Great Battles of World War II: How the Allies Defeated the Axis Powers

INTRODUCTION

ALTHOUGH THE SECOND WORLD WAR has been over for nearly 60 years and most of those who took part in it are no longer with us, the war remains a topic of enduring fascination. How was it that the world could be drawn into such madness, which consumed the lives of some fifteen million servicemen and women, and between twenty and forty-five million civilians? And how was it that the efficient and well-equipped armies of ruthless warlike states, who seemed initially unstoppable, could be defeated by a coalition of nations who had no desire to go to war?

The origins of the Second World War can be found in the First World War. As an ally of Britain, France and America, Italy had been on the winning side in 1918, but it did not do as well out of the peace settlement as it expected. In the period of economic instability that followed the war, the political agitator Benito Mussolini seized power. In 1922, he became the first Fascist dictator, promising his people a return to the glories of imperial Rome. His new empire did not stretch very far though. In 1935–36, he seized Abyssinia (now called Ethiopia) and in 1939 he occupied Albania.

After the First World War, many former members of the German army, including the Austrian corporal Adolf Hitler, were disaffected. They felt that they had been defeated not on the battlefield, but by Communist agitation at home, a feeling encouraged by the Dolchstoss legend (the ‘stab-in-the-back’). Many prominent German Communists at that time were Jewish. Those who opposed them played on the long tradition of anti-Semitism in Germany. The $33 billion in reparations demanded by the victors in the First World War at the Versailles Conference of 1919 bankrupted Germany and brought political infighting to the streets. The result was the rise to power of the Nazi Party and its demagogic leader Adolf Hitler, who became Chancellor in 1933. In 1936, he signed an agreement with Mussolini, forming an anti-Communist ‘Axis’.

Hitler made no secret of his ambitions. In his political manifesto, Mein Kampf (‘My Struggle’) published in two volumes in 1925 and 1927, he makes no attempt to hide his anti-Semitism. He also makes clear that he intends to make Germany a mighty empire on the Continent with its borders extending to include European Russia, where the Slav peoples would be dominated by the Teutonic master race.

Hitler made his first gains by diplomacy, arguing for the return of territory taken from Germany by the Versailles agreement. He got the Saarland back from France in 1935, reoccupied the Rhineland in 1936, against the advice of his generals, and took his native Austria into his Third Reich in 1938. (The First Reich – or realm – had been the Holy Roman Empire from 1157 to 1806; the Second Reich was the German Empire under the Prussian Hohenzollerns from 1871 to 1918.) After the Anschluss (joining) with Austria, Hitler demanded the Sudetenland, part of Czechoslovakia, and threatened war. A peace conference in Munich in September 1938 dismembered Czechoslovakia, giving Hitler the territory he wanted. In March 1939, however, he seized the rest of Czechoslovakia. What Hitler really wanted was to go to war. He had progressively defied the Versailles agreement that had also disarmed Germany. He rearmed and soon had a powerful army, air force and navy. The Western Allies, particularly Britain and France, had suffered huge losses in the First World War and they had no desire to go to war with Germany again. Their armed forces were ill-prepared for a modern war so they had little choice but to appease the demands of the dictator.

Japan had also been on the winning side in the First World War and, again, was disappointed in the territorial gains it was awarded in the peace settlement. However, the Versailles Conference awarded Japan former German concessions in China. The Japanese had long coveted an Empire like the ones Britain, France and the Netherlands had established in the Far East. In 1910, it had annexed Korea and, during the First World War, had established a toehold in Manchuria. In 1931, the Japanese consolidated their hold on Manchuria and, when the Chinese objected, fire-bombed Shanghai. The Chinese appealed to the League of Nations, which found in China’s favour. Japan promptly withdrew from the League. When China was further weakened by the fall of the last Emperor of the Manchu Dynasty, Japan swallowed up Mongolia and parts of China’s Hebei province.

Up until this time, the Japanese military had been constrained by a civilian government at home. But in 1936, the military seized power in Tokyo and signed the anti-Communist ‘Axis’ pact with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. In 1937, the Japanese commanders in Manchuria decided to ‘solve the Chinese question once and for all’ and launched a full-scale invasion. The United States insisted that Japan be ‘quarantined’ for this aggression.

On 23 August 1939, the staunchly anti-Communist Hitler signed a Non-Aggression Pact with the leader of the Soviet Union – Communist Russia and its satellites – Joseph Stalin. Everything was set for a war that would engulf the whole world.

