Germany had signed a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union, a deal that gave Stalin control over Eastern Europe alongside Hitler. But when the German army overran Poland in weeks, Moscow grew nervous. With the border just thirty kilometers from Leningrad, Stalin decided that neutral Finland would provide the buffer he needed. In the winter of 1939–40, he invaded, hoping to snatch easy territory.
It didn’t turn out that way. The Finns, led by their revered Civil War hero Field Marshal Carl Mannerheim, had built a complex series of entrenched defenses through the only area where the geography allowed an invasion. On November 30th, the attack began with a surprise bombing of Helsinki, followed by 450,000 men and over 4,000 tanks crossing the border. The entire Finnish army consisted of just 70,000 men, with almost no anti-tank weapons and only 34 World War I-era tanks, of which one was reportedly operational.
The Finns were slowly pushed back as calls for help went largely ignored by an international community that considered them a lost cause. Then the weather turned. Finland experienced one of its coldest winters on record. As temperatures plunged below -40, Soviet soldiers began to succumb to the cold.
The motorized columns ground to a halt on rugged, unmade tracks. The Finns, clad in white winter suits that made them nearly invisible, wreaked havoc. Lightly equipped and moving on skis, they descended on the Russian columns, cut them off, and cut them to pieces—a tactic the Finns called “motti,” meaning piling up wood in the forest. But perhaps the greatest handicap the Russians faced was leadership.
The Russian army had been massively purged by Stalin, so every senior officer knew that failure meant execution. It made commanders reluctant to take initiative and severely damaged the Soviet war effort. On March 13th, the two governments agreed to an armistice. Those three cold months had cost over 200,000 Russian lives.
When a Russian soldier was asked after World War II what he remembered of the Winter War, he said simply, “The incompetence of our army. ” An observation not lost on the rest of Europe, particularly Adolf Hitler. Far from those border conflicts, German naval vessels had been ordered to shipping hotspots around the Atlantic. Commerce raiding had been hugely successful for Germany during World War I, and World War II was to be no different.
One such raider was the pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spee, a jewel in the crown of the German Navy—12,000 tons with 10 cm of armor, massive 280 mm guns, and enormous range. Having cruised into the South Atlantic a fortnight before the war began, her captain Hans Langsdorff received authorization to commence raiding on September 26th, 1939. Within four days, the Graf Spee had her first victim. Over the next several weeks, she and her sister ship the Deutschland sank over 50,000 tons of Allied shipping while carefully avoiding engagement with enemy warships.
Langsdorff’s duty was to preserve his ship undamaged, not to fight the British. When news of the attacks reached the Admiralty, nine squadrons were dispatched to intercept the two ships. The Deutschland prudently returned to Germany. The Graf Spee, however, remained, crisscrossing the Atlantic and Indian oceans, using her range and speed to great effect.
On December 13th, she was sighted by a squadron of three British ships under Commodore Henry Harwood off the coast of Uruguay, near the massive estuary of the River Plate. Mistaking the light cruisers Ajax and Achilles for less threatening destroyers, Langsdorff decided to engage. It was a costly error. At 6:14, the Graf Spee opened fire.
Almost immediately, the Ajax was damaged along with the heavy cruiser HMS Exeter. Half an hour later, the Exeter, taking water and listing seven degrees, was struck again. But disabled and with just one turret operational, she delivered a decisive blow. A 208 mm shell penetrated the Graf Spee’s deck and exploded, destroying her fuel processing system.
With only sixteen hours of fuel available and unable to make complex repairs under fire, Langsdorff made for the neutral port of Montevideo. On arrival, in keeping with treaty obligations, he disembarked 61 merchantmen captured at sea. British diplomats demanded the ship leave port while British intelligence led Langsdorff to believe a powerful fleet, including the aircraft carrier Ark Royal, was approaching. The Germans were helpless, having used all but twenty minutes of their heavy ammunition and lost all their anti-aircraft defenses in the battle.
Faced with what he thought was a superior force, Langsdorff attended the funeral of his men killed at sea, then ordered the Graf Spee scuttled in the middle of Montevideo Harbor at 8:50 p. m. on December 17th, just 72 hours after entering port. Two days later, believing he had brought dishonor to the Wehrmacht, Langsdorff shot himself.
He scuttled the ship because he believed its destruction was inevitable and that continuing the fight would cost all his crew with almost no military effect. The first naval battle of World War II had resulted in an Allied victory. It was telling, not least because it had taken place off the coast of South America—an early indication this war would indeed be global—but more because of its impact on Royal Navy morale. After the failures of World War I, it confirmed the attributes the Royal Navy prided itself on: initiative, aggression, and innovation.
It set the tone for how the Navy would fight the war. The period between the fall of Poland and the German invasion of Denmark and Norway in April 1940 was known on both sides as the “phony war. ” Despite Britain and France declaring war on Germany, conflicts were few and lackluster. It could easily have been different.
