part0005

“The receptivity of the masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous. In consequence of these facts, all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these in slogans until the last member of the public understands what you want him to understand by your slogan.”

The invasion of Poland and the declaration of war against Germany by the British and French were followed by six months of such inactivity that it was named it the Phoney War or, to the Germans, “the sitting war.” There was hostile action taking place, although not in defense of the doomed Poles. The navies of Great Britain and Germany had begun to strike in the Atlantic, and German U-boats sank more than 100 merchant vessels that were on their way to Great Britain.

The Atlantic came into play as a battlefield shortly after war was declared, when a German U-boat torpedoed the SS Athenia , a passenger liner, off the coast of Ireland, killing 117. During the first four months of the war, the Phoney War saw the loss of 260,000 tons of neutral and Allied merchant shipping. The Germans distributed between 50,000 and 100,000 sea mines in the Thames Estuary and the English Channel. German torpedoes struck the HMS Courageous when the war was only two weeks old, killing 500 British sailors. An attack on the Royal Navy’s base at Scapa Flow killed 900 and destroyed the HMS Royal Oak . The British Navy, long the masters of the seas, was on the receiving end of punishment from the German U-boats.

In the spring of 1940, the Phoney War ended as Germany, protecting the iron ore shipments that it received from Sweden, attacked Norway and Denmark simultaneously on April 9; the Danes surrendered within hours and Norway in two months. On May 10, the Germans, en route to France, entered Belgium and the Netherlands, fooling the Allies, who regarded the Ardennes region as a barrier against German armored vehicles. The Germans moved so quickly through their blitzkrieg methods that they cut off the Allies in Belgium, trapping them near Lille on the border between France and Belgium. Justifiably alarmed at the results of the campaign, the British government appointed Winston Churchill as prime minister.

As the Germans advanced, they had split the communication and transport between the Allies’ southern and northern branches, driving several hundred thousand Allied troops north to a narrow segment of the French coast at Dunkirk. The British command, as well as the French, were opposed to evacuating from the coast of Dunkirk, despite the grim situation they faced. But Churchill, about to be tested in his role as prime minister, realized that if the troops were not evacuated, Britain could very well lose the war.

Meanwhile, Hitler ordered his panzer divisions to halt their advance to Dunkirk. The Nazi generals feared an Allied counterattack, and they believed Herman Goering’s assurance that his Luftwaffe could prevent the Allies from evacuating Dunkirk. On the evening of May 26, the evacuation began, directed by a team at work in a room deep inside the cliffs of Dover. The room had once contained a generator or dynamo, and the evacuation from Dunkirk was therefore codenamed Operation Dynamo.

Goering’s confidence in his air force was not entirely misplaced; the planes bombed ceaselessly, and the British Royal Air Force lost many aircraft as the pilots tried to keep the Germans out of range of the beaches. Dunkirk’s beach was shallow, preventing the Royal Navy from reaching it. When the Royal Navy sent out a call for assistance from smaller vessels, the response was overwhelming, as more than 800 boats came to help. The “Little Ships,” as the rescue vehicles became known, began arriving on May 28; some were navy vessels with a naval crew, but others were operated by civilians who brought their fishing boats and pleasure craft to come to the aid of the soldiers. Churchill’s hope was that 45,000 men could be evacuated, but when the evacuation was over on June 4, 198,000 British and 140,000 French troops had been saved by the “Little Ships.”

Hitler had hoped that a defeat at Dunkirk would force the British to negotiate for terms to end the war. But the British, despite Churchill’s reminder that wars were not won by evacuations, were rejuvenated by the miracle at Dunkirk, rallied by the manner in which their army had been saved and fortified to endure the difficult times to come. Churchill’s oratory echoed the sentiments of the British public, as he promised that “we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.”

Unfortunately, 90,000 Allied forces and most of the British Expeditionary Force’s ammunition, anti-aircraft artillery, machine guns, jeeps, motorcycles, and tanks were left on the beaches by the time the Germans reached Dunkirk on June 4. Without Allied defense, Western Europe was now the domain of the Nazis. The Germans entered Paris on June 14 and divided France into two zones. The Germans occupied one section, while World War I hero Marshal Philippe Pétain was put in charge of the other zone with a puppet government at Vichy. The Germans now had the advantage of controlling French ports, from which they were able to launch U-boat attacks in the Atlantic Ocean against British shipping.

Churchill was genuinely worried about the success of the U-boats. Great Britain depended upon the merchant ships that brought troops, raw materials, food, and equipment from North America to Britain, and without this aid, the island nation would have been cut off from vital supplies that kept it in fighting fettle.

To alleviate the situation, the United States passed the Lend-Lease Act in March 1941, which authorized President Franklin D. Roosevelt to transfer arms and defense materials to the government of any country deemed vital to American defense. The U.S. was not yet engaged in the fighting, but it could transfer supplies, without compensation, to Great Britain, China, and eventually to the Soviet Union, Brazil, and numerous other nations as the list of combatants grew. Although neutral, the American Navy was also already aiding the British by providing escort duties in the Atlantic. Neutrality under such ambiguous methods was inevitably going to lead to casualties, and on October 31, 1941, the American destroyer USS Reuben James was hit by a U-boat and sank.

Not content with fighting only on the water, the Germans sought to defeat the Allies from the skies, and in July 1940 began the Battle of Britain. As Luftwaffe planes flew over the skies above Britain, they were met by the Royal Air Force. Hitler decided that the Luftwaffe could not defeat the RAF in the daytime, and from October 1940 until May 1941, the Germans switched to nighttime bombing; for 57 consecutive nights, London felt the fury of German planes from the skies. The British sought refuge in underground shelters, the subway stations, and air-raid shelters, as London, Coventry, Portsmouth, Southampton, Liverpool, and other cities were ravaged by bombs. More than 40,000 British civilians were killed.