World War II Read online

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Grant, Reg G.

  World War II: Europe / by Reg Grant.

  p. cm. — (Atlas of conflicts)

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-1-61535-604-1 (e-book)

  1. World War, 1939-1945—Campaigns—Europe—Juvenile literature. [1. World War, 1939-1945—Campaigns—Europe—Maps for children.] I. Title. II. Series.

  D743.G644 2004

  940.54’21—dc22

  2004046471

  This North American edition first published in 2005 by

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  This U.S. edition copyright © 2005 by World Almanac® Library.

  Original edition copyright © 2004 by Arcturus Publishing Limited.

  Additional end matter copyright © 2005 by World Almanac® Library.

  Produced by Arcturus Publishing Limited.

  Series concept: Alex Woolf

  Editor: Philip de Ste. Croix

  Designer: Simon Burrough

  Cartography: The Map Studio

  Consultant: Paul Cornish, Imperial War Museum, London

  Picture researcher: Thomas Mitchell

  World Almanac® Library editor: Gini Holland

  World Almanac® Library design: Steve Schraenkler

  World Almanac® Library production: Jessica Morris

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  CONTENTS

  1. THE WAR BEGINS

  2. BLITZKRIEG

  3. WAR IN THE MEDITERRANEAN

  4. CLASH OF THE GIANTS

  5. OCCUPIED EUROPE

  6. THE TIDE TURNS

  7. THE ROAD TO BERLIN

  PROFILES

  TIME LINE

  GLOSSARY

  STATISTICS

  FURTHER INFORMATION

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  INDEX

  CHAPTER 1

  THE WAR BEGINS

  German dictator Adolf Hitler shakes hands with army officers at a Nazi Party rally in 1934. Hitler rapidly expanded Germany’s armed forces through the 1930s.

  World War II is generally said to have started on September 1, 1939, when Germany, ruled by the Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler, invaded its neighbor Poland. Conflict in Europe, however, had actually been building up for several years before that date.

  Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933. He had publicly committed himself to the overthrow of the Versailles Treaty, the peace treaty imposed by the victors on a defeated Germany in 1919 at the end of the Great War (now known as World War I). Under the terms of this treaty, which had been designed to keep Germany from starting another world war, Germany was only allowed a small army with limited armaments and no air force. It was not allowed to have troops in its own Rhineland, which bordered France. The borders of Germany set by the treaty left many German-speaking people outside the country’s borders. Austria, which was mostly German-speaking, was forbidden to become part of Germany.

  Hitler challenged the Versailles settlement step by step. He rapidly set about rebuilding Germany’s armed forces, including its air force. Rearmament was already well under way by the time it was officially announced in 1935. The following year, German troops marched into the demilitarized Rhineland. Britain and France, the two powers mainly responsible for the Versailles Treaty (and with a major interest in upholding it to keep Germany contained) protested but did nothing.

  THE AXIS ALLIANCE World War II would soon become a struggle between Hitler’s Axis Alliance and the Allies of Britain. In 1936, Hitler formed the Axis alliance with another dictator, Italy’s Benito Mussolini, who had angered Britain and France in 1935 by invading the independent African country of Abyssinia (now Ethiopia). When civil war broke out in Spain in July 1936, Germany and Italy sent forces to support General Francisco Franco’s Nationalist rebels against the Republican government. Franco triumphed in 1939 and became Spain’s dictator.

  Meanwhile, in March 1938, encouraged by his success in remilitarizing the Rhineland, Hitler annexed Austria. This was known as the Anschluss (“joining together”). Hitler’s army faced no resistance, and he was greeted by cheering crowds in the Austrian capital, Vienna. Again, Britain and France did nothing.

  Next, Hitler’s attention turned to Czechoslovakia, a well-armed, democratic ally of France. Hitler threatened to invade Czechoslovakia to “liberate” the Germans living in Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland area. This seemed certain to lead to war with Britain and France. Instead, at a Munich conference in September 1938, Britain and France joined Germany and Italy and ordered the Czechs to hand over Sudetenland to Germany. British prime minister Neville Chamberlain returned to Britain claiming “peace with honor,” for allowing German forces to occupy the Sudetenland without a shot being fired.

  The Saarland voted to rejoin Germany in 1935. The rest of Germany’s expansion was achieved by the threat of military action.

  Hitler drives triumphantly through the streets of the Austrian capital, Vienna, after the annexation of Austria—the Anschluss—in June 1938.

  HITLER’S ACHIEVEMENTS

  In April 1939, German Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler looked back triumphantly over his successes. He declared: “I have … endeavoured to destroy sheet by sheet that Treaty [of Versailles] which … contains the vilest oppression which peoples and human beings have ever been expected to put up with. I have brought back to the Reich provinces stolen from us in 1919; I have led back to their native country millions of Germans who were torn away from us and were in misery …”

  —Quoted in Hitler, Joachim Fest

  Danzig—now Gdansk—on the Baltic provided Hitler with a pretext for invading Poland in September 1939. Once the Soviet Union invaded from the east, the Poles had no chance. Germany and the Soviet Union had secretly agreed to partition Poland between themselves before the war began.

