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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 When German troops invaded Poland, they fired the first shots of Hitler's rise to power. His conquests from 1933 to 1939 had been achieved without his armed forces going into action. But this did not mean that the German military was unprepared for war. On the 17th of July 1936, a brutal civil war erupted in Spain. The ancient kingdom, once the hub of the world's most powerful empire, had long been in decline. The rise of the left and the formation of an effective popular front government were challenges that the traditional power bases of aristocracy,
army, and church could not ignore. History calls the left the Republican and the right the Nationalist forces. The Republicans received support from the Soviet Union and the participation of foreign volunteers in the International Brigades. The Nationalists, with General Francisco Franco emerging as their leader, received military assistance from both Italy and Germany. Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, head of the Luftwaffe, the German Air Force, saw the advantages in training my young pilots. And General von Reichenau, who would command armies in Poland and Russia, said that 2 years in the conflict had
been worth more than 10 years of peacetime training to our yet immature Wehrmacht. Barcelona fell to Franco on January the 26th, 1939. In February, his regime was recognized by Britain and France. Adolf Hitler could welcome home victorious soldiers, sailors, and airmen and turn his thoughts towards the next step in his plan for the Thousand-Year Reich. Hitler's ally, Benito Mussolini, Duke J of Italy, had also bloodied his troops in Spain. Impatient to prove not just his value to the fascist alliance, but also his position as its senior leader, he had been in power in Italy for 10 years before Hitler's rise,
Mussolini was first to initiate further military action. On April the 7th, 1939, he invaded Albania, then and now the poorest country in Europe. The campaign lasted 5 days. His 100,000 soldiers quickly overcame Albania's 15,000-man army. The Albanian Parliament voted for union with Italy, giving Mussolini vital control over the Adriatic Sea. Albania, the little Balkan country whose invasion by Italy on Good Friday shook the world. The details are too familiar to need retelling, but Movietone's pictures of King Zog's wedding with Queen Geraldine add light and shade to the story.
Observe King The acquisition of a springboard for further empire-building in the Balkans and into Greece was to lead Mussolini, and in order to save his Italian ally from disaster, Hitler dangerously astray in the years ahead. But for the moment, Adolf Hitler had his gaze fixed on a more glittering prize than impoverished Albania. Hitler's political philosophy is well documented. From Mein Kampf from 1923 through all of his speeches whilst in office, there is a consistency. Hitler never spoke about going west to regain Alsace and Lorraine. He never spoke about going south to mop up the German-speaking regions of Switzerland or Italy. He only ever spoke about going east. That was his destiny. That was
Germany's destiny. And east was Poland, the Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia. Poland owed its unhappy history to its position as a buffer between Slavic Russia and the Germanic lands. As a state, Poland could trace its history back to the 10th century, but it had ceased to exist as an independent polity in 1795, not returning to nationhood until reformed as part of the peace settlement of 1919. That settlement had stripped Germany of territory, effectively disenfranchising German-speaking communities. But any attempt at grabbing back land and people posed a problem for Hitler. Would the Soviet Union stand idly by?
Revolutionary Russia had lost territory in the peace it made with Germany in 1918. 1919 made that territory Polish, and attempts to reclaim it had been frustrated as recently as 1920 when Polish forces had beaten back a Soviet invasion. The Russians sued for peace, and Hitler could suppose that the USSR, stronger and better equipped now, was hungry for revenge as well as territory. So, in a diplomatic masterstroke, he conceived a plan for the partition of Poland and an alliance with the Soviet Union. On August the 20th, 1939, Hitler sent a telegram to the Soviet leader, Joseph Stalin. "Dear Mr. Stalin," it began, and proposed a treaty.
The reply, addressed to "Chancellor of Germany, A. Hitler," invited the German foreign minister to Moscow. And "Marvelous!" Hitler said, "I have the world in my pocket." We have reached the serious events of the week. Von Ribbentrop leaving Berlin for Moscow ushers in a new incomprehensible chapter in German diplomacy. Where is the anti-Comintern The non-aggression pact, named for the foreign ministers of the two nations, Molotov and von Ribbentrop, and binding for 10 years, was signed between Germany and the USSR on August the 24th, 1939. Poland's fate, and as it transpired, the issue of war or peace, was settled by a secret protocol written into the pact.