Hitler’s instinct after Poland’s capitulation had been to attack. On October 6th, he issued Directive Number Six, calling for a westward offensive against France to be launched on November 12th. His generals were reluctant, thinking of the First World War and the years it would take to defeat Britain and France. They succeeded in convincing Hitler to delay.
The delay gave Britain, poorly prepared for a continental conflict, valuable time to build capacity. On April 9th, 1940, the real war began when Hitler’s armies launched attacks on Norway and Denmark. Determined to take control of the Channel ports and break the British naval blockade, his armies were brutally efficient. The Low Countries fell like dominoes.
France had been bled white by the First World War. Convinced a second war would be long and defensive, the French, along with the British, planned almost exclusively for an updated version of 1914–1918. Their defenses revolved around the supposedly impregnable Maginot Line. When Germany swept through the Low Countries, the Allies positioned their best troops and superior mobile armor along the Belgian border, expecting the Germans to come through Belgium.
They had not planned for an attack through the Ardennes forest—which is exactly the way the German army decided to go. On May 13th, over a million highly mobile German troops and 1,500 tanks emerged from the Ardennes near Sedan on the River Meuse. After a two-day battle, the panzers crossed the river, broke out of their bridgehead, and under the inspired leadership of General Heinz Guderian, began racing toward the Channel coast, aided by the now utterly dominant Luftwaffe. With the bulk of Allied forces in Belgium, there was little to stop the Germans as they sliced across northern France, reaching the English Channel on May 20th.
With the Allied forces in Belgium now surrounded, France was effectively helpless. On June 14th, the first German troops entered Paris. The humiliation was completed on June 22nd when Hitler insisted Marshal Philippe Pétain sign the capitulation in the same railway carriage used when Germany agreed to the armistice in 1918. France had fallen in just six weeks.
The defeat of France turned a Western European conflict into a global one. The collapse of the French Empire created a vacuum in East Asia, encouraging Japan to be more aggressive. Fascist Italy under Mussolini decided this was the moment to get involved, believing the war wouldn’t last much longer. “Now that the battle of France is lost,” said Winston Churchill, “there must be a battle of Britain.
”
In time, he would have it. The German blitzkrieg had left the British, French, and Belgian armies all but defeated. Despite the desperate situation, London implored the commander of the British Expeditionary Force, Lord Gort, to attempt to reclaim the strategically important French city of Arras. After a failed attempt to cut through the German spearhead on May 21st, Gort and the British, along with remnants of the Belgian and French armies, found themselves trapped in a small area along the coast.
It looked as if the war in the west would be over within weeks. But Gort chose the right moment to withdraw toward Dunkirk, the only port from which an Allied evacuation remained possible. The Royal Navy launched Operation Dynamo to evacuate not just British troops, but French and Belgian soldiers as well. To do that, they needed time—and the Germans gave it to them.
On May 24th, as Guderian drove toward Dunkirk, he was ordered to pause. The tank forces were exhausted from an incredibly rapid two-week advance across France. Hermann Göring promised Hitler, “We don’t need the tanks to do this. We can take care of it with the air force.
” Hitler believed him. The halt gave the British vital days to organize the small ships and Royal Navy vessels to evacuate the beleaguered troops. Heavy German bombing had reduced Dunkirk to rubble and decimated the harbor facilities. The evacuation began slowly on May 26th but gathered pace on the 27th when Hitler rescinded his order and the panzers recommenced their attack.
By then, the Allies had strengthened their defenses. With the harbor almost entirely unusable, the only option was to take men off the wide sand beaches, but shallow-draft ships were in short supply. The admiral made the desperate situation public, and within hours, scores of privately owned vessels began appearing off the beaches. For five days, a fleet of all shapes and sizes, many with civilian crews, sat calmly offshore under constant air attack as troops waded through shallow water to be ferried back to England.
By June 4th, 198,000 British and 140,000 French and Belgian troops had been rescued by an estimated 860 small vessels—a flotilla that became known as the “little ships. ”
The evacuation meant Britain had hundreds of thousands of men to continue the fight, a free French army was created in Britain, and the country gained an enormous psychological boost. Although it was a massive defeat—the British were bundled off the continent in three weeks—it was a psychological victory that Britain drew on for the rest of the war. France’s collapse exposed Britain’s lack of military readiness.
Great Britain was in peril. Churchill was forced to confront factions within his own party who petitioned for a negotiated peace. Hitler himself sought channels for negotiation, using air attacks as leverage: “Look, this is what it’s going to be like. Don’t take this path.
