At the Yalta conference, between the US, the Soviet Union and Britain, the tensions between the Allies became increasingly obvious. Representing Britain, Churchill wanted the Allies’ war effort to be directed in such a way as to limit Soviet control over Central and Eastern Europe. The Soviets wanted to make sure they maximised the area they controlled. And given how powerfully they were surging towards Germany, it was hard to see how they could be blocked. Certainly, the Americans saw no way to stop them and weren’t prepared to go along with Churchill’s schemes for trying.

The result was that the Soviets ended up completely controlling such nations as Poland and Czechoslovakia, and several other countries of Eastern Europe. They also got to Berlin first and symbolically planted a Soviet flag on top of the German Reichstag (parliament) building. With Hitler committing suicide while Soviet forces were only 500 metres away, this meant that when the Nazis surrendered on 8 May (to the western powers) or 9 May (to all the Allies including the Soviets), Stalin was in a powerful position among the victors.

Illustration: A Soviet soldier plants a flag on the Reichstag building in Berlin. Public Domain

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By the time of the Yalta conference in February 1945, between the USA, Soviet Union and Britain, the latter still being treated as a great power though its decline was already clear, there could be little doubt that the war in the west, at least, was heading towards victory for the Allies.

The Soviets were sweeping through eastern Europe and were only 65 km from Berlin.

The D-day landings had gone well, in great part thanks to the brilliant planning work of Admiral Bertram Ramsay, and since then – despite a few setbacks, at least two of the more serious down to Bernard Montgomery – the America and British armies had swept through northern France, liberating Paris, and then Belgium. Meanwhile, another landing, this time by American and French troops, in the south of France had added further momentum to the advance.

The war was drawing to its end. The main leaders of the Allies came to Yalta to discuss what happened to Europe next, once peace had been secured. The decisions we’ll talk about next week, but for now it was clear that all the Allied sides would be negotiating from positions of strength.

Illustration: Driving down the Champs Elysées of newly liberated Paris, with the Arc de Triomphe behind, on 26 August 1945, the halftrack ‘Guernica’ from the Ninth Company – La Nueve – manned by exiled republican veterans of Spain’s civil war, from Philippe Leclerc’s Deuxième DB. Public Domain

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In 1943, Britain didn’t feel the Western Allies were ready yet for an invasion of France, and with its influence at the highest point it ever reached, it was able to persuade the Americans reluctantly to postpone it for the moment. Instead, they went for an invasion of Sicily, which went well overall, though with significant casualties. Bertram Ramsay, who’d handled the Dunkirk Evacuation so well, commanded the naval forces and learned some invaluable lessons about this kind of combined operation.

The Allies moved onto the Italian mainland next, and after overthrowing Mussolini, the government there surrendered. Mussolini, rescued by the Germans from captivity, was set up ruling a rump and unpleasant republic in the north of Italy, and the fighting continued.

The Americans, though, now finally decided that enough was enough and that preparations had to be made for the French invasion. Stalin couldn’t agree more, when the USA, Britain and the Soviet Union met in Tehran. Oddly, the Americans accepted Stalin’s invitation to accommodation, which meant that every word they said was heard by the Soviets.

The agreement was for an invasion in May 1944. There were a few obstacles on the way, but in the end it went ahead only slightly delayed, on the 6th of June.

D-day! We’ve finally got there. And Allied troops were once more back on French soil.

Illustration: 1944 Royal Navy official photo of Admiral Bertram Ramsay, Naval Commander during both Operation Husky and Operation Overlord. Public Domain

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The tide turned against the Axis and in favour of the Allies in the course of 1943. Victories at Stalingrad in Russia, in the Battle of the Atlantic, and in North Africa, came on top of American advances in the Pacific, from island to island towards Japan. That relieved some of the pressure on the British government, that had been coming under fire for the all the disasters of 1942: the shipping losses in the Battle of the Atlantic, the loss of Burma and Malaya culminating in the fall of Singapore, and the Eighth Army’s retreat in front of Rommel in North Africa.

Within the British government, things had changed since the start of the war, with the Conservatives Chamberlain and Halifax gone, as well as the poorly performing Labour Deputy Leader, Arthur Greenwood. Churchill and Attlee, so different in personality, had found an effective working relationship, with Attlee now officially Churchill’s deputy, and deeply loyal to him. Attlee supported his boss on the big questions, such as the strategic bombing campaign against Germany, now considerably stepped up with the arrival of the Americans. That campaign was increasingly targeting civilians, making it arguably a war crime, or even simply terrorism, but it continued even though it never achieved its aim of breaking German morale.

