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Second World War: A Short History

Battle of Britain Memorial, Chapel le Ferne

World War One and World War Two represent the two active phases of one long European struggle through the first half of the twentieth century. Following the end of World War One the whole of Europe, victors as well as vanquished, was exhausted. Russia collapsed in 1917; Britain was nearly bankrupt; France was hamstrung by poor government. The only period of relative prosperity came about in the 1920s. But this led into the Great Depression of the 1930s. It was out of the chaos of the 1930s that the power of Nazi Germany arose.

Adolf Hitler was born in Austria in 1889. He had a completely undistinguished early career and seemed destined for work in the lower levels of the civil service, like his father. Hitler, however, saw himself as a great artist. He drifted into low level military intelligence work, and joined one of the many small political parties which existed in post-war Germany. At first this "party" consisted of no more than half a dozen individuals.They argued about politics, and generally had a programme based on hating politicians, provincialism, Jews, and the Treaty Of Versailles, which had put limits on Germany following World War One. Somehow this crazy little group gained a power base in Bavaria. In 1923 Hitler's group tried to take over the government of Bavaria in the so-called Beer House Putsch. Hitler was arrested and served nine months in jail, where he wrote his turgid Mein Kampf, or "My Struggle."

The Great Depression of the 1930s had a terrible effect on Germany, and desperate people started listening to a group of fanatics who said they had all the answers. They had the answers in the sense that they had someone to blame. It was all the fault of the government, the Jews, and the Western powers. It all seemed so clear. It was also clear to them that the German people were better than everybody else. The basis of war lies in the feeling that one people are somehow better than another, and the new proponents of the Master Race had plenty to say about this. Half baked "Darwinian" ideas about the survival of the fittest were dragged in to support the Nazi's cruel ideology. This was a perversion of Darwin. When life is considered as deriving from a single source, as it was by Darwin, then it gets much harder to talk of master races and inferior races. Thomas Hardy who read the first edition of The Origin Of Species in 1859 felt that if all life derived from a common origin, then it all deserved the same respect. Hardy wrote about milkmaid heroines, and became one of the first animals rights campaigners. Darwin saw each species in the animal kingdom merging into each other, with "a sense of actual passage." Compare this with the ludicrous racial and nationalistic ideas of the Nazis. Notions of the "purity" of the German people had officials tying themselves up in knots. It was laughable, if the consequences weren't so tragic. Lines of T.S. Eliot come to mind: "Bin gar keine Russin, stamm aus' Litauen, echt deutsch." This means "I am not Russian at all; I come from Lithuania. I am a real German."

Hitler might have harped on about racial and national purity, but he used the reality of racial and national vagaries to start building his empire. In brief, Hitler claimed that people of German origin in countries surrounding Germany needed his protection, so he took over those countries to "protect" the German people living in them. The details are complicated, and these complications give the lie to any idea of "pure" races. So in the following paragraphs about Austria, Czecholovakia and Poland, don't worry if the details are bewildering. They are bewildering because people live together in complicated ways with no clear border between one group and the next. That is the truth of the matter that Hitler tried to override. I only include some of the detail to make that point. So, here we go...

The first act on the road to war was the take over of Austria, the Anschluss of early 1938. This involved the overthrow of Vienna's institutions by the Austrian Nazi party, followed by the entry of the German army into Austria. The following month, following systematic intimidation of possible opposition, a plebiscite was held where the Nazi's apparently received 99.73% of the vote. Austria had a long and frankly bizarre history as the centre of a baffling collection of peoples. 1272 saw the crown of the German Empire handed to an obscure Austrian nobleman, Rudolf Hapsburg. He and his descendents built up a huge empire, which ebbed and flowed through history. By the nineteenth century Austria-Hungary was a complicated ethnic mixture. In 1866 Bismarck, the Prussian Prime Minister, attacked Austria and pulled Germany together under the domination of the northern Prussian provinces of Germany: but if you thought that Austrians considered themselves the same people as the Prussians of the north with whom they fought wars, then you'd be wrong. At the end of World War One Hungary broke away, leaving Austria as a separate country. Hitler wanted Austria back because he felt it was "German" really. No doubt it was all clear to him.

