Chapter 9
The War of the World
In This Chapter
Learning the secrets of the Germans’ success
Discovering how the tide turned
Witnessing terrible events as the war ended
The Second World War was a global disaster. No war in history has killed so many people in so many different parts of the world. And not just soldiers: Civilians died in their millions, by bombing and by systematic mass murder. When the war began, armies were still sending men into battle on horseback; when it ended, men were sent out to drop the atomic bomb. The Second World War was the central, defining event of the twentieth century. The world still hasn’t fully recovered.
A New Strategy: Blitzkrieg
During the long years of the Depression (see Chapter 8) military strategists had been reflecting on the Great War. They decided that the next conflict was to be a war of movement and the key was to have plenty of tanks and aircraft. A French officer, one Charles de Gaulle, wrote a book about How to Make Best Use of Your Tank but it was a German general, Heinz Guderian, who wrote the book Achtung! Panzer! (Attention! Tank!), which outlined a whole new approach to warfare: ‘Lightning war’ – Blitzkrieg.
Blitzkrieg was based on the idea of winning victory very fast. Here’s how:
1. Attack without warning: Don’t tell your enemy you’re coming by declaring war: That approach is, like, sooo last century.
2. Deploy overwhelming force: Throw in everything you’ve got. Shock and awe, my friends, shock and awe.
3. Send in the dive-bombers: Bomb your enemy’s airfields while their planes are still lined up neatly outside their hangars. Don’t let a single enemy plane take off, not even a paper one. Now you control the skies.
4. Dive bomb the columns of refugees: Doing so spreads panic and clogs up the roads, so your enemy can’t get troops forward. Forget ethics: This is total war.
5. Send in the tanks: Lots of them, moving very fast. They’ll need to be light and able to swamp even the heaviest enemy tanks.
6. Send in the infantry: The enemy will be too dazed from the planes and tanks to put up much of a fight, so you won’t have any trouble.
7. Grab your enemy’s capital: Great for morale. Mission accomplished. And make sure you stage a big victory parade.
The German High Command liked Guderian’s ideas and decided to put them into action. Starting with Poland.
Whirlwind War
The Second World War had two main phases. From 1939 to 1942 everything moved bewilderingly fast: Whole countries fell to the Germans and Japanese, sometimes in a matter of days. From 1942 until 1945 events moved at a much more agonising pace, as the Allies gradually regained the initiative and pushed their enemies back.
Poland pole-axed
The German invasion of Poland followed Guderian’s book (see preceding section) to the letter: The German Air Force (Luftwaffe) destroyed the Polish Air Force while it was still on the ground, Poland’s elite cavalry, who could do a lot of damage to infantry, found themselves charging against tanks, and Poland’s roads were soon full of terrified, dive-bombed refugees. Warsaw was the only fly in Germany’s ointment, which proved tougher than the Germans had anticipated. But then the Russians invaded Poland from the east, as per the terms of the Nazi–Soviet Pact (see Chapter 8 for more on this) and the Poles had to surrender.
Germany and the USSR annexed huge areas of Poland. The country was reduced to a rump in the centre called the General Government and ruled by a singularly unsavoury Nazi, Hans Frank. Thousands of Poles were forced to work in German labour camps. Even more sinister: Frank forced Poland’s huge Jewish community into small, cramped ghettos in each city. They soon found out why.
War in the west
After Poland fell to the Germans (see previous section) Britain and France sat around waiting for something to happen. Someone called this period a ‘phony war’; someone else called it Sitzkrieg. Whatever: This waiting period ended suddenly in April 1940, when the Germans unleashed Blitzkrieg in Norway and Denmark. They were after Scandinavia’s important mineral reserves but Hitler was also angry because the Norwegians had allowed a British ship into their waters, where it raided the German ship Altmark and rescued some 300 British prisoners. The French and British rushed troops to Norway and recaptured the town of Narvik, before they were forced to withdraw. Beaten.
The disaster in Norway brought down the British government. Neville Chamberlain resigned and Winston Churchill became prime minister. The very next day the Germans invaded Belgium and Holland. German bombers launched a devastating raid on the Dutch port of Rotterdam. Then German panzers (tanks) tore through the Ardennes forest into France itself.
