On this day in 1941, the Germans took Athens and the Greek government surrendered.
Today in World War II History—April 27, 1941
Almost 1,000 men died in British naval evacuations on this day when the ships carrying the evacuated troops were sunk in Luftwaffe raids. The event is known as the Salmat Disaster.
Churchill delivered a radio address:
Westward Look, the Land is Bright (Audio) - International Churchill Society: April 27, 1941. Broadcast, London. http://ia800205.us.archive.org/19/items/Winston_Churchill/1941-04-27_BBC_Winston_Churchill_Westward_Look_The_Land_Is_Bright.mp3 Related Story
All in all, obviously, it was a bad day for the Allies in what had been a bad month.
Hindsight is 20/20, of course, but relating these events now, what do they say about the actual state of the forces? We know, of course, how the story ends, but even then there were certain things that seem evident, if considered.
One is, and the one the Germans were obviously focused on, that the Germans were pretty much the top contenders in ground combat at the time. They'd now defeated all of the continental European powers they'd fought and had pushed the British off of the continent twice. And at the moment, they were besting the British in North Africa.
Having said that, and it wasn't quite evident yet, that strength waned considerably once they were removed from the continent, and the opposite was the case for the British. The British were retreating in North Africa in the face of the modern new opponent, the Afrika Corps, but they weren't defeated and hadn't been pushed out of Tobruk.
Moreover, the British, with naval power the Germans couldn't match, were capable of landing troops wherever they wished, and whenever they wished. They'd commenced naval based raids and had conducted them on German held Norway, in North Africa, and on the Italian peninsula. This meant that the Axis, which had a massive coastline, was really incapable of defending it against such raids but it had to try. The British, for their part, were not really subject to them due to their superior naval strength.
Additionally, the Italians had proven completely incompetent in the war. This is something that is well known, and the reasons for it are debated by historians, but it was a fact. Without German direct support the Italian military was completely useless. Indeed much of its more "modern" equipment was now obsolete, having peaked its point of being cutting edge in the mid 1930s prior to the onset of the war. In the rapidly developing armor and aircraft industries of the time, that meant that their equipment was old and past its prime.
This in turn meant that for the most part the Italian army was of no real aid to the German war effort other than that it simply existed. Indeed, Italy had caused the Germans to commit men to North Africa and to an effort in Greece which caused it to have to invade Yugoslavia. The German Army, in 1939-1941, was the best on the ground in Europe, but it was spread pretty thin.
All of this sets the background, of course, for what was coming. But what was, was this. Germany could go where it wanted and when it wanted on the European landmass. . . against conventionally sized European states. It couldn't, however, knock the United Kingdom out of the war, and the UK could strike the Axis coast anywhere it wanted at any time. Germany was committed to an air campaign against the UK but it wasn't denting British resolve and it wasn't really impacting British production much. The British, in turn, could and did hit Germany fairly frequently in bombing raids conducted at night, which also weren't denting German resolve and which weren't really impacting German production much, but which should have been a red flat to the Germans that in spite of their ability to occupy the European landmass they weren't even remotely close to defeating the British and whatever they might wish to do next, the British remained a power capable of really harassing them, at a bare minimum, and one that needed to be constantly guarded against.
And, in the background, the United States was openly edging closer to war every day with the Roosevelt Administration openly backing the British and coming as close to bringing the country into the war without openly asking for a declaration of war. The German Navy's "Happy Time" had ended and now the production scale was tipping towards the British.
Not obvious yet, with the occupation of Yugoslavia and Greece the Germans now would, additionally, have to maintain a fighting garrison as those countries would soon be the seen of guerilla warfare.
With all of this in mind, the Germans looked east towards the Soviet Union, which had started a rolling slow mobilization earlier that week. Hitler and his lieutenants calculated, perhaps rationally, that German land forces had been invulnerable to date and they would be again. But they discounted, and rather seriously, that their rear was completely exposed from the air and sea, they hadn't been able to really absorb what they'd taken to date, and with every miles they gained anywhere, they were spread that much thinner with no real source of additional manpower to supply them with replacements other than from Germany itself.
Footnote:
1. This is one of those odd texts that doesn't translate directly from one language to another, so it can be translated more than one way.
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