World War II

by Reg Grant

  Faced with an apparently hopeless situation, Hitler put his faith in German “secret weapons” which entered the war in 1944. One of these, the first jet aircraft, had only a marginal effect on the conflict. In contrast, the “V’ weapons had much more impact on the war. The V-1 was a pilotless aircraft packed with explosives. The V-2 was the world’s first supersonic ballistic missile—the forerunner of today’s space rockets. Fired chiefly at London and Antwerp, the V-1s and V-2s together killed almost 9,000 people in England, but fell far short of having a decisive effect. For that they needed a nuclear warhead, as was finally used in the Pacific theater of World War II to end the war there.

  The German offensive of winter 1944 is called the Battle of the Bulge because of how it pushed into Allied-held territory.

  ARMORED OFFENSIVE—BATTLE OF THE BULGE Let down by his secret weapons, in December 1944 Hitler decided to gamble on a shock German counterattack. In virtually a repeat of May 1940, he ordered an armored offensive through the Ardennes region of Belgium. The tanks were to break through the Allied lines and advance rapidly across the Meuse River to the coast, taking the vital port of Antwerp, Belgium.

  A V-1 pilotless aircraft, photographed over Britain in 1945. The V-1 would dive when its fuel ran out, exploding on contact with the ground.

  Launched on December 16, the Ardennes offensive (popularly known as the Battle of the Bulge) at first had just the success Hitler must have hoped for. The Ardennes front was thinly held by U.S. forces and surprise was complete. Allied aircraft, which could have countered the German advance, were grounded by severe winter weather.

  Germany was crushed between the Soviet forces advancing from the east and the Western Allies.

  NOBLE CRUSADE

  The Allied advance revealed to the outside world the full horror of the Nazi death camps and concentration camps, with their medical experiments, gas chambers, and starving prisoners. For most people, this removed any doubts about whether the war was justified. British historian A.J.P. Taylor, who lived through World War II, wrote: “No English soldier who rode with the tanks into liberated Belgium or saw the German murder camps at Dachau or Buchenwald could doubt that the war had been a noble crusade.”

  —From English History 1914-1945, A. J. P. Taylor

  The Americans, however, reacted swiftly. They rushed in reinforcements, tripling the U.S. forces in the Ardennes within four days. U.S. soldiers, especially those encircled at Bastogne, fought with great bravery. The German forces never reached the Meuse. On December 23, the weather lifted and Allied aircraft struck against the exposed enemy forces. On December 26, Patton’s Third Army advanced from the south to relieve Bastogne (see page 45). By then German tanks and aircraft were running out of fuel. Through January 1945, in deep snow, the Germans made a fighting withdrawal back into their homeland. They had suffered about 100,000 casualties, and hundreds of aircraft and most of their tanks were destroyed. Hitler had made his last gamble and lost.

  Hitler’s only hope was that the Western Allies and the Soviet Union would quarrel. Instead, in February 1945, Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin, met at the Ukranian port of Yalta in Crimea (see page 25), and agreed on conquered Germany’s immediate future.

  Hitler’s last public appearance was in March 1945, when he distributed medals to members of the Hitler Youth movement.

  On January 12, the Red Army launched a massive offensive from the Vistula River, where they had halted five months earlier. They conquered all before them, overrunning their prize, Poland, and crossing into Germany by the end of the month. Their spearhead was only about 39 miles (65 km) from Berlin. Further south, they conquered Budapest, Hungary, in mid-February, taking more than 100,000 German prisoners.

  Some of the 30,000 survivors of Dachau, where about 50,000 died, cheer their liberation by the U.S. Army on May 3, 1945.

  ON THE WESTERN FRONT On the Western Front, Allied troops reached the banks of the Rhine in the first week in March. The Germans destroyed all the bridges across the river well in advance of the arrival of Allied forces, except at Remagen, where U.S. forces found a single bridge intact and crossed it on March 7. It was another two weeks before further Rhine crossings were made, by Patton in the south at Oppenheim and, shortly afterwards, by Montgomery in the north at Wesel.

