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The World Wars
By the early part of 1939 the German
dictator Adolf Hitler had become determined to
invade and occupy Poland. Poland, for its part,
had guarantees of French and British military support should it be attacked by
Germany. Hitler intended to invade Poland anyway, but first he had to neutralize
the possibility that the Soviet Union would resist the invasion of its western
neighbour. Secret negotiations led on August 23-24 to the signing of the German-Soviet
Nonaggression Pact in Moscow. In a secret protocol of this pact, the
Germans and the Soviets agreed that Poland should be divided between them, with
the western third of the country going to Germany and the eastern two-thirds
being taken over by the U.S.S.R.
Having achieved this cynical agreement,
the other provisions of which stupefied Europe even without divulgence of the
secret protocol, Hitler thought that Germany could attack Poland with no danger
of Soviet or British intervention and gave orders for the invasion to start on
August 26. News of the signing, on August 25, of a formal treaty of mutual
assistance between Great Britain and Poland (to supersede a previous though
temporary agreement) caused him to postpone the start of hostilities for a few
days. He was still determined, however, to ignore the diplomatic efforts of the
western powers to restrain him. Finally, at 12:40 PM on Aug. 31, 1939, Hitler
ordered hostilities against Poland to start at 4:45 the next morning. The
invasion began as ordered. In response, Great Britain
and France declared war on Germany on September
3, at 11:00 AM and at 5:00 PM, respectively. World War II had begun.
In September 1939 the Allies,
namely Great Britain, France, and Poland, were together superior in industrial
resources, population, and military manpower, but the German Army, or Wehrmacht,
because of its armament, training, doctrine, discipline, and fighting spirit,
was the most efficient and effective fighting force for its size in the world.
The index of military strength in September 1939 was the number of divisions
that each nation could mobilize. Against Germany's 100 infantry divisions and
six armoured divisions, France had 90 infantry divisions in metropolitan France,
Great Britain had 10 infantry divisions, and Poland had 30 infantry divisions,
12 cavalry brigades, and one armoured brigade (Poland had also 30 reserve
infantry divisions, but these could not be mobilized quickly). A division
contained from 12,000 to 25,000 men.
It was the qualitative superiority of
the German infantry divisions and the number of their armoured divisions that
made the difference in 1939. The firepower of a German infantry division far
exceeded that of a French, British, or Polish division; the standard German
division included 442 machine guns, 135 mortars, 72 antitank guns, and 24
howitzers. Allied divisions had a firepower only slightly greater than that of
World War I. Germany had six armoured divisions in September 1939; the Allies,
though they had a large number of tanks, had no armoured divisions at that time.
The six armoured, or panzer,
divisions of the Wehrmacht comprised some 2,400 tanks. And though Germany
would subsequently expand its tank forces during the first years of the war, it
was not the number of tanks that Germany had (the Allies had almost as many in
September 1939) but the fact of their being organized into divisions and
operated as such that was to prove decisive. In accordance with the doctrines of
General Heinz Guderian, the German tanks were
used in massed formations in conjunction with motorized artillery to punch holes
in the enemy line and to isolate segments of the enemy, which were then
surrounded and captured by motorized German infantry divisions while the tanks
ranged forward to repeat the process: deep drives into enemy territory by panzer
divisions were thus followed by mechanized infantry and foot soldiers. These
tactics were supported by dive bombers that
attacked and disrupted the enemy's supply and communications lines and spread
panic and confusion in its rear, thus further paralyzing its defensive
capabilities. Mechanization was the key to the German blitzkrieg, or
"lightning war," so named because of the unprecedented speed and
mobility that were its salient characteristics. Tested and well-trained in
maneuvers, the German panzer divisions constituted a force with no equal in
The German Air Force, or Luftwaffe,
was also the best force of its kind in 1939. It was a ground-cooperation force
designed to support the Army, but its planes
were superior to nearly all Allied types. In the rearmament period from 1935 to
1939 the production of German combat aircraft steadily mounted. Table
5 shows the production of German aircraft by years.
The standardization of engines and
airframes gave the Luftwaffe an advantage over its opponents. Germany had an
operational force of 1,000 fighters and 1,050 bombers in September 1939. The
Allies actually had more planes in 1939 than Germany did, but their strength was
made up of many different types, some of them obsolescent. Table
6 shows the number of first-line military aircraft available to the
Allies at the outbreak of war.
Great Britain, which was held back by
delays in the rearmament program, was producing one modern fighter in 1939, the
Hurricane. A higher-performance fighter, the Spitfire,
was just coming into production and did not enter the air war in numbers until
The value of the French Air Force in
1939 was reduced by the number of obsolescent planes in its order of battle: 131
of the 634 fighters and nearly all of the 463 bombers. France was desperately
trying to buy high-performance aircraft in the United States in 1939.
At sea the odds against Germany were
much greater in September 1939 than in August 1914, since the Allies in 1939 had
many more large surface warships than Germany had. At sea, however, there was to
be no clash between the Allied and the German massed fleets but only the
individual operation of German pocket battleships and commerce raiders.
When World War I ended, the experience
of it seemed to vindicate the power of the defensive over the offensive. It was
widely believed that a superiority in numbers of at least three to one was
required for a successful offensive. Defensive concepts underlay the
construction of the Maginot Line between France and Germany and of its lesser
counterpart, the Siegfried Line, in the interwar years. Yet by 1918 both of the
requirements for the supremacy of the offensive were at hand: tanks and planes.
The battles of Cambrai (1917) and Amiens (1918) had proved that when tanks were
used in masses, with surprise, and on firm and open terrain, it was possible to
break through any trench system. (see also military
The Germans learned this crucial, though
subtle, lesson from World War I. The Allies on the other hand felt that their
victory confirmed their methods, weapons, and leadership, and in the interwar
period the French and British armies were slow to introduce new weapons,
methods, and doctrines. Consequently, in 1939 the British Army did not have a
single armoured division, and the French tanks were distributed in small packets
throughout the infantry divisions. The Germans, by contrast, began to develop
large tank formations on an effective basis after their rearmament program began
in 1935.
In the air the technology of war had
also changed radically between 1918 and 1939. Military aircraft had increased in
size, speed, and range, and for operations at sea, aircraft carriers were
developed that were capable of accompanying the fastest surface ships. Among the
new types of planes developed was the dive bomber, a plane designed for accurate
low-altitude bombing of enemy strong points as part of the tank-plane-infantry
combination. Fast low-wing monoplane fighters
were developed in all countries; these aircraft were essentially flying
platforms for eight to 12 machine guns installed in the wings. Light and medium
bombers were also developed that could be used for the strategic bombardment of
cities and military strongpoints. The threat of bomber attacks on both military
and civilian targets led directly to the development of radar
in England. Radar made it possible to determine the location, the distance, and
the height and speed of a distant aircraft no matter what the weather was. By
December 1938 there were five radar stations established on the coast of
England, and 15 additional stations were begun. So, when war came in September
1939, Great Britain had a warning chain of radar stations that could tell when
hostile planes were approaching.
The German conquest of Poland in
September 1939 was the first demonstration in war of the new theory of
high-speed armoured warfare that had been adopted by the Germans when their
rearmament began. Poland was a country all too well suited for such a
demonstration. Its frontiers were immensely long--about 3,500 miles in all; and
the stretch of 1,250 miles adjoining German territory had recently been extended
to 1,750 miles in all by the German occupation of Bohemia-Moravia and of
Slovakia, so that Poland's southern flank became exposed to invasion--as the
northern flank, facing East Prussia, already was. Western Poland had become a
huge salient that lay between Germany's jaws.
It would have been wiser for the Polish
Army to assemble farther back, behind the natural defense line formed by the
Vistula and San rivers, but that would have entailed the abandonment of some of
the most valuable western parts of the country, including the Silesian
coalfields and most of the main industrial zone, which lay west of the river
barrier. The economic argument for delaying the German approach to the main
industrial zone was heavily reinforced by Polish national pride and military
When war broke out the Polish Army was
able to mobilize about 1,000,000 men, a fairly large number. The Polish Army was
woefully outmoded, however, and was almost completely lacking in tanks, armoured
personnel carriers, and antitank and antiaircraft guns. Yet many of the Polish
military leaders clung to the double belief that their preponderance of horsed
cavalry was an important asset and that they could take the offensive against
the German mechanized forces. They also tended to discount the effect of
Germany's vastly superior air force, which was nearly 10 times as powerful as
their own.
The unrealism of such an attitude was
repeated in the Polish Army's dispositions. Approximately one-third of Poland's
forces were concentrated in or near the Polish Corridor (in northeastern
Poland), where they were perilously exposed to a double envelopment--from East
Prussia and the west combined. In the south, facing the main avenues of a German
advance, the Polish forces were thinly spread. At the same time, nearly another
one-third of Poland's forces were massed in reserve in the north-central part of
the country, between Lódz and Warsaw, under the commander
in chief, Marshal Edward Rydz-Shmigly. The Poles' forward
concentration in general forfeited their chance of fighting a series of delaying
actions, since their foot-marching army was unable to retreat to their defensive
positions in the rear or to man them before being overrun by the invader's
mechanized columns.
The 40-odd infantry divisions employed
by the Germans in the invasion counted for much less than their 14 mechanized or
partially mechanized divisions: these consisted of six armoured divisions; four
light divisions, consisting of motorized infantry (infantry wholly transported
by trucks and personnel carriers) with two armoured units; and four motorized
divisions. The Germans attacked with about 1,500,000 troops in all. It was the
deep and rapid thrusts of these mechanized forces that decided the issue, in
conjunction with the overhead pressure of the Luftwaffe, which wrecked the
Polish railway system and destroyed most of the Polish Air Force before it could
come into action. The Luftwaffe's terror-bombing of Polish cities, bridges,
roads, rail lines, and power stations completed the disorganization of the
Polish defenses.
On Sept. 1, 1939, the German attack
began. Against northern Poland, General Fedor von Bock
commanded an army group comprising General Georg von Küchler's 3rd Army,
which struck southward from East Prussia, and General Günther
von Kluge's 4th Army, which struck eastward across the base of the
Corridor. Much stronger in troops and in tanks, however, was the army group in
the south under General Gerd von Rundstedt,
attacking from Silesia and from the Moravian and Slovakian border: General Johannes
Blaskowitz's 8th Army, on the left, was to drive eastward against Lódz;
General Wilhelm List's 14th Army, on the right,
was to push on toward Kraków and to turn the Poles' Carpathian flank; and
General Walter von Reichenau's 10th Army, in the
centre, with the bulk of the group's armour, was to deliver the decisive blow
with a northwestward thrust into the heart of Poland. By September 3, when Kluge
in the north had reached the Vistula and Küchler was approaching the Narew
River, Reichenau's armour was already beyond the Warta; two days later his left
wing was well to the rear of Lódz and his right wing at
Kielce; and by September 8 one of his armoured corps was in the outskirts of
Warsaw, having advanced 140 miles in the first week of war. Light divisions on
Reichenau's right were on the Vistula between Warsaw and Sandomierz by September
9, while List, in the south, was on the San above and below Przemyshl. At
the same time, the 3rd Army tanks, led by Guderian, were across the Narew
attacking the line of the Bug River, behind Warsaw. All the German armies had
made progress in fulfilling their parts in the great enveloping maneuver planned
by General Franz Halder, chief of the general
staff, and directed by General Walther von Brauchitsch,
the commander in chief. The Polish armies were splitting up into uncoordinated
fragments, some of which were retreating while others were delivering disjointed
attacks on the nearest German columns. (see also Poland,
Battle of)
On September 10 the Polish commander in
chief, Marshal Edward Rydz-Shmigly, ordered a general retreat to
the southeast. The Germans, however, were by that time not only tightening their
net around the Polish forces west of the Vistula (in the Lódz
area and, still farther west, around Poznan) but also penetrating deeply
into eastern Poland. The Polish defense was already reduced to random efforts by
isolated bodies of troops when another blow fell: on Sept. 17, 1939, Soviet
forces entered Poland from the east. The next day, the Polish government and
high command crossed the Romanian frontier on their way into exile. The Warsaw
garrison held out against the Germans until September 28, undergoing
terror-bombings and artillery barrages that reduced parts of the city to rubble,
with no regard for the civilian population. The last considerable fragment of
the Polish Army resisted until October 5; and some guerrilla fighting went on
into the winter. The Germans took a total of 700,000 prisoners, and about 80,000
Polish soldiers escaped over neutral frontiers. Polish total casualties (killed,
wounded, and missing) remain unknown, while the Germans sustained about 45,000
casualties. Poland was conquered for partition between Germany and the U.S.S.R.,
the forces of which met and greeted each other on Polish soil. On September 28
another secret German-Soviet protocol modified the arrangements of August: all Lithuania
was to be a Soviet sphere of influence, not a German one; but the dividing line
in Poland was changed in Germany's favour, being moved eastward to the Bug
Profiting quickly from its understanding
with Germany, the U.S.S.R. on Oct. 10, 1939,
constrained Estonia, Latvia,
and Lithuania to admit Soviet garrisons onto their territories. Approached with
similar demands, Finland refused to comply, even
though the U.S.S.R. offered territorial compensation elsewhere for the cessions
that it was requiring for its own strategic reasons. Finland's armed forces
amounted to about 200,000 troops in 10 divisions. The Soviets eventually brought
about 70 divisions (about 1,000,000 men) to bear in their attack on Finland,
along with about 1,000 tanks. Soviet troops attacked Finland on Nov. 30, 1939.
The invaders succeeded in isolating the
little Arctic port of Petsamo in the far north but were ignominiously repulsed
on all of the fronts chosen for their advance. On the Karelian
Isthmus, the massive reinforced-concrete fortifications of Finland's Mannerheim
Line blocked the Soviet forces' direct land route from Leningrad into
Finland. The Soviet planners had grossly underestimated the Finns' national will
to resist and the natural obstacles constituted by the terrain's numerous lakes
and forests.
The western powers exulted overtly over
the humiliation of the Soviet Union. One important effect of Finland's early
successes was to reinforce the tendency of both Hitler and the western
democracies to underestimate the Soviet military capabilities. But in the
meantime, the Soviet strategists digested their hard-learned military lessons.
On Feb. 1, 1940, the Red
Army launched 14 divisions into a major assault on the Mannerheim Line.
