Introduction

Ruins in Warsaw after World War II

World War II was the greatest conflict in human history, involving more than fifty countries spanning the globe. Over 100 million combatants fought in the war, and between 50 and 85 million people, mainly civilians, lost their lives. The war changed modern society far beyond the rearrangement of national borders; it demoted Western Europe, the premier world power since the 16th century, to second place after the rise of the two postwar superpowers. The imperial colonies would gain their independence, international relations were permanently altered, and new technologies developed during the war would change daily life.

This chapter will examine the causes of World War II, its progress and outcome, and the consequences of history’s greatest conflict.

---

The Rise of Fascism

As we saw in the Introduction, the 17th and 18th centuries brought tremendous changes to human society. The development and spread of democracy in Europe and the Americas remade the relationship between citizen and state. Democracy not only spread geographically, but also widened to extend rights to more people; this manifested, for example, as the abolition of slavery and the global women’s rights movement. Industrialization remade not just economies, but the very foundation of workers’ lives, changing how they related to each other and their families. Clearly, the implications of industrialization were profound.

These changes caused unprecedented social upheaval. While democracy brought increasing freedom to the common man, some opposed it; for example, nobles and royals might not want to lose their privileged hereditary positions, and racists might despise the idea of extending equality to ethnic minorities, while many others opposed the idea of women’s rights. Such people wanted empowerment for themselves, but not for others.

Economic changes caused even more turmoil. In the early days of industrialization, capitalism was almost entirely unregulated. There was no minimum wage, no unemployment insurance, no old-age pensions, no safety standards, and no anti-discrimination laws. New agricultural machinery, like tractors and harvesters, replaced farm workers, who flooded into the cities in search of jobs. Workers were forced to live in unregulated tenements (cheap apartments), often without ventilation or running water. All these intolerable conditions led to the Progressive and Socialist movements, which tried to provide economic relief to workers (see the Introduction for a more thorough explanation).

This tension was magnified in the opening decades of the 20th century. The First World War defeated and destroyed old empires, but not without angering the losers, whose desire for revenge simmered. The Bolshevik Revolution in Russia and founding of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) as the world’s first socialist nation seemed to confirm the worst revolutionary fears of elites. And then the Great Depression, beginning in 1929, devastated the global economy, resulting in worldwide poverty and suffering. These catastrophes served only to increase social pressures.

In the 1930s, a political movement in several nations sought to address these tensions: fascism. Adherents of fascism wanted a return to the “glory days” of the past, when their nation was noble, stable, and powerful, even if this vision of the nation’s past was more mythological than historical. Fascists believed that their nation had become degraded because it had moved away from tradition. Democracy had allowed new voices onto the social stage, voices such as feminists, socialists, homosexuals, the labor unions, ethnic minorities, and so on. Fascists believed that these “nontraditional” people, these outsiders, had led the country astray, away from the traditional path. Fascists embraced victimization, the belief that one’s group or nation is under attack by groups seeking its destruction; and typically, in this view, it is the outsiders who are the guilty parties. Fascism, therefore, seeks to restore the nation to health by removing the new social voices and returning to tradition.

It is notoriously difficult to define fascist ideology, because the theory and execution varied so much from one nation to the next. However, all forms of fascism share several common traits. Fascism is reactionary – that is, it is a response to social changes, and aims to stop and reverse those changes. In that sense, it is the opposite of progressivism. Also, fascism is a form of right-wing socialism, because it proclaims that the needs of the society outweigh the desires of the individual. However, the society that fascism upholds is not based on economic class, as in Marxism; it is based instead on nationalism, the belief that one’s own nation is superior to others. In fascism, the individual must abandon his own desires and instead serve the nation. The extreme nationalism of fascism also dovetails with racism, since the nation under fascism is thought to be based on ethnicity even more than geography. Fascism is also always authoritarian. It views democracy as a failure responsible for the chaos in society, and seeks to bring every aspect of human society under the total control of the state. And fascism is unrepentantly militarist; its adherents believe in the energizing power of war, not just to defend or even expand the nation, but also to keep the society virile, preventing it from falling into decadence and, thus, destruction from within. This aggression is excused through victimization, believing that all the nation’s ills are due to nontraditional outsiders who seek to destroy the country from within. Once one accepts this theory, then violence against “nontraditional” groups is a logical next step. Therefore, fascists wanted to bring their nation under total control, unified under their own social vision, allowing no other voices to interfere. They could then eliminate the “degenerate” forces within the nation and return it to its former glory.

As with Marxism, fascism was based on older social theories. Benito Mussolini, an Italian army veteran of WWI, coined the term “fascism” in 1919 to describe his political ideas. Mussolini began in Milan, in northern Italy, and brought together anti-communists, such as business leaders and large landowners. These economic elites feared a communist revolution in Italy, a repeat of the recent Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. Mussolini’s followers formed into street-fighting bands known as Blackshirts to attack local communist leaders. From the very beginning, the fascists relied on violence and intimidation. Through organizing and repressing other political parties, the fascists’ strength grew.

