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Pride Of War

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Pride of man through strength of steel has won many a battle of thought. The second world war was a war on all fronts, waged from coast to coast and mountain to valley. From the icy fjords of Norway to the arid deserts of North Africa, German steel had transformed a world in dissent in to a world at war. U-boats ravaged the Atlantic, Panzers blitzed through France and Poland, and the armies of the fatherland forged an empire of such a size that it rivaled that of the ancient roman empire. The pride of a broken people, marshaled by the onslaught of hostile foreign resentment and mistreatment stemming from the first world war and impassioned through the words of one of the most infamous leaders in history, had transformed the downtrodden nation …show more content…

German engineers and scientists were producing military technology the first of its kind, including mobile radios, new weapons, and new war machines, giving the Wehrmacht a huge tactical and strategic advantages over the militaries of other European nations. As many of the European powers were still recovering from the first world war, they were not themselves expanding their military to anywhere near the extent that Germany was. The fact that countries like France, Romania, and Poland had at most only a few months warning to prepare and marshal their armies gave Germany a huge tactical advantage. The Wehrmacht were able in most cases, using Blitzkrieg, to completely overrun and outmaneuver their opponents before they had the time to react. This "lightning war" strategy was the key to the Wehrmacht's undisputed dominance in main land Europe. Only one country eluded Hitler's grasp. Great Britain's island stronghold meant that the Blitzkrieg tactics that had worked so well on mainland Europe would not work unless the Wehrmacht established a beachhead or landing zone for an invading army. To accomplish this, he ordered the Luftwaffe and the Kriegsmarine to wrest control of the skies and waters around Britain and maintain safe passage through the English channel. So in July of 1940, once the Luftwaffe had …show more content…

This was because one of the requirements of the Treaty of Versailles, Article 190, stated that the Kriegsmarine had to surrender most of their warships to the Allies and put a cap on the amount of commissioned warships the Kriegsmarine could have at any given time. The exact restrictions were that the Kriegsmarine could not have more than 6 battleships, 6 cruisers, 12 destroyers, and 12 u-boats. However on June 18, 1935, the German and British foreign ministers signed the Anglo-German Naval Agreement, which allowed for an increase in the number of commissioned ships that the Kriegsmarine could have. Still, the Kriegsmarine was in no shape to take on the British royal navy, which was considered at the time by many to be the strongest navy in the world and certainly one of the largest. This is most likely why Britain signed the agreement, putting naive confidence in their navy's ability to handle anything and everything that the Kriegsmarine could put up against them. What the naval strategists in Britain did not realize though, was that by depleting the Kriegsmarine to next to nothing, it gave German engineers and designers the opportunity and motivation to create a brand new modern fleet consisting of the types of ships that would most benefit the Kriegsmarine in a fight against Britain. Because of the resounding success of the u-boat during the first world

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