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[A] Chapter 8: Downfall 1944-1945

[A] Chapter Outline

o Downfall
o Profiling Global Suffering
o Opening a Western Front
o Destruction of Hitler’s Thousand Year Reich
o Hiroshima and Japan’s Surrender
o Beyond Catastrophe

[A] Timeline
1944 Allied Invasion of Normandy
1945 Yalta Conference
1945 Germany’s Surrender
1945 Hiroshima
1945 Japan’s Surrender

[A] Introduction: Downfall

Crippling defeats at Stalingrad and Midway all but foreclosed upon Axis victory. In
private Axis leaders often acknowledged this grim reality. Their sobriety, however, did not
incline them to surrender. Fascist doctrines clouded their thinking. As innovators for race war,
they associated military defeat with annihilation. After the failed July 1944 assassination plot,
Hitler’s fragile sanity collapsed into a morose fantasy about orchestrating Germany’s downfall.
At the opera, tears would often fill Hitler’s eyes when he watched the final scene of Richard
Wanger’s Gӧtterdämmerung where Valhalla comes crashing down. Hitler twisted mind
transformed his disastrous policies leading to Germany’s ruin into a heroic defeat that would
purge his peoples’ weaknesses and sins. Correspondingly, the Nazis accelerated their war on the
Jews. Cattle cars transporting diaspora communities were shipped to Polish death camps with
renewed urgency, assigned an even higher priority than trains transporting supplies to their
troops at the front.
Some Axis generals still put hope that some stroke of luck, a split among the allies or
some futuristic weapon might yet turn the tide. Excepting Italian elites- who overthrew
Mussolini in 1943- the Axis leaders did not seek to engage their enemies diplomatically. Rather
by mobilizing scant resources and upping the blood price, they hoped to cajole the Allies to
reconsider their Casa Blanca pledge for unconditional surrender. Both Japan and Germany
continued to fight doggedly until war’s end in 1945. The vast territories accumulated in dramatic
military victories from 1940-1942, enabled them to delay their inevitable defeat. This pyrrhic
strategy also ensured that the final chapter of World War II would prove unnecessarily bloody.
Axis resilience fueled Allied frustration. From Africa to the Pacific, and later in Europe,
as the Western Allies slowly pushed the Axis armies back, they brought the war to Axis rear
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areas. Infrastructure, cities and civilians were targeted with increasing intensity. Carpet bombing,
incendiary munitions and ultimately nuclear weapons reveal a pattern of escalating destruction
and a blurring of the line between enemy civilians and combatants. Mounting civilian casualties
were rationalized as necessary, unfortunate by-products of Axis stubbornness, or a conscious
strategy to undermine enemy war machine and morale. Given that Japan and Germany were
police states, however, public opinion exerted little influence upon their leaders. Although
unrestricted submarine warfare and incendiary bombing did exert a limited impact upon enemy
industry, it also indiscriminately butchered children, women and the elderly. The Allies had not
started this war, but they were determined to finish it. Barry Sieglaff commander of the USS
Tautog that operated in the Pacific captured the contemporary mindset well: ‘After the carnage at
Pearl Harbor – a sneak attack – who could have moral qualms about killing Japanese? Every ship
they had, combat or merchant, was engaged in the war effort one way or the other.’i
The Allies cast aside international law and the Geneva Conventions prohibiting civilian
bombing or unrestricted submarine warfare. Mounting civilian casualties revealed both an
abstraction of enemy suffering and often a deeper racial hatred against mindless krauts and
‘simian’ Japs. Among the liberal democracies ideological dehumanization of the enemy was not
as conscious or systematic as in the case of Axis and their fascist doctrine of annihilation war.
However, the results for Axis civilians proved catastrophic given the destructive arsenals the
Allies wielded.
Not only for Axis civilians, but for soldiers and occupied peoples, 1944-1945 represented
the war’s bloody climax. Suffering spiked as the war turned against the Axis and they imposed
increasingly draconian measures on occupied peoples. This only increased Allied frustration with
the casualties incurred by fruitless resistance. This chapter continues to explore the evolution of
World War II from 1944-1945 from the angle of military and diplomatic history, but it also
delves into popular experience, exploring how the war distributed civilian suffering around the
world. Colonial mobilization, scorched Earth strategies and Allied propaganda worked together
to discredit the international system and to galvanize a complex coalition determined to secure
ordinary people from the ‘scourge of war.’

[A] Profiling Global Suffering

Word War II represented a total war where belligerent states went to extreme measures to
expand their authority over the economy and mobilize civilians for their war effort. The
mechanization of warfare, particularly the wide adoption of airplanes, carriers, tanks and high
explosives, also dramatically escalated the scale of destruction and extended the radius of combat
from frontlines to civilian rear areas. In Europe, North Africa, and the Pacific unarmed civilians
were not only caught in the crossfire of armies, but 550 million were placed under occupation
regimes that viewed most of them as racially inferior or undesirable. Throughout the world, the
experience of American GIs, Australian grandmothers in Darby, Bengali artisans or Polish Jews
varied immensely, yet one universal feature of World War II was the degree to which it upset
established patterns of life, disrupted the global economy and imposed civilian suffering.
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Fascist occupation of neighboring states, economic blockades and the retooling of

national economies for war production reoriented established patterns of trade, manufacture and
investment. For civilians, mobilization measures meant long hours of hard work for often
miserable wages. Exceptionally, in the Americas, employment prospects brightened and wages
rose, but food and consumer goods were rationed. Western women working in armaments
factories received a paycheck, but they still needed to maintain the household and nurture
children, leading most to see the war as exhausting rather than liberating. While war disruption
provided a window of opportunity for Indian, Sub-Saharan and American industrialists, miners
and plantation owners, most colonial subjects saw their living standards creep lower during the
course of the long war. World War II led belligerent states to ration food, while occupied states
had many of their resources requisitioned. Even neutral nations struggled to procure basic
household supplies as global industries retooled for war. Canadian consumers started their
mornings by brewing up a coffee substitute made from acorns and grain. American civilians
gave up driving after patched tires ran out of tread, while in France consumers lived without
chocolate, and eventually wine. Britain imported half their food. When German U-Boats
threatened Britain’s link to their empire, people were forced to grow vegetables in public parks,
while grandmothers scrambled to devise recipes that could harness the delicacy of canned Spam.

>>INSERT PHOTO VIII.1 HERE

Title: Canadian Recruitment Poster
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Caption: A Canadian poster inspiring defense of distant and beleaguered Britain.

Although the Treaty of Westminster had severed Canada from the Empire, many Canadians still
identified with Britain and saw western civilization as threatened by fascist tyranny.
LINK: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lick_Them_Over_There.jpg
END Image VIII.1<<

