The Opening Campaigns

This theatre exists because a Western Front that begins in 1944 leaves the first two years of the war in Europe with nowhere to sit. Poland, the Winter War, Norway, the fall of France, the Battle of Britain and the Balkans are not preliminaries to something else. They are the campaigns in which the German army learned its trade, the French army was destroyed, and the terms of everything that followed were set.

The geography moves further and faster than in any other theatre on this site. It runs from Warsaw to Narvik to Dunkirk to Crete, and the front line in it is often not a line at all but a set of columns moving down roads faster than the defenders can report them.

It ends in June 1941 not because the fighting stopped but because the war changed shape. From Barbarossa onwards Germany was fighting an eastern war with a western sideshow, and the Mediterranean and the Atlantic had become theatres in their own right.

Each page carries the chronology mapped at hour or day resolution, the commanders and the decisions behind it, the equipment that shaped it, what it cost, and the archive record for every claim.

The German records for this period are at Freiburg and are unusually complete, because the army that wrote them was winning and had not yet begun destroying its files. The French archives at Vincennes hold the other half of the 1940 story, and the British official histories cover Norway, France and Britain.

The campaign in Poland is best read from Polish and German sources together; the Soviet invasion of eastern Poland on 17 September and the Winter War that followed are documented in Russian archives that opened partially in the 1990s and have since closed again.