  Germany’s situation was hopeless. Poorly armed members of the Volkssturm, Germany’s Home Guard, were drafted into the front line to reinforce its vastly outnumbered and outgunned armies. German roads were crammed with refugees fleeing westwards in front of the advancing Soviet forces. Hitler, now installed in a bunker in Berlin, still hoped for some twist of fate. The Nazis seized upon President Roosevelt’s death on April 12 as a miracle that might save their skins, but democratic transition went smoothly to Vice President Truman, and Allied policy did not change.

  The First Belorussian Front, commanded by Marshal Zhukov, attacked Berlin directly from the east, while other Soviet forces joined in from south and north.

  THE NATION WILL PERISH

  Hitler was determined that if he was to go down, Germany would be destroyed with him. He gave orders to lay the country waste in the path of the invaders, saying: “If the war is lost the German nation will perish. So there is no need to consider what the people require for continued existence.”

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

  Avoiding a race with his Soviet ally, General Eisenhower decided to allow the Red Army to take the honor (and the heavy casualties) involved in capturing Berlin. Instead, the Western Allies mopped up in central Germany, accepting the surrender of more than 300,000 German soldiers in the Ruhr in mid-April. On April 25, Soviet and U.S. forces advancing from east and west met at Torgau on the Elbe River. By that time, troops commanded by Russian Marshal Georgi Zhukov were fighting their way into the Berlin suburbs. Street-to-street battles raged, moving toward the heart of the city. On April 30, as the sound of gunfire shook his bunker, Hitler committed suicide.

  Hitler’s death did not immediately halt the fighting, which stuttered on until ended by a series of separate local surrenders. In Italy, Mussolini, who had been running a puppet government under German control since his fall from power, was captured by Italian partisans and shot on April 28. The following day, the German commanders in Italy signed an unconditional surrender. German forces in Berlin surrendered on May 2—taking the city that had cost the Soviets about 300,000 casualties. The armies in northwest Germany followed suit on May 4. Finally, on May 7, General Alfred Jodl signed a general unconditional surrender of all German forces, to take effect the following day. War in Europe was over.

  WHEN THE FIGHTING STOPPED

  Despite the enormous scale of World War II, it was not followed by any great peace conference setting out to redraw the map of Europe. When the leaders of the victorious Allies met at Potsdam, west of Berlin, in July 1945, the main item on the agenda was Japan, where World War II still raged. Most questions regarding Europe were either settled according to agreements that had been made in the course of the war or resolved by whoever was in military control of a given place when the fighting stopped. Much of eastern Europe was now therefore under Soviet control.

  As they had agreed during the war, the Allies divided the defeated Germany into four occupation zones—American, British, French, and Soviet. Berlin was deep inside the Soviet zone, but it too was divided between the four Allied powers, each occupying a sector of the city. Austria, once more separated from Germany, was similarly divided into occupation zones.

  U.S. and Soviet troops meet at Torgau on the Elbe river on April 25, 1945. There was genuine warmth of feeling between soldiers of the Western Allies and their Soviet counterparts at this time.

  The Soviet flag is raised over the Reichstag building in Berlin, April 30, 1945.

  The western border of the Soviet Union remained what it had become in 1941, so the Soviets kept the gains they made early in the war, including the Baltic Republics and eastern Poland. In compensation, Pol
and was allowed to take land from Germany in the west, shifting Poland westward. Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Austria, and Hungary were broadly returned to the shape they had been given after World War I—the largest change was that Yugoslavia took Istria from Italy. Otherwise, changes of borders in Europe were small, although actual Soviet domination increased in many Eastern European countries.

  Nazi leaders on trial at Nuremberg in September 1945.

  In the years immediately after the war, much effort was put into the “de-Nazification” of Germany and the prosecution of Germans for war crimes (the Nuremberg Trials). The problem of German minorities outside the borders of Germany—the issue that Hitler had exploited so successfully in the 1930s—was settled crudely and brutally by driving them out of their homes. All the Sudeten Germans, for example, were expelled from Czechoslovakia. In total, some ten million German refugees, who had fled or been deported from lands to the east, had to make new lives for themselves in Germany.

