Transcript 10.8 Lecture – Europe and Japan in Ruins

10.8 Lecture – Europe
and Japan in Ruins
I. The Character of Warfare
A. Figure at close to 60 million deaths.
1. Six to eight times more than in World War I.
2. Over half of the dead were civilian victims of massacres,
famines, and bombs.
3. Soviet Union lost between 20 million and 25 million
people.
4. China suffered 15 million deaths.
5. Poland lost some 6 million, of whom half were Jewish.
a. The Jewish people lost another 3 million
outside Poland.
6. Over 4 million Germans and over 2 million Japanese
died.
7. Great Britain lost 400,000 people, and the United States
lost 300,000.
8. Almost every family mourned one or more of its
members.
B. Many parts of the world were flooded with refugees.
1. Many refugees never returned to their homes, creating
new ethnic mixtures more reminiscent of the New World
than of the Old.
C. Change in moral values.
1. Belligerents even labeled their own ethnic minorities as
“enemies.”
2. Another reason for the devastation was the appearance
of new technologies that carried destruction deep into
enemy territory, far beyond the traditional battlefields.
D. The War of Science
1. Chemists found ways to make synthetic rubber from coal
or oil.
2. Physicists perfected radar, which warned of approaching
enemy aircraft and submarines.
3. Cryptanalysts broke enemy codes and were able to
penetrate secret military communications.
4. Pharmacologists developed antibiotics that saved the
lives of countless wounded soldiers, who in any earlier war
would have died of infections.
5. Aircraft development was especially striking.
a. As war approached, German, British, and
Japanese aircraft manufacturers developed fast,
maneuverable fighter planes.
6. Military planners
a. Expected scientists to furnish secret weapons
that could doom the enemy.
b. President Roosevelt received a letter from physicist
Albert Einstein, a Jewish refugee from Nazism, warning of
the dangers of nuclear power.
1. Fearing that Germany might develop a nuclear
bomb first, Roosevelt placed the vast resources of
the US government at the disposal of physicists
and engineers, both Americans and refugees from
Europe.
i) By 1945 they had built two atomic
bombs, each one powerful enough to
annihilate an entire city.
E. Bombing Raids
1. German bombers
a. Lacked a strategic bomber force capable
of destroying whole cities.
1. British and Americans excelled.
2. British Air Staff
a. Operations should now be focused on
the morale of the enemy civilian population
and in particular the industrial workers.
b. Bombing raids against Germany killed
600,000 people – more than half of them
women and children – and injured 800,000.
3. Air strategists
a. Break the morale of the German people,
they failed.
b. The population remained obedient and
hard working.
c. The only effective bombing raids were
those directed against oil depots and
synthetic fuel plants.
F. Devastation in Europe
1. Where rapid military movements and air power carried
the war into people’s home.
2. The war was far more terrifying than their worst
nightmares.
3. Armies swept through the land, confiscating food, fuel,
and anything else of value.
4. Bombers and heavy artillery pounded cities into rubble,
leaving only the skeletons of buildings.
a. Air-raid sirens awakened people throughout
the night.
b. Millions fled their homes in terror, losing their
families and friends.
5. Women also played major roles in the war effort,
replacing men in fields, factories, and offices.
6. The Nazis, in contrast, believed that German women
should stay home and bear children, and they imported 7
million ‘guest workers’ – a euphemism for war prisoners
and captured foreigners.
7. A Harvest of Destruction
a. Paris, Rome, and Brussels – remained largely
undamaged by war.
b. The Battle of Britain left huge areas of London little more
than blackened ruins.
c. Warsaw, the capital of Poland, was almost completely
destroyed.
1. In 1939, Warsaw had a population of nearly 1.3
million.
2. When Soviet soldiers entered the city in January
1945, only 153,000 people remained.
d. Tons of Allied bombs demolished 95 percent of the central
area of Berlin.
e. Civilians had no water, no electricity, and very little food.
1. The displaced people included the survivors of
concentration camps, prisoners of war, and refugees
who found themselves in the wrong country when
postwar treaties changed national borders.
i) Wandered across Europe, hoping to find
their families or to find a safe place to live.
8. Misery Continues After the War
a. The Fighting had ravaged Europe’s countryside, and
agriculture had been completely disrupted.
1. Most able bodied men had served in the military,
and the women had worked in war production.
b. Thousands died as famine and disease spread through
the bombed-out cities.
1. First postwar winter brought more suffering as
people went without shoes and coats.
G. The Home Front in the United States
1. The United States flourished during the war.
2. Americans felt no bombs, saw no enemy soldiers, had almost
no civilian causalities, and suffered fewer military casualties than
other belligerents.
a. The economy went into a prolonged boom after 1940.
b. Produced twice as much as all the Axis powers
combined.
c. Jobs were plentiful and opportunities beckoned.
d. Breadlines disappeared, and nutrition and health
improved.
e. Many Americans later looked back on the conflict as
the “good war.
