A Second War, Profound Atrocities, And a Recovery

8/12/2019 A Second War, Profound Atrocities, And a Recovery

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“The world mustknow whathappened, andnever forget.”

General Dwight D. Eisenhower

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During the 1930s, Japan too moved towardauthoritarian government and a denial ofdemocracy at home

It also launched an aggressive program of territorialexpansion in East Asia

But in sharp contrast to Italy and Germany, Japan’s

participation in World War I was minimal

During the 1920s, Japan seemed to be movingtoward a more democratic politics and Westerncultural values

Universal male suffrage was achieved in 1925

In this environment, the accumulated tensions ofJapan’s modernizing and industrializing processes

found expression

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Trade unionists, feminists, socialists, andcommunists organized and advocated for theircauses. To many people in established elite circles,

all of this was alarming and suggested echoes ofthe Russian Revolution of 1917. A PeacePreservation Law, enacted in 1925, promised longprison sentences or even the death penalty to

anyone who organized against the existing imperialsystem of government or private property.

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As in Germany, however, it was the impact of theGreat Depression that paved the way for harsherand more authoritarian action

In the desperate circumstances of the GreatDepression, many began to doubt the ability ofparliamentary democracy and capitalism

Such conditions energized a growing movement in

Japanese political life known as RadicalNationalism or the Revolutionary Right

The movement’s many separate organizations

shared an extreme nationalism, hostility to

parliamentary democracy, a commitment to eliteleadership focused around an exalted emperor, anddedication to foreign expansion

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Yet no major fascist party emerged in Japan nor didJapan produce any charismatic leader on the orderof Mussolini or Hitler. But in the 1930s, the

Japanese military came to exercise a moredominant role in Japanese political life. Theerosion of democracy and the rise of the military inJapanese political life reflected long-standingJapanese respect for the military values of itsancient samurai warrior class as well as therelatively independent position of the military inJapan’s Meiji constitution. And as in Nazi Germany,

state-financed credit, large-scale spending on

armaments, and public works projects enabledJapan to emerge from the Depression more rapidlythan Western nations.

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Private property, however, was retained, and thehuge industrial enterprises called zaibatsu continued to dominate the economic landscape

Although Japan during the 1930s, shared somecommon features with fascist Italy and NaziGermany, it remained, at least internally, a lessrepressive and more pluralistic society than either

of those European states Japanese conceptions of racial purity and

uniqueness were directed largely against foreignersrather than an internal minority

Nevertheless, like Germany and Italy, Japandeveloped extensive imperial ambitions

Those projects of conquest collided with theinterests of the United States and Britain

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World War II, even more than the Great War, was agenuinely global conflict with independent origins inboth Asia and Europe. Their common feature lay in

dissatisfied states in both continents that sought tofundamentally alter the international arrangementsthat had emerged from World War I. ManyJapanese, like their counterparts in Italy andGermany, felt stymied by Britain and the UnitedStates as they sought empires that they regardedas essential for their national greatness andeconomic well-being.

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World War II began in Asia before it occurred inEurope

Units of the Japanese military seized control ofManchuria in 1931 and established a puppet statecalled Manchukuo

This action infuriated Western powers, promptingJapan to withdraw from the League of Nations andin 1936 to align more closely with Germany and

Italy

By that time, relations with an increasinglynationalist China had deteriorated further, leading toa full-scale attack on heartland China in 1937

Anti-immigration policies in the U.S. also convincedsome Japanese that European racism preventedthe West from acknowledging Japan as an equalpower

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Furthermore, Japan was quite dependent on foreignand especially American sources of strategicgoods. By the late 1930s, some 73 percent of

Japan’s scrap iron and 80 percent of its oil camefrom the United States, which was becomingincreasingly hostile. Thus, in 1940-1941, Japanextended its military operations to the French,British, Dutch, and American colonies of Indochina,Malaya, Burma, Indonesia, and the Philippines inan effort to acquire needed natural resources.

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A decisive step in the development of World War IIin Asia lay in the Japanese attack on the UnitedStates at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii in December 1941

Japanese authorities reluctantly undertook theattack only after negotiations to end Americanhostility to Japanese imperialism proved fruitlessand an American oil embargo was imposed onJapan in July 1941

As a consequence of the attack on Pearl Harbor,the United States entered the war in the Pacific thatonly ended with the use of atomic bombs againstHiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945

Germany, Italy, and Japan (the Axis powers) werepitted in a single global struggle against the U.S.,Britain, and the Soviet Union (the Allies)

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In Europe, war was central to the Nazi phenomenon.Nazism was born out of World War I and the hatedtreaty that ended it. Hitler also stressed the

importance for Germany of gaining “living space” inthe east. Slowly at first and then moreaggressively, Hitler prepared the country for warand pursued territorial expansion.

