ABSTRACT
The Second World War opened with a lightening campaign (blitzkrieg —as an Italian journalist dubbed it) by Germany against Poland on 1 September 1939. It was all over in just over a month, and then the Wehrmacht made ready for its anticipated attack on the West. The intervening military operations against Norway and the occupation of Denmark were something of a cleverly executed ad hoc measure to frustrate an invasion by the British and to secure her vital steel supplies from Sweden. The onslaught on the West opened on 10 May 1940, and was overwhelming in its speed and efficiency. Even the Germans were surprised at how well things went. This campaign too was frighteningly brief; it was completed in just about six weeks. All was now set for the attack on the Soviet Union the following year, but again there was a hitch, in this case caused by Italy’s plans to conquer Greece. Mussolini, in trying to emulate his Pact of Steel partner, had launched this attack but with dire results and now had to endure the added humiliation of being rescued by the Germans. Hitler’s Balkan campaign-another very swift success-was therefore something of an emergency operation that delayed the Russian campaign for over a month. The delay proved fatal; not immediately, of course, the Germans had some brilliant victories in the first year or so of the war, but their failure to take Moscow that first winter (December 1941) did wonders for their opponents, and provided a shock from which the seemingly invincible Wehrmacht never quite recovered. From then on, despite some further temporary gains in the Crimea in 1942, it was all a lost cause. In addition, there was the loss of North Africa through the efforts of combined British and American forces, and the terrible saturation bombing of German cities from 1942 onwards. These, and the punishing haemorrhage of German manpower on the Russian front, brought the whole awful conflict to an end in May 1945.