It said, "In the event of a territorial and political rearrangement of the areas belonging to the Polish state, the spheres of influence of Germany and the USSR shall be bounded approximately by the line of the rivers Narew, Vistula, and San. The question of whether the interests of both parties make desirable the maintenance of an independent Polish state can only be definitely determined in the course of further political developments." So, Germany would take the Polish lands west of the line of the Vistula, the Soviet Union those to the east. The British historian, Michael Burleigh, has a vivid description of this political settlement.
Poland, he says, was crucified between two thieves. One of the thieves had already made his expectations of the invasion clear. On August 22nd, Hitler had told his generals to send "My Death's Head formations with orders to kill without pity or mercy all men, women, and children of Polish descent or language. Only in this way," Hitler said, "can we obtain the living space we need." Hitler had sought with the devil as an understandable strategic expedient. But why had Stalin entered into a treaty with a fascist dictator who was murdering his communist opponents?
Stalin signed on August the 24th because events far away had persuaded him that he could join in the obliteration of Poland without risk from elsewhere in his empire. To understand why, we must turn our attention to a distant place where skirmishes involving Mongolian cavalry were threatening full-scale conflict. On the borders of Manchukuo, a puppet state ruled by Kangteh, ex-emperor of China, there's been bloodshed and clashes between Japanese troops and the forces of the Soviet. By its invasion of Manchuria in 1931, Japan had doubled the size of its empire and given itself a common border with the Soviet Union, which it policed energetically, determined to stop Russia's revolution from spreading across the frontier and
ultimately into Japan. On the 20th of August, 4 days before signing the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the Soviet Union had enjoyed a major victory on this frontier. The place was Khalkhin Gol and the victorious general was Georgy Zhukov. It was a classic battle and an historic one, the first anywhere in which the use of mobile armor was decisive. Zhukov sent his body of infantry against the center of the Japanese line, pinning the enemy's main force. He then sent his armor sweeping around the flanks and against the encircled Japanese from the rear.
Under further air and artillery assault, the Japanese were destroyed and Stalin was free of the fear of any further offensive in the East. A ceasefire was agreed on September the 15th, 2 days before the Red Army attacked Poland. By then, German forces had been fighting in Poland for 2 weeks. Their invasion had been launched on September the 1st with the usual strange German concern for the appearance of legality. The Germans assembled some German convicts, put them in Polish uniforms, and then the SS, the Schutzstaffel or protective squadron, shot them.
This manufactured border incident, in which the convicts were portrayed as Polish infiltrators, has been described as a case of German convicts being killed by German criminals. For Hitler, it was a casus belli, the reason for war. And on September the 1st, 1939, the German Air Force, the Luftwaffe, attacked the Polish town of Wieluń, destroying 3/4 of the city. History records that this was the start of the Second World War. 5 minutes after the air raid, the old German battleship Schleswig-Holstein opened fire on the military transit depot at Westerplatte. And at 0800 hours, German troops
attacked near the Polish town of Mokra. Later that day, the Germans attacked on Poland's western, southern, and northern borders. German aircraft began raids on Polish cities. Poland's defenses were being overwhelmed all along the almost 2 and 1/2 thousand kilometer front. It was a war of brute force. Suddenly, German bombers appear. There was no war declared. We knew it was going on because we could hear their propaganda coming nonstop over the radio.
Poland was at war. 1 and 1/2 million German soldiers in 67 divisions with air and naval support invaded Poland. Three Slovak divisions supported the German assault, Slovakia having been made a German protectorate following the annexation of Czechoslovakia. When the Soviets joined the invasion, the total Axis strength exceeded 2 million. Facing them was a Polish army less than half that size. 6,000 aircraft were opposed by a Polish air force of 400 machines. Within 2 weeks of the invasion, Poland would be reduced to less than 60 serviceable aircraft.
Even more devastatingly, the invaders could muster 7 and 1/2 thousand tanks, the Poles less than 900. The deployment of these forces to completely swamp Polish defenses was made possible by the earlier German occupation of Czechoslovakia, which provided the springboard against Poland's southern flank and also gifted Germany tanks, aircraft, and munitions factories that were to make a priceless contribution to the Axis war effort. Proving that a place which British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain had called at the time of the Munich crisis a faraway country populated by people of whom we know nothing was in fact a nation of which the allies should have
made it their business to know a great deal. Poland doubtless entertained hopes that these same allies, pledged to her defense, would now intervene. For their commitment to Poland was quite explicit, as the British Foreign Secretary, using the new medium of the newsreel, explained. It is not the British way to go back of an obligation. It has often been stated, rightly or wrongly, that the last war might have been prevented if the British government had made it clear where they stood. Now that the possibility of conflict again exists, the government have taken steps to declare their attitude not only to the world, but in a special message to Herr Hitler. Before the British and French ultimatum
expired on September the 2nd, something passed unnoticed on the other side of the Atlantic, but we should note it as being of extraordinary significance. On that day, the most famous scientist in the world wrote a letter to the President of the United States. "Sir," he wrote, "some recent work by E. Fermi and L. Szilard leads me to expect that the element uranium may be turned into a new and important source of energy. This new phenomenon would also lead to the construction of bombs. I understand that Germany has actually stopped the sale of uranium from the Czechoslovakian mines which she has taken over."
