By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

How the various countries justified WWII Part One

Starting with the rearming of Germany following the "stab in the back" (that Germany didn't lose the First World War) myth of the First War War which thus can be seen how it led to the Second World War already had become a worldwide conflict. Some say that this started early on when Britain declared war on Germany, whereas others say it was when the US joined the First War War, which ultimately led to a strengthening of the position of Japan vis a vis China.

 

The South Manchuria Railway Zone and the Korean Peninsula had been under the control of the Japanese Empire since the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905. Japan's ongoing industrialization and militarization ensured their growing dependence on oil and metal imports from the US. The US sanctions, which prevented trade with the United States (which had occupied the Philippines around the same time) resulted in Japan furthering its expansion in the territory of China and Southeast Asia. The invasion, or the Marco Polo Bridge Incident of 7 July 1937, is sometimes cited as an alternative starting date for World War II. No doubt, the Manchurian Incident hastened the situation because the latter the Asian and Pacific theatres were as important as the European ones and possibly more so in their consequences.

On 5 June, 1940 the German armed forces were ready for the second stage of their campaign, ‘Case Red,’ defeating French troops remaining and forcing a surrender. The French line hastily formed along the Somme, Aisne, and Oise rivers fielded only 40 divisions against the 118 available to the Germans. The large infantry tail had caught up with the German spearhead, providing the new German front line with relatively fresh forces. General Georges told Weygand that they were fighting for the honor since there was no other way left: ‘no reserves, no relief forces, no reinforcements, without cavalry, without tanks. Tragic situation.’1 Despite the significant disparity in strength, the French units showed better organization and determination than had been possible in the first weeks of collapse, but the outcome was inevitable. On 9 June, German Army Group A had reached Rouen, and by the 12th German armies were close to Paris. On 10 June, Weygand told Reynaud that a ‘definitive rupture’ of the front was imminent.

The French government abandoned the capital and made first for the Loire valley, then eventually to Bordeaux. Paris, where air bases had been bombed on 3 June, was declared an open city, and on the 14th, the German army entered in triumph. At a meeting of ministers on 12 June, Weygand told his listeners that the time for an armistice had arrived; Reynaud remained undecided, but when Georges held a meeting with French commanders on the 15th, they all agreed that the battle had to be stopped.2 Reynaud, exhausted and frustrated, bowed to reality and resigned the next day, to be succeeded by the chief spokesman for an armistice, Marshal Pétain. Even now, the issue was not settled, for Weygand had imagined an armistice as a suspension of the fighting’, which might allow French forces to regroup. Pétain, on the other hand, in announcing the decision on the radio at midday on 17 June, told the French people that ‘we must cease combat.’ Weygand told Georges to announce that he had only decided to ‘attempt to end the combat’ and ordered all commanders to continue fighting.3 The Battle of France ended not with Pétain’s announcement but eight days later. Although the fight was over, and thousands of soldiers now abandoned their units to return home, those forces still intact in western and central France continued fighting, though they were exhausted and short of equipment. The 120,000 men of General Frère’s Seventh Army straddled the Loire valley and tried to block each step of the river system as the Germans approached. They ceased fighting only on 25 June.4

The agreement to ask for an armistice was complicated by the decision taken in May 1940 by the Italian dictator to intervene on Hitler’s side against the democracies. Mussolini had disliked the state of ‘non-belligerence’ he had been forced to declare in September 1939 because Italy was prepared neither economically nor militarily to confront Britain and France after a decade of combat. In December, he gave an ambiguous promise to Hitler that he would eventually honor his commitment to the Axis. In March 1940, he had written that Italy could not remain neutral for the whole war without becoming ’a Switzerland multiplied by ten’.5 But Mussolini remained constrained by the opposition of the monarchy and the military leadership to risking a conflict for which Italy was manifestly not ready. The Italian commander-in-chief, Marshal Badoglio, told Mussolini that preparations would not be complete until 1942 at the earliest, which was at best an optimistic assessment. It is difficult to judge the extent to which Mussolini respected this advice because he was trapped in his rhetorical vision of Italy’s military potential. Still, he was also uncertain whether Germany would attack in the West and, even if it happened, how quickly the campaign would be decided.6 When Hitler asked if Italy could supply twenty to thirty divisions to fight alongside German forces in the Rhône Valley, the Italian army command rejected the idea out of hand. What Mussolini and his circle wanted was what they called a ‘parallel’ war, ‘not “for” or “with” Germany,’ as the deputy war minister, Ubaldo Soddu, put it, ‘but one for ourselves.7 However, once news of German victories began to roll in, Mussolini decided that Italy could stand by no longer. On 13 May, he announced that he would declare war within a month. On 28 May, after hearing of the Belgian surrender, he fixed the date for 5 June if he missed the bus and could claim ‘no title to participate in the succession.’ The declaration was delayed until 10 June when Mussolini announced war from the balcony of the Palazzo Venezia in Rome to a crowd whose enthusiasm was observed to be muted.8 

The declaration did not mean that Italy was ready to participate, but it prompted immediate retaliation from British and French bombers, which raided Turin and Genoa two days later. Mussolini was only stirred into action by the news that Pétain had called for an armistice. He ordered the Italian army on the western frontier to begin an offensive against France three days later. Then he hurried to Munich to meet Hitler to discuss possible armistice terms; on the train to Germany, he talked of asking for the maximum – occupation of all of France, seizure of the French fleet, occupation of Tunisia, French Somaliland, and Corsica – but when he arrived he felt at once, he told Ciano, that ‘his role was second-class.’9 Hitler wanted a more modest armistice so that German hands would not be tied in any future peace settlement and prevent driving the French back into the arms of Britain. The ceasefire also provided the opportunity, according to von Ribbentrop, to expel Europe’s Jews to the French colony of Madagascar now that France was defeated.10 Hitler refused to permit a standard armistice agreement. On 19 June, the French high command was informed through the German embassy in Spain that Hitler was ready to consider the conditions for an armistice, and the following day the French delegation drove through the front line to arrive at Compiègne, where the Germans had been forced to sign the armistice twenty-three years before. A brief ceremony in the same railway carriage as 1918 confirmed the ceasefire on 22 June, but it could only come into effect when Italy had agreed to cease hostilities.11

Since Italian forces had only begun to fight on the 20th, Mussolini was compelled to wait a few days so that there was something definite that could be ended. Some twenty-two understrength and poorly equipped divisions attacked the French south-east frontier and made almost no progress against well-dug-in and determined French opposition. The town of Menton was occupied, but otherwise, the Italian side had only 1,258 dead and 2,151 frostbite cases to show for three days of ineffectual combat.12 An armistice was nonetheless reluctantly agreed, and on 23 June, a French delegation arrived to sign an agreement at the Villa Incisa in Rome. Although the French delegation understood that they had little choice, they could not accept that the armistice represented military defeat at the hands of the Italians. Mussolini kept his promise to Hitler, and the terms were far more modest than the extreme ambitions he had harbored. Still, in both the German and the Italian case, the words were not all that different from the Versailles settlement imposed on Germany – and in some sense worse. French sovereignty was effectively lost by the occupation of northern and western France; the French armed forces were to be reduced to a rump 100,000, though limited colonial troops could be kept to ensure that Britain could not easily occupy French imperial territory; naval bases and fortifications were to be demilitarized, weapons surrendered and the fleet to be immobilized. Italian negotiators also insisted that the Italian Armistice Commissionjurisdictionn Corsica, French North Africa, French Somaliland, and Syria.13 Pétain’s France is center now at the spa town of Vichy, ruled with limited independence throughout the unoccupied territory in the center and south of the country.

The defeat of the Allies in 1940 transformed the nature of the war. It encouraged Italian and Japanese aggression to take advantage of a widening window of opportunity by threatening the European empires with a terminal crisis. The defeat shocked Stalin, who had expected a much longer campaign, but, as he told the British ambassador Stafford Cripps in July 1940, the outcome meant that there was no going back now to ‘the old equilibrium.’14 To underline his argument, the Soviet Union began to encroach on Eastern European territory, annexing the Baltic States and the Romanian provinces of Northern Bukovina and Moldova. The Allied defeat accelerated the United States rearmament program and alerted American opinion fully to the threat posed by the Axis states. But the most significant consequence for Hitler was the realization that the European axis could now create a ‘New Order’ in the whole of Europe, just as Japanese leaders now prepared to grasp the opportunity suddenly handed to them in Asia by the defeat of the European Allies. This had not been a plan in the 1930s; it was an unanticipated consequence of the decision by Britain and France to declare war, but it presented the Axis leadership with an exceptional strategic opportunity. The principal barrier to the security of any ‘New Order’ remained British resistance. At the meeting with Mussolini in Munich on 18 June, Hitler had insisted that he had no desire to destroy the British Empire, which he still considered a great factor in the equilibrium of the world’, but if there were no peace settlement with the West in 1940, the war would be waged that was ‘total, absolute and pitiless’.15

 

