World War II: Difference between revisions

The collapse of the German and Habsburg empires after the war led to the creation of many 'new' states and the re-drawing of borders all over central-southern Europe. The Habsburgs' dual-monarchy of Austria-Hungary was divided into Germanic Austria, Magyar Hungary, Czecho-Slovakia (a union of the Czech and Slovak peoples, with large minorities of Germans and Hungarians), Yugoslavia (a pan-Slavic union under Serbia), and Poland. Italy and Romania also received Austrian Trent and Hungarian Transylvania, respectively. Germany itself became a democracy (with numerous inner conflicts due to [[Dirty Communists|the spread of communism troughoutthroughout Europe]] after the Russian Revolution and military coups) and lost land to Denmark, a large chunk to Poland, and Alsace and Lorraine went back to France. ('Again', after a fashion. Nominally 'German' and 'French' people had been fighting over this region since before the modern nations of Germany or France existed.) And Germany also lost all her overseas colonies, which had been economically useless but nonetheless a great source of national pride before the war.

The monetary cost of the war is literally incalculable - Russia dodged its bill entirely, for instance, by becoming a whole new country - but the average cost to europeanEuropean human capital was about 6%, domestic assets about 11% and national wealth some 10-20%. Furthermore, the conclusion of the war and the creation of so many new, weak states along national lines resulted in a Europe that spent most of its time grappling with great political unrest instead of addressing the fundamental structural economic problems which underpinned much of said unrest. Almost overnight Europe went from a handful of curriencescurrencies with fixed exchange rates to over a dozen currencies with variable exchange rates. Where there had been a handful of tariff barriers and taxation systems before, there were dozens. Germany, whose economic power would have together with France and Britain been required to 'save' europeEurope from itself, was deliberately weakened and saddled with near-crippling war-reparations debts. London had managed the world's pre-war banking; now, the situation was too complex and London too weak for it to exert any real control over it, and New York refused to step up to the plate and take charge of the situation. Furthermore, the four-year war disrupted the natural trade cycles of europeEurope and resulted in economies that had to be re-geared to peace-time conditions post-1918. Which resulted in mass unemployment and gave impetus to Socialist and Fascist movements through much of Europe. The danger seemed to have passed by about 1923, with things taking a shaky turn for the better... but then came the Great Depression, which saw world industrial production down by a fifth and trade by half. With this came unemployment rates of some 5-30% for many countries, these figures often concealing vast regional and temporal variations. The political implications of all this for social unrest were only intensified given the poor or non-existent state of social welfare throughout the industrial world.

One year earlier, a [[Second Sino-Japanese War|border clash]] had broken out between the disorganiseddisorganized and factious Republic of China and the Japanese Empire, after a Japanese soldier went missing during exercises near the 'Marco Polo Bridge' (near Beijing). Ironically, after nearly half a century of political and economic expansion at the expense of China, Japan was in the spring of 1937 minded to follow Britain's example in China and gradually disengage (politically and militarily) from the region, viewing the Soviet Union as a far greater threat for reasons both ideological and practical, with some overly-optimistic elements of the military hoping to expand into Siberia. (Urban) Chinese public opinion, on the other hand, would not stand for anything less than firm opposition to Japan, opposing any further political compromises and railing at real and perceived insults to Chinese national pride. So when the Marco Polo Bridge incident turned into yet another border skirmish, the conflict quickly escalated to a scale that the leadership of neither side wanted. Generalissimo Jiang and his entourage would have much preferred to avoid a full-scale war to focus on eliminating Communists, independent-minded Warlords and banditry; The Imperial Cabinet was happy with trading with China and preparing for the seemingly-inevitable war against the Soviets.

The reaction to the China Incident abroad was one of muted sympathy. People felt sorry for China and had begun to think rather badly of Japan, but non-ethnic Chinese didn't care enough to actually pressure their governments to do anything aboatabout the War. People related more to the people and events in Europe, which they were more interested in generally. From the Japanese seizure of the France-sized northern province of Manchuria in 1931 to the full-scale invasion and occupation of 1937, the whole mess served to highlight the true uselessness of the League of Nations. Its reaction to the very obvious problems at hand was effectively to sit in a corner with its eyes shut and its fingers in its ears saying 'La la la I can't hear you!'. When they had tried to reprimand Japan for its actions back in '31, Japan simply left the League. This last straw, when taken with incidents like the Italian annexation of Ethiopia, only encouraged the 'Axis' (formed by the Tripartite Pact between Germany, Italy and Japan) powers to take action against what increasingly seemed like tired and weak old democracies which hadn't the stomach to fight. Hitler in particular was convinced that Britain and France were in no way interested in another war with Germany and would likely only fight to defend themselves. This misjudgement was just asking for trouble, [[You Fail Economics Forever|as was the belief that having an Empire was an automatic guarantor of prosperity. There was some vague spiel about markets for the fruits of industry, and military might ensuring the prosperity of the nation. Never mind the ginormous costs of war.]]