In October 1922, Mussolini was ready to strike. After announcing, “Either the government will be given to us, or we will seize it by marching on Rome,” Mussolini and his Blackshirts did in fact march to Rome by the tens of thousands. The parliament of Italy resigned in fear. The King of Italy, Victor Emmanuel, was forced to form a new government and, to pacify the fascists, made Mussolini the Prime Minister of Italy. (Incidentally, this error of trying to placate fascists with concessions would be repeated several times in the 1930s. It never worked for long.)

Two years later, in 1924, Mussolini called for new parliamentary elections which would include his own Fascist Party as well as a smaller, allied fascist party. The election was marred by fraud and voter intimidation by the fascists, who won 66 percent of the vote.

Now in full control of the national government, the fascists moved quickly to consolidate all political and social power into their own hands. Mussolini abolished all political parties except his own, outlawed labor unions and strikes, and took total control of education, turning it into a propaganda outlet for his party. He formed his own secret police to eliminate political enemies. His party controlled the economy, both capital and labor alike, although his policies tended to benefit the wealthy. Nevertheless, Mussolini’s policies did reduce unemployment during the Great Depression, increasing his popularity. Eventually, the fascists neutralized even the mighty Catholic Church; Mussolini made concessions to the church with anti-abortion and anti-divorce legislation, and in return, the church remained aloof from politics. By 1925, Mussolini was effectively a dictator, referring to himself as Il Duce (the Leader).

Having gained complete control of Italy, Mussolini took the next step in his plan for glory: military conquest. He dreamed of creating an Italian empire in the image of Imperial Rome. To him, doing so would restore Italy to its former (and proper) glory, prove the correctness of fascism, and fashion himself into an imperial emperor.

Mussolini began with Ethiopia in Africa, the nation which in 1896 had successfully resisted an Italian invasion. In 1935, Mussolini again attacked, this time successfully thanks to improved military technology. Mussolini also sought reproachment with Germany, against which Italy had fought in WWI, and even made a pact with Germany (the “Pact of Steel”) in 1939, asserting that each nation would help the other in time of war.

Proto-fascist philosophies were not unknown in Germany, either. Many of these right-wing, ultranationalist theories were espoused by the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP), later more colloquially known outside Germany as the Nazi Party. (Again, note that this socialism is not the same as Marxism, which the Nazis despised). Adolf Hitler, a veteran of WWI, was a military intelligence agent in 1919, and was assigned the mission of infiltrating the NSDAP, since it was regarded as an extremist and potentially dangerous organization. Hitler found that he appreciated the organization’s racist ultranationalism. He became a very useful member due to his newly-discovered talent for public speaking. He became a true believer, and was so important in the party that, by 1921, he was its leader, a role he would hold until his death.

Hitler’s philosophy differed from Mussolini’s in that he placed much more emphasis on race and ethnicity than his Italian counterpart. Hitler’s racial theories drove both his domestic and foreign policies. To Hitler, all of Germany’s troubles were due to the Jews, whom he claimed were working in coordination with communists and foreign enemies, like the British and French, to suppress the German people. From the very beginning, Hitler intended to disenfranchise German Jews and empower pure-blooded “Aryan” Germans. Antisemitism and anti-communism were already strong in Germany, so Hitler’s message found a wide audience. But Hitler did not want to just expel “Non-Aryans” from Germany. The Treaty of Versailles, which stipulated the peace terms ending World War I, separated certain regions of ethnically-German people from Germany itself: Austria (becoming an independent republic in 1919), the Sudetenland (going to Czechoslovakia), and the provinces of Posen and West Prussia (going to Poland). Hitler wanted to bring those territories back into the nation, thus achieving German unity under a single state. Furthermore, Hitler dreamed of conquering vast territories in Eastern Europe, mainly in Russia, expelling or killing the “ethnically-inferior” Slavic people living there, and giving the land to the German people. This policy was called Drang nach Osten (Drive to the East), and Hitler was very serious about accomplishing it. All these steps would culminate in the establishment of the Third Reich (Third German Empire), which Hitler claimed would last for a thousand years.

Carving up German land was not the Nazis’ only complaint with their former enemies. A popular myth in Germany, especially among veterans of World War I, such as Hitler himself, was that Germany’s defeat in the war was not due to any failure of the army. They instead blamed the surrender on disloyal elements within Germany itself, particularly Jews and socialists. Once they had purged the “traitors” from Germany, the Nazis planned to remove the shame of the surrender. Many Germans viewed the Treaty of Versailles as very unfair towards Germany. First, Germans were made to shoulder all the blame for the war, and therefore required to pay huge reparations to France, payments which the stricken nation could not afford. The allies also demanded that Germany demilitarize the Rhineland region, so that German troops would not be adjacent to France. Furthermore, Germany was not permitted to possess any aircraft or tanks, and very few warships. As these restrictions were so odious to many Germans, the Nazi plan to renounce the Treaty of Versailles earned them considerable popularity.

Influenced by Mussolini’s success in Italy, Hitler attempted a coup in 1923 (the “Beer Hall Putsch”), which failed, leading to Hitler’s arrest and imprisonment. It was during his prison term that he wrote his autobiography, Mein Kampf (My Struggle). But such was Hitler’s popularity and influence that he served only nine months in prison.