Disaster surge

When Churchill rose in the House of Commons to deliver his speech on 20 August 1940, famously remembered for his brief remarks about ‘the Few’ of RAF Fighter Command, he spent most of a slow-moving account summarizing the catastrophe that had overtaken the Western powers in the summer of 1940. ‘What a cataract of disaster,’ he told fellow MPs. ‘The trustful Dutch overwhelmed … Belgium invaded and beaten down; our own fine Expeditionary Force cut off and almost captured … our Ally, France, out; Italy in against us ….’ Such a prospect only three months before would, Churchill concluded, ‘have seemed incredible.’16 Though his speech also contained an ebullient declaration of continued resistance, it was not warmly greeted by the chamber. Churchill’s secretary, Jock Colville, listening in the gallery of the Commons, found the session languid. He could not even recall later hearing the memorable sentence about the ‘Few.’17 The Soviet ambassador in London, Ivan Maisky, was in the gallery too. Though he thought the speech oratorically limited – ‘not at his best today – he found the parliamentary lobbies full of a ‘new-found confidence’ despite the cataract of disasters.18 A few weeks before, Churchill’s son, Randolph, had explained to Maisky that British belligerency after the collapse of France was essential to preserve the empire: ‘if we lose our empire, we shall become not a second-rank, but a tenth-rank power. We have nothing. We will all die of hunger. So, there is nothing for it but to fight to the end.’ Like father, like son, Maisky might have thought.19 

The list of disasters was, as Churchill insisted, not what had been expected from the declaration of war on Germany. Churchill’s military secretary, Hastings Ismay, later wrote that if the British Chiefs of Staff had remotely imagined in August 1939 that this would be the outcome, ‘they would have unhesitatingly warned the Cabinet that to go to war would be to invite overwhelming disaster.’ Instead, he concluded, they would have recommended ‘humiliating concessions.’20 Now, the British Empire faced the prospect of world war alone. In the wake of the French defeat and the expulsion of the British forces fighting on the European Continent, the future of the British Empire suddenly became open to international speculation. This was scarcely surprising given the scale of the defeat and the self-evident difficulty Britain now faced in defending outposts of empire. At the same time, the home islands were themselves under threat. ‘What can the future hold for us, personally, now?’ wrote the British MP Henry’ Chips’ Channon in his diary in July 1940. ‘What a mess … Our reign is slowly ending; I shall regret its close.’21 In India, the news was met, according to reports on Indian opinion, with ‘bewilderment’ and ‘depression.’ However, anti-imperialists saw it as the writing on the wall for the whole institution. ‘It will go to pieces,’ wrote the Congress Party leader Jawaharlal Nehru, ‘and not all the king’s horses and all the king’s men will be able to put it together again.’22 Outside the empire, a probable British collapse was now taken for granted. Soviet commentators assumed that Germany would invade and occupy Britain with relative ease, while American opinion, even when sympathetic, was suddenly uncertain about British survival. Even Britain’s recent French ally experienced a wave of Anglophobia directed at Britain's limp contribution to the campaign and the bankruptcy of the British world order. Among the new French government, ministers gathered at Vichy were hostile critics, including the new prime minister, Pierre Laval, and his successor, Admiral Darlan, who both thought Britain’s empire claims were hollow echoes of a lost age. ‘England’s day has passed,’ wrote Laval in July 1940. ‘No matter what happens now, she will lose her Empire.’23

The frailty of the British position was not lost on Churchill’s new government. While Churchill hoped to inspire the British people to fight on for the sake of the empire and the ideals it stood for, he privately deplored ‘our weakness, slowness, lack of grip and drive’.24 Nevertheless, the defeat of France was swiftly turned into a more positive outcome for the empire than the facts merit. Chamberlain considered that the French had been ‘nothing but a liability and that Britain was better off alone, a view that Churchill had already privately expressed when in charge of the Admiralty.25 When public opinion was tested about the prospect of waging the war alone, polls showed that three-quarters of those asked expected to continue the war. At the same time, a more modest 50 percent were confident of the eventual outcome.26 The idea of fighting ‘alone’ was a rallying cry for a country that now saw itself as a latter-day David fighting a fascist Goliath. Still, for Churchill and his political supporters, the concept ‘alone’ embraced the home islands and the entire British Empire. Churchill was sentimental about the empire, and stocked his Cabinet, as the historian Lewis Namier observed at the time, with a line of ‘Kipling imperialists’ who shared that sentimental attachment.27 For Churchill, survival of the empire was a central priority: ‘My ideal,’ he claimed in 1938, ‘is narrow and limited. I want to see the British Empire preserved for a few more generations in its strength and splendor.’28

Nonetheless, Britain’s strategic options remained narrow after the defeat of France. The priority was survival, and that meant avoiding destruction or defeat at the hands of a German enemy whose forces now ranged from northern Norway to the Atlantic coast of France. In the summer of 1940, one option was still to pursue a compromise peace with the enemy, acknowledging that there was no effective way to defeat the Axis. This was the view of a minority, and how large it was is difficult to guess, but the minority had political representation. The most prominent spokesman for a negotiated settlement was the former First World War prime minister David Lloyd George. Though he continued to argue that the country should wage war more effectively than it had done under Chamberlain, his preference, which he made clear in the press and parliament, was for some kind of settlement with Germany. Chamberlain thought Lloyd George was a potential Marshal Pétain, waiting in the wings to replace a bankrupt government, and Churchill later repeated this jibe in his parliamentary riposte to a speech by Lloyd George in May 1941, the last major speech he was to make.29 Lloyd George was stung by the comparison, but it is not unlikely that, like Pétain, he felt crushed by the terrible cost of the previous conflict and hopeful that peace would allow Britain to shed the pre-war years of drift in favor of a reinvigorated national identity under Germany’s watchful eye. For this, there was no mandate in 1940. Churchill was determined that he should not have taken the premiership in May only to end the war ignominiously weeks later, but it was the much-maligned Chamberlain who, at the end of June, gave a worldwide broadcast in which he insisted that Britain ‘would rather go down in ruin than admit the domination of the Nazis’.30 

Britain was not defenseless in the summer of 1940, though after Dunkirk the entire British army was temporarily reduced to the rank of a minor state. The Royal Navy was still the world’s largest, even if its resources now had to be spread between four theatres: home waters, the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, and the Asian empire. The RAF was growing in defensive strength, both in terms of numbers and in terms of the integrated system of control and communication that was designed to ensure that fighters were used sparingly and effectively against any incoming enemy aircraft. Britain’s global trading and financial economy and large merchant fleet meant that distant resources could be brought in to feed a war economy that was already overtaking German production in a range of weapons. Large orders placed in the United States committed American industry by August 1940, despite the Neutrality Laws passed in the 1930s, to supply 20,000 American aircraft and 42,000 aero-engines, in addition to a regular supply of 100-octane fuel, which allowed British fighter aircraft enhanced performance over their German rivals.31 In July, it was agreed that Britain should pursue a three-pronged strategy for prosecuting the war against Germany and Italy that reflected current capabilities. The first was a blockade and economic warfare, a key element in the Anglo-French planning for war in 1939; the second was political warfare against Axis-occupied Europe, to be carried out through a mix of political propaganda and sabotage (‘set Europe ablaze’ was Churchill’s description); the third was long-range ‘strategic’ bombing of Germany and Italy, directed primarily against centers of the industry within bombing range. None of these campaigns could be conducted with any real hope of success. The blockade was frustrated by the unexpected fact that Germany and Italy now dominated most of continental Europe with access to a rich range of raw material and food resources, which German businesses and the German armed forces began almost immediately to co-ordinate for the German war effort. Political warfare and sabotage were at best a speculation. Radio and leaflet propaganda was difficult to coordinate between a number of rival organizations, each with its own agenda. Though intelligence sources suggested that in occupied Europe there was a receptive audience, the prospect of fomenting widespread resistance or local rebellion was almost non-existent, while the teams organized under the Special Operations Executive (SOE), placed incongruously under the minister of economic warfare, Hugh Dalton, took time to train before even a limited infiltration was possible. Most hopes in the summer of 1940 were placed in the bombing of Germany. In a well-known letter in July to Lord Beaverbrook, Minister of aircraft production, Churchill concluded that only ‘an absolutely devastating, exterminating attack by very heavy bombers’ would bring down the Hitler regime. The bombing had begun on the night of 11/12 May 1940 against targets in the Ruhr–Rhineland industrial region and continued almost every night when conditions permitted for the rest of the year. The impact on Germany was negligible, though the raids compelled thousands of Germans to sit in air-raid shelters over the summer nights and provoked widespread popular demands for the German air force to retaliate. Intelligence information had at first painted an optimistic account of the damage to industrial plants and popular morale, but the picture soon became bleaker once it was clear that only a small fraction of aircraft found the target area, and an even smaller fraction of bombs actually hit it.32 Though later accounts have emphasized the psychological boost bombing gave to British morale, the early raids attracted very modest attention. 

