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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.