The offensive's weight was concentrated along a 10-mile sector of the line near
Summa, which was pounded by a tremendous artillery bombardment. As the
fortifications were pulverized, tanks and sledge-carried infantry advanced to
occupy the ground while the Soviet Air Force broke up attempted Finnish
counterattacks. After little more than a fortnight of this methodical process, a
breach was made through the whole depth of the Mannerheim Line. Once the Soviets
had forced a passage on the Karelian Isthmus, Finland's eventual collapse was
certain. On March 6 Finland sued for peace, and a week later the Soviet terms
were accepted: the Finns had to cede the entire Karelian Isthmus, Viipuri, and
their part of the Rybachy Peninsula to the Soviets. The Finns had suffered about
70,000 casualties in the campaign, the Soviets more than 200,000.
During their campaign in Poland, the
Germans kept only 23 divisions in the west to guard their frontier against the
French, who had nearly five times as many divisions mobilized. The French
commander in chief, General Maurice-Gustave Gamelin,
proposed an advance against Germany through neutral Belgium and The Netherlands,
in order to have room to exercise his ponderous military machine. He was
overruled, however, and French assaults on the 100-mile stretch of available
front along the Franco-German frontier had barely dented the German defenses
when the collapse of Poland prompted the recall of Gamelin's advanced divisions
to defensive positions in the Maginot Line (see below). From October 1939 to
March 1940, successive plans were developed for counteraction in the event of a
German offensive through Belgium--all of them based on the assumption that the
Germans would come across the plain north of Namur, not across the hilly and
wooded Ardennes. The Germans would indeed have taken the route foreseen by the
French if Hitler's desire for an offensive in November 1939 had not been
frustrated, on the one hand, by bad weather and, on the other, by the
hesitations of his generals; but in March 1940 the bold suggestion of General Erich
von Manstein that an offensive through the Ardennes should, in fact, be
practicable for tank forces was adopted by Hitler, despite orthodox military
opinion. (see also Phony War, Western
Meanwhile, Hitler's immediate outlook
had been changed by considerations about Scandinavia. Originally he had intended
to respect Norway's neutrality. Then rumours leaked out, prematurely, of British
designs on Norway--as, in fact, Winston
Churchill, first lord of the Admiralty, was arguing that mines
should be laid in Norwegian waters to stop the export of Swedish iron ore from Gällivare
to Germany through Norway's rail terminus and port of Narvik. The British
Cabinet, in response to Churchill, authorized at least the preparation of a plan
for a landing at Narvik; and in mid-December 1939 a Norwegian politician, Vidkun
Quisling, leader of a pro-Nazi party, was introduced to Hitler. On Jan.
27, 1940, Hitler ordered plans for an invasion of Norway, for use if he could no
longer respect Norway's neutrality.
After France's failure to interrupt the
German conquest of Poland, the western powers and the Germans were so inactive
with regard to land operations that journalists began to speak derisively, over
the next six months, of the "phony war." At sea, however, the period
was somewhat more eventful. German U-boats sank
the British aircraft carrier Courageous
(September 17) and the battleship Royal
Oak (October 14). The U-boats' main warfare, however, was against merchant
shipping: they sank more than 110 vessels in the first four months of the war.
Both the Germans and the British, meanwhile, were engaged in extensive mine
In surface warfare at sea, the British
were on the whole more fortunate than the Germans. A German pocket battleship in
the Atlantic, the Admiral
Graf Spee sank nine ships before coming to a tragic end: having
sustained and inflicted damage in an engagement with three British cruisers off
the Río de la Plata on Dec. 13, 1939, she made off to Montevideo and
obtained leave to spend four days there for repairs; the British mustered
reinforcements for the two cruisers still capable of action after the
engagement, namely the Ajax and the Achilles, and brought the Cumberland
to the scene in time; but, on December 17, when the Graf Spee put to sea again, her crew scuttled her a little way out
of the harbour before the fight could be resumed.
British plans for landings on the
Norwegian coast in the third week of March 1940 were temporarily postponed.
Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, however, was
by that time convinced that some aggressive action ought to be taken; and Paul
Reynaud, who succeeded Daladier as France's premier on March 21, was of
the same opinion. (Reynaud had come into office on the surge of the French
public's demand for a more aggressive military policy and quicker offensive
action against Germany.) It was agreed that mines should be laid in Norwegian
waters and that the mining should be followed by the landing of troops at four
Norwegian ports, Narvik, Trondheim, Bergen, and
Because of Anglo-French arguments, the
date of the mining was postponed from April 5 to April 8. The postponement was
catastrophic. Hitler had on April 1 ordered the German invasion of Norway to
begin on April 9; so, when on April 8 the Norwegian government was preoccupied
with earnest protest about the British mine laying, the German expeditions were
well on their way.
On April 9, 1940, the major Norwegian
ports from Oslo northward to Narvik (1,200 miles away from Germany's naval
bases) were occupied by advance detachments of German troops. At the same time,
a single parachute battalion (the first ever employed in warfare) took the Oslo
and Stavanger airfields, and 800 operational aircraft overawed the Norwegian
population. Norwegian resistance at Narvik, at Trondheim (the strategic key to
Norway), at Bergen, at Stavanger, and at Kristiansand had been overcome very
quickly; and Oslo's effective resistance to the seaborne forces was nullified
when German troops from the airfield entered the city.
Simultaneously, along with their
Norwegian enterprise, the Germans on April 9 occupied Denmark,
sending troopships, covered by aircraft, into Copenhagen harbour and marching
over the land frontier into Jutland. This occupation was obviously necessary for
the safety of their communications with Norway.
Allied troops began to land at Narvik on
April 14. Shortly afterward, British troops were landed also at Namsos and at
Åndalsnes, to attack Trondheim from the north and from the south,
respectively. The Germans, however, landed fresh troops in the rear of the
British at Namsos and advanced up the Gudbrandsdal from Oslo against the force
at Åndalsnes. By this time the Germans had about 25,000 troops in Norway.
By May 2, both Namsos and Åndalsnes were evacuated by the British. The
Germans at Narvik held out against five times as many British and French troops
until May 27. By that time the German offensive in France had progressed to such
an extent that the British could no longer afford any commitment in Norway, and
the 25,000 Allied troops were evacuated from Narvik 10 days after their victory.
The Norwegian king Haakon VII and his government
left Norway for Britain at the same time. Hitler garrisoned Norway with about
300,000 troops for the rest of the war. By occupying Norway, Hitler had ensured
the protection of Germany's supply of iron ore from Sweden and had obtained
naval and air bases with which to strike at Britain if necessary.
What was to happen in Norway became a
less important question for the western powers when, on May 10, 1940, they were
surprised by Hitler's long-debated stroke against them through the Low
France's 800,000-man standing army was
thought at the time to be the most powerful in Europe. But the French had not
progressed beyond the defensive mentality inherited from World War I, and they
relied primarily on their Maginot Line for
protection against a German offensive. The Maginot Line was an extremely
well-developed chain of fortifications running from the Swiss frontier opposite
Basel northward along the left bank of the Rhine and then northwestward no
farther than Montmédy, near the Belgian
frontier south of the Ardennes Forest. The line consisted of a series of giant
pillboxes and other defensive installations constructed in depth, equipped with
underground supply and communications facilities, and connected by rail lines,
with all its heavy guns pointed east at the German frontier. Depending heavily
on the line as a defense against German attack, the French had 41 divisions
manning it or backing it, whereas only 39 divisions were watching the long
stretch of frontier north of it, from Montmédy through the Ardennes and
across Flanders to the English Channel. (see also Luxembourg,
Netherlands, The)
In their plan for the invasion of France
and the Low Countries, the Germans kept General Wilhelm von Leeb's Army Group C
facing the Maginot Line so as to deter the French from diverting forces from it,
while launching Bock's Army Group B into the basin of the Lower Maas River north
of Liège and Rundstedt's Army Group A into the Ardennes. Army Group B
comprised Küchler's 18th Army, with one armoured division and airborne
support, to attack The Netherlands, and Reichenau's 6th, with two armoured
divisions, to advance over the Belgian plain. These two armies would have to
deal not only with the Dutch and Belgian armies but also with the forces that
the Allies, according to their plan, would send into the Low Countries, namely
two French armies and nine British divisions. Rundstedt's Army Group A, however,
was much stronger, comprising as it did Kluge's 4th Army, List's 12th, and
General Ernst Busch's 16th, with General Maximilian von Weichs's 2nd in reserve,
besides a large armoured group under Kleist and
a smaller one under General Hermann Hoth, and amounting in all to 44 divisions,
seven of them armoured, with 27 divisions in reserve. Army Group A thus amounted
to more than 1,500,000 men and more than 1,500 tanks, and it would strike at the
weak hinge of the Allies' wheel into Belgium--that is to say, at two French
armies, General Charles Huntziger's 2nd and General André Corap's 9th,
which together mustered only 12 infantry and four horsed cavalry divisions and
stood, respectively, east and west of Sedan on the least-fortified stretch of
the French frontier. Against this weak centre of the Allied line were thus
massed nearly two-thirds of Germany's forces in the west and nearly
three-quarters of its tank forces.
The Dutch Army comprised 10 divisions
and the equivalent of 10 more in smaller formations, and thus totaled more than
400,000 men. It apparently had a good chance of withstanding the German
invasion, since the attacking German army comprised only seven divisions, apart
from the airborne forces it would use. The Dutch, however, had a wide front, a
very sensitive and loosely settled rear, very few tanks, and no experience of
modern warfare. On May 10, the German attack on The Netherlands began with the
capture by parachutists of the bridges at Moerdijk, at Dordrecht, and at Rotterdam
and with landings on the airfields around The Hague. On the same day, the weakly
held Peel Line, south of the westward-turning arc of the Maas, was penetrated by
the German land forces; and on May 11 the Dutch defenders fell back westward
past Tilburg to Breda, with the consequence that the French 7th Army, under
General Henri Giraud, whose leading forces had sped forward across Belgium over
the 140 miles to Tilburg, fell back to Breda likewise. The German tanks thus had
a clear road to Moerdijk, and by noon on May 12 they were in the outskirts of
Rotterdam. North of the Maas, meanwhile, where the bulk of the Dutch defense was
concentrated, the Germans achieved a narrow breach of the Geld Valley line on
May 12, whereupon the Dutch, unable to counterattack, retreated to the
"Fortress of Holland" Line protecting Utrecht and Amsterdam. Queen
Wilhelmina and her government left the country for England on May 13; and the
next day the Dutch commander in chief, General Henri Gerard Winkelman,
surrendered to the Germans, who had threatened to bomb Rotterdam and Utrecht, as
places in the front line of the fighting, if resistance continued. In fact,
Rotterdam was bombed, after the capitulation, by 30 planes through a mistake in
the Germans' signal communications.
The news of the German onslaught in the
Low Countries, dismaying as it was to the Allies, had one effect that was to be
of momentous importance to their fortunes: Chamberlain,
whose halfhearted conduct of the war had been bitterly criticized in the House
of Commons during the debate of May 7-8 on the campaign in Norway, resigned
office in the evening of May 10 and was succeeded as prime minister by
Churchill, who formed a coalition government.
For the first phase of the invasion of
the Belgian plain north of Liège, Reichenau had four army corps, one
armoured corps, and only 500 airborne troops; but he also had massive
cooperation from the German Luftwaffe, whose dive bombers and fighters played a
major role in breaking down the Belgian defenses. West of the Maastricht
"appendix" of indefensible Dutch territory separating Belgium from
Germany, the fortress of Eben Emael, immediately
opposite Maastricht, and the line of the Albert Canal constituted the Belgians'
foremost defensive position. On May 10 German airborne troops landed in gliders
on the top of the fortress and on bridges over the canal. On May 11 the Belgian
front was broken, the German tanks running on westward and some of the infantry
turning southward to take Liège from the rear, while the Belgians made a
general retreat to the Antwerp-Namur, or Dyle, Line. French and British
divisions had just arrived on this Dyle Line, and General René Prioux's
two tank divisions went out from it to challenge the German advance. After a big
battle on May 14, however, Prioux's tanks had to retire to the consolidated Dyle
Line; and on May 15, notwithstanding a successful defense against a German
attack, Gamelin ordered the abandonment of the position, because events farther
to the south had made it strategically untenable.
The chances for success of the German
offensive against France hinged on a German advance through the hilly and dense Ardennes
Forest, which the French considered to be impassable to tanks. But the Germans
did succeed in moving their tank columns through that difficult belt of country
by means of an amazing feat of staff work. While the armoured divisions used
such roads through the forest as were available, infantry divisions started
alongside them by using field and woodland paths and marched so fast across
country that the leading ones reached the Meuse River only a day after the
armoured divisions had.
The decisive operations in France were
those of Rundstedt's Army Group A. Kleist's tanks on May 10 took only three
hours to cover the 30 miles from the eastern border of independent Luxembourg to
the southeastern border of Belgium; and on May 11 the French cavalry divisions
that had ridden forward into the Ardennes to oppose them were thrown back over
the Semois River. By the evening of May 12 the Germans were across the
Franco-Belgian frontier and overlooking the Meuse River. The defenses of this
sector were rudimentary, and it was the least-fortified stretch of the whole
French front. Worse still, the defending French 2nd and 9th armies had hardly
any antitank guns or antiaircraft artillery with which to slow down the German
armoured columns and shoot down their dive bombers. Such was the folly of the
French belief that a German armoured thrust through the Ardennes was unlikely.
On May 13 Kleist's forces achieved a
threefold crossing of the Meuse River. At Sedan wave after wave of German dive
bombers swooped on the French defenders of the south bank. The latter could not
stand the nerve-racking strain, and the German troops were able to push across
the river in rubber boats and on rafts. The tremendous air bombardment was the
decisive factor in the crossings. A thousand aircraft supported Kleist's forces,
while only a few French aircraft intervened in a gallant but hopeless effort to
aid their troops on the ground. Next day, after the tanks had been brought
across, Guderian widened the Sedan bridgehead and beat off French
counterattacks. On May 15 he broke through the French defenses into open
country, turning westward in the direction of the English Channel. On May 16 his
forces swept on west for nearly 50 miles. His superiors tried to put on the
brake, feeling that such rapid progress was hazardous, but the pace of the
German drive upset the French far more, and their collapse spread as Reinhardt's
corps joined in the pressure. When more German tanks crossed the Meuse between
Givet and Namur, the breach of the French front was 60 miles wide.
