Booth / Walton The Illustrated History of World War II

1. Auflage 2015
ISBN: 978-1-78274-171-8
Verlag: Amber Books Ltd
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 256 Seiten

Reihe: Illustrated History

The military engagements and campaigns of World War II are emblazoned on mankind's memory: from the Blitzkrieg attacks that smashed the Polish army in 27 days, and conquered Norway in a day, through the savage and sustained fighting of Operation Barbarossa on the Eastern Front, to the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The previously unknown level of destruction made possible by Robert Oppenheimer's scientific breakthrough brought the war to an end, and in its wake came the full revelation of the horror of the Holocaust.

With the aid of 300 black and white and colour photographs, The Illustrated History of World War II tells the full story of the war and the individuals who led it - Hitler, Stalin, Churchill, Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Mussolini, Togo, Rommel, Montgomery and De Gaulle, among many others. In addition, the book examines life beyond the frontline: the Holocaust, living under occupation, refugees, the Blitz and evacuations, the changing role for women, and food. Full-colour maps complement the lively text and pictures, leading the reader through many of the principal engagements on land, sea and air.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Booth, Owen

Walton, John

Leseproben

CHAPTER 1
The
Gathering Storm
IMMEDIATELY AFTER TAKING POWER HITLER SET ABOUT
REBUILDING GERMANY’S WAR MACHINE WITH THE AIM OF OVER
TURNING THE GERMAN DEFEAT IN THE FIRST WORLD WAR.
HITLER WAS DETERMINED THAT GERMANY WOULD NOT BE ON
THE LOSING SIDE A SECOND TIME. SURRENDER AT MUNICH
The storm clouds of war seemed to be gathering over Europe when the British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, returned from Munich on 30 September 1938, after completing tense diplomatic negotiations with the dictator of Nazi Germany, Adolf Hitler. Chamberlain’s quest had been peace, but the British public were so fearful of failure that there had been a run on the gas masks already pouring off the production lines. Fear of gas attack, inspired by its use in the First World War of 1914–18, was a potent one, but then so was fear of German air raids. HITLER TAKES CENTRE STAGE AT ONE OF THE NAZI PARTY’S FAMOUS NUREMBERG RALLIES. HELD EVERY YEAR, THE RALLIES WERE THE FOCAL POINT OF THE NAZI POLITICAL CALENDAR. THE PARTY FAITHFUL AND THOUSANDS OF ORDINARY GERMANS WOULD FLOCK TO NUREMBERG EACH YEAR TO HEAR THEIR FUHRER’S SPECTACULAR AND MESMERISING SET PIECE SPEECHES. An air raid warning system was prepared in case German bombers attempted to attack British cities, and plans were laid for the evacuation of children from the major towns to the safety of the countryside. Half a million men and women, in a mood of defiance and trepidation, volunteered to serve in the ARP – Air Raid Precautions. The catchphrase of the time was ‘the bombers will always get through’, and both civilians and the military believed it. So did former prime minister Stanley Baldwin, whom Chamberlain had replaced in 1937. Chamberlain had not hidden the grim nature of the crisis from the public. Before he left for Munich, he broadcast on BBC radio, and told listeners: ‘How horrible, how fantastic, how incredible it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas masks here because of a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing.’ The people ‘of whom we know nothing’ were the Czechs, whose republic had been created only 20 years before, after the end of the First World War in 1918, and the Germans, the enemy defeated the same year by Britain, France and their allies. The quarrel concerned the Sudetenland, which was part of Czechoslovakia, but was claimed by Hitler on the grounds that its mainly German-speaking population was, he said, being persecuted. On his return, Chamberlain emerged slowly from his plane to tell reporters waiting at Heston aerodrome that his negotiations with Hitler had been successful. Britain and Germany, he said, had agreed ‘never to go to war with one another again’. This, the Prime Minister claimed, was ‘peace for our time’ and ‘peace with honour’, not only for Britain but for the whole of Europe. Overnight, it seemed, tension drained away. The relief was overwhelming, the reaction ecstatic. Chamberlain’s face-saving deal with Hitler had saved Europe from a second war within a generation. But not everyone was convinced. Some MPs denounced the Munich agreement as ‘a sell-out to Hitler’. The French Prime Minister, Edouard Daladier, who had been with Chamberlain at Munich, surveyed the wildly cheering crowds that greeted his return to Paris and remarked: ‘Bloody fools!’ These sceptics already realised the truth behind the Munich Agreement. For those who wanted to see it, the evidence was already there. At Munich, Hitler’s approach had not been conciliatory, but threatening. He had warned Britain and France that another war was inevitable unless they could convince the government of Czechoslovakia to cede the Sudetenland to his Third Reich. This, he said, was his ‘last territorial claim in Europe’. It meant that three million Sudeten Czechs would find themselves in German territory, but, in return, Hitler undertook to guarantee the independence of what was left of Czechoslovakia, and, he promised, there would be no war. The Czechs were stunned. They had not been consulted about the carving up of their young country and they were in a mood to fight. Morale was high in their army, which was one million strong. Their soldiers were well equipped with modern weapons from their own sophisticated arms factory at Brno, and they believed they could count on aid from Britain and France if the Nazis attacked. How wrong they were. In 1938, Britain and France preferred to appease Hitler and give in to his demands, and the Czech President, Eduard Benes, had no option but to follow suit. As events were soon to prove, Czechoslovakia, the first nation to be gobbled up by the Nazis, would not be the last. ‘How horrible, how fantastic, how incredible it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas masks here because of a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing.’
Neville Chamberlain in a broadcast to the British people, 1938 For the moment, though, Neville Chamberlain was riding a high tide of popularity. Even the ruling monarch, King George VI, approved of the policy of appeasement, and despite the warning note sounded by MPs who opposed it, Parliament gave the prime minister a rapturous response. At the time, giving in to Hitler appeared the sensible thing to do in order to avoid a Europe-wide conflict for which Britain was not prepared, and which she could not afford and did not yet possess the will to fight. The long, dreadful shadow cast by the First World War strongly influenced the British people, whose memories of mass carnage were still vivid. That alone made another war unthinkable, and both the British public and the British press stood full square behind Chamberlain. The Times newspaper, which led the applause for the prime minister, even went so far as to assert that the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia had in some way been a service to humanity. HITLER ROSE FROM HOMELESS RABBLE-ROUSER TO BECOME GERMANY’S SUPREME LEADER IN LITTLE OVER A DECADE. HITLER The fact that a man like Adolf Hitler succeeded in becoming Chancellor of Germany is still an example of one of the most astonishing rises to power ever to take place. Hitler was born in 1889 at Braunau in Austria to lower middle-class parents. At school, he was described as an arrogant and lazy child who found conventional discipline impossible to accept, so it was ironic that after spending years living in hostels and doing occasional work as a labourer Hitler was to find life in the German Army during the First World War his most important and formative experience. Hitler relished the war. He received two Iron Crosses for bravery and when Germany was finally beaten by the Allies in 1918, he made it his life’s work to overturn his adopted country’s defeat. To this end, he became a politician and combined his profound nationalism, contempt for democracy and violent hatred of Jews, communists and socialists into a coherent political platform. The retributive terms of the Treaty of Versailles after Germany’s defeat in the First World War and the harsh economic crises of the 1920s and 1930s left many Germans penniless or unemployed, and with little faith that their new democratic government could solve the nation’s problems. As Germany’s politics became increasingly violent, Hitler’s Nazi Party seemed to many people to be the only organisation capable of challenging the large and powerful Communist Party. This social and political upheaval provided Hitler, who would in other circumstances have languished on the lunatic fringe of politics, with a ready audience for his ideology and his policies. After the Nazi Party became Germany’s larger single party at the polls, Hitler was reluctantly appointed Chancellor by the aged President Paul von Hindenburg on 30 January 1933. Hindenburg, however, died in 1934 and after that Hitler ruthlessly exploited any opportunity to crush opposition to his dictatorship inside Germany, and to extend German power in Europe. GERMAN SOLDIERS EXECUTE CZECH CIVILIANS AT BRNO IN MORAIVIA, 1942. OVER 300,000 CZECHS DIED DURING THE GERMAN OCCUPATION. BUT EVEN THIS HORRIFIC FIGURE PALES BESIDE THE HORRORS THE GERMANS WERE TO COMMIT ONCE THEYINVADED POLAND AND THE SOVIET UNION, WHERE MILLIONS OF INNOCENTS WERE SLAUGHTERED. The critics, however, were not silenced. Winston Churchill, a strong and long-standing opponent of appeasement, long labelled ‘a warmonger’ for his robust views, told the House of Commons that the Munich agreement was a ‘total and unmitigated defeat’. His statement was greeted with jeers, but Churchill was not alone. In France, Prime Minister Daladier was now convinced that war was inevitable, and had no illusions that the decision to let Czechoslovakia fall prey to Nazi ambitions was in any way a noble one. The cheers that greeted Daladier on his return from Munich to Paris surprised him: he had fully expected to be booed. Having secured, in effect, the submission of Britain and France, Adolf Hitler wasted no time. In less than a week, on 5 October 1938, President Eduard Benes had resigned and German troops had marched into the Sudetenland. Less than six months later, on 15 March 1939, Hitler cynically broke his word and invaded the rest of Czechoslovakia. By April, the country had ceased to exist, having been broken up and absorbed into...