Aryan state A core component of the German Nazi Party’s political ideology was that German greatness stemmed from the fact that Aryans represented a superior human race, and that Germans were the purest of all Aryan peoples. Such ideas of racial superiority were a core element of fascism.
Beer Hall Putsch Inspired by Italian fascist Benito Mussolini’s successful takeover in Italy in 1922, in November 1923 roughly 2,000 German Nazi Party supporters, led by Adolf Hitler, attempted to overthrow the Weimar government of Germany. The coup failed and led to Hitler’s conviction and imprisonment, but it also brought him considerable fame among German extremists.
Cold War This term describes the competition between the United States and the Soviet Union from after the Second World War (1939–45) to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989–91. The term ‘Cold War’ highlighted that the conflict was more about ideas and political allegiance among allies than about warfare. The Cold War was nonetheless very hot in places such as Korea, Angola and Afghanistan.
The Manhattan Project In 1939, the United States launched a top-secret research programme to investigate the potential of atomic weapons. By 1942, in cooperation with the British and Canadians, the project was well under way: by 1945 it had succeeded in producing the Trinity test bomb and the weapons used against Nagasaki and Hiroshima. In doing so the project launched the Atomic Age and set the stage for the Cold War.
Mujahideen This is an Arabic term that translates loosely as “holy warrior” – designating someone who fights against the enemies of Islam. The term gained wide recognition during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s, when the US government funded, armed and advised the anti-Soviet Mujahideen, who eventually drove out the Soviet forces.
Social Darwinism This concept, which argues that superior societies ‘naturally’ subjugate inferior ones, first gained currency in the late 19th century to justify European colonialism. In the 20th century, however, it was increasingly used to justify anti-Semitism, racism, eugenics and genocide – not only in fascist states, but also in some democracies.
Treaty of Versailles The Treaty of Versailles of 1919 between the Allied Powers and Germany is one of the most controversial topics of the 20th century. The demands that Germany accept guilt for the First World War (1914–18), pay substantial reparations, cede lands and demilitarize are all considered factors that helped facilitate the rise of German fascism and set the world on the path to the Second World War (1939–45).
Third Reich The period from the rise of the German Nazi Party in 1933 to the surrender of Germany in 1945 is often dubbed the ‘Third Reich’, meaning ‘third nation’ or ‘third empire’. The term was chosen to invoke the idea that the German people had returned to greatness under the Nazis.
Viêt Minh The Independence Party of Vietnam, the Viêt Minh, was formed in 1941 to oppose French colonialism. During the Second World War (1939–45), they fought against the Japanese and their Vichy French Allies. With Soviet support, over the next four decades they would fight against the French, US and Chinese in pursuit of Vietnamese independence.
Between 1839 and 1895 China lost three wars and considerable autonomy to Western powers and Japan. In 1898 the young Manchu emperor, advised by reformers, called for dramatic modernization. But Empress-Dowager Cixi and her conservative allies blocked the proposals, arrested the reformers, put the emperor under house arrest, promoted an anti-foreign atmosphere and encouraged the Chinese to organize militias. Many Chinese resented the impact of western-financed modernization, especially railways, on their lives. Floods, famine and drought affected parts of northern China. The ensuing tensions sparked the Boxer Rebellion in 1900 to drive foreigners out of China. The Boxers, a peasant, anti-western, anti-Christian secret society, attacked foreigners and Chinese Christians in northern China, occupied Beijing and besieged foreign embassies, while the Qing declared war on foreign powers. But British, American and French forces routed the Boxers and occupied Beijing, while the Qing was made to pay another huge indemnity to Western powers and permit foreign military forces in China. Europeans talked openly of dismantling China; Russians used the rebellion to occupy Manchuria. The rebellion’s failure left China in an even weaker position than before and primed for more far-reaching revolution.
The Boxer Rebellion was a violent uprising in response to Western pressure on China, but government-supported attacks on foreigners led to humiliating defeat.
