Chapter 26: World War II

Paths to War

The German Path to War

  • World War II in Europe had its beginnings in the ideas of Adolf Hitler.
    • Already in the 1920s, Hitler had indicated that a Nazi regime would find this land to the east—in the Soviet Union.
  • After World War I, the Treaty of Ver- sailles had limited Germany’s military power.
    • On March 9, 1935, however, Hitler announced the creation of a new air force.
  • France, Great Britain, and Italy condemned Germany’s actions and warned against future aggressive steps.
  • Hitler was convinced that the Western states had no intention of using force to maintain the Treaty of Versailles.
    • Hence, on March 7, 1936, he sent German troops into the Rhineland.
    • The Rhineland was part of Germany, but, according to the Treaty of Versailles, it was a demilitarized area.
  • Great Britain did not support the use of force against Germany, however.
    • Great Britain thus began to practice a policy of appeasement.
    • This policy was based on the belief that if European states satisfied the reasonable demands of dissatisfied powers, the dissatisfied powers would be content, and stability and peace would be achieved in Europe.
  • Meanwhile, Hitler gained new allies.
    • Benito Mussolini had long dreamed of creating a new Roman Empire in the Mediterranean, and, in October 1935, Fascist Italy invaded Ethiopia.
  • In 1936, both Germany and Italy sent troops to Spain to help General Francisco Franco in the Spanish Civil War. I
  • By 1937, Germany was once more a “world power,” as Hitler proclaimed.
    • By threatening Austria with invasion, Hitler forced the Austrian chancellor to put Austrian Nazis in charge of the government.
    • Hitler’s next objective was the destruction of Czechoslovakia.
  • At a hastily arranged conference in Munich, British, French, German, and Italian representatives did not object to Hitler’s plans but instead reached an agreement that met virtually all of Hitler’s demands.
  • The Munich Conference was the high point of Western appeasement of Hitler.
    • In March 1939, Hitler invaded and took control of Bohemia and Moravia in western Czechoslovakia.
    • At last, the Western states reacted to the Nazi threat.
  • They began political and military negotiations with Joseph Stalin, the Soviet dictator.
    • Meanwhile, Hitler pressed on in the belief that the West would not fight over Poland.
    • On August 23, 1939, Germany and the Soviet Union signed the Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact.
  • On September 1, German forces invaded Poland.
  • Two days later, Britain and France declared war on Germany.

The Japanese Path to War

  • In September 1931, Japanese soldiers had seized Manchuria, which had natural resources Japan needed
  • Worldwide protests against the Japanese led the League of Nations to send investigators to Manchuria.
  • Over the next several years, Japan strengthened its hold on Manchuria, which was renamed Manchukuo.
  • Japan now began to expand into North China.
  • By the mid-1930s, militants connected to the government and the armed forces had gained control of Japanese politics.
  • Chiang Kai-shek tried to avoid a conflict with Japan so that he could deal with what he considered the greater threat from the Communists.
  • As Japan moved steadily southward, protests against Japanese aggression grew stronger in Chinese cities.
    • Japan had not planned to declare war on China.
    • However, the 1937 incident eventually turned into a major conflict
  • Japanese military leaders had hoped to force Chiang to agree to join a New Order in East Asia, comprising Japan, Manchuria, and China.
  • Part of Japan’s plan was to seize Soviet Siberia, with its rich resources.
  • When Germany signed the nonaggression pact with the Soviets in August 1939, Japanese leaders had to rethink their goals
    • A move southward, however, would risk war with the European colonial powers and the United States.
    • The United States objected. It warned Japan that it would apply economic sanctions—restrictions intended to enforce international law — unless Japan withdrew from the area and returned to its borders of 1931.
  • Japan was now caught in a dilemma.
    • To guarantee access to the raw materials it wanted in Southeast Asia, Japan had to risk losing raw materials from the United States.
    • After much debate, Japan decided to launch a surprise attack on U.S. and European colonies in Southeast Asia.

