The World War II began with Adolf Hitler’s surprise attack on Poland. A massive German army spearheaded by armored divisions and backed up by the Luftwaffe, the German air force which Warsaw in six days. This was the first dramatic display of the blitzkrieg or lightning warfare. Joseph Stalin acting under a secret clause of the Nazi-soviet Non-Aggression Pact ordered Russian troops into Eastern Poland.
Poland collapsed and was dismembered and the first of millions of Polish Jews were murdered. In November Soviet forces invaded Finland. Following a six month
load the Third Reich attack Norway and Denmark then overrun the low countries in France. Germany style of billion highly mobile mechanize warfare stunned the West. The rescue of 338,000 Allied soldiers of Dunkirk was one bright spot in an otherwise disastrous period for the allies.
Days after fascist Italy under Benito Mussolini declared war on the Allies, the Germans marched into Paris. France capitulated and was divided into two zones. The German occupied North and Vichy, the pro-German puppet state in the south.
Meanwhile Stalin annexed the Baltic States and Moldavia. Winston Churchill, self confident and pugnacious, pledged that Britain would fight if necessary for years, if necessary alone. The Luftwaffe had pummeled England cities but failed to knock out the royal air force. Hitler ordered the invasion of Britain indefinitely postponed.
In North Africa, Italy’s defeat brought the third Reich into the field and the elite Africa core under General Erwin Rommel began a drive on the Suez Canal. In an impressive campaign, the Desert Fox pushed the British into Egypt. Meanwhile, German forces quickly crashed Yugoslavia and Greece and to quit in a spectacular airborne assault.
In June 1941, Hitler tore up his pact with Stalin and plunge into the Russia with 3 million men. Along a 2000-mile front, the entire Russian divisions melted away under the shock of the German assault. The Germans captured Smolensk and besieged Leningrad. While in the south Kiev and Odessa fell.
By the end of the year, Hitler’s army touched the outskirts of the Soviet capital but during an usually harsh winter the Germans failed to take Moscow and the Russians pushed them back in the spring. Hitler then unleashed a new offensive aimed at the Kramer and the rich oil-fields in the Caucasus. He laid siege of the vital transportation hub Stalingrad but a Russian counter offensive under General Zhukov trapped and annihilated the German Sixth Army in a titanic battle.
Hitler ordered a new armored attack. Initiating the wars main encounter between the Russian and German armies, the campaign cost the Germans 1 million men. The Russians repulsed and began a great Westwood drive lifting the two-year siege of Leningrad and smashing through into Axis territory.
In the first half of 1942, Rommel’s spirited offensive in North Africa hurled the British back and captured Tobruk. But Rommel’s advanced was checked that the decisive battle of El Alamein. British field Marshall Bernard Montgomery then began his own offensive and push Rommel into Tunisia.
Simultaneously, an Allied force pulled on for surprise invasion of Morocco and Algeria then moved eastward. The fall of triple E effectively ended axis ambitions in North Africa. In June, the Allies invaded Sicily where General George Patton displayed his characteristic speed and theatricality in the capture of Messina.
The American sustains savage losses on the Italian mainland against in trench German forces notably at Anzio. In the spring, the Allies breached the Gustav Line and liberated Rome. Under the command of General Dwight Eisenhower, “Operation Overlord” saw the largest amphibious assault in the history, the invasion of Normandy on June 6th.
Meanwhile, a new Russian offensive pushed to the borders of Poland. Allied forces advanced in Italy broke out of Normandy and landed in southern France. Paris was liberated while in the east Soviet troops took Bucharest. The advanced continued on the broad front.
Hitler personally directed one final offensive in the west. The “Battle of the Bulge” but under the weight of a two-front war the third Reich collapsed. On April 30th, in his bunker beneath the rubble of Berlin, Hitler took his own life. Germany surrendered a week later. The World War II is history’s most destructive conflict. The statistics are numbing. Among civilian fatalities about six million Jews, two thirds of the total Jewish population of Europe were systematically slaughtered by the Nazis.
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