Chapter 25
In This Chapter
• Hitler and the roots of World War II
• The policy of appeasement
• Blitzkrieg
• Japan in the Pacific
• The Allies turn the tide
• The bitter end of World War II
During the early 1930s, the rise of the Nazi Germany led by Adolf Hitler began the final act of European dominance. As the European powers practicedappeasement with Germany, Hitler and his Axis allies of Italy and Japan prepared for war in Europe and the Pacific. World War II started in Europe with the invasion of Poland in 1939 and in the Pacific with the attack on Pearl Harbor) in 1941.
The Axis powers experienced initial success against the Allies, but in 1942 the tide started to turn against the Axis powers. The Big Three Allied nations, Great Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union, mobilized their superior resources for the war effort.
In the end the Allies defeated the Axis powers, leaving Europe in a broken state. It was then, in 1945, that the United States and the Soviet Union replaced Europe in dominating the world stage. As a result, tensions arose between the two rival nations called the Cold War.
Hitler and World War II
World War II was directly brought about by the influence of one man: Adolf Hitler. His views on the superiority of the Aryan race and his goal of creating a great German civilization made the acquisition of territory one of his policy priorities. But Hitler knew that this acquisition of territory had to come in baby steps.
Hitler’s first step was the rebuilding of the German military, disregarding the militaryrestrictions the Treaty of Versailles placed on Germany at the end of World War I. Hitler announced that Germany was creating an air force on March 9, 1935. Seven days later, he instituted a military draft to enlarge the army. In addition, he sent German troops into the demilitarized zone of the Rhineland.
With these violations of the Versailles treaty and Germany’s military incursion, France had the right to use military force to expel German troops, but they did not. Great Britain did not support France in the use of military force, preferring to follow a policy of appeasement with Hitler. No one wanted another war except Hitler.
definition
The policy of appeasement involved giving in to the reasonabledemands of unsatisfied nations of Europe (meaning Germany) in hopes of gaining mutual trust and respect.
Hitler’s next step was to form new alliances. In 1936, Germany and Fascist Italy reached an agreementbased on common political and economic interests creating the Rome-Berlin Axis. Germany struck another alliance with Japan called the Anti-CominternPact, based on their mutual distrust of communism. These agreements created the alliance of nations called the Axis powers.
The next step for Hitler was to acquire the lebensraum, or “living space,” his new German Empire would require. In 1937, he united Germany with his native land of Austria, rattling his saber and threatening to invade Austria if the Austrian chancellor did not give political power to the Austrian Nazi party. Once the Austrian Nazi party was in power, they invited the German troops to occupy Austria. On March 13, 1938, Germany had officially annexed Austria as part of the Third Reich.
Of course, the annexation of Austria was only a first step. On September 15, 1938, Germany demanded that Czechoslovakia surrender the territory of the Sudetenland in northwest Czechoslovakia, which was inhabited by mostly Germans. A quick conferencewas convened in Munich with Britain, Germany, France, and Italy attending. At the end of the conference, Czechoslovakia was carved up to suit Hitler’s demands while Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister, declared that Europe had satisfied Hitler and secured “peace in our time.” Hitler sensed the fear behind the appeasement policy of the British and French and made another bold move. In March 1939, German forces invaded and took control of Bohemia and Moravia in western Czechoslovakia. The British appeasement policy was no brake on Hitler’s ambitions.
Hitler was not done; he demanded that the Polish port of Danzig be turned over to Germany. In reality, Hitler was concocting a reason to invade Poland. At that point, the British made a stand and pledged to protect Poland in the event of an invasion. Then France and Great Britain started to negotiate with the Soviet Union to create some type of alliance against Germany.
Little did the British and French know that the Soviets had their own negotiations going on with Germany. On August 24, 1939, Germany and the Soviet Union signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, a Nazi-Soviet nonaggression treaty in which they promised not to attack one another. During the secret negotiations, Hitler offered Stalin control of eastern Poland and the Baltic states if he would stand by during a German invasion of Poland. When Hitler announced the nonaggression pact in late August, the world was shocked and dismayed. The treaty had given Hitler the freedomto attack Poland. On September 1, 1939, German forces invaded Poland on the pretense of a Polish attack. In response, on September 3, Great Britain and France declared war on Germany. World War II had started.
Japan Turns Very Imperialist
Germany was not the only country inciting conflict with the rest of the world. Japan wanted to create a New Order in East Asia, which included Japan, Manchuria, and China.
