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READING 1 Candice Goucher, Charles LeGuin, and Linda Walton, “Culture, Power, and Perspective: War and Peace in the Twentieth Century,” in In the Balance: Themes in Global History (Boston: McGraw-Hill, 1998), 817–26, 829–37. Abstract: This essay examines World War II and the political, cultural, and social changes that resulted from this struggle. It explores both the war in Europe and the war in the Pacific, and details its costs in human lives and resources. It then discusses the fundamentally different world order that emerged in the war’s aftermath, where European dominance no longer reigned supreme. World War II Neither the League of Nations nor individual nations were able to stop the Japanese attack on China, German rearmament, remilitarization of the Rhineland and absorption of central European states, Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia, or the Spanish Civil War. Japan, Germany, and Italy, had embarked on similar designs backed by similar government ideologies and policies. They consolidated their assault on international law and order by joining in an alliance known as the Axis. The classic example of response to Axis actions came in 1938 when the British and French prime ministers met with Hitler, poised to attack Czechoslovakia. Their diplomatic effort to check German aggression without the risk of armed resistance was an approach that came to be known as “appeasement.” As a policy, appeasement was as much dictated by British and French domestic politics and economic realities as it was a reflection of the hope for a conciliatory and reasonable response to demands made by the Axis, and a policy that would continue the noble aim of the peacemakers after World War I. The War in Europe The faulty idealism of the policy of appeasement applied to Hitler was revealed when Hitler gained British and French approval for annexing the Sudeten region of Czechoslovakia, which was inhabited by Germans. In return Hitler promised to halt his plans to annex all of the Czech republic, a promise that lasted only until March 1939 when the remainder of Czechoslovakia was occupied. Six months later, following a Nazi-Soviet nonaggression pact, Germany and its new ally, the Soviet Union, invaded Poland. Britain and France abandoned appeasement and declared war. World War II in Europe had begun. Within two months Germany invaded and occupied Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, and France in a rapid effort to confirm its hegemony over the continent. The two-thirds of France in German hands became a part Used by permission for Bridging World History, The Annenberg Foundation copyright © 2004 1 of Hitler’s Reich; what remained was the collaborationist Vichy government, a German puppet state that maintained a tenuous independence until 1942 when it too was absorbed by Germany. The Holocaust From 1942 the Nazi language of elimination (“the final solution”) and genocide became a gruesome reality when the victims of propaganda and discrimination were branded with ink identity numbers and herded into camps to be removed from German cities and occupied territory, enslaved or killed. For years Jews and members of other groups attacked by the Nazis were forcibly detained by the state. Between 1942 and 1945 Jews were sent to concentration camps, where those who were strong enough were used as slave labor and the weak were gassed to death by assembly-line methods or “eliminated” in other ways. The largest of the camps was Auschwitz, where more than 1 million Jews died. The full impact of the horrors of the concentration camps only became evident to people around the world when the camps were liberated at the end of the war. More than 15 million people were exterminated in the Holocaust (from the Greek holo, “whole”; caustos, “burned”), including Jews, Gypsies, Slavs, and homosexuals. The complicity of those who watched the killings in silence or knew about them and did nothing remains the most troubling and unexplained aspect of the century’s history. It is a history that could not be silenced. The Battle of Britain With the fall of France, Great Britain faced Germany alone. Since the English Channel separated the British Isles from the continent, Hitler had to rely on the German air force as the primary weapon with which to assault England. Within six weeks of the fall of France, Hitler launched a massive air campaign against the British Isles that is known as the Battle of Britain. Between August and October 1940, the Battle of Britain involved indiscriminate massive day and night bombing designed to destroy British production and demoralize the public. Civilians, including women and children, huddled together in cold and dark underground shelters listening to the air assault. The foremost obstacle to German success was the British Royal Air Force (RAF). Not until the Battle of Britain did the RAF, significantly aided by technological innovations like radar, show its greater skill and quality against the experience and strength of the German air force. The success of the RAF greatly bolstered British morale and saved British industry. The Great Patriotic War As fatal to German plans as the RAF was Hitler’s unannounced attack on his Russian ally. Believing that the Soviet Union constituted a threat to German Used by permission for Bridging World History, The Annenberg Foundation copyright © 2004 2 security and ambitions, and anxious to gain control of food supplies and raw materials, especially oil, in the Soviet Union, the Germans launched their invasion on June 22, 1941. Great Britain no longer stood alone, and when the United States joined Britain and Russia against the Axis powers in late 1941 following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in