Abandon front!
The German attack on France caught the French and British by surprise. They were busy guarding the Belgian frontier, so the Germans came up behind them and cut them off.
In response to the German assault, the French appointed a new commander, Marshal Philippe Pétain, who’d stopped the Germans in the First World War, but even he couldn’t stop them this time. The British and most of the French army were trapped in the port of Dunkirk. The Royal Navy organised a rescue, using hundreds of ships and small craft, even pleasure boats, to get the men off the beaches and back to England. Meanwhile the Germans marched into Paris and France surrendered. France had fallen in a matter of weeks.
Game over? No chance!
Once France had fallen, everyone assumed the war was over. The British didn’t have anything left to fight with and stopping a Blitzkrieg with your bare hands was hardly possible. But to everyone’s amazement, Winston Churchill announced that the war was still on. ‘We shall fight on the beaches,’ he growled, ‘and in the hills. We shall never surrender.’ Brave words, but many people, including members of his own Cabinet, thought Churchill had gone mad. What was Britain going to fight with?
Churchill knew that Britain wasn’t as weak or as alone as people thought:
Britain still controlled the sea: The Royal Navy could sink any German invasion fleet. Much of the German navy had been sunk in the Norwegian campaign.
Britain had a sophisticated network of air defences: The British used radar to detect incoming planes and direct the Royal Air Force’s fast, effective fighter planes to intercept them.
Britain’s empire and commonwealth were at war with Germany, too: Large numbers of Canadian troops were stationed in Britain, and many pilots from commonwealth countries, as well as from European countries the Germans had occupied, were in the RAF. Churchill had plans to carry the war on from Canada if Britain did fall to the Germans.
Battle over Britain
The Germans had expected a nice post-conquest holiday; now they had to cobble together an invasion plan for Britain using small boats and barges: Operation Sealion. Just one problem: What if the RAF bombed them? ‘Leave that to me,’ said Hermann Goering, head of the German Luftwaffe, ‘I’ll wipe out the RAF while they’re on the ground drinking their tea.’ Radar, the British early warning system, got the RAF into the air in time and told them where to find the enemy, but the Germans bombed the RAF airfields so the planes had nowhere to land. Churchill called this campaign the ‘Battle of Britain’ and the RAF came very close to losing it. Then the Germans made their big mistake. They stopped attacking airfields and started bombing London: The Blitz.
The Blitz started when a German bomber got lost and bombed London by mistake, so the RAF bombed Berlin back. Hitler was so incensed, he told Goering to bomb London back to the stone age. The Blitz was terrifying: It destroyed thousands of homes and factories, but also gave the RAF time to recover. In September 1940 the RAF finally defeated the Luftwaffe in a massive showdown battle over the south of England. The Germans lost so many planes that Hitler filed Operation Sealion in the bin. ‘So I can’t invade Britain,’ he thought, ‘but the British can’t harm me either. Time to start planning the real business: Invading Russia.’ Bad mistake.
The Battle of the Atlantic
If you can’t break in, starve them out. Germany tried this tactic with Britain after Hitler cancelled plans to invade it (see previous section). He couldn’t use Germany’s battleships: The British cornered the Graf Spee in Montevideo and the captain had to scuttle her; the Bismarck was sunk at sea after an epic chase, and the Tirpitz was sunk at anchor in a Norwegian fjord by British midget submarines. But Germany’s huge fleet of U boats (unterseeboot – underseaboat, meaning submarine) could sink the merchant ships Britain depended on for food and supplies.
The British tried sailing in protected convoys, but the U boats still sank hundreds of them. US President Roosevelt did what he could to help Britain, even though the United States was neutral. Under his lend-lease scheme, America ‘lent’ Britain pretty much anything she needed to carry on the fight (even though Roosevelt knew the British wouldn’t be able to pay for the goods), which meant even more ships crossing the Atlantic for the U boats to hunt down. Churchill called this life-or-death struggle at sea ‘the Battle of the Atlantic’: The prospect of losing it was truly scary.