Beyond these efforts, Britain’s leaders looked for support overseas. In the United States, opinion was divided not only over the prospects for British survival but over the issue of American intervention in any more active way in the European war. Wooing the United States was a central ambition for Churchill, but he was wary of giving too much away. When there was talk in the summer of the British fleet sailing for the New World in the event of an invasion crisis, he told the British ambassador, Lord Lothian, to ‘discourage any complacent assumption on United States’ part that they will pick up the débris of the British Empire …’33 For their part, American politicians, could be put off by constant reiteration of the theme of empire, for which there was little support across America’s political divides. ‘We should all get on much better,’ Senator Arthur Vandenberg told Lord Halifax, ‘if you British would stop talking about the British Empire.’34 Empire aid, on the other hand, could be taken for granted, although the role of the empire in the summer of 1940 was also more ambiguous after the Allied defeat than the heady rhetoric in London suggested. It was to take time before the manpower and industrial resources of the empire could be fully mobilized, and many of those resources were to be used for local defense rather than sent to Britain. In the first fifteen months of the conflict, Britain supplied 90 per cent of the empire’s military needs.35

Mobilization of empire manpower varied widely. The instinct of the white Dominions was at first to reject the idea of sending forces overseas again, as they had done in the First World War, and to use their armies for home defense. The Australian government eventually reluctantly agreed to send forces to the Middle East; Canadian mobilization was made possible only because Francophone Canadians were promised no conscription and no overseas posting. In South Africa, where similar tensions existed between British and Afrikaner communities, South African volunteers prepared to fight outside the country wore a distinctive orange tab, a reminder of the dominant Dutch presence. Dominion support for the war continued in the summer of 1940. Still, the Australian premier, Robert Menzies, was attracted by the idea of a negotiated peace (though he later recanted), while in Canada there were bitter arguments about the terms for setting up RAF training facilities in the Dominion. Strong complaints about the conditions the first Canadian troops were forced to accept in camps in Britain.36 In Éire, which was still a Dominion (though since 1937 an independent state), Prime Minister Éamon de Valera refused to abandon Irish neutrality even when offered the possibility of a united Ireland, which he had fought for two decades before. ‘We, of all people,’ he told the Irish parliament on 2 September 1939, ‘know what force a stronger nation uses against a weaker one means.’ Churchill grumbled about the Irish being ’at war but skulking’, but the Irish government remained unmoved throughout the conflict.37

In the rest of the empire, there was a mixed reaction. The situation in India was particularly delicate because there was an implicit assumption among Indian politicians from a variety of very different political backgrounds that support for the war would be recompensed with immediate promises of political reform or even independence. Indian troops were sent to support the Asian rim of the empire, in Iraq, Kenya, Aden, Egypt and Singapore, while substantial internal funds were raised to support the defense of India. But even though the main Indian parties were opposed to fascism, they wanted the British to concede an acceptable political price for fighting against it. On 29 June 1940 Gandhi called for full independence. Churchill’s government was unwilling to make any major concessions beyond allowing a War Advisory Council to be established in Delhi, composed of Indians, together with an expanded Executive Committee, but with the key portfolios of defense, finance, and home affairs firmly in British hands. The Congress Party began a campaign of civil disobedience in October, and 700 Congress leaders were immediately added to the 500 Indian Communist Party leaders already in prison. A Revolutionary Movement Ordinance was prepared to allow the government in India to outlaw the Congress Party and crush its organization, but the Cabinet in London hesitated to use it. Nevertheless, by spring 1941 7,000 Congress members had been convicted and 4,400 incarcerated. Even for those Indians who supported participation in the war, Britain was only able to supply very limited resources because of the demands of home defense. India eventually contributed over 2 million volunteer troops, but the military condition of the Indian forces in the first years of the conflict was rudimentary. When war broke out the whole of the Indian subcontinent had no modern fighter aircraft and only one anti-aircraft gun; almost two years later, on the eve of the Japanese invasion of South East Asia, forces in India still possessed no modern fighter aircraft, tanks, or armored cars, and only twenty anti-aircraft and twenty anti-tank guns.38 When Indian troops moved to other theatres, they had to be supplied almost entirely from British sources. So weak was the British position that when the Japanese insisted in early July 1940 that Britain close the ‘Burma Road’ supply line to Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist forces in China, Churchill was forced to comply, unable to risk ‘all the inconveniences of war with Japan’.39 

The other serious problem was Egypt. Although the country was nominally independent under the 1936 treaty, the British maintained a major political and military presence and enjoyed special privileges for the defense of the Suez Canal lifeline to the Asian empire. In May and June 1940, as British forces faced defeat in Europe, the Egyptian government of Ali Maher not only refused to be drawn into the war but actively sought to end the British presence. There was thought of imposing once again the protectorate that had been established in the First World War, or of declaring martial law, but in the end, heavy-handed threats were enough for King Farouk to sack Maher and replace him with an Anglophile politician, Hassan Sabry. Though more accommodating to British demands, he too refused to commit Egypt to war; the Egyptian government only declared war on the Axis's left on 25 February 1945 to ensure a seat in the new United Nations organization. The British regarded their presence in Egypt as a vital component of their global strategy. The ports at either end of the canal were reinforced and heavy guns installed, in violation of the 1888 Canal Treaty.40 German and Italian shipping was denied entry during the war but securing the defense of the canal against a determined enemy was difficult to reconcile with British priorities in Europe, and the threat to Suez remained a real one for the next two years. East of Suez, the promise that empire unity would mean British protection was impossible to redeem as long as the major threat remained that of a German invasion. German intelligence passed on to the Japanese in November 1940 a secret document captured from a vessel sunk in the Indian Ocean, clearly showing the current British view that little could be done to save the imperial position in South East Asia if the worst happened. The empire was still a limited resource for Britain in 1940, but Britain was also now a limited resource for the empire and its many outposts.

These awkward issues were thrown into sharp relief by the reality now facing the three Allied empires – Dutch, Belgian and French – after the German conquest. The Belgian and Dutch empires were cut off entirely from their mother countries. The armistice agreement with France allowed the Vichy authorities to retain what control they could over the French Empire, but the course of the war undermined the French imperial project almost entirely, leaving the empire in the hands of others. In 1942 the Vichy minister of colonies, Jules Brérié, finally resigned: ‘my role is terminated because we no longer have an Empire.’41 For all three imperial states there were many imponderables to consider. The Axis plans for a New Order in Europe were uncertain and the fate of the overseas territories was unknown. In mid-June 1940 at the meeting between Mussolini and Hitler, their foreign ministers, Ciano and von Ribbentrop, could be seen poring over a map of Africa in which they divided the wreckage of empire between them: North and West Africa for Italy, sub-Saharan Africa for the Germans. All such grandiose plans waited on the defeat of Britain, but in summer 1940 the idea of a German African empire re-emerged as a possibility and was enthusiastically pursued by the colonial lobby in the Foreign Office and the German navy, and by the Colonial League, whose leader, Ritter von Epp, was made provisional minister of colonies in June.42 The first speculative planning suggested a German imperial bloc of former French colonies, the Belgian Congo, Nigeria, even South Africa, and the Rhodesias, and included the use of the French island of Madagascar as a semi-autonomous home for Europe’s Jewish population.43 The German decision to allow France to retain the empire was not a permanent one but merely reflected the desire to win France over from any possible rapprochement with Britain, though in the end, Britain made sure that would not happen by treating Vichy France as a virtual enemy. None of the three former imperial powers could be certain that Britain would not take advantage of their defeat to extend British influence into their imperial spheres, either from short-term strategic necessity or with some longer-term plan in mind. In May 1940, Britain had occupied the Danish dominion of Iceland with forestalling the Germans and immediately began to treat the islanders in a familiar colonial fashion, arresting and deporting the island’s small number of communists and controlling the country’s trade.44 Neither was the position of the United States encouraging. The American anti-colonial lobby actively promoted the idea that in future colonial empires should be held on trust from an international body, like the mandates in 1919; more radical anti-imperialists saw the European war as an opportunity to extend independence to all the former dependencies. When Britain faced growing opposition to its rule in Iceland, United States forces took over in June 1941, and two years later the island was declared an independent republic. In 1942 the American secretary of state, Cordell Hull, called for an international charter guaranteeing eventual independence after the war to colonial peoples under a system of international trusteeship.45 The defeat of the metropolitan states bankrupted their claims to maintain imperial rule. The year 1940 was indeed a critical turning point in the final crisis of the global imperial project. 

For Belgium and the Netherlands, the outcome of the military campaign in 1940 produced a complex political situation. Both were now cut off from their empires and found themselves unfamiliar with being occupied, subjects rather than rulers. The decision of the Belgian king to stay in Brussels undermined the claims of those Belgian ministers who had fled abroad to represent a Belgium in exile and placed the Belgian Congo in a constitutional limbo. Because of the Congo’s rich mineral resources, including the world’s largest uranium deposits, all the major powers were interested in its fate. There was talk of a possible Franco-German arrangement to take the colony over; in Brussels, the German authorities hoped to press German claims on Belgium’s colonial mining corporations; in May 1940, the British government refused to recognize the Congo’s neutrality because they hoped to use the Congo’s rich resources for the Allied war effort. In an attempt to ensure the survival of Belgian sovereignty, the king decreed that the minister of colonies in exile, Albert De Vleeschauwer, should have executive authority for the Congo and Rwanda-Burundi in order to maintain their neutrality, but after pressure from the British, De Vleeschauwer agreed in July 1940 that the Congo’s resources should be used for the Allied war effort. A year later the Congo’s currency and trade were integrated into the British economic zone.46 The United States was also interested in the Congo. By August 1941, had stationed 1,200 troops there, including black troops who were removed at the insistence of the Belgian government-in-exile, to avoid encouraging the colony's population to see black Americans as a symbol for their eventual liberation. De Vleeschauwer struggled to maintain Belgian sovereignty in the face of British and American intervention. Still, by 1943 there was now every indication that the United States would insist on the internationalization of the former colonies as a prelude to independence after the war.47 

