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May 7,2005.08:23 AM
A world changed by war
Sixty years ago today, the most destructive conflict in history came to an end in Europe
But the alliances formed in its wake laid the basis for hostilities that rolled across the
globe for decades
OLIVIA WARD
FEATI'RE WRITER
The end came with ironic calm: signatures penned on a piece of paper by five generals in a makeshift
schoolhouse building in northeastern France
a German, anAmerican, a Briton, a Russian and a
French observer.
Sixty years ago today, Germany surrendered to the Allied forces, and the most destructive war in
history ended in Europe. The ceremony was brief and businesslike. Victory in Europe Day would be
officially celebrated aday later, on May 8, 1945.
As fires were lit, electric lights blazed, and weeping, dancing, embracing survivors thronged the
streets of European and North American cities, the great blackout that was World War II ended.
But in the bleak, grey dawn came the reckoning: 60 million dead,46 million uprooted from their
homes, millions more sick and starving and the majority of Europeans faced with rebuilding their
lives on the ashes of a world that no longer existed.
"There were those who died cheering, because that effort of happiness was more than their bodies
could endure," wrote war coffespondent Martha Gellhorn, who heard of the surrender at Dachau
concentration camp among the remains of some of Europe's six million slain Jews.
For those who lived to see the end of the war, the most immediate cause to celebrate was the demise
of Adolf Hitler's Third Reich. For months it had headed toward defeat, leaving few in doubt that
Germany would lose the war.
"The siege of Berlin ensured suffocation," says British historian Norman Davies. "The suicide of the
Fuhrer on the 30th of April prevented all chance of recovery; the general surrender of 8/9 May
marked the last twitch. The Nuremberg Tribunal of 1946 may be likened to a coroner's court," he said
in his book, Europe.
In Italy, surrender had taken place the previous week, and a German delegation in Lubeck tried to
negotiate a conditional peace. After signing the official surrender at Reims, France, Soviet Maj.-Gen.
Ivan Sousloparov was told he had no authority to do so, and his govemment held its own ceremony
May 9, in Hitler's charred capital, Berlin.
The confusion would be a harbinger of things to come. For World War II not only stitched together a
tenuous alliance of East and West, but laid the groundwork for new hostilities that would roll across
the world in decades to come.
"The Second World War ... was really several wars in one," says Columbia University historian Mark
Mazower in his book Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century. Apart from its military
campaigns, "it was also a war between races, religions and ethnic groups
a bloody reopening of
-
accounts by extreme nationalists wishing to revise the Versailles settlement (after World War I)
by
force."
The war in some regions was a class conflict, too, settling the scores of the poor and landless against
wealthy owners and destitute peasant farmers against urbanites. And it provoked civil war between
pro-fascist and resistance forces that were split on ideological grounds.
Such cataclysmic violence would take on a life of its own, played out for years to come.Among the
first victims of the post-war era were refugees, displaced throughout Europe through expulsion,
forced migration and fear.
"There was a tremendous movement of 11 million ethnic Germans from other countries where they
had been living to Germany," says Christiane Harzig, an expert in migration history now working on
a research project at the University of Winnipeg. "To those in Germany, they appeared at first as a
great burden."
Hundreds of thousands of Jewish survivors, meanwhile, headed for North America and the Middle
East, some taking years to gain permission to emigrate. Those who returned to Poland and Slovakia
faced new pogroms in which many were killed. Others were interned in "displaced persons" camps
by the occupying powers, awaiting travel to British-ruled Palestine.
At summit meetings in Yalta and Potsdam, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin set out the price of his support
for the Alliance, which cost Russia 25 million lives. The partition of Europe began in an orgy of
ethnic cleansing, with Poles forced into vacated German regions, and Russians into Poland. As
communist regimes took power across Eastern Europe, Germans and others fled west, many dying of
starvation or in communist labour camps.
