THE LEGACY OF WORLD WAR II
By Edward B. Driscoll,Jr
The fate of history changed for the better 70 years ago this May 8 when the Allies celebrated the unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany. Victory in Europe Day followed by mere days the deaths of two dictatorial aggressors, Adolf Hitler of Germany and Benito Mussolini of Italy, and preceded by three months the conclusive defeat of Japan.
And so ended World War II, an unprecedented conflict that actually encompassed 17 different wars, included battles on every continent and led to three great holocausts.
“World War II permeates history in the 20th century, and it permeates the past, present and future of Western civilizations,” says historian Victor Davis Hanson.
Hanson should know. He has studied the war extensively and is the host of asix-part video seriesthat takes viewers back in time to a momentous clash, one that began with the Polish cavalry pitted against tanks and ended with jet planes, guided missiles and atomic bombs. Available in thePJ Store,the streaming lectures cover everything from the causes of World War II to the winners and losers in the decades that followed.
The seeds of global war took root in Germany during the rule of the kaisers decades before World War I and sprouted again after that “war to end all wars.” Hitler took full advantage of Germany’s post-war bitterness to promote his fascist ideas and empirical dreams.
Mussolini in Italy and Hirohito in Japan had similar visions, but the three Axis powers had one insurmountable problem. “They could not work together because they were dictators,” Hanson said. “And as dictators, they were inveterate liars.” They made key strategic decisions, such as Japan attacking Pearl Harbor, without talking to each other.
Europe was the primary battleground in the early years of the war, which most historians generally agree began with Hitler’s Sept. 1, 1939, invasion of Poland. For the next two years, Hitler seemed destined to conquer every foe – Poland, Norway, Denmark, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Belgium and even France, which resisted Germany’s advances in World War I.
“The fall of France was disastrous strategically, morally, emotionally and politically for the Allies, and it was a great boon for the Axis,” Hanson said.
But the momentum shifted almost as rapidly as Hitler’s ego grew. Although successful at first, Germany’s merciless aerial assaults on Great Britain inspired what Hanson called “one of the greatest comebacks in the history of warfare” in 1941. Then Hitler foolishly invaded Russia, turning a cautious friend into an angry foe and forcing German troops to fight a two-front war.
Add to that incendiary mix Japan’s Dec. 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor, which lured the United States into the war, and the dynamics of World War II changed dramatically. Hanson analyzes those decisions and the events that followed in a lecture dubbed “The New World War.” It includes a recap of the key battles of 1941-42 and their impact on the war’s outcome.
The next phase of the war, from 1943 to 1945, was marked by both the rapid decline of the Axis powers and the uneasy addition of Josef Stalin’s Russia to the Allies. Poland, Finland and the Baltic nations had suffered more at the hand of Russia than Germany, but war and politics have made stranger bedfellows than Russia and the Allies.
With new battle lines drawn, the Allies cranked up the assembly lines of what Eisenhower would later dub the military-industrial complex. Russia provided Katyusha rocket launchers, tactical aircraft and T-34 tanks, and the United States contributed B-17, B-24 and eventually B-29 bombers at a rapid pace – and the crews to fly them. The Allies scored victories against Germany by land, sea and air, and they employed an island-hopping strategy in the Pacific on their way to the Japanese mainland.
The Allies won the war on every front, both physical and philosophical.
“By the beginning of 1946, Japan, Germany and Italy were ruined,” Hanson says in the final video lecture. “You couldn’t find anybody in any of those countries who said they were a supporter of Tojo, Mussolini or Hitler. They had democracies in the process of being created. And they were de facto allies of the British and the Americans.”
But victory came at a price – namely a decades-long ideological Cold War between the United States and Russia that also made Germany relevant again. “In the long-term sense,” Hanson concluded, “it was a terrible price to pay.”