Causes And Effects Of 20th Century Wars - Course Companion - David M. Smith - Oxford 2015

150 Global Context

The Second World War emerged from the ashes of the First World War, leaving a deep impression on the political, economic, and social climate of Europe in the 1920s and 1930s.
No country was untouched by the First World War.
Totalitarian ideologies grew out of the context of poverty, humiliation, and dependence on other countries.
The three dominant ideologies in Europe during this period were liberal democracy, fascism, and communism, which were mutually incompatible.
The uncompromising and expansionist nature of fascism made conflict more likely.
The isolationist policies of the US and the introverted stance of France and Britain made this dangerous mix more volatile.

Timeline - The Second World War in Europe and North Africa

September 1, 1939: German forces invade Poland.
September 27, 1939: Poland surrenders to Germany.
November 30: Soviet Red Army invades Finland.
April 9: German forces invade Norway and Denmark.
May 10: German forces invade Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, France; Winston Churchill becomes British Prime Minister.
May 15: The Netherlands surrender to Germany.
May 28: Belgium surrenders to Germany.
June 3: Norway surrenders to Germany.
June 22: France surrenders to Germany; German forces invade USSR.
July 5: Battle of Kursk begins.
August 12: Stalin and Churchill meet in Moscow.
August 25: Paris is liberated.
September: Battle of Stalingrad begins.
October 28, 1940: Italy invades Greece.
October 23: Battle of El Alamein begins.
November 8: US troops land in North Africa.
December 5: Soviet counter-attack halts German advance.
December 6: German forces invade Yugoslavia and Greece.
December 11: Italy and Germany declare war on the US.
December 16–27: Battle of the Bulge.
January: Casablanca Conference; Soviet Red Army enters Poland.
January 17: Soviet Red Army captures Warsaw.
March 11, 1941: Roosevelt signs Lend-Lease Act.
July 25: Italian fascist regime falls.
April 16: Soviet Red Army begin final assault on Berlin.
April 30: Adolf Hitler commits suicide.
May 7: All German forces surrender to Allies.
June 6: Allies land at Normandy in France.
September 17: Allied airborne attack on the Netherlands.

6.1 Causes of the Second World War

Conceptual understanding

Key questions:
- To what extent did Hitler plan a war?
- What responsibility do France and Britain bear for the outbreak of the war?
- What alternatives were there to the policy of appeasement?
- What is the relationship of the First World War to the outbreak of the Second World War?
Key concepts: Cause, consequence, significance.

Long-term causes

The legacy of the First World War

The roots of the Second World War are found in the unsatisfactory conclusion to the First World War.
With the exception of the US, the victors were near ruin.
Germany and the other Central Powers were sliding into chaos and denied a seat at Versailles, losing any meaningful say in the future of their countries.
The Nazi Party came to power partially on a promise of reversing the verdict of Versailles, and Germany’s subsequent military program had this as one of its key aims.
The Bolshevik government in Russia extracted itself from the war only to face three more years of devastating civil war, during which she was ostracized from European politics.
Marshal Ferdinand Foch recognized that the end of the war brought little stability to Europe when he said at the signing of the treaty of Versailles, “This is not a peace. It is an armistice for 20 years”.
The unsatisfactory outcome of the First World War suggests that some issues in international relations were outstanding for some if not all the combatants.
The victors sought to recreate the conditions of the 19th century that had brought them to the commanding positions they had enjoyed in international politics and economics.
Britain eschewed the politics of the continent after Versailles and instead looked to its empire to return it to its former position.
Britain would take part in the League of Nations insofar as it helped to confirm its worldview – that it was the natural leader of its empire and this empire should serve first the mother country.
Britain believed that international disputes could be sorted out by discussion and compromise and that war as a tool of diplomacy was to be used as a last resort.
Germany was dissatisfied with its place in European and world politics.
Versailles had stripped Germany of its colonies, and these sources of income needed to be replaced, especially in light of the massive public spending that Germany undertook once the Nazis came to power.
Nationalism in the Balkans riled Mussolini and the Italians. Nationalism also posed a threat to more established empires such as the British and French.
Russia’s position and interests were more of an enigma to the West than it had been in 1914, and she was certainly not the continental power she had been in 1914, although her industrial and thus her military potential was still massive.
Between them, Britain and France controlled a third of the world by the 1930s, and each country saw its empire as vital to its economic health.
This was especially true in the years after the stock market crash of 1929. Of course, it was an advantage denied to Germany, Italy, and Japan in 1919.
While colonies may have been an economic asset, strategically they could also be a liability, as they had in the years leading up to 1914.
Colonial issues could collide in Africa or Asia thus destabilizing Europe.
Protecting such large empires was expensive, and in the 1930s neither country could afford to do so adequately.
Britain and France were faced with using their limited military to police and defend their empires, thus leaving them only diplomacy to maintain their international interests.
Western Europeans looked on the international situation of the inter-war period with a sense of unease and pacifism.
This took many forms, from popular support for official neutrality in the US to student-led peace movements throughout Europe.
The legacy of the First World War in western Europe was one of military and diplomatic weakness.
This weakness was obscured by the absence of any power to challenge it. The rise of fascism in the 1920s and 1930s would provide such a power and expose that weakness.

