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[snorts] War ravaging the East since 1937 and Japan's invasion of China reached Europe on the 1st of September 1939 with Germany's invasion of Poland. It became global on the 7th of December 1941 when Japanese aircraft attacked the American naval base at Pearl Harbor. It ended with a new weapon for a new age. This is the history of the greatest of all man-made events. These men are part of that history. They are eyewitnesses to the triumphs and tragedies of the war wherever it was fought.
Their testimony is part of the story of how our world was made With the end of the Spanish Civil War, both of the countries of the Iberian Peninsula were controlled by fascist dictators. Italy had been ruled by such a dictator, Benito Mussolini, for more than 15 years and now the rest of Western Europe, most of Scandinavia, and much of Central and Eastern Europe was flying the swastika. East, the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin, carefully observed the terms of its treaty with Hitler, to whom it shipped supplies of food and other material. But the greatest empire in the world was undefeated and defiant.
The Battle of Britain, their Prime Minister had told them, is about to begin. Defiance, however, does not come cheap. Banker to the world at the beginning of the 20th century, 50 years later, Britain would be the most indebted nation to the tune of $40 Food rationing had been progressively introduced since January 1940. Rationing had been introduced in Germany in August 1939, the month before the invasion of Poland. As the war went on, the vast majority of Britons, including more than half of the manual workers, had their own piece of land, their garden or their allotment. The British reliance on imported food was almost halved. But not everything in the British Isles was as spirited or good-hearted.
The poet T.S. Eliot wrote to a friend, "We are involved in an enormous catastrophe, which includes a war." He may have been thinking of the deliberate policy of misinformation designed to confuse spies and traitors, which spread fear through the population, spawning a whole catalog of invasion alarms in which parachutists, variously dressed as nuns, priests, and policemen featured, not to mention those in sky blue uniforms with transparent parachutes who floated invisibly to earth. As early as May the 12th, the tabloid Sunday Pictorial was asking if the government had considered training golfers in rifle shooting to eliminate stray parachutists.
These scenes, multiplied a hundred times, show how our men have been prepared for the defense of Britain. A German-Swiss resident of the London Borough of Kensington was arrested for puffing on his cigar and pointing the lighted end at the night sky. He was clearly signaling to enemy aircraft. Many stray dogs, less fortunate, were shot on suspicion of carrying messages. On the 23rd of May, Sir Oswald Mosley, who had led the British fascists during the 1930s with some huffing and puffing but little electoral success, was interned. On the 31st, General Ironside, Commander-in-Chief Home Forces, reported "Suspicious men moving at night all over the country." And on July the 2nd, he reported "There is signaling going on all over the place."
But he lamented that no evidence had been found of fifth column activities or weapons of mass destruction. In fact, though many stories from death rays to parachuting nuns circulate to this day, the evidence to support them is as threadbare as evidence for the tooth fairy. Under pressure to form some sort of home defense, the Secretary for War, Anthony Eden, went on the radio on May the 14th to announce the formation of the Local Defense Volunteers or LDV, said by some to stand for look, duck, and vanish. This questionnaire is addressed to civilians who are not in armament factories or in government service. Have you joined the Local Defense Volunteers?
The LDV formed groups associated with social and sporting clubs and factories. By July, 1 and a quarter million men had joined, but they were not well supplied with weapons. When I started to form the Home Guard, which was the LDV, I joined them. I was 15 when I joined We got a bit of this and a bit of that, and then finally you got your rifle. The ones we were given was a Ross rifle. It was a Canadian rifle that only held five rounds. Churchill insisted that the LDV be renamed the Home Guard. Eden was annoyed. He had 1 million LDV armbands printed.
Well, I was at school at Dulwich College and not working very hard because I was spending most of the evenings in the Home Guard as a dispatch rider uh and learning how to smoke and drink and all the rest of the things. Jack White was keen to play his part in the Home Guard, but his application was rejected because born the son of Russian Jews, he was classed as an alien. In the First World War, Jack White had been awarded the highest decoration for valor, the Victoria Cross. He was not classed as an enemy alien or interned. 2,000 aliens living near the coast were rounded up and others followed.
Churchill said that it was necessary to collar the lot. In contradiction of its popular postwar image, the Home Guard was a serious reserve. It fired shots in anger with several kills to its credit in anti-aircraft duties. Its patrols freed regular army units for other work, and it housed, or rather disguised, lethal groups of trained commando-style personnel tasked with murder and mayhem in the event of an invasion. Guard units also provided the enemy in training situations. More than one new recruit reported on being captured by First World War veterans more adept at soldiering than they were.