Over the six years of war that followed, there were hundreds of battles. Unfortunately there is not the space to cover them all here. Indeed whole campaigns are missing, such as the heroic fight by British and Dominion troops against the Japanese in Burma. It has also not been possible to include such decisive action as the Battle of the Atlantic, which maintained the British lifeline from America against German submarines and warships, or the RAF and USAAF – the United States Army Air Force, as the American air force was then known – bombing campaign against Germany. But these actions went on day-after-day for years and are not battles in the conventional sense.

However, the decisive battles we have picked here do cover the main scenes of action. Taken together, they explain how the war progressed and how the use of improved technology, the harnessing of industrial might, the development of well co-ordinated combined operations and the willingness of individuals to sacrifice their own lives for what they thought to be right finally brought victory to the Allies.

The fall of France June, 1940

1

WESTERN EUROPE

THE ROAD TO DUNKIRK

THE SECOND WORLD WAR began on 1 September 1939. At dawn, a huge German army rolled across the 1,250-mile Polish border. Immediately Britain and France ordered a general mobilisation. Their ambassadors in Berlin delivered identical messages to the German Foreign Ministry saying that if Germany did not withdraw her troops from Poland, Britain and France would ‘fulfil their obligations to Poland without hesitation’. France had had a military treaty with Poland since 1921 and Britain had pledged its assistance to Poland, if its independence was threatened, on 31 March 1939, marking an end to the policy of appeasement.

Britain had given Germany a deadline for her withdrawal from Poland – 0900 on 3 September. Two hours later, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain declared war. At midday, the French ambassador in Berlin called the German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop who told him that Germany refused to halt her invasion of Poland. France declared war at 1700.

The fifty-five German armoured and motorised divisions that rolled over the Polish border on 1 September faced just seventeen infantry divisions, three infantry brigades and six cavalry brigades. Poland had only mobilised on 31 August and thirteen divisions were still moving to their concentration areas, with another nine mustering in their barracks. While the Germans had modern arms and equipment, a large part of the Polish weaponry dated from the 1920s and fast-moving German Panzers (tanks) were charged by cavalry wielding lances. Against the Polish Air Force’s 842 obsolescent planes, the Luftwaffe – the German airforce – could put 4,700 modern aircraft in the air. German planes devastated Polish road, railways, bridges and power stations, and terror-bombed the cities.

There was little Britain and France could do to help Poland. The French Army had been prepared for defence not attack and there were no British forces on the Continent until the first part of the British Expeditionary Force took its place in the line at Lille, in France, on 3 October – one month after Britain had declared war.

Nevertheless the French did attack Germany on 7 September in Operation Saar. It was a disaster. To avoid violating Belgian neutrality, the French had to attack along the frontier between the Rhine and the Moselle which had been drawn up after the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo with the specific aim of discouraging French aggression. The Germans held the high ground and salients into French territory. The Germans had booby-trapped houses and laid cleverly sited fields of anti-tank and anti-personnel mines. The French were completely defensive. They did not possess any mine detectors. Beyond the border was the Siegfried Line, a German defensive wall built during the 1930s. To attack it, the French had to bring their own artillery within range of the German batteries, which were well defended inside concrete casemates. French 155mm shells made little impression and the heavier 220mm and 280mm shells were not fitted with delayed action fuses which would have let them penetrate the casemates before exploding. Although French fire was rapid and accurate, many of their shells, which were of the First World War vintage, failed to explode.

In Poland, however, the Germans were demonstrating the effectiveness of their new tactic of Blitzkrieg – ‘lightning war’. Armoured columns would race across the flat Polish landscape with any defensive action being annihilated by dive-bombers. By 8 September, a German armoured corps was in the outskirts of the Polish capital Warsaw, having advanced 140 miles in seven days. The attack had been so swift that, by 10 September, Polish defence had been reduced to pockets of isolated troops.

By 13 September, the French decided that the Battle of Poland had been lost and the French advance into the Saarland, which was making no significant progress, was told to halt. French casualties were twenty-seven killed, twenty-eight missing and twenty-two wounded. They had also lost nine fighters and eighteen reconnaissance planes, out of an air force that was already significantly under strength.