  Chamberlain and other “appeasers” believed that if Hitler was allowed to overturn the Versailles Treaty, gathering all German-speaking people within Germany’s borders, he would be satisfied and peace would be maintained. In reality, Hitler’s ambitions went much further. His ultimate goal, as he told his generals in 1939, was to obtain “living space (Lebensraum) in the East.” This meant that Germany must conquer Slav peoples such as the Czechs, Poles, and Russians to create a German-ruled empire that would dominate Europe. This would also allow Hitler to crush other groups he hated and feared, especially communists and Jews.

  Hitler had declared the Sudetenland his “last territorial claim in Europe.” Instead, in March 1939, German troops marched into the Czech capital, Prague, and Czechoslovakia ceased to exist. In the same month, Germany took over Memel, Lithuania, on the Baltic, and Italy i
nvaded Albania. Then the focus shifted to Poland, which disputed the port of Danzig (Gdansk) with Germany. Although it had a mainly German population, the peace treaty had made Danzig a “Free City” linked to Poland. Hitler demanded that Danzig be returned to Germany and that a “corridor” through Poland link Germany with East Prussia.

  THE SOVIET ALLIANCE In April 1939, shamed by their failure to defend Czechoslovakia, Britain and France signed a treaty with Poland, committing themselves to go to war if the Poles were attacked. The crucial issue then was the position of the Soviet Union, led by the communist dictator Josef Stalin. The British, French, and Polish democracies disliked and distrusted Stalin. In the summer of 1939, however, Britain and France sought an alliance with the Soviet Union, aware that only the Soviets were in a geographical position to give the Poles immediate military assistance in case of a German invasion.

  To the world, Hitler and Stalin appeared to be enemies. Nazism was an explicitly anti-communist movement. The Soviets had sent military aid to the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. Yet, in August 1939, while the British and French dithered, Hitler sent a delegation to the Soviet Union that struck a ruthless deal with the Soviets. Publicly, this Nazi-Soviet Pact was a non-aggression treaty, saying that Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union would not attack one another. In fact, the two powers secretly agreed to partition Poland between them.

  German soldiers pull down a barrier on the Polish border on September 1, 1939. Two days later, in response to the invasion of Poland, Britain and France declared war on Germany.

  Soviet commisar for foreign affairs Vyacheslav Molotov signs a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany on August 23, 1939, as German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop (left) looks on.

  German troops invaded Poland on September 1, 1939. Poland had a large army, but its equipment was out-of-date. Germany, by contrast, used its most modern tank formations and aircraft in the invasion. The tanks moved fast, punching holes in the Polish lines and penetrating deep inside Poland. German tanks were supported by. Stuka dive-bombers acting as “aerial artillery.” The German Luftwaffe (air force) also bombed Polish cities, terrorizing the population.

  DEVASTATING DEFEAT

  During the fighting in Poland in 1939, the death toll was high and many more were taken prisoner. The estimated figures are:

  60,000

  Poles killed in action

  25,000

  Polish civilians killed

  694,000

  Polish prisoners in German hands

  217,000

  Polish prisoners in Soviet hands

  German losses, although substantial, were far lighter:

  14,000

  German soldiers killed

  The Polish forces were already in disarray when, on September 17, the Soviet Union invaded eastern Poland. The Polish government fled the country the next day. Warsaw, Poland’s capital, surrendered on September 28. The defeat of Poland had taken four weeks.

  WAR ON GERMANY The German invasion of Poland forced Britain and France to declare war on Germany on September 3. The British and French government, however, still recovering from the trauma of World War I, had little enthusiasm for war and did nothing effective to help the Poles. While it could have attacked its neighbor Germany, France was committed to a defensive strategy. A British Expeditionary Force was sent to France, but these Allied forces stayed on the defensive—even though, with the best German troops occupied in Poland, Germany’s western border would have been vulnerable to a swift attack. Once Germany defeated Poland, Britain and France felt even less inclined to attack.

  Finnish soldiers wearing winter camouflage man a machine gun during the war between Finland and the Soviet Union in 1939-40.

  The Finns used troops on skis to launch counteroffensives after the Soviet invasion.

  Germany and the Soviet Union duly carved up Poland between them. The Soviet Union also bullied the independent Baltic states, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, into allowing Soviet troops to be stationed in their territory. Another of the Soviet Union’s neighbors, Finland, was not as accommodating.

