Introduction

At 11.00 am on 11 November 1918, the First World War came to an end. The combined forces of Great Britain, France, Italy, and the USA had defeated the armies of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Turkey. This war cost the lives of around 7 million combatants and a further 7 million civilians, although exact totals are difficult to ascertain. During the four years between 1914 and 1918, the ‘Great War,’ as it was being referred to even during the fighting, redefined the parameters of the experience of war.

The First World War was the first true ‘industrial’ war, where the nineteenth-century advances in technology and modes of production were harnessed to an insatiable war machine – with terrifying results. The impact of new and more efficient killing methods, backed by virtually the whole social, political, and economic infrastructure of the warring nations, produced a war of destruction unparalleled in human history. The cost of victory was such that in terms of casualty figures alone there was little to choose between winner and loser. At all levels of society – politicians, generals, ordinary soldiers, and the civilian population – there was a belief and a hope that this was the ‘war to end all wars’ and that in this fashion the tremendous sacrifice would not have been in vain.

Of course, tragically, the Great War did not prove to be the end of war. Instead, in many ways the Great War typified the future of war and not its past. The manner in which the war was fought, with an emphasis on the full utilization of all available resources and the involvement of the whole populace, pointed the way forward and offered a glimpse of how wars might be fought in years to come.

To those who witnessed the Armistice in 1918, the possibility of another major European conflict within their lifetime must have seemed an unimaginable horror, yet that was precisely what was to happen. Despite the shock of the Great War, of the endless lists of dead and wounded published daily in newspapers across Britain, Germany, and France, despite the widespread revulsion at war itself that the Great War engendered, Europe had barely 20 years of peace to enjoy. In 1939 Europe was plunged again into a major conflagration, and this time the cost, incredibly, would be even higher than 1914–18 in lives, in property, and, significantly, in morality.

As with the First World War, the Second World War began in Europe as a result of the actions of an aggressive Germany. Where the Second World War differed markedly from its predecessor, however, was in why the war was fought. The Second World War was not fought for material aggrandizement or for power-political advantage, although these factors had a considerable bearing on the course of the war. Fundamentally, the Second World War was fought because of political ideas – ideologies.

Political extremism in post-First World War Germany brought to power Adolf Hitler, a man convinced of his own infallibility and almost divine calling to lead Germany to victory in a race war that would establish the Germans in their rightful position of preeminence in a new global order. Hitler intended to lead the German people in a war of conquest in which the inherent superiority of the German race would be demonstrated and Germany’s racial and ideological competitors would be destroyed, leaving Germany at the helm of a unified Europe. This ideological dimension underpinned the reasons for the fighting and also exercised an enormous bearing on how the fighting was conducted.

Up to August 1939, Adolf Hitler’s Germany had achieved many of her initial, territorial, ambitions through a combination of threat and belligerent diplomacy. In August 1939, Hitler felt sufficiently confident to abandon diplomacy as his principal weapon and instead to use military force to overwhelm Germany’s eastern neighbor, Poland. Hitler’s invasion of Poland was the event that precipitated the Second World War. Britain and France were committed to Poland’s independence and had pledged to come to her aid in the event of a German attack. The British and French governments issued an ultimatum to Germany, demanding her withdrawal. Hitler dismissed this threat, believing that the French and British were unlikely to do anything to stop the German invasion. When Germany failed to respond to the ultimatum, Britain and France were brought into another war and the Second World War was born.

However, unlike the attritional struggle and stalemate of the First World War, the Second World War was fought to quite a different tempo, initially at least. In the first nine months of the Second World War, Germany’s military triumphs were nothing less than astonishing. She invaded and conquered Poland in little over a month, aided by an expedient alliance with the Soviet Union, which enthusiastically helped Germany to dismember and divide Poland. During the course of this opening campaign, Britain and France did nothing to come to Poland’s aid.

The German invasion of Poland was followed by an attack on Norway and then, when Hitler’s forces were fully prepared, on the combined British and French forces in the west. In a brilliant, if fortuitous campaign, the French and their Belgian, Dutch, and British allies (the British in the form of a large army dispatched to the Continent) were defeated in barely six weeks. By June 1940 all continental Europe, from Moscow to Madrid, had succumbed to Germany, was allied to her, or was neutral. Hitler’s Germany had achieved in a little over nine months what Imperial Germany, the Germany of Kaiser Wilhelm, had failed to do over the course of four years.

