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.

Introduction

One of the key historical debates regarding the Cold War has to do with the nature of the Cold War within the context of global history. There are a number of views. Lawrence Freedman has identified the key issue as one of interpretation, however. Was the Cold War at its core an ideological conflict, or was it a power struggle? If the first, the conflict between Communism and Capitalism, as it were, over world domination and the future of human social organization, then the Cold War becomes a period of history, encapsulating everything that occurred between 1945 and 1989, when the USSR collapsed. If the later, then the Cold War must be seen as one of many events within the “Post War” period, all of which are related, but none of which was the single defining factor of the era. This is interesting from a historical point of view since those who see the conflict as ideological also tend to subordinate everything that occurred within the period to that disagreement. The most common narrative strategy within this view sees the USSR as an evil empire with designs on world domination which was ultimately thwarted by a heroic United States sacrificing blood and treasure to keep the world safe for us all. On the other hand, the advocates of the power struggle model easily fall into a view of the Cold War as an example of diplomatic realism – Kissinger Style neo-brinksmanship in which the potential military conflict was only one in a whole gamut of world realities, and in which the United States and the Soviet Union were self-interested actors who happened to have a lot of power. In other respects, this view sees the other actors in the world more clearly as states with interests and directions independent of the two superpowers, sometimes coinciding with them, and sometimes at odds.]
While Freedman sees the conflict as ideological, I tend to be more in the power struggle camp. However, where Freedman and I agree is in the subtle space where we can see that the immediate conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union had ideological causes and overtones (as Freeman says, to an ever decreasing degree), but the struggle itself did not fully define the period between 1945-1999. Instead, the Cold War was one rather extended and important event within a constellation of events, ideas, and realities in the Post War world.]
So, what happened that the United States and the Soviet Union, allies during the Second World War, became such implacable enemies after it? To begin to understand that is the goal of this lecture.
As the world recovered from the Second World War, the only two powers still able to maintain significant military power and global political influence were the United States and the Soviet Union.] Great Britain, until 1947, still held on to its empire, but that situation was becoming financially and politically more and more difficult. France was attempting to recreate, at least in part, its empire by reclaiming Vietnam (French Indochina) and Algeria. Germany had lost its colonial possessions, as had Japan. Italy was stripped of its small empire as well. Most of the other participants in the Second World War were economically and physically devastated, and unable to concentrate on more than their own recovery. The geopolitical realities of the prewar world, which included multiple power centers, shifting alliances, and multiple ideological approaches to political reality was simply not possible because most of the former world players were out of the game. In this situation, the multipolar world came to be limited to two poles of power, and those two poles, the United States and the Soviet Union, allies during the war, increasingly became rivals. The power of these two nations was so much greater than others that for many, aligning with one or the other seemed to be the safest diplomatic course. For others, after the Cold War began in earnest, the bi-polar situation provided an opportunity to play both powers off against the other in an attempt to minimize their influence, and reap the benefits of aid from both sides.

The Atlantic Charter & Wartime Alliance

In the first years of the 1940’s the United States entered the Second World War on the side of the allies after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December, 1941. In 1942, the United States joined Germany’s major enemies in Europe, the Soviet Union and Great Britain in an alliance known as the Atlantic Charter initiated by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill on board a ship in the Atlantic Ocean in early 1942. The agreement made was simply to cooperate in the effort to defeat the Third Reich in Europe. Joseph Stalin, the leader of the Soviet Union, would join later in 1942, as Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union, began in earnest. As it turns out, this pact had consequences far beyond the end of the war.
In the start the Atlantic Charter was based upon the principles enunciated by U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, known as the “Fourteen Points,” that had contributed so much to the willingness of Germany to consider a peace in 1918. The alliance between the three powers, despite the high principles which they enumerated as their reasons for working together against the Axis, was no more than a military alliance with a relatively short term goal – to defeat Germany and Japan in the Second World War. There was no inkling at this point in time that the seeds were being sewn for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) or the Warsaw Pact.
The three powers began to recognize that simple military cooperation would not be sufficient to win the war, and especially to create a successful and lasting peace afterword, during the first summit of their leaders, in Teheran, Iran, between November 28 and December 1, 1943. At this meeting, after significant pressure from Stalin to open a second front in Europe to relieve the Soviet Red Army (at the time, the Soviets were the only ones fighting the Germans directly, and they had begun to turn the tide). The United States and Great Britain agreed at this meeting to open the second front in France in the summer of 1944. In exchange, Stalin agreed to join his two allies in the fight against Japan in the Pacific once Hitler was defeated.
There were ulterior motives here in the case of all three of the leaders. Stalin wanted to relieve pressure on the Red Army, but was not happy with the idea of an allied assault up the boot of Italy, and then possibly through Eastern Europe to Germany. This route would mean that the Americans and British would be able to occupy East European nations as they moved through, a strategy which Stalin hoped to reserve to himself, knowing that occupation at the end of the war would mean a powerful influence on the political structure of those nations in the post-war periond. Stalin wanted Eastern Europe as a buffer zone for the Soviet Union, and so wanted to be sure the Allies stayed in the West, attacking from France, and allowing him to occupy the territory he felt he needed.
Franklin Roosevelt was not unaware of this situation, but he had a motive of his own – he began talking about the strategy of the Four Policemen, in which the United States, Great Britain, The Soviet Union, and a reconstituted France would act as international policemen to protect the world from aggression. To get agreement to go forward on talks about this idea (which eventually combined with Wilsonian ideas to become the United Nations), Roosevelt was willing to make many concessions.
Churchill appears to have been desperate enough for continued assistance from the United States and USSR that he was willing to accept these backroom political deals to keep the alliance together, despite his suspicions of Stalin.

Rebuilding the World

By 1944, confidence among the allies in victory over Germany was high, and the endgame over the “new world order” began. Each of the allies began to assert their own plans for dealing with Germany and reconstituting Europe. In many ways, Stalin had an upper hand here, as Russia was at the time in the process of liberating Poland, the Balkans, and the Baltic States of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. Soviet occupation of these territories gave Stalin a free hand in rebuilding them to suit Soviet needs. All three agreed that their goals would include disarming Germany, denazifying Germany, and the division of Germany into four occupation zones, one each for Great Britain, France, the United States, and the Soviet Union, which would each administer, police, and help to rebuild its respective zone.
However, Stalin also had plans to dismember Germany – to take it apart into smaller pieces and avoid reunification. Stalin also wanted to require reparations of up to $20 billion, which would have been impossible for Germany to repay. The United States and Great Britain refused to go along with these plans. This is where we can begin to see a fraying of the allies’ relationship – the roots of the Cold War that would break out soon after the end of World War II. The United States and Great Britain were interested in creating a new world order that would bring Germany back into the community of nations, to restore a normal situation as soon as possible. Stalin, on the other hand, was interested primarily in preventing even the possibility that Germany could ever attack the Soviet Union again. For lack of a better term, this was a ‘kick ‘em while they’re down’ strategy for global security.
At the Yalta Conference in February of 1945, the big three allies continued their negotiations on the postwar order. By this time, as the leaders were meeting in the Crimean resort town of Yalta, hosted by Stalin, Germany was clearly losing the war. Roosevelt was therefore pushing for the Soviets to get into the war against Japan, to take the pressure off the United States in Asia and the Pacific. Roosevelt had also begun to suspect that Churchill’s strategy included the idea of expanding the British Empire, which he did not support at all. There is evidence that Great Britain was still, in 1945, hoping to hold onto its empire, but expansion was probably not an aim. However, Roosevelt’s chief concern was that any concession the Great Britain in the way of expanding its empire would encourage Stalin to seek more territory for the USSR, as well. So Roosevelt’s policy included a get tough approach with Churchill, and an attempt to buddy up to “Uncle Joe” Stalin, whom he characterized as a moderate, interested in peace, but forced to behave brutally by the Communist Party.]
At Yalta, Roosevelt proposed the creation of the United Nations. Churchill proposed the restoration of France to Great Power status to balance Germany, and Stalin attempted to consolidate Soviet control of Poland and the Balkans region. Ultimately, among the agreements made at Yalta were a guarantee by the United States and Great Britain that Russia’s 1941 Borders would be accepted (thus guaranteeing Russian gains in 1939 at the expense of Finland, Poland, and the Baltic states Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. In exchange, Stalin agreed to hold free elections, and to accept democratic governments, in Eastern Europe.]
In July, 1945, just after the defeat of Nazi Germany, the three allies held one more conference, this time at Potsdam, a suburb of Berlin. Roosevelt was absent – he had died in April of 1945 of a massive stroke – so the United States was represented by its new President, Harry S. Truman. Churchill was also forced to stay home, having lost an election to Clement Attlee and the Labour Party. So Stalin was the only one of the original three left at the Potsdam Conference. There, the three allies agreed to move Poland’s border’s west as they recreated that state, in order to accommodate the agreement to allow Russia to keep its 1941 borders. This meant taking chunks out of Germany to give to Poland. The allies also divided Germany into 4 occupation zones, and set up a council of ministers to draft the peace treaties to end the war in Europe.
One of the key questions in the decisions on how to deal with Germany (and Japan) after the allied victory in 1945 was how best to deal with the defeated nations so as to prevent a recurrence of aggression in the future. This concern arose from the fact that the Second World War had come so soon on the heals of the First, which itself had been a disastrous and brutal conflict. The fear was that somehow it could happen again.

