Second World War, The

by Corrigan, Gordon

Simmons, General Keith

  Simpkins, Peter

  Simpson, General William

  Singapore

  Japanese atrocities

  liberation and Japanese surrender

  and loss of battleships

  Singora

  Sinkawang

  Sio

  Sittang,river

  Skorzeny, Obersturmbannführer Otto

  Skudai, river

  Slim, General William

  and recovery of Burma

  and recovery of Malaya

  and retreat from Burma

  sacking and reappointment

  Slim, river

  Slot,the

  Slovakia

  Slovenia

  Smolensk

  Smoot–Hawley Act

  Smuts, Field Marshal Jan

  Smyth, General J. G. ‘Jackie’

  Social Darwinism

  Sollum

  Solojewka

  Solomon IslandsSomaliland

  Somerville,Admiral Sir James

  Somme, river

  Sousse

  South Africa

  South African air force

  South African War

  Soviet air force

  Soviet navy

  Soviet Union (USSR)

  and Britain

  civilian deaths

  collectivization

  death toll

  deportations

  domestic conditions

  economy

  and Geneva Convention

  and German rearmament

  German invasion

  and history

  invasion of Poland

  and Japanese surrender

  and Japanese threat

  and Molotov–Ribbentrop pact

  partisan resistance

  purges and show trials

  railway system

  and Spanish Civil War, 75–6

  war with Japan

  and Winter War

  see also Russia

  Spaatz, General Carl

  Spain

  and Gibraltar

  and invasion of Soviet Union

  Jews

  railway system

  Spanish Civil War

  Spanish-American War

  Sparks, Marine William

  Special Night Squads

  Special Operations Executive

  (SOE)

  Speer, Albert

  Speranza

  Spree, river

  Spruance, Admiral Raymond

  Allgemeine SSEinsatzgruppen

  European volunteers

  and Jewish vengeance

  and retreat from Soviet Union

  Waffen SS

  and Warsaw Rising

  Stakanowo

  Stalin, Josef

  and allied advance

  and Arctic convoys

  and Britain

  and German surrender

  and invasion of Soviet Union

  and Japanese surrender

  and post-war Europe

  and Soviet air force

  and strategic bombing campaign

  Stalingrad

  Stark, Admiral Harold

  Stark, Colonel Robert

  Steiner, Obergruppenführer Felix

  Stemmerman, General Wilhelm

  Stephan, Colonel

  Stilwell, General Joseph ‘Vinegar

  Joe’

  Stoltz

  Stopes

  Stopford, General Sir Montague

  Strait of Gibraltar

  Strait of Johore

  Strait of Kerch

  Straits of Messina, Straits of Vitiaz

  Strasbourg

  Strauss, General Adolf

  Stresa Front

  Stroop, Brigadeführer Jürgen

  Student, General Kurt

  Stülpnagel, General Karl-Heinrich

  Stumme, General Georg

  Stuttgart

  submarines

  long-range

  U-boats

  Soviet

  wolf packs

  SudanSudetenland

  Suez Canal

  Suez Crisis

  Sultan, General Daniel I

  Sumatra

  Sungei Jurong, river

  Sungei Kedah, river

  Sungei Muda, river

  Suzuki, Admiral Baron Fantaro

  Swatow

  Sweden

  Switzerland

  Syria

  Tai Po

  Taiwan

  see Formosa Takagi, Admiral Takeo, 282

  Takeda, General Hisashi, 466

  Tamu,331,391,548

  Tanaka, Admiral Raizo, 376

  Tanamdogo, 373

  Tananarive, 334

  Tangiers, 404

  tanks

  Christie tank suspension

  and invasion of Soviet Union

  and North Africa campaign

  tanks, types of

  Char B

  Churchill

  KV

  M3 (Grant)

  M4 (Sherman)

  Panzer Mk III

  Panzer Mk IV

  Panzer Mk V (Panther)

  Panzer Mk VI (Tiger)

