Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia From the Bronze Age to the Present (58 page)

In light of the damage to the European economy inflicted by the First World War and the postwar economic punishment of Germany and Austria and, it appears, by the closing of the Soviet Union (including Russia and most of Central Eurasia) to world commerce, it is not surprising that the Great Depression, a worldwide economic recession worse than any previously known, struck at the end of 1929.
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Millions of people lost their savings, their jobs, and their homes, and were on the edge of starvation. Unlike earlier recessions, the Depression lasted for many years in the countries hit hardest by it. As a direct outcome of both the Depression and the continuing effects of the sanctions imposed after the First World War, in Germany a new government was elected, completely “democratically.” The new chancellor, Adolf Hitler, leader of the National Socialist (or Nazi) Party, turned his adopted country and Europe as a whole toward war once again. Yet he was not alone in his mania.

In the early twentieth century, intellectuals and artists in the West thought it was worth fighting for or against various solutions to political, intellectual, and artistic issues. For different reasons, many of them rejected the sociopolitical order of the world of their day and preferred instead a totalitarian system. Their number included several of the most prominent English-language writers of the early to mid-twentieth century.
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Of them, Ezra Pound very publicly supported Fascism and Nazism through the Second World War and until his trial afterward.
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Pound’s close friend T. S. Eliot was very strongly influenced by French fascist ideas, and both of them, and D. H. Lawrence as well, were openly anti-Semitic.
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Even W. B. Yeats was attracted to the idea of violently overthrowing the sociopolitical order of Western Europe in the 1920s and 1930s, which, like many other leading intellectuals of the day, he considered to be completely corrupt and beyond salvation short of total war. These writers shared the view that great art could not be produced under the conditions of the world in their time and drastic measures were necessary to produce conditions that, they thought, would be amenable to art. The next great war was inevitable, and as before many actually welcomed it.

The Second World War in the Eurasian Periphery

Although once again Eurasia—especially Europe and East and Southeast Asia—was the central locus of the war, this time it was more nearly a global conflict. It not only devastated Northeast Asia, East Asia, Southeast Asia, and Oceania (1937–1945) in addition to most of Europe and North Africa (1939–1945), but it also extended into the colonial territories of the Americas and Australia and included combatants from all corners of the globe.

In East Asia, the war was presaged in 1931–1932 by the Japanese conquest of Manchuria, which had earlier been the easternmost region of Central Eurasia, but by that time had been largely Sinified by Chinese colonists. They established the puppet Manchurian kingdom of Manchukuo in 1932 and placed P’u-i, the deposed last ruler of the Manchu-Chinese Ch’ing Dynasty, on the throne. The local Japanese military leaders in the colonies of Korea and eastern Manchuria were responsible for beginning the Second World War there. They and other pro-militarists increasingly took control over the Japanese government, bringing the country under de facto military rule. A minor military incident at Marco Polo Bridge in Peking (July 7, 1937) provided the excuse for full-scale war. By 1939 the Japanese occupied the Chinese coast and northeast China, as well as the rest of Manchuria.

In August 1939 the Soviet Union and Germany concluded a nonaggression treaty, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which involved the partition of Poland between them. When the two countries invaded Poland in September, Britain and France, Poland’s allies, declared war on Germany. The Second World War thus broke out in Europe. In the summer of 1940 the Germans began the aerial bombardment of Britain in preparation for a planned invasion. Following radical changes in Hitler’s relations with the Soviet Union, he launched an invasion of the country on June 22, 1941. By the end of 1941 the Nazis occupied nearly all of continental Western Europe, extending eastward as far as the Western Steppe zone region of the Don River and the Black Sea coast, and excepting only neutral Sweden, Switzerland, and Spain, as well as the Axis states of Italy and southern France. The Axis powers also held much of North Africa.

In June 1941 the Japanese completed their military occupation of French Indochina. That summer the Western nations, including the United States (which was then still officially neutral),
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froze Japanese assets abroad and declared a trade embargo, ostensibly in an attempt to force the Japanese to leave China. The Japanese military, which was by that time running both the war and the government, depended completely on imported oil; the only option open to them was to go to war with the United States, Britain, and the Netherlands, who controlled the oil supplies in Asia.
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On December 7, 1941, the Japanese bombed the naval base of Pearl Harbor in the American colony of Hawaii,
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killing more than two thousand sailors and other personnel and destroying part of the Pacific Fleet. This act finally brought the United States to declare war on the Axis powers.
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It must be stressed that the Pearl Harbor attack was not isolated or poorly planned, or haphazard in any way, as it is sometimes represented. Precisely simultaneously with the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the Japanese also attacked the British colonies of Hong Kong and Malaya and invaded the Philippines, which was then still an American colony.
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By May they had defeated the Americans and taken the Philippines.
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In fifty-five days the Japanese marched south through the Malay Peninsula, defeating all resistance, and captured the strategic port city of Singapore.
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Moreover, only a month after Pearl Harbor, in January 1942 they invaded the British colony of Burma. By March they occupied Rangoon, and by April they took Central Burma, cutting the Burma Road, the sole remaining Allied land link with China. By May the Japanese had driven the remaining Allied forces from Burma.
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All of these countries were at the time colonies of the Europeans and Americans. China too had been partially colonized. It was essentially the colonized Chinese coast, and China’s colony of Manchuria, that the Japanese captured during the war. Thailand was at the time the only independent, uncolonized country in South and Southeast Asia. Rather than taking Thailand by force, the Japanese signed an alliance (December 21, 1941) with the country. The entire war in the East was thus fought over the countries of Southeast Asia and the Pacific that had been colonized or had come under European domination at the end of the period of commercial expansion begun by the Portuguese four centuries earlier.

