Читать книгу D-Day: History in an Hour - Rupert Colley - Страница 5

D-Day initiated the end-game of what had been an unprecedented struggle for supremacy in Europe. If the Second Battle of El Alamein in 1942 had been what Winston Churchill called ‘the end of the beginning’, then D-Day was perhaps the beginning of the end.

Almost five years before D-Day, on 1 September 1939, Hitler had launched the German invasion of Poland. Two days later, Great Britain and France had declared war on Germany – and so the Second World War had begun. While German forces then struck Poland from the west, from 17 September, forces of the Soviet Union attacked from the east.

With Poland crushed between two totalitarian heavyweights, Hitler focused his attention on Scandinavia. On 9 April 1940, German forces attacked both Denmark, which capitulated within six hours, and Norway, which held out until 10 June.

On 10 May, Hitler launched the German invasion of Western Europe. By 28 May, Luxembourg, Belgium and the Netherlands had surrendered. On 10 June, Germany invaded France. On the same day, Benito Mussolini, fascist dictator of Italy, keen to share in Germany’s spoils of victory, declared war on France and Britain. British troops, sent to aid the French, were forced back to the French port of Dunkirk before being evacuated back to Britain. On 22 June, France, under its new prime minister, Philippe Pétain, surrendered. The dark years of Nazi occupation had begun.

During the summer of 1940, the Battle of Britain raged above the skies of southern England as the RAF saved Britain from the German Luftwaffe, while, soon after, Britain endured the Blitz, the aerial bombardment of its cities.

In 1941, the German juggernaut continued on its course of destruction. Greece fell, as did Yugoslavia. Then, on 22 June, Hitler launched the invasion of the Soviet Union, opening up the Eastern Front, which, over the coming four years, would experience the most brutal fighting perhaps ever seen.

The war became truly global when, on 7 December 1941, Japan attacked the American fleet anchored at Pearl Harbor, on the Hawaiian island of Oahu. Four days later, Hitler and Mussolini declared war on the USA.