Although Hitler was apparently surprised when France
and Britain declared war on September 3, he was confident
of ultimate victory. After a winter of waiting
(called the “phony war”), on April 9, 1940, Germany
launched a Blitzkrieg against Denmark and Norway. One
month later, the Germans attacked the Netherlands,
Belgium, and France. German panzer divisions broke
through the weak French defensive positions in the Ardennes
forest and raced across northern France, splitting
the Allied armies and trapping French troops and the entire
British army on the beaches of Dunkirk. Only by
heroic efforts did the British succeed in a gigantic evacuation
of 330,000 Allied (mostly British) troops. The
French capitulated on June 22. German armies occupied
about three-fifths of France while the French hero of
World War I, Marshal Philippe Pétain (1856 –1951), established
a puppet regime (known as Vichy France) over
the remainder. Germany was now in control of western
and central Europe (see Map 6.1). Britain had still
not been defeated, but it was reeling, and the wartime
cabinet under Prime Minister Winston Churchill debated
whether to seek a negotiated peace settlement.
As Hitler realized, an amphibious invasion of Britain
could succeed only if Germany gained control of the air.
In early August 1940, the Luftwaffe (German air force)
launched a major offensive against British air and naval
bases, harbors, communication centers, and war industries.
The British fought back doggedly, supported by an
effective radar system that gave them early warning of
German attacks. Nevertheless, the British air force suffered
critical losses and was probably saved by Hitler’s
change in strategy. In September, in retaliation for a British
attack on Berlin, Hitler ordered a shift from military
targets to massive bombing of cities to break British morale.
The British rebuilt their air strength quickly and
were soon inflicting major losses on Luftwaffe bombers.
By the end of September, Germany had lost the Battle of
Britain, and the invasion of the British Isles had to be
abandoned.
At this point, Hitler pursued a new strategy, which
would involve the use of Italian troops to capture Egypt
and the Suez Canal, thus closing the Mediterranean to
British ships and thereby shutting off Britain’s supply of
oil. This strategy failed when the British routed the Ital-
ian army. Although Hitler then sent German troops to
the North African theater of war, his primary concern lay
elsewhere; he had already reached the decision to fulfill
his long-time obsession with the acquisition of territory
in the east. In Mein Kampf, Hitler had declared that future
German expansion must lie in the east, in the vast
plains of southern Russia.
Hitler was now convinced that Britain was remaining
in the war only because it expected Soviet support. If the
Soviet Union were smashed, Britain’s last hope would be
eliminated. Moreover, the German general staff was convinced
that the Soviet Union, whose military leadership
had been decimated by Stalin’s purge trials, could be defeated
quickly and decisively. The invasion of the Soviet
Union was scheduled for spring 1941 but was delayed because
of problems in the Balkans. Mussolini’s disastrous
invasion of Greece in October 1940 exposed Italian
forces to attack from British air bases in that country. To
secure their Balkan flank, German troops seized both Yugoslavia
and Greece in April 1941. Hitler had already obtained
the political cooperation of Hungary, Bulgaria,
and Romania. Now reassured, Hitler ordered an invasion
of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, in the belief that
the Soviets could still be decisively defeated before winter
set in. It was a fateful miscalculation.
The massive attack stretched out along an 1,800-mile
front. German troops, supported by powerful panzer
units, advanced rapidly, capturing two million Russian
soldiers. By November, one German army group had
swept through Ukraine and a second was besieging Leningrad;
a third approached within 25 miles of Moscow,
the Russian capital. An early winter and unexpected Soviet
resistance, however, brought a halt to the German
advance. For the first time in the war, German armies had
been stopped. A counterattack in December 1941 by Soviet
army units newly supplied with U.S. weapons came
as an ominous ending to the year for the Germans.
World History
