The German invasion of Poland, 1 September 1939

The Second World War began at dawn on Friday 1 September 1939,

when Adolf Hitler launched his invasion of Poland. The Poles fought
bravely, but they were heavily outnumbered in both men and
machines, and especially in the air. Britain and France declared war
on Germany on 3 September 1939, but gave no real assistance to
Poland. Two weeks later, Stalin invaded eastern Poland, and on 27
September Warsaw surrendered. Organised Polish resistance ceased
after another week’s fighting. Poland was divided up between Hitler
and Stalin.

In Poland the Nazis unleashed a reign of terror that was eventually to claim
six million victims, half of whom were Polish Jews murdered in
extermination camps. The Soviet regime was no less harsh. In March and
April 1940, Stalin ordered the murder of over 20,000 Polish officers and
others who had been captured in September 1939. Tens of thousands of
Poles were also forcibly deported to Siberia. By May 1945, and despite his
promises to Churchill and Roosevelt, Stalin had installed a subservient
communist regime in Poland. Back in 1939, Poland’s then-leader Marshal
Eduard Smigly-Rydz had warned, “With the Germans we risk losing our
liberty, but with the Russians we lose our soul”.

Germans launch offensive in the West, 10 May 1940

The German unwillingness to limit their war to the conquest of

Poland and to launch meaningful peace talks meant that the Second
World War broadened out. Hitler was eager to profit from the ability
Poland’s defeat offered for Germany to fight on only one front and
argued that Germany enjoyed a window of opportunity thanks to
being more prepared for war than Britain or France.

Bad weather in the severe winter of 1939–40, caution on the part of

the German High Command, and the need for preparations, delayed
the attack until May 1940. On 10 May, the Germans attacked Belgium
and the Netherlands, both hitherto neutral, and invaded France. They
successfully gained and used the initiative, while the French and
British suffered from a failure to prepare for fluid defence in depth.

Germany’s success in its subsequent seven-week campaign

transformed the strategic situation in Europe. Victory led Hitler to a
conviction of his own ineluctable success, and that of the
Wehrmacht under his leadership. Thanks to this victory, the Germans
would clearly be able to fight on, and any successful challenge to
them would now have to overcome German dominance of Western
Europe.

The Battle of Britain, 25 July, 1940

After France’s surrender in June 1940, Churchill told the British

people, “Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or
lose the war”. To mount a successful invasion, the Germans had to
gain air superiority. The first phase of the battle began on 10 July
with Luftwaffe attacks on shipping in the Channel. The following
month, RAF Fighter Command airfields and aircraft factories came
under attack. Under the dynamic direction of Lord Beaverbrook,
production of Spitfire and Hurricane fighters increased, and despite
its losses in pilots and planes, the RAF was never as seriously
weakened as the Germans supposed.

The Blitz, 29 December 1940

The Blitz – an abbreviation of the word Blitzkrieg (lightning war) –

was the name given to the German air attacks on Britain between 7
September 1940 and 16 May 1941. London was bombed by accident
on the night of 24 August 1940, and the following night Churchill
ordered an attack on Berlin.

This prompted the Germans to shift their main effort from attacking
RAF airfields to bombing Britain’s towns and cities. 7 September
1940, ‘Black Saturday’, saw the beginning of the first major attacks
on London. The capital was bombed for 57 consecutive nights, when
over 13,650 tons of high explosive and 12,586 incendiary canisters
were dropped by the Luftwaffe.

Beginning with Coventry on 14 November 1940, the Germans also

began bombing other cities and towns while still keeping up attacks
on London. Over 43,000 civilians were killed in the Blitz and much
material damage was done, but British morale remained unbroken
and Britain’s capacity to wage war was unimpaired. In Winston
Churchill’s words, Hitler had tried and failed “To break our famous
island race by a process of indiscriminate slaughter and destruction”.

Operation Barbarossa: the German invasion of Russia, June 1941

Since the 1920s, Hitler had seen Russia, with its immense natural
resources, as the principal target for conquest and expansion. It
would provide, he believed, the necessary ‘Lebensraum’, or living
space, for the German people. And by conquering Russia, Hitler
would also destroy the “Jewish pestilential creed of Bolshevism”. His
non-aggression pact with Stalin in August 1939 he regarded as a
mere temporary expedient.

