rise-and-fall-of-the-third-reich-william-shirer-pdf

BARBAROSSA: THE TURN OF RUSSIA 743relieved to be pulled off the hook, he was humiliated that it had to be done bythe Germans. Nor were his feelings assuaged by Italy’s disappointing share inthe Yugoslav spoils, which Hitler now began to divide up. ∗The Balkans was not the only place where the Fuehrer pulled his muddlingjunior partner off the hook. After the annihilation of the Italian armies in LibyaHitler, although reluctantly, had finally consented to sending a light armoreddivision and some Luftwaffe units to North Africa, where he arranged for GeneralEnvin Rommel to be in over-all command of the Italo-German forces. Rommel,a dashing, resourceful tank officer, who had distinguished himself as commanderof a panzer division in the Battle of France, was a type of general whom theBritish had not previously met in the North African desert and he was to provean immense problem to them for two years. But he was not the only problem.The sizable army and air force which the British had sent to Greece from Libyahad greatly weakened them in the desert. At first they were not unduly worried,not even after their intelligence reported the arrival of German armored unitsin Tripolitania at the end of February. But they should have been.Rommel, with his German panzer division and two Italian divisions, one ofwhich was armored, struck suddenly at Cyrenaica on the last day of March. Intwelve days he recaptured the province, invested Tobruk and reached Bardia, afew miles from the Egyptian border. The entire British position in Egypt andthe Suez was again threatened; in fact, with the Germans and Italians in Greecethe British hold on the eastern Mediterranean had become gravely endangered.Another spring, the second of the war, had brought more dazzling Germanvictories, and the predicament of Britain, which now held out alone, battered athome by nightly Luftwaffe bombings, its armies overseas chased out of Greeceand Cyrenaica, seemed darker and more hopeless than ever before. Its prestige,so important in a life-and-death struggle where propaganda was so potent aweapon, especially in influencing the United States and Russia, had sunk to anew low point. †Hitler was not slow or backward in taking advantage of this in a victoryspeech to the Reichstag in Berlin on May 4. It consisted mostly of a venomousand sarcastic personal attack on Churchill as the instigator (along with the∗ On April 12, 1941, six days after the launching of his attack, Hitler issued a secretdirective dividing up Yugoslavia among Germany, Italy, Hungary and Bulgaria. Croatia wascreated as an autonomous puppet state. The Fuehrer helped himself liberally, Germany takingterritory contiguous to the old Austria and keeping under its occupation all of old Serbia aswell as the copper- and coal-mining districts. Italy’s grab was left somewhat vague, but it didnot amount to much. 998† Charles A. Lindbergh, the hero flyer, who had seemed to this writer to have fallen withstartling naivete, during his visits to Germany, to Nazi propaganda boasts, was already consigningBritain to defeat in his speeches to large and enthusiastic audiences in America. OnApril 23, 1941, at the moment of the Nazi victories in the Balkans and North Africa, headdressed 30,000 persons in New York at the first mass meeting of the newly formed AmericaFirst Committee. ”The British government,” he said, ”has one last desperate plan: . . .To persuade us to send another American Expeditionary Force to Europe and to share withEngland militarily, as well as financially, the fiasco of this war.” He condemned England forhaving ”encouraged the smaller nations of Europe to fight against hopeless odds.” Apparentlyit did not occur to this man that Yugoslavia and Greece, which Hitler had just crushed, werebrutally attacked without provocation, and that they had instinctively tried to defend themselvesbecause they had a sense of honor and because they had courage even in the face ofhopeless odds. On April 28 Lindbergh resigned his commission as a colonel in the U.S. ArmyAir Corps Reserve after President Roosevelt on the twenty-fifth had publicly branded him asa defeatist and an appeaser. The Secretary of War accepted the resignation.