By September, the Germans are in control of much of Western Russia, from Novgorod to Kiev. Hitler is initially satisfied with the results and plans only limited mop-up operations the following year. However, his generals convince him that Moscow is an easy target and he approves of Operation Typhoon. Winter comes to aid the Soviet defenses: bad weather, hailstorms and snow, culminating in a mind-numbing cold that the German Army is unable to cope with, particularly since Hitler lacked the foresight to outfit his troops with winter uniforms and machinery wasn't suetedsuited to cold weather and failed to even start. These devastating natural conditions reinforce the sheer determination of the Red Army, and the Germans are halted literally within sight of Moscow. Finally, the Soviets launch a surprise counterattack that forces the Germans back. Stalin and the Soviets have avoided defeat, but the Germans remain in possession of the western part of the USSR. In addition, this defeat begins Hitler's distrust of his generals and from this point on, he begins taking more control over military operations.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, the third Axis power, [[Imperial Japan]], is going nowhere fast. On paper, the Empire and its puppets control a third of China, half her population and almost all her industry. In reality occupied China teems with bandits and guerillasguerrillas, and one only has to travel twenty miles from a railroad or river to find territory beyond Imperial control. On paper, the Republic's troops outnumber those of the Empire and her allies by three-to-one; in reality, only half these troops answer to the central government led by the Guomindang, the Chinese Nationalists under Generalissimo Jiang Jieshi we mentioned earlier. The superiority of Japanese equipment, training, unit organisation and command structure - [[Death From Above|not to mention air-power]], which is being used to level Chinese towns and cities more or less with impunity (typically by [[Kill It with Fire|fire-bombing]] them) - has counted for nothing in the face of the vast size of China and her massive population. For instance, the Chinese have virtually no anti-tank weapons; but the Japanese have virtually no tanks in working order they can bring to where they are needed except in the on-and-off meat-grinder battles which rage through the hills of southern and central China. The attrition rate for the Guomindang's core armies over the past four years has been at least half. In a relatively unmolested, mountainous province of north-central China, a young Communist official is slowly offing his rivals to become the leader of the socialist commune there, the largest in the country. His name is [[Mao Ze Dong]].

Rational officers like Admiral Yamamato, who understand the US's real strength - c.30% of World GDP to Japan's c.3%, and nearly 51% of the entire world's industrial capacity, albeit much of it still idled by the Great Depression - object to this [[Honor Before Reason]] line of suicidal thinking, but are [[My Country, Right or Wrong|duty-bound]] to follow the government's orders. Yamamato decides that, if this course must be taken, JaponJapan's best chance of victory lies in making a preemptive strike at the US Pacific Fleet, then based at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii; hopefully, the USA will simply drop its sanctions and negotiate a peace treaty instead of going to the enormous expense and inconvenience of replacing much of its fleet and taking the offensive to Japan.

After six months of planning and training, a taskforce based around six Japanese aircraft carriers moves out under complete secrecy and on December 7, 1941, catch the Americans completely off guard, wrecking much of the American fleet. Unfortunately (for them), the US fleet's aircraft carriers are at sea and Yamamoto's subordinate Admiral Nagumo is correspondingly cautious, choosing to withdraw rather than launch a third wave of bombers against the base facilities themselves (thereby leaving the fleet vulnerable to a carrier-based counter-attack). Thus Pearl HarbourHarbor's drydocks, machine shops, naval headquarters, storehouses and fuel reserves - without which the remnants of the fleet could have been left stranded - are left intact. <ref> Destroying the fleet itself took priority, as the aim of the attack was 'Shock and Awe'; sinking the fleet's ships was rightly considered more impressive than wrecking their repair and resupply facilities. The task force was not, in fact, actually trained for the latter objective. In any case nearly a third of the fleet's aircraft were destroyed in the first two waves, and the remainder were ill-equipped to take out said ground facilities. Take torpedo-bombers, for instance: great for sinking ships, but they can do pretty much nothing against a concrete (bullet-proof) oil-silo.</ref> All things considered the attack hasn't done a great deal of (permanent) damage, as many of the ships can be - and are - repaired and returned to service with a year or so; only three ships are completely out of commission, and a lot of material is salvaged from them. <ref> Also, with their battleships out of action for months, the US Navy is forced to put all its faith into the new untested aircraft carriers and submarines. Though born of necessity at the time, this doctrine rules naval strategy to this day.</ref>

