Third Reich Victorious

Third Reich Victorious by Unknown Read Free Book Online Page B

Book: Third Reich Victorious by Unknown Read Free Book Online
Authors: Unknown
Tags: History
in 1939: as long as Great Britain and its naval power survive, no mainland nation will ever be able to establish hegemony over western Europe. Sea power must never be underestimated—and the same goes double for British spirit.
     
    To change Hitler, I introduced the one thing that he clearly lacked—a strong male role model, Stabsoberbootsman Günther Luck (and I am sure that readers with naval service will agree that no one can change a young man as quickly or as effectively as a senior petty officer). Luck, as with any effective leader, showed Hitler how to maximize his natural talents and taught him to love something greater than himself—the Imperial Navy. He instilled discipline in the young man (a quality that Hitler lacked in reality). Perhaps most important, Luck’s death at the hands of the Royal Navy gave new direction to Hitler’s anger—a direction that spared Germany the self-destructive anti-Semitic impulse forever tied to the real Hitler, and forever a leading cause of Germany’s failure to win World War II.
     

Bibliography
     
Great Naval Battles: North Atlantic, 1939-43 (Strategic Simulations, Sunnyvale, CA, 1992).
     
Hill, J. R., ed., The Oxford Illustrated History of the Royal Navy (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1995).
     
Mulligan, Timothy P., Neither Sharks nor Wolves: The Men of Nazi Germany’s U-boat Arm, 1939-1945 (Naval Institute Press, Annapolis, 1999).
     
Vause, Jordan, Wolf U-boat Commanders in World War II (Naval Institute Press, Annapolis, 1997).
     
Von der Porten, Edward P., The German Navy in World War II (Ballantine Books, NY, 1969).
     
Wegener, Vice Admiral Wolfgang, The Naval Strategy of the World War , trans. by Holger H. Herwig (Naval Institute Press, Annapolis, 1989).
     

Disaster at Dunkirk
     

The Defeat of Britain, 1940
     
    Stephen Badsey
     

The New Government
     
    At eleven o’clock on the morning of Friday, May 10, 1940, three men met in the Cabinet Room of 10 Downing Street to decide the future fate of their country. The result of their decision was to be the catastrophic surrender of Britain to Nazi Germany just seventy days later. Historians have tended to be kind to these men, especially as two of them died without knowing the consequences of their actions. Particularly in Germany, it has been argued that Britain’s defeat was virtually inevitable in the face of the formidable Third Reich. But given the narrow margin of victory, concealed at the time by Nazi propaganda, a case can be made that things might have happened otherwise.
     
    Of the three men present at that fatal meeting, Neville Chamberlain, Prime Minister and head of the Conservative government since 1937, had taken Britain and its Empire to war in September 1939 against all his own hopes and expectations. Chamberlain had championed the policy of “appeasement,” believing that another world war would give Britain only the choice between military defeat by Germany and economic domination by the United States. Already in February 1940 the Treasury had warned that its gold reserves would be exhausted within two years. When forced into war, Chamberlain still hoped to avoid a repetition of the monstrous casualties of the First World War. As in 1914, Britain sent a small British Expeditionary Force (BEF) to France; but British strategy relied on the French Army, together with the Royal Air Force (RAF) and Royal Navy, to defend against the Germans, while hoping for some kind of negotiated solution. One American journalist complained that “there is something phony about this war,” 1 and the expression stuck. Now the Phony War was over, and with it, Chamberlain’s tenure of office.
     
    Earlier that morning the long awaited German offensive in the West had begun. Aircraft of the Luftwaffe were attacking targets in France, and also in Belgium and the Netherlands, both of which had abandoned their neutrality and asked for French and British help. The first Allied troops were driving across the

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