In September 1931, Japan seized the remainder of Manchuria with the pretense of a Chinese attack on the Japanese railway on Mukden. The League of Nations condemned this action, but did little to stop it. In response, Japan withdrew from the League and then continued to acquired bits and pieces of territory in northern China. Chiang Kai-shek was desperate to avoid a conflict with Japan, but eventually was forced to ally with communist forces to form a united front against Japan. This united front did not work together well, but, in July 1937, they clashed with Japanese forces south of Beijing. The Japanese seized the Chinese capital of Nanjing.
With the Anti-Comintern Pact, Japan had envisioned conquering Soviet Siberia with the Nazis and dividing the spoils, but the Nazi-Soviet nonaggression pact forced Japan to look to Southeast Asia, which had traditionally been controlled by the imperialist policies of Britain, France, and the United States.
Japan started by invading and conquering French Indochina. The United States placed economic sanctions on Japan, which threatened Japan’s ambitions because they needed U.S. oil and scrap iron to fuel their armies. So the Japanese began to develop a plan to shock the United States and Europe into a quick submission.
Hitler Gets Some Quick Licks In
In Europe, Hitler’s war for “living space” was going very well. Using a military strategy called the “blitzkrieg,” or lightning war, German tank divisions with the aid of air support were able to defeat the Polish armies in a matter of four weeks. On September 28, 1939, Germany and the Soviet Union, as spelled out in their treaty, divided the territory of Poland. Spurred on by his success, Hitler ordered the invasionof Denmark and Norway on April 9, 1940, and then on May 10, 1940, the Netherlands, Belgium, and France fell to the German blitzkrieg. Once conquered, the Nazis took direct control of those nations’ governments and resources, except in France, where they set up the Vichy government led by Marshall Henri Petain.
Shocked by Hitler’s quick victories, Great Britain appealed to the United States for help. The United States had practiced a policy of isolationism for most of its existence and especially during the 1930s with a series of neutrality acts. But the old Anglo-Americaninformal alliance was strong and the United States supplied food, ships, planes, and weapons to the British cause.
The Battle of Britain
Britain was for a time alone in its struggle with Nazi Germany. In August 1940, the German Luftwaffe, or air force, launched a major offensive on the British Isles to soften up the island for a German invasion force. At first, they bombed only air and naval bases, but after a British air raid on Berlin, Hitler ordered the bombing of major British cities.
This was Britain’s “finest hour,” as the British population took the brunt of the German attacks, but, because the focus of the air raids were the cities, the British were able to rebuild their military. By the end of September 1940, with the British military rebounding, Hitler ordered the indefinite postponement of the invasion of Britain.
Notable Quotable
"We shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. … We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.”
—Winston Churchill, 1940
Doesn’t Anyone Read History?
Thinking that the British were only able to hang on because of the support of the Soviet Union, in addition to his hatred of communism, and the need for “living space,” Hitler turned his sights east and planned an invasion of the Soviet Union. Before striking, he sent German forces into Greece and Yugoslavia in April 1941; his Italian allies were not having much success with their invasions of those nations.
What in the World
One city was off limits to the German Luftwaffe in the bombing of Great Britain: the university city of Oxford. Hitler had such respect for the tradition and learning at the various collegesof Oxford University that he did not want to see it destroyed.
Finally the stage was set for Hitler’s biggestmistake. On June 22, 1941, German armies invaded Soviet territory. At first, the Germans advanced rapidly, capturing 2 million Russian soldiers and taking a large amount of territory. By the winter of 1941, the German armies had stopped, but not because of Soviet armies. The heavily mechanized German army was not prepared for the brutal Russian winter. Hitler had made a fatal military mistake, very similar to Napoleon’s when he invaded Russia. (Doesn’t anyone pay attention in history class?)
Japan Gets In Some Quick Licks, Too
Like Germany, Japan also experienced quick success in the Pacific. On December 7, 1941, a “day that will live in infamy,” Japanese aircraft attacked a totally surprised U.S. naval base and fleet at Pearl Harbor). The United States declared war, but the Japanese, having caught the United States flatfooted, were able to take the U.S.-controlledPhilippines, Dutch East Indies, British Malaya and most of Southeast Asia and the Pacific Ocean. These territories under Japanese control were now called the “Great East-Asia Co-prosperity Sphere.” The Japanese came into these territories as liberators but treated the countries like conquered lands.
The Japanese hope with the attack of Pearl Harbor was to destroy the U.S. Pacific fleet and shock the United States into quick compliance with the shift of power in the Pacific. This was a miscalculation. American opinion quickly unified against Japanese aggression and the United States joined Great Britain and Nationalist China in an effort to defeat Japan in the Pacific. Four days later, in response to the U.S. declaration of war on Japan, Hitler declared war on the United States. Truly it had become a global war.