During World War I soldiers had marched off to great fanfare, but during World War II
most believed war an unfortunate tragedy imposed upon them despite honest efforts to broker a
reasonable compromise. Axis civilians dreaded war, although fascist states were largely
insulated from public opinion. Ultimately all the belligerents erected elaborate propaganda
networks that exploited maturing mass media technologies to rally citizens behind their war
effort. British posters shamed civilians for using scarce resources like public trams. Canadian
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families were encouraged to buy war bonds, while in the Soviet Union, Stalin wisely exhorted
civilians to defend the Russian motherland rather than pressing them to sacrifice for socialism or
his unpopular regime. Roosevelt articulated the ‘four freedoms’ to provide Americans a clear
rationale for ‘why we fight.’ Polls of service personnel, however, revealed that few GIs could
identify these virtues. American soldiers, like those in other armies, fought for complicated
reasons that were often more profound, immediate and personal than the overbearing sermons
conveyed through state propaganda.
For many civilians ‘occupation’ was a defining element of their war experience. This
included civilians subjected to fascist military regimes, colonial subjects mobilized for war,
prisoners of war and to a lesser degree civilians ‘fighting’ on the home front. Spectacular Axis
victories from 1939-1942 led to the imposition of brutal occupation regimes that subjected
hundreds of millions of civilians to degrading treatment on par with the racial characteristics
attributed to them. Invariably, fascist rule, however, meant plundering the assets of occupied
states, corrupting their institutions, suspending civil liberties and imposing a draconian legal
system enforced by a secret police force. For many occupied Europeans and Asians, Axis
occupation proved particularly traumatic given its long duration. Japan occupied Manchuria in
1931, while civilians in Eastern China endured eight years of arbitrary violence from Japanese
soldiers that considered them lesser peoples. In Europe, the Czechs suffered seven years under a
Nazi protectorate designed to exploit their industry and resources, while the Poles endured a
Nazi administration determined to disintegrate their cultural identity.
Canadian civilians, like those in democratic states living outside war zones, retained more
freedom, but life was still subject to many restrictions. The US government took over many
private businesses, coordinated agricultural production and raised taxes to pay for the war.
Unprecedented intervention in the market economy deprived consumers of pocket money and
leisure time. Britain’s wartime government dispatched shocked Cambridge graduates to sweat in
Midland mines, while the War Board dispatched women from urban slums for unpopular farm
work in the countryside. Japanese requisitions in Vietnam in 1945 led to a famine that cost two
million lives.ii Life in wartime Winnipeg was no picnic, but hardly compared to occupied Manila
or in besieged Leningrad, where some starving citizens resorted to cannibalism in 1942. Across
the globe, total war forced ordinary people to adjust to difficult conditions, often pushing
civilians beyond traditional physical and psychological limits.
Occupation and total war mobilization also upset traditional patterns of life, forcing
ordinary people to make multiple, often difficult adjustments. During World War II, 110 million
troops were mobilized for war. Young men drafted into the fighting forces left the grey slums of
Brooklyn and Essen for the dense green jungles of Papua New Guinea or the parched deserts of
Libya. In these inhospitable environments, they encountered snakes, flies, or monsoon rains that
lasted weeks and soaked them to the bone. In the USA, the invitation of women, African-
Americans and other minorities onto shop floors stirred up resentment among the relict older
male work force because it challenged informal norms of gender, sex and race. Although
American workers faced the pressure of meeting production targets, at least they did not worry
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about the wail of air sirens that awoke many European civilians from their nightly slumber.
Aerial bombardment, internment and enemy occupation left deep scars. Decades later a passing
ambulance or explosion might trigger an unwelcome flashback for civilians suffering from post-
traumatic stress syndrome.
World War II dislocated people on massive scale, separating family members,
transforming traditional labor markets and stimulating complex patterns of involuntary
migration. The Nazis shipped three million Jews to Polish death camps, even while they shuttled
Russian and Italian POWs to Ruhr and Bohemia to keep their factories and mines running.
Wealthy German women fled the bombing of the northern cities for the safety of rural Bavaria,
while in the USA, African-American sharecroppers escaped the Jim Crow laws by migrating to
the booming armaments factories in Northern cities.
Ordinary people developed many strategies to cope with war-time stress. Throughout
Nazi occupied Europe, resistance ranged from organized sabotage to quiet acts of defiance like
stealing food or maintaining an illegal radio to listen to BBC broadcasts. Japanese and German
authorities often retaliated to guerilla resistance by executing civilian hostages. Brutal partisan
wars in Northern China, Malay, the Philippines, Serbia and Eastern Poland resulted in massive
civilian loss of life, as Japanese and German forces resorted to indiscriminate slaughter of
villages suspected of colluding with partisan forces. For most of occupied Asia and Europe,
hunger, degradation, and arbitrary state rules pushed civilians into criminal behavior. People
forged ration cards, sabotaged factory machinery and hoarded resources in a bid to live another
day, steadily eroding prewar notions of morality.

>>INSERT PHOTO VIII.2

Title: Hitler’s War of Annihilation in the East

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Caption: Behind invading German soldiers, Einsatzgruppen conducted pacification

campaigns in the Russian countryside rounding up mostly Jews, but also other race and
ideological enemies, for summary execution.
LINK: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/75/Einsatzgruppen_Killing.jpg
END IMAGE VIII.2<

In the West, workers and soldiers sought relief from stress through alcohol, humor and
promiscuity. During the war, the Soviet government tolerated ‘war marriages’ that sprung up
spontaneously along its frontlines among its gender integrated ranks. British officials, like their
German and Japanese counterparts, set up brothels for their troops. The diaries of British field
troops from 1943 revealed increasing anxiety that well-paid GIs stationed in Britain might
seduce their girls back home with otherwise unavailable nylons, cocoa or lipstick. Britons
chastised the ‘goodtime girls’ who fraternized with African-American soldiers rather then their
‘own’ kind. The Japanese Government forced hundreds of thousands of Korean, Chinese and
Malayan women to serve as ‘comfort women’ to help alleviate their troops’ stress from combat.
In France, war widows left destitute sometimes resorted to prostitution, while the wives of POWs
were tempted to establish amorous relations with the boche in order to feed their family. Around
the world civilians adjusted their routines, beliefs and morals to survive the catastrophe.
After 1942, the war’s escalating intensity redoubled state mobilization efforts, which in
turn amplified the pressure belligerent states brought to bear on their own citizens and subjugated
peoples. For Germany, defeats on the Russian Front forced the mobilization of occupied civilians
and prisoners of war to offset its growing military losses. Desperate manpower shortages led
Stalin to conscript women, which exposed them to rape. As the war turned against Japan, they
forcibly relocated 1.3 million Koreans to work in mainland industries, while conscripting
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thousands of Javanese and Burmese villagers to augment Allied prisoners of war in constructing
the infamous Burma railway. Conditions in Japanese camps were atrocious; food and medical
care consistently inadequate, sanitary facilities primitive, while sadistic Japanese guards indulged
in systemic abuse of prisoners who had dishonored themselves by surrendering. Poles lived
under the ‘law of death’ knowing that Occupation authorities could arbitrarily kill them for
surrealistic crimes like baking white bread or consuming too much electricity.
Psychologically, the occupation experience was defined by systemic deprivation,
degradation and often indiscriminate punishment. Unlike World War I, civilians often found
themselves on unwillingly placed on the frontlines and enduring the horror of combat and the
slow burning stress of insecurity.
During air raids, British civilians numbly stared at their cellar walls wondering whether they
might suddenly bulge open from a direct hit. Elderly Chinese women passed Japanese patrols
never knowing whether they might receive a polite nod or a rifle butt between their teeth for the
crime of not being Japanese. Frontline soldiers, concentration camp prisoners and civilians
subjected to aerial bombardment lived in a state of constant insecurity. Even inside North
America, regimes of censorship curbed press freedoms, overcrowded public transportation made
chores and getting to work challenging, while state indoctrination pushed citizens to sacrifice.
Escapism represented a popular reaction to this intense oppression. Civilians sought temporary
reprieve from the pressures of war by pursuing simple pleasures; indulgence in alcohol, sexual
intercourse and miscellaneous acts of depravity. Deviance and subversion chipped away at older
ideas of morality, gender and race and paved the way for radical postwar movements for radical
change.
Over time, the stresses of total war eroded traditional ideas about gender, race, class and
society. In wartime Britain, women from variant social classes joined together to form local
mutual aid societies that pooled resources to help the poor and less fortunate. The London Blitz
and the evacuation of children awakened the British public to urban poverty and malnutrition
among the urban working classes. The British government’s campaign to enlist popular support
for a war of uncertain prospects mandated them to make implicit promises for postwar reform.
The wartime coalition government adopted the ‘fair share’ slogan that explicitly renounced
prewar Britain’s class system and responded to a popular desire for a postwar state that would
better reflect the equality of wartime sacrifice.
The shocks of World War II dealt a fatal blow to the legitimacy of western colonial
empires. Once more countless colonial soldiers were recruited from Algeria, India and Sub-
Saharan colonies to work, bleed and die to restore democratic rights their European masters
denied them in their own homelands. In India, the prestige of British authorities plummeted
following the arrest of Congress Party leaders and a devastating famine that struck Bengal from
1943-1944. The famine was a complex result of draught, a cyclone, crimped transportation
resources and Japanese occupation of Siamese rice fields that traditionally supplied Bengal.
While the famine was exacerbated by autonomous Indian provincial governments that banned
rice exports, British administrators received most of the blame. Not only in Europe, but in North
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Africa and Asia cities emerged as battlefields claiming high numbers of civilian casualties.
Returning African-American soldiers who bled and died fighting Nazism resented racial
discrimination at home. Japan’s East Asian War, and to a lesser extent the Nazi campaign in the
Middle East, exploited native nationalism by promising colonial liberation. Even when the Axis
armies were pushed back and discredited, the discourse of self-determination had become
inextricably linked to postwar promises of a better world and the experience of wartime suffering
making return to the prewar colonial status quo difficult.
During World War I combat had been mostly confined to European trenches. During
World War II, new strategic warfare doctrines directly targeted enemy civilians. Routinely cities
emerged as battlefronts between clashing armies because their rubble afforded cover from high
explosives. Across the globe, civilians were not just caught in the crossfire, but were often
deliberately put into the cross hairs. Prewar British doctrines had emphasized how strategic
bombers provided a deterrent to attack. With the fall of France, strategic bombing afforded
Britain its only immediate avenue for attacking Germany. When its campaign failed to disable
enemy factories from 1941-42, Bomber Command increasingly switched to a ‘saturation’
strategy that called for indiscriminate carpet bombing. Operation Gomorrah in 1943, devastated
the armaments industry in Hamburg, but also killed 40,000 civilians. Most died in air raid
shelters from asphyxiation. A firestorm literally sucked oxygen from their lungs.
While Allied air attacks against enemy civilians intensified, and turned increasingly
indiscriminate, they were increasingly justified as necessary and effective at eroding enemy
morale. Fascist indoctrination meant that Axis atrocities frequently revealed an explicit racial
motivation, but Allied atrocities were also shaped by racial stereotypes. Japanese atrocities
committed in 1942-43, were reciprocated on the battlefield by US Marines from Guadalcanal
onward, and later justified the USA’s later pitiless bombing of ‘Jap’ cities from 1944-1945.
Racism spurred the Canadian government to suspend the rights of citizens of Japanese descent,
to liquidate their property and confine them to interior concentration camps. The nature, timing
and scope of civilian atrocities during World War II varied widely, but they were a depressingly
common feature of World War II. Whether persecuted as racially undesirable, or exploited as
culturally inferior or targeted as a combatant without uniform, civilians were not spared the
horrors of war.

