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Homework # 1 - Overview of World War Two
Homework # 1 - Overview of World War Two
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Reading - Overview of World War Two
Reading - Overview of World War Two
World War Two was the most destructive and violent war in human history. Fifty-four countries were involved in the war by its end. 110 million people were mobilized for military service. Between 50 – 60 million people (2.5% of the world population) were killed (more civilians were killed than soldiers). In addition, millions more were physically or psychologically wounded by the war, or lost homes, families and friends. The exact numbers of the human cost of the war is incalculable because of the massive numbers of people involved and because many nations’ records were destroyed in the war. The estimated cost of the war was 1.5 trillion dollars or $1,500,000,000,000!
The origin of World War Two was based in the flawed peace treaty, the Versailles Treaty, which ended World War One in a way that angered Germany because it made Germany responsible for the war and forced the country to pay $33 billion in reparations to France and England for war damages. The reality was that Germany was unable to pay this because it was broken by the war and its newly formed democratic government was not very strong. Germany’s situation was made worse by the world-wide economic crisis of the Great Depression which began in 1929 and caused millions in Germany to lose their jobs and pushed many in the country into poverty. Many people in Germany lost faith in democracy as a good form of government and began to look at other ideas that promised to rebuild Germany and make it strong.
In 1932, Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party used this popular anger over the Depression and the end of World War One to take over Germany with the popular support of many people. Hitler wanted to create a racially pure Germany in which the only people who would be able to live in Germany would be people they considered to be part of the “German” race. Hitler said that everyone who was not racially “German” would be thrown out of the country, made into slaves or killed. Hitler and Nazis focused most of their hatred on Jewish people. They irrationally blamed all of Germany’s problems, including the peace treaty that ended World War One, on the Jews. Once he came to power, Hitler made himself a dictator and ruled with the support of a secret police force called the Gestapo who would imprison, torture and kill anyone who opposed him.
Once he took over Germany, Hitler began to build up the German army with the goal of taking over large parts of Europe to fulfill his goal of making a “Greater Germany” through a war of aggression. Unfortunately, the other countries of Europe did not forcefully stand up to Hitler because they were traumatized by World War One and wanted to avoid another war. Hitler used this to his advantage to take over several countries before World War Two even began. For example, no other country opposed Hitler when forced the country of Austria to become part Nazi Germany in 1938. Two months later, Hitler demanded that the country of Czechoslovakia surrender the western part of the county to Nazi Germany. At this point, Britain and France agreed to let Hitler take the land from Czechoslovakia if he promised not to take any more land. Hitler even signed a document with the leaders of both countries saying that he would not demand any more land in return for part of Czechoslovakia. The future leader of Britain, Winston Churchill described this policy as “appeasement” (which means giving into demands to make someone happy) and that it was a mistake because Hitler would not stop taking land. Churchill’s description was accurate because less than a year later, in March 1939, Hitler took over all of Czechoslovakia. After this, Britain and France said they would use force to stop Hitler if he tried to take more land.
Hitler began World War Two in Europe in September 1939, when he ordered the German army to attack the country of Poland. The Germans used a new military tactic call Blitzkrieg or “lightning war” in the attack on Poland. Blitzkrieg involves using airplanes and tanks to quickly swarm into another country and surround and cut off an enemy army. Blitzkrieg was designed to be a form of mobile warfare which could not be stopped by fixed fortifications, like trenches. Essentially, the German army used Blitzkrieg tactics to avoid the stalemate of trench warfare that existed in World War One. It took the Germans only a few weeks to conquer Poland. While England and France promised to help Poland if was attacked, they did nothing to stop Germany or help Poland. After defeating Poland, in the spring of 1940, Hitler ordered the German army to attack France. In few weeks, the German army defeated both the French and British armies and militarily occupied France. The British were forced to rescue their army from France before it was totally destroyed by the Germans. At this point, Hitler was able to do what Germany had not been able to do during World War One – conquer and defeat France.
After the defeat of France, Britain was alone in its opposition to Nazi Germany. Winston Churchill, the new leader of Britain described this period as the country's "darkest hour". However, unlike the earlier British government which was willing to negotiate with Hitler, Churchill was opposed to surrendering to Nazi Germany and he rallied the British people to fight against Hitler’s Germany. Hitler was determined to defeat Britain and ordered the German air force to attack Britain in daily bombing raids to prepare for an invasion of Britain. The bombing raids were devastating and some parts of London, the British capital, were reduced to ruins. However, while outnumbered, the British air force fought back in the Battle of Britain and prevented Germany from invading Britain. Hitler then tried to defeat Britain by cutting it off from its empire by using German submarines to sink ships carrying supplies to Britain in a conflict called the Battle of the Atlantic.
Unable to conquer Britain, Hitler next turned to attack the Soviet Union (Russia). Hitler wanted to take over the area of Russia and make it into German “living space” where the Russian people would be forced to be slaves to the Germans. Hitler used the racist term “sub-human” to describe how he thought of the Russians. In the summer of 1941, Hitler broke the treaty he had with the Soviet Union and launched a massive invasion of the Soviet Union. In the first few months of the war, the German army did very well and the Soviet army was unable to stop it. The Soviets used a “scorched-earth” policy of destroying everything as they retreated. This had the effect of turning large parts of Russia into a wasteland. By the winter of 1941, the German army had advanced to the outskirts of Moscow, the Soviet capital. However, at that point, the Russian winter hit and stopped the German army, which was unprepared for a winter war. As the brutal winter took hold, the Soviet Union counter attacked with its reserve army from Siberia and, for the first time, the German army was forced to retreat. But, as the winter ended, the Germans returned to the offensive and pushed deeper into Soviet Union, reaching the city of Stalingrad (named for the Soviet dictator, Joseph Stalin). The war between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union was a brutally vicious war in which both sides killed prisoners of war and civilians. It is estimated that the Soviet Union lost 20 million people in the war – it lost 1.5 million people in the Battle of Leningrad (which is more people than the United States has lost in all of its wars combined).
