Wednesday the 31st of March
The Major turning points of ww2 This essay is about the major turning points in the war, such as Britain and France declaring war on Germany, the Battle of Britain, the battle of Stalingrad, Pearl Harbour and D-Day. I have chosen these topics because I believe that they played the most significant roles in the war. Because Hitler invaded Poland, Great Britain and France declared war on Germany. Hitler wasn’t ready for this and had to change his plan by opening a second war front. Hitler's plan to start off with was to take Poland, then Russia, and with Russia's natural resources he could take the rest of the world only having one war front at a time. Hitler invaded France in 1940 but this was not part of his plan and he would have fight on a second front during the rest of the war if he followed his original plan, This meant that Germany would not be able to follow the plan that Hitler had began the war with. This played to our advantage because he had to change his plans. I thought that this was the third most significant part of the war because Germany could no longer get away with breaking the treaty of Versailles without Britain interfering. This is a turning point because Germany couldn’t disobey the rules without creating a war so they had less freedom then before.

Hitler wanted to finish the fighting with Britain and France so that he could go back to his first plans. He took France in an invasion. He then followed with an unplanned attack on Britain in an air campaign so that it would be much easier to invade Britain. The German Luftwaffe, which was built for air support of German ground forces. Fighting the battle over Britain meant that if a plane got shot down then Germany would loose a whole crew whereas any British pilots that were shot down could return to the ground and keep fighting, so for an equal number of planes shot down Germany had much greater losses in trained pilots. The smaller Royal Air Force was initially losing the battle to the stronger Luftwaffe. This changed in the middle of the battle when Hitler ordered to change the objective of the Luftwaffe's effort, from destroying the Royal Air Force, to terror bombing London. This big mistake and the other problems with the Luftwaffe mentioned above, allowed the Royal Air Force to recover, destroy more enemy Luftwaffe planes and increase Germany’s loss rate while maintaining its own force. Then win the battle of Britain. The western front remained as a threat against Hitler’s campaign. I thought this was a good turning point because Hitler was defied to what he was hoping to do. This was to stop the fighting on the western front. This was a turning point because Germany began to lose the war as they were not able to invade Britain with their surprise attack.

Even though there was still a threat on the western front in 1941, Hitler decided to turn back east to try and take Russia once again as he had hoped for all along. Russia was plotting an attack on Hitler anyway so they were prepared for war. Despite spending years preparing for the objective, the German army was not quite prepared to fight in the extreme conditions of the Russian winter. Because of this Hitler and his Generals gambled everything on the German army’s ability to defeat Russia before the winter and with total confidence in their success this seamed like a reasonable idea. What did happen was that the Germans managed to catch the Russians in a complete surprise, but even that was not enough. Following Stalin's direct order, the Russian intelligence made a huge effort to constantly monitor for any preparation by the German army to equip itself for the severe conditions of the Russian winter, this would be an obvious warning sign of a coming German attack. There were no preparations, and since he could not believe that Hitler will make such a wild gamble of invading Russia unprepared for winter,