<C> Hitler’s Final Solution

During World War II, mass civilian killings represented not an unfortunate side effect,
but a distinguishing feature of race war. In Poland during 1939, both the Soviets and Nazis
prepared kill lists that targeted members of the elite. Similarly, in occupied China “bandits” were
marked for abuse, torture, rape and degradation for failing to submit and acknowledge the
superiority of the Yamato race. Japan’s Sook Ching “pacifications” missions are estimated to
have killed 25 million in rural China, considerably more than Jews killed in the Holocaust. iii
Japan’s scorched earth anti-guerrilla Three Alls Policy: “kill all, loot all, burn all”iv was later
applied to the Philippines and Malay where 50,000 of 200, 000 of Chinese descent were killed.
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Race was critical in helping Nazi authorities to identify Reichsfeinde incompatible with the new
order they were building in Eastern Europe. Racial doctrines blurred the distinction between
nation security, guerrilla pacification and ethnic cleansing. This was evident in the intimate
connection between Operation Barbarossa and General Plan Ost, where conquest of the USSR
was tied to a systematic program for ethnic cleansing of Slavs to make room for people of
German stock. This led to state sanctioned starvation of 4.2 million Soviet civilians and 3 million
Red Army soldiers by 1944.v
The Holocaust represented World War II’s most infamous atrocity, but it was unique
principally in its genocidal intent. The Nazis had dealt ruthlessly with political rivals ever since
their seizure of power. During the war, the Nazi state subjected Slavs, communists, homosexuals,
Polish priests and gypsies to its brutal concentration camp system. Their primary aim was not
death or confinement, but degradation, breaking the spirit of state enemies. What set Jewish
victims apart, was their prominent place in Hitler’s imagination and Nazi propaganda. Hitler had
never concealed his willingness to resort to extreme measures to address the ‘racial threat’ posed
by Jews, but what the Nazis termed their Final Solution to the ‘Jewish problem’ had complex
origins. The technologies used to murder Jews were originally developed for an euthanasia
program targeting Germany’s mentally ill. The Dachau system of concentration camps was
devised to cordon off political prisoners and psychological break them to prevent them from
ideologically infecting the general population. Despite an institutional drift towards genocide, it
was not until the 1942 Wannsee Conference that the Nazis organized six death camps in Poland
provisioned with poison gas extermination facilities for mass murder and industrial scale
crematoria to dispose of the resulting corpses. The Holocaust was a complex culmination of
Hitler’s rabid anti-Semitism, the erection of a police state that operated outside the scope of law
and civilian control, a series of decisions brokered inside the Nazi bureaucracy from 1938-1942,
as well as the changing trajectory of the war. What sets the Holocaust apart from other war
atrocities was the clarity of its genocidal ambition and its systemic implementation. The closet
analogue was the counter insurgency policies imposed by the Japanese from 1937-1945 that
killed over 23 million Chinese. While Japan lacked the ambition, plan or infrastructure for
genocide, their occupation policies reflected a similar combination of racial indoctrination and
systematic application of state violence. The most startling aspect of the 1937-1938 Nanking
Massacre, was not that an estimated 200, 000 Chinese civilians died in three months, but how the
army’s rank and file spontaneously participated in this butchery. Ordinary soldiers revealed a
streak for sadistic innovation, raping girls and mothers before fathers and husbands, cutting off
the breasts of women, or mutilating their genitals. Hannah Arendt argued that the Holocaust
shocks because it demonstrates the ability for humans to coldly rationalize murder, but Nanking
reveals a more brutal impulse. The link between Nanking and Auschwitz was fascist propagation
of racial attitudes that rendered enemy civilians animals worthy of slaughter.

<Insert Textbox>
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Historians of the Holocaust often assert its uniqueness. While this remains indisputable, to what
extent did Hitler’s war against the Jews fit into a larger World War II pattern of racial
dehumanization and mass civilian killings?
<Insert Textbox>

World War II’s global radius makes it difficult to summarize the dimensions of suffering.
Soldiers fought in different fronts and branches of service, while civilians were subjected to
divergent stresses and hardships over variant periods of time. Cities like Berlin were transformed
into battlefields, while states like Brazil and Canada escaped the ravages of aerial bombardment.
Still, few states remained neutral, and none escaped the war’s radical disruption of global
patterns of trade, manufacture, and investment. World War II represented a global tsunami. From
Manila to Warsaw, houses were destroyed, crops were burned, and villages were laid to waste.
For prisoners of war, miners in the British Midlands, Bengalese peasants, total war meant long
hours for miserable wages, hunger, and adapting to adverse circumstances, shortages and
restricted freedoms. Pressure mounted during the course of the war, challenging traditional ideas
about gender, race, class, and state, while stimulating a yearning for rest and relief. Russians,
Serbians, Koreans and Americans may have experienced different wars, but across the world
stage soldiers and civilians understood that they were enduring a global tragedy. After two world
wars and a Great Depression there could be no return to the past. The United Nations call for
‘peace and security’ resonated precisely because it echoed a deep yearning for a better future.