After the fall of France and the loss of much of the British army’s heavy equipment during the fighting and the hasty evacuation from Dunkirk, Britain faced a desperate battle to maintain her freedom against what appeared to be an irresistible tide of German success. During what became known as the ‘Battle of Britain,’ a struggle in effect for air superiority, Germany suffered her first major setback of the war. Tenacious Royal Air Force (RAF) fighter pilots, mainly British but with many Australians, Americans, Canadians, New Zealanders, Poles, Czechs, and others among them, denied the Germans the freedom of the skies that they needed to launch their projected invasion of the British Isles.

Unable to implement Operation Sea Lion, the code name for the invasion of Britain, Hitler instead began planning for what he considered to be the main prize: the Soviet Union. Before this, however, Hitler’s forces also occupied Greece and Yugoslavia and became active in North Africa in support of Italian forces. On 22 June 1941, Hitler’s armed forces turned eastwards, attacking the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa and widening the war dramatically. On 12 July, Britain and the Soviet Union signed a mutual assistance agreement to fight their common enemy together. On 11 December 1941, following the surprise Japanese attack on the American Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor, Germany also declared war on the USA, widening the war still further and, in doing so, increasing the odds considerably on conclusive German victory (see The Second World War (1) The Pacific War and The Second World War (5) The Eastern Front in this series).

Adolf Hitler’s Germany, at the zenith of her power, now faced a formidable array of opponents: the largest empire in the world, the British; the state with the largest armed forces, the Soviet Union; and the nation that possessed the largest economy and probably the greatest latent potential of all, the USA. The German offensive in the Soviet Union, after some impressive early success, did not bring about the decisive and swift victory that was required. Whether Germany had a chance to win this war decisively is a matter of considerable debate. Certainly, her failure to knock the Soviet Union out of the war before the USA was able to make her impact felt effectively meant that Germany could only realistically achieve a draw of some description. The ferocity with which Germany had waged the war, however, especially in the east, meant that her foes were in no mood for compromise and, following a conference at Casablanca in early 1943, demanded nothing short of unconditional surrender.

Once the initiative had passed from Germany to her opponents and the war became attritional, there could be only one logical outcome, although Germany’s resistance to the bitter end meant that this conclusion was reached with the loss of more, rather than fewer, lives and with greater damage. From early 1943, after the Battle of Stalingrad, the Soviets gradually pushed back the German forces and in June 1944 the western allies invaded occupied France and began to drive the Germans back from the west. The hard-pressed Germans, obliged to fight a two-front war and bombed mercilessly from the air, fought on until May 1945. On 8 May 1945, the new German Chancellor, Admiral Dönitz – Hitler’s successor of a mere eight days – surrendered unconditionally to the Allies: Great Britain, the USA, the Soviet Union, and France.

In the ruins of Hitler’s Germany – the Reich he had claimed would last 1,000 years – it was, symbolically, the USA and the Soviet Union who linked up first on the Elbe River. These two extra-European powers would be the new determinants of the world order in the postwar years, as Britain and France, the two preeminent European powers, reluctantly redefined their respective roles on the world stage, exhausted by the demands of two wars in short succession.

The first four years of the Second World War – the period covered in this book – witnessed the rise and gradual fall of German hegemony in Europe. The book examines how the Second World War began, first by looking at the legacy of the First World War and then by exploring Adolf Hitler’s actions, which precipitated the war itself. The book also examines the role of Nazi ideology in influencing how the war would be fought. The major campaigns of the first four years are then chronicled: the German invasion of Poland; the Norway campaign; the fall of France and the Low Countries; the ‘miracle’ of Dunkirk and then the subsequent ‘Battle of Britain.’ The book describes how the British tried to hit back at German-occupied Europe, with the disastrous Dieppe raid and the development of the controversial strategic bomber offensive. There are also accounts of life in occupied Germany and of the experiences of war for both a civilian and a soldier.