Civilians on the frontline

The speed and success of the early stages of the German campaign in Europe surprised even its own commanders. By 1940, says Richard Overy, it looked like this 'total war' would spell disaster for Britain too
Londoners shelter in a tube station during the second world war
Londoners shelter in a tube station during the second world war. Photograph: Bettmann/Corbis

When the second world war broke out on 3 September 1939, the populations of the fighting powers expected immediate air raids as the enemy tried to achieve the feared "knock-out blow" from the air. It was widely believed that modern armaments would usher in a quite different war using new weapons of mass destruction – bombs, gas, biological weapons. The reality was very different. War was not over in 72 hours of apocalyptic destruction but instead there set in what came to be called the "phoney war", almost eight months in which Germany, Britain and France did very little. What fighting did take place was largely confined to naval warfare, little different from the war at sea between 1914 and 1918.

The real war was fought instead in eastern Europe. German armies quickly destroyed Polish resistance and by 28 September Warsaw surrendered. Polish leaders had expected help from their powerful western allies, Britain and France, but the west had already decided that Poland could not be saved in the short term. Western strategy was based on the idea of a long war of attrition, with Germany bottled up by economic blockade and the impenetrable Maginot Line of defences along France's eastern border, and subject to heavy bombing raids to reduce German willingness to continue the war. Western strategy was modelled on the first world war in which economic strength and a static front had finally produced victory. The "phoney war" reflected those expectations.

Poland was defeated not only by German armies but by a Soviet invasion from the east that began on 17 September. This attack was the fruit of the unexpected agreement signed between the two dictatorships in the early hours of 24 August 1939. The non-aggression pact had been the result of Hitler's belief that without the prospect of possible Soviet assistance, Britain and France would back down from confrontation over the Polish question. Stalin accepted the agreement in order to avoid the prospect of war in 1939, but he had few illusions about the threat posed by Germany in the future. Although it was a shock to the thousands of communist sympathisers in the west, who thought agreement between the two ideological enemies impossible, the western powers stuck by their commitment to Poland regardless, hopeful that the Polish army would prove more effective than it turned out to be in September.

Under the terms of the pact Germany and the Soviet Union agreed spheres of influence in eastern Europe. Eastern Poland was in the Soviet sphere, as well as the Baltic states and Finland. Stalin saw this as an opportunity to improve the Soviet defensive position and to absorb former areas of the old Tsarist empire back under Russian rule.

In November demands were presented to Finland to make territorial concessions in the Baltic area, designed to increase Soviet security in the region. When the Finnish government refused, the Red Army invaded on 30 November 1939 and there followed more than three months of fierce fighting in a war that proved to be longer and more costly than the brief German-Polish war. The western powers thought about intervening but did nothing before it ended in March with limited Finnish concessions to the Soviet Union. But it seemed to the west that the totalitarian states were now bent on tearing up the political geography of eastern Europe between them. Relations between the Soviet Union and the west reached their lowest point before the onset of the cold war.

Lightning war

From Hitler's point of view there might have been no "phoney war" at all. First he tried to offer peace terms to the west in October 1939, which were turned down. They were terms he had already offered in August 1939 – a free hand for Germany in eastern Europe, possible "guarantees" for the British and French empires – and he offered them in the belief that there was no sensible reason for the west to carry on the war once Poland was annihilated.

Following western rejection, he planned a quick attack in the late autumn that failed to materialise because of the deteriorating weather. Instead, over the winter and early spring, firmer operational plans were made and the armed forces brought up to a greater state of readiness. German generals were not confident of victory, but they had learned in the 1930s how to use the new weapons initially developed in the first world war, the tank and the battlefield aeroplane.

The German commanders did not call their new operational method blitzkrieg (lightning war), but the term soon came to be popularly applied to a form of warfare that produced swift, annihilating victories and has been used ever since. British and French forces were much less well prepared to use modern weapons to their best advantage, even though the number of western tanks exceeded the numbers available to Germany.