Defeat of the Boxers led to frantic efforts at modernization. Fearing China might soon be divided into colonies, the Qing rulers raised military spending, strengthened provincial governments, abolished the 2,000-year-old Confucian examination system, sent 10,000 pupils to Japan and set up western-style schools that enrolled only a fraction of China’s school-age children. The reforms were often slow and ineffective. In 1911–12 a more radical revolution swept away the Qing dynasty and established a republic.
EMPRESS DOWAGER CIXI
1835–1908
Powerful Manchu imperial concubine who unofficially led China’s Qing dynasty (1875–1908)
KANG YOUWEI
1858–1927
A major Chinese reformer whose advice to the emperor sparked the 100 Days of Reform that helped inspire the reactionary Boxer Rebellion in response
Craig Lockard
The ‘Society of Righteous and Harmonious Fists’, known as the Boxers, were local farmers and peasants whose livelihoods had been lost through imperialism and a series of natural disasters.
After being shocked out of isolation by American gunboat diplomacy in 1853, Japan began a breakneck pursuit of political and industrial modernization. Crucial to the process was the building of a modern army and navy. This undertaking required access to resources and markets not available within its borders. Like the western powers, Japan looked to imperial conquest to help fuel and fund its expansion, setting its new military sights on Korea and northern China. Meantime, Russia was seeking to anchor its expansion eastwards. Port Arthur, a warm-water port on the Yellow Sea that could be accessed via the recently completed trans-Siberian railway, proved exactly the location the Russians sought, setting Russia and Japan on a collision course. After diplomatic efforts failed, Japan launched a combined land and sea attack in February 1904, sinking and damaging several Russian ships. By August it had destroyed much of Russia’s Pacific fleet and seized Port Arthur. Russia responded by sending its Baltic fleet to the Pacific. Despite significantly outnumbering their Japanese adversaries, the new Russian fleet was nearly annihilated in the decisive Battle of Tsushima on 27–29 May 1905. The Russo-Japanese war represented the first ‘modern’ naval conflict and paved the way for the Japanese annexation of Korea and invasion of China.
In 1904 and 1905, Japan stunned the world by defeating Imperial Russia in a series of land and naval engagements.
At the beginning of the 20th century, Russian desires for a warm-water port on the Pacific and Japanese aspirations for control over Korean and Manchurian resources exploded into warfare. Western observers expected the Russian juggernaut easily to defeat the upstart Japanese state. Japan’s decisive land victories and near-total destruction of the Russian navy upset both the global balance of power and western assumptions about racial superiority.
TŌGŌ HEIHACHIHŌ
1848–1934
Admiral in the Japanese Imperial Navy
WILGELM VITGEFT
1847–1904
Admiral in the Imperial Russian Navy
STEPAN OSIPOVICH MAKAROV
1849–1904
Vice Admiral in the Imperial Russian Navy
Jonathan Reynolds
The Japanese navy’s defeat of its Russian counterpart in May 1905 occurred in the Tsushima Strait between Korea and Japan – and sent shock waves around the world.
The bloodiest battle in the history of mankind was waged from 1 July to 13 November 1916, as the British and French fought tooth and nail to recover territory in France from the invading Germans. While it was two years into the First World War (1914–18), ‘the Somme’ marked the loss of a generation’s innocence as eyes were opened to the terrible nature of modern warfare. Men on both sides died, not through lack of professionalism or spirit on their part, but because the world’s military leadership still underestimated the strength of dug-in positions and the dangers of assaulting them. In the first afternoon, the British sustained more than 55,000 casualties. Brave men charged into razor wire and the teeth of machine guns by the thousand; one division, the Eighth from III Corps, suffered 80 per cent casualties in the battle’s first ten minutes. The Allies endured, regrouped, stood fast against German counter-attacks and tried again, and again, and again. Forward progress came slowly but steadily, and when November’s cold halted the campaign, both sides breathed sighs of relief and let the battle die with the Allied trenches having advanced roughly 8 km (5 miles).
The Battle of the Somme raged for four-and-a-half months, resulting in more than 1 million casualties, so that roughly 25 km (15 miles) of trench could advance 8 km (5 miles).
