"Evil" Leaders
Adolf Hitler
(Part 2)
Guderian's reforms had proven magnificent, and Germany conquered Poland in little over a month with support from their frenemies the Soviet Union. Improvements in armoured formation and aircraft tactics had rendered the Polish defence plan useless, especially as Poland wasn't able to mobilise its army in time.
Over the winter of 1939/1940, Hitler became more confident. If Poland would last a month, how long could Britain and France last? Despite the fact that many assassination attempts had thus far occurred against him, none had yet come close to taking his life - or at least, so he thought. Furthermore the German army was in good shape, although it still lacked a great deal of trucks and medium tanks.
In early 1940 Germany invaded Denmark and Norway. Denmark surrendered after hours of combat but Norway with British assistance managed to last months. Despite this the Germans prevailed and Hitler's grand strategy, which relied on iron ore imports from Sweden, seemed to be coming together at last.
Meanwhile the German General Staff (Generalstab) began to plan for the attack on the West. Hitler had predicted that "one million Germans would die in France" but Germany's best generals, Manstein and Guderian, were determined for other things to happen. They planned to draw the French army, which had superior numbers and better tanks, into Belgium and then surprise them by encircling them in a sickle shaped attack from the Ardennes forest to the South.
The French in May were caught totally unprepared. Their pre-war plans had relied on the htought that the Ardennes would be impenetrable by large amounts of armoured forces, and while the forest slowed down the German advance in actuality, it was not enough to make a difference. Over one million Allied troops were taken prisoner but hundreds of thousands were saved by the defence at Dunkirk and Hitler's odd decision to refuse to press the attack there. Why didn't he attack? Some historians thought it was because Hitler delusionally viewed Britain as a future ally, some have postulated that the Germans merely ran out of fuel and supplies. Regardless the British Army would live to fight another day. Meanwhile Italy entered the war as part of the Axis in a foolhardy attempt to break the French lines in the South of France.
Paris surrendered without a fight in June and Hitler was viewed as a hero in Germany. He took credit for the Manstein plan when he had initially opposed it, and his popularity in Germany was never higher before or after 1940. Germany occuiped the North half of France while a puppet government was allowed to remain in the South, centred in Vichy...for the moment.
After a brutal air campaign in August called the Battle of Britain, Goering's bombastic boast that "How long will England last...two, three weeks?" proved uneventful as Britain was able to fend off the Luftwaffe assault. With Ameircan support Britain launched a swift counterattack in Libya against Italy, with Australian troops capturing 100,000 Italians and losing only about 500 of their own.
Later that year Yugoslavia broke away from the Axis, and Germany invaded. A new state, Croatia, was set up, and a brutal partisan war began.
Hitler's real goal in all of this was, however, the sick idea of exterminating the native populations of Eastern Europe and colonising the land with Germans instead. On June 22, 1941 after months of preparations, the Axis as a whole invaded the Soviet Union.
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"We only have to kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will collapse!"
- Hitler before the invasion of the USSR
About 3 million Axis troops attacked 4 million Soviet soldiers. Although it was large Stalin's purges had left the Red Army crippled, and combined with the paranoid dictator's refusal to accept the impending reality of invasion until it had already begun complivated Soviet defensive efforts further.
Month by month, battle by battle, the German army crushed resistance and took millions of Soviet troops prisoner, burning and looting Russian towns along the road to Moscow. Most of the Soviet prisoners were to die in concentration camps both back in Germany and in the freezing plains of Russian soil. Stalin rallied the nation after a period of depression, however, and Soviet armies sprang up as fast as the German troops could destroy them. Stalin proclaimed a "Great Patriotic War" against Germany, like the war against Napoleon in 1812, and the whole nation began to either sign up or produce supplies for the military.
In August and September the Axis completed their most damaging blow to date, capturing 700,000 Soviet troops as well as the capital of Ukraine, Kiev, for minimal losses. But by November the cold was setting in, and extraordinarily bitter Soviet resistance as well as partisan actions were taking their toll. Many German units were down to half strength, losing more men each day to the cold, snipers and enemy action.
Leningrad (St. Petursburg) was surrounded by German and Finnish troops and Hitler planned to starve the city's 4 million inhabitants to death instead of capturing it by assault. In October Hitler approved "Operation Typhoon (Typhon), the battle against Moscow. 2 million German troops were to attack. But the freeing up of crack Siberian troops from the Far East as well as multi layered defence emplacements and the bitter cold (which at one point reached -42 degrees Celsius!) allowed the outnumbered Soviets to claim victory, inflicting 300,000 irreparable losses on the German army.
Stalin's ministers abandoned Moscow and there was rioting in the streets, but Stalin decided to stay and even ordered the annual 1917 commemorations to continue. The soldiers participating in the military parade would march out to fight the enemy as soon as it was over, on foot. Here's Stalin's speech, probably his most famous of the war:
Stalin's (ENTJ) Speech Before the Battle of Moscow, November 7th 1941
[video=youtube;8IGbjPqFFvA]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8IGbjPqFFvA[/video]
Hitler was furious. He would display his normal tantrums whenever something particularly catastrophic to his war plans occurred. This time he sacked the general in charge, and a very odd thing later occurred in 1943: von Kluge (commander of the Moscow operation) challenged Guderian, who had two years earlier argued to attack Moscow instead of taking a detour to Kiev, to a duel (Hitler forbade it).
Stalin's victory at Moscow was followed by an ambitious attempt at a frontwide offensive: unfortunately for the Soviets, the Germans were able to largely repulse the attack. Nevertheless it showed that the German army was not so invincible after all, and Moscow was to be the beginning of the end of Hitler's new empire.
In 1942, Hitler developed a new obsession: the oilfields of the Caucasus. He was convinced that Germany needed the oil in order to survive and reportedly said "If I cannot seize the oil of Maikop and Grozny then I must end this war" (how he was to do so nobody knows).
This obsession was to be made real through Fall Blau, a new attack on the South of the USSR. Once again German arms proved unparalleled and Stalingrad and the oilfields both were by August 1942 almost in the hands of Germany. But thanks to the self-sacrificial efforts of Soviet units and the determination of the Soviets to defend the city - "there is no land on the other side of the Volga" was a quote from Soviet troops at the time - the Germans would have to grind with blood and steel through the streets of Stalingrad.
By November, the Germans had lost over 100,000 men in Stalingrad, and with no sign of an end. Hitler's other obsession was with never retreating, and he certainly stuck to his guns now - against the advice of his generals.
Marshal Grigory Zhukov (ENTJ), Stalin's only confidant and probably the best general of the war, had been planning a tremendous counterstroke against Germany for weeks. The Russian tanks would burst through the ranks of the inferior Romanian and Italian troops and encircle the whole German 6th Army in a stunning reversal of trends. The plan was a success and Hitler's refusal to withdraw led to all but 10,000 of his troops being killed, after a failed winter counterattack led by General Hoth (yes, this was probably where George Lucas got the name from).
From here on Nazi Germany would win no more major victories. Speer, Bormann and Goebbels would take over the administrative functions of government as Hitler withdrew further and further from reality. He had a special base in East Prussia near Rastenburg constructed called the Wolfschanze (Wolf's Lair) where he would spend most of his time from 1941 until late 1944.