The Netherlands faced a similarly bleak situation. The Dutch queen, Wilhelmina, had sought refuge in London with a government-in-exile, but there was little the exiled Dutch could do to hold the empire together. The Caribbean colonies of Curaçao and Surinam were taken under British and American trusteeship, which left open their future fate.48 German designs on the colonial economy were frustrated by the British naval blockade and the hostility of the Dutch colonial administration. The Dutch government in the Indies interned 2,800 Germans and 500 members of the Dutch National Socialist Party living in the colony, and in retaliation, the German authorities in the Netherlands arrested 500 prominent Dutch citizens and sent them to Buchenwald concentration camp. The Germans interpreted growing popular interest in the future of the colonies as a key element of Dutch national identity as a political threat, and the main political movement, Nederlandse Unie, was eventually banned.49 The Dutch East Indies were immediately subject to pressure from the Japanese government to guarantee substantial increases in the supply of oil, rubber, tin, and other raw materials essential for the Japanese war effort. The Indies were threatened with military intervention if they allowed other powers to undermine Japan’s commercial interests, and although the government in Batavia (present-day Jakarta) successfully stalled the discussions with Japanese emissaries well into 1941, the Japanese had already assumed that the Indies were now part of their new economic order in Asia and seized the entire colony early in 1942, bringing the Dutch empire to a provisional end.50 

The French Empire was an entirely different case, though its eventual fate during the war brought it closer to the Dutch and Belgian experience. The attitude of the Germans to the new Vichy regime encouraged the hope that the empire could be salvaged from the wreckage of metropolitan France. German economic demands from the African empire had to be met as a priority, but they were generally less excessive than expected and French forces were allowed to remain in the empire to keep domestic peace.51 Marshal Pétain saw the empire as an essential element in the creation of a new order in France. Vichy propaganda played on the idea of unity between the mother country and the colonies and presented Pétain as the ‘savior of the Empire’; the Maritime and Colonial League trebled its membership during the war to over 700,000; a grand ten-year plan was elaborated for the economic development of the empire, including a new Trans-Saharan railway, some of which was built using forced Jewish labor; constitutional plans suggested a possible imperial parliament and imperial citizenship. The empire became, in Charles-Robert Ageron’s term, a ‘compensating myth’ for the humiliation of defeat.52 Yet the imperial reality was less rosy. Italian demands for territory were kept at bay only with German assistance but it was clear that at some point Mussolini hoped to achieve major territorial concessions at French expense. In Indochina, pressure from the Japanese army to be allowed to deploy troops and aircraft in northern Vietnam proved impossible to deflect and by September 1940 there were 6,000 Japanese soldiers and 5 airbases in place, the start of a steady encroachment.53 However, the main threat to the integrity of the French Empire in 1940 came paradoxically not from the Axis states, but from the former British ally. While Axis claims were for the moment held on a leash, there was no way of restraining Britain.

The hope colored british policy towards its recent ally in June 1940 that the French government might continue the fight alongside Britain with the aircraft, troops, and ships available in the empire. The British colonial minister, Lord Lloyd, was sent to Bordeaux on 19 June to try to extract a promise that French resistance would continue from North Africa and that the French Mediterranean fleet would sail there in support. The promise was briefly given but summarily reneged on.54 When the armistice was signed, the empire abandoned the struggle as well. All that was left to the British were a small number of French forces that had been brought to England and the deputy war minister, Charles de Gaulle. On 18 June he was allowed to make a broadcast from London calling on Frenchmen to continue the fight, and ten days later he was recognized by the Churchill government as the leader of the ‘Fighting French’. The fighters brought to Britain were not enthusiastic. Out of 11,000 sailors, all but 1,500 opted to return to France; only 2,000 soldiers answered the call. But though his supporters were few, the British decision to pretend that there still was a French ally alienated the new regime at Vichy, which condemned de Gaulle to death in absentia as a traitor.55 

The confrontation between the British authorities and the Vichy government now involved the fate of the French fleet. The British Chiefs of Staff did not want the fleet to fall into German hands because it would tilt the balance of naval power in the Mediterranean strongly against them. With some reluctance, the War Cabinet decided that the fleet would have to be captured or destroyed pre-emptively. On 3 July the Royal Navy launched Operation’ Catapult’ against the French navy. Some 200 ships were boarded and seized in British ports, the naval vessels in the Egyptian port of Alexandria were disarmed, and a battlecruiser at the West African port of Dakar was torpedoed. At the main base at Mers-el-Kébir, near the Algerian city of Oran, a British squadron commanded by Admiral James Somerville blockaded the port and gave the French commander, Admiral Marcel-Bruno Gensoul, an ultimatum to either scuttle his ships or sail to a British, American, or Caribbean port, or accept the consequences of combat. Gensoul assumed it was a bluff and refused to comply. After eleven hours of waiting, the British ships finally opened fire, sinking the battleship Bretagne and damaging two others. On 6 July, the battleship Dunkerque was hit by a torpedo and severely damaged. The French navy lost 1,297 killed, 351 wounded. A few days later Vichy broke all diplomatic relations and sent bombers to raid the British naval base at Gibraltar.56 The assault on the French fleet shocked French opinion but it was only one part of Britain’s naval strategy directed at the French Empire. The blockade was now extended to France and the French African colonies, cutting North African trade and reducing key imports of food and oil into French colonies. Oil imports to Algeria dropped to just 5 percent of the pre-war level. Vichy convoys were attacked by British vessels. The effects created local food crises and sustained the resentment of the Vichy regime and pro-Vichy colonists against British intervention.57 After Mers-el-Kébir, Admiral Darlan had briefly explored the idea of a joint Italian–French naval attack against Alexandria until Mussolini vetoed it.58 The British also put pressure on French colonies to side with de Gaulle. At first, only the Pacific New Hebrides had done so, but they were followed later in 1940 by Gabon, Cameroon, Chad, and Tahiti, dividing the empire into two armed camps.59 In August, the British hoped to bring Senegal over to the Free French side and, with de Gaulle’s co-operation, undertook a second operation, codenamed ‘Menace,’ against the capital, Dakar, where the battleship Richelieu was berthed, and where both the Polish and Belgian national gold reserves had been stashed away for safety. The result this time was a fiasco, with heavy damage to the Royal Navy vessels involved and stiff resistance from the Vichy garrison. The operation was suspended, but it gave notice to every European empire that Britain was prepared ruthlessly to impose British wartime interests on the colonies of others. In the autumn, rumors abounded that France was about to conclude a separate peace or to take the empire into a pan-European bloc directed at Britain. Churchill fulminated against the French and threatened to bomb Vichy if the regime joined the German war effort.60 Watching from the Netherlands, the Dutch fascist leader, Anton Mussert, claimed that 300 years of British imperialism represented the real enemy of Europe, and called on the Dutch settlers in South Africa to restart the Boer War.61 

For the European Axis states, the British Empire remained the one stumbling block to the political reordering of continental Europe and the Mediterranean basin, but little effort was made to coordinate their strategies for bringing Britain to defeat or capitulation. The sudden opportunity opened up by victory in France exposed just how little thinking there had been beforehand about future strategy, but in neither Rome nor Berlin was there much enthusiasm for working out this strategy together. Mussolini insisted that he was a ‘parallel war’, not one combined with Hitler’s. He accepted the arguments about limiting territorial claims against France with an ill grace, and disapproved of the German decision to allow Vichy to keep defense forces in North Africa against the British because they could also be used against Italy.62 The two regimes had different views of the coming New Order; for Mussolini, it was imperative that Italy establish a European imperial presence, as Hitler had now done across the whole north of the Continent, and not be confined to an empire in Africa or the Middle East. Hitler, in turn, was happy enough for Mussolini to develop a Mediterranean sphere, but he instructed his armed forces to give no secrets away to the Italians. When, in late June, Mussolini offered to send an Italian expeditionary corps to take part in whatever campaign Hitler was planning against Britain, Hitler gave a polite but definite refusal. In turn, Mussolini refused Hitler’s offer of German aircraft to carry out the bombing of the Suez Canal. ‘Evidently,’ wrote Ciano in his diary, ‘faith in us and in our possibilities is not excessive!’63 The ‘Pact of Steel’ by which the Italian–German alliance was supposed to have been sealed in May 1939 remained little more than a gesture. Until the spring of 1941, the two allies went their separate ways. The strategic options available for Hitler and his military leadership to end the war in the West in the summer of 1940 could be reduced to either to find a political solution that the British would accept or find a military means to end British resistance. Neither was straightforward, first because it was unclear whether the peace party in Britain did have the political means to deliver a compromise agreement. Secondly, it was not clear that any possible military options, from blockade to invasion, were sure to succeed. In the end, he tried all the strategic options in the hope that one would work. The political solution seemed less likely after Churchill’s speech on 18 June pledging Britain to fight on alone, but Hitler privately could not understand why the British wanted to continue. Franz Halder, the army chief of staff, recorded a meeting with Hitler on 13 July: ‘The Führer is fully occupied with the question, why England does not want to take the path to peace?’64 Hitler’s confusion lay in the mixed messages emanating from Britain about the possibility of reaching an agreement. Behind the scenes, a string of go-betweens kept alive in 1940 the idea that influential circles in Britain could deliver a negotiated settlement. In Britain, noted Goebbels in his diary in late June, ‘there are two parties: a powerful war and peace party’; a few days later he observed ‘Rumours of peace from England thicken.’65

