With France and Britain too afraid to stop him and Russia secretly plotting alongside, Hitler felt a reassuring confidence that led to the fateful autumn day of September 1, 1939, when Germany invaded Poland. Only then, as the Poles crumbled under a vicious Blitzkrieg onslaught, did France, Great Britain and it’s Commonwealth Dominions declare war on Germany. France and Britain had pledged mutual assistance with Poland, but they did little to stop the Germans racing across Poland; and within a week the powerful German Army, led by it’s mechanized Panzer divisions had reached Warsaw. To make matters worse for Poland, Russia invaded from the east on September 17 and Poland was conquered in about a month.
Even as Hitler turned his attention, and mighty war machine, north and invaded Denmark and Norway, France and Britain were still hesitant. But the plan was becoming clear to even the most simple political observer. Hitler was trying to eliminate the weakest of his targets to isolate better defended nations. All of Europe was on alert, but Germany’s unprecedented military buildup left others at a disadvantage; and having met little resistance, Germany was nearly free to plunder at will. Nazi confidence was soaring when Hitler launched a massive attack on Belgium, the Netherlands and France on May 10, 1940. Europe, and soon the world was plunged into the deadly sequel to the Great War.
Prior to the invasion of France much of the rest of the world was beginning to take the threat seriously, and in the United Kingdom Winston Churchill succeeded the man sometimes referred to as the Prince of Appeasement, Neville Chamberlain, as Prime Minister; and quickly employed bulldog tenacity to transform Great Britain into a formidable fighting force. Still, unlike the stalled invasion that led to trench warfare in the First World War, French and English forces couldn’t stop the Germans in their drive to the west; with the British Army and part of the French Army being driven back against the sea where they had to be evacuated from Dunkirk, losing massive amounts of much needed heavy equipment.
The German assault was relentless; and revolutionary, like the Mongols of centuries before. Blitzkrieg, as the devastating combination of speed and power came to be known, made the German army faster, stronger, and better coordinated than any of the armies they met in battle. Like the Poles, Danes and others before them, the French and British were caught flat-footed by the savage speed of the invading army slamming into their disarrayed defenses, and as the German onslaught continued to tear across the countryside, France surrendered on June 22.
In a matter of month’s Hitler had conquered much of continental Europe. But was he satisfied? Could a man that woke each morning dreaming of building a German empire, and was still obsessing with Aryan world domination when he went to sleep, be satisfied? Could Hitler ever be satisfied? Seemingly no, there would always be another target, there would always be another impediment to his new world order, there would always be a fight to define the true essence of his character. The antagonism and hatred that drove Adolf pushed him to his next conquest across the English channel. To subdue the island nation that had assembled the largest empire the world has ever seen, Hitler depended on softening up British defenses through the air. But his Luftwaffe air force was tracked by improved British radar and eventually defeated in the critically important air campaign known as the Battle for Britain.
And though they were the last western European power to seriously challenge Hitler’s ambition of empire, the British were not completely alone. They were receiving assistance from past and present members of their world empire such as Canada, Australia and India. And though the Royal Navy was stretched thin trying to cut-off German supply lines and keep the Nazis from crossing the Channel, the United States was also willing to help, for a price. That price included handing over some foreign military bases to the U.S., providing more global reach for the emerging world power from the Western Hemisphere, in exchange for fifty destroyers. Meanwhile, by the summer of 1940 the theater of war had spread around the Mediterranean and Hitler’s duplicit partner Mussolini led Italy to some initial success before being beaten back and having to rely on German reinforcements to regain control of the area.
But those German reinforcements would be needed elsewhere. The arrogance and immaturity that continually pushed Hitler to fight caused him to make a decision that may well have sealed his fate, even as he was getting a taste of defeat with the Battle of Britain setback. Despite having his hands full in the west, Hitler turned on his co-conspirator Stalin; biting off more than even he could chew in the process. And as if fighting much of Europe weren’t already too much trouble, after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in December of 1941, Hitler invited further punishment by declaring war on the United States. Undoubtedly, the success of Japan’s surprise attack on the U.S. naval base in Hawaii gave Hitler more confidence in Japanese victory, but he most certainly underestimated the resources at America’s disposal, much as he underestimated the resilience of the vast Russian territories.
