President Truman did not have a good New Year on January 1, 1939, as the US Navy was making little progress against the British Royal Navy, and the landings in Spain and Italy were not going as well as anticipated. At least, until the Italian admiral staff showed its inexperience in combat. US General Patton made a successful landing with a US Army Group in Sicily at “Point Liberation” after the Italians had somehow failed to guard the landing site adequately. (The US Navy ships assigned to help the Army group land had destroyed the coastal defenses, and lured the Italian submarines and ships supposed to guard the area out to sea where they were met by an ambush and destroyed). Much of the Italian army was also away, attacking Greece and the Balkans unsuccessfully, or trying to push north into Germany and Eastern Europe.
Much of this blame fell in the hands of the Italian junta, especially with Giulio Cesare Evola. He had risen to power primarily because of the promises of glory he had given the Italian people. The Italian junta that had used Vespasianist ideals of a military-dominated government had failed at making an effective military. One reason is because much of the populace did not like the junta, and as a result, had little reason to fight willingly. Much of the old Republic-era generalship had also fled the country, taking much of their effectiveness with them. The forces in Greece and in the Balkans received an urgent request to defend the homeland, but they had difficulty coming back. Once again, ineffective Italian generalship, often chosen less out of merit than for political reasons, ruined the day (or saved the day for the Americans). The Roman glories of the Italian junta ended up becoming mirages as much of their army was encircled in Greece and the Balkans.
Battles in this time period were extremely brutal. Mobile warfare was the order of the day, with increased combined arms warfare (to avoid overspecialization). Unlike in the “Dreadful War” where two sides built trenches and hardly moved, tanks and air power allowed for mass movement once again. No longer would there be hundreds of thousands of casualties for a few meters—now there would be hundreds of thousands of casualties for longer stretches of several kilometers at a time. The largest advantage the US had was its immense industrial capacity. While most other powers would be running short on war materials, the US would always be able to make more of them. In an attritional conventional war such as the “Judgment War” (non-insurgent), the side with more industrial capacity usually wins.
The securing of Sicily by February 27, 1939 turned the island into a beachhead for attacking mainland Italy. On March 12, 1939, US forces streamed into the “boot” area of Italy in several landing spots, overwhelming the Italian forces. Generals Patton and Eisenhower had won many great battles against the overwhelmed Italian forces, such as the Battle of Taranto, the largest battle in Italy at that point, with almost 100,000 on the US side alone. Evola and the rest of the Italian junta had enough of the chronic failure, and they were going to clear out the incompetent military staff. Evola tasked Benito Mussolini as the leader of a new institution supposed to solve the incompetence problem in the Italian military. Everyone expected some kind of disciplinary action, but no one expected the New Inquisition. This group of red-uniformed officers served partially as political officers similar to the Russian commissars (and perhaps similar examples in Germany), but they had a more nefarious purpose. The New Inquisition carried out a purge of officers supposedly for ineptitude. At least that was the intention. The real consequences of the New Inquisition was terrifying the Italian ranks, and it did not actually solve the incompetence problem. Simply put, there were not enough qualified candidates for the generalship positions. And even if there were, the Italian army was just too underequipped to survive a long war—having bought the promises of military glory much too easily. The US and allied forces had taken city after city, and hope was lost for the Italian junta. By November 1939, the US would demand an unconditional surrender from Italy, and then quickly receive it because Italy was done as a combatant. This would finally allow US soldiers to connect with their German allies, who really needed the support, as the Russians were almost at the eastern border of Germany.
The island of Corsica was also taken, and it would provide a useful stopping point in the eventual counterattack on France. Marseilles seemed like the most obvious point of invasion, but it was also heavily guarded. As such, feints and skirmishes occurred along the French southern coast, in an attempt to draw out the French. The US Navy pounded the living daylights out of some of the French Mediterranean defenses, but this alerted some of the French Navy. The French Navy, already damaged in the Atlantic Campaign, had fought with the US Navy in the Mediterranean, with mixed results. Both sides lost ships and submarines in the naval war, but France had difficulty replacing its losses due to damage to the shipyards. The French waited for an invasion on their southern coast, and rebuilt their defenses. This attack, however, never came. It turned out that the attacks on the French southern coast had the objective of distracting the French. This distraction would force redeployment of troops to defend the homeland, giving the German soldiers in the west some more breathing room. The German general Erwin Rommel was finally finding success in the west, at least stopping the French and British advances. While Belgium and the Netherlands were lost, at least the French and British armies were no longer advancing.
The Morocco Campaign (really a series of landings from Morocco into Portugal and Spain, to liberate the former and counterattack the latter) started in June 1939. The Rock of Gibraltar was so well-fortified that attacking it directly was never going to work. As a result, US Navy ships simply attacked coastal cities of occupied Portugal and moved in from there. The Americans planned to liberate Portugal, and as a result, were assisted by Portuguese resistance or partisan irregulars. The Battle of Lisbon was the largest battle in this campaign, and after almost one week of brutal urban combat, the occupying Spanish forces were either killed in action, or driven out. The liberation of Portugal took two months. One reason for this was that even though General MacArthur made some mistakes along the way, such as taking heavier-than-expected casualties, support among the local populace made it easier to drive out all the Spanish forces.