Driving westward down the empty corridor
between the Sambre and the Aisne rivers, Guderian's tanks crossed the Oise River
on May 17 and reached Amiens two days later. Giraud, who on May 15 had
superseded Corap in command of the French 9th Army, was thus frustrated in his
desperate plan of checking the Germans on the Oise; and Kleist, meanwhile, by
lining the Aisne progressively with tanks until the infantry came up to relieve
them, was protecting the southwestern flank of the advance against the danger of
a counteroffensive from the south. Indeed, when the Germans, on May 15, were
reported to be crossing the Aisne River between Rethel and Laon, Gamelin told
Reynaud that he had no reserves in that sector and that Paris might fall within
two days' time. Thereupon Reynaud, though he postponed his immediate decision to
move the government to Tours, summoned General Maxime
Weygand from Syria to take Gamelin's place as commander in chief; but
Weygand did not arrive until May 19.
Guderian's tanks were at Abbeville on
May 20, and on May 22 he turned northward to threaten Calais and Dunkirk, while
Reinhardt, swinging south of the British rear at Arras, headed for the same
objectives, the remaining ports by which the British
Expeditionary Force (BEF) could be evacuated.
For the Allies, all communication
between their northern and southern forces was severed by the arc of the
westward German advance from the Ardennes to the Somme. The Allied armies in the
north, having fallen back from the Dyle Line to the Escaut (Schelde), were being
encircled, and already on May 19 the British commander, Viscount Gort, was
considering the withdrawal of the BEF by sea. On May 21, however, to satisfy
orders from London for more positive action, he launched an attack from Arras
southward against the right flank of the Germans' corridor; but, though it
momentarily alarmed the German high command, this small counterstroke lacked the
armoured strength necessary for success. Meanwhile, Guderian's tanks had swept
up past Boulogne and Calais and were crossing the canal defense line close to Dunkirk
when, on May 24, an inexplicable order from Hitler not only stopped their
advance but actually called them back to the canal line just as Guderian was
expecting to drive into Dunkirk. (see also Somme River)
Dunkirk was now the only port left
available for the withdrawal of the mass of the BEF from Europe, and the British
Cabinet at last decided to save what could be saved. The British Admiralty had
been collecting every kind of small craft it could find to help in removing the
troops, and the British retreat to the coast now became a race to evacuate the
troops before the Germans could occupy Dunkirk. Evacuation began on May 26 and
became still more urgent the next day, when the Belgians, their right wing and
their centre broken by Reichenau's advance, sued for an armistice. On May 27,
likewise, bombing by the Luftwaffe put the harbour of Dunkirk out of use, so
that many of the thousands of men thronging the 10-mile stretch of beaches had
to be ferried out to sea by petty craft pressed into service by the Royal Navy
and manned largely by amateur seamen, though the harbour's damaged breakwater
still offered a practicable exit for the majority. By June 4, when the operation
came to an end, 198,000 British and 140,000 French and Belgian troops had been
saved; but virtually all of their heavy equipment had to be abandoned, and, of
the 41 destroyers participating, six were sunk and 19 others damaged. The men
who were saved represented a considerable part of the experienced troops
possessed by Great Britain and were an inestimable gain to the Allies. The
success of the near-miraculous evacuation from Dunkirk was due, on the one hand,
to fighter cover by the Royal Air Force from the English coast and on the other
to Hitler's fatal order of May 24 halting Guderian. That order had been made for
several reasons, chiefly: Hermann Göring,
head of the Luftwaffe, had mistakenly assured Hitler that his aircraft alone
could destroy the Allied troops trapped on the beaches at Dunkirk; and Hitler
himself seems to have believed that Great Britain might accept peace terms more
readily if its armies were not constrained into humiliating surrender. Three
days passed before Brauchitsch, the German Army commander in chief, was able to
persuade Hitler to withdraw his orders and allow the German armoured forces to
advance on Dunkirk. But they met stronger opposition from the British, who had
had time to solidify their defenses, and almost immediately Hitler stopped the
German armoured forces again, ordering them instead to move south and prepare
for the attack on the Somme-Aisne line.
The campaign in northern France was
wound up by Küchler's forces, after both Guderian and Reichenau had been
ordered southward. Altogether, the Germans had taken more than 1,000,000
prisoners in three weeks, at a cost of 60,000 casualties. Some 220,000 Allied
troops, however, were rescued by British ships from France's northwestern ports
(Cherbourg, Saint-Malo, Brest, and Saint-Nazaire), thus bringing the total of
Allied troops evacuated to about 558,000.
There remained the French armies south
of the Germans' Somme-Aisne front. The French had lost 30 divisions in the
campaign so far. Weygand still managed to muster 49 divisions, apart from the 17
left to hold the Maginot Line, but against him the Germans had 130 infantry
divisions as well as their 10 divisions of tanks. The Germans, after redisposing
their units, began a new offensive on June 5 from their positions on the Somme.
The French resisted stiffly for two days, but on June 7 the German tanks in the
westernmost sector, led by Major General Erwin Rommel,
broke through toward Rouen, and on June 9 they were over the Seine. On June 9
the Germans attacked on the Aisne: the infantry forced the crossings, and then Guderian's
armour drove through the breach toward Châlons-sur-Marne before turning
eastward for the Swiss frontier, thus isolating all the French forces still
holding the Maginot Line. (see also France, Battle of)
had been unprepared for war when Hitler attacked Poland, but if the Italian
leader, Benito Mussolini, was to reap any positive advantages from partnership
with Hitler it seemed that Italy would have to abandon its nonbelligerent stance
before the western democracies had been defeated by Germany singlehanded. The
obvious collapse of France convinced Mussolini that the time to implement his
Pact of Steel with Hitler had come, and on June 10, 1940, Italy declared war
against France and Great Britain. With about 30 divisions available on their
Alpine frontier, the Italians delayed their actual attack on southeastern France
until June 20, but it achieved little against the local defense. In any case,
the issue in France had already been virtually settled by the victory of Italy's
German ally.
Meanwhile, Reynaud had left Paris for
Cangé, near Tours; and Weygand, after speaking frankly and despondently
to Churchill at the Allied military headquarters at Briare on June 11, told
Reynaud and the other ministers at Cangé on June 12 that the battle for
France was lost and that a cessation of hostilities was compulsory. There was
little doubt that he was correct in this estimate of the military situation: the
French armies were now splitting up into fragments. Reynaud's government was
divided between the advocates of capitulation and those who, with Reynaud,
wanted to continue the war from French North Africa. The only decision that it
could make was to move itself from Tours to Bordeaux.
The Germans entered Paris on June 14,
1940, and were driving still deeper southward along both the western and eastern
edges of France. Two days later they were in the Rhône Valley. Meanwhile,
Weygand was still pressing for an armistice, backed by all the principal
commanders. Reynaud resigned office on June 16, whereupon a new government was
formed by Marshal Philippe Pétain, the
revered and aged hero of the Battle of Verdun in World War I. In the night of
June 16 the French request for an armistice was transmitted to Hitler. While
discussion of the terms went on, the German advance went on too. Finally, on
June 22, 1940, at Rethondes, the scene of the signing of the Armistice of 1918,
the new Franco-German Armistice was signed. The
Franco-Italian Armistice was signed on June 24. Both armistices came into effect
early on June 25.
The Armistice of June 22 divided France
into two zones, one to be under German military occupation, one to be left to
the French in full sovereignty. The occupied zone comprised all northern France
from the northwestern frontier of Switzerland to the Channel and from the
Belgian and German frontiers to the Atlantic, together with a strip extending
from the lower Loire southward along the Atlantic coast to the western end of
the Pyrenees; the unoccupied zone comprised only two-fifths of France's
territory, the southeast. The French Navy and Air Force were to be neutralized,
but it was not required that they be handed over to the Germans. The Italians
granted very generous terms to the French: the only French territory that they
claimed to occupy was the small frontier tract that their forces had succeeded
in overrunning since June 20. Meanwhile, from June 18, General Charles
de Gaulle, whom Reynaud had sent on a
military mission to London on June 5, was broadcasting appeals for the
continuance of France's war. (see also occupation zone)
The collapse of France in June 1940
posed a severe naval problem to the British, because the powerful French Navy
still existed: strategically, it was of immense importance to the British that
these French ships not fall into German hands, since they would have tilted the
balance of sea power decidedly in favour of the Axis--the Italian Navy being now
also at war with Britain. Mistrustful of promises that the French ships would be
used only for "supervision and minesweeping," the British decided to
immobilize them. Thus, on July 3, 1940, the British seized all French ships in
British-controlled ports, encountering only nominal resistance. But when British
ships appeared off Mers el-Kébir, near Oran on the Algerian coast, and
demanded that the ships of the important French naval force there either join
the Allies or sail out to sea, the French refused to submit, and the British
eventually opened fire, damaging the battleship Dunkerque, destroying the Bretagne,
and disabling several other vessels. Thereupon, Pétain's government,
which on July 1 had installed itself at Vichy, on July 4 severed diplomatic
relations with the British. In the eight following days, the constitution of
France's Third Republic was abolished and a new French
state created, under the supreme authority of Pétain himself. The few
French colonies that rallied to General de Gaulle's Free
French movement were strategically unimportant. (see also mine)
With France conquered, Hitler could now
turn his forces on Germany's sole remaining enemy: Great Britain, which was
protected from the formidable German Army by the waters of the English
Channel. On July 16, 1940, Hitler issued a directive ordering the
preparation and, if necessary, the execution of a plan for the invasion of Great
Britain. But an amphibious invasion of Britain would only be possible, given
Britain's large navy, if Germany could establish control of the air in the
battle zone. To this end, the Luftwaffe chief, Göring, on August 2 issued
the "Eagle Day" directive, laying down a plan of attack in which a few
massive blows from the air were to destroy British air power and so open the way
for the amphibious invasion, termed Operation "Sea
Lion." Victory in the air battle for the Luftwaffe would indeed have
exposed Great Britain to invasion and occupation. The victory by the Royal
Air Force (RAF) Fighter Command blocked this possibility and, in fact,
created the conditions for Great Britain's survival, for the extension of the
war, and for the eventual defeat of Nazi Germany.
The forces engaged in the battle were
relatively small. The British disposed some 600 frontline fighters to defend the
country. The Germans made available about 1,300 bombers and dive bombers, and
about 900 single-engined and 300 twin-engined fighters. These were based in an
arc around England from Norway to the Cherbourg Peninsula in northern coastal
France. The preliminaries of the Battle of Britain occupied June and July 1940,
the climax August and September, and the aftermath--the so-called Blitz--the
winter of 1940-41. In the campaign, the Luftwaffe had no systematic or
consistent plan of action: sometimes it tried to establish a blockade by the
destruction of British shipping and ports; sometimes, to destroy Britain's
Fighter Command by combat and by the bombing of ground installations; and
sometimes, to seek direct strategic results by attacks on London and other
populous centres of industrial or political significance. The British, on the
other hand, had prepared themselves for the kind of battle that in fact took
place. Their radar early warning, the most advanced and the most operationally
adapted system in the world, gave Fighter Command adequate notice of where and
when to direct their fighter forces to repel German bombing raids. The Spitfire,
moreover, though still in short supply, was unsurpassed as an interceptor by any
fighter in any other air force. (see also Blitz, the)
The British fought not only with the
advantage--unusual for them--of superior equipment and undivided aim but also
against an enemy divided in object and condemned by circumstance and by lack of
forethought to fight at a tactical disadvantage. The German bombers lacked the
bomb-load capacity to strike permanently devastating blows and also proved, in
daylight, to be easily vulnerable to the Spitfires and Hurricanes.
Britain's radar, moreover, largely prevented them from exploiting the element of
surprise. The German dive bombers were even more vulnerable to being shot down
by British fighters, and long-range fighter cover was only partially available
from German fighter aircraft, since the latter were operating at the limit of
their flying range.
The German air attacks began on ports
and airfields along the English Channel, where convoys were bombed and the air
battle was joined. In June and July 1940, as the Germans gradually redeployed
their forces, the air battle moved inland over the interior of Britain. On
August 8 the intensive phase began, when the Germans launched bombing raids
involving up to nearly 1,500 aircraft a day and directed them against the
British fighter airfields and radar stations. In four actions, on August 8, 11,
12, and 13, the Germans lost 145 aircraft as against the British loss of 88. By
late August the Germans had lost more than 600 aircraft, the RAF only 260, but
the RAF was losing badly needed fighters and experienced pilots at too great a
rate, and its effectiveness was further hampered by bombing damage done to the
radar stations. At the beginning of September the British retaliated by
unexpectedly launching a bombing raid on Berlin, which so infuriated Hitler that
he ordered the Luftwaffe to shift its attacks from Fighter Command installations
to London and other cities. These assaults on
London, Coventry, Liverpool,
and other cities went on unabated for several months. But already, by September
15, on which day the British believed, albeit incorrectly, that they had scored
their greatest success by destroying 185 German aircraft, Fighter Command had
demonstrated to the Luftwaffe that it could not gain air ascendancy over
Britain. This was because British fighters were simply shooting down German
bombers faster than German industry could produce them. The Battle of Britain
was thus won, and the invasion of England was postponed indefinitely by Hitler.
The British had lost more than 900 fighters but had shot down about 1,700 German
During the following winter, the
Luftwaffe maintained a bombing offensive, carrying out night-bombing attacks on
Britain's larger cities. By February 1941 the offensive had declined, but in
March and April there was a revival, and nearly 10,000 sorties were flown, with
heavy attacks made on London. Thereafter German strategic air operations over
England withered.
The continued resistance of the British
caused Hitler once more to change his timetable. His great design for a campaign
against the U.S.S.R. had originally been
scheduled to begin about 1943--by which time he should have secured the German
position on the rest of the European continent by a series of
"localized" campaigns and have reached some sort of compromise with
Great Britain. But in July 1940, seeing Great Britain still undefeated and the
United States increasingly inimical to Germany, he decided that the conquest of
the European part of the Soviet Union must be undertaken in May 1941, in order
both to demonstrate Germany's invincibility to Great Britain and to deter the
United States from intervention in Europe (because the elimination of the
U.S.S.R. would strengthen the Japanese position in the Far East and in the
Pacific). Events in the interval, however, were to make him change his plan once
While the invasion of the U.S.S.R. was
being prepared, Hitler was much concerned to extend German influence across
Slovakia and Hungary into Romania, the oil
fields of which he was anxious to secure against Soviet attack and the military
manpower of which might be joined to the forces of the German coalition. In May
1940 he obtained an oil and arms pact from Romania; but, when Romania, after
being constrained by a Soviet ultimatum in June to cede Bessarabia and northern
Bukovina to the U.S.S.R., requested a German military mission and a German
guarantee of its remaining frontiers, Hitler refused to comply until the claims
of other states against Romania had been met. Romania was compelled to cede
southern Dobruja to Bulgaria on August 21 (an act that was formalized in the Treaty
of Craiova on September 7); but its negotiations with Hungary
about Transylvania were broken off on August 23.
