A Short History of the World (24 page)

Change in the East

If Europe witnessed significant change in the early 20th century, so too did Asia, specifically China and Japan. China looked much like it had done for the last several hundred years, but there was growing discontent with foreign interference and, by association, with imperial rule. When the Qing emperor was overthrown in 1911, 2,000 years of imperial rule came to an end. Officially, the Republic of China came into being, but in reality the country was taken over by warlords. They would not be defeated until 1926 when a nationalist party, the Kuomintang, under the leadership of Chiang Kai-Shek, led a successful campaign to defeat them and unite the country.
 

When the nationalists needed cash to pay troops and buy arms, only the Soviet Union was ready to give them assistance. This aid was given on the understanding that they would cooperate with the communists who had founded a Chinese Communist Party under Soviet supervision in 1919. Nevertheless, Kai-Shek had always been strongly opposed to communism and shortly after uniting the country carried out a purge against party members during which tens of thousands of communists were executed.
 

Although the communists managed to rebuild support in the cities, where the disparity between rich and poor was greatest, in 1934, the nationalist military campaigns to defeat them eventually forced almost 90,000 communists to retreat in a historic ‘Long March’ over 6,000 miles of land. It was during this march that Mao Zedong became unrivalled leader of the communists. With over one-third of the group dying on the march alone, the nationalists almost succeeded in wiping out the communist threat. They might very well have done so entirely had they not faced a much larger threat from the east: Japan.
 

The East at War (1931–1945)

The Japanese had held an economic interest in north-eastern China since the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese wars at the turn of the century. Thanks to the speed of Japan’s economic growth and to its siding with the Allies in the First World War, it was invited to sit as a major power in its own right at Versailles. It was here that its territorial gains in China – many of which were made at the expense of the defeated Germans – were recognised.

Japan had expanded its interest in northern China throughout the 1920s and had been defending its territory there with increasingly hostile military activity. This was driven first by the push of a growing population that Japan could not feed with its limited arable land, and second through the pull of the natural resources that existed in weak, sparsely populated and neighbouring Manchuria. Japanese military strength meant it was confident that it could handle any uprising with which it might be confronted in these territories. When the Great Depression struck, Japan’s trade suffered, as did its ability to pay for imported food. Western governments responded with protectionist trading policies that only worsened the situation in the country and increased the influence of the military within the government.

In December 1931, using the threat of increased nationalistic activity and anti-Japanese sentiment in the region as an excuse, Japanese troops seized Manchuria. A puppet government was established with the former Chinese emperor as head of state and the territory was subsequently given the suitably Japanese name of ‘Manchukuo’. While Hitler was only talking about Germany needing ‘Lebensraum’ or living space in the east, the Japanese were actually implementing this policy in China. Convinced that the country could become great only by being self-sufficient, it seemed obvious to the Japanese that they needed to expand their territory and gain access to natural resources. What’s more, they had invested heavily in Manchuria and had no intention of losing this investment. The only thing the Western powers could do, mired as they were in their own post-depression nadir, was to condemn Japan through the largely ineffectual League of Nations. Instead of leaving Manchuria, Japan simply withdrew from the League.

Many Chinese were angered and humiliated by the attitude of non-resistance taken by their government; Kai-Shek understood the country was in no position to fight a superior army and his priority was to destroy the communists first, and only then turn to face the Japanese. His generals eventually forced him to ally with the communists against the Japanese in an uneasy truce
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In July 1937, using the pretext of fighting between Chinese and Japanese troops, Japan launched a full-scale invasion of China that started the second Sino-Japanese War and the Second World War in Asia. They easily overpowered the enemy troops and within five months had captured half of the Chinese seaboard in a war of unprecedented brutality. In December 1937, Japanese troops entered the city of Nanking and committed some of the worst atrocities in the war, butchering up to 300,000 men, women and children in an orgy of rape and terror that easily matched the most brutal acts of the Nazis in the years to come. Above all, it showed their utter contempt and disrespect for the Chinese.
 

Millions of Chinese fled the Japanese terror by retreating inland while Japan called for a Greater East Asia (consisting of Japan, Manchukuo, China and Southeast Asia) to be integrated politically and economically, under its leadership of course.
 
The problem Japan faced was that while it had thought war against China would be over in three months, its troops became bogged down and it was forced to station an ever larger number of troops there to keep order. China sucked up more of Japan’s resources than China provided, prevented it from focusing its resources elsewhere and forced a resource-poor Japan to rely on the West for supplies.

The Second World War (1939–1945)

Over in Europe, by playing on the misery of the German people, as well as on the general fears of a communist takeover, while promising jobs for all, Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist (or Nazi) party captured 18 percent of the popular vote in 1930. Three years later he was appointed Chancellor of Germany, and by 1934 he had gained absolute power. The ‘Thousand Year Reich’ had begun. Over the next few years, Hitler would terrorise his political opponents, eliminate any challenges to his power and, in direct contravention of the Treaty of Versailles, begin re-arming Germany. Between 1936 and 1939, Hitler used the Spanish Civil War, which had ignited in 1936 following a military coup by the old order against a coalition of communist and socialist parties, as a testing ground for his new forces.
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In 1938, Hitler annexed German-speaking Austria and the German-speaking part of Czechoslovakia, the Sudetenland. Unprepared for war, Britain and France accepted Germany’s move just as they had accepted Japan’s invasion of Manchuria, in return for promises of peace. At the same time, they promised a nervous Poland that they would defend it in the event of a German invasion. By this stage Hitler had already confirmed his plans for world domination; his master plan was to regain Germany’s pre-First World War borders by attacking Poland and striking at France, before turning to defeat the Soviet Union. To facilitate this strategy and maintain the safety of Germany’s eastern borders while attacking France, he signed a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union in which it was agreed that the two countries would divide Poland between them as well as not attack each other.

