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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 by those who could pay and those who could no longer meet In a world made unstable by issues of the First World War unresolved by the peace treaty which ended that struggle, dictators rose and their ambitions brought Europe once more to the brink of conflict. In the second episode of the price of empire, Europe crashed over the brink when an unlikely alliance between Germany and the Soviet Union made each bold enough to move on Poland. It is now the early spring of 1940. 6 months have passed with little action. The phony war that is about to end and a new word is to be added to the vocabulary of warfare. Blitzkrieg on January the 10th, 1940. A German
military aircraft made a forced landing at Meccalan Surmmer in Belgium. Aboard was Major Helmut Reinberger, a staff officer of the seventh airborne division. In his possession was a complete copy of Vela case or plan yellow, the German plan for the invasion of Western Europe. The loss of this document to the enemy was, according to the German chief of operations, catastrophic. Hitler was forced to postpone his invasion until the spring, much to the relief of his high command, which had been arguing for a halt to allow for repair, rest, and re-equipment. That delay was the phony war.
Plan yellow being compromised now presented General Eric von Mannstein with the opportunity to press again his invasion strategy which had earlier been rejected. Plan yellow was little more than a rehashing of the offensive plan with which Germany had gone to war in 1914. Essentially an attack across the Belgian border outflanking France's defensive preparations. It was the strategy that the allies expected. The dreadful losses of the First World War, 4 and a half million French casualties, almost 1 and a half million dead, had persuaded France that the future of war lay with the entrenched soldier and the machine gun.
Between the wars, France had spent vast amounts of money on preparing a defensive posture. Most of the money, perhaps three billion French Franks, had gone on a fortified installation named for the minister for war who had initiated it, Andre Majino. The Majino line fortified the border between France and Germany. It was equipped with an underground railway, underground cinemas, and a garrison of half a million soldiers ready to repel any direct German assault. This supposedly impregnable position would, or so it was argued, oblige Germany to attack through Belgium along the lines of the 1914 offensive. And so it was here from late 1939 that the French and British concentrated their forces.
Had plan yellow, the attack across the Belgian border, been implemented, the outcome is unknowable. It would surely have been a tighter struggle than the demolition job that lay ahead. With plan yellow shelved following the plane crash in Meccalin Sur Murs, the German high command was forced to consider an alternative strategy. This was the moment for Eric von Mannstein, a professional soldier in the Prussian tradition. By midFebruary, Hitler had accepted von Mannstein's plan, which has come to be known as the sicklenit or sickle cut. Earlier German plans had proposed a right hook, swinging around against the channel ports. The sickle cut was to be a left hook, swinging up behind the Allied
armies, waiting for their enemy to pour across the Belgian border. That left hook would be delivered by the new concept of masked armor. Valter, chief of operations of the first pancer division, coined the expression that best explains the thinking behind German as opposed to allied armored tactics. Hit with your fist, Ven said. Don't feel with your fingers. German armor would be the clenched fist, not the spled fingers of Allied tactics, and it would race for territory, not stop for a setpiece battle. For Mannstein planned to exploit the weak point that was the key to the whole undoing of France,
the gap between the defense of the Belgian border and the Majino line. That gap was the forest of the Arden. The point which German military theorists called the punct the focal point or center of gravity. For von manstein the punct was the river m between sedan and dino. According to French planners no attack could be pressed through the thick forest of the aren. But according to the Manstein plan, armor could move through the forest and then undetected burst into the rear of the Allied lines as they faced the frontal attack being pressed not just through Belgium, but also the Netherlands, whose sovereignty the Kaiser had respected 25 years earlier.
Belgium and France were involved in the First World War, but the Netherlands was neutral and I suppose it will be all right. Everybody was hoping that things would not turn for the worse. Hitler gambled. He ordered that all of the stockpiled materials and munitions of war be expended. The idea was that they would be replenished from the conquered lands. At the commencement of the invasion, the Luftvafa, for example, had enough bombs for only 14 days of combat. The Germans were in every particular seriously outnumbered. They had three army groups comprising 133 divisions. The allies facing them had 145 divisions, 3.7 million men to Germany's 2.7 million.
And on paper at least, France on her own was superior in tanks and aircraft. Speaking in August 1941, Hitler is reported to have said, "I never use the word blitzkrieg because it is a very silly word, but it is a word meaning literally lightning war, which has become stuck limpitike to the idea of Germany's mechanized offensives. The most devastating of which began at 0545 hours on the morning of May the 10th, 1940. In less than 6 weeks, in as catastrophic and humiliating a military defeat as can be imagined, the battle would be over and all the countries of continental Europe that had neither allied with Germany nor managed to preserve their neutrality would be under Nazi control.