Barely a month after the fall of France, and while the Battle of Britain
was being fought, Hitler started planning for the Blitzkrieg campaign
against Russia, which began on 22 June 1941. Despite repeated
warnings, Stalin was taken by surprise, and for the first few months
the Germans achieved spectacular victories, capturing huge swathes
of land and hundreds of thousands of prisoners. But they failed to
take Moscow or Leningrad before winter set in.

On 5/6 December, the Red Army launched a counter-offensive which

removed the immediate threat to the Soviet capital. It also brought
the German high command to the brink of a catastrophic military
crisis. Hitler stepped in and took personal command. His intervention
was decisive and he later boasted, “That we overcame this winter
and are today in a position again to proceed victoriously… is solely
attributable to the bravery of the soldiers at the front and my firm will
to hold out…”

Pearl Harbor, 7 December 1941

After Japan’s occupation of French Indo-China in July 1941,

US President Franklin D Roosevelt, followed by Britain and the
Netherlands, ordered the freezing of Japanese assets. Many
Japanese now believed that there was no alternative between
economic ruin and going to war with the United States and the
European colonial powers. In October 1941, a hardline government
under General Hideki Tojo came to power, and preparations were
made to deliver a devastating blow against the Americans.

On 7 December 1941, “a date which will live in infamy,” Japanese carrier-

borne aircraft attacked the US Pacific fleet at its base at Pearl Harbor in
the Hawaiian Islands. Despite warnings, the Americans were caught
completely by surprise. Eight battleships were put out of action, and seven
other warships damaged or lost. Over 2,500 Americans were killed, while
the Japanese lost only 29 planes. Crucially, the American carriers were at
sea and so escaped, and the base itself was not put out of action. The
following day Congress declared war on Japan, which had also attacked
British and Dutch colonial possessions.

On 11 December, Hitler declared war on the United States, and the war
was now truly a global conflict. The Japanese were initially victorious
everywhere, but Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto warned: “We can run wild for
six months or a year, but after that I have utterly no confidence”.

The fall of Singapore, 15 February 1942

The Japanese began their invasion of Malaya on 8 December 1941,

and very soon the British and empire defenders were in full retreat.
Told previously that the Japanese were no match for European
troops, morale among the defending forces slumped as General
Tomoyuki Yamashita’s forces moved swiftly southwards towards
Singapore.

The sinking of the British capital ships HMS Prince of

Wales and Repulse by Japanese aircraft also contributed to the
decline in morale, and panic began to set in among the civil
population and the fighting troops. British commander Lieutenant
General Arthur Percival had hoped to make a stand at Johore, but
was forced to withdraw to Singapore Island. The Japanese landed
there on 8/9 February, and before long the defence collapsed. To
avoid further bloodshed, and with his water supply gone, Percival
surrendered on 15 February.

Churchill described the surrender as, “the worst disaster… in British

military history”. Over 130,000 British and empire troops surrendered
to a much smaller Japanese force, which only suffered 9,824 battle
casualties during the 70-day campaign. Singapore was not only a
humiliating military defeat, but also a tremendous blow to the
prestige of the ‘white man’ throughout Asia.

Midway, 4 June 1942

For six months after Pearl Harbor, just as Admiral Yamamoto

predicted, Japanese forces carried all before them, capturing Hong
Kong, Malaya, the Philippines and the Dutch East Indies. In May
1942, in an attempt to consolidate their grip on their new conquests,
the Japanese sought to eliminate the United States as a strategic
Pacific power.
Smoking hulk of the Japanese heavy cruiser Mikuma, which was destroyed
during the battle of Midway. (Photo by Time Life Pictures/US Navy/The LIFE
Picture Collection via Getty Images)

This would be done by luring into a trap the US navy carriers that had
escaped Pearl Harbor, while at the same time the Japanese would
occupy the Midway atoll in preparation for further attacks. The loss
of the carriers would, the Japanese hoped, force the Americans to
the negotiating table. In the event, it was the Americans who
inflicted a crushing defeat on the Japanese. Their codebreakers were
able to determine the location and date of the Japanese attack. This
enabled US admiral Chester Nimitz to organise a trap of his own.

During the ensuing battle the Japanese suffered the loss of four
carriers, one heavy cruiser and 248 aircraft, while American losses
totalled one carrier, one destroyer and 98 planes. By their victory at
Midway, the turning point of the Pacific war, the Americans were
able to seize the strategic initiative from the Japanese, who had
suffered irreplaceable losses. Admiral Nimitz described the battle’s
success as “Essentially a victory of intelligence”, while President
Roosevelt called it “Our most important victory in 1942… there we
stopped the Japanese offensive.”

