1940
Germany invades France and the Low Countries
At dawn German armor poured through the Ardennes, bypassing the Maginot Line which the French had spent a fortune building. Within six weeks Panzer divisions had reached the Channel, trapping the British Expeditionary Force and driving Paris into exile. The strongest army in Europe had been broken in six weeks.
Trotsky killed in Mexico City
A Spanish communist agent of Stalin's named Ramon Mercader drove an ice axe into Leon Trotsky's skull in the revolutionary's fortified Mexican villa. Trotsky died the next day. The last of Lenin's original Politburo had been eliminated. Stalin sent Mercader a Hero of the Soviet Union medal twenty years later, after his release from Mexican prison.
Battle of Britain
Through a blue summer, Luftwaffe bombers came across the Channel day after day and Spitfires and Hurricanes rose to meet them. Young men on both sides died in burning cockpits over English fields. By October the Germans had failed to break the RAF and Hitler postponed his invasion. Never, said Churchill, was so much owed by so many to so few.
Dunkirk evacuation
Surrounded on the French coast, three hundred thousand British and French soldiers waited on the beaches while a ragtag flotilla of warships, fishing boats, and pleasure craft ferried them home across the Channel under German dive bombers. Churchill called it a miracle of deliverance. It was also, he noted, a defeat.
The Blitz begins
Unable to defeat the RAF in daylight combat, Hitler switched to bombing British cities by night. For fifty-seven consecutive nights London burned beneath waves of Luftwaffe bombers. Families slept in Underground stations while their neighborhoods turned to rubble. Twenty thousand Londoners died under the high explosive. The city did not break. Other cities, Coventry foremost, fared worse. A new kind of civilian war had arrived.
Germany invades Norway and Denmark
Wehrmacht troops swept into Denmark in a few hours and into Norway in weeks, securing iron ore supplies from Sweden and Atlantic ports. A British expedition to help was outfought and withdrawn. The failure brought down Neville Chamberlain in London and put Winston Churchill into 10 Downing Street on the day the Germans invaded France.
Axis pact binds Germany, Italy, Japan
In Berlin the three Axis powers signed a tripartite pact formalizing their alliance and dividing the world into spheres. Hitler got Europe, Mussolini the Mediterranean, Japan East Asia. The pact was aimed at warning America off. It instead helped push Washington into the anti-fascist camp. The lines of global war were hardening.