Lecture 11
World War II
World War II (1939–1945) was and remains the largest and deadliest conflict in human history. It involved more than sixty nations, cost several trillion dollars, and killed approximately 60 million people. Civilian deaths account for half that figure, owing largely to destructive tactics and technologies (including terror bombing and strategic bombing) and even more to campaigns of genocide—a new term coined during the war—which included the Nazi Holocaust.
World War II also shifted the balance of global strength completely, toppling the European powers from their position of geopolitical superiority and ushering in the U.S.-Soviet Cold War and a massive wave of postwar decolonization.
The war’s principal actors included:
·The Axis Powers: Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy (joined the war in June 1940; left in July 1943), and Japan.
·Major Allied Powers: Great Britain, France (left the war in 1940), Canada, Australia, New-Zealand, the USSR (joined the war in June 1941), the United States (joined the war in December 1941), and the Nationalist China.
In August of 1939, Stalin, no longer trusting the democracies, negotiated a nonaggression treaty with Hitler. This Nazi-Soviet Pact (Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, Hitler-Stalin Pact) kept the USSR neutral and allowed Hitler to invade Poland without worrying about a two-front war. Germany’s invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, began World War II.
September 17, 1939, Poland was also invaded from the east by the USSR.
The Soviet secret police NKVD brutally repressed the local population of Western Ukraine and Belarus deporting and killing huge parts of population, including thousands of Polish POWs in Katyn and Kharkiv.
From 1939 to 1941, Soviet Union provided Germany with 860,000 tons of oil, 140,000 tons of iron, 14,000 tons of copper, etc. for symbolical prices.
World War II: A Combat Overview
Between 1939 and the end of 1941, the Axis Powers enjoyed great triumphs. New technology and tactics gave armed forces tremendous offensive capacity, making World War II far more mobile and faster-paced than World War I—but also far more destructive, especially where civilians were concerned.
Germany immediately exploited this new offensive potential with its innovative blitzkrieg (“lightning war”), which used tanks and airplanes to penetrate quickly and deeply into enemy territory.
Poland fell to Germany in six weeks in the fall of 1939, and when Hitler turned against Norway, Denmark, Belgium, the Netherlands, and France in the spring of 1940, his forces defeated them all between April and June.
From the summer of 1940 through the spring of 1941, Germany focused its attention on Britain, trying—but failing—to bomb it into submission from the air. The Royal Air Force defended England’s skies in the Battle of Britain, and Britain continued to hold out thanks to control of the seas, the skill of its pilots, its use of radar, and economic aid from Canada and the United States (although the latter was neutral, Franklin Roosevelt sympathized with the Allies and began his Lend-Lease program of economic assistance to Britain, and later the USSR, in the spring and summer of 1941).
The war expanded in 1941 to Africa, where German tank forces drove toward the British-controlled Suez Canal, and also to Eastern Europe, as Hitler began a surprise invasion of the USSR—a fateful decision, since he had not yet finished off the British.
Operation Barbarossa began June 22, 1941, and from this point forward, between 60 to 75 percent of all German forces would fight on this Soviet front. At first, it looked as though blitzkrieg would topple the USSR as quickly as it had France: the Germans surrounded Leningrad, the country’s second largest city, placing it under the worst siege in modem times, and reached the outskirts of Moscow in October. But a last-ditch defensive effort halted the German advance in December.
At this point, events in Asia further complicated the war. Earlier in 1941, the Japanese, extending their imperial reach from China to Southeast Asia, had occupied French Indochina, a bold move that also threatened Britain’s Asian colonies and the U.S.-controlled Philippines.
Repeated U.S. trade embargoes heightened diplomatic tensions and convinced the Japanese to launch a massive naval and air assault throughout the Pacific, beginning with the December 7,1941, surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. By the late spring of 1942, the Japanese were masters of the South Pacific and Southeast Asia, having captured Hong Kong, Thailand, Burma, Britain’s mighty naval base at Singapore, the Philippines, and Dutch Indonesia. However, Pearl Harbor, while devastating, was not a knockout blow, and by bringing the United States into the war—just as the Soviets stalled the Germans outside Moscow—Japan had roused a gigantic enemy that neither it nor Germany could come close to matching in terms of industrial production or human power reserves. Although they were still winning major victories, the Axis Powers had made the war far more strategically and economically challenging for themselves.
This fact became clear in the summer and fall of 1942, when three turning-point battles completely reversed the war’s tide. Had the Axis won them, their short-term advantages in skill and speed might have forced an end favorable to them before the Allies’ long-term economic and population advantages overpowered them.
The three battles were Midway (June 1942), a Pacific dash in which the U.S. Navy destroyed the bulk of Japan’s carrier fleet;
El Alamein (July-November 1942), where the British turned back the German tanks driving toward the Suez Canal; and
Stalingrad (August 1942-February 1943), a savage showdown on the Volga, where a huge German force nearly pushed the Soviets across the river and gained access to the USSR’s oil reserves but was instead encircled and captured.
In 1943 and 1944, U.S. forces in the Pacific moved west toward Japan in a strategy of island hopping, while Allied armies and guerrilla uprisings in China and Southeast Asia pinned down Japanese forces on the mainland.
In Europe, the Allies invaded Italy from North Africa in 1943, deposing Mussolini’s government.
At sea, they neutralized Germany’s submarines—the only truly dangerous threat still at Hitler’s disposal—in the Battle of the Atlantic (1942-spring 1943).
From the east, the Soviets pushed the Germans out of the USSR, into Eastern Europe, and toward Berlin.
In June 1944, Operation Overlord, or the D-Day invasion, landed more than 170,000 British, Canadian, and American troops on the beaches of Normandy, in northern France.