  Scorpion

  Somua

  T-34

  Tiger II

  Valentine

  Taranto

  Tarhuna-Homs

  Tauragé

  Tavoy

  Tebessa mountains

  Tedder, Air Marshal Sir Arthur

  Televaag

  Tempelhof airport

  Templar, Field Marshal Gerald

  Tenasserim

  Tengah

  Ten-Year Rule

  Terauchi, Field Marshal Count

  Hisaichi

  Terraine, John

  Territorial Army

  Teschen

  Teutonic Knights

  Thailand,see Siam

  Tharrawaddy,

  Thoma, General Wilhelm Ritter von

  Thomas, Sir Shenton

  Thrace

  Tiddim

  Tilsit

  Time magazine

  Times,The

  Timor

  Timoshenko, Marshal Semyon

  tin

  Tinian

  Tippelskirch, General Kurt von

  Tito, Marshal (Josip Broz)

  Tobruk

  Todt Organization

  Togo, Admiral Heihachiro

  Tojo, General Hideki

  Tokyo

  air raids

  ‘Tokyo Express’

  Tokyo war crimes trials

  Tonga

  Tonkin

  Torgau

  Toulon

  Toungoo

  Toyoda, Admiral Soemu

  trade unions

  Trafalgar, battle of

  Trans-Siberian railway

  Treaty of Brest-Litovsk

  Treaty of Tirana

  Treaty of Utrecht

  Treaty of Versailles

  and German rearmament

  and US ratification

  Treblinka

  Tresckow, Lieutenant-Colonel

  Henning von

  Treviso

  Trieste

  Trincomalee

  TripartitePact

  Triple Alliance

  Tripoli

  Tripolitania

  Trotsky, Leon

  Truman, Harry S.

  Truscott, General Lucian

  Tsunoda, Admiral Kanji

  Tsushima, battle of

  Tukachevsky, Marshal Mikhail

  Tuker, General Francis ‘Gertie’

  Tula

  Tulagi Island

  Tungale

  Tunis

  Tunisia

  Turin

  Turkey

  typhus

  Tyrol

  Ukraine

  Ulster

  Uman

  Umberto, Crown Prince, of Savoy

  unconditional surrender

  Union Sacrée

  United Nations

  United States of
America

  death toll

  domestic conditions

  and economic recession

  entry into war

  and history

  and invasion of Soviet Union

  and Israel

  and Japanese internment

  Japanese invasion threat

  New Deal

  and the Philippines

  post-war

  relations with Britain

  unemployment

  war economy

  United States Army

  United States Navy

  United States Air Force

  and gliders

  and strategic bombing campaign

  Ural mountains

  US Federal Reserve

  Ushijima, General Mitsuru

  USSR, see Soviet Union

  van der Lubbe, Marius

  Vasilevsky, Marshal Aleksandr

  Vatican

  Vatutin, General Nikolai

  VE Day

  Vella Navella

  Vemork heavy water plant

  Vengeance weapons

  Venice

  Verdun

  Verona

  Viareggio

  Vichy France

  German occupation

  and Madagascar

  treatment of Jews

  Victor Emmanuel III, King

  Vienna

  Vietinghoff, General Heinrich von

  Vietnam War

  Vigón, General Juan

  Villers Bocage

  Vilnius

  Vistula, river

  Vittorio Veneto, battle, of

  Vladivostok

  Vlasov, General Andrei

  Voice of America

  Volga, river

  Volksturm

  Vormann, General Nikolaus von

  Voronezh

  Voroshilov, Marshal Klim

  Vyazma

  Wadi Akarit

  Wagner, General Edouard

  Wainright, General Jonathan ‘Snowy’

  Wake Island

  Wall Street Crash

  Wannsee conference

  War Bonds

  war crimes trials

  War of Jenkins’s Ear

  War of the Spanish Succession

  Warlimont, General Walter

  Warm Springs, Georgia

  Warsaw

  Warsaw Rising

  Washington, DC

  Bonus March

  Washington conferences

  Washington Naval Treaty

  Waterloo, battle of

  Wavell, General Sir Archibald

  and Far East and India

  and Middle East

  and Orde WingateWavre

  Wavre

  Waw

  Webb, Beatrice

  Webb, Judge Sir William

  Wedemeyer, General Albert C.