Alamein, 25 October 1942

The North African campaign began in September 1940, and for the
next two years the fighting was marked by a succession of Allied and
Axis advances and retreats. In the summer of 1942, the Axis forces
under ‘Desert Fox’ field marshal, Erwin Rommel, looked poised to
take Cairo and advance on the Suez Canal.

The British Middle East commander General Claude Auchinleck took

personal command of the defending Eighth Army and halted the
retreat at the strong defensive line at El Alamein. But Churchill,
dissatisfied with Auchinleck, replaced him in August with General
Harold Alexander, while Lieutenant -General Bernard Montgomery
took over command of the Eighth Army.

Montgomery immediately began to build up an enormous superiority

in men and equipment, finally launching his offensive at Alamein on
23 October 1942. By the beginning of November, the Axis forces
were in full retreat, although final victory in North Africa was not
achieved until May 1943.

Although Montgomery has been criticised for being too cautious in

exploiting his success at Alamein, it made him a household name
and he became Britain’s most popular general of the war. Churchill
hailed Alamein as a “Glorious and decisive victory… the bright gleam
has caught the helmets of our soldiers, and warmed and cheered all
our hearts”.

Stalingrad, February 1943

The battle for Stalingrad began in late August 1942, and by

12 September, German troops of the Sixth and Fourth Panzer Armies
had reached the city’s suburbs. Bearing the name of Russia’s leader,
Stalingrad had a symbolic significance as well as a strategic one.

Throughout September and October, under General Vassili Chuikov,

the city’s defenders contested every yard of ground of the devastated
city. The Red Army’s stubborn defence allowed General Georgi
Zhukov time to prepare a counterattack that was launched on
19 November 1942, and which soon trapped the Sixth Army
commanded by General Friederich Paulus.

Hitler, wrongly assured by Göring that the Luftwaffe could supply

Stalingrad by air, ordered Paulus to hold out. He also ordered Field
Marshal Erich Manstein to break through and relieve the beleaguered
Sixth Army. Manstein was unsuccessful, and on 31 January 1943
Paulus capitulated. Of the 91,000 German troops who went into
captivity, less than 6,000 returned home after the war. Stalingrad
was one of Germany’s greatest defeats, and it effectively marked the
end of Hitler’s dreams of an empire in the east.

Germans launch battle of Kursk,

The last major German offensive on the Eastern Front sought to

exploit the opportunities provided by a major German salient. They
sought to break through the flanks of the salient and to achieve an
encirclement triumph to match the Soviet success at Stalingrad the
previous winter.

Still engaging in strategic wishful thinking, Hitler saw this as a battle

of annihilation in which superior will would prevail. He hoped that
victory would undermine the Allied coalition, by lessening western
confidence in the likelihood of Soviet victory and increasing Soviet
demands for a second front in France.

The Germans were outnumbered by the Soviets who had prepared a

defence system that thwarted the German tank offensive. After
heavy losses and only modest gains, Hitler cancelled the operation
that had cost him much strength. Having stopped the Germans, the
Soviets were now in a position to counterattack. The Germans were
now to be driven back in a near-continuous process.
By Professor Jeremy Black

D-Day, Operation Overlord, 6 June 1944

Operation Overlord, the invasion and liberation of north-west Europe,

began on D-Day, 6 June 1944. That day, under the overall command
of US General Dwight Eisenhower, British, Canadian and American
troops, supported by the Allied navies and air forces, came ashore on
the coast of Normandy. By the end of the day, 158,000 men, including
airborne troops, had landed. Initially, except on the American Omaha
beach, German resistance was unexpectedly light. But it soon
stiffened and the Allied breakout from the beachhead area was
painfully slow.
Troops from the 48th Royal Marines at Saint-Aubin-sur-mer on Juno Beach,
Normandy, France, during the D-Day landings, 6 June 1944. (Photo by
Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

The fierceness of the fighting can be gauged by the fact that in

Normandy British infantry battalions were suffering the same
percentage casualty rates as they had on the Western Front in 1914–
1918. Eventually the breakout was achieved, and on 25 August,
Paris was liberated. Brussels followed on 3 September. Hopes that
the war might be won in 1944 were dashed by the Allied failure at
Arnhem and the unexpected German offensive in the Ardennes in
December. It was not until 4 May 1945 that the German forces in
north-west Europe surrendered to Montgomery at his HQ on Lüneburg
Heath.
By Terry Charman

23–26 October 1944: Battle of Leyte Gulf

The Americans used their naval and air superiority, already strong
and rapidly growing, to mount a reconquest of the Philippines from
October 1944. That operation helped ensure a naval battle: that of
Leyte Gulf of 23–26 October, the largest naval battle of the war and
one (or rather a series of engagements) that secured American
maritime superiority in the western Pacific.