1942 and Things Don’t Look Too Good
At the beginning of 1942, the Allied nations that remained were the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union (strange bedfellows indeed). But rather than focus on political differences, they agreed to stress military operations to end the Axis threat. In 1943, they also agreed that the only surrender they would accept was an unconditional one. They meant business.
The Tide Turns
In the European theater in 1942 things did not appear to be going well for the Allies. In North Africa, German forces led by the “Desert Fox,” General Erwin Rommel, broke through British defenses in Egypt and were moving toward Alexandria. Also a new German offensive captured the Soviet Crimea. But British forces stopped Rommel’s forces at the Battle of El Alamein. Then in November 1942, U.S. and British troops invaded Vichy French North Africa, forcing German and Italian troops to surrender in Africa and Rommel to return to Germany. Finally when superior German forces attacked the key city of Stalingrad, they were surrounded by a Russian counteroffensive. As a result the entire German 6th Army, Hitler’s best of the best, surrendered. The tide had turned in Europe.
In the Pacific theater, 1942 was also a key turning point. In the Battle of the Coral Sea on May 7 and 8, U.S. naval forces stopped a Japanese invasion fleet headed for Australia. Then on June 4, at the Battle of Midway Island, the U.S. naval fleet encounteredand destroyed four Japanese aircraft carriers, establishing naval superiority in the Pacific. With naval superiority, General Douglas MacArthur and U.S. forces moved in on South China and Burma, while a combination of U.S. naval and ground forces advanced from island to island toward Japan, a strategy sometimes referred to as island hopping. The tide had turned in the Pacific.
What in the World
The U.S. Marine Corps recruited members of the Navajo Native American tribe to create a military code that would be impossible for the Japanese to break. Using their language as a base, the Navajo Code Talkers, as they were called, made and successfully used the only unbreakable secret code in military history.
The Final Years of World War II
At the beginning of 1943, the Axis powers were on their heels and fighting a defensivewar. In September 1943, the Allies invaded Italy, seeing it as the weak link in Axis-controlled Europe. Hitler, knowing this was true, had sent German forces to occupy Italy and support Mussolini since the fall of the island of Sicily to the Allies. The Italian capital of Rome fell to the Allies on June 4, 1944. Two days later, on D-Day, the Allied forces landed on the beaches of Normandy, France, fighting the German occupying forces for a foothold in Western Europe. Paris was liberated by the Allies by August 1944. The end of Nazi Germany seemed close at hand.
During the winter of 1944, the Germans made one last offensive to try and push the Allies off the continent. They chose the Ardennes Forest as the site of the major offensive. The resulting Battle of the Bulge, however, went in the Allies favor. Nazi Germany had no hope of winning the war, but Hitler pushed his people to continue.Continuing air raids by the Allies crippled the German infrastructure. This was apparent in March 1945 when the Allies crossed the Rhine River and advanced into Germany. By April, they had crossed the Elbe River and were closing in on the German capital of Berlin.
The war was not going well for Germany on the Eastern front, either. After the Soviets won at the Battle of Stalingrad, they advanced toward Germany at a rapid pace. At the Battle of Kursk in July 1943, the Soviets destroyed the notion of German superiority in mechanized warfare in the largest tank battle of World War II. By the end of 1943, the Soviets reoccupied the Ukraine and moved in the Baltic States in 1944. In January 1945, Soviet armies entered Warsaw while also sweeping through Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria. So by April 1945, Soviet troops were closing in on Berlin, too.
Victory Around the World
At the end of the war, Hitler remained in a protective bunker in Berlin. As time passed, he became more delusional about the predicament that the nation of Germany was in. Finally, with most of Germany in shambles around him on April 30, 1945, Hitler committed suicide with his long-time mistress. Two days earlier, his Italian ally, Mussolini, was killed by Italian resistance fighters. Without Hitler to bark orders and threaten lives, the German will to continue the war faltered. On May 7, 1945, Germany surrendered to the Allies, referred to as Victory-Europe Day (V-E Day).
Japan also suffered many setbacks from the island-hopping campaign. But the invasionof Japan itself was something that scared U.S. military planners and President Harry Truman. So on August 6, 1945, the U.S. Air Force dropped the first-ever atomic bomb, named “Little Boy,” on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, killing more than 100,000 civilians. When Japan did not respond with an unconditional surrender, the U.S responded by dropping another atomic bomb, “Fat Man,” on the Japanese city of Nagasaki, killing more than 75,000 civilians on August 9, 1945. Japan surrenderedunconditionally on August 14, 1945.
Unthinkable Acts
When the war came to a close, the Nazi atrocities surfaced to the world. First, in an effort to making “living space” for the Germans, Slavic people were forcibly moved from their traditional homes. Under the direction of the leader of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, 1 million Poles were moved from northern to southern Poland. Additionally, more than 7 million foreign workers were placed in labor camps and forced to work in German agriculture and industry.