[A] Opening a Western Front 1944

The Grand Alliance defeated Nazi Germany by grinding down the Wehrmacht with superior
forces from multiple fronts. The threat of an Anglo-American invasion had contributed to Soviet
advances during 1943, but an establishment of a viable western front was necessary to bring the
war to a swift conclusion. The success of the Allied invasion of Normandy in 1944 often lends
the impression that victory was somehow inevitable. On June 6, however, Supreme Allied
Commander Dwight Eisenhower carried in his breast pocket the text to a speech announcing a
beach disaster, so uncertain was he about Operation Overlord’s prospects. Only in 1944 did the
Allies possess sufficient landing craft to enable the landing of five infantry divisions, which they
could augment with three airborne divisions. Although this constituted the largest invasion force
in human history, it represented the absolute minimum for success. Troops disembarking from
landing craft would be extremely vulnerable to enemy fire and would initially lack heavy
weapons. Churchill feared a beach disaster. He long advocated for a less risky continuance of the
Allied push up through the rugged mountains of central Italy and into the Balkans. Such a plan
would have taken years to threaten Germany. American leaders, with Russian support, insisted
on a more efficient, but riskier invasion through France.
The key to the Allied invasion was the capture of a port with dock facilities that would
enable their armies to offload heavy equipment, reinforcements, and supplies to nurture an
advance. The Germans understood this and had consequently fortified Western Europe’s ports.
The success of Operation Overlord ultimately hinged on an elaborate deception. The Allies fed
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Germany a steady diet of false intelligence suggesting that their invasion targeted Pas de Calais.
This ruse proved convincing given its plausibility. Calais was close to Britain and its surrounding
plains would facilitate a speedy advance into Germany. The Allied deception was cemented by
an elaborate campaign where General Patton was installed as head of a fictitious Third Army.
The Allies went so far as to blow up inflatable tanks for the benefit of German reconnaissance
planes, while a signal corps dutifully transmitted thousands of orders to non-existent units. By
June 1944, the Germans were utterly convinced that an Allied invasion would come through
Calais. This led the German high command to keep most of their panzer divisions in reserve
rather than deploying them decisively on the beaches of Normandy when Allied forces were at
their weakest. It took over a month for the Germans to realize their mistake, but by July the
Allied forces had broken out of Normandy’s hedge country and secured the port of Cherbourg.
Hitler pulled reserves from the Eastern front in one last desperate bid to drive the Anglo-Saxon
powers back to the sea, but his forces were insufficient to this task. Allied fighter bombers
proved deadly effective as German tanks left the cover of their camouflage. In the Falaise
Pocket during August 1944, thousands of German troops were cut off, killed, and captured,
precipitating a collapse of their Western front.

INSERT MAP VIII.1>>

Title: Normandy Breakout 1944
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Caption: Following a successful diversion operation, Allied forces managed to establish

a beachhead in Normandy, followed by a breakout in August that led to the collapse of Nazi
power in France and most of Belgium.
LINK: http://www.battleofnormandytours.com/uploads/2/5/1/7/2517577/6248868_orig.jpg
END INSERT MAP VIII.1<<

<Insert Textbox>
Some historians hate counterfactuals. Does the significance of D-Day, however, become clearer
when measuring its outcome against the likelihood of its success? Would the Allies have won if
repelled at Normandy?
<End Textbox>

Allied units raced across the plains of Northern France unmolested, Paris was liberated and most
of Belgium fell into Allied hands before they ran low on fuel. Although the road to Berlin lay
open, the Allies’ inability to secure a port early in the campaign now limited their striking power.
The famous Red Bull express funneled gasoline, ammunition, and food from Normandy’s
beaches to frontline units, but any further advance risked exposing Allied advance units to a
dangerous counter attack.

INSERT MAP VIII.2>>>

Title: Operation Bagration 1944
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Caption: In a massive offensive, the Red Army drove German troops from Russian soil,
bringing lead elements to Germany’s Eastern frontier.
LINK: http://i59.fastpic.ru/big/2013/1029/a5/0e077d71e3b14ebf24fd50e127d205a5.jpg
END INSERT MAP VIII.2>>>

On the Eastern Front, in a rare case of Western-Soviet collaboration, Stalin had launched
a major offensive calculated to relieve pressure on the Allies in France. Operation Bagration
destroyed most of Germany’s army group center and brought Russian troops three hundred miles
east to the gates of Warsaw. For Stalin too, the road to Berlin lay open, but he diverted the Red
Army south to secure Central Europe and the Balkans. Already Stalin was thinking ahead and
embracing the grim calculus of “whoever occupies a territory also imposes on it his own social
system.”vi
By winter 1944-45, Germany managed to re-establish the semblance of a defensive
perimeter perilously close to their national borders. The war was lost, but Hitler refused to give
up. For German civilians and Northern Europeans still occupied by the Nazis, the war’s bloodiest
chapter was about to ensue. For Japan, the Battle for Leyte Gulf represented its last major
offensive of the war as the remnants of its fleet, fortified by Kamikazes, was shunted aside. With
the fall of the Philippines, the Japanese troops continued to resist fiercely, but they too had lost
the war.
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[B] The 1945 Yalta Chill

Some consider the February 1945 Conference in the Crimea as the beginning of the Cold War.
Ostensibly, the Big Three gathered to plot the final destruction of Hitler’s Reich, but Stalin had
sent his western partners a clear message that preceding September. As the Red Army
approached the gates of Warsaw the Polish Home Army had risen in revolt, anticipating their
imminent liberation. Stalin, however, held the Red Army back while rebuffing Western requests
for the use of Ukrainian bases to resupply beleaguered Polish fighters. Stalin was content to
allow irregular SS units to move in and lay Warsaw to waste. The Germans helped Stalin to
weaken the Polish Home Army, a western backed, fiercely anti-Bolshevist force that represented
the prime obstacle to Soviet plans for establishing a Moscow ‘friendly’ postwar government. So
the West arrived at Yalta understanding that Stalin had cast down his gauntlet. Much of the
Conference became devoted to squabbling over the future of Poland and Eastern Europe. The
Anglo-Americans pushed for free elections as a key realization of their Atlantic Charter pledge
for self-determination. To Soviet eyes, most states of Eastern Europe were Hitler’s allies and had
participated in the invasion of the Soviet Union. Stalin was determined that areas liberated by
Russian blood would not only be ‘anti-fascist’ but remain in Soviet sphere of interest. By the
conference’s end, Stalin reluctantly signed on to the West’s ‘Declaration of Liberated Europe’
pledge, but Soviet negotiators watered down its language to insure that this declaration contained
no explicit guarantee for free elections that could undermine the Soviet Union’s intent to
dominate Eastern Europe.

>>Insert Map VIII.3 here

Title: Yalta Partitioning of Europe

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Caption: At Yalta, the Allies agreed to a partitioning of Germany into military

occupation zones. They were drawn based on estimates of where delegates believed advancing
armies would end up.