French tanks and aircraft were dispersed in largely defensive formation, while British aircraft were kept back in mainland Britain to prepare for the expected German air attack. When the German forces eventually attacked in the west on 10 May 1940, they concentrated modern weapons in air fleets and armoured divisions to punch a hole in the western defences. Behind the modern vanguard moved a much slower infantry army, reliant on horses, not very different from the army of 1918.

The western states expected a German attack at some point in the spring of 1940 but there was poor intelligence on exactly what form the attack would take. The western states were not weaker than the German attacker – between them they could mobilise more divisions, had more vehicles and tanks and almost as many high-quality aircraft – but their forces were poorly positioned to absorb a heavy blow.

Too much confidence was placed in the Maginot Line, which extended only along the most vulnerable part of the frontier. In the north, on the French-Belgian border, and opposite the dense Ardennes forest, little had been done and it was here that the German high command planned the attack. If the west needed any warning of the operational skill of the enemy they faced, it came on 9 April when Germany launched a sudden attack on Denmark and Norway, occupying Denmark in a matter of hours and destroying Norwegian resistance (backed up by a small contingent of allied troops) by early May. Hitler wanted to secure his northern flank before the invasion of France, and evidence that Britain was about to pre-empt him by sending forces to Norway hastened his decision. The operation secured valuable bases to launch attacks on British shipping and protected the vital supplies of high-quality Swedish iron ore, essential to German arms production.

Disaster at Dunkirk

On 10 May 1940, Operation Sichelschnitt (Sickle Cut) was launched in the west. The plan was to attack through the Netherlands and Belgium and with heavy armoured forces through the Ardennes to drive a wedge between the French and British armies in the north and the rest of the French forces, many of whom were manning the Maginot Line. The operation worked better than German leaders could have hoped. Dutch positions were swiftly overwhelmed and the Dutch armed forces surrendered on 15 May. Belgian defences were penetrated quickly and before French forces could be moved up to prepared positions, the Belgian army fell back, fighting bravely but hopelessly against repeated air attacks and fast-moving German divisions.

Further south, the bulk of German armour pushed through the difficult wooded terrain and then, with unexpected speed and power, drove on into the northern French plain, smashing the French front and driving towards the sea to encircle a large portion of the French army and the small British expeditionary force still engaged with German forces coming through Belgium. Efforts to redeploy French forces from the south were made too late, while the risk of moving forces from the Maginot Line seemed too great. The result was an operational disaster. French and British forces were pushed back into a circle around the French port of Dunkirk while German armies prepared to turn south towards Paris.

The allied troops trapped in northern France were rescued from complete defeat by an improvised evacuation, Operation Dynamo. By 4 June some 338,000 men had been evacuated, more than two-thirds British. The Dunkirk evacuation has gone down in legend as a triumph of British seamanship and dogged resistance, and it is certainly the case that a hastily organised defensive perimeter did hold up the German advance and make rescue possible. But it was nonetheless a major defeat. Almost all the equipment and armour was left behind, and 50,000 British soldiers passed into captivity.

The retreat from Dunkirk saved British lives, but it signalled the near impossibility of a British return to continental Europe, and opened up the real prospect of a German invasion of the British mainland. For France, the collapse of the northern front opened the way to a comprehensive defeat. Efforts were made to construct a line to hold up the remorseless German advance, but two main German army groups, free now to turn south, attacked between 5 and 9 June towards Paris and Rheims. Paris was taken on 14 June after the French government fled to Bordeaux. Two days later Marshal Philippe Pétain was appointed head of government and an armistice was sought the following day; it was signed on 22 June in the same railway carriage at Compiègne where the Germans had been made to sign in November 1918.

France collapses

There has been much written about what the historian Marc Bloch described as France's "strange defeat". It has often been attributed to French "decadence" in the inter-war years; weakened by communism, pacifism, anti-war sentiment and modernist culture, it is alleged that French society simply lacked the will and moral commitment to fight the Germans again.