Fascism

The First World War convinced many that political systems based on liberal democracy were incapable of organizing and governing modern states to the benefit of the many.
Two ideologies that rejected liberal principles, one from a class perspective and the other from an ultra-nationalist perspective, rose to the fore in the dislocation of the First World War.
Fascism, based as it was on ultra-nationalism, had expansionism built into its central tenets.
In Italy, Mussolini used theatre and violence to ride socio-economic unrest and parliamentary weakness to power.
Part of Mussolini’s political theatre was to invoke the grandeur of the Roman Empire with rhetoric and symbols, but with the Great Depression and Mussolini’s policy of autarky, this rhetoric would take on more substance.
The Italian military was expanded as an expression of national strength and virility.
Initial forays into the Balkans proved insufficient, and in 1935 Italy invaded Abyssinia in a quest for an empire of its own, in the process destabilizing the diplomatic situation in Europe even further.
Taking as its premise the racial superiority of Germans and certain social Darwinian concepts, Nazism preached the need for Germany to expand in response to economic and demographic pressures.
A belief that Jews and Slavs were inferior provided a racist justification for expansion to the east.
The tool of this expansion, or Lebensraum, was to be a massive and modern national military seen, as it was in Italy, as an expression of national strength.
Restoration of territory also fuelled Nazi ideology.
The fact that German-speaking people in Austria, parts of Czechoslovakia and Poland were not part of Germany was anathema to the Nazis’ ultra-nationalism.
The means and justification for war was built into Nazism.

Short-term causes

The Great Depression

After the First World War it became clear that the only national economy that could in any way claim to be healthy was that of the United States.
Any kind of recovery in the post-war years, therefore, would in some way, shape, or form be dependent on the US economy.
This proved true with the adoption of the Dawes Plan as a solution to the Ruhr Crisis and attendant economic turmoil. Money in the form of loans and capital flowed from the US to Germany.
$Dawes Plan$ : A financial aid package from the US to Germany. The package was in response to the French invasion of the Ruhr and subsequent German hyperinflation. The plan provided US dollars to refinance the German currency as well as capital to German banks and businesses.
Reparations in turn flowed from Germany to France and Britain, which then paid back wartime loans to the US.
This triangular flow seemed to work at first. The German economy, with its new currency, began to recover in the years 1924–1929, the so-called Golden Age of the Weimar Republic.
After the Wall Street Crash of 1929, cash-strapped US banks recalled German loans and investors sold German securities, plunging Germany into depression.
Eight million Germans were unemployed by 1932, and Hitler and the Nazis rode this wave of economic hardship into office.
In this sense the Great Depression can be seen as a long-term cause of the war, in that it brought an expansionist ideology to power.
The depression also prompted countries into adopting protectionist economic policies that isolated countries such as Germany and Japan, who had to look elsewhere for markets.
This increased economic rivalry between European powers in South America, China, and the Balkans.
Economic isolation helped fuel diplomatic isolation, especially in the case of the United States, which emboldened expansionist powers.
Economic hardship also hampered the rearmament of the western allies at exactly the time the expansionist powers were rapidly increasing the size of their militaries.