the Hawaiian Islands, the second phase of World War II commenced what was known to the Russians as the “great patriotic war.” Within four months the Germans reached the vicinity of Moscow, when a combination of the extreme Russian winter and a Soviet counteroffensive checked them. In the following year the Russians halted a German offensive into the Ukraine in a bitter siege at Stalingrad. The Battle for Africa While an air war raged over Britain and the Germans and Russians struggled for control of the Soviet Union, the British fought the Axis in North Africa. It was essential for the British to protect the Suez Canal, their life line to India, Australia, and New Zealand. From the beginning of the war, they established their line of defense at the western border of Egypt in order to prevent Axis armies from moving eastward from the Italian colony of Tripolitania (modern Libya). In October 1942 the British undertook an offensive against the Italians in conjunction with the landing of British and American troops in Morocco and Algeria. The aim was a joint attack from east and west that would drive the Axis out of North Africa. The costly campaign shifted back and forth across the deserts of North Africa, but by the spring of 1943, following the Axis loss of Tripolitania, the Axis “Army Group Africa,” by now dominated by the Germans, surrendered. The southern flank of Europe, across the Mediterranean, was open for Allied assault. The Assault on Europe Russian demands that the Americans and British come to their aid by launching a second-front assault on Hitler’s “Fortress Europe” were answered soon after the surrender of Axis armies in North Africa. In the summer of 1943, British troops landed in Sicily and Americans at Salerno on the mainland to begin a slow and destructive attack on Italy. As Allied forces fought their way up the peninsula, Mussolini was removed from power. The Germans took over Italy and continued to offer strenuous resistance until an Allied offensive achieved a breakthrough that brought about the capitulation of German forces in Italy by the beginning of May 1945. The Allies opened up an even more significant second front in western Europe on June 6, 1944, when the invasion of France began. Despite desperate German resistance, Paris was liberated in a little more than two months. The Allies reached the borders of Germany and the Netherlands in the fall of 1944 Used by permission for Bridging World History, The Annenberg Foundation copyright © 2004 3 and commenced a three-pronged invasion that carried them deep into German territory by spring 1945, at the same time that a major Soviet offensive brought their troops into contact with the Allies. On April 30 Hitler committed suicide, and on May 7, at Reims in France, representatives of a German provisional caretaker government signed an unconditional surrender; the following day the Germans repeated the act of capitulation at Soviet headquarters in Berlin. The war in Europe was over. Naval Technology and the War at Sea The war in Europe had been primarily fought on the land and in the air, though Allied control of the sea was no less important to victory in World War II than it had been in World War I. Naval warfare was waged on the surface and under the seas, and even in the air. The identical pattern of conflict between small groups of highly trained fighting men manipulating complex weapons systems, of competing technologists, and of commanders exercising control at a very long distance, though not new, emerged with the development of war in the air as it had at sea. An important innovation in naval warfare was the introduction of the aircraft carrier, which enabled aircraft, taking off on the high seas, to take part in naval battles, provide cover for troop landings from ships, and engage in long-distance bombing of targets on land. But it was the submarine, which had proved its worth in World War I, that was the major weapon in the war at sea in World War II. German U-boats, in conjunction with the German air force, were extensively employed in the effort to defeat Great Britain quickly after the fall of France. The U-boat campaign against British shipping produced a successful Allied response from Britain and the United States. In the United States, ships were constructed in such numbers and so speedily that a “bridge of ships” was maintained, enabling Britain to keep up her struggle against Germany. Large convoys of merchant ships carrying supplies sailed under the protection of battleships skilled in antisubmarine combat. Sensitive electronic detection devices, known as sonar, were perfected, and effective depth bombs neutralized the U-boat menace. About 700 German submarines were destroyed while Allied shipping losses attributed to U-boats amounted to an incredible 21 million tons. Navies and merchant marines made definite contributions to the mobility characteristic of World War II. Large numbers of men and heavily mechanized equipment could best be transported to distant battle zones by ship, despite great advances in air transport, which was faster and increasingly used as the war persisted. Nowhere were naval power and air power more significant than in the struggle in the vast Pacific. Used by permission for Bridging World History, The Annenberg Foundation copyright © 2004 4 The War in Asia and the Pacific Victory in Europe did not mean that the war was over. Though Germany and Italy had been defeated, Japan was still an active and potent enemy, despite the fact that domestic conditions in Japan were desperate. Throughout the war, opposition to militarism and Japan’s pursuit of empire festered, though it was suppressed by the government’s “thought police” (kempeitai). Anonymous graffiti collected from the walls of private and