LINK:
http://img.bhs4.com/2c/4/2c45d9dcb43706a2142d87f91d6058095a0f2fbd_large.jpg

END INSERT MAP VIII.3<<

Western negotiators emerged from Yalta upset about Soviet behavior towards Poland,
and fearful for the future of Eastern Europe, but they lacked leverage. The Anglo-Saxon Powers
still needed the Red Army for the final push into Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, both of
whom continued to resist fiercely. Although Churchill and Roosevelt believed that Stalin had
endorsed the Yalta Declaration, in fact, Stalin had left the conference indignant at Western
attempts to encroach upon his sphere of influence, while embittered at Western reluctance to sign
onto a concrete figure for Soviet reparations. Many consider the Yalta Conference a failure given
that the Big Three did not reach a comprehensive settlement for postwar Europe. By sweeping
17

serious disagreements under the rug, the Big Three made it more difficult to reach a consensus
later on. This interpretation, however, overlooks the wide gulf separating the Allies in 1945. The
Grand Alliance was a flimsy partnership galvanized in common hatred for Hitler. With German
power waning, the mortar binding this unnatural alliance was dissolving. More charitably, the
Yalta Accord can be seen as the best compromise possible in February 1945. Yalta’s success was
that tensions had not dissolved the Allied resolve to bring down Nazi Germany. Its principal flaw
was that all sides left nurturing unrealistic hopes that they could procure their ultimate objectives
at some future summit.

[A] Collapse of Hitler’s Thousand Year Reich

The December 1944 Ardennes offensive constituted Hitler’s last ditch attempt to alter the war`s
momentum. Hitler hoped that a surprise offensive through the Ardennes might enable German
forces to reach the North Sea, driving a wedge between American and British forces while
exacerbating a public rift between their commanders. Such a victory might induce the West to
accept some sort of settlement. German generals knew they did not have adequate resources to
achieve such a lofty outcome, but the Ardennes plan was their only realistic option for still
influencing the war’s trajectory. Once more German tanks rumbled through the narrow roads of
the rugged Ardennes. Initially, German forces, including behemoth Tiger tanks, overran the
lightly armed US Ninth Army. Overcast skies prevented the Allied air force from operating, but
the German advance quickly fell behind schedule. American troops resisted fiercely, particularly
after it became known how SS troops under Sepp Dietrich had executed prisoners at Malmédy.
After the German troops failed to capture the road junction at Bastogne, their forces began to
wear down as the result of continued fighting and lack of reinforcement. As the skies cleared in
mid-January, the German advance had failed to secure most of its objectives. Allied fighter
bombers now hounded German motorized columns, forcing them to beat a retreat.
Diversion of the last German reserves facilitated the final Russian push into Berlin. A
Russian attack along the Vistula brought the Red Army to the gates of Berlin. Hitler declined to
retreat to his mountain redoubt in Bavaria, opting to make his last stand at Berlin in a move
reminiscent of his hero Frederick the Great. This decision elevated the Battle for Berlin into the
war’s symbolic climax. On the streets of Germany’s capital, former allies engaged in a pitiless
finale to their no holds barred war. Russian soldiers understood that they had arrived on the
scene from which the orders had come to invade their motherland. Russian troops committed
numerous atrocities, most famously raping over 100, 000 German women during the final savage
week of fighting. Inside Berlin, Russian troops faced off against not only decimated German
units, but a civilian militia armed to fend off ‘red beasts.’ As the Russians pushed to the city
center they suffered over 300, 000 casualties in bitter house-to-house fighting where it proved
difficult to distinguish soldiers from armed civilians. German women manned the anti-aircraft
guns, frightened pre-pubescent youths held carbines, while ragged old men fired panzerfausts at
Russian tanks. As Russian troops blasted a path towards the Reich Chancellery, little mercy was
shown, or expected.
18

Top Nazi dignitaries had gathered on April 20, 1945 for a surreal celebration of Hitler’s
last birthday. Around them Berlin smouldered and German civilians fought, suffered, and died.
The last image of a living Hitler is a haggard figure rising up from the bowels of his bunker to
pin medals on the chest of boy soldiers that were willingly sacrificing their lives to grant their
Führer a few more breaths of life. Returning to his underground lair, a demented Hitler would
complain to his rapidly shrinking entourage that the German people had betrayed him:
”Disloyalty and betrayal have undermined resistance throughout the war. It was therefore not
granted to me to lead the people to victory.”vii On April 30, Hitler shot himself, setting in motion
a process that led to Germany’s official surrender on May 8.

[B] 1945 Peace at Potsdam

Following Germany’s surrender, the victorious Allies gathered in July 1945 to hammer out a
permanent settlement in Potsdam. Once more, the Big Three returned to the nettlesome issues
that had divided them at Yalta, but Germany’s defeat had not brought them any closer to a
resolution. In fact, Potsdam proved more intense as Truman and Stalin, who had never met, took
an immediate dislike to each other. Stalin had little reason to greet Truman warmly given the
former senator’s 1941 declaration that

"If we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia, and if Russia is winning we ought
to help Germany, and that way let them kill as many as possible.”viii Additionally, ‘Give them
Hell Harry’ Truman had set the tone for Potsdam by giving Russian foreign minister Molotov a
firm dressing down earlier in Washington after the Soviet Union had recognized Stalin’s puppet
communist government in Poland in contravention to the Yalta Accord. “I have never been
talked to like that in my life,” Molotov complained to Truman, only to have him retort “carry out
your agreements and you will not be talked to like that.”ix

US cancellation of the Lend Lease program preceding the conference angered Stalin and left him
determined to procure reparations from Germany instead. Stalin’s demand to set aside $20
billion represented only a pitiful fraction of the damages inflicted on Russia by Hitler’s war, but
it also represented a sum well beyond a devastated Germany’s means to pay. Unlike during the
Great War, Allied bombing, stiff German resistance, and Hitler’s Nero Decree, ordering his
soldiers to detonate their own infrastructure, had left Germany a pile of ruins. Stalin felt no pity
for German civilians. In fact, permanently weakening Germany represented one of his principal
goals. At Potsdam, the Grand Alliance was committed to resolving the German question, but
they could not agree on a formula. British and US statesmen were reluctant to repeat the
mistakes of Versailles. Some argued that Germany needed to be rebuilt before it could be made
to repay. To Soviet ears such benevolence lacked precedent and was flagrantly self-serving.
Animated by its own Bolshevik dogma, the Soviet Union started to nourish its traditional
paranoia about the machinations of its ‘capitalist’ partners. The Soviets began to suspect that
every Western proposal represented some capitalist plot to profit from Germany’s rebuilding,
leaving a devastated Russia in the cold. Stalin reminded his western partners of Russian
19