Attitudes towards the First World War changed when it became clear how wasteful inflexible strategies were when they clashed with industrialized firepower. The British army was largely composed of the ‘pal battalions’, young volunteers who had joined up in groups from neighbourhood clubs and football or rugby teams. When word, and even documentary footage, of the Somme’s butchery reached the Home Front, a nation was left asking high command and their government one terrible question about their sons’ deaths: ‘Why?’
DOUGLAS HAIG
1861–1928
Field Marshal and leader of the British Army during the Somme
ROBERT GRAVES
1895–1985
British novelist, soldier and poet, injured at the Somme
Russell Zimmerman
Scarlet corn poppies, which grew after the war on fields ravaged by conflict, became a potent symbol of the youthful lives lost in battle.
The name Adolf Hitler has become synonymous with evil, racism and totalitarian dictatorship; to much of the world, Hitler has become a symbol of oppression and failure, but to modern neo-Nazis and others who still follow his ideology, he is seen as something of a martyred patron.
Hitler’s early years were marked by poverty and a growing public hatred of liberals, Jews and Marxists. He was also privately disdainful of and bitter towards Christianity, the Catholic church in particular, for most of his adult life.
A frustrated veteran of the First World War, Hitler ranted against Germany’s leadership to gain popular support, blaming the nation’s economic woes on the external pressures of the Treaty of Versailles and on internal betrayals by imagined Jewish conspiracies. His National Socialist German Worker’s Party – the Nazis – built a political platform on shared hatred and bitterness, growing stronger until Hitler became the most powerful man in Germany (partially through the violent oppression of his rivals). The Third Reich was born, and he dreamed of an empire that would last a thousand years.
The German state under Hitler was uniquely celebrative of the ‘German’ spirit, while simultaneously oppressive of outside influences or those who disagreed with precisely what being a good German meant. A fine example of this is the Nazi Party’s schizophrenic celebration/suppression of music and other art, with loyal party members being allowed to flourish, and talented artists who disagreed with the Nazis being harshly censored or punished. Hitler and Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels adored Beethoven and Wagner as masters of good German music, and even found some common ground with them regarding Beethoven’s Teutonic pride, and Wagner’s anti-Semitism.
Hitler took a fierce pride in the German – Aryan – state that flourished under him, and soon ordered the recovery of ground lost in the First World War and, in fact, the taking of new territory entirely. Hitler’s aggressive expansion soon prompted the outbreak of the Second World War. The Nazis swiftly occupied most of Western Europe, spreading their doctrine at bayonet-point and grinding dissention beneath the treads of their tanks. Free to act upon the promises and hatreds that had brought him to power, Hitler oversaw the deaths of millions in the infamous concentration camps.
While the Second World War initially went well for Hitler and his allies, another of his decisions, Operation Barbarossa – the betrayal and invasion of the Soviet Union – marked the war’s turning point. Fighting on two fronts, Nazi Germany began to crumble. Hitler’s madness led to increasingly erratic and irrational decisions until the Reich fell. In a bunker beneath Berlin, Hitler escaped capture by ending his own life.
