A Quintet Of Britairis War Leaders ...
Marshal Harold R.
Alexander led Mediter
ranean drives.
Adm. Andrew Browne
Cunningham led the
British at sea.
Marshal Bernard L.
Montgomery led 21st
Allied Army Group.
Adm. Lord Louis Mount
batten commanded in
Southeast Asia.
Arthur W. Tedder, air
chief marshal, was
deputy to Eisenhower.
Congress to appropriate an additional billion dol
lars for defense. A vast expansion program to pro
vide a “two-oceao navy” was under way, and in
June conscription bills were introduced in the Sen
ate and House. But war itself seemed remote from
the United States in mid-1940 as the country pre
pared to elect a President.
BATTLE OF BRITAIN
'T'HE BRITISH were alone. From the coasts of
* their tight little isle they could see only Axis
cations, or Axis sympathizers, or Axis-occupied
countries, or jittery neutrals fearing to offend the
awaggering Reich.
“I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and
•weat,” Winston Churchill had told them when he
became prime minister. And as the last exhausted
survivors from Dunkerque returned to English soil,
he had vowed:
“We shall defend our island whatever the cost
xqay be. 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.”
Almost all their ground equipment was left in
Flanders. But with a few tanks and cannon, hunting
guns and pitchforks, Britons grimly prepared a
defense. A civilian home army was mobilized. Dis
guised pillboxes were erected along city streets.
The R.A.F. hid airfields throughout the countryside
to protect its meager force. More barrage balloons
went up around London to halt low-flying bombers.
Workmen feverishly dug trenches—and air raid
shelters—in the public parks. Churchill, heeding
the lesson? of “fifth column” treachery in Norway
and the Lowlands, sped dubious aliens into concen
tration camps. Church bells were silenced; when
they pealed again it would mean the Germans were
coming—by parachute.
Women and old men went into munitions plants
in a grim race against time, and watched their ra
tions grow slimmer as the navy strove desperately
to keep open Britain’s sub-infested life lines.
The Luftwaffe set up airbases along the Atlantic
coast from Norway to the Bay of Biscay. “We’re
Sailing Against England” was the most popular
song in the Reich.
Early in August the German air force began to
come in greater numbers. At first they came by
day and hit port areas. Then they moved inland.
Goering sent his fast and lightly armored bombers
swooping over by the hundreds to hit factories and
railroad centers. But often they bombed population
centers without military value and strafed persons
on the streets.
The R.A.F. nursed its 700 speedy Spitfires and
Hurricanes carefully, sent them up only when the
probable Nazi bag seemed worth it, and often re
fused to be drawn into hopeless battle.
There were 04 major attacks from August 8 to
September 5. The list of targets grew long and
varied—the naval base at Portsmouth; the Croydon
ajrport; the Tyneside industrial area near New
castle; the Thames estuary; the residential London
suburbs; the great shipping port of Liverpool.
Civilian casualties reached an average of 75 a day.
On August 17 the German government announced
the whole area around the British Isles had been
mined; in a night raid on September 9 a time bomb
was dropped in the garden of Buckingham Palace,
70 feet from the king’s study; on September 12
Britain moved 2,000,000 soldiers into defense posi
tions along the English and Scottish coasts.
But the air blitz was just beginning. Just befoje
noon on September 15, Goering sent 250 planes over
London and two hours later 250 more. The R.A.F.
went up to get them, and Sunday crowds stood in
the streets and cheered madly as flaming bombers
plumeted out of the 700 square miles of sky above
the sprawling capital. At least 185 of the enemy’s
planes—and possibly as many as 230—went down.
THE BLITZ THAT FAILED
AT THAT point the Germans switched almost ex
clusively to night bombing. But they kept com
ing in even greater numbers—and their targets
were greatly widened.
The civilians took it. A million went underground
to sleep in subway stations and stairways. They
emerged in daylight to dig out the dead and watch
flames roaring through the streets. For days on end
the skies were black with smoke above London,
Bristol, Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester, Shef
field and scores of other places. Winston Churchill,
chin thrust forward and eyes blazing with anger,
stepped among the ruins and made a “V” sign with
his fingers.
Despite their losses the British could see progress.
R.A.F. bombers were going over Germany and even
Italy, striking key industrial targets in the Ruhr,
Berlin, Mannheim, Bremen, Danzig, Turin, Milan
and Genoa. Day after day they pounded the ports
where invasion barges were massing. Roosevelt
gave 50 old American destroyers to reinforce the
hard-pressed British Navy in return for U. S. leases
on bases like Newfoundland, Bermuda and Trinidad
in the western hemisphere.