Since, if war had broken out between Romania and Hungary, the U.S.S.R. might
have intervened and won control over the oil wells, Hitler decided to arbitrate
immediately: by the Vienna Award of August 30,
Germany and Italy assigned northern Transylvania, including the Szekler
district, to Hungary, and Germany then guaranteed what was left of Romania. In
the face of the Romanian nationalists' outcry against these proceedings, the
king, Carol II, transferred his dictatorial
powers to General Ion Antonescu on Sept. 4,
1940, and abdicated his crown in favour of his young son Michael two days later.
Antonescu had already repeated the request for a German military mission, which
arrived in Bucharest on October 12.
Though Hitler had apprised the Italian
foreign minister, Galeazzo Ciano, of his
intention to send a military mission to Romania, Ciano had not apprised
Mussolini. So, since the latter's Balkan ambitions had been continually
restrained by Hitler, particularly with regard to Yugoslavia, the sudden news of
the mission annoyed him. On Oct. 28, 1940, therefore, having given Hitler only
the barest hints of his project, Mussolini launched seven Italian divisions
(155,000 men) from Albania into a separate war
of his own against Greece.
The result was exasperating for Hitler.
His ally's forces were not only halted by the Greeks, a few miles over the
border, on Nov. 8, 1940, but were also driven back by General Alexandros
Papagos' counteroffensive of November 14, which was to put the Greeks in
possession of one-third of Albania by mid-December. Moreover, British troops
landed in Crete, and some British aircraft were sent to bases near Athens,
whence they might have attacked the Romanian oil fields. Lastly, the success of
the Greeks caused Yugoslavia and Bulgaria,
who had hitherto been attentive to overtures from the Axis powers, to revert to
a strictly neutral policy.
Anticipating Mussolini's appeal for
German help in his "separate" or "parallel" war, Hitler in
November 1940 drew Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia successively into the Axis, or
Tripartite, Pact that Germany, Italy, and Japan
had concluded on September 27 (see below Japanese policy, 1939-41
); and he also obtained Romania's assent to the assembling of German
troops in the south of Romania for an attack on Greece through Bulgaria. Hungary
consented to the transit of these troops through its territory lest Romania take
Hungary's place in Germany's favour and so be secured in possession of the
Transylvanian lands left to it by the Vienna Award. Bulgaria, however, for fear
of Soviet reaction, on the one hand, and of Turkish, on the other (Turkey had
massed 28 divisions in Thrace when Italy attacked Greece), delayed its adhesion
to the Axis until March 1, 1941. Only thereafter, on March 18, did the Yugoslav
regent, Prince Paul, and his ministers Dragisa Cvetkovic and
Aleksandar Cincar-Markovic agree to Yugoslavia's adhesion to the Axis.
(see also Axis Powers)
Meanwhile, the German 12th Army had
crossed the Danube from Romania into Bulgaria on March 2, 1941. Consequently, in
accordance with a Greco-British agreement of February 21, a British
expeditionary force of 58,000 men from Egypt landed in Greece on March 7, to
occupy the Olympus-Vermion line. Then, on March 27, 1941, two days after the
Yugoslav government's signature, in Vienna, of its adhesion to the Axis Pact, a
group of Yugoslav Army officers, led by General Dusan
Simovic, executed a coup d'état in Belgrade,
overthrowing the regency in favour of the 17-year-old king Peter II and
reversing the former government's policy.
Almost simultaneously with the Belgrade
coup d'état, the decisive Battle of Cape Matapan took place between the
British and Italian fleets in the Mediterranean, off the Peloponnesian mainland
northwest of Crete. Hitherto, Italo-British naval hostilities in the
Mediterranean area since June 1940 had comprised only one noteworthy action: the
sinking in November at the Italian naval base of Taranto
of three battleships by aircraft from the British carrier Illustrious. In March 1941, however, some Italian naval forces,
including the battleship Vittorio Veneto,
with several cruisers and destroyers, set out to threaten British convoys to
Greece; and British forces, including the battleships Warspite, Valiant, and Barham
and the aircraft carrier Formidable,
likewise with cruisers and destroyers, were sent to intercept them. When the
forces met in the morning of March 28, off Cape Matapan, the Vittorio
Veneto opened fire on the lighter British ships but was soon trying to
escape from the engagement, for fear of the torpedo aircraft from the Formidable.
The battle then became a pursuit, which lasted long into the night. Finally,
though the severely damaged Vittorio
Veneto made good her escape, the British sank three Italian cruisers and two
destroyers. The Italian Navy made no more surface ventures into the eastern
The German attack on Greece, scheduled
for April 1, 1941, was postponed for a few days when Hitler, because of the
Belgrade coup d'état, decided that Yugoslavia was to be destroyed at the
same time. While Great Britain's efforts to draw Yugoslavia into the
Greco-British defensive system were fruitless, Germany began canvasing allies
for its planned invasion of Yugoslavia and Greece. Italy agreed to collaborate
in the attack, and Hungary and Bulgaria agreed to send troops to occupy the
territories that they coveted as soon as the Germans should have destroyed the
Yugoslav state.
On April 6, 1941, the Germans, with 24
divisions and 1,200 tanks, invaded both Yugoslavia (which had 32 divisions) and
Greece (which had 15 divisions). The operations were conducted in the same way
as Germany's previous blitzkrieg campaigns. While massive air raids struck
Belgrade, List's 12th Army drove westward and
southward from the Bulgarian frontiers, Kleist's armoured group northwestward
from Sofia, and Weichs's 2nd Army southward from Austria and from western
Hungary. The 12th Army's advance through Skopje to the Albanian border cut
communications between Yugoslavia and Greece in two days; Nis fell to
Kleist on April 9, Zagreb to Weichs on April 10; and on April 11 the Italian 2nd
Army (comprising 15 divisions) advanced from Istria into Dalmatia. After the
fall of Belgrade to the German forces from bases in Romania (April 12), the
remnant of the Yugoslav Army--whose only offensive, in northern Albania, had
collapsed--was encircled in Bosnia. Its capitulation was signed, in Belgrade, on
In Greece, meanwhile, the Germans took
Salonika (Thessaloníki) on April 9, 1941, and then initiated a drive
toward Ioánnina (Yannina), thus severing communication between the bulk
of the Greek Army (which was on the Albanian frontier) and its rear. The
isolated main body capitulated on April 20, the Greek Army as a whole on April
22. Two days later the pass of Thermopylae, defended by a British rear guard,
was taken by the Germans, who entered Athens on April 27. All mainland Greece
and all the Greek Aegean islands except Crete
were under German occupation by May 11, the Ionian islands under Italian. The
remainder of Britain's 50,000-man force in Greece was hastily evacuated with
great difficulty after leaving all of their tanks and other heavy equipment
The campaign against Yugoslavia brought
340,000 soldiers of the Yugoslav Army into captivity as German prisoners of war.
In the campaign against Greece the Germans took 220,000 Greek and 20,000 British
or Commonwealth prisoners of war. The combined German losses in the Balkan
campaigns were about 2,500 dead, 6,000 wounded, and 3,000 missing.
German airborne troops began to land in
Crete on May 20, 1941, at Máleme, in the Canea-Suda area, at Réthimnon,
and at Iráklion. Fighting, on land and on the sea, with heavy losses on
both sides, went on for a week before the Allied commander in chief, General Bernard
Cyril Freyberg of the New Zealand Expeditionary Force, was authorized to
evacuate the island. The last defenders were overwhelmed at Réthimnon on
May 31. The prisoners of war taken by the Germans in Crete numbered more than
15,000 British or Commonwealth troops, besides the Greeks taken. In battles
around the island, German air attacks sank three light cruisers and six
destroyers of the British Mediterranean fleet and damaged three battleships, one
aircraft carrier, six light cruisers, and five destroyers.
Both the Yugoslav and the Greek royal
governments went into exile on their armies' collapse. The Axis powers were left
to dispose as they would of their conquests. Yugoslavia was completely
dissolved: Croatia, the independence of which
had been proclaimed on April 10, 1941, was expanded to form Great Croatia, which
included Srem (Syrmia, the zone between the Sava and the Danube south of the
Drava confluence) and Bosnia and Hercegovina; most of Dalmatia was annexed to
Italy; Montenegro was restored to independence; Yugoslav Macedonia was
partitioned between Bulgaria and Albania; Slovenia was partitioned between Italy
and Germany; the Baranya triangle and the Backa went to Hungary; the
Banat and Serbia were put under German military administration. Of the
independent states, Great Croatia, ruled by Ante Pavelic's nationalist Ustase
("Insurgents"), and Montenegro were Italian spheres of influence,
although German troops still occupied the eastern part of Great Croatia. A
puppet government of Serbia was set up by the Germans in August 1941.
While Bulgarian troops occupied eastern Macedonia
and most of western Thrace, the rest of mainland Greece, theoretically subject to a
puppet government in Athens, was militarily occupied by the Italians except for
three zones, namely the Athens district, the Salonika district, and the Dimotika
strip of Thrace, which the German conquerors reserved for themselves. The
Germans also remained in occupation of Lesbos, Chios, Samos, Melos, and Crete.
The contemporary course of events in the
Balkans, described above, nullified the first great victory won by British land
forces in World War II, which took place in North Africa. When Italy declared
war against Great Britain in June 1940, it had nearly 300,000 men under Marshal Rodolfo
Graziani in Cyrenaica (present-day
Libya), to confront the 36,000 troops whom the British commander in chief in the
Middle East, General Sir Archibald Wavell, had
in Egypt to protect the North African approaches
to the Suez Canal. Between these forces lay the Western Desert, in which the
westernmost position actually held by the British was Mersa Matruh ( Marsa
Matruh), 120 miles east of the Cyrenaican frontier. The Italians in
September 1940 occupied Sidi Barrani, 170 miles west
of Mersa Matruh; but, after settling six divisions into a chain of widely
separated camps, they did nothing more for weeks, and during that time Wavell
received some reinforcements.
Wavell, whose command included not only
Egypt but also the East African fronts against the Italians, decided to strike
first in North Africa. On Dec. 7, 1940, some
30,000 men, under Major General Richard Nugent O'Connor, advanced westward, from
Mersa Matruh, against 80,000 Italians; but, whereas the Italians at Sidi
Barrani had only 120 tanks, O'Connor had 275. Having passed by
night through a gap in the chain of forts, O'Connor's forces stormed three of
the Italian camps, while the 7th Armoured Division was already cutting the
Italians' road of retreat along the coast to the west. On December 10 most of
the positions closer to Sidi Barrani were overrun;
and on December 11 the reserve tanks made a further enveloping bound to the
coast beyond Buqbuq, intercepting a large column of retreating Italians. In
three days the British had taken nearly 40,000 prisoners.
Falling back across the frontier into
Cyrenaica, the remnant of the Italian forces from Sidi Barrani
shut itself up in the fortress of Bardia (Bardiyah), which O'Connor's
tanks speedily isolated. On Jan. 3, 1941, the British assault on Bardia began,
and three days later the whole garrison of Bardia surrendered--45,000 men. The
next fortress to the west, Tobruk (Tubruq), was assaulted on January 23
and captured the next day (30,000 more prisoners).
To complete their conquest of Cyrenaica,
it remained for the British to take the port of Benghazi. On Feb. 3, 1941,
however, O'Connor learned that the Italians were about to abandon Benghazi and
to retreat westward down the coast road to Agheila (al-'Uqaylah). Thereupon he
boldly ordered the 7th Armoured Division to cross the desert hinterland and
intercept the Italian retreat by cutting the coast road well to the east of
Agheila. On February 5, after an advance of 170 miles in 33 hours, the British
were blocking the Italians' line of retreat south of Beda Fomm (Bayda`
Fumm); and in the morning of February 6, as the main Italian columns appeared, a
day of battle began. Though the Italians had, altogether, nearly four times as
many cruiser tanks as the British, by the following morning 60 Italian tanks had
been crippled, 40 more abandoned, and the rest of Graziani's army was
surrendering in crowds. The British, only 3,000 strong and having lost only
three of their 29 tanks, took 20,000 prisoners, 120 tanks, and 216 guns.
The British, having occupied Benghazi on
February 6 and Agheila on February 8, could now have pushed on without hindrance
to Tripoli, but the chance was foregone: the Greek government had accepted
Churchill's reiterated offer of British troops to be sent to Greece from Egypt,
which meant a serious reduction of British strength in North Africa.
The reduction was to have serious
consequences, because on February 6, the very day of Beda Fomm, a young general,
Erwin Rommel, had been appointed by Hitler to command two German mechanized
divisions that were to be sent as soon as possible to help the Italians.
Arriving in Tripolitania, Rommel decided to try an offensive with what forces he
had. Against the depleted British strength, he was rapidly and brilliantly
successful. After occupying Agheila with ease on March 24 and Mersa Bréga
(Qasr al-Burayqah) on March 31, he resumed his advance on April 2--despite
orders to stand still for two months--with 50 tanks backed by two new Italian
divisions. The British evacuated Benghazi the next day and began a precipitate
retreat into Egypt, losing great numbers of their tanks on the way (a large
force of armour, surrounded at Mechili, had to surrender on April 7). By April
11 all Cyrenaica except Tobruk had been
reconquered by Rommel's audacious initiative.
Tobruk, garrisoned mainly by the 9th
Australian Division, held out against siege; and Rommel, though he defeated two
British attempts to relieve the place (May and June 1941), was obliged to
suspend his offensive on the Egyptian frontier, since he had overstretched his
supply lines.
