21

The Second World War
1939–1945

Germany’s opening moves

The start of the Second World War was like an opening in a game of chess – predictable. As with the first war, Germany sought to escape its geography. It looked eastwards, towards the open lands beyond the Oder and Danube, and westwards across the Rhine into the ever-contested territory of old Lotharingia. Hitler was a keen student of history. Bismarck in the 1860s had carefully covered his back with an alliance with Russia, to give him room for manoeuvre against Austria and France. He had done so with conspicuous success. In 1914 Kaiser Wilhelm had failed to do likewise, and paid a terrible price by fighting on two fronts. By 1939 Hitler had neutralized Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland, and had held the Soviet Union in check with the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact. He knew that he would one day have to reckon with the Soviet Union, but for the moment France had to be removed from the equation. The strategic clarity was Bismarckian.

Hitler had been a private soldier in the trenches, and was unencumbered by the received wisdom of generals fighting the proverbial ‘last war but one’. He had learned the critical value of mobile armour. An army should move at the speed of its fastest tank, while everyone else should catch up. German industry rallied to the cause, turning out tanks, ships and aircraft by the hundreds in a matter of months.

Over the winter of 1939–40, Hitler took stock. He already had his Lebensraum, and there were rumours of peace feelers put out to Britain and France, to which Britain’s foreign secretary, Lord Halifax, is known to have been sympathetic. But an Allied threat to block Swedish iron exports to Germany in Norwegian waters led him in April 1940 to invade Denmark and Norway. An Allied expeditionary force was forced to withdraw, and a Commons debate in London led to Chamberlain’s resignation and his succession by a coalition headed by Churchill. On one matter all – or almost all – agreed, there could now be no deal with Hitler or any further British aloofness from a looming European war. Still it was hoped that war might prove ‘phoney’.

In May, Hitler sent his tanks through the Ardennes forest in southern Belgium, bypassing France’s supposedly impenetrable Maginot Line of fortresses. He swept aside a British force sent to northern France to stop him, driving it back to Dunkirk. Reluctant at this stage for open war with Britain, and wanting to rest his tanks, Hitler let its soldiers return home with minimal harassment. The Dunkirk evacuation was even portrayed in Britain as a sort of triumph. France’s defences were hopeless. German troops swiftly reached Paris and Hitler was filmed driving down the Champs-Élysées and posing before the Eiffel Tower.

All northern France was soon in German hands, while the south came under the pro-German Vichy regime of Marshal Pétain. In contrast to the First World War, France’s involvement in the Second was minimal. Less successful was Hitler’s reliance on his axis with Italy to master southern Europe. Mussolini’s attempt to expand Italy’s ‘empire’ into the Balkans and Africa met with failure. German troops had to invade the Balkans themselves, and move on to Greece. In Spain, Hitler’s negotiations with Franco foundered on the latter’s unacceptable demands for French territory in Africa, though Franco affirmed Spain’s promise of neutrality.

As for Britain, Hitler relied on its traditional detachment in the hope it would avoid a continental conflict. None the less, he allowed his staff to prepare Operation Sealion for an invasion of Britain’s south coast, should the need arise. Since Germany lacked sea power comparable to Britain’s navy, Hitler was adamant that Sealion should not proceed without the neutralization of Britain’s navy and air force. An attempt to wipe out the RAF was baulked when it won the ‘Battle of Britain’ in the summer of 1940, a success brilliantly exploited by Churchill to restore morale after Dunkirk. Hitler was undoubtedly wise to doubt the feasibility of a German invasion of Britain. The British navy was as yet undefeated, and its air force had shown itself effective against the Luftwaffe. Hitler cancelled Sealion in September 1940.

The Anglo-German war now became a tit-for-tat of bombing, at great cost but dubious strategic value. Both sides’ air commanders insisted that bombs would weaken war production and break popular spirit, such that governments would have to capitulate. It was a strategy that applied to the enemy but not to one’s own side, which was supposedly strengthened by the ‘blitz spirit’. This mutated into an argument over whether bombs should be aimed at military/industrial targets, or at civilian areas for maximum terror impact, even though attacking civilians breached the Hague conventions. Since military targets required precision and were heavily defended, air forces preferred easier objectives. The leading advocate of terror bombing, Britain’s Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris, sought ‘a state of devastation in which surrender is inevitable’. The thesis was to be tested to massive destruction, and survives in the ‘shock and awe’ tactics of air forces to this day.