The End of World War II

There is a lot of truth to the cliché that World War II began with a bang, but ended with a whimper. In an interesting sideline, the end of the war also created one of the great historical myths of our time: that going to war creates a booming economy. In fact, nearly all of the nations that participated in the Second World War were economically, physically, and politically devastated by its end. Only the United States, which was not a battlefield, and had been the supplier of much of the Allied war materiel and financing as well as sending soldiers ended the war with a substantially better economic situation than it had when it entered. The United States, in its unique position, came to control nearly 60% of all world trade, and American manufacturing was producing about 50% of the manufactured goods produced globally in the late 1940’s.

European and Asian countries who had participated in, or been victims of, the war, on the other hand, were in very precarious circumstances. To begin with, Europe at the end of the war was a continent of refugees. During the war, huge numbers of people had been moved out of their original circumstances. German occupiers had moved Jews and Slavs, Gypsies and the handicapped to concentration camps, where they worked until they died or were exterminated. Most of them perished, but large numbers also survived. In addition, the citizens of occupied countries such as Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and the Unkraine had been moved to work camps, where they provided labor for the Nazi war machine. In the Ukraine, Georgia, parts of Southern Russia and Poland, in accordance with Hitler’s goal of Lebensraum, the residents had been forcibly displaced to make room for new German settlers. All of these people were moving back to where they came from after the German surrender. In addition, the reverse was also true – in most of these territories, Germans who had settled in during the war were unwelcome, and either voluntarily or forcibly repatriated to Germany. Finding transportation and housing for all of these people was a near impossibility in bombed-out Europe.]

In Asia, similar problems of dislocation and large numbers of refugees complicated the problem of a peaceful settlement. Japanese settlers in Manchuria left or were driven from their farms and businesses with only the possessions they could carry. Transportation systems were not working, and Manchuria is a huge space, making the walk to a port city arduous at best. Japanese civilian refugees trying to find a way back to Japan (which many of them had never seen, having been born between 1931 and 1945 in Manchuria) were often randomly and brutally attacked by Manchurians and Chinese seeking retribution for the brutality of the Japanese military (and civilians) during and before the war. Large numbers of these civilians were killed or died of starvation and disease along the way. Many were orphaned and remained in China as pariahs, unable to get back to Japan, lost in Chinese society for the remainder of their lives. Japanese repatriation from the Pacific and other parts of Asia was similarly difficult, and complicated further by the lack of ships available (Japan had only one working naval transport left at the end of the war).]

Worldwide, starvation and disease were rampant. In Europe, the feeding of the German population during the war had taken place at the expense of the populations of the occupied countries. This meant that at the end of the war, reconstruction was slowed by the fact that people had not only to deal first with their own personal and family needs for shelter and food, but that they were severely malnourished and unable to work very hard or for sustained periods. Food production in Europe remained well below the needs of the population for years, and the only nation able to supply large quantities of food aid was the United States.

Again, in Asia, similar problems existed. Food production was low, and the nutritional health of most of the occupied populations was also poor because of the sacrifices that had been required of them by their Japanese occupiers. In Japan, as well, food production was at a level that could not sustain the population. Japanese use of nearly all metal available, including plows, kitchen knives, and garden tools, for military use during the war had left the farming population with substandard tools and an ability to farm only small portions of the land available to them. Arial bombing campaigns had destroyed farms, fields, and left unexploded bombs in many places, making farming impossible until removal could be effected. So in Asia, as well, starvation and disease were out of control, and reconstruction began as a slow and painful process.

The cities of nearly all the belligerents (fighting countries) and the occupied countries were also devastated, as were the transportation infrastructures of both Europe and Asia. Bridges had been destroyed. Roads bombed out. Airfields rendered unusable. Rail systems wrecked. In Germany and England, nearly every city was devastated by bombing and left in ruins, with the exceptions of Oxford, Cambridge, and Heidelberg – university towns whose historic and cultural value had been considered too important to destroy by both sides. In Japan, Kyoto was the only city of first or second degree importance left untouched. In this situation, moving goods around within any country was nearly impossible. Local areas had little or no contact with regional or national political and economic centers, and had to function autonomously. This made food distribution and medical services very difficult to provide.

The Standoff in Europe

One of the first goals for both the United States and the Soviet Union at the end of the war was to discharge and bring home as many of the soldiers who had fought as possible. Both powers needed to reduce expenditures by minimizing the number of soldiers in uniform, and “bringing the boys home” was politically popular. In addition, until September of 1945, the United States continued to fight the war in Asia and the Pacific, and the Soviet Union joined that effort in August. In Europe, the United States reduced its forces from 7.5 million to 1.3 million within six months after the surrender of the Germans, and the Soviet Union reduced its troop strength in the West from 13 million to about 2.6 million. Clearly, even though the superpowers made significant reductions, there was an imbalance of forces, and the Soviet Union continued to occupy and control most of Eastern Europe. It was already becoming clear, as Churchill warned, that without American soldiers on the ground in Europe, there was nothing to stand between the Soviet army and a march to the English Channel. Still, in the last months of 1945, despite British fears, and differences between the Soviet and U.S. governments on implementation of the peace, the alliance held firm. This was in part because the greatest differences had yet to surface, and in part because U.S. commanders, aware of the fact that the Soviet Union had taken on 2/3 of the German Army without allied assistance during WWII, were concerned that such experience made Soviet soldiers more effective on the battlefield – this concern, along with the fact that Soviet troops outnumbered U.S. forces, seemed to make contemplation of a confrontation with Stalin’s war machine a very risky proposition.]

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]Lawrence Freedman, “The Confrontation of the Superpowers, 1945-1990,” in The Oxford History of the Twentieth Century, ed. Michael Howard and WM. Roger Louis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 154.
]Ibid.
]David Clay Large and Felix Gilbert, The End of the European Era: 1890 to the Present, ed. Felix Gilbert, 4 ed., The Norton History of Modern Europe (New York, London: W.W. Norton & Co., 1991), 362.
]Paul M. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers : Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (New York, NY: Random House, 1987).
]Ibid.
]Gilbert, The End of the European Era: 1890 to the Present, 355-58.
]Ibid.
]Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994).

East Asia after World War II

We’ve discussed the beginnings of the Cold War in light of the general postwar historical context – the emergence of the United States and the Soviet Union as two superpowers, and the decline of the older European Great Powers of the previous hundred years – England, France, Germany, etc… This decline is fascinating in a number of different ways. However, in this lecture, I intend to talk specifically about the post war situation in East Asia. By East Asia I mean primarily China, Korea, and Japan.

The realities of Asia in the immediate postwar period were stark. The prewar international system, including trading partnerships, diplomatic relations, even the “trajectory of development” of many nations had been compromised and in some cases, like that of China, overturned. The trading relationship between Japan and China, which had been very large before the war, was non-existent in 1946. Great Britain had been removed as a major factor in the military equations of the region, as had France and the Netherlands, both of which had lost their colonies during the war. The United States had become the preeminent power in the region. This meant that, under international auspices, it was the American plan that would determine what the immediate postwar peace would look like.

However, the United States had no clear plan for Asia as a region, and very little understanding of the dynamics of Asia politically, socially, or economically. During the war, in fact, there was so little information in American academe about Asia that much had to be created in a short time. One example is the fact that ethnographies of Japanese culture were so severely lacking that the Department of Defense commissioned a young Anthropologist with no previous connection to Japan to research and write a report that could help them to understand prisoners of war and possibly predict Japanese reactions to American military and diplomatic maneuvers during the war.

