War : Survivors, Memory, and Moral Responsibility (9)

By the final days of April 1945, Soviet artillery could be heard from within the Reich Chancellery itself. Berlin was encircled, burning, and beyond salvation. Yet in the subterranean bunker beneath the Chancellery garden, Adolf Hitler continued to preside over military briefings with the solemnity of a commander whose armies still existed. He moved flags across maps, issued orders to divisions that had ceased to function, and raged at generals who dared inform him that the units he was deploying existed on paper alone. His staff watched in silence, having long since understood that to correct him was to invite destruction. It was, perhaps, the most revealing portrait of the man who had started the war: a mind so entirely enclosed within its own mythology that reality, even when it arrived in the form of Soviet tank fire overhead, could not penetrate it. He had begun the war with a delusion of invincibility. He ended it with the same delusion, undimmed, in a hole in the ground.

When historians speak of the origins of the Second World War, they speak, inescapably, of the unfinished business of the First. The Great War of 1914–1918 did not conclude with a genuine peace; it concluded with an armed truce—a settlement so punishing in its humiliation of Germany and so fragile in its institutional guarantees that it contained, from the very moment of its signing, the seeds of its own violent undoing. Marshal Ferdinand Foch, Supreme Commander of the Allied Armies, understood this with terrible clarity. Emerging from the railway carriage at Compiègne on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918, he did not speak of victory. He spoke of postponement. "This is not a peace," he declared. "It is an armistice for twenty years." He was wrong only in his arithmetic. The Second World War began precisely twenty years and sixty-five days after the ink had dried on the Versailles Treaty.

To comprehend how Europe—and, in time, the entire world—stumbled once more into catastrophe a mere two decades after swearing that it never would, one must reckon with four interlocking forces: the poisoned legacy of Versailles; the catastrophic economic dislocations of the interwar years; the ideological pathologies—fascism, Nazism, militant nationalism—that flourished in the ruins of shattered empires and broken economies; and, finally, the systematic failure of the Western democracies to confront those pathologies before they had grown too powerful to be checked without another world war. None of these forces, in isolation, was sufficient to produce the catastrophe of 1939. Together, they made it, if not inevitable, then very nearly so.

THE SECOND WORLD WAR

Origins, Combatants, and Consequences: An Analysis

1939 — 1945 and Beyond

The Second World War began precisely twenty years and sixty-five days after the signing of the Treaty of Versailles. The war that was supposed to end all wars had, in fact, served chiefly as the incubator of a still greater catastrophe—a conflict that would consume the lives of an estimated seventy to eighty-five million human beings, shatter the remaining structures of the old European order, and inaugurate the age of nuclear terror.

To understand the Second World War, one must understand it as an unfinished chapter of the First — not a separate event, but the second act of a single European tragedy that began in the summer of 1914 and did not truly conclude until May 1945. The seeds of Nazism, the resentments of a humiliated Germany, the territorial disputes of a carelessly redrawn map, the weakness of democratic institutions born in the ruins of empire: all of these were the direct inheritance of the Great War and its flawed peace settlement. The task of this article, therefore, is to trace how the unresolved contradictions of 1919 erupted, three decades later, into the most destructive conflict in recorded human history. 

I. Background and Causes: The Long Road to 1939

The causes of the Second World War are, by near-universal consensus amongst historians, both more complex and more immediate than those of the First. Where the origins of 1914 remain a matter of scholarly debate — a fog of miscalculation, imperial rivalry, and sleepwalking statesmanship — the origins of 1939 are in large measure attributable to the deliberate and systematic acts of a single state: Nazi Germany under Adolf Hitler. This is not to suggest that Hitler alone caused the war; the structural conditions that made his rise possible, and the diplomatic failures of the Western democracies that enabled his aggression, were equally essential preconditions. But the proximate cause of the Second World War was the expansionist programme of the Third Reich, pursued with implacable ideological conviction and reckless strategic ambition.