But of course the single largest Nazi atrocity was the Holocaust. Hitler had detailed his anti-Semitic views in his volume Mein Kampf, and once he became leader of Germany, he put them to practice. Using the SS to execute his “Final Solution,” Hitler waged a war of genocide on the Jewish population. At first in Poland, strike forces of mobile killing units executed Jews in villages and buried them in mass graves. By 1942, all Jews in the nations that Germany conquered were being shipped to extermination centers built in Poland.
At the end of the war, the SS had killed more than 5 million Jews in camps while also murdering more than 10 million Jews, gypsies, Catholics, and Africans with SS death squads. These staggering numbers became even larger with the addition of more than 8 million Slavic and Soviet prisoners who died in German labor camps.
Notable Quotable
"I picked my way over corpse after corpse in the gloom until I heard one voice that rose above the gentle, undulating moaning. I found a girl, she was a living skeleton,impossible to gauge her age for she had practically no hair left on her head and her face was a yellow parchment sheet with two holes in it for eyes.”
—BBC war correspondent Richard Dimbleby at Belsen concentration camp, 1945
The Japanese also committed atrocities in the name of war. With the program Asia for Asiatics, they forced the conquered people to serve in local military units and public works projects. Couple the forced labor with food shortages (food was shipped to Japan for the war effort), more than 1 million civilians died in Vietnam alone. One particular brutal example of Japanese atrocities was after their conquest of Nanzing, China, in 1937, in which Japanese soldiers spent several days killing and raping the population of the city. Other numbers have not been accounted for in the other nations as of yet. Additionally, more than 1 million Allied POWs and local workers died on forced labor projects for the Japanese government.
What in the World
Not only Germany, Japan, and the Soviet Union violated human rights during the before and during World War II. The United States also had its own episode. During the war, for "security reasons,” over 100,000 Japanese-Americans were removed from their businesses and homes to internment camps surrounded by fences and barbed wire. They were allowed to return to their homes after the war, but many lost their livelihoodsas a result.
The Big Three and Lots of Meetings
During the final years of World War II, the Big Three (Great Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union) met at three conferences to talk war and post-war strategy. At the Tehran Conference in November 1943, the Big Three seemed to get along quite well, agreeing that the Soviets would liberate Eastern Europe while the United States and Britain would free Western Europe.
The Yalta Conference
At the Yalta Conference in April 1945, the relationship between the three started to go south (or, in this case, east). With Germany’s defeat imminent, Stalin, who was very suspicious of the United States and Britain, wanted to create a buffer zone between the Soviet Union and Western Europe. That zone was Eastern Europe. President Franklin Roosevelt wanted self-determination for these nations. He also wanted the Soviet Union to pitch in against the Japanese. In return for helping with Japan, Stalin wanted the Sakhalin and Kuril Islands (Japanese territories), two warm-water ports, and railroads in Manchuria. Roosevelt agreed, hoping that this agreement would lead to self-determination in Eastern Europe. He also hoped that Stalin would agree to his idea of the United Nations. In the end, both Stalin and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill agreed to the United Nations, but self-determinationin Eastern Europe was still up in the air.
The Potsdam Conference
Four months later at the Potsdam Conference in July 1945, the differences in the Big Three became very evident. President Truman (Roosevelt died on April 12) and Churchill demanded free democratic elections in the nations of Eastern Europe; Stalin refused and, since Soviet troops occupied those regions, he could back it up. Soon a cloud of mistrust came between the United States and the West and the Soviet Union. It became a war of words and ideologies with global capitalist imperialismversus worldwide communist expansion. It crystallized further in March 1946 when Churchill gave his “iron curtain” speech. Stalin saw the speech as a call to war. The whole world was bitterly divided into two camps.
The Impact of World War II
The impact of World War II was immeasurable. It affected the twentieth century like no other event. More than 17 million men had died in combat, while 20 millioncivilians died. Europe was completely shattered, with very little of the continent unscathed. No longer were the European nations in control of the world with imperialpolicies. The United States and the Soviet Union were in command and soon were locked in a Cold War of ideologies that dominated the world consciousness until the end of the twentieth century.
The Least You Need to Know
• Hitler’s beliefs in Aryan superiority led to World II and the Holocaust.
• The Axis powers experienced initial success against the Allies, but in 1942 the tide turned against them.
• Toward the end of the war, the Big Three—Great Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union—squabbled over the fate of Eastern Europe.
• Tensions rose at the end of World War II, which produced a new period in world history called the Cold War.