The Nazi Party’s power and influence grew dramatically after 1930, when the Great Depression gutted the German economy and drove the people to desperation. The Nazi Party blamed the Depression on Jews and communists, a claim which resonated in Germany at the time. By 1932, the Nazi party controlled nearly a third of the seats in the Reichstag (parliament), making it the single largest faction in the government. Although German President Hindenburg despised Hitler, the Nazis’ political position compelled him to appoint Hitler to serve as Chancellor of Germany.

Once he was Chancellor, Hitler moved quickly to consolidate power. Four weeks after his appointment, a fire broke out in the Reichstag building in Berlin. Hitler blamed the fire on communists and claimed that this terrorism was the start of a political coup. He demanded that the Reichstag grant him emergency powers to fight the uprising – powers which would suspend the constitution and give Hitler broad, though not total, political power. The Reichstag voted to grant Hitler this power for four years, and the Nazis quickly leveraged their new position. Hitler outlawed all other political parties and abolished the powers of the states’ governments. When President Hindenburg died the next year, Hitler combined the roles of Chancellor and President into one position, making him the Head of State. He did so with the approval of the majority of Germans. Hitler’s ambitions, previously laughed at by so many, were finally realized. The Nazis followed this with a series of suppressions and persecutions of Jews, homosexuals, Romani, and other political and ethnic enemies, killing thousands in the process.

Although the Japanese did not refer to the ultranationalism that led them into World War II as fascism, it was remarkably similar to the ideologies of German and Italian fascists. Prior to 1868, Japan was a closed country, almost completely isolated from the world; although the emperor was the nominal ruler, the shogun (a samurai warlord) exercised actual power through a feudal system of lords.

By the 19th century, however, Western powers seemed to threaten Japan. Great Britain had conquered India, Burma, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Malaysia; the French had taken Indochina, and the Dutch had captured Indonesia. Although Western empires could not conquer all of China, they regularly humiliated the Chinese in incidents such as the Opium Wars. American Commodore Matthew Perry had visited Japan with warships in 1853 and forced a trade treaty upon the country at gunpoint. All of this convinced certain Japanese leaders that the West would someday attack or extort Japan, and that the shogun’s feudal government was not strong enough to repel them. Therefore, they decided that their country needed a new government, one that would transform Japan into a powerful, modern nation.

In 1868, these modernizing lords launched the Meiji Restoration, a coup which planned to place the young emperor Meiji, who was sympathetic to the modernizers, back in executive power of Japan. Since the emperor was considered to be descended from the sun god, the shogun could not directly oppose the emperor without losing the support of the Japanese people, and so surrendered his position. The samurai families, who were a privileged military class in Japan, were stripped of their power. This spawned a series of revolts by traditional, disaffected samurai. The national army, however, had quickly modernized along European designs, and managed to defeat the samurai revolts. In the meantime, the flood of modern, Western ideas into Japan included the concepts of democracy and human rights, and the Japanese people now demanded a constitutional, representative government. Therefore, a constitution and Diet (parliament) were established in 1889. It seemed that Japan had become a modern nation in every way, in an astonishingly short time.

The Meiji Constitution, however, contained some critical errors in terms of democracy. First, the emperor was granted a lofty position, “sacred and inviolable,” according to Article 3. The Army and Navy also held veto power in the formation of government cabinets, a direct intervention of the military into civilian politics. These provisions weakened Japanese democracy and eventually allowed for the rise of military rule.

The Japanese had modernized their industry and military with astonishing speed. Japan’s new military conquered Taiwan and Korea; then, in 1905, Japan defeated Russia to seize Port Arthur in China, the first time in modern history an Asian power defeated a Western one.

During the 1920s, ultranationalists, particularly in the military, initiated a plan to seize control of the civilian government, which they considered (not without reason) to be corrupt and ineffective; they wanted a return to the days of military rule and to launch an ambitious military campaign to purge the Far East of Western influence and make Japan the supreme power in Asia. Secret anti-democratic societies within the military assassinated civilian leaders and even launched unsuccessful coups in the early 1930s. By 1940, ultranationalists, through coordinated violence and political maneuvering, had gained complete control of the government. By the time Japan attacked the United States, its military no longer answered to civilian control but only to the emperor. Emperor Hirohito was at first resistant to fascism, and put down the various illegal attempts to seize power; but once the military had control of the government, he seemed to surrender to them and allowed them to carry out their campaigns.

Adolf Hitler	Benito Mussolini
Joseph Stalin	Hideki Tojo
Franklin Delano Roosevelt	Winston Churchill

Chiang Kai-Shek

---

The Early War Years

World War II did not begin all at once and, depending on where you are from, you could place the outbreak at different times. Eight years of fighting and negotiation preceded the main theatres of the war, with all sides struggling to either prevent a general war or to gain an advantage before full-scale conflict began.