By this point, the Allies also had complete control of the skies. Having been bombed so mercilessly in 1940 and 1941, they now carried out the strategic bombing of German-held Europe at will, seeking to disrupt military and economic efforts and to break the civilian population’s morale.
By the summer of 1944, U.S. forces were within range to do the same to Japan.
Strategic bombing killed hundreds of thousands of civilians and remains one of the most controversial aspects of the Allies’ war effort.
The Axis collapsed in 1945. With the Soviets storming Berlin, Hitler committed suicide on April 30, and Germany ceased hostilities in early May.
Japan continued to fight, despite constant firebombing from above and the steady approach of U.S. naval forces. America’s new president, Harry Truman, who had taken office after Franklin Roosevelt’s death in April, feared that an invasion of Japan’s home islands would cost hundreds of thousands of casualties.
He hoped to win from the air, but conventional bombardment did not appear to be denting the Japanese leadership’s resolve.
So in mid-July, when Allied scientists completed the first successful atomic bomb test, Truman elected to use the new weapon to hasten Japan’s surrender. On August 6, the B-29 Enola Gay dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, killing an estimated 80,000 initially, with tens of thousands dying later from bums or radioactive fallout. Japan still refused to yield, but a second bomb, released over Nagasaki on August 9 and killing another 80,000 in total, forced Japan’s capitulation. Formal surrender followed in September.
War Crimes and the Holocaust
Violence in World War II was unprecedented, both in scale and type. Half of the approximately 60 million people killed by the war were civilians, and the war crimes were of unprecedented cruelty. It was during World War II that genocide was formally defined as a crime.
The Allies were not blameless when it came to brutality. The Soviet army raped as many as two million women and girls as it advanced through Germany toward Berlin.
The Allies' strategic bombing campaign killed over 600,000 in German-held Europe and at least another 500,000 in Japan, and some historians and legal commentators—albeit a minority—have argued that Allied bombing should be considered a war crime. Similarly, the question of whether it was proper or necessary to drop the atomic bombs on Japan, especially the second one, remains a matter of controversy.
Allied bombing proved especially devastating to certain cities, including Hamburg in 1943 and Dresden in early 1945, where firebombing killed approximately 25,000 to 35,000 (this figure was inflated to 200,000 by early but inaccurate German reports that continue to confuse the record today). Dresden remains notorious because it took place when the war was essentially over and because it is debatable whether the city was militarily important enough to warrant targeting. The author Kurt Vonnegut was present in Dresden with a number of other U.S. prisoners of war and portrays the event in his novel Slaughterhouse Five.
The U.S. firebombing of Tokyo in March 1945 killed approximately 100,000 people—more than either atomic bomb did in its initial blast.
Nonetheless, the Axis committed atrocities more systematically and on a larger scale. Both Japan and Germany killed large numbers of civilians, executed or mistreated prisoners of war, and pressed several million enemy non-combatants into forced labor.
Japan plundered its occupied territories, the so-called “Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere.” It used prisoners as human subjects to test biological and chemical weapons, and Japan’s army forced thousands of women from mainland Asia to serve as “comfort women,” or military prostitutes.
Most heinous were the German campaigns of genocide, a crime defined in 1943 by the Polish-Jewish lawyer Rafael Lemkin (by the way Ukrainian famine of 1932–33 was also defined by him as genocide – beheading of nation by killing its most conscious parts) as the premeditated attempt to annihilate a group based on its identity. As noted above, Nazi policy singled out several racial groups as “subhumans” who could not be allowed to “contaminate” the Germans’ “pure Aryan” blood. These included Slavs, those of African descent, Roma (Gypsies), and especially Jew's. Others considered “undesirable” were homosexuals, the mentally disabled, and people with venereal or incurable diseases.
Before 1939, treatment of these groups—particularly anti-Semitic persecution – had grown steadily worse, but the war triggered an escalation of systematic violence, culminating in the mass exterminations popularly known as the Holocaust. Nazi officials estimated that 11 million Jews in Europe would have to be expelled or eradicated—the so-called “Jewish problem”—and Roma were to be eliminated as well. Slavic peoples were to be conquered with brute force and the survivors enslaved.
In 1939 and 1940, as much of Europe came under German control, Nazi authorities began detaining Jews in concentration camps and city neighborhoods called ghettos. In the spring of 1941, as Germany readied its invasion of the USSR, special action squads (Einsatzgruppen) were formed to accompany the German army and execute Soviet Jew's by shooting. In July, moreover, an order to prepare a “final solution of the Jewish problem” was handed down to Nazi security forces, and though it was not signed by Hitler, it came from his chief lieutenant, certainly on Hitler’s orders.
Firing-squad executions proved too slow for the Nazis, and by late 1941, they were seeking more efficient means of mass killing. Inspired by how Nazi doctors had been clinically “euthanizing” the mentally and physically ill since 1939, key officials decided —principally at the Wannsee Conference in January 1942—to use special extermination camps, already under construction in German-held Poland, to kill victims on a truly industrial scale. At these camps, which included the infamous Auschwitz-Birkenau, victims were gassed, their bodies plundered for hidden loot, and their remains cremated. Also at these camps, numerous victims, especially Jews, Roma, and Soviet prisoners of war, were used for medical and scientific experiments, to the point of mutilation and death.
In the end, the “final solution” killed approximately 6 million Jews. Another 5 to 6 million non-Jewish victims—including an estimated 200,000 to 1.5 million Roma—perished as a result of non-military killings carried out by the Germans.
It was to punish these atrocities that the Allies organized the Nuremberg Trials (1945-1946), where Nazi leaders were prosecuted, and where the concept of crimes against humanity was codified. (A similar series of Tokyo Trials followed in 1946-1948.)
In 1948, in a collective effort to avoid such barbarities in the future, the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.