The History of the Twentieth Century

The world reacts to the Fall of France.

After the Dunkirk evacuation, the next stage of the Western offensive began, aimed at capturing Paris and defeating France.

After German armor cut off the Allied First Army Group in Belgium, the Royal Navy attempts an evacuation of the trapped forces from the port of Dunkirk.

After months of delays and a diversion into Denmark and Norway, Hitler finally gets his Western offensive.

The Allied debacle in Norway sparked a revolt in the British Parliament against the Chamberlain government's conduct of the war.

Improbably, the nation of Norway finds itself the front line of the Second World War.

In the final year before the war began, Winston Churchill's denunciations of Nazi Germany began to seem prescient, but Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain fiercely resisted calls to invite Churchill into the Cabinet until war came. Then Churchill became First Lord of the Admiralty, for the second time in his career.

Adolf Hitler wanted to attack in the west immediately after the fall of Poland, but unfavorable weather kept postponing the offensive. Then a copy of the plan fell into Allied hands.

With the other Great Powers involved in their own wars, Stalin and the USSR are now free to claim the territories Germany granted to their "sphere of influence."

When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, it freed the Nazis from having to worry about international opinion. Hitler and his followers could now do as they pleased.