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Example research essay topic: Battle Of Britain Lend Lease - 2,785 words

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... eral Maxime Weygand, had nothing with which to screen it or Paris on the north and west. On June 17, Marshal Henri Philippe P'email, a World War I hero who had become premier the day before, asked for an armistice. The armistice was signed on June 25 on terms that gave Germany control of northern France and the Atlantic coast. P'email then set up a capital at Vichy in the unoccupied southeast. The Battle of Britain In the summer of 1940, Hitler dominated Europe from the North Cape to the Pyrenees.

His one remaining active enemy-Britain, under a new prime minister, Winston Churchill-vowed to continue fighting. Whether it could was questionable. The British army had left most of its weapons on the beaches at Dunkerque. Stalin was in no mood to challenge Hitler. The U.

S. , shocked by the fall of France, began the first peacetime conscription in its history and greatly increased its military budget, but public opinion, although sympathetic to Britain, was against getting into the war. The Germans hoped to subdue the British by starving them out. In June 1940 they undertook the Battle of the Atlantic, using submarine warfare to cut the British overseas lifelines. The Germans now had submarine bases in Norway and France. At the outset the Germans had only 28 submarines, but more were being built-enough to keep Britain in danger until the spring of 1943 and to carry on the battle for months thereafter.

Invasion was the expeditious way to finish off Britain, but that meant crossing the English Channel; Hitler would not risk it unless the British air force could be neutralized first. As a result, the Battle of Britain was fought in the air, not on the beaches. In August 1940 the Germans launched daylight raids against ports and airfields and in September against inland cities. The objective was to draw out the British fighters and destroy them. The Germans failed to reckon with a new device, radar, which greatly increased the British fighters' effectiveness. Because their own losses were too high, the Germans had to switch to night bombing at the end of September.

Between then and May 1941 they made 71 major raids on London and 56 on other cities, but the damage they wrought was too indiscriminate to be militarily decisive. On September 17, 1940, Hitler postponed the invasion indefinitely, thereby conceding defeat in the Battle of Britain. The Balkans and North Africa (1940 - 1941) In Fact, Hitler had told his generals in late July 1940 that the next attack would be on the USSR. There, he said, Germany would get its 'living space' and defeat Britain as well. He claimed the British were only being kept in the war by the hope of a falling-out between Germany and the USSR.

When the Soviets had been defeated and British positions in India and the Middle East were threatened, he believed that Britain would make peace. Hitler wanted to start in the fall of 1940, but his advisers persuaded him to avoid the risks of a winter campaign in the Soviet Union and wait until the spring. Meanwhile, Germany's ally, Mussolini, had staged an unsuccessful attack (September 1940) on British-occupied Egypt from the Italian colony of Libya and an equally abortive invasion (October 1940) of Greece. In response to the latter move, the British occupied airfields on Crete and in Greece.

Hitler did not want British planes within striking distance of his one major oil source, the Ploiesti fields in Romania, and in November he began to prepare an operation against Greece. Early in 1941 British forces pushed the Italians back into Libya, and in February Hitler sent General Erwin Rommel with a two-division tank corps, the Afrika Korea, to help his allies. Because he would need to cross their territory to get at Greece (and the Soviet Union), Hitler brought Romania and Hungary into the Axis alliance in November 1940; Bulgaria joined in March 1941. When Yugoslavia refused to follow suit, Hitler ordered an invasion of that country.

Yugoslavia The operations against Greece and Yugoslavia began on April 6, 1941. The Germans' primary difficulty with the attack on Yugoslavia was in pulling together an army of nine divisions from Germany and France in less than ten days. They had to limit themselves for several days to air raids and border skirmishing. On April 10 they opened drives on Belgrade from the northwest, north, and southeast. The city fell on April 13, and the Yugoslav army surrendered the next day. Yugoslavia, however, was easier to take than it would be to hold.

Guerrillas-Cetniks under Dra'a Mihajlovic and partisans under Josip Broz (Tito) -fought throughout the war. Greece The Greek army of 430, 000, unlike the Yugoslav, was fully mobilized, and to some extent battle tested, but national pride compelled it to try to defend the Metals line northeast of Salonika. By one short thrust to Salonika, the Germans forced the surrender on April 9 of the line and about half of the Greek army. After the Greek First Army, pulling out of Albania, was trapped at the Metsovon Pass and surrendered on April 22, the British force of some 62, 000 troops retreated southward.