The Course of World War II

Europe at War

  • Hitler stunned Europe with the speed and efficiency of the German attack on Poland.
  • His blitzkrieg, or “lightning war,” used armored columns, called panzer divisions, supported by airplanes.
    • Each panzer division was a strike force of about three hundred tanks with accompanying forces and supplies.
    • The forces of the blitzkrieg broke quickly through Polish lines and encircled the bewildered Polish troops.
    • After a winter of waiting (called the “phony war”), Hitler resumed the attack on April 9, 1940, with another blitzkrieg against Denmark and Norway.
  • The French signed an armistice on June 22. German armies now occupied about three-fifths of France.
  • President Franklin D. Roosevelt denounced the aggressors, but the United States followed a strict policy of isolationism.
  • Hitler realized that an amphibious (land-sea) invasion of Britain could succeed only if Germany gained control of the air
    • The British fought back with determination. They were supported by an effective radar system that gave them early warning of German attacks.
  • In September, in retaliation for a British attack on Berlin, Hitler ordered a shift in strategy.
    • At the end of September, Hitler postponed the invasion of Britain indefinitely.
  • Although he had no desire for a two-front war, Hitler became convinced that Britain was remaining in the war only because it expected Soviet support.
  • Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union was scheduled for the spring of 1941, but the attack was delayed because of problems in the Balkans.
    • Reassured, Hitler invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941.
  • The massive attack stretched out along a front some 1,800 miles (about 2,900 km) long.
  • An early winter and fierce Soviet resistance, however, halted the German advance.

Japan at War

  • On December 7, 1941, Japanese aircraft attacked the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor in the Hawaiian Islands
    • A triumphant Japan now declared the creation of a community of nations.
    • Japanese leaders had hoped that their lightning strike at American bases would destroy the U.S. fleet in the Pacific.
  • The Japanese miscalculated, however.
  • The attack on Pearl Harbor unified American opinion about becoming involved in the war.

The Allies Advance

  • The entry of the United States into the war created a new coalition, the Grand Alliance
  • Defeat was far from Hitler’s mind at the beginning of 1942.
    • Until late 1942, it appeared that the Germans might still prevail on the battlefield
  • In North Africa, British forces had stopped Rommel’s troops at El Alamein in the summer of 1942.
  • On the Eastern Front, after the capture of the Crimea, Hitler’s generals wanted him to concentrate on the Caucasus and its oil fields.
  • Hitler, however, decided that Stalingrad, a major industrial center on the Volga, should be taken first.
  • In perhaps the most terrible battle of the war, between November 1942 and February 2, 1943, the Soviets launched a counterattack.
    • By February 1943, German forces in Russia were back to their positions of June 1942.
    • In 1942, the tide of battle in the East also changed dramatically.
  • The turning point of the war in Asia came on June 4, at the Battle of Midway Island. U.S. planes destroyed four attacking Japanese aircraft carriers.
  • The United States defeated the Japanese navy and established naval superiority in the Pacific.
  • By the fall of 1942, Allied forces in Asia were gathering for two operations.
  • One, commanded by U.S. general Douglas MacArthur, would move into the Philippines through New Guinea and the South Pacific Islands.

Last Years of the War

  • By the beginning of 1943, the tide of battle had turned against Germany, Italy, and Japan.
  • After the fall of Sicily, Mussolini was removed from office and placed under arrest by Victor Emmanuel III, king of Italy.
  • The Germans set up effective new defensive lines in the hills south of Rome.
  • Since the autumn of 1943, the Allies had been planning an invasion of France from Great Britain, across the English Channel.
    • After the breakout, Allied troops moved south and east.
    • The Soviets had come a long way since the Battle of Stalingrad in 1943.
  • Soviet forces now began a steady advance westward.
  • By January 1945, Adolf Hitler had moved into a bunker 55 feet (almost 17 m) under the city of Berlin to direct the final stages of the war.
  • Hitler committed suicide on April 30, two days after Mussolini had been shot by Italian partisans, or resistance fighters.
    • On May 7, 1945, German commanders surrendered.
  • The war in Asia continued. Beginning in 1943, U.S. forces had gone on the offensive and advanced, slowly at times, across the Pacific.
  • Using atomic weapons would, Truman hoped, enable the United States to avoid an invasion of Japan.
    • Truman decided to use the bombs.
    • The first bomb was dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima on August 6.
    • World War II was finally over. Seventeen million had died in battle.