It was during the war against the Soviet Union that Nazi Germany began the Holocaust, one of the worst genocides in history, when it attempted to kill all of the Jewish people in Europe. As the German army had conquered Europe, Hitler ordered that the Jewish people and anyone else he thought to be racially “undesirable” to be sent to concentration camps or ghettos to be used as slave labor. Then in 1942, the Nazis held the Wanssee Conference where the Nazis decided to kill all of the Jewish people at specially built extermination camps, like Auschwitz. For Hitler and the Nazis, carrying out the Holocaust was more important than winning the war since their main goal was to create a racially pure society. In fact, they increased the killing of Jewish people as they lost the war. In all, the Nazis killed six million Jews and four million other people they considered “sub-human”.
At the end of 1941, Japan attacked the United States naval base at Pearl Harbor and the United States had joined the Allied side (Britain and the Soviet Union) in the war. The addition of the United States to the Allied side tipped the balance of the war in favor of the Allies. Together the Allied countries fought for four more years to defeat Nazi Germany. The United States used its strong economy to build the weapons and grow the food to support the Allied war effort – the Americans supplied the weapons that the British, French and Soviet armies used to fight against the Germans. For this reason, The United States was called “The Great Arsenal of Democracy”. Similar to World War One, World War Two was a “total war” and the countries involved in war had to put the full weight of their industry and population into the war. The United States and the Soviet Union converted their factories to make weapons and women went to work in the factories to replace the men who went into the army (the Soviet Union also put women in the army to fly planes and drive tanks).
While the industrial power of the United States was crucial to the Allies winning the war, the problem was that the United States was far away from Europe. In order to win the war, the United States and British navies first needed to win the Battle of the Atlantic and destroy the German fleets of submarines. After this, the United States would be able to move its powerful army to Europe to fight Germany. The Allies were able to defeat the German submarines through a combination of building ships faster than German submarines could sink them and using airplanes to hunt for German submarines. By 1943, the German submarine force had been broken. This was the first Allied victory on the long road to defeating Nazi Germany.
The Allied side was able to win the war because the United States, Soviet Union and Britain had more men and equipment than the Germans. As the war went on, the Germans could not replace the men and equipment that they lost. In addition, the Allied armies became better at fighting, and even adopted the tactic of blitzkrieg against the Germans. The Allies began to push the Germans back on all fronts. In 1943, the Americans and British defeated the German army in North Africa and invaded Italy. At the same time, the Soviet Union defeated the Germans in the battles of Stalingrad (destroying an entire German army) and Kursk (the largest tank battle of the war). Then 1944, America and Britain landed an army in France, to attack Germany from the west, in the D-Day invasion while the Soviet pushed the German army out of the Soviet Union. In addition, the American and British air forces began to bomb German cities with the goal of destroying German war production. These bombing raids also reduced entire cities to ruble and killed large numbers of Germans civilians.
By late 1944, it was clear that Germany was going to lose the war. The Allied armies were attacking Germany from the east and the west while the Allied air forces were bombing its cities on an on-going basis. The Allies coordinated their war against Nazi Germany at a series of conferences during the war. The combined Allied leadership made the decision to refuse to negotiate an end to the war with Nazi Germany and instead to continue the war until Nazi Germany surrendered unconditionally. Unconditional surrender means that a country simply gives up and has no say in what happens to it after the war. The Allies did not want this war to end the way World War One ended, in a bitter armistice and a messy peace treaty. The Allies refusal to negotiate an end to the war became more justified as the Allied armies moved closer to Germany and liberated the Nazi Death Camps, like Auschwitz, that showed the fully evil nature of the Nazi Germany.
While it was clear that Germany was going to lose the war, Hitler and the Nazi party leadership was not interested in negotiating an end to the war. Members of the German army realized that Hitler would never surrender and attempted to assassinate Hitler in July 1944. They came very close to killing him, but failed - and lost their lives as a result. After this, Hitler and the Nazi leadership became more extreme. They sped up the Holocaust against the Jews. Hitler ordered the German army to fight to the death against the Soviet army in battles that destroyed many cities in eastern Europe and to use its last reserves to attack the American army in the Battle of the Bulge. Nazi soldiers enforced Hitler's orders by going as far as killing German soldiers who retreated. Some of the worst battles of the war happened in the last year of the war.
The war in Europe only ended in the spring of 1945, when the Allied army converged on Germany. In April, 1945, Soviet army captured the German capital of Berlin and Hitler committed suicide. After this, Germany surrendered unconditionally to the Allies. The Nazi leadership who survived the war were put on trial for “waging a war of aggression” and “crimes against humanity” at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trial – most were found guilty and were executed or sentenced to life in prison.
After World War Two, Germany was divided into two countries, East Germany and West Germany, and became a focal point in the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. West Germany was rebuilt by the United States to be a democratic country. East Germany was controlled by the Soviet Union, which forced the country to become a communist country. Because democratic West Germany was freer and more prosperous than communist East Germany, many people in East Germany tried to flee into West Germany. The East German government built the Berlin Wall to keep people trapped in East Germany. The Berlin Wall became a symbol of the Cold War conflict. The weakening of the Soviet Union in the 1980's and Gorbachev's policy of perestroika, or "openness", resulted in more freedom in East Germany and ultimately in the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. After that, the two parts of Germany were allowed to reunite into a single country.
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