41 The Second World War: Europe

By the late 1930s, the world was preparing for another war. In the Far East, an increasingly militaristic Japan had been pursuing an aggressive policy of territorial expansion since its occupation of Chinese Manchuria in 1931. The world sat back and did nothing. In 1935, Mussolini, the Italian dictator, ordered his troops into Abyssinia. Again, the world did nothing.

In 1937 Japan launched an all-out war of conquest in China itself. The international community did not lift a finger. In 1938 Hitler annexed Austria, and at the Munich Conference Britain and France agreed to his annexation of the Sudeten area of Czechoslovakia. Hitler went on to occupy the whole of the country, and then started threatening Poland, demanding the return of former German territory lost after the First World War.

At last, Britain and France woke up to the danger, and declared that they would come to Poland’s aid should it be invaded. Of more concern to Hitler, however, was the Soviet Union, and to avoid the prospect of a war on two fronts, on August 23, 1939 he shocked the world by agreeing a Non-Aggression Pact with Stalin, his greatest ideological enemy. On September 1, German tanks rolled into Poland. Two days later, Britain and France declared war.

Dark days Being on the other side of Europe, there was little that either Britain or France could do to help the Poles. For six months there was a period of tense stand-off known as the Phoney War, which came abruptly to an end in April 1940, when Hitler overran Denmark and invaded Norway. Then in May he launched his Blitzkrieg (“lightning war”) on the Low Countries and France, using fast-moving tanks and motorized infantry to punch holes in the enemy’s defenses, and aircraft to support the attack and terrorize the civilian population with aerial bombing. Both the British and French armies were taken by surprise, and were forced into headlong retreat.

The British prime minister Neville Chamberlain, who had sought to appease Hitler in 1938 by acceding to his territorial demands, resigned. He was replaced by the robust and defiant figure of Winston Churchill, who told the British people he had “nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat.” After the British Expeditionary Force, surrounded in Dunkirk, was evacuated at the end of May, and France signed an armistice with Germany, Britain was left to fight Hitler alone. “We shall never surrender,” Churchill famously told the British people.

“What is our policy? … to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime.”

Winston Churchill, first address as prime minister to the House of Commons, May 13, 1940

Across the Atlantic, President F. D. Roosevelt, though sympathetic to Britain’s plight, was constrained by strong isolationist sentiment in the USA from entering the war on the British side. However, he supplied huge amounts of material aid via Atlantic convoys, which found themselves under constant attack by German U-boats, Hitler’s aim being to starve the British into submission. During the summer of 1940, he prepared to launch an invasion across the English Channel, and as a first step set out to destroy Britain’s military airfields. In this aim he was thwarted by the Royal Air Force, which, during the Battle of Britain, shot down so many German bombers that Hitler turned instead to nighttime raids on British cities—the Blitz—in which tens of thousands of civilians were killed.

The tide turns The war moved to different fronts. In September 1940 Italy attacked the British in Egypt, and were later reinforced by the German Afrika Korps. The two sides fought to and fro across the deserts of North Africa until British and Commonwealth troops scored a decisive victory in 1942 at El Alamein. By this time the USA had entered the war and landed in northwest Africa, and in July 1943 the Allies invaded Sicily. Italy agreed to an armistice, but German troops occupied the country and fiercely resisted the Allied advance.

Cracking the Enigma Code

Long before the war the Germans had developed a sophisticated encryption device, the Enigma machine, which scrambled top secret military communications into codes that could only be unscrambled using another Enigma machine. In 1939 the British set up an equally top secret project at Bletchley Park, where hundreds of mathematicians and linguists eventually found a way of deciphering Enigma radio signals—and in the process created one of the world’s first computers. The intelligence thus gained played a key role in a number of decisive campaigns—perhaps most notably the Battle of the Atlantic, where by 1943 the Allies knew exactly where the German U-boat packs were going to strike. This proved invaluable in protecting the huge flow of men and materials across the Atlantic during the build-up to D-Day.

All these were sideshows compared to the massive scale of operations on the Eastern Front. In June 1941 Hitler abandoned his Non-Aggression Pact with Stalin and launched a massive invasion of the Soviet Union. The Red Army, weakened by Stalin’s purges of the later 1930s, reeled. The Germans treated the Russians as not only ideological enemies because of their communist system, but also as Untermenschen (sub-humans) because of the supposed inferiority of the Slavic “race” to which they belonged. In consequence, the suffering of the Soviet people as well as the Soviet armed forces was on a horrendous scale: perhaps 20 million died in the course of the war. But Hitler, like Napoleon before him, had underestimated the size, the climate and the resources of Russia. As Stalin pulled Russian industry behind the Urals, churning out tanks and aircraft in unprecedented numbers, the Germans suffered in the bitter Russian winter and were weakened by over-extended supply lines. Stalin had no qualms in sacrificing wave after wave of infantry, who were sent into battle with NKVD (secret police) machine-guns at their backs. The turning point on the Eastern Front came at Stalingrad on the Volga, where through the winter of 1942–3 a whole German army was encircled and forced to surrender. The Soviets then went on the offensive, advancing westward into eastern Europe.

“I ask you: Do you want total war? Do you want it, if necessary, more total and more radical than we can even imagine it today?”

Joseph Goebbels, Nazi propaganda minister, speech following the German surrender at Stalingrad, February 1943

Stalin had long demanded that his Western Allies open a second front. This eventually occurred when US, British and Commonwealth forces landed on the beaches of Normandy on D-Day, June 6, 1944. As the Western Allies advanced through France and the Low Countries and eventually crossed the Rhine into Germany itself, on the other side of the continent the Red Army was approaching Berlin. Hitler committed suicide on April 30, 1945, and on May 7 all German forces unconditionally surrendered to the Allies. No one quite knows the full extent of the human cost of the conflict around the world: estimates suggest that in excess of 50 million people died as a direct or indirect consequence of the fighting.

the condensed idea

The bloodiest war in history