The New Order and the Holocaust

The New Order in Europe

  • In 1942, the Nazi regime stretched across continental Europe from the English Channel in the west to the outskirts of Moscow in the east.
  • Nazi administration in the conquered lands to the east was especially ruthless.
  • Heinrich Himmler, the leader of the SS, was put in charge of German resettlement plans in the east.
    • Himmler’s task was to move the Slavic peoples out and replace them with Germans.
  • One million Poles were uprooted and moved to southern Poland.
  • The invasion of the Soviet Union made the Nazis even more excited about German colonization in the east.
  • Himmler told a gathering of SS officers that 30 million Slavs might die in order to achieve German plans in the east.
  • Labor shortages in Germany led to a policy of rounding up foreign workers for Germany.
    • The use of forced labor often caused problems, however.

The Holocaust

  • No aspect of the Nazi New Order was more terrifying than the deliberate attempt to exterminate the Jews
  • Himmler and the SS closely shared Hitler’s racial ideas.
    • The SS was given responsibility for what the Nazis called their Final Solution to the Jewish problem.
    • The Final Solution was genocide (physical extermination) of the Jewish people.
  • Reinhard Heydrich, head of the SS’s Security Service, was given the task of administering the Final Solution
  • In June 1941, the Einsatzgruppen were given the new job of acting as mobile killing units.
    • Probably one million Jews were killed by the Einsatzgruppen.
  • Beginning in 1942, Jews from countries occupied by Germany (or sympathetic to Germany) were rounded up, packed like cattle into freight trains, and shipped to Poland.
  • Six extermination centers were built in Poland for this purpose.
    • The largest was Auschwitz
  • About 30 percent of the arrivals at Auschwitz were sent to a labor camp, where many were starved or worked to death.
  • By the spring of 1942, the death camps were in full operation.
  • The Germans killed between five and six million Jews, over three million of them in the death camps.
    • The Nazis were also responsible for the deliberate death by shooting, starvation, or overwork of at least another nine to ten million non-Jewish people.
  • The leading citizens of the Slavic peoples — the clergy, intellectuals, civil leaders, judges, and lawyers — were arrested and killed.
  • This mass slaughter of European civilians, partic- ularly European Jews, is known as the Holocaust.
  • Some people did not believe the accounts of death camps because, during World War I, allies had greatly exaggerated German atrocities to arouse enthusiasm for the war.
    • Most often, people pretended not to notice what was happening.
  • Even worse, collaborators (people who assisted the enemy) helped the Nazis hunt down Jews.
  • Young people of all ages were also victims of World War II.
    • Many children were evacuated from cities during the war in order to avoid the bombing.
    • Some British parents even sent their children to Canada and the United States.
  • Children evacuated to the countryside did not always see their parents again.
  • In Eastern Europe, children especially suffered under harsh German occupation policies.

The New Order in Asia

  • Japanese war policy in the areas in Asia occupied by Japan was basically defensive.
    • The Japanese had conquered Southeast Asia under the slogan “Asia for the Asiatics.”
    • Japanese officials in occupied territories quickly made contact with anticolonialists.
  • In fact, real power rested with Japanese military authorities in each territory.
  • In some cases, these policies brought severe hard- ships to peoples living in the occupied areas.
  • At first, many Southeast Asian nationalists took Japanese promises at face value and agreed to cooperate with their new masters.
  • Japanese officials provoked such attitudes by their arrogance and contempt for local customs.
  • Like German soldiers in occupied Europe, Japanese military forces often had little respect for the lives of their subject peoples.
    • In construction projects to help their war effort, the Japanese made extensive use of labor forces composed of both prisoners of war and local peoples.
  • Such Japanese behavior created a dilemma for many nationalists in the occupied lands.
  • Indonesian patriots tried to have it both ways.