Thereafter, fast German drives-to the Isthmus of Corinth by April 27 and through the Pop " onanists by April 30 -forced the British into an evacuation that cost them 12, 000 men. An airborne assault on May 20 - 27 also brought Crete into German hands. Meanwhile, Rommel had launched a successful counteroffensive against the British in Libya, expelling them from the country (except for an isolated garrison at Tobruk) by April 1941. The Second Phase: Expansion of the War In the year after the fall of France, the war moved toward a new stage-world war.

While conducting subsidiary campaigns in the Balkans, in North Africa, and in the air against Britain, Hitler deployed his main forces to the east and brought the countries of southeastern Europe (as well as Finland) into a partnership against the USSR. U. S. Aid to Britain The U.

S. abandoned strict neutrality in the European war and approached a confrontation with Japan in Asia and the Pacific Ocean. U. S.

and British conferences, begun in January 1941, determined a basic strategy for the event of a U. S. entry into the war, namely, that both would center their effort on Germany, leaving Japan, if need be, to be dealt with later. In March 1941 the U.

S. Congress passed the Lend-Lease Act and appropriated an initial $ 7 billion to lend or lease weapons and other aid to any countries the president might designate. By this means the U. S.

hoped to ensure victory over the Axis without involving its own troops. By late summer of 1941, however, the U. S. was in a state of undeclared war with Germany. In July, U. S.

Marines were stationed in Iceland, which had been occupied by the British in May 1940, and thereafter the U. S. Navy took over the task of escorting convoys in the waters west of Iceland. In September President Franklin D. Roosevelt authorized ships on convoy duty to attack Axis war vessels. Friction Between the U.

S. and Japan Meanwhile, American relations with Japan continued to deteriorate. In September 1940 Japan coerced Vichy France into giving up northern Indochina. The U. S. retaliated by prohibiting the exportation of steel, scrap iron, and aviation gasoline to Japan.

In April 1941, the Japanese signed a neutrality treaty with the USSR as insurance against an attack from that direction if they were to come into conflict with Britain or the U. S. while taking a bigger bite out of Southeast Asia. When Germany invaded the USSR in June, Japanese leaders considered breaking the treaty and joining in from the east, but, making one of the most fateful decisions of the war, they chose instead to intensify their push to the southeast. On July 23 Japan occupied southern Indochina. Two days later, the United States, Britain, and the Netherlands froze Japanese assets.

The effect was to prevent Japan from purchasing oil, which would, in time, cripple its army and make its navy and air force completely useless. The German Invasion of the USSR The war's most massive encounter began on the morning of June 22, 1941, when slightly more than 3 million German troops invaded the USSR. Although German preparations had been visible for months and had been talked about openly among the diplomats in Moscow, the Soviet forces were taken by surprise. Stalin, his confidence in the country's military capability shaken by the Finnish war, had refused to allow any counter activity for fear of provoking the Germans. Moreover, the Soviet military leadership had concluded that blitzkrieg, as it had been practiced in Poland and France, would not be possible on the scale of a Soviet-German war; both sides would therefore confine themselves for the first several weeks at least to sparring along the frontier. The Soviet army had 2. 9 million troops on the western border and outnumbered the Germans by two to one in tanks and by two or three to one in aircraft.

Many of its tanks and aircraft were older types, but some of the tanks, particularly the later famous T- 34 s, were far superior to any the Germans had. Large numbers of the aircraft were destroyed on the ground in the first day, however, and their tanks, like those of the French, were scattered among the infantry, where they could not be effective against the German panzer groups. The infantry was first ordered to counterattack, which was impossible, and then forbidden to retreat, which ensured their wholesale destruction or capture. Initial German Successes For the invasion, the Germans had set up three army groups, designated as North, Center, and South, and aimed toward Leningrad, Moscow, and Kyyiv. Hitler and his generals had agreed that their main strategic problem was to lock the Soviet army in battle and defeat it before it could escape into the depths of the country. They disagreed on how that could best be accomplished.

Most of the generals believed that the Soviet regime would sacrifice everything to defend Moscow, the capital, the hub of the road and railroad networks, and the country's main industrial center. To Hitler, the land and resources of the Ukraine and the oil of the Caucasus were more important, and he wanted to seize Leningrad as well. The result had been a compromise-the three thrusts, with the one by Army Group Center toward Moscow the strongest-that temporarily satisfied Hitler as well as the generals. War games had indicated a victory in about ten weeks, which was significant because the Russian summer, the ideal time for fighting in the USSR, was short, and the Balkans operations had caused a 3 -week delay at the outset. Ten weeks seemed ample time. Churchill offered the USSR an alliance, and Roosevelt promised lend-lease aid, but after the first few days, their staffs believed everything would be over in a month or so.

