Chapter 2: The Campaign in the West: 1940
p. 9: “east of Holland.” Dahms, 162;
p. 11: “the French army.” Manstein, 100–102; Cooper, 198–200.
p. 11: “‘was inadmissible,’ Manstein wrote.” Manstein, 103–104.
p. 12: “‘of the German offensive.’” Ibid., 118.
p. 13: “‘had to say,’ Manstein wrote later.” Ibid., 121.
p. 15: “vulnerable to ground fire.” Goutard, 32–37.
p. 16: “on only slightly inferior terms.” Zabecki, vol. 2, 962, 964–66, 983–85 (Carl O. Schuster, Philip C. Bechtel).
p. 16: “could be moved forward.” Kiesling, 140–42.
Chapter 3: The Defeat of France
p. 20: “Walther von Reichenau’s following 6th Army.” Zabecki, vol. 2, 1471–72 (Kevin Dougherty);
p. 21: “to Antwerp, Belgium.” The Allied land forces were divided into the 1st Group of Armies (Billotte), located between the English Channel and Montmedy, and including 7th Army (Giraud), the BEF (Gort), 1st Army (Georges Blanchard), 9th Army (Andre Corap), and 2nd Army (Charles Huntziger); the 2nd Group of Armies (Gaston Pretelat) between Montmedy and Selestat (thirty miles south of Strasbourg on the Rhine River), and including 3rd Army (Charles Conde), 4th Army (Edouard Requin) and 5th Army (Victor Bourret); and the 3rd Group of Armies (Georges Besson) between Selestat and Geneva, Switzerland, with 8th Army ( Joanny J.M. Garchery) and 3rd Army (Robert Auguste Touchon).
p. 22: “to the German panzers.” Goutard, 111–13.
p. 22: “‘Victory whatever the cost!’” Churchill,
p. 23: “in their thrust westward.” Guderian’s three divisions had 276 tanks each, Reinhardt’s two divisions 218 each; Hoth’s 5th Division had 324 tanks, his 7th Division 218; Hoepner’s two divisions had 324 tanks apiece, and the 9th Division (detailed to Holland) 229: total 2,683. Of these, 640 were Mark Is, 825 Mark IIs, 564 Mark IIIs, and 654 Mark IVs. The Mark Is were inadequate for combat and were relegated to reconnaissance. They weighed 6.5 tons, were armed with two machine guns, and had maximum armor 15 millimeters thick. The Mark IIs also were inadequate, weighed 10.5 tons, had only a 20-millimeter gun and 30-millimeter armor. The Mark IIIs carried a 37-millimeter gun and had 57-millimeter maximum armor. The Mark IVs mounted a short-barreled 75-millimeter gun and had maximum of 60-millimeter armor. All four models could travel at about 25 miles per hour. However, the tanks designated Mark IVs in the 6th, 7th, and 8th Panzer Divisions were Czech Skodas. They weighed 11.5 tons, could travel 21 miles an hour, had 25-millimeter maximum armor, and carried a 37-millimeter gun. See Goutard, 27; Chapman, 347; Zabecki, vol. 2, 1111–14, 1133 (Paul W. Johnson and Robert G. Waite).
p. 23: “‘think there is any danger?’” Chapman, 113.
p. 25: “‘guns had been abandoned.’” Ibid., 121.
p. 28: “‘boundless shores’ (
p. 28: “and seized Bouvellement.” Guderian, 108.
p. 31: “attempted no further attack.” Ellis, 90–98.
p. 32: “‘and protective movements.’” Liddell Hart,
pp. 33–34: “‘the liberation of the Old.’” Churchill,
p. 35: “51st Highland Division.” Rommel, 44–67.
p. 35: “‘the back of its neighbor.’” Kimball, 51.
Chapter 4: Hitler’s First Great Error
pp. 36–37: “‘their finest hour.’” Churchill,
p. 38: “pick up low-flying aircraft.” One of the greatest British feats in the war was breaking the German Enigma cipher machine’s code by the Government Code and Cipher School at Bletchley, between Oxford and Cambridge. Radio intercepts of Enigma-encoded messages gave the Allies advance warning of many German actions, plans, and dispositions. A Berlin commercial company invented the Enigma machine, and the army adopted it in the late 1920s and other governmental agencies in 1933. The machine mechanically enciphered plain text messages by means of three cipher drums, or rotors, with twenty-six letters along the rims and a fourth stationary reflector or reversing cipher drum. Changing the connections of these four rotors gave almost infinite potential codes. The Germans regarded Enigma transmissions as unbreakable. Polish intelligence turned over one of these machines to the British in late July 1939. Mathematicians at Bletchley began a laborious process of breaking the codes based on the repeated sequence of letters an operator was obliged to preface messages with to show the receiving station how he had geared or set the machine. Luftwaffe keys were the first broken, but Gestapo keys were never broken. The Bletchley operation was code-named Ultra. Its first great victory was in the Battle of Britain, when Ultra was able to give key advance information on Luftwaffe operations to the RAF. See Zabecki, vol. 2, 959–60, 1290–91 (Alexander Molnar, Jr.); Keegan,
p. 42: “role in deciding the war.” Shirer, 775–82; Dahms, 211; Zabecki, vol. 2 (Robert G. Waite), 1405–9; Liddell Hart,
p. 43: “to British Guiana (Guyana).” Hitler made a great strategic error when he signed the Tripartite Pact between Germany, Italy, and Japan on September 27, 1940. The alliance was aimed at maintaining American neutrality by raising the prospect of a two-front war, against Germany and Italy in Europe and against Japan in the Pacific. This threat increased the determination of American leaders to arm the nation. But the pact encouraged Japan to risk an attack on the United States in the belief that in a two-front war Americans would be unable to defeat the Japanese navy, leaving control of the Pacific to Japan. This decision probably cost Germany and Japan the war. By seeming to offer Japan the opportunity to exclude the United States from the western Pacific, the pact encouraged Japan to seize the colonies of Britain, France, and the Netherlands in Southeast Asia (the so-called southern strategy). This diverted Japanese attention from its designs on Siberia, and led to a neutrality treaty with the Soviet Union in April 1941.
p. 44: “American entry into the war.” Paul Kennedy points out that the economic power of the United States dwarfed that of every other nation. In 1938, with at least half of its capacity idle because of economic depression, the United States still produced almost 29 percent of the world’s manufactured goods, more than twice that of Germany, whose factories were operating at maximum capacity. In 1937 the United States had three times the income of the entire British Empire, almost seven times that of France, four times that of Germany, and sixteen times that of Japan. In 1937, the United States possessed 41.7 percent of the entire world’s war-production potential. Germany’s share was 14.4 percent, the Soviet Union’s 14, Britain’s 10.2, France’s 4.2, Japan’s 3.5, and Italy’s 2.5. See Kennedy, 325–33.
p. 44: “a peaceful solution.” Kimball, 69–76; Zabecki, vol. 1, 108–9 (Paul G. Pierpaoli, Jr.).