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A major rearmament program began in 1935

The next year, German forces entered theRhineland, which the Treaty of Versailles had

declared demilitarized In 1938, Germany annexed Austria and the

German-speaking parts of Czechoslovakia

At a famous conference in Munich in that year, the

British and French gave these actions theirreluctant blessings, hoping that this “appeasement”

would prevent an all-out war

But it did not

In 1939, Hitler invaded Poland, an action thattriggered the Second World War in Europe

Quickly defeating France, the Germans launched adestructive war against Britain

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And in 1941, the Nazis turned their war machineloose on the Soviet Union. By then, most of Europewas under Nazi control. In this second war, the

German tactic of blitzkrieg (“lightning war”)coordinated the rapid movement of infantry, tanks,and airpower over very large areas. Such militarytactics were initially successful but the tide began toturn in 1942, when the Soviet Union absorbed theGerman onslaught and counterattacked, sustainingsome 25 million casualties in the process. TheUnited States fully joined the struggle in 1942.Three more years of fighting ensued before a

German defeat in May 1945.

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The Second World War was the most destructiveconflict in world history, with total deaths estimatedat around 60 million, some six times the deaths in

World War I More than half of all casualties were civilians

Partly responsible for this horrendous toll were newtechnologies of warfare – heavy bombers, jet

fighters, missiles, and atomic weapons An almost complete blurring of civilian and military

targets also occurred, as entire cities and wholepopulations came to be defined as the enemy

Deaths in the Soviet Union due to war accountedfor more than 40 percent of the total deaths in thewas – probably around 25 million

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In China, perhaps 15 million deaths and uncountedrefugees grew out of prolonged Chinese resistanceto Japan. During the infamous Rape of Nanjing in

1937-1938, some 200,000 to 300,000 Chinesecivilians were killed and countless women weresexually assaulted. Indiscriminate Germanbombing of British cities and the Allied firebombing

of Japanese and German cities likewise reflectedthe new morality of total war, as did the dropping ofatomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which ina single instant vaporized tens of thousands ofpeople.

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Colonial resources were also harnessed once again

Everywhere, the needs of the war drew largenumbers of women into both industry and the

military The most haunting outcomes of the war was the

Holocaust

The outbreak of the war closed off certain

possibilities, such as forced emigration, forimplementing the Nazi dream of ridding Germany ofits Jewish population

It also brought millions of additional Jews in Poland

and Russia under German control and triggeredvarious schemes for a “Final Solution” to the Jewish

question

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From this emerged the death camps and gaschambers of Auschwitz, Dachau, Bergen-Belsen,an other concentration camps. Altogether, some 6

million Jews perished in a technologicallysophisticated genocide that has haunted the world’s

conscience ever since. Millions more whom theNazis deemed inferior, undesirable, or dangerous –

Russians, Poles, and other Slavs; Gypsies, or theRoma; mentally or physically handicapped people;homosexuals; communists; and Jehovah’s

Witnesses – likewise perished in Germany’s efforts

at racial purification.

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A th d d E i i h d



As the war ended, Europe was impoverished

Within a few years, this much weakened Europewas effectively divided, with its western halfoperating under an American umbrella and theeastern half subject to Soviet control

Europe’s dominance in world affairs was finished

Over the next two decades, Europe’s greatly

diminished role registered internationally when its Asian and African colonies achieved independence

A further outcome of World War II lay in theconsolidation and extension of the communist world

The Soviet victory over the Nazis gave immensecredibility to the communist regime and to itsleader, Joseph Stalin

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Communist parties, largely dominated by the SovietUnion and supported by its armed forces, tookpower all across Eastern Europe, pushing the

communist frontier deep into the Europeanheartland. Even more important was a communisttakeover in China in 1949. The Second World Warallowed the Chinese Communist Party to gain

support and credibility by leading the struggleagainst Japan.