After the Americans joined the war effort, the Allies slowly began pushing the Axis back. On the western front, the Americans and British attained naval and air superiority over the Germans in each theater of operations. In November 1942 Anglo-American forces landed in French Morocco and French Algeria. The Axis forces capitulated in French Tunisia in May 1943. From North Africa, the Allied forces invaded Italy in July 1943, but though they had achieved air superiority the campaign there was slow and difficult and did not measurably contribute to the eventual Allied victory over Germany.

The tide of the war on the western front turned decisively when on June 6, 1944, the Allies landed a major invasion force on the beaches of Normandy.
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Their troops included Americans, British, French, and others from occupied European countries, especially Poland, and soldiers from colonies or former colonies of the Allied countries in the Americas, Africa, and Australasia. They advanced rapidly. On August 15, 1944, U.S. and French forces landed on the southern French coast between Nice and Marseilles and continued their offensive northward up the Rhone River valley. The Allies coming from Normandy captured Paris on August 25, Belgium on September 4, and Luxembourg on September 11.
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While the Western Allies invaded the Axis realms from the west and south, on the eastern front the Soviets stopped the German armies in several long, bloody siege battles, the most crucial of which took place at Stalingrad (before Stalin, Tsaritsyn; now Volgograd) from August 1942 to February 1943. More Soviet victories followed.
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With the assistance of military, industrial, and other supplies sent by the Americans and British, the Soviets pressed westward toward Germany.

The Allies were much aided in the war by two technical developments unknown to the Axis: they broke the top-secret communications codes of both the Germans and the Japanese
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and by 1940 had developed a functioning radar defense system. These were essential elements in the rapid Allied victory. By the end of January 1945, the Allies had completed recovering the territory they had lost in the strong German counteroffensive attack known as the Battle of the Bulge (December 16–26, 1944). They quickly broke the remaining German resistance and marched into Germany from both east and west. On April 28, 1945, Benito Mussolini, the Fascist leader of Italy, was captured and shot to death by Italian anti-Fascists near Lake Como. Two days later, on April 30, 1945, Adolf Hitler committed suicide in Berlin.
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In East Asia the Second World War ended the Japanese colonial empire. American forces captured Shanghai and other Chinese coastal cities, and sent troops to Peiping (Beijing) and Tientsin (Tianjin). After the Americans dropped the atomic bomb on the southwestern Japanese cities of Hiroshima (August 6, 1945) and Nagasaki (August 9, 1945), the Japanese surrendered unconditionally on August 14, 1945 (formally signed on September 2, 1945), and the American military occupied Japan. On September 8, 1945, American forces occupied the southern part of Korea, which country was divided into an American-administered zone in the south and a Soviet-administered zone in the north.
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The foundations for many more decades of misery in Korea had been laid by the Western and Soviet victors over the former Japanese colonial rulers there.

The Second World War in Central Eurasia

In eastern Central Eurasia, the Battle of Nomonhan (Khalkhyn Gol) developed out of skirmishes along the unfixed border between Inner Mongolia—then under Japanese rule—and the Mongolian People’s Republic, which was allied with the USSR and had allowed the entry of some 30,000 Soviet troops into Mongolia. Hostilities began in spring 1939 and by July had become full-scale war. The Soviets crushed the Japanese forces by the end of August. A cease-fire was signed on September 16, and a nonaggression treaty was signed in May, 1941.
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It was observed by the two nations until the last months of the war.

Western Central Eurasia did not escape the war. German forces had invaded deep into Ukraine and the south Russian steppe, reaching as far east as the Volga and as far southeast as the Caucasus. When in late 1942 the Germans entered the Kalmyk Republic, some Kalmyks encouraged cooperation with them as a way to achieve national liberation from the brutal Stalinist regime. A small number of them became attached to the German army and served as a rear guard during the German retreat. When the Soviets returned, the Kalmyk Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic was abolished (December 27, 1943), the Kalmyk nation was accused of disloyalty, and the entire Kalmyk Mongol population was exiled to “special settlements”—essentially concentration camps—in Siberia, Central Asia, and Sakhalin Island.
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Similarly, immediately after the Soviets recaptured the Crimea from the Germans, in May 17–18, 1944, they shipped the entire Crimean Tatar population to Central Asia in cattle cars. It is believed that as many as 200,000 perished in the process. Tatars who had been in the Soviet army during the war were sent to join their countrymen in the Central Asian “special settlements.” The government aimed to erase the Crimean Tatars’ history, culture, language, and identity.
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