German expansion

With the ideological justification of National Socialism and a mandate, manipulated though it was, from the German people, Hitler set about undoing the hated Treaty of Versailles.
In 1935, he tore up the disarmament clauses of the treaty and announced conscription and rearmament, responding, he said, to the lengthening of French conscription terms.
This was to be the first example of Hitler’s approach to the West. He would push the envelope and wait for the Allies’ reaction and judge his next step accordingly.
When Britain and France did not react to his rearmament program, he accelerated it.
The Anglo-German Naval Agreement of 1935, although seeming to limit German naval building, signified for Hitler a tacit approval of German rearmament.
In 1936 he again tested the West’s commitment to Versailles. Hitler ordered the German army to re-occupy the Rhineland, German territory demilitarized by Versailles, and waited for the Allies’ response.
German commanders had orders to pull back across the Rhine should France show the slightest inclination to intervene. Hitler did not want to risk his fledgling army.
When France did nothing, Hitler was again emboldened.
The next year, Germany intervened in the Spanish Civil War on the side of Franco and the rebels, while France and Britain rigorously upheld their non-interventionist stance.
If France and her British ally did not respond to threats on its border, why would they object to German expansion in the east?
The territorial ambitions of Nazism pushed Germany to annex Austria, the Anschluss, in 1938, an act forbidden by Versailles. Again the British and French raised no objections. Versailles was clearly dead.
Perhaps more disturbingly for the British was Hitler’s preference for unilateral action, without recourse to diplomacy or negotiation.
If Germany no longer played by the rules that Britain assumed underpinned international relations, rules like the sanctity of treaties and agreements and the use of war as a last resort rather than a preferred response, then her whole approach to European relations was built on sand.
Hitler’s ephemeral promises were illustrated when he ignored the Munich Agreement within six months of signing it and occupied what remained of Czechoslovakia.
When France and Britain guaranteed Poland’s borders in response, Hitler had no reason to believe that this commitment was any more solid than the Allies’ commitment to Munich.

Appeasement

Very simply, appeasement is to give in to demands in order to avoid conflict.
This, however, obscures the great complexity with which appeasement was used in the 1930s.
With the benefit of hindsight, many postwar commentators used the word with disdain to denote what they saw as British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s naive and weak approach to German foreign policy in the late 1930s.
Appeasement can be seen as a continuation of traditional British diplomacy:
- based on discussion and negotiation
- based on Britain’s economic and military strength
- considering the global scope of Britain’s interests
- treating each issue on its own merits
- avoiding war when possible
- resorting to war if it were in Britain’s interest to do so
These principles were applied by the British to each of Hitler’s foreign policy adventures.
When he re-occupied the Rhineland, it was clearly no direct threat to British interests and could be seen as a return to a more normalized situation of German autonomy. Likewise, it was not clear how the Anschluss threatened British interests. Certainly the Sino- Japanese war was more of a concern for Britain globally.
At Munich, Chamberlain judged the Czechs’ sovereignty to be less of a concern than the costs of any kind of British intervention, if such an intervention was even feasible, and negotiated an end to the crisis.
Germany’s actions did not threaten her shores as any movement toward France or Belgium would. It did not threaten their sea routes and communications through the Mediterranean. It in no way impeded the operation of the British Empire.
Rearmament, started in 1938, nevertheless continued in Britain.
There were two underlying assumptions when it came to applying this policy to German actions in central Europe. This first assumption was that German leadership held the same values as did Britain and France in terms of international agreements. The second assumption was that German ambitions could be satisfied. Both assumptions in the end proved to be false.
Once it became obvious that they were false, and the British rearmament program was close to putting Britain on par with German military output, war became a more feasible solution to future situations.
This interpretation suggests that the key question is not why did the Allies not fight for Czechoslovakia, but rather why did they fight for Poland?
British rearmament had reached peak production by mid-1939 and French rearmament was progressing. Globally, the Sino-Japanese war seemed to be sapping Japanese ability to menace British holdings.
The Nazi-Soviet Non-aggression Pact removed the USSR as a deterrent to German expansion.
In the end, the British abandoned their assumption that Hitler could be sated and thus their ability to affect the course of world affairs and by so doing protect their interests through diplomacy was no longer feasible. Appeasement had worked until it did not.

