1987/01/01 by Roger Beaumont · 1 citation
Social Sciences · Engineering · #World Wars: History, Literature, and Impact #Offensive #Surrender #Front (military) #Battle #Economic history #Spanish Civil War #History #Government (linguistics) #Ancient history #Political science #World War II #Law #Geography #Operations research #Engineering
paper · doi:10.1177/002200948702200101
openalex publication_date 1987/01/01 · openalex created_date 2022/05/12 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/04
It was not the first call nor the last. Demands for a Second Front continued until D-Day in June 1944 and recriminations thereafter. British reluctance to attack in 1942 and Churchill's scepticism regarding the likelihood of success have frequently been censured by American as well as by Soviet and some British critics. Whatever the motives of their leaders, by mid-1941 major British forces had been pushed off the continent by the Germans three times in just over a year from Norway in April 1940, from France in May 1940, and from Greece in May 1941. Nearly bankrupted by the cost of preparing to fight a war not accepted as likely by the British government until 1938, Britain's stressed economy and military forces nevertheless had held out against the nazis for a full year after France's surrender in June 1940, while bolstered by an increasing flow of American aid and encouragement. Some of Britain's imperial defence problems were critical to AngloAmerican and ultimately Allied strategy, e.g. the defence of Suez, the Battle of the Atlantic, and fending off Japanese threats to India. From 1940 to 1942, there, as in Europe, successes were outweighed by failures. The British drove back the Italians in Libya and Ethiopia in late 1940, and then, in the spring of 1941, Rommel and the Afrika Korps came to the aid of Mussolini's battered legions. Losses incurred in the Greek expedition cost the British the initiative in North Africa for some time. Although American production in mid-1942 steadily gained momentum, much of it went to the Pacific, while Britain's