While the war turns against him in Europe, Hitler and his cronies begin planning a thorough program of genocide, one that we know today as '[[Final Solution|The Holocaust]]'. This is an organised response to the problems created by Germany's dominion over various new subject peoples come Operation Barbarossa. Ghettos and Work-camps were only part of the solution; while many Red Army prisoners and able-bodied undesirables could be worked to death in the mines, minefields and factories, there was really no reason to suffer the existence of (male) homosexuals - female homosexuals might yet be cured by corrective sexual activity, it was hoped - gypsies and jews, who by their very natures could never be anything but a blight upon any superior people. To this end a steady stream of un-usable un-desirables was stealthily moved out of the ghettos and concentration camps and sent to dedicated death-camps to be... well, processed for their belongings and used for what materials could be extracted from their corpses. At Auschwitz-Birkenau, over a million Jews from all over Europe are gassed. At Treblinka, dedicated to the extermination of PoliahPolish Jews, over eight hundred thousand are gassed. Estimates vary, but around six million Jews or people of Jewish descent (Nazi race laws meant even people with a single Jewish grandparent ''could'' be counted as Jewish, though whether one was brought up on this depended on your connections) are gassed, shot, starved or worked to death before the Reich surrenders. This figure is about half of the prewar Jewish population in Germany and the areas conquered by Hitler. Over 90% of the Jews of Poland are murdered.

In Europe, Germany's situation goes from bad to worse when the Western Allies -- principally the Americans, British and Canadians -- land in northern France (Normandy) on [[The Longest Day|the 6th of June, 1944]]; Hitler is now fighting a two-front war against larger and arguably better-equipped armies with better air support. Two weeks after the Allies land in France, the Soviets launch their biggest attack of the war: Operation Bagration, which finally completes one of oldest Soviet strategic goals - annihilates Army Group Centre. The Red Army leaps forward some two hundred miles, clearing almost all of the USSR of Germans and advancing to the gates of Warsaw. Stalin has broken the back of the Wehrmacht. Western Allies initially disbelieved that Soviets were able to do so, wichwhich lead to huge "POWs march", where 57 thousands German POWs walked on Moscow streets. In the meantime, while the Soviets are busy wiping out enormous concentrations of German troops, the Western Allies break out of their beachhead in Normandy after two months of savage combat. Increasingly-frequent Allied bombing raids like the one described in [[Slaughterhouse-Five]] do enormous damage to the German war effort and citizenry. The bombing grows steadily more intense through the end of the war, leaving almost every major city in Hitler's Reich in ruins. With the Luftwaffe's bombing capabilities rendered as good as ineffective, having lost their airfields sufficiently close to the Channel, Hitler turns to using the newly-developed Vergeltungswaffen (retaliation weapons), the V-1 'Buzz Bomb' and later the V-2 ballistic missile to try and exact some revenge on the British, who by and large consider this nuisance not worth getting worked up about.

The "Battle of the Bulge" results in German gains for a few days under the cover of bad weather, then an inevitable defeat as Hitler's tanks run out of fuel and are left behind as his troops are pushed back by Allied counter-attacks, especially when the streak of cloudy days runs out and the Allies' air forces can resume operations. This defeat essentially breaks the back of Germany's power to resist in the West. Germany is now a country void of teen- and middle-aged males, who have virtually all been drafted into citizen militias to defend the Fatherland to the last. Meanwhile, the Soviets clear Poland of German forces and push all the way to the Oder river, 56 miles from Berlin, and taking the time to advance through the Balkans, Hungary, and Romania before advancing into Germany proper - so that they will be negotiating the post-war world order from a position of strength. In April of 1945, Soviet and American troops meet at a German village called Torgau. The job of taking Berlin is left to the Soviets, who is ten times closer at the moment, who do so in the latter part of April and at 1st May Red Flag vaves above the Reichstag in an operation, that even Allied generals was forced to remark as highly sucsessfullsuccessful. Hitler [[Better to Die Than Be Killed|kills himself]] in his underground bunker on April 30, 1945. On May 8, the Germans officially surrender and the war in Europe is over.

