Download The course of war: 1939-1944

Chapter 28 (Excerpt)
Purges and show trials. Western and Polish concern with Soviet intentions was understandable.
Even as Stalin called for European communist parties to join “Popular Front” governments and entered
into alliances with some democracies, at home he implemented a program of political terror beyond
anything contemplated even by the Nazis. In 1934, Sergei Mironovich Kirov (1888–1934), who had
criticized Stalin’s despotism in party meetings, was killed, probably on Stalin’s orders. But at the time,
the Soviet dictator pretended to mourn Kirov’s loss, and proceeded to “investigate” the assassination.
By the conclusion of the crackdown in 1939, the government had arrested between three and five
million of its citizens for imaginary crimes against the state. These supposed opponents, extremists, and
“enemies of the people,” who were paraded in “show trials” that instructed the Soviet people and the
watching world. There were trials of engineers, of industrial managers, of party leaders and officials.
Disoriented or impassive after torture and threats, strangely compliant defendants confessed to ever
more incredible crimes against the state before being sent to the labor camps or to death. In the course
of trial, some of the accused went insane, committed suicide, or mysteriously died. Hundreds of
thousands of Soviet citizens were shot.
The “show trials” culminated with the Soviet state turning on itself. Between 1934 and 1939
hundreds of inner-circle Communists were arrested, tried, and executed. Those killed included 70
percent of Central Committee members and 56 percent of the representatives to the 17th party
congress, held in 1934. A purge of military officers in 1937–1938 eliminated half of the Red Army’s
officer corps. The secret police killed more than 40,000 officers, of whom 400 were of the rank of
colonel and above. This total included three of the five marshals, thirteen of the fifteen army
commanders, nine out of ten army generals, and six out of seven admirals.
The gulag. Victims of the purge who escaped death wound up in labor camps, known by their
Russian acronym of “gulag.” This network of prisons, which spanned all 12 of the Soviet Union’s time
zones, was controlled by the secret police. (Between 1929 and Stalin’s death in 1953, an estimated 18
million Soviet citizens passed through the gulag system.) The idea of the gulag originated from the
“special camps” to which Bolsheviks sent “class enemies” during the Russian civil war. Stalin took a
personal interest in their development and implementation, and the camps gradually came to serve an
economic purpose as well. The prisoners provided slave labor to fuel the dictator’s aims of rapidly
industrializing the Soviet economy. Jailers fed the prisoners based on their capacity to work; those who
could not toil did not survive.
Ironically, the officials responsible for the gulag itself did not escape Stalin’s great purge. In
1938, Genrikh Yagoda, who had overseen the gulag’s dramatic expansion during the 1930s, was
sentenced to death for “counter-revolutionary” activity. In vain, he pleaded for his life in a letter to
Stalin: “It is hard to die. I fall to my knees before the People and the Party, and ask them to pardon me,
to save my life.”
With this record, why did so many people, especially European intellectuals, continue to have
such a favorable view of the Soviet Union? The historian François Furet has described this phenomenon
as the “illusion of October”—a naïve belief among intellectuals that the French revolution proved that
all revolutions were good things, and therefore the Russian Revolution must represent an advance for
humanity, regardless of its specific development. Moreover, the Depression was indeed a terrible crisis
for capitalism, leading many people to wonder if a better alternative existed. For those willing to believe
in goals rather than reality, the Soviet Union promised not only an economic paradise but also a socialist
utopia.
The course of war: 1939-1944
World War II began in September 1939 with the German assault on Poland. The war’s early stages
featured the rapid defeat of Poland and Germany’s stunning triumph in the Low Countries and France.
Though the German air war on Britain launched in the summer of 1940 met with resistance, Nazi forces
swept easily into the Soviet Union in the spring of 1941. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor at the end
of 1941 brought the United States into the war.
The tide of Axis success would turn in 1943, when the Russians defeated the Germans at
Stalingrad and the Allies launched an invasion of Europe from the south, through Italy. In the Asian
theater, meanwhile, Japan had reached the limit of its expansion, although it fiercely withstood the
Allied advance in ferocious naval warfare during 1943 and 1944.
The fall of Poland
The summer of 1939 featured Hitler turning his attention to Poland. He claimed mistreatment of ethnic
Germans in Polish Corridor, which divided East Prussia from the rest of Germany. Meanwhile, halfhearted negotiations occurred between British and Soviet diplomats for a formal military alliance.
Sensing an opening, Hitler again exploited his foes’ diplomatic weaknesses. In an event that stunned the
world, on August 23, 1939, Hitler’s foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, traveled to Moscow and
signed a non-aggression pact with his Soviet counterpart, V.I. Molotov. The Nazis, who detested the
Soviets both as Slavs and as Bolsheviks, had bought freedom for their invasion of Poland. From the
Soviet side, the pact delayed war with Germany and contained a secret clause allowing the Red Army to
occupy the eastern third of Poland and the three Baltic States. Comintern officials dictated the new
party line: they had fought fascism in Spain, but would now remain aloof from the “imperialist war.”
On September 1, 1939, free from the possibility of the Soviets assisting the Poles, Hitler let loose
Blitzkrieg (“lightning war”) on his eastern neighbor. To the end, he believed that the western
democracies would abandon Poland. Instead, under strong pressure from their own publics,
Chamberlain and Daladier redeemed their promises. On September 3, Britain and France declared war
on Germany.