The plan that the German high command, the oba commando deseris or okh had for the invasion of western Europe forecast the defeat of France and the low countries and the isolation of Great Britain. But that was the extent of German planning in the west. There was no plan for the exploitation of conquered territory. For that sort of vision, we must turn our eyes as Hitler did to the east where German plans were very different. It was only to secure the German rear preparatory to initiating the plan for the east. The Genelau plan Ost that Hitler bothered with countries on his western borders.
Once Western Europe was under his heel, Hitler would turn to realize his great vision of an empire in the east. So it was to secure the German rear that Hitler launched the Manstein plan, a fearful demonstration of what war had become. General George Marshall, US President Franklin D. Roosevelt's chief of staff saw as early as 1940 that the flag waving days of warfare are gone. Nikolai Bosnenski, chief of the Soviet State Planning Commission, warned of a war of engines. A war that is one not on the battlefield but in the factories.
It would not be flag waving or glinting sabers or scarlet tunics, but bombs and shells and advancing armor that decided the issue. And most critically, not their possession, but their replenishment. The strength of a German panser division by March 1945 would amount to 54 tanks. But in May 1940, a panser division comprised 328 tanks and there was everything to play for. The German onslaught began with bombs as the Luftvafa attacked Allied airfields. German airborne troops parachuted into the Netherlands to seize vital bridges. In Belgium, the supposedly impregnable fortress of Ian Email Ku Lege fell to
Gliderborn troops who overcame its defenses by the simple strategim of landing on its roof. Units of Fonbach Army Group B crossed the Dutch and Belgian borders, luring the Allies into taking the bait. The Allied commander, French General Gamalan, obliged, moving three French armies and the entire British Expeditionary Force, 40 divisions in total, north to face the anticipated invasion through Belgium. But the real threat was from Army Group A in the center. Its seven panser divisions with 1,800 tanks smashed through the Arden. A part of German military philosophy was Altra's tactic or mission tactics which encouraged and expected initiative from commanders flexibly meeting local conditions.
When the Blitzkrieg burst onto the French and British defenses, it was the initiative of generals like Hez Gderion and Owen RML, whose growing reputation would be later confirmed in the desert battles of North Africa, that drove their forces across country as they defied the attempts of their superiors to reign them in. In the evening of what was day one of the invasion, the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain resigned from office. Cabinet Minister Leo Amory said of Chamberlain that he loathed war so passionately that he was determined to wage as little of it as possible.
Chamberlain was replaced by Winston Churchill who did not loathe war having served in the first world war and taken part in the last great British cavalry charge atman in the Sudan late in the 19th century in May 1940. Winston Churchill was 65 years old only 5 years younger than the man he replaced. The man to beat Hitler is Winston Churchill. Among his colleagues Mr. The Chamberlain, whose vacation of office was accomplished in a manner worthy of his great sincerity, remains at Churchill's right hand. 2 days after Churchill took office on May 12th, the leading German units crossed into France, securing the north bank of the MS. On the 13th, the Dutch army was ordered to fall back for a last stand on the
line Amsterdam Rotterdam Utre. But the war was lost in the Netherlands. And on the same day, Queen Villamina and her government evacuated to London. On the 10th of May, Germany attacked Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium, and France all on the same day. On the fifth day, the German air force bombed Rotterdam. A lot of damage was done. I'm not aware how many people died, but I'm sure people died. And on that day, the Dutch high command surrendered. So now we were occupied. The first couple of days in the occupation, quite a few huge families committed suicide. How many? I don't know. But the rumor came through Amsterdam. this family and that family.
The relentless German assault was now pressing the allies all along the front. The Netherlands was out of the war. Armor from army groups A and B was moving against the French 9inth army which disintegrated. The German 12th and 16th armies having crossed the MS were threatening the rear of the Allied position. In Paris, they tried an appeal to the Almighty. In their hour of anxiety, French people hear the summons to prayer. At NRAAM Cathedral in Paris, a solemn service of intercession is held. The prime minister, Mureno, attends and Mu Daladier with the American ambassador. On the day that the Netherlands surrendered, the French prime minister had telephoned his British counterpart.