Mussolini in a mess
Mussolini wanted to prove that anything Adolf could do, he could do better. In April 1939 he’d conquered the not-exactly-mighty state of Albania (and then found himself having to deal with a very effective Albanian communist resistance movement) and in 1940, just when the French had virtually collapsed (see the earlier section ‘Abandon front!’), he dramatically sent his troops in to invade the French Riviera, occupy Nice, and confiscate the pedalos. He ordered massive celebrations in Rome when Italian troops from Libya advanced over the border into British-run Egypt, but the British, with their African and commonwealth troops, counter-attacked, conquered Abyssinia, restored the emperor (see Chapter 8 to find out what the Italians were doing in Abyssinia) and started driving the Italians out of Libya as well.
Meanwhile Mussolini, one of history’s best examples of a man in denial, decided for his next trick to launch a stunningly successful invasion of Greece. And it was stunningly successful – for the Greeks. They defeated the Italians and chased them out of the country. At which point Hitler looked up from his maps of Russia and told his generals to drop everything and get their men down to Greece pronto.
The German intervention turned the tables on the British. The Germans tore through Yugoslavia and into Greece, where they drove the British out and captured Crete in a daring, though very costly, airborne attack. Hitler sent a special ‘Afrika Korps’ to North Africa under General Erwin Rommel, who immediately pushed the British out of Libya, took, lost, and retook the port of Tobruk, and invaded Egypt.
Operation Barbarossa
Hitler was born to invade Russia. Everything he’d ever believed in, lebensraum (living space) in the east, anti-communism, anti-Semitism, an Aryan ‘master race’, and ‘subhuman’ Slavs, pointed to the idea that Germany should invade Russia, clear it of communists, Jews, and most of its population, and move German settlers in like homesteaders in the American West. Other great rulers had invaded Russia in the past (and you can find out about them in European History For Dummies (Wiley)) and had all come to grief, but Hitler thought this time would be different. He told his generals to prepare for the Mother of all Blitzkriegs. Codename: Operation Barbarossa.
Kick in the USSR
The Germans attacked on 22 June 1941 and caught the Russians by surprise. The British and Americans had warned Stalin the attack was coming but he refused to believe it. The Germans tore through the Russian defences and took thousands of prisoners. City after city fell to the Germans, and they pushed on towards Leningrad and Moscow. Stalin ordered the Russians to burn all the crops and dismantle factory equipment and move it east, across the Urals. Then the Russians set their factories up anywhere they could find, even in the open air, to start producing tanks and planes so they could fight back.
USSR kicks back
The Germans had hoped to reach Moscow and Leningrad before the Russian winter set in, but didn’t make it. They cut Leningrad off and tried to starve it into surrender. Thousands of Leningraders died in a siege that lasted from 1941 to 1944, falling dead in the street from starvation with their relatives often too weak to bury them. The people of Leningrad were reduced to eating paste from their wallpaper. But the Germans could never break through the city’s defences and eventually the Russians were able to get supplies through.Thanks to having to invade Greece and the Balkans (see the earlier section ‘Mussolini in a mess’) the Germans had invaded later in the year than they’d planned, which meant they hadn’t reached Moscow by the time the Russian winter set in. First snow, then a thaw which turned everything to deep mud, and then the real, deep, freezing snow. The Germans had been so confident they’d reach Moscow easily they hadn’t bothered about heavy winter equipment. So when the Russians, who knew how to dress properly for their own climate, launched a devastating counter-attack in front of Moscow, the Germans were sent reeling back. German propaganda films had to launch appeals for winter woollies for the lads.
You Are Free to Do Whatever We Tell You: Occupation
At first the Germans treated various parts of Europe differently according to what they thought of the people there. The Nazis felt contempt for Poles and Czechs, so their countries were cut up, with a part annexed to Germany and the rest ruled directly by a German governor or Gauleiter. In contrast, the Nazis thought that the Scandinavians and the Dutch were racially similar to them, so tried to govern them more lightly. They put Vidkun Quisling in charge in Norway, thinking (wrongly) that the Norwegians would appreciate a local man; ‘Quisling’ came to mean ‘collaborator’ or ‘traitor’. The Germans soon found they had to impose harsh, direct rule on these so-called ‘kindred’ countries.
