World War II

In its early stages the war was depicted in the West as a struggle of the democracies (France and Britain) against a fanatical and evil German National Socialist dictatorship. This perception was magnified after the entry of the USSR and the United States on the side of Britain in 1941, and Italy and Japan on the side of Germany in 1940 and 1941. From then on the Western powers proclaimed the war as a fight to the finish against the totalitarian Axis, a view reinforced by Roosevelt's call for the unconditional surrender of the Axis powers in 1943. As the war dragged on, the distinction between the belligerent peoples and their “evil” governments became increasingly blurred in the Allied mind—though in the case of the Japanese people, towards whom a crude racist attitude was adopted from the outset, such a distinction had often not existed anyway. This depiction of the war as a life-or-death struggle between democracy and fascism was a convenient fiction—the USSR was anything but democratic, although Stalin made some cosmetic changes, such as the abolition of the Comintern, relaxation of religious and anti-Semitic persecution, and portrayal of the war as “The Great Patriotic War” (thus downplaying Communist ideology for the duration), to appeal to the West. America's Far Eastern ally, Nationalist China under Chiang Kai-shek was corrupt and dictatorial, however much Roosevelt pretended otherwise.

Indeed, while Britain and the United States maintained the outward semblances of democracy—Parliament and Congress respectively—both Winston Churchill after 1940 and Roosevelt after 1941 conferred on themselves immense powers which would have been unthinkable in peace time. In both states, civil liberties were restricted as never before in an effort to enforce uniformity and unity. In Britain, for instance, the Defence of the Realm Act could be utilized to justify any arbitrary State action, as in the case of Oswald Mosley and his Fascist Party, many of whose leaders were rounded up and imprisoned in 1940. The internment of German and Italian refugees in Britain and of Japanese-Americans, in the western United States could equally be justified in the name of the security of the State, despite the fact that most were either refugees from fascist persecution or, in the case of the Japanese-Americans were mostly patriotic Americans. In general, however, British and American authorities ruled with a light hand, since the overwhelming majority of their citizens supported the war. In both the USSR and Germany, Stalin and Hitler had already consolidated their power, and during the war both dictators became the supreme commanders of their armed forces, interfering both in strategic and tactical matters, often ignoring military advice. Internally, loyalty to their respective regimes was maintained by Draconian police measures, coupled with skilful propaganda that emphasized patriotism and hatred of the enemy as a means of keeping their populations in line. Democracy had long ceased to exist in Italy (Mussolini was overthrown in 1943 by an internal coup), while Japan was governed by a succession of Cabinets dominated by the Army and the Navy, who were very often at cross purposes over their objectives, presided over by an emperor who kept a discreet silence until the end of the war.

The war's end was a total victory for the “democratic” coalition. Fascism and Japanese militarism had been crushed, and for Roosevelt a future peaceful world order could now be guaranteed by the UN, presided over by the four major victor powers, the United States, the USSR, Great Britain, and China. His vision soon faded after his death on April 12, 1945. China collapsed into civil war. Britain attempted to assert its continuing great-power status as a victor, but by 1945, having lost the bulk of its overseas assets and nearly bankrupted by its war effort, this was to be an uphill, and ultimately fruitless, task. The loss of Singapore had been a fatal blow to Britain's already tottering prestige in Asia. The war also created serious rifts between Britain and its Commonwealth partners. At the outbreak of the war the White Dominions—Canada, Australia, and New Zealand—had rallied to the British cause, sending troops to the British Isles and, in the case of Australia and New Zealand, to the Middle East. South Africa also declared war on Germany, although rather reluctantly and not without considerable unrest among the Boer population. With the rising Japanese threat in the Far East in 1941, the Australian and New Zealand governments began to demand the repatriation of their troops from the Middle East. Churchill ignored or evaded their requests. The loss of British ships off Singapore demonstrated to the two Commonwealth governments that Britain's pre-war promises to send a powerful fleet to the Far East in the event of Japanese aggression had been entirely bogus. The fall of Singapore, without any major British resistance, was the final blow to what little Australasian confidence remained in British military prowess. Around 14,000 Australian troops, some of whom had only recently arrived in Singapore, were captured, and half of them died in Japan's prisoner-of-war camps. Thereafter, both countries turned to the United States for their future defence. The Singapore debacle was also the death knell for Britain's already shaky hold on India. Indian troops—the British Viceroy had declared war on Germany on behalf of India in 1939 without any consultation with Indian nationalist leaders—formed the bulk of the British army in Malaya and Burma. Indeed, the feeble resistance to the Japanese invaders by the British, Dutch, and French colonialists in South East Asia ignited nationalist passions across Asia; although Japanese behaviour in the conquered territories hardly endeared them to the indigenous populations, despite Japan's call for “Asia for the Asiatics”. Canadian troops remained in the British Isles until they embarked for Normandy on D-Day in 1944.

By 1945 the pre-1939 status quo had disappeared beyond recall. France, Germany, and Western Europe were in ruins, and the devastated lands of Eastern and Central Europe were under Soviet control. The United States had emerged as the predominant global power, rich in human skills, boundless energy, and natural resources, with her homeland barely touched by the ravages of war. When the United States and the USSR quarrelled after 1946 the stage was set for a new conflict—the Cold War.