We have been defeated, Paul Reo said. We are beaten. We have lost the battle. Churchill could only answer. Surely it can't have happened so soon. in his telephone call to Churchill. Bueno was reacting to news from the battlefield that if any one action can be said to have been responsible sealed the fate of France. The battlefield at Sedan. On September the 1st, 1870, a Prussian force had destroyed the French army at Sedan, forcing the abdication of the emperor and advancing the cause of German unification under Prussian stewardship. This historical resonance added something to the significance of a battle now being fought over the same ground.
On the 16th of May, the Allies began to withdraw from Belgium. On the 17th, the fighting at Sedan ended with a German victory. In 7 days, the Germans had advanced 320 kilometers, crossed the MS, and broken into the undefended Allied rear. On the 7th day of the invasion, Brussels, the Belgian capital, fell. German tanks were reported to be refueling at local petrol stations. German troops were seen milking cows abandoned in the fields. In close support of the tanks and the following infantry were the artillery and the Luftvafer.
The German air force had been designed to support action on the ground. Its later shortcomings can be traced to this priority. But in the invasion of France, they were not shortcomings. German fighters dominated the skies and both military and civilians feared nothing so much as the shrieking approach of the Jonas 87. The Stuka, short for Stewart's campflug zoig dive bomber, equipped with a mischievously terrifying device that the Germans called the Jericho trumpet. The Jericho trumpet, a propeller-driven siren tube that made the approaching aircraft with its banshee howl as menacing as some fantastical beast.
We got off at Cali and I thought, "God, what's going on here?" And the restaurant on the keyside, the windows are all broken and I was rather puzzled. You know, it still didn't click. All of a sudden, the planes came over and they came screaming down. The scream of bombs coming down and these stoers driving made a horrible screaming noise and we dashed amongst the sand dunes clawed at the earth trying to get underground. You just fear is just overpowering and I knew then that was war. On May the 19th, Gamalan was replaced as Allied commander by General Ve, but it was too late.
The seventh pancer division under RML had reached Comre on the 18th and on the 20th. German armor reached the English Channel and the mouth of the river Som where so much blood had been spilled in the First World War. This thrust effectively split the Allied armies in two. The Allies attempted a counterattack, but where the Germans masked their 2,700 tanks, the Allies still thought of the tank as an infantry support weapon and had their 3,000 machines widely dispersed along the entire front. Britain and French counter offensives were also poorly coordinated, and the disruption to the German advance was momentary.
Following the blunted Allied counterattack, the Germans turned north, pressing for the prize that had evaded the Kaiser's troops 25 years earlier, the Channel ports. Bologone fell on the 25th, and Calala bitterly defended by the British on the 27th. Before then, an order which has puzzled many ever since changed the character of the battle. On May the 24th, army groups A and B linked up and group fun stopped less than 25 kilometers from Dunkirk where it was opposed by a single lowgrade French division and a weak British infantry force. And then in one of war's regular and somewhat inexplicable turning points, it was ordered to halt.
The day following the halt order, Hitler visited Army Group A's headquarters and he confirmed Fonstead's decision. We questioned the decision because with hindsight, we can see how feeble French resistance was beyond this point and how cheaply French capitulation was sold. For Hitler and his generals, the bulk of France's armed forces was yet to be conquered. And after two hard weeks of fighting, many of Germany's armored units had been reduced to 30% of their tank strength. Surely a pause to reform and re-equip would be prudent. They could not have known that prudence was not required. On May the 25th, the day after Hitler's visit to the front, Lord Gort, commanding the British Expeditionary Force, was advised by the Belgians,
commanded by King Liupold, that their situation was desperate. Gort decided that his duty lay in saving his army to fight another day rather than seeing it sacrificed for a lost cause. He began to withdraw his forces on Dunkirk. And the following day, May the 26th, almost 28,000 men not central to the BEF's fighting capacity were evacuated. The road from Boloin was just full of moving bodies. That's all I could call them because they didn't look like people. They were men, women, and children with bags dragging little trucks. The children weren't talking or playing. All with vacant expressions just looking straight ahead going nowhere.
Reich's marshal Herman Guring commanding the German air force rejoiced that the kill of the troops trapped at Dunkirk would be left to his Luftvafer. But the Luftvafer could not do the job. The bombers could not find their targets at night and the fighters could not operate effectively. It took one more miracle for the troops at Dunkerk to be saved. The notorious English Channel was for the duration of the operation a calm sea. On the 26th of May, the halt order was rescinded, but it was too late. An armada had been organized. An effective defense perimeter had been established and 330,000 Allied troops were assembled at Dunkerk to be evacuated.
