“Whatever happens,” he said, “the flame of French resistance must not and shall not die.”
All over France, despite the terrible danger, French resistance fighters attacked the Germans and helped British pilots who had been shot down. Britain was no longer alone. The Allies – Britain, America, Russia and France – were ready to fight back.
But the war was no longer just a war in Europe. It was a war all over the world.
War All over the World
IN every corner of the globe armies fought each other and aeroplanes dropped bombs from the sky. In the east the Japanese conquered Singapore and attacked Burma. Thousands of Australians and New Zealanders went to fight them, along with Gurkhas, Indians and troops from the Caribbean. The war in the east was particularly hard because the Japanese treated their prisoners badly, often starving and beating them.
Meanwhile, British soldiers fought the Italians and Germans in North Africa. And it was there they won their first victory. Hitler sent his best soldier, Rommel, to fight them, and Rommel drove the British all the way back to Egypt. But a skilful British general, Bernard Montgomery, attacked Rommel at the Battle of El Alamein and defeated him. That was the turning point, and soon Britain’s 8th Army, the Desert Rats, were advancing across the sands of the Sahara.
“Before Alamein,” said Churchill afterwards, “we never had a victory – after Alamein we never had a defeat.”
A year later, the British and Americans invaded Italy, where Hitler’s ally Mussolini was still in charge. Mussolini surrendered and Hitler had to send his own army into Italy to fight the British and Americans. Though the Allies were still far from winning, Hitler no longer had everything his own way. And the weary people of Britain, huddling around their radios to hear the news, had something to celebrate at last.
The Holocaust
BUT the news from Germany was more terrible than ever. It was difficult to know exactly what was happening, because German radio only broadcast what the Nazis allowed. Gradually, however, an awful rumour started to come out. To begin with, people could hardly believe it, even of Hitler. But at last they realized it was true. Hitler had always hated the Jews, and now he had decided to kill them – all of them.
According to the Nazis the Jews weren’t people at all, so they treated them like animals, starving the women and children, and sending the men to factories to work until they died. The countries Germany had invaded in eastern Europe – Poland, Ukraine and Russia – were full of Jewish towns and villages. Hitler ordered the Jews who lived there to be rounded up and sent to concentration camps, where they were beaten and starved.
Some Jews tried to hide. Anne Frank, a Jewish girl who lived in Holland, hid for two years in the attic of her father’s office. But the Nazi secret police, the Gestapo, found her and sent her to a concentration camp as well.
Hitler’s camps filled up with Jews, along with the other races he hated, like the Roma; and the other people he feared, like homosexuals. The Gestapo built a special camp called Auschwitz and sent Jews there to be killed. When they arrived at Auschwitz, families were told to have a shower. They put down their suitcases, took off their boots and clothes, and soldiers herded them into the bathrooms. But when the showers were switched on, it wasn’t water that came out of the taps but poison gas.
To kill someone else is the worst crime a person can commit. For a government to commit murder is even worse – governments are there to protect people. For a government to exterminate a whole race – which is called genocide – is the most evil crime imaginable.
Ever since, Jews around the world have called what happened under Hitler the Holocaust. It was the worst crime in history and will never be forgotten. And when the Allies heard the rumour about what Hitler was doing, they knew it was more important than ever to defeat him.
The War in the West
FOR the moment, there was only one way for the British to attack Germany: from the air. So they sent planes to bomb German cities, just as Hitler had bombed London and Coventry.
Every night, people were woken by the sound of aeroplanes flying overhead. The British bombers were much bigger than German ones; the Lancaster had four engines and needed seven men to fly it. Even so, flying into Germany was terribly dangerous. Guns fired at the bombers from the ground, and German fighter planes pounced on them out of the darkness. Often, through the cockpit windows, pilots saw their friends crashing to the ground in flames.
But they never saw what their bombs did to the cities below them. Most of Berlin was destroyed. Düsseldorf looked like an ancient ruin no one had lived in for centuries. One night, in Dresden, so many bombs were dropped that they started a fire too hot to put out. Burning winds sucked bystanders into the flames, and afterwards nothing was left of Dresden but smoking ruins and cellars full of bodies.
Some people wondered if it was right for the British to bomb cities. Should Britain fight in the same way Hitler did? “Wars should be fought against soldiers in uniform,” they said, “not old men and children.” Most people, though, just thought how brave the bomber crews were.
In any case, Hitler soon found a way to retaliate. His scientists invented exploding rockets. People walking down the street in London would hear a sound like a lawnmower in the sky overhead, then the sound would cut out and a rocket would dive out of the clouds and crash with a huge explosion. People called the rockets doodlebugs because of the noise they made. They were even more frightening than air raids because they came without warning, so no one had a chance to take cover. Later, Hitler’s scientists came up with an even bigger rocket, which they called the V-2.
Even though the Russians had started to beat Hitler, people worried that he might still win the war by inventing weapons no one could fight against. It became more important than ever to defeat him quickly.
