You’ve probably guessed where I’m going with this. It’s what certain hosts on Fox News are always going on about when President Obama “leads from behind.” In September 1938 German, Italian, French, and British leaders, the latter represented by one Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, met in Munich to try and calm the circumstances. Hitler and Mussolini agreed not to get aggressive elsewhere if they could hold on to the Sudetenland and Ethiopia respectively.
Chamberlain at this point made what was to become one of the most unfortunate statements of all time. He declared that with this appeasement he had achieved “peace in our time.”
The situation got increasingly dire. Six months later German troops were in the rest of Czechoslovakia. In August 1939, Stalin and Hitler signed a nonaggression pact. By September, Hitler was marching his military into Poland (Germany had lost territory there thanks to … the Treaty of Versailles).
All hell broke loose. The Brits and French had guaranteed Poland military support if it underwent German military attack. Finally the Brits and the French declared war on Germany. And so began World War II.
The Soviets invaded Poland from the east. It stood no chance and fell. The Germans and Russians divided it. Germany stepped the war up a notch in April 1940 by occupying Denmark and invading Norway. The Netherlands and Belgium followed.
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KEY TERM: BLITZKRIEG
• Means lightning war.
• It’s how the Germans got Poland, Netherlands, Belgium, and so forth and so forth.
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German forces reached Paris by June 1940. There was an armistice. Now, this is important for when you read war novels and get a bit hazy about what’s going on. France was divided into two zones. The Germans occupied one in the north and northwest, which covered three-fifths of the country. A French one, installed at Vichy, administered the two-fifths in the south. Which Mussolini promptly started attacking.
Now it’s time for my tiny island nation’s big moment. After Germany occupied France, Britain—and its empire—was ALL ALONE against the Germans. Until the Soviet Union’s side-switching in 1941. Just saying.
The Brits did have an advantage, which with these massive odds against it was vital. It was surrounded by water. That didn’t stop Hitler trying to invade it with Operation Sea Lion in the summer of 1940. Cue the Battle of Britain and the inspiration of a thousand films. This is the name given to the air battle between the Royal Air Force (RAF) and the Luftwaffe, the German air force. Beginning in July 1940 and ending that September, the battle was a close-run thing. The Brits prevailed and Germany abandoned immediate invasion plans. Interestingly, you can still see the bomb damage if you walk around London today. Go to almost any street and you’ll have a line of old (as in Victorian or older) houses and an awful 1950s monstrosity in the middle. That was a German bomb. Tit for tat: The Brits annihilated parts of Berlin.
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KEY TERM: LEND-LEASE
• The Brits needed resources and so Congress passed the Lend-Lease Act in early 1941.
• Roosevelt’s argument was that if a neighbor’s house was on fire, you didn’t sell him a hose to put it out. You lent it to him and he returned it when the fire was extinguished.
• Thanks to the act, $50 billion of aid went to the Allies.
• Hitler did not see this as neutrality—he ordered American ships be attacked.
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A bit of water didn’t put Hitler off his stride that much, he just focused his energies elsewhere. His troops marched through Yugoslavia and Greece, aka the Balkans, in April 1941. Hitler was in position. To invade the Soviet Union. That’s right. His “comrade” Stalin.
As we touched on in the introduction, the Germans’ Operation Barbarossa, ordered in June 1941, took Stalin and co. by surprise, and initially Hitler’s troops managed to get within tens of miles of Moscow. The war in the East got as brutal as the Russian weather and included the infamous street-by-street battle in Stalingrad from 1942 to 1943.
We’re in danger of being too Eurocentric. This was, after all, a world war. The Brits (and their commonwealth forces) were fighting the Germans and Italians in North Africa and in the Atlantic. The Japanese had set their sights on a huge empire spanning East Asia. But they had one large obstacle. Uncle Sam.
We have reached December of 1941. You know this one. Don’t tell me you didn’t see Pearl Harbor, that rather underrated Josh Hartnett and Ben Affleck film (and doesn’t Kate Beckinsale look younger now than she did when making it?). America’s turn to be blindsided. The Japanese, trying to neutralize America’s Pacific power, attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7. As we all know, this act didn’t exactly have the intended consequences. The deaths of more than two thousand American military personnel and the destruction of twenty naval vessels and almost two hundred airplanes killed off American isolationist sentiment and galvanized American support for war. The next day Congress declared war on Japan. Japanese allies Germany and Italy subsequently declared war on America. Congress reciprocated. America was in a two-ocean war.
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NOTEWORTHY NUGGETS: THE WARTIME US ECONOMY
• The mass mobilization of the US economy for the war effort vanquished not just the Axis powers, but the Great Depression.
• There was full employment. Both African-Americans—many migrating from the rural South to the industrial North—and women were sourced for work, setting the stage for civil rights and feminism.
• The increase in GDP was dramatic. For the first time the American standard of living was higher than the pre-Depression era.
• Tax rates were raised—up to 90 percent for some—to generate revenue and keep a lid on inflation.