sacrifices. While his Western partners acknowledged this, they privately expressed frustration
with the Soviet failure to acknowledge their material contributions to the Red Army’s success
during the war.
At Potsdam, the Grand Alliance, which had functioned better than might have been
expected during the war, buckled. The war partners still agreed on the broad parameters for a
postwar settlement; Germany should be democratized and weakened so that it could never
threaten global security again. What separated the Allies was the best method for achieving these
goals. Personal animosities and conflicting ideologies certainly played a role in the breakdown at
Potsdam, but these masked a deeper gulf in how they had experienced the war. The Americans
and the British had suffered less from the war and were inclined to see Germany as a charter
member of Western civilization. This allowed them to draw a contrast between the evil Nazis
and the good Germans that Hitler had duped. To Soviet eyes, Germany was a menace that had
invaded mother Russia throughout its history. The Soviet Union had barely survived the last war
and they had borne the brunt of Hitler’s war of annihilation. This made it difficult for the Soviets
to distinguish between Nazis and Germans. They were all ‘fascists’ who had put Hitler in power,
served in his armies, and brutalized their sons, wives, and daughters. Americans were in position
to be generous. They emerged from the war stronger. A deficit fueled economy had put
Americans to work and consistently raised living standards, lifting the country from the dark
bowels of the Great Depression. Americans, however, were not prepared to finance the Soviet
Union’s reconstruction, especially given Stalin’s brutality when starting the war off as Hitler’s
partner. Western leaders were genuinely skeptical about deindustrializing a country that had been
a significant trading partner and seemed key to their own economic recovery. Given this gulf, it
was no surprise that East and West would fail to resolve upon a Versailles style grand settlement.
For nearly a week the Allies quarreled bitterly. The West parried Soviet demands for
reparations, while Stalin resisted guarantees for free elections in Eastern Europe. At the
Conference’s climax, Truman presented Stalin with an ultimatum. The Soviet Union could either
take compensation in the form of territory or monetary reparations, but not both. Truman’s
frankness frustrated and angered Stalin, but the Soviet Union had little leverage. The West
controlled most of Germany, including its industrial Ruhr core. Forced into a choice, Stalin opted
for the lands east of the Oder-Neisse that had already been promised him, rather than the
uncertain prospects of Western aid. But Stalin left Potsdam feeling cheated, betrayed, and
humiliated. This sense of injustice fueled the Soviet Union’s truculence in subsequent months
and poisoned western efforts to reach a compromise in terms of a postwar settlement.
By any measure, Potsdam ended in failure. The victorious allies failed to bridge the gap
concerning the future of Germany, the fate of Eastern Europe, or the structure of the postwar
world. For the most part they left the skeletal Yalta framework in place, but this had been drawn
up principally to coordinate the advance of Allied armies. The Allies did agree to a redrawing of
the borders of Eastern Europe. At Versailles in 1919, borders had been redrawn to accommodate
patterns of ethnic settlement. At Potsdam, the Grand Alliance instead opted to resettle ethnic
minorities inside the borders of their respective states. The Allies also reached an agreement on a
20

number of technical issues regarding the administration of an occupied Germany, but all the big
questions concerning the postwar structure of Europe were deferred to a Council of Foreign
Ministers to be resolved at some future date. In this sense, Potsdam was the anti-Versailles.
Failure to negotiate a settlement for the world’s most destructive war left a vacuum. Subsequent
failure to bridge the gap created East-West mistrust and mounting pressure that left both the
USA and USSR struggling to improvise increasingly unilateral solutions that served only to
accelerate their divorce.

[A] Hiroshima and the Surrender of Japan

At the July 1945 Potsdam Conference, Truman was informed that Trinity was a success. The
Manhattan Project had proven the theory of nuclear fission, giving rise to a weapon of
unprecedented destructive magnitude. The project’s principal architect, Robert Oppenheimer,
upon witnessing the New Mexican blast developed second thoughts about this scientific triumph,
appreciating how nuclear weapons marked a quantum leap forwards in humanity’s ability to
transform the Earth. Among the American High Command, however, the bomb was seen
principally as an instrument for inducing Japan’s surrender. The officers controlling Japan’s
Imperial Government refused the humiliation of an unconditional surrender. At Iwo Jima and
Okinawa in 1945, the Japanese had resisted fiercely, inflicting heavy allied casualties. As Allied
forces prepared for the invasion of Japan they confronted grim casualty estimates. In its history,
Japan had never surrendered. Its air force, navy and cities destroyed, Japan still had 8 million
fanatical men under uniform and began redeploying them for defense of the home islands.
Intelligence intercepts, revealed that the Japanese ultranationalists calculated that if they elevated
the Allied blood price, they could procure a better settlement. Given Soviet intransigence in
Europe, American planners were also developing second thoughts about inviting Russian troops
to participate in Asia’s war. From March to May 1945, Allied planes bombed Japanese cities
mercilessly using incendiary bombs that turned most of the island’s metropolitan areas to rubble
and ash. Houses constructed mostly from wood, bamboo, and rice paper served as kindling for
deadly conflagrations that burned out of control, while white phosphorous leached through
inadequate air raid shelters unleashing burns on the skin of women and children that could not be
doused with water. One devastating raid over Tokyo on March 1945 killed nearly 100, 000.
Despite atrocious civilian suffering, the military government adopted the Ketsu Go “Fight to
the Finish” strategy, recalling veteran soldiers from Manchuria and mobilizing civilians for a
defense of the Home Islands. Old women were armed with bamboo spears and young boys
trained in throwing themselves under vehicles with explosive vests.

>>INSERT PHOTO VIII.3 HERE

TITLE: Ruins of Church in Midst of Hiroshima’s Devastation

21

Caption: Hiroshima launched the world into the nuclear age. Humanity had passed a
threshold where their mastery of science now emerged as a threat to species’ survival.
LINK:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Hiroshima_in_ruins#/media/File:131778_THE_R
UINS_OF_THE_HIROSHIMA_CATHOLIC_CHURCH_ONE_YEAR_AFTER_THE_ATOM_
BOMB_WAS_DROPPED.JPG
END INSERT IMAGE VIII.3<<

The American government hoped that the bomb’s destructive effect would shock and
sway Japanese decision makers. Japan’s surrender would save hundreds of thousands of
American lives, and countless Japanese ones, although this was not part of the official calculus.
At Potsdam on July 26, the Allies issued a declaration warning Japan to surrender immediately
or face ‘terrible destruction’. The Potsdam declaration made no reference to nuclear weapons,
but the ultimatum was delivered to the Japanese populace by leaflets dropped from bombers. To
the dismay of American planners, however, intercepts revealed that the Potsdam declaration
stiffened Japanese resolve because it reinforced their belief that fierce resistance was making the
Allies desperate and would force them to revisit their unconditional surrender demand.
22

<Insert Textbox
The decision to drop the nuclear bomb remains controversial. Nuclear bombs are by definition
arms of mass destruction that indiscriminately slaughter civilians. Defenders of Truman often
cite a utilitarian logic that the ‘Bomb’ saved lives. Was Hiroshima justified?
<End text box>

On a clear August 6 morning, the Enola Gay, a B-29 Super Fortress named after the
pilot’s mother, meandered towards Hiroshima unescorted. Authorities spotted the solitary plane’s
approach, but Japanese air defenses were ordered to stand down. This was standard practice
given that the collateral damage inflicted by anti-aircraft guns was usually more serious than any
single plane’s payload. At 8:15 AM, with the luminescence of the seven suns, ‘Little Boy’
reached critical mass above a central Hiroshima hospital. At the epicenter, buildings and their
human occupants were literally vaporized by the explosion’s intense heat. Outside the one-mile
blast crater, the concussive shock of the explosion knocked down most of the buildings in
Hiroshima over a ten-mile radius. At least 40, 000 people died instantly. Another 20, 000
succumbed to fractures, burns, and other wounds within a few days. Another 60, 000 would die
over ensuing months from radiation poisoning and associated complications.
The Japanese High Command was initially puzzled when they lost contact with
Hiroshima. When an air patrol revealed the extent of the damage, this did not immediately sway
the Japanese High Command’s thinking. The bomb’s horrific effects on Hiroshima were noted,
but in their mind the damage was consistent with earlier incendiary raids. Accordingly,
Hiroshima was followed by the US bombing of Nagasaki on August 9. The shock effect of this
second bomb, in conjunction with a Soviet invasion of Manchuria on August 8, inspired Emperor
Hirohito and his family to side decisively with those inside the Japanese cabinet advocating for
surrender. Over the ensuing week militant Japanese officers resisted, but ultimately acquiesced to
the Emperor’s will and authority. On September 2, the Japanese delegation climbed onto the
deck of the USS Missouri. Silently the Japanese signed the documents of surrender under the full
panoply of uniforms representing all the old imperial powers they had dared to challenge.