As the tide of human misery swept the continent, the international community created a new human
rights doctrine. "The Geneva Convention (on refugees) was written as a response to this huge
problem," says Harzig. "It has been used as a standard ever since."
'Europe ended up as a
political entity, but its real power is now
economic.'
Derek Penslar, U of T history professor
The convention and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights together gave refugees the right to
seek asylum from persecution, and prohibited their forced return to countries where they were
endangered
The brutality of World War II drove most countries to embrace the idea of a new world community,
through the United Nations, founded as a successor to the failed League of Nations, but this time with
the enthusiastic backing of the United States. A body of humanitarian law evolved, in an attempt to
ensure that such genocide, atrocities and slaughter would never happen again.
But the war's effect on Europe was like that of a virus, sapping the strength of its foundations.
"The main issue is that World War II marked the end of Europe as the political centre of power in the
world," says history professor Derek Penslar of the University of Toronto. "It changed the whole
meaning of Europe, including its boundaries. Western Europe was now 'free Europe,' Central Europe
meant 'under communist control,' and East Europe meant 'communist."'
And, says Davies, "There is a strong sense of futility about Europe in the second half of the 20th
century. The vast sacrifices of the war did not generate security: the continent was divided into rival
political and military blocs whose energies were squandered for nearly 50 years."
As Soviet forces consolidated their gains, the Cold War spread across the still-smoking ruins of postwar Europe: "An iron curtain has descended across the continent," lamented British Prime Minister
Winston Churchill. "This is certainly not the liberated Europe we fought to build ... nor is it one
which contains the essentials of permanent peace."
Russia's victory was a pyrrhic one. In Leningrad, where carrion rats ruled the alleys and starved
inhabitants dropped dead in the streets, Oxford professor Isaiah Berlin visited the poet Anna
Akhmatova, who told him that the city was "nothing but a vast cemetery, the graveyard of her
friends; it was like the aftermath of a forest fire
the few charred trees made the desolation still
more desolate."
The war gave Stalin an excuse to revive the Great Terror, savagely repressing any suspected
opponents who might take advantage of Moscow's weakness, to foment rebellion.
Meanwhile the technological advances of the war moved on at a steady pace, with the development
of the atomic bomb in the forefront. In May 1945,war still raged in Asia, with Japan ignoring calls to
surrender when the guns of Europe fell silent. The U.S. believed that a weapon of overwhelming
power was needed to inflict a final defeat, as the Japanese navy foundered under repeated attack.
The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 ushered in an age of nuclear politics
and
permanent fear. "I am become death, the destroyer of worlds," said physicist Robert Oppenheimer
after witnessing the magnitude of the bomb's destruction.
The rapid development of nuclear weapons by the Soviet Union, Britain, France and China
consolidated a stalemate of power that continued until the fall of Soviet communism in 1991, with
Moscow and Washington battling each other through proxy wars in poor, unstable countries, but
drawing back from atomic Armageddon.
In the decades after the war, however, Europe gained a new sense of peaceful solidarity, beginning
with the Council of Europe in 1949, and moving toward the European Economic Community six
years later. The still-expanding European Union would follow.
"It was the end of colonialism, pure and simple," says Penslar. "Major colonial possessions were
released. Europe ended up as a political entity, but its real power is now economic."
America, meanwhile, emerged from the war as a superpower
a new position that surprised a
people who had largely enjoyed isolation from the geopolitical- struggles of Europeans.
"Americans tend not to focus on global problems unless the country is actively engaged in conflict,
or facing an imminent threat," says foreign policy expert Stephen Hook of Ohio's Kent State
University. "After World War I it attempted to retreat to that isolation, but the consequences were
disastrous. World War II forced us to play an active role in world politics."
Canada, too, was vastly changed by the war, says Wesley Wark, professor of international relations at
the Universitv of Toronto.
'lt
had the biggest impact of any historical
event in (Ganada's) history to date.'