After freeing Portugal and restoring its government in exile, US Army groups had gone into Spain to overthrow its Vespasianist era government led by Francisco Franco. The Eighth and Ninth Army Groups had coursed west into Spain, who had gone into the “Judgment War” largely underequipped to fight a long war, would sue for peace by December 1939. Spain requested more armored corps from France, but due to France wanting to use all its tanks against Germany, very few reached Spain in time to fight the Americans. An important tactic used to get Spain to sue for peace was the usage of strategic bombing operations. The most important bombing attack was the Bombing of Madrid, where US bombers wreaked havoc on the Spanish capital. This attack ended up being even more destructive than the Americans had initially anticipated—even many of the American officers would consider this to be excessive brutality. Nevertheless, the attack had its intended purpose of getting the Spanish government to the surrender talks. The next nut to crack for the Americans, Germans, and their allies, was taking out Britain, France, and Russia.
The arrival of American soldiers, as well as volunteers from many other countries, to help the struggling Germans helped to change the tide of the war. Russia had already looked overstretched, with the Russian Army groups, though vast in size, having often overextended or outraced much of their supply lines. The corporatization process that led to Russia’s rapid industrialization showed its flaws—as the war went on, the quality of weapons produced in Russian factories decreased. The offensive would eventually slow down and grind to a halt while the Russian supply lines caught up. The Battle of Poland was a critical error for the Russian Armies. General (later Marshal) Zhukov could only watch in dismay as less experienced commanders allowed themselves to get overextended, then surrounded by the German, Eastern European, and US soldiers. The only other great Russian general around was Tukhachevsky, who was farther south at the time, to knock out some of Germany’s Eastern European allies.
One of the largest tank battles occurred near Warsaw, Poland. This was a true “Tank Bowl” (massive battle of two mechanized tank armies). Tank armies clashed as the forces of Rommel, Patton, Eisenhower, and Zhukov fired uncounted numbers of shells at each other. The battles across the plains of Poland were so intense that even two decades after the campaigns, the soil had not recovered. The Battle of Warsaw ended up lasting for almost a week before Zhukov retreated with much of his forces intact. The end result of this battle was the Russian forces largely leaving Poland, but then setting up a more defensible position to the east. Climate played a large part of the winter campaigns. Attacking Russia in the winter is extremely difficult, except for the original Rus and the Mongols. As such, all the war plans created by the Americans and Germans involved attacking right when spring started to maximize the amount of time available before the fatal winter began.
(There were naval battles near Alaska, but most were inconclusive, and any landing Russian soldiers usually were taken out quickly.)
The France campaign was also concurrent with the struggles against Russia. The German forces on the west had managed to push the French back across the Rhine, but the damage to German industry was still immense. The rebuilding process would take time, especially about repairing the factories and getting the assembly lines back to work. Bombing raids also devastated cities in France, Germany, and Britain. Various operations such as the “Lightning Raids” caused by British and French bombers, and their German and American counterparts wreaked havoc on enemy industrial sites.
One bombing campaign caused by Britain was called the “Cromwell Plan”. It targeted German cities in an attempt to cause Germany to give up the war. Cities like Hamburg and Dresden often ended up as the targets of massive bombing raids, with thousands of casualties. The operations, however, failed to dent the German resolve, especially once the US helped restock the German Luftwaffe (air force) with fresh planes to drive off the bombing raids.
A big turning point in the war was in the scientific front. The usage of gas masks made poison gas attacks far less effective than in the “Dreadful War” era. In addition, the wind-blown nature of many poison gases made them unreliable at times, further hampering their effectiveness. Some poison gases were used in emergency situations, but they were rarely used. The “Judgment War” was the last hurrah of gas weapons because they would be banned (with the exceptions of stun/tear gas) shortly after the “Judgment War” in various arms treaties. Biological weapons also saw limited testing and usage, such as some of the first weaponized diseases, but due to the fear that they could destroy both sides, never saw any action. Some of these weapons were tested in the infamous “Death Camps” of political dissidents in Site D, a black site in Britain; Russia also had its own attempts at making chemical and biological weapons that were tested in the Siberian top-secret laboratories, but again, few of these weapons actually saw use. Other important new weapons would have more of an impact than the chemical or biological weapons.
Many interesting weapons were tested in Britain, where some “wonder weapon” programs occurred. Most of these “wonder weapon” projects were too costly to be truly effective, such as the “Black Arrow” (A rocket-propelled bomb). This “Black Arrow” was pioneered by Frank Whittle as a faster method of carrying bombs that was almost impossible to intercept. Besides being very costly, the “Black Arrow” also had a small payload, making it less effective than Whittle originally anticipated. Some historians consider “Black Arrow” as the first ballistic missile, but the range was not very large—just enough to hit western Germany from launch sites in Britain. (Incidentally, “Black Arrow” and other parts of Whittle’s “wonder weapon” projects ended up saving his life—his prison sentence was commuted in exchange for all his blueprints and records, especially because rocket scientists were in demand in the 1950s when satellite rockets and ballistic missiles were in development).
