Hitler stepped in and took personal command.
It also brought the German high command to the brink of a catastrophic military crisis. On 5/6 December, the Red Army launched a counter-offensive which removed the immediate threat to the Soviet capital. But they failed to take Moscow or Leningrad before winter set in. Despite repeated warnings, Stalin was taken by surprise, and for the first few months the Germans achieved spectacular victories, capturing huge swathes of land and hundreds of thousands of prisoners. His non-aggression pact with Stalin in August 1939 he regarded as a mere temporary expedient.īarely a month after the fall of France, and while the Battle of Britain was being fought, Hitler started planning for the Blitzkrieg campaign against Russia, which began on 22 June 1941. And by conquering Russia, Hitler would also destroy the “Jewish pestilential creed of Bolshevism”. It would provide, he believed, the necessary ‘Lebensraum’, or living space, for the German people. Since the 1920s, Hitler had seen Russia, with its immense natural resources, as the principal target for conquest and expansion. June 1941: A column of Red Army prisoners taken during the first days of the German invasion “Blitz stoicism resulted in needless deaths”ĥ Operation Barbarossa: the German invasion of Russia.
In Churchill’s words, Hitler had tried and failed “To break our famous island race by a process of indiscriminate slaughter and destruction”. Over 43,000 civilians were killed in the Blitz and much material damage was done, but British morale remained unbroken and Britain’s capacity to wage war was unimpaired. The capital was bombed for 57 consecutive nights, when over 13,650 tons of high explosive and 12,586 incendiary canisters were dropped by the Luftwaffe.īeginning with Coventry on 14 November 1940, the Germans also began bombing other cities and towns while still keeping up attacks on London. 7 September 1940, ‘Black Saturday’, saw the beginning of the first major attacks on London. This prompted the Germans to shift their main effort from attacking RAF airfields to bombing Britain’s towns and cities. London was bombed by accident on the night of 24 August 1940, and the following night Churchill ordered an attack on Berlin. The Blitz – an abbreviation of the word Blitzkrieg (lightning war) – was the name given to the German air attacks on Britain between 7 September 1940 and 16 May 1941. 29 December 1940: St Paul’s Cathedral photographed during the Second Great Fire of London
0 kommentar(er)
