THE LARGEST, COSTLIEST, AND

DEADLIEST CONFLICT

The Second World War

World War II (September 1939 – September 1945) was and remains the largest, costliest, and deadliest armed conflict in human history

Beyond that, its long-term global impact continued to be felt in world politics, economics, and diplomacy for five decades

Before the war ended, sixty-one nations joined the fighting

They were divided into two coalitions, the Axis Powers and the Allied Powers

The Axis Powers – Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Japan

The Allied Powers were Great Britain, France, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the Soviet Union, and the United States

Every continent except Antarctica and South America saw fighting on the ground, and naval engagements ranged over every major body of water

Much more so than World War I, World War II was truly a global war

Concerning the grimmest statistic of all, it is estimated that somewhere between 55 million and 60 million people were killed during the war

Almost half of these causalities were noncombatants

World War II involved yet another ugly trend of the twentieth century, genocide

Twelve million victims – 6 million Jewish, 6 million non-Jewish – perished in the German campaign of racial extermination known as the Holocaust

In addition to its immediate effects, World War II also resulted in a complete shift in the balance of global strength

World War I had begun the process of toppling the powers of Europe from their position of dominance

World War II finished it When the war was over, only two

nations, the United States and the Soviet Union, which became known as the superpowers, had the military and economic might to affect the course of world events

The geopolitical struggle that ensued between these powers and known as the Cold War would affect the world for four and half decades

World War II also destroyed the imperial might of the European powers

From the 1940s through the 1970s, a massive wave of decolonization swept through the non-Western world, and dozens of nations in Africa and Asia became free

Unlike the First World War, whose origins were quite complex, World War II resulted from a straightforward pattern of aggression on the part of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and militaristic Japan

Especially in Europe, aggression met with a weak and passive response from the major democracies

Hamstrung by the Great Depression, anxious to avoid another global conflict, or simply hoping that each aggressive move would be the last, countries such as France, Britain, and the United States did little to stop the aggression

This policy of letting the aggressors have what they wanted, in the hope that they would demand no more, became known as appeasement

And the League of Nations proved almost useless when it came to dealing with foreign-policy crises

And by 1933, Hitler withdrew from the League of Nations

In 1935, Hitler openly rebuilt the German army and navy, violating the disarmament clauses of the Treaty of Versailles

In 1936, Hitler sent German troops into the Rhineland, which was supposed to remain a demilitarized zone

It was another violation of Versailles In 1937, Hitler signed the Anti-Comintern Pact

with Italy and Japan This pact pledged opposition to international

communism and the formation of the Axis Powers

Hitler also made public his desire for Lebensraum or “living space” for Germany

In 1938, Germany annexed Austria in the Anschluss (“union”)

Hitler also announced his plans to take over the Sudetenland which had formerly been German territory and had been given to Czechoslovakia after World war I

In 1939, Germany took the rest of Czechoslovakia, demonstrating the foolishness of France and Britain in believing Hitler’s promises to take only so much territory and then be satisfied

And on September 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland and World War II began

Meanwhile, by 1936, Italy had completed its conquest of Ethiopia

Spain experienced civil war (1936-1939) when Francisco Franco’s military uprising attacked the democratically elected, left-leaning government

More than 600,000 people were killed in the conflict and Franco’s rebellion eventually succeeded

Franco ruled Spain as a dictator until his death in 1975

In 1937, Japan invaded mainland China, taking much of the coastline

The Japanese army committed terrible atrocities in China, including the “Rape of Nanking,” in which it hundreds of thousands of civilians, including women and children, were slaughtered

And in 1939, Hitler and Stalin signed the Nazi-Soviet Pact, keeping the USSR neutral thus allowing the Germans to avoid a two-front war as long as the pact was strong

During the first half of the war, the Axis powers were triumphant

In Europe, the only major powers opposing Germany were France and Britain

The USSR had agreed to remain neutral, and the United States, sunk into isolation, stayed out of the fighting as well

In Asia, Japan expanded its war against China to include a greater war of conquest against British, Dutch, and French colonies in Southeast Asia

The nature of warfare had changed since World War I

Military technology had developed in such a way as to make warfare more rapid and more dynamic

The new offensive character of war was apparent right away

Germany’s innovative method of warfare, Blitzkrieg (“lightning war”), used tanks and airplanes to penetrate deeply and quickly into enemy territory

Within weeks, the war in Poland was over But Britain and France waited for Germany

to attack them, relying on an outdated World War I mentality that viewed war as primarily defensive

Historians refer to the winter of 1939 and 1940 as the Sliztkrieg, or “phony war” due to the British and French strategy of waiting

In April 1940, Hitler launched his assault on western Europe

The next several months were stunningly successful

Denmark, Norway, Luxembourg, Belgium, and the Netherlands were all defeated in weeks, if not days

Most amazing of all was the fall of France The Germans attacked France on May 10 By June 22, the largest and most powerful

democracy on the European continent had surrendered

The French had been confident that their great chain of border fortifications, the Maginot Line, would protect them

