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Chapter 37
New Conflagrations: World War II
THE CHAPTER IN PERSPECTIVE
From the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931 to the dropping of the atomic bombs on
Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the late summer of 1945, the peoples of the world suffered through
fourteen years of horrible war and devastating deprivation. To an even greater extent than the
Great War, the Second World War was truly a global conflict. Unfortunately, the number of dead
and wounded would also be much greater in the second confrontation. Civilians also suffered to
a much greater extent. Relations between imperialist nations and their colonies were strained,
finally, to the breaking point. Gender relations were transformed once again by international
warfare. To the horror of many, the end of World War II led directly into the uncertainty of the
cold war and the ever-present nightmare of the atomic age.
OVERVIEW
Origins of World War II
The uneasy calm that had followed the end of World War I, already strained by the Great
Depression, was shattered forever by the outbreak of war in Asia in the early 1930s. Militant
nationalists won control in Japan and used the staged Mukden incident to justify an invasion of
Manchuria (which soon became the puppet state Manchukuo). Japanese plans to build a
“Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” appeared to Japan’s neighbors to be a thinly veiled call
for empire. Any illusion to the contrary disappeared in 1937 with a full-scale Japanese invasion
of China. The response of the League of Nations was ineffectual and war raged on in China.
Atrocities such as the bombing of Shanghai and rape of Nanjing followed. Jiang Jieshi and the
Guomindang and Mao Zedong and the Communists were eventually able to tie the Japanese
down in a prolonged and very bloody stalemate.
The peace in Europe lasted only a few years longer. Benito Mussolini and the Italian
fascists sent troops into Ethiopia and Albania and sided with Francisco Franco in the Spanish
Civil War. A quarter million Ethiopians lost their lives but the League remained helpless. Adolf
Hitler, emboldened by the collective lack of response to Japanese and Italian aggression, put in
place his own plans for a return to German greatness. Like Italy, German trained its troops in the
Spanish Civil War. In 1938 Hitler forced the Anschluss on Austria. In response the English and
French, in a policy that has received the pejorative title “appeasement”, seemed to cave in to
every one of Hitler’s demands. Recent scholarship, while not commending the policy of
appeasement, has pointed out that with the absence of the United States and the presence of the
Soviet Union, the British and French may not have had any good options. The high point of
appeasement came at the Munich Conference in September 1938 when the British prime minister
Neville Chamberlain handed the Sudetenland over to Hitler in return for “peace for our time.”
Less than a year later the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact in August 1939 showed the folly of
Chamberlain’s words. Within a few weeks Poland was invaded by the Germans and Soviets, and
war had returned to Europe.
Total War: The World Under Fire
Almost unbelievably, the scale of warfare in World War II dwarfed that of the Great War.
Only eleven nations in the world were not involved directly. Germany shocked the world by
rapidly taking over hundreds of miles of conquered land with its new blitzkrieg style. In short
order Poland, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, and France fell to the Nazi Panzer
and Luftwaffe forces. Only the miracle of Dunkirk allowed the British to remain in the fight. Nazi
planes pounded away at England in the Battle of Britain, but Hitler made his first mistake when
he switched from strategic bombing to the more terror-oriented assault of “the Blitz.” Displaying
characteristic grit, the British held out, and in 1941 Hitler decided to move on to an invasion of
the Soviets while leaving England unconquered.
The war changed dramatically in the summer and winter of 1941with the entry of the
Soviet Union and the United States. Germany invaded the Soviet Union, as part of Operation
Barbarossa, in June 1941. At first the Russian campaign looked like blitzkrieg at its finest, with the
German army chewing up hundreds of miles of territory and closing in on Moscow and
Leningrad. A stiffening Russian resistance and the arrival of “General Winter” froze the
Germans in their tracks just shy of their goals. Victory remained maddeningly just out of reach.
