Download 48. World War II in Europe

World War II in Europe
So much for the promises of the totalitarian dictator and fascist, Adolf Hitler.
Desperate to avoid war, Neville Chamberlain had tried to appease Hitler by agreeing to
his seizure of the Sudetenland at the Munich Conference. Hitler said that would be his
last territorial acquisition. He lied. The United Kingdom and the other democracies of
Europe finally awakened to Hitler’s intentions after the German army moved into the rest
of Czechoslovakia and carved out more “living space” by the summer of 1939. Only
then did the free western powers act by pledging support for Poland. What Chamberlain
had predicted would bring, “Peace for our time,” had convinced Hitler he could expand
the German Empire at will. The result was a conflagration that reduced modern
European cities to rubble and killed millions of Europeans, soldier and civilian alike. The
European theater of World War II reopened old wounds, cutting deeper and resulting in
catastrophic destruction.
Among Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points was the desire to make Poland an
independent country with access to the sea. The principle of self-determination mandated
through the Treaty of Versailles that Poles would have a country at last. Among all the
provisions of the treaty that ended World War I, this one proved most odious to Adolph
Hitler. German territory was stripped away, including the city of Danzig, to provide the
Polish Corridor to meet Wilson’s ideal. Before Hitler could mobilize to invade Poland,
Mussolini took Albania. The two fascist aggressors allied firmly together in a “Pact of
Steel” by May of 1939. By August Hitler revealed to his generals that he had a surprise
ace up his sleeve. He had come to an agreement with, of all people, Josef Stalin. This
Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact provided for the partitioning of Poland to be shared by
the expanding totalitarian empires of Germany and the Soviet Union. Hitler said, “A few
weeks from now I shall, on the common German-Russian border, shake hands with Stalin
and carry out with him a redistribution of the world.” Hitler planned to avoid this way a
two-front war like the one Germany faced in the Great War. In late August, German
loudspeakers were installed on the border from which Wagner music was blasted into
Poland. On the first day of September, 1939, German armies followed. Two days later
Britain and France declared war against Germany, and World War II had begun.
The Second World War became the biggest event in all history. To say it was the
fault of one country, or one man, reduces the scope of the blame and gives Hitler too
much frightening power. The hesitancy of Britain and France to act to stop Hitler
encouraged him. The cooperation of Stalin in erasing Poland from the map unleashed
him. Yet Hitler had almost nothing to do with Japan’s aggression in China. Together,
though, the aggressors and the appeasers ignited a truly total war across Europe, Africa,
Asia, and in all the world’s oceans. Modern aircraft turned world war from a battle for
position to a battle of almost constant movement. Technically, then, there were no
battlefields, or everywhere was a battlefield including cities filled with civilians. Hitler’s
military used modern weaponry to create blitzkrieg, or lightning war, the combined,
quick attacks of infantry, mechanized cavalry, and aircraft with devastating effect. He
had prepared for war for a long time and in the opening months seemed unstoppable.
Nazi troops dispatched Poland in four weeks, and Hitler told Britain and France
the war was over. Europe was stunned by the rapidity of the onslaught. Stalin had not
even been able to mobilize his forces to help partition Poland and was simply handed the
eastern half. Hitler held off attacking France by land or England by air in hopes that they
would merely quit and appease him again. He scored two encouraging blows with
submarines at sea, however, as the German U-Boat menace resurfaced. Stalin,
meanwhile, grabbed Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania and added them to the Soviet Union
using the excuse of mutual protection. With protectors like that, who needed invaders?
Thinking the world wouldn’t mind if he kept going, Stalin ordered an attack on Finland.
The Finns and the rest of the world did mind, though. The Soviet troops were dealt
severe losses, and the League of Nations expelled the Soviet Union from membership.
Before much else could be done, however, German troops advanced again.
Hitler wanted a wider range for his U-Boats, so he set his sights on Norway. He
simultaneously attacked Norway and Denmark and conquered both in a matter of days.
To secure even better staging areas for attacks on France and Great Britain, the German
army turned west and swept across the Netherlands and Belgium, nearly annihilating the
combined British, French, and Belgian army in their way. The retreating Allied forces
were only spared because of the “Miracle at Dunkirk,” the spontaneous mobilization of
every friendly vessel in the North Sea to evacuate fleeing troops. Once again, the
Germans had swept through Belgium on their way to France, this time much faster and
by tank. The even more fortified French/German border could not wheel fast enough to
face the invaders. The one bright spot in 1940, although it did not seem one at the time,
was the resignation of Neville Chamberlain as the Prime Minister of England to be
succeeded by Winston Churchill, the man who looked and acted like a bull dog.
Meanwhile the one man who might rally France the way Churchill set about
rallying England did nothing of the kind. Marshal Henri Philippe Pétain felt abandoned
and decided to make peace with Hitler in order to save as much of France from
destruction as possible. Hitler paused in late May of 1940 to ponder the merits of
consolidating his hold on France over against a cross-channel invasion of England.