After their military success in the Russo-Japanese war, militant Japanese leaders sought to fulfill their expansionist dreams. Their long-term goal was to end the Western dominance of China and monopolize that nation’s raw materials and markets; they claimed that Japan would liberate Asia from the domineering Western empires, but Japan’s brutal behavior towards conquered Asians revealed more imperial motivations. Japanese leaders chose to move north to secure the raw materials they would need to conquer all of China. In 1931, without informing their government, Japanese forces in their colony of Korea invaded Manchuria, a northeastern province of China, and turned it into a puppet state.

This proved a critical moment. After the First World War, the Treaty of Versailles established the League of Nations, an international organization to prevent future wars, an early form of the United Nations. The strength of the League was collective security. The agreement was that, should any nation invade another without due cause, all the other nations of the League would contribute troops to a powerful international force, which would stop the aggressor. Since no nation was as powerful as all the other nations combined, no nation would dare to defy the League and launch a war.

The League condemned the invasion of Manchuria, but the members of the League declined to enforce its decrees with force. Although collective security looked good on paper, the member nations were unwilling to make the necessary sacrifices on the battlefield to enforce it. It is widely believed that the League’s failure to punish Japan was the green light for the fascists, indicating to them that the world would not stop them in their march for conquest.

Japanese troops in Manchuria, Nov. 1931

Italy began its imperial expansion in 1936, when it invaded Ethiopia. Mussolini’s plans were not based on such a clear ideology as Hitler’s; his plan was simply to conquer all the lands surrounding the Mediterranean Sea, as the Roman Empire had once done. When Ethiopia asked the League of Nations to activate collective security, the League again demurred, offering only ineffective sanctions against Italy. In his speech to the League, Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie made the chilling prophecy, “It is us today. It will be you tomorrow.”

The Nazis had no intention of confining their conquest to Germany; much of their appeal to the German people was their promise to settle old scores with other nations. However, since Germany had been defanged by the Treaty of Versailles and weakened by the Great Depression, Hitler had to first rearm Germany before contemplating foreign adventures. In 1936, he marched his troops back into the Rhineland, and began a massive military rearmament program, both of which were in direct violation of the Treaty of Versailles. Britain and France, both keen to avoid another war, did not attempt to stop him.

In 1936, political tensions in Spain exploded after a major left-wing electoral victory convinced the right that a communist government would soon be installed. Right-wing general Francisco Franco led a military revolt against the government. Germany and Italy sent aid to his Nationalists, and the USSR supported the leftist Republican government. Thousands of international volunteers flooded into the country and fought on both sides. The Nationalists proved victorious in 1939, and Spain remained a right-wing dictatorship until 1975. The Spanish Civil War is widely regarded as a “dress rehearsal” for World War II, with Germany, Italy, and the USSR testing new weapons and tactics in the war.

Japan took the fateful step of reopening their war with the Republic of China in 1937, this time with the intention of conquering the entire country. The well-disciplined Japanese Army made deep inroads, capturing Beijing, Shanghai, and the capital, Nanjing. Despite terrible casualties, the Chinese forces, under the leadership of Chiang Kai-Shek, refused to surrender, and simply retreated farther into the vast interior of China and fought on, now with material support from the USSR, which feared Japanese expansion in Asia.

A nearly-forgotten border conflict between Japan and the USSR in 1939 proved to be one of the most fateful conflicts of the 1930s. The two nations disagreed on the border between Manchukuo, the Japanese puppet state in northeastern China, and Mongolia, a Soviet client state. In 1939, the Japanese crossed into Mongolia with the intention of driving Soviet forces from the area (as with so many Japanese military campaigns, they had no permission from the government to conduct this attack). Joseph Stalin, leader of the USSR, decided to make an impression on the Japanese and sent a powerful force to repel them. The Japanese were pushed back, and a ceasefire was arranged.

Although no one could have known it at the time, it was one of the most important battles of the century. The Japanese badly needed oil to continue their war in China, since modern warfare requires vast quantities of fuel to power vehicles. Having no oil reserves of its own, Japan was purchasing American oil. But when the US embargoed Japan in 1941 to stop their conquest of China, Japanese leaders realized that they had to either find another source of oil, or else abandon their military plans in China. They first planned to invade Siberia in the USSR to capture the oil there, a plan which would look especially attractive after the German invasion of the USSR in June 1941. However, recalling the defeat they suffered at Soviet hands in Mongolia in 1939, Japanese military leaders decided that invading the USSR was too dangerous. Therefore, they planned instead to attack the weaker British and Dutch colonies in Southeast Asia to secure the oil of the region. The only problem with this plan was that the US Navy would come to the aid of America’s European allies and disrupt Japanese plans. Japan therefore planned to strike the American fleet at Pearl Harbor to eliminate the threat – a move which brought the US into the war on the side of the allies and ultimately led to Japan’s defeat.

In Europe, the Nazis took another step towards the establishment of their Reich with the Anschluss (“Unity”) of Austria in 1938. Hitler demanded that Austria, his home country, reunite with Germany. Rather than let the Austrian people decide the issue in a vote, Hitler ordered the German Army to occupy the country. The Austrian government, cowed by the Nazis, did not resist. Once in power, the Nazis conducted the same ethnic persecutions which they had carried out in Germany.