Hitler believed Russia was especially vulnerable due to internal stresses under the iron fist of Stalin. But vulnerable or not, he had long planned to invade Russia because of the belief they just couldn’t stand up to his super-race of Germans. Paradoxically however, instead of being the wedge that split Russia apart, Hitler’s attack helped to unify Russia under the tyrannical Stalin, who from 1936 to 1938 had ordered mass executions of those he thought might oppose his fanatical regime, in a campaign known as the Great Purge. Hundreds of thousands had been executed or died in labor camps, including many military leaders, and altogether tens of thousands of military personnel.
The vast majority of Stalin’s Great Purge victims didn’t receive trials, although Stalin did stage some show trials of the most publicly visible victims. But show trials aimed at justifying murder was all they’re reported to have been, as the defendants were tortured and threatened that their families would also be tortured and executed if they didn’t confess. After receiving the false confessions to justify the murderous rampage, Stalin went back on his word and had the families of the accused executed as well to limit the possibility of reprisal. And as if to reinforce his image as an egotistical self-serving monster, Stalin even had all of the old Bolshevik leadership from Lenin’s time executed.
Hitler said that once the front door to the house of Russia was kicked in the rest of the rotten structure would come crashing down. How could it not? Hitler wondered, consumed as it was with the dreaded disease of communism. His invasion of Russia was launched on June 22, 1941 and, true to Hitler’s prediction, met with tremendous early success. The superior equipment and strategy of the German forces allowed them to smash through Russian defenses and quickly encircle entire Russian armies that were either captured or destroyed on the field.
The battles of the Eastern Front of WWII were the most massive military land engagements in history, fought by hundreds and even thousands of tanks and aircraft on either side. The destruction, casualties, and number of prisoners of war was astounding. Within months the Germans had destroyed most of the Russian Army, taken more than a million prisoners, and Moscow and Leningrad were threatened with imminent capture. But while the Central German Army Group was rolling toward Moscow, Hitler intervened and diverted some of the central tank divisions north and south just as it looked like Moscow would fall.
The diversion by Hitler gave Russian reinforcements from the east time to reach Moscow. And in classic fashion, weather again appeared to be one of Russia’s best weapons, as the Germans ran out of time and found themselves trapped in a bitter Russian winter that brutalized both the Russians in the besieged cities of Leningrad and Moscow and the isolated German invaders. By December the Germans were fifteen miles from the Kremlin in Moscow before a Russian counterattack drove them back.
Following the stall of German momentum the war in the east continued to rage for three more years, as the deadliest theater of combat in human history with the German Wehrmacht and Soviet Red Army exchanging offensives and repeatedly encircling and annihilating opposing units. In that war of attrition, after having nearly collapsed in the early months, it was the Soviets that eventually turned the tide and gained a lasting advantage as German armament production and personnel couldn’t keep pace with the massive losses abroad, damage from Allied bombing raids at home, and shortages of oil and other vital foreign materials. Withered by continual fighting, bad weather and logistical shortfalls, the Germans eventually could no longer stand up to the increased Russian resistance, and in 1943 the Soviets began a steady drive toward the Nazi homeland.
Even as the Germans and Russians hammered away at one another, serious political questions remained for the other Allies. After Russia had conspired with Germany and invaded Poland, and knowing how oppressive Stalin’s Communism was, perhaps the Allies should have let Russia fight Germany alone on the Eastern Front. It’s obvious Stalin didn’t want to help the Allies, and it was advantageous for the other Allies to let Germany and Russia wear each other out, because Stalin couldn’t be trusted and it gave the Allies in the west time to regroup. But, unifying opposition against the common German enemy, and not wanting Russia, with its vast resources, to fall into German hands, or into another alliance with Germany, Britain and the United States did help Russia with supplies, and Britain fought alongside Russia near its southern border.