Russell Zimmerman
20 April 1889
Born in Braunau am Inn, Austria
1907
Twice fails to gain entry into the Vienna Academy of Art
1914-18
Serves in the German Army during the First World War
1923
Stages a failed Bavarian coup, the Beer Hall Putsch
1925-26
Publishes volumes one and two of Mein Kampf, a political manifesto and autobiography
30 January 1933
Inaugurated as Chancellor of Germany
30 June–2 July 1934
Orders the Röhm-Putsch (Night of the Long Knives), a series of perhaps 90 political murders carried out to secure his power
1939
Invades Poland, launching the Second World War
March 1941
Featured on the cover of Captain America Comics No.1, getting punched in the face in the titular superhero’s patriotic premier
1944
Survives multiple assassination attempts amid Nazi Germany’s downward spiral, many by his own people
30 April 1945
Commits suicide with his new bride, Eva Braun, while Russian forces stormed Berlin
The watershed moment of the first atomic bomb – 8:15am on 6 August 1945 – came to symbolize not only the beginning of the end of the Second World War, but also the opening of a nuclear Pandora’s box. This sparked the start of an arms race that showed man to be his own greatest enemy. US President Truman gave the order to unleash atomic destruction upon Japan after the country refused to respond to the Potsdam Conference’s ultimatum of surrender. As a military and industrial target, Hiroshima was intentionally spared conventional bombing so that the results of the atomic weapon could be accurately measured in the aftermath. Developed through the $2 billion Manhattan Project, the first bomb, named ‘Little Boy’, exploded with the radiation and heat energy equivalent to 16 kilotons of TNT. The bomb was dropped from the Enola Gay, a B-29 Superfortress aircraft. Hiroshima was decimated in literally a flash; a 6,000°C (10,830°F) fireball and shockwave of pressure obliterated everything within a radius of 1.6 kilometres (1 mile). Damage from the blast encompassed a 7-kilometre (4.4-mile) area from the epicentre of the blast and people continued die from the effects of radiation poisoning, days, weeks, months and even years later.
The first use of a nuclear weapon helped end the Second World War, but launched an era of potential nuclear conflict and the Cold War.
The challenge of Hiroshima’s recovery was twofold. The bomb was so devastating that both physical and human resources were vaporized, leaving victims with nowhere to turn for help; 90 per cent of the medical professionals were dead or disabled. Wilfred Burchett, the first Western journalist to have documented the effects of the ‘atomic plague’, was quickly censored from publishing his reports. As a result medical personnel were not able to treat victims adequately.
JULIUS ROBERT
OPPENHEIMER
1904–67
American physicist, most famously known as the ‘father of the atomic bomb’ for his leadership on the Manhattan Project
WILFRED BURCHETT
1911–83
Australian journalist, the first foreign correspondent to enter Hiroshima and report on the devastating effects
PAUL TIBBETS
1915–2007
US pilot whose plane, named after his mother, dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima
Rita R. Thomas
The US bombings of Japan are the only two uses of nuclear weapons in war.
The 1948 war was a complicated result of European colonialism and racism and new national aspirations. Jewish settlement in Palestine was driven by well-established fears of anti-Semitism in Europe. During the Second World War, extremist Jewish groups in the region used bombings and attacks to try to force the British to allow more Jewish emigration. The post-war flood of Jewish refugees from Europe and elsewhere heightened Jewish–Palestinian tensions, with both populations committing atrocities. The newly established United Nations proposed the creation of two states with economic union. Most Palestinians rejected the plan because the proposed Palestinian borders were fragmented and separated by a single Israeli territory. Local conflicts grew into civil war, which burgeoned as newly independent Arab nations joined the conflict. The heavily outnumbered Israeli army was supplied with weapons and supplies by communist Czechoslovakia, allowing them to fight poorly coordinated Arab forces to a stalemate. When Egypt and other Arab states aligned with the Soviets in the 1950s, the United States began to support Israel. Arab-Israeli conflicts in 1967 and 1973 were flashpoints of Cold War tensions, and the plight of Palestinian refugees would become a focus for global Muslim discontent.
A minor 20th-century war in terms of casualties, the 1948 Arab–Israeli War was among the most politically complex and influential conflicts of the century.
Colonised by the British in 1917, the region of Palestine became a destination for those seeking to create a Jewish state. This desire collided with the aspirations of local Palestinian and regional Arab populations to create independent states of their own following the Second World War. A UN partition plan proposed politically independent but economically interdependent states, but the partition collapsed in the face of local conflict that grew to include the newly independent Arab states.
MENACHEM BEGIN
1913–92
Israeli militant and politician
YASSER ARAFAT
1929–2004
Palestinian militant and politician
Jonathan T. Reynolds
The war made refugees of populations on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute and had repercussions that lasted for decades.
