Stalin

In Russia, the Bolsheviks won the civil war by 1921, reuniting the Ukraine, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia to the Russian Empire (now the Soviet Union). In May 1918, Lenin nationalized all large industries, using conscripted labor.

Still, the Soviet Union lagged Europe in industrial production. In 1921, Lenin announced the New Economic Policy (NEP), combining Communist state ownership with capitalist private ownership and the free market. Lenin saw this as a pragmatic compromise to restart the Soviet economy. Richer peasants, known as Kulaks, prospered greatly from the NEP. Lenin also had to realize that the proletariat of the Soviet Union was far from ready for the state to wither away.

Lenin suffered a series of strokes between 1922 and 1924. Before his third stroke, Lenin had planned to remove Stalin from power, but the stroke prevented him from doing so. Lenin died in 1924, leaving a power struggle for succession between Trotsky and Stalin. Stalin managed to outmaneuver Trotsky and drive him from power. Trotsky was forced into exile in 1929; he was assassinated in Mexico City in 1940.

Stalin was determined to rule the Soviet Union. He allied himself at various times with the left wings and right wings of the Communist Party, switching alliances whenever necessary. In 1928, Stalin abolished the NEP. In 1926, Stalin modified the original Cheka secret police into the NKVD under Felix Dzerzhinsky and Nikolai Yezhov. Dzerzhinsky was credited with transforming the NKVD into the instrument of terror Stalin would use to rule with an iron fist.

Stalin created a vast network of prison camps in Siberia for political opponents. Estimates of 10 to 18 million people were shipped to the camps. Stalin ended the NEP and began oppressing the kulaks; approximately 5 to 6 million peasants were killed in the campaign after the kulaks began resisting collectivization of their property. Stalin began purging his opponents with ruthless efficiency. In the Great Purge of 1936-1939, nearly 1 million people had been executed, including most of the officer corps of the Red Army and many of the Communist Party leaders. Yezhov was one of the victims, along with Nikolai Bukharin, one of the Party leaders that had opposed Stalin. All told, Stalin may have killed between 10 million and 20 million people during the decade after he succeeded Lenin.

Prelude to War

Once Stalin cemented his control of the Soviet Union, the last piece fell into place for the coming world war. Hitler and the Nazis controlled Germany; Tojo and the military ruled in Japan; and Mussolini and the Fascists controlled in Italy. Foch’s 20 year truce was ending.

First, Italy still resented Allied inaction on claims against former Austro-Hungarian territory. Mussolini seized this territory in the 1920’s, beginning with the town of Fiume. In 1934, Mussolini invaded Ethiopia; this time the Italians won. Italy annexed Albania in 1939. The League of Nations did nothing against Italian aggression.

Hitler began pushing the League of Nations soon after his election. In 1935, Hitler denounced the demilitarization of Germany and enacted military conscription. Suddenly, all the “soldiers” in the 100,000 man army became non-commissioned officers, allowing for a vast expansion of the army.

Secondly, the Germans had been banned from creating or maintaining an air force. Glider flying became a popular “pastime” in Germany during the 1930’s; by the end of the decade, all the “glider pilots” became military pilots in the new air force, the Luftwaffe. In 1939, the Luftwaffe had over 4,000 planes.

In 1936, Hitler began the great gambles that would eventually lead to the war. Germany had lost land in the Treaty of Versailles and had been forbidden from uniting with Austria. Germany had also been prohibited from keeping military units in the Rhineland, the area between the Rhine River and the Belgian border. In early 1936, Hitler renounced the Locarno Treaty and sent military units into the Rhineland. At this point, Hitler had few units and would have backed down if the Allies had pushed. France was hindered by political uncertainty (a new election was coming); Britain had a new government led by the Conservative Party, and the Conservatives had no intention of involving British units on the Continent ever again. Therefore, while Britain and France did nothing but bicker over whether to enforce the Treaty of Versailles, Hitler continued militarizing the area.

Next, Hitler looked toward Austria. In March 1938, he annexed Austria in a sham election called the Anschluss. Austrian Nazis facilitated the union by working against the Austrian government. The French were again in a political crisis, and the British hadn’t liked the prohibition in the first place; therefore, the Allies again did nothing.

Over 10 million Germans lived outside Germany in the post-World War I Europe. Hitler turned to Czechoslovakia and demanded the Sudetenland, an area with 2.8 million Germans. This time, the Allies took notice. Hitler responded by saying he supported self-determination of the area. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain met with Hitler to discuss the issue. In a meeting between the British, French, and Germans (the Czechs weren’t invited), the Allies agreed that the Sudetenland belonged to Germany. Hitler declared the Sudetenland would be his last annexation. In 1938, Britain, France, and Germany signed the Munich Agreement, giving the Sudetenland to Germany. Chamberlain returned to Britain waving the agreement and saying he had won “peace in our time.” In early 1939, Hitler took the rest of Czechoslovakia, Germans, Slavs, and all.