In early July Hitler decided to make another appeal to Britain to see sense. He explained to his staff that he did not want to be the instrument for destroying the British Empire, because German blood would be spilled only for the benefit of the Americans and the Japanese.66 Historians have been skeptical about the claim, but Hitler shared a sentimental admiration for what the British Empire had achieved with Churchill. In the 1930s, and again during the war, Hitler came back to the theme that the British Empire was a model for Germany’s own colonial plans.67 

This schizophrenic view of the British enemy was reflected in the speech eventually delivered on 19 July. Hitler prefaced the offer by prophesying the destruction of an empire ‘which it was never my intention to destroy or even to damage’; a brief appeal to reason followed it: ‘I see no ground which could compel the struggle to continue.’68 The request, he told Goebbels, was to be a ‘short, brief offer’ with nothing precise, but it was to be his ‘very last word.’69 Churchill refused to respond. When Robert Vansittart, the Cabinet’s diplomatic adviser, asked him why he had not replied, Churchill told him he had nothing to say to Hitler, ‘not being on speaking terms.70 Lord Halifax rejected the offer a few days later, and Hitler reluctantly accepted that this was ‘the final refusal.’71 

Hitler anticipated rejection, though there is little doubt that a British request for an armistice would have been his preferred option, despite the fact that the preservation of the British Empire ran against the interests of his Italian, Japanese and Soviet allies. But even before the speech was made, he had re-issued the November 1939 directive for an air-sea blockade of Britain and had authorized military planning for a possible invasion of southern England. The invasion directive for Operation’ Sea Lion’ (Seelöwe) was issued on 16 July for a landing on the English south-east coast. The precondition for the invasion was the suppression of the RAF to a level where it would no longer have ‘any worthwhile capacity to attack the German crossing.’72 In the discussions with his staff a few days before, he had also suggested a more radical military solution to the problem of British resistance for the first time. Trying to grasp the grounds of British intransigence, he began to suspect that Britain counted on reaching an agreement with the Soviet Union. Two days after his peace offer, Hitler met his commanders-in-chief and elaborated his thinking into a possible campaign: ‘Russia must be watched very closely,’ recorded his air force adjutant. ‘An attack on Russia had to be planned for, and in the greatest secrecy.’ Hitler called for newsreels of the Soviet–Finnish war so he could understand his putative victim more closely.73 On 31 July he finally explained his strategic conclusion to his military commanders. Since Britain would not give up, preparations should be undertaken for a possible pre-emptive strike against the Soviet Union to rule out any final hope that Britain might harbor for fomenting a two-front war. For the present, this was a contingency only, not a firm directive for enlarging the war, but it framed Hitler’s subsequent conviction that the solution to the defeat of the British Empire lay in the East. 

This decision has commonly been seen as the root of the massive operation undertaken a year later against the Red Army and a clear indication that Hitler was no longer interested in invading or subjugating Britain. This is to distort reality. The German high command favored the idea that somehow, either through blockade or invasion or political initiatives, they might secure a British capitulation, and Hitler, as he told his commanders on 21 July, did not want the British ‘to take the initiative out of his hands.74 The suggestions about a Soviet alternative were initially a reaction against British intransigence rather than deliberate. Hitler’s priority in the summer of 1940 was still to end British resistance, not yet to carve out an empire in Russia. The British and Soviet strategies were complementary, not stark alternatives. There were, nevertheless, solid grounds for Hitler’s concern about Soviet ambitions. Stalin used the opportunity of Germany’s war with the West to press Soviet claims agreed under the secret terms of the Pact in August 1939. Step by step, the Soviet Union was trespassing towards the new German imperial sphere in the East. When Churchill sent the radical socialist politician Sir Stafford Cripps to Moscow in June 1940 as ambassador (’a lunatic in a country of lunatics,’ Churchill later commented) it raised the distinct possibility in Berlin that a British–Soviet rapprochement might be the aim.75 ‘Unclear,’ Hitler told his military staff on 21 July, ‘what is happening in England’; a few days later Goebbels noted that a few heavy blows would be needed ‘to bring [England] to its senses.’76

The German plans for military action against Britain were serious enough. For all the thoughts of the Soviet threat, German forces spent almost a year in constant combat with the British at sea, in the air, and, in spring 1941, on land as well. None of this substantial effort made sense if Hitler’s gaze was now fixed solely on the Soviet Union. The production of land armaments was scaled down in the summer of 1940 in favor of redirecting resources to aircraft and naval production, while the high command prepared the directives and material necessary to carry out the amphibious invasion. The planning was extensive and detailed and again made little sense if the invasion scare was simply designed to put psychological pressure on the British leadership to abandon the fight. Nevertheless, it was an unanticipated campaign for the German armed forces that put the onus on the navy and the air force to create the appropriate conditions for a crossing. Neither service had been oriented before the war to conduct primary amphibious operations or long-range air warfare. The navy had suffered severe losses during the Norwegian campaign, and there were still too few submarines to pose a significant threat to British naval intervention. They were much more rested on the capacity of the German air force to protect the invasion sea lanes and suppress British airpower. The problem was that German air fleets had been used to best effect so far in support of land offensives in Poland in 1939 and Scandinavia and Western Europe in 1940; the air force had little experience of long-range independent operations. The reorientation to a significant overseas campaign and the building of suitable airfields took time. In the end, the German air force prepared for a larger version of what had been carried out in Poland and France, destroying enemy airpower and softening up the enemy’s military infrastructure prior to the invasion, then building a protective umbrella over the invasion force against enemy naval power while offering tactical air support for ground operations.77 

The Germans began the campaign to achieve air superiority with a whimper rather than a bang. Probing attacks – Störangriffe – were carried out with a handful of aircraft by day and night through late June and July to test the defenses and to give aircrew the chance to orient themselves to conditions over British soil. The probing failed to detect the nature of the Fighter Command organization, which depended on a complex network of communications to give warning of approaching raids and to coordinate the fighter response. The central element was the use of radar (radio direction finding) developed from the mid-1930s. A chain of thirty radar stations to detect high-flying aircraft, and thirty-one for low-flying aircraft, stretching from Cornwall in the far west to the north of Scotland; they were supported by a Ground Observer Corps of 30,000 organized in 1,000 observation points. The radar and observation posts were linked by a web of telephone lines to Fighter Command headquarters and the numerous fighter stations to give warning in a few minutes and fighter aircraft scrambled for action. Though the commander-in-chief of Fighter Command, Air Chief Marshal Hugh Dowding, later complained that the system had often supplied ‘inaccurate and insufficient intelligence’, enough was supplied to ensure that almost all enemy incursions were met with some measure of fighter resistance. Time was not wasted on standing patrols.78 After more than a month of preparation and probing, Göring, commander-in-chief of the German air force, wanted to test RAF resistance with a flourish of attacks against Fighter Command targets beginning with the code-named ‘Eagle Day’ and ending, so he hoped, four days later with British air defenses crushed. On 1 August, Hitler’s headquarters issued the order to begin the campaign for air supremacy, and ‘Eagle Day’ was fixed for 5 August.79 Poor weather conditions delayed the opening of the campaign for more than a week. ‘Eagle Day’ was then ordered for 13 August, but cloud forced a half-hearted opening and not a single Fighter Command station was attacked that day. German losses were forty-five aircraft, RAF losses just thirteen. The messy opening to what came to be called the Battle of Britain was sustained over the course of the following weeks. The promise that the RAF would be crippled after just four days, based though it was on the successes enjoyed earlier in 1939 and 1940, proved impossible to realize. Over the three-week period of the opening phase of the battle fifty-three raids were made on RAF stations, with growing intensity in the last ten days of August as the weather improved. Of these, thirty-two raids were on fighter stations, all but two directed at 11 Group in south-east England, but only three stations were temporarily put out of action, all of them forward stations near the coast. Satellite airfields allowed aircraft to be flown despite damage to the main station, while careful camouflage veiled the scattered aircraft. Radar stations had been briefly bombed earlier in August, but because the German side did not consider them important, the chain remained relatively unscathed. Though much has been made of the narrow margin between success and defeat, a view embroidered by Churchill’s famous line about the ‘few’ of Fighter Command, at no point during the last weeks of August and early September was Fighter Command significantly reduced in size or its number of pilots insufficient. On 6 September Fighter Command had 738 serviceable aircraft while the German fighter force was down to an average of 500.80 By this stage the Junkers Ju87 dive-bomber and the twin-engine Me110 had been more or less withdrawn as too vulnerable to be risked against high-performance single-engine fighters. Losses on both sides were high. It was a brutal and dramatic confrontation, but that was what Britain’s air defenses were for. 

