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Only in surface combat could the Royal Navy claim that Britain still ruled the waves. One of Germany's pocket battleships, the Graf Spee, sank nine British vessels (with no loss of lives), but three cruisers finally trapped it off the coast of Uruguay. Though the four ships' gun duel was a draw, the damaged Graf Spee finally took refuge in Montevideo. To avoid capture, the captain scuttled his ship; then he committed suicide. Germany's last hope for a warship that could fight off British attackers was the 42,000-ton, 30-knot battleship Bismarck, which put to sea in March 1941 with eight 15-in. guns and six aircraft. In its first encounter with British pursuers, it blew up the battleship Hood, killing 1,416 crewmen. But a British seaplane managed to torpedo the Bismarck and cripple its steering gear; that enabled other warships to close in and sink it.
Hitler had yet other resources, or so he thought. Italy, still considered one of the great powers, had finally joined the war in the last days of the fall of France. Mussolini had achieved almost no success in his effort to grab a piece of southeastern France, failing to get more than a couple of miles into the playgrounds of the Riviera. But he had nearly half a million Italian and colonial troops in northern and eastern Africa, which he hoped to make part of a new Roman empire.
Assuming that the British would be fully occupied at home, Mussolini sent some 80,000 men from Libya across the border into Egypt to threaten British control of the Suez Canal. The British, outnumbered nearly 3 to 1, counterattacked, and most of the ill-equipped Italians promptly surrendered. The British could probably have captured all of eastern North Africa, but Churchill instead withdrew much of his force to help defend Greece, which Mussolini had vainly tried to conquer the previous fall. Hitler sent one of his ablest tank commanders, General Rommel, to rescue the Italians in North Africa, and "the Desert Fox" soon pushed the weakened British back into Egypt.
In the Balkans, meanwhile, a British-backed coup overthrew the pro-German government of Yugoslavia in March 1941. Hitler was so angered that he decided almost overnight to invade, and he conquered his prey in about a week. While he was at it, he took over the bungled Italian invasion of Greece and subdued that country in less than a month. Of the 62,000 men Churchill had rashly sent to Greece, fewer than 20,000 were ultimately evacuated; the rest were killed or captured.
And so, in May 1941, Hitler stood master of Europe. It was an incredible achievement. Less than ten years before, he had tricked and blustered his way into the leadership of a penniless and disarmed nation. Now, from the Pyrenees to the Arctic Circle, from Brittany to Warsaw to Crete, this ex-corporal ruled virtually unchallenged over more of Europe than any man had governed since the days of the Roman Empire. And his friends and allies ruled in Moscow, Tokyo, Rome, Madrid. His only remaining enemy, Britain, was badly mauled and begging the U.S. for supplies.