<A>Beyond Catastrophe
World War II had cut a swathe of devastation across the globe. In Asia and Europe, displaced,
shell-shocked and hungry peoples huddled in ruined cities and devastated villages. Over five
years of total war left survivors exhausted, disillusioned and desperate. Fifty-five million died,
the majority being civilians caught in the crossfire of marauding armies, brutalized by racist
occupation regimes and terrorized by aerial bombing. Never had war spread so far across the
globe, or united so many in an experience of suffering. While the war’s horrors had been
unequally distributed, what united veterans, villains and victims alike was a grim determination
to bury the past, rebuild, and prevent such catastrophe from ever recurring.
Hastily negotiated armistices did not bring the war’s suffering to an end. In June 1945,
animal carcasses remained strewn before shattered window fronts, while emaciated men in
23

striped pajamas wandered about as looters ransacked shuttered offices and abandoned factories.
From Tokyo to Coventry, homes, railway bridges, levees, and harbors lay in ruin. In both Asia
and Europe, victims of fascist occupation turned against their oppressors in a spate of violent
retribution against tormentors and collaborators. In the Pacific Rim and Eastern Europe millions
of imperial settlers, former slave laborers, and prisoners of war struggled to return home. Making
things worse, a famine settled over the world, stretching from Algerian villages to the hamlets of
the Mekong and Germany’s bombed out cities and rural Ukraine. For most survivors, peace
brought relief but also initiated a fresh struggle to procure food and shelter from broken
economies, gutted infrastructure, and abandoned fields still crisscrossed by tank tracks.
In the summer of 1945, many survivors felt the clock struck zero hour. Perhaps humanity
had emerged from the Valley of Death, but Auschwitz Nanking, and Hiroshima served as
reminder of the frailty of international institutions, civil society and the darkness governing
human hearts. In the aftermath of Versailles and Munich, few trusted postwar conferences to fix
the international system. From Buchenwald harrowing images of mounds of bodies bulldozed
into mass graves raised troubling questions about human nature and God’s existence. Total war,
genocide and strategic bombing swept away the past, undermining confidence in science,
modernity and western empires. No one was too sure what would emerge in World War II’s
wake, but a victim of Buchenwald gave symbolic expression to the postwar sentiment when he
scrawled “never again” over the prison gate. After the catastrophe millions endured, something
better needed to be put into the place of a broken world. This chapter explores the multiple
dimensions of rebuilding across the postwar stage.

<B> Liberation Turmoil

Victory in Europe (VE) Day touched off frenzied celebrations stretching from Piccadilly Circus
to Toronto’s York Street. In Holland ecstatic maidens considered it a privilege to merely touch
the sleeve of their liberator’s uniform: “each Canadian private was a Christ, a savior.”x In Korea,
radio announcement of Japan’s surrender inspired spontaneous street celebrations where
Japanese imposed garb was ritually jettisoned and burned as people hoisted up hastily fabricated
national flags. In devastated Germany and Japan, the bombing stopped, but war widows
anxiously awaited news of their menfolk. Throughout Europe and East Asia, the exhilaration of
liberation was accompanied by spasms of violent retribution against accused collaborators.
Italian partisans strung up Mussolini’s decapitated corpse from a lamp post in Milan. In France,
‘vertical collaborators’ had their heads shaven, were tarred or forced to eat portraits of Hitler. In
Eastern Europe, accused ‘fascists’ were often arbitrarily shot. Inside Soviet occupation zones
men learned to hide their wristwatches, while women dodged patrols until Red Army soldiers
were finally confined to base in 1947. How can the liberated blame soldiers that “crossed
thousands of kilometers through blood and fire and death has fun with a woman or takes some
trifle,” Stalin grumbled to a Yugoslav comrade in 1946.xi

>>INSERT PHOTO 8.4

24

Title: View onto a Devastate Dresden, 1945

Caption: Corpses of charred victims stacked in city square in aftermath of the firestorm.
World War II had proven unusually destructive and its most indelible symbol was the
transformation of cities like Dresden into piles of rubble.

Link:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Casualties_of_the_Bombing_of_Dresden
#/media/File:Bundesarchiv_Bild_183-08778-
0001,_Dresden,_Tote_nach_Bombenangriff.jpg

End Insert Image VIII.4<<

In July 1945, 8 million German refugees from the East crowded into bombed-out
buildings, the tip of a crisis that would rise to over fifty million people worldwide displaced by
Great Power bargains, ethnic violence and local score settling. Some Jewish survivors of
Auschwitz returned to their Polish homes inhabited by hostile Ukrainians. Five million Japanese
settlers transplanted to Northern Manchuria fled south desperate to escape advancing Russian
soldiers. Throughout Europe, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration
(UNRRA) worked to reconnect 13 million separated family members, to feed liberated prisoners,
25

to repatriate forced laborers, and to find refuge for people rendered stateless “because of race,
religion or activities in favor of the United Nations."xii
By Christmas 1946, many survivors sunk into a sober pessimism. The war’s final orgy of
violence had disrupted agricultural production and wrecked transportation networks exacerbating
a deadly global famine. Inhabitants of a conquered Germany lived in a cigarette and chocolate
bar economy. That first winter more than 200, 000, mostly children, perished from malnutrition
and frost. A tragedy but paltry number compared to the million impoverished Vietnamese
peasants that starved to death from 1945-1946. In Britain the bill for victory came due as the
postwar Labour government maintained wartime price controls, while extending rationing to
bread. The USA had reached the pinnacle of its power, producing over sixty percent of the
world’s manufactured goods, yet ordinary Americans fretted about another Great Depression.
Emperor Hirohito instructed the Japanese to “suffer what is insufferable,” as Americans
disembarked on a mission to ‘Americanize’ a country recently mobilized to liberate Asian from
western domination.xiii Hirohito’s surrender proclamation had carefully avoided ‘defeat’ and
‘occupation,’ but in Hangzhou, Japanese officers greeted the news by falling to their knees and
weeping. Over subsequent days many chose ritual suicide rather than the humiliation of
surrender.

<Insert Textbox>
In what ways had World War II’s devastation undermined global confidence in states, liberal
progress, international diplomacy and human goodness?
<End Textbox>

For most of Southeast Asia, liberation came abruptly. After surrendering in August 1945,
Japan still controlled a vast Pacific Empire and most of China. The Western Allies lacked the
resources to immediately relieve Japanese troops. Throughout Asia, Japanese officers took
advantage by arming local militias, supporting nationalist politicians and impeding European
attempts to restore their authority. In Indonesia, liberated European POWs returning to their
home were greeted by the pemuda, a loosely organized group of thugs, nationalist militants and
former Japanese auxiliaries determined to thwart restoration of Dutch rule. The population inside
Japanese internment camps reached an all-time high a month after the war as not only
Europeans, but Indonesians of Chinese descent fled vigilantes and begged their former
tormentors for protection.
In China, the American ambassador personally flew Mao to confer with Chiang Kai-
shek on August 28, 1945 with the goal of forming a coalition government. The tired Chinese
peoples’ dream for stability disintegrated as old rivals failed to reach an accord. Mao and
Chiang’s publicly unveiled October 10 agreement was less a settlement than a roadmap outlining
their scramble for territory formerly occupied by the Japanese. Based in the North, Mao’s
communists were better positioned to claim these areas, but the USA helped the Kuomintang by
deploying Marines to stake control over Eastern port cities, while airlifting nationalist troops to
26