  Weichs, General Maximilian Freiherr von

  Weidling, General Helmuth

  Weiss, General Walter

  Wellington, Duke of

  Wells, H. G.

  Welsh, Air Marshal W. L.

  Wenck, General Walter

  West Wall

  Weygand, General Maxime

  Weymouth

  White Russians

  Wilhelm II, Kaiser

  Wilhelmina, Queen

  Wilson, Captain Eric

  Wilson, General Henry Maitland, ‘Jumbo’

  Wilson, Woodrow

  ‘window’

  Wingate, Brigadier Orde

  Winter, Denis

  WinterWar

  Wismar

  Wolf, General Karl

  women

  women soldiers

  Women’s Auxiliary Service Burma, (Wasbies)

  Women’s, Voluntary Service, (WVS)

  World Disarmament Conference

  Worthing

  Wuest, Lieutenant-Colonel Jacob

  Xerxes the Great

  Yalta conference

  Yamamoto, Admiral Isoruku

  Yamashita, General Tomoyuki

  Yangtze, river

  Yeats, W. B.

  Young, Owen

  Young, Sir Mark

  Ypres Salient

  Yugoslavia

  Yunnan province

  Zaghouan hills

  zaibatsu

  Zaponezhe

  Zeitzler, General Kurt

  Zhitomir

  Zhukov, Marshal Georgi

  Ziegler, General Heinz

  Zinoviev, Gregory

  Zokali

  Zossen

  * If the countries of the British Empire are counted separately, then the total is even greater.

  * Starting in 1793, as far as the British are concerned, when France declared war on England.

  * Even if the Germans, unlike the British, stubbornly refused to conscript women until the final stages.

  * The British would have sent troops too, if the Norwegians and Swedes had agreed to allow them passage. By 1941 perceptions had changed and Britain declared war on Finland.

  * Quoted in Wolfram Wette, Die Wehrmacht – Feindbilder, Vernichtungskrieg, Legenden, S. Fischer Verlag GmbH, Frankfurt am Main, 2002.

  * A British private soldier stationed in Moenchengladbach was recently reprimanded by a German Hausfrau for smacking his child, who was misbehaving in the street. At the soldier’s subsequent interview with his company commander (a close relative of this author), it transpired that the lady had said, ‘In Germany we do not strike children’, to which the soldier replied, ‘And in England we don’t gas Jews.’ Mud sticks for a very long time.

  † But see Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, where it is stated that ‘hundreds of thousands’ of Germans were directly involved and ‘millions’ knew about it.

  * The word means ‘compete destruction by fire’ and so could equally well refer to the Allied bombing of Dresden, or the fire-bombing of Tokyo, but instead has come to mean, with doubtful etymological accuracy, the elimination of large numbers of the Jewish population of Europe by the Germans from 1942 to 1945.

  * Mud, Blood and Poppycock (Cassell, London, 2003) won me two death threats, both written in green ink with lots of block capitals and bits underlined. Fortunately, the would-be assassins’ map-reading was as bad as their spelling and I am still here.

  † 1 South African, 2 New Zealand, 4 Indian, 9 Australian and a French brigade.

  * By the end of the war, Pape was a major-general in command of a panzer grenadier division. After the war, he became a major-general in the Bundeswehr but resigned in 1966 during the ‘Crisis of the Generals’, when the head of the Luftwaffe, Lieutenant-General Werner Panitzki, and the head of the army, General Heinz Trettner, resigned over differences in the method of civilian control of the armed forces. Pape resigned in loyalty to his commander. Ernst finished the war as a captain, when he surrendered the city of Iserlohn to the Americans on 16 April 1945.

