tensions present intheir alliance with the Soviet Union.However, despite these German hopes of aseparate peace, which prompted HeinrichHimmler, the head of the SS and Gestapo, toattempt negotiations with the British andAmericans in the last weeks of the war, theunlikely alliance of East and West, capitalistdemocracies and communist dictatorship,held firm until the defeat of Germany.

The 'unconditional surrender' ultimatumnevertheless galvanized the Germanpopulace. Whatever they may have feltabout the rights and wrongs of the war, andirrespective of the common cause that theaverage German might or might not havefelt with the Nazi Party, after the Casablancaultimatum it was obvious that there was noway out for Germany. Unconditionalsurrender obliged Germany to fight onuntil she was defeated, totally.

The Germans also fought on for the samereasons that had prompted the outbreakinitially. Put simply, a state that had beenbuilt on ideas of racial superiority wasunlikely to seek to negotiate a peace, even ifone had been on offer. And, as the Alliesfrequently pointed out, such an option didnot exist. The extent to which all Germanswere avid believers in all aspects of Naziideology has always been an area of


considerable debate. Certainly, however,even those who opposed the Nazi regimehad little option but to either keep quiet orface arrest and death, so strong was thesecurity apparatus of Nazi Germany.

The brutal fashion with which NaziGermany had waged the war also ensuredthat her opponents' determination to seethe conflict through to a decisive conclusionwas total. Nazi Germany's commitment to

the ideas of racial supremacy made theirdogged resistance all the more determined,as did their increasingly firm belief inultimate victory. Arthur Harris, the man incharge of Bomber Command, once said ofHitler's Germany that 'they have sown thewind and, now, they shall reap thewhirlwind.' In 1944 and 1945, Hitler'sGermany was to reap the whirlwind inno uncertain fashion.

Further reading

Addison, Paul, The Road to 1945:BritishPolitics and the Second World War (London1994 [1975])

Bell, Philip, The Origins of the Second WorldWar (1986).

Bond, Brian, British Military Policy between theTwo World Wars (Oxford, 1980)

— France and Belgium, 1939-40 (London,1975)

Bullock, Alan,. Hitler: A Study in Tyranny(London, 1965)

Calvocoressi, Peter and Guy Wint, Total War:Causes and Courses of the Second World War(London, 1995 [1972]).

Chapman, Guy, Why France Fell (London1968)

Churchill, Winston, The Second World: War,6 vols (London, 1948-51).

Deighton, Len, Fighter: The True Story of theBattle of Britain (London, 1978)

Foot, M.R.D., SOE in France (London, 1966)Haestrupp, Jorgen, European Resistance

Movements 1939-45 (Westport, Conn,1981)

Hastings, Max, Bomber Command (London1979)

Home, Alistair, To Lose a Battle: France 1940(London 1999 {1969])

Irving, David, Hitler's War (London, 1977)Keegan, John, The Second World WarKieser, Egbert, Hitler on the Doorstep:

Operation Sea Lion (trans. Helmut Bogler,London, 11997)

Kitchen, Martin, A World in Flames: A ShortHistory of the Second World War in Europeand Asia 1939-45 (London, 1990).

Levine, Alan, The Strategic Bombing ofGermany (New York, 1992)

Maier, Klaus (ed.), Germany's Initial Conquestsin Europe: Germany and the Second WorldWar (Oxford, 1991)

Marwick, Arthur (ed.), Total War and SocialChange (London, 1988)

Millet, Allan R., and Williamson Murray(eds), Military Effectiveness: The SecondWorld War (London, 1999).

Overy, Richard, Why the Allies Won (NewYork, 1996).

Ray, John, The Battle of Britain: NewPerspectives - Behind the Scenes of the GreatAir War (London 1999)

Taylor, A.J.P., The Origins of the Second WorldWar (Oxford, 1963)

Weinberg, Gerhard, A World at Arms:A Global History of World War 2(Cambridge, 1994).