What it did do is divert a significant amount of German airpower from the Russian front to German home defence. The North African campaign had a similar effect: small scale though it was, it sucked in German troops who might otherwise have fought in Russia, and it cost the Luftwaffe dearly, helping the Soviets gain air superiority on the Eastern Front, as the Brits and the Americans won it in the West.

Where Attlee differed from Churchill was over questions such as India. A terrible new famine in Bengal, handled with callousness by Churchill, ensured that the question of Indian independence remained a burning one.

Attlee was also under pressure from his own party, with Labour demanding that the government adopt as immediate policy the Beveridge report, proposing major reforms to ensure the poor and workers emerged better off when Britain reconstructed itself after the war. Attlee resisted the pressure, since he felt that it was important to hold the Churchill government together, making only small changes until it had won the war, and saving the major reforms for peacetime.

Illustration: The Cathedral of Lübeck in Germany burning after an air raid in 1942. Bundesarchiv Bild 146-1977-047-16, released for free public use.

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This is an episode for turning points.

The year’s 1943.

The Battle of Stalingrad, where the unstoppable German offensive into Russia was finally stopped and turned around, with Soviet forces essentially fighting forwards to the two remaining, and grim years, of their war with the Nazis.

The Battle of the Atlantic reached a peak where Britain looked as though it might actually lose not just that battle but the whole war, when a number of vital technical developments and the release, at last, of some more resources for convoy protection, at last gave them the edge over the U-boats.

The man who replaced Auchinleck at the head of the British Eighth Army in North Africa, Bernard Montgomery, though always so cautious that he consistently failed to take advantage of any victory, nonetheless took credit for defeating Rommel because he was in charge at the Second Battle of El Alamein when that success was secured. With hindsight, it’s clear that credit should in large part go to Auchinleck for the First Battle which laid the ground for the Second.

With Operation Torch landing US and British troops in Morocco and Algeria, the Axis forces were caught in a pincer between them advancing eastward and the Eighth army pushing them westward. They finally surrendered on 13 May 1943.

In the meantime, there’d been an ugly quarrel among the French about who should lead the newly liberated territories. Eventually, it would be won by de Gaulle, deservedly, but that was by no means obvious from the start.

Finally, the episode gives a little insight into the character of a remarkable Free French general, Philippe de Leclerc, and one unit that came under his command, the Ninth Company of his Second Armoured Division, made up of exiled Republican veterans of Spain’s Civil War. We’ll be hearing about it, and about him.

Illustration: Philippe Leclerc, the Free French general who never compromised with the collaborationist Vichy regime.

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The years 1941 and 1942 were tough ones…

Things were going badly in the Battle of the Atlantic, with Germany threatening to strangle Britain by sinking more merchant ships than the British could bear to lose.

In the Far East, the Japanese were giving the British, and indeed several other of the western nations previously seen as unbeatable, that they could be beaten by an Asian power. But by taking on the Americans, they’d made a mistake: the US had barely deployed its strength and, when it did, it first put a stop to Japanese advance by sea or land before it started to fight back.

In Russia too, the German advance was running out steam. Unexpectedly tough resistance from the Soviets stopped the Germans short of their objectives. One army made it as far as the city now called Volgograd, then called Stalingrad. What happened to it there is something for our next episode.

Meanwhile, in North Africa, late 1942 was when Rommel’s breathtaking advance was at last halted at the First Battle of El Alamein in Egypt, by General Claude Auchinleck at the head of the British Eighth Army. Sadly, though, that hadn’t come fast for Winston Churchill or the British Chief of Imperial General Staff, who relieved Auchinleck of his command. Credit for the victory would go to someone else. Again, a story for the next episode.

Illustration: Officers on the bridge of a British destroyer escorting a convoy of ships, looking out for submarines. Public Domain

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Hitler, feeling himself obliged to help out his inept ally Mussolini, was dragged into two wars the Italian dictator had started but lacked the resources to prosecute to victory: in North Africa and in Greece. Where the Italians had failed, the Germans moved in with lightning speed, overrunning Yugoslavia and Greece, and driving the hitherto triumphant British into retreat in Libya.

Britain meanwhile was feeling the pain of a German blockade, most effectively applied by submarines, the deadly U-boats of the German navy. Britain was stepping up its bombing of Germany (while also continuing to be bombed back itself), in the deluded belief that this might win the war. That limited its ability to extend air protection to convoys of ships crossing the Atlantic, where it came close to losing it.

Then in June 1941, Germany made a colossal error. Despite having committed forces in North Africa and the Balkans, it went ahead with Hitler’s pet project, the invasion of the Soviet Union. Suddenly Britain, previously without great power allies, found the Soviets dragged into fighting the Germans too.

