The Second World War

The Second World War was not a single armed conflict. Rather, it was a collection of three different conflicts -- the Japanese-League war in Southeast Asia and China, the German war in eastern Europe, and the German-League war in western and central Europe -- that happened to coincide in time and causes. The Japanese war against the League of Nations in 1942-44 stemmed from Japanese dissatisfaction with the restrictions allegedly placed upon Japan by League policies, and for that reason was the least bloody of the wars. The German wars conducted in eastern Europe against Poland and Russia, and against the League of Nations elsewhere in Europe, though, were notoriously bloody. Despite the different causes, theatres, and strategies of the different conflicts, though, their simultaneity and their direct challenge to the norms of the global community leads historians and other observers to classify them as a single worldwide war.

In 1940, Poland was vulnerable and weak, as Ukraine's successful war of independence and the Galician population exchanges had placed severe strains upon the Polish state. Given time, Poland might have been able to stabilize and develop a legitimate democratic government that would have been able to push the country towards modernization. However, Poland was vulnerable to attack from west or east -- the western frontier, in Upper Silesia, Poznán, and Mazuria, might have been disputed by Greater Germany, and central Poland's access to the eastern Belarusian provinces might have been rather more difficult than Soviet access -- but that vulnerability didn't necessarily make invasion inevitable. If the Polish government had rejoined the League of Nations Poland might have been protected from invasion by League security guarantees. Throughout the first half of 1940, though, representatives of Greater Germany and the Soviet Union had been negotiating in Moscow on the question of spheres of influence in eastern Europe. For Greater Germany, the acquisition of the Polish provinces was necessary for Greater Germany's future prosperity -- the inferior Polish Slavs couldn't make use of the resources of their homeland, while a German colonial regime could. For its part, the Stalinist Soviet Union was uncomfortable with its western frontier -- the existence of an independent non-Communist Ukrainian republic was seen by Stalin as an affront to Soviet national dignity, while the Belarusian provinces of Poland were viewed as a useful buffer zone. Neither Greater Germany nor the Soviet Union fully trusted one another, but then the two governments were concerned more with the establishment of secure frontiers separating their expanded territories than with anything else.

On the 6th of July, 1940, the German government claimed that the Polish army had massacred a dozen ethnic Germans in Danzig. As the other European Great Powers and the League of Nations looked on, worried, in the following week Germany claimed that the Polish government had committed further outrages against its ethnic German population. Finally, on the 14th of July, Greater Germany declared war on Poland. The German invasion was devastatingly effective -- although Poland had developed a modern air force in the 1920's and 1930's, and the Polish army had extensive battle experience in Ukraine, the Polish military was outclassed. To seal Poland's fate, the Soviet Union invaded the Belarusian provinces of Poland on the 21st of July, and Ukraine the next day. Armed resistance continued in Ukraine and the Belarusian provinces against the clumsily-applied might of the Red Army until November, but in Poland the terrifyingly well-integrated air and land attacks of the German invaders led to the collapse of the country's military, and the Polish army in the west fell within three weeks of the German invasion. Refugees fleeing Poland for Czechoslovakia in the weeks and months following the German conquest of Poland told stories of the gratuitous German massacre of prisoners of war and of civilian populations. Diplomatic protests from Germany's neighbours -- the Soviet Union excluded -- and the League of Nations met on deaf ears in Berlin. Galvanized, the League of Nations' member states in western and central Europe quietly began to rearm for a defensive war, even as the Southern Hemispheric member states of the League renewed their membership in League collective-security treaties.

Greater Germany's declaration of war upon the Soviet Union in May of 1941 didn't surprise the rest of Europe as much as it signalled Greater Germany's desire for expansion eastward, to fulfill Nazi ideology's plans for a vast eastern European colonial empire under German control. Even as the Greater German army swept east into the Soviet Union, using the Greater German army's logistical superiority over the larger numbers of Soviet troops, the League of Nations refrained from war. Apart from the fears of the smaller states of central Europe -- Czechoslovakia in particular, but also Hungary, Yugoslavia, and Romania -- that they could be overrun before the League could defend their territories from invasion, the League of Nations and its members had identified Soviet Communism as equivalent to Greater German Nazism and saw no reason to defend either. By the end of the summer of 1941, the German armies broke through the hastily-assembled Soviet defenses in Ukraine and outside Voronezh and had taken almost all of European Russia west of the Volga -- including the city of Moscow in October of 1941.