”
Hitler knew an amphibious invasion of the British Isles would be possible if Germany could control the air. Less than two weeks after Dunkirk, he ordered his generals to prepare Operation Sea Lion, the invasion of Britain. Its first stage was a campaign to secure German air superiority over southern England—a titanic twelve-week struggle that became known as the Battle of Britain. By the numbers, the Luftwaffe, with nearly 1,300 bombers and dive bombers and 1,200 fighters, held a clear advantage.
Before them stood the British Fighter Command with just 600 planes. But Britain had two significant new weapons: radar and the Supermarine Spitfire. Chain Home, a series of 21 radar stations along the Channel coast commissioned in 1938, was at the time the only operational early warning radar system in the world. Although primitive by today’s standards, it could detect inbound aircraft at 150 miles, giving notice of where and when to direct interceptors.
The intensive phase of the battle began on August 8th. Raids involving up to 500 aircraft a day were directed against British fighter airfields and radar stations. By late August, the Luftwaffe had lost more than 600 aircraft while the RAF had lost just 260. But the RAF was rapidly losing experienced pilots, and bombing damage to radar stations and airfields was severely hampering their effectiveness.
With the situation grave, Churchill ordered a counterattack. The RAF launched bombing raids against German industry in early September. An outraged Hitler immediately redirected Luftwaffe attacks from Fighter Command installations to London and other cities. Given temporary respite, the RAF regrouped.
Bolstered by pilots from France and Belgium, they began shooting down German bombers faster than they could be built. With losses beyond calculation and no clear victory in sight, Hitler postponed Operation Sea Lion indefinitely. On September 17th, the Battle of Britain ended. It proved that without command of the skies, you could not win the war.
Hitler had to accept that Britain would remain a belligerent power for the rest of the war, and the Allies retained a base of operations on Germany’s doorstep. But they weren’t the only players looking to go on the offensive. Mussolini had watched his military hero Adolf Hitler battle through Western Europe. The time had come, he thought, to maintain parity with Germany and build the great Mediterranean empire he had promised the Italian people.
Having easily occupied a weak and virtually unarmed Albania in 1939, his sights turned to neighboring Greece. Imagining himself a Julius Caesar, Mussolini proved himself more an impulsive buffoon. Italy’s invasion of Greece was poorly thought through. They expected to walk through Greece, but the Greeks were motivated to repel the invader.
Not only did they stop the Italian invasion at the Albanian border, they drove the Italian forces deep into Albanian territory. It was October 28th, 1940. A stunned Hitler was in Spain when he learned of the Italian attacks. His blueprint for a massive invasion of the Soviet Union in the spring of 1941 relied on peace in the Balkans.
The importance of the Eastern Mediterranean was oil and the Suez Canal. In a single stroke, without warning, Mussolini had destabilized Germany’s entire southern flank. Hitler had no interest in expanding a German empire into the Mediterranean, but he had no choice but to intervene when his Italian ally got into dire trouble. He resisted immediate intervention, watching as what he described as a “pig’s breakfast” unfolded over three long months.
Mussolini’s army, poorly equipped and poorly managed, suffered embarrassment after embarrassment. Then the worst winter in two decades struck, creating a scene like a macabre replay of World War I—men shivering in trenches carved out of ice and frozen mud, thousands receiving amputations due to frostbite. By late February 1941, Greece, which had been neutral, was pleading with Britain for reinforcements, and they obliged. Once Italy drew Greece into the war, it drew the British in.
Once the British were in Greece, Germany’s vital southern interests were in jeopardy. On Sunday, April 6th, 600,000 German troops and 2,000 tanks launched a blitzkrieg assault through Bulgaria. Within three days, the Second Panzer Division rolled into Greece’s second largest city and port, Salonika, surrounding 70,000 Greek soldiers who were forced to surrender. A small Allied force of 60,000, mostly Australians and New Zealanders, stood with what remained of the Greek army against overwhelming odds.
They tried to defend the passes that had been defended in ancient times, like Tempe and Thermopylae. None of it worked. Within three weeks of crossing the Greek border, the Germans were flying the swastika over the Acropolis. From that moment on, Italy became a dependency of Germany.
In September 1940, five Italian divisions had begun a rapid advance into Egypt, brought to a grinding halt in front of British defenses at Mersa Matruh. Despite being severely outnumbered, the British launched a withering counteroffensive six weeks later. By February 1941, they had seized virtually all Italian territory along the North African coastline, including the strategically important Libyan port of Tobruk. But when Britain agreed to support Greece, much of their North African force was reassigned.
Libya was left garrisoned by an underequipped and inexperienced Australian division and a similarly underequipped remnant of the British Army’s Second Armoured Division. Hitler, dismayed by the Italian defeats, dispatched one of his most enterprising generals, Erwin Rommel, along with the newly formed Afrika Korps to stabilize the situation. Rommel wasted little time. On March 24th, he attacked, and within a week he had completely overwhelmed the British forces and driven them back across Libya, toward the ancient city of Tobruk.
