Published in memory of all those who suffered as a result of the war begun 80 years ago today, and the actions that led to it;
We will remember them.
On 1st September 1939 Germany invaded Poland.
In August Germany and the Soviet Union had signed a non-aggression pact, dividing Poland between them. This enabled Adolf Hitler, the leader of Nazi Germany, to launch his invasion of Poland.
On 25th August 1939, having stomached Hitler’s annexation of Austria and the invasion of Czechoslovakia (despite flagrant contravention of the 1938 Munich Agreement - the document the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain had proclaimed to “bring peace for our time”), Britain allied itself firmly with Poland by signing the Anglo-Polish Agreement. We were committed to offer military assistance to the Polish if other powers encroached on their territory.
When the German forces began to attack Poland on 1st September, Britain and France prepared for war, evacuating children from their capital cities and the mobilising troops. At 9am on the 3rd September Britain delivered an ultimatum to Hitler that Germany must commit to the withdrawal of troops from Poland by 11 am. With no such declaration received Neville Chamberlain announced to the nation at 11.15 am that Britain was at war with Germany. Six hours later France also declared war against Germany. The independent Dominions of the British Commonwealth – Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Canada – soon followed suite.
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On 17th September Soviet forces crossed the Polish frontier and invaded Poland from the east. Despite fierce Polish resistance the capital city, Warsaw, surrendered to the Germans on 1st October. Germany and Russia soon carved Poland up between them with the Soviets also taking the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. Germany established a Nazi Generalgouvernement under Hans Frank in the centre and south-west of Poland but absorbed other areas into the German Reich.
The German invasion of Poland brought terrible civilian casualties. More than 16,000 Poles were executed in the first five weeks and the Poles killed some 6,000 ethnic Germans living in Poland as revenge. Thousands of Poles and Jews were massacred at Mniszek and Bydgoszcz in north-east Poland (Pommerania) by Germanic Poles and in the carefully planned Operation Tannenberg the Einsatzgruppen (Nazi paramilitary death squads) eliminated Polish leaders.
Nazi ideology was a form of fascism incorporating extreme nationalism, racism, anti-Semitism and aggressive intolerance of diversity and democracy. In October Hitler signed a secret euthanasia order, leading to the murder of more than 100,000 disabled Germans by August 1941 and covering mass killings of the disabled, Gypsies and prostitutes in Poland. Many Polish children who conformed to the Aryan (white Nordic) stereotype were seized and sent to Germany for adoption. Not all Germans accepted the leadership of the Führer, however. The Army artillery commander Halder plotted a coup to remove him but was scared off by Gestapo interest and on 8th November Hitler survived an assassination attempt by the German Georg Eler, in Berlin.
Collaboration with the Nazis was almost unknown at the beginning of the war in Poland and a large resistance formed rapidly. This movement, and the brutal invasion of Poland, enabled Roosevelt (the American President) to overturn the Neutrality Act forbidding the sales of arms to belligerents and on 4th November 1939 “the cash and carry bill” allowed Britain and France to purchase armaments from the USA.
Poles had been persecuted in Russia during Stalin’s purges (now known as the Great Terror) and thousands were now deported to the Gulags (Soviet forced-labour camps) or executed if it was thought they might be potential Polish nationalist leaders. Stalin also began a ‘Winter War’ against Finland, bombing Helsinki and attacking across the Russo-Finnish border on 30th November 1939. The League of Nations final act was to expel the Soviet Union for the invasion of Finland.
The RAF had begun to bomb German military bases in September and by October 150,000 British troops had crossed the Channel, assembling a ‘British Expeditionary Force’ in France. At sea the British Navy battled against the notorious German ‘U’ boat submarines, suffering a terrible blow on Friday 13th October when the battleship HMS Royal Oak was sunk at Scapa Flow in the Orkneys. However, in December, British Navy cruisers defeated the German battleship, Admiral Graf Spee, in the Battle of the River Plate off the coast of Uruguay in South America. War had crossed the Atlantic and entered the southern hemisphere.
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World War 2 could be said to have begun on 11th May 1939 with the Battle of Khalkin Gol between Japan and Russia near the Manchurian border of Mongolia.