Wesley Wark, U of T professor of
i nternation al rel ations
"It had the biggest impact of any historical event in the country's history to date. It solidified Canada
as a nation, a state and a power. The war rooted the notion of Canada as an independent country
capable of making a mark on the world."
Like the U.S., Canada emerged from the war economically transformed: "We had gone beyond
resource trading. We were now producers of a wider range of goods, and a member of the G-7 (group
of wealthy nations)."
In both Canada and the U.S., too, longer-range social effects surfaced. Women, who had largely
worked inside the home, filled vacant jobs in industry during the war. They also joined labour unions
and rose to senior positions. Although the return of men from the war reversed their employment
gains for a decade, the concept of what women could achieve was irrevocably altered.
In America, some barriers of segregation fell during the war as black people took factory jobs that
were previously closed to them. The strong wartime performance of black soldiers also gave them
new confidence on return, though a long battle for desegregation followed.
While North America built on its successes after World War II, the Middle East was plunged into
crisis.
As the colonial powers withdrew from lraq, Syria and Eg)pt, the pressure for Jewish settlement in
Palestine increased after the Holocaust. In 1941, the Palestinians rejected a U.N. plan to partition
Palestine from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean, and Jewish settlers then declared the State of
Israel a year later.
For the devastated Jewish population of Europe, it was a victory: "It allowed the continuity of Jewish
civilization, and without Israel's creation it's difficult to see how that would have happened," says
Penslar, director of U of T's Jewish Studies program.
For Arab Palestinians, however, it was a disaster that culminated in loss of land, warfare and more
than half a century of strife. As a result, a new polaization occurred in the Middle East, and Israel
became the target of mounting resentment.
The U.S., taking over from Britain as the major Western power in the Mideast, was also embattled.
"Driven by a desire to keep vast oil reserves in hands friendly to the United States," says Sheldon
Richman of the Washington-based Cato Institute, America "compiled a record of tragedy in the
Middle East ... (including) alliances with Iraq to counter Iran, then with Iran and Syria to counter
Iraq, illustrating a theme that has played for the last 45 years."
Asia's war legacy was no less bitter.
"World War II has never really finished in Asia," explains Paul Evans, acting director of the
University of British Columbia's Liu Institute for Global Issues. "Russia and Japan, for instance, have
never signed a peace treaty. And the technical issues point to something bigger and more dangerous."
The two main flashpoints in Asia today
the cross-strait hostility between China and Taiwan, and
tensions on the divided Korean peninsula
are directly traceable to World War II, Evans says. In
- place in China against Japanese residents, to protest a
recent example, violent demonstrations took
Japan's adoption of textbooks that gloss over its wartime atrocities.
"Looking back is very difficult for both China and Japan," says Evans. "It is fair to say that neither
country has dealt properly with its own history of terror imposed on civilians. Physical divisions
persist in the region, too, leaving a legacy of instability to this day."
In Europe, the profound transformations of World War II shredded the social fabric of all the
countries touched by it.
Faced with the brutal realities of survival of the fittest, authoritarian rule and the devaluation of
human life, many people retreated into cynicism and disgust. Those in the West, exhausted and
impoverished, searched for new values. But in the end, says Mazower, the terrible war years provided
the basis for hope, and a rebirth that had little to do with grand nationalist schemes, and much to do
with living together in peace and prosperity
the finest tribute to the continent's tens of millions of
dead.
-
"Today, Europe's major powers are partners with one another rather than military rivals," he says.
"Globally, Europe has lost its primacy ... yet compared with other historical epochs and other parts
the world today, the inhabitants enjoy a remarkable combination of individual liberty, social
solidarity and peace."
of
A WORLD CHANGED BY WAR
ARTICLE, QUESTIONS
l.
Why does Mark Mazorver write that World War 2 was "really several wars in
one"']
2.
Cornplete the following organizer, explaining the effect of World War 2.
Area of the World
Eastern Europe
Western Eurooe
Russia
United States
Canada
The Middle East
China and Japan
Eff'ect of World War