The German enemy also considered the RAF to be the ‘few’. By late August German intelligence suggested that 18 fighter stations had been knocked out and that Fighter Command was down to around 300 aircraft at most. German radio announced that ‘domination of the air’ had been achieved.81 To pilots who reported back the sight of blazing buildings and pock-marked runways, and regularly exaggerated by a high margin the number of aircraft shot down, the claim initially tallied with their own experience. This explains the decision to switch by the end of August to a range of military and economic targets designed to weaken the British defense effort immediately prior to the invasion. At Hitler’s headquarters, the news from the air front suggested that air supremacy was all but assured. ‘English fighter defense strongly affected,’ wrote the official OKW diarist on 3 September, ‘the question is can England, therefore, continue the struggle.82 The final stage of the pre-invasion air plan was to attack London with a series of heavy blows to disorient the capital at the point of greatest threat. On 2 September the air force was directed to organize attacks on London and three days later Hitler ordered them to begin, still hoping that the news about air supremacy was right. On the night of 5/6 September, bombs dropped on thirty London boroughs, from Croydon in the south to Enfield in the north, aiming at military, transport, and utility targets.83

The myth has lingered on that Hitler shifted air attacks to London on 7 September as revenge for RAF raids on Berlin in late August and that this change in target saved Fighter Command. In reality, the switch to London and to other military and industrial targets was consistent with the pre-invasion planning, and bombs had fallen on London areas for more than a week before, including the extensive raiding on the 5/6 September.84 Hitler was able to use the switch as the opportunity to still criticism from the German communities in western Germany that had been subjected to RAF bombing for four months. In a widely publicized speech on 4 September, he promised the German public that he would raze British cities to the ground, but the claim was rhetorical. The disabling attacks on London were supposed to be followed a week or so later by invasion. Hitler had fixed the date for 15 September, when the tides were favorable and fine weather not impossible. On the 3rd he altered the date to 20/21 September. Göring continued to insist that the RAF was on its last legs. The war against Britain, he told Goebbels, would all be over in three weeks.85

The British had been preparing for invasion for months, and indeed the political and military leadership had expected it to happen within a few weeks of the French defeat and to be a disaster. Brooke observed in July that the shortage of trained men and equipment was ‘appalling’. At Dunkirk, the army had lost 88 percent of its artillery and 93 percent of its vehicles.86 Between June and August 1940, a further 324,000 men were called up, but it was too late to train and equip them. There were 300,000 First World War rifles available for the 22 army divisions, only half of which could be regarded as ready for the kind of mobile combat the Germans would wage.87 So desperate did the situation seem that Cripps was instructed when he got to Moscow to try to buy Soviet aircraft and tanks, a request that was politely turned down.88 There was no way of working out exactly when the invasion might come and though historians have generally been skeptical about German intentions, the British certainly thought it was going to happen. According to Home Intelligence reports, the population remained expectant but less anxious than in the early summer, buoyed up by news from the air battles, which, like German reports, greatly exaggerated the losses inflicted on the enemy. In early September, the Ministry of Information observed that the public mood seemed ‘extraordinarily good,’ reflected not least in the fact that drunkenness seemed to have decreased.89 In early September evidence from photo-reconnaissance and decrypts of German air force ‘Enigma’ messages or ‘Ultra’ (first broken in May 1940) suggested an imminent invasion, and on 7 September the codeword ‘Cromwell’ was issued to put the whole military system on highest alert to expect invasion within twelve hours. Nothing happened, but the following weekend, 14–15 September, was widely regarded as ‘invasion weekend’ because of favorable tides and the moon. Men were ordered to sleep in their uniforms to be ready to fight at a moment’s notice when they heard the toll of local bells.90 

By chance, 14 September was the date on which Hitler met with his commanders-in-chief to review the prospects for Operation’ Sea Lion’. Throughout September he had received mixed messages about the possibility of an invasion. His chief of operations, Alfred Jodl, favored the more indirect route suggested in the summer to ‘go round via Russia’.91 The navy commander-in-chief, Grand Admiral Erich Raeder, had initially been in favor, but by September thought the risks too high. Göring continued to insist that his force had met the requirements and the timetable. Hitler understood that the invasion had to work at the first attempt because the political fall-out from failure would undermine the year’s successes, but on 14 September, according to his air adjutant, he still considered a successful “Sea Lion” as the best solution for victory against England’.92 The principal issue was the air war. The invasion plan had always been predicated on achieving air mastery. Despite Göring’s assurances, OKW had come to realize by the middle of September that British air resistance had not been broken; the invasion depended critically on using the air force to shield the cross-Channel force from naval interception and to provide air support for the initial beachheads. Hitler decided to review the position on 17 September, by which time the German air force had been badly mauled in daylight raids on London two days before, losing almost one-quarter of the attacking force on what became for the British ‘Battle of Britain Day. ‘Sea Lion’ was postponed again and on 12 October abandoned for the year, to be revived if necessary the following spring.

The British Empire did not collapse or accept defeat in 1940, but the year was a turning point in the long history of European imperialism. Failure and occupation in Europe undermined the claims of the other metropolitan powers, France, Belgium fatally, and the Netherlands. Fatally undermined For the British Empire, the crisis raised awkward questions about the future. Nevertheless, the British government refused to confront the paradox of emphasizing the value of the empire to Britain’s war effort while at the same time using force to stifle demands for greater political autonomy in India and running Egypt under virtual martial law. The priority was the survival of the home islands. Neither side, German nor British, could find a strategy capable of undermining the other’s war willingness or of achieving a decisive military result. Still, it seems almost certain that with an army of 180 divisions and the spoils of much of continental Europe, Germany would have found a way in 1941 of bringing the war in the West to an end if Hitler had not turned to the East. Britain, by contrast, had no way of achieving victory over Germany. Expelled from Europe twice in Norway and France, facing a crisis in Africa, economically weakened, desperately defending its access to the wider world economy, Britain faced strategic bankruptcy. The war Britain waged for a year after the fall of France was the one prepared for in the 1930s – air defense, a powerful navy, and lesser imperial conflicts. This was the war Chamberlain had prepared for, but Churchill was the one forced to wage it.

Both sides realized that airpower was the critical factor in the summer of 1940. The British Chiefs of Staff observed in July that ‘the crux of the matter is air superiority.93 What followed in the late summer months was the first major air-to-air conflict of the war. The two air forces were organized very differently, the German air force in large air fleets combining together bomber, fighter, dive-bomber and reconnaissance aircraft in each one, the RAF in separate commands defined by function – Fighter Command, Bomber Command, Coastal Command – but with no combined force for supporting army or navy operations. In France the German air force stationed Air Fleets 2 and 3 with the great bulk of its air strength, a total of seventy-seven combat squadrons; in Norway, the much smaller Air Fleet 5 (six squadrons) was expected to attack targets on the east and north-east coasts. In early August, on the eve of the German air campaign, there were 878 serviceable Messerschmitt Me109 single-seat fighters, 310 Messerschmitt 110 twin-engine fighters, 949 serviceable bombers, and 280 dive-bombers. The RAF had in early August 715 serviceable fighters (19 squadrons of the Supermarine Spitfire and 29 units of Hawker Hurricanes) with a further 424 aircraft available at one day’s notice. Bomber Command was much smaller than its German equivalent, with only 667 bomber aircraft in July 1940. Around 85 percent of its sorties in the summer were directed at targets in Germany rather than against German air bases, stores, etc., invasion shipping.94 The RAF had a larger pool of fighter pilots than the German air force, and across the period of daytime air fighting, British factories turned out 2,091 new fighter planes, German factories only 988. The critical element of the battle was fighter-to-fighter combat, and it was this that was to decide the issue of the war over southern England. The commander-in-chief of British home forces, General Alan Brooke, gave the RAF the simple order: ‘to prevent the enemy establishing air superiority.95

 

Previously:

 

The critical factor for Japan, Italy, and Germany was territory. Control over a domain, exercised in various formal and informal ways, lay at the heart of the empire. The model for 'territoriality' was the forty years of violent territorial expansion and pacification that preceded the 1930s and were still going on. In this more extended context, the decisions taken in Tokyo, Rome, or Berlin to wage their local wars of aggression make historical sense. The discourses of 'race and space' that had supported empire since the late nineteenth century had lost none of their explanatory force for the generation that came to power in the 1930s. Though this form of imperialism appears anachronistic, even delusional, the paradigm of empire seemed familiar and near. The results of the redistribution of territory in 1919–23, or the consequences of the economic catastrophe after 1929, only strengthened rather than weakened the belief that seizing more territory and resources was an indispensable means to save the nation. From the Manchurian Incident to Word War II.

 

It is not clear when Hitler decided that living space in the East could be found more usefully in Poland. Until 1938, the Poles were regarded as potential allies in a German-dominated anti-Soviet bloc. They would hand back the German lands they were granted at Versailles and voluntarily became a German satellite. Only when the Polish government repeatedly refused the German request for an extra-territorial rail and road link across the Polish Corridor and the incorporation of the League-run Free City of Danzig back into Germany did Hitler decide to launch against the Poles the small war he had been denied in 1938, and to take Polish resources by force. Poland now contained the vast former German coal and steel region in Silesia and promised vast areas for German settlement and an agricultural surplus to feed the German population. At the meeting on 23 May 1939, when Hitler presented to the military leadership his intentions against Poland, he claimed that 'Danzig is not the object in this case. For us, it involves rounding off our living space in the East and securing our food supplies.' Food supply could only come from the East because it was sparsely populated, continued Hitler. German agricultural proficiency would raise the productivity of the region many times over. From the Manchurian Incident to Word War II, part two.