The Germans regarded the French with a mixture of respect for their great history and culture and contempt that they had lost so quickly. France was cut into three sections. Alsace and Lorraine were annexed to Germany, the whole of northern and southwestern France, including Paris and the whole of the Channel and Atlantic coastline, was occupied by the Germans, and the centre and south of France was a supposedly ‘independent’ state with its own government based at the spa town of Vichy and led by Marshal Pétain. The French authorities in the occupied zone and in ‘Vichy France’ collaborated fully with the Germans, even rounding up Jews and resistance fighters for transportation to the concentration camps.
Not all Nazis were Germans: Collaborators and sympathisers
Plenty of people across Europe came forward to help the Nazis. Many were just as anti-Semitic and anti-communist as the Nazis and volunteered to go to Germany to work in the German war effort. Vicious Nazi militia units were set up in France, Croatia, and the Baltic states to round up Jews and resistance fighters, and even to help run concentration camps. Pro-Nazi volunteers from occupied countries formed their own units of the Waffen-SS (armed SS), the army wing of Hitler’s dreaded elite security corps.
Not all Germans were Nazis: Resistance fighters
Resistance groups fought back in any way they could, blowing up railway lines or important installations, or shooting individual German soldiers. Even Germany had resistance movements, such as the White Rose group, who distributed anti-Nazi leaflets among their fellow students at Munich University. The Nazis countered resistance with savage punishments and reprisals. The White Rose students were guillotined; elsewhere, for every act carried out by the resistance, the Germans rounded up groups of innocent people and shot them. When Czech resistance fighters flown in from England assassinated Reinhardt Heydrich, the SS ‘Protector’ of Bohemia-Moravia (that is, what was left of Czechoslovakia), the Germans chose a Czech village at random called Lidice, and murdered its entire population.
Genocide
The Nazis’ crime against Europe’s Jewish population was so appalling that it helped create a new term: ‘Genocide’ – the murder of an entire people. The Germans had been forcing Jewish people in every country they conquered to wear a yellow star on their clothing and sometimes to live in special ghettos so they could be easily identified and located. In 1942 the Nazis decided on the ‘Final Solution’ to what they called the ‘Jewish Question’. Rather than shipping the entire Jewish population of Europe off to Madagascar or even Palestine, both of which they had considered, they decided to kill them. Those who could do useful work were to be kept alive for a time; others, including the elderly, the sick, the children and most of the women, were to be murdered in gas chambers and their bodies burned in industrial death camps. The best-known was Auschwitz-Birkenau, which was a vast complex including a labour camp and even a prisoner of war (POW) camp, as well as the extermination camp. More typical was Treblinka, which only needed a couple of huts for the guards because everyone who arrived there was to be gassed.
War Around the World
For its first two years the Second World War was essentially a European conflict, even the fighting in Africa. In 1941, however, the Japanese attacked the Allies and the war became truly global.
The rise of the Rising Sun
Japan had allied itself to Germany and Italy in the 1930s (see Chapter 8 to discover why). The Japanese were desperate to expand, partly to cater for their growing population and partly to acquire raw materials. The question was: Should they head north into China or south into the Pacific? At first the ‘head north’ brigade won: The Japanese invaded Manchuria in 1931 and the rest of China in 1937. But conquering China wasn’t the pushover the Japanese had been expecting; they took the Chinese cities, but the Chinese, especially the communists, kept up a very effective resistance in the countryside. To make things worse, in 1939, when the Japanese pushed into Mongolia, near the Soviet border, the Russians sent an army under Marshal Zhukhov to push them back. The two sides fought a battle at Nomanhan and the Japanese lost. As the cost of the long war in China rose, the Japanese government started looking again at those maps of the Pacific.
