Even as Billy Mitchell was uncannily predicting the use of airpower in future conflicts, events were in motion on the other side of the Atlantic that would propel the nations of Europe and the world into the Second World War.
In the Treaty of Versailles, which concluded the First World War, the wartime Allies had imposed steep reparations demands and economic restrictions that shoved Germany’s already tottering economy to the brink. In so doing, they were creating the environment which would breed the next great war.
While the rest of the world was enjoying a decade of prosperity in the 1920s, Germany imploded. Having been the industrial powerhouse of continental Europe before the war, that nation collapsed economically because of its defeat and the Versailles restrictions. Unemployment and hyperinflation reached staggering levels that have few, if any, comparisons in the history of modern industrialized nations. Also part of the Versailles restrictions was the policy forbidding Germany to have an air force, or even an aircraft industry.
The treaty handed Germany insult on top of injury, demanding that it accept sole responsibility for the war. While Germany had been the principal combatant among the Central Powers, there were plenty of nations on both sides who had a share in the blame for the war having started. Because Germany had been so obviously singled out, it provided German extremists of all stripes a gift on which they could agree. The treaty became a lightning rod for the harangues of rabble-rousers from all political persuasions.
Out of the swirling sea of leaderless chaos, there at last emerged a powerful and charismatic leader who promised much and was embraced by masses yearning for prewar glories.
Germany’s downward economic spiral reversed its course when Adolf Hitler’s National Socialists came to power in 1934. When Hitler became Führer und Reichskanzler (leader and Reich chancellor), he began rearming Germany in violation of the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. In 1936, his armies occupied the German Rhineland, again in direct violation of the Treaty of Versailles.
Tensions between Germany and its wartime enemies, Britain and France, quickly increased, but neither of them was keen to challenge Hitler and risk another war. Neither did the Soviet Union relish the idea, despite the ferocious ideological divide between the Nazis and the Communists. Hitler had written at length in his 1926 manifesto, Mein Kampf (My Struggle), about his desire to incorporate large slices of the Soviet Union into his Third Reich, but as with so much about his tome, the world did not take it seriously.
The ticking of the time bomb of World War II began with Hitler’s grab for the territory of Germany’s closest neighbors. In March 1938, Hitler annexed Austria in a move that was called Anschluss, or “Connection.” This fulfilled the dreams of Germanic ethnocentrists in both countries who wished to see all German-speaking people united in a single Reich. There were also large numbers of ethnic Germans in Czechoslovakia, and Hitler next demanded that Czechoslovakia’s German-speaking Sudetenland region also be folded into his Third Reich. There were also a large number of Germans in the nominally independent port city of Danzig, which had alternated between Poland and Prussia for centuries before the League of Nations took it away from Germany in 1920, when Poland was reconstituted, and made it a “free city.” Known as Gdansk in Polish, it was coveted by Poles, whose territory surrounded it, and it was coveted by Germans, who had owned it for more than a century and wanted it back.
In September 1938, at the now infamous summit conference, Britain’s Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and France’s President Édouard Daladier flew to Munich, the mother city of the Nazi Party, to meet with Adolf Hitler. The Führer told these gentlemen that the Sudetenland should properly be part of Germany, and he promised that this was the end of his territorial ambitions. Czechoslovakia naturally complained, but Chamberlain and Daladier ignored the Czechs and acceded to the Führer’s demands. When Chamberlain flew home, he happily announced that he had helped to negotiate “peace for our time.”
In March 1939, Hitler decided that he wanted the rest of Czechoslovakia. The price tag for “peace for our time” had gone up. Chamberlain and Daladier were willing to go to almost any lengths to appease Adolf Hitler and avoid war. Like a terminal patient in his hospital bed, Czechoslovakia had no choice. The poor country was chopped into bits. Slovakia was sliced off as a quasi-autonomous satellite of Germany, while the remainder of Czechoslovakia became the Reich Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.
Two months later, Hitler inked a deal with Italy’s Fascist “Duce,” Benito Mussolini. Known as the Pact of Steel, the agreement called for cooperation in time of war, a war that seemed all that much closer because of the pact. With a name like “Pact of Steel,” it didn’t even sound like an alliance with friendly intentions.