In conjunction with Germany’s mounting losses and fading fortunes in the east, Allied air attacks were softening Germany for a massive seaborne invasion much as Hitler had expected to do when he initiated the Battle of Britain. Allied forces finally landed on the beaches of Normandy in northern France on what’s remembered as D-Day: June 6, 1944. The two million man Allied invasion force in the west pushed its way across France and into Germany as the Soviets launched Operation Bagration in the east with two and a half million men and six thousand tanks. After almost a year of heavy fighting, the Allies in the west met up with the advancing Russians at the Elbe River in April of 1945. And having learned of the humiliating death of Mussolini at the hands of captors, Hitler committed suicide on April 30, 1945 as the Soviets were taking control of Berlin. Hitler’s war in Europe essentially died with him, though the war in the Pacific between the Allies and Japan would drag on for months longer.
Altogether, World War II eclipsed World War I as the deadliest war in history, with sixty million people believed killed in all combat theaters including Asia. Of the sixty million killed only about a third of those were reported to be military personnel killed in combat, the remaining forty million people were civilians or military personnel that died of accident, disease, or mistreatment. Massive numbers of prisoners from the Eastern Front were forced into slave labor for the Nazis, and in Russian Gulags. Both Germany and Russia enslaved huge groups of people from opposing and contested territories. Millions died from starvation, disease, beatings, executions and exhaustion in the horror of captivity.
All told, about three million Russian prisoners of war died in German captivity, and six million Jews were exterminated in Hitler’s campaign for racial purity. Hitler’s wars first started with control of Germany and then spread to the rest of Europe, and he first stripped Jews and other minorities of property and rights and deported them. When he invaded Poland he had them rounded up into ghettos. Often times the invading Germans rounded up all the Jews in captured villages and shot them near open pits or trenches that had been dug as defensive works.
While the German military was waging conventional war on nations, Hitler’s SS was waging a race war, following the army and systematically locating and exterminating Jews and other minorities. But, still not satisfied by the massive carnage they were inflicting, Hitler and his henchmen created large death camps that were designed much as modern slaughterhouses to maximize throughput. Victims were shipped in by the truck and train loads just as cattle are to be executed and disposed of. The extermination camp at Auschwitz alone was capable of killing as many as ten thousand people per day. Altogether, Nazi death camps killed an estimated twelve million people. About half of the victims were Jewish and the rest were Poles, political or military prisoners, and other minorities such as Gypsies, gays, and Jehovah’s Witnesses.
The extermination camps were almost exclusively in occupied Poland which was multi-ethnic and had Europe’s largest Jewish population prior to Hitler’s War. Though Jews had faced death and oppression in Eastern Europe on numerous occasions in the past, they had been forcibly evicted from many Western European countries like England long before the twentieth century. As death camp victims left the trains that carried them to their doom they were separated between those that looked like they could be useful for forced labor and others. The others, largely young children, their parents, especially mothers, and the elderly were often herded over to the gas chambers where they were told to strip down for a disinfecting shower.
While entering the deadly chambers people often realized they weren’t showers, but death traps, and the Nazis beat them and forced them inside before locking the heavy doors behind them. The screams and cries for help from children and grandparents alike would last a few minutes as the poison gas poured into the room. After the herds of people choked on the suffocating poison, the warm corpses were carried out of the gas chambers where ‘barbers’ cut the longer hair of the females for use as mattress stuffing or cloth, and ‘dentists’ hammered gold fillings from the wet mouths of the recently deceased.
Gas chambers were the pinnacle of Nazi controlled extermination techniques; as the Nazis employed many methods of mass murder, from shooting and hanging to burying alive and killing in the gas chambers. The gas chambers were so brutally efficient that the crematories often couldn’t keep up, and disposal of the bodies was always a challenge. The horrid duty of encouraging cooperation in undressing and entering the death chambers and disposing the bodies was often left up to other death camp inmates. Those inmates were so broken down by beatings, exhaustion, fear and grief that they lost what decency and conviction they had. Even when they saw acquaintances and family members they were too helpless to intervene. One man even continued on as if nothing were the bother even as he happened upon his own wife’s body as he carried victims from the gas chamber to a burn pit.