Index

References to illustrations are shown in bold

Adlerangriff 64Adlertag 64Anschluss 31-32, 32-33, 33Anti-Comintern Pact 32appeasement 37, 60Ardennes 27, 49, 54, 90 .'area bombing' 70Armies (Germany)

Army Group A 49-50, 54Army Group B 50, 54Army Group C 50Army Group Center 90Army Group North 43Army Group South 433rd Army 434th Army 43, 5710th Army 438th Army 4314th Army 43

Armies (Great Britain)12th Division 71-72East Surrey Regiment 71

Armistice 15, 22Arras 58, 73-74Aryan Germans 31Attlee, Clement 75Austria and Anschluss 31-32, 32-33, 33

B-17 'Flying Fortress' 69Baldwin, Stanley 60Battle of Britain 61, 62, 63, 64-65Battle of France 54, 58, 59, 71-74, 71Battle of the Atlantic 66-67'Battle of the Bulge' 90'Battle of the River Plate' 91Belgium 27-28, 48, 49, 50, 51, 54Beveridge Report 75Bismarck, Chancellor 14Bismarck 65Blitz 64, 65, 87-88Blitzkrieg 24, 52, 57Blunden, Edmund 24Bohemia 35British Expeditionary Force 9, 25, 45, 49, 53, 57, 58, 60,

61-62, 71-74, 71 '

Chamberlain, Neville 34, 35, 35, 36, 37, 51, 60, 72, 87Churchill, Winston 51, 60, 62, 69, 78, 87, 91civilian life (Great Britain) 86-88communism 21concentration camps 15, 17, 18, 42, 81, 84Condor (reconnaissance aircraft) 62'Continuation War' (1941-44) 46Convoy routes to Soviet Union 67Czechoslovakia 19, 33, 34-35, 84

Daladier, Edouard 35, 37Danzig 19, 37, 43Darlan, Admiral 60, 61Dawes Plan 16D-Day 90Denmark 47-48Dieppe raid 65, 66Dollfuss, Chancellor 31,32Dönitz, Admiral (Chancellor) 10, 67Dowding, Sir Hugh 68Dunkirk, evacuation of 9, 59, 60

Dyle Plan 49Breda variant 49

Eben Emael fortress 54Edar, Donald 71-74Eichmann, Adolf 81

Fall Gelb (Case Yellow) 49Fall Weiss (Case White) 42Ferdinand, Archduke Franz 14'final solution' 81Finland, alliance with Germany 46'fire-balloons' 91Foch, Marshal 19'fortress Europe' 65France 10, 15, 25-27, 29-30, 34-35, 37, 39, 45, 48,

49-59, 50, 53, 54, 55, 56, 58, 59, 61, 82-83Franco-German armistice 60, 84Franco-Prussian War (1870) 14Free French forces 83French air force 58French army 25-26, 27, 45, 53, 53, 54French navy 60-61

Gamelin, C-in-C General Maurice 49Gano, Count 35Gaulle General Charles de 27, 82, 83Great Britain 24-25, 37, 45, 48, 72, 76, 79German air force (Luftwaffe) 19, 43, 54, 57-58, 62, 63,

64-65, 70German army 19, 22, 24, 40, 43, 43, 44, 54, 57, 89, 90German navy 22, 67German Workers' Party 15Germany 9, 10, 13, 14, 15, 16-17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22-24,

27, 30, 31-33, 35, 37-39, 40-44, 40, 42, 43, 46-59, 50,53, 54, 55, 56, 58, 59, 61, 81, 90, 91

Gestapo 84, 91Goebbels, Josef 79Goring, Reichsmarschal Hermann 65Great Depression 21Greece, invasion of 9Guderian, General Heinz 24, 57Guernsey 85

Haider, General Franz 50Hall of Mirrors 14'Haller' Army 28Harris, Arthur Travers ('Bomber') 68, 69, 70, 92Henlein, Konrad 33Heydrich, Reinhard 40, 41, 81, 84Himmler, Heinrich 19, 84, 91Hindenburg, Paul Beneckendorff und 17Hitler, Adolf 9-10, 13-14, 15-16, 16, 17, 19, 15-21, 20,

24, 28, 31-35, 37, 42, 45, 50, 51, 58-59, 62-63, 82, 89-90,91

Holland 48, 49, 50, 51, 54Holocaust 81home front (Great Britain) 75-76Hurricane, Hawker 58, 62

Japan 91Jersey 85Jews 15, 17, 18, 31, 42, 81, 84'Judo-Bolshevik' coup 13-14

Kammhuber, General Joseph 70Kanalkampf 64'Kapp Putsch' 15Kapp, Wolfgang 15

Index 95

Keitel, Field Marshal 45Kennedy, Ambassador Joseph 62Kesselschlachten 43Keynes, John Maynard 21, 21Kristallnacht 17

Lancaster, Avro (bomber) 69, 70Land Army 75League of Nations 16, 20, 21Lebensraum 31, 37, 62Lebrun, President 82-83Lend-Lease Act 89Liddice, destruction of by SS 84Lloyd-George, David 20-21Locarno, Treaty of 16, 30Low Countries 48, 49, 50, 51, 54Luxembourg 51