On August 24, Hitler sent his foreign minister to Moscow. There, Joachim von Ribbentrop signed a nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union’s own brutal strongman, Josef Stalin. Much to the surprise of the global media that demonized and caricaturized them both, the right-wing demon, Hitler, had tumbled into bed with the left-wing demon, Stalin.
A week later, on the morning of September 1, 1939, as German troops raced across the border, German bombs began falling on Poland. In London, Neville Chamberlain proposed more negotiations, but Hitler held the best hand—and he had just decreed that the time for negotiating was over.
Chamberlain consulted with Daladier, and together they came to realize that the time for negotiating was indeed over. On September 3, Britain and France declared that a state of war between them and the Third Reich had existed for two days. There would be no “peace in our time.”
Not only did the German invasion stun the world politically, the precision of the integrated German war machine stunned the world militarily. It was the most well-trained, best-equipped, and overall superior military force in the world. Their coordinated air and ground offensive, known as blitzkrieg (lightning war), was the most rapid and efficient mode of military attack the world had ever seen. The use of fast-moving tanks, mobile forces, dive bombers, and paratroop units—all working together as one tight, well-disciplined force—stunned the world, especially the Polish defenders. Germany was able to subjugate Poland in just three weeks. The Luftwaffe played such a crucial role in this action that it surprised airpower advocates and airpower skeptics alike.
After Germany had conquered Poland—naturally annexing the great port at Danzig—Britain and France dispatched a few bombers over Germany but, for the most part, took no offensive action. A lull in the action of World War II descended over Europe. Throughout the winter of 1939–1940, Allied and German troops sat and stared at one another across the heavily fortified Franco-German border. So little was happening that newspaper writers dubbed the situation the “sitzkrieg” or the “phoney war.”
On April 9, 1940, Germany attacked to the west.
Sitzkrieg became blitzkrieg once again. German troops quickly occupied Denmark and Norway. On May 10, the Germans began a great offensive to the west that duplicated their advance on Belgium and France in 1914 at the beginning of World War I. By May 28, Luxembourg, Belgium, and the Netherlands had surrendered and German forces were pouring into France. By June 14, Germany had seized control of Paris, having accomplished in five weeks what it had been unable to do in four years of protracted fighting in World War I.
France finally surrendered on June 22, leaving Britain to face the onslaught of Germany’s blitzkrieg alone. Only twenty-one miles of English Channel separated Germany’s crack troops from an army that had abandoned all of its equipment in France when it barely managed to escape from the Germans at Dunkirk on the French coast on June 4.
While Hitler’s forces prepared for a cross-channel invasion of Britain, the English people rallied around Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who had taken office on May 10 telling them he had “nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.” He defied Hitler by informing him that his troops would meet relentless opposition on the beaches, on the streets, and in every village. However, Luftwaffe commander Field Marshal Hermann Göring insisted that his bombers could easily subdue Britain, making the planned sea invasion a simple walk-over.
In August, the Luftwaffe began a brutal, unremitting bombing assault on Britain’s ports, factories, and cities. Soon the assault turned to the British capital, with the ruthless London Blitz.
The only thing that stood in the way of an easy victory was the courageous, but vastly outnumbered, pilots of the Royal Air Force, who met the Germans like gnats attacking crows. Despite the fact that the British had fewer than one thousand fighters to face a Luftwaffe onslaught four times as large, the RAF was able to destroy twelve bombers for each one of their own losses. Churchill called it the RAF’s “finest hour.”
The Luftwaffe had eradicated the will of the Netherlands to resist German armies by leveling downtown Rotterdam in June, but failed to do the same to the British a few months later. Nevertheless, the London Blitz stunned and nearly demoralized Britain.
In their use of integrated tactical air operations in support of the blitzkrieg, the Luftwaffe had revolutionized tactical air warfare. They had developed the right aircraft and had mastered the right tactics to achieve frighteningly successful results.
The Germans had shown the world that this war would be an air war.