The writer is concerned because he has become aware of research at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin. He signs himself yours very truly, Albert Einstein. The day after Einstein sent his prophetic letter anticipating the weapon which 6 years later would hasten the end of the war and change the world, the British and French ultimatum to Germany expired. In London, Neville Chamberlain took to the airwaves. One Sunday morning, we were ordered to the canteen to listen to a announcement by the Prime Minister. And he said, "We are at war with Germany." And strange enough, it didn't mean much.
We didn't know what war was, you know? And within an hour, we were busy organizing to go out and to warm and stuff for lunch. This was in one very obvious way to be the first modern war. What happened, no matter where it happened, was reported to the world almost in real time through the radio. Hitler and his propaganda chief, Joseph Goebbels, knew how to use both the radio and the cinema, where newsreels and feature films projected the glories of the Reich. In America, President Roosevelt understood how radio was like a visitor
in the home and initiated weekly broadcasts in a calm and friendly tone. They were called fireside chats. By the evening of Chamberlain's broadcast, almost a million and a half women and children had been moved from the cities of Britain to what was hoped would be the safety of its countryside. Between the wars, the threat to civilian populations of bombing, including with poison gas, had been bloated to Armageddon proportions. Governments invested heavily in bombers and people everywhere were looking for, or making, or digging shelters. The British people had been issued with 38 million gas masks, which as it transpired, they did not need.
The cities were blacked out. Air raid wardens were on patrol, and everyone waited for the bombs to fall. All windows used to be taped in the house. He said all blinds and shutters and different things cuz you couldn't show any lights. Street lighting went out all together or very dim, and the buses had to dim all their lights. Britain and France declared war on Germany, the ultimatum said, in defense of Poland. But when 2 weeks later the USSR invaded Poland, neither said or did a thing. Because both Britain and France had large overseas empires, their declarations of war transformed a continental into a global conflict.
Around the world the leaders of colonies and dominions passed on news of a war in which their people were now automatically involved. We had an allegiance to the king and queen, which I don't think applies today. In this day and age, of course, uh we're a democratic society that stands on its own feet. In those days there was an element of security in being part of the British Empire. The violence of war did not involve the empires straight away. Poland's hopes of intervention were disappointed. France advanced 8 km into the Saar, and then ordered her troops to withdraw.
Britain dropped 13 tons of leaflets on Germany. Some called it the confetti war. 12 million bits of paper recommending peace to the German people. But that's all that Britain did, and meanwhile, Poland was being torn apart. On the 8th of September, the city of Lodz was already under Nazi occupation. All those racial laws actually applied to us immediately. terror began. People were arrested immediately. Professors, teachers, trade union leaders, you name it. The day after Stalin learned that the Soviet truce with Japan had been finalized, September the 16th, he ordered the invasion of Eastern Poland.
The annihilation of Poland, Joseph Stalin said, would mean one fewer bourgeois fascist state to contend with. And as promised in the secret accord of the Soviet-Nazi non-aggression pact, his troops invaded from the east. By September the 17th, Poland was fighting a war on two fronts. 65,000 Polish troops were killed in the fighting. 420,000 others became prisoners of the Germans, 240,000 prisoners of the Soviets. Germany occupied the west and administered the south, the so-called general government. The east, more than 50% of Polish territory and more than 35% of its population, was now firmly in Soviet control.
This allowed Stalin to neutralize any possibility of a reorganized Polish army rising against him. He ordered the deportation of 60,000 Polish soldiers with their families to Kazakhstan, and the murder of 21,892 Polish military officers, notably at five forest sites, the best known, a place called Katyn. My father was caught by Russians, and he visited us in our camp near Kiev, and he said, "You are going to be taken to United States." But that was a lie. They were all taken to Katyn and shot, 22,000 of them. Vasily Blokhin wore a leather butcher's apron for his work as Stalin's favorite executioner, and perhaps the man with more individual deaths to his credit than any other person in history.
