We’ll look at the Second World War, a part of the “New Thirty Years’ War.” This makes it a part of the story we’ve been thinking about for the entire semester: in what way does the war help us explain the development of, the modern world? In this context, I want to characterize the Second World War as both the catalyst for our contemporary world political, social, and economic situations, and as the perfection of the concept of “total war.” With greater technology, faster armies, and new political goals, the second world war was brought to civilian populations in new and horrifying ways that drastically changed the experience of warfare, and brought new industrial realities to the fore.
Of course, wars have always been accompanied by tragedy and great violence. World War II was different in scale in that way, too. More than 50 million people were killed during the Second World War, and some estimates go as high as 80 million. Those deaths were not all, or even mostly, among the soldiers and sailors doing the fighting. Most were civilian deaths. The tragedy with which most of us are familiar is the Holocaust, in which six million of Europe’s seven million Jews were interned in camps in Poland and Germany, cruelly deprived of their humanity and brutally killed. There were tragedies before and after the beginning of this one, though, and we need to review those as well in our attempt to understand what about all this is important in our search for the road to our modern life. There was the great tragedy of the massacre at Nanking in 1938, the allied firebombing of cities in Germany and Japan in 1944 and 1945 that killed tens of thousands of non-combatants. There were the atomic bombings, the mistreatment of prisoners of war, the executions of civilians who were singled out only because of their positions of importance in their communities, and many other examples of inhumane treatment of people who did nothing, but happened to be in the path of the war.
The first of the great tragedies of the Second World War, of course, is the fact that it occurred at all. Despite the punitive treaties that were dished out to Germany at Versailles in 1919, by the mid to late 1920’s Europe seemed to have a lasting peace within its grasp. With the Locarno Pact of 1925, the Kellogg-Briand pact of 1928, the League of Nations functioning at its high point, and Germany developing a democracy, the possibilities of a second world war seemed remote.
Unfortunately, that late 1920’s period was to be the Indian Summer of peace and liberal government in Europe. Forces were already afoot in 1923 that would soon set fire to the dry leaves of European security. This time, the flames truly would engulf the world.
Adolf Hitler, Fascism, and the Nazi Party
In 1923, following his arrest while trying to destroy Germany’s Weimar Republic, Adolf Hitler dictated Mein Kampf to Rudolph Hess from his well appointed jail cell in Germany. In it, he outlined a broad vision for a kind of malignant nationalism that would call together all Germans, and exclude, even from within its own ranks, those that were somehow different (race was not the only determining factor in this). He was preceded in his political thinking by Benito Mussolini, a former socialist in Italy whose frustration with the inability of socialism to gain power, and whose ambition drove him to create a radical, conservative, nationalist ideology that could claim a broad base of support from the laboring classes because of its semi-socialist ideals, including sharing of resources, etc., but also gained backing from the upper classes of Italian society because of its conservatism, support for private ownership of business and property, and nationalist leanings. Mussolini called his new political system “fascism” for the fasces, a bundled bushel of grain commonly used in ancient Rome as a symbol of power and military success.
Hitler refined Mussolini’s ideas later, when, in 1933, with only 37% of the popular vote, he was able to get himself appointed chancellor of the republic. In a few short years – by 1936 in fact, Hitler was able to use the electoral process to destroy the republic. Once the National Socialist Party (“Nazi,” is a shortened word for National Socialism) gained a place in the Reichstag, and Hitler became Germany’s Chancellor, they were able to use the system of voting in the Reichstag to essentially eliminate legal opposition or disagreement with the Nazi party. This became a major symbol of his repudiation of capitalism as a viable economic system. The elimination of the Weimar Republic, which had tried to keep Germany afloat in the freewheeling market economy of the interwar years seemed to be the beginning of the solution to all of the problems of the German People, most of which stemmed from the first World War and the Great Depression.
For both Hitler and Mussolini, the chief aim of life was to serve the state. Individual existence had little meaning outside of that. This service, and group ethic, became the primary ethical force in fascist societies. In a sense, this solved the problem of modern economics, because if all were one, then there was no need for a state assembly to negotiate and argue decisions for long periods. Instead, Fascism in Italy, and later Nazism in Germany, came to believe that a single leader, with the power to shape social, political, and economic debate would best solve these problems, for he, like the enlightened despot of the 17th century, would be seeking the most rational and effective decisions for the people of the nation. This is Totalitarianism. In many ways, this solution seemed to make sense at the time, and not just in Italy and Germany, but in the United States as well, where Senator Huey Long put together his own security force of thugs and attempted a power grab that seems related to the activities of Hitler and Mussolini.