Wavell, the success of whose North
African strategy had been sacrificed to Churchill's recurrent fantasy of
creating a Balkan front against Germany (Greece in 1941 was scarcely less
disastrous for the British than the Dardanelles in 1915), nevertheless enjoyed
one definitive triumph before Churchill, doubly chagrined at having lost
Cyrenaica for Greece's sake and Greece for no advantage at all, removed him, in
the summer of 1941, from his command in the Middle East. That triumph was the
destruction of Italian East Africa and the elimination, thereby, of any threat
to the Suez Canal from the south or to Kenya from the north. (see also eastern
In August 1940 Italian forces mounted a
full-scale offensive and overran British Somaliland.
Wavell, however, was already assured of the collaboration of the former Ethiopian
emperor Haile Selassie in raising the Ethiopians
in patriotic revolt against the Italians; and, whereas in June he had disposed
only of meagre resources against the 200,000 men and 325 aircraft under the Duca
d'Aosta, Amedeo di Savoia, his troops in the Sudan were reinforced by two Indian
divisions before the end of the year. After Haile Selassie and a British major,
Orde Wingate, with two battalions of Ethiopian exiles, had crossed the Sudanese
frontier directly into Ethiopia, General William Platt and the Indian divisions
invaded Eritrea on Jan. 19, 1941 (the Italians had already abandoned Kassala);
and, almost simultaneously, British troops from Kenya, under General Alan
Cunningham, advanced into Italian Somaliland.
Platt's drive eastward into Eritrea was
checked on February 5, at Keren, where the best Italian troops, under General
Nicolangelo Carnimeo, put up a stiff defense facilitated by a barrier of cliffs.
But when Keren fell on March 26, Platt's way to Asmara (Asmera), to Massawa
(Mitsiwa), and then from Eritrea southward into Ethiopia was comparatively easy.
Meanwhile, Cunningham's troops were advancing northward into Ethiopia; and on
April 6 they entered the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa. Finally, the Duca
d'Aosta was caught between Platt's column and Cunningham's; and at Amba Alaji,
on May 20, he and the main body of his forces surrendered.
In 1940 Prince 'Abd
al-Ilah, regent of Iraq for King Faysal,
had a government divided within itself about the war; he himself and his foreign
minister, Nuri as-Said, were pro-British, but
his prime minister, Rashid Ali al-Gailani, had
pro-German leanings. Having resigned office in January 1941, Rashid Ali on April
3 seized power in Baghdad with help from some army officers and announced that
the temporarily absent regent was deposed. The British, ostensibly exercising
their right under the Anglo-Iraqi Treaty of 1930
to move troops across Iraqi territory, landed troops at Basra on April 19 and
rejected Iraqi demands that these troops be sent on into Palestine
before any further landings. Iraqi troops were then concentrated around the
British air base at Habbaniyah, west of Baghdad;
and on May 2 the British commander there opened hostilities, lest the Iraqis
should attack first. Having won the upper hand at Habbaniyah
and been reinforced from Palestine, the British troops from the air base marched
on Baghdad; and on May 30 Rashid Ali and his friends took refuge in Iran. 'Abd
al-Ilah was reinstated as regent; Nuri became prime minister; and the
British military presence remained to uphold them. (see also Habbaniyah,
Hawr al-)
German military supplies for Rashid Ali
were dispatched too late to be useful to him; but they reached Iraq via Syria,
whose high commissioner, General H.-F. Dentz, was a nominee of the Vichy
government of France. Lest Syria and Lebanon should fall altogether under Axis
control, the British decided to intervene there. Consequently, Free
French forces, under General Georges Catroux, with British, Australian,
and Indian support, were sent into both countries from Palestine on June 8,
1941; and a week later British forces invaded Syria from Iraq. Dentz's forces
put up an unexpectedly stiff resistance, particularly against the Free French,
but were finally obliged to capitulate: an armistice was signed at Acre on July
14. By an arrangement of July 25 the Free French retained territorial command in
Syria and Lebanon subject to strategic control by the British.
On June 10, 1940, when Italy entered the
war on the German side and when the fall of France was imminent, U.S. president Franklin
D. Roosevelt declared that the United States would "extend to the
opponents of force the material resources of this nation." After France
fell, he pursued this policy by aiding the British in their struggle against
Germany. Roosevelt arranged for the transfer of surplus American war matériel
to the British under various arrangements, including the exchange of 50 old
American destroyers for certain British-held Atlantic bases, and he facilitated
the placing of British orders for munitions in the United States. The British
decided to rely on the United States unreservedly and without regard to their
ability to pay. By December 1940 they had already placed orders for war
materials that were far more than they could possibly muster the dollar exchange
to finance.
Churchill suggested the concept of
lend-lease to Roosevelt in December 1940, proposing that the United States
provide war materials, foodstuffs, and clothing to the democracies (and
particularly to Great Britain). Roosevelt assented, and a bill to achieve this
purpose was passed by the Congress in early 1941. The Lend-Lease Act not only
empowered the president to transfer defense materials, services, and information
to any foreign government whose defense he deemed vital to that of the United
States, but also left to his discretion what he should ask in return. An
enormous grant of power, it gave Roosevelt virtually a free hand to pursue his
policy of material aid to the "opponents of force." Congress
appropriated funds generously, amounting to almost $13,000,000,000 by November
1941. Other countries besides Britain began receiving lend-lease aid by this
time, including China and the Soviet Union. From the time of the German invasion
of the U.S.S.R., Roosevelt had been clearly determined to aid the Soviet Union,
but the American public's suspicions of Communism delayed his declaring that
country eligible for lend-lease until November 1941. American deliveries of
aircraft, tanks, and other supplies to the U.S.S.R. began shortly thereafter.
At the outbreak of World War II, the
primary concerns of the British Navy were to defend Great Britain from invasion
and to retain command of the ocean trading routes, both in order to protect the
passage of essential supplies of food and raw materials for Britain and to deny
the trading routes to the Axis powers, thus drawing tight once again the
blockade that had proved so successful during World War I. Britain had adequate
forces of battleships, aircraft carriers, cruisers, and other ships to fulfill
these tasks.
The German Navy's role was to protect
Germany's coasts, to defend its sea communications and to attack those of the
Allies', and to support land and air operations. These modest goals were in
keeping with Germany's position as the dominant land-based power in continental
Europe. Germany's main naval weapon during the war was to be the submarine, or U-boat,
with which it attacked Allied shipping much as it had in World War I.
German control of the Biscay ports after
the fall of France in June 1940 provided the U-boats with bases from which they
could infest the Atlantic without having to pass either through the Channel or
around the north of the British Isles at the end of every sortie. Thenceforward,
so long as naval escorts for outgoing convoys from the British Isles could go
only 200 or 300 miles out to sea before having to turn back to escort incoming
convoys, the U-boats had a very wide field for free-ranging activity: sinkings
rose sharply from 55,580 tons in May 1940 to 352,407 tons in October, achieved
mainly by solitary attacks by single U-boats at night. But the beginning of
lend-lease and the freeing of British warships after the German invasion threat
waned enabled the British to escort their convoys for 400 miles by October 1940
and halfway across the Atlantic by April 1941. Since air cover for shipping
could also be provided from the British Isles, from Canada, and from Iceland,
the Atlantic space left open to the U-boats was reduced by May 1941 to a width
of only 300 miles. Moreover, British surface vessels had the ASDIC
(Anti-Submarine Detection Investigation Committee) device to detect submerged
U-boats. By the spring of 1941, under the guidance of Admiral Karl
Dönitz, the U-boat commanders were changing their tactic of
individual operation to one of wolf-pack
attacks: groups of U-boats, disposed in long lines, would rally when one of them
by radio signaled a sighting and overwhelm the convoy by weight of numbers.
Between July and December 1941 the German U-boat strength was raised from 65 to
more than 230.
Furthermore, the German surface fleet
became more active against Allied seaborne trade. Six armed German raiders
disguised as merchantmen, with orders to leave convoys alone and to confine
their attacks to unescorted ships, roamed the oceans with practical impunity
from the spring of 1940 and had sunk 366,644 tons of shipping by the end of the
year. German battleships--the Admiral
Scheer, the Admiral Hipper, the Scharnhorst,
and the Gneisenau--one after another
began similar raiding operations, with considerable success, from October 1940;
and in May 1941 a really modern battleship, the Bismarck,
and a new cruiser, the Prinz Eugen,
put out to sea from Germany. The Bismarck
and the Prinz Eugen, however, were
located by British reconnaissance in the North Sea near Bergen, and an intensive
hunt for them was immediately set in motion. Tracked from a point northwest of
Iceland by two British cruisers, the two German ships were engaged on May 24 by
the battle cruiser Hood and by the new
battleship Prince
of Wales; and, though the Hood
was sunk, the Bismarck 's fuel supply
was put out of action, so that her commander, Admiral Günther Lütjens,
decided to make for the French coast. Separating from the Prinz Eugen (which escaped), the Bismarck threw off her pursuers early on May 25 but was sighted
again the next day some 660 miles west of Brest. Paralyzed by torpedo aircraft
from the Ark Royal, she was bombarded
and sunk by the King George V, the Rodney,
and the Dorsetshire on May 27.
In the Mediterranean the year 1941 ended
with some naval triumphs for the Axis: U-boats torpedoed the Ark
Royal on November 13 and the Barham
12 days later; Italian frogmen, entering the harbour of Alexandria, on December
19 crippled the battleships Queen
Elizabeth and Valiant; and two British cruisers and a destroyer were also sunk in
Mediterranean waters in December.
German strategy in World War II is
wholly intelligible only if Hitler's far-reaching system of power politics and
his racist ideology are borne in mind. Since the 1920s his program had been
first to win power in Germany proper, next to consolidate Germany's domination
over Central Europe, and then to raise Germany to the status of a world power by
two stages: (1) the building up of a continental empire embracing all Europe,
including the European portion of the Soviet Union, and (2) the attainment for
Germany of equal rank with the British Empire, Japan, and the United States--the
only world powers to be left after the elimination of France and the
U.S.S.R.--through the acquisition of colonies in Africa and the construction of
a strong fleet with bases on the Atlantic. In the succeeding generation Hitler
foresaw a decisive conflict between Germany and the United States, during which
he hoped that Great Britain would be Germany's ally.
The conquest of the European part of the
Soviet Union, which in Hitler's calendar was dated approximately for 1943-45,
was to be preceded, he thought, by short localized campaigns elsewhere in Europe
to provide a strategic shield and to secure Germany's rear for the great
expedition of conquest in the East, which was also bound up with the
extermination of the Jews. The most important of the localized campaigns would
be that against France. While this European program remained unfulfilled, it was
imperative to avoid any world war, since only after the German Reich had come to
dominate the whole European continent would it have the economic base and the
territorial extent that were prerequisite for success in a great war, especially
against maritime world powers.
Hitler had always contemplated the
overthrow of the Soviet regime, and though he had congratulated himself on the
German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact of 1939 as a matter of expediency,
anti-Bolshevism had remained his most profound emotional conviction. His
feelings had been stirred up afresh by the Soviet occupation of the Baltic
states and of Bessarabia and northern Bukovina in June 1940 and by the
consequent proximity of Soviet forces to the Romanian oil fields on which
Germany depended. Hitler became acutely suspicious of the intentions of the
Soviet leader, Joseph Stalin, and he began to
feel that he could not afford to wait to complete the subjugation of western
Europe before dealing with the Soviet Union. Hitler and his generals had
originally scheduled the invasion of the U.S.S.R. for mid-May 1941, but the
unforeseen necessity of invading Yugoslavia and Greece in April of that year had
forced them to postpone the Soviet campaign to late June. The swiftness of
Hitler's Balkan victories enabled him to keep to this revised timetable, but the
five weeks' delay shortened the time for carrying out the invasion of the
U.S.S.R. and was to prove the more serious because in 1941 the Russian winter
would arrive earlier than usual. Nevertheless, Hitler and the heads of the
Oberkommando des Heeres (OKH, or German Army High Command), namely the army
commander in chief Werner von Brauchitsch and
the army general staff chief Franz Halder, were
convinced that the Red Army could be defeated in two or three months, and that,
by the end of October, the Germans would have conquered the whole European part
of Russia and the Ukraine west of a line stretching from Archangel to Astrakhan.
The invasion of the Soviet Union was given the code name "Operation
For the campaign against the Soviet
Union, the Germans allotted almost 150 divisions containing a total of
about 3,000,000 men. Among these were 19 panzer divisions, and in total the
"Barbarossa" force had about 3,000 tanks, 7,000 artillery pieces, and
2,500 aircraft. It was in effect the largest and most powerful invasion force in
human history. The Germans' strength was further increased by more than 30
divisions of Finnish and Romanian troops. (see also Eastern
The Soviet Union had twice or perhaps
three times the number of both tanks and aircraft as the Germans had, but their
aircraft were mostly obsolete. The Soviet tanks were about equal to those of the
Germans, however. A greater hindrance to Hitler's chances of victory was that
the German intelligence service underestimated the troop reserves that Stalin
could bring up from the depths of the U.S.S.R. The Germans correctly estimated
that there were about 150 divisions in the western parts of the U.S.S.R. and
reckoned that 50 more might be produced. But the Soviets actually brought up
more than 200 fresh divisions by the middle of August, making a total of 360.
The consequence was that, though the Germans succeeded in shattering the
original Soviet armies by superior technique, they then found their path blocked
by fresh ones. The effects of the miscalculations were increased because much of
August was wasted while Hitler and his advisers were having long arguments as to
what course they should follow after their initial victories. Another factor in
the Germans' calculations was purely political, though no less mistaken; they
believed that within three to six months of their invasion, the Soviet regime
would collapse from lack of domestic support.
The German attack on the Soviet Union
was to have an immediate and highly salutary effect on Great Britain's
situation. Until then Britain's prospects had appeared hopeless in the eyes of
most people except the British themselves; and the government's decision to
continue the struggle after the fall of France and to reject Hitler's peace
offers could spell only slow suicide unless relief came from either the United
States or the U.S.S.R. Hitler brought Great Britain relief by turning eastward
and invading the Soviet Union just as the strain on Britain was becoming severe.
On June 22, 1941, the German offensive
was launched by three army groups under the same commanders as in the invasion
of France in 1940: on the left (north), an army group under Leeb struck from
East Prussia into the Baltic states toward Leningrad; on the right (south),
another army group, under Rundstedt, with an armoured group under Kleist,
advanced from southern Poland into the Ukraine against Kiev, whence it was to
wheel southeastward to the coasts of the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov; and in
the centre, north of the Pripet Marshes, the main blow was delivered by Bock's
army group, with one armoured group under Guderian and another under Hoth,
thrusting northeastward at Smolensk and Moscow.