By the end of the first week in July, Army Group Center had taken 290, 000 prisoners in encirclements at Bialystok and Minsk. On August 5, having crossed the Dnepr River, the last natural barrier west of Moscow, the army group wiped out a pocket near Smolensk and counted another 300, 000 prisoners. On reaching Smolensk, it had covered more than two-thirds of the distance to Moscow. Hitler's Change of Plan The Russians were doing exactly what the German generals had wanted, sacrificing enormous numbers of troops and weapons to defend Moscow. Hitler, however, was not satisfied, and over the generals' protests, he ordered Army Group Center to divert the bulk of its armor to the north and south to help the other two army groups, thereby stopping the advance toward Moscow.

On September 8 Army Group North cut Leningrad's land connections and, together with the Finnish army on the north, brought the city under siege. On September 16 Army Group South closed a gigantic encirclement east of Kyyiv that brought in 665, 000 prisoners. Hitler then decided to resume the advance toward Moscow and ordered the armor be returned to Army Group Center. The Attempt to Take Moscow After a standstill of six weeks, Army Group Center resumed action on October 2. Within two weeks, it completed three large encirclements and took 663, 000 prisoners. Then the fall rains set in, turning the unpaved Russian roads to mud and stopping the advance for the better part of a month.

In mid-November, the weather turned cold and the ground froze. Hitler and the commander of Army Group Center, Field Marshal Fedor von Bock, faced the choice of having the armies dig in where they were or sending them ahead, possibly to be overtaken by the winter. Wanting to finish the 1941 campaign with some sort of a victory at Moscow, they chose to move ahead. In the second half of November Bock aimed two armored spearheads at Moscow. Just after the turn of the month, one of those, bearing in on the city from the northwest, was less than 32 km (less than 20 mi) away. The other, coming from the south, had about 65 km (about 40 mi) still to go.

The panzer divisions had often covered such distances in less than a day, but the temperature was falling, snow was drifting on the roads, and neither the men nor the machines were outfitted for extreme cold. On December 5 the generals commanding the spearhead armies reported that they were stopped: The tanks and trucks were freezing up, and the troops were losing their will to fight. Soviet Counteroffensive Stalin, who had stayed in Moscow, and his commander at the front, General Georgy Zhukov, had held back their reserves. Many of them were recent recruits, but some were hardened veterans from Siberia. All were dressed for winter. On December 6 they counterattacked, and within a few days, the German spearheads were rolling back and abandoning large numbers of vehicles and weapons, rendered useless by the cold.

On Stalin's orders, the Moscow counterattack was quickly converted into a counteroffensive on the entire front. The Germans had not built any defense lines to the rear and could not dig in because the ground was frozen hard as concrete. Some of the generals recommended retreating to Poland, but on December 18 Hitler ordered the troops to stand fast wherever they were. Thereafter, the Russians chopped great chunks out of the German front, but enough of it survived the winter to maintain the siege of Leningrad, continue the threat to Moscow, and keep the western Ukraine in German hands. The Beginning of the War in the Pacific The seeming imminence of a Soviet defeat in the summer and fall of 1941 had created dilemmas for Japan and the U. S.

The Japanese thought they then had the best opportunity to seize the petroleum and other resources of Southeast Asia and the adjacent islands; on the other hand, they knew they could not win the war with the U. S. that would probably ensue. The U. S. government wanted to stop Japanese expansion but doubted whether the American people would be willing to go to war to do so.

Moreover, the U. S. did not want to get embroiled in a war with Japan while it faced the ghastly possibility of being alone in the world with a triumphant Germany. After the oil embargo, the Japanese, also under the pressure of time, resolved to move in Southeast Asia and the nearby islands. Pearl Harbor Until December 1941 the Japanese leadership pursued two courses: They tried to get the oil embargo lifted on terms that would still let them take the territory they wanted, and they prepared for war. The U.

S. demanded that Japan withdraw from China and Indochina, but would very likely have settled for a token withdrawal and a promise not to take more territory. After he became Japan's premier in mid-October, General Tojo Hideki set November 29 as the last day on which Japan would accept a settlement without war. Tojo's deadline, which was kept secret, meant that war was practically certain.

The Japanese army and navy had, in fact, devised a war plan in which they had great confidence. They proposed to make fast sweeps into Burma, Malaya, the East Indies, and the Philippines and, at the same time, set up a defensive perimeter in the central and southwest Pacific. They expected the United States to declare war but not to be willing to fight long or hard enough to win. Their greatest concern was the U. S.

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