The Poisoned Legacy of Versailles

The Treaty of Versailles imposed upon Germany in 1919 a settlement that combined maximum humiliation with insufficient enforceable security. The ‘War Guilt Clause’ (Article 231) forced Germany to accept sole responsibility for the war; reparations of 132 billion gold marks crippled an already exhausted economy; the Rhineland was demilitarised; German-speaking Austria was forbidden to unite with Germany; and the new state was stripped of its overseas empire, its merchant fleet, and significant portions of its European territory. The result was a festering wound in German national consciousness that Adolf Hitler proved devastatingly adept at exploiting.

Hitler, an Austrian-born corporal who had served throughout the First World War and found in its aftermath a violent politics of rage and conspiracy, joined the tiny National Socialist German Workers’ Party in 1919 and transformed it within a decade into the most formidable fascist movement in Europe. His ideology—a potent and poisonous mixture of extreme nationalism, racial hierarchy, antisemitism, and social Darwinism—offered to a humiliated and economically devastated Germany a seductive narrative of victimhood, destiny, and revenge. The Great Depression of 1929, which obliterated German savings and drove unemployment above thirty per cent, provided the catastrophe that converted mass resentment into a political majority. Hitler was appointed Chancellor on the 30th of January 1933 — legally, constitutionally, democratically—and within eighteen months had dismantled the democratic institutions that had brought him to power. 

The Policy of Appeasement and Its Fatal Consequences

The Western democracies—Britain and France above all—met Hitler’s successive violations of the Versailles settlement with a policy that history has rendered infamous: appeasement. In March 1936, Germany remilitarised the Rhineland in open defiance of Versailles and the Locarno Treaty. Britain and France did nothing. In March 1938, Germany annexed Austria—the Anschluss—in an act that Versailles had explicitly forbidden. In September 1938, at Munich, Neville Chamberlain and Édouard Daladier surrendered the Sudetenland to Hitler in exchange for a piece of paper promising “peace for our time.” Six months later, Hitler occupied the remainder of Czechoslovakia. On the 1st of September 1939, Germany invaded Poland. Britain and France declared war two days later. The Second World War had begun.

“You were given the choice between war and dishonour. You chose dishonour and you will have war.”—Winston Churchill, to Neville Chamberlain, following the Munich Agreement, September 1938

The Asian Theatre: Imperial Japan and the Path to Pearl Harbour

The Second World War was, in truth, two interconnected but distinct conflicts that merged into one. In Asia and the Pacific, the conflict was the culmination of decades of Japanese imperial expansion: the annexation of Korea in 1910, the invasion of Manchuria in 1931, and full-scale war against China in 1937. The Japanese military, driven by an ideology of racial superiority and imperial destiny, sought to establish a ‘Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere’ — in practice, a Japanese-dominated empire stretching from Manchuria to New Guinea. The two theatres merged definitively on the 7th of December 1941, when Japanese carrier aircraft launched a devastating surprise attack on the United States naval base at Pearl Harbour, Hawaii. Within days, Germany and Italy had declared war on the United States, and the conflict had become, at last, genuinely global. 

II. The Belligerents: Who Fought Whom, and Why

The Second World War divided the world into two opposing coalitions: the Allied Powers and the Axis Powers. Yet both coalitions were, from the outset, ideologically heterogeneous and strategically complicated—a reminder that in great-power conflict, interest invariably trumps principle. 

The Second World War divided the world into two broad coalitions whose composition reflected not merely military alliance but the deeper ideological and strategic fault lines of the age. On one side stood the Axis Powers, a bloc forged principally from the ambitions of three states: Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan. To these three principal aggressors were added some smaller European states—Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and Slovakia—that aligned themselves with the Axis through varying combinations of ideological sympathy, territorial self-interest, and coercion. Croatia, established as a puppet state under German and Italian patronage following the dismemberment of Yugoslavia in 1941, swelled the Axis ranks further, whilst Finland occupied a position of deliberate ambiguity, participating in military operations against the Soviet Union as a so-called co-belligerent rather than a full Axis member—a distinction the Finns maintained with some care, mindful that their war was one of national survival rather than ideological crusade.

