of effort, especially to the Mediterranean theatre, the focus was always in the East.
As one historian reminds us, ‘More than 8 0 per cent of all combat during World War II
took place on the Eastern Front. The Germans suffered in excess of 90 per cent of
their total war losses on the Eastern Front... ; 10 million dead, wounded, missing or
captured’ (Roberts, 2002: 9). This is not to suggest that other military campaigns did not
matter, but they mattered primarily for their impact upon the course of the struggle in the
East. The strategic logic is inescapable. Germany had to be defeated utterly, since a
compromise peace with Hitler was neither possible nor desirable, and that defeat could
be imposed on the necessary scale only in the East. The centre of gravity of the Third
Reich, apart from the Führer himself, was the main body of the army. From 1941 until
the end of the war that was always on the Eastern Front. This fact parallels the situation
in World War I. In order to defeat Germany from 1914 to 191 8 , there was no alternative
to beating its principal concentration of fighting power, which in that war was always on
the Western Front.
The text now proceeds chronologically, an approach the merits of which are easily lost
if one analyses thematically or geographically. It is important to attempt to understand
the flow of events and their consequences as they occurred at the time.
The course of the war
1939: first moves
The war should have begun in 193 8. That had been Hitler’s intention, and as late as
1945 he was convinced that all would have been well for his grand design for conquest
had he not been outmanoeuvred by British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain at
Munich. As a result, the war had to be postponed to 1939, with the excuse shifted from
Czechoslovakia to Poland. The delay and change of country target allowed all parties a
further year to rearm, but, more pertinently, it produced a critical political mobilization
in Britain and France. Germany’s seizure of the ethnically non-German remainder of
Czechoslovakia in March set the stage for a decision for war by the Western powers
next time. And next time was expected to be Poland, especially over the issue of the
Polish ‘corridor’ to the sea and the ethnically largely German port of Danzig granted to
Warsaw by Versailles. With the security of its pact with the Soviet Union in its pocket
after 23 August, Germany duly destroyed the Polish state and its armed forces in a five-
week campaign, from 1 September until 6 October, when Polish resistance ceased. There
was war at sea, as Hitler’s small U-boat arm made its modest presence felt, and also some
action in the air. Britain’s Royal Air Force (RAF) discovered that its medium-bomber
force was nowhere near functioning as a great deterrent and, indeed, could attack
Germany in daylight only at the cost of suicidal losses. Moreover, RAF bombers lacked
the numbers, the range, the navigation aids and the ordnance to do Germany much
damage.
Hitler toyed seriously with the notion of swinging the fifty-four divisions (and the
Luftwaffe) with which he had subdued Poland in September westwards for a late autumn
campaign against France and Britain. He was, however, dissuaded from such a move
by military advisers who anticipated that France would be a much tougher opponent
than Poland, requiring more time to subdue. It was judged to be too late in the year to
World War II in Europe, I 129