Frank Whittle also had some more useful inventions. Perhaps his most useful one was the jet engine (invented 1939), the cornerstone of modern aviation. The British government quickly seized the opportunity and allowed him to gain more funding for this project. The first jet plane was the Gloster E.20, which was an experimental plane with no weapons. It first flew on July 15, 1940. It was a proof of concept that jet planes could outspeed and outperform propeller-powered airplanes. The first military jet aircraft was the Gloster Meteor, first produced in 1941. Jet aircraft also appeared in other countries as the German engineer Hans von Ohain had also discovered jet propulsion (independently, as Whittle’s work was kept secret). These jets included the Heinkel series of jet fighters in Germany, and the Bell series of jet aircraft in the United States of America.
Maybe the most frightening of these scientific discoveries occurred in the new field of nuclear physics. German atomic scientists had tested a nuclear weapon deep below the ground in German Kamerun (one of the few German colonies) in November 1942. The ensuing cataclysm annihilated the test site despite the bomb buried deep below the surface. One of the reasons why atomic research went by so quickly in Germany was due to the German government’s full-throated embrace of atomic energy and its usage, especially in war. (This did not go well with Albert Einstein, the chief scientist of the German Atomic division, but he allowed the German government to use his work due to the national crisis). By December 1942, the German government, pleased with the results, would start producing more of these doomsday devices as the ultimate weapon to force an unconditional surrender. American nuclear scientists were not far behind, having their own nuclear testing led by the scientists Robert Oppenheimer and Enrico Fermi, who were hard at work making their own nuclear weapons in the Alamogordo Project. These terrifying weapons would herald in the upcoming atomic age. Besides nuclear weapons, the first nuclear reactors were also produced in this time period, and they contributed to the further study of nuclear physics and nuclear fission. The dangerous effects of nuclear radiation were also further documented.
1942 saw more fighting, including the end of the French campaign and the final preparations for the invasions of Britain and Russia. Invading Britain would be a nightmare regardless of which angle of attack—Iceland or mainland Europe—was chosen. (One of the earliest ideas of using Ireland as the attack springboard, failed when the Irish government was subverted by British agents in a gradual process. This process had started in the late 1930s, but it was only completed by 1940.) The slow chipping away of the Royal Navy and Royal Air Force and the devastation of British industry to prevent more from being produced would need to occur prior to any serious invasion attempt. Naval bombers and submarines were integral to the slow erosion of the Royal Navy. US and German intelligence agencies also considered plans to infiltrate and liberate Ireland, but these were largely unsuccessful until 1943.
One of the largest air battles of all time was the Battle of the Channel. This battle could only take place after France was largely defeated in the French campaign, which had started to gain ground by March 1942. The advances of Tanks into the Ardennes surprised the French leadership, who did not expect them there. The French Maginot line was about as useful as the German Siegfried line—not very useful, as the more mobile warfare made static defenses less effective than in the “Dreadful War”. The Siege of Paris would occur on July 1942 and last 2 months. Sieging the area was very difficult, as all the French relief forces that could reinforce it had to be defeated first. General de Gaulle was known for his tenacity, and so taking down these relief forces was much harder than it sounded. The German general Heinz Guderian was tasked with the destruction of these forces. Clever usage of tank warfare combined with US and Brazilian support (which had finally arrived) would lead to the defeat in detail of the numerous relief forces.
The Normandy escape was an attempt for French soldiers that were stuck on the beaches of Normandy, and about to be obliterated by a German tank force, to evacuate using ships. Ships of all shapes and sizes were gathered in an attempt to escape in the cover of night, on August 2, 1942. At least that was the plan. A rearguard would hold off the German tanks long enough for everyone else to escape. This would have been a heroic feat had it succeeded. In reality, a German spy tipped off the German Navy, which sent destroyers to intercept the fleeing French soldiers. Most of them perished in the attempted escape. By the time ships of the British Royal Navy arrived to either pick up the French soldiers, or to drive off the German destroyers, it was too late. The escaping French soldiers had been slaughtered in the water. Admiral Karl Donitz was the architect behind this plan of using the destroyers to prevent the French from escaping (He had already foreseen the fact that the French would try a sea escape, and then set up a trap with the destroyers. The French Army seemed doomed to collapse.
Important locations in France all fell in August, September, and October. August 21st, 1942 saw the fall of Marseilles—hardly defended now that most of the soldiers were rushed to defend Paris and drive off the German and US forces, allowing a US Naval invasion to take the city. Lyons fell on September 19th, 1942. Paris would finally fall on December 2, 1942, after US and German armies had occupied almost all the other major French cities. The French government was forced to surrender unconditionally less than a week afterwards.