Ranged against them stood the Allied Powers, a coalition far more heterogeneous in its composition and far more formidable in its collective resources. At its core were the United Kingdom and the nations of the British Commonwealth—a global network whose contribution in manpower, matériel, and strategic reach proved indispensable to Allied victory. The Soviet Union entered the Alliance not by choice but by necessity, following Germany's invasion in June 1941; the United States followed in December of the same year, propelled into the conflict by Japan's attack on Pearl Harbour. Free France, the government-in-exile led by General de Gaulle from London, represented the undefeated spirit of a nation whose territory had fallen but whose will had not; similarly, the governments-in-exile of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Greece, Norway, and the Netherlands continued the fight from British soil, contributing forces that served with distinction across every theatre of the war. The Republic of China, often overlooked in Western accounts, had been engaged in a brutal struggle for survival against Japanese aggression since 1937, tying down vast Japanese resources that might otherwise have been deployed elsewhere. Rounding out the Alliance were Brazil—the only Latin American nation to deploy combat forces to the European theatre—alongside Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, whose soldiers fought from the deserts of North Africa to the jungles of the Pacific.

What is perhaps most striking about this alignment, viewed in retrospect, is not the coherence of either coalition but its profound internal contradictions. The Allies bound together a liberal democracy, a communist dictatorship, and the world's largest colonial empire in a partnership sustained by nothing more durable than a common enemy. That it held together long enough to win the war was, by any measure, one of the more remarkable feats of statecraft in modern history.

III. The Course of the War: 1 September 1939 to 2 September 1945

The war began on the 1st of September 1939, when German armoured forces crossed the Polish frontier in the early hours of the morning without a declaration of war. The campaign ended in thirty-five days; Poland was partitioned between Germany and the Soviet Union, whose pact with Hitler had freed him, temporarily, from the nightmare of a two-front war. Britain and France, bound by treaty to Poland’s defence, declared war on the 3rd of September but were unable to render effective assistance.

The period from September 1939 to June 1941 saw spectacular Axis successes. The ‘Phoney War’ of winter 1939–40 gave way to the shattering German offensives of spring 1940: Denmark, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and France fell in a matter of weeks. The British Expeditionary Force was evacuated from Dunkirk in a remarkable operation that preserved an army at the cost of its equipment. France signed an armistice on the 22nd of June 1940; a collaborationist regime under Marshal Pétain governed the unoccupied south from Vichy, whilst General Charles de Gaulle rallied the Free French from London. In the summer of 1940, the Battle of Britain denied the Luftwaffe the air supremacy that a German invasion of Britain would have required. It was Hitler’s first significant strategic failure.

Two decisions in 1941 transformed the war irreversibly. In June, Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa — the invasion of the Soviet Union, the largest military operation in the history of warfare, committing Germany to precisely the two-front war that strategic prudence had always counselled against. In December, Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbour brought the United States fully into the conflict, adding an industrial and military capacity that no conceivable Axis combination could match.

The years 1942 and 1943 marked the decisive turning of the tide. The German Sixth Army surrendered at Stalingrad in February 1943 — the most catastrophic defeat in German military history. The Afrika Korps surrendered in Tunisia in May 1943. The United States Navy destroyed Japan’s carrier striking force at the Battle of Midway in June 1942, permanently shifting the balance of naval power in the Pacific. Allied landings in Sicily and Italy in July 1943 knocked Italy out of the war. The massive Soviet offensive operations of 1943–45 — Kursk, Operation Bagration, the Vistula–Oder Offensive — ground down the Wehrmacht in the East with industrial remorselessness.

The Allied landings in Normandy on the 6th of June 1944—D-Day—opened the Second Front in Western Europe that Stalin had demanded for two years. By April 1945, Soviet forces were in Berlin; Hitler took his own life on the 30th of April in the ruins of the Reich Chancellery. Germany surrendered unconditionally on the 8th of May 1945—VE Day. In the Pacific, the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima (6th August) and Nagasaki (9th August) by the United States, combined with the Soviet declaration of war against Japan on the 8th of August, persuaded the Japanese Emperor to announce Japan’s surrender on the 15th of August. The formal instrument of surrender was signed aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay on the 2nd of September 1945—VJ Day. The most destructive war in human history was over.