public places by the thought police between December 1941 and early 1944 bear mute testimony to the hidden opposition to the war: “Look at the pitiful figures of the undernourished people. Overthrow the government. Shoot former Prime Minister Konoe, the traitor (December 1941); No rice. End the war. Give us freedom (June 1942); Anglo-American victory, Japanese German defeat (October 1943). Following the invasion of China in 1937–1938, Japan had moved into Southeast Asia and occupied territory from Burma to Singapore on the Asian mainland and a vast array of islands stretching from Indonesia and the Philippines into the central Pacific. Japan’s expansion on the Asian continent, beginning in 1931, was stimulated by demand for raw materials and markets; its continuing advance into Southeast Asia was driven by increasing needs for oil, tin, and rubber, which Southeast Asia had in abundance. Critics later called this cycle the “China Quagmire,” referring to the idea that Japan was sucked deeper and deeper into war as each advance demanded more resources to sustain it. Japanese propagandists justified Japan’s role in Asia as exercising beneficial political and economic leadership for Asian countries through the “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere;” however much Southeast Asians resented European colonial powers, few were taken in by the Japanese claim that their imperial goals worked for the benefit of Asians. Because the long struggle in Europe had exhausted its allies, the burden of the campaign to defeat Japan fell on the United States. It was a campaign of naval warfare, “island hopping” whereby the Japanese had to be driven from one after another of the many Pacific islands they had occupied, and air power. On the Asian mainland the Japanese put up stiff resistance. In support of the land campaigns, the Americans took the war to Japan itself by an air offensive—launched from bases in China, liberated Pacific islands, and aircraft carriers—designed to destroy Japanese industrial centers and morale. Despite land, sea, and air efforts, Japan showed no signs of ending the war quickly. Toward the end of the sixth year of World War II, an air raid by the United States on the Japanese main island dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima (August 6, 1945), destroying military targets and killing outright 80,000 civilians. The detonation of a second atomic bomb over Nagasaki on the southern island of Kyushu (August 9, 1945), before the effects of the first were properly registered, brought about Japanese surrender Used by permission for Bridging World History, The Annenberg Foundation copyright © 2004 5 (September 2, 1945). World War II ended exactly six years after it had begun, and nuclear warfare had become a global reality. Secretly developed by an international team of scientists working for the U.S. government in various laboratories and tested in the deserts of New Mexico, the atomic bomb was a weapon of incredible terror and destruction. The question of whether the bomb should have been used, or even developed, raises an issue that has never been resolved. Military justification for the dropping of the bomb, that it would put a quick end to a seemingly interminable war and accordingly save lives, particularly Allied lives. Nevertheless, much of the world continues to ask: Could not other means, such as stringent blockading, have accomplished the same ends? Was it necessary to drop the bomb on a city? Above all, why was it necessary to drop a second bomb? What of the environmental results of atomic explosions? Peace replaced war at the cost of enormous uncertainty and questioning. Peacemaking In yet another way World War II recapitulated the experience of World War I. While both conflicts raged, attention was given to the shaping of the postwar world. After two global wars, the planet was conflict oriented, its nations suffering deepening divisions between classes, cultures, and races. President Wilson had pinned his hopes on a League of Nations that would guarantee a peace without victors or vanquished and “make the world safe for democracy.” The Allied vision of the postwar world, reflecting the powerful influence of President Franklin Roosevelt, was perhaps less idealistic and more pragmatic. It was formulated in a series of wartime conferences, beginning with the meeting of Roosevelt and Churchill at Casablanca in Morocco in January 1943, where they declared a policy of unconditional surrender as basic to any peace agreement. They were joined by representatives from Russia and other countries in a series of conferences held to design a peace based on victory that would deal harshly with the vanquished. At a meeting held in Cairo, Egypt, in November 1943, the fate of the Japanese empire was agreed upon, and at a meeting at Yalta in Soviet Crimea, agreement on the future of Germany and eastern Europe was arranged. Like Wilson, Roosevelt believed that an international organization would help establish and maintain a rule of law among nations, and once again the United States took a leading role in creating such an organization. Roosevelt’s proposals, which were less skeptically received than Wilson’s, resulted in the San Francisco Conference (April–June 1945) that created a United Nations organization even before the war in Europe was completed, though not before Roosevelt’s death in 1945. The new international organization came into existence before and apart from subsequent peace treaties. Fifty years after its Used by permission for Bridging World History, The Annenberg Foundation copyright © 2004 6 creation, the United Nations continues to wrestle with the maintenance of international order in a global climate of rapid change and instability. The Balance Sheet Perspective on Global