  Victory in the war had carried Soviet armies deep into the heart of Europe. They did not go home for more than forty years. The Soviet Union installed a repressive communist political and social system in the countries under its military control (Poland, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Czechoslovakia), while in Yugoslavia, the wartime resistance leader Tito also established a communist regime.

  The United States, under President Harry S. Truman, was from 1947 committed to resisting the spread of communism worldwide. The U.S. took steps to prevent communist parties from taking power in Western Europe, including funding the Marshall Plan, a program to rebuild Western European economies and thus encourage social stability. In 1949, through the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the United States pledged to defend Western Europe against attack by the Soviet Union. Like the Soviets, the U.S. forces had come to stay.

  IMPOSING A SYSTEM

  During World War II Stalin told a fellow communist: “This war is not as in the past. Whoever occupies a territory also imposes on it his own social system. Everyone imposes his own system as far as his army can reach. It cannot be otherwise.”

  —Quoted in Russia’s War, Richard Overy

  Because of the rift between the wartime allies, in Germany the military occupation zones solidified into a political divide. The U.S., British, and French zones became West Germany (the German Federal Republic) and the Russian zone became communist-ruled East Germany (the German Democratic Republic). West Berlin was left as a western outpost deep inside East Germany. The dividing line between communist-ruled Eastern Europe and the West was dubbed the “Iron Curtain.” At the end of the 1980s and into the early 1990s, Soviet influence over Eastern Europe began to weaken. The Soviet Union itself broke up into Russia and other independent, noncomcommunist nations, and other Eastern European countries formerly under Soviet domination also turned toward democracy. Following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, East and West Germany reunified.

  The results of World War II were not entirely negative. Having experienced horror and destruction on a massive scale, Britain, France, Germany, and Italy were now motivated to bury their old differences and become partners in the European Union and NATO. A war between them became unthinkable. The people of Europe and their governments, it seems, truly did learn a lesson from history.

  By the mid-1950s, Europe was divided between a Western alliance headed by the United States and the countries east of the Iron Curtain dominated by the USSR.

  The Berlin Wall divided Berlin, Germany from 1961 to 1989, and was the most visible symbol of the division of Europe that followed World War II.

  PROFILES OF MILITARY AND POLITICAL LEADERS

  FIELD MARSHAL SIR HAROLD ALEXANDER (1891–1969)

  Commander of the British rear guard, which held off the Germans during the evacuation of Dunkirk in June 1940, Alexander was the last British officer to leave France. In August 1942, he was appointed British Commander in Chief in the Middle East. He oversaw the victories in North Africa from El Alamein to Tunisia, the invasion of Sicily, and the Italian campaign. By the end of the war, Alexander was Allied Supreme Commander in the Mediterranean.

  GENERAL OMAR BRADLEY (1893–1981)

  After distinguishing himself as a corps commander in Tunisia and Sicily in 1943, Bradley commanded the U.S. forces at the D-Day landings in Normandy. During the campaign in Europe that followed, he commanded Twelfth U.S. Army Group. His swift decision making was to a large degree responsible for the defeat of the German Ardennes offensive in December 1944.

  WINSTON CHURCHILL (1874–1965)

  As a Member of British Parliament in the 1930s, Churchill led opposition to Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s policy of appeasing Germany. He joined the government as First Lord of the Admiralty at the outbreak of war and, in May 1940, replaced Chamberlain as prime minister, heading a coalition government including both Conservative and Labour politicians. In the summer of 1940, his policy of no surrender succeeded against defeatists in the government and his defiant speeches helped sustain British morale. He traveled widely during the war, at considerable personal risk, to maintain personal contact with Britain’s Soviet and U.S. allies. Two months after victory in Europe, he was defeated in a general election.

