A Short History of World War II

The Greatest Conflict in Human History

Nigel Cawthorne

• Publisher: Arcturus
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781782129967
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World War II
• Index: History

World War II was the greatest conflict in human history, involving over 100 million people serving in the forces of the Axis and the Allies and resulting in 50 to 70 million deaths. This book covers war in Europe, war in the Pacific and war across a number of other fronts between 1939 and 1945. • Features the leading protagonists in the conflict, their ideological positions and the strategies they employed.
• Focuses on the Battle of Britain, the Blitz, Pearl Harbor, Hitler and the SS, Operation Barbarossa, the Holocaust, Stalingrad, the Battle of the Bulge, the Fall of Berlin and the Atomic Bomb.
• Fully illustrated, this book contains a blow-by-blow account of six extraordinary years that shaped the world we live in today.

Chapter 1

THE ROAD TO WAR

Three years after completing his political testament Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler wrote a second, untitled volume which he withheld from publication. He realized that he could not afford to make others aware of his unshakable conviction that a second European war was not only inevitable but necessary. It was the only way to secure Lebensraum – ‘living space’ – for the German people.

‘Every healthy, unspoiled nation… sees the acquisition of new territory not as something useful but as something natural… He who would ban this sort of contention from earth from all eternity might possibly do away with the struggle of man against man, but he would also do away with earth’s highest force for evolution,’ he wrote.

This was Hitler’s thinking in 1928 and it remained the foundation stone of his foreign policy once he was in power. It was Germany’s destiny to engage in a life and death struggle with the Slavonic nations to prove the superiority of the Aryan race. If Germany proved worthy the reward would not only be a vast expanse of rich arable land and an almost limitless supply of slave labour, but also the natural resources of the Crimea and Ukraine. These regions included the vast oil fields vital for sustaining a modern empire and its war machine.

According to an aide, Hitler had a ‘pathological need for battle’. He once confided to his commanders that the ‘need to strike’ had always been a part of his nature and that the war, when it came, would be the same struggle he had once fought out within himself. He believed that war was the final aim of politics, giving the aggressor the opportunity to ‘cleanse’ the conquered land of the ‘unfit and unworthy’.

According to an aide, Hitler (seen here at Nuremberg in 1928) had a ‘pathological need for battle’ and he once confided that the ‘need to strike’ had always been part of his nature. War was inevitable

Nazi-inspired art: three young men struggle to push iron-ore uphill in a labour camp. Everyone had to toe the line and pull together behind the war effort, or face the consequences

But in 1933 Hitler was in no position to prosecute a war in Europe. The German army numbered fewer than 100,000 men, the figure imposed by the Versailles Treaty ending World War I. Even Poland had double that number and France had a far superior force – recalling the sacrifices made in the 1914–18 war, this favoured a defensive strategy. They dug themselves in behind the Maginot Line, 87 miles (140 km) of forts and bunkers running parallel with the German border from Belgium to Switzerland. Besides, the Rhineland on Germany’s western border had been closed to the German military as a buffer zone between France and Germany.

Hitler knew he would give the French an excuse to march into Germany if he rearmed in open defiance of the Versailles Treaty. So in October 1933 he demanded that the French and the British reduce their armaments, knowing full well that they would refuse. This gave him an excuse to withdraw his delegation from the Geneva disarmament conference and pull out of the League of Nations, forerunner of the United Nations.

Hitler’s second stratagem was to sign a ten-year, non-aggression pact with Poland in January 1934. This drove a wedge between the Allies and gave the Poles a reason to postpone the modernization of their armed forces.

The coal-rich Saar region had been taken by the League of Nations in part payment for reparations but under the terms of the Versailles Treaty it was returned when its inhabitants voted for reunification. This gave Germany a rich source of fuel for its rearmament programme. In March of 1935 Hitler announced the formation of the Luftwaffe, the new German air force, under the command of Field Marshal Hermann Göring, and the introduction of conscription. Both measures were blatant violations of the treaty.

Hitler then asked the British if he could build up the German navy to no more than a third of the size of the British fleet. Incredibly, they agreed. The tenuous alliance of anti-German nations came apart at the seams when, in October 1935, Italian dictator Benito Mussolini invaded Ethiopia, demonstrating the impotence of the League of Nations.

At home, Hitler began his persecution of the Jews, whom he blamed for Germany’s defeat in World War I and the Depression of the 1930s. Under the Nazis anti-Semitism became government policy. They enacted a series of laws designed to exclude Jews from German public life. Jews were banned from the civil service, education, universities, medicine and journalism. The 1935 Nuremberg laws deprived Jews of their citizenship and prevented them from marrying non-Jews.

The Four-Year Plan

In 1936 Hitler instigated the Four-Year Plan, which ensured that by 1940 all the elements would be in place for a full-scale war in Western Europe. The first step was to reduce Germany’s dependence on the importation of oil, rubber and iron ore by producing synthetic fuel and rubber, and increasing Germany’s stockpile of low-grade iron ore.

