1941

The year in brief

1941 began with British victories over the Italians: Tobruk capitulated in January, the remnants of the Tenth Army surrendered at Beda Fomm in February, and in East Africa Indian divisions broke the Italian defence of Eritrea at Keren while Cunningham’s troops entered Addis Ababa. In February, however, Rommel flew in to Tripoli and in three weeks took Cyrenaica back from the British. Only Tobruk held out against him, defended from August by the Polish Carpathian Brigade as well. On 11 March Roosevelt signed the Lend-Lease Act. On 6 April Germany invaded Yugoslavia and Greece, and in May it took Crete from the air. On the night of 10–11 May London suffered the last great raid of the Blitz before the Luftwaffe left for the east.

On 22 June Germany and its allies attacked the USSR. The Wehrmacht destroyed millions of soldiers in encirclements – at Białystok and Minsk, at Smolensk and at Kiev – and on 8 September cut Leningrad off from the rest of the country. By autumn it had reached Moscow, but on 5 December the Red Army struck the exhausted Army Group Centre and for the first time the Germans fell back along the whole front. On 7 December aircraft from Japanese carriers struck Pearl Harbor, and on 11 December Hitler and Mussolini declared war on the United States. The war had become truly a world war.

In the Kresy the NKVD began in May the last great deportation of Polish citizens. In the summer the German Security Police shot Polish professors in Lwów, and in Jedwabne Polish residents, acting on German inspiration, murdered their Jewish neighbours. Behind the front mass shootings of Jews went on, at Ponary near Wilno and at Babi Yar in Kiev, and on 31 July Göring authorised Heydrich to prepare a “total solution of the Jewish question”. The German–Soviet war transformed the position of Poles in the east: on 30 July Sikorski and Maisky signed the Polish–Soviet agreement, an “amnesty” was announced for Polish prisoners and deportees, and on 4 December Sikorski and Stalin signed a declaration of friendship and mutual aid at the Kremlin. The year ended with the German retreat from Moscow and the Japanese advance in Asia.