In October of 1941, Stalin had died in Moscow before its occupation by Greater Germany, either of a stroke or of assassination. Lavrenti Beria, chief of the KGB, took over the reins of Soviet government. Beria and Stalin's appointed commander at the front, General Georgy Zhukov, had held back their reserves, some hardened veterans from Siberia, all dressed for winter. On the 19th of November they counterattacked outside Kazan', and within a few days, the German spearheads were rolling back and abandoning large numbers of vehicles and weapons, rendered useless by the cold. Soviet industrial plant, shipped out of the Nazi-occupied areas of Russia ahead of the invasion, were reestablished in the Urals and in central Siberia, creating a vast industrial complex far beyond the reach of any plausible Nazi invasion eastward. This secure industrial base, and the determination of Soviet regulars and commanders alike not to lose their country to the barbarities of Greater Germany, helped the Soviet push back the German front line throughout the harsh winter of 1941-1942, as the counteroffensive was turned into an offensive against the unprepared Germans. German technological superiority and the massive use of chemical weapons in the battlefield ensured, though, that any Soviet reconquest of Russia and Ukraine would come at an exceedingly heavy cost.

The survival of the Soviet Union after 1941 discomfited many German generals, as did the harsh occupational policies. German military officers had expected, for instance, that Ukrainians would welcome Greater Germany as a liberator from Soviet occupation, and indeed the first elements of the German army to arrive in Kyiv and Odesa were welcomed. Soon, though, the dictates of Nazi ideologists that all Slavs were fit only for slavery led to massacres of ordinary Ukrainians and the formation of a violent anti-German partisan movement. The professed discomfort of many old-line German officers with Nazi policies of mass murder -- and of the Einsatzgrüppen's mass extermination of Polish and Soviet Jews -- contributed to a coup attempt against Hitler.

On the 9th of June, 1942, an attempt was made to kill Hitler with a bomb. Although Hitler was crippled by the bomb blast, he -- and more importantly, his attachés Himmler and Goering, not to mention the entire feared SS organization -- survived. The attempt of army units in Berlin loyal to the plotters were vigorously countered by the SS units in Berlin, which proceeded to capture and execute all the soldiers working under orders from the plotters at their hands. As Hitler lay in his hospital bed, he and an enraged Himmler ordered the capture, interrogation, and execution of all of the plotters, suspected and proven alike. By the end of the summer of 1942, the Greater German officer corps had been gutted just as the Soviet officer corps under Stalin, and hints of the further radicalization of Nazism in action in Germany appeared.

Despite Greater Germany's problems on the home front, though, the USSR, the initiative had passed to the Germans again by summer 1942. The Soviet successes in the winter had been followed by disasters in the spring, with setbacks throughout the central Russian front costing more than a half-million men in prisoners alone. Worse, the hitherto-neutral Baltic States were drafted into the war, forced to provide routes for the Greater German army to outflank the Soviet defense of Leningrad under threat of invasion and enslavement. Thus, even as the devastated husk of Moscow was liberated in April of 1942, Leningrad was besieged. The Soviet Union was saved by the fact that Hitler's overconfidence that the Soviet Union would be destroyed in 1941 caused him to order war industries to begin to produce for the air force and navy, with which he proposed to finish off the League of Nations members on the European continent. By the time that Hitler's error had become apparent, Soviet weapons output increased steadily since the beginning of 1942. Slowly but surely, and without much ado, the front line was being pushed west.

As Ukrainian partisans continued to threaten German supply lines despite harsh reprisals against Ukrainian civilians, Greater Germany began to convert the eastern European areas under its control into colonies. Ukraine was annexed in June of 1942, as was Lithuania in January of 1943. Together with Poland, these areas were to provide agricultural goods for German consumers, slave labourers for German factories, and lebensraum -- living space -- for German colonists. Plans were eventually made for the conversion of the Slavs and Lithuanians of this "Eastern Reich" into an illiterate helot population entirely under German control. The lives of the five million Jews living in Poland, Ukraine, and Lithuania were, of course, forfeit -- as Hitler argued in his Table Talk papers, allowing German and eastern European Jews to live at all would be as irresponsible "as to allow mosquitos and flies from malarial swamps to breed in good Aryan homes." By the end of 1942, the Einsatzgrüppen had already executed more than a million Jews . In the months and years to come, plans were made to establish a vast complex of death camps, to ship Jews from all over German-occupied areas of Europe to work camps safely isolated in Poland, where Jews capable of work would be worked to death, and the remainder would simply be executed in gas chambers.