War: Human and Material Costs In contrast to nineteenth-century conflicts such as the Crimean and the Franco-Prussian Wars, which were relatively brief and had fewer casualties, the global wars of the twentieth century were of long duration and exacted heavy tolls in human lives and resources. Loss of lives among civilian populations could not be immediately nor easily estimated, and measuring the spiritual anguish and emotional dislocation caused by the war and its effects was virtually impossible. World War I was unique in the numbers participating in and affected by it. Previous wars, such as the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars, had required the active participation of large portions of the population, but never before 1914 had war so extensively called into play all the human and material resources of the participating nations. In World War I more than 10 million soldiers perished and twice as many were wounded, many permanently crippled and unable to return to normal peacetime lives. In World War II conscription and the displacement of people fleeing war or persecution made huge demographic changes across the European landscape. Between September 1939 and early 1943, at least 30 million Europeans were deported or fled from their homes. By recent estimates close to 60 million men, women, and children lost their lives in World War II, and many millions more suffered the indelible pain of loss and hardship. Twenty million people are estimated to have succumbed to war and its effects in the Soviet Union alone. Material costs were also too vast to be readily comprehended. Combatant nations in World War I spent at the rate of $10 million an hour, and the grand total of war expenditure (including property damage) has been estimated at $186 billion. World War II cost the United States $341 billion and cost Japan $562 billion; the Soviet Union lost approximately 30 percent of its national wealth. These staggering figures take on true meaning only in terms of what might have been accomplished by the expenditure of so much energy, effort, and money for peaceful purposes such as feeding, housing, and clothing people. How War Changed Society War tends to encourage the growth of state power for the mobilization of resources and the mobilization of citizenry. Control of the economy, government regulation and planning, and even requisitioning and rationing were necessary in the pursuit of wartime goals. The demands of technological innovation and the expense of new technology showed that the concentration Used by permission for Bridging World History, The Annenberg Foundation copyright © 2004 7 of power in the hands of political leaders was an effective and essential way to increase production and contribute to national power through military successes. Both World War I and II depended heavily on conscripted manpower. The mass production of weapons required the mass production of soldiers. By World War II fighting units were highly diversified, and the new dependence on technology required many units dedicated to servicing and supplying that technology. The traditional division between soldier and civilian disappeared, as mechanics were as necessary as other soldiers to the war effort. The importance of scientists and engineers grew as the realization dawned that new weapons could tip the balance quickly in favor of one belligerent over another. During World War II, European refugee scientists fleeing Hitler’s Germany persuaded the British and American governments to mount an effort for research and development that produced the first atomic bomb. Science and other aspects of culture were harnessed to serve the nationalist goals of societies. The Impact On Daily Life People felt the impact of war in many ways. Rationing of sugar, gasoline, tires, automobiles, coffee and other goods, shortages, and inflation were endured by millions. Welfare measures and expanding roles for labor unions in the organization of the labor force were utilized in the interests of the war effort. The war permitted the intrusion of states into the daily lives of individuals and families, sometimes legislating motherhood. Managed health care likewise was a product of the need to ensure workers’ health so that they could achieve maximum productivity. In the postwar era technology that had been created to meet military demands was applied to the production of consumer goods. Conflict in the Twentieth Century As the engagement of almost all the nations of the world in global warfare suggests, the twentieth century reflects the widespread and deep cultural divisions among societies. The goals of the major combatants and their alliances in World War II were complex and diverse, but the governments, if not the entire populations, were ardently committed to the justness of their causes and devoted enormous energy in propaganda efforts to convince both their own people and sometimes the enemy that they were right. Technological innovation, bureaucratic expansion, the ideological fervor were all characteristics of participants in World War II, which only temporarily, if at all, masked the divisions of race, class, and gender emerging in societies around the world. Used by permission for Bridging World History, The Annenberg Foundation copyright © 2004 8 Propaganda Propaganda was an important strategy that all sides used to help win the war. Hitler created a Ministry of Propaganda under the direction of Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945), who orchestrated mass demonstrations of Nazi supporters and coordinated the use of Nazi symbolism such as the swastika while crafting negative images of Jews and others in contrast to the ideal of Germanic nationhood. After the United States entered the war