Czechoslovakia was next. The Czechs had once been part of the old Hapsburg Empire centred on Austria. Out of a population of fifteen million there were substantial ethnic minorities, particularly people of Germanic origin in the Sudentenland area of Czechoslovakia. Inspite of this ethnic complexity Czechoslovakia was viewed as the most viable democratic state in central Europe, put in that position by the wise leadership of the country's founder T.G. Masaryk who died in 1937. Czechoslovakia was a stable, prosperous country, well able to look after itself, with an army larger than Germany's. So Hitler and his minister of propaganda started to spread tales of the oppression of the Germanic minority. Sudentenland was destabilised, real riots followed the fictional tales of riots. Hitler laid a claim to Sudentenland, on the pretext that he wanted to protect the people there. This was nonsense, and a number of senior German generals suddenly seemed to realise the sort of man they were dealing with. The rebel generals contacted the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and told him that the allies must stand firm behind Czechoslovakia. They knew that Hitler could not possibly win the country in a straight fight with Allied support. As soon as Hitler ordered an invasion of the Sudentenland they would have Hitler removed. Unfortunately Chamberlain and the Allies did not stand firm. They caved in to Hitler's demands, and Czechoslovakia, fearing internal strife, as well as invasion, handed over the Sudentenland to Germany. Hitler now knew the Allies would not stand up to him. He invaded the part of Czechoslovakia that he had not won by treaty. There was little resistance.

View of the entrance to Dover Harbour from Admiralty Casement

On the 1st of September 1939 Germany invaded Poland. Once again it was all to do with recreating a pure Germany. When Poland had been reestablished after World War One, it had been granted access to the sea with a strip of territory around the city of Danzig. This had isolated the once German province of East Prussia. So Hitler wanted his German province back. Once again the Allies had their chance to defeat Hitler, by attacking Germany while most of the German military was tied up in Poland. The Allies failed to do this, and World War Two had begun as the huge conflagration it turned out to be. On May 10th 1940 Germany invaded France. By late May and early June the British Expeditionary Force was being evacuated from the beaches of Dunkirk. The Allies managed to lift 335000 men off the beach, a triumph and a disaster, as recognised by Winston Churchill, who had now taken over from Chamberlain as Prime Minister. The operation to evacuate Dunkirk was coordinated from Admiralty Casement at Dover Castle, which can still be visited. The smallest boat to take part in the Dunkirk evacuation, a little sailing dinghie called Tamzine is preserved at the Imperial War Museum London.

 

A Hurricane at the Battle of Britain Memorial, Chapel le Ferne

By the 25th of June France had surrendered and most thought Britain was done for. If the Germans came ashore there was nothing with which to fight them, the army's equipment abandoned at Dunkirk. The situation seemed hopeless, but Churchill would not accept this. In contrast to the earlier situation where Allied military superiority had been combined with defeatism and indecisiveness, Britain now fought decisively against the odds, spurred on by a leader who refused to accept defeat. Fortunately Churchill had been talked out of sending the RAF to its destruction in the battle for France by the commander of Fighter Command Hugh Dowding. Without Dowding's stubborn courage in standing up to a raging Churchill, the Prime Minister would not have had the aircraft to fight what became the Battle of Britain. Thanks in no small part to Dowding the Battle of Britain began, with a Luftwaffe campaign to win air superiority over south east England, in preparation for an invasion. This was the first time a nation had tried to defeat another from the air. The battle rose to a crescendo in the last week of August and the first week of September. At this point Fighter Command was on the verge of defeat, its airfields bombed so constantly that recovery was almost impossible. Then a stray German bomber dropped its load by mistake over London, on the night of August 25th. Britain responded with a small raid on Berlin. The German effort was then switched to London, which soaked up the punishment. Fighter Command recovered and it soon became clear that the Luftwaffe could not achieve the air superiority needed for an invasion. The Battle of Britain Memorial to pilots who fought in the Battle of Britain sits on the cliffs at Capel le Ferne near Folkestone in Kent. It is also possible to visit the Orford Ness testing ground in Suffolk where radar was developed. Radar allowed early warning of German attacks and provided a vital advantage in the Battle of Britain.