Those kept as slaves were savagely beaten and starved so that they could offer no resistance. Those that survived as Nazi slaves were so frail and degraded they looked like ghosts. Young women were raped with impunity and then sent to the gas chamber or worked and starved to death. Many Jews were even tortured and killed in Nazi experiments like those conducted in laboratories today. Josef Mengele, known as the Angel of Death, had a particular fondness for dwarfs and twins in his savage experiments. Mengele shared Hitler’s delusion of Aryan racial superiority and treated his victims as nothing more than material for experimentation.
While at Auschwitz Mengele injected chemicals into the eyes of children in hopes of changing their eye color, he also performed amputations and exploratory surgeries, even killing victims for the sole purpose of dissection. Friends and relatives wept for the agony and horror of their loved ones, but that didn’t lesson the pain of the victims, whether represented by voices crying out for the madness to stop or not. Since those atrocities came to light many have wondered what kind of monsters are capable of torturing their fellow creatures as a course of habit? And what kind of society would allow it? Still to this day, the majority of people support systematic abuse, torture and slaughter, yet somehow deny their own pestilence.
Pain and violence is the consort of war, and vicious atrocities were also being carried out in Asia. Japan was one of the rising powers that jumped into the First World War to claim some of Germany’s territory in the Pacific. After what many called the war to end all wars, Hirohito, son of Emperor Yoshihito, visited Europe in 1921. It was the first such visit for a member of the Japanese monarchy. The structured formality of life in the imperial court had so pervaded Hirohito’s life that he was taken aback by the friendly and unpretentious greeting he received in Europe, moving him to write to his brother Chichibu that he discovered freedom for the first time in England.
But, like Germany, ambitions of empire consumed the government and military leaders of Japan and they too relied heavily on foreign plunder and forced labor for their productive wealth. Taiwan and Korea had been occupied by the Japanese since 1895 and 1910 respectively and Manchuria was added to Japan’s growing empire in 1931. To further guard its gains, Japan signed treaties with Germany and Italy in 1936 and 1937. Not coincidentally Japan invaded China to begin the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937 to get at the vast resources of China that held a powerful attraction for Japanese elite. There again, brutality was a trademark of profiteering through occupation as great numbers of Chinese were forced into servitude and the Japanese response to Chinese resistance was described by a Japanese official as “kill all, burn all, and destroy all.”
As a result of publicized incidents such as the Nanking Massacre where civilians estimated in the hundreds of thousands were executed, worldwide public sentiment was turned heavily against Japan. In the run-up to the Second World War the Japanese also had another encounter with Russian troops, but the Japanese invasion of Mongolia in 1939 was repelled by the Soviets. Japan’s invasion of French Indochina, roughly modern Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos in 1940, along with Japan’s alliance with Germany and Italy and the overtly offensive nature of its military actions caused the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and the Netherlands to place a trade embargo on Japan and freeze its assets.
The decision to go to war with the United States wasn’t easy for Japan, as some Japanese officials did realize that the prospect of winning such a war was remote. The industrial capacity and wealth of resources of the United States seemed a huge advantage to overcome. But, then again, Japan had very strong industrial production of its own and was acquiring material resources from throughout the Pacific Rim. In addition, an ongoing trade embargo, hard-line insistence backed by religious conviction, and previous success against China and Russia with their comparable material resources, lead to the bombing of the U.S. Pacific Fleet on December 7, 1941. In a bold and well-conceived move the Japanese bypassed American positions in the Philippines and struck straight at the heart of the Pacific Fleet, catching the U.S. off guard. Almost simultaneously Japan attacked colonial holdings such as Hong Kong, the Philippines, and Wake Island.
But the success of Japan’s initial assaults, not being nearly substantial enough to break America’s will or cripple the navy, virtually guaranteed a bloody, protracted affair. And while Japan busied itself subduing and occupying vast areas of Asia and Pacific Islands, America prepared to respond. After a costly defense of the New Guinea port of Moresby and some mostly psychological air raids of Tokyo, that response was delivered at Midway on June 5, 1942. Unlike previous maritime engagements, Pacific naval battles of the Second World War were dominated by aircraft carriers, of which Japan lost four to America’s one at Midway. And just that quickly the initial Japanese advantage was beginning to disappear. In the course of successive naval engagements and marine landings the U.S. pushed the Japanese back toward home, setting up another large sea battle near the Marianas Islands on June 19 and 20, 1944 where the U.S. scored a very lopsided victory; destroying 600 Japanese aircraft and three carriers.
