Module 9: World War II

With the rise of totalitarian dictatorships in Germany and Italy, and one rooted in militarism in Japan, it wasn't long before these countries looked to expand in their quest for empire. The Treaty of Versailles and the worldwide depression created the economic conditions for these governments to take power, and the League of Nations which was created to curb aggression and solve international disputes, was powerless in the face of invasions by these militaristic powers.

In response to Germany's territorial acquisitions in Austria and the Sudetenland, the Western democracies adopted a policy of appeasement, hoping that Hitler would be satisfied with his gains. He saw this as a sign of weakness and soon after invaded Poland thereby starting WWII with the Axis powers of Germany, Italy, and Japan pitted against the Allied powers, first only Great Britain and France, and later on the Soviet Union and the U.S. following the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

The Soviets bore the brunt of the casualties in the war during Hitler's invasion and subsequent sieges. Meanwhile, the Americans did the majority of the fighting in the Pacific against the Japanese.

It was D-Day, the Allied invasion of occupied France, which opened up the second front in Europe and helped to defeat the Germans as they fought wars on two fronts. After a long and bloody island-hopping campaign and firebombing of the Japanese mainland, President Truman decided to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in order to avoid significant casualties.

As the Allies liberated parts of Germany, Poland, and Czechoslovakia, the full impact of the Holocaust was revealed to the world. Hitler and the Nazi party had targeted European Jews as part of his Final Solution the "Jewish problem" - killing them in gas chambers. We also looked at other examples of genocide in Armenia, in the Soviet Union under Stalin with the Great Purges, Pol Pot in Cambodia, and the Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda.

After the war, the Allied powers held war crimes trials for the military and political leaders of both Germany and Japan. As part of their victory strategy, the Allies worked to rebuild the European and Japanese economy to avoid the economic turmoil which led to the war. The Allies also occupied Germany and Japan and installed democratic governments. As a result, both West Germany and Japan emerged as major economic powers.

In order to try and prevent future wars, many of the world's nations joined the United Nations, an organization devoted to peacekeeping and humanitarian causes. Unlike the League of Nations, this organization had the means to enforce its decisions through military means, a major improvement in its success.

The years that followed the end of the war saw a new rivalry between the world's two remaining military powers - the U.S. and the Soviet Union. The Soviets maintained control of the territories that they occupied in Eastern Europe at the end of the war. Over time, they installed communist dictatorships modeled on their own government in these countries which became the Eastern Bloc. These countries joined together in the Warsaw Pact, a military alliance designed to prevent aggression from Western Europe. Meanwhile, much of Western Europe joined together with the U.S. to form the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a military organization designed to prevent aggression from the Soviet Union and its allies.

The rivalry between the primarily democratic and capitalist West, and the communist dictatorships of Eastern Europe behind the Iron Curtain would dominate world politics over the next 40 years in a conflict known as the Cold War. The war had severely weakened the European empires, and the next 30 years would see most of the colonies gain independence through political or violent struggle.