 

The calculation that Hitler would be deterred by the sight of the rapidly rearming British and French empires or by the wave of anti-fascist sentiment washing across the democracies was not entirely misplaced. A weaker hand had forced Hitler to climb down from war in 1938. Intelligence sources suggested a severe economic crisis in Germany, even the possibility of an anti-Hitler coup. Even after the German invasion of Poland on 1 September, Chamberlain allowed him to withdraw his forces rather than face a world war. The idea of a conference was briefly mooted by the Italian leadership on 2 September, echoing Mussolini's intervention in September 1938. Still, the foreign secretary Lord Halifax told his Italian counterpart Ciano that the British condition was 'the withdrawal of German troops from Polish soil,' which ended any prospect of peace.60 Historians have searched for convincing evidence that Chamberlain wanted to wriggle out of his commitment even at this late stage, but there is none. Only a complete German capitulation to British and French demands for an end to the violence would have averted world war, and by 1 September, that was the least likely outcome. Neither containment nor deterrence had in this case worked. Chamberlain announced a state of war on the radio at 11.15 on the morning of 3 September; Daladier announced a state of war at 5 p.m. that afternoon. A temporary alliance of imperial elites and democratic anti-fascists had made possible a new world war. 'We can't lose,' observed the British army chief of staff in his diary. When the war of empires started in Manchuria not included Western Europe.

 

While the collapse of resistance on the northeast front continued in late May, the significant Allies began to consider the awful capitulation scenario unthinkable two weeks before. Weygand, despite his apparent resilience and energy, told the French Cabinet on 25 May to think about abandoning the fight, and Reynaud was the first to pronounce the word 'armistice,' though it was an ambiguous term, as the Germans had discovered in November 1918. According to a commitment made on 25 March 1940, this had to be agreed with the British that neither ally would create a separate peace. On 26 May, Reynaud flew to London to explain to Churchill that France might consider giving up. Unknown to him, the British War Cabinet had begun to discuss a proposal from the foreign secretary, Halifax, presented to him by the Italian ambassador, for a possible conference convened by Mussolini. Italian motives remain unclear since, by now, Mussolini was also preparing to declare war to profit from what seemed to the Italian leadership a ripe opportunity for exploiting the imminent conquest of France. After three days of debate, the British decided against any initiative. Though often seen as a turning point at which the appeasers might nearly have triumphed, some discussion of the consequences of a comprehensive defeat was inevitable, and not even Halifax had favored any settlement that compromised Britain's primary interests. Eventually winning support from Chamberlain, who kept a seat in the War Cabinet, Churchill carried the debate to reject any approach to Mussolini. British leaders were already contemplating war without France. 'If France could not defend herself,' Churchill told his colleagues, 'it was better that she should get out of the war. The war in the West deepens while at the same time it spread further into the western colonies.

 

The two major campaigns against British Malaya and the American Philippines protectorate began on 8 December. Pilots with specialized training for extended overseas flights attacked the Philippines, flying from Japanese Empire bases on Taiwan; as in Oahu, they found American aircraft lined up on the tarmac at Clark Field and destroyed half the B-17s and one-third of the fighters. Amphibious landings began on the 10th on the main island of Luzon and made rapid progress towards the capital, Manila, which surrendered on 3 January. The United States commander, General Douglas MacArthur, appointed earlier in the year, withdrew his mixed American–Filipino force south to the Bataan peninsula. The staff was doomed with no air cover and only 1,000 tons of supplies shipped by an American submarine. MacArthur was evacuated to Australia on 12 March to fight another day. Bataan was surrendered on 9 April. On 6 May, after a grueling and tenacious defense of the island fortress of Corregidor, the surviving American commander, General Jonathan Wainwright, gave up the fight.

The Japanese Fourteenth Army captured almost 70,000 soldiers, 10,000 of them American. They were marched along the Bataan Peninsula to an improvised camp; ill, exhausted, and hungry, they suffered beatings, killings, and humiliation from Japanese Empire forces. The geopolitical transformation of Asia and the Pacific.

In 1942 the new Fair Employment agency was absorbed by the War Manpower Commission, limiting the prospects for using the agency to combat racial inequality. In the South, the administration offered subsidies and training programs to help raise the productivity of white farms while turning a blind eye to the increased control over black workers that wartime reforms made possible. The president remained largely silent on the paradox presented by his rhetoric of freedom and the survival of racial segregation and discrimination at home. The same held for Roosevelt’s view of racism in the British Empire, which was prudently cautious about undermining the wartime alliance, despite his private view that the colonial empires were morally bankrupt and ought to be brought under international trusteeship or granted independence. When the British authorities arrested Gandhi in August 1942 and thousands of other Indian supporters of his ‘Quit India’ campaign, Roosevelt made no public statement condemning the decision or the violence. Walter White, secretary of the NAACP, canceled a speech he was to make on behalf of the Office of War Information in protest and sent a telegram to Roosevelt linking the civil rights movement to the broader world struggle for emancipation from Western imperialism: ‘One billion brown and yellow people in the Pacific will without question consider ruthless treatment of Indian leaders and peoples typical of what white people will do to colored people if United Nations win. How the various countries justified WWII.

 

1. Schiaron, ‘La Bataille de France’, 7–8. 

 

2. Ibid., 9–11; Elisabeth du Réau, ‘Le débat de l’armistice’, in Ricalens and Poyer (eds.), L’Armistice de juin 1940, 65–9.

 

3. Schiaron, ‘La Bataille de France’, 11–12; Jackson, Fall of France, 143. 

 

4. Gilles Ragache, ‘La bataille continue!’, in Ricalens and Poyer (eds.), L’Armistice de juin 1940, 142–5. 

 

5. Rochat, Le guerre italiane, 239. 

 

6. Gooch, Mussolini and His Generals, 494–8, 508–11; Robert Mallett, Mussolini and the Origins of the Second World War, 1933–1940 (Basingstoke, 2003), 214–17.

 

7. Gooch, Mussolini, and His Generals, 510. 

 

8. Galeazzo Ciano, Diario 1937–1943, ed. Renzo di Felice (Milan, 1998), 429, 435, 442, entries for 13 May, 28 May, 10 June 1940. 

 

9. Rodogno, Fascism’s European Empire, 25–6. Ciano, Diario, 444, entry for 18/19 June 1940. 

 

10. Ciano, Diario, 443, entry for 18/19 June 1940. 

 

11. Ragache, ‘La bataille continue!’, 143–4. 

 

12. Rochat, Le guerre italiane, 248–50. 

 

13. Karine Varley, ‘Entangled enemies: Vichy, Italy and collaboration’, in Ludivine Broch and Alison Carrol (eds.), France in an Era of Global War, 1914–1945: Occupation Politics, Empire and Entanglements (Basingstoke, 2014), 153–5; Rodogno, Fascism’s European Empire, 26–7. On German terms see Thomas Laub, After the Fall: German Policy in Occupied France 1940–1944 (Oxford, 2010), 36–9. 

 

14. Roberts, ‘Stalin’s wartime vision of the peace’, 236–7.

 

15. Ciano, Diario, 443, entry for 18/19 June 1940. 

 

16. Randolph Churchill (ed.), Into Battle: Speeches by the Right Hon. Winston S. Churchill (London, 1941), 255–6, 259. 

 

17. John Colville, The Fringes of Power: Downing Street Diaries 1939–1955: Volume 1 1939–October 1941 (London, 1985), 267, entry for 20 Aug. 1940. 

 

18. Gorodetsky, Maisky Diaries, 304, entry for 20 Aug. 1940. 

 

19. Ibid., 287, entry for 17 June 1940. 

 

20. Hastings Ismay, Memoirs (London, 1960), 153. 

 

21. James (ed.), The Diaries of Sir Henry Channon, 261–2. 

 

22. Srinath Raghavan, India’s War: The Making of Modern South Asia, 1939–1945 (London, 2016), 47–8. 

 

23. On Soviet views see Sergei Kudryashov, ‘The Soviet perspective’, in Paul Addison and Jeremy Crang (eds.), The Burning Blue: A New History of the Battle of Britain (London, 2000), 71–2. In France see Robert Tombs and Isabelle Tombs, That Sweet Enemy: Britain and France (London, 2007), 10, 571–3. 

 

24. Colville, Fringes of Power, 176, entry for 6 June 1940.

 

25. Robert Self, Neville Chamberlain: A Biography (Aldershot, 2006), 434; for the Churchill quotation, Spears, Assignment to Catastrophe, 70, who reported Churchill’s remark that ‘We were quite capable of beating the Germans single-handed. 

 

26. Paul Addison and Jeremy Crang (eds.), Listening to Britain: Home Intelligence Reports on Britain’s Finest Hour May–September 1940 (London, 2011), 80, 123, 126, entries for 5 June, 17 June and 18 June 1940. See too Richard Toye, The Roar of the Lion: The Untold Story of Churchill’s World War II Speeches (Oxford, 2013), 51–9. 

 

27. John Charmley, Lord Lloyd and the Decline of the British Empire (London, 1987), 251. 

 

28. John Ferris and Evan Mawdsley, ‘The war in the West’, in idem (eds.), The Cambridge History of the Second World War: Volume I: Fighting the War (Cambridge, 2015), 350. 

 

29. Richard Toye, Lloyd George and Churchill: Rivals for Greatness (London, 2007), 342, 363–9, 380; Antony Lentin, Lloyd George and the Lost Peace: From Versailles to Hitler, 1919–1940 (Basingstoke, 2001), 121–7. 

