A World at Arms (99 page)

For the Soviet Union, the ordeal of war was in many ways even worse than for China, whose ordeal was terrible enough. In the occupied areas, discussed later in this chapter, German policies and practices were in general more barbaric than those followed by Japan, whose atrocities were on the whole concentrated in the first period of fighting. Furthermore, the very fact that the Red Army drove the Germans out in prolonged and bitter fighting meant that the destruction in the liberated areas was enormous, with the retreating Germans doing what they could to cart off or destroy whatever they were forced to give up. By contrast, the Japanese surrendered most of the Chinese-occupied areas intact in 1945. The intensity of the fighting on the Eastern Front also implied a total mobilization of the Soviet home front. People and resources were drawn into the conflict on a scale matched by none of the other major belligerents. The enormous casualties reached into every home even as the already low pre-war economy imposed terrible privations.

Three factors operated to hold together the Soviet home front under the hammer blows of war. First, it was immediately and dramatically obvious to increasing numbers of Soviet citizens that, whatever their objections to the policies of their rulers and to the conditions under which they had been living, the policies of the Germans were infinitely worse and the conditions under their rule for those left alive–were sure to be even more dreadful.
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And if they were going to be ruled by those they disliked, better their own than those from another country.

A second element was the combination of an effective Communist Party and secret police apparatus which made some concessions during the time of war. The government eased its restrictions on religious
observances and made other gestures to public preferences even as it had to mobilize all resources for the war and, therefore, impose the most drastic material sacrifices. This process was related to a third factor, that of patriotism, to which the regime effectively and successfully appealed. The war itself was now called not the Second Imperialist War but the Great Patriotic War as the people were summoned to defend their homes.

It is worth noting in this connection that the maintenance of cohesion and the revival of hope and pride can be seen in part as a reaction to the course of the fighting. In World War I, the Russian armies had first defeated the Austrians, then been defeated by the Germans, had then had their front ripped open in 1915, and had thereafter been driven back ever further in a series of see–saw battles. In World War II, on the other hand, the biggest defeats came at the beginning, but thereafter, in spite of a major retreat in the south in 1942 and occasional setbacks some of them serious–the tide of battle moved steadily the other way. Large portions of the Soviet Union might still be in the hands of the Germans and their allies, but there was hope that they would be freed as the first ones had been in the winter of 1941. Clearly the German army was not invincible; there was hope even if the road to victory might be a long one. In these elements of the situation, and especially the sense of shared dangers and shared accomplishments at the cost of vast sacrifice, one may recognize the experience of World War II as the great consolidating experience of the Soviet Union between the revolutionary upheaval of 1917–22 and the dramatic changes of the 1980s.

As discussed in connection with the review of the fighting in 1941 and 1942, the Russians evacuated many industries from the areas overrun by the Germans, and during the war naturally expanded facilities and production in areas which were considered safe from the invaders, primarily the industrial region in the Urals and in portions of Soviet Central Asia. It was in these expanded and new factories that a long-suffering and very hard working labor force turned out the tanks, guns, planes, ammunition, and other supplies of war which enabled the Red Army to overwhelm the Germans.
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Standardizing on a series of very fine weapons, especially on heavy tanks, artillery, rocket launchers, and automatic weapons, the Soviet industrial system provided its troops with great volumes of weapons which were often qualitatively superior to those of the Germans as well. Even in the air, where Soviet inferiority had been marked at the beginning of hostilities–in part because of the surprise attack–there was a substantial change as excellent new models were put into service in substantial numbers.

In the process, a country which had barely begun to recover from the
ravages of collectivization of agriculture, forced industrialization, and the great purges was burdened by the most drastic further privations. But with these came first hope and then pride. No other country on the continent had been able to stand up to the German army in its hours of great strength. The very price of victory–substantially over twenty million dead, massive destruction, total disruption of the society–came to look in retrospect like special badges of honor. The brutalities of their own regime, including the forced deportations of whole nationality groups suspected of collaborating with the invader, paled by comparison with the horrors imposed by the Germans. The people had seen an alternative to their own system and knew they did not want it. There was hope, which would be cruelly disappointed, that a victorious regime would deal more kindly and leniently with its people, who had suffered and accomplished so much. But for all who survived, the war remained a dominating memory.

The continent of Africa cannot be discussed as if it were a single unit, and its experiences during World War II cannot, except in one important respect, be discussed collectively. The differences must be noted first. The portion of the continent which saw the earliest fighting was also the first to see it end. In the northeastern comer, Ethiopia had been conquered by Italy in 1935–36 and had thereafter been the scene of some guerilla warfare against the Italians and later the base for the Italian conquest of British Somaliland: in the winter of 1940–41 the British armed forces had defeated all the Italian forces, liberated Ethiopia and British Somaliland and occupied Eritrea and Italian Somaliland. There had been considerable destruction from the fighting at a few places, but on the whole the damage was very localized. The Emperor of Ethiopia, Haile Selassie, returned to his capital, long to outlive Mussolini and most of those who had watched him deposed and his land conquered. In Eritrea and Italian Somaliland, a British military administration was established to control the area until the end of the war.
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Eritrea would be turned over to Ethiopia in spite of considerable local opposition, while Italian Somaliland became independent and absorbed British Somaliland as the country of Somalia. The war years actually brought some economic development to these territories because their importance to the Allied war effort along major oceanic supply routes led to some improvement in port and transportation facilities being made.

What would later become the largest country in Africa, the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, was only slightly touched by fighting on its eastern
border. A major effect of the war there was the development of transportation facilities, especially the airport at Khartoum, the eastern terminus of the Takoradi supply route across Africa to the Middle East theater of war.

