World War II

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6

The Defeat of France

On May 20, the panzer group took Abbeville at the mouth of the River Somme and began to push north along the coast; it covered 400 km (250 mi) in 11 days. By May 26, the British and French were pushed into a narrow beachhead around Dunkirk. The Belgian king, Leopold III, surrendered his army two days later. Destroyers and smaller craft of all kinds rescued 338,226 men in the evacuation of Dunkirk, a heroic sealift that probably would not have succeeded if the German commander, General Gerd von Rundstedt, had not stopped the tanks to save them for the next phase.

The drive into France began on June 5 and picked up on June 9. Italy declared war on France and Britain on June 10. The Maginot Line, which only extended to the Belgian border, was intact, but the French commander, General Maxime Weygand, had nothing with which to screen it or Paris on the north and west. On June 17, Marshal Henri Philippe Pétain, the World War I hero who had become premier the day before, asked for an armistice. The armistice was signed on June 22 on terms that gave Germany control of northern France and the Atlantic coast. Pétain then set up a capital at Vichy in the unoccupied south-east, and his Vichy government remained an obedient client of the Axis until the end of the war.

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7

The Battle of Britain

In the summer of 1940, Hitler dominated Europe from the North Cape to the Pyrenees. His one remaining active enemy—Britain, under a new prime minister, Winston Churchill—vowed to continue fighting. Whether it could was questionable. The British Army had left most of its weapons on the beaches at Dunkirk, although its trained soldiers had been saved. Stalin was in no mood to challenge Hitler. The United States, shocked by the fall of France, began the first peacetime conscription in its history and greatly increased its military budget, but public opinion, although sympathetic to Britain, was against getting into the war.

The Germans hoped to subdue the British by starving them out. In June 1940 they began the Battle of the Atlantic, using submarine warfare to cut the British overseas lifelines. The Germans now had submarine bases in Norway and France. At the outset the Germans had only 57 submarines, but more were being built—enough to keep Britain in danger until the spring of 1943 and to carry on the battle for months thereafter.

Invasion was the expeditious way to finish off Britain, but that meant crossing the English Channel; Hitler would not risk it unless the Royal Air Force (RAF) could be neutralized first. As a result, the Battle of Britain was fought in the air, not on the beaches. In August 1940 the Germans launched daylight raids against ports and airfields and in September against inland cities. The objective was to draw out the British fighters and destroy them. The Germans failed to reckon with a new device, radar, which greatly increased the British fighters' effectiveness. Also, a sudden change in strategy led the Germans to switch their attacks from RAF airfields to London and other cities, beginning the Blitz. Because their own losses were too high, the Germans had to switch to night bombing at the end of September. Between then and May 1941 they made 71 major raids on London and 56 on other cities, but the damage they wrought was too indiscriminate to be militarily decisive. On September 17, 1940, Hitler postponed the invasion indefinitely, thereby conceding defeat in the Battle of Britain.

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8

The Balkans and North Africa (1940-1941)

In fact, Hitler had told his generals in late July 1940 that the next attack would be on the USSR. There, he said, Germany would get its “living space” and defeat Britain as well. He claimed the British were only being kept in the war by the hope of a falling-out between Germany and the USSR. When the USSR had been defeated and British positions in India and the Middle East were threatened, he believed that Britain would make peace. Hitler wanted to start in the autumn of 1940, but his advisers persuaded him to avoid the risks of a winter campaign in the USSR and wait until the spring.

Meanwhile, Germany's ally, Mussolini, had staged an unsuccessful attack (September 1940) on British-occupied Egypt from the Italian colony of Libya and an equally abortive invasion (October 1940) of Greece. In response to the latter move, the British occupied airfields on Crete and in Greece. Hitler did not want British planes within striking distance of his one major oil source, the Ploieşti fields in Romania, and in November he began to prepare an operation against Greece. Early in 1941 British forces pushed the Italians back into Libya, and in February Hitler sent General Erwin Rommel with a two-division tank corps, the Afrika Korps, to help his allies.

Because he would need to cross their territory to get at Greece (and the USSR), Hitler brought Romania and Hungary into the Axis alliance in November 1940; Bulgaria joined in March 1941. When Yugoslavia refused to follow suit, Hitler ordered an invasion of that country.

The operations against Greece and Yugoslavia began on April 6, 1941. The Germans' primary difficulty with the attack on Yugoslavia was in pulling together an army of nine divisions from Germany and France in less than ten days. They had to limit themselves for several days to air raids and border skirmishing. On April 10 they opened drives on Belgrade from the north-west, north, and south-east. The city fell on April 13, and the Yugoslav Army surrendered the next day. Yugoslavia, however, was easier to take than it would be to hold. Guerrillas—Chetniks under Draža Mihajlović and partisans under Josip Broz Tito—fought throughout the war (see European Resistance Movements of World War II).

The Greek army of 430,000, unlike the Yugoslav army, was fully mobilized, and to some extent battle-tested, but national pride compelled it to try to defend the Metaxas Line north-east of Salonica. By one short thrust to Salonica, the Germans forced the surrender on April 9 of the line and about half of the Greek army. After the Greek First Army, pulling out of Albania, was trapped at the Metsovon Pass and surrendered on April 22, the British force of some 62,000 troops retreated southward. Thereafter, fast German drives—to the Isthmus of Corinth by April 27 and through the Peloponnese by April 30—forced the British into an evacuation that cost them 12,000 men. An airborne assault on May 20 to 27 also took Crete into German hands.

Meanwhile, Rommel had launched a successful counter-offensive against the British in Libya, expelling them from the country (except for an isolated garrison at Tobruk) by April 1941.

B

The Second Phase: Expansion of the War

In the year after the fall of France, the war moved towards a new stage—world war. While conducting subsidiary campaigns in the Balkans, in North Africa, and in the air against Britain, Hitler deployed his main forces to the east and brought the countries of south-eastern Europe (as well as Finland) into a partnership against the USSR.

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1

US Aid to Britain

The United States abandoned strict neutrality in the European war and approached a confrontation with Japan in Asia and the Pacific Ocean. US and British conferences, begun in January 1941, determined a basic strategy for the event of a US entry into the war, namely, that both would centre their effort on Germany, leaving Japan, if need be, to be dealt with later.

In March 1941 the US Congress passed the Lend-Lease Act and appropriated an initial $7 billion to lend or lease weapons and other aid to any countries the President might designate. Britain, on the verge of bankruptcy at the end of 1940, was the main recipient, followed, after the German invasion in June 1941, by the Soviet Union. By this means the United States hoped to ensure victory over the Axis without involving its own troops. By late summer of 1941, however, the United States was in a state of undeclared war with Germany. In July, US Marines were stationed in Iceland, which had been occupied by the British in May 1940, and thereafter the US Navy took over the task of escorting convoys in the waters west of Iceland. In September, President Franklin D. Roosevelt authorized ships on convoy duty to attack Axis war vessels.