Then on 17 September, Soviet forces entered Poland from the east. The country was to be partitioned by Hitler and Stalin under a secret protocol that accompanied their Non-Aggression Pact. On the morning of 18 September, the Polish government and high command crossed the Rumanian frontier into exile and formal resistance was over. The Warsaw garrison held out against the Germans until 28 September, while terror-bombings and artillery barrages reduced parts of the city to rubble. The Germans set the city’s flour mills ablaze and destroyed the water supply with no regard for the civilian population. The last serious body of the Polish Army held out until 5 October, though some guerrilla fighting went on into the winter. By then, Poland, as an independent state, had been ceased to exist. The Germans took a total of 700,000 prisoners. The Soviets took 217,000. The officers were murdered in the Katyn Forest. Many of the rest died from maltreatment. About 80,000 Polish soldiers escaped over the Rumanian frontier and continued the fight against Germany from France and Britain. It is not known how many Poles were killed, wounded, or missing. The cost to the Germans was 45,000 casualties.

On 27 September 1939, before the Germans had even taken Warsaw, Hitler told his generals that an offensive should be launched immediately against France. Hitler had wanted to defeat France, particularly, to erase the humiliation of Germany’s defeat in the First World War. The attack should come as soon as possible as the Western Allies were then ill-prepared for war and could only get stronger. Plans were laid to launch an attack between 20 and 25 October.

However, Hitler was still prepared to make peace. In a speech to the Reichstag – the German Parliament – on 5 October, he proposed a peace agreement on the basis of the partition of Poland, along the lines of that agreed in a new treaty signed with Stalin in Moscow on 28 September. Britain and France declined, so on 9 October Hitler told his army, navy and air force to begin preparations. The initial attack, like that in the First World War, would be through Belgium, but it would also violate Dutch territory in what was known as the ‘Maastricht Appendix’. The head of the Luftwaffe, Reichsmarschall Herman Göring, feared that the Dutch government might retaliate by allowing the British Royal Air Force to use their airbases to bomb Germany, so the plan was altered to take in the invasion of the Netherlands.

Britain and France watched the German build-up on the borders of Holland and Belgium with growing disquiet, but heavy rain that autumn meant that Hitler had to postpone the attack no fewer than thirteen times. Due to the lack of action that period became known as the Phoney War.

Before the Battle of France got underway Hitler’s attention turned to the north. Initially he had intended to respect Norway’s neutrality, but rumours leaked of British designs on Norway. Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, planned to lay mines in Norwegian waters to stop the export of Swedish iron ore from Gällivare to Germany through the Norwegian port of Narvik. The British Cabinet also authorised Churchill to prepare a landing at Narvik.

Hitler feared that, if the British took Norway, they would cut German ports off from the Atlantic and threaten Germany itself through the Baltic. However, an argument between the French and the British delayed the beginning of mine-laying operations from 5 April until 8 April. On 9 April, with the connivance of the leader of the Norwegian Fascist Party, Vidkun Quisling, Hitler invaded, deploying paratroopers for the first time in warfare. Quisling was rewarded by becoming ‘minister president’ under a German commissioner. That same day, the German Army – the Wehrmacht – overran Denmark. However Sweden managed to maintain its neutral status throughout the Second World War.

The British and French responded by sending in troops of their own to Norway. Despite setbacks elsewhere, on 27 May, the Allies eventually took Narvik after fierce German resistance. But by this time, the Battle of France had begun and, ten days after taking Narvik, the 25,000 Allied troops there were evacuated. For the rest of the war, some 300,000 German troops were stationed in Norway. This guaranteed Germany its supply of Swedish iron ore and gave them naval and air bases for their struggle against the British.

Although the French were ill-equipped to attack, it had been thought that they were more than ready to defend themselves. In 1939 France had a standing army of 800,000 men which was thought to be the most powerful in Europe at the time. During the 1930s, the French had also built the Maginot Line, a line of fortifications that ran along France’s border with Germany from the Swiss frontier to the Belgian border south of the Ardennes Forest. Its giant pillboxes, underground supply depots, fortified communications facilities and heavy guns pointing eastwards were designed to discourage German aggression. With forty-one divisions manning it, it seemed invincible. However, there were no fortifications along the border with Belgium, though it was defended by thirty-nine divisions.

The Dutch Army had ten divisions and ten smaller formations, a conscript army of over 400,000 men. But the Netherlands had managed to stay out of the First World War, so they had no experience of modern warfare. On 10 May, the Germans attacked with just seven divisions. Again they used paratroopers who captured vital bridges at Rotterdam, Moerdijk, and Dordrecht. They also landed at the airfields around The Hague, but were repulsed. At the same time, the German 9th Panzer Division raced across the country to link up with their airborne troops. On 11 May the Dutch defenders fell back to Breda, along with the French Seventh Army which had sped 140 miles across Belgium to assist them. By midday on 12 May German tanks were in the suburbs of Rotterdam. The Dutch retreated into the ‘Fortress of Holland’, the area north of the Maas and Waal rivers, to protect Amsterdam and Utrecht. But with few planes and few anti-aircraft guns, the Dutch had no defence against German air attacks. Queen Wilhelmina and her government escaped to England on 13 May, where she was later joined by the Norwegian king Haakon VII and his government. The Germans threatened to bomb Rotterdam and Utrecht if resistance continued and, on 14 May, Holland capitulated – though Rotterdam was bombed anyway due to a mix-up in German communications.

