World War II, 1939-1945 - PDF

# CHAPTER XV ## WORLD WAR II, 1939-1945 ### I. INITIAL GERMAN SUCCESSES AND RUSSIAN COOPERATION, 1939-1940 Nazi Germany began the Second World War auspiciously. They were well prepared with superior air and ground forces, extraordinary mechanized equipment, and popular confidence in the vigor and...

# CHAPTER XV ## WORLD WAR II, 1939-1945 ### I. INITIAL GERMAN SUCCESSES AND RUSSIAN COOPERATION, 1939-1940 Nazi Germany began the Second World War auspiciously. They were well prepared with superior air and ground forces, extraordinary mechanized equipment, and popular confidence in the vigor and ability of its high command. They had recently made a pact with communist Russia which safeguarded them in the east guaranteeing them a speedy victory over Poland. On the west, there would have to be a reckoning with France and Great Britain as well as the British dominions, all of which, with the exception of Ireland, followed Britain in declaring war against Germany. However, this reckoning could be safely postponed until after the conquest of Poland and the full might of German arms was concentrated in the west. France and Britain were ill prepared for the coming war. They had fewer available soldiers than Germany and possessed notably inferior equipment. They were furthermore reluctant to enter the war with misgivings, particularly in France. The war effort was greatly impeded by a popular pacifist undercurrent and by open criticism and opposition. There was also a fringe group of Frenchmen that favored collaboration rather than war with Nazi Germany. The propaganda contention of the dictatorship at Moscow that the war, so far as the Western Allies were concerned, was "capitalistic" and "imperialistic" also echoed by some French communists. France's weakness at home was compounded by it's weakness abroad. The defensive alliances it formed after World War I had either been dissolved or nullified by the last few years. The Allies past World War I included Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Yugoslavia, none of which were willing to antagonize Germany or Russia by siding with France and Britain. Germany had an outright ally in Italy and virtually another in the Soviet Union. The militarists in control of Japan also inclined to sympathize with Nazi Germany and believed that it's success in Europe would contribute to their own aggressive designs in the Far East forestalling foreign interference. In the United States, public sentiment was overwhelmingly pacifist. While verbally favorable to Britain and France, the public was quite opposed to active support of them. President Franklin Roosevelt declared on September 3, 1939 that the United States would stay out of the war and remain at peace in accordance with the strict neutrality legislation then in force and in unquestioned harmony with public opinion. The circumstances of the initial stage of the Second World War, the slashing German attack beginning on September 1, proved to be a very one-sided affair. The Poles, taken by surprise, were unable to effect a full mobilization and outnumbered three to one with deficient equipment their armies were no match for the Blitz-krieg ("lightning war") which the German invaders waged under the brilliant direction of Hitler's Chief of Staff, Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch. It was essentially a new kind of war, terrifying and involving heavy air bombing of fortifications, roads, railways, industrial plants, and power stations, followed by an advancing infantry force spearheaded by armored tanks and amid the resulting confusion and destruction. The clear bright days of that September helped the Germans as they were ideal for air operations and kept the Polish plains dry and firm for tank maneuvers. The Poles fought bravely and furiously. Within two weeks their western provinces were overrun and their capital city of Warsaw was surrounded. On September 17, a Russian army invaded, engulfing their retreating forces. After ten days, their forces were reduced to a shambles and Warsaw surrendered to the Germans. Poland was prostrate before its conquerors. On September 29 Germany and Russia, through their respective foreign ministers, Ribbentrop and Molotov, partitioned hapless Poland. Russia’s share, comprising slightly over half the total area of Poland and about fourteen million of its people, was annexed, after farcical plebiscites, to the Soviet states of Ukrainia and Byelorussia. Germany’s share, which included the industrialized and more populous western regions, was split into two parts: one half was incorporated outright in the Nazi Empire; the other half, with Cracow as its "capital," was made into a German "protectorate." Throughout the former Republic, the surviving population was subjected to ruthless exploitation; and in the German-occupied areas this was accompanied by merciless extermination of large numbers of Poles and Jews by firing squads and "gas chambers" directed by the Nazi police chief, Heinrich Himmler. Remnants of the Polish armies, together with the Polish Republican government, managed to escape capture. The government fled to Rumania and thence established itself as a "government-in-exile" under the premiership of General Sikorski, first at