Blokhin may have accounted for as many as 7,000 of the Polish officers with bullets in the back of the head. He used German pistols, important in providing ballistic evidence of the lie about German culpability, which the Russians did not admit to until 1989. Other truths were likewise to remain hidden for years. Following Poland's capitulation, what was to become the familiar German policy in occupied countries began. Schrecklichkeit, or frightfulness. Two days after the last Polish unit had capitulated, Hitler appointed Heinrich Himmler Reich Commissioner for the consolidation of German nationhood, sometimes translated as Commissioner for the protection of the German
race, though no one was of the German race. Germans are a language group. They are not a race, a scientific distinction that did nothing to disarm the virulence of Nazi racist theories. For Poland, five vicious weeks of fighting were to be followed by 5 years of repressive German occupation and a further 44 years of Soviet control, an unexpected outcome for a country whose sovereignty Britain and France went to war to defend. In the war, Poland was to lose 17% of its population, many from what was by far the largest Jewish population in Europe. Jews in Poland in 1939. About 350,000 of them would survive the war.
The invasion had been both a political and a military gamble by Hitler. He threw most of his army into the offensive, leaving a mere 23 divisions and no tanks on the western front to face Britain and France. If they had attacked, to draw his forces back from the Polish assault, they would have found a reed-thin defensive line facing their 110 divisions. But they did not attack. Following capitulation, Polish troops who managed to escape into exile reformed to fight alongside the allies in defense of a homeland they had lost. They fought from September 1st, 1939 to the last day of the war, and maintained, although in exile, one of the largest armies to face the Wehrmacht.
Like Germany, Imperial Japan was convinced that to survive it had to increase its territory, find living space, resources, and food security. But where? Those who favored going north had been sidelined by Zhukov's defeat of the Japanese at Khalkhin Gol on the Mongolian border. This setback strengthened the position of the strike south party. And south were the colonial possessions of the Dutch East Indies, French Indochina, British Malaya, Burma, even India. Before striking towards these targets on
September 13th, less than 2 weeks after Hitler's invasion of Poland, and before the Red Army had crossed into that country, 120,000 Japanese in six divisions began to move deeper into China, extending what the Japanese would always refer to as the China Incident. They went south towards Changsha. The Japanese were at first rebuffed, but on the 19th of September, 1939, renewed their attack, this time using poison gas. By October the 6th, counterattacks had bloodied the Japanese forces, which were obliged to withdraw. The world was at war, but few were yet regarding the wars of east and west as a single conflict.
Three days after the final Polish capitulation, October the 9th, Führer Directive 6 was issued. It called for an offensive in the west, an attack to take France and her allies out of the war. Although Hitler's crusade lay to the east, he would first move to neutralize the threat to his rear. The plan for the offensive was code-named Case or Plan Yellow, and its specific purpose was defined as securing land as a base for conducting air and sea war against England. Plan Yellow proposed an assault along the lines of the tactics attempted by the Germans at the start of the First World War, but as we shall see, strange circumstances forced the abandonment of Plan Yellow. It was replaced by something more audacious.
Something that came to be called Blitzkrieg. That lay in the future. What now settled over Europe was an improbable calm. An American senator coined the phrase the Phony War. To the British, it was the Bore War. The French called it la drôle de guerre, the Funny War, and to the Germans, it was Sitzkrieg, sitting war. Morale was low among the allies. Their mood was uncertain and the winter was freezing. Soviet intentions after the fall of Poland were unclear. Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty at the time, famously said in a broadcast in October, "I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma."
The riddle was solved a month later. Joseph Stalin, encouraged by the effectiveness of the Red Army against Poland, continued building the Soviet Empire with an offensive against Finland. It became known as the Winter War. Russia's justification for taking up arms against Finland was the security of Leningrad. Arguing that present borders were not viable, the USSR demanded border territory from Finland. "Since Leningrad cannot be moved," Stalin told the Finnish emissaries, "the frontier must be further off." But the Finns were not prepared to cede territory, so Stalin attacked.