The Road to World War II in Europe
The war itself began, as always, from a complex set of goals and problems that affected the governments of Hitler, Mussolini, and that of Japan, which was fascist, but not totalitarian – Japan did not have a single all-powerful leader at its head.
Hitler’s war actually started in 1936, only three years after his election to the Chancellorship of the Weimar Republic, when he decided to remilitarize the Rhineland, an area that had been left as a demilitarized zone after WWI to provide for French security concerns. This act was a gamble for Hitler. By 1936 German rearmament was still in its early stages, still illegal, and still a kind of open secret. He was not sure what the reaction of the former allies would be. His advisors certainly made it clear to Hitler that his army was not yet strong enough to defend itself if France or Great Britan decided to use force to keep them out. In the actual event, France complained loudly, but Great Britain and the United States had the attitude that Germany needed to be given a little breathing space, and chose to see the remilitarization of the Rhineland as a return to a normal condition for the German nation, and heralding a possible recovery in the German economy which might bring hope for further payment of war reparations and repayment of loans. Hitler’s move went without a hitch.
His next aggressive step was the Anschluss – the March, 1938 annexation of Austria. Hitler accomplished this, as well. It did not go smoothly, however. Proposing union to the Austrian government, Hitler was rebuffed by the Austrian Prime Minister, who proposed an election on the matter. Recognizing that under fair election rules, Austrians would likely reject a union with Germany, Hitler declined. Instead, contacts in the Austrian army allowed the Germans to bring in an invasion force through border checkpoints without any conflict. As German units poured toward Vienna, the SS found Nazi supporters to line the streets. Austrians who were not supporters of the Nazis were encouraged to stay indoors. Hitler’s army was thus greeted in Vienna by a friendly crowd of swastika waving pan-German nationalists. As the Austrian government agreed to union with the Third Reich, Hitler held an election under his own rules, in which only those who were of proper racial or political provenance could vote. This vote, hardly a true majority, was heavily in favor of the Anschluss. Britain and France considered protests, but neither had a population willing to go to war with Hitler, or anyone, after WWI. Both thus accepter the Anschluss and justified that recognition by references to the election, which was clearly carried out under unfair voting rules. The fact that the great democracies, victors in World War I, were unwilling to go to war caused Hitler to feel confirmed in his view that democracy was weak.
After his success with Austria, Hitler moved to further increase his territory by claiming that the several million ethnic Germans living in Czechoslovakia should be a part of the Greater German Empire. Since those Germans were living in a border area of Czechoslovakia known as the Sudetenland, Hitler's intent was clearly that the Sudetenland should be ceded to Germany. It was convenient for Hitler that the primary fortifications and armories of the Czechoslovak army happened to be in the Sudetenland, as well, and their loss would leave that country practically defenseless. In fact, by the time Hitler began his diplomatic work to this end, he had already set an invasion date and moved the German army to the frontier of Czechoslovakia. In any case, after a tense series of negotiations, English Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, convinced by Hitler's declaration that after the Sudetenland Germany would have no more continental interests, and French Foreign Minister Eduard Daladier, representing a French republic aghast at the possibility of war, first counselled Czechoslovakia to accede to Hitler's demands, then, on September 29 and 30th, 1938, allowed Hitler to take the Sudetenland in an agreement signed at Munich. This strategy, initiated to avoid war, and based on the assumption that Germany would need no more territory, was known as "appeasement." In the end, Hitler took the Sudetenland, then quickly invaded and occupied the whole of defenseless Czechoslovakia. The Allies – France and Great Britain, were unready for war, and were unable to do anything to stop the final step of this “rape of Czechoslovakia.”
The War of Ideas
By 1939 it seemed to many world political leaders that the true power broker in Europe was Adolf Hitler. He was unafraid of using force, and this willingness, combined with strong and definite political ideals made him a decisive and effective leader in the minds of many. Democracy had been to a great extent discredited by the effectiveness of Hitler’s solutions to the modern problems of Europe. Gradually, the number of democracies in the world, which had increased in the period just after WWI, began a drastic decline.