following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, vivid imagery and powerful stereotypes emerged on both sides of the Pacific. Just as the films of Leni Riefenstahl were useful propaganda for the Nazis, the forces of Hollywood created a propaganda campaign to convince American troops that they were fighting for their way of life. The director Frank Capra was called in by the U.S. government to prepare a series of documentaries to be distributed to American troops. These films were called Why We Fight and portrayed Japan as a demonlike enemy that represented the annihilation of civilization. Political cartoons showed Japanese soldiers with simian features, at once powerful and superhuman and pathetic and subhuman. Either image dehumanized the Japanese soldier. The Japanese used similar dehumanizing imagery in portrayals of American soldiers to strengthen the Japanese soldiers’ will to fight. Racism The Axis powers, particularly Nazi Germany, were committed to building a modern society based on racial purity; to this end they dedicated energy and resources to eliminating those human beings who did not fit their description of racial purity, including Gypsies and other minorities, along with the 6 million Jews who died in the Holocaust. The racism of the Nazis, widely criticized by the Allies but only reluctantly acted on, found echoes in racial discrimination that was part of both American and European societies. While the U.S. government critized Nazi policies, anti-Semitism and segregation laws that demeaned African American citizens were widely practiced in American society. Mobilization for the war effort also brought jobs to many African Americans. In Detroit, where auto factories first hired minorities in large numbers, hate strikes erupted in the plants and a race riot occurred in 1943. Unlike the women workers whose presence had been tolerated because it was assumed to be temporary, the black workers stayed after the war and Detroit became a center of the Civil Rights movement. The U.S. military establishment was segregated, and racial discrimination extended to the defense industry. Despite the fact that African-American troops saw heavy combat that they valiantly laid down their lives, they Used by permission for Bridging World History, The Annenberg Foundation copyright © 2004 9 remained segregated in most situations and were frequently discriminated against by white soldiers. Even the elite corps of black American bomber pilots known as the Tuskegee Airmen were subjected to racism by their fellow white soldiers. American armies also included Native Americans and Chicanos. The only secret U.S. military code never to be deciphered by the enemy was based on a Native American language. War in the Colonies European armies included many thousands of colonized peoples from Africa, Asia, and the Americas who fought alongside their colonizers. Support for the war effort was not unanimous. For example, in the British colony of Trinidad, where an American military base was situated, many saw the class struggle as more important and resisted fighting in the war. Black activist Elma Francois, whose occupation was clothes washer, was tried for sedition in 1937, and she spoke for many oppressed peoples when she claimed: “The only war we will fight in is the fight for better conditions, peace, and liberty.” But many in the colonies did see combat. Their wartime experiences forever changed the era’s understanding of colonial notions of “civilization” and “barbarism.” Japanese American Internment Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, U.S. immigration policy was severely biased against nonwhites, except for purposes of importing workers for hard labor. After Pearl Harbor the summary incarceration of more than 110,000 persons of Japanese birth or ancestry on the Pacific coast in either relocation (for the general population) or internment (for suspected Japanese loyalists or troublemakers) camps between March and mid-August 1942 demonstrated the difference in the ways that European and nonEuropean immigrants were viewed. A U.S. Supreme Court decision in 1943 (Hirabayashi v. U.S.) upheld the right of the military to treat Japanese Americans as enemy aliens, despite protestations of loyalty and actions that confirmed loyalty. One example of this was the all–Japanese American U.S. Army Unit 442, which fought bravely on World War II battlefields and became the most highly decorated unit in the army’s history. Japanese Americans also served the United States during the war as translators. The 150,000 Japanese living in Hawaii were not sent to internment camps because their labor was needed in agriculture and to rebuild the shipyards, unlike the West Coast Japanese whose confiscated agricultural lands and small businesses were desirable assets coveted by others. Used by permission for Bridging World History, The Annenberg Foundation copyright © 2004 10 Pan-Asianism The Japanese heralded Pan-Asianism in their Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, a plan aimed, however hypocritically, to unite Asians against their white European colonial oppressors. When the Japanese invaded Southeast Asia in 1941–1942, they claimed to be liberators from European colonial aggressors, and in India, Burma, and Indonesia the Japanese were met with support from local nationalists seeking to overthrow their European colonial masters. But the Japanese, like their Nazi allies, also had a strong sense of their own superiority and ultimately proved to be as oppressive as the Europeans they displaced, forcing other Asians to labor in factories and to serve their Japanese rulers as they had Europeans. Pan-Asian unity was as much a myth as that of the Aryan nation promoted by the Nazis. War Atrocities and War Crimes Trials Atrocities were