Bombing
No aspect of the war provoked as much controversy as bombing. The Germans used heavy bombers to attack British cities. At first they aimed at industrial cities such as Manchester or Birmingham in order to disrupt war production. Bombing was also meant to destroy civilian morale: The beautiful centre of Coventry, including its medieval cathedral, was completely destroyed. Bombing did produce enormous suffering and hardship, but it also made people more determined to fight on and not to give in. The Germans reacted in the same way when the British, and later the Americans, started bombing their cities even more heavily than the Germans had bombed Britain. Bombing was carefully planned to create the maximum chaos: Incendiary bombs set buildings on fire and high explosives blew them apart, allowing the air in to fan the flames. Second and third waves of bombers arrived in time to hit the rescue operation after the first wave. The biggest raids of the war, on cities such as Hamburg and Dresden, created terrible firestorms – heat so intense it sucked the oxygen out of the air and created vacuums, which led to burning hot tornados. The Germans accused the Allied bombers of war crimes; the Allies replied that the Germans had started it and, anyway, bombing was necessary to win the war. More recently, historians have questioned how much damage the bombing really did to industrial production on either side. The arguments go on to this day.
This may sound crazy, but let’s attack Pearl Harbor
Attacking in the Pacific was a very high risk strategy. South East Asia had huge reserves of oil and rubber as well as industrial production, but they all belonged to the Europeans who ruled the area. But the French and Dutch had been conquered by the Germans and were in no state to resist, and the British were fighting for their life in Europe, North Africa, and the Atlantic. No, the country the Japanese had to fear was the United States.
The US regarded the Pacific as its own special area. The Americans had taken over some Pacific islands as colonies and had even made Hawaii part of America itself. Roosevelt had warned the Japanese to keep out of the Pacific and he imposed a crippling oil embargo to force them to withdraw from China. By 1941 the Japanese situation was getting desperate: They had to launch an attack now or never. The Imperial Japanese Navy then hit on the idea of attacking the US Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.
The Japanese weren’t fools. They knew they could never win a war with the US. Their thinking went like this:
We must have oil. The European colonies in South East Asia have got it. They’re weak, we’re strong – let’s take it.
Wait a minute, the Americans will intervene to stop us. They are stronger than us and we cannot hope to beat them.
Hang on, we might force them to accept a compromise peace which leaves us with most of what we want. But we’ll only achieve that peace if (a) we’re in a commanding position and (b) the Americans have suffered badly and need a breather.
Therefore, if we conquer lots of European colonies in South East Asia very fast and destroy the American Pacific Fleet, we might be in with a chance. You’ll find the fleet at anchor in Pearl Harbor. Keep them guessing and don’t let them know what’s in the wind.
The Japanese ambassador in Washington was actually on his way to meet the US Secretary of State to talk peace terms when the first Japanese planes swooped down on the US fleet on 7 December 1941, a day, Roosevelt stated, that would live in infamy. And so it has.
Asian Blitzkrieg
As their planes attacked Pearl Harbor, the Japanese launched a series of devastating attacks across South East Asia and the Pacific. They captured the Dutch East Indies, French Indochina, and British Hong Kong. Churchill sent two warships, the Prince of Wales and the Repulse, as a ‘vague menace’ to warn the Japanese not to get ideas about attacking the naval base at Singapore. So Japanese aircraft sank both ships (the Brits hadn’t thought to provide any air cover, which made any menace they posed very vague indeed) and invaded Malaya and Burma. Singapore fell with hardly a struggle when the Japanese captured the city’s water supply. In Burma, the British and their Australian, New Zealand, and Indian troops had to retreat over 900 miles to reach India before the monsoon. They made it – just – and the Japanese took Burma. Meanwhile they were capturing islands across the Pacific, including the Philippines, where they trapped the American garrison in the Bataan peninsula and forced them to surrender. ‘I shall return,’ vowed the US commander, General Douglas MacArthur, but he couldn’t save his men from the nightmare ahead of them.
Did Roosevelt know?
Conspiracy theorists love the idea that Roosevelt knew in advance about the attack on Pearl Harbor and let it happen, so he could take a united American people into war. That Washington knew more about the Japanese threat to Pearl Harbor than they told Admiral Kimmel and General Short, the commanders in Hawaii, is certainly true. Short thought he had to guard against sabotage, so he bunched all his fighter planes together where guards could keep an eye on them: Perfect for the Japanese to destroy them all on the ground. That Washington did its best to put all the blame for the disaster on Kimmel and Short and covered up its own failures is also true. But the evidence points to a mixture of complacency and jaw-dropping incompetence at the Washington end, rather than a deliberate plot to sacrifice the entire Pacific fleet.