One of the most important, in terms of events leading to war, was Spain. In the 1920’s, Spain had developed a vibrant democracy. In 1936, a secular liberal government, with socialist leanings, was elected. General Francisco Franco then rebelled against the government, hoping to overthrow the elected government and create a dictatorship with himself at its head. His philosophy was deeply nationalist, and very anti-communist, and he drew his assistance from the fascist states - Germany and Italy. While the United States and Great Britain supported the duly elected government, they did not do so directly, for fear that they might be associated with the only power willing to support Spain's democracy openly - the Soviet Union. Spain's civil war thus provided a new fascist state in Europe, one that had turned quite abruptly and unwillingly from democracy. It also provided Germany with a testing ground for the weapons and tactics of its newly rearmed military. In one instance, German bombers dropped tons of explosives on a small Spanish town called Guernica, which had no military value in the civil war, apparently just to test a new bomb site. Pablo Picasso's painting "Guernica" memorializes the brutality of that event.
Hitler’s basic philosophy of nationalism didn’t leave much room for ethnic non-Germans. His plan was to create a lasting and large ethnic German empire. He was convinced, for example, that the ancestral territory of the “pure” Germans was in southern Russia, the Ukraine and Georgia. He was determined to take that territory, along with Poland, to satisfy his perceived need for lebensraum, or living space. The problem that there were already people living there did not bother Hitler, for he believed that the Slavs were an inferior race – sub-human in fact, and thus subject to killing, repression, and forced relocation in order to make room for the Germans. At the top of his list for elimination from the German population, and from southern Russia, from Poland, eventually from Czechoslovakia and Hungary and Austria as well, were the Jews. His design for Norwary, Sweden, and Denmark, though, did not involve slaughter or mass deportation, because he saw the inhabitants of those nations as ethnic Germans who had lost their knowledge of their German ancestry and language. Occupation by Germany would serve to remind them who they were, he believed, and they would become a part of the Third Reich.
By 1938, Germany was already actively persecuting Jewish and other “undesirable” racial groups throughout its territories. In 1939, as Germany started WWII in Europe by Invading Poland, the active destruction of the Jews was well under way. As early as the year he was appointed to be Chancellor of Germany, 1933, Hitler and the Nazi Party instituted a boycott against shops and businesses owned by Jewish people. In 1935 Jews were denied German citizenship, and their voting in the 1936 elections was illegal. In 1938 a law requiring Jews to carry identification cards was passed in the Reichstag, and Jews of Polish descent were expelled from Germany. On the night of November 9 and 10 of 1938, Nazi gangs roamed German cities, breaking glass and destroying property and synagogues in Jewish neighborhoods. So much destruction occurred, and there was so much broken glass that this act of racial violence has come to be called Kristallnacht. Initially, as they invaded Poland, and later Russia, the SS would move ahead of the main Germany army. Their job was to spread terror and prepare territories politically for defeat and German rule. One of their activities was to round up and either imprison or execute Jews, Slavs, Gypsies, and those who were physically or mentally disabled. At first this was done with machine guns, and the undesirables were made to line up in front of long mass graves, undress and fold their clothes, after which they would be executed by machine-gun fire, and fall backward into the trenches on top of their comrades. Such methods apparently took too much of a toll on the morale of the SS men whose job it was to man the machine guns, however, and eventually the highly efficient measures that included concentration camps, slave labor for German industry, and mass execution by Gas, were developed to make it possible for the SS to do its job more efficiently, and with less toll on the soldiers in the ranks. In all, around 7 million people went into the concentration camps of the Nazis between 1938 and 1945. Of those, around 6 million never made it out. Most of those people are unidentified, and the whereabouts of their remains a mystery. This is the tragedy known as the Holocaust.
In a way, we could say that the most successful tactic of the Germans in World War II was blitzkrieg. The use of shock tactics was not confined to the battlefield, but was used to stun enemies ideologically, to reduce them in a racial sense, and to sew discord and chaos, even before German arms arrived on the scene. The term blitzkrieg, however, was not invented by the German generals who used it - though its definition would make sense to them. It is a term used by Western journalists to describe the way the German army operated in the first theater on the opening of the war in Europe: Poland. This tactic of "lightning war” (a literal translation of blitzkrieg) began with aircraft sent over the enemy to “soften up” defensive positions with heavy bombing. The ground assault started with tracked armored vehicles, mostly the fast, effective German Panzer, behind which walked foot soldiers armed with effective, but light, weapons. These thrusting armored units could often cover 60 miles in a day - a far cry from the average speed of attack from the 18th century all the way through World War I, which was less than 13 miles per day on average. The fast tracked units were used to punch through the enemy lines, or go around the flank, forcing the enemy to defend or collapse, and allowing the slower infantry battalions to fight in more advantageous circumstances. Beginning September 1, 1939, this tactic proved very effective. Poland was conquered and occupied in a month.