Hitler immediately followed this by threatening war with Czechoslovakia, a country whose northern border region was home to millions of ethnic Germans. Hitler demanded that this region, the Sudetenland, be given to Germany, or else Germany would take it by force. The Czechs had a defensive alliance with France, so if Germany invaded Czechoslovakia, France would have to fight as well, and would certainly ask the British to assist them, since Germany would be violating the Treaty of Versailles which both countries had signed. Neither France nor Britain favored a war; at the Munich Conference of September, 1938, France and Great Britain agreed that they would not fight over the Sudetenland, provided that Hitler respected the territorial integrity of the rest of Czechoslovakia. Hitler agreed. The Czech government realized it could not fight Germany single-handedly and so, feeling betrayed, relinquished the Sudetenland. Great Britain and France celebrated, thinking that, by abandoning their Czech allies, they had avoided war. The next year, Germany, through invasion and intimidation, conquered the rest of Czechoslovakia in direct violation of the Munich Agreement. This convinced many in Europe and the United States that there was no way to negotiate with the fascists.

The trigger for global conflict was the joint German – Soviet invasion of Poland in September, 1939. Hitler claimed territory in Poland, and had shown no hesitation in using threat or force in previous territorial claims. France and Great Britain concluded a pact with Poland in 1939, requiring the Western nations to assist Poland if it was attacked. The USSR, for its part, was fearful of invasion from the capitalist West. Stalin first tried to establish a defensive alliance with France, Great Britain, and Poland, but that fell through due to Polish distrust of the Soviets. Clearly, fear and paranoia were in the air in 1939.

Rejected by the allies, Stalin then concluded the secret Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, in which Germany and the USSR promised not to attack each other, and which would divide Poland between Germany and the Soviets. Although no love was lost between the two nations, it benefitted them both in the moment. The pact aided Germany by removing the USSR from the Polish equation, as Hitler was already expecting war with France and Great Britain; the Soviets bought themselves time to prepare for war with Germany, as well as more than half of Poland, which would serve as a buffer zone between their country and the Nazis.

Despite French and British threats of war, Germany invaded Poland from the west on September 1, 1939, and the USSR attacked from the east on the 17th. France and Great Britain, true to their alliance, declared war on Germany. Poland fell to the invaders before its allies could amass their troops for battle; but now, all of Europe was embroiled in the war that the allies had striven so hard to avoid. Soon, most of the of the world would follow.

Progress of the War

After Poland’s defeat, Hitler wanted to immediately invade France, which had already declared war; however, bad weather compelled the Germans to wait for spring to attack. France and Great Britain began a naval blockade of Germany, aimed at cutting the Nazis off from foreign trade. In retaliation, Germany began unrestricted submarine warfare against the allies, which would destroy both civilian and military shipping.

In the meantime, the USSR threatened war with the Baltic nations of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, unless they accepted Soviet troops in their territory. Stalin was trying to use these nations as another buffer between himself and the Nazis. All three nations submitted, but Finland rejected a similar threat, so the USSR invaded it in November 1939. Soviet performance in this “Winter War” was unimpressive, and they gained only small territorial concessions from the Finns when the war ended in March, 1940.

In April, 1940, Germany invaded both Denmark and Norway, since control of these countries would help Germany protect the shipping lanes between Germany and neutral Sweden from the allied navies, and Germany was importing iron ore from Sweden. The failure of Great Britain to contain the Nazis forced the resignation of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, who was replaced by Winston Churchill on May 10, 1940 – the same day that German troops finally attacked France.

France had constructed a line of fortifications, known as the Maginot Line, along their border with Germany and trusted that the defenses would repel the Nazis. The Germans simply went around the fortifications by invading neutral Belgium, Netherlands, and Luxembourg, then turning south and invading France where it was largely undefended. The new Germany strategy of blitzkrieg (Lightning War), which relied on close coordination between armored vehicles, aircraft, and motorized troops, allowed the German military to move much more quickly than it had in the previous war. It overran both the French army and their British allies in only six weeks, sending the remaining British troops retreating across the Channel. Italy also invaded France once a fascist victory was assured. France was divided up between a German-occupied zone and a pro-Nazi puppet state known as Vichy France.

The Nazis now faced a difficult strategic problem in Europe. Hitler wanted to eliminate Great Britain from the war by invading the island, but with the British navy and air force still intact, this was impossible, as any invasion force would be destroyed upon the sea. Therefore, Hitler initiated an air campaign which became known as the Battle of Britain. For an entire year, Germany bombed Great Britain, targeting cities such as London, and Great Britain’s air force fought back against numerically-superior opponents. Hitler hoped to force the British into surrendering, but British morale held.

While this aerial battle raged, British and Commonwealth (British colonies and former colonies) forces fought Germany and Italy in North Africa. Italy attacked British Somaliland and Egypt, and the British counterattacked, capturing Libya. Hitler sent German forces to stabilize the situation, and the Italians and Germans together forced the British back again and looked set to drive them out of North Africa entirely. At about the same time, German and Italian forces conquered both Greece and Yugoslavia.