Few expected Poland to prevail, but the war nonetheless went worse for the Poles than nearly
any observer predicted. Within two days, German bombs had destroyed the Polish air force. Within two
weeks, the Polish army had retreated to Warsaw. Poland then lost any chance to regroup when, fulfilling
a secret codicil of the Nazi-Soviet pact, Stalin sent the Red Army across Poland’s border and occupied
the eastern third of the country. By the end of September 1939, the invasion of Poland was complete.
Both conquering armies treated the Poles savagely. Seventy thousand Polish soldiers were killed
in action, and another 900,000 were captured by the enemy (just under 700,000 by the Germans, and
just over 200,000 by the Red Army). The Red Army massacred 4,443 Polish officers in Katyn forest, and
was surely also responsible for killing 10,000 other Polish officers missing since the Soviet occupation. SS
divisions accompanying the invading German army, meanwhile, implemented Nazi ideology: as an
inferior race, the Slavic Poles would be reduced to a docile, illiterate serfdom. Poles were barred from
schools, denied privileges and position, and subjected to arbitrary violence. SS troops slaughtered the
country’s leaders and intellectuals. After a slight delay, the SS and the German occupying authorities
herded much of Poland’s Jewish population into ghettoes in Lodz, Krakow, Warsaw, and other cities. The
Warsaw Ghetto exemplified the cruelties of Nazi rule. A walled-in section of the capital city from which
Jews could not leave, the ghetto at one point housed nearly 400,000 Jews in an area comprising less
than three percent of Warsaw’s land.
Beyond declaring war, Poland’s western allies did nothing to assist the beleaguered nation. The
British, fearing Luftwaffe reprisals, sent airplanes over Germany that dropped not bombs but thousands
of leaflets denouncing Hitler’s policies. French forces crossed four miles into German territory, engaged
in a brief skirmish, and then withdrew, lest the Germans counterattack.
In retrospect, bolder French action might have produced an early end to the war. Even in 1939,
with the Allies’ rearmament program incomplete, both French and German military leaders considered
the British/French side militarily superior. Moreover, since Hitler had left only a token force in the west,
a full-fledged French invasion in early September had a good chance of breaking through the German
lines. But French leaders, confident in their ability to repel a German assault on the Western Front from
secure defensive positions, saw no reason to risk the casualties that an offensive would have produced.
Immediately after the conquest of Poland, Hitler told his generals to prepare for an all-out
assault on France. The initial German strategy replicated the Schlieffen Plan by placing the main line of
attack through Belgium (see Chapter 25). This route avoided the Maginot Line, a sophisticated French
defense network that spanned the French-German border from Switzerland in the south to the
Ardennes Forest in the north. To Hitler’s dismay, weather and tactical delays postponed the German
attack through the winter of 1939-1940. The lack of action led some to label the conflict in the West the
“Phoney War.”
The winter’s only fighting occurred in far northeastern Europe. On November 30, 1939, eager to
reclaim territory lost after World War I, the Soviets invaded Finland. Twenty-six Red Army divisions
(465,000 men) sought to install a puppet regime. But in what became known as the Winter War, the
Finns, despite an army totaling a mere 130,000 men, desperately resisted. The British and French
governments believed that their military superiority over the Germans gave them troops to spare, and
considered assisting the Finns. On December 7, Chamberlain announced the sale of 30 fighter aircraft to
Finland. By February 1940, still searching for strategies to minimize casualties, the Allies spoke of waging
the war through the “Scandinavian cockpit.” They planned an expedition of 135,000 men to Finland
while simultaneously cutting off shipment of Swedish iron ore to Germany.
The fall of France
The “Phoney War” abruptly ended on April 8, 1940. Lest this Allied flirtation with Finland provide a
threat from the north, Germany invaded Denmark and Norway. Denmark surrendered within 24 hours;
Norway, with some assistance from British naval forces, lasted a few weeks longer.
By the time that Norway and Denmark fell, Daladier had been replaced as prime minister by
Paul Reynaud (1878-1966). But Daladier remained in the government, as minister of war. And the failure
of British intelligence to anticipate the attack on Norway marked the end of Chamberlain’s tenure as
prime minister. On May 10, 1940, Churchill assumed the post. As the British politician most associated
with a determined resistance to Nazi expansion, Churchill promised to end the cycle of Allied defeat and
retreat.
The very day that Churchill took office, German troops crossed into the Netherlands, Belgium,
and Luxembourg. A massive bombing of Rotterdam prompted the Dutch to surrender in four days. As
German intelligence had forecast, the best French and British troops rushed into Belgium. (The Belgian
government, recognizing too late the failure of its policy of neutrality, requested their assistance.) Poor
coordination among the Allies hampered their response. After 13 of its planes were shot down in the
first day of action, the Royal Air Force (RAF) unilaterally decided to cease supplying air cover for frontline troops. On the northern fringe of the Ardennes Forest, elite Belgian forces abandoned their
positions to move north to defend Brussels, but failed to inform their French allies of their change in
position.
Most important, however, it took the French military leadership more than four days to
recognize that the enemy was concentrating its attack not, as expected, on Belgium but instead on the
Ardennes. French and British military planners had believed that the Germans could not deploy their
tanks through the dense forest—one reason why the Maginot Line stopped at the forest’s edge. Instead,
the element of surprise and brilliant strategic planning allowed the Germans to overwhelm the weak
forces that the French general staff had stationed to defend the forest. When Gamelin finally ordered
his troops in Belgium to reverse course, German forces had already broken through the French line in
the Ardennes, and the roads in Belgium, clogged with refugees fleeing the German advance, were nearly
impassable.