6.2 Combatants

Conceptual understanding

Key questions:
- At what point could the western powers challenge the Axis Powers in terms of military strength?
- What was the relationship of industrial power to military strength in 1939?
Key concepts: Continuity, change, significance.

Axis Powers

The Treaty of Versailles had placed severe restrictions on the size of the German army.
The small officer corps undertook a thorough analysis of both the lessons of the First World War and what this meant for Germany in the context of Versailles restrictions.
It was this analysis and subsequent doctrine that would structure the German military when it began to expand in the mid-1930s.
The lessons that the German general staff took from the battles of 1918 were that flexibility, initiative, and active combat leadership were the key to mobile warfare.
Even before Hitler came to power, the German army had a plan for expansion beyond its Versailles restrictions.
In 1935 conscription raised the strength of the German army from its 100,000 men to 21 divisions. By the eve of war in 1939 it was 103 divisions – some three million men.
These six divisions included armoured divisions boasting close to 2,400 tanks.
The German air force, banned by Versailles, boasted over 4,000 aircraft in 1939. Likewise the navy also expanded both its surface and submarine fleets.
It is one thing to build and maintain a peacetime army and quite another to keep it supplied with men and material while fighting a modern war, and in 1939 many within the German command believed the German economy was incapable of sustaining a fight over the long term without the conquest of significant productive land.
Over half of its government expenditure went to rearmament consuming over 15% of its GNP.
Throughout the war, the Germans were famously handicapped by their Italian allies.
Italy had suffered in the First World War without the compensation she deemed owed to her.
The economic crisis that accompanied the peace brought Mussolini to power, with his chaotically dangerous blend of ultra-nationalism, economic planning, militarism, terror, and incompetence, and with him a vague notion of regaining the glories of ancient Rome.
He expanded the Italian navy in both surface vessels and submarines.
Counter-intuitively, though, because Italy rearmed before all the other European powers, her material was obsolete first as well, and she lacked the economic resources to modernize before she entered the war.
The Italian military/industrial complex had some of the same economic weaknesses that the German military did, without the real ability to conquer new territories to compensate for them.
These weaknesses were exacerbated by poor leadership in all branches of the military and indeed up to Il Duce himself.

Allied Powers

As with the Axis Powers, the legacy of the First World War deeply affected military expenditure in the inter-war period.
In the 1930s, France spent nearly 50% of its budget on debt and pensions accumulated between 1914 and 1918. This meant there was less money available to rearm in the face of German rearmament.
The economic and social malaise that settled on France in the 1930s fed the deeply conservative army. Tanks theory was still based on 1918 experiences. Aircraft production fell far below other European powers.
Although her navy was a reasonably modern force, it was of little use against France’s key rival.
As much as French command had been besotted with the idea of the offensive fueled by dangerously vague notions of élan in 1914, it was defensive and statically minded in the 1930s.
The most complete expression of this was the reliance on the massively expensive Maginot Line.
France could muster 90 divisions of infantry. Five million were theoretically available for call up in case of war.
At the outbreak of the war she had not organized her tanks into divisions, preferring instead to distribute tanks among infantry divisions as she had in 1918.
In the inter-war period, British policy turned inward, as, indeed, her voting public demanded. It was poverty and standard of living, not European stability, to which the British governments turned their attention.
If she was to look abroad, it was to bolster her empire in the face of dominion independence and nationalism in the colonies.
In the 1920s and 1930s she had returned to a policy of maintaining a small army. The economic crisis of the 1930s precluded anything else, even if there had been public support for rearmament.
When the war broke out, the British army mustered four divisions to send to France. By May 1940 conscription had raised this number to 50 divisions. By the time the smoke of the Battle of France had settled, the British army numbered some 1.6 million men.
The Royal Air Force (RAF) had 900 bombers and 600 fighters with which to defend the island.
The Royal Navy was the largest in the world, although still stretched thin having to defend outposts as far away as Hong Kong and Singapore, the Mediterranean and the home islands.
Wartime production
Germany’s economic strategy mirrored its military strategy, designed for quick victory. The same can be said for the Japanese economy. None of the Axis economies could withstand a long war of attrition with the likes of the United States and the Soviet Union.
This weakness was exacerbated by the fact that the Allied production facilities were well out of reach of Axis forces.
Soviet factories that lay in the path of the German onslaught were for the most part spared when they were torn down and transported out of harm’s way into the Ural mountain region. This evacuation had the added benefit of moving Soviet production closer to its supply of raw materials. Germany and Japan did not enjoy any such luxury.
From 1943 Germany’s industrial complex was subject to day and night bombing.
Japan moved production out of large centers and decentralized it, making targeting and concentration of firepower more difficult and ineffectual.
Until 1942, the German economy had not fully committed to war production. Consumer goods were still being produced in an attempt to maintain the standard of living, and women were not used to augment the industrial workforce.
When Albert Speer became Minister of Armaments and War Production early in 1942, he rationalized production and centralized control of the economic system. Production began to rise, even in the face of Allied bombing.
Initially, its occupied territories were used to help meet the economic demands of the war, but as time went on this was far from sufficient, especially after 1944 when the size of Germany’s occupied territory shrank. Thereafter war production plummeted.
Unlike their enemies, the Allies, specifically Britain, understood it would have to sacrifice consumer production for war production. About half of British production went to the war effort during the war.
Despite their impressive production figures, both Britain and the USSR depended on aid from North America.
The US economy produced a staggering amount of material. This included 36 billion yards of cotton cloth and 41 billion rounds of ammunition. By 1943 a liberty ship was being completed every three days.