The problem was that the Germans had now forced the Soviet Union, a country with a large
population and tremendous industrial potential, directly into the fray. Obviously, the situation
became much more dire for the Nazis with the later arrival of a certified industrial giant, the
United States. Quite simply, at this point the war became a matter of production and the
Germans were buried. Bismarck’s admonition about “blood and iron” took on an even greater
meaning. The Russian victory at Stalingrad in February 1943 turned the tide of the war, and the
Allied invasion at Normandy in June 1944 sealed Germany’s doom. Hitler committed suicide on
30 April 1945 and the Germans surrendered a week later.
In Asia the war dated back to 1931 and had been fought on a full-scale basis since 1937.
By 1941 Japan found itself in the difficult position of being trapped in a bloody stalemate in
China that left it no closer to victory than it had been four years earlier. A tightening American
embargo on oil left Japan with a limited window of opportunity for carving off its empire. The
surprise attack on the American base at Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941 was designed to buy
the Japanese enough time to solidify their conquests in the Pacific while the United States rebuilt
its navy. To the surprise of the Japanese, the American victory at Midway in June 1942 quickly
turned the tide of battle in the Pacific. A tortuous process of island hopping slowly shrank the
Japanese empire. In early 1945 the United States won bloody battles at Iwo Jima and Okinawa
and was within striking distance of Japan itself. The war ended with the dropping of atomic
bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945.
Life During Wartime
One of the great horrible constants of both military and civilian life in World War II was
continual bombing, ranging from high explosives and incendiaries to V-1 rockets and the atomic
bomb. On a much greater scale than in the Great War cities and civilian populations were
important targets, both to destroy infrastructure and to terrorize the populace. Shanghai,
Warsaw, Dresden, London, Tokyo, and of course, Hiroshima and Nagasaki all underwent
intensive bombing. Occupation by the Axis powers almost always followed military conquest. It
was common for the Axis powers to exploit the conquered civilian population as virtual slave
laborers. Many members of the occupied countries would serve as resistance fighters, while
others would be only too willing to collaborate with the conquerors for personal gain or to
redress perceived past wrongs.
With the possible exception of the rape of Nanjing, the worst example of treatment meted
out to a conquered people was the Holocaust. Anti-Semitism has a long and sad history, and it
became one of the foundations of Hitler’s political philosophy. With Hitler, however, mistrust of
the Jews took on an all-encompassing racial hatred that bordered on madness. Persecution of the
Jews by Hitler dated back to the early days of his reign with the Nuremberg Laws and the later
Kristallnacht. The outbreak of the war only increased Hitler’s paranoia, and by the end of 1941
the SS Einsatzgruppen (“action squads”) had killed around 1.4 million Jews. At the Wannsee
Conference in January 1942 a Final Solution to the Jewish Question was reached. By the end of
the war, death camps such as Auschwitz, Treblinka, Kuhmhof, and Belzec had killed 5.7 million
Jews.
Neither Peace nor War
Unfortunately, the rise of the cold war followed hard on the heels of the end of World
War II. The Allies had always argued over questions such as Stalin’s desire for a second front,
but what would eventually tear them apart would be questions about the makeup of the postwar
world. The Americans believed the Soviet rhetoric of permanent revolution and felt that the
Russians were spending more time setting up new communist regimes than finishing off the
Germans. For their part, the Soviets, even if they at times reflected Stalin’s own paranoia, had
lost twenty million people in the war and wanted to create a cordon sanitaire out of eastern
Europe. As early as the Yalta Conference it was becoming obvious that serious cracks had
developed in the foundations of the Grand Alliance. The United States’s foreign policy entered a
new, more interventionist phase with the Truman Doctrine’s stated goal of “containing”
communism. A constant and increasingly dangerous competitive game followed. The Marshall
Plan’s goal of financially rebuilding Europe and thus holding off the spread of communism
inspired the rise of the Soviet Council for Mutual Economic Aid (COMECON). Tensions were
heightened with the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the Warsaw
Pact. Despite the growing Soviet-American tension, the signing of the United Nations Charter in
1945 gave hope for a world based on cooperation rather than conflict. When the Soviet Union
exploded its own atomic bomb in 1949, the world became an even more terrifying place. At the
same time, however, a strange equilibrium resulted.