  The Soviet Union proposed changes to its border with Finland that would have improved the Soviet defensive position in case of an attack from the west. The Finns refused. On November 30, 1939, the Soviet Red Army invaded Finland. To their surprise, they met fierce resistance. In harsh winter weather, over 120,000 Soviet soldiers died attempting to breach the Finnish defenses. As Finnish resistance held the Soviet army at bay, Britain and France discussed sending an expeditionary force to support the Finns—an action that would have put them simultaneously at war with the Soviet Union and Germany.

  In February 1940, however, the Soviet Red Army broke through, and the following month the Finns were forced to accept a peace agreement that gave the Soviet Union even more territory than it had originally requested. In the summer of 1940, Stalin went on to absorb Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania into the Soviet Union and took the province of Bessarabia from Romania. By then, however, momentous events in Western Europe had distracted attention from these Eastern European concerns.

  INCAPABLE REDS

  The events of the “Winter War” led many people to underestimate Soviet military strength. In a radio broadcast in January 1940, Winston Churchill, then Britain’s First Lord of the Admiralty, said that Finland “had exposed, for the world to see, the incapacity of the Red Army.”

  —Quoted in History of the Second World War, B.H. Liddel Hart

  The Mannerheim Line, a strong defensive position named after Finland’s senior military commander, was key to the war between the Soviet Union and Finland in 1939–40. After the Soviets broke through the Line in February 1940, the Finns had to agree to a negotiated peace.

  CHAPTER 2

  BLITZKRIEG

  The Junkers Ju-87 dive-bomber, known as the Stuka, was a crucial weapon in Germany’s “Blitzkrieg” offensives in the early years of the war.

  The period between September 1939 and April 1940 in western Europe was dubbed the “Phony War.” The British Expeditionary Force (BEF) in France numbered more than 350,000 troops by spring 1940, and France had mobilized an army almost five million strong. Still, there was no significant fighting. Allied forces passively awaited a German offensive, manning the Maginot Line (see map on page 5), a powerful concrete fortification that France had built along its own and neutral Belgium’s borders to protect them from another German invasion after World War I.

  In April 1940, partly in response to criticism of their lack of military action, Britain and France decided to cut off supplies of iron ore that were being exported to Germany from mines in neutral Sweden. The iron ore was being shipped chiefly through Narvik, a port in another neutral country, Norway. On April 8, the Allies sent ships to mine Norwegian coastal waters with explosives. They also prepared to land troops at key Norwegian ports.

  German troops drag a gun up a beach during the Norwegian campaign in the spring of 1940.

  GERMANY ATTACKS NORWAY

  Germany had been planning its own invasion of Norway. On April 9, German troops seized control of neutral Denmark and moved on to attack Norway. In a series of lightning moves, they occupied coastal towns from Oslo in the south to Narvik in the far north. Airborne troops were parachuted in to capture key airfields—the first use of parachutists in war—but most of the German soldiers arrived by ship.

  THE ROYAL NAVY The British Royal Navy was unable to stop German ships from delivering and then resupplying troops, because the British warships could not operate effectively while within range of German land-based aircraft. The Royal Navy succeeded in sinking a fair number of German warships, especially in fierce battles at Narvik, but most of Norway was in German hands by early May 1940.

  A German tank rolls unchallenged along a country road during the occupation of Denmark in April 1940. Danes were powerless to resist invasion.

  The German invasion of Norway in April 1940 was resisted by Britain and France, who also sent ships and lan
ded troops.

  LOSSES IN NORWAY

  The level of combat losses in the Norway campaign was quite low compared with battles later in the war. The estimated death toll was:

  German

  5,500

  British

  4,500

  Norwegian

  1,800

  French

  500

  In Britain, the defeat in Norway undermined confidence in Chamberlain’s leadership. Therefore, on May 10, Winston Churchill replaced Chamberlain as prime minister. On Churchill’s first day as prime minister, the Germans launched their long-feared offensive on the western front.

  The German army was easily outnumbered by British and French troops. While Germany had fewer tanks, however, it had more aircraft than its opponents, so Germany triumphed with the “Blitzkrieg” (lightning war) tactics first employed against Poland—fast-moving armored columns that broke through or outflanked enemy defenses, backed by armed aircraft that caused panic and terror behind the lines.

  Germany began its offensive by invading Belgium and the Netherlands, both neutral countries. In a series of surprise attacks, Germany’s airborne troops seized bridges, airfields, and the key Belgian fortress of Eben Emael, allowing armored forces to quickly penetrate deep into enemy territory. Within five days, the Netherlands surrendered, but not before German bombers devastated their port city of Rotterdam. Meanwhile, the best elements of the British and French armies advanced into Belgium to meet the advancing Germans. This was a fatal mistake.

  Allied troops wait to be evacuated from the beach at Dunkirk. Men formed lines into the sea, where small boats took them on board.

  CHURCHILL DEFIANT

  On June 4, 1940, Prime Minister Winston Churchill told the House of Commons: “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.”