The war between Japan and China had started several years earlier with Japan’s seizure of Manchuria and Formosa (Taiwan). By September 1939 Japanese forces had taken Peking (now Beijing) near the Manchurian border with China and Suchow (Xuzhou), also in the north; most of the important Yangtze River delta ports Shanghai and Nanking (Nanjing); Wuhan, Nanchang and Changsha in the Yangtze river basin and Canton near British Hong Kong in the south.
Many atrocities were committed by the Japanese against the Chinese civilian population as well as captured Chinese militia, most notoriously in the Nanking massacre of December 1937. The Chinese were also fighting among themselves – although the Nationalists led by Chang Kai-shek held most of the country Mao Tse-tung’s communist Red Army held Yenan (Yan’an) in the central north and communist guerrilla forces dominated many rural areas.
The nationalists counter-attacked against the Japanese in a winter offensive in 1939 but on 24th November the Japanese advanced in the south taking the city of Nanning and threatening the railway line to French Indochina (Vietnam and Laos). However, Japan had not yet declared war on Britain or France or formally joined with the Axis Powers of Germany and Italy and the USA was still neutral. War had not yet spread around the world.
1940
On 10th January 1940 papers were recovered from a crashed Luftwaffe plane indicating Hitler’s early plans to attack Holland. The ‘Low Countries’ had always been seen as vulnerable to invasion compared with France’s German border, the fortified Maginot line, which, defended by a large French Army, was regarded as almost impregnable. British Expeditionary Forces moved to the Belgian border forcing Hitler to adopt an alternative plan advocated by General Erich von Mannstein – an advance through the heavily forested mountains of the Ardennes in north Luxembourg and southern Belgium.
In July 1939 the Polish Cipher Bureau had given the British their reconstructed Enigma machines (the German cipher machine for encrypting messages), as well as the technique they had discovered for decrypting the ciphers. This was essential for the future detection and decoding of German signals carried out from the secret British military intelligence establishment at Bletchley Park, near Woburn in Buckinghamshire, and played a crucial role in the Allies eventual victory.
On 23rd January 1940 the British codebreakers at Bletchley succeeded in deciphering the German Army administrative key they called “The Green”. Soon after this the “Red Key” used by the Luftwaffe to co-ordinate air support for army units was also cracked and on 19th March Alan Turing's first ‘bombe’ machine was installed in Hut 1 at Bletchley to rapidly work out the enigma key settings, which changed daily.
In April the codebreakers were able to break the Enigma cypher (nicknamed “Yellow”) for the German invasion of Denmark and Norway within a week. However, this huge mass of decrypts could not be used because there was no service for the dissemination of intelligence information of such critical sensitivity to the British command. It was crucial that Germany did not discover the Enigma code had been broken.
The Soviets had begun a new offensive against Finland on 1st February 1940. Norway and Sweden refused permission for Britain or France to cross their neutral territory and aid the Finns. Finland had to seek peace with Russia and signed a surrender treaty on 13th March.
On 1st March Germany had begun preparations to invade Denmark and Norway. Denmark was annexed rapidly on 9th April when German troops landed without alerting their defences.
Britain was prevented from entering Norway and cutting off the Baltic Sea by Vidkun Quisling, the pro-Nazi Norwegian leader. Daladier, the French Prime Minister who argued for Allied landings on Norway (possibly to divert the war from French soil), was replaced by Paul Reynaud on 20th March. Reynaud, like Winston Churchill, had been strongly opposed to the appeasement of Nazi Germany before the war.
A large German force set sail from Wilhelmshaven on the German north-west coast on 7th April heading for Trondheim in central Norway and Narvik in the north, focusing on the supply route for Swedish iron ore. British aircraft spotted the force and the Home Fleet set sail to engage the enemy, but too late. Although the battle-cruiser HMS Renown, which was already minelaying in the area, damaged the German battleship Gneisenau and succeeded in delaying the Kriegsmarine (German Navy), Germany succeeded in landing 100,000 troops. The Allies didn’t land troops to assist the Norwegian defence (led by the Royal family) until 28th April. They succeeded in retaking Narvik and destroying the port but further advance was prevented by the Luftwaffe (German Air Force).
On 8th May 1940 a Parliamentary debate on Britain’s poor performance in preventing the German invasion of Norway led for demands for the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, to step down. Two candidates were discussed as successors: Lord Halifax, the Foreign Secretary and Winston Churchill, the First Lord of the Admiralty.