The horrors of the Holocaust lead to the creation of the State of [[Israel]] in 1948 as a homeland for the Jewish nation in what had been British Palestine (thereby leading to the [[Arab-Israeli Conflict]]). Despite talks of unifying Germany, Austria and Korea under neutral democratic governments, [[Cold War|both countries and Europe as a whole become increasingly divided between the Soviet-dominated, dictatorial Communist East and the American-backed, eventually fairly democratic West.]] It is only in 1989 that the Communist '2nd world' crumbles from within and the regimes of eastern Europe go down in a series of revolutions. Germany is officially reunited the next year, largely bringing a close one of the most visible legacies of World War II.

The war killed about 62 to 78 million people, 3-4% of the world's population at that time. The USSR 'won' the numbers of total and total military casualties at about 26.6 million people in all. Next was China, who won out in the numbers of civilian dead for a total at least in the mid-teens of millions. Poland lost a seventh of its population and the Soviet Republic of Belarus - which bore the brunt of both German and Soviet offensives ''and'' history's highest-intensity guerillaguerrilla warfare - lost '''''a full quarter''''' of its people, proportionally more than even the Jews. Yugoslavia lost some 1 million of its 15-million population. Hungary and Greece were similarly mauled, losing up to 6% and 10% of their populations respectively. The Commonwealth and France, however, actually had less military deaths than in [[World War One]]. This isn't particularly surprising, since the Soviets bore the brunt of the German onslaught, but civilian casualties were ''much'' higher, due to the aerial bombings, massacres of civilians (as reprisals) and the occasional spot of genocide.

== {{tropelist|Popular tropes for this time period ==}}

** Italy wasn't ready for the war for a series of reasons, the most evident of which being that the Italian industry, while capable to produce some fine equipment and in full expansion, was just too small to adequately support its armed forces in such a vast war (in fact, Mussolini knew this, and had Italy enter the war when France was all but conquered and Britain seemed about to sue for peace. Then Britain choose to fight, and Mussolini started to realize he was holding the [[Idiot Ball]]). Then there were the problems of the armed forces. The air force, while equipped with capable attack aircrafts (best known of which is the [[wikipedia:Savoia-Marchetti SM.79|Savoia-Marchetti SM.79 Sparviero]], Sparviero being Italian for [[Big Badass Bird of Prey|Sparrowhawk]]), had bombs too little to do the job (nicknamed cowshit drops by the Italian Navy for their ineffectiveness) was still equipped with very manouverable but too slow ''biplane fighters'', and the new monoplane fighters, while on par and sometimes superior to the ones of other powers, were too little and too late. The navy was powerful and arguably the best of the Italian armed forces, but lacked carriers and torpedo boats due [[Interservice Rivalry|rivalry with the air force]] and Mussolini thinking that the Italian peninsula was an unsinkable carrier by itself, was insufficiently supported by the air force (that usually arrived on the battlefield too late and had the unfortunate tendencetendency to [[Friend or Foe|mistake the Italian ships for the British ones]]. That's also how the Italian navy learned of the ineffectiveness of the air force bombs), suffered from an extremely restrictive operative doctrine that included the fleet being directed from Rome until a few minutes before the battle (meaning the Royal Navy always knew where the Italians were by tracking the radio signals), and the fact they weren't fighting the French Navy (that the Italian Navy was tailored to counter and defeat with a combination of speed advantage in the lesser ships and four battleships that outgunned everything in the world save for the ''Yamato'' and the most massive American battleships) but the Royal Navy, that the Italian sailors admired and feared and whose ships and aggressive operative doctrine seemed tailored to take advantage of the Italian ships [[Fragile Speedster|sacrificing protection for speed]] and their restrictive operative doctrine. Finally the army suffered of severe morale problems (a reflection of the Italian people lack of enthusiasm for the war), shortage of modern or efficient equipment and most high officers and generals getting their ranks from politics rather than actual ability impairing the ability and, most important, the ''will'' to fight of most units in spite of the soldiers combat capability (Rommel, whose troops included both Germans and Italians, admitted that the Italian soldiers were superior to the German ones, but the officers were a disaster). As [[La Résistance|partisans]] the now motivated Italians fared much better, even taking control of enclaves and defending them against overwhelming force for short periods and, on April 25, 1945, launching a general insurrection that prevented the Germans from regrouping and hold off the Allies at the Po river.

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