Angers in France and subsequently at London. Escaping Polish troops made their way by devious routes to western Europe where they joined the French and British armies. With Poland out of the way, Germany could concentrate all its forces against the Western Allies, while Russia felt free to assail countries of eastern Europe which the Russo-German pact had indicated as within its "sphere of influence." The very day after obtaining half of Poland, the Soviet dictatorship, in flat violation of previous pledges, compelled Estonia to grant it naval and air bases and to admit Russian troops. Within the next two weeks it extorted similar concessions from Latvia and Lithuania. The three small Baltic states, utterly powerless to oppose their big neighbor, thus passed under its military control, which was merely preliminary to their extinction as independent republics and their incorporation in the Soviet Union. Simultaneously, in early October, the Soviet dictatorship demanded of Finland the dismantling of the strong defensive "Mannerheim Line" which it had built along the Russian frontier, the cession of part of the Karelian peninsula, certain Baltic islands, and the Arctic port of Petsamo, and a thirty-year lease of the naval base of Hangö close to the Finnish capital. Finland, unlike the other Baltic states, did not yield immediately. Though it offered to concede some of the Russian demands, it held out against others. In mid-November, Stalin and Molotov abruptly ended the negotiations, and the Soviet Union went to war with Finland. The Finns, under command of the veteran Marshal Mannerheim, put up a stubborn and valiant resistance. They were adept at winter fighting; and they received considerable material help from Sweden and Norway, and at least moral encouragement from France and Britain and the entire Western world. In mid-December, the League of Nations, in a last gasp of life, pronounced Russia an "aggressor" and expelled it from membership. Yet Finland could not long withstand Russia's overwhelming forces. These breached the Mannerheim Line in January 1940, and a month later they were in occupation of a large part of the country. Finland then sued for peace, and on March 12 the war was formally ended by Finnish acceptance of all the original Russian demands and in addition the cession of the whole Karelian peninsula including the city of Viborg. Altogether Finland was despoiled of over 16,000 square miles of territory and 400,000 inhabitants, and of its principal military and naval defenses. The Soviet Union correspondingly enlarged its own "Karelian-Finnish State." Meanwhile, nothing was done, and apparently nothing could be done, by France and Great Britain to prevent the defeat and partition of Poland or the despoiling of Finland. The Western Allies were in no position to undertake an offensive against Germany, much less against Germany and Russia combined. They were astounded by the swiftness and terror of the Blitzkrieg in Poland and quite unprepared to cope with it. They possessed a wholly inadequate number of planes and tanks, and they recognized that any infantry advance would be stopped by the heavily fortified German "Westwall" (or Siegfried Line) in the Rhineland and might cost them catastrophic losses. Though Britain enjoyed naval superiority over Germany, it had a relatively small and ill-equipped army, the transport of which to the Continent took time. France had a larger army, but its morale was none too good and its commander-in-chief, General Maurice Gamelin, was convinced that it could be preserved and strengthened only by avoiding offensive operations and maintaining defensive positions behind the supposedly impregnable Maginot Line which the French had been building since 1930 along their northeastern border from Switzerland to Belgium and which was now paralleled across the border by the German Westwall. Thus the land forces of the Western Allies, if seemingly sheltered from German attack by one line of fortifications, was practically prevented by the opposite line from invading Germany, and hence from affording any relief to Poland. This curious situation in the West continued throughout the winter of 1939-1940 with some patrol activity and with occasional airplane dropping of propaganda pamphlets, but without serious fighting. It gave currency to the description of the apparent inactivity as a "phony war." On the German side, appearances were deceptive. True, the unusual severity of the winter of 1939-1940, and perhaps an overestimate of French strength, militated against Germany's prompt following up of its offensive in the East with one in the West. Yet the Germans were feverishly active. Throughout the winter they were busily building up their forces behind the Westwall and along the Belgian and Dutch borders, speeding the production of planes and tanks and other instruments of mechanized warfare, accumulating munitions and supplies, and preparing for an all-out offensive in the spring. They also launched, as early as October, a vigorous campaign of unrestricted submarine warfare, which, with improved technique, soon proved more destructive of Allied shipping and more menacing to Great Britain than the similar campaign in the First World War. On the Allied side, Great Britain gave