In April and May 1940 thousands of Polish officers, leaders and intellectuals who refused to co-operate with the invading Soviet forces were murdered in the forests of Katyn near Smolensk in Russia. The discovery of the massacre by German forces in 1943 was used to discredit and divide the Allies, which by then included the Soviet Union.
On 10th May 1940 German forces advanced into Holland and landed forces in Belgium, both neutral countries that had not allowed the Allies to cross their borders. The Luftwaffe attacked airfields in Holland, Belgium and France and in one day 131 aircraft were destroyed (more than half of them German but the rest British and French). German airborne forces succeeded in taking the fortress of Eban-Emael, on the eastern border of Belgium, and seized bridges on the Albert Canal while ground forces penetrated deep into Holland. This was the diversion to bring British and French forces into the Low Countries so they could be cut off by von Mannstein’s “sickle-cut” – the secret advance of German forces through the Ardennes.
On the same day, 10th May 1940, Winston Churchill became Prime Minister of Great Britain (Lord Halifax had stood down, regarding Churchill as the better war leader).
The British Expeditionary Force (BEF) was now welcome and advanced into Belgium with the French 1st, 7th and 9th Armies. Only the French second Army with three third rate divisions was left to defend the critical Sedan section facing the Ardennes north of the Maginot line. Maurice Gamelin, the French Army leader, regarded the Ardennes mountains as impenetrable.
The Germans main attack made good progress through the mountain forests. By 12th May the 16th Army had crossed Luxembourg and the Ardennes Forest and led by General Heinz Guderian’s 1st Panzer (tank) Division was approaching Sedan. The town was quickly captured enabling safe crossing of the River Meuse by the German Army who could now advance quickly through the French lowlands.
To the north Generalmajor Erwin Rommel’s 7th Panzer Division fought a fierce battle on the Belgian Meuse (or Maas) but succeeded in securing a crossing near Dinant for the German 4th Army. Between them the 12th Army crossed the Meuse at Monthermé in the French Ardennes and split the French line at Montcornet. The German bridgehead was now 50 miles wide.
The Allies were still distracted by the German’s rapid advance in Holland. On 14th May Rotterdam, her largest port, surrendered but the Luftwaffe were not informed and bombed the city killing 800 civilians. The Dutch announced a general surrender.
The French were convinced that the German spearhead from the Ardennes would head south behind the Maginot line or for Paris. Instead Rommel and Guderian’s tanks raced for the Channel coast meeting little resistance, although a French Colonel called Charles de Gaulle bravely attacked Guderian’s supply route near Montcornet with his ill-equipped 4th Armoured division.
Churchill heard of the breakthrough at Sedan on 14th May and flew to Paris on the 16th to meet Reynaud. He was shocked to find Paris preparing for invasion with no strategic reserve to defend the capital.
In Belgium the BEF, having held off German attacks, began a fighting retreat on 16th May and German troops entered the capital, Brussels, on the 17th May. Maxime Weygand replaced Gamelin as Supreme Commander of the French Army but failed to initiate the timely counter-offensive needed to break through the German advance. A famous war hero from World War 1, Marshal Philipe Pétain, also joined Reynaud’s government as Vice Premier.
On 19th May the RAF (British Royal Air Force), who by then had lost a quarter of their total fighter force, withdrew their remaining planes, now cut off from the BEF by the Panzer corridor, flying them back to Britain. On the same day the German 1st Army, who had advanced south of Luxembourg, succeeded in breaking the famous Maginot line and on the 20th Guderian’s forces reached Amiens and then the coast near Abbeville. Rommel was temporarily halted by a British counter-attack at Arras before moving north towards Lille, south of Dunkirk near the Belgian border.
In Britain a defence regulation was extended to enable the arrest and internment of Nazi sympathisers who might support the Germans from within Britain and on 23rd May Sir Oswald Moseley, leader of the British Union of Fascists, was detained.
Special liaison units feeding intelligence from Bletchley Park to commanders in the field were first employed in France in May 1940 where a new wireless based intelligence unit known as “Phantom” and led by Lieutenant-Colonel George Frederick Hopkinson played a critical role in the collection and transmission of information in battle. However, liaison between the Allied Armies was poor leading to a breakdown in understanding between the British and the French. They fought together to defend the port of Boulogne but the British began the evacuation of their troops on 23rd May while the French fought on, finally surrendering on 25th May. Calais was also defended until 25th May, leaving a small pocket of land around the port of Dunkirk free for the evacuation of the trapped British Expeditionary Force.