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The horrors of two world wars within a singlegeneration prompted a renewed interest ininternational efforts to maintain the peace in a world

of competing and sovereign states The chief outcome was the United Nations (UN),

established in 1945 as a successor to the moribundLeague of Nations

Further evidence for a growing internationalism layin the creation in late 1945 of the World Bank andInternational Monetary Fund, whose purpose wasto regulate the global economy, prevent another

depression, and stimulate economic growth,especially in the poorer nations

These initiatives shared the dominant presence ofthe United States – a new global superpower

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In the twentieth century’s second half, Europeans

rebuilt their industrial economies and revived theirdemocratic political systems, while the United

States, a European offshoot, assumed a dominantand often dominating role both within Westerncivilization and in the world at large. E

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Th f t h l l i thi t i hi



Three facts help explain this astonishing recovery

One is the apparent resiliency of an industrialsociety, once it has been established

A second factor lay in the ability of the majorWestern European countries to integrate theirrecovering economies

Perhaps most important, Europe had long agospawned an overseas extension of its owncivilization in what became the United States

In the twentieth century, that country served as areservoir of military manpower, economic resources(the Marshall Plan), and political leadership for the

West as a whole

By 1945, the center of gravity within Westerncivilization had shifted across the Atlantic

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The United States was the only major countryphysically untouched by the war. Its overall militarystrength was unmatched, and it was in sole

possession of the atomic bomb, the most powerfulweapon ever constructed.E .N a p p



An early indication of the United States’ intention to

exercise global leadership took shape in its effortsto rebuild and reshape shattered European

economies Known as the Marshall Plan, that effort funneled

into Europe some $12 billion, together withnumerous advisers and technicians

It was motivated by a combination of humanitarianconcern, a desire to prevent a new depression, andan interest in undermining the growing appeal ofEuropean communist parties

This economic recovery plan was successfulbeyond anyone’s expectations

Between 1948 and the early 1970s, WesternEuropean economies grew rapidly

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The Marshall Plan also required its Europeanrecipients to cooperate with one another. Afterdecades of conflict and destruction, many

Europeans were eager to do so.

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The process began in 1951, when Italy, France,West Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, andLuxembourg created the European Coal and Steel

Community to jointly manage the production ofthese critical items

In 1957, these six countries deepened their level ofcooperation by establishing the European

Economic Community (EEC), more widely knownas the Common Market, whose members reducedtheir tariffs and developed common trade policies

Over the next half century, the EEC expanded its

membership to include almost all of Europe,including many former communist states

In 1994, the EEC was renamed the EuropeanUnion (EU)

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In 2002, twelve of its members adopted a commoncurrency, the euro. All of this sustained Europe’s

remarkable economic recovery and expressed a

larger European identity, although it certainly didnor erase deeply rooted national loyalties. Nor didit lead, as some had hoped, to a political union, aUnited States of Europe.

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Beyond economic assistance, the Americancommitment to Europe soon came to includepolitical and military security against the distant

possibility of renewed German aggression and themore immediate communist threat from the SovietUnion

Without that security, economic recovery was

unlikely to continue Thus was born the military and political alliance

known as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization(NATO) in 1949

It committed the United States and its nucleararsenal to the defense of Europe against the SovietUnion, and it firmly anchored West Germany withinthe Western alliance

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Thus, as Western Europe revived economically, itdid so under the umbrella of U.S. political andmilitary leadership, which Europeans generally

welcomed.

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A parallel process in Japan which was under



A parallel process in Japan, which was under American occupation between 1945 and 1952,likewise revived that country’s devastated but

already industrialized economy

In the two decades following the occupation,Japan’s economy grew at the remarkable rate of 10

percent a year, and the nation became aneconomic giant on the world stage

This “economic miracle” received a substantialboost from some $2 billion in American aid duringthe occupation and even more from U.S. militarypurchases in Japan during the Korean War (1950-

1953) Furthermore, the democratic constitution imposed

on Japan by American occupation authoritiesrequired that Japan depend on the U.S. for its

military security

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Because Japan was not allowed to maintain an armyfor war, it spent only about 1 percent of its grossnational product on defense. Without major

defense spending, more capital was available forproductive investment.E .N a p p



STRAYER QUESTIONS

How did Japan's experience during the 1920s and1930s resemble that of Germany, and how did itdiffer?

In what way were the origins of World War II in Asia

and in Europe similar to each other? How were theydifferent?

How did World War II differ from World War I?

How was Europe able to recover from thedevastation of war?

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Documents

A Second War, Profound Atrocities, And a Recovery