Earlier in 1939 Germany and the Soviet Union had made a pact that allowed the Germans to move forward with their conquest of Poland with no fear of reprisal from the Red Army. In essence, they agreed that if Germany moved on Poland, Russia would move as well, and they would eliminate Poland altogether, dividing its territory along the Bug River. This they proceeded to do, and though the German Army had conquered well beyond the Bug, and far more than the Red Army by October, both sides honored the agreement and established a border between Germany and the USSR. The reaction of England and France was also quick, though far less effective. After the Czechoslovakia mistake, both powers had decided that Hitler could not be trusted, and began to prepare for war. When the invasion of Poland began, both France and England declared war on Germany within three days, but because of the location of the action in a landlocked part of the European continent, and the lack of preparedness of both armies, nothing could be done to help the Poles.
From October of 1939 to April of 1940, little happened in the war. Hitler was busy consolidating his conquests, and making plans. The French and English put forward their best efforts to mobilize. This part of the war, sometimes known ironically as the sitzkrieg, was an ominous silence.
On the night of April 8, 1940, the silence of the sitzkrieg was ended when the Germans began their invasion of Norway. Norway was a strategic prize for the Germans, and Great Britain had been in the process of planning its own invasion of Norway in order to deny Germany access to its ore mines. When Hitler beat them to the punch, Great Britain attempted a number of counter-attacks, but all fell short. The Norwegian military fought valiantly, though, like Britain and France its government had ignored the need for increased vigilance and military preparedness until the late 1930's - too late to be prepared of the Nazi onslaught. Norway fell quickly, and Hitler moved on to Western Europe, attacking France on May 10, 1940, and fully controlling Western Europe by the end of July of the same year. England's troops had been forced to evacuate at the beach at Dunkirk in an emergency operation using everything from military transports to fishing boats to ferry the soldiers across the English Channel, and leaving all of their equipment behind. France. whose hopes had been pinned on the formidable Maginot Line, a series of reinforced concrete fortresses connected by large underground tunnels running along the frontier between France and Germany, collapsed in two months. Germany took control of 2/3 of French territory, leaving a small rump state under the command of General Petain at the resort town of Vichy.
The Battle of Britain
The surrender of France left Great Britain alone in Western Europe resisting the Nazi war machine by the late summer of 1940. Hitler initially had plans to invade England as well, but those were indefinitely postponed as the Luftwaffe, Germany's airforce, was unable to defeat the English Royal Air Force for control of the skies. Losing too many aircraft, Hitler fell back on a strategy of civilian bombing and attrition that came to be known as the “Battle of Britain,” or “the Blitz”
This act of the war is also an example of the brutality and horror of World War II. Beginning in August of 1940, Hitler’s air force, the Luftwaffe, bomed airfields, naval bases, and other military installations in England. By September, the ineffectiveness of those raids in slowing down or stopping British production of aircraft and military hardware caused the Germans to reevaluate their strategy, and they began bombing London and other major population centers. In World War II, it seems, technology had caught up with the philosophy of “total war” and made it more effective and deadly than its WWI creators could have imagined.
The great atrocity here: civilians were bombed not because they were close to targets of military significance, but because they were the targets. Long range bombers, big guns, increasingly heavy and destructve bombs, and better and better targeting systems made it possible not only to hit the enemy where he lived, but to do so with alarming consistency, and frightening casualties. More than 40,000 people died in the Battle of Britain from bombing raids alone.
Operation Barbarossa: 1941
In June of 1941, Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, in direct violation of the mutual non-aggression pact he had signed with Stalin in 1939. Hitler’s reasons for invading Russia are not completely clear, and historians have spent much time and ink discussing them. There were almost certainly more than one reason. Speculation has run from the rational – Hitler may have wanted to be certain of his supply of oil and ore from the Soviet Union, so decided to take the territory where they were found for Germany - to the irrational - Hitler's dislike of Communism and distrust of Stalin were visceral, and he suffered from a sense of superiority and overconfidence, so he decided to rid himself of a potential future enemy and a thorn in his side at the same time.
Whatever the reason, after cleaning up Mussolini’s mess in Greece and Yugoslavia, which delayed the start of the operation until the end of summer, the German army moved in force into southern Russia in the late summer and fall of 1941. The attack was known as operation Barbarossa. At first, the success of the German Army in the Soviet Union reflected the success of its blitzkrieg tactics earlier in the war. The Germans saw success after success, and the Soviet Red Army was caught unprepared. In addition, the sudden change in direction had caught Stalin off guard, and initially he panicked, becoming unable to make any decisions at all for some time.