The Home Front and the Aftermath of the War

The Mobilization of Peoples: Four Examples

  • Even more than World War I, World War II was a total war.
  • Fighting was much more widespread and covered most of the world.
  • Economic mobilization (the act of assembling and preparing for war) was more extensive; so, too, was the mobilization of women.
  • World War II had an enormous impact on civilian life in the Soviet Union, the United States, Germany, and Japan.
  • The initial defeats of the Soviet Union led to drastic emergency measures that affected the lives of the civilian population.
    • As the German army made its rapid advance into Soviet territory, Soviet workers dismantled and shipped the factories in the western part of the Soviet Union to the interior — to the Urals, western Siberia, and the Volga regions.
    • Stalin called the widespread military and indus- trial mobilization of the nation a “battle of machines.”
    • Soviet women played a major role in the war effort.
  • The home front in the United States was quite different from that of the other major powers.
    • The mobilization of the American economy resulted in some social turmoil, however.
    • Over a million African Americans moved from the rural South to the cities of the North and West, looking for jobs in industry.
    • One million African Americans enrolled in the military.
    • Japanese Americans faced even more serious difficulties.
  • In August 1914, Germans had enthusiastically cheered their soldiers marching off to war.
    • In September 1939, the streets were quiet.
    • Many Germans did not care.
    • Even worse for the Nazi regime, many feared disaster.
    • Hitler was well aware of the importance of the home front
  • To maintain the morale of the home front during the first two years of the war, Hitler refused to cut consumer goods production or to increase the production of armaments.
  • Early in 1942, Hitler finally ordered a massive increase in armaments production and in the size of the army.
  • Hitler’s architect, Albert Speer, was made minister for armaments and munitions in 1942.
  • A total mobilization of the economy was put into effect in July 1944.
  • Nazi attitudes toward women changed over the course of the war.
  • In spite of this change, the number of women working in industry, agriculture, commerce, and domestic service increased only slightly.
  • Wartime Japan was a highly mobilized society.
    • The calls for sacrifice reached a high point in the final years of the war.
    • Young Japanese were encouraged to volunteer to serve as pilots in suicide missions against U.S. fighting ships at sea.
    • These pilots were known as kamikaze, or “divine wind.”
  • Japan was extremely reluctant to mobilize women on behalf of Japan’s war effort.
  • General Hideki Tojo, prime minister from 1941 to 1944, opposed female employment.
  • Female employment increased during the war, but only in such areas as the textile industry and farming, where women had traditionally worked.

Frontline Civilians: The Bombing of Cities

  • Bombing was used in World War II against a variety of targets, including military targets, enemy troops, and civilian populations.
    • A few bombing raids had been conducted in the last year of World War I.
  • The first sustained use of civilian bombing began in early September 1940.
  • Londoners took the first heavy blows.
  • The blitz, as the British called the German air raids, soon became a national experience.
  • The British failed to learn from their own experience, however.
    • Bombing raids added an element of terror to circumstances already made difficult by growing shortages of food, clothing, and fuel.
  • Germany suffered enormously from the Allied bombing raids.
    • Nor did the bombing destroy Germany’s industrial capacity.
  • In Japan, the bombing of civilians reached a new level with the use of the first atomic bomb
    • Attacks on Japanese cities by the new U.S. B-29 Superfortresses, the biggest bombers of the war, had begun on November 24, 1944.
  • The Japanese government decreed the mobili- zation of all people between the ages of 13 and 60 into a People’s Volunteer Corps.
  • Fearing high U.S. casualties in a land invasion of Japan, President Truman and his advisers decided to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of 1945.

Peace and a New War

  • The total victory of the Allies in World War II was followed not by a real peace but by a period of political tensions, known as the Cold War.
  • Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill were the leaders of what was called the Big Three (the Soviet Union, the United States, and Great Britain) of the Grand Alliance.
    • The acceptance of this plan had important consequences.
    • The Big Three powers met again at Yalta in southern Russia in February 1945.
  • Stalin was deeply suspicious of the Western powers.
  • Roosevelt, however, favored the idea of self-determination for Europe.
    • At Yalta, Roosevelt sought Soviet military help against Japan.
    • The creation of the United Nations was a major American concern at Yalta.
  • The issues of Germany and Eastern Europe were treated less decisively.
  • The issue of free elections in Eastern Europe caused a serious split between the Soviets and the Americans
  • The Potsdam conference of July 1945 began under a cloud of mistrust.
    • Roosevelt had died on April 12 and had been suc- ceeded as president by Harry Truman.
    • After a bitter and devastating war in which the Soviets had lost more people than any other country, Stalin sought absolute military security.
  • As the war slowly receded into the past, a new struggle was already beginning.
  • Many in the West thought Soviet policy was part of a world- wide Communist conspiracy.
  • In March 1946, in a speech to an American audience, the former British prime minister Winston Churchill declared that “an iron curtain” had “descended across the continent,” dividing Europe into two hostile camps.