Black J. World War Two A Military History
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Sakhalin, the Kuriles and the Pacific islands it had received after
World War One. Particularly in Eastern Europe, territorial changes
were accompanied by major population moves. In 1945–6, 9 million
Germans fled from Eastern Europe, especially from large parts of
what had been Germany (Silesia, eastern Pomerania, East Prussia),
but also from Czechoslovakia, Poland and other countries. This was
an aspect of the widespread displacement that the war had brought
and that continued after its conclusion. For example, the Soviet
conquest of Karelia and other areas from Finland in 1940 was
preceded by the flight of nearly 0.5 million refugees. After Karelia
was reconquered in 1941, nearly 300,000 refugees returned, only to
flee anew when the Soviet forces advanced again in 1944.
The emigration to British-ruled Palestine of Jewish refugees from
Europe, many of them survivors of concentration and labour camps,
was an aspect of this wartime and post-war movement of peoples. It
exacerbated the British inability to contain the rivalry in Palestine
between the indigenous Arab population and Jews. This failure led
the British to abandon Palestine in 1948, and resulted in the first
Arab–Israeli war (1948–9) and the creation of the state of Israel.
The new world order
The leading colonial powers, Britain and France, were among the
victors of World War Two, but their empires were largely to have
disappeared within two decades, one of the most important shifts of
authority in global history, and an important aspect of the decline of
Europe’s place in the world. The war had massively weakened the
imperial powers.Two, Italy and Japan, completely lost their empires,
but neither empire was treated as the German and Ottoman
(Turkish) empires had been at the close of World War One when
their colonies had been allocated, as League of Nations’ mandates, to
the victors. During World War Two, the British occupied both Italian
Somaliland and Libya (another Italian colony), and Churchill consid-
ered the annexation of the latter, while the French feared British
designs on their empire, but such views now seemed anachronistic.
The dominant role in the victorious coalition had been taken by the
USA and the Soviet Union, both of which, albeit from different
perspectives, had anti-colonial ideologies and saw no reason to view
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the expansion of the European empires with any favour; in fact, they
questioned their continued existence. Under American pressure, the
Atlantic Charter, issued by Churchill and Roosevelt at the Placentia
Bay conference (9–12 August 1941), declared ‘the right of all people
to choose the form of government under which they will live’.
The United Nations, the body founded in 1945 to replace the
League of Nations (which had been moribund during the war), was
to show favour for the notion of national self-determination. The
inaugural meeting of the United Nations, the United Nations
Conference on International Organisation, was, appropriately, in an
American city, San Francisco. Held from 25 April to 26 June, the
conference was attended by delegates from fifty states.The structure
of the United Nations reflected the role of the victors in creating
the new world order: the five permanent members of the Security
Council – the USA, USSR, Britain, France and (Nationalist) China
– had a crucial role to play in the United Nations.
Other bodies founded by the victors were also designed to mould
the post-war world.The Bretton Woods conference, held in the USA
in July 1944, produced plans for post-war co-operation designed to
ensure economic and fiscal stability. Both had been weakened by the
1930s Depression, but this was greatly accentuated by the impact of
the war on the trade, credit-worthiness, and industrial production of
the combatants bar the USA. Bretton Woods led to the foundation
of the International Monetary Fund and the International Bank for
Reconstruction and Development (World Bank), both of which had
American headquarters.The Americans did not want a return to the
beggar-my-neighbour devaluation policies of the 1930s. Free trade
was also actively supported as part of a liberal economic order. The
General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), signed in 1947,
began a major cut in tariffs that slowly re-established free trade and
helped trade to boom.
In practice, both the USA and the Soviet Union were imperial, if
not colonial, powers, and the war strengthened both their systems.
Although the Philippines were, as promised before the war by the
Americans, granted independence in 1946, American territorial
power in the Pacific increased as a result of occupation of Japanese
territory and the establishment of military bases, such as Okinawa;
under the San Francisco Peace Treaty of 1951, Japan accepted
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285
American control of the Ryþkyþ and Bonin chains under a United
Nations’ trusteeship. More generally, the USA became the dominant
military and economic power in the Pacific.