In late October the United States and Australia brought forces to bear on the Philippine island of Leyte where Japan tried one last stand to stop the advancing Allies in a battle in which the Allies had clear numerical superiority, as Japan was unable to replenish its mounting losses. In a series of engagements constituting the largest modern naval battle, the Imperial Navy was further reduced in a crushing defeat. As if a microcosm of Allied success in routing the Japanese, the members of lightship group “Taffy 3,” mistakenly cut off from carrier or even battleship protection, displayed tremendous courage in confronting a much larger and more powerful Japanese group that included the largest battleship ever built, the Yamato. Confusing the enemy with unusually aggressive behavior for such a light contingent, behavior that had the appearance of baiting a non-existent trap, and causing extensive losses with their bold actions, Taffy 3 repulsed the charge of the formidable Imperial battlegroup, and earned a Presidential Unit Citation for their actions.
By April of 1945, after Allied ground units retook the Philippines, Japanese desperation was beginning to show and remnants of the Imperial Navy, including the mighty, but ineffective, Yamato, were flung at the Allied Forces fighting for control of Okinawa in what has been called a suicide mission. With the days of the battleship having passed, and no effective aircraft cover, the Japanese ships were easy targets for Allied bombers. The desperation of the Japanese military was also illustrated by death-before-surrender ground fighting, and kamikaze air strikes in which pilots underwent ceremonial proceedings before taking-off in planes lacking sufficient fuel to return from their target objectives. The outcome of the war was becoming obvious, but the dogged determination of the Japanese was sure to make the remainder of the war very costly. To compound the troubles for Japan, Russia, after the suicide of Hitler and cessation of hostilities in Europe, was speeding toward Japan. The battle proven Red Army was tearing through the Imperial Army in Manchuria, racing to claim as much territory as possible before the apparently imminent Japanese surrender.
Faced with a great many more casualties on both sides, President Harry Truman ordered the use of the most devastating weapon the world had ever seen, and few knew existed, the atomic bomb. On August 6, 1945 a single atomic bomb destroyed much of the Japanese city of Hiroshima, but still the Japanese didn’t surrender. So, on August 9, 1945, another atomic bomb was dropped, this time on the city of Nagasaki; prompting high ranking Japanese officials to meet on August 10th and finally deciding to surrender, after the death of about three million of their countrymen in two bomb strikes; though even then the decision to surrender was bitterly contested. And Hirohito, also known as Emperor Showa, announced the surrender in a radio address on August 15, but not soon enough to prevent Russian troops from entering Korea, laying the stage for the partitioning of Korea that would again lead to war in just a few years.
In order to maintain stability in Japan and ensure the U.S. was working with a respected figurehead that they could reach agreement with, General MacArthur, who would later encourage the use of nuclear weapons and invasion of China in the Korean War, protected Emperor Hirohito from trials of war crimes. But approximately 5,700 other Japanese were tried for war crimes and 920 of those were put to death for their parts in atrocities before and during the second world war. Although not commonly remembered as a major party to the second world war, the number of Chinese killed in the Second Sino-Japanese War and World War II was surpassed only by those of Russia.
Interestingly, in drafting a new constitution for Japan, U.S. authorities allowed for a symbolic monarchy to provide the Japanese with a sense of cohesiveness and continuity. That controversial decision resulted in Hirohito, a man despised as the leader of a band of butchers by hundreds of millions, becoming one of the longest ruling monarchs in history. Prior to becoming emperor he ruled as regent for his father beginning in 1921, and assuming the title of emperor upon the death of his father in 1926, he remained emperor until his own death in 1989, although his homeland lost the territories it had gained in war and was occupied by the United States until 1952.