Japan after WWII

The scholar, Ruth Benedict, produced the classic study The Chrysanthemum and The Sword in response to this request. The book was a marvel of speed and hard work, and served its purpose relatively well, becoming quickly one of the foundations of understanding for Americans seeking knowledge of Japanese culture and ideas. Still, it suffered from some critical flaws, as well. All of Benedict’s informants, for example, were prisoners of war. Japanese soldiers so rarely surrendered during the Pacific War that these people were potentially unusual as examples of Japanese culture (most who surrendered were caught unawares and disarmed before they could do themselves harm – captured unconscious, for example. Some few surrendered willingly. However, the shame involved with being a POW for a Japanese soldier was so great that most assumed it was as if they had died and never expected to return home). Additionally, the number of people who could speak Japanese was severely limited (even more than it needed to be, as the majority of the Japanese-American population was incarcerated in concentration camps for the duration of the war, and when they were allowed to come out, it was to fight in the European theater, where their language skills were useless – though some did serve as interpreters and translators in the Asian theatre). So understanding of Japan was severely limited.
This example holds true for many of the countries that were liberated from Japanese control at the end of the war as well. Thus, as mentioned above, it was difficult for the United States to make plans for the post-war period with limited understanding of how people in the occupied territories viewed themselves and their position vis-a-vis other Asian groups and nations.
Places like Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore, and Vietnam had been colonies of Western nations since well before WWII (the Philippines was a U.S. possession before the war). This made their postwar position ambiguous, and limited American vision in thinking about the postwar reorganization of Asia. It seems that American planners and diplomats had an innate assumption in many cases that postwar rebuilding would be directed by the former Western colonizing power that “owned” each of these territories. This, of course, turned out to be far from accurate.
It should be no surprise, then, to find that the United States had no postwar reorganization plan for the Asia-Pacific as a region, and in fact, had clear policy goals only for Japan. This led to a haphazard approach to the creation of a new world order, and left plenty of gaps for the coming Cold War to seep into.
The policy for Japan, though inconsistent at times in its implementation, followed general U.S. postwar goals in its outline. Japan was to be turned into a primarily agrarian land of private property ownership, petty capitalism, and democratic government.
On August 14, 1945, following the explosions of two Atomic weapons by the Americans – one on Hiroshima, the other on Nagasaki, that between them killed more than 150, 000 people, had decided to surrender. The Emperor Showa (Hirohito) made a recording of a speech to the nation, in secret on the night of the 13th. In it he noted that the war had not favored the Japanese, and asked his people to “bear the unbearable.” The recording was kept hidden for fear that militarist extremists would destroy it before it could be broadcast the next day. When it was broadcast, it was very difficult for common Japanese to understand. Hirohito never used the word “surrender” or admitted to having lost directly, and the language he used was a very esoteric, polite style of speech known only to Japanese aristocrats. Most people had to wait for the commentary by radio station announcers to understand that Japan was surrendering to the United States. Nearly the entire nation broke down and wept at the news. They had been ready to sacrifice down to the last person, and now it was no longer being asked of them. Many were confused by the change in direction – most still did not fully grasp the fact of the atomic bombs, or their effect. The surrender, then, came as a shock, even as most of the nation knew that the war was being lost.
When, in September of 1945, American marines began to wade ashore on the beaches, no one was exactly certain what the reception would be. Americans were certainly not prepared, though, for the warm welcome they received from their erstwhile enemies. It was as if many Japanese were happy to see them.
In fact, Japanese quickly adjusted to the fact that the war was at last over. The cost to the Japanese economy, and to the lives of ordinary Japanese, had been high. More than three million soldiers, and 2 million civilians, had been lost during the war. Many more were still unaccounted for by September, 1945 – most trapped behind U.S. lines in the Pacific or Asia, where they had been hopped over, supply lines cut, and left to wilt with no one to help them. Many of those would be repatriated. Some would choose not to go home. Others, out of no choice of their own, could not go home. So Japanese families were wrecked by the war, and its end brought hope to some, closure to others. Additionally, nearly everyone was poorer – not just in terms of savings, but in terms of total possessions and lifestyle, than they had been before the war. They began to refer to the war period as a dark valley in Japan’s history. Its end brought the hope for a new beginning in the simple fact that change had to occur. So the occupation was in some ways welcome simply because it signified the end of the war.
This does not mean, however, that most Japanese liked having been defeated. Many were nervous. Rumors about the Americans suggested that they were brutal rapists and murderers, as happy to slash a child to pieces as to munch a chocolate bar. To protect Japanese womanhood, one of the pre-occupation government’s last acts was to set up a “front line” of brothels occupied by volunteers, orphans, “compromised” women who were seen, in effect, as soldiers defending other women. Many were shocked by the defeat. Most were impressed by the fact that while Japan had gutted its economy and its resources to fight and lose the war, the United States had actually increased its wealth and productive capacity. This was visually demonstrated by the symbolic acts of filling Tokyo Bay with naval ships, and blotting out the sun over Tokyo with a fleet of over 1,000 aircraft during the signing of the surrender instrument aboard the USS Missouri.
Japan, then entered a new period in its history. When Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP) arrived and began implementing his program to rebuild Japan, that new course was set.
MacArthur’s program was, in his mind, no less than a holy mission to democratize what he saw (somewhat mistakenly) as a backward, “feudal” political and social system. MacArthur was determined to remake Japan into a free and democratic nation with a market economy and free exchange of ideas. He was backed up in this determination by the Truman administration – since the government of the United States had begun planning as early as 1943 for the occupation.
The occupation’s first act was to disband the Japanese Imperial Army and Navy. All soldiers and sailors were discharged and sent home. Japan was, for the occupation period, to depend for its defense entirely upon the United States.
Next, the pre-war Meiji Constitution was replaced by a document written by a committee of Americans working for SCAP – and often that committee was micromanaged by SCAP himself. The constitution contained a number of new provisions. The most significant of these were its granting of universal adult franchise – both men and women could now vote. It also defined the Emperor not as head of state, but as a symbol of the Japanese state and the Japanese people. Hirohito’s divinity was disavowed (even by the Emperor himself, publicly, in his second ever radio address to the Japanese people), and he was made a powerless figurehead.
The second critical point in the constitution was, of course, Article 9, in which the Japanese renounced war, and the right to maintain any military forces for any reasons whatsoever – including self-defense. This article is still extremely popular among Japanese today.
Finally, the constitution mandated the creation of a parliamentary system based on that of the British government, in which the Prime Minister is chosen from the majority party, and is one of the sitting members of the legislative assembly. MacArthur deliberately chose this system over the directly elected executive system of the United States – perhaps for the purpose of keeping power in the state fluid and difficult to concentrate in one pair of hands.
At the same time, MacArthur and SCAP concentrated great amounts of energy on social engineering. They redistributed the land to farmers in Japan – a very popular move, and one that increased the number of middle class, property-owning Japanese – thus hoping to increase the number of people with self-interest in the political activities of the state. This was an attempt not only to be fair, but to create and sustain a private voice in government to balance special interests and the military. They also began to promote democracy in Japan, with education campaigns about voting, get-out-the-vote rallies, and articles in Japanese newspapers about what democracy was to mean to a new Japan. The word democracy, and the images of popular power that go with it became fashionable – one magazine actually called itself Democracy.
Social engineering, for SCAP, included recreating the economic system. The Zaibatsu – huge industrial combines, quite literally trusts, of many different types of business activities centered around a single bank, through which they shared profits and losses, and kept each other afloat – were dismantled. Each different business division was required to go its own way in the world in the name of a market economy.
Former government and business leaders who had been in their positions during wartime (between 1936 and 1945) were purged. Many were sent to jail. Others were forced into retirement. At the same time, wartime thought police prisons were opened, and suspected dissenters, socialists, communists, liberals all came out entered society once more. They began immediately to organize along the lines of their former political beliefs. The communists became quite popular, and were able to organize or help organize some massive labor strikes that crippled whole industries during a period of difficulty. Again, this was done in the name of getting a diverse set of opinions and political ideas out into the marketplace so that Japanese could think critically about any choices their government made, and think back critically on the war.
Finally, to give the Japanese a sense that they did have both the need and the desire to learn these lessons from the United States, American shipments of food and clothing, American medical aid, and grassroots diplomacy was used to care for the starving, poverty-stricken postwar Japanese nation. This largess, combined with the reality in the period after 1945 that the United States was not only the single largest player in the world economy, but controlled 60% of all world trade, convinced Japanese that if occupation was unavoidable, the United States was the only acceptable occupying power, and one that could be learned from.
In 1950, however, all of this came to a stop, and much of what was gained in Japan by the Americans was lost. This was the result of the beginning of the Cold War, and the first hot flare-up of that war, in Korea in 1950.