This argument has some truth to it; there was widespread anti-war sentiment after the terrible bloodletting of the great war. But French defeat owed much more to strategic miscalculation, poor intelligence and limited tactical understanding of new weaponry, much of which was shared with their British ally. The western states were outfought in 1940. Even German commanders were surprised at the speed and completeness of their victory after the earlier experience of four years of stalemate on the western front between 1914 and 1918.

Although Hitler and the German people welcomed victory over the old enemies, the complete collapse of western resistance presented problems as well as opportunities. The Hitler regime began planning a European New Order based on economic exploitation and racial hierarchy. Yet Britain remained undefeated, while Stalin took the opportunity afforded by the war in the west to take control of the Baltic states and to pressure Romania to give up a large slice of former Russian-controlled territory.

In July 1940 Hitler made one final attempt to offer terms to Britain; he could now dictate any settlement as the victor on continental Europe, and as in October 1939 could not see any rationality in continued British belligerency. Britain was now led by Winston Churchill, the bellicose prime minister appointed to succeed Neville Chamberlain on the day the Germans invaded France. Like Chamberlain before him, he refused to consider a settlement, although there were others inside and outside the government who thought an agreement of some kind was preferable to further warfare. Churchill's view carried the day, but even those who might have considered a negotiation were in general unwilling to accept Hitler's terms unconditionally.

Three days before his peace offer, on 16 July, Hitler had already issued a directive for Operation Sealion, a cross-Channel invasion of southern England scheduled for the autumn, once British air power was neutralised. At the same time he began to think seriously about a war against the Soviet Union. The non-aggression pact had bought time for Hitler in the east, but the "Jewish-Bolshevik" enemy was now regarded as a dangerous power-seeker.

Invading Britain

On 30 July 1940 he ordered preliminary planning for a war of annihilation against the Soviet Union. One of the senior planners was Friedrich Paulus, whose Sixth Army was later to be encircled and destroyed at Stalingrad. There has always been argument about whether Hitler was ever serious about invading Britain when his eyes were now turned eastwards. Here again the issue was largely operational: invading Britain without neutralising the Royal Air Force or the Royal Navy was always going to be a risk. What Hitler hoped for was a cheap victory if British resistance or will-for-war crumbled.

July to October saw what Churchill in June 1940 had called, in one of his many striking speeches, the "Battle of Britain". Unlike most battles, it had no clear start or conclusion, and neither side surrendered or collapsed by its end. It was a battle fought not only in the air but also at sea, as the German navy attempted to use submarines and marine air power to blockade Britain into submission.

Much of the air activity between July and September 1940 was aimed at the same object by attacking ports, warehouses and shipping to erode Britain's capacity to feed and supply its population. This explains the terrible air assaults on all the major port cities – Bristol, Plymouth, Hull, Liverpool, Portsmouth, Southampton and, above all, the dockland areas of east London. At the same time the German air force was ordered to destroy the RAF, whose strength and capability was regularly underestimated by German air intelligence. In early August the attacks on the RAF began – and, on 13 August, codenamed Eagle Day, the assault on the RAF airfields began in earnest.

The result of the two-month air battle is well known. Over the whole campaign the German air force lost 1,733 aircraft, the RAF 915. On 15 September, popularly known ever since as Battle of Britain day, the RAF claimed to have destroyed 185 German aircraft. The real figure was 60, with 20 seriously damaged, but this represented 25% of the attacking bomber force, a rate of attrition the German side could no longer contemplate. After that, daylight attacks faded away and were ended in late October.

Victory in the Battle of Britain owed something to the heroism of British pilots and the technical standard of the new Spitfire and Hurricane fighters, but German pilots were also well trained and German aircraft at the cutting-edge. The difference lay in numbers and tactics: there were always more fighter aircraft and fighter pilots available on the British side than on the German, while German fighters had the difficult task of escorting the bombers, leaving them less free to fight the enemy. By mid-September, despite German claims that the RAF was close to annihilation, Hitler realised the air force had failed. On 19 September, preparations for Sealion were abandoned while planning for war against the Soviet Union was scaled up.