The invasion along a 1,800-mile front
took the Soviet leadership completely by surprise and caught the Red Army in an
unprepared and partially demobilized state. Piercing the northern border,
Guderian's tanks raced 50 miles beyond the frontier on the first day of the
invasion and were at Minsk, 200 miles beyond it, on June 27. At Minsk they
converged with Hoth's tanks, which had pierced the opposite flank, but Bock's
infantry could not follow up quickly enough to complete the encirclement of the
Soviet troops in the area; though 300,000 prisoners were taken in the salient, a
large part of the Soviet forces was able to escape to the east. The Soviet
armies were clumsily handled and frittered their tank strength away in piecemeal
action like that of the French in 1940. But the isolated Soviet troops fought
with a stubbornness that the French had not shown, and their resistance imposed
a brake by continuing to block road centres long after the German tide had swept
past them. The result was similar when Guderian's tanks, having crossed the
Dnepr River on July 10, entered Smolensk six days later and converged with
Hoth's thrust through Vitebsk: 200,000 Soviet prisoners were taken; but some
Soviet forces were withdrawn from the trap to the line of the Desna, and a large
pocket of resistance lay behind the German armour. By mid-July, moreover, a
series of rainstorms were turning the sandy Russian roads into clogging mud,
over which the wheeled vehicles of the German transport behind the tanks could
make only very slow progress. The Germans also began to be hampered by the scorched
earth policy adopted by the retreating Soviets. The Soviet troops burned
crops, destroyed bridges, and evacuated factories in the face of the German
advance. Entire steel and munitions plants in the westernmost portions of the
U.S.S.R. were dismantled and shipped by rail to the east, where they were put
back into production. The Soviets also destroyed or evacuated most of their
rolling stock (railroad cars), thus depriving the Germans of the use of the
Soviet rail system, since Soviet railroad track was of a different gauge than
German track and German rolling stock was consequently useless on it.
Nevertheless, by mid-July the Germans
had advanced more than 400 miles and were only 200 miles from Moscow. They still
had ample time to make decisive gains before the onset of winter, but they lost
the opportunity, primarily because of arguments throughout August between Hitler
and the OKH about the destination of the next thrusts thence: whereas the OKH
proposed Moscow as the main objective, Hitler wanted the major effort to be
directed southeastward, through the Ukraine and
the Donets Basin into the Caucasus, with a minor swing northwestward against
Leningrad (to converge with Leeb's army group).
In the Ukraine, meanwhile, Rundstedt and
Kleist had made short work of the foremost Soviet defenses, stronger though the
latter had been. A new Soviet front south of Kiev was broken by the end of July;
and in the next fortnight the Germans swept down to the Black Sea mouths of the
Bug and Dnepr rivers--to converge with Romania's simultaneous offensive. Kleist
was then ordered to wheel northward from the Ukraine, Guderian southward from
Smolensk, for a pincer movement around the Soviet forces behind Kiev; and by the
end of September the claws of the encircling movement had caught 520,000 men.
These gigantic encirclements were partly the fault of inept Soviet high
commanders and partly the fault of Stalin, who as commander in chief stubbornly
overrode the advice of his generals and ordered his armies to stand and fight
instead of allowing them to retreat eastward and regroup in preparation for a
Winter was approaching, and Hitler
stopped Leeb's northward drive on the outskirts of Leningrad. He ordered
Rundstedt and Kleist, however, to press on from the Dnepr toward the Don and the
Caucasus; and Bock was to resume the advance on Moscow.
Bock's renewed advance on Moscow began
on Oct. 2, 1941. Its prospects looked bright when Bock's armies brought off a
great encirclement around Vyazma, where 600,000
more Soviet troops were captured. That left the Germans momentarily with an
almost clear path to Moscow. But the Vyazma battle had not been completed until
late October; the German troops were tired, the country became a morass as the
weather got worse, and fresh Soviet forces appeared in the path as they plodded
slowly forward. Some of the German generals wanted to break off the offensive
and to take up a suitable winter line. But Bock wanted to press on, believing
that the Soviets were on the verge of collapse, while Brauchitsch and Halder
tended to agree with his view. As that also accorded with Hitler's desire, he
made no objection. The temptation of Moscow, now so close in front of their
eyes, was too great for any of the topmost leaders to resist. On December 2 a
further effort was launched, and some German detachments penetrated into the
suburbs of Moscow; but the advance as a whole was held up in the forests
covering the capital. The stemming of this last phase of the great German
offensive was partly due to the effects of the Russian winter, whose subzero
temperatures were the most severe in several decades. In October and November a
wave of frostbite cases had decimated the ill-clad German troops, for whom
provisions of winter clothing had not been made, while the icy cold paralyzed
the Germans' mechanized transport, tanks, artillery, and aircraft. The Soviets,
by contrast, were well clad and tended to fight more effectively in winter than
did the Germans. By this time German casualties had mounted to levels that were
unheard of in the campaigns against France and the Balkans; by November the
Germans had suffered about 730,000 casualties.
In the south, Kleist had already reached
Rostov-on-Don, gateway to the Caucasus, on
November 22, but had exhausted his tanks' fuel in doing so. Rundstedt, seeing
the place to be untenable, wanted to evacuate it but was overruled by Hitler. A
Soviet counteroffensive recaptured Rostov on November 28, and Rundstedt was
relieved of his command four days later. The Germans, however, managed to
establish a front on the Mius River--as Rundstedt had recommended.
As the German drive against Moscow
slackened, the Soviet commander on the Moscow front, General Georgy
Konstantinovich Zhukov, on December 6 inaugurated the first great
counteroffensive with strokes against Bock's right in the Elets (Yelets) and
Tula sectors south of Moscow and against his centre in the Klin and Kalinin
sectors to the northwest. Levies of Siberian troops, who were extremely
effective fighters in cold weather, were used for these offensives. There
followed a blow at the German left, in the Velikie Luki sector; and the
counteroffensive, which was sustained throughout the winter of 1941-42, soon
took the form of a triple convergence toward Smolensk.
These Soviet counteroffensives tumbled
back the exhausted Germans, lapped around their flanks, and produced a critical
situation. From generals downward, the invaders were filled with ghastly
thoughts of Napoleon's retreat from Moscow. In that emergency Hitler forbade any
retreat beyond the shortest possible local withdrawals. His decision exposed his
troops to awful sufferings in their advanced positions facing Moscow, for they
had neither the clothing nor the equipment for a Russian winter campaign; but if
they had once started a general retreat it might easily have degenerated into a
panic-stricken rout.
The Red Army's winter counteroffensive
continued for more than three months after its December launching, though with
diminishing progress. By March 1942 it had advanced more than 150 miles in some
sectors. But the Germans maintained their hold on the main bastions of their
winter front--such towns as Schlüsselburg, Novgorod, Rzhev, Vyazma,
Bryansk, Orël (Oryol), Kursk, Kharkov, and Taganrog--despite the fact that
the Soviets had often advanced many miles beyond these bastions, which were in
effect cut off. In retrospect, it became clear that Hitler's veto on any
extensive withdrawal worked out in such a way as to restore the confidence of
the German troops and probably saved them from a widespread collapse.
Nevertheless, they paid a heavy price indirectly for that rigid defense. One
immediate handicap was that the strength of the Luftwaffe was drained in the
prolonged effort to maintain supplies by air, under winter conditions, to the
garrisons of these more or less isolated bastion towns. The tremendous strain of
that winter campaign, on armies which had not been prepared for it, had other
serious effects. Before the winter ended, many German divisions were reduced to
barely a third of their original strength, and they were never fully built up
The German plan of campaign had begun to
miscarry in August 1941, and its failure was patent when the Soviet
counteroffensive started. Nevertheless, having dismissed Brauchitsch and
appointed himself army commander in chief in December, Hitler persisted in
overruling the tentative opposition of the general staff to his strategy.
The first three months of the
German-Soviet conflict produced cautious rapprochements between the U.S.S.R. and
Great Britain and between the U.S.S.R. and the United States. The Anglo-Soviet
agreement of July 12, 1941, pledged the signatory powers to assist one another
and to abstain from making any separate peace with Germany. On Aug. 25, 1941,
British and Soviet forces jointly invaded Iran,
to forestall the establishment of a German base there and to divide the country
into spheres of occupation for the duration of the war; and late in
September--at a conference in Moscow--Soviet, British, and U.S. representatives
formulated the monthly quantities of supplies, including aircraft, tanks, and
raw materials, that Great Britain and the United States should try to furnish to
the Soviet Union.
The critical situation on the Eastern
Front did not deter Hitler from declaring Germany to be at war with the United
States on Dec. 11, 1941, after the Japanese attack on the U.S., British, and
Dutch positions in the Pacific and in the Far East (see below Japanese policy, 1939-41
), since this extension of hostilities did not immediately commit the
German land forces to any new theatre but at the same time had the merit of
entitling the German Navy to intensify the war at sea.
In 1931-32 the Japanese
had invaded Manchuria (Northeast China)
and, after overcoming ineffective Chinese resistance there, had created the
Japanese-controlled puppet state of Manchukuo. In the following years the
Nationalist government of China, headed by Chiang
Kai-shek, temporized in the face of Japanese military and diplomatic
pressures and instead waged an internal war against the Chinese
Communists, led by Mao Zedong, who were based in Shensi Province in
north-central China. Meanwhile, the Japanese began a military buildup in North
China proper, which in turn stimulated the formation of a unified resistance by
the Nationalists and the Communists. Overt hostilities between Japan
and China began after the Marco Polo Bridge incident of July 7, 1937, when shots
were exchanged between Chinese and Japanese troops on the outskirts of Peking.
Open fighting broke out in that area, and in late July the Japanese captured the
Peking-Tientsin area. Thereupon full-scale hostilities began between the two
nations. The Japanese landed near Shanghai, at the mouth of the Yangtze River,
and took Shanghai in November and the Chinese capital, Nanking,
in December 1937. Chiang Kai-shek moved his government to Han-k'ou (one of the
Wu-han cities), which lay 435 miles west of Shanghai along the Yangtze. The
Japanese also pushed southward and westward from the Peking area into Hopeh and
Shansi provinces. In 1938 the Japanese launched several ambitious military
campaigns that brought them deep into the heart of central China. They advanced
to the northeast and west from Nanking, taking Suchow and occupying the Wu-han
cities. The Nationalists were forced to move their government to Chungking in
Szechwan Province, about 500 miles west of the Wu-han cities. The Japanese also
occupied Canton and several other coastal cities in South China in 1938.
Nationalist Chinese resistance to these
Japanese advances was ineffective, primarily because the Nationalist leadership
was still more interested in holding their forces in reserve for a future
struggle with the Communists than in repelling the Japanese. By contrast, the
Communists, from their base in north-central China, began an increasingly
effective guerrilla war against the Japanese troops in Manchuria and North
China. The Japanese needed large numbers of troops to maintain their hold on the
immense Chinese territories and populations they controlled. Of the 51 infantry
divisions making up the Japanese Army in 1941, 38 of them, comprising about
750,000 men, were stationed in China (including Manchuria).
When war broke out in Europe in
September 1939, the Japanese, despite a series of victorious battles, had still
not brought their war in China to an end: on the one hand, the Japanese
strategists had made no plans to cope with the guerrilla warfare pursued by the
Chinese; on the other, the Japanese commanders in the field often disregarded
the orders of the supreme command at the Imperial headquarters and occupied more
Chinese territory than they had been ordered to take. Half of the Japanese Army
was thus still tied down in China when the commitment of Great Britain and
France to war against Germany opened up the prospect of wider conquests for
Japan in Southeast Asia and in the Pacific. Japan's military ventures in China
proper were consequently restricted rather more severely henceforth.
The German victories over The
Netherlands and France in the summer of 1940 further encouraged the Japanese
premier, Prince Konoe, to look southward at
those defeated powers' colonies and also, of course, at the British and U.S.
positions in the Far East. The island archipelago of the Dutch
East Indies (now Indonesia) along with French
Indochina and British-held Malaya contained raw materials (tin, rubber,
petroleum) that were essential to Japan's industrial economy, and if Japan could
seize these regions and incorporate them into the empire, it could make itself
virtually self-sufficient economically and thus become the dominant power in the
Pacific Ocean. Since Great Britain, single-handedly, was confronting the might
of the Axis in Europe, the Japanese strategists had to reckon, primarily, with
the opposition of the United States to their plans for territorial
aggrandizement. When Japanese troops entered northern Indochina in September
1940 (in pursuance of an agreement extorted in August from the Vichy government
of France), the United States uttered a protest. Germany and Italy, by contrast,
recognized Japan as the leading power in the Far East by concluding with it the
Tripartite, or Axis, Pact of Sept. 27, 1940:
negotiated by Japanese foreign minister Matsuoka Yosuke,
the pact pledged its signatories to come to one another's help in the event of
an attack "by a power not already engaged in war." Japan also
concluded a neutrality pact with the U.S.S.R. on April 13, 1941.
On July 2, 1941, the Imperial Conference
decided to press the Japanese advance southward even at the risk of war with
Great Britain and the United States; and this policy was pursued even when
Matsuoka was relieved of office a fortnight later. On July 26, in pursuance of a
new agreement with Vichy France, Japanese forces began to occupy bases in
southern Indochina.
This time the United
States reacted vigorously, not only freezing Japanese assets under U.S.
control but also imposing an embargo on supplies of oil to Japan. Dismay at the
embargo drove the Japanese naval command, which had hitherto been more moderate
than the army, into collusion with the army's extremism. When negotiations with
the Dutch of Indonesia for an alternative supply of oil produced no
satisfaction, the Imperial Conference on September 6, at the high command's
insistence, decided that war must be undertaken against the United States and
Great Britain unless an understanding with the United States could be reached in
a few weeks' time.
General Tojo
Hideki, who succeeded Konoe as premier in mid-October 1941, continued the
already desperate talks. The United States, however, persisted in making demands
that Japan could not concede: renunciation of the Tripartite Pact (which would
have left Japan diplomatically isolated); the withdrawal of Japanese troops from
China and from Southeast Asia (a humiliating retreat from an overt commitment of
four years' standing); and an open-door regime for trade in China. When Cordell
Hull, the U.S. secretary of state, on Nov. 26, 1941, sent an abrupt note
to the Japanese bluntly requiring them to evacuate China and Indochina and to
recognize no Chinese regime other than that of Chiang Kai-shek, the Japanese
could see no point in continuing the talks.