While the factories worked to rearm the Reich, the future pilots of Göring’s Luftwaffe trained in secret, using gliders under the pretence of being part of the League of Air Sports. Old cavalry regiments were disbanded and the men were being familiarized with the rapid mobility and firepower of small armoured vehicles. Tanks would soon be rolling off the production lines. Their commanders were being trained to take part in a new, fast-moving mechanized form of warfare known as Blitzkrieg – or ‘lightning war’ – developed by General Heinz Guderian and other forward-looking officers.

Reoccupying the Rhineland

Hitler’s next step was to move troops into the Rhineland – 9,450 square miles (24,475 square kilometres) of German territory bordering Holland, Belgium and France. Under the Locarno Pact of 1925, it had been demilitarized. Hitler knew that if he could recover the Rhineland, which included the important city of Cologne, he would enhance his reputation at home. So on the morning of 7 March 1936 22,000 German troops marched into the demilitarized zone, to the cheers of the inhabitants who threw flowers.

A detachment of 2,000 troops continued across the bridges into Cologne, with secret orders to turn back if the French opposed the crossing. But not a single French soldier could be seen. Hitler’s popularity soared. Meanwhile, Hitler sold coal and weapons to the Italians and they joined forces in the fight against Communism in the Spanish Civil War which lasted from July 1936 to March 1939.

Il Duce and Der Führer ride together through Munich in June 1940. The Spanish Civil War had brought them together and Hitler’s audacious reoccupation of the Rhineland cemented their alliance

Austria

Hitler’s eyes then turned on Austria, where he had been born. Indeed, Hitler only became a German citizen in 1932, the year before he became Chancellor. In the early 1930s there were forty thousand Nazi party members active in Vienna. Fearing an armed rebellion, in March 1933, the Austrian Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss banned the Nazi party. In July 1934 Hitler sent 150 SS troops across the border dressed in Austrian uniforms to storm the Viennese cabinet and kill Dollfuss. They managed to mobilize the Austrian army, who arrested the SS men.

Madrid, 1939: the Falangists celebrate victory, inspiring other European fascists to take up arms

Dollfuss was succeeded by his deputy Kurt von Schuschnigg. On 12 February 1938, Hitler summoned Schuschnigg to his Bavarian retreat at Berchtesgaden and demanded that he lift the ban on the Austrian Nazi party and appoint Nazis to key ministries. Schuschnigg was then forced to hold a plebiscite where the Austrian people could choose between independence and Anschluss – that is, union with Germany.

On 11 March 1938, the day before the vote, Schuschnigg learned that Hitler had issued orders to invade. He resigned, to be succeeded by the pro-Nazi Arthur Seyss-Inquart. The following morning the German Eighth Army streamed across the border and took Hitler’s homeland without a shot. Hitler made a personal appearance in Linz, where he had been brought up, later that day.

An estimated 70,000 socialists and other ‘enemies of the Reich’ were rounded up and imprisoned. Even Schuschnigg was to spend seven years behind bars. He was lucky. Jews were dragged from their homes and businesses, and forced to scrub the pavements.

Czechmate

Three million Germans lived in the Sudetenland inside Czechoslovakia’s western border. On 24 April, goaded by Hitler, the Nazi-sponsored Sudeten German Party led by Konrad Henlein demanded autonomy for the Sudeten Germans, knowing full well that the Czech president Edvard Benes would refuse. While Henlein’s thugs started riots, Germany used this as an excuse to prepare for war. Hitler had set a date for the invasion of Czechoslovakia. It was 30 September.

On 15 September British prime minister Neville Chamberlain flew to Berchtesgaden in a last-ditch effort to seek a compromise. Hitler said, if the Allies could guarantee that the Czechs would hand the Sudetenland over, he would order his army to stand down and give his ‘sacred oath’ that he would respect Czech sovereignty.

Into the spider’s web: Neville Chamberlain is welcomed to Berchtesgaden by Hitler and his chief interpreter Paul Schmidt. Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement cost the Czechs dear

Chamberlain returned to cheering crowds in London. Britain and France then forced the Czech government to hand over the Sudetenland. Chamberlain flew back to Germany on 22 September believing that he had appeased the dictator and that signing the agreement was a mere formality. Instead Hitler rejected the Anglo-French proposals for an orderly withdrawal of Czech troops and police and, instead, demanded that they do so immediately.

This was no bluff. Hitler was ready for war. The German army had swelled from seven divisions to 51, with five heavy armoured divisions and four light ones, while the German navy could boast a formidable fleet consisting of two battleships of 31,200 tons, two heavy cruisers, 17 destroyers and 47 submarines. The Luftwaffe now had 21 squadrons, manned by pilots who had gained experience during the Spanish Civil War, while the German armaments industry was increasing its output. Back in Britain Chamberlain spoke of a ‘quarrel in a...