A major development in 1940 was the signing of the Tripartite Pact, a defensive arrangement in which Germany, Italy, and Japan all agreed that an attack by any nation (except the USSR) on any of the three Tripartite nations would be considered an attack on all three, who would fight together. The treaty was soon widened to include Hungary, Slovakia, and Romania. These nations would come to be known as the Axis Powers.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, President of the United States, wanted to join the war on the side of the allies, but the US was still neutral, and American public opinion regarding the war was unsettled. When the war in Poland began, under FDR’s leadership, the US amended its neutrality laws to permit allied nations to purchase war material in the US, provided they transported it themselves (to avoid the sinking of American ships). After the fall of Paris, the US began a major naval construction program to prepare for war in Europe. In September of 1940, the US agreed to give Great Britain fifty old, mothballed destroyers in exchange for use of British military bases in the Caribbean. Finally, in early 1941, the US signed the Lend-Lease Act, by which the US supplied Great Britain and other allied countries with war materials. The Americans were slowly changing their opinions and, overall, taking an anti-fascist stance.

An American propaganda poster showing the extent of the Lend-Lease Program

Hitler had not forgotten about his arch-enemy, the Soviet Union. He long dreamed of destroying the world’s premier socialist nation and giving its lands to the German people, as he claimed he would in Mein Kampf. In June 1941, Germany, Italy, and Romania invaded the USSR in a surprise attack called Operation Barbarossa, the largest land invasion in history. Axis forces drove deep into the USSR, quickly conquering the Baltic states and Ukraine, nearly reaching Moscow before being stopped. Although the fascists had inflicted terrible casualties on the Red Army (the army of the Soviet Union) and civilians alike, they had failed to deliver a decisive knock-out blow.

The final Axis strategic gambit of the war came in December 1941. The Allies had stopped selling Japan the oil it needed to complete its war in China, which had become deadlocked. In October, 1941, General Hideki Tojo was named Prime Minister of Japan. Tojo was a member of one of the ultranationalist groups in the military – specifically, the Black Dragons. To him, the idea of forgoing war in China was intolerable. He therefore ordered the military to launch the planned attack into the Pacific, to seize the Dutch East Indies, Malaysia, Thailand, and the Philippines. These would provide Japan with the rubber and oil they needed to fuel their war machine. They also attacked the Americans, primarily at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, as well as in the Philippines, in an attempt to forestall an American counterattack. The United States declared war on Japan the next day, and Germany and Italy followed with declarations of war against the US. With all neutrality cast aside, the United States finally entered the global struggle wholeheartedly.

In August 1941, the US and Great Britain had signed the Atlantic Charter, an agreement that outlined the nations’ post-war goals. They agreed that, when the fascists were defeated, the peoples of formerly-occupied nations would be allowed to decide their own governments, and that the Allies would not seek territorial gain in the war. It also laid out concepts of economic and political cooperation. This charter became the basis for the Declaration by United Nations, the official “rulebook” for the Allies during the war (“United Nations” was the formal name of the allied coalition). First, it acknowledged that all the United Nations should abide by the Atlantic Charter; second, that each nation “pledges itself to employ its full resources, military or economic, against those members of the Tripartite Pact and its adherents with which such government is at war”; and that no nation would abandon the others by making a separate peace with the enemy.

In the Pacific, Japan enjoyed early successes against the unprepared Allied forces; but by June 1942, the tide had turned. The American fleet stopped a Japanese advance to seize the Australian territory of Papua, and decisively defeated the Japanese fleet at Midway Island. Late in the year, the Americans successfully went on the offensive by invading the Japanese-held island of Guadalcanal, the first of many such bloody battles in the Pacific.

On the Eastern Front (in the USSR), the Germans also enjoyed early successes in their drive into the southern Caucus region, but were stopped at the city of Stalingrad, where some of the bloodiest fighting of the war took place. By February 1943, the Germans were soundly beaten and driven back with terrible losses; they would never again achieve the initiative on the Eastern Front.

The North African theatre was a seesaw affair of offensive and counter-offensive across the barren desert until November 1942, when the Americans entered the theatre by landing troops in Algeria and Morocco. The combined British – American force then drove the Axis forces into Tunisia.

In the meantime, two other battles raged nonstop. The first was the Battle of the Atlantic, where Allied forces strove to protect the shipping lanes between Great Britain and the US from German submarines. The second was the strategic bombing campaign against the Axis, which saw British and American bombers attacking German cities to reduce both their industrial capacity and morale. This campaign caused a great many civilian casualties.

American bombers over Germany

In the Pacific in 1943, the Americans continued their “island-hopping” campaign, wherein they captured certain Japanese-held islands and bypassed others, allowing them to concentrate their forces where they were most needed. In the USSR, despite desperate fighting, the Germans were unable to make further headway against the Soviets and were pushed back from the city of Leningrad, which had endured a horrific siege. And in the Mediterranean, American and British forces successfully invaded Sicily from North Africa in July. This defeat caused the Italians to oust Mussolini and arrest him, although Il Duce wasn’t quite finished yet. In September, Italy changed sides, joining the Allies. In response, German forces rescued Mussolini and invaded Italy, even as Allied forces were landing in the south of that country.
The next year saw the Allies closing in on the Axis from all directions. The British, Canadians, and Americans landed in France in June and liberated Paris on August 25, but encountered stiffening resistance as they reached the German border. In the east, the Soviets launched a massive attack which liberated all the territory taken by the Axis and even continued into the Balkans to drive out Axis forces there. In Italy, however, Allied forces were bogged down by strong German defenses and could make little headway. They had more success in the Pacific, with the Americans liberating the Philippines in October.