30
The Soviet state not only maintained its imperial grip on Siberia,
Central Asia, the Caucasus and Mongolia, with the independence of
the last now recognised by China; the Soviet Union also made terri-
torial gains on its western frontiers, including the Baltic republics
(Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania), Bessarabia (seized from Romania in
1940), and parts of Finland, Poland, Czechoslovakia (Ruthenia) and
Germany (northern East Prussia: the Poles gained the rest). The
renaming of Königsberg, the capital of East Prussia, as Kaliningrad
by its new Soviet rulers was symptomatic of a wider transformation.
The Soviet Union now also controlled most of Eastern Europe, with
a large occupation force in Germany and Austria.This control played
a major role in the seizures of power in the region by Communists,
which culminated in 1948 with a coup in Czechoslovakia.
Italy and Japan had lost their overseas empires because of defeat in
the war, but other powers on the winning side found theirs gravely
weakened by the strains of the conflict. There were hopes in some
circles of revived imperial military greatness. Imperial authority was
reimposed, and rebellions, for example against the French in
Madagascar in 1947–8, were suppressed, or at least confronted.
However, in large part due to the accumulated strains of war, as
well as to the lessening of support for imperial rule from the colonial
population, especially their most influential sectors, there was also a
major retreat from empire.The British renounced control over India
(1947), which became India and Pakistan, as well as over Burma,
Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and Palestine (1948). Syria was granted
independence by the French in 1944, although Anglo-French occu-
pation continued. Fighting began in 1945, and, in 1946, the
Anglo-French forces withdrew; Lebanon became independent the
same year. The French also faced a growing insurrection in Indo-
China; Ho Chi Minh, the Communist head of the Viet Minh,
declared the Democratic Republic of Vietnam on 2 September
1945.The French regained control, but conflict began in November
1946.
31
The Dutch proved unable to sustain their attempt to regain
control of the East Indies.
32
The war also led to a marked increase in
hostility to the British in Egypt, a key part of the ‘informal empire’.
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This collapse of empire reflected both its failure as an ideology for
both rulers and ruled, and the breakdown of the system of consensus
that enabled the maintenance of imperial control without a major
military presence. Both owed much to the humiliations and
demands of the war. Furthermore, the disruption brought by indus-
trialisation and other social and economic trends encouraged by the
war helped sap established patterns of behaviour and loyalties. Thus
the ‘home fronts’ that were most affected by the war were those of
countries under imperial control, which, however, have received the
least attention in work on the subject. This process was readily
apparent in Vietnam and the Dutch East Indies, but would also have
been more obvious in the Philippines and India had they not
received independence.
China
The Nationalist Chinese government had also been gravely weak-
ened by the long war with Japan. Despite American support, it was
defeated in the Chinese Civil War of 1945–9 by the Soviet-backed
Communists.This would have been unlikely bar for the war: prior to
Japanese attack, the Chinese Communists had been in a vulnerable
position.This war was the largest, in terms of number of combatants
and area fought over since World War Two, and it proves an instruc-
tive counterpoint to the latter, indicating the difficulty of drawing
clear lessons from the conflicts of the 1940s; although it ought to be
stressed that there has been far less scholarship on the Chinese Civil
War than on World War Two, and much of the work published on
the former has reflected ideological bias. In China, technology and
the quantity of matériel did not triumph.The Communists were infe-
rior in weaponry, and, in particular, lacked air and sea power, but
their strategic conceptions, operational planning and execution,
army morale and political leadership proved superior. They also
benefited from having become the dominant anti-Japanese force in
northern China.The Nationalist cause was weakened by poor lead-
ership and inept strategy; and, as the war went badly, poor morale,
corruption and inflation badly affected civilian support. Until 1948,
however, the Nationalists held their own, but, that year, Communist
victory in Manchuria led to a crucial shift in advantage and the
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rapid collapse of the Nationalists the following year. Chiang Kai-
shek took refuge in Formosa (Taiwan), which was all he retained
control over.
33
In 1950, China signed a treaty of alliance with the
Soviet Union.