Between May 10 and May 13, a well-timed counter-offensive of Allied troops moved north from
the Maginot Line and south from Belgium would have destroyed the German army. But, as German
intelligence analysts had anticipated, the overly bureaucratic French decision-making structure and
inter-Allied tensions prevented quick action. By the time Gamelin did move, it was too late.
On May 15, Reynaud privately informed Churchill that the battle for France was lost. Shortly
thereafter, the British leadership evacuated the British Expeditionary Force, which was pinned down on
the French coast at Dunkirk. Inexplicably, Hitler, fearful of a counterattack, ordered German
commanders then racing across France toward Dunkirk to halt. This decision allowed Churchill to
assemble a makeshift armada of all available vessels (222 naval and 665 privately owned civilian craft) to
rescue the beleaguered troops. At the start of the operation, the British military expected to save only
30,000 men. But all told, the volunteer armada was able to ferry 340,000 soldiers (123,000 of them
French) and more than 85,000 vehicles across the English Channel to safety.
The Dunkirk miracle sustained the British war effort, but the French cause was now hopeless.
On June 14, 1940, German troops entered Paris, and Reynaud resigned. The new government, headed
by Marshal Philippe Pétain (1856-1951), an aging hero of the previous war, sued for peace. Upon Hitler’s
orders, the signing ceremony for France’s unconditional surrender occurred in the Forest de Compiègne,
in the same rail car in which German representatives had signed the armistice to end World War I. The
terms of surrender placed northern France, the Netherlands, and Belgium under military occupation.
Southern France, around two-fifths of the prewar French territory, became a collaborationist state,
headed by Pétain. The resort town of Vichy served as the new regime’s capital. More than 1.5 million
French soldiers captured by the Germans remained as prisoners of war.
The Battle of Britain
For a brief period, the German army seemed invulnerable. As the Nazi-Soviet Pact held firm, Britain
alone fought Hitler. But in Churchill, the European democracies finally had a leader who could match
Hitler’s ability to rally public support. In one of his most famous addresses, just after the fall of France,
the prime minister informed the House of Commons:
We shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and
growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we
shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the
fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and even if,
which I do not for a moment believe, this Island or a large part of it were subjugated and
starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet,
would carry on the struggle, until, in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power
and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.
Despite Churchill’s soaring rhetoric, Britain’s fate now rested upon the Royal Air Force. The
conquest of France and the Netherlands provided air bases from which the Luftwaffe could challenge for
air supremacy over the English Channel, which long had sheltered the island from invasion. In the Battle
of Britain, which raged in August and September 1940, RAF pilots, aided by the invention of radar,
narrowly beat back the numerically superior Luftwaffe. Never, said Churchill, had so few done so much
for so many. Bombing of civilian targets in Britain nonetheless continued. The German “blitz” of London
lasted about six months and killed over 40,000 British civilians. By late 1940, the Germans were
dropping between 150 and 200 tons of bombs on London each day.
Other effects of the fall of France. On the eastern front, the Finns had sued for peace even
before France’s defeat, recognizing that their exhausted army could not hold out much longer. The
Soviet Union annexed the Karelian Isthmus and Viipuri (Finland’s third largest city), and received a 30year lease of the southern port city of Hangö. Stalin soon obtained more buffer territory. In late June,
Red Army troops occupied Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, their fates sealed by the Nazi-Soviet pact. The
Soviet dictator formally incorporated all three nations into the USSR, deeming them new “Soviet
Socialist Republics.” Stalin also demanded that Romania cede Bessarabia (modern-day Moldova). The
Romanians, who had tried to maintain their independence by bargaining with both the Soviet Union and
Germany, acceded. Additional Soviet pressure forced King Carol (r. 1930-1940) to abdicate the throne.
Novelist Olivia Manning described King Carol’s fate: “He had been too clever. He had played a double
game and lost.”
In East Asia, meanwhile, Japan in September 1940 joined Germany and Italy in the Tripartite
Pact. This defensive alliance committed each signatory to a common defense if one party were attacked.
The Japanese also took advantage of Vichy France’s weakness by demanding military rights and eventual
possession of French Indochina (Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam). In so doing, Japan threatened British
possessions in Malaya, Singapore, and Hong Kong, as well as the U.S. colony in the Philippines. Meeting
this threat represented one reason why U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882-1945) moved
the Pacific Fleet from San Diego to Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.
The invasion of the Soviet Union
By 1941, Hitler was planning a new venture for the spring: the invasion of his ally, the Soviet Union. As
the pages of Mein Kampf made clear, a determination to crush “Jewish Bolshevism” and calls for
Lebensraum formed cardinal principles of Hitler’s ideology, which were put aside only temporarily by
the requirements of the Nazi-Soviet pact. Some historians, however, have contended that the decision
to attack the Soviet Union was primarily strategic. Having lost the Battle of Britain, Hitler hoped to
eliminate Britain’s last potential ally on the continent and thus crush British morale.
The Balkan disruption. Events in the Balkans then disrupted Hitler’s plans. In 1939, dreaming of a
Balkan empire, Mussolini declared war on Albania, which the Italians quickly conquered. This acquisition
failed to satisfy Mussolini’s ambitions, and in October 1940, Italian troops invaded Greece. Until this
point, Italy had fought foes that were either overmatched (Ethiopia, Albania) or already defeated by
others (France). The Greeks had neither problem. After initially giving ground, they drove the
incompetently led Italians back into Albania. Then, in late March 1941, a coup toppled the pro-Axis
government in Yugoslavia, and the new regime appealed to Britain for assistance. Thanks to Mussolini’s
bungling, Hitler suddenly faced a potentially hostile front in the Balkans.
