Download The Second World War

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The Second World War
Framework of Events:
1939 September: German invasion of Poland. Britain and France declare war on Germany
November: Beginning of ‘Winter War’ between USSR and Finland
1940 Russian annexation of Baltic states
April: German invasion of Norway and Denmark
May: German invasion of Holland, Belgium and France
June: Dunkirk evacuation and fall of France
July-September: Battle of Britain
1941 March: ‘Lend-Lease’ agreement between Britain and USA
June: Germany launches ‘Operation Barbarossa’, the invasion of the USSR
September: Britain and USA sign ‘Atlantic Charter’
December: Japanese attack upon Pearl Harbour. American entry into war
1942 August: German assault on Stalingrad
October: German defeat in North Africa at El Alamein
1943 January: German defeat at Stalingrad
July: German defeat at Kursk. Allied invasion of Italy. Mussolini falls from power
1944 June: British and American forces launch D-Day landings in Normandy. Fall of Rome to Allied
forces
1945 January: Fall of Warsaw to Soviet troops
February: Allied conference at Yalta. Allied forces cross the Rhine
April: Russian forces enter Berlin
May: Unconditional surrender of German forces
August: Atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki
September: Unconditional surrender of Japanese forces. Allied conference at Potsdam
Overview:
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Although the Second World War was different in many respects from the war of 1914-1918, it too
began with a misconception. Hitler did not anticipate a global conflict of long duration, but had
planned a series of limited rapid campaigns that would achieve strictly defined objectives in a
manner that would not stretch German economic resources. The first of these crushed Poland in a
matter of weeks (September 1939) and another, the following year, destroyed French resistance
almost as rapidly. Subsequently, however, Hitler’s calculations began to go wrong. Britain did not
immediately give in once its French ally had been defeated, nor did Hitler’s third Blitzkrieg, launched
from the air, succeed in bringing it to its knees. Instead, Britain gained material assistance from the
United States of America and, within a year, could count the USA as a direct ally after Japanese
aggression had brought them into the war. Nevertheless, Hitler’s political and racial beliefs led him
to believe that his next projected offensive, against the Soviet Union, must also succeed.
Germany owed its impressive successes in 1939-41 to the fact that its military commanders had
perfected this art of Blitzkrieg. They had appreciated before any of their contemporaries the impact
of large tank forces, supported from the air by superior forces of rapid fighter planes and divebombers. When this strategy failed a second time, however, and the Soviet Union survived the
massive blow struck against it, it became clear that the Second World War would actually be
decided in the same manner as the first. It would be won by those who possessed the greatest
industrial resources and who could bring them most effectively to bear. By 1942 Hitler and his allies
were involved in a great struggle that stretched from one end of Europe to the other, from the
Channel coast to the Caspian See. It was linked with another struggle on the other side of the globe,
for Japan’s leaders had also miscalculated, underestimating America’s aerial and naval power, failing
similarly to achieve a quick ‘knock-out’ blow, and becoming locked in a desperate battle for survival
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in the Pacific. Britain’s colonial interests in Canada, Australasia, South Africa and India drew those
regions, too, into what was now a truly global war.
In effect, by the end of 1942, this was a war that Germany and its allies could not win. Germany in
particular, however, adapted its war effort impressively in an attempt to stave off defeat. This
involved the mobilisation of Germany’s domestic economy to meet the demands of ‘total war’, and
only from 1942 did the Nazis realise the country’s potential for making war. It also meant the most
ruthless exploitation of the sources available to Germany in the territories that it had occupied.
Enormous efforts were made to seize material resources and to mobilise foreign labour to work in
German industry, either by force or by more subtle inducements. One of the most remarkable
features of this stage of the war was the willingness with which some elements within the occupied
states, especially in western Europe, co-operated and collaborated with the invaders. This ruthless
exploitation also stimulated resistance to the Germans, and in eastern Europe in particular, this put
further obstacles in the path of Germany’s war effort. At the same time, the Nazi leadership placed
additional obstacles in its own path by judging that the time was now ripe for a ‘final solution’ to the
‘problem’ of Europe’s Jewish population. Even as the war was being lost, human resources, transport
and the like were being used for ferrying Jews to the concentration camps where genocide was to
take place.
Great though the scope of the war was by 1942, its focus was the German campaign against the
Soviet Union, and the decisive battles of the whole world war were those fought around Moscow,
Leningrad and Stalingrad. There, once the invaders had lost the element of surprise, their forces
were steadily ground down by geography and climate of the region, and by the vast resources that
the Soviet Union could mobilise. In the meantime, the American economy attained the highest
levels of industrial production that the world had ever witnessed, and its military resources were
steadily concentrated in Britain and in North Africa. In the course of 1944 Germany found itself
fighting on three fronts. Whereas the First World War ended without a single foreign soldier on
German soil, the Second World War drew to a close with the wholesale destruction of German cities,
with Soviet troops in the heart of Berlin, and with the arrest and condemnation of many of
Germany’s political leaders. The year 1945 marked the most comprehensive military and political
defeat that any modern state had ever experienced.
Six years of bitter conflict had serious implications for the political and economic balance of Europe
and of the world at large. To say that they brought about the destruction of the German state, the
downfall of the political regimes of several other European states, the end of Europe’s international
supremacy, and a new political balance between two world superpowers, is only to list some of the
war’s results. Some historians argue that the two world wars must be viewed together, the second
completing some of the unfinished business of the first. Looked at it in this way it might be possible
to conclude that the extreme nationalist movements of the 1920s and the 1930s were only
makeshift expedients to fill the gaps left by the collapse of the aristocratic empires pf pre-1914
Europe. The defeat of such movements left supremacy in Europe to be disputed between the liberal
democracies that were already well developed by 1914, and the vast socialist power of the Soviet
Union that had achieved such apparent permanency under the rule of Joseph Stalin.
(from: Derrick Murphy, Terry Morris (eds.): International Relations 1879-2004. London (Collins Flagship History) 2008,
pp.82-83.)
Annotations:
l.23: Australasia: the islands of the southern Pacific Ocean, including Australia, New Zealand and
New Guinea; l.26: to stave off: to fend off; l.59: makeshift expedient: substitute, temporary means
to an end
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