We did all sorts of classes and things for about a month and fighting against the Home Guard. And people took people thought Home Guard was a joke, but they weren't. I was captured by them twice. And I thought I was a clever soldier. They were on the ball. The plan for Britain's defense, agreed to on June the 12th, drew a line south from Edinburgh to the Medway. Another west from below London to south of Bristol, an area further defined by a number of stop lines. Within these defined areas, anti-tank ditches were dug and concrete pillboxes built, and everyone waited.
Winston Churchill waited with unquenchable optimism. His mother was American. His belief in the onward march of the English-speaking peoples was well documented, and his optimism was sustained not by confidence in British arms, but by the conviction that America, inextinguishable and inexhaustible, would come in. The greatest boost to Churchill's belief in salvation across the Atlantic came in August in one of the key moments of the war. The American Congress would not allow neutrality to be breached by the supply of war material to either side without payment.
Opinion polls registered American support for involvement in the war at a mere 8%. Roosevelt found a way. It was called Lend-Lease. Payment in kind, Britain made over naval bases in her West Indian possessions to the United States. Or payment later. And Britain was obliged to pay. It took 50 years. Churchill called Lend-Lease a long step towards America coming in on our side. Two days after the signing of the Lend-Lease agreement, the 15th of August was Adler Tag, Eagle Day, which the head of the Luftwaffe, Reichsmarschall
Göring, nominated as the start of the critical phase of the Battle of Britain. The German air offensive that sought to achieve control of the skies over southern England preparatory to an invasion. In one respect, the advantage had already moved from Germany to Great Britain. In early 1940, Britain had been producing 256 fighter planes a month. Winston Churchill, recognizing the urgency of improving production, appointed the Anglo-Canadian newspaper proprietor, Lord Beaverbrook, Minister for Aircraft Production. And so I beg all of you, everywhere, to speed the tank. Speed the defenses of Britain.
Under Beaverbrook's management, production for the month of July climbed to 496. An article in Time magazine in 1940 drew attention to his record and presciently noted that this war is a war of machines. It will be won on the assembly line. Importantly, the British assembly line was not just turning out lots of aircraft, but good ones. These were the Hurricanes and Spitfires that would write their names into the history books. Britain deployed other tools that would be vital in the battle ahead. Cryptologists, famously installed at Bletchley Park, a country estate outside of London, decoded Luftwaffe signals that gave warning of planned sorties.
The work of a British meteorologist between the wars was critical in developing the screen of radar stations that was vital to British air defense. His name was Robert Watson-Watt, and it was under his leadership that the design and installation of aircraft detection and tracking stations, called Chain Home, made possible the early warning of incoming squadrons. It was not, of course, all high-tech. The defense of Britain also relied on the keen eyes of 30,000 watchers peering through binoculars at 1,000 posts throughout the country.
Like Britain, Germany had first-rate aircraft, but they were not first-rate for the task ahead. They had been developed to support battlefield operations. Luftwaffe had no heavy bombers, and the feared Stuka was, as we shall see, to prove almost useless. The Luftwaffe's commander, Hermann Göring, had been a Nazi Party faithful from the start. A decorated fighter ace in the First World War, he had been injured in Hitler's abortive attempt to seize power, the so-called Beer Hall Putsch. The medicine Göring took during recovery from those injuries made him a lifelong morphine addict.
His influence with Hitler and on Luftwaffe strategy and spending was substantial. Between the first air raid on July the 10th and the middle of August, the German strategy, essentially Göring's strategy, was to try and draw British fighters On August the 8th, over the English Channel, the RAF lost 16 aircraft, Over the next 3 days, German losses continued to be greater than those of the RAF. And on August the 12th, the focus of the battle shifted. Elsewhere in its empire, Britain was about to fight another action that would conclude with another forced evacuation of her troops. In the early hours of the 3rd of August, 1940, the Italian army crossed the border between Italian East
Africa and British Somaliland. The Italians numbered about 24,000. Opposing them was a British force of about 4,000 troops, mostly soldiers from India and Africa. The Somaliland Camel Corps, battalions from the King's African Rifles, the 3/15 Punjab Regiment, joined during the campaign by a second Indian regiment and a Scottish battalion from the Black Watch. The British had no tanks, armored cars, or anti-tank weapons. The smaller force fought a rearguard action against the advancing Italians until it was taken off by the Royal Navy in the early hours of the 18th of August.