But the German Blitzkrieg sidestepped the Maginot Line and sent tanks streaming into northern France

The defeat of France shocked the world It also left Great Britain in the seemingly

hopeless position of fighting Germany and Italy

But Hitler’s attempt to knock Britain out of the war failed

The Royal Navy protected the British isles from invasion

And the Royal Air Force defended England’s skies against Hitler’s bombers in the Battle of Britain

In the spring and summer of 1941, Hitler decided to shift his focus from Britain to eastern Europe

Hitler wanted to help Italy in its wars in Greece, Yugoslavia, and North Africa but also had in mind the invasion of the Soviet Union or Operation Barbarossa

Since France had been eliminated from the war, Hitler felt confident in his planned attack on the USSR

On June 22, 1941, Germany invaded the Soviet Union, starting the largest ground war in history

From this point onward, 60 to 75 percent of the German armed forces would be fighting on the eastern front

German forces surrounded Leningrad, the USSR’s second largest city, placing it under the worst siege in modern times

They drove deep into Ukraine and southern Russia

They also reached the outskirts of Moscow, the capital

A last-ditch defensive effort in December halted the German advance, but only barely

In the Pacific, fighting between China and Japan continued

When France fell in 1940, Japan threaten its colony in Indochina

Japan’s eventual goal was to establish its Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere over the entire Chinese coast, all of Southeast Asia, India, Indonesia, and perhaps Australia and New Zealand

The United States responded to Japanese aggression by imposing economic sanctions

Without steel, oil, and other resources from the U.S., the Japanese war effort would be damaged

The Japanese viewed this embargo as an act of war

On December 7, 1941, just as the Soviets were halting the Germans outside Moscow, Japan launched its surprise attack on the U.S. naval installation at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii

The effect of this attack was to bring the United States into the war

But the attack on Pearl Harbor, though devastating, was not a knockout blow

It managed to bring a powerful nation into the war

The second half of the war, 1942 through 1945, had a much different character than the first

A handful of battles during the summer and fall of 1942 completely changed the tide of the war

A the Battle of Midway (June 1942), the Battle of El Alamein (fall 1942) and the Battle of Stalingrad (August 1942-February 1943), the Allies experienced victories that changed the outcome of the war

In June 1944, in the famous D-Day invasion, British, Canadian, and American troops crossed the English Channel and landed on the coast of France

In 1945, the Axis surrendered Despite the fact that it had no hope of

winning, Japan continued its struggle against the Allies

America’s new president, Harry Truman, greatly feared that an invasion of the Japanese islands would cost millions of American and Japanese lives

On August 6, 1945, a B-29 bomber named Enola Gay dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima

The initial blast killed at least 78,000 people

Tens of thousands more died later from radioactive fallout

When the Japanese government ignored Truman’s next request for surrender, the Americans dropped a second bomb on August 9, on the port of Nagasaki

The following week, the Japanese agreed to a cease-fire

They surrendered officially on September 2

The most grisly aspect of World War II involved the many war crimes committed during the 73 months of fighting

Of the 55 million to 60 million people who died during the war, approximately half were civilians

Indeed it was after World War II that the phrase “crimes against humanity” entered the world’s legal vocabularies

But even more extensive than the Japanese crimes against humanity were those committed by the Germans

Even before the war, the Nazis operated an extensive apparatus of terror, which included the formation of a secret police (the Gestapo) and the establishment of concentration camps (such as Dachau)

Dissidents had been imprisoned, even executed, since the early 1930s

But most infamous was the Nazi campaigns of genocide

The Nazis targeted a number of ethnic and cultural groups

Roman (Gypsies) and Slavs were among the peoples the Nazis considered to be “subhuman” or “undesirable”

Most of all, the Nazis hated the Jews After Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, the

Nazis passed a number of anti-Semitic policies that grew worse over time

The worst were the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, which deprived all German Jews of their civil rights

And even before the war, violence against Jews occurred

The worst of these moments came in November 1938, on Kristallnacht (“Night of Broken Glass”), when Jewish shops, synagogues, and homes throughout Germany and Austria were attacked or burned in a single night

But it was during the war that Nazi anti-Semitic policy escalated to the point of genocide

There were 11 million Jews in Europe before the beginning of the war

In 1939 and 1940, as the Germans brought more and more of Europe under their control, Nazi authorities began to round Jews up and detain them, either in ghettos or preexisting concentration camps like Dachau

It was sometime in 1941 that the order for genocide came down from above

Although no written orders survive, it is certain, that ultimately, the command itself was issued by Hitler himself

In the end, the Final Solution resulted in 12 million deaths

Of Europe’s 11 million Jews, approximately 6 million were killed

In addition, 6 million non-Jewish victims perished

It was mainly to punish these crimes that the Americans, British, and Soviets staged an important set of court cases, the Nuremberg Trials (1946), to try remaining Nazi military and political leadership

It was during the Nuremberg Trials that term “crimes against humanity” was coined

In 1948, in a collective effort to avoid such atrocities in the future, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

The end of the Second World War brought fundamental shifts in thinking, politics, and power