The German Army was ruthless, following orders to destroy whole villages, they also rounded up Jews, Slavs, and Gypsies and shot them on the spot, or forced them to march outside of town, where often conscripted locals who were not Jews machine-gunned them as they stood in front of huge trenches used for mass graves. In some cases, Jews were burned alive in synagogues or their own homes, as they had been during the invasion of Poland. A similar fate awaited political leaders and intellectuals in each town and village. The Red Army could do little but retreat before the German advance.
World War II in Asia and the Pacific
Japan’s war started even earlier than that of Germany. In 1931, a group of young officers in the Japanese Kwantung Army which guarded Manchurian assets for the Japanese government manufactured an incident of violence that gave the Kwantung army an excuse to take full control over Manchuria. Investigation of this incident by a commission headed by Lord Lytton of Great Britain under League of Nations mandate took until 1937. When Japan was found to be an aggressor, the Japanese delegation walked out of the meeting, and Japan renounced its membership in the League of Nations. This event is often pointed to as being both an indicator of the ineffectiveness of the League at managing international affairs, and as the beginning of Japan's move toward all-out war in Asia and the Pacific. Certainly Japan’s refusal to recognize its own role as aggressor influenced the decision of the United States to begin trade embargoes, particularly of items like scrap steel, rubber, and oil, that were critical for Japan's military operations. Though the United States was not a member of the League of Nations either, American attempts to force Japan to release Manchuria from its Jaws, and the cooperation of China, Great Britain, and Holland (the Dutch) in restricting Japanese access to raw materials in Asia (the so-called ABCD Line) caused Japan’s military to feel choked and backed into a corner. Japan would, eventually, choose to fight rather than capitulate to this pressure.
In 1937, another manufactured incident provided an excuse to invade China proper. With this, the Second World War had gotten started in earnest in Asia. Japan quickly moved south- and westwards, taking control of major population centers, though having more trouble controlling the Chinese countryside.
The Nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek eventually moved to Chungking, in Szichuan Province, and created a government in exile and a large military base there. The United States sent General Stilwell to advise Chiang, and to act as liaison for supply operations. But the Nationalist KMT army did little fighting from Chungking, instead following Chiang's war plan - let the communists face the Japanese, and get worn down from it. When Japan was defeated by the United States, then the KMT would be able to move quickly and effectively against the communists.
The communists in Northern China, however, led by Mao Zedong, were not getting worn out. They had some military supply channels from the United States as well. In addition, Mao's strategy of guerilla fighting in the countryside kept the Japanese off balance, and his insistence that the Communist army treat farmers well won the communists many friends.
With the war looking longer and longer in Asia, and a tightening cordon of trade restrictions from the members of the ABCD Line, including the United States, making fighting more and more expensive, the Japanese military realized that it had to secure new access to raw materials or starve and lose the war because of it. This led to a decision to attempt to take the raw materials in Indonesia and Vietnam. However, doing so would necessitate crossing the Pacific in force, and the United States, with its powerful Pacific Fleet based at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii was not likely to allow that to happen.
These facts led to the Japanese strategy - the idea was to hit the United States hard, disabling its Pacific Fleet for a short time, and allowing Japan the chance to establish a defensive perimeter in the Pacific with which to keep the Americans away from Japanese shipping and military operations. To accomplish this aim, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto planned a series of secret voyages which would eventually bring the bulk of Japan's carrier fleet and their escorts into position north of the island of Oahu on December 7, 1941 (December 8, in Japan), a Sunday, when most American sailors would be at church, or asleep. Yamamoto, who knew the American Navy, having studied at the US Naval Academy, was correct in his assumptions, and equally accurate in his planning. The actual raid on Pearl Harbor was planned by the head of the air wing under Yamamoto, Captain Yasuo Fukuda.
In any event, the raid on Pearl Harbor went of smoothly, achieving nearly complete surprise. Nearly simultaneous raids occurred elsewhere in the Pacific, including US bases in the Philippines, and very shortly thereafter Singapore. Within three months, Japan had taken control of the entire Western Pacific - making its empire, in terms of raw square miles, nearly one quarter of the Earth's surface.
The Nanking Massacre and Atrocities in Asia
In 1938, after a relatively successful first phase of their invasion of China, the Japanese Army confronted China’s Nationalist (Goumindang, or KMT) army under the command of Chiang Kia-shek (also known as Jiang Jieshi) at the ancient capitol of Nanking.