6.3 Strategy

Conceptual understanding

Key questions:
- What was the significance of the ABC 1 plan for the conduct of the war?
- To what extent were the German strategy and tactics feasible given its material situation?
- To what extent did strategy contribute to the outcome of the war?
- What role did ideology play in strategic decisions for both Axis and Allied Powers?
Key concepts: Cause, consequence, significance.

Axis Powers

As vaguely sketched out in Mein Kampf, Hitler sought Lebensraum – space in the east into which the German population could expand. This was Poland.
He then turned his sights on readjusting the hated Versailles settlement in the west – again alluded to although not detailed in his autobiography.
His calculation had been that the Allies would not intervene in Poland and that it could be taken quickly, leaving German forces to deal with western Europe with no enemy at her back. In other words to accomplish what the Schlieffen Plan was designed, but failed, to do in 1914 – capture France while avoiding the effects of a two-front war.
In Hitler’s worldview there was to be a cataclysmic struggle between fascism and communism at some point in history, and this belief formed the core of his strategic thinking, even before the fall of France.
When, in the wake of France’s defeat, Churchill and the British did not accept what Hitler believed to be the reality of their defeat, the German Führer had to re-evaluate. Should he postpone the conflict with the USSR and invade the British Isles? Or should he risk Napoleon’s fate and turn east to settle ideological accounts with Bolshevism and secure the productive fields of western Russia and the oil of southern Russia?
Regardless of ideology and supply, strengthening the German army in the east can be seen as a response to aggressive Soviet actions in the Baltic States and in Romania.
True to his leadership style, Hitler did not choose, but rather let circumstances help dictate the course of events. While he had his military chiefs drafting plans for the invasion of the Soviet Union, he had his air force wage a desperate struggle to destroy the RAF in preparation for the invasion of Britain.
Once they had been defeated in the skies over Britain, the Germans devoted all their energy to the invasion of the Soviet Union.
From 1942 on, German strategy was dominated by the search for resources, particularly oil, and securing her previous conquests.
Thus, Rommel’s exploits in North Africa can be understood as a quest for the oil of the Middle East. When the German army swung south in Russia, it was with a view to securing the oil of the Caucasus Mountains.
For the Germans 1943–1945 can be seen as a series of rearguard actions with occasional offensive thrusts, as in the case of the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944.
The defensive posture that Germany had to adopt was in some ways a function of her early success or we might say overreach.
German forces were forced to defend a massive front in Russia, her conquests in Greece and the Balkans.
The Italian collapse added the Italian peninsula to German responsibilities. When the British, Canadian, and United States armies secured their beachheads at Normandy on 6 June 1944, it added immeasurably to the defensive burden of the German forces.
German tactics, especially early in the war, were dominated by Blitzkrieg, so-called “Lightning War”. This operational doctrine integrated precision dive-bombing – “flying artillery” – and other air support with very mobile massed armour.
Offensive thrusts were to bypass enemy strong points, isolating them for later reduction. Traditional infantry would follow to secure and “mop up” any remaining resistance.
Blitzkrieg required open spaces and a definitive and attainable end point. Both of these conditions existed in France and Poland. Both had relatively open territory through which the German tanks known as panzers could dash. he panzers pressed the Anglo-French forces against the channel. In the east the retreating Polish forces ran headlong into the Red Army.
In the Soviet Union, however, only one of these conditions existed. It may have had wide, open spaces in abundance, but these spaces went on forever and would swallow the German army as it had Napoleon’s.