The Axis ascendant

In September 1940 Hitler signed an alliance with Italy and Japan, agreeing that Germany would support Japan in the event of war with America. This risked repeating the Kaiser’s error in 1915, when he also goaded America into opposing him. It jeopardized the isolationism that was overwhelmingly popular in America, so much so that Roosevelt fought for re-election in November 1940 with the pledge, ‘I say it again and again and again. Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.’ After he won the election, and under intense pressure from Churchill, he said the precise opposite, warning of a ‘second world war’ when America ‘must be the great arsenal of democracy’. Roosevelt launched Lend-Lease in 1941 as a massive aid package to the British and, later, Soviet war efforts. American ships now became targets for German U-boats, even close to America’s eastern seaboard. The U-boats were the one thing that ‘truly frightened’ Churchill.

By the end of 1940, Hitler had all but conquered continental Europe. No German army had suffered a defeat and German military casualties were small. Germany’s neighbours now found themselves beholden to German military commanders. Their soldiers and war machines were requisitioned, their Jews, gypsies and communists rounded up and enslaved or killed. As under Napoleon, a single mind and a single obsession were again dictating the actions of rulers across Europe. Only Stalin and Churchill still had some freedom of manoeuvre.

Talleyrand had observed that a megalomaniac leader’s next move is usually governed only by the opportunities opened up by the last. Hitler now adjusted his ambitions to circumstance. While ostensibly eager to avoid war with America, Hitler had to guard against the possibility of one. In February 1941 he dispatched General Rommel’s Afrika Korps to Libya, to prevent a British army from occupying the Italian colony. He also needed to command the Atlantic littoral, to impede an attack from America and prevent supplies reaching Britain. Rommel would then move through Egypt to the oilfields of the Middle East.

At the same time Hitler decided it was the moment to commence his fateful gamble, a main-force assault on the Soviet Union. The objective was to colonize western Russia, replace or enslave its Slav population, kill its Jews and seize the Caucasus oilfields. In June 1941, Hitler abandoned the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact and ordered his high command to activate Operation Barbarossa. This involved four invading armies surging forward along a 300-mile front, with infantry units preceded by mobile Panzer divisions. Five thousand tanks were committed. These forces swiftly took Kiev in Ukraine and Minsk in Belarus and, in September 1941, laid siege to Leningrad. The siege was to last more than two years and see a million people die.

By the start of winter 1941, the Germans were just forty miles from Moscow. Their behaviour was abominable. All rules of war were disregarded. Passive civilians were slaughtered in their hundreds of thousands. Large areas were subjected to a ‘hunger plan’, whereby existing populations would be starved to death and later replaced by Germans. In a rage of preventative paranoia, Stalin killed or sent to Siberian gulags over half a million Russians and other minorities, lest for some reason they might collaborate with the Germans.

While this battle was taking place in the east, Roosevelt and Churchill were meeting aboard a warship off Newfoundland and formulating an Atlantic Charter. It reiterated Woodrow Wilson’s fourteen points for world peace of 1918, including national self-determination and freedom, following the ‘final destruction of Nazi tyranny’. America was not yet party to the war, and the unspoken bargain was Churchill’s agreeing to dismantle the British empire in return for America’s return to another European combat. By January 1942 the charter had been signed by twenty-six Allied nations as a ‘declaration of united nations’ against Hitler. But there was no guarantee of a Nazi defeat. Only the Soviets were seriously fighting.

The charter talks were followed by an act of unprovoked aggression. In December 1941, 353 Japanese planes struck America’s Pacific fleet in Hawaii’s Pearl Harbor. They sank four battleships and destroyed or damaged fifteen other ships, with the loss of 2,400 American sailors. At the same time, Japan was attacking and occupying American, British and Dutch colonies throughout south-east Asia and the western Pacific. They invaded Hong Kong, the Philippines, Malaya, Singapore and the Dutch East Indies with a clear intention to move on to Ceylon and India. British forces were helpless against them. Europe’s Asian empires faced oblivion. The war had gone truly global. But it also reached a turning point. Within three days of Pearl Harbor, the United States was at war with both Japan and Germany.