The following day, the Italians moved down the coast to complete their conquest of British Somaliland. They would not stay there long. Of more lasting significance in the history books, the month of August was also the central and most famous month of the Battle of Britain. The Luftwaffe attacked the Royal Air Force directly, targeting airfields and supporting installations. Many of the airfields were in the southeast of England, and the skies over that part of the country came to be known as Hellfire Corner. In that small, vapor trail-laced piece of sky, more fighter pilots died than in the whole of the rest of Britain.
Below them on downs and headland, crowds assembled to cheer each British kill. On the first day of the attack on the RAF, three airfields were damaged and one radar station put out of action. The next day, August the 13th, the Luftwaffe launched its greatest attack of the war to date. It flew 1,485 sorties, damaged airfields, though it mistakenly targeted many that were not fighter bases, and lost more than twice as many aircraft as the RAF. Losses to the fleet of Junkers 87s, the Stukas that so terrorized ground forces, were particularly heavy. The Stuka was a lethal dive bomber, but a cumbersome machine in level flight, both outsped and outmaneuvered by British fighters.
After further losses, the Stuka was withdrawn from the Battle of Britain. And so to Adler Tag, the day that Göring said was the first day of the decisive phase of the battle. The Luftwaffe flew 1,786 sorties against British airfields. It lost 76 of its aircraft. The RAF lost 35. The raw figures are misleading. British losses could to an extent be made up by the repair of damaged aircraft returning to their bases. Damaged German aircraft forced to land in Britain were lost.
Even more tellingly, British pilots who bailed out landed in their own fields and fought again. German pilots went into captivity. More than 900 Luftwaffe pilots who bailed out over Britain were taken prisoner. German aircraft were further disadvantaged by the limited amount of time they could spend over their targets. The best of their fighters, the Messerschmitt 109, had an operational range of only 850 km, much of which was expended flying to and from the combat zone.
Even so, it was, as the Duke of Wellington said of Waterloo, the nearest run thing you ever saw. On August the 18th, British losses, though still smaller than those suffered by the Luftwaffe, were substantial. More than 100 RAF pilots had been killed in a week. A resource that could not be speedily replaced. In one of those strange quirks of fate that seem to be scattered through the narratives of war, the near advantage gained by the Germans on the 18th was not pressed. Both weather and the stresses on the German side forced a four-day pause. It was during this pause on August the 20th that Winston Churchill gave one of his best-remembered speeches.
Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few. That those who fought and won the Battle of Britain were indeed few in number compared to the many who were in their debt cannot be doubted. But they were not few compared to the number of opponents they faced. In most respects, the fight in the skies above England was an even contest. And it was one in which a few of the few dominated the battle. Air aces account for a disproportionate amount of the success. 3 and 1/2% of the RAF's pilots were responsible for 30% of the claimed kills.
The first phase of the battle had been attacks on shipping. The second attacks on the RAF itself. After the pause on August the 24th, the third and decisive phase began. On that night, an off-course Heinkel bomber dropped its bombs in error on an unintended target. These were the first bombs to fall on London. The bombs had been meant for military targets in London's suburbs, but they fell in the center of the city and did some damage. The extent to which this mistake and the British reaction to it determined the future course of the war can be debated. Perhaps what happened would have happened in any case.
Perhaps not. What is sure is that Winston Churchill, convinced that it had been a deliberate attack, ordered Berlin to be bombed the next evening. On August the 25th, British bombers reached Berlin and inflicted minimal property damage. But the Germans were shocked. Hermann Göring had assured them that such a thing could never happen. But it did. It happened again on the night of August the 28th with buildings damaged and civilians killed. Two nights later, a third attack occurred. In Führer Directive 17 of the 1st of August, in which he laid out his plans for the conduct of air and sea warfare against England, Hitler had specified his targets. They did not include civilian targets, but at clause five, he did say, "I reserve to
myself the right to decide on terror attacks as measures of reprisal." He now exercised that right. On September the 4th, he promised, "When the British Air Force drops two or three or 4,000 kg of bombs, then we will in one night drop 150, 200, 300, or 400,000 kg." "When they declare that they will increase their attacks on our cities, then we will raise their cities to the ground. We will stop the handywork of those night pirates, so help me God." The next night, London was attacked and three days later, on September the 7th, 1940, and for 57 consecutive nights thereafter, London was bombed.