Prisoners in the east
The Japanese regarded surrender as shameful: A soldier who hadn’t fought to the death didn’t deserve to be called a soldier. They force-marched thousands of American prisoners in the Philippines in a death march to prison camps, beat, tortured, and murdered Allied POWs and worked them to death as slaves, especially building the notorious Burma railway. By the time the war ended, many Allied prisoners of war were in the same state of starvation and disease as the inmates of German concentration camps.
Strange liberators
The Japanese circulated propaganda claiming they were fighting to liberate the peoples of Asia from foreign colonial rule. They weren’t fighting for a Japanese empire, they said, but to set up a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. In fact this liberation turned out to mean ruthless Japanese exploitation of every area they took for Japanese purposes, and just to terrify their Asian brothers and sisters into doing as they were told, the Japanese army engaged in the systematic rape and murder of civilians.
Turning the Tables
For most of 1942 the situation for the Allies was pretty desperate. But by the end of the year they’d won important victories on all fronts:
The Coral Sea and Midway: Two major naval battles between the Americans and the Japanese fought by planes from the two sides’ aircraft carriers. At the Coral Sea on 9 May each side lost an aircraft carrier, but the Japanese fleet was badly damaged and had to turn back. At Midway Island a month later, American planes sank four Japanese carriers.
Operation Cartwheel: The Americans launched their campaign to retake Japanese-held islands in the Pacific, beginning in August with Guadalcanal in the Solomons. The Japanese fought back very fiercely but the Americans won. From now on the Japanese were in retreat.
Stalingrad: The Germans launched a huge offensive in southern Russia and took Stalingrad – Hitler only really wanted it because of its name. The Russians fought back and trapped the Germans. The fighting was so intense the two sides fought in the rubble, and as Hitler refused to allow Field Marshal von Paulus to be sensible and retreat, the whole German army in Stalingrad surrendered. It was a massive German defeat.
El Alamein and Operation Torch: Rommel invaded Egypt to seize the Suez Canal but the new British commander, Montgomery, counter-attacked at El Alamein and drove him back. Then American troops landed in Algeria and tried to trap Rommel from behind. The American campaign went badly wrong to begin with, but eventually, in 1943, Rommel was forced to withdraw from North Africa altogether.
1943: Slogging away on all fronts
We can see now that 1942 was the turning point; at the time no one could see an end to the war. In 1943 the Allies stepped up their bombing raids on Germany, even breaching two German dams and devastating Hamburg, but the Germans didn’t surrender. German U boats sank over fifty ships in two British Atlantic convoys. The Japanese were fighting the Australians in New Guinea and the Americans in the Solomon Islands. The British launched a big offensive in Burma and then got pushed back again. Specially-trained British jungle fighters known as chindits (from the chinthe – a half-lion-half-dragon beast seen in Burmese temples) landed deep behind Japanese lines in Burma, but so few of them came back it wasn’t clear that the attack had been worth the cost.
The two biggest developments in 1943 were:
The Battle of Kursk: A huge tank battle in Russia which finally broke the strength of the Germans.
Italy falls: The Allies landed in Sicily and the Italian mainland. ‘At last!’ say the Italians, as they overthrow Mussolini and lock him up. Hold on: The Germans moved in, rescued Mussolini, and stopped the Allies in their tracks. The Allies did make progress in Italy but it was so hard and slow you’d hardly notice.
1944: Second front now!
In 1942 and 1943 the Russians were still doing most of the fighting and Stalin demanded to know when the British and Americans would land in France and open up a second front against the Germans. The British and Canadians had tried landing at Dieppe on the French coast in 1942 but it was a disaster. Still, some people in Britain demanded a ‘Second Front Now!’ and suspected the Allied governments were deliberately holding back to weaken the Russians. In fact invading France was difficult and complex, but eventually, on D-Day, 6 June 1944, American, British, and Canadian troops landed in Normandy and began the slow business of liberating western Europe from German rule.