The term D-Day is, in its original military usage, considerably less specific than its popular meaning suggests. The letter "D" is simply an abbreviation of the word "Day" itself — making D-Day, in its literal sense, nothing more than "Day-Day," a deliberate tautology employed by military planners to designate the unnamed date on which a planned operation is scheduled to begin. By using the notation "D-Day," "D+1," "D+2," and so forth, commanders could plan and communicate the sequential timetable of an operation without committing to, or revealing, its actual calendar date. Every major military operation, in principle, has its own D-Day.

In practice, however, the term has long since ceased to belong to military terminology alone. Through the sheer magnitude of a single event, it has passed into the general language of history with one meaning and one meaning only: the Allied landings on the beaches of Normandy on the 6th of June 1944. Operation Overlord, as it was formally designated, was the largest amphibious military operation ever attempted — involving in its opening twenty-four hours alone some 156,000 troops drawn from the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and a dozen other Allied nations, transported across the English Channel in nearly 7,000 vessels and supported by almost 12,000 aircraft. Five beaches had been assigned to the assault forces, each given a codename: Utah and Omaha to the Americans, Gold and Sword to the British, and Juno to the Canadians. The casualties on that single day — particularly on Omaha Beach, where American forces faced withering fire from heavily fortified German positions — were staggering. Yet by nightfall, the Allies had established a foothold on the European continent that would not be dislodged. D-Day opened the Second Front in Western Europe that Stalin had demanded for two years, and set in motion the chain of events that would bring the war in Europe to its conclusion eleven months later.

VE Day—an abbreviation of Victory in Europe Day—marks the 8th of May 1945, the date on which Nazi Germany's unconditional surrender formally came into effect, and the war in Europe was declared at an end. The instrument of surrender had in fact been signed in the early hours of the 7th of May at Reims, in northern France, by General Alfred Jodl on behalf of the German Armed Forces, in the presence of General Dwight D. Eisenhower's representatives. At Stalin's insistence, however, a second, more formal ceremony was held in Berlin on the 8th of May—the Soviet leader was determined that the capitulation of Germany should be ratified on German soil, before Soviet commanders, in acknowledgement of the colossal sacrifice the Eastern Front had demanded of the Soviet people.

When the news reached the British public on the afternoon of the 7th of May, the reaction was one of overwhelming and entirely unrestrained relief. In London, crowds of a size and exuberance that the capital had not witnessed in living memory flooded Trafalgar Square, The Mall, and Whitehall. Churchill appeared on the balcony of the Ministry of Health to address a sea of jubilant faces, declaring: "This is your victory." The crowd roared back: "No—it is yours." King George VI and Queen Elizabeth appeared on the balcony of Buckingham Palace eight times that evening, accompanied on two occasions by the Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret, who had slipped unrecognised into the crowds below earlier in the day. It was, by any measure, one of the great collective expressions of human relief in modern British history.

It is worth noting, however, that VE Day was emphatically not the end of the Second World War. For the hundreds of thousands of Allied servicemen still fighting in the jungles of Burma, on the islands of the Pacific, and in the waters of the Far East, the 8th of May 1945 was a cause for celebration tempered by the sobering knowledge that their own war continued. The complete and final end of the conflict awaited a further three months of fighting—and, ultimately, the most destructive weapons ever deployed in the history of warfare.

VJ Day—Victory over Japan Day—marks the end of the Second World War in its totality, bringing to a close not merely the Pacific campaign but the entire global conflict that had begun, depending on one's chosen starting point, either with Germany's invasion of Poland in September 1939 or with Japan's invasion of China in July 1937. The date, however, is observed differently by different nations, reflecting the two distinct moments at which Japan's defeat became known to the world.

