World War II and the destruction of the old order should have serve all of us as lesson at this time, given the genocide in Gaza and Hezbollah attacks on Israel.
Approximately 60 million people lost their lives as a direct result of the war, fully two-thirds of them noncombatants.
The war’s losers, the Axis states of Germany, Japan, and Italy, suffered more than 3 million civilian deaths; their conquerors, the Allies, suffered far more: at least 35 million civilian deaths.
An astonishing 10 to 20% of the total populations of the Soviet Union, Poland, and
Yugoslavia perished, between 4 and 6% of the total populations of Germany, Italy, Austria, Hungary, Japan, and China.
If the exact toll of this wrenching global conflagration continues to defy all efforts at statistical precision, the magnitude of the human losses it claimed surely remains as shockingly unfathomable two generations after World War II as it was in the conflict’s
immediate aftermath.
At war’s end, much of the European continent lay in ruins. British Prime Minister Winston S. Churchill, in characteristically vivid prose, described postwar Europe as ‘a rubble heap, a charnel house, a breeding ground of pestilence and hate’. Berlin was ‘an utter wasteland’, observed correspondent William Shirer, ‘I don’t think there has ever been such destruction on such a scale’.
In fact, many of the largest cities of central and eastern Europe suffered comparable levels of devastation; 90% of the buildings in Cologne, Düsseldorf, and Hamburg were gutted by Allied bombing, 70% of those in the centre of Vienna.
In Warsaw, reported John Hershey, the Germans had ‘destroyed, systematically, street by street, alley by alley, house by house. Nothing is left except a mockery of architecture’.
US Ambassador Arthur Bliss Lane, upon entering that war-ravaged city in July 1945, wrote: ‘The sickening sweet odor of burned human flesh was a grim warning that we were
entering a city of the dead.’
In France, fully one-fifth of the nation’s
buildings were damaged or destroyed; in Greece, one-quarter. Even never-occupied Great Britain suffered extensive damage,
principally from Nazi bombing, while losing an estimated one quarter of its total national wealth in the course of the conflict.
Soviet losses were the most severe of all: at least 25 million dead, another 25 million rendered homeless, 6 million buildings destroyed, and much of the country’s industrial plant and productive farmland laid to waste.
Across Europe, an estimated 50 million of the war’s survivors had been uprooted by the war, some 16 million of them euphemistically termed ‘displaced persons’ by the victorious Allies.
Conditions in postwar Asia were nearly as grim. Almost all of Japan’s cities had been ravaged by relentless US bombing, with
40% of its urban areas completely destroyed.
Tokyo, Japan’s largest metropolis, was gutted by Allied firebombing that levelled more than half of its buildings. Hiroshima and
Nagasaki met an even more dire fate as the twin atomic blasts that brought the Pacific War to a close left them obliterated.
Approximately 9 million Japanese were homeless when their leaders finally surrendered.
In China, a battleground for more than a decade, the industrial plant of Manchuria lay in shambles, the rich farmland of the Yellow River engulfed in floods. As many as 4 million Indonesians perished as a direct or indirect result of the conflict. One million Indians succumbed to war-induced famine in 1943, another million people in Indo-China two years later.
Although much of Southeast Asia was spared the direct horrors of war visited upon Japan,
China, and various Pacific islands, other parts, such as the Philippines and Burma, were not so fortunate. During the war’s final stage, 80% of Manila’s buildings were razed in savage
fighting. Equally brutal combat in Burma, in the testimony of wartime leader Ba Maw, ‘had reduced an enormous part of the country to ruins’.
The vast swath of death and destruction precipitated by the war left not only much of Europe and Asia in ruins but the old international order as well. ‘The whole world structure and order that we had inherited from the nineteenth century was gone’, marvelled US
Assistant Secretary of State Dean Acheson.
Indeed, the Eurocentric international system that had dominated world affairs for the past
500 years had, virtually overnight, vanished. Two continent-sized military behemoths – already being dubbed superpowers – had
risen in its stead, each intent upon forging a new order consonant with its particular needs and values.
As the war moved into its final phase, even the most casual observer of world politics could see that the United States and the Soviet Union held most of the military, economic, and diplomatic cards.
On one basic goal, those adversaries turned allies were in essential accord: that some
semblance of authority and stability needed to be restored with dispatch and not just to those areas directly affected by the war but to the broader international system as well.
The task was as urgent as it was daunting since, as Under Secretary of State Joseph
Grew warned in June 1945: ‘Anarchy may result from the present economic distress and political unrest.’
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