The Nazis responded with a lightning strike, invading Yugoslavia and Greece on April 6. The
campaign opened with savage German bombing of Belgrade; the Yugoslav government capitulated 11
days later. The Germans captured more than 300,000 Yugoslav soldiers, and Hitler ordered the country
dismembered. Germany treated Serbia as a conquered province, Italy annexed Dalmatia, and Croatia
became a puppet state under the rule of Ante Pavelić (1889-1955), head of the Croatian fascists, or
Ustaše. Greece held out until the end of April before surrendering. Roughly 300,000 Greek troops were
taken prisoner, and more than 15,000 died in the campaign.
Germany’s Balkan intervention had two important consequences. First, the operation pushed
back the invasion of the Soviet Union by roughly a month—a delay that would pose problems as winter
1941 loomed. Second, the newly created Ustaša government unleashed a genocidal campaign against
Serbs, Jews, Bosnians, and gypsies. By the end of the war, the Croatian regime killed an estimated
400,000 people.
Serbian royalist partisans—the Chetniks—responded with ethnic massacres of their own, while
another branch of partisans headed by Josef Broz (Marshal Tito; 1892-1980) looked to expel the
Germans and reunify the country under communist rule. By the end of the war, more than 1.7 million
Yugoslavs (over 10 percent of the nation’s prewar population) had perished. Sixty percent of the killings
occurred in Croatia. This legacy fueled ethnic hatreds that would reappear at the end of the Cold War.
Operation Barbarossa. With Yugoslavia and Greece pacified, Hitler returned his attention to the
Soviet Union. As German troops massed on the Soviet border in May and June 1941, Churchill shared
with Stalin British intelligence intercepts regarding German plans. A high-placed Soviet spy in Japan,
Richard Sorge, delivered similar warnings to Moscow. Yet Stalin, who normally trusted no one, for some
reason convinced himself that Hitler would keep his word. To his advisers, the Soviet dictator blandly
stated, “You can’t believe everything intelligence says.”
Hitler, for his part, predicted that “we have only to kick in the door and the whole rotten
structure will come crashing down.” The Red Army, after all, had barely defeated Finland. On June 22,
1941, German troops launched a three-pronged assault on the Russian heartland. In the north, they
targeted Leningrad; from the center, the capital, Moscow; to the south, the Crimean ports and lower
river Don. The Germans dubbed the invasion “Operation Barbarossa,” to commemorate the medieval
German emperor Frederick I Barbarossa. The invading force included 3600 tanks, 7000 artillery pieces,
2500 aircraft, and 600,000 motorized vehicles, spread out over a front totaling more than 900 miles.
In the first hours of fighting, the Germans destroyed one quarter of the Soviet air force. For
several days, a stunned Stalin retreated to his rural dacha, leaving the communist state leaderless. The
Red Army was ill-trained and poorly led; because of Stalin’s prewar purges, two-thirds of its generals
were novices. German troops advanced ruthlessly, authorized by Hitler to ignore international law and
kill captured political officials. In the operation’s first month, the invading forces captured more than
300,000 Red Army soldiers, while conquering most of Byelorussia, Latvia, and Lithuania.
The American role
As German troops surged across Ukraine, most international observers expected the Soviets to collapse
within weeks. One important figure, however, dissented from the consensus. Franklin Roosevelt, in fact,
long had encouraged international cooperation against the fascist threat. Yet as President of a country
whose public firmly supported a policy of isolation, Roosevelt had to move carefully. By December 1940,
he had transformed the United States into an “arsenal for democracy,” which would supply Britain with
military equipment. In January 1941, Roosevelt delivered his “Four Freedoms” address, envisioning a
postwar world committed to freedom of speech and worship, whose people would be free from fear
and want. On March 11, 1941, at Roosevelt’s urging, Congress passed the Lend-Lease Act, which
authorized military aid to nations fighting Axis aggression.
In the summer of 1941, Roosevelt took two momentous steps to aid the Soviets. First—rejecting
the counsel of his military advisers, who predicted that the USSR would collapse before the aid would
arrive—he offered Lend-Lease assistance to the Red Army. The first supplies arrived in September.
Second, and far more boldly, the President used American economic power—Japan relied on foreign
imports, and as late as 1941, the bulk of its oil still came from the United States—to discourage a
Japanese attack on the Soviet Union.
In September 1941, as Roosevelt had hoped, the Japanese government called off an attack to
the north. Japan instead sought to acquire a new source of oil by conquering the virtually undefended
Dutch colony of Indonesia. As the Axis threat to Siberia receded, Stalin recalled from the east winterized
troops, who helped stave off a German bid to capture Moscow. Hitler’s invading forces, like those of
Napoleon more than a century before, were thus left exposed in the field to the brutal Russian winter.
To the west, the citizens and soldiers holding Leningrad—where a siege of almost 900 terrible days cost
over 1,000,000 lives—saved that city as well. Though Ukrainians and Belarussians initially greeted
German troops as liberators and a small minority collaborated with the Nazis, most soon reconsidered.
Hitler’s racial theories, which called for treating the Slavs as well as the Jews as subhuman, cost
Germany potential allies in the campaign against Stalin.
Pearl Harbor. As the Russian front stabilized, the Japanese strike to the south assumed a
dimension that few in either the United States or Britain anticipated. A combination of bureaucratic
failures, distraction with events in Europe, and racial prejudice (Churchill, for instance, speculated that
Japanese pilots could not fly at night) led key policymakers to downplay the possibility of the Japanese
targeting U.S. or British possessions in East Asia. In a plan brilliantly conceived by Admiral Isoroku
Yamamoto (1884-1943), Japanese air, naval, and ground forces simultaneously struck the Philippines,
Singapore, the Dutch East Indies, and Pearl Harbor. The attack, on December 7, 1941, was a complete
surprise. The Pearl Harbor bombings killed 2,403 American servicemen and 68 civilians.