Their famous evacuation, Operation Dynamo, was ordered on 26th May. Some 600 volunteer small boats joined the Royal Navy’s 200 vessels in this bitter task.
In Britain some members of the War Cabinet, including Lord Halifax, were now in favour of investigating, through Italy, what terms Hitler would demand from Britain in return for peace. Churchill argued that Britain should fight on: “Even if we were beaten we should be no worse off than we should be if we were now to abandon the struggle. Let us therefore avoid being dragged down the slippery slope with France.” Reynaud was by now under pressure from Marshal Pétain and General Weygand to begin negotiating for peace in France.
After a brief halt the German advance had resumed but the ‘Dunkirk pocket’ was strongly defended by British, French and Belgian troops. The Germans had believed that the Luftwaffe would wipe out the remains of the Allied armies at Dunkirk but in practice RAF fighters from Kent were able to intercept planes flying from Germany. However, the Luftwaffe succeeded in sinking many of the evacuation vessels including ten Royal Navy destroyers. The evacuation plans were confused with British and French troops often clashing in the scramble for the boats. The Belgian Army, which was defending the perimeter of the pocket to the south and east, surrendered after fierce fighting on 28th May.
Dunkirk fell on 4th June but by then 338,000 troops had been rescued (nearly 200,000 British and the rest French). Some 80,000, mainly French, were left behind. In total Britain lost 68,000 of the BEF troops in the battles for Belgium and north-eastern France. The allies had also lost their tanks, motor transport and most of their artillery and stores, which they destroyed in their retreat. The ranks of the survivors were swelled by Polish forces in France who made their way to Britain. The 8,000 experienced Polish air force personnel were to play a critical role in the defence of Britain.
Brigadier-General de Gaulle joined Reynaud’s government as under-Secretary for National Defence and War on 5th June. France was now battling for survival. German forces attacked across the rivers Somme, in Picardy, and Aisne, near Rheims, on 6th June. There were still 100,000 British troops south of the Somme and a second British Expeditionary Force was sent across the Channel but with little chance of success.
The Germans in France took what they needed but also massacred some prisoners of war and civilians, in particular French colonial troops (some 3,000 were shot during the battle for France). About eight million refugees were on the move, heading away from the Germans towards south-west France and on 11th June, after Italy declared war on France and Britain, the French government moved to the Loire valley in the west.
Churchill with his chiefs of staff flew to join them and found Weygand and Pétain more concerned about the risk of a Communist uprising than the defence of Paris or continuing the war (on 12th June Weygand advocated an armistice to the Council of Ministers but Reynaud held their resolve for the last time).
On 13th June the Germans were in the outskirts of Paris and on 14th June Churchill reluctantly agreed that the British troops in north-west France should prepare for evacuation from Normandy and Brittany. He still hoped that the French Fleet would be secured for the Allies and the French government would fight on from French North Africa. Reynaud’s last hope was pinned on a promise of US intervention but when this was not forthcoming he tendered his resignation. Marshall Pétain immediately formed a new government.
General de Gaulle, who was in London with Churchill proposing a ‘united states of Britain and France’ with a single war cabinet briefly flew back to France and, meeting secretly with Reynaud, secured support and funds for fighting on from England. He was flying back to England when Pétain announced that he would be seeking an armistice with Germany. 92,000 French had been killed, two hundred thousand wounded and nearly 2 million taken as prisoners of war.
Evacuation of the British troops remaining in France continued from St Nazaire in Brittany and, although roughly 3,500 drowned when the Lancastria liner carrying them was bombed by the Germans (the worst maritime disaster in British history) a total of some 191,000 Allied troops reached England in this second evacuation.
On 18th June General de Gaulle broadcast to France his famous speech to “hoist the colours” of the Free French:
“La France a perdu une bataille. Mais la France n’a pas perdu la guerre” and Winston Churchill addressed the House of Commons, …......
.......... which is where this story begins.
(Recommended selective source ‘The Second World War’ by Antony Beevor, published by Weidenfield and Nicolson 2012 – a brilliant, revealing and humane account of World War 2.)
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