Korea after WWII

No such plan existed for Korea. The United States initially committed all of its soldiers not occupying places taken elsewhere during the war to Japan. There was no U.S. force left for Korea, nor had their been much thought given to what needed to be done in Korea after the Japanese moved out. The United States seems to have assumed that with the absence of the Japanese, the Korean peninsula would somehow find leaders and form a government.
This was unrealistic given the history of Japanese occupation of Korea. Japanese control of the political system had been brutal. Koreans, particularly after annexation to Japan in 1905, were expected to become Japanese subjects (though they were always seen as second class people, even within the Korean peninsula). Political criticism and activism by Koreans was punished with brutal torture and execution. Koreans were expected to speak Japanese, and an active campaign to eliminate the Korean language seems to have been carried on. Korean school children were not only taught to speak Japanese, they were not allowed to speak Korean, were required to have Japanese names, and studied the same emperor-centered nationalist history of Japan that school children did in Tokyo, Kita-Kyushu, or Sapporo.
Koreans were drafted to go to Japan as members of virtual slave-labor work gangs, replacing Japanese who had been sent to war. Many Korean men were drafted into the Japanese military and fought for Japan during the entire war period, and the Japanese high command expected Korean women, willing or not, to do their part for the war effort by providing sexual services for Japanese soldiers as so-called “comfort women”.
It should come as no surprise to find that the American (lack of a) plan for Korea was doomed to fail. The government was not trusted by the Korean people and soon overthrown. Communist forces which had fought the Japanese as adjuncts to Mao Zedong’s communist forces in China were unwilling to let American-style democracy and capitalism get a foothold on the peninsula.
The United States and the Soviet Union (Russia) agreed to divide Korea along the 38th parallel into occupation zones, as Germany was, and await a United Nations brokered solution and UN-sponsored elections to unify the peninsula. Such elections never occurred. Instead, in 1948 in the southern (U.S. Occupied) zone, a military leader, Syngman Rhee, became autocratic ruler of southern Korea. The Soviet Union and China sponsored Kim Il-Sung and helped him to organize a communist administration in the north.

China after WWII

China was also in turmoil in the immediate postwar period. Before 1937, China, though it had its problems, had been expected to become Asia’s next industrialized and democratic great power. After WII, the United States’ goal was to restore that China, and to accelerate its progress toward democracy and a place in the world economy. However, Communist agitation, which had been growing before the war, and which had provided the more effective force in China against the Japanese during wartime, grew quickly after 1945. Jiang Jiexi, (Chiang Kai-Shek) and his Nationalist Party (Kuomintang, or KMT in Chinese) had been given the bulk of foreign aid during the war in order to fight the Japanese. After a number of defeats, however, and after correctly gaging the U.S. and Great Britain’s commitment to get the Japanese out of China, Jiang seems to have bided his time, and to have stockpiled most of the weapons and cash he received, engaging the Japanese only in a limited way, in order to fight the Communists at war’s end.
When the war did end, the United States gave the Japanese occupying forces orders to surrender only to Jiang’s forces, and not to the Communists. When Jiang proved unable to get his soldiers to many northern cities on time, the United States provided air transport to lift KMT soldiers to these cities in order to accept the surrender of Japanese forces. Still, the Communists were faster, and many of the Japanese forces were so poorly supplied, and so close to starvation, that they disregarded U.S. orders and surrendered to the Communists. This began to give Mao and his Communists a foothold in northern cities in China where they could begin to apply their wartime policies of wealth redistribution, which had been amazingly popular in the countryside, to the urban situation. Despite some early setbacks, the Communists learned quickly, and were able to soon gain a few cities from which they could launch their attacks on other northern cities held by the KMT. KMT weakness, combined with corruption, and a perceived distance from the Chinese people played into the Communists’ hands, and by 1948 the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) had the advantage in this civil war.

Bretton Woods: Preparing the Postwar Economy

The disagreement came when further, more ideological and political attempts to prevent a future war were contemplated. The proximate cause of the German, Italian, and Japanese turns to fascism seemed to have been in the Great Depression of the 1930’s. In the United States, the assumption that victory in the war had come from the American way of doing things – in particular, the fact that the United States had supplied most of the hardware, and most of the cash that led to the allied victory in Europe seemed to suggest that American capitalism was the most effective way of organizing an economy – led to the desire to, in effect, share the wealth. The United States came to be committed to a new world order which was beneficial to the needs of capitalism – an all inclusive capitalism that would allow all to share in the wealth of the world through trade and cooperation. Thus, in 1944, at a resort in New Jersey called Bretton Woods, the United States sponsored delegates from 44 different countries at a conference to discuss economic measures to prevent another postwar depression by setting in place a financial and trade system so strong, and so cooperative that such a global cash crisis could not occur again. The “Bretton Woods Agreement” led to the creation of some critical world financial programs that are still with us today. They include the World Bank (The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development – its official name), the International Monetary Fund, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (the GATT, the precursor to the World Trade Organization), and the designation of the US Dollar as the international currency of choice. These measures were intended to help provide money, particularly for European redevelopment and recovery, but also for the growing of global trade infrastructure; a system for helping insolvent or financially troubled nations through difficult periods, so that they could continue making payments and global cash flow could be maintained; a system for gradual elimination of trade barriers globally, and a common currency by which trade and economic measurements could be conducted.

There is little doubt that these organizations have made massive contributions to global financial security and increases in wealth. However, it is also clear, partly because the United States controlled 60% of global trade at the end of WWII, and partly because there were no other currencies as strong, and partly because the efforts were happening under the auspices of the United States, that participation in this system was not automatic. To recieve loans, assistance, and membership in the GATT, nations had to conform to American style capitalism. This was not, apparently, an attempt to undermine communism in the Soviet Union, but was certainly seen as being so, which caused diplomatic tensions.

The Marshall and Dodge Plans: Building the Economy and Undermining Communism

The work of the Bretton Woods Agreement was completed by 1946. By 1948, the United States had also put in place the Marshall Plan. This was a system to provide technical and economic aid to European countries devastated by the war. The idea was that the United States would provide large amounts of money for investment and redevelopment of infrastructure, but that it had to be distributed by the European participants as a group. The Marshall Plan, which led by 1952 to about $13 billion in aid, was certainly meant in part to undermine the efforts of socialists and communists in Europe, whose ideas had be receiving growing audiences in devastated postwar Germany, France, England, and other European nations. The other effect of the Marshall Plan, however, was to encourage European cooperation. The European Coal and Steel Community, the commission set up by the participants in the plan as the body to distribute the aid, became the precursor to the European Union of today. The Soviet Union, which was invited to participate, declined, and required its client states in Eastern Europe to decline as well. Once again, then, the American vision of the creation of a global community, beginning with joint economic activity, was at odds with the Soviet vision of a dis-integrated Germany. Interestingly, the Marshall Plan was so successful in increasing American popularity in Europe, improving European economies, and creating a bulwark against communism that the United States attempted something similar with what came to be known as the Dodge Plan in Japan.

East Asia after World War II

East Asia went through a period of adjustment following the end of the second world war. Japan, defeated, was occupied by the United States. China went through a revolution (or perhaps “civil war” would be a better term) that ended with victory for the Communists, and a retreat by the Nationalist Kuomintang Party, led by Jiang Kai-shek, to the island of Formosa. Korea, split into Soviet and American occupation zones, like Germany, at the end of the war, also experienced a war that appeared to pit a communist political system against one supported by the capitalist West. East Asia, then, was the first hotpoint in the Cold War. That fact meant that events in Asia would to a great extent define Cold War attitudes and policies the West, as well as the Soviet block.

The U.S. occupation of Japan is as a good a place to start in this story as any, and so it will be our beginning point.

On August 14, 1945, following the explosions of two Atomic weapons by the Americans – one on Hiroshima, the other on Nagasaki, that between them killed more than 150, 000 people, had decided to surrender. The Emperor Showa (Hirohito) made a recording of a speech to the nation, in secret on the night of the 13th. In it he noted that the war had not favored the Japanese, and asked his people to “bear the unbearable.” The recording was kept hidden for fear that militarist extremists would destroy it before it could be broadcast the next day. When it was broadcast, it was very difficult for common Japanese to understand. Hirohito never used the word “surrender” or admitted to having lost directly, and the language he used was a very esoteric, polite style of speech known only to Japanese aristocrats. Most people had to wait for the commentary by radio station announcers to understand that Japan was surrendering to the United States. Nearly the entire nation broke down and wept at the news. They had been ready to sacrifice down to the last person, and now it was no longer being asked of them. Many were confused by the change in direction – most still did not fully grasp the fact of the atomic bombs, or their effect. The surrender, then, came as a shock, even as most of the nation knew that the war was being lost.

When, in September of 1945, American marines began to wade ashore on the beaches, no one was exactly certain what the reception would be. Americans were certainly not prepared, though, for the warm welcome they received from their erstwhile enemies. It was as if many Japanese were happy to see them.