But the attack on Holland was a diversion. The main attack would come through Belgium. On 10 May German paratroops landed in gliders on the top of the fortress of Eben Emael, to the north of Liège, and on bridges over the Albert Canal, which runs from Maastricht to Antwerp and was the Belgians’ forward line of defence. Although the invaders had only four army corps and one armoured corps, along with five hundred airborne troops, at their disposal, air attacks and terror-bombing quickly took their toll on the defenders. On 11 May, the Belgian line collapse and German tanks swept through to take Liège from the rear. The Belgian army retreated to a defensive line along the River Dyle, where they were joined by British and French troops. Two tank divisions staged a set piece battle to check the German advance. The Dyle Line might have held, but by 15 May it had been outflanked and had to be abandoned.

However, the setbacks in Norway, Holland and Belgium brought with them one benefit which may well have been decisive. On the evening of 10 May, the architect of the policy of appeasement, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, resigned and was succeeded by Churchill, who formed a national government.

The British and the French had imagined that the main German attack would come through Liège and Namur as it had in the First World War. The plain there was perfect tank country. Instead, using a plan developed by General Erich von Manstein, the German main offensive came on a narrow front through the dense and hilly Ardennes Forest, which the French thought was impassable to tanks. Again on 10 May, Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt threw 1,500,000 men and over 1,500 tanks – two-thirds of Germany’s forces in the west and nearly three-quarters of its tanks – against the weakest part of the front, which was defended by just twelve infantry divisions and four cavalry divisions mounted on horses. The attack was brilliantly organised. A thrust through Luxembourg took just three hours to cover the thirty miles to the Belgian border. Another thrust through the forest itself sent the armoured divisions down the narrow lanes. It reached France in less than three days, crossing the border on the evening of 12 May. The infantry followed, using pathways through the woods, travelling so fast that they reached the River Meuse just a day behind the armour. The French had not expected an advance in this area and the defences there were rudimentary. There were no fortifications in that sector and the French forces there had few anti-aircraft or anti-tank guns to take on the German dive-bombers or armoured columns; the French cavalry divisions which rode in on horseback to reinforce the sector were forced to retreat to the Semois River on 11 May.

On 13 May, after the French defenders on the south bank had been devastated by waves of dive-bombers, German infantry crossed the Meuse on rafts and in rubber dinghies at Sedan – the site of France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War in 1870. The French had just a handful of aircraft aloft, while the German thrust was supported by a thousand. The next day, German tanks crossed the river and, on 15 May, they broke through what remained of the French defences. It was estimated that the Germans could be in Paris in two days. Instead, the Germans turned westwards towards the Channel. The following day, the German spearhead covered almost fifty miles of open country. The advance was so fast that even the German High Command were worried that it was vulnerable but, when it was joined by a diversionary German force that had come through Liège, French resistance collapsed. Facing almost no opposition, the Germans reached Amiens on 19 May. German tanks entered Abbeville on 20 May and on 22 May they turned northwards towards Dunkirk and Calais. The French and British suddenly found that had been fighting the wrong war. They imagined that the German advance would sweep across Belgium to the coast and turn southwards, as it had in the First World War. Instead it swept southwards into France, then swept around in an arc to the north. This move was known as the Sichelschitt (sickle stroke). It broke all communication between Allied forces north and south of this ‘Panzer corridor’ and the French and British forces that had advanced into Belgium were now threatened with encirclement. As early as 19 May the British commander, Viscount Gort, had considered withdrawing the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) by sea, but the British government wanted action, for the sake of the alliance with France. Gort gave it to them. On 21 May, he launched an attack southwards from Arras against the Germans’ right flank in an attempt to break through to the French forces to the south. This kind of counter-attack was just what the German High Command had feared.

By that time, the head of the German column had swept through Boulogne and Calais. Dunkirk was now the only Channel port left in Allied hands that the BEF could withdraw through. The Allies had set up their final defence line along the Canal d’Aire outside Dunkirk. On 24 May, the Germans were crossing the canal, ready to make