Download Blitzkrieg in Europe, 1939–1941

Blitzkrieg in Europe, 1939–1941
Throughout the 1930s, Great Britain's
Neville Chamberlain and France's Paul
Reynaud made valiant efforts to keep
peace through a policy of appeasement
with Germany's Adolf Hitler and Italy's
Benito Mussolini. They stood aside as
Germany occupied first the Sudetenland
in 1938, Austria in 1939, and then all of
Czechoslovakia later that same year,
and as Italy took over Albania in 1938.
They were determined to do whatever
was necessary to maintain peace in
Europe.
While most European nations hoped to
avoid open conflict, Hitler was
determined to make Germany a world
power and began to talk of war and
conquest. First of all, he wanted the
Polish Corridor—a strip of land that
Germany had lost as a result of the
Treaty of Versailles (1919) at the end of
World War I—which gave Poland
access to the sea but also split off a
piece of Germany. Several factors
fueled German pursuit of control of that
area: many ethnic Germans still
inhabiting the region, Hitler's
embracement of the concept of
lebensraum, and German desire to
retrieve what had been lost. Toward that
end, Hitler negotiated in secret with the
Soviet Union's Joseph Stalin, and in
August 1939, he announced that they
had finalized a nonaggression pact.
They had pledged that in the event of a
war, they would not attack each other. In
addition, they had agreed quietly to split
Poland.
the Polish, although the Poles offered
courageous resistance. On September
3, the British and French promised their
support to Poland and declared war on
Germany.
However, Hitler's blitzkrieg—"lightning
war"—was so effective that Poland fell
before Great Britain and France could
even plan for its defense, let alone
actually mobilize to come to its defense.
Strategically employing new, fastmoving weapons of war—the armored
tank and the airplane—Hitler's Nazi
troops systematically destroyed
Poland's air force, army, transportation,
communication, and factories. On
September 17, the Soviet Red Army
plowed across Poland's east border. By
September 20, practically the whole
country was in German or Soviet hands,
just as Hitler and Stalin had planned.
The conquest of Poland isolated the
Baltic countries of Lithuania, Latvia, and
Estonia, as well as Finland. Within a few
months, Stalin had forced all four
countries to allow Soviet military bases
on their soil. Germany's conquests of
Denmark and Norway were almost
equally as easy. German forces invaded
Denmark on the morning of April 9,
1940, captured the Danish king and his
ministers, and secured their surrender
within 24 hours. German forces also
invaded Norway on the same day and
had captured Oslo, its capital city, within
48 hours.
France Falls
Blitzkrieg in Europe
With a land-hungry Germany to the west
and Russia to the east, Poland seemed
ripe for picking. On September 1, 1939,
Hitler invaded Poland. Waves of
German bombers targeted Polish
railroads and airfields and immobilized
In order to avoid a war on two fronts,
Hitler then set his sights on France. His
strategy was to blitz through the Low
Countries (Belgium, the Netherlands,
and Luxembourg) and thereby attack
France without having to fight through
the highly fortified Maginot Line on the
border between France and Germany.
On May 10, German airborne troops
landed inside the Low Countries. They
seized airfields and bridges. Tiny
Luxembourg collapsed in only a few
hours. The Dutch surrendered on May
14 and the Belgians on May 28. Once
again, the countries under attack as well
as their allies—the British and the
French—were not prepared to deal
effectively with Germany's lightningquick invasions. Hitler's blitzkrieg tactics
had made the German forces seem
unstoppable.
The German panzer group, truly an
armored army, advanced into northern
France. The French and British troops
fell back until they were trapped on a
narrow beachhead at Dunkirk with the
Germans in their faces and the sea at
their backs. The British Navy, aided by
smaller crafts of all kinds—fishing boats,
tugs, motorboats, and private yachts—
rescued the stranded soldiers and
carried them across the channel to
safety in England. In an eight-day heroic
sealift from May 28 to June 4, 338,226
men were rescued. However, they were
forced to abandon supplies,
ammunition, and equipment that would
soon be sorely needed. France's
problems had just begun.
On June 10, Italy declared war on both
Great Britain and France and attacked
France from the south. France was
doomed. On June 16, Marshal Philippe
Pétain, a World War I hero, became the
new premier of France; on June 17, he
asked for an armistice, saying, "We
must cease to fight." By June 25,
Germany controlled northern France
and the Atlantic coast, and Pétain's
government had moved its headquarters
south to Vichy. In less than 10 months,
Hitler had conquered almost all of
western Europe.
Britain Fights Alone
At that point, England stood alone but
determined. England had a new prime
minister, Winston Churchill, who vowed
never to surrender and inspired his
countrymen to give their all to stop
Germany. Hitler planned a threepronged attack: submarine warfare to
cut off supplies to the island nation, an
all-out air war to knock out British
defenses, and then, a land invasion of
the weakened nation. Germany's
Luftwaffe bombers began bombing sites
in England and Ireland in August 1940
and continued with day and night
bombing runs for over a year, totaling 71
major raids on London and 56 on other
cities.
The British fought back by bolstering the
skill and raw courage of the British
Royal Air Force (RAF) with two new
secret weapons: a new electronic
tracking system, radar, that could detect
enemy bombers and identify their
locations for RAF fighters and a
decoding device known as Ultra (one of
the earliest computers) that allowed the
British to intercept and decode secret
German radio messages.
Nevertheless, the Battle of Britain
(called "the Blitz" by the British,
borrowing the German word blitzkrieg)
was devastating to the island nation.
The RAF lost 792 planes and over 500
pilots. The air raids destroyed some 2
million houses—60% of those homes
were in London—killed 42,000 civilians,
and injured seriously another 50,000.
However, Hitler finally acknowledged
that he had met his match; he conceded
defeat in the Battle of Britain and turned
his sights elsewhere.