The Allied Powers

Between January and March 1941, British, US, and Canadian military planners secretly met in Washington to discuss a common strategic approach to the war. Secrecy was paramount given that the US was still neutral.
US planners had already developed a contingency should they find themselves in a war with both Germany and Japan, and the ABC 1 plan followed from these strategic schemes. According to the plan:
- Italy was to be eliminated as quickly as possible.
- The Allied Powers would concentrate on the defeat of Germany before the defeat of Japan.
- Strategic bombing would become a key component of the overall strategy.
- British and US holdings in the Pacific would be defended.
For the most part, the broad-brush strokes of ABC 1 were realized throughout the war.
The Allies did prioritize victory in Europe, which seemed all the more justified with the suspicion that the Germans were working on an atomic weapon.
The North African landings and the subsequent Sicily and Italian campaigns knocked Italian forces out of the war, although they did not eliminate Italy as a theater of war.
The Allies may have differed on how strategic bombing was to be implemented, but they persevered through heavy losses and questionable efficacy throughout the war.
The US did go on the offensive in the Pacific, but really only after their economy had been fully mobilized for war production and they had won the essentially defensive Battle of Midway.
Even before the entry of the United States in the war in December of 1941, it was clear that a key component of the Allied strategy would be to outproduce their enemy.
This strategy played a vital role in all the Allied victories, especially once the United States entered the war in December 1941.
Liberty ships were produced at a rate far in excess of the German U-boats’ ability to sink them. The exchange ratio during the Battle of Britain favored the RAF.
The Red Army may have lost more tanks than the Germans in the Battle of Kursk, but they could afford to do so. The Soviet Union would produce more than 54,000 tanks to Germany’s 20,000.
This gap was made even wider given that for much of the war Germany had to distribute this tank production over multiple fronts, while the Soviets could concentrate all their production on one front.

6.4 Operations

Conceptual understanding

Key questions:
- What factors led to the early success of the Axis forces?
- To what extent did each side integrate land, air and sea power?
- To what extent did the Allies outproduce the Axis Powers?
- Why did the Allies win the war?
Key concepts: Cause, consequence, significance.