The tides of battle which moved back and forth across Egypt and Libya took place for the most part in desert and rocky terrain of little economic value, but there was extreme damage to the towns along the east Libyan coast. The local population in both territories suffered as a result of the dislocations of war, but both also benefited in the long run from large-scale construction of airports and other facilities.

In Egypt, however, there were other developments as well. Egyptian nationalists resented continued British dominance of their country, while both King Farouk and some extreme nationalist officers in the Egyptian army, such as Gamal Abdel Nasser and Anwar Sadat, hoped for a German victory and were in touch with the Germans-never understanding that Axis rule of Egypt was likely to be far more oppressive than British. The officers were arrested and the King was forced to pick a government more willing to cooperate in the war alongside the British.
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The whole process, however, exacerbated Egyptian antagonism toward the British and left a bitter legacy behind.

In Northwest Africa, only Tunisia suffered serious damage from the fighting in 1942–43. The Vichy regime had kept control before that time and de Gaulle did so thereafter, but the whole concept of rule by France had been called into question by both the population there and President Roosevelt, who ostentatiously met with local dignitaries.
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In Tunisia, some nationalists sided with the Axis in hopes of a respect for their independence from Berlin and Rome that they had not had from Paris; as so often, neither a wise idea nor a sign of great insight.

In the band of French, British, and Belgian colonial possessions across Africa from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean, the war meant some recruitment for armies to fight in the war, further development of local industries and transportation facilities, and great difficulties in exporting the products which in peacetime provided much of the earnings of these colonial economies.

The one development which was really general on the continent was the increased nationalist agitation. From whatever level anti-colonialist sentiment had reached before the war, the years 1939–45 saw an escalation. The plans of the Germans for a huge new colonial empire in Africa
had been thwarted by the Allied victory. The educated elite in each colonial area saw the weakness of the old imperial masters: France, Belgium, and Italy defeated, Britain weak, and Spain and Portugal standing aside. Both the United States and the Soviet Union were strongly opposed to colonialism in their respective views of the world. Italy’s colonial territories were certain to have new rulers; and whatever the post-war plans of London and Paris, Brussels, Madrid and Lisbon, there were major changes ahead.
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In Latin America, the years of war brought several significant changes. With the exception of Argentina, the countries of the Western Hemisphere joined the Allies. Their economic ties to Germany had been largely broken by the blockade, and only in the summer of 1940, when it looked briefly as if Germany might win, was there serious consideration of new ties with the Axis in the post-war years. In that brief period, there was serious worry in Washington; as Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles wrote President Roosevelt on June 3, 1940, in words omitted from the published version: “The majority of the American Republics would run helter–skelter to Hitler just as so many of the remaining small neutral nations of Europe are doing today.”
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But except for a few shells from German submarines fired at the Dutch West Indies, and the sinking of their ships off the coast, the Latin American countries were spared the most conspicuous impact of war. There was an ongoing struggle between the intelligence organizations of the Axis and the Allies, but much of this is still shrouded in secrecy and would, in any case, leave no major after effects.
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Only Brazil sent troops to the front, in this case to Italy, and those involved with that effort in some instances came to play major roles in post-war Brazilian politics.
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As for the war years themselves, the possibilities for economic development were largely negated by local ineffectiveness and the incompetence of United States “experts” sent to increase production.
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The one field in which Brazil and several other Latin American countries made some progress during the war was that of reducing foreign control of the economy. The sale of products needed by the Allied war effort, combined with a reduction in the imports of manufactured goods–almost entirely from Europe-made it possible to reduce the level of foreign ownership of enterprises in Brazil, Argentina, and elsewhere. The pre-war role of both Germany and Britain was lessened, while that of the United States only grew temporarily.

The Germans had hoped to keep the countries of Latin America
neutral at first and looked to vastly expanded trade opportunities at the expense of a defeated Britain after the war.
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There was also some hope that movements based on local Fascist elements, like the Integralists in Brazil and the Peronists in Argentina, combined with pressure from the large German immigrant community in several countries of the region, would open the Western Hemisphere to political as well as economic penetration.
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Such hopes were not realized.

But there was to be an important legacy of the war all the same. The United States had adopted a “Good Neighbor” policy which included a far less imperious attitude toward Latin America than prior administration had been accustomed to show. This certainly helped in rallying the countries of the hemisphere in the war against the Axis, but it also had another result. The very use of the resources and products of the South American countries in the Allied war effort gave those countries not only a better price for their products during the war but also led them to feel that they had some claim on the gratitude of the victors afterwards. With internal problems of poverty and disease remaining very serious, the nations of Latin America would assert themselves in new ways once the war was over.

Internal developments in the Middle East were directly influenced by the war in several very important ways during the conflict, and in even more dramatic ways thereafter. The collapse of France in 1940 and the fighting of 1941 provided an enormous stimulus to the independence movement in Syria. Whatever the hopes of the French for continued domination of this important area acquired as a mandate carved out of the Ottoman empire at the end of World War I, there was really not the slightest chance of reestablishing rule from Paris. Syrian nationalist aspirations could not be subdued, even by shelling Damascus. The independence of Syria and an enlarged Lebanon was assured by the war. The issue caused much friction between France and Great Britain, especially because the French quite falsely suspected the British of wanting to take over from them, but the fact was that France’s time in Syria had run out. The French had actually promised independence; after a double defeat, there could be no road back, even for a France led by Charles de Gaulle.
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