 

HMS Belfast

Hitler then turned to bombing British towns and cities, and to a submarine campaign against merchant shipping, known as the Battle of the Atlantic.The idea was to simply starve Britain by blocking its imports, and thus force a surrender. Intelligence gathering was crucial in this battle, and the code breaking centre at Bletchley Park near Milton Keynes played a major role in turning the battle against the U boats. Bletchley Park now has a museum dedicated to its wartime intelligence work. Battles also took place between surface vessels, with battleships such as Bismarck and Scharnhorst being used as surface raiders. The cruiser HMS Belfast which was involved in the sinking of Scharnhorst in December 1943 can now be seen in the Pool of London as part of the Imperial War Museum.

 

Entrance to underground Cabinet War Rooms, Whitehall

Into 1941 Britain continued to struggle, in the Atlantic, and also in a campaign in north Africa, which hoped to attack Hitler's Europe from the south. Then on June 22nd 1941 Hitler invaded Russia, and made frightening progress towards Moscow. But tactical errors resulting from Hitler interfering with his generals' decisions led to a delay in the advance to Moscow. The Germans also alienated many millions of people who had no love for the Russians and possibly would have helped them. The Germans thought they were the master race and treated conquered peoples of eastern Europe appallingly. Any chance of help for their offensive quickly vanished. The delays meant that the Germans were not in a position to threaten Moscow until December. In the first days of December winter began early, the temperature plummeting almost overnight to around minus forty degrees.The German army had assumed they would have won by now and had not prepared for cold weather. There were no warm clothes for the soldiers, and no cold weather fuel for vehicles and tanks. The advance froze to a halt on 5th of December. The Russians counter attacked on the 6th, and the 7th saw Japan attacking the United States' Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbour in Hawaii. The Japanese had been waging war in China for a number of years and were looking to expand into areas in the south Pacific in search for more raw materials for their expanionist plans. They knew they would eventually run into conflict with the United States in doing this, and decided to strike first. After Pearl Harbour, as America sat outraged and shocked, Churchill's feelings were different. On hearing news of the raid Churchill's first thought was "we have won the war." That night, ironic as it sounds, he slept what he described as "the sleep of the saved and the thankful."

Churchill was correct in his judgment. December 1941 was the turning point, even though it did not seem that way for a while. The Japanese had initial success in the Pacific, and the Germans continued to fight in Russia. Nevertheless the war started to go against the Axis forces( the countries allied with Germany). Russia held the Germans and started to push them back, the Americans turned the Pacific war, following victory at the Battle of Midway in June 1942. The British also made progress in north Africa. At this point there was another poignant illustration of the true complexity of human relations, against which the illusion of Hitler's national purity sat. Following victory at the Battle of El Alamein in October 1943 it was decided that there should be a British and American invasion of French North Africa. At this point the French servicemen in these provinces found themselves in a dilemma. They were being instructed by their German dominated government in Vichy to defend French territory, but they were doing so against allies who had fought with them against the Germans. Were France's best interests served by listening to the government, or by ignoring the government and siding with the allies? There was confusion, some fighting, and the scuttling of French ships in Toulon. In retribution for the element of collusion that had occurred the French government operating from Vichy had its authority stripped away, and the country was taken completely under German administration. Once again the German ideas of national purity make no sense in the real world. In the real world nationalities, races, ethnic groups, whatever you want to call them, are not inviolate. They merge into each other, as Darwin said, with a sense of actual passage. The French found that sometimes the best way to act for your country is seemingly to act against it.

Fifteen inch naval guns outside the Imperial War Museum London

Into 1944 the war swung decisively in the Allies favour. Allied soldiers fighting in Italy took Rome on 4th of June 1944. On 6th of June the invasion of northern Europe began with Operation Overlord. This massive invasion took place in Normandy, and involved the building of portable harbours off the invasion beaches to support armies going ashore. A breakwater from one of these "Mulberry" harbours can still be seen floating in Portland Harbour in Dorset. Two fifteen inch naval guns, from HMS Ramilles and HMS Roberts, which shelled the French coast on D-Day can be seen outside the entrance to the Imperial War Museum London

Inspite of setbacks, such as the ill-fated attempt to capture the bridge over the Rhine at Arnhem in October 1944, and a German counterattack in the Ardennes in December, the Allies made progress across Europe. On March 7th 1945 a bridge over the Rhine was captured at Remagen and the Allies entered German heartlands. It has sometimes been suggested that the German defenders of the Remagen bridge left it intact to allow the Allies over, so that they advanced into Germany at the expense of the Russians. Whether this is true or not, and it probably isn't, there were certainly a number of senior German commanders who wanted the German western front to be allowed to collapse, since they felt occupation by the Allies would be preferable to Russian occupation. The Germans were now in the same situation as those poor French soldiers in French North Africa. Perhaps seemingly working against their country was the best way to work for it. An attempt on Hitler's life by a group of senior officials had already been made soon after the Normandy landings.

