World War II

D

20

The Defeat of Japan

Although Japan's position was hopeless by early 1945, an early end to the war was not in sight. The Japanese navy would not be able to come out in force again, but the bulk of the army was intact and was deployed in the home islands and China. The Japanese gave a foretaste of what was yet in store by resorting to kamikaze (Japanese, “divine wind”) suicide air attacks, during the fighting for Luzon in the Philippines. On January 4-13, 1945, quickly trained kamikaze pilots flying obsolete planes had sunk 17 US ships and damaged 50.

While the final assault on Japan awaited reinforcements from Europe, the island-hopping approach continued, first, with a landing on Iwo Jima on February 19. That small, barren island cost the lives of over 6,000 US Marines in the Battle of Iwo Jima before it was secured on March 16. Situated almost halfway between the Marianas and Tokyo, the island played an important part in the air war. Its two airfields provided landing sites for damaged B-29s and enabled fighters to give the bombers cover during their raids on Japanese cities.

On April 1, the US Tenth Army, composed of four army and four Marine divisions under General Simon B. Buckner, Jr., landed on Okinawa, 500 km (310 mi) south of the southernmost Japanese island, Kyushu. The Japanese did not defend the beaches. They proposed to make their stand on the southern tip of the island, across which they had constructed three strong lines. The northern three fifths of the island were secured in less than two weeks, the third line in the south could not be breached until June 14, and the fighting continued to June 21, with the deaths of around a third of the island's population.

The next attack was scheduled for Kyushu in November 1945. An easy success seemed unlikely. The Japanese had fought practically to the last man on Iwo Jima, and hundreds of soldiers and civilians had jumped off cliffs at the southern end of Okinawa rather than surrender. Kamikaze planes had sunk 15 naval vessels and damaged 200 off Okinawa. Emperor Hirohito and others in Japan's government realized that defeat was inevitable, but could not bypass the military, which was divided and unable to admit defeat.

The Kyushu landing was never made. Throughout the war, the US government and the British had maintained a massive scientific and industrial project to develop nuclear weapons, believing Germany was doing the same. The chief ingredients, fissionable uranium and plutonium, had not been available in sufficient quantity before the war in Europe ended. The first bomb was exploded in a test at Alamogordo, New Mexico, on July 16, 1945.

Two more bombs had been built, and the possibility arose of using them to convince the Japanese to surrender. President Harry S. Truman, who had succeeded Roosevelt in April, decided to allow the bombs to be dropped because, he said, he believed they might save thousands of American lives. Some historians have speculated that the decision was influenced by a desire to exhibit the new weapon to the Soviets in preparation for post-war power struggles. However, it is now generally accepted that Truman's decision was based on the need to end the war quickly, without the loss of American lives involved in a conquest of Japan. Effects on Soviet opinion were not a paramount calculation, and indeed Stalin became more inflexible after the atomic bombs were used. For maximum psychological impact, they were used in quick succession, one over Hiroshima on August 6, the other over Nagasaki on August 9. These cities had not previously been bombed, and thus the bombs' damage could be accurately assessed. US estimates put the number killed in Hiroshima at 66,000 to 78,000 and in Nagasaki at 39,000. Japanese estimates gave a combined total of 240,000. The USSR declared war on Japan on August 8 and invaded Dongbei the next day, breaking the last inhibitions of the Japanese High Command, which was terrified at the prospect of Communist invasion.

On August 14 Japan announced its surrender, which was not quite unconditional because the Allies had agreed to allow the country to keep its emperor. The formal signing took place on September 2 in Tokyo Bay aboard the battleship Missouri. The Allied delegation was headed by General MacArthur, who became the military governor of occupied Japan.

IV

Cost of the War

World War II's basic statistics qualify it as by far the greatest war in history in terms of human and material resources expended. In all, 61 countries with 1.7 billion people, three quarters of the world's population, took part. A total of 110 million people were mobilized for military service, more than half of those by the USSR (22-30 million), Germany (17 million), and the United States (16 million). The largest numbers of active-duty personnel at any one time were: USSR 12,500,000; the United States 12,245,000; Germany 10,938,000; British Empire 8,720,000; Japan 7,193,000; and China 5,000,000.

Most statistics on the war can only be estimates. The war's vast and chaotic sweep made accurate record-keeping impossible. Some governments lost control of the data, and some resorted to manipulating it for political reasons. However, there is a rough consensus on the total cost of the war. In terms of money spent, it has been put at more than US$1 trillion, which makes it more expensive than all other wars combined.

The United States spent the most money on the war, an estimated $341 billion, including $50 billion of Lend-Lease supplies which were distributed as follows: Britain $31 billion; USSR $11 billion; China $5 billion; and all others $3 billion. The expenditure of other belligerents (in US dollars) was as follows: Germany $272 billion; USSR $192 billion; Britain $120 billion; Italy $94 billion; and Japan $56 billion. Except for the United States and some of the less militarily active Allies, the money spent does not come close to the war's true costs. The former Soviet government calculated that the USSR lost 30 per cent of its national wealth, while Nazi exactions and looting in the Soviet Union and other occupied countries are incalculable. The full cost to Japan has been estimated at US$562 billion.

Clearly the major factor in the Allied victory was the possession of vastly superior resources in comparison to those of the Axis powers. All economic indices attest to this superiority—in manpower, manufacturing output, raw materials, education, etc. The United States eventually surpassed all the belligerents economically, but the Soviet Union and Britain proved equally capable of prodigious efforts in the production of weapons of all kinds. The Axis powers could not hope to match this in the long run, despite the vast territorial gains they had made in the early stages of the war.