There were 222 Royal Navy and approximately 860 civilian vessels at Dunkirk. Instead of the 45,000 hoped for, the fleet took off 3608,000 Allied troops. On the way down the harbor, they were shelling us. And I dropped into the gutter a couple of times. The harbor is full of sunken ships. And at the keyside, I could see somebody running in front of me. I see him running and he was running and I thought, "Oh, that ship's got smoke coming out of the funnel." So, I ran like mad as well. And it was just pulling away from the keyside. And I managed to get aboard. 40% of those evacuated from Dunkirk, 170,000 men, were French troops. They were returned to their own shores in southwestern France to carry on the
fight. Following France's capitulation, they were out of the war. Dunkirk had saved the bulk of the British Expeditionary Force, but that army had been effectively disarmed. It left behind 64,000 vehicles and 2,500 guns. Those evacuated were to all intents and purposes beaten. But they were not defeated, and they were not pursued. When I first joined up, my training was pretty much the same as the 1914 18 War. The end feed rifled with a big 18inch long baylet and uh jumping in and out of trenches, charging at bundles of twigs or sacks of straw and stabbing them. And of course it wasn't until uh Dunkerk at the time Dunkerk where we learned that there's
another way of fighting which was the Blitzky and that was taught to us by the Germans. The evacuation continued until June the 4th when the Germans entered Dunkirk. The following day they resumed their offensive pushing south into France. By the 9th the French had been driven from the SO. The outcome was hardly in doubt. And on the 10th, scenting victory, Mussolini declared war on Britain and France, and the French government removed itself from Paris. Mussolini's caution is understandable. His army was both smaller and less well equipped than it had been in 1915. On the 11th of June, Paris was declared an open city in the hope that this would
save it from bombing and destruction. On June the 14th, General Boguslav Fon Studnitz led the 87th Infantry Division of the Vermachar through the almost deserted streets of the French capital. The next day, June the 15th, 400,000 Frenchmen of the surrounded 3rd, fifth, and eighth armies surrendered our mass. Whilst on the other side of Europe, in an opportunistic move, the Soviet Union expanded its empire by liquidating Latia, Lithuania, and Estonia as independent nations. On June the 17th, the 86-year-old Marshall Pa, the hero of Verdan in the First World War, whose recall to Paris from his post as ambassador to Spain had been greeted by cheering crowds,
announced that he had taken over as head of state and was seeking an armistice. The panic in his country that this announcement must have been calculated to quell is best illustrated by the 8 million French people who had abandoned their homes since the invasion began. It was seeing some of these civilians on the road being strafed by a German fighter aircraft that led a British airman to say, "So they are shits after all. The Dutch and Belgian governments, though the Belgian king remained in his country, went into exile and many urged the French to do the same. Perhaps relocating to French colonies in North Africa and continuing the fight from there.
But the government of Marshall Pan chose instead to surrender. An editorial in Okomesio Dorto, a newspaper in the Portugal of dictator Antonio Salazar, declared that the war is a sorry advertisement for democracy. As the military disaster was unfolding, there was talk in England of relocating the British royal family to Canada. A faction in the British cabinet led by Lord Halifax, the foreign secretary who had been favored by both Chamberlain and the king to become prime minister, proposed putting out peace feelers using Mussolini as an intermediary. But Halifax had declined the top job, and the man who had been handed what many thought was a poisoned chalice was having none of it. Winston Churchill began at once to mobilize the weapon
that he would use to such great effect throughout the war, the English language. That heartening broadcast of Mr. Winston Churchills was a tonic to all who heard it. We tried again and again to prevent this war. And for the sake of peace, we put up with a lot of things happening which ought not to have happened. But now we are at war and we are going to make war and persevere in making war until the other side have had enough of it. If Churchill sounds different to the voice familiar from the stirring speeches delivered as prime minister. It is because the prime minister did not have time to travel to broadcasting house and record for the nation the
speeches he made in the House of Commons which was not wired for sound. So, an actor named Norman Shel, the voice of Larry the Lamb on the BBC's Children's Hour, was the voice of Winston Churchill for several radio broadcasts. On the 18th of June, Marshall Peter replaced Reo as prime minister. It was the day that Churchill made the speech in the Commons in which he swore that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last a thousand years, men will say this was their finest hour. It was not France's finest hour. That same day, Sha de Gaulle broadcast from London. He told the French people, "This war has not been settled by the Battle of France. This is a world war. We believe that the honor of the French depends on