  * There are many ways to calculate inflation but using the conservative Consumer Price Index measure, this is equivalent to over $100bn today, or about one and a half times the UK’s annual defence budget.

  * An investor buys a thousand shares each priced at $10.He puts up 10 per cent ($1,000) and borrows the rest ($9,000) from the broker. A month later the shares have doubled in value to $20 and the investor sells. He gets $20,000 for the sale, pays the broker back the $9,000 plus interest (say, an annual interest rate of 6 per cent, as it was in mid-October 1929,orroughly$45 for the month) and now has $10,955 for an initial investment of $1,000.

  * Readers should note that the United Kingdom, despite its geographical location, is not considered part of Europe, at least in regard to matters of finance.

  * Louis Napoleon, the son of Louis, the one-time king of Holland and brother of Napoleon I. He reigned as Napoleon III to sustain the fiction that the first Napoleon’s infant son was the rightful ruler of France after his father’s exile to St Helena. Like so many deposed emperors, kings and dictators, Napoleon III went into exile in Hampshire and his son (the Prince Imperia
l) was killed in a particularly foolish escapade while an observer with the British Army in the Zulu War in 1879. Louis Napoleon, his Spanish ex-empress Eugenie and the Prince Imperial are all buried at Farnborough Abbey. Despite the Bonaparte lineage, most of the French considered them to be upstarts and have never asked for the bodies to be repatriated.

  * The First Republic was that established by the Revolution and lasted until Napoleon I crowned himself emperor in 1804; the second ran from the 1848 revolution which ditched King Louis Philippe until the coup by Napoleon III in 1852, and the Third from the defeat of the Second Empire in 1870 until defeat yet again in 1940.

  * The term ‘intellectual’ is one frequently found in descriptions of political groupings and presumably refers to writers, artists, poets, philosophers and other idlers whose influence is considerably greater than their numbers or contribution would warrant.

  * The full-time armies of Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa were tiny at the beginning of the war; only India had a professional regular army almost as large (or as small) as Britain’s.

  * This was to ensure that there would be more male voters than female. When it became apparent that female voting patterns broke down in exactly the same way as men’s, the females’ age was also set at twenty-one in 1928.

  * The Daily Mail refused to print a government-dictated leader – some things don’t change.

  * The USA threatened to build a navy to rival the Royal Navy. To maintain superiority, Britain would have had to build too, and her government was terrified by the cost. At the Washington Conference Britain agreed a ratio of tonnage that made the US Navy equal in size to the Royal Navy. To get to that tonnage, the USA could build, while the British had to decommission and scrap. The result was a Royal Navy unprepared for war when it came. In fact, if the British had shown a bit more gumption, the US would not have built – the Crash and the Depression would in due course have seen to that.

  † Britain went formally on to the gold standard in 1844 whenthe pound sterling was fixed at 113 grains of gold to one pound. She came off it in 1914, went on again in 1925 at the same rate and came off it in 1931.On 1 July 2008 (before recession began temporarily to inflate its price) the same amount of gold cost £109.

  * Actually the November Revolution – Russia was still on the old calendar.

  * Strictly speaking, White Russia is Belorussia, that area bounded in the west by Latvia, Lithuania and Poland, and to the south by the Ukraine, but the term quickly became applied to all those in arms against the communists.

  † Although it is doubtful if they knew that the Tsar was there, and questionable whether they could have cared less what the communists might do to him.

  * As the population was around 240 million, the one copper’s nark per 2.29 million people must have been a very busy spy.

  * By Dora Kaplan, a socialist revolutionary who had done time in Siberia and whose parents had emigrated to the USA. She thought Lenin was betraying the revolution, and put two bullets into him. She was caught and executed shortly afterwards.

  * In December 1918 Lenin sent Kamenev to London to explain to the British government what the new communist state was all about. He lasted a week before the British deported him, irritated by his clumsy attempts to spread Bolshevism amongst British workers. Distrustful of foreigners as British workers are, those few who understood what Kamenev was trying to say thought him a joke.