This was the final phase of the Battle of Britain. They called it the Blitz. Thanks to the Anderson shelter, we're quite safe. I think he dropped a couple of bombs on us and it shook the shelter like very well. But when I had the four boys talk to me, I was quite contented. So far I was saying Young women in boiler suits wearing tin hats patrolled the streets of the capital blowing whistles and shouting, "Turn that bloody light off!" Londoners took to the shelters and slept in their thousands on the platforms of underground railway stations. There was a lot of looting, which you wouldn't have thought when people went down the shelters just how easy to get broke into. They wouldn't
bother about the raid. Searchlights lit up the night skies and anti-aircraft batteries kept up the tumult of ack-ack against the fleets of bombers overhead. But it was all largely show. The searchlights, some suggested, mainly helped the bombers find their targets. And the anti-aircraft batteries are calculated to have downed one enemy aircraft for every 30,000 shells fired. September the 7th, the night of the first major bombing raid on London, was a high tide in the English Channel. It may have been this, so suitable for invading ships, and possibly other intelligence received, that caused the alarm to be sounded.
Troops standing on the defensive throughout southern England received the codeword warning that the invasion of England was expected within 24 hours. Perhaps surprisingly, at the time of the greatest threat to the realm and king and country, the codeword was the name of a regicide, Cromwell. But the Cromwell alert lapsed and no invasion came. The bombing offensive continued. About 15,000 Londoners were killed during the Blitz and more than a quarter of a million made homeless.
Buildings that were damaged included Wren churches, the Houses of Parliament, and Buckingham Palace, London home of the king and queen. On September the 30th, the Luftwaffe flew its last daylight raid, continuing thereafter to attack by night. The British government commissioned polls to test the mood of the population and found that 80% remained confident of a British victory. The raids grew smaller. The British officially marked the end of October as the conclusion of the Battle of Britain, although London continued to suffer heavily. On November the 14th, the attack on Coventry marked a new phase in the German offensive.
Birmingham, Bristol, Southampton, Sheffield, and Liverpool were all targeted in November, and British civilian deaths for that month exceeded 4 and 1/2 thousand. By now, Britain's Bomber Command was raining equal, if not greater, destruction on German cities, as we shall see in a later episode. The last night of the Blitz on British cities would not be until the middle of May 1941, when Hitler needed all of his strength elsewhere for the invasion of Russia.
A world war will always draw our attention across the map as things of greater or lesser significance occur, all of which are bricks in the same edifice. The autumn of 1940 is, in most histories, the story of the Battle of Britain. But history needs peripheral vision. On September the 6th, 1940, the day before the first major bombing raid on London, King Carol of Romania, a great-grandchild of Queen Victoria, abdicated, leaving the country in the control of another fascist leader, Ion Antonescu. On September the 11th, Hitler sent army and air force reinforcements uncontested into Romania to protect the Ploesti oil fields, the only significant
oil wells in Europe. This also placed the Wehrmacht in a forward base for operations against the Soviet Union. But why was Hitler turning his back on the invasion of Great Britain? Führer Directive number 16 of July the 16th, 1940, setting in motion preparations for a landing in Britain, had stated, "As England, in spite of her hopeless military situation, still shows no signs of willingness to come to terms, I have decided to prepare, and if necessary, to carry out a landing operation against her." "If necessary." How could it not be necessary?
Only 3 days later, in a speech delivered to the Reichstag and broadcast around the world, Hitler said, "From London, I now hear a cry. It's not the cry of the masses people, but rather of politicians, that the war must now all the more be continued." Hitler said, "In this hour, I feel compelled to direct yet another appeal to reason in England." Hitler would have preferred peace terms and the chance to turn to his real objective, expansion eastwards. British defiance denied him.
Hitler well understood the risks of an invasion of the British Isles. Failure would instantly demolish what had been built up through his extraordinary successes since September 1939. The heads of his air force and navy were not confident. There was division among his generals, and Hitler himself was far from sure of success. "On land, I am a hero," he told the commander of the Kriegsmarine. "At sea, I am a coward." There is evidence that the plan for the invasion, Operation Sea Lion, was more a political than a military strategy, a device for strengthening the
peace party in Britain and forcing the enemy to the negotiating table. In a sense, for Hitler at least, a bluff. On the last day of July 1940, Hitler held a meeting at the Berghof, his home near Berchtesgaden in the Bavarian Alps. He was told of the difficulty of obtaining suitable vessels to carry invasion troops across the channel and about the problems of massing troops and equipment. The German navy argued for a postponement of the invasion until May 1941. Hitler postponed the start date, but only until September the 16th, allowing the Luftwaffe time to clear the channel of British warships and the skies over southeast England of British aircraft, repeating what had been the first
condition of Führer Directive 16, that the RAF be so reduced morally and physically that it is unable to deliver any significant attack against the German crossing. As we have seen in the story of the Battle of Britain, that had not happened. Further, during the Battle of Britain, the Luftwaffe had made 21 attacks on Royal Navy torpedo boats operating in the channel. It had managed to sink none of them. Germany had virtually no landing craft and given barely 2 months to assemble a sea-going invasion fleet, was obliged to convert more than 2,000 river barges.