A

The Effects of the War on Civilians

Technological and scientific developments made the war one of unparalleled ferocity. It reached a level of bestiality and horror never before seen in the history of humankind. Civilians in the vast war zones became part of the fighting fronts, and suffered from disease, malnutrition, and often actual starvation, destruction of their towns and cities, and appalling injuries and death.

The air war accounted for much of this civilian suffering. The Nazi aerial blitz on Warsaw in 1939 and Rotterdam in 1940 was followed by much larger-scale night bombing of London and other British towns and cities in 1940 and 1941. Britain's Bomber Command retaliated after 1942 with a massive night bombing campaign against Germany's towns and cities, the only means until 1944 by which Britain could strike directly at the heartland of Germany. By the end of the war, most large German cities and towns had been reduced to rubble, with an ever-increasing civilian death toll from direct hits, blasts, and fire-storms.

Contrary to the expectations of many pre-war air strategists, aerial war did not undermine enemy morale to the extent that it would force its government to sue for peace. Assisted by government exhortation and efforts to ameliorate the worst effects of the bombing by provision of shelters, first aid, and other measures (and in Germany by a ferocious and ever-present police apparatus), the civilian populations in Britain and Germany, while undeniably depressed by the destruction inflicted on them, held firm, despite occasional panic in places like Southampton where shelters were inadequate and the local administration collapsed. Indeed, in Germany in 1944, despite Allied bombing by day and night, military industrial production rose sharply, a result of the innovations of Albert Speer, Hitler's energetic and ruthless Minister of Armaments after 1942, who discovered plenty of slack and wastage in German industry.

Air historians remain divided about the effectiveness of the RAF's aerial night bombing of Germany. Many suggest that it largely failed in its objectives, and the resources devoted to bombing might have been better invested elsewhere, such as in the Middle East or Far East or in the Battle of the Atlantic. Others insist that in its collateral effects on German communications and industries it made a decisive impact on Germany's war potential—that without it Germany's military-industrial resurgence after 1943 might have been even more impressive. There is little doubt that, despite its immense losses, the US Army Air Force's “precision” bombing of Germany's industrial infrastructure, particularly oil and communications, and its progressive destruction of the German fighter defence forces did have a major impact on Germany's fighting capabilities. However when the Americans began the aerial bombing of Japanese towns and cities in 1944 and 1945 this seemed to have little effect on the Japanese people's will to continue fighting, until the dropping of the atomic bombs and the Soviet Union's declaration of war convinced the Emperor and his closest advisers that Japan must surrender or be totally obliterated.

Civilians were also adversely affected in other ways. Many were forced into slave labour in Germany's factories and armaments industries, while French, Belgian, Dutch, and Italian citizens were shipped to Germany to work in its factories. Many of the slave labourers were starved to death. The Germans also ruthlessly pillaged the resources of occupied countries like France and the Benelux countries until they belatedly realized that it was more profitable to the German war effort to keep the workers and resources of these countries in place to produce essential armaments and other goods. Civilians, as well as former soldiers, in the occupied countries also joined guerrilla bands—such as the Marquis in France, the underground in Singapore, and the partisans in Yugoslavia—to harry communications and sabotage Axis-controlled industries.

B

The Holocaust

By far the most horrifying event was the deliberate murder of 5 million Jewish men, women, and children, deported from Germany, Poland, and other occupied countries to Nazi concentration camps. This was Hitler's “Final Solution” to the Jewish “problem”. Before the war the persecution of the Jews in Germany, and later in Austria and Czechoslovakia, had taken the form of banning them from their employment, the seizure of their property, and arbitrary arrest and various other humiliations, such as being forced to wear the Star of David in public. Before 1942 special German units had indiscriminately murdered Jews, Poles, and Russian Bolshevik commissars captured in Poland and Russia. In 1942 a conference of German officials drew up plans for a more “scientific” approach, the Holocaust, which involved herding these people—as well as other target groups such as Roma and homosexuals—into killing camps, where they were exterminated in gas chambers and then cremated. In some camps 10,000 of these unfortunates could be gassed every day. It is not known how many Germans and their collaborators in occupied territories were involved or connived in this mass slaughter, but certainly it was not restricted, as was believed immediately after the war, to Heinrich Himmler and his entourage and a few German civil servants and police officials, with the bulk of the German population unaware of what was going on—the network of the guilty appears to have been much wider than that.

C

Human Losses

As well as this monstrous programme of extermination, the human cost of the war was appalling for most of the belligerents. The USSR lost the most—at least 20 million civilian and military personnel killed—including large numbers of Russian prisoners deliberately starved to death in German prisoner-of-war camps. Poland lost around a fifth of its civilian population. Allied civilian losses were 44 million; Axis losses, 11 million. The military deaths on both sides in Europe numbered 19 million, and in the war against Japan, 6 million (which included a sizeable number of Allied prisoners-of-war starved or tortured to death in Japanese forced-labour camps in Burma and elsewhere). Only the United States was spared any significant civilian losses, with 292,131 military deaths in battle and 115,187 military deaths from other causes.

The highest numbers of deaths and missing among the armed forces of the combatant countries were: USSR 11 million; Germany 3.25 million; Japan 1.7 million; China 1.4 million; Poland 480,000; Romania 360,000; Italy 350,000; United States 300,000; Yugoslavia 300,000; UK 260,000; Hungary 200,000; and France 125,000.