In fact, many Japanese were happy, once they had adjusted to the fact of the loss, that the war was at last over. The cost to the Japanese economy, and to the lives of ordinary Japanese, had been high. More than three million soldiers, and 2 million civilians, had been lost during the war. Many more were still unaccounted for by September, 1945 – most trapped behind U.S. lines in the Pacific or Asia, where they had been hopped over, supply lines cut, and left to wilt with no one to help them. Many of those would be repatriated. Some would choose not to go home. Others, out of no choice of their own, could not go home. So Japanese families were wrecked by the war, and its end brought hope to some, closure to others. Additionally, nearly everyone was poorer – not just in terms of savings, but in terms of total possessions and lifestyle, than they had been before the war. They began to refer to the war period as a dark valley in Japan’s history. Its end brought the hope for a new beginning in the simple fact that change had to occur. So the occupation was in some ways welcome simply because it signified the end of the war.

This does not mean, however, that most Japanese liked having been defeated. Many were nervous. Rumors about the Americans suggested that they were brutal rapists and murderers, as happy to slash a child to pieces as to munch a chocolate bar. To protect Japanese womanhood, one of the pre-occupation government’s last acts was to set up a “front line” of brothels occupied by volunteers, orphans, “compromised” women who were seen, in effect, as soldiers defending other women. Many were shocked by the defeat. Most were impressed by the fact that while Japan had gutted its economy and its resources to fight and lose the war, the United States had actually increased its wealth and productive capacity. This was visually demonstrated by the symbolic acts of filling Tokyo Bay with naval ships, and blotting out the sun over Tokyo with a fleet of over 1,000 aircraft during the signing of the surrender instrument aboard the USS Missouri.

Japan, then, unhappy about losing, but somewhat pleased to be done with the war, entered a new period in its history. When Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP) arrived and began implementing his program to rebuild Japan, that new course was set.

MacArthur’s program was, in his mind, no less than a holy mission to democratize what he saw (somewhat incorrectly) as a backward, “feudal” political and social system. MacArthur was determined to remake Japan into a free and democratic nation with a market economy and free exchange of ideas. He was back up in this determination by the Truman administration – since the government of the United States had begun planning as early as 1943 for the occupation.

The occupation’s first act was to disband the Japanese Imperial Army and Navy. Als soldiers and sailors were discharged and sent home. Japan was, for the entire occupation period, to depend for its defense entirely upon the United States.

Next, the pre-war Meiji Constitution was replaced by a document written by a committee of Americans working for SCAP – and often that committee was micromanaged by SCAP himself. The constitution contained a number of new provisions. The most significant of these were its granting of universal adult franchise – both men and women could now vote. It also defined the Emperor not as head of state, but as a symbol of the Japanese state and the Japanese people. Hirohito’s divinity was disavowed (even by the Emperor himself, publicly, in his second ever radio address to the Japanese people), and he was made a powerless figurehead. The second critical point in the constitution was, of course, Article 9, in which the Japanese renounced war, and the right to maintain any military forces for any reasons whatsoever – including self-defense. This article, though its interpretation has been modified, is still extremely popular among Japanese today. Finally, the constitution mandated the creation of a parliamentary system based on that of the British government, in which the Prime Minister is chosen from the majority party, and is one of the sitting members of the legislative assembly. MacArthur deliberately chose this system over the directly elected executive system of the United States – perhaps for the purpose of keeping power in the state fluid and difficult to concentrate in one pair of hands.

At the same time, MacArthur and SCAP concentrated great amounts of energy on social engineering. They redistributed the land to farmers in Japan – a very popular move, and one that increased the number of middle class, property-owning Japanese – thus hoping to increase the number of people with self-interest in the political activities of the state. This was an attempt not only to be fair, but to create and sustain a private voice in government to balance special interests and the military. They also began to promote democracy in Japan, with education campaigns about voting, get-out-the-vote rallies, and articles in Japanese newspapers about what democracy was to mean to a new Japan. The word democracy, and the images of popular power that go with it became fashionable – one magazine actually called itself Democracy.

Social engineering, for SCAP, included recreating the economic system. The Zaibatsu – huge industrial combines, quite literally trusts, of many different types of business activities centered around a single bank, through which they shared profits and losses, and kept each other afloat – were dismantled. Each different business division was required to go its own way in the world in the name of a market economy.

Former government and business leaders who had been in their positions during wartime (between 1936 and 1945) were purged. Many were sent to jail. Others were forced into retirement. At the same time, wartime thought police prisons were opened, and suspected dissenters, socialists, communists, liberals all came out entered society once more. They began immediately to organize along the lines of their former political beliefs. The communists became quite popular, and were able to organize or help organize some massive labor strikes that crippled whole industries during a period of difficulty. Again, this was done in the name of getting a diverse set of opinions and political ideas out into the marketplace so that Japanese could think critically about any choices their government made, and think back critically on the war.

In 1950, however, all of this came to a stop, and much of what was gained in Japan by the Americans was lost. This was the result of the beginning of the Cold War, and the first hot flare-up of that war, in Korea in 1950.

Thus the context of the change in the direction of the occupation, known as the Reverse Course, involved much more than the war in Korea. It was also related to the success of Mao Zedong’s revolution in China: the People’s Republic Of China had been proclaimed in 1949, and the United States saw communism winning the world’s most populous country. The Soviet Union had exploded its first atomic weapon in 1949. The arms race was starting all over again.

In response to these events, American need to hold the line against communism appeared to become more important, and Japan came to be the last wall against communism in Asia. It was used as a jumping off point, forward supply base, rear area medical and entertainment center by American troops fighting in the Korean War. Japanese corporations were invested in, then used to supply war materiel to the U.S. military. Billions of dollars was spent to return Japan’s industrial capacity to full production as soon as possible. The Zaibatsu partially reconstituted themselves. The United States’ Military Police actually joined the Japanese police in putting down strikes. Even the political agitators who had been released from prison by the United States in 1945/46 were in many cases re-arrested. Many of the wartime leaders of business and government who had been purged in 1945/46 were now rehabilitated and accepted by the SCAP as legitimate representatives of Japan.

In Short, the activities that came to be known as the Reverse Course were implemented because the United States was fighting a war against communism in Asia, and Japan was the nearest and most convenient staging ground. U.S. policy had changed from the original goal – to make Japan a successful but third-rank economy governed by a contentious multi-party political structure that maximized gridlock and minimized political unity. Now the goal was to make Japan into the Asian outpost against communism in what was becoming a game of global one-ups-man-ship. Anything Japan needed to remain capitalist was to be provided – from money to political motivation.

This was the basis for Japan’s “economic miracle” after the war then. The Japanese people certainly worked hard, and sacrificed much. But they needed customers, and the United States supplied both heavy-duty investments, the legal and moral framework for rebuilding much of Japan’s heavy industry, and the customers for Japanese goods. In return for the commitment from Japan’s once and future leaders to resist communism and allow U.S. use of Japanese soil, and U.S. patronage of Japanese companies the Japanese government received the green light to develop itself into a first rank industrial power.

Additionally, the United States discovered that while it was busy fighting a war elsewhere, it had not the financial nor the political capital to fully guarantee Japan’s defense. So Japan was pressured to develop its own defense forces – in violation of the constitution written for the Japanese by the United States. The Japanese finally agreed to this change, but only under the condition that the force created be limited to self defense, and created under rules that allowed for police forces – thus necessitating no change in Article 9 of the “Peace Constitution.” In a 1952 agreement reached in San Francisco, the United States agreed to provide Japan with any additional defense needs it had in exchange for the use of Japanese soil for forward bases for U.S. forces in Asia. This accomplished, and the Japanese economy well on the road to recovery, the United States returned sovereignty over most of Japan to the Japanese government in 1952. Okinawa was not returned to Japan until 1972.

In direct contrast to Japan, China, which was also devastated by the Second World War, in 1949 became the world’s largest communist country under the leadership of the Great Helmsman, Mao Zedong. China’s march to communism, and perhaps more importantly unity and modernization had begun, though, not in 1945, but in 1895.

In 1895, Sun Yat-sen was born in Guangzhou, in southern China. Sun was educated at Iolani School in Hawaii, then later took his medical degree in Hong Kong. Sun was called to serve China, however, and became one of the chief proponents of modernization and unification in the early 20th century. In 1912, Sun was elected president of China in Nanking. Ironically, in an unrelated series of events, protests against the Qing regime in Beijing reached a fever pitch, and the ministers for the young emperor Pu-yi agreed to have the emperor abdicate his thrown. At something like five years old, the boy sealed a decree in which he gave up his claim to the thrown and abdicated in favor of a new Chinese republic.