The 15th of August 1945 is the date most commonly observed in the United Kingdom and across much of the Commonwealth. On that morning, Emperor Hirohito addressed his nation by radio broadcast in a recorded message—the first time in Japanese history that the Emperor's voice had been heard directly by his subjects—announcing Japan's acceptance of the terms of the Potsdam Declaration and, in the careful euphemism of imperial language, the cessation of hostilities. The broadcast followed in rapid succession three events of overwhelming force: the dropping of an atomic bomb on Hiroshima on the 6th of August, killing an estimated 70,000 to 80,000 people instantly; the dropping of a second atomic bomb on Nagasaki on the 9th of August; and the Soviet Union's declaration of war against Japan on the 8th of August, which shattered any remaining Japanese hope that Moscow might mediate a negotiated peace.

The formal, legal end of the war, however, came on the 2nd of September 1945, when Japanese government and military representatives signed the instrument of surrender on the deck of the American battleship USS Missouri, anchored in Tokyo Bay, before General Douglas MacArthur and the assembled representatives of nine Allied nations. It was this date—the 2nd of September—that the United States has always observed as the official end of the Second World War: precisely six years and one day after Germany's invasion of Poland had set the world ablaze.

Taken together, the three dates form a sequence of decisive finality. D-Day opened the door to victory in Europe; VE Day marked the moment that door was walked through; and VJ Day closed, at last, the chapter that the guns of August 1914 had first opened—and that thirty-one years of almost uninterrupted catastrophe had left so devastatingly unfinished.

IV. Nations Destroyed and Nations Born 

The Second World War, like the First, produced a dramatic redrawing of the political map. States that had existed for decades or centuries were abolished, partitioned, or subjected to foreign occupation; new states emerged from the wreckage of colonial empires and occupied territories; and the architecture of European and Asian politics was transformed beyond recognition.

The Second World War did not merely redraw the map of the world—it unmade and remade it with a thoroughness that no previous conflict had approached. The political consequences of the war fell into two distinct categories: the destruction or fundamental transformation of states that had existed before 1939, and the emergence of entirely new political entities from the wreckage of empire, occupation, and ideological upheaval.

Among the states that collapsed or were abolished outright, none was more consequential than the Third Reich itself. Defeated, occupied, and stripped of any claim to sovereign continuity, Germany ceased to exist as a unified state in 1945 and was partitioned into two separate republics—the Federal Republic in the West, aligned with the Atlantic democracies, and the German Democratic Republic in the East, bound to the Soviet sphere—a division that would endure for four decades until reunification in 1990. Fascist Italy, having been knocked out of the war by the Allied invasion of 1943, shed its monarchical and fascist structures entirely, re-emerging as the Italian Republic in 1946. Imperial Japan, its cities devastated and its imperial ambitions comprehensively shattered, submitted to American occupation and was reconstituted as a constitutional monarchy, its military capacity permanently curtailed and its political life reordered along democratic lines. Vichy France, the collaborationist regime that had governed the unoccupied south since 1940, was swept away by Liberation in 1944 and superseded by the restored French Republic under de Gaulle's provisional government. The Kingdom of Yugoslavia, dismembered by the Axis in 1941, was re-established after the war—but as a communist federal republic under Josip Broz Tito, bearing little resemblance to the pre-war monarchy it nominally succeeded. The three Baltic states—Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania—which had enjoyed independence since the aftermath of the First World War, were reabsorbed into the Soviet Union, their illegal annexation of 1940 consolidated by the post-war settlement, and their sovereignty not recovered until the dissolution of the USSR in 1991. Poland, whose invasion had triggered the war in the first place, was formally reconstituted, but with its borders shifted dramatically westwards and its political life subordinated to Soviet direction. The Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, the rump of Czechoslovakia that Hitler had seized in 1939, was reintegrated into a restored Czechoslovak state— one that would itself, within three years, fall under communist rule.