Since peace with the United States
seemed impossible, Japan set in motion its plans for war, which would now
necessarily be waged not only against the United States but also against Great
Britain (the existing war effort of which depended on U.S. support and the Far
Eastern colonies of which lay within the orbit of the projected Japanese
expansion) and against the Dutch East Indies (the oil of which was essential to
Japanese enterprises, even apart from geopolitical considerations).
The evolving Japanese military strategy
was based on the peculiar geography of the Pacific Ocean and on the relative
weakness and unpreparedness of the Allied military presence in that ocean. The
western half of the Pacific is dotted with many islands, large and small, while
the eastern half of the ocean is, with the exception of the Hawaiian Islands,
almost devoid of landmasses (and hence of usable bases). The British, French,
American, and Dutch military forces in the entire Pacific region west of Hawaii
amounted to only about 350,000 troops, most of them lacking combat experience
and being of disparate nationalities. Allied air power in the Pacific was weak
and consisted mostly of obsolete planes. If the Japanese, with their large,
well-equipped armies that had been battle-hardened in China, could quickly
launch coordinated attacks from their existing bases on certain
Japanese-mandated Pacific islands, on Formosa ( Taiwan),
and from Japan itself, they could overwhelm the Allied forces, overrun the
entire western Pacific Ocean as well as Southeast Asia, and then develop those
areas' resources to their own military-industrial advantage. If successful in
their campaigns, the Japanese planned to establish a strongly fortified
defensive perimeter extending from Burma in the west to the southern rim of the
Dutch East Indies and northern New Guinea in the south and sweeping around to
the Gilbert and Marshall islands in the southeast and east. The Japanese
believed that any American and British counteroffensives against this perimeter
could be repelled, after which those nations would eventually seek a negotiated
peace that would allow Japan to keep her newly won empire.
Until the end of 1940 the Japanese
strategists had assumed that any new war to be waged would be against a single
enemy. When it became clear, in 1941, that the British and the Dutch as well as
the Americans must be attacked, a new and daring war plan was successfully
sponsored by the commander in chief of the Combined Fleet, Admiral Yamamoto
Yamamoto's plan prescribed two
operations, together involving the whole strength of his navy, which was
composed of the following ships: 10 battleships, six regular aircraft carriers,
four auxiliary carriers, 18 heavy cruisers, 20 light cruisers, 112 destroyers,
65 submarines, and 2,274 combat planes. The first operation, to which all six
regular aircraft carriers, two battleships, three cruisers, and 11 destroyers
were allocated, was to be a surprise attack, scheduled for December 7 (December
8 by Japanese time), on the main U.S. Pacific Fleet
in its base at Pearl Harbor in the Hawaiian Islands. The rest of the Japanese
Navy was to support the army in the "Southern Operation": 11 infantry
divisions and seven tank regiments, assisted by 795 combat planes, were to
undertake two drives, one from Formosa through the Philippines, the other from
French Indochina and Hainan Island through Malaya, so as to converge on the
Dutch East Indies, with a view to the capture of Java as the culmination of a
campaign of 150 days--during which, moreover, Wake Island, Guam, the Gilbert
Islands, and Burma should also have been secured as outer bastions, besides Hong
In accordance with Yamamoto's plan, the
aircraft carrier strike force commanded by Admiral Nagumo Chuichi sailed
westward undetected by any U.S. reconnaissance until it had reached a point 275
miles north of Hawaii. From there, on Sunday, Dec. 7, 1941, a total of about 360
aircraft, composed of dive-bombers, torpedo bombers, and a few fighters, was
launched in two waves in the early morning at the giant U.S. naval base at Pearl
Harbor. The base at that time was accommodating 70 U.S. fighting ships, 24
auxiliaries, and some 300 planes. The Americans were taken completely by
surprise, and all eight battleships in the harbour were hit (though six were
eventually repaired and returned to service); three cruisers, three destroyers,
a minelayer, and other vessels were damaged; more than 180 aircraft were
destroyed and others damaged (most while parked at airfields); and more than
2,330 troops were killed and over 1,140 wounded. Japanese losses were
comparatively small. The Japanese attack failed in one crucial respect, however;
the Pacific Fleet's three aircraft carriers were at sea at the time of the
attack and escaped harm, and these were to become the nucleus of the United
States' incipient naval defense in the Pacific. Pearl Harbor's shore
installations and oil-storage facilities also escaped damage. The Pearl Harbor
attack, unannounced beforehand by the Japanese as it was, unified the American
public and swept away any remaining support for American neutrality in the war.
On December 8 the U.S. Congress declared war on Japan with only one dissenting
vote. (see also Pacific Campaign)
On the day of the attack, December 8 by
local time, Formosa-based Japanese bombers struck Clark and Iba airfields in the
Philippines, destroying more than 50 percent of
the U.S. Army's Far East aircraft; and, two days later, further raids destroyed
not only more U.S. fighters but also Cavite Naval Yard, likewise in the
Philippines. Part of the U.S. Asiatic Fleet, however, had already gone south in
November; and the surviving major ships and bomber aircraft, which were
vulnerable for lack of fighter protection, were withdrawn in the next fortnight
to safety in bases in Java and Australia.
Japanese forces began to land on the
island of Luzon in the Philippines on December 10. The main assault, consisting
of the bulk of one division, was made at Lingayen Gulf, 100 miles
north-northwest of Manila, on December 22, and a
second large landing took place south of Manila two days later. Manila itself
fell unopposed to the Japanese on Jan. 2, 1942, but by that time the U.S. and
Filipino forces under General Douglas MacArthur
were ready to hold Bataan Peninsula (across the
bay from Manila) and Corregidor Island (in the
bay). The Japanese attack on Bataan was halted initially, but it was reinforced
in the following eight weeks. MacArthur was ordered to Australia on March 11,
leaving Bataan's defense to Lieutenant General Jonathan
M. Wainwright. The latter and his men surrendered on April 9; Corregidor
fell in the night of May 5-6; and the southern Philippines capitulated three
days later.
Japanese bombers had already destroyed
British air power at Hong Kong on Dec. 8, 1941, and the British and Canadian
defenders surrendered to the ground attack from the Kowloon Peninsula (the
nearest mainland) on December 25. To secure their flank while pushing southward
into Malaya, the Japanese also occupied Bangkok on December 9 and Victoria Point
in southernmost Burma on December 16. The Japanese landings in Malaya, from
December 8 onward, accompanied as they were by air strikes, overwhelmed the
small Australian and Indian forces; and the British battleship Prince
of Wales and the battle cruiser Repulse,
sailing from Singapore to cut Japanese communications, were sunk by Japanese
aircraft on December 10. By the end of January 1942, two Japanese divisions,
with air and armoured support, had occupied all Malaya except Singapore Island.
In Burma, meanwhile, other Japanese troops had taken Moulmein and were
approaching Rangoon and Mandalay.
On the eastern perimeter of the war
zone, the Japanese had bombed Wake Island on December 8, attempted to capture it
on December 11, and achieved a landing on December 23, quickly subduing the
garrison. Guam had already fallen on December 10. Having also occupied Makin and
Tarawa in the Gilbert Islands in the first days of the war, the Japanese
successfully attacked Rabaul, the strategic base on New Britain (now part of
Papua New Guinea), on Jan. 23, 1942.
A unified American-British-Dutch-Australian
Command, ABDACOM, under Wavell, responsible for holding Malaya, Sumatra,
Java, and the approaches to Australia, became operative on Jan. 15, 1942; but
the Japanese had already begun their advance on the oil-rich Dutch East Indies.
They occupied Kuching (December 17), Brunei Bay (January 6), and Jesselton
(January 11), on the northern coast of Borneo, as well as Tarakan Island (off
northeastern Borneo) and points on Celebes. Balikpapan (on Borneo's east coast)
and Kendari (in southeastern Celebes) fell to the Japanese on Jan. 24, 1942,
Amboina on February 4, Makasar City (in southwestern Celebes) on February 8, and
Bandjarmasin (in southern Borneo) on February 16. Bali was invaded on February
18, and by February 24 the Japanese were also in possession of Timor.
Meanwhile, on February 8 and 9, three
Japanese divisions had landed on Singapore Island; and on February 15 they
forced the 90,000-strong British, Australian, and Indian garrison there, under
Lieutenant General A.E. Percival, to surrender. Singapore was the major British
base in the Pacific and had been regarded as unassailable due to its strong
seaward defenses. The Japanese took it with comparative ease by advancing down
the Malay Peninsula and then assaulting the base's landward side, which the
British had left inadequately defended. On February 13, moreover, Japanese
paratroopers had landed at Palembang in Sumatra, which fell to an amphibious
assault three days later.
When ABDACOM was dissolved on Feb. 25,
1942, only Java remained to complete the
Japanese program of conquest. The Allies' desperate attempt to intercept the
Japanese invasion fleet was defeated in the seven-hour Battle
of the Java Sea on February 27, in which five Allied warships were lost
and only one Japanese destroyer damaged. The Japanese landed at three points on
Java on February 28 and rapidly expanded their beachheads. On March 9 the 20,000
Allied troops in Java surrendered. In the Indian Ocean, the Japanese captured
the Andaman Islands on March 23, and began a series of attacks on British
shipping. After the failure of ABDACOM, the U.S.-British Combined Chiefs of
Staff placed the Pacific under the U.S. Joint Chiefs' strategic direction.
MacArthur became supreme commander of the Southwest Pacific Area, which
comprised the Dutch East Indies (less Sumatra), the Philippines, Australia,
the Bismarck Archipelago, and the Solomons; and Admiral Chester
W. Nimitz became commander in chief of the Pacific Ocean Areas, which
comprised virtually every area not under MacArthur. Their missions were to hold
the U.S.-Australia line of communications, to contain the Japanese within the
Pacific, to support the defense of North America, and to prepare for major
amphibious counteroffensives.
Japan's initial war plans were realized
with the capture of Java. But despite their military triumphs, the Japanese saw
no indication that the Allies were ready for a negotiated peace. On the
contrary, it seemed evident that an Allied counterstroke was in the making. The
U.S. Pacific Fleet bombed the Marshall Islands on Feb. 1, 1942, Wake Island on
February 23, and Marcus Island (between Wake and Japan) on March 1. These moves,
together with the bombing of Rabaul on February 23 and the establishment of
bases in Australia and a line of communications across the South Pacific, made
the Japanese decide to expand so as to cut the Allied line of communications to
Australia. They planned to occupy New Caledonia, the Fiji Islands, and Samoa and
also to seize eastern New Guinea, whence they would threaten Australia from an
air base to be established at Port Moresby. They planned also to capture Midway
Island in the North Pacific and to establish air bases in the Aleutians. In
pursuance of this new program, Japanese troops occupied Lae and Salamaua in New
Guinea and Buka in the Solomon Islands in March 1942 and Bougainville in the Solomons and
the Admiralty Islands (north of New Guinea) early in April. (see also Aleutian
Something to raise the Allies' morale
was achieved on April 18, 1942, when 16 U.S. bombers raided Tokyo--though they did little real damage except to the Japanese
government's prestige. Far more important were the consequences of the U.S.
intelligence services' detection of Japanese plans to seize Port
Moresby and Tulagi (in the southern Solomons). Had these two places
fallen, Japanese aircraft could have dominated the Coral Sea. In the event,
after U.S. aircraft on May 3, 1942, had interfered with the Japanese landing on
Tulagi, U.S. naval units, with aircraft, challenged the Japanese ships on their
circuitous detour from Rabaul to Port Moresby. On May 5 and 6 the opposing
carrier groups sought each other out, and the four-day Battle
of the Coral Sea ensued. On May 7 planes from the Japanese carriers sank
a U.S. destroyer and an oil tanker, but U.S. planes sank the Japanese light
carrier Shoho and a cruiser; and the
next day, though Japanese aircraft sank the U.S. carrier Lexington
and damaged the carrier Yorktown, the
large Japanese carrier Shokaku had to
retire crippled. Finally, the Japanese lost so many planes in the battle that
their enterprise against Port Moresby had to be abandoned.
Despite the mixed results of the Battle
of the Coral Sea, the Japanese continued with their plan to seize Midway
Island. Seeking a naval showdown with the remaining ships of the U.S.
Pacific Fleet and counting on their own numerical superiority to secure a
victory, the Japanese mustered four heavy and three light aircraft carriers, two
seaplane carriers, 11 battleships, 15 cruisers, 44 destroyers, 15 submarines,
and miscellaneous small vessels. The U.S. Pacific Fleet had only three heavy
carriers, eight cruisers, 18 destroyers, and 19 submarines, though there were
some 115 aircraft in support of it. The Americans, however, had the incomparable
advantage of knowing the intentions of the Japanese in advance, thanks to the
U.S. intelligence services' having broken the Japanese Navy's code and
deciphered key radio transmissions. In the ensuing Battle
of Midway, the Japanese ships destined to take Midway Island were
attacked while still 500 miles from their target by U.S. bombers on June 3. The
Japanese carriers were still able to launch their aircraft against Midway early
on June 4, but in the ensuing battle, waves of carrier- and Midway-based U.S.
bombers sank all four of the Japanese heavy carriers and one heavy cruiser.
Appalled by this disaster, the Japanese began to retreat in the night of June
4-5. Though the U.S. carrier Yorktown
was sunk by torpedo on June 6, Midway was saved from invasion. In the Aleutians,
the Japanese bombed Dutch Harbor effectively and on June 7 occupied Attu and
The Battle of Midway was probably the
turning point of the war in the Pacific, for Japan lost its first-line carrier
strength and most of its navy's best trained pilots. Henceforth, the naval
strengths of the Japanese and of the Allies were virtually equal. Having lost
the strategic initiative, Japan canceled its plans to invade New Caledonia,
Fiji, and Samoa.