The war would end the next year. Despite a desperate German counterattack, Allied forces in Western Europe continued their advance into Germany, freeing countries which the fascists had overrun early in the war. Anti-fascist Italian partisans captured and executed Mussolini on April 28, 1945. The Soviets drove across Poland and into eastern Germany; they captured Berlin in April, only to find that Hitler had committed suicide to prevent his capture. The German government surrendered on May 8. The war in Europe was over.

In the Pacific, the Americans took the strategic islands of Iwo Jima and Okinawa, which put their bombers in range of Japan. They then began a devastating bombing campaign, like the one they had conducted against Germany. The USSR assisted the Allies in Asia by attacking Japanese forces in northeast China. Finally, the first use of atomic weapons in August, combined with defeats at the hands of the USSR, convinced the emperor to surrender on September 2, ending the war. Although casualty estimates vary widely, it is assumed that upwards of 85 million people died in the war, the majority of them civilians.

---

The War’s Outcome

At the beginning of World War II, the fascist nations were holding all the cards. Their militaries were far more powerful than those of the Allies, who were keen to avoid war. Why did the Allies win? Here are four primary reasons:

First, Adolf Hitler made the error of invading the Soviet Union before he had neutralized Great Britain. When it became clear that Germany could not soon invade the UK, and that the UK could not present a threat to Hitler for some time, Hitler decided to turn east and eliminate the USSR in the meantime. Initially, Hitler was loathe to fight a two-front war, fearing an encirclement; however, he was convinced that the Red Army would fall in only weeks, and that with the USSR destroyed, he would then be able to handle the UK at his leisure. Hitler’s appraisal of the Red Army, and the USSR in general, proved incorrect. The communist nation had vastly greater reserves of men than he estimated, and their people fought on through utterly horrific conditions without surrender. When Berlin finally fell, it was to the Red Army, not the democracies. And by sending eighty percent of his war machine into the USSR, Hitler so weakened his western flank that it permitted the Western allies to invade France in 1944, allowing the allies back into continental Europe and creating the encirclement he once feared.

The second reason for the fascist defeat was that Hideki Tojo underestimated American fighting ability and morale. Tojo, who hated all things Western, viewed American society as decadent and soft. He knew that a battle across the Pacific to reach Japan would be exceedingly bloody – and he was right about that. His mistake was believing that the Americans did not have the courage to make the necessary sacrifices, and would sue for peace before reaching Japan. As to his own military, Tojo believed that the Japanese people were superior to all others, and by dint of their superior willpower, would surely win the war. Had Tojo been more educated about the Americans, he might never have chosen to attack them.

The third reason was that the United States, protected by two large, insulating oceans, was never directly attacked (apart from its Pacific possessions and a few insignificant attacks against the mainland). President Roosevelt knew that, with modern technology, the oceans were no longer enough to protect America forever, and so wanted to push back the fascists as soon as possible, before they could reach the American mainland. But America’s geographic isolation from Europe and Asia bought it enough time to build up its industrial might, which was the country’s main contribution to the war. British, Soviet, and Chinese factories came under constant attack, making it difficult for them to produce the necessary war materials. Safe from bombardment, American industry could produce more and more weapons and equipment all the time. During the war, the United States outproduced the rest of the world combined, churning out unprecedented amounts of every type of war material. This allowed the United States not only to lavishly equip its own troops, but also to supply the Allies’ armies as well. America was, as FDR put it, the “Arsenal of Democracy.”

Finally, the brutality of the fascist armies, as demonstrated at Leningrad, Nanking, and the Philippines, among other places, convinced the allied nations that surrender to the fascists was a fate worse than death. Hitler openly promised genocide against the “racially-inferior” Slavs of the USSR and against Jews everywhere. Stories of Japanese atrocities, as well as a desire for revenge, likewise convinced the Americans that negotiation and accommodation with Japan was out of the question. Since the allies had nothing to lose, they endured some of the worst suffering in human history, held their coalition together, and fought together to the end. The brutality of their enemies had convinced them that failure was simply not an option.

---

Notable Aspects of the War

World War II was noteworthy for more than its geographical span and casualty count. Several other aspects stand out as well.

The first is the concept of Total War, of which World War II was the foremost example. Total War refers to a war in which a nation dedicates all its civilian capabilities to victory, from agriculture to industry to the media. All major nations involved in World War II were forced, by necessity, to focus their entire national life on the war. Factories only made war materials, ignoring unnecessary civilian products. Most men of fighting age found themselves in uniform, so women took over manufacturing jobs in all countries. Imperial nations such as Great Britain and France recruited men from their overseas colonies to fight, and the US launched a program to invite Mexican civilians to work in agriculture to make up for the manpower deficit. Civilians practiced rationing at home, so that their militaries had the food, gasoline, rubber, and other materials needed for victory. Technological research focused on new weapons, the media on propaganda. It is noteworthy that suicides go down during a war, because the civilian population feels that it has a job to do, a meaningful purpose to fulfill, and civilians worldwide dedicated themselves to their nations.

