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nity to get a piece of France, joined the war in early June; Paris fell on June
14th and the government gave up on June 25th. In just 7 weeks, Germany
had taken over France, a major western power. Many French who were anti-
Nazi, led by the conservative Charles de Gaulle and a significant number of
Communists, began an underground movement to fight against Germany, but
the future did not look positive. This, safe to say, was the bleakest moment of
the war. The West could understand, and to a point tolerate, Hitler’s moves
on Austria, the Czechs, and Poland, since that was part of Central Europe and
traditionally part of German’s area of interest. But the invasion of France, as
it had been in 1871 and 1914, was something much bigger—a sign of
German’s larger ambitions to take over all of Europe.
Hitler’s next moves would, ultimately, determine the outcome of the war—
invading Britain and the Soviet Union. In July 1940, Hitler began air attacks
against Britain with the German Luftwaffe. No country had ever used just air
power to defeat an enemy, but Hitler was determined to vanquish Britain with
his air force, and then, when it was sufficiently weakened, begin an invasion
across the English Channel, code-named Sea Lion, to finish it off. By August,
the Luftwaffe attacked British airfields in the hopes of destroying the Royal
Air Force [RAF] before its planes could get off the ground, and then launched
a grand offensive with the goal of controlling the skies above Britain in
anticipation of the cross-channel invasion. If Hitler were to succeed, Europe
would be under Nazi control. The British, however, offered up much more
resistance than Germany expected. They had developed radar and the RAF
performed admirably while British industry was in high gear and replaced
downed aircraft quickly. In August and September 1940, the Germans
destroyed 832 fighter planes and damaged 532 others. The RAF, however,
downed 668 Nazi fighters, damaged 436, and also shot down 500 bombers.
The easy success Hitler expected did not occur, so in September he went to
a 3d phase in his air war, general attacks on the people of London. The idea
behind such “terror bombings” was to create such panic among the popula-
tion that it would demand that the British government surrender. The people
of London, however, created a system of safety shelters and never lost their
morale, and Hitler finally had to call off Sea Lion. The Luftwaffe raids con-
tinued through late 1940 and into the spring of 1941, but Britain was not
seriously in danger of being defeated by then. Finally, the Nazis had met
failure, and the West could relax a bit.