The catalogue of states born from the war is, if anything, even more remarkable in its global reach. The most charged and consequential of these new creations was the State of Israel, proclaimed in May 1948 from the territory of the British Mandate of Palestine—a state whose establishment was inseparable from the moral reckoning imposed upon the world by the Holocaust, and whose creation simultaneously fulfilled a century-old Zionist aspiration and inaugurated a conflict with its Arab neighbours whose reverberations have not ceased to this day. On the Indian subcontinent, the end of British imperial rule produced two new nations simultaneously: India and Pakistan, partitioned in August 1947 along lines drawn in such haste and with such inadequate regard for the human geography of the region that the process was accompanied by one of the largest and most violent mass migrations in recorded history. Burma followed in 1948, and Ceylon shortly thereafter. In South-East Asia, Indonesia declared independence from the Netherlands in 1945 and secured it, after four years of bitter armed struggle, in 1949. The Chinese Civil War, which the Japanese invasion had interrupted rather than ended, resumed after 1945 and concluded in 1949 with the victory of Mao Zedong's Communist Party, establishing the People's Republic of China on the mainland whilst the Nationalist government retreated to Taiwan. Korea, liberated from Japanese colonial rule in 1945, was divided along the 38th parallel into Soviet and American occupation zones that hardened, by 1948, into two mutually hostile states—and a division that produced the Korean War of 1950 and whose legacy endures in one of the world's last remaining Cold War frontiers. Vietnam, similarly, emerged from French Indochina as a divided nation: the Geneva Accords of 1954 partitioned it into a communist north and a Western-aligned south, a settlement that within a decade would draw the United States into the most divisive foreign conflict in its modern history. Germany itself contributed two new states to the post-war map—the Federal Republic and the Democratic Republic, formally established in 1949—whilst the Philippines, having been promised independence by the United States before the war, received it in 1946 as scheduled, becoming the first South-East Asian nation to achieve formal sovereign statehood in the post-war era.

What unites these two categories—the states destroyed and the states created—is a single underlying dynamic: the Second World War did not merely defeat armies and topple governments. It delegitimised entire political orders. The imperial systems that had governed much of Asia and Africa, the fascist and militarist regimes that had convulsed Europe and the Pacific, the colonial arrangements that had structured international relations for three centuries: all of these were fatally undermined by a conflict whose scale, whose ideological stakes, and whose moral aftermath made the old order simply impossible to restore. The world that emerged from the rubble of 1945 was not the world of 1939 with its wounds dressed; it was, in the most fundamental sense, a different world altogether.

V. The Victor—and the Ambiguities of Victory

The Second World War ended in the unconditional surrender of both Germany and Japan. The Allied Powers were the victors—but the nature of that victory was far from straightforward, and the manner in which its fruits were distributed was to poison international relations for half a century.

The principal beneficiary of the war was, paradoxically, the United States. A power that had entered the conflict late suffered proportionally far smaller losses than any other major belligerent and emerged from it with the world’s largest economy, most powerful military, and—crucially—a monopoly on nuclear weapons. American GDP had doubled during the war years; its cities were undamaged; its civilian population was unstarved. The era of American global primacy had arrived, and with it came a conception of world order centred on American values, American institutions, and American power.

The Soviet Union was the other great victor—though at a cost almost incomprehensible in its magnitude. Between twenty-six and twenty-seven million Soviet citizens died in the war, the vast majority on the Eastern Front. The Soviet Union had borne the greatest burden of the war against Nazi Germany, and Stalin was determined that this sacrifice should be recompensed in territory, influence, and security. The post-war Soviet empire in Eastern Europe, the result of that determination, created the fault lines along which the Cold War would be fought for the following four decades.

Britain’s victory was real but pyrrhic. The United Kingdom had survived; its democratic institutions were intact; it had fought longer than any other Western power and had never been occupied. But it had spent the entirety of its overseas investments, accumulated debts it would not finish repaying until 2006, and emerged from the war militarily exhausted and economically enfeebled. The British Empire, whose resources had been indispensable to Allied victory, was itself terminally undermined by the war. Within two years of VJ Day, Britain had quit India, the jewel of its imperial crown. The age of British world power was over.

“We had won the Second World War. But had we won the peace?”—A. J. P. Taylor, English History, 1914–1945 (1965)

VI. Conclusion: The War That Remade the World

How does one weigh the Second World War against the measure of human history? It was, by every quantitative measure, the most destructive conflict ever fought: perhaps eighty-five million dead, entire cities reduced to rubble, the industrial murder of six million Jews in the Holocaust, and the dawn of the nuclear age that placed, for the first time, the means of civilisational annihilation in human hands.

