A Short History of the World (25 page)

As Germany had in Europe, Japan rapidly won a series of victories in the east – and with equal brutality. In every territory that the Japanese occupied they carried out massacres and instigated forced labour and death marches from which millions died. Japan’s victims were predominantly Chinese, Indonesians, Koreans and Filipinos, but also included Western prisoners of war who were treated as contemptible for surrendering.
 

Regardless of the entry of the USA into the war and a US victory over the Japanese fleet at the Battle of Midway that summer, the Germans continued to make significant headway in Russia, threatening oil supplies from the Caucasus. Churchill became increasingly concerned that if Hitler conquered the USSR, Europe would be dominated and Germany would be free to attack Britain. As a result, he agreed to help the Soviets, despite distrusting them entirely.
 

It was not until 1943 that the war eventually turned in favour of the Allies. The most significant event in their favour was the German defeat in the Russian city of Stalingrad (present-day Volgograd) in history’s largest recorded land battle; the battle caused over one million deaths
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in total and saw the first major defeat of Hitler’s armies. The entire Sixth German Army was encircled, reduced and surrendered en masse after Hitler refused to give an order to retreat. After a see-saw series of running battles stretching across the North African desert, the tide also turned in Africa, from where the Allies finally drove the Germans and the Italians in May 1943.
 

Driving home their victory, the Allies launched an invasion of mainland Europe via southern Italy that summer with the Italians promptly overthrowing Mussolini and declaring allegiance with the Allies in October 1943. Mussolini was promptly arrested by the Italians and imprisoned, only to be rescued by German SS Commandos. Meanwhile, the Italian government proceeded to change sides and declare war on Germany in October 1943. In June 1944 the Allies organised Operation Overlord, a massive combined invasion of northern France via the beaches of Normandy (D-Day).
 

Despite a few more offensives by the Axis powers, including a failed attack on the Western Front through the Ardennes Forest which became popularly known as the Battle of the Bulge, the writing was on the wall for the Germans. The final months of the war in Europe involved a race to Berlin between the Allies and the Russians; the Russian advance notable for the savagery of the fighting and its extreme brutality to German civilians. On 30th April 1945, only two days after Mussolini had been captured and hanged by Italian partisans, Hitler killed himself. A week later Germany surrendered and Europe celebrated VE (Victory in Europe) Day the following day.
 

While the war in Europe was over, the War in Asia continued. The Americans eventually gained the initiative in the Pacific and gradually forced the Japanese back, island by island, with terrible losses on both sides. In return for territorial gains, the Soviets were also persuaded to join the war against Japan. In July, the Americans had invaded Okinawa, the southernmost island of the Japanese island chain. Poised to invade mainland Japan and anticipating massive US and Japanese casualties, the US demanded that Japan surrender unconditionally or face destruction. The Japanese predictably refused, only for the emperor to finally surrender unconditionally on 14th August 1945 after the Americans dropped two atomic bombs on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the 6th and 9th of August respectively.
 

After the War

Some 60 million people died as a result of the Second World War. For the first time in history, civilian losses outnumbered military losses. The Soviet Union suffered more than any other nation with some 20 million dead
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and Poland suffered the highest losses per capita (approximately 16 percent), including three million of its Jews – of the estimated six million Jewish dead from the war.

While it took a long time for the horrors of the Stalinist regime to come to light and to be accepted, and while the atrocities of the Japanese had already been well-publicised, the horrors of the Nazi concentration and death camps shocked the world. Slavs, gypsies, socialists, the mentally ill and gay men and women had been added to the predominantly Jewish camp populations and murdered on an industrial scale, both through gas chambers and through exhaustion, starvation and exposure – an abominable act by an abominable regime. It was these horrors that played a major role in the establishment by the United Nations (UN)
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of the Jewish State of Israel on Palestinian land in 1948.
 

Japan was occupied by Allied forces; the first time it had ever been occupied by a foreign power; and forbidden to ever again possess an army. Its munitions were destroyed and its war industries were converted to civilian uses. Japan also lost all its overseas possessions, including Manchuria, which was returned to China, and Korea, which was divided into American and Soviet zones of occupation. The emperor of Japan only narrowly managed to avoid execution because the Americans believed that the administration of the country would be facilitated if he appeared to be cooperating with the occupying Allied powers. He was, however, deprived of his political power. Other leading military men were not so lucky, and were executed following quick war-crime trials. Japan remained occupied, predominantly by the Americans, until 1952 when the country became a parliamentary democracy.

The Arab-Israeli Conflict

The establishment of the the Jewish State of Israel in 1948 was met by a joint military offensive of Arab countries including Syria, Egypt, Iraq and Lebanon, only for Israel to reverse the situation and increase the territory it had been given by a third. During this conflict, some 500,000 Palestinians were forcibly expelled or fled in panic in what has since become known as the ‘Nakba’, the Arabic word for catastrophe. The UN partition plan proved to be a terrible failure and laid the foundation for repeated conflicts in the Middle East such as the Arab-Israeli wars of 1967 and 1973. The latter of these led to a global increase in the price of oil that directly contributed to a severe world recession.
 