  GENERAL MARK CLARK (1896–1984)

  Clark was U.S. deputy supreme commander under Eisenhower for the November 1942 landings in North Africa. He subsequently commanded the Fifth Army in the Italian campaign, from the Salerno landings in September 1943 to the German surrender in Italy at the end of April 1945.

  GENERAL CHARLES DE GAULLE (1890–1970)

  Before the war, de Gaulle was a French officer who vainly urged the French Army to modernize and adopt mobile warfare using tanks and aircraft. After losing the fight of May–June 1940 in France, he fled to Britain and established the Free French movement as a rallying point for those opposed to the pro-German French government at Vichy. When France was liberated in 1944, de Gaulle headed a provisional government. Largely as a result of his efforts, France was recognized as one of the victorious Allies in 1945, along with Britain, the U.S., and the Soviet Union.

  ADMIRAL KARL DOENITZ (1891–1980)

  Doenitz was appointed head of the German U-boat force in 1935. He masterminded the use of submarines in “wolf packs”—coordinated groups hunting down merchant ships. Commander in Chief of the German Navy from 1943, Doenitz was chosen by Hitler to succeed him as German head of state, a position he briefly held until arrested by the Allies in May 1945.

  SIR HUGH DOWDING (1882–1970)

  Commander in Chief of RAF Fighter Command from 1936, Dowding played a large part in organizing Britain’s radar-based air defenses before the war. In May–June 1940, he resisted pressure to send too many RAF fighter aircraft to join the battle in France. During the Battle of Britain in July–September 1940, he made masterly use of limited numbers of men and aircraft to deny the Luftwaffe air supremacy.

  GENERAL DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER (1890–1969)

  Eisenhower was given command of the Allied invasion of French North Africa in November 1942. He proved so good at the difficult task of making British and American generals work together that he was made Supreme Commander for the Normandy landings in 1944. During the subsequent campaign in Europe, he was sometimes criticized for his cautious approach, preferring an advance on a broad front and refusing to race the Soviets to Berlin, which set up conditions for Soviet dominatation in the Cold War. After World War II, Eisenhower was elected to the U.S. presidency from 1953 to 1961.

  REICH MARSHAL HERMANN GOERING (1893–1946)

  An ace pilot in World War I, Goering joined Hitler’s Nazi Party in its early days in 1922. A powerful figure in the Nazi regime after 1933, he took a special interest in building up the Luftwaffe (German air force). In 1940, he boasted that the Luftwaffe would bring Britain to its knees. The Luftwaffe’s failure dealt a crushing blow to his prestige. After the war, he was condemned to death at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trial but committed suicide before he could be executed
.

  GENERAL HEINZ GUDERIAN (1888–1954)

  A leading tank expert in the 1930s, Guderian helped develop the Blitzkrieg style of fast-moving armored warfare. His panzer corps supported the German victory in France in May–June 1940. Guderian led the 2nd Panzer Group invasion of the Soviet Union, but he was fired by Hitler in December 1941 for military withdrawal against specific orders. Restored to favor, he was chief of the army general staff in 1944 when he again quarrelled with Hitler. He was on indefinite sick leave when the war ended.

  AIR CHIEF MARSHAL SIR ARTHUR HARRIS (1892–1984)

  Commander in Chief of RAF Bomber Command in 1942. He felt that bombing German cities would be a sure way to win the war if only enough resources were devoted to it. After the controversial bombing of Dresden, Germany. in February 1945, he was criticized for having led a campaign that caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of German civilians.

  ADOLF HITLER (1889–1945)

  Leader of the Nazi Party, Hitler became German Chancellor in 1933 and Führer (“leader”) in 1935. By 1938, he had effectively achieved total control over the German officer corps. In World War II, he insisted on making major military decisions himself. The swift successes of the first years of the war confirmed Hitler’s view of himself as an infallible Man of Destiny. His later mishandling of the war with the Soviet Union brought disaster on the German Army. After surviving an assassination attempt by German officers in July 1944, he killed himself on April 30, 1945, to prevent capture by the Allies.