Poland

Poland would be the first trial of Blitzkrieg. On the surface, Poland seemed the ideal terrain for the innovative tactics. Large, open plains allowed for unrestricted movement of large tank formations.
The relative lack of cover would give the screaming Stuka dive bombers unobstructed sightlines to their targets, allowing Germany’s air power to be fully integrated with its ground operations, an essential element of Blitzkrieg.
While the topography of Poland theoretically would allow the Polish army a fairly easy path of withdrawal, after which it might regroup in the east, the secret codicils of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact made that prospect an illusion.
The Polish army would instead be driven mercilessly east only to come up hard against the anvil of the Soviet Red Army, claiming its portion of the spoils.
Just before 5 am on 1 September 1939, the Luftwaffe launched massive air raids against Polish air force facilities, eradicating it by the end of the day. Those Polish planes which managed to get off the ground were destroyed.
The air raids also targeted those infrastructure elements essential for a modern army to function: roads, rail lines, and communication centers. Terror was a deliberate aspect of the air raids and as such these raids also targeted Polish cities and towns.
The resulting civilian panic would clog the roads with fleeing refugees and thus hamper the operation of both civilian authorities and the Polish military.
The 1.5 million German soldiers that crossed the frontier into Poland on 1 September were divided into two army groups.
One went north and then quickly east, driving behind Polish lines. The main attack would drive toward Warsaw, avoiding large Polish formations, preferring instead to get to the capital while at the same time encircling and isolating those same formations. This is, in fact what transpired.
Some of the Polish forces managed to disengage and withdraw to Warsaw where they would set up a defensive perimeter around their capital.
Following the main force were units of the Schutzstaffel (SS), the Death’s Head Regiments. Hitler’s orders to these units were to rid Poland of the “enemies of Nazism”– a long list.
The siege of Warsaw began on 17 September. The Luftwaffe pounded the city for ten days. Although the city was defended by 140,000 Polish soldiers, the suffering that the terror bombing created persuaded the Polish authorities to surrender the city on 27 September.
True to their pledge, the British and French declared war on Germany on 3 September. By 10 September, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa had followed suit.
But this meant very little in terms of practical aid to the beleaguered Poles.
On 4 September, British bombers attacked German ships at their births in Wilhelmshaven, resulting in limited damage. French army units made tentative advances across the frontier with Germany.
$Schutzstaffel(SS)$ : Originally Hitler’s personal bodyguard, the SS grew into a massive organization within the Nazi Party. Broadly tasked with party and state security, the SS managed domestic and foreign intelligence gathering, the Gestapo, policing, and racial policies including the concentration camp system. The Waffen SS was the military branch of the SS, which fought throughout Europe alongside and in coordination with the German army, the Wehrmacht.

Battle for western Europe

Hitler had hoped that his army could be quickly turned west to conquer what he believed to be a hesitant and weak France.
His generals were far more cautious. They argued for more time to better prepare for what they believed to be a more formidable enemy, one bolstered by a growing British army.
It became evident, however, that the German advance in the west would have to wait until the spring of 1940.
The interim, known as the Phoney War or to some of the British and Canadian soldiers waiting in Britain “the Sitskrieg” , provided an opportunity for the British to raise 15–20 divisions, the French to mobilize reserves and reinforce the Maginot Line and the Germans to correct the deficiencies that became apparent in the Polish campaign and transfer their forces to the western front.
The war in the west did not open with a German drive into western Europe, but rather with an attack on Norway. Although officially neutral, Norway would provide the German navy with an important base of operation. Its occupation would also help secure the resources Germany obtained from Sweden.
In March 1940 German mountain troops landed at Narvik in the north supported by German paratroopers.
Stiff resistance from the Norwegians, reinforced by French and British troops, and strong support from the Royal Navy slowed the German advance.
By the end of April, however, the British and French high command had decided that the prospects of success were slim and in any event, the expected thrust into France could not be far off.
Hitler opted for the bolder plan that would send a smaller force to attack Belgium and the Netherlands -- in a seeming repeat of 1914 -- in hope of pulling French and British forces north. The vast majority of the German armour would then push through the forests of the Ardennes thought to be impenetrable by large forces, especially with tanks, separating the bulk of the Allied forces from the bulk of France. A third force would attack the Maginot Line.
French troops were mobile, yet they were not the equivalent of the panzer divisions that would smash through the Ardennes. The French army, like its German counterpart with the exception of the panzer divisions, was road-bound and on foot, relying on horses to pull much of its artillery.
On 10 May Germany launched Operation Sickle Stroke. Paratroopers seized bridges, canals, and forts in the Netherlands and Belgium. The Luftwaffe began to do to Rotterdam what it had done to Warsaw some months earlier. The Dutch surrendered on 19 May.
The nine panzer divisions of the main German force took only three days to push through the Ardennes and one to cross the Meuse River. As they prepared to begin the race to the English Channel, the Anglo-French forces still believed that the main attack would come down from the north.
Some units of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) dug in around their positions and prepared for a prolonged fight. Those French units that managed counter-attacks did so with little coordination, and even these fell off as the German advance gained momentum.
Hitler ordered his panzers to stop – a controversial decision. The best German intelligence report put the number of British soldiers trapped within the