the interior. The Soviet Red Army greeted Mao’s communists cordially as they occupied
Manchuria. Covertly the USSR covertly transferred some captured Japanese weapons, but
Stalin’s principal objective was securing concessions in Manchuria. Believing nationalist forces
predominant, in August 1945, Stalin brokered a deal with Chiang that recognized his nationalist
regime in return for access to Lushun (formerly Port Arthur). Subsequently, Stalin pressured
Mao to reach a compromise with Chiang. Over the autumn of 1945, however, the fragile
compromise between nationalists and communists dissolved pushing exhausted civilians once
more into war.
Desire for national liberation simmered throughout the colonial world. In Algeria, VE
Day celebrations stimulated demonstrators to invoke the Atlantic Charter in an overt challenge to
French rule. In Sétif, a confrontation between Algerian demonstrators and French gendarmes
escalated into a bloody confrontation. After the French executed a young nationalist hoisting a
banner for independence, rifles shot into the crowd. The panicked mob dispersed into side streets
but took vengeance. Over 100 French settlers were slaughtered in mob violence, but a French
reprisal campaign killed over 6,000 Algerians. In a humiliating ritual, starving Algerians were
forced to lie prostrate and beg for mercy proclaiming “We are dogs. Long live France.”xiv The
Sétif Massacre poisoned the relationship between French settlers and native Algerians, setting
the stage for a bloody civil war that would last until 1962.
Latin America escaped direct war damage and its export economies mostly benefitted
from rising commodity prices. Disruption of wartime trade patterns pushed South America’s
greater integration into the US economy. Interwar urbanization transformed Latin American
society, expanding the ranks of the working classes and shifting regional politics. This is best
exemplified in Argentina where a former army officer Juan Perón came to power in 1946
trumpeting a populist brand of politics that championed the ‘unshirted’ ones. Peron’s
government inaugurated a corporatist era where populist governments increased the state’s
footprint in society, diversifying the national economy and instituting schemes for social
insurance. While World War II’s impacts had been unevenly felt, global carnage had united
humanity in an experience of common suffering. Most survivors perceived the war as a tragic
calamity, but also as the avoidable culmination of the Great Depression. This perception
cemented their determination to reform the global economy and international system.

[A] Conclusion

Insert Graphic VIII.1>>

Title: World War II’s Grim Toll
27

Global Breakdown of Casualties

Axis Military
Millions of Deaths
13%
Axis Civilians All Others
4%
Germany

Allied Allied Japan

Civilians Military
58% China
25%
Soviet Union

0 10 20 30

Caption: The high incidence of civilian casualties on the Allied side reflects the dark legacy of
the Axis doctrine of annihilation warfare. In Eastern Europe, Russia, Manchuria and Eastern
China Japanese and German armies sought to cleanse lesser peoples from lands they hoped to
populate.
End Insert Graphic VIII.1<<

Hitler launched war in 1939 propelled by grand dreams for establishing a new world order.
German military successes from 1940-1941, convinced Italy and Japan to join the fray, spreading
the conflict across East Asia and North Africa. The Atlantic Charter elevated World War II into a
global struggle between democracy and fascism to determine the world’s future. Never in history
had war stretched so far and wide. The war inflicted suffering, death, and destruction on an
unprecedented scale, leaving survivors hungry, broken and exhausted. Yet the 1945 Potsdam
Conference failed to produce any grand settlement. This ushered in a period of uncertainty,
ethnic violence, mass migration, colonial agitation, and superpower tension. In the aftermath of
the Great Depression, Hiroshima and Auschwitz, popular expectations for reform were dimmer
in 1945 than they had been in 1919. At the same time, the catastrophe was greater, producing a
grim consensus that something needed to be done. Throughout the world colonial subjects,
civilians, and demobilizing soldiers rallied to the United Nations’ ‘peace and security’ slogan
even while they struggled to cast off the long dark shadow of the most destructive war in human
history.

<A>Questions for Critical Thought

1. Some historians consider World War II the second chapter of Europe’s civil war. How
was World War II linked to the Great War and the Versailles settlement? How did
fascism imprint a unique character upon this conflict?
2. Most historians credit Hitler’s 1939 invasion of Poland with provoking World War II, but
this perspective is limiting when you examine the war from a more global light. For some
28

groups like the Chinese, Jews, the Japanese, and the Czechs the suffering started well
before Poland’s invasion.
3. In what ways did Hitler’s initiatives influence World War II’s global trajectory? Did Nazi
Germany’s military success influence Imperial Japan to launch its Pearl Harbor attack, or
did Japan launch its East Asian War for its own reasons?
4. France’s sudden defeat in 1940 represented a major turning point in World War II. How
did the different lessons German and French officer draw from the First World War
influence the outcome of this campaign?
5. One unique aspect of World War II was the scope and intensity of civilian suffering. How
did the war upset traditional patterns of life and stimulate diverse coping strategies?
6. World War II was characterized by countless atrocities. In what ways were Axis and
Allied atrocities distinct? What distinguished the Holocaust from other atrocities against
unarmed civilians?
7. How did the Axis Alliance’s challenge of the Versailles system and the promulgation of
the Atlantic Charter undermine European colonialism?
8. Why did the Grand Alliance, which worked effectively to destroy Nazi Germany, fail to
reach a comprehensive postwar settlement at Potsdam?

<A>Suggestions for Further Reading

Beasley, W. G., Japanese Imperialism 1894-1945. Oxford: Clarendon: 1987.

Citino, R., The German Way of War: From the Thirty Years' War to the Third Reich. Lawrence,
KS: University of Kansas Press, 2005.

Dower, J., War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War. London: Pantheon, 1993.

Frank, R., Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire New York: Random House,
1999.

Friedlander, Saul, Nazi Germany and the Jews 1933-1945. New York: Harper, 2009.

Iriye, A., The Origins of the Second World War in Asia and the Pacific. New York: Longman,
1987.

Kershaw, I., Hitler: Nemesis 1936-1945. London: Penguin, 2000.

Overy, R., Why the Allies Won. London: Jonathan Cape, 1995.

Reynolds, D., From World War to Cold War: Churchill, Roosevelt, and the International History
of the 1940s. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006,

Weinberg, G., A World at Arms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

29

i
Quoted in Michael Sturma, ‘Atrocities, Conscience, and Unrestricted Warfare: US Submarines during the
Second World War,’ War in History, vol. 16, no. 4 (2009): 450.
ii
Paul Kratoska, The Japanese Occupation of Malay. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1998.
iii
Jochen Böhler, “Race, Genocide and Holocaust.” In Thomas Zeiler and Daniel Dubois, Companion to World War
II. Chichester, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013, 677.
iv
Cheah Boon Kheng, The Making of a Nation. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2002.
v
Timothy Synder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. New York: Basic, 2010.
vi
Quoted in M. Djilas, Wartime,. London: Secker and Warburg, 1977, 438.
vii
Quoted in Joachim Fest, Hitler. New York: Harvest, 1973, 747.
viii
Quoted in David McCullough, Truman. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992, 262.
ix
Quoted in America and the Cold War, 1941-1991: A Realist Interpretation, Volume 1, edited
By Norman A. Graebner, Richard Dean Burns, Joseph M. Siracusa, New York: Praeger, 2010, 72.
x
Quoted in Ian Buruma, Zero Hour. New York: Penguin, 2013, 23.
xi
Quoted in Alexander Statiev, The Soviet Counterinsurgency in the Western Borderlands. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2013, 276.
xii
Agreement for United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, November 9, 1943. See
http://www.ibiblio.org/pha/policy/1943/431109a.html
xiii
Radio address delivered 14 August, 1945. See https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/hirohito.htm
xiv
Quoted in Buruma, Zero Hour, 124.