carried out by Japanese soldiers in China as elsewhere, though perhaps the most dramatic was the “Rape of Nanjing” in December 1937, when Japanese troops engaged in random and merciless slaughter of an estimated 200,000 civilians in Nanjing and the surrounding area over a period of six weeks. The secret documents of Unit 731, a Japanese military unit in Manchuria whose doctors and scientists performed institutionalized murder in the form of lethal medical experimentation, only came to light publicly long after the end of the war. Such experiments as spreading bubonic plague virus among the local Chinese population or the vivisection of captured U.S. airmen at Kyushu Imperial University in 1945 mirror Nazi medical experiments on the inmates of concentration camps. No side was immune to accusations of atrocities. Toward the end of the war in Europe, the British put the German city of Dresden to the torch in a massive incendiary raid that killed 135,000 people, many of whom had fled westward from the Soviet advance. The firebombing of Tokyo in spring 1945 razed 16 square miles of the capital city and killed between 80,000 and 100,000 civilians, who were “scorched and boiled and baked to death” in the words of U.S. General Curtis LeMay, the architect of the bombing raid. The atomic bombs were dropped only a few months later on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Nuremberg and Tokyo War Crimes Trials were held after the war ended to seek legal redress against war criminals. Some were sentenced and a few individuals were executed, but these people, while guilty as charged, were also scapegoats for the responsibility of many more. Universal Human Rights and Values The two world wars focused attention on the extremes of human behavior and values and on the different interpretations of “human rights” that cultures and governments constructed to promote domestic or international Used by permission for Bridging World History, The Annenberg Foundation copyright © 2004 11 interests. After World War II organizations dedicated to international peace and order began to discuss universal human rights—basic human needs, decencies, participatory rights, and liberties. Could peoples from vastly different cultural and political perspectives agree on a basic covenant of human rights? The Postwar Order After 1945 the United States constructed a system of interlocking alliances and organizations that were designed to protect its national interests globally and to further economic ties. The most important of these was the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the principal organizational link between the United States and Europe. Other alliances formed by the United States in the postwar period include the Organization of American States (OAS), the defense treaty with Australia and New Zealand (ANZUS), and the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO). The Soviet Union similarly concluded the Warsaw Pact in postwar Europe to seal its relations with its allies and client states in eastern Europe. Seemingly little had changed in the perspectives of power. Status in the world community continued to be based on strategic military strength and the global reach of political and economic influence. The Cold War The emergence of the two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, is the clearest example of this postwar continuity of international relations. Their rivalry and competitiveness resulted in the era known as the “Cold War,” a period between the end of World War II and 1990, that arms and security continued to play a defining role. During the Cold War, suspicion and insecurity ran rampant. Russian distrust of the capitalist west and western distrust of radicalism had existed since the Bolsheviks took power in 1917. Russian and Allied self-interest, rather than mutual trust, had prevailed during the war. The Cold War was a global political chess game of moves and countermoves that tensions between the two superpowers varied in intensity. The division of Germany into Allied and Soviet zones of occupation after the war created the frontline of the Cold War in Europe, which persisted in the division of the city of Berlin and the two Germanys, East and West, until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The division between the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) deepened as a result of the Marshall Plan, by which the United States provided about $22.5 billion to aid the recovery of western Europe between 1948 and 1952. The Soviets perceived the 1949 military alliance of western governments (NATO) as a threat to their security. They responded with the economic integration of central European satellite Used by permission for Bridging World History, The Annenberg Foundation copyright © 2004 12 states and the Warsaw Pact, a counter military alliance. From West Asia to Ethiopia to South Africa, the superpowers extended their perspectives through conflicts and strategies involving “national security interests.” The Cold War found expression in technological ventures, including the space race to the moon, and in the continued development in military arms and nuclear capability. The Cold War became global in scale; no part of the world could be uninvolved. The Occupation of Japan In theory an Allied operation, the Occupation of Japan was in reality an American undertaking. General Douglas MacArthur, the supreme commander of the Allied Powers (SCAP), was in control of the Occupation forces. Initially, members of political parties and labor union organizers released from jail were allowed to recreate their organizations in the interest of creating a “democratic” Japan. Officials and bureaucrats identified with the militaristic ultranationalism of the war were removed from