WWII

6 Key excerpts on "WWII"

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  From Lexington to Baghdad and Beyond

  War and Politics in the American Experience

  • Donald M Snow, Dennis M. Drew(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  5

  WORLD WAR II

  The Great War had been the largest and bloodiest conflict to date in human history, but it was in many ways only a preview of what would follow. Approximately 20 years later World War II erupted and became the largest military event in history. It was a conflict that was total in all senses of that term and a world war in which virtually every corner of the globe served as a theater of action at one time or another. Although records are inadequate, the best guesses are that about 80 million people were in military service at a given time. Of those, between 15 and 20 million were killed and probably about the same number of noncombatants perished. There were around 10 million combatant casualties and almost that many additional civilian casualties in the Soviet Union alone. Even more than the First World War, World War II was a war between whole societies, a war of factories. The entire resources of the major combatants were dedicated to the war’s conduct, and whole populations were mobilized for one aspect or another of the effort.

  America’s role in World War II was unique in at least two ways. World War II was almost two distinct conflicts: one in Europe, where the Western Allies (including the Soviet Union) faced Germany and her European allies, and the other in the Pacific, where Imperial Japan was the major antagonist. The U.S. position was unique in that only the United States had major responsibilities in both theaters. In Europe the Allied effort was dominated by the triumvirate of the United States, the Soviet Union, and Great Britain, but American presence was of vital importance: the British depended heavily on the United States for the materiel and manpower necessary to open the Western Front, and the Soviets relied to some degree on American lend-lease. In the Pacific the war was essentially a conflict between the Americans and the Japanese. Certainly others were part of the Pacific campaign: the British on the peripheries (e.g., Burma) and Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang Chinese (who occupied a million-man Japanese army that could not be used elsewhere). The task of defeating the military might of the Japanese Empire, however, was clearly an American task. As we shall see later in the chapter, this unique position created some friction within the government and with our Allies over which enemy should receive the greatest attention and even some interservice rivalries about resource allocations (the war in Europe was basically an Army enterprise, whereas the Navy dominated the Pacific war).

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  Remaking the Modern World 1900 - 2015

  Global Connections and Comparisons

  • C. A. Bayly(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  This was certainly one of the three most destructive and bloody encounters in history, killing perhaps 25 million soldiers and civilians. It dwarfed even the mortality of the Taiping Rebellion in nineteenth-century China, while exceeding fatalities in the First World War itself. In fact, as a global event, the Second World War touched more regions directly than the First World War and created a consciousness of fear and ideological conflict which was even more pervasive. 6 Above all, the war was coexistent with the Holocaust, the mass murder of European Jews by the Nazis, an event of such enormity that it forms the central act of Chapter 14. The scale of devastation and loss of life was one condition which made conceivable the use of atomic weapons against Japan in 1945. Still, it is helpful to consider a decentralised view of the Second World War, seeing it in Churchill's terms again as the climax of a second, and yet broader, world crisis which stretched from about 1935 to 1948 and continued to incite small wars well after that date. The conflict between heavily armed and increasingly nationalistic powers began with the Italian invasion of Ethiopia (Abyssinia) in 1935, the expansion of Japan's war against China from the Manchurian borderlands to mainland China in 1936 and the Spanish Civil War. The next phase of this second world crisis saw the war between Germany, France and Britain with the occupation of France in 1940. The third phase, beginning in late 1941 and 1942, was dominated by the German invasion of the USSR, the central event of the period, Japanese attacks in the Pacific and Southeast Asia and the entry of the United States into the war. The final phase saw the dropping of the atomic bomb, the American conquest of Japan and the Anglo-American reconquest of Southeast Asia

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  The remnants of war

  • John Mueller(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Cornell University Press

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER 4

  WORLD WAR II AS A REINFORCING EVENT

  Europeans brought war under a degree of control in the middle of the last millennium with the development of disciplined military and policing forces and with the consequent rise of coherent states. But they still considered it to be a natural, inevitable and, often, desirable fact of life. After the trauma of World War I, they moved to use their control of war to eliminate the institution entirely from their affairs with each other.

  Since that war, countries in the developed world have participated in four wars or kinds of war: first, the cluster of wars known as World War II; second, wars relating to the Cold War; third, various wars in their colonies; and fourth, still to be defined and delimited, policing wars: assorted applications of military force after the Cold War to pacify civil conflicts and to topple regimes deemed harmful. The second and third of these are taken up in the next chapter, and the fourth is the central subject of chapters 7 and 8.

  This chapter deals with the first. It surveys the aggressor states that launched World War II, and it concludes that, but for the machinations of one man—Adolf Hitler—the Second World War in Europe would likely never have come about. It also explores the implications of this conclusion, and it assesses the impact of World War II on the developed world’s developing sense of war aversion.