The Red Army had many times the men, 30 times the aircraft, and a hundred times the tanks, but their officers, brutally thinned out, as we shall learn, lacked experience. They certainly lacked a leader to equal Finland's Marshal Carl Gustaf Mannerheim, born when the Grand Duchy of Finland was part of the Tsarist Russian Empire. Mannerheim was a former general in the Imperial Russian Army. The Soviet invasion was launched on the 30th of November, 1939, with a bombing attack on the Finnish capital, Helsinki. A month later, the League of Nations declared the invasion illegal and expelled the USSR. It was almost the
last act of an organization whose good work has been sadly obscured by the memory of its futile and ineffective attempts to curb the dictators. Red planes over the Finnish capital. The terrors of total war loosed upon the unoffending population of Helsinki. After the air raid on Helsinki, the Soviets launched their land offensive and were checked at great cost. The first month of the campaign was humiliating as motivated Finnish fighters, equipped for the winter and adept at using the cover of the dense Finnish forests that defied Soviet armor, harried and repelled the Red Army.
A simple weapon hurled at the tanks was pioneered by the Finns in this conflict, a bottle filled with petrol and tar, hurled at the target, and named for the Soviet foreign minister, the Molotov cocktail. Inevitably, sheer weight of numbers in the end overwhelmed Finnish defenses, and after 4 months, Finland sued for peace. The Winter War ended with the Moscow Peace Treaty of March 14th, 1940. Stalin had expanded the Soviet Empire. Not halting with the acquisition of Eastern Poland, he now gained part of the Karelian Isthmus from Finland.
The forcible occupation of the Romanian provinces of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina and of the three Baltic states would follow, and Stalin would celebrate the Red Army's conquests with the largest mass promotion in military history, raising 479 officers to the rank of major general. The elevation of so many officers had been made necessary by Stalin's own murderous policies. His paranoia, fueled by material fed to him by the SD, the Sicherheitsdienst, the Nazi security service, and by a confession extracted under torture that a military plot was being developed against him, had prompted a 1930s purge
of the Red Army in which a total of 36,000 officers fell victim to Stalin's imagining of a fascist Trotskyist plot. Many were sent to the Gulag and many killed. Joseph Stalin, in this and other ways, was responsible for millions of deaths. And so was Adolf Hitler. But as we tally the butcher's bill of their ambitions, we must remember that Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union were machines. They may have been monsters, but they were monsters in the machine. Machines which, when Finland sued for peace, were allies. But the map of Europe was realigning, and those perceptive enough could see the emergence of two ambitious new
empires and sense the inevitability of their titanic clash. Before the shooting war resumed in Europe, the World War disturbed a remote and most unlikely continent. A naval battle was fought in waters off South America. Germany's naval building program had focused on both surface and submarine vessels that could disrupt shipping and threaten the supply routes on which her probable opponents, chiefly the United Kingdom, depended. Before the war, spoiled by the riches of her empire, Britain had been importing 70% of her food, which is why she had the world's largest merchant marine. Almost 1/3 of the world's merchant tonnage was British. 2 and 1/2 thousand British ships were plying the oceans at any given time.
As we will see, Hitler's attack on this maritime lifeline would bring Britain serious consequences. The deadly potential of the U-boat threat had been revealed at the start of the war. On the night of October 13th, 1939, U-47 penetrated the defenses of the great naval base at Scapa Flow and sank the British battleship Royal Oak at her moorings. The Royal Navy did not have to wait long to restore its pride. A force was assembled to pursue and destroy a notorious surface raider, the Admiral Graf Spee, which had accounted for several merchantmen in the Indian Ocean and South Atlantic.
A naval gunnery duel followed. The German ship had superior weapons, but was both outnumbered and outmaneuvered. Taking damage, she was forced to seek safe haven in the harbor of the Uruguayan capital, Montevideo, to attempt to affect repairs. Blockaded in Montevideo, the Germans were deceived by false British radio messages suggesting that a massive naval force was being assembled against them. In view of this, Graf Spee's commander, Captain Hans Langsdorff, ordered that the ship be scuttled. His crew was taken off, the cruiser destroyed, and on December 19th, Langsdorff himself committed suicide. In a daring-do sequel in February, 1940, a team of British Marines stormed aboard the German supply ship Altmark at sea in Norwegian waters.
The Altmark was carrying to imprisonment in Germany merchant seamen captured by the Graf Spee. In an engagement in which it is said the cutlass was used for the last time in naval warfare, the prisoners were rescued. On April the 4th, 1940, the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain addressed the Conservative Party faithful. He said that it had been right to expect a German attack when the war started. "Is it not a very extraordinary thing," he asked his audience, "that no such attempt was made? Whatever may be the reason," he continued, "one thing is certain, he missed the bus."