continuing the war at the side of our allies." I was I left Franches I bought a big ship. We left France in June when France collapsed and I went to England and then alerted that the goal was carry on the war beside the British. We went out to find out what was the goal which because it was nobody know who he was. After a few days of inquiry, we uh we decided to run the goal. I won the goal on the 13th of July 1940. On the day that de Gaulle made his appeal, Churchill said in his finest hour speech, "The battle of France is over. I expect that the battle of Britain is about to begin." In one of history's strange ironies, these speeches were made on the day that marked the 125th anniversary of the
battle of Waterloo when Britain with her German allies had defeated the French under Napoleon. On June the 17th, Britain had suffered its worst ever maritime disaster about three times worse than the Titanic. The Cunada Lancastria carrying between 6 and 9,000 evacuees, troops, and civilians who had been left in France after the Dunkirk operation had been sunk by German aircraft. Only 2,500 were saved. Churchill imposed a news blackout on the event. He felt that the British people were receiving quite enough bad news. On June the 20th, Leon fell and a general ceasefire was declared in France. More than 1 and a half million French troops
became German prisoners when Sha de Gaulle called for continued resistance. General Vega, his commanderin-chief, said nonsense. He said in 3 weeks England will have her neck rung like a chicken. some chicken, Churchill was later famously to remark, some neck. France's formal surrender was signed on June the 22nd. France, if not quite all of the French, was out of the war. The Kaiser, who had abdicated at the very end of the First World War, telegram Hitler from his exile in the Netherlands. My furer, he wrote, I congratulate you and hope that under your marvelous leadership, the German monarchy will be restored completely. Hitler turned to his valet. What an idiot, he said.
The Blitzkrieg was a military disaster, but not a military defeat. The French armed forces were still in the field when the government capitulated. And after the armistice, 1,700 of France's frontline aircraft were found distributed amongst airfields in the unoccupied zone. They had never flown against the Germans. The fall of France was the result not of her defeat, but of her surrender. The Vichy regime that became the government of France. Vichy is the small spa town in which it was located stands shoulderto-shoulder with the most controversial topics of the Second World War.
Was Marshall Phipe Peter the shield of France who had saved his country from the humiliation of total defeat? Or was he happy to reach an early accommodation with was he sympathetic with Hitler's ideology? In 1934, as the dictators were starting to rise, the French newspaper Leetal ran a poll. France endured 42 weaker governments between the wars and the poll asked who should take over as dictator. Philip Pan was the popular pick with 200,000 votes. Second was Pierre Laval who would become Vish's prime minister. He received 31,000. When Peter formed his government, he effectively abolished the republic.
He got rid of the motto that had served since the revolution, liberty, equality, brotherhood and replaced it with trai famili work, family, fatherland. France would now, Pan said, be a new society. Rejecting the false idea of the equality of men, the armistice that Pan agreed to accepted German occupation of three-fifths of France, the industrial heartland, the border region with Germany, and the whole of the Atlantic and channel coastline. The Vichy government nominally ruled over the country but in reality exercised complete sovereignty only over the so-called zone libra the free zone.
Pan also agreed to pay the full costs of the occupation which were grossly overstated by the Germans. France overall is estimated to have contributed 42% of the Reich's external aid through the war. supply from French farms and factories, supply of French labor to German factories, acquisition of French military hardware, and the continued detention in Germany of 1 and a half million French prisoners of war were all part of a very one-sided armistice. France was allowed to keep her overseas empire and her navy, and it was the French fleet that caused the greatest immediate concern to the British government. It sought reassurance that the fleet would not be allowed to fall into axis hands. Receiving no such
assurance, the Royal Navy blockaded the fleet at its North African bases in May El Kabir and Oruron. On July the 3rd, Admiral James Somerville communicated his terms to the French Admiral Marcel Bruno Jeans. It is impossible for us, your comrades, up to now, to allow your fine ships, to fall into the power of the German enemy, he wrote. His majesty's government have instructed me to demand that the French fleet shall act in accordance with one of the following alternatives. and he listed joining him, scuttling the fleet or sailing away with reduced crews to some French port in the West Indies where they can be demilitarized to our satisfaction or perhaps be entrusted to the United States.