  THE QUEST FOR PEACE AFTER THE GREAT WAR

  The Great War (as it was to be called for more than two decades) chiefly inspired bitterness, disillusionment, recrimination, and revulsion in Europe. For the most part, war was no longer embraced as supreme theater, redemptive turmoil, a cleansing thunderstorm, or an uplifting affirmation of manhood. It was what the first modern general, William Tecumseh Sherman, had called it a half century earlier: hell. People who often had praised war and eagerly anticipated its terrible, determining convulsions now found themselves appalled by it. Within half a decade, war opponents, once a derided minority, had become a decided majority: everyone now seemed to be a peace advocate.1

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  War, Peace and International Relations

  An introduction to strategic history

  • Colin S. Gray(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  10  World War II in Europe, I The structure and course of total war Reader's guide : Casualties. The wars that comprised World War II. A strategic narrative of the war. The Holocaust. Introduction: total war The actuality or the threat of war was by far the most important influence on international relations in the twentieth century. Its outcomes reshaped societies and enforced regime changes, added and deleted states to and from the geopolitical map, and accelerated the long process of global decolonization. Warfare, its memories, legends, myths and consequences of all kinds, virtually defined the European experience in the century. Two total wars dominated the first fifty years, while the threat of a potentially total nuclear war overhung, even dominated, all but ten of the second. World War II brought casualty figures to new heights. If one includes the Sino-Japanese War that began in 1937, the total death toll in the war was of the order of 53.5 million. That figure has to be suspect in detail, but it is reliable as to order of magnitude. Whereas in 1914–18 the belligerents mobilized some 65 million men for military duty, in 1939–45 the comparable figure was 105 million, a fraction of whom were women. Also, unusually in modern times, the civilian death toll exceeded the military, and by a wide margin (perhaps 36.5 million to 17 million; see Table 10.1). There were three principal reasons why this was the case. First, the growing maturity of air power guaranteed that civilians would be targets, both inadvertently, as collateral damage, and intentionally, as required by the new doctrine of seeking victory, or at least to coerce, by strategic air power. Second, everywhere, even eventually in Germany following the defeat at Stalingrad in the winter of 1942–3, the war was explained and conducted as a ‘people's war’: everybody was at war

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  For the Common Defense

  • Allan R. Millett, Peter Maslowski(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Free Press

    (Publisher)

  THIRTEEN    

  The United States and World War II: From the Edge of Defeat to the Edge of Victory, 1939–1943

  O n the evening of November 28, 1943, the leaders of the Allied war effort—President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Prime Minister Winston S. Churchill, and Premier Josef Stalin—discussed the world’s most destructive modern war. Dining at the Soviet embassy in Tehran, Iran, the “Big Three” moved quickly from a review of their current military operations to an animated exchange of views on the political organization of the postwar world. The choice of subject spoke volumes, for Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin assumed that they—and not the Germans and Japanese—would dominate the peace. At different times and in different ways the Allied anti-Axis coalition had moved by the end of 1943 from the edge of defeat to the edge of victory.

  Four years earlier the visions of victory came from meetings in Berlin and Tokyo. The momentum for changing the world’s map rested with Nazi Germany, the Japanese Empire, and fascist Italy. Pursuing their visions of a new world order, the Axis states had tested the resolve of the Western democracies and the Soviet Union and found that resolve wanting. Between 1936 and 1939 Adolf Hitler, disregarding the cautious advice of his senior military officers, defied the Allies by remilitarizing the Rhineland (1936), annexing Austria (1938), and occupying Czechoslovakia (1938–1939). The Italians under Benito Mussolini had extended their African empire into Ethiopia without Western resistance, and the Germans and Italians had supported the victorious fascists in a civil war in Spain (1936–1939). In the Far East the Japanese government, dominated by the military, had used its armed forces to create a puppet state in Manchuria (1931) and had then opened a war of conquest against the Chinese Nationalist government (1937) in the name of civilizing China, ending European imperialism in Asia, and forming an Asian economic sphere that would feed and supply Japan.

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  Europe 1880-1945

  • J.M. Roberts(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The publicity given to American disagreements with England and France over colonial issues, and the suggestive overtures of American policy towards Russia which resulted from this, helped to sap the old empires. Morally, their prestige waned; politically, trouble was being laid up for the future. But in 1945 the rapidity with which they would disappear could hardly have been envisaged; we must beware of the distorting effects of hindsight in assessing the damage already done. Only in retrospect can it be seen to have been fatal. In any case, there was more to the collapse of the European hegemony than the waning of empire. Colonial possessions had only been its glittering façade.

  The world can hardly be said to have profited from Europe’s suicidal disasters. Even before 1939, Japanese aggressiveness had showed what had been lost with the old European balance of power. When the policemen of the world fell out, there was bound to be uncertainty and disorder until new policemen appeared and could agree. Only in one respect did the European hegemony survive, yet it was crucial. As the men of 1945 looked round for guidance and landmarks in a world of new possibilities, they discerned two sources of hope and enlightenment. One was the tradition of liberal nationalism, the other, Marxist communism; both were European. Inspired by them, and armed with inventions and practical knowledge from the same source, the people of the post-European age faced an alarming future in 1945. Yet in some perspectives, that future now seems likely to be regarded as the most European age of all: Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit .19

  1 On the wider implications of the Blitzkrieg , see A. Milward, The German Economy at War (London, 1965), esp. pp. 7–14.

  2 See the volumes of the official History of the Second World War . United Kingdom Civil Series , under the general editorship of W. K. Hancock, on various aspects of the war’s domestic effects.

  3 For what this implied, see Milward, pp. 49–52 and 131–61.

  4 Milward, p. 6. Indices of consumer goods production (1939 = 100)

  1943	1944
  UK	54	54
  Germany	91	85

  5 We need not exaggerate the significance of this; Roosevelt’s health was not good and Stalin cannot have wished to have been far from the levers of power in Russia at moments of danger.

  6 Persia was occupied by British and Russian forces in August 1941.

  7 Or, as it was called after 2 January 1942, the United Nations.

  8 The Waffen SS were full-scale military units organized in formations as large as a division for normal warfare.

  9 See G. Reitlinger, The Final Solution (London, 1953), pp. 489–500, for an early assessment of the problems of estimating the extent of the killings; the rough total is taken from M. Gilbert, The Holocaust

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