Conclusion
Every conflict is different, and civil wars have particular characteris-
tics, but the Chinese Civil War demonstrates, like World War Two,
that wars have to be waged and won. Their course and result were
(and are) not inevitable, and it is necessary to give due weight to
operational history: capability had to be proved successful in conflict.
In 1950, with the USA overwhelmingly dominant in the world
economy, as well as the leading global power, China and Eastern
Europe Communist, India independent, Fascism defeated, and the
states of Western Europe now with far less room for independent
manoeuvre, the world was set for the situation that was to prevail
until the collapse of European Communism.
NOTES
1 K. Smith, Conflict over Convoys: Anglo-American Logistics Diplomacy in the
Second World War (Cambridge, 1996).
2 B. Fischer, Albania at War 1939–1945 (West Lafayette, Indiana, 1999).
3 J.A. English, Marching Through Chaos.The Descent of Armies in Theory and
Practice (Westport, Connecticut, 1996), p. 105.
4 A. Mombauer, Helmuth von Moltke and the Origins of the First World War
(Cambridge, 2001). For earlier planning for war with Russia, see G.A.
Tunstall, Planning for War Against Russia and Serbia: Austro-Hungarian and
German Military Strategies, 1871–1914 (Boulder, Colorado, 1993).
5 L.H. Addington, The Blitzkrieg Era and the German General Staff,
1865–1941 (New Brunswick, New Jersey, 1971), pp. xi, 216–17.
6 M. Matloff, ‘The American Approach to War, 1919–1945’, in M.
Howard (ed.), The Theory and Practice of War (New York, 1966), p. 237.
7 This came into operational service in February 1945.
8 R.F. Weigley, History of the United States Army (New York, 1967), pp.
467–9.
9 O’Connor to Major-General Sir Percy Hobart, 24 August 1944, LH.
O’Connor papers 5/3/41.
10 J.M.Vernet,‘The Army of the Armistice 1940–1942:A Small Army for a
Great Revenge’, in C.R. Shrader (ed.), Proceedings of the 1982
International Military History Symposium.The Impact of Unsuccessful Military
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Campaigns on Military Institutions, 1860–1980 (Washington, 1984), pp.
241–2, 246–7.
11 K.E. Bonn, When the Odds were Even: The Vosges Mountains Campaign,
October 1944–January 1945 (Novato, California, 1994); C.Whiting, The
Battle of Huertgen Forest:The Untold Story of a Disastrous Campaign (1989);
E.G. Miller, A Dark and Bloody Ground:The Huertgen Forest and the Roer
River Dams, 1944–1945 (College Station, 1995); M. Doubler, Closing
with the Enemy: How GIs Fought the War in Europe, 1944–1945
(Lawrence, 1994); P.R. Mansoor, The GI Offensive in Europe:The Triumph
of American Infantry Divisions, 1941–1945 (Lawrence, Kansas, 1999); R.S.
Rush, Hell in the Hürtgen Forest: The Ordeal and Triumph of an American
Infantry Regiment (Lawrence, Kansas, 2001).
12 Manchester, John Rylands Library, Special Collections, GOW/1/2/2,
pp. 33, 54, 1/2/1, p. 6.
13 S. Bungay, Alamein (2002), pp. 210–12.
14 LH.Alanbrooke papers 6/2/37.
15 O’Connor to Major General Allan Adair, 24 July 1944, LH. O’Connor
5/3/22.
16 LH.Alanbrooke papers 6/2/37.
17 R. Buderi, The Invention that Changed the World (New York, 1996); G.
Hartcup, The Effect of Science on the Second World War (Basingstoke, 2000).
18 D. Hapgood and D. Richardson, Monte Cassino (1984).
19 P.K. Grimsted, Trophies of War and Empire.The Archival Heritage of Ukraine,
World War II, and the International Politics of Restitution (Cambridge,
Massachusetts, 2001), pp. 196–209.
20 M. Levene and P. Roberts (eds), The Massacre in History (Oxford, 1999).
21 A.J. Aluit, By Sword and Fire: The Destruction of Manila in World War II
(Manila, 1966).
