Sublime

IN BERLIN on 28 November, a conference of industrialists chaired by armaments supremo Fritz Todt reached a devastating conclusion: the war against Russia was no longer winnable. Having failed to achieve a quick victory, Germany lacked resources to prevail in a sustained struggle. Next day, Todt and tank-production chief Walter Rohland met Hitler. R

Barbarossa persuaded the Finns to avenge their 1940 defeat: in June 1941 Finland’s army, reequipped by Hitler, joined the assault on the Soviet Union. German troops thrust from northern Norway to reach positions within thirty miles of Murmansk.

Allied soldiers shocked local people by their contempt for civilian property; a Civil Affairs unit noted in Ouistreham: “Looting by troops pretty general. British prestige has fallen here today.” Similarly, a Frenchwoman described the ransacking of her home in Colombières by Canadians: “It was an onslaught throughout the village. With wheelbarrows

Harald and his comrades took off from their base on the Greek mainland before sunrise, “with a fiery heart in proud confidence of our wartime good fortune.” Flying over the mainland coast, German fighter planes appeared on all sides to escort the paratroopers to their jump site over the island. British anti-aircraft guns started firing on the plane

At that point the German generals recognized their advance was spent. Von Rundstedt, Model, and Manteuffel all asked for permission to withdraw, but Hitler refused. “It was Stalingrad No. 2,” said von Rundstedt.54

a U-boat torpedoed the passenger liner Lusitania as it sailed in neutral waters off the Irish coast near Kinsale. The ship sank in just eighteen minutes, taking with it 1,200 people. A third of the victims were women and children; 128 of the dead were Americans whose country was not even at war. Outrage was immediate, but Germany made matters infin

Both the Germans and the Japanese made a critical strategic mistake, to which fuel famine contributed, by failing to allocate resources to sustain a flow of proficient pilots.

Finland sued for peace, Romania surrendered, the Baltic states were overrun, and the Red Army was on the Vistula, a hair’s breadth from the German frontier.