In the short term, Pearl Harbor benefited the Axis powers. But in the long term, the surprise
attack ensured their defeat by bringing the United States into the conflict. On December 11, Hitler
declared war on the United States. The unexpected move made it easier for Roosevelt to ignore public
pressure for retaliation against the Japanese and focus the U.S. military response on the European
theater. (For the next three years, around two-thirds of American men and materiel would be expended
in Europe and North Africa.) On the economic front, American factories soared into full production. By
spring 1942, U.S, troops were pouring into England, Africa, and Asia while a fleet strong enough to patrol
two oceans gathered in the south Pacific.
The tide turns
As the United States geared up for full participation in the war (its federal budget increased ten-fold
between 1940 and 1945), the Soviets withstood another furious assault from German troops. Having
failed to conquer Moscow, the Germans in 1942 targeted the Crimea, in southern Russia. In August
1942, German forces reached the industrial center of Stalingrad, on the river Volga, gateway to the
Caucasus oilfields. Along with troops from Romania and Hungary, they laid siege to the city. As winter
arrived, the battle hardened. In a daring maneuver, General Georgi Zhukov (1896–1974), commander of
the Soviet forces defending the city, concentrated his troops to the city’s south. There, Soviet forces
broke through a line defended by ill-equipped Romanians, and moved north to encircle the invaders.
The German military leadership told their troops to pull back. But Hitler countermanded the
order, and threatened that any German soldier who retreated would be shot. As Zhukov’s forces pushed
northward behind enemy lines, the Germans were surrounded. Many froze and starved; others died in
combat as newly minted tanks emerged from the Stalingrad factories. Of the 284,000 German soldiers
initially trapped in Stalingrad, the 91,000 who survived surrendered to the Soviet army on January 31,
1943. German military morale never recovered. On all sides, the battle left two million dead, including
500,000 Soviet civilians.
Stalin spent the decade before the German invasion orchestrating a program of mass terror in
his country. The forced collectivization of Soviet agriculture produced a famine that killed millions. The
show trials led to mass arrests for imagined political crimes. How, then, could the Soviet dictator
mobilize his nation to withstand the German onslaught, even as an estimated 20 to 28 million Soviet
soldiers and civilians died in the conflict?
During the war, Stalin deliberately downplayed communist ideology and stressed patriotism and
nationalism instead. Wartime Soviet propaganda described the conflict as a war for Mother Russia, the
Great Patriotic War. At the same time, he engaged in a brutal campaign of repression against national
minorities suspected of disloyalty, such as the Chechens, who were deported en masse to Siberia.
The Middle East and North Africa. In the North African and East Asian theaters, the war turned
firmly in the Allies’ direction by late 1943. Instability in the Middle East dated from prewar Arab
opposition to increased Jewish immigration to the British mandate in Palestine. In 1936, Arabs, led by
Muhammed Amin al-Husseini (1896-1974), the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, rebelled against what they
perceived as a pro-Jewish tilt in British policy. British troops suppressed the revolt and banished the
Grand Mufti, but the start of the European war gave him new leverage. He aggressively sought Nazi
support in their common campaign against Jews, and in early 1941, helped organize a coup that ousted
the pro-British government of Iraq. Thereafter, he traveled to Berlin as a guest of the Nazi leadership,
and subsequently delivered propaganda broadcasts urging Arabs to take up arms against the Allies and
the Jews.
Throughout 1941 and early 1942, the Allies were also on the defensive in North Africa. German
forces under General Erwin Rommel (1891–1944), joined by Italian troops, consolidated their holdings in
Libya and moved eastward to threaten the Suez Canal. But at El Alamein, Egypt, in October 1942, British
general Bernard Montgomery (1887–1976) bested Rommel, the mastermind of tank warfare, profiting
from the British having cracked German codes. (Rommel, meanwhile, attributed his defeat to the
“meager quality of the Italians and their reluctance to fight.”) A few weeks later, on November 8, U.S.
forces under General Dwight Eisenhower (1890–1969) launched Operation TORCH, landing in Morocco
and Algeria. British troops moving from the east and Americans marching from the west trapped
Rommel’s forces in Tunisia.
Invasion of Italy. With the liberation of North Africa completed by May 1943, Stalin pressed
Roosevelt and Churchill to establish a second front in France. The Soviet ruler wanted to force the
Germans to transfer some of their troops to the west. (Approximately 80 percent of Germany’s wartime
forces and nearly all of its elite troops fought in the East.) But Western leaders correctly considered a
cross-channel landing suicidal at this stage. Hoping to soothe Stalin’s concerns that the West might
negotiate a separate peace, they issued a declaration from Casablanca, Morocco, affirming their
intention to demand unconditional surrender from Germany.
Instead of a landing in France, the Allied leadership targeted what Churchill (incorrectly) termed
the “soft underbelly” of Nazi Europe—Italy. The invading force had little difficulty conquering Sicily and
southern Italy. Then, on July 22, 1943, King Victor Immanuel III (1869-1947), still nominally sovereign,
ordered Mussolini’s dismissal and imprisonment. Seeking to prevent the Allied advance, the Hitler
withdrew battle-hardened troops, including SS units, from the eastern front and invaded Italy from the
north. In a daring rescue, they freed Mussolini, who they installed as head of a new puppet regime. By
June 5, 1944, the Allies had fought their way to Rome, but the Germans still held the north.
