To this day, the Second World War is the most extreme example of ‘total war’, in which civilian resources and infrastructure are entirely mobilised as part of the war effort, and are also treated by the enemy as legitimate military targets. For perhaps the first time in history, civilian deaths far outnumbered military deaths, and altogether as many as 60 million people may have lost their lives, with many millions more lost to famine and disease.
Hitler craved a Greater Germany, uniting the many areas across Central Europe that were home to ethnic German populations. He aimed to gain Lebensraum (living space) for Germans in western Russia, and to conquer further areas to the south for economic resources such as oil. At first he was hugely successful, seizing a large part of Europe between 1939 and 1941. However, despite driving British forces from the European mainland, and also conquering much of the European parts of the Soviet Union in 1941–2, he was unable to end the war.
The new British government under Winston Churchill was not interested in a compromise peace, so the conflict went on until the actions of the Soviet Union and the United States could play a decisive role. Crucially, the Soviet regime did not respond to serious battlefield defeats following the German invasion of 1941 by offering peace terms, as it had done in 1918, partly because Hitler had made it clear that his aim was to either enslave or annihilate all the non-‘Aryan’ populations to the east, most of whom were Slavs, regarded by the Nazis as Üntermenschen (‘sub-humans’).
In the East, Germany’s ally Japan won major victories at the expense of the British, French, Dutch and American empires in South-East Asia and the Pacific in 1941–2. Like the Germans, it was never able to call a halt and capitalize on its gains. The surprise attack on the American Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941 that brought the USA into the war ruled out any remaining chance of a limited war. The USA and its Allies demanded nothing less than the unconditional surrender of Germany and Japan.
The superior industrial and manpower resources of the Allies proved to be decisive. The USA was by far the world’s biggest economy, while in the Soviet Union industrial production, particularly of arms, was relocated safely to the east, beyond the Ural Mountains. In addition, Stalin could muster millions of infantrymen to launch wave after wave of counter attacks. By 1945 the Soviets had driven westward into Germany itself. On D-Day, 6 June 1944, Anglo-American-Canadian forces mounted the biggest sea-borne invasion of all time, to land on the Normandy beaches of France and push east towards Germany. Meanwhile, Allied bombers targeted German cities, regardless of their military importance, leaving hundreds of thousands of civilians dead.
On the other side of the world, the Americans drove the Japanese back across the Pacific while the British blocked the Japanese attempt to invade India. In 1945, as Soviet forces fought to enter Berlin, Hitler committed suicide. Germany surrendered in May. The Japanese staged a fierce resistance in the Pacific, and might have fought harder still had the Allies invaded their home islands. However, the situation changed utterly after 6 and 9 August, when the Americans dropped two atomic bombs on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with death tolls in single explosions of around 70,000 and 35,000 lives respectively. Japan surrendered six days later.
The US development of the atomic bomb cost billions of dollars and drew on immense scientific, technological, industrial and organizational resources. It was an example of how total war meant mobilizing whole societies, not just men of fighting age, as governments increased their power and directed economies as never before. Conscription was extended, while women were recruited into workforces to an unprecedented extent, with effects felt long after the end of the war. Governments also had to maintain social cohesion and morale, employing methods such as propaganda and police surveillance.
‘I ask you: Do you want total war? If necessary, do you want a war more total and radical than anything that we can even yet imagine? . . . Now, people, rise up, and let the storm break loose.’
Josef Goebbels, Nazi propaganda minister, in February 1943, after the tide had turned against Germany
In many ways, the Second World War transformed the world. The scale of the conflict had been far greater than in the First World War, as had the damage to civilian life. Millions of refugees were left trying to find shelter and new homes in the aftermath. In terms of geopolitics, the United States and the Soviet Union became the world’s two post-war superpowers, while the European imperial powers were greatly weakened, losing most of their overseas possessions over the next two or three decades.
Perhaps the most enduring legacy is that the idea of ‘total war’ has been normalized. The wars and civil wars fought across much of the world since 1945 have seen many wholesale attacks on civilians committed as instruments of policy, the widespread use of rape as a means of punishment or repression, and the enlistment and indoctrination of children to fight.