Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

The Battle of Poland, September 1939

The Sitzkrieg, September 1939-May 1940

GERMAN MOBILIZATION AND THE ALLIED ECONOMIC BLOCKADE

THE SOVIET BORDERLANDS, SEPTEMBER 1939-APRIL 1940

THE GERMAN ATTACK ON DENMARK AND NORWAY, APRIL 1940

The Fall of France (May-June 1940) and the Vichy Regime

The Battle of Britain, July-October 1940

The Mediterranean and Eastern Europe, June 1940-June 1941

American Neutrality and Aid to Britain

The Nazi Attack on Soviet Russia, 1941-1942

Introduction

The history of the Second World War is a very complex one. Even now, after hundreds of volumes and thousands of documents have been published, many points are not clear, and interpretations of numerous events are hotly disputed. The magnitude of the war itself would contribute to such disputes. It lasted exactly six years, from the German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939 to the Japanese surrender on September 2, 1945. During that period it was fought on every continent and on every sea, in the heights of the atmosphere and beneath the surface of the ocean, and fought with such destruction of property and lives as had never been witnessed before.

The total nature of the Second World War can be seen from the fact that deaths of civilians exceeded deaths of combatants and that many of both were killed without any military justification, as victims of sheer sadism and brutality, largely through cold-blooded savagery by Germans, and, to a lesser extent, by Japanese and Russians, although British and American attacks from the air on civilian populations and on non-military targets contributed to the total. The distinctions between civilians and military personnel and between neutrals and combatants, which had been blurred in the First World War, were almost completely lost in the second. This is clear from a few figures. The number of civilians killed reached 17 millions, of which 5,400,000 were Polish; while Poland had less than 100,000 soldiers killed or missing in the Battle of Poland in 1939, Polish civilians to the number of 3,900,000 were executed, or murdered in the ghetto, subsequently.

The armies which began to move in September 1939 had no new weapons which had not been possessed by the armies of 1918. They still used infiltration tactics, with columns of tanks, strafing airplanes, and infantrymen moving in trucks, but the proportions of these and the ways in which they cooperated with one another had been greatly modified. Weapons for defense were also much as they had been at the end of the previous war, but, as we shall see, they were not prepared in proper amounts nor were they used in proper fashions. These defensive weapons

included antitank guns, antiaircraft guns with controlled fire, minefields, mobile artillery on caterpillar tracks, trenches, and defense in depth.

Germany used the offensive weapons we have mentioned in the new fashion, while Poland in 1939, Norway, the Low Countries, and France in 1940, the Balkan countries and the Soviet Union in 1941 did not use the available defensive tactics properly. As a result, Hitler advanced from one astounding victory to another. In the course of 1942 and 1943, new weapons created by democratic science and new tactics learned in Russia, in North Africa, and on the oceans of the world made it possible to stop the authoritarian advance and to reverse the direction of the tide. In 1944 and 1945 the returning tide of Anglo-American and Soviet power overwhelmed Italy, Germany, and Japan with the superior quality and the superior quantities of their equipment and men. Thus the war divides itself, quite naturally, into three parts: (1) the Axis advance covering 1939, 1940, and 1941; (2) the balance of forces in 1942; and (3) the Axis retreat in 1943, 1944, and 1945.

The Germans were able to advance in the period 1939-1941 because they had sufficient military resources, and used them in an effective way. The chief reason they had sufficient military resources was not based, as is so often believed, on the fact that Germany was highly mobilized for war, but on other factors. In the first place, Hitler’s economic revolution in Germany had reduced financial considerations to a point where they played no role in economic or political decisions. When decisions were made, on other grounds, money was provided, through completely unorthodox methods of finance, to carry them out. In France and England, on the other hand, orthodox financial principles, especially balanced budgets and stable exchange rates, played a major role in all decisions and was one of the chief reasons why these countries did not mobilize in March 1936 or in September 1938 or why, having mobilized in 1939 and 1940, they had totally inadequate numbers of airplanes, tanks, antitank guns, and motorized transportation.

There was another reason for the military inadequacy of the Western Powers in 1939. This, of even greater significance than the influence of orthodox finance, arose from conflicts of military theories in the period 1919-1939. Several violently conflicting theories held the stage during the twenty years of armistice, and paralyzed the minds of military men to the point where they were unable to provide consistent advice on which politicians could base their decisions. In Germany, on the other hand, decisions (not necessarily correct ones) were made, and action could go on.

One theoretical dispute raged around the role of tanks in combat. The tank had been invented to protect advancing infantry against machine-gun fire by its ability to put machine guns out of action. Accordingly, tanks were originally scattered among the infantry, to advance with it, both moving at a rate of speed no greater than that of a man on foot, consolidating the ground, yard by yard, as both moved forward. This view of the tactical function of tanks continued to be held in high military circles in France and England until too late in 1940. It was sharply challenged, even a decade earlier, by those who insisted that tanks should be organized in distinct units (armored brigades or divisions) and should be used, without close infantry support, moving as perpendicular columns rather than in parallel lines against the defensive formations, and should seek to penetrate through these formations at high speed and without consolidating the ground covered, in order to fan out on the rear of the defensive formations to disrupt their supplies, communications, and reserves. According to these new ideas, the breakthrough made by such an armored column could be exploited and the ground consolidated by motorized infantry, following the armored division in trucks and dismounting to occupy areas where this would be most useful.

In France, the new theory of armored warfare was advocated most vigorously by Colonel Charles de Gaulle. It was generally rejected by his superior officers, so that De Gaulle was still a colonel in 1940. This theory was, however, accepted in the German Army, notably by Heinz Guderian in 1934, and was used very effectively against the Poles in 1939 and against the Western Front in 1940.

At full strength a German panzer (armored) division had two regiments of tanks and two regiments of motorized infantry plus various specialized companies. This gave it a total of 14,000 men with 250 tanks and about 3,000 motorized vehicles. In September 1939, Germany had six of these panzer divisions with a total of 1,650 tanks of which one-third were 18-ton models with a 37-mm. gun (Mark III), while two-thirds were 10-ton models (Mark II). By May 1940, when the attack was made in the west, there were 10 armored divisions with a total of 2,000 tanks, some of which were the new Mark IV model, a 23-ton conveyance carrying a 75-mm. gun. No major increase occurred in the next year, but the number of armored divisions was doubled by splitting the ten which existed in May 1940. Thus in June 1941, when Germany attacked Russia, it had 20 armored divisions with a total of 3,000 tanks, of which several hundred were Mark IV but 1,000 were still Mark II. In opposition to these, Poland had only a handful of tanks in 1939, France had over 3,000 in May 1940, and the Soviet Union had, in June 1941, about 15,000 scattered tanks, almost all light or obsolescent models.