It was at this interval that the decision was made to launch the invasions of western and southern Europe. Although the German-Soviet war made any diversion of Greater German forces suicidal, Hitler and the Greater German army's high command believed that Germany had no choice but to try to destroy the forces massing along its western and southern frontiers before it was too late. Already, France and the Italian Empire had begun to equip their understaffed armies with the latest technologies in armaments, as was the United Kingdom and the smaller states of Europe. Even more alarmingly, the South American states were beginning to mobilize for war. It was hoped that a quick and decisive invasion of Greater Germany's immediate neighbours could prevent the League of Nations' armies from fully mobilizing and allow it to transfer its western garrisons to stem the Soviet breakthroughs on the Eastern Front. The decision was made to launch the invasions in early February. The Western Army Group was charged to advance through eastern Belgium into France and to occupy Paris, while the Southeastern Army Group was ordered to descend from Austria and Saxony onto Czechoslovakia and Hungary, which were then to be fortified against a possible Soviet invasion. Plans were also made to mount secondary invasions -- from Tyrol into the northern Italian plains, from Schleswig-Holstein into Denmark, and from Swabia into northern Switzerland.

The invasions were launched simultaneously on the 5th of February, 1943, in the midst of negotiations between Germany and the League of Nations. The outgunned Czechoslovak army surrendered Prague by the end of the month, while German forces came dangerously close to Venice and Budapest. On the western European front, the Western Army Group likewise managed to occupy most of the Low Countries by the middle of May, along with French Lorraine and Denmark. Despite the terrifying initial setbacks for the League of Nations, they quickly rallied. The Greater German offensive was poorly planned -- the dictates of the Eastern Front kept the German army from transferring its experienced troops to the western invasions, while the post-assassination purges of the German officer corps left it incapable of the disciplined attacks that marked the German invasions of eastern Europe. Too, the brutal reign of terror embarked by the SS and units of the regular army against the civilian populations of the occupied areas -- particularly against Jews, quickly rounded up and deported to the extermination camps -- created a violently anti-German attitude in national populations that had been reluctant to go to war. For instance, the German occupation and looting of the Swiss city of Basel led Switzerland to break its policy of neutrality and join forces with the League of Nations.

By the end of July, League of Nations forces had pushed the Greater German forces back into German proper -- indeed, a combined Franco-Argentine-Chilean force had managed to occupy Aachen, while Brazilian transports arrived at Genoa with soldiers and tanks to reinforce the Italian front line. Even in Hungary, the overextended German forces had to retreat almost to the Austrian border. The League counteroffensives began in the month of August. From the west, soldiers from western Europe, French Africa, Argentina, and Chile, were placed under the command of General de Gaulle and began a crushing offensive into the Rhineland, while from the south, the Brazilian Expeditionary Force spearheaded an Italo-Yugoslav push across the Alps into Austria. At the end of the year, the League forces had occupied most of Germany west of the Rhine and southern Austria, while Greater Germany was in occupation only of western Czechoslovakia and the Hungarian province of Burgenland.

League and Soviet units first made contact in eastern Czechoslovakia's Ruthenian province, and preliminary negotiations were conducted to discuss a joint strategy against Greater Germany. By this time, though, Soviet anger with the League's neutrality in the German-Soviet war made any kind of cooperation all but impossible. Worse, by this time Soviet policy in the Baltic States had made it clear that any territory occupied by the Soviet Union would be transformed into a Soviet satellite. League and Soviet forces, then, found themselves engaged in a contest to see which armies would reach Berlin -- capital of the Greater German Reich, home of Nazi ideology -- first.

League forces crossed the Rhine in January, while Munich and Vienna fell to the Italo-Brazilians in February. This, and the Soviet Union's capture of Warsaw after bloody street fighting on New Year's Day, made it clear that Greater Germany was about to lose its two-front war. Rather than surrender, though, Greater Germany fought on vigorously. By the beginning of the year, with the blessing of Hitler and Himmler the SS took over the administration of German-controlled territories and went on to adopt even more radical policies. As League and Soviet forces continued their advances -- Denmark was liberated by early February, as was western Czechoslovakia by the 1st of April -- they discovered horrific barbarities. For instance, public worship of the Norse gods -- including public rituals requiring the human sacrifice of Jews or captured soldiers -- had been made mandatory by the Greater German government. Chemical weapons such as phosgene and mustard gas were regularly used in Poland against Soviet troops. In March of 1944, when the extermination camps around Poznán in the east and Hannover in the west had been seized, it was found that almost all of the five million Jews of central Europe had been systematically slaughtered in what was later known as the Holocaust.