office, and some military figures were tried for war crimes. The goal of the democratization and demilitarization phase of the Occupation was to destroy the foundations of the Japanese empire and to prevent its resurgence. By 1947 the direction of Occupation policy began to shift. A general strike called by the newly reorganized labor unions was prevented by the Occupation authorities, and gradually former bureaucrats regained positions in the economic and political hierarchies of the Japanese government. Growing fears on the part of the United States that Communism was going to overwhelm Asia influenced the policies of the American Occupation. American authorities began to see Japan less as a defeated enemy to be controlled and more as a potentially important strategic ally in Asia. Reform and recovery became the key concerns of the Occupation after 1948 as the tide turned clearly in favor of Communist victory in China. When the Occupation ended in 1952, the United States had signed a peace treaty with Japan linked to the U.S.-Japan Security Pact, which provided for United States defense of Japan and the right of the United States to station troops in Japan. Part of the new Japanese constitution concluded in 1947 was a prohibition against maintaining armed forces capable of aggression. The United States demanded the inclusion of this article as a means to prevent Japan from launching another aggressive war. Because of this prohibition and because of U.S. interest in maintaining a strategic Asian ally, the United States has continued to maintain bases in Japan. Although there was considerable opposition to the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty, both domestically and abroad, and serious demonstrations against the renewal of the treaty in 1960 forced the resignation of the prime minister and the cancellation of a visit by the United States president, it was renewed every ten years. Used by permission for Bridging World History, The Annenberg Foundation copyright © 2004 13 The Korean War The Korean War erupted in 1950 as tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union heightened on the Korean peninsula following the postwar drawing of a line at the 38th parallel demarcating the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea in the north from the Republic of Korea in the south. An ally of the Soviet Union, the People’s Republic of China felt threatened by the landing of United Nations troops led by the American general Douglas MacArthur, who advocated crossing the northern border of the Yalu River into Chinese territory and eradicating the specter of Communism in Asia. The Korean War, which ended in 1953, symbolized the growing strategic concerns of the United States in Asia, reflected in the shift of Occupation policy toward Japan, and the division of Korea paralleled the division of postwar Germany and later of Vietnam between the two superpowers and their client states. After the Cold War The collapse of the USSR and the fragmentation of Eurasia in the closing decade of the twentieth century ended the Cold War. The costs of this “war” were higher than those of any other global conflict. Human, capital, and technological resources were drawn into the worldwide competition of the superpowers for political influence and strategic advantage. World military spending from 1960 to 1990 was $21 trillion. Despite major arms reductions (especially after the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks in 1991), the international perspectives on the role of weapons in creating security have not altered. Nuclear dangers persist. Japan’s economic achievement and the united postwar European economic community, as examples of successful transformations that global interdependence is balanced with limited military spending, are exceptions to the pattern of conflict and development. The persistence of world poverty among 1 billion of the planet’s peoples and the oppression of many more reminds us that “global politics in the human interest” reaches beyond the dualistic and perhaps oversimplistic perspectives of war and peace. Summary Despite its origins as a European conflict, World War II truly engulfed nearly the entire globe because of connections among Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas created by imperialism. Japan’s rise as a modern nation state and its role as a powerful player in both Asian and global politics by the early part of the twentieth century is a potent reminder of the influence of European imperialism as a model. Japan adapted rapidly to the developing global system of nation states and emerged as an Asian imperialist power by World War I, becoming a world player in World War II as a major ally of Germany and Italy. Used by permission for Bridging World History, The Annenberg Foundation copyright © 2004 14 Even more than World War I, World War II was a total war. It showed how effective an alliance among industry, science, and nationalism could be in the creation of wartime culture and its instruments of mass destruction used in the interests of the state. Though the era of mass armies supported by the fanatical nationalism of the civilian population had passed, World War II was a conflict between entire societies and cultures. The dropping of two atomic bombs on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 marked the end of the world war, but not the end of the perspectives that saw the world in terms of war and peace. Soon thermonuclear weapons, containing more destructive power than used by humans in their entire recorded history, made mass warfare utterly and completely obsolete. The powerful forces of resistance and revolution, however, were not. Used by permission for Bridging World History, The Annenberg Foundation copyright © 2004 15