Jack Holroyd - The Second World War Illustrated: The Third Year - Archive and Colour Photographs of WW2

The Second World War Illustrated

The Second Year

The Second Year

J ACK H OLROYD

Dedicated to the One True Sovereign

To serve as a visual reminder of the consequences when mankind persists in a course of rebellion against His rulership

First published in Great Britain in 2020 by

PEN & SWORD MILITARY

an imprint of

Pen & Sword Books Ltd,

47 Church Street, Barnsley,

South Yorkshire.

S70 2AS

Copyright Jack Holroyd 2020

ISBN 9781526757944

ePUB ISBN 9781526757951

Mobi ISBN 9781526757968

The right of Jack Holroyd to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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by Nigel Cave

The second year was one of almost unrelieved disaster as regards the Allied cause, whilst the Germans could look back with some satisfaction on what their forces had achieved, despite some notable failings by their Italian partners. By the early summer of 1941 Great Britain was faced by a continental Europe that was even more firmly under Hitlers control than in the dark, dismal days following the evacuation from Dunkirk and the Fall of France. When German conquests are combined with the reality of the other dictatorial governments in Europe, most of which could be described as fascist in nature for example those of Spain, Portugal and Hungary, the prospects for Britain and its Dominions by September 1941 seemed at least as bleak as they were at the same time in 1940. The one possible glimmer of light lay with the Soviet Union, brought into the fray by Hitlers invasion in late June, although it could hardly be said that the paranoid and unpredictable Stalin had been enjoying a war that was going extraordinarily badly.

British forces in campaigns outside the United Kingdom itself had been almost uniformly unsuccessful. At first there were signs of promise, however. Both in North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean, Mussolinis adventurism, in line with his belief that the sea and its adjoining territories were Italys mare nostra , proved to be catastrophic. He had to be bailed out by the diversion of valuable German manpower, in North Africa notably under the capable and dynamic leadership of Erwin Rommel. Not only did Rommel stem the tide of the British advances along the Libyan coast but he turned the tables and once more British control of Egypt and of the Suez Canal was under a real threat of being lost. Similarly, Mussolinis ill-judged attacks in the Aegean in the autumn of 1940 came spectacularly unstuck and Italy was forced, once more, to turn to the Germans. Bringing on board hitherto neutral nations and in a series of campaigns that bore all the characteristics of the Blitzkrieg tactics that had worked so effectively in 1940, Yugoslavia and Greece fell to the Axis powers. At the same time, Hungary and Rumania came firmly into the Axis camp. British intervention resulted in an all too similar tale of woe: outmanoeuvred, outgunned and out-generaled, the depressing photographs of captured British and Dominion soldiers from Libya to Crete were triumphantly distributed across the worlds media by an exultant Goebbels, Hitlers master of propaganda.

The situation was not much better at sea indeed the effectiveness of the German submarine campaign against the life blood of Britains merchant shipping proved a far more immediate danger, one that was not really overcome until the winter of 1943 and never entirely suppressed.