Editing The World Wars (section)

===The War in the West===
See also [[Nazi]]s and [[Fascist Italy]].

With Poland unwilling to roll over for Hitler, the Nazis securing a ceasefire with Soviet Russia and with Britain and France finally stirred to the defense of Poland, it was clear that war was inevitable. Germany invaded Poland on September 1st 1939, after creating a false-flag incident to offer the thinnest fig leaf of legality (and also dispose of a few dissenting Germans on the Nazis' hitlist). Two days later, Britain and France declared war on Germany. Contrary to the popular imagination, Poland did not simply crumble before the German onslaught, and the myth of Polish cavalry trying to charge German tanks was yet another piece of propaganda. (What actually happened was this: a Polish cavalry detachment surprised and overran a group of German infantry who were taking a rest and were in turn driven off by machine gun fire from some armored cars; the actual tanks didn't show up until it was all over. Later on, German and Italian war correspondents were shown the battlefield with the tanks parked nearby and cooked up the story of "these brave dumbasses charged our tanks with lances and sabers".) But after a month of hard fighting with no help from Britain or France and with the Soviets entering the war and overrunning much of the country's western half, Poland finally gave in to the inevitable. 

After that, the Germans sat around for a bit (literally, German soldiers called the period between October 1939 and June 1940 the ''Sitzkrieg'', or "sitting war"), causing the British and the French to fortify the hell out of the northeast part of France in anticipation of the inevitable assault. However, the French ignored a large wooded area called the Ardennes. This region was thought to be impenetrable to the German army, as it was believed that the mobility of German tanks would be fatally hampered by the thick forests. Needless to say, this was wrong, and the panzers blew through the Ardennes in days, completely buttfucking France's entire defensive strategy. France, which had held out through four years of brutal attritional warfare in 1914-1918, fell at just an alarmingly fast rate as Poland did. The Italians jumped in at the last minute to steal some land and pretend they could help their ally Germany in warfare. It should be mentioned that in spite of the surrender memes everyone makes about France, they fought quite hard and inflicted casualties on the German invaders at a rate far higher than should have been expected of them. In fact, the German High Command felt very uneasy about the whole operation throughout its entirety, in large part because (at least on paper) the French military ''was'' stronger than the Germans, and had ample reason to believe going in that this was a fight they ''could'' win. The Germans' success came down to several factors: tactics that focused on speed, shock, and mobility; excellent close air support from the Luftwaffe; high levels of coordination thanks to the widespread use of radio; and hard-driving generals who spotted opportunities and seized them without consulting with high command, following the longstanding Prussian-German principle of independence in the field. Combine all of these with a healthy dose of luck, and you have a perfect explanation of why the Germans succeeded. The Battle of France ended with the conquest and surrender of Paris, the British Expeditionary Force's famous evacuation from Dunkirk, and Germany annexing the north of the country, leaving the rest to the Vichy puppet government that would administer southern France and her colonies. However, French general Charles de Gaulle rallied several of the colonies to continue their resistance against the Germans and many colonists would pledge their support to "Free France". They would eventually form a provisional government in Algiers and ultimately return to Paris in 1944.

After France fell, Germany went on a spree of conquest that would give any [[Axis & Allies]] or ''Hearts of Iron'' player a colossal throbbing war-boner: they overran Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, the Balkans, and Greece in the space of a year, stunning the rest of the world. It wasn't all roses for the Nazis, of course; there were large and active partisan movements in all the territories they conquered, and the invasion of the Balkans and Greece was largely because Italy had got itself spanked trying to throw its weight around in the region and ran crying to Germany for help. The latter two campaigns tied the Wehrmacht up for several months on the eve of Operation Barbarossa, potentially costing them critical time that they could have used to get to Moscow before winter set in. 

The British spent the majority of 1940-1942 on the defensive from all sides and every angle. Chamberlain was out as prime minister after having been humiliated by Hitler's pissing all over his hard diplomatic work, and Winston Churchill was in. A man with an iron will and indomitable resolve, he led his country through the loss of HMS ''Hood'', the U-boat crisis (something that he made clear was his greatest fear throughout the war), the Battle of Britain, and the fall of Burma, Crete, Malaya, and Singapore. Canadians, South Africans, Indians, ANZACs, and all manner of soldiers that could be acquired were pressed into service to defend the Empire all across the globe. Among the successes, such as the sinking of the ''Bismarck'' and the Taranto raid, were horrible failures like the Greek and Norwegian expeditionary forces, and the war for Africa was largely a stalemate until the Torch landings.

Meanwhile, the USSR and Germany had been circling each other like prizefighters before a bout. Their nonaggression pact notwithstanding, each country regarded the other as an existential threat. Hitler wanted the vast territories and resources that Russia had to offer, and he regarded the Russian people as subhuman Bolsheviks who needed to be exterminated or enslaved for the good of the Greater German Reich. Stalin, meanwhile, saw the Nazis as a pack of murderous fascists who would need to be dealt with before they could ruin the glorious USSR. Thus, even while they dismembered Poland together, the two countries were plotting to take each other down. Germany struck first, launching Operation Barbarossa on 22 June 1941. Hilariously enough, Stalin refused to believe that the invasion was occurring at first, in spite of repeated warnings from his spies, allies, and generals. He even threatened to court-martial or execute some of the officers who first reported that the Germans were pouring across the border from Poland. Initially, Barbarossa looked like it was going to be another walkover for the Wehrmacht, since the Red Army was in a bad way. Stalin's paranoid purges in the 1930s had gotten rid of most of the army's competent, professional officers, leaving it to be led by incompetent yes-men and/or inexperienced junior officers. It was also caught in a doctrinal bind regarding the employment of its armored forces and suffering from low institutional morale because of the rough handling they'd received at the hands of the Finnish Army in the Winter War. Because of this, the Wehrmacht beat the absolute shit out of the Red Army at first, wiping out or capturing entire army groups along with seizing the entirety of Ukraine and a reasonably large slice of western Russia. Fortunately for the Soviets, the Germans spread themselves thinly enough, and the Red Army managed to fight just hard enough, that the Wehrmacht didn't make it to Moscow in time. The infamously brutal Russian winter forced the Germans to stay the winter just outside of Moscow, suffering tremendous casualties from the cold, and the oil they wished to seize was either just out of reach or destroyed in the Red Army's scorched earth retreats.