But there is another side to Total War. Traditional, pre-industrial laws of warfare in many cultures stated that non-combatants (women, children, prisoners of war, etc.) were not to be harmed, and that non-military targets (places of worship, hospitals, schools, etc.) were not to be destroyed. The idea was that these targets present no threat to an army, and therefore should be spared. Of course, these rules were not always followed, but at least there were some ethical norms that might restrain armies.

In Total War, however, such rules are often abandoned. In a modern, industrialized war, factories are necessary for victory; but factories are civilian targets, not military, as are the workers in the factories. If these civilian installations and workers are critical to the enemy, it then follows that one must destroy them. While this is logical, it breaks the traditional laws of war. The logic of Total War led to the strategic bombing campaigns against Great Britain, Germany, and Japan during the war, and was one reason why most of the war’s causalities were civilians. The acceptance of Total War during World War II, plus the development of nuclear weapons in the same war, would soon influence superpower strategy. During the Cold War, the superpowers planned to use nuclear weapons to destroy entire cities with no thought to civilian casualties; wiping out nations became the primary goal. This apocalyptic strategy represents the combination of nuclear weapons and the theory of Total War. It haunts the entire world to this day.

Another notable aspect of the war was the number of atrocities and war crimes committed. The Holocaust, the Rape of Nanking, and the Bataan Death March were only a few of the war’s recorded atrocities. One reason for all these crimes was that the militaries of World War II were highly mobile, with troops quickly ranging over vast areas, so that more civilians found themselves in harm’s way. Another reason was the racism that drove so much of the rationale for the war, primarily on the Axis side. Axis governments had convinced their people that their enemies were subhuman, and that killing them was no worse than killing animals.

urthermore, the Nazi plan for Eastern Europe was genocidal from the start, and aimed at the total elimination of Slavs, Jews, and other groups. In their case, at least, massacres and other atrocities were the plan, not an error.

A final major aspect of the war was technological development. War is the ultimate form of competition, and all sides in the conflict sought every advantage they could, mobilizing the best minds in their nations to develop better weapons. World War II saw the development of the first practical jet aircraft, the first military rockets, the first use of radar in war, the atom bomb, as well as the rapid development of many existing technologies. Industrial processes were developed and improved. These technologies would be put to civilian use after the war, becoming part of everyday life.

---

The Aftermath of the War

A great many of the topics in this book are the results of World War II. The most immediate and obvious was the beginning of the Cold War, a nuclear stand-off between the world’s two remaining superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union (see Chapter 2). This battle for the future of mankind (as viewed by its participants, anyway) was fought through proxy nations and massive propaganda campaigns, because direct military conflict between the superpowers was considered too devastating. This culture war started shortly after World War II and continued until 1991 (the collapse of the USSR). All international developments and conflicts took place in the context of the Cold War, the influence of which hung like a shadow over world events for about forty-five years.

While the Cold War seemed to divide the world into two camps, the remaining empires – Great Britain, France, Portugal, and the Netherlands – were being divided up as well. One result of World War II was decolonization, the process by which colonized nations gain their independence (see Chapter 4). The first two decades after the war saw the end of the world’s legacy empires as various new political forces conspired to make their maintenance impossible. This led to a period of great instability, with dozens of new countries being born, some of them in great violence.

At the same time, there was a countercurrent against this wave of division, born of the need to prevent future wars. One factor was the rise of international human rights. The concept of legal protections for the dignity, freedom, and well-being of individuals and groups can be traced back primarily to the Age of Enlightenment, and was instrumental in the American and French revolutions. During World War II, the Allies declared that the point of the war was to uphold human rights, which the fascists were in the process of destroying. With human rights violations being associated with fascists, respect for human rights became the foundation of legitimate government, at least theoretically. This manifest in several international laws and covenants signed after the war (see Chapter 12 for more information), which provided a legal and moral basis for revolutions after the war, particularly anticolonial struggles.

Finally, major international organizations were created after the war to prevent future wars. The United Nations (Chapter 12) was founded to preserve world peace and assist in social and economic development. European integration (Chapter 12) was another unifying project, which created international unions in Europe designed both to remove the divisions which had caused the war, but also to aid in reconstruction and economic development. This movement eventually created the European Union, one of the great power blocs of today’s world.

---

Conclusion

World War II was the result of longstanding tensions, both nationalistic and ethnic, as well as a desire for revenge and a fear of foreign powers. That is why the United Nations was established to end the divisions which caused the war. But the peace following the war turned out to be uneasy at best, as the Cold War cast the pall of nuclear war over all mankind, a threat which can never be entirely ended. The newly decolonized nations, although now free from domination, had to face the tangle of problems which perplex any independent nation. The postwar decades were a tug-of-war between division and unity; and now that the Pandora’s Box of nuclear weapons had been opened, the consequences of division could be, at their worst, apocalyptic.

---