Only about 800 of these were powered. The rest would have to be towed by tugs. When the barges began to be assembled in channel ports, the RAF's Bomber Command was ordered to target them. And about 10% were destroyed at their moorings. When Hitler told his commanders that Operation Sea Lion was indefinitely postponed, he cited the Luftwaffe's failure to obtain air superiority and a general lack of coordination between the branches of the German military. But it is difficult to feel that he ever really believed in the invasion or its chances of success. With the cancellation of Operation Sea Lion, Great Britain was left an unsinkable aircraft carrier off the shores of Western Europe.
On November the 11th, no sirens sounded in London for the first time since July. The RAF had lost 915 aircraft, the Luftwaffe 1,733. Turning his back on the British Isles, Hitler must have hoped or imagined that if not defeated, Britain had at least withdrawn behind her ramparts to bluster on, but not to interfere in his future plans. The danger that he overlooked was that above all else, the Battle of Britain ensured the survival of opposition to the Third Reich. And that opposition was not a small island nation off the coast of the European mainland.
It was an empire. Events in Europe that had changed the continent's political complexion through 1940 now had an unexpected and strategically significant effect on the opposite side of the globe, in Asia. When France fell, its collaborationist regime, the Vichy government headed by Marshal Pétain, was as we have learned, allowed to retain its colonies under the terms of the peace settlement. And one of the jewels in that particular imperial crown was French Indochina, the modern states of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. For expansionist Japan, occupying these territories was tempting, and in the case of Vietnam, simply a matter of walking across the border from occupied China, which in September of 1940 is exactly what she did.
Japan's rationale for invasion, which given there was a war on, was reasonably legitimate, was that the Nationalist Chinese were being supplied through the port of Hai Phong via the Sino-Vietnamese Railway. When the Imperial Japanese Army developed an invasion threat, the Vichy French administration yielded, and on September 22nd, signed an accord which permitted the Japanese to station several thousand troops on Vietnamese territory. At the conference, the Japanese demanded bases in Indochina and got them. Meanwhile, the air raids over China continue. Chungking, the capital, being bombed again and again.
Within a few hours of the treaty being signed, columns from the Imperial Japanese Army moved over the border in three places and advanced on the railhead near Lang Son. The next day, on the 23rd of September, Vichy France protested the breach of the agreement to the Japanese government. On the morning of the 24th, Japanese aircraft attacked French positions on the coast. On the 26th, Japanese forces came ashore south of Hai Phong and moved on the port. By the evening of the 26th, fighting had died down. Japan was allowed, among other concessions, three airfields. When little more than a year later, Japan launched the offensive designed to create the Co-Prosperity Sphere, these
and other air bases would prove critical to providing air support for the Japanese invasions of the British colonies of Malaya and Singapore and of the Dutch East Indies. As well as Asia, the World War in these months reached and flared as fierce fighting in another continent, Africa. On the 23rd of September, a joint British Free French adventure was launched against a Vichy garrison in West Africa. By the 25th, the adventure turned into an embarrassing flop and the forces were withdrawn. A Royal Navy force with General Charles de Gaulle, leader of the Free French on board, ready to appeal to his countrymen, approached Dakar, the
capital of modern Senegal. Leaflets were dropped. Free French aircraft landed, but instead of being welcomed, its crews were taken prisoner. Shore and naval batteries exchanged fire, and de Gaulle declared that he did not want to be responsible for Frenchmen killing Frenchmen. The task force withdrew. The affair had been called, inappropriately, Operation Menace. September of 1940 also saw the start of operations in what was to become the best known and most significant theater of operations on the African continent,
the North African littoral. Italo Balbo, marshal of the Italian Air Force, was one of the architects of Italian fascism and the only leading fascist to oppose both anti-Jewish racial laws and Mussolini's alliance with Germany. He was responsible for planning the invasion of Egypt. On the 28th of June 1940, coming in to land at Tobruk, Balbo and his crew were mistakenly shot down by Italian gunners and killed. Friendly fire was a poor beginning to Italy's North African campaign. On September the 13th, when it had become clear that Hitler was not going to invade Britain, Mussolini ordered the invasion of Egypt.
