Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
British plan to break the deadlock called for a new offensive through the Ottoman Empire (modern Tur-
key), then allied to Germany. The point of attack was the narrow Gallipoli Peninsula overlooking the Dard-
anelles, the strait that connects the Mediterranean to the Black Sea. The plan had merit, but the British
failed to launch it in time. By the time they did attack, the Turks and Germans had heavily fortified the
area in anticipation. The combined assault by British, French, Australian, and New Zealand troops began
in August 1915. Instead of a brilliant strategic coup, the assault on Gallipoli turned into a fiasco, opening
up one more long, ghastly front in which losses on both sides were enormous and without the British and
French gaining the advantage they'd hoped for.
The stalemate on the western front continued into 1916. Both sides mounted ambitious offensives to
put an end to the war. The Germans assaulted the fortress city of Verdun, on the Meuse River in eastern
France, in February 1916. The fighting raged inconclusively but devastatingly for months. By June, the
French had lost more than 300,000 men at Verdun, the Germans 281,000.
Greater madness and death lay ahead when the French and Allies counterattacked in July 1916 in the
Battle of the Somme, a river in the north of France. The fighting there lasted until November, and when it
was over, the conflict had claimed over a million casualties at Somme alone.
The aftermath of the Somme was simply another deadly but indecisive standoff. When the Germans at-
tempted a last-ditch offensive, once again at the Marne, the allies fended them off. Exhaustion rather than
good sense finally prevailed. The United States had joined the British and French, providing fresh cannon
fodder for a time, but by 1918, the Allies had at last begun to advance into German territory, and Germany
and its allies called for peace.
Stalingrad, El Alamein, Normandy, and Iwo Jima
The First World War had been called the Great
War and even the “war to end all wars.” That was before the world realized that a sequel was imminent.
With Germany crippled by its loss, having surrendered both European territory and colonial possessions
overseas, there was great unrest in the country. During the economic upheaval of the worldwide depression
of the 1930s, Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) came to power in Germany and blamed the country's problems on
the unfair war reparations that Germany had to pay, on foreigners in general, the French in particular, and
on the Jews, Hitler's most tragic scapegoats. He found an accepting national audience eager to see Ger-
many restored to its “rightful” place among the nations of Europe.
After making quick work of Czechoslovakia and Poland in 1939, Hitler's armies smashed through Den-
mark and Norway in the spring of 1940. And in a repeat of the strategy of 1914, Germany rolled over the
Low Countries of Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg and then into France, taking Paris against
token resistance. The British made a heroic moment of their evacuation from the French port of Dunkirk.
Hitler's Germany and Mussolini's Italy had uncontested control over Europe, and the German armies once
again wore the sash of seeming invincibility.
A secret nonaggression pact with the Soviet leader Stalin temporarily kept the Russians out of the war
and allowed Stalin to take half of Poland and the three Baltic states of Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia. But
thwarted by the British victory in the Battle of Britain—the monumental air war fought in the skies over
Great Britain—Hitler made the same mistake Napoleon and the German commanders of 1914 had made:
he invaded Russia late in 1941. These Germans, too, learned the hard lesson of committing land troops to
Russia. The German offensive stalled at the monumental Battle of Stalingrad, an industrial center (formerly
called Tsaritsyn, and renamed Volgograd in 1961) at the junction of the Don and the Volga Rivers. Fought
from August 1942 to early in 1943, with both sides suffering heavy casualties, the Russian victory there
marked the end of Germany's eastern offensive.
The United States entered the war after the attack on the naval base at Pearl Harbor by Germany's ally
Japan in December 1941, and the American-British Allies planned to counterattack. But instead of assault-
ing Europe directly, they planned first to retake North Africa. The Italians had moved on Libya and Algeria