The Pacific theater. In East Asia, elements within Japan’s government began to redefine the
empire’s war aims so they could claim, at least, a moral victory. Diplomats such as Foreign Minister
Mamoru Shigemitsu (1887-1957) contended that Japan was fighting not for conquest, but to create a
“Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.” Such a system, Shigemitsu claimed, could exist just as easily in
peacetime as in war, now that the Japanese military had cast off the yoke of Western imperialism in the
region.
Japan reached the limits of its expansion in June 1942, after losing naval battles in the Coral Sea
(which prevented an invasion of Australia) and at Midway (which made Hawaii safe from invasion). The
United States, with its British and Australian allies, thereafter combined naval battles, often with aircraft
carriers, and Marine “island hopping,” taking vital islands while bypassing other Japanese-held atolls.
The fiercest of these early battles, on the island of Guadalcanal, lasted from August 7, 1942 until March
6, 1943. It left 2,092 Americans killed in action, compared to 14,800 Japanese who perished in battle
and another 9,000 who died from disease. Only about 1,000 Japanese soldiers remained alive to be
taken prisoner.
Final reckoning: 1944-1945
By mid-1944, it was clear that Allied forces eventually would prevail. In the first half of 1945, the
Americans closed in on Germany from the West while the Red Army did so from the East. Allied forces
declared “Victory in Europe”—VE—on May 8, 1945. Three months after the last shots were fired in
Europe, the Pacific War ended when the United States used two atomic bombs against Japan, eliciting
its unconditional surrender.
Millions of civilian deaths paved the way for that final triumph. Between 1931 and 1945, war left
more than 100 million people killed, wounded, or homeless. Unlike any previous international conflict,
all sides targeted civilians as well as soldiers. Citizens of urban areas suffered mass bombings; much of
Eastern Europe experienced the grim effects of ethnic cleansing; more than 150,000 Japanese were
incinerated by atomic bombs; and the Nazis slaughtered six million Jews in implementing their “Final
Solution.” This massive episode of genocidal murder was later named the Holocaust (Greek for “burnt
sacrifice”), or Shoah (Hebrew for “destruction”).
The Holocaust
At the start of the war, the German regime claimed that it merely intended to “resettle” Europe’s Jews,
herding them into concentration camps, mostly in Poland and Ukraine. But the plan soon became a
determination to annihilate all of European Jewry, a program described by the Nazis as the “final
solution.”
Some Jews were shot, like the 33,771 at Babi Yar, near Kiev in Ukraine—and a further 500,000
before the German retreat from the Soviet Union. Others were walled into ghettos from which they
could not leave, like the Jews of Warsaw, where disease and hunger was rampant. Others were
transported to concentration camps—along with resisters, communists, gypsies, homosexuals, Russian
and Polish prisoners, and other groups that the Nazis considered inferior. There they were tormented,
starved, and worked to death. Many died from the privations of the camps, the brutality of the guards,
and the grotesque “scientific” experiments performed on these dehumanized subjects. The Germans
established more than 20 concentration camps on German and Polish territory to warehouse their
victims and extract what labor they could before the imprisoned succumbed to starvation and disease.
Of these, a few were designated as death camps—in German, literally “places of annihilation”—whose
purpose was the extermination of human beings. The major death camps were Auschwitz (which also
served as a labor camp), Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibor, and Treblinka.
Nazi managers invented a method of mass extermination: the gas chamber, which was first
deployed on an experimental basis in late 1941, at Auschwitz. SS guards packed hundreds, even
thousands of prisoners at a time into the sealed rooms. They introduced a precise quantity of Zyklon-B
gas (crystallized prussic acid, normally used as a pesticide). Death followed in just a few minutes—
between three and fifteen, a camp commander would report to the postwar Nuremberg Tribunal for
war crimes. Squads of Jewish slave laborers then ripped out gold teeth, and searched the bodies for
gold, jewelry, and gems, before burning or burying the dead. In a few hours, all trace of the slaughter
was removed—bones, blood, ashes, all vanished. At Auschwitz, the most efficient of the death camps,
the Germans used this pitiless system to kill as many as 18,000 people per day, and a total of perhaps
2.5 million during its years of operation.
Responses to the Holocaust. Why did no one intervene to stop the slaughter? Much of the killing
happened in secret. But by 1942, the Allied governments understood that the Germans were murdering
Jews on a large scale. The British general staff, however, turned down Churchill’s requests for bombing
raids of the railroads used to transport Jews to the death camps. Military leaders did not want to place
British pilots in harm’s way for what they considered a non-military purpose, and the prime minister did
not press the issue.
Countries living under Nazi occupation responded to the Holocaust in dramatically different
ways. Pétain’s Vichy government proved nearly as zealous as the Nazi regime itself in sending Jews to
death camps. The legacy of collaboration would haunt French society in the postwar years. Contrary to
the country’s postwar reputation as a bastion of tolerance, the Dutch did little to resist the Nazis’
campaign of killing. Local Nazis offered a monetary reward to any Dutch citizen who revealed the
whereabouts of a Jew; by the end of the war, a higher percentage of Jews had been deported to
concentration camps from the Netherlands than from any country in Europe.
