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them. That’s why they’re “for the Germans”.’ Very few Frenchmen in 1940 and afterwards followed the example set by tens of thousands of Poles – fighting on in exile, even after their country had been defeated. Only in 1943–44, when it became plain that the Allies would win the war and German occupation had proved intolerably oppressive, did French people in large numbers offer significant assistance to the Anglo-Americans. In the years of Britain’s lonely defiance, French forces offered determined resistance to Churchill’s armies and fleets wherever in the world they encountered them. Few even among those who did not fight against the British chose instead to fight with them: the French aircraft carrier Béarn, for instance, laden with precious American fighter planes, took refuge in the French Caribbean colony of Martinique from June 1940 until November 1942.

Among the shocked spectators of the collapse of France was Stalin. Molotov sent Hitler a dutiful telegram offering congratulations on his capture of Paris, but in Moscow the Nazi triumph provoked horror. All Soviet strategic calculations had been founded upon an expectation that a protracted bloodbath would take place on the Continent, which would drastically weaken Germany as well as the Western Powers. A Russian diplomat in London later remarked indiscreetly that, while most of the world weighed Allied and German casualties against each other, Stalin added the two together to compile an assessment of his own balance of advantage. Nikita Khrushchev described the fury of Russia’s warlord at Pétain’s surrender: ‘Stalin was in a great agitation, very nervous. I had seldom seen him in such a state. As a rule he seldom sat in his chair during meetings, usually he kept walking. On this occasion he was literally running around the room, swearing terribly. He cursed the French, cursed the English, [demanding]: “How come they allowed Hitler to thrash them?”’

Stalin probably expected eventually to fight Germany, but anticipated at least two or three years’ grace before a showdown. The Soviet Union had embarked on a massive rearmament programme that was still far from fulfilment. Stalin believed that Hitler gained too many material advantages from their relationship to breach the Nazi–Soviet Pact, at least until Britain was occupied. The German navy enjoyed access to north Russian ports. Vast quantities of corn, commodities and oil flowed from the Soviet Union to the Reich. Even after the French surrender Stalin remained anxious to avoid provocation of his dangerous neighbour, and constructed no major fortifications on his western frontier. Instead, he exploited the chaos of the moment to increase his own territorial gains. While the eyes of the world were fixed on France, he annexed the Baltic states, where in the year that followed the NKVD conducted savage purges and mass deportations. From Romania, he took Bessarabia, which had been Russian property between 1812 and 1919, and the Bukovina. At least 100,000 Romanians, and perhaps as many as half a million, were deported to Central Asia, to replace Russian industrial workers conscripted into the army. Amid events in the west, few people outside the world’s foreign ministries noticed the human catastrophe created by Stalin in the east; to that extent, Hitler’s lunge across western Europe served Soviet interests. But Russia’s warlord recognised the outcome as a calamity almost as alarming for his own nation as for the vanquished Western Powers.

Italy entered the war alongside Hitler on 10 June, in a shamelessly undignified scramble for a share of the spoils. Benito Mussolini feared Hitler and disliked Germans, as did many of his fellow countrymen, but he was unable to resist the temptation to secure cheap gains in Europe and the Allied African empires. Mussolini’s conduct inspired the derision of most of his contemporaries, friends and foes alike: he coupled himself to Hitler because he sought for his country a splendour he knew Italians could not achieve alone; he wanted the rewards of war, in return for a token expenditure