Chamberlain’s policy was called appeasement. The Allies felt that if they merely “appeased” Hitler and the Germans, they could avoid another war. No one wanted another war on the Continent, and few really understood Hitler’s determination to unite all German speakers into one nation. Had any of the British or French politicians in control taken the time to read Mein Kampf, they would have seen Hitler’s intentions.

After the Germans took Czechoslovakia, the Allies realized that Hitler would not stop with that nation, but it was too late to do anything to oppose him. By this time, the German army — the Wehrmact — numbered in the millions, the Luftwaffe was fully armed, and both groups had been battle-hardened in the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939. Their cooperation during the Spanish Civil War led Mussolini and Hitler to sign the Italo-German Alliance in 1936. The two nations later signed the Anti-Comintern Treaty with Japan in 1936, surrounding the Soviet Union with hostile powers.

Stalin saw through Hitler’s post-Czech passiveness and ordered his foreign minister, Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov, to negotiate a treaty with the Germans. Molotov and the German foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, negotiated the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which guaranteed non-aggression between the two nations. Unknown to the rest of the world, the treaty also partitioned Poland along pre-World war I lines.

In 1939, Hitler demanded the final piece of the puzzle: The Polish Corridor that separated Germany and East Prussia. Poland refused to budge, and this time the British and French stood firm against Germany. On 1 September 1939, the Wehrmact invaded Poland. On 3 September, Britain and France declared war on Germany.

Tactics of the War

Within six weeks of its beginning, World War I had bogged down in the Western areas and was transformed into trench warfare. The German army, the Wehrmacht, was determined not to repeat this in the next war. The resulting tactics were known as Blitzkrieg, or “lightning war.”

Blitzkrieg called for a combined assault of air and army units, both moving swiftly in coordinated attacks. German tanks smashed through the Polish lines, closely supported by the Luftwaffe dive bombers. The Luftwaffe attacked communication and supply lines in addition to attacking concentrated troop units. With this combination, the Germans moved swiftly through enemy territory before opposing armies could react with reinforcements.

Poland would fall to the Germans in less than a month. Britain and France had no time whatever to do more than give moral support.

1939

Within 1 week of the invasion, the Germans were outside Warsaw. In the next 2 weeks, the Luftwaffe leveled most of Warsaw. The Poles suffered over 300,000 casualties in the first 3 weeks of war.

On 17 September, the Russians invaded Poland from the east. Before the Soviet Army met the Germans, the Soviets had taken two-thirds of the country. The Soviets massacred over 4,000 Polish military officers in the Katyn Forest region in their invasion. Stalin was determined that Poland remain Soviet indefinitely.

Poland’s troubles were just starting. Before the war ended, over 6 million Poles would die, including over 3 million Jews.

After Hitler consolidated his gains in Poland, the Wehrmacht seemed to halt. Meanwhile, Stalin invaded Finland and the Baltic States. The Finns held firm until finally overwhelmed by a 50-to-1 numerical advantage on the side of the Soviets. The League of Nations had done nothing against Hitler; it now did nothing against Stalin. The Finns surrendered in March 1940; the Baltic States fell in June 1940.

After the conquest of Poland, everything seemed to settle in Western Europe. Germany did nothing, and the French sat behind the Maginot Line, an extensive fortification system built on the German border. Newspaper reporters began calling the war the “phony war.”

The Germans may have done little on land, but the German Navy was busy in the Atlantic. Hitler had done little to the navy except for give it 56 submarines, called U-boats (as in World War I). The German navy was led by Admiral Karl Doenitz, an old U-boat veteran of World War I. Doenitz immediately began operations in the Atlantic to cut Britain off from its supply lines overseas. U-boats managed to sink a British naval vessel in the Royal Navy base at Scapa Flow, home of the fleet that defeated the Germans at the Battle of Jutland in 1916. Even worse, U-boats began unrestricted warfare on the Atlantic, sinking over 688,000 tons of shipping by the spring of 1940. By 1942, U-boats had sunk over 14 million tons of Allied shipping.

1940

The “phony war” came to an abrupt end in April 1940. Germany attacked Denmark on its way to controlling Scandanavia. The Danish king was forced to surrender only 24 hours after the invasion began. On the same day, the Luftwaffe occupied Oslo’s airport in Norway while the German navy took over Norwegian ports. Norway fell in spite of British and French troops sent to support their army, primarily because the Luftwaffe prevented reinforcements by sea. Norway’s king and government fled the nation, leaving Vidkun Quisling, a German collaborator, in control of the nation. Norway fell in June 1940, and Germany controlled Scandanavian iron ore and the Baltic Sea. (Sweden declared neutrality, as it had during World War I.)

The Germans hit Belgium and the Netherlands in May 1940. The Dutch port of Rotterdam was reduced to rubble; Amsterdam and the Belgian cities of Antwerp and Brussels were also bombed. The Dutch lost 100,000 casualties in only 5 days of fighting, forcing Queen Wilhelmina and her government to flee to Britain. More than 5 million Dutch citizens would be sent to the German labor camps during the war.