The siege of Nanking lasted roughly two weeks, after which Jiang, realizing he would have to surrender or retreat, decided to leave the city with his army. In order to protect Nanking, Chiang also took with him any men of military age, leaving women, young children, and old men only within the walls of the great city. This was done in the hope that the Japanese would abide by the international rules of warfare, and leave the city and its inhabitants intact.
However, after the surrender of Nanking, the Japanese went on a killing spree. Lining residents of the city up on the dock near the Yangtze river, Chinese were shot and thrown into the current. Inside the walls, Japanese officers engaged in competitions to see who could cut off the most heads with their swords in a given amount of time. Babies were impaled on bayonets, and women raped multiple times. Japan, then, clearly took part in the horrors of WWII. This is further evidence that this war embodied the perfection of "total war" in the sense that the primary targets are not military, but civilian in nature. Both of the two primary aggressor nations knew almost instinctively that no longer was the enemy army the most important target, but that destruction of the enemy economy, social structure, and political stability were the keys to winning the war.
Japan proved this again with the establishment of its infamous, and secret, Unit 731. This detachment of the army was a research unit whose work concentrated on the development of biological weapons and systems for their delivery. Its experiments included work with Typhus, and Anthrax among others. The unit's records are now buried in CIA vaults, but what little has come to light through investigation and the admission of some members of Unit 731 is shocking. It is known that Unit 731 laced rice balls, drinking water, and juice with food poisoning bacteria, sprayed anthrax and other diseases in the air over Chinese cities, and deliberately infected captured Chinese civilians with diseases such as Anthrax in attempts to understand the development of diseases, and to refine them for maximum toxicity. Although Unit 731 never succeeded in developing delivery systems with battlefield capability, its work was almost entirely on human subjects, and much of its delivery research was focused not on infecting enemy fighting units, but on disabling the population of towns and cities. This war was a war on civilians.
Allied Atrocities
The allied powers, particularly the United States and Great Britain, are not entirely innocent of atrocities themselves, though they did arrive a bit late in the game to the realization that a major battlefield in WWII was the home front. As early as 1942, certain members of the British and American bomber commands in Europe were discussing the bombing of civilian centers. In April of 1945, they began carrying out such raids. Dresden, a medium sized German city, and Hamburg, were attacked during daylight raids with incendiary bombs. Documents on the decision to run these raids state clearly that the goal is to create pandemonium and shock among the civilian populations of the Nazi regime. In Dresden, incendiary bombs in the center of the city caused a conflagration so powerful that nothing that could burn was left after the fire. More than 40,000 civilians perished as a result of the Dresdent raid. Hamburg, too, was left an empty shell of concrete.
In March of 1945, prior to the raids on Germany, the United States had carried out this policy in Japan. In the briefing of American bomber pilots, some were so shocked at what they were being told to do that several considered refusing orders. American planes on that night flew low over the mostly wood and paper homes in the residential area for Tokyo laborers (no major military bases were here, and no major manufacturing of military hardware existed in the area either). The bombers dropped thousands of tons of incendiary bombs on the streets and homes of the Japanese, causing a fire, whipped by the wind, that rapidly reached 1200 degrees. It was so hot that it caused areas on the opposite side of the Edo River to spontaneously explode into flame. This created a tunnel of water between the two sides of the raging fire into which many people jumped in an attempt to save themselves. Because of the intensity of the flames, though, the oxygen was sucked from their lungs and many suffocated as a result. Many others were boiled alive or drowned. In all, 100,000 residents of Tokyo were killed that night - a number equal to or greater than that of the Hiroshima atomic bomb on August 6 of the same year. This raid, like those on Dresden and Hamburg, was calculated to create tremendous civilian casualties, in the hope of causing the Japanese populace to lose hope and confidence in their leadership.
What seems ironic in all these cases is that the attacks on civilians rarely, if ever, had the desired effect. In Tokyo, citizens became more willing than ever to become a part of the "smashing of the jewels" - the proposed suicide of the entire Japanese race to resist an American invasion of the Japanese home islands. In Germany, the battering being dished out by the Soviets on the ground was as bad or worse, and Germans were becoming, if not able to survive, at least inured to the suffering. In St. Petersburg, Russia, the harsh treatment of civilians during the Nazi siege of the city made them more, not less, willing to hold out, which they did - for 900 days – until the German army gave up and left. In London, the bombing made British more resistant, not less, to the attempt of Germans to break their spirit. The Jews survived the holocaust, and were determined never to let it happen again - their spirit as a race, as an ethnic group, as a culture, was galvanized, not destroyed by the Nazi attempt to erase them from the face of the earth.