The first leader of that republic was not Sun Yat-sen, though his election appears to have been as valid as any other. Sun stepped aside in favor of Yuan Shih-kai, a former Qing general (at the time a warlord who controlled Manchuria and much of northern China). Yuan had an army, and Sun apparently hoped that he would use that army to try and unify China by defeating other warlords and making a reality out of a republic that really had only a very superficial legitimacy and mandate.

Yuan Shih-kai proved a disappointment to Sun. Eventually Yuan attemped to make himself emperor, and to found a new Chinese dynasty. It was only popular revolt that stopped him.

In this atmosphere, Sun Yat-sen once again stepped into the vacuum and provided leadership to a directionless China. Sun proposed a three step system, the Three Principles of the People, that he said would make it possible for China to unify, and to create a viable democracy. The first of the three principles that Sun advocated was nationalism. He planned to unstill the Chinese with a keen sense of nation that would allow them to care for, and suffer with, compatriots from across the country as their own. How he planned to accomplish this was unclear.

Sun’s next step was what he called democracy, a stage in which the Chinese people, under the tutelage of Sun’s nationalist Kuomintang Party, would be taught what democracy is, and how important it was for each citizen to participate. Until the Chinese could get the hang of this, to prevent radical parties such as fascists or communists from gaining control, the first few decades of the democracy phase would have to be an enforced one-party system. The Kuomintang would be the only legal party that could field candidates. This, according to Sun, would have the effect of limiting the risk that China’s government could be abused to near zero., Evnetually, Sun’s hope was, that full multi-party democracy would be possible, but he did not expect that within his own lifetime.

Sun’s last principle, and last step, was called people’s livelihood, and consisted of creating an economy in which everyone could afford basic life-sustaining goods and services. Again, what such an economy would look like, or how it was to be developed, Sun did not elaborate.

It may have been this big-picture with no clear program defined as to how to carry out his reforms that ultimately made Sun Yat-sen ineffective as a leader of a unifying and consistent political movement with real hopes of taking and reforming China. Instead, the party that Sun created – the nationalist Kuomintang – muddled through its existence in China in the early 1920’s with a program, but little in the way of effective implementation.

That was changed when Jiang Kai-shek became the commander in charge of the Kuomintang military academy, then later, after Sun’s death, leader of the Kuomintang itself. Jiang was trained to organize a party, to implement its policies, and to lead a revolutionary group by the Russians, who saw an opportunity to expand the world revolution to include China. When he returned to China, however, Sun’s contacts and supporters came from the middle class, and had essentially liberal political goals. Jiang supported those goals. By 1926, Jiang was so successful in organizing the Kuomintang that he began a successful “Northern Campaign” to get rid of warlords and bring north China under KMT control.

During that same period, in the 1920’s, the Chinese Communist Party was struggling to organize itself and to have some relevance in a China that was far less industrialized than even Russia had been in 1917.

The CCP base of operations was the most industrialized city in China at the time: Shanghai. It was there that they could organize industrial labor in the marxist way. But a young communist named Mao Zedong quickly realized that a successful revolution was going to have to include the peasants. Though the party scoffed at him, Mao began riding his bicycle out to the countryside and organizing them. He taught them how to create a collective fruit stand, the profits of which they could all share. He also taught them, eventually, that as a group they were strong enough not only to defy their landlords, but to overthrow their landlords and gain control and ownership of the land themselves.

Mao’s experiments were very successful, and his peasant-oriented and practical vision of how a revolution could take place made him the leader of the CCP. Mao was elected to this post during the “Long March” – a trek by foot around the outermost fringes of China, thousands of miles, and months long, that was made by the communist party to escape discovery and persecution by Jiang Kai-shek in and around the area of Shanghai.

Mao was aware from early in his career that China faced the same problems in its revolution that Russia had faced in 1917. Far more of China’s population were engaged in farming than in industrial labor. In fact, China’s industrial sector was even small and less developed in comparison with the overall population than Russia’s had been.

Mao’s solution to this problem was very different from that of Lenin, however. Mao was not interested in Lenin’s revolutionary vanguard party, whose role as Lenin saw it was to teach Russia’s peasants class consciousness and lead them in revolution, then lead the country through an industrial revolution. Mao, too, skipped a step in Marx’s dialectical history – the industrial/bourgeois phase. However, Maoism was much more people- and results-oriented. For Mao, the Communist Party was not a vanguard to lead and teach people about the revolution. Rather, it was an organ of the people, existing only to serve the public will. The party was to stay in touch with this public will be maintaining close ties to working Chinese. Party officials were expected to roll up their sleeves and get into work alongside peasants and laborers to find out what their lives were like, and what they needed. Rather than lead the people, the Party was to be led by the people.

Organizationally, the party did not differ drastically from the Soviet model. However, Mao’s emphasis on serving the people of China, rather than leading them, would have dramatic effects on China’s revolution.

First, during the Second World War, while the nationalist Kuomintang, even with support from the United States in money and materiel, continued to withdraw in front of the Japanese army, leaving ordinary Chinese to face the wrath and slaughter. Jiang was apparently holding his troops in reserve, perhaps for a final push against Japan, but historians speculate that he was more interested in waiting for the Japanese to be beaten, then having the resources to destroy the communists.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) operated in a different mode. They conducted a guerrilla war against the Japanese in north China, making any territory outside of the cities extremely dangerous for the Japanese. They traveled mostly on foot, and received little outside aid in arms or money. They chose to inhabit a series of caves, which they enlarged through had stone carving, away from major population centers, where they grew their own food. Mao enjoined the CCP resistance fighters never to take anything from farmers without asking and paying. In most cases, the CCP carried all the supplies it needed with it, thus avoiding any disturbance of peasant lives, in marked contrast the the rapine ways of the KMT. As the communists liberated territory, they often organized the peasants, who would then be encouraged to rebel against landlords, and the landlords’ property and wealth would then be redistributed among the peasants in the area. These policies made the communist party quite popular in the north China countryside, and contributed to a growing number of new members, and consequently a growing military force.

Immediately after the Japanese surrendered, both the Communists and the KMT began frenzied attempts to maximize their territorial positions. Jiang, in a mad race to gain cities, flew KMT troops to major cities all over the country to accept the surrender of local Japanese garrisons. The United States attempted to assist the KMT by forbidding Japanese commanders to surrender to anyone but a legitimate representative of the KMT. So, by 1946, the KMT held the cities, and the CCP held the Chinese countryside. By 1949, through shrewd tactics and popular activities, the CCP had gained control of the country, and the KMT, with Jiang, fled to the island of Formosa.

Mao and his CCP then began a period in which they consolidated their control of the country and the government structure. Much of this organization was done with Soviet help and advice. The Soviet Union saw China as its little brother in communism, and was liberal with both money and counsel.

However, the realities of China and of Mao made Chinese communism very different in many ways from the Russian brand. By 1957, Mao was beginning to tire of the Soviet advisors, and by 1959, they were gone, and China and the USSR had entered a period of frosty relations. Mao realized that without Soviet aid, China would have to become self-sufficient. He therefore began an economic experiment that was designed to make China first completely independent economically, then, within 15 years, help it to out produce even Great Britain – at the time still one of the world’s most productive and prosperous economies.

This plan came to be known as the Great Leap Forward. It began in 1958 with China’s second 5-year plan, and was intended to industrialize China far faster, and more efficiently than would have been possible in any other way. The secret to the expected success was within Mao’s brand of communism – decentralization. Rather than create factories in the cities and bring laborers to them, Mao decided to move the factories out into the countryside. This coincided with his move to collectivize Chinese agriculture into huge communes. The Communes were thus asked both to produce food for China, and become its industrial workshops as well. This double duty caused double trauma for China. Not only were the peasants unable, because of bad weather, poor advice, and lack of labor, to produce enough food for the nation (crop shortages may have contributed to the starvation deaths of up to 30 million people), they were also not knowledgeable about industrial production methods. Backyard steel furnaces that had been the centerpiece of Mao’s hopes produced more steel than China had ever produced before, but all of it was of such poor quality it was unusable. China’s economy was devastated.

Chairman Mao had to face the music for the failure of his economic program. In 1960, he accepted the failure of the Great Leap Forward, and resigned as President of the People’s Republic of China. He retained his position as de-facto and official head of the CCP. This made him, while famous, much more of a background figure in the governing of China for the years following.

Mao was replaced in the position of President by Deng Xiaping, a long time communist and member of the core party faithful. Deng instituted reforms that placed communes and industry under professional managers, and began to disassemble the great communes that the Great Leap had created. His government began the slow process of rebuilding a government structure and workflow system. This necessarily involved creating a hierarchy of authority, specific job functions, experts in the various functions of government, etc. Deng’s government appears to have been on the road to becoming efficient and effective. However, its hierarchical structure and assumption of the authority to lead, rather than simply serve, the people of China went against Mao’s principles. He also, apparently, had an interest in getting back into the limelight of leadership.