And yet from this catastrophe emerged, however imperfectly, a new international order of remarkable durability. The United Nations, established in 1945 to replace the failed League, provided an institutional framework for managing great-power relations that—whatever its limitations—has proved more resilient than its predecessor. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in 1948, established for the first time a global normative framework for the treatment of individuals by states. The Nuremberg trials inaugurated the principle of individual criminal accountability for crimes against humanity—a principle that has since become foundational to international law. The Marshall Plan rebuilt Western Europe; the post-war economic settlement at Bretton Woods created the institutions — the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank—that underpinned three decades of unprecedented prosperity.

The Second World War also, ultimately, destroyed the totalitarian ideologies that had caused it. Nazism and Italian Fascism were crushed utterly; the regimes that had practised them were exposed, tried, and condemned before the world. The decolonisation that the war accelerated, though it produced its own tragedies and conflicts, extended the principle of self-determination to peoples whom the framers of Versailles had largely ignored. And the Cold War that followed, for all its tensions and its genuine dangers, proved to be a competition between two superpowers that—paradoxically, perhaps because of the very weapons whose existence they both feared—never escalated into a Third World War.

The Second World War was the hinge upon which the modern world turned. Every major feature of the post-1945 order—the American hegemony, the Cold War, decolonisation, the State of Israel, the nuclear age, the human rights framework, the institutions of international governance—is incomprehensible without it. To understand the world in which we live is, in large measure, to understand what happened between September 1939 and August 1945. The lamps that Sir Edward Grey saw go out in 1914 were re-lit, after a fashion, in 1945—but the world that gathered in the light was utterly changed from the one that had known their going-out.

“In war, whichever side may call itself the victor, there are no winners, but all are losers.”—Neville Chamberlain, speech at Kettering, 3 July 1938

“The world must know what happened, and never forget.”—Dwight D. Eisenhower, upon visiting the Ohrdruf concentration camp, April 1945. He was right. And our obligation to remember has not diminished with the passing of the years.

Further Reading

The following works are recommended for readers wishing to explore the origins, conduct, and consequences of the Second World War in greater depth:

1. Beevor, Antony. The Second World War. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2012.—The most authoritative single-volume narrative history of the war; comprehensive, balanced, and compellingly written.
2. Keegan, John. The Second World War. London: Hutchinson, 1989.—A masterwork of military history by one of the finest analysts of the conduct of warfare.
3. Kershaw, Ian. Hitler: 1889–1936 Hubris and Hitler: 1936–1945 Nemesis. London: Allen Lane, 1998 & 2000.—The definitive biography; indispensable for understanding both the man and the regime he created.
4. Evans, Richard J. The Third Reich Trilogy. London: Allen Lane, 2003–2008.—The most scholarly and thorough account of the Nazi state from its rise to its destruction.
5. Overy, Richard. Why the Allies Won. London: Jonathan Cape, 1995.—A brilliant and provocative analysis of the factors that determined Allied victory, challenging many received assumptions.
6. Hastings, Max. All Hell Let Loose: The World at War 1939–1945. London: HarperPress, 2011.—A superb account that foregrounds the experience of ordinary combatants and civilians across all theatres.
7. Sebag-Montefiore, Hugh. Dunkirk: Fight to the Last Man. London: Viking, 2006.—The definitive account of one of the war’s most consequential early episodes.
8. Gilbert, Martin. The Holocaust: The Jewish Tragedy. London: Collins, 1986.—The most comprehensive single-volume account of the systematic murder of the Jews of Europe.
9. Rhodes, Richard. The Making of the Atomic Bomb. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986.—The Pulitzer Prize-winning account of the Manhattan Project; essential for understanding the war’s apocalyptic conclusion and the nuclear age it inaugurated.
10. Mazower, Mark. Hitler’s Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe. London: Allen Lane, 2008.—An authoritative study of how the Nazi regime organised and exploited the territories it conquered.

[Part 10]

[Part 8]

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