special attention to safeguarding its navy and commerce against German submarines and surface raiders; and in a naval engagement off the coast of Uruguay in South America, a British squadron in December 1939 destroyed the German battleship Graf Spee. Moreover, from November onwards, both Britain and France supplemented their stock of munitions and supplies by purchases in the United States under a so-called "cash-and-carry" amendment to American neutrality legislation. Yet neither the British government of Neville Chamberlain nor the French government of Édouard Daladier exhibited any such energy as Lloyd George and Clemenceau had displayed in the First World War or as Nazi Germany was now putting forth. The dispatch of British troops to France was limited and leisurely, and French arming was sluggish and to a large extent outmoded. In vain a French army officer, Charles De Gaulle, urged speedy mass production of tanks and other implements for waging the new type of war which Germany had so successfully demonstrated in Poland. The lessons of this war seemed lost on the Allied governments, which optimistically hoped that their armies could sit indefinitely behind the protecting Maginot Line, while their superior economic and commercial resources, combined with a naval blockade, would gradually weigh against Germany and bring it to terms. They failed to appreciate that what Germany was deprived of by a blockade at sea, it was getting in ample quantity overland from Russia. In March 1940 a bit more energy was infused into French preparedness by the replacement of Daladier in the premiership by Paul Reynaud, though Daladier remained in the cabinet as minister of war. And in early April the Allied governments pressed Norway to stop the transport of Swedish iron ore through its coastal waters to Germany. Already, however, the Germans had prepared a counter-stroke to obtain control of all Scandinavia. On April 9 they invaded and occupied Denmark against the "protest" of its King, Christian X; and simultaneously they launched an air and naval attack on Norway. Here they met with a declaration of war and Norway an attempt at resistance. This was confused and disjointed, and was interfered with by traitors within the country. The leading traitor, a certain Major Vidkun Quisling, who had once been Norwegian minister of war, was later to enrich modern language with a new word, for "quisling" came to stand for any "fifth-column" betrayer of his homeland to a foreign country. Major Quisling, backed by a small group of Norwegian Nazis, cooperated with the Germans and headed the puppet regime they set up in Norway. For a short time it seemed as if Great Britain might be able, with its superior naval strength, to free Norway. But German air power drove British ships out of the straits between Denmark and Norway and soon compelled them to quit Norwegian ports from Oslo up to Narvik. The Norwegian King Haakon VII, after being chased about the country by the victorious Germans, escaped to England and there set up a "government-in-exile." Most of the Norwegian merchant marine also escaped and became an important adjunct to Allied shipping in the Atlantic. Yet the Allies had to face the distressing fact that their naval superiority was ineffectual without air superiority and that Germany now had in Norway and Denmark strategically located bases whence its planes could dominate all Scandinavia and further imperil North Atlantic shipping and Great Britain itself. On May 10, 1940, as a result of the British fiasco in Norway, Winston Churchill succeeded Neville Chamberlain as prime minister. In Churchill the British found a great war leader, capable of uniting and inspiring them in the face of disaster. Son of an American mother and a father who was descended from the famous Duke of Marlborough, Churchill had had a long experience in public affairs. He had consistently warned his country of the rising menace of Nazi Germany and had severely criticized Chamberlain's pre-war policy of "appeasement." He now took the helm in Britain's gravest crisis. For the loss of Norway was only a portent of much greater loss. On the very day he became British prime minister the Germans let loose a thunderous Blitzkrieg against the Allies in France. ### 2. FALL OF FRANCE AND ISOLATION OF BRITAIN, 1940-1941 The Germans, instead of making a frontal attack on the Maginot Line, which would have been much too costly, outflanked it by a surprise attack through the neutral countries of Holland, Belgium, and Luxemburg. Luxemburg was occupied on the first day of the attack, May 10, 1940, and its Grand-Duchess and her government fled to France and thence to the United States. Holland and Belgium declared war, but the armed resistance they offered was quickly mowed down by the same tactics as the Germans had employed in Poland -a skillful use of air power, lightning movements of armored columns spearheaded by tanks, some "fifth column" work, the use of parachute troops, and relentless pressure against a disorganized foe. In Holland, German paratroopers, wearing Dutch uniforms, hurtled down from the air, while German ground forces, in rubber boots, swarmed across canals and flooded fields. The Rotterdam airfield was captured on the first day, and the city was turned to