How Germany and Japan overran much of the world

Press, 2 September 1989, Page 24

How Germany and Japan overran much of the world

In the third part of a four-part series, NAYLOR HILLARY describes the swift victories won by Germany and Japan at the beginning of the Second World War.

FIFTY YEARS ago tomorrow (September 3) the Governments of Britain and France declared war on Germany. Few realised at the time, but this was the beginning of World War 11, the most important and most destructive event of the twentieth century. In September, 1939, the war seemed to be a local, European affair. Britain and France were honouring an undertaking to come to the defence of Poland. Both countries brought with them the support of colonial empires that stretched round the world.

On the other side, Nazi Germany had already absorbed Austria and Czechoslovakia and was attempting to take over parts of western Poland that had significant German populations. German ambitions grew out of the bitterness of the country’s defeat in the First World War, still known then as the Great War or the War to End Wars.

After trying for years to avoid a new war in Europe, the democratic States had decided in mid--1939 that Hitler must be stopped. When the Germans took over Czechoslovakia the world had done no more than send protests to Hitler. The threat to Poland was the last straw. Poland was overrun in a few weeks; the Poles were also attacked from the east by the Soviet Union acting under a secret agreement made between Hitler and Stalin to partition the country. By October, 1939, Britain and France found themselves at war in the defence of a Poland that no longer existed. Apart from naval actions, the war seemed settled in a stalemate, then called the “phony war.” That was broken by a rush of events in 1940. The Germans, using the blitzkrieg or lightning war technique of rapid armoured thrusts, overran first Denmark and Norway, then the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxemburg. Britain’s failure to provide effective military assistance to the smaller European countries led to a crisis in the Government.

Neville Chamberlain, the Prime Minister who has been branded with the label of appeasement of Hitler in the late 19305, was replaced by a man who turned into one of the great war leaders — Winston Churchill. In June, 1940, France was attacked and surrendered after a month. The British Army in northern France — 225,000 men along with 110,000 of their French comrades — escaped by an evacuation across the Channel from Dunkirk. Mussolini’s Italy, smelling easy gains, joined the war on the German side shortly before the fall of France and occupied a corner of southern France. French colonial possessions from Morocco to Vietnam were suddenly neutral, or even hostile to the anti-German cause. The honour of France came to reside in a junior general, Charles de Gaulle, who escaped to England and became the core of a Free French movement that ultimately played a part in the liberation of France. Encouraged by Britain, a resistance movement grew up inside France, but it was seldom more than a local nuisance to the occupying Germans, although there were many individual acts of heroism, and myths have since grown up about its achievements.

For months in the later part of 1940 the German Air Force attempted to subdue Britain in what became known as the Battle of Britain. The Germans, were fought off in the air; there was no German attempt to invade across the Channel while Britain kept control of the air and sea; another lull descended, but this time with the Germans seemingly triumphant and Britain alone and on the defensive everywhere.

Britain did have the support of her dominions — Canada and South Africa, Australia and New

Zealand. She still had the vast resources of her Indian empire. Troops from New Zealand, for instance, reached Egypt early in 1940 and were on the fringes of fighting against the Italians in the then Italian colony of Libya. Indian troops fought in Abyssinia against the Italians there. The war at sea continued, especially in the Mediterranean which the Italians tried unsuccessfully to turn into a private lake. The island of Malta, under British rule, held out for years against repeated air attacks from nearby enemy bases in southern Italy and North Africa. In the North Atlantic, convoys from the United States and Canada fought their way through increasing numbers of German U-boats to bring vital supplies to Britain. The United States, under President Roosevelt, maintained a benevolent neutrality until events in the Pacific forced the United States into the war. Italian ambitions and incompetence widened the scope of the war early in 1941. Italy had occupied Albania as a base to invade Greece. The Greeks fought back successfully. In North Africa the Italians were pushed back by British, Australian, New Zealand and Indian troops.

On both fronts Hitler was forced to come to the aid of his ally. So it was that the first major battles for the New Zealand Army in World War II were fought in Greece against German invaders. Britain and her allies were driven out of Greece and from the island of Crete. In North Africa a stiffening of German troops turned the tide against Britain and here, too, the New Zealand division faced some of its toughest fighting. Germany had also overrun Yugoslavia. The Nazis picked up Finland, Hungary and Bulgaria as allies, and Romania joined in

too. By June, 1941, Germany’s conquests stretched from northern Norway to the western Egyptian desert, and from the French Atlantic ports to the Russian border in eastern Europe. For Britain, and for New Zealand, this was the darkest time of the war. Not since the early months of 1812 had Britain been at war with major European powers, without allies in support. In the next year — 1942 — the military situation would deteriorate even further, but by that time Britain was no longer alone. She had gained two powerful allies — the Soviet Union and the United States.

On June 22, 1941, Hitler made his first great mistake as a strategist. He launched an invasion of the Soviet Union, believing the Russians could be defeated before the onset of winter. But the Germans were uncertain about the ultimate . extent and direction of their invasion. The Germany Army, still a magnificent machine of 175 divisions, advanced rapidly and destroyed the Soviet’s frontier armies; and decisive victory eluded them. . German troops reached the outskirts of Moscow in early December before the weather, and a counter attack by fresh Soviet divisions from Siberia, drove them back. In the first few weeks the Germans were welcomed as liberators in parts of White Russian and the Ukraine. But as the army moved on administration of the occupied areas fell to a score of Nazi organisations including the Gestapo and the SS. Their abominable treatment of Russian civilians turned the. population against the Germans. Then, on December 8, 1941, Japan attacked the American fleet in its Hawaiian base of Pearl Harbour. Germany thus gained a major ally, half a world away. By a fluke, the American

aircraft carriers were not in port. They escaped to become the core of the American forces that eventually defeated Japan nearly four years later. For a time the Japanese swept everything before them. By early 1942 they had occupied the islands of the north-west Pacific, as well as Hong Kong, Singapore, the Philippines, Malaya, and the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia), and were advancing through Burma towards India. Thailand joined Japan as a far-from-enthusiastic ally, but the Thais ultimately had the good sense to change sides shortly before the war ended. Northern Australian ports were bombed by the Japanese, and New Zealand and Australia faced the threat of enemy invasion with the bulk of their fighting forces 10,000 miles away facing Germans and Italians in North Africa. American sea and air power stopped the Japanese in the carrier battles at Midway Island and in the Coral Sea off the north-east coast of Australia.

The British-led Indian Army finally halted the Japanese on land on the Indian frontier in what is now Bangladesh. The furthest Japanese advance was a tip and run raid on the island of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) in the central Indian Ocean. But in China, where Japan had been extending military control for a decade, the advance continued. Substantial American aid did no more than allow the Nationalist Chinese Government to survive in south-west China round the city of Chungking.

In the north of China the Japanese invasion gave a new impetus to the Chinese Communist Party under Mao Tse-tung. The credit earned among the Chinese population by communist guerrilla fighters who resisted the Japanese was a major reason for the success of the communists in the Chinese civil war that followed the end of World War 11.

On Monday: Germany and Japan defeated, and the consequences of the war.