A Short History of the World

by Christopher Lascelles

  Many Chinese were angered and humiliated by the attitude of non-resistance taken by their government; Kai-Shek understood the country was in no position to fight a superior army and his priority was to destroy the communists first, and only then turn to face the Japanese. His generals eventually forced him to ally with the communists against the Japanese in an uneasy truce104.

  In July 1937, using the pretext of fighting between Chinese and Japanese troops, Japan launched a full-scale invasion of China that started the second Sino-Japanese War and the Second World War in Asia. They easily overpowered the enemy troops and within five months had captured half of the Chinese seaboard in a war of unprecedented brutality. In December 1937, Japanese troops entered the city of Nanking and committed some of the worst atrocities in the war, butchering up to 300,000 men, women and children in an orgy of rape and terror that easily matched the most brutal acts of the Nazis in the years to come. Above all, it showed their utter contempt and disrespect for the Chinese.

  Millions of Chinese fled the Japanese terror by retreating inland while Japan called for a Greater East Asia (consisting of Japan, Manchukuo, China and Southeast Asia) to be integrated politically and economically, under its leadership of course. The problem Japan faced was that while it had thought war against China would be over in three months, its troops became bogged down and it was forced to station an ever larger number of troops there to keep order. China sucked up more of Japan’s resources than China provided, prevented it from focusing its resources elsewhere and forced a resource-poor Japan to rely on the West for supplies.

  The Second World War (1939–1945)

  Over in Europe, by playing on the misery of the German people, as well as on the general fears of a communist takeover, while promising jobs for all, Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist (or Nazi) party captured 18 percent of the popular vote in 1930. Three years later he was appointed Chancellor of Germany, and by 1934 he had gained absolute power. The ‘Thousand Year Reich’ had begun. Over the next few years, Hitler would terrorise his political opponents, eliminate any challenges to his power and, in direct contravention of the Treaty of Versailles, begin re-arming Germany. Between 1936 and 1939, Hitler used the Spanish Civil War, which had ignited in 1936 following a military coup by the old order against a coalition of communist and socialist parties, as a testing ground for his new forces.105

  In 1938, Hitler annexed German-speaking Austria and the German-speaking part of Czechoslovakia, the Sudetenland. Unprepared for war, Britain and France accepted Germany’s move just as they had accepted Japan’s invasion of Manchuria, in return for promises of peace. At the same time, they promised a nervous Poland that they would defend it in the event of a German invasion. By this stage Hitler had already confirmed his plans for world domination; his master plan was to regain Germany’s pre-First World War borders by attacking Poland and striking at France, before turning to defeat the Soviet Union. To facilitate this strategy and maintain the safety of Germany’s eastern borders while attacking France, he signed a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union in which it was agreed that the two countries would divide Poland between them as well as not attack each other.

  On 1st September 1939, Hitler invaded Poland. Standing by its treaty to defend Poland, Britain declared war on Germany with other countries following suit. Within weeks the Soviet Union attacked Poland from the east and annexed Finland and the Baltic States.

  The Katyn Massacre (1940)

  Many Polish prisoners of war were taken by both sides during the Russian and German invasions of Poland. While many of them died of starvation and disease, millions of others died in forced labour and extermination camps. 21,857 prisoners of war were executed in 1940 on Stalin’s orders in a series of massacres known collectively as ‘Katyn’ from the name of the forest in Russia where they took place. The dead were predominantly soldiers but also included university professors, physicians and lawyers. A Soviet Major-General, Vassiliy Blokhin, is said to have personally shot 7,000 of the prisoners with a German-made pistol used for its reliability. When the Germans discovered the mass graves in 1943 during their invasion of Russia, they were blamed by the Soviets for the massacre, and the Soviets ashamedly only finally admitted to the act in 1990.

  It was not until April 1940 that Hitler launched his major offensive on Europe. Denmark, Norway, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands capitulated in a matter of weeks, as did France. Some 225,000 British and 110,000 French troops were forced to evacuate via the port of Dunkirk two weeks before Hitler’s triumphal entrance into Paris on 14th June. Thereafter, France was divided in two, with a collaborationist Vichy French government ruling southern and eastern France, and Germany ruling the northern and western regions.

  With France overwhelmed, Hitler planned to bomb Britain into submission and then invade it. The island only narrowly managed to escape this fate thanks to the inspired leadership of the new prime minister, Winston Churchill – who had been appointed to the role only after Germany invaded Denmark – and to the bravery of a handful of Spitfire and Hurricane pilots in an air war what came to be known as the Battle of Britain. Hitler was forced to cancel his invasion of Britain.