Winning the War of Industry and Technology
Since World War II was a modern war - fought with technology, mass production, and sophisticated economics and propaganda systems, it makes some sense that the nations that could best afford it, and could muster the best technology coupled with the most productive manufacturing system and the raw materials to put into it would eventually be victorious. In fact, gaining, and using, these very things were war aims for all of the axis powers – Germany, Japan, and Italy. For the Allies, the two powers most likely to be able to muster such support were the Soviet Union and the United States. Both were richly endowed with raw materials, including oil, metals, wood, and many other necessities. Both were trans-continental in scope, and so had a wide variety of resources and locations for manufacture – this put the Soviet Union in good stead because not only were distances within it so vast that no army could hope to fill them all, but also because it left room to back up, to move factories and workers far from the clutching hands of the German Army. For the United States, distance was the key blessing. Both were able relatively quickly to increase production of war material not only for themselves but for their allies (the Soviet Union much less so than the United States, which became the workshop for the allied powers in this period). The United States produced 2/3 of the war material and weapons used by the Allied Powers during the Second World War.
The Endgame
In 1940, after Mussolini decided to invade Abyssinia, in North Africa the British used the excuse to send an exhibition force into North Africa to see action against the Italians. The British drove Italy out of North Africa, but then was engaged by a small German expeditionary force under General Irwin Rommel. Rommel’s forces were small, but their experience and weapons gave them an edge, and they drove the British force back to the frontiers of Egypt.
On December 6, 1941, in the Soviet Union the Red Army counterattacked, stopping the Germans before they reached Moscow. On the very next day, the United States was drawn into the war by Japan's surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. These two events constitute a turning point of sorts. With the end of Germany's speed offensive against Russia, the German Army came to recognize that it would now have to fight the long war that it had feared and was unprepared for. Hitler then decided, in spring of 1942, to send the majority of his force toward the Caucasus, with the intent of grabbing the oil fields there in the hope that this would provide resources for fighting a longer war. After the German Army punched through to Stalingrad, however, the Red Army cut them off, trapping the entire German 6th Army. At this point, it was clear that the war was lost for Germany, though much hard fighting across Eastern Europe was still to come.
By August of 1942, the United States was also heavily in the fight in Europe. This added strength and material to the British effort against the Nazis in North Africa. The British on their own in that year were able to defeat Rommel’s forces, and then the United States and Great Britain invaded Italy through Sicily in July of 1943, causing Mussolini’s overthrow, and the new Italian government to join the Allied side in the war.
In June of 1944 a combined Allied force began landing at Normandy, on the French Coast. The entire landing included 850,000 troops, and their weapons, medics, and supplies. It was the largest logistical effort ever undertaken. Initially, German defenses held and the Allied forces were held to the beaches. However, they were continuously resupplied (with some difficulty) and in mid-July began to break out from the beaches and penetrate France itself. From there, allied victories outnumbered allied defeats, and the German army was forced to fall back until its ultimate defeat in April 1945, when Hitler committed suicide in his bunker in Berlin.
The war in the Pacific took longer. This was in part because recovery of the US Pacific Fleet took time (no carriers had been damaged, but a large number of repairs to other ships had to be completed, and new ships brought into the Pacific). It also had to do with the fact that the United States was fighting on two fronts simultaneously. Priority was given to defeating Hitler in Europe, and so the United States consequently devoted fewer of its resources to the Pacific theater.
Still, Pearl Harbor had been damaged, but the giant fuel depot at Pearl Harbor was secure, and that meant that Hawaii could still be used as a forward base, making long forays into Japanese-held territory possible. After a few short battles, including one where the U.S. carrier fleet was badly mauled in the Coral Sea, the U.S. and Japanese fleet met each other in force at Midway, in 1942.
This fight was partially a set-up by the US Navy, whose intelligence system, including the ability to read Japanese code, made it possible for them to plant disinformation about Midway, which lured the Japanese fleet there. Still, luck was involved as well – the Japanese thought they had achieved surprise at Midway, but were patrolling looking for U.S. ships that they expected to be in the area. The aircraft of both fleets scanned the seas for the enemy, and both found each other almost simultaneously. The U.S. aircraft were first by a matter of only a few minutes, and U.S. planes were sent to attack the Japanese fleet. They arrived just after the Japanese planes had left to attack the U.S. fleet. The battle was brutal, long, and new - involving the aircraft from aircraft carriers fighting each other from over the horizon, rather than the closer-range battleship slugfests that commanders on both sides had prepared for over their entire careers. naval warfare was changed forever at Midway. So was the course of the war in the Pacific. Ultimately, the Japanese fleet lost more ships than the United States, and more than it could replace, which permanently reduced the size and effectiveness of the Japanese Navy.