22 Pound to Admiral Layton, 9 February 1943, BL.Add. 74796.
23 P.S. Dull, A Battle History of the Imperial Japanese Navy, 1941–1945
(Wellingborough, 1978).
24 G. Best, Nuremberg and After: The Continuing History of War Crimes and
Crimes Against Humanity (Reading, 1984); T. Taylor, The Anatomy of the
Nuremberg Trials (1993).
25 D. Bloxham, Genocide on Trial. War Crimes Trials and the Formation of
Holocaust History and Memory (Oxford, 2001), pp. 156–81, 226.
26 J.J.Weingartner, Crossroads of Death:The Story of the Malmedy Massacre and
Trial (Berkeley, 1979); F. Buscher, The US War Crimes Trial Program in
Germany, 1946–1955 (Westport, Connectictu, 1980); M. Reynolds, The
Devil’s Adjutant: Jochen Peiper, Panzer Leader (Staplehurst, 1995).
27 I. Deak, J.T. Gross and T. Judt (eds), The Politics of Retribution in Europe:
World War II and Its Aftermath (Princeton, 2000).
28 P.R. Piccigallo, The Japanese on Trial: Allied War Crimes Operations in the
East, 1945–1951 (Austin,Texas, 1979).
29 P. Williams and D. Wallace, Unit 731: Japan’s Secret Biological Warfare in
World War II (1989).
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30 S.R. Fischer, A History of the Pacific Islands (Basingstoke, 2002), pp.
210–11.
31 S.Tonnesson, The Vietnamese Revolution of 1945: Roosevelt, Ho Chi Minh,
and De Gaulle in a World at War (1991); D.G. Marr, Vietnam 1945: The
Quest for Power (Berkeley, 1995).
32 J.A. Krancher, The Defining Years of the Dutch East Indies, 1942–49
(Jefferson, New Jersey, 1996).
33 L.E. Eastman, Seeds of Destruction: Nationalist China in War and Revolution,
1937–49 (Stanford, 1984).
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The best recent single-volume coverage is A War To Be Won. Fighting
the Second World War by Williamson Murray and Allan R. Millett
(Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2000). Effective shorter studies include
A.W. Purdue, The Second World War (Basingstoke, 1999), and S.C.
Tucker, The Second World War (Basingstoke, 2003). An excellent
earlier single-volume account is provided by Gerhard Weinberg, A
World at Arms: A Global History of World War II (Cambridge, 1994),
and, for another look at the war in its global context, John Ray, The
Second World War: A Narrative History (1999). The encyclopedia
approach of The Oxford Companion to the Second World War (Oxford,
1995), edited by I.C.B. Dear and M.R.D. Foot, offers a mass of well-
informed essays. The significant cartographic dimension is covered
(with helpful text as well) in The Times Atlas of the Second World War
(London, 1989), edited by John Keegan, who has also published a
single-volume Second World War (London, 1989).
The economic dimension is tackled in Richard Overy’s Why the
Allies Won (London, 1995), while long-term perspectives are offered
in Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (London,
1988) and Jeremy Black’s Warfare in the Western World 1882–1975
(Chesham, 2002).
The naval dimension can be approached through R.D. Spector,
At War. At Sea: Sailors and Naval Warfare in the Twentieth Century
(London, 2001), C. Barnett, Engage the Enemy More Closely:The Royal
Navy in the Second World War (1991), and G.W. Baer, One Hundred
Years of Sea Power: The US Navy, 1890–1990 (Stanford, California,
1993). For air warfare, John Terraine, The Right of the Line:The RAF
291
Selected further reading
in the European War 1939–45 (1985), and John Buckley, Air Power in
the Age of Total War (London, 1999).
For the war in Europe, the series Germany and the Second World
War , published under the auspices of the Militärgeschichtliches
Forschungsamt, and, in English translation, by Oxford University
Press, is of great importance. The most instructive of these lengthy
volumes is volume 6, The Global War. Widening of the Conflict into a
World War and the Shift of the Initiative 1941–1943 (Oxford, 2001),
edited by Horst Boog and others. On German policy, see also Ian
Kershaw, Hitler 1936–1945: Nemisis (London, 2000), and Gerhard
Weinberg, Germany, Hitler and World War II: Essays in Modern German
and World History (Cambridge, 1995).