Belgium had withstood the Germans for the duration of World War I. The Wehrmacht forced the Belgians to surrender after only 1 week of fighting.

The loss of the Low Countries had another casualty: Neville Chamberlain, the erstwhile prime minister of Great Britain. Chamberlain’s name was forever linked in complete disgrace with his appeasement policies. Chamberlain was succeeded by Winston Churchill.

Churchill’s career was an unusual one. He lost his first election in 1899, but he became a hero when he escaped from the Boers in the Boer War later that year. His advocacy of the Gallipoli campaign cost him his job as First Lord of the Admiralty in 1915, so he did what he always did when things went wrong: Joined the army and demonstrated his bravery. In 1917, Churchill became minister of munitions and supported development of the tank. In 1924, Churchill returned to Parliament where he served until after World War II. When Chamberlain resigned in humiliation, Churchill was asked by King George VI to form a new government. Churchill was 65 years old. In a stirring speech before Parliament in May 1940, Churchill told the British people he had nothing to offer but “blood, toil, tears, and sweat.”

The British had sent an expeditionary force to the Continent to support the Belgians and the French, but the fall of Belgium left the BEF caught behind German lines and surrounded by the Wehrmacht. Rather than leave the BEF to be destroyed by the German attack, the British Royal Navy decided to evacuate their troops. Between 27 May and 4 June 1940, over 900 Royal Navy and civilian craft evacuated nearly 340,000 British, French, and Belgian soldiers to Britain. Unfortunately, the BEF lost all its equipment, and the French army of 50,000 men defending the evacuation was forced to surrender.

France was next. The French had an army of 800,000 men and 5.5 million reserves, but the French had relied heavily on the Maginot Line. The Luftwaffe destroyed much of the French air force while it was on the ground. Two days after Dunkirk, 120 German divisions slammed into France, sweeping around the vaunted Maginot Line through the Ardennes Forest. (The French military command had decided that the Ardennes frontier did not require fortifications because the Germans couldn’t get their tanks through the forest.) After less than 2 weeks of fighting, the French army was in chaos, suffering more than 100,000 casualties. The French government fled Paris so the Germans wouldn’t bomb it. Mussolini invaded southern France with an army of 400,000 men. German troops paraded down the Champs Elysees after entering the city on 14 June. The French government agreed to an armistice on 22 June. Hitler forced the French to sign the armistice in Compiegne Forest — the place where the Germans signed the armistice of World War I — in the exact same railroad car used for the World War I armistice signing. The Germans hung a Nazi banner from the Eiffel Tower.

In the armistice, German took Alsace and Lorraine (again); occupied the entire northern half of France, including the Atlantic coast; and placed the occupied area under German military rule. The remaining areas of the nation were ruled from the city of Vichy (earning it the name of Vichy France) by World War I hero Henri Petain, who collaborated with the Germans down to sending French Jews to concentration camps and French laborers to German labor camps.

The French who escaped the Germans were led by General Charles de Gaulle. de Gaulle escaped to Britain, where he led the French resistance. In spite of British attempts to replace him, de Gaulle became the de facto French ruler in exile.

After the fall of France, Britain stood alone against a German military that had taken the entire western half of the Continent. On 4 June, Churchill said in a speech that even though all of Europe might fall, “... we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end ... we shall fight in the seas and oceans ... we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing-grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender. ...” (World Book Encyclopedia)

In July, the Germans began sending planes across the English Channel in an attempt to destroy the Royal Air Force. The British had a secret weapon: radar, which allowed them to see the German planes coming from 75 miles away from the coast. During July, the RAF destroyed the Luftwaffe’s efforts to support an invasion, but at the cost of nearly half the RAF. Churchill said of the RAF, “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.” (ibid.)

When the Germans couldn’t destroy the RAF, Hitler ordered the bombing of London and other civilian targets. In what was known as the London Blitz, the Germans bombed the city for 23 days with roughly 20,000 tons of bombs. More than 30,000 people died, but the British remained steadfast in their opposition to Hitler. Churchill was everywhere in the city, even leaving his shelter during the bombings. When France asked for an armistice, Churchill had said, “Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will say, ‘This was their finest hour.’” At the end of the bombings, everyone knew the British had survived “their finest hour.”

Churchill worked relentlessly to get the Americans to recognize the danger of Hitler. Isolationism still held the day in the U.S., especially in the Congress. Most Congressmen were content to let the Europeans destroy themselves if they wished. However, president Franklin Delano Roosevelt understood that if totalitarianism won in Europe, the U.S. would pay a horrible price. After Dunkirk, FDR sent $43 million in surplus arms to Britain, but the Congress insisted the British pay cash for everything sent. FDR and Churchill signed a “destroyers for bases” deal that enabled him to send 51 older destroyers to Britain.

In October 1940, the Italians invaded Greece from Albania, expecting a quick victory over the ill-equipped Greek military. Instead, the Greeks whipped the Italians back into Albania. In Africa, the Italians invaded Egypt from Libya; the British beat them back. Still, at the end of 1940, the war was going Hitler’s way everywhere he looked.