The Palestinian refugee problem has still not been resolved, with some four million Palestinian refugees currently living around the world and unable to return home. Many believe that the inability to solve this thorny issue is a major factor in the increase in Islamic terrorist acts witnessed globally over the recent decades. Conflict between the Arabs and the newly founded State of Israel – which was, and still is, unwaveringly supported by the United States – has dominated international politics for much of the post-war period.
 

The New World Order

Two major and often interlinked themes dominate global history between the end of the Second World War and the turn of the 21st century. First, the ideological Cold War between Western liberal democracy and communism, a battle in which Europe saw its position at the centre of the world replaced by the USA and the USSR. Second, the efforts of the colonies of the great powers to gain independence.
 

The defeat of fascism and nazism was marred by the entrenchment of communism across the world. The efforts of the communist bloc to spread its ideology would cause further millions of deaths and bring the world to the brink of nuclear war.
 

Winston Churchill had been forced against his will by the circumstances of war to deal with Stalin and was one of the few to understand the danger of communism. Already in 1946 he warned that an ‘iron curtain’ was descending across the continent and exhorted Western powers to contain this ‘enemy of freedom’. During the war, much of Eastern Europe had already come under Soviet domination and the Soviets proceeded to install puppet communist regimes that brutally suppressed any opposition. There was no let-up of fear within the Soviet Union itself, where a paranoid Stalin, tightening his grip, sent forcibly returned prisoners of war and refugees to labour camps, deported Soviet Jews, and embarked on further purges.
 

A less isolationist America funded much of the rebuilding of Western Europe with the Marshall Plan, under which US$12.5 billion of aid (equivalent to over $100 billion today) was distributed over the following six years, leading to an economic boom. Unhappy with this, the Soviet Union attempted to blockade Berlin in 1948, destroying any trust that had been built up between the two blocs during the war in one fell swoop. Western powers reacted to this new situation by creating a defensive military alliance, NATO, in 1949, which the Eastern bloc met in turn with the creation of the Warsaw Pact, their NATO equivalent, in 1955. The arms race that followed was seen by both blocs as a way of protecting their interests.
 

Unable or unwilling to attack each other directly, the two new global powers of the USA and the USSR supported friendly regimes as a way of increasing their global influence. Military conflicts in China, Korea and Vietnam, among others, were all born as a direct result of this support.

Paradoxically, it was Japan and Germany – the aggressor countries that had previously both faced total destruction – which became the ultimate winners in the post-war period. Forbidden from spending money on arms, they both invested money in industry and in rebuilding their infrastructure, and this led to economic booms. Germany’s growth in the 1950s was so strong that it was termed a ‘wirtshaftswunder’, or ‘economic miracle’, and the country became the strongest economy in Europe.
 

In the mean time Japan benefited from American investment following the war, in an attempt by the USA to create an ally in the Far East to counter the growth of communism in neighbouring China. Japan grew to be the second largest economy in the world until it was overtaken by China in the 21st century.

Revolution in China (1949)

Soon after the defeat of Japan, civil war resumed in China between the communists, supported by the Soviet Union, and the nationalists, supported by the USA. Despite initial nationalist successes, the communists rapidly gained the upper hand, forcing Chiang Kai-Shek to resign in January 1949 and retreat with his government and two million people to the island of Taiwan, which was proclaimed the temporary capital of China. His nationalist government was recognised by most Western nations as the legitimate government of China for many decades.
 

In October 1949 Chairman Mao declared that ‘the Chinese people have stood up!’ and proclaimed the People’s Republic of China, as opposed to the Republic of China (run out of Taiwan). A few months later, China and the Soviet Union signed a Sino-Soviet treaty of alliance. Almost half of the world’s landmass was now under communist rule, with China becoming the largest communist state in the world.
 

No sooner had the communists taken power in China than they supported an attempt by communist North Korea to occupy the democratic South Korea in a war that lasted until 1953 and caused four million deaths. South Korea only managed to defend itself through Western support. A decade or so later, China would also give significant support to a communist North Vietnam in its battle to unite with the south.

De-Stalinisation and the Space Race

In Russia, Stalin’s long rule of terror finally came to an end with his death in 1953. He had suffered a stroke and was not attended to for several hours, due either to fear of disturbing him or through wilful neglect.
 

Three years later his successor, Nikita Khrushchev, privately and then publicly denounced Stalin’s tyrannical rule, condemning the crimes which had been committed under Stalin’s leadership, and released a number of political prisoners. He also instigated a policy of ‘peaceful co-existence’ with the West to allow the Soviet Union to develop its economy without having to dedicate so much of its budget to defence. While this policy was welcomed warmly by Eastern European satellite countries, the thaw only went so far: when Hungary called for a multiparty political system and withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact in 1956, Soviet troops invaded.