For Germany’s early successes, see R.A. Doughty, The Breaking
Point: Sedan and the Fall of France, 1940 (Hamden, Connecticut,
1990), and Brian Bond and Michael Taylor (eds), The Battle for France
and Flanders. Sixty Years On (Barnsley, 2001).
For the Eastern Front, John Erickson, The Road to Stalingrad
(London, 1975) and The Road to Berlin (London, 1987), can usefully
be supplemented by David M. Glantz and Jonathan M. House, When
Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler (Lawrence, Kansas,
1995) and The Battle of Kursk (Lawrence, Kansas, 1999), Richard
Overy, Russia’s War: Blood upon the Snow (London, 1997), and D.M.
Glantz, Barbarossa. Hitler’s Invasion of Russia 1941 (Stroud, 2001).
For the war in the Pacific, see R. Spector, Eagle Against the Sun:
The American War with Japan (New York, 1985), and H.P. Willmott,
Pearl Harbor (London, 2001).
For the war in North Africa, see W.G.F. Jackson, Battle for North
Africa (1975), and, in the Mediterranean, C. D’Este, World War II in
the Mediterranean, 1942–1945 (Chapel Hill, 1990).
For the war in Europe, see A.N. Garland and H.M. Smith, United
States Army in World War II: The Mediterranean Theater of Operations:
Sicily and the Surrender of Italy (Washington, 1993), and R.F. Weigley,
Eisenhower’s Lieutenants: The Campaign of France and Germany,
1944–1945 (Bloomington, Indiana, 1981).
For Axis occupation and the response, see M. Mazower, Inside
Hitler’s Greece:The Experience of Occupation, 1941–1944 (New Haven,
1993), and B. Moore (ed.), Resistance in Western Europe (Oxford, 2000).
SELECTED FURTHER READING
292
Abyssinia 5
air conflict 36, 47, 53–4, 81, 98,
142, 150, 183–4, 190
‘Air Gap’ 64–5, 145
air power 23–7, 273
air supply 198, 219, 223
airborne forces 26, 153, 170, 175,
179, 210, 222–3
Albania 56, 59, 166, 234, 267
Aleutian Islands 103, 141, 228
Alexander, General Sir Harold
153–4, 167–8
Algeria 52, 151–2
Andaman Islands 101
anti-tank weapons 36–7, 48–9,
120, 208, 270–1, 274
Antwerp 177, 183
Anzio 157, 167–8
appeasement 4–9, 76–7
Arakan 112, 137, 219
Arctic xiii, 227
Arnhem 177
artillery 49, 117, 206, 208, 222,
270, 272, 279, 281
Athens 61, 235,
Atlantic, battle of the 62–5, 113,
126, 143–7, 216
atomic bombs 218–19, 221, 275,
280
Auschwitz 87, 126, 183
Australia 109–10, 99, 221, 227
Austria 5–6, 60, 283
Axis powers see Germany, Italy,
Japan
Azores 67, 146
Bagration, Operation 162–3
Baku 27, 41, 116, 275
Balkans 224, 234; see also Albania,
Bulgaria, Greece, Hungary,
Romania,Yugoslavia
Baltic Sea 19–20, 38, 164
Baltic states 76, 164–5, 244, 286
Barbarossa 74–87, 229
Barentz Sea, Battle of the 144
Bataan 88, 93, 98
battleships 15–17, 21, 138–9, 215
Beijing 31–2
Belgium 45–6, 176–7
Belgrade 61, 166
Berlin 149–51, 206–9, 212, 278,
Bessarabia 42, 83, 286
Bismarck 63, 148
Black Sea 19
Blitz 70
Blitzkrieg 11, 25, 35, 48–9, 68, 77,
86, 103, 162, 198, 222, 241,
278, 281
Bock, Field Marshal Fedor von
75, 116
bombing 37, 46, 53–4, 125,
149–51, 182–8, 207, 210,
216–18, 240, 276–7
293
INDEX