rel="nofollow" href="#litres_trial_promo">8 Advance of the Allied XIII Corps along the North African coast, January/February 1941
9 The Mediterranean Theatre 1939–40
10 Battle of Britain – the air battlefield
11 Russian/Japanese battles of 1938–40
12 The expansion of the USSR, 1939–40
13 The ‘buffer states’ between Germany and Russia eliminated by invasions and treaties
14 Russian rail communications
15 Barbarossa: the German Army on the eve of the invasion of the USSR
16 Barbarossa: the first impact
17 German advance towards Moscow, June to December 1941
18 The economic resources of the USSR
19 The German assault on Moscow
20 Petroleum supplies to Britain and Germany 1939
22 The Japanese assault on Pearl Harbor
23 Japanese invasion routes, and the sinking of Force Z
TABLES
1 Allied shipping losses May–December 1941
2 Relative strengths of the Great Powers in 1939
3 German and Allied casualties, 1940
4 Airmen killed in the First World War
6 Average monthly Farenheit temperatures in four Soviet cities
7 Sources of German oil supplies in 1940
8 Japan’s Pearl Harbor carrier attack force
DOCUMENT Guidelines issued for the behaviour of German troops in England as part of the invasion play of 1940
The maps and drawings are by Denis Bishop. Permission to reproduce the photographs is acknowledged with thanks to the following sources: Bibliothek fur Zeitgeschichte, Stuttgart (20); Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin (13); E.C.P. Armées, France (5); Getty Images (1, 14 , 15); Imperial War Museum, London (8, 9, 10, 11, 16, 17, 19); Robert Hunt Library/Mary Evans (18); SZ Photo/Mary Evans (2, 3, 6); Ullsteinbild/TopFoto (4, 7, 12).
I was lucky to be so early in my studies of the Second World War. Finding participants was not difficult: the eyewitnesses and the men who had done the fighting were mostly still young. The men who had commanded the battles and made the decisions that influenced them were no longer young. My great good fortune was in being able to talk to such senior figures as General Adolf Galland, the Luftwaffe fighter chief, to Major-General Sir Francis de Guingand, the chief of staff to Field Marshal Montgomery, and to General Walther Nehring, who was chief of staff to General Rommel. (General Nehring was kind enough to write an Introduction for my book Blitzkrieg.) I also met with Albert Speer, Hitler’s Minister of Armaments, a remarkable, and usefully frank, source of information about top-level decisions.
When the first edition of this book was ready to go to the printers I sat down with Tony Colwell and Steve Cox, editors who had supported and advised me through the years of writing it. It was the biggest and most demanding work I had ever undertaken and I knew that many of the truths I had uncovered would not bring universal joy. Tony and Steve had been tough critics. It was because they tested and challenged my theories and conclusions that I am now able to look with confidence at this reprinted version which remains as originally written.
***
It is a national characteristic beloved of the British to see themselves as a small cultured island race of peaceful intentions, only roused when faced with bullies, and with a God-given mission to disarm cheats. Rather than subjugating and exploiting poorer people overseas, they prefer the image of emancipating them. English school history books invite us to rally with Henry V to defeat the overwhelming French army at Agincourt, or to join Drake in a leisurely game of bowls before he boards his ship to rout the mighty Armada and thwart its malevolent Roman Catholic king. The British also cherish their heroes when they are losers. The charge of the Light Brigade is seen as an honourable sacrifice rather than a crushing defeat for brave soldiers at the hands of their incompetent commanders. Disdaining technology, Captain Scott arrived second at the South Pole and perished miserably. Such legendary exploits were ingrained in the collective British mind when in 1939, indigent and unprepared, the country went to war and soon was hailing the chaotic Dunkirk evacuation as a triumph.
Delusions are usually rooted in history and all the harder to get rid of when they are institutionalized and seldom subjected to review. But delusions from the past do not beset the British mind alone. The Germans, the Russians, the Japanese and the Americans all have their myths and try to live up to them, often with tragic consequences. Yet Japan and Germany, with educational systems superior to most others in the world, and a generally high regard for science and engineering design, lost the war. Defeat always brings a cold shock of reality, and here was defeat with cold and hunger and a well-clothed and well-fed occupying army as a daily reminder that you must do better. The conquerors sat down and wrote their memoirs and bathed in the warm and rosy glow that only self-satisfaction provides.
Half-finished wartime projects, such as the United Nations, fluid and unsatisfactory frontiers and enforced allegiances suddenly froze as the war ended with the explosion of two atomic bombs. The ever-present threat of widespread nuclear destruction sent the great powers into a sort of hibernation that we called the Cold War. The division of the world into two camps was decided more by the building of walls, secret police and prison camps than by ideology. Expensively educated men and women betrayed their countrymen and, in the name of freedom, gave Stalin an atomic