The availability of oil helped determine Japanese naval dispositions

and, with carrier formations based in home waters and the battle
force based just south of Singapore, any American movement against
the Philippines presented a very serious problem for Japan. There
was growing pessimism in Japan and losing honourably became a
goal for at least some Japanese naval leaders. The head of the Naval
Operations Section asked on 18 October 1944 that the fleet be
afforded “a fitting place to die” and “the chance to bloom as flowers
of death”.

With Operation Sho-Go (Victory Operation) the Japanese sought to

intervene by luring the American carrier fleet away, employing their
own carriers as bait, and then using two naval striking forces (under
Vice-Admirals Kurita and Kiyohide respectively) to attack the
vulnerable American landing fleet. This overly complex scheme
posed serious problems for the ability of American admirals to read
the battle and control the tempo of the battle, and, as at Midway, for
their Japanese counterparts in following the plan.

In a crisis for the American operation, one of the strike forces was
able to approach the landing area and was superior to the American
warships. However, instead of persisting, the strike force retired; its
exhausted commander, Kurita, lacking knowledge of the local
situation, not least due to the difficulties of identifying enemy
surface ships. The net effect of the battle was the loss of four
Japanese carriers, three battleships including the Musashi, 10
cruisers, other warships and many aircraft.
By Professor Jeremy Black

15

Yalta: The Big Three, February 1945

Between June 1940 and June 1941, Britain stood alone against
Hitler. But then, after the German invasion of Russia and the
Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, she gained two powerful allies. For
the next four years Churchill did his utmost to foster ‘The Grand
Alliance’ against the Nazis. He even earned the grudging admiration
of Nazi propaganda chief Dr Goebbels who said, “…I can feel only
respect for this man, for whom no humiliation is too base and no
trouble too great when the victory of the Allies is at stake”.

Churchill conferred with both Roosevelt and Stalin to hammer out strategy
and to discuss postwar arrangements. The three men congregated for the
first time at Tehran in November 1943. There, and again at their
last meeting at Yalta, Churchill was conscious of the fact that Britain,
exhausted by her war effort, was now very much the junior partner of the
two emerging superpowers.

 Opinion | Did Britain really stand alone in WW2?

At Yalta, the postwar division of Germany was agreed upon as was

the decision to bring war criminals to trial. The future constitution of
the United Nations was discussed, and Stalin undertook to enter the
war against Japan after Germany had been defeated. But the future
of eastern Europe remained a stumbling block. With the Red Army in
occupation, the Soviet dictator was disinclined to listen to the views
of his two allies.
By Terry Charman

16

The bombing of Dresden, 13/14 February 1945

Dresden under incendiary bomb attack

At Yalta, an Allied plan to bomb the hitherto untouched city of

Dresden was discussed. The reason for attacking the city was due
principally to its strategic importance as a communications centre in
the rear of the German retreat that followed the Soviet winter
offensive of January 1945. It was also believed that Dresden might
be used as an alternative to Berlin as the Reich capital.

The attack was part of a plan codenamed ‘Thunderclap’, designed to

convince the Germans that the war was lost. It was drawn up in
January 1945, when Hitler’s Ardennes offensive, V2 rocket attacks
on Britain and the deployment of snorkel-equipped U-boats clearly
demonstrated that Germany was still capable of offering stubborn
resistance. Strategic bombing attacks had previously failed to break
Germany, although they had proved valuable in reducing its capacity
to wage war.

Now, on the night of 13/14 February 1945, Dresden was attacked by

800 RAF bombers, followed by 400 bombers of the United States
Army Air Force. The bombing created a firestorm that destroyed
1,600 acres of Dresden. Even today it is still uncertain as to how
many died and estimates have ranged from 25,000 to 135,000. Most
authorities now put the death toll at around 35,000. The scale of
destruction, the enormous death toll, and its timing at such a late
stage in the war, have all ensured that the bombing of Dresden still
remains highly controversial.
By Terry Charman

Listen: Sinclair McKay explores the bombing of Dresden, one of the

most controversial Allied actions of the Second World War, on
this episode of the HistoryExtra podcast:

17

The liberation of Bergen-Belsen, 17 April 1945

Bodies of dead prisoners at the newly liberated Belsen concentration

camp

Bergen-Belsen concentration camp was liberated by the British

Army on 15 April 1945. The photographs, newsreel films and Richard
Dimbleby’s moving BBC broadcast from the camp sent a shockwave
of horror and revulsion through Britain. Stories about concentration
camps and the Nazi persecution and extermination of the Jews had
been circulating since 1933, but this was the first time that the
British public were faced with the reality of Hitler’s Final Solution of
the Jewish Question – the Holocaust.