MacDonald, Ramsay 60Maginot, Defense Minister Andre 51Maginot Line 26-27, 26, 50, 51, 59, 83'Maginot mentality' 27Manstein, General Erich von 49Manstein Plan 49-50Mein Kampf 16, 20, 31Messerschmitt 109 57-58Meuse, River 49, 55, 55, 56, 58mobilization at home (Great Britain) 75-76, 76mobilization at home (Germany) 78-81mobilization at home (USA) 76-78, 77Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact 37, 42, 44, 49Montgomery, General Bernard 90Moravia 35Munich conference 35, 35, 37Munich Putsch 15Mussolini 31, 35

Nazi Party 13, 15, 16, 17, 33, 91New Deal 21Norway 46-48, 47, 48'Nuremberg Laws' 81

Office of Strategic Services (OSS) 83OKW Directive No. 1 37, 38Operation

Bagration 90Barbarossa 9-10, 90Dynamo 59-60, 60Gomorra 70Hindenburg 40, 42Jubilee 66Market Garden 90Overlord 89, 90Sea Lion 9, 62Torch 83

Owen, Frank 59-60

P-51 Mustang 70Palace of Versailles 14Peace Ballot 21,24Pearl Harbor 9,89Perry, Colin 86-88Pétain Marshal 26-27, 82-83'phoney war' 45Pilsudski, Josef 28, 29Poland 19, 24, 28-30, 31, 37-39, 40-44, 40, 45, 82Polish air force 43Polish army cavalry 28, 28, 30, 40Polish Corridor 19, 43Polish Legions 28Prince of Wales, HMS 69propoganda posters 79, 80, 81Prussia 14, 19, 28, 37

Quisling, Vidkun 48

rationing (Germany) 79-81Red Army 29. 44, 45-46, 89, 90Reichstag 32-33Repulse, HMS 69Resistance movements in France 83-84

Reynaud, Paul 82Rhineland 19, 20, 31Röhm, Ernest 17, 19Romania 30Rome-Berlin axis 32Roosevelt, Franklin D 21, 87, 89, 91Royal Air Force 25, 59, 62, 63, 64-65, 69, 70, 81Royal Navy 25, 35, 59, 62Russo-Finnish War 45-46, 46Russo-Polish War 30

Saarbrucken 45Sassoon, Siegfried 24, 25Schlieffen Plan 49Schuschnigg, Chancellor 33Schutzstaffel (SS) 19, 91Seeckt, Colonel-General Hans von 22, 23Seven Weeks' War (1866) 14Seys-Inquart, Chancellor 33Shirer, William 39, 62, 63Sicherheitsdienst (SD) 40Siegfried Line 45Sikorski, Wladyslaw 44Soviet Union 10, 22, 37, 42, 44Special Operations Executive (SOE) 65-66, 83, 84Spitfire, Supermarine 58, 62SS 19,91'stab in the back' 15, 22Stalin, Joseph 29, 37, 42, 44, 45, 46, 90Stilton Plan 51Stirling, Short (bomber) 69strategic bomber offensive (Allied) 67-70, 67Stresemann, Gustav 16Stuka 58Sturmabteilung (SA) 17, 19Sudetenland 33-34, 34, 35

tank warfare 24, 25, 57tankettes 24, 25, 29tanks (British) 52, 53, 66, 76tanks (French)

Char B1 tank 53, 53tanks (German) 51,52-54,57

Panther 89Panzer 1 53Panzer II 53Panzer III 53Panzer IV 53-54Panzers 24, 57, 59

Territorial Army 71'terror bombing' 69

U-boats 22, 66, 67Ukraine, invasion by Poland 29Ulster Rifles 60Untermenschen 14, 82United States Army Air Force (USAAF) 69, 81United States of America 10, 25, 77-78, 89

V1 flying bomb 65V2 rocket 65Verdun 26, 82Versailles, Treaty of 13, 15, 18, 19, 21, 22, 28, 31, 33Vichy France 83Vickers Mark VI tank 52

Wall Street Crash 16, 17, 21Warsaw 44Weimar Republic 15,17Wellington. Vickers (bomber) 69Wilhelm I. Kaiser 9, 14Wilhelm II, Kaiser 14, 15'Winter War' 45-46women, changing role of in war 75, 76, 77, 78-79,

79

Yalta Conference 90Young Plan 16Yugoslavia, invasion of 9

Zeppelin airships 68, 70

Documents

DR ROBIN HAVERS is Senior - Higher Intellect · DR ROBIN HAVERS is Senior Lecturer in War Studies at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, ... combined forces of Great Britain, France,