During the First Indochina War (1946–54) the French attempted to maintain their colonial grip over Vietnam against the communist-led Viêt Minh but got bogged down in a ‘quicksand war’. To regain the initiative, in early 1954 they stationed large forces in a remote valley along the border with Laos in hopes of weakening Viêt Minh operations. But they underestimated Viêt Minh capabilities and commander Võ Nguyên Giáp’s formidable logistical preparations, which built roads into Dien Bien Phu to transport troops, food and weapons, particularly artillery. By March 80,000 Viêt Minh troops surrounded the French garrison and its 15,000 defenders. Three months of fierce fighting, including artillery disabling the airstrip for relief fights, devastated the garrison, leaving only 3,000 healthy defenders. In early May the Viêt Minh overran the base. The fighting had left some 3,000 French dead and 5,000 wounded; the Viêt Minh lost 8,000 and 15,000 were wounded. The Viêt Minh force-marched 6,000–8,000 French prisoners 800 kilometres (500 miles) to prison camps; only 10 per cent survived. The humiliating defeat stunned the French public and caused the government to collapse. The French abandoned their efforts, negotiated a peace agreement at a conference in Geneva in 1954, and went home.
The Battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954, in which communist forces overwhelmed a key French garrison, ultimately brought an end to French colonialism in Vietnam.
This battle dramatically changed history. The resulting Geneva agreements divided Vietnam into two countries: communist-ruled North and pro-western South. Cold War tensions and nationalism ensured further conflict. The United States, which had given massive aid to the French against the Viêt Minh, now assumed a more prominent role in Vietnam’s affairs, resulting in what Americans call the Vietnam War. By 1975 US forces were gone and Vietnam was reunited under communist control.
GENERAL VÕ NGUYÎN GIÁP
1911–2013
Vietnamese general who led communist resistance against the Japanese in the Second World War and French forces in the First Indochina War
HO CHI MINH
1890–1969
Most important builder of Vietnamese communism and leader of North Vietnam (1945–69)
Craig Lockard
Colonial rule began to seem unsustainable when, in a battle with major historical implications, a western army was humiliated by a formidable colonial independence force in March–May 1954.
Afghanistan spent the late 1970s begging the Soviet Union for aid in a bitter sectarian conflict. While the civil war provided the USSR with its pretence for action, in many ways the ensuing invasion had imperialist underpinnings: to spread the Soviet bloc into the area, impress Middle Eastern nations and gather natural resources. Rather than pacifying the country, the heavy Soviet military presence encouraged the rebellion, now united against a common foe to spread. Soon, the fundamentally atheist Soviets found themselves opposed by Muslim freedom fighters who were receiving support from the Soviets’ secular Cold War rivals (these Mujahideen insurgents were commonly trained by Western CIA, MI6 and SAS advisors, for instance). Though often lacking in organization, the Mujahideen used sabotage, assassination and other guerrilla tactics to resist their occupiers, and war dragged on, involving hundreds of thousands of casualties. The momentum of the conflict began to shift in the mid-1980s when the United States provided ground-to-air Stinger missiles, taking away the Soviet advantage of air superiority. The Soviets spent the latter half of the decade shifting the burden of maintaining security back to the Afghani army, prior to withdrawing completely.
The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979, but remained bogged down in guerrilla war for nearly a decade before a humiliating withdrawal.
The Soviets’ invasion of Afghanistan has been called ‘Russia’s Vietnam’. In both cases, the guerrilla resistance was able to recruit based on powerful ideological differences, to blend with the civilian populace and often to leverage the brutality of the invaders against them by turning that, too, into a recruitment tool. Many of the Soviet disadvantages would come back to haunt a new wave of soldiers decades later, with NATO military operations in Afghanistan encountering the same frustrations.
HAZIFULLAH AMIN
1929–79
Afghan prime minister who urged early Muslim agitation
CHARLES WILSON
1933–2010
American politician responsible for ‘Operation Cyclone’, the CIA operation that supplied military equipment to the Mujahideen
AHMAD SHAH MASSOUD
1953–2001
Afghan politician and freedom fighter during the Soviet occupation
Russell Zimmerman
US military hardware combined with Mujahideen passion brought down the USSR.