They cheered their leader. Less than a week later, they threw him out of office when they realized that Hitler wasn't coming by bus. On the 9th of April, 1940, 5 days after Chamberlain's speech, Germany invaded Norway and Denmark. It is an underreported action which was to have an enormous influence on everything that followed in terms of German forces tied up for the remainder of the war, in terms of the far-reaching effect on German naval competence and tactics, and in terms of the leadership of the United Kingdom. Far above the Arctic Circle in the north of Sweden was one of the world's largest developments of high-grade iron ore, the ore that fed the steel mills of Germany,
vital to the manufacture of munitions. Germany took more than 70% of the Swedish mines' output. The security of the iron ore supply was a constant concern to the Führer. He knew it, and the British who took 10% of Sweden's output knew it, too. Both sides also knew that possession of the Norwegian coastline meant both control of the sea route that took the ore to the German mills, and with its abundant fjords and deep-water anchorages, the chance for German U-boats to operate from close to the main shipping lanes. Britain and Germany began to make plans. Of course, neither knew what the other was planning, but that became clear, almost comically so, when they made
their moves at virtually the same time. that our discussions together On April the 9th, Hitler gave orders for the invasion of Norway and Denmark to be launched. In Denmark, the Germans met with limited resistance. Denmark was neutral, unprepared, and lost her capital to the Germans within the first 12 hours. In Norway, also neutral, a combination of seaborn and airborne German troops made six landings, from Kristiansand in the south of the country to Narvik in the far north. On April the 10th, Denmark surrendered to the invader, and further north towards the top of Scandinavia, six British destroyers engaged a German force outside the town of Narvik.
The following day, April the 11th, the first British military contingent sailed for Norway. On the 12th, the Royal Navy returned to Narvik. This time with consequences that were devastating to the long-term effectiveness of the German Navy, the Kriegsmarine. British destroyers, supported by the battleship Warspite, sank seven German destroyers, losses which amounted to half of Germany's total destroyer force. This fatally compromised her navy's capacity to act in support of a cross-Channel invasion. It was this engagement which made air superiority over the Channel a prerequisite of any invasion attempt, and made inevitable the Battle of Britain.
Between the 15th and 18th of April, British troops landed to oppose the Germans at Harstad, Namsos, and on Andalsnes. In less than 10 days, the first evacuations would begin, and by early June, all British troops would have been withdrawn. It need not have been so. The expeditionary force sent to Trondheim, for example, outnumbered the Germans six to one, but it was routed. Ill-equipped British territorial or militia troops being no match for fully trained and well-equipped German soldiers. By May the 2nd, the fighting in southern Norway was over.
Defeated as much by bungling and bickering as by their enemy, the British had been evacuated. In the north of Norway, Narvik fell to the Allies on May the 28th, though the German garrison managed to escape by train into Sweden. But by May the 28th, what was happening in Norway seemed trifling. France had been invaded on May the 10th, and the situation there was desperate. The new British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, could not afford to exploit the situation in Norway. He called his forces home, where the threat was greatest.
King Haakon and his government were taken off by the Royal Navy, and a collaborationist Norwegian government was set up under Vidkun Quisling, whose name has entered the English language as a word describing a traitor. Quisling was found guilty of treason and executed by firing squad in 1945. Hitler remained convinced for the rest of the war that an attempt would be made by the Allies to take Norway. For that reason, there were never less than 12 German divisions stationed there. They never saw action, and would have been of far greater value elsewhere. A further price that Germany paid for her victory was that the Allies took possession of the world's fourth largest merchant marine. 4.6 million tons of
Norwegian shipping was added to the British fleet. But possibly the most influential of all the consequences of the Norwegian mess was the replacement of the British Prime Minister. On May the 7th, 5 days after the humiliating evacuation from southern Norway, the House of Commons began a two-day debate on the handling of the war. Famously quoting words used in the Parliament 300 years earlier, one of Chamberlain's own party stalwarts, Leo Amery, declared, "You have sat here too long for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go." Chamberlain saw his support collapse and left the chamber to a chant of go, go, go.
Chamberlain's preference to replace him, Lord Halifax, the Foreign Secretary, declined the post, and it fell to Winston Churchill. Halifax, as we shall see, would have been a very different sort of war leader. So are the destinies of nations decided. On the very day that Chamberlain resigned and Churchill received his commission from the king, Adolf Hitler unleashed the invasion of the Netherlands and Belgium. In the next episode of The Price of Empire, Blitzkrieg scorches across Western Europe. France and the Low Countries fall, and Britain, her army miraculously plucked from the jaws of defeat, stands alone in defiance of the Third Reich.