Japan's entry into war against the
western Allies had its repercussions in China. Chiang
Kai-shek's government on Dec. 9, 1941, formally declared war not only
against Japan (a formality long overdue) but also, with political rather than
military intent, against Germany and Italy. Three Chinese armies were rushed to
the Burmese frontier, since the Burma Road was
the only land route whereby the western Allies could send supplies to the
Nationalist Chinese government. On Jan. 3, 1942, Chiang was recognized as
supreme Allied commander for the China theatre of war; and a U.S. general, Joseph
W. Stilwell, was sent to him to be his chief of staff. In the first eight
weeks after Pearl Harbor, however, the major achievement of the Chinese was the
definitive repulse, on Jan. 15, 1942, of a long-sustained Japanese drive against
Ch'ang-sha, on the Canton-Han-k'ou railway.
Thereafter, Chiang and Stilwell were
largely preoccupied by efforts to check the Japanese advance into Burma. By
mid-March 1942 two Chinese armies, under Stilwell's command, had crossed the
Burmese frontier; but before the end of the month the Chinese force defending
Toungoo, in central Burma between Rangoon and Mandalay, was nearly annihilated
by the more soldierly Japanese. British and Indian units in Burma fared scarcely
better, being driven into retreat by the enemy's numerical superiority both in
the air and on the ground. On April 29 the Japanese took Lashio, the Burma
Road's southern terminus, thus cutting the supply line to China and turning the
Allies' northern flank. Under continued pressure, the British and Indian forces
in the following month fell back through Kalewa to Imphal (across the
Indian border), while most of the Chinese retreated across the Salween River
into China. By the end of 1942 all of Burma was in Japanese hands, China was
effectively isolated (except by air), and India
was exposed to the danger of a Japanese invasion through Burma.
Since the U.S. bombers that raided Tokyo
on April 18 flew on to Chinese airfields, particularly to those in Chekiang (the
coastal province south of Shanghai), the Japanese reacted by launching a
powerful offensive to seize those airfields. By the end of July they had
generally achieved their objectives.
In the year following the collapse of
France in June 1940, British strategists, relying as they could on supplies from
the nonbelligerent United States, were concerned first with home defense, second
with the security of the British positions in the Middle East, and third with
the development of a war of attrition against the Axis powers, pending the
buildup of adequate forces for an invasion of the European continent. For the
United States, President Roosevelt's advisers, from November 1940, based their
strategic plans on the "Europe first" principle: that is to say, if
the United States became engaged in war simultaneously against Germany, Italy,
and Japan, merely defensive operations should be conducted in the Pacific (to
protect at least the Alaska-Hawaii-Panama triangle) while an offensive was being
mounted in Europe.
Japan's entry into the war terminated
the nonbelligerency of the United States. The three weeks' conference, named
Arcadia, that Roosevelt, Churchill, and their advisers opened in Washington,
D.C., on Dec. 22, 1941, reassured the British about U.S. maintenance of the
"Europe first" principle and also produced two plans: a tentative one,
code-named "Sledgehammer," for the buildup of an offensive force in
Great Britain, in case it should be decided to invade France; and another,
code-named "Super-Gymnast," for combining a British landing behind the
German forces in Libya (already planned under the code name "Gymnast")
with a U.S. landing near Casablanca on the Atlantic coast of Morocco. The same
conference furthermore created the machinery of the Combined Chiefs of Staff,
where the British Chiefs of Staff Committee was to be linked continuously,
through delegates in Washington, D.C., with the newly established U.S. Joint
Chiefs of Staff Organization, so that all aspects of the war could be studied in
concert. It was on Jan. 1, 1942, during the Arcadia
Conference, that the Declaration of the United Nations was signed in
Washington, D.C., as a collective statement of the Allies' war aims in sequel to
the Atlantic Charter.
Meanwhile, Churchill became anxious to
do something to help the embattled Soviets--who were clamouring for the United
States and Britain to invade continental Europe so as to take some of the German
pressure off the Eastern Front. Roosevelt was no less conscious than Churchill
of the fact that the Soviet Union was bearing by far the greatest burden of the
war against Germany; and this consideration inclined him to listen to the
arguments of his Joint Chiefs of Staff Organization for a change of plan. After
some hesitation, he sent his confidant Harry Hopkins and his army chief of staff
General George C. Marshall to London in April
1942 to suggest the scrapping of "Super-Gymnast" in favour of
"Bolero," namely the concentration of forces in Great Britain for a
landing in Europe (perhaps at Brest or at Cherbourg) in the autumn; then
"Roundup," an invasion of France by 30 U.S. and 18 British divisions,
could follow in April 1943. The British agreed but soon began to doubt the
practicability of mounting an amphibious invasion of France at such an early
Attempts to conclude an Anglo-Soviet
political agreement were renewed without result, but a 20-year Anglo-Soviet
alliance was signed on May 26, 1942; and, though Churchill warned Molotov not to
expect an early second front in Europe, Molotov seemed gratified by what he was
told about Anglo-U.S. plans.
Visiting Roosevelt again in the latter
part of June 1942, Churchill at Hyde Park, N.Y., and in Washington, D.C.,
pressed for a revised and enlarged joint operation in North Africa before the
end of the year, instead of a buildup for the invasion of France; but the U.S.
Joint Chiefs resolutely upheld the latter plan. After further debate and
disagreement, in July the U.S. Joint Chiefs yielded at last to British obstinacy
in favour of a North African enterprise: it was decided that "Torch,"
as this combined Anglo-U.S. operation came to be called, should begin the
following autumn. (see also Torch, Operation)
Already, on July 17, 1942, Churchill had
had to notify Stalin that convoys of Allied supplies to northern Russia must be
suspended because of German submarine activity on the Arctic sea route (on June
2 a convoy from Iceland had lost 23 out of 34 vessels). Consequently, it was the
more awkward to inform Stalin that there would be no second front in Europe
before 1943. In mid-August 1942, when Churchill went to Moscow to break the
news, Stalin raged against the retreat from the plan for a second front in
Europe but had to admit the military logic of "Torch."
In the Western Desert, a major offensive
against Rommel's front was undertaken on Nov. 18, 1941, by the British 8th Army,
commanded by Cunningham under the command in chief of Wavell's successor in the
Middle East, General Sir Claude Auchinleck. The offensive was routed. General
Neil Methuen Ritchie took Cunningham's place on November 25, still more tanks
were brought up, and a fortnight's resumed pressure constrained Rommel to
evacuate Cyrenaica and to retreat to Agedabia. There, however, Rommel was at
last, albeit meagrely, reinforced; and, after repulsing a British attack on
December 26, he prepared a counteroffensive. When the British still imagined his
forces to be hopelessly crippled, he attacked on Jan. 21, 1942, and, by a series
of strokes, drove the 8th Army back to the Gazala-Bir Hakeim line, just west of
Both sides were subsequently further
reinforced. Then, on the night of May 26-27, Rommel passed around Ritchie's
southern flank with his three German divisions and two Italian ones, leaving
only four Italian divisions to face the Gazala line. Though at first Rommel did
some damage to the British tanks as they came into action piecemeal from a weak
position, he failed to break through to the coast behind Gazala. In a single day
one-third of Rommel's tank force was lost; and, after another unsuccessful
effort to reach the coast, he decided, on May 29, to take up a defensive
The new German position, aptly known as
the Cauldron, seemed indeed to be perilously exposed; and throughout the first
days of June the British attacked it continually from the air and from the
ground, imagining that Rommel's armour was caught at last. The British tanks,
however, persisted in making direct assaults in small groups against the
Cauldron and were beaten off with very heavy losses; and Rommel, meanwhile,
secured his rear and his line of supply by overwhelming several isolated British
positions to the south.
Whereas in May 1942 the British had had
700 tanks, with 200 more in reserve, against Rommel's 525, by June 10 their
present armoured strength was reduced, through their wasteful tactics against
the Cauldron, to 170, and most of the reserve was exhausted. Suddenly then, on
June 11, Rommel struck eastward, to catch most of the remaining British armour
in the converging fire of two panzer divisions. By nightfall on June 13 the
British had barely 70 tanks left, and Rommel, with some 150 still fit for
action, was master of the battlefield.
The British on June 14 began a
precipitate retreat from the Gazala line toward the Egyptian frontier. A
garrison of 33,000 men, however, with an immense quantity of material, was left
behind in Tobruk--on the retention of which Churchill characteristically and
most unfortunately insisted in successive telegrams from London. Rommel's prompt
reduction of Tobruk, achieved on June 21, 1942, was felt by Great Britain as a
national disaster second only to the loss of Singapore; and 80 percent of the
transport with which Rommel chased the remnant of the 8th Army eastward
consisted of captured British vehicles.
At this point Auchinleck relieved
Ritchie of his command and in a realistic and soldierly way ordered a general
British retreat back to the Alamein area. By June 30 the German tanks were
pressing against the British positions between el-Alamein (al-'Alamayn) and the
Qattara Depression, some 60 miles west of Alexandria, after an advance of more
than 350 miles from Gazala. Hitler and Mussolini could expect that within a
matter of days Rommel would be the master of Egypt.
The ensuing First Battle
of el- Alamein, which lasted throughout July 1942, marked the end of the
German hopes of a rapid victory. Rommel's troops, having come so far and so
fast, were exhausted; their first assaults failed to break the defense rallied
by Auchinleck; and they were also subjected to disconcerting counterstrokes. At
this point, the respite that Rommel had to grant to his men gave Auchinleck time
to bring up reinforcements. By the end of July Rommel knew that it was he rather
than Auchinleck who was now on the defensive.
Auchinleck had saved Egypt by halting
Rommel's invasion, but his counterattacks had not driven it back. Early in
August, when Churchill arrived in Cairo to review the situation, Auchinleck
insisted on postponing the resumption of the offensive until September, so that
his new forces could be properly acclimatized and trained for desert warfare.
Impatient of this delay, Churchill removed Auchinleck from the command in chief
in the Middle East and gave the post to General Sir
Harold Alexander, while the command of the 8th Army was transferred
eventually (after the sudden death of Churchill's first nominee) to General Bernard
Law Montgomery. Paradoxically, Montgomery postponed the resumption of the
offensive even longer than Auchinleck had desired.
While the British in the course of
August raised their strength in armour at the front to some 700 tanks, Rommel
received only meagre reinforcement in the shape of infantry. He had, however,
about 200 gun-armed German tanks and also 240 Italian tanks (of an obsolete
model). With this armament, in the night of Aug. 30-31, 1942, he launched a
fresh attack, intending to capture by surprise the minefields on the southern
sector of the British front and then to drive eastward with his armour for some
30 miles before wheeling north into the 8th Army's supply area on the coast. In
the event, the minefields proved unexpectedly deep, and by daybreak Rommel's
spearhead was only eight miles beyond them. Delayed on their eastward drive and
already under attack from the air, the two German panzer divisions of the Afrika
Korps had to make their wheel to the north at a much shorter distance from the
breach than Rommel had planned. Their assault thus ran mainly into the position
held by the British 22nd Armoured Brigade, to the southwest of the ridge 'Alam
al-Halfa`. Shortage of fuel on the German side and reinforced defense on the
British, together with intensification of the British bombing, spelled the
defeat of the offensive, and Rommel on September 2 decided to make a gradual
The German plan to launch another great
summer offensive crystallized in the early months of 1942. Hitler's decision was
influenced by his economists, who mistakenly told him that Germany could not
continue the war unless it obtained petroleum supplies from the Caucasus. Hitler
was the more responsive to such arguments because they coincided with his belief
that another German offensive would so drain the Soviet Union's manpower that
the U.S.S.R. would be unable to continue the war. His thinking was shared by his
generals, who had been awed by the prodigality with which the Soviets squandered
their troops in the fighting of 1941 and the spring of 1942. By this time at
least 4,000,000 Soviet troops had been killed, wounded, or captured, while
German casualties totaled only 1,150,000.
In the early summer of 1942 the German
southern line ran from Orël southward east of Kursk, through Belgorod, and
east of Kharkov down to the loop of the Soviet salient opposite Izyum, beyond
which it veered southeastward to Taganrog, on the northern coast of the Sea of
Azov. Before the Germans were ready for their principal offensive, the Red Army
in May started a drive against Kharkov; but this premature effort actually
served the Germans' purposes, since it not only preempted the Soviet reserves
but also provoked an immediate counterstroke against its southern flank, where
the Germans broke into the salient and reached the Donets
River near Izyum. The Germans captured 240,000 Soviet prisoners in the
encirclement that followed. In May also the Germans drove the Soviet defenders
of the Kerch Peninsula out of the Crimea; and on June 3 the Germans began an
assault against Sevastopol, which, however, held out for a month.
The Germans' crossing of the Donets near
Izyum on June 10, 1942, was the prelude to their summer offensive, which was
launched at last on June 28: Field Marshal Maximilian von Weichs's Army Group B,
from the Kursk-Belgorod sector of the front, struck toward the middle Don River
opposite Voronezh, whence General Friedrich Paulus' 6th Army was to wheel
southeastward against Stalingrad ( Volgograd);
and List's Army Group A, from the front south of Kharkov, with Kleist's 1st
Panzer Army, struck toward the lower Don to take Rostov and to thrust thence
northeastward against Stalingrad as well as southward into the vast oil fields
of Caucasia. Army Group B swept rapidly across a 100-mile stretch of plain to
the Don and captured Voronezh on July 6. The 1st Panzer Army drove 250 miles
from its starting line and captured Rostov on July 23. Once his forces had
reached Rostov, Hitler decided to split his troops so that they could both
invade the rest of the Caucasus and take the
important industrial city of Stalingrad on the Volga River, 220 miles northeast
of Rostov. This decision was to have fatal consequences for the Germans, since
they lacked the resources to successfully take and hold both of these
objectives. (see also Rostov-na-Donu)
Maikop (Maykup), the great oil centre
200 miles south of Rostov, fell to Kleist's right-hand column on August 9, and
Pyatigorsk, 150 miles east of Maikop, fell to his centre on the same day, while
the projected thrust against Stalingrad, in the opposite direction from Rostov,
was being developed. Shortage of fuel, however, slowed the pace of Kleist's
subsequent southeastward progress through the Caucasian mountains; and, after
forcing a passage over the Terek River near Mozdok early in September, he was
halted definitively just south of that river. From the end of October 1942 the
Caucasian front was stabilized; but the titanic struggle for Stalingrad,
draining manpower that might have won victory for the Germans in Caucasia, was
to rage on, fatefully, for three more months (see below Stalingrad and the German retreat, summer
1942-February 1943 ). Already,
however, it was evident that Hitler's new offensive had fallen short of its
objectives, and the scapegoat this time was Halder, who was superseded by Kurt
Zeitzler as chief of the army general staff.
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