Suffice it to say he made his decision and rolled over France so quickly that Mussolini
barely had time to invade from the south in order to claim some part for Italy. France
surrendered and abandoned 3/5 of its territory, including its entire Atlantic coast, to the
Nazis. The remaining French territory became known as Vichy France because of the
choice of that city as a new capital of what amounted to a puppet state with Pétain at the
head.
Great Britain was next. Hitler began planning what he called, “Operation Sea
Lion,” a plan for the full scale invasion of the British Isles. The fact that they were
islands helped save them. Just like Napoleon, Hitler could never quite achieve the
mastery of the sea (and the air this time) required to mount an amphibious invasion. In
hopes that Britain would give up as had the French, Hitler unleashed the fury of the
Luftwaffe, the German air force, in what became known as the Battle of Britain.
Churchill called this moment England’s “darkest hour” when seemingly endless waves of
German bombers and fighter planes crossed the English Channel to attack. Churchill
pledged, though, that “We shall defend our island whatever the cost may be; we shall
fight on beaches, landing grounds, in fields, in streets and on the hills. We shall never
surrender. . .” Bombing reached London and among other targets gutted the House of
Commons. Numerous times throughout the summer of 1940 England’s reserves of
planes and pilots with which to meet the Germans in the air were nearly depleted.
Thanks to heroic flying and to the Spitfire’s incredible fire power (it had six machine
guns), Hitler turned his attention elsewhere. When the Battle of Britain was over,
Churchill said of the RAF pilots, “Never have so many owed so much to so few.” If you
have any imagination at all it is difficult to say those ten simple words all the way
through without having to swallow hard to finish.
European war spilled over into North Africa. Italians tried to invade Egypt and
failed, so the German Afrikakorps under General Erwin Rommel came and finished the
job by April of 1941. Rommel was a brilliant tank commander who had written a book
on tactics that he first put into action in Belgium on the way to France. He was sent to
North Africa to strip away resources from the British Empire and direct them into
German hands. The Italians then botched an invasion of Greece, and Germans had to fill
the gap on a whole new front in the Balkans. Bulgaria and Hungary had joined the
Germans as they had in World War I, and the young country of Yugoslavia was quickly
overrun with their help. Greece fell to the Nazis by the spring of 1941. The first real
setback to German military supremacy came when their giant battleship, the Bismarck,
was sunk by the British at the end of May. There was hope among the British and the
Free French forces that the United States of America, which had been ramping up its
supply of the Allied side, would officially enter the war. Hitler then shocked everyone by
doing the unexpected—he invaded Russia. This move prompted Churchill to say:
Hitler is a monster of wickedness, insatiable in his lust for blood and plunder.
Not content with having all of Europe under his heel or else terrorized into
various forms of abject submission, he must now carry his work of butchery and
desolation among the vast multitudes of Russia and Asia. The terrible military
machine which we and the rest of the civilized world so foolishly, so supinely, so
insensately, allowed the Nazi gangsters to build up, year by year, from almost
nothing—the machine cannot stand idle lest it rust, or fall to pieces. It must be in
continual motion, grinding up human lives and trampling down the homes and the
rights of hundreds of millions of men. Moreover, it must be fed, not only with
human flesh but with oil.
Historians refer to the invasion of the Soviet Union in June of 1941 as Hitler’s
Russian Gamble, and most say it was his fatal mistake. In search of the oil needed to
feed the Nazi war machine and more Lebensraum (living space), Hitler attacked the
communists he hated. Had he presented himself as a great liberator from communist
oppression, he might have succeeded. As it turned out, he came pretty close. The
Germans swept into Russia and took hundreds of thousands of Russians prisoner to either
work as slaves back in Germany or to starve in prisoner camps. Stalin was able to
mobilize resistance for “Mother Russia” as the Germans pushed east, and all opposition
to his control ended. As winter began to descend on the unprepared German troops,
Stalin rallied a last-ditch effort at the Battle of Stalingrad. Had the Nazis won, they
would have had complete access to the oil fields of the Caucasus. By February of 1943
the Germans were repulsed at Stalingrad and began to fight a defensive war both in
Russia and in North Africa where British and American forces combined. The
Americans had finally entered the war.
Hitler imposed what he called a “New Order” wherever German armies had
occupied in Europe. Alongside the atrocities in the Holocaust of which you will hear
more, later, the Nazis imposed the racial superiority of the Aryan Race over all nonGermanic peoples. The Holocaust killed 6 million Jews and up to 2 million others, but 7
million Europeans were enslaved, too. Hitler confiscated land and redistributed it to
German-speaking people he had drawn into his empire. German Kultur was in the
process of being systematically imposed wherever the Nazi boot had tread when the first
German losses occurred. Hitler had plans in place for the indoctrination of the children
of conquered peoples into German life, that is, of children of desired bloodlines. Others
he systematically killed, as you will see.