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Game-change time. Germany was concentrated on first. By 1943 the Brits and Americans had beaten the Germans and Italians in North Africa. The Allies then invaded Italy, and by July 1943 Mussolini’s government had fallen. The fight was dogged and dirty in the East, but Stalin eventually prevailed. In November 1943 came that rather classic photo op: FDR, Churchill, and Stalin met at the Tehran Conference. Yes. You read that right. Tehran. I can just feel your excitement about the Middle East Cheat Sheet coming up.
D Day (not to be confused with Dunkirk, which was when the British Expeditionary Force got evacuated out of France in May 1940) occurred on June 6, 1944. Allied forces invaded Nazi-occupied France, eventually pushing through to Berlin from the west while the Soviet-led Allied armies converged from the east. Hitler took his own life on April 30, 1945, eighteen days after Roosevelt’s untimely death. The Germans surrendered on May 8, 1945, hereafter known as VE (Victory in Europe) Day.
It was at this stage that Germany got divided, and the remainder of Europe split into Western and Soviet spheres of influence.
Meanwhile the war in the Pacific was still raging, and the US was island-hopping to get to the Japanese mainland. Roosevelt’s death left the decision to drop the bomb to Truman. He did so in August 1945 on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Japanese surrendered. Justification for its use? Prolonging the war would have cost more lives in war-weary nations, both Japanese and American. The Japanese were prone to kamikaze raids (suicide attacks), and an invasion would supposedly have led to a million casualties.
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KEY TERM: THE MANHATTAN PROJECT
• There was a very real fear that German scientists would figure out how to harness nuclear fission to produce an atomic bomb.
• Enrico Fermi and Albert Einstein, scientists who had fled Italy and Germany respectively, told the US government that they needed an atomic research program.
• The US government launched a program, the Manhattan Project. It was so top secret that Truman—the vice-president—knew of it only when he BECAME president. Roosevelt and Churchill were determined to keep not only the Germans and Japanese in the dark, but also the Russians.
Los Alamos, New Mexico, housed the main assembly plant.
A
Soviet spy, Klaus Fuchs, penetrated the scientists’ inner circle.
The first bomb was tested in July 1945. By August they were in use over Japan.
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World War II was history’s most destructive war. The precise number of people who lost their lives is unknown, but the atrocities were like nothing seen before. The Allies suffered 85 percent of the deaths, mostly Soviet and Chinese; the Axis powers 15 percent. It is thought 27 million Soviets perished, helping shape a defensive Soviet mind-set, the legacy of which can be seen during the cold war and arguably through to today. More than 400,000 Americans died.
It was a civilian war. Forty million civilians died, double the number of military. The Holocaust killed around 12 million. The Nazis murdered those they believed unworthy of life, including Jews, ethnic Europeans, homosexuals, and the disabled. The Japanese also believed they were racially superior and were notoriously cruel. It is thought 7.5 million civilians died in China under Japanese occupation. At the infamous Nanking Massacre, several hundred thousand Chinese civilians were slaughtered, many being raped and buried alive. The Japanese prisoner-of-war camps had a death rate seven times higher than those of the Germans and the Italians.
The Soviets had gulags, their labor camps. Although the other allies didn’t have official systems in place, there was their fair share of torture, murder, and rape. Reports were received by the American Joint Chiefs of US forces raping many Italian, French, and Japanese women. Civil liberties were compromised, as we note in Cheat Sheet 19, when Japanese Americans and German Americans were placed in camps.
The legacies of World War II included massive social changes, including the rise of feminism and America’s civil rights movement. There were huge ramifications in Europe financially, as we saw in Subject Two, math and economics, but also with decolonization and therefore the emergence of the third world. There was the creation of Israel, which we cover in the next Cheat Sheet. Then there were the major technological breakthroughs, including the bomb and space programs.
And of course the spread of communism.
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WISE WORDS
The world must know what happened, and never forget.
—General Dwight D. Eisenhower, supreme commander, Allied Expeditionary Force, European Theater of Operations, while visiting Nazi death camps, 1945
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MINI REPORT 3. THE COLD WAR
Times had changed. America didn’t turn up late in the day for the cold war: It was one of the two main protagonists. Whatever internal debate raged, America’s public game face was: Isolationism is over.
George Orwell is typically credited for coining the term cold war, after America had deployed the first nuclear bombs. By 1949 the Soviets exploded their first atomic bomb in a test. H. G. Wells and others had foreseen that one day there would be two peers threatened with mutual annihilation who never meet in war directly but instead conduct proxy wars. So it proved. Nuclear weapons have not been used since 1945, and the only country that has deployed them is America. However, between 1947 and 1991 we had the cold war, which was littered with skirmishes between client states. Throw around the phrase “fault lines of the cold war” here. People will nod and look terribly impressed.