Even as the area under the control of Greater Germany contracted to greater Berlin, armed resistance by radical Nazis continued. By the 15th of April, Berlin had been entirely surrounded by League of Nations troops, which proceeded to begin the Battle of Berlin on the 23rd with the help of very heavy Franco-British bombardment of the city. A quarter-million League casualties and one week later, Berlin had fallen. Hitler and Himmler were captured in their bunker by French African commandos on the last day of the battle. After almost four years of horrid warfare, the Second World War had come to an end in Europe.

In marked contrast to the European wars, the Pacific War was conducted in humane fashion by the Empire of Japan. The collapse of Japan's puppet government in China, and the oil embargo imposed by the League of Nations made Japan desperate to try to secure its dominance in Asia. In early 1941, the Japanese army and navy devised a war plan in which they proposed to sweep into Burma, Malaya, the Netherlands East Indies, and the Philippines, in order to establish a defensive perimeter separating Japan from Europe and European colonies. Japanese military planners were confident that faced with the loss of their Southeast Asian colonies, the European powers would push the League of Nations to lift the oil embargo against Japan, leaving Japan to continue its war in China unhindered. Many parliamentarians feared that Japan simply could not afford to war with the entire League of Nations, and advocated compromise, but the Nationalist and Conservative parties both supported war.

On the 5th of February of 1942, after negotiations with France failed, Japan launched surprise air raids upon the French Indochinese ports of Haiphong and Saigon, the Spanish colonial capital of Manila in the Philippines, and French Macau with British Hong Kong. The rebellion launched by Filipino nationalists against their Spanish rulers in mid-February allowed the Japanese to handily isolate the Spanish garrison in Manila by the end of March. The British colony of Hong Kong and the French colony of Macau likewise fell, after a week-long battle, by the middle of March. Although French Indochina managed to hold out against the Japanese invaders, it was also too isolated to prevent the Japanese navy from occupying the South China Sea and raiding the north coast of Dutch Borneo in April. The British Indian Army, advancing through Burma and the Andaman Sea to reinforce French forces in Indochina and British forces in Malaya, managed to repel further Japanese advances against mainland Southeast Asia and the Dutch island of Sumatra, but insular Southeast Asia -- the Dutch East Indies, the Anglo-Australian East Indies, and the Australian protectorates of New Guinea and the Solomons -- remained vulnerable. By the beginning of 1943, a vast strategic perimeter including the South China Sea, Borneo and Java, the islands of the Anglo-Australian East Indies, and northern New Guinea had been established.

The preoccupation of the European colonial powers in Southeast Asia with European affairs had left them blind to the threat posed by the Japanese armed forces. Although the Japanese navy and air force had been run down in order to finance Japan's war in China and Japanese garrisons in the Far Eastern Republic, the Japanese navy was still the largest naval force in the western Pacific and had the advantage of operating from a homeland far closer to the Southeast Asian battlefields than even the Australian navy. The Japanese also had the advantage of appealing to the colonized Southeast Asian nations as an example of an Asian nation that had succeeded in modernizing, and was willing to help the colonized nations gain their independence. In the Philippines, for instance, traditionally Japanophile Filipino nationalists had enthusiastically collaborated with the Japanese against their colonial rulers, as did the Javanese against the Dutch rulers in the Japanese invasion of Java in September and October. Even neutral Thailand had been tempted by Japanese promises of territorial aggrandizement to its east and south, but had ultimately been dissuaded by the British Indian Army and by the fate of China.

The Japanese civilian government, and the Japanese Navy charged with administering the seized colonies, took great care in order to ensure the safety of European civilians and property. This sensitivity to human life was reflecting in Japanese policy in the Philippines and Java, which were declared independent states with the enthusiastic support of local nationalists. Although the army coordinated anti-Chinese pogroms in Java and Anglo-Australian Bali, these pogroms were enthusiastically supported by the local populations.

In the rest of 1943, Southeast Asia remained divided between Japanese-occupied areas and League-controlled areas. Fighting continued in Melanesia, as Japanese forces raiding south from Micronesia tried to take all of New Guinea. The most spectacular battle was the Battle of the Coral Sea, from the 17th to the 19th of June, around the Solomon Islands, where an Anglo-Australian aeronaval force destroyed the Japanese carrier fleet that had been poised to support an invasion of south New Guinea and northeast Australia. Aside from comparable raids on French Indochina, the League forces in the Pacific simply sought to contain Japanese advances in Southeast Asia and the Pacific.

