Only days after Pearl Harbor, Prime Minister Churchill and his military chiefs met in Washington with Roosevelt and his advisers. In every quarter of the globe, disaster threatened. The Japanese were gobbling up East Asia. Hitler’s armies, checked outside Leningrad and Moscow, were preparing for a massive attack in the direction of Stalingrad, on the Volga River. German divisions under General Erwin Rommel were beginning a drive across North Africa toward the Suez Canal. U-boats were taking a heavy toll in the North Atlantic. British and American leaders believed that eventually they could muster enough force to smash their enemies, but whether or not the troops already in action could hold out until this force arrived was an open question.
The decision of the strategists was to concentrate first against the Germans. Japan’s conquests were in remote and, from the point of view of the Allies, relatively unimportant regions. If the Soviet Union surrendered, Hitler’s position in Europe might prove impregnable.
But how to strike at Hitler? American leaders wanted to attack German positions in France, at least by 1943. The Soviets, with their backs to the wall and bearing the full weight of the German war machine, heartily agreed. Churchill, however, was more concerned with protecting Britain’s overseas possessions than with easing the pressure on the Soviet Union. He advocated instead air bombardment of German industry combined with an attempt to drive the Germans out of North Africa, and his argument carried the day.
During the summer of 1942 Allied planes began to bomb German cities. In a crescendo through 1943 and 1944, British and American bombers pulverized the centers of Nazi might. While air attacks did not destroy the German army’s capacity to fight, they hampered war production, tangled communications, and brought the war home to the German people in awesome fashion. Humanitarians deplored the heavy loss of life among the civilian population, but the response of the realists was that Hitler had begun indiscriminate bombing, and victory depended on smashing the German war machine.
In November 1942 an Allied army commanded by General Dwight D. Eisenhower struck at French North
OCEAN
The Liberation of Europe After November, 1942, Allied armies pushed the German-Italian armies back on three fronts: the Soviets, from the East; and American-British armies from North Africa and then, after the Normandy invasion, from France.
Africa. After the fall of France, the Nazis had set up a puppet regime in those parts of France not occupied by their troops, with headquarters at Vichy in central France. This collaborationist Vichy government controlled French North Africa. But the North African commandant, Admiral Jean Darlan, agreed to switch sides when Eisenhower’s forces landed. After a brief show of resistance, the French surrendered.
Eisenhower now pressed forward quickly against the Germans in North Africa. In February 1943 at Kasserine Pass in the desert south of Tunis, American tanks met Rommel’s Afrika Korps. The battle ended in a standoff, but with British troops closing in from their Egyptian bases to the East, the Germans were soon trapped and crushed. In May, after Rommel had been recalled to Germany, his army surrendered.
In July 1943, while air attacks on Germany continued and the Russians slowly pushed the Germans back from the gates of Stalingrad, the Allies invaded Sicily from Africa. In September they advanced to the Italian mainland. Mussolini had already fallen from power and his successor, Marshal Pietro Badoglio, surrendered. However, the German troops in Italy threw up an almost impregnable defense across the rugged Italian peninsula. The Anglo American army inched forward, paying heavily for every advance. Monte Cassino, halfway between Naples and Rome, did not fall until May 1944, the capital itself not until June; months of hard fighting remained before the country was cleared of Germans. The Italian campaign was an Allied disappointment even though it weakened the enemy.
See the Map World War II In Europe at Www. myhistorylab. com
Senator Alben Barkley of Kentucky views emaciated bodies at Buchenwald, Germany, one of several dozen Nazi concentration camps created to exterminate Jews—and others whom the Nazis deemed "undesirable.”
World History