After Japan’s sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, Franklin Roosevelt asked the US
Congress to declare war against the Japanese Empire. When they did, Japan’s ally,
Germany, declared war against the United States. America’s entry into the war meant
immense industrial power for the Allied cause. Americans built more planes than both
Germany and Japan combined. Americans built ships faster than the German submarines
could sink them, especially once convoy systems and new anti-submarine technology
came to bear. Europe was still considered too tough for an Allied attack in 1942, so the
first assault on Nazi forces by Americans happened in North Africa. While green
American troops pushed from the west, veteran British troops pushed from the east just
as US and UK pilots worked together to cripple German industry with waves of bombers
attacking the German homeland. In Africa the largest tank battle in history happened at
El Alamein where British forces proved victorious. Rommel was cornered at Tunis by
US General George S. Patton and British General Bernard Montgomery. Patton stepped
out in the open on the battlefield, shook a fist at Rommel’s smoking tanks, and shouted,
“I read your book!”
By the summer of 1943, the Allies were ready to attack the “soft underbelly” of
the Nazi dragon at Sicily and Italy. As the Allies learned how to make amphibious
landings better, they also benefitted from the fact that the German secret codes had been
broken. This breakthrough, which was kept secret until after the war, allowed Roosevelt
and Churchill and their commanders to see into Hitler’s mind, probe his weaknesses, and
anticipate his next moves. Even with this advantage the campaign up the Italian
peninsula was murderously slow and brutal. Stalin even accused his allies of stalling
while his country was dying, and he demanded that Britain and the US open a real second
front in Europe. Historians agree, however, that an invasion from the north was only
made possible because of the Allied forces that fixed German troops in place defending
Italy. And possible does not mean easy.
Dwight D. Eisenhower had been given the title of Supreme Commander and
coordinated the plans for “Operation Overlord,” the largest attack on an enemy’s shores
of any in history. Through various subterfuges, the Germans were convinced this main
attack would come near Calais. When the attack commenced at Normandy on “D-Day,”
(June 6, 1944) there was still stiff resistance. As the ships of the landing force made their
way across the Channel, Eisenhower had the following speech delivered over
loudspeakers to the troops:
Soldiers, Sailors and Airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Force!
You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade, toward which we have
striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you. The
hopes and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you.
In company with our brave Allies and brothers-in-arms on
other Fronts, you will bring about the destruction of the German war
machine, the elimination of Nazi tyranny over the oppressed peoples of
Europe, and security for ourselves in a free world.
Your task will not be an easy one. Your enemy is well trained, well
equipped and battle hardened. He will fight savagely.
But this is the year 1944! Much has happened since the Nazi triumphs of
1940-41. The United Nations have inflicted upon the Germans great defeats,
in open battle, man-to-man. Our air offensive has seriously reduced their
strength in the air and their capacity to wage war on the ground. Our Home
Fronts have given us an overwhelming superiority in weapons and munitions
of war, and placed at our disposal great reserves of trained fighting men.
The tide has turned! The free men of the world are marching together to
Victory!
I have full confidence in your courage and devotion to duty and skill in
battle. We will accept nothing less than full Victory!
Good luck! And let us beseech the blessing of Almighty God upon this great
and noble undertaking.
Privately, Eisenhower wasn’t so sure. He had also composed a message ahead of D-Day
in which he took full blame for the failure of the attack he had planned. His plan worked,
however. His own form of lightning war involved the positioning of airborne and glider
troops behind the main enemy positions so as to cut off retreat or resupply. This scheme
succeeded as the landing forces carved out a beachhead. From there, the Germans were
driven out of northwestern France in three months. In four months Allied forces invaded
Germany itself. Hitler hurled eight armored divisions at the advancing Allied line in
December of 1944 and drove deeply into Allied territory in what became known as the
Battle of the Bulge. This thrust proved to be Hitler’s last offensive attack.
The Soviets by this time had been pushing steadily westward and by January of
1945 were within 100 miles of Berlin. The Allies were demanding “unconditional
surrender,” so after a plot to kill Hitler had failed and been punished with the execution
of thousands, Germany was prompted to fight with suicidal resistance. Those German
officers, like Rommel, who talked of surrender were shot at Hitler’s command. Through
February and March Soviet troops and the western allies advanced on Berlin from both
sides. Russian and American patrols first encountered each other at the Elbe River on
April 25. Four days later, news arrived that Hitler’s old ally, Mussolini, had been caught
and executed by an Italian mob. On April 30th Russian troops fought their way into the
center of Berlin, and Hitler committed suicide in an underground bunker. On May 7th the
highest ranking German officer that could be found agreed to the terms of Germany’s
unconditional surrender. When this fact was announced to the world the next day, May
8th, 1945, was declared V-E Day, or victory day in Europe. Never have so many owed so
much to so many, or in other words, the entire power of free nations had met the entire
power of fascist aggressor nations and prevailed.