Remarkably, Japan entered the Pacific War without considering a strategy to end the conflict, aside from the expectation that expelling League forces from the Pacific and threatening Australia would force Japan's enemies to accept Japanese predominance in China. To the horror of Japanese strategists and politicians, though, the League did not surrender. Rather, the League of Nations was simply waiting for the British Indian Army to fully mobilize and for the European war to end before throwing its forces -- supported by a far larger economic base -- against Japan. As early as February of 1944, the British and French navies began to concentrate their forces in the South Pacific, even as the Chilean navy continued its mobilization and the British Indian army massed in Sumatra and Annam. The invasion of West Java in March by the British Indian Army was fiercely resisted by the Japanese and by their Javanese collaborators, but by the middle of May the Indians had managed to destroy Japan's Javanese protectorate.

Even as Japanese land and sea forces were pinned down in Southeast Asia, Japan was faced with an increasingly bloody war in China. The collapse of the Chinese puppet government in April of 1944 had left the Japanese representatives on the ground desperately trying to prevent local warlords and Communists from uniting against Japan. Even in Korea, a protectorate since 1912, the newly-urbanized Korean proletariat began a massive rebellion. In the Home Islands, Japanese parliamentarians and the Japanese public were upset with the rising death toll -- more than one million Japanese had died trying to secure a Chinese empire -- and with Japan's international isolation. Even Emperor Hirohito, once a cautious supporter of the pro-war faction, chastised the Nationalist Party Prime Minister Hideki Tôjô about the latter's poor conduct of the Pacific War. In July, after the end of the British campaign in Indonesia, a second campaign began in New Guinea and the Anglo-Australian East Indies, waged jointly by British Indian and Australian forces. The relative unpopularity of Japanese by the natives of the Anglo-Australian East Indies led to the rapid collapse of the Japanese front in the islands.

The Japanese parliamentary elections of August of 1944 had decimated the Nationalist Party and caused the election of a new Liberal-Socialist coalition government. By October of 1944, this coalition government had approached the League of Nations with peace offers. Had the Soviet Union not invaded the Far Eastern Republic and Manchuria, transferring its battle-hardened armies from occupation duties in Poland over the Trans-Siberian Railway to assault the Japanese garrisons in mainland Asia, peace might have come at a much later date. After the fall of Mukden and Khabarovsk in late November, and the destruction of the last viable Japanese defense lines in mainland Asia, Japan sued for peace. The fortuitous return of the Ri dynasty from its Swiss exile and the reestablishment of an independent non-Communist Korea aside, under the terms of the November 1944 Treaty of San Francisco with the League of Nations, and the April 1945 Treaty of Helsinki with the Soviet Union, Japan was forced to cede its entire empire in mainland Asia either to the Soviet Union or to the Chinese Communists.

The ultimate toll of the Second World War, in all three of its component conflicts, was horrendous. By far the bloodiest of the theatres was in eastern Europe, where more than 15 million soldiers and 36 million civilians -- the vast majority Soviet and Polish died in four years of warfare and genocide. The Pacific War was also destructive, responsible for the death of almost 27 million people, but most of the dead were Chinese killed as a result of the fighting between the Japanese-imposed regime and nationalist rebels. The western and central European theatre, by contrast, was almost bloodless, with barely more than one million dead, military and civilian. The systematic destruction of infrastructure and industrial plants by Greater Germany as it retreated from its conquests left the Soviet and Polish economies reeling, and cities as far apart as Metz, Leyden, Daugavpils, and Kazan' were destroyed.

The effects of the Second World War upon the global balance of power were incalculable. Greater Germany was destroyed -- Austria, Bavaria, and Saxony regained their independence, while even devastated Brandenburg was transformed into an independent republic, and the German population living to the east of the Oder and Western Neisse was expelled by enraged Poles. Even Japan, which retained Taiwan and Micronesia, lost all of its empire in mainland Asia, most of it to the same Communists that it had fought against. For the League of Nations, the net result was to transform it into a far more cohesive organization, involving its Southern Hemispheric members as much as its European members. After so many dead and so much destruction in its heartland, the reeling Soviet Union found itself with a new buffer zone separating it from central Europe, including the Baltic States and Poland, and providing it with new reasons for discord with western Europe.

In destroying the old world order, the Second World War necessitated the formation of a new world order, one shaped by the victorious, defeated, and neutral powers alike. It is this world system that, passing by the quarante glorieuses and the unification of Europe and South America, eventually culminated in the Third World War.