The turning of the tide

In January 1942 senior Nazi and SS officials met in conference at Wannsee outside Berlin. The topic was the ‘final solution’ to Europe’s ten million Jews, a switch from using them as slave labour to their complete extermination. The officials were concerned at public reaction to such a plan in Germany itself, especially in the less-Nazified Catholic provinces. Extermination camps were therefore located principally in lands to the east, notably Poland. Though Europe had seen exterminations before – not least against Jews – for a modern state systematically to plan the eradication of millions of its own citizens was unprecedented. A European power was not just perpetrating a pogrom but doing so on an industrial and pseudo-scientific basis – justly to be termed a Holocaust.

That winter of 1941–2, the coldest of the century, saw German soldiers within sight of Moscow. The grease on German shells froze and the tanks needed hours to warm up before moving. Army clothing was inadequate and frostbite ubiquitous. Russia’s old ally, General Winter, played his hand, as he had against Sweden’s Charles XII and France’s Napoleon. A mass Soviet mobilization ensued, with a million Russians pressed into an army that already topped nine million. These numbers proved successful. The Soviet commander, General Zhukov, pushed the Germans back from Moscow; for the first time, Hitler experienced defeat.

The following summer, Hitler retaliated with a massive assault on Stalin’s southern flank towards Stalingrad. The resulting battle, involving two and a half million troops, lasted from July 1942 until the following February. In terms of numbers committed, it was probably the greatest battle in Europe’s history. The Germans reached the centre of Stalingrad. Months of street fighting ensued, with the Germans at an increasing disadvantage. In the winter, a Soviet counter-attack encircled the Germans, and resupply became impossible. Rats were eating the insulation wires on the Panzer tanks, immobilizing half of them. In February 1943, defying Hitler’s express orders, German commanders in Stalingrad surrendered.

Japan’s ascendancy in the Far East proved brief. The American navy defeated the advancing Japanese fleet in the Battle of Midway in June 1942, sinking or incapacitating seven of the Imperial Fleet’s capital ships, including four aircraft carriers. By December, British and Indian troops began a long, grim fight to regain Burma, achieved in 1944. The closer the Allies got to Japan, the slower was progress, until the war in the east proved longer than the war in Europe.

Rommel’s advance across north Africa had also been halted. A British army at the Battle of El Alamein in October–November 1942 fended off the German threat to Egypt and the oilfields of Arabia. German and Italian forces were pushed back through Libya and Tunisia. In November, American troops under General Eisenhower arrived, to attack Rommel from the west. By May 1943 German activity in Africa had ceased. One hundred and fifty thousand Germans and Italians were taken prisoner and all their equipment was seized. Churchill described El Alamein as ‘the end of the beginning.’

The tenor of the war now changed. From the summer of 1943 Hitler was turned from aggressor to defender. He was retreating from the Soviet Union and from Africa, and knew that, sooner or later, Allied forces would land on the continent. There followed an intense debate among the Allies as to whether to invade Europe from the north, along the French coast, or from the south, through southern France or Italy. The invasion route was decided at a meeting between Roosevelt and Churchill in Casablanca in January 1943.

The British war effort was now confined largely to maritime convoy operations and the nocturnal bombing of German cities. Germany’s Blitz of Britain had almost ceased, the Luftwaffe being needed on the eastern front. The RAF’s ‘demoralization’ campaign had switched to demolishing symbols of German culture, beginning with the destruction of the historic ports of Lübeck and Rostock in spring 1942. An enraged Hitler retaliated with the ‘Baedeker’ raids on Britain’s cathedral cities, including Exeter, Bath, Norwich and Coventry. After Britain destroyed much of ancient Cologne, Germany desisted from this barbarism. Britain did not.

In July 1943 Hitler ordered a last desperate assault on the Soviet heartland at Kursk, south of Moscow, in a tank battle that dwarfed those in north Africa. Against him the Soviet Union was able to field vast resources, and an army of two and a half million soldiers and 3,800 tanks overwhelmed 780,000 German troops and 3,000 Panzers. Germany’s attempted conquest of Russia was at an end. Near an end too was the war in the Atlantic. Anglo-American collaboration in anti-submarine warfare and the breaking of German Enigma machine codes were rendering U-boat operations near suicidal. Convoy losses dwindled over 1943 and supplies began to pour into Europe.