Hitler now turned to one final effort to force the British to sue for peace. From early September he ordered bomb attacks against British port cities and industrial centres. The campaign lasted until May 1941 and involved dropping 50,000 tonnes of bombs. The blitz, as it soon came to be called, was the first time a European population had been subjected to heavy bombing on such a scale. More than 43,000 civilians were killed and 1 million rendered homeless.

The result was not mass panic and pressure on the Churchill government to sue for peace, as Hitler hoped. The blitz was the kind of war the British public had expected and been prepared for. Millions of ordinary people worked in air raid precautions and the auxiliary services, undertook firewatching, or joined the home guard. Millions were evacuated from the threatened cities, as they were in Germany too. This was how the new form of warfare, "total war", had been defined before 1939. Civilians were now in the frontline, and thousands wore uniforms and were trained, just like soldiers. The capacity to withstand bomb attack owed much to the process of "militarising" civilians.

Blitz spirit: myth v reality

It is always claimed that survival owed something to an intangible "blitz spirit" as well. There is no doubt that ordinary people did find the psychological and physical resources to cope with bombing. This did not stop occasional panics, the long treks from threatened towns into the surrounding countryside, or the fact that middle-class households could afford to buy their own shelters and had the gardens to put them in. Class divisions were not greatly eroded by the blitz. Evacuated children were often placed with working-class families, who were glad of the fees, rather than with middle-class families.

In London there was much resentment in the East End of different conditions for the better-off. Although some food was rationed (unlike in Germany where almost all food supply was controlled by rationing), it was possible for the better-off to eat well in hotels and restaurants, or to buy more expensive foods. On one occasion, protesting workers forced their way into the Savoy hotel on London's Strand to demand the use of the hotels shelters. In the end the government had to concede the right to sleep in the tube stations to avert further unrest.

Nevertheless, British society became in many ways strengthened by the blitz, and more, rather than less, determined to stay the course. The effect on Hitler was disillusioning. Bombing did not force surrender, and in the end it was kept on in 1941 to trick the Soviets into thinking that Britain was still Hitler's priority. In December 1940 he signed Directive No. 21 for Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union and the annihilation of the Soviet armed forces and state.

Originally scheduled for May, the operation had to be postponed to allow preparations to be completed and because German forces were compelled to move south into the Mediterranean where Benito Mussolini, Hitler's fellow fascist dictator, found himself in difficulty following his declaration of war against Britain in June 1940 and his invasion of Greece on 28 October. German forces completed the conquest of the Balkans in a matter of weeks, while in February 1941 General Rommel arrived in north Africa at the head of a German army corps to stiffen Italian resistance against British Commonwealth forces in Egypt.

With the Mediterranean temporarily secure, Operation Barbarossa was launched on 22 June 1941 by a force of four million German and axis soldiers. Within two months, most of the Soviet army, ill-prepared for the assault and poorly led and trained, was annihilated in great encirclement operations that netted more than 3 million prisoners. In late November, Hitler ordered Operation Typhoon, to seize the Soviet capital at Moscow.

By early December, German forces were only a few kilometres from the Kremlin when they were subject to a sudden counter-attack; against all expectations, the Soviet side succeeded in holding the German army back from complete victory. On 7 December Japanese aircraft bombed Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. A few days later Hitler announced to party leaders his aim to eliminate the Jewish presence in Europe. The war was about to enter a new and very different phase.

Richard Overy is professor of history at the University of Exeter. He has published more than 20 books on the second world war, the Third Reich and Stalin's Russia, including Why the Allies Won, The Dictators, The Battle of Britain and, most recently, The Morbid Age: Britain Between the Wars, and 1939: Countdown to War