When the Allies fell back to the city in early April, they quickly built on what defenses existed. Tobruk was attacked on April 13th. Rommel followed the tried-and-tested method of sending his tanks in first to create a gap for infantry to follow. The tanks met little resistance, but as soon as the infantry advanced, they came under fierce attack.
The Allies had made a strategic decision to let the tanks through and attack only once they were trapped inside the defensive line. Rommel was forced to withdraw with significant losses. He attacked again on April 15th with similar results. The siege began—a siege that would last nine months and place a huge burden on Rommel’s already overstretched resources.
He was fighting on two fronts, trying to keep the British army at bay on the Egyptian frontier while attempting to concentrate his forces to capture Tobruk. Tobruk provided a huge boost to British morale after the devastation of Western Europe. For the first time in the war, the all-conquering German panzer units had been stopped. By holding Tobruk, the Allies prevented Rommel from potentially advancing into Egypt and bought time to build up reinforcements.
As Hitler’s attention turned to a far greater conflict in the east, the Allies would eventually succeed in taking back the territory Rommel had captured. In Hitler’s mind, communism and Judaism were linked as the same evil force threatening Germany. Despite signing a non-aggression pact with the Soviets in 1939, it was never a question of if he would attack Russia, but when. That “when” arrived on June 22nd, 1941, when the German army launched the largest armed invasion in history: Operation Barbarossa.
From that day, no less than 75% of the German army was engaged in the east. This was a war of pure Nazi doctrine, with no restraint. German planners thought in terms of 30 or 40 million people in the Soviet Union dying in the first year of occupation alone—the most unthinkably massive genocidal campaign in history. Barbarossa set the German forces into three distinct army groups.
Army Group North attacked toward Leningrad. Army Group Center toward Moscow. Army Group South moved through the Balkans. In excess of 3 million infantry supported the tanks along a 2,900-kilometer front.
At first, it was a stunning success. Within a week, they had taken Riga. A week later, they forced the surrender of 290,000 Red Army troops and 2,500 tanks at Bialystok. But the Russians withdrew, and the Germans were drawn east over ever-increasing distances.
Extreme conditions began to take a toll on their tanks—fine sands, poor roads, a shortage of replacement engines. Their operational capacity diminished. Hitler had hoped to destroy the Red Army quickly. When the Soviet Union did not collapse, his lightning war fell into disarray.
He fell into a dispute with his generals who wanted to push on to Moscow. Hitler overruled them and directed the main force toward Kiev. The Germans had destroyed most of the Red Army and the Russian air force, but without their panzers at full strength, they had failed to deliver the crucial blow to break Soviet resistance. The spear tip had been cut off.
The shaft remained, but it no longer functioned as a spear. By early October, it was clear that Barbarossa could not deliver the speedy victory Germany had hoped for. As Hitler redirected his army toward Moscow, the Russian winter began to bare its teeth. The front line was about 300 kilometers from Moscow.
The Germans launched Operation Typhoon—a final throw of the dice—beginning again with stunning success. At the Battle of Vyazma, they encircled some 550,000 Soviets. At Briansk, another 100,000 were captured. In just ten days, over one million Russians were removed from the order of battle, 650,000 as prisoners.
But as October moved to November, the weather rapidly deteriorated. Heavy rain turned the battlefield into a quagmire. The German army, so close to total victory, was forced to halt. The Wehrmacht by the end of 1941 was in a desperate state.
When they launched the invasion, they had a numerical superiority of 1. 4 to 1 over the Soviets. By the time they reached Moscow, the Soviets outnumbered them 1. 2 to 1.
On November 15th, the ground froze sufficiently for the tanks to move again. They had just a third of their motor vehicles functioning and their infantry divisions at a third to half strength. They attacked anyway. But the Red Army had used the time well.
Moscow was protected by a triple defensive ring. The biggest enemy was the Russian winter—the coldest of the 20th century. Vehicles had to be heated for hours before use. German soldiers perished in frightening numbers as temperatures plunged below -40.
By early December, with Moscow in plain view, the German push came to an end. On December 5th, Operation Typhoon was halted. German forces were overextended, exhausted, at the end of tenuous supply lines—and they had no idea what was coming. The Soviet offensive began that night, and within days, the Germans began a massive withdrawal around Moscow and Tula, a withdrawal that would prove catastrophic.
The German army had already suffered appalling losses, with over 25% of the initial invasion force killed or wounded. The final toll was over 35,000 killed in action, 128,000 wounded, and thousands unaccounted for. Hitler’s ideological war in Eastern Europe had failed. The implications of that failure would roll on into every operation for the rest of the war.
It was unambiguously the turning point. With Europe in disarray, the rest of the world would explode into total war.
