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77,000 French Jews
Congress appropriated $7 billion for it in 1941, followed by $26 billion in 1942, and in all during the war $50 billion was given under the programme to thirty-eight countries, more than $31 billion of it to Britain. All this allowed the United States massively to extend her involvement in the war without direct military intervention.
In direct contrast to perceptions of national stereotype, when it came to the projected invasion it was the British who were ruthlessly efficient and the Germans who attempted to muddle through haphazardly.
Operation Sealion.
Small wonder, therefore, that he did not exert himself to make Sealion a reality.
‘He showed little interest in the plans,’ recalled Blumentritt after the war, ‘and made no effort to speed up the preparations. That was utterly different to his usual behaviour.’
Hitler’s failure to grasp the fundamental principles of air warfare were in large part responsible for his defeat in the battle of Britain.
The crossing of a boisterous and unpredictable sea was too much for his vision, which therefore travelled elsewhere across the map table, allowing the impetus of the attack on Britain to be lost.’
‘Radar really won the Battle of Britain … We wasted no petrol, no energy, no time.’
An Elizabethan term for a fiery personality, it was also a popular name for warships and racehorses, and combined the best qualities of all three.
So when Schmid estimated that the RAF was down to its last 430, in fact there were 1,438, over thrice the number.27
Schmid’s massive miscalculations were to result in a demoralization of the Luftwaffe pilots,
in the course of destroying no fewer than seventeen enemy aircraft in the period up to August 1940, the New Zealand ace Al Deere ‘was shot down seven times, bailed out three times, collided with an Me-109, had one Spitfire of his [at an aerodrome] blown up 150 yards away by a bomb, and had another explode just seconds after he had scrambled from its wreckage’.29
They changed the Schwerpunkt in the middle of the campaign, from Britain’s airfields to her cities.
Yet by switching from bombing airfields to bombing cities three days later, Hitler made as fundamental an error as he had when he ordered his Panzers to halt outside Dunkirk on 24 May.
tocsin.
The RAF had more fighters operational at the end of the battle of Britain – despite the high attrition rates – than at the beginning.
Whereas Hitler never visited an air base or bomb-site throughout the war, probably fearful of being publicly connected to failure, Churchill, King George VI and Queen Elizabeth regularly did so, and were often cheered there
The initiation of the London Blitz during the battle of Britain allowed the RAF to achieve victory in the air battle, although the Blitz continued long after that victory was won.
The Stuka’s lack of speed and manoeuvrability in anything other than Blitzkrieg-style attack supporting ground troops made the plane a relatively easy target for Hurricanes and Spitfires.
Germany had no efficient long-range bomber,
Indeed, statistically the most successful unit of the battle was 303 Squadron, composed of Poles. They and the Czechs were particularly ruthless pilots, their fanaticism fuelled by what their countries were suffering under German occupation and by what faced them if they were to be defeated in Britain, which Polish RAF officers dubbed Wyspa ostatniej nadziei (the island of last hope).
The first day that no planes were lost on either side was 31 October, by which time the battle of Britain could be safely described as over.
Overall, since May 1940 the Germans had lost 1,733 planes to the RAF’s 915.
It was the first engagement that the Allies had won against the Germans.
‘Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.’
imposed radical changes on British society which were generally accepted in the mood of national emergency.
The amount of arable land was increased by 43 per cent, with 7 million acres of grassland going under the plough.
As often as not, this was the blood and sweat of women.
Nor did they receive equal pay for equal work.
It was an indictment of British society of the 1930s that some people actually ate better under wartime rationing than they had during the Great Depression six years earlier.
The British economy was driven into near-bankruptcy by the colossal expense of the struggle.
Though largely unsung compared to his other great acts of reckless courage, Churchill’s largesse with the British Treasury was nothing short of heroic.
Before the war, the Swiss state-subsidized timber company had built the concentration camp of Dachau,
Swiss refusal to accept Jewish refugees escaping from the Vichy militia roundups of 1942–3.
‘Some committed suicide in front of the Swiss border guards.’
It was only after the battle of Stalingrad in February 1943, when she saw which side would probably win, that Sweden gave in to Allied pressure and forced the Germans to carry the ore in their own ships; not until April 1944 did Sweden stop selling Germany ball-bearings, and after the war crucial components for the V-2 rockets were found to have ‘Made in Sweden’ stamped on them.
horrific price to pay when this was put into operation.
(where SOE was nicknamed ‘the Racket’)
even though his strategy dictated that neither place would be the key to the victory he sought,
‘We’ve blown up rubber tanks, put them in position, taken them down in the evening, taken them three or four miles further away, blown them up again and laid them there, and from the air it looks as if we had plenty of tanks. Just the same as on the Canal Zone … every other anti-aircraft gun was a wooden one.’
mainly South Africans
At the battle of Beda Fomm on the Gulf of Sirte between 5 and 7 February 1941 the British Empire and Commonwealth won its first really significant land victory of the Second World War.
In the whole course of the campaign, Wavell never enjoyed a force larger than two divisions, only one of them armoured.
‘a synthetic morale inspired by repetitive propaganda and one was very conscious that if they suffered a defeat this would probably peel off like a plastic wrapper, which in fact was the case’.
debouching
The brutality can be gauged by the fact that 17,000 Yugoslavs were killed by the Luftwaffe on a single day, almost as many certified deaths as the RAF were to cause in Dresden in February 1945.14
In retrospect, the Commonwealth expedition to Greece was one of the worst British blunders of the war, stretching Wavell’s forces far too thin, which did not allow him to fight effectively in either Greece or Libya.
critical strategic mistake
It drew off German strength from the war’s main Schwerpunkt,