Other occupied states did much more to protect the lives of their fellow citizens. The Danish
underground, with the support of the country’s prewar political establishment, audaciously slipped
nearly all of Denmark’s 7,200-person Jewish population to safety in neutral Sweden. The Finnish
government, despite joining Nazi Germany in the invasion of the Soviet Union, rebuffed Hitler’s
demands to hand over Jews (many of them German) who had fled to Finland. Hungary (until early 1944)
and Bulgaria also resisted German calls to deport Jews from their countries.
By early 1944, Hitler was a sick man physically—he did not deliver a public address all year—and
increasingly divorced from reality. But he still pressed for the execution of all Jews, even at the expense
of the German war effort. Deportations of Jews from Holland and France increased. Hungary’s ruler,
Admiral Horthy, caved in to intense German pressure to hand over his nation’s Jews. Over 400,000
Hungarian Jews went to their deaths until international pressure led Horthy to reverse his position in
June 1944. Shortly thereafter, the Nazis invaded Hungary, deposed Horthy, and established a puppet
government under the fascist Arrow Cross movement.
Rescuers. In this bleak environment, stories of personal and intellectual heroism nonetheless
appeared. The best known is that of Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg (1912-1947?), who arrived in
Budapest in June 1944, charged by the Swedish government with organizing a rescue operation for
Hungarian Jews. After a personal plea from the king of Sweden, Horthy allowed Hungarian Jews who
were issued special Swedish diplomatic papers to remain free. Wallenberg’s aggressive, and courageous,
diplomatic maneuvers saved tens of thousands of Jews.
Around Europe, others risked their lives to save the victims of Hitler’s persecution. Portuguese
diplomat Aristides de Sousa Mendes, consul-general at Bordeaux during the German invasion of France,
defied his government’s orders and issued transit visas to thousands of Jews fleeing the advancing
German army. In Lithuania, Jonas Paulavicius constructed a secret compartment below his home, in
which he sheltered a dozen Jews. In Greece, Nikolaou Kostas hid a Jewish family outside of Athens,
supplied them with forged identity papers, and arranged for their transport to neutral Turkey.
Luxembourg’s former justice minister, Victor Bodson, organized an underground escape route from
Germany and brought 100 Jews to safety.
The Pope’s role. The most controversial response to the Holocaust came from the leadership of
the Roman Catholic Church. For three years after assuming the papacy in 1939, Pope Pius XII rebuffed
pleas from religious leaders and diplomats to publicly condemn the Nazi killing of civilians. On some
occasions, he explained that doing so could expose Catholics in Nazi-occupied lands to harm; on others,
he stated that the Vatican could not verify accounts of Nazi atrocities.
Defenders of Pius point to the Pope’s behind-the-scenes efforts to save Jews, and cite his
vulnerability as head of a state entirely surrounded by Fascist Italy. Critics note that the Pope never
publicly uttered the word “Jews” at any point during the war, and contend that Pius’ extreme anticommunism blinded him to the evils from the anti-Semitic right. Since the Vatican has refused to allow
scholars to see its archival documents on Pius’ tenure, it is impossible to speak definitively about the
Pope’s true intentions.
By the end of World War II, the death camps killed about eleven million people, of whom nearly
six million were Jews.
The fate of Poland
Including three million Polish Jews, more than six million citizens of Poland died in World War II, victims
of both Nazi and Soviet savagery. Indeed, in terms of the proportion of the pre-war population killed, no
single nation suffered more cruelly than Poland.
After the discovery in 1943 of the Katyn gravesite, which contained victims of the Soviet
massacre of May 1940, the Polish government-in-exile severed diplomatic relations with Moscow. In
response, Stalin recognized a committee of communist Poles as the legitimate government of Poland. As
the Red Army pressed westward in 1944 and approached the Vistula River east of Warsaw, the Polish
government-in-exile ordered its partisans to revolt against the German occupiers. But the Red Army
then stopped its advance just before reaching the capital. Stalin rejected pleas from Churchill and
Roosevelt to aid the Poles himself or to allow British and American forces to use Soviet territory to
supply the Poles. Hitler sent five divisions of German troops to crush the uprising, and, after two months
of intense fighting, the Polish Home Army was destroyed.
Poland’s fate symbolized the division among the Allies in their vision of postwar Europe, the
subject of two wartime conferences between the “Big Three”—Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin. The trio
first met in 1943, in the Iranian capital of Teheran. (This was the first time in his life that Stalin had
traveled outside of the borders of the Soviet Union.) The Teheran conferees accepted Stalin’s insistence
on redrawing Poland’s boundaries. The territory annexed by the Soviet Union after the Nazi-Soviet pact,
home to almost three million Poles, would remain under Soviet control. The Poles would be
compensated with 100,000 square kilometers of German territory, with a new boundary established at
the Oder and Neisse rivers. The two million Germans residing on the Polish side of the new border
would be deported.
In February 1945, Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt met for the final time, in the Crimean city of
Yalta. The three men called for a four-power occupation of postwar Germany (with the French zone to
be carved out of the territory assigned to Britain and the United States). Stalin promised to enter the
Pacific War on the Allies’ side within three months after European hostilities concluded. The issue of
Poland, however, proved unresolvable. Stalin still refused to recognize the Polish government-in-exile.
He would only agree to what the conference communiqué termed “the holding of free and unfettered
elections” between “all democratic and anti-Nazi parties.”
Long after World War II ended, conservatives denounced the Yalta Accords as a “sellout” to the
Soviet Union, contending that Roosevelt consented to the “enslavement” of Poland and, by extension,
all of Eastern Europe. It is unclear, however, what more the President could have done. Apart from the
relatively small amount of U.S. Lend-Lease aid to the Soviet Union, the West lacked leverage over Soviet
policy. Roosevelt could only hope that his cooperative attitude at Yalta would make Stalin feel secure
enough not to install a Polish puppet regime.