The air blitz intensified its fury. On November 14
some 500 Nazi planes converged on Coventry, north
west of London. They blasted motor factories—
along with churches, hospitals and schools—and left
the city virtually in ruins. A power-shovel dug a
trench to bury 200 dead in one grave. On December
29 a record incendiary attack was made on London.
It wrecked a square mile area in the city proper,
including many landmarks, and started the greatest
fire the city had known since the blaze of 1666.
But the British stood to their guns. A new device—
radar—which could seek out the presence of objects
even through clouds warned of approaching planes,
and the R.A.F. continued to exact a toll.
The Germans made one mistake in all this, and as
usual it was a honey. They bombed in an attempt to
break Britain’s morale, as much as to break her
industrial system. The morale didn’t break; her in
dustrial system might have done so had it been
subjected to sufficiently concentrated attack.
Finally, in the spring of 1941, the attacks abated.
Bullet-riddled German invasion boats lay awash
along the French coast and the bodies of Nazi troops,
trained to sail against England, floated in the
channel.
The British lost 42,950 civilians killed in the blitz.
Churchill toasted the R.A.F.: “Never in the field of
human conflict was so much owed by so many to
so few.”
Britain was still alone. But Britain was still free.
THE BALKANS GET IN IT
UTTLER had won a great deal in the West mei
ix by rattling his sword. Then he turned to
East and rattlejj. Some of the Balkans liked
sound.
In Romania, uprisings of the fascist Iron Gu
made the regime of King Carol II so precari
that he fled the country with his morganatic w
Madame Lupescu, on September 6, 1940, and
the throne to his son Michael. But actually
Iron Guard and General Ion Antonescu took
power, and as soon as Carol left more Gerr
troops moved in.
Hungary moved into the Axis camp, and £
garia headed that way too.
Mussolini thought he had bought off Gree
generals and could occupy that country easily.
October 26 the official Italian news agency char
a band of armed Greeks had invaded Alba
Greece denied the charge. The next night Mussc
sent an ultimatum demanding the right to occ
strategic Greek bases for the war’s duration. Gr
Premier Metaxas rejected it.
II Duce sent his warplanes over the Italian I
der and into Greece. The invaded country
only about 150,000 troops and a puny navy,
Mussolini discovered the generals were not bo’u
Holing up in their mountains, the Greeks
off the invaders and by the end of a month
chased them all off Grecian soil. The British
in planes and from coastal bases the R.A.F. bon
southern Italian cities.
The Greeks kept moving right into Albania
Hitler, who had not been advised of II Duce’s t
cian plans, now let nis ally stew.
In February, 1941, der Fuehrer changed his i
and put the heat on Yugoslavia, demanding
sage for his troops through that country to Gi
and other concessions that would pull the Y
slavs firmly into the Axis. The Yugoslav cai
got ready to accept. Then undercover resist
grew so great that 17-year-old King Peter II
over the government and formed an anti
cabinet. A friendship pact was signed with Ri
Hitler’s troops marched into Yugoslavia
Bulgaria on April 6 In three days they broke a
the Vardar Valley, cut the links between G
and Yugoslovia, and were at the Aegean Sea.
The British forces, which had come up
Africa, tried to stand at Thermopylae. It was
less. Nazi tanks rolled through the streets o
cient Athens on April 27. By then Yugoslavs
fallen under, and King Peter and his cabine
fled.
Hitler next pulled a new trick out of the
He sent paratroopers floating down over r
tainous, jagged Crete on May 20. Some of tl
vaders wore British and New Zealand battle
Ten days later the chagrined British admit!
loss of the island.
The swastika now flew from the top of N
to the Black Sea. It flew over an empire g
than Napoleon’s, greater than the Caesars’, g
than Charlemagne’s.
But this empire still was not great enouj
Hitler.
HITLER FACES EAST
II7HEN the Germans and Russians signed
” friendship treaty in 1939, veteran stud<
Europe wondered how long the match woul
In “Mein Kampf” Hitler made it plain that
garded “the Bolsheviks” as Germany’s Numb
enemy, and almost as inbred in Germans
goose-step was the desire to get their hands
lush grain lands of the Ukraine. In 1940 ther
periodic rumors—not taken seriously—of t
minent conflict between the two powers. But
spring of 1941 reports began to multiply that
was massing great numbers of troops ale
. . . And Five Top Frghters Of The Sov
Marshal Ivan S. Konev
led the 1st Ukranian
Army lor the Reds*
Marshal Rodion Y. Ma
linovsky led the 2nd
Ukranian Army,
Morshol KontlaMi* tt.
Rokojiovjky 1*4 M
While Russian Amf.
Mortkal Aicxcndtr M.
Vailtvtkt S«<i VUd For
Martha' Gref
Zhukov led the
armiat »•« ®