The West had always been against the idea of communism. As the saying goes, politics makes strange bedfellows, but war makes even stranger bedfellows. The Brits, Americans, and Russians got into bed with one another only because they really had no choice. It took until 1933 for the US to recognize the USSR after the Bolsheviks took charge in 1917. As far as Stalin went, he was furious that the Brits and Americans had taken their time in massing a French front during World War II. The wait had kept immense pressure on the Eastern Front, leading to millions of deaths. The Soviet leader wasn’t too impressed either that the Soviet version of Lend-Lease ended during the war.
In the aftermath of World War II, the earth’s most populous nation, China, ended up communist, becoming the sleeping giant that was the People’s Republic of China. Half of Europe was under Soviet influence behind the Iron Curtain, while much of the remainder lost its grip on its colonies. As the British and French empires succumbed to independence movements, a new third world emerged. With the decolonization of Africa and Asia, every new state found itself wooed by the superpowers. Indeed, the third world became the major battleground of the cold war as the United States and the Soviet Union struggled to bring new nations into their respective orbits, squaring off against each other care of proxy armies. The Israel independence in 1948 had massive ramifications in the Middle East, which we cover more extensively in Cheat Sheet 17.
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KEY TERM: THE THIRD WORLD
• A cold war term. Initially NATO-type countries were first world, the Communist bloc was second world, and the third world was for countries that weren’t aligned with either of them.
• Use of the term third world, however, did not stick to this strict definition. We now often use it as a blanket term to refer to developing, poorer countries.
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There are three organizations you should be aware of if discussing the cold war or partaking in a spy thriller. There was the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the Warsaw Pact, which were the military alliances of the US and the USSR respectively. There was also the UN, an international peace organization that the US managed to sign up to this time.
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NOTEWORTHY NUGGETS: THE UN
• The United Nations was an attempt to keep the peace where the League of Nations had failed to do.
• The executive branch, the Security Council, is made up of fifteen seats and must authorize the use of force, deployment of peacekeeping troops, etc. There are five permanent members, the Great Powers: France, Britain, China, Russia (then the USSR), and the US. Well, they were all great in 1945; the first two don’t exactly punch above their weight anymore. The ten remaining seats go to countries the General Assembly elects to two-year terms. If any of the big five objects about pretty much anything, action is prohibited. Action is prohibited quite a bit.
• The main body is the General Assembly—every member nation has a seat.
• The Secretariat manages the daily logistic-type things of the UN.
• Oh, and there’s an International Court of Justice, which rules on arguments between governments, which is the only major bit of the UN not in New York—it’s in the Hague in the Netherlands. This is not to be confused with the later-established International Criminal Court, also in the Hague, which has the ability to try individuals, which the International Court of Justice does not.
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As soon as World War II ended, the US and USSR immediately entered into competition—to get hold of the best German scientists, who had also been working on the nuclear side of things and been busy developing a rocket program so that they could fire missiles at the Brits. This contributed to the development of intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads and the space race.
The cold war provided the impetus for humanity to get beyond the confines of earth. The Russians got there first with Sputnik, the first satellite to go into orbit in 1957. The survivalists you see on modern-day reality shows have NOTHING on how people were acting back then. A very real fear of nuclear holocaust reached into the fabric of everyday life. The cold war made an indelible mark on popular culture. This was the age of James Bond, of the propaganda broadcasts of Radio Free Europe/Liberty.
Congress’s and Eisenhower’s response to Sputnik was to invent the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, NASA, and find some cash for science. From 1961 to 1964, NASA’s budget was increased almost 500 percent. Americans won the space race in 1969 when Apollo 11 landed astronauts on the moon.
The Americans and Soviets were also locked in a deadly arms race.
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KEY TERMS: THE HUNGARIAN REVOLUTION AND PRAGUE SPRING
• The Hungarian Revolution took pla
ce in 1956. An uprising against the Soviet-backed government, it ended with Soviet tanks rolling into Budapest to regain control.
• The Prague Spring was an era of political liberalization in Czechoslovakia in 1968. In response, the Soviet Army, along with the majority of the Warsaw Pact allies, invaded.
• The external impact of these acts was that the number of those who had supported communism in the West diminished. The cold war became less about ideological clashes, more about geopolitical ones.
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Other important notes. With all the financial drama surrounding the euro we’ve been through in the past few years, you may have been asking WHY? Why did Europeans want to be so close that they shared a currency? The roots of the European Union can be traced back to the 1950s, as Western Europe began policies that moved it closer together militarily, economically, and politically. It was next door to the Soviet sphere of influence, after all. Also please observe that Stalin died in 1953, and after some maneuvering Khrushchev was in charge.
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KEY TERMS: THE DOCTRINES
Most of these have cropped up elsewhere, but they’re worth a summary now. The Cold War ones are all in the same vein.
Monroe Doctrine (president 1817–1825): Europe shouldn’t meddle with the Americas anymore.
Truman Doctrine (president 1945–1953): America would assist democratic countries threatened by authoritarian forces—in essence attempt to contain the spread of communism.
Eisenhower Doctrine (president 1953–1961): Came from a speech to Congress re the Middle East in 1957, after the Suez crisis. Offered America’s economic and military assistance to countries being threatened by armed aggression. Communism singled out.
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