3. World War II also did much to weaken the hold of traditional
ideas, as employers recruited women and members of racial
minorities to work in jobs once reserved for white men.
a. At the beginning, many men resisted the idea that
women, especially mothers of young children, should
take jobs that would take them away from their families.
1. As the labor shortage got worse, employers
and politicians grudgingly admitted that the
government ought to help provide day care for
the children of working mothers.
4. The war loosened racial bonds as well, bringing hardships for
some and benefits for others.
a. 1.2 million African-Americans migrated to the north and
west.
b. The southwest Mexican immigrants took jobs in
agriculture and war industries.
1. No new housing was built to accommodate the
influx of migrants to the industrial cities, and as a
result many suffered from overcrowding and
discrimination.
c. Much worse was the fate of 112,000 JapaneseAmericans living on the west coast of the United States;
they were rounded up and herded into internment camps
in the desert until the war was over, ostensibly for fear of
spying and sabotage, but actually because of their race.
H. War and the Environment
1. Battles scarred the landscape, leaving behind spent
ammunition and damaged equipment.
2. The bombing of cities left ruins that remained visible for a
generation or more.
a. Much of the damage eventually was repaired,
although the rusted hulls of ships still darken the
lagoons of once-pristine coral islands in the Pacific.
3. The main cause of environmental stress was not the
fighting but the economic development that sustained it.
a. Barracks, shipyards, docks, warehouses, and
other military construction sprouted on every
continent.
4. As war industries boomed so did the demand for raw
materials.
5. Except for the destruction of cities, much of the war’s
impact was simply the result of industrial development only
temporarily slowed by the Depression.
I. Postwar Governments and Politics
1. In countries like Germany, Italy, and France, a return to
the old leadership was not desired.
a. Much of the old leadership was in disgrace.
2. After the war, the Communist Party promised change,
and millions were ready to listen.
a. In both France and Italy, Communist Party
membership skyrocketed.
b. Anxious to speed up a political takeover, the
communists staged a series of violent strikes.
c. Alarmed French and Italians reacted by voting
for anticommunist parties.
d. Communist Party membership and influence
began to decline.
1. Declined even more as the economies
of France and Italy began to recover.
3. The Nuremburg Trials
a. War Crimes
1. During 1945 and 1946, an International Military
Tribunal representing 23 nations put Nazi war
criminals on trial in Nuremberg, Germany.
2. 22 Nazi leaders were charged with waging a war
of aggression.
3. They were also accused of committing “crimes
against humanity” – the murder of 11 million
people.
b. Found guilty
1. Sentenced to life in prison or received the death
sentence.
2. Some committed suicide to avoid prison or the
death sentence.
3. The bodies of those executed were burned at
the concentration camp of Dechau.
i) They were cremated in the same ovens
that had burned so many of their victims.
J. Postwar Japan
1. Two million lives had been lost.
a. The country’s major cities, including the capital,
Tokyo, had been largely destroyed by bombing
raids.
b. The Atomic Bomb had turned Hiroshima and
Nagasaki into blackened wastelands.
2. Occupied Japan
a. General Douglas MacArthur took charge of the
US occupation of Japan.
b. Demilitarization – disbanding the Japanese
armed forces.
1. Japanese only had a small police force.
2. Brought war criminals to trial.
c. Democratization – the process of creating a
government elected by the people.
1. In February 1946, he and his American
political advisers drew up a new constitution.
2. It changed the empire into a constitutional
monarchy like that of Great Britain.
i) Went into effect on May 3, 1947.
d. MacArthur was instructed to broaden land ownership
and increase the participation of workers and farmers
in the new democracy.
1. Put forward a plan that required absentee
landlords with huge estates to sell land to the
government.
2. Sold land to tenant farmers at reasonable
prices.
3. Gave workers the right to create
independent labor unions.
K. Occupation Brings Deep Changes
1. The new constitution was the most important
achievement of the occupation.
2. A long Japanese tradition had viewed the emperor as
divine.
a. Was also an absolute ruler whose will was law.
b. The emperor now had to declare that he was not
divine.
c. Power was dramatically reduced.
d. Emperor became largely a figurehead – a
symbol of Japan.
3. New Constitution
a. Real political power in Japan rested with the people.
1. The people elected a two house parliament,
called the Diet.
2. All citizens over the age of 20, including women,
had the right to vote.
3. Led by a Prime Minster chosen by a majority of
the Diet.
b. Constitutional bill of rights protected basic freedoms.
1. Article 9 – stated that Japanese could no longer
make war.
2. They could fight only if attacked.
4. In September 1951, the United States and 47 other nations
signed a formal peace treaty with Japan.
a. Six months later, the US occupation of Japan was over.
b. The Japanese agreed to a continuing US military
presence to protect their country.
c. The United States and Japan, once bitter enemies, were
now allies.
5. The Soviet Union and the United States emerged from the war
as the world’s two major powers.
a. They also ended the war as allies.
b. It soon became clear that their postwar goals were very
different.
c. This difference stirred up conflicts that would shape the
modern world for decades – THE COLD WAR.