In December, Japan made an equally massive mistake, attacking the US in an air raid of Pearl Harbor. Now the US declared war on Japan and, when Germany in solidarity with its Axis partner in the Far East, declared war on the US, Britain found itself with another mighty partner in its war effort.

It was a huge turnaround for Britain. Obtained not though its own efforts, though Churchill had done all he could to persuade the US into the fighting, but through the errors of its enemies. A failing with plenty of precedents in history…

Illustration: Contemporary photo of the attack on Pear Harbo. Public Domain.

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Following the Battle of France, came the Battle of Britain. Thanks, though, above all to the fighter pilots of the RAF – 20% of them from other countries, led by Poland and New Zealand – Britain weathered that storm, where France had been overcome by it. There’d been fewer than 3000 of those airmen but Britain owed its survival in the war to them so, as Churchill put it, never ‘was so much owed by so many to so few’.

But Britain was far from out of the woods yet. There were worrying signs from the Far East where, taking advantage of France’s defeat, Japan had occupied the north of Vietnam, then part of the French colony of Indochina. Its aim in doing so was to cut off a supply route to the Nationalist forces fighting the Japanese army in China, but it also brought Japan right up to the imperial territories of the European powers with holdings in the region: as well as France these were Britain, with its holdings in India and Malaya, as well as Holland in the Dutch the East Indies.

Meanwhile, there was fighting in North Africa too, where the British overwhelmed the Italians attacking from Libya into Egypt. But then Rommel showed up with the German Afrika Korps. The tables were about to be turned.

Illustration: A German Luftwaffe Heinkel He 111 bomber flying over the East End of London on 7 September 1940. Photo from a German aircraft. Public Domain.

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The phoney war’s over. The shooting war has begun. And it isn’t going at all well.

France is in collapse, its generals quickly turning defeatist and its politicians unable to shake them out of their inertia. Churchill tried hard, flying across to talk them into keeping up the fight, but without success. In the end, they surrendered to the Germans, being forced to sign an armistice in the same railway wagon, in the same forest, where they had previously forced the Germans to sign their armistice at the end of World War One.

Britain was now more isolated than ever. Not as alone as many liked to think, since it had its empire and dominions still with it, and they supplied huge numbers of men. But without either of the growing world powers, the US or the Soviet Union.

Now Churchill had to become tougher than ever. First, he had to see off Halifax, his own defeatist, serving in his war cabinet. Fortunately, he had the support of the Labour members, and the man invited as a guest, the Liberal leader too. When Chamberlain finally came down on his side, Churchill, buoyed by the success of the Dunkirk evacuation, could see off Halifax.

Next, he had to show that he had the hard core, the ruthlessness even, to win the war. He did that but in a tragic action, the firing by British warships on a French fleet in Mers el-Kébir, in Algeria. The major loss of life among men who’d been allies weeks earlier was a bitter pill for everyone to swallow.

Arguably, though, it prepared the British to develop the toughness for the harsh trial that was about to start. As Churchill warned, Hitler had now to turn his ‘whole fury and might’ on them. That’s the subject of next week’s episode.

Illustration: ‘Very well, Alone’, cartoon by David Low, June 1940.

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This episode includes several extracts from recordings of speeches by Churchill, so that we can enjoy listening to his actual voice – on the other hand, I apologise for the background noise on the recordings, but they sound inauthentic if I try to remove it.

We also meet a number of people who will continue to have a significant role later: a man who deserves to be better-known, the brilliant theoretician and practitioner of armoured warfare (sadly on the German side), Heinz Guderian; Erwin Rommel; Charles de Gaulle; Friedrich Pauls, attending an enemy’s surrender now though better known for offering his own later; and Bertram Ramsay, another man who deserves to be far better known than he now is.

All this is against the background of the devastating defeat of British and French forces in France, once Germany decided to end the phoney war (which had already started to be a lot less phoney in Norway) and, using the Blitzkrieg tactics favoured by Guderian, of rapidly-advancing armoured forces backed by air support and followed by infantry, broke though the French defences and rounded on the British Expeditionary Force and French troops in Northeastern France, pinning them against the Channel coast.

Those Allied troops were caught in a vice that was closing on them. It was only the extraordinary ability of the man Churchill chose to organise their evacuation from Dukirk, Admiral Bertram Ramsay, and Churchill’s own leadership, that allowed Britain to save the core of its army from destruction.

Illustration: Troops waiting to be taken off the beaches at Dunkirk. Photo: EPA.

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