By the 16th, the Italians had advanced the best part of a 100 km beyond the Libyan border. Their casualties were 3 and 1/2 thousand, but the British, falling back into the desert, had taken only 150 casualties. The British commander, General later Field Marshal Archibald Wavell, had an advantage over his opponents in armor. So, he determined to counterattack and drive the Italians back beyond the Libyan border, placing the crucial port of Tobruk in Allied hands. Wavell's force of 50,000 pushed the Italians out of Egypt. 138,000 prisoners and more than 200 guns fell to the Western Desert Force.
"How many prisoners have you taken?" one British officer asked another. "Oh, several acres, I would think." was the reply. The story of Italy's war lives in the popular mind as a story of defeat, retreat, and surrender. It is an unfair picture. What it fails to recognize is the inferiority of Italy as a fighting machine. One statistic tells the tale. In 1938, Italy's military expenditure was 746 million dollars.
Germany's was 7 billion 415 million. Wavell's force typified the strength of the British Empire. British troops fought side by side with soldiers from far away New Zealand and South Africa and divisions from India. Every Indian who fought under the British flag was a volunteer. Their motives for volunteering were generally practical. Soldiering was a job that fed and clothed and housed them. The soldiers from the Dominions, like New Zealand, were resolutely patriotic. They were fighting for their King George the VI and the mother country. The war would challenge the imperial sentiments of the white Dominions and transform the loyalties of
the Indian troops. Mussolini, frustrated in North Africa by Wavell's motley army, had meanwhile, and in a typically feckless way, turned his attention elsewhere. Renewing the Balkan ambitions that had seen him invade Albania and using that small country as the springboard, Mussolini launched an invasion of Greece on October the 28th. Il Duce had only informed Hitler of his intentions the day before the attack. He met the Führer on the day that Italian troops moved. This was war by vanity.
Greece was neutral. Greece was irrelevant to Hitler's war aims, but Greece and the Balkans could also, Mussolini hoped, boost Italian prestige to match Germany's achievements in the war. Hitler, angered by his ally's rashness, nonetheless offered troops to support the Italian invasion, but Mussolini declined. This was to be an Italian triumph. Greek Prime Minister General Ioannis Metaxas, himself a right-wing dictator, similarly declined Britain's offer of support. Instead, and unaided, he mounted a counterattack against the invading Italians on November the 4th.
Within days, the Italians had been driven back all the way into Albania. The reversal owed much to the conditions, winter, and the terrain, the northern mountains of Epirus. The outcome had been foreseen by the Italian Chief of Staff, Marshal Pietro Badoglio, who resigned when his counsel was ignored by Il Duce. On November the 11th, London's first day without an air raid warning, the Italians suffered another setback of a very different kind. Venerable British Swordfish torpedo bombers, operating off of the carrier HMS Illustrious, attacked the Italian fleet at its moorings in Taranto harbor.
The British cheered the first thing in over a year that had even smelled like a victory. The Italians counted the cost of three badly damaged battleships, one never to put to sea again. And the Japanese naval attaché in Berlin hurried to the scene to take detailed notes of what a carrier-borne attack on a fleet at anchor could do. On December the 4th, 5 weeks after the invasion of Greece, the Italian Under Secretary of State for War, General Ubaldo Soddu, was recommending an armistice. Winter had already frozen military activity with the armies facing each other on what had formerly been Italian territory. In January, Hitler would announce military support for his Axis partner, marching to Italy's aid firstly in
Greece and then in North Africa. Also in January, the British would launch their offensive against the Italians in the Horn of Africa, in Somaliland and in Abyssinia, whose emperor, Haile Selassie, the Italians had chased from his throne. But much greater events were to occur in the year ahead. As 1941 dawned, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt broadcast to the American people. "My friends," he said, "this is not a fireside chat on war. It is a talk on national security." He told the international audience, for many were listening around the world on shortwave radios, "We must be the great arsenal of democracy."
And he concluded, "We have no excuse for defeatism. We have every good reason for hope. Hope for peace, yes, and hope for the defense of our civilization and for the building of a better civilization in the future." In the next episode of The Price of Empire, it is the year 1941, the year that was to transform the war and the world in a way that few single years can be said to have affected the narrative of history. Germany would invade the Soviet Union and Japan would force the United States into the war at a place called Pearl Harbor.