The Germans fought back fiercely but once the Allies had broken through they were able to drive the Germans out of France, liberate Paris, and push into Belgium. The Western Allies attempted a daring airborne attack in Holland, but the British landing at Arnhem were slaughtered by a German SS-panzer division. Liberating western Europe was a long, slow haul as the Western Allies advanced into Germany from the west while the Russians crossed into Poland and German-occupied eastern Europe.
As the Allied troops advanced, they began to uncover the awful truth of what the Germans had been doing in Europe. The Russians found Auschwitz and the other death camps in Poland; the Americans liberated Dachau and the British Bergen-Belsen. The Germans had forced their prisoners to walk hundreds of miles on death marches away from the Russians to camps in the west, so the Allies found scenes of indescribable squalor and misery. The Allies determined to make the Nazis pay for these crimes against humanity.
1945: Endgame in Europe
By April 1945 even Hitler knew it was all over. The Russians were in Berlin and had raised the Red Flag over the Reichstag. Russian troops had met up with the Americans deep in southern Germany. Still refusing to believe that he might in some way have been responsible for the disaster that was happening to Germany (he preferred to blame the German people for not living up to his own high standards, if you please), Hitler married his girlfriend, Eva Braun, and then they both killed themselves. A few days later the German government surrendered.
As Germany began to collapse, Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill met at the Russian Black Sea resort of Yalta and agreed to divide Europe between them, with a communist zone in the east and a non-communist zone in the west. ‘You will allow people to hold free elections, won’t you?’ said Roosevelt to Stalin. ‘But of course,’ said Stalin. Well, Roosevelt believed him. By the time the leaders next met, at Potsdam outside Berlin, Roosevelt was dead, and Harry S. Truman was president. Truman wasn’t as star-struck by Stalin as Roosevelt had been, and protested vigorously when it was clear Stalin was going to impose a communist government on the Poles whether they liked it or not. When they talked about how to defeat Japan, Truman let slip ever-so-casually that the Americans had a powerful secret weapon that would change everything. Stalin wasn’t too worried: He’d already heard all about this weapon from his agents in America. The Japanese hadn’t, though.
Endgame in Japan: Hiroshima
Fighting for each Pacific island was costing huge numbers of American lives. Taking Okinawa, the last island before Japan itself, cost the Americans nearly 50,000 casualties. The Japanese were launching devastating kamikaze (suicide) bombing missions, flying aircraft full of fuel straight into American ships. The Americans blanched at the idea of how many men would be killed invading Japan itself. Also, by then the Allies had found out how the Japanese had been maltreating prisoners, so no one had much sympathy for them. The Russians had agreed to declare war on Japan and were hoping for large areas of Asia. All of these considerations weighed with Truman as he took one of the most controversial decisions in history: To drop the atomic bomb.
On 6 August 1945 the crew of the Enola Gay dropped a single atom bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. That bomb destroyed the entire city. People were burnt to cinders where they stood, and thousands died in the months – and years – that followed from the effects of radiation. Still the Japanese did not surrender, so three days later the Americans dropped a second bomb, on the city of Nagasaki. Finally, on 14 August the Japanese government surrendered and the Second World War was over.
End of Round One. Stand by for Round Two
The end of the Second World War led almost immediately to a period of even more dangerous conflict and tension. The Nazis had always predicted that the Western Allies would soon fall out with the Russians and events after 1945 quickly proved them right. Both sides kept their troops in Europe, and the Allied positions across Germany at the end of the Second World War soon became the front line in the Cold War that followed.
Weapons of mass destruction
The Germans had perfected deadly Vengeance Weapons, which they launched against Britain as the Allies advanced in 1944. The V1 was a flying bomb with its own engine which could, with a bit of luck, be shot down, though enough of them hit their targets to cause massive damage. But you couldn’t shoot down a V2 rocket: It exploded without any warning at all. The attacks only stopped when the Allies captured the launching grounds. The Allies knew a good idea when they saw one, so the Americans were delighted when the German engineer responsible for the rockets, Wernher von Braun, came over and offered to work for them. Meanwhile, American scientists working for the secret Manhattan Project were completing the world’s first atomic bomb. It wasn’t long after the war before scientists thought: ‘What if you took one of these rockets and attached an atomic bomb to it?’ The Second World War was the origin of the post-war arms race.