The crippling of the Japanese Navy meant that the United States could operate in the Pacific Theater more easily than before, and that the Japanese would have a harder time resupplying the army and the Japanese mainland with raw materials to keep Japan’s war machine operating.
The United States then pursued an island hopping strategy, moving across and around Japanese-occupied islands that were clearly well-defended fortified areas, and attacking, for the most part, less-well-defended spots, thus cutting off and strangling the Japanese army in pockets around the pacific. One of the first, and most brutal of these, was Guadalcanal.
Eventually arriving at control of Iwo Jima, very close to the Japanese mainland, the United States massed its fleet and attacked the island of Okinawa in the Ryukyu chain. This was one of the most destructive battles in the war. Beginning in April, 1945, with the largest battle fleet ever assembled arriving off the coast of Okinawa to begin a massive bombardment of Japanese positions. By June 21, 38,000 American soldiers, 107,000 Japanese military personnel, and up to 100,000 Japanese and Okinawan civilians were killed in this last and most difficult battle of the war.
On August 6, then again on August 11, the United States used the newest of the technologically advanced weapons developed during World War II – the atomic bomb – on two Japanese cities. The August 6th bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a city that at the time had no military value – it was chosen at random from a list of targets used by the US Army Air Force. The Hiroshima bomb, dropped by Col. Paul Tibbets and his crew in a B-29 Bomber named Enola Gay, was devastating in its effect, flattening the city, and immediately killing nearly 80,000 peopled. The Nagasaki bomb, dropped on August 11, was less destructive, primarily because of the fact that Nagasaki sits in a bowl surrounded by mountains, which redirected the force of the blast and it’s after effects, limited the immediate death toll to about 40,000 to 50,000 individuals.
Still, the power of the weapon was staggering, and the use of it prompted Japan’s emperor to do what he had been considering for some time – surrender. He did so in a very vague way, and in fact, was nearly stopped by the army. The speech which was broadcast to the Japanese people over the radio was in fact recorded on a disc, and the army, which was willing to sacrifice itself and all the people of Japan should the U.S. invade the Japanese mainland, attempted to take away from the emperor’s envoys the night before the scheduled broadcast.
In any even, the broadcast went forward, and Japan formally surrendered on August 15, 1945, ending the Second World War.
Ultimately, World War II was a modern war, in the sense that it made clear the reality of the industrial revolution, the scientific revolution, and the political revolutions of the two centuries before. The reality of the modern world was that political, social, and economic systems were the tools of populations, not ruling groups, and that was emphasized by the fact that when those populations went to war, the they fought each other not as armies or governments, but as whole populations, entire economies, rival social and political systems. World War II was total war, and it changed the face of human society totally for the rest of the 20th century.
Austin, Benjamin. "The Holocaust/Shoa Page: "Kristallnacht"." Middle Tennessee State University, http://frank.mtsu.edu/~baustin/knacht.html.
Beevor, Antony. Stalingrad. New York , N.Y.: Penguin Books, 1999.
Chang, Iris. The Rape of Nanking : The Forgotten Holocaust of World War Ii. New York: Penguin Books, 1998.
Gentile, Benito Mussolini & Giovanni. "Fascism." In Italian Encyclopedia, 1932.
Howard, Michael. "The Oxford History of the Twentieth Century." edited by Michael Howard and WM. Roger Louis, 343. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Keegan, John. The Second World War. 1 ed. New York, London: Penguin, 1990.
John Keegan, The Second World War, 1 ed. (New York, London: Penguin, 1990), 33.
Benito Mussolini & Giovanni Gentile, "Fascism," in Italian Encyclopedia (1932).
Keegan, The Second World War, 36.
Benjamin Austin, "The Holocaust/Shoa Page: "Kristallnacht"," Middle Tennessee State University, http://frank.mtsu.edu/~baustin/knacht.html.
Michael Howard, "The Oxford History of the Twentieth Century," ed. Michael Howard and WM. Roger Louis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 112-15.
CBS News video “The Century, America’s Time,” #3, “The 1940’s”.
Iris Chang, The Rape of Nanking : The Forgotten Holocaust of World War Ii (New York: Penguin Books, 1998).
Howard, "The Oxford History of the Twentieth Century," 114-15. Antony Beevor, Stalingrad (New York , N.Y.: Penguin Books, 1999).