Mao thus began, in 1966, to organize the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. His activities were based on a sense that a true revolution can never end. It must be an ongoing phenomenon, or risk the creation of a stable, hierarchical system of political leadership. This was the specific complaint Mao had about Deng’s government, and the reason why he said that Deng was following the “Capitalist Road.” Namely, the creation of a government means that one group of people claims greater expertise than, and authority over, another group of people. Mao saw this as fundamentally opposed to the equality that was the goal of communism. For Mao, equality meant interchangeability. He expected every member of Chinese society to be able to do the work of any other member. This meant that University Professors and government administrators should be able to farm, and farmers should be able to teach at colleges, or run government offices. During the Great Leap Forward, and even before, Mao had encouraged the creation of such situations as an educational tool – mostly for the white collar intellectual and administrative types to experience the kind of life peasants lived, in order to indoctrinate them into Mao’s vision of communism. With a planned, hierarchical government structure in which responsibility for different administrative tasks was clearly delegated, interchageability became an impossibility. This was what Mao called “the white and expert path,” as opposed to the “red and expert path,” which was essentially communist and promoted interchageability.

Mao’s complaints against Deng’s government were thus made clear. But the CCP, and many ordinary citizens, were beginning to see the benefit of efficient government, and so Mao had to find a group that would follow him, and be willing to upset the apple cart in the process. He finally settled on China’s youth, because they had never experienced a revolution, and he felt that giving them a cause, and a sense of creating their own revolution would teach them the spirit of sacrifice necessary to carry on without becoming complacent (his main complaint against their parents).

So Mao appealed to the youth of China, and he, his wife Jiang Qing, and several other high level CCP operators printed a “Little Red Book” of quotations from the writings of Chairman Mao. These books (the only book that has had more copies printed is the Christian Bible) were used by organizers of the youth groups (known as Red Guards) to inspire young people to follow the example and teachings of Chairman Mao. Mao was raised almost to the status of demigod, and was looked up to by millions of young Chinese. Mao urged them to complete the work of the revolution, left undone by their complacent parents. Schools were closed down, from grade one through graduate school. Primary and secondary schools did not reopen until 1969. Colleges and Universities did not reopen until 1972. During that time, Mao encouraged the youth to eliminate old ideas, old culture, and anything else that might be seen as linking Chinese people with their non-communist past.

He told government officials to welcome students into their offices to observe their work and criticize it in terms of its applicability to the goals of communism. Where students found the work or the people to be lacking in their devotion to the red and expert path, their criticism could become public and violent. Deng was dragged out of his office and paraded around Beijing surrounded by huge posters proclaiming he was a capitalist roader. In local areas, Red Guards would turn on, and turn in, their parents, or stand aside as other Red Guards criticised them, then kicked and beat them, sometimes to death. In some instances, possession of foreign books or newspapers was enough to convict a CCP member of being a subversive and capitalist roader, with the result that many were sent to labor camps in remote regions to do hard labor for years. In all, the Cultural Revolution became a sort of purge of the CCP that was encouraged by the top, but carried out by the rank and file – as Mao would certainly have wanted it.

The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution did cause chaos in China’s society and political system. However, it was a part of Mao’s evolving plan for continuous revolution, without which, he believed, a hierarchical system would reassert itself, and the fundamental equality of all people on a social and economic basis would be destroyed, leading to the sort of control by small groups of elites that the revolution had been made to destroy. Without constant revolution, the people of China would not be aware of what sacrifice meant, and how it could benefit them. They would not be a unified group serving a higher cause, but an atomized society of individuals who could be divided and conquered by insidious means used by intelligent people to enslave them. It was thus necessary to give both the experience of revolution, and constantly reap the benefits of turning society on its head so as to avoid complacency that Mao was after. It can be said, then, in that sense, that the Cultural Revolution was sometimes too successful. By the early 1970’s, in fact, even Mao had had enough, and he began to use the army to calm, then disband, the Red Guards.

Mao died in 1976, just 3 years after a rapproachement between the United States and China that would result in normalized relations by 1979. In the wake of his death, Deng Ziaoping, who had been purged from the CCP and reinstated at least three times since his time as President in the early 1960’s, emerged as the leader of China. Deng set about reforming Chinese communism during the 1980’s to bring China into the modern world. Deng’s reforms included special economic zones where a limited form of capitalism could be practiced, and where exports were the name of the game. He relaxed economic and social rules, while at the same time reaffirming that the CCP was the only legitimate political body in China.

Deng’s reforms would certainly have made Mao turn in his grave. If there is a capitalist road, Deng’s reforms definitely went down it. Their success in transforming China from a net debtor nation that could not feed all of its own people in the mid 1970’s to a nation that exports to the world in the 21st century has been nothing short of amazing. While it can certainly be extrapolated from this that communism in China may be dead, the corrollary to that analysis is that successful capitalist economies do not also have to be democratic societies. Where China will go from here, and how it will change, are matters of intense interest for the world. Still the world’s most populous country, with a growing military budget, and a powerful economy, and a desire to lead Asia into the 21st century, China is ambitious, rich, and powerful, and is likely to play a critical role on the world stage.
Back to Hist. 152 page

The First Marxist Revolution: Russia, 1917

One of the first casualties of “total war” was Russia. A country with a huge population, but limited industrial capacity, Russia was the ally of both Serbia and France, and was thus committed from the first to entering the war against Austria and Germany. In the first days of the war, France pushed, and Russia agreed, to Russian entry into the war as soon as possible so as to take the pressure off of France, and pinch Germany between two fronts.

The Russians entered the war, as did every other European country, with a kind of war fever. The hawks in Russia believed it would be an excellent opportunity to gain the area around the Dardanelles and the Crimea that had been denied them in the 1908 fiasco with Austria. Liberals within Russia saw the opportunity of fighting alongside France and England as an opportunity for Russians to witness liberal political values and working national assemblies, and to bring such things back to Russia. Both sides thus supported war. That support began to erode after the first two battles Russia fought.

The Russian Steamroller, the nickname for Russia’s army, which was notoriously slow to get started, and low tech to boot, but was mythologized as unstoppable once motion began, actually was partially mobilized nearly 3 weeks earlier than the Germans had expected. Although some commanders warned against it, the Russian army began its invasion of East Prussia nearly as soon as soldiers arrived at the staging areas, in keeping with its promise to France. By this point in the war, though the army was partially mobilized, it was in some disarray, and the limited industry of Russia had not yet been able to produce enough rifles for all of the soldiers who were already at the front. They were told to find one as they marched through Germany, and the invasion of East Prussia began in August of 1914.

The Russian plan, which had failed in practice due to poor communications and coordination, was to create pincers, one to the north of the Masurian Lakes, and one to the South, and move into East Prussia to surround the German army there. After linking up, they would draw the bag closed, and, it was assumed, destroy the Eastern German Army.

The plan was a reasonable one, given the massing of 2.5 to 3 million Russian troops against a minimal defensive force the Germans had left in East Prussia of roughly 350,000. Actualization of the plan was plagued from the start with misfortunes, poor communications, and mistakes that would lead to tragedy.

The first problem was that the armies comprising the north and the south arms of the pincers began their march at different times. Their commanders were unable to be sure where the other was – in fact, they really did not even try to be certain that their movements were coordinated at all – throughout the entire operation.

In addition, the Russian communcations system was so poor, and the availability of telegraph line so limited, that the armies were reduced to communicating with each other by unscrambled wireless, often without even an effort at encoding critical information on movements, troop strength and location, and daily movement objectives. The Germans were able to read most of the Russian radio traffic regularly, and with no difficulty.

The Russian armies, vast as they were, and slow, quickly out marched their supply lines. The Russian railway guage, in order to slow a possible German invasion, had been built much wider than the German guage, and so as the Russian moved into East Prussia, they had to capture German rolling stock (none of which had been left for them by the retreating German army). With no transportation, supplies had to be brought up by horse cart, limiting access to the already short supplies of shells, powder, and food that could be supplied by Russian industry. The armies invading East Prussia regularly had to halt for days at a time in order for supply lines to catch up.

In front of these slow moving behemoths, the German defensive armies were able to use rails and fast marches to maneuver at will. Some German units saw action against two separate Russian units on opposite sides of the front on the same day. Clearly, even in its first days, the Eastern Front was not the stalemate situation in the West, but a far more fluid site of battle.

By the End of August, after transferring two divisions from the Western Front, the Germans were able to surround and destroy the Russian northern army near the village of Tannenberg in East Prussia. Nearly 250,000 Russians died in that battle, including the commander of the Northern Army, who took his own life rather than be captured by the Germans as he tried to escape back to Russia through the forest.