Failing the above, I have orders from his majesty's government to use whatever force may be necessary to prevent your ships from falling into German hands. But Admiral Jeans Sul would not comply. Somerville opened fire. The first engagement between British and French forces since Waterloo resulted in the deaths of 1,297 French servicemen, the sinking of a battleship, damage to five other ships, and to the Anglo French relationship. Britain was now alone, but at least thanks to Dunkirk, she still had some sort of an army. Importantly, in terms of recognizing that the war was far from over, it should be remembered that the British Expeditionary Force represented
a small proportion of the forces available to Britain from within, a reasonably unified empire, an empire that was mobilizing to her aid, as it had done a generation earlier. Those in the Dominions would again demonstrate their readiness to pay the price of empire. It wasn't until uh May and June we learned that Britain really had her backs to the wall and looked like being invaded by the Nazis. So there was a an outpouring of patriotic fervors up and down Australia and fellas by the thousand literally by the thousand are rushing to join up so to go and help Britain. But the price of empire is not evenly shared. Amongst French troops left to fall into German hands were thousands from France's African possessions. About 10,000 were killed in the fighting. And
among those taken prisoner, it is estimated that as many as 3,000 were shot out of hand in a racially motivated crime. Following the evacuation from Dunkirk and the fall of France, orders were given in Britain that the church bells, which peeled every Sunday, were not to be rung again except to signal an invasion. and an invasion of the British Isles by a rampant Germany was everyone's expectation. After all, considered numerically, the troops restored to British soil meant that if the Vermar invaded, they would face weaker opposition than they had brushed aside in Belgium and the Netherlands. Instead of an invasion, in mid July, the Luftvafer dropped leaflets over England.
They were titled A Last Appeal to Reason. On July the 19th, Hitler said, "I feel it is my duty before my own conscience to appeal once more to reason and common sense in Great Britain." The controversy over whether the peace overtures to Britain were sincere, whether peace would have been possible persists. To the moment of his death, Adolf Hitler would talk about the war that was forced on me and describe Winston Churchill as a war monger. Hello. Good luck to you all. Keep it up. It's going well. You're all playing a part. When Churchill became prime minister, his country was already at war, and the evidence of the cruel and destructive ambitions of Hitler was overwhelming.
Peace may have been possible, but it strains credibility to suppose that it could have been a lasting peace or a peace in which the United Kingdom would have been better treated than France, obliged to allow occupation stripped of her military strength and forced to pay a sum equivalent to 50 times the actual cost of the occupation. Churchill wanted no part of it. He told the British people in the first of his landmark speeches, "We shall go on to the end." He told them, "We shall fight on the sea and oceans." He said, "We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be." He promised, "We shall never surrender." And he meant it. Which is why at this exact time on July the 18th, the day before Hitler's
consiliatory statement, Churchill closed the Burma Road. Although the conflicts of East and West were yet to merge into one great affair, this was already a world war. Burma was part of the British Empire. It had been made so by Churchill's father, Lord Randolph Churchill, and the road, which was never more than a precarious single track along which trucks lumbered slowly, carried up to 30,000 tons of supplies a day to support China's fight against Japan. On the 18th of July 1940, Churchill, the great enemy of appeasement, yielded to Japanese pressure and closed the Burma Road. He later defended his action by saying that leaving the road open would
have meant something dangerous might have happened. Something dangerous would have been Japan taking matters into its own hands, moving against Burma and forcing Britain into a war on two fronts. But appeasing Japan did not prevent danger. On the day that Churchill closed the Burma Road, the military party in Japan triumphed and General Hideki Tojo, who would later achieve notoriety as wartime prime minister, became minister for war. A few days later, Japan announced its aim of creating a greater East Asia co-rossperity sphere. In September 1940, Japan occupied Indochina and signed a tripartite pact with Rome and Berlin.
The threat to Britain's empire in the east was becoming palpably real. The price of empire was going up. Hitler was a great admirer of the British Empire. In mine Kempemp, he made clear his admiration for the British Empire and lives of a Bengal lancer was his favorite film. What India was for England, Adolf Hitler would say before launching the invasion of the Soviet Union. The territories of Russia will be for us. He believed that the two empires could coexist and on August the 14th, the day after the Battle of Britain began, told the 12 generals that he had raised to field Marshall, that Germany would not benefit from defeating Great Britain.
The beneficiaries of that, Hitler said, would be Japan in Asia, Russia in India, Italy in the Mediterranean, and the United States in world trade. That Hitler said is why peace is possible with Britain. But it was not. In the next episode of the Price of Empire, the only opposition to Hitler and the Third Reich is the United Kingdom and her empire. Germany begins assembling a fleet for the cross channel invasion and launches an air war. the Battle of Britain to gain aerial superiority and to weaken civilian morale. It was the time when the darkest hour became the finest hour.