  Inspired by German successes, and desperate for his own empire in the Mediterranean and the Balkans, Mussolini declared war on Britain and France in June and proceeded to invade Egypt and Greece in September and October. Italy also signed the Tripartite Act with Japan and Germany, effecting a military agreement to re-divide the world.106 In typical Italian military fashion, the invasions were fiascos and Mussolini’s troops had to be rescued by the German Wehrmacht. Both territories were strategically important to Germany due to their access to oilfields, so Hitler could not afford for them to be taken by the Allies. While Greece was rapidly brought into submission, the battle for northern Africa lasted until May 1943. The German intervention in Greece caused a three month delay in plans to attack the Soviet Union. The delay would turn out to be of critical importance as the harsh Russian winter became a significant factor in slowing the German advance.

  With most of Europe under German control, in June 1941 Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa, with the plan of forcing Russia into submission. Convinced that Germany only needed to kick in the door to ‘send the whole rotten structure crumbling down’, as he put it, and completely disregarding Germany’s non-aggression pact with Russia, German forces invaded the Soviet Union with three million men in the largest military operation in history.

  Despite multiple warnings of the invasion that were dismissed by Stalin as a campaign of false information, and despite the clear build up of German troops on Russia’s borders, Stalin’s reaction was one of complete surprise. He was so shocked that he hesitated for an entire week before finally heeding the urgent pleas of his generals to take action. With the majority of his officer corps and generals executed in the purges, nobody had been willing to make any decisions without Stalin’s approval, and without specific orders to fire, Soviet troops did not return fire for hours. The result was the capture of a huge number of Soviet troops in the first few weeks, the majority of whom died from starvation and disease.

  Hitler’s armies made incredible headway, penetrating over 300 km in the first five days, and the Luftwaffe reported destroying 2,000 Soviet aircraft in the first two days alone. Stalin’s inability to understand the situation on the ground and his refusal to listen to the advice of his commanders led to a number of devastating defeats for the Soviet forces in the first six months.

  In the Ukraine, the Germans were welcomed as liberators from Stalin’s terror. However, any initial goodwill was squandered by self-defeating German brutalities in the occupied territories. Jews were rounded up and shot, women raped, villages burned and civilians executed. In fact, for many Ukrainians there was little difference between their Soviet oppressors and the German invaders.

  The War in the East

  Hitler’s armies reached the outskirts of Moscow in December 1941, before becoming bogged down by a comb
ination of determined Soviet resistance and the arrival of the harsh Russian winter. With the Germans finally checked, the world’s attention turned to the east where Japan, in ‘a war of self-defence’ as they called it, attacked the American naval base at Pearl Harbour in Hawaii, killing over 2,200 Americans. Having perceived Japan’s imperialism in China and the Pacific as a military threat, the Americans had forbidden the export of oil, iron and rubber to Japan in July 1941, as well as freezing all Japanese assets. Increasingly under the influence of its military, resource-poor Japan had felt that the USA was preventing the country from fulfilling its destiny as leader in Asia. More importantly, with a thirsty war machine to feed, Japan had felt it had no choice but to seize the oil-rich Dutch East Indies, which only the US Pacific fleet and token British forces were preventing them from doing.

  The attack on Pearl Harbour brought the USA – led by President Franklin D. Roosevelt – into the war the next day and, as in the First World War, the resources the USA brought to the Allied cause helped swing the war. Up until this point, though it had provided aid to the Allies, the country had stayed out of the war, having adopted an isolationist policy following the First World War. By mid-December Japan had invaded much of Southeast Asia. The Japanese seized the Philippines from the USA, Indonesia from the Dutch, and Burma, Singapore and Malaya from the Brits, with the intention of conquering China and uniting all East Asia under Japanese domination.

  As Germany had in Europe, Japan rapidly won a series of victories in the east – and with equal brutality. In every territory that the Japanese occupied they carried out massacres and instigated forced labour and death marches from which millions died. Japan’s victims were predominantly Chinese, Indonesians, Koreans and Filipinos, but also included Western prisoners of war who were treated as contemptible for surrendering.

  Regardless of the entry of the USA into the war and a US victory over the Japanese fleet at the Battle of Midway that summer, the Germans continued to make significant headway in Russia, threatening oil supplies from the Caucasus. Churchill became increasingly concerned that if Hitler conquered the USSR, Europe would be dominated and Germany would be free to attack Britain. As a result, he agreed to help the Soviets, despite distrusting them entirely.

  It was not until 1943 that the war eventually turned in favour of the Allies. The most significant event in their favour was the German defeat in the Russian city of Stalingrad (present-day Volgograd) in history’s largest recorded land battle; the battle caused over one million deaths107 in total and saw the first major defeat of Hitler’s armies. The entire Sixth German Army was encircled, reduced and surrendered en masse after Hitler refused to give an order to retreat. After a see-saw series of running battles stretching across the North African desert, the tide also turned in Africa, from where the Allies finally drove the Germans and the Italians in May 1943.

  Driving home their victory, the Allies launched an invasion of mainland Europe via southern Italy that summer with the Italians promptly overthrowing Mussolini and declaring allegiance with the Allies in October 1943. Mussolini was promptly arrested by the Italians and imprisoned, only to be rescued by German SS Commandos. Meanwhile, the Italian government proceeded to change sides and declare war on Germany in October 1943. In June 1944 the Allies organised Operation Overlord, a massive combined invasion of northern France via the beaches of Normandy (D-Day).