Hitler’s defeat now seemed only a matter of time, but the time seemed long in coming. In July 1943 American and British troops landed in Sicily and swiftly captured Palermo. Within two days Mussolini, after making a minimal contribution to Hitler’s war, was dismissed by Italy’s grand council and imprisoned. He was rescued by the Germans, but was later captured by partisans, shot and strung up on a building site. Although the Italian government officially capitulated, Italy was the theatre for a determined rearguard resistance by German units. It was not until June 1944 that the Allies captured Rome, for once respecting its historic buildings.

Back on the eastern front, German divisions round Leningrad were finally forced to retreat in January 1944, looting the Romanov palaces of their treasures as they went. The city was freed, and Stalin ordered starving craftsmen immediately to work on restoring the ruined palaces. In London, Eisenhower took over command of the prospective northern assault on France, his tact proving crucial in resolving three-way conflicts with Churchill and the exiled French leader, General de Gaulle. On 6 June 1944 came D-Day, history’s greatest ever amphibious invasion along fifty miles of the Normandy coast.

The Allied conquest of Nazi Europe proved unexpectedly laborious. Not until the end of August 1944 did Paris fall to the Allies, its German commander defying Hitler’s order to destroy the historic centre with explosives. In December, retreating German troops staged the Battle of the Bulge in the Belgian Ardennes, further delaying the Allied advance. But by February 1945 both Soviet and western armies were moving onto German territory.

British and American bombers were pulverizing German cities at will. Immensely destructive of property, the lack of impact on the war of this bombing was illustrated by German tank and plane production hitting an all-time high in the early spring of 1945. Postwar assessment was that barely seven per cent of German industrial plants were put out of action. The Wehrmacht was even able to deploy the V-1 flying bomb and V-2 ballistic missile against London. In February 1945 British and American planes visited a massive firestorm on the city of Dresden, crowded with unknown numbers of refugees from the Soviet advance. Estimates of deaths vary from 25,000 to over 100,000.

The fall of Berlin came on 2 May, two days after Hitler shot himself in his bunker, his wife Eva Braun taking cyanide beside him. Germany’s generals surrendered to Britain’s Montgomery in a bleak cabin on Lüneburg Heath in North Saxony. Others surrendered to the Soviets on the eastern front. Allied troops spread across a devastated land, trying to restore a modicum of order. Misery turned to horror as Hitler’s concentration camps were liberated. About six million Jews, two-thirds of Europe’s total, are estimated to have perished in the camps, along with as many again of Soviets, Poles, Slavs and Roma gypsies.

The germ of a settlement

By now diplomats in Allied capitals had been revising the Atlantic Charter. Roosevelt, already a sick man, was eager to act as elder statesman, leading a Europe that had again immersed the world in bloody conflict. The Allied powers were fighting as ‘united nations’, and Roosevelt put this concept at the heart of his post-war settlement. Already in the spring of 1945 at Yalta in Crimea, Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill had taken the first steps on that much-travelled route, redrawing the map of Europe. Now it had to be made real.

The overriding question was once more what to do with Germany. The mistakes of Versailles had to be avoided. Germany had to be made secure for democracy, but few agreed on how. Churchill felt the need, as he had in 1918, for a strong Germany as a bulwark against Soviet communism. He had foreseen ‘a United States of Europe … with an international police force, charged with keeping Prussia disarmed’. He did not say if Britain should be a member.

The Soviet Union had borne the brunt of the war and felt it should be duly rewarded. It got what Stalin wanted, a ‘sphere of influence’ over Germany’s east European conquests. France regained Alsace-Lorraine. For the time being, Germany was administered by the four Allied powers, America, Britain, France and the Soviets. Partitioned too was Austria and the German capital, Berlin, uncomfortably isolated within the Soviet sector.

Yalta preceded the German surrender. At the post-surrender Potsdam conference in July, the west found itself facing a more confident Stalin. Roosevelt had died and been replaced by his vice-president, Harry Truman (1945–53). Churchill was ousted by Labour’s Clement Attlee in an election held in the middle of the conference. With the west lacking in leadership experience, Stalin was cock of the walk. He ignored western demands for a larger Poland, and emphatically rejected democracy or self-determination in eastern Europe. ‘A freely elected government in every one of these countries,’ he said baldly, ‘would be anti-Soviet and we cannot permit that.’ The words echoed across the continent. A new Europe would clearly be two Europes.

In August 1945, the war against Japan finally ended when the Americans dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Shock was mingled with relief as the Japanese emperor surrendered, vindication to many that such bombs could sometimes be used to secure victory. The war ended in an act of humanitarian obscenity. But it was over.