D-Day and beyond
The final act of World War II opened with the invasion of France on D-Day—June 6, 1944. Months of
British and American planning paid off as Allied forces crossed the Channel to land on the Normandy
coast, under the supreme command of Dwight Eisenhower. Hitler, convinced by double agents that the
landing was a diversion for an assault further up the French coast, held back German troops for an
attack that never came. In league with the Allies were the forces of General Charles de Gaulle (1890–
1970), who had escaped ahead of the Nazi takeover in 1940. From exile in England, de Gaulle had
organized the “Free French,” which the Allies recognized as the legitimate government of France.
The final stages of the war, from June 1944 through May 1945, featured unprecedented military
defeats for the Germans. Between June and September 1944, the German army lost on all fronts, with
over one million Germans killed or captured. In the east, the Soviets resumed their campaign across
Poland; Romania and Bulgaria changed sides and declared war on Germany; and the first Soviet troops
occupied Hungary. While there, they arrested Raoul Wallenberg as an alleged spy; he was never seen
alive again.
In the west, the British and Americans withstood a last-ditch German counteroffensive in the
Ardennes—the “Battle of the Bulge”—and crossed into German territory. The Italian front remained
bloody, as Germans bitterly resisted a slow Allied advance northward. Venice, the last major Italian city
to fall, was taken only nine days before the German surrender on VE (“Victory in Europe”) Day.
Meanwhile, the Allies launched an unprecedented bombing campaign against the German heartland. In
the final four months of the war, the Allies dropped 471,000 tons of bombs on Germany, double the
amount in all of 1943. In the same time period, more than 1.5 million German soldiers died.
It was a dreadful liberation, accomplished with looting and terror. Red Army troops sweeping in
from eastern Europe raped as many as 1.4 million women (18 percent of the female population). As they
marched towards Berlin, Soviet troops found in the Nazi concentration camps they liberated—mass
graves, machines of torture and death, a remnant of starved survivors—the evidence of unutterable
evil, a secret and hideous genocidal war against the Jews.
On May 8, shortly after Hitler committed suicide in his Berlin bunker, German forces finally
surrendered. German society had reached Stunde Null (“zero hour”), the time of absolute capitulation.
Berlin had no electricity, gas, or water supplies. One-fifth of the capital’s buildings had been destroyed.
Cholera and diphtheria epidemics claimed an estimated 4,000 people daily. And the city’s population
had shrunk more than 30 percent from its prewar level.
Japan and the atomic bomb
The end of the European war focused undivided attention on East Asia. Many in the West thought that
Japan could hold out until 1947, and virtually all expected a bloody invasion of the Japanese home
islands. Instead, the war swiftly ended. On August 15, 1945, Japan surrendered after two atomic bombs
destroyed the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The making of the bomb. Throughout World War II, Germany, the Soviet Union, and the United
States all funded projects to design an atomic bomb. They built off the investigation of the atom by
scientists such as Denmark’s Neils Bohr (1885–1962) and Germany’s Max Planck (1858–1947).
Previously, the atom had been understood as the smallest particle, irreducible and changeless, of any
substance. Within the atom, scientists discovered an inconceivably small universe anchored by a nucleus
about which other particles whirled (the electrons); and within the nucleus, further particles (protons
and neutrons).
Albert Einstein (1879–1955), who had foreseen the horror of the bomb, wrote President
Roosevelt in 1939, explaining how the power of nuclear fission could be harnessed to create a weapon
of unprecedented force. Late in 1941, a team of British, Canadian, and U.S. scientists, in the top-secret
“Manhattan Project,” labored to create this weapon of weapons.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki. On July 16, 1945, a test explosion in the New Mexico desert showed
the bomb was ready. When Japan refused a U.S. ultimatum to surrender unconditionally, President
Harry S Truman (who had succeeded to the presidency after Roosevelt’s death in April), ordered U.S.
planes to drop on two Japanese cities the most powerful weapon ever made. On August 6, in Hiroshima,
78,000 of the city’s 300,000 people were killed—vaporized, burned, crushed. Many more were injured.
The remainder lived to suffer mutilation and the horrible consequence of radiation. Three days later, a
second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, where 74,000 perished. The deadly bombs, signaled by the
mushroom-shaped cloud that immediately formed above the ruins, brought the desired result. On
August 15, the Japanese government surrendered.
Truman’s decision to use atomic bombs has generated intense controversy among scholars. The
President’s defenders have cited his explanation from the time: that he wanted to spare the casualties
from an invasion of the Japanese home islands. Some historians, however, have claimed that Japan was
on the edge of surrendering, and the President actually used the bomb to intimidate the Soviet Union.
Others have deemed the head of a democratic state using a weapon of such potency an immoral act.
Little evidence exists to sustain the arguments of those who have claimed that Truman acted for anti-
Soviet reasons. The morality of his action—in a war riddled with so many examples of immorality—is
harder to judge.
Conclusion: never again
In this fight to the finish, Fascism was decisively defeated. But the memory of the unique horrors of
World War II remained. Europeans and Americans resolved never to forget, and never to repeat, the
evils spawned of dictatorship: the depredations, the slaughter of civilians, the racist fantasies, the
Holocaust and the bomb. Yet even before the war closed, the seeds of a new conflict had been sown,
one which would result in a standoff between two nations on the periphery of Europe—the United
States and the Soviet Union—whose rivalry would threaten the destruction not just of Europe, but of all
the inhabitants of the globe.