Meanwhile in the Pacific, the Battle of the Philippine Sea in June 1944 destroyed most of what remained of Japan's fleet. Once again the Japanese seemed to feel that national interest came before everything. Surrender was unthinkable, and young men crashed their aircraft into American ships in a desperate attempt to hold them back. Because surrender was unthinkable, Allied prisoners of war who had surrendered were treated terribly. Churchill may have said "we will never surrender" in 1940, but surrender by enemy troops was seen as an acceptable thing to do; and when Churchill was defeated in the General Election of 1945 he accepted his defeat. Both the Japanese and Hitler would not accept surrender under almost any circumstances. Seemingly, in the summer of 1945 it was only blasts from two atomic bombs at Hiroshima on August 6th and Nagasaki on August 7th that persuaded Japan to capitulate. In the end the totalitarian way of doing things which rigidly separated winner from loser, race from race, alienated more people than it held together. In Europe the catastrophic attempt to liquidate all European Jews derived from this same fanaticism. At first glance it might seem as though fanatical Japanese national allegiance was eventually defeated by a democracy where every four years people would decide if they wanted the government to stay or not. A democracy, in a formalised way, could surrender every four years, turn on itself and create itself anew.

All this may be true, but inevitably things are not as clear cut as they may seem. The idea of Japan's apparent refusal to surrender is controversial. On the one hand the Japanese refusal to surrender seems very clear: on the 14th of August 1945, following the atomic bomb attacks, a thousand Japanese troops stormed the Imperial Palace in Tokyo to try and prevent their emperor from humiliating himself by surrendering. Conventional bombing raids of Tokyo, which killed more people than the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, showed no sign of persuading the Japanese to surrender. In the Pacific war's final battles, on the islands of Iwo Jima and Okinawa, it was clear the Japanese would fight for every foot of territory, and that an invasion of main land Japan would lead to terrible casualties. In these circumstances the decision to use atomic weapons could well have seemed justified. But some historians feel there are indications that Japan was looking for a negotiated surrender before Hiroshima and Nagasaki were attacked. According to A.N. Wilson in After The Victorians there is evidence to suggest that Roosevelt's Secretary of State Edward R. Stettinius even favoured a negotiated end to the war. He planned to promise that Japan's emperor would not be harmed after the war, a major concern for the Japanese. But then in April 1945 Roosevelt died, and he was replaced by Harry Truman, and Stettinius was replaced by James Byrnes. Byrnes, according to Wilson, wasn't interested in surrender. He wanted to use the bomb as a demonstration of strength to the Russians. Stalin was clearly a monster, and it was obvious that he would not be giving up territories "liberated" from the Germans. Brynes seemed to believe that the most extreme measures were necessary in dealing with him. So two Japanese cites were destroyed, apparently to shorten the war and save lives. If the bombs were dropped to terrify the Japanese into surrender why drop a second bomb within a few days of the first, without waiting to see if the Hiroshima bomb had served its purpose? Some historians believe that the real aim of dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was to make a point to Russia. Of course there are others who do not agree with this. Max Hastings in his history of Japan in the Second World War, Nemesis, thinks that Japan virtually brought the attacks on itself by its refusal to surrender. City after city had been destroyed with conventional bombs killing just as many people as the nuclear weapons. There may have been little confidence that the destruction of one more city would bring the desired result.

That all said I still think you can say that western democracies built surrender into the every day processes of their government. This is what helped make them at least more likely to embrace tolerance. Following the defeat of German and Japanese totalitarianism, the struggle than quickly became a similar one, between the democratic West, and totalitarian Russia. it seems a strange irony that societies that somehow accepted surrender eventually prevailed. Victory came about by accepting defeat, in the words of Kipling, treating those two imposters just the same.

The Imperial War Museum North in Manchester has been built with clever chaotic buildings to suggest the disorientation of war. In fact the Second World War seems to show that the real trouble comes when people try to make clear lines out of life. Peaceful life is vague, one race merges into another, defeat and victory can be imposters that are treated just the same.