  Despite a few more offensives by the Axis powers, including a failed attack on the Western Front through the Ardennes Forest which became popularly known as the Battle of the Bulge, the writing was on the wall for the Germans. The final months of the war in Europe involved a race to Berlin between the Allies and the Russians; the Russian advance notable for the savagery of the fighting and its extreme brutality to German civilians. On 30th April 1945, only two days after Mussolini had been captured and hanged by Italian partisans, Hitler killed himself. A week later Germany surrendered and Europe celebrated VE (Victory in Europe) Day the following day.

  While the war in Europe was over, the War in Asia continued. The Americans eventually gained the initiative in the Pacific and gradually forced the Japanese back, island by island, with terrible losses on both sides. In return for territorial gains, the Soviets were also persuaded to join the war against Japan. In July, the Americans had invaded Okinawa, the southernmost island of the Japanese island chain. Poised to invade mainland Japan and anticipating massive US and Japanese casualties, the US demanded that Japan surrender unconditionally or face destruction. The Japanese predictably refused, only for the emperor to finally surrender unconditionally on 14th August 1945 after the Americans dropped two atomic bombs on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the 6th and 9th of August respectively.

  After the War

  Some 60 million people died as a result of the Second World War. For the first time in history, civilian losses outnumbered military losses. The Soviet Union suffered more than any other nation with some 20 million dead108 and Poland suffered the highest losses per capita (approximately 16 percent), including three million of its Jews – of the estimated six million Jewish dead from the war.

  While it took a long time for the horrors of the Stalinist regime to come to light and to be accepted, and while the atrocities of the Japanese had already been well-publicised, the horrors of the Nazi concentration and death camps shocked the world. Slavs, gypsies, socialists, the mentally ill and gay men and women had been added to the predominantly Jewish camp populations and murdered on an industrial scale, both through gas chambers and through exhaustion, starvation and exposure – an abominable act by an abominable regime. It was these horrors that played a major role in the establishment by the United Nations (UN)109 of the Jewish State of Israel on Palestinian land in 1948.

  Japan was occupied by Allied forces; the first time it had ever been occupied by a foreign power; and forbidden to ever again possess an army. Its munitions were destroyed and its war industries were converted to civilian uses. Japan also lost all its overseas possessions, including Manchuria, which was returned to China, and Korea, which was divided into American and Soviet zones of occupation. The emperor of Japan only narrowly managed to avoid execution because the Americans believed that the administration of the country would be facilitated if he appeared to be cooperating with the occupying Allied powers. He was, however, deprived of his political power. Other leading military men were not so lucky, and were executed following quick war-crime trials. Japan remained occupied, predominantly by the Americans, until 1952 when the country became a parliamentary democracy.

  The Arab-Israeli Conflict

  The establishment of the the Jewish State of Israel in 1948 was met by a joint military offensive of Arab countries including Syria, Egypt, Iraq and Lebanon, only for Israel to reverse the situation and increase the territory it had been given by a third. During this conflict, some 500,000 Palestinians were forcibly expelled or fled in panic in what has since become known as the ‘Nakba’, the Arabic word for catastrophe. The UN partition plan proved to be a terrible failure and laid the foundation for repeated conflicts in the Middle East such as the Arab-Israeli wars of 1967 and 1973. The latter of these led to a global increase in the price of oil that directly contributed to a severe world recession.

  The Palestinian refugee problem has still not been resolved, with some four million Palestinian refugees currently living around the world and unable to return home. Many believe that the inability to solve this thorny issue is a major factor in the increase in Islamic terrorist acts witnessed globally over the recent decades. Conflict between the Arabs and the newly founded State of Israel – which was, and still is, unwaveringly supported by the United States – has dominated international politics for much of the post-war period.

  The New World Order

  Two major and often interlinked themes dominate global history between the end of the Second World War and the turn of the 21st century. First, the ideological Cold War between Western liberal democracy and communism, a bat
tle in which Europe saw its position at the centre of the world replaced by the USA and the USSR. Second, the efforts of the colonies of the great powers to gain independence.

  The defeat of fascism and nazism was marred by the entrenchment of communism across the world. The efforts of the communist bloc to spread its ideology would cause further millions of deaths and bring the world to the brink of nuclear war.

  Winston Churchill had been forced against his will by the circumstances of war to deal with Stalin and was one of the few to understand the danger of communism. Already in 1946 he warned that an ‘iron curtain’ was descending across the continent and exhorted Western powers to contain this ‘enemy of freedom’. During the war, much of Eastern Europe had already come under Soviet domination and the Soviets proceeded to install puppet communist regimes that brutally suppressed any opposition. There was no let-up of fear within the Soviet Union itself, where a paranoid Stalin, tightening his grip, sent forcibly returned prisoners of war and refugees to labour camps, deported Soviet Jews, and embarked on further purges.