On 1st September 1939, Hitler invaded Poland. Standing by its treaty to defend Poland, Britain declared war on Germany with other countries following suit. Within weeks the Soviet Union attacked Poland from the east and annexed Finland and the Baltic States.
 

The Katyn Massacre (1940)

Many Polish prisoners of war were taken by both sides during the Russian and German invasions of Poland. While many of them died of starvation and disease, millions of others died in forced labour and extermination camps. 21,857 prisoners of war were executed in 1940 on Stalin’s orders in a series of massacres known collectively as ‘Katyn’ from the name of the forest in Russia where they took place. The dead were predominantly soldiers but also included university professors, physicians and lawyers. A Soviet Major-General, Vassiliy Blokhin, is said to have personally shot 7,000 of the prisoners with a German-made pistol used for its reliability. When the Germans discovered the mass graves in 1943 during their invasion of Russia, they were blamed by the Soviets for the massacre, and the Soviets ashamedly only finally admitted to the act in 1990.

It was not until April 1940 that Hitler launched his major offensive on Europe. Denmark, Norway, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands capitulated in a matter of weeks, as did France. Some 225,000 British and 110,000 French troops were forced to evacuate via the port of Dunkirk two weeks before Hitler’s triumphal entrance into Paris on 14th June. Thereafter, France was divided in two, with a collaborationist Vichy French government ruling southern and eastern France, and Germany ruling the northern and western regions.

With France overwhelmed, Hitler planned to bomb Britain into submission and then invade it. The island only narrowly managed to escape this fate thanks to the inspired leadership of the new prime minister, Winston Churchill – who had been appointed to the role only after Germany invaded Denmark – and to the bravery of a handful of Spitfire and Hurricane pilots in an air war what came to be known as the Battle of Britain. Hitler was forced to cancel his invasion of Britain.
 

Inspired by German successes, and desperate for his own empire in the Mediterranean and the Balkans, Mussolini declared war on Britain and France in June and proceeded to invade Egypt and Greece in September and October. Italy also signed the Tripartite Act with Japan and Germany, effecting a military agreement to re-divide the world.
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In typical Italian military fashion, the invasions were fiascos and Mussolini’s troops had to be rescued by the German Wehrmacht. Both territories were strategically important to Germany due to their access to oilfields, so Hitler could not afford for them to be taken by the Allies. While Greece was rapidly brought into submission, the battle for northern Africa lasted until May 1943. The German intervention in Greece caused a three month delay in plans to attack the Soviet Union. The delay would turn out to be of critical importance as the harsh Russian winter became a significant factor in slowing the German advance.
 

With most of Europe under German control, in June 1941 Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa, with the plan of forcing Russia into submission. Convinced that Germany only needed to kick in the door to ‘send the whole rotten structure crumbling down’, as he put it, and completely disregarding Germany’s non-aggression pact with Russia, German forces invaded the Soviet Union with three million men in the largest military operation in history.

Despite multiple warnings of the invasion that were dismissed by Stalin as a campaign of false information, and despite the clear build up of German troops on Russia’s borders, Stalin’s reaction was one of complete surprise. He was so shocked that he hesitated for an entire week before finally heeding the urgent pleas of his generals to take action. With the majority of his officer corps and generals executed in the purges, nobody had been willing to make any decisions without Stalin’s approval, and without specific orders to fire, Soviet troops did not return fire for hours. The result was the capture of a huge number of Soviet troops in the first few weeks, the majority of whom died from starvation and disease.
 

Hitler’s armies made incredible headway, penetrating over 300 km in the first five days, and the Luftwaffe reported destroying 2,000 Soviet aircraft in the first two days alone. Stalin’s inability to understand the situation on the ground and his refusal to listen to the advice of his commanders led to a number of devastating defeats for the Soviet forces in the first six months.
 

In the Ukraine, the Germans were welcomed as liberators from Stalin’s terror. However, any initial goodwill was squandered by self-defeating German brutalities in the occupied territories. Jews were rounded up and shot, women raped, villages burned and civilians executed. In fact, for many Ukrainians there was little difference between their Soviet oppressors and the German invaders.
 

The War in the East

Hitler’s armies reached the outskirts of Moscow in December 1941, before becoming bogged down by a combination of determined Soviet resistance and the arrival of the harsh Russian winter. With the Germans finally checked, the world’s attention turned to the east where Japan, in ‘a war of self-defence’ as they called it, attacked the American naval base at Pearl Harbour in Hawaii, killing over 2,200 Americans. Having perceived Japan’s imperialism in China and the Pacific as a military threat, the Americans had forbidden the export of oil, iron and rubber to Japan in July 1941, as well as freezing all Japanese assets. Increasingly under the influence of its military, resource-poor Japan had felt that the USA was preventing the country from fulfilling its destiny as leader in Asia. More importantly, with a thirsty war machine to feed, Japan had felt it had no choice but to seize the oil-rich Dutch East Indies, which only the US Pacific fleet and token British forces were preventing them from doing.

The attack on Pearl Harbour brought the USA – led by President Franklin D. Roosevelt – into the war the next day and, as in the First World War, the resources the USA brought to the Allied cause helped swing the war. Up until this point, though it had provided aid to the Allies, the country had stayed out of the war, having adopted an isolationist policy following the First World War. By mid-December Japan had invaded much of Southeast Asia. The Japanese seized the Philippines from the USA, Indonesia from the Dutch, and Burma, Singapore and Malaya from the Brits, with the intention of conquering China and uniting all East Asia under Japanese domination.