In Early September, the Southern Army, nearly reaching its planned link point south of the Masurian Lakes region, was also caught and destroyed by the more mobile Germans, who also carried machine guns and other weapons that the Russians did not have available to them. In this battle, another 250,000 to 300,000 Russians were killed, and the Russian army was unable to continue prosecuting the war temporarily on the German front, thought it did have some success against the Austrians to the South.

This initial defeat was devastating for the Russian army, and eventually prompted the Czar, Nicholas II, to travel to the front to take personal command of his troops. Nicholas was a large man, who has been described as “slightly stupid” by those close to him. He had little experience with the military, and it is unclear what he thought he could accomplish by doing this. Furthermore, he left his wife, Czarina Alexandra, in charge of governing Russia. She was under the influence of one of the more corrupt Priests of the 20^th century, a named Rasputin whose less devout activities included heavy drinking and regular visits to brothels. These two systematically removed the more effective administrators from the Russian government and military commands in order to secure their own positions and avoid argument or opposition. This created an incompetent and ineffective government which could not provide for the needs of the state. Russian peasants began to refuse to supply food to the government for distribution in the cities or to the military because of the anger at the war and the high taxes and inefficiency of the administration.

By March 8, 1917, Petrograd, the capital at the time, was paralyzed by strikes in nearly every industry and service in protest of the government’s inefficiency and lack of concern for Russia’s people. Bread shortages in the cities, especially Petrograd, also brought out demonstrators who were not connected to unions. The streets were full of people who had been the engines of the economy, but were now providing only unrest and chaos. On March 11, the tsar required workers to end their strikes and return to work. He also dissolved the legislative assembly, which had really never been more than an advisory body in any case. To the tsar’s surprise, rather than create peace, these demands angered people so much that strikers refused to return to work despite threats of physical violence, and the legislative assembly, the Duma, remaind illegally in session. However, when the tsar ordered the police forces to intervene, they sided with the workers, creating great pressure on the tsar’s government.

On March 12, 1917, the Duma voted to create a “provisional committee” with the task of creating a republican constitution for Russia. At the same time, a group of workers gathered to form the Petrograd Soviet – a kind of congress of workers’ (and eventually soldiers’) deputies.

On March 15, the tsar abdicated in favor of his brother Michael. Late that night, and after much thought, Michael refused to accept the throne, and instead transferred his rights to rule to the Duma, which then became the provisional government of Russia. The Duma, however, was reluctant to rule on specific issues because it felt that was the proper duty only of a new Duma to be elected in October according to the new constitution. Thus rather than address the social problems of the war, taxes, land reform, and food supply, the Duma spent its time on political problems. Great reforms were achieved, including the creation of a constitutional right of all Russians to equality before the law, and universal suffrage. However, the refusal, on moral grounds, to deal with structural and social issues made the Duma look as if it was abdicating its authority in these matters. The government appeared to be refusing to govern.

At the same time, the Petrograd Soviet, which took its legitimacy only from the fact that it represented more people in Petrograd than any other organization, had no such temerity. The Petrograd Soviet issued proclamation after proclamation, none of which had the force of law, but many of which had the backing of the people of Petrograd (though often not of the rest of Russia). Army Order #1, for example, was a resolution that absolved non-commissioned soldiers from responsibility to their officers and their posts. Soldiers left in droves, some after shooting their commanding officers. This occurred even though the order had no legal authority.

This led, then to a situation in which the Provisional Government of the Duma was in constant competition for legitimacy and authority with the Petrograd Soviet – a situation your textbook calls “dual power.” In effect, though, there was no real power – the competition only led to the question of who was in charge, and Russia was in political chaos. The Provisional Government could perhaps have regained the advantage when Alexander Kerensky, a socialist, became its prime minister in July of 1917. However, Kerensky was unable to address social problems either. His government continued plans to attack the Germans, and refused to redistribute land. This made Kerensky unable to gain the public support he would have needed to make the government work.

To be fair, the Petrograd Soviet was unable – or more precisely, unwilling – to take the initiative as well. Its deputies were mostly members of the Menshevik party – a group who believed that Russia, because of its lack of an industrialized economy, was not yet at the proper stage for a marxist revolution. This meant that before the marxist revolution could occur, the middle class had to have its opportunity to build the economy and create the factories where the laboring class would be born and nurtured. This intermediate step would, they expected, be provided for by the provisional government. So while they were noisy and opinionated, their interest was not to destroy the provisional government, but to keep the pressure on so that the bourgeois stage would be quickly formed, and the preparation for revolution quickly realized. They thus had no interest in taking power for themselves in 1917.

Only months before his arrival in Petrograd in April, 1917, Vladimir Ilich Lenin was agreeing with the Menshevik line. Russia, he thought, was the last place in the western world that would be ready for a socialist revolution. He did not expect to see one, he said, within his own lifetime. The problem for Lenin was the same as that mentioned above. According to Marx the revolution of the proletariat (the working class) could not occur until there was a critical mass of workers all aware of their plight, and their similarity to each other. Such a critical mass could not occur until a society reached a relatively high degree of industrialization – most people had to be workers before a revolution could occur. In Russia, Lenin knew, a population of more than 170 million people included only about 50,000 actual factory workers. This tiny proletarian class found itself opposed to an even tinier group of upper-middle-class factory owners and entrepreneurs. The situation was not the stuff to create sufficient interest in social change by the majority of the population. Russia, Lenin thought, was just not ready for revolution.

However, by April 16, 1917, as his secret train, provided by the Germans, stopped in Petrograd, Lenin had changed his mind. He believed now that in fact a revolution could be created, and be successful. The key was to skip the Bourgeois step in Marx’s plan. To do this, Lenin realized, he would need a party (the Bolsheviks) that was not a popular party of workers, but a vanguard party of teachers. The assignment Lenin gave the Bolsheviks was to teach the peasants, farmers, workers, and urban poor of Russia how to create a revolution – to teach them to have class consciousness. This could best be done by a secret organization, not a popular one – and often the most effective media for the message was violence. Peasants who could not read, and had never heard political theory in their life could easily get the message that the upper class was the enemy if members of the upper class were killed in front of them. Widespread, systemic violence thus became one of the Bolsheviks’ most important voices. In this way, Lenin used the technique of solidifying a population by taking it to war – in this case, though, not against the Germans, but against the upper classes.

By sheer accident, Lenin also began to talk about two things that were extremely popular among the Russian common people. Those were ending the war, and reforming land ownership. In this, he proved to be prescient. Already in 1917, in a bottom-up sort of way, peasants were creating the land reform that the governments had refused to act on for so long. Peasants took large farms, and redistributed the land among themselves. Workers violently seized factories for themselves. Various peoples who had been conquered by the Russians during the past 300 years of expansion began to assert their differences and their independence. Government had no control over this civil unrest.

At the same time, in mid-1917, a Russian General sent troops to help the provisional government defend itself against the urban mob. The move was misinterpreted by Kerensky as an attempt at a coup and restoration of the monarchy, and he marched out an army to meet it. This fiasco caused the Russian political divisions within the provisional government to move farther apart, as they began to perceive each other as untrustworthy.

On November 6, 1917, Lenin’s close aid Leon Trotsky led a contingent of the crew of the battleship Aurora, now known as the Red Army, into the old Winter Palace of the tsar in Petrograd and placed Lenin in power. The police stood aside and let them in with no shots fired.  The first thing Lenin did was to get rid of the provisional government – he had most of them arrested and put in jail by the notorious CHEKA – the state security organization that would eventually become the KGB. The CHEKA was also used to create terror. It would arrest or execute anyone that might be considered to be a threat to the state, in the name of making the world safe for communism.

Thus the Bolsheviks, only 200,000 people in 1917, with Lenin as their absolute director, became the rulers of 170,000,000 Russians.  When the Bolsheviks received only 25% of the votes in December elections, Lenin assumed that the Russian people had no idea what was good for them, and rather than accept the election results, Lenin shut down the Duma with military force, and arrested any who tried to enter the Duma building in January, 1918.

In March,1918, in order to allow himself and his new government to consolidate their control, and stabilize the country, Lenin signed the treaty of Brest-Litovsk with the Germans.  This treaty handed over large chunks of land to the Germans, including the Caucasian oil fields, and territory that included all of the Ukraine, Russia’s most productive agricultural region, and areas that included a full 1/3 of all of the Russian population.

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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.[1] 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).[2]

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.[3] 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 17^th 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.[4] 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.[5]

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 30^th, 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.”[6]

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.[7] 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.[8]

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.[9] 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.[10] 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.[11]

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 6^th 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 20^th century.

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