Even today it is not known for certain when the order to set about
systematic extermination of European Jewry was given. But by
December 1941, the first extermination camp at Chelmno in German-
occupied Poland was in operation, while mass shootings of Soviet
Jews had begun in June.

On 20 January 1942, a meeting of Nazi bureaucrats took place at

Wannsee, near Berlin, to discuss the technicalities of the Final
Solution. It is estimated that nearly six million Jews were murdered
by the Nazis and their collaborators, over 1.1 million in the gas
chambers of Auschwitz, the largest extermination camp in German-
occupied Poland. During the Second World War, Hitler’s racial
policies also claimed many millions of non-Jewish victims, including
Soviet prisoners of war, those with mental and physical disabilities,
gypsies (Roma and Sinti), homosexuals and Jehovah’s Witnesses.
The future Archbishop of Canterbury Robert Runcie saw Belsen just
after it was liberated. Years later he said,“ A war that closed down
Belsen was a war worth fighting”.
By Terry Charman

Learn more about the horrors of the Holocaust and those responsible:

 12 things you need to know about Anne Frank and her diary

 Forgotten trials: the other side of Nuremberg

 Experiments in evil: the shocking efforts to understand the atrocities

of the Holocaust

 Laurence Rees on the perpetrators of the Holocaust: “What they told

us was, at the time, they felt it was the right thing to do”

18

VE Day, 8 May 1945

On the afternoon of 8 May 1945, the British prime minister Winston

Churchill made the radio announcement that the world had long
been waiting for. “Yesterday morning,” he declared, “at 2.41 a.m., at
General Eisenhower’s headquarters, General Jodl, the representative
of the German High Command, and Grand Admiral Dönitz, the
designated head of the German State, signed the act of unconditional
surrender of all German land, sea and air forces in Europe.” After
nearly six years, the war in Europe was finally over.

 What events led to VE Day?

But while VE Day marked the end of the Second World War in
Europe, fighting in the far east would continue for another three-and-
a-half months. As a consequence, there was always a slightly solemn
undercurrent to the celebrations of VE Day. Japan was not finally
defeated until after the atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima and
Nagasaki in August 1945…
By Terry Charman

19

Nagasaki, 9 August 1945

On 2 August 1939, Albert Einstein wrote a letter to President

Roosevelt alerting him to the military potential of splitting the atom.
Fears that German scientists might be working on an atomic bomb,
prompted the Americans and British to set up the Manhattan Project
to develop their own atomic weapon. It was successfully tested in
the desert near Alamogordo in New Mexico on 16 July 1945 and the
news was flashed to Roosevelt’s successor Harry Truman, who was
meeting Churchill and Stalin at Potsdam. Although the bomb had
been conceived with Germany as the target, it was now seen as both
a way of quickly ending the war with Japan, and as a lever to apply
political pressure on the Russians.

A dense column of smoke rises into the air over the Japanese industrial
port of Nagasaki, the result of an atomic bomb. (Courtesy of the National
Archives/Newsmakers via Getty Images)
Although the Japanese were warned that if they carried on fighting
their homeland would face “utter devastation”, they continued to
resist with their usual fanaticism. Thus, the first atomic bomb to be
used militarily, codenamed Little Boy, was dropped on Hiroshima on
6 August 1945.

An estimated 78,000 people died and 90,000 others were seriously

injured. Three days later a second bomb, Fat Man, was dropped on
Nagasaki causing a similar loss of life.
By Terry Charman

20

Japan surrenders, 2 September 1945

The dropping of the atomic bombs brought about the quick

acceptance of Allied terms and Japan surrendered on 14 August
1945. Japan publicly announced its surrender on 15 August 1945.
This day has since been commemorated as Victory over Japan – or
‘VJ’ – Day.

But the official surrender documents were not signed until 2

September, which is considered VJ Day in the USA. The formal
surrender took place on USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay on 2 September
1945, six years and one day after the Germans invaded Poland. The
Second World War was officially over.