 

30. Self, Neville Chamberlain, 433. 

 

31. Richard Hallion, ‘The American perspective’, in Addison and Crang (eds.), The Burning Blue, 83–4. 

 

32. Richard Overy, The Bombing War: Europe 1939–1945 (London, 2013), 252–4. 

 

33. Toye, Roar of the Lion, 54.

 

34. Richard Toye, Churchill’s Empire: The World that Made Him and the World He Made (New York, 2010), 203–4.

 

35.. Jackson, The British Empire and the Second World War, 21–3. 

 

36.. Parsons, The Second British Empire, 108–9; K. Fedorowich, ‘Sir Gerald Campbell and the British High Commission in wartime Ottawa, 1938–40’, War in History, 19 (2012), 357–85; Toye, Churchill’s Empire, 209; Jonathan Vance, Maple Leaf Empire: Canada, Britain, and Two World Wars (Oxford, 2012), 149–50, 179; Darwin, The Empire Project, 495–7. 

 

37.. Clair Wills, The Neutral Island: A History of Ireland during the Second World War (London, 2007), 41–8; Toye, Churchill’s Empire, 196–7, 207. 

 

38.. Raghavan, India’s War, 13–16, 38–9, 52–60, 69–70. 

 

39. Dilks (ed.), Diaries of Sir Alexander Cadogan, 311, entry for 5 July 1940; Tarling, A Sudden Rampage, 54–5. 

 

40. Morewood, British Defence of Egypt, 174–7, 193–8. 

 

41. Ageron, ‘Vichy, les Français et l’Empire’, 122. 

 

42. Schmokel, Dream of Empire, 144–54. 

 

43. Gerhard Schreiber, Bernd Stegemann and Detlef Vogel, Germany and the Second World War: Volume III (Oxford, 1995), 282–8; Schmokel, Dream of Empire, 140–44. 

 

44. Donald Nuechterlein, Iceland: Reluctant Ally (Ithaca, NY, 1961), 23–36. 

 

45. William Roger Louis, Imperialism at Bay: The United States and the Decolonization of the British Empire, 1941–1945 (Oxford, 1977), 158, 175–7; Neil Smith, American Empire: Roosevelt’s Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization (Berkeley, Calif., 2003), 353–5. 

 

46. Guy Vanthemsche, Belgium and the Congo 1885–1980 (Cambridge, 2012), 122–6, 130. 

 

47. Jonathan Helmreich, United States Relations with Belgium and the Congo, 1940–1960 (Newark, NJ, 1998), 25–40. 

 

48. Jennifer Foray, Visions of Empire in the Nazi-Occupied Netherlands (Cambridge, 2012), 3–5. 

 

49. Ibid., 50–51, 54, 109–15. 279. Ibid., 50–53; Tarling, A Sudden Rampage, 66–8. 

 

50. Marcel Boldorf, ‘Grenzen des nationalsozialistischen Zugriffs auf Frankreichs Kolonialimporte (1940–1942)’, Vierteljahresschrift für Wirtschafts-Sozialgeschichte, 97 (2010), 148–50. 

 

60. Ageron, ‘Vichy, les Français et l’Empire’, 123–4, 128–9; Frederick Quinn, The French Overseas Empire (Westport, Conn., 2000), 219–20. 

 

61. Tarling, A Sudden Rampage, 53–4; Martin Thomas, The French Empire at War 1940–45 (Manchester, 1998), 45–6. 

 

62. Charmley, Lord Lloyd, 246–7. 

 

63. Tombs and Tombs, That Sweet Enemy, 561, 572–3. 

 

64. Ibid., 562–3; Christopher Bell, Churchill and Sea Power (Oxford, 2013), 197–9; Raymond Dannreuther, Somerville’s Force H: The Royal Navy’s Gibraltar-based Fleet, June 1940 to March 1942 (London, 2005), 28–34. 

 

65. Martin Thomas, ‘Resource war, civil war, rights war: factoring empire into French North Africa’s Second World War’, War in History, 18 (2011), 225–48. 

 

66. Varley, ‘Entangled enemies’, 155–6. 

 

67. Quinn, French Overseas Empire, 221–2; Thomas, French Empire at War, 52–8. 

 

67. Robert Frank, ‘Vichy et les Britanniques 1940–41: double jeu ou double langage?’, in Azéma and Bédarida (eds.), Le Régime de Vichy et les Français, 144–8. On Dakar see Thomas, French Empire at War, 75–6; Bell, Churchill and Sea Power, 209. 

 

68 Foray, Visions of Empire, 93, 103. 291. Varley, ‘Entangled enemies’, 155–8. 

 

69. Ciano, Diario, 449, 452, entries for 2 July, 16 July 1940. 

 

70. Max Domarus, Hitler: Reden und Proklomationen 1932-1945, 3 vols. Volume II, Untergang (Munich, 1965), 1538. 

 

71. Elke Fröhlich (ed.), Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels: Sämtliche Fragmente, 4 vols. (Munich: K. G. Saur, 1987), iv, 221, 227, entries for 28 June, 4 July 1940. On the ‘go-betweens’ see Karina Urbach, Go-Betweens for Hitler (Oxford, 2015). 

 

72. Domarus, Reden und Proklamationen, ii, 1537–8, Halder’s notes of meeting at the Berghof, 13 July 1940; von Below, At Hitler’s Side, 67–8. 

 

73. Gerwin Strobl, The Germanic Isle: Nazi Perceptions of Britain (Cambridge, 2000), 84, 92–4. 

 

74. Domarus, Reden und Proklamationen, ii, 1557–8. 

 

75. Fröhlich (ed.), Tagebücher: Sämtliche Fragmente, iv, 246–7, entry for 20 July 1940.

 

76. Colville, Fringes of Power, 234, entry for 24 July 1940. 

 

77. Fröhlich (ed.), Tagebücher: Sämtliche Fragmente, iv, 250, entry for 24 July 1940. 

 

78. Walter Hubatsch (ed.), Hitlers Weisungen für die Kriegführung (Frankfurt am Main, 1962), 71–2, Directive No. 16. 

 

79. Von Below, At Hitler’s Side, 68–9, entry for 21 July 1940. 

 

80. Domarus, Reden und Proklamationen, ii, 1561, General Halder’s report on meeting with the Führer, 21 July 1940. 

 

81. Toye, Lloyd George and Churchill, 376. 

 

82. Domarus, Reden und Proklamationen, ii, 1561; Fröhlich (ed.), Tagebücher: Sämtliche Fragmente, iv, 249. 

 

83. Das Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv (BArch-MA) in Freiburg, I Fliegerkorps, ‘Gedanken über die Führung des Luftkrieges gegen England’, 24 July 1940. On German preparations see Horst Boog, ‘The Luftwaffe’s assault’, in Addison and Crang, Burning Blue, 40–41. 

 

84. Bell, Churchill and Sea Power, 199. 

 

85. Overy, The Bombing War, 251–2. 

 

86. The National Archives London (henceforth TNA), AIR 16/212, No. 11 Group Operational Orders, ‘Measures to Counter an Attempted German Invasion, Summer 1940’, 8 July 1940, p. 2. 

 

87. AHB, ‘Battle of Britain: Despatch by Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding’, 20 Aug. 1940, 569. 

 

88. Hubatsch (ed.), Hitlers Weisungen für die Kriegführung, 75–6; AHB, German Translations, vol. 1, VII/21, OKW directive ‘Operation Sea Lion’, 1 Aug. 1940. 

 

89. TNA, PREM 3/29 (3), Fighter Command Order of Battle, 6 Sept. 1940. 

 

90. TNA, AIR 22/72, report on German propaganda, Aug. 1940. 

 

91. Percy Schramm (ed.), Kriegstagebuch/OKW: Band 1, Teilband 1 (Augsburg, 2007), 59–60, entry for 3 Sept. 1940. 

 

92. TNA, AIR 16/432, Home Security intelligence summary, ‘Operations during the Night of 5/6 September’. 

 

93. Ibid., reports for 24/25, 25/26 and 28/29 Aug. 1940. The first night three London boroughs were hit, the second night five, and the third night eleven. 

 

94. Overy, The Bombing War, 83–4; Fröhlich (ed.), Tagebücher: Sämtliche Fragmente, iv, 309. 

 

95. Allport, Browned Off and Bloody-Minded, 68. 

 

96. David French, Raising Churchill’s Army: The British Army and the War against Germany 1919–1945 (Oxford, 2000), 185, 189–90; Alex Danchev and Daniel Todman (eds.), War Diaries: Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke, 1939–1945 (London, 2001), 108, entry for 15 Sept. 1940. 

 

97. TNA, AIR 8/372, minute by the chief of the air staff, 22 May 1940; Cripps to War Cabinet, 26 June 1940; Foreign Office minute for Churchill, 3 July 1940. 

 

98. TNA, INF 1/264, Home Intelligence, Summary of daily reports, 4 Sept. 1940. 

 

99. Virginia Cowles, Looking for Trouble (London, 1941), 448–9, 452. 

 

100. Warlimont, Inside Hitler’s Headquarters, 114. 324. Ibid., 115–7; von Below, At Hitler’s Side, 72.

 

 

For updates click homepage here