The History of the Twentieth Century Mark Painter

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.

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."

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.

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.

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

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