D-Day
AT last Roosevelt and Churchill came up with a plan to invade northern France and attack Germany from there. The British army wasn’t strong enough to do it by itself, so thousands of American soldiers arrived in Britain to help. After four years of war, the British were pinched and thin. They looked tired and their clothes were shabby. The Americans were much better fed and richer. They drank Coca-Cola, listened to jazz records and liked to show off to English girls.
“Overpaid!” the British grumbled. “Over sexed! And over here!”
All the same, they were grateful for the Americans’ help. And soldiers of both armies, along with Canadian and French fighters, started preparing for the great invasion.
The Allied commander-in-chief, General Eisenhower, called the day planned for the invasion D-Day. The Allies tricked the Germans into thinking they were going to land near Calais, where the Channel was narrowest. Instead Eisenhower decided to invade Normandy, from where William the Conqueror had attacked Britain a thousand years before. During the night, landing craft set out across the English Channel towards five beaches which the planners code-named Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno and Sword. Some of the soldiers remembered being rescued from Dunkirk four years earlier. Now they were going the other way, to win France back again. The weather was bad, and the landing craft – square boats designed to take as many soldiers and tanks as possible – heaved up and down in the waves. Many of the soldiers were seasick.
But at dawn they saw the coast ahead of them.
“Get ready!” shouted the officers.
As soon as the landing craft reached shallow water, ramps were let down with a splash, and the soldiers charged through the breakers and up the beach. Now they would find out whether the Germans were ready for them. Luckily the trick had worked and most of the German army was still waiting at Calais. And the night before, parachute troops had dropped from the air to capture bridges across all the important roads. The British and Canadians landed quite easily, but on one of the American beaches, Omaha, the Germans fought back and thousands of American soldiers were killed.
Next came the second part of the plan: to move inland and conquer France.
The Allies needed a port to keep the army supplied, but the Germans still held all the ports, so the British built floating harbours, towed them across the Channel and anchored them by the beaches. Then ships could come alongside and unload all the food, bullets and spare petrol the army needed.
Inland, French families hung out British, French and American flags, and girls kissed the soldiers who came to free them from Nazi rule. Quite soon the Allies captured Paris, which became the capital of France again. Then they invaded Germany itself.
The Germans knew that with Russia, America and Britain against them, they had little chance of winning. They had even less food than the British, and their cities were in ruins. Even so, Hitler refused to give up. As the Russian army drew closer from the east, he hid in his concrete bunker under the streets of Berlin, shouted at his generals and made speeches blaming everyone but himself.
One day, the Allied soldiers reached Auschwitz. They found a fence of barbed wire and thousands of starving children in striped prison clothes. The children looked like walking skeletons, and hundreds of bodies lay in heaps around the gas chambers. When the soldiers pushed open the doors of the wooden huts where the prisoners lived, they found rows of Jewish men and women lying sick on their bunks, too weak even to call for help. Crows waited in the trees and everything stank of death.
Then the Allies knew that all the sacrifices of the past six years had been worthwhile. Hitler was so evil that he had to be defeated.
The Russians, advancing from the east, had the worst of the fighting, but at last they reached the first of the Americans, British and French advancing from the west. In the ruins of Berlin, where there wasn’t a single building left standing, the Allied soldiers met, and the last German defenders came out of the rubble with their hands up.
But Hitler was not among them. He was already dead. He shot himself in the last hours of the war, and his soldiers burned his body.
The Nuclear Bomb
ALTHOUGH the war in Europe was over, the war against Japan still went on, because Japanese soldiers never surrendered but fought until they were killed. As the Americans advanced across the Pacific Ocean, the Japanese defended island after island – and each island meant another battle and more dead soldiers to send home to families in America. Meanwhile, British, Australian, Indian, Caribbean and African troops fought in the jungles of Burma, where it was so hot that weapons burned the soldiers’ hands and flies buzzed incessantly around their heads.
The British general was called William Slim. He had once been an ordinary soldier, and knew what his men were suffering. Little by little he pushed the Japanese back, but still they refused to surrender. It seemed as if the war would drag on for years and thousands more soldiers be killed, so the Americans decided to end it once and for all by using a new and terrible weapon.
Their scientists had been working on an atom bomb. All of matter is made out of atoms, and splitting an atom releases huge amounts of energy. That energy can be used to run nuclear power stations, but Albert Einstein, the greatest scientist in the world, had realised that it could also be used to make a bomb.
One morning, Japanese in the city of Hiroshima looked up to see a single aeroplane flying overhead. Usually the American air force sent waves of bombers to attack them. A single plane couldn’t mean an air raid, they thought, so most of them went on with what they were doing. Only a few kept watching. They saw a bomb drop from the plane and begin to fall. A moment later there was a bright flash of light. Before they could even hear the bang, most of the people of Hiroshima were dead.
From his cockpit, the American pilot saw a huge mushroom-shaped cloud rise into the air. It billowed up until it was as tall as a mountain. What have we done? he thought.
A few days later, the Americans dropped a second atom bomb on Nagasaki. Afterwards, when planes flew over to see what the two cities looked like, they found nothing left at all: no buildings, no trees, no people. Japanese who went to visit Nagasaki said it was “like a graveyard with not a tombstone standing”. The atom bomb destroyed cities as if they had never been there.
And the terror it brought didn’t even end with those huge explosions. In the weeks that followed, everyone who lived near Hiroshima or Nagasaki fell sick. Their skin began to peel off, then they started to vomit and died, for atom bombs released radiation, which caused radiation sickness and cancer.
Afterwards, Einstein would always regret that he had suggested making such a terrible weapon. But the Japanese knew they could not fight against atom bombs, so they surrendered. On 15 August 1945 the war in the east came to an end, and the Second World War was over.
The Great War – which people now call the First World War – had been terrible, but the Second World War was even worse. Around the world more than sixty million people had been killed – as many as there are living in the whole of Britain today. Cities had been destroyed, families uprooted, and races slaughtered.
The world had never seen such destruction before.
The Welfare State
IN Germany and Japan, the fascist leaders were captured and put on trial; and on victory night, fireworks were let off all over Britain. Soldiers came home to their families to see children they remembered as babies, and wives whose faces they had almost forgotten. But when the celebrations were over, they looked around and scratched their heads.
“Everything’s changed,” they said. “Where’s the cinema? What’s happened to the pub?”
The streets they knew were full of gaps where buildings had been bombed. Some of the soldiers found their homes gone, and their families living in temporary sheds. Everyone looked thin and tired.
“You wouldn’t think we’ve just won a war,” they said. “It feels more like we’ve been through a disaster!”
Factories had been bombed, shops were empty, and everything was shabby, for nothing had been mended for six years and there was no money to set things right. The war had cost a fortune, and Britain no longer had a fortune. Grey-faced and hungry, the British stood in queues to see the doctor, and in queues to buy bread. Everyone had thought food rationing would finish when the war was over; instead it got worse. Friends in Australia wrote about fresh fruit and meat. The British hadn’t seen fresh fruit in years, and were only allowed to eat meat once or twice a week. At night cities stayed dark to save electricity. People looked sadly through magazines from before the war. Would they ever be able to afford new clothes again, new furniture, or new cars? They didn’t feel like victors; they felt as if they were the ones who had been beaten.
“But at least we can make Britain fairer now,” they told each other. “So much has been destroyed in the war, it’s a chance for a fresh start.”
And when the time came for a general election, they didn’t choose Winston Churchill and the Conservatives. Instead, most people voted for the Labour Party and its leader, Clement Attlee.
“If there’s one thing the war’s taught us,” they said, “it’s to do things together.”
The Labour government nationalized the coal mines and the railways, which meant that from now on they wouldn’t be owned by bosses but by the whole country. Nye Bevan, a Welsh MP, started the National Health Service, so that everyone would be looked after when they were sick. Most people were proud of the NHS. But the Labour Party couldn’t feed people, and it couldn’t make them happy. The lights kept going out and, in wintertime, the old huddled under blankets because they couldn’t afford coal for a fire. Everyone was grey, thin and ill.
The British had fought two great wars in thirty years, and they were exhausted.
The End of the Empire
AS soon as the war was over, Britain agreed it was time for India to become independent. The British Empire was the biggest there had ever been, and the British were proud of it. But in one way, there had been something wrong with it from the very start. People in Britain loved to talk about freedom, and believed everyone should have a say in choosing their government. So why shouldn’t Indians have a say in
choosing who governed them? And Africans? And Jamaicans?
The Indians had never lost their longing for freedom. “It’s our right,” they said. “Would the British want to be ruled by people from Delhi?”
They could see that the British ran India in a way that benefited themselves far more than the Indians. For example, cotton came from India, but Indians weren’t allowed to build their own factories and make money selling cloth. They had to sell the raw cotton cheap to factories in Lancashire, and it was British factory owners who became rich.
But when Indians protested against the empire, the British government always stopped them. One day, at Amritsar, a British general ordered his soldiers to open fire on a crowd of unarmed men, women and children. The only place to take shelter was a well, and hundreds jumped into it and were drowned. The massacre at Amritsar was a bit like the Peterloo Massacre in Britain. It made people in India even more determined to change things.
Some of the British realized countries like India would have to be allowed to govern themselves one day, so they let Indians become judges and government officials. But just as in Ireland, change came very slowly, and it seemed to the Indians as if Britain would always find an excuse not to make them free. Some of them thought the only way to change things was by violence. However, the leader of the Indian reformers knew how damaging violence was. His name was Mohandas Gandhi and he refused to have anything to do with bombs or terror.
Gandhi had trained as a lawyer, but to show how close he